Priority updates - RedHat could hypothetically decide to offer updates via the update
agent service before they're available via FTP. Depending on how this gets done, it could
be delibrate (such as it appearing on the update agent a week before FTP) or just an
artifact of bandwidth and priority (it may appear on the FTP site as soon as the update
agent starts pushing, but connection limits and mirroring delays may mean it's not
readily available until a day or two later).
The majority of released updates to Red Hat Linux are fixes for security holes. Since the release of Red Hat 7.0, Red Hat has released 39
security fixes, 15
other bug fixes, and one
package enhancement.
Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.
Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.
All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.
The country is beautiful, the people friendly, and damn that maple syrup sure tastes great.
You underappreciate your own nation, erotus -- that sounds like Vermont. Not all of the United States is California, Detroit, Harlem, and Bad Ass TX, you know.
(On-topic: Among some of my associates, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books are known as "Marx Goes to Mars". Spread the meme.)
Apple has at least been able to keep its loyalists in line with the change in leadership back to Steve Jobs. If
they really want to see true growth, they need to lure other people to their platform.
The last time I saw a report on the subject, some large percentage of iMac owners were new to the Macintosh platform or even to home computer ownership.
If a language is worth using, the syntax is the least of your worries!
Corollary: If a language's syntax is a nontrivial worry, the language is not worth using.
For some reason, though, people continue to use sendmail and procmail, both of which use configuration languages whose syntax is decidedly nontrivial and nonobvious. Moreover, people continue to invent new programming languages with take-offs on well-understood existing syntax.
Microsoft.NET is basically a virtual machine, kinda like the Java virtual machine. The virtual machine works with several different languages. This makes debugging and development easier than before.
Development, perhaps. Debugging? Maybe not. As the Mercury folks mentioned,.NET encourages the mixing of garbage-collectable and non-garbage-collectable pointers, and "verifiability goes out the window pretty quickly."
Meanwhile, there already exist cross-language network object-model environments , some of which support far more languages than Mercury mentions.NET supporting. No, GNOME isn't VM-based, and for good reason; however, it doesn't need to be to support C, C++, Objective C, Perl, Python, Guile, Ruby, Ada, Eiffel, Dylan, Pike, Pascal, Haskell, et al.
He was??? That's surprising, because if there is any theme that runs throughout most of his science fiction its SEX.
Yes, but never sleazy sex.
The protagonists of that class of Heinlein novel do not cheat on their spouses in motels or Las Vegas casinos, with or without waterbeds. Rather, they and their spouses and their friends get together for a friendly Sunday afternoon orgy; usually in the refresher or other hot-tub equivalent.
Wow. This guy's writing style bears a remarkable resemblance to a well-known columnist in PC Magazine.
Cute. I'm not, though; I'm a Linux and network-security technician for a moderately well-known research institution.
I make selective use of the <strong> tag in my Slashdot posts because it serves to bring important points and words into higher visibility. It also represents emphasis in speech; I find that Slashdot is even more "conversational" even than Usenet, where I make much sparer use of the *rather* *annoying* *emphasis* *tags* *available*.
(Re: rebooting as a troubleshooting tactic under Windows)
Do keep in mind that the reason we tell people that is, a very large percentage of the time, it fixes the problem. It's an easy thing to do, and often works. If that doesn't fix it, we'll go from there.
No, it doesn't fix the problem. It works around the problem. It causes the present manifestation of the problem to go away, letting the user go back to his or her work, while the problem itself -- the bug which caused the user's grief -- remains unfixed. Thus, the underlying problem is almost guaranteed to plague the user again.
It is this sort of phony "tech support" which encourages Windows users to start constructing their elaborate voodoo rituals of self-protection from system bugs -- reboot, stand on one foot, whack the monitor three times on one side, boot into safe mode, reboot, sacrifice a goat, and reinstall. The "just reboot" attitude leads not to computer literacy, but to more ignorance and irrationality.
If the user is suffering from a Windows bug which causes intermittent failure, be honest with them: "This is a problem we've reported to Microsoft; they've said they'll consider including it in the next Service Pack, due out in six months; until then, you're out of luck -- just save your work twice as often and do more backups." Don't cop out and defend the indefensible with another "Just reboot, it'll go away."
Symantec & Lotus: They already sold out, or have been crushed by Microsoft. Much more worrisome.
Of course Symantec wouldn't port their products to Linux. Most of Symantec's products would be completely unnecessary under Linux.Symantec's products page presently lists 17 software products, of which three serve solely to fix Windows or MacOS design flaws, eight serve purposes already well-served by existing free software, and two serve political purposes not in tune with many or most users of Linux-based OSes. I count only three as potential Linux-based products.
The following Symantec products serve to correct or work around design flaws of Windows/DOS or MacOS:
Norton AntiVirus -- While viruses running under Linux have been created as experiments, the Linux platform does not suffer from the promiscuous vulnerability to machine-code viruses of unprotected platforms. Nor do Linux's popular applications suffer from unprotected scripting systems vulnerable to viruses.
Norton CleanSweep -- Almost all Linux-based OSes use package-management systems such as dpkg and rpm, which permit the clean uninstallation of programs.
Norton Speed Disk -- ext2fs, the current standard filesystem for Linux, does not suffer from the severe fragmentation problems of FAT, nor from the somewhat lesser but noticeable ones of FAT's successors and MacOS's HFS.
The following Symantec products serve purposes already filled by existing free software:
Mail Gear -- The foremost mail daemons for Linux (such as sendmail, postfix, and qmail) already support the filtration of mail. Users can use procmail recipes or other tools to accomplish the task at their level.
Norton Ghost -- Virtually every Linux-based OS ships with backup/recovery and disk-imaging tools such as dump, tar, and dd. There are even X-based versions such as guiTAR available.
Norton Internet Security (firewall portion) -- Firewall capability is built into the Linux kernel. Several popular free packages exist to do rule-based intrusion detection, such as snort.
Norton Utilities -- Though ext2fs is more robust than FAT or HFS, it can suffer from disk hosement in certain situations (such as loss of power); in these cases, Linux already has fsck. (Norton Utilities also contains tools that belong in the previous category, such as software to prevent program crashes from bringing down the whole OS.)
pcAnywhere -- Linux has ssh and X for secure remote login and display.
Procomm Plus -- The last thing Linux needs is another terminal emulator.
Retriever -- Port-scanning software is hardly anything new to Unix; for network security mapping try SATAN or one of its derivatives such as SAINT.
WinFax PRO -- The Hylafax system supports the sending and receiving of faxes under Linux (and other Unices) as well as network-based faxing.
The following Symantec products serve political purposes not in tune with many or most Linux users; specifically, they are parental or office censorware:
I-Gear
Norton Internet Security (censorware portion)
(The functionality of censorware may be duplicated with free software, so these could perhaps be put in the previous category; however, due to the general opinion of censorware as Bad And Wrong [i.e. unethical on principle and furthermore broken in its implementations] among the Linux community, they belong in their own category.)
The following Symantec products are potentially useful under a Linux-based OS:
Expert -- From the blurb, this sounds like an attempt at implementing Bruce Schneier's model of analyzing security as a business risk. (I am not convinced that Schneier is right, nor do I claim that Symantec Expert is a good implementation of his ideas... but that's another story.)
Mobile Essentials -- While one could well keep several versions of/etc in tarballs and untar the right one for each location, I imagine laptop users would like a clean way to switch from one set of settings to another.
TalkWorks PRO -- The last time I looked into the matter, there didn't seem to be any reasonably advanced voice-mail or answering-machine packages for Linux.
(Mobile WinFax is not counted as it runs on the PalmOS, not a conventional OS. Norton SystemWorks is not counted because it is a bundle of several packages listed above.)
In short, it is not to be taken as a surprise that Symantec, and other "utility software" companies, see themselves as not having anything to offer the Linux community -- they don't.
Do you mean Roddenberry, since you mention tricorders I'm wondering if you are attempting to equate writing the fiction called Star Trek with the serious business of inventing.:)
Actually, a description of an invention in published science fiction apparently can militate against a patent being granted when someone else builds it in the real world. Prior to the invention of the waterbed, Robert A. Heinlein described it in one of his books. Later, someone built the first real-world waterbed and applied for a patent. No can do; Heinlein's description of the device in a novel had placed the idea in the public domain, thus rendering it unpatentable.
(Curiously enough, the ever-practical Heinlein had envisioned waterbeds being used for long-term hospital patients [to avoid bedsores] and as acceleration couches for space travel. He was apparently a bit put out to discover them being considered a sexual novelty for sleazy motels....)
Agreed "spam" is a loaded, derogatory word that has devolved from it's original meaning of "multiple
excessive USENET postings" into "unsolicited commercial email".
Net History: The term "spam" in the Internet sense appears to have originated on a MUSH, where it referred to the disruption of a role-playing session by an obnoxious character singing the Monty Python "Spam Spam Spam Spam" song.
Exactly. It is a really irritating cliche in science fiction that whenever a character becomes "more than
human" (whatever that means), that character only gets to enjoy the benefits of that state for a brief while
before descending into madness and death.
Ironheart didn't. Neither did Obi-wan or Dave
Bowman. Hell, even Wesley Crusher didn't, more's the pity.
Bah. Only reason I run redhat at work is that I can't get FreeBSD to *stop* detecting the integrated i810 so the XFree SVGA server will start using the voodoo3 I have in there instead.
On some PCs, you can disable onboard peripherals (NIC, sound, video, etc.) in the BIOS. Have you tried this?
At worst I'd hope the most you'd have to do is clean out the MBR and low-level format the drive. Though IMHO, if it requires more than needing to reformat the filesystem, it may be going a bit too far.
Take off and nuke the drive from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
(But seriously -- installing a proper OS should be enough to prevent any crazed apps "sprinkling bits" all over your filesystem. Preferably one where you could run any untrusted app in a chroot jail. Is that even possible under Win32? [No flame intended -- I'd actually like to know if it is.])
I think wires and electricity should be developed and used to assist
us and make our lives easier, however at no point should we become so reliant on electricity that we
would not be able to function without it...
Sorry, too late. Our present level of population cannot be maintained without our present level of technology. More generally, no level of population could be maintained without the corresponding level of technology: you can't support Renaissance Europe on Babylonian-era agriculture.
The corollary of this fact is that any person who advocates "rolling technology back" or "going back to the land" is advocating genocide -- and should be regarded on that level of (im)morality.
Yes, the world depends more and more on software. Yes, there is no such thing as a bug-free piece of code.
There is, however, software that approaches bug-free as a limit, as opposed to merely replacing one set of bugs with another. I offer TeX as an example.
You can tell smoking geeks by their keyboard gunk. Which usually winds up being 60% ash.
A Japanese friend of the family once gave my father an old pachinko machine, complete with a stupendous number of pachinko balls. This machine had actually been in use in a pachinko parlor, and had been retired apparently because both the electronics and the mechanical apparatus were shot.
My father, being the engineer type, was compelled to restore this device to serviceability. However, the thing which the Japanese do in pachinko parlors besides playing pachinko is -- you guessed it -- smoking. The machine was clogged with tar and ash, and most of the balls (which are inscribed steel balls, somewhat smaller than marbles) resembled small spheres of dirt. Thus, most of the restoration of the machine involved taking it apart, scrubbing the tar off, and putting it back together.
The other trouble with pachinko machines is that the balls get everywhere if there are young children in the house....
what makes u think we don't use vi on our Macs? or am i the only insane one?
Not at all. I use vim on my Mac because it's the only editor I've found with syntax highlighting for all the languages I use. I used to use Alpha (a Mac editor which is based on Tcl and vaguely resembles emacs), but found that it wouldn't highlight Inform documents... and besides, vim is faster.
of open source is, that it is marked as "stable" when and only when it is really stable (and not when marketing has decided to ship
the product), and yet you can still have your bleeding edge program when you like it.
Oh really? Open source does not guarantee that any particular release is stable, nor that packagers take precautions against unethically releasing software that is unstable, insecure, and difficult to make stable or secure.
Open source does guarantee that bugs will be found rather than left concealed, and that they can be fixed straightforwardly. It doesn't in any sense keep them from being made or released in the first place.
The fact of the matter is that some open-source and free-software projects have a vastly better track record in terms of stability (which includes security) than someothers.
No... the C compiler, libraries, editors, shells, system tools, graphical interface toolkits, and other material produced as parts of Project GNU, and which compose a far greater number of lines of code in most modern Linux-based systems than does the kernel.
And things like Delorie Lynx Viewer, Delorie Web Page Purifier, HTML PrettyPrinter, Delories Search Engine Simulator for
starters - oh, don't forget last weeks Slashdotted site DejaVu for viewing sites in 'old browsers'.
Am I the only one who thinks that Slashdot looks better after HTML 4.0 Strict purification than it does by default? Slow as hell, but plenty readable.
Frisbee; personal information ... shades of TRON?
on
The Computer of 2010
·
· Score: 2
Because it's small (about the size of a Frisbee) and because it has the power of today's supercomputer, the 2010 PC will become the repository of information covering every aspect of our daily life. Our computer, untethered and unfettered by wires and electrical outlets, becomes something of a key that unlocks the safety deposit box of our lives.
"You will each receive an identity disc. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc, or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate deresolution. That will be all." -- Command Program Sark
It is unreasonable to expect a person to remember that "grep -quiet" and "grep -silent" are two different things.
I don't know what system you're using, but in GNUgrep(1) on my Debian 2.2 box they're the same. --quiet and --silent are the same as -q (suppress normal output). They are not , howeber, the same as -s, (aka --no-messages), which suppresses file-related error messages.
In other words, yes, there's a potential for confusion there, but it's not the one you say it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.
Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.
All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.
(On-topic: Among some of my associates, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books are known as "Marx Goes to Mars". Spread the meme.)
For some reason, though, people continue to use sendmail and procmail, both of which use configuration languages whose syntax is decidedly nontrivial and nonobvious. Moreover, people continue to invent new programming languages with take-offs on well-understood existing syntax.
Meanwhile, there already exist cross-language network object-model environments , some of which support far more languages than Mercury mentions .NET supporting. No, GNOME isn't VM-based, and for good reason; however, it doesn't need to be to support C, C++, Objective C, Perl, Python, Guile, Ruby, Ada, Eiffel, Dylan, Pike, Pascal, Haskell, et al.
The protagonists of that class of Heinlein novel do not cheat on their spouses in motels or Las Vegas casinos, with or without waterbeds. Rather, they and their spouses and their friends get together for a friendly Sunday afternoon orgy; usually in the refresher or other hot-tub equivalent.
I make selective use of the <strong> tag in my Slashdot posts because it serves to bring important points and words into higher visibility. It also represents emphasis in speech; I find that Slashdot is even more "conversational" even than Usenet, where I make much sparer use of the *rather* *annoying* *emphasis* *tags* *available*.
Call it user interface.
It is this sort of phony "tech support" which encourages Windows users to start constructing their elaborate voodoo rituals of self-protection from system bugs -- reboot, stand on one foot, whack the monitor three times on one side, boot into safe mode, reboot, sacrifice a goat, and reinstall. The "just reboot" attitude leads not to computer literacy, but to more ignorance and irrationality.
If the user is suffering from a Windows bug which causes intermittent failure, be honest with them: "This is a problem we've reported to Microsoft; they've said they'll consider including it in the next Service Pack, due out in six months; until then, you're out of luck -- just save your work twice as often and do more backups." Don't cop out and defend the indefensible with another "Just reboot, it'll go away."
The following Symantec products serve to correct or work around design flaws of Windows/DOS or MacOS:
The following Symantec products serve purposes already filled by existing free software:
The following Symantec products serve political purposes not in tune with many or most Linux users; specifically, they are parental or office censorware:
- I-Gear
- Norton Internet Security (censorware portion)
(The functionality of censorware may be duplicated with free software, so these could perhaps be put in the previous category; however, due to the general opinion of censorware as Bad And Wrong [i.e. unethical on principle and furthermore broken in its implementations] among the Linux community, they belong in their own category.)The following Symantec products are potentially useful under a Linux-based OS:
(Mobile WinFax is not counted as it runs on the PalmOS, not a conventional OS. Norton SystemWorks is not counted because it is a bundle of several packages listed above.)
In short, it is not to be taken as a surprise that Symantec, and other "utility software" companies, see themselves as not having anything to offer the Linux community -- they don't.
(Curiously enough, the ever-practical Heinlein had envisioned waterbeds being used for long-term hospital patients [to avoid bedsores] and as acceleration couches for space travel. He was apparently a bit put out to discover them being considered a sexual novelty for sleazy motels ....)
(See the spam glossary.)
(But seriously -- installing a proper OS should be enough to prevent any crazed apps "sprinkling bits" all over your filesystem. Preferably one where you could run any untrusted app in a chroot jail. Is that even possible under Win32? [No flame intended -- I'd actually like to know if it is.])
The corollary of this fact is that any person who advocates "rolling technology back" or "going back to the land" is advocating genocide -- and should be regarded on that level of (im)morality.
My father, being the engineer type, was compelled to restore this device to serviceability. However, the thing which the Japanese do in pachinko parlors besides playing pachinko is -- you guessed it -- smoking. The machine was clogged with tar and ash, and most of the balls (which are inscribed steel balls, somewhat smaller than marbles) resembled small spheres of dirt. Thus, most of the restoration of the machine involved taking it apart, scrubbing the tar off, and putting it back together.
The other trouble with pachinko machines is that the balls get everywhere if there are young children in the house ....
(I'm also writing this in iCab, yah ....)
Open source does guarantee that bugs will be found rather than left concealed, and that they can be fixed straightforwardly. It doesn't in any sense keep them from being made or released in the first place.
The fact of the matter is that some open-source and free-software projects have a vastly better track record in terms of stability (which includes security) than some others.
When did Theo de Raadt get a "van"?
In other words, yes, there's a potential for confusion there, but it's not the one you say it is.