S Korea may just be using this as a threat to get MS to negotiate on price and/or features. Until recently, govts (and large companies) haven't really had much of a credible alternative to Windows, so they haven't been able to use their incredible scale as purchasing and negotiating power. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS and S Korea come to a deal in six months time...
But that's the point.
Even when Linux is used only as a bargaining chip against Microsoft, the fact that it is a bargaining chip against an abusive monopoly means that Linux is providing a real-world benefit.
It's clear that we (consumers) are already winning because of Linux.
You don't have to be a *nix geek like me to appreciate this!
Spoken like a true genius. It takes real intelligence to provide us all with such profundity and splendor!
If it means anything, as a sysadmin, I've been served with a DMCA request because a client was doing as the original poster did - copying materials and displaying them where the materials were protected by a trivially obtainable login/pw.
The only way that copying a NYT article to Slashdot could even remotely be construed as an affront to coypyrights is if the poster did not credit NYT or if the poster changed the text.
Copyrights protect, among other thing, the the GPL: "Proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the users' freedom; we use copyright to guarantee their freedom."
what is the purpose of having registration on the NYT site anyway??
By requiring a login/pw, NYT gets a "copyright protection device" and therefore gives them the additional weight of the DMCA against anybody who copies their material.
You sir, are in fact of law, providing a "Copyright Protection Circumvention Device" actionable under the DMCA by posting this on/. - did you think of that?
Specifically, take a look at the "-g" option. Using the "-g" option allows other hosts to connect through your forwarded port. However, it only works with the "-L" option, and not the "-R" option.
Port forwarding via SSH is a bit one sided, though.
You can take a local port, and forward it to a remote location, but you can't forward a remote location to local. At least, not "openly". (only from localhost)
This means that you can take a connection inside a local network and tunnel out, but you can't use SSH to tunnel through a firewall outside and get a connection back *in*.
I sent in a note to the SSH dev mailing list and they told me that it's not a bug, that they want it this way...
Why couldn't this be done, and then toggled based on a setting in the config file?
1) its should be it's - a contraction of "it is" as in "it is not even funny".
2) admitadely should be admittedly
3) entirley should be entirely
4) competitor's should be competitors'. "competitor's" is possesive singular, "competitors'" is possesive plural.
5) by enlarge should be "by and large".
6) "but a MP3 player" should be "but an MP3 player".
7) goodstanding should be "good standing" - two words!
8)"inoperable" should be "inter-operable" or "interoperable".
OK, I'm being a hypocrite. So sue me, already. I just have a certain "pain" threshold reading somebody else's work, and this post reaches that threshold...
The internet seems to become more worthless every day, as more and more of it is hijacked by spammers and other commercialization.
That's defeatism, and it's simply not true. Every day, more useful information is published, more power is transferred to the Internet, and its usefulness in everyday life today is much greater than 10 years ago.
Even though more "bad stuff" is happening, there's also alot more "good stuff" happening, as well.
It's regrettable that we need to take such drastic measures, but what really worries me is that the need is increasing with time. Can you imagine the situation where 99% of your email is spam? Is there an alternative to giving up email entirely at that point?
As a system administrator, I hit this point a *long* time ago. Yes, much more than 99% of the email I receive is crap. Pure, and utter crap.
I've had to build special handling scripts and filtering rules to catch and destroy most of the 7,000+ junk mails I used to get each day.
I'm constantly devising ways to improve the odds of detecting and deleting a SPAM, while ensuring that the "good" stuff gets through. In order to keep complaints down, I tend to err on the side of permissiveness.
Probably 4 of 5 incidents involve email - a mail bomb, attack, virus, or something related.
Until an alternative comes up, that's just reality. Sucks that humanity can't deal with true, instantaneous, global communication, huh?
It's starting to become clear that Microsoft is starting up the IM wars again and that the 3rd-party lockout indeed isn't so much about security as it is about marketshare.
Starting? Even without the anti-MS bias, you have to admit that altruism doesn't exist among companies. No air==dead people. Money is air to a company.
If MSN figures they can get more air this way, they will.
Duh.
MS only was nice so long as they got marketshare away from AIM. From this POV, it seems Jabber really needs to be rallied...
So the biggest problem Linux faces on the Desktop is the Microsoft-sponsored stranglehold on the industry.
Not only are OEMs strongly discouraged from installing Linux, they are usually contractually obligated not to install anything else!
So, Mr. Cowpland, making the best of a *bad* situation, goes one back in the supply chain - to the hard disk manufacturers!
Wow. Good thinking! No OEM contracts! Product delivered, ready for use!
I know, 90% of these preinstalls are going to be nuked. So what. If Lindows gets 1%, given the cost of duplication on the drives, this is a smashing success.
And, what else is he going to do? Knock Lindows as the orphan child of Linux, but, like Red Hat, this is clearly a positive commercial influence.
I'd be curious to know how PHP-GTK performs against JVM for client-side development.
I've developed some decent applications using PHP, I LOVE IT!
PHP is clean, straighforward, performs reasonably well, makes socket connections and multi-system communications a breeze, offers enough OO support to be useful, and doesn't mire one into the details of whether an "a" is an "a" or actually ord('a')...
One of the most common complaints for PHP is error handling. I've found that where it's needed, just create a class with its own error handling function(s). It's not hard, and the only limitations of an error handling system like this are the limits you put on it.
Using PHP-GTK allows me to write client-side applications that seamlessly integrate with a PHP-based server side... a serious advantage since dataset compatability is a non-issue, and combining this with various forms of encryption result in a very secure communication system.
PHP is generally distributed only as source - but it's definitely NOT a requirement. Use the Ioncube encoder to "compile" your PHP or PHP-GTK application. It's cheap - $200. You can compile a single file for just $0.50.
In my most recent, 30,000-ish line PHP-GTK application, I see acceptable performance all the way down to a P-200, though it's not "snappy" until you get up to around 400-500 Mhz PII.
Seems to me to be very similar to Java in this regard. Can anybody comment intelligibly?
And there is really no reason to limit this to corporations only. A buffer overflow in some Linux code? Look into the source for the copyright notice and sue the hell out of the poor schmuck who wrote it!
One of the basis of commerce (in the US, I have no experience elsewhere) is the concept of "Merchantability" - in other words, when selling a product, the product sold had better be pretty much what was promised.
If I sold a widget to a customer, and the widget did not perform to "reasonable expectation" then the customer is entitled to a functional widget or his/her money back.
In the case of the immerchantability causing personal harm, some additional liability may be incurred by the vendor as well.
However, if I *give* something away, the idea of merchantability is thrown on its ear. Merchantability as a concept depends on the existence of a profit on the item which ownership of is being transferred.
I can give you defective stuff until we're both blue in the face - but I incur no particular liability or requirement that the stuff perform to any standard, because when it's given away noncommercially, it's not merchandise.
Even in the case of Red Hat, merchantability starts to weaken - they don't really provide the software, per se, they provide the package. They provide additional services to otherwise free software. Since they give it away, they are certainly not charging for the software itself!
It's a fine line, and one that's increasingly solidifying.
All I can say is, cancel SBC Yahoo while you still can. I'd be surprised if that shitty thing could work on any computer on the first try, after recently setting it up for my brother. You will have to set your machine up to use PPPoE. Instructions on how to do it without their CD can be found here. Whatever you do, don't use the CD.
Which has what to do with Japan?
Also, if you want to cancel SBC/Yahoo, aren't they the good guys today? Even though you accuse them of installing spyware on your computer, it seems here that they are fighting for your privacy!
When will slashdotters realize that the whole world is not black and white, it's just various shades of grey?
hmm... I question your 90% number. Proprietary software tends to drive focus where the money is. OSS tends to drive focus where the work is interesting.
... And often an OSS solution simply isn't feasible. For example, why is there no Turbo Tax replacement? Nor will there be for some time... the reason is that the software is really a means of delivering the intelligence and knowledge of the accountants and lawyers that decide how the software should work. It's really software as a means of delivering a service, rather than a product in its own right.
I'm part of a company much like this - Charterworks which automates much of the process of tracking and meeting CA educational standards.
While I'd love to take all the credit for writing the software, the software is just the vehicle used to deliver a massive amount of information carefully entered and maintained by qualified educational professionals about the state educational standards. (of which there are thousands)
This is a situation and product inherently incompatible with OSS - which is why I've used OSS in the construction of the software, but we certainly won't be giving away the educational standards information!
But here's my real question. Why post such flaimbait? This article is just some nobody giving his foolish opinion in a non-influential news site... . It [SIC] this written by a big name in IT, I could see posting it.
BZZZZZZZZZT!!!!!!
I call bullshit. Anybody who can call Bruce Schneier "some nobody" is truly "some nobody" themselves.
Bruce Schneier is one of the top names in cryptography. *Alot* of the cryptographic functions we take for granted today came from his ground-breaking work, applied cryptography.
I guess what it comes down to, if you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't talk.
And yet here is a study that shows otherwise. Now look at all those people try to dismiss it. Try to dance around it, making excuses, and so on.
I've tried to run a DNS/Email/Web server with MS products. Couldn't be done reliably. Linux is stable, reliable, and powerful, on commodity hardware, even with a large number of services enabled. Apache, MySQL, java vm, postgres, named, and numerous others.
Is it perfect? no. Neither is 'doze. But let me ask you rhis; How many times have you applied an MS patch that broke *everything*?
If it's never happened, you need to move out of your parent's house. In recent memory I'e only had one problem, with sendmail, in keeping up with patches.
A file server I put together in 1998 run right through Y2K with no problems, and though it was finally rebooted in spring of 2000, it's been running ever since - to this day. (fileserver, LAN, no 'net access)
PostgreSQL has a very robust multi-version concurency controll mechanism - somthing MS SQL could only dream of.
MVCC is truly awesome. It isn't until you do a full dump of a live database, knowing that all your data is referentially complete, while it's busy handling dozens of other requests, simultaneously, that MVCC really shines.
It just plain rocks. When you do a query of any kind, anything from "select name from users where id=12355" to a full dump, you get the state of the database as of the moment that the query was submitted.
Transactions underway but not yet complete are ignored. Transactions that begin, or actions performed while the database dump is underway is similarly ignored.
The result? You can take a live, working database server and back it up at 3:00 in the afternoon, during heavy load, and have a clean dataset with high integrity.
My only complaint about PG is lack of replication - I'd KILL for decent replication. Oh, and I just don't "do" compiling if I can possibly avoid it. As soon as you compile, then you have to worry about compile flags, dependencies, and all that jazz, which usually isn't a problem but just increases the workload.
Slashdot Mirror
S Korea may just be using this as a threat to get MS to negotiate on price and/or features. Until recently, govts (and large companies) haven't really had much of a credible alternative to Windows, so they haven't been able to use their incredible scale as purchasing and negotiating power. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS and S Korea come to a deal in six months time...
But that's the point.
Even when Linux is used only as a bargaining chip against Microsoft, the fact that it is a bargaining chip against an abusive monopoly means that Linux is providing a real-world benefit.
It's clear that we (consumers) are already winning because of Linux.
You don't have to be a *nix geek like me to appreciate this!
I think that the GNU project has brought software freedom to the masses and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.
So, let me get this straight - It won't be the U.S.S. Enterprise, but the GNU Enterprise?
No, you ignorant fuck
Spoken like a true genius. It takes real intelligence to provide us all with such profundity and splendor!
If it means anything, as a sysadmin, I've been served with a DMCA request because a client was doing as the original poster did - copying materials and displaying them where the materials were protected by a trivially obtainable login/pw.
The only way that copying a NYT article to Slashdot could even remotely be construed as an affront to coypyrights is if the poster did not credit NYT or if the poster changed the text.
Let's see - copyright belongs to the author. "A copyright provides its holder several exclusive rights to control the reproduction, import and export of a work of authorship.".
Copyrights protect, among other thing, the the GPL: "Proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the users' freedom; we use copyright to guarantee their freedom."
Perhaps you should read 10 Big Myths about copyright explained?
You know, I can't believe I've written this much in reply to a post as lame as this one....
what is the purpose of having registration on the NYT site anyway??
/. - did you think of that?
By requiring a login/pw, NYT gets a "copyright protection device" and therefore gives them the additional weight of the DMCA against anybody who copies their material.
You sir, are in fact of law, providing a "Copyright Protection Circumvention Device" actionable under the DMCA by posting this on
Specifically, take a look at the "-g" option. Using the "-g" option allows other hosts to connect through your forwarded port. However, it only works with the "-L" option, and not the "-R" option.
-Ben
Port forwarding via SSH is a bit one sided, though.
You can take a local port, and forward it to a remote location, but you can't forward a remote location to local. At least, not "openly". (only from localhost)
This means that you can take a connection inside a local network and tunnel out, but you can't use SSH to tunnel through a firewall outside and get a connection back *in*.
I sent in a note to the SSH dev mailing list and they told me that it's not a bug, that they want it this way...
Why couldn't this be done, and then toggled based on a setting in the config file?
I just lambasted somebody for this, but I just can't help it here:
1) its should be it's - a contraction of "it is" as in "it is not even funny".
2) admitadely should be admittedly
3) entirley should be entirely
4) competitor's should be competitors'. "competitor's" is possesive singular, "competitors'" is possesive plural.
5) by enlarge should be "by and large".
6) "but a MP3 player" should be "but an MP3 player".
7) goodstanding should be "good standing" - two words!
8)"inoperable" should be "inter-operable" or "interoperable".
OK, I'm being a hypocrite. So sue me, already. I just have a certain "pain" threshold reading somebody else's work, and this post reaches that threshold...
I hope you don't hate me for this post.
And, in other news, in an SEC filing, Microsoft has disclosed a cash "gift" to a company called @stake.
Said Microsoft spokesman: "It's a voluntary contribution, with much at stake. ".
The internet seems to become more worthless every day, as more and more of it is hijacked by spammers and other commercialization.
That's defeatism, and it's simply not true. Every day, more useful information is published, more power is transferred to the Internet, and its usefulness in everyday life today is much greater than 10 years ago.
Even though more "bad stuff" is happening, there's also alot more "good stuff" happening, as well.
It's regrettable that we need to take such drastic measures, but what really worries me is that the need is increasing with time. Can you imagine the situation where 99% of your email is spam? Is there an alternative to giving up email entirely at that point?
As a system administrator, I hit this point a *long* time ago. Yes, much more than 99% of the email I receive is crap. Pure, and utter crap.
I've had to build special handling scripts and filtering rules to catch and destroy most of the 7,000+ junk mails I used to get each day.
I'm constantly devising ways to improve the odds of detecting and deleting a SPAM, while ensuring that the "good" stuff gets through. In order to keep complaints down, I tend to err on the side of permissiveness.
Probably 4 of 5 incidents involve email - a mail bomb, attack, virus, or something related.
Until an alternative comes up, that's just reality. Sucks that humanity can't deal with true, instantaneous, global communication, huh?
Starting? Even without the anti-MS bias, you have to admit that altruism doesn't exist among companies. No air==dead people. Money is air to a company.
If MSN figures they can get more air this way, they will.
Duh.
MS only was nice so long as they got marketshare away from AIM. From this POV, it seems Jabber really needs to be rallied...
OK.
So the biggest problem Linux faces on the Desktop is the Microsoft-sponsored stranglehold on the industry.
Not only are OEMs strongly discouraged from installing Linux, they are usually contractually obligated not to install anything else!
So, Mr. Cowpland, making the best of a *bad* situation, goes one back in the supply chain - to the hard disk manufacturers!
Wow. Good thinking! No OEM contracts! Product delivered, ready for use!
I know, 90% of these preinstalls are going to be nuked. So what. If Lindows gets 1%, given the cost of duplication on the drives, this is a smashing success.
And, what else is he going to do? Knock Lindows as the orphan child of Linux, but, like Red Hat, this is clearly a positive commercial influence.
Yeah, but what about php-GTK?!?!
Good software !== no bugs ever.
Just like good posts don't require logical operators that actually exist.
Ahh, but this logical operator DOES exist... perfectly valid under PHP, where it means that it's not the same value and type.
EG:
$a=1;
$b='1';
if ($a!==$b)
echo 'fubar';
The program would output fubar since the numeric 1 is not the same type as the string '1'.
A common mistake of inexperience is to conclude that if you don't know it, it doesn't exist or is untrue.
-Ben
. It looks like a great VB replacememt, but can it run on Windows, Linux, BSD, and OSX [more?] without changing the programming?
Windows and Linux so far, Mac OS/X with the X-windows library loaded, though I can't claim to have seen it myself.
Yeah, it's quite promising, and a "VB Replacement" would be a good way to "pidgeon hole" it...
I'd consider that one of the definitions of "life" could be "a pattern that attempts its own continuance despite destructive obstacles".
Reproduction is simply a continuance of that pattern. Think about it:
1) loud noise == cat runs to preserve itself.
2) War == baby boomer generation.
ad nasueum. What we have is a curiousity of bare physics, nothing more.
I'd be curious to know how PHP-GTK performs against JVM for client-side development.
I've developed some decent applications using PHP, I LOVE IT!
PHP is clean, straighforward, performs reasonably well, makes socket connections and multi-system communications a breeze, offers enough OO support to be useful, and doesn't mire one into the details of whether an "a" is an "a" or actually ord('a')...
One of the most common complaints for PHP is error handling. I've found that where it's needed, just create a class with its own error handling function(s). It's not hard, and the only limitations of an error handling system like this are the limits you put on it.
Using PHP-GTK allows me to write client-side applications that seamlessly integrate with a PHP-based server side... a serious advantage since dataset compatability is a non-issue, and combining this with various forms of encryption result in a very secure communication system.
PHP is generally distributed only as source - but it's definitely NOT a requirement. Use the Ioncube encoder to "compile" your PHP or PHP-GTK application. It's cheap - $200. You can compile a single file for just $0.50.
In my most recent, 30,000-ish line PHP-GTK application, I see acceptable performance all the way down to a P-200, though it's not "snappy" until you get up to around 400-500 Mhz PII.
Seems to me to be very similar to Java in this regard. Can anybody comment intelligibly?
So, will this by "High speed" PC-Card or "Full speed" PC-Card?
And there is really no reason to limit this to corporations only. A buffer overflow in some Linux code? Look into the source for the copyright notice and sue the hell out of the poor schmuck who wrote it!
One of the basis of commerce (in the US, I have no experience elsewhere) is the concept of "Merchantability" - in other words, when selling a product, the product sold had better be pretty much what was promised.
If I sold a widget to a customer, and the widget did not perform to "reasonable expectation" then the customer is entitled to a functional widget or his/her money back.
In the case of the immerchantability causing personal harm, some additional liability may be incurred by the vendor as well.
However, if I *give* something away, the idea of merchantability is thrown on its ear. Merchantability as a concept depends on the existence of a profit on the item which ownership of is being transferred.
I can give you defective stuff until we're both blue in the face - but I incur no particular liability or requirement that the stuff perform to any standard, because when it's given away noncommercially, it's not merchandise.
Even in the case of Red Hat, merchantability starts to weaken - they don't really provide the software, per se, they provide the package. They provide additional services to otherwise free software. Since they give it away, they are certainly not charging for the software itself!
It's a fine line, and one that's increasingly solidifying.
All I can say is, cancel SBC Yahoo while you still can. I'd be surprised if that shitty thing could work on any computer on the first try, after recently setting it up for my brother. You will have to set your machine up to use PPPoE. Instructions on how to do it without their CD can be found here. Whatever you do, don't use the CD.
Which has what to do with Japan?
Also, if you want to cancel SBC/Yahoo, aren't they the good guys today? Even though you accuse them of installing spyware on your computer, it seems here that they are fighting for your privacy!
When will slashdotters realize that the whole world is not black and white, it's just various shades of grey?
Ok, so now they discover that randomizing the text within words doesn't detract (too much) from readability - does that mean we'll soon be seeing:
ELNRAGE YUOR PNEIS!!!
on the subject lines of emails received? How would any of the pattern matching anti-spam methods out there deal with this one?
And, we just gave them the tool do use!
-Ben
2. "a lot" is two words, not one
3. Many people make typos. (don't sentences end in PUNCTUATION?!?!)
Lea, it's almost never productive to correct them unless you are the teacher of an English class or proof reading.
... And often an OSS solution simply isn't feasible. For example, why is there no Turbo Tax replacement? Nor will there be for some time... the reason is that the software is really a means of delivering the intelligence and knowledge of the accountants and lawyers that decide how the software should work. It's really software as a means of delivering a service, rather than a product in its own right.
I'm part of a company much like this - Charterworks which automates much of the process of tracking and meeting CA educational standards.
While I'd love to take all the credit for writing the software, the software is just the vehicle used to deliver a massive amount of information carefully entered and maintained by qualified educational professionals about the state educational standards. (of which there are thousands)
This is a situation and product inherently incompatible with OSS - which is why I've used OSS in the construction of the software, but we certainly won't be giving away the educational standards information!
But here's my real question. Why post such flaimbait? This article is just some nobody giving his foolish opinion in a non-influential news site... . It [SIC] this written by a big name in IT, I could see posting it.
BZZZZZZZZZT!!!!!!
I call bullshit. Anybody who can call Bruce Schneier "some nobody" is truly "some nobody" themselves.
Bruce Schneier is one of the top names in cryptography. *Alot* of the cryptographic functions we take for granted today came from his ground-breaking work, applied cryptography.
I guess what it comes down to, if you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't talk.
And yet here is a study that shows otherwise. Now look at all those people try to dismiss it. Try to dance around it, making excuses, and so on.
I've tried to run a DNS/Email/Web server with MS products. Couldn't be done reliably. Linux is stable, reliable, and powerful, on commodity hardware, even with a large number of services enabled. Apache, MySQL, java vm, postgres, named, and numerous others.
Is it perfect? no. Neither is 'doze. But let me ask you rhis; How many times have you applied an MS patch that broke *everything*?
If it's never happened, you need to move out of your parent's house. In recent memory I'e only had one problem, with sendmail, in keeping up with patches.
A file server I put together in 1998 run right through Y2K with no problems, and though it was finally rebooted in spring of 2000, it's been running ever since - to this day. (fileserver, LAN, no 'net access)
Come on. Be REAL...
PostgreSQL has a very robust multi-version concurency controll mechanism - somthing MS SQL could only dream of.
MVCC is truly awesome. It isn't until you do a full dump of a live database, knowing that all your data is referentially complete, while it's busy handling dozens of other requests, simultaneously, that MVCC really shines.
It just plain rocks. When you do a query of any kind, anything from "select name from users where id=12355" to a full dump, you get the state of the database as of the moment that the query was submitted.
Transactions underway but not yet complete are ignored. Transactions that begin, or actions performed while the database dump is underway is similarly ignored.
The result? You can take a live, working database server and back it up at 3:00 in the afternoon, during heavy load, and have a clean dataset with high integrity.
My only complaint about PG is lack of replication - I'd KILL for decent replication. Oh, and I just don't "do" compiling if I can possibly avoid it. As soon as you compile, then you have to worry about compile flags, dependencies, and all that jazz, which usually isn't a problem but just increases the workload.
Make a
postgresql-replication-7.3.4-51.rpm
and I will be one happy dude.
-Ben