Lose 2 marks for bad reporting again, somewhere along the line.
This bill does not specifically give UK employers more access in terms of monitoring their staffs email.
This bill gives the UK government + police services, access to monitor *ANYBODYS* email, for any reason, even if you are not under suspicion of having committed a crime. It's not even email either - they can demand the ISP feed traffic in general their way.
If it was just work mails I wouldn't really care - it's their bandwidth, but the fact is that the RIP bill is in fact there purely to give the authorities unprecedented power to intercept the communications of the general populace, to demand their decryption keys (or face prison), and other such lovely fluffy things. It's big brother, approved by a government with no clue whatsoever.
To be quite honest I think redhat is doing as much harm as good at the moment. Bugged distros from start to finish, _serious_ stability problems (I once ran a compute cluster of RH6.2 machines, and they were NEVER all running at the same time), poor configuration file setups, more outofthebox security holes than you can shake a whole tree at, etc. To top it off, the recent bundling of a development version of gcc paints redhat in full cowboy colours.
This one's easy - Redhat has had FAR more security alerts than Debian. Point that out to them. If they are the sort of people short-sighted enough to place faith in market share, then they're also short sighted enough not to realise that it's a poor argument;-)
DeCSS decrypts the DVD movie for playing on things other than "approved" players/operating systems.
It doesn't make it any easier or any harder to pirate DVDs. If someone copies a CSS'd movie, they have a CSS'd pirate copy. If they copy a non-CSS'd movie, they get a non-CSS'd pirate copy.
DVDs aren't even software either, get a bloody clue. IMHO people should pay for their films/DVDs (I personally don't have a DVD player at all, just a nice VCR), but they should also be able to watch it using whatever equipment is capable, not just a specific operating system they might not even own.
Ok - not _just_ you, this is just the article at which I snapped and decided I needed to say this:
LINUX IS NOT REDHAT!!!!:-)
Linuxconf sucks. One might even go as far as to say it blows goats - so it's fortunate that other distributions don't use it. YaST (SuSE linux) is really easy to use.
I don't agree that it's easier to set up NT. If it was, then I wouldn't be able to install/configure several machines in the time it takes our resident NT admin to set up just one.
> Win2k/WinNT make GREAT file servers that will run forever if you give it the same respect as you would any other server.
Perhaps if you're only serving a Mickey Mouse number of files to a Mickey Mouse number of users. In the Real World (tm) they're not stable enough, not flexible enough, and _certainly_ not fast enough. For a small company they'll probably work if not abused, but if you're running a large operation you're digging you own grave using M$ machines for file serving. Trust me on this one, I worked on the systems that store most of the UK contribution to the human genome project;-)
> Reason most NT/Win systems fudge up is because of all the CRAP people put on them.
Not totally true. We have an NT/Oracle/IS cluster. Only one half of the cluster ever runs either app - and NO other software/extrenious services are installed. The machines and/or IS fall down almost daily, despite support from M$, and the hardware vendor. I wouldn't deploy NT on anything critical - it's just not stable under heavy use. (I saw this at my old job too..)
I won't address the home use comments - I bloody hate the new win2k interface more than the '98 one (it's slower), and you clearly use your machine for different things to me. I code/play/irc/etc, and would use a DVD player to watch DVDs, plugged into a television, in the lounge;-)
I'd _love_ to disagree with him here, I use linux as my desk OS both at home and at work, since it's excellent for that. It's very good at many things, but he's right - there isn't anything I can think of offhand that another OS doesn't do better..
I wouldn't choose windows for anything other than times when Microsoft-only products are required, but I'd choose solaris as a DNS server over everything else, and I'd choose FreeBSD for web serving way before linux. Disk arrays? I'd probably go for HP-UX, since their lvm system is absolutely solid as a _rock_. Mail? Probably FreeBSD again..
Oh dear - poor tux;-)
The only place it wins over all other competitors, IMHO, is the desktop - and then only for people who like pretty desktops - if you want a desktop unix machine anything with CDE will do the easier to please..
Tell that to Sun, HP, IBM, Compaq (well.. Digital;-) )and all the other server vendors who build decent machines (full of SCSI drives)
> If I want more than for drives, I'll buy an A-Bit motherboard...
Fine. You buy your new motherboard so you can have 8 devices. I'll go and buy a single channel SCSI card and get 15, for a lot less money.
> If I want a money pit, of course, I will start buying SCSI peripherals
This weekend I ditched my Ultra/ATA drives, and replaced them with 6 year old Seagate Barracuda 4s. End result? Star office now loads in _9_ seconds as opposed to 30. Also, when lots of data is being trawled to/from the drives, my machine doesn't behave like its wading through treacle, I don't actually even notice it going on.
Total cost of conversion? Nothing for the SCSI channels, I've got twin ultra/2 on the motherboard (but cards cost about 50 ukp), and about 120 ukp for the 3 4.5gb drives. Of course in America, where parts are much cheaper, you'd pay even less.
Quit preaching about cheap n cheerful low-performance IDE crap;-)
You're not wrong there - the PSX Castlevania is very good. I've played + finished it several times, and I can't ever see myself selling it. Not only is the game full of depth, and fun to play - the graphics are the best true 2D ones I've seen, and the music is breathtaking.
Why must people have polygons everywhere? A well crafted 2d character can look just as good, if not better.
I've been into 2d shooters for years (starting with defender on the ZX81, through Delta on the C64, and onto stuff like Battle Squadron, Blood Money (etc) on the Amiga).
Currently I'm playing Gradius IV on the Playstation 2 quite a bit, but the BEST ever 2D shooter I've played is Einhander (which although rendered in polygons, is essentially just a sidescrolling 2d shooter) on the Playstation. Done by Squaresoft, and only available in Japan or America.
Incredible! Graphics, sound, gameplay - all perfect, with a decent level of difficulty.
It's yet another case of companies thinking they're writing Linux software by releasing kludged wine-ports. I've yet to see any real productivity app that works quickly and well using wine (no doubt someone will contradict me) - and they've always suffered the flickering dialog boxes and half-drawn widgets.
I can see why they do it (development costs), but the end results are a tragic missed opportunity.
StarOffice and WordPerfect are free for download and use by private individuals, but last I checked, the same doesn't hold true for Applix.
I actually think StarOffice is pretty good. Sure, it's large, but at least it isn't yet another wine-app like Corel and IBM (etc) seem content to push out.
"You have opted in on one of our web servers or.."
type things? I get spam from those all the time, often several times, despite a claimed 'one time only mailing' since 'signing up'. Of course I never have signed up, I've never registered interest, and one of the addresses has only ever posted to _one_ newsgroup a couple of times.
So either a) they trawl newsgroups with an address harvester, or b) they get someone with a harvester to register the interest...
I think the opt-in in question was probably sending to people who hadn't signed up. Personally I think it's fine to blackhole them for it. I also think it's fine to blackhole entire sites due to one of their users - since then you can pretty much be sure that they _will_ get rid of the user as opposed to just ignoring it.
Try IE for HP-UX. I've got it, and it crashes all the time. Mostly if it dislikes your network settings at all, but reproducably segfaults if you send it to a 16bit display;-)
If they come up with a lightning fast display architecture with a decent API then the best of luck to them. X is just a _bit_ too bloated to be anything other than an engine for window managers. In all fairness it does a great job of doing what it was _designed_ to do, which was not unfortunately games or multimedia.
Yet another rather good application for Linux that I _would_ buy if it was priced reasonably. They need to have a home user license and a seperate price for commercials. At $75 for a personal edition I'd probably buy it, at $299 I'll stick to nedit thanks. At $199 I wasn't even vaguely interested in AccelX, but when they released the 2d/3d licensed-by-gfx-card servers at $29 I bought a license straight away. They still haven't learnt that Linux users are largely a very different market to Windows ones.
Heh - Rational didn't endear themselves to me particularly... I was in charge of a small collection of Irix machines, which all got upgraded to 6.5 because 6.2/6.3 were slow and bugged. Some time after 6.5 was in full release, Rational still weren't supporting Purify on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Lose 2 marks for bad reporting again, somewhere along the line.
This bill does not specifically give UK employers more access in terms of monitoring their staffs email.
This bill gives the UK government + police services, access to monitor *ANYBODYS* email, for any reason, even if you are not under suspicion of having committed a crime. It's not even email either - they can demand the ISP feed traffic in general their way.
If it was just work mails I wouldn't really care - it's their bandwidth, but the fact is that the RIP bill is in fact there purely to give the authorities unprecedented power to intercept the communications of the general populace, to demand their decryption keys (or face prison), and other such lovely fluffy things. It's big brother, approved by a government with no clue whatsoever.
If anyone offers me a job in the US, I'll move..
To be quite honest I think redhat is doing as much harm as good at the moment. Bugged distros from start to finish, _serious_ stability problems (I once ran a compute cluster of RH6.2 machines, and they were NEVER all running at the same time), poor configuration file setups, more outofthebox security holes than you can shake a whole tree at, etc. To top it off, the recent bundling of a development version of gcc paints redhat in full cowboy colours.
Just my 2p.
james
For instance, a 64 processor Alpha will have better performance under NT because the SMP has been heavily developed in the kernel
;-) (and apache compiles under it)
Ever tried Digital Unix (sorry Compaq - Tru64...) on a multi processor alpha? It utterly smokes NT and linux
That made me laugh so hard I cried! :-)
This one's easy - Redhat has had FAR more security alerts than Debian. Point that out to them. If they are the sort of people short-sighted enough to place faith in market share, then they're also short sighted enough not to realise that it's a poor argument ;-)
79 days isn't actually a very long time for a machine to run.
;-) It was bought and installed approximately 443 days ago.
From a FreeBSD server I have access to:
9:58AM up 129 days, 12:19, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
And even 129 isn't very high, I've seen linux and *BSD boxes alike with a couple hundred days uptime.
Some food for thought:
10:00am up 441 days, 19:07, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.11, 0.15
Thats an hp-ux machine
james
Stupid Stupid Stupid.
DeCSS decrypts the DVD movie for playing on things other than "approved" players/operating systems.
It doesn't make it any easier or any harder to pirate DVDs. If someone copies a CSS'd movie, they have a CSS'd pirate copy. If they copy a non-CSS'd movie, they get a non-CSS'd pirate copy.
DVDs aren't even software either, get a bloody clue. IMHO people should pay for their films/DVDs (I personally don't have a DVD player at all, just a nice VCR), but they should also be able to watch it using whatever equipment is capable, not just a specific operating system they might not even own.
james
I had the same problem until I compiled ppp into the kernel, and not as a module...
Ok - not _just_ you, this is just the article at which I snapped and decided I needed to say this:
:-)
LINUX IS NOT REDHAT!!!!
Linuxconf sucks. One might even go as far as to say it blows goats - so it's fortunate that other distributions don't use it. YaST (SuSE linux) is really easy to use.
I don't agree that it's easier to set up NT. If it was, then I wouldn't be able to install/configure several machines in the time it takes our resident NT admin to set up just one.
james
> Win2k/WinNT make GREAT file servers that will run forever if you give it the same respect as you would any other server.
;-)
;-)
Perhaps if you're only serving a Mickey Mouse number of files to a Mickey Mouse number of users. In the Real World (tm) they're not stable enough, not flexible enough, and _certainly_ not fast enough. For a small company they'll probably work if not abused, but if you're running a large operation you're digging you own grave using M$ machines for file serving. Trust me on this one, I worked on the systems that store most of the UK contribution to the human genome project
> Reason most NT/Win systems fudge up is because of all the CRAP people put on them.
Not totally true. We have an NT/Oracle/IS cluster. Only one half of the cluster ever runs either app - and NO other software/extrenious services are installed. The machines and/or IS fall down almost daily, despite support from M$, and the hardware vendor. I wouldn't deploy NT on anything critical - it's just not stable under heavy use. (I saw this at my old job too..)
I won't address the home use comments - I bloody hate the new win2k interface more than the '98 one (it's slower), and you clearly use your machine for different things to me. I code/play/irc/etc, and would use a DVD player to watch DVDs, plugged into a television, in the lounge
I'd _love_ to disagree with him here, I use linux as my desk OS both at home and at work, since it's excellent for that. It's very good at many things, but he's right - there isn't anything I can think of offhand that another OS doesn't do better..
;-)
I wouldn't choose windows for anything other than times when Microsoft-only products are required, but I'd choose solaris as a DNS server over everything else, and I'd choose FreeBSD for web serving way before linux. Disk arrays? I'd probably go for HP-UX, since their lvm system is absolutely solid as a _rock_. Mail? Probably FreeBSD again..
Oh dear - poor tux
The only place it wins over all other competitors, IMHO, is the desktop - and then only for people who like pretty desktops - if you want a desktop unix machine anything with CDE will do the easier to please..
james
(a linux advocate, before anyone flames me)
Actually, in my experience its not even stable under a constant light load...
Where I work, _all_ of our network problems are caused by NT services failing.
sigh.
james
(who has no option to strip them out)
> Didn't you hear? SCSI is dying.
.. Digital ;-) )and all the other server vendors who build decent machines (full of SCSI drives)
;-)
Tell that to Sun, HP, IBM, Compaq (well
> If I want more than for drives, I'll buy an A-Bit motherboard...
Fine. You buy your new motherboard so you can have 8 devices. I'll go and buy a single channel SCSI card and get 15, for a lot less money.
> If I want a money pit, of course, I will start buying SCSI peripherals
This weekend I ditched my Ultra/ATA drives, and replaced them with 6 year old Seagate Barracuda 4s. End result? Star office now loads in _9_ seconds as opposed to 30. Also, when lots of data is being trawled to/from the drives, my machine doesn't behave like its wading through treacle, I don't actually even notice it going on.
Total cost of conversion? Nothing for the SCSI channels, I've got twin ultra/2 on the motherboard (but cards cost about 50 ukp), and about 120 ukp for the 3 4.5gb drives. Of course in America, where parts are much cheaper, you'd pay even less.
Quit preaching about cheap n cheerful low-performance IDE crap
You're not wrong there - the PSX Castlevania is very good. I've played + finished it several times, and I can't ever see myself selling it. Not only is the game full of depth, and fun to play - the graphics are the best true 2D ones I've seen, and the music is breathtaking.
Why must people have polygons everywhere? A well crafted 2d character can look just as good, if not better.
james
I've been into 2d shooters for years (starting with defender on the ZX81, through Delta on the C64, and onto stuff like Battle Squadron, Blood Money (etc) on the Amiga).
Currently I'm playing Gradius IV on the Playstation 2 quite a bit, but the BEST ever 2D shooter I've played is Einhander (which although rendered in polygons, is essentially just a sidescrolling 2d shooter) on the Playstation. Done by Squaresoft, and only available in Japan or America.
Incredible! Graphics, sound, gameplay - all perfect, with a decent level of difficulty.
james
HPUX.
I've got it - it's ok if you happen to want to display it on the HP console - but crashes if you sent it to a remote X display.
It's yet another case of companies thinking they're writing Linux software by releasing kludged wine-ports. I've yet to see any real productivity app that works quickly and well using wine (no doubt someone will contradict me) - and they've always suffered the flickering dialog boxes and half-drawn widgets.
I can see why they do it (development costs), but the end results are a tragic missed opportunity.
james
Because they have to pay for it.
StarOffice and WordPerfect are free for download and use by private individuals, but last I checked, the same doesn't hold true for Applix.
I actually think StarOffice is pretty good. Sure, it's large, but at least it isn't yet another wine-app like Corel and IBM (etc) seem content to push out.
Then why bother reading all the replies?
I presume you mean those:
"You have opted in on one of our web servers or.."
type things? I get spam from those all the time, often several times, despite a claimed 'one time only mailing' since 'signing up'. Of course I never have signed up, I've never registered interest, and one of the addresses has only ever posted to _one_ newsgroup a couple of times.
So either a) they trawl newsgroups with an address harvester, or b) they get someone with a harvester to register the interest...
I think the opt-in in question was probably sending to people who hadn't signed up. Personally I think it's fine to blackhole them for it. I also think it's fine to blackhole entire sites due to one of their users - since then you can pretty much be sure that they _will_ get rid of the user as opposed to just ignoring it.
Try IE for HP-UX. I've got it, and it crashes all the time. Mostly if it dislikes your network settings at all, but reproducably segfaults if you send it to a 16bit display ;-)
If they come up with a lightning fast display architecture with a decent API then the best of luck to them. X is just a _bit_ too bloated to be anything other than an engine for window managers. In all fairness it does a great job of doing what it was _designed_ to do, which was not unfortunately games or multimedia.
I miss the days of demos.
Yet another rather good application for Linux that I _would_ buy if it was priced reasonably. They need to have a home user license and a seperate price for commercials. At $75 for a personal edition I'd probably buy it, at $299 I'll stick to nedit thanks. At $199 I wasn't even vaguely interested in AccelX, but when they released the 2d/3d licensed-by-gfx-card servers at $29 I bought a license straight away. They still haven't learnt that Linux users are largely a very different market to Windows ones.
Heh - Rational didn't endear themselves to me particularly... I was in charge of a small collection of Irix machines, which all got upgraded to 6.5 because 6.2/6.3 were slow and bugged. Some time after 6.5 was in full release, Rational still weren't supporting Purify on it.
I'm fairly sure that ASP will rewrite to M$ stupidity levels any ASP code that is well written ;-)