I think from now on I am going to go out of my way to buy wireless cards, printers, and other accessories and peripherals only from those manufacturers that have helped make their stuff work with linux whenever I can.
For a long time, most of my stuff would work with linux, but when I started buying wireless cards a few years ago (dlink 650's), I had a hell of a time getting them working.
Does anyone know of a web page that makes it easy to find manufacturers that have actively supported linux?
Thanks for the pointer to their web site. I really like what they are doing.
I'd like to respond to your point though.
Money can buy food and water and shelter. So if you can make it possible for some of the brighter people in a poor country to earn money, then you are helping with the 'more important' stuff.
Even in the poorest countries, you will find a lot of bright young people sitting around with nothing to do. Of all the resources going to waste, surely that is one of the most valuable.
One of the amazing things about programming is that all you need is to be bright, access to a computer and documentation, and time and you can teach yourself.
I don't think someone who travels to a poor country and spends their time teaching programming should feel bad they are not tilling the fields instead.
this guy should be admonished for attempting to teach IT skills to a third world country. Next thing you know, greedy american companies will be outsourcing IT or programming work to people in Ghana for pennies and letting 3 well-paid American programmers go.
For the sarsacm inpaired, I think what this guy is doing is great. What I don't think is great is the guild/labor mentailty of some programmers and IT people who think there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
My dad bought it for me when I was a junior in high school in 1983, and Osborne went out of business a month later.
I'm 36 now.
I spent many delightful hours programming in basic on it, and then took a programming course at the University of Pittsburgh where I learned pascal (my high school had a thing with the university for intersted students.). Man I worked hard unlearning my bad BASIC habits and learning how to think in Pascal. I bought Turbo Pascal so I could practice from home and I also used a 300 baud modem with the Osborne to connect to the computers at the University to run my finished pascal programs.
I used the Osborne for pascal programming till around 1987, when I bought a leading edge PC.
The Osborne was a great computer for its time and it was there for me to practice programming at a critical time (end of high school and beginning of collage).
Thank you, Adam, for creating it. You will be greatly missed.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Another way to put this is to note that the same people who have no problem buying foreign products themselves when they are cheaper than the american products (and supposedly putting americans out of work who could have made those products) have a problem with american companies buying foreign labor to make the american products they buy.
If american companies should hire only americans, then shouldn't americans only buy american products?
It's hipocrisy to say otherwise.
It never ceases to amaze me how sympathy and concern for others seem to end at national boundaries.
Someone please explain to me why it is o.k. to buy foreign products (which supposedly deprives american workers of jobs in the industry that produces said product) but it is not o.k. to hire foreign labor.
Don't you get most of the benefit of EROS with linux+LIDS?
I am curious what capabilities advocates think of LIDS.
The LIDS patch is much less extreme of a measure than trying to implement a non executable stack when people have found interesting uses for an executable stack.
I think by far the easiest way to mitigate the security nightmare that buffer overflows represent is to use LIDS (www.lids.org). Buffer overflows would not be the huge problem that they are if you didn't have daemons running with all of the privilidges of the root account.
LIDS lets you strip away all of root's power, until it is no more powerful than any other normal user account, and add individual capabilities back to particular programs, like giving/usr/sbin/httpd the ability to bind to port 80, and no other root powers.
Now, buffer overflows are still a problem in that you can crash a daemon, but they would not be the security disasters they currently are.
What I like the best about LIDS is that is sits on top of the existing Linux security mechanisms so nicely and doesn't do violence to them. You can turn off LIDS when you need to install new software or want to test something without having to figure out a whole new ruleset. You just disable it, do your testing and reconfiguration, then reenable it before you go back into production mode.
The one question I wanted to see an answer to was whether I could designate myself as a signing authority and get the motherboard to only run code I had signed, or whether there was a fixed list of signing authorities.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see an answer to that. The answer seems to be no, which means the comsumer is being taken for a ride.
If I were Microsoft, I would attempt to buy the patents to the Mandatory Access Controls as used in SELinux, in order to stop the scenario described here from playing out.
The scenario is that by further developing the SELinux concept, linux would become such a secure OS for general government use that governments would be forced to use it instead of Windows.
I think the main reason Fortran is still alive and well is that legions of professors and graduate students in the 60s and 70s wrote so much good numerical analysis software. Translating that code into a more modern language is simply out of the question. It would require a huge effort.
If is really tough to write a function to invert a matrix of arbitrary size that performs well and to do it with proper attention to numerical stability (basically I mean that round off error won't kill you). You would need to write about a thousand such functions to replace the work that is available if you are willing to use fortran.
The R language (www.r-project.org), which for this discussion can be considered an open source version of matlab, has been built atop the old fortran sources. It's a very cutting edge software package and if it weren't for the gnu fortran compiler and the old fortran numeric code, it would have never gotten off the ground.
If you want to convince someone (like your employer, say) to use linux, solve a problem for them using linux that they would be helpless to solve in windows.
I am a communications engineer working at a company that operates a satellite mobile data network. When I started working for them in 1998, my first task was to get on top of their network statistics and figure out how to monitor the performance of their network.
I started assembling a data analysis and display system using linux by piecing together the fantastic open source software packages available like tcpdump, ethereal, R, vnc, apache, bash, and many others. The continued development of this system has become my full time job and my employers and I couldn't be happier with each other.
Internally we are still a windows shop but linux is slowly taking over more and more functions because it solves our problems better.
I'm 6'2". I went from 210lbs to 155lbs in 6 months. I lost 5lbs a week for the first month. I've been at 155 lbs for a year. I am 35 years old and now weigh what I did when I graduated high school.
Weight watchers boils down to counting calories, penalizing fat and rewarding fiber.
(You won't see that formula in their literature. I had to figure it out from their point calculator thingy by playing around with it. Now watch them sue me for violating the DMCA;-).
Although fruit has a lot of calories, it also has a lot of fiber, so the point value of fruit is smaller than you would think if you simply counted calories. Basically 1 cup of fruit is 1 point (that is true of cherries, strawberries, and grapes. An average apple or orange is 1 point also).
I was eating 35 points a day when I started (roughly 1500 calories) and I have been maintaining my weight eating 45 to 50 points a day (more like 2500 calories).
What I have noticed about dieting is that there is a big difference between being hungry and feeling like you'd like to eat something. That is why controlling your portion size is so effective. If you just follow your appetite, you'll eat until you are stuffed.
You'd be suprised how little food it takes to stop feeling hungry, if you can pry the fork out of your fingers after a modest portion.
You basically need to fill your life with interesting, engaging activities so you don't rely on food so much to be happy. If you do that, and only eat enough food to stop feeling hungry, you'll lose weight and be a lot happier person at the same time.
I think the biggest reason Americans are gaining weight is that they are using food to manage stress.
Find a good book on the area of math you are interested in then keep it on you as you run all the errands of your day. I highly recommend Gilbert Strang's books. He is the one of the best explainers of math around.
If you go to a doctor's office, and they make you wait for 45 minutes, then that's 45 minutes you can use to read the book.
I ironically discovered an interest in math shortly after the birth of my first son (although I had studied more post high school math than you did). What amazed me, however, was how much good I could get out of 45 minutes here and there when I was really interested in a subject and always kept the book I was working on handy. If you only get a few hours a week in, but keep at it, you'd be suprised how much you learn in just a few months.
You think that the license fees the government pays to Microsoft and other software companies creates economic activity in those companies, that wouldn't exist otherwise, and that the tax revenue from that activity is larger than the license fees paid by the government?
How do you figure?
You must be assuming some sort of catalyst effect, where the license fees paid by the government allow for the development of software, which is so useful to other people that it raises profits at other companies and comes back to the government as tax revenue from those other companies.
If that is true, and I would love to see more of your reasoning about it, then you do think the government has a role in creating software, since the government is apparently so good at determining which software to buy that the software they choose is more useful to the wider economy than the software the wider economy would choose to buy (and hence, fund) on its own.
I wonder what hands down the best use of computers is in the classroom?
My first three guesses would be web browsing, email, and word processing (writing reports). Linux is clearly up to that and has been for some time.
I have heard that what we usually think of, programs that drill you in math or some other subject, aren't any better than pencil and paper drills.
I asked my son's first grade teacher what they use the computers in the classroom for and she said mostly for them to print stories they write, so the students feel like they have created a book. I have to admit, then feels right.
My son *loves* to write sentences in word and print them out, more so than playing reader rabbit or many of the educational programs we have bought for him.
I have to wonder if all of these initiatives to write flashy, multimedia educational software aren't misguided.
This issue is one of the reasons I started studying linux. Control of my machine.
The only real way to be sure you are free of viruses and trojans is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall your operating system and personal software.
With linux, it turns out to be simple to arrange things so that even with a lot of complicated, customized software installed on a machine, you can reformat your root partition, reinstall linux, and have your non-standard software installed and configured in under an hour. This makes it feasible to do every few weeks for your home computer.
The main reason is that most of the software configuration consists of ascii text files in/etc and a few other locations which in any event are well known, or easy to figure out.
Keep your compiled software directories on a separate partition and write a script to descend into each of them and run a "make install". Then keep copies of all the/etc files you modify in your post install config in another directory (again, off of the root partition), and have a script that copies each file to its proper place on the root partition.
When it comes time to reinstall, reformat the root partition, reinstall linux, and then run your 2 scripts and you are back where you started, minus any viruses and trojans and exploits that managed to infest you since the last time you did this.
I wrote up an article with more detail on this on rootprompt at:
Yes, it leads to poor performance and an unstable link. Still, for my purposes (connecting from home to my work machines through a firewall over a DSL line at 128kbps), you'd be suprised how useful it is.
IPSec would be better but I would have a lot to learn and experiment with before I could use it. The ssh+ppp solution is much easier.
Thanks for the info on "-p". I didn't know about that.
You are correct, of course, about the flaws of my scheme, but you'd be amazed how well it works for my purposes. I work from home and need to get access to my work machines through the firewall.
USing my 128k DSL connection to the net, I can do a lot this way, including using VNC acceptably.
I wouldn't recommend it for any production environment, but for simple things it more than fits the bill.
Here's this script I use to setup a quick and dirty VPN between my workstation at work and my home PC. It has to originate from work to get through the firewall but once setup, of course, packets can flow both ways. I call the script ssh-vpn.
You have to setup ssh correctly with rsa keys before it will work. You also have to download pty-redir. See the VPN mini how-to for more details.
#!/bin/bash
REMOTE_HOST=$1 REMOTE_IP=$2 LOCAL_IP=$3
if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ] || [ -z "$3" ] ; then
echo "usage ssh-vpn "
exit 1 fi
# this file holds the slave pty that the local pppd needs tmpfile=/tmp/tmp$$
Slashdot Mirror
SCO's ruin is no longer what I want.
Nothing less than McBride being led away in chains for fraud and libel is going to satisfy me now.
I think from now on I am going to go out of my way to buy wireless cards, printers, and other accessories and peripherals only from those manufacturers that have helped make their stuff work with linux whenever I can.
For a long time, most of my stuff would work with linux, but when I started buying wireless cards a few years ago (dlink 650's), I had a hell of a time getting them working.
Does anyone know of a web page that makes it easy to find manufacturers that have actively supported linux?
Thanks for the pointer to their web site. I really like what they are doing.
I'd like to respond to your point though.
Money can buy food and water and shelter. So if you can make it possible for some of the brighter people in a poor country to earn money, then you are helping with the 'more important' stuff.
Even in the poorest countries, you will find a lot of bright young people sitting around with nothing to do. Of all the resources going to waste, surely that is one of the most valuable.
One of the amazing things about programming is that all you need is to be bright, access to a computer and documentation, and time and you can teach yourself.
I don't think someone who travels to a poor country and spends their time teaching programming should feel bad they are not tilling the fields instead.
this guy should be admonished for attempting to teach IT skills to a third world country. Next thing you know, greedy american companies will be outsourcing IT or programming work to people in Ghana for pennies and letting 3 well-paid American programmers go.
For the sarsacm inpaired, I think what this guy is doing is great. What I don't think is great is the guild/labor mentailty of some programmers and IT people who think there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
people who seem to get their kicks out of suggest new taxes?
My dad bought it for me when I was a junior in high school in 1983, and Osborne went out of business a month later.
I'm 36 now.
I spent many delightful hours programming in basic on it, and then took a programming course at the University of Pittsburgh where I learned pascal (my high school had a thing with the university for intersted students.). Man I worked hard unlearning my bad BASIC habits and learning how to think in Pascal. I bought Turbo Pascal so I could practice from home and I also used a 300 baud modem with the Osborne to connect to the computers at the University to run my finished pascal programs.
I used the Osborne for pascal programming till around 1987, when I bought a leading edge PC.
The Osborne was a great computer for its time and it was there for me to practice programming at a critical time (end of high school and beginning of collage).
Thank you, Adam, for creating it. You will be greatly missed.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Another way to put this is to note that the same people who have no problem buying foreign products themselves when they are cheaper than the american products (and supposedly putting americans out of work who could have made those products) have a problem with american companies buying foreign labor to make the american products they buy.
If american companies should hire only americans, then shouldn't americans only buy american products?
It's hipocrisy to say otherwise.
It never ceases to amaze me how sympathy and concern for others seem to end at national boundaries.
I am also disappointed by these posts.
Someone please explain to me why it is o.k. to buy foreign products (which supposedly deprives american workers of jobs in the industry that produces said product) but it is not o.k. to hire foreign labor.
Don't both actions deprive americans of jobs?
Or does either?
Don't you get most of the benefit of EROS with linux+LIDS?
I am curious what capabilities advocates think of LIDS.
The LIDS patch is much less extreme of a measure than trying to implement a non executable stack when people have found interesting uses for an executable stack.
I think by far the easiest way to mitigate the security nightmare that buffer overflows represent is to use LIDS (www.lids.org). Buffer overflows would not be the huge problem that they are if you didn't have daemons running with all of the privilidges of the root account.
/usr/sbin/httpd the ability to bind to port 80, and no other root powers.
LIDS lets you strip away all of root's power, until it is no more powerful than any other normal user account, and add individual capabilities back to particular programs, like giving
Now, buffer overflows are still a problem in that you can crash a daemon, but they would not be the security disasters they currently are.
What I like the best about LIDS is that is sits on top of the existing Linux security mechanisms so nicely and doesn't do violence to them. You can turn off LIDS when you need to install new software or want to test something without having to figure out a whole new ruleset. You just disable it, do your testing and reconfiguration, then reenable it before you go back into production mode.
The one question I wanted to see an answer to was whether I could designate myself as a signing authority and get the motherboard to only run code I had signed, or whether there was a fixed list of signing authorities.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see an answer to that. The answer seems to be no, which means the comsumer is being taken for a ride.
If I were Microsoft, I would attempt to buy the patents to the Mandatory Access Controls as used in SELinux, in order to stop the scenario described here from playing out.
The scenario is that by further developing the SELinux concept, linux would become such a secure OS for general government use that governments would be forced to use it instead of Windows.
I think the main reason Fortran is still alive and well is that legions of professors and graduate students in the 60s and 70s wrote so much good numerical analysis software. Translating that code into a more modern language is simply out of the question. It would require a huge effort.
If is really tough to write a function to invert a matrix of arbitrary size that performs well and to do it with proper attention to numerical stability (basically I mean that round off error won't kill you). You would need to write about a thousand such functions to replace the work that is available if you are willing to use fortran.
The R language (www.r-project.org), which for this discussion can be considered an open source version of matlab, has been built atop the old fortran sources. It's a very cutting edge software package and if it weren't for the gnu fortran compiler and the old fortran numeric code, it would have never gotten off the ground.
Windows is great for pissy little stuff, I agree.
The reason I couldn't use windows is what I put together was not pissy or little.
If you want to convince someone (like your employer, say) to use linux, solve a problem for them using linux that they would be helpless to solve in windows.
I am a communications engineer working at a company that operates a satellite mobile data network. When I started working for them in 1998, my first task was to get on top of their network statistics and figure out how to monitor the performance of their network.
I started assembling a data analysis and display system using linux by piecing together the fantastic open source software packages available like tcpdump, ethereal, R, vnc, apache, bash, and many others. The continued development of this system has become my full time job and my employers and I couldn't be happier with each other.
Internally we are still a windows shop but linux is slowly taking over more and more functions because it solves our problems better.
I'm 6'2". I went from 210lbs to 155lbs in 6 months. I lost 5lbs a week for the first month. I've been at 155 lbs for a year. I am 35 years old and now weigh what I did when I graduated high school.
;-).
Weight watchers boils down to counting calories, penalizing fat and rewarding fiber.
The point formula goes like this:
points = calories/50 + fat grams/12 - fiber grams/5.
(You won't see that formula in their literature. I had to figure it out from their point calculator thingy by playing around with it. Now watch them sue me for violating the DMCA
Although fruit has a lot of calories, it also has a lot of fiber, so the point value of fruit is smaller than you would think if you simply counted calories. Basically 1 cup of fruit is 1 point (that is true of cherries, strawberries, and grapes. An average apple or orange is 1 point also).
I was eating 35 points a day when I started (roughly 1500 calories) and I have been maintaining my weight eating 45 to 50 points a day (more like 2500 calories).
What I have noticed about dieting is that there is a big difference between being hungry and feeling like you'd like to eat something. That is why controlling your portion size is so effective. If you just follow your appetite, you'll eat until you are stuffed.
You'd be suprised how little food it takes to stop feeling hungry, if you can pry the fork out of your fingers after a modest portion.
You basically need to fill your life with interesting, engaging activities so you don't rely on food so much to be happy. If you do that, and only eat enough food to stop feeling hungry, you'll lose weight and be a lot happier person at the same time.
I think the biggest reason Americans are gaining weight is that they are using food to manage stress.
Find a good book on the area of math you are interested in then keep it on you as you run all the errands of your day. I highly recommend Gilbert Strang's books. He is the one of the best explainers of math around.
If you go to a doctor's office, and they make you wait for 45 minutes, then that's 45 minutes you can use to read the book.
I ironically discovered an interest in math shortly after the birth of my first son (although I had studied more post high school math than you did). What amazed me, however, was how much good I could get out of 45 minutes here and there when I was really interested in a subject and always kept the book I was working on handy. If you only get a few hours a week in, but keep at it, you'd be suprised how much you learn in just a few months.
Good luck!
How much time did your father spend raising you?
Did anyone pay him for doing that?
Oh, wait, you mean he got something other than money out of the whole process?
Hmmm, imagine that. People valuing things other than money...
Something to think about.
You think that the license fees the government pays to Microsoft and other software companies creates economic activity in those companies, that wouldn't exist otherwise, and that the tax revenue from that activity is larger than the license fees paid by the government?
How do you figure?
You must be assuming some sort of catalyst effect, where the license fees paid by the government allow for the development of software, which is so useful to other people that it raises profits at other companies and comes back to the government as tax revenue from those other companies.
If that is true, and I would love to see more of your reasoning about it, then you do think the government has a role in creating software, since the government is apparently so good at determining which software to buy that the software they choose is more useful to the wider economy than the software the wider economy would choose to buy (and hence, fund) on its own.
Right?
Gradebook software. Hmmm.
I wonder what hands down the best use of computers is in the classroom?
My first three guesses would be web browsing, email, and word processing (writing reports). Linux is clearly up to that and has been for some time.
I have heard that what we usually think of, programs that drill you in math or some other subject, aren't any better than pencil and paper drills.
I asked my son's first grade teacher what they use the computers in the classroom for and she said mostly for them to print stories they write, so the students feel like they have created a book. I have to admit, then feels right.
My son *loves* to write sentences in word and print them out, more so than playing reader rabbit or many of the educational programs we have bought for him.
I have to wonder if all of these initiatives to write flashy, multimedia educational software aren't misguided.
This issue is one of the reasons I started studying linux. Control of my machine.
/etc and a few other locations which in any event are well known, or easy to figure out.
/etc files you modify in your post install config in another directory (again, off of the root partition), and have a script that copies each file to its proper place on the root partition.
3 91 2
The only real way to be sure you are free of viruses and trojans is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall your operating system and personal software.
With linux, it turns out to be simple to arrange things so that even with a lot of complicated, customized software installed on a machine, you can reformat your root partition, reinstall linux, and have your non-standard software installed and configured in under an hour. This makes it feasible to do every few weeks for your home computer.
The main reason is that most of the software configuration consists of ascii text files in
Keep your compiled software directories on a separate partition and write a script to descend into each of them and run a "make install". Then keep copies of all the
When it comes time to reinstall, reformat the root partition, reinstall linux, and then run your 2 scripts and you are back where you started, minus any viruses and trojans and exploits that managed to infest you since the last time you did this.
I wrote up an article with more detail on this on rootprompt at:
http://www.rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=
Yes, it leads to poor performance and an unstable link. Still, for my purposes (connecting from home to my work machines through a firewall over a DSL line at 128kbps), you'd be suprised how useful it is.
IPSec would be better but I would have a lot to learn and experiment with before I could use it. The ssh+ppp solution is much easier.
Thanks for the info on "-p". I didn't know about that.
You are correct, of course, about the flaws of my scheme, but you'd be amazed how well it works for my purposes. I work from home and need to get access to my work machines through the firewall.
USing my 128k DSL connection to the net, I can do a lot this way, including using VNC acceptably.
I wouldn't recommend it for any production environment, but for simple things it more than fits the bill.
Here's a link to a tgz file of the pty-redir source and compiled utility:
http://www.hopelesscase.com/pty-redir.tgz
I had to modify it to get it to work so in the interests of saving time, I'm posting it here.
Here's this script I use to setup a quick and dirty VPN between my workstation at work and my home PC. It has to originate from work to get through the firewall but once setup, of course, packets can flow both ways. I call the script ssh-vpn.
/usr/bin/ssh -1 -o 'Batchmode yes' -t -l root $REMOTE_HOST /usr/sbin/pppd local ${REMOTE_IP}:${LOCAL_IP} 2> $tmpfile
You have to setup ssh correctly with rsa keys before it will work. You also have to download pty-redir. See the VPN mini how-to for more details.
#!/bin/bash
REMOTE_HOST=$1
REMOTE_IP=$2
LOCAL_IP=$3
if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ] || [ -z "$3" ] ; then
echo "usage ssh-vpn "
exit 1
fi
# this file holds the slave pty that the local pppd needs
tmpfile=/tmp/tmp$$
# start remote pppd
/usr/local/bin/pty-redir
# give the remote pppd process a little time to send its first connect request
sleep 5
#start local pppd
/usr/sbin/pppd $(cat $tmpfile) passive
# remove file that held the slave pty file name
sleep 5
rm $tmpfile