Rich text format seems to be the preferred document format among open-source word processors, yet KWord still lacks this feature. Heck, even MS-Word can read and save RTF!
Given that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format, and changes with each release of Word, this is not surprising. It's definitely a bad format to try to follow, particularly at this stage in the development of XML, which should make both.rtf and.doc obsolete.
KOffice needs to have provisions for English measurement parameters in KWord and its other products.
English measurements are millimetres. It's only Americans who still use inches. And, as with other open source projects, if you want it fixed, fix it.
When was the last time that the United States or Israel flew a plane loaded with jet fuel into an office building full of civilians?
The answer is, most recently, Monday this week. OK, so it was missiles, not planes, but the effect is much the same, and they've been doing it regularly for the last fifteen years at least.
Now that's an interesting point! My experience has been that when overloaded...
mainframes and real Unix servers (Sun, HP, etc.) slow down instead of crashing.
Linux (and NT) crashes hard.
I don't know what you're running, mate. I've been running Linux on Intel, BSD on ARM, Solaris on SPARC, AIX on RS6000, UnixWare on Intel, and NCR and Data General badged System V.4 on Intel and Aviion hardware for fifteen years. All of them slow up under load. If you get your swap badly wrong, and you run out of memory hard, all of them will fall over in a heap. Linux is in my experience just as robust under very heavy load as any other UN*X. The quality of the hardware matters, of course; if you buy cheap hardware, you will get reliability problems.
I've never run Windows, so I can't comment on that.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
For the record, I am a citizen of Israel, but have been living in the USA for three years. Probably become a citizen soon if I feel like it.
For the record, who do you think lived in what is now Israel, before Zionist terrorists drove them out? The wheel rolls around.
One of the most foolish things you can do in a conflict is to under-rate your enemy.
A few terrorists lost their lives, to perform a dispicable and cowardly act, this is not bravery.
When our soldiers are involved in a war and embark on a mission which they know is going to lead to their deaths, we call them heroes - whether they succeed or not. The people who engaged in this attack - whatever you may think of their motivation - were in the highest degree professional, disciplined, competent and courageous. They carried out a mission behind 'enemy' (their enemy) lines. Their security was not breached. Three out of four of their targets were hit, two were destroyed. And they died, as they knew they would.
That makes them an elite military unit. Yes, we don't like what they did. Yes, we don't agree with their motivations. But if you think of them as 'cowards', or any other belittling term, they will hit you again and again because you will not set up defences which are proof against elite professionals. Belittling your enemy breeds complancency, and complacency leads to defeat.
Respect these men. They are supremely disciplined, superbly organised, totally unafraid. If you do not respect them, you will not beat them.
My wife and I were speculating last night: will they rebuild the towers?
Oh, yeah, this is great. At a time when there's way too much office accomodation in NYC, when commuting's a major hassle, when the Internet and home working makes large offices less and less relevent, we rebuild a building which is a proven prime terrorist target. Let's just set the skittles up again.
Simon, knowing he's going to lose some karma over this one.
The only difference was that Bomber Harris had access to a much greater array of weaponry than the terrorists who attacked today.
What's scary about this is that the perpetrators did not need access to a 'greater array of weaponry'. While the US President commits huge sums of money, and breaches solemn international treaty obligations, to develop missile defence, the perpetrators were able to use fifty tons of aviation fuel that they didn't even have to pay for. Who needs a suitcase bomb, when you've got domestic aircraft?
This was a superbly well organised and executed operation on the part of the perpetrators, whoever they were, but it was also an incredibly cheap one. I should be surprised if the whole budget for the operation exceeded $100,000.
So what can a government do in response to this? It's easy (and depressing) to predict what Dubya will do - just what so many here are urging him to do. And it's easy to see exactly why it will be counter productive. If the US Government lauches its predictable 'massive strike' against the assumed perpetrators, there will inevitably be enough 'colateral damage' to radicalise a whole new population of people who don't yet hate the US that much. And they'll get together and launch more strikes like todays, because (if you are sufficiently organised, disciplined, ruthless and security conscious) strikes like todays are cheap to mount out of all proportion to the damage they cause.
The US cannot run. It cannot hide. It cannot - ever - protect itself against this sort of thing. It has thousands of miles of coastline, thousands of miles of borders, which it can never effectively monitor. Today shows that wannabe terrorists don't have to smuggle in large quantities of explosives.
For the US as for the rest of the democracies of the world, the only solution to this problem is not to be hated that much. And the only way to not be hated that much is to not act unreasonably. Which means - among other things - that the response to today's event must be strictly limited to individuals who are provably in the direct chain of command to today's event - and not thousands of civilians who just happen to live in the same town.
Not meaning to be a pessimist here but the UE and the states are quite powerless. The only thing they can do is ban sales of ms products in their states or in Europe. They wont and can't do this.
You're a pessimist. They don't need to do anything as draconian as that.
Nothing stops either the states of California and New York, or the European Union, mandating that all computers in use in the public sector run only software to which the full source code is freely available. If they do this, then they constitute a market force sufficiently large to guarantee that all the software needs of a very large organisation can be met from open source. In which case,
every other large organisation has the choice between paying large sums to Microsoft for no benefit, or adopting the open source alternatives.
every OEM has the choice of selling his products with Microsoft OS and pay the Microsoft tax, or selling them with a well-proven, publicly recognised, free alternative.
Microsoft would not even have to be mentioned by name in this legislation. The legislation could be justified simply on grounds of security, as France has been suggesting, or on grounds of cost, as Brazil has been suggesting. But it would destroy Microsoft's dominant position utterly and permanently. Interesting times lie ahead.
And why the fsck are they using Pascal?!!! Would it have been that hard to port the old winsock code over to cpp?
C++ isn't the beginning and end of computer science. It isn't even a particularly good language - for any purpose. Pascal is a perfectly reasonable choice of a language to write an OS in. OK, it wouldn't be my choice either - but it's what, for example, MacOS used to be written in. Any programming team is going to be most productive in the language they're most familiar with. If they go for Pascal, fine, that won't kill the project.
And source will be open to "select partners" only? Sorry, peter, but fuck shared source.
H'mmm... yeah... well there I do agree with you. Suppose I want to use a Win32 application but I don't want to run Win32. I can run Linux + WINE, and if it busts in some way that's critical to my application, I've got the source so I might be able to fix it; and I've got a critical mass of a community out there so there's a good chance someone else knows how to fix it.
Or I can go PetrOS, and I won't have the source or the community, and even if I did have the community they won't have the source so they won't know how to fix it. Shared Source will kill this project.
... would be for LEGO to give Markus a license to use their trademark for the operating system. That protects their trademark rights (because he can no longer be seen to be infringing) and keeps everyone happy.
[Declaration of interest: I run LegOS on my robots].
Not safe to say this in the US of A?
on
ACM vs. RIAA
·
· Score: 2
From the declaration:
"I am the Executive Director of the Association for Computing Machinery ('ACM'), a non-profit educational and scientific computing society, whose executive offices are located at 1515 Broadway, New York, New York 10036....
"...application of the DMCA to the presentation and publication of scientific papers could result in the departure from the U.S. of the information security community for conferences and publications...
"...I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on August 6, 2001 in London, England."
You know, I wouldn't stress. I don't think these dates are nearly as critical as that. I mean, suppose the EU adopted the suggestion (already gaining ground in France and in Latin America) that all public-sector computer systems had to be open source. Suppose they went on to require organisations contracting to the public sector to have compatible systems.
BANG!
There goes Microsoft's monopoly. The EU is big enough and powerful enough to make it work. If there are interoperable open source applications for everything that every public sector body in Europe wants to do, then there are open source applications fo everything any large corporation needs to do, and everything any business user needs to do, anywhere in the world.
This wouldn't drive Microsoft out of business, of course, nor should it; but it would mean that if they wanted to sell anything into European Government markets they'd have to (i) open source it and (ii) make it interoperate with other open source software.
It also means that the corporate and public sector, everywhere in the world, would be able to choose between proven, demonstrable, free software already in use in one of the world's largest beaurocracies, and expensive software from Microsoft. The monopoly would erode pretty quickly.
I roll out of bed about nine, wander down the corridor, make a coffee, sit down at my desk and read Usenet and/. for about an hour. Then I work for a bit. Unless of course the tide is up and the weather looks nice in which case I go sailing. Or if the tide isn't up I might go up the hillside and look at the trees growing. And I might take my laptop and I might not. And then I wander back to my desk and read some email and do a bit more work.
I'm perfectly sure this qualifies as the good life, and I'm not swapping with anyone. I get to earn a very-nearly-big-city income while living in a remote rural location, and not actually working terribly hard.
There's no way I'm going back to living in a city.
There's no way I'm going back to working in an office.
There's no way I'm going to sit in a traffic jam every morning and evening.
There's no way I'm going to work in a cube.
The world does not contain enough money or toys to motivate me to do any of that shit.
Before we get upset and assume that there is some sort of corporate conspiracy keeping multi-OS systems off the shelfs
When I bought my Toshiba Libretto, it came preinstalled with two OSs. When first booted up, it offered a dialogue box which asked which of the two OSs you wanted to use, and then deleted the other.
What were those OSs? MS Win95 and MS Win98. But that's really not the point. Toshiba had developed an installer which allowed the machine to be shipped to the customer with multiple OSs, and allow the user to choose which he wanted. It's not just technically possible, it was judged financially worth while.
And it would have been nice if it had also shipped with Linux installed, because it's a real pain getting Linux onto one of those beaties first time. The additional cost of adding Linux would have been small, and it doesn't take much research to discover that quite a proportion of the ultra-small, ultra-geek-toy laptops run alternative OSs - just check out any geek conference you go to.
They didn't even show him any evidence that his IP number was used.
Actually, as far as we know based on the information in the story, they didn't even specify what copyright material they alleged had been posted. This is a great way to take out people whom you dislike - randomly accuse them DMCA violation. Sure, you could get sued for perjury, but Joe Average isn't going to go up in court against a large corporation.
Even if he does, in a situation where the large corporation is both the accuser and the ISP, it is perfectly capable of forging the evidence, so this is pretty safe.
When you have people being paid to help support a peice of software I feel you get a superior product.... So what if OSS people care about their products more, they code only for their own needs and the "customer" comes second.
Complete non sequitor. Open source doesn't have a 'customer'. I know I've been droning on about this for ages, but the nugget of truth you're looking for is that the Open Source movement will never make software for Joe Public to use, because Joe Public needs things that we don't and vice versa. The fact that it lacks the ease of use features that Joe Public needs doesn't make it less good - it's designed by and for a community which doesn't need them, and doesn't value them.
It remains true that Open Source software is by and large better engineered, better written, better suited to the purpose for which it was built, and generally just better.
These errors are the most irritating, since the html doesn't read as invalid when you are writing it.
If a page isn't valid, it isn't valid. And if a web designer is so unprofessional (s)he can't write a valid web page, that's not the browser's problem.
My experience, on a much faster more modern machine with lots of memory, is that Netscape is substantially slower, especially on complex pages, than either Opera or Konqi. I suspect that the test machine was running out of memory and was paging; Netscape being relatively small may have appeared better under those conditions.
Frankly, if you care, rerun these tests yourself; I don't think the figures quoted are representative.
$125 million (when he owned more of the company, I'll bet) or $11 million... hmmm, which would I choose?
You know, money doesn't mean everything, and frankly, past the first ten million, just how many more Ferraris can one man drive? Integrity means a lot, and so does reputation, and so does independence...
Furthermore, the people we are talking about are Übergeeks first and anything else second. If you're a geek, you know that what motivates you is getting to build the next big one, not how much loot you get.
...whose only busienss was selling games to a community that would rather pirate them...
You know, I find that really offensive. There is no pirated software on any of my machines - none at all. I'm sure that's true of many other Linux users, probably most. There is proprietary commercial software on my machines, including Loki games; but it's all paid for.
Yes, I'm an open source person. Most of my own work is available under BSD license. I maintain three separate open source packages. I use, in my work, many other open source packages. And there are a huge range of packages I don't use because their licenses are not compatible with what I'm doing.
Open source people are not pirates. Most pirated software, lets face it, is Windows software. How many Windows machines do you know which have no pirate software at all? Closed source people are far more likely, in my experience, to be pirates than open source people.
One of the things I'm seeing here is that people are recommending the distro's they've used recently, and knocking distros they haven't. For example
He probably placed Slackware above Debian for a few reasons. The install actually needs no explanation. It is all very easy to use and understand, and works quite well. Debian was my first Linux installation, and it absolutely confused the heck out of me trying to figure out exactly which disk images I needed to download,
I installed yet another Debian 2.2r3 box yesterday, the fifth in this room alone. Procedure: put the first CD in the CD drive, boot, answer a few on-screen questions, change CDs when prompted, job done. All distros are getting slicker, all installs are getting easier. Likewise, all package management systems are getting better.
However, while it's my perception that Mandrake is leading the charge on slickness of install and point-clicky admin tools, Debian is definitely leading the charge on package management and stability. As a newbie, you value slick install and pointy clicky admin; as you get older and more grizzled, you value package management and stability.
So my advice to a newbie would definitely be try Mandrake first, but be prepared to switch later.
Why is it that political or foreign-relations stories get all the responses with Bush-bashing and America-bashing? I would like to have an accurate poll as to how many of these 'informed' slashdot posters actually voted.
I voted. For Malcolm Fleming of the Scottish National Party. Oddly enough, there are 180 odd countries in the world which are not the United States, and which do not conduct foreign policy by a mixture of ignorance, arrogance and petulance.
Some of us even live in countries where for the brother of one of the candidates in an important election to be in charge of the administration of the vote, even in a local area, would be considered improper. As a representative of the Zimbabwean government was quoted as saying after the United States last presidential farce, if they had conducted an election like that in Zimbabwe, the American's would have been the first ot condemn it as neither free nor fair.
There are several different builds of IE5 floating about and they are significantly different at least at the HTTP level; I know this to my cost because (at least) one generates incorrect RFC 1967 headers, and this breaks my maybeupload package.
IE 5.5 and IE 6 are much better. While I use Konqi as my browser of choice, there's no doubt that the latest IEs are very good.
Are there people our there running Linux on laptops that are under 4 pounds ? What are your opinions on these ?
I run Debian Stable on a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. It's three years old, and I still use it because I don't think anyone's yet produced anything as good. It weight 2 pounds 4 ounces, is the size of a paperback book, and will happily run a full Oracle + Apache + Tomcat servlet setup. Downside is short battery life - about 90b minutes.
I wrote the following shell script to mail webmasters on infected hosts:
#!/bin/bash
# OK: the rationale behind this is that it will lookup the name of each host
# which probes us with the Code Red style probe, and then see whether that
# name resolves back to the number. If it does there's some hope that it's a
# real host, so we'll try to mail webmaster@
log=$HOME/codered.log
for ip in `grep default.ida/var/log/httpd/access_log |\
awk '{print $1}'`
do
grep "$ip" $log >/dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then # it's not there
echo $ip >> $log # remember so we don't mail them again
if [ "$ip" = "$valid" ]
then
mail -s "Your machine appears to be infected by Code Red" \
webmaster@$host <<EOF
Dear Webmaster
We have received a request for 'default.ida' from your server at
$ip. This is usually an indication that you have been
infected by the 'Code Red' or 'Code Red II' worm, currently
attacking Microsoft IIS servers. To secure your server, download
and install the appropriate patch from Microsoft
* Windows NT 4.0:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Rel easeID=30833
* Windows 2000:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Rel easeID=30800
Or, better still, switch to a proper operating system
EOF
echo "...mailed"
else
echo " ? not valid?"
fi
fi
done
I've been hit by 61 different unique IP's today, of which 17 had IPs which resolved to addresses which resolved to the same IPs. So how many of my mails were actually accepted for delivery?
Slashdot Mirror
Given that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format, and changes with each release of Word, this is not surprising. It's definitely a bad format to try to follow, particularly at this stage in the development of XML, which should make both .rtf and .doc obsolete.
English measurements are millimetres. It's only Americans who still use inches. And, as with other open source projects, if you want it fixed, fix it.
The answer is, most recently, Monday this week. OK, so it was missiles, not planes, but the effect is much the same, and they've been doing it regularly for the last fifteen years at least.
I don't know what you're running, mate. I've been running Linux on Intel, BSD on ARM, Solaris on SPARC, AIX on RS6000, UnixWare on Intel, and NCR and Data General badged System V.4 on Intel and Aviion hardware for fifteen years. All of them slow up under load. If you get your swap badly wrong, and you run out of memory hard, all of them will fall over in a heap. Linux is in my experience just as robust under very heavy load as any other UN*X. The quality of the hardware matters, of course; if you buy cheap hardware, you will get reliability problems.
I've never run Windows, so I can't comment on that.
For the record, who do you think lived in what is now Israel, before Zionist terrorists drove them out? The wheel rolls around.
One of the most foolish things you can do in a conflict is to under-rate your enemy.
When our soldiers are involved in a war and embark on a mission which they know is going to lead to their deaths, we call them heroes - whether they succeed or not. The people who engaged in this attack - whatever you may think of their motivation - were in the highest degree professional, disciplined, competent and courageous. They carried out a mission behind 'enemy' (their enemy) lines. Their security was not breached. Three out of four of their targets were hit, two were destroyed. And they died, as they knew they would.
That makes them an elite military unit. Yes, we don't like what they did. Yes, we don't agree with their motivations. But if you think of them as 'cowards', or any other belittling term, they will hit you again and again because you will not set up defences which are proof against elite professionals. Belittling your enemy breeds complancency, and complacency leads to defeat.
Respect these men. They are supremely disciplined, superbly organised, totally unafraid. If you do not respect them, you will not beat them.
Oh, yeah, this is great. At a time when there's way too much office accomodation in NYC, when commuting's a major hassle, when the Internet and home working makes large offices less and less relevent, we rebuild a building which is a proven prime terrorist target. Let's just set the skittles up again.
Simon, knowing he's going to lose some karma over this one.
[disclaimer: I'm Scots, posting from Scotland]
What's scary about this is that the perpetrators did not need access to a 'greater array of weaponry'. While the US President commits huge sums of money, and breaches solemn international treaty obligations, to develop missile defence, the perpetrators were able to use fifty tons of aviation fuel that they didn't even have to pay for. Who needs a suitcase bomb, when you've got domestic aircraft?
This was a superbly well organised and executed operation on the part of the perpetrators, whoever they were, but it was also an incredibly cheap one. I should be surprised if the whole budget for the operation exceeded $100,000.
So what can a government do in response to this? It's easy (and depressing) to predict what Dubya will do - just what so many here are urging him to do. And it's easy to see exactly why it will be counter productive. If the US Government lauches its predictable 'massive strike' against the assumed perpetrators, there will inevitably be enough 'colateral damage' to radicalise a whole new population of people who don't yet hate the US that much. And they'll get together and launch more strikes like todays, because (if you are sufficiently organised, disciplined, ruthless and security conscious) strikes like todays are cheap to mount out of all proportion to the damage they cause.
The US cannot run. It cannot hide. It cannot - ever - protect itself against this sort of thing. It has thousands of miles of coastline, thousands of miles of borders, which it can never effectively monitor. Today shows that wannabe terrorists don't have to smuggle in large quantities of explosives.
For the US as for the rest of the democracies of the world, the only solution to this problem is not to be hated that much. And the only way to not be hated that much is to not act unreasonably. Which means - among other things - that the response to today's event must be strictly limited to individuals who are provably in the direct chain of command to today's event - and not thousands of civilians who just happen to live in the same town.
You're a pessimist. They don't need to do anything as draconian as that.
Nothing stops either the states of California and New York, or the European Union, mandating that all computers in use in the public sector run only software to which the full source code is freely available. If they do this, then they constitute a market force sufficiently large to guarantee that all the software needs of a very large organisation can be met from open source. In which case,
Microsoft would not even have to be mentioned by name in this legislation. The legislation could be justified simply on grounds of security, as France has been suggesting, or on grounds of cost, as Brazil has been suggesting. But it would destroy Microsoft's dominant position utterly and permanently. Interesting times lie ahead.
C++ isn't the beginning and end of computer science. It isn't even a particularly good language - for any purpose. Pascal is a perfectly reasonable choice of a language to write an OS in. OK, it wouldn't be my choice either - but it's what, for example, MacOS used to be written in. Any programming team is going to be most productive in the language they're most familiar with. If they go for Pascal, fine, that won't kill the project.
H'mmm... yeah... well there I do agree with you. Suppose I want to use a Win32 application but I don't want to run Win32. I can run Linux + WINE, and if it busts in some way that's critical to my application, I've got the source so I might be able to fix it; and I've got a critical mass of a community out there so there's a good chance someone else knows how to fix it.
Or I can go PetrOS, and I won't have the source or the community, and even if I did have the community they won't have the source so they won't know how to fix it. Shared Source will kill this project.
[Declaration of interest: I run LegOS on my robots].
From the declaration:
Comment would be superfluous, wouldn't it?
You know, I wouldn't stress. I don't think these dates are nearly as critical as that. I mean, suppose the EU adopted the suggestion (already gaining ground in France and in Latin America) that all public-sector computer systems had to be open source. Suppose they went on to require organisations contracting to the public sector to have compatible systems.
BANG!
There goes Microsoft's monopoly. The EU is big enough and powerful enough to make it work. If there are interoperable open source applications for everything that every public sector body in Europe wants to do, then there are open source applications fo everything any large corporation needs to do, and everything any business user needs to do, anywhere in the world.
This wouldn't drive Microsoft out of business, of course, nor should it; but it would mean that if they wanted to sell anything into European Government markets they'd have to (i) open source it and (ii) make it interoperate with other open source software.
It also means that the corporate and public sector, everywhere in the world, would be able to choose between proven, demonstrable, free software already in use in one of the world's largest beaurocracies, and expensive software from Microsoft. The monopoly would erode pretty quickly.
I roll out of bed about nine, wander down the corridor, make a coffee, sit down at my desk and read Usenet and /. for about an hour. Then I work for a bit. Unless of course the tide is up and the weather looks nice in which case I go sailing. Or if the tide isn't up I might go up the hillside and look at the trees growing. And I might take my laptop and I might not. And then I wander back to my desk and read some email and do a bit more work.
I'm perfectly sure this qualifies as the good life, and I'm not swapping with anyone. I get to earn a very-nearly-big-city income while living in a remote rural location, and not actually working terribly hard.
There's no way I'm going back to living in a city.
There's no way I'm going back to working in an office.
There's no way I'm going to sit in a traffic jam every morning and evening.
There's no way I'm going to work in a cube.
The world does not contain enough money or toys to motivate me to do any of that shit.
When I bought my Toshiba Libretto, it came preinstalled with two OSs. When first booted up, it offered a dialogue box which asked which of the two OSs you wanted to use, and then deleted the other.
What were those OSs? MS Win95 and MS Win98. But that's really not the point. Toshiba had developed an installer which allowed the machine to be shipped to the customer with multiple OSs, and allow the user to choose which he wanted. It's not just technically possible, it was judged financially worth while.
And it would have been nice if it had also shipped with Linux installed, because it's a real pain getting Linux onto one of those beaties first time. The additional cost of adding Linux would have been small, and it doesn't take much research to discover that quite a proportion of the ultra-small, ultra-geek-toy laptops run alternative OSs - just check out any geek conference you go to.
Actually, as far as we know based on the information in the story, they didn't even specify what copyright material they alleged had been posted. This is a great way to take out people whom you dislike - randomly accuse them DMCA violation. Sure, you could get sued for perjury, but Joe Average isn't going to go up in court against a large corporation.
Even if he does, in a situation where the large corporation is both the accuser and the ISP, it is perfectly capable of forging the evidence, so this is pretty safe.
Complete non sequitor. Open source doesn't have a 'customer'. I know I've been droning on about this for ages, but the nugget of truth you're looking for is that the Open Source movement will never make software for Joe Public to use, because Joe Public needs things that we don't and vice versa. The fact that it lacks the ease of use features that Joe Public needs doesn't make it less good - it's designed by and for a community which doesn't need them, and doesn't value them.
It remains true that Open Source software is by and large better engineered, better written, better suited to the purpose for which it was built, and generally just better.
If a page isn't valid, it isn't valid. And if a web designer is so unprofessional (s)he can't write a valid web page, that's not the browser's problem.
Frankly, if you care, rerun these tests yourself; I don't think the figures quoted are representative.
You know, money doesn't mean everything, and frankly, past the first ten million, just how many more Ferraris can one man drive? Integrity means a lot, and so does reputation, and so does independence...
Furthermore, the people we are talking about are Übergeeks first and anything else second. If you're a geek, you know that what motivates you is getting to build the next big one, not how much loot you get.
You know, I find that really offensive. There is no pirated software on any of my machines - none at all. I'm sure that's true of many other Linux users, probably most. There is proprietary commercial software on my machines, including Loki games; but it's all paid for.
Yes, I'm an open source person. Most of my own work is available under BSD license. I maintain three separate open source packages. I use, in my work, many other open source packages. And there are a huge range of packages I don't use because their licenses are not compatible with what I'm doing.
Open source people are not pirates. Most pirated software, lets face it, is Windows software. How many Windows machines do you know which have no pirate software at all? Closed source people are far more likely, in my experience, to be pirates than open source people.
One of the things I'm seeing here is that people are recommending the distro's they've used recently, and knocking distros they haven't. For example
I installed yet another Debian 2.2r3 box yesterday, the fifth in this room alone. Procedure: put the first CD in the CD drive, boot, answer a few on-screen questions, change CDs when prompted, job done. All distros are getting slicker, all installs are getting easier. Likewise, all package management systems are getting better.
However, while it's my perception that Mandrake is leading the charge on slickness of install and point-clicky admin tools, Debian is definitely leading the charge on package management and stability. As a newbie, you value slick install and pointy clicky admin; as you get older and more grizzled, you value package management and stability.
So my advice to a newbie would definitely be try Mandrake first, but be prepared to switch later.
There are several different builds of IE5 floating about and they are significantly different at least at the HTTP level; I know this to my cost because (at least) one generates incorrect RFC 1967 headers, and this breaks my maybeupload package.
IE 5.5 and IE 6 are much better. While I use Konqi as my browser of choice, there's no doubt that the latest IEs are very good.
I run Debian Stable on a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. It's three years old, and I still use it because I don't think anyone's yet produced anything as good. It weight 2 pounds 4 ounces, is the size of a paperback book, and will happily run a full Oracle + Apache + Tomcat servlet setup. Downside is short battery life - about 90b minutes.
#!/bin/bash
# OK: the rationale behind this is that it will lookup the name of each host
# which probes us with the Code Red style probe, and then see whether that
# name resolves back to the number. If it does there's some hope that it's a
# real host, so we'll try to mail webmaster@
log=$HOME/codered.log
for ip in `grep default.ida
awk '{print $1}'`
do
grep "$ip" $log >
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then # it's not there
echo $ip >> $log # remember so we don't mail them again
host=`dig -x $ip -Aq +nocmd +nostats +noheader +noauthor \
+noaddit | tail -3 | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/\.$//'`
echo -n "Seen $ip [$host]"
echo $host | grep '^[a-z0-9.-]*$' >
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo -n "...appears to be valid..."
valid=`nslookup $host | tail -2 | grep '^Address:' |\
awk '{print $2}'`
fi
if [ "$ip" = "$valid" ]
then
mail -s "Your machine appears to be infected by Code Red" \
webmaster@$host <<EOF
Dear Webmaster
We have received a request for 'default.ida' from your server at
$ip. This is usually an indication that you have been
infected by the 'Code Red' or 'Code Red II' worm, currently
attacking Microsoft IIS servers. To secure your server, download
and install the appropriate patch from Microsoft
* Windows NT 4.0:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Re
* Windows 2000:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Re
Or, better still, switch to a proper operating system
EOF
echo "
else
echo " ? not valid?"
fi
fi
done
I've been hit by 61 different unique IP's today, of which 17 had IPs which resolved to addresses which resolved to the same IPs. So how many of my mails were actually accepted for delivery?
That's right, none.