Don't confuse the OS with the distribution. It's not the OS which provides the apps. It's not the distribution which provides the functionality. You need both. The world is filled with barely computer literate WinME and WinXPHome users, who have, as a rule, been responsible for all the spam, DDOS and zombie attacks, and whose crappy pre-installed apps (Hello Outlook Express) are responsible for email harvesting attacks which fill my spam folder.
You can go back and forth on too complicated or too simple an install, but it doesn't absolve the user from needing a clue. It's merely a question of when you require the clue, at install, or at run-time.
syntax highlighting!
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 5, Funny
I, for one, welcome our upgraded syntax highlighting overlords. I can't remember the last time I wrote syntactically incorrect code since I switched from vi. Of course, I can still write BAD code, or silly code, but vim catches my typos every time.
I remember the day when my PC was finally faster than the processor on the Virge, but boy, Descent looked kickass in special 'S3' mode. Of course that was also 1996.
sparc, as well as sparc64? I know it's über to have an old Sparcstation IPX running Sendmail under your desk, but seriously, isn't it time to let sparc die? If its ANY work at all to maintain outside of the sparc64 tree, let it go. Also, I for one, welcome our ppc overlords, as my G3 running YDL (at the moment) is an excellent combination. PPC is not nearly as dead as Sparc, or as *BSD, for that matter. (joke, not a troll!)
In a time when people don't trust "the big drug companies" and "the government coverups of the mercury", or believe in some sort of higher power, or taking minute doses of chicken farts or similar as a way to "boost your immune system", and in a culture where causality is for losers, is anyone surprised that overall immunity to these trivial diseases is dropping, leading to an upswing in outbreaks?
SMTP servers can be used as open relays if improperly configured, and you should not use "password" for your root account, especially if you are allowing direct root login. Um, next up, will this researcher discover that operating a motor vehicle requires skill, and that brain surgery should be done only by professionals? Call me jaded, but the world seems full of Cringelys and Dvoraks who say that "X is bad" or "Y is insecure", but fewer people seem engaged in MAKING things better or more secure.
Joe Sixpack, you know, the guy who buys the Hemi, or puts the "Type R" sticker on his Honda Civic, will by the Blu-Ray DVD, because..well, it's "Blue". Blue is better, neater, more high tech, with less distortion, jitter, wow, and flutter. I mean, think of it, red has a long wavelength, blue shorter. So it must be higher definition.
Seriously. This is what you'll hear from the droid at Best Buy.
"HD-DVD" sounds old and busted, a hack to make DVD "HD". "Blu-Ray" is an entirely new technology, and as everyone knows, unless you have the latest trinket, you're a dinosaur, obsolete, gay, etc.
I may sound flip, but you get the idea. People buy spin, and marketing crap. They don't buy technology, or purchase on any rational basis.
Lets see, there's the Linux angle, with optional (anti)piracy garnish. Then there's the Iraq angle. Then there's the "we should be feeding people before we bother to set up ISPs in the 3rd world angle".
Gosh.
S/N ratio dropping to zero in 10...9....8....7....
Oh the humanity, a submitted link that links to a blog! This couldn't be a thinly veiled attempt to drive up page hits, could it? Lets see, a user called 'ReadWriteWeb', and its linking to a blog about 'WebOS' (stupid term, misnomer, buzzword-compliant). What's next a Roland Piquipaille story?
After this, the State will just have to outlaw speeding, smoking pot, and underage drinking, and enact single-payer healthcare, and we'll all live happily ever after!
Where I work, you must have a capital letter, and at least one number. You must change it every 4 weeks, and you cannot reuse any of the last 9. I consider this just on the verge of silly, but it can easily be circumvented like so:
Pick a person's name, say, Annakin. Add a number or two to the name, Annakin123. When the password expires, change to Annakin234, then Annakin345... 3) Profit!
Our AD guys are constantly battling the Infosec weenies who claim we need to have even stricter passwd policies, which will result in even MORE Post-It notes underneath keyboards.
If you share an account over which you have no control, get Passkeeper, or develop a "seed" algorithm, that knowing the code, and the seed word, and the hostname, you can derive the password, so you can easily remember it, i.e.
Seed is "slash" Algorithm = seed + 3rd octet of hostname + first letter of hostname + last letter of hostname. (or similar, I just thought this up off the top of my head)
Immune to all but dictionary attacks, and you and coworkers can easily derive it on the fly. Potential security breach? Just change the seed word.
And if they do read, they don't care. If you tell them that Friday at 3pm, the a server is going down, they'll ignore it, and call you at 3:01 screaming that they are kicked off.
People don't care about your silly technical problems, they've learned that screaming loudly works, as it does. They don't care that you had to reboot the mail server because Exchange died again, goddammit, they have important email to send, what are you, incompetent?
And, your boss will kiss their ass and make excuses for your failures, and discuss grand schemes to Make Sure It Doesn't Happen Again.
Yes, I work at $LARGE_US_BANK, and this sort of thing does happen. Technologists are only ever the reason that people can't get work done, we're never seen as enablers.
Why do you think the BastardOperatorFromHell is such a powerful meme?
Linus has frequently called people idiots, and ignored patches, and done stuff his own way for a very long time now. He's quite successful at it. Perhaps what most people need to realize is that he is that good, that he can. The average read-Slashdot-during-work-while-coding Slashdotter is not in his league, so decrying his adhominem attacks, or "I would do X instead" arguments just dont hold much water.
They have this thing called DNS now, where you can create 'aliases' for all of your servers when someone tries to connect to 'mail.isp.net'. It's kind of interesting stuff, one of these days it might take off.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't confuse the OS with the distribution. It's not the OS which provides the apps. It's not the distribution which provides the functionality. You need both. The world is filled with barely computer literate WinME and WinXPHome users, who have, as a rule, been responsible for all the spam, DDOS and zombie attacks, and whose crappy pre-installed apps (Hello Outlook Express) are responsible for email harvesting attacks which fill my spam folder.
You can go back and forth on too complicated or too simple an install, but it doesn't absolve the user from needing a clue. It's merely a question of when you require the clue, at install, or at run-time.
DOS
I, for one, welcome our upgraded syntax highlighting overlords. I can't remember the last time I wrote syntactically incorrect code since I switched from vi. Of course, I can still write BAD code, or silly code, but vim catches my typos every time.
Take that, pickle-smoking teabaggers aka the RIAA.
I remember the day when my PC was finally faster than the processor on the Virge, but boy, Descent looked kickass in special 'S3' mode. Of course that was also 1996.
Go S3!
Because Slashdot will post any old story, period, especially if it inspires a flamewar, because then their ad revenue increases.
sparc, as well as sparc64? I know it's über to have an old Sparcstation IPX running Sendmail under your desk, but seriously, isn't it time to let sparc die? If its ANY work at all to maintain outside of the sparc64 tree, let it go. Also, I for one, welcome our ppc overlords, as my G3 running YDL (at the moment) is an excellent combination. PPC is not nearly as dead as Sparc, or as *BSD, for that matter. (joke, not a troll!)
In a time when people don't trust "the big drug companies" and "the government coverups of the mercury", or believe in some sort of higher power, or taking minute doses of chicken farts or similar as a way to "boost your immune system", and in a culture where causality is for losers, is anyone surprised that overall immunity to these trivial diseases is dropping, leading to an upswing in outbreaks?
UDP against Google? What are you some kind of DDOS-bot? Besides, everyone knows that the Intarweb runs on TCP.
Here is Professor Hawking's early research into the field
SMTP servers can be used as open relays if improperly configured, and you should not use "password" for your root account, especially if you are allowing direct root login.
Um, next up, will this researcher discover that operating a motor vehicle requires skill, and that brain surgery should be done only by professionals?
Call me jaded, but the world seems full of Cringelys and Dvoraks who say that "X is bad" or "Y is insecure", but fewer people seem engaged in MAKING things better or more secure.
Joe Sixpack, you know, the guy who buys the Hemi, or puts the "Type R" sticker on his Honda Civic, will by the Blu-Ray DVD, because..well, it's "Blue". Blue is better, neater, more high tech, with less distortion, jitter, wow, and flutter. I mean, think of it, red has a long wavelength, blue shorter. So it must be higher definition.
Seriously. This is what you'll hear from the droid at Best Buy.
"HD-DVD" sounds old and busted, a hack to make DVD "HD".
"Blu-Ray" is an entirely new technology, and as everyone knows, unless you have the latest trinket, you're a dinosaur, obsolete, gay, etc.
I may sound flip, but you get the idea. People buy spin, and marketing crap. They don't buy technology, or purchase on any rational basis.
You're right. So because it doesn't do $SPECIFIC_BUZZWORD, we should shitcan the entire thing. Very +1, Insightful.
Lets see, there's the Linux angle, with optional (anti)piracy garnish.
Then there's the Iraq angle.
Then there's the "we should be feeding people before we bother to set up ISPs in the 3rd world angle".
Gosh.
S/N ratio dropping to zero in 10...9....8....7....
Oh the humanity, a submitted link that links to a blog! This couldn't be a thinly veiled attempt to drive up page hits, could it? Lets see, a user called 'ReadWriteWeb', and its linking to a blog about 'WebOS' (stupid term, misnomer, buzzword-compliant). What's next a Roland Piquipaille story?
After this, the State will just have to outlaw speeding, smoking pot, and underage drinking, and enact single-payer healthcare, and we'll all live happily ever after!
Who lets these people in here?
chmod 0400 doesn't do jack if I can boot your machine into single user mode from CD.
Where I work, you must have a capital letter, and at least one number. You must change it every 4 weeks, and you cannot reuse any of the last 9. I consider this just on the verge of silly, but it can easily be circumvented like so:
Pick a person's name, say, Annakin.
Add a number or two to the name, Annakin123.
When the password expires, change to Annakin234, then Annakin345...
3) Profit!
Our AD guys are constantly battling the Infosec weenies who claim we need to have even stricter passwd policies, which will result in even MORE Post-It notes underneath keyboards.
If you share an account over which you have no control, get Passkeeper, or develop a "seed" algorithm, that knowing the code, and the seed word, and the hostname, you can derive the password, so you can easily remember it, i.e.
Seed is "slash"
Algorithm = seed + 3rd octet of hostname + first letter of hostname + last letter of hostname.
(or similar, I just thought this up off the top of my head)
Immune to all but dictionary attacks, and you and coworkers can easily derive it on the fly.
Potential security breach? Just change the seed word.
And if they do read, they don't care. If you tell them that Friday at 3pm, the a server is going down, they'll ignore it, and call you at 3:01 screaming that they are kicked off.
People don't care about your silly technical problems, they've learned that screaming loudly works, as it does. They don't care that you had to reboot the mail server because Exchange died again, goddammit, they have important email to send, what are you, incompetent?
And, your boss will kiss their ass and make excuses for your failures, and discuss grand schemes to Make Sure It Doesn't Happen Again.
Yes, I work at $LARGE_US_BANK, and this sort of thing does happen. Technologists are only ever the reason that people can't get work done, we're never seen as enablers.
Why do you think the BastardOperatorFromHell is such a powerful meme?
I bet you googled feverishly for another "Linus tells *BSD to die in a fire" quote, just so you could seem insightful.
But you don't address the most recent incident. So your post is irrelevant.
Linus has frequently called people idiots, and ignored patches, and done stuff his own way for a very long time now. He's quite successful at it. Perhaps what most people need to realize is that he is that good, that he can. The average read-Slashdot-during-work-while-coding Slashdotter is not in his league, so decrying his adhominem attacks, or "I would do X instead" arguments just dont hold much water.
Just as useless, and as unprovable. Next, specialized computer technology to detect the color underwear most bloggers wear?
They have this thing called DNS now, where you can create 'aliases' for all of your servers when someone tries to connect to 'mail.isp.net'. It's kind of interesting stuff, one of these days it might take off.