"..Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents.."
Err.. Next week news called, they want their draft story back.
There is no certain outcome of next weeks vote; and the fact that we even are discussing the defects of OOXML are proof that the ISO body will have much problems just waiving this through. Please refrain from taking sides just because this is an 'Microsoft-standard'.
I'd say it's possible that OOXML will NOT be approved next week. It will probably have to take the long road through the ISO as a real standard proposal, not just a fast-tracked 6000 page gorilla.
Here in Trondheim, Norway one of the weirdest IT-setups I've heard of comes from one of the largest high schools (let's keep them anonymous) in Norway.
Four years ago (2003) The IT-department were to re-wire one of the older buildings (that had been refurbished in early 2000) and to get the job done they had to remove old cables from the building to give space to new ones. In the process of this they decided to make sure there was no devices still "live" on the LAN in the building. After shutting down all networked computers, printers, etc known to the techies they were a bit puzzled to find one switchport still alive, besides the uplink. To resolve the matter they followed the cable from the switch, down a hallway and.. straight into the far end brick wall. There was no doors in the wall, and when they went around to look for the cable exiting on the other side they found no trace of it. After a little investigation back at their office they found that the wall had been put up during the refurbishment more than 2 years earlier. They decided just to unplug the cable and proceed with their network re-wireing.
Two weeks later the students and the employees returned to their building for a new term. They had only been there for a few hours when IT Support started getting calls about printing not working. A techie was dispatched to the building but could find no printer errors. The techie asked one of the employees to show him what they were trying to do when the error occured. The employee quickly pulled up a file and pushed print. No response.
One week later and still no printing in the building the team that had been doing the network re-wireing was asked to resolve the matter. They unplugged all ports in the local switch and tried to put them back in one by one printing one page each time. Still no pages showed up at the printers. Then one of the techies decided to put the last cable in, it was left over from before the re-wireing. It was the cable that went into the wall. Right then, after putting the cable back in the printers all started spewing out documents queued up for printing. Confused by this the techie went back to the office and asked his boss to ask the janitor about the cable in the wall. The school janitor told them that he had no idea, so they had to go pull the blueprints of the building up for reviewing. After looking at the blueprints it turned out that the wall had been put up to mask a door into a part of the building that had been removed. On the side of that door there was another door.
Armed with a sledge hammer the janitor and two techies returned to the building and smashed a hole in the wall at the point the prints said there was a door on the other side. Behind the wall they found a door, and inside was a little room with an old networked computer on a small table by a wall labeled "printserver", happily humming along. The room was full of dust and very hot. Within a few days the edges of the banged up wall was fixed, the dust removed and the door replaced with a new one. The printserver inside were left to do it's task.
In the end the morale of this story must be that when refurbishing old buildings one should always consult IT about the network before -- not after the job is done. But we all know that, ofcourse.
How Firefox have changed my use of Mozilla
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Planning For Mozilla 2.0
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· Score: 2, Interesting
..to the better. Since Firefox 1.0 came out I have used the Mozilla suite for email and Internet-browsing at work while I still stick with Opera at home. Firefox is there on both locations and are used from time to time. What Firefox did do when it came along was make it clear to me that Mozilla had improved over the years and no longer required me to have a heap of other browsers installed for visiting particular webpages with picky code. So, you may say that Firefox made Mozilla shine in it's own true light.
Lets be honest. The people on Wallstreet are probably an indicator to what newSCO will do next. If their stock trade bad for a reasonable time (1-2 months) their "media machine" will roll out a new story to boost their stockprice. So, right now newSCO isn't doing too well on the exchange.
Lets have a look at their 6 months movement. This little chart shows how newSCO's stock is doing. Their recent pressreleases and blabbering during the SCOforum left a certain spike upwards, then things settled again, and the price is currently at around $4.30. Compared to such companies as Novell, wich you can see the comparison of here, there clearly is a trend that whenever newSCO releases some FUD to the general public and the eager-to-cover media their stock is up for a short time, and the companies they are in legal battles with are down. Then it all slowly goes back as it was before. IBM, RedHat and Novell are all three doing rather well in comparison to newSCO.
It's sad to see how this hunger for money drive a former great company into the ground. I hope both investors and current stockholders realize that the only thing that is going to save newSCO is to focus on their product and shuffle Darl and his litigation off into the void.
The thing I quite don't get a grip on here is how Sun can claim that Solaris is so much safer when it now can run Linux-applications. For years Sun have been preaching that applications they have are better and more secure. When they now comply with the LSB, wouldn't that make their OS just as "insecure" as Linux supposedly are in their views?
Their webpage says: "You can safely run Solaris and Linux applications side by side in the same container, or you can configure separate containers that isolate Solaris and Linux applications from each other and from system faults. If an application fault occurs and the application needs to be restarted, other applications continue to run without interruption. ".
Okay, let's look at this. You can now run Solaris and Linux-applications side by side - This would mean a security breach in their previous views then? Or, you can choose to lock the Linux-applications away in their own container - This seem much more in line with previous statements from Sun.
"Unlike technology previously available for running Linux in other non-Linux environments, Project Janus functionality is kernel-integrated and supported as an operating system feature."
So, this LSB-compliance are kernel-integrated, and yet they claim Solaris is more secure than Linux? Can someone please help me out on this? I'll try to investigate myself, but I am not sure what I will find, as Solaris for now, still are, closed source.
The US patent process is quite amusing in its own way. The main idea behind the US patent system is that "any" patent will be granted unless the Patent Office finds that there is prior art, or someone can claim prior art to the pending patent.
From the article: "The overtaxed U.S. Patent and Trademark Office often grants absurdly broad patents that reflect little actual innovation. (For example, Microsoft owns a patent for activating a program on a handheld device by holding a button down for several seconds). And because it costs less to pay the toll than to hire lawyers and resist, smaller firms have no choice but to pony up."
As this is by all means a news-article rather than a factfinding mission into the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office I will regard the "facts" in the article as is.
In a document describing the general information about U.S. patents you can read the following: "The patent law specifies the general field of subject matter that can be patented and the conditions under which a patent may be obtained".
A patent in the U.S. may be granted to anyone whom; "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvements thereof, may obtain a patent".
The following, from the same document describes the process of examination of an Patent application: "The examination of the application consists of a study of the application for compliance with the legal requirements and a search through United States patents, prior foreign patent documents which are available in the Patent and Trademark Office, and available literature, to see if the claimed invention is new and unobvious. A decision is reached by the examiner in the light of the study and the result of the search".
In most cases when it comes to technology and patents the patents are granted and the burden of getting them revoked or stopped from being used falls on anyone who has prior art that the Patent Office did not discover in their work.
The Reference to a non disclosure contract was towards the Linux-kernel developers who may be given internal information from the findings of the OSRM. It was not intended to come out as if a U.S. patent can be put under a NDA, as it can not, since it is, like you put it, a public document.
Sorry for the bad wording, I've had a bussy day at work, and my english grade is not what I would want it to be:)
The article says: "Marshall Phelps tries to dispel the notion that Microsoft is preparing a patent assault on open-source software. He notes that at IBM he never initiated a single lawsuit"
Will this mean that the 27 seven unidentified patents that Open Source Risk Management have found can just remain then? Maybe not. If those 27 patents are identified under a contract of no disclosure to key kernel developers, will the community be able to implement workarounds before the suits starts to rain?
I would be very interested in knowing who else owns a patent that yet have not been tested in court that covers code in the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernel-series. Without knowing if they have been tested in court or not we will just have to stick with the numbers made public then: IBM has 60 patents, Microsoft has the 27, 20 has HP and 11 goes to Intel. That leaves us with just above 160 other unidentified patents to deal with.
Microsofts 27 patents are most likely the worst here, but have they been tested in court? Things like their silly patent for "activating a program on a handheld device by holding a button down for several seconds" will most likely not pass any court, or I for sure hope not.
I think that the SCO-case will set a precedence so that other stupid claims are thrown out without years of countersuits and motions in all directions. Lets atleast pray it does. I will.
I think the boot time advantage is not worth the trouble.
Maybe boot time alone does not fully justify a free opensource BIOS alternative, but what about boot time combined with better hardwarecontrol (ie allowing the user to tweak performance?), and the option of "hotbooting" bypassing the entire BIOS and letting the OS run the show. This is a very interesting area and I hope development are allowed to happen:)
One key factor to wanting to develop a free BIOS or "BIOS-like" solution to the startupsequence is that unlike what most endusers are aware of, the BIOS is a pain. Its slow, consumes a lot of bootup time and really isnt needed much longer. A free alternative would provide the user with shorter bootup times and more control over their own hardware. BIOS at its current state are just there for hardware detection/error handling and checking availability of an OS. The LinuxBIOS-project have reduced the bootup time consumed to just 5 seconds afaik. Thats really a lot less than the current BIOSes out there. Most of todays operating systems discards whatever the BIOS provide them and probe hardware directly anyways..
There were acording to El. Reg ten more of these crimminals who got arrested in Riga, Latvia last year. This investigation seem to have been going for a while and its good to see that scriptkiddies, mafia and mobsters are not allowed to try to extort victims this way.
Just took a look at them. I guess they were done in a big hurry. They're not really up to any kind of decent demo standard, Linux or otherwise. Crappier demos have been seen, but not by reliable witnesses.
Are you aware of the rules for these demo-compos? The FastIntro democompo with its content and goals are released AT the party, hence the main purpose is to show that you are able to meet the deadline and bring the content in line with the rules for the compo. Not to show off smooth graphical design skills, and to be honest, there is not really anything worse than a FastIntro-Compo. It's suppose to be Fast. On the other hand, a FastIntro-compo also lay strict limits on how much gui you can expect. Please see guidelines for the FastIntro democompo at TG2003 here. Also read up on what you need to do with a FastIntro democompo here. Hope this helps you to understand:)
If you head over to The Gathering wich is one of the top four Demo/Computer-parties in the world, held every easter here in Norway you will see that TG also has Microsoft as a huge sponsor, but that does not mean that there was no Linux-demos at TG04, TG03, TG02.. etc. Actually, the number of Linux/Amiga-based demos keep steadily rising at TG. If you have a peek: here you'll see that there is 3 Linux-FastIntro-demos and Four Win32-Fast-Intro-demos, hence, nearly equal numbers, and at TG2003, Microsoft was a masjor sponsor, as they've been for the past four years or more. Hope this helps you keep hope for Linux-based demos:)
I belive it was Uday, Saddam's now dead son, who ran the Internet in Iraq. Citizen could not access it, but he himself was usually found surfing online when not attending to his daily torture-sessions afaik. Uday got hold of this kind of administrative jobs after his younger brother Qusay was given executive power due to him being disabled after assassination-attempts.
I am there with you all the way. Setting up slackware for the first time back in the early winter of 1995/1996 was very fun. Back then I remember how everyone looked at me with weird eyes; "what is it you're doing with those computers?" Now, years later, Slackware 10.0 is out and I still feel the same joy and giggling feeling I had back then when I think about installig it.
For me, average installtime is just about 1 hour for a working X setup with Gnome 2.6.1, and thanks to the wonders of Dropline Gnome I have been able to play around with what's now Slackware 10's Gnome for quite a while. I am confident that the Dropline Crew will move on onto Slackware 10.x as they did with 9.x., thus allowing Slackware-users to deploy updated Gnome-packages and other system utilities along the development of the next Slackware version.
Perhaps, if I may add some disapointment at the bottom; I had hoped that 10.0 would be the first time Slackware got on the 2.6 series, but I do somehow understand the desire to stick with 2.4 as I myself do so also on my workstation and servers. 2.6 is great tho, and I would very much like to see it on the 10.1-release. Keep up the good work Patrick!
"..recent story"
Err.. a story *I* read recently:-)
Akamais distributed DNS & content solutions
on
Akamai Having Problems?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Akamai may have problems from time to time over in the US, while not in Europe. The fact that Akamai uses a distributed network of both DNS and content servers helps them deliver content to most users in other regions even if some servers are down in the US.
This is nicely commented on in a recent story over at CFO where it says "Broadly speaking, Akamai needs servers near the consumers of content..[] Akamai, on the other hand, has servers pretty much everywhere."
To trim the facts down a bit: Akamai has servers near by most users these days, and the distributed DNS gives you returning DNS to the closest contentserver. If I, who live in Norway, try to access fbi.gov from any computer from a ISP connected to the NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) I get a DNS response that leads me to Akamais servers in Oslo, Norway. I've tried this for some time, just to see what happens, with cnn.com, apple.com and fbi.gov. While on a trip to Sweden I tried this while connecting through a local DSL-provider and I got a response from a server located in Sweden, hence even the swedes have their own Akamai mirror these days.
The problems with a DDOS from someone in Norway would, if directed towards a domain or webpage and not an IP-address lead to downtime on that specific local mirror, not Akamais entire network. We can from this conclude that only such events as a major blackout in Akamais core network or like this time, DOS'ing their own network would take out their service.
You just got to love the way the Linux companies rush to the marketplace now with their Desktop distros. I remember back when a little company called Caldera released OpenLinux, with a very promeising suite of applications and functionality based around KDE.
Now, we have both SuSE and RedHat with their very smooth and stylable desktop gui's that should work for anyone interested in trying out Linux as a desktop OS.
I did some realtime testing with this, and gave my dad a SuSE Linux 9.0 Live-CD and told him to stick it in his brand new HP Pavilion. The distro fired up smoothly and within ten minutes my dad was surfing the net, reading his mail and listening to the local networked radio.
If this release of RedHat can match the likes of SuSE and others I belive we're finally set for - the year of the Penguin:-)
I Myself, a Linux Sysadmin, had no problems with this worm:-) For the MS-people here the case was also the same as they patched this vuln. last week. Having an agressive policy on antivirus also helps, along with some network monitoring of traffic peaks:)
What kind of whistles and trumpets the IT-droids in 'If' need I would not know, but the issue may be the VPN-access that their smaller offices and homeoffice users rely on.
The Sasser-worm had its fair amount of success yesterday as it crashed the networks of insurance-giant 'If' and their competitor in Norway, 'Vesta'. Both companies blame corporate users with laptops for the glitches in the security system and media all over Norway reported the whole thing as "unavoidable".
I have been giving this some thought, and quite frankly, even laptops can be locked down so that users are patched against this kind of attacks. The main issue in the IT-depts' of the companies mentioned above must surely have been giving it some thought yesterday; -Why did we not apply that patch from MS?
The answers for many sysadmins is to apply patches in batches on a regular basis, unless there is something *mission critical* on the radar. Ofcourse such things as the patch available to stop "sasser"-worm may have slipped by the eyes of even expirienced sysadmins, especially when its not flagged with whistles and trumpets by Microsoft.
Other sysadmins have choosen not to patch the vuln. due to its effect on VPN-connectivity as mentioned in other posts. The big question here is why Microsoft released a patch that disabled VPN in such a way. I realise it may have been the lesser of two evils, but hey, atleast they could have released the VPN-aware patch a little earlier than yesterday morning..
Who says that the storagedevice needs to be local anyway? Having the storage accessible over a LAN or WAN or maybe just the Internet seem quite reasonable to me, but in this particular case you are right:)
Slashdot Mirror
Please check http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/22/1849235 :-)
"..Next week members of the International Standard Organization are likely to approve the format as a second official ISO standard for office documents.."
Err.. Next week news called, they want their draft story back.
There is no certain outcome of next weeks vote; and the fact that we even are discussing the defects of OOXML are proof that the ISO body will have much problems just waiving this through. Please refrain from taking sides just because this is an 'Microsoft-standard'.
I'd say it's possible that OOXML will NOT be approved next week. It will probably have to take the long road through the ISO as a real standard proposal, not just a fast-tracked 6000 page gorilla.
PSSST! 2002 also called and wanted to say that Debian-Edu/Skolelinux want their project details back :-)
Finally, I got that cloud to find someone else to hover at!
Here in Trondheim, Norway one of the weirdest IT-setups I've heard of comes from one of the largest high schools (let's keep them anonymous) in Norway.
Four years ago (2003) The IT-department were to re-wire one of the older buildings (that had been refurbished in early 2000) and to get the job done they had to remove old cables from the building to give space to new ones. In the process of this they decided to make sure there was no devices still "live" on the LAN in the building. After shutting down all networked computers, printers, etc known to the techies they were a bit puzzled to find one switchport still alive, besides the uplink. To resolve the matter they followed the cable from the switch, down a hallway and.. straight into the far end brick wall.
There was no doors in the wall, and when they went around to look for the cable exiting on the other side they found no trace of it. After a little investigation back at their office they found that the wall had been put up during the refurbishment more than 2 years earlier. They decided just to unplug the cable and proceed with their network re-wireing.
Two weeks later the students and the employees returned to their building for a new term. They had only been there for a few hours when IT Support started getting calls about printing not working. A techie was dispatched to the building but could find no printer errors. The techie asked one of the employees to show him what they were trying to do when the error occured. The employee quickly pulled up a file and pushed print. No response.
One week later and still no printing in the building the team that had been doing the network re-wireing was asked to resolve the matter. They unplugged all ports in the local switch and tried to put them back in one by one printing one page each time. Still no pages showed up at the printers. Then one of the techies decided to put the last cable in, it was left over from before the re-wireing. It was the cable that went into the wall. Right then, after putting the cable back in the printers all started spewing out documents queued up for printing. Confused by this the techie went back to the office and asked his boss to ask the janitor about the cable in the wall. The school janitor told them that he had no idea, so they had to go pull the blueprints of the building up for reviewing. After looking at the blueprints it turned out that the wall had been put up to mask a door into a part of the building that had been removed. On the side of that door there was another door.
Armed with a sledge hammer the janitor and two techies returned to the building and smashed a hole in the wall at the point the prints said there was a door on the other side. Behind the wall they found a door, and inside was a little room with an old networked computer on a small table by a wall labeled "printserver", happily humming along. The room was full of dust and very hot. Within a few days the edges of the banged up wall was fixed, the dust removed and the door replaced with a new one. The printserver inside were left to do it's task.
In the end the morale of this story must be that when refurbishing old buildings one should always consult IT about the network before -- not after the job is done. But we all know that, ofcourse.
..to the better.
Since Firefox 1.0 came out I have used the Mozilla suite for email and Internet-browsing at work while I still stick with Opera at home. Firefox is there on both locations and are used from time to time. What Firefox did do when it came along was make it clear to me that Mozilla had improved over the years and no longer required me to have a heap of other browsers installed for visiting particular webpages with picky code. So, you may say that Firefox made Mozilla shine in it's own true light.
Lets have a look at their 6 months movement.
This little chart shows how newSCO's stock is doing. Their recent pressreleases and blabbering during the SCOforum left a certain spike upwards, then things settled again, and the price is currently at around $4.30. Compared to such companies as Novell, wich you can see the comparison of here, there clearly is a trend that whenever newSCO releases some FUD to the general public and the eager-to-cover media their stock is up for a short time, and the companies they are in legal battles with are down. Then it all slowly goes back as it was before. IBM, RedHat and Novell are all three doing rather well in comparison to newSCO.
It's sad to see how this hunger for money drive a former great company into the ground. I hope both investors and current stockholders realize that the only thing that is going to save newSCO is to focus on their product and shuffle Darl and his litigation off into the void.
The thing I quite don't get a grip on here is how Sun can claim that Solaris is so much safer when it now can run Linux-applications. For years Sun have been preaching that applications they have are better and more secure. When they now comply with the LSB, wouldn't that make their OS just as "insecure" as Linux supposedly are in their views?
Their webpage says:
"You can safely run Solaris and Linux applications side by side in the same container, or you can configure separate containers that isolate Solaris and Linux applications from each other and from system faults. If an application fault occurs and the application needs to be restarted, other applications continue to run without interruption. ".
Okay, let's look at this. You can now run Solaris and Linux-applications side by side - This would mean a security breach in their previous views then? Or, you can choose to lock the Linux-applications away in their own container - This seem much more in line with previous statements from Sun.
"Unlike technology previously available for running Linux in other non-Linux environments, Project Janus functionality is kernel-integrated and supported as an operating system feature."
So, this LSB-compliance are kernel-integrated, and yet they claim Solaris is more secure than Linux? Can someone please help me out on this? I'll try to investigate myself, but I am not sure what I will find, as Solaris for now, still are, closed source.
The US patent process is quite amusing in its own way. The main idea behind the US patent system is that "any" patent will be granted unless the Patent Office finds that there is prior art, or someone can claim prior art to the pending patent.
:)
From the article:
"The overtaxed U.S. Patent and Trademark Office often grants absurdly broad patents that reflect little actual innovation. (For example, Microsoft owns a patent for activating a program on a handheld device by holding a button down for several seconds). And because it costs less to pay the toll than to hire lawyers and resist, smaller firms have no choice but to pony up."
As this is by all means a news-article rather than a factfinding mission into the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office I will regard the "facts" in the article as is.
In a document describing the general information about U.S. patents you can read the following:
"The patent law specifies the general field of subject matter that can be patented and the conditions under which a patent may be obtained".
A patent in the U.S. may be granted to anyone whom; "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvements thereof, may obtain a patent".
The following, from the same document describes the process of examination of an Patent application:
"The examination of the application consists of a study of the application for compliance with the legal requirements and a search through United States patents, prior foreign patent documents which are available in the Patent and Trademark Office, and available literature, to see if the claimed invention is new and unobvious. A decision is reached by the examiner in the light of the study and the result of the search".
In most cases when it comes to technology and patents the patents are granted and the burden of getting them revoked or stopped from being used falls on anyone who has prior art that the Patent Office did not discover in their work.
The Reference to a non disclosure contract was towards the Linux-kernel developers who may be given internal information from the findings of the OSRM. It was not intended to come out as if a U.S. patent can be put under a NDA, as it can not, since it is, like you put it, a public document.
Sorry for the bad wording, I've had a bussy day at work, and my english grade is not what I would want it to be
Sources and reference for this posting can be found at: USPTO, US Patent and Trademark Office General Information Concerning Patents.
The article says:
"Marshall Phelps tries to dispel the notion that Microsoft is preparing a patent assault on open-source software. He notes that at IBM he never initiated a single lawsuit"
Will this mean that the 27 seven unidentified patents that Open Source Risk Management have found can just remain then? Maybe not. If those 27 patents are identified under a contract of no disclosure to key kernel developers, will the community be able to implement workarounds before the suits starts to rain?
I would be very interested in knowing who else owns a patent that yet have not been tested in court that covers code in the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernel-series. Without knowing if they have been tested in court or not we will just have to stick with the numbers made public then: IBM has 60 patents, Microsoft has the 27, 20 has HP and 11 goes to Intel. That leaves us with just above 160 other unidentified patents to deal with.
Microsofts 27 patents are most likely the worst here, but have they been tested in court? Things like their silly patent for "activating a program on a handheld device by holding a button down for several seconds" will most likely not pass any court, or I for sure hope not.
I think that the SCO-case will set a precedence so that other stupid claims are thrown out without years of countersuits and motions in all directions. Lets atleast pray it does. I will.
I think the boot time advantage is not worth the trouble.
:)
Maybe boot time alone does not fully justify a free opensource BIOS alternative, but what about boot time combined with better hardwarecontrol (ie allowing the user to tweak performance?), and the option of "hotbooting" bypassing the entire BIOS and letting the OS run the show. This is a very interesting area and I hope development are allowed to happen
One key factor to wanting to develop a free BIOS or "BIOS-like" solution to the startupsequence is that unlike what most endusers are aware of, the BIOS is a pain. Its slow, consumes a lot of bootup time and really isnt needed much longer. A free alternative would provide the user with shorter bootup times and more control over their own hardware. BIOS at its current state are just there for hardware detection/error handling and checking availability of an OS. The LinuxBIOS-project have reduced the bootup time consumed to just 5 seconds afaik. Thats really a lot less than the current BIOSes out there. Most of todays operating systems discards whatever the BIOS provide them and probe hardware directly anyways..
There were acording to El. Reg ten more of these crimminals who got arrested in Riga, Latvia last year. This investigation seem to have been going for a while and its good to see that scriptkiddies, mafia and mobsters are not allowed to try to extort victims this way.
In Soviet Russia noone can afford a Sport-plane, hence the ^WUSA-part :-)
But then again, you are probably much more funny than me.
Terrorists fly planes, not you
Just took a look at them. I guess they were done in a big hurry. They're not really up to any kind of decent demo standard, Linux or otherwise. Crappier demos have been seen, but not by reliable witnesses.
:)
Are you aware of the rules for these demo-compos? The FastIntro democompo with its content and goals are released AT the party, hence the main purpose is to show that you are able to meet the deadline and bring the content in line with the rules for the compo. Not to show off smooth graphical design skills, and to be honest, there is not really anything worse than a FastIntro-Compo. It's suppose to be Fast. On the other hand, a FastIntro-compo also lay strict limits on how much gui you can expect. Please see guidelines for the FastIntro democompo at TG2003 here. Also read up on what you need to do with a FastIntro democompo here. Hope this helps you to understand
If you head over to The Gathering wich is one of the top four Demo/Computer-parties in the world, held every easter here in Norway you will see that TG also has Microsoft as a huge sponsor, but that does not mean that there was no Linux-demos at TG04, TG03, TG02.. etc. Actually, the number of Linux/Amiga-based demos keep steadily rising at TG. If you have a peek: here you'll see that there is 3 Linux-FastIntro-demos and Four Win32-Fast-Intro-demos, hence, nearly equal numbers, and at TG2003, Microsoft was a masjor sponsor, as they've been for the past four years or more. Hope this helps you keep hope for Linux-based demos :)
I belive it was Uday, Saddam's now dead son, who ran the Internet in Iraq. Citizen could not access it, but he himself was usually found surfing online when not attending to his daily torture-sessions afaik. Uday got hold of this kind of administrative jobs after his younger brother Qusay was given executive power due to him being disabled after assassination-attempts.
For me, average installtime is just about 1 hour for a working X setup with Gnome 2.6.1, and thanks to the wonders of Dropline Gnome I have been able to play around with what's now Slackware 10's Gnome for quite a while. I am confident that the Dropline Crew will move on onto Slackware 10.x as they did with 9.x., thus allowing Slackware-users to deploy updated Gnome-packages and other system utilities along the development of the next Slackware version.
Perhaps, if I may add some disapointment at the bottom; I had hoped that 10.0 would be the first time Slackware got on the 2.6 series, but I do somehow understand the desire to stick with 2.4 as I myself do so also on my workstation and servers. 2.6 is great tho, and I would very much like to see it on the 10.1-release. Keep up the good work Patrick!
Err.. a story *I* read recently
This is nicely commented on in a recent story over at CFO where it says "Broadly speaking, Akamai needs servers near the consumers of content..[] Akamai, on the other hand, has servers pretty much everywhere."
To trim the facts down a bit: Akamai has servers near by most users these days, and the distributed DNS gives you returning DNS to the closest contentserver. If I, who live in Norway, try to access fbi.gov from any computer from a ISP connected to the NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) I get a DNS response that leads me to Akamais servers in Oslo, Norway. I've tried this for some time, just to see what happens, with cnn.com, apple.com and fbi.gov. While on a trip to Sweden I tried this while connecting through a local DSL-provider and I got a response from a server located in Sweden, hence even the swedes have their own Akamai mirror these days.
The problems with a DDOS from someone in Norway would, if directed towards a domain or webpage and not an IP-address lead to downtime on that specific local mirror, not Akamais entire network. We can from this conclude that only such events as a major blackout in Akamais core network or like this time, DOS'ing their own network would take out their service.
Now, we have both SuSE and RedHat with their very smooth and stylable desktop gui's that should work for anyone interested in trying out Linux as a desktop OS.
I did some realtime testing with this, and gave my dad a SuSE Linux 9.0 Live-CD and told him to stick it in his brand new HP Pavilion. The distro fired up smoothly and within ten minutes my dad was surfing the net, reading his mail and listening to the local networked radio. :-)
If this release of RedHat can match the likes of SuSE and others I belive we're finally set for - the year of the Penguin
I Myself, a Linux Sysadmin, had no problems with this worm :-) For the MS-people here the case was also the same as they patched this vuln. last week. Having an agressive policy on antivirus also helps, along with some network monitoring of traffic peaks :)
What kind of whistles and trumpets the IT-droids in 'If' need I would not know, but the issue may be the VPN-access that their smaller offices and homeoffice users rely on.
I have been giving this some thought, and quite frankly, even laptops can be locked down so that users are patched against this kind of attacks. The main issue in the IT-depts' of the companies mentioned above must surely have been giving it some thought yesterday; -Why did we not apply that patch from MS?
The answers for many sysadmins is to apply patches in batches on a regular basis, unless there is something *mission critical* on the radar. Ofcourse such things as the patch available to stop "sasser"-worm may have slipped by the eyes of even expirienced sysadmins, especially when its not flagged with whistles and trumpets by Microsoft.
Other sysadmins have choosen not to patch the vuln. due to its effect on VPN-connectivity as mentioned in other posts. The big question here is why Microsoft released a patch that disabled VPN in such a way. I realise it may have been the lesser of two evils, but hey, atleast they could have released the VPN-aware patch a little earlier than yesterday morning..
Just my 0.02 Norwegian Kroner
Who says that the storagedevice needs to be local anyway? Having the storage accessible over a LAN or WAN or maybe just the Internet seem quite reasonable to me, but in this particular case you are right :)