While it's pretty unprofessional and juvenile to dismiss software because the name sounds silly, I have to say, if you want a database running on a server, maybe Feisty's short support commitment is not the best option? Dapper is supported for 5 years on servers, while feisty will be over in a year. You've failed to give the most convincing argument that Ubuntu should be deployed for your needs, especially in terms of things IT cares about. I don't think IT would go for it, even if the code name was "Virgin Fucker" or "Indiscriminate Fire" or something else appropriately masculine.
Right, because when I tell people about Vista, I call it "Longhorn". The boss loves the sexual innuendo, as does HR. Everyone has codenames, and nobody has to use em. If your boss doesn't like fun, then just call it Ubuntu, and if he wants to hear about a specific release, call it by version number. Or you can embrace the silly names and corequisite laughter, and point out that Ubuntu isn't worried about perception. They'll fix bugs as they're found, they don't deny or deliberately hide security vulnerabilities, and let people laugh if they want to.
Honestly, the numbers seem less confusing than say version 3.11, which means almost nothing. In contrast, 6.06, 7.10 an 8.04 carry a specific meaning. And as we saw with 6.06, sometimes that number needs to change to reflect reality. The codename does not.
The author's website was pegged serving that 20MB PDF before slashdot got ahold of it, I doubt it'll survive now. The paper is also hosted by the ACM, if you're a subscriber.
I think you're missing a bigger problem here: somewhere around 50 percent of the population of parents has a vested interest in making sure the filter is circumventable.
I don't know if that is the "root of all your evil", but that might be one of the closer truths I've heard from Christians. If reproduction was painful, I'd wager the human species would not be so nearly plentiful. It just makes evolutionary sense to encourage reproduction.
Why not just give the channel away for free then? The whole point is to mass viewers for ad sales and ratings. I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that charging acts as a tax on viewership. You lose viewers, viewers lose content, and ad men lose whatever demographic you could have captured. Of course, you gain a small amount of money for charging, so this might not be a correct statement.
These were meant as two separate ideas, hence the paragraph separation. The first thought's reasoning: If you look at what it takes to get a PhD, explaining things to people with an 8th grade education isn't on the list. Journal papers are often filled with jargon and such that I sincerely hope is added rather than the level of discourse scientists have. But to some degree, many PhDs seem to dislike teaching. Why else would universities competing for talented PhD's offer research only (no teaching duties) positions? As for the second, I simply meant that if you're bright enough to obtain a physics degree, there's several mathematically complicated disciplines available to you, both in and outside the field of physics. Of course you can want to teach students. I just wonder what sort of person skills one could be lacking to be unable to find a job after obtaining incredible credentials like a physics degree. Also, every physics guy I've known has been.. pretty weird. But we're talking about news for nerds here, right? Par for course;)
And you have to be pretty condescending to suggest I never thought that PhDs might want to teach young people science after I just wrote about a guy who wanted to teach young people science. It's pretty clear from the replies that there's many scientist's opinions on teaching, but where are the opinions of teacher's opinions on scientists teaching? This side is sorely lacking any representation here, to the detriment of the topic.
I have a story from my senior year in high school. During AP physics (a class of ten boys, the only girl enrolled dropped the class before the first day of school!) once day, a former student of the teacher came in to give a short demonstration of neat things. It turns out that the dude had a PhD in chemistry, and offered to work for the school. As I understand it, the school didn't consider him because he would cost too much. So now he works for the EPA figuring out ways to measure emissions without being on an owner's property (who often dislike surprise inspections). Now maybe he simply was asking for too much, or maybe they were already looking at budget cutbacks, but part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students.
Honestly, if you have a degree in Physics and can't find a job, I'm not sure I want you in front of students as you must be a horribly weird person.
Actually, I missed a rather single important word in that post: "out." Debian is committed to keeping bad software like spyware out. I don't think popcon is spyware -- it's entirely opt in and reports mere usage and installation of binaries, though it would be rather scary to have a list of IPs running phpBB.
Re:Turns out the whole reason for the attack was..
on
Ubuntu Servers Hacked
·
· Score: 1
Frankley, I've never bothered paying attention to the boards, rightly recognizing them as instant newb magnets that are unfortunately a waste of my time. But the Automatix stuff prompted me to read more about this, and investigate. What I found was a string of quoted posts deleted, and plenty of bad grammar from developers telling people to take their criticism and shove it. Simply put, Automatix is software written by Poisonous People.
university sponsored school for students with ADD, ADHD, and Asperger's kids and I can personally attest to the amount of money that needs to make sure these students grow up to become normal functioning members of our society. And:
Psychologists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, specially trained teachers -- almost all of which have their PH.Ds. It's no surprise it costs more. Hint: these two are probably highly related...
This isn't entirely true. I had a high school calculus teacher. My roommate had a high school calculus computer education program with two other students. He's said he wished there were more people to ask about complicated subjects, but his teacher was there primarily to babysit all the advanced computer education students enrolled in different classes, rather than know about a specific subject. This might work for self checkout at the grocery store, but you can't pull this sort of efficiency trick in education without having a well rounded and intellectual teacher. You might not need 1:1 aides, but you'll still need to spend on smart teachers and additional educational tools, like that calculus software. The article in question suggests that the gifted receive one tenth the financial attention of the disabled, and that traditionally cheap means of accommodating the gifted (skipping grades) is intentionally kept off the table for reasons uncertain. I have no idea what the numbers are, and my guess is that the allocations for gifted come from the same budget as the disabled, making estimates difficult at best. Perhaps this is why you say allocated for is not the same as spent on. I also don't have a solution for the rural Kansas education system, and I begin to doubt one exists.
But I don't think that teachers should just leave the gifted to their own devices. I don't think students should be antagonized by teachers as some gifted feel they have been, but active involvement can improve education a great deal -- as long as the teacher knows what to teach and can prepare for it. For example, our gifted education system entered a market game. Combined with talk about investment rates and reading SEC filings, this could have been informative and productive. But with no emphasis on what was important, we were left drifting in the wind, so to speak, and I think we lost a lot of fake money on tech companies. The only thing I learned was that it's easy to lose money in the market, and not to buy companies I thought I liked (SGI). We never even heard about price to earnings or market capitalization. In these days the internet was just beginning to lift off the ground, and the only access we had was severely filtered school access, for maybe an hour after school.
A mock trial ran in a similarly unprepared method, whereby "creative" prosecuting student attorneys fabricated damning evidence and the teachers approved, and told me I should have come up with some of my own evidence. That's right, in a classroom mock trial designed to teach about court proceedings and concepts, and heavy emphasis on testimony (preceeding the trial were 8 rounds of role playing whereby each student assumes a suspected persona and reveals various facts to other people, trying to shift the blame off of them--this was clearly intended to be the primary evidence and highlighted the importance of reasonable doubt), I was encouraged to fabricate evidence, and given no tools to counter the fabrication of evidence. Because creativity counts. I'll leave it to the cynics whether I learned anything instructive that day.
Both of these things are informative about professional concepts, and require intensive preparation of both students and teachers. And I think run properly, they're both highly engaging and give students a context within to read and accumulate knowledge about societal functions like the court or the market. I have to wonder though, how much less jaded with education our students would be if we doubled the salaries of gifted education teachers and sought highly qualified people for the position. From my limited discussion with Secondary Education teachers specializing in Gifted Education, the reasons for entering seem to be "don't tell anyone, but it's easier --because they pretty much teach themselves anyways". It might seem true, but the motivation is wrong, and if true then there's no point in sending the gifted to school at all. As I've alluded to above, I don't believe that's the case.
The trouble with Computer Science is that it's not a science, directly speaking. It's more similar to engineering disciplines: you design a system to meet requirements, and analyze the design using mathematical principals. Partly, the last part has eroded as the requirements have shifted from technology to "customer logic". A large group of types of programs have computation constraints that are eased with every passing moment by improvements in computing power, enough that many people don't bother to look at Big O notation during their design, and instead focus on memory caching techniques.
The reason that this is not a like a traditional science is that the entire system is man-made. The scientific method is intended to reveal the machinations of things nobody yet understands. We don't need to resort to the scientific method to determine the number of clock cycles a multiply takes -- we can also ask the guy who made it. Only in the case where the designer doesn't understand how his creation works would the scientific method help, and I suggest that this is a really bad approach to design.
Which is why software packaging groups like Debian rely on pure statistics for such things. Popcon does more than measure downloads, it measures installed user base and I believe frequency of use. It's not a perfect system for recommendations, but it's clearly better than the five star ratings this man recieved. For example, if you're looking for a PDF reader or something, popularity may be a good indicator of quality. While Debian's system is committed to keeping bad software like spyware, it's still nice to prioritize your software search by such metrics.
It might be neat to come up with a better evaluation system that considers popularity, rate of new releases and critical bug counts, so by no means am I suggesting that popcon is perfect;)
Re:Turns out the whole reason for the attack was..
on
Ubuntu Servers Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And up until last week the most frequent answer on the Ubuntu forums for many questions was "use Automatix". Possibly because web forum software is horrible on all fronts. It caters to a narrow, dangerous audience of experienced people who should know better. People who's been using the internet for long enough to know what a "web forum" is, but aren't familiar with mailing lists and IRC. So the forums were never planned for, but it eventually it was felt that the forums should be intergrated rather than continue to grow and divide the community.
Automatix in particular is a fantastic story of why I avoid forums. Automatix began life as a bash script under a different title by someone other than "arnieboy", and shared by a sticky forum thread. A marginal step up from guides telling you what commands to run to enable various things, etc. Based on a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright, licensing and the GPL, Automatix was born as a fork of this script, featuring numerous dubious personalizations that might be okay for arnieboy to accept but aren't good suggestions (such as enabling a root account). The forum admins have regularly played an active role, playing favorites amongst the various tools. Automatix at one point had it's own 3rd party project sub forum, where apparently traditional Ubuntu Code of Conduct did not apply ("his forum, his rules"). Eventually automatix was blamed for the failed upgrade of a number of users, and some people took to abusing a "popular searches" front page widget to advertise the phrase "automatix sucks", which was eventually fixed by telling the software that "automatix" was too common a word to search for, I think at the author's request.
As things stand now, Automatix has it's own forum and remains mostly antagonistic towards criticism. It's functionality has been largely dupplicated though it still serves a purpose, to commit copyright infringement via w32codecs etc. Ubuntu has tools that function very similar to Automatix' normal behavior, and in some cases improve upon it. The codec detection stuff in totem is helpful, as you don't need to know about Automatix to learn how to make things work, though it doesn't install w32codecs. And the most significant, repeated complaint has not been solved: Automatix has scheduled for themselves a single week with which to test all bugs and upgrade flaws -- they plan to release one week before gutsy is published.
A number of forum posts relating to this history have gone missing, which I disagree with. The proper thing to do in the face of misconduct is confront it and denounce it, not hide it by deletion. You might have the right to be offended by what people say, but not the right to erase history. Instead of the forums, use mailing lists and IRC when you feel like being sociable with other linux users, and launchpad's bugs and answers services if you have a problem.
Screw up? 5 of 8 LoCo servers were hit. They're for use to organize local regional events, translate, and the like. This is the Ubuntu equivalent of getting your LUG webserver hacked. They were hosted away from the Canonical infrastructure, and have not compromised the internet upgrade delivery system directly, and while I can't be sure, I'd hope nobody was storing GPG keys or the like on a LoCo server.
If you don't think the users are capable of handling the full measure of a given technology, to where it compromises security decisions, then maybe they shouldn't be using it? In other words, if you can't figure out how to change the ssh port, what are you using it for?
That, as it turned out, did not happen. The trouble with maintaining a public forum is that the media will interpret dialog as fact, conversation as action. Feisty did not come with beryl by default, but it did come with a tool to inform you of what non-free software is running, and to enable / disable such hardware support. Examples are nvidia-glx and intel's iwl3945 drivers. The truth is that what's infringing and what is not is very nuanced.
A tax on the unimproved value of land: there's one I like. Hard to dodge, can't be hidden, nothing to deduct, if you speculate on land without developing it, there is a price to pay (whereas, conversely, there is a benefit for developing it: no added tax). And farmers hate it so much they decided to inflict the income tax on the rest of us as payback.
The Georgia state park Stone Mountain features a cliff side bas relief of three Confederate Generals, and is also the historic site of the re-founding of the KKK. The carving was started by the KKK and finished by the state of Georgia. I'm pretty sure the KKK had significant control in Georgia.
If the point of $ per kg and per gallon is to establish some sort of direct comparison between fuels, I suggest making sure that a kilogram of hydrogen fuel is comparable to a gallon of gas in terms of distance.
Slashdot Mirror
And please, tell us who shot JFK. It's been decades and has been driving us bonkers.
Are header files considered copyrightable?
While it's pretty unprofessional and juvenile to dismiss software because the name sounds silly, I have to say, if you want a database running on a server, maybe Feisty's short support commitment is not the best option? Dapper is supported for 5 years on servers, while feisty will be over in a year. You've failed to give the most convincing argument that Ubuntu should be deployed for your needs, especially in terms of things IT cares about. I don't think IT would go for it, even if the code name was "Virgin Fucker" or "Indiscriminate Fire" or something else appropriately masculine.
Right, because when I tell people about Vista, I call it "Longhorn". The boss loves the sexual innuendo, as does HR. Everyone has codenames, and nobody has to use em. If your boss doesn't like fun, then just call it Ubuntu, and if he wants to hear about a specific release, call it by version number. Or you can embrace the silly names and corequisite laughter, and point out that Ubuntu isn't worried about perception. They'll fix bugs as they're found, they don't deny or deliberately hide security vulnerabilities, and let people laugh if they want to.
Honestly, the numbers seem less confusing than say version 3.11, which means almost nothing. In contrast, 6.06, 7.10 an 8.04 carry a specific meaning. And as we saw with 6.06, sometimes that number needs to change to reflect reality. The codename does not.
The author's website was pegged serving that 20MB PDF before slashdot got ahold of it, I doubt it'll survive now. The paper is also hosted by the ACM, if you're a subscriber.
I think you're missing a bigger problem here: somewhere around 50 percent of the population of parents has a vested interest in making sure the filter is circumventable.
I don't know if that is the "root of all your evil", but that might be one of the closer truths I've heard from Christians. If reproduction was painful, I'd wager the human species would not be so nearly plentiful. It just makes evolutionary sense to encourage reproduction.
Why not just give the channel away for free then? The whole point is to mass viewers for ad sales and ratings. I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that charging acts as a tax on viewership. You lose viewers, viewers lose content, and ad men lose whatever demographic you could have captured. Of course, you gain a small amount of money for charging, so this might not be a correct statement.
The bigger part to me is where they replaced a part without checking whether it was a suitable replacement. 10G != 4G.
These were meant as two separate ideas, hence the paragraph separation. The first thought's reasoning: If you look at what it takes to get a PhD, explaining things to people with an 8th grade education isn't on the list. Journal papers are often filled with jargon and such that I sincerely hope is added rather than the level of discourse scientists have. But to some degree, many PhDs seem to dislike teaching. Why else would universities competing for talented PhD's offer research only (no teaching duties) positions? As for the second, I simply meant that if you're bright enough to obtain a physics degree, there's several mathematically complicated disciplines available to you, both in and outside the field of physics. Of course you can want to teach students. I just wonder what sort of person skills one could be lacking to be unable to find a job after obtaining incredible credentials like a physics degree. Also, every physics guy I've known has been.. pretty weird. But we're talking about news for nerds here, right? Par for course ;)
And you have to be pretty condescending to suggest I never thought that PhDs might want to teach young people science after I just wrote about a guy who wanted to teach young people science. It's pretty clear from the replies that there's many scientist's opinions on teaching, but where are the opinions of teacher's opinions on scientists teaching? This side is sorely lacking any representation here, to the detriment of the topic.
I have a story from my senior year in high school. During AP physics (a class of ten boys, the only girl enrolled dropped the class before the first day of school!) once day, a former student of the teacher came in to give a short demonstration of neat things. It turns out that the dude had a PhD in chemistry, and offered to work for the school. As I understand it, the school didn't consider him because he would cost too much. So now he works for the EPA figuring out ways to measure emissions without being on an owner's property (who often dislike surprise inspections). Now maybe he simply was asking for too much, or maybe they were already looking at budget cutbacks, but part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students.
Honestly, if you have a degree in Physics and can't find a job, I'm not sure I want you in front of students as you must be a horribly weird person.
Actually, I missed a rather single important word in that post: "out." Debian is committed to keeping bad software like spyware out. I don't think popcon is spyware -- it's entirely opt in and reports mere usage and installation of binaries, though it would be rather scary to have a list of IPs running phpBB.
Frankley, I've never bothered paying attention to the boards, rightly recognizing them as instant newb magnets that are unfortunately a waste of my time. But the Automatix stuff prompted me to read more about this, and investigate. What I found was a string of quoted posts deleted, and plenty of bad grammar from developers telling people to take their criticism and shove it. Simply put, Automatix is software written by Poisonous People.
This isn't entirely true. I had a high school calculus teacher. My roommate had a high school calculus computer education program with two other students. He's said he wished there were more people to ask about complicated subjects, but his teacher was there primarily to babysit all the advanced computer education students enrolled in different classes, rather than know about a specific subject. This might work for self checkout at the grocery store, but you can't pull this sort of efficiency trick in education without having a well rounded and intellectual teacher. You might not need 1:1 aides, but you'll still need to spend on smart teachers and additional educational tools, like that calculus software. The article in question suggests that the gifted receive one tenth the financial attention of the disabled, and that traditionally cheap means of accommodating the gifted (skipping grades) is intentionally kept off the table for reasons uncertain. I have no idea what the numbers are, and my guess is that the allocations for gifted come from the same budget as the disabled, making estimates difficult at best. Perhaps this is why you say allocated for is not the same as spent on. I also don't have a solution for the rural Kansas education system, and I begin to doubt one exists.
But I don't think that teachers should just leave the gifted to their own devices. I don't think students should be antagonized by teachers as some gifted feel they have been, but active involvement can improve education a great deal -- as long as the teacher knows what to teach and can prepare for it. For example, our gifted education system entered a market game. Combined with talk about investment rates and reading SEC filings, this could have been informative and productive. But with no emphasis on what was important, we were left drifting in the wind, so to speak, and I think we lost a lot of fake money on tech companies. The only thing I learned was that it's easy to lose money in the market, and not to buy companies I thought I liked (SGI). We never even heard about price to earnings or market capitalization. In these days the internet was just beginning to lift off the ground, and the only access we had was severely filtered school access, for maybe an hour after school.
A mock trial ran in a similarly unprepared method, whereby "creative" prosecuting student attorneys fabricated damning evidence and the teachers approved, and told me I should have come up with some of my own evidence. That's right, in a classroom mock trial designed to teach about court proceedings and concepts, and heavy emphasis on testimony (preceeding the trial were 8 rounds of role playing whereby each student assumes a suspected persona and reveals various facts to other people, trying to shift the blame off of them--this was clearly intended to be the primary evidence and highlighted the importance of reasonable doubt), I was encouraged to fabricate evidence, and given no tools to counter the fabrication of evidence. Because creativity counts. I'll leave it to the cynics whether I learned anything instructive that day.
Both of these things are informative about professional concepts, and require intensive preparation of both students and teachers. And I think run properly, they're both highly engaging and give students a context within to read and accumulate knowledge about societal functions like the court or the market. I have to wonder though, how much less jaded with education our students would be if we doubled the salaries of gifted education teachers and sought highly qualified people for the position. From my limited discussion with Secondary Education teachers specializing in Gifted Education, the reasons for entering seem to be "don't tell anyone, but it's easier --because they pretty much teach themselves anyways". It might seem true, but the motivation is wrong, and if true then there's no point in sending the gifted to school at all. As I've alluded to above, I don't believe that's the case.
The trouble with Computer Science is that it's not a science, directly speaking. It's more similar to engineering disciplines: you design a system to meet requirements, and analyze the design using mathematical principals. Partly, the last part has eroded as the requirements have shifted from technology to "customer logic". A large group of types of programs have computation constraints that are eased with every passing moment by improvements in computing power, enough that many people don't bother to look at Big O notation during their design, and instead focus on memory caching techniques.
The reason that this is not a like a traditional science is that the entire system is man-made. The scientific method is intended to reveal the machinations of things nobody yet understands. We don't need to resort to the scientific method to determine the number of clock cycles a multiply takes -- we can also ask the guy who made it. Only in the case where the designer doesn't understand how his creation works would the scientific method help, and I suggest that this is a really bad approach to design.
Which is why software packaging groups like Debian rely on pure statistics for such things. Popcon does more than measure downloads, it measures installed user base and I believe frequency of use. It's not a perfect system for recommendations, but it's clearly better than the five star ratings this man recieved. For example, if you're looking for a PDF reader or something, popularity may be a good indicator of quality. While Debian's system is committed to keeping bad software like spyware, it's still nice to prioritize your software search by such metrics.
;)
It might be neat to come up with a better evaluation system that considers popularity, rate of new releases and critical bug counts, so by no means am I suggesting that popcon is perfect
Automatix in particular is a fantastic story of why I avoid forums. Automatix began life as a bash script under a different title by someone other than "arnieboy", and shared by a sticky forum thread. A marginal step up from guides telling you what commands to run to enable various things, etc. Based on a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright, licensing and the GPL, Automatix was born as a fork of this script, featuring numerous dubious personalizations that might be okay for arnieboy to accept but aren't good suggestions (such as enabling a root account). The forum admins have regularly played an active role, playing favorites amongst the various tools. Automatix at one point had it's own 3rd party project sub forum, where apparently traditional Ubuntu Code of Conduct did not apply ("his forum, his rules"). Eventually automatix was blamed for the failed upgrade of a number of users, and some people took to abusing a "popular searches" front page widget to advertise the phrase "automatix sucks", which was eventually fixed by telling the software that "automatix" was too common a word to search for, I think at the author's request.
As things stand now, Automatix has it's own forum and remains mostly antagonistic towards criticism. It's functionality has been largely dupplicated though it still serves a purpose, to commit copyright infringement via w32codecs etc. Ubuntu has tools that function very similar to Automatix' normal behavior, and in some cases improve upon it. The codec detection stuff in totem is helpful, as you don't need to know about Automatix to learn how to make things work, though it doesn't install w32codecs. And the most significant, repeated complaint has not been solved: Automatix has scheduled for themselves a single week with which to test all bugs and upgrade flaws -- they plan to release one week before gutsy is published.
A number of forum posts relating to this history have gone missing, which I disagree with. The proper thing to do in the face of misconduct is confront it and denounce it, not hide it by deletion. You might have the right to be offended by what people say, but not the right to erase history. Instead of the forums, use mailing lists and IRC when you feel like being sociable with other linux users, and launchpad's bugs and answers services if you have a problem.
Screw up? 5 of 8 LoCo servers were hit. They're for use to organize local regional events, translate, and the like. This is the Ubuntu equivalent of getting your LUG webserver hacked. They were hosted away from the Canonical infrastructure, and have not compromised the internet upgrade delivery system directly, and while I can't be sure, I'd hope nobody was storing GPG keys or the like on a LoCo server.
If you don't think the users are capable of handling the full measure of a given technology, to where it compromises security decisions, then maybe they shouldn't be using it? In other words, if you can't figure out how to change the ssh port, what are you using it for?
That, as it turned out, did not happen. The trouble with maintaining a public forum is that the media will interpret dialog as fact, conversation as action. Feisty did not come with beryl by default, but it did come with a tool to inform you of what non-free software is running, and to enable / disable such hardware support. Examples are nvidia-glx and intel's iwl3945 drivers. The truth is that what's infringing and what is not is very nuanced.
The Georgia state park Stone Mountain features a cliff side bas relief of three Confederate Generals, and is also the historic site of the re-founding of the KKK. The carving was started by the KKK and finished by the state of Georgia. I'm pretty sure the KKK had significant control in Georgia.
And the energy density of gasoline should be very much higher.
If the point of $ per kg and per gallon is to establish some sort of direct comparison between fuels, I suggest making sure that a kilogram of hydrogen fuel is comparable to a gallon of gas in terms of distance.
I hear it is not.