So, basically, they want you to run a keystroke logger. The logger will then report back the number of times you push each key. Are we supposed to just trust them to ignore the order? I have to really doubt the sanity (or common sense, anyway) of the person who would voluntarily give away his security like that.
I think that the fact that 27 million Soviets died in the war, and that the USSR actually had to fight the Nazis on their own soil should be taken into account by more of the idiots who continually say, "Communism Sux! Look who won the cold war."
The only reason Russia was not wiped off the map by the Nazis is AMERICAN-provided armamaments (which we were never paid for) and AMERICAN military support for the Allies in general.
Sure, 27 million commies may have died fighting the Nazis. But at least twice that many died in COMMUNIST soviet prisons, labor camps, political executions, mass starvation, and so on.
Try reading some Solzhenitsyn sometime. Solzhenitsyn experienced the wonders of Communism first-hand--unlike you, you self-hating suburban piece of shit.
Some people are confusing the Oracle9i Database with the Oracle9i Application Server . . . The article refers to Oracle9i Application Server, not the database.
Oracle9i Application Server is basically Apache 1.3 bundled with Orion Application Server and and embedded (yes, embedded!) Oracle database server used for data caching.
I'm so glad you pointed that out. I know there are a lot of people out there with no experience in databases, who are jumping on Oracle for something that really isn't consequential. Oracle makes the best DB software in the business, period. Their software has taken everything I've thrown at it, and more. So it may be vulnerable tto DoS attacks. What else is new? Isn't everything on the internet?
This whole situation does go to show you what happens when you integrate your product with Open Source software, though. I mean, let's face it, Apache was never designed to handle mission-critical, Enterprise-level applications. It's great for serving web-pages out of your dorm-room, but for a $$$ piece of software like Oracle 9i, I don't know. I realize Oracle's engineers reworked it from the ground up, but you're never going to be able to fully vet a piece of software like Apache that was developed by non-professionals. Of course bugs are going to get through. If Larry wants to be able to keep making his grandiose (and generally true) claims about the robustness of his products, he's going to have to reconsider the using free, non-trusted code.
The Unforseen Consequence of Foreign Workers
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I hope this event will be enough to make the greedy corporations reconsider their use of foreign workers. When corporations like Microsoft import cheap labor from places like India, where Islamic Fundementalism is rampant, it's only a matter of time before they compromise security.
Congress should be ahsamed of themselves for increasing the number of green cards for tech workers last year. If it weren't bad enough that thousands of American tech workers are out of jobs, Microsoft and others are hiring not just foreigners, but Muslims! I can't believe nobody saw this coming. This basically undoes all the positives in Microsoft security. I have to ask you, Redmond. Was it worth it? Was saving a little bit on labor costs worth hiring foreign terrorists over good, decent Americans.
As a business owner, I can heartily state that I've never hired foreigners; this event only hardens my resolve to never do so in the future. I encourage other business owners to take the pledge, and only hire Americans.
These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.
a) You mean 'magazine', not 'clip'
b) Satellites don't have superman-style x-ray vision; and bin Ladin wears a turban; and steel doesn't transmit light.
Ontopic: how about instead, he uses Linux for the server. You can uptime, scalability, reliability, lower memory footprint, etc.
Linux is a great teaching tool, but not my first recommendation for business use, even as far as servers go. (Also, I don't think any knowledgeable person has accused Linux of having excellent scalability.)
Depending on price and application considerations, Solaris, Win2k, or *BSD would all beat out Linux. I'd recommend Win2k for servers if you can't afford the type of Admin talent needed to properly maintain a *nix box; Solaris if you need the best, and are willing to pay; *BSD, otherwise.
If you were starting your own business and standardized on Linux as a platform, what accounting package would you use and why?
You want my honest opinion? (And I know I'm going to get flamed for saying this.) I wouldn't use Linux at all.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Linux by any means. Linux remains an important learning tool for CompSci students and others interested in learning about hacking together an operation system from scratch. But I can't recommend Linux for business use.
Here's my experience. I run a fairly successful business with a mid-sized accounting department. My employees have years of experience with Windows and Windows-based accounting software. It would simply not make sense to re-train them to use Linux.
The same goes for someone starting a business. Don't ignore basic business sense. There are more potential employees out there who are already trained with Windows. If you do decide to go with Linux, whether out of short-sighted greed or out of the desire to support some vaguely defined set of principles, prepare to spend righteously on your training budget. Linux still has a long ways to go, as far as usability.
Well, it doesn't really matter at this point
on
MacOSX Vs BeOS ShootOut
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I loved BeOS, too. It was a great operating system, ahead of it's time. BeOS beats both Windows and the classic MacOS, by far.
Unfortunately, BeOS is for all intents and purposes dead. Nothing me or you can do will change that. That's why I'm going to put my money on MacOSX every time. We all know the advantages of OSX--I mean, it's certainly the first time anyone has combined user-friendliness and good-design with the power of Unix (and a real Unix, at that).
So, sad is I am to say it, this article is sort of irrelevant. Sure, I'll keep BeOS around as a toy. But for serious work, OSX is my new OS of choice.
Is "photoshop" falling into common usage as a word meaning "to digitally modify [an image]" similar to the way "xerox" is now synonymous with "photocopy"?
Indeed. This usage has existed for a good 5 years, anyway.
Personally I'd rather hear them referred to as "gimped Ringwraiths".
If I heard "gimped Ringwraiths", my first thought would be of Ringwraiths who'd had their ankles broken, or perhaps had had polio as children.
Anyway, "gimped" won't be replacing "photoshopped" any time soon. Gimp will have to break out of the Open Source ghetto first, and I don't see that happening. The serious graphics professional accepts no imitation for Photoshp. Period.
I've always thought of myself as an ardent supporter of the Earth. I'll never forget my six years spent cavorting around Berkely, stoned out of my mind, singing environmentalist folk songs and such.
All that said, I can no longer tolerate the Electric Vehicle fraud being perpetuated by my environmentalist brethren. Whether out of ignorance, or sheer, Judas-like greed, I am seeing more and more supposedly pro-environment types buying into the big corporate Lie. Do you really think these big corporations (Ford, Chrysler, etc.) would support EV if they were good for the environment? Being a good earth-steward and being a greedy-capitalist are, and always will be, antithetical.
Let me lay it out for you. EV do more harm to the environment than the Internal Combustion engine could even imagine. (Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the automobile no matter what powers it.) Producing the toxic substances (borate, in this case. Borate!) used in fuel cells entails spewing thousands of liters of Earth-murdering by-products. And what happens when a car powered by a borate fuel cell gets in an accident? (I'll leave that to your imagination.)
And that's before we get to the real problem. These electric vehicles still need to be powered by electricity! Can you fucking believe the nerve of corporations to suggest that we should use vehicles that rely on unnatural power production of any kind--and then call it "environmentally-friendly"? That's just unacceptable! Also, I'd strongly caution everybody against buying an EV, purely for economic reasons. Once we get a pro-Earth president in office (Gore/Lieberman 2004, baby!!) and stop circumventing the Kyoto protocol, your EVs will turn into so much scrap-metal with no environment-killing artificially generated electricity to power them.
Wired also ran this story. BTW, also mentioned in the wired article are the archived Usenet postings of "American Taliban", John Walker. I found that part pretty interesting, as well.
And while we're on the subject, anybody have any nominations for great moments in Slashdot history? I'll start. Here is the first article on Slashdot that mentions Google.
One of the good things about the dot come failures is that there are now many more geeks out there with enough spare time to come up with these cool ideas. One of the downsides is it also gives them the time to come up with odd presentations of their cool ideas.
It's not polite to bitch about the individual's presentation choices.
In addition, what makes you think this guy ever worked for a dotcom? He appears to have actual electronics and design skills, unlike the geniuses who worked for dotcoms. I assume he has a real job, which pays him well enough and gives him enough time to pursue his hobby. That has nothing to do with the late mass hysteria which resulted in thousands of clueless, unskilled individuals getting paper-rich off the ignorance and greed of even more clueless investors. HTH.
Want to know why there were no bodies in Nola, while there were thousands of bodies in Pompeii? It's simply a function of the society that was in place.
Research shows that Bronze Age Europe was home to peaceful, matriarchal, egalitarian cultures. When the volcano started to go off, the wise wymyn leaders knew enough to evacuate the town in an orderly fashion.
Contrast this to Roman times. Rome was a racist, patriarchal society that opressed women and other minorities. So, when the male leaders of Pompeii saw the volcano smoking, their testosterone-addled brains made them ignore it until it was too late. ("What can a silly volcano do against a big, strong man like me?") Still, when they realized what was happening, the white male elite of Pompeii managed, by and large, to escape on their yachts, while they left the wymyn and slaves to their deaths (that's why 70% of the bodies are female, and 60% are African-American).
I think this case is instructive, especially in the oppressive, male-dominated environment of today. Who knows, perhaps if the US were a matriarchal society, the casualty figures at WTC wouldn't have been so high.
Have you seen this guys picture? Niether sexy, nor cool, IMO. He looks visibly Canadian, so that tells you something right there.
I think somebody forgot to tell Bruce that 1994 cyber-chic is over. Wired was never cool, and certainly isn't anymore. Most of the "geeks" that got rich off the internet bubble are now back in their parents's basements. The yuppies have moved on, too. Now, instead of geeks they idolize cops and firefighters (and that's the way it should be).
Geeks in general, and Bruce Sterling in particular, need to stop living in a fantasy world where they are the center of attention. So, you work in the world of technology? So what? You want a prize? There are millions of people working in more essential jobs than you.
If we are approaching the age of cyberfeudalism, then cyberguilds (such as Apache, Jakarta, GNOME, and other self-styled independent "meritocratic" organizations) will be significant power holders. Good time to be a code artist, bad time to be a serf.
OSS projects as centers of power? Are you kidding me? The manager at your local K-Mart has more power than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined.
What you're missing, is that the "code artists" are the serfs. Writing code is low-level labor--to the information age what plowing fields was to the age of agriculture. The only way you can cease to be a serf, is to cease writing code. Code is just a commodity, like wheat. Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale. The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
I took a look at the site, and quite frankly, I'm overwhelmed by the number of choices. I started using Linux quite recently, and if I'd known there were this many different distributions, I probably would have stayed away.
When I started using Linux, I vaguely knew there were other distributions besides RedHat; but I knew that RedHat was the biggest, oldest, most successful Linux. So, why would anyone want to use any of the other distos? Do they seriously rival RedHat in terms of performance and ease-of-use. Do they have redhat package manager type innovation? Does anyone use them besides the people that develop them as vanity projects?
If any of the other distros do have advantages over RedHat (which I kind of doubt), then I may have to reconsider my use of Linux. I mean, if you can't get all the benefits of Linux in one distribution, what's the point? I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros. Isn't Linux kind of shooting itself in the foot with the distro system? Wouldn't cooperation be more efficient than competition?
I know that the typical slashdot-reader is a discipline-case with serious distrust of authority, but please read the article before you pass judgement. The justice department's move is not at all controversial, unless you're one of those anti-American types who thought we got was coming to us 9/11.
To put your mind at ease if you're too lazy to click the link in the article, I'll reproduce the most relevant part here:
The statement stressed there are restrictions on the monitoring of such communications, which includes phone calls and mail. Among them are that the inmates being held must be told of the monitoring, that the monitoring team cannot have a connection to any "ongoing prosecution" and that the monitoring must be limited to inmates subject to a "special administrative measure."
"In order to be subject to a special administrative measure the attorney general has to have a certification from the head of a law enforcement or intelligence agency that reasonable suspicion exists to believe that a particular inmate may use communication with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of terrorism," the statement said. [Emphasis added.]
If you don't get it, read that again. Now, what is there to whine about? I'm all for Civil Liberties, but this case has absolutely nothing to do with Civil Liberties. Terrorists, especially foreign terrorists, have no Civil Liberties to be concerned with, as far as I and 99.9% of Americans are concerned.
Okay, I'm kind of a newbie to Linux. I've been using Linux a little over a month, and I just finished compiling the latest stable 2.4 kernel. Now, tell me again why I'd want to take a step backwards? 2.4 is greater than 2.2.20 according to my math, which means it's better and more recent. So why are they still releasing 2.2? Is there some infighting in the Linux development world or something? Is this type of confusion (releasing 2.2.20 when 2.4 is already out) just one of the costs of the Open Source development methodology? I mean, you never hear about Microsoft releasing Windows 3.12 after Windows 95 is out.
With Aleph1 gone, perhaps they'll drop the strong anti-OpenBSD stance. OpenBSD is the most secure out-of-the-box operating system ever created, yet if Theo makes one tiny misstep Aleph2 and the BugTraq kiddies felt they had grounds to trash him left and right.
Of course, if you use OpenBSD you don't really need to bother reading BugTraq, as OpenBSD has never been successfully hacked. BugTraq is, in my experience, a resource hackers use to learn about the latest Win2K and Redhat vulnerablities - which means security conscious admins of those OSs need to read it as well. For the rest of us, it's not that useful.
September 11 has, as stated caused people to rethink their vulnerabilities. The recent terrorist attacks, I believe, proved that a centralized model for telephone switching is no longer viable.
During my years at Bell Labs, we drew up a fast, redundant, distributed switching system. At the time, technology wasn't up to implementing it cost-effectively. But today, it could be done for cheap using Linux and the Linux Router Project. Nearly all switches in the US are already digital, and a changeover to a fail-safe, decentralized switching system operating along the lines of a packet-switching network would be trivial. I'm almost inclined to call the Telcos irresponsible for not having made the change already.
I refuse to buy AMD products as long as they use this gimmicky, false labeling. If you think the MHz is no longer a good measure of performance, stop using MHz in the product name. Don't tack on an inflated "Model Number" the most consumers will mistake for a MHz rating.
With AMD's new naming process, they just bought Intel one new customer for the indefinite future.
Imagine someone broke into your house and stole your stereo. Later, through your neighbor's window, you see your stereo. You try to reason with your neighbor (just as the RIAA has tried reason with music-thieving public), but to no avail. Would you not then be justified to break into your neighbors house and reclaim your property?
I think this "Right to Hack" law is long overdue. In addition to copyright holders, I believe victims of libel and slander should also be able to legally use hacking to remedy their situations. The internet will be a lot more civilized when people realize they can no longer get away with anything.
They solicited the vendors on our list for donations of parts, and their courage was rewarded when IBM generously volunteered $15,000 for the project budget.
Okay, Raymond isn't a millionaire any more, either. But he does have corporate backing, which is a hell of a lot more than I've got. When I feel like dropping 15 large on a personal computer, I think I'll go for an OS a bit more upscale than Linux. Solaris, maybe.
Anyway, "dream" is the key word in the title of the article. No real Linux users (mostly college students, AFAIK) can afford a PC like ESR has designed. And I'm not sure what they'll accomplish by "dreaming" about the "ultimate" Linux box when the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
Slashdot Mirror
So, basically, they want you to run a keystroke logger. The logger will then report back the number of times you push each key. Are we supposed to just trust them to ignore the order? I have to really doubt the sanity (or common sense, anyway) of the person who would voluntarily give away his security like that.
I think that the fact that 27 million Soviets died in the war, and that the USSR actually had to fight the Nazis on their own soil should be taken into account by more of the idiots who continually say, "Communism Sux! Look who won the cold war."
The only reason Russia was not wiped off the map by the Nazis is AMERICAN-provided armamaments (which we were never paid for) and AMERICAN military support for the Allies in general.
Sure, 27 million commies may have died fighting the Nazis. But at least twice that many died in COMMUNIST soviet prisons, labor camps, political executions, mass starvation, and so on.
Try reading some Solzhenitsyn sometime. Solzhenitsyn experienced the wonders of Communism first-hand--unlike you, you self-hating suburban piece of shit.
I'm so glad you pointed that out. I know there are a lot of people out there with no experience in databases, who are jumping on Oracle for something that really isn't consequential. Oracle makes the best DB software in the business, period. Their software has taken everything I've thrown at it, and more. So it may be vulnerable tto DoS attacks. What else is new? Isn't everything on the internet?
This whole situation does go to show you what happens when you integrate your product with Open Source software, though. I mean, let's face it, Apache was never designed to handle mission-critical, Enterprise-level applications. It's great for serving web-pages out of your dorm-room, but for a $$$ piece of software like Oracle 9i, I don't know. I realize Oracle's engineers reworked it from the ground up, but you're never going to be able to fully vet a piece of software like Apache that was developed by non-professionals. Of course bugs are going to get through. If Larry wants to be able to keep making his grandiose (and generally true) claims about the robustness of his products, he's going to have to reconsider the using free, non-trusted code.
I hope this event will be enough to make the greedy corporations reconsider their use of foreign workers. When corporations like Microsoft import cheap labor from places like India, where Islamic Fundementalism is rampant, it's only a matter of time before they compromise security.
Congress should be ahsamed of themselves for increasing the number of green cards for tech workers last year. If it weren't bad enough that thousands of American tech workers are out of jobs, Microsoft and others are hiring not just foreigners, but Muslims! I can't believe nobody saw this coming. This basically undoes all the positives in Microsoft security. I have to ask you, Redmond. Was it worth it? Was saving a little bit on labor costs worth hiring foreign terrorists over good, decent Americans.
As a business owner, I can heartily state that I've never hired foreigners; this event only hardens my resolve to never do so in the future. I encourage other business owners to take the pledge, and only hire Americans.
These guys see him, know what side his hair is parted on, and how many rounds are in the clip of his Kalashnikov.
a) You mean 'magazine', not 'clip'
b) Satellites don't have superman-style x-ray vision; and bin Ladin wears a turban; and steel doesn't transmit light.
HTH.
Terraserver has aerial photos of the entire country for free. You can look up your address and everything.
Maybe composite aerial photos aren't quite as cool as satellite photos, but who cares? It's free.
Ontopic: how about instead, he uses Linux for the server. You can uptime, scalability, reliability, lower memory footprint, etc.
Linux is a great teaching tool, but not my first recommendation for business use, even as far as servers go. (Also, I don't think any knowledgeable person has accused Linux of having excellent scalability.)
Depending on price and application considerations, Solaris, Win2k, or *BSD would all beat out Linux. I'd recommend Win2k for servers if you can't afford the type of Admin talent needed to properly maintain a *nix box; Solaris if you need the best, and are willing to pay; *BSD, otherwise.
If you were starting your own business and standardized on Linux as a platform, what accounting package would you use and why?
You want my honest opinion? (And I know I'm going to get flamed for saying this.) I wouldn't use Linux at all.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Linux by any means. Linux remains an important learning tool for CompSci students and others interested in learning about hacking together an operation system from scratch. But I can't recommend Linux for business use.
Here's my experience. I run a fairly successful business with a mid-sized accounting department. My employees have years of experience with Windows and Windows-based accounting software. It would simply not make sense to re-train them to use Linux.
The same goes for someone starting a business. Don't ignore basic business sense. There are more potential employees out there who are already trained with Windows. If you do decide to go with Linux, whether out of short-sighted greed or out of the desire to support some vaguely defined set of principles, prepare to spend righteously on your training budget. Linux still has a long ways to go, as far as usability.
--
I support a US first strike
I loved BeOS, too. It was a great operating system, ahead of it's time. BeOS beats both Windows and the classic MacOS, by far.
Unfortunately, BeOS is for all intents and purposes dead. Nothing me or you can do will change that. That's why I'm going to put my money on MacOSX every time. We all know the advantages of OSX--I mean, it's certainly the first time anyone has combined user-friendliness and good-design with the power of Unix (and a real Unix, at that).
So, sad is I am to say it, this article is sort of irrelevant. Sure, I'll keep BeOS around as a toy. But for serious work, OSX is my new OS of choice.
--
I support a US first strike
Is "photoshop" falling into common usage as a word meaning "to digitally modify [an image]" similar to the way "xerox" is now synonymous with "photocopy"?
Indeed. This usage has existed for a good 5 years, anyway.
Personally I'd rather hear them referred to as "gimped Ringwraiths".
If I heard "gimped Ringwraiths", my first thought would be of Ringwraiths who'd had their ankles broken, or perhaps had had polio as children.
Anyway, "gimped" won't be replacing "photoshopped" any time soon. Gimp will have to break out of the Open Source ghetto first, and I don't see that happening. The serious graphics professional accepts no imitation for Photoshp. Period.
I've always thought of myself as an ardent supporter of the Earth. I'll never forget my six years spent cavorting around Berkely, stoned out of my mind, singing environmentalist folk songs and such.
All that said, I can no longer tolerate the Electric Vehicle fraud being perpetuated by my environmentalist brethren. Whether out of ignorance, or sheer, Judas-like greed, I am seeing more and more supposedly pro-environment types buying into the big corporate Lie. Do you really think these big corporations (Ford, Chrysler, etc.) would support EV if they were good for the environment? Being a good earth-steward and being a greedy-capitalist are, and always will be, antithetical.
Let me lay it out for you. EV do more harm to the environment than the Internal Combustion engine could even imagine. (Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the automobile no matter what powers it.) Producing the toxic substances (borate, in this case. Borate!) used in fuel cells entails spewing thousands of liters of Earth-murdering by-products. And what happens when a car powered by a borate fuel cell gets in an accident? (I'll leave that to your imagination.)
And that's before we get to the real problem. These electric vehicles still need to be powered by electricity! Can you fucking believe the nerve of corporations to suggest that we should use vehicles that rely on unnatural power production of any kind--and then call it "environmentally-friendly"? That's just unacceptable! Also, I'd strongly caution everybody against buying an EV, purely for economic reasons. Once we get a pro-Earth president in office (Gore/Lieberman 2004, baby!!) and stop circumventing the Kyoto protocol, your EVs will turn into so much scrap-metal with no environment-killing artificially generated electricity to power them.
And while we're on the subject, anybody have any nominations for great moments in Slashdot history? I'll start. Here is the first article on Slashdot that mentions Google.
It's not polite to bitch about the individual's presentation choices.
In addition, what makes you think this guy ever worked for a dotcom? He appears to have actual electronics and design skills, unlike the geniuses who worked for dotcoms. I assume he has a real job, which pays him well enough and gives him enough time to pursue his hobby. That has nothing to do with the late mass hysteria which resulted in thousands of clueless, unskilled individuals getting paper-rich off the ignorance and greed of even more clueless investors. HTH.
Okay, the Robot pet site is slashdotted. But no problem, since the Google cache version is there. Hope this helps.
Research shows that Bronze Age Europe was home to peaceful, matriarchal, egalitarian cultures. When the volcano started to go off, the wise wymyn leaders knew enough to evacuate the town in an orderly fashion.
Contrast this to Roman times. Rome was a racist, patriarchal society that opressed women and other minorities. So, when the male leaders of Pompeii saw the volcano smoking, their testosterone-addled brains made them ignore it until it was too late. ("What can a silly volcano do against a big, strong man like me?") Still, when they realized what was happening, the white male elite of Pompeii managed, by and large, to escape on their yachts, while they left the wymyn and slaves to their deaths (that's why 70% of the bodies are female, and 60% are African-American).
I think this case is instructive, especially in the oppressive, male-dominated environment of today. Who knows, perhaps if the US were a matriarchal society, the casualty figures at WTC wouldn't have been so high.
I think somebody forgot to tell Bruce that 1994 cyber-chic is over. Wired was never cool, and certainly isn't anymore. Most of the "geeks" that got rich off the internet bubble are now back in their parents's basements. The yuppies have moved on, too. Now, instead of geeks they idolize cops and firefighters (and that's the way it should be).
Geeks in general, and Bruce Sterling in particular, need to stop living in a fantasy world where they are the center of attention. So, you work in the world of technology? So what? You want a prize? There are millions of people working in more essential jobs than you.
OSS projects as centers of power? Are you kidding me? The manager at your local K-Mart has more power than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined.
What you're missing, is that the "code artists" are the serfs. Writing code is low-level labor--to the information age what plowing fields was to the age of agriculture. The only way you can cease to be a serf, is to cease writing code. Code is just a commodity, like wheat. Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale. The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
When I started using Linux, I vaguely knew there were other distributions besides RedHat; but I knew that RedHat was the biggest, oldest, most successful Linux. So, why would anyone want to use any of the other distos? Do they seriously rival RedHat in terms of performance and ease-of-use. Do they have redhat package manager type innovation? Does anyone use them besides the people that develop them as vanity projects?
If any of the other distros do have advantages over RedHat (which I kind of doubt), then I may have to reconsider my use of Linux. I mean, if you can't get all the benefits of Linux in one distribution, what's the point? I might as well switch to WinXP, where I know that the entire company is focused on one version of the OS, not dozens of competing distros. Isn't Linux kind of shooting itself in the foot with the distro system? Wouldn't cooperation be more efficient than competition?
To put your mind at ease if you're too lazy to click the link in the article, I'll reproduce the most relevant part here:
If you don't get it, read that again. Now, what is there to whine about? I'm all for Civil Liberties, but this case has absolutely nothing to do with Civil Liberties. Terrorists, especially foreign terrorists, have no Civil Liberties to be concerned with, as far as I and 99.9% of Americans are concerned.
Okay, I'm kind of a newbie to Linux. I've been using Linux a little over a month, and I just finished compiling the latest stable 2.4 kernel. Now, tell me again why I'd want to take a step backwards? 2.4 is greater than 2.2.20 according to my math, which means it's better and more recent. So why are they still releasing 2.2? Is there some infighting in the Linux development world or something? Is this type of confusion (releasing 2.2.20 when 2.4 is already out) just one of the costs of the Open Source development methodology? I mean, you never hear about Microsoft releasing Windows 3.12 after Windows 95 is out.
Of course, if you use OpenBSD you don't really need to bother reading BugTraq, as OpenBSD has never been successfully hacked. BugTraq is, in my experience, a resource hackers use to learn about the latest Win2K and Redhat vulnerablities - which means security conscious admins of those OSs need to read it as well. For the rest of us, it's not that useful.
During my years at Bell Labs, we drew up a fast, redundant, distributed switching system. At the time, technology wasn't up to implementing it cost-effectively. But today, it could be done for cheap using Linux and the Linux Router Project. Nearly all switches in the US are already digital, and a changeover to a fail-safe, decentralized switching system operating along the lines of a packet-switching network would be trivial. I'm almost inclined to call the Telcos irresponsible for not having made the change already.
With AMD's new naming process, they just bought Intel one new customer for the indefinite future.
I think this "Right to Hack" law is long overdue. In addition to copyright holders, I believe victims of libel and slander should also be able to legally use hacking to remedy their situations. The internet will be a lot more civilized when people realize they can no longer get away with anything.
Okay, Raymond isn't a millionaire any more, either. But he does have corporate backing, which is a hell of a lot more than I've got. When I feel like dropping 15 large on a personal computer, I think I'll go for an OS a bit more upscale than Linux. Solaris, maybe.
Anyway, "dream" is the key word in the title of the article. No real Linux users (mostly college students, AFAIK) can afford a PC like ESR has designed. And I'm not sure what they'll accomplish by "dreaming" about the "ultimate" Linux box when the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.