M16's - the preferred sidearm of the Republican Guard. Sourced from South America. Various Soviet designed equipment was upgraded with US made parts, notably missiles and aircraft (ejector seats, etc).
Note that I said little of Saddams hardware came directly from the USSR. As for US hardware, the policy of ensuring everything was deniable meant most arms and material went via third parties (Jordan or Egypt in particular if my memory serves). A good example of direct sales are helicopters, although I can't remember the specific model.
Also, don't forget how dangerous Iran was/is
Dangerous to whom, and why? The most obvious answer is "dangerous to US interests", as America had been propping up the Shah for years. When a popular revolution removed the monarchy the US were scared of losing influence, and of a domino effect throughout the Gulf region. Similar trends a starting to surface in Saudi, so it will be interesting to see how the US reacts if there are signs of an insurrection.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how?
Because no ethical stance was considered. Both sides should have been reprehensible to leaders of liberal democracies, but the slavish adherence to the domino theory meant the Soviets "had to be stopped" regardless of the means. In purely diplomatic terms, the Kabul government invited the Soviet forces - hence part of the reason not to be seen openly fighting them by the US and UK.
don't forget, the Taliban != the mujahedeen
While there's no direct correlation, most of the future Taliban were also members of the mujahadeen resistance during the Soviet incursion. To suggest that all, or even a majority of Taliban members were outsiders is incorrect. Once the Soviets withdrew, the usual pattern of tribal loyalties reemerged in Afghanistan, resulting in the predominately southern Taliban, the Northern Alliance and loose federations of other tribal groups. The influx of foreign volunteers was most pronounced after the Taliban had declared theirs was a Sharia state.
... the twisted mind of a Muslim...
That kind of generalisation makes me suspect you are a US resident. When I lived in the States I was shocked at the type of bias in the media. All media is biased, fact of human nature, but I hadn't seen anything so obviously one sided before. This was prior to September 11th, but Arabs and Muslims were already portrayed as rabid maniacs, while I never saw any criticism of Israeli policies.
Not really. We are not trying to establish empire or colonies.
What about Iraq? A puppet regime with no popular support, backed by huge amounts of American military might.
We are also quite sensitive to the death and mistreatment of native populations
What, like the Palestinians? Or the the Iraqi Kurds (unless its using them as a stick to beat the Saddam regime with) - check out Hallabja, the 1988 VX gas attack and the Republican administrations attempts to ignore it.
Except that we didn't back Saddam with weapons against Iran, at least not in any meaningful way. The vast majority of his arms came from either Russia (then the Soviet Union) or France.
The US allowed American firms to sell arms to third parties knowing full well they were intended for Iraq. Further US designed weapons were sourced from licensed producers outside the US. Other material, such as chemicals, machine tools and industrial plant intended for military production were sold directly. The US government also sanctioned sales of hardware such as communication equipment, that allowed the regimes security apparatus to operate more effectively. This last example indicates why US policy wasn't particularily forward looking. Giving a regime that is unpopular with its own people the means to function more effectively laid the basis for effective guerilla activity - coalition soldiers and the puppet regime have replaced the dissenting Iraqi populace as targets of Tikriti loyalists.
Little of Saddams military material came directly from the USSR, as mutual distrust took hold early on. Despite token offerings to the Iraqi communists, Saddam never seriously countenanced sharing power with anyone. The remainder of Saddams arsenal came from many sources, part of a policy of not being dependent on any one supplier for key military items. This could only occur with tacit approval of the US, as the only country prepared to earn the disapproval of Washington was France.
We supplied the mujahedeen weapons and equipment in their fight against Soviet aggression
To quote you "leave us alone and we'll leave you alone". Whether the Soviets were justified in invading Afghanistan (they would have argued they were assisting a secular rgime against a fundamentalist insurrection) is moot. However, the US cannot take any moral high ground over its actions in Afghaninstan. Nor can the United Kingdom, who also trained and covertly armed the mujahadeen.
What amazes me is that people who are cynical enough to take expedient action like that of supporting the mujahadeen or Saddam seem incapable of seeing the future problems this may bring.
That was Saddams "get out of jail" plan when the US failed to overlook the invasion of Kuwait. However, by that time Iraq was no longer at war with Iran, so Washington no longer saw Saddam as a bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism. By coming to assistance of Kuwait, the US could placate a worried Saudi regime and ensure their existing guarantor of Middle East oil.
Saddam felt the need to invade Kuwait because the Iraqi economy was bankrupt after the war with Iran. He believed that the other Arab nations owed him a debt of gratitude for defending them from the "Persian menace", and wanted to flex his military muscle to get something more than platitudes. Looks like he seriously moread the situation...
pChris
Never said it was, I'da let him have Kuwait first time around, let him piss all over isreal and S.A. and made friends with him to buy lotsa oil cheap.
Having just finished reading Said Aburish's biography of Saddam, it appears he intended to do just that. The CIA helped the Ba'ath party to achieve power, and the US (along with many other countries) armed Iraq during its fight with Iran. Given this past approval for his activities, Saddam hoped to gain US acceptance of his Kuwait occupation in return for guaranteeing USA oil requirements.
Having choice does not mean having to choose... KDE works out of the box.
GNOME also works "out of the box", but more thought has gone into the default settings than with KDE. The gconf-editor still allows so called power users to tweak the more obscure settings, while the applications configuration dialog can limit itself to providing the more frequently changed options.
The original GNOME chose to be window manager agnostic, but it usually shipped with Enlightenment. Since then, two window managers have been the official choice of the GNOME project, with metacity being the standard since GNOME 2.0 was released. To the average user, the switch from sawfish to metacity was seamless.
not change toolkit APIs with each release
There has been one major API overhaul in GTK+ since its adoption by the GNOME project, and that still allows the older API to be used until the next major version. Having maintained a number of GTK+ applications since the October GNOME era, I can assure you that GTK+ API changes have had less impact than the switches from Qt 1.x, 2.x and 3.x. The only windowing API that has remained backwards compatible during this period despite changes to it, is Win32 - and that's why it's such an ugly mess.
not moronically start to partly copy the worst parts of Windows ever envisioned (the registry)
The Windows registry was a good idea, but badly implemented. The Gconf system relies on a much simpler XML backend built on top of the superb libxml2 library. Other backends can be plugged in, but none have gone beyond the proof of concept stage, as the XML one has proved itself to be excellent. What do you suggest instead? Separate configuration file formats for each application?
If you enjoy KDE with it's fetish for configuration dialogs, slow startup times and reliance on Qt (MOC - what a fscking joke), then so be it.
If your country has industrial tribunals like those in the United Kingdom, then I think you would have very good grounds for an unfair dismissal case. Even if there aren't special courts for such matters, then I would be suprised if you couldn't sue your former employers for breach of contract.
Does your patch editor work with the CM32 (an MT32 without the patch buttons on the front)? A friend gave me his CM32 a while ago, and I started writing a patch editor for it. Unfortunately, NetBSD doesn't appear to send and receive SysEx messages properly so I gave up. I do have an ST in storage, so I'm wondering if it's worth firing it up and running your editor on it.
... what are the differences to/etc between platforms (namely i386 and SPARC)
Apart from fstab and the network bits in rc.conf, all the files in/etc that I edit after an install are identical on my SPARC, Vax and x86 machines. There might be minor differences in files that describe devices, but all the files I'm likely to actually edit have the same format regardless of the machines architecture.
Don't use NetBSD myself, but I'm curious. What are the differences?
Compared to Linux, there is only one NetBSD distribution. Companies like Wasabi Systems may offer branded copies of a release, but they contain the same software as the ISO images found on the NetBSD ftp servers. Another key difference is that the NetBSD project maintains an entire operating system, rather than Linus Torvalds and his loose knit team, who concern themseles almost exclusively with the Linux kernel itself. The NetBSD approach leads to a greater consistency and closer integration of kernel and userland. The downsides are that third party software which NetBSD relies on (gcc for instance), often takes a while to update to new releases while Linux'isms are worked out.
The NetBSD project is based around a core team, and peer review is encouraged before any changes are commited by non-core developers. This leads to a very consistent, clear code base that conforms to number of good coding practices. For instance, the NetBSD kernel drivers liberally use #defines for addresses and registers, while Linux doesn't frown on undocumented magic numbers. The Linux style makes supporting someone elses code a nightmare, unless you're very familiar with the hardware the driver is for.
The NetBSD project has a server farm dedicated to autobuilds, and it is easy for port masters (people concerned with NetBSD on a particular platform) to see when the development version has broken for their platform. In the Linux world, as long as x86 works the other platforms are considered secondary. This is why I run NetBSD on my non-x86 hardware - I got pissed off with Linux claiming fot support a platform when it had clearly been broken for months.
Finally, there is the pkgsrc collection. This allows me to install all the software I need, confident that it has been tested (and patched if necessary). The dependency tracking of pkgsrc makes the much vaunted Debian Linux look very ho-hum in comparison.
Chris
Re:a cool hack for sure, but not very useful i thi
on
Chock Full o' NetBSD!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You might want to check Ebay for Javastation rather than Mr Coffee. The latter was just the Sun code name for that particular Javastation (Krups being the other model IIRC).
The low spec is irrelevant on a machine like this, as it is nothing more than a thin client. I occasionally use a similar NCD ThinStar to login to one of the development servers at work. The client runs nothing more than WinCE and an X server, and all the apps are run on the server.
Apparently in Finnish "Ha ha ha" translates into "No remorse."
There's no such word as "ha", unless it's obscure slang. "Remorse" is "katumus", so "no remorse" would be something like "ei katumus". Or maybe I'm not getting the joke...
Try reading BugTraq, where you will see that MS are usually very slow in producing patches, as you'd expect from a bureaucratic megacorp. This frustrates vulnerability researchers so much that you often see messages of the "MS notified months ago, still no patch, full disclosure now felt necessary" kind. The result is that the timeframe between bugs being disclosed and a "hotfix" being issued are often misleading, as MS discourages full and early disclosure. In fact, wasn't it Balmer who recently tried to suggest vulnerability researchers, especially those who espouse full disclosure, were criminals?
If you read BugTraq, then you would also be aware of the numerous holes in Interner Explorer and misfeatures in Outlook, which MS have stated categorically they will not fix. While that's notionally acceptable for their corporate customers, who should have the expertise to use firewalls, mail filters, etc. for the home user this is disastrous.
One patch isn't "patches, patches everywhere!". If you want to see "patches, patches everywhere" for the month of December, look at Red Hat 9.
I'd sooner trust an operating system vendor that releases prompt patches to small portions of their product, than some cowboy outfit who release occasional mega patches to their product. Besides, comparing the number of patches to RedHat 9 against those for Windows is bullshit. The typical Linux distro includes a large number of genuinely useful software packages, while MicroSoft's OS comes with... notepad.
they will still release zero-hour patches for vulnerabilities which are actively being exploited in the wild
"Kewl", as the script kiddies might say. This simply means that those crackers who resist the urge to get some f4me for their new exploit by announcing it on a SadCrAck3r IRC channel have a four week window to root more boxes.
While I went elsewhere, my girlfriend did get an Egg credit card. She tried logging into their website from my computer earlier this week, and got a message saying "browser unrecognised, cookies must be enabled to login". Cookies were definitely not blocked, as I'd setup Mozilla to allow all cookies. I can only assume that the Egg site tried detecting the OS from the browser string and crapped out when it saw NetBSD...
But why not concentrate on implementing IE's version of DHTML?
Because the Mozilla developers will always be playing catchup. Once MicroSoft cottons onto the fact that the Moz people are expending considerable effort in matching IE's DHTML features, they'll most likely start releasing new extensions. As it is, there is a good compromise already in Mozilla. Web pages that don't appear to be standards conforming are rendered in "sloppy" mode, which generally works for IE targeted stuff.
At the end of the day, I cannot think of a single website that uses IE specific DHTML in a way that makes me yearn for support for it in Moz. The last IE only website I encountered was the Egg online bank one. Their insistence that I hadn't got a recognised browser simply means I got a credit card from somewhere else (Sainsburys as it happens).
Are you running memory hogging applications on Linux boxes? If you run out of memory then the OOM killer can produce the symptoms you're talking about. I run the Mozilla, the NetBeans IDE and java compiles on a fairly low memory box (128Mb), and have seen X freeze a couple of times thi year.
Binary modules may "lower the entry barrier" for some companies, but it can end up being counter productive. Binary only drivers have tended to be crude ports of Windows drivers, and frequently crash the users kernel. This results in bug reports that the regular kernel hackers can't solve, and a misconception amongst users that Linux is unstable.
Far better would be if companies jumped wholeheartedly into the Linux way of doing things, and published their drivers under the GPL. Their competitors aren't going to get much of a leg up from seeing the source to most drivers, especially those for network adapters and the like, but the vendor can benefit from bug fixes provided by independent kernel hackers.
Wow. Every single internet business runs on IIS? Then how come almost every advert for e-business vacancies asks for experience in one or more of the following:
Apache on Unix
Perl on Unix
PHP on Unix
J2EE on Unix
The only jobs that I see asking for IIS and/or ASP with any frequency are the corporates running little more than a bare bones web presence. The really big e-businesses are running on Unix and Apache - sites like Amazon (HP-UX and Apache), Yahoo (FreeBSD, Apache and a custom webserver) and Google (Linux and a custom webserver). Ebay are the only notable exception, but they have a scheduled, one hour outage every Friday morning.
Mac OS X is cutting edge for the simple fact that it is the first OS to combine all of these proven technologies (and many more) into a package that just works and is slick to boot.
Actually SunOS with the SunView windowing system predated Mac OS X while providing all the features the previous poster described. Mac OS X itself is of course little more than NeXTSTEP with a facelift to take advantage of more powerful hardware. That's why GNUStep still generates some interest - it's no longer seeking to clone a dead operating system.
A pkgsrc Makefile can specify which architectures and version of operating system the package is suitable for. It can also force the use of a specific version of gcc as well (the DDD package had this restriction fo a while recently).
Slashdot Mirror
Name the weapons to which you refer.
M16's - the preferred sidearm of the Republican Guard. Sourced from South America. Various Soviet designed equipment was upgraded with US made parts, notably missiles and aircraft (ejector seats, etc).
Chris
So all those T-72's came from, where?, Poland?
Note that I said little of Saddams hardware came directly from the USSR. As for US hardware, the policy of ensuring everything was deniable meant most arms and material went via third parties (Jordan or Egypt in particular if my memory serves). A good example of direct sales are helicopters, although I can't remember the specific model.
Also, don't forget how dangerous Iran was/is
Dangerous to whom, and why? The most obvious answer is "dangerous to US interests", as America had been propping up the Shah for years. When a popular revolution removed the monarchy the US were scared of losing influence, and of a domino effect throughout the Gulf region. Similar trends a starting to surface in Saudi, so it will be interesting to see how the US reacts if there are signs of an insurrection.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how?
Because no ethical stance was considered. Both sides should have been reprehensible to leaders of liberal democracies, but the slavish adherence to the domino theory meant the Soviets "had to be stopped" regardless of the means. In purely diplomatic terms, the Kabul government invited the Soviet forces - hence part of the reason not to be seen openly fighting them by the US and UK.
don't forget, the Taliban != the mujahedeen
While there's no direct correlation, most of the future Taliban were also members of the mujahadeen resistance during the Soviet incursion. To suggest that all, or even a majority of Taliban members were outsiders is incorrect. Once the Soviets withdrew, the usual pattern of tribal loyalties reemerged in Afghanistan, resulting in the predominately southern Taliban, the Northern Alliance and loose federations of other tribal groups. The influx of foreign volunteers was most pronounced after the Taliban had declared theirs was a Sharia state.
That kind of generalisation makes me suspect you are a US resident. When I lived in the States I was shocked at the type of bias in the media. All media is biased, fact of human nature, but I hadn't seen anything so obviously one sided before. This was prior to September 11th, but Arabs and Muslims were already portrayed as rabid maniacs, while I never saw any criticism of Israeli policies.
Chris
Not really. We are not trying to establish empire or colonies.
What about Iraq? A puppet regime with no popular support, backed by huge amounts of American military might.
We are also quite sensitive to the death and mistreatment of native populations
What, like the Palestinians? Or the the Iraqi Kurds (unless its using them as a stick to beat the Saddam regime with) - check out Hallabja, the 1988 VX gas attack and the Republican administrations attempts to ignore it.
Fuckwit.
Chris
Except that we didn't back Saddam with weapons against Iran, at least not in any meaningful way. The vast majority of his arms came from either Russia (then the Soviet Union) or France.
The US allowed American firms to sell arms to third parties knowing full well they were intended for Iraq. Further US designed weapons were sourced from licensed producers outside the US. Other material, such as chemicals, machine tools and industrial plant intended for military production were sold directly. The US government also sanctioned sales of hardware such as communication equipment, that allowed the regimes security apparatus to operate more effectively. This last example indicates why US policy wasn't particularily forward looking. Giving a regime that is unpopular with its own people the means to function more effectively laid the basis for effective guerilla activity - coalition soldiers and the puppet regime have replaced the dissenting Iraqi populace as targets of Tikriti loyalists.
Little of Saddams military material came directly from the USSR, as mutual distrust took hold early on. Despite token offerings to the Iraqi communists, Saddam never seriously countenanced sharing power with anyone. The remainder of Saddams arsenal came from many sources, part of a policy of not being dependent on any one supplier for key military items. This could only occur with tacit approval of the US, as the only country prepared to earn the disapproval of Washington was France.
We supplied the mujahedeen weapons and equipment in their fight against Soviet aggression
To quote you "leave us alone and we'll leave you alone". Whether the Soviets were justified in invading Afghanistan (they would have argued they were assisting a secular rgime against a fundamentalist insurrection) is moot. However, the US cannot take any moral high ground over its actions in Afghaninstan. Nor can the United Kingdom, who also trained and covertly armed the mujahadeen.
What amazes me is that people who are cynical enough to take expedient action like that of supporting the mujahadeen or Saddam seem incapable of seeing the future problems this may bring.
Chris
Of course, for all I know, that was the plan
That was Saddams "get out of jail" plan when the US failed to overlook the invasion of Kuwait. However, by that time Iraq was no longer at war with Iran, so Washington no longer saw Saddam as a bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism. By coming to assistance of Kuwait, the US could placate a worried Saudi regime and ensure their existing guarantor of Middle East oil.
Saddam felt the need to invade Kuwait because the Iraqi economy was bankrupt after the war with Iran. He believed that the other Arab nations owed him a debt of gratitude for defending them from the "Persian menace", and wanted to flex his military muscle to get something more than platitudes. Looks like he seriously moread the situation ...
pChris
Never said it was, I'da let him have Kuwait first time around, let him piss all over isreal and S.A. and made friends with him to buy lotsa oil cheap.
Having just finished reading Said Aburish's biography of Saddam, it appears he intended to do just that. The CIA helped the Ba'ath party to achieve power, and the US (along with many other countries) armed Iraq during its fight with Iran. Given this past approval for his activities, Saddam hoped to gain US acceptance of his Kuwait occupation in return for guaranteeing USA oil requirements.
Chris
Having choice does not mean having to choose ... KDE works out of the box.
GNOME also works "out of the box", but more thought has gone into the default settings than with KDE. The gconf-editor still allows so called power users to tweak the more obscure settings, while the applications configuration dialog can limit itself to providing the more frequently changed options.
Chris
not change window managers with each release
The original GNOME chose to be window manager agnostic, but it usually shipped with Enlightenment. Since then, two window managers have been the official choice of the GNOME project, with metacity being the standard since GNOME 2.0 was released. To the average user, the switch from sawfish to metacity was seamless.
not change toolkit APIs with each release
There has been one major API overhaul in GTK+ since its adoption by the GNOME project, and that still allows the older API to be used until the next major version. Having maintained a number of GTK+ applications since the October GNOME era, I can assure you that GTK+ API changes have had less impact than the switches from Qt 1.x, 2.x and 3.x. The only windowing API that has remained backwards compatible during this period despite changes to it, is Win32 - and that's why it's such an ugly mess.
not moronically start to partly copy the worst parts of Windows ever envisioned (the registry)
The Windows registry was a good idea, but badly implemented. The Gconf system relies on a much simpler XML backend built on top of the superb libxml2 library. Other backends can be plugged in, but none have gone beyond the proof of concept stage, as the XML one has proved itself to be excellent. What do you suggest instead? Separate configuration file formats for each application?
If you enjoy KDE with it's fetish for configuration dialogs, slow startup times and reliance on Qt (MOC - what a fscking joke), then so be it.
Chris
If your country has industrial tribunals like those in the United Kingdom, then I think you would have very good grounds for an unfair dismissal case. Even if there aren't special courts for such matters, then I would be suprised if you couldn't sue your former employers for breach of contract.
Chris
Does your patch editor work with the CM32 (an MT32 without the patch buttons on the front)? A friend gave me his CM32 a while ago, and I started writing a patch editor for it. Unfortunately, NetBSD doesn't appear to send and receive SysEx messages properly so I gave up. I do have an ST in storage, so I'm wondering if it's worth firing it up and running your editor on it.
Chris
Apart from fstab and the network bits in rc.conf, all the files in /etc that I edit after an install are identical on my SPARC, Vax and x86 machines. There might be minor differences in files that describe devices, but all the files I'm likely to actually edit have the same format regardless of the machines architecture.
Chris
Don't use NetBSD myself, but I'm curious. What are the differences?
Compared to Linux, there is only one NetBSD distribution. Companies like Wasabi Systems may offer branded copies of a release, but they contain the same software as the ISO images found on the NetBSD ftp servers. Another key difference is that the NetBSD project maintains an entire operating system, rather than Linus Torvalds and his loose knit team, who concern themseles almost exclusively with the Linux kernel itself. The NetBSD approach leads to a greater consistency and closer integration of kernel and userland. The downsides are that third party software which NetBSD relies on (gcc for instance), often takes a while to update to new releases while Linux'isms are worked out.
The NetBSD project is based around a core team, and peer review is encouraged before any changes are commited by non-core developers. This leads to a very consistent, clear code base that conforms to number of good coding practices. For instance, the NetBSD kernel drivers liberally use #defines for addresses and registers, while Linux doesn't frown on undocumented magic numbers. The Linux style makes supporting someone elses code a nightmare, unless you're very familiar with the hardware the driver is for.
The NetBSD project has a server farm dedicated to autobuilds, and it is easy for port masters (people concerned with NetBSD on a particular platform) to see when the development version has broken for their platform. In the Linux world, as long as x86 works the other platforms are considered secondary. This is why I run NetBSD on my non-x86 hardware - I got pissed off with Linux claiming fot support a platform when it had clearly been broken for months.
Finally, there is the pkgsrc collection. This allows me to install all the software I need, confident that it has been tested (and patched if necessary). The dependency tracking of pkgsrc makes the much vaunted Debian Linux look very ho-hum in comparison.
Chris
You might want to check Ebay for Javastation rather than Mr Coffee. The latter was just the Sun code name for that particular Javastation (Krups being the other model IIRC).
The low spec is irrelevant on a machine like this, as it is nothing more than a thin client. I occasionally use a similar NCD ThinStar to login to one of the development servers at work. The client runs nothing more than WinCE and an X server, and all the apps are run on the server.
Chris
Apparently in Finnish "Ha ha ha" translates into "No remorse."
There's no such word as "ha", unless it's obscure slang. "Remorse" is "katumus", so "no remorse" would be something like "ei katumus". Or maybe I'm not getting the joke ...
Chris
Try reading BugTraq, where you will see that MS are usually very slow in producing patches, as you'd expect from a bureaucratic megacorp. This frustrates vulnerability researchers so much that you often see messages of the "MS notified months ago, still no patch, full disclosure now felt necessary" kind. The result is that the timeframe between bugs being disclosed and a "hotfix" being issued are often misleading, as MS discourages full and early disclosure. In fact, wasn't it Balmer who recently tried to suggest vulnerability researchers, especially those who espouse full disclosure, were criminals?
If you read BugTraq, then you would also be aware of the numerous holes in Interner Explorer and misfeatures in Outlook, which MS have stated categorically they will not fix. While that's notionally acceptable for their corporate customers, who should have the expertise to use firewalls, mail filters, etc. for the home user this is disastrous.
Chris
One patch isn't "patches, patches everywhere!". If you want to see "patches, patches everywhere" for the month of December, look at Red Hat 9.
I'd sooner trust an operating system vendor that releases prompt patches to small portions of their product, than some cowboy outfit who release occasional mega patches to their product. Besides, comparing the number of patches to RedHat 9 against those for Windows is bullshit. The typical Linux distro includes a large number of genuinely useful software packages, while MicroSoft's OS comes with ... notepad.
Chris
they will still release zero-hour patches for vulnerabilities which are actively being exploited in the wild
"Kewl", as the script kiddies might say. This simply means that those crackers who resist the urge to get some f4me for their new exploit by announcing it on a SadCrAck3r IRC channel have a four week window to root more boxes.
Chris
While I went elsewhere, my girlfriend did get an Egg credit card. She tried logging into their website from my computer earlier this week, and got a message saying "browser unrecognised, cookies must be enabled to login". Cookies were definitely not blocked, as I'd setup Mozilla to allow all cookies. I can only assume that the Egg site tried detecting the OS from the browser string and crapped out when it saw NetBSD ...
Chris
But why not concentrate on implementing IE's version of DHTML?
Because the Mozilla developers will always be playing catchup. Once MicroSoft cottons onto the fact that the Moz people are expending considerable effort in matching IE's DHTML features, they'll most likely start releasing new extensions. As it is, there is a good compromise already in Mozilla. Web pages that don't appear to be standards conforming are rendered in "sloppy" mode, which generally works for IE targeted stuff.
At the end of the day, I cannot think of a single website that uses IE specific DHTML in a way that makes me yearn for support for it in Moz. The last IE only website I encountered was the Egg online bank one. Their insistence that I hadn't got a recognised browser simply means I got a credit card from somewhere else (Sainsburys as it happens).
Chris
Are you running memory hogging applications on Linux boxes? If you run out of memory then the OOM killer can produce the symptoms you're talking about. I run the Mozilla, the NetBeans IDE and java compiles on a fairly low memory box (128Mb), and have seen X freeze a couple of times thi year.
Chris
Binary modules may "lower the entry barrier" for some companies, but it can end up being counter productive. Binary only drivers have tended to be crude ports of Windows drivers, and frequently crash the users kernel. This results in bug reports that the regular kernel hackers can't solve, and a misconception amongst users that Linux is unstable.
Far better would be if companies jumped wholeheartedly into the Linux way of doing things, and published their drivers under the GPL. Their competitors aren't going to get much of a leg up from seeing the source to most drivers, especially those for network adapters and the like, but the vendor can benefit from bug fixes provided by independent kernel hackers.
Chris
E-business runs on IIS.
Wow. Every single internet business runs on IIS? Then how come almost every advert for e-business vacancies asks for experience in one or more of the following:
The only jobs that I see asking for IIS and/or ASP with any frequency are the corporates running little more than a bare bones web presence. The really big e-businesses are running on Unix and Apache - sites like Amazon (HP-UX and Apache), Yahoo (FreeBSD, Apache and a custom webserver) and Google (Linux and a custom webserver). Ebay are the only notable exception, but they have a scheduled, one hour outage every Friday morning.
Chris
Mac OS X is cutting edge for the simple fact that it is the first OS to combine all of these proven technologies (and many more) into a package that just works and is slick to boot.
Actually SunOS with the SunView windowing system predated Mac OS X while providing all the features the previous poster described. Mac OS X itself is of course little more than NeXTSTEP with a facelift to take advantage of more powerful hardware. That's why GNUStep still generates some interest - it's no longer seeking to clone a dead operating system.
Chris
Does the DMCA apply outside the US? How can this guy be breaking US and Federal law while carrying out his research in Milan, Italy? Chris
A pkgsrc Makefile can specify which architectures and version of operating system the package is suitable for. It can also force the use of a specific version of gcc as well (the DDD package had this restriction fo a while recently).
Chris