At the very least, if it's an intentional hole you could be obliged to do a lot more than that. You're lucky if you put a backdoor in and you only have to spend the time to fix it. If I bought something from you and deployed it into production and you have a backdoor in it that was used by someone, you'd wish you never meet me or my company's lawyers by the time it was all said and done.
People are buying "hacker insurance." Think about that, the insurance industry is getting involved. More importantly, in a smaller to mid-sized operation a good security breech could be the end of the company. You could potentially go to jail for something like that. It's a stupid practice.
I'm in the security business and there are so many unintentional holes it's frightening, there are some very clever people out there who are trying to break in to computers. They can do it on systems that are designed to be secure (think OpenSSH) you want to give them a hand? It's just stupid.
I've been getting that feeling too. XBox live is cool, but SOCOM is pretty sweet too.
If Sony is 50% on the mark with the Cell processor and PS3, a pentium on your TV with an NVidia DSP (err, I mean "3D chip") just won't cut it.
How much money can they lose? It seems like every time they do something cool, Sony makes an equally cool move, I just bought some fairly recent games (within the last year) for $20 a piece, brand new with the red "Greatest Hits" box. Hard to beat that and 50million units in the field.
My girlfriend ordered my copy from sony's site. Playsation2.com.
No HDD compatible games on PS2. The HDD won't work with them, says Sony.
Games work just fine, you put a different DVD in and swap memory cards and play your games.
You can use the TV but you need a VGA monitor to install it.
The memory card is needed to load the kernel in to RAM. It's like a BIOS on a PC. You need code that can read the drive in memory and running before you can read the drive.
When I first started hacking on Linux, I was working with a seasoned Linux kernel hacker who my company hired as a consultant. He helped us with some I/O issues and such, did some other tweaks and gave us a ton of inspiration to go get after it ourselves. (You be amazed at how many people are afraid to just start making changes to kernel code) He is a wickedly cool individual and as someone whose had a lot of schooling and experience it was one of the best learning experiences I can remember.
The first thing I started dorking with after that experience was the scheduler because I, like all other hakers, know how to schedule stuff. At the time, (early 2.x) the scheduler was also a fairly easy to digest piece of code that could have impacts on the system in great ways.
Well all my stuff got bit bucketed. I called up our consultant guy who my friend by now, "what's the deal? Linus doesn't like my stuff. How do you mail him stuff?" And his answer was that pretty much every body wants to tweak the scheduler, everybody sends stuff in. Linus is sage in his wisdom, schedulers are freaking hard because there is always a pedantic worst case that sucks and actually shows up in the real world. Linus has always done fairly simple things that aren't best but certainly aren't worst. So 2.0 had pretty straight round robin. 2.2 and 2.4 they started to add queuing schedulers with niceness. 2.5 we're going to get a pretty killer scheduler that has taken a ton of effort to tweak and there are still discussions to expose parameters to the user via/proc or something because you can find cases were it doesn't perform as well.
Now this IO scheduler is opening up a whole new can of worms, it's a new chunk of code called "scheduler" and all hackers know scheduling. In the past it has been fairly simple. It should be fun to watch and the kernel is going to kick mucho ass in the end. There will be a lot of talk and debate about this stuff. It's also distilled down to the trusted set that Linus will let play with things called "scheduler"
So because something can be used for a crime its all illegal.
Not true. The spirit of the law is to prevent people from wholesale committing that crime. It's worded sloppily and there are holes but you know what they are trying to do. I don't know of anyone who has been busted for ripping a DVD, just selling tools to do it, and really not even that, they were busted for distributing copyrighted materials.
Seriously, how many xbox modchips were used for putting linux on xbox? How many do you think were used for piracy? How about PS2 modchips, what is the legitmate use for them?
I don't know a single person that has moded a PS2 or Xbox for some reason other than piracy. You have some points with the DMCA, it's sloppy, but this isn't the case that makes it. These people were selling tools with the sole intention being to pirate, that's illegal, that was illegal prior to the DMCA.
The Feb 17th issue broke it down nicely. You can read it on their web site. Basically. The conventional wisdom is that there are exactly 2 players in the 64bit arena: IBM and Intel. IBM isn't jumping on the Itanic either, at least not in any big way other than building some low end servers with it.
AMD is the wildcard. If x86-64 is the bomb and takes off like AMD is betting on it. Intel lost the 64bit war for many years. IBM and maybe even Sun will quietly (well sun doesn't do jack shit quietly) push x86-64 for the low end while IBM POWER4 and POWER5 and POWER6 down the road run the big end.
Basically Intel needs something like Sun to jump on it IA64 to really give it some credibility and they don't sound real eager to. IBM sounds like they are down for the fight. Alpha, MIPS, PARISC are all pretty dead; long term and relatively speaking. Meanwhile, if Intel doesn't get on the shit quick then they'll have to support x86-64 too and that's the real death blow to IA64.
Because you'd be killed so quickly? Or because it's so lihgt weight?
Re:How heavy is the foam?
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More on Columbia
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· Score: 4, Informative
That's a very complex question. Water condenses on it and freezes. Making it a combination of foam and ice. The worst case according to one of the links in the article was that it was pure ice which would put it in the 60+ lbs range. Roughly like a safe hitting the wing at 365mph.
The shuttle is obsolete.
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 3, Insightful
NASA needs to move on. I think NASA threw the dice way back when, they lost but they've been trying to make it look successful ever since. It's far more expensive to fly the shuttle than it was to use the single use rockets we used before and they were more reliable now that 14 people have been killed in the shuttle.
It's simple math and economics. Financially the
shuttle program has been a terrible disaster. Now you can't second
guess anything and there have been advances in comfort and living
conditions in space and such thanks to the shuttle but I'm sure the
same kind of things would have been done without it. We've learned
things because of the shuttle, it hasn't stopped science, it's just
not delivered what it was supposed to have.
I also fear that NASA itself may be out of date and obsolete. Am I
the only one who is disgusted by the notion of the beaurocracy? There
are all of these emails surfacing. I've worked at IBM and other big
places and I get this sick feeling of CYA going on. I can just see
the Dilbert-esque rocket scientist sitting at his desk composing the
emails to the director about the foam falling off and the other
possible causes. "Properly documenting" the risk. I've read
Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster and that's one of the
issues he pointed out. The administration lives in make believe where
the engineers make compromises to do things on time. It's kind of a
bummer because there are people that die because of it. I'd like to
think that someone will be held accountable, I doubt that anybody
other than an administrative warm body will be and at best they'll be
fired and get a really high paying job at Boeing, TRW, or Raytheon.
I think it's high time we start looking at splitting NASA up in to 2
or 3 groups and making them compete with each other. Let the
beaurocracy die and the science come back, make them write proposals,
beg congress and private parties for funding and then hold them
accountable for delivery. Let different groups take different
approaches. Reward success with continued funding. NASA is cheap, relatively speaking.
We can easily fund 3 NASAs. Right now it all rides on the success
and failure of one entity with nearly an impossible mission,
logisitally speaking. NASA can't even admit that the shuttle program
is a failure because then they lose face and funding and there isn't
another organization in place to do the science. So science
continues to limp and NASA continues to put bandaids on a very
expensive wound that has taken more lives than all other space related
accidents put together.
And for the record I am appriciative and recognize the hard work and
accomplishments of everyone associated with the shuttle program.
They have engineered some amazing things and I'm not attacking anybody
personally. It's the program as a whole that hasn't delivered what it
promised.
Line of code count, NT is up there. If not number one then it is damn close.
I think Brookes quantified the OS360 development effort in terms of man years and it is probably the largest engineering effort on any kind undertaken by a private entitiy ever. On the order of man centuries of development effort and time.
Why hasn't NASA been split up? THey don't have competition. They control all of the US's space ambitions and they succeed or fail by NASA's success or failure.
It's too much for one organization. Even the military recognizes that and they divide stuff up. They have competition, they have different specialties. That's exactly what NASA needs.
Peter also did a ton of work on PGP 2.0 and he wrote the "world famous" hpack archvier which was the first one known to compress all of the files in the archive was a single unit (unit mode I believe was the switch) which is now copied by JAR and RAR and others. All around cool guy from my few emails to and from him.
You're right the ends don't justify the means. That's why they
shouldnt' take themselves so damn seriously. I'm not advocating
abuse, but at the same time, it's software and it's not personal.
What is important is what the end users do with it. It's far more
important than the egos of a few developers. This guy had better be a
raging prick, a few arguements or some abrasive characteristics
doesn't cut it. In contrast their have been some amazing flames in
Linux land and the guys who take part are amazing in their ability to
not take it personally and the whole keeps improving.
Of course that's the whole BSD movement, 2 developers get their
panties in a bunch and instead of either one of them being big enough
to compromise they fork. You can't tell me that the OpenBSD folks
aren't doing things that all BSDs benefit from, same for FreeBSD and
their amazing accomplishments. FreeBSD has been strong so far but
it's sad to see them drop to that same level.
This is kind of nice of them. Just as 5.0 was coming out and there
seemed to be this general quietness about freedom and the GPL and RMS
bashing seemed to be at an acceptable high point the good lads at
FreeBSD go and remind us all again what open and freedom is all
about.
I've read some hella good flames and wars on the linux kernel dev
list, I never recall someone being invited not to take part though.
Al Viro is especially good and reading your code and then telling you
exactly how incompentent your are.
If this guy is the master hacker everyone makes him to be, this isn't
enough explanation. Shouldn't the users have some say? Perhaps the
mistreated developers should move on to other projects or maybe grow
into adults and learn to take the heat, it's just software, it's not
like you should be taking the flames seriously.
For crying out loud! Why do we keep assuming that opensource resources just transfer between products?
If these guys weren't working on this, they probably wouldn't be working on anything.
I think this is a hell of a project with a ton of potential. If there was a drop in windows replacement that runs windows apps, that's a killer app. Now they are years and years away from such a platform but from a pure oss ideological perspective this rocks. Anything that helps break the ties and allows for freedom is a good thing.
Unless is has a transputer or something, believe me, it's not too
difficult to code for. Not for most game producing companies, who
insist on doing it their way even when you give them a lot of cool
toys to play with.
This is an industry where momentum and future are king. You'll never
buy a box with only 5 games unless it comes from Sony or Nintendo and
has promise for more.
When I worked at TV settop box company, you'd be surprised at how they
casually thought that they could just step in to the game business.
Seriously, they thought they'd just put doom on it and the next thing
you know the world would come running. Meanwhile the hardware has
about a 10th the performance of a PS2 and offers just as much in the
way of platform support. Never mind that doom was years old at the
time. The idea got wacked, but not before some poor bastard spent 5
months working on getting doom running on it.
Most of those things have that same vibe. Some company with some
money thought that they could just step in and own. Doesn't work that
way.
Well how do you think the pass phrase factors in to that equation? Seriously. Do the math for El Gamal or RSA, I don't see a "passphrase" component.
They use a symmetric cipher to encrypt your private key on disk. Depending on which cipher is used, likey IDEA, AES or 3DES. You're looking at a 112, 128, 168, 192, or 256bit symmetric block cipher and the effort it takes to break that. RFC 2440 states that a hash is applied to your pass phrase to expand it or reduce it to the proper key space (your 70character phrase doesn't buy you any more than a 32character phrase,) MD5 or SHA is probably used and then a cipher which isn't specified. However MD5 and IDEA are chosen for backwards compatibility, implicitely.
So how long does it take to decrypt an IDEA encrypted message? 64bit blocks, 128bit key space. A lot less time than it does to factor a 4096bit Blum integer.
Yes, there have been the need. Windows2000 is well over 10million lines. Now is it a single program or system of programs or what? Arguably there is a large amount of that code whereby the removal of it would make the system stop being windows2000; GDI for example. LOC is a terrible metric.
There are other very large systems out there. LOC never factors in expressivness though. I know of multimillion line 370 systems that were done in 370. I believe that they could be much much shorter if they were done in PLx or Cobol or Java or something else.
I would love a $65 3v and 5v compatible POST with like 2K of memory on it. Anyone seen something like that?
You can buy an HP logic analyzer on EBay and program them to do PCI decodes and record POSTs. The deep throats and the new wizbang color models are still very expensive but you can get one that will work for well under a thousand.
I debugged the Linux kernel boot process on an embedded box with POSTs and an HP logic analzyer. One you get some hardware geek to set it up for you it's a slick way to work on that kind of stuff.
Yeah, did you ever lie about your crimes to the inmates to gain
respect with them? I understand inmates generally don't like
pedophiles and that "the system" punishes them pretty harshly. How do
they like super elite hackers? You ever claim you killed a man?
I like Mandrake a lot. My path went SLS to Slackware to Redhat to Mandrake with 2 Debian machines thrown in. I'm a kernel hacker and an embedded programmer and have been on UNIX since the mid-1980's. I've also got a few of degrees, including an advanced one. I'm not Alan Cox or Linus but I'm not exacly a newbie either. Technically, until 8.2, Mandrake was on par with anything. I've yet to hear a substantiated argument that it's not, just hearsay from people who couldn't get their sound to work or install fonts and probably, IMO, couldn't properly adminstrate any version of Linux or UNIX. Please follow up if you want to refute this point. I'm only bringing it up because I'm sick of the bashing going on, go bash UnitedLinux or those pricks at Lindows.
Out of the box, it comes more secure than I tend to believe Redhat or SuSE does; particularly with the high and paranoid options. It's easy to set up and they have a ton of contrib packages, I rarely find them lacking an RPM for anything, which is very important for RPM based distributions, nothing can screw them up faster than willy-nilly compiling and installation of packages from source that the RPM database can't manage. I like that packages are there when you want them.
Now there are some stylistic things, but I can't find anything to complain about with Mandrake that I couldn't complain about in all non-BSD platforms. It's also just style, if you're admining all day then you're probably not writing code or being productive. I don't know maybe I'm not "IT department" enough to be able to bitch about admining a box. I throw Linux on a box and write code. I guess if you don't like graphics for some reason or really dislike GUIs then you probably wouldn't be happy with Mandrake. Big deal. Again, follow up with some specifics if you'd like to refute this.
Now in the 8.2 days I personally think they lost a bit of their edge, primarily because they've been running like a bat out of hell from financial problems and because Redhat is looking hard at the desktop and produced a killer app with blue curve. Nothing that can't be fixed but definitely not the same quality we were used to. Also there has been a lot more input and submissions from the user community at large. 9.0 is a bit better and you can easily see them getting back to form as they get used to the new operation style. It already looks like a community driven distribution. So what do you mean Ben? Do you want to fork? Go for it, like you've said, their code is GPL, I might go with you. Are you asking for someone to rise to the occasion and start driving project "Freedrake"? Or are you throwing salt in the wounds? I don't want them to go away exactly but I'm not sure what you're advocating here.
However, Mandrake screwed up in their budget early on, and ran out of money. IF Mandrake dies all the Mandrake users will be forced to use Lindows or Lycoris.
Why is that? The more likely reality of it is most of them will use Redhat, or a UnitedLinux product.
It's also entirely possible that there will be a community lead effort similar to debian. They already have an insane amount of RPM contributions and such.
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People are buying "hacker insurance." Think about that, the insurance industry is getting involved. More importantly, in a smaller to mid-sized operation a good security breech could be the end of the company. You could potentially go to jail for something like that. It's a stupid practice.
I'm in the security business and there are so many unintentional holes it's frightening, there are some very clever people out there who are trying to break in to computers. They can do it on systems that are designed to be secure (think OpenSSH) you want to give them a hand? It's just stupid.
If Sony is 50% on the mark with the Cell processor and PS3, a pentium on your TV with an NVidia DSP (err, I mean "3D chip") just won't cut it.
How much money can they lose? It seems like every time they do something cool, Sony makes an equally cool move, I just bought some fairly recent games (within the last year) for $20 a piece, brand new with the red "Greatest Hits" box. Hard to beat that and 50million units in the field.
No HDD compatible games on PS2. The HDD won't work with them, says Sony.
Games work just fine, you put a different DVD in and swap memory cards and play your games.
You can use the TV but you need a VGA monitor to install it.
The memory card is needed to load the kernel in to RAM. It's like a BIOS on a PC. You need code that can read the drive in memory and running before you can read the drive.
When I first started hacking on Linux, I was working with a seasoned Linux kernel hacker who my company hired as a consultant. He helped us with some I/O issues and such, did some other tweaks and gave us a ton of inspiration to go get after it ourselves. (You be amazed at how many people are afraid to just start making changes to kernel code) He is a wickedly cool individual and as someone whose had a lot of schooling and experience it was one of the best learning experiences I can remember.
The first thing I started dorking with after that experience was the scheduler because I, like all other hakers, know how to schedule stuff. At the time, (early 2.x) the scheduler was also a fairly easy to digest piece of code that could have impacts on the system in great ways.
Well all my stuff got bit bucketed. I called up our consultant guy who my friend by now, "what's the deal? Linus doesn't like my stuff. How do you mail him stuff?" And his answer was that pretty much every body wants to tweak the scheduler, everybody sends stuff in. Linus is sage in his wisdom, schedulers are freaking hard because there is always a pedantic worst case that sucks and actually shows up in the real world. Linus has always done fairly simple things that aren't best but certainly aren't worst. So 2.0 had pretty straight round robin. 2.2 and 2.4 they started to add queuing schedulers with niceness. 2.5 we're going to get a pretty killer scheduler that has taken a ton of effort to tweak and there are still discussions to expose parameters to the user via /proc or something because you can find cases were it doesn't perform as well.
Now this IO scheduler is opening up a whole new can of worms, it's a new chunk of code called "scheduler" and all hackers know scheduling. In the past it has been fairly simple. It should be fun to watch and the kernel is going to kick mucho ass in the end. There will be a lot of talk and debate about this stuff. It's also distilled down to the trusted set that Linus will let play with things called "scheduler"
Not true. The spirit of the law is to prevent people from wholesale committing that crime. It's worded sloppily and there are holes but you know what they are trying to do. I don't know of anyone who has been busted for ripping a DVD, just selling tools to do it, and really not even that, they were busted for distributing copyrighted materials.
Seriously, how many xbox modchips were used for putting linux on xbox? How many do you think were used for piracy? How about PS2 modchips, what is the legitmate use for them?
I don't know a single person that has moded a PS2 or Xbox for some reason other than piracy. You have some points with the DMCA, it's sloppy, but this isn't the case that makes it. These people were selling tools with the sole intention being to pirate, that's illegal, that was illegal prior to the DMCA.
AMD is the wildcard. If x86-64 is the bomb and takes off like AMD is betting on it. Intel lost the 64bit war for many years. IBM and maybe even Sun will quietly (well sun doesn't do jack shit quietly) push x86-64 for the low end while IBM POWER4 and POWER5 and POWER6 down the road run the big end.
Basically Intel needs something like Sun to jump on it IA64 to really give it some credibility and they don't sound real eager to. IBM sounds like they are down for the fight. Alpha, MIPS, PARISC are all pretty dead; long term and relatively speaking. Meanwhile, if Intel doesn't get on the shit quick then they'll have to support x86-64 too and that's the real death blow to IA64.
Because you'd be killed so quickly? Or because it's so lihgt weight?
It's simple math and economics. Financially the shuttle program has been a terrible disaster. Now you can't second guess anything and there have been advances in comfort and living conditions in space and such thanks to the shuttle but I'm sure the same kind of things would have been done without it. We've learned things because of the shuttle, it hasn't stopped science, it's just not delivered what it was supposed to have.
I also fear that NASA itself may be out of date and obsolete. Am I the only one who is disgusted by the notion of the beaurocracy? There are all of these emails surfacing. I've worked at IBM and other big places and I get this sick feeling of CYA going on. I can just see the Dilbert-esque rocket scientist sitting at his desk composing the emails to the director about the foam falling off and the other possible causes. "Properly documenting" the risk. I've read Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster and that's one of the issues he pointed out. The administration lives in make believe where the engineers make compromises to do things on time. It's kind of a bummer because there are people that die because of it. I'd like to think that someone will be held accountable, I doubt that anybody other than an administrative warm body will be and at best they'll be fired and get a really high paying job at Boeing, TRW, or Raytheon.
I think it's high time we start looking at splitting NASA up in to 2 or 3 groups and making them compete with each other. Let the beaurocracy die and the science come back, make them write proposals, beg congress and private parties for funding and then hold them accountable for delivery. Let different groups take different approaches. Reward success with continued funding. NASA is cheap, relatively speaking. We can easily fund 3 NASAs. Right now it all rides on the success and failure of one entity with nearly an impossible mission, logisitally speaking. NASA can't even admit that the shuttle program is a failure because then they lose face and funding and there isn't another organization in place to do the science. So science continues to limp and NASA continues to put bandaids on a very expensive wound that has taken more lives than all other space related accidents put together.
And for the record I am appriciative and recognize the hard work and accomplishments of everyone associated with the shuttle program. They have engineered some amazing things and I'm not attacking anybody personally. It's the program as a whole that hasn't delivered what it promised.
I think Brookes quantified the OS360 development effort in terms of man years and it is probably the largest engineering effort on any kind undertaken by a private entitiy ever. On the order of man centuries of development effort and time.
And the Dutch!
It's too much for one organization. Even the military recognizes that and they divide stuff up. They have competition, they have different specialties. That's exactly what NASA needs.
Peter also did a ton of work on PGP 2.0 and he wrote the "world famous" hpack archvier which was the first one known to compress all of the files in the archive was a single unit (unit mode I believe was the switch) which is now copied by JAR and RAR and others. All around cool guy from my few emails to and from him.
Of course that's the whole BSD movement, 2 developers get their panties in a bunch and instead of either one of them being big enough to compromise they fork. You can't tell me that the OpenBSD folks aren't doing things that all BSDs benefit from, same for FreeBSD and their amazing accomplishments. FreeBSD has been strong so far but it's sad to see them drop to that same level.
I've read some hella good flames and wars on the linux kernel dev list, I never recall someone being invited not to take part though. Al Viro is especially good and reading your code and then telling you exactly how incompentent your are.
If this guy is the master hacker everyone makes him to be, this isn't enough explanation. Shouldn't the users have some say? Perhaps the mistreated developers should move on to other projects or maybe grow into adults and learn to take the heat, it's just software, it's not like you should be taking the flames seriously.
For other things I've had it wired up to NMI and some other lines, just monitoring edges.
If these guys weren't working on this, they probably wouldn't be working on anything.
I think this is a hell of a project with a ton of potential. If there was a drop in windows replacement that runs windows apps, that's a killer app. Now they are years and years away from such a platform but from a pure oss ideological perspective this rocks. Anything that helps break the ties and allows for freedom is a good thing.
This is an industry where momentum and future are king. You'll never buy a box with only 5 games unless it comes from Sony or Nintendo and has promise for more.
When I worked at TV settop box company, you'd be surprised at how they casually thought that they could just step in to the game business. Seriously, they thought they'd just put doom on it and the next thing you know the world would come running. Meanwhile the hardware has about a 10th the performance of a PS2 and offers just as much in the way of platform support. Never mind that doom was years old at the time. The idea got wacked, but not before some poor bastard spent 5 months working on getting doom running on it.
Most of those things have that same vibe. Some company with some money thought that they could just step in and own. Doesn't work that way.
I'd still love to go up but if this is as close as I get then I can be happy.
They use a symmetric cipher to encrypt your private key on disk. Depending on which cipher is used, likey IDEA, AES or 3DES. You're looking at a 112, 128, 168, 192, or 256bit symmetric block cipher and the effort it takes to break that. RFC 2440 states that a hash is applied to your pass phrase to expand it or reduce it to the proper key space (your 70character phrase doesn't buy you any more than a 32character phrase,) MD5 or SHA is probably used and then a cipher which isn't specified. However MD5 and IDEA are chosen for backwards compatibility, implicitely.
So how long does it take to decrypt an IDEA encrypted message? 64bit blocks, 128bit key space. A lot less time than it does to factor a 4096bit Blum integer.
There are other very large systems out there. LOC never factors in expressivness though. I know of multimillion line 370 systems that were done in 370. I believe that they could be much much shorter if they were done in PLx or Cobol or Java or something else.
You can buy an HP logic analyzer on EBay and program them to do PCI decodes and record POSTs. The deep throats and the new wizbang color models are still very expensive but you can get one that will work for well under a thousand.
I debugged the Linux kernel boot process on an embedded box with POSTs and an HP logic analzyer. One you get some hardware geek to set it up for you it's a slick way to work on that kind of stuff.
Yeah, did you ever lie about your crimes to the inmates to gain respect with them? I understand inmates generally don't like pedophiles and that "the system" punishes them pretty harshly. How do they like super elite hackers? You ever claim you killed a man?
Out of the box, it comes more secure than I tend to believe Redhat or SuSE does; particularly with the high and paranoid options. It's easy to set up and they have a ton of contrib packages, I rarely find them lacking an RPM for anything, which is very important for RPM based distributions, nothing can screw them up faster than willy-nilly compiling and installation of packages from source that the RPM database can't manage. I like that packages are there when you want them.
Now there are some stylistic things, but I can't find anything to complain about with Mandrake that I couldn't complain about in all non-BSD platforms. It's also just style, if you're admining all day then you're probably not writing code or being productive. I don't know maybe I'm not "IT department" enough to be able to bitch about admining a box. I throw Linux on a box and write code. I guess if you don't like graphics for some reason or really dislike GUIs then you probably wouldn't be happy with Mandrake. Big deal. Again, follow up with some specifics if you'd like to refute this.
Now in the 8.2 days I personally think they lost a bit of their edge, primarily because they've been running like a bat out of hell from financial problems and because Redhat is looking hard at the desktop and produced a killer app with blue curve. Nothing that can't be fixed but definitely not the same quality we were used to. Also there has been a lot more input and submissions from the user community at large. 9.0 is a bit better and you can easily see them getting back to form as they get used to the new operation style. It already looks like a community driven distribution. So what do you mean Ben? Do you want to fork? Go for it, like you've said, their code is GPL, I might go with you. Are you asking for someone to rise to the occasion and start driving project "Freedrake"? Or are you throwing salt in the wounds? I don't want them to go away exactly but I'm not sure what you're advocating here.
Why is that? The more likely reality of it is most of them will use Redhat, or a UnitedLinux product.
It's also entirely possible that there will be a community lead effort similar to debian. They already have an insane amount of RPM contributions and such.