As you know, the plural of virus is viruses
on
20 Years of Virii
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· Score: 0, Redundant
There is no such word 'virii', and in fact, the plural of 'virus' is 'viruses', not 'virii'. Read on for more details about the proper way to use the word 'virus'.</fud>
"I'm looking forward to the end the nasty OSSFree, and the beginning of the silky smooth default included Alsa sound kernel."
Silky smooth, not-as-loud, perceptable-hiss Alsa? No thank you. I'll stick with OSS. The implementation might suck, but the sound reproduction on every card and speaker pair I've thrown OSS at (studio-level gear, not Labtec speakers here), is centuries beyond what today's Alsa can do. I can't stand that constant background hiss, even at low volumes (which Alsa seems to excel at; low volumes).
OSS goes louder, clearer, and sounds much more lifelike than Alsa's "mechanial" reproduction of sound.
But of course, YMMV, and I'm glad you found something that works for you.
"What's ridiculious is that people on/. still haven't figured out how to spell that word properly."
Considering you botched it also:
ridiculous
Re:While we're in punditry mode ...
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 1
I guess I'm in the other camp. I use neither.
Actually, not entirely true. I use both at the same time, but neither of them have any visual components I ever see, they're all back-end libraries and functions that other applications I use reference.
I don't use any of those toolbars, wharfs, docs, icons, file managers, or anything like that. Just a fast, speedy sawfish build with all the other goodies removed, which gives me a high-performing development desktop. No icons, no titlebars, no frames, nothing to get in the way of working on code itself. I have all of the eye-candy tools and applications installed also, available from right/left/shift/alt context menus, depending on my area of the screen or window. Works like a champ.
To do this on Windows, would cost several thousand dollars in application registrations for tools that remove or add these things, and it still wouldn't allow me to do what lisp + sawfish + other configuration options I have set, can do.
The GNOME camp is trying to make Linux as "dumb" as possible (they've admitted this numerous times), so that Joe User and Grandma can use it. This is the primary reason why GNOME1 had all the powerful "crackrock" features, and GNOME2 is fairly crippled, with most of those features removed. GNOME is not meant for a power user or a developer or a technology person. It is meant for your mother, your younger sister, or your grandfather to use.
It is for this reason alone, that I hope GNOME or KDE do not "win" this faux race for the desktop. If all there is left, is innovation for the "Joe User" camp, we will once-again be forked off building more alternatives for those that this option does not suit.
"We need to educate people of the value of open standards for file formats."
"But until that happens, send PDF files. They usually work better than going from one version of Word to another anyway."
In what world do you live in, where PDF is any less proprietary than Microsoft Word documents?
Re:What I want in 2004 . . .
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 1
"What person is going to want to dig out the command line to compile source code, and will he or she know about all the ocnfigure options... and then, will there be dependency issues (or should the source contain the dependencies too?)."
Most developers don't even know all of the available configure options, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS optimizations, and source-level-per-hardware pokes to make the package build with the best speed and options availble to it, to minimize breakage and increase compatibility. I see this all the time in irc. It goes like this:
<noob>Hi, I can't seem to get 'Package X' to build. It just quits when I run configure.
<me>What were your configure arguments?
<noob>./configure, run as root. I got errors running it as a user, so I just do everything as root.
<me>No configure parameters?
What was your --prefix?
What did config.log say?
Where did it give you an error?
Did you say you were configuring and building this as root? NEVER do that!
Do you have the compiler and linker set up properly?
What about your system headers and includes?
All development libraries and headers also installed?
(noob in test-pattern hypnotic stare)
They expect that./configure replaces SETUP.EXE, and that just isn't the case. This is a hurdle that users who decide to use source, need to understand, not a problem we (as developers of said software) have to fix.
Re:Always "a couple years away"
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"It seems like Linux on the desktop for the masses is always a couple years away."
A famous quote comes to mind:
"When victory is inevitable, don't complain that it doesn't arrive fast enough."
Re:While we're in punditry mode ...
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 1
"When, if ever, will there be a clear "winner" between Gnome and KDE for the average desktop?"
Never, I hope. That's the whole point! C H O I C E!
Re:My hopes for 2004 - some realisation please
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Linux will never replace Windows on it desktop with the RTFM attitude so leave it at the door."
Perhaps that is because for most of us, the goal isn't to replace Windows with Linux. It is to replace "legacy" Unix with Linux. Microsoft isn't even on the radar for 90% or more of the people actually developing and providing the Linux kernel, tools and other applications.
"Encryption should be simply part of the protocol, at least client-to-client, and ideally to the server as well. There isn't *that* much traffic from each client (though it'd certainly put more load on the server, and might require a more fanned-out-network."
Funny thing, I've been running an ircd with client-to-client and server-to-server SSL enabled connections for about 3-4 years. We're small and developer-focused, but it works, and if your client supports SSL on port 994, your connections are secured. This is all native to the ircd binary itself, and not to stunnel or some wrapper. Observe:
I receive, read, and reply to all of the replies here on Slashdot (assuming they're not trolls or flamebait, of course).
That being said; the Roundup I tested and tried was (and still appears to be) very rough. Is yours a continuation of that effort? Or a fork? Or a similar project with the same name? There isn't mention of the relationship on Ka-Ping's page.
Regarding the Python statement, it's simple; Python is a userspace binary which is called at each load of each page (evidenced by watching the processes in real-time on the server as hits are being made), whereas PHP lives inside the namespace of the webserver process itself. I'm also good friends with the author of PHP, so I can get direct help at a moment's notice when I run into snags.
I realize that I can probably load mod_python into the server as well (DSO), but at the time I was testing, mod_python wasn't mature or functional enough to be usable in a production environment. It really boiled down to that.
And at this point, we have so much metadata and bugs in the system across several dozen projects, I'm not sure switching would be easy, unless Roundup (your version) can cleanly import all of the metadata that Mantis manages, from users to passwords to bug history and file attachments. A long shot, to be sure, but I'll reconsider Roundup again in the next round of evaluations for new projects. It might make a good option for users to pick in the ala-carte menu at project signup time.
Thanks again for the comments and feedback; always welcome.
At SourceFubar we use Mantis exclusively for bug, issue, feature tracking. After evaluating about 15 other projects and products, commercial and non, we decided on Mantis. It is feature-rich, extensible, written in PHP, hooks to MySQL and other databases, and the developers are really a great bunch of people to work with. They are very receptive to patches, ideas, fixes, and anything else you can throw at them.
Mantis is actually getting me some contract work on the side, from Free Software developers on our projects who brought the notion of Mantis to their employers, who are talking to us about doing deployments of Mantis in their enterprise for customers and internal use.
The second-runner up out of the 15 we tried was a product called "Round-Up", written in Python. The reason it didn't win out over the top was the fact that it was written in Python (no flames, just that Python is more resource-hungry than PHP itself), and that the web-based interface wasn't anywhere near as mature as the Mantis interface.
Give it a try, you will most-certainly be impressed. I was, and still continue to be, to this day.
In a corporate environment however I could see this used as a virtually undetectable piece of snitch software, ie for spying on employees at their workstation, even if they have root.
So now the question is.. do you even trust the systems you have accounts on, even when you use gpg and ssh to access them or get data from untrusted systems TO them?
I regularly use client networks and systems, generally with ssh/vpn/ipsec/gpg, but now I have no idea if I should trust these "trusted" systems.
So what we need now is a tool that lets us determine if Sebek is actually loaded and running in the kernel, before we use these "secure" protocols and applications FROM that system.
Next, someone will just obfuscate the structures and symbols to make it impossible to tell if the "sniff" module is a simple usb interface, or an actual low-level sniffing module.
It was bound to happen, and now basically undermines security on "trusted" systems.
IBM, being IBM, didn't want to get involved without understanding the legal issues, so they asked their lawyers to look over the GPL. The lawyers came back with the opinion that it was a well written legal document.
keywords are case-insensitive and arguments are case-sensitive
Uhm, no.
Change ANY option in your sshd_config from 'yes' to 'Yes' or 'no' to 'No' and try to restart the sshd daemon. It WILL fail. It is absolutely, positively case-sensitive. The manpage is wrong, not the code.
/etc/ssh/sshd_config line 81: Bad yes/no argument: Yes
Having been on the Atkins diet, I found that I was able to replace my fat stores (good thing when they go away) with muscle mass, not loosing it.
The Atkins Diet, and others like it, trigger short-term weight loss through a process called ketosis. Ketosis occurs whenever the body lacks a sufficient supply of carbohydrates, a prime source of energy. During ketosis, carbohydrate-depleted metabolisms turn to other sources, including ketones from stored fat or protein, to satisfy daily energy needs. (more of Ketosis later). The first bit of weight loss is water weight, the carbohydrate that's in your muscles, and then as you progress on the diet you will lose some fat, but you will also lose some muscle mass.
It suggests that you keep the below 35g per day. Protein and some fat will NOT raise your cholesterol to astronomical levels as you put it.
According to Dr. Chris Rosenbloom of the ADA (American Dietetic Association), she believe that this type of diet can have a negative long-term impact on health. "It's so high in cholesterol and fat and total fat -- the opposite of what all the health organizations, from the American Heart Association to the American Dietetic Association, recommend," Rosenbloom points out. And she noted that the diet "is also low in fruits and vegetables and whole grains"-- foods with proven health benefits. While some of the vitamins and minerals in these foods can be obtained through supplements, other benefits -- like fiber or
phytochemicals -- can only be found at the source.
Low carbohydrate
ketogenic diets (such as the Atkins' diet) are often high in fat, which may increase cholesterol and lead to many other health risks.
The American Institute for Cancer Research has also evaluated the Atkins' diet
and their assessment is quite alarming. They say that the high-protein, high-
fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet tends to promote the loss of water weight, and that if such an imbalanced diet is maintained, the body soon reverts to the fasting state of ketosis, in which the body begins to break down muscle tissue
instead of fat over the term.
Ketosis is one of the body's last-ditch emergency responses; deliberately
inducing ketosis can lead to muscle breakdown, nausea, dehydration, headaches,
light-headedness, irritability, bad breath, and kidney problems. In pregnancy,
ketosis may cause fetal abnormality or death. It can also be fatal in individuals with diabetes! While supporters of the Atkins diet concentrate so much on the fat burning capability of ketosis they neglect to mention that over the long term protein, and thus muscle, is also burned!
In short, your OPINION of the Atkins diet doesn't matter. There are actual scientific studies backed up by well-over 20 years of dietetic data that clearly shows the Atkins diet is quite dangerous for you and your body. Go do some research first, before proclaiming your opinion as fact.
Why does the Atkins diet work for so many people? Because you don't need carbohydrates if you sit in an office all day.
Excuse me. The "Atkins Diet" is quite dangerous, in fact, as proven by no less than a hundred studies out there on the web.
The basic building block of energy is glucose, and carbohydrates provide that. The brain lives ONLY on glucose. You're starving your body of the necessary building block of energy by reducing the single-most important way to deliver glucose to the cells; carbohydrates. Yes, you can get glucose out of the remaining two nutrients found in foot; fat and protein. On the Atkins, you can eat as much of those as you want, and refrain from ingesting carbohydrates.
By just ingesting fat and protein, you're stressing your liver and kidneys out. You're severely reducing your water retention. An excess of fat and protein will also cause your cholesterol to rise to astronomical levels. The reason people seem to lose weight on the Atkins, is because your body has to use a completely different metabolic pathway to turn that fat and protein into glucose. It takes a LOOONG time to turn fat into glucose, and similarly for protein. Your muscle tone and fat stores are severely depleted when you're on the Atikins diet. You starve your brain of nutrients, your muscles of nutrients, your liver and kidneys of nutrients. Basically you're killing yourself.
People have just up and dropped DEAD on the Atkins diet, because their heart or liver could no longer function. The reason more people aren't dying on the no-carb diet plans is because NOBODY has the discipline to remove ALL carbohydrates from their diet. Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of foods have carbohydrates in them? Probably not. Nor does anyone else. You can survive on a low-carb diet if you want, but your body is slowly deteriorating; liver, heart, and muscle. You're killing yourself by staying on that diet.
Go search the web and find the studies out there that clearly point out the Atkins diet and other similar "fad" no-carb diets are dangerous to human physiology.
"No royalties have entered the chain, but suddenly I'm immune and (more importantly) an Honest, Moral Being."
I don't have the link handy, but the RIAA and MPAA have been investigating a series of methods to a business model around getting royalties on second-hand sales of music and movies.
Watch out, they're getting it wherever they can find it.
They:
Get royalties on the sale of the "new" CD in the music store
Get micro-payments for posters and advertising in the stores for that band/artist.
Get a royalty based on a tax on the purchase of blank CD media, used to "pirate" legally-owned music purchases.
Get a royalty on the CD player used to listen to that media (home audio, not computer CD players)
Soon, will be getting a royalty on second-hand sales.
And for the past 2-3 years, they've been trying to distribute music on CD media that either won't play at all on your computer, or if it does, begins to "expire" after a certain number of plays/amount of time expires.
How is this legal? They're septuple-dipping into the well, and STILL trying to restrict our right to make a legal copy of music we've legally purchased in the stores.
Supposedly, copyrights/patents are a required to encourage the production of new knowledge.
Copyrights are not evil, and in fact, are what allows Free Software to propagate as it does, without being abused in commercial companies as it would be, if copyrights were abolished or "relaxed".
The prices on the media have dropped, because the media is manufactured with less protective layers than previously.. making it cheaper to make the disks, and forcing you, the customer, to have to "merge-and-purge" every 2 years or so, because the data on the disk degrades faster now, without those extra protective layers.
See this thread for more information on exactly that.
Except that they're not. They are providing the upstream source, not the Linksys-modified sources. This is akin to Sony providing the source for their PS2 development kit by pointing to gnu.org for gcc and binutils. Where is the actual source to the actual code running on the WRTG? Nowhere.
In fact, some of the sources they link to aren't even GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such word ' virii ', and in fact, the plural of ' virus ' is ' viruses ', not 'virii'. Read on for more details about the proper way to use the word ' virus '.</fud>
I'm afraid I, and the rest of the Free Software community disagree with you.
OSS goes louder, clearer, and sounds much more lifelike than Alsa's "mechanial" reproduction of sound.
But of course, YMMV, and I'm glad you found something that works for you.
Spread the word, not the FUD.
Considering you botched it also:
Actually, not entirely true. I use both at the same time, but neither of them have any visual components I ever see, they're all back-end libraries and functions that other applications I use reference.
I don't use any of those toolbars, wharfs, docs, icons, file managers, or anything like that. Just a fast, speedy sawfish build with all the other goodies removed, which gives me a high-performing development desktop. No icons, no titlebars, no frames, nothing to get in the way of working on code itself. I have all of the eye-candy tools and applications installed also, available from right/left/shift/alt context menus, depending on my area of the screen or window. Works like a champ.
To do this on Windows, would cost several thousand dollars in application registrations for tools that remove or add these things, and it still wouldn't allow me to do what lisp + sawfish + other configuration options I have set, can do.
The GNOME camp is trying to make Linux as "dumb" as possible (they've admitted this numerous times), so that Joe User and Grandma can use it. This is the primary reason why GNOME1 had all the powerful "crackrock" features, and GNOME2 is fairly crippled, with most of those features removed. GNOME is not meant for a power user or a developer or a technology person. It is meant for your mother, your younger sister, or your grandfather to use.
It is for this reason alone, that I hope GNOME or KDE do not "win" this faux race for the desktop. If all there is left, is innovation for the "Joe User" camp, we will once-again be forked off building more alternatives for those that this option does not suit.
You mean exactly like Security-Enhanced Linux, which is sitting right at nsa.gov, and given away completely free?
Ok, what else?
In what world do you live in, where PDF is any less proprietary than Microsoft Word documents?
Most developers don't even know all of the available configure options, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS optimizations, and source-level-per-hardware pokes to make the package build with the best speed and options availble to it, to minimize breakage and increase compatibility. I see this all the time in irc. It goes like this:
They expect that ./configure replaces SETUP.EXE, and that just isn't the case. This is a hurdle that users who decide to use source, need to understand, not a problem we (as developers of said software) have to fix.
A famous quote comes to mind:
Never, I hope. That's the whole point! C H O I C E!
Perhaps that is because for most of us, the goal isn't to replace Windows with Linux. It is to replace "legacy" Unix with Linux. Microsoft isn't even on the radar for 90% or more of the people actually developing and providing the Linux kernel, tools and other applications.
Actually, the GPL was penned by Eben Moglen, not RMS. RMS came up with the idea, and Eben made it legally sound and defensible in court.
Funny thing, I've been running an ircd with client-to-client and server-to-server SSL enabled connections for about 3-4 years. We're small and developer-focused, but it works, and if your client supports SSL on port 994, your connections are secured. This is all native to the ircd binary itself, and not to stunnel or some wrapper. Observe:
It works with mIRC, xchat, ircii, and other GUI and text-mode clients, and we've heard no complaints at all.
That being said; the Roundup I tested and tried was (and still appears to be) very rough. Is yours a continuation of that effort? Or a fork? Or a similar project with the same name? There isn't mention of the relationship on Ka-Ping's page.
Regarding the Python statement, it's simple; Python is a userspace binary which is called at each load of each page (evidenced by watching the processes in real-time on the server as hits are being made), whereas PHP lives inside the namespace of the webserver process itself. I'm also good friends with the author of PHP, so I can get direct help at a moment's notice when I run into snags.
I realize that I can probably load mod_python into the server as well (DSO), but at the time I was testing, mod_python wasn't mature or functional enough to be usable in a production environment. It really boiled down to that.
And at this point, we have so much metadata and bugs in the system across several dozen projects, I'm not sure switching would be easy, unless Roundup (your version) can cleanly import all of the metadata that Mantis manages, from users to passwords to bug history and file attachments. A long shot, to be sure, but I'll reconsider Roundup again in the next round of evaluations for new projects. It might make a good option for users to pick in the ala-carte menu at project signup time.
Thanks again for the comments and feedback; always welcome.
Mantis is actually getting me some contract work on the side, from Free Software developers on our projects who brought the notion of Mantis to their employers, who are talking to us about doing deployments of Mantis in their enterprise for customers and internal use.
The second-runner up out of the 15 we tried was a product called "Round-Up", written in Python. The reason it didn't win out over the top was the fact that it was written in Python (no flames, just that Python is more resource-hungry than PHP itself), and that the web-based interface wasn't anywhere near as mature as the Mantis interface.
Give it a try, you will most-certainly be impressed. I was, and still continue to be, to this day.
So now the question is.. do you even trust the systems you have accounts on, even when you use gpg and ssh to access them or get data from untrusted systems TO them?
I regularly use client networks and systems, generally with ssh/vpn/ipsec/gpg, but now I have no idea if I should trust these "trusted" systems.
So what we need now is a tool that lets us determine if Sebek is actually loaded and running in the kernel, before we use these "secure" protocols and applications FROM that system.
Next, someone will just obfuscate the structures and symbols to make it impossible to tell if the "sniff" module is a simple usb interface, or an actual low-level sniffing module.
It was bound to happen, and now basically undermines security on "trusted" systems.
That might just be because it was penned by a former IBM attorney?
Uhm, no.
Change ANY option in your sshd_config from 'yes' to 'Yes' or 'no' to 'No' and try to restart the sshd daemon. It WILL fail. It is absolutely, positively case-sensitive. The manpage is wrong, not the code.
The Atkins Diet, and others like it, trigger short-term weight loss through a process called ketosis. Ketosis occurs whenever the body lacks a sufficient supply of carbohydrates, a prime source of energy. During ketosis, carbohydrate-depleted metabolisms turn to other sources, including ketones from stored fat or protein, to satisfy daily energy needs. (more of Ketosis later). The first bit of weight loss is water weight, the carbohydrate that's in your muscles, and then as you progress on the diet you will lose some fat, but you will also lose some muscle mass.
According to Dr. Chris Rosenbloom of the ADA (American Dietetic Association), she believe that this type of diet can have a negative long-term impact on health. "It's so high in cholesterol and fat and total fat -- the opposite of what all the health organizations, from the American Heart Association to the American Dietetic Association, recommend," Rosenbloom points out. And she noted that the diet "is also low in fruits and vegetables and whole grains"-- foods with proven health benefits. While some of the vitamins and minerals in these foods can be obtained through supplements, other benefits -- like fiber or phytochemicals -- can only be found at the source.
Low carbohydrate ketogenic diets (such as the Atkins' diet) are often high in fat, which may increase cholesterol and lead to many other health risks.
The American Institute for Cancer Research has also evaluated the Atkins' diet and their assessment is quite alarming. They say that the high-protein, high- fat, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet tends to promote the loss of water weight, and that if such an imbalanced diet is maintained, the body soon reverts to the fasting state of ketosis, in which the body begins to break down muscle tissue instead of fat over the term.
Ketosis is one of the body's last-ditch emergency responses; deliberately inducing ketosis can lead to muscle breakdown, nausea, dehydration, headaches, light-headedness, irritability, bad breath, and kidney problems. In pregnancy, ketosis may cause fetal abnormality or death. It can also be fatal in individuals with diabetes! While supporters of the Atkins diet concentrate so much on the fat burning capability of ketosis they neglect to mention that over the long term protein, and thus muscle, is also burned!
In short, your OPINION of the Atkins diet doesn't matter. There are actual scientific studies backed up by well-over 20 years of dietetic data that clearly shows the Atkins diet is quite dangerous for you and your body. Go do some research first, before proclaiming your opinion as fact.
Excuse me. The "Atkins Diet" is quite dangerous, in fact, as proven by no less than a hundred studies out there on the web.
The basic building block of energy is glucose, and carbohydrates provide that. The brain lives ONLY on glucose. You're starving your body of the necessary building block of energy by reducing the single-most important way to deliver glucose to the cells; carbohydrates. Yes, you can get glucose out of the remaining two nutrients found in foot; fat and protein. On the Atkins, you can eat as much of those as you want, and refrain from ingesting carbohydrates.
By just ingesting fat and protein, you're stressing your liver and kidneys out. You're severely reducing your water retention. An excess of fat and protein will also cause your cholesterol to rise to astronomical levels. The reason people seem to lose weight on the Atkins, is because your body has to use a completely different metabolic pathway to turn that fat and protein into glucose. It takes a LOOONG time to turn fat into glucose, and similarly for protein. Your muscle tone and fat stores are severely depleted when you're on the Atikins diet. You starve your brain of nutrients, your muscles of nutrients, your liver and kidneys of nutrients. Basically you're killing yourself.
People have just up and dropped DEAD on the Atkins diet, because their heart or liver could no longer function. The reason more people aren't dying on the no-carb diet plans is because NOBODY has the discipline to remove ALL carbohydrates from their diet. Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of foods have carbohydrates in them? Probably not. Nor does anyone else. You can survive on a low-carb diet if you want, but your body is slowly deteriorating; liver, heart, and muscle. You're killing yourself by staying on that diet.
Go search the web and find the studies out there that clearly point out the Atkins diet and other similar "fad" no-carb diets are dangerous to human physiology.
I don't have the link handy, but the RIAA and MPAA have been investigating a series of methods to a business model around getting royalties on second-hand sales of music and movies.
Watch out, they're getting it wherever they can find it.
They:
And for the past 2-3 years, they've been trying to distribute music on CD media that either won't play at all on your computer, or if it does, begins to "expire" after a certain number of plays/amount of time expires.
How is this legal? They're septuple-dipping into the well, and STILL trying to restrict our right to make a legal copy of music we've legally purchased in the stores.
Copyrights are not evil, and in fact, are what allows Free Software to propagate as it does, without being abused in commercial companies as it would be, if copyrights were abolished or "relaxed".
Copyright != Patent
See this thread for more information on exactly that.
In fact, some of the sources they link to aren't even GPL.