As a Debian user, this has me wondering what could happen if say RedHat suddenly adopts this. I find myself torn between the unbelievable convenience that apt gives me, and the inconvenience because Debian is not being RedHat, and so much of Linux has a RedHat focus.
Don't get me wrong, I like Debian for a lot of reasons, but apt is the absolute killer app that keeps me on Debian. I now find myself wondering, if RedHat adopts apt, what would happen to Debian. Would it be enough for me to switch back? I guess the question is how many RedHat users switched to Debian solely because of apt.
One possibility is, of course, that RedHat wouldn't adopt apt because it would cut into their financial stream from RedHat Updates.
Anyone have any opinions on this?
And please don't mod this as a troll. I'm not trying to start a distro war. I'm really only looking for intelligent discourse about how this might change the landscape, especially w.r.t Debian.
The electoral college is especially silly given that most states now legislate that electors vote based on how the state's populace votes
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I thought I heard someone say on the news either last night or more recently that the way that it works is that every party in the state selects a set of electors for the state. When the state votes, they are voting on which party's electors get to submit their vote to congress.
So when the dems win a state, all the democrat selected electors get their votes sent to congress for the electoral vote. If the reps win a state, all the republican selected electors get their votes sent ot congress for the electoral vote.
The outcome is the same, but it's not like the state government is forcing the electors to vote one way or the other. The state gov is simply choosing the majority will of the state to represent the state's electoral votes.
BTW - the article mentions that she's a parachutist. Skydivers get pretty pissed off when you call them "parachutists"
Second guy says:
Umm, we do?
Well I'm not going to speak for you, but I don't like being thought of as a passenger of a parachute. I like flying my body. Parachutist implies that the primary thing we do is to ride under canopy. But, for a lot of us, it's about freefall. Not about the thing that allows freefall to happen. Canopy rides are fun, but the point is body flying! Feel free to disagree, tho.
Blue skies.
-- If riding in a plane is flying, then riding in a boat is swimming. If you want to experience the element, you gotta get out of the vehicle
I have almost 1000 skydives. Speaking for the skydivers, I can't imagine a single one of us who wouldn't absolutely love to have the oppurtunity to train for, and make this jump.
We're all under the illusion that there is a such thing as perpetual freefall. 31 miles up! That's going to add some freefall time to your log book! Let's see. My charts stop at 15k feet. Assuming you open at 2500 ft, that's somewhere around 75 seconds of freefall, through approximately 2.5 miles of very thick air. I wonder how long this jump will last?
I'm sure that the danger that they refer to is related to the thinness of the air. Without air blowing by you, you can't control which way your body is turning. If you can't control that, then you can't prevent a spin. That would be bad.
The license. I know, I know, the GPL is not just a legal document, but also a philosophy. The problem, is I think that it actually is self-destructive. The very nature of a viral license is to reduce the Freedom of Information.
I understand your distaste of the GPL. But if I, as a coder make something that's successful, wouldn't you consider it my right to demand that my code not become part of some proprietary system that makes someone else money off of my work? By the same token, don't I have the right, as a coder, to waive that expectation? It seems to me that this is what the GPL vs BSD licensing thing boils down to. What you (the coder) wants. Does the GPL restrict freedom? Yes it does. Are you free not to use it because you don't like those restrictions? Yes you are. Really that's all that needs to be said about it.
It seems to me that you're making the subtle suggestion that not only do you find the GPL distasteful but everyone else should as well. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but if that's what you're saying, I think it's a mistake.
The GPL exists because it meets the needs of a certain set of people. The suggestion that it is inherently bad seems a bit much to me. That would be like a GPL zealot saying that the BSD license is evil (like that's ever happened;-) The reality is that each serves a different purpose. BSD serves a set of coders who would prefer that their software be distributed as widely as possible. Whereas the GPL serves the set of coders that want to ensure that their work doesn't get exploited by someone with profit motives.
I say to each his/her own. Different strokes...
Not only that, but it really sucks from a legal perspective. The fact is, the boundary between what is allowed with the GPL and what is not, is very, very poorly defined. (See below for an example.)
IANAL, but if I accept your claim that the boundary is not well defined, shouldn't I expect lots of legal tests of that boundary to push its limits? It seems to me that the fact that the GPL has never been legally tested suggests that the boundary is not only defined, but defined so strongly as to discourage any sort of exploitation.
I can't imagine that no one has thought to try and exploit the GPL.
I went to their web site. Thanks for the link. I've always wondered something about websites like www.ucitaonline.com, are they legally responsible for the interpretations that they are publishing?
The reason that I ask is that if you read their FAQ, they seem to villify all Linux supporters who oppose UCITA. In particular they have an entire section devoted to "Myths". In this section they claim that slashdotters are worried about things that aren't true in UCITA.
Well, when push comes to shove, who is right? If it turns out that UCITA passes, and the things that they say are false end up being true, are they responsible?
I assume that they're not. (I don't even know what it would mean for them to be responsible.) Which means that anyone can say anything w/out regard to its truthfulness, just so long as it makes their side look good.
So, how should I (someone woefully uniformed about UCITA) determine whether the/. interpretation of UCITA is true or the ucitaonline interpretation is true? Any suggestions? Please keep in mind IANAL, so to read the actual law would not help. I'm not qualified to interpret it.
I really hope that this doesn't get modded as a troll. I certainly don't intend it that way. I just don't get what the big deal is. Isn't gcc under GPL? If so doesn't that permit Red Hat to do anything they want to with the code? You might argue that gcc 2.96, since it hasn't yet been released, isn't under any license. But doesn't it inherit the GPL as a derivative work?
Personally, on this issue, I think that Red Hat is going to end up eating crow. They released a piece of software in their 7.0 release that isn't just unstable, its necessarily incompatible with any other release that they have to date, and any future release that uses gcc 3.0. It's no different than if they decided to fork the gcc code, and from now on they either have to support that fork all by themselves or go back to the non-forked code.
It also means two other things. First, Red Hat 7.0 is a release to avoid because it guarantees incompatibility. But we already knew that. Every Red Hat x.0 release is a release to avoid. Second Red Hat now has to tell their users who upgrade either to 7.0 or from 7.0 that they're going to lose binary compatibility with previously compiled code, and possibly with future compiled code (assuming that Red Hat will eventually go back to gcc 3.0).
The least we can say about this is that it will have created extra work and bad PR for Red Hat. The most it seems we can say is that it was a major gaff. But to talk about Red Hat as if they're sneaking around and abusing gcc seems a bit much to me. It's GPL'ed software, and as such its use is free (as in speech) to whoever downloads it.
I always thought that someone using GPL'ed software outside of the manner intended by the auther was an explicit feature of the GPL. To complain about someone actually doing that seems more like the tactics of the software proprietors.
I'm sure that I must be missing something. Can someone help me out?
In essence, this is a management problem, which can only be solved by putting in place stringent security policies (e.g. "Yes, the new mail system is working, but it has not been passed as secure, so we are NOT putting it live, and I don't care how crucial it is to your quarterly comission that you are able to send attachments larger than 2MB...") and proactively allocating resources to security
Wow, I think you really missed one of the points of that article. The generation of commisions is also a generation of sales for the company. To say that security out ranks sales for the company is short sighted. Now, to be sure, sales shouldn't blindly outrank security either. But one of the critical points in the paper is that when thinking about security for businesses, you're providing a benefit to your company if you only look at removing risks. You need to look at risk management. Which means all 3 of the following:
accepting risk - risks are acceptable when the cost to transfer or avoid is higher than the cost of incurring the risk (e.g. I will drive on the highway, despite the risk of accidents. This is necessary because I have to work to feed my family.)
reducing risk - risks are reduced/avoided when the cost to reduce them low in comparison to the cost of incurring the risk (e.g. I will drive at reasonable speeds and drive with a constant vigilance towards other unsafe driving practices. I will wear my seatbelt. I will invest a little bit more in a safer vehicle).
transfering risk - risks are transferred when you pay someone else to take them if they occur (e.g. I will buy car/health/life insurance).
Simply banning the installation of a mail server because it hasn't been passed "as secure", might just be the best solution. But it may be the worst solution. If not having that mail server available costs the company their business, then not installing it is actually a bigger security threat than installing it insecurely. In short, there's got to be more to it than the overly simplistic example that you gave.
And that's one of the points of the article. That security isn't a thing. It's an activity. You have two choices:
Delude yourself into not thinking there's any risk.
Realize that risk is a constantly changing and morphing thing, and appropriate response must also be constant and morphing.
Failure to do the latter on a constant basis is the same as doing the former. But the only reasonable way to do the latter is to accept some risks, avoid some risks, and transfer some risks.
In many cases there is only one high speed provider in the area, a "virtual monopoly" if you will. Sure, you can switch providers... but it'll be dialup.
With cable modems this is true, but with DSL, this is typically not true. The limiting factor with DSL is whether or not a CO contains the switching equipment to support the service. IANAL, but as I understand it if the primary carrier offers xDSL in the area, it must open up those lines (by law) to competitors, at some reasonable prices (I don't know how they determine this!).
So if the primary carrier offers xDSL, it's almost always quickly followed by some CLEC offering the same service. Because of this DSL has some pretty serious consumer benefits with it, in that if I don't like my DSL ISP, there's almost always another ISP in the area that will happily switch over your service to them.
I suspect this is why DSL carriers enforce long term contracts, so that they can be immune from competition for a little bit!
Personally, I'd like to see the cable companies have to be subject to the same open access requirements that the phone companies are required to follow.
My cable modem provider (Road Runner, through Time Warner, in Charlotte, NC) just recently put caps on our service also. We used to get "up to 100x faster than a modem". Which practically meant that you could get between 600-800kB/s before the cap. Now we are capped at 256kB/s.
Yeah, I know I shouldn't be complaining about this. It's still pretty fast, I'm just bothered that it's happening! It bothers me that they can advertise one thing, and then blatently, without warning implement changes!
If you want to play it safe (although no security holes are known to exist in ORBits incoming processing path) you can put this in your/etc/orbitrc:
ORBIIOPUSock=1
ORBIIOPIPv4=0
ORBIIOPIPv6=0
Have you given any thought to making these settings the default config? Why not "play it safe" by default, and give people the oppurtunity to be dangerous on their own?
How do you get that? If I believed in evil, yes, I'd do anything I could to suppress it. But that doesn't mean I label as "evil" everything I want to suppress. I think that's basically what the other poster was objecting to.
First, I gather from your emphasis on the word "if" that you don't believe in evil. Second, I think you've got it backwards too. The other poster said that more often than not, ppl label things as evil because they want to suppress them. My contention is that it's the other way around. More often than not ppl want to suppress things because they believe that those things are evil.
Now I definately believe that the other does occur, but I think it's the exception, not the rule.
It's all fine and good to say that people shouldn't use drugs, or play mind-dulling games, or have kids as teenagers, or any number of things. But when you start thinking of that as "evil" then, as you say, you'll do anything to combat it.
Well, ok, let's take some reasonable limitations on "anything". I won't embrace evil to try and combat evil. That would be counterproductive. So your example of stomping on constitutional rights is not a fair example. First, it assumes that constitutional rights are the opposite of evil, and stomping on them, as you say would be evil. Second, if it's ok to say that ppl shouldn't use drugs, what are you saying if you're not saying that the behavior is bad (a.k.a. evil)? What is the point of saying you shouldn't use drugs if you're not saying that using drugs is bad?
But I really think that you may be missing the point. Which is this: You are arguing that certain activities shouldn't be labeled as evil - drug use, homosexuality, video games, etc. But then you turn around and say that ppl who do that labeling are evil. If you can't label things as evil, aren't you being hypocritical? Isn't this doubly hypocritical since your comments suggest that you don't believe in evil.
I, on the other hand, am saying that it's ok to label some things as evil, and to pursue the supression of those things. But the only things that should be labeled as evil are those things that are evil. But I intentionally leave open the question of how to determine what things are and aren't evil.
My humble apologies if this post offends anyone. I see that this is a possibility, but it is not my intention.
The comparison is not to the genetic characteristic, it is the comaprison to the "moral crusade" against any group of people that is perceived to be different.
Hmmm... most people have a "moral crusade" against the group of people that practice killing other humans for any random reason. I certainly perceive that type of person to be different.
That includes Homosexuality, Drug Use, Violent Video Games, whatever... Society as a whole has decided to brand these people as "EVIL" because they do not fit in to the norm of society.
I think you've got it backwards. You seem to think that someone brands another as "evil" as a consequence of non-normalcy. But more often, I think it's the other way around. Some person thinks that some other person's behavour is evil, and that the consequence for that evil behavour is that the practicer should not be considered normal.
The point that the previous poster was making is that persecution of someone due to a trait that they are born with, that they have no choice in having to deal with, is wrong. But when it comes to something that is a choice, it's not cut and dry. Some things we all agree are bad choices and should be stopped (e.g. murder), while others are legitimate choices and choosing them is not wrong, therefore, persecuting them is wrong (e.g. my preference for chocolate chip cookies).
But once you start persecuting a subculture because they are not normal, or doing things that you simply do no agree with, you are falling into fascism.
I don't agree with murder. Does that make me a fascist? The answer might very well be yes. If it is, then there must be good fascism (the kind that forbids murder) and bad fascism (the kind that forbids certain skin colors). But if there is a good kind of fascism, then falling into fascism isn't necessarily bad.
Now, personally, I don't think there is a good fascism. So, consequently, I don't think that forbidding murder is fascist. Which means I also think that I don't think you're falling into fascism if you disagree with someone, and forbid their behavour.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if you truly believed that something was evil, you would do everything in your power to suppress that thing. I know that I would. Which means that we're generally agreed on what we should suppress: evil. But we're not sure that we agree on what is and isn't evil. So the discussion needs to turn not to how we react to evil, but what is or isn't evil and why it is or isn't.
I do agree with one of your points, though. How exactly to determine whether or not some traits are inherited can be difficult. Other traits are not difficult to determine that they're inherited. The color of one's skin is clearly inherited, whereas the best we can say with homosexuality is that it might be.
The "time saving" aspects of technology do not come to those who build the technology. It almost always takes longer to design and build a multiple use tool than to complete the task that the tool is built for. For example, building a web browser is a much more time consuming thing than getting information. If I really want information about something, I can call someone, or go to the library, etc. The web browser saves a ton of time for the people who use it, but a costs huge amount of time for the people who build it.
Those of us who are building the technology are not building it so that we save ourselves time. We're building it, I believe, out of a desire to make other people's lives easier.
But I'm not convinced that amount of time is really the issue. Working to save time, solely to save time, is pointless if you're not going to do anything worth while with that time. I think that many of us are willing co-conspirators in our time drainage because if we don't make ourselves useful, we'd just go home and watch TV.
What's really entertaining about the whole thing is that this is a viscious cycle. We build things that are faster, and consequently set the expectation that everything should be fast, so that the next, more complex thing that we build, needs more hardware so that it can run faster, so that we can use that thing to build more complex things that run slow... etc, etc. People are becoming lazy, because we (the geeks) put so much emphasis on doing things fast!
I've been watching, from time to time, a series on PBS called "1900 House". It's about a family that has volunteered to move into a house that was rebuilt to be as close as possible to a house from 100 years ago. It has all of the same technology, including a stove that barely works but must remain on 7x24 because it's the main heat source for the house. I find this show interesting because it's unbelievable how much time is spent cooking and cleaning. Virtually all of the time is spent keeping things clean, while most of the rest of the time is spent cooking!
This show is enlightening because it demonstrates how much additional time we actually do have because of technology. And what the vast majority of us do with that extra time is (drumroll please)... watch TV!
Now, that being said, I don't disagree with the article. Employeers do seem to be demanding more and more of our leisure time. And I don't think some of the demands are justified. But, if you're good at what you do, you are golden. There's a technology labor shortage - a big one. As long as this exists, those who are technically capable can either:
Set up reasonable boundaries without fear of reprisal, by refusing to dedicate all of your time to your employer.
Become co-conspirators in the drainage of their time by never setting any boundary on what is or isn't reasonable.
That being said, let's all go out and demand that we only work 60 hour weeks so that we can have some time to catch up on the Simpsons!
I know that this is not a popular belief, but I don't think that Episode I was that bad. It wasn't anywhere near what it was hyped to be. But if you go into a movie expecting something lifechanging, and you get an OK movie, you're severely disappointed.
Because I now have children, going to movies is a rare treat. The first time I saw it was on rental. I had expected it to completely suck, and it wasn't that bad.
It's all about expectations. If everyone puts the same sort of ridiculous expectations on Episode II, that were on Episode I, then no one's going to like that movie, either.
One of the biggest problems that I see with taking non-free out of debian is that the bug tracking system will no longer work. Debian's bug tracking system is, in a word, *AWESOME*. I believe that Gnome is using it too.
If all of the non-free.debs are removed from debian and put somewhere else, the ability to improve those programs, through the reporting of bugs via the debian BTS, will severely diminish the overall quality, usability, and integration with Debian.
Yes the packages will be available elsewhere, but their ability to interoperate within debian, I fear, will diminish.
The example of KDE (hosted at kde.tdyc.com) is probably a good example of how an independant repository for.debs should exist. It runs the debian BTS also, so that there is a good mechanism for reporting and following up on bug reports. It also has several mailing lists for users, developers and announcements. These things allow the seperate Debian KDE site to keep itself better integrated with the rest of Debian.
The only way that I, as a Debian user, would want to see non-free seperated out, is if it were done in such a way that the non-free packages weren't simply dropped, but phased out onto a seperate non-Debian site that included its own instance of the BTS, and ran a set of mailing lists.
If that could be done, then I think that seperated non-free allows for Debian to keep their philosophy intact, and not hurt their users in the process.
Ok, I've read many of the arguments that suggest that M$ was chosen by the average consumer, and I'm tired of it. Saying that people "choose" something when there is no altnernative is hardly a choice. If you put a gun to my head and tell me to throw a torch into my neighbor's house, responsibility for the resulting damage should fall to you.
My point is that the issue of how M$ became the predominant OS on the PC platform is very complicated. It isn't fully described by saying that consumers "chose" M$. That's an oversimplification that ignores the fact that M$ bullied OEMs, and tied products, and... #include <FindingsOfFact>
If you want to argue that consumers chose M$, then you're ignoring the facts.
Productivity is down, morale is down, the only thing that isn't hurt is the fact that (in our opinions) we are still making the best software and are well-positioned to advance the state of computing in the next few years.
Somebody else, in another reply to a different article summed up the morale issue fantastically. This person said (paraphrased) that it must be intensely frustrating and demoralizing to work for a company that doesn't believe that it's workers produce the best software in the world that could win on its own merits. M$ believes that they produce such poor software that they resort to the tactics of bullying OEM's if *any* competition begins to crop up.
If just hosting the.debs wins, such that you only need to add a apt-sources line, then the contest is already over and won. The winning apt-sources line is:
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/debian potato kde kde2 contrib rkrusty
I agree with that completely, but I'm curious about why you said it. Are you attempting to imply the Macintosh forces you to stick with the default environment?
I said this only to suggest that the previous poster's statement had some limits. That certainly you want things to be easy for end users. But you don't want to create an easy to use paradigm that is hard to use for power users.
Do I think that MacOS makes it difficult for power users to create customizations? Yes, I do. Try to do a command pipeline with a mouse. There are some things that are just managed more efficiently with a command line.
Everyone is Linux (Offitopic: -1)
on
Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
I know that this is offtopic and should probably be moderated down, but this comment just kinda drives me crazy:
'Linux is biting itself in the foot' for not supporting that
All of us are Linux! Everyone who uses it, who wants it improved. It's us. There is no "They" who is going to shoot "themselves" in the foot. If Linux fails at something its because every single one of us was too lazy to implement the thing that we thought it should do. We have the source for crying out loud. What more do we need?
So enough of this us vs them crap. There is no "them".
Some people are more interested in getting work done than fucking around with machines that should be there to serve them instead. I personally have no problem screwing around with the innards of my OS, writing shell scripts, and so on. But should my mom be forced to? I certainly don't think so.
No. But by the same token, those people who want to screw around with the innards should not be prevented from doing so.
I screw around with my OS, because the default environment doesn't accomplish want I want accomplished. Forcing me to stick with the default environment means that I can't get my work done. The default environment doesn't do what I want it to do. Forcing me to stick with it is just as unproductive to me as forcing your mom to have to constanly "poke under the hood" in order to get her work done.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong, I like Debian for a lot of reasons, but apt is the absolute killer app that keeps me on Debian. I now find myself wondering, if RedHat adopts apt, what would happen to Debian. Would it be enough for me to switch back? I guess the question is how many RedHat users switched to Debian solely because of apt.
One possibility is, of course, that RedHat wouldn't adopt apt because it would cut into their financial stream from RedHat Updates.
Anyone have any opinions on this?
And please don't mod this as a troll. I'm not trying to start a distro war. I'm really only looking for intelligent discourse about how this might change the landscape, especially w.r.t Debian.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I thought I heard someone say on the news either last night or more recently that the way that it works is that every party in the state selects a set of electors for the state. When the state votes, they are voting on which party's electors get to submit their vote to congress.
So when the dems win a state, all the democrat selected electors get their votes sent to congress for the electoral vote. If the reps win a state, all the republican selected electors get their votes sent ot congress for the electoral vote.
The outcome is the same, but it's not like the state government is forcing the electors to vote one way or the other. The state gov is simply choosing the majority will of the state to represent the state's electoral votes.
Do I have this wrong?
Second guy says:
Well I'm not going to speak for you, but I don't like being thought of as a passenger of a parachute. I like flying my body. Parachutist implies that the primary thing we do is to ride under canopy. But, for a lot of us, it's about freefall. Not about the thing that allows freefall to happen. Canopy rides are fun, but the point is body flying! Feel free to disagree, tho.
Blue skies.
--
If riding in a plane is flying, then riding in a boat is swimming. If you want to experience the element, you gotta get out of the vehicle
We're all under the illusion that there is a such thing as perpetual freefall. 31 miles up! That's going to add some freefall time to your log book! Let's see. My charts stop at 15k feet. Assuming you open at 2500 ft, that's somewhere around 75 seconds of freefall, through approximately 2.5 miles of very thick air. I wonder how long this jump will last?
I'm sure that the danger that they refer to is related to the thinness of the air. Without air blowing by you, you can't control which way your body is turning. If you can't control that, then you can't prevent a spin. That would be bad.
BTW, Cheryl Stearns is among the elite skygods. She's got a gazillion jumps, and a bunch of style and accuracy championships. She's been a fabulous ambassador to the sport, and should rightfully be credited as one of the sport's most important participants.
I understand your distaste of the GPL. But if I, as a coder make something that's successful, wouldn't you consider it my right to demand that my code not become part of some proprietary system that makes someone else money off of my work? By the same token, don't I have the right, as a coder, to waive that expectation? It seems to me that this is what the GPL vs BSD licensing thing boils down to. What you (the coder) wants. Does the GPL restrict freedom? Yes it does. Are you free not to use it because you don't like those restrictions? Yes you are. Really that's all that needs to be said about it.
It seems to me that you're making the subtle suggestion that not only do you find the GPL distasteful but everyone else should as well. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but if that's what you're saying, I think it's a mistake.
The GPL exists because it meets the needs of a certain set of people. The suggestion that it is inherently bad seems a bit much to me. That would be like a GPL zealot saying that the BSD license is evil (like that's ever happened ;-) The reality is that each serves a different purpose. BSD serves a set of coders who would prefer that their software be distributed as widely as possible. Whereas the GPL serves the set of coders that want to ensure that their work doesn't get exploited by someone with profit motives.
I say to each his/her own. Different strokes...
IANAL, but if I accept your claim that the boundary is not well defined, shouldn't I expect lots of legal tests of that boundary to push its limits? It seems to me that the fact that the GPL has never been legally tested suggests that the boundary is not only defined, but defined so strongly as to discourage any sort of exploitation.
I can't imagine that no one has thought to try and exploit the GPL.
The reason that I ask is that if you read their FAQ, they seem to villify all Linux supporters who oppose UCITA. In particular they have an entire section devoted to "Myths". In this section they claim that slashdotters are worried about things that aren't true in UCITA.
Well, when push comes to shove, who is right? If it turns out that UCITA passes, and the things that they say are false end up being true, are they responsible?
I assume that they're not. (I don't even know what it would mean for them to be responsible.) Which means that anyone can say anything w/out regard to its truthfulness, just so long as it makes their side look good.
So, how should I (someone woefully uniformed about UCITA) determine whether the /. interpretation of UCITA is true or the ucitaonline interpretation is true? Any suggestions? Please keep in mind IANAL, so to read the actual law would not help. I'm not qualified to interpret it.
Personally, on this issue, I think that Red Hat is going to end up eating crow. They released a piece of software in their 7.0 release that isn't just unstable, its necessarily incompatible with any other release that they have to date, and any future release that uses gcc 3.0. It's no different than if they decided to fork the gcc code, and from now on they either have to support that fork all by themselves or go back to the non-forked code.
It also means two other things. First, Red Hat 7.0 is a release to avoid because it guarantees incompatibility. But we already knew that. Every Red Hat x.0 release is a release to avoid. Second Red Hat now has to tell their users who upgrade either to 7.0 or from 7.0 that they're going to lose binary compatibility with previously compiled code, and possibly with future compiled code (assuming that Red Hat will eventually go back to gcc 3.0).
The least we can say about this is that it will have created extra work and bad PR for Red Hat. The most it seems we can say is that it was a major gaff. But to talk about Red Hat as if they're sneaking around and abusing gcc seems a bit much to me. It's GPL'ed software, and as such its use is free (as in speech) to whoever downloads it.
I always thought that someone using GPL'ed software outside of the manner intended by the auther was an explicit feature of the GPL. To complain about someone actually doing that seems more like the tactics of the software proprietors.
I'm sure that I must be missing something. Can someone help me out?
Wow, I think you really missed one of the points of that article. The generation of commisions is also a generation of sales for the company. To say that security out ranks sales for the company is short sighted. Now, to be sure, sales shouldn't blindly outrank security either. But one of the critical points in the paper is that when thinking about security for businesses, you're providing a benefit to your company if you only look at removing risks. You need to look at risk management. Which means all 3 of the following:
- accepting risk - risks are acceptable when the cost to transfer or avoid is higher than the cost of incurring the risk (e.g. I will drive on the highway, despite the risk of accidents. This is necessary because I have to work to feed my family.)
- reducing risk - risks are reduced/avoided when the cost to reduce them low in comparison to the cost of incurring the risk (e.g. I will drive at reasonable speeds and drive with a constant vigilance towards other unsafe driving practices. I will wear my seatbelt. I will invest a little bit more in a safer vehicle).
- transfering risk - risks are transferred when you pay someone else to take them if they occur (e.g. I will buy car/health/life insurance).
Simply banning the installation of a mail server because it hasn't been passed "as secure", might just be the best solution. But it may be the worst solution. If not having that mail server available costs the company their business, then not installing it is actually a bigger security threat than installing it insecurely. In short, there's got to be more to it than the overly simplistic example that you gave.And that's one of the points of the article. That security isn't a thing. It's an activity. You have two choices:
- Delude yourself into not thinking there's any risk.
- Realize that risk is a constantly changing and morphing thing, and appropriate response must also be constant and morphing.
Failure to do the latter on a constant basis is the same as doing the former. But the only reasonable way to do the latter is to accept some risks, avoid some risks, and transfer some risks.With cable modems this is true, but with DSL, this is typically not true. The limiting factor with DSL is whether or not a CO contains the switching equipment to support the service. IANAL, but as I understand it if the primary carrier offers xDSL in the area, it must open up those lines (by law) to competitors, at some reasonable prices (I don't know how they determine this!).
So if the primary carrier offers xDSL, it's almost always quickly followed by some CLEC offering the same service. Because of this DSL has some pretty serious consumer benefits with it, in that if I don't like my DSL ISP, there's almost always another ISP in the area that will happily switch over your service to them.
I suspect this is why DSL carriers enforce long term contracts, so that they can be immune from competition for a little bit!
Personally, I'd like to see the cable companies have to be subject to the same open access requirements that the phone companies are required to follow.
$.02
Yeah, I know I shouldn't be complaining about this. It's still pretty fast, I'm just bothered that it's happening! It bothers me that they can advertise one thing, and then blatently, without warning implement changes!
Yes, I'm just whining!
Have you given any thought to making these settings the default config? Why not "play it safe" by default, and give people the oppurtunity to be dangerous on their own?
You didn't have to tell me that you were smoking crack. I could tell by your comments!
See the smiley? It's just a joke. Breathe!
First, I gather from your emphasis on the word "if" that you don't believe in evil. Second, I think you've got it backwards too. The other poster said that more often than not, ppl label things as evil because they want to suppress them. My contention is that it's the other way around. More often than not ppl want to suppress things because they believe that those things are evil.
Now I definately believe that the other does occur, but I think it's the exception, not the rule.
Well, ok, let's take some reasonable limitations on "anything". I won't embrace evil to try and combat evil. That would be counterproductive. So your example of stomping on constitutional rights is not a fair example. First, it assumes that constitutional rights are the opposite of evil, and stomping on them, as you say would be evil. Second, if it's ok to say that ppl shouldn't use drugs, what are you saying if you're not saying that the behavior is bad (a.k.a. evil)? What is the point of saying you shouldn't use drugs if you're not saying that using drugs is bad?
But I really think that you may be missing the point. Which is this: You are arguing that certain activities shouldn't be labeled as evil - drug use, homosexuality, video games, etc. But then you turn around and say that ppl who do that labeling are evil. If you can't label things as evil, aren't you being hypocritical? Isn't this doubly hypocritical since your comments suggest that you don't believe in evil.
I, on the other hand, am saying that it's ok to label some things as evil, and to pursue the supression of those things. But the only things that should be labeled as evil are those things that are evil. But I intentionally leave open the question of how to determine what things are and aren't evil.
Uh oh... this thread has convinced me of one thing: don't ever get in to a discussion on /. about the nature of good and evil.
:-)
That would be wrong!
Hmmm... most people have a "moral crusade" against the group of people that practice killing other humans for any random reason. I certainly perceive that type of person to be different.
I think you've got it backwards. You seem to think that someone brands another as "evil" as a consequence of non-normalcy. But more often, I think it's the other way around. Some person thinks that some other person's behavour is evil, and that the consequence for that evil behavour is that the practicer should not be considered normal.
The point that the previous poster was making is that persecution of someone due to a trait that they are born with, that they have no choice in having to deal with, is wrong. But when it comes to something that is a choice, it's not cut and dry. Some things we all agree are bad choices and should be stopped (e.g. murder), while others are legitimate choices and choosing them is not wrong, therefore, persecuting them is wrong (e.g. my preference for chocolate chip cookies).
I don't agree with murder. Does that make me a fascist? The answer might very well be yes. If it is, then there must be good fascism (the kind that forbids murder) and bad fascism (the kind that forbids certain skin colors). But if there is a good kind of fascism, then falling into fascism isn't necessarily bad.
Now, personally, I don't think there is a good fascism. So, consequently, I don't think that forbidding murder is fascist. Which means I also think that I don't think you're falling into fascism if you disagree with someone, and forbid their behavour.
The point that I'm trying to make is that if you truly believed that something was evil, you would do everything in your power to suppress that thing. I know that I would. Which means that we're generally agreed on what we should suppress: evil. But we're not sure that we agree on what is and isn't evil. So the discussion needs to turn not to how we react to evil, but what is or isn't evil and why it is or isn't.
I do agree with one of your points, though. How exactly to determine whether or not some traits are inherited can be difficult. Other traits are not difficult to determine that they're inherited. The color of one's skin is clearly inherited, whereas the best we can say with homosexuality is that it might be.
Those of us who are building the technology are not building it so that we save ourselves time. We're building it, I believe, out of a desire to make other people's lives easier.
But I'm not convinced that amount of time is really the issue. Working to save time, solely to save time, is pointless if you're not going to do anything worth while with that time. I think that many of us are willing co-conspirators in our time drainage because if we don't make ourselves useful, we'd just go home and watch TV.
What's really entertaining about the whole thing is that this is a viscious cycle. We build things that are faster, and consequently set the expectation that everything should be fast, so that the next, more complex thing that we build, needs more hardware so that it can run faster, so that we can use that thing to build more complex things that run slow... etc, etc. People are becoming lazy, because we (the geeks) put so much emphasis on doing things fast!
This show is enlightening because it demonstrates how much additional time we actually do have because of technology. And what the vast majority of us do with that extra time is (drumroll please)... watch TV!
Now, that being said, I don't disagree with the article. Employeers do seem to be demanding more and more of our leisure time. And I don't think some of the demands are justified. But, if you're good at what you do, you are golden. There's a technology labor shortage - a big one. As long as this exists, those who are technically capable can either:
That being said, let's all go out and demand that we only work 60 hour weeks so that we can have some time to catch up on the Simpsons!
I know that this is not a popular belief, but I don't think that Episode I was that bad. It wasn't anywhere near what it was hyped to be. But if you go into a movie expecting something lifechanging, and you get an OK movie, you're severely disappointed.
Because I now have children, going to movies is a rare treat. The first time I saw it was on rental. I had expected it to completely suck, and it wasn't that bad.
It's all about expectations. If everyone puts the same sort of ridiculous expectations on Episode II, that were on Episode I, then no one's going to like that movie, either.
$.02
If all of the non-free .debs are removed from debian and put somewhere else, the ability to improve those programs, through the reporting of bugs via the debian BTS, will severely diminish the overall quality, usability, and integration with Debian.
Yes the packages will be available elsewhere, but their ability to interoperate within debian, I fear, will diminish.
The example of KDE (hosted at kde.tdyc.com) is probably a good example of how an independant repository for .debs should exist. It runs the debian BTS also, so that there is a good mechanism for reporting and following up on bug reports. It also has several mailing lists for users, developers and announcements. These things allow the seperate Debian KDE site to keep itself better integrated with the rest of Debian.
The only way that I, as a Debian user, would want to see non-free seperated out, is if it were done in such a way that the non-free packages weren't simply dropped, but phased out onto a seperate non-Debian site that included its own instance of the BTS, and ran a set of mailing lists.
If that could be done, then I think that seperated non-free allows for Debian to keep their philosophy intact, and not hurt their users in the process.
My point is that the issue of how M$ became the predominant OS on the PC platform is very complicated. It isn't fully described by saying that consumers "chose" M$. That's an oversimplification that ignores the fact that M$ bullied OEMs, and tied products, and...
#include <FindingsOfFact>
If you want to argue that consumers chose M$, then you're ignoring the facts.
Somebody else, in another reply to a different article summed up the morale issue fantastically. This person said (paraphrased) that it must be intensely frustrating and demoralizing to work for a company that doesn't believe that it's workers produce the best software in the world that could win on its own merits. M$ believes that they produce such poor software that they resort to the tactics of bullying OEM's if *any* competition begins to crop up.
I could see how that would be frustrating.
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/debian potato kde kde2 contrib rkrusty
Cheers!
I said this only to suggest that the previous poster's statement had some limits. That certainly you want things to be easy for end users. But you don't want to create an easy to use paradigm that is hard to use for power users.
Do I think that MacOS makes it difficult for power users to create customizations? Yes, I do. Try to do a command pipeline with a mouse. There are some things that are just managed more efficiently with a command line.
All of us are Linux! Everyone who uses it, who wants it improved. It's us. There is no "They" who is going to shoot "themselves" in the foot. If Linux fails at something its because every single one of us was too lazy to implement the thing that we thought it should do. We have the source for crying out loud. What more do we need?
So enough of this us vs them crap. There is no "them".
No. But by the same token, those people who want to screw around with the innards should not be prevented from doing so.
I screw around with my OS, because the default environment doesn't accomplish want I want accomplished. Forcing me to stick with the default environment means that I can't get my work done. The default environment doesn't do what I want it to do. Forcing me to stick with it is just as unproductive to me as forcing your mom to have to constanly "poke under the hood" in order to get her work done.