It sucks this happened on here, its yet another example of how/. has really been going downhill in the last six or nine months. It used to be the worst things that got posted were stories posted as new info that were duplicates of things posted in the past by other/. honchos.
Since the beginning of the year, that seems less of a problem, and a bigger problem is poorly researched stories being posted and thus given validation when they're wrong, or cases like this when things get blown way out of proportion.
Yes and no. As a minor you're not legally bound by contracts you agree to, but your parents can be if it can be shown that your acceptance of a contract or ability to accept a contract is the result of negligence by the parent.
Ie, if you vioilate a EULA under 18, and it can be shown that your parents knowingly allow you to install software on your PC, your parents can be held liable.
I think this is bad. These IPO's are going to really hurt the Linux community and drive developers away from the platform.
Sure, its because of jealousy and greed, but I'll be honest and admit to it. I'm still pissed off I got boned on the RedHat thing, while in total friends and aquantences I know (and largely pushed to get involved with Linux) are collectively sitting on over a million dollars in Linux stock. The numerous bug reports sent to RedHat meant nothing. The fact that one of their primary distributers would have never heard of them if I hadn't been pushing it as something worth selling meant nothing.
Its changed now. When I want to GPL and contribute code to the community (or patches, bugfixes, features, etc...) I can't help but think twice now. I never once had a problem with someone taking something I wrote and packaging it and selling it for greater convenience and ease of use for end users. But making billions of dollars in virtual cash because of inflated stock prices where my hard work is involved, and I am unable to experience those gains myself? That's something totally different. That just sucks.
I hate to say Microsoft made a good product, but I just got an IntelliEye mouse a few hours ago, and it blows the pants off every mouse I've ever used.
Its a shame someone else didn't make it, but if you're really looking for a great pointing device, these are about as nice as they get. You never realize how much friction you get from that ball until its gone.
A point to remember is most people still say they use Netscape when they're talking about their ISP, even if they're running MSIE.
Even stranger I know pleanty of people who if you ask them what web browser they're using, they say Internet Explorer, and if you ask how they get on the internet, they say Netscape.
This is kinda obvious but I think deserves saying... You wouldn't go to a lawyer website and ask their opinion on a diagnosis your doctor made and give it more than a grain of salt, so I wouldn't in this case either.
Don't trust that they don't have a case because people on here tell you they don't, the best advice anyone can give in a case like this is one that was already given. Ask a lawyer (not a nerd;) ) if the case may have merit. If it might, and you don't want to deal with the hassle, compromise or give up the domain. If the case likely has no merit, then wait until they sue you and have the lawyer deal with it.
One thing worth saying though, is that if you decide to wait until they sue you knowing they have a case and assuming you'll give up the domain and things will be fine at that point, you should be aware that the offer to return the domain from you is not sufficient to force them to withdraw the lawsuit, and they can choose to continue it to a court case if they want.
There are very few rules preventing malicious lawsuits here in the U.S.
Getting into that field is really hard. There are immensely talented people in the field, and many more entering it. The problem you're likely to find in getting work at any of the cutting edge shops is they are essentially meatmarkets. At the cream of the crop companies, you'll work extremely long hours for pay that will make you jealous of people with McJobs. There are pleanty of people willing to work for the big name places for free, so they are rarely willing to pay well for their positions.
I looked for a long time for an interesting position at companies like that, but in the places you tend to find them (SF, LA, NYC) cost of living is so high, the $25k they're likely to pay won't get you a place to live.
I saw someone else suggest ad agencies, that's a good place to think about, or find smaller unknown companies, you're a lot more likely to make a livable wage.
For anyone who hasn't seen HD digital television in person, its hard to appreciate how drastic a difference it really does make in the viewing experience.
The first time I saw HD programming was at the Newseum in Washington DC (great place to visit if you're ever in the area). I was *stunned* and stopped in my tracks when I walked around the corner and saw it.
I'm a geek and a film guy. Film was the field of choice when I was in school. The 35mm crap people see in movie theaters can't hold anything on HD. Night and day. Really, until you've seen it you can't appreciate how amazing it really is.
I hope these issues get resolved quickly so people have more confidence in buying sets, and prices start to drop. The art of video and film deserves to be seen that way. Its good to see that there is finally serious pressure to drop the DTV standard we've got now for a better one.
Actually, its 1.21 gigawatts... the conversion is that you've probably been pronouncing words starting with "giga" wrong ever since you got a computer with a harddrive bigger than 1000 megs.
The correct pronounciation of the "giga" prefix is "jigga". So that's a 1.21 "jiggabyte" drive you've got too...
You can't legally use Apache+SSL in the US for any commercial purpose without buying a commercial version of apache unless you want to license the RSA patents, at hundreds of times the cost of buying a commercial server.
The decision to use Stronghold (which is massively overpriced) probably relates to the fact that its one of the few that you can get a Digital UNIX port of... on Linux, redhat's professional 6.1 is a better deal. (And 1/6 the cost)
No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG.
For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them.
PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that.
On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection.
*shrug* Seems like a reactionary move that won't get anywhere. The effort wasted changing sites to a widely-incompatible format would be better spent writing to your congresspeople and getting these rediculous century-old patent laws changed.
Anyone who hasn't owned a Qualcomm phone ought to think twice about buying one of these because they may not know what they're getting into.
In a nutshell, Qualcomm phones are pieces of crap. The original one that Bell Atlantic started selling when they first started adding digital service in CT was a nice enough phone, althoguh heavy. The flip up earpiece got loose fairly easily and the phone would randomly drop calls as a result.
Replaced that with a Q-phone when I switched to Sprint. Three months later the case was cracked and the antenna mount was broken. They replaced it as all of them had been recalled for that problem. Replacement phone had the same problem. I taped it up and dealt with it for almost nine months. Got sick of it, and replaced it again. Sprint gave me a hassle about it because the warranty on the original phone had expired, even though the second one wasn't a year old. I pointed out that they'd already admitted it was a problem with the phone and the "solution" of taking away my belt clip hadn't prevented it from breaking again.
So they finally gave me another one. That one didn't want to talk to their network. Reprogrammed it twice at the prompting of their tech support. No luck. Bring it back the next day, and get another one. Make a test call. That one works. (yay!)
That night, discover the voicemail and info buttons don't work. Neither does the * or #. Jump around an curse a lot.
Return phone, and tell them generally where they can stick their Qualcomm phones. Buy Startac. Talk for three times longer. Charge the phone almost ten times less often. Rejoice in a phone noticable lighter.
How's this new? RIT was doing that years ago when I was going there, the student ID card had it in barcode form *and* plain text right on the card. They simply tacked a 0-9 onto the end of it for the number of times you'd lost your ID card.
I was more upset when I found that my heathplan number was my social security number. They already know too much about me.
Why do you refuse to prove your point by actually cracking an NT box in one of these challenges? On a related note, I have heard as an excuse for Linux in response to the ZDnet trial, "A system is only as good as its administrator." This seems true, but if you really believed it, (A) you would know that you would not be helping MS by cracking NT, you would be helping only the particular person administrating that box, and (B) you would be proving your as-yet undemonstrated point that NT is at least as insecure as Linux.
Part of the thing that people sometimes miss is the higher number of underqualified administrators administrating NT servers than Unix servers. With the meteoric rise of Linux, that's becoming less the case. These days any joe-blow can throw redhat on a machine in ten minutes and leave it at that. A few years ago it wasn't that easy.
Its also probably worth pointing out that on the net, there's more usefulness that comes to a cracker in cracking a Unix system than an NT because of its inherant multiuser ability, and the fact that many things can be easily configured through text files. That makes them a prime target for script-kiddies, both because they're easier to reconfigure in a small amount of code, and because of the fact that actually getting into the server is more useful. Therefore, there's a lot more exploit scripts it seems for Unix than for NT. I don't think that's because of any lack of security holes in NT, but rather a lack of reasons to bother hacking an NT machine beyond pointing out to the administrators that NT is a bad solution.
Why do I read, in every mailing list and newsgroup, posts from Linux people saying "HELP! Someone cracked my box! What do I DO??" These would seem to back up my first point.
For the same reason as I said above, as well as the fact that most Windows users probably wouldn't notice the fact that they'd been cracked. They can't simply type "w" and see who's logged in, and they're more used to seeing their computer slowing down and having the drives running for god-knows-what-reason. Last time I was using a cable modem, there were several dozen machines that would've been rather easy to get into because they had their drive shared without a password. Short of deleting all the files, how would any possibly know I was in their stuff? They wouldn't. And even if I deleted any of their files, without the logging present like there is under Unix, they wouldn't be able to figure out that it was an external user that wiped the files, and not some wierd glitch in the system. Why is network security so complicated in Linux as compared to Windows? My windows computer is connected 24x7 via aDSL, all I have to do is disable file/print sharing; one check box. If I enable sharing, I just have to use common sense and set a password. If you wanted Linux to be more secure, you could try making it easier batten down the hatches.
Its more complicated because you're running a server OS. That's been discussed to death -- the fact that there aren't (yet) any good "desktop" distributions, that won't by default install all the services that aren't actually used. Linux is easy to tighten up, but you've got to know that you need to do it, and you've got to know that the desktop system you installed has as much capability as any "server". A lot of people don't know that, and don't understand what that entails.
I'm hoping to find out that Corel's distribution ends up a "client only" distribution... that'd go a long way towards making that distinction clear.
Can I use Road Runner with multiple computers in my home? Sure. We will install the MediaOne Road Runner connection to one computer and after the installation, you are free to connect that computer to an existing home LAN (Local Area Network). Please note that MediaOne will not support or install home LANs (see our customer service agreement on this site for specific details regarding home LAN usage).
Actually its the other way around, supporting anything but GSM (which you're correct -- it is a cell phone standard) would leave 90% of the world unable to use it.
Its mostly just here in the US that we use anything but GSM, the rest of the world does. And there's a lot more cell phone users elsewhere than here, as anyone who's been to the far east or Africa can attest to. (They're more widely used elsewhere because its cheaper to build cell networks than copper networks, and most of the world doesn't have 75 years of copper infrastructure already in place)
I figure no one else has listened to anyone else who's said this, so I'll say it. Maybe a few more people might stop and think.
THIS IS NOT A GPL VIOLATION!
If I wasn't rather averse to the blink tag, that'd be blinking. Corel's doing this exactly as they should. If they tried to keep a closed beta but didn't go through the normal beta testing processes (ie, where you are essentially becoming part of the internal testing team, not joe public, and as such are expected to file reports on the software with the company, not just use it and report bugs), then there'd be a GPL violation. But if I want to take every single GPL'ed program out there and restrict access to the combination I've put together, as long as I'm not publicly distributing it, THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
So everyone needs to get a grip.
Corel hasn't said anywhere that they have any intention of violating the GPL. They haven't said that the final system WHEN AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC won't be free! They're simply keeping their testing versions private, which is probably a good thing. Using the general public for beta testing is a Microsoft tactic that is not only inappropriate in my opinion, but also does a poorer job of really methodically testing an environment.
Corel doesn't give a crap about the individual software packages where the beta is concerned -- they're not going to be fixing wierd things like the perl extensions to vgetty not ever working right... that's not what they do. They want to test their install process, the whole integration, the "polish" of the system. That's not an open-source part of the distribution, and doesn't need to be. You can't send a contrib RPM to RedHat and expect to see it in the next version of RedHat's distribution either... I think its completely retarded that I can't mount the swap space before going through all the crap in RedHat's install process -- thus I can't install in 8 meg on a PCMCIA system. But that's RedHat's business, and I can use another distribution.
Corel is undoubtedly one of the best things to happen to the Linux community, there are no lingering questions of their motives like Sun and others. They've been supporting Linux for years with Word Perfect, and with everythign else they're doing, it seems pretty childish to jump on something like this and risk pissing them off.
Linux isn't going to last if the hotheaded members of the community keep flipping out about every little thing, particularly when the flipping out is so uncalled for.
- a reformed hotheaded member of the linux community, for seven years;)
I can't talk on the IRC issue, its been years since I've used IRC, but I seem to recall there being some sort of an issue with the networks themselves, not with the robustness of the platform. In the early days of Linux, I saw that a lot for Usenet, IRC, and other network tasks that "old school" administrators saw as being the realm of the "real" Unixes. Sometimes it'd be tough to get the feed in the first place, not to deal with it once you got it.
The eBay comment, though, I thought was an interesting one. I could say with virtually 100% certainly that you could EASILY get a Linux-based system to perform more reliably than the current system, but that's not the fault of Solaris and itsn't a Solaris vs Linux issue, its simply a network application architecture issue.
Dejanews has the right idea, boatloads of Linux systems with a good application architecture, and you'll never have any downtime.
Admitted eBay has an interesting situation in that the nature of auctions where users can have bids automagically updated means running a lot of business logic on the database server, which can really move the bottleneck to the actual server software and the stored procedures, not the OS itself. My understanding is eBay runs Oracle, and Oracle has always struck me as being a real bitch to get good redundancy on and replicated servers that can cleanly fail-over.
A site like e-bay could easily be reliably run on Linux systems using a well designed architecture though, with database servers (running Oracle on Linux) that are handling only portions of the site, and a lot of inexpensive front-end servers. Adding a tier in front of that, made up of http-accellerators, would make the system even more robust.
Salon and dejanews both show that properly done, you can do high-profile with Linux. Certainly more so than you can with NT, particularly if you don't have millions to throw at hardware.
That's why they're usually said to cut the "haze" on overcast and hazy days -- the lower light levels makes it more noticable. Its also a matter of what colors the light registers as on the film as compared to the visible-light color of the same object. Sometimes it'll just minutely shift the color and fuzz the outlines. How stopped down the lens is, what kind of lens it is and factors like that also affect it. You'll almost never notice it on a handheld shot. But if you shoot a scene on a more overcast day on a tripod with and without the filter, depending on the camera it can be very noticable.
The more glass there is in the lens (the more elements) you also strip out more and more UV.
Do some searching on the net, I've seen a half-dozen sites with ultraviolet galleries.
Most standard chemical-based film stock is also ultraviolet sensitive. That's why even novice photographers know to put a UV filter on the lens, because lenses focus the ultraviolet at a different point than the other colors (and ditto with infared, although non-infared film is rarely very sensitive to infared, whereas most film is fairly sensitive to ultraviolet), and you get a hazy look to the film -- the haze is just a blurry exposure of the scene in ultraviolet.
For any amateur shutterbugs out there, if you can find a quartz lens that fits on your camera (they're very hard to find and VERY expensive unless you get really lucky), you can get filters to put on the lens that will cut out all the visible light, letting the ultraviolet through, and you can actually shoot very interesting photos in UV using standard film. Exposure times are longer, and you've got to guess on the exposure because meters won't read the light levels, however.
So, if we're a stockholder, will anyone listen when we say "Quit posting stories that were posted two weeks ago!"?
;)
Seriously though, I think Andover should do like RedHat and give back to the community. How about a free share to the people with the lowest slashdot ID numbers? How about everyone 2822 and before? Yeah, that's good by me.:)
Seriously more, though, its good to see the/. people really getting a return on the work they do. I hope (as the other posts mentioned) that this doesn't leave slashdot open for raping the way dejanews went, went the marketroids got their hands on it. Dejanews was ruined by them, and I'd hate to see Slashdot have the same thing happen.
Here's a thought... maybe they had to dump their plans because they actually WERE planning on using Transmeta's chips, and those just aren't hacking it yet.
I mean, really, how can they expect to come out with a new super-duper system that fast, when the supposed supplier for the processor has never even talked about the chip, much less demoed a simulator, or gone to silicon.
And you know there's not much chance they could go to silicon without people finding out. Its not like they're going to build their own fabrication plants.
So maybe its not really Gateway's decision. Maybe they've been making plans based on assumptions that have turned out to be incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Bruce,
/. has really been going downhill in the last six or nine months. It used to be the worst things that got posted were stories posted as new info that were duplicates of things posted in the past by other /. honchos.
It sucks this happened on here, its yet another example of how
Since the beginning of the year, that seems less of a problem, and a bigger problem is poorly researched stories being posted and thus given validation when they're wrong, or cases like this when things get blown way out of proportion.
Its like seeing Newsweek turn into the Enquirer.
Yes and no. As a minor you're not legally bound by contracts you agree to, but your parents can be if it can be shown that your acceptance of a contract or ability to accept a contract is the result of negligence by the parent.
Ie, if you vioilate a EULA under 18, and it can be shown that your parents knowingly allow you to install software on your PC, your parents can be held liable.
That'd be an extreme case, but a valid one.
I think this is bad. These IPO's are going to really hurt the Linux community and drive developers away from the platform.
Sure, its because of jealousy and greed, but I'll be honest and admit to it. I'm still pissed off I got boned on the RedHat thing, while in total friends and aquantences I know (and largely pushed to get involved with Linux) are collectively sitting on over a million dollars in Linux stock. The numerous bug reports sent to RedHat meant nothing. The fact that one of their primary distributers would have never heard of them if I hadn't been pushing it as something worth selling meant nothing.
Its changed now. When I want to GPL and contribute code to the community (or patches, bugfixes, features, etc...) I can't help but think twice now. I never once had a problem with someone taking something I wrote and packaging it and selling it for greater convenience and ease of use for end users. But making billions of dollars in virtual cash because of inflated stock prices where my hard work is involved, and I am unable to experience those gains myself? That's something totally different. That just sucks.
I hate to say Microsoft made a good product, but I just got an IntelliEye mouse a few hours ago, and it blows the pants off every mouse I've ever used.
Its a shame someone else didn't make it, but if you're really looking for a great pointing device, these are about as nice as they get. You never realize how much friction you get from that ball until its gone.
A point to remember is most people still say they use Netscape when they're talking about their ISP, even if they're running MSIE.
Even stranger I know pleanty of people who if you ask them what web browser they're using, they say Internet Explorer, and if you ask how they get on the internet, they say Netscape.
This is kinda obvious but I think deserves saying... You wouldn't go to a lawyer website and ask their opinion on a diagnosis your doctor made and give it more than a grain of salt, so I wouldn't in this case either.
;) ) if the case may have merit. If it might, and you don't want to deal with the hassle, compromise or give up the domain. If the case likely has no merit, then wait until they sue you and have the lawyer deal with it.
Don't trust that they don't have a case because people on here tell you they don't, the best advice anyone can give in a case like this is one that was already given. Ask a lawyer (not a nerd
One thing worth saying though, is that if you decide to wait until they sue you knowing they have a case and assuming you'll give up the domain and things will be fine at that point, you should be aware that the offer to return the domain from you is not sufficient to force them to withdraw the lawsuit, and they can choose to continue it to a court case if they want.
There are very few rules preventing malicious lawsuits here in the U.S.
Getting into that field is really hard. There are immensely talented people in the field, and many more entering it. The problem you're likely to find in getting work at any of the cutting edge shops is they are essentially meatmarkets. At the cream of the crop companies, you'll work extremely long hours for pay that will make you jealous of people with McJobs. There are pleanty of people willing to work for the big name places for free, so they are rarely willing to pay well for their positions.
I looked for a long time for an interesting position at companies like that, but in the places you tend to find them (SF, LA, NYC) cost of living is so high, the $25k they're likely to pay won't get you a place to live.
I saw someone else suggest ad agencies, that's a good place to think about, or find smaller unknown companies, you're a lot more likely to make a livable wage.
I said the 35mm crap people see in theaters, not 35mm in general. But very few theaters properly focus their projectors, clean the film, etc...
Its rare to get a good film experience.
For anyone who hasn't seen HD digital television in person, its hard to appreciate how drastic a difference it really does make in the viewing experience.
The first time I saw HD programming was at the Newseum in Washington DC (great place to visit if you're ever in the area). I was *stunned* and stopped in my tracks when I walked around the corner and saw it.
I'm a geek and a film guy. Film was the field of choice when I was in school. The 35mm crap people see in movie theaters can't hold anything on HD. Night and day. Really, until you've seen it you can't appreciate how amazing it really is.
I hope these issues get resolved quickly so people have more confidence in buying sets, and prices start to drop. The art of video and film deserves to be seen that way. Its good to see that there is finally serious pressure to drop the DTV standard we've got now for a better one.
Actually, its 1.21 gigawatts... the conversion is that you've probably been pronouncing words starting with "giga" wrong ever since you got a computer with a harddrive bigger than 1000 megs.
The correct pronounciation of the "giga" prefix is "jigga". So that's a 1.21 "jiggabyte" drive you've got too...
You can't legally use Apache+SSL in the US for any commercial purpose without buying a commercial version of apache unless you want to license the RSA patents, at hundreds of times the cost of buying a commercial server.
The decision to use Stronghold (which is massively overpriced) probably relates to the fact that its one of the few that you can get a Digital UNIX port of... on Linux, redhat's professional 6.1 is a better deal. (And 1/6 the cost)
This is just plain stupid.
No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG.
For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them.
PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that.
On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection.
*shrug* Seems like a reactionary move that won't get anywhere. The effort wasted changing sites to a widely-incompatible format would be better spent writing to your congresspeople and getting these rediculous century-old patent laws changed.
RedHat's Professional 6.1 version comes with the RedHat Secure Server, with a license to use it.
Used to be $99, but I think they bumped it up to $149 recently.
Still the best deal I've seen.
Anyone who hasn't owned a Qualcomm phone ought to think twice about buying one of these because they may not know what they're getting into.
In a nutshell, Qualcomm phones are pieces of crap. The original one that Bell Atlantic started selling when they first started adding digital service in CT was a nice enough phone, althoguh heavy. The flip up earpiece got loose fairly easily and the phone would randomly drop calls as a result.
Replaced that with a Q-phone when I switched to Sprint. Three months later the case was cracked and the antenna mount was broken. They replaced it as all of them had been recalled for that problem. Replacement phone had the same problem. I taped it up and dealt with it for almost nine months. Got sick of it, and replaced it again. Sprint gave me a hassle about it because the warranty on the original phone had expired, even though the second one wasn't a year old. I pointed out that they'd already admitted it was a problem with the phone and the "solution" of taking away my belt clip hadn't prevented it from breaking again.
So they finally gave me another one. That one didn't want to talk to their network. Reprogrammed it twice at the prompting of their tech support. No luck. Bring it back the next day, and get another one. Make a test call. That one works. (yay!)
That night, discover the voicemail and info buttons don't work. Neither does the * or #. Jump around an curse a lot.
Return phone, and tell them generally where they can stick their Qualcomm phones. Buy Startac. Talk for three times longer. Charge the phone almost ten times less often. Rejoice in a phone noticable lighter.
I can't imagine the pdQ is much better...
How's this new? RIT was doing that years ago when I was going there, the student ID card had it in barcode form *and* plain text right on the card. They simply tacked a 0-9 onto the end of it for the number of times you'd lost your ID card.
I was more upset when I found that my heathplan number was my social security number. They already know too much about me.
Why do you refuse to prove your point by actually cracking an NT box in one of these challenges? On a related note, I have heard
as an excuse for Linux in response to the ZDnet trial, "A system is only as good as its administrator." This seems true, but if you
really believed it, (A) you would know that you would not be helping MS by cracking NT, you would be helping only the particular
person administrating that box, and (B) you would be proving your as-yet undemonstrated point that NT is at least as insecure as
Linux.
Part of the thing that people sometimes miss is the higher number of underqualified administrators administrating NT servers than Unix servers. With the meteoric rise of Linux, that's becoming less the case. These days any joe-blow can throw redhat on a machine in ten minutes and leave it at that. A few years ago it wasn't that easy.
Its also probably worth pointing out that on the net, there's more usefulness that comes to a cracker in cracking a Unix system than an NT because of its inherant multiuser ability, and the fact that many things can be easily configured through text files. That makes them a prime target for script-kiddies, both because they're easier to reconfigure in a small amount of code, and because of the fact that actually getting into the server is more useful. Therefore, there's a lot more exploit scripts it seems for Unix than for NT. I don't think that's because of any lack of security holes in NT, but rather a lack of reasons to bother hacking an NT machine beyond pointing out to the administrators that NT is a bad solution.
Why do I read, in every mailing list and newsgroup, posts from Linux people saying "HELP! Someone cracked my box! What do I
DO??" These would seem to back up my first point.
For the same reason as I said above, as well as the fact that most Windows users probably wouldn't notice the fact that they'd been cracked. They can't simply type "w" and see who's logged in, and they're more used to seeing their computer slowing down and having the drives running for god-knows-what-reason. Last time I was using a cable modem, there were several dozen machines that would've been rather easy to get into because they had their drive shared without a password. Short of deleting all the files, how would any possibly know I was in their stuff? They wouldn't. And even if I deleted any of their files, without the logging present like there is under Unix, they wouldn't be able to figure out that it was an external user that wiped the files, and not some wierd glitch in the system.
Why is network security so complicated in Linux as compared to Windows? My windows computer is connected 24x7 via aDSL,
all I have to do is disable file/print sharing; one check box. If I enable sharing, I just have to use common sense and set a
password. If you wanted Linux to be more secure, you could try making it easier batten down the hatches.
Its more complicated because you're running a server OS. That's been discussed to death -- the fact that there aren't (yet) any good "desktop" distributions, that won't by default install all the services that aren't actually used. Linux is easy to tighten up, but you've got to know that you need to do it, and you've got to know that the desktop system you installed has as much capability as any "server". A lot of people don't know that, and don't understand what that entails.
I'm hoping to find out that Corel's distribution ends up a "client only" distribution... that'd go a long way towards making that distinction clear.
Huh, their website here they specifically say:
Can I use Road Runner with multiple computers in my home?
Sure. We will install the MediaOne Road Runner connection to one computer and after
the installation, you are free to connect that computer to an existing home LAN (Local
Area Network). Please note that MediaOne will not support or install home LANs (see our
customer service agreement on this site for specific details regarding home LAN usage).
Actually its the other way around, supporting anything but GSM (which you're correct -- it is a cell phone standard) would leave 90% of the world unable to use it.
Its mostly just here in the US that we use anything but GSM, the rest of the world does. And there's a lot more cell phone users elsewhere than here, as anyone who's been to the far east or Africa can attest to. (They're more widely used elsewhere because its cheaper to build cell networks than copper networks, and most of the world doesn't have 75 years of copper infrastructure already in place)
I figure no one else has listened to anyone else who's said this, so I'll say it. Maybe a few more people might stop and think.
;)
THIS IS NOT A GPL VIOLATION!
If I wasn't rather averse to the blink tag, that'd be blinking. Corel's doing this exactly as they should. If they tried to keep a closed beta but didn't go through the normal beta testing processes (ie, where you are essentially becoming part of the internal testing team, not joe public, and as such are expected to file reports on the software with the company, not just use it and report bugs), then there'd be a GPL violation. But if I want to take every single GPL'ed program out there and restrict access to the combination I've put together, as long as I'm not publicly distributing it, THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
So everyone needs to get a grip.
Corel hasn't said anywhere that they have any intention of violating the GPL. They haven't said that the final system WHEN AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC won't be free! They're simply keeping their testing versions private, which is probably a good thing. Using the general public for beta testing is a Microsoft tactic that is not only inappropriate in my opinion, but also does a poorer job of really methodically testing an environment.
Corel doesn't give a crap about the individual software packages where the beta is concerned -- they're not going to be fixing wierd things like the perl extensions to vgetty not ever working right... that's not what they do. They want to test their install process, the whole integration, the "polish" of the system. That's not an open-source part of the distribution, and doesn't need to be. You can't send a contrib RPM to RedHat and expect to see it in the next version of RedHat's distribution either... I think its completely retarded that I can't mount the swap space before going through all the crap in RedHat's install process -- thus I can't install in 8 meg on a PCMCIA system. But that's RedHat's business, and I can use another distribution.
Corel is undoubtedly one of the best things to happen to the Linux community, there are no lingering questions of their motives like Sun and others. They've been supporting Linux for years with Word Perfect, and with everythign else they're doing, it seems pretty childish to jump on something like this and risk pissing them off.
Linux isn't going to last if the hotheaded members of the community keep flipping out about every little thing, particularly when the flipping out is so uncalled for.
- a reformed hotheaded member of the linux community, for seven years
I can't talk on the IRC issue, its been years since I've used IRC, but I seem to recall there being some sort of an issue with the networks themselves, not with the robustness of the platform. In the early days of Linux, I saw that a lot for Usenet, IRC, and other network tasks that "old school" administrators saw as being the realm of the "real" Unixes. Sometimes it'd be tough to get the feed in the first place, not to deal with it once you got it.
The eBay comment, though, I thought was an interesting one. I could say with virtually 100% certainly that you could EASILY get a Linux-based system to perform more reliably than the current system, but that's not the fault of Solaris and itsn't a Solaris vs Linux issue, its simply a network application architecture issue.
Dejanews has the right idea, boatloads of Linux systems with a good application architecture, and you'll never have any downtime.
Admitted eBay has an interesting situation in that the nature of auctions where users can have bids automagically updated means running a lot of business logic on the database server, which can really move the bottleneck to the actual server software and the stored procedures, not the OS itself. My understanding is eBay runs Oracle, and Oracle has always struck me as being a real bitch to get good redundancy on and replicated servers that can cleanly fail-over.
A site like e-bay could easily be reliably run on Linux systems using a well designed architecture though, with database servers (running Oracle on Linux) that are handling only portions of the site, and a lot of inexpensive front-end servers. Adding a tier in front of that, made up of http-accellerators, would make the system even more robust.
Salon and dejanews both show that properly done, you can do high-profile with Linux. Certainly more so than you can with NT, particularly if you don't have millions to throw at hardware.
That's why they're usually said to cut the "haze" on overcast and hazy days -- the lower light levels makes it more noticable. Its also a matter of what colors the light registers as on the film as compared to the visible-light color of the same object. Sometimes it'll just minutely shift the color and fuzz the outlines. How stopped down the lens is, what kind of lens it is and factors like that also affect it. You'll almost never notice it on a handheld shot. But if you shoot a scene on a more overcast day on a tripod with and without the filter, depending on the camera it can be very noticable.
The more glass there is in the lens (the more elements) you also strip out more and more UV.
Do some searching on the net, I've seen a half-dozen sites with ultraviolet galleries.
Most standard chemical-based film stock is also ultraviolet sensitive. That's why even novice photographers know to put a UV filter on the lens, because lenses focus the ultraviolet at a different point than the other colors (and ditto with infared, although non-infared film is rarely very sensitive to infared, whereas most film is fairly sensitive to ultraviolet), and you get a hazy look to the film -- the haze is just a blurry exposure of the scene in ultraviolet.
For any amateur shutterbugs out there, if you can find a quartz lens that fits on your camera (they're very hard to find and VERY expensive unless you get really lucky), you can get filters to put on the lens that will cut out all the visible light, letting the ultraviolet through, and you can actually shoot very interesting photos in UV using standard film. Exposure times are longer, and you've got to guess on the exposure because meters won't read the light levels, however.
Nah, like many sites, they added all their marketing crap and made it significantly more difficult to use with Lynx.
So, if we're a stockholder, will anyone listen when we say "Quit posting stories that were posted two weeks ago!"?
:)
/. people really getting a return on the work they do. I hope (as the other posts mentioned) that this doesn't leave slashdot open for raping the way dejanews went, went the marketroids got their hands on it. Dejanews was ruined by them, and I'd hate to see Slashdot have the same thing happen.
;)
Seriously though, I think Andover should do like RedHat and give back to the community. How about a free share to the people with the lowest slashdot ID numbers? How about everyone 2822 and before? Yeah, that's good by me.
Seriously more, though, its good to see the
Here's a thought... maybe they had to dump their plans because they actually WERE planning on using Transmeta's chips, and those just aren't hacking it yet.
I mean, really, how can they expect to come out with a new super-duper system that fast, when the supposed supplier for the processor has never even talked about the chip, much less demoed a simulator, or gone to silicon.
And you know there's not much chance they could go to silicon without people finding out. Its not like they're going to build their own fabrication plants.
So maybe its not really Gateway's decision. Maybe they've been making plans based on assumptions that have turned out to be incorrect.