Fedora is directly comparable to Mandrake Community. There is no free version of RH that compares to Mandrake Official.
This is quite true from the perspective of support - Fedora is not supported by RedHat, but Mandrake Official is supportted by Mandrakesoft.
From the perspective of "stability" I don't see much external difference (i.e. versions of major components) between Mandrake Official and Fedora. I've never run them side by side for a long time to compare, so I could be wrong.
Fedora is the free RedHat TESTING branch. There is NO stable and free RedHat anymore. Get that?
Go ahead and cite a source for that... you can't. You are absolutely dead wrong - the RedHat testing branch is Rawhide. Fedora is its own distro with its own release schedule. Does technology that ends up in RHEL start in Fedora? Sure, the same way that technology start starts in SuSE linux ends up in Suse Enterprise linux.
Fedora says they schedule releases 2-3 times a year. That is a joke for any system that actually gets used in the real world. The current versioning is nice timing for your argument, but 3 months from now it'll be a new release with new bugs and new holes. 3 months from now SuSE and Mandrake will be that much more secure and stable, and a year or two from now you might want to think about updating.
As I have already stated, RedHat doesn't oficially support Fedora. However, you can get updates for about a year and half if you want to continue running an older Fedora release. Mandrake seems to be supported for about the same amount of time. I can't find product lifetimes for SuSE, but I suspect you'll find that their commercial release is 2 years or less, while the enterprise version will give you longer (~5 years, like RedHat) lifetime.
...you're a keen RedHat fanboy from way back... <snip the rest of the ad-homenim attacks>
I won't dignify this with a response. Suffice it to say that I actually run a couple of distributions for work on a day-to-day basis. Unlike yourself, I don't go around spreading FUD and half-truths about any of them though.
Debian/etc are different because there is still a free stable branch.
Fedora is the free RedHat stable branch. How hard is this to comprehend?
SuSE 9.x is a rather stable release too, not a rolling baseline line Fedora appears to be.
Go ahead, compare the versions of packages in the SuSE 9.X releases to Fedora core 1 and 2. They use the same major versions of the Kernel, Gnome, KDE, etc. etc. etc. How is SuSE 9.X a "stable release" while Fedora is "a rolling baseline"? This is just plain FUD, with nothing to back it up.
You can directly compare the SuSE commerical releases and SuSE enterprise with Fedora and RHEL respectively. The major difference is that you can get support from SuSE for their commercial releases, while RedHat does not officially support Fedora. If that vendor support is important to you then this is a distinction, but otherwise your RedHat bashing is nothing more than uninformed nonsense.
A better comparison would have been Mandrake Cooker
No, it wouldn't be. Cooker was created my Mandrake as a copy of RedHat Rawhide, to which it directly compares.
One difference though... I don't recall beta-testing for RedHat's pay-for software when running RH8 or 9...
I guess you weren't paying attention then, since RedHat has been selling a higher priced and better supported version since back in the RedHat 7.X days, first as RedHat "Advanced" and then RedHat "Enterprise".
If you insist on looking at using Fedora as beta testing for RHEL, then please let us know how this is different than Debian testing/unstable, the Mandrake community releases or SuSE (as compared to SuSE Enterprise).
There is so much uninformed RedHat FUD on Slashdot I seriously wonder if it is astroturfing.
they pretty much blew any other advantage off with their Fedora vs Enterprise debarkle
What "debarkle" is that? The one where they announced that RH9 support would only last one year at the time it was released? Or the one where they announced the Fedora/RHEL strategy nine months before RH9 support expired? The only debacles occurred in the heads of uninformed Slashdot commentators, or those who were too lazy to follow the goings-on of the distro that they run. We had our post RH9 strategy in place 6 months ago!
RedHat users faced the choice of a distro in continuous state of Beta, or paying large fees for updates.
Yeah, a continuous state of Beta, right. Didn't FC2 go though three beta releases before final release? And let's look at some of the major components in the final release of FC2:
Kernel 2.6
Gnome 2.6
KDE 3.2
Mozilla 1.6
OpenOffice 1.1
Hmmm, where have I seen that before... oh right, the same stuff that is in SuSE 9.1 and MDK 10! (ok, Gnome 2.4 in the MDK case). So how is Fedora Core a "beta" distro and SuSE/MDK not?
You know what, I'm glad to see RedHat have some quality competition. But Mandrake is just out of bankruptcy protection and the "Novell juggernaut" is the same Novell that many observers had written off for dead in recent years. No question that both distros are gaining popularity, but I'd hardly say that they have made RedHat irrelevant quite yet.
Oh, and to counter your anecdotal evidence... RH9/FC1/FC2 is the preferred Linux install at my office. So if it is happening to me it must be true for everyone else!
As somone who works on an open-source project that requires evolution-devel to compile, let me say that I am well aware of that problem. When GNOME went over to pkgconfig, many distros took a while to build their -devel packages with the.pc files.
That being said, I agree with the parent post - pkgconfig goes a long way toward solving problems with automake and autoconf. Everything in GNOME now uses it, so setting up the build environment for anything that depends on GNOME libraries is much, much easier. Hopefully other projects that provide libraries will follow in GNOME's footsteps.
do that, then. It shouldn't be your customer responsibility to house that data
Right - create an account log in every time you want to do a google search, or you can't save search preferences. Do you think that might have a major negative impact on the usability of their search engine?
Google watch issue aside, the poster makes a good point. Why would I want a corporation to have access to my data? Google may be the all wonderfull geeky fluffy bunny of the internet, but who knows who will control it in 5 years?
Hello? What data does google have access to? A number they assign you, your preferences and your IP address. How the hell are they going to "access your data" with that? Do you think that the Google cookie magically knows your social insurance number or something?
Most people don't realize that they can remove cookies, or that they can be hijacked, and are very often miss-used.
Yes, they can be hijacked if you don't have a patched up web browser. And they can be used to do track banner advertising (why I don't accept cookies except from the wesite from whence the HTML was served). But go ahead, prove me wrong - show me a concrete example of how Google could misuse the data in your cookie and invade your privacy.
Well, that is a lot less sensational than google-watch.org, so thanks.
However they seem to skate over the fact that the only thing google has is my IP address to link the GUID to. So when I am at work a few dozen GUIDs link to a single IP address. And when I am on dialup my GUID links to a different IP every time. And if I am using PPPoE or DHCP then my GUID is linked to a different IP address every time it changes, never mind all the PCs behind my firewall... you get the idea.
That's what cookie opponents don't seem to get - a website can't put anything in a cookie that you don't give them. What information could Google really gather from the dozen or more GUIDs I have made searches from using probably dozens more IP addresses? How does that link back to me as a person? You are effectively already anonymous, even with the GUID there. I don't know what else Google is planning to do with the ID either, but I can't find any plausible explanations that could harm my anonymity given the data that Google has available.
google-watch.org would have you believe that this information allows google to telepathically control your movements or some such garbage.
Second, HTTP is a stateless protocol. If you want a user's preferences to to persist within a session you need to use cookies or attach a lot of state information to each GET/POST request. If you want the preferences to persist after you close and re-open your browser you have to have the user log in every time and store the prefs on the server or store the prefs on the client side in a cookie like Google does. This simple fact seems to fly right over the head of google-watch.org and their ridiculous cookie conspiracy theories.
But hey, we've been over this in every Google story since the anti-Google FUD crowd started coming out of the woodwork. Here's a thought: if you really need a tinfoil hat then disable cookies, don't use Orkut and sleep better at night. But please stop subjecting people to google-watch.org FUD.
I'll go out on a limb here and assume that you don't support an open source project in your spare time... but I don't think it is a very long limb.
I see your silly "STFU, RTFM n00b" strawman every time Linux is discussed.
Of course if you go into a random linux-related channel on some IRC network then you might get this kind of response. This is true regardless of operating system - are you telling me that there aren't idiots on Windows message boards? But when you characterize the support you get for Linux or open source projects like this you (purposefully?) ignore the hundreds of volonteers who answer questions and help people on such places as freenode.net. The worst you are likely to get in one of those channels is a URL pointing to a FAQ.
You also can't expect an answer that will make you happy 100% of the time. Maybe the hardware you have isn't supported, or you can't do what you are asking. This might not be "useful" to you, but perhaps there are reasons for this, like the developers don't have access to your hardware, or the manufacturer won't provide specs? I'd like to live in a fantasy world where every device is 100% supported too.
If I can't rely on the programmers to do those checks now, why should I rely on them to properly set this NX bit where and when needed?
Currently you have to rely on every idiot with a text editor and a compiler not to do something stupid like strcpy() dynamic data into a fixed size buffer on the stack. We are talking millions of programmers, and inevitably there are mistakes.
With the NX flag, you have to rely on a few dozen people implementing your O/S to make this work correctly with the stack. It isn't terribly complex, and it is only implemented in one place so it is easy to test. After that the idiots with the text editors and compilers can leave open as many stack overflows as they like and it won't lead to an exploit.
Would you rather rely anyone off the street who can afford "C for dummies" or the handful of people who develop the memory management code for your operating system?
You will have to rely on the programmers of your O/S - they take care of it. This is a fix for a specific kind of buffer overflow, and something that has been present on some non-x86 architectures (Sparc, Alpha) for some time.
This is primarily used to stop 'stack smashing' buffer overflows where the the inital code that is executed is part of the overflowed buffer on the stack. Read this and imagine that you can't execute the shellcode that you have placed on to stack memory via the overflow.
Also: France was correct to surrender to Germany. When you are faced with a fight that you cannot win, you must surrender. Sun Tzu said that 2200 years ago, and it stands today. If all that you will do by fighting is to get your people killed and get defeated anyway, it is better to surrender. As it was, it worked out well for them. By surrendering, they were able to sustain a powerful guerrilla resistance using trained military personnel. This force of terrorists and saboteurs laid the foundation for our invasion of France, and made liberation possible. France's surrender made winning the war possible. If they had not surrendered, their military would have been summarily crushed, and could not have gone on fighting from the shadows.
What historical revisionist bullshit! Let's try checking some facts:
1. The French were rolled by the Germans because they let the same idiots who were in charge of their army in WWI dictate their inter-war policy. They built the Maginot line and expected another static war, totally ignoring the lessons more recent conflicts including the Spanish Civil War that occurred in their backyard. Then when the shooting started their army was affected with the same morale problems that effectively stopped them from being an effective fighting force after 1916 in the first war.
2. The French Resistance did fight a guerrilla war against the Germans, but in the grand scheme of things it had virtually no impact on winning or losing the war in Europe. It hardly made "winning the war possible" - I challenge you to come up with one citation that backs this ludicrous position.
3. If you are going to mention the Resistance, you might want to mention Vichy France - you know, Foch and the regular French army that collaborated with the Nazis, assisted with the deportation of Jews to German concentration camps and actively fought the Allies when they invaded North Africa in 1942.
The "French surrender" jokes get old, and France is a different place today than it was in 1940. However, French actions in WWII don't merit any praise, so stop trying to re-invent history to give them some. Even the French government knows better that to try and discuss WWII - try visiting the Louvre with hundreds of thousands of square feet devoted to the Napoleonic wars and then an area about the size of my living room devoted to WWII.
Why not? That is the LSB standard for installing applications on Linux.
People here bitch about Microsoft, then rip them off by stealing their taskbar, "start menu", integrated filesystem and net browser, and so forth.
Did Microsoft "innovate" these things? No - they "stole" them from other operating systems. Did you call Microsoft out for that too, or is it only Gnome and KDE developers who can't borrow ideas from other desktops? Look at this article for an example of Gnome developers trying to innovate a bit and what do you get - flames away!
One sane programming library
Right, just like the one library that exists in Mac OSX or Windows. Ooops, they have multiple libraries too. And have you noticed the freedesktop.org project to unite some of the technology behind Gnome and KDE?
The removal of X
This is such a crock of BS, and every person who tries to to explain why X should be removed comes off as someone who doesn't understand history and is doomed to repeat it. Ever wonder why every X "replacement" has flopped? Furthermore, X isn't stainding still - check X.org.
Finally, an ATTITUDE CHANGE
If you are getting flamed by zealots then maybe you need to get away from #linuxn00bs (and slashdot) and notice that there is a large mature community that uses Linux for work, and is more interested in pragmatisim than zealotry. Yes, there are zealots, but most of them are not in a real position to influence Linux adoption.
but the average user who actually buys news hardware and drivers, installs new applications and removes them, does homework, and all the other things the average computer user does these days will have tough times compared to the much easier Windows XP
Finally, something that makes sense. People are working on ideas for this, but quite frankly with device manufacturers only releasing Windows drivers and no specs it is a very difficult problem to solve. But I suppose you have ideas to contribute instead of just complaints?
No, they just have to make the source available to you if you ask them.
No, they have to give you then source when they give you the binaries or make it available to any third party upon request, although they can change for media distribution.
Plus, they can deliver it to you any way they want: teletype, microfiche, or Morse Code.
Incorrect - it has to be on a "on a medium customarily used for software interchange" to comply with the GPL. I don't think any of those would qualify.
Actually the H2 is just a hummer made street legal
Absolutely incorrect. The AM General "H1" (a.k.a the original Hummer) already came in a street legal version. GM bought the rights to the "Hummer" name and then proceeded to take a Chevy Tahoe and put square body panels and fake plastic lift hooks on it and call that an "H2". The "Hummer H2" has absolutely nothing to do with the military HWWMV (Hummer) or the street legal version thereof. It is just GM selling an overproced SUV and cashing in on the name.
"Hemi" engines are called such as they have hemispherical combustion chamber...
I'm well aware. But look at Dodge's marketing - the ads with the truck towing the old Hemi 'Cuda and the guy asking "does that thing have a Hemi?". The way they are marketing the engine has nothing to do with cylinder profiles and everything to do with cashing in on brand recognition from a '60s muscle car.
This is just the game indstry using the same marketing scum tactics that work in other industries: if you have a brand name then capitalize on it.
For example, the GM "Hummer H2" or the Dodge truck "Hemi" engines have little if anything to do with what they are named after. It is just the manufacturer trying to cash in on brand populatrity.
Not that I don't agree with you: I loved the N64 Goldeneye and I hope whomever thought of this marketing tactic at EA rots in hell.
What do you get from Red Hat, a single point of contact for support or RTFM from people in the community?
Yes, yes that is exactly what they are selling - you call them up and they tell you to hop on #linuxn00bs on DALNet and ask one of the FAQs. Don't be ridiculous - they are selling support for the packages that they ship with their distro - as in you call/email them and they help fix your problem. You know - the same kind of support that IBM and HP sell for Linux too.
If I were to purchase a desktop OS purely on the idea of support MS products would be top of my list due to the fact they actually might be around for awhile.
More classic FUD. RedHat wasn't incorporated yesterday, and I don't see them going away tomorrow. If we go with your logic then we should all be buying from IBM instead.
Didn't Red Hat say a few months ago that they were not going to compete with MS at the desktop level?
No, they said that they were not going to compete with them for consumer desktops. Can you comprehend the difference? In the corporate desktop world Microsoft does the same thing - charge a subscription for support/licensing. The free KB articles and windows update plus a 1-800 number so Microsoft can charge you $200 to report a bug is for consumer desktops, which is specifically not what is being discussed.
On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods:)
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great
features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes
and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's
look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really
means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something,
as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the
latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single
program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at
endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to
international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the
text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on
Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other
programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though
only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations,
and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the
third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved
by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me
more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and
Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta
snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once
every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near
future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far
too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is
now using it, so it must be growing!"
If you are a programmer, rate your prospective employer on the Joel test.
You agree or disagree with a lot of things that Joel has to say, but IMHO this test tells you a lot about what your life as a software developer will be like. If there is no spec, no schedule, no bug database, no testers and no source control then do you really want to work there?
One shouldn't have to check whether the hardware one purchases works with their operating system? Is this some kind of joke?
How about I point out any number of sound cards that worked with Win98 that don't work with WinXP. Or vice-versa. Of course you have to check to see if the hardware you buy works with your O/S, no matter what that O/S is. Granted, you can pretty much go to Best Buy and all of the hardware there will work with WinXP, but that isn't a function of WinXP being "better" - just that the Windows monopoly makes sure that desktop hardware is supplied with WinXP drivers by the manufacturer. Linux doesn't have that luxury, and it isn't helped by many manufacturers not releasing specs either.
That being said, this article is complete trash. I could go and get a slightly older "mainstream sound card" that the manufacturer never bothered to write WinXP drivers for and make all of the same claims that this guy did about WinXP. And they'd be just as pointless - he takes one data point "hardware X doesn't work with Linux" - and then goes on to make all sorts of grandiose extrapolations. Right out of the logical fallacies hasty generalization handbook.
Going from 2.4 to 2.6 worked great on Debian and Gentoo, but they automatically download the proper extras for you whereas RedHat only distributes single RPMs for everything. I see where my mistakes were, but the problem lies with RedHat and the way they distribute software.
I think that your problem is understanding how RedHat distributes software. Your upgrade worked ok on Debian or Gentoo because the version you were using supported being upgraded to a 2.6 kernel.
RedHat does not support RH9 upgrading to a 2.6 kernel, but you can do it if you look for instructions.
RH9 is really not meant to be upgraded
Sure it is. Grab yum and pull RH9 up to FC1. Then use yum to pull FC1 up to FC2 test - voila, a RedHat distribution that supports a 2.6 kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Fedora is directly comparable to Mandrake Community. There is no free version of RH that compares to Mandrake Official.
This is quite true from the perspective of support - Fedora is not supported by RedHat, but Mandrake Official is supportted by Mandrakesoft.
From the perspective of "stability" I don't see much external difference (i.e. versions of major components) between Mandrake Official and Fedora. I've never run them side by side for a long time to compare, so I could be wrong.
Fedora is the free RedHat TESTING branch. There is NO stable and free RedHat anymore. Get that?
Go ahead and cite a source for that ... you can't. You are absolutely dead wrong - the RedHat testing branch is Rawhide. Fedora is its own distro with its own release schedule. Does technology that ends up in RHEL start in Fedora? Sure, the same way that technology start starts in SuSE linux ends up in Suse Enterprise linux.
Fedora says they schedule releases 2-3 times a year. That is a joke for any system that actually gets used in the real world. The current versioning is nice timing for your argument, but 3 months from now it'll be a new release with new bugs and new holes. 3 months from now SuSE and Mandrake will be that much more secure and stable, and a year or two from now you might want to think about updating.
As I have already stated, RedHat doesn't oficially support Fedora. However, you can get updates for about a year and half if you want to continue running an older Fedora release. Mandrake seems to be supported for about the same amount of time. I can't find product lifetimes for SuSE, but I suspect you'll find that their commercial release is 2 years or less, while the enterprise version will give you longer (~5 years, like RedHat) lifetime.
I won't dignify this with a response. Suffice it to say that I actually run a couple of distributions for work on a day-to-day basis. Unlike yourself, I don't go around spreading FUD and half-truths about any of them though.
It trashes Windows partition maps
Before you open your piehole, you might want to notice that this problem is kernel 2.6 related and affects Mandrake 10 and SuSE 9.1 as well.
breaks NVIDIA drivers
New kernel version breaks closed-source kernel module. Film at 11! Want to place a wager on how long it takes NVIDIA to fix their problem anyway?
has missing popular packages (XCDroast)
You name one package, and it isn't even missing from FC2. Nice.
Debian/etc are different because there is still a free stable branch.
Fedora is the free RedHat stable branch. How hard is this to comprehend?
SuSE 9.x is a rather stable release too, not a rolling baseline line Fedora appears to be.
Go ahead, compare the versions of packages in the SuSE 9.X releases to Fedora core 1 and 2. They use the same major versions of the Kernel, Gnome, KDE, etc. etc. etc. How is SuSE 9.X a "stable release" while Fedora is "a rolling baseline"? This is just plain FUD, with nothing to back it up.
You can directly compare the SuSE commerical releases and SuSE enterprise with Fedora and RHEL respectively. The major difference is that you can get support from SuSE for their commercial releases, while RedHat does not officially support Fedora. If that vendor support is important to you then this is a distinction, but otherwise your RedHat bashing is nothing more than uninformed nonsense.
A better comparison would have been Mandrake Cooker
No, it wouldn't be. Cooker was created my Mandrake as a copy of RedHat Rawhide, to which it directly compares.
One difference though... I don't recall beta-testing for RedHat's pay-for software when running RH8 or 9...
I guess you weren't paying attention then, since RedHat has been selling a higher priced and better supported version since back in the RedHat 7.X days, first as RedHat "Advanced" and then RedHat "Enterprise".
If you insist on looking at using Fedora as beta testing for RHEL, then please let us know how this is different than Debian testing/unstable, the Mandrake community releases or SuSE (as compared to SuSE Enterprise).
There is so much uninformed RedHat FUD on Slashdot I seriously wonder if it is astroturfing.
they pretty much blew any other advantage off with their Fedora vs Enterprise debarkle
What "debarkle" is that? The one where they announced that RH9 support would only last one year at the time it was released? Or the one where they announced the Fedora/RHEL strategy nine months before RH9 support expired? The only debacles occurred in the heads of uninformed Slashdot commentators, or those who were too lazy to follow the goings-on of the distro that they run. We had our post RH9 strategy in place 6 months ago!
RedHat users faced the choice of a distro in continuous state of Beta, or paying large fees for updates.
Yeah, a continuous state of Beta, right. Didn't FC2 go though three beta releases before final release? And let's look at some of the major components in the final release of FC2:
- Kernel 2.6
- Gnome 2.6
- KDE 3.2
- Mozilla 1.6
- OpenOffice 1.1
Hmmm, where have I seen that beforeYou know what, I'm glad to see RedHat have some quality competition. But Mandrake is just out of bankruptcy protection and the "Novell juggernaut" is the same Novell that many observers had written off for dead in recent years. No question that both distros are gaining popularity, but I'd hardly say that they have made RedHat irrelevant quite yet.
Oh, and to counter your anecdotal evidence ... RH9/FC1/FC2 is the preferred Linux install at my office. So if it is happening to me it must be true for everyone else!
As somone who works on an open-source project that requires evolution-devel to compile, let me say that I am well aware of that problem. When GNOME went over to pkgconfig, many distros took a while to build their -devel packages with the .pc files.
That being said, I agree with the parent post - pkgconfig goes a long way toward solving problems with automake and autoconf. Everything in GNOME now uses it, so setting up the build environment for anything that depends on GNOME libraries is much, much easier. Hopefully other projects that provide libraries will follow in GNOME's footsteps.
do that, then. It shouldn't be your customer responsibility to house that data
Right - create an account log in every time you want to do a google search, or you can't save search preferences. Do you think that might have a major negative impact on the usability of their search engine?
Google watch issue aside, the poster makes a good point. Why would I want a corporation to have access to my data? Google may be the all wonderfull geeky fluffy bunny of the internet, but who knows who will control it in 5 years?
Hello? What data does google have access to? A number they assign you, your preferences and your IP address. How the hell are they going to "access your data" with that? Do you think that the Google cookie magically knows your social insurance number or something?
Most people don't realize that they can remove cookies, or that they can be hijacked, and are very often miss-used.
Yes, they can be hijacked if you don't have a patched up web browser. And they can be used to do track banner advertising (why I don't accept cookies except from the wesite from whence the HTML was served). But go ahead, prove me wrong - show me a concrete example of how Google could misuse the data in your cookie and invade your privacy.
Well, that is a lot less sensational than google-watch.org, so thanks.
However they seem to skate over the fact that the only thing google has is my IP address to link the GUID to. So when I am at work a few dozen GUIDs link to a single IP address. And when I am on dialup my GUID links to a different IP every time. And if I am using PPPoE or DHCP then my GUID is linked to a different IP address every time it changes, never mind all the PCs behind my firewall ... you get the idea.
That's what cookie opponents don't seem to get - a website can't put anything in a cookie that you don't give them. What information could Google really gather from the dozen or more GUIDs I have made searches from using probably dozens more IP addresses? How does that link back to me as a person? You are effectively already anonymous, even with the GUID there. I don't know what else Google is planning to do with the ID either, but I can't find any plausible explanations that could harm my anonymity given the data that Google has available.
google-watch.org would have you believe that this information allows google to telepathically control your movements or some such garbage.
I wish a could beat the creator of google-watch.org and every person who ever linked to it with a gigantic clue stick.
First of all, the creator of google-watch.org has a really big axe to grind with Google.
Second, HTTP is a stateless protocol. If you want a user's preferences to to persist within a session you need to use cookies or attach a lot of state information to each GET/POST request. If you want the preferences to persist after you close and re-open your browser you have to have the user log in every time and store the prefs on the server or store the prefs on the client side in a cookie like Google does. This simple fact seems to fly right over the head of google-watch.org and their ridiculous cookie conspiracy theories.
But hey, we've been over this in every Google story since the anti-Google FUD crowd started coming out of the woodwork. Here's a thought: if you really need a tinfoil hat then disable cookies, don't use Orkut and sleep better at night. But please stop subjecting people to google-watch.org FUD.
I'll go out on a limb here and assume that you don't support an open source project in your spare time... but I don't think it is a very long limb.
I see your silly "STFU, RTFM n00b" strawman every time Linux is discussed.
Of course if you go into a random linux-related channel on some IRC network then you might get this kind of response. This is true regardless of operating system - are you telling me that there aren't idiots on Windows message boards? But when you characterize the support you get for Linux or open source projects like this you (purposefully?) ignore the hundreds of volonteers who answer questions and help people on such places as freenode.net. The worst you are likely to get in one of those channels is a URL pointing to a FAQ.
You also can't expect an answer that will make you happy 100% of the time. Maybe the hardware you have isn't supported, or you can't do what you are asking. This might not be "useful" to you, but perhaps there are reasons for this, like the developers don't have access to your hardware, or the manufacturer won't provide specs? I'd like to live in a fantasy world where every device is 100% supported too.
If I can't rely on the programmers to do those checks now, why should I rely on them to properly set this NX bit where and when needed?
Currently you have to rely on every idiot with a text editor and a compiler not to do something stupid like strcpy() dynamic data into a fixed size buffer on the stack. We are talking millions of programmers, and inevitably there are mistakes.
With the NX flag, you have to rely on a few dozen people implementing your O/S to make this work correctly with the stack. It isn't terribly complex, and it is only implemented in one place so it is easy to test. After that the idiots with the text editors and compilers can leave open as many stack overflows as they like and it won't lead to an exploit.
Would you rather rely anyone off the street who can afford "C for dummies" or the handful of people who develop the memory management code for your operating system?
You will have to rely on the programmers of your O/S - they take care of it. This is a fix for a specific kind of buffer overflow, and something that has been present on some non-x86 architectures (Sparc, Alpha) for some time.
This is primarily used to stop 'stack smashing' buffer overflows where the the inital code that is executed is part of the overflowed buffer on the stack. Read this and imagine that you can't execute the shellcode that you have placed on to stack memory via the overflow.
You know the "American beers == water" jokes come from the fact that (most) American beers have less alcohol than (most) Canadian beers, right?
Also: France was correct to surrender to Germany. When you are faced with a fight that you cannot win, you must surrender. Sun Tzu said that 2200 years ago, and it stands today. If all that you will do by fighting is to get your people killed and get defeated anyway, it is better to surrender. As it was, it worked out well for them. By surrendering, they were able to sustain a powerful guerrilla resistance using trained military personnel. This force of terrorists and saboteurs laid the foundation for our invasion of France, and made liberation possible. France's surrender made winning the war possible. If they had not surrendered, their military would have been summarily crushed, and could not have gone on fighting from the shadows.
What historical revisionist bullshit! Let's try checking some facts:
1. The French were rolled by the Germans because they let the same idiots who were in charge of their army in WWI dictate their inter-war policy. They built the Maginot line and expected another static war, totally ignoring the lessons more recent conflicts including the Spanish Civil War that occurred in their backyard. Then when the shooting started their army was affected with the same morale problems that effectively stopped them from being an effective fighting force after 1916 in the first war.
2. The French Resistance did fight a guerrilla war against the Germans, but in the grand scheme of things it had virtually no impact on winning or losing the war in Europe. It hardly made "winning the war possible" - I challenge you to come up with one citation that backs this ludicrous position.
3. If you are going to mention the Resistance, you might want to mention Vichy France - you know, Foch and the regular French army that collaborated with the Nazis, assisted with the deportation of Jews to German concentration camps and actively fought the Allies when they invaded North Africa in 1942.
The "French surrender" jokes get old, and France is a different place today than it was in 1940. However, French actions in WWII don't merit any praise, so stop trying to re-invent history to give them some. Even the French government knows better that to try and discuss WWII - try visiting the Louvre with hundreds of thousands of square feet devoted to the Napoleonic wars and then an area about the size of my living room devoted to WWII.
Adobe's not gonna give you RPMs, sorry.
Why not? That is the LSB standard for installing applications on Linux.
People here bitch about Microsoft, then rip them off by stealing their taskbar, "start menu", integrated filesystem and net browser, and so forth.
Did Microsoft "innovate" these things? No - they "stole" them from other operating systems. Did you call Microsoft out for that too, or is it only Gnome and KDE developers who can't borrow ideas from other desktops? Look at this article for an example of Gnome developers trying to innovate a bit and what do you get - flames away!
One sane programming library
Right, just like the one library that exists in Mac OSX or Windows. Ooops, they have multiple libraries too. And have you noticed the freedesktop.org project to unite some of the technology behind Gnome and KDE?
The removal of X
This is such a crock of BS, and every person who tries to to explain why X should be removed comes off as someone who doesn't understand history and is doomed to repeat it. Ever wonder why every X "replacement" has flopped? Furthermore, X isn't stainding still - check X.org.
Finally, an ATTITUDE CHANGE
If you are getting flamed by zealots then maybe you need to get away from #linuxn00bs (and slashdot) and notice that there is a large mature community that uses Linux for work, and is more interested in pragmatisim than zealotry. Yes, there are zealots, but most of them are not in a real position to influence Linux adoption.
but the average user who actually buys news hardware and drivers, installs new applications and removes them, does homework, and all the other things the average computer user does these days will have tough times compared to the much easier Windows XP
Finally, something that makes sense. People are working on ideas for this, but quite frankly with device manufacturers only releasing Windows drivers and no specs it is a very difficult problem to solve. But I suppose you have ideas to contribute instead of just complaints?
No, they just have to make the source available to you if you ask them.
No, they have to give you then source when they give you the binaries or make it available to any third party upon request, although they can change for media distribution.
Plus, they can deliver it to you any way they want: teletype, microfiche, or Morse Code.
Incorrect - it has to be on a "on a medium customarily used for software interchange" to comply with the GPL. I don't think any of those would qualify.
Actually the H2 is just a hummer made street legal
Absolutely incorrect. The AM General "H1" (a.k.a the original Hummer) already came in a street legal version. GM bought the rights to the "Hummer" name and then proceeded to take a Chevy Tahoe and put square body panels and fake plastic lift hooks on it and call that an "H2". The "Hummer H2" has absolutely nothing to do with the military HWWMV (Hummer) or the street legal version thereof. It is just GM selling an overproced SUV and cashing in on the name.
"Hemi" engines are called such as they have hemispherical combustion chamber...
I'm well aware. But look at Dodge's marketing - the ads with the truck towing the old Hemi 'Cuda and the guy asking "does that thing have a Hemi?". The way they are marketing the engine has nothing to do with cylinder profiles and everything to do with cashing in on brand recognition from a '60s muscle car.
This is just the game indstry using the same marketing scum tactics that work in other industries: if you have a brand name then capitalize on it.
For example, the GM "Hummer H2" or the Dodge truck "Hemi" engines have little if anything to do with what they are named after. It is just the manufacturer trying to cash in on brand populatrity.
Not that I don't agree with you: I loved the N64 Goldeneye and I hope whomever thought of this marketing tactic at EA rots in hell.
Talk about FUD... +5 insightful my arse.
What do you get from Red Hat, a single point of contact for support or RTFM from people in the community?
Yes, yes that is exactly what they are selling - you call them up and they tell you to hop on #linuxn00bs on DALNet and ask one of the FAQs. Don't be ridiculous - they are selling support for the packages that they ship with their distro - as in you call/email them and they help fix your problem. You know - the same kind of support that IBM and HP sell for Linux too.
If I were to purchase a desktop OS purely on the idea of support MS products would be top of my list due to the fact they actually might be around for awhile.
More classic FUD. RedHat wasn't incorporated yesterday, and I don't see them going away tomorrow. If we go with your logic then we should all be buying from IBM instead.
Didn't Red Hat say a few months ago that they were not going to compete with MS at the desktop level?
No, they said that they were not going to compete with them for consumer desktops. Can you comprehend the difference? In the corporate desktop world Microsoft does the same thing - charge a subscription for support/licensing. The free KB articles and windows update plus a 1-800 number so Microsoft can charge you $200 to report a bug is for consumer desktops, which is specifically not what is being discussed.
On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time ... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods :)
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-maticGentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
If you are a programmer, rate your prospective employer on the Joel test.
You agree or disagree with a lot of things that Joel has to say, but IMHO this test tells you a lot about what your life as a software developer will be like. If there is no spec, no schedule, no bug database, no testers and no source control then do you really want to work there?
One shouldn't have to should they?
One shouldn't have to check whether the hardware one purchases works with their operating system? Is this some kind of joke?
How about I point out any number of sound cards that worked with Win98 that don't work with WinXP. Or vice-versa. Of course you have to check to see if the hardware you buy works with your O/S, no matter what that O/S is. Granted, you can pretty much go to Best Buy and all of the hardware there will work with WinXP, but that isn't a function of WinXP being "better" - just that the Windows monopoly makes sure that desktop hardware is supplied with WinXP drivers by the manufacturer. Linux doesn't have that luxury, and it isn't helped by many manufacturers not releasing specs either.
That being said, this article is complete trash. I could go and get a slightly older "mainstream sound card" that the manufacturer never bothered to write WinXP drivers for and make all of the same claims that this guy did about WinXP. And they'd be just as pointless - he takes one data point "hardware X doesn't work with Linux" - and then goes on to make all sorts of grandiose extrapolations. Right out of the logical fallacies hasty generalization handbook.
Going from 2.4 to 2.6 worked great on Debian and Gentoo, but they automatically download the proper extras for you whereas RedHat only distributes single RPMs for everything. I see where my mistakes were, but the problem lies with RedHat and the way they distribute software.
I think that your problem is understanding how RedHat distributes software. Your upgrade worked ok on Debian or Gentoo because the version you were using supported being upgraded to a 2.6 kernel.
RedHat does not support RH9 upgrading to a 2.6 kernel, but you can do it if you look for instructions.
RH9 is really not meant to be upgraded
Sure it is. Grab yum and pull RH9 up to FC1. Then use yum to pull FC1 up to FC2 test - voila, a RedHat distribution that supports a 2.6 kernel.
What I have a problem with is when you try to install a Vanilla kernel on a RedHat system, it still goes berserk.
Nice FUD. I have compiled pretty much every 2.4.X kernel on RedHat 7/8/9/FC1 without ever having a problem.