No, they haven't issued a patch for these two issues yet. I never claimed that Slackware was perfect.
But two factors may explain why these two items didn't get "utmost" priority on Patrick's todo list: 1) they are local exploits, and 2) they do not affect the default and recommended kernel.
I looked this ruling over, yawned, and then got back to more important things. If you think this is the end of the world, then let me clue you in.
Your freedom and liberty are your responsibility. You don't get them from Microsoft, Apple, Linux, Debian, RMS, or ESR. You don't get them from John Ashcroft, Janet Reno, George Bush, or Bill Clinton. You don't get them from the DOJ, DOD, IRS or USPO. You don't get them from the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. Liberty is something innate that you are born with.
As a free human being, you need to exercise your freedom or it will atrophy. I don't use Microsoft products because I am a free man and have chosen of my own free will not to use them. I know other free men who have chosen of their own free will to use Microsoft products. They are no less free than me.
Microsoft has never infringed upon my liberty. They have never held a gun to my head and forced me to use any of their products. They have never coerced me in any way. I could sit back like the rest of you and whine that choosing an alternate operating system is inconvenient, but I'm smarter than that. I know that the best things in life are NOT convenient. You have to work at them.
Could this ruling mean that Microsoft will remain a monopoly? Yes. But so what? It won't bother me in the least bit. They were a monopoly yesterday and I was using Linux yesterday. They will be a monopoly tomorrow and I will still be using Linux tomorrow.
Nobody is going to make you use Windows. If you end up using Windows it is because you chose to use it of your own free will. The only way Microsoft can get any power over you is if you choose to let them. Stop looking to the DOJ as your savior! You are already free so get out there and start acting like it!
But I would clarify you post a bit. Our legal system is controlled 100% by the legal profession. How many congressmen are NOT lawyers? How many Supreme Court justices are NOT lawyers? Heck, how many judges of any level are NOT laywers? How many members of the executive branch below the cabinet level are NOT laywers?
The problem is clear to me: conflict of interest. Normally it is not a problem, and quite efficient, for an industry or profession to be run by its practioneers. We want our medicine delivered by physicians. We want our children taught by educators. We want our software written by programmers. But the law is an exception. The law is raw naked power. And we have given the monopoly over that raw naked power to a single profession.
Take the legal system out of the hands of the legal profession. Lawyers need to stick to representing their clients and judges need to stick to arbitrating disputes. Let congress be composed of the ordinary people. I want to see congress composed of farmers, educators, physicians, programmers and automotive engineers.
I'm not against package management tools. I'm just against braindead package management tools. dpkg and apt-get are the lonely exceptions to braindead package managment tools.
The Slackare package stuff is like the rest of the system, simple, bare bones, and assumes you know what you are doing.
Have you tried a custom install lately on any of the other big linux distros lately?
Last big flashy distro I installed was Mandrake 8.0. Horrible experience. First off you are presented with a nauseating yellow on purple themed installer. Then it installed unecessary dependencies after I deselected their dependent packages. Then it decided my Matrox G450 was really a cheap framebuffer. Then it turned on a bunch of services without me asking. The overall attitute of Mandrake is "we know better than you so shut up and obey".
If you want a simple bare bones installation, use a simple bare bones distribution. Trying to coax one out of a complex bloated distribution isn't worth the effort.
If I start an overnight delivery service and use Chevy vans, that doesn't make me a Chevy company. If I build houses using Stanley tools, that doesn't make me a Stanley company.
Just because I use Linux as an end user product doens't mean that I am a Linux company.
Companies will continue to make money by *using* Linux, but I don't see too many making money by selling or developing Linux.
OS/2 could also run Windows applications natively. This led in part to the demise of OS/2. If you could write an application once for Windows, and have it run on both Windows and OS/2, then why bother ever writing for OS/2 natively?
So the consumer sees 10,000 native Windows titles and 10 native OS/2 titles on the store shelves, and thinks to himself "duh!"
Of course, it's much better to shove everything under / in one big flat file structure. Think of the simplicity. Only a single entry in your PATH. Only a single entry in your ld.so.conf. Heck, why not put your home directory there as well!
Except when it comes time to upgrade your distro, or try another, then the scheme all comes crashing down.
The Unix file hierarchy make sense once you think about it. A certain section is reserved for the OS and OS installed software. Another section is reserved for user/admin installed software. And there's even a section (opt) for software that refuses to conform.
But this system only works well with distros that use a bit of common sense. Unfortunately a lot of them don't, including a few of the big name guys. With FuLinux (as a fictitous example) I have no idea whether a package is installed under/usr,/usr/local, or/opt. Under a sensible distro you know exactly where everything is without having to check.
Linux is a Unix-like operating system. If you don't want it to be Unix-like, then go roll your own. The rest of us want Linux to be Unix-like, and we'll keep the Unix-like file hierarchy.
Taking a quick look at the "Recent Additions" packages list, I see that 9 out of the first 10 entries have no ties at all to the FSF (the tenth is a tenuous tie at best).
Looking closer, I see that the first two entries aren't even licensed under a FSF-style license at all, but under MIT-style licenses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "FSF-style free software", but it's clear that your project is porting more than GNU software, and more than copyleft software.
We call it GNU-Darwin because we are reaching Apple users with free software.
That might make sense if all of the free software you were porting over to Darwin where GNU software. But it's not. GNU is not a repository of all possible free software. It is a specific project to create a specific operating system.
Why not call it "BSD Darwin"? BSD is also free software, and there's a hell of a lot more BSD stuff in GNU Darwin than there is GNU stuff. Since RMS insists that LinuxOS be called "GNU/Linux" since he thinks it is derived from GNU, then why not call your project "BSD Darwin" since it is clearly derived from BSD software.
Or even better, since you want to use "GNU" to imply "free", why not just call it "Free Darwin?" You would avoid much confusion that way. It would also avoid pissing off the BSD community by taking their software and renaming it GNU.
RMS wants LinuxOS to be called GNU/Linux because he really believes that it is "The GNU System" that he started back in 1985. It has nothing to do with there being GNU software included. Solaris ships with GNU software but RMS doesn't call it GNU/Solaris. FreeBSD contains just as much GNU software as LinuxOS does, but he doesn't want to call it GNU/FreeBSD.
He just thinks that Linux is really The GNU System with linux as the kernel instead of Hurd.
GNU Darwin is no such beast. Not even close.
In theory, your Windows box with GNU software (If it has the full set) is now "GNU-Windows".
Of course Windows doesn't have the "full set". GNU is a complete operating system in its own right. What good is Hurd going to do under Windows?
But that's beside the point. Not even RMS considers Windows with all possible GNU software installed on it to be "GNU/Windows".
Darwin is not a GNU project. FreeBSD is not a GNU project. Mach is not a GNU project. OSX is not a GNU project.
And of course, GNU Darwin is not a GNU project. So why is it called "GNU Darwin"? This project has nothing to do with GNU. Sure it has some ported GNU software, but so do my Solaris and FreeBSD boxen. Come to think of it, so do my Windows and QNX boxen.
Most people who settle in for the long haul of writing a debugging a new theme do so because they want it to look like something they've already seen and liked. Having written a few themes myself, it's easy to say "make something totally new" than it is to make something totally new that doesn't suck.
One of the more original themes for KDE is the default high-color theme. It doesn't look like anything else out there, but it doesn't suck either. My third favorite after the default and Liquid is Qnix. Of course you won't like it, as it emulates the QNX look.
Remember "The Prisoner"? In one episode they briefly mentioned "jamming" to disrupt the activities of the warders. A later episode, "Hammer into Anvil", showed awesome jamming in practice.
"Prisoner" style jamming would be stuff like secretly passing (real) grocery lists, abruptly changing your well known hobbies, getting a post office box that you only use for two of your four magazine subscriptions, etc. Makes the warders think you're up so something so they expend effort trying to figure it out.
So what would "Carnivore" style jamming be? It can't be just randomness, and it has to be at least semi-legitimate. Posting signed and encrypted random streams won't count, because it's not real. And it can't get you in real trouble. One idea: create a PGP key for "Anonymous Coward", and sign all of your AC posts to Slashdot with it. Another: always use a signature tag composed of 26 randomly selected letters, all lowercase.
The key to getting jamming to work is for all the jammers to respond appopriately to other jammers. When one jammer sends you a PGP signed grocery list, send him or her your chocolate cheesecake recipe.
There is absolutely no privacy left on the Net any more. None. Keep that in mind when you rant. That's what crypto is for.
PGP, GnuPG, or whatever public key crypto you use, enables you to sign, verify, encrypt or decrypt documents. That's it. It's not an anonymizer. You can use them to keep your personal communications private, but they're useless for public posts on Slashdot. What good's a post on Slashdot that no one can read?
Now a PGP based mailing list would be a very Good Thing(tm). Encrypt your messages to the list server, which then sends it out encrypted for each subscriber.
I hear you! Where I work we develop Unix applications using Unix workstations. We can't give up our Solaris, it's out of the question.
But times are tight. We had to cut back on our lunches, our perks, our benefits. But some bozo in another division thinks we all need to use Outlook Mail and Calendar instead of Netscape Mail and Calendar. So when we don't even have enough budget to authorize a lunch meeting with a client, we are going to rip out our Netscape servers and replace them with Outlook servers, and give everyone a new Dell/W2K box so sit alongside their Ultrasparcs.
This is so stupid even the M$ lackeys in IT are up in arms over it.
Oh well, since IT isn't going to "police" these machines, it's time to repartition.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they haven't issued a patch for these two issues yet. I never claimed that Slackware was perfect.
But two factors may explain why these two items didn't get "utmost" priority on Patrick's todo list: 1) they are local exploits, and 2) they do not affect the default and recommended kernel.
I looked this ruling over, yawned, and then got back to more important things. If you think this is the end of the world, then let me clue you in.
Your freedom and liberty are your responsibility. You don't get them from Microsoft, Apple, Linux, Debian, RMS, or ESR. You don't get them from John Ashcroft, Janet Reno, George Bush, or Bill Clinton. You don't get them from the DOJ, DOD, IRS or USPO. You don't get them from the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution. Liberty is something innate that you are born with.
As a free human being, you need to exercise your freedom or it will atrophy. I don't use Microsoft products because I am a free man and have chosen of my own free will not to use them. I know other free men who have chosen of their own free will to use Microsoft products. They are no less free than me.
Microsoft has never infringed upon my liberty. They have never held a gun to my head and forced me to use any of their products. They have never coerced me in any way. I could sit back like the rest of you and whine that choosing an alternate operating system is inconvenient, but I'm smarter than that. I know that the best things in life are NOT convenient. You have to work at them.
Could this ruling mean that Microsoft will remain a monopoly? Yes. But so what? It won't bother me in the least bit. They were a monopoly yesterday and I was using Linux yesterday. They will be a monopoly tomorrow and I will still be using Linux tomorrow.
Nobody is going to make you use Windows. If you end up using Windows it is because you chose to use it of your own free will. The only way Microsoft can get any power over you is if you choose to let them. Stop looking to the DOJ as your savior! You are already free so get out there and start acting like it!
This is why I'm STILL a Libertarian :-)
But I would clarify you post a bit. Our legal system is controlled 100% by the legal profession. How many congressmen are NOT lawyers? How many Supreme Court justices are NOT lawyers? Heck, how many judges of any level are NOT laywers? How many members of the executive branch below the cabinet level are NOT laywers?
The problem is clear to me: conflict of interest. Normally it is not a problem, and quite efficient, for an industry or profession to be run by its practioneers. We want our medicine delivered by physicians. We want our children taught by educators. We want our software written by programmers. But the law is an exception. The law is raw naked power. And we have given the monopoly over that raw naked power to a single profession.
Take the legal system out of the hands of the legal profession. Lawyers need to stick to representing their clients and judges need to stick to arbitrating disputes. Let congress be composed of the ordinary people. I want to see congress composed of farmers, educators, physicians, programmers and automotive engineers.
I'm not against package management tools. I'm just against braindead package management tools. dpkg and apt-get are the lonely exceptions to braindead package managment tools.
The Slackare package stuff is like the rest of the system, simple, bare bones, and assumes you know what you are doing.
When I want to upgrade, I want it done quickly.
You can do the same with Slackware.
What kernel issues are those? Slackware 8.0 ships with the 2.2.19 and 2.4.5 kernels. I don't recall any security issues with those.
Last big flashy distro I installed was Mandrake 8.0. Horrible experience. First off you are presented with a nauseating yellow on purple themed installer. Then it installed unecessary dependencies after I deselected their dependent packages. Then it decided my Matrox G450 was really a cheap framebuffer. Then it turned on a bunch of services without me asking. The overall attitute of Mandrake is "we know better than you so shut up and obey".
If you want a simple bare bones installation, use a simple bare bones distribution. Trying to coax one out of a complex bloated distribution isn't worth the effort.
If I start an overnight delivery service and use Chevy vans, that doesn't make me a Chevy company. If I build houses using Stanley tools, that doesn't make me a Stanley company.
Just because I use Linux as an end user product doens't mean that I am a Linux company.
Companies will continue to make money by *using* Linux, but I don't see too many making money by selling or developing Linux.
OS/2 could also run Windows applications natively. This led in part to the demise of OS/2. If you could write an application once for Windows, and have it run on both Windows and OS/2, then why bother ever writing for OS/2 natively?
So the consumer sees 10,000 native Windows titles and 10 native OS/2 titles on the store shelves, and thinks to himself "duh!"
Of course, it's much better to shove everything under / in one big flat file structure. Think of the simplicity. Only a single entry in your PATH. Only a single entry in your ld.so.conf. Heck, why not put your home directory there as well!
/usr, /usr/local, or /opt. Under a sensible distro you know exactly where everything is without having to check.
Except when it comes time to upgrade your distro, or try another, then the scheme all comes crashing down.
The Unix file hierarchy make sense once you think about it. A certain section is reserved for the OS and OS installed software. Another section is reserved for user/admin installed software. And there's even a section (opt) for software that refuses to conform.
But this system only works well with distros that use a bit of common sense. Unfortunately a lot of them don't, including a few of the big name guys. With FuLinux (as a fictitous example) I have no idea whether a package is installed under
Linux is a Unix-like operating system. If you don't want it to be Unix-like, then go roll your own. The rest of us want Linux to be Unix-like, and we'll keep the Unix-like file hierarchy.
Taking a quick look at the "Recent Additions" packages list, I see that 9 out of the first 10 entries have no ties at all to the FSF (the tenth is a tenuous tie at best).
Looking closer, I see that the first two entries aren't even licensed under a FSF-style license at all, but under MIT-style licenses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "FSF-style free software", but it's clear that your project is porting more than GNU software, and more than copyleft software.
GNU=Free
:-)
Hmmm, not quite.
GNU="GNU's Not Unix".
GNU is free, but not everything that is free is GNU. How much more plain than that can you get?
Oh, and don't call me "dear"
So let's call it BNU!
We call it GNU-Darwin because we are reaching Apple users with free software.
That might make sense if all of the free software you were porting over to Darwin where GNU software. But it's not. GNU is not a repository of all possible free software. It is a specific project to create a specific operating system.
Why not call it "BSD Darwin"? BSD is also free software, and there's a hell of a lot more BSD stuff in GNU Darwin than there is GNU stuff. Since RMS insists that LinuxOS be called "GNU/Linux" since he thinks it is derived from GNU, then why not call your project "BSD Darwin" since it is clearly derived from BSD software.
Or even better, since you want to use "GNU" to imply "free", why not just call it "Free Darwin?" You would avoid much confusion that way. It would also avoid pissing off the BSD community by taking their software and renaming it GNU.
RMS wants LinuxOS to be called GNU/Linux because he really believes that it is "The GNU System" that he started back in 1985. It has nothing to do with there being GNU software included. Solaris ships with GNU software but RMS doesn't call it GNU/Solaris. FreeBSD contains just as much GNU software as LinuxOS does, but he doesn't want to call it GNU/FreeBSD.
He just thinks that Linux is really The GNU System with linux as the kernel instead of Hurd.
GNU Darwin is no such beast. Not even close.
In theory, your Windows box with GNU software (If it has the full set) is now "GNU-Windows".
Of course Windows doesn't have the "full set". GNU is a complete operating system in its own right. What good is Hurd going to do under Windows?
But that's beside the point. Not even RMS considers Windows with all possible GNU software installed on it to be "GNU/Windows".
A filesystem is a database...
Which makes me wonder, what filesystem does the database reside on? Inquiring minds want to know.
Unfortunatly, indexing on many columns (in RDBMS) can actually take a lot of disk space...
So there actually IS a traditional filesytem underneath it all? Or are all the index files stored in the same database they index?
Well Timmy doesn't know for sure that it WON'T be under the MIT license, so maybe he should shut up as well.
Darwin is not a GNU project. FreeBSD is not a GNU project. Mach is not a GNU project. OSX is not a GNU project.
And of course, GNU Darwin is not a GNU project. So why is it called "GNU Darwin"? This project has nothing to do with GNU. Sure it has some ported GNU software, but so do my Solaris and FreeBSD boxen. Come to think of it, so do my Windows and QNX boxen.
Most people who settle in for the long haul of writing a debugging a new theme do so because they want it to look like something they've already seen and liked. Having written a few themes myself, it's easy to say "make something totally new" than it is to make something totally new that doesn't suck.
One of the more original themes for KDE is the default high-color theme. It doesn't look like anything else out there, but it doesn't suck either. My third favorite after the default and Liquid is Qnix. Of course you won't like it, as it emulates the QNX look.
Remember "The Prisoner"? In one episode they briefly mentioned "jamming" to disrupt the activities of the warders. A later episode, "Hammer into Anvil", showed awesome jamming in practice.
"Prisoner" style jamming would be stuff like secretly passing (real) grocery lists, abruptly changing your well known hobbies, getting a post office box that you only use for two of your four magazine subscriptions, etc. Makes the warders think you're up so something so they expend effort trying to figure it out.
So what would "Carnivore" style jamming be? It can't be just randomness, and it has to be at least semi-legitimate. Posting signed and encrypted random streams won't count, because it's not real. And it can't get you in real trouble. One idea: create a PGP key for "Anonymous Coward", and sign all of your AC posts to Slashdot with it. Another: always use a signature tag composed of 26 randomly selected letters, all lowercase.
The key to getting jamming to work is for all the jammers to respond appopriately to other jammers. When one jammer sends you a PGP signed grocery list, send him or her your chocolate cheesecake recipe.
There is absolutely no privacy left on the Net any more. None. Keep that in mind when you rant. That's what crypto is for.
PGP, GnuPG, or whatever public key crypto you use, enables you to sign, verify, encrypt or decrypt documents. That's it. It's not an anonymizer. You can use them to keep your personal communications private, but they're useless for public posts on Slashdot. What good's a post on Slashdot that no one can read?
Now a PGP based mailing list would be a very Good Thing(tm). Encrypt your messages to the list server, which then sends it out encrypted for each subscriber.
Will it compile ISO Standard C++? That's all I care about. If it detects nonstandard code in my stuff, then I can fix my stuff.
I can't wait for the day when a configure script says "g++ x.y found, no further compiler checks needed."
I hear you! Where I work we develop Unix applications using Unix workstations. We can't give up our Solaris, it's out of the question.
But times are tight. We had to cut back on our lunches, our perks, our benefits. But some bozo in another division thinks we all need to use Outlook Mail and Calendar instead of Netscape Mail and Calendar. So when we don't even have enough budget to authorize a lunch meeting with a client, we are going to rip out our Netscape servers and replace them with Outlook servers, and give everyone a new Dell/W2K box so sit alongside their Ultrasparcs.
This is so stupid even the M$ lackeys in IT are up in arms over it.
Oh well, since IT isn't going to "police" these machines, it's time to repartition.
You completely misunderstood me. I'm not running any OS that comes with an EULA. If you are, then that's your problem.
The GUI doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when the ONLY option is to use the GUI.
You should see the desktops of my coworkers.
A friend of mine who uses KDE has the motto "what, my desktop isn't my home directory!"
One of my coworkers is using Windowmaker with 100 docked app icons.
I don't think desktop clutter is confined to the Windows lusers.