> I'd like to suggest to the rwth-aachen to participate next time
You can't participate directly; you need to come to the regional contest. For Aachen this is the NWERC. Participation from Germany has been quite low the past years: only a couple of teams for the whole of the country. The nordic countries and The Netherlands are traditionally strong contenders.
Experience makes all the difference. Here in Holland, most universities have their own local contest, of which the best few teams go to the Dutch National Programming Championship. Each university also sends teams to the Northwestern European Regional Contest, so for teams arriving there it will most probably already be their third contest that year.
If you think that way, please get involved! There are lots of ways you can help, the most obvious being reporting bugs and submitting patches for open problems. Debian is kept alive by people who care about it actually contribute.
No, it's not. The wait has been long, but newer upstream versions of packages have been accepted into testing until yesterday. Of course, some of the more fundamental packages have not been upgraded to their latest versions in order not to break testing, but it's no general rule that the software is old. And for the fundamental packages I'm even glad that I don't have the very latest release but rather something a bit more tested.
Here at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) traditionally there have been rooms equipped with NT and rooms with Suns. Over the years, the Sun rooms became emptier and emptier. Two years ago they decided to install a room with Dells+RedHat (later CentOS). All of a sudden the Sun rooms were completely empty and there were more people in the Linux rooms than had been in the Sun rooms before.
So they tried it out, and Linux was definately more popular than Sun. Seems like a valid decision that Sun is now completely phased out (saves a lot of money too - but that has been a secondary concern).
This new rule is an example of how such an overly bureaucratic system costs.
Here in The Netherlands we had the same system until 5 years ago where you had to pay to some special authority if you own a tv. That licensing stems from the ages when only few people had a TV and it was unfair to tax everyone for the broadcasts.
Since 5 years, this whole separate authority has been ditched and the public channels are just paid out of the general tax budget. A lot easier and a lot more cost-effective. And no need for special rules when some people use only a computer to watch tv.
You say you've used "Firebird", so I guess you've installed an older version of Mozilla's excellent Firefox product. You should try the latest version: they've made huge enhancements to stability and reliability in the past few releases. I use it as my only browser under Linux and the occasions where it doesn't function properly are becoming rare.
This person is mixing up a specific political view with the use of free software. The good thing about free software is that there can be no restrictions on who may use it.
I do not neccessarily agree with the war on Iraq, but limiting software licences to those who agree with my standpoint would be a bad way to express my opinion. There are many other ways to do that.
Plus, if this would become common practice, we'd have to prepare ourselves for a hard time. Checking for all software you use whether the author included some kind of usage constraint would be very tedious. Imagine the situation where for example the Apache Group would say: "we're pro the war on Iraq, so who's against can not use our webserver to promote that standpoint". Very undesireable of course.
Please don't mix up politics and free software.
Difficult question, because the "ij"-sound is unique to the Dutch language. My first name is "Thijs" and I have the same problems trying to explain that sound. The ij sounds somewhat like the english "eye".
The a on the end of Dijkstra should be pronounced short like the U in "cut".
I've also found this page which has MP3's of the different sounds in the Dutch language. Good luck pronouncing Dijkstra's and my name:)
Interesting point, but you put forward the need for diversity and combine that with standards that have been implemented on many platforms.
Following your line of thought we really should all be using different ways to communicate in stead of standards, to differentiate and mitigate the risk of an attack that uses one of the technologies.
Standard communication protocols are just a monoculture as a "standard" operating system is. I'm more tempted to go for standards and accept the monoculture that comes with it. The "proper diversity" you're suggesting comes at the high price of losing standards; one I'm not willing to pay.
Definately agree. Anyone is paying taxes on the stuff that they buy in the supermarket; and we have had the bonus of not having to pay VAT for goods bought online until now. So we get to keep the bonus we've had for years, and now internet-trading has become just like offline-trade which shows that the internet is maturing.
I would like to ask for factually-based opinions whether these innumerable highly dangerous security holes in MS software are more the result of the ingenuity of the hackers or the incompetence of the Microsoft design and testing process, or about 50:50.
In this case, judging from the fact that WinAMP's developers made the exact same mistake, I don't think this would be something specific to Microsoft incompetence.
The UCITA makes sense to me, it's perfectly normal for anything to be warranted. The big problem however would be the organization of free software projects. If my open source email client wipes my harddisk, exactly who am I going to turn to for my warranty? With companies like RedHat I can understand, but what about those thousands of open source projects which are no more than a loose colaboration of numbers of individuals? As long as there's no central entity to put my claims, what expect the designers of the UCITA me to do?
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You can't participate directly; you need to come to the regional contest. For Aachen this is the NWERC. Participation from Germany has been quite low the past years: only a couple of teams for the whole of the country. The nordic countries and The Netherlands are traditionally strong contenders.
Experience makes all the difference. Here in Holland, most universities have their own local contest, of which the best few teams go to the Dutch National Programming Championship. Each university also sends teams to the Northwestern European Regional Contest, so for teams arriving there it will most probably already be their third contest that year.
What about the vendor-sec list, to which to my knowledge all the major distributions are subscribed?
If you think that way, please get involved! There are lots of ways you can help, the most obvious being reporting bugs and submitting patches for open problems. Debian is kept alive by people who care about it actually contribute.
No, it's not. The wait has been long, but newer upstream versions of packages have been accepted into testing until yesterday. Of course, some of the more fundamental packages have not been upgraded to their latest versions in order not to break testing, but it's no general rule that the software is old. And for the fundamental packages I'm even glad that I don't have the very latest release but rather something a bit more tested.
So they tried it out, and Linux was definately more popular than Sun. Seems like a valid decision that Sun is now completely phased out (saves a lot of money too - but that has been a secondary concern).
This new rule is an example of how such an overly bureaucratic system costs. Here in The Netherlands we had the same system until 5 years ago where you had to pay to some special authority if you own a tv. That licensing stems from the ages when only few people had a TV and it was unfair to tax everyone for the broadcasts. Since 5 years, this whole separate authority has been ditched and the public channels are just paid out of the general tax budget. A lot easier and a lot more cost-effective. And no need for special rules when some people use only a computer to watch tv.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Perhaps no-one is crying that because they know that Akamai has already been using Linux for quite a while.
This person is mixing up a specific political view with the use of free software. The good thing about free software is that there can be no restrictions on who may use it. I do not neccessarily agree with the war on Iraq, but limiting software licences to those who agree with my standpoint would be a bad way to express my opinion. There are many other ways to do that. Plus, if this would become common practice, we'd have to prepare ourselves for a hard time. Checking for all software you use whether the author included some kind of usage constraint would be very tedious. Imagine the situation where for example the Apache Group would say: "we're pro the war on Iraq, so who's against can not use our webserver to promote that standpoint". Very undesireable of course. Please don't mix up politics and free software.
Difficult question, because the "ij"-sound is unique to the Dutch language. My first name is "Thijs" and I have the same problems trying to explain that sound. The ij sounds somewhat like the english "eye". The a on the end of Dijkstra should be pronounced short like the U in "cut". I've also found this page which has MP3's of the different sounds in the Dutch language. Good luck pronouncing Dijkstra's and my name :)
Interesting point, but you put forward the need for diversity and combine that with standards that have been implemented on many platforms. Following your line of thought we really should all be using different ways to communicate in stead of standards, to differentiate and mitigate the risk of an attack that uses one of the technologies. Standard communication protocols are just a monoculture as a "standard" operating system is. I'm more tempted to go for standards and accept the monoculture that comes with it. The "proper diversity" you're suggesting comes at the high price of losing standards; one I'm not willing to pay.
Definately agree. Anyone is paying taxes on the stuff that they buy in the supermarket; and we have had the bonus of not having to pay VAT for goods bought online until now. So we get to keep the bonus we've had for years, and now internet-trading has become just like offline-trade which shows that the internet is maturing.
Maybe dmca@comcast.net is just an alias for /dev/null...?
The UCITA makes sense to me, it's perfectly normal for anything to be warranted. The big problem however would be the organization of free software projects. If my open source email client wipes my harddisk, exactly who am I going to turn to for my warranty? With companies like RedHat I can understand, but what about those thousands of open source projects which are no more than a loose colaboration of numbers of individuals? As long as there's no central entity to put my claims, what expect the designers of the UCITA me to do?