I agree that discovering that the barn door could be opened before it was installed is the best solution, however just in case something is found, you have to have a half-decent backup plan.
This is something that I believe Windows XP got right - by forcing users to download the latest patches, it means that the clueless are no longer vulnerable, and those who know enough to turn the updates off are either keeping up with the patches themselves, or basically have nobody to blame when Code Red III comes along...
The article says that the kernel is affected - does it statically link zlib, in which case a recompile is in order, or do I just need to upgrade the zlib package?
Ok, in reference to the part that you quoted I shouldn't have said appeared - it actually _did_ become more unstable - Trying to run various programs would cause similar errors, and very quickly, the keyboard/mouse would lock up, forcing a reboot.
In the case of Internet Explorer crashing, you get used to the way that your computer responds when it is stable - how long it takes for software to boot up, how the mouse moves across the screen, how long it takes for the start menu to respond, and how it draws itself on the screen, how often the hard drive whirs, when it is likely to spin up, and what it sounds like when it does, etc. When these things change for no reason, then it's a warning sign - you know something is happening which doesn't in the normal operation of your computer, and in my experience, it normally means that the computer is about to crash.
Ok, it doesn't work on my system, but what he's trying to do is to find out whichever Mozilla you are using, and see how long it takes to read it, piping the output to/dev/null so that you don't see it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - the mozilla found on my system is a tiny script which calls the _real_ mozilla. This script is only about 5K in size and therefore minimal
I've had experiences before where an application would crash whilst in a DLL, (or a VXD but I could be wrong - it's been a long time), and then within the course of say, the next five minutes, the computer would appear to become more and more unstable.
This isn't the same kind of thing that ever crashed IE - the error messages always came from explorer.exe or iexplorer.exe (I can't remember which) - but the system would feel like it was in the same unstable state.
Ummm... you don't download them, but the install _is_ package/component based
Or have you never noticed the "Custom" option during installation:-P
* * *
An OT annecdote - MS Office and how I converted to Linux.
Windows 98 was starting to p*ss me off again - ever time I tried to load it, it was getting slower and slower, so I guessed I had to free up some hard drive space - I was running pretty low. I started uninstalling some software that I didn't use very often. Each and every one required me to reboot the computer (WHY?!?). Still, it wasn't speeding up. So I uninstalled MS Office 97. Hey - I wasn't using it much anyway, and I have it on CD.
Tumpty tumpty tum, Uninstall complete, Windows must now restart.
Have you ever noticed how, on Windows, after the desktop appears it still takes a good thirty seconds to a minute until your computer actually starts responding to what you want to do? (for me the time seems to increase proportional to how many programs you have uninstalled)
The issue is not that IE takes less time to load than say, Konqueror or Netscape, it's that it loads at startup, whether you want it to or not.
Here's a question I don't know the answer to - what happens when Internet Explorer crashes? Does it get completely unloaded from memory, like any crashes program should, or does partially remain?
An unrelated point (as in that I never thought about the relation between the two until now) but I realise that at any point that Internet Explorer has ever crashed on me before, I've had to reboot Windows before my computer "feels" stable again, and I'm the kind of person who picks up on the warning signs when a computer/program are about to crash...
Anyway, that's (some of) the reasons I use KDE on linux...
The problem with peer 2 peer networks is that they are only as useful as the content shared on them.
And the content shared depends upon the number iof people using the service.
It makes sense for Morpheus to switch to a P2P which has a known audience, so that they don't have to start "from scratch"
I would like to hazard aguess that the gnutella network is slowly but surely becoming more mature, and more capable of handling large loads, with the addiiion of ultra peers or whatever they are called in Limewire, In other words, the mathematical arguments againsy the gnutella network are being worked around, instead of being ignored.
At the moment, I do not believe that Gnutella is the best network out there. However, it does seem to be the only one that is actually advancing with new features.
I would like to add that a lot of places still use Windows NT 4.0, which as far as I can tell does not have antialiased text (or if it does, it's really badly anti-aliased at the place where I use it).
Now that I've set fonts up, my Linux box running KDE 2.2 looks just as pretty as Windows XP, font-wise.
(IMHO it looks better than Windows XP period, but hey - that's off topic)
That's great as long as the money's there, but now it seems these companies have bled all their cash away, leaving the community right where it was before.
...except from all the money that they pumped in of course.
The community only grows stronger when a business joins us. When a business leaves us, we _haven't_ lost anything, we have merely stopped gaining from them.
Corel has left, but the work that they put in remains and will be built upon. That is the crowning achievement of free software.
Wordperfect for linux isn't free software, and hence doesn't fall under the argument I just proposed:-)
If you've still got any lucasarts games that your wanting to play again under linux or windows, then you could do worse than checking out scummvm which is an interpreter for them.
Your either compiling it on a spectrum or your doing something wrong. For a _FULL_ compile of kdelibs, kdebase, koffice and kdenetwork, it only takes about 8 hourse on my pathetic 350 MHz pc.
Which, let's be honest, is just a case of leaving it running and going to bed.
By your rationale, warez sites, Limewire, Napster, etc. don't exist.
Neither does SETI@home, or any of the other distributed computing things going on.
Or to look at it another way, by giving your miniscule amount of bandwidth, CPU power, etc to other people, you are recieving the COLLECTIVE bandwitdh, CPU power, etc. in return.
The best analogy I can think of is the philosophy behind GNU software - All of the resources are your for the taking AS LONG as you are willing to give your (comparatively tiny) resources back. Everyone wins, except the people who want to freeload and profit from their freeloading.
I can take a good reason to build an elevator straight out of a book called 'science of the Discworld'. Basically, the argument goes that if you have an elevator into space, then you can reuse energy, whilst if you have a propulsion system then you cannot.
How does this work? Simple. After you have successfully sent so much stuff into orbit, your going to start to want to bring things back down, whether this be from mining other planets or simply getting the astronaughts back to their parents. Normally, we waste all of the energy on reentry because we don't use it for anything. With an elevator, the energy being exerted by gravity on the way down can be used to balance out the gravity being used to get other stuff up. Hence, you don't need as much energy overall to get stuff into orbit.
And as others have already stated, once out of the earth's gravity, you don't need that much energy to move around at all...
And what do you do when the program is so obscure that you can't just "find a different one"? Write a new one from scratch?
Well, if it just lost you a months worth of work, then your in exactly the right frame of mood to go out and do so!
And of course, if it was open source you wouldn't have to write it from scratch...
But seriously, if a program is so mission critical (or deadline critical) that it is important not to lose a months worth of work, and the software has no safeguards to prevent this from happening, and if you can't add any yourself AND you go ahead and use the software anyway... well your a fool and deserve everything you get.
Or at the least, learn a nice important lesson. And then go and rewrite the software.
And the same deal works no matter what the timescale. If the software isn't up to scratch, then get or make some that is.
Of course, if your running some job which could take a month to finish... you code it so that it can pick up where it left off, or at least where it will only have lost a couple of hours-worth of work at the most.
Or is that too sensible?
(and if it's a proprietary package and it can't pick up from where it left off, find a different one).
Can anyone provide a soundfile as to how "lagom" should be pronounced? It's one of those words that really fills a hole missing in the English Language, and I'd like to start using it:-)
If you've ever seen anyone using a computer for the first time, there really is no difference between KDE2, Windows... they suck on both of 'em.
I think the only reason why Windows seems easier to learn is that it doesn't have the advanced options that Linux has. And since the people who teach others are normally advanced and they teach how they use the system themselves... which is why people get scared with Linux when a guru goes straight to the command line and edits config files, even though there happens to be a perfectly usable and "user friendly" GUI to perform the same task.
So what we really need is people who are better at teaching Linux.
As an analogy, the average Linux user trying to teaching a newbie is the same as Shakespeare using Romeo and Juliet to learn somebody how to read... Whilst a Windows user never reads books that don't have big pictures and less than 50 pages.
I think the question that has to be asked is... when the old people go, will new people take their places?
I personally think the answer to this is yes - the philosophy behind Linux, the Linux Economy and community as you call it, is especially attractive to students who aren't earning money anyway. So as one group of people leave university and realise that they need to find a job, a new bunch of coders step in from the bottom and discover the philosophy.
And even though previous coders like yourselves don't have time to maintain their projects anymore, it doesn't mean that they just vanish. Could I hazard a guess that you still dabble in Linux once in a while, or send bug reports, or still post on Slashdot?:-)
And slightly tracking away from your post, but even if Linux does die, what does this mean to open source in general? We still have FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, perhaps one day even the Hurd will actually be finished! So the death of Linux would simply mean people shifting to one of the other free systems with the (almost) same philosophy, and in a lot of cases people won't notice the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone here say Code Red?
I agree that discovering that the barn door could be opened before it was installed is the best solution, however just in case something is found, you have to have a half-decent backup plan.
This is something that I believe Windows XP got right - by forcing users to download the latest patches, it means that the clueless are no longer vulnerable, and those who know enough to turn the updates off are either keeping up with the patches themselves, or basically have nobody to blame when Code Red III comes along...
Cheers for that, though damn - I'd only just finished downloading 2.4.18 :-)
The article says that the kernel is affected - does it statically link zlib, in which case a recompile is in order, or do I just need to upgrade the zlib package?
Or is the article lying?
Ok, in reference to the part that you quoted I shouldn't have said appeared - it actually _did_ become more unstable - Trying to run various programs would cause similar errors, and very quickly, the keyboard/mouse would lock up, forcing a reboot.
In the case of Internet Explorer crashing, you get used to the way that your computer responds when it is stable - how long it takes for software to boot up, how the mouse moves across the screen, how long it takes for the start menu to respond, and how it draws itself on the screen, how often the hard drive whirs, when it is likely to spin up, and what it sounds like when it does, etc. When these things change for no reason, then it's a warning sign - you know something is happening which doesn't in the normal operation of your computer, and in my experience, it normally means that the computer is about to crash.
Ok, it doesn't work on my system, but what he's trying to do is to find out whichever Mozilla you are using, and see how long it takes to read it, piping the output to /dev/null so that you don't see it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - the mozilla found on my system is a tiny script which calls the _real_ mozilla. This script is only about 5K in size and therefore minimal
I've had experiences before where an application would crash whilst in a DLL, (or a VXD but I could be wrong - it's been a long time), and then within the course of say, the next five minutes, the computer would appear to become more and more unstable.
This isn't the same kind of thing that ever crashed IE - the error messages always came from explorer.exe or iexplorer.exe (I can't remember which) - but the system would feel like it was in the same unstable state.
Ummm... you don't download them, but the install _is_ package/component based
:-P
Or have you never noticed the "Custom" option during installation
* * *
An OT annecdote - MS Office and how I converted to Linux.
Windows 98 was starting to p*ss me off again - ever time I tried to load it, it was getting slower and slower, so I guessed I had to free up some hard drive space - I was running pretty low. I started uninstalling some software that I didn't use very often. Each and every one required me to reboot the computer (WHY?!?). Still, it wasn't speeding up. So I uninstalled MS Office 97. Hey - I wasn't using it much anyway, and I have it on CD.
Tumpty tumpty tum, Uninstall complete, Windows must now restart.
Tumpty tumpty tum, rebooting... Cannot find win.com
"WTF???"
So I gave up, reformatted the harddrive and gave linux a try.
That was 6 months ago.
Have you ever noticed how, on Windows, after the desktop appears it still takes a good thirty seconds to a minute until your computer actually starts responding to what you want to do? (for me the time seems to increase proportional to how many programs you have uninstalled)
The issue is not that IE takes less time to load than say, Konqueror or Netscape, it's that it loads at startup, whether you want it to or not.
Here's a question I don't know the answer to - what happens when Internet Explorer crashes? Does it get completely unloaded from memory, like any crashes program should, or does partially remain?
An unrelated point (as in that I never thought about the relation between the two until now) but I realise that at any point that Internet Explorer has ever crashed on me before, I've had to reboot Windows before my computer "feels" stable again, and I'm the kind of person who picks up on the warning signs when a computer/program are about to crash...
Anyway, that's (some of) the reasons I use KDE on linux...
The problem with peer 2 peer networks is that they are only as useful as the content shared on them.
And the content shared depends upon the number iof people using the service.
It makes sense for Morpheus to switch to a P2P which has a known audience, so that they don't have to start "from scratch"
I would like to hazard aguess that the gnutella network is slowly but surely becoming more mature, and more capable of handling large loads, with the addiiion of ultra peers or whatever they are called in Limewire, In other words, the mathematical arguments againsy the gnutella network are being worked around, instead of being ignored.
At the moment, I do not believe that Gnutella is the best network out there. However, it does seem to be the only one that is actually advancing with new features.
I would like to add that a lot of places still use Windows NT 4.0, which as far as I can tell does not have antialiased text (or if it does, it's really badly anti-aliased at the place where I use it).
Now that I've set fonts up, my Linux box running KDE 2.2 looks just as pretty as Windows XP, font-wise.
(IMHO it looks better than Windows XP period, but hey - that's off topic)
Didn't notice myself, konqueror let's me stop javascript from opening popup windows without my consent...
That's great as long as the money's there, but now it seems these companies have bled all their cash away, leaving the community right where it was before.
:-)
...except from all the money that they pumped in of course.
The community only grows stronger when a business joins us. When a business leaves us, we _haven't_ lost anything, we have merely stopped gaining from them.
Corel has left, but the work that they put in remains and will be built upon. That is the crowning achievement of free software.
Wordperfect for linux isn't free software, and hence doesn't fall under the argument I just proposed
If you've still got any lucasarts games that your wanting to play again under linux or windows, then you could do worse than checking out scummvm which is an interpreter for them.
Worked like a charm on Day of the Tentacle!
I'd guess they are provided by kindly soles who run those distros themselves/
If your distro isn't there, and you REALLY think it should be, and if you feel that strong about it, then why don't you add to the collection?
Your either compiling it on a spectrum or your doing something wrong. For a _FULL_ compile of kdelibs, kdebase, koffice and kdenetwork, it only takes about 8 hourse on my pathetic 350 MHz pc.
Which, let's be honest, is just a case of leaving it running and going to bed.
Just because the resources are there doesn't mean you should waste 'em. No, just download the movie files instead of wasting all that cpu power.
:-)
Unless of course, your controling the camera positions yourself, and decide that Shrek would look better in purple
By your rationale, warez sites, Limewire, Napster, etc. don't exist.
Neither does SETI@home, or any of the other distributed computing things going on.
Or to look at it another way, by giving your miniscule amount of bandwidth, CPU power, etc to other people, you are recieving the COLLECTIVE bandwitdh, CPU power, etc. in return.
The best analogy I can think of is the philosophy behind GNU software - All of the resources are your for the taking AS LONG as you are willing to give your (comparatively tiny) resources back. Everyone wins, except the people who want to freeload and profit from their freeloading.
That's how I see it anyway.
I can take a good reason to build an elevator straight out of a book called 'science of the Discworld'. Basically, the argument goes that if you have an elevator into space, then you can reuse energy, whilst if you have a propulsion system then you cannot.
How does this work? Simple. After you have successfully sent so much stuff into orbit, your going to start to want to bring things back down, whether this be from mining other planets or simply getting the astronaughts back to their parents. Normally, we waste all of the energy on reentry because we don't use it for anything. With an elevator, the energy being exerted by gravity on the way down can be used to balance out the gravity being used to get other stuff up. Hence, you don't need as much energy overall to get stuff into orbit.
And as others have already stated, once out of the earth's gravity, you don't need that much energy to move around at all...
And what do you do when the program is so obscure that you can't just "find a different one"? Write a new one from scratch?
Well, if it just lost you a months worth of work, then your in exactly the right frame of mood to go out and do so!
And of course, if it was open source you wouldn't have to write it from scratch...
But seriously, if a program is so mission critical (or deadline critical) that it is important not to lose a months worth of work, and the software has no safeguards to prevent this from happening, and if you can't add any yourself AND you go ahead and use the software anyway... well your a fool and deserve everything you get.
Or at the least, learn a nice important lesson. And then go and rewrite the software.
And the same deal works no matter what the timescale. If the software isn't up to scratch, then get or make some that is.
Of course, if your running some job which could take a month to finish... you code it so that it can pick up where it left off, or at least where it will only have lost a couple of hours-worth of work at the most.
Or is that too sensible?
(and if it's a proprietary package and it can't pick up from where it left off, find a different one).
Can anyone provide a soundfile as to how "lagom" should be pronounced? It's one of those words that really fills a hole missing in the English Language, and I'd like to start using it :-)
I second this!
If you've ever seen anyone using a computer for the first time, there really is no difference between KDE2, Windows... they suck on both of 'em.
I think the only reason why Windows seems easier to learn is that it doesn't have the advanced options that Linux has. And since the people who teach others are normally advanced and they teach how they use the system themselves... which is why people get scared with Linux when a guru goes straight to the command line and edits config files, even though there happens to be a perfectly usable and "user friendly" GUI to perform the same task.
So what we really need is people who are better at teaching Linux.
As an analogy, the average Linux user trying to teaching a newbie is the same as Shakespeare using Romeo and Juliet to learn somebody how to read... Whilst a Windows user never reads books that don't have big pictures and less than 50 pages.
Harsh, but about true, I think....
Yeah, but we planted a flag and said the moon was ours, so all there base are belong to us!
:-)
sorry, couldn't resist
Cool, apparently I'm in Cyprus at the moment :-)
Actually I'm in the UK, so I very quickly start to lose confidence in the accuracy of this web page. Does anyone else have better luck?
I think the question that has to be asked is... when the old people go, will new people take their places?
:-)
I personally think the answer to this is yes - the philosophy behind Linux, the Linux Economy and community as you call it, is especially attractive to students who aren't earning money anyway. So as one group of people leave university and realise that they need to find a job, a new bunch of coders step in from the bottom and discover the philosophy.
And even though previous coders like yourselves don't have time to maintain their projects anymore, it doesn't mean that they just vanish. Could I hazard a guess that you still dabble in Linux once in a while, or send bug reports, or still post on Slashdot?
And slightly tracking away from your post, but even if Linux does die, what does this mean to open source in general? We still have FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, perhaps one day even the Hurd will actually be finished! So the death of Linux would simply mean people shifting to one of the other free systems with the (almost) same philosophy, and in a lot of cases people won't notice the difference.