Is it just me or is the UK now the free nation America use to be. now they are the home of the free and land of.. well 1 out of 2 ain't bad.
It seems to me (not a troll, honest) but all of the 'rights' granted to Americans seem to empower the worst people. See 'right to have guns' and 'right to sue the asss of anyone for anything' for details. Althoguh the UK is getting much of the latters nowadays.
RedHat has made great strides in the user-friendly install... At least making easy for Windows users to "try out its features".
The problem is, so much of the strong reasons for switching to Linux (aka security) are hard to realize in a user friendly sort of way.
For instance, getting OpenSSH up and running to integrate a Windows box to be able to ftp from/to the secure Linux install takes alot of work, and fishing around. It's an immediate turn-off.
Then there's wireless networking. Oh by the way, you have to become a kernel compile afficianado to get these wireless drivers workers.
If we're talking RedHat/ here and security in the same breath, then why not focus on a user friendly install for security. Including a side howto on how to possibly go get Putty up and running. And how you're going to need to generate your keys with ssh-keygen type 2 rsa and then load them into puttygen which will convert them. And oh by the way, the converted private key will also work under SecureNetTerm. Don't forget something like this for your private keys in you $home/.ssh dir:
chmod 600 id_rsa cp id_rsa authorized_keys2
It wasn't that easy, but it should be, and it could be.
In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.
I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.
--Automated software is a good baseline approach, but it falls far short of cunning humans hammering away at systems.
Automated software cuts costs. That's why they use it. Human security testers are expensive, even though IMHO it might be a good way for the most talented script kiddies to make a buck during summer...
--The testing companies make money by certifying products, not catching problems.
Of course they do, they're _certification_ companies, not tech support for security problems. Their job is not to catch problems in your software for you. It is to tell if a product is "secure" or not, according to tests. Which bring us to the point:
1) You can't predict the future. Tests run today can't reproduce new problems that will be discovered next year. So this "security certification" is short-termed at least.
2) There is a bias, both in the test suite used and the conception they have of "security". They're human beings too, and to them "good enough" can mean a whole less (or more) than to you.
So what is the problem ? The problem is that apps that pass their tests is instantly classified as "secure". So we have to:
- Expand the concept of "security" to give it a little more subjectify ("secure", according to company X, not just "secure, period).
- Use peer-to-peer review, which has proven good at detecting security flaws, and is quite inexpensive for free software projects.
This is what the world needs. To adapt to the new media, not to try and force the world to their standards. The RIAA is alarmed that we are not buying their music and so wants to stop the spread of other music. I agree that it can be bad for certain artists, but I believe that the spread of digital media is overall good for all. Secondly, I really don't want DRM cancelling my ability to keep copies of my CDs and other digital media. If I had a printing press I'd make copies of some of my favorite books. I've lost one of them, and I'm really wishing I had a copy. Bills like this are ones I expect to see almost all Slashdotters supporting!
Hmmm. Only 215 "qualified respondents" that provided "reliable information". Then they divide them into small, medium, large, and very large sites. Assuming small networks outnumber large ones by a long shot, just how many "very large" networks (10,000+ machines) could they be getting results from?
Between the questionable statistics and the bizarre correlation between security and sex mentioned in the first paragraph, this article is nothing but a large serving of Buzzword Soup topped with noise and a sprinkling of anecdotal evidence, with yummy USA-Today-style pie charts for dessert.
The problem I have with these reviews and those that are found on Amazon, is that there is no context for the review. Specifically, what's great to you might suck to me. We have no knowledge of the reviewers skill level or experience.
It would be far better if the reviewers would give a little background information about themselves, along with the review.
What is Zenomorph's skill level? How long have they worked in this field? What related hardware and software are they proficient with? What other books on the subject has this person read and what was their opinion of those books? Without this information the review carries no more weight than one from Jon Katz.
This was a fairly good guide, but not as comprehensive as one could wish. As one reader noted it would have been interesting if they actually wrote about something other than cables, eg how to set up your TV/HDTV/projector to make things look as good as possible, how VGA-boxes compare and so forth. And as far as I am concerned, Monster Cable are not by far the only manufacturer of high-end cables. Interact make some good stuff too, and about a million Hong Kong-manufacturers have different budget variants that will improve your results, if not by as much.
More specifically, a note that while MC do produce S-Video cables for all recent consoles, the PAL GameCubes do not support this kind of output, and thus a little test of RGB-Scarts wouldn't have been such a bad idea, eh? Especially considering that more people have Scart/Euro-connectors than S-video on their TVs, and that an RGB-Scart is easily on par with S-video output.
Since most people also only have one "good" Scart input on their TV set, a little write-up on different Scart-splitters and how they affect the quality would have been nice too.
Well, well, just a few thoughts. I guess we'll have to test these things ourselves, seeing as they who wrote the article are sponsored by MC and not interested in alternatives, which the consumer always is...
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
this is a col enough challenge to be sure, but whay are ALL of the games coded for obsolete systems? Why aren't there Java or Shockwave titles in there? Seems like a bit of a waste of time...
Dude, System.out.println("This is the best game ever"); is bigger than 1k in Java!
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, you're right. And all the people who contributed to this discussion (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/29/0 2 7256 ) are wrong.
I've seen this "Profit!" post quite a few times, and obviously, it's making fun of some lovely "innovative internet business idea" that was proposed somewhere. Can someone fill me in on the back story? Thanks./I?
Yes. It is mocking the hugely successful open source software model.
While everything's getting patented, I'm going to go take out a patent for sex, smoking, and eating. That should be a little more profitable than online auctions.
If you invented any of those, that's very clever.
However, since I find that unlikely, you've just wasted 10 seconds of your pitiful life posting such a lame comment.
Come on...if you're using Linux, what's the big deal about command line installation? Yeah, I know - make it appealing to the masses, blah, blah, blah.
ha ha ha, welcome to Why Linux isn't Used on the Desktop 101.
This reminds me of point 3 on this excellent Linux Zealot putdown on the other site
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure, but I think the guy going round shooting people at the moment has a gun.
It seems to me (not a troll, honest) but all of the 'rights' granted to Americans seem to empower the worst people. See 'right to have guns' and 'right to sue the asss of anyone for anything' for details. Althoguh the UK is getting much of the latters nowadays.
of arse. Is there NO subject that the some slashdot reader can't drag over to being about Microsoft? Just shut your cakehole, will you?
RedHat has made great strides in the user-friendly install... At least making easy for Windows users to "try out its features".
The problem is, so much of the strong reasons for switching to Linux (aka security) are hard to realize in a user friendly sort of way.
For instance, getting OpenSSH up and running to integrate a Windows box to be able to ftp from/to the secure Linux install takes alot of work, and fishing around. It's an immediate turn-off.
Then there's wireless networking. Oh by the way, you have to become a kernel compile afficianado to get these wireless drivers workers.
If we're talking RedHat/ here and security in the same breath, then why not focus on a user friendly install for security. Including a side howto on how to possibly go get Putty up and running. And how you're going to need to generate your keys with ssh-keygen type 2 rsa and then load them into puttygen which will convert them. And oh by the way, the converted private key will also work under SecureNetTerm. Don't forget something like this for your private keys in you $home/.ssh dir:
chmod 600 id_rsa
cp id_rsa authorized_keys2
It wasn't that easy, but it should be, and it could be.
'nuff said
In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.
I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.
Indeed.
--Automated software is a good baseline approach, but it falls far short of cunning humans hammering away at systems.
:
:
Automated software cuts costs. That's why they use it. Human security testers are expensive, even though IMHO it might be a good way for the most talented script kiddies to make a buck during summer...
--The testing companies make money by certifying products, not catching problems.
Of course they do, they're _certification_ companies, not tech support for security problems. Their job is not to catch problems in your software for you. It is to tell if a product is "secure" or not, according to tests. Which bring us to the point
1) You can't predict the future. Tests run today can't reproduce new problems that will be discovered next year. So this "security certification" is short-termed at least.
2) There is a bias, both in the test suite used and the conception they have of "security". They're human beings too, and to them "good enough" can mean a whole less (or more) than to you.
So what is the problem ? The problem is that apps that pass their tests is instantly classified as "secure". So we have to
- Expand the concept of "security" to give it a little more subjectify ("secure", according to company X, not just "secure, period).
- Use peer-to-peer review, which has proven good at detecting security flaws, and is quite inexpensive for free software projects.
'nuff said.
This is what the world needs. To adapt to the new media, not to try and force the world to their standards. The RIAA is alarmed that we are not buying their music and so wants to stop the spread of other music. I agree that it can be bad for certain artists, but I believe that the spread of digital media is overall good for all.
Secondly, I really don't want DRM cancelling my ability to keep copies of my CDs and other digital media. If I had a printing press I'd make copies of some of my favorite books. I've lost one of them, and I'm really wishing I had a copy.
Bills like this are ones I expect to see almost all Slashdotters supporting!
I have spoken.
Hmmm. Only 215 "qualified respondents" that provided "reliable information". Then they divide them into small, medium, large, and very large sites. Assuming small networks outnumber large ones by a long shot, just how many "very large" networks (10,000+ machines) could they be getting results from?
Between the questionable statistics and the bizarre correlation between security and sex mentioned in the first paragraph, this article is nothing but a large serving of Buzzword Soup topped with noise and a sprinkling of anecdotal evidence, with yummy USA-Today-style pie charts for dessert.
I have spoken.
The problem I have with these reviews and those that are found on Amazon, is that there is no context for the review. Specifically, what's great to you might suck to me. We have no knowledge of the reviewers skill level or experience.
It would be far better if the reviewers would give a little background information about themselves, along with the review.
What is Zenomorph's skill level? How long have they worked in this field? What related hardware and software are they proficient with? What other books on the subject has this person read and what was their opinion of those books? Without this information the review carries no more weight than one from Jon Katz.
I have spoken.
This was a fairly good guide, but not as comprehensive as one could wish.
As one reader noted it would have been interesting if they actually wrote about something other than cables, eg how to set up your TV/HDTV/projector to make things look as good as possible, how VGA-boxes compare and so forth. And as far as I am concerned, Monster Cable are not by far the only manufacturer of high-end cables. Interact make some good stuff too, and about a million Hong Kong-manufacturers have different budget variants that will improve your results, if not by as much.
More specifically, a note that while MC do produce S-Video cables for all recent consoles, the PAL GameCubes do not support this kind of output, and thus a little test of RGB-Scarts wouldn't have been such a bad idea, eh? Especially considering that more people have Scart/Euro-connectors than S-video on their TVs, and that an RGB-Scart is easily on par with S-video output.
Since most people also only have one "good" Scart input on their TV set, a little write-up on different Scart-splitters and how they affect the quality would have been nice too.
Well, well, just a few thoughts. I guess we'll have to test these things ourselves, seeing as they who wrote the article are sponsored by MC and not interested in alternatives, which the consumer always is...
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
Jeesus, take slashdot's dick out of your mouth already!
canadians?
this is a col enough challenge to be sure, but whay are ALL of the games coded for obsolete systems? Why aren't there Java or Shockwave titles in there? Seems like a bit of a waste of time...
Dude, System.out.println("This is the best game ever"); is bigger than 1k in Java!
Yes, you're right. And all the people who contributed to this discussion (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/29/0 2 7256 ) are wrong.
Nice attitude.
slashdot isn't freshmeat
Yes. So let's not have software posted on the front page, eh?
or you could buy a proper car, rev the engine to 8000 rpm and drop the clutch yourself.
:).
50 year old execs in their lame-ass pension-mobiles need not apply.
My car, which cost 2.5k (english pounds) will nail the crap out of one of these. And I can burn rubber whenever I want
The link goes to a story about the porn business buying the Napster trademark.
:)
Wired must have swapped referrers for this article I guess...
Scroll down 4 lines, man
I've seen this "Profit!" post quite a few times, and obviously, it's making fun of some lovely "innovative internet business idea" that was proposed somewhere. Can someone fill me in on the back story? Thanks. /I?
Yes. It is mocking the hugely successful open source software model.
1. Write 'free' software.
2. ?????
3. Profit!!!
While everything's getting patented, I'm going to go take out a patent for sex, smoking, and eating. That should be a little more profitable than online auctions.
If you invented any of those, that's very clever.
However, since I find that unlikely, you've just wasted 10 seconds of your pitiful life posting such a lame comment.
I think the poster, and subsequently everyone who has replied, has missed the point of this camera.
It is not bluetooth enable so you take a picture, send to BT device, take another one.
You use it like a normal camera, but you can ALSO transmit your pictures to other BT devices, like sync with your computer etc..
that was pretty weak, you big puff.
sig: If it's theft to listen to music before buying it, then it's theft to refuse returns on albums that suck.
No it's not. Dickwad.
a) It isn't theft to listen to music before buying it. It's breaking copyright law to make unauthorised copies of said music.
b) Your second point is just dumb.
Change your shitty sig, fucktard.
Dude, that's the best post I have *ever* read on slashdot, good work.
Come on...if you're using Linux, what's the big deal about command line installation? Yeah, I know - make it appealing to the masses, blah, blah, blah.
ha ha ha, welcome to Why Linux isn't Used on the Desktop 101.
This reminds me of point 3 on this excellent Linux Zealot putdown on the other site
instead of windows = cutting off your nose to spite your face.