OpenBSD was designed to be a secure server, even with default install.
There's no 'even' about it being secure in the default install. There are other OSes that are pretty secure in their default install as well. That state, in most modern freenixes, is that most services aren't running, most ports aren't open by default.
So it's MORE likely that boxes with the 'default install' are secure. When the person who did the install starts adding services, configuring it, etc. it's likely it will become by definition somewhat less secure.
I've long been an advocate of reducing the number of different and nearly equal (in functionality) ways to do the same thing
I feel much the same, in a lot of ways. So I've focused on NetBSD.
I have Sparc and Intel and various other pieces of hardware. With NetBSD I can run the same OS, built from the exact same source tree (kernal and userland, plus the packages) on it all. I've built a library of almost all the essential references for Unix, including a complete 'real' manual set from 4.3BSD (it's great to use the tutorials from the old days- I'm starting to appreciate 'ed' as a real editor after reading Kernighan's tutorials), the 'devil' BSD book (McKusick/Bostic/Karels/Quarterman), 'The Basic Kernel' 386BSD book (Jolitz and Jolitz), Bach and (of course) Tannenbaum. Throw in an assortment of O'Reilly books (the Vol 3 and 8 X11 books are especially good, along with 'Essential System Administration').. There's more than enough on my plate for me to study and learn from. I see Linux as generally growing away from it's UNIX roots, part of why as I came to like UNIX more and more I liked Linux less and less and gravitated to one of the BSDs.
The BSD forks were probably a good thing, as it's allowed the BSD systems to thrive and grow in several directions. Generally there's a synergy there in the way the code gets passed around between the different groups that would probably be more destructive if they were one group with all the infighting that would entail.
They are fairly common on eBay, although not always low priced. Stay away from the earlier ones, I've had nothing but problems with my 'BigMacEthernet' (be). People hawking them on eBay generally know they're selling you a lemon. Get a HappyMeal (hme), they're good stuff.
You can get the second processor card, for SMP hacking, real cheap on eBay. I got my second SM51 there (50 MHz sparc with 1MB of cache) for $5.
The enforcement apparatus established to police 'emissions' can be used for all sorts of other mischief.
Everybody's got their theory about what little tweak they need to do that will fix the whole world. We don't need any one entity having that power, thankyou.
You're overgeneralizing. There are a hell of a lot of unique loonies out there.
Believe me, many creationists, flat earthers, and crystal lovers have no idea of the definition of the term 'scientist' in the first place. Hell, lots of 'science teachers' teach little or no science to their unsuspecting secondary school pupils.
And needless to say, many 'scientists' are really just people who nestled into a campus bureacracy because they didn't want to go out into that big scary real world. The number of people who've taken a 'Philosophy of Science' course taught by a real philosophy professor is tiny.
The biggest polluters per GNP unit are in the third world. Lots of the biggest dirty industries have moved there to escape US envrionmental regulation.
This isn't in the interest of the people living in these countries, they have to breathe and live in their environment. The 'short cut' they're taking to prosperity is cheap dirty expansion. Giving more local control to the people in these countries will grant power to the people who have a direct interest in promoting cleaner alternatives.
Spending millions at an international level yammering about the problem in big task groups doesn't solve the problem at all. Unless you're a big-worlder and want to force people in other countries to 'clean up, or else.' Which has frightening appeal to certain forces who claim they are 'progressive.'
There have always been people entrenched in their fields who will defend nearly to the death the reputations they built for themselves. In face of any findings to the contrary.
Read Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' or any number of other books on the philosphy of science.
No, 'thousands of PhDs' doesn't automatically impress us. They have their grant funding to think of, and if there isn't an emergency how will they fund the new lab benches?
You're making the mistake that many people do, of assuming there's "One Big Entity" that rules the world and can change things to arrive at the more ideal state of affairs. It's not even certain that allowing a big overbearing single-state government to rule the world wouldn't be Worse for the environment. However, we do know what a dismal failure planned economies have been in the past.
So the magnitude of the risk (global warming) needs to be weighed against the magnitude of the risk of the 'solution' (huge overwhelming world-level mandates on what people are allowed to do).
There are people out there (some can be characterized as armchair megalomanics) for whom issues like 'global warming' are an excellent excuse to campaign for what they're really after.
That's common practice in some circles. All the communist newspapers (The Worker, Revolutionary Worker, etc. etc.) process the 'demo' shots that inevitably make it to the front page to enhance the 'demands' and slogans on the placards.
They're sorta nostalgic for the past, when entire new slogans and even faces were dubbed in soviet era publications.
Actually, the fact that you mentioned Natalie Portman shows that you're a newbie.
Now, if you'd said something about 'Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified' we'd know you had been around for some time. But that would be off topic, as a naked petrified statue doesn't exactly wear a computer, eh?
One of the best 'lossy compression' algorhythms for pi is the expression 355/113, which is accurate to 8 places (it's 3.141592920...). When I discovered how close to pi 355/113 was (with a program I wrote for my SR-56 programmable calculator back in about 1978) I recognized it for what it is: a value for pi that is significantly more accurate than any but the most extremely precise measuring devices for use in the real world. For almost all practical purposes 355/113 is pi. Also, there isn't any other common factor that results in ~pi to a greater precision until you get up into much larger integers. I confess that like probably many others particpating in this discussion I am a pi geek as well. I wrote programs to calculate pi for my SR-56, and it's been one of my 'benchmark' programs to cobble together for all new programmable calculators I've had. Back in the day I was willing to run down the batteries (between tether points where I could plug in the power pack) carrying that SR-56 around in my pocket calculating pi.
Where but on slashdot could we discuss such things? It's good to be home.
Many, many of the people who only use their PC to run one application run a specific application: the crap that comes on that AOL CDROM that came in the mail. No, really. I am not kidding. Lots of people almost exclusively live in that AOL shell.
And, ummm, the CD doesn't come with a Linux version of the AOL program. Maybe they should try that, but they haven't so far.
Then this hypothetical person can stare at the box the computer is in wistfully for two months, until s/he can afford to buy a monitor for it with the additional money saved up.
(note to anybody who hadn't noticed- the $199 computer has no monitor. Now, there are newbies who such a machine can still be sold to, but the $199 price isn't going to impress them when they discover they have to spend $100-200 more before they can even use the machine)
However, in spite of all the cheering and brouhaha going on here, people should acknowledge there is a distinct difference between Wal-Mart the stores that ordinary people walk into every day, and Walmart.com, the website, which is the only place people can get these Lindows computers....
It's a little niche part of the WalMart empire. Let's not all 'Yay Linux!!y' about it.
You know, I just thought of something. This isn't a proposal to require thumbprint authentication and proof of adulthood to get onto the Internet as a whole. It's just to be a 'protected domain' that Parents can limit their children to if they so choose. A choice like that is to be made by the individual parents, not mandated by law. That sounds a heck of a lot like 'responsible adult supervision.'
There are trivial solutions, they just aren't being taken advantage of at this time.
Any older PC has a lot of parts that could be reused. The case, power supply, drive bays, etc. Someone just needs to get slick with one of those mini-atx boards. Make one that can be plugged in and bolted down in any old PC, using the case and keyboard. Unplug the power supply connector from the old PC, plug it into the new unit.
In a near-future world where resources dry up (i.e. the post-scarcity scenario), that is almost inevitably what will happen with the old machines. There's no reason to continue to use up steel/plastic/etc. making new cases, power supplies, etc. A well-designed 'upgrade-anything' board could use existing monitors, keyboards, maybe even CD drives.
The 'externalities' are created by people's wants and desires. They want a new computer, they buy one.
It isn't at all like scrap industrial waste, or process chemical disposal, or the like.
My experience has been that 'more easily recycled parts' generally amounts to shoddy crap components. That buys totally into the hype about 'get a new computer ever year.' Which is bullshit.
People like us will benefit from these taxes, we will not be forced to subsidize the "upgrade every year" mob as we do at present through our income and (conventional, non computer related) sales taxes.
No.
Wrong.
In fact, people like us will lose bigtime from these taxes and the streamlined 'computer disposal' aparatus that will be funded by them. "Got an old PC? Here, throw it on the government truck and we'll haul it off for storage and eventual(?) disposal. We'll store it in this facility with a chain link fence.
The regulatory apparatus will make it difficult or impossible to sell gear as a private individual. Don't be antisocial and strew your waste around, throw it on the government truck! We won't be able to salvage decent used CD-ROM drives from people's $5 computers at garage sales.
"If we dig little fragments and snippets out of the oral histories of indigenous people, and use them as sound-bites to make our political points, we trivialize their culture, while distorting it to forward our luddite vision for the future."
100 years from now, after recovery methods and technology have advanced, the 'municipal dump heap' and indeed all landfills, will be viewed as a valuable resource. All that plastic and metal and etc. will be strip mined again, and recovered for reuse.
I know it's more advantageous to fret about how we're going to be one big landfill before long if you have a political agenda in mind, but let's be real.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD was designed to be a secure server, even with default install.
There's no 'even' about it being secure in the default install. There are other OSes that are pretty secure in their default install as well. That state, in most modern freenixes, is that most services aren't running, most ports aren't open by default.
So it's MORE likely that boxes with the 'default install' are secure. When the person who did the install starts adding services, configuring it, etc. it's likely it will become by definition somewhat less secure.
I've long been an advocate of reducing the number of different and nearly equal (in functionality) ways to do the same thing
I feel much the same, in a lot of ways. So I've focused on NetBSD.
I have Sparc and Intel and various other pieces of hardware. With NetBSD I can run the same OS, built from the exact same source tree (kernal and userland, plus the packages) on it all. I've built a library of almost all the essential references for Unix, including a complete 'real' manual set from 4.3BSD (it's great to use the tutorials from the old days- I'm starting to appreciate 'ed' as a real editor after reading Kernighan's tutorials), the 'devil' BSD book (McKusick/Bostic/Karels/Quarterman), 'The Basic Kernel' 386BSD book (Jolitz and Jolitz), Bach and (of course) Tannenbaum. Throw in an assortment of O'Reilly books (the Vol 3 and 8 X11 books are especially good, along with 'Essential System Administration').. There's more than enough on my plate for me to study and learn from. I see Linux as generally growing away from it's UNIX roots, part of why as I came to like UNIX more and more I liked Linux less and less and gravitated to one of the BSDs.
The BSD forks were probably a good thing, as it's allowed the BSD systems to thrive and grow in several directions. Generally there's a synergy there in the way the code gets passed around between the different groups that would probably be more destructive if they were one group with all the infighting that would entail.
Anybody know about S-bus fast ethernet cards?
They are fairly common on eBay, although not always low priced. Stay away from the earlier ones, I've had nothing but problems with my 'BigMacEthernet' (be). People hawking them on eBay generally know they're selling you a lemon. Get a HappyMeal (hme), they're good stuff.
You can get the second processor card, for SMP hacking, real cheap on eBay. I got my second SM51 there (50 MHz sparc with 1MB of cache) for $5.
Pardon me, but you've wandered into the wrong discussion to make fun of pi fanatics. Tread lightly. ;)
The enforcement apparatus established to police 'emissions' can be used for all sorts of other mischief.
Everybody's got their theory about what little tweak they need to do that will fix the whole world. We don't need any one entity having that power, thankyou.
You're overgeneralizing. There are a hell of a lot of unique loonies out there.
Believe me, many creationists, flat earthers, and crystal lovers have no idea of the definition of the term 'scientist' in the first place. Hell, lots of 'science teachers' teach little or no science to their unsuspecting secondary school pupils.
And needless to say, many 'scientists' are really just people who nestled into a campus bureacracy because they didn't want to go out into that big scary real world. The number of people who've taken a 'Philosophy of Science' course taught by a real philosophy professor is tiny.
There's one simple answer: uuencode.
*ducks*
Incompatible with anything but a single sourced computer that runs a closed-source GUI.
The biggest polluters per GNP unit are in the third world. Lots of the biggest dirty industries have moved there to escape US envrionmental regulation.
This isn't in the interest of the people living in these countries, they have to breathe and live in their environment. The 'short cut' they're taking to prosperity is cheap dirty expansion. Giving more local control to the people in these countries will grant power to the people who have a direct interest in promoting cleaner alternatives.
Spending millions at an international level yammering about the problem in big task groups doesn't solve the problem at all. Unless you're a big-worlder and want to force people in other countries to 'clean up, or else.' Which has frightening appeal to certain forces who claim they are 'progressive.'
There have always been people entrenched in their fields who will defend nearly to the death the reputations they built for themselves. In face of any findings to the contrary.
Read Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' or any number of other books on the philosphy of science.
No, 'thousands of PhDs' doesn't automatically impress us. They have their grant funding to think of, and if there isn't an emergency how will they fund the new lab benches?
You're making the mistake that many people do, of assuming there's "One Big Entity" that rules the world and can change things to arrive at the more ideal state of affairs. It's not even certain that allowing a big overbearing single-state government to rule the world wouldn't be Worse for the environment. However, we do know what a dismal failure planned economies have been in the past.
So the magnitude of the risk (global warming) needs to be weighed against the magnitude of the risk of the 'solution' (huge overwhelming world-level mandates on what people are allowed to do).
There are people out there (some can be characterized as armchair megalomanics) for whom issues like 'global warming' are an excellent excuse to campaign for what they're really after.
That's good to hear. I just ordered a 7 cd set of Debian3/sparc from Cheapbytes. Sparc serial console installs are great.
That's common practice in some circles. All the communist newspapers (The Worker, Revolutionary Worker, etc. etc.) process the 'demo' shots that inevitably make it to the front page to enhance the 'demands' and slogans on the placards.
They're sorta nostalgic for the past, when entire new slogans and even faces were dubbed in soviet era publications.
Actually, the fact that you mentioned Natalie Portman shows that you're a newbie.
Now, if you'd said something about 'Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified' we'd know you had been around for some time. But that would be off topic, as a naked petrified statue doesn't exactly wear a computer, eh?
One of the best 'lossy compression' algorhythms for pi is the expression 355/113, which is accurate to 8 places (it's 3.141592920...). When I discovered how close to pi 355/113 was (with a program I wrote for my SR-56 programmable calculator back in about 1978) I recognized it for what it is: a value for pi that is significantly more accurate than any but the most extremely precise measuring devices for use in the real world. For almost all practical purposes 355/113 is pi. Also, there isn't any other common factor that results in ~pi to a greater precision until you get up into much larger integers. I confess that like probably many others particpating in this discussion I am a pi geek as well. I wrote programs to calculate pi for my SR-56, and it's been one of my 'benchmark' programs to cobble together for all new programmable calculators I've had. Back in the day I was willing to run down the batteries (between tether points where I could plug in the power pack) carrying that SR-56 around in my pocket calculating pi.
Where but on slashdot could we discuss such things? It's good to be home.
Many, many of the people who only use their PC to run one application run a specific application: the crap that comes on that AOL CDROM that came in the mail. No, really. I am not kidding. Lots of people almost exclusively live in that AOL shell.
And, ummm, the CD doesn't come with a Linux version of the AOL program. Maybe they should try that, but they haven't so far.
Yeah, right.
Then this hypothetical person can stare at the box the computer is in wistfully for two months, until s/he can afford to buy a monitor for it with the additional money saved up.
(note to anybody who hadn't noticed- the $199 computer has no monitor. Now, there are newbies who such a machine can still be sold to, but the $199 price isn't going to impress them when they discover they have to spend $100-200 more before they can even use the machine)
Wal-Mart is huge. No doubt of that.
However, in spite of all the cheering and brouhaha going on here, people should acknowledge there is a distinct difference between Wal-Mart the stores that ordinary people walk into every day, and Walmart.com, the website, which is the only place people can get these Lindows computers....
It's a little niche part of the WalMart empire. Let's not all 'Yay Linux!!y' about it.
You know, I just thought of something. This isn't a proposal to require thumbprint authentication and proof of adulthood to get onto the Internet as a whole. It's just to be a 'protected domain' that Parents can limit their children to if they so choose. A choice like that is to be made by the individual parents, not mandated by law. That sounds a heck of a lot like 'responsible adult supervision.'
There are trivial solutions, they just aren't being taken advantage of at this time.
Any older PC has a lot of parts that could be reused. The case, power supply, drive bays, etc. Someone just needs to get slick with one of those mini-atx boards. Make one that can be plugged in and bolted down in any old PC, using the case and keyboard. Unplug the power supply connector from the old PC, plug it into the new unit.
In a near-future world where resources dry up (i.e. the post-scarcity scenario), that is almost inevitably what will happen with the old machines. There's no reason to continue to use up steel/plastic/etc. making new cases, power supplies, etc. A well-designed 'upgrade-anything' board could use existing monitors, keyboards, maybe even CD drives.
The 'externalities' are created by people's wants and desires. They want a new computer, they buy one.
It isn't at all like scrap industrial waste, or process chemical disposal, or the like.
My experience has been that 'more easily recycled parts' generally amounts to shoddy crap components. That buys totally into the hype about 'get a new computer ever year.' Which is bullshit.
People like us will benefit from these taxes, we will not be forced to subsidize the "upgrade every year" mob as we do at present through our income and (conventional, non computer related) sales taxes.
No.
Wrong.
In fact, people like us will lose bigtime from these taxes and the streamlined 'computer disposal' aparatus that will be funded by them. "Got an old PC? Here, throw it on the government truck and we'll haul it off for storage and eventual(?) disposal. We'll store it in this facility with a chain link fence.
The regulatory apparatus will make it difficult or impossible to sell gear as a private individual. Don't be antisocial and strew your waste around, throw it on the government truck! We won't be able to salvage decent used CD-ROM drives from people's $5 computers at garage sales.
"If we dig little fragments and snippets out of the oral histories of indigenous people, and use them as sound-bites to make our political points, we trivialize their culture, while distorting it to forward our luddite vision for the future."
100 years from now, after recovery methods and technology have advanced, the 'municipal dump heap' and indeed all landfills, will be viewed as a valuable resource. All that plastic and metal and etc. will be strip mined again, and recovered for reuse.
I know it's more advantageous to fret about how we're going to be one big landfill before long if you have a political agenda in mind, but let's be real.
Well, then. Stay in your laboratory. It's safer there anyway.