This is bad. Now I can't see the details about a security hole without firing up a web browser and going round half a dozen sites... Or if I've already been hit by some denial-of-service, I won't be *able* to fire up a web browser to see which of the many security holes it might have been.
MS doing this doesn't bother me personally since I trust them so little I don't run their software, but if this becomes a trend, it'll be a blow for security... and that's something so fragile we can't afford to make it harder...
And yes, I think everyone's fear of companies rewriting earlier reports to make them seem less serious or "accidentally" moving them so the links are dead is a very real one.
> Why in the hell would I want to replace my superbly useful Windows Desktop with GNOME???
It's not just the desktop, it's the ability to run software written with GNOME. I'd imagine you can disable most of the visible GNOME stuff and just run the apps.
I'm in two minds as to whether this is a good thing or not.
Good: Makes it easier to write apps that work on Windows and Linux.
Bad: Makes it easier to write apps that work on Windows and Linux.
I thought that their claim of how easy it was to change the gnome source to get it to work was a sure sign of a hoax until I saw the list of requirements...
The thing I find most interesting is that the
Mozilla nightlies are significantly better than
Netscape 6. Even the ones from around the release date.
NS4.75 is faster and smaller, but (for me) much
less stable and it can't render pages at all well.
I don't care how quick it is when it still crashes several times a day. (Under Win98 and Mandrake7.2)
NS6 is pretty but sooo slow. I find it quite useable under Windows, but the Linux version just crawls.
However, I'm finding the Mozilla nightlies quite wonderful - haven't had a crash for months, and although the startup time is terrible, once it's loaded it's quite useable.
I still think there's room for a lightweight standards compliant browser *only* though. Galeon seems promising for that. Maybe a Galeon based on M19 will be what I want.
Konqueror (KDE2) is nice, but once you take the KDE bloat into account, using it just for the web browser is a bit much. And I've still had crashes from it.
I too spent a while scratching my head at ways to secure NFS, but with little success.
There does appear to be support in the (rpc) protocol for authentication other than the primitive "trust the client" stuff it defaults to on Linux, but none of it seems to be supported by Linux NFS.
I think some of the commercial UNIXen have kerberos authentication attached to NFS, which seems a good way to do it. But this doesn't seem to be something simple to implement.
> Have you checked out CODA? Quite possibly it may have resolved some of these issues.
I've checked many other file systems: Coda seems quite secure and has many features, but also has many limitations that make it unsuitable for a lot of environments.
Same goes for Samba (doesn't do UNIX permissions, symlinks, etc).
IBM have announced that they're open sourcing AFS and making it free (OpenAFS) www.transarc.com, but mention that they've removed some secret stuff. It seems to be my last hope for network
security though...
> That damn Dock is a PITA though,
> should autohide like in windows.
Erm, it can.
Just go into the Dock preferences and
turn on autohide:)
I must say I (usually a Linux user) have just
tried out MacOS Xbeta on my iMac and am very
impressed. A solid UNIX underneath with a
GUI designed by people with human-interface
design skills.
I can't wait for the developer CD to arrive so
I can see how difficult it is to port software over...
At the place I work, we have a similar problem. We have many "unsecured" machines around (in labs), and currently have home directories exported via NFS.
Trying to secure the end machines is not really possible - we don't control all of them, and students (we're a university) often legitimately need bootdisks, or local installs, or laptop access to their home dirs.
NFS trusts the client machine pretty much completely - ie. root can pretend to be any user.
Our solution (not yet implemented) is to have a seperate authentication step (tied to the login program) that the server verifies and sets up an explicit export. However since we haven't finished this, we don't know if it'll work in practice.
Samba would seem like the best bet, but it does screwy things to UNIX file permissions (there's a reason we use UNIX...), and Coda just has two many negative points that make it inappropriate for us. AFS is a non option for an all-linux shop with no real budget to speak of.
I tend to think that being (public) shareholder driven provides a very strong anti-quality force.
I don't believe it's possible for a short-term profit driven company to produce good quality complex goods. It doesn't matter whether it's open source or proprietary.
Linux programmers who don't like the decisions of RedHat or VA are quite likely to move to other environments like Debian or similar.
I don't see this as being a threat to Linux at all really. Only the public perception of it (which I don't really count as important).
When the GNU project was started, it was intended that HURD be the kernel used with the GNU utils to form a UNIX-like operating system.
However, they left HURD to last (seemingly) and before they could get it finished enough to be useable, the Linux Kernel arrived and was combined with the GNU utils to form "Linux" as we know it today.
It's nice to see another OS (kernel) design is still being worked on - people seem to get so caught up in the Linux/Windows war that they forget that there are several other designs that offer benefits of their own.
I'll certainly give a full HURD distro (say, Debian HURD) a good try should it ever make near-completion.:)
> you don't understand, without microsoft, PCs would > not have an easy to use GUI operating system.
That's a very debatable opinion.
There were many alternatives back in the late 70's and especially early 80's that had GUI environments before even Windows 1.0 appeared.
The Apple LISA(?), the ICL PERQ, the Commodore Amiga, and several others.
In the absence of MS, we really don't know what would have happened. Things might have been better, or they might have been worse, but I don't think the idea that without MS we wouldn't have had cheap GUI desktop computers isn't necessarily a viable one.
>Microsoft has done so much for us, like create >the internet, bring down the price of PCs and >software, make an easy to use operating system. >Without microsoft we would still be using DOS applications.
> Or is it just me that's suspicious of a company > with unrealistic products, no pricing > information, no dealers, and no-one who's > used anthing they've made?
I think it'll be something that's in Amazon's interests. Perhaps the numbers after the ISBN number refer to letters from the title, or are review/word references. Something that makes us search through their site.
My link is too slow at the moment to pursue this, and I'm not in the US. (bah!)
It's nice to see a sensible article responding to all too common poorly researched media rubbish.
The sad thing is that it seems people would rather buy sensationalist fiction than (IMHO interesting) facts. Papers only report what their buyers want to hear.
I think experimental physics is interesting enough without wildly claiming we're going to risk the universe every few months. (I expect we'll *really* get onto that kind of dangerous stuff in a decade or two)
> A study on men's brains showed that men in > their 40's are at their mental peak, in terms > of overall effectiveness. They don't have the > mental flexibility of 20 year olds, but their > extreme experience compensates.
I would wonder if there's an inverse relationship in there somewhere. Perhaps "experience" actually replaces, or disables free thought.
Experience seems to be a "this is the way it's done" thing, rather than mental flexibility, which would be a "We could do it this way, or this, or this".
Do they get restored in a "blank" state, ready to be reprogrammed (by the brain), or are would they just make people's minds even more confusing - I'm sure that if parts of my brain suddenly gained an extra 10% of "blank", things'd seem hellishly spacey for a while.
Of course, it could just be the mental equivalent of getting an old HD repaired.
> Why? Because 1/12/02 is y2k-ambiguous and > therefore non-compliant.
It's not only non y2k ambiguous...
Is it 1st December 1902, 1st December 2002, 2nd December 1901, 2nd December 2001, or the 12th January 1902/2002? or the 12th February 1901/2002 ?
Why is it that the one problem at the turn of the century seems to be more important than the daily problems of software operating internationally? That are just as easy to fix, and likely to be with us for much longer?
Slashdot Mirror
> Isn't it weird that the most obvious solution - eating less, does not come to mind of most people.
For many people, being able to get *enough* food is difficult.
Not everyone overeats, you know!
In fact many people die from insufficient diets.
- Muggins the Mad
If it was as simple as turning a single gene on
:) )
or off, I'm sure evolution would already have done
it for us...
Presumably there's some penalty (other than living many years past senility
This is bad. Now I can't see the details about a security hole without firing up a web browser and going round half a dozen sites... Or if I've already been hit by some denial-of-service, I won't be *able* to fire up a web browser to see which of the many security holes it might have been.
MS doing this doesn't bother me personally since I trust them so little I don't run their software, but if this becomes a trend, it'll be a blow for security... and that's something so fragile we can't afford to make it harder...
And yes, I think everyone's fear of companies rewriting earlier reports to make them seem less serious or "accidentally" moving them so the links are dead is a very real one.
- Muggins the Mad
> Why in the hell would I want to replace my superbly useful Windows Desktop with GNOME???
It's not just the desktop, it's the ability to run software written with GNOME. I'd imagine you can disable most of the visible GNOME stuff and just run the apps.
I'm in two minds as to whether this is a good thing or not.
Good: Makes it easier to write apps that work on Windows and Linux.
Bad: Makes it easier to write apps that work on Windows and Linux.
- Muggins the Mad
I thought that their claim of how easy it was to change the gnome source to get it to work was a sure sign of a hoax until I saw the list of requirements...
An X server...
:)
- Muggins the Mad
The thing I find most interesting is that the
Mozilla nightlies are significantly better than
Netscape 6. Even the ones from around the release date.
NS4.75 is faster and smaller, but (for me) much
less stable and it can't render pages at all well.
I don't care how quick it is when it still crashes several times a day. (Under Win98 and Mandrake7.2)
NS6 is pretty but sooo slow. I find it quite useable under Windows, but the Linux version just crawls.
However, I'm finding the Mozilla nightlies quite wonderful - haven't had a crash for months, and although the startup time is terrible, once it's loaded it's quite useable.
I still think there's room for a lightweight standards compliant browser *only* though. Galeon seems promising for that. Maybe a Galeon based on M19 will be what I want.
Konqueror (KDE2) is nice, but once you take the KDE bloat into account, using it just for the web browser is a bit much. And I've still had crashes from it.
- Muggins the Mad
I too spent a while scratching my head at ways to secure NFS, but with little success.
There does appear to be support in the (rpc) protocol for authentication other than the primitive "trust the client" stuff it defaults to on Linux, but none of it seems to be supported by Linux NFS.
I think some of the commercial UNIXen have kerberos authentication attached to NFS, which seems a good way to do it. But this doesn't seem to be something simple to implement.
> Have you checked out CODA? Quite possibly it may have resolved some of these issues.
I've checked many other file systems: Coda seems quite secure and has many features, but also has many limitations that make it unsuitable for a lot of environments.
Same goes for Samba (doesn't do UNIX permissions, symlinks, etc).
IBM have announced that they're open sourcing AFS and making it free (OpenAFS) www.transarc.com, but mention that they've removed some secret stuff. It seems to be my last hope for network
security though...
- Muggins the Mad
> MS gives theirs away for free most of the time,
Which MS supplied development tools are free?
I wasn't aware you could get a useful set of compiler, IDE, debugger, class libraries and similar tools for free (from MS)?
> That damn Dock is a PITA though,
:)
> should autohide like in windows.
Erm, it can.
Just go into the Dock preferences and
turn on autohide
I must say I (usually a Linux user) have just
tried out MacOS Xbeta on my iMac and am very
impressed. A solid UNIX underneath with a
GUI designed by people with human-interface
design skills.
I can't wait for the developer CD to arrive so
I can see how difficult it is to port software over...
I don't know myself, but I'm curious how this compares with things like old newspapers and such.
I know newsstands tend not to keep even yesterdays papers, it's up to organisations like libraries to do that.
Do we have any comparible organisations who specifically archive things like online news?
How do they deal with copyright issues?
- Muggins the Mad
At the place I work, we have a similar problem. We have many "unsecured" machines around (in labs), and currently have home directories exported via NFS.
Trying to secure the end machines is not really possible - we don't control all of them, and students (we're a university) often legitimately need bootdisks, or local installs, or laptop access to their home dirs.
NFS trusts the client machine pretty much completely - ie. root can pretend to be any user.
Our solution (not yet implemented) is to have a seperate authentication step (tied to the login program) that the server verifies and sets up an explicit export. However since we haven't finished this, we don't know if it'll work in practice.
Samba would seem like the best bet, but it does screwy things to UNIX file permissions (there's a reason we use UNIX...), and Coda just has two many negative points that make it inappropriate for us.
AFS is a non option for an all-linux shop with no real budget to speak of.
Has anyone solved this yet?
I've had a look through the site, but I can't see any mention of how well the Crusoe chips would work in parallel.
Given the low cost and power consumption, they'd seem to be a logical choice for making cheap parallel machines.
Does anyone know if they're able to run (closely) in parallel? (ie. sharing system memory and buses) ?
I tend to think that being (public) shareholder driven provides a very strong anti-quality force.
I don't believe it's possible for a short-term profit driven company to produce good quality complex goods. It doesn't matter whether it's open source or proprietary.
Linux programmers who don't like the decisions of RedHat or VA are quite likely to move to other environments like Debian or similar.
I don't see this as being a threat to Linux at all really. Only the public perception of it (which I don't really count as important).
The HURD is a kernel, much like the Linux Kernel.
When the GNU project was started, it was intended that HURD be the kernel used with the GNU utils to form a UNIX-like operating system.
However, they left HURD to last (seemingly) and before they could get it finished enough to be useable, the Linux Kernel arrived and was combined with the GNU utils to form "Linux" as we know it today.
It's nice to see another OS (kernel) design is still being worked on - people seem to get so caught up in the Linux/Windows war that they forget that there are several other designs that offer benefits of their own.
I'll certainly give a full HURD distro (say, Debian HURD) a good try should it ever make near-completion.
> you don't understand, without microsoft, PCs would
> not have an easy to use GUI operating system.
That's a very debatable opinion.
There were many alternatives back in the late 70's and especially early 80's that had GUI environments before even Windows 1.0 appeared.
The Apple LISA(?), the ICL PERQ, the Commodore Amiga, and several others.
In the absence of MS, we really don't know what would have happened. Things might have been better, or they might have been worse, but I don't think the idea that without MS we wouldn't have had cheap GUI desktop computers isn't necessarily a viable one.
>Microsoft has done so much for us, like create
:)
>the internet, bring down the price of PCs and
>software, make an easy to use operating system.
>Without microsoft we would still be using DOS applications.
Without MS, we probably wouldn't even have DOS.
But then, CP/M was always better anyway
> Or is it just me that's suspicious of a company
> with unrealistic products, no pricing
> information, no dealers, and no-one who's
> used anthing they've made?
Transmeta anyone?
I think it'll be something that's in Amazon's interests. Perhaps the numbers after the ISBN number refer to letters from the title, or are review/word references. Something that makes us
search through their site.
My link is too slow at the moment to pursue this, and I'm not in the US. (bah!)
Whatever happened to slackware 5.0 and 6.0?
Did I blink and miss them?
It's nice to see a sensible article responding to all too common poorly researched media rubbish.
The sad thing is that it seems people would rather buy sensationalist fiction than (IMHO interesting)
facts. Papers only report what their buyers want
to hear.
I think experimental physics is interesting enough without wildly claiming we're going to risk the
universe every few months. (I expect we'll *really* get onto that kind of dangerous stuff in a decade or two)
"There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO. "
:)
Ah well, at least they're now saying Linux is a real UNIX
The thing that scares me most about all this MS FUD is that a large number of people will be believing it.
> A study on men's brains showed that men in
> their 40's are at their mental peak, in terms
> of overall effectiveness. They don't have the
> mental flexibility of 20 year olds, but their
> extreme experience compensates.
I would wonder if there's an inverse relationship
in there somewhere. Perhaps "experience" actually
replaces, or disables free thought.
Experience seems to be a "this is the way it's done" thing, rather than mental flexibility, which
would be a "We could do it this way, or this, or
this".
Can we have both in high quantities together?
That's kinda something I was wondering.
Do they get restored in a "blank" state, ready
to be reprogrammed (by the brain), or are would
they just make people's minds even more confusing - I'm sure that if parts of my brain suddenly gained an extra 10% of "blank", things'd seem
hellishly spacey for a while.
Of course, it could just be the mental equivalent of getting an old HD repaired.
> Why? Because 1/12/02 is y2k-ambiguous and
> therefore non-compliant.
It's not only non y2k ambiguous...
Is it
1st December 1902, 1st December 2002,
2nd December 1901, 2nd December 2001,
or the 12th January 1902/2002?
or the 12th February 1901/2002 ?
Why is it that the one problem at the turn of the century seems to be more important than the daily problems of software operating internationally?
That are just as easy to fix, and likely to be with us for much longer?
- Muggins the Mad