Well, I think we call all confess that CAN-SPAM pretty much sucks. About the only good thing was the idea that forged headers is recognized as a bad thing but still unenforcable.
How do you fix it? Without all the SPF et al stuff that just makes it harder to send email anyways?
First: Allow anyone, not just some ISP's to sue. That makes it more likely that someone will actually give a shit.
Second: Identify the most offending nations and start putting pressure against them through international Law, Politics, and Economics to get their own shit together.
Failing that, take the largest offending ASN's and just block them out of the entire USA or nuke 'em all.
Some of these suggestions might not be appropriate in an election year...
All we need is to find an individual who meets the following criteria for gauranteed access to all these clubs:
female
definitely non-christian in religious orientation
ethnic background should be American Indian and African descent. 50/50 would be best
divorced with children marital status preferred
Then all they have to do is ask, "Can I join?". And if they are refused, unleash the ACLU upon them in all their glory for clear discrimination violations. They don't stand a chance.
I'm glad someone's got an in to these groups. Maybe they should invite all of us.
Tried Suse 8.1 and 9.0. I'm not a big fan of the entire RPM strategy. It has some problems with it that are clearly superceded by Debian and Gentoo packaging methods. Once an installation goes to crap, it's very hard or cryptic to recover from it and it takes a real slice of time to figure out what you need to do in order to recover.
I found SuSE 9.0 to be getting a little too easy to use. For a workstation it was nice, but for a server it limited. I'm working on moving off SuSE this week for my servers.
With better video support (libdvdcss) under Debian, or better configuration management under Gentoo, they would have really great products.
Debian suffers from non-proprietary support problems and Gentoo has the worse tool I've experienced for resolving configuration changes in/etc. They could use a lesson from Debian. I've tried several times installing Gentoo and have always eventually rendered the system unuseable because of configuration changes. It's far easier to make a mistake than to get it right.
Is the manufacturer of the vehicle now exempt from liabilities because the car was stolen? I think not. It would have failed regardless of the owner involved.
To simply state the there is no liability of product when that product is stolen is not a valid statement. In addition, their product, stolen or not, has a negative impact upon myself who chooses not to purchase that product, or steal it, at all.
If you Pinto explodes, dousing me in flaming gasoline, there is still a product liability even if I'm riding my horse.
I was reading the article from the BBC. How many key services of the society must be crippled before those in charge start to realize that Microsoft, while pleasing to the eyes and well marketed, just isn't suitable for anything that matters.
When someone can crash a railroad system from a virus, we have a problem. What would Benito Mussolini have said when his trains were running late because of yet another worm? How many railroad operators would have died?
I love all this discussion about GNUstep and such. Personally I'm partial to WindowMaker which I believe is or can be a part of GNUstep. Not sure, it's early
But this talk of Microsoft porting their framework to Linux... Why? Seriously... Why? I just don't see why anyone with an eye on technical factors give this any consideration at all.
It's Over because Linux and Apple have clearly broken the beach heads to Fortress Microsoft and now it's time to prepare for their big defensive resistence push as we eat their market share and profit margins.
What got me to originally consider Linux wasn't the interoperability or ease of use or feature rich desktops. It was the freedom from Microsoft and the freedom from Corporate PHB's trying to run the show. Do you have any idea how much Marketing Hype is integrated into every software manual?
What's going to keep me there is the same thing. Microsoft could release Office XP for Linux tomorrow morning in both RPM and DEB packages and I simply would not touch it. Too my Hype and too many Hooks to use safely. So if Microsoft isn't really involved in the article, don't give them any airtime. Their current direction shows they are Loosers. If they can honestly change their tune then maybe the won't be Loosers.
And don't give me that "Corporations have to make money and that's all Microsoft does" crap. RedHat and SuSE makes money and they haven't been convicted multiple times in multiple countries.
There exists a big difference between Debian and all the rest in how they have tiered their packages into:
stable
testing
unstable
This allows you to choose your own comfort level of new software versus surprises. Eventually, the merits of this software distribution approach will win over the rest of the distros and we'll be able to support both stable servers and well supported workstations in any distribution.
They've been doing everything possible to FUD open source lately.
I'm more worried about what they are going to do next. All of their previous tactics, which have proven successful against Closed Source entities in the market have failed to make a dent against Open Source.
In desperation they may do... anything. That's what I'm worried about. But my best guess says that they will never attempt to compete technically. Their only saving grace against the eventuality of a shared environment between Microsoft and Linux will be legal actions similar to RIAA, MPAA, and DMCA
I was reading on this email post and it's really discouraging.
many pieces of hardware will not be supported by the Debian system itself
The single biggest problem that I've seen in getting people to adopt Linux, and Debian in particular, is the function of hardware connected to the computer. If my widget doesn't work with Linux then what's the point of using Linux?
I've grown accustomed to the practice of due diligence on researching any hardware support for a product X before I buy it. But if I have to start doing this, and then perform another search just for Debian, it's making Debian very unattractive.
I am really doubtful that this is a smart move on their part. I am a HUGE fan of Debian and very supportive of their work. But the implications of this are not good from where I sit. Their ideologies are making their product non-useful to the community which they attempt to serve.
They are creating an overly complex architecture at a time when Linux does not have the support necessary from the commercial entities controlling the market (hardware and software). This will tend to isolate Debian from the rest of the Linux community and may give them the label of "Oh... Those guys over there in the orange sheets."
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Debian really screwed this up in a big way. The fact that they have just incurred an entire year of delays to their release cycle at a time when they were months away and years behind the rest really doesn't help them in the least.
I really don't understand their motives with this one.
It's not because it works. They all work. It's because RedHat has a very aggressive marketing program in America.
Debian has not marketing program to speak of. Neither does just about anyone else.
SuSE (until recently) and Mandrake have no presence in America and as such are viewed as foreign commercial entities and are looked upon dimply. I don't know exactly why, but they aren't getting fair billing.
RedHat has done a tremendous job at selling their name to the point where a huge majority of PHBs think that the Linux software is at version 9.0 and that it's logo is not a penguin but a dude in a hat. Think Kleenex and facial tissue.
It is because of this job selling that their recent increase in licensing costs will have near zero effect on their corporate incursion.
SuSE, however, will probably make some awesome inroads to the SOHO market because of their better cost model and lower entry cost.
But Debian will still be the best distro ever!!! <g>
You might consider the via epia boards and mini-itx boards for your test system. They can easily be built up in 8"x8"x12" cases, use under 20W power, and have only one fan (optional).
Not as space efficient as rack mounts, but much better on power and they're cheap. Very inexpensive.
I use them for my various servers around the area.
At the end of his article he claims that this process of self-elimination through suicide has ALWAYS happened. Where?
I can't think of any Business history where this might have happened in the past. The closest things I can think of that are similar tend to be Standard Oil (broken up monopoly) and the Bells (broken up monopoly). I missed something.
About the only place I see anything like this is in Political History, but I'm not certain that this applies to Corporations. They have different forces driving them and as such, have a different quality of focus.
If anyone can cite an example please do.
Personally, I think we are going to be entering a very dark age.
Maybe they are releasing it because they realize it's worthless piece of shit that no one in their right mind would work on for more than 2 seconds.
That being the case, they don't lose anything by effectively throwing it away, only not in the trash but in sourceforge. In the meantime they pump up their Open Source happy face and hope to save a few bucks from the EU.
I agree with much of what was said, that Microsoft is just a shitty company doing shitty things. If they were a cellular phone company I would not buy their phones. And I don't buy Nike either.
They need something more along the lines of redemption before they can be trusted. But considering that they only exist to make money, I don't see that ever happening.
I think we are on the verge of another flame-war of epic purportions. Only this time it will be between GUI and CLI, which is unfortunate.
One of the most valuable assets that Linux, or any *nix, application has is the ability to affect function from both GUI and CLI. From either one you can run email, web browsers, configuration tools, just about anything. You can't do that with other desktops and therein lies their weakness.
While the Aunt Tillie's of the world can use their GUI interface, the hard-core zealots can use their CLI interface and everyone gets their email on time.
I am concerned from reading the RedHat Blog one desktop linux that they will completely miss this point and not make the Desktop better, but more generic. I've seen the Fedora interface and it's nothing to be proud of. So it looks like something between Gnome and KDE. Big deal. But it still uses the same esoteric crappy toolsets for configuration and management that RedHat 5.2 used. That wouldn't be so bad, but they aren't consistent. Fedora gets a flaming F because they have configurations resetting other settings - try setting up ntp and firewalls at the same time and see how many times you have to reset your clock.
At least under SuSE everything is consistent. If it isn't in YaST2, it practically doesn't exist. Yast2 does a great job of configuration management, but to a limited extent and under a GUI requirement (for the practicaly user). This too is a failure because CLI is a bitch
Debian is also consistent with a mostly CLI interface with their GUI being ncurses. Probably not GUI by most standards, but functional. Also slightly harder to use, but advancing greatly.
But regardless of all the basic distro management tools, the problem here that ESR describes is the non-discoverable nature of the interfaces for configuration of hardware/software
I've been using Linux since RedHat 5.0 and Slackware 4. The single hardest thing has always been getting all of the purchased hardware to work correctly. Originally this was because of crappy hardware support in the kernel and no help from the manufacturers. This has changed and lot and you can almost buy without a research project. At least you stand a good chance of having the hardware recognized by the kernel.
But getting the software to correctly use the hardware is a major problem still. Did you know that if you turn off the print server, CUPS, under YAST2, will simply redefine the networked servers as on your USB ports? This requires a root-access reconfiguration of the hardware. This is a BSOD as far as I'm concerned. And there was never any message anywhere about the printers being offline.
A GUI wouldn't have fixed this problem and it stumped both the n00b and the expert. I do hope that we don't get GUI and Useability mixed up so everyone has a really nice looking but totally useless interface that still tells them nothing about what's really going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried posting this early this morning.
it's still pending.
wtf?
You don't get much spam, do you?
Well, I think we call all confess that CAN-SPAM pretty much sucks. About the only good thing was the idea that forged headers is recognized as a bad thing but still unenforcable.
How do you fix it? Without all the SPF et al stuff that just makes it harder to send email anyways?
First: Allow anyone, not just some ISP's to sue. That makes it more likely that someone will actually give a shit.
Second: Identify the most offending nations and start putting pressure against them through international Law, Politics, and Economics to get their own shit together.
Failing that, take the largest offending ASN's and just block them out of the entire USA or nuke 'em all.
Some of these suggestions might not be appropriate in an election year...
All we need is to find an individual who meets the following criteria for gauranteed access to all these clubs:
- female
- definitely non-christian in religious orientation
- ethnic background should be American Indian and African descent. 50/50 would be best
- divorced with children marital status preferred
Then all they have to do is ask, "Can I join?". And if they are refused, unleash the ACLU upon them in all their glory for clear discrimination violations. They don't stand a chance.I'm glad someone's got an in to these groups. Maybe they should invite all of us.
Tried Suse 8.1 and 9.0. I'm not a big fan of the entire RPM strategy. It has some problems with it that are clearly superceded by Debian and Gentoo packaging methods. Once an installation goes to crap, it's very hard or cryptic to recover from it and it takes a real slice of time to figure out what you need to do in order to recover.
I found SuSE 9.0 to be getting a little too easy to use. For a workstation it was nice, but for a server it limited. I'm working on moving off SuSE this week for my servers.
With better video support (libdvdcss) under Debian, or better configuration management under Gentoo, they would have really great products.
Debian suffers from non-proprietary support problems and Gentoo has the worse tool I've experienced for resolving configuration changes in /etc. They could use a lesson from Debian. I've tried several times installing Gentoo and have always eventually rendered the system unuseable because of configuration changes. It's far easier to make a mistake than to get it right.
Is the manufacturer of the vehicle now exempt from liabilities because the car was stolen? I think not. It would have failed regardless of the owner involved.
To simply state the there is no liability of product when that product is stolen is not a valid statement. In addition, their product, stolen or not, has a negative impact upon myself who chooses not to purchase that product, or steal it, at all.
If you Pinto explodes, dousing me in flaming gasoline, there is still a product liability even if I'm riding my horse.
Not quite. He got the trains on time by executing the engineers if they were late.
I was reading the article from the BBC. How many key services of the society must be crippled before those in charge start to realize that Microsoft, while pleasing to the eyes and well marketed, just isn't suitable for anything that matters.
When someone can crash a railroad system from a virus, we have a problem. What would Benito Mussolini have said when his trains were running late because of yet another worm? How many railroad operators would have died?
I love all this discussion about GNUstep and such. Personally I'm partial to WindowMaker which I believe is or can be a part of GNUstep. Not sure, it's early
But this talk of Microsoft porting their framework to Linux... Why? Seriously... Why? I just don't see why anyone with an eye on technical factors give this any consideration at all.
It's Over because Linux and Apple have clearly broken the beach heads to Fortress Microsoft and now it's time to prepare for their big defensive resistence push as we eat their market share and profit margins.
What got me to originally consider Linux wasn't the interoperability or ease of use or feature rich desktops. It was the freedom from Microsoft and the freedom from Corporate PHB's trying to run the show. Do you have any idea how much Marketing Hype is integrated into every software manual?
What's going to keep me there is the same thing. Microsoft could release Office XP for Linux tomorrow morning in both RPM and DEB packages and I simply would not touch it. Too my Hype and too many Hooks to use safely. So if Microsoft isn't really involved in the article, don't give them any airtime. Their current direction shows they are Loosers. If they can honestly change their tune then maybe the won't be Loosers.
And don't give me that "Corporations have to make money and that's all Microsoft does" crap. RedHat and SuSE makes money and they haven't been convicted multiple times in multiple countries.
There exists a big difference between Debian and all the rest in how they have tiered their packages into:
This allows you to choose your own comfort level of new software versus surprises. Eventually, the merits of this software distribution approach will win over the rest of the distros and we'll be able to support both stable servers and well supported workstations in any distribution.
This would almost work except the the CF cards can't deliver hard drive reliability at rate.
If you tried to set up something that did a lot of file IO (mail server, webserver, database), you would be melting the CF cards
But with a Seagate Barracude hard drive, you get much better noise levels than anything else I've seen to date
He's right. As long as it is in the EULA, there's nothing you can do about it accept not agree to the conditions for use of the product.
Now the stinky part is that you don't see the EULA until after you've removed the shrink-wrap and can no longer return said product for a refund.
What's the big deal?
They've been doing everything possible to FUD open source lately.
I'm more worried about what they are going to do next. All of their previous tactics, which have proven successful against Closed Source entities in the market have failed to make a dent against Open Source.
In desperation they may do ... anything. That's what I'm worried about. But my best guess says that they will never attempt to compete technically. Their only saving grace against the eventuality of a shared environment between Microsoft and Linux will be legal actions similar to RIAA, MPAA, and DMCA
This is just my opinion.
Does it come with OnStar?
Might be handy if you get into one of those 250 mph accidents on a dark road in the country.
I was reading on this email post and it's really discouraging.
The single biggest problem that I've seen in getting people to adopt Linux, and Debian in particular, is the function of hardware connected to the computer. If my widget doesn't work with Linux then what's the point of using Linux?I've grown accustomed to the practice of due diligence on researching any hardware support for a product X before I buy it. But if I have to start doing this, and then perform another search just for Debian, it's making Debian very unattractive.
I am really doubtful that this is a smart move on their part. I am a HUGE fan of Debian and very supportive of their work. But the implications of this are not good from where I sit. Their ideologies are making their product non-useful to the community which they attempt to serve.
They are creating an overly complex architecture at a time when Linux does not have the support necessary from the commercial entities controlling the market (hardware and software). This will tend to isolate Debian from the rest of the Linux community and may give them the label of "Oh... Those guys over there in the orange sheets."
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Debian really screwed this up in a big way. The fact that they have just incurred an entire year of delays to their release cycle at a time when they were months away and years behind the rest really doesn't help them in the least.
I really don't understand their motives with this one.
was the only word that came to mind this morning
It's not because it works. They all work. It's because RedHat has a very aggressive marketing program in America.
Debian has not marketing program to speak of. Neither does just about anyone else.
SuSE (until recently) and Mandrake have no presence in America and as such are viewed as foreign commercial entities and are looked upon dimply. I don't know exactly why, but they aren't getting fair billing.
RedHat has done a tremendous job at selling their name to the point where a huge majority of PHBs think that the Linux software is at version 9.0 and that it's logo is not a penguin but a dude in a hat. Think Kleenex and facial tissue.
It is because of this job selling that their recent increase in licensing costs will have near zero effect on their corporate incursion.
SuSE, however, will probably make some awesome inroads to the SOHO market because of their better cost model and lower entry cost.
But Debian will still be the best distro ever!!! <g>
You might consider the via epia boards and mini-itx boards for your test system. They can easily be built up in 8"x8"x12" cases, use under 20W power, and have only one fan (optional).
Not as space efficient as rack mounts, but much better on power and they're cheap. Very inexpensive.
I use them for my various servers around the area.
How do you look for a virus if you have no virus detecting software on your computer?
It isn't necessarily FUD.
If you have a Dual 64-bit 3GHz cpu it won't show up at all. If you have a K-7 600MHz cpu it probably will show up.
At the end of his article he claims that this process of self-elimination through suicide has ALWAYS happened. Where?
I can't think of any Business history where this might have happened in the past. The closest things I can think of that are similar tend to be Standard Oil (broken up monopoly) and the Bells (broken up monopoly). I missed something.
About the only place I see anything like this is in Political History, but I'm not certain that this applies to Corporations. They have different forces driving them and as such, have a different quality of focus.
If anyone can cite an example please do.
Personally, I think we are going to be entering a very dark age.
This does a better job of outlining my concerns
To answer your other question, some make money and do other things at the same time. Even RedHat makes money, but not with the veracity of Microsoft.
Maybe the reality is about money, but not everyone chooses to be a whore, a pimp, or a pusher to do it.
Yeah, but Debian is no longer supporting nonfree software with their next (sarge) release. Doesn't that put XFree86 back on the Outs with Debian?
Maybe they are releasing it because they realize it's worthless piece of shit that no one in their right mind would work on for more than 2 seconds.
That being the case, they don't lose anything by effectively throwing it away, only not in the trash but in sourceforge. In the meantime they pump up their Open Source happy face and hope to save a few bucks from the EU.
I agree with much of what was said, that Microsoft is just a shitty company doing shitty things. If they were a cellular phone company I would not buy their phones. And I don't buy Nike either.
They need something more along the lines of redemption before they can be trusted. But considering that they only exist to make money, I don't see that ever happening.
I think we are on the verge of another flame-war of epic purportions. Only this time it will be between GUI and CLI, which is unfortunate.
One of the most valuable assets that Linux, or any *nix, application has is the ability to affect function from both GUI and CLI. From either one you can run email, web browsers, configuration tools, just about anything. You can't do that with other desktops and therein lies their weakness.
While the Aunt Tillie's of the world can use their GUI interface, the hard-core zealots can use their CLI interface and everyone gets their email on time.
I am concerned from reading the RedHat Blog one desktop linux that they will completely miss this point and not make the Desktop better, but more generic. I've seen the Fedora interface and it's nothing to be proud of. So it looks like something between Gnome and KDE. Big deal. But it still uses the same esoteric crappy toolsets for configuration and management that RedHat 5.2 used. That wouldn't be so bad, but they aren't consistent. Fedora gets a flaming F because they have configurations resetting other settings - try setting up ntp and firewalls at the same time and see how many times you have to reset your clock.
At least under SuSE everything is consistent. If it isn't in YaST2, it practically doesn't exist. Yast2 does a great job of configuration management, but to a limited extent and under a GUI requirement (for the practicaly user). This too is a failure because CLI is a bitch
Debian is also consistent with a mostly CLI interface with their GUI being ncurses. Probably not GUI by most standards, but functional. Also slightly harder to use, but advancing greatly.
But regardless of all the basic distro management tools, the problem here that ESR describes is the non-discoverable nature of the interfaces for configuration of hardware/software
I've been using Linux since RedHat 5.0 and Slackware 4. The single hardest thing has always been getting all of the purchased hardware to work correctly. Originally this was because of crappy hardware support in the kernel and no help from the manufacturers. This has changed and lot and you can almost buy without a research project. At least you stand a good chance of having the hardware recognized by the kernel.
But getting the software to correctly use the hardware is a major problem still. Did you know that if you turn off the print server, CUPS, under YAST2, will simply redefine the networked servers as on your USB ports? This requires a root-access reconfiguration of the hardware. This is a BSOD as far as I'm concerned. And there was never any message anywhere about the printers being offline.
A GUI wouldn't have fixed this problem and it stumped both the n00b and the expert. I do hope that we don't get GUI and Useability mixed up so everyone has a really nice looking but totally useless interface that still tells them nothing about what's really going on.