Not all wars are ambiguous as Vietnam or Iraq. In the event of a determined, well organized army campaigning against your country, would you actually thinkit's a bad idea to fight back?
Throughout history capturing and using enemy information has been a lot more useful in combat than attacking the information of the enemy.
True. Then again, never before in history has so much of the world's economy and stability hinged upon the appropriate flow of data. In World War II, do you think we could have shut down Japan's port operations from the comfort of an air conditioned room in Washington? Of course not - that would have required stopping or misdirecting a huge amount of paper flowing through a closed system. I'm not confident at all that's still the case, though.
An enemy could still get much value from capturing and using our information. They could also get much value from using it to stop our railroads, gridlock our airports, or put FedEx on pause for a week. This isn't the twentieth century anymore.
Everyone has the idea that terrorists will one day hack into the power grid and cripple the stock market.
Here's the problem: if that turns out to be possible, then J. Random Terrorist could do it from half a world away. No amount of concrete and razor wire would protect against a motivated cracker with a laptop and an Iridium uplink.
They should focus on protecting the power grids from physical attacks before they start focusing on "cyber terrorism" where they could take the grid by "hacking into the system."
You say that as if they have to pick one. How about a third option: harden the physical and network defenses simultaneously. I kind of like that idea.
Why? They don't care anymore than we (Americans) care that Tijuana, Mexico is more appropriately, "Tijuana, BC, Mexico".
If there were as many Tijuanas as there are certain popular city names in the US, then you'd almost have a point. However, it's normal to have similarly named places here that have little in common with each other save for the fact that they're on the same continent.
Given that the US is vastly larger than the UK in population and land size, it makes sense to specify geographical regions there when it wouldn't elsewhere. Same goes for ex-USSR; there's a lot of difference between Siberia and the Ukraine, and I'd expect an article about a city there to give at least the ballpark region where it was located.
As a Christian (aka "Religous wacko") I can see a _very_ good reason to have a.xxx domain. Porn is degrading to women, and it does destroys relationships
No more - "sorry honey - I didn't know what I was doing" crap.
As a Christian, your logic horrifies me. Do you want to live in a world were we also have ".liberal", ".atheist", ".evolution", or ".fishonfriday" and you're obligated to block all of them (after all, a good Christian wouldn't want to read all that secular stuff, right)?
How about this: I'm an adult and I'll read or not read what I damn well want based on my own morals and judgment, rather than what an external filter imposed upon me thinks I should see. I absolutely guarantee that if enough people willingly accept these artificial roadblocks, then they'll become compulsory (peer-group enforced) all too soon.
By having a ".xxx" domain, I can set my firewall to instantly block all of the porn in the world.
I think you meant to say "United States that goes along with this voluntary plan".
Look, I'm not pro-pr0n, except in the sense that I think it's up to each person to decide for themselves. However, if you don't want to look at it, though, then don't - and don't expect the government to stand in as a replacement for your own conscience.
Seems like too many new DVDs are coming out at $30 USD or higher.
What hellishly expensive boutique world do you live in? I haven't paid more than $15 for a newly released DVD in years. Hint: Wal-Mart, Target, and the other big chains compete well on these things. Even if you hate Wal-Mart, you can enjoy the fact that they're paying the *AA bottom dollar.
I have a 17" LCD monitor that does 1280x1024. I'd like to upgrade to a 19" monitor, but the only ones I've seen locally are also 1280x1024. In other words, the only difference between a 17" and 19" monitor are a couple hundred dollars and sitting a little closer to the screen.
Why is that? A 19" CRT typically gets you more pixels than a 17" CRT, so why isn't the same true for LCDs? I'm sure I could buy find a higher-resolution model somewhere if I looked hard enough, but I'm really wondering why that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
It actually is a "fuller, more entertaining experience", as long as they're referring to my bladder after drinking the $6.00 small-keg-o-cola, and the joy of impromptu voiceovers from a 12 year old with a cell phone and The Batteries Of Infinite Talk Time (tm). I was in tears by the end of "Return Of The King", and it had nothing to do with the movie.
It was very nice to have one system, not wonder how *.deb is different from *.rpm or *.tgz, or really how to get one to play CLEANLY with my systems packaging system.
In all fairness, Linux is just as consistent intra-platform as *BSD. FreeBSD has ports. NetBSD has pkgsrc. OpenBSD has (incompatible, I think) ports.
Con of *BSD:
Did not seem to have the same number of packages as GNU/Linux
FreeBSD has something like 15,000 ports available for installation. Gentoo seems to have around 10,000 (based on the results of locate metadata.xml | wc, which I think is roughly accurate). I don't know where to look for the official count on either system, so feel free to correct me if my guesses are wrong.
I've seen the occasional quirks and temporary brokenness, sure. I guess I'm mainly replying to the people who think that problems are the norm rather than the exception.
By the way, how did you get an mplayer linked against libm.so.3? libm.so.4 is the current version on my system that I'm typing this on, and that's what my mplayer is linked to.
...as a precompiled port ("package") from the third-party ports system.
Ok, since we are being pedantic, how about these from the base system: awk, bc, cpio, cvs, diff, gcc, gdb, groff, less, ncurses, patch, texinfo, tar I'm sure there are others.
I didn't say that they don't use any GPL/GNU stuff (although tar is actually their own), just that there's no more of it in the base system than necessary. OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).
You chose a GPL package (Samba) available through the third-party ports system, and another (X.org) released under the MIT license to demonstrate that FreeBSD is widely GPLed?
What's your goal? An old saying is that "Linux is for people who hate Windows, but FreeBSD is for people who love Unix". From a novice perspective, there's some amount of truth to that. More browser plugins work out-of-the-box under Linux, and you'll get more video game ports. FreeBSD definitely has its own charms, though, and if you want to learn how to administer a Unix system, you could definitely do worse.
Both are good. I prefer FreeBSD, but that's just me.
I'm leaning toward Ubuntu simply because there is more support.
I kind of doubt that. I haven't had the need to use Ubuntu's support, but can definitely state that the FreeBSD mailing lists are packed with smart, helpful people. I'm not saying that Ubuntu's support is lacking, but that I can't imagine what more you could get from the FreeBSD crowd short of one of them driving to your house and fixing it for you (which is probably possible if you live in a populous area).
Sure KDE can be a hog, but it's either more of a hog on FreeBSD or FreeBSD just doesn't pay attention to a desktop user's needs.
I recently switched my work desktop from FreeBSD to Gentoo because of a harddrive failure and the need to try something different. I think you're at least partially right: KDE "felt" much more responsive under Linux than FreeBSD, even under the same hardware, compiled with the same compiler version, and using similar CFLAGS.
However, I think that's partly because FreeBSD has traditionally been optimized for throughput instead of interactivity. On idle systems, Linux seems to respond more quickly to user input. However, the FreeBSD system seemed to stand up better to high loads than Linux ("how on earth did my load average get up to 10? It's been there for how long?") without becoming jerky or noticeably less responsive.
I have zero real evidence to support this idea, but personal observation makes me think I'm basically right. Maybe you were seeing the same low-load behavior but didn't notice the corresponding high-load advantage?
Lately, FreeBSD as a desktop has been plagued by missing libs and lack of maintainers for certain applications requiring a lot of configuation, most of the time, using -current worked to fix a lot of these issues, but not always.
I typed "portinstall kde3" on a FreeBSD system last week, and it resulted in a fully installed, ready-to-use KDE 3.5.1 system. What exactly did you find it to be missing or broken?
Why? You find it surprising that people like seeing bad things happen to people they don't like? In other news, I'd laugh if Steve Ballmer tripped over an iPod and broke his ankle, but wouldn't find it funny if the same thing happened to my mom.
This falls into that nebulous category called "human nature". If you get your kicks from watching people do normal people things, then you are easily amused.
You immediately lose all credibility, regardless of topic, when you advocate violence against people you disagree with. Did you think everyone would say, "gee, what an enlightened, thoughtful person - I wonder what else he'll have to say?" Do you think you're doing non-Republicans a favor by confirming Republicans' suspicions that you and your co-believers are nuts?
On behalf of everyone who isn't in your club: screw you and grow up.
Some of us feel that being proficient at your job and being comfortable are much more important than being a shortsighted, uninformed asshole in a fancy monkey suit.
That's fine - as long as you know that a decent pair of khakis and a nice polo shirt aren't comfortable, and haven't just ruled them out without trying. Is there any harm in dressing comfortably in a business-friendly way?
Although there are many others out there, citrix should've at least rated a mention!
OK, here it is:
1989: Citrix is founded to create a commercial product with the functionality of MIT's X Window System, which originated in 1984 - and was in turn derived from still older systems.
But, note how you feel about the project today? The inconvenience of waiting are just completely gone. You've got a nice new freeway, and you get from here to there without much problem. In a couple of months it seems like it has always been there. All the hair-pulling and outrage that you felt when the finish date was first posted just seems so trivial now.
I haven't been to Boston, either, but I hear it's lovely. You should visit there sometime.
The F/OSS solution, of course. You get a system custom-tailored to your business, and its survival isn't dependent on the whims of a third party with no vested interest in your company's well-being. It's even management-friendly: you actually have someone to sue if things go really, really badly instead of trying to decide in court whether the no-indemnity EULA is legally binding in your district.
That makes no sense unless your political idology is your number one factor in decision making for what software to use.
You say that as if it's a bad thing, or even particularly uncommon. We use Apache because we can hack it if we need a feature that no one else in the world wants. Our servers run FreeBSD because we possess the ability to tune it as we see fit. We write our business logic in Python because it's transparent - we can see exactly how our bytecode is being executed. We use PostgreSQL because we have the right to fix it even if its maintainers get bored.
From a business perspective, Microsoft offers almost nothing of value to us. Political ideology doesn't always have to mean impracticality.
Slashdot Mirror
...other than Asterisk, right? Or is this somehow much better?
Not all wars are ambiguous as Vietnam or Iraq. In the event of a determined, well organized army campaigning against your country, would you actually thinkit's a bad idea to fight back?
Throughout history capturing and using enemy information has been a lot more useful in combat than attacking the information of the enemy.
True. Then again, never before in history has so much of the world's economy and stability hinged upon the appropriate flow of data. In World War II, do you think we could have shut down Japan's port operations from the comfort of an air conditioned room in Washington? Of course not - that would have required stopping or misdirecting a huge amount of paper flowing through a closed system. I'm not confident at all that's still the case, though.
An enemy could still get much value from capturing and using our information. They could also get much value from using it to stop our railroads, gridlock our airports, or put FedEx on pause for a week. This isn't the twentieth century anymore.
Here's the problem: if that turns out to be possible, then J. Random Terrorist could do it from half a world away. No amount of concrete and razor wire would protect against a motivated cracker with a laptop and an Iridium uplink.
They should focus on protecting the power grids from physical attacks before they start focusing on "cyber terrorism" where they could take the grid by "hacking into the system."
You say that as if they have to pick one. How about a third option: harden the physical and network defenses simultaneously. I kind of like that idea.
If there were as many Tijuanas as there are certain popular city names in the US, then you'd almost have a point. However, it's normal to have similarly named places here that have little in common with each other save for the fact that they're on the same continent.
Given that the US is vastly larger than the UK in population and land size, it makes sense to specify geographical regions there when it wouldn't elsewhere. Same goes for ex-USSR; there's a lot of difference between Siberia and the Ukraine, and I'd expect an article about a city there to give at least the ballpark region where it was located.
No more - "sorry honey - I didn't know what I was doing" crap.
As a Christian, your logic horrifies me. Do you want to live in a world were we also have ".liberal", ".atheist", ".evolution", or ".fishonfriday" and you're obligated to block all of them (after all, a good Christian wouldn't want to read all that secular stuff, right)?
How about this: I'm an adult and I'll read or not read what I damn well want based on my own morals and judgment, rather than what an external filter imposed upon me thinks I should see. I absolutely guarantee that if enough people willingly accept these artificial roadblocks, then they'll become compulsory (peer-group enforced) all too soon.
By having a ".xxx" domain, I can set my firewall to instantly block all of the porn in the world.
I think you meant to say "United States that goes along with this voluntary plan".
Look, I'm not pro-pr0n, except in the sense that I think it's up to each person to decide for themselves. However, if you don't want to look at it, though, then don't - and don't expect the government to stand in as a replacement for your own conscience.
He complained about spyware and then posted a link to a free web forum in his (hideable) signature.
In other news, yesterday I hypocritically complained about noise pollution and then tied my shoes.
What hellishly expensive boutique world do you live in? I haven't paid more than $15 for a newly released DVD in years. Hint: Wal-Mart, Target, and the other big chains compete well on these things. Even if you hate Wal-Mart, you can enjoy the fact that they're paying the *AA bottom dollar.
Exactly. You can simulate inches by sitting closer to the screen, but either you have the pixels or you don't.
Why is that? A 19" CRT typically gets you more pixels than a 17" CRT, so why isn't the same true for LCDs? I'm sure I could buy find a higher-resolution model somewhere if I looked hard enough, but I'm really wondering why that seems to be the exception rather than the norm.
It actually is a "fuller, more entertaining experience", as long as they're referring to my bladder after drinking the $6.00 small-keg-o-cola, and the joy of impromptu voiceovers from a 12 year old with a cell phone and The Batteries Of Infinite Talk Time (tm). I was in tears by the end of "Return Of The King", and it had nothing to do with the movie.
In all fairness, Linux is just as consistent intra-platform as *BSD. FreeBSD has ports. NetBSD has pkgsrc. OpenBSD has (incompatible, I think) ports.
Con of *BSD:
FreeBSD has something like 15,000 ports available for installation. Gentoo seems to have around 10,000 (based on the results of locate metadata.xml | wc, which I think is roughly accurate). I don't know where to look for the official count on either system, so feel free to correct me if my guesses are wrong.
By the way, how did you get an mplayer linked against libm.so.3? libm.so.4 is the current version on my system that I'm typing this on, and that's what my mplayer is linked to.
...as a precompiled port ("package") from the third-party ports system.
Ok, since we are being pedantic, how about these from the base system: awk, bc, cpio, cvs, diff, gcc, gdb, groff, less, ncurses, patch, texinfo, tar I'm sure there are others.
I didn't say that they don't use any GPL/GNU stuff (although tar is actually their own), just that there's no more of it in the base system than necessary. OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).
You chose a GPL package (Samba) available through the third-party ports system, and another (X.org) released under the MIT license to demonstrate that FreeBSD is widely GPLed?
What's your goal? An old saying is that "Linux is for people who hate Windows, but FreeBSD is for people who love Unix". From a novice perspective, there's some amount of truth to that. More browser plugins work out-of-the-box under Linux, and you'll get more video game ports. FreeBSD definitely has its own charms, though, and if you want to learn how to administer a Unix system, you could definitely do worse.
Both are good. I prefer FreeBSD, but that's just me.
I'm leaning toward Ubuntu simply because there is more support.
I kind of doubt that. I haven't had the need to use Ubuntu's support, but can definitely state that the FreeBSD mailing lists are packed with smart, helpful people. I'm not saying that Ubuntu's support is lacking, but that I can't imagine what more you could get from the FreeBSD crowd short of one of them driving to your house and fixing it for you (which is probably possible if you live in a populous area).
I recently switched my work desktop from FreeBSD to Gentoo because of a harddrive failure and the need to try something different. I think you're at least partially right: KDE "felt" much more responsive under Linux than FreeBSD, even under the same hardware, compiled with the same compiler version, and using similar CFLAGS.
However, I think that's partly because FreeBSD has traditionally been optimized for throughput instead of interactivity. On idle systems, Linux seems to respond more quickly to user input. However, the FreeBSD system seemed to stand up better to high loads than Linux ("how on earth did my load average get up to 10? It's been there for how long?") without becoming jerky or noticeably less responsive.
I have zero real evidence to support this idea, but personal observation makes me think I'm basically right. Maybe you were seeing the same low-load behavior but didn't notice the corresponding high-load advantage?
I typed "portinstall kde3" on a FreeBSD system last week, and it resulted in a fully installed, ready-to-use KDE 3.5.1 system. What exactly did you find it to be missing or broken?
Why? You find it surprising that people like seeing bad things happen to people they don't like? In other news, I'd laugh if Steve Ballmer tripped over an iPod and broke his ankle, but wouldn't find it funny if the same thing happened to my mom.
This falls into that nebulous category called "human nature". If you get your kicks from watching people do normal people things, then you are easily amused.
Yes, you do. If you use any software that ships in the OpenBSD base installation, such as:
then you're using software audited and patched by OpenBSD.
You immediately lose all credibility, regardless of topic, when you advocate violence against people you disagree with. Did you think everyone would say, "gee, what an enlightened, thoughtful person - I wonder what else he'll have to say?" Do you think you're doing non-Republicans a favor by confirming Republicans' suspicions that you and your co-believers are nuts?
On behalf of everyone who isn't in your club: screw you and grow up.
That's fine - as long as you know that a decent pair of khakis and a nice polo shirt aren't comfortable, and haven't just ruled them out without trying. Is there any harm in dressing comfortably in a business-friendly way?
OK, here it is:
I think that should just about cover it.
I haven't been to Boston, either, but I hear it's lovely. You should visit there sometime.
The F/OSS solution, of course. You get a system custom-tailored to your business, and its survival isn't dependent on the whims of a third party with no vested interest in your company's well-being. It's even management-friendly: you actually have someone to sue if things go really, really badly instead of trying to decide in court whether the no-indemnity EULA is legally binding in your district.
You say that as if it's a bad thing, or even particularly uncommon. We use Apache because we can hack it if we need a feature that no one else in the world wants. Our servers run FreeBSD because we possess the ability to tune it as we see fit. We write our business logic in Python because it's transparent - we can see exactly how our bytecode is being executed. We use PostgreSQL because we have the right to fix it even if its maintainers get bored.
From a business perspective, Microsoft offers almost nothing of value to us. Political ideology doesn't always have to mean impracticality.