I'm not sure dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS really counts as the beginning of their charging customers for service.
I'm not sure that actively developing Fedora Core (100% GPL distribution, unlike some) really counts as "dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS". Fedora Core 1 was what RedHat 10 would have been and so on.
Also, if you want Red Hat Enterpise Linux for free, just download the thing (source code is freely available). If you want it in a pre-packaged distribution, use CentOS or Whitebox.
Umm... you realize 18 year olds are adults according to the law, right?
According to The-Obviously-Holier-Than-Us-Law maybe. IMNSHO, 18 year olds are KIDS. I wouldn't feel quite right about having a relationship with an 18 year old for instance: she'd be too naive and have little grip on reality.
Do you really think "Right, now this person has turned 18, it's OK for them to die"? Really? If it's OK by The Law, it's OK by you? Hmm.
Essentially, we use technology as a force-multiplier because we are obsessed with preventing American casualties, sometimes to operational detriment.
Not invading other countries would be a whole lot more effective in reducing casualties methinks.
You WILL find it with the regular milk... it is refrigerated and stored the same way as the other non dry-goods dairy products.
UHT Milk is usually on the supermarket shelf round here, with powdered milk, chocolate powder, etc. Sometimes it's in the fridge though. Before it's opened it can sit in a shelf, no problems.
I sometimes buy "Milk Jiggers" which are bags of little one-serve (20ml?) packets of UHT milk. They can be stored in the cupboard. When you run out of milk in the morning and need coffee before you become functional you can almost cry in joy when you remember "Hang on... I've got Jiggers! Woot!"
What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before.
Agreed and work towards this is happening at freedesktop.org.
However you also need some *designers* to realise a spec effectively. You can't get developers to "implement an icon from a spec", well you might but I wouldn't expect stellar results.
This seems to be more about the actual practical work of beautifying icons, widgets, etc. Getting palletes not only standardised but nicely utilised in aesthetically-pleasing graphics. It's really important work. Kudos to these dudes for their efforts: I am really glad they're doing it.
My family used to have a Ford Falcon XF. You could start it by using the dipstick as a key. Therefore if the car had any door unlocked it was trivial to steal without doing any damage whatsoever.
Then again I've noticed modern cars have funky keys now...
Number of people who would buy a given official DVD if piracy were infinitely easy and unenforceable: 3
You keep saying that but it flies in the face of evidence. VHS tapes were really easy to copy. Did the movie industry suffer as a direct result of that?
Piracy is inevitable. There will always be people copying stuff despite it's illegality. However there's historical evidence that suggests if you make the technology brain-dead easy to use and cheap as possible you'll maximise sales. You may also increase piracy but that has minimal impact on your bottom line if your revenues are significantly greater.
Just remember that Microsoft is not into giving competitors slots on their conferences just so they can come across as being nice.
Agreed, which highlights the fact that this "Free and Open (ECMA standard! woot!) Platform that developers should rally around(tm)" is obviously far from free.
Everybody used FreeBSD and Xterms? What accounting package did your finance team use?
Good point. We had an MIS department that produced reports in Perl. They were on Xterminals too.
Sales and Marketing were in a completely different office (in another suburb) and they probably used Windows but I don't know, sorry.
The ISP was a manufacturer of XTerminals before becoming an ISP, hence the unix-centric focus and plenty of spare XTerminals.
I'm sure there must have been a Windows box with Quicken somewhere though. There always is, even if just for payroll... that's why I think you're right in pulling me up on it.
As I stated in my previous post this setup isn't appropriate under *all* conditions. I can't see a graphic design firm or advertising agency taking on this sort of setup any time soon for instance. My point is that this setup is very workable under a very good number of conditions, more than people think apparently.
Because it's likely going to be very tied to MS platforms and won't work on anything else.
It might be a fun toy for those utilising the MS Platform but support for it in Free OSes will probably only come about via reverse engineering in a country other than the US.
None of us particularly look forward to yet another closed standard, especially when it is pushed out on the web, effectively locking non-MS users out of certain sites.
Most IT environments fall far short of the utility-grade mark.
Most IT departments don't have a budget for utility-grade IT environments. Where I work, I am the IT department of a number of companies and I need to really fight to get ANY of them to spend money on stuff they need to help prevent disasters. Redundancy? Hah! "It's not broken now... what are the chances it's going to go down? Haven't you set it up right or something?"
I won't rehash the reasons why Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
It depends on the business.
I used to work for an ISP that utilised XTerminals w/4M Ram for all departments, including customer service. The apps ran on FreeBSD.
It was a DE of: fvwm (although I ended up moving to olvwm), exmh and Netscape.
Sure it wasn't the prettiest thing in the world and it's not appropriate under all conditions but for the role we had it doing it was fine. No-one complained: they could do their work.
One of the great things was these machines had no hard drive. That alone reduced maintenance costs significantly and when a machine crashed you could reboot with almost reckless abandon.
The XTerminals with centralised server setup is a great demonstration of the elegance and manageability of X and Unix. Having all client data and applications on one server that can be scanned for viruses, backed up, etc. is wonderful. Being able to roll out (or roll back) new versions of applications to all clients by changing one symlink is powerful.
I know you can do similar things with Citrix but I only really hear horror stories about that product and it costs more than most businesses can afford. MS Terminal Services is pretty good but it still feels like an add-on product/hack like VNC rather than a network-transparent desktop environment.
I doubt spanking is effective, mainly because "If you do *this*, you get a *spank*" doesn't really teach the kid anything. The kid would probably make a stronger connection between the parent and the spanking than they would the activity and the spanking.
Why don't parents *explain* to their kids, honestly, why their activity is bad? Is that just too hard?
"When you do *this* you are hurting *this person* and *that person* because of *this reason*. If you keep doing this, these people will be upset with you and may not want to play with you anymore"
I'm not saying "Treat them as an adult", I'm saying "treat them with respect and tell them what they're doing wrong"
I have had years of dealing with PHP sites. PHP is a security nightmare. Just last Sunday morning I was dealing with yet-another-PHP-exploit-on-a-client-server. You might want to keep that in mind when reading the vitriol below.
Most PHP code I've looked at is vile: the people who wrote it cannot code worth a damn and seem to program completely by trial-and-error. register_globals anyone? no checking return values? Grabbing values from POST variables and using them unconditionally, without any sort of validation? Yeah, let's do that! People seem to start programming in PHP before they learn fundamental programming practices.
PHP should be more strict and not allow the strictness to be reduced. PHP should be written with security as the number 1 priority: it needs to not even _offer_ things like register_globals. You don't need a "Enterprise PHP" book, you need:
1. A hardened PHP 2. To learn how to program secure, correct code under whatever language.
Gallery 1.x is trivially exploitable (to say the least). I hope G2 is better but doubt it will go without an exploit for long. Apparently there's only been one exploit found in Gallery 2 so far and that was fixed before an official version was pushed out, so that raises my confidence level marginally.
Sorry to piss on everyone's batteries but I'm missing out on sleep because of PHP and the legions of self-styled "PHP Programmers" that can whip up $200 brochure sites that are trivially exploitable.
But don't go there man, I'm warnin' ya! I know people who've seriously lost their baseball playing that game. A friend of mine knows some dude with ~10 accounts and 10 computers online dedicated to Eve.
disable password authentication and use key-based authentication instead.
That's one thing I do. Get it working and Just Do It(tm). It will let you sleep better at night.
You may need to learn about ssh-agent. *sigh* ssh-agent rocks but it's another one of those things that's really easy to use once you know what's going on but before then you could be banging your head against it. The commands you need:
ssh-add ssh -A
I always chmod 700 ~/.ssh and chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2. Make sure you have that right because ssh won't work with the permissions of this file and directory being too lax OR restrictive.
In sshd_config, reduce the value of "MaxAuthTries" down to 2 (by default I believe it's at 6). That's a bit more discouragement for the wankers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS really counts as the beginning of their charging customers for service.
I'm not sure that actively developing Fedora Core (100% GPL distribution, unlike some) really counts as "dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS". Fedora Core 1 was what RedHat 10 would have been and so on.
Also, if you want Red Hat Enterpise Linux for free, just download the thing (source code is freely available). If you want it in a pre-packaged distribution, use CentOS or Whitebox.
Cheers
Stor
Umm... you realize 18 year olds are adults according to the law, right?
According to The-Obviously-Holier-Than-Us-Law maybe. IMNSHO, 18 year olds are KIDS. I wouldn't feel quite right about having a relationship with an 18 year old for instance: she'd be too naive and have little grip on reality.
Do you really think "Right, now this person has turned 18, it's OK for them to die"? Really? If it's OK by The Law, it's OK by you? Hmm.
Essentially, we use technology as a force-multiplier because we are obsessed with preventing American casualties, sometimes to operational detriment.
Not invading other countries would be a whole lot more effective in reducing casualties methinks.
Cheers
Stor
... Anonymous Coward's like you get sent to the layer of hell God specially reserved for fuckwits and child molesters.
Indeed, it is the very same place we send those who misuse the apostrophe.
Cheers
Stor
Well, if MTV wouldn't keep shaking preteen ass in my face I wouldn't be so tempted...
Hey buddy, I think you missed the "Post Anonymously" checkbox.
Cheers
Stor
You WILL find it with the regular milk... it is refrigerated and stored the same way as the other non dry-goods dairy products.
UHT Milk is usually on the supermarket shelf round here, with powdered milk, chocolate powder, etc. Sometimes it's in the fridge though. Before it's opened it can sit in a shelf, no problems.
I sometimes buy "Milk Jiggers" which are bags of little one-serve (20ml?) packets of UHT milk. They can be stored in the cupboard. When you run out of milk in the morning and need coffee before you become functional you can almost cry in joy when you remember "Hang on... I've got Jiggers! Woot!"
Cheers
Stor
OpenOffice.org's gonna have to find something new to distinguish itself soon.
The *only* advantage OO.o has over office is it's "export to PDF" option? What?
Cheers
Stor
Gimp UI devs need a sharp rap across the knuckles. Otherwise, it would be a CHECK,
You might be interested in this.
In short: they know, they're working on it...
Cheers
Stor
What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before.
Agreed and work towards this is happening at freedesktop.org.
However you also need some *designers* to realise a spec effectively. You can't get developers to "implement an icon from a spec", well you might but I wouldn't expect stellar results.
This seems to be more about the actual practical work of beautifying icons, widgets, etc. Getting palletes not only standardised but nicely utilised in aesthetically-pleasing graphics. It's really important work. Kudos to these dudes for their efforts: I am really glad they're doing it.
Cheers
Stor
My family used to have a Ford Falcon XF. You could start it by using the dipstick as a key. Therefore if the car had any door unlocked it was trivial to steal without doing any damage whatsoever.
Then again I've noticed modern cars have funky keys now...
Cheers
Stor
"Poindexter, do you wanna fuck or what?"
Cheers
Stor
Number of people who would buy a given official DVD if piracy were infinitely easy and unenforceable: 3
You keep saying that but it flies in the face of evidence. VHS tapes were really easy to copy. Did the movie industry suffer as a direct result of that?
Piracy is inevitable. There will always be people copying stuff despite it's illegality. However there's historical evidence that suggests if you make the technology brain-dead easy to use and cheap as possible you'll maximise sales. You may also increase piracy but that has minimal impact on your bottom line if your revenues are significantly greater.
Cheers
Stor
Your informed opinion has no place in a Slashdot discussion.
Phew! Lucky it was actually a troll!
Cheers
Stor
Just as you would not expect groups associated with Linux to be under any obligation to cater for Microsoft.
Hmm, they seem to:
Microsoft to Talk Unix Interop at LinuxWorld
Also, SFU 3.0 won "best system integration software" IIRC at LinuxWorld 2003.
Feels a bit like a one-way street...
Cheers
Stor
Just remember that Microsoft is not into giving competitors slots on their conferences just so they can come across as being nice.
Agreed, which highlights the fact that this "Free and Open (ECMA standard! woot!) Platform that developers should rally around(tm)" is obviously far from free.
Cheers
Stor
Everybody used FreeBSD and Xterms? What accounting package did your finance team use?
Good point. We had an MIS department that produced reports in Perl. They were on Xterminals too.
Sales and Marketing were in a completely different office (in another suburb) and they probably used Windows but I don't know, sorry.
The ISP was a manufacturer of XTerminals before becoming an ISP, hence the unix-centric focus and plenty of spare XTerminals.
I'm sure there must have been a Windows box with Quicken somewhere though. There always is, even if just for payroll... that's why I think you're right in pulling me up on it.
As I stated in my previous post this setup isn't appropriate under *all* conditions. I can't see a graphic design firm or advertising agency taking on this sort of setup any time soon for instance. My point is that this setup is very workable under a very good number of conditions, more than people think apparently.
Cheers
Stor
Because it's likely going to be very tied to MS platforms and won't work on anything else.
It might be a fun toy for those utilising the MS Platform but support for it in Free OSes will probably only come about via reverse engineering in a country other than the US.
None of us particularly look forward to yet another closed standard, especially when it is pushed out on the web, effectively locking non-MS users out of certain sites.
Example: FEMA IE-Only
Cheers
Stor
Most IT environments fall far short of the utility-grade mark.
Most IT departments don't have a budget for utility-grade IT environments. Where I work, I am the IT department of a number of companies and I need to really fight to get ANY of them to spend money on stuff they need to help prevent disasters. Redundancy? Hah! "It's not broken now... what are the chances it's going to go down? Haven't you set it up right or something?"
Cheers
Stor
I won't rehash the reasons why Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
It depends on the business.
I used to work for an ISP that utilised XTerminals w/4M Ram for all departments, including customer service. The apps ran on FreeBSD.
It was a DE of: fvwm (although I ended up moving to olvwm), exmh and Netscape.
Sure it wasn't the prettiest thing in the world and it's not appropriate under all conditions but for the role we had it doing it was fine. No-one complained: they could do their work.
One of the great things was these machines had no hard drive. That alone reduced maintenance costs significantly and when a machine crashed you could reboot with almost reckless abandon.
The XTerminals with centralised server setup is a great demonstration of the elegance and manageability of X and Unix. Having all client data and applications on one server that can be scanned for viruses, backed up, etc. is wonderful. Being able to roll out (or roll back) new versions of applications to all clients by changing one symlink is powerful.
I know you can do similar things with Citrix but I only really hear horror stories about that product and it costs more than most businesses can afford. MS Terminal Services is pretty good but it still feels like an add-on product/hack like VNC rather than a network-transparent desktop environment.
Cheers
Stor
It's pretty effective at blocking bad things from out-of-the-box Microsoft systems.
Unfortunately this does not help if the user runs Internet Explorer.
Cheers
Stor
No worries, I just diarised an action plan.
Cheers
Stor
Does discipline require spanking?
I doubt spanking is effective, mainly because "If you do *this*, you get a *spank*" doesn't really teach the kid anything. The kid would probably make a stronger connection between the parent and the spanking than they would the activity and the spanking.
Why don't parents *explain* to their kids, honestly, why their activity is bad? Is that just too hard?
"When you do *this* you are hurting *this person* and *that person* because of *this reason*. If you keep doing this, these people will be upset with you and may not want to play with you anymore"
I'm not saying "Treat them as an adult", I'm saying "treat them with respect and tell them what they're doing wrong"
Cheers
Stor
I have had years of dealing with PHP sites. PHP is a security nightmare. Just last Sunday morning I was dealing with yet-another-PHP-exploit-on-a-client-server. You might want to keep that in mind when reading the vitriol below.
Most PHP code I've looked at is vile: the people who wrote it cannot code worth a damn and seem to program completely by trial-and-error. register_globals anyone? no checking return values? Grabbing values from POST variables and using them unconditionally, without any sort of validation? Yeah, let's do that! People seem to start programming in PHP before they learn fundamental programming practices.
PHP should be more strict and not allow the strictness to be reduced. PHP should be written with security as the number 1 priority: it needs to not even _offer_ things like register_globals. You don't need a "Enterprise PHP" book, you need:
1. A hardened PHP
2. To learn how to program secure, correct code under whatever language.
Gallery 1.x is trivially exploitable (to say the least). I hope G2 is better but doubt it will go without an exploit for long. Apparently there's only been one exploit found in Gallery 2 so far and that was fixed before an official version was pushed out, so that raises my confidence level marginally.
Sorry to piss on everyone's batteries but I'm missing out on sleep because of PHP and the legions of self-styled "PHP Programmers" that can whip up $200 brochure sites that are trivially exploitable.
Cheers
Stor
Is any leading publisher willing to take a risk of no initial income and bank on the monthly subscription?
Eve is like that.
But don't go there man, I'm warnin' ya! I know people who've seriously lost their baseball playing that game. A friend of mine knows some dude with ~10 accounts and 10 computers online dedicated to Eve.
Cheers
Stor
disable password authentication and use key-based authentication instead.
That's one thing I do. Get it working and Just Do It(tm). It will let you sleep better at night.
You may need to learn about ssh-agent. *sigh* ssh-agent rocks but it's another one of those things that's really easy to use once you know what's going on but before then you could be banging your head against it. The commands you need:
ssh-add
ssh -A
I always chmod 700 ~/.ssh and chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2. Make sure you have that right because ssh won't work with the permissions of this file and directory being too lax OR restrictive.
In sshd_config, reduce the value of "MaxAuthTries" down to 2 (by default I believe it's at 6). That's a bit more discouragement for the wankers.
And of course, change PermitRootLogin to "no".
Cheers
Stor
I've got one for you if you haven't learnt it: xargs.
some cruddy examples of how to use it:
"cat filelist.txt |xargs -i ls -l {}"
"ls | xargs -i mv {} {}.bak"
It's a great workaround to the "file list too long" problem some tools exhibit. It saves my arse every month or so.
Cheers
Stor