We need a site called geek-exchange so people like us can swap inconveniently-situated tech problems (ie, I fix your mum's PC if you do my cousin's....)
It'd save us all an awful lot of driving.
That reminds me, "The difference between Americans and the British is that the British think 100 miles is a long distance, and Americans think 100 years is a long time.";-)
Clinton in an unguarded moment in a speach said that China and Japan can't be criticised or otherwise sanctioned much by America because they are financing the national debt.
There was a point in time where ECT in mental institutions was commonplace because it was endorsed by the American Psychology Association.
Today, we know that ECT only helps certain cases of clinical depression, and is used only in extreme cases when no other solution exists.
If you go further back with the same association, they used to perform labotamies.
Excellent post. Just want to add that lobotomies became popular due to the inventor of the proceedure getting a Nobel Prize in medicine for his "cure" for mental illness, and the popularity of the "icepick lobotomy" that could be performed by non-surgeons with local anasthesia (the patient would be forced to report how the proceedure was going to determine if enough brain damage had been done.)
few of the radical-right, orhtodox jews, serve in combat rolls in the IDF. Why? Because they're religious scholars and exempt from such duty. Yet, they are usually the ones howling the loudest about how it's their promised land
You're confusing the Religious Zionists, who *do* serve in the army and attend Hesder yeshiva, and happen to be Modern Orthodox, with the "ultra" Orthodox who dress funny but aren't rigid Zionists and who's Rabbis have made rulings that land can be traded if and only if it saves lives.
The question was, did giving land to Arafat save lives? That was debatable. Hopefully the new regime will be better, but I remain sceptical (but not doctrinaire) of the ability of a holocaust denier (Abbas) who's pledged to not fight his brothers in Hamas to be a true moderate.
While not directly saying it, what most employers appreciate is the ability to deliver. Best way to achieve this in college? An opensource project.
That of course depends upon the company you're applying to. If you apply to Microsoft one of the questions they ask is "have you worked on or otherwise seen the code of an open source project licensed under the GPL or similar so-called "viral" license"? If you answer in the affirmative, you won't be hired. Of course, nobody wants to work in a company like that anyway.;-)
Well, one could argue that Occam's razor favors atheism
William of Occam, a Fransiscan friar, was a theist; albeit one nearly excommunicated by the Catholic church of the time, not for his razor but for his advocacy of apastolic poverty. If people did things like rolling over in their graves Occam has probably done a lot of that.
I won't comment on the rest of the article because perhaps some of it is true, but it's a set of mostly irrelevant comparisons.
You know what's funny? When Linux is the first to support something (eg x86-64), all the BSD zealots say that's because they rush into it and do quick and dirty hacks.
I don't know when Linux got the support, but when NetBSD first started to support the x86-64 architecture it was in 2001, when the hardware was only in the form of pre-release simulators. It doesn't get much better than that, for all practical purposes.
Maybe it doesn't have journaling by default (though a log file system is under development) but FFS and FFS2 in NetBSD have reliability that others could only dream of. Or you've never heard of Reiserfs and XFS loosing data?
its hardware support is out of date
That's laughable. NetBSD has some of the cleanest device driver system in existance. It was the first free OS to include USB, and it's continued porting to various platforms increase its hardware support, because thanks to its device driver infrastructure, if a piece of hardware is available for one platform, it's available to any platform that can run it.
It's not easy to get security updatesWhich is better, having to patch or use cvs a few times a year, or having to download every week new security fixes to keep from getting rooted? You decide.
MSN has improved their search for the keyword "Linux". Before it highlighted biased studies comparing Linux to Windows, now it is entirely, at least on the first page, major Linux websites. I'll still use google though.
The many tasks where there isn't equivalent software under Linux. Can you beat Chessmaster, Fritz, Chessbase, Shredder, Tasc Tutor for chess on Linux? Certainly not.
xboard is an x11 front end to professional-quality chess engines such as Crafty and GNU Chess as well as some of the chess servers that attract the best players.
Yes, xboard might not have feature X of the software you listed, but you did say "there just isn't equivalent software". In the hands of a good chess player xboard is more than adaquate.
Unfortunately, any effort to replace the current calendar will be met with grave opposition by the hyper-religious, who seem inclined to believe that a box on a chart MUST correspond with their chosen Sabbath
Actually, since Jewish law, as expressed in the Torah, mandates that months begin with the new moon, and that Passover occurs in the spring (i.e. a lunisolar hybrid calendar) the Julian-Gregorian calendar already doesn't pass Biblical muster.
Interestingly, the astronomy used in creating the Jewish calendar makes it drift overall (it has a few months that change lengths to account for the fractional lunar month length, and has a leap month every few years, which operate according to a 19 year cycle of the different types of months. (19 years of lunar months divide equally into the solar year, the ancient astronomers knew) much less than the Julian calendar does, and practically speaking not noticably different than the Gregorian.
Of course, non-Jews mostly don't consider the lunar nature of the months important for their religion (though the name month derives from "moonth") and since Jews are a lot less pushy about forcing their calendar upon others than the Catholic church and the Roman empire, the Jewish calendar, as ingenius as it is in matching biblical demands, is only in use by Jews today; and of course is a bit difficult to program for unless you're good at astronomy or use Emacs. (Emacs has a Hebrew calendar function, and l'havidil a Mayan one as well.)
You may want to try NetBSD, it's mantra is portability (over 50 architectures), so it was the first free Unix-like OS with AMD64 support. It for a long time has supported other 64 bit platforms so I assume that it is more likely to be 64-bit safe.
The NetBSD 2.0 release candidate is a lot faster than 1.6, in some benchmarks such as high speed networking surpassing all Unix-like operating systems.
I thought it was Honeynet but that is quite old, and only talks about RH6.2. Do you have a source for a more up to date study?
I recall one quoted on slashdot that said that Windows on the average was rooted after twenty minutes while a Linux installation wasn't at all. It was recent, but unfortunately slashdot seems to have gotten rid of their search feature.
Thanks for the info on other distributions. FYI, we use Debian primarily for intranet servers but occasionally for day-to-day development. I'm a developer not a sysadmin, so I don't have the time to stay up to date on anything we don't actually run. We looked at RHEL primarily for the support but were unimpressed to the point of standardising on Debian.
I prefer Debian too, but have looked at other distributions; apt-get or some kind of clone of it is de-rigour on any major distribution, and distributions for corporate environments rutinely do patches rather than new versions whenever possible.
There has only been one remote root of openssh in the past eight years, it's part of the openbsd project and is enabled on that platform by default; it is the source of the "once in eight years" statistic mentioned on the OpenBSD homepage.
Has your vendor bothered to backport that fix? I might just believe you if you said "Debian" box, because the Debian people I know put a lot of work into fixing and backporting fixes, which apt is configured to pick up by default. I flat out do not believe that Redhat / Fedora ships secure
Fedora does ship with a few errata, but not any openssh exploits to my knowledge.
at least RHEL seems to have some sort of maintained updates server (and I don't use SUSE or Slackware so I have no idea about them).
I don't think you use *any* of them or if you have you aren't paying attention. For Fedora it is recommended to use the included program yum which gives it capabilities similar to Debian's apt-get, though unlike Debian Stable and RHEL, and like Debian Unstable, Fedora tends to simply upgrade to a newer version rather than patch existing versions. SuSE uses YaST, or apt4rpm, the latter can be used by Fedora too. (apt4rpm originated with Connectiva, it's apt-get that uses rpm rather than dpkg.) Slackware can use several different third party programs to automatically get new security/bug fixes from/patches or track -current.
(Everyone should pray for Patrick Volkerding, for helping to start the whole Linux distribution world rolling with Slackware.)
You must be new here. We're all closet Windows users.
I haven't used Windows for a long time. I blew away my Windows partition after realising, after a couple of months and prior to SP2, that getting it safe on the internet would take too long to be practical. I then blew away my "rescue partition", the only form of restoration of Windows on this HP, in order to play around with an early DragonFlyBSD (Actually, for money you can order a rescue CD, they've since started including a rescue CD on later models.)
Now how many of you are blown away by Half-Life 2? I rest my case.
My video card can't run HL2, and I can't justify getting a new video card considering how little I like games, especially first person shooters and other games requiring a lot of hand-eye coordination and/or including a lot of gore. Linux though does have a lot of roguelike games, my favorite game genere, and a few arcade games that are fun to run. It even can run most, if not nearly all, ID Software first-person shooters and Ultra Tournament series games if what you want is first person shooters.
I just want things to work without the need of manually changing LD_LIBRARY_PATH or using a distro that comes with a beta version of gcc (redhat).
Red Hat (and Fedora) haven't come with a beta version of gcc for years, ever since RH 8.0 came with gcc 3.2 instead of 2.96. Your criticism is a bit out of date.
Then you must enter an intense period of training to hone your installation skills. Go out now and get a copy of NetBSD and begin. After you can install that, you can return to Linux in triumph, for you will be able to install anything.
Actually, although it's text mode and scares some people, the NetBSD installer is actually nice and straightforward because of its simplicity. Of course, afterwards you will need to do some configuring that other free Unices do with a GUI interface, but that's what NetBSD's excellent documentation is for.
I know this is off-topic, but since the parent was modded up fairly high by people who are silly enough to think it's insightful and not-offtopic too perhaps it's worthwhile to disagree with it publically:
The American Dream is for me and my childern to have a better life.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that it includes other people. Do you dream of what some guy across the city childern future is?
To say that everyone should have a better future isn't the American Dream, its more, IMHO, of the Communist Dream.
There's nothing Communist about saying that we're all G-d's children and since this is the case we should all care for one another, rather than only ourselves. Perhaps it's not entirely the American dream as you see it but it's certainly the Judeo-Christian dream and there's nothing "Communist" about that.
HP dropping gnome (not that I have ever seen anything in news about this)
HP-UX, one of HP's brands of Unix (the other being Tru-64 that they got when they swallowed Compaq, which Compaq got from DEC; I assume it too will be with CDE?) was originally part of a propritary Unix vendor's consortium standardizing on GNOME.
HP pulled out, and switched from GNOME, not in favor of KDE, but in favor of the closed-source CDE desktop they'd been using, along with most other propritary Unix vendors such as Sun (who is keeping GNOME), prior to adopting GNOME. (Actually CDE was invented by HP, though it's basically a decendant of Motif with a launcher, fancier colors, and more bugs.;-) )
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton in an unguarded moment in a speach said that China and Japan can't be criticised or otherwise sanctioned much by America because they are financing the national debt.
The question was, did giving land to Arafat save lives? That was debatable. Hopefully the new regime will be better, but I remain sceptical (but not doctrinaire) of the ability of a holocaust denier (Abbas) who's pledged to not fight his brothers in Hamas to be a true moderate.
It's mentioned on the NetBSD website's amd64 section.
My apoligies for the bad formatting in the last paragraph. :-(
MSN has improved their search for the keyword "Linux". Before it highlighted biased studies comparing Linux to Windows, now it is entirely, at least on the first page, major Linux websites. I'll still use google though.
Yes, xboard might not have feature X of the software you listed, but you did say "there just isn't equivalent software". In the hands of a good chess player xboard is more than adaquate.
Interestingly, the astronomy used in creating the Jewish calendar makes it drift overall (it has a few months that change lengths to account for the fractional lunar month length, and has a leap month every few years, which operate according to a 19 year cycle of the different types of months. (19 years of lunar months divide equally into the solar year, the ancient astronomers knew) much less than the Julian calendar does, and practically speaking not noticably different than the Gregorian.
Of course, non-Jews mostly don't consider the lunar nature of the months important for their religion (though the name month derives from "moonth") and since Jews are a lot less pushy about forcing their calendar upon others than the Catholic church and the Roman empire, the Jewish calendar, as ingenius as it is in matching biblical demands, is only in use by Jews today; and of course is a bit difficult to program for unless you're good at astronomy or use Emacs. (Emacs has a Hebrew calendar function, and l'havidil a Mayan one as well.)
Lua was in last year's lightweight languages workshop.
The NetBSD 2.0 release candidate is a lot faster than 1.6, in some benchmarks such as high speed networking surpassing all Unix-like operating systems.
There has only been one remote root of openssh in the past eight years, it's part of the openbsd project and is enabled on that platform by default; it is the source of the "once in eight years" statistic mentioned on the OpenBSD homepage.
Fedora does ship with a few errata, but not any openssh exploits to my knowledge.I don't think you use *any* of them or if you have you aren't paying attention. For Fedora it is recommended to use the included program yum which gives it capabilities similar to Debian's apt-get, though unlike Debian Stable and RHEL, and like Debian Unstable, Fedora tends to simply upgrade to a newer version rather than patch existing versions. SuSE uses YaST, or apt4rpm, the latter can be used by Fedora too. (apt4rpm originated with Connectiva, it's apt-get that uses rpm rather than dpkg.) Slackware can use several different third party programs to automatically get new security/bug fixes from(Everyone should pray for Patrick Volkerding, for helping to start the whole Linux distribution world rolling with Slackware.)
http://www.militaryphotos.net.nyud.net:8090/forums /viewtopic.php?t=30510
HP pulled out, and switched from GNOME, not in favor of KDE, but in favor of the closed-source CDE desktop they'd been using, along with most other propritary Unix vendors such as Sun (who is keeping GNOME), prior to adopting GNOME. (Actually CDE was invented by HP, though it's basically a decendant of Motif with a launcher, fancier colors, and more bugs. ;-) )