If I run into a situation where I have to use more time than I want to I just remember that there's an old equation saying "time is money" and so I buy my time by delegating the thing to a service vendor that does the job for me. Then I don't need to care about how much time it will take him, all I need is
to pay some money for it.
My second point in that is that ESR's example is a typical "configuration" example. Configuration is a process usually done once and if Joe User is not able to do it he shouldn't waste his time but let it be done by someone who knows. Just as a comparison: When I built my house all the heating
system was installed by a plumber, even if I think I could have done it myself. But doing it myself would have required time and also time to learn things I just need to use once. So I didn't care about how that thing needs to be configured, all my concern is the real User interface, in that case what I need to do to have a warm house.
And hey, isn't that the business model of Open Source? We give them the software for free and we charge them for service...
Yes I did. And I'm still convinced that even taking
a thousand images in low-res that all show the entire page can't be "averaged" to a hi-res image. If that statement would be true we wouldn't need to have expensive optical instruments, it would be enough to make a large number of low-res images and "average" them to get any resolution you want...
Just imagine spy satellites, we equip them with a cheap cell phone camera and we make a lot of images and then.. voila we can read a newspaper from the sky. No my friend, that's nonsense.
There is one thing that is not clear yet: How far away is "over the surface"? I mean, looking at a piece of paper from 1 meter distance is "over the surface", but I doubt it will get a high-res picture on a cell-phone camera. If I get closer to the thing I want to scan, then the field of vision is getting smaller. At the end that means that a cell-phone camera laying on the piece of paper that it should scan will only "see" a very small part of the image. So if I have to move it along to get the whole image, I'll be busy for a while, the data stream will be quite big and if I'm unlucky the camera shadow will darken my scanned movie. If I scan from a distance of lets say 10 cm away then the question is how much influence a variation of this distance will have to the result. And how I know that I got all details of the picture. And when the camera memory is exceeded.:-)
If I see how much MS is reacting for the source code and if I think how much MS is reacting when piracy copies of Windows are traded, then I think that
Microsoft doesn't care about pricacy copies, because even a user of a priate Windows is a Windows user
Microsoft has something to hide in that source. Since we all know that "security by obscurity" doesn't work it can't be because of security reasons. So the question is if that source code could be the evidence of a copyright violation.
Honestly, I don't think someone will ever compile that things to get a binary. (I intentionally avoided to call it "running binary":-)
Does this mean we can get Oktoberfest-flavoured linux?
No. But I've heard rumors that they are working on a
bavarian localization of Linux. So you'll find a "by" (Bayern) branch under/usr/share/locale with localized program messages. Just a few examples:
"Command not found" will translate to "Des find i net" in the bash and a typical menu will look like this:
"File" -> "Datenglump"
"Edit" -> "Rumfummla"
"View" -> "Glotzn"
"Tools" -> "Werkzeugkistl"
"Help" -> "Der Schmarrn erklaert"
One of the last remaining problems is that also the system clock should be reworked, since in Germany everybody knows that in Bavaria the clocks go the other way round...:-)
...then my first goal would be to abandon money.:-)
All this mess is caused by people that try to maximize their profit. Just imagine a world without money, nobody would need to send spam mails because there is no profit to make. Ok, sorry, was just kdding.
But I hope you see the point. I guess the price we have to pay for globalisation and outsourcing important infrastructure things from governments to private companies is that those things might get abused by morons that want to get a maximum profit.
But since I'm not able to lie so well I'll guess I'll keep stuck to engineering and won't make a careeer in politics.
" Sometimes I misspell URLs and I actually *like* having a service that attempts to find the site I'm looking for."
Isn't Google enough service to look for sites?
SiteFinder will only be of help if you misspell the hostname, if you have a typo in the path you'll get the usual 404 anyway. And I guess you will start not liking it when you misspell hostnames in mail addresses. The Internet is more than just HTTP and SiteFinder is messing up the rest a lot.
"Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying"
No, its not the fact that you have to do a small coffee break for rebooting your machine (a coffee break is always welcome) the real annoying thing is that you lose 4 hours of work because your PC crashed right 10 seconds before you wanted to save your work. Or, thanks to the latest security issues you're unable to use your PC because remote administration is enforcing a virus signature update that needs a reboot. That's especially big fun if you use a PC installed in a meeting room and only booted when you have a meeting... If a meeting of 12 people is postponed because a security patch has to be installed, than this adds 1 hour of worktime to the TCO! And if you need a person that applies those patches as a service that also adds to the TCO.
"but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable"
That is exactly why I switched from Windows to Linux. There are things I can't do with Windows as well, sometimes the problem is technical, sometimes
its just that I'm not able or willing to pay a fortune for a software I just want to try out.
"For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others."
Pardon me. Receiving a lot of MS-Office documents from people that always say that there is no better things than MS-Office I find out that not even 1% of them is really using one of the advanced feature. They could even go with notepad or Write, but it has to be office...
"...while its chart-making is so poor,..."
So what? The good thing of Linux is that if I'm not satisfied with the features of one component I'm able to use another component as well. So if the chart functions of OO are too poor, why not exporting the data and generating something with GnuPlot?
"Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?"
One reason could be that some things won't work (like very big documents), the other could be that MS-Office files can give away information that you don't want to give away or just simple seurity issues. I wouldn't mind if Outlook and its "childs" would be deleted from every installation, that could make the net much more safe and hopefully less worms would spread around.
"People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals."
I guess exactly the opposite. Big organisations that get the "discount licenses" because they order so much are usually forced to use a "common set of features", so that means that you put
company communication to the lowest possible level. An individual that is working just for himself and his pleasure is maybe more able to use features than a company. Here you have to use what everybody understands... so using high level features would result in a higher TCO (we're back at the topic, wow) because you'll always find some idiots in the firm that don't know how to use that. So firms policy to avoid support costs for those idiots can only be to lower the standards.
Since there is no source code published under the GPL yet I don't believe that Mydoom was created by Linux programmers. It looks more like a closed source work.
Now, my new motherboard is ICH5 (the uber-clockable P4 2.4C is too good a deal to pass up; sorry AMD), so I assume if I had an installer with the 2.6.0 kernel (released in December, please let me know if my assumption is incorrect), I could get things up and running.
Even with a SuSE 9.0 and 2.4.x kernel I had no problem on my ICH5-SATA-drives. In my case the BIOS setup of the board offered a mode that the SATA drives were mapped into the parallel ATA "namespace" so that I was able to run them like normal IDE drives. Just check out your BIOS setup on that thing, I guess that "mapping feature" is a basic feature of ICH5 based systems. On the other hand with the 2.4.x-kernel I didn't succeed on VIA VT8237 controllers or even the Silicon Image 3114.
SATA is not an issue of the hard disk drive, its an issue of the SATA controller chip. The new kernel support several of them, but for example I'm fighting with a Dual Opteron Workstation that has a Silicom Image 3114, and that's not working as well. I found a patch on the LKML that enables at least 2 of the 4 SATA channels, but its far away from booting from SATA actually. Unfortunately Silicon Image is only distribution binary modules for an outdated kernel version and no source. And the controller spec is available under NDA only, so I try not to read it otherwise I could gain knowledge that I'm not allowed to use for patching the driver. Well, I sent a notice to Silicon Image as well asking for source or free specs.:-)
There is no conflict situation. We send Bush to Mars and if he finds aliens there they will be convinced that there is no intelligent life on our planet, so we can be categorized as "mostly harmless".
SCO is sending letters to 1500 companies that are using the Linux operating system. May I ask where SCO got the addresses of those companies? I guess its not listed in the yellow pages that a company uses Linux. So they had to do some sort of "investigation". Could it be that this gathering of data is illegal? That its a form of industrial espionage?
...which means that with that ISBN I can refer to the book and find it at libraries or bookstores. Why don't we setup a sort of unique web page number if articles of interest or knowledge are published there. Then it would be easy to track an article if its moved to another site or whatever just by looking up a sort of catalog for these numbers.
...that they can't do the same for SMTP. I would really like that, because then no idiot with an Outlook Express would be able to fill my mailboxes with stupid worms like Swen.
Besides that: Limiting acess to services would be like if you allow only a certain type of cars on the road or a certain type of lightbulbs to be plugged into the sockets of your house. Yeah, welcome to the dark age...:-)
Easy to filter, but this is by far the worst worm load I've seen to date on my little server.
Lucky you, that you can filter it because you have your own little server. I'm a user of a freemail account and yes, so far I tried to poll it by POP. Then on Thursday night the first worm mails were arriving and until saturday afternoon I got a load of 60 MBytes in my box. Well, I got it because I always polled it, then I filtered it out on my machine. But then I removed this mailbox form my fetchmail config. So for those people that just want to do email and don't have the rights and knowledge to access the server for setting up filters it is the following situation:
If you poll your mailbox frequently you get around 20 MBytes in 12 hours. That's not big deal if you have a fast line and you don't pay for the traffic, but if you're a dialup user with a telephone modem this method means, that your modem is busy for 90 minutes to download rubbish that then you throw away. And if you have to pay for the minute it means that here in Germany you would pay 2 Euro a day for nothing or 60 Euro a month for this worm. 60 Euro is normaly my budget to feed my family for one week.
If you don't poll your mailboxes with POP and try to use the web interface of the free mailer instead you'll find a lot of pages to go through just to get rid of the worm. That means a lot of time effort and yes, for some people its true that time is money.
And don't forget to have a look at your mailbox all few hours, otherwise its filled up and real mails that should reach you were bounced because of the exceeded quota.
This worm has a big impact on every mail user and even not using Microsoft I'm paying for the load as well.
... it is a sin to spill beer. Beer is a basic food and people should drink it and not spill it. This separates the tourists from the real bavarian men at the Octoberfest.
Caution: Be aware that beer contains a lot of female hormons. If you drink too much you start takling nonsense and you're unable to drive a car.
I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.
Well, I would really distinguish a bit between frequently issued newsletters and those who are sent out only sporadically. A frequently issued publication like LWN, DWN, LinuxGazette etc. is something I can poll as well because I know for example that every Tuesday there is the DWN and every Thursday there is the LWN. But what for the newsletters that arrive only sporadically. In that case I prefer to get them by mail instead of forcing me to poll a website frequently to find out that there is nothing new.
Re:It is so obvious that Microsoft wrote this arti
on
Blaster Writer Caught
·
· Score: 1
When is somebody going to finally decide to call them on this and force Microsoft to do a security audit?
Well, trying to read between the lines of the article I think that Microsoft did a security audit and one outcome of it is stuff like the article. Because with that you give a message to the public that says
Writing viruses and worms is a bad crime.
The FBI is going after those criminals.
And finally they catch them.
So the average "John Doe" is fine because he didn't do something wrong and justice is brought to the bad guys. And of course its not the fault of anybody that a software is insecure since we all know that its impossible to write software without bugs. Brave new world!
How much will the release be delayed because of that f***ing SCO stuff?
How much influence has SCO on the developers, e.g. make them response to the SCO FUD instead of fixing bugs in the kernel? That's also a sort of "denial of service" attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of us don't have the time
If I run into a situation where I have to use more time than I want to I just remember that there's an old equation saying "time is money" and so I buy my time by delegating the thing to a service vendor that does the job for me. Then I don't need to care about how much time it will take him, all I need is to pay some money for it.
My second point in that is that ESR's example is a typical "configuration" example. Configuration is a process usually done once and if Joe User is not able to do it he shouldn't waste his time but let it be done by someone who knows. Just as a comparison: When I built my house all the heating system was installed by a plumber, even if I think I could have done it myself. But doing it myself would have required time and also time to learn things I just need to use once. So I didn't care about how that thing needs to be configured, all my concern is the real User interface, in that case what I need to do to have a warm house.
And hey, isn't that the business model of Open Source? We give them the software for free and we charge them for service...
Yes I did. And I'm still convinced that even taking a thousand images in low-res that all show the entire page can't be "averaged" to a hi-res image. If that statement would be true we wouldn't need to have expensive optical instruments, it would be enough to make a large number of low-res images and "average" them to get any resolution you want... Just imagine spy satellites, we equip them with a cheap cell phone camera and we make a lot of images and then.. voila we can read a newspaper from the sky. No my friend, that's nonsense.
There is one thing that is not clear yet: How far away is "over the surface"? I mean, looking at a piece of paper from 1 meter distance is "over the surface", but I doubt it will get a high-res picture on a cell-phone camera. If I get closer to the thing I want to scan, then the field of vision is getting smaller. At the end that means that a cell-phone camera laying on the piece of paper that it should scan will only "see" a very small part of the image. So if I have to move it along to get the whole image, I'll be busy for a while, the data stream will be quite big and if I'm unlucky the camera shadow will darken my scanned movie. If I scan from a distance of lets say 10 cm away then the question is how much influence a variation of this distance will have to the result. And how I know that I got all details of the picture. And when the camera memory is exceeded. :-)
I can make phonecalls with my scanner?
that Rob Enderle will be dead as well sooner or later. And I think that even then Bluetooth will be around...
Honestly, I don't think someone will ever compile that things to get a binary. (I intentionally avoided to call it "running binary"
No. But I've heard rumors that they are working on a bavarian localization of Linux. So you'll find a "by" (Bayern) branch under /usr/share/locale with localized program messages. Just a few examples:
"Command not found" will translate to "Des find i net" in the bash and a typical menu will look like this:
"File" -> "Datenglump"
"Edit" -> "Rumfummla"
"View" -> "Glotzn"
"Tools" -> "Werkzeugkistl" "Help" -> "Der Schmarrn erklaert"
One of the last remaining problems is that also the system clock should be reworked, since in Germany everybody knows that in Bavaria the clocks go the other way round... :-)
All this mess is caused by people that try to maximize their profit. Just imagine a world without money, nobody would need to send spam mails because there is no profit to make. Ok, sorry, was just kdding.
But I hope you see the point. I guess the price we have to pay for globalisation and outsourcing important infrastructure things from governments to private companies is that those things might get abused by morons that want to get a maximum profit.
But since I'm not able to lie so well I'll guess I'll keep stuck to engineering and won't make a careeer in politics.
Isn't Google enough service to look for sites?
SiteFinder will only be of help if you misspell the hostname, if you have a typo in the path you'll get the usual 404 anyway. And I guess you will start not liking it when you misspell hostnames in mail addresses. The Internet is more than just HTTP and SiteFinder is messing up the rest a lot.
No, its not the fact that you have to do a small coffee break for rebooting your machine (a coffee break is always welcome) the real annoying thing is that you lose 4 hours of work because your PC crashed right 10 seconds before you wanted to save your work. Or, thanks to the latest security issues you're unable to use your PC because remote administration is enforcing a virus signature update that needs a reboot. That's especially big fun if you use a PC installed in a meeting room and only booted when you have a meeting... If a meeting of 12 people is postponed because a security patch has to be installed, than this adds 1 hour of worktime to the TCO! And if you need a person that applies those patches as a service that also adds to the TCO.
"but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable"
That is exactly why I switched from Windows to Linux. There are things I can't do with Windows as well, sometimes the problem is technical, sometimes its just that I'm not able or willing to pay a fortune for a software I just want to try out.
"For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others."
Pardon me. Receiving a lot of MS-Office documents from people that always say that there is no better things than MS-Office I find out that not even 1% of them is really using one of the advanced feature. They could even go with notepad or Write, but it has to be office...
"...while its chart-making is so poor, ..."
So what? The good thing of Linux is that if I'm not satisfied with the features of one component I'm able to use another component as well. So if the chart functions of OO are too poor, why not exporting the data and generating something with GnuPlot?
"Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?"
One reason could be that some things won't work (like very big documents), the other could be that MS-Office files can give away information that you don't want to give away or just simple seurity issues. I wouldn't mind if Outlook and its "childs" would be deleted from every installation, that could make the net much more safe and hopefully less worms would spread around.
"People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals."
I guess exactly the opposite. Big organisations that get the "discount licenses" because they order so much are usually forced to use a "common set of features", so that means that you put company communication to the lowest possible level. An individual that is working just for himself and his pleasure is maybe more able to use features than a company. Here you have to use what everybody understands... so using high level features would result in a higher TCO (we're back at the topic, wow) because you'll always find some idiots in the firm that don't know how to use that. So firms policy to avoid support costs for those idiots can only be to lower the standards.
Since there is no source code published under the GPL yet I don't believe that Mydoom was created by Linux programmers. It looks more like a closed source work.
What about the kernel source? :-)
make menuconfig or the GUI configurators can give you a good idea what hardware is supported.
Even with a SuSE 9.0 and 2.4.x kernel I had no problem on my ICH5-SATA-drives. In my case the BIOS setup of the board offered a mode that the SATA drives were mapped into the parallel ATA "namespace" so that I was able to run them like normal IDE drives. Just check out your BIOS setup on that thing, I guess that "mapping feature" is a basic feature of ICH5 based systems. On the other hand with the 2.4.x-kernel I didn't succeed on VIA VT8237 controllers or even the Silicon Image 3114.
SATA is not an issue of the hard disk drive, its an issue of the SATA controller chip. The new kernel support several of them, but for example I'm fighting with a Dual Opteron Workstation that has a Silicom Image 3114, and that's not working as well. I found a patch on the LKML that enables at least 2 of the 4 SATA channels, but its far away from booting from SATA actually. Unfortunately Silicon Image is only distribution binary modules for an outdated kernel version and no source. And the controller spec is available under NDA only, so I try not to read it otherwise I could gain knowledge that I'm not allowed to use for patching the driver. Well, I sent a notice to Silicon Image as well asking for source or free specs. :-)
There is no conflict situation. We send Bush to Mars and if he finds aliens there they will be convinced that there is no intelligent life on our planet, so we can be categorized as "mostly harmless".
Just a thought...
that at least Sweden is neutral! :-)
...which means that with that ISBN I can refer to the book and find it at libraries or bookstores. Why don't we setup a sort of unique web page number if articles of interest or knowledge are published there. Then it would be easy to track an article if its moved to another site or whatever just by looking up a sort of catalog for these numbers.
Besides that: Limiting acess to services would be like if you allow only a certain type of cars on the road or a certain type of lightbulbs to be plugged into the sockets of your house. Yeah, welcome to the dark age... :-)
Lucky you, that you can filter it because you have your own little server. I'm a user of a freemail account and yes, so far I tried to poll it by POP. Then on Thursday night the first worm mails were arriving and until saturday afternoon I got a load of 60 MBytes in my box. Well, I got it because I always polled it, then I filtered it out on my machine. But then I removed this mailbox form my fetchmail config. So for those people that just want to do email and don't have the rights and knowledge to access the server for setting up filters it is the following situation:
And don't forget to have a look at your mailbox all few hours, otherwise its filled up and real mails that should reach you were bounced because of the exceeded quota.
This worm has a big impact on every mail user and even not using Microsoft I'm paying for the load as well.
If I sum up the values of Mon..Sun then I see that you get 620% of spam every week. That's of course quite a lot of spam.
Caution: Be aware that beer contains a lot of female hormons. If you drink too much you start takling nonsense and you're unable to drive a car.
Well, I would really distinguish a bit between frequently issued newsletters and those who are sent out only sporadically. A frequently issued publication like LWN, DWN, LinuxGazette etc. is something I can poll as well because I know for example that every Tuesday there is the DWN and every Thursday there is the LWN. But what for the newsletters that arrive only sporadically. In that case I prefer to get them by mail instead of forcing me to poll a website frequently to find out that there is nothing new.
Well, trying to read between the lines of the article I think that Microsoft did a security audit and one outcome of it is stuff like the article. Because with that you give a message to the public that says
So the average "John Doe" is fine because he didn't do something wrong and justice is brought to the bad guys. And of course its not the fault of anybody that a software is insecure since we all know that its impossible to write software without bugs. Brave new world!
How much influence has SCO on the developers, e.g. make them response to the SCO FUD instead of fixing bugs in the kernel? That's also a sort of "denial of service" attack.