I'll never have one of these in my home. It's bad enough I have smart phones which could have the microphone turned on without my knowledge either by a "legitimate" party or by someone with malicious intent. Either way, it's a constant mental struggle between enjoying neat technology and concerns about having it used against you. These days, it seems like every business entity or government agency feels the need to know what you're thinking or doing at every moment of ever yday... and some folks seem to welcome that.
I think the difference between you and I is that at least I'm upfront with the uncertain nature of my argument. If you believe that the lack of certainty in my argument discredits it, I disagree. I openly admit that my beliefs on these matters aren't backed up by concrete facts, but no one else's is either. The "establishment" purposely makes this the case. We all get our news from the same places and make are own determinations from what information we have. I think any sensible person that looks at the news articles that come out regarding actions taken by the US Government or military and asks themselves who stands to benefit from them can draw their only reasonable conclusions.
It's off-topic, but let me take an example from recent history to try and explain what my point is, the Boston marathon bombing. Some folks believe all that military armed law enforcement was justified. You know what I saw? A trial run at martial law to see how the public would react and how much resistance there would be. I live in Maine, and happened to get home early from work that day, so naturally, I had the TV on watching several different networks for coverage. Over and over, they displayed examples of hundreds... no exaggeration... hundreds of military armed police conducting dragnet-style searches in neighborhood after neighborhood in the Boston area. The city was on full lockdown. Have you ever seen that for a 2-person manhunt? I've not. There is video footage of police entering peoples homes. There is other footage of people who refused police entry. Heh, side note, there is evidence showing CNN using crisis actors. Ask yourself why they'd need to do such a thing. There is obviously an agenda there, even if it's something as stupid as a ratings grab... but I digress.
The level of paranoia and fear mongering is amazing. I think the Federal government is intentionally doing this because I think the more afraid you make people, the more accepting they are of Government control in the interest of "protecting people". Consider how out-of-control political correctness is. Once upon a time, the "accepted" idea was that in the US, we tolerated our differences. Nowadays, the "accepted" idea is that we offend no one. These are control tactics, in my opinion. Ask yourself where you believe it will stop.
I'm not attempting to start an argument with anyone. All I ask is for "people" (in general) to consider that it's even remotely possible that there is a grand plan for all of this. Throughout human history there is a mountain of evidence showing people with power over other people want more of it. The people living in the US have been fortunate to have this grand experiment of the population having some amount personal liberty. It's not the only place for it, but there have not been many. I'm merely stating that there are people that want to take that away. Call them liberals, call them democrats, can call them whatever you want, the premise is the same.
One thing I am certain of... is that fear is a popular method used to control people.
I have to disagree with you. I don't have any unnecessary feelings of "fear", and yes it is exactly what has been happening. In fact, I'm quite the opposite, as I've questioned the fear mongering that has been going on for a long time. I really wish you people would look up how things actually work. Everything from petrodollar recycling, to quantitative easing, to the purchase and sales of bonds to adjust the money supply. It's all there. Another belief I have, and I don't have any proof of this, but neither does anyone else, but I think the real reason for the second Iraq war was to protect the US Dollar. It had nothing to do with WMD. Hussein had started to sell Iraq oil on the Euro, which was on the rise at the time as a currency (17% more value than the US Dollar, IIRC). The US went in and secured the Ministry of Oil and the oil fields and switched the countries oil sales back to the US Dollar immediately.
Furthermore, you can't ignore the technical details for the purpose of making your argument, the truth of the matter is in the technical details. I don't think you understand inflation. My suspicion is that everything you know about how things work is incorrect.
You saying that shows you don't understand how the Federal Reserve works. It is a central bank that uses bond purchases to increase or decrease the money supply as it deems necessary. You should look up "Quantitative Easing" as well. The Federal Reserve has been injecting money into the economy or buying toxic assets from commercial banks like crazy since the Great Recession in 2008.
The only reason they can do this, with little effect on the economy right now, is that the US Dollar is still held in high regard as the World's reserve currency. I believe that whenever that changes, whether it be 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years from now will be when the US economy officially collapses. It's certain to happen at some point, the only unknown is when. I actually have come to believe that all of our involvement in the Middle East is to protect the US oil interests over there and making sure that the US Dollar is the currency other countries must use to purchase oil.
I personally think that is a very ignorant thing to say. First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best. Sure... *IF* the person pirating said copyrighted material would have bought it legitimately otherwise, then I could buy that argument, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more likely that most of the pirated material simply would not have been purchased at all. If someone wanted it bad enough, and they couldn't obtain it any other way, of course they'd pay for it.
For me though the real issue is how anyone thinks they could make such a bold claim to stop piracy all together. If it just so happens that torrents no longer function because of their software, or some other means, people who want to pirate copyrighted material will just come up with another way. This is a never-ending competition and the RIAA, the MPAA, or any other organization for that matter, will *NEVER* win it as long as there is some method to digitize the material and there is someone out there with the intelligence and the desire to put forth the effort to get around whatever copy-protection mechonism is in place at the time.
I use VPS servers and run my own site using wordpress for blogging, as well as some other software, and I encountered a situation similar to this with VPSLand (which, by the way, is the worst VPS hosting service I have ever used). I have since changed providers, obviously.
After having already been through several periods of unexplained downtime, and an instance where the VPS was unexpectedly rolled back due to some unexplained problems (you can see where this is going), my VPS seemed to be permanently down, and customer service would not, or could not, assist me.
I had been using their backup service, but I could not restore the VPS to a running state with the tools I was provided. However, I figured out that I could put the VPS in maintenance mode and I could atleast SSH to it, so I used WinSCP across SSH to download my files and databases.
Bottom line. While I didn't lose anything, I learned the hard way (which was a failure on my part since I am a systems administrator) that you can't become complacent if you care about your data when you don't control the environment. I trusted VPSLand's administrators to safeguard my data and they failed. If I had not discovered the maintenance mode option, I would have lost everything. The only way I can ensure my data is safe is to back it up myself. I eventually wrote a VBscript that connects and downloads all of the web and MySQL directories to my machine at home on a regular basis.
I know all situations are different, but if you can backup your data yourself in any way... even if it's just additional copies on some form of removable media, it's best to do it. Do not trust that whatever service you are paying for will ensure that it's never lost. The company might have a great looking website and have well written policies, but if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes, you don't really know anything about the company hosting your data. Go the extra mile and safeguard your data yourself.
I find this particularly disturbing
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SCO Offline
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
All this does is make the open-source community look like a bunch of whinebabies. People with techincal superiority, using that power against SCO instead of waiting to see how things turn out in court.
It doesn't matter that 99.9% of the open-source community is not malicious like this. The.1% of the people are the ones that are doing the talking when doing something like this. All this does is hurt the cause that Linus, the OSI, the FSF, and all the linux geeks have been working so hard to defend.
I don't condone what Darl and SCO are trying to do, but I don't condone people doing this sort of thing either. "Hackers" (as opposed to "crackers") everywhere look bad when this happens, and ultimately confirm the malicious intent that most peope believe "hackers" to have.
This is a sad day for Linux and opensource if you ask me:(.
I don't know about "nobody". Being a UNIX admin that is security conscious, I'm pretty concerned about our Windows Network's security (or lack of it). One thing I have noticed is the Windows' guys lack of concern, which borders on complete laziness. They don't enforce any type of security with regard to network access, passwords are completely insecure, our DMZ is anything but secure (this one my UNIX admin buddy and I are trying to talk them into fixing). My point is this: These guys can't be unique (and they're not idiots, just unmotivated), I wonder how many other corporate networks are in the same type of persons hands (the M$ mentality I mean), it has to be more than I would figure. I believe that it is no too difficult to secure even an M$ machine, but the lack of desire to do so seems to be prevelant among our Windows admins. Just food for thought.
What I find funny is that what was said is almost a valid point and it may even be believable except that the RIAA has shown time and time again that all they care about is money. Just watch one VH1 "Behind the Music" and you're sure to see what the RIAA is all about. Almost every single one of the artists that the shows feature had to file for bankruptcy or was in serious financial trouble and had to consult attorneys to get them out of their slave contracts. All I can say is that despite the partial validity of the statement, it's still all a bunch of big business crap.
You are an imputant mortal, obviously. While I don't agree either with his statement, I don't agree because it doesn't apply to me. A lot of people I know that have computers don't even realize that AOL is NOT the internet. His statement may apply, atleast partially, to them. Assuming your a computer geek like a decent percentage of/. readers, I would've thought that you might realize that not all people think like you or I do. While I find easy to configure, Solaris, Linux or Windows to my liking, and you might also, to others it may be a nightmare just to configure their computer name to work with an @home cable modem. You need a reality check, because not all people are computer experts and your comment suggests that you think that people who aren't are idiots and that is not just so. A lot of people I know are brilliant with other things but have no clue about computers, I do not believe they are idiots.
I really liked the link you posted, this guy definately puts some humor to an otherwise serious situation, and makes a valid point doing it. So I would have to agree with you that M$ would find it in their best interest to change the protocol they use for file sharing to prevent such a hypothetical situation from becoming reality. That would be detrimental to them. Good point.
This seems like good news, but what, if anything, does this mean to the current findings of anti-competitive practices and what penalties will they be forced (if any) to pay. Seems to me that the jucicial system is willing to say that M$ is bad, but what are they doing to try and rectify the situation. Will they:
1) Force M$ to open the Windows source, 2) Force M$ to had the source to a couple of other companies to try and force competition with a set group of compatibility standards, 3) Change their minds and break the company up into an OS company and an application company, 4) Provide yet another solution, 5) Slap them on the wrist and tell them "Don't do this anymore"
M$ has so much history regarding their threat to competition, that the time has come to stop talking and start actually doing something to them. Maybe we need someone like Milo (Antitrust) to come along and bring them down... so to speak:-).
Very intriguing individual
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Tridge Speaks Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I must say that Andrew seems to be very aware of Samba's direction and future. He also seems to be very honest about the delevopment-to-date. I really liked how he points out the learning phases, from concept to write to rewrite that Samba has taken over the years. My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS'. Right now, my employer (like most other employers) use Windows on its servers and desktops, the only exceptions are the CAD designer's that I and my buddy take care of, but we have Samba running on our Sun E450, authenticating to our Windows PDC and it works great. It be really suck if they upgrade our Windows servers to a newer version that doesn't support SMB, but that would just be the next challenge to software developers to once again try and accomadate Microsoft, and once again prove that no matter what Microsoft does, hackers will always find a way. Hooray for Andrew and all hackers like him.
It seems arcane to think that most users are to ignorant, or so unwilling to learn the OS in more depth, but it is true. Most computer users that actually have a clue about how to manipulate the OS will be inclined to do so. I personally always set the defaults to be what I want them to be, but not everybody knows how... that's just a fact, and a fact that covers a HUGE percentage of computer users. I think his solution has a valid point, even if it doesn't acomplish anything. Users are not given the choice obviously enough for most of them to figure out how to switch default applications for file types, and knowing M$ history, I would think that most people here would believe that they (M$) would be inclined to take advantage of this. Once again, it's M$ taking advantage of user's ignorance, just like that have all along. I'm not saying that if the court ruled his way on this subject, that it would change things, but it would give people more control over the applications they use without having to do additional learning of the OS. Just my.02, flame away if you must.
Complain, complain, complain.... I use Mandrake. I've also used RedHat and Debian in the past. I liked all three, despite having one problem or another with all of them. Probably due to a lack of knowledge, but, oh well.
I love using Linux and I've learned a lot about it. The problem is: RedHat wins and award, Mandrake wins an award, Caldera wins an award... so what. If Slackware, TurboLinux, SUSE, or any other distro won an award there would be people complaining about that too. The point here is "YOU HAVE A CHOICE".
Not that I never have a complaint with Linux from time to time, but if I can't make something work, instead of blaming the distro, I blame my lack of knowledge.
Maybe people should stop complaining and start working on their problems... everything would be much better.
I love Linux, but day after day I have a new reason to like the Linux community less and less. Lack of a sense of humor and constant complaining makes communicating with others here really tiresome. Long live Linux and the people who care enough to learn it.
This is the exact kind of comment that leads me to believe that the Linux Community is just as full of ass holes as it is people that care about it, and care about helping people understand it... Go back to f*cking using Windows get out of our realm!!!!
For further explanation of my opinion on this subject see my "The Linux Community" post to jerk-off.
At the time I post this, they're about 34 replys. I want to first start by saying clearly "I LOVE LINUX"
Now for the flaming part:
Why is it that the Linux community, for the most part can't accept a little press awareness or a little humor? I am a member of MDLUG (Metro Detroit Linux Users Group) and recently someone posted a funny site that was sarcatic to "Micorsoft" (as he put it), and the group went mad about it. Slam after slam was posted about how STUPID this guy was and I thought his site was hilarious (sorry I don't have the URL handy). I laughed my ass off.
Now CNET is paying attention to Kernel 2.4... so what, big deal. The direction that Linux goes is controlled by what the Linux community wants and what the developers are interested in. God bless the people with that kind of knowledge.
The point of the whole CNET article was that things like USB and Firewire were being worked on, who knows if it will actually be implemented or how stable it will be. As of right now Linux is still geared at people who are computer literate, but I think thats soon to change, especially if things like USB are implemented.
Enough said... now will the uptight people in the Linux community please take a minute to pull the underware out of the crack of their ass' and just be glad that Linux is getting press time? Linux is serious but even Linus said it should be a little fun, and comments like most of these are worthless attempts to slam people that don't know as much as you do.
IMHO, it's just as bad as M$ taking advantage of people's ignorance by hiding the fact that Win98 is version 4.1 and Win95 is version 4.0, how many people realized that? Not many I'll bet, atleast until they spent $89 on it.
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I was just glad to see someone give M$ a taste of their own medicine. I think open source software is the best thing that's happened to computing in a long time (since this was a common practice among UNIX gurus) M$ started the whole thing, which is just a major rip for consumers IMHO.
Compare StarOffice with M$ Office and you see what I mean, free vs $300 or more for nearly the same thing? And StarOffice is XPlatform, what a joke M$ is... and furthermore how they obtained their dominace is really pathetic. Linux distros don't have that ability, and Linux knew that when he licensed the kernel under GPL. People in the Linux world know how things work that's why things are the way they are.
BTW, I use RedHat 6.0, and while it may very well not be the best distro (but I really don't have any good comparisons, Debian is the only other one I have any experience with and that's not too much), they have released EVERYTHING GPL, can you say that about SUSE or Caldera? No.
But I would never knock any Linux distro, they are all great and the fact that you have a choice is what it's all about.
One thing strikes me funny. I would've figured that AOL would be more in tune with letting the Linux community do some of the things they do. After all, both organizations have a common enemy, M$.
I guess it doesn't surprize me that AOL would request the removal of the logo from this IM, but what purpose does that really serve? It was developed because there were people that wanted to communicate with others via AOL IM. Having their logo there would've been a plus as far as I see it.
I do have to admit I was proud of AOL for sticking M$ the way they did with their protocol tweaks, but I hope this doesn't mean it's another M$ in the works. Having both ICQ and IM in their corner I don't really see much for M$'s future in the IM market. Maybe AOL should just take it easy. Then again, it is M$ that we're talking about.
Decisions, decisions, decisions... just get me a reliable communbicating tool so I can play StarCraft and Quake with my friends....
In a computer world dominated largely by a company that thrives on peoples ignorance, you serve as a prime example why Linux still has many years to go before it is a major player on desktops.
You, like most people, want an install tha requires little or no user input and even less knowledge to perform. M$ has the InstallShield, which does basically everything, Linux has nothing quite like that yet. Though that being said, installing RPMS or using configure,make,make install is not that difficult. If you would have taken the time to RTFM (like most people don't) you would have seen that you can install it with the/net option (usually as root) to do the main install. Run the setup program as a user and you get, ready for this, a WORKSTATION OPTION. 1.3MB of files in a user's home dir, and they're off and running. Sounds pretty multi-user to me. BTW, if you would have atleast done (1) ls command you would have noticed a PDF file, guess which app is required to view it (other than xPDF)... hope you know. Download it and install it. Might have to read a man page or two from that one too.
My point is this: M$ has taken the liberty to make things easy... so easy that a person that uses computers might actually not learn a thing. Linux isn't that simple yet and I hope it never gets that way. If people understood it better, they'd take the time to better EDUCATE themselves, which is why M$ will stay the dominate force for a while yet.
Remember (2) things. RTFM, and research your own problems first. Try to sound a little informed and like you've made an effort to solve your own problem... that's where the Linux community will embrace any questions you may have.
Bottom line: Ignorance is everything that the Linux community is not, and that will not be comprimized
Apparently you have no idea what events have taken place in the last couple years regarding Microsoft and Java. Here's a quick summary: Sun Microsystems, developer of Java, intended for it to be a cross platform compatible programming language (i.e. compile once, run anywhere), and it licensed it that way. Java has been slow to develop due to compatibility issues and has of yet not been too successful. Microsoft took it upon themselves to fine tune Java to run on windows very well, provided you developed your app on Visual J++ and ran it on Windows. According to Sun, programs that were developed on Visual J++ would not run on other platforms, thus violating the license agreement. Sun sued M$ and as far as I can tell are winning. M$ is backing off (forcefully, I assume), and started pulling Visual J++ off the shelves. Here's the REAL KICKER: Shortly after all this took place what did M$ do? They released a java clone language that they called, I believe, cool. If I'm wrong somebody please correct that.
Now if this isn't classic M$, I don't know what is. As far as the MSN Messenger, here's what would happen if a standard we're formed (IMHO): M$ would gain market share because they are M$, ignorant people would use it for that reason. Once M$ had a significant share of the market, they would make changes to their software, thus not allowing anybody else to use it. If you need more evidence of how corrupt M$ ways are go to Caldera's web site. There's a whole story about MSDOS, DRDOS, and windows.... you'll love it.
Well, I've read a lot of comments here and I think it boils down to a simple desire. If speed is what you're looking for, maybe right now NT is the solution. The trade-off is that you sacrifice reliability and stability. Take race cars for instance. They tune up for qualifing because they can get more speed, but at the same time the mechanics know that tuned up settings will never get them thru say, a 500 mile race. Indianapolis is a great example of that, before the IRL came around, they could push upper 220 MPH laps, which you'd never see in a race until the very end with only a few miles to go; when speed is everything. To last 500 miles, they tune the cars back for reliability. Linux I would say is very similar in that respect. I would think that many people in the Linux community could easilly accept this gracefully, knowing full well that the Linux/Apache combination may be slower, but at the same time will provide much less unscheduled downtime. M$, I think, would rather have great performance bechmark tests and inferior stability, then the opposite because benchmark tests are what get published and people that aren't that well informed about computers will read that. It's like when your new to the web, flashly graphics may awe you, but after awhile, when information is what you're looking for, text pages do just fine. M$ strives for looking good, people that know computers know that looking good doesn't always get the job done. If reliablility is what you want there are far better solutions than NT. For example,we have an SGI Octane at work that acts as a file server and an intranet server, I have no idea when the last it went down abnormally was; maybe never in the 2 years its served that role. Could you say that about NT, I highly doubt it. If NT had that reliability and stability I think that the people who post their concerns here would have a reason to really be worried, I personally don't see the need to pout over NT's speed because Linux is still VERY young, (especially in the commercial world) and this is an obsticle that I would assume be easily tackled in the near future. Hope I'm right, have a good day.
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I'll never have one of these in my home. It's bad enough I have smart phones which could have the microphone turned on without my knowledge either by a "legitimate" party or by someone with malicious intent. Either way, it's a constant mental struggle between enjoying neat technology and concerns about having it used against you. These days, it seems like every business entity or government agency feels the need to know what you're thinking or doing at every moment of ever yday... and some folks seem to welcome that.
I think the difference between you and I is that at least I'm upfront with the uncertain nature of my argument. If you believe that the lack of certainty in my argument discredits it, I disagree. I openly admit that my beliefs on these matters aren't backed up by concrete facts, but no one else's is either. The "establishment" purposely makes this the case. We all get our news from the same places and make are own determinations from what information we have. I think any sensible person that looks at the news articles that come out regarding actions taken by the US Government or military and asks themselves who stands to benefit from them can draw their only reasonable conclusions.
It's off-topic, but let me take an example from recent history to try and explain what my point is, the Boston marathon bombing. Some folks believe all that military armed law enforcement was justified. You know what I saw? A trial run at martial law to see how the public would react and how much resistance there would be. I live in Maine, and happened to get home early from work that day, so naturally, I had the TV on watching several different networks for coverage. Over and over, they displayed examples of hundreds... no exaggeration... hundreds of military armed police conducting dragnet-style searches in neighborhood after neighborhood in the Boston area. The city was on full lockdown. Have you ever seen that for a 2-person manhunt? I've not. There is video footage of police entering peoples homes. There is other footage of people who refused police entry. Heh, side note, there is evidence showing CNN using crisis actors. Ask yourself why they'd need to do such a thing. There is obviously an agenda there, even if it's something as stupid as a ratings grab... but I digress.
The level of paranoia and fear mongering is amazing. I think the Federal government is intentionally doing this because I think the more afraid you make people, the more accepting they are of Government control in the interest of "protecting people". Consider how out-of-control political correctness is. Once upon a time, the "accepted" idea was that in the US, we tolerated our differences. Nowadays, the "accepted" idea is that we offend no one. These are control tactics, in my opinion. Ask yourself where you believe it will stop.
I'm not attempting to start an argument with anyone. All I ask is for "people" (in general) to consider that it's even remotely possible that there is a grand plan for all of this. Throughout human history there is a mountain of evidence showing people with power over other people want more of it. The people living in the US have been fortunate to have this grand experiment of the population having some amount personal liberty. It's not the only place for it, but there have not been many. I'm merely stating that there are people that want to take that away. Call them liberals, call them democrats, can call them whatever you want, the premise is the same.
One thing I am certain of... is that fear is a popular method used to control people.
I have to disagree with you. I don't have any unnecessary feelings of "fear", and yes it is exactly what has been happening. In fact, I'm quite the opposite, as I've questioned the fear mongering that has been going on for a long time. I really wish you people would look up how things actually work. Everything from petrodollar recycling, to quantitative easing, to the purchase and sales of bonds to adjust the money supply. It's all there. Another belief I have, and I don't have any proof of this, but neither does anyone else, but I think the real reason for the second Iraq war was to protect the US Dollar. It had nothing to do with WMD. Hussein had started to sell Iraq oil on the Euro, which was on the rise at the time as a currency (17% more value than the US Dollar, IIRC). The US went in and secured the Ministry of Oil and the oil fields and switched the countries oil sales back to the US Dollar immediately.
Furthermore, you can't ignore the technical details for the purpose of making your argument, the truth of the matter is in the technical details. I don't think you understand inflation. My suspicion is that everything you know about how things work is incorrect.
You saying that shows you don't understand how the Federal Reserve works. It is a central bank that uses bond purchases to increase or decrease the money supply as it deems necessary. You should look up "Quantitative Easing" as well. The Federal Reserve has been injecting money into the economy or buying toxic assets from commercial banks like crazy since the Great Recession in 2008.
The only reason they can do this, with little effect on the economy right now, is that the US Dollar is still held in high regard as the World's reserve currency. I believe that whenever that changes, whether it be 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years from now will be when the US economy officially collapses. It's certain to happen at some point, the only unknown is when. I actually have come to believe that all of our involvement in the Middle East is to protect the US oil interests over there and making sure that the US Dollar is the currency other countries must use to purchase oil.
I personally think that is a very ignorant thing to say. First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best. Sure... *IF* the person pirating said copyrighted material would have bought it legitimately otherwise, then I could buy that argument, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more likely that most of the pirated material simply would not have been purchased at all. If someone wanted it bad enough, and they couldn't obtain it any other way, of course they'd pay for it.
For me though the real issue is how anyone thinks they could make such a bold claim to stop piracy all together. If it just so happens that torrents no longer function because of their software, or some other means, people who want to pirate copyrighted material will just come up with another way. This is a never-ending competition and the RIAA, the MPAA, or any other organization for that matter, will *NEVER* win it as long as there is some method to digitize the material and there is someone out there with the intelligence and the desire to put forth the effort to get around whatever copy-protection mechonism is in place at the time.
I use VPS servers and run my own site using wordpress for blogging, as well as some other software, and I encountered a situation similar to this with VPSLand (which, by the way, is the worst VPS hosting service I have ever used). I have since changed providers, obviously.
After having already been through several periods of unexplained downtime, and an instance where the VPS was unexpectedly rolled back due to some unexplained problems (you can see where this is going), my VPS seemed to be permanently down, and customer service would not, or could not, assist me.
I had been using their backup service, but I could not restore the VPS to a running state with the tools I was provided. However, I figured out that I could put the VPS in maintenance mode and I could atleast SSH to it, so I used WinSCP across SSH to download my files and databases.
Bottom line. While I didn't lose anything, I learned the hard way (which was a failure on my part since I am a systems administrator) that you can't become complacent if you care about your data when you don't control the environment. I trusted VPSLand's administrators to safeguard my data and they failed. If I had not discovered the maintenance mode option, I would have lost everything. The only way I can ensure my data is safe is to back it up myself. I eventually wrote a VBscript that connects and downloads all of the web and MySQL directories to my machine at home on a regular basis.
I know all situations are different, but if you can backup your data yourself in any way... even if it's just additional copies on some form of removable media, it's best to do it. Do not trust that whatever service you are paying for will ensure that it's never lost. The company might have a great looking website and have well written policies, but if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes, you don't really know anything about the company hosting your data. Go the extra mile and safeguard your data yourself.
All this does is make the open-source community look like a bunch of whinebabies. People with techincal superiority, using that power against SCO instead of waiting to see how things turn out in court.
.1% of the people are the ones that are doing the talking when doing something like this. All this does is hurt the cause that Linus, the OSI, the FSF, and all the linux geeks have been working so hard to defend.
:(.
It doesn't matter that 99.9% of the open-source community is not malicious like this. The
I don't condone what Darl and SCO are trying to do, but I don't condone people doing this sort of thing either. "Hackers" (as opposed to "crackers") everywhere look bad when this happens, and ultimately confirm the malicious intent that most peope believe "hackers" to have.
This is a sad day for Linux and opensource if you ask me
I don't know about "nobody". Being a UNIX admin that is security conscious, I'm pretty concerned about our Windows Network's security (or lack of it). One thing I have noticed is the Windows' guys lack of concern, which borders on complete laziness. They don't enforce any type of security with regard to network access, passwords are completely insecure, our DMZ is anything but secure (this one my UNIX admin buddy and I are trying to talk them into fixing). My point is this: These guys can't be unique (and they're not idiots, just unmotivated), I wonder how many other corporate networks are in the same type of persons hands (the M$ mentality I mean), it has to be more than I would figure. I believe that it is no too difficult to secure even an M$ machine, but the lack of desire to do so seems to be prevelant among our Windows admins. Just food for thought.
What I find funny is that what was said is almost a valid point and it may even be believable except that the RIAA has shown time and time again that all they care about is money. Just watch one VH1 "Behind the Music" and you're sure to see what the RIAA is all about. Almost every single one of the artists that the shows feature had to file for bankruptcy or was in serious financial trouble and had to consult attorneys to get them out of their slave contracts. All I can say is that despite the partial validity of the statement, it's still all a bunch of big business crap.
You are an imputant mortal, obviously. While I don't agree either with his statement, I don't agree because it doesn't apply to me. A lot of people I know that have computers don't even realize that AOL is NOT the internet. His statement may apply, atleast partially, to them. Assuming your a computer geek like a decent percentage of /. readers, I would've thought that you might realize that not all people think like you or I do. While I find easy to configure, Solaris, Linux or Windows to my liking, and you might also, to others it may be a nightmare just to configure their computer name to work with an @home cable modem. You need a reality check, because not all people are computer experts and your comment suggests that you think that people who aren't are idiots and that is not just so. A lot of people I know are brilliant with other things but have no clue about computers, I do not believe they are idiots.
I really liked the link you posted, this guy definately puts some humor to an otherwise serious situation, and makes a valid point doing it. So I would have to agree with you that M$ would find it in their best interest to change the protocol they use for file sharing to prevent such a hypothetical situation from becoming reality. That would be detrimental to them. Good point.
This seems like good news, but what, if anything, does this mean to the current findings of anti-competitive practices and what penalties will they be forced (if any) to pay. Seems to me that the jucicial system is willing to say that M$ is bad, but what are they doing to try and rectify the situation. Will they:
:-).
1) Force M$ to open the Windows source, 2) Force M$ to had the source to a couple of other companies to try and force competition with a set group of compatibility standards, 3) Change their minds and break the company up into an OS company and an application company, 4) Provide yet another solution, 5) Slap them on the wrist and tell them "Don't do this anymore"
M$ has so much history regarding their threat to competition, that the time has come to stop talking and start actually doing something to them. Maybe we need someone like Milo (Antitrust) to come along and bring them down... so to speak
I must say that Andrew seems to be very aware of Samba's direction and future. He also seems to be very honest about the delevopment-to-date. I really liked how he points out the learning phases, from concept to write to rewrite that Samba has taken over the years. My only concern would be that as awesome as Samba is, that Microsoft would dump the SMB protocol completely, rendering the current implementations useless with newer Microsoft OS'. Right now, my employer (like most other employers) use Windows on its servers and desktops, the only exceptions are the CAD designer's that I and my buddy take care of, but we have Samba running on our Sun E450, authenticating to our Windows PDC and it works great. It be really suck if they upgrade our Windows servers to a newer version that doesn't support SMB, but that would just be the next challenge to software developers to once again try and accomadate Microsoft, and once again prove that no matter what Microsoft does, hackers will always find a way. Hooray for Andrew and all hackers like him.
It seems arcane to think that most users are to ignorant, or so unwilling to learn the OS in more depth, but it is true. Most computer users that actually have a clue about how to manipulate the OS will be inclined to do so. I personally always set the defaults to be what I want them to be, but not everybody knows how... that's just a fact, and a fact that covers a HUGE percentage of computer users. I think his solution has a valid point, even if it doesn't acomplish anything. Users are not given the choice obviously enough for most of them to figure out how to switch default applications for file types, and knowing M$ history, I would think that most people here would believe that they (M$) would be inclined to take advantage of this. Once again, it's M$ taking advantage of user's ignorance, just like that have all along. I'm not saying that if the court ruled his way on this subject, that it would change things, but it would give people more control over the applications they use without having to do additional learning of the OS. Just my .02, flame away if you must.
Complain, complain, complain.... I use Mandrake. I've also used RedHat and Debian in the past. I liked all three, despite having one problem or another with all of them. Probably due to a lack of knowledge, but, oh well.
I love using Linux and I've learned a lot about it. The problem is: RedHat wins and award, Mandrake wins an award, Caldera wins an award... so what. If Slackware, TurboLinux, SUSE, or any other distro won an award there would be people complaining about that too. The point here is "YOU HAVE A CHOICE".
Not that I never have a complaint with Linux from time to time, but if I can't make something work, instead of blaming the distro, I blame my lack of knowledge.
Maybe people should stop complaining and start working on their problems... everything would be much better.
I love Linux, but day after day I have a new reason to like the Linux community less and less. Lack of a sense of humor and constant complaining makes communicating with others here really tiresome. Long live Linux and the people who care enough to learn it.
This is the exact kind of comment that leads me to believe that the Linux Community is just as full of ass holes as it is people that care about it, and care about helping people understand it... Go back to f*cking using Windows get out of our realm!!!!
For further explanation of my opinion on this subject see my "The Linux Community" post to jerk-off.
At the time I post this, they're about 34 replys. I want to first start by saying clearly "I LOVE LINUX"
Now for the flaming part:
Why is it that the Linux community, for the most part can't accept a little press awareness or a little humor? I am a member of MDLUG (Metro Detroit Linux Users Group) and recently someone posted a funny site that was sarcatic to "Micorsoft" (as he put it), and the group went mad about it. Slam after slam was posted about how STUPID this guy was and I thought his site was hilarious (sorry I don't have the URL handy). I laughed my ass off.
Now CNET is paying attention to Kernel 2.4... so what, big deal. The direction that Linux goes is controlled by what the Linux community wants and what the developers are interested in. God bless the people with that kind of knowledge.
The point of the whole CNET article was that things like USB and Firewire were being worked on, who knows if it will actually be implemented or how stable it will be. As of right now Linux is still geared at people who are computer literate, but I think thats soon to change, especially if things like USB are implemented.
Enough said... now will the uptight people in the Linux community please take a minute to pull the underware out of the crack of their ass' and just be glad that Linux is getting press time? Linux is serious but even Linus said it should be a little fun, and comments like most of these are worthless attempts to slam people that don't know as much as you do.
IMHO, it's just as bad as M$ taking advantage of people's ignorance by hiding the fact that Win98 is version 4.1 and Win95 is version 4.0, how many people realized that? Not many I'll bet, atleast until they spent $89 on it.
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I was just glad to see someone give M$ a taste of their own medicine. I think open source software is the best thing that's happened to computing in a long time (since this was a common practice among UNIX gurus) M$ started the whole thing, which is just a major rip for consumers IMHO.
Compare StarOffice with M$ Office and you see what I mean, free vs $300 or more for nearly the same thing? And StarOffice is XPlatform, what a joke M$ is... and furthermore how they obtained their dominace is really pathetic. Linux distros don't have that ability, and Linux knew that when he licensed the kernel under GPL. People in the Linux world know how things work that's why things are the way they are.
BTW, I use RedHat 6.0, and while it may very well not be the best distro (but I really don't have any good comparisons, Debian is the only other one I have any experience with and that's not too much), they have released EVERYTHING GPL, can you say that about SUSE or Caldera? No.
But I would never knock any Linux distro, they are all great and the fact that you have a choice is what it's all about.
One thing strikes me funny. I would've figured that AOL would be more in tune with letting the Linux community do some of the things they do. After all, both organizations have a common enemy, M$.
I guess it doesn't surprize me that AOL would request the removal of the logo from this IM, but what purpose does that really serve? It was developed because there were people that wanted to communicate with others via AOL IM. Having their logo there would've been a plus as far as I see it.
I do have to admit I was proud of AOL for sticking M$ the way they did with their protocol tweaks, but I hope this doesn't mean it's another M$ in the works. Having both ICQ and IM in their corner I don't really see much for M$'s future in the IM market. Maybe AOL should just take it easy. Then again, it is M$ that we're talking about.
Decisions, decisions, decisions... just get me a reliable communbicating tool so I can play StarCraft and Quake with my friends....
In a computer world dominated largely by a company that thrives on peoples ignorance, you serve as a prime example why Linux still has many years to go before it is a major player on desktops.
/net option (usually as root) to do the main install. Run the setup program as a user and you get, ready for this, a WORKSTATION OPTION. 1.3MB of files in a user's home dir, and they're off and running. Sounds pretty multi-user to me. BTW, if you would have atleast done (1) ls command you would have noticed a PDF file, guess which app is required to view it (other than xPDF)... hope you know. Download it and install it. Might have to read a man page or two from that one too.
You, like most people, want an install tha requires little or no user input and even less knowledge to perform. M$ has the InstallShield, which does basically everything, Linux has nothing quite like that yet. Though that being said, installing RPMS or using configure,make,make install is not that difficult. If you would have taken the time to RTFM (like most people don't) you would have seen that you can install it with the
My point is this: M$ has taken the liberty to make things easy... so easy that a person that uses computers might actually not learn a thing. Linux isn't that simple yet and I hope it never gets that way. If people understood it better, they'd take the time to better EDUCATE themselves, which is why M$ will stay the dominate force for a while yet.
Remember (2) things. RTFM, and research your own problems first. Try to sound a little informed and like you've made an effort to solve your own problem... that's where the Linux community will embrace any questions you may have.
Bottom line: Ignorance is everything that the Linux community is not, and that will not be comprimized
Hank
Apparently you have no idea what events have taken place in the last couple years regarding Microsoft and Java. Here's a quick summary: Sun Microsystems, developer of Java, intended for it to be a cross platform compatible programming language (i.e. compile once, run anywhere), and it licensed it that way. Java has been slow to develop due to compatibility issues and has of yet not been too successful. Microsoft took it upon themselves to fine tune Java to run on windows very well, provided you developed your app on Visual J++ and ran it on Windows. According to Sun, programs that were developed on Visual J++ would not run on other platforms, thus violating the license agreement. Sun sued M$ and as far as I can tell are winning. M$ is backing off (forcefully, I assume), and started pulling Visual J++ off the shelves. Here's the REAL KICKER: Shortly after all this took place what did M$ do? They released a java clone language that they called, I believe, cool. If I'm wrong somebody please correct that.
Now if this isn't classic M$, I don't know what is. As far as the MSN Messenger, here's what would happen if a standard we're formed (IMHO): M$ would gain market share because they are M$, ignorant people would use it for that reason. Once M$ had a significant share of the market, they would make changes to their software, thus not allowing anybody else to use it. If you need more evidence of how corrupt M$ ways are go to Caldera's web site. There's a whole story about MSDOS, DRDOS, and windows.... you'll love it.
Well, I've read a lot of comments here and I think it boils down to a simple desire. If speed is what you're looking for, maybe right now NT is the solution. The trade-off is that you sacrifice reliability and stability. Take race cars for instance. They tune up for qualifing because they can get more speed, but at the same time the mechanics know that tuned up settings will never get them thru say, a 500 mile race. Indianapolis is a great example of that, before the IRL came around, they could push upper 220 MPH laps, which you'd never see in a race until the very end with only a few miles to go; when speed is everything. To last 500 miles, they tune the cars back for reliability. Linux I would say is very similar in that respect. I would think that many people in the Linux community could easilly accept this gracefully, knowing full well that the Linux/Apache combination may be slower, but at the same time will provide much less unscheduled downtime. M$, I think, would rather have great performance bechmark tests and inferior stability, then the opposite because benchmark tests are what get published and people that aren't that well informed about computers will read that. It's like when your new to the web, flashly graphics may awe you, but after awhile, when information is what you're looking for, text pages do just fine. M$ strives for looking good, people that know computers know that looking good doesn't always get the job done. If reliablility is what you want there are far better solutions than NT. For example,we have an SGI Octane at work that acts as a file server and an intranet server, I have no idea when the last it went down abnormally was; maybe never in the 2 years its served that role. Could you say that about NT, I highly doubt it. If NT had that reliability and stability I think that the people who post their concerns here would have a reason to really be worried, I personally don't see the need to pout over NT's speed because Linux is still VERY young, (especially in the commercial world) and this is an obsticle that I would assume be easily tackled in the near future. Hope I'm right, have a good day.