Well written comment. I only have a couple of objections to some of your statements.
> Q: Does this make linux more secure than closed source systems? > A: No!
What it does do is give Linux the *potential* to be more secure (note the emphasis). Patches are released early and often, usually within hours of the security hole being found.
> Q: Is linux more secure or less secure than other systems? > A: There is no clear answer. Weigh up the pros/cons of the security records of each OS you are considering, and the areas in > which they have had security problems and decide for yourself.
A system's security can only be judged by comparing it with other systems. No system can be absolutely secure.
So, let's compare it with Microsoft's security model (I know, easy target...). The hole with VBScript in Outlook has been well known for over a year (Melissa was the first widespread exploit). Yet it took until *last month* for MS to *announce* that they intended to release a patch for Outlook. They still have not actually released that patch.
This does lead me to believe that Linux has a far greater potential than NT for having greater security.
I think this is more or less what you're looking for. There aren't numeric ratings, but rather there are descriptions of each license, and exactly how free it is, and in what ways.
I have never engaged in "moderate this up" posts before (I consider most of them to be trolls), but this lucid, well thought out post absolutely deserves a (5, Informative).
I was just looking up information on it, and I'm not positive anymore that it will be released for Linux.
I have no clue where I read that, and it may have been either a rumor or I was confusing it with something else. Usually any company making a game for Linux these days makes sure it's mentioned somewhere in the FAQ...
Hopefully my first post was correct, otherwise let's hope it works under Wine!
It's called Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption. It's made by Nihilistic.
They're getting close to demo release, I think.
Looks like a good plot. It takes place in medieval times. You're a religously devout knight who falls in forbidden love with a nun and gets Embraced by a Brujah.
The woman goes searching for a way to turn you mortal again, and then mysteriously disappears. You set off to find her.
Looks pretty cool - I'm definitely reserving a copy:)
Oh, definitely. I just wish UT had come in a seperate box for Linux or something so it would have been obvious what OS my purchase was for.
I no longer run MS windows since I booted up and it spontaneously decided it didn't know what type of card my Voodoo3 was. Re-installing the drivers did not help. Not a hardware problem, X and Quake 2 worked just fine...
I've now convinced my best friend to convert as well, since he ran "disk cleanup" on Win98 and it decided for some reason he wasn't using about 300.dll files in the/windows and/windows/system directories...
I'm going to order Heavy Gear 2 real soon now. (just as soon as I pay some of this massive credit card balance...) I'm going to buy Neverwinter Nights and whatever the Vampire game is called (I forget) the moment they hit the shelves.
I have a copy of Kingpin (and my friend and I are working on a mod to make coop play work).
> Outside a tiny (relatively speaking) demimonde, www.jargon.org has no real authority. Referring to it will be as effective as referring to the Book of the Subgenius.
Hail Bob! Find the true meaning of "Slack"ware!
Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to get carried away. (actually, that slackware thing just came to me. makes you wonder, though...)
I understand what you're saying (despite getting the reference), but the thing is that when I attempt to speak of certain social groups of which I am not a member, I make an effort to utilize their terminology. It just seems like a small thing to expect the same courtesy in return. (sigh)
Someone please tell me how long it's been since Melissa? It's been over a year, hasn't it?
If open-source projects took that long to close up something this glaring, that had already been pointed out and exploited more than once, there would be no internet right now.
BIND would be so broken that if you typed "www.microsoft.com", for example, you would be taken instead to wherever the script-kiddie-of-the-day decided to make it point to. (of course, that would probably be an improvement, but...)
If that's not considered a bad turn-around for closing up a *hardcore* security violation, then it's no wonder that Microsoft has gained monopoly-like powers over the computer industry. They can write as many bugs as they want to, and as long as it's fixed within three years or so, it's "really not a bad turn-around time for a patch."
LIMEAid is a GTK+ front-end to LIME (Is an Mp3 Encoder). LIMEAid supports the entire range of bitrates that LIME can use, and best of all, it's no longer LAME!
Changes: First Freshmeat Announcement Supports KDE and GNOME menuing systems
> Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics.
This is actually kind of the heart of the debate, isn't it?
Cracking usually doesn't involve 3d imagery.
Hacking can. Follow this example.
If I am a special-effects wizard, working on production film for a movie, then I am hacking on the FX. A visually impresive explosion might be an exemplary hack, using definitions 1-6 of "hacker", and 2,4 of "hack" (www.jargon.org).
Also possibly using 8 of hack, if I enjoy playing NetHack in my spare time while the computer is rendering the frames (which I do/would). (www.nethack.org)
I am a big fan of many types of music. I have many metal CDs (only two Metallica, and I'm not going to get any more Metallica now), and I also have four They Might Be Giants CDs.
Believe me when I say that I don't put the two close together for fear of them disappearing (kind of like matter and anti-matter).:)
TMBG is a great band, but any review that said they were a great example of what Metal should be would definitely cause me to rethink visiting that web site.
I used to think the music they played at the end of Castlevania's one and two (don't remember about three) after you killed Dracula was original. Now I know better.
Anybody here ever hear of Yngwie Malmsteen?
Get Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force (1984 album - don't remember the title), and listen to track five (Icarus Dream Suite). About 5 minutes and 30 seconds into it, you'll hear something hauntingly familiar...that came out a year before Castlevania I.
The only question I have is, did they both happen to use the same piece of classical music as a base for their songs, or did Konami license the song from him? (or did they just use it without asking?)
It's not actually FTL communcation - the only information you can get is what's already there. What changes is the way you're looking at it. It just looks "spooky" when you actually see it happening. Recognizing an effect is possible mathematically is not the same as viewing it experientially.
The whole reason I object to seeing this kind of breakage is because I know this stuff can be done better.
The whole reason I object to this objection is because you don't seem to understand the idea of "development release".
This is not code intended to be running high-availability web servers. This is code that is intended to be downloaded by people who are willing to do testing on it themselves, to watch things break, and then to submit core dumps/debug output/code patches to the main kernel developers. If you put this kernel on your production box, then yes, something will most likely break.
Is the fault that of the kernel developers? No, the fault is yours for being ignorant.
One reason testing is done this way is because out in the wide world of kernel release land, people are going to use different setups. What happens if some odd interaction between my AMI Megaraid card and my Soundblaster 128 on my VIA motherboard with an Athlon processor brings my system down? What would have happened if none of the kernel developers had this exact setup that demonstrated this problem, and they hadn't been putting out development releases?
Answer: They might not have found the problem in the IRQ spinlock or whatever would have caused that rhetorical situation.
Intel just announced its new Bond, Chip Bond series of processors using the.007 micron process.
The Chip Bond processor line will start with Goldeneye at 150 GHz, giving you a great deal of Room, With a View to expanding up to 300GHz by next September. They will simultaneously release their new low-end processor, the Goldfinger, which will be targeted at the budget conscious market. The latest addition to the Xeon series, Octopussy, will have 8 MB of full-speed cache...
>> It has been proven over and over again (from the Goths to the American Revolution to Vietnam) >> that distributed, guerilla-style fighting is less fragile...
Goths proved this? I've never seen a Goth that was really interested in fighting. Seems like all they want to do is stand there in their black cloaks and pretend to be vampires.
Everyone knows that the Discordians FOUGHT the undead Nazis led by the Illuminati during the rock concert!:)
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I read the Illuminatus! trilogy, or I would remember where the concert took place... (somewhere in Austria? or is that where the AMA was from? one forgets so quickly...)
-----
I'm testing Netscape 6.0 preview. Either they accidentally compiled with debug code and symbols turned on, or this thing is a real bitch of a memory hog. I've got six Netscape windows open, and I'm swapping like there's no tomorrow!
XFree 4.0 supports non-RGB colorspaces in video memory. This will greatly enhance MPEG playback, as colorspace translation is no longer necessary. Translating from YUV to RGB is an expensive calculation that needed to be done every frame. Now playback should be speeded up a good deal.
I'm not positive, but I don't think that MS Windows supports non-RGB colorspaces, so theoretically MPEG playback should be faster using a movie player optimized for XFree 4.0 than using one optimized for Microsoft's OS.
IANAPP (I Am Not A Professional Physicist), but I believe I can answer some of your questions.
> 1) Electrons seem to be perpetual motion machines.
Not really, it only seems that way. Entropy (slow loss of energy due to friction, gravity, magnetic fields and other elements opposing the current state) does happen, but is not observable in any way that a human would be able to notice, except for mathematically. The electromagnetic interaction between a proton and an electron provides the centripetal force necessary to maintain the electron in a stable orbit. The amount of gravitational attraction generated by an electron is so small that the orbit will not decay naturally for billions of years. Note that in this case, when the orbit decays, instead of falling inward toward the proton, like a spaceship around a planet, the electron will actually fly away from the proton.
2) Does gravity push or pull and how would one prove it? If it pushes that would sure explain why all the Zero G crystal can be duplicated on earth.
All particles push on objects they collide with, however in the case of gravitons, my understanding is that they push on the fabric of space-time rather than the physical objects. This could be seen as a mathematical hack, though, since in effect this is the same as the object itself warping space-time, as per Einstein.
3) Speed of light seems to lock down lots of physics. Is it the speed of light or the speed of gravity that is the limiting factor?
It seems to be the speed of light. And it's not really a lock-down, just a natural limiting factor in many equations. In a hyperbolic formula, one could say the asymtopes of the equation are limiting factors in much the same way.
4) There always seems to be enough electrons.
I don't think I understand the question here:) Enough electrons for what? There are atoms with fewer electrons than protons - they're called ions. You could just as well say there always seem to be enough protons, or gluons, or quarks, or photons, etc., etc. It doesn't mean anything.
Ummm - that's not really the same thing they're talking about here. The benefits they're talking about are on the order of figuring out how to take liver cells from you and grow them quickly into a new liver so that you can get a transplant before you die of liver failure.
I saw that thing, too (was it on 20/20 or CNN?), and that was a much cruder version of what they've got now. The idea is to make it so they don't have to use a host animal to grow the new organ.
-- Ethan Baldridge
The only reason I keep my Fat32 partition around is so I can mount it like the bitch it is.
Looking at the comments, I'm seeing a lot of postings to the effect that people can't see why Walnut Creek would want to "get rid of" a Linux distribution, looking at it from the standpoint that it might make them a lot of money.
People, you need to step back and breathe the fresh, GNU air.;)
Walnut Creek is not doing this because it is a good business move. They are doing it in the same spirit that they have consistently shown to Linux, BSD, and all other open source projects. They are being the GOOD GUYS!
They know that there is a possibility that Slackware Linux will fall by the wayside once BSDI moves in. They don't want to see that happening, so they're cutting it loose before something bad happens to it.
The Walnut Creek Archives have been a bastion of open source software and championship for many, many years now. I'm sure that will not change. All they are trying to do is make sure that Slackware will sink or swim on its own merits, not go unattended because of the merger with BSDI.
Slashdot Mirror
Well written comment. I only have a couple of objections to some of your statements.
> Q: Does this make linux more secure than closed source systems?
> A: No!
What it does do is give Linux the *potential* to be more secure (note the emphasis). Patches are released early and often, usually within hours of the security hole being found.
> Q: Is linux more secure or less secure than other systems?
> A: There is no clear answer. Weigh up the pros/cons of the security records of each OS you are considering, and the areas in
> which they have had security problems and decide for yourself.
A system's security can only be judged by comparing it with other systems. No system can be absolutely secure.
So, let's compare it with Microsoft's security model (I know, easy target...). The hole with VBScript in Outlook has been well known for over a year (Melissa was the first widespread exploit). Yet it took until *last month* for MS to *announce* that they intended to release a patch for Outlook. They still have not actually released that patch.
This does lead me to believe that Linux has a far greater potential than NT for having greater security.
Check this page out:
http://www.gnu.org/p hilosophy/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses
I think this is more or less what you're looking for. There aren't numeric ratings, but rather there are descriptions of each license, and exactly how free it is, and in what ways.
I have never engaged in "moderate this up" posts before (I consider most of them to be trolls), but this lucid, well thought out post absolutely deserves a (5, Informative).
I was just looking up information on it, and I'm not positive anymore that it will be released for Linux.
I have no clue where I read that, and it may have been either a rumor or I was confusing it with something else. Usually any company making a game for Linux these days makes sure it's mentioned somewhere in the FAQ...
Hopefully my first post was correct, otherwise let's hope it works under Wine!
It's called Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption. It's made by Nihilistic.
:)
They're getting close to demo release, I think.
Looks like a good plot. It takes place in medieval times. You're a religously devout knight who falls in forbidden love with a nun and gets Embraced by a Brujah.
The woman goes searching for a way to turn you mortal again, and then mysteriously disappears. You set off to find her.
Looks pretty cool - I'm definitely reserving a copy
Oh, definitely. I just wish UT had come in a seperate box for Linux or something so it would have been obvious what OS my purchase was for.
.dll files in the /windows and /windows/system directories...
I no longer run MS windows since I booted up and it spontaneously decided it didn't know what type of card my Voodoo3 was. Re-installing the drivers did not help. Not a hardware problem, X and Quake 2 worked just fine...
I've now convinced my best friend to convert as well, since he ran "disk cleanup" on Win98 and it decided for some reason he wasn't using about 300
I'm going to order Heavy Gear 2 real soon now. (just as soon as I pay some of this massive credit card balance...)
I'm going to buy Neverwinter Nights and whatever the Vampire game is called (I forget) the moment they hit the shelves.
I have a copy of Kingpin (and my friend and I are working on a mod to make coop play work).
So, yes, Virginia, there is a market.
> Outside a tiny (relatively speaking) demimonde, www.jargon.org has no real authority. Referring to it will be as effective as referring to the Book of the Subgenius.
:)
Hail Bob! Find the true meaning of "Slack"ware!
Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to get carried away. (actually, that slackware thing just came to me. makes you wonder, though...)
I understand what you're saying (despite getting the reference), but the thing is that when I attempt to speak of certain social groups of which I am not a member, I make an effort to utilize their terminology. It just seems like a small thing to expect the same courtesy in return. (sigh)
Thanks for making my day, though
Excuse me?
Someone please tell me how long it's been since Melissa? It's been over a year, hasn't it?
If open-source projects took that long to close up something this glaring, that had already been pointed out and exploited more than once, there would be no internet right now.
BIND would be so broken that if you typed "www.microsoft.com", for example, you would be taken instead to wherever the script-kiddie-of-the-day decided to make it point to. (of course, that would probably be an improvement, but...)
If that's not considered a bad turn-around for closing up a *hardcore* security violation, then it's no wonder that Microsoft has gained monopoly-like powers over the computer industry. They can write as many bugs as they want to, and as long as it's fixed within three years or so, it's "really not a bad turn-around time for a patch."
Sheesh.
LIMEAid 0.3.6
LIMEAid is a GTK+ front-end to LIME (Is an Mp3 Encoder). LIMEAid supports the entire range of bitrates that LIME can use, and best of all, it's no longer LAME!
Changes: First Freshmeat Announcement
Supports KDE and GNOME menuing systems
> Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics.
This is actually kind of the heart of the debate, isn't it?
Cracking usually doesn't involve 3d imagery.
Hacking can. Follow this example.
If I am a special-effects wizard, working on production film for a movie, then I am hacking on the FX. A visually impresive explosion might be an exemplary hack, using definitions 1-6 of "hacker", and 2,4 of "hack" (www.jargon.org).
Also possibly using 8 of hack, if I enjoy playing NetHack in my spare time while the computer is rendering the frames (which I do/would). (www.nethack.org)
I am a big fan of many types of music. I have many metal CDs (only two Metallica, and I'm not going to get any more Metallica now), and I also have four They Might Be Giants CDs.
:)
Believe me when I say that I don't put the two close together for fear of them disappearing (kind of like matter and anti-matter).
TMBG is a great band, but any review that said they were a great example of what Metal should be would definitely cause me to rethink visiting that web site.
I used to think the music they played at the end of Castlevania's one and two (don't remember about three) after you killed Dracula was original. Now I know better.
Anybody here ever hear of Yngwie Malmsteen?
Get Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force (1984 album - don't remember the title), and listen to track five (Icarus Dream Suite). About 5 minutes and 30 seconds into it, you'll hear something hauntingly familiar...that came out a year before Castlevania I.
The only question I have is, did they both happen to use the same piece of classical music as a base for their songs, or did Konami license the song from him? (or did they just use it without asking?)
Do you work at NASA?
Did you forget to convert centimeters to inches?
It's not actually FTL communcation - the only information you can get is what's already there. What changes is the way you're looking at it. It just looks "spooky" when you actually see it happening. Recognizing an effect is possible mathematically is not the same as viewing it experientially.
The whole reason I object to seeing this kind of breakage is because I know this stuff can be done better.
The whole reason I object to this objection is because you don't seem to understand the idea of "development release".
This is not code intended to be running high-availability web servers. This is code that is intended to be downloaded by people who are willing to do testing on it themselves, to watch things break, and then to submit core dumps/debug output/code patches to the main kernel developers. If you put this kernel on your production box, then yes, something will most likely break.
Is the fault that of the kernel developers? No, the fault is yours for being ignorant.
One reason testing is done this way is because out in the wide world of kernel release land, people are going to use different setups. What happens if some odd interaction between my AMI Megaraid card and my Soundblaster 128 on my VIA motherboard with an Athlon processor brings my system down? What would have happened if none of the kernel developers had this exact setup that demonstrated this problem, and they hadn't been putting out development releases?
Answer: They might not have found the problem in the IRQ spinlock or whatever would have caused that rhetorical situation.
Development releases are a GOOD THING.
What'll Intel's code name for that series be?
.007 micron process.
I can see it now:
Intel just announced its new Bond, Chip Bond series of processors using the
The Chip Bond processor line will start with Goldeneye at 150 GHz, giving you a great deal of Room, With a View to expanding up to 300GHz by next September. They will simultaneously release their new low-end processor, the Goldfinger, which will be targeted at the budget conscious market. The latest addition to the Xeon series, Octopussy, will have 8 MB of full-speed cache...
Can't wait to see the commercials.
>> It has been proven over and over again (from the Goths to the American Revolution to Vietnam)
>> that distributed, guerilla-style fighting is less fragile...
Goths proved this?
I've never seen a Goth that was really interested in fighting. Seems like all they want to do is stand there in their black cloaks and pretend to be vampires.
Didn't you read his .signature?
:)
Everyone knows that the Discordians FOUGHT the undead Nazis led by the Illuminati during the rock concert!
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I read the Illuminatus! trilogy, or I would remember where the concert took place... (somewhere in Austria? or is that where the AMA was from? one forgets so quickly...)
-----
I'm testing Netscape 6.0 preview. Either they accidentally compiled with debug code and symbols turned on, or this thing is a real bitch of a memory hog. I've got six Netscape windows open, and I'm swapping like there's no tomorrow!
If you look at the link to the guidelines for posting a reply, it says they extended the deadline to March 20th, not March 31st.
It's already too late.
XFree 4.0 supports non-RGB colorspaces in video memory. This will greatly enhance MPEG playback, as colorspace translation is no longer necessary. Translating from YUV to RGB is an expensive calculation that needed to be done every frame. Now playback should be speeded up a good deal.
:)
I'm not positive, but I don't think that MS Windows supports non-RGB colorspaces, so theoretically MPEG playback should be faster using a movie player optimized for XFree 4.0 than using one optimized for Microsoft's OS.
That's what I love about Open Source
1- Photons DO have an inertial mass (this has been known for ~70 years)... unless they are at rest (haven't seen a photon at rest yet!)
:)
If it was at rest, you wouldn't see it, silly
IANAPP (I Am Not A Professional Physicist), but I believe I can answer some of your questions.
:)
> 1) Electrons seem to be perpetual motion machines.
Not really, it only seems that way. Entropy (slow loss of energy due to friction, gravity, magnetic fields and other elements opposing the current state) does happen, but is not observable in any way that a human would be able to notice, except for mathematically. The electromagnetic interaction between a proton and an electron provides the centripetal force necessary to maintain the electron in a stable orbit. The amount of gravitational attraction generated by an electron is so small that the orbit will not decay naturally for billions of years. Note that in this case, when the orbit decays, instead of falling inward toward the proton, like a spaceship around a planet, the electron will actually fly away from the proton.
2) Does gravity push or pull and how would one prove it? If it pushes that would sure explain why all the Zero G crystal can be duplicated on earth.
All particles push on objects they collide with, however in the case of gravitons, my understanding is that they push on the fabric of space-time rather than the physical objects. This could be seen as a mathematical hack, though, since in effect this is the same as the object itself warping space-time, as per Einstein.
3) Speed of light seems to lock down lots of physics. Is it the speed of light or the speed of gravity that is the limiting factor?
It seems to be the speed of light. And it's not really a lock-down, just a natural limiting factor in many equations. In a hyperbolic formula, one could say the asymtopes of the equation are limiting factors in much the same way.
4) There always seems to be enough electrons.
I don't think I understand the question here
Enough electrons for what? There are atoms with fewer electrons than protons - they're called ions. You could just as well say there always seem to be enough protons, or gluons, or quarks, or photons, etc., etc. It doesn't mean anything.
Ummm - that's not really the same thing they're talking about here. The benefits they're talking about are on the order of figuring out how to take liver cells from you and grow them quickly into a new liver so that you can get a transplant before you die of liver failure.
I saw that thing, too (was it on 20/20 or CNN?), and that was a much cruder version of what they've got now. The idea is to make it so they don't have to use a host animal to grow the new organ.
--
Ethan Baldridge
The only reason I keep my Fat32 partition around is so I can mount it like the bitch it is.
Looking at the comments, I'm seeing a lot of postings to the effect that people can't see why Walnut Creek would want to "get rid of" a Linux distribution, looking at it from the standpoint that it might make them a lot of money.
;)
People, you need to step back and breathe the fresh, GNU air.
Walnut Creek is not doing this because it is a good business move. They are doing it in the same spirit that they have consistently shown to Linux, BSD, and all other open source projects. They are being the GOOD GUYS!
They know that there is a possibility that Slackware Linux will fall by the wayside once BSDI moves in. They don't want to see that happening, so they're cutting it loose before something bad happens to it.
The Walnut Creek Archives have been a bastion of open source software and championship for many, many years now. I'm sure that will not change. All they are trying to do is make sure that Slackware will sink or swim on its own merits, not go unattended because of the merger with BSDI.
--
Ethan Baldridge