I think this points out a pretty big problem with our civilization.
One of the things that have enabled past civilizations to endure and be remembered was their permanence. Every great civilization knew they were leaving a legacy for future generations to look back on. Think of how much we still know about the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. They made sure that everything that was important to them was recorded for posterity, and we owe a lot to them for that.
I laugh when people talk about digitally remastering music, movies, and books in order to preserve them. The Vatican is currently scanning their entire archive and saving it to digital media (CD-ROM). What's going to happen, though, when CD-ROM drives are no longer profitable to make because the next new technology has rendered them obsolete? What about when copyright holders or companies with exclusive rights to certain types of media go out of business? Just think of the effort involved to keep the data we already enjoy now up to date. How many times has the Beatles been remastered on new formats in the last 50 years? Just one generation of people who thinks of it as passe is enough for it to be lost forever.
So much of what is written now, including this, is only available on "the net" which is the most transitory medium we've come up with yet. How much of what is on the net today do you think will still be readable 100 years from now. Any of it? I still have a hard time getting to stuff from 10 years ago. And this is what is killing off our newspapers.
When our civilization dies off like all the others have, what will we leave behind? What will people of the future be able to learn from us? Are all the advances we've made in science, technology, engineering, medicine, being recorded in a way that will ensure permanence for the future? Or are we so focused on the short term in everything we do, that no one will even know we existed?
Get em while they're hot, folks. With the price/performance ratio so far out of whack they'll sell fuck all, so they're sure to become rare collectors items... especially after Sun goes out of business Any Day Now(tm).
I actually think it's kinda cool just from a geek perspective. Every other laptop out there is x86 or Apple. Nobody else has made a laptop with a "weird" architecture like Sparc. There aren't any Alpha or IBM Power laptops out there, are there?
I've got single sign-on for all my websites through my MacOS X Keychain. I imagine there's a similar facility bundled with or made available for Windows. It works great and I only have to trust myself to keep it secure for me.
With tools like that, why is there even a market for this thing?
The iPod is a great mp3 player. It's simple and ergonomically ideal.
Please don't "second system" it with tons of add-on features like photo browsing, video, card readers, FM transmitter, TV tuner, wireless telephony, blah blah blah...
However, with this iteration, IBM took one of the cores from the dual-core POWER4 chip, repackaged it as the PPC970, and sold it to Apple as the G5. So PowerPC and POWER have re-merged... sort of. Freescale is still developing their own PowerPC chips which do not fall under the POWER umbrella.
I strongly believe that if September 11 showed us anything, it was that zealots of any movement represent a huge risk to that movement because zealots do not consider the repercussions of their actions
Nothing amuses me more than when people decry the very freedoms they're exercising.
Funny, I was the first one to post this joke (too naive, I guess, to think 50 others would do the same thing) and I get moderated down to -1 as redundant.
IBM AS/400's have offered integrated Netfinity adapters for years. These are PCI cards with processors, memory, and console/network connections which share power and storage on the AS/400. You can fit up to 16 of these in a single machine.
Check it out
Actually, the default kernel (2.2.19) is just as vulnerable as the "edge" kernel (2.4.5).
And just because they are local exploits doesn't make them any less important. It's generally a lot easier (social engineering, default passwords, more users = better odds) to hack a user account than to hack root. I'd be very disappointed if that was Pat's attitude toward security.
That's not been the case in the past. Yes, Slackware has a reputation for being a DIY distribution, and I like it that way. However, they've always posted security fixes themselves. Any responsible distribution should do so, IMHO.
Slackware is an excellent distribution, which I hope never goes away. I prefer it over anything Red Hat, Mandrake, or SuSE have to offer.
However, it's not the qualities of the distribution that have me worried about its future (so what if it doesn't do RPM?). After the "layoff" Patrick's helpers (David, Chris, Logan) have been forced to get paying jobs elsewhere and only help out on a part time basis, leaving Patrick to handle the bulk of development by himself. He's started a slackware-current which has a few package collections in there, but nothing close to a new distribution tree. I'm also concerned that the latest patches put out for 8.0 were in August.
They've always been on time with security patches, but they've yet to release a patch for the kernel issues found a couple weeks ago. While, I don't mind so much downloading the new kernel source and recompiling it myself, I imagine there are many out there who don't know to do that. And yes, the newgrp exploit thing doesn't work in slackware because it uses shadow passwords instead of PAM, but the kernel bug is still there for exploitation by other means (su perhaps).
The fact that David is no longer developing autoslack and protopkg is unsettling, but it doesn't concern me as much as the seeming lack of activity at the slackware site. Please, Patrick, tell me I'm wrong and that you've got something big cooking up back there...
Slashdot Mirror
I think this points out a pretty big problem with our civilization.
One of the things that have enabled past civilizations to endure and be remembered was their permanence. Every great civilization knew they were leaving a legacy for future generations to look back on. Think of how much we still know about the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. They made sure that everything that was important to them was recorded for posterity, and we owe a lot to them for that.
I laugh when people talk about digitally remastering music, movies, and books in order to preserve them. The Vatican is currently scanning their entire archive and saving it to digital media (CD-ROM). What's going to happen, though, when CD-ROM drives are no longer profitable to make because the next new technology has rendered them obsolete? What about when copyright holders or companies with exclusive rights to certain types of media go out of business? Just think of the effort involved to keep the data we already enjoy now up to date. How many times has the Beatles been remastered on new formats in the last 50 years? Just one generation of people who thinks of it as passe is enough for it to be lost forever.
So much of what is written now, including this, is only available on "the net" which is the most transitory medium we've come up with yet. How much of what is on the net today do you think will still be readable 100 years from now. Any of it? I still have a hard time getting to stuff from 10 years ago. And this is what is killing off our newspapers.
When our civilization dies off like all the others have, what will we leave behind? What will people of the future be able to learn from us? Are all the advances we've made in science, technology, engineering, medicine, being recorded in a way that will ensure permanence for the future? Or are we so focused on the short term in everything we do, that no one will even know we existed?
Do you think Apple is better at it than IBM was?
iPods are suddenly this brand-new giant ten million user-huge market which Apple has unique content-control over
What are you babbling about? Of the 36GB of content in my iPod not a single file was obtained from Apple.
Terabyte ATA hard drives by year end. 1.2TB SCSI drives in 2007.
I feel pretty confident about that. Seagate is already selling 160GB platters. Hitachi will be stuffing drives with five 200GB platters real soon now.
Aha... well then the stuff Sun is selling is nothing new, as this is the same system displayed on their website.
e x.xml
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/ind
Get em while they're hot, folks. With the price/performance ratio so far out of whack they'll sell fuck all, so they're sure to become rare collectors items... especially after Sun goes out of business Any Day Now(tm).
I actually think it's kinda cool just from a geek perspective. Every other laptop out there is x86 or Apple. Nobody else has made a laptop with a "weird" architecture like Sparc. There aren't any Alpha or IBM Power laptops out there, are there?
Not $3400 cool, though...
IBM does multicore on Power and has for years.
How long before we start seeing these inside hacked up Mac Minis? Mini-ITX fits inside one of those, doesn't it?
Only old people have dead pixels
(sorry)
I've got single sign-on for all my websites through my MacOS X Keychain. I imagine there's a similar facility bundled with or made available for Windows. It works great and I only have to trust myself to keep it secure for me.
With tools like that, why is there even a market for this thing?
The iPod is a great mp3 player. It's simple and ergonomically ideal.
Please don't "second system" it with tons of add-on features like photo browsing, video, card readers, FM transmitter, TV tuner, wireless telephony, blah blah blah...
Yes.
However, with this iteration, IBM took one of the cores from the dual-core POWER4 chip, repackaged it as the PPC970, and sold it to Apple as the G5. So PowerPC and POWER have re-merged... sort of. Freescale is still developing their own PowerPC chips which do not fall under the POWER umbrella.
I strongly believe that if September 11 showed us anything, it was that zealots of any movement represent a huge risk to that movement because zealots do not consider the repercussions of their actions
Nothing amuses me more than when people decry the very freedoms they're exercising.
Oh sure. Nobody really needs a simple POP/IMAP client, right?
I guess that means Eudora will be getting more business.
When I get rich enough to buy my 993, I'll give you a call.
Funny, I was the first one to post this joke (too naive, I guess, to think 50 others would do the same thing) and I get moderated down to -1 as redundant.
It figures.
That's the same password I have on my luggage!
I don't know if they do or not, but it sounds like good advice to me.
IBM AS/400's have offered integrated Netfinity adapters for years. These are PCI cards with processors, memory, and console/network connections which share power and storage on the AS/400. You can fit up to 16 of these in a single machine. Check it out
I run my Slack with GNOME and wouldn't have it any other way.
Actually, the default kernel (2.2.19) is just as vulnerable as the "edge" kernel (2.4.5).
And just because they are local exploits doesn't make them any less important. It's generally a lot easier (social engineering, default passwords, more users = better odds) to hack a user account than to hack root. I'd be very disappointed if that was Pat's attitude toward security.
see here
and here
That's not been the case in the past. Yes, Slackware has a reputation for being a DIY distribution, and I like it that way. However, they've always posted security fixes themselves. Any responsible distribution should do so, IMHO.
Slackware is an excellent distribution, which I hope never goes away. I prefer it over anything Red Hat, Mandrake, or SuSE have to offer.
However, it's not the qualities of the distribution that have me worried about its future (so what if it doesn't do RPM?). After the "layoff" Patrick's helpers (David, Chris, Logan) have been forced to get paying jobs elsewhere and only help out on a part time basis, leaving Patrick to handle the bulk of development by himself. He's started a slackware-current which has a few package collections in there, but nothing close to a new distribution tree. I'm also concerned that the latest patches put out for 8.0 were in August.
They've always been on time with security patches, but they've yet to release a patch for the kernel issues found a couple weeks ago. While, I don't mind so much downloading the new kernel source and recompiling it myself, I imagine there are many out there who don't know to do that. And yes, the newgrp exploit thing doesn't work in slackware because it uses shadow passwords instead of PAM, but the kernel bug is still there for exploitation by other means (su perhaps).
The fact that David is no longer developing autoslack and protopkg is unsettling, but it doesn't concern me as much as the seeming lack of activity at the slackware site. Please, Patrick, tell me I'm wrong and that you've got something big cooking up back there...
You forgot Robotix!
Unique features: slotted connectors for cable management, dinosaur jaws, astronaut action figure, weighted piece for adjusting center of gravity, rough terrain wheels