Nope, it's like devloping very good lemonade. Making and selling it for those who don't have the time or skill to devote to making it. On top of some of your customers say it's such good lemonaid they would like to know how it's made, so if they have time they might make some of it for themselves. -- James Michael Keller
HandSpring isn't a "Clone", HandSpring was founded by the people who started up Palm Computing. After 3Com bought them they starting dicking around with the product line against their recomendation so they all quit, but retained licences to all their developed technoliges. Thus the OS, design, etc. Now they are creating products 3Com wanted to "hold off on" to "maximise profits" from the older designs. -- James Michael Keller
Re:How does this mock religion?
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Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 2
The likelyhood is that they will fail because the genes are more complex than the scientists really understand. Nature tends to eliminate unneeded genetic parts over time so it is likely that the organism is very close to having as small a genetic code as possible to allow it to survive and reproduce
Bunk, even a casual review of gentic research will show that all species genome's contain vast sequences of "noise" of permeniatly turned off segments of DNA. Nature is a pack rat of code - it's more bloated then the latest from Readmond.
What these researchers want to do is place a synthisised DNA strand in a phospholipid sphere. All species cell's have to have the same basic tools to make protines, recive nutrients, and expell waste. This is the part of the genome that's identical in each one.
All this DNA building is basicaly humans using a HEX editor to muck around with the machine code for life - DNA. A simple phosolipid shell in a nutrient providing environment is the computer device it runs on.
The trick down the road is going to not be this primitive tinkering, akin to putting your name in the credits of a game by editing the text strings held in the executible; but the development of an abstracted language to "program" life. Want a radiation waste eating roach that can clean up reactors? Just use the latest object oriented visial LIFE ( Living Individual Functional Engineering ) compiler and link the pre-coded objects together to get one. Compile and debug your new bug! -- James Michael Keller
Actualy Chistmas as we know it is the result of the Roman empire's domination of pagan europe. The winter solstace celebration ( Yule ) was a long standing tradition from at least the time farming emurged as a human occupation. Most religions apart form the minority of people who follow a path with a single deity ( yes - monotheism is a minority, the majority of the worlds population follows some form of polytheism ) they would have had to mark the importand times of the year. The Romans were quite fond of mixing local and empire wide traditions. It was a way to subdu the local populations and apease them. Easter is also a combination of Christian dogma overlaying the traditional spring celebration of Oeaster ( various spellings - spoken history languages and all that ).
Anyhow - this has scant to do with the little robot save it would make for a cool Yule party conversation gimic as the party goes on. -- James Michael Keller
I'll tell you what - go download the tarfiles for EVERY package on the redhat discs, compile each one and install into a temp top level tree. Then tarball that temp tree so you can untar it into the root dir.
In the proccess fix all the little bugs that crop up with make files and old library calls, make patches for each source file tree.
Now, manage to build a boot floopy image and write an installer for your system. Heck - don't have to that's basicaly slackware.
However come up with a useful package management system that others can and do use as well to do all that in a few key strokes.
Then I'll lend an ear to your bitching about redhat or ANY distribution company making a living off the blood and sweet of coders. There is NOTHING to stop you and your closest geek friends from developing your own distribution. Just time and desire stop most people. New ones crop up all the time. Case in point - Mandrake actualy out sells Redhat now. However the BRANDING redhat has done is what works for them now. That had years of work behind it as well.
So clean out your mothers basement where you still live and get to work on that distribution kiddo. -- James Michael Keller
Well I'm not an AC - and I agree completely with this. I wanted to look at the code and see how some things are done, but those functions arn't in the old posted client.
But I belive there is also a "alpha" archive that's more upto date.
So when do we start the GPL slash movement:) -- James Michael Keller
No no, he/she is talking about movie lenght DVD production units. The things you MAKE movie dvds with.
I do multimedia devel work and we were looking at getting a devel station, but I desided all we needed was MPEG-1/2 playback and static graphics with navigation - I went with a highspeed local network and XML with MPEG playback links instead ( kiosks and such ) -- James Michael Keller
That's it, we need to make "slashdate.org" now folks. I mean it's the natural extention to slashdot! I get everything I need techie news wise from here - why not dates?!
Come now guys I'm sure such a system wouldn't take more then a weekend to code up and link in:) -- James Michael Keller
Actualy IBM demonstrated a 1 Tb holographic cube a few years back, it had fantastic read times. I belive the only problem was the cost of manufacturing the substance it was made out of in mass quantities at a reasonable cost. -- James Michael Keller
There were so many - "An admin can not be expected to read mailing lists for 2 hours or more a day to keep up with security issues with his/her out of the box linux distributions" threads I got sick of it and desided not to respond directly
First off - if your handed even a SINGLE let along HUNDREDS of computers to admin that have a network connection - and your not at least subscribed to the announce mailing list from your respective vendor -- then you deserve to be hacked and then fired to return to your much more realistic job fliping burgers down and your locak fry shack
Secondly - redhat -- or any other rpm based system -- is NOT hard to keep updated to the latest security fixed packages. The first thing you need to do when you install any system is unplug the network cable. You don't need to have it pluged in to set up the network, unless your doing a network install - and you just unplug it once you get finished and have a login prompt. You can then either go download via another system the entire updates dir for your vendor and then use something like a jazz disk or zip drive if your uber paranoid.
Personaly I do almost all my redhat installs via a T1 and the ftp install option, then install autorpm from disk - or if I'm feeling lucky I leave the network cable pluged in and download it from the net. Then I set it to install automaticaly each night any new rpms from the updates dir for my version, save things like the kernel and libc, and you can even set it to check the package sigs.
So by the time I come in and read a bugtrack post - in this case the cron exploit - it's already been patched.
Now the paranoid among you will say that this then could leave you open to spoofing or somone hacking redhat or another vendor and trojoning everyone.
A] That's just as likely as to happen to MS with it's NT service packs. And it's happend before with a few open source packages. But due to the checksums and the sigs on the packages being off - it was discovered after only a few people had downloaded them.
B] You can set it to download, but not install - and it e-mails you a nice little note to read in the morning when you come in that there are updated filesm, and you can then search the bugtrack list for what was wrong with the old version - or hopefuly you already have mail waiting from the announcement e-mail list giving you the details.
This is exactly what happend with all my redhat boxen when this exploit came out, they automagickaly upgraded and e-mailed me about it, read the security e-mail from redhat and finished my coffee and went back to work. -- James Michael Keller
But not really a new concept, by any means. The cordless phone example is a pretty good one, though. There are tons of things we depend on every day that suddenly become useless if we lose power
Then your silly to buy a critical things that don't also have battry backup.
Your average buggy driver a centry ago could not repaire - let alone make - a buggy. If it broke he/she was just as screwed stuck out in the country as one of us would be with any modern car that broke down.
Technology will always fill the holes. Power's out and we can't use radios? Well that's what Baygen's are for
Once fuel cell tech gets a little better we can just stick our cell phones out in the rain and set it in the sun to recharge - or fill it with a little vodka and be charged up for a month. -- James Michael Keller
I'm truly tired of this cycle every 10 years or so where people get into a round of "gloom-n-doom"(tm) books predicting the end of "something""Anything!"
First it was the death of the printed book, book sales are higher per capita then ever. Perioticals are down yes - but when the point is to have information to the masses faster a daily rag will loose to the net. That's only logical, movible type beat out hand copied text, now something better has come around.
The notion that we are all going to a hell in a gateway cow computer box - a land illuminated by ghoastly green light from billions of blinking "12:00" VCR displays bouncing off trillions of "Free AOL 4.xxxxxxxxx" cd's is just chicken little crying bloody murder because no one wants to by "The end is at hand - by Chicken Little, fifteenth ed" anymore
Sure some people are lost in this brave new world - screw them. They adapt or die. My grandfather made it out of the depression working his way up from a paper boy and came out a millionar running a large supermarket chain down under. Others sat around and wined about how bad things where.
"Information Overload" - bull
Do any of you remember how much a pain in the rear it was just to find one artical from a magazine on microfilm? I spend days in the basements of libraries going blind scrolling through reals of newpapers and time back issues years ago.
Now I type in a few key words in google, yahoo, altavista, etc and I spend a few moment to scan through the results sifted from the eather.
The only thing technology does is shorten our attention spans and patients. 15 years ago I could dial a phone just fine with a rotoray pulse phone. Now I'm pissed off if people give cute numonic phone numbers, 1-800-call-menow and the like, instead of the damn digits so I can finger my phone pad faster - I don't want to be bothered with remembering the cute number - I just want to make a call and get off the line
I hear people complain about the amount of work today - the average work day has been shortened drasticaly over the last 20 years. Especialy in areas heavy into information systems useage. I have people complaine at work if they have to site down and do anything for six hours out of the work day.
In general yes - the work day hasn't gotten shorter - the often hyped "technology will liberate" montra was always bunk cooked up by the likes of Disney imagineers. An individual can now get more work done in the same time. I have a dozen computers around me at the moment, I'm coding, surfing, monitoring my network, watching the firewall, taking calls, and writing this. Could I do that if all I had was a phone and a typewriter?
Even better - Redhat 6.0 FTP install - single boot disk on a completely new system with a just out of the static bag hard disc. 15 minutes and a FULL disc install is finished ( ok it helps I have a small shop with 100b-T and a T1, but still - assuming no PCMCIA it's a single boot disk and a few questions about the networking and your off and running. -- James Michael Keller
The US constitution's second amendment is for americans what the GPL is for the net community.
9 out of 10 people that benifit from the GPLs existants will never activly partake of it in the form of programming with a GPLed program. The same goes for the right to posess a firearm.
While the vast majority of American's do not now, nor will probably ever - own a gun -- the mear fact that they CAN and some DO is a check against 'the government'.
Some are quick to point out that we have nothing to fear about the US government. Only crazy folks like Branch Dividians worry about the 'black helicopters'. However every major represive regiem that has ever come to power has made de-arming the civilian population it's first act of business. From the latest hunta in south america or africa to the Hilter. -- The scary thing about Hitler was he even sold the idea as the way to "peace" - claiming Germany would be on the forfront to remove the weapons of war from civilized peoples.
It is not the CURRENT governemnt civilian gun ownership is in place to be a check against - it is against a future one that no longer serves at the leasure of the governed population.
It's just like the GPL. It's not here to protect you from what's going on with a program in the current setting - it's ment as a stop gap against abuse of the codebase by someone at some point down the line.
Both are in place to protect the rights of those that live under it from abuse by powerful entities - be they a facist governemnt or the Microsofts of the world.
Some scoff at this notion - the US military has tanks and steath bombers. A bunch of rednecks in camo arn't going to stop the government from doing what it wants. - but that's wrong. The US tried to impose itself in both Korea and Vietnam - both foes resisted primparly via gorilla warfare in small bands with light weaponry in the face of crapet bombing and napalm.
Just as we fend off folks like MS with near unlimited funds and ability to hire brilient coders a dozen at a time. -- James Michael Keller
Make guns illegal, and they'll use knives. A much smaller problem. A madman cannot successfully attack a crowd with a knife. 3-4 unarmed guys in the crowd can knock him out using almost anything they have at hand. Defense is a lot easier.
Bull. I own a nin-to. Over the years I have become quite skilled in it's use.
If I were to go into any inclosed space holding say a dozen or more people ( a classroom or office ) I could kill every single one of them in under a minute. Anyone who lived would have lower chance of being saved at the hospital due to the severe lacerating nature of a sword vs hydrostatic shock from a bullet.
Such a weapn can quite easly remove limbs and if the target was standing - heads.
A single person with a swoard can easly hold off three or four unarmed and untrained opponets. The simple fact is the first person in range is going to die - and that usualy stops anyone from getting close to the person.
How do you protect against a sword? Thats right a range weapon like a Bow - or a Gun.
So now that we are going to ban the gun, we must now ban the bow - since an archer can fire off bows as fast as most revolovers or rifles, and at the effective targeting range of a pistol he/she is actualy more accurate.
So now that we have desided to get rid of the range weapns - guns and bows, we have to protect the public at large from crazy people with swoards. We just have to take if as fact that criminals will have whatever they want - we just want to stop the unknown crazy person from being able to kill anyone.
"That's silly" you might say - but why - it's the same logic. -- James Michael Keller
Are you smoking crack or what? Debian package management suite is and was far superior to anything that redhat had. dpkg/dselect/apt, never break and are pretty much rock solid. You can sync your system with ftp mirrors with just 2 commands. Hell you can upgrade the whole system with apt-get dist-upgrade command from ftp/http/cdrom/whatever. dselect and apt also take care of dependencies and conflicts automatically. There are other benefits too, these are just a few that I got from top of my head. RedHat LAGS in this area, sorry.
I haven't used a debian install before, so I'm not going to get into which is better with debian folk. However just because rpm's own codebase dosn't have those features is irrelivent. Other packages handle those functions you belive it lacks, work just as well doing the same things. They don't replace, but work with rpm. Rpm handles the package databasing, installing, removing, etc. Autorpm has all the networking code to go out and check the ftp servers and download anything new - and if you set it to - update the rpms. It's especially good when you point it at redhat's update dir on the ftp server, so when I read something on bugtraq or redhat-list about a patched package update -- it's already on my system.
Rpmfind handles finding and meeting dependencies. It too, simply uses the rpm system - vs bloating rpm itself with functions.
The problem with automagickal download and installs is it only works when your system is rolled in a consistant basis. Ie BSD's ports collection system is great - it will download and install anything needed to install the package you needed in the first place. However that only works because the entire system is set up to do version checking for libraries and such. It's also a source based system. If your dealing with binaries - as most people using rpm do - you get into all sorts of problems.
If you always use say --sources for your rpmfind call, and recompile the src.rpm files all the time you get the same effect.
The downside is not every package is going to be up on an ftp server in rpm format. I think what rpm really needs is a much better source/binary rpm packaging system. More exactly a front end that generates.spec files. Rpm handles the generation just fine. That way if you can't find anything but tarballs of the latest and greatest file you - or the developers or packge mantainers - could create a standard.spec based on a valid template. Something where you could move around and tag files as documetation, binaries, etc and pick the paths. And output a valid.spec file.
That wouldn't help for when you have to create patches against the source Makefiles to add in rpm environment vars, but even that could be automated by such a system looking for hard coded paths in Makefiles and such. -- James Michael Keller
They're package management system has lagged behind Red Hat's due to lack of developers for a while.
Has it? Is there a feature in RedHat's system allowing you to automatically update from a server? (I honestly want to know, I'm not trying to start a flameware here). That feature is one of the major reasons I use Debian.
I don't belive there is a need for this feahttpture to be rolled into the rpm codebase. autorpm is quite good at pulling updates from a distribution company web site automaticaly. It's quite good at keeping an rpm based system up to date from any number of mirrors ( handles mirror rotations and such).
With other utilities such as rpmfind and the very useful rpm database at rpmfind.net, an admin of an rpm based system has all the tools they need to manage the system.
OMNSHO, a system to act as a front end to all three would be an even better boon to the community. -- James Michael Keller
Something that needs to be addressed in all of this, if they start implementing preditory bandwithrestrictions - they will lose the "common carrier" leagle coverage. They then could be sued for ANY content that comes across the wire, or lack there off. -- James Michael Keller
Despite what the blurb implies, this is all still very theoretical stuff. Don't expect to see warp drives in actual use in your lifetime.
Funny, that's exactly the sentiment Orvil Write had about man mastering flight -- two years before he and his brother were hailed as the first to make a controled flight.
Never Say Never ( or "In your lifetime" for that matter ) -- James Michael Keller
Now since the old win95 kernel is dead and microsoft has trippled the amount of programers and now has every app in kernel space, you ca be sure that NT is going to excell quick and windows2000 will be thee OS that kills linux.
Dear gods, you actualy cite the fact that every MS app is going to be running in ring 0 - kernel space - as a GOOD thing?
The mear fact that MS moved the GUI sub system to ring 0 in NT and 95 is what has lead to the ability of crappy third party programs to nuke your NT or 95 box and get you BOSs.
I am sorry but windows 3.1 to windows 95 is alot more of an improvemnt then linux.8 to 2.0. Windows 95 is more advanced then NT
Excuse me? Windows 3.1 ran atop DOS. Windows 95 ran atop DOS ( don't belive me, install drdos on the box and type win - or disable the auto "win" that is in the IO.SYS file which is now just a hidden ini file. ) Windows 98 is just 95 OSR2 with service packs and IE 4 preinstalled.
Do you even know what NT is? NT is OS/2 ( or the vast majority of it is still identical ) with the windows GUI replacing the IBM GUI, 3.5 had the win 3.1 program manager. 4.0 has the windows 95 GUI. OS/2 was designed to REPLACE the severly outdated DOS arch for a 32bit system. When MS left, IBM continued development with an eye to stability. MS desided to go for ease of use and speed. Hence they merged the video subsystem into the kernel - bloating it to all hell and making it an unstable pice of tripe. I ran a medium sized BBS for five years under OS/2 running 5 copies of a DOS bbs system at once all in VDM's which could be manualy configred. If IBM had done what Sun has done with Solaris - gave it away in binary form - it would have trashed NT's growth. -- James Michael Keller
However, my experience with Mozilla releases on the 2 major platforms so far (Windoze and Linux) has been most unimpressive. Extremely slow and jerky rendering, many bugs, many if not most buttons and keys non-functional, too many crashes, and the list goes on.
That's not exactly a valid complaint yet. Mozilla is just now halfway to it's planed completion. Saying it's crap because it crashes and buttons don't work is akin to complaining your 10 year old hasn't gotten his PhD in quantium physics yet. -- James Michael Keller
I had a huge headache at work a week and a half ago when everything died. I'm in a scientific group, and we've mostly used Solaris in the past. We've been ramping up our Linux usage, and on the whole Linux has been *more* stable than Solaris. However, we just recently started writing in bulk to a Linux disk NFS exported to a Solaris machine, and the nfs daemon *kept* *dying*. Very annoying. I solved it with some Alan Cox patches that included H.J. Lu's latest knfsd. So Linux isn't as unreliable as it first looked. But there are a few places where Linux still does falter.
But look at how fast it was fixed - you found an error, it was something Alan Cox and H.J. Lu had already found and fixed. Those fixes will appear in the next AC full kernel revision patch. So within, what - a few months tops, the problem is solved for everyone.
Try that with anything comming out of MS. Or for that matter any of the commercial UNIX flavors which often take longer to even find and fix the glitch, let alone begin to distribute it to those who need it.
No realistic person will say Linux is currently, or will ever be, the perfect operating systems - one that works on everything, always, from now till time everlasting.
The facinating thing about Linux, the GNU tools, and body of GPL applications - is the ever evolving nature of them. Yes - headaches for Venders, and fodder for VARs and consultants. However one can always apply "If it's not broke don't fix it" with linux. If your 2.0.xx kernel works fine with the hardware in a dedicated environment works - there is no reason to change anything save any fixes for security or bugs. No need for the latest and greatest like virtual frame buffers found in the 2.2.x series.
The key to Linux is, it turns the operating system into a commodity. Linux does for the operating system market what cheap PCs have done for the computer industry.
As an example, the USA would never have grown as mighty as it is today if the intersate rail and road networks were locked behind toll booths. The same goes for the break up of "blessed monopolies" such as MaBell, and more recently with the move to have gas and eletric companies loose exclusive rights to regions. It's only when you remove the toll boths to progress, do we end going anywhere.
Linux is not the destination we should be seeking, it's mearly the open road to tommorow. -- James Michael Keller
Is it just me or does this sound like a bad thing? MP3 has been one of the better examples of the freedom of the net comming through and forcing the corps to see a new paradigm for music distribution.
But now, a corp - ok apple is once again "cool" but where is qt4 for linux? - own the "free" codec. Actualy I'm surprised, I had assumed the mpeg codecs to have been an open standard, which is why all the record companies were going ape over since they couldn't "Buy it out and shut it down"
So does this mean that once apple corp makes a deal with the RIAA in a move to collect licnce fees from manufacuers of things like RIO? Are they going to file injunctions against all distributors of software that reads/writes this codec? For example CD rippers? -- James Michael Keller
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it's like devloping very good lemonade. Making and selling it for those who don't have the time or skill to devote to making it. On top of some of your customers say it's such good lemonaid they would like to know how it's made, so if they have time they might make some of it for themselves.
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James Michael Keller
HandSpring isn't a "Clone", HandSpring was founded by the people who started up Palm Computing. After 3Com bought them they starting dicking around with the product line against their recomendation so they all quit, but retained licences to all their developed technoliges. Thus the OS, design, etc. Now they are creating products 3Com wanted to "hold off on" to "maximise profits" from the older designs.
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James Michael Keller
The likelyhood is that they will fail because the genes are more complex than the scientists really understand. Nature tends to eliminate unneeded genetic parts over time so it is likely that the organism is very close to having as small a genetic code as possible to allow it to survive and reproduce
Bunk, even a casual review of gentic research will show that all species genome's contain vast sequences of "noise" of permeniatly turned off segments of DNA. Nature is a pack rat of code - it's more bloated then the latest from Readmond.
What these researchers want to do is place a synthisised DNA strand in a phospholipid sphere. All species cell's have to have the same basic tools to make protines, recive nutrients, and expell waste. This is the part of the genome that's identical in each one.
All this DNA building is basicaly humans using a HEX editor to muck around with the machine code for life - DNA. A simple phosolipid shell in a nutrient providing environment is the computer device it runs on.
The trick down the road is going to not be this primitive tinkering, akin to putting your name in the credits of a game by editing the text strings held in the executible; but the development of an abstracted language to "program" life. Want a radiation waste eating roach that can clean up reactors? Just use the latest object oriented visial LIFE ( Living Individual Functional Engineering ) compiler and link the pre-coded objects together to get one. Compile and debug your new bug!
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James Michael Keller
Actualy Chistmas as we know it is the result of the Roman empire's domination of pagan europe. The winter solstace celebration ( Yule ) was a long standing tradition from at least the time farming emurged as a human occupation. Most religions apart form the minority of people who follow a path with a single deity ( yes - monotheism is a minority, the majority of the worlds population follows some form of polytheism ) they would have had to mark the importand times of the year. The Romans were quite fond of mixing local and empire wide traditions. It was a way to subdu the local populations and apease them. Easter is also a combination of Christian dogma overlaying the traditional spring celebration of Oeaster ( various spellings - spoken history languages and all that ).
Anyhow - this has scant to do with the little robot save it would make for a cool Yule party conversation gimic as the party goes on.
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James Michael Keller
I'll tell you what - go download the tarfiles for EVERY package on the redhat discs, compile each one and install into a temp top level tree. Then tarball that temp tree so you can untar it into the root dir.
In the proccess fix all the little bugs that crop up with make files and old library calls, make patches for each source file tree.
Now, manage to build a boot floopy image and write an installer for your system. Heck - don't have to that's basicaly slackware.
However come up with a useful package management system that others can and do use as well to do all that in a few key strokes.
Then I'll lend an ear to your bitching about redhat or ANY distribution company making a living off the blood and sweet of coders. There is NOTHING to stop you and your closest geek friends from developing your own distribution. Just time and desire stop most people. New ones crop up all the time. Case in point - Mandrake actualy out sells Redhat now. However the BRANDING redhat has done is what works for them now. That had years of work behind it as well.
So clean out your mothers basement where you still live and get to work on that distribution kiddo.
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James Michael Keller
Well I'm not an AC - and I agree completely with this. I wanted to look at the code and see how some things are done, but those functions arn't in the old posted client.
But I belive there is also a "alpha" archive that's more upto date.
So when do we start the GPL slash movement :)
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James Michael Keller
That was like the hospital monitor that went haywire in LA.
"Damnit, where did we get those monitors nurse?"
"NewYork Doctor! - It's already midnight there, I bet these things arn't Y2K complient!!!!"
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James Michael Keller
No no, he/she is talking about movie lenght DVD production units. The things you MAKE movie dvds with.
I do multimedia devel work and we were looking at getting a devel station, but I desided all we needed was MPEG-1/2 playback and static graphics with navigation - I went with a highspeed local network and XML with MPEG playback links instead ( kiosks and such )
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James Michael Keller
That's it, we need to make "slashdate.org" now folks. I mean it's the natural extention to slashdot! I get everything I need techie news wise from here - why not dates?!
Come now guys I'm sure such a system wouldn't take more then a weekend to code up and link in :)
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James Michael Keller
Actualy IBM demonstrated a 1 Tb holographic cube a few years back, it had fantastic read times. I belive the only problem was the cost of manufacturing the substance it was made out of in mass quantities at a reasonable cost.
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James Michael Keller
There were so many - "An admin can not be expected to read mailing lists for 2 hours or more a day to keep up with security issues with his/her out of the box linux distributions" threads I got sick of it and desided not to respond directly
First off - if your handed even a SINGLE let along HUNDREDS of computers to admin that have a network connection - and your not at least subscribed to the announce mailing list from your respective vendor -- then you deserve to be hacked and then fired to return to your much more realistic job fliping burgers down and your locak fry shack
Secondly - redhat -- or any other rpm based system -- is NOT hard to keep updated to the latest security fixed packages. The first thing you need to do when you install any system is unplug the network cable. You don't need to have it pluged in to set up the network, unless your doing a network install - and you just unplug it once you get finished and have a login prompt. You can then either go download via another system the entire updates dir for your vendor and then use something like a jazz disk or zip drive if your uber paranoid.
Personaly I do almost all my redhat installs via a T1 and the ftp install option, then install autorpm from disk - or if I'm feeling lucky I leave the network cable pluged in and download it from the net. Then I set it to install automaticaly each night any new rpms from the updates dir for my version, save things like the kernel and libc, and you can even set it to check the package sigs.
So by the time I come in and read a bugtrack post - in this case the cron exploit - it's already been patched.
Now the paranoid among you will say that this then could leave you open to spoofing or somone hacking redhat or another vendor and trojoning everyone.
A] That's just as likely as to happen to MS with it's NT service packs. And it's happend before with a few open source packages. But due to the checksums and the sigs on the packages being off - it was discovered after only a few people had downloaded them.
B] You can set it to download, but not install - and it e-mails you a nice little note to read in the morning when you come in that there are updated filesm, and you can then search the bugtrack list for what was wrong with the old version - or hopefuly you already have mail waiting from the announcement e-mail list giving you the details.
This is exactly what happend with all my redhat boxen when this exploit came out, they automagickaly upgraded and e-mailed me about it, read the security e-mail from redhat and finished my coffee and went back to work.
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James Michael Keller
But not really a new concept, by any means. The cordless phone example is a pretty good one, though. There are tons of things we depend on every day that suddenly become useless if we lose power
Then your silly to buy a critical things that don't also have battry backup.
Your average buggy driver a centry ago could not repaire - let alone make - a buggy. If it broke he/she was just as screwed stuck out in the country as one of us would be with any modern car that broke down.
Technology will always fill the holes. Power's out and we can't use radios? Well that's what Baygen's are for
Once fuel cell tech gets a little better we can just stick our cell phones out in the rain and set it in the sun to recharge - or fill it with a little vodka and be charged up for a month.
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James Michael Keller
I'm truly tired of this cycle every 10 years or so where people get into a round of "gloom-n-doom"(tm) books predicting the end of "something" "Anything!"
First it was the death of the printed book, book sales are higher per capita then ever. Perioticals are down yes - but when the point is to have information to the masses faster a daily rag will loose to the net. That's only logical, movible type beat out hand copied text, now something better has come around.
The notion that we are all going to a hell in a gateway cow computer box - a land illuminated by ghoastly green light from billions of blinking "12:00" VCR displays bouncing off trillions of "Free AOL 4.xxxxxxxxx" cd's is just chicken little crying bloody murder because no one wants to by "The end is at hand - by Chicken Little, fifteenth ed" anymore
Sure some people are lost in this brave new world - screw them. They adapt or die. My grandfather made it out of the depression working his way up from a paper boy and came out a millionar running a large supermarket chain down under. Others sat around and wined about how bad things where.
"Information Overload" - bull
Do any of you remember how much a pain in the rear it was just to find one artical from a magazine on microfilm? I spend days in the basements of libraries going blind scrolling through reals of newpapers and time back issues years ago.
Now I type in a few key words in google, yahoo, altavista, etc and I spend a few moment to scan through the results sifted from the eather.
The only thing technology does is shorten our attention spans and patients. 15 years ago I could dial a phone just fine with a rotoray pulse phone. Now I'm pissed off if people give cute numonic phone numbers, 1-800-call-menow and the like, instead of the damn digits so I can finger my phone pad faster - I don't want to be bothered with remembering the cute number - I just want to make a call and get off the line
I hear people complain about the amount of work today - the average work day has been shortened drasticaly over the last 20 years. Especialy in areas heavy into information systems useage. I have people complaine at work if they have to site down and do anything for six hours out of the work day.
In general yes - the work day hasn't gotten shorter - the often hyped "technology will liberate" montra was always bunk cooked up by the likes of Disney imagineers. An individual can now get more work done in the same time. I have a dozen computers around me at the moment, I'm coding, surfing, monitoring my network, watching the firewall, taking calls, and writing this. Could I do that if all I had was a phone and a typewriter?
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James Michael Keller
Even better - Redhat 6.0 FTP install - single boot disk on a completely new system with a just out of the static bag hard disc. 15 minutes and a FULL disc install is finished ( ok it helps I have a small shop with 100b-T and a T1, but still - assuming no PCMCIA it's a single boot disk and a few questions about the networking and your off and running.
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James Michael Keller
The US constitution's second amendment is for americans what the GPL is for the net community.
9 out of 10 people that benifit from the GPLs existants will never activly partake of it in the form of programming with a GPLed program. The same goes for the right to posess a firearm.
While the vast majority of American's do not now, nor will probably ever - own a gun -- the mear fact that they CAN and some DO is a check against 'the government'.
Some are quick to point out that we have nothing to fear about the US government. Only crazy folks like Branch Dividians worry about the 'black helicopters'. However every major represive regiem that has ever come to power has made de-arming the civilian population it's first act of business. From the latest hunta in south america or africa to the Hilter. -- The scary thing about Hitler was he even sold the idea as the way to "peace" - claiming Germany would be on the forfront to remove the weapons of war from civilized peoples.
It is not the CURRENT governemnt civilian gun ownership is in place to be a check against - it is against a future one that no longer serves at the leasure of the governed population.
It's just like the GPL. It's not here to protect you from what's going on with a program in the current setting - it's ment as a stop gap against abuse of the codebase by someone at some point down the line.
Both are in place to protect the rights of those that live under it from abuse by powerful entities - be they a facist governemnt or the Microsofts of the world.
Some scoff at this notion - the US military has tanks and steath bombers. A bunch of rednecks in camo arn't going to stop the government from doing what it wants. - but that's wrong. The US tried to impose itself in both Korea and Vietnam - both foes resisted primparly via gorilla warfare in small bands with light weaponry in the face of crapet bombing and napalm.
Just as we fend off folks like MS with near unlimited funds and ability to hire brilient coders a dozen at a time.
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James Michael Keller
Make guns illegal, and they'll use knives. A much smaller problem. A madman cannot successfully attack a crowd with a knife. 3-4 unarmed guys in the crowd can knock him out using almost anything they have at hand. Defense is a lot easier.
Bull. I own a nin-to. Over the years I have become quite skilled in it's use.
If I were to go into any inclosed space holding say a dozen or more people ( a classroom or office ) I could kill every single one of them in under a minute. Anyone who lived would have lower chance of being saved at the hospital due to the severe lacerating nature of a sword vs hydrostatic shock from a bullet.
Such a weapn can quite easly remove limbs and if the target was standing - heads.
A single person with a swoard can easly hold off three or four unarmed and untrained opponets. The simple fact is the first person in range is going to die - and that usualy stops anyone from getting close to the person.
How do you protect against a sword? Thats right a range weapon like a Bow - or a Gun.
So now that we are going to ban the gun, we must now ban the bow - since an archer can fire off bows as fast as most revolovers or rifles, and at the effective targeting range of a pistol he/she is actualy more accurate.
So now that we have desided to get rid of the range weapns - guns and bows, we have to protect the public at large from crazy people with swoards. We just have to take if as fact that criminals will have whatever they want - we just want to stop the unknown crazy person from being able to kill anyone.
"That's silly" you might say - but why - it's the same logic.
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James Michael Keller
Are you smoking crack or what? Debian package management suite is and was far superior to anything that redhat had. dpkg/dselect/apt, never break and are pretty much rock solid. You can sync your system with ftp mirrors with just 2 commands. Hell you can upgrade the whole system with apt-get dist-upgrade command from ftp/http/cdrom/whatever. dselect and apt also take care of dependencies and conflicts automatically. There are other benefits too, these are just a few that I got from top of my head. RedHat LAGS in this area, sorry.
I haven't used a debian install before, so I'm not going to get into which is better with debian folk. However just because rpm's own codebase dosn't have those features is irrelivent. Other packages handle those functions you belive it lacks, work just as well doing the same things. They don't replace, but work with rpm. Rpm handles the package databasing, installing, removing, etc. Autorpm has all the networking code to go out and check the ftp servers and download anything new - and if you set it to - update the rpms. It's especially good when you point it at redhat's update dir on the ftp server, so when I read something on bugtraq or redhat-list about a patched package update -- it's already on my system.
Rpmfind handles finding and meeting dependencies. It too, simply uses the rpm system - vs bloating rpm itself with functions.
The problem with automagickal download and installs is it only works when your system is rolled in a consistant basis. Ie BSD's ports collection system is great - it will download and install anything needed to install the package you needed in the first place. However that only works because the entire system is set up to do version checking for libraries and such. It's also a source based system. If your dealing with binaries - as most people using rpm do - you get into all sorts of problems.
If you always use say --sources for your rpmfind call, and recompile the src.rpm files all the time you get the same effect.
The downside is not every package is going to be up on an ftp server in rpm format. I think what rpm really needs is a much better source/binary rpm packaging system. More exactly a front end that generates .spec files. Rpm handles the generation just fine. That way if you can't find anything but tarballs of the latest and greatest file you - or the developers or packge mantainers - could create a standard .spec based on a valid template. Something where you could move around and tag files as documetation, binaries, etc and pick the paths. And output a valid .spec file.
That wouldn't help for when you have to create patches against the source Makefiles to add in rpm environment vars, but even that could be automated by such a system looking for hard coded paths in Makefiles and such.
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James Michael Keller
So much for me previewing, IIRC it's ftp and / or mirrors of them, not web sites as I typo'ed above.
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James Michael Keller
They're package management system has lagged behind Red Hat's due to lack of developers for a while.
Has it? Is there a feature in RedHat's system allowing you to automatically update from a server? (I honestly want to know, I'm not trying to start a flameware here). That feature is one of the major reasons I use Debian.
I don't belive there is a need for this feahttpture to be rolled into the rpm codebase. autorpm is quite good at pulling updates from a distribution company web site automaticaly. It's quite good at keeping an rpm based system up to date from any number of mirrors ( handles mirror rotations and such).
With other utilities such as rpmfind and the very useful rpm database at rpmfind.net, an admin of an rpm based system has all the tools they need to manage the system.
OMNSHO, a system to act as a front end to all three would be an even better boon to the community.
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James Michael Keller
Something that needs to be addressed in all of this, if they start implementing preditory bandwithrestrictions - they will lose the "common carrier" leagle coverage. They then could be sued for ANY content that comes across the wire, or lack there off.
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James Michael Keller
Despite what the blurb implies, this is all still very theoretical stuff. Don't expect to see warp drives in actual use in your lifetime.
Funny, that's exactly the sentiment Orvil Write had about man mastering flight -- two years before he and his brother were hailed as the first to make a controled flight.
Never Say Never ( or "In your lifetime" for that matter )
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James Michael Keller
Now since the old win95 kernel is dead and microsoft has trippled the amount of programers and now has every app in kernel space, you ca be sure that NT is going to excell quick and windows2000 will be thee OS that kills linux.
Dear gods, you actualy cite the fact that every MS app is going to be running in ring 0 - kernel space - as a GOOD thing?
The mear fact that MS moved the GUI sub system to ring 0 in NT and 95 is what has lead to the ability of crappy third party programs to nuke your NT or 95 box and get you BOSs.
I am sorry but windows 3.1 to windows 95 is alot more of an improvemnt then linux .8 to 2.0. Windows 95 is more advanced then NT
Excuse me? Windows 3.1 ran atop DOS. Windows 95 ran atop DOS ( don't belive me, install drdos on the box and type win - or disable the auto "win" that is in the IO.SYS file which is now just a hidden ini file. ) Windows 98 is just 95 OSR2 with service packs and IE 4 preinstalled.
Do you even know what NT is? NT is OS/2 ( or the vast majority of it is still identical ) with the windows GUI replacing the IBM GUI, 3.5 had the win 3.1 program manager. 4.0 has the windows 95 GUI. OS/2 was designed to REPLACE the severly outdated DOS arch for a 32bit system. When MS left, IBM continued development with an eye to stability. MS desided to go for ease of use and speed. Hence they merged the video subsystem into the kernel - bloating it to all hell and making it an unstable pice of tripe. I ran a medium sized BBS for five years under OS/2 running 5 copies of a DOS bbs system at once all in VDM's which could be manualy configred. If IBM had done what Sun has done with Solaris - gave it away in binary form - it would have trashed NT's growth.
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James Michael Keller
However, my experience with Mozilla releases on the 2 major platforms so far (Windoze and Linux) has been most unimpressive. Extremely slow and jerky rendering, many bugs, many if not most buttons and keys non-functional, too many crashes, and the list goes on.
That's not exactly a valid complaint yet. Mozilla is just now halfway to it's planed completion. Saying it's crap because it crashes and buttons don't work is akin to complaining your 10 year old hasn't gotten his PhD in quantium physics yet.
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James Michael Keller
I had a huge headache at work a week and a half ago when everything died. I'm in a scientific group, and we've mostly used Solaris in the past. We've been ramping up our Linux usage, and on the whole Linux has been *more* stable than Solaris. However, we just recently started writing in bulk to a Linux disk NFS exported to a Solaris machine, and the nfs daemon *kept* *dying*. Very annoying. I solved it with some Alan Cox patches that included H.J. Lu's latest knfsd. So Linux isn't as unreliable as it first looked. But there are a few places where Linux still does falter.
But look at how fast it was fixed - you found an error, it was something Alan Cox and H.J. Lu had already found and fixed. Those fixes will appear in the next AC full kernel revision patch. So within, what - a few months tops, the problem is solved for everyone.
Try that with anything comming out of MS. Or for that matter any of the commercial UNIX flavors which often take longer to even find and fix the glitch, let alone begin to distribute it to those who need it.
No realistic person will say Linux is currently, or will ever be, the perfect operating systems - one that works on everything, always, from now till time everlasting.
The facinating thing about Linux, the GNU tools, and body of GPL applications - is the ever evolving nature of them. Yes - headaches for Venders, and fodder for VARs and consultants. However one can always apply "If it's not broke don't fix it" with linux. If your 2.0.xx kernel works fine with the hardware in a dedicated environment works - there is no reason to change anything save any fixes for security or bugs. No need for the latest and greatest like virtual frame buffers found in the 2.2.x series.
The key to Linux is, it turns the operating system into a commodity. Linux does for the operating system market what cheap PCs have done for the computer industry.
As an example, the USA would never have grown as mighty as it is today if the intersate rail and road networks were locked behind toll booths. The same goes for the break up of "blessed monopolies" such as MaBell, and more recently with the move to have gas and eletric companies loose exclusive rights to regions. It's only when you remove the toll boths to progress, do we end going anywhere.
Linux is not the destination we should be seeking, it's mearly the open road to tommorow.
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James Michael Keller
Is it just me or does this sound like a bad thing? MP3 has been one of the better examples of the freedom of the net comming through and forcing the corps to see a new paradigm for music distribution.
But now, a corp - ok apple is once again "cool" but where is qt4 for linux? - own the "free" codec. Actualy I'm surprised, I had assumed the mpeg codecs to have been an open standard, which is why all the record companies were going ape over since they couldn't "Buy it out and shut it down"
So does this mean that once apple corp makes a deal with the RIAA in a move to collect licnce fees from manufacuers of things like RIO? Are they going to file injunctions against all distributors of software that reads/writes this codec? For example CD rippers?
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James Michael Keller