I'm happy with my Linux system right now. It supports all my hardware and gives me a nice desktop. Why, beyond standard geek curiosity, should I switch to *BSD?
(altogether now) Because the demon is cuter than the penguin!
Beyond that, probably no reason to switch. Familiarity is the single most important feature an OS can have for actual use (as opposed to play, when novelty is fun).
Used to be, not very long ago, that FBSD was a clear winner on simple performace and comfort. I was working on newish RedHat machines a couple of yeas ago which would more orless go to sleep when a large process was dumping core, sign of a really piss poor disk/VM implementation, but I believe the more recent kernels fixed that. Linux used to bethe only real option for laptops because the PCMCIA (asit then was) and power management support was so much better. Recent FBSDs have fixed that up.
OTOH, I honestly do think BSD was right and SysV was wrong on so many things that the choice of almost all linux distributions to pretend to be SysV makes them too painful to use.
And Linux documentation is so piss poor I just feel sloppy using it in any professional role. When `man hostname' gave several different ways to permanently set the hostname, none of which work on the system I typed it on, I just put linux down on clearly not for real use list.
Of course most of my experience has been with Redhat, which is just MicrosoftLite. Suse is now a tenticle of Novell. At this rate all the distributions will remove themselves from consideration before I get the spare time+machine to play with them...
[disposable addresses] You still have to wade through it all if any important email is ever comming there.
But for many thing, there will either never be anything important (things which just require an address for no sane reason). Sometimes the important stuff will come only at predictable times (sign up, when you ask for a password reminder, when you have just placed an order etc). Sometimes the important stuff will be in a known format which something like procmail can easily pick out from any spam and forward to your real mailbox (eg mailing lists which put in useful headers).
Additionally, such email addresses can have limited lifetimes. If you are prepared to unsubscribe and resubscribe to mailing lists every six months, you can limit the time for which harvested addresses are useful to the spammers. Make sure a pointer to your permanent web presence is in your.signature for anyone who wants to get in touch 2 years from now about what you wrote.
Eg: Set up a real mailbox for each mailing list (fred-bugtraq etc), and one for all mail from websites, shops etc. For each mailinglist, website etc. set up an alias as a disposable address to give them pointed to the real box (alias fred-bugtraq-0401 fred-bugtraq), and every now and again take a look at where spam is comeing to and zap those addresses.
Not that I do all this:-). Most of my spam comes to a couple of addresses which exist from way back when spam was not a problem and so I didn't hide them, and which I don't want to zap because they would be the way old friends etc occasionally get in contact. Spamprobe and Bogofilter are lifesavers.
I've had too many hard drives (of the desktop or notebook size) fail in my day to feel very comfortable about having one in a device as likely to be subject to stress and shock as a digital camera.
Well, digital cameras are relatively expensive things people look after, and they are write-often things (as opposed to, for instance, my mp3 player where I load up the flash cards every couple of weeks of use), so disks sound reasonable.
Perhaps more importantly, the required data lifetime is short. It would be painful to lose a day's photographs, but nothing compared to the pain of losing a PC disk if you don't have complete backups. Even leaving aside work or important home stuff, I never did finish Tomb Raider 2 after having lost the saved states which represented hours of play.
Random, off topic, WoWoW: Why, Oh Why, Oh Why can't game manufacturers put saved states in the Windoze "My Documents" area where they should be (being my personal, changing, data) rather than in with the bloody internals of the program?
Executive compensation is way out of whack, and it's because the executive club takes care of itself.
No, it's because the shareholder's want/allow it to be that way. Executives are employees. If whoever owns your employer allowed you to set your own pay, what would it be?
Anyone with a private pension or share based savings product is one of those owners. If you think executive pay is a problem, what have you done about it? Pulled your money from all companies which behave that way? If not, why not?
Citizenship would be teaching them about their responsibilities as citizens of a representative democracy [...]
Well, that is exactly what they do. Of course, the people who create the curriculum may have a dufferent idea of what those responsibilities are.
As you say, the school may have an agenda too.
If you think that's hard, try it with live ones. Shrub is too thick for me to be able to close the lid, Clinton has this bit that always seems to stick out the side, Bush is too slippery to stay put on the glass, Reagan won't go in without his astrologer's approval, Carter's teeth dazzle the CCD, and Ford is invisible.
The message is not "netsend is hacking" it's "don't demonstrate our ignorance infront of students causing further loss of control".
Then perhaps the correct response would have been to kick out the teacher, rather than the pupil. A teacher who is not on top of the subject stands no chance of maintaining any level of respect and control and should go out and get a job they are more suited to.
I remember a sports techer being pulled in to teach us when a math teacher was unexpectedly off sick. A guy who had no problems keeping control of kids on the football field had no chance when he was clearly out of his depth.
If only that were true. I don't know about the US, but in the UK one noticable change in schools over the past couple of decades is a move away from actual education and towards a bizzare mixture of things like `citizenship' (which is on the core national ciriculum next to things like being able to read) and an obsession with testing so strong that preparing for the next round of tests has pushed education out of the classroom.
Why we would want young adults with great exam technique, no useful skills or knowledge and a vague memory of the names of government departments etc. (which will change in six months anyway) is beyond me.
[having to do a make world on 300 boxen is not my idea of time well spent.]
mount/usr/src
mount/usr/obj
cd/usr/src
make installkernel installworld
scp -r build:/etc/\*/etc
This is assuming all your machines are identical. If not you'd have to be more careful about the config stuff, and use mergemaster, but that would be the case for any OS.
Of course, NFS is not something you'd want to use to a remote machine, the idea of opening RPC ports in my firewall makes my skin crawl. But for upgrading multiple machines on your own network, the BSD system is really quick and clean.
If something could be done to improve mergemaster, the ease of upgrading FBSD would be the killer argument for the death of the penguin. I've never seen a description of how to upgrade linux which didn't make me decide it would be easier just to do a clean install ofa new version. If there is such a description/method, please post and earn some well deserved karma.
I'm not sure it was clear to the safety personnel that they were doing a bad job.
If they recomend X and X neither happens nor is rejected for considered and sane reasons, or if they ask for access to information source Y and are denied for political or beurocratic reasons, or if they are snowed under with paperwork and nonsense, then it must be very clear to them that they are not being allowed to do the job.
If every laptop user had to be subjected to virus scans and patches every day, everyone would have to come in 25 minutes earlier for work
Er, that wasn't my suggestion.
The sane way to cope with laptop users is to only allow them to plug the laptops into a quarantined network. I.e. treat all laptops as if they are machines in the outside world -- logically they are (assuming they are ever connected to theinternet outside your firewall).
Really this doesn't work as well as you'd think. If you have laptop users on your network, [...]
Then you don't have a firewall in any real sense, and you deserve everything you get just as if you had no firewall on your internet connection.
Well about 3 times per week some user brings in a laptop, plugs it in to the LAN
take the amount of IT staff time to clean up themess, and the amount of lost time to everyone else. Cost it at full commercial rates. Divide the bill equally between the person who plugged the laptop in, their bosss, the IT person responisble for the socket and their boss. Repeat until the clue fairy pays a visit.
What if they were not *allowed* to do their job well?
Then (presuming good faith) they would have resigned at the time their advice was rejected - i.e. long before the accident.
If NASA was not allowing them to do their job well, and they kept doing the job, they must have been content to do the job badly.
This reminds me of a couple of years ago when the whole EU commission resigned after the publication of a report on corruption. It is a beurocrat's response to incoming shrapnel from an investigation. The theory is that you get under cover and if you don't take a direct hit you may be ablle to sneak back in when the storm blows over.
But what happens when you hit 2 of the surrounding buttons? Or one alpabetic button and a one numeric button.
I think it would be hard to hit an alpha and a digit -- the alphas are raised, so youur finger would stop before triggering the digit.
Personally I like the Ericson keypad+slide varient on multi-tap. 3 characters per key are available because you have a double shift, slider up or slider down.
A simple virus or worm can literally bring a corporation's operations to a halt for a day or two
Think of it as evolution in action. Eventually all the corporations with clueless IT people (or manages who outlaw clue use) will die. This will result in either an economy full of clued up corporations or no economy, all of us starving in the streets, and an ecological niche for a new apex species.
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down.
But that is not the same as the set of bridges with no bugs.
Indeed, I was watching a TV programme about the building of one of the early big New York bridges the other day. Turns out the cables are full of brittle crappy wire substituted by a corrupt contractor. Quite a big bug. The bridge hasn't fallen down because it was designed well, and is still in use.
Engineerign is not about perfection, it is about designing for the real world where shit happens.
Revolutiun doesn't always have to be huge. See such little things as the scroll-wheel on a mouse. Or for that matter the replacement of the ball by a light in mice. Tiny changes but do you really want to go back?
I agree with what you say, it was not the fact that this was new and interesting, but the hype that it was revolutionary and exciting I was commenting on.
In any case I was using mice with lights for years before I ever used one with a ball, so that is an example of the amazing conservatism of the Wintel and Apple world.
It's what you get if you take a beige box, glue the monitor stand to the top, roundoff the corners and make it out of plastic.
It's fairly conservative. It only seems not because the rest of the industry is even more conservative.
A radical design might be to put all the componets in individual small boxes, let them communicate by a wireless protocol and scatter the boxes around the room as paperweights, bookends, wedges under wobbly desks etc. Or perhaps to produce a PC with no screen but a projection system or...
Slashdot Mirror
(altogether now)
Because the demon is cuter than the penguin!
Beyond that, probably no reason to switch. Familiarity is the single most important feature an OS can have for actual use (as opposed to play, when novelty is fun).
Used to be, not very long ago, that FBSD was a clear winner on simple performace and comfort. I was working on newish RedHat machines a couple of yeas ago which would more orless go to sleep when a large process was dumping core, sign of a really piss poor disk/VM implementation, but I believe the more recent kernels fixed that. Linux used to bethe only real option for laptops because the PCMCIA (asit then was) and power management support was so much better. Recent FBSDs have fixed that up.
OTOH, I honestly do think BSD was right and SysV was wrong on so many things that the choice of almost all linux distributions to pretend to be SysV makes them too painful to use.
And Linux documentation is so piss poor I just feel sloppy using it in any professional role. When `man hostname' gave several different ways to permanently set the hostname, none of which work on the system I typed it on, I just put linux down on clearly not for real use list.
Of course most of my experience has been with Redhat, which is just MicrosoftLite. Suse is now a tenticle of Novell. At this rate all the distributions will remove themselves from consideration before I get the spare time+machine to play with them...
Pull the mail in with fetchmail, or equivalent, and deliver it to local mailboxes.
But for many thing, there will either never be anything important (things which just require an address for no sane reason). Sometimes the important stuff will come only at predictable times (sign up, when you ask for a password reminder, when you have just placed an order etc). Sometimes the important stuff will be in a known format which something like procmail can easily pick out from any spam and forward to your real mailbox (eg mailing lists which put in useful headers).
Additionally, such email addresses can have limited lifetimes. If you are prepared to unsubscribe and resubscribe to mailing lists every six months, you can limit the time for which harvested addresses are useful to the spammers. Make sure a pointer to your permanent web presence is in your .signature for anyone who wants to get in touch 2 years from now about what you wrote.
Eg: Set up a real mailbox for each mailing list (fred-bugtraq etc), and one for all mail from websites, shops etc. For each mailinglist, website etc. set up an alias as a disposable address to give them pointed to the real box (alias fred-bugtraq-0401 fred-bugtraq), and every now and again take a look at where spam is comeing to and zap those addresses.
Not that I do all this:-). Most of my spam comes to a couple of addresses which exist from way back when spam was not a problem and so I didn't hide them, and which I don't want to zap because they would be the way old friends etc occasionally get in contact. Spamprobe and Bogofilter are lifesavers.
Well, digital cameras are relatively expensive things people look after, and they are write-often things (as opposed to, for instance, my mp3 player where I load up the flash cards every couple of weeks of use), so disks sound reasonable.
Perhaps more importantly, the required data lifetime is short. It would be painful to lose a day's photographs, but nothing compared to the pain of losing a PC disk if you don't have complete backups. Even leaving aside work or important home stuff, I never did finish Tomb Raider 2 after having lost the saved states which represented hours of play.
Random, off topic, WoWoW:
Why, Oh Why, Oh Why can't game manufacturers put saved states in the Windoze "My Documents" area where they should be (being my personal, changing, data) rather than in with the bloody internals of the program?
No, it's because the shareholder's want/allow it to be that way. Executives are employees. If whoever owns your employer allowed you to set your own pay, what would it be?
Anyone with a private pension or share based savings product is one of those owners. If you think executive pay is a problem, what have you done about it? Pulled your money from all companies which behave that way? If not, why not?
Well, that is exactly what they do. Of course, the people who create the curriculum may have a dufferent idea of what those responsibilities are. As you say, the school may have an agenda too.
put dead president into scanner
If you think that's hard, try it with live ones. Shrub is too thick for me to be able to close the lid, Clinton has this bit that always seems to stick out the side, Bush is too slippery to stay put on the glass, Reagan won't go in without his astrologer's approval, Carter's teeth dazzle the CCD, and Ford is invisible.
Well, whoever it is generally accepted by is clearly a moron, it's as if someone were to start talking about the `Honshu Yen'.
Then perhaps the correct response would have been to kick out the teacher, rather than the pupil. A teacher who is not on top of the subject stands no chance of maintaining any level of respect and control and should go out and get a job they are more suited to.
I remember a sports techer being pulled in to teach us when a math teacher was unexpectedly off sick. A guy who had no problems keeping control of kids on the football field had no chance when he was clearly out of his depth.
If only that were true. I don't know about the US, but in the UK one noticable change in schools over the past couple of decades is a move away from actual education and towards a bizzare mixture of things like `citizenship' (which is on the core national ciriculum next to things like being able to read) and an obsession with testing so strong that preparing for the next round of tests has pushed education out of the classroom.
Why we would want young adults with great exam technique, no useful skills or knowledge and a vague memory of the names of government departments etc. (which will change in six months anyway) is beyond me.
A big sticker: `Intel Inside'.
mount /usr/src /usr/obj /usr/src /etc
mount
cd
make installkernel installworld
scp -r build:/etc/\*
This is assuming all your machines are identical. If not you'd have to be more careful about the config stuff, and use mergemaster, but that would be the case for any OS.
Of course, NFS is not something you'd want to use to a remote machine, the idea of opening RPC ports in my firewall makes my skin crawl. But for upgrading multiple machines on your own network, the BSD system is really quick and clean.
If something could be done to improve mergemaster, the ease of upgrading FBSD would be the killer argument for the death of the penguin. I've never seen a description of how to upgrade linux which didn't make me decide it would be easier just to do a clean install ofa new version. If there is such a description/method, please post and earn some well deserved karma.
If they recomend X and X neither happens nor is rejected for considered and sane reasons, or if they ask for access to information source Y and are denied for political or beurocratic reasons, or if they are snowed under with paperwork and nonsense, then it must be very clear to them that they are not being allowed to do the job.
Er, that wasn't my suggestion.
The sane way to cope with laptop users is to only allow them to plug the laptops into a quarantined network. I.e. treat all laptops as if they are machines in the outside world -- logically they are (assuming they are ever connected to theinternet outside your firewall).
Really this doesn't work as well as you'd think. If you have laptop users on your network, [...]
Then you don't have a firewall in any real sense, and you deserve everything you get just as if you had no firewall on your internet connection.
Well about 3 times per week some user brings in a laptop, plugs it in to the LAN
take the amount of IT staff time to clean up themess, and the amount of lost time to everyone else. Cost it at full commercial rates. Divide the bill equally between the person who plugged the laptop in, their bosss, the IT person responisble for the socket and their boss. Repeat until the clue fairy pays a visit.
Then (presuming good faith) they would have resigned at the time their advice was rejected - i.e. long before the accident.
If NASA was not allowing them to do their job well, and they kept doing the job, they must have been content to do the job badly.
This reminds me of a couple of years ago when the whole EU commission resigned after the publication of a report on corruption. It is a beurocrat's response to incoming shrapnel from an investigation. The theory is that you get under cover and if you don't take a direct hit you may be ablle to sneak back in when the storm blows over.
I think it would be hard to hit an alpha and a digit -- the alphas are raised, so youur finger would stop before triggering the digit.
Personally I like the Ericson keypad+slide varient on multi-tap. 3 characters per key are available because you have a double shift, slider up or slider down.
Think of it as evolution in action. Eventually all the corporations with clueless IT people (or manages who outlaw clue use) will die. This will result in either an economy full of clued up corporations or no economy, all of us starving in the streets, and an ecological niche for a new apex species.
They bought out Security Focus and now run bugtraq. Think how that interacts with this stated position on security information sharing.
Well, as formulated it would also ban Windows, computers in general, coffee, oxygen...
OK, I missed the reply from TomV. It's early here and I hadn't had by second cup.
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down.
But that is not the same as the set of bridges with no bugs.
Indeed, I was watching a TV programme about the building of one of the early big New York bridges the other day. Turns out the cables are full of brittle crappy wire substituted by a corrupt contractor. Quite a big bug. The bridge hasn't fallen down because it was designed well, and is still in use.
Engineerign is not about perfection, it is about designing for the real world where shit happens.
Actually, it is hard to reach such a high value of
Bluetooth is second only to clocks on video recorders in this field.
I agree with what you say, it was not the fact that this was new and interesting, but the hype that it was revolutionary and exciting I was commenting on.
In any case I was using mice with lights for years before I ever used one with a ball, so that is an example of the amazing conservatism of the Wintel and Apple world.
It's what you get if you take a beige box, glue the monitor stand to the top, roundoff the corners and make it out of plastic.
It's fairly conservative. It only seems not because the rest of the industry is even more conservative.
A radical design might be to put all the componets in individual small boxes, let them communicate by a wireless protocol and scatter the boxes around the room as paperweights, bookends, wedges under wobbly desks etc. Or perhaps to produce a PC with no screen but a projection system or...