Um....it IS XWindows. Yes, the full name is the X Windowing System, and it really doesn't have anything to do with how your display works and looks, but we even called it XWindows back when I started college in '92. Are you complaining that it's used generically, like "Linux 6.1"? Or that we just added an X to the beginning of that other OS?
Do you complain when people say "Can you hand me a Kleenex?" when there's nothing but Acme brand facial tissue around? Or when your boss tells you that he needs some Xerox's made of these papers for a presentation this afternoon?
If people are bugging you to install Linux like people used to bug me, point out to them that they will have no problem installing it themselves. Tell them where on the CD the Linux-Install-HOWTO is. Tell them to make sure they grab all the manuals for their computer just in case their hardware isn't recognized so they can look at it and pick the right one out of a list. Don't get so uppity, if it hadn't been for people telling me where to find the information on how to do all the things I learned back when, I wouldn't know as much as I do now.
And maybe they'll learn enought o stop asking you questions in the first place, which should be your ultimate goal anyway.
Refuse the shipment when the mailman or UPS person shows up at your door. If you don't get to meet them yourself, write in big black letters "RETURN TO SENDER - LINUX VERSION NOT ENCLOSED".
Then, to get your point across, call your credit card company/bank, and tell them to cancell the payment, because the item being shipped is not what you ordered in the first place.
Anyone else notice that transparent Eterms seem to dump core when they start up? Turn off the transparency, they get run fine, but with it on, break out gdb and start poking around in core files. BTW, none of the libraries on the mirror are newer than the libs I have with my RedHat 6.0/E15-100 install, so if you are on a modem, don't worry about them.
Janes didn't come to Slashdot to find Experts; nor did they want some "cheap proofreading" as Cringley seems to indicate. Johan J Ingles-le Nobel happened to be familiar with Slashdot, and knew that, in general, we are a widely knowledgable group. We are not the de facto go-to group for information on Cyberterrorism, or Journalistic standards, or even how to run websites (Not that you don't do great Rob). But, over all, with the large number of people from differing backgrounds that come here and contribute to the community, we're a pretty good source of information.
Cringley seems to think that Janes came to us because they were lazy. I don't think so; I think Johan recognized a poorly researched article, and wanted to bounce it off of as many people with in as short a time as possible. So he came here. If Mt. Cringley would have read the rest of the second Janes article, he would see that they were, in addition to pulling information from here, planning on contacting people who are experts.
We're not the Encyclopedia Cyberia by any means here at Slashdot, but we do make a pretty good peer review board
Yeah, what the first poster said:) I run KDE on my home PC, and Gnome (Enlightenment) on my work PC, and run the same programs on both of them with very few differences that I can see.
The apps should look the same. You will just have to work around not having the 'features' of the various Windowmanagers.
IIRC, the GNOME/KDE people were starting to get together on making their features intercompatible...the first feature to come ofer is/was supposed to be drag-n-drop, and I think I read the article on here a long time ago.
As one of the other readers commented, this article just about looks like they are replacing Terorism with CT, and rehashing a previous article. The two really have nothing to do with each other, outside of the fact that both are disruptive to the intended target. In addition, there is nothing in this article that goes into any kind of depth; I'd expect to get this article back out of an academic article abstract database, like ERIC or PSYLIT, or something similar. At least include references for additional reading.
Standard terroristic attacks are designed to physically disrupt or injure the target. CT attacks are intended to logistically disrupt or subversively capture sources of information, communications, or other lines of non-physical infrastructure. Because of this, it is much harder to identify from the inside what you are trying to defend against (would you think to secure your "recent documents" list on a computer that regularly handles sensitive material that may include logistical data?)
How easy is it to bring down vital systems depends on how vital those systems are considered by the owners/administrators, and how secure they attempt to make these systems. If you run your company's payroll and general ledger system on a computer that has a wide-open link to the Internet, and don't consider that information very vital ("I can restore that any time I need to if it crashes..."), then you can expect that even commonly known points to hack into systems will be vulnerable.
Basically, all that's needed is a good set of programs that can identify systems and, equipped with a knowledge base of vulnerabilities, start hammering away at them. In reality, being able to crack systems is all in a way of thinking that most people don't manage. Just as some people can't "get" math and some people seem to breathe it, some people just "get" cracking.
If you mean "Can I buy Microsoft Hacker 2000", no. But the tools and means are readily available to anyone who knows how to read, has a dialup connection of some sort, and knows how to either download already-written program snippets or can program themselves.
Any system that can be accessed in some way by someone who does not explicitly need access to the system is attackable. If you touch the internet, you may be attackable (DoS, various service attacks, etc). If the machine is physically accessible by someone who doesn't need access to it, it can be attacked (I don't need to blow up your data center, I just need to hit the big red button on the wall to shut you down). It all comes down to whether or not the system is available to someone who doesn't need it to be available to them.
Recovery can be made, but is the window acceptable? How fast do you need to recover the computer that controls the ballast tanks and external hatches on a submarine? How long does it take someone who gains access to a satellite to get the image of the local layout of your building/utilities/people? If you have to "recover", you didn't properly perform your job at hand, which is to secure your systems.
CT wil probably get worse as time goes on. More devices are being connected to the world, more information is flowing between them, and we are becoming more dependent on these devices and the imformation they provide. The bigger the mountain, the more places to drill into it and cause an avalanche.
As far as preventative work, you should look at everything as a potential target. Once you start seeing your technology in that light, you will begin to see holes in it's existence. Why is that essential server just sitting in a common room with no limits to it's access? How come we designed our phone system to trunk every line we use through this closet? How vital is this data that we are broadcasting to possible millions of people; could it end up being subversively intercepted, edited, and redirected?
Reading back on this, it sounds alarmist, but I've worked in both the financial and transportation industries, and have seen points in the companies that, given the right circumstances and the right time, could cause irreparable harm to the operations.
This is really the point of CT; if I blow up a bridge, you can wade through the river, or go around to the next one; or build another command center, or have another one available. However, if I have access to your computer systems, or have the ability to alter your data, you may never be able to tell your people about the blown bridge, and half of them will walk right off of it.
Ummm.....a working USB mouse doesn't mean the USB support in Linux works right. Some of the chipseeets have some of the USB functionality, but I don't believe there is a completely-implemented interface for any USB configuration.
....the right to control the clientele of their establishments with the right to expand or focus on what that base clientele is.
Yes, the theaters have the right to say "OK, you are a problem viewer and you may not visit our establishment".
They do not have the right to say "We as a corporation feel that we are better qualified to judge who the target audience of this movie is than the MPAA". The MPAA gives every movie a rating which is intended to guide parents on the content of the film.
In agreeing to show movies, the movie theaters should be following the pre-established guidelines for the film. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a letter-writing campaign to the studios informing them that your local theater chain is not allowing all of the potential customers in to see the film would generate good results.
This moral decisionmaking is being made at the corporate level for us, so bring in another corporate level to help counter the idiocy. Making movies is a business. If the studios can't get the movie out to be seen by everyone who wants to see it, then they will eventually come down on the outlets that are limiting their take on the film.
And remember how to go about the advocacy, people. The studios aren't going to care if you and your brother, both 15, couldn't get in to see these movies. But they will care that theaters are shutting down legitimate 17-year-old viewers because some corporate menegement weenie thinks he has a better grasp on the morality of your children than you do.
IRC is a standard, go check the RFC's. But that's been covered already, so I won't get into it.
The reason IRC servers bog down so bad is they are connection-oriented (TCP). Everything sent between IRC servers and clents is a static connection.
Change the TCP connection to handling just control information, and use UDP with an ACK protocol on top of it, and you have a lightweight, mostly-connectionless communications standard.
Even this change would comply with the IRC RFC, if I remember correctly, since I don't think it specifies the transport for the protocol, just the contents of it.
And then you reboot, and your 24x7 server is no longer up 24x7, causing the developers who were on a 3-day rollout schedule for their new program to lose a whole load of database changes cause you rebooted the machine before this evening's backup and all the table changes that were made but not documented are now lost.
I can make tuning changes on the fly on the SUN Enterprise servers we run here. Linux should be able to, since it's already a modular kernel. But it doesn't, so we have downtime.
That's really the final result we need to aim for: 24x7 availability, even if the whole freaking computer dies.
Jon did mention what is needed: the ability for the system to say up and available 24x7 REGARDLESS of disk failures, CPU deaths, and motherboards frying.
Linux is good at the low-end server and desktop role, ans Jon and DH Brown state. However, I don't think your company is willing to run it's General Ledger, Web Server, or other critical systems on one of the Sys Admin's PCs. If they are, you need better Line-Of-Business people to whack upper management around a bit.
It's proprietary because it CAN be. I don't know why people seem to think that having a free and open OS means we need to have every bit of code we run on our systems free and open. If I had the money, and they hadn't all-but opened the license, I would have paid for StarOffice (I got it with my new SuSE 6.1 distro, which rocks, BTW, though it seems to be lacking some package entries). Why? Because it works, and I like it, and if someone can make something that I need, like, and want, and it works, then I have no problem paying them for their time so that I can better use mine.
Besides, it's an INSTALLER. What do you need it for other than to install their distro from their CD's? If you're THAT bent on getting a replacement, go look at dialog and code your own package and administration manager, sheesh.
Actually, SUSE supplies downloadable.ISO images of the previous version, and the current FTP tree. All are freely downloadable. In addition, SuSE is _VERY_ big in assisting the Linux community in X support. They have bitten the bullet and bought the specs for a number of video cards to develop servers that would have never made it to the Linux community otherwise. They also provide a number of commercial packages, since they (unlike many of the Linux 'mob') realize that people _will_ pay for good software that works, that free OS and commercial software can co-exist, and that there's nothing wrong with that concept.
Amen to geeks who can talk to the Suits
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
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· Score: 1
You know, when I was hired at my present place of work, it wasn't because I was the most qualified technically for the job. In fact, I was actually near the bottom of the list of "qualified" applicants. No, I got the job because, during the interview, I sat there with my soon-to-be boss and just talked about stuff with him.
From what I've seen, today's world generally demands that geeks not spend their lives in a cubicle answering Email and existing as just an email address to the Suits they despise so much. The fact of the matter is, I spend a good portion of my week (maybe 5-10 hours) meeting with DBA's, application managers, and upper management, discussing things that are going on in our department.
It's not easy, and it's not fun for a lot of geeks to sit down with a bunch of people that they can't talk about how cool this piece of code they wrote is because it makes all of these other functions perform 5 times better (because they really don't care about that level of detail), but you really need to learn how to hold your own with the Suits or you will be stuck at the bottom of the food chain pimping yourself on the latest consulting job for as much money as you can get. I don't plan on moving up to management myself, but I sure as hell will try to make myswelf invaluable to the management suits as a resource they can't do without; and without being able to talk to them, they'll never know if you're that resource.
At least SUSE didn't move all of the standard GNU include files to "gnu/*" as opposed to the standard / of the/usr/include directory tree, breaking all of my programs when the computer I have access to decided to upgrade to RedHat. What a bonehead thing that was, I spent about 3 days before I thought "Maybe the files really aren't there" and ran a 'find' on them....
...that just because M$oft controlls the idiotprone^H^Hoof software, people shouldn't even bother trying to write it for Linux? That's bass-ackwards thinking....
Oh, of course, I forgot about those 640 GB boot proms that get their data off of the CD by osmosis and include a fully functional version of [insert OS here].
End result is, there's got t o be a drive somewhere, unless the troll doesn't install any software. And what with moving parts bothering them so much, they prolly don't play games either, cause joysticks are [ack] analog!
Not his statement to make? Sorry, but the last time I check, Linus was the final say of what did and did not make it into the Kernel. He may not own the GPL, but he does, for all intents and purposes, own the Linux kernel. Binary drivers are not against the GPL of the kernel, they just can't be distributed _as_ the kernel.
...and it's been used on SUN machines forever. It's actually tied to the BIOS of the system, not the CPU, so it doesn't change. And the copy protection based on it works very well, since licence keys are generated off of the hostname, the HostID, and a random string that the company generates.
Slashdot Mirror
....try the web interface to the ftp server
Only as far as money goes. The current number 1 closed up 616%, according to the article linked to earlier.
Do you complain when people say "Can you hand me a Kleenex?" when there's nothing but Acme brand facial tissue around? Or when your boss tells you that he needs some Xerox's made of these papers for a presentation this afternoon?
If people are bugging you to install Linux like people used to bug me, point out to them that they will have no problem installing it themselves. Tell them where on the CD the Linux-Install-HOWTO is. Tell them to make sure they grab all the manuals for their computer just in case their hardware isn't recognized so they can look at it and pick the right one out of a list. Don't get so uppity, if it hadn't been for people telling me where to find the information on how to do all the things I learned back when, I wouldn't know as much as I do now.
And maybe they'll learn enought o stop asking you questions in the first place, which should be your ultimate goal anyway.
Refuse the shipment when the mailman or UPS person shows up at your door. If you don't get to meet them yourself, write in big black letters "RETURN TO SENDER - LINUX VERSION NOT ENCLOSED".
Then, to get your point across, call your credit card company/bank, and tell them to cancell the payment, because the item being shipped is not what you ordered in the first place.
Just a few suggestions.
Anyone else notice that transparent Eterms seem to dump core when they start up? Turn off the transparency, they get run fine, but with it on, break out gdb and start poking around in core files. BTW, none of the libraries on the mirror are newer than the libs I have with my RedHat 6.0/E15-100 install, so if you are on a modem, don't worry about them.
Janes didn't come to Slashdot to find Experts; nor did they want some "cheap proofreading" as Cringley seems to indicate. Johan J Ingles-le Nobel happened to be familiar with Slashdot, and knew that, in general, we are a widely knowledgable group. We are not the de facto go-to group for information on Cyberterrorism, or Journalistic standards, or even how to run websites (Not that you don't do great Rob). But, over all, with the large number of people from differing backgrounds that come here and contribute to the community, we're a pretty good source of information.
Cringley seems to think that Janes came to us because they were lazy. I don't think so; I think Johan recognized a poorly researched article, and wanted to bounce it off of as many people with in as short a time as possible. So he came here. If Mt. Cringley would have read the rest of the second Janes article, he would see that they were, in addition to pulling information from here, planning on contacting people who are experts.
We're not the Encyclopedia Cyberia by any means here at Slashdot, but we do make a pretty good peer review board
Yeah, what the first poster said :) I run KDE on my home PC, and Gnome (Enlightenment) on my work PC, and run the same programs on both of them with very few differences that I can see.
The apps should look the same. You will just have to work around not having the 'features' of the various Windowmanagers.
IIRC, the GNOME/KDE people were starting to get together on making their features intercompatible...the first feature to come ofer is/was supposed to be drag-n-drop, and I think I read the article on here a long time ago.
As one of the other readers commented, this article just about looks like they are replacing Terorism with CT, and rehashing a previous article. The two really have nothing to do with each other, outside of the fact that both are disruptive to the intended target. In addition, there is nothing in this article that goes into any kind of depth; I'd expect to get this article back out of an academic article abstract database, like ERIC or PSYLIT, or something similar. At least include references for additional reading.
Standard terroristic attacks are designed to physically disrupt or injure the target. CT attacks are intended to logistically disrupt or subversively capture sources of information, communications, or other lines of non-physical infrastructure. Because of this, it is much harder to identify from the inside what you are trying to defend against (would you think to secure your "recent documents" list on a computer that regularly handles sensitive material that may include logistical data?)
Reading back on this, it sounds alarmist, but I've worked in both the financial and transportation industries, and have seen points in the companies that, given the right circumstances and the right time, could cause irreparable harm to the operations.
This is really the point of CT; if I blow up a bridge, you can wade through the river, or go around to the next one; or build another command center, or have another one available. However, if I have access to your computer systems, or have the ability to alter your data, you may never be able to tell your people about the blown bridge, and half of them will walk right off of it.
...Hardware Instruction Set translation (i.e. x86 to Alpha). Maybe for an embedded cross-platform system?
Ummm.....a working USB mouse doesn't mean the USB support in Linux works right. Some of the chipseeets have some of the USB functionality, but I don't believe there is a completely-implemented interface for any USB configuration.
Yes, the theaters have the right to say "OK, you are a problem viewer and you may not visit our establishment".
They do not have the right to say "We as a corporation feel that we are better qualified to judge who the target audience of this movie is than the MPAA". The MPAA gives every movie a rating which is intended to guide parents on the content of the film.
In agreeing to show movies, the movie theaters should be following the pre-established guidelines for the film. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a letter-writing campaign to the studios informing them that your local theater chain is not allowing all of the potential customers in to see the film would generate good results.
This moral decisionmaking is being made at the corporate level for us, so bring in another corporate level to help counter the idiocy. Making movies is a business. If the studios can't get the movie out to be seen by everyone who wants to see it, then they will eventually come down on the outlets that are limiting their take on the film.
Here's a few links for you all....
And remember how to go about the advocacy, people. The studios aren't going to care if you and your brother, both 15, couldn't get in to see these movies. But they will care that theaters are shutting down legitimate 17-year-old viewers because some corporate menegement weenie thinks he has a better grasp on the morality of your children than you do.
The reason IRC servers bog down so bad is they are connection-oriented (TCP). Everything sent between IRC servers and clents is a static connection.
Change the TCP connection to handling just control information, and use UDP with an ACK protocol on top of it, and you have a lightweight, mostly-connectionless communications standard.
Even this change would comply with the IRC RFC, if I remember correctly, since I don't think it specifies the transport for the protocol, just the contents of it.
Comments?
The FAQ says 150 feet
If you use FreeBSD....make install distclean...
And then you reboot, and your 24x7 server is no longer up 24x7, causing the developers who were on a 3-day rollout schedule for their new program to lose a whole load of database changes cause you rebooted the machine before this evening's backup and all the table changes that were made but not documented are now lost.
I can make tuning changes on the fly on the SUN Enterprise servers we run here. Linux should be able to, since it's already a modular kernel. But it doesn't, so we have downtime.
That's really the final result we need to aim for: 24x7 availability, even if the whole freaking computer dies.
Jon did mention what is needed: the ability for the system to say up and available 24x7 REGARDLESS of disk failures, CPU deaths, and motherboards frying.
Linux is good at the low-end server and desktop role, ans Jon and DH Brown state. However, I don't think your company is willing to run it's General Ledger, Web Server, or other critical systems on one of the Sys Admin's PCs. If they are, you need better Line-Of-Business people to whack upper management around a bit.
Linux is good. It's just not good ENOUGH yet.
It's proprietary because it CAN be. I don't know why people seem to think that having a free and open OS means we need to have every bit of code we run on our systems free and open. If I had the money, and they hadn't all-but opened the license, I would have paid for StarOffice (I got it with my new SuSE 6.1 distro, which rocks, BTW, though it seems to be lacking some package entries). Why? Because it works, and I like it, and if someone can make something that I need, like, and want, and it works, then I have no problem paying them for their time so that I can better use mine.
Besides, it's an INSTALLER. What do you need it for other than to install their distro from their CD's? If you're THAT bent on getting a replacement, go look at dialog and code your own package and administration manager, sheesh.
Actually, SUSE supplies downloadable .ISO images of the previous version, and the current FTP tree. All are freely downloadable. In addition, SuSE is _VERY_ big in assisting the Linux community in X support. They have bitten the bullet and bought the specs for a number of video cards to develop servers that would have never made it to the Linux community otherwise. They also provide a number of commercial packages, since they (unlike many of the Linux 'mob') realize that people _will_ pay for good software that works, that free OS and commercial software can co-exist, and that there's nothing wrong with that concept.
You know, when I was hired at my present place of work, it wasn't because I was the most qualified technically for the job. In fact, I was actually near the bottom of the list of "qualified" applicants. No, I got the job because, during the interview, I sat there with my soon-to-be boss and just talked about stuff with him.
From what I've seen, today's world generally demands that geeks not spend their lives in a cubicle answering Email and existing as just an email address to the Suits they despise so much. The fact of the matter is, I spend a good portion of my week (maybe 5-10 hours) meeting with DBA's, application managers, and upper management, discussing things that are going on in our department.
It's not easy, and it's not fun for a lot of geeks to sit down with a bunch of people that they can't talk about how cool this piece of code they wrote is because it makes all of these other functions perform 5 times better (because they really don't care about that level of detail), but you really need to learn how to hold your own with the Suits or you will be stuck at the bottom of the food chain pimping yourself on the latest consulting job for as much money as you can get. I don't plan on moving up to management myself, but I sure as hell will try to make myswelf invaluable to the management suits as a resource they can't do without; and without being able to talk to them, they'll never know if you're that resource.
At least SUSE didn't move all of the standard GNU include files to "gnu/*" as opposed to the standard / of the /usr/include directory tree, breaking all of my programs when the computer I have access to decided to upgrade to RedHat. What a bonehead thing that was, I spent about 3 days before I thought "Maybe the files really aren't there" and ran a 'find' on them....
...that just because M$oft controlls the idiotprone^H^Hoof software, people shouldn't even bother trying to write it for Linux? That's bass-ackwards thinking....
Oh, of course, I forgot about those 640 GB boot proms that get their data off of the CD by osmosis and include a fully functional version of [insert OS here].
End result is, there's got t o be a drive somewhere, unless the troll doesn't install any software. And what with moving parts bothering them so much, they prolly don't play games either, cause joysticks are [ack] analog!
Maybe now Linux will get decent 3c905b drivers, since that card seems to have a few quirks...
Anyone else notice that they are using 3com 905b cards in their systems? Don't they know that those cards suck?
Not his statement to make? Sorry, but the last time I check, Linus was the final say of what did and did not make it into the Kernel. He may not own the GPL, but he does, for all intents and purposes, own the Linux kernel. Binary drivers are not against the GPL of the kernel, they just can't be distributed _as_ the kernel.
...and it's been used on SUN machines forever. It's actually tied to the BIOS of the system, not the CPU, so it doesn't change. And the copy protection based on it works very well, since licence keys are generated off of the hostname, the HostID, and a random string that the company generates.