> The problem with linux, if you agree that it's a problem, is that it doesn't make it easy for people to package > non-free software.
Why do you say that? It is equally easy to package proprietary software as it package Free stuff. The only difference is proprietary vendors would keep the.src.rpm or the Debian equiv inhouse. Which makes tweaked repackaging for alternate distros a bit harder, but otherwise adds no difficulties for supported platforms.
> The best so far would be the radeon 9250, which is the most recent card supported by the current (open source) x.org > "radeon" driver, and has EXA acceleration in the just-released 6.9/7.0 version.
Does it actually work yet? I keep on buying ATI based cards on the theory that it is the only major vendor with Free drivers available (even if ATI themselves doesn't help all that much to make them happen, it is still more than Nvidia does) but I have never had success with Xfree86's 3D driver. I always get random hardware lockups until I tire of it and install the proprietary driver. It can be a major bitch as well but once installed correctly the lockups end.
Haven't tried the latest x.org version though, does it work at last? I'd really like to remove the only taint (other than a couple of old Loki games) from an otherwise 100% pure machine.
I have slagged Sun and Java often enough but if forced to pick I'd say take Java since it has a few advantages:
1. It is fairly Open and work on GCJ and GNU Classpath is rapidly making it Free. Plus by making it a native compiled language it will end most of the major limitaions of Java. The language is OK, in a Visual Basic like language for low paygrade codemonkeys sort of way, but the JVM and JIT compiling was a killer.
2. It has a future on non-Windows platforms. Mono is doomed; the second the patent wars start it is going to be the very first casualty. And it starts as soon as they have wrung the last bit of FUD from the SCO v. IBM fiasco; i.e. probably about the time you got through learning it.
Some here claim C# has some advantages due to being able to learn from the mistakes of Java. While this is true to some extent it is also true that they aren't enough to make up for the practical reasons I just cited.
> If your bank's IT staff is so incompetent that it can't figure out how to make a > standards-compliant webpage, then why would you trust them to not screw up more > critical systems...
Exactly. It isn't a question of you being annoyed, that is important but not the most important. It raises serious questions about the competence of the IT staff at the instituition. Most IE only pages are running are the result of dependencies. Usually they are displaying the 'seal of insecurity' in the address bar, i.e..asp, or Netcraft shows them running IIS. Can you sleep at night knowing your money is in the hands of people so incompetent that they don't know how dangerous running IIS is?
Personally I look at the webpage when picking a financial instituition as an indicator of their technical abilities, and these days banks are more an IT operation than anything else. IIS is an instant NO. Client side Java is a major negative,.jsp pages or other indications of server side java is only a minor negative. (Too many.jsp based sites have severe availability problems for me to totally trust it.)
I made an exception for BankOne/Chase because A) my account was at a bank they absorbed and the branch is right across the street from work and B) I sent them an email giving notice that ANY online activity on my account should be considered a fraud attempt on the grounds I would never trust their IIS based online banking.
> And yet, you talk essentially classify anyone reading this particular book as a "retard", unless they're reading > it for purely educational purposes or for the sake of completeness.
If the millions of shallow mostly unmarked graves left behind aren't enough to convince you of the utter depraved wickedness of Stalin, Mao and Hitler then I really doubt there is little I can say to change what passes for your mind. And yes, anyone reading their writings from anything but academic curiosity/scholarship worries me a bit because those authors appear to have a strong influence on weak minds, witness their original power and the horrors they unleased.
Do I support a total ban, like Germany has a total ban on Nazi materials? No, ignoring history only invites a repeat as Germany will likely learn. While they shouldn't be banned they should be discouraged for the unprepared and should NEVER be taught in an academic setting without preparing the students by a full exploration of the consequences these books had.
> I guess you don't read much stuff out of curiosity, eh?
Matter of priorities. Sure there are probably some nuggests of wisdom buried in the filth, but I suspect that would be true of a lot more people. Hell, David Koresh probably said one or two truly profound things before Reno's storm troopers burned his crazy ass up, doesn't mean I plan to read through his writings either. When I haev time to put the O'Reilly books down and read some political/philosophical stuff there are tons of books by sane authors I will never get the time to catch up, why waste time reading the ravings of a madman?
Which is why I question the stability anyone reading Mao who isn't doing it in the context of some rational persuit. Makes me wonder whether they actually think that asshat's ideas are worth discussion outside a study on mental illness or (as in the case of this student) of dictators and tyrants.
> "Political power comes from the barell of a gun" -Chairman Mao
Which only goes to prove my assertion elsewhere in this thread that Mao is a congenital idiot. Which would the average evil overlord prefer? A thousand machine guns neatly sealed in crates or a hundred -loyal- men armed with anything.
> that is why US of A spends more money on its Military than rest of the world combined.
Our fearsome array of high tech weapons is impressive, yes. But without the highly trained, motivated and very professional soldiers carrying/driving/flying all that hardware it wouldn't be a tenth as frightening to our enemies. The hight tech hardware is what allows us to accomplish our foreign policy objectives with the relatively small number of active duty personnel and low casualty rates, but if we lacked the hardware we could always use more troups as we did in WWII.
In the end it is people who count, and it is ideas that animate people into action. It is ideas (Truth Justice and the American Way) animating our men in uniform and it is equally ideas which inspire our enemies to strap on a bomb.
> So you are saying that thoughts should be controlled?
Oh course not. But let is be realists for a moment. If we are to prevent madmen from going KABOOM in unwelcome places we have to have spooks doing the sometimes unpleasant things spooks do, right? Now if we can agree that so long as the risk of people going FOOM in a shopping mall exceeds the risk of Bush taking to the podium and announcing a new thousand year reich, we as informed citozens should insist that intelligence agencies investigate. Since they can't investigate everyone, and we wouldn't want to live in a country where they COULD investigate everyone, how are they to pick? I assert that their current methods resemble what we here on slashdot would propose. Computerized sieving of raw information followed up by actual humans asking questions supplemented by old school human intelligence.
From the press account it looks as if this is exactly what happened, this guy was asked some questions because the computer spit out his name, and from the noteworthy items mentioned in the article it probably should have kicked his name out for a human to have a look at. But unless there is a little more than the article revealed, and there probably is, they probably should not have expended the resources to send two agents over to directly question this guy.
> My guess is that the unnamed student didn't get the book in time, or was otherwise late in turning in his paper. So > the student makes up this story to tell his professors.
No! Just like women never lie about sexual harrassment (except the dozen or so who accused Clinton, including one who went so far as to claim attempted rape) students would never lie about the fascism of Bush! How dare you defend the administration like this.
> Reading Mao or anything else like it isn't a good marker for a potential terrorist threat. It's a great marker > for someone who may be thinking for themselves
Whatever. Seriously dude, twenty years ago one could be forgiven reading Mao just to see what all the fuss was about. Anyone doing it now falls into a few groups:
1. Historians. Mao certainly has a place in history, a dark one, but there it is.
2. Completeness freaks, reading every crackpot philosophy just to have read em all.
3. Retards. Seriously, show of hands if anyone still believes Mao was anything other than an insane genocidal lunatic.
> not like the direction this country is going, and actually might stand up and say something about it
Sorry pal, hate to break the bad news to you. You can oppose current policy all ya want, it IS still a (mostly) Free Country. But anybody tries to introduce any of Mao's insane political ideas here I'll be fighting my way to the front of the line to answer their challenge with a bullet. I might not know what works, but I damned sure know enough history to know what doesn't. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Castro are on the ashheap of history for very good reasons and they need to stay there.
> I find this reply pathetically ironic and hypocritical after seeing your signature line.
Not at all. I oppose government attempts at censorship which is why I want the SLC abolished, it is the door through which CIPA passes Supremem Court scrutiny. If the Feds start trying to supress Mao's "Little Red Book (of evil)" I'd be against that also. But I actually read the linked article and ran it through my "de-bullshitter". Just the things mentioned in that obviously biased press report would have make ME want to send an agent to check out Dartmouth if I were a spook, and I'm not nearly paranoid to be one. So I have no problem with them having a look, but did say in the original post they probabaly should have done so invisibly. Especially with it being at a bastion of moonbat thought, they see an Army recruiter they scream fascist, of course they were going to freak at the sight of a Dept of Homeland Security MiB.
A book is far more dangerous than any gun ever was. You see guns aren't dangerous, it is the person holding it and it is ideas that animate us.
> this is no more justified than McCarthyism was
Despite what your Maxist professor or the evening news taught you, McCarthy was spot on in almost every one of his accusations, something you can confirm for yourself now that the archives of the former Soviet Union have been opened. Most so called 'innocent victims' were in the actual pay of the KGB and the rest were involved in treason without pay. If you are going to learn from history make sure you learn what actually happened instead of the mythology of the moonbats.
> I was under the stupid impression that america didnt persecute people for just reading a book,
They asked him some questions and went away. No rubber hoses were involved. They didn't rape his girlfriend in front of him like your buddy Saddam was fond of.
If they don't ask questions how are they supposed to learn anything. Helping the police do their duty is a responsibility of a citizen, even in, especially in, a free country.
Dunno, after reading the whole article I'm a bit conflicted. Keeping an eye out is what we expect the Feds to be doing, and someone who travels abroad frequently, not only wants to read Mao but wants to be sure they are reading the official version instead of just any translation and is clustered with a lot of other hits on the automated sensors due to the professor's frequent contacts in watch list countries, added to the hits on al-Qaeda websites he was assigning students.
Sounds like this prof is actually trying to educate his students instead of being one of these pro-terrorist cranks the university system seems to enjoy hiring, but shouldn't we be wanting the Feds to go have a look for themselves to make sure everything was on the level? Be careful before tossing out the standard issue slashbot line, because when something eventually goes BOOM you won't be allowed to ask "Why didn't the spooks connect the dots and prevent it" if you are now howling that they shouldn't be looking for the dots.
Does sound like this was a case for them to have done a more quiet investigation though instead of coming in flying the colors. Good spook action is invisible, the quiet defenders of Truth, Justice and the American Way of life and all that stuff.
No, what shocks and confounds me is what sort of instituition is Dartmouth anyway! No copy of Mao in the library, they have to request one via ILL? Shocking.
> Will you have the support of the phone company and the cable company,
Wouldn't need their support anymore than we needed them to build the first one. Dude, the phone companies were absolutely the last players to arrive at the ball when the.bomb party was blasting away. If us enterprising geeks can't find a way to exchange traffic amongst ourselves we should hang up our keyboard. The first and most obvious workaround would be to reuse a trick from the previous playbook and simply build a new net atop the old. I.e. install their 'approved' box as a router which would only tunnel traffic between our internel networks, probably with a simple gateway. AOL/MSN/BellSouth and a serial port (USB2 in the modern reinvention) establishing a tunnel to a new breed of meta ISPs which would arise to service geeks. Conpare and contrast this to our previous work building the Internet atop telco POTS, ISDN and T1 leased circuits which were not intended for our use but were adapted by clever folk.
> Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:
Research isn't direct experience. On RHEL3 you can navigate to applications:/// and even right click to create a new launcher. And then nothing happens. Yup, the intuitive way to do it, only it doesn't work. On RHEL4 you never see the address bar so you would have some difficulties going anywhwere the GNOMEs haven't allowed you to go.
And while it might be possible to argue that RedHat != GNOME, that argument fails for two reasons. RedHat is one of the biggest and most prominent contributers to GNOME. But mostly RedHat is the last major distribution to feature GNOME as the default desktop, Ubuntu's brief flirtation notwithstanding. (Ubuntu will be KDE within a year I'd predict. Since the switch to GPL on Qt Debian is quickly moving, etc.)
> Unless all broadband Internet access providers that serve residences in your area start to require that you use a kernel > and apps with a specific signature dictated by the ISP.
Sorrt, that isn't the Internet, that is AOL or Minitel and I won't play. We built one Internet, we will build another if needed and if all else fails there is still FIDONet support for Linux.
> The TPM won't fix all OS and application bugs that allow someone to tamper with your data, unless you live in wonderland.
That depends. In a server environment you could even forbid scripts from running unless the signed and checked.
> What if the attacker make sure that all OS files on your disk are restored each time you reboot ?
Won't help, a TPM checks each time an application is executed and doesn't permit anything to write to the app's program area after the initial load.
But the key is that it does have a valid place in a secure environment, and any machine connected to the Internet these days pretty much is either a secure environment, 0wn3d or waiting to be 0wn3d.
> I will *never* buy a computer with such a module installed.
I will, and happily. What I won't do is install software that turns over the 'trust' it creates to an outside entity. But oh hell yes I lust after a well implemented TCPA driven infrastructure for Linux. The idea of being able to sign every binary on the machine and KNOW to a high degree of certainty is a great thing. No matter how on top of updating you are, no matter how anan you are with the iptables rules, you always wonder if somebody out there who knows a trick you missed has rooted ya.
> It will only emulate the OS4 and earlier devices, of which the Treo650 is not.
Fine by me. I still use a Handspring and if I could have that environment on a newer bit of hardware that was running Linux I'd be tempted. You see, I think Palm OS was da bomb while it was small and simple. A PDA needs to be simple, it doesn't need to be a media player, web browser, etc. So having the old Palm OS would be a big plus for me. Let the Linux side do all those "PC" type tasks.
Uh huh. A window of unavailibility that managed to impact both RHEL3 and RHEL4. That is one hell of a long time to be missing a major function. If true that just highlights another problem, the tendency to release a new version long before it duplicates the functionality of the previous one.
> BTW, the Gnome menu's not hard to edit unless you're afraid of a text editor.;)
Now you done gone and pushed one of my hot buttons. Try it Motherf***er. Just TRY to move an application to another group, create a custom group with copies of apps for a task specific purpose, add new apps you have installed into ~/bin or for that matter make ANY edits. Oh, one catch... you aren't root and you don't want the changes to be system wide.
I'd like to find the asshole responsible for that decision and personally remove the defective turd from the gene pool. Do I think having the option for an admin to lock down the menus to that degree, sure. But to make it the default, and because it is GNOME the default is the ONLY option; that is madness.
Current RH tech does it. Install RHEL4 (or a rebuild) and click an rpm in Firefox. For example, go to ATI and download their driver as an rpm. Watch Firefox invoke the mime handler for.rpm files, which is system-config-packages. See it prompt for the root password and proceed to install with no additional fuss. It can be done, and increasingly IS done. Yet one more myth about "linux will never be as easy as Windows" busted.
> Personally I enjoy watching Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Dell and IBM all squirm as Sun > undercuts their prices in every product line.
And how exactly are they doing this?
> I can get Solaris for free, Sun Cluster for free, the tools for free, Java for free, the > source code to Solaris for free and a dual core Opteron or multi-core UltraSparc for dirt > cheap.
So? RHEL is a support contract. I doubt Sun is handing out service contracts for free or even price matching RH. If you want the RH software sans support pick your RHEL Rebuild and start installing. Same for the RH GFS, it is Free as in GPL. Java on the other hand is NOT Free. Sun hardware is getting competitive, which is a good thing but 'dirt cheap'? Put down the crackpipe.
Legally 100 years IS pretty much the same thing as forever, see the laws about 'perpetuity'. That is only nine renewals under your scheme, so even if that initial renewal was a thousand dollars, Disney would have no problem paying 1023 thousand dollars to keep any of their feature films for a century and neither would any of the major studios.
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> The problem with linux, if you agree that it's a problem, is that it doesn't make it easy for people to package
.src.rpm or the Debian equiv inhouse. Which makes tweaked repackaging for alternate distros a bit harder, but otherwise adds no difficulties for supported platforms.
> non-free software.
Why do you say that? It is equally easy to package proprietary software as it package Free stuff. The only difference is proprietary vendors would keep the
> The best so far would be the radeon 9250, which is the most recent card supported by the current (open source) x.org
> "radeon" driver, and has EXA acceleration in the just-released 6.9/7.0 version.
Does it actually work yet? I keep on buying ATI based cards on the theory that it is the only major vendor with Free drivers available (even if ATI themselves doesn't help all that much to make them happen, it is still more than Nvidia does) but I have never had success with Xfree86's 3D driver. I always get random hardware lockups until I tire of it and install the proprietary driver. It can be a major bitch as well but once installed correctly the lockups end.
Haven't tried the latest x.org version though, does it work at last? I'd really like to remove the only taint (other than a couple of old Loki games) from an otherwise 100% pure machine.
I have slagged Sun and Java often enough but if forced to pick I'd say take Java since it has a few advantages:
1. It is fairly Open and work on GCJ and GNU Classpath is rapidly making it Free. Plus by making it a native compiled language it will end most of the major limitaions of Java. The language is OK, in a Visual Basic like language for low paygrade codemonkeys sort of way, but the JVM and JIT compiling was a killer.
2. It has a future on non-Windows platforms. Mono is doomed; the second the patent wars start it is going to be the very first casualty. And it starts as soon as they have wrung the last bit of FUD from the SCO v. IBM fiasco; i.e. probably about the time you got through learning it.
Some here claim C# has some advantages due to being able to learn from the mistakes of Java. While this is true to some extent it is also true that they aren't enough to make up for the practical reasons I just cited.
> If your bank's IT staff is so incompetent that it can't figure out how to make a
.asp, or Netcraft shows them running IIS. Can you sleep at night knowing your money is in the hands of people so incompetent that they don't know how dangerous running IIS is?
.jsp pages or other indications of server side java is only a minor negative. (Too many .jsp based sites have severe availability problems for me to totally trust it.)
> standards-compliant webpage, then why would you trust them to not screw up more
> critical systems...
Exactly. It isn't a question of you being annoyed, that is important but not the most important. It raises serious questions about the competence of the IT staff at the instituition. Most IE only pages are running are the result of dependencies. Usually they are displaying the 'seal of insecurity' in the address bar, i.e.
Personally I look at the webpage when picking a financial instituition as an indicator of their technical abilities, and these days banks are more an IT operation than anything else. IIS is an instant NO. Client side Java is a major negative,
I made an exception for BankOne/Chase because A) my account was at a bank they absorbed and the branch is right across the street from work and B) I sent them an email giving notice that ANY online activity on my account should be considered a fraud attempt on the grounds I would never trust their IIS based online banking.
> And yet, you talk essentially classify anyone reading this particular book as a "retard", unless they're reading
> it for purely educational purposes or for the sake of completeness.
If the millions of shallow mostly unmarked graves left behind aren't enough to convince you of the utter depraved wickedness of Stalin, Mao and Hitler then I really doubt there is little I can say to change what passes for your mind. And yes, anyone reading their writings from anything but academic curiosity/scholarship worries me a bit because those authors appear to have a strong influence on weak minds, witness their original power and the horrors they unleased.
Do I support a total ban, like Germany has a total ban on Nazi materials? No, ignoring history only invites a repeat as Germany will likely learn. While they shouldn't be banned they should be discouraged for the unprepared and should NEVER be taught in an academic setting without preparing the students by a full exploration of the consequences these books had.
> I guess you don't read much stuff out of curiosity, eh?
Matter of priorities. Sure there are probably some nuggests of wisdom buried in the filth, but I suspect that would be true of a lot more people. Hell, David Koresh probably said one or two truly profound things before Reno's storm troopers burned his crazy ass up, doesn't mean I plan to read through his writings either. When I haev time to put the O'Reilly books down and read some political/philosophical stuff there are tons of books by sane authors I will never get the time to catch up, why waste time reading the ravings of a madman?
Which is why I question the stability anyone reading Mao who isn't doing it in the context of some rational persuit. Makes me wonder whether they actually think that asshat's ideas are worth discussion outside a study on mental illness or (as in the case of this student) of dictators and tyrants.
> "Political power comes from the barell of a gun" -Chairman Mao
Which only goes to prove my assertion elsewhere in this thread that Mao is a congenital idiot. Which would the average evil overlord prefer? A thousand machine guns neatly sealed in crates or a hundred -loyal- men armed with anything.
> that is why US of A spends more money on its Military than rest of the world combined.
Our fearsome array of high tech weapons is impressive, yes. But without the highly trained, motivated and very professional soldiers carrying/driving/flying all that hardware it wouldn't be a tenth as frightening to our enemies. The hight tech hardware is what allows us to accomplish our foreign policy objectives with the relatively small number of active duty personnel and low casualty rates, but if we lacked the hardware we could always use more troups as we did in WWII.
In the end it is people who count, and it is ideas that animate people into action. It is ideas (Truth Justice and the American Way) animating our men in uniform and it is equally ideas which inspire our enemies to strap on a bomb.
> So you are saying that thoughts should be controlled?
Oh course not. But let is be realists for a moment. If we are to prevent madmen from going KABOOM in unwelcome places we have to have spooks doing the sometimes unpleasant things spooks do, right? Now if we can agree that so long as the risk of people going FOOM in a shopping mall exceeds the risk of Bush taking to the podium and announcing a new thousand year reich, we as informed citozens should insist that intelligence agencies investigate. Since they can't investigate everyone, and we wouldn't want to live in a country where they COULD investigate everyone, how are they to pick? I assert that their current methods resemble what we here on slashdot would propose. Computerized sieving of raw information followed up by actual humans asking questions supplemented by old school human intelligence.
From the press account it looks as if this is exactly what happened, this guy was asked some questions because the computer spit out his name, and from the noteworthy items mentioned in the article it probably should have kicked his name out for a human to have a look at. But unless there is a little more than the article revealed, and there probably is, they probably should not have expended the resources to send two agents over to directly question this guy.
> My guess is that the unnamed student didn't get the book in time, or was otherwise late in turning in his paper. So
> the student makes up this story to tell his professors.
No! Just like women never lie about sexual harrassment (except the dozen or so who accused Clinton, including one who went so far as to claim attempted rape) students would never lie about the fascism of Bush! How dare you defend the administration like this.
> Reading Mao or anything else like it isn't a good marker for a potential terrorist threat. It's a great marker
> for someone who may be thinking for themselves
Whatever. Seriously dude, twenty years ago one could be forgiven reading Mao just to see what all the fuss was about. Anyone doing it now falls into a few groups:
1. Historians. Mao certainly has a place in history, a dark one, but there it is.
2. Completeness freaks, reading every crackpot philosophy just to have read em all.
3. Retards. Seriously, show of hands if anyone still believes Mao was anything other than an insane genocidal lunatic.
> not like the direction this country is going, and actually might stand up and say something about it
Sorry pal, hate to break the bad news to you. You can oppose current policy all ya want, it IS still a (mostly) Free Country. But anybody tries to introduce any of Mao's insane political ideas here I'll be fighting my way to the front of the line to answer their challenge with a bullet. I might not know what works, but I damned sure know enough history to know what doesn't. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Castro are on the ashheap of history for very good reasons and they need to stay there.
> I find this reply pathetically ironic and hypocritical after seeing your signature line.
Not at all. I oppose government attempts at censorship which is why I want the SLC abolished, it is the door through which CIPA passes Supremem Court scrutiny. If the Feds start trying to supress Mao's "Little Red Book (of evil)" I'd be against that also. But I actually read the linked article and ran it through my "de-bullshitter". Just the things mentioned in that obviously biased press report would have make ME want to send an agent to check out Dartmouth if I were a spook, and I'm not nearly paranoid to be one. So I have no problem with them having a look, but did say in the original post they probabaly should have done so invisibly. Especially with it being at a bastion of moonbat thought, they see an Army recruiter they scream fascist, of course they were going to freak at the sight of a Dept of Homeland Security MiB.
> But a *book*
A book is far more dangerous than any gun ever was. You see guns aren't dangerous, it is the person holding it and it is ideas that animate us.
> this is no more justified than McCarthyism was
Despite what your Maxist professor or the evening news taught you, McCarthy was spot on in almost every one of his accusations, something you can confirm for yourself now that the archives of the former Soviet Union have been opened. Most so called 'innocent victims' were in the actual pay of the KGB and the rest were involved in treason without pay. If you are going to learn from history make sure you learn what actually happened instead of the mythology of the moonbats.
> I was under the stupid impression that america didnt persecute people for just reading a book,
They asked him some questions and went away. No rubber hoses were involved. They didn't rape his girlfriend in front of him like your buddy Saddam was fond of.
If they don't ask questions how are they supposed to learn anything. Helping the police do their duty is a responsibility of a citizen, even in, especially in, a free country.
Dunno, after reading the whole article I'm a bit conflicted. Keeping an eye out is what we expect the Feds to be doing, and someone who travels abroad frequently, not only wants to read Mao but wants to be sure they are reading the official version instead of just any translation and is clustered with a lot of other hits on the automated sensors due to the professor's frequent contacts in watch list countries, added to the hits on al-Qaeda websites he was assigning students.
Sounds like this prof is actually trying to educate his students instead of being one of these pro-terrorist cranks the university system seems to enjoy hiring, but shouldn't we be wanting the Feds to go have a look for themselves to make sure everything was on the level? Be careful before tossing out the standard issue slashbot line, because when something eventually goes BOOM you won't be allowed to ask "Why didn't the spooks connect the dots and prevent it" if you are now howling that they shouldn't be looking for the dots.
Does sound like this was a case for them to have done a more quiet investigation though instead of coming in flying the colors. Good spook action is invisible, the quiet defenders of Truth, Justice and the American Way of life and all that stuff.
No, what shocks and confounds me is what sort of instituition is Dartmouth anyway! No copy of Mao in the library, they have to request one via ILL? Shocking.
> Will you have the support of the phone company and the cable company,
.bomb party was blasting away. If us enterprising geeks can't find a way to exchange traffic amongst ourselves we should hang up our keyboard. The first and most obvious workaround would be to reuse a trick from the previous playbook and simply build a new net atop the old. I.e. install their 'approved' box as a router which would only tunnel traffic between our internel networks, probably with a simple gateway. AOL/MSN/BellSouth and a serial port (USB2 in the modern reinvention) establishing a tunnel to a new breed of meta ISPs which would arise to service geeks. Conpare and contrast this to our previous work building the Internet atop telco POTS, ISDN and T1 leased circuits which were not intended for our use but were adapted by clever folk.
Wouldn't need their support anymore than we needed them to build the first one. Dude, the phone companies were absolutely the last players to arrive at the ball when the
> Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:
Research isn't direct experience. On RHEL3 you can navigate to applications:/// and even right click to create a new launcher. And then nothing happens. Yup, the intuitive way to do it, only it doesn't work. On RHEL4 you never see the address bar so you would have some difficulties going anywhwere the GNOMEs haven't allowed you to go.
And while it might be possible to argue that RedHat != GNOME, that argument fails for two reasons. RedHat is one of the biggest and most prominent contributers to GNOME. But mostly RedHat is the last major distribution to feature GNOME as the default desktop, Ubuntu's brief flirtation notwithstanding. (Ubuntu will be KDE within a year I'd predict. Since the switch to GPL on Qt Debian is quickly moving, etc.)
> Unless all broadband Internet access providers that serve residences in your area start to require that you use a kernel
> and apps with a specific signature dictated by the ISP.
Sorrt, that isn't the Internet, that is AOL or Minitel and I won't play. We built one Internet, we will build another if needed and if all else fails there is still FIDONet support for Linux.
> The TPM won't fix all OS and application bugs that allow someone to tamper with your data, unless you live in wonderland.
That depends. In a server environment you could even forbid scripts from running unless the signed and checked.
> What if the attacker make sure that all OS files on your disk are restored each time you reboot ?
Won't help, a TPM checks each time an application is executed and doesn't permit anything to write to the app's program area after the initial load.
But the key is that it does have a valid place in a secure environment, and any machine connected to the Internet these days pretty much is either a secure environment, 0wn3d or waiting to be 0wn3d.
> I will *never* buy a computer with such a module installed.
I will, and happily. What I won't do is install software that turns over the 'trust' it creates to an outside entity. But oh hell yes I lust after a well implemented TCPA driven infrastructure for Linux. The idea of being able to sign every binary on the machine and KNOW to a high degree of certainty is a great thing. No matter how on top of updating you are, no matter how anan you are with the iptables rules, you always wonder if somebody out there who knows a trick you missed has rooted ya.
> It will only emulate the OS4 and earlier devices, of which the Treo650 is not.
Fine by me. I still use a Handspring and if I could have that environment on a newer bit of hardware that was running Linux I'd be tempted. You see, I think Palm OS was da bomb while it was small and simple. A PDA needs to be simple, it doesn't need to be a media player, web browser, etc. So having the old Palm OS would be a big plus for me. Let the Linux side do all those "PC" type tasks.
Uh huh. A window of unavailibility that managed to impact both RHEL3 and RHEL4. That is one hell of a long time to be missing a major function. If true that just highlights another problem, the tendency to release a new version long before it duplicates the functionality of the previous one.
> BTW, the Gnome menu's not hard to edit unless you're afraid of a text editor. ;)
Now you done gone and pushed one of my hot buttons. Try it Motherf***er. Just TRY to move an application to another group, create a custom group with copies of apps for a task specific purpose, add new apps you have installed into ~/bin or for that matter make ANY edits. Oh, one catch... you aren't root and you don't want the changes to be system wide.
I'd like to find the asshole responsible for that decision and personally remove the defective turd from the gene pool. Do I think having the option for an admin to lock down the menus to that degree, sure. But to make it the default, and because it is GNOME the default is the ONLY option; that is madness.
Current RH tech does it. Install RHEL4 (or a rebuild) and click an rpm in Firefox. For example, go to ATI and download their driver as an rpm. Watch Firefox invoke the mime handler for .rpm files, which is system-config-packages. See it prompt for the root password and proceed to install with no additional fuss. It can be done, and increasingly IS done. Yet one more myth about "linux will never be as easy as Windows" busted.
> Personally I enjoy watching Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Dell and IBM all squirm as Sun
> undercuts their prices in every product line.
And how exactly are they doing this?
> I can get Solaris for free, Sun Cluster for free, the tools for free, Java for free, the
> source code to Solaris for free and a dual core Opteron or multi-core UltraSparc for dirt
> cheap.
So? RHEL is a support contract. I doubt Sun is handing out service contracts for free or even price matching RH. If you want the RH software sans support pick your RHEL Rebuild and start installing. Same for the RH GFS, it is Free as in GPL. Java on the other hand is NOT Free. Sun hardware is getting competitive, which is a good thing but 'dirt cheap'? Put down the crackpipe.
Legally 100 years IS pretty much the same thing as forever, see the laws about 'perpetuity'. That is only nine renewals under your scheme, so even if that initial renewal was a thousand dollars, Disney would have no problem paying 1023 thousand dollars to keep any of their feature films for a century and neither would any of the major studios.