sudo allows fine grained access control for users, machines, and commands. There is a config file that lets you do all sorts of restricted access.
su to root allows a user to do anything, lock anyone else out, change root password, etc.
the benefits of sudo may seem opaque in the case of a single user on a laptop where there's no admin or IT team. When you think about real multiuser machines with an IT support group and users who need a variety of privilege levels, sudo it a great solution.
wget - grab url without any annoying save dialog boxes elinks - text-based wysiwyg calc - http://sf.net/projects/calc vlc - cause it can play just about anything without concern on local OS dependencies ImageMagic suite - these tools rock - most notably 'convert' awk and sed - you'd be surprised how many times I've used awk and sed on a text/csv file in 5 seconds to do what someone else takes hours to do in a spreadsheet find, grep, and xargs - with this trio, I can do in 1 minute what takes other people hours or days to do scp - so much better than ftp for so many reasons rsync - there are so many very expensive commerical data replication solutions that basically are just GUI wrappers around rsync htop - I just like it. Fast, colorful, unbloated tkdiff - one of the best graphical diff tools around. Small, simple, fast. screen - take your console session with you vncserver and vncclient - while I don't like their non-pam OS authenticaiton, they're great tools. Fast and lightweight rdesktop audacity pidgin
I did a key mash to figure out the stop key on boot to get me in.
That's plain stupid. You buy a computer you don't know how to use. You don't have an experienced admin. You don't pay for support.... then you bitch?
Reminds me of the youtube video of the guy who just bought a helicopter, didn't know how to fly one, gets in, and within 30 seconds he had destroyed the whole thing. http://youtube.com/watch?v=upHc9xgNT5E... stupid helicopter company!
If you are actually trying to convince your boss to install BeOS 5 at work, then I'm afraid we can't help you.
As to silly names... everyone deals with codenames for products and projects. I don't mind that. I do think perhaps Canonical should do more to emphasize the LTS releases.
As to naming hurting Ubuntu adoption... I'm not sure I could say "hoary" at my work to a mixed audience without getting reprimanded by HR.
Personally, I sort of like the fun names, but... could they be just a little less oblique? Instead of Icosahedral Imp maybe something more like itchy iguana. Instead of kinky koodoo maybe something more like kicking kangaroo.
First off, all I can say is that the DefectiveByDesign campaign isn't changing its name to EnabledByDesign..
Reminds me of when NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) was deemed a bad name for a machine that people went in because "nukular" must be bad, right? (actually in the case refers to nucleus, not radiation).
So, we now have MRI machines instead of NMR machines.
I have some suggestions for new names for DRM?
NCT - Nuclear Cancer Terrorism? NSV - Nigerian Scam Validation? WAR - War Atrocities Rights? BCS - Birdflu content system? IHG - ILoveYou.exe hello.jpg goatse? BBHMM - B!tch better have my money
one of my colleagues called me a Pirate (Aarrr) just because I use Open Source software.
I said "so to not be a pirate I have to use Windows?" His answer: "Yep, If you use free software you must be pirating something."
Oh, man... that is *so* inaccurate. Windows users have very little useful software that is free. Most software is commercial or shareware. Windows users seek to fill the gaping functionality holes with commercial software and get nickeled and dimed (more like $20 and $50) to death. That, I believe, is a major factor for *Application* piracy.
Linux users on the other hand, explore all their well integrated, easy to centrally install, free options and find tools that work great, or pretty well, or at least do some of what they need for free.
Running MythTV, I have more than enough content that I'm paying for to watch on TV - I have no interest in looking for bittorents of video content.
Likewise, using streaming audio, I have more than enough access to audio content to keep me busy for the rest of my life.
I believe it's more like website project managers saying:
92% of our server logs show people using IE7.
If you want this website to work on firefox, I'm going to need to hire more people.
I can't "certify" for Opera or Macintosh Safari.
We've leveraged scripting technology that only works with ActiveX. If you want to replace it, I'm going to need the following additional server, developers, and it's going to delay the $NEW_CONTENT_PROJECT by 4 months and cost $LARGE_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY.
I just don't get the whole secondlife thing. Exactly how is it better than IRC... or AOL chatrooms? It's graphic? Okay... so you need a really expensive computer and lots of bandwidth to play...
What, you can't play it? Oh... so you mean you just cruise around jerkily and congregate either on purpose or randomly.
Oh, okay... so you pretend to be a hot girl and... do what?
Oh, okay... so you design "virtual clothes" and sell them to people who want their avatars to load slower?
No, wait... you make "geek island" and invite all the lonely geeks on their computer to come and try to solve real problems?... for free?
Phase 1: Press release including Second Life Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit!
I have to agree. I've used MusicMatch for years, and while I like the overall interface and *LOVE* the supertagging feature, I've found musikCube to be much faster, much lighter weight, and more flexible for playing my music collection on Windows
If you really want to be mobile and go a lot of places and see a lot of things, the key is to *NOT* encumber yourself with bulky/heavy/unreliable things.
I traveled around Asia with a laptop, large camera bag, dive gear bag, and a backpack. I've done other backpack-ish trips with my PDA and phone.
Long story short.
Laptop: Spent a large amount of money on it right before my trip. Had to carry it in a separate backpack. Had to hold it over my head while I walked through waist high flood waters on the sidewalk. It broke, a travel buddy broke it, ruined a friendship. No place in Thailand could fix it. Warranty couldn't be honored without long trip to another country. Heavy. Needed lots of converters. Lugged a broken laptop around on my travels. Wasted travel time trying to get it fixed. Stayed in bungalows that had poor locks/security - worried about theft. By the time I could fix the laptop, it had depreciated to the point that I would have been better off buying a new one.
Camera: Bring a small camera with extra memory cards as your PRIMARY camera. Burn CDs of your pictures regularly. Burn two copies. Keep one with you. Send one to somewhere safe. Large SLR cameras: Get a good telephoto lens and don't bring extra lenses. Decide how much you love photography and how much of your pack storage you're willing to devote to YOUR SECOND camera -- once you factor in the chargers and extra batteries and ram cards for each camera. Also, consider the security factors of your camera gear. Cameras are small and valuable/desirable and need to be protected. Keeping the number of things you have to protect to a minimum is a benefit when you travel. Also, you'll want to have some waterproof bag to put your camera/electronic gear in so that when you travel between cities in a minibus and your bags are on top of the minivan for 12 hours, you won't worry about the 4-hour typhoon-like rains ruining your electronic gear.
Dive gear: Not gadgets, per se. If you're a diver and your travel focus is diving, nothing beats traveling with your own gear. On the other hand, try being one person carrying 150 lbs. of bags with you and see how mobile you are when you're looking for deals on accomodation... Check your gear and stow it in reliable lockers in a big city when you're not going to be using it.
Backpack: Not a gadget, a necessity.
PDA: in my experience, PDA battery life and backpacking around aren't very compatible. I *WANTED* to use my PDA a lot while traveling, but battery life drains after a few hours and requires a long time to charge. Do you want to travel or spend time sitting in cafe's waiting for your PDA to charge? On long trips, your PDA battery will die and when you need it, you won't be able to use it. You'll run your battery down very low and get used the scary warnings about "BATTERY LEVEL CRITICALLY LOW: RECHARGE IMMEDIATELY OR RISK DATA LOSS"
Phone: chances are that your phone won't work in all of the countries you're traveling to. It's actually a good thing to have a working phone while you travel. Do your research in advance with your cell service provider. Make sure you have all of the proper adapters.
Internet cafes are easy to find. Don't encumber yourself with unnecessary gadgets. You'll find them much more of a burden than a benefit in general. They'll keep you from meeting interesting new people. *IF* you choose to bring gadgets, make some tradeoffs so that you don't bring too much stuff and keep your bag light.
Palm imploded, got rid of their talented engineers, stopped product development, and went into milk-whatever-revenue-stream-we've-got mode.
They've now painted themselves into a corner where the best thing PalmOS has got going for it is the vast array of Palm apps, and the worst thing going for them is their ancient patched up, buggy, impossible to develop for OS.
Palm has pissed off developers - lots of my favorite apps are no longer being developed or supported - many don't even have an official webpage). No good development environment for you.
Palm has pissed off users - no bugfixes for you, well okay... maybe *ONE fix*. No upgrades for you. No new non-treo products for you. No decent browser for you. No multitasking for you. No 802.11g wireless for you. Want a new feature? You'll need to buy a fractionally different product to get it.
I sincerely hope Apple eats Palm's lunch. I even hope that Microsoft copies apple's phone UI and makes Windows Mobile a decent OS. But, palm... you've let me down on so many levels for so many years... I don't need your redesigned icons or redesigned splash screen on the Palm desktop software. I don't need a new point version of versamail. I don't need Palm OS 5.4999999999. I don't need a new color on a treo. I don't need a battery with less battery life.
I'm glad you hired an ex-Apple developer. I'm sure that your ex-Be developers are hungry and will eat him up.
Jump into spring moon fashion! We've got the modular living quarters you're looking for at the prices that won't make you have to skimp on your Earth communication center!
Is the US government still buying $600 hammers and $500 toilet seats? When are the Chinese producers going to start competing in the lucrative Mil Spec market?
Think of how many companies have old systems that just continue to run forever. Most OS vendors drop OS patch support after about 5 years.
Okay, so all system processes should use UTC. We all know that. Users don't set their watches to UTC though.
Want a DST patch for Solaris 8? RHAS 2.1? Windows NT? You're going to have to shuffle and maybe you'll need to update the timezone files with 'zic' yourself. Have hundreds or thousands of these machines. Sucks to be you.
Oh, and the big killer is that Java has timezone rules embedded in it. That's right. Java VIRTUAL MACHINE. Java tracks timezones and DST changes INDEPENDENT of the OS since Java wants to be it's own OS.
So, if your company standardized on j2ee when you moved off the legacy systems for y2k, I'll almost bet you that the OS those java apps are running on won't have DST patches from the vendor, and your apps could have multiple JVMs that contain the wrong DST rules. You'll need to fix both of those if your java apps have anything to do with timezones and if you care about the times displayed.
I'd really like to get a list of everyone who voted for the 2005 dst timezone changes and start a movement to make them take responsibility for the huge business cost of their stupid legislation. It has to be 100X the cost of what they expected the changes to save...
While every techno-illiterate parent may be jumping up and down saying, "oh yes! Keep the sex offenders off the internet!"
What is being suggested here isn't really possible or desirable.
If you ever delete your cookies files, If you ever blocked ads, If you ever used an internet kiosk, If you ever have had the desire to surf the web anonymously, If you ever used PGP or put a password on an archive file, then you are against this type of thinking and need to be very concerned about where internet legislation is going and what it means to your privacy.
That being said... how in the world would anyone stop someone from joining an IRC channel and typing "/nick FriendlyKoolKid16"? How is anyone going to stop someone from registering for webmail and IM accounts?
I'm no criminal, yet I certainly wouldn't be willing to register any nicks I might use on IRC with the police. Neither would I willingly provide or want any companies to provide any information about my IM accounts to the police.
As a matter of fact, if I found out that AIM, MSN, Google, Yahoo! would capitulate to authorities and turn over information on me based solely on some suspicion that they might need access to my IM logs, I'd re-register at all of them with completely bogus information and single use mail accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
sudo is way better than su. Here's why:
sudo allows fine grained access control for users, machines, and commands. There is a config file that lets you do all sorts of restricted access.
su to root allows a user to do anything, lock anyone else out, change root password, etc.
the benefits of sudo may seem opaque in the case of a single user on a laptop where there's no admin or IT team. When you think about real multiuser machines with an IT support group and users who need a variety of privilege levels, sudo it a great solution.
A company with 15 servers?!
15 servers where I work is barely a ROUNDING ERROR
wget - grab url without any annoying save dialog boxes
elinks - text-based wysiwyg
calc - http://sf.net/projects/calc
vlc - cause it can play just about anything without concern on local OS dependencies
ImageMagic suite - these tools rock - most notably 'convert'
awk and sed - you'd be surprised how many times I've used awk and sed on a text/csv file in 5 seconds to do what someone else takes hours to do in a spreadsheet
find, grep, and xargs - with this trio, I can do in 1 minute what takes other people hours or days to do
scp - so much better than ftp for so many reasons
rsync - there are so many very expensive commerical data replication solutions that basically are just GUI wrappers around rsync
htop - I just like it. Fast, colorful, unbloated
tkdiff - one of the best graphical diff tools around. Small, simple, fast.
screen - take your console session with you
vncserver and vncclient - while I don't like their non-pam OS authenticaiton, they're great tools. Fast and lightweight
rdesktop
audacity
pidgin
Anyone whose ever spent time programming in emacs knows the name stands for "escape, meta, alt, control, shift"
;)
If you've never met a 'meta' key before... well... go buy yourself a real computer
That's plain stupid. You buy a computer you don't know how to use. You don't have an experienced admin. You don't pay for support.
Reminds me of the youtube video of the guy who just bought a helicopter, didn't know how to fly one, gets in, and within 30 seconds he had destroyed the whole thing. http://youtube.com/watch?v=upHc9xgNT5E
Post your idea on slashdot. All posts have a timestamp.
Here's another one: Remember x10 and popunders?
If you are actually trying to convince your boss to install BeOS 5 at work, then I'm afraid we can't help you.
... Enterprise Ubuntu 2?
As to silly names... everyone deals with codenames for products and projects. I don't mind that. I do think perhaps Canonical should do more to emphasize the LTS releases.
Perhaps retroactively brand 6.06 / Edgy Eft as Enterprise Ubuntu 1? Call Hoary Heron
As to naming hurting Ubuntu adoption... I'm not sure I could say "hoary" at my work to a mixed audience without getting reprimanded by HR.
Personally, I sort of like the fun names, but... could they be just a little less oblique?
Instead of Icosahedral Imp maybe something more like itchy iguana.
Instead of kinky koodoo maybe something more like kicking kangaroo.
That's because the true UNIX sysadmin gurus already know everything.
Can you find me any hardware that is supported in Vista and *not* in XP?
First off, all I can say is that the DefectiveByDesign campaign isn't changing its name to EnabledByDesign..
Reminds me of when NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) was deemed a bad name for a machine that people went in because "nukular" must be bad, right? (actually in the case refers to nucleus, not radiation).
So, we now have MRI machines instead of NMR machines.
I have some suggestions for new names for DRM?
NCT - Nuclear Cancer Terrorism?
NSV - Nigerian Scam Validation?
WAR - War Atrocities Rights?
BCS - Birdflu content system?
IHG - ILoveYou.exe hello.jpg goatse?
BBHMM - B!tch better have my money
Oh, man... that is *so* inaccurate. Windows users have very little useful software that is free. Most software is commercial or shareware. Windows users seek to fill the gaping functionality holes with commercial software and get nickeled and dimed (more like $20 and $50) to death. That, I believe, is a major factor for *Application* piracy.
Linux users on the other hand, explore all their well integrated, easy to centrally install, free options and find tools that work great, or pretty well, or at least do some of what they need for free.
Running MythTV, I have more than enough content that I'm paying for to watch on TV - I have no interest in looking for bittorents of video content.
Likewise, using streaming audio, I have more than enough access to audio content to keep me busy for the rest of my life.
They are stupid and/or lazy.
I believe it's more like website project managers saying:
92% of our server logs show people using IE7.
If you want this website to work on firefox, I'm going to need to hire more people.
I can't "certify" for Opera or Macintosh Safari.
We've leveraged scripting technology that only works with ActiveX. If you want to replace it, I'm going to need the following additional server, developers, and it's going to delay the $NEW_CONTENT_PROJECT by 4 months and cost $LARGE_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY.
You choose...
I just don't get the whole secondlife thing. Exactly how is it better than IRC ... or AOL chatrooms? It's graphic? Okay... so you need a really expensive computer and lots of bandwidth to play...
... do what?
... for free?
What, you can't play it? Oh... so you mean you just cruise around jerkily and congregate either on purpose or randomly.
Oh, okay... so you pretend to be a hot girl and
Oh, okay... so you design "virtual clothes" and sell them to people who want their avatars to load slower?
No, wait... you make "geek island" and invite all the lonely geeks on their computer to come and try to solve real problems?
Phase 1: Press release including Second Life
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
I have to agree. I've used MusicMatch for years, and while I like the overall interface and *LOVE* the supertagging feature, I've found musikCube to be much faster, much lighter weight, and more flexible for playing my music collection on Windows
Actually, DOS's death has been greatly exaggerated. It basically became Windows PE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallat
If you really want to be mobile and go a lot of places and see a lot of things, the key is to *NOT* encumber yourself with bulky/heavy/unreliable things.
I traveled around Asia with a laptop, large camera bag, dive gear bag, and a backpack.
I've done other backpack-ish trips with my PDA and phone.
Long story short.
Laptop: Spent a large amount of money on it right before my trip. Had to carry it in a separate backpack. Had to hold it over my head while I walked through waist high flood waters on the sidewalk. It broke, a travel buddy broke it, ruined a friendship. No place in Thailand could fix it. Warranty couldn't be honored without long trip to another country. Heavy. Needed lots of converters. Lugged a broken laptop around on my travels. Wasted travel time trying to get it fixed. Stayed in bungalows that had poor locks/security - worried about theft. By the time I could fix the laptop, it had depreciated to the point that I would have been better off buying a new one.
Camera: Bring a small camera with extra memory cards as your PRIMARY camera. Burn CDs of your pictures regularly. Burn two copies. Keep one with you. Send one to somewhere safe. Large SLR cameras: Get a good telephoto lens and don't bring extra lenses. Decide how much you love photography and how much of your pack storage you're willing to devote to YOUR SECOND camera -- once you factor in the chargers and extra batteries and ram cards for each camera. Also, consider the security factors of your camera gear. Cameras are small and valuable/desirable and need to be protected. Keeping the number of things you have to protect to a minimum is a benefit when you travel. Also, you'll want to have some waterproof bag to put your camera/electronic gear in so that when you travel between cities in a minibus and your bags are on top of the minivan for 12 hours, you won't worry about the 4-hour typhoon-like rains ruining your electronic gear.
Dive gear: Not gadgets, per se. If you're a diver and your travel focus is diving, nothing beats traveling with your own gear. On the other hand, try being one person carrying 150 lbs. of bags with you and see how mobile you are when you're looking for deals on accomodation... Check your gear and stow it in reliable lockers in a big city when you're not going to be using it.
Backpack: Not a gadget, a necessity.
PDA: in my experience, PDA battery life and backpacking around aren't very compatible. I *WANTED* to use my PDA a lot while traveling, but battery life drains after a few hours and requires a long time to charge. Do you want to travel or spend time sitting in cafe's waiting for your PDA to charge? On long trips, your PDA battery will die and when you need it, you won't be able to use it. You'll run your battery down very low and get used the scary warnings about "BATTERY LEVEL CRITICALLY LOW: RECHARGE IMMEDIATELY OR RISK DATA LOSS"
Phone: chances are that your phone won't work in all of the countries you're traveling to. It's actually a good thing to have a working phone while you travel. Do your research in advance with your cell service provider. Make sure you have all of the proper adapters.
Internet cafes are easy to find. Don't encumber yourself with unnecessary gadgets. You'll find them much more of a burden than a benefit in general. They'll keep you from meeting interesting new people. *IF* you choose to bring gadgets, make some tradeoffs so that you don't bring too much stuff and keep your bag light.
How exactly does digital TV lower costs for consumers?
More expensive TVs, obsoleted equipment, more expensive cable contracts, monthly rental for cable boxes, less freedom.
Yeah OK, we all see that it's a win for the US gov't to free up bandwidth.
The problem is that by doing so, they're aiding the campaign to implement DRM and "close the analog hole"s.
If digital TV provided the same freedom and flexibility as analog TV, this wouldn't even be a story on Slashdot.
Palm imploded, got rid of their talented engineers, stopped product development, and went into milk-whatever-revenue-stream-we've-got mode.
They've now painted themselves into a corner where the best thing PalmOS has got going for it is the vast array of Palm apps, and the worst thing going for them is their ancient patched up, buggy, impossible to develop for OS.
Palm has pissed off developers - lots of my favorite apps are no longer being developed or supported - many don't even have an official webpage). No good development environment for you.
Palm has pissed off users - no bugfixes for you, well okay... maybe *ONE fix*. No upgrades for you. No new non-treo products for you. No decent browser for you. No multitasking for you. No 802.11g wireless for you. Want a new feature? You'll need to buy a fractionally different product to get it.
I sincerely hope Apple eats Palm's lunch. I even hope that Microsoft copies apple's phone UI and makes Windows Mobile a decent OS. But, palm... you've let me down on so many levels for so many years... I don't need your redesigned icons or redesigned splash screen on the Palm desktop software. I don't need a new point version of versamail. I don't need Palm OS 5.4999999999. I don't need a new color on a treo. I don't need a battery with less battery life.
I'm glad you hired an ex-Apple developer. I'm sure that your ex-Be developers are hungry and will eat him up.
Can't you just imagine the newspaper inserts?
Jump into spring moon fashion!
We've got the modular living quarters you're looking for at the prices that won't make you have to skimp on your Earth communication center!
Is the US government still buying $600 hammers and $500 toilet seats? When are the Chinese producers going to start competing in the lucrative Mil Spec market?
I can see the writing on the wall.
...
Greetz griefers! Want to 0wn the n00b in your class? download this script and run it to disable anyone's OLPC.
Here's what you do:
Thanks for that list... It appears that, among other things, we can thank the "red staters" for this DST change legislation.
Think of how many companies have old systems that just continue to run forever. Most OS vendors drop OS patch support after about 5 years.
Okay, so all system processes should use UTC. We all know that. Users don't set their watches to UTC though.
Want a DST patch for Solaris 8? RHAS 2.1? Windows NT? You're going to have to shuffle and maybe you'll need to update the timezone files with 'zic' yourself. Have hundreds or thousands of these machines. Sucks to be you.
Oh, and the big killer is that Java has timezone rules embedded in it. That's right. Java VIRTUAL MACHINE. Java tracks timezones and DST changes INDEPENDENT of the OS since Java wants to be it's own OS.
So, if your company standardized on j2ee when you moved off the legacy systems for y2k, I'll almost bet you that the OS those java apps are running on won't have DST patches from the vendor, and your apps could have multiple JVMs that contain the wrong DST rules. You'll need to fix both of those if your java apps have anything to do with timezones and if you care about the times displayed.
I'd really like to get a list of everyone who voted for the 2005 dst timezone changes and start a movement to make them take responsibility for the huge business cost of their stupid legislation. It has to be 100X the cost of what they expected the changes to save...
While every techno-illiterate parent may be jumping up and down saying, "oh yes! Keep the sex offenders off the internet!"
What is being suggested here isn't really possible or desirable.
If you ever delete your cookies files, If you ever blocked ads, If you ever used an internet kiosk, If you ever have had the desire to surf the web anonymously, If you ever used PGP or put a password on an archive file, then you are against this type of thinking and need to be very concerned about where internet legislation is going and what it means to your privacy.
That being said... how in the world would anyone stop someone from joining an IRC channel and typing "/nick FriendlyKoolKid16"? How is anyone going to stop someone from registering for webmail and IM accounts?
I'm no criminal, yet I certainly wouldn't be willing to register any nicks I might use on IRC with the police. Neither would I willingly provide or want any companies to provide any information about my IM accounts to the police.
As a matter of fact, if I found out that AIM, MSN, Google, Yahoo! would capitulate to authorities and turn over information on me based solely on some suspicion that they might need access to my IM logs, I'd re-register at all of them with completely bogus information and single use mail accounts.