And this really is sad because.NET in general and C# in particular is so much better than Java for many reasons, in specific circumstances. It is cleaner, more flexible, and does things the JVM just cannot do yet (soon it will though) such as generics--true generics, not the Java 5 pseudo-generics--and delegates. Even in the current state Mono is in, it's a joy to use to program Linux apps in GTK#. Even the most hawkish anti-Mono people have to admit that MS's patents really only cover the parts of.NET that are more interesting which includes ASP.net. The rest of the CLR is still quite useful in its own right even if we strip the patented stuff. This is the reason Redhat's legal counsel is comfortable with them shipping Mono, beagle, etc with FC6. So we shouldn't count C# out just yet. Besides we can always compile C# to binary and have a great language without the VM.
One of my co-workers spent the summer working for Microsoft on a very cool project (IronPython). During his stay there he heard from Microsoft lawyers during a presentation that Microsoft has approached Novell numerous times over licensing concerning.NET patents during the last year or two. Each time they were rebuffed by Novell. He got the impression Microsoft was very displeased about this. In their minds after all,.NET *is* their IP and Novell was flouting it. One has to wonder what really changed Novell's mind about dealing with Microsoft in a patent covenant relationship.
unfortunately a log of web sites have brain-dead e-mail validation logic that claims "word+word@fqdn" is not a valid e-mail address. Comcast.com is one of these brain-dead sites.
Re:Fedora for Enterprise?
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
Awesome. I am interested in this. Thanks for the link!
Re:Fedora for Enterprise?
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
RHEL respins the ISOs every so often to incorporate the latest errata into their install disks. Fedora does not do this for obvious reasons. But it does make doing the initial install a bit of a pain, especially 4 months down the road.
As for downloading an entire package for a minor update, that's what debian does too. I think I prefer this anyway. Binary patching is too messy. Something else you might not realize is that, unlike on windows, most linux programs come in a single binary with a few auxillary files (like locale info, docs, etc). And the single binary or library file usually takes up most of the space anyway. So this is a much cleaner and less-error prone way to do it.
I set up a caching web proxy server usually that can help speed up the updates to multiple machines (I do this at home even). Sometimes I'll use repo-janitor to build mirror repositories (works good for install-fests at the local LUG) for my machines. Also it's possible to burn a DVD of all the errata and have yum work with that (I believe; it certainly works with apt), which is sometimes useful.
You're right, though. I would rather use RHEL or CentOS for a server.
Buy a new book every 6 months
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
That's great! Now not only do I get to upgrade my OS every 6 months but I can also buy another book too! After all, the FC4 book is now obsolete (and in seriousness, in some ways this is true). O'Reilly's got quite a thing going here!
The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros actually have an option (on by default) that does both sleep and hybernate. Basically when you shut the lid the laptop immediately goes into sleep mode but also at the same time writes the hibernate state information to disk. Then if you pop the lid open, it just awakes from sleep in a matter of a second or two (much much faster than Windows XP's sleep). If, while sleeping, you happen to remove the battery or otherwise lose power, then the next time the machine is booted, it boots from the hibernate information and restores right where you left off, in just about 20 seconds or so.
This is a great combination of the two mechanisms, and done in a way that the user will never really have to worry or care about it.
I disagree. Microsoft often takes similar specs, then uses their know-how to make a product that does similar things as a competitors. Is Microsoft pirating Apple's iPod? I don't think so. MS didn't create anything new IP-wise. Instead then just took a bunch of existing ideas and technologies and combined them in a novel (debatable) way.
Making a car that looks similar to an American car, and even has the same features (anti-lock brakes, etc) is hardly piracy. On the contrary, we'd call that capitalism. However if there are patents involved on, say, a special system for coordinating the steering and breaks, and the Chinese company had access to the technologies under contract with the US company but uses that information in its own products, then you might have a point. But I have a hard time seeing how things like cell phones or portable game players are going to qualify as pirate. It's a fine line, I agree. But crying piracy generally is pretty hypocritical by western companies.
I find it interesting that this article used the word "Piracy" in conjunction with all these products. In many cases it appears the products weren't pirate versions of the originals, but unique, new products in their own right that happened to have the same features or in some cases even more features. For example the phone that is claimed to be a knock-off of the LG phone looked very similar, but it was by no means identical. The device that looks like a PSP but has a nintendo emulator and GSM phone built in is quite brilliant, and is in no way a fake PSP anymore than a portable tape or cd player is a fake walkman. To me the product would be pirate if it was produced by the same company off the same assembly lines but shipped out the back door and sold as using the original name, brand, etc, but through grey-market channels. On a general level, IP theft in China by chinese companies doing business with foreign companies is rampant. The question is, though, is that a bad thing? Is this not, at some level, unchecked and enthusiastic entrepreneurialism at work? At some point this is bad, as the Chinese, like the Japanese were during the 70s and 80s, are not really inventing or creating anything new. But the Japanese did move on and now seem to be inventing and creating a lot of things, and I think the Chinese will too. But the question becomes what will become of the West?
4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
As has been stated many times, Novell can indeed continue to distribute software under the GPLv2. But as the FSF (which owns the copyrights on a lot of software that is critical to any linux distribution, such as the compiler) moves their software to the GPLv3, this new license forbids Novell from distributing such software because of their patent agreement with Microsoft. The GPLv3 does not allow Novell to license a particular patent that is alleged to cover the GPLv3 software to some people but not others. In other words Novell cannot respect the GPLv3 terms because of the patent covenant with Microsoft and therefore can use but not distribute GPLv3 software (well at least such software that is supposedly covered by the patents they licensed).
No in this case paranoia is in fact justified on the rest of your points. The FSF is often portrayed as a bunch of strange, ideological extremists, but the truth of the matter is they are more like prophets. Who would have thought when the FSF started working on the GPLv3 (well they did, obviously) that something as bizarre as this Novell and Microsoft deal would emerge, necessitating the need for the GPLv3. Obviously the FSF saw this coming and in the coming years we will thank them for having the foresight. Now the GPLv3 still isn't settled yet, and there still are legitimate concerns by a lot of people over it. Perhaps this Novell/Microsoft stuff will influence people like Torvalds to really get involved in the process and get everything moved to an acceptable GPLv3 as soon as possible (I have my doubts there).
Sorry but you're completely missing the point. If a country wants to have its own domain names in its own character set, internal that country and not globally available, then that is fine, since no one outside that country (non-speakers anyway) will be able to reach the site anyway (because they cannot type it). But to lobby the entire DNS system to change in a way that will fundamentally break the interconnected nature of the internet is silly. I also never said that English should be the language. I said that the Latin character set should be the default, for obvious reasons. Your comment about an American company reacting to an order in Chinese is somewhat of a red herring. If an American company truly wanted to do business with the Chinese (and if Asian characters were the basis of the default technology) then they would do well to find someone who could read it.
The point is that the fundamental, underlying technology (the computer and keyboard itself) is based on the Latin character set. Hence it forms the lowest comment denominator of the basic, core technologies that drive computing and the internet, across the entire world. Thus to change DNS on a global scale just isn't practical or even desirable.
So stop thinking that I'm just saying we all should be like Americans and speak English. This seems to be a knee-jerk reaction by many in the world to assume this kind of thing. For every close-minded American I know, there seems to be at least one equally close-minded non-American.
As for speaking English well, I would not have thought your English was any different from any other profane, vulgar American, had you not said you were from Norway.
There is a neat little piece of javascript at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/Pass wordComposer/ that lets you just think up a master password in your head and then use this applet to automatically generate a site-specific, unique hash and fill in the password field automatically. This way you can remember the passwords easily, you never have to save them or write them down. And if one site gets compromised, that password (the hash) won't work with any other site. The drawback is that if you don't have this piece of javascript then you can't get into your sites.
There is at least one reason, why non-latin letters in DNS names are a bad idea: International keyboards always support at least two character sets: latin (english) and whatever native character set. Thus even if the user is localized in Cyrillic, if I publish my DNS name using latin characters, I know that he and other people all over the world can reach it. If, on the other hand, I was a businessman in China, I could possibly create a nice domain name that was entirely in chinese, even if it was well-known name that was recognized across the world. Now suddenly only people who happen to a) read chinese and b) have chinese character support turned on in their OSes (input support, not display) can access my site. Whereas I could simply transliterate my name into latin characters and reach everyone, without requiring special input methods or skills on the part of the end user.
Certainly I don't want to have add big-5 support to my Linux install and all the various input methods just to visit a site of guy in China that wants to sell me radio-controlled electronics for my hobby (I do want to buy from him though).
I've always migrated my data every time I changed formats or computer platforms. Thus I still have intact an exact copy of my hard drive from 15 years ago on my hard drive and on CD-ROM. I also have all my data from the beginning of my computing days (1981) copied from floppies (5.25" and 3.5", neither of which are usable on my current PC) which I brought with me. The original floppies are long gone. So the moral of the story is to never rely on any one medium for long-term archival. Always plan to copy the data and bring it with you. One should never expect to be able to go back to some stored media format that's more than a couple of years old and read it.
Yes. Stock spams are getting through the greylister. The Greylist program tells the connection to wait 20 minutes. So the stock spammers wait 20 minutes. The stock spams aren't phased at all by grey-listing. They follow the RFCs.
Greylisting is no longer completely effective. Initially when I started it cut down on 100% of the spam, as you said. But now, thanks to this new botnet which does honor RFCs for e-mail, I have enlargement and stock spam coming through just fine after waiting out the delay. I won't disable greylisting though; it still keeps out a lot of spam. I'm just saying greylisting doesn't actually completely work. I agree with another poster who said SMTP is pretty much done. Too many people have ruined it for the rest of us. Time to replace the protocol completely with something less vulnerable to abuse.
Guess you should read a bit more carefully. Everything you said was definitely implied by my comment. See I was making the statement that our troop losses are the least of the problems. Iraqi blood is own our hands. Thus the cost has been much higher than Rumsfeld thought. So I cannot control what has happened in the past (recent past) but I can hope to influence the future. Before you accuse me of being narrow minded be sure to make sure you yourself have an open mind, which does not appear to be the case. I am not supporting Rumsfeld's actions nor condoning them. Merely stating facts. Your emotional reaction to my comments completely misses the point.
I read recently that simulations done under the Clinton administration found that an invasion of Iraq and the subsequent "nation-building" would requite sustained troop levels of 400,000. Rumsfeld, completely lacking any understanding of the middle east, the culture, and peoples, figured we can do it on the cheap. Alas it tis not so. Kind of reminds me of when Brutus assasinated Caesar, he figured the people would be happy and cheer him. I honestly think Rumsfeld thought the Iraqi people would support him as Brutus thought.
Now we're paying the price. And much more than just troop loss (which is actually quite minimal, compared to other world conflicts, like, say WWII).
In countries where education is available, and methods of protection are cheaply available, yes HIV and AIDS are controllable. But in the place where HIV and AIDS first orginated, the virus and the disease are widespread. Drugs are not widely available, and education in the disease and safe practices are lacking. Hence HIV is spreading at a fast rate and is affecting many many women and children in particular, because of the willful ignorance of husbands and men in their society. Witness the South African government minister who said that showering an encounter protected him from HIV. That attitude combined with the general attitudes toward women in that part of the world make HIV and AIDS a lot harder to combat and control. Judging by the rest of the world's inability to really care about Africa (millions have died from war and disease in the last 10 years), this problem--no this epidemic--will be with us for some time. This new AIDS virus-attacking-virus, if it can be cheap enough, will certainly go a long ways to help. But my point is that while we in the west have the means to attack the problem and prevent it in the future, there's a lot of work to be done in Africa and other places in order to change attitudes about HIV and AIDS, and protect people from them.
The deal is what Novell is licensing from Microsoft. Basically patents relating to Mono and probably wine and samba. Think about it. Samba is probably the single most important product in the linux world. Now that Novell has made an exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft, the effect on the rest of the industry is going to be chilling. Microsoft will use it's deal with Novell to apply indirect market pressure on everyone else, causing consumers to think twice about using linux in any capacity that relates to Samba (or mono or wine), knowing that Microsoft successfully pursued Novell. Of course if you use Novell you are safe, but this is only because Novell has already agreed to pay microsoft. This is a brilliant move on MS's part, one we denied was coming for years. They have now successfully co-opted what they could not buy: linux and GPL'd software. In essence they own GPL software now and can extract license fees from us at their will and pleasure. This is very very bad news for all of linux indeed. Novell has signed their death warrant and also brought risk and death to us all. Here's an interesting quote:
"On Thursday night, I asked Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer, if he could think of a company that had partnered with Microsoft and done really well as a result. Which Microsoft alliance, I asked him, would he cite as the model that he'd like to emulate?His response: "I think this partnership is breaking new ground." http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/03/linux-microsoft-n ovell-tech-cz_dl_1103linux.html?partner=yahootix
I wonder how Novell's stock price will respond. I guess it will probably go up since stock traders are pretty clueless and probably eat up everything Jaffe says.
Still loses quality, though. The significant quality loss is in the codec mainly, not necessarily signal losses, although this digital method would be of a somewhat higher quality than analog.
While that does decrease the risk somewhat, the risk is still there. My friend once showed me a keylogger he designed that would fit right inside the old AT-style keyboard plug. No software required. Of course that was years ago, but it's still possible that something like this could happen on computers in public places. This is a bit paranoid, granted. Maybe you can use knoppix and then change your bank passwords shortly after.
Slashdot Mirror
And this really is sad because .NET in general and C# in particular is so much better than Java for many reasons, in specific circumstances. It is cleaner, more flexible, and does things the JVM just cannot do yet (soon it will though) such as generics--true generics, not the Java 5 pseudo-generics--and delegates. Even in the current state Mono is in, it's a joy to use to program Linux apps in GTK#. Even the most hawkish anti-Mono people have to admit that MS's patents really only cover the parts of .NET that are more interesting which includes ASP.net. The rest of the CLR is still quite useful in its own right even if we strip the patented stuff. This is the reason Redhat's legal counsel is comfortable with them shipping Mono, beagle, etc with FC6. So we shouldn't count C# out just yet. Besides we can always compile C# to binary and have a great language without the VM.
One of my co-workers spent the summer working for Microsoft on a very cool project (IronPython). During his stay there he heard from Microsoft lawyers during a presentation that Microsoft has approached Novell numerous times over licensing concerning .NET patents during the last year or two. Each time they were rebuffed by Novell. He got the impression Microsoft was very displeased about this. In their minds after all, .NET *is* their IP and Novell was flouting it. One has to wonder what really changed Novell's mind about dealing with Microsoft in a patent covenant relationship.
unfortunately a log of web sites have brain-dead e-mail validation logic that claims "word+word@fqdn" is not a valid e-mail address. Comcast.com is one of these brain-dead sites.
Awesome. I am interested in this. Thanks for the link!
RHEL respins the ISOs every so often to incorporate the latest errata into their install disks. Fedora does not do this for obvious reasons. But it does make doing the initial install a bit of a pain, especially 4 months down the road.
As for downloading an entire package for a minor update, that's what debian does too. I think I prefer this anyway. Binary patching is too messy. Something else you might not realize is that, unlike on windows, most linux programs come in a single binary with a few auxillary files (like locale info, docs, etc). And the single binary or library file usually takes up most of the space anyway. So this is a much cleaner and less-error prone way to do it.
I set up a caching web proxy server usually that can help speed up the updates to multiple machines (I do this at home even). Sometimes I'll use repo-janitor to build mirror repositories (works good for install-fests at the local LUG) for my machines. Also it's possible to burn a DVD of all the errata and have yum work with that (I believe; it certainly works with apt), which is sometimes useful.
You're right, though. I would rather use RHEL or CentOS for a server.
That's great! Now not only do I get to upgrade my OS every 6 months but I can also buy another book too! After all, the FC4 book is now obsolete (and in seriousness, in some ways this is true). O'Reilly's got quite a thing going here!
Seriously, their Fedora books are pretty good.
The new MacBooks and MacBook Pros actually have an option (on by default) that does both sleep and hybernate. Basically when you shut the lid the laptop immediately goes into sleep mode but also at the same time writes the hibernate state information to disk. Then if you pop the lid open, it just awakes from sleep in a matter of a second or two (much much faster than Windows XP's sleep). If, while sleeping, you happen to remove the battery or otherwise lose power, then the next time the machine is booted, it boots from the hibernate information and restores right where you left off, in just about 20 seconds or so.
This is a great combination of the two mechanisms, and done in a way that the user will never really have to worry or care about it.
I disagree. Microsoft often takes similar specs, then uses their know-how to make a product that does similar things as a competitors. Is Microsoft pirating Apple's iPod? I don't think so. MS didn't create anything new IP-wise. Instead then just took a bunch of existing ideas and technologies and combined them in a novel (debatable) way.
Making a car that looks similar to an American car, and even has the same features (anti-lock brakes, etc) is hardly piracy. On the contrary, we'd call that capitalism. However if there are patents involved on, say, a special system for coordinating the steering and breaks, and the Chinese company had access to the technologies under contract with the US company but uses that information in its own products, then you might have a point. But I have a hard time seeing how things like cell phones or portable game players are going to qualify as pirate. It's a fine line, I agree. But crying piracy generally is pretty hypocritical by western companies.
I find it interesting that this article used the word "Piracy" in conjunction with all these products. In many cases it appears the products weren't pirate versions of the originals, but unique, new products in their own right that happened to have the same features or in some cases even more features. For example the phone that is claimed to be a knock-off of the LG phone looked very similar, but it was by no means identical. The device that looks like a PSP but has a nintendo emulator and GSM phone built in is quite brilliant, and is in no way a fake PSP anymore than a portable tape or cd player is a fake walkman. To me the product would be pirate if it was produced by the same company off the same assembly lines but shipped out the back door and sold as using the original name, brand, etc, but through grey-market channels. On a general level, IP theft in China by chinese companies doing business with foreign companies is rampant. The question is, though, is that a bad thing? Is this not, at some level, unchecked and enthusiastic entrepreneurialism at work? At some point this is bad, as the Chinese, like the Japanese were during the 70s and 80s, are not really inventing or creating anything new. But the Japanese did move on and now seem to be inventing and creating a lot of things, and I think the Chinese will too. But the question becomes what will become of the West?
4. Does anyone really care ? If Novell and FSF don't talk, how will they (FSF) stop Novell from using open source code ? They can't, as long as they respect the licencing.
As has been stated many times, Novell can indeed continue to distribute software under the GPLv2. But as the FSF (which owns the copyrights on a lot of software that is critical to any linux distribution, such as the compiler) moves their software to the GPLv3, this new license forbids Novell from distributing such software because of their patent agreement with Microsoft. The GPLv3 does not allow Novell to license a particular patent that is alleged to cover the GPLv3 software to some people but not others. In other words Novell cannot respect the GPLv3 terms because of the patent covenant with Microsoft and therefore can use but not distribute GPLv3 software (well at least such software that is supposedly covered by the patents they licensed).
No in this case paranoia is in fact justified on the rest of your points. The FSF is often portrayed as a bunch of strange, ideological extremists, but the truth of the matter is they are more like prophets. Who would have thought when the FSF started working on the GPLv3 (well they did, obviously) that something as bizarre as this Novell and Microsoft deal would emerge, necessitating the need for the GPLv3. Obviously the FSF saw this coming and in the coming years we will thank them for having the foresight. Now the GPLv3 still isn't settled yet, and there still are legitimate concerns by a lot of people over it. Perhaps this Novell/Microsoft stuff will influence people like Torvalds to really get involved in the process and get everything moved to an acceptable GPLv3 as soon as possible (I have my doubts there).
Sorry but you're completely missing the point. If a country wants to have its own domain names in its own character set, internal that country and not globally available, then that is fine, since no one outside that country (non-speakers anyway) will be able to reach the site anyway (because they cannot type it). But to lobby the entire DNS system to change in a way that will fundamentally break the interconnected nature of the internet is silly. I also never said that English should be the language. I said that the Latin character set should be the default, for obvious reasons. Your comment about an American company reacting to an order in Chinese is somewhat of a red herring. If an American company truly wanted to do business with the Chinese (and if Asian characters were the basis of the default technology) then they would do well to find someone who could read it.
The point is that the fundamental, underlying technology (the computer and keyboard itself) is based on the Latin character set. Hence it forms the lowest comment denominator of the basic, core technologies that drive computing and the internet, across the entire world. Thus to change DNS on a global scale just isn't practical or even desirable.
So stop thinking that I'm just saying we all should be like Americans and speak English. This seems to be a knee-jerk reaction by many in the world to assume this kind of thing. For every close-minded American I know, there seems to be at least one equally close-minded non-American.
As for speaking English well, I would not have thought your English was any different from any other profane, vulgar American, had you not said you were from Norway.
There is a neat little piece of javascript at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/Pass wordComposer/ that lets you just think up a master password in your head and then use this applet to automatically generate a site-specific, unique hash and fill in the password field automatically. This way you can remember the passwords easily, you never have to save them or write them down. And if one site gets compromised, that password (the hash) won't work with any other site. The drawback is that if you don't have this piece of javascript then you can't get into your sites.
There is at least one reason, why non-latin letters in DNS names are a bad idea: International keyboards always support at least two character sets: latin (english) and whatever native character set. Thus even if the user is localized in Cyrillic, if I publish my DNS name using latin characters, I know that he and other people all over the world can reach it. If, on the other hand, I was a businessman in China, I could possibly create a nice domain name that was entirely in chinese, even if it was well-known name that was recognized across the world. Now suddenly only people who happen to a) read chinese and b) have chinese character support turned on in their OSes (input support, not display) can access my site. Whereas I could simply transliterate my name into latin characters and reach everyone, without requiring special input methods or skills on the part of the end user.
Certainly I don't want to have add big-5 support to my Linux install and all the various input methods just to visit a site of guy in China that wants to sell me radio-controlled electronics for my hobby (I do want to buy from him though).
I've always migrated my data every time I changed formats or computer platforms. Thus I still have intact an exact copy of my hard drive from 15 years ago on my hard drive and on CD-ROM. I also have all my data from the beginning of my computing days (1981) copied from floppies (5.25" and 3.5", neither of which are usable on my current PC) which I brought with me. The original floppies are long gone. So the moral of the story is to never rely on any one medium for long-term archival. Always plan to copy the data and bring it with you. One should never expect to be able to go back to some stored media format that's more than a couple of years old and read it.
Yes. Stock spams are getting through the greylister. The Greylist program tells the connection to wait 20 minutes. So the stock spammers wait 20 minutes. The stock spams aren't phased at all by grey-listing. They follow the RFCs.
Greylisting is no longer completely effective. Initially when I started it cut down on 100% of the spam, as you said. But now, thanks to this new botnet which does honor RFCs for e-mail, I have enlargement and stock spam coming through just fine after waiting out the delay. I won't disable greylisting though; it still keeps out a lot of spam. I'm just saying greylisting doesn't actually completely work. I agree with another poster who said SMTP is pretty much done. Too many people have ruined it for the rest of us. Time to replace the protocol completely with something less vulnerable to abuse.
Guess you should read a bit more carefully. Everything you said was definitely implied by my comment. See I was making the statement that our troop losses are the least of the problems. Iraqi blood is own our hands. Thus the cost has been much higher than Rumsfeld thought. So I cannot control what has happened in the past (recent past) but I can hope to influence the future. Before you accuse me of being narrow minded be sure to make sure you yourself have an open mind, which does not appear to be the case. I am not supporting Rumsfeld's actions nor condoning them. Merely stating facts. Your emotional reaction to my comments completely misses the point.
I read recently that simulations done under the Clinton administration found that an invasion of Iraq and the subsequent "nation-building" would requite sustained troop levels of 400,000. Rumsfeld, completely lacking any understanding of the middle east, the culture, and peoples, figured we can do it on the cheap. Alas it tis not so. Kind of reminds me of when Brutus assasinated Caesar, he figured the people would be happy and cheer him. I honestly think Rumsfeld thought the Iraqi people would support him as Brutus thought.
Now we're paying the price. And much more than just troop loss (which is actually quite minimal, compared to other world conflicts, like, say WWII).
In countries where education is available, and methods of protection are cheaply available, yes HIV and AIDS are controllable. But in the place where HIV and AIDS first orginated, the virus and the disease are widespread. Drugs are not widely available, and education in the disease and safe practices are lacking. Hence HIV is spreading at a fast rate and is affecting many many women and children in particular, because of the willful ignorance of husbands and men in their society. Witness the South African government minister who said that showering an encounter protected him from HIV. That attitude combined with the general attitudes toward women in that part of the world make HIV and AIDS a lot harder to combat and control. Judging by the rest of the world's inability to really care about Africa (millions have died from war and disease in the last 10 years), this problem--no this epidemic--will be with us for some time. This new AIDS virus-attacking-virus, if it can be cheap enough, will certainly go a long ways to help. But my point is that while we in the west have the means to attack the problem and prevent it in the future, there's a lot of work to be done in Africa and other places in order to change attitudes about HIV and AIDS, and protect people from them.
Unfortunately patents trump copyright. The GPL cannot save us if the patents come killing us.
The other poster is correct about IBM. It's not the end of the world yet, but it certainly is another nail in the coffin of Novell.
The deal is what Novell is licensing from Microsoft. Basically patents relating to Mono and probably wine and samba. Think about it. Samba is probably the single most important product in the linux world. Now that Novell has made an exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft, the effect on the rest of the industry is going to be chilling. Microsoft will use it's deal with Novell to apply indirect market pressure on everyone else, causing consumers to think twice about using linux in any capacity that relates to Samba (or mono or wine), knowing that Microsoft successfully pursued Novell. Of course if you use Novell you are safe, but this is only because Novell has already agreed to pay microsoft. This is a brilliant move on MS's part, one we denied was coming for years. They have now successfully co-opted what they could not buy: linux and GPL'd software. In essence they own GPL software now and can extract license fees from us at their will and pleasure. This is very very bad news for all of linux indeed. Novell has signed their death warrant and also brought risk and death to us all. Here's an interesting quote:
n ovell-tech-cz_dl_1103linux.html?partner=yahootix
"On Thursday night, I asked Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology
officer, if he could think of a company that had partnered with
Microsoft and done really well as a result. Which Microsoft alliance,
I asked him, would he cite as the model that he'd like to emulate?His
response: "I think this partnership is breaking new ground."
http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/03/linux-microsoft-
I wonder how Novell's stock price will respond. I guess it will probably go up since stock traders are pretty clueless and probably eat up everything Jaffe says.
Good luck. IE7 fixes enough CSS to make it not work with the old IE 6 hacks but not enough to allow you to use one sane standard CSS template. Sorry.
Still loses quality, though. The significant quality loss is in the codec mainly, not necessarily signal losses, although this digital method would be of a somewhat higher quality than analog.
Change your yum sources and do a yum update. Of course you will need to wait a bit for yum mirrors to catch up likely.
While that does decrease the risk somewhat, the risk is still there. My friend once showed me a keylogger he designed that would fit right inside the old AT-style keyboard plug. No software required. Of course that was years ago, but it's still possible that something like this could happen on computers in public places. This is a bit paranoid, granted. Maybe you can use knoppix and then change your bank passwords shortly after.