Klerck wasn't modded down, he posts at -1 by default. I guess you havn't been around here very long. Klerck is the most famous crapflooder. I'm glad to see he is posting his opinions rather than crapflooding now, he is actally pretty smart it seems.
It's the same logic behind social security numbers and immunizations.
Sure you don't HAVE to get your kids a social security number, but you would have a whole lot of trouble getting them into any school without one, they would have a whole lot of trouble ever getting a job or passport without one, etc.
When the alternatives are a ton of hassles, you really don't have much choice at all.
I think you may be correct there. See recent story on MS "remote control" technology being questionable under the HIPPA medical privacy act. Corps will think hard before accepting outside control of their data.
One thing that MS has already done though is offer corps a better version of the software than they foist on the public, XP home is a lot more obnoxious than corporate edition. All the people I know pirated corporate edition on their home and LAN party computers (except myself, I don't care for Windows, Moat all my computers run Linux except for 1 Win2K box that I used for LAN parties.. I think that got reformatted recently though)... but I am sure there are a lot of less geeky users who use whatever came on their system, which would be XP home.
I know this MS stuff is scaring a lot of people, people that used to be soft on MS, and even bought into the sour grapes arguments before. My boss for instance. He always supported using UNIX-type OS on the servers, but he has recently vowed to remove MS from his desktop, which has proven to be a struggle for him, but he is sticking with it. He does have some UNIX knowledge, he was the guy that managed the SCO servers before us young people came along, so he isn't a typical user, but Linux on the desktop still presents him with a pretty steep learning curve.
Anyway, my point isn't to discuss Linux desktop readiness, my point is that even people who were somewhat supportive of MS in the past are getting scared about the recent events in MS-land. The list of unfixed windows and IE-bugs was a real eye-opener for him, and also the stories I forward him about DRM, remote control, passport,.NET, and all the other stuff that MS is trying to do. It's been said a lot recently, but MS is really a big driving force behind open source adoption, and the more they push, the better it is for us, we just really can't let software patents and legislative measures get in the way of open source.
As other people have pointed out, it is loaded in other ways.
An industry push to tighten security on personal computers could be either the salvation of electronic commerce or the bane of consumers, who view the Internet as their digital information playground.
Like the other poster pointed out, this implies that the users do not control the Internet, rather large corporations do.
The "playground" reference seems to discredit users as credible creators of content, they are just kids playing; the corporations are the ones doing the important stuff. By extention of their generally condescending tone, this "fair use" thing is silly too.
What may be perceived as minor intrusions in a Western corporate setting might have Big Brother consequences for computer users in countries with more controlled environments like China and Saudi Arabia.
In other words, "of course our government is benevolent, but in other countries run by evil people, it may be a problem, but not here".
That's what they want you to think. I see this all the time in printed news. The first two or three paragraphs paint the propaganda picture, then the jump on page A-4 has the critical part. They know most people will only read the first few paragraphs. Lets see how balanced you think this is, if it were all you read:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An industry push to tighten security on personal computers could be either the salvation of electronic commerce or the bane of consumers, who view the Internet as their digital information playground.
Microsoft Corp. , Intel Corp. and nearly 200 other companies from the computer hardware, software and security industries are working on technologies designed to protect data in computers from being tampered with by intruders.
The first mention that this is anything but a great new technology is at the end of the next paragraph. By that time the PHB has clicked to the next article.
And a nice big ad for MS Visual Studio in the story too, how ironic.
As proof, Anderson points to a patent called "Digital Rights Management Operating System," for which Microsoft has rights
One of the first times a software patent might actually be a good thing. At least stifling competition and innovation in this area will give us a chance to focus our efforts on what is inevitably going to be a fundamentally flawed MS implementation of DRM.
Biddle and a TCPA spokesman deny the assertions, saying that no monitoring, reporting or censoring capabilities are designed into the systems, and people will be able to choose whether they want to use the security features, or not.
Talk about bullshit. DRM is useless if the user can turn it off.
To some, the TCPA plan is reminiscent of Intel's proposal in the mid-1990s to put a serial number on its Pentium chips. Public backlash caused Intel to abandon the plan.
Last I checked, the serial numbers are still there, and even though you can turn them off in the CMOS on some motherboards, software can turn them back on, so I hear.
By contrast, in trusted computing, special security chips and other hardware will work with software to verify the source of data and that it has not been changed, and to create safe zones within the computer for storing information.
Talk about a stupid solution to a simple problem. It doesn't require special hardware to protect the integrity of files, just proper software design. The earlier story on microBSD showed an implementation of software based integrity verification.
Technology companies must carefully balance individual rights and corporate interests, says Bruce Schneier, cryptography expert and chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security, a network monitoring firm.
Consumers used to vote with their dollars, no "balancing" was necessary. MS is betting on using monopoly power, and ignorant consumers to pull this one over on the public. Educated consumers are a necessary part of the free market, with technology becoming so complex, and specialization at an all time high, this may point to a larger problem, a complete breakdown of the free market, due to the lack of educated consumers.
"Microsoft wants the Chinese to pay for software," said Ross Anderson, head of computer security at the University of Cambridge in England and a renowned software expert.
Yeah, cause we all know those fucking chinks just leech off westerners. That is a pretty controversial thing to tell an AP reporter. To be fair, it was probably taken out of context.
require knowledge of police work, evidence handling, physical monitoring equipment, etc.
All those skills are required to do proper conputer forensics also, especially if you ever expect to be able to press charges. You at least need to know enough no to destroy the chain of custody, or change vital information by rebooting a server before collecting data, things like that.
d) It will be closed, not compatible, and forced upon a unsuspecting public through monopolistic practices and lawsuits, and become the de facto standard that is a moving target for people trying to interoperate through contant forced upgrades, and patented extensions.
Freedom can be bad. Suppose you make really cheap guns that work really well, and you decide to give them away completely free. Then some terrorist comes along and takes a few thousands of your guns, for free.
The BSD license allows companies like MS to take the code for free, and close the source, and possibly hurt the industry by extending the standard with proprietary, closed source, extensions, and then forcing people to use them through monopolistic practices.
So yes, the obvious conclusion is "If You Support BSD You Are Supporting Terrorism (TM)"
Of course this post is partly joking, but the analogy is somewhat fair I think.
BSD licensing has a place, but in my mind, that place is very limited. A small program that you don't care if people use for whatever reason, like something that is mostly educational as a code example, or a launching point for building another app that isn't very useful in and of itself, that is fine for BSD.
If you don't care about what MS or other companies are doing with your code, then by all means use the BSD. That is what it is there for. If you would rather guarantee that your code stays open source no matter what, then GPL. If you don't mind closed source people linking with and using your code, so long as they don't extend it without giving back to the community, then LGPL. If you don't want people to use your code at all, then use a more restrictive license, or close source it. It's all very simple.
The BSD license is useful, but when someone says something meaningless like the "beauty of the BSD license" for something like this distro, it just sort of pisses me off.
I was about to start using --backupdir with my rsyncs to do incremental, but this is a lot more slick. Right now I just run it with --delete weekly, so my live backups vary from none to 7 days old for deleted files. We run tapes too, so it wasn't a big deal, but the tape robot is on the way out, so I needed to get true incrementals going soon.
It's stories like this that keep me reading Slashdot. (Other than ranting on YRO stories, but that is no where near as cool as a neat trick like this)
'The poor man's daily snapshot, glastree builds live backup trees, with branches for each day. Users directly browse the past to recover older documents or retrieve lost files. Hard links serve to compress out unchanged files, while modified ones are copied verbatim. A prune utility effects a constant, sliding window.'
It looks like this might be almost the exact same thing as is linked in the article. It's the same basic premise.
What i was saying is that a base OpenBSD install, with full range of commands that you will already be used to, takes less than 100mb.
Yes, of course, they all have their place, but I agree with the earlier poster, microBSD is sort of a misnomer. compactBSD or smallishBSD seems better.:)
There. That's the script basically. Add more snapshot levels as needed, stick it in cron at whatever interval you need.
dump only supports ext2/3. This supports any file system, and retreiving a file from backups is as simple as running "cd" to the directory of the snapshot you need and "cp" the file out.
I run backups from Linux to IRIX and other UNIXs using gnu rsync and openssh. This little trick is going to be very handy for me. I can't waste my time worrying about which filesystem type the files came from originally.
Read the fucking article, that's the point. He uses hard links to make a second copy of the backed up directory, exploiting the fact that rsync always unlinks before changing a file, thereby effectively doing incremental backups without wasting hard disk space.
Freesco does most of that and fits on a 1.44mb floppy. Linux based. Web server, bridging, routing, dial in, web management interface, plenty for a basic server. Takes about 4 megs of RAM. What were you saying again?
100K is peanuts to IBM. The accounting time and overhead for running a campaign for them to sell something for 100K in donations would not be worth it.
IBM has an incentive to just open source it outright, the way SGI did with XFS.
What a jerk...this is obviously a post from one of those wanks that wants everyone to have a choice in what license they use, as long as it's the infectious GPL. Yea....choose any license as long as you use THIS one and not THAT one...
Use whatever license you like. If you don't mind that you are going to benefit companies like MS and their closed source products, then by all means, release under BSD. The writeup was just trolling anyway, the article says nothing about the "beauty of the BSD license" only that the MicroBSD people didn't even clearly license their product back under the BSD license, something that is permitted under the BSD license.
The microBSD people claim it was just because they havn't finished cleaning up the code.
From the article, it looks like the microBSD thing is pretty shitty right now, maybe in a few revisions it would be OK, but this guy seemed to have tons of trouble with it.
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Klerck wasn't modded down, he posts at -1 by default. I guess you havn't been around here very long. Klerck is the most famous crapflooder. I'm glad to see he is posting his opinions rather than crapflooding now, he is actally pretty smart it seems.
Then it's still a bullshit statement...
It's the same logic behind social security numbers and immunizations.
Sure you don't HAVE to get your kids a social security number, but you would have a whole lot of trouble getting them into any school without one, they would have a whole lot of trouble ever getting a job or passport without one, etc.
When the alternatives are a ton of hassles, you really don't have much choice at all.
I think you may be correct there. See recent story on MS "remote control" technology being questionable under the HIPPA medical privacy act. Corps will think hard before accepting outside control of their data.
.NET, and all the other stuff that MS is trying to do. It's been said a lot recently, but MS is really a big driving force behind open source adoption, and the more they push, the better it is for us, we just really can't let software patents and legislative measures get in the way of open source.
One thing that MS has already done though is offer corps a better version of the software than they foist on the public, XP home is a lot more obnoxious than corporate edition. All the people I know pirated corporate edition on their home and LAN party computers (except myself, I don't care for Windows, Moat all my computers run Linux except for 1 Win2K box that I used for LAN parties.. I think that got reformatted recently though)... but I am sure there are a lot of less geeky users who use whatever came on their system, which would be XP home.
I know this MS stuff is scaring a lot of people, people that used to be soft on MS, and even bought into the sour grapes arguments before. My boss for instance. He always supported using UNIX-type OS on the servers, but he has recently vowed to remove MS from his desktop, which has proven to be a struggle for him, but he is sticking with it. He does have some UNIX knowledge, he was the guy that managed the SCO servers before us young people came along, so he isn't a typical user, but Linux on the desktop still presents him with a pretty steep learning curve.
Anyway, my point isn't to discuss Linux desktop readiness, my point is that even people who were somewhat supportive of MS in the past are getting scared about the recent events in MS-land. The list of unfixed windows and IE-bugs was a real eye-opener for him, and also the stories I forward him about DRM, remote control, passport,
As other people have pointed out, it is loaded in other ways.
An industry push to tighten security on personal computers could be either the salvation of electronic commerce or the bane of consumers, who view the Internet as their digital information playground.
Like the other poster pointed out, this implies that the users do not control the Internet, rather large corporations do.
The "playground" reference seems to discredit users as credible creators of content, they are just kids playing; the corporations are the ones doing the important stuff. By extention of their generally condescending tone, this "fair use" thing is silly too.
What may be perceived as minor intrusions in a Western corporate setting might have Big Brother consequences for computer users in countries with more controlled environments like China and Saudi Arabia.
In other words, "of course our government is benevolent, but in other countries run by evil people, it may be a problem, but not here".
I wouldn't call this article balanced at all.
We should come out with our own trusted computing platform and call it adamantium. Everyone knows that's the strongest material ever.
Yeah, cause we all know those fucking chinks just leech off westerners.
You know it's true, don't deny it.
There is some truth to it, but it's painting with a pretty big brush.
That's what they want you to think. I see this all the time in printed news. The first two or three paragraphs paint the propaganda picture, then the jump on page A-4 has the critical part. They know most people will only read the first few paragraphs. Lets see how balanced you think this is, if it were all you read:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An industry push to tighten security on personal computers could be either the salvation of electronic commerce or the bane of consumers, who view the Internet as their digital information playground.
Microsoft Corp. , Intel Corp. and nearly 200 other companies from the computer hardware, software and security industries are working on technologies designed to protect data in computers from being tampered with by intruders.
The first mention that this is anything but a great new technology is at the end of the next paragraph. By that time the PHB has clicked to the next article.
And a nice big ad for MS Visual Studio in the story too, how ironic.
As proof, Anderson points to a patent called "Digital Rights Management Operating System," for which Microsoft has rights
One of the first times a software patent might actually be a good thing. At least stifling competition and innovation in this area will give us a chance to focus our efforts on what is inevitably going to be a fundamentally flawed MS implementation of DRM.
Biddle and a TCPA spokesman deny the assertions, saying that no monitoring, reporting or censoring capabilities are designed into the systems, and people will be able to choose whether they want to use the security features, or not.
Talk about bullshit. DRM is useless if the user can turn it off.
To some, the TCPA plan is reminiscent of Intel's proposal in the mid-1990s to put a serial number on its Pentium chips. Public backlash caused Intel to abandon the plan.
Last I checked, the serial numbers are still there, and even though you can turn them off in the CMOS on some motherboards, software can turn them back on, so I hear.
By contrast, in trusted computing, special security chips and other hardware will work with software to verify the source of data and that it has not been changed, and to create safe zones within the computer for storing information.
Talk about a stupid solution to a simple problem. It doesn't require special hardware to protect the integrity of files, just proper software design. The earlier story on microBSD showed an implementation of software based integrity verification.
Technology companies must carefully balance individual rights and corporate interests, says Bruce Schneier, cryptography expert and chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security, a network monitoring firm.
Consumers used to vote with their dollars, no "balancing" was necessary. MS is betting on using monopoly power, and ignorant consumers to pull this one over on the public. Educated consumers are a necessary part of the free market, with technology becoming so complex, and specialization at an all time high, this may point to a larger problem, a complete breakdown of the free market, due to the lack of educated consumers.
"Microsoft wants the Chinese to pay for software," said Ross Anderson, head of computer security at the University of Cambridge in England and a renowned software expert.
Yeah, cause we all know those fucking chinks just leech off westerners. That is a pretty controversial thing to tell an AP reporter. To be fair, it was probably taken out of context.
Oh, OK, yeah, that is plausible.
When people find out it takes longer than a week, they tend to give up.
:)
Yeah, good thing that Linux kernel thing only took 6 days.
"In the beginning, Linus saw that there was no free operating systems, and it was not good"
"And lo, on the first day, there was created a kernel, and Linus saw that it was good"
require knowledge of police work, evidence handling, physical monitoring equipment, etc.
All those skills are required to do proper conputer forensics also, especially if you ever expect to be able to press charges. You at least need to know enough no to destroy the chain of custody, or change vital information by rebooting a server before collecting data, things like that.
You should have finished reading, you would have seen I was partly kidding about the analogy.
d) It will be closed, not compatible, and forced upon a unsuspecting public through monopolistic practices and lawsuits, and become the de facto standard that is a moving target for people trying to interoperate through contant forced upgrades, and patented extensions.
You forgot that option.
Freedom can be bad. Suppose you make really cheap guns that work really well, and you decide to give them away completely free. Then some terrorist comes along and takes a few thousands of your guns, for free.
The BSD license allows companies like MS to take the code for free, and close the source, and possibly hurt the industry by extending the standard with proprietary, closed source, extensions, and then forcing people to use them through monopolistic practices.
So yes, the obvious conclusion is "If You Support BSD You Are Supporting Terrorism (TM)"
Of course this post is partly joking, but the analogy is somewhat fair I think.
BSD licensing has a place, but in my mind, that place is very limited. A small program that you don't care if people use for whatever reason, like something that is mostly educational as a code example, or a launching point for building another app that isn't very useful in and of itself, that is fine for BSD.
If you don't care about what MS or other companies are doing with your code, then by all means use the BSD. That is what it is there for. If you would rather guarantee that your code stays open source no matter what, then GPL. If you don't mind closed source people linking with and using your code, so long as they don't extend it without giving back to the community, then LGPL. If you don't want people to use your code at all, then use a more restrictive license, or close source it. It's all very simple.
The BSD license is useful, but when someone says something meaningless like the "beauty of the BSD license" for something like this distro, it just sort of pisses me off.
I was about to start using --backupdir with my rsyncs to do incremental, but this is a lot more slick. Right now I just run it with --delete weekly, so my live backups vary from none to 7 days old for deleted files. We run tapes too, so it wasn't a big deal, but the tape robot is on the way out, so I needed to get true incrementals going soon.
It's stories like this that keep me reading Slashdot. (Other than ranting on YRO stories, but that is no where near as cool as a neat trick like this)
'The poor man's daily snapshot, glastree builds live backup trees, with branches for each day. Users directly browse the past to recover older documents or retrieve lost files. Hard links serve to compress out unchanged files, while modified ones are copied verbatim. A prune utility effects a constant, sliding window.'
It looks like this might be almost the exact same thing as is linked in the article. It's the same basic premise.
What i was saying is that a base OpenBSD install, with full range of commands that you will already be used to, takes less than 100mb.
:)
Yes, of course, they all have their place, but I agree with the earlier poster, microBSD is sort of a misnomer. compactBSD or smallishBSD seems better.
Do you have a problem with the way they censor the public airwaves (TV, radio)?
I know I do.
It's an expression, it's not particularly abusive.
rm -rf backup.3
mv backup.2 backup.3
mv backup.1 backup.2
cp -al backup.0 backup.1
rsync -a --delete source_directory/ backup.0/
There. That's the script basically. Add more snapshot levels as needed, stick it in cron at whatever interval you need.
dump only supports ext2/3. This supports any file system, and retreiving a file from backups is as simple as running "cd" to the directory of the snapshot you need and "cp" the file out.
I run backups from Linux to IRIX and other UNIXs using gnu rsync and openssh. This little trick is going to be very handy for me. I can't waste my time worrying about which filesystem type the files came from originally.
Read the fucking article, that's the point. He uses hard links to make a second copy of the backed up directory, exploiting the fact that rsync always unlinks before changing a file, thereby effectively doing incremental backups without wasting hard disk space.
Freesco does most of that and fits on a 1.44mb floppy. Linux based. Web server, bridging, routing, dial in, web management interface, plenty for a basic server. Takes about 4 megs of RAM. What were you saying again?
100K is peanuts to IBM. The accounting time and overhead for running a campaign for them to sell something for 100K in donations would not be worth it.
IBM has an incentive to just open source it outright, the way SGI did with XFS.
What a jerk...this is obviously a post from one of those wanks that wants everyone to have a choice in what license they use, as long as it's the infectious GPL. Yea....choose any license as long as you use THIS one and not THAT one...
Use whatever license you like. If you don't mind that you are going to benefit companies like MS and their closed source products, then by all means, release under BSD. The writeup was just trolling anyway, the article says nothing about the "beauty of the BSD license" only that the MicroBSD people didn't even clearly license their product back under the BSD license, something that is permitted under the BSD license.
The microBSD people claim it was just because they havn't finished cleaning up the code.
From the article, it looks like the microBSD thing is pretty shitty right now, maybe in a few revisions it would be OK, but this guy seemed to have tons of trouble with it.
The BSD license is pretty beautiful, if you are MS and you need a TCP/IP stack to steal.