OK, maybe I'm missing something, but how is this Red Hat's problem? Are you talking about security updates to Red Hat proprietary software? i wasn't aware that they made any. If it's not Red Hat proprietary, then do you mean that Red Hat should shoulder the entire burden for security for all free software? I find that position untenable. Do you mean that Red Hat isn't fast enough in putting up nice, pretty, easy-to-use RPMs to plug newly-known security holes? If security is truly a concern for you, then you shouldn't be waiting for Red Hat's people to make the update easy to install for you, no matter how fast they are. You should instead be spending your time fixing your system. In the time it takes someone else to figure out how to apply a patch and how to make it easy to use and how to put it on their website, I could figure out how to apply the patch and be done with it.
I tell people about this cool site at "slashdot period org". If they're not geeky enough to figure out the "http://" part, they won't enjoy the site.
How to get the message to Congress
on
ISP Sues Spammer
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· Score: 1
Forward every piece of spam you get to your Senators and your Representative. The intent here is not to swamp the Congressional mail server (though this may be an unfortunate side effect of not already outlawing spam;), but to make our Senators and Representatives PERSONALLY aware of what it is we have to deal with. Preface the spam message with the following statement.
":
As I'm sure you are aware, unsolicited commercial email (commonly known as "spam") has a deleterious effect on the internet. The cost of this email is borne almost entirely by the recipients, in terms of both higher prices from internet service providers as a result of dealing with spam, and of the time required to wade through the numerous spams received by each individual internet user. While some states have enacted laws to regulate or ban it, the Federal government has so far lagged behind. While spam may well be considered a form of protected speech, it is a commercial form of speech whose cost is borne by the recipients - your constituents. It therefore needs to be regulated. In order to assist you in evaluating the magnitude of this problem, I am forwarding this message, which I received today, as an example of the sort of message which can be sent to anyone with an email address."
Your comments in paragraphs two and three are almost exactly analogous to the following:
"Theft, I'll admit, is bad, but we'll never be able to eliminate it, so we should just regulate it. Face it, all the time the police spend filing reports and investigating theft just increases the costs. I should know; i work for a police department."
Furthermore, your understanding of the business you work for is abysmal. Spam is a cost of doing business. Eliminating it eliminates one of your costs and allows you to lower your price. While other ISPs would doubtless be able to do the same, the overall lower price would increase the size of the market, so while you might not get a proportionally larger piece of the pie, the pie would be larger to start with.
Every ISP should have a contract with its dial-up customers stating costs for sending UBE or spam. Should one substantiated spam complaint arise, that provision of the contract should kick in, and the spammer should be charged accordingly. As someone else indicated, the possibilities for revenue are tremendous. Some would say that this would require teams of lawyers. I would disagree. I would suggest that much spam comes from small business which are unincorporated (evidence to the contrary is encouraged). Whoever created the account will be an individual with a house and a car. It's pretty easy to file a lien against these assets.
Yes and no; I don't see how it would be any harder than wiring up 2,000 workstations in a large office building. There are engineering firms that do this sort of thing as a matter of routine. I'd hate to see the bill, though.
MS paid for the study, but that doesn't make the study invalid. Right. This same logic would apply to research indicating that there is no such thing as Desert Storm syndrome, sponsored by the U.S. Army. That there was no presidential cover-up of Monicagate, paid for by Friends of Bill. That operating a nuclear power plant has no effect on the environment, paid for by (insert your local electrical utility here). One of the most basic techniqes of critical thinking in the modern world consists of asking "Who paid for this information and how does it benefit them?" This bozo doesn't have the intelligence to do that. Or rather, his employer/customer doesn't want him to.
I got that impression, too, but he has a funny way of saying it. It's like he got massively flamed for telling Polack jokes in his column, and then tried to stem the tide of flames by writing ANOTHER column that said "Those Polacks keep sending me email telling me how smart they are. If they're so smart, why are there all these jokes? There's got to be some basis in fact, or else they wouldn't be funny, right? They're as bad as the Mexicans used to be - I wish they'd all leave me alone. Remember, I didn't write those offensive jokes - I merely told them."
I like the phrase "liberated software". It is less ambiguous than "free software", and shorter than "free (think speech not beer) software". It has a connotation of freedom that "open source (tm) software" does not.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but this has been one of the most cleverly orchestrated bits of FUD I have seen in a long time. Look how it worked...
1. Microsoft hired a known-biased "independent" lab to produce some obviously skewed results. If corporate America believes this, that's a bonus 2. The lab does tests on hardware for which there is not solid evidence that Linux is better. 3. The results are roundly drubbed by anyone with half a brain. The labs general conclusions are shown to be invalid. 4. The press examines the data and announces that Linux does not scale well and is not well-supported.
Microsoft did a masterful job of creating the perception of shortcomings in Linux.
Mindcraft finds themselves with their reputation intact: "We do what we're paid to, thanks for the check, look forward to doing business with you again sometime, Mr. Gates!" If they had any other reputation, they'd go out of business rather rapidly, doncha think? Good parasites do what they can to protect their hosts.
It's pretty hard to be an NT newbie for more than about a week unless you've never seen an MS OS in your life. What you see is all you get, kind of thing - click on Start, Programs, and everything under that is everything you can do. Spend a week playing with that and there's not much else to learn. There is some command line stuff, but I don't know of any that does anything other than (poorly) emulate similar Unix commands or maintain backwards compatibility with LAN Manager.
But to answer your question, 1. Windows NT Resource Kit 2. Microsoft Technet 3. Microsoft Knowledge Base in that order. Just about everything I know about NT has come from those sources. When I read a book about NT, I find it is generally a dumbed-down how-to derived from those sources.
As an example to address your question (and not a great one, since it's for an NT client - Win 95 - and not NT itself), I remember the first time I had occasion to use those resources, as a phone tech in 1995. Somebody couldn't log in to their NT server with Windows 95. I searched TechNet for the error message they were getting and found a registry setting that would cause the problem. At the time, I knew NOTHING about networking - all I knew was how to do boolean searches against an MS database.
So yes, I agree that it's a lot easier for the inexperienced (and the stupid) to optimize Windows NT than Linux. Kind of like saying it's easier for a 10-year-old to make a paper airplane than a Boeing 777:)
I use a 14" Commodore 1702 monitor attached to an old VCR with no antenna. It pulls in UHF with no problem and the VHF is viewable but slightly snowy. I figure the quality of my hardware doesn't need to be better than the quality of the information it displays:)
If you could think of several dozen apps that complex, I'd be more likely to agree. But of the top of your head, you can think of only one complex open source app? This does not bode well:)
Granted that Windows has captured the "grandma technophobe" market, I would suggest that Linux just needs a pretty face. Have you ever looked into the Windows API? Can you imagine how painful Windows would be if it were implemented as a series of command line utilites, each of which executed one call into the API? Do you think that maybe a GUI could be put on top of that to hide most of the complexity from Grandma? Then why can't it be done with Linux? Just because it hasn't been done yet doesn't mean that it can never happen.
While I'll grant that by definition, people with IQs higher than three standard deviations above the mean are in the minority, I disagree with the idea that only those people would want to use Linux. Remember the atomic bomb? Pretty neat piece of physics, that. Scores of the best minds in the US were needed to set the first one off. Now think about modern atomic bombs (or nuclear missiles, if you prefer). These are designed to be set off by people who may or may not have graduated from high school (soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines). It's amazing how incredibly complex technology can be simplified so that a layman can use it.
Doubtless you consider yourself to be one of the smart people. May I suggest that if you really were, then, you would find it simple to conceive of a Linux distribution that my 80-year-old ditzy Granny could use. Your inability to conceive something that does not exist in the present or the past puts you in the company of those who forced Galileo to recant.
The computer community, us included, has given them the impression that if anything goes wrong on their computer, like strange stuff happening, then it is most likely their fault
Speak for yourself. I did technical support for a large OEM (there were over 4,000 tech support reps) for 3 years, and everyone I knew was fond of blaming Microsoft when Windows crashed. I regularly explained to callers that Windows and Windows software had bugs that would cause their computer to crash without warning on occasion and that was the way it was.
I've seen this several times - anybody care to enlighten me as to it's origin, derivation, or meaning, apart from "I am an annoying dweeb and take perverse joy in that fact"?
The most elegant thing I ever saw was when the number of comments had spilled over the limit and only the subjects were displayed. My regular threshold is -1, so I could easily get to all comments. The really cool, elegant part was that the comments with a score of 3 (there's another treshold value that controls this) or higher were displayed in full - not just the subject. So I could see the scope of the entire discussion, I could go in and look at any comment, and every high-scoring comment was immediately visible.
It would be nice to be able to switch between to that mode (all subjects + good comments in full) at will without having to reconfigure. Mr. Malda, if you get all these configurable filters set up, we may find that we like two or three viewing modes, depending on the length of the article or its subject or our mood - how about some way to quickly switch between them without having to go the preferences page?
So, can I borrow $905 from you? I will pay back the $509 I owe you within an hour.:)
I was addressing the 3C509 (as was the post I replied to), not the 3C905. The 3C905 situation is just insane. There is no possible way that an inexperienced non-geek could install that card - the card misdetects or misinstalls and the.INF file doesn't contain accurate information on file locations. You almost have to install the driver files by hand.
Can I have some of your crack? Because there is NO retail or OEM version of Windows 98 without support for 3C509 series of cards. (I used to earn a living configuring Windows 98 for networks - sad but true). The only possible explanation is that you were working with a beta copy of '98. I find it interesting that you fail to mention this fact. You are either intellectually dishonest or ignorant of the situation. I doubt that it is the latter. I hereby dub thee a FUDster.
The Obvious Looming Bio-Catastrophe
on
Gene Leakage
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· Score: 1
Malthus is a bad example. He used quantitative methods that assumed exponential growth of people and linear growth in food supply. He was wrong on both counts. He also assumed that the rate of growth of the human population would be independent of the rate of growth of the food supply, which is absurd - isn't it obvious that as food becomes more scarce, the rate of population growth will go down?
I would further suggest that those who believe we are not currently encountering ecological disasters are good examples of the human ability to accept any situation as normal. We are in the middle of an ecological disaster of geological proportions - future paleontologists will debate endlessly about what caused the die-out of so many species during this epoch.
I think you misunderstand
on
Gene Leakage
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· Score: 1
I think his point was not that genetic engineering would have an effect similar to the introduction of penicillin. I think his point was merely that ecology is almost always more complex than we perceive, and our actions have long-term unintended consequences. 50 years ago, the concept of resistant strains would not have been taken seriously. He used the analogy to ask the question, "What could happen 50 years from now that people today would think impossible?"
So close, and yet so far...
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 1
It's a funny thing about the UK - it's an island (or two). It is much easier to wipe out a species on an island than on a continent.
Let me ask the same question in a different way that would perhaps clarify the intent of the question.
If Lucas had to cut costs in order to make the film profitable, could he have found places to do so while still maintaining his artisitic integrity, without damaging the film's entertainment value, and while telling the same story? For example, could he have cut the costume budget?
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly right. It's been done already, though not with ".fsf". The problem is getting people to point to your DNS servers.
1. Timely security updates don't always happen.
OK, maybe I'm missing something, but how is this Red Hat's problem? Are you talking about security updates to Red Hat proprietary software? i wasn't aware that they made any. If it's not Red Hat proprietary, then do you mean that Red Hat should shoulder the entire burden for security for all free software? I find that position untenable. Do you mean that Red Hat isn't fast enough in putting up nice, pretty, easy-to-use RPMs to plug newly-known security holes? If security is truly a concern for you, then you shouldn't be waiting for Red Hat's people to make the update easy to install for you, no matter how fast they are. You should instead be spending your time fixing your system. In the time it takes someone else to figure out how to apply a patch and how to make it easy to use and how to put it on their website, I could figure out how to apply the patch and be done with it.
I tell people about this cool site at "slashdot period org". If they're not geeky enough to figure out the "http://" part, they won't enjoy the site.
Forward every piece of spam you get to your Senators and your Representative. The intent here is not to swamp the Congressional mail server (though this may be an unfortunate side effect of not already outlawing spam ;), but to make our Senators and Representatives PERSONALLY aware of what it is we have to deal with. Preface the spam message with the following statement.
":
As I'm sure you are aware, unsolicited commercial email (commonly known as "spam") has a deleterious effect on the internet. The cost of this email is borne almost entirely by the recipients, in terms of both higher prices from internet service providers as a result of dealing with spam, and of the time required to wade through the numerous spams received by each individual internet user. While some states have enacted laws to regulate or ban it, the Federal government has so far lagged behind. While spam may well be considered a form of protected speech, it is a commercial form of speech whose cost is borne by the recipients - your constituents. It therefore needs to be regulated. In order to assist you in evaluating the magnitude of this problem, I am forwarding this message, which I received today, as an example of the sort of message which can be sent to anyone with an email address."
Your comments in paragraphs two and three are almost exactly analogous to the following:
"Theft, I'll admit, is bad, but we'll never be able to eliminate it, so we should just regulate it. Face it, all the time the police spend filing reports and investigating theft just increases the costs. I should know; i work for a police department."
Furthermore, your understanding of the business you work for is abysmal. Spam is a cost of doing business. Eliminating it eliminates one of your costs and allows you to lower your price. While other ISPs would doubtless be able to do the same, the overall lower price would increase the size of the market, so while you might not get a proportionally larger piece of the pie, the pie would be larger to start with.
Every ISP should have a contract with its dial-up customers stating costs for sending UBE or spam. Should one substantiated spam complaint arise, that provision of the contract should kick in, and the spammer should be charged accordingly. As someone else indicated, the possibilities for revenue are tremendous. Some would say that this would require teams of lawyers. I would disagree. I would suggest that much spam comes from small business which are unincorporated (evidence to the contrary is encouraged). Whoever created the account will be an individual with a house and a car. It's pretty easy to file a lien against these assets.
Yes and no; I don't see how it would be any harder than wiring up 2,000 workstations in a large office building. There are engineering firms that do this sort of thing as a matter of routine. I'd hate to see the bill, though.
MS paid for the study, but that doesn't make the study invalid. Right. This same logic would apply to research indicating that there is no such thing as Desert Storm syndrome, sponsored by the U.S. Army. That there was no presidential cover-up of Monicagate, paid for by Friends of Bill. That operating a nuclear power plant has no effect on the environment, paid for by (insert your local electrical utility here). One of the most basic techniqes of critical thinking in the modern world consists of asking "Who paid for this information and how does it benefit them?" This bozo doesn't have the intelligence to do that. Or rather, his employer/customer doesn't want him to.
Please stop sending me email. -Paul
I got that impression, too, but he has a funny way of saying it. It's like he got massively flamed for telling Polack jokes in his column, and then tried to stem the tide of flames by writing ANOTHER column that said "Those Polacks keep sending me email telling me how smart they are. If they're so smart, why are there all these jokes? There's got to be some basis in fact, or else they wouldn't be funny, right? They're as bad as the Mexicans used to be - I wish they'd all leave me alone. Remember, I didn't write those offensive jokes - I merely told them."
I like the phrase "liberated software". It is less ambiguous than "free software", and shorter than "free (think speech not beer) software". It has a connotation of freedom that "open source (tm) software" does not.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but this has been one of the most cleverly orchestrated bits of FUD I have seen in a long time. Look how it worked...
1. Microsoft hired a known-biased "independent" lab to produce some obviously skewed results. If corporate America believes this, that's a bonus
2. The lab does tests on hardware for which there is not solid evidence that Linux is better.
3. The results are roundly drubbed by anyone with half a brain. The labs general conclusions are shown to be invalid.
4. The press examines the data and announces that Linux does not scale well and is not well-supported.
Microsoft did a masterful job of creating the perception of shortcomings in Linux.
Mindcraft finds themselves with their reputation intact: "We do what we're paid to, thanks for the check, look forward to doing business with you again sometime, Mr. Gates!" If they had any other reputation, they'd go out of business rather rapidly, doncha think? Good parasites do what they can to protect their hosts.
It's pretty hard to be an NT newbie for more than about a week unless you've never seen an MS OS in your life. What you see is all you get, kind of thing - click on Start, Programs, and everything under that is everything you can do. Spend a week playing with that and there's not much else to learn. There is some command line stuff, but I don't know of any that does anything other than (poorly) emulate similar Unix commands or maintain backwards compatibility with LAN Manager.
:)
But to answer your question,
1. Windows NT Resource Kit
2. Microsoft Technet
3. Microsoft Knowledge Base
in that order. Just about everything I know about NT has come from those sources. When I read a book about NT, I find it is generally a dumbed-down how-to derived from those sources.
As an example to address your question (and not a great one, since it's for an NT client - Win 95 - and not NT itself), I remember the first time I had occasion to use those resources, as a phone tech in 1995. Somebody couldn't log in to their NT server with Windows 95. I searched TechNet for the error message they were getting and found a registry setting that would cause the problem. At the time, I knew NOTHING about networking - all I knew was how to do boolean searches against an MS database.
So yes, I agree that it's a lot easier for the inexperienced (and the stupid) to optimize Windows NT than Linux. Kind of like saying it's easier for a 10-year-old to make a paper airplane than a Boeing 777
I use a 14" Commodore 1702 monitor attached to an old VCR with no antenna. It pulls in UHF with no problem and the VHF is viewable but slightly snowy. I figure the quality of my hardware doesn't need to be better than the quality of the information it displays :)
If you could think of several dozen apps that complex, I'd be more likely to agree. But of the top of your head, you can think of only one complex open source app? This does not bode well :)
Granted that Windows has captured the "grandma technophobe" market, I would suggest that Linux just needs a pretty face. Have you ever looked into the Windows API? Can you imagine how painful Windows would be if it were implemented as a series of command line utilites, each of which executed one call into the API? Do you think that maybe a GUI could be put on top of that to hide most of the complexity from Grandma? Then why can't it be done with Linux? Just because it hasn't been done yet doesn't mean that it can never happen.
While I'll grant that by definition, people with IQs higher than three standard deviations above the mean are in the minority, I disagree with the idea that only those people would want to use Linux. Remember the atomic bomb? Pretty neat piece of physics, that. Scores of the best minds in the US were needed to set the first one off. Now think about modern atomic bombs (or nuclear missiles, if you prefer). These are designed to be set off by people who may or may not have graduated from high school (soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines). It's amazing how incredibly complex technology can be simplified so that a layman can use it.
Doubtless you consider yourself to be one of the smart people. May I suggest that if you really were, then, you would find it simple to conceive of a Linux distribution that my 80-year-old ditzy Granny could use. Your inability to conceive something that does not exist in the present or the past puts you in the company of those who forced Galileo to recant.
The computer community, us included, has given them the impression that if anything goes wrong on their computer, like strange stuff happening, then it is most likely their fault
Speak for yourself. I did technical support for a large OEM (there were over 4,000 tech support reps) for 3 years, and everyone I knew was fond of blaming Microsoft when Windows crashed. I regularly explained to callers that Windows and Windows software had bugs that would cause their computer to crash without warning on occasion and that was the way it was.
or MEEPT!
I've seen this several times - anybody care to enlighten me as to it's origin, derivation, or meaning, apart from "I am an annoying dweeb and take perverse joy in that fact"?
The most elegant thing I ever saw was when the number of comments had spilled over the limit and only the subjects were displayed. My regular threshold is -1, so I could easily get to all comments. The really cool, elegant part was that the comments with a score of 3 (there's another treshold value that controls this) or higher were displayed in full - not just the subject. So I could see the scope of the entire discussion, I could go in and look at any comment, and every high-scoring comment was immediately visible.
It would be nice to be able to switch between to that mode (all subjects + good comments in full) at will without having to reconfigure. Mr. Malda, if you get all these configurable filters set up, we may find that we like two or three viewing modes, depending on the length of the article or its subject or our mood - how about some way to quickly switch between them without having to go the preferences page?
So, can I borrow $905 from you? I will pay back the $509 I owe you within an hour. :)
.INF file doesn't contain accurate information on file locations. You almost have to install the driver files by hand.
I was addressing the 3C509 (as was the post I replied to), not the 3C905. The 3C905 situation is just insane. There is no possible way that an inexperienced non-geek could install that card - the card misdetects or misinstalls and the
Can I have some of your crack? Because there is NO retail or OEM version of Windows 98 without support for 3C509 series of cards. (I used to earn a living configuring Windows 98 for networks - sad but true). The only possible explanation is that you were working with a beta copy of '98. I find it interesting that you fail to mention this fact. You are either intellectually dishonest or ignorant of the situation. I doubt that it is the latter. I hereby dub thee a FUDster.
Malthus is a bad example. He used quantitative methods that assumed exponential growth of people and linear growth in food supply. He was wrong on both counts. He also assumed that the rate of growth of the human population would be independent of the rate of growth of the food supply, which is absurd - isn't it obvious that as food becomes more scarce, the rate of population growth will go down?
I would further suggest that those who believe we are not currently encountering ecological disasters are good examples of the human ability to accept any situation as normal. We are in the middle of an ecological disaster of geological proportions - future paleontologists will debate endlessly about what caused the die-out of so many species during this epoch.
I think his point was not that genetic engineering would have an effect similar to the introduction of penicillin. I think his point was merely that ecology is almost always more complex than we perceive, and our actions have long-term unintended consequences. 50 years ago, the concept of resistant strains would not have been taken seriously. He used the analogy to ask the question, "What could happen 50 years from now that people today would think impossible?"
It's a funny thing about the UK - it's an island (or two). It is much easier to wipe out a species on an island than on a continent.
Let me ask the same question in a different way that would perhaps clarify the intent of the question.
If Lucas had to cut costs in order to make the film profitable, could he have found places to do so while still maintaining his artisitic integrity, without damaging the film's entertainment value, and while telling the same story? For example, could he have cut the costume budget?