I cant have sympathy for those who get burnt by such a glitch.
Anyone dealing in short term 'guaranteed profits' is just a speculator at best, a parasite at worst, depending on your POV.
Its just gambling.. what, if anything, are these people contributing to society ? What motivation can they have aside from personal greed ? Why should they have any safegaurds provided ? Let em burn.
I was just thinking that looking around in various companies, all those guys at the coalface who helped push Windows forward are now pushing Linux instead.
All the elite troops have gone over to the enemy, and all that is left in the MS trench is second rate garrison troops (Help deskers , VB programmers, etc). They make up formidable numbers, but they are not capable of launching a fresh assault.
Microsoft is like the Wehrmacht perhaps - but at the gates of Moscow. Worse still, the 1st SS Pz Div LAH has been seen flying the Red Flag, and the entire Fallschirmjager brigades have sworn an oath of loyalty to Stalin !
In such a situation, RedHat could be seen as Italy in reverse. Defiantly standing up against the Wehrmacht, until such time as the writing is on the wall that the war is lost, at which point they change their colours and start fighting for the wehrmacht.
Very strange strategies.
Seems like all those poisonous stock $$ have meant an influx of the wrong sort of people into RH management.. thats the only sensible excuse I can see.
#1 OS - Embedded Linux & variants - running mobile phones, PDAs, cars, fridges, toasters, etc.
#2 OS - Free Unix variants - Linux, BSD, etc, running the desktops, front end systems and clustered servers.
#3 OS - Commercial Unixen, Solaris - MacOS - zSeries Linux - HPUX - Irix - as part of turn-key big mother mission critical systems.
#4 OS - Proprietry Commercial OSen, MVS (or whatever they run on mainframes these days), OpenVMS-II, Tandem Guardian, NSA super secret hackproof proprietry OS, and other weird ass stuff that does some very specific job.
Did I mention Microsoft at all ? no.. they are just not relevant any more. Game over.
That might have been true back in the 80's B-grade film epidemic, but.. have you seen the US Army at play recently ??
Gone are the days of Vic Morrow and John Wayne.
Today we get pencil necked geeks with extra thick glasses and protruding front teeth in control of remote-controlled UAVs, GPS guided cruise missles and other horrific WRD's (Weapons of Remote Destruction).. all operated from some green screen somewhere far from the sharp end.
Even when a Bradley FV pulls up before the camera and the doors spill open, we dont exactly see a bunch of Sly Stallone and Doplh Lundgren look-alikes jumping out - more pencil necks, and more glasses than Ive ever seen in any military unit. They are not here to arm wrestle though - they have antennas sticking out of every orifice, and are practically wired into some sort of control matrix.
So, yeah, Getting even may well have been the way of the Geek back in the 20th Century, but these days, The Geek Crew is the Biggest, Baddest and Meanest gang this side of Compton.
ROI, TCO, IT - does not matter
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ROI, TCO, IT, etc is all waffle.
A business sells stuff in the hope of turning a profit.
In the course of doing business, the people in the company have to do certain things - like advertise, talk to customers, talk to suppliers, build and service the products, keep the books up to date, etc.
Each of these activities is a royal pain in the ass, and every business is swamped with problems and inefficencies in all of these areas.
All the business owner wants to know is - 'Hey, IT dude, these are my biggest headaches today - how much time and money do we need to spend to make these headaches go away'.
More often than not, the IT dude will propose some electronic solution to remove the day to day headaches.. but for some problems the best option may well be Feng Shui, a new whiteboard, or even an upgrade to the kettle in the staff room.
I really think that the best 'IT strategy' for any business is to simply treat each real-life headache as a separate issue, and knock em on the head one after the other, as quickly as possible.
I would advise any non-IT management types to be extremely suspicious of any IT person who proposed some grand unified vision of the future, which would be delivered at some unknown time, and would be guaranteed to solve all their headaches - both current and unseen headaches to come. They are basically saying - Hand me an open cheque book, and continue to be plagued with your current set of problems for an indefinate period, whilst we go away and develop this miracle cure for you - here are the ROI projections that justify the expense.
Now, the problem for the (sane) IT provider is to be able to implement the quick fix to solve today's problems without creating a hopeless morass of incompatible solutions that need to be integrated tommorow. Whatever solution you build today, needs to be open enough for you to either plug into or extend tommorow. This is only remotely possible using a completely OpenSource infrastructure that you control. Trying to do this with any collection of 3rd party proprietry products is just suicidal - it will simply never work. Even if it does manage to hang together today (by whatever miracle), you can bet that future strategic moves from the 3rd party proprietry vendors are going to rip your solution apart, and create much bigger problems tommorow than the original problems that you are addressing today.
We have already seen a thousand examples of internal IT departments which are nothing more than marketting arms for a proprietry vendor - basically a parasitic unit who's loyalty lies not with the business that pays their wages, but some foreign organisation who is fleecing the business in licence fees. Such IT departments need to be revealed for what they really are - and then cast out from their long suffering hosts, just like one would remove a bloated tapeworm from the bowels of a suffering dog.
An IT department that is working FOR the business that employs them, should have a TODO list that covers today's problems, and be working on providing fast solutions to these problems. The IT department should be paying for all hardware uprades and licences out of it's own fixed budget. Once these things come at the expense of their own wages, you will be amazed at how little 3rd party software is really 'needed' after all, or be astounded to find out how much life is left in that 'old' server that was installed 2 years ago.
Having said all that, it should be recognised that the IT department is not the holder of Corporate IP. Any code developed by the IT department (in order to solve todays problems for the business) should be allowed to flow back into the larger system as GPL'ed code, simply because that is the way that IT works. The business is there to make and sell widgets - let IT get on with it's job of serving the business in GPL'ed peace.
As an analogy - if your plumbing broke in the office, and the company maintenance dude knocked together some intriguing
Just connect all your home PC's to your squid server, and use that as the gateway to the broadband connection.
Print out the offending parts of the squid.log file that you dont like and leave that on their keyboard - they will soon understand that everything they do they are responsible for.
When and if they are old enough / good enough to bypass your technical ability to log things, then they have proven that they are no longer answerable to you. Think of it as grabbing the pebbles out of the blind master's hand.
If the aim of the system is to provide a proper representative democracy, then it is critical that the system works and is secure. In this scenario, trust is secondary, since the untrusters will be in the minority, and not in a position to rock the boat too much - natural forces will balance out a level of distrust. Even if a paper audit trail is available, Joe Avg is not in a position to personally audit the results, so its all down to faith at the end of the day.
If the aim of the system is to install a fascist autocracy, then it is critical that public trust and perception comes first. The actual workings and security of the system (and indeed the results themselves) are largely irrellevant. Votes are conducted in a dictatorship scenario as a simple mechanism to make people think that they had their say, and therefore are being fairly represented.
Either way, there is going to be a small portion of the population who dont trust the result, and blame it on some conspiracy. Fact is, come the next general election in the USA (2004 ?), we are just not in any position to know which version of reality we are living in.
In another 20 years time anyway, voting will be conducted via SMS, and people will be openly encouraged to post multiple votes - Elections will be a combination of public circus, TV entertainment and money spinner.
They will start with 100 presidential candidates, and each week voters will have to tune in to TV to listen to their addresses, and then vote via SMS to evict a bunch of candidates who failed to perform in the speeches, singing and bathing costume sections of the election.
And tune in next week viewers, as our surviving presidential candidates have to negotiate the crocodile infested obstacle course in their speedos whilst singing 'I Did It My Way'. The real government of the day can then go about their business unmolested, whilst Mr Popular stands out before the TV cameras as the public face of the party.
I will never understand US law, but here in Australia, if you subpeona someone to appear as a witness, then you are obliged to pay them at an hourly rate for their time, as well as pay to put them up in a hotel, receive a decent meal allowance, and provide enough surplus cash for them to go out at night, get roaring drunk, and end up in some stranger's apartment with three table dancers, an overweight german shepard dog, and a pet parrot who keeps saying 'Give us a Beer, Give us a Beer' over and over again.
So I cant see how Linus would be financially put out by being subpeoned to appear as a witness.
Actually, when I remember back to my time as a witness in techo/computer related case in the Supreme Court of Queensland (with fond memories indeed), then I can perhaps see why they have called on him - maybe they hope to destroy the quality of kernel code by plying the main players with alcohol and loose women, as is the custom when calling witnesses to the stand in high profile cases ? And there are some totally gorgeous loose women in Brisbane. (Where is this one.. Utah ?.. hmm.. any comments ?)
Lets hope they dont get him up to the point of being threatened with a contempt of court hearing for arriving late and semi-attired, or for overtly flirting with the stenographer during question time. (Why do they place the witness box in an elevated position so that the witness can see nothing but the exposed cleavage of the stenographer ?.. thats not really fair is it ?)
You make some good points here, but this is all old ground.
A 'desktop system' is more than the sum of it's parts - its the hardware, all the fiddly hardware settings and choices, the quality of the power supply, cooling, RAM selection, noise emmision, the operating system, layers of software libs, application software, supplied documentation, vendor support, and finally, the tip-of-the-iceberg persentation layer for the actual user.
Its no wonder Joe Avg has a hard time, and its plainly a miracle that Joe Avg can build this himself in the first place. It would be equivalent to Joe Avg buying a bunch of bits and peices and building himself a new car, in the spare room, all in the space of a weekend.
I think what you are saying is that Joe Avg should be able to go down to the local computer store, and buy a complete 'Linux Desktop' system that is guaranteed to work, and is supported by the vendor. In a way, this is what Apple have done with the Unix based Mac, but there are more and more computer vendors going down this path.
Fedora Core is a good attempt at providing a base operating system that can then be quickly customised as a server or desktop system - if you know what you are doing. Its a quick, easy, and painless install but still pretty Lowest-Common-Demoninator. Fedora/RedHat is not aimed at the home user - its aimed at system builders who want a nice generic base to start from,
I have a couple of servers running production FC1, and there are NO problems. I suspect that the reviewer got an incomplete ISO download, or failed to verify the CD / checksum.
If you want a "LinuxHome" edition - Have a look at ArkLinux, its an early release, but is exactly what you are asking for.
For a more business oriented desktop - OfficeOptimizedLinux (www.sol-linux.com) produces a great 1-CD distribution that quickly turns a peice of raw metal into a linux based WordProcessor/Email/IM/Spreadsheet/DivX player.
Anyway, let me pitch you a question:
If there was a commercial website that offered a Linux machine that was:
Really cool looking, high quality aluminium case, parts, etc
Powerful, Fully loaded, fully optimized
Configured with - Office/Email/IM/Web/Flash/3D/Video/MP3
Properly secured, and uncrashable
12 months return-to-base hardware warranty
12 month email support
Not cheap, but less than a lower-spec Dell machine
Assuming that you have a CDrom in the machine, and an identical type of hard disk to create your backup..
Step 1) boot a live linux CD (knoppix, SoL-diag, etc) Step 2) # dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc (Where IDE-0 master is your windows-infected disk, and IDE-1 master is your DMCA violating 'backup for personal, educational use only' disk)
All they need to do now is to embed the CPU serial number, and/or the hard disk serial number into the kernel, and none of these techniques will work in future.
For me, music is mostly something that happens in the background to keep the CPU slightly above idle. It acts as real-time tool to monitor that the machine is still running fine - and that you can still monitor the machine whilst in another room. That is rather cool.
As far as musical content, I cant think of a single 'artist' who's CD I would willingly pay for.
Except Guy Sebastian (Australian Idol). I dont normally watch that sort of stuff, but it was playing in the background, and suddenly this freak gets on the TV and starts singing. I was totally moved when I heard him sing.. what he manages to do is completely unnatural.
I have since watched the American Idol videos - they are good some of those dudes, but you can see that they put in an effort. Guy puts in no effort at all.. its just heaven sent. Its like he just gets up on stage and then God Himself takes over and sings through him. There is no-way that Guy is only 22 years old, he must be 2200 years old to have reached that level. You have to watch it to see what I mean. He basically does to vocals what Linus Torvalds does to code...
Oh - I would buy the Keith Beukelaer CD when it comes out as well - especially if it has those dance moves that he does so well. He does for music what Bill Gates has done for software, so from that point of view I would buy a legal copy of his CD, just so that I can interract coherently with those less fortunate than myself.
The reason I got into Linux in the first place was to be able to build systems independant of any large vendor that could make strategic changes that force me to change what Im doing. Good on RedHat, Novell, IBM and SuSE I say, but I still like my independence.. so its time to start looking at alternative distros.
Im building a server and a couple of workstations at the moment.. so Im downloading FC1 in the background to try these out.
Did a quick install of Gentoo - liked that, but the install had some major problems that are going to take some time to resolve (Cannot get Apache/PHP/MySQL working from GRP with no net access)
In the meantime, Ive just installed SoL (http://www.sol-linux.com).. a little distro from Austria that comes in 2 flavours - A Server Optimized one and a Desktop optimized one.
Nice little package - it has a single monster tarball that it simply untars onto your disk, asks a couple of simple questions (root passwd, network card type, SW Raid setup, ip address, list of services required at boot time), and bang - 5 minutes and you are done. No silly hardware probing during the install, so it does require that you know what sort of hardware you are installing on.
Nice - 5 minutes after boot, I have a complete i686 optimized server with 2.4.20 kernel, sitting on a JFS filesystem.. I like it.
Also, uses a completely different XML driven init system which is very easy to hack - everything in the 1 file, and no more symlink madness in/etc/rc.d. Boot times are quite a bit quicker than the traditional RH approach.
If you just want to roll out a standard server with Apache/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL/Samba/Cups/FTP/Firewal l, or a standard desktop with KDE/OO/MozillaFirebird/Cups/MPlayer, then its worth the 10 minutes of your time to load onto your machine and have a play. I think that it took me more than 10 minutes just to read & digest the emerge man page when playing with Gentoo.
I promise to get deeper into Gentoo when time permits, but for now Im going to throw SoL into a production environment.
I upgraded a machine over the weekend - I used a 30c notepad & pen to write down user settings such as/etc/fstab, grub.conf, iptables additions, etc.
After upgrading the disks, I installed a clean OS on the machine, and then proceeded to RE-APPLY-THE-SETTINGS-FROM-REMOTE-STORAGE remote storage being my 30c notepad.
Since I was charging for my time, this was a commercial activity, which may place me firmly in violation of this patent, and a good candidate to be sued.
My only defence could be that when transfering information from the remote storage (paper notepad) to the computer (via the keybord), the WWW was not involved.
Regarding the transmission of data from the paper notebook to the PC, this involves using an unsual physical medium involving the passive reception of reflected ambient light parsed by an OCR device, and converted to a sequence of mechanical actions (ie. reading the notes off the paper pad, and typing it in).
Despite this, it could well be argued that this mechanism involves a complex set of SYN/ACK like packets that closely resemble TCP/IP. (ie - the same OCR device which scans the reflected light from the paper also scans the emitted light from the monitor, to check that the keyed in letters match the original source).
So, at what point can something be called part of the WWW ? My paper notepad is world-viewable, can store data from a computer. Surely this is a pretty fuzzy thing to define in legal terms.
I have an accounting system for SME's using Apache/PHP/MySQL intranet model.
I am currently adding OOffice classes so that the accounting system can generate nicely formatted invoices and other customer related documents by generating an sxw document with the correct letterhead and layout. Fairly simple and effective, but I would not bother trying this without XML.
The client can edit their standard template for each document, and PHP just fills in the blanks.
Another one is for the debtors and creditors aged balances to generate an OOffice spreadsheet, complete with formulas, for projecting cashflow. I have yet to see any accounting software provide cashflow budgetting as simple and effective as a spreadsheet - so spreadsheet generation it is.
Anyone else developing PHP functions to read/write OO docs ?? If so, we should create a sourceforge project and collaborate.
Since we live in a free market, I think that SCO should also offer a licence that indemnifys the buyer of the licence against prosecution for MP3 piracy.
Let them compete, price wise, in a fair and open market for such things.
The RIAA can always offer a similar licence for freedom from prosecution for using Linux.
Just imagine the marketting possibilities - A whole range of licences that promise to protect you from such things as:
Being abducted by Aliens.
Being kidnapped and corn-holed by Elvis.
Being hit by Iraqi Nukes.
Being sued for listening to music.
Being sued for loading Linux on a PC.
You could flog off each licence for $699, or sign people up for the Mega-Bundle for $3000 - a saving of nearly $500 !!
Firstly, the second strain of the virus is clearly derived from the first strain. This is blatant piracy, and a violation of the cherished IP of the original authors.
The original author of the virus is now in a position to reap a windfall, by: - Suing the second author to the tune of $3Bn for having blatantly stolen their code. - Suing the thousands of owners of infected machines because they may be running pirated code in violation of the DMCA. - Offering infected users a $699 licence fee for running the derived virus, which will protect them from any further legal action.
What the authors of the second, derived virus have done is abominable, and shows a callous disregard for the IP rights of the original authors. They are nothing but pirates, and a threat to the wholesome values of benign free-trade capitalism.
>> An MS rep was heard to mutter: >> "It's a very popular technology today, but ultimately it's not a sustainable business model.
How is a business model which saves the SA govt billions of Rand, and promotes local employment 'unsustainable' compared to giving all that money to M$ ?? Who has the sustainability then ??
>> What happens when the developers who find it exciting today move on to something which will pay the bills?"
Lets see.. if there was no OpenSource, if there never was a Linux.. if M$ had complete reign to set prices in this industry.. then how many hundreds of thousands of dollars would it have cost me to build an 8 node cluster, with all those compilers, SQL database(s), GUI development tools, webserver, unlimited users, etc, etc. What Bills is he referring to ?
The real question is, without OpenSource, where am I going to find a job which pays me enough money to save up to foot all these bills for stuff that I _need_ ?? I dont need to pull 100k pa to pay for food and board.
Finally, where is this M$ sales rep going to find a job to pay the bills by this time next year, when the Microsoft Pyramid scheme collides with cold hard reality ??
>> and have moved to Sydney, Australia (like most who can, do!). The primary reason for this was the amount of corruption going on, largely due to the shocking government in South Africa
Ha Ha Ha.. Ho Ho.. Im laughing so hard I cant even breate.
So, If I put up a website showing (for example), a photo of an israeli tank running over a palestinian child.. that could be deemed as inciting hatred against the israelis, and therefore get my website blocked (on the grounds that I am somehow denying the holocaust perhaps) ??
On the other hand, if I produce a website showing a non-descript factory in Iraq, fake up some WMD's hiding in the background, superimpose a pic of Saddam Hussein, and add a title 'Death to the Iraqis and all who support them'.. do you think anyone will ban my website ?? Maybe I will get free hosting for 12 months, and a consulting job with Union Oil of California ?
Stopped listening after a few days, and went out to buy Mutter. (Neues Rammstein Lieder).
First day or 2 - Mutter seems like a dud, then it gets better and better.
Finally got sick of Mutter, so I burnt me a CD of all the songs that I had lying around in my mp3 areas that managed to get me kicked off of opennap servers.
This way I can drive through the streets with the sunroof open and play loud music from various artists whose CD's I am not allowed to buy. Let everyone within earshot enjoy the music !
Next week I might set fire to the Houses of Parliment.
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I cant have sympathy for those who get burnt by such a glitch.
.. what, if anything, are these people contributing to society ? What motivation can they have aside from personal greed ? Why should they have any safegaurds provided ? Let em burn.
Anyone dealing in short term 'guaranteed profits' is just a speculator at best, a parasite at worst, depending on your POV.
Its just gambling
Belgium analogy is intersting.
.. thats the only sensible excuse I can see.
I was just thinking that looking around in various companies, all those guys at the coalface who helped push Windows forward are now pushing Linux instead.
All the elite troops have gone over to the enemy, and all that is left in the MS trench is second rate garrison troops (Help deskers , VB programmers, etc). They make up formidable numbers, but they are not capable of launching a fresh assault.
Microsoft is like the Wehrmacht perhaps - but at the gates of Moscow. Worse still, the 1st SS Pz Div LAH has been seen flying the Red Flag, and the entire Fallschirmjager brigades have sworn an oath of loyalty to Stalin !
In such a situation, RedHat could be seen as Italy in reverse. Defiantly standing up against the Wehrmacht, until such time as the writing is on the wall that the war is lost, at which point they change their colours and start fighting for the wehrmacht.
Very strange strategies.
Seems like all those poisonous stock $$ have meant an influx of the wrong sort of people into RH management
Only 2 ? the guy is dreaming.
.. they are just not relevant any more. Game over.
#1 OS - Embedded Linux & variants - running mobile phones, PDAs, cars, fridges, toasters, etc.
#2 OS - Free Unix variants - Linux, BSD, etc, running the desktops, front end systems and clustered servers.
#3 OS - Commercial Unixen, Solaris - MacOS - zSeries Linux - HPUX - Irix - as part of turn-key big mother mission critical systems.
#4 OS - Proprietry Commercial OSen, MVS (or whatever they run on mainframes these days), OpenVMS-II, Tandem Guardian, NSA super secret hackproof proprietry OS, and other weird ass stuff that does some very specific job.
Did I mention Microsoft at all ? no
>> Geeks don't get physical, they get even.
.. have you seen the US Army at play recently ??
.. all operated from some green screen somewhere far from the sharp end.
That might have been true back in the 80's B-grade film epidemic, but
Gone are the days of Vic Morrow and John Wayne.
Today we get pencil necked geeks with extra thick glasses and protruding front teeth in control of remote-controlled UAVs, GPS guided cruise missles and other horrific WRD's (Weapons of Remote Destruction)
Even when a Bradley FV pulls up before the camera and the doors spill open, we dont exactly see a bunch of Sly Stallone and Doplh Lundgren look-alikes jumping out - more pencil necks, and more glasses than Ive ever seen in any military unit. They are not here to arm wrestle though - they have antennas sticking out of every orifice, and are practically wired into some sort of control matrix.
So, yeah, Getting even may well have been the way of the Geek back in the 20th Century, but these days, The Geek Crew is the Biggest, Baddest and Meanest gang this side of Compton.
ROI, TCO, IT, etc is all waffle.
.. but for some problems the best option may well be Feng Shui, a new whiteboard, or even an upgrade to the kettle in the staff room.
A business sells stuff in the hope of turning a profit.
In the course of doing business, the people in the company have to do certain things - like advertise, talk to customers, talk to suppliers, build and service the products, keep the books up to date, etc.
Each of these activities is a royal pain in the ass, and every business is swamped with problems and inefficencies in all of these areas.
All the business owner wants to know is - 'Hey, IT dude, these are my biggest headaches today - how much time and money do we need to spend to make these headaches go away'.
More often than not, the IT dude will propose some electronic solution to remove the day to day headaches
I really think that the best 'IT strategy' for any business is to simply treat each real-life headache as a separate issue, and knock em on the head one after the other, as quickly as possible.
I would advise any non-IT management types to be extremely suspicious of any IT person who proposed some grand unified vision of the future, which would be delivered at some unknown time, and would be guaranteed to solve all their headaches - both current and unseen headaches to come. They are basically saying - Hand me an open cheque book, and continue to be plagued with your current set of problems for an indefinate period, whilst we go away and develop this miracle cure for you - here are the ROI projections that justify the expense.
Now, the problem for the (sane) IT provider is to be able to implement the quick fix to solve today's problems without creating a hopeless morass of incompatible solutions that need to be integrated tommorow. Whatever solution you build today, needs to be open enough for you to either plug into or extend tommorow. This is only remotely possible using a completely OpenSource infrastructure that you control. Trying to do this with any collection of 3rd party proprietry products is just suicidal - it will simply never work. Even if it does manage to hang together today (by whatever miracle), you can bet that future strategic moves from the 3rd party proprietry vendors are going to rip your solution apart, and create much bigger problems tommorow than the original problems that you are addressing today.
We have already seen a thousand examples of internal IT departments which are nothing more than marketting arms for a proprietry vendor - basically a parasitic unit who's loyalty lies not with the business that pays their wages, but some foreign organisation who is fleecing the business in licence fees. Such IT departments need to be revealed for what they really are - and then cast out from their long suffering hosts, just like one would remove a bloated tapeworm from the bowels of a suffering dog.
An IT department that is working FOR the business that employs them, should have a TODO list that covers today's problems, and be working on providing fast solutions to these problems. The IT department should be paying for all hardware uprades and licences out of it's own fixed budget. Once these things come at the expense of their own wages, you will be amazed at how little 3rd party software is really 'needed' after all, or be astounded to find out how much life is left in that 'old' server that was installed 2 years ago.
Having said all that, it should be recognised that the IT department is not the holder of Corporate IP. Any code developed by the IT department (in order to solve todays problems for the business) should be allowed to flow back into the larger system as GPL'ed code, simply because that is the way that IT works. The business is there to make and sell widgets - let IT get on with it's job of serving the business in GPL'ed peace.
As an analogy - if your plumbing broke in the office, and the company maintenance dude knocked together some intriguing
Just connect all your home PC's to your squid server, and use that as the gateway to the broadband connection.
Print out the offending parts of the squid.log file that you dont like and leave that on their keyboard - they will soon understand that everything they do they are responsible for.
When and if they are old enough / good enough to bypass your technical ability to log things, then they have proven that they are no longer answerable to you. Think of it as grabbing the pebbles out of the blind master's hand.
If the aim of the system is to provide a proper representative democracy, then it is critical that the system works and is secure. In this scenario, trust is secondary, since the untrusters will be in the minority, and not in a position to rock the boat too much - natural forces will balance out a level of distrust. Even if a paper audit trail is available, Joe Avg is not in a position to personally audit the results, so its all down to faith at the end of the day.
If the aim of the system is to install a fascist autocracy, then it is critical that public trust and perception comes first. The actual workings and security of the system (and indeed the results themselves) are largely irrellevant. Votes are conducted in a dictatorship scenario as a simple mechanism to make people think that they had their say, and therefore are being fairly represented.
Either way, there is going to be a small portion of the population who dont trust the result, and blame it on some conspiracy. Fact is, come the next general election in the USA (2004 ?), we are just not in any position to know which version of reality we are living in.
In another 20 years time anyway, voting will be conducted via SMS, and people will be openly encouraged to post multiple votes - Elections will be a combination of public circus, TV entertainment and money spinner.
They will start with 100 presidential candidates, and each week voters will have to tune in to TV to listen to their addresses, and then vote via SMS to evict a bunch of candidates who failed to perform in the speeches, singing and bathing costume sections of the election.
And tune in next week viewers, as our surviving presidential candidates have to negotiate the crocodile infested obstacle course in their speedos whilst singing 'I Did It My Way'. The real government of the day can then go about their business unmolested, whilst Mr Popular stands out before the TV cameras as the public face of the party.
I will never understand US law, but here in Australia, if you subpeona someone to appear as a witness, then you are obliged to pay them at an hourly rate for their time, as well as pay to put them up in a hotel, receive a decent meal allowance, and provide enough surplus cash for them to go out at night, get roaring drunk, and end up in some stranger's apartment with three table dancers, an overweight german shepard dog, and a pet parrot who keeps saying 'Give us a Beer, Give us a Beer' over and over again.
.. Utah ? .. hmm .. any comments ?)
.. thats not really fair is it ?)
So I cant see how Linus would be financially put out by being subpeoned to appear as a witness.
Actually, when I remember back to my time as a witness in techo/computer related case in the Supreme Court of Queensland (with fond memories indeed), then I can perhaps see why they have called on him - maybe they hope to destroy the quality of kernel code by plying the main players with alcohol and loose women, as is the custom when calling witnesses to the stand in high profile cases ? And there are some totally gorgeous loose women in Brisbane. (Where is this one
Lets hope they dont get him up to the point of being threatened with a contempt of court hearing for arriving late and semi-attired, or for overtly flirting with the stenographer during question time. (Why do they place the witness box in an elevated position so that the witness can see nothing but the exposed cleavage of the stenographer ?
A 'desktop system' is more than the sum of it's parts - its the hardware, all the fiddly hardware settings and choices, the quality of the power supply, cooling, RAM selection, noise emmision, the operating system, layers of software libs, application software, supplied documentation, vendor support, and finally, the tip-of-the-iceberg persentation layer for the actual user.
Its no wonder Joe Avg has a hard time, and its plainly a miracle that Joe Avg can build this himself in the first place. It would be equivalent to Joe Avg buying a bunch of bits and peices and building himself a new car, in the spare room, all in the space of a weekend.
I think what you are saying is that Joe Avg should be able to go down to the local computer store, and buy a complete 'Linux Desktop' system that is guaranteed to work, and is supported by the vendor. In a way, this is what Apple have done with the Unix based Mac, but there are more and more computer vendors going down this path.
Fedora Core is a good attempt at providing a base operating system that can then be quickly customised as a server or desktop system - if you know what you are doing. Its a quick, easy, and painless install but still pretty Lowest-Common-Demoninator. Fedora/RedHat is not aimed at the home user - its aimed at system builders who want a nice generic base to start from,
I have a couple of servers running production FC1, and there are NO problems. I suspect that the reviewer got an incomplete ISO download, or failed to verify the CD / checksum.
If you want a "LinuxHome" edition - Have a look at ArkLinux, its an early release, but is exactly what you are asking for.
For a more business oriented desktop - OfficeOptimizedLinux (www.sol-linux.com) produces a great 1-CD distribution that quickly turns a peice of raw metal into a linux based WordProcessor/Email/IM/Spreadsheet/DivX player.
Anyway, let me pitch you a question
If there was a commercial website that offered a Linux machine that was
Would you buy one ?
Assuming that you have a CDrom in the machine, and an identical type of hard disk to create your backup ..
Step 1) boot a live linux CD (knoppix, SoL-diag, etc)
Step 2) # dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc (Where IDE-0 master is your windows-infected disk, and IDE-1 master is your DMCA violating 'backup for personal, educational use only' disk)
All they need to do now is to embed the CPU serial number, and/or the hard disk serial number into the kernel, and none of these techniques will work in future.
On an intranet that I run for a customer, I have weaned them off MS Word, and now everything is stored in OOffice XML format.
When they commit a document, the webserver at the backend unzips the OOffice file, and then commits it to CVS.
Being raw text, you can use cvsweb to be able to display versions of documents over the web, and also to do graphically enhanced diffs of documents.
Dont know if Microsoft already has something like this ? CVS works a treat for this, and the customer is pretty happy.
No Dude, thats a fansite for an Australian Idol singer - closely on topic, but no cigar.
For me, music is mostly something that happens in the background to keep the CPU slightly above idle. It acts as real-time tool to monitor that the machine is still running fine - and that you can still monitor the machine whilst in another room. That is rather cool.
.. what he manages to do is completely unnatural.
.. its just heaven sent. Its like he just gets up on stage and then God Himself takes over and sings through him. There is no-way that Guy is only 22 years old, he must be 2200 years old to have reached that level. You have to watch it to see what I mean. He basically does to vocals what Linus Torvalds does to code ...
As far as musical content, I cant think of a single 'artist' who's CD I would willingly pay for.
Except Guy Sebastian (Australian Idol). I dont normally watch that sort of stuff, but it was playing in the background, and suddenly this freak gets on the TV and starts singing. I was totally moved when I heard him sing
I have since watched the American Idol videos - they are good some of those dudes, but you can see that they put in an effort. Guy puts in no effort at all
Oh - I would buy the Keith Beukelaer CD when it comes out as well - especially if it has those dance moves that he does so well. He does for music what Bill Gates has done for software, so from that point of view I would buy a legal copy of his CD, just so that I can interract coherently with those less fortunate than myself.
The reason I got into Linux in the first place was to be able to build systems independant of any large vendor that could make strategic changes that force me to change what Im doing. Good on RedHat, Novell, IBM and SuSE I say, but I still like my independence .. so its time to start looking at alternative distros.
.. so Im downloading FC1 in the background to try these out.
.. a little distro from Austria that comes in 2 flavours - A Server Optimized one and a Desktop optimized one.
.. I like it.
/etc/rc.d. Boot times are quite a bit quicker than the traditional RH approach.
l l, or a standard desktop with KDE/OO/MozillaFirebird/Cups/MPlayer, then its worth the 10 minutes of your time to load onto your machine and have a play. I think that it took me more than 10 minutes just to read & digest the emerge man page when playing with Gentoo.
Im building a server and a couple of workstations at the moment
Did a quick install of Gentoo - liked that, but the install had some major problems that are going to take some time to resolve (Cannot get Apache/PHP/MySQL working from GRP with no net access)
In the meantime, Ive just installed SoL (http://www.sol-linux.com)
Nice little package - it has a single monster tarball that it simply untars onto your disk, asks a couple of simple questions (root passwd, network card type, SW Raid setup, ip address, list of services required at boot time), and bang - 5 minutes and you are done. No silly hardware probing during the install, so it does require that you know what sort of hardware you are installing on.
Nice - 5 minutes after boot, I have a complete i686 optimized server with 2.4.20 kernel, sitting on a JFS filesystem
Also, uses a completely different XML driven init system which is very easy to hack - everything in the 1 file, and no more symlink madness in
If you just want to roll out a standard server with Apache/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL/Samba/Cups/FTP/Firewa
I promise to get deeper into Gentoo when time permits, but for now Im going to throw SoL into a production environment.
I upgraded a machine over the weekend - I used a 30c notepad & pen to write down user settings such as /etc/fstab, grub.conf, iptables additions, etc.
After upgrading the disks, I installed a clean OS on the machine, and then proceeded to RE-APPLY-THE-SETTINGS-FROM-REMOTE-STORAGE remote storage being my 30c notepad.
Since I was charging for my time, this was a commercial activity, which may place me firmly in violation of this patent, and a good candidate to be sued.
My only defence could be that when transfering information from the remote storage (paper notepad) to the computer (via the keybord), the WWW was not involved.
Regarding the transmission of data from the paper notebook to the PC, this involves using an unsual physical medium involving the passive reception of reflected ambient light parsed by an OCR device, and converted to a sequence of mechanical actions (ie. reading the notes off the paper pad, and typing it in).
Despite this, it could well be argued that this mechanism involves a complex set of SYN/ACK like packets that closely resemble TCP/IP. (ie - the same OCR device which scans the reflected light from the paper also scans the emitted light from the monitor, to check that the keyed in letters match the original source).
So, at what point can something be called part of the WWW ? My paper notepad is world-viewable, can store data from a computer. Surely this is a pretty fuzzy thing to define in legal terms.
I, for one, welcome David Hasselhof as our new Overlord !
Do you get a free David Hasselhof fridge magent with these Amiga boards ?
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I have an accounting system for SME's using Apache/PHP/MySQL intranet model.
I am currently adding OOffice classes so that the accounting system can generate nicely formatted invoices and other customer related documents by generating an sxw document with the correct letterhead and layout. Fairly simple and effective, but I would not bother trying this without XML.
The client can edit their standard template for each document, and PHP just fills in the blanks.
Another one is for the debtors and creditors aged balances to generate an OOffice spreadsheet, complete with formulas, for projecting cashflow. I have yet to see any accounting software provide cashflow budgetting as simple and effective as a spreadsheet - so spreadsheet generation it is.
Anyone else developing PHP functions to read/write OO docs ?? If so, we should create a sourceforge project and collaborate.
Let them compete, price wise, in a fair and open market for such things.
The RIAA can always offer a similar licence for freedom from prosecution for using Linux.
Just imagine the marketting possibilities - A whole range of licences that promise to protect you from such things as
You could flog off each licence for $699, or sign people up for the Mega-Bundle for $3000 - a saving of nearly $500 !!
Drive the share price down down down to 50c for SCOX.
Then MSFT can but them out for under $10m, and suddenly, MSFT owns Unix !!
There are massive legal rammifications to this.
:
Firstly, the second strain of the virus is clearly derived from
the first strain. This is blatant piracy, and a violation of the
cherished IP of the original authors.
The original author of the virus is now in a position to reap a windfall, by
- Suing the second author to the tune of $3Bn for having blatantly stolen their code.
- Suing the thousands of owners of infected machines because they may be running pirated code in violation of the DMCA.
- Offering infected users a $699 licence fee for running the derived virus, which will protect them from any further legal action.
What the authors of the second, derived virus have done is abominable, and shows a callous disregard for the IP rights of the original authors. They are nothing but pirates, and a threat to the wholesome values of benign free-trade capitalism.
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>> An MS rep was heard to mutter :
.. if there was no OpenSource, if there never was a Linux .. if M$ had complete reign to set prices in this industry .. then how many hundreds of thousands of dollars would it have cost me to build an 8 node cluster, with all those compilers, SQL database(s), GUI development tools, webserver, unlimited users, etc, etc. What Bills is he referring to ?
>> "It's a very popular technology today, but ultimately it's not a sustainable business model.
How is a business model which saves the SA govt billions of Rand, and promotes local employment 'unsustainable' compared to giving all that money to M$ ?? Who has the sustainability then ??
>> What happens when the developers who find it exciting today move on to something which will pay the bills?"
Lets see
The real question is, without OpenSource, where am I going to find a job which pays me enough money to save up to foot all these bills for stuff that I _need_ ?? I dont need to pull 100k pa to pay for food and board.
Finally, where is this M$ sales rep going to find a job to pay the bills by this time next year, when the Microsoft Pyramid scheme collides with cold hard reality ??
>> and have moved to Sydney, Australia (like most who can, do!). The primary reason for this was the amount of corruption going on, largely due to the shocking government in South Africa
.. Ho Ho .. Im laughing so hard I cant even breate.
Ha Ha Ha
Man that really is funny.
Mod that man up !!
Option 1 : 4 Logical CPUS
Option 2 : 2 x Dual Athlon OpenMosix
Option 3 : 4 node cheap Athlon OpenMosix
All much of a muchness I suspect.
Id lean for Option 2, since its got real SMP, and OpenMosix, and redundancy, and coolness factor.
So, If I put up a website showing (for example), a photo of an israeli tank running over a palestinian child .. that could be deemed as inciting hatred against the israelis, and therefore get my website blocked (on the grounds that I am somehow denying the holocaust perhaps) ??
.. do you think anyone will ban my website ?? Maybe I will get free hosting for 12 months, and a consulting job with Union Oil of California ?
On the other hand, if I produce a website showing a non-descript factory in Iraq, fake up some WMD's hiding in the background, superimpose a pic of Saddam Hussein, and add a title 'Death to the Iraqis and all who support them'
Bought 18 - thought, yeah, OK, sorta ..
Stopped listening after a few days, and went out to buy Mutter. (Neues Rammstein Lieder).
First day or 2 - Mutter seems like a dud, then it gets better and better.
Finally got sick of Mutter, so I burnt me a CD of all the songs that I had lying around in my mp3 areas that managed to get me kicked off of opennap servers.
This way I can drive through the streets with the sunroof open and play loud music from various artists whose CD's I am not allowed to buy. Let everyone within earshot enjoy the music !
Next week I might set fire to the Houses of Parliment.