Honestly, I don't think it matters much. They could take a huge market share drop, but when they release longhorn, it will come with the new version of IE.. if that IE is "good enough", everyone will simply jump back on the bandwagon (I mean, it does come with Windows.. why have two programs that do the same thing when one of them (IE) is ALWAYS taking up resources..)
The longer they hold out, thats one more reason people will want to upgrade to longhorn..
There are lots of postscript printers under $1000.. I use a $339 Brother HL-5170DN laser.. it has postscript 3, pcl 6, duplex printing, 20ppm, built-in network print server, 2400dpix600dpi.. great small office printer.
Want under $1000, Postscript and Color? Insight.com shows 37 printers that fit.. They show 169 postscript printers under $1000 (laser, inkjet, led, solid-ink (Xerox Phaser), etc..)
Your assuming geeks would sign up to claim the money. First off, the amount is very small.. second, atleast with the settlement in AZ, by filing the paperwork, it prohibits you from being apart of any other lawsuit against MS for the same activities. Given the broad nature of some of these settlements, I didn't feel the pittance was worth waiving my rights to be involved in future activity against MS (read: something that might make a difference..)
In anycase, these settlements are bogus. Hopefully with the increased interest in linux, firefox and other FOSS, the industry will be able to self-correct the MS problem.
100% agreed. Having 3 testimonials from unknown sources is umm.. lame.
I honestly don't understand it. On the mozilla.org site, they have:
"Beware of spyware. If you can, use the Firefox browser." - USA Today
"Better than Internet Explorer by leaps and bounds." - FORBES
"I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer" - Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal.
People KNOW USA Today, Forbes and Wall Street Journal. In addition to this, there are a variety of very positive reviews that rate Firefox highly, how about listing some quotes from those?
But then ended up using 3 unknowns and a lot of names..
Granted, I think the press will generate additional press and it will feed on itself, but from an ad layout POV, I'm giving this one 1 1/2 thumbs down.
1. In many ways, BSD is *more free* than Linux and other GPL code.. so perhaps its already "at the forefront" as you put it.
2. Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc already DO utilize a lot of BSD code in their products. BSDers just ask for some acknowledgement, but do not impose limitations of usage like the GPL. Heck, check out Mac OS X lately? Lots of BSD there..:)
3. Duplication of effort is a *good thing*. It promotes creativity, different implimentations and so forth. Without it, the first "good enough" version of something would stick. No one would question it and people would live with it. Stagnation would result.
In addition, having diversity is GREAT for open source. It provides many projects that different contributors can put forth effort. I find hacking on BSD a lot of fun.. I didn't have as much fun on Linux. If Linux was the only system, I'd probably NOT spend nearly as much time developing on it.. Since I develop on BSD, stuff I create can be imported and/or reimplimented on other systems. A win all around.
Besides, if there was one obvious answer, then other projects would slowly fade away. Since BSD is as strong as ever (even WITH all the attention toward Linux) -- perhaps people working on Linux should pay attention and see what the deal is.
My thoughts exactly. This is a non-article, its amazing that it was posted to this site. With DNSRBL lists, some reasonable SMTP level filtering and spamassassin, I have had similar success in reducing the amount of spam.
I have played music (primarily piano) since I was a kid, but over the past 6-7 years, it has proven to be an enjoyable side job/second income. I play out several times a week.. I know many other musicians so during crunch times, I can sub out to someone else. I've actually been surprised at the number of other IT guys who are fantastic musicians.
Well according to slashdot, it takes 1hr to charge 200miles worth of battery.. the article states 10 hours to charge the full battery.. so thats 2000 miles per full charge.
Thats 5-6x what most people get with their current cars, so now you are at easily 1/4 the business (ie 200-250 customers) per station, requiring significantly less storage space.
But on top of this, it is electric, so EVERYWHERE is a possible recharge station. Hook it up when you sleep -- even 4hr of charge per day would equate to 800miles or ~10.6 hrs of driving (@75mph average).
Needless to say, I think most people would not need to go to a recharge station.. so I think the traditional station would not be sustainable given advancements in battery technology. On top of this, as batteries would be safer, I wouldn't be surprised to see them available at other locations (ie Walmart) , not specialized stations. So you end up with a handful of retailers having a dozen or so batteries in stock (err.. assuming they are standardized..) and that would be that..
>> Go check out the Secunia reports. >> In the last six months, Firefox has had >> as many vulnerabilities as IE
Cool.. so your saying that Firefox when being developed (pre-1.0) had the same number of vulnerabilities as Internet Explorer, a browser developed for 9+ years by the largest software company in the world and the company is working under a "security as priority" policy for the past 2.5 years.
Not only that, but the latest version of Internet Explorer (6.0) has been getting the holes patched for the past umm.. 3+ years? AND its intergrated with Windows so people are PAYING MONEY for this browser, it has less features, less standards compliance, etc.. and the BEST you can come up with is a pre-release version of a FREE, community developed browser with more features has the same number of security issues over the past 6 months?
The NYT ad will cost less than $50k.. The rest of the $250k will be used by the Mozilla Foundation for other needs (promotions, developers, equipment, etc..)
I have a Red Hat box running Linux 2.2.19.. Installed June 2001.. Serves up ftp, mail, web, mac & pc files, NAT, DHCPd, databases and who knows what else.. Whats interesting is out of the huge array of Macs (G3, G4, G5, XServe) and PCs (Win98, 2k, XP) at that business, the lowly Red Hat box on 5 year old hardware is the most reliable system there.
Its getting upgraded here.. one of these days.. I have since moved to FreeBSD for all of my other servers, but this system just works and it would be such a shame to upgrade it just for the sake of upgrading.. heh.
I think these items should be posted as well as major security issues for FOSS/Linux (which they are). Given that I'd guess 99.9% of us know of people or use Windows ourselves, it is important to keep on top of these new vulnerabilities to protect the networks we admin, notify others who are not frequenting tech sites and of course, use as ammo for getting more FOSS in the workplace.:)
I agree with you there. I have several businesses where its just a few apps that are industry specific. While some of the apps appear to work fine (on the surface) with emulation, there is no guarantee they work all the time or that future updates of the programs will not break compatibility.
As a result, these businesses are sitting somewhere between steps 1 and 2. Evaluation of new software does put weight behind FOSS and cross-platform solutions with Windows-only apps as the last resort. In addition, requests for cross-platform versions of existing apps have been made, but it is still very much a minority that most companies have yet to go beyond "we are looking into it" or "we do not have any plans at this time".
ClamAV is such a great FOSS success story. I run it side by side with some commercial AV software, and ClamAV has caught several viruses that the others have not (the reverse has not yet been true on my mail servers). Its a beautiful thing.
i know this is a joke, but honestly, stop using root! grr.. if your learning and using root, I really hope your computer doesn't have anything valuable on it.
I'll agree with the other replies.. I think your trying too hard or something.:)
I've setup Knoppix, SuSE, FreeBSD, RedHat among other distros to print without problems. Local printers (parallel/usb), windows network printers, ipp printers, etc.. piece of cake.
Of course, depending on the distro will ultimately determine what to do, but more than likely, if you install CUPS (or get cups preinstalled) and run KDE, its cake.. just go into print manager and run through the wizard. printing in no time.
If you don't have KDE, use the localhost:631 page to configure your printers..
And for all the people who don't know how big an angstrom is.. apparently it is 1 hundred-millionth of a centimeter. A sheet of paper is 1,000,000 angstroms thick.
So lets calculate..
"Earth Surface Area: Land area, about 148,300,000 sq km, or about 30% of total surface area; water area, about 361,800,000 sq km, or about 70% of total surface area." -- Coble, Charles R; Murray, Elaine G; Rice, Dole R. Earth Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987: 102.
Total surface area of earth: 510,100,000 sq km = 5.10100 × 10^34 sq angstroms x 1400 IP addresses = 7.1414e+37 IP addresses.
IPv6 Space = 2^128 = 3.402823669209e+38 IP Addresses
It appears from my quick calculations that the professor was off. I get 6670 IP addresses per sq angstrom.
I guess the question ends up being... why? Based on this calculation, a sheet of letter sized paper would receive 4.023508082e+22 IP addresses.. This ends up being the address space for 9,367,959,764,790 current IPv4 networks.. or in other words, every person, object and device in the entire earth could receive a unique, network addressable IP address and we would still not even come close to filling up even a fraction of the IP space in IPv6.
Seems like a case of getting a bit carried away.. yes?
> Ask anybody who uses Linux if he cares if his > dotfiles and home directory get wiped.
If people are not backing up their data, then they have a serious issue. Every "Learning Linux" book I have read has devoted a chapter (usually after the installation chapter) on different backup methods available (I like rsnapshot), why backups are important, etc..
Not only do they have to worry about potential security holes but hardware failures, theft (either physical or unauthorized access to their account) and so forth.
Bottom line, if a security exploit exists, I'd rather have it happen on a Linux box than a Windows box.. Simply recreating a user account and salvaging anything that remains sounds a LOT more appealing then spending 4-5 hours minimum backuping up data from the hosed system, reinstalling fresh and then reconfiguring everything.
It's all moot anyway, all it really takes, no matter how 'secure' Linux is, is for an inexplicably popular program to have a hole in it. That's why Mozilla exploits are just as scary as OS exploits.
Hmmmm.. but if there is a hole in Mozilla, it will still only have the access rights that the user has. As a result, it is still more secure as the *majority* of Windows users run as Administrator and as a result, an exploited popular program would have free reign over a system.. on linux/bsd, it would still be constrained and not be able to take over the entire system without some other easily accessible exploit.
As a result, in my opinion, not nearly as scary as an OS exploit.. Well I guess it is if your running root, but then your just being foolish.
It sounds nice but you do have a lot of technical hurdles to jump over. The "desktop linux" driver would need to come in various flavors for the different platforms (powerpc, ia32, amd64, ia64, etc..) plus different kernels (2.4, 2.6, etc..)
So the question ends up being -- what platforms to support for a given "desktop linux" stamp of approval? only 32bit x86 machines? only running 2.6 kernel? When you get to that point, do you start making "desktop linux" modifications (ie "desktop linux powerpc" or "desktop linux amd64") for platforms that did not make the cut?
If you are going to do all that, why not stick with just listing out compatible distros (which lately seems to amount to Red Hat & SuSE)
Personally I would like to see manufacturers release the source to their drivers. I *believe* it would then be feesible for the distro to accept the source and then automate the compile & installation of the driver for the particular platform.
Even more ideal would be for manufacturers to release the source in a common repository, have the distro makers grab them and offer them up when the hardware is plugged in first time (ie: new hardware detected, do you wish to check online for the latest driver version? [yes/no] -- new driver installed) -- personally I think that would be fantastic. That way, as drivers are updated, during the normal system updating process, it would update drivers as well.
Of course, my ideas are from an uneducated pov as I have never done driver development or any truly extensive kernel hacking/poking so even this idea might not be possible (though based on how distros currently work, it does seem feesible).
Sadly I wasn't trying to be funny. I have told many people about OOo that currently use MS Office. For *MOST* of them, a complaint has been "Where is the Word Art feature?". This is well above grammar check (perhaps because its automatic in Office they didn't notice).
Needless to say, I hope that OOo never gets grammar check. I absolutely HATE the version in MS Office with a passion. Way too many people (students, corporate workers, etc.) use it as the "absolute truth" in grammar. I have seen it on more than one occasion take a perfectly good sentence and recommend an incoherant one that absolutely makes no sense in the context, and the "worker bee" clicks on the recommendation without thinking twice. AUGH.
It seems like nowadays if people are writing a letter and Word doess not come back with a spelling or grammatical error, they believe it is perfect.
Granted, my gripe has less to do with MS Office and more to do with the users, but it absolutely annoys me how poor written communication skills are in general. People are too "busy" churning out poorly written documents and trying to decipher other poorly written/formatted documents that I believe any productivity gain has been loss in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't think it matters much. They could take a huge market share drop, but when they release longhorn, it will come with the new version of IE .. if that IE is "good enough", everyone will simply jump back on the bandwagon (I mean, it does come with Windows .. why have two programs that do the same thing when one of them (IE) is ALWAYS taking up resources..)
..
The longer they hold out, thats one more reason people will want to upgrade to longhorn
There are lots of postscript printers under $1000 .. I use a $339 Brother HL-5170DN laser .. it has postscript 3, pcl 6, duplex printing, 20ppm, built-in network print server, 2400dpix600dpi .. great small office printer.
Want cheap?
Lexmark E323 Laser 20PPM -- $188.54
Panasonic KX-P 7305 -- $232.18
Brother HL-5150D -- $243.33
Want under $1000, Postscript and Color? Insight.com shows 37 printers that fit.. They show 169 postscript printers under $1000 (laser, inkjet, led, solid-ink (Xerox Phaser), etc..)
Your assuming geeks would sign up to claim the money. First off, the amount is very small.. second, atleast with the settlement in AZ, by filing the paperwork, it prohibits you from being apart of any other lawsuit against MS for the same activities. Given the broad nature of some of these settlements, I didn't feel the pittance was worth waiving my rights to be involved in future activity against MS (read: something that might make a difference..)
In anycase, these settlements are bogus. Hopefully with the increased interest in linux, firefox and other FOSS, the industry will be able to self-correct the MS problem.
100% agreed. Having 3 testimonials from unknown sources is umm.. lame.
..
I honestly don't understand it. On the mozilla.org site, they have:
"Beware of spyware. If you can, use the Firefox browser." - USA Today
"Better than Internet Explorer by leaps and bounds." - FORBES
"I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer" - Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal.
People KNOW USA Today, Forbes and Wall Street Journal. In addition to this, there are a variety of very positive reviews that rate Firefox highly, how about listing some quotes from those?
But then ended up using 3 unknowns and a lot of names
Granted, I think the press will generate additional press and it will feed on itself, but from an ad layout POV, I'm giving this one 1 1/2 thumbs down.
hahahahhahahahahah...
:)
.. Since I develop on BSD, stuff I create can be imported and/or reimplimented on other systems. A win all around.
1. In many ways, BSD is *more free* than Linux and other GPL code.. so perhaps its already "at the forefront" as you put it.
2. Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc already DO utilize a lot of BSD code in their products. BSDers just ask for some acknowledgement, but do not impose limitations of usage like the GPL. Heck, check out Mac OS X lately? Lots of BSD there..
3. Duplication of effort is a *good thing*. It promotes creativity, different implimentations and so forth. Without it, the first "good enough" version of something would stick. No one would question it and people would live with it. Stagnation would result.
In addition, having diversity is GREAT for open source. It provides many projects that different contributors can put forth effort. I find hacking on BSD a lot of fun.. I didn't have as much fun on Linux. If Linux was the only system, I'd probably NOT spend nearly as much time developing on it
Besides, if there was one obvious answer, then other projects would slowly fade away. Since BSD is as strong as ever (even WITH all the attention toward Linux) -- perhaps people working on Linux should pay attention and see what the deal is.
I've been using the following:b l.spamhaus.org
relays.ordb.org
list.dsbl.org
sbl-x
My thoughts exactly. This is a non-article, its amazing that it was posted to this site. With DNSRBL lists, some reasonable SMTP level filtering and spamassassin, I have had similar success in reducing the amount of spam.
I have played music (primarily piano) since I was a kid, but over the past 6-7 years, it has proven to be an enjoyable side job/second income. I play out several times a week .. I know many other musicians so during crunch times, I can sub out to someone else. I've actually been surprised at the number of other IT guys who are fantastic musicians.
No wonder its dead .. it was running FreeBSD .. :)
Well according to slashdot, it takes 1hr to charge 200miles worth of battery .. the article states 10 hours to charge the full battery .. so thats 2000 miles per full charge.
.. so I think the traditional station would not be sustainable given advancements in battery technology. On top of this, as batteries would be safer, I wouldn't be surprised to see them available at other locations (ie Walmart) , not specialized stations. So you end up with a handful of retailers having a dozen or so batteries in stock (err.. assuming they are standardized..) and that would be that..
Thats 5-6x what most people get with their current cars, so now you are at easily 1/4 the business (ie 200-250 customers) per station, requiring significantly less storage space.
But on top of this, it is electric, so EVERYWHERE is a possible recharge station. Hook it up when you sleep -- even 4hr of charge per day would equate to 800miles or ~10.6 hrs of driving (@75mph average).
Needless to say, I think most people would not need to go to a recharge station
No need for underground robotic storage systems.
> BTW, is the name really "Windows Server 2003
> Compute Cluster Edition"? Sounds terrible...
I agree.. they should call it Windows Server 2005 Compute Cluster Edition. Much better. Who wants to run a 2003 OS??
>> Go check out the Secunia reports.
>> In the last six months, Firefox has had
>> as many vulnerabilities as IE
Cool.. so your saying that Firefox when being developed (pre-1.0) had the same number of vulnerabilities as Internet Explorer, a browser developed for 9+ years by the largest software company in the world and the company is working under a "security as priority" policy for the past 2.5 years.
Not only that, but the latest version of Internet Explorer (6.0) has been getting the holes patched for the past umm.. 3+ years? AND its intergrated with Windows so people are PAYING MONEY for this browser, it has less features, less standards compliance, etc.. and the BEST you can come up with is a pre-release version of a FREE, community developed browser with more features has the same number of security issues over the past 6 months?
Fantastic.
The NYT ad will cost less than $50k.. The rest of the $250k will be used by the Mozilla Foundation for other needs (promotions, developers, equipment, etc..)
Hey .. stop stealing my story!! heh..
.. Installed June 2001.. Serves up ftp, mail, web, mac & pc files, NAT, DHCPd, databases and who knows what else.. Whats interesting is out of the huge array of Macs (G3, G4, G5, XServe) and PCs (Win98, 2k, XP) at that business, the lowly Red Hat box on 5 year old hardware is the most reliable system there.
.. one of these days .. I have since moved to FreeBSD for all of my other servers, but this system just works and it would be such a shame to upgrade it just for the sake of upgrading.. heh.
I have a Red Hat box running Linux 2.2.19
Its getting upgraded here
I think these items should be posted as well as major security issues for FOSS/Linux (which they are). Given that I'd guess 99.9% of us know of people or use Windows ourselves, it is important to keep on top of these new vulnerabilities to protect the networks we admin, notify others who are not frequenting tech sites and of course, use as ammo for getting more FOSS in the workplace. :)
I agree with you there. I have several businesses where its just a few apps that are industry specific. While some of the apps appear to work fine (on the surface) with emulation, there is no guarantee they work all the time or that future updates of the programs will not break compatibility.
As a result, these businesses are sitting somewhere between steps 1 and 2. Evaluation of new software does put weight behind FOSS and cross-platform solutions with Windows-only apps as the last resort. In addition, requests for cross-platform versions of existing apps have been made, but it is still very much a minority that most companies have yet to go beyond "we are looking into it" or "we do not have any plans at this time".
ClamAV is such a great FOSS success story. I run it side by side with some commercial AV software, and ClamAV has caught several viruses that the others have not (the reverse has not yet been true on my mail servers). Its a beautiful thing.
how about rf -rf ??
i know this is a joke, but honestly, stop using root! grr.. if your learning and using root, I really hope your computer doesn't have anything valuable on it.
I'll agree with the other replies .. I think your trying too hard or something. :)
.. just go into print manager and run through the wizard. printing in no time.
I've setup Knoppix, SuSE, FreeBSD, RedHat among other distros to print without problems. Local printers (parallel/usb), windows network printers, ipp printers, etc.. piece of cake.
Of course, depending on the distro will ultimately determine what to do, but more than likely, if you install CUPS (or get cups preinstalled) and run KDE, its cake
If you don't have KDE, use the localhost:631 page to configure your printers..
And for all the people who don't know how big an angstrom is.. apparently it is 1 hundred-millionth of a centimeter. A sheet of paper is 1,000,000 angstroms thick.
... why? Based on this calculation, a sheet of letter sized paper would receive 4.023508082e+22 IP addresses.. This ends up being the address space for 9,367,959,764,790 current IPv4 networks .. or in other words, every person, object and device in the entire earth could receive a unique, network addressable IP address and we would still not even come close to filling up even a fraction of the IP space in IPv6.
.. yes?
So lets calculate..
"Earth Surface Area: Land area, about 148,300,000 sq km, or about 30% of total surface area; water area, about 361,800,000 sq km, or about 70% of total surface area." -- Coble, Charles R; Murray, Elaine G; Rice, Dole R. Earth Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987: 102.
Total surface area of earth: 510,100,000 sq km = 5.10100 × 10^34 sq angstroms x 1400 IP addresses = 7.1414e+37 IP addresses.
IPv6 Space = 2^128 = 3.402823669209e+38 IP Addresses
It appears from my quick calculations that the professor was off. I get 6670 IP addresses per sq angstrom.
I guess the question ends up being
Seems like a case of getting a bit carried away
hmm how bout the minidisc iso? I've used that and done FTP install with it.
> Ask anybody who uses Linux if he cares if his
> dotfiles and home directory get wiped.
If people are not backing up their data, then they have a serious issue. Every "Learning Linux" book I have read has devoted a chapter (usually after the installation chapter) on different backup methods available (I like rsnapshot), why backups are important, etc..
Not only do they have to worry about potential security holes but hardware failures, theft (either physical or unauthorized access to their account) and so forth.
Bottom line, if a security exploit exists, I'd rather have it happen on a Linux box than a Windows box.. Simply recreating a user account and salvaging anything that remains sounds a LOT more appealing then spending 4-5 hours minimum backuping up data from the hosed system, reinstalling fresh and then reconfiguring everything.
It's all moot anyway, all it really takes, no matter how 'secure' Linux is, is for an inexplicably popular program to have a hole in it. That's why Mozilla exploits are just as scary as OS exploits.
Hmmmm.. but if there is a hole in Mozilla, it will still only have the access rights that the user has. As a result, it is still more secure as the *majority* of Windows users run as Administrator and as a result, an exploited popular program would have free reign over a system .. on linux/bsd, it would still be constrained and not be able to take over the entire system without some other easily accessible exploit.
As a result, in my opinion, not nearly as scary as an OS exploit .. Well I guess it is if your running root, but then your just being foolish.
It sounds nice but you do have a lot of technical hurdles to jump over. The "desktop linux" driver would need to come in various flavors for the different platforms (powerpc, ia32, amd64, ia64, etc..) plus different kernels (2.4, 2.6, etc..)
So the question ends up being -- what platforms to support for a given "desktop linux" stamp of approval? only 32bit x86 machines? only running 2.6 kernel? When you get to that point, do you start making "desktop linux" modifications (ie "desktop linux powerpc" or "desktop linux amd64") for platforms that did not make the cut?
If you are going to do all that, why not stick with just listing out compatible distros (which lately seems to amount to Red Hat & SuSE)
Personally I would like to see manufacturers release the source to their drivers. I *believe* it would then be feesible for the distro to accept the source and then automate the compile & installation of the driver for the particular platform.
Even more ideal would be for manufacturers to release the source in a common repository, have the distro makers grab them and offer them up when the hardware is plugged in first time (ie: new hardware detected, do you wish to check online for the latest driver version? [yes/no] -- new driver installed) -- personally I think that would be fantastic. That way, as drivers are updated, during the normal system updating process, it would update drivers as well.
Of course, my ideas are from an uneducated pov as I have never done driver development or any truly extensive kernel hacking/poking so even this idea might not be possible (though based on how distros currently work, it does seem feesible).
Sadly I wasn't trying to be funny. I have told many people about OOo that currently use MS Office. For *MOST* of them, a complaint has been "Where is the Word Art feature?". This is well above grammar check (perhaps because its automatic in Office they didn't notice).
Needless to say, I hope that OOo never gets grammar check. I absolutely HATE the version in MS Office with a passion. Way too many people (students, corporate workers, etc.) use it as the "absolute truth" in grammar. I have seen it on more than one occasion take a perfectly good sentence and recommend an incoherant one that absolutely makes no sense in the context, and the "worker bee" clicks on the recommendation without thinking twice. AUGH.
It seems like nowadays if people are writing a letter and Word doess not come back with a spelling or grammatical error, they believe it is perfect.
Granted, my gripe has less to do with MS Office and more to do with the users, but it absolutely annoys me how poor written communication skills are in general. People are too "busy" churning out poorly written documents and trying to decipher other poorly written/formatted documents that I believe any productivity gain has been loss in the process.
*rant off*