I've used gentoo a lot at home and debian a lot at work.
Debian really does demonstrate the problems inherent in letting someone else make decisions about what options and dependencies should exist for a piece of software.
To see what I mean, you have a freshly installed debian box you want to monitor with nagios.
So, you want to install the nagios nrpe server on this machine.
The Debian package for this is in two parts:
1. nagios-nrpe-plugin
This is the plugins that are actually used by an nrpe server. If you install this, the nagios monitoring server cannot connect to your freshly build server to monitor things under nrpe.
2. nagios-nrpe-server
This is the actual nrpe server component; the part that listens on the network for the nagios monitoring server to connect and to get it to run the various plugins.
Ok so on your freshly installed, lean mean serving machine (well as lean and mean as a default Debian install can be with the c compilers, ppp et.al.) do;
and be prepared for a shock at what else it wants to bring in.
Its a database server? No webserver required?
TOUGH SHIT!
The Debian package maintainer *decided* that if you want the nagios nrpe server component you also MUST have the nagios server component itself, and this requires a webserver. And thats just one example.
With gentoo I get to set my USE flags according to what *I* want support for.
However I would never consider using gentoo in a production environment. Never. Thats after two years of using it at home.
"The proper response to terrorism isn't self-censorship- it's more and bigger terrorism."
Ahhhhhh so *thats* what Israel has been up to all this time... I thought it was a 'terrorist state' already but this sheds more light on the situation.
Given that more than 51% of Americans *Don't* vote... this organism must what is deterring people from voting, not what is causing the 20% (or so) who do vote to vote in the stupid ways that they do...
Careful, you will start a holy war with talk like that... next it'll be a cartoon featuring a depiction of Jesus Christ making disparaging remarks about Joni Mitchell then there will be flag burning and embassies being assaulted...
Coda though, is especially disasterous; its not production ready unless you happen to be at Carnegie-Mellon University. If you happen to be located there then you have enough support to consider it production ready. Otherwise its just junk. Seriously. I wasted a LOT of time on this.
For one thing, its incredibly inefficient and can't be made more efficient without major refactoring of the code due to extensive debugging code thats liberaly sprinkled throughout it and which can't be turned off.
For another thing, if a client tries to access a file on the server thats larger than the *client* side cache the *server* crashes. Last I heard, this was regarded as 'can't fix won't fix' by the Coda team.
AFS, well I've tried that too and it seems a bit better off but I didn't think that it could be used for a root filesystem in Linux?
GFS? I plan to try this out at some stage when I can get my hands on some surplus servers and time... but it seems to be only really well supported on Redhat?
"Xen can also move live VMs between hardware nodes"
Given shared storage...
So you either have something like fiber channel (vey expensive), iSCSI (doesn't look production-ready on Linux) or NFS root (pity the fool that relies on Linux NFS servers in a production environment).
Any realistic, production-ready, Linux-based shared-storage alternatives that don't cost like a bazillion dollars?
Of course, the UK has a long-standing tradition of this sort of legal shenanigan.
At one time, they didn't make much of a distinction between stealing an entire bakery and stealing a single loaf of bread; in either case they turned you into an Australian...
And now with the anti-terrorism laws, its illegal to possess any information that *might* be useful to a terrorist. I guess they'd turn you into a Cuban for that (ie Guantanamo).
Child porn (of 16 year old girls) vs child porn (of 8 year old girls)? What will they turn you into then? A hillbilly?
Ok, you seem to know what you are talking about.. would you like to give some explanation of the bit in the second book of kings, chapter 2, which on the face of it seems to be about God sending a couple of bears to slaughter 42 children for merely insulting a prophet?
Also, one of the problems with science reporting is that it's largely gee-whiz stuff whose intention is to entertain and alarm
Just as 'sports news' has become 'sports entertainment' so 'science news' becomes 'science entertainment'.
Just as the rugby sevens and the one day cricket have turned sporting events into fancy-dress clown parades, so will go the way of science conferences.
Mark my words; scientists turning up at conference dressed up as Elvis, schoolgirls or king kong hoping to improve their TV ratings.
It'll be the only way to get funding... whats next??
A reality-Science show, made for TV!!!
We'll be reminiscing about the good old days of the 'intelligent design vs evolution' debates!
The rash of Microsoft security problems isn't because it was targeted at the corporate market, it is because it never had a security model to begin with
Not entirely true.
When they started developing applications with the vision that they will only ever be used in the context of a corporate intranet, they let things slip past them.
Example?
Outlook.
I have a CD of Office 97 which includes MS Outlook. This early release of Outlook has NO support for POP or IMAP. None at all; it was intended for use on an MS-based corporate intranet using Exchange server.
The Outlook application was designed from the ground up to be open to whatever scripted content came its way since, *obviously* (so far as the developers were concerned) if an email arrives containing scripting, its intended to be run without bothering the reader (it probably contains some important piece of information overload from your pointy-haired boss).
And there starts the opening for email viruses and trojans.
Later on, MS released updates and enhancements for this version of Outlook allowing it to use POP and IMAP mail services. And hence opened the old pandoras box since now people use Outlook to read email that comes at them from who knows where, and *still* accepts whatever scripted content comes your way.
True, MS have adapted Outlook over the years, but thats where it came from and thats the reason that so many MS applications are such filthy crack-whores. They may have started life as corporate geishas but now they are on the street, as it were.
Indeed, I've often felt like the different so-called 'races' of humankind are really no more than huge extended families. No difference, nothing to see here except family resemblances.
yeah its the way that vegans seem to assume that their dietary regime is somehow supported by arguments that humans are naturally vegan and that meat is really bad for us "because our digestive systems aren't built for it" bullshit that makes me laugh at them hilariously.:)
Its interesting to think of veganism as a high-tech lifestyle though... I doubt many vegans see it that way, but there it is! Without some fairly sophisticated and huge processing and refining factories and highly developed dietary science, its a disaster.
As for not killing, is it really ok to kill bacteria to make, for example, miso?
Personally I don't see how vegans can live with themselves drinking miso soup...;)
Don't forget the big cock-up with the black highlighters...
I mean, who would have thought that using black highlighters could be a mistake? You want to draw attention to some text in a document, highlight it in bold black. Seems perfectly natural...
The fact that this guy actually bent to their will and took the information down is the worst part.
He should have either:
1. Stood up to them and demanded an explanation that *wasn't* vague and disengenuous.
2. Arranged for the information to be hosted in a part of the world that respects free speech. (Assuming such places actually exist any more).
3. (If 2 isn't possible) Arranged for the server to be moved to a basement belonging to some militia group in Wisconsin (for example) who would only be told that it "contains information that Corporate America doesn't want the world to see"
Maybe its just the way that all the vegans that I have ever known have been sickly, pale and weak? And the ones that gave up veganism and started eating meat soon became stronger, more healthy, active and alert?
Just going by observation here... I Am Not A Dietician.
And sure, *these* days all the nutrients you need are surely available through pills and supplements derived from artificial sources or from highly concentrated and processed plant, algae, fungal or bacterial sources... great stuff! Ie: successful veganism depends very much on technology, ie it can't be natural? Maybe?
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a good one
;)
Here are some more...
The diet of the North American brown bat consists principally of bugs.
Sendmail is a software package principally composed of bugs.
or this one...
Bat guano is a good source of ammonium nitrate, a major ingredient in things that can blow up in your face, like sendmail.
If I recall correctly, there is a whole list in 'the unix haters handbook'
"Sendmail is a big program."
;)
When my eyes grazed over your text I initially read that as "Sendmail is a big problem"
Do you know why the "sendmail book" has a bat on the cover?
"material that is harmful to minors"
This is the USA, right? So that would have to include any form of international news media...
Its not so bad though, if it were the UK it would be any kind of knowledge at all...
(You see, I 'have the benefit of an English education')
I've used gentoo a lot at home and debian a lot at work.
Debian really does demonstrate the problems inherent in letting someone else make decisions about what options and dependencies should exist for a piece of software.
To see what I mean, you have a freshly installed debian box you want to monitor with nagios.
So, you want to install the nagios nrpe server on this machine.
The Debian package for this is in two parts:
1. nagios-nrpe-plugin
This is the plugins that are actually used by an nrpe server. If you install this, the nagios monitoring server cannot connect to your freshly build server to monitor things under nrpe.
2. nagios-nrpe-server
This is the actual nrpe server component; the part that listens on the network for the nagios monitoring server to connect and to get it to run the various plugins.
Ok so on your freshly installed, lean mean serving machine (well as lean and mean as a default Debian install can be with the c compilers, ppp et.al.) do;
# apt-get install nagios-nrpe-plugin nagios-nrpe-server
and be prepared for a shock at what else it wants to bring in.
Its a database server? No webserver required?
TOUGH SHIT!
The Debian package maintainer *decided* that if you want the nagios nrpe server component you also MUST have the nagios server component itself, and this requires a webserver. And thats just one example.
With gentoo I get to set my USE flags according to what *I* want support for.
However I would never consider using gentoo in a production environment. Never. Thats after two years of using it at home.
And why not?
Surely any software engineer knows that writing code inevitably introduces bugs into an otherwise perfect algorithm.
The only way to have bug-free software is to not write the code.
Otherwise they would have taken a lesson from their own experience in the 1940s and cranked up the gas chambers by now
"like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead"
-- Colonel Kurtz, circa 1970-something, Cambodia.
"The proper response to terrorism isn't self-censorship- it's more and bigger terrorism."
Ahhhhhh so *thats* what Israel has been up to all this time... I thought it was a 'terrorist state' already but this sheds more light on the situation.
Given that more than 51% of Americans *Don't* vote... this organism must what is deterring people from voting, not what is causing the 20% (or so) who do vote to vote in the stupid ways that they do...
The drug obsession in the U.S. is causing serious financial issues because we are spending increasingly staggering sums on them
Then its about time the U.S. had some sort of 'war on drugs' then, isn't it.
Oh... wait
"Christ, what a load of crap."
Careful, you will start a holy war with talk like that... next it'll be a cartoon featuring a depiction of Jesus Christ making disparaging remarks about Joni Mitchell then there will be flag burning and embassies being assaulted...
Behind my bolt-locked door the Eagle and the Serpent are at war in me,
the Serpent fighting for blind desire, the Eagle for clarity.
What strange prizes these battles bring,
these hectic joys, these weary blues.
Puffed up and strutting when I think I win,
down and shaking when I think I lose.
"Possibly Coda or AFS as well."
I've worked with both, had problems with both.
Coda though, is especially disasterous; its not production ready unless you happen to be at Carnegie-Mellon University. If you happen to be located there then you have enough support to consider it production ready. Otherwise its just junk. Seriously. I wasted a LOT of time on this.
For one thing, its incredibly inefficient and can't be made more efficient without major refactoring of the code due to extensive debugging code thats liberaly sprinkled throughout it and which can't be turned off.
For another thing, if a client tries to access a file on the server thats larger than the *client* side cache the *server* crashes. Last I heard, this was regarded as 'can't fix won't fix' by the Coda team.
AFS, well I've tried that too and it seems a bit better off but I didn't think that it could be used for a root filesystem in Linux?
GFS? I plan to try this out at some stage when I can get my hands on some surplus servers and time... but it seems to be only really well supported on Redhat?
"Xen can also move live VMs between hardware nodes"
Given shared storage...
So you either have something like fiber channel (vey expensive), iSCSI (doesn't look production-ready on Linux) or NFS root (pity the fool that relies on Linux NFS servers in a production environment).
Any realistic, production-ready, Linux-based shared-storage alternatives that don't cost like a bazillion dollars?
Presumably a university located in, say, Guantanamo Bay would have a very relaxed ethics board?
I'm surprised they havn't set one up. Question is, who would be on that board...
But I bet it would have a top notch medical research center
Freaky indeed.
I just don't understand how anyone can take the 'moral superiority' of such an entity seriously...
Its always seemed to me as if the 'god' of the old testament were nothing more than the deciever himself...
Of course, the UK has a long-standing tradition of this sort of legal shenanigan.
At one time, they didn't make much of a distinction between stealing an entire bakery and stealing a single loaf of bread; in either case they turned you into an Australian...
And now with the anti-terrorism laws, its illegal to possess any information that *might* be useful to a terrorist. I guess they'd turn you into a Cuban for that (ie Guantanamo).
Child porn (of 16 year old girls) vs child porn (of 8 year old girls)?
What will they turn you into then? A hillbilly?
Ok, you seem to know what you are talking about.. would you like to give some explanation of the bit in the second book of kings, chapter 2, which on the face of it seems to be about God sending a couple of bears to slaughter 42 children for merely insulting a prophet?
Thanks!
There are not unlimited "fossils" on this planet.
Try telling that to the Alabama or Kansas boards of edumification.
Also, one of the problems with science reporting is that it's largely gee-whiz stuff whose intention is to entertain and alarm
Just as 'sports news' has become 'sports entertainment' so 'science news' becomes 'science entertainment'.
Just as the rugby sevens and the one day cricket have turned sporting events into fancy-dress clown parades, so will go the way of science conferences.
Mark my words; scientists turning up at conference dressed up as Elvis, schoolgirls or king kong hoping to improve their TV ratings.
It'll be the only way to get funding... whats next??
A reality-Science show, made for TV!!!
We'll be reminiscing about the good old days of the 'intelligent design vs evolution' debates!
The rash of Microsoft security problems isn't because it was targeted at the corporate market, it is because it never had a security model to begin with
Not entirely true.
When they started developing applications with the vision that they will only ever be used in the context of a corporate intranet, they let things slip past them.
Example?
Outlook.
I have a CD of Office 97 which includes MS Outlook. This early release of Outlook has NO support for POP or IMAP. None at all; it was intended for use on an MS-based corporate intranet using Exchange server.
The Outlook application was designed from the ground up to be open to whatever scripted content came its way since, *obviously* (so far as the developers were concerned) if an email arrives containing scripting, its intended to be run without bothering the reader (it probably contains some important piece of information overload from your pointy-haired boss).
And there starts the opening for email viruses and trojans.
Later on, MS released updates and enhancements for this version of Outlook allowing it to use POP and IMAP mail services. And hence opened the old pandoras box since now people use Outlook to read email that comes at them from who knows where, and *still* accepts whatever scripted content comes your way.
True, MS have adapted Outlook over the years, but thats where it came from and thats the reason that so many MS applications are such filthy crack-whores. They may have started life as corporate geishas but now they are on the street, as it were.
Indeed, I've often felt like the different so-called 'races' of humankind are really no more than huge extended families. No difference, nothing to see here except family resemblances.
yeah its the way that vegans seem to assume that their dietary regime is somehow supported by arguments that humans are naturally vegan and that meat is really bad for us "because our digestive systems aren't built for it" bullshit that makes me laugh at them hilariously. :)
;)
Its interesting to think of veganism as a high-tech lifestyle though... I doubt many vegans see it that way, but there it is! Without some fairly sophisticated and huge processing and refining factories and highly developed dietary science, its a disaster.
As for not killing, is it really ok to kill bacteria to make, for example, miso?
Personally I don't see how vegans can live with themselves drinking miso soup...
Don't forget the big cock-up with the black highlighters...
I mean, who would have thought that using black highlighters could be a mistake? You want to draw attention to some text in a document, highlight it in bold black. Seems perfectly natural...
The fact that this guy actually bent to their will and took the information down is the worst part.
He should have either:
1. Stood up to them and demanded an explanation that *wasn't* vague and disengenuous.
2. Arranged for the information to be hosted in a part of the world that respects free speech. (Assuming such places actually exist any more).
3. (If 2 isn't possible) Arranged for the server to be moved to a basement belonging to some militia group in Wisconsin (for example) who would only be told that it "contains information that Corporate America doesn't want the world to see"
Maybe its just the way that all the vegans that I have ever known have been sickly, pale and weak? And the ones that gave up veganism and started eating meat soon became stronger, more healthy, active and alert?
Just going by observation here... I Am Not A Dietician.
And sure, *these* days all the nutrients you need are surely available through pills and supplements derived from artificial sources or from highly concentrated and processed plant, algae, fungal or bacterial sources... great stuff! Ie: successful veganism depends very much on technology, ie it can't be natural? Maybe?