FUD is making a claim that is not entirely accurate in order to scare people away.
This is close, but not quite true.
FUD can be composed of truths and often is. A statement is or is not FUD based on the focus of the statement. If it is an objective statement of fact, it's not FUD. If on the other hand, the statement is worded so as to play on existing (or worse yet, instill new) fears, uncertainties, and doubts, then, my anonymous friend, that is FUD.
For example, of the two statements following, only the second is FUD.
"One of the problems with Linux, is that many MS-Office documents are incompatible with applications available on Linux."
"But remember, you won't be able to work on your PowerPoint presentation on Linux"
Here endeth the lesson:)
Re:mirror - you will not be able to get this /.'ed
on
Some KDE news
·
· Score: 1
Let's see what we have here.
A historically vigourous discussion topic on slashdot
A link posted recently slashdotted
A link to a mirror of the slashdotted site
A Monday morning (Second only to friday afternoons for network problems, as we all know)
And an AC virtually challenging the/. community to DoS the poor server
First, I cringe with every misquote. My friends and I can't go 10 minutes without some obscure Python-ism (Ditto for Star Wars tho). So I darn all thee misquoters to heck (unless it's actually applied in satirical context)
I have to agree about he misquotes. In fact I want to complain abou-
YOU want to complain!? I've only 'ad these shoes three weeks and the 'eels 'ave worn through!
Microsoft are indeed interested in open standards up to a point. That point being once they have a decent slice of the marketshare. Once they have that, open standards appear to go right out the window.
Does anyone here really believe that Microsoft will remain faithful to their current stance on open standards for Internet messaging? I don't! I predict that their righteous stance will win them their little tiff with AOL. After that, they will gain a decent marketshare, and (surprise, surprise) begin to introduce closed "enhancements".
For these reasons, I refuse to say that Microsoft is right, they are just less wrong than AOL. Microsoft will not be right about open standards until they are consistent in their stance.
This isn't the Australian equivalent of the lame-ass Canadian goods-and-services tax
(aka the Mulroney Tax) is it?
That's exactly what it is - a goods and services tax. Basically (and in really simplistic terms) it's a 10% surcharge on the end-point purchase of everything except fresh food.
Apparently, most developed countries have something similar these days, but because its new, and because "people are dumb, panicky animals", we Aussies got all outraged over it, whilst allowing this little censorship niggle slip under our guard.
I agree with you. This idea of personal firearms being to protect against the (apparently ever-present) potential threat of "da man" taking away ones God-given rights is an aboslute furfy. After all, who controls the greater proportion of firepower in the USA? The populace? No.
The armed forces? Right! And who controls the armed forces? Hello, it's our old enemy, the government!
So when the government goes all totalitarian on y'all and starts taking away the rights that are set down in law, how do you think they are going to do it? They are going to send heavily armed police or soldiers (to whom a citizen with a gun or three has suddenly become just a dangerous subversive who deserves to be shot).
On the other hand, if the government does not have the support of the armed forces, then it becomes the armed forces' duty to correct the attempted tyranny.
In short, privately owned guns are no protection against governments becoming tyrannical.
I think the big deal here is that we will now have an open standard for (unix, at least) system performance reporting.
You say "just pull it out of/proc". Well, that works just fine on systems with a/proc filesystem, but it ain't gonna work on the HP-UX systems I admin. Sure, they already have a "sar", but, what if I want to use the same performance monitoring scripts on the SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and Linux boxes as well?
Will the scripts work "out of the box"? Do the cmdline switches to sar perform the same? Is the output going to be the same?
To be honest I don't actually know the answer to these questions using the existing implementations of sar. But I would guess not.
However, with a freely available, open version of sar, I know that the answer to both will be "yes".
In this case, I thgink "spooks" refers to the CIA, the NSA and other such intelligence/security agencies.
I have not heard the term used as a racial insult against blacks, but I have heard the Ku Klux Klan referred to as spooks. Probably a reference to their white robes making them look like ghosts.
What's equally important about that statement is that is does not say "HP-UX and Windows NT system administrators". Certainly HP would not be interested in "transitioning" from HP-UX to Linux, but the fact that there is no course aimed at Linux for Unix sysadmins implies that little or no training is necessary.
On another note, as mentioned below - Yes, I think it would cost about the same as the HP-UX course. After all, it's probably not very different from the "HP-UX for NT administrators" course. It's not aimed at the general user, it's aimed squarely at the corporate market, those who quite willing shell out $2K for training (plus the cost of having a staff member out of the office for a week, often more than the cost of the course). But they do provide a certificate of completion, which would probably carry more sway with your average PHB than a RedHat certification. Go figure.
While I do agree with you about the "fascination with carrying guns", you have to realise that the Port Arthur incident was committed with a weapon which was already illegal under the laws existing at the time. The firearm legislation reform was knee-jerk reaction.
I think that that Second amended to the US constitution should be recinded. It was perfectly valid to suggest such a right in 1791 when it was drafted, but America is no longer a wild frontier. And the average US citizen does not need a gun, except for the perceived need for protection against other citizens who also have a constitutional right to "bear arms".
Certainly there are some US citizens who genuinely do require firearms, but where is the "currently justifiable" reason that it be wtitten into the constitution as an inviolable right?
You bring up a very good point that there is no hard evidence supporting *either* view. i.e. that the [internet/goth subculture/violent videogames/demon du jour] does or does not promote violence. However that being the case, we must rely on the anecdotal evidence to provide the support for our opinions, because we don't have anything else. And the anecdotal evidence supports quite firmly that most of the people who do [embrace the goth subculture/play violent video games/mess about with the internet/demon du jour], tend to live quite sane lives and have a strong tendency not to blow up their High School or whatever.
Hey, they lived in houses... in the suburbs, no less. That must have been what did it, those suburbs. We all know that those big city kids don't go shooting up their schools, do they? (No they shoot up at school)
Well, I'll give you point #1. Yes, there is a difference between idiot and newbie. And I was perhaps denigrating the newbie by calling him an idiot.
However for point #2 - the incentive to progress from stage to stage comes from a thirst for knowledge. And that's exactly the way it should be.
There will be people who don't want to know how their computer system works, they will just be glad that it does. There will be others that do want to know how their system works.
As long as we're individuals that will always be the case.
(sorry, couldn't resist:)
If a particular user does not want to learn how some function of his system works, but is forced to do so by an inadequacy in the system, he may learn something, but he won't learn it willingly or well. He'll tinker with it and will almost certainly hit problems because of his lack of knowledge. Maybe he'll work it out, maybe he won't, but he won't enjoy the experience. (You can lead a horse to water...)
OTOH, if he does not need to learn about that function, because the system can adequately handle it for him, he will leave it alone and it will continue to function properly.
With Linux, it is always possible to get stuck into learning how the system hangs together. It is only useful (and fun) if you want to, otherwise it is downright annoying.
And I don't believe that any-user-friendliness is some sort of unattainable Holy Grail. Linux is almost there already. With the vast diversity and configurability exhibited across different distributions, there should be at least one combination of distribution, apps, UI and configuration that a user will be able to work with easily.
Absolutely nothing, but why should we restrict "friendliness" to idiots? Why shouldn't we have a system that is all of the following?
idiot-friendly
user-friendly
power-user-friendly
programmer-friendly
system-administrator-friendly
kernel-hacker-extraordinaire-friendly
just plain friendly
It seems to me that Windows falls short of the mark on 4, maybe 5 of these criteria. When Linux is genuinely "any-user-friendly", it will have a much clearer and more noticeable advantage over Windows.
As long as the system is easy to use at any level of experience, and allows, but does not require the user to learn anything (s)he might want to about the system, who can possibly have a problem with that? I, for one, don't.
Your case is valid in the case of Solaris, because it does run on hardware other than Sun's.
However, if I say that I am an AIX specialist, isn't the fact that I am familiar with AIX on IBM hardware implicit? (It doesn't run on any other, AFAIK) As is the case with Irix on SGI, HP-UX on HP, etc. Most commercial variants of Unix run only on one vendor's platform.
The point is not to tout oneself as merely a Foonix(TM) System Administrator, but as as a Unix Systems Administrator, specialising in Foonix. Note the singular/plural distinction, that one little "s" helps to confirm the idea that you are skilled in multiple variants. Listing other variants you have worked with is also a big help here.
Many sites run more than one variant of Unix. As such, a Foonix sysadmin would not be considered at some Foonix sites because he doesn't know Frobnix, and they've got one of those too. However, the Unix sysadmin who is a Foonix "specialist" would get a look-in even if he doesn't have any experience with Frobnix.
Of course, Linux and *BSD fall squarely into the same category as Solaris, as above. When mentioning Linux/*BSD experience, the platform is essential.
"The real fault is in the gross insecurity of the Microsoft software, or perhaps in the over-reliance on Microsoft software."
You can't be serious! That's like saying "All he did was point the gun and pull the trigger - No big deal. The real problem was that the gun was loaded."
I do agree that gross insecurity and/or over-reliance on software is a bad thing, but exploiting them is just wrong.
1) Melissa can, under certain conditions, infect another document and send it as an attachment to the list of fifty recipients. Thereby creating the possibility of distributing confidential information to those who have no right to that information.
2) It amounts to a mass DoS attack that makes the/. effect pale into insignificance by comparison. To be able to DoS literally hundreds of mail servers in this manner, with such little effort, and not using your own bandwidth to do so is scary to say the least.
Instead of letting a moderator choose between moderating or posting, make the decision for him/her.
That is, have a unique (pseudo)randomly selected jury of about 50-100 moderators for each story. If selected for jury duty for that story, you would then have it displayed on your custom front page with some indication that you are a moderator in this forum (regardless of topic/author filtering).
Once selected, you would then be expected to "fulfil your civic duty" and moderate posts in that forum, without the option of posting. Naturally you would still have the option of choosing whether or not to be in the pool of jurors from the outset. If the juror pool were sufficiently large and each jury were sufficiently small, the incidence of being ineligible to post in a particular forum would be quite small, and, IMHO, an acceptable price to pay.
I was actually a bit saddened that they chose not to make the President of the US a woman as in the book. Although it did allow for a little real-life footage to be thrown in.
That was a little literary trick that really impressed me. There I was, well into the story, and Carl suddenly reveals the fact that the president is a woman! I had just been assuming "his" gender all along. I was quite taken aback by that revelation.
Then there was the whole 5 travellers vs. 1 traveller thing, but that's another beef altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
FUD can be composed of truths and often is. A statement is or is not FUD based on the focus of the statement. If it is an objective statement of fact, it's not FUD. If on the other hand, the statement is worded so as to play on existing (or worse yet, instill new) fears, uncertainties, and doubts, then, my anonymous friend, that is FUD.
For example, of the two statements following, only the second is FUD.
"One of the problems with Linux, is that many MS-Office documents are incompatible with applications available on Linux."
"But remember, you won't be able to work on your PowerPoint presentation on Linux"
Here endeth the lesson
You're not that site's network admin, are you?
I have to agree about he misquotes. In fact I want to complain abou-
YOU want to complain!? I've only 'ad these shoes three weeks and the 'eels 'ave worn through!
Microsoft are indeed interested in open standards up to a point. That point being once they have a decent slice of the marketshare. Once they have that, open standards appear to go right out the window.
Does anyone here really believe that Microsoft will remain faithful to their current stance on open standards for Internet messaging? I don't! I predict that their righteous stance will win them their little tiff with AOL. After that, they will gain a decent marketshare, and (surprise, surprise) begin to introduce closed "enhancements".
For these reasons, I refuse to say that Microsoft is right, they are just less wrong than AOL. Microsoft will not be right about open standards until they are consistent in their stance.
I noticed some correct spelling in your post.
Sloppy, very sloppy! BAD AC! No Cookie!
That's exactly what it is - a goods and services tax. Basically (and in really simplistic terms) it's a 10% surcharge on the end-point purchase of everything except fresh food.
Apparently, most developed countries have something similar these days, but because its new, and because "people are dumb, panicky animals", we Aussies got all outraged over it, whilst allowing this little censorship niggle slip under our guard.
"Wake up Australia!" - oh... too late.
Risking straying WAY off-topic here, but...
I agree with you. This idea of personal firearms being to protect against the (apparently ever-present) potential threat of "da man" taking away ones God-given rights is an aboslute furfy. After all, who controls the greater proportion of firepower in the USA?
The populace? No.
The armed forces? Right! And who controls the armed forces? Hello, it's our old enemy, the government!
So when the government goes all totalitarian on y'all and starts taking away the rights that are set down in law, how do you think they are going to do it? They are going to send heavily armed police or soldiers (to whom a citizen with a gun or three has suddenly become just a dangerous subversive who deserves to be shot).
On the other hand, if the government does not have the support of the armed forces, then it becomes the armed forces' duty to correct the attempted tyranny.
In short, privately owned guns are no protection against governments becoming tyrannical.
I think the big deal here is that we will now have an open standard for (unix, at least) system performance reporting.
/proc". Well, that works just fine on systems with a /proc filesystem, but it ain't gonna work on the HP-UX systems I admin. Sure, they already have a "sar", but, what if I want to use the same performance monitoring scripts on the SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and Linux boxes as well?
You say "just pull it out of
Will the scripts work "out of the box"?
Do the cmdline switches to sar perform the same?
Is the output going to be the same?
To be honest I don't actually know the answer to these questions using the existing implementations of sar. But I would guess not.
However, with a freely available, open version of sar, I know that the answer to both will be "yes".
In this case, I thgink "spooks" refers to the CIA, the NSA and other such intelligence/security agencies.
I have not heard the term used as a racial insult against blacks, but I have heard the Ku Klux Klan referred to as spooks. Probably a reference to their white robes making them look like ghosts.
Has anyone ported myxomatosis (sp?) to the Bunnypeople yet?
Try this link for a list of words that did not pass the filter.
Scary shit, huh?
Of course
What's equally important about that statement is that is does not say "HP-UX and Windows NT system administrators". Certainly HP would not be interested in "transitioning" from HP-UX to Linux, but the fact that there is no course aimed at Linux for Unix sysadmins implies that little or no training is necessary.
On another note, as mentioned below - Yes, I think it would cost about the same as the HP-UX course. After all, it's probably not very different from the "HP-UX for NT administrators" course. It's not aimed at the general user, it's aimed squarely at the corporate market, those who quite willing shell out $2K for training (plus the cost of having a staff member out of the office for a week, often more than the cost of the course). But they do provide a certificate of completion, which would probably carry more sway with your average PHB than a RedHat certification. Go figure.
While I do agree with you about the "fascination with carrying guns", you have to realise that the Port Arthur incident was committed with a weapon which was already illegal under the laws existing at the time. The firearm legislation reform was knee-jerk reaction.
I think that that Second amended to the US constitution should be recinded. It was perfectly valid to suggest such a right in 1791 when it was drafted, but America is no longer a wild frontier. And the average US citizen does not need a gun, except for the perceived need for protection against other citizens who also have a constitutional right to "bear arms".
Certainly there are some US citizens who genuinely do require firearms, but where is the "currently justifiable" reason that it be wtitten into the constitution as an inviolable right?
You bring up a very good point that there is no hard evidence supporting *either* view. i.e. that the [internet/goth subculture/violent videogames/demon du jour] does or does not promote violence.
However that being the case, we must rely on the anecdotal evidence to provide the support for our opinions, because we don't have anything else. And the anecdotal evidence supports quite firmly that most of the people who do [embrace the goth subculture/play violent video games/mess about with the internet/demon du jour], tend to live quite sane lives and have a strong tendency not to blow up their High School or whatever.
Hey, they lived in houses... in the suburbs, no less. That must have been what did it, those suburbs. We all know that those big city kids don't go shooting up their schools, do they? (No they shoot up at school)
However for point #2 - the incentive to progress from stage to stage comes from a thirst for knowledge. And that's exactly the way it should be.
There will be people who don't want to know how their computer system works, they will just be glad that it does. There will be others that do want to know how their system works.
(sorry, couldn't resistIf a particular user does not want to learn how some function of his system works, but is forced to do so by an inadequacy in the system, he may learn something, but he won't learn it willingly or well. He'll tinker with it and will almost certainly hit problems because of his lack of knowledge. Maybe he'll work it out, maybe he won't, but he won't enjoy the experience.
(You can lead a horse to water...)
OTOH, if he does not need to learn about that function, because the system can adequately handle it for him, he will leave it alone and it will continue to function properly.
With Linux, it is always possible to get stuck into learning how the system hangs together. It is only useful (and fun) if you want to, otherwise it is downright annoying.
And I don't believe that any-user-friendliness is some sort of unattainable Holy Grail. Linux is almost there already. With the vast diversity and configurability exhibited across different distributions, there should be at least one combination of distribution, apps, UI and configuration that a user will be able to work with easily.
Why shouldn't we have a system that is all of the following?
It seems to me that Windows falls short of the mark on 4, maybe 5 of these criteria. When Linux is genuinely "any-user-friendly", it will have a much clearer and more noticeable advantage over Windows.
As long as the system is easy to use at any level of experience, and allows, but does not require the user to learn anything (s)he might want to about the system, who can possibly have a problem with that? I, for one, don't.
Your case is valid in the case of Solaris, because it does run on hardware other than Sun's.
However, if I say that I am an AIX specialist, isn't the fact that I am familiar with AIX on IBM hardware implicit? (It doesn't run on any other, AFAIK) As is the case with Irix on SGI, HP-UX on HP, etc. Most commercial variants of Unix run only on one vendor's platform.
The point is not to tout oneself as merely a Foonix(TM) System Administrator, but as as a Unix Systems Administrator, specialising in Foonix. Note the singular/plural distinction, that one little "s" helps to confirm the idea that you are skilled in multiple variants. Listing other variants you have worked with is also a big help here.
Many sites run more than one variant of Unix. As such, a Foonix sysadmin would not be considered at some Foonix sites because he doesn't know Frobnix, and they've got one of those too. However, the Unix sysadmin who is a Foonix "specialist" would get a look-in even if he doesn't have any experience with Frobnix.
Of course, Linux and *BSD fall squarely into the same category as Solaris, as above. When mentioning Linux/*BSD experience, the platform is essential.
"The real fault is in the gross insecurity of the Microsoft software, or perhaps in the over-reliance on Microsoft software."
You can't be serious! That's like saying "All he did was point the gun and pull the trigger - No big deal. The real problem was that the gun was loaded."
I do agree that gross insecurity and/or over-reliance on software is a bad thing, but exploiting them is just wrong.
Two things are the big deal here.
/. effect pale into insignificance by comparison. To be able to DoS literally hundreds of mail servers in this manner, with such little effort, and not using your own bandwidth to do so is scary to say the least.
1) Melissa can, under certain conditions, infect another document and send it as an attachment to the list of fifty recipients. Thereby creating the possibility of distributing confidential information to those who have no right to that information.
2) It amounts to a mass DoS attack that makes the
Worm, virus, who cares what form of low lifeform we name it after?
The fact remains that it was engineered by a form of lowlife.
Instead of letting a moderator choose between moderating or posting, make the decision for him/her.
That is, have a unique (pseudo)randomly selected jury of about 50-100 moderators for each story. If selected for jury duty for that story, you would then have it displayed on your custom front page with some indication that you are a moderator in this forum (regardless of topic/author filtering).
Once selected, you would then be expected to "fulfil your civic duty" and moderate posts in that forum, without the option of posting. Naturally you would still have the option of choosing whether or not to be in the pool of jurors from the outset. If the juror pool were sufficiently large and each jury were sufficiently small, the incidence of being ineligible to post in a particular forum would be quite small, and, IMHO, an acceptable price to pay.
True, very true, LeBleu. And while I did not take part in CT's little "gift", I am *quite* willing to take part in Hemos' revenge.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny...
"Ain't I a stinker?"
I was actually a bit saddened that they chose not to make the President of the US a woman as in the book. Although it did allow for a little real-life footage to be thrown in.
That was a little literary trick that really impressed me. There I was, well into the story, and Carl suddenly reveals the fact that the president is a woman! I had just been assuming "his" gender all along. I was quite taken aback by that revelation.
Then there was the whole 5 travellers vs. 1 traveller thing, but that's another beef altogether.