Are they referring to the core OS? Regarding kernel vulnerabilities? Regarding Apache vs. IIS? I noticed one of the tables on the SecurityFocus site, show "Top Vulnerable Packages 2001" - what exactly does that mean? , installed packages and running daemons? or the kernel each OS is packaging?
Look at those tables. How can you refer to Windows NT 4.0 versus Internet Explorer versus IIS versus RedHat Linux 5.2!!!
Those are really huge apples and massive oranges...
This is marketing fluff, vague and doesn't do anyone any good! Doesn't matter if you are referring to Windows, Linux, Solaris, QNX, or whatever. These are raw stats, without enough detail to make an informed decision regarding their meaning.
Look deeper into statistics, et al. before flaming one way of the other!
OK , so let's narrow it down Microsoft IIS servers are more secure than Linux/*NIX/Apache servers? How about the immesnse propogation of crap that unpatched IIS servers are propogating on the 'net?
I am running a little hobby server at home, running FreeBSD and I have been getting a HUGE number of NIMDA requests, so , is NIMDA resolved? ummm I think not...
Here's the proof, it's a quick and dirty generation of the requests my apache is getting from the clueless IIS dorks on Rogers@Home (an informal traceroute has shown most of the requests coming from within the @Home network).
I like SF , I read SF, but those tables and statistics are completely ridiculous and I'm not even slamming MSFT one way or the other....
I am running gnome 1.4 on a Solaris Ultra Sparc 5 and had that same problem for a few minutes until I realized that the path for the gnome libs wasn't being added to my library path properly. You might want to echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH when logging into an alternate wm. If the path to your gnome libs isn't there (ie/opt/gnome-1.4/lib), you might wanna make sure it is exporting properly. If you're using Solaris, then simply add the addtional export to your.profile in your home and gnome will boot fine.
Anyhow hope this helps you out as your description is exactly what my Ultra Sparc 5 was doing. And IMHO, GNOME on Solaris rocks...FINALLY a modern environment for the beauty that is a Sun Machine!
My christmas haul....
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well this year was a fun one...
My mother got into a car accident in march of this year and has been in therapy for chronic back damage , my step dad damaged the disks in his lower back. As such, both have been a little tight for money recently. So my gifts to them this year were:
(1) Fixing their car for them
(2) Lending them money for 3 months.
(3) A little P2-266 for step sister who has never owned a computer before. She almost hyper ventilated when she got it. Sometimes the joy is in seeing something I take for granted, like technology, even old technology, greatly appreciated by someone who is not surrounded by it 24/7.
(4) One of those green bankers lamps for my girlfriend, every time we watch Law and Order she comments on how cool those lamps look
No I didn't get much, I don't want much, if I need something in the world of tech, I buy it for myself. The gifts that mean most to me are the ones where the person gives you a unique gift based upon something you love.
Example, my girlfriend gave me National Geographics 100 Best Pictures of All Time and Gladiator on DVD. Not high in monetary value, but very high meaning for me.
My girlfriend was listening to me all year, and picked on up on stupid little comments I had made months ago! The listening is a gift I appreciate...it's just one of those things that keeps on giving all year long.
Then you should be hawking your second hand hardware on eBay rather than hanging out on Slashdot. Years ago, stories like this were far more common on Slashdot, this is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
It's not about marketing it, selling it, etc. It's about doing it yourself.
IMHO, 0.9.3 is an excellent browser. It's installed on all my machines,including on both partitions of my Development box at work (w2k and slack 8.0). Yes, development my appear to be slow, but I'd simply like to point out to a few things
Mozilla is a massive project, whose (main) goal is a natively running browser on multiple platforms, this is no small task and they have done well thus far. I don't think anyone can point to a browser that runs on as many different platforms as well as Moz does.
Mozilla was one of the first major Open Source initiatives undertaken, and in fact must have been a logisitical nightmare to get rolling - especially taking into account the fact that they wiped the proverbial board clean with Mozilla - however, consider all the other issues that go into an open code distribution system.
We have no other development process to use as a benchmark to the development of Mozilla. Up until this point in time, all one has ever gotten is binary distributions. Very little insight and even less information from previous organizations.
Agreed, the much hyped 'browser-wars' are over, thank god, IMHO, those wars ended up coming down to distribution issues that Microsoft capitalized (unfairly) upon. As we all know, 99% of the world will use the browser that smacks them in the face at home. As for the corporate scene, many organizations continue to use Netscape and (from people I know who deal with these issues) will move to a stable, compliant browser when available. Which is in fact becoming more of a critical issue - called them 'web enabled' or 'network aware' applications. I would point to.NET as an example of how this scheme seems to be gaining prominence.
Mozilla is quite a bit more than just a browser or mark up renderer. Granted most of you wouldn't ever need the capabilities provided in XUL, but many application developers might. Cry cry cry about bloat all you want - if you are using a windoze box to read this, then you are familiar with bloat. You may bitch and moan about XUL and how horrible it is, however, it is essentially providing the multi-platform capabilities of Mozilla. And for me anyhow, it is important to have a rich, dynamic, and actively developed multiplatform browser. Try not to overlook that contribution - Mozilla is an extremely flexible piece of code.
I am not going to put down or put on a pedestal any of the other available browsers. I use them all, on numerous platforms, both open and closed. Konqueror is great for quick and dirty net searches. Opera is great on low-end boxen. Explorer is well...explorer...*sigh*. Mozilla is quick, stable and does everything I want to do online. This is just my opinion.
From the pace of development, Mozilla is doing fairly well. If you're a programmer, you should realize the scope of what they are doing over at Mozilla. As for Slashdot, why exactly would you guys post an article so blatantly and obviously mis-informed?? Generally I look to/. to give up interesting news, somewhat outside the normal of FUD and goofie marketing/media coverage we see everywhere on the net.
Could someone from/. explain the motivation for posting the story in the first place? Not that an article which is critical of Mozilla or any open source should not be posted. In fact, critical articles are fine. So long as they are informed and well written which this one obviously is not.
Just a note to Asa - your posts are very obviously showing a note of tension. Don't worry about it, you guys are doing a helluva job and from one (semi) sane coder to another I'd just like you guys at Mozilla to know that your broswer is sweet. They'll always bitch abut something *shrug*
I agree with you on your last point, which in fact is the crux of my entire argument to this guy.
My earlier reply is there also (to the original poster). As a sys admin, or junior IT guy or maintainer of any system, it's your job to read read read the Changelogs, Mailing Lists, and all associated docs. Seriously a competent IT person should be all over their systems.
I mean this guy was complaining (original poster) that he almost got fired! Well, ummm *duh*...these are 2.4 issues...I promise someone has run into it before. What sys admin runs out adhoc and grabs new kernel source (even 2.4 source) without checking the implications of what they are doing. I am a coder, not a sys admin, although I used to be and it just goes against everything a sys admin *should* stand for. Many guys I know admin'ing linux systems which are critical are very very wary of any kernel upgrading unless *absolutley* neccessary. Then when the decision is made to upgrade it is *thoroughly* researched, planned, carefully implemented with redundancy in case of any bad circumstances.
It certain does not seem to be the case here. Beware the l33t sysadmin!
Did you ever stop to consider why NFS blew up? Is it possible you have it misconfigured? Is it possible that you should not be blaming the kernel maintainers?
Sounds like you should go through your system config file by config file, library by library...if you can't figure it out, then you can't make a critical system stable..which might indicate time for a career change...*wink*
IMHO, looking at the low quality of alot of games out there that do get released (*cough* Myst III *cough*).
I am personally fine with waiting for complete, mainly correct, runnable, optimized and fun game rather than a piece of cruft. The gaming industry has a habit of producing alot of junk at the expense of quality. So far as I am concerned, get it right, and I'll be a dedicated customer for life. Companies like Dynamix, Id, and Blizzard do their absolute best to produce games of quality - for that I thank them and always purchase their games. Think about it too...some other game developers will release a decent game, then lock it up so it can never be expanded to enhance the game in the future.
Much like Aliens vs. Predator - GREAT game - but it just stagnated after a while because the game was locked very, few mods etc and I stopped playing it. Not that I didn't like the game, it just died. I can't say that I have had that experience with any of the above mentioned companies. I play their games often, I purchase their products gladly - because they make great games period! They seem to have balanced the marketroid interference with quality products in an intense, horribly stressful, fast paced, and unforgiving market. Gamers are the worst critics I think you'll all agree...
I am a programmer by trade too - and you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming into the gaming industry - I'll stick to developing scientific applications for Linux thanks very much! But I have an enormous amount of respect for these developers...so hurrah!
When Warcraft 3 comes out it will kick ass and I'll be playing it for years...heck I'm still playing warcraft2!
posting a vague inflammatory and judgemental post like this is ridiculous. You problem should be directed to Kernel.org specifically to their mailing lists. But blandly proclaiming that "the 2.4 series" is not presentable is ridiculous. What was the output of your make dep or make bzImage? where did it fail?
C'mon don't be lame, I have been using every single 2.4 update with ntfs support and MANY experimental features...never had a single problem. I am not saying you are incompetent, but an informed comment would be far more helpful than that kind of ridiculous statement.
that the most powerful nation on this planet has such a massive budget for more death machines and waste, and ignores such valid and honorable areas such as Research, Science, Health Care, Education, et al.
It's embarrassing here in Canada that the politicians scream "We need more of our young people to become highly educated!" on one side of their face while absolutley screwing over every practical implementation of such a statement!
NASA needs money, their research is invaluable.
Schools need money, their services are incalculable
Hospitals (and Health Care in general) need money, some day you will be glad if they do have more cash!
Go ahead and mod me as redundant or offtopic. But it's a fact that in both the US and Canada, our priorities are totally backwards. Although being larger and more prominent (and having alot more money), the whole situation disgusts me a little more when I watch PBS news shows or listen to NPR.
Plus damnit, it is our money. (Respective to our own countries of course).
"Solaris is in use mainly as a server operating system at the moment"
I have to disagree with your statement. Solaris Boxen are found in a great many research, engineering and academic environments as workstations.
As a research programmer, I use a solaris Ultra 5 on a regular basis along side with my Linux/Intel Box. This Gnome 1.4 release from sun is welcome, and is currently happily chugging away through the install process right beside me. I have, in the past, installed and compiled Gnome 1.2 on the same machine and a Computing Lab full of Ultra 5's.
The problem with the solaris boxen (when using precompiled or compiled on the boxes themselves) was the occasional app crash due to some of the Gnome libraries. Having a compiled version from Sun themselves gives us regular Solaris users something to cheer about.
Although heavily proprietary, I've had excellent experiences with Sun products on the Solaris machines. I am also sure that the Sun people have tweaked many of the bugs out of the distribution of Gnome.
Additionally, it's great to see Sun licensing and supporting OSS. Three cheers for Sun, and many thanks...
I have always used pine in my day to day mail operations, I am a member of several email lists and recieve about 150-200 emails per day, plus the one or two personal emails i actually get addressed to me =)
For many years i used pine and/or emacs as my mail reader. I tried kmail and it was not too bad for a while, but I don't run the K Desktop exclusivley (I run blackbox...roar) and K apps aometimes suffer negative effects from being run outside of the entire K environment. So it was back to pine
I tried Balsa for a while, it was pretty, but at the time, it was not threaded and died, alot. Once again back to pine.
A month ago or so, I decided to give Evolution a try. I must say, it is one hell of a good mail client , yes it crashes once in a while, but I just start it up again and there are no corruptions or anything. The mail filtering system works really well. The user interface is dead simple to set-up, and *heck* it's pretty.
I couldn't begin to compare it to MS Outlook (or Outlook Express), since I haven't used that mail client in many years.
But from a guy that has used alot of the new email clients kicking around, and has always reverted back to good ol' pine, Evolution is my mail client now.
Of course there is a soft spot in my heart for pine, it's still configured to read my Evolution mail box (easier for remote mail checking). And the uh *calendar* I dunno, it looks pretty, but I'm not a big calendar user...I prefer mass disorganization in that dept. *grin*
Any governmental agency, whether American or Canadian (being a Canuck myself, I can't really comment on the Yankees), should make it a serious goal to utilize the *nix's or custom developed OS'es in sensitive operations. There are a couple of reasons.
1) No coporate entity should have absolute control over the operations, however minimal, of a government. I think most of you would agree that a coporation, whether it is Sun or Microsoft, should not infiltrate a government agency in that manner. As a point, I am aware that the US Military and various agencies use the services of Sun Microsystems. However, my understanding is that Sun is contracted for customized development work, of both OS'es and apps (rather than just running out and buying 50 workstations preinstalled).
2) Its also my understanding that the original BSD distribution, developed at Berkley was contracted by the American government for use in critical systems. If that was the case, then why is a consumer OS like Microsoft Windows seeing such proflific use in government operations. Economic deals with major corporations should not dictate what what OS is holding our sensitive information. Again, American or Canadian, that basic point of fact should make you think.
3) If it was government policy to use a specific *nix, one or many (ie OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, whichever was most appropriate for the particular task), then numerous engineers and scientists could be utilized to strengthen weak areas and improve already effective areas. In effect what would be happening is a re-conribution of code back into the main source trees of each distribution, or flavour. This would be the same as an influx of intellect and dollars into this area of Computing.(I also think most of you would agree that many of the best, and brightest minds in CS and OS development around today are working in government agencies - whether or not you know their names, this is the truth).
Finally, throughout the computing industry, it is being recognized that computing technology no longer exists only in the realms of research and science. This technology has become critical to the functioning of society, in a very practical, day to day sense. I did read an article recently on Ars-Technica about the recognition that fault tolerant computing is now getting. To this end, the government should seriously evaluate the use of a consumer OS. For instance:
Does NASA buy 50 Aibo robot dogs to launch into space? No
Do they hire TRW or Boeing to custom build equipment on a contract basis? yes
So, if these agencies already have a method for contractng the services of companies to design fault-tolerant and secure systems for various military and aerospace operations, why should the database which stores my medical, personal, or credit information be any different? In both cases, the lives of individual citizens is at stake.
I am certainly not trying to simplify the situation or even offer a blanket solution. I am saying one thing though no government should be purchasing and using off the shelf, shrink wrapped software to hold any of our information. Period.
Of course I noticed that people not in the computing industry use computers. Which is why I suggested purchasing a distribution, and taking advantage of the excellent documentation and support they offer.
But thanks for taking one snippet of my original post out of context.
I didn't imply that one know how to kernel hack and ensure POSIX compliance when I said they should understand the underpinnings.
But in order to get gaim or establish a net connection, you damn well should understand what/etc/resolv.conf and ifconfig do for ya.
No one implied that you were stupid. And there are tonnes of things you can do to pick up linux quickly. Seriously I doubt that you purchased Suse Professional. The book is very clearly laid out in a step by step fashion. Purchasing this distribution will facilitate your learning, hell, Suse even provides 90 days of telephone support for free. You can sit on a toll free line with someone that will walk you through each and every step, for as long as it takes.
Once you buy it, then use the services they offer, I think you'll totally change your tune.And yes, Linux is free, but free comes with a different cost (you gotta answer all your questions yourself -- did you purchase every copy of windows you've ever used? Then hmmm...did you call microsoft support with that burned version? *grin*), and what you get with purchasing a Linux distro is alot more than microsoft ever did for anyone in terms of support
Inherently Linux is hard, its an incredibly complex *nix system. Usage is not hard to set up. If you use the resources available to you.
Hmmm....so how do you propose to get Windows users over to Linux?
Well, what I do is encourage people whom I know to buy a distro. Then I get them to pick me up a case off beer, go to their place and sit down for an afternoon.
It works suprisingly well. I think if you want to promote activism you need to affect people one at a time.
Now consider, what is more effective? You and I writing up a 'linux is X = Windows is Y' doc or you and I talking to people we know, hangin' for an afternoon and showing the tricks of the trade? I have personally converted 14 people to Linux. I think I practice active Linux promotion. If every Linux user did this, numbers would swell....
Think of it. But I always let them start it themselves, then help them through the roadblocks. Only after they read the docs.
I was wondering if your interests are limited to computing (or computer science, hacking, gaming, etc.)
What other types of things are you interested in? Literature, Music, Outdoors (for example).
An additional question here, when you look around you, do you feel that today's young lack an interest in a variety of interests?
Are the young like the borg? One mindset, no variety of interests, no thrill in the joy of learning something new? I would be interested to hear your views on that. And finally, looking at your brief introduction here, you seem like a renaissance man, a variety of interests , few limitations on 'how hard it might be to learn'.
Do you feel alienated from your peers due to this? ie are you one of the few renaissance men you've come into contact with?
Finally, keep it up dude, I was like you - I continue to be interested in new and exciting things. It may alienate you somewhat in the teenage years, but you will notice in your 20's that it makes you a more interesting person.
I think you need to get do a couple of things to get yourself from windozw world to a Linux world:
1) buy a distribution. Suse Linux has an excellent users manual. Well laid out, I know many an NT user who found this one useful.
2) Read the docs. Again from a Suse perspective , they have an excellent knowledge base and website with tonnes of docs.
3) Stop expecting "doing x ni linux is like doing y in windows". I think you need to understand the underpinnings of Unix a bit more. Windows NT dulls the mind of an IT person. Seriously, flame me away, but you are so shielded from what the OS is doing that eventually you think the world is controlled through an applet.
4) O'Rielly publishes tones of books, they're a hell of an investment since you will use them regularly, I have been using Linux as my main OS and at work (programming fibre optics simulations) for 4 years and I still refer to them.
I think it's kind of silly to assume that we need a document that says if you do "this" in windows , you do "this" in Linux. There are docs, there are books, of excellent quality and free (on the net). Read them first. If you buy a distribution, you will always get a manual, which requires reading before installation.
I simply don't understand the griping, you move to a new OS , wether it's end user, programmer, IT , admin...you should be prepared to learn how that new OS works.
The most interesting thing I noticed when reading this "new bite" of a column is the lack of capability for any discussion.
No CNet style talkback , no threaded conversations aka Slashdot.
Moody's column, as many have pointed out, has little journalistic integrity. Rather, he has taken what he sees as tasty bits of statistics, manipulated them in qualitative, rather than an accurate quantitative fashion.
The column reflects the author's opinion, then shuts the door to any valid discussion or argument.
Many columnists will at the very least encourage readers to respond. Moody does none of that, in fact, he doesn't even mention it.
Let's put aside the preferences we many have and look at the column for what it is.
I am really sick of every desktop discussion turn into a KDE vs. Gnome discussion.
Yes, both have their strong points. Gnome is the GPL foundation onto which the FSF may work its way into the desktop market. It certainly has Miguel, who has an astute eye on the overall development process. This is a very good thing.
The KDE team has numerous solid developers who saw a need to create an enivronment which would not shock a windows into never-ever using Linux again. They build a solid environment for some people. This is also a good thing.
In fact BOTH are good things. Both run as GUI into Linux, which, please repeat after me, is a kernel, not a distribution or a window manager.
Now granted as far a coding goes, the Linux community needs to decide on a standard for a Graphical front end. No doubt, no question. However, the people who are doing the real work , the programmers from both projects are working on it. And, I might add, working hard for no money.
The day will come, in my opion that a standard will be agreed upon. Then these groups will adhere to that standard. I have no doubt that they will.
So, everyone involved with development in KDE and Gnome, congrats, you have made great progres in very little time. To the complainers, shut up, input is good when it is contructive , otherwise, it just contributes the insane drivel that oozes into these pointless arguments.
sorry to break to ya AC. My comment was no troll, that really did happen.
And I think the quality of the Corel library could be debated, as much of that would be a personal artistic opinion (unless by quality you mean that the images were well scanned, which they were no doubt).
Making money would be debatable since managing a stock photographic house is a more than full time pursuit. Do you think those images just wander into a library by themselves. Stock image houses look very profitable, however rquire massive amounts of maintenance to run on a dialy basis.
Cash strapped and confused as Corel may seem, this move would appear to me to be a consolidation and focusing of Corel's main products (those being WordPerfect Office Suite et al.)
In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.
In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.
This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.
This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the first good laugh I've had on /. in a while...thanks!
Are they referring to the core OS? Regarding kernel vulnerabilities? Regarding Apache vs. IIS? I noticed one of the tables on the SecurityFocus site, show "Top Vulnerable Packages 2001" - what exactly does that mean? , installed packages and running daemons? or the kernel each OS is packaging?
Look at those tables. How can you refer to Windows NT 4.0 versus Internet Explorer versus IIS versus RedHat Linux 5.2!!!
Those are really huge apples and massive oranges... This is marketing fluff, vague and doesn't do anyone any good! Doesn't matter if you are referring to Windows, Linux, Solaris, QNX, or whatever. These are raw stats, without enough detail to make an informed decision regarding their meaning.
Look deeper into statistics, et al. before flaming one way of the other!
OK , so let's narrow it down Microsoft IIS servers are more secure than Linux/*NIX/Apache servers? How about the immesnse propogation of crap that unpatched IIS servers are propogating on the 'net?
I am running a little hobby server at home, running FreeBSD and I have been getting a HUGE number of NIMDA requests, so , is NIMDA resolved? ummm I think not...
Here's the proof, it's a quick and dirty generation of the requests my apache is getting from the clueless IIS dorks on Rogers@Home (an informal traceroute has shown most of the requests coming from within the @Home network).
I like SF , I read SF, but those tables and statistics are completely ridiculous and I'm not even slamming MSFT one way or the other....
Anyhow hope this helps you out as your description is exactly what my Ultra Sparc 5 was doing. And IMHO, GNOME on Solaris rocks...FINALLY a modern environment for the beauty that is a Sun Machine!
My mother got into a car accident in march of this year and has been in therapy for chronic back damage , my step dad damaged the disks in his lower back. As such, both have been a little tight for money recently. So my gifts to them this year were:
(1) Fixing their car for them
(2) Lending them money for 3 months.
(3) A little P2-266 for step sister who has never owned a computer before. She almost hyper ventilated when she got it. Sometimes the joy is in seeing something I take for granted, like technology, even old technology, greatly appreciated by someone who is not surrounded by it 24/7.
(4) One of those green bankers lamps for my girlfriend, every time we watch Law and Order she comments on how cool those lamps look
No I didn't get much, I don't want much, if I need something in the world of tech, I buy it for myself. The gifts that mean most to me are the ones where the person gives you a unique gift based upon something you love.
Example, my girlfriend gave me National Geographics 100 Best Pictures of All Time and Gladiator on DVD. Not high in monetary value, but very high meaning for me.
My girlfriend was listening to me all year, and picked on up on stupid little comments I had made months ago! The listening is a gift I appreciate...it's just one of those things that keeps on giving all year long.
It's not about marketing it, selling it, etc. It's about doing it yourself.
I am not going to put down or put on a pedestal any of the other available browsers. I use them all, on numerous platforms, both open and closed. Konqueror is great for quick and dirty net searches. Opera is great on low-end boxen. Explorer is well...explorer...*sigh*. Mozilla is quick, stable and does everything I want to do online. This is just my opinion.
From the pace of development, Mozilla is doing fairly well. If you're a programmer, you should realize the scope of what they are doing over at Mozilla. As for Slashdot, why exactly would you guys post an article so blatantly and obviously mis-informed?? Generally I look to /. to give up interesting news, somewhat outside the normal of FUD and goofie marketing/media coverage we see everywhere on the net.
Could someone from /. explain the motivation for posting the story in the first place? Not that an article which is critical of Mozilla or any open source should not be posted. In fact, critical articles are fine. So long as they are informed and well written which this one obviously is not.
Just a note to Asa - your posts are very obviously showing a note of tension. Don't worry about it, you guys are doing a helluva job and from one (semi) sane coder to another I'd just like you guys at Mozilla to know that your broswer is sweet. They'll always bitch abut something *shrug*
Please understand my point before you imply that I was flaming..
plus if I was flaming you'd know it
My earlier reply is there also (to the original poster). As a sys admin, or junior IT guy or maintainer of any system, it's your job to read read read the Changelogs, Mailing Lists, and all associated docs. Seriously a competent IT person should be all over their systems.
I mean this guy was complaining (original poster) that he almost got fired! Well, ummm *duh*...these are 2.4 issues...I promise someone has run into it before. What sys admin runs out adhoc and grabs new kernel source (even 2.4 source) without checking the implications of what they are doing. I am a coder, not a sys admin, although I used to be and it just goes against everything a sys admin *should* stand for. Many guys I know admin'ing linux systems which are critical are very very wary of any kernel upgrading unless *absolutley* neccessary. Then when the decision is made to upgrade it is *thoroughly* researched, planned, carefully implemented with redundancy in case of any bad circumstances.
It certain does not seem to be the case here. Beware the l33t sysadmin!
Just my 2 cents.
Sounds like you should go through your system config file by config file, library by library...if you can't figure it out, then you can't make a critical system stable..which might indicate time for a career change...*wink*
And yes, I am being serious.
I am personally fine with waiting for complete, mainly correct, runnable, optimized and fun game rather than a piece of cruft. The gaming industry has a habit of producing alot of junk at the expense of quality. So far as I am concerned, get it right, and I'll be a dedicated customer for life. Companies like Dynamix, Id, and Blizzard do their absolute best to produce games of quality - for that I thank them and always purchase their games. Think about it too...some other game developers will release a decent game, then lock it up so it can never be expanded to enhance the game in the future.
Much like Aliens vs. Predator - GREAT game - but it just stagnated after a while because the game was locked very, few mods etc and I stopped playing it.
Not that I didn't like the game, it just died. I can't say that I have had that experience with any of the above mentioned companies. I play their games often, I purchase their products gladly - because they make great games period! They seem to have balanced the marketroid interference with quality products in an intense, horribly stressful, fast paced, and unforgiving market. Gamers are the worst critics I think you'll all agree...
I am a programmer by trade too - and you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming into the gaming industry - I'll stick to developing scientific applications for Linux thanks very much! But I have an enormous amount of respect for these developers...so hurrah!
When Warcraft 3 comes out it will kick ass and I'll be playing it for years...heck I'm still playing warcraft2!
C'mon don't be lame, I have been using every single 2.4 update with ntfs support and MANY experimental features...never had a single problem. I am not saying you are incompetent, but an informed comment would be far more helpful than that kind of ridiculous statement.
It's embarrassing here in Canada that the politicians scream "We need more of our young people to become highly educated!" on one side of their face while absolutley screwing over every practical implementation of such a statement!
NASA needs money, their research is invaluable.
Schools need money, their services are incalculable
Hospitals (and Health Care in general) need money, some day you will be glad if they do have more cash!
Go ahead and mod me as redundant or offtopic. But it's a fact that in both the US and Canada, our priorities are totally backwards. Although being larger and more prominent (and having alot more money), the whole situation disgusts me a little more when I watch PBS news shows or listen to NPR.
Plus damnit, it is our money. (Respective to our own countries of course).
StarOffice
CorelOffice
Microsoft Office
additionally since according to Adobe lawyers KIllustrator seems to be insufficient, would'nt:
KDEIllustrator
Be more than sufficient? Just a suggestion.
I have to disagree with your statement. Solaris Boxen are found in a great many research, engineering and academic environments as workstations.
As a research programmer, I use a solaris Ultra 5 on a regular basis along side with my Linux/Intel Box. This Gnome 1.4 release from sun is welcome, and is currently happily chugging away through the install process right beside me. I have, in the past, installed and compiled Gnome 1.2 on the same machine and a Computing Lab full of Ultra 5's.
The problem with the solaris boxen (when using precompiled or compiled on the boxes themselves) was the occasional app crash due to some of the Gnome libraries. Having a compiled version from Sun themselves gives us regular Solaris users something to cheer about.
Although heavily proprietary, I've had excellent experiences with Sun products on the Solaris machines. I am also sure that the Sun people have tweaked many of the bugs out of the distribution of Gnome.
Additionally, it's great to see Sun licensing and supporting OSS. Three cheers for Sun, and many thanks...
For many years i used pine and/or emacs as my mail reader. I tried kmail and it was not too bad for a while, but I don't run the K Desktop exclusivley (I run blackbox...roar) and K apps aometimes suffer negative effects from being run outside of the entire K environment. So it was back to pine
I tried Balsa for a while, it was pretty, but at the time, it was not threaded and died, alot. Once again back to pine.
A month ago or so, I decided to give Evolution a try. I must say, it is one hell of a good mail client , yes it crashes once in a while, but I just start it up again and there are no corruptions or anything. The mail filtering system works really well. The user interface is dead simple to set-up, and *heck* it's pretty.
I couldn't begin to compare it to MS Outlook (or Outlook Express), since I haven't used that mail client in many years.
But from a guy that has used alot of the new email clients kicking around, and has always reverted back to good ol' pine, Evolution is my mail client now.
Of course there is a soft spot in my heart for pine, it's still configured to read my Evolution mail box (easier for remote mail checking). And the uh *calendar* I dunno, it looks pretty, but I'm not a big calendar user...I prefer mass disorganization in that dept. *grin*
1) No coporate entity should have absolute control over the operations, however minimal, of a government. I think most of you would agree that a coporation, whether it is Sun or Microsoft, should not infiltrate a government agency in that manner. As a point, I am aware that the US Military and various agencies use the services of Sun Microsystems. However, my understanding is that Sun is contracted for customized development work, of both OS'es and apps (rather than just running out and buying 50 workstations preinstalled).
2) Its also my understanding that the original BSD distribution, developed at Berkley was contracted by the American government for use in critical systems. If that was the case, then why is a consumer OS like Microsoft Windows seeing such proflific use in government operations. Economic deals with major corporations should not dictate what what OS is holding our sensitive information. Again, American or Canadian, that basic point of fact should make you think.
3) If it was government policy to use a specific *nix, one or many (ie OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, whichever was most appropriate for the particular task), then numerous engineers and scientists could be utilized to strengthen weak areas and improve already effective areas. In effect what would be happening is a re-conribution of code back into the main source trees of each distribution, or flavour. This would be the same as an influx of intellect and dollars into this area of Computing.(I also think most of you would agree that many of the best, and brightest minds in CS and OS development around today are working in government agencies - whether or not you know their names, this is the truth).
Finally, throughout the computing industry, it is being recognized that computing technology no longer exists only in the realms of research and science. This technology has become critical to the functioning of society, in a very practical, day to day sense. I did read an article recently on Ars-Technica about the recognition that fault tolerant computing is now getting. To this end, the government should seriously evaluate the use of a consumer OS. For instance:
Does NASA buy 50 Aibo robot dogs to launch into space? No
Do they hire TRW or Boeing to custom build equipment on a contract basis? yes
So, if these agencies already have a method for contractng the services of companies to design fault-tolerant and secure systems for various military and aerospace operations, why should the database which stores my medical, personal, or credit information be any different? In both cases, the lives of individual citizens is at stake.
I am certainly not trying to simplify the situation or even offer a blanket solution. I am saying one thing though no government should be purchasing and using off the shelf, shrink wrapped software to hold any of our information. Period.
Flame away if u think I am way off base =)
But thanks for taking one snippet of my original post out of context.
Happy New Year.
But in order to get gaim or establish a net connection, you damn well should understand what /etc/resolv.conf and ifconfig do for ya.
No one implied that you were stupid. And there are tonnes of things you can do to pick up linux quickly. Seriously I doubt that you purchased Suse Professional. The book is very clearly laid out in a step by step fashion. Purchasing this distribution will facilitate your learning, hell, Suse even provides 90 days of telephone support for free. You can sit on a toll free line with someone that will walk you through each and every step, for as long as it takes.
Once you buy it, then use the services they offer, I think you'll totally change your tune.And yes, Linux is free, but free comes with a different cost (you gotta answer all your questions yourself -- did you purchase every copy of windows you've ever used? Then hmmm...did you call microsoft support with that burned version? *grin*), and what you get with purchasing a Linux distro is alot more than microsoft ever did for anyone in terms of support
Inherently Linux is hard, its an incredibly complex *nix system. Usage is not hard to set up. If you use the resources available to you.
Well, what I do is encourage people whom I know to buy a distro. Then I get them to pick me up a case off beer, go to their place and sit down for an afternoon.
It works suprisingly well. I think if you want to promote activism you need to affect people one at a time.
Now consider, what is more effective? You and I writing up a 'linux is X = Windows is Y' doc or you and I talking to people we know, hangin' for an afternoon and showing the tricks of the trade? I have personally converted 14 people to Linux. I think I practice active Linux promotion. If every Linux user did this, numbers would swell....
Think of it. But I always let them start it themselves, then help them through the roadblocks. Only after they read the docs.
I was wondering if your interests are limited to computing (or computer science, hacking, gaming, etc.)
What other types of things are you interested in? Literature, Music, Outdoors (for example).
An additional question here, when you look around you, do you feel that today's young lack an interest in a variety of interests?
Are the young like the borg? One mindset, no variety of interests, no thrill in the joy of learning something new? I would be interested to hear your views on that. And finally, looking at your brief introduction here, you seem like a renaissance man, a variety of interests , few limitations on 'how hard it might be to learn'.
Do you feel alienated from your peers due to this? ie are you one of the few renaissance men you've come into contact with?
Finally, keep it up dude, I was like you - I continue to be interested in new and exciting things. It may alienate you somewhat in the teenage years, but you will notice in your 20's that it makes you a more interesting person.
Cheers =)
1) buy a distribution. Suse Linux has an excellent users manual. Well laid out, I know many an NT user who found this one useful.
2) Read the docs. Again from a Suse perspective , they have an excellent knowledge base and website with tonnes of docs.
3) Stop expecting "doing x ni linux is like doing y in windows". I think you need to understand the underpinnings of Unix a bit more. Windows NT dulls the mind of an IT person. Seriously, flame me away, but you are so shielded from what the OS is doing that eventually you think the world is controlled through an applet.
4) O'Rielly publishes tones of books, they're a hell of an investment since you will use them regularly, I have been using Linux as my main OS and at work (programming fibre optics simulations) for 4 years and I still refer to them.
I think it's kind of silly to assume that we need a document that says if you do "this" in windows , you do "this" in Linux. There are docs, there are books, of excellent quality and free (on the net). Read them first. If you buy a distribution, you will always get a manual, which requires reading before installation.
I simply don't understand the griping, you move to a new OS , wether it's end user, programmer, IT , admin...you should be prepared to learn how that new OS works.
No CNet style talkback , no threaded conversations aka Slashdot.
Moody's column, as many have pointed out, has little journalistic integrity. Rather, he has taken what he sees as tasty bits of statistics, manipulated them in qualitative, rather than an accurate quantitative fashion.
The column reflects the author's opinion, then shuts the door to any valid discussion or argument.
Many columnists will at the very least encourage readers to respond. Moody does none of that, in fact, he doesn't even mention it.
Let's put aside the preferences we many have and look at the column for what it is.
Poorly Written.
Yes, both have their strong points. Gnome is the GPL foundation onto which the FSF may work its way into the desktop market. It certainly has Miguel, who has an astute eye on the overall development process. This is a very good thing.
The KDE team has numerous solid developers who saw a need to create an enivronment which would not shock a windows into never-ever using Linux again. They build a solid environment for some people. This is also a good thing.
In fact BOTH are good things. Both run as GUI into Linux, which, please repeat after me, is a kernel, not a distribution or a window manager.
Now granted as far a coding goes, the Linux community needs to decide on a standard for a Graphical front end. No doubt, no question. However, the people who are doing the real work , the programmers from both projects are working on it. And, I might add, working hard for no money.
The day will come, in my opion that a standard will be agreed upon. Then these groups will adhere to that standard. I have no doubt that they will.
So, everyone involved with development in KDE and Gnome, congrats, you have made great progres in very little time. To the complainers, shut up, input is good when it is contructive , otherwise, it just contributes the insane drivel that oozes into these pointless arguments.
Night all =)
And I think the quality of the Corel library could be debated, as much of that would be a personal artistic opinion (unless by quality you mean that the images were well scanned, which they were no doubt).
Making money would be debatable since managing a stock photographic house is a more than full time pursuit. Do you think those images just wander into a library by themselves. Stock image houses look very profitable, however rquire massive amounts of maintenance to run on a dialy basis.
so....nah nah nah
In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.
In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.
This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.
This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.