That would be do to the fact that the filesystem (usually FAT/16 maybe FAT/32 on larger devices) has overhead. I reformatted a 256MB keychain to use EXT2 and a whopping 32 megs are eaten just by the filesystem data structures. As the size of these things goes up, 32 MB on a large > 4GB device will be much less of a problem.
I am normally a gentoo user but slapped Fedora core 2 on an XP machine for fun. It seems to be plenty stable enough on a standard Dell and the sound appears to be working fine when I used it.
The main problems I have had are the lack of MP3 support out of the box, and no default inclusion of niceties like flash, nvidia drivers, and java (I know they are not open source but a quick-download utility to get them separately would be nice). Even some OSS software like K3B is not included by default even though I chose KDE packages at install time.
On the good side, it was stupidly simple to setup (I love gentoo but bootstrapping has never been fun and an SATA system I setup required some prestedigitation to get running) the up2date utility is simple to use and has that nifty icon tray to alert you when there are new updates. It has all the standard development utilities in relatively recent versions and while I am not a regular Gnome user the desktop seems quite polished with good fonts default out of the box.
In summation, it certainly ain't perfect, but I haven't found any real problems to complain about either. While I'll stick to Gentoo on machines that I want to develop on, Fedora seems fine for a workstation that is easy to maintain.
I would be a little more hesitant to call anybody who goes to work for MS a greedy bastard. I go to a small university in Pittsburgh that has a rather large anti-MS student body.... but at the same time I have never seen a larger turnout for prospective job seekers than when MS comes to town. Microsoft has the luxury of being able to hire the best people, and in the marketing business they can often come from the competition. After all, who better to detail the flaws in a competitor's products than someone who used to hawk them?
That being said I think the arguments are bunk but if you ever want to succeed you should learn to never hate your enemy since it clouds your judgement.
For nuclear and fossil fuels, figure in the amount of land used/ruined by fuel extraction and spent fuel storage. This gives you a base opportunity cost of land. Add to that the amount of money required to construct the plant. Figure in the amount of time the plant will last, as well.
An excellent point.... all of those problems are just as important for solar cells! The materials to make solar cells are often quite toxic and they gotta come from somewhere (namely the ground). As for how long they will last, solar cells are notorious for having short lifespans and must be replaced just like any other piece of industrial equipment.
Actually I must admit that I am a terrible white racist. There was this guy back in the 1960's that said something about "judging a man by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin" Silly of me to spread such hate filled ideas here. We all know from good liberal indoctrination that all minorities are by default repressed and helpless, and that all white people are by default evil. Thank you for pointing that out.
Your full of shit. If Michael Moore was prevented from putting his movie online for free by the US government then that would be censorship (and before you make up some conspiracy theory, no they haven't). Disney and Mirimax told him OVER 1 YEAR AGO they did not want to distribute the film and he admitted that whining about it was a publicity stunt. Do I have a right to paint pro-Bush slogans all over your house? No? How dare your censor me!!
Since coming to college the only censorship I hvae seen is by so-called 'liberals' who want "diversity". Unfortunately somebody forget to tell them that there is infinitely more diversity in 2 white guys arguing different points of view than in 1000 people carefully chosen to fill the proper racial quotas all unthinkingly droning the same moveon.org propoganda spoon fed to them by their professors. Any dissenting opinion from the liberal accepted norm is immediately labeled as racist or sexist or war-mongering or any other label, without a single iota of real argument; just abject emotional hatred with no need to look at any facts. I find it amazing that any tiny perceived problem in America is iron-clad proof to most liberals that America is worse than Nazi Germany, while simultaneously the most heinous abuse, torture, and murder anywhere else in the world is just "a different culture" that must be respected above all else. An example: In the US the first-year students were (and still are by me because I'm a neanderthal I guess) called freshman. This is obvious proof that America is repressive towards women and is a mysongenistic hellhole. Meanwhile in the Islamic world that we should never interfere with with our evil American "values" women are routinely killed after they are raped or seen to be "damaged". These are called "honor" killings and are a perfectly normal part of the culture, but remember they must be respected at all costs! See wonderful it is anywhere in the world except for the US? But you won't get any criticism of that in 90% of university campuses and you don't see much if anything to put in perspective how good we really do have things here in the US on Slashdot.
I think SELinux could help here, but while I think SELinux is the best thing since sliced bread, it is still non-trivial to setup and configure and this has been one of its major stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance. The newer mandatory access control systems need to be simple enough for the average administrator to tackle.
Re:Let's just get this out of the way...
on
More on Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
peak power in the green - coincidence that chlorophyll is chemical of choice for providing energy to plants? I think not... The problem with that statement is that something colored green absorbs all the light except for the green frequencies, so the plants would be reflecting away the most powerful frequency and not absorbing it.
Somewhat OT, but I've seen those cards and was wondering what their Linux support was like, I'm interested in VPN and also using one for hardware acceleration on encrypted filesystems.
Actually, I would say the scientists and climatologits. The "evil" flaks you like to berate actually produce products that people buy on their own. The scientists have to stoke fear in order to get funding from governments. If we had scientists more concerned with creating viable solutions to the "problems" of global warming they would be more interested in practical solutions that people would want instead of screaming about doom & gloom to get another grant.
Hmmm... 50% of people live below the poverty line? Congratulations! You just won the IAFOS Award! (I'll let you guess what that means) According to some real statistics made up by HHS: The latest poverty figures in the US are at 12.1% Keep in mind that poverty does not necessarily mean you are some bum about to starve to death. You can own a car, a house, have cable TV and major appliances and still be considered living in poverty. Many people in other countries would love to be poor in ours.
OK, This is OT to the story but related to X and I want to vent. When are we going to see some real improvements to the X protocol?? Before you flame me for saying that X shouldn't be network transparent that's not my point. I LIKE the network transparency and use it every day. However, over slower links it SUCKS and you rapidly find out how inefficient the protocol is. Case in point, I open up Kmail on my PC at school to check my mail from home. I've got a cable modem so I do have a relatively decent amount of bandwidth. Gripe 1: A packet gets sent EVERY TIME THE CURSOR BLINKS!!! Why the fsck is that needed?? Even when I am on a separate virtual desktop and not viewing the app the traffic is STILL SENT!! Now you might say, that the app is simply refreshing itself so it is up to date when I go back to view it. A fair assumption except that it's completely wrong and brings me to Gripe 2: Why does the ENTIRE app need to redraw itself (using huge amounts of network bandwidth) every time I obscure it with a window or hop to another virtual desktop??? The damned thing is already wasting traffic updating when I'm not even lookin g at it, why does it need to redraw AGAIN when I view the window again???? Now onto my final gripe for right now. Gripe 3: If X is such a truly network independent application why the hell can't I simply redirect the output of an already running process to any X-term??? If I have a process running on my PC at school, I should be able to simply redirect the X output over my forwarded SSH port and the running application should smoothly appear on my remote X server. The X-client would still be my machine at school, and the process would keep on running without missing a beat. I thought the whole point of setting up X was to allow for just this kind of operation!! The only thing I have ever seen to do this kind of operation was an experimental project called xmove from about 10 years ago and this type of functionality is severely lacking.
In conclusion, we need to improve X, and while most people whine about eye candy (and I like eye candy don't get me wrong) I think we really need to address why X's network protocols are not up to pace with modern technology.
MAC in this case means Mandatory Access Control.... if you wanted to be a grammar Nazi you could have pointed out my invalid use of possessive cases, misspellings, and run-on sentences. You try to put out a rant 20 minutes after waking up:)
Right now the current level of technology in commercial OS systems (I mean Linux/BSD/etc. too) is not enough to stop worms before they can spread. You can (try) to patch all your services and stay ahead of vulnerabilities, but in a very large organization unpatched machines can fall through the cracks, and in a small organization there may not be enough skilled staff to keep everything patched. User edjimukation (sic) is all well and good, but unfortunately there will always be a population of Darl's who will willfully ignore best practices and try to do stupid things with viruses and whatnot. IMHO there are solutions to at least some of the more stupid problems with security. I think the best ones are through least privilege enforcement with Mandatory Access Controls (see SELinux as one very good commercially available example, I also like Domain & Type Enforcement for Linux too!) With MAC systems root is no longer a god, and you have a much richer ability to limit what user's can do with things like email attachments. Worms can also be contained much better since you define a policy of what a server is supposed to do instead of trying to pattern match every possible type of malware (an impossible job in the long run).
So why is this rambling post not entirely OT? Well a bigger organizatio like a corporation will have a greater incentive and a greater ability to start experimenting with MAC systems that are both secure and usable in an office environment. Bigger companies have more resources to work with software vendors to iron out bugs and kinks in the system, and then the refined products can start to filter down to consumer grade products, where security is usually almost non-existant. It is a slow process, but we desparately need better methods and technologies than the standard issue patch & pray employed in today's networks.
It's boring but what the hell....
I graduated from Purdue undergrad ECE in '02 and with the job market the way it was back then I knew I'd go to grad school. I had picked up a big interest in infosec my last year there so I emailed Spaf about opportunities in grad school. As soon as he found out I was a lowly Computer Engineer he basically said I shouldn't bother.
So I ended up at Carnegie Mellon instead, and I just finished my MS in Information Networking with a focus on security, I even got to write a Mandatory Access Control system for Linux for my thesis.... Hey Gene? Am I up good enough to be a grad student now?
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Clinton: War in Iraq without even alerting the UN (remember 1999 around the time of the Lewinski scandal??) Bush: 2 more UN Resolutions and a war that actually deposes Saddam as opposed to only blowing up buildings with smart bombs.
The Difference: Moveon.org approved of Clinton's war, but didn't approve of Bush's.
Well I'm posting too late, but because this is another bash-Bush thread it should be noted that an earlier Bush administration policy on Cybersecurity was roundly criticized because it did not do enough to regulate online activities (be they really illegal or just stuff Microsoft doesn't like). You can't have it both ways.
Hmm... That's interesting, every time Bush proposes any NASA activities these days everybody here just says it's for military purposes. I can also assure you that the Soviets were just as interested in the military uses of space as they were in scientific exploration. As an aside to how 'evil' companies cannot innovate anything, imagine if NASA was in charge of creating computer chips, and nasty companies like Intel were outlawed from any involvement in creating processors... do you really think modern computing would be anything more advanced than an Apple II?
The problem with this is that so many warnings will show up that users will ignore them anyway and get infected. My Linux email client always warns me before opening up attachments and I just click OK. Since there are not Linux email viruses out now, not a big problem. However, if there was one, the popup box would not help me since I instinctively click through it. This is not even considering an entire class of people (I like to call them Darls) that will intentionally try to open dangerous attachments. It really doesn't take a large number of Darls to screw up the fun for everybody.
We here at Spyware Inc are deeply troubled that nearly 95% of all computers DON'T have Spyware!
To help capture a greater market, our newest service will automatically install Perl(tm) spyware on any host posting to Slashdot, and even make it open source We think OSS spyware is the future!
I got a question.... you do realize that Apple just buys the HD's used in iPods from a regular OEM (I know that at one point at least Fujitsu was selling the HD's) So why didn't you just go buy the same HD for less money??? I found it amusing that when the very first iPods came out that the same HD used was reviewed and the reviewers complained about how slow it was. The irony was not that the HD was slow, but that at the same time the "firewire" connection to the iPod was being trumpeted even though the HD could not come even closed to saturating the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be do to the fact that the filesystem (usually FAT/16 maybe FAT/32 on larger devices) has overhead. I reformatted a 256MB keychain to use EXT2 and a whopping 32 megs are eaten just by the filesystem data structures. As the size of these things goes up, 32 MB on a large > 4GB device will be much less of a problem.
I am normally a gentoo user but slapped Fedora core 2 on an XP machine for fun. It seems to be plenty stable enough on a standard Dell and the sound appears to be working fine when I used it.
The main problems I have had are the lack of MP3 support out of the box, and no default inclusion of niceties like flash, nvidia drivers, and java (I know they are not open source but a quick-download utility to get them separately would be nice). Even some OSS software like K3B is not included by default even though I chose KDE packages at install time.
On the good side, it was stupidly simple to setup (I love gentoo but bootstrapping has never been fun and an SATA system I setup required some prestedigitation to get running) the up2date utility is simple to use and has that nifty icon tray to alert you when there are new updates. It has all the standard development utilities in relatively recent versions and while I am not a regular Gnome user the desktop seems quite polished with good fonts default out of the box.
In summation, it certainly ain't perfect, but I haven't found any real problems to complain about either. While I'll stick to Gentoo on machines that I want to develop on, Fedora seems fine for a workstation that is easy to maintain.
Of course, he's just some greedy bastard
I would be a little more hesitant to call anybody who goes to work for MS a greedy bastard. I go to a small university in Pittsburgh that has a rather large anti-MS student body.... but at the same time I have never seen a larger turnout for prospective job seekers than when MS comes to town. Microsoft has the luxury of being able to hire the best people, and in the marketing business they can often come from the competition. After all, who better to detail the flaws in a competitor's products than someone who used to hawk them?
That being said I think the arguments are bunk but if you ever want to succeed you should learn to never hate your enemy since it clouds your judgement.
Open source in the military? Has anybody made a Colonel Panic joke yet?
No way! Just go up the chain of command to General Protection Fault!
For nuclear and fossil fuels, figure in the amount of land used/ruined by fuel extraction and spent fuel storage. This gives you a base opportunity cost of land. Add to that the amount of money required to construct the plant. Figure in the amount of time the plant will last, as well.
An excellent point.... all of those problems are just as important for solar cells! The materials to make solar cells are often quite toxic and they gotta come from somewhere (namely the ground). As for how long they will last, solar cells are notorious for having short lifespans and must be replaced just like any other piece of industrial equipment.
Actually I must admit that I am a terrible white racist. There was this guy back in the 1960's that said something about "judging a man by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin" Silly of me to spread such hate filled ideas here. We all know from good liberal indoctrination that all minorities are by default repressed and helpless, and that all white people are by default evil. Thank you for pointing that out.
Your full of shit. If Michael Moore was prevented from putting his movie online for free by the US government then that would be censorship (and before you make up some conspiracy theory, no they haven't). Disney and Mirimax told him OVER 1 YEAR AGO they did not want to distribute the film and he admitted that whining about it was a publicity stunt. Do I have a right to paint pro-Bush slogans all over your house? No? How dare your censor me!!
Since coming to college the only censorship I hvae seen is by so-called 'liberals' who want "diversity". Unfortunately somebody forget to tell them that there is infinitely more diversity in 2 white guys arguing different points of view than in 1000 people carefully chosen to fill the proper racial quotas all unthinkingly droning the same moveon.org propoganda spoon fed to them by their professors. Any dissenting opinion from the liberal accepted norm is immediately labeled as racist or sexist or war-mongering or any other label, without a single iota of real argument; just abject emotional hatred with no need to look at any facts. I find it amazing that any tiny perceived problem in America is iron-clad proof to most liberals that America is worse than Nazi Germany, while simultaneously the most heinous abuse, torture, and murder anywhere else in the world is just "a different culture" that must be respected above all else. An example: In the US the first-year students were (and still are by me because I'm a neanderthal I guess) called freshman. This is obvious proof that America is repressive towards women and is a mysongenistic hellhole. Meanwhile in the Islamic world that we should never interfere with with our evil American "values" women are routinely killed after they are raped or seen to be "damaged". These are called "honor" killings and are a perfectly normal part of the culture, but remember they must be respected at all costs! See wonderful it is anywhere in the world except for the US? But you won't get any criticism of that in 90% of university campuses and you don't see much if anything to put in perspective how good we really do have things here in the US on Slashdot.
Look's like Cthulu's cousin is getting busy!
I think SELinux could help here, but while I think SELinux is the best thing since sliced bread, it is still non-trivial to setup and configure and this has been one of its major stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance. The newer mandatory access control systems need to be simple enough for the average administrator to tackle.
peak power in the green - coincidence that chlorophyll is chemical of choice for providing energy to plants? I think not...
The problem with that statement is that something colored green absorbs all the light except for the green frequencies, so the plants would be reflecting away the most powerful frequency and not absorbing it.
Somewhat OT, but I've seen those cards and was wondering what their Linux support was like, I'm interested in VPN and also using one for hardware acceleration on encrypted filesystems.
Actually, I would say the scientists and climatologits. The "evil" flaks you like to berate actually produce products that people buy on their own. The scientists have to stoke fear in order to get funding from governments. If we had scientists more concerned with creating viable solutions to the "problems" of global warming they would be more interested in practical solutions that people would want instead of screaming about doom & gloom to get another grant.
Hmmm... 50% of people live below the poverty line? Congratulations! You just won the IAFOS Award! (I'll let you guess what that means)
According to some real statistics made up by HHS:
The latest poverty figures in the US are at 12.1%
Keep in mind that poverty does not necessarily mean you are some bum about to starve to death. You can own a car, a house, have cable TV and major appliances and still be considered living in poverty. Many people in other countries would love to be poor in ours.
OK, This is OT to the story but related to X and I want to vent. When are we going to see some real improvements to the X protocol?? Before you flame me for saying that X shouldn't be network transparent that's not my point. I LIKE the network transparency and use it every day. However, over slower links it SUCKS and you rapidly find out how inefficient the protocol is.
Case in point, I open up Kmail on my PC at school to check my mail from home. I've got a cable modem so I do have a relatively decent amount of bandwidth. Gripe 1: A packet gets sent EVERY TIME THE CURSOR BLINKS!!! Why the fsck is that needed?? Even when I am on a separate virtual desktop and not viewing the app the traffic is STILL SENT!! Now you might say, that the app is simply refreshing itself so it is up to date when I go back to view it. A fair assumption except that it's completely wrong and brings me to Gripe 2: Why does the ENTIRE app need to redraw itself (using huge amounts of network bandwidth) every time I obscure it with a window or hop to another virtual desktop??? The damned thing is already wasting traffic updating when I'm not even lookin g at it, why does it need to redraw AGAIN when I view the window again???? Now onto my final gripe for right now. Gripe 3: If X is such a truly network independent application why the hell can't I simply redirect the output of an already running process to any X-term??? If I have a process running on my PC at school, I should be able to simply redirect the X output over my forwarded SSH port and the running application should smoothly appear on my remote X server. The X-client would still be my machine at school, and the process would keep on running without missing a beat. I thought the whole point of setting up X was to allow for just this kind of operation!! The only thing I have ever seen to do this kind of operation was an experimental project called xmove from about 10 years ago and this type of functionality is severely lacking.
In conclusion, we need to improve X, and while most people whine about eye candy (and I like eye candy don't get me wrong) I think we really need to address why X's network protocols are not up to pace with modern technology.
MAC in this case means Mandatory Access Control.... if you wanted to be a grammar Nazi you could have pointed out my invalid use of possessive cases, misspellings, and run-on sentences. You try to put out a rant 20 minutes after waking up :)
Right now the current level of technology in commercial OS systems (I mean Linux/BSD/etc. too) is not enough to stop worms before they can spread.
You can (try) to patch all your services and stay ahead of vulnerabilities, but in a very large organization unpatched machines can fall through the cracks, and in a small organization there may not be enough skilled staff to keep everything patched.
User edjimukation (sic) is all well and good, but unfortunately there will always be a population of Darl's who will willfully ignore best practices and try to do stupid things with viruses and whatnot.
IMHO there are solutions to at least some of the more stupid problems with security. I think the best ones are through least privilege enforcement with Mandatory Access Controls (see SELinux as one very good commercially available example, I also like Domain & Type Enforcement for Linux too!) With MAC systems root is no longer a god, and you have a much richer ability to limit what user's can do with things like email attachments. Worms can also be contained much better since you define a policy of what a server is supposed to do instead of trying to pattern match every possible type of malware (an impossible job in the long run).
So why is this rambling post not entirely OT? Well a bigger organizatio like a corporation will have a greater incentive and a greater ability to start experimenting with MAC systems that are both secure and usable in an office environment. Bigger companies have more resources to work with software vendors to iron out bugs and kinks in the system, and then the refined products can start to filter down to consumer grade products, where security is usually almost non-existant. It is a slow process, but we desparately need better methods and technologies than the standard issue patch & pray employed in today's networks.
It's boring but what the hell....
I graduated from Purdue undergrad ECE in '02 and with the job market the way it was back then I knew I'd go to grad school. I had picked up a big interest in infosec my last year there so I emailed Spaf about opportunities in grad school. As soon as he found out I was a lowly Computer Engineer he basically said I shouldn't bother.
So I ended up at Carnegie Mellon instead, and I just finished my MS in Information Networking with a focus on security, I even got to write a Mandatory Access Control system for Linux for my thesis.... Hey Gene? Am I up good enough to be a grad student now?
Clinton: War in Iraq without even alerting the UN (remember 1999 around the time of the Lewinski scandal??)
Bush: 2 more UN Resolutions and a war that actually deposes Saddam as opposed to only blowing up buildings with smart bombs.
The Difference: Moveon.org approved of Clinton's war, but didn't approve of Bush's.
Integrity on Slashdot my ass.
Well I'm posting too late, but because this is another bash-Bush thread it should be noted that an earlier Bush administration policy on Cybersecurity was roundly criticized because it did not do enough to regulate online activities (be they really illegal or just stuff Microsoft doesn't like). You can't have it both ways.
Hmm... That's interesting, every time Bush proposes any NASA activities these days everybody here just says it's for military purposes.
I can also assure you that the Soviets were just as interested in the military uses of space as they were in scientific exploration.
As an aside to how 'evil' companies cannot innovate anything, imagine if NASA was in charge of creating computer chips, and nasty companies like Intel were outlawed from any involvement in creating processors... do you really think modern computing would be anything more advanced than an Apple II?
Too bad there's not a -1 wrong moderation
Unless of course you don't believe that Soyuz 1 never happened....
Soyuz 1
The problem with this is that so many warnings will show up that users will ignore them anyway and get infected. My Linux email client always warns me before opening up attachments and I just click OK. Since there are not Linux email viruses out now, not a big problem. However, if there was one, the popup box would not help me since I instinctively click through it. This is not even considering an entire class of people (I like to call them Darls) that will intentionally try to open dangerous attachments. It really doesn't take a large number of Darls to screw up the fun for everybody.
We here at Spyware Inc are deeply troubled that
nearly 95% of all computers DON'T have Spyware!
To help capture a greater market, our newest
service will automatically install Perl(tm) spyware on any host posting to Slashdot, and even make it open source
We think OSS spyware is the future!
(Yes... this IS a joke)
I got a question.... you do realize that Apple just buys the HD's used in iPods from a regular OEM (I know that at one point at least Fujitsu was selling the HD's) So why didn't you just go buy the same HD for less money???
I found it amusing that when the very first iPods came out that the same HD used was reviewed and the reviewers complained about how slow it was. The irony was not that the HD was slow, but that at the same time the "firewire" connection to the iPod was being trumpeted even though the HD could not come even closed to saturating the connection.
Didn't openssl have a very similar bug that
was disclosed & fixed just about 6 months ago?
Anybody? Buehler?
Looks like MS gets some slack that OSS just
has to fix immediately.