If redhat, suse or whoever can offer something similar that is as easy to set up and monitor, they'll certainly help get *nix easier to support as an end user OS.
Not sure about the others but Red Hat does indeed offer this service as the Red Hat Network.
Except the whole point of Windows 7 is that it's being re-written from scratch to compete with the iPhone (and other multitouch phones.)
I'm with him on 6.5, but that doesn't necessarily mean 7 will also be a huge failure.
But 6.5, like 6.1 and 6.0, is basically just a facelift to the years-old 5.0. Since 6.0 was launched, Google, Palm, and RIM have rewritten or created new mobile OSes that can hold their own, and here we have Microsoft slapping yet another veneer on their tired old OS. Why isn't 7 out already? Why can't Microsoft even keep up with everyone else?!
As Gizmodo pointed out, the really bizarre thing is that even the Zune is more polished and up-to-date than Windows Mobile. What the hell have the WinMo team been doing for the past five years?!
I think that Mozilla and their millions of dollars in revenue would argue that the Netscape re-write (most of us call it "Firefox") is far from a business disaster.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.
It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even/. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".
No, that's the distinction. In Sony's (and the *AA's) eyes, you don't purchase content, you buy a license to use it in whatever ways they say you can. Since they lost the Fair Use battle, they are trying to change the game to something that favors them.
Yes it sucks but I agree, none of us should really be surprised. Ever since Verisign bought Thawte I've been waiting for this to happen. I've been a notary in a fairly large metro area for years and can't remember the last time I was asked to notarize someone.
Yeah, the concept itself was a bit difficult for a lot of people to grasp but their website also really sucked. It hadn't been updated in years and you had to navigate through that ridiculous hierarchical system instead of being able to just "find notaries within 25 miles of me".
But really, email certs serve two purposes: sender verification and/or encryption (I guess proving an email wasn't tampered with could count as a third but it's really part of encryption). The first function is increasingly already being performed at the server level using SenderID/DomainKeys, and there are plenty of ways to accomplish the second if two parties so choose.
It's one of those things that probably would have been a great idea if it were baked into the email standard since inception, but was just too unwieldy to bolt-on later.
Doing something and then obsessing about the statistical data - it's using up a part of your life you won't get back again. I've always argued (over a 30 year engineering career) that the purpose of automated data collection and analysis is to enable us to do human things, not robot things. Rowing, for instance, should be a fun exercise that keeps you fit, improves your social life, and makes you aware of your environment in new ways.
As someone who is about to run his first marathon and who has plans to enter my first Ironman triathlon next year, I can absolutely tell you that without this type of data you are at a serious disadvantage to the other competitors and likely won't even cross the finish line.
Training for these type of endurance events is a science, and like everything else requires data. I'm only just beginning to consume the massive volume of information available on the subject but already I have a deep appreciation for the scientific betterment of one's fitness.
I won't try to explain it all here but search for terms like "anaerobic threshold" and "VO2 max" (maximal oxygen consumption) to understand why doing things like analyzing your heartrate at specific training intensities is so important.
Your body must undergo very specific changes (blood volume per heart beat, hemoglobin density, mitochondria efficiency, etc. etc.) in order to have a chance, and only by knowing how the body responds to training and then training for very specific results (by adjusting intensity, duration, repititions) and periodizing your workouts throughout a training season is it possible to get your body to peak ability.
Just going out and busting your ass swimming, biking, and running won't improve your fitness enough if you don't know what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish, and you can't do that without precise training data.
And on a psychological level, let me say that it's very invigorating to find out that I can run (for example) a 9:30 mile for 10 miles and see that my heart rate has dropped 10bpm from a month ago. That's quantitative proof that my fitness has increased and is just the sort of encouragement I need to keep going, just like someone who is dieting to lose weight who finds out they lost 5 pounds in a month.
This makes me very happy. I've owned a Forerunner 305 for a while and use it for running and biking (with heart rate monitor and bike speed/cadence sensor) but hadn't yet looked into getting at the data from my Linux desktop. I just assumed that it was yet another Windows and Mac-only proprietary binary blob; glad to hear otherwise!
Now, please recreate the chart to show which party controlled Congress as opposed to who was in the White House. You know, because Congress writes the budget, not the President.
He's been out of office for six months now. It's time to give up the knee-jerk Bush bashing and get some new material. There are plenty of other ripe targets if you just look around a bit.
The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in?
Yeah, just like the lack of a single image format killed the <img> tag right? I think we'll see browsers coalesce around two or three codecs that all of them will end up supporting, plus they will all likely also hook into the OS to support whatever codecs it provides. Sure, it would have been nice if Theora was left as the blessed default, but with YouTube and DailyMotion supporting it you can bet it will become the de facto standard anyway.
Word processor documents aren't designed to preserve their layout exactly from one system to the next. That's what PDF is for; just install a virtual PDF printer driver like CutePDF and send that instead. Or else use numbered sections within the document and refer to those.
Wow, this sounds like almost exactly what I need, thanks for the link! I've never heard of this before, and even though it says "open source" the only download I can find is a "VmWare evaluation version". Very odd. I'll definitely do some more digging though...
It's obvious that my biggest mistake when submitting this question is the assumption that many people would actually know what the Red Hat Network does. I want an open source system that I can run on my own server that duplicates the functionality of RHN. That means:
Each machine runs its own cron job to determine (through the regular yum repo mechanism) which updates are available
Each machine publishes that list to the server.
I can log in to the server, see which updates are available for each machine, view the errata details for each update, and decide for each whether to push to the client.
The next time the client checks back in, the server tells it that I want to install patch X, Y, and Z.
That's really all I meant by reviewing each available update. Just a quick sanity check so that the system isn't in full-auto update mode.
2) How secure is it? You are effectively granting root privs to a website - not always a good idea.
Forgot to reply to that part... the way the RHN works is that there is a cron job that runs on the client to ask the server once an hour whether there are any requested updates. The server just provides the list of packages that the user wants updated, and the local cron job pulls those packages from the pre-approved repository/ies only.
So yeah, it's still granting a fair deal of power to the website but it's not like someone could use it to run arbitrary commands on the client. But as long as everything is secured using https and PKI signing is used to verify that the list of requested updates is legitimate, I don't see how that's much/any less secure than performing manual updates via SSH.
Me? I have a web doohickey to let me know when updates are available. Cron job runs nightly to yum and a pattern match identifies whether or not updates are needed, to show on my homepage. So it doesn't DO the update, butit makes it ez to see has been done.
Care to publish this somewhere? To be honest knowing which updates are available is a bigger concern to me than actually installing them. The latter is more a nice to have but all the other suggestions are concentrating mostly on that aspect.
I'm close to just knuckling down and writing such a thing myself but it's always nice to not start from scratch.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of Landscape before, although it seems to be Ubuntu-specific. I am rather surprised that no vendor has created a similar non-distro-specific solution.
Yes, I could have found that myself (in much less than 2 minutes) if a distributed command execution tool were anything at all close to what I was looking for.
Thanks for the suggestion, but this and other solutions like Puppet and CFEngine solve only half the problem, which is actually pushing out the patches. The part that's really missing is a way to easily identify the available patches from the distro for that particular machine. When I log on to Red Hat Network it has a list like "10 of your 12 systems are up to date" and you can see which systems need updating, which packages are available for install on them, and actually schedule those patches for install.
I guess I should have mentioned that for various reasons these servers are spread across multiple hosting companies at disparate locations, and no two of them have the same exact list of packages etc. installed. So I need a much more federated setup (like RHN) where each machine checks on its own whether it is up to date and reports those results back to the central server.
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If redhat, suse or whoever can offer something similar that is as easy to set up and monitor, they'll certainly help get *nix easier to support as an end user OS.
Not sure about the others but Red Hat does indeed offer this service as the Red Hat Network.
Except the whole point of Windows 7 is that it's being re-written from scratch to compete with the iPhone (and other multitouch phones.)
I'm with him on 6.5, but that doesn't necessarily mean 7 will also be a huge failure.
But 6.5, like 6.1 and 6.0, is basically just a facelift to the years-old 5.0. Since 6.0 was launched, Google, Palm, and RIM have rewritten or created new mobile OSes that can hold their own, and here we have Microsoft slapping yet another veneer on their tired old OS. Why isn't 7 out already? Why can't Microsoft even keep up with everyone else?!
As Gizmodo pointed out, the really bizarre thing is that even the Zune is more polished and up-to-date than Windows Mobile. What the hell have the WinMo team been doing for the past five years?!
Netscape re-write? disaster (in a business sense)
I think that Mozilla and their millions of dollars in revenue would argue that the Netscape re-write (most of us call it "Firefox") is far from a business disaster.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.
It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even /. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".
No, that's the distinction. In Sony's (and the *AA's) eyes, you don't purchase content, you buy a license to use it in whatever ways they say you can. Since they lost the Fair Use battle, they are trying to change the game to something that favors them.
Yes it sucks but I agree, none of us should really be surprised. Ever since Verisign bought Thawte I've been waiting for this to happen. I've been a notary in a fairly large metro area for years and can't remember the last time I was asked to notarize someone.
Yeah, the concept itself was a bit difficult for a lot of people to grasp but their website also really sucked. It hadn't been updated in years and you had to navigate through that ridiculous hierarchical system instead of being able to just "find notaries within 25 miles of me".
But really, email certs serve two purposes: sender verification and/or encryption (I guess proving an email wasn't tampered with could count as a third but it's really part of encryption). The first function is increasingly already being performed at the server level using SenderID/DomainKeys, and there are plenty of ways to accomplish the second if two parties so choose.
It's one of those things that probably would have been a great idea if it were baked into the email standard since inception, but was just too unwieldy to bolt-on later.
Doing something and then obsessing about the statistical data - it's using up a part of your life you won't get back again. I've always argued (over a 30 year engineering career) that the purpose of automated data collection and analysis is to enable us to do human things, not robot things. Rowing, for instance, should be a fun exercise that keeps you fit, improves your social life, and makes you aware of your environment in new ways.
As someone who is about to run his first marathon and who has plans to enter my first Ironman triathlon next year, I can absolutely tell you that without this type of data you are at a serious disadvantage to the other competitors and likely won't even cross the finish line.
Training for these type of endurance events is a science, and like everything else requires data. I'm only just beginning to consume the massive volume of information available on the subject but already I have a deep appreciation for the scientific betterment of one's fitness.
I won't try to explain it all here but search for terms like "anaerobic threshold" and "VO2 max" (maximal oxygen consumption) to understand why doing things like analyzing your heartrate at specific training intensities is so important.
Your body must undergo very specific changes (blood volume per heart beat, hemoglobin density, mitochondria efficiency, etc. etc.) in order to have a chance, and only by knowing how the body responds to training and then training for very specific results (by adjusting intensity, duration, repititions) and periodizing your workouts throughout a training season is it possible to get your body to peak ability.
Just going out and busting your ass swimming, biking, and running won't improve your fitness enough if you don't know what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish, and you can't do that without precise training data.
And on a psychological level, let me say that it's very invigorating to find out that I can run (for example) a 9:30 mile for 10 miles and see that my heart rate has dropped 10bpm from a month ago. That's quantitative proof that my fitness has increased and is just the sort of encouragement I need to keep going, just like someone who is dieting to lose weight who finds out they lost 5 pounds in a month.
This makes me very happy. I've owned a Forerunner 305 for a while and use it for running and biking (with heart rate monitor and bike speed/cadence sensor) but hadn't yet looked into getting at the data from my Linux desktop. I just assumed that it was yet another Windows and Mac-only proprietary binary blob; glad to hear otherwise!
Now, please recreate the chart to show which party controlled Congress as opposed to who was in the White House. You know, because Congress writes the budget, not the President.
I was thinking more of The Stand. I'm pretty sure creating a superposition of the common flu is how Captain Trips got started. This will end badly.
but does it come with Ms. Fox?
What about just a Bee-otch air freshener?
Is she a full 10 barbie doll? nope. She's a 6.8-7 but I'm far happier than my friends with the high maintenance arm candy they rarely get to touch.
Try telling your wife she's not as hot as your friends' wives, and then see how often you get sex.
Man, that almost makes me feel pity for Bush.
He's been out of office for six months now. It's time to give up the knee-jerk Bush bashing and get some new material. There are plenty of other ripe targets if you just look around a bit.
The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in?
Yeah, just like the lack of a single image format killed the <img> tag right? I think we'll see browsers coalesce around two or three codecs that all of them will end up supporting, plus they will all likely also hook into the OS to support whatever codecs it provides. Sure, it would have been nice if Theora was left as the blessed default, but with YouTube and DailyMotion supporting it you can bet it will become the de facto standard anyway.
Word processor documents aren't designed to preserve their layout exactly from one system to the next. That's what PDF is for; just install a virtual PDF printer driver like CutePDF and send that instead. Or else use numbered sections within the document and refer to those.
urban dictionary = idiots making up words. At 27 years old I am now an old fart.
That's ricockulous.
Exactly. Maybe as a consolation prize someone could buy him one of these.
True, they would have used more carbon-friendly gnus, but were afraid of RMS starting a campaign to refer to them as GNU/Google.
Wow, this sounds like almost exactly what I need, thanks for the link! I've never heard of this before, and even though it says "open source" the only download I can find is a "VmWare evaluation version". Very odd. I'll definitely do some more digging though...
It's obvious that my biggest mistake when submitting this question is the assumption that many people would actually know what the Red Hat Network does. I want an open source system that I can run on my own server that duplicates the functionality of RHN. That means:
That's really all I meant by reviewing each available update. Just a quick sanity check so that the system isn't in full-auto update mode.
2) How secure is it? You are effectively granting root privs to a website - not always a good idea.
Forgot to reply to that part... the way the RHN works is that there is a cron job that runs on the client to ask the server once an hour whether there are any requested updates. The server just provides the list of packages that the user wants updated, and the local cron job pulls those packages from the pre-approved repository/ies only.
So yeah, it's still granting a fair deal of power to the website but it's not like someone could use it to run arbitrary commands on the client. But as long as everything is secured using https and PKI signing is used to verify that the list of requested updates is legitimate, I don't see how that's much/any less secure than performing manual updates via SSH.
Me? I have a web doohickey to let me know when updates are available. Cron job runs nightly to yum and a pattern match identifies whether or not updates are needed, to show on my homepage. So it doesn't DO the update, butit makes it ez to see has been done.
Care to publish this somewhere? To be honest knowing which updates are available is a bigger concern to me than actually installing them. The latter is more a nice to have but all the other suggestions are concentrating mostly on that aspect.
I'm close to just knuckling down and writing such a thing myself but it's always nice to not start from scratch.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of Landscape before, although it seems to be Ubuntu-specific. I am rather surprised that no vendor has created a similar non-distro-specific solution.
Yes, I could have found that myself (in much less than 2 minutes) if a distributed command execution tool were anything at all close to what I was looking for.
Thanks for the suggestion, but this and other solutions like Puppet and CFEngine solve only half the problem, which is actually pushing out the patches. The part that's really missing is a way to easily identify the available patches from the distro for that particular machine. When I log on to Red Hat Network it has a list like "10 of your 12 systems are up to date" and you can see which systems need updating, which packages are available for install on them, and actually schedule those patches for install.
I guess I should have mentioned that for various reasons these servers are spread across multiple hosting companies at disparate locations, and no two of them have the same exact list of packages etc. installed. So I need a much more federated setup (like RHN) where each machine checks on its own whether it is up to date and reports those results back to the central server.