All i see a is a bunch of uninformed kids complaining about RH not being free and it turns my belly inside out. Ofcourse you don get it for free if you want support and managed upgrades!
What did you expect, Redhat paying you to use their dist?
Also it IS still free, you can D/L and use it but you have to do it yourself. The only thing missing is the ready made isos. You be lazy?
I for one think it make perfect sense to pay for packaging and support. Pay someone to do it or do it yourself.
If this is such a hard thing to accept then by all means leech on someone like debian, mandrake, whatever and tuck your common sense away in some dusty closet until they goes tits up out of funds.
If we want linux to be around kicking we need to give something back. Whining and leeching and not doing anything is just heartaking to watch. Pay back either by code or anything and stop this piggybacking. Stop asking what linux/RMS/RedHat does for linux and ask yourself: "what the fuck have i done for linux?".
If RH sucks you can build your own dist out of their rpms even, just stop this whining.
All it takes is some glue around the pieces. Granted it hasnt happened yet on all the dists but if a big push gets rolling towards the desktop i have no doubt that it is an easy task once in motion.
Many of us who now uses GNU/linux WANT to have complete control. Because of that there are maybe not that much incentive for developers today to put that much effort in doing things as simple as possible . They know most of the userbase today is perfectly fine with some tweaking. If the userbase changes i have no doubt developers will start making more effort towards easy applications, after all many developers problably want as large userbase as possible (not all).
With for eg. RedHat you van d/l and try the systems out before you decide to buy legaly. Even if a manager says "no money is going to be spent on linux" he sure will have a hard time arguing to get rid of that squid/firewall humming along nicely without intervention.
Also as to linux viruses i dont think that is such a big threat to linux. Because of the multi vendor model of linux there will be fast migration to safer linux dists if viruses gets problematic. There are highly efficient security mechanisms avaliable on linux not utilized yet on most normal systems mainly because the lack of real threats today. If that changes everything is ready in the background for stepping up security very fast.
Always the next version is the one they say will work, right up until the day the start on the version after that. Heck, with w2003 the started talking abour how longhorn would be betterm before 2003 was out.
How the h*** did they manage to spend that kind of money without making anything useful with it? What did they do? They have spent that kind of money and samba still runs burning circles around Windows cifs, the security still sucks and the damn thing isnt either smaller nor faster!
As much as i despice patents on methods of accomplishing common tasks like theese i rather see a patent like this in the hands of IBM than to be bitchslapped by Microsoft with it. IBM has shown themselves quite understanding about the hows and whys of open source and wouldn gain anything by using it against OS. Commercial companies on the other hand should beware.
Whether or not we like patents it is rather nice having the company with the most patents in the industry on our side.
And i dont think IBM is evil at all and not even historically. When MS have fought tooth and nail IBM did give us the PC albeit reluctantly and under threat. Microsoft did the opposite and destroyed their own product just to keep the competition away.
Am i the only one who needs an OS and not every application ever written? Sure MS can and should make applications too but why cram them into the OS with a hammer and vaseline? A more modular approach would benefit everyone in the long run.
I dont think MS is capable of imagening themselves being able to compete on merits. They are so tuned into forcefeeding people that they have forgotten hoeto listen to their customers and deliver what they want.
This constant bundling and tight integration of apps into the OS is getting silly.
Microsoft cant come up with anything new or fresh by themselves. They should be paying Apple for providing them with ideas when they are as innovative as a catholic priest themselves.
MS is the like a bad xerox that copies things but just half right.
For the first time i aint even the slightest bit interested in what they may come up with. It feels like the release party of the next generation can opener or something. They upgrade their systems in such small steps that its like watching grass grow. There will be many realeses between now and longhorn so its just not worth it to speculate. Lets wait for W2003,2003SE,2003ME first.
The mere hype is making every release an anticlimax and by now we know that what seems new and shiny is most surely the old clown with some new colors, nothing new, nothing exciting.
The obvious solution is to ignore MSN and have everybody who wants to contact you use something else. If enough people do this instead of banging their heads against the monopoly brickwall others will follow. Nobody wants to use an IM client that no friend of theirs use. I doesnt use MSN anymore and if anybody wants to IM me they better get some IM that has linux/mac/whatever support.
We all new this would happen as soon as MS had gotten a big enough userbase.
It was only some days since i read a (biased) article of how much faster windows 2003 was than Samba. I wonder what version they compared against? 0.1?
Seems like samba is keeping the lead despite MS having thrown every service known to man far to close to the kernel to be comfortable.
And this lack of alternatives isnt exactly a coinsidense either. Many are the fine uppstarters who have come and gone. Be is one of the most promising ones lately on the desktop. The efficiancy that Be had makes XP look like a fat slow ugly pile of junk and loops.
All those companies that developed something the market wanted didnt go away by themselves, they wore hampered by the monopoly and the lockin in place by said monopoly.
Take away the monopoly and the OS business will once again thrive like it did in the 80s.
MS just plain sucks at delivering new technology. At best they mimic others but by themselves at best we would be stuck with windows NT. They just suck.
Daniel E. Geer Jr must have really hit a sensitive area of Microsoft. Its really sad to see them so unwilling to realize that the report isnt a hit on MS but more about monoculture in the internet. Monoculture is bad, ask any biologist and hell tell you why. Diversity is much better but it demands open standards and interopability, something Microsoft have been successfully avoiding since day one.
Why dont the govt just demand better software? They are such a huge player that there would be a new market created just to sell secure software.
I dont buy this bullsh*t people keeps spreading that its impossible. It aint, just as you can build secure bridges and houses you can make software that is much more secure than todays crap.
There hasnt been a strong enough market for secure software and its up to the consumers and govts to start demand better software.
Even open source could use a kick in the but to get their act togheter.
Compare vsftpd to some other random ftpd and youll get my drift. Security is about design and not about being bugfree.
Many projects arent aimed at production at all and thats all dandy in my book. If every piece of open source became mysteriously secure by accident and voodoo i would be much surprised. Ofcourse there will be insecure and shoddy apps but you know what?
With open source the users can migrate without a penny to something more secure. The difference as i see it is that you can choose what authentication/web/shadowing/crypt you want by yourself and you are not in the hands of someone else. You are responsible for the security, not someone else that you just put the blame on. A frightening thought to some but a bliss to the likes of me.
"Drivers from SCO Unix to be ported into Solaris x86?"
Ehrr, that would be incredible stupid since many sources points at the high possibility that SCO nicked the USB code from linux. Who knows what else they may have incorporated into SCO?
Anyway the amount of money is to big.
Why would SCO give SUN shares? Why is there a clause in MS contract that says that they can CHOOSE to pay more if they WANT to? MS paying to a company that has nothing to show for and at the same time refusing to pay legit patent holders much lesser than what they paid SCO? It doesnt compute in any level of abstraction no matter how you turn it inside out.
The whole thing smells to high heaven, especially since normally you would find som kind of specification as of what was bought. This time everything is handled under the table.
There is without a doubt somthing really fishy going on.
Sun has already paid for a perpetual license to the AT&T source from back when novell owned it. Their license allows them all possible rights to the source including all redistribution and relicensing of the source.
I cant imagine what SUN really paid for since they already have cleaned out hte shop before.
I have to agree on this. A computer is to most people just a tool and in many cases an overpriced deck of cards to play solitare on. As such there is something very wrong if the end users should be forced to be administrators to use their computer for the simplest of tasks.
The quality of the software should be up to the vendor and not for the user to mend afterwards. Imagine the same situation but with other goods and you get the picture of how stupid this idea is. Patches is just a temporary solution to an underlying error in how the software was planned.
To move the responsibility of making secure systems from the manufacturer to forcing the user fixing them afterwards is a terrible idea. It would be much better if security was adressed by design instead of by trial and error as of today. After the software has been released its already too late to adress security concerns. All that is left is a total rewrite or constant patching until the codebase is so filled with patches that ot cant be successfully audited anymore.
Especially OS should be made secure by design since they cant be altered less breaking compability with the applications running ontop of it. It should be up to the software maker to design the software to be as persistant as possible to attacks. Vsftpd is an example that everyone else should follow. Because it is designed on the presumption that there will be bugs in it the result of a breach is much much smaller than if it would have been designed to be flawless. Since software has proven itself to be very hard to make flawless it is a stupid approach to try anyway.
Making software error persistant requires that it is first well thought trough and designed for security before the first line of code is written.
To just put the blame on the users when the problem lies in the fact that nobody paid any attention on safety is just backwards as it relinguish the vendors from making software secure in the first place. That kind of thinking will keep us in etarnal patch land.
You shouldnt have ssh running on a normal desktop unless you really need to get into the computer from some other place. If you are unsure you can see if it is running by either open a terminal and typing
netstat -l
or
ps -A
(and look after sshd)
If you dont use it and it is installed then uninstall it. It isnt somehting needed in your computer and you dont damage anything by removing it.
as a side note.
This is becoming interesting atleast to me. I have seen more and more posts like this where parents introduce their kids to linux instead of the opposite. Its too soon to speculate but its an interesting trend.
Why use a soggy Xbox when you get a better real computer for less money? A mini-PC or a PS2 would be money much better spent. Xbox just plain sucks so i cant figure out why ppl bother using it for linux. Even the size is rather clumsy.
Why pretend to be surprised? We know that Microsoft desnt play fair. Same thing will happen with MONO and some people will stand there and act surprised when MS drags them to court. Dont interact with them at all or get burnt, simple.
Until i see a written document from Microsoft where they openly state they wont go after Mono in any way i will consider MONO a big pile of toxic waste in Gnome. One can only ponder as to why Miquel hasnt done anything to get the legal things in order?
Any company but MS and i wouldnt be so scared.
Miquel, i really hope you dont put Gnome in a rough spot here. I dont think thats something enyone would want on their consiense?
Here a smart thought. If Eola would grant Mozilla, Epiphany etc. the right to use the technology for free Microsoft HAS to license the patent. As most people who have used both IE and Mozilla knows IE is by now long after in the race tech vise, Mozilla is simply better. If ie wouldnt be able to render the pages but Mozilla did what would people do? If MS had to choose between license Eolas patent or give the market away to Open source what would they do? No sane person would follow MS if they tried building a new www standard so i am sure business would continue as usual should MS decide to try another MSN aka the -95 version.
I have a hard time imagine companies sitting on needles waiting to have something unessesary to spend money at such as a total rewrite of the net.
Software patents lets you patent an idea, not how to perfor or manufacture a unique item. To be able to patent ideas is beyond stupidity. All software patents accomplish is screeching software development to a grinding halt even if its still in its infancy.
I really hope the EU understands what a stopper of all competition software patents is. A patent is a sanctioned monopoly. That monopoly should be short in timespan and narrow in its scope. An idea cant be considered a narrow scope since it covers every possible way of accomplish the same end result. Todays copyright is more than enough protection and allows for competition while software patents hinders all form of competition thus harming the entire society and the industry.
Software patens has some short term winners but no long term benificiary at all. We all loose on them in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
All i see a is a bunch of uninformed kids complaining about RH not being free and it turns my belly inside out. Ofcourse you don get it for free if you want support and managed upgrades!
What did you expect, Redhat paying you to use their dist?
Also it IS still free, you can D/L and use it but you have to do it yourself. The only thing missing is the ready made isos. You be lazy?
I for one think it make perfect sense to pay for packaging and support. Pay someone to do it or do it yourself.
If this is such a hard thing to accept then by all means leech on someone like debian, mandrake, whatever and tuck your common sense away in some dusty closet until they goes tits up out of funds.
If we want linux to be around kicking we need to give something back. Whining and leeching and not doing anything is just heartaking to watch. Pay back either by code or anything and stop this piggybacking. Stop asking what linux/RMS/RedHat does for linux and ask yourself: "what the fuck have i done for linux?".
If RH sucks you can build your own dist out of their rpms even, just stop this whining.
Damn, its like a kindergarten here sometimes.
All it takes is some glue around the pieces. Granted it hasnt happened yet on all the dists but if a big push gets rolling towards the desktop i have no doubt that it is an easy task once in motion.
Many of us who now uses GNU/linux WANT to have complete control. Because of that there are maybe not that much incentive for developers today to put that much effort in doing things as simple as possible . They know most of the userbase today is perfectly fine with some tweaking. If the userbase changes i have no doubt developers will start making more effort towards easy applications, after all many developers problably want as large userbase as possible (not all).
With for eg. RedHat you van d/l and try the systems out before you decide to buy legaly. Even if a manager says "no money is going to be spent on linux" he sure will have a hard time arguing to get rid of that squid/firewall humming along nicely without intervention.
Also as to linux viruses i dont think that is such a big threat to linux. Because of the multi vendor model of linux there will be fast migration to safer linux dists if viruses gets problematic. There are highly efficient security mechanisms avaliable on linux not utilized yet on most normal systems mainly because the lack of real threats today. If that changes everything is ready in the background for stepping up security very fast.
Yeaaa...
Kind of funny it is.
Always the next version is the one they say will work, right up until the day the start on the version after that. Heck, with w2003 the started talking abour how longhorn would be betterm before 2003 was out.
How the h*** did they manage to spend that kind of money without making anything useful with it? What did they do? They have spent that kind of money and samba still runs burning circles around Windows cifs, the security still sucks and the damn thing isnt either smaller nor faster!
As much as i despice patents on methods of accomplishing common tasks like theese i rather see a patent like this in the hands of IBM than to be bitchslapped by Microsoft with it. IBM has shown themselves quite understanding about the hows and whys of open source and wouldn gain anything by using it against OS. Commercial companies on the other hand should beware.
Whether or not we like patents it is rather nice having the company with the most patents in the industry on our side.
And i dont think IBM is evil at all and not even historically. When MS have fought tooth and nail IBM did give us the PC albeit reluctantly and under threat. Microsoft did the opposite and destroyed their own product just to keep the competition away.
Am i the only one who needs an OS and not every application ever written? Sure MS can and should make applications too but why cram them into the OS with a hammer and vaseline? A more modular approach would benefit everyone in the long run.
I dont think MS is capable of imagening themselves being able to compete on merits. They are so tuned into forcefeeding people that they have forgotten hoeto listen to their customers and deliver what they want.
This constant bundling and tight integration of apps into the OS is getting silly.
Microsoft cant come up with anything new or fresh by themselves. They should be paying Apple for providing them with ideas when they are as innovative as a catholic priest themselves.
MS is the like a bad xerox that copies things but just half right.
For the first time i aint even the slightest bit interested in what they may come up with. It feels like the release party of the next generation can opener or something. They upgrade their systems in such small steps that its like watching grass grow. There will be many realeses between now and longhorn so its just not worth it to speculate. Lets wait for W2003,2003SE,2003ME first.
The mere hype is making every release an anticlimax and by now we know that what seems new and shiny is most surely the old clown with some new colors, nothing new, nothing exciting.
The obvious solution is to ignore MSN and have everybody who wants to contact you use something else. If enough people do this instead of banging their heads against the monopoly brickwall others will follow. Nobody wants to use an IM client that no friend of theirs use. I doesnt use MSN anymore and if anybody wants to IM me they better get some IM that has linux/mac/whatever support.
We all new this would happen as soon as MS had gotten a big enough userbase.
It was only some days since i read a (biased) article of how much faster windows 2003 was than Samba. I wonder what version they compared against? 0.1?
Seems like samba is keeping the lead despite MS having thrown every service known to man far to close to the kernel to be comfortable.
And this lack of alternatives isnt exactly a coinsidense either. Many are the fine uppstarters who have come and gone. Be is one of the most promising ones lately on the desktop. The efficiancy that Be had makes XP look like a fat slow ugly pile of junk and loops.
All those companies that developed something the market wanted didnt go away by themselves, they wore hampered by the monopoly and the lockin in place by said monopoly.
Take away the monopoly and the OS business will once again thrive like it did in the 80s.
MS just plain sucks at delivering new technology. At best they mimic others but by themselves at best we would be stuck with windows NT. They just suck.
Daniel E. Geer Jr must have really hit a sensitive area of Microsoft. Its really sad to see them so unwilling to realize that the report isnt a hit on MS but more about monoculture in the internet. Monoculture is bad, ask any biologist and hell tell you why. Diversity is much better but it demands open standards and interopability, something Microsoft have been successfully avoiding since day one.
Why dont the govt just demand better software? They are such a huge player that there would be a new market created just to sell secure software.
I dont buy this bullsh*t people keeps spreading that its impossible. It aint, just as you can build secure bridges and houses you can make software that is much more secure than todays crap.
There hasnt been a strong enough market for secure software and its up to the consumers and govts to start demand better software.
Even open source could use a kick in the but to get their act togheter.
Compare vsftpd to some other random ftpd and youll get my drift. Security is about design and not about being bugfree.
Many projects arent aimed at production at all and thats all dandy in my book. If every piece of open source became mysteriously secure by accident and voodoo i would be much surprised. Ofcourse there will be insecure and shoddy apps but you know what?
With open source the users can migrate without a penny to something more secure. The difference as i see it is that you can choose what authentication/web/shadowing/crypt you want by yourself and you are not in the hands of someone else. You are responsible for the security, not someone else that you just put the blame on. A frightening thought to some but a bliss to the likes of me.
I am a grown up and i can make my own decisions.
"Drivers from SCO Unix to be ported into Solaris x86?"
Ehrr, that would be incredible stupid since many sources points at the high possibility that SCO nicked the USB code from linux. Who knows what else they may have incorporated into SCO?
Anyway the amount of money is to big.
Why would SCO give SUN shares?
Why is there a clause in MS contract that says that they can CHOOSE to pay more if they WANT to? MS paying to a company that has nothing to show for and at the same time refusing to pay legit patent holders much lesser than what they paid SCO? It doesnt compute in any level of abstraction no matter how you turn it inside out.
The whole thing smells to high heaven, especially since normally you would find som kind of specification as of what was bought. This time everything is handled under the table.
There is without a doubt somthing really fishy going on.
Sun has already paid for a perpetual license to the AT&T source from back when novell owned it. Their license allows them all possible rights to the source including all redistribution and relicensing of the source.
I cant imagine what SUN really paid for since they already have cleaned out hte shop before.
This really stinks to high heaven!
I have to agree on this. A computer is to most people just a tool and in many cases an overpriced deck of cards to play solitare on. As such there is something very wrong if the end users should be forced to be administrators to use their computer for the simplest of tasks.
The quality of the software should be up to the vendor and not for the user to mend afterwards. Imagine the same situation but with other goods and you get the picture of how stupid this idea is. Patches is just a temporary solution to an underlying error in how the software was planned.
To move the responsibility of making secure systems from the manufacturer to forcing the user fixing them afterwards is a terrible idea. It would be much better if security was adressed by design instead of by trial and error as of today. After the software has been released its already too late to adress security concerns. All that is left is a total rewrite or constant patching until the codebase is so filled with patches that ot cant be successfully audited anymore.
Especially OS should be made secure by design since they cant be altered less breaking compability with the applications running ontop of it. It should be up to the software maker to design the software to be as persistant as possible to attacks. Vsftpd is an example that everyone else should follow. Because it is designed on the presumption that there will be bugs in it the result of a breach is much much smaller than if it would have been designed to be flawless. Since software has proven itself to be very hard to make flawless it is a stupid approach to try anyway.
Making software error persistant requires that it is first well thought trough and designed for security before the first line of code is written.
To just put the blame on the users when the problem lies in the fact that nobody paid any attention on safety is just backwards as it relinguish the vendors from making software secure in the first place. That kind of thinking will keep us in etarnal patch land.
Hey newb, welcome!
You shouldnt have ssh running on a normal desktop unless you really need to get into the computer from some other place. If you are unsure you can see if it is running by either open a terminal and typing
netstat -l
or
ps -A
(and look after sshd)
If you dont use it and it is installed then uninstall it. It isnt somehting needed in your computer and you dont damage anything by removing it.
as a side note.
This is becoming interesting atleast to me. I have seen more and more posts like this where parents introduce their kids to linux instead of the opposite. Its too soon to speculate but its an interesting trend.
Why use a soggy Xbox when you get a better real computer for less money? A mini-PC or a PS2 would be money much better spent. Xbox just plain sucks so i cant figure out why ppl bother using it for linux. Even the size is rather clumsy.
Why pretend to be surprised? We know that Microsoft desnt play fair. Same thing will happen with MONO and some people will stand there and act surprised when MS drags them to court. Dont interact with them at all or get burnt, simple.
Until i see a written document from Microsoft where they openly state they wont go after Mono in any way i will consider MONO a big pile of toxic waste in Gnome. One can only ponder as to why Miquel hasnt done anything to get the legal things in order?
Any company but MS and i wouldnt be so scared.
Miquel, i really hope you dont put Gnome in a rough spot here. I dont think thats something enyone would want on their consiense?
Here a smart thought. If Eola would grant Mozilla, Epiphany etc. the right to use the technology for free Microsoft HAS to license the patent. As most people who have used both IE and Mozilla knows IE is by now long after in the race tech vise, Mozilla is simply better. If ie wouldnt be able to render the pages but Mozilla did what would people do? If MS had to choose between license Eolas patent or give the market away to Open source what would they do? No sane person would follow MS if they tried building a new www standard so i am sure business would continue as usual should MS decide to try another MSN aka the -95 version.
I have a hard time imagine companies sitting on needles waiting to have something unessesary to spend money at such as a total rewrite of the net.
Software patents lets you patent an idea, not how to perfor or manufacture a unique item. To be able to patent ideas is beyond stupidity. All software patents accomplish is screeching software development to a grinding halt even if its still in its infancy.
I really hope the EU understands what a stopper of all competition software patents is. A patent is a sanctioned monopoly. That monopoly should be short in timespan and narrow in its scope. An idea cant be considered a narrow scope since it covers every possible way of accomplish the same end result. Todays copyright is more than enough protection and allows for competition while software patents hinders all form of competition thus harming the entire society and the industry.
Software patens has some short term winners but no long term benificiary at all. We all loose on them in the long run.
Iptables anyone?
(or any of the other free ones out there)