At no point did anyone ask whether the avaliablility of guns was a factor.
Guns simply don't have a place in a modern society.
Actually, the story suggests that the availability of guns led to less people being killed. If guns were truly unavailable (if we delude ourselves for a moment into thinking that black markets don't exist), I believe they would have retreived the bombs and made sure they went off another day.
Regarding guns having no place in a modern society, I strongly disagree with you. Guns equalize people so that people can't use superior physical prowess to overpower victims. For instance, carrying concealed firearms has been demonstrated to cut rape rates dramatically in Florida. Beyond that, though, is the basic human right to self-defense. There are plenty of ways to kill people (run them down with cars, make bombs, poison, etc) but, firearms have the unique capability of being useful for self-defense.
If we take a more realistic view - that someone capable of maliciously killing someone else would also not have a problem with breaking anti-gun laws, we can see that trying to ban guns in a society such as the United States has will only make the problem of violent crime worse. (Which Washington, D.C.'s crime statistics illustrate quite well) And, that even after many years of the United States' war on drugs, the fact that they remain readily available shows that simply outlawing something doesn't mean it goes away.
Perhaps you're ok with the idea of a policeman coming to fill out a report once you've been stabbed to death. Personally, I value my life more than that.
This seems like a decision made to make the testing process go smoother. Keeping track of a bunch of beta testers is much easier than trying to sort through tons of "It's not working." type bug reports from millions of users. Keeping the pool small lets them get more specific info about bugs and get back to people who have valid reports.
If that's truly their goal, Corel can allow x number of people register to be beta testers. Then they have the option to only accept registered users' problem reports (for instance by having a password-protected bugzilla or form mailer) Why should anyone allow their licenses to be violated while in the process allowing a bad precedent to be set - because it's more "convenient" for Corel to violate a license than to not violate it?
In haste to make my comment I didn't think about the programmers releasing thier code under the GPL and then having some commercial company take it and close the source. In actuality though if it is released under the GPL you can find the source either on Freshmeat or by your own means.
In actuality, even though the original source code is on Freshmeat, the source-closing you speak of violates the license (and by extension, the original author's copyright). So, passing out a program based on a GPL'd program but not under the GPL is *illegal*
There's a different license that allows proprietary projects to swallow code. It's called the BSD license. Under the BSD license, the original source is still available to everyone but the proprietary parts aren't required to be. Some people prefer it that way. Those who do release their code under the BSD license.
Btw, Corel seems to be concerned with keeping their license attached to this distro (going so far as distributing its beta illegally - at least for the time being). Why should the people who created and maintain the GPL'd software not be concerned about keeping the code under its original, legitimate license?
Do you think Corel will be ok with me swiping Word Perfect code and distributing it under the GPL as a beta while saying "Oh, I'll return all of the code to Corel's original license when I'm done"?
Are we talking about a distribution targeted at networking professionals, corporations, consumers?
Is a network administer interested in trying out GNU/Linux for some mission critical service going to opt for a distribution with a prerelease of the kernel and other relatively untested packages, or is he/she going to opt for the distribution that is the most widely used and supported, and fairly well-tested?
The "networking professionals" around here use Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (And occasionally Solaris if the boss requests it) Red Hat is not even in the running due to their hasty releases & apparent lack of any real testing, quality control or attention to security issues. The Linux distribution I'd give the undisputed "most tested" title to is Debian.
Corporations may be effectively targeted by Red Hat, though. I noticed a post yesterday where someone said he was choosing Red Hat to push at work despite those problems for the very reason that the PHB's have seen it mentioned in a good light in the standard PHB-oriented publications. Of course, given that Mandrake won the Linux product of the year award at LWCE, which had a 'suit-friendly' aroma, and that Caldera also won an award, I wouldn't regard Red Hat dominance in this segment as a given.
I think consumers could easily sway between Mandrake, Red Hat or Corel (once released), as they tend to be more about pushing the envelope on "new user gui friendliness", which recently has necessarily meant releasing quickly. For instance, the new kernels and X support evermore devices.
I think Red Hat is really blowing it the hardware certification area, though. That the only machine they've certifed was one that contained a winmodem demonstrates a profound lack of ethics, imho.
Of course, this is from the geek "big picture" and not from the business "big picture".. I'm guessing the businessmen at Red Hat thought it would be great to further legitimize themselves by having a hardware certification program and to grant IBM a favor to promote good relations with a huge industry player. But, as their IPO risks statement said, they risk losing the support of the community. I think this is a risk that could have easily been avoided by picking a different model to certify. (Was the Thinkpad really doing that poorly against competing laptops that IBM felt they had to push this one for Red Hat certification? Do they really think this will affect their future sales positively?)
I think it's critical that any of the doors Red Hat is given credit to for opening should really be opened. Speaking from experience, it really sucks walking into a screen.
Using concepts developed under my "Virtual Fart Blame Assignment System" (widely know as "whoever smelt it dealt it"), and adapted to digial new media, timestamps from the several AntiOnline articles were compared to those of other website vandalism reporting organizations. Dubbed "digital fartprinting" in hacker circles, this technique clearly shows that on several occasions, AntiOnline had clearly smelt it first. I therefore conclude that the operators of AntiOnline are the perpetrators of several high profile acts of vandalism.
What you say is exactly how I got in using the unauthenticated ftp proxy (which has been gotten rid of). The authenticated ftp proxy works differently - requires more lines be entered to work, which sysinstall doesn't grok. And, the web proxy isn't supported by sysinstall at all. If I were the one running the proxy, it would be easy, but this is at a large corporation, you see.
Thanks for the response. By "proxy" do you mean ftp proxy or web proxy? I got some stuff through an unauthenticated FTP proxy per the docs in the Handbook, but the network security banished it. Only an authenticated one is available, which works like this:
Then I'm in.. but this doesn't work with sysinstall. And, I haven't seen any way to make it work with a web (http) proxy, i.e., connecting to port 1080 of a box and saying GET ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/
No big deal, though. I just finished grabbing 3.3-RELEASE the 'hard' way (with some ncftp2 get -R's) and doing a filesystem install.:)
Since people seem to be interested in a comparison of some aspects of Linux & *BSD, I'll post my experiences & knowledge on the subject. I've been using Linux for nearly 4 years (mostly Debian), FreeBSD for about 1 year and NetBSD for about 4 months, and I enjoy all of them. Also, note that I have these OS's on different machines, not all on the same box. I'm using all 3 on production servers.
I'll start off with installation & package selection. I've exclusively done network installations, so that's what I'm comparing. In this area I've found Debian to be the most robust. For instance, installing on a corporate intranet where only a web proxy is available is no problem as Debian's installation and upgrade tools understand web proxies. If you lose a connection in the process of downloading, Debian will resume at the byte it left off. Also, it allows you to select the primary function of the machine so a corresponding set of packages can be installed.
FreeBSD has a user-friendly (full screen curses) install tool, but it doesn't grok web proxies, so it's a bit more difficult to install onto an intranet. Also, the packages selection tool is nicely hierarchically laid out so you can, for instance, select net -> ncftp to get the ncftp package - instead of having 1 huge screen like Debian's dselect does.
NetBSD's install is more spartan, but still gets the job done with a direct internet connection (I haven't tried it through a firewall/proxy) There was a fullscreen curses install tool last time I installed on sparc, though, so it seems to be getting "easier" on this front.
Neither of the BSD's seem to have an installation-type download recovery mechanism as robust as Debian's in case of a lost connection.
Getting packages after install:
NetBSD & FreeBSD have/usr/pkgsrc and/usr/ports, respectively, as well as precompiled packages. The/usr/ports and/usr/pkgsrc directories contain directories such as/usr/ports/net/ncftp.. To download the source & compile it, you enter that directory & type make. To install, make install. Any packages the tool you're compiling depends on will be downloaded, compiled & installed automatically as part of the process. 1 caveat here, though. At least on FreeBSD, if you use this for things that require X, it will want to download, compile & install X, even if you've got the "base distro" X installed. I use the precompiled versions of this type of stuff instead. The command-line tool 'fetch', which is the backend for file retrieval works nicely through web proxies, also.:)
Debian is about as easy - apt-get install packagename does the trick.
OS Upgrades: Debian is nice here, as it has friendly package scripts that try to (and mostly succeed in) making upgrades smooth & integrating changes well. Upgrades through web proxies work fine. apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade does the trick.
For FreeBSD the most "correct" method seems to be CVS, but I haven't tried it yet. I've used sysinstall, which still could use a bit of improvement. My biggest gripe is that it downloads/etc/passwd in-place, leaving a networked machine's root account open until copied back (which it does automatically, but, make sure to disable incoming connections during this time) Neither of these methods fetch through web proxies, so you'll have to manually download the files in that case.
Haven't upgraded NetBSD yet.;)
Regarding the actual systems, some quick comparisons:
Linux & FreeBSD utilize multiple processors in a machine, NetBSD does not.
NetBSD & FreeBSD both currently support NFSv3 in stable releases. Linux is supposed to RSN...
NetBSD uses 32 bit UID's, Linux is supposed to in 2.4 (as of 2.2.x, it's 16 bit), FreeBSD 3.2 is still on 16 bit, but I'm unsure of their future plans.
FreeBSD can do host-based (i.e., pci controller) hardware raid on the Alpha architecture, Linux & NetBSD cannot.
The BSD's support very large files (don't have the #'s), the largest file size on ext2 is 2gb. (Which is being worked on).
On Alpha, Linux supports quite a few vga video cards. NetBSD only supports TGA. (haven't looked at FreeBSD here)
Documentation:
FreeBSD & NetBSD both have their documentation more centralized, but there tends to be less task-oriented stuff than for Linux. NetBSD's task-oriented stuff tends to be a bit sparse. The mailing list archives are searchable, though, and often already have the answer you're after.;)
Stability: I've achieved > 100 day uptimes achieved with each of them.
The features overlap and tend to leapfrog quite a bit. Proposing one of the systems is "best" reminds me of the perl camel book's definition of binary: "Some people think in binary. You can tell by the questions they ask. 'Should we program everything in perl or C'".
I think that some people in the BSD community need to recognize that Linux is not Red Hat, btw. A good amount of the negative BSD advocacy I've seen has been pointed at Red Hat problems, not Linux problems.
If anything I've said here is wrong, I welcome corrections.:)
Lest I become a source of misinformation, I'm correcting myself now:
As far as I can tell, this doesn't directly compromise control of the domain name, just the cheesy webmail account. Of course, as others have stated, that may be an effective tool to help with social engineering..
Anyway, I prefer to roll my own webmail service using Imp along with mod_ssl which doesn't require sending cleartext passwords over the net.
Just when you thought you'd seen it all, NSI sinks to a new low! I just noticed a name I control affected, too. It appears that they may still be in the process of rolling this out, as the oldest domain got this account, but the others haven't (yet, at least).
Also, I think it's disturbing that something important as control of your domain name is left wide open by only offering cleartext passwords. i.e, even if you *do* log in and change your password, it can be seen in transit and your name can still get hijacked.
I think this is a demonstration of NSI's utter incompetence/unwillingness to take due dilligence and that their contract should be terminated.
It's kind of a similar philosophy to BSD, in that the OS consists not just of a kernel and a set of basic stuff, but of everything. In a BSD this is true because everyone's running THE official BSD -- no distros. In Debian, there's the same kind of mentality. By comparison, RedHat's distro is sparse (granted most of the difference is in packages that very very very few people are interested in).
As a Debian & (Free|Net)BSD user, I think the "OS is the distro" thing should be clarified a wee bit. The actual OS parts of the free *BSD's consist of a far lower number of packages than Debian. The strategy there is to have the core stuff in the base OS and the application stuff in the ports subsystem.
Similar, yes (there's one ports.tar.gz or pkgsrc.tar.gz for the OS), but it does lead to different results. For instance, the stuff in ports is not treated as an integral part of the system in FreeBSD, so each package in the ports subsystem can be updated on an as-needed basis by the port maintainer. That means if you need to keep some non-core thing updated, it's easier to do that with *BSD.
Of course, I've heard rumblings about solving the problem Debian has had with staleness by releasing packages tested for 2-3 months as ready to go into the stable distro. That would be a Good Thing, imho.
Alpha Processor, Inc. is currently the one focused on this. See this URL: Alpha Processor, Inc.
They had a booth at LinuxWorld in San Jose this year, and I had the occasion to watch the presentation. Apparently, they've decided to actually put some marketing behind Alpha to help promote its use. Samsung is the most prolific Alpha chip manufacturer right now afaik.
Now if they would just fix the API website to no longer have.asp's and get rid of the mention of Microsoft being a partner...
If the "Lieutenants" continued to code Offical Red Hat X, then almost certainly the best code would always be most current in that version. Of course, because of the GPL, most of that code would make it out, but the lag would mean that Red Hat would consistently be on top.
Actually, this isn't a concern. Once something is released, it's released, and integrating it isn't much of a problem. Especially if you've already got an infrastructure set up, building the new package is cake. Testing & fixing a distribution as a whole is what takes time.
From what I've seen, doing things like this (being first to release something w/o proper testing) have actually bitten Red Hat rather than helping them.. Witness for instance, the buggy libc6 they shipped with 5.0 which caused many of the setuid binaries to be exploitable, and the less-than-ready gnome shipped in 6.0.
You miss the point. "Integrating" jdk & StarOffice would mean that anyone who got jdk would also be getting Star Office in the process. Kind of like how another software company "integrated" their browser & OS.;)
I picked the wrong time to try StarOffice - just as I download it sun rip up the whole site and trash the news groups, great support guys! (Seems to hang on Deb potato)
Yeah, StarOffice 5.1 doesn't work on glibc2.1.2 (at least the pre in potato)
I saw the Support site last night before they took it down, and StarDivision's response was "Yes, it's broken right now. We may have to release a patch for that" But, for the time being, it's just broken. I get the idea that they're waiting to see if it's a bug in glibc or if it will actually require a fix for StarOffice.
This is exactly the sort of thing the community sourcing of Star Office should facilitate getting fixed, though.:)
Do standard pc components (NIC, video, etc) work in Alpha mobo's? Seems like they should, but anyone know for sure?
Yes, if they have PCI/ISA slots, they do. My alpha has a number 9 video card (with S3Trio64 chipset), and I've used Buslogic BT-958 and some IntraServer Symbios/NCR SCSI card in it. The limiting factor is drivers. For instance, Linux on Alpha doesn't support any PCI RAID controllers, but FreeBSD supports DPT Raid cards there. And, NetBSD, which it's running now, doesn't currently have support for any video chipset in X besides TGA (although it supports a nice range of non-video hardware) It has worked nicely in the past few months I've been using it as a server, too. The uptime turns 100 days today.:)
GD has been doing non-lzw gif creation and suggesting PNG for a while now (as of 1.3) As of v1.6, gif support was removed. The release notes for 1.3 state:
Non-LZW-based GIF compression code
Version 1.3 contained GIF compression code that uses simple Run Length Encoding instead of LZW compression, while still retaining compatibility with normal LZW-based GIF decoders (your browser will still like your GIFs). LZW compression is patented by Unisys. We are currently reevaluating the approach taken by gd 1.3. The current release of gd does not support this approach. We recommend that you use the current release, and generate PNG images. Thanks to Hutchison Avenue Software Corporation for contributing the RLE GIF code.
Re:One of the more telling comments...
on
Wired on Slashdot
·
· Score: 1
.is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
I think anyone who can make this statement is profoundly biased, more so than who they're accusing. The fact that the interview (presumably with someone important in Microsoft) contained things that makes Microsoft look stupid, and a "journalist" *wouldn't* highlight that implies that said journalist is hiding the fact that the supposed "computer industry leader" is deficient.
It's like saying that the boy who mentioned "The Emperor has no clothes!!" is biased against the emperor. Then she goes on to say there's no editor to say what's "legitimate"... Given what's seen coming from the direction of ZDNN Tech News, the definition of "legitimate" is tied more to finances (with clear bias favoring Microsoft) than truth.
I think if Mary Jo Foley wants to see a balanced view of Tech news, she should have a look at C'T magazine and Linux news at Linux Weekly News These are part of the very small group of publications I've seen who try to get to the actual meaning behind current events (and tend to do a good job of it).. Highlighting Microsoft's "roadmap", "vision", etc., while ignoring the fact they've been known to be less than honest & unethical in the past is what strikes me as bad journalism.
Dude, didn't you see the KDE pre2.0 screenshots yesterday?:) That looks pretty damned new-user oriented. The days of fvwm being the coolest X interface are gone.
I think the article was perhaps purposely foolish, anyway. Anyone who can code has always had liberal opportunities for "selling out" if that's what they're after.
Also, even though Red Hat isn't my distro of choice, I think it's apparent that they *do* pay people for coding without "selling out"... I think Alan Cox is a pretty good example here.:)
I think the future is interoperability, X or otherwise. That's what the various toolkits such as GTK+ and QT can give us - an abstration from the underlying protocol.
I remember reading that there wouldn't be any more posts about geeks in space on the normal news.
But, it's not with the "normal news". It has its own section like Ask Slashdot, Book Reviews, Features and Interviews.:) You can disable it right there in your Preferences if you want. But who would want to do a thing like that?
The one that immediately springs to mind is The Linux Documentation project at http://www.linuxdoc.org/ - the Installation and Getting Started Guide is excellent and once you're comfortable with what you've learned there, the other guides such as the User Guide and the System Administrator guide introduce you to more.
Another good one is http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ - It has what they call "NHF's", which stands for Newbie Help Files.
You may also want to have a look at Linux.Com which is working to provide articles and links to help newbies get established.
Once you understand the basics, learning how to do new things or handle new situations becomes much easier. Then your tools can become mailing list archives for particular things you may be looking for information on, and deja.com & google.com for that hard-to-find tidbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding guns having no place in a modern society, I strongly disagree with you. Guns equalize people so that people can't use superior physical prowess to overpower victims. For instance, carrying concealed firearms has been demonstrated to cut rape rates dramatically in Florida. Beyond that, though, is the basic human right to self-defense. There are plenty of ways to kill people (run them down with cars, make bombs, poison, etc) but, firearms have the unique capability of being useful for self-defense.
If we take a more realistic view - that someone capable of maliciously killing someone else would also not have a problem with breaking anti-gun laws, we can see that trying to ban guns in a society such as the United States has will only make the problem of violent crime worse. (Which Washington, D.C.'s crime statistics illustrate quite well) And, that even after many years of the United States' war on drugs, the fact that they remain readily available shows that simply outlawing something doesn't mean it goes away.
Perhaps you're ok with the idea of a policeman coming to fill out a report once you've been stabbed to death. Personally, I value my life more than that.
There's a different license that allows proprietary projects to swallow code. It's called the BSD license. Under the BSD license, the original source is still available to everyone but the proprietary parts aren't required to be. Some people prefer it that way. Those who do release their code under the BSD license.
Btw, Corel seems to be concerned with keeping their license attached to this distro (going so far as distributing its beta illegally - at least for the time being). Why should the people who created and maintain the GPL'd software not be concerned about keeping the code under its original, legitimate license?
Do you think Corel will be ok with me swiping Word Perfect code and distributing it under the GPL as a beta while saying "Oh, I'll return all of the code to Corel's original license when I'm done"?
Corporations may be effectively targeted by Red Hat, though. I noticed a post yesterday where someone said he was choosing Red Hat to push at work despite those problems for the very reason that the PHB's have seen it mentioned in a good light in the standard PHB-oriented publications. Of course, given that Mandrake won the Linux product of the year award at LWCE, which had a 'suit-friendly' aroma, and that Caldera also won an award, I wouldn't regard Red Hat dominance in this segment as a given.
I think consumers could easily sway between Mandrake, Red Hat or Corel (once released), as they tend to be more about pushing the envelope on "new user gui friendliness", which recently has necessarily meant releasing quickly. For instance, the new kernels and X support evermore devices.
I think Red Hat is really blowing it the hardware certification area, though. That the only machine they've certifed was one that contained a winmodem demonstrates a profound lack of ethics, imho.
Of course, this is from the geek "big picture" and not from the business "big picture".. I'm guessing the businessmen at Red Hat thought it would be great to further legitimize themselves by having a hardware certification program and to grant IBM a favor to promote good relations with a huge industry player. But, as their IPO risks statement said, they risk losing the support of the community. I think this is a risk that could have easily been avoided by picking a different model to certify. (Was the Thinkpad really doing that poorly against competing laptops that IBM felt they had to push this one for Red Hat certification? Do they really think this will affect their future sales positively?)
I think it's critical that any of the doors Red Hat is given credit to for opening should really be opened. Speaking from experience, it really sucks walking into a screen.
Using concepts developed under my "Virtual Fart Blame Assignment System" (widely know as "whoever smelt it dealt it"), and adapted to digial new media, timestamps from the several AntiOnline articles were compared to those of other website vandalism reporting organizations. Dubbed "digital fartprinting" in hacker circles, this technique clearly shows that on several occasions, AntiOnline had clearly smelt it first. I therefore conclude that the operators of AntiOnline are the perpetrators of several high profile acts of vandalism.
What you say is exactly how I got in using the unauthenticated ftp proxy (which has been gotten rid of). The authenticated ftp proxy works differently - requires more lines be entered to work, which sysinstall doesn't grok. And, the web proxy isn't supported by sysinstall at all. If I were the one running the proxy, it would be easy, but this is at a large corporation, you see.
;)
But, now I have a suggestion for them.
ftp ftp.proxy.box
Login: MyID
Password: MyPass
ftp> user ftp@ftp.freebsd.org
Password: user@
Then I'm in.. but this doesn't work with sysinstall. And, I haven't seen any way to make it work with a web (http) proxy, i.e., connecting to port 1080 of a box and saying GET ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/
No big deal, though. I just finished grabbing 3.3-RELEASE the 'hard' way (with some ncftp2 get -R's) and doing a filesystem install. :)
http://www.daemonnews.org/
http://www.freebsdrocks.com/
http://www.freebsddiary.com
Since people seem to be interested in a comparison of some aspects of Linux & *BSD, I'll post my experiences & knowledge on the subject. I've been using Linux for nearly 4 years (mostly Debian), FreeBSD for about 1 year and NetBSD for about 4 months, and I enjoy all of them. Also, note that I have these OS's on different machines, not all on the same box. I'm using all 3 on production servers.
/usr/pkgsrc and /usr/ports, respectively, as well as precompiled packages. The /usr/ports and /usr/pkgsrc directories contain directories such as /usr/ports/net/ncftp .. To download the source & compile it, you enter that directory & type make. To install, make install. Any packages the tool you're compiling depends on will be downloaded, compiled & installed automatically as part of the process. 1 caveat here, though. At least on FreeBSD, if you use this for things that require X, it will want to download, compile & install X, even if you've got the "base distro" X installed. I use the precompiled versions of this type of stuff instead. The command-line tool 'fetch', which is the backend for file retrieval works nicely through web proxies, also. :)
/etc/passwd in-place, leaving a networked machine's root account open until copied back (which it does automatically, but, make sure to disable incoming connections during this time) Neither of these methods fetch through web proxies, so you'll have to manually download the files in that case.
;)
;)
:)
I'll start off with installation & package selection. I've exclusively done network installations, so that's what I'm comparing. In this area I've found Debian to be the most robust. For instance, installing on a corporate intranet where only a web proxy is available is no problem as Debian's installation and upgrade tools understand web proxies. If you lose a connection in the process of downloading, Debian will resume at the byte it left off. Also, it allows you to select the primary function of the machine so a corresponding set of packages can be installed.
FreeBSD has a user-friendly (full screen curses) install tool, but it doesn't grok web proxies, so it's a bit more difficult to install onto an intranet. Also, the packages selection tool is nicely hierarchically laid out so you can, for instance, select net -> ncftp to get the ncftp package - instead of having 1 huge screen like Debian's dselect does.
NetBSD's install is more spartan, but still gets the job done with a direct internet connection (I haven't tried it through a firewall/proxy) There was a fullscreen curses install tool last time I installed on sparc, though, so it seems to be getting "easier" on this front.
Neither of the BSD's seem to have an installation-type download recovery mechanism as robust as Debian's in case of a lost connection.
Getting packages after install:
NetBSD & FreeBSD have
Debian is about as easy - apt-get install packagename does the trick.
OS Upgrades: Debian is nice here, as it has friendly package scripts that try to (and mostly succeed in) making upgrades smooth & integrating changes well. Upgrades through web proxies work fine. apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade does the trick.
For FreeBSD the most "correct" method seems to be CVS, but I haven't tried it yet. I've used sysinstall, which still could use a bit of improvement. My biggest gripe is that it downloads
Haven't upgraded NetBSD yet.
Regarding the actual systems, some quick comparisons:
Linux & FreeBSD utilize multiple processors in a machine, NetBSD does not.
NetBSD & FreeBSD both currently support NFSv3 in stable releases. Linux is supposed to RSN...
NetBSD uses 32 bit UID's, Linux is supposed to in 2.4 (as of 2.2.x, it's 16 bit), FreeBSD 3.2 is still on 16 bit, but I'm unsure of their future plans.
FreeBSD can do host-based (i.e., pci controller) hardware raid on the Alpha architecture, Linux & NetBSD cannot.
The BSD's support very large files (don't have the #'s), the largest file size on ext2 is 2gb. (Which is being worked on).
On Alpha, Linux supports quite a few vga video cards. NetBSD only supports TGA. (haven't looked at FreeBSD here)
Documentation:
FreeBSD & NetBSD both have their documentation more centralized, but there tends to be less task-oriented stuff than for Linux. NetBSD's task-oriented stuff tends to be a bit sparse. The mailing list archives are searchable, though, and often already have the answer you're after.
Stability: I've achieved > 100 day uptimes achieved with each of them.
The features overlap and tend to leapfrog quite a bit. Proposing one of the systems is "best" reminds me of the perl camel book's definition of binary: "Some people think in binary. You can tell by the questions they ask. 'Should we program everything in perl or C'".
I think that some people in the BSD community need to recognize that Linux is not Red Hat, btw. A good amount of the negative BSD advocacy I've seen has been pointed at Red Hat problems, not Linux problems.
If anything I've said here is wrong, I welcome corrections.
As far as I can tell, this doesn't directly compromise control of the domain name, just the cheesy webmail account. Of course, as others have stated, that may be an effective tool to help with social engineering..
Anyway, I prefer to roll my own webmail service using Imp along with mod_ssl which doesn't require sending cleartext passwords over the net.
Just when you thought you'd seen it all, NSI sinks to a new low! I just noticed a name I control affected, too. It appears that they may still be in the process of rolling this out, as the oldest domain got this account, but the others haven't (yet, at least).
Also, I think it's disturbing that something important as control of your domain name is left wide open by only offering cleartext passwords. i.e, even if you *do* log in and change your password, it can be seen in transit and your name can still get hijacked.
I think this is a demonstration of NSI's utter incompetence/unwillingness to take due dilligence and that their contract should be terminated.
Similar, yes (there's one ports.tar.gz or pkgsrc.tar.gz for the OS), but it does lead to different results. For instance, the stuff in ports is not treated as an integral part of the system in FreeBSD, so each package in the ports subsystem can be updated on an as-needed basis by the port maintainer. That means if you need to keep some non-core thing updated, it's easier to do that with *BSD.
Of course, I've heard rumblings about solving the problem Debian has had with staleness by releasing packages tested for 2-3 months as ready to go into the stable distro. That would be a Good Thing, imho.
They had a booth at LinuxWorld in San Jose this year, and I had the occasion to watch the presentation. Apparently, they've decided to actually put some marketing behind Alpha to help promote its use. Samsung is the most prolific Alpha chip manufacturer right now afaik.
Now if they would just fix the API website to no longer have .asp's and get rid of the mention of Microsoft being a partner...
Actually, this isn't a concern. Once something is released, it's released, and integrating it isn't much of a problem. Especially if you've already got an infrastructure set up, building the new package is cake. Testing & fixing a distribution as a whole is what takes time.
From what I've seen, doing things like this (being first to release something w/o proper testing) have actually bitten Red Hat rather than helping them.. Witness for instance, the buggy libc6 they shipped with 5.0 which caused many of the setuid binaries to be exploitable, and the less-than-ready gnome shipped in 6.0.
Hmmm.. Maybe it's time for another Freedows article. :)
If this sort of thing happens, you may benefit from the Magic SysRq kernel feature. Read about it at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt
Quoth the text file:
* Okay, so what can I use them for?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, un'R'aw is very handy when your X server or a svgalib program crashes.
And, there's lots more listed where came from. :)
You miss the point. "Integrating" jdk & StarOffice would mean that anyone who got jdk would also be getting Star Office in the process. Kind of like how another software company "integrated" their browser & OS. ;)
I saw the Support site last night before they took it down, and StarDivision's response was "Yes, it's broken right now. We may have to release a patch for that" But, for the time being, it's just broken. I get the idea that they're waiting to see if it's a bug in glibc or if it will actually require a fix for StarOffice.
This is exactly the sort of thing the community sourcing of Star Office should facilitate getting fixed, though. :)
GD has been doing non-lzw gif creation and suggesting PNG for a while now (as of 1.3) As of v1.6, gif support was removed. The release notes for 1.3 state:
Non-LZW-based GIF compression code
Version 1.3 contained GIF compression code that uses simple Run Length Encoding instead of LZW compression, while still retaining compatibility with normal LZW-based GIF decoders (your browser will still like your GIFs). LZW compression is patented by Unisys. We are currently reevaluating the approach taken by gd 1.3. The current release of gd does not support this approach. We recommend that you use the current release, and generate PNG images. Thanks to Hutchison Avenue Software Corporation for contributing the RLE GIF code.
It's like saying that the boy who mentioned "The Emperor has no clothes!!" is biased against the emperor. Then she goes on to say there's no editor to say what's "legitimate" ... Given what's seen coming from the direction of ZDNN Tech News, the definition of "legitimate" is tied more to finances (with clear bias favoring Microsoft) than truth.
I think if Mary Jo Foley wants to see a balanced view of Tech news, she should have a look at C'T magazine and Linux news at Linux Weekly News These are part of the very small group of publications I've seen who try to get to the actual meaning behind current events (and tend to do a good job of it) .. Highlighting Microsoft's "roadmap", "vision", etc., while ignoring the fact they've been known to be less than honest & unethical in the past is what strikes me as bad journalism.
Dude, didn't you see the KDE pre2.0 screenshots yesterday? :) That looks pretty damned new-user oriented. The days of fvwm being the coolest X interface are gone.
... I think Alan Cox is a pretty good example here. :)
I think the article was perhaps purposely foolish, anyway. Anyone who can code has always had liberal opportunities for "selling out" if that's what they're after.
Also, even though Red Hat isn't my distro of choice, I think it's apparent that they *do* pay people for coding without "selling out"
I think the future is interoperability, X or otherwise. That's what the various toolkits such as GTK+ and QT can give us - an abstration from the underlying protocol.
Another good one is http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ - It has what they call "NHF's", which stands for Newbie Help Files.
You may also want to have a look at Linux.Com which is working to provide articles and links to help newbies get established.
Once you understand the basics, learning how to do new things or handle new situations becomes much easier. Then your tools can become mailing list archives for particular things you may be looking for information on, and deja.com & google.com for that hard-to-find tidbit.
Good luck. :)