But doesn't the MyDoom virus depend on a dope sysadmin clicking on a binary attachment to spread?
Not really. Two points:
In Windows XP everyone defaults to being sysadmins
A virus does not need access to other people's files to access our user's address book and mass-mail itself. Though in this case the virus would only be active once the user logs on
The problem with Windows permissions is that you could attach an executable and it would have 'execute' permission by default, unless in Unix-like OSes where attachments are not by default executable. You could send a Unix trojan in a tarball, but it would not be point-and-click anymore, so would probably spread less.
Still, if Windows users have 5 popular e-mail clients to choose from virus/trojan writers would still have a much harder time. That they don't, in general, should be Microsoft's problem. Except that they don't care.
that they would always have toplay catch up, with no big company to support them
Novell, Intel and HP. In fact, Mono's libraries (as opposed to the compiler, interpreter and JIT) were relicensed from LGPL to MIT X11 to accomodate corporate backers.
Hmm, interesting, did not know about that. Mandrake does use Debian's menu system, but the first version I heard about was 5.1, and it was already based on Red Hat, which I think was at version 5.0 at that time, thus the version number.
What gets me is the contracts with the high schoolers, and now the grade schools. They say the average teenager drinks *10* cans of pop a day. That's scary.
They did a TV documentary in the UK on healthy living, with the presenter going around to people's houses with a nutritionist. Apparently kids in some families eat one week's worth of RDA salt and sugar *every* day.
No wonder 70% of Americans and 50% of Britons are overweight.
... should allow humans to play chess against their computers. I think Windows chess games already do this; the GNUchess and Crafty engines played through xboard or eboard, on the other hand, seems to only allow limiting difficulty by search depth and background thinking. One can't even have assymetrical chess clocks.
There is a way out for the last problem - set the game to Human vs Human, play your first move, and then run Black's clock down before you hand it over to the computer. Awkward and won't work if you want to play Black, though.
Err... I presume the PR meant first with *graphical* partitioning utility, since even the bare-bones fdisk counts as one.
In fact, I still use fdisk in conjunction with Anaconda's GUI to GNU parted; when one is fussy about the positioning and naming of partitions on disk, one have to.
To their credit, Mandrake has one of the more powerful GUI partitioning utility around. Apart from that one release (9.0 IIRC?) where you could not enter the partition size manually and have to use sliders!
A lot of companies must be beating their chests and wail about their misinformed decision to create IE-friendly intranets.
I have seen browser detection codes that lump together Gecko browsers with Netscape 4.x.. and when I set my UA selector to 'IE6/Windows' minor parts of the IE page would turn out not to follow W3C specs. Sigh.
It's a more elegant solution than my long-contemplated idea which would be to have a sort of steward/ess light over the tables in restaurants.
Thought of that myself:) Though seeing how it is dismally ineffective on airplanes, having a central board in the kitchen showing which tables need attending is probably better.
I expected 2.6 to be faster than patched 2.4 kernels too, but the point is that you run a custom kernel, while the benchmark was comparing vanilla 2.4.23 against vanilla 2.6.0. Which not many people probably use if they care about performance..
FC2 test1 should be out next week with a post-2.6.1 kernel as default. With SELinux to boot, though it's recommended to disable it at boot time for test1. Mandrake 10.0 beta1 has 2.6.1 too.
No self-respecting large Linux distributor would ship a vanilla 2.4 kernel (well, SuSE does, but as an option, and not pre-compiled). The O(1) scheduler which AFAICT makes quite a large performance difference, has been available since RH9, IIRC, and presumably its contemporaries adopted it back then as well.
So it's not such a big leap for real users. Mind you, still a big improvement - especially for interactive use, and also considering that there are so many patches for 2.4 that are now integrated into 2.6, lessening compatibility worries (try patching Red Hat's pre-FC1 2.4 kernel source).
However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange.
I'm sure this applies only to a vocal minority.. we have Linux/GPL zealots on one side, BSD zealots on the other.
Is GPL worse than propietory???
Ever noticed how in the Middle Ages the Church was much more concerned with suppressing heresies rather than battling infidels? (the Spanish Inquisition was the tip of the iceberg, really, nothing more). Ideas similar to yours but different enough could be your worst enemies; after all, they compete for similar ecological niches, biologically speaking.
Macs have another great keyboard combo: Command-Option-Escape! On old-school macs it would generally not help, but on OS X it's the friendliest GUI to kill -9 I have ever seen.
move to this untested hobby distro (fedora) that requires a complete re-install anyway
Fedora is *not* untested, it's just *commercially* unsupported, i.e. you cannot buy support contracts for it. AFAICT it is actually one of the most stable Red Hat releases I have used. The most severe bug I ran into was the init.d script for MySQL incorrectly reporting an error starting up, but that was fixed in an update.
You should be able to upgrade from a Red Hat release to Fedora, if not, that is a bug. If you can't be bothered to report it to Bugzilla, then... you're not contributing, and can't complain.
The question mark is over FC2, because of its ambitious scope - Linux 2.6 with SELinux and LVM2. Upgrading might be a more tricky matter, so if you care about Fedora, please consider beta testing the upcoming test release.
It does, sans the VNC remote sharing, using gdmflexiserver. AFAIR an icon for this is in the 'Foot' start menu on stock GNOME, but not in Red Hat's or Fedora's menu - probably considered not stable enough. Going to have to try KDE again one of these days - probably when the upcoming Fedora test release is out (or, realistically, three days after that. Slow cable modem). I quite like the integration of VNC and WebDAV..
Now, maybe you don't use MPlayer (and the other "native" driver apps) but there are a hell of a lot of us that do and love it.
MPlayer does not use native drivers, it uses Win32 libraries. Drivers are used to access hardware, libraries are used to provide software functionality.
That being said, insofar as Win32 drivers are 'native' since Windows is the dominant OS, it is possible to use Win32 network drivers on Linux, if that's your cup of tea. It's a chicken-and-egg problem - too many people do this and manufacturers lose incentive to release native drivers (i.e. Linux drivers to run on Linux, FreeBSD drivers to run on FreeBSD..)
With that said, my #1 greatist wish for 2.7/8 would be to get the damn SBP2 Firewire drivers working correctly. Dammit, that thing has been broken since it was introduced. Nearly every time I boot my system I have to plug and unplug the firewire cable (sometimes several times) to get the devices reset and loaded properly so I can access them (I'm using kernel 2.6, but has always been broken like this).
Rest assured that once some intrepid users start beta testing the first batch of 2.6 distros (Fedora Core 2 test1 should be out next week, if they sort out SELinux integration in time) there will be enough eyes looking at this. I personally would be giving it a try.
Funny, I remember someone saying SBP2 support in 2.6 is much improved and there is no need to run rescan-scsi-bus.sh at every boot time. I've not been able to verify this - using Rawhide 2.6 kernels it keeps resetting, so I guess your experience was quite spot on - but at the time I thought it had something to do with a broken SELinux setup.
Remember the Bluecurve controversy? Bero quitted RH over that, and started Ark Linux, AFAIR.
Nice distro - once it hits 1.0, if an end-user comes to me asking for a distro recommendation and (s)he much prefers KDE over GNOME, I'd probably recommend Ark.
It's probably the only large (in size) distro that does not ship GNOME, on the other hand (it does ship the libraries) so I would not recommend it for people who like both desktops. Least of all those who prefer GNOME, if that's not self-evident:)
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Two points:
The problem with Windows permissions is that you could attach an executable and it would have 'execute' permission by default, unless in Unix-like OSes where attachments are not by default executable. You could send a Unix trojan in a tarball, but it would not be point-and-click anymore, so would probably spread less.
Still, if Windows users have 5 popular e-mail clients to choose from virus/trojan writers would still have a much harder time. That they don't, in general, should be Microsoft's problem. Except that they don't care.
[humor]Why, yes, he's obviously using Gentoo![/humor]
Novell, Intel and HP. In fact, Mono's libraries (as opposed to the compiler, interpreter and JIT) were relicensed from LGPL to MIT X11 to accomodate corporate backers.
Hmm, interesting, did not know about that. Mandrake does use Debian's menu system, but the first version I heard about was 5.1, and it was already based on Red Hat, which I think was at version 5.0 at that time, thus the version number.
They did a TV documentary in the UK on healthy living, with the presenter going around to people's houses with a nutritionist. Apparently kids in some families eat one week's worth of RDA salt and sugar *every* day.
No wonder 70% of Americans and 50% of Britons are overweight.
MMC/SD memory cards are much smaller in size though, and probably much more energy efficient than CompactFlash.
My old CF-based Kodak certainly ran out of batteries after barely 10 minutes of running its LCD.
There is a way out for the last problem - set the game to Human vs Human, play your first move, and then run Black's clock down before you hand it over to the computer. Awkward and won't work if you want to play Black, though.
In fact, I still use fdisk in conjunction with Anaconda's GUI to GNU parted; when one is fussy about the positioning and naming of partitions on disk, one have to.
To their credit, Mandrake has one of the more powerful GUI partitioning utility around. Apart from that one release (9.0 IIRC?) where you could not enter the partition size manually and have to use sliders!
I have seen browser detection codes that lump together Gecko browsers with Netscape 4.x .. and when I set my UA selector to 'IE6/Windows' minor parts of the IE page would turn out not to follow W3C specs. Sigh.
Deserved what they get, really.
Thought of that myself
I expected 2.6 to be faster than patched 2.4 kernels too, but the point is that you run a custom kernel, while the benchmark was comparing vanilla 2.4.23 against vanilla 2.6.0. Which not many people probably use if they care about performance..
Won't be a long wait; 2.6.2-rc3 is out now.
FC2 test1 should be out next week with a post-2.6.1 kernel as default. With SELinux to boot, though it's recommended to disable it at boot time for test1. Mandrake 10.0 beta1 has 2.6.1 too.
So it's not such a big leap for real users. Mind you, still a big improvement - especially for interactive use, and also considering that there are so many patches for 2.4 that are now integrated into 2.6, lessening compatibility worries (try patching Red Hat's pre-FC1 2.4 kernel source).
I could have *sworn* I read the URL as 'Fast Silicone' .. :P
Don't worry, in the upcoming Fedora Core 2 they have been renamed to system-*
- Michel
Ever noticed how in the Middle Ages the Church was much more concerned with suppressing heresies rather than battling infidels? (the Spanish Inquisition was the tip of the iceberg, really, nothing more). Ideas similar to yours but different enough could be your worst enemies; after all, they compete for similar ecological niches, biologically speaking.
Something like KDE's CTRL-ALT-Escape then
Have fun!
Fedora is *not* untested, it's just *commercially* unsupported, i.e. you cannot buy support contracts for it. AFAICT it is actually one of the most stable Red Hat releases I have used. The most severe bug I ran into was the init.d script for MySQL incorrectly reporting an error starting up, but that was fixed in an update.
You should be able to upgrade from a Red Hat release to Fedora, if not, that is a bug. If you can't be bothered to report it to Bugzilla, then... you're not contributing, and can't complain.
The question mark is over FC2, because of its ambitious scope - Linux 2.6 with SELinux and LVM2. Upgrading might be a more tricky matter, so if you care about Fedora, please consider beta testing the upcoming test release.
It does, sans the VNC remote sharing, using gdmflexiserver. AFAIR an icon for this is in the 'Foot' start menu on stock GNOME, but not in Red Hat's or Fedora's menu - probably considered not stable enough.
Going to have to try KDE again one of these days - probably when the upcoming Fedora test release is out (or, realistically, three days after that. Slow cable modem). I quite like the integration of VNC and WebDAV..
MPlayer does not use native drivers, it uses Win32 libraries. Drivers are used to access hardware, libraries are used to provide software functionality.
That being said, insofar as Win32 drivers are 'native' since Windows is the dominant OS, it is possible to use Win32 network drivers on Linux, if that's your cup of tea. It's a chicken-and-egg problem - too many people do this and manufacturers lose incentive to release native drivers (i.e. Linux drivers to run on Linux, FreeBSD drivers to run on FreeBSD..)
Rest assured that once some intrepid users start beta testing the first batch of 2.6 distros (Fedora Core 2 test1 should be out next week, if they sort out SELinux integration in time) there will be enough eyes looking at this. I personally would be giving it a try.
Funny, I remember someone saying SBP2 support in 2.6 is much improved and there is no need to run rescan-scsi-bus.sh at every boot time. I've not been able to verify this - using Rawhide 2.6 kernels it keeps resetting, so I guess your experience was quite spot on - but at the time I thought it had something to do with a broken SELinux setup.
We'll soon find out if Solaris 10 would be based on SunOS 6.0 or 5.10
Slightly OT, but what is the kernel version in Win2k3? WinXP was 5.1, would it be 5.2, 5.5 or 6.0?
Nice distro - once it hits 1.0, if an end-user comes to me asking for a distro recommendation and (s)he much prefers KDE over GNOME, I'd probably recommend Ark.
It's probably the only large (in size) distro that does not ship GNOME, on the other hand (it does ship the libraries) so I would not recommend it for people who like both desktops. Least of all those who prefer GNOME, if that's not self-evident :)
Furthermore, Badnarik was listed on top due to the way the list was sorted. What are you on about?