Funny, makes me wonder what the fancy desktop stuff in Fedora is all about, then...
OTOH, it is possible that Linux really might not be suitable for the "but I ordered a green iMac, why are there all kinds of other colors on the front?" audience yet...
Not everybody knows how to double-click or when to use a left or a right mouse button...
(this is my personal opinion... but it could be yours, too)
Re:Still concerns about security errata
on
Fedora Core 1 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
One of the nice things about Fedora being an open source project is that participation by others (eg. the Fedora Legacy people) is encouraged.
If a lot of people want backported security fixes, there's nobody stopping them from doing the work and putting up an apt or yum repository with those packages.
(one nice feature of Fedora is that up2date now talks apt and yum, so you can get your packages from anywhere you want, not just Red Hat)
The Fedora Legacy Project wants to increase this to 18 months, but so far they are just getting organized, so it remains to be seen how reliable they will be.
Considering the number of people who want the updates, I'm almost amazed there isn't a huge group of volunteers to help with the Fedora Legacy project. Or could it be that the people who complain only want to download stuff and not help ?;)
More seriously, open source has proven itself as a development model for all the programs included in the distribution. Why shouldn't it work for the distribution itself ?
Having volunteers help with the distribution should mean that more effort is going into Fedora than has ever gone into Red Hat Linux (simply because non-Red Hat people are also working on it).
Fedora isn't about abandoning the community. On the contrary, it is about better involving the community in the development of the distribution.
Note: this is my personal opinion (but it should be everyone's;))
Yes, the 64 bit versions of RHEL3 can run 32 bit binaries. The AMD64 version runs 32 bit x86 binaries, the iSeries and pSeries versions run 32 bit PPC binaries, the s390x version runs 32 bit s390 binaries and the IA64 version runs simple 32 bit x86 binaries.
Last time I checked, understanding the basic rules of reality wasn't needed to ensure that you live long enough to breed.
It is needed for long term survival, though. One day this planet will be hit by a huge asteroid again, some day way into the future the sun will stop burning. If we want to survive beyond those hurdles we'll need to understand a lot about the universe; this means that physics is important to our survival.
OTOH, if all that mattered to us was getting away from the things that want to eat us and finding the next thing to eat, then I guess we don't really deserve long-time survival. Or do we ?
Re:Let's hope this means the end of veal
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 2
you can't argue that eating meat is more efficient than eating the plants yourself.
Too bad that humans can't digest grass, and much of the land in this world just isn't suitable for intensive agriculture, but only for growing grass.
that life was rather horrible: jam-packed feed lots, pumped with antibiotics and hormones, force fed foods, disgusting sanitary conditions, etc. ... If you really want meat, buy from local farms (if possible) or buy free-range meat.
Even if you wouldn't care about the cows, you'll find that the meat from free-range cattle just tastes better.
There doesn't need to be a conflict between the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the People for Eating Tasty Animals: the better the animal is treated, the better the meat tastes.
... imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted
Not at all. All that is restricted is that US companies are forbidden from exporting these computers to India. Sanctions like these would have worked if the US were the only exporter of fast computers, but it looks like now they're just a way to shoot Cray and other US supercomputer manufacturers (do those still exist?) in the foot.
Re:Reminds me of the scene in "The Fly"
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It tasted more like a burger than any other veggie burger I tried, but was perhaps a bit too close without being perfect. The end result was that it was more "disturbing" to eat because though it sorta tasted like meat, it had a weird "there is something not right here" kind of taste to it.
To me, the same is true of corn-grown beef or beef from animals who've been fed too much growth hormones. The meat has a strange taste or just feels like a sponge.
The best beef comes from the happiest animals, the ones who grew up roaming the lands and eating grass. The kind of beef grown in Alberta (Canada), Argentina and Brazil.
Having said that, I suspect that the artificial beef will just add another gradient to the taste and structure scale of beef. I doubt it'll be a lot different from real beef since it is real beef, only grown in a lab. If the researchers are serious about making the artificial beef "exercise" I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up tasting better than the beef from cows who are locked up in stables all their lifes.
My first reaction is: why? Why not just be a vegetarian? My second reaction is that astronauts should be eating no meat, anyway.
One, people need the proteins. Astronauts need the proteins, too.
Yes, you can get the proteins from soy and beans, too, but I doubt a space ship will have space for soy or bean plantations. When you think about a (space) ship, you have to think about space efficiency.
Any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients.
If that were true, ISPs would have absolutely no reason to kick their spammers and the admins of open relays and open proxies would have no reason to secure their systems to abuse.
In short, nobody would slow down the spammers and our inboxes would be flooded by spam, even if the filters were 99% effective.
The only way to reduce the amount of spam you receive is by reducing the amount of spam being sent.
Personally I use the SBL and DSBL lists to block mail from known spammers, their supporters and open relays and open proxies.
Email is protected speech. There is a fundamental free speech right to be able to send and receive messages, regardless of medium.
Spammers have a right to free speech, but they have no right to free speech on my property. If they want to advertise, let them setup a website I can view when I want to. Free speech is about speech in public areas and is not relevant when it comes to private property. Free speech does not trump private property rights. If you think free speech does apply to private property, send me your address and I'll organise an industrial and hardrock concert in your garden.
Having said that, I think it would be good if every user could choose for him/herself the filters used on his/her mailbox. If only because the users are likely to choose much more agressive filtering than ISPs could ever setup by default.
MS.Net (their implementation) is indeed the property of Microsoft. That doesn't mean they have a legal or moral right to stop other people from creating alternative implementations.
If copyright owners could determine the law, they wouldn't need to spend millions lobbying in Washington. The fact that they're lobbying like crazy illustrates the fact that users are bound by the law, not by the wishes of copyright holders.
Having said that, in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers. This abuse of patents hurts the US public and is against the constitutional idea behind patents (the promotion of progress and innovation).
However, the open source community can't change patent law, so the only way to win this game is to follow the rules by the letter but creating the opposite result from what other players are doing. Maybe through something like a GPL for patents ?
'Linux will probably not solve such issues as clean drinking water'
Not handing 3 monthly salaries to Microsoft for every PC installed and building up a national software industry might help the economy of Jordan, which in turn should get clean drinking water to more people.
You're not going to kick-start a country's economy by buying imported end-user products in favour of locally produced goods. This is especially true of software; the cost of the CD, the cardboard box and the book are so low that importing software is just exporting money without getting anything material in return.
The question is, what is worth more to the american people: a piece of radio spectrum which is freely usable for everybody, or a one-time $10/person tax cut ?
I'm pretty sure that the radio spectrum is worth a lot more, since it opens up a large amount of opportunities for new consumer devices and house&garden communication.
In fact, if consumer devices show up I'm pretty sure the government would get more in sales tax on those devices than it would get if it sold off the spectrum.
"Not inherently less secure" is a strange way of advocating your position. Double-negatives like this usually betray a defensive mind set. Why didn't they have the conviction to say "we're *more* secure"?
Could that be because Microsoft is finally on the defense? The latest halloween document suggests that Microsoft has gotten to the point where they're behind reality, even on the field of marketing...
While it is true that Perl makes it easy to write horribly ugly code that mysteriously works, it is also possible to write nicely readable code in Perl.
Like with all languages, it's a question of discipline by the programmer. The fact that Perl is more forgiving with undisciplined programmers shouldn't be held against the language itself.
Are we talking about the same thing here? I'm saying client-side spam filters must not reject legitimate emails. I think that's a very uncontrovercial statement
I think it's a controversial statement. The only way we're ever going to stop spam is by stopping the spammers from sending it in the first place.
If no legitimate mail gets rejected, ISPs will never have any motivation to fix their open relays/proxies or kick off their spammers.
I have no problem with rejecting all email from an ISP like Verio, who has made legal threats to the operators of blocklists and has done more to protect spammers than any other ISP I am aware of.
It also must let every non-spam email get through.
Why ?
If it was important, the open relay problem will get fixed or the spammer will get booted from the network and then the mail can be sent again.
Alternatively, send the email via some webmail service like Outblaze.
I agree that ideally the receivers of email would get all the mails they wanted, but in practice this just isn't possible. Email has been "poisoned" by spammers and in some bad cases the spammers have "poisoned" whole networks so badly that the best cure is to just nullroute them until they've kicked off all their spammers.
When will ISPs decide, or be forced, to stop playing Big Brother and let the users make their own decisions about what to filter?
That will happen the day hell freezes over. Users don't WANT to receive spam, nor do they want to be bothered with having to teach their own bayesian spam filter. They simply want to receive "good" email and never be bothered with "bad" email, from the day they sign up to their account.
People pay money to their ISP and because of that expect their ISP to do the spam filtering for them.
Besides, the only sure way to stop receiving spam is to have the spammer's ISPs stop the spammers from sending it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, makes me wonder what the fancy desktop stuff in Fedora is all about, then...
... but it could be yours, too)
OTOH, it is possible that Linux really might not be suitable for the "but I ordered a green iMac, why are there all kinds of other colors on the front?" audience yet...
Not everybody knows how to double-click or when to use a left or a right mouse button...
(this is my personal opinion
One of the nice things about Fedora being an open source project is that participation by others (eg. the Fedora Legacy people) is encouraged.
If a lot of people want backported security fixes, there's nobody stopping them from doing the work and putting up an apt or yum repository with those packages.
(one nice feature of Fedora is that up2date now talks apt and yum, so you can get your packages from anywhere you want, not just Red Hat)
One of the reasons for the name change from "Red Hat Linux" to Fedora is that everybody can sell CDs with the distribution now.
No need to rename it to "pink tie linux" or "green sock linux" any more, every cheap CD shop selling CDs with Fedora can call it by its real name.
Considering the number of people who want the updates, I'm almost amazed there isn't a huge group of volunteers to help with the Fedora Legacy project. Or could it be that the people who complain only want to download stuff and not help ?
More seriously, open source has proven itself as a development model for all the programs included in the distribution. Why shouldn't it work for the distribution itself ?
Having volunteers help with the distribution should mean that more effort is going into Fedora than has ever gone into Red Hat Linux (simply because non-Red Hat people are also working on it).
Fedora isn't about abandoning the community. On the contrary, it is about better involving the community in the development of the distribution.
Note: this is my personal opinion (but it should be everyone's
It means Red Hat isn't going to sell a product in the Red Hat Linux line.
...
It doesn't say there won't be a distribution in the tradition of Red Hat Linux. In fact, Fedora Core 1 is about to be released
Nothing says they have to hand it to you on a silver platter.
Exactly. The software is free, the silver platter is an extra you need to pay for.
I mean, the salaries of the developers and the QA people needs to come from somewhere...
Yes, the 64 bit versions of RHEL3 can run 32 bit binaries. The AMD64 version runs 32 bit x86 binaries, the iSeries and pSeries versions run 32 bit PPC binaries, the s390x version runs 32 bit s390 binaries and the IA64 version runs simple 32 bit x86 binaries.
Also, don't forget the kernelnewbies mailing list and IRC channel.
If you want to learn about the kernel, you're not alone. There are a few thousand people out there willing to learn about the kernel with you...
OTOH, if all that mattered to us was getting away from the things that want to eat us and finding the next thing to eat, then I guess we don't really deserve long-time survival. Or do we ?
There doesn't need to be a conflict between the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the People for Eating Tasty Animals: the better the animal is treated, the better the meat tastes.
To me, the same is true of corn-grown beef or beef from animals who've been fed too much growth hormones. The meat has a strange taste or just feels like a sponge.
The best beef comes from the happiest animals, the ones who grew up roaming the lands and eating grass. The kind of beef grown in Alberta (Canada), Argentina and Brazil.
Having said that, I suspect that the artificial beef will just add another gradient to the taste and structure scale of beef. I doubt it'll be a lot different from real beef since it is real beef, only grown in a lab. If the researchers are serious about making the artificial beef "exercise" I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up tasting better than the beef from cows who are locked up in stables all their lifes.
One, people need the proteins. Astronauts need the proteins, too.
Yes, you can get the proteins from soy and beans, too, but I doubt a space ship will have space for soy or bean plantations. When you think about a (space) ship, you have to think about space efficiency.
Shipboard living space, the final frontier.
In short, nobody would slow down the spammers and our inboxes would be flooded by spam, even if the filters were 99% effective.
The only way to reduce the amount of spam you receive is by reducing the amount of spam being sent.
Personally I use the SBL and DSBL lists to block mail from known spammers, their supporters and open relays and open proxies.
Spammers have a right to free speech, but they have no right to free speech on my property. If they want to advertise, let them setup a website I can view when I want to. Free speech is about speech in public areas and is not relevant when it comes to private property. Free speech does not trump private property rights. If you think free speech does apply to private property, send me your address and I'll organise an industrial and hardrock concert in your garden.Having said that, I think it would be good if every user could choose for him/herself the filters used on his/her mailbox. If only because the users are likely to choose much more agressive filtering than ISPs could ever setup by default.
Maybe it is a spam conference after all and not the anti-spam conference people seem to assume ;)
If this conference is anti-spam, why are they using slashdot to spam for this conference ?
This thing must have been featured 3 or 4 times on slashdot now...
MS .Net (their implementation) is indeed the property of Microsoft. That doesn't mean they have a legal or moral right to stop other people from creating alternative implementations.
If copyright owners could determine the law, they wouldn't need to spend millions lobbying in Washington. The fact that they're lobbying like crazy illustrates the fact that users are bound by the law, not by the wishes of copyright holders.
Having said that, in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers. This abuse of patents hurts the US public and is against the constitutional idea behind patents (the promotion of progress and innovation).
However, the open source community can't change patent law, so the only way to win this game is to follow the rules by the letter but creating the opposite result from what other players are doing. Maybe through something like a GPL for patents ?
Not handing 3 monthly salaries to Microsoft for every PC installed and building up a national software industry might help the economy of Jordan, which in turn should get clean drinking water to more people.
You're not going to kick-start a country's economy by buying imported end-user products in favour of locally produced goods. This is especially true of software; the cost of the CD, the cardboard box and the book are so low that importing software is just exporting money without getting anything material in return.
I know this story is a dupe. The slashdot editors have re-posted the old story, instead of posting the newly submitted follow-up story to this one...
*sigh*
The question is, what is worth more to the american people: a piece of radio spectrum which is freely usable for everybody, or a one-time $10/person tax cut ?
I'm pretty sure that the radio spectrum is worth a lot more, since it opens up a large amount of opportunities for new consumer devices and house&garden communication.
In fact, if consumer devices show up I'm pretty sure the government would get more in sales tax on those devices than it would get if it sold off the spectrum.
While it is true that Perl makes it easy to write horribly ugly code that mysteriously works, it is also possible to write nicely readable code in Perl.
Like with all languages, it's a question of discipline by the programmer. The fact that Perl is more forgiving with undisciplined programmers shouldn't be held against the language itself.
I think it's a controversial statement. The only way we're ever going to stop spam is by stopping the spammers from sending it in the first place.
If no legitimate mail gets rejected, ISPs will never have any motivation to fix their open relays/proxies or kick off their spammers.
I have no problem with rejecting all email from an ISP like Verio, who has made legal threats to the operators of blocklists and has done more to protect spammers than any other ISP I am aware of.
If it was important, the open relay problem will get fixed or the spammer will get booted from the network and then the mail can be sent again.
Alternatively, send the email via some webmail service like Outblaze.
I agree that ideally the receivers of email would get all the mails they wanted, but in practice this just isn't possible. Email has been "poisoned" by spammers and in some bad cases the spammers have "poisoned" whole networks so badly that the best cure is to just nullroute them until they've kicked off all their spammers.
People pay money to their ISP and because of that expect their ISP to do the spam filtering for them.
Besides, the only sure way to stop receiving spam is to have the spammer's ISPs stop the spammers from sending it in the first place.