Seeing as there is no source code, and NVidia do not appear to have released a fix, using the Open Source X driver appears to be the only viable solution. Do you have a better suggestion? You are at the mercy of your proprietary vendor.
The OpenBSD Project has been warning about the dangers of binary blobs - security and otherwise - for years now. Indeed, binary blobs were the theme of the OpenBSD 3.9 release (as mentioned in the kernel trap article).
Perhaps people will now start to wake up and realise that these kinds of drivers are unacceptably dangerous, both for immediate system security and for future hardware freedom. Slimey vendors like NVidia, Intel and Atheros have been trying to shove this crap down our throats for some time now.
Free software users need to unite and say NO to binary blobs! Lets kick this crud out of our operating systems!
There is no concrete definition of what is art. The Modernists spent their time negating every successive art movement. You think that art has to be beautiful? Baudelaire showed us that art could be about the ugly too. You think art has to be painstakingly made by masters who dedicated great portions of their lives to painting or sculpting? Duchamp showed us that art could be regular industrial products like urinals and snow shovels (the readymade). Warhol took this a step further by becoming the industry himself (his famous gallery/workshop known as "The Factory"). Today, you can buy socks and postage stamps - each one a work of art! - from the great contemporary artist Ben Vautier.
In truth, art today has merged with marketing and advertising. To be an artist today is to be a master of communication, a master networker.
The question is not is programming art but rather can somebody convince you that programming is art.
Re:Declare your bias, why don't you?
on
OpenBSD 3.7 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Who said anything about closed source wireless drivers?
The whole point of the recent OpenBSD wireless developments are that the drivers are completely free!
The installer might not have shiny graphics, but its actually extremely simple. It fits on a single floppy and can be used remotely. Same goes for upgrading.
You misunderstand. OpenBSD already have a driver. They want documentation to improve that and more importantly implement a management program which can do critical stuff like check if any drives have failed.
The management utility in the FreeBSD ports tree is binary-only. OpenBSD refuse to accept binary only crap, which is why they want this documentation.
I'm pretty sure, that Linux developers are numerous enough to aim for all three goals: reliability, safety and efficiency.
While I like Linux and use it in some situations, I can tell you for sure that most distributions are far from competing with OpenBSD in terms of safety. You are right in saying that OpenBSD has a lot less resources than Linux, but they use their resources in a far more focused way.
Yes, there are 3rd party patches which hack many anti-buffer overflow protections into the Linux kernel, similar to what OpenBSD has.
Yes, there is a stateful firewall for Linux.
Yes, there is ipv6 support for Linux.
But OpenBSD takes all of these things, which under Linux can be half baked and kludged, and packages them together as a polished, stable end product. Their PF work is quite frankly amazing. The features and documentation are unbeatable. Checkpoint and Cisco, watch out!
The key difference between GNU/Linux and the various BSDs is integration. The BSDs assure you that the various things will play together properly. Features are added more conservatively, but they are going to work. The system as a whole is stable.
You know that for example the buffer overflow protections are not going to break half your userland applications, because it has been thouroughly tested on the system as a whole. Some example results of this:
I see many many comments saying that making Java open source would be a bad idea, that people can get a JVM for free (as in beer) now - whats the problem? Damn commie GNU hippies wanting everything for free, yada yada.
Well, let me put it this way:
Yes, there are existing efforts at making a Free Software JVM/Java implementation - notably GCJ and Kaffe - and it is perfectly legal to do so. However, the big problem is reimplementing the whole Java API. Java has probably one of the biggest unified API's ever. Creating a compatible and stable implementation is not only a massive job, but also such an effort will be forever playing catch up! GNU Classpath is an admirable effort, relied upon by pretty much every GPL Java implementation, but just look at all the core stuff missing from the API!
If Sun GPL'd all its API, we could have a functional 100% free Java implementation right now, and they could still keep their own JVM tech proprietary, maybe sell it as a high performance option or something. Also, think of the improvements and bugfixes you'd get with thousands of people hacking on the class libraries?
As for forking the language, I think Sun could use its existing Community infrastructure to help tie development together and prevent this. Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are all open languages, yet forking is not a problem with them! As for Microsoft somehow doing evil stuff with Java - they have C# doing a good enough job at eroding Java already!
Another advantage to opening Java would be that distributions could include it in the base install. As it stands, if you want to run Sun's JVM, you have to go to their website seperately and download it. Even their download procedure itself can be a pain (especially on a server)!
Other people have blamed distros themselves for "religious" attitudes, but the fact is they simply aren't allowed to distribute JVMs, without at least adding all kinds of EULAs etc to the installer.
In my opinion Sun should:
Preferably GPL the API
At very least allow binary distribution by distros
If Sun opened it up, Java could become the base language of GNOME as detailed here. Think of how cool it would be to use a well established, modern language to write GNOME apps? And Sun would get even more of a foothold with their language.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a clue. Recent Sun amd64 servers ship with the vulnerable NVIDIA blob under Solaris (which is also probably vulnerable).
Seeing as there is no source code, and NVidia do not appear to have released a fix, using the Open Source X driver appears to be the only viable solution. Do you have a better suggestion? You are at the mercy of your proprietary vendor.
The OpenBSD Project has been warning about the dangers of binary blobs - security and otherwise - for years now. Indeed, binary blobs were the theme of the OpenBSD 3.9 release (as mentioned in the kernel trap article).
Perhaps people will now start to wake up and realise that these kinds of drivers are unacceptably dangerous, both for immediate system security and for future hardware freedom. Slimey vendors like NVidia, Intel and Atheros have been trying to shove this crap down our throats for some time now.
Free software users need to unite and say NO to binary blobs! Lets kick this crud out of our operating systems!
I've got a Sharp Zaurus and it seems much nicer than this thing. Has a full keyboard too. Of course, its more expensive. You get what you pay for.
Maybe an operating system such as OpenBSD which the reviewer has his written his own book about.
Pieces by Warhol and Duchamp (two name but two names) would appear to contradict this Jan Mukarovsky.
In truth, art today has merged with marketing and advertising. To be an artist today is to be a master of communication, a master networker.
The question is not is programming art but rather can somebody convince you that programming is art.
Who said anything about closed source wireless drivers?
The whole point of the recent OpenBSD wireless developments are that the drivers are completely free!
Stallman gave Theo de Raadt the 2004 FSF award in Febuary as recognition for crying out loud!
Um, that stuff is cool and all, but you realise that
pfsync(4) is the only component of all those you mention which works on OpenBSD?
The new song has been out for a while, you can get them all on the lyrics page.
If you like Pink Floyd you'll like this one!
I'll assume you meant OpenBSD and not FreeBSD.
Thats cool if you don't like reading documenation. Stick with MacOSX/Windows/Linux/Whatever.
Nobody says OpenBSD is for everybody.
It's only "hard" if you don't understand what you are doing.
:)
Of course, OpenBSD is not for people who don't understand what they are doing.
Read the docs so you understand properly, and it is no longer hard
The installer might not have shiny graphics, but its actually extremely simple. It fits on a single floppy and can be used remotely. Same goes for upgrading.
Java as a language is not so bad. However, its portability is a joke.
Java is available and stable on Linux i386, Windows, Solaris and Mac.
But what about all the other platforms. I run OpenBSD/amd64. No working JVM for any of the 17 other architectures.
I can use KOffice and Abiword just fine, but not OpenOffice 2.
The management utility in the FreeBSD ports tree is binary-only. OpenBSD refuse to accept binary only crap, which is why they want this documentation.
Unfortunately, Guinness is rather expensive in Ireland these days.
Its called Cooperative Linux, and has been around for quite some time.
www.colinux.org
Yet, suspiciously, the Linux kernel running on my laptop hasn't spontaneously died. Hmm. This Dvorak chap is quite the retard.
No, OpenBSD has not adopted their new BSD init system. The project doesn't agree its quite "so simply correct" as you let on.
http://silcnet.org/
Its usually trivial to get root once you have local access to a Linux box. Same goes for most UNIX-likes.
Except that your iptables version doesn't limit access to the "torrent" user like OpenBSD's PF does. Which is pretty important.
So in practise I can shell home from any access point which permits me to make DNS lookups.
See http://nstx.dereference.de/nstx/ for one software package this enables this.
While I like Linux and use it in some situations, I can tell you for sure that most distributions are far from competing with OpenBSD in terms of safety. You are right in saying that OpenBSD has a lot less resources than Linux, but they use their resources in a far more focused way.
But OpenBSD takes all of these things, which under Linux can be half baked and kludged, and packages them together as a polished, stable end product. Their PF work is quite frankly amazing. The features and documentation are unbeatable. Checkpoint and Cisco, watch out!
The key difference between GNU/Linux and the various BSDs is integration. The BSDs assure you that the various things will play together properly. Features are added more conservatively, but they are going to work. The system as a whole is stable.
You know that for example the buffer overflow protections are not going to break half your userland applications, because it has been thouroughly tested on the system as a whole. Some example results of this:
You also don't get silly things like stable kernels which corrupt your filesystem or ripping out the virtual memory subsystem in a stable kernel and completely changing it.
All these things are very nice when you are running serious production servers.
Linux can perform a large number of roles adequately.
OpenBSD can perform a smaller number of roles excellently
Well, let me put it this way:
Yes, there are existing efforts at making a Free Software JVM/Java implementation - notably GCJ and Kaffe - and it is perfectly legal to do so. However, the big problem is reimplementing the whole Java API. Java has probably one of the biggest unified API's ever. Creating a compatible and stable implementation is not only a massive job, but also such an effort will be forever playing catch up! GNU Classpath is an admirable effort, relied upon by pretty much every GPL Java implementation, but just look at all the core stuff missing from the API!
If Sun GPL'd all its API, we could have a functional 100% free Java implementation right now, and they could still keep their own JVM tech proprietary, maybe sell it as a high performance option or something. Also, think of the improvements and bugfixes you'd get with thousands of people hacking on the class libraries?
As for forking the language, I think Sun could use its existing Community infrastructure to help tie development together and prevent this. Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are all open languages, yet forking is not a problem with them! As for Microsoft somehow doing evil stuff with Java - they have C# doing a good enough job at eroding Java already!
Another advantage to opening Java would be that distributions could include it in the base install. As it stands, if you want to run Sun's JVM, you have to go to their website seperately and download it. Even their download procedure itself can be a pain (especially on a server)!
Other people have blamed distros themselves for "religious" attitudes, but the fact is they simply aren't allowed to distribute JVMs, without at least adding all kinds of EULAs etc to the installer.
In my opinion Sun should:
If Sun opened it up, Java could become the base language of GNOME as detailed here. Think of how cool it would be to use a well established, modern language to write GNOME apps? And Sun would get even more of a foothold with their language.
Take a look here