1. Take a successful comercial product 2. Try to rewrite it from the ground up with an open source license 3. Announce this on slashdot 4. Get a lot of kudos 5. ??? 6. Profit
If You serously think the French government was against the war because of some higher reason than You are as dumb as the people that think Bush attacked for a higher reason.
The French just had better oil contracts with Saddam than the US. So the USA showed the world (and the French) that they have the biggest willy in town.
And now the US get beat up on it. Which is again unfair, because now they at least want to repair what they destroyed by first supporting Saddam, then bombing the country, then sanction it for ten years and then bombing it again (this really destroyed pretty much everything).
George W Bush is worth for the US than Stalin could ever have been. But he doesn't earn the weasel award, because he is way too dumb. I think he doesn't even realize what he is doing.
The Slashdot snapshot seems to suggest that the US wants to keep space peaceful. This is cetainly not the case. In June 2002 the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM treaty to develope an anti ballistic missle system, which will partly be based in space.
So the US government is placing part of a strategic weapon system in space.
In other news: "The RIAA wants to keep file trading legal."
From what it looks like the case of that thing seems to be a:
Casetek CK-1010-1B, which one could get a online shops like Portatech, or Aaronix for about 50 bucks.
Since those are Mini-Itx form factor cases I suspect that Inspiri put a Via Epia board inside.An Epia 5000 can be bought at Ebay. Then get an hd (160 GB are cheaper per GB nowdays).
The price will be lower than 300 bucks.
Epia 5000 have the lowest power intake, which should be considered if the box is to be run 24/7. But the prices on ebay seem to allow an M10000 to be had for not much more. The Epia M10000 has the advantage that one can change it to a media box for the living room (like Tivo), since it is fast enough for Divx and has TV-Out. This way one could have everything in one box. By putting mldonkey on it it could even run as a server for filesharing 24/7 while one could access mldonkey from everywhere using its http interface.
Much more for much less money without having them spy on your data. Sometimes it pays to be geek;-)
This seems to be a large operation with much money involved. So you it is very likely that You need professional support. There is a company behind MySQL that maintains the server and sells support contracts (at least I think so). So MySQL might be much better acceptable to Your boss than Postgres. Postgres might be better (can do more) but since You would be buying a large contract from MySQL or Oracle, just give both a call, ask Your question very specifically and then compare the answers.
You might even find a company to offer You Postgres support, but I dunno.
Btw. if You want 24/7 with low response times You have to buy the whole system somewhere. The only company that offers such kind of contracts (worldwide under 4 hours for anything) on x86 (cheaper than the other stuff, like Sun or IBM) is Red Hat with their Server for Linux afaik. You might then be able to get them to support Your MySQL system as well, because if You have two vendors, like Red Hat and Oracle then they might blame each other in case of a failure.
But those contracts at Red Hat cost six figures.
Just go for Debian GNU/Linux!!!! I love it and it runs and runs and runs....
When some documents leaked last year about the pentagon and mini-nukes a high profile officer of the US armed forces said that the mini-nukes were only the least interesting part about the document. It also talked about making the Poseidon system (submarine based ICBMs) more accurate. Making them more accurate (supposedly to use smaller nukes, because at the moment their accuracy is very low, but that doesn't matter with a fat nuke) to strike within a ten meter radius or less would enable them to refit the poseidon with conventional warheads. If this could be achieved within the next five years it would enable the US to launch a ballistic missle attack on any target in the world within 30 minutes. Cruise missiles still need to be in range, but with as many ICBM submarines as the US has floating around one could spread them around the globe and make this possible globally. Combined with the "Star Wars" program that the Bush administration restarted, which includes the capability to launch weapons in space against targets both in space and on the earth I don't see how such an expensive plane would be worthwhile. Maybe the idea that the launch vehicle could be reused and only the payload would be dropped (kind of like the space shuttle) is attracting the attention (and the money) of the DARPA here. But remember that the huge developing costs of the original design of the space shuttle, which were sliced several times, brought out a much less cost effective solution.
But on the other hand, military and funding works in a different league than things like common sense and budget cuts or national deficit.
This looks a bit like the Rockwell XB-70 Supersonic Bomber "Valkyrie", which was shelfed as well in favour of ICBMs. I suppose the hypersonic bomber will go the same way.
For anybody that cares to know what "off the record" means:
If I am a politcian or a celebrity and I have many stories to give out over the years there is a relationship going on between the reporter and the clebrity. If I tell them something "off the record" and they would publish this they would loose all the future stories, because they destroyed the relationship and from then on they won't get any stories from that person. So usually they won't tell (maybe even the paper would take a hit so they won't print something "off the record").
A "one story person" on the other hand doesn't tell anybody "off the record" anything, because the reporter has nothing to loose. If someone can't keep their mouth shut... I am sorry.
Sidenote: That "relationship thing" between politicians and reporters hase some really bad effects considering reporting and nonreporting nowdays. Read about it elsewhere.
There seems to be some lack of knowledge around here as to where Unix is now used at in big business and where RH wants to break in the big server market.
I only got to know because I have a neighbour who works for Acatel SEL. We don't talk much about Linux or Unix because he always gets worked up about it and doesn't like to talk about it. He is a fan of MS by the way;-)
Nevertheless, he sells huge 24/7 machine setups with their own apps to telcos all over the world (he's been to China a lot lately). Those machines manages telephone networks. So if one would go down Your telephone goes down. Since this isn't accepted generally very often the setups have to be pretty stable. They are now working with HP-Unix at the moment, because the *nix they used before (some other big business one I don't know) broke compatibility with their apps at each other upgrade even though they were promised otherwise by the developers. He now gripes about the fact that HP hard drives cost twice the market price and have to be replaced at least twice as often as they used to be (in Raid they just see the red light and replace it).
For those setups they need 24/7 support with very low response times to ANY bugs in the system on any layer. He talked about a 4 hour maximum response time for getting the system to run again and 24 hours for nailing and fixing the cause.
Last Cebit (big computer fair in Germany) I met him by chance and he said that his company is looking into Linux, because of the low cost fo x86 server hardware which has become very stable. Linux is the only stable x86 *nix from their point of view, because RH is the only company that offers the kind of contract (24/7 support, low response time) and might even be able to deliver on it. He said something about a couple million dollars a year per contract. So I think this is were Red Hat AS comes in. This is also the reason why they can't use FreeBSD for example (or Debian, my flavour of choice for that matter).
You can take any System, be it HP, Solaris, OpenBSD, TurboLinux or Windows 2000 and install it on your home network or your company or as your webserver. If your company/wallet doesn't have much money to invest and shops for a good deal for their money they compare alternatives a lot different. Microsoft offers now stability and no security, but there is a high chance that you can degrade one of your engineers to quickly install it and hope it doesn't break or you can easily install it at home. FreeBSD was and is the best alternative for a lot of web servers, because it is free, runs on the cheapest hardware, is very stable and scalable. Debian is IMHO the best mix of all for me, because it contains all the software that I want, is more stable than I would ever need, is easy to maintain and can be upgraded to the next version. It could improve on ease to configure and documentation a lot, but those drawbacks are the same drawbacks FreeBSD has and the "Desktop" Linux distros can't upgrade properly IMHO.
For a company that loose a lot of mony on downtime and have a lot of money to invest Debian and BSD is simply not an alternative. They might be more stable, but if a bug occurs, who fixes it guarenteed within 24 hours?
You are right about the casutlies on the Korean peninsula. I made the fault of taking the knowledge about this fact for granted. But I should never overestimate the intellectual capacity of my readers I guess.
Also since I posted to a board predomenantly read by Americans I used an American point of view and assumed this to be clear. Any war against the US would be asymetrical (even China doesn't have second strike capability yet), because the US govt. will spend 50% of what the world will spend on their military next year (45% this year not counting the war against Iraq).
This is one of the reasons why a paper by two PLA officers consering asymetrical warfare last year was noted with so much interest by the worlds security community.
If anyone thinks that China would ever join North Korea in a war with the US clearly has no idea about international politics. Also since I don't live anywhere near that region (I might go a year to Bejing to study, but that is another case) why should I be scared about a war with North Korea??? China is only interested in keeping North Korea somewhat stable, because a collapse would destabilize a part of their own country due to refugees. The party would also reject the idea of digging up the past, since that would surely happen in the aftermath of a North Korean collapse. The US is helping were it can. Threatenting (or engaging) a country with military force has almost always stabilized a regime, because people tend to stick together in the even of danger from the outside. Simple, but true!
Apart from all that in the end You state that my post is just wrong. I view this as a purly emotional statement, since nothing in Your post contradicts anything in mine.
Coming back to Your post: I doubt that North Korea has many missiles that could reach Japan. They could only make an impact if they were armed with nuclear warheads, of which North Korea may not have more than two which were never tested and may not even work. And I don't see why chemical weapons would be the primary weapon to attack South Korea. The only thing that works in North Korea is their military. They would surly first try to conquer the South and only resort to the chemical option if that fails.
Apart from that: Who doesn't have chemical weapons by now??? There was an article in Newsweek a while ago about the problem the US has with the huge stockpile of chemical shell rotting away in large stashes. This year their editor in chief has a column stating: "The US doesn't have chemical weapons." Go figure.
AFAIK they are one of the few countries in Europe that don't have IDs. But one of the EU treaties provides that people only need IDs to travel many counties of the EU (the ones that signed that treaty). UK signed and still their people need passports to go around Europe because they don't have IDs.
The second largest email provider in Germany has this in the mail headers:
Received: from [216.136.173.219] (helo=web14612.mail.yahoo.com) by mx07.web.de with smtp (WEB.DE(Exim) 4.75 #2)
They have a Server farm of Linux boxen. www.web.de
Maybe they are not as big as gmx.de (qmail on Sun), but from guessing the size of web.de (at least several million accounts) I would say it is save to say that exim is scalable.
The most likely foe for North Korea in any military conflict would be South Korea and its ally, the USA. Since South Korea's economy relies heavily on their IT infrastructure it is more than logical to have a credible threat at hand.
It is also far more difficult to wage war against the US, since North Korea's fleet wouldn't stand a chance against Aircraft carriers. So they would not be able to reach the American coast with enough forces to conquer the territory of the US. Considering the overwhelming force of the US military the only viable solution for the North Koreans in this asymetrical combat situation is to resort to tatics formerly only used by so called terrorists, like the Unabomber, the guy from Florida that sent the Antrax letters or the entity formerly supported by the CIA (during the 80's in Afghanistan) now known as Al Quaida, that managed a direct attack on the pentagon.
Modern civilisations have modern vurnerabilities. Our modern societies result in a lot of highly trained scientists that can research very much and very fast. Our infrasructure allows for a lot of production. This and other things allow for our overwhelming military might.
Even though it might be possible for rogue nations to infiltrate our societies with "undercover soldiers" or special forces ready to use our modern infrastructure against us in the event of war against their country I doubt if this to be possible on a large scale.
The nations that come into question here don't trust their citizen. The greatest strength modern societies have is loyalty and wealth (connected, no doubt about it). The dollar (combined with military might) proved to be the most potent weapon against resitence in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries the lower leaders were just bought out. The few that didn't accept the money were bombed. That showed the rest the way to go.
Anyways. Using hackers the rogue nations can attack and still control their soldiers, since they physically stay were they are. Let's wait and see what online pr0n does to them;-)
I think the whole Europe bashing by Americans and vice versa pretty strange. First of all anyone that thinks foreign policy of the Bush administration has anything to do with American interest has not been following the news recently. Americans tend to support their administration in times of war (which is a very big reason why there was a war at all) and Europeans tend to reduce the war to "Operation Iraqi Liberation" or OIL in short.
I read a very interesting article about American part yesterday: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/kolumne n/gol/14874/ 1.html
But domestic politics was a major reason for foreign politics on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Schröder (of Germany) would not have been reelected without the war and his opposition to it (the election was very close and many believe that his statement that no German soldier would ever, even with UN support, set a foot on Iraq, given in September last year was the last little bit he needed to win). Putin only opposed the US because of domestic pressure and Chirac has huge problems with a corruption scandal (much like Cheney and Haliburton, just much much bigger) that threatens to take him over.
I also don't understand how Galileo would make any difference in the current military situation, where the US military budget is 45% of the worlds military budget at the moment and is sharply increasing to 50% next year and most likely more the following years.
There has never been world peace. There was a brief period in time (44 years), where two blocks threatened to destroy the world if one would attack the other and the number of proxy wars that were fought was slightly lower than the number of "normal" wars we have right now.
There are always people here on Slashdot that mock the rest of us for pointing at M$ errors and starting to jump up and down and scream like monkeys.
Well, I get asked almost everyday by my friends why the hack I made the switch for my desktop computer from Windoze to Linux, when it is so complicated and frustrating sometimes.
This is a good example why I did. I got stuck with a desktop machine that for some reason lost its TCP/IP ability after some time using it for no apparent reason. The only fix was to reboot it. And I got veeeery tired of reboots. In Linux I could have just mailed the creators of the drivers and have a high chance of resolving the problem if I include a core dump. In Windows I just kept switching every possible driver for my SCSI card, sound card, nic, mb... Reboot, reboot, reboot, reboot. And this is just an example.
Nowdays I use a laptop. Since I use it in my room mostly I have it plugged in and I can just put down the lid and send it to sleep (suspend to RAM). When I want to use it I just open the lid. I boot up in 3 seconds. I have Win98 preinstalled on the system and it still sits there (on less space) and I could maybe do one or two suspend to RAM after which it wouldn't wake up anymore and I had to... guess what: REBOOT
Disclaimer: OK, this is not a reboot bug, but one that can be verry annoying and could be dresolved by writing to the mozilla developer team and have it fixed in the next release in one or two month. I doubt if Microsoft will ever issue a fix.
Now that is something very American. In Germany, where I come from we have certain taboos. Talking this openly about segragation would not be possible. Even though I am very sure what the outcome has to be of those discussions and it really gets to me when someone speaks on favour of some very stupid things the whole discussion seems to be necessary.
In Germany we just had a case of police torture. The officer in question thought he could save the live of a boy be torturing the guy he thought to be the one who kidnapped the boy. Turned out the he was right. Then a judge publicly stated that if the life of a child is in danger and You have the guy that is responsible for it it is OK to torture that person (ignoring the fact that one can always be wrong and You can get anything You want using torture, if You torture me I will confess that I killed Kennedy).
Since the public discussion about that subject was held so uptight, because we were talking about a taboo many people I met came out with the opinion that torture would be OK, something the society that originally imposed the taboo didn't have in mind, I think.
Anyways, there seem to be still people out there that think there is a difference between emporer A trying to rid the people of king B and waging for for religous/ownership/whatever reasons or bullying that king into doing something using military threat and the current situation in Iraq and in Syria. An interesting effect that democrazy has on people. But public support for wars came about with the emergence of nation states. In times of kings people had to be pressured to do military service. That is the reason why George Washington was successful. The colonists fought against people that didn't give a damn (many Germany were sold to the English as soldiers and fought on the British side). In WWI the Germans were eager to get to the front, even though we still had a king. So I don't blame democrazy for people so stupid to support wars, they started earlier. Maybe nation states are to blame. I dunno.
I wonder how? The Russians lost 300.000 men in the battle of Berlin. At that time Berlin was in ruins (thanks to the USAF and the RAF) and all the serious military resitance was crushed. And the Russians didn't give a damn about civillian casulites. Now war in a city hasn't changes fundementally, because soldiers still can't see through walls.
The only way Bush could justify loosing tens of thousands of sons of voters in Bagdad would be another major attack on American soil involving WMD that could be directly traced back to Iraq. I don't think Saddam is that dumb! But who knows? He certainly is a lunatic.
You guys are all pretty funny. At least these discussions reveal that there are a lot of smart people on Slashdot (politically much smarter than I thought). This probabely stems from the fact the people who know a little about something only talk about it when it is appropriate, so the political comments before were of the clueless most of the time.
I believe that war is bad, for different reasons than most of the protesters over here in Europe. I am a damn liberal. But I am not dumb and the Security Council is all about power politics. Calling Chirac and Schröder the "axis of weasels" is about as dumb as believing that the premier chicken hawk is tough. They are all a bunch of weenie politicians that wouldn't hesitate a second in sending troops to die on a battlefield if that would help their political career. War in Iraq is counterproductive for the US, but Bush seems to think it is good for his career. I doubt it, because his dad did the same and didn't get the second term. Bush jr. is really dumb. Unfortunately a couple thousand Americans and Iraqis now have to die because of this. But I am much more concerned about the state of Afghanistan (still absolutely no civil society), Chechnia, Columbia and many parts of Africa. I hope when the troops bail out another strongman comes up quickly (or Saddam comes back) to restore order, because there is nothing worse for the people than civil war, where everything is for grabs. Then might makes right, and that is where the weaker elements of society suffer the most. Imagine High School, but only the bullies don't beat you, but shoot you and rape your sister.
For everyone that thinks Bush still has some brain cells left I have a question. I still marvel at the fact that Bush managed to turn international public opinion from a very positiv right after 9/11 to what is going on right now. Btw. if any of you Americans go oversees just say you are from Canada, if someone asks. I think it is pretty stupid to judge someone by the country he/she comes from, but I often feel lonly with this opinion.
Many times they make really crappy remixes off the old master tapes they have lying around and You are much better off if You digitize Your vinyl with a decent soundcard and some proper software for phone recording.
I've following the OS debate for smartphones for a couple years now, because I am from Europe an seemingly everyone wants a cellphone and smartphone technology eventually trickles down to normal phones as well. This means that the number of phones (and therefore of OSs on them) will soon surpass or is already bigger than the number of PCs. Any OS that will dominate that market will have the biggest installer base of all OSs in the world and will sell more licences than MS. The most interesting event was when Psion gave up its control of their embedded OS called Epox and now shares control with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. The new name is Symbian. Motorola is the only one that for some reason still can't make up its mind how to power their smartphones and has been trying j2me for a while now. Siemens and Samsung got on the Symbian train last year.
The problem with Symbian is that it is still very unstable on some phones which is the reason why they don't give out kits for the P800. Many apps seem to stall the system.
Imagine writing a killer app for an OS that dominates the mobile market. Symbian is pretty new and still doesn't have many of the most basic app written for it. Any future Bill Gates readings this? Good Luck! If Symbian will ever turn out to dominate. And the chances are still pretty high.
I've just been through setting up a raid system. I set up a file server that automatically backs up data every week that the users on the network put on it via samba. Since I only want to show up at the place every 6 month or so to check on the server it needs to be bullet proof to the max and still cheap, because they don't have much money as social workers.
I purchased a used p2 system with a stable mb and two ibm scsi drives on an adaptec controller. I installed Debian GNU/Linux stable and upgraded to the latest stable. Then I put up a softraid and opted for xfs in case of a power failure. I decided against an ups, because I hooked the machine up to the local power network, which is very stable, since the server lives in Berlin/Germany, and I wanted to save the cost. Then I moved the root filesystem over to the raid device. Up until now everything was documented very good, except for the fact, that I heard that reiserfs doesn't work with softraid and I didn't find that info on the net anymore. I would have taken reiserfs instead if I would have had a reliable source, such as the book, telling me that that is OK. The only thing I had problems with was how to make the system boot off the raid device. Here the howtos and man pages had contradicting stands on how to do this.
I read this Slashdot article with some regret, because I thought it could have saved me a lot of trouble. But the only section that gave me trouble also seems to confuse the auther of the book. Now that is no help at all. So this book is a waste of time if You know how to use google, which I had to learn painfully fast getting into Debian:-(, since doku is the last thing those guys seem to think about.
But since Debian is still by far the best system out there overall I have no choice. If You start to rely on seemingly simple things such as a reliable update of Your system with very low hassle then You are hooked.
I first would like to agree to the comments, that more guns don't necessarily mean more gun violence as Switzerland seems to show.
But: Many people, especially gun advocats miss an important point. You can't protect yourself with a gun. A gun can't catch a bullet or knife. Only if the bullet or knife accidently hit the steel part of the gun and bounce off in a safe direction. Much better would be a bulletproof west if you want protection.
Deterence is another thing. But any gun introduced into a conflict (were deterence is needed) raises the conflict to a potentially deadly level. A gun draws fire. If a person feels threatened by a gun and knows that he/she can loose their life they will do anything to remove that threat. That means that a gun actually makes you unsave, because it draws on violence. If the other side has a gun or any other deadly force available against you they are most likely to use it as soon as you threaten their most precious asset. Their life.
But it is such a cool, macho thing to draw a gun, ain't it?
I also had to do one of those, sorry!
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 1
Imagine running Cygwin in Wine in Linux on big iron (remember, 40.000 of those on one machine) and then do a couple of VMwares in each. Then You can run a beowulf cluster...
Slashdot Mirror
1. Take a successful comercial product
2. Try to rewrite it from the ground up with an open source license
3. Announce this on slashdot
4. Get a lot of kudos
5. ???
6. Profit
If You serously think the French government was against the war because of some higher reason than You are as dumb as the people that think Bush attacked for a higher reason.
The French just had better oil contracts with Saddam than the US. So the USA showed the world (and the French) that they have the biggest willy in town.
And now the US get beat up on it. Which is again unfair, because now they at least want to repair what they destroyed by first supporting Saddam, then bombing the country, then sanction it for ten years and then bombing it again (this really destroyed pretty much everything).
George W Bush is worth for the US than Stalin could ever have been. But he doesn't earn the weasel award, because he is way too dumb. I think he doesn't even realize what he is doing.
The Slashdot snapshot seems to suggest that the US wants to keep space peaceful. This is cetainly not the case.
In June 2002 the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM treaty to develope an anti ballistic missle system, which will partly be based in space.
So the US government is placing part of a strategic weapon system in space.
In other news: "The RIAA wants to keep file trading legal."
Therefore I didn't even read the article.
https
for faster encryption check via story on the same frontpage
Since those are Mini-Itx form factor cases I suspect that Inspiri put a Via Epia board inside.An Epia 5000 can be bought at Ebay. Then get an hd (160 GB are cheaper per GB nowdays).
The price will be lower than 300 bucks.
Epia 5000 have the lowest power intake, which should be considered if the box is to be run 24/7. But the prices on ebay seem to allow an M10000 to be had for not much more. The Epia M10000 has the advantage that one can change it to a media box for the living room (like Tivo), since it is fast enough for Divx and has TV-Out. This way one could have everything in one box. By putting mldonkey on it it could even run as a server for filesharing 24/7 while one could access mldonkey from everywhere using its http interface.
Much more for much less money without having them spy on your data. Sometimes it pays to be geek ;-)
This seems to be a large operation with much money involved. So you it is very likely that You need professional support. There is a company behind MySQL that maintains the server and sells support contracts (at least I think so). So MySQL might be much better acceptable to Your boss than Postgres. Postgres might be better (can do more) but since You would be buying a large contract from MySQL or Oracle, just give both a call, ask Your question very specifically and then compare the answers.
You might even find a company to offer You Postgres support, but I dunno.
Btw. if You want 24/7 with low response times You have to buy the whole system somewhere. The only company that offers such kind of contracts (worldwide under 4 hours for anything) on x86 (cheaper than the other stuff, like Sun or IBM) is Red Hat with their Server for Linux afaik. You might then be able to get them to support Your MySQL system as well, because if You have two vendors, like Red Hat and Oracle then they might blame each other in case of a failure.
But those contracts at Red Hat cost six figures.
Just go for Debian GNU/Linux!!!! I love it and it runs and runs and runs....
What is an ISA slot?
a movie about the old Scandinavian warrior called Beowulf all done on Linux.
OK, OK, it is not funny, but I didn't see the CowboyNeal Option and I thought something was missing.
When some documents leaked last year about the pentagon and mini-nukes a high profile officer of the US armed forces said that the mini-nukes were only the least interesting part about the document. It also talked about making the Poseidon system (submarine based ICBMs) more accurate.
Making them more accurate (supposedly to use smaller nukes, because at the moment their accuracy is very low, but that doesn't matter with a fat nuke) to strike within a ten meter radius or less would enable them to refit the poseidon with conventional warheads.
If this could be achieved within the next five years it would enable the US to launch a ballistic missle attack on any target in the world within 30 minutes. Cruise missiles still need to be in range, but with as many ICBM submarines as the US has floating around one could spread them around the globe and make this possible globally.
Combined with the "Star Wars" program that the Bush administration restarted, which includes the capability to launch weapons in space against targets both in space and on the earth I don't see how such an expensive plane would be worthwhile. Maybe the idea that the launch vehicle could be reused and only the payload would be dropped (kind of like the space shuttle) is attracting the attention (and the money) of the DARPA here. But remember that the huge developing costs of the original design of the space shuttle, which were sliced several times, brought out a much less cost effective solution.
But on the other hand, military and funding works in a different league than things like common sense and budget cuts or national deficit.
This looks a bit like the Rockwell XB-70 Supersonic Bomber "Valkyrie", which was shelfed as well in favour of ICBMs. I suppose the hypersonic bomber will go the same way.
For anybody that cares to know what "off the record" means:
If I am a politcian or a celebrity and I have many stories to give out over the years there is a relationship going on between the reporter and the clebrity. If I tell them something "off the record" and they would publish this they would loose all the future stories, because they destroyed the relationship and from then on they won't get any stories from that person. So usually they won't tell (maybe even the paper would take a hit so they won't print something "off the record").
A "one story person" on the other hand doesn't tell anybody "off the record" anything, because the reporter has nothing to loose. If someone can't keep their mouth shut... I am sorry.
Sidenote: That "relationship thing" between politicians and reporters hase some really bad effects considering reporting and nonreporting nowdays. Read about it elsewhere.
There seems to be some lack of knowledge around here as to where Unix is now used at in big business and where RH wants to break in the big server market.
;-)
I only got to know because I have a neighbour who works for Acatel SEL. We don't talk much about Linux or Unix because he always gets worked up about it and doesn't like to talk about it. He is a fan of MS by the way
Nevertheless, he sells huge 24/7 machine setups with their own apps to telcos all over the world (he's been to China a lot lately). Those machines manages telephone networks. So if one would go down Your telephone goes down. Since this isn't accepted generally very often the setups have to be pretty stable. They are now working with HP-Unix at the moment, because the *nix they used before (some other big business one I don't know) broke compatibility with their apps at each other upgrade even though they were promised otherwise by the developers. He now gripes about the fact that HP hard drives cost twice the market price and have to be replaced at least twice as often as they used to be (in Raid they just see the red light and replace it).
For those setups they need 24/7 support with very low response times to ANY bugs in the system on any layer. He talked about a 4 hour maximum response time for getting the system to run again and 24 hours for nailing and fixing the cause.
Last Cebit (big computer fair in Germany) I met him by chance and he said that his company is looking into Linux, because of the low cost fo x86 server hardware which has become very stable. Linux is the only stable x86 *nix from their point of view, because RH is the only company that offers the kind of contract (24/7 support, low response time) and might even be able to deliver on it. He said something about a couple million dollars a year per contract. So I think this is were Red Hat AS comes in.
This is also the reason why they can't use FreeBSD for example (or Debian, my flavour of choice for that matter).
You can take any System, be it HP, Solaris, OpenBSD, TurboLinux or Windows 2000 and install it on your home network or your company or as your webserver. If your company/wallet doesn't have much money to invest and shops for a good deal for their money they compare alternatives a lot different. Microsoft offers now stability and no security, but there is a high chance that you can degrade one of your engineers to quickly install it and hope it doesn't break or you can easily install it at home. FreeBSD was and is the best alternative for a lot of web servers, because it is free, runs on the cheapest hardware, is very stable and scalable.
Debian is IMHO the best mix of all for me, because it contains all the software that I want, is more stable than I would ever need, is easy to maintain and can be upgraded to the next version. It could improve on ease to configure and documentation a lot, but those drawbacks are the same drawbacks FreeBSD has and the "Desktop" Linux distros can't upgrade properly IMHO.
For a company that loose a lot of mony on downtime and have a lot of money to invest Debian and BSD is simply not an alternative. They might be more stable, but if a bug occurs, who fixes it guarenteed within 24 hours?
You are right about the casutlies on the Korean peninsula. I made the fault of taking the knowledge about this fact for granted. But I should never overestimate the intellectual capacity of my readers I guess.
Also since I posted to a board predomenantly read by Americans I used an American point of view and assumed this to be clear. Any war against the US would be asymetrical (even China doesn't have second strike capability yet), because the US govt. will spend 50% of what the world will spend on their military next year (45% this year not counting the war against Iraq).
This is one of the reasons why a paper by two PLA officers consering asymetrical warfare last year was noted with so much interest by the worlds security community.
If anyone thinks that China would ever join North Korea in a war with the US clearly has no idea about international politics. Also since I don't live anywhere near that region (I might go a year to Bejing to study, but that is another case) why should I be scared about a war with North Korea??? China is only interested in keeping North Korea somewhat stable, because a collapse would destabilize a part of their own country due to refugees. The party would also reject the idea of digging up the past, since that would surely happen in the aftermath of a North Korean collapse. The US is helping were it can. Threatenting (or engaging) a country with military force has almost always stabilized a regime, because people tend to stick together in the even of danger from the outside. Simple, but true!
Apart from all that in the end You state that my post is just wrong. I view this as a purly emotional statement, since nothing in Your post contradicts anything in mine.
Coming back to Your post: I doubt that North Korea has many missiles that could reach Japan. They could only make an impact if they were armed with nuclear warheads, of which North Korea may not have more than two which were never tested and may not even work. And I don't see why chemical weapons would be the primary weapon to attack South Korea. The only thing that works in North Korea is their military. They would surly first try to conquer the South and only resort to the chemical option if that fails.
Apart from that: Who doesn't have chemical weapons by now??? There was an article in Newsweek a while ago about the problem the US has with the huge stockpile of chemical shell rotting away in large stashes. This year their editor in chief has a column stating: "The US doesn't have chemical weapons."
Go figure.
AFAIK they are one of the few countries in Europe that don't have IDs. But one of the EU treaties provides that people only need IDs to travel many counties of the EU (the ones that signed that treaty). UK signed and still their people need passports to go around Europe because they don't have IDs.
The second largest email provider in Germany has this in the mail headers:
Received: from [216.136.173.219] (helo=web14612.mail.yahoo.com)
by mx07.web.de with smtp (WEB.DE(Exim) 4.75 #2)
They have a Server farm of Linux boxen.
www.web.de
Maybe they are not as big as gmx.de (qmail on Sun), but from guessing the size of web.de (at least several million accounts) I would say it is save to say that exim is scalable.
The most likely foe for North Korea in any military conflict would be South Korea and its ally, the USA. Since South Korea's economy relies heavily on their IT infrastructure it is more than logical to have a credible threat at hand.
;-)
It is also far more difficult to wage war against the US, since North Korea's fleet wouldn't stand a chance against Aircraft carriers. So they would not be able to reach the American coast with enough forces to conquer the territory of the US. Considering the overwhelming force of the US military the only viable solution for the North Koreans in this asymetrical combat situation is to resort to tatics formerly only used by so called terrorists, like the Unabomber, the guy from Florida that sent the Antrax letters or the entity formerly supported by the CIA (during the 80's in Afghanistan) now known as Al Quaida, that managed a direct attack on the pentagon.
Modern civilisations have modern vurnerabilities. Our modern societies result in a lot of highly trained scientists that can research very much and very fast. Our infrasructure allows for a lot of production. This and other things allow for our overwhelming military might.
Even though it might be possible for rogue nations to infiltrate our societies with "undercover soldiers" or special forces ready to use our modern infrastructure against us in the event of war against their country I doubt if this to be possible on a large scale.
The nations that come into question here don't trust their citizen. The greatest strength modern societies have is loyalty and wealth (connected, no doubt about it). The dollar (combined with military might) proved to be the most potent weapon against resitence in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries the lower leaders were just bought out. The few that didn't accept the money were bombed. That showed the rest the way to go.
Anyways. Using hackers the rogue nations can attack and still control their soldiers, since they physically stay were they are. Let's wait and see what online pr0n does to them
I think the whole Europe bashing by Americans and vice versa pretty strange. First of all anyone that thinks foreign policy of the Bush administration has anything to do with American interest has not been following the news recently. Americans tend to support their administration in times of war (which is a very big reason why there was a war at all) and Europeans tend to reduce the war to "Operation Iraqi Liberation" or OIL in short.
e n/gol/14874/ 1.html
I read a very interesting article about American part yesterday:
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/kolumn
But domestic politics was a major reason for foreign politics on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Schröder (of Germany) would not have been reelected without the war and his opposition to it (the election was very close and many believe that his statement that no German soldier would ever, even with UN support, set a foot on Iraq, given in September last year was the last little bit he needed to win). Putin only opposed the US because of domestic pressure and Chirac has huge problems with a corruption scandal (much like Cheney and Haliburton, just much much bigger) that threatens to take him over.
I also don't understand how Galileo would make any difference in the current military situation, where the US military budget is 45% of the worlds military budget at the moment and is sharply increasing to 50% next year and most likely more the following years.
There has never been world peace. There was a brief period in time (44 years), where two blocks threatened to destroy the world if one would attack the other and the number of proxy wars that were fought was slightly lower than the number of "normal" wars we have right now.
I think of GPS vs Galileo more like KDE vs Gnome.
There are always people here on Slashdot that mock the rest of us for pointing at M$ errors and starting to jump up and down and scream like monkeys.
... Reboot, reboot, reboot, reboot. And this is just an example.
... guess what: REBOOT
Well, I get asked almost everyday by my friends why the hack I made the switch for my desktop computer from Windoze to Linux, when it is so complicated and frustrating sometimes.
This is a good example why I did. I got stuck with a desktop machine that for some reason lost its TCP/IP ability after some time using it for no apparent reason. The only fix was to reboot it. And I got veeeery tired of reboots. In Linux I could have just mailed the creators of the drivers and have a high chance of resolving the problem if I include a core dump. In Windows I just kept switching every possible driver for my SCSI card, sound card, nic, mb
Nowdays I use a laptop. Since I use it in my room mostly I have it plugged in and I can just put down the lid and send it to sleep (suspend to RAM). When I want to use it I just open the lid. I boot up in 3 seconds. I have Win98 preinstalled on the system and it still sits there (on less space) and I could maybe do one or two suspend to RAM after which it wouldn't wake up anymore and I had to
Disclaimer:
OK, this is not a reboot bug, but one that can be verry annoying and could be dresolved by writing to the mozilla developer team and have it fixed in the next release in one or two month. I doubt if Microsoft will ever issue a fix.
Now that is something very American. In Germany, where I come from we have certain taboos. Talking this openly about segragation would not be possible. Even though I am very sure what the outcome has to be of those discussions and it really gets to me when someone speaks on favour of some very stupid things the whole discussion seems to be necessary.
In Germany we just had a case of police torture. The officer in question thought he could save the live of a boy be torturing the guy he thought to be the one who kidnapped the boy. Turned out the he was right. Then a judge publicly stated that if the life of a child is in danger and You have the guy that is responsible for it it is OK to torture that person (ignoring the fact that one can always be wrong and You can get anything You want using torture, if You torture me I will confess that I killed Kennedy).
Since the public discussion about that subject was held so uptight, because we were talking about a taboo many people I met came out with the opinion that torture would be OK, something the society that originally imposed the taboo didn't have in mind, I think.
Anyways, there seem to be still people out there that think there is a difference between emporer A trying to rid the people of king B and waging for for religous/ownership/whatever reasons or bullying that king into doing something using military threat and the current situation in Iraq and in Syria. An interesting effect that democrazy has on people. But public support for wars came about with the emergence of nation states. In times of kings people had to be pressured to do military service. That is the reason why George Washington was successful. The colonists fought against people that didn't give a damn (many Germany were sold to the English as soldiers and fought on the British side). In WWI the Germans were eager to get to the front, even though we still had a king. So I don't blame democrazy for people so stupid to support wars, they started earlier. Maybe nation states are to blame. I dunno.
>There's no question that we're going to win
I wonder how? The Russians lost 300.000 men in the battle of Berlin. At that time Berlin was in ruins (thanks to the USAF and the RAF) and all the serious military resitance was crushed. And the Russians didn't give a damn about civillian casulites. Now war in a city hasn't changes fundementally, because soldiers still can't see through walls.
The only way Bush could justify loosing tens of thousands of sons of voters in Bagdad would be another major attack on American soil involving WMD that could be directly traced back to Iraq. I don't think Saddam is that dumb! But who knows? He certainly is a lunatic.
You guys are all pretty funny. At least these discussions reveal that there are a lot of smart people on Slashdot (politically much smarter than I thought). This probabely stems from the fact the people who know a little about something only talk about it when it is appropriate, so the political comments before were of the clueless most of the time.
I believe that war is bad, for different reasons than most of the protesters over here in Europe. I am a damn liberal. But I am not dumb and the Security Council is all about power politics. Calling Chirac and Schröder the "axis of weasels" is about as dumb as believing that the premier chicken hawk is tough. They are all a bunch of weenie politicians that wouldn't hesitate a second in sending troops to die on a battlefield if that would help their political career. War in Iraq is counterproductive for the US, but Bush seems to think it is good for his career. I doubt it, because his dad did the same and didn't get the second term. Bush jr. is really dumb. Unfortunately a couple thousand Americans and Iraqis now have to die because of this. But I am much more concerned about the state of Afghanistan (still absolutely no civil society), Chechnia, Columbia and many parts of Africa. I hope when the troops bail out another strongman comes up quickly (or Saddam comes back) to restore order, because there is nothing worse for the people than civil war, where everything is for grabs. Then might makes right, and that is where the weaker elements of society suffer the most. Imagine High School, but only the bullies don't beat you, but shoot you and rape your sister.
For everyone that thinks Bush still has some brain cells left I have a question. I still marvel at the fact that Bush managed to turn international public opinion from a very positiv right after 9/11 to what is going on right now. Btw. if any of you Americans go oversees just say you are from Canada, if someone asks. I think it is pretty stupid to judge someone by the country he/she comes from, but I often feel lonly with this opinion.
Many times they make really crappy remixes off the old master tapes they have lying around and You are much better off if You digitize Your vinyl with a decent soundcard and some proper software for phone recording.
I've following the OS debate for smartphones for a couple years now, because I am from Europe an seemingly everyone wants a cellphone and smartphone technology eventually trickles down to normal phones as well.
This means that the number of phones (and therefore of OSs on them) will soon surpass or is already bigger than the number of PCs. Any OS that will dominate that market will have the biggest installer base of all OSs in the world and will sell more licences than MS.
The most interesting event was when Psion gave up its control of their embedded OS called Epox and now shares control with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. The new name is Symbian.
Motorola is the only one that for some reason still can't make up its mind how to power their smartphones and has been trying j2me for a while now. Siemens and Samsung got on the Symbian train last year.
The problem with Symbian is that it is still very unstable on some phones which is the reason why they don't give out kits for the P800. Many apps seem to stall the system.
Imagine writing a killer app for an OS that dominates the mobile market. Symbian is pretty new and still doesn't have many of the most basic app written for it. Any future Bill Gates readings this?
Good Luck! If Symbian will ever turn out to dominate. And the chances are still pretty high.
I've just been through setting up a raid system. I set up a file server that automatically backs up data every week that the users on the network put on it via samba. Since I only want to show up at the place every 6 month or so to check on the server it needs to be bullet proof to the max and still cheap, because they don't have much money as social workers.
:-(, since doku is the last thing those guys seem to think about.
I purchased a used p2 system with a stable mb and two ibm scsi drives on an adaptec controller. I installed Debian GNU/Linux stable and upgraded to the latest stable. Then I put up a softraid and opted for xfs in case of a power failure. I decided against an ups, because I hooked the machine up to the local power network, which is very stable, since the server lives in Berlin/Germany, and I wanted to save the cost.
Then I moved the root filesystem over to the raid device. Up until now everything was documented very good, except for the fact, that I heard that reiserfs doesn't work with softraid and I didn't find that info on the net anymore. I would have taken reiserfs instead if I would have had a reliable source, such as the book, telling me that that is OK.
The only thing I had problems with was how to make the system boot off the raid device. Here the howtos and man pages had contradicting stands on how to do this.
I read this Slashdot article with some regret, because I thought it could have saved me a lot of trouble. But the only section that gave me trouble also seems to confuse the auther of the book. Now that is no help at all. So this book is a waste of time if You know how to use google, which I had to learn painfully fast getting into Debian
But since Debian is still by far the best system out there overall I have no choice. If You start to rely on seemingly simple things such as a reliable update of Your system with very low hassle then You are hooked.
I first would like to agree to the comments, that more guns don't necessarily mean more gun violence as Switzerland seems to show.
But: Many people, especially gun advocats miss an important point. You can't protect yourself with a gun. A gun can't catch a bullet or knife. Only if the bullet or knife accidently hit the steel part of the gun and bounce off in a safe direction. Much better would be a bulletproof west if you want protection.
Deterence is another thing. But any gun introduced into a conflict (were deterence is needed) raises the conflict to a potentially deadly level. A gun draws fire. If a person feels threatened by a gun and knows that he/she can loose their life they will do anything to remove that threat. That means that a gun actually makes you unsave, because it draws on violence. If the other side has a gun or any other deadly force available against you they are most likely to use it as soon as you threaten their most precious asset. Their life.
But it is such a cool, macho thing to draw a gun, ain't it?
Imagine running Cygwin in Wine in Linux on big iron (remember, 40.000 of those on one machine) and then do a couple of VMwares in each. Then You can run a beowulf cluster...