Well, yeah, I sort of knew about this, though not to this detail. I'm not positive it's worth getting too bent about. It certainly does raise some questions:
1)If you own a TV in the UK, can you receive any broadcast programming other than the BBC? 2)Is cable service available there? 3)If cable is available, do the cable companies build the BBC channels in on their feed and then bill you (and presumably pay the BBC; you wouldn't have to twice), or if not can you tell the BBC to piss off because you don't watch them (showing your cable bill in explanation of your tele)? 4)Does any of this change if you can show you aren't using any broadcast functionality? Like, if it's plugged into your playstation, and when the BBC guys come in you show them that there's no antenna plugged in and the channels don't come in at all? 5)Do they sell TV's without broadcast capability? Owners of which the BBC presumably wouldn't harrass? 6)This local oscillator thingie...is that specific to CRT's? 7)Is the local oscillator specific to broadcast reception? (Would the hypothetical brodcastless TV's get picked up by the wardriving BBC guys?) 8)Is the local oscillator part of the tuner? Like, would a "monitor" that had inputs for rca/component/svideo/etc. qualify, if it didn't have a tuner? Could you plug an LCD projector into a digital cable box and not pay the BBC? 9)Are radios that pick up TV band sold in the UK? Are they taxed? Do they have local oscillators?
Oh wait, they DID find banned weapons which Iraq was destroying (or not since they apparently had SOME that were ready to fire at us when the invasion began).
Huh? Iraq fired WMD's at us? When was this?
I don't think anyone truely believed that Iraq was clean. We found out later that they weren't.
When did we find this out? When we utterly failed to find any evidence of any WMD programs? I'm having trouble reconciling what you've said with reality...my guess is you actually meant to type: "I don't think anyone truly believed that the Administration was clean. We found out later that they weren't."
But perhaps there is a solution that could kill two bird with one stone: make Linux-systems deliberately incompatible with Windows by supplying them with a legacy-free OpenFirmware-implementation, such as OpenBIOS
Well, it's an interesting idea. I would be worried about hardware compatibility with the OpenBIOS, and of course you couldn't expect MS to keep Windows incompatible with that standard if anyone actually started using it. Don't forget, while they'd like to see all these users pay for the OS, they would much rather have them running pirate Windows than Linux.
Thank god! I was wondering how many pages of inane suggestions as to what might be wrong (video drivers? seriously?) before encountering the first right one: "Dude, your monitor's busted."
Great. So now the cell-phone makers jump at the chance to enroll in the antivirus racket. These assholes perpetuate the threats and charge by the day for mobster-style "protection." And we're all supposed to eat it with a spoon.
I just wanted to get into this, because it seems like a lot of people are missing an important point.
Sure, it's true, nothing is 100% secure, or at least nothing worthwhile is. You can put an unpatched SQL server on this quantum network and it won't matter that no one can sniff the network. I'll go back to a quote I remember wrong, and will (possibly wrongly) attribute to some openssl documentation: "SSL does not make your application secure. SSL only protects your application's network connections from eavesdropping."
It's not the same thing. The person who said Breaking quantum encryption would most likely net you a Nobel Prize in Physics, since it implies breaking QM. I guess was right...but his larger point, that this was a sea-change in overall security, was wrong.
This does tremendously raise the bar for network-layer security. It means a network that can unquestionably be trusted to be free from sniffing. Yet this is not a security panacea. We have had very good security of this variety (or emulating it) for some time. However, it is important that we keep going forward with it; note the slashdot story last week about SSL being declared insufficient for the truly hardcore.
In other words, this is a major breakthrough for secure local transmissions...but not so much for security in general.
uCLinux and Linux proper are different kernels. They share some code, obviously, but it's more than likely that so do the CE and XP kernels, and it will be somewhat tricky to show that one way or the other....
Error messages have always been more helpful for core applications with the exception of XFree86...
BWahaha! Yeah, those fuckers. I can picture them, sitting there writing the error logging routines, going, "Dude, make that error more general. We want them to sweat some here. Do you want them to appreciate what we're doing here, or not?"
And I'm sitting there, looking at "Module failed to load." Fuck you guys!
(In reality, I have something of a love-hate relationship with X. For some reason, I get off on fixing it when it gives me shit. But I'll be the first to admit it can be a serious bitch.)
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when the same app releases an update for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times.
Come now. Do you honestly not see how silly that reads? I'm just going to do a quick phrase substitution:
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when someone makes a package for me for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times.
Seriously! It's the same thing! Either way, somebody is making a package for you!
Dude, you got horribly ripped off. This might have been the best post in the whole thread Cereal started, and no mods were looking. Well, except for me, and I can't spend them after I've posted.
If the goal is to have an OS/distro that will compete with Windows and OSX, then the OS/distro will have to accommodate the millions (or Billions, even) who will view Linux through Windows-trained eyes.
Agreed. However, since this isn't the goal, your point is moot.
Windows CE is only Windows by name. It's a completely different codebase, running on completely different processors.
Well, I've never seen the CE or XP codebase....but do you really think they are that much more different than, say, a uCLinux distribution and RedHat Advanced Server?
OK, all I'm proposing is that certain guidelines be followed in the spirit of mutual compatibility and platform-neutrality. That IN NO WAY hinders you, jusdisgi, from altering your distribution to do whatever wacky crap you feel necessary.
What if my "whacky crap" includes wanting all my software to be compiled from source with the options I choose? That will certainly not be OK for folks who desire quick and resource-friendly installation. Woops, suddenly we just broke package compatibility. What if I want to run the latest kernel and glibc, but other, more conservative, distro maintainers want to keep 2.4 and an older glibc? Whoa...that glibc part is going to break a whole shitload of compatibility.
It just is not feasible at all to make all distributions binary-compatible. It just isn't. That's why we have distributions in the first place, and that's why they occupy different niches. And frankly, that's what makes the whole family of systems so powerful.
It's also interesting that you start to make the right point, that about the availability of certain tools, like cd and grep. I wish you hadn't chosen bash, because I have a few servers that only have tcsh installed, but whatever. The point is the right one, you just don't see it.....standards are great for giving things base-level functionality. They ensure that I can scp a file from any of my halfway-*nix-esque systems to any of them. They ensure that my Windows-using clients can pull email from my FreeBSD mailserver. They do lots of great shit. BUT THEY DON'T GOVERN EVERY PART OF ANY SYSTEM, AND THEY SHOULDN'T!!!! To make every part of every system conform to standards would be to force the existence of only one system....and no one OS is going to make everybody happy, ever.
There is that level of standardization; it's called LSB (Linux Standards Base). Furthermore, this is a fictional problem...the minor differences in where distro's put things don't cause upheaval when other things are installed, because they are designed to be configurable and find things in different spots. Typically the installer script (or makefile, or configure script, or whatever is being used) just takes care of that for you. Not only that, but it's not even different from Windows, where installers ask you where you want to install things. I could choose differently than you....but things will still work. Same here; I don't think I have ever had an installation fail because the installing package had its dependency in the "wrong place." Perhaps if you have actually had that problem you could be more specific about it?
What's even better is the fact that there's "one" FreeBSD...
Uh...surely you jest. After all, there's only "one" Gentoo. But, like there are different Linux distributions, there are different BSD distributions also. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. They don't all work the same way any more than Linux distributions do, and the fact that there are simply fewer of them doesn't really make much of a difference. Well, except of course that it means there's a whole hell of a lot less developer talent pushing BSD forward.
Aren't you about done with this pointless bitching? Or at least done having me whip all your alleged arguments?
(btw to anyone who cares...I really dig FreeBSD too; not quite the way I love Gentoo, but not far off)
If I can find a package for one but not the other...
Damn it! I asked if your distro's lacked packages you need. You said no. And then you went right back to saying this bullshit in italics. For fuck's sake, you yourself just said you don't have that problem (i.e. that both distros have what you need). So shut the fuck up about it already.
1)Your experience with Linux 5 years ago is probably not too relevant. Considering my experiences during that period, I would say "probably" may not be a strong enough word.
2)Your FreeBSD experience doesn't really count either, as it's not Linux...but on the other hand, is there really anything that ports isn't giving you?
3)Are you actually claiming that Red Hat Advanced Server and SuSE 9.1 lack packages for things you need? Or that you have actually experienced serious dependency problems on them? Because I'm not buying that.
It still sounds like you are waging a personal war against package management. If you are out there refusing to use the tools the distros gave you, installing RPMs from a bunch of sources and source tarballs for stuff that you could be installing with a single command, it's not surprising that you run into problems.
All I'm saying is if you actually do run Linux, and you are having these kind of problems, you are really doing something bad wrong. I take care of a bunch of machines on several distributions, I know lots of people who do the same, and neither dependencies nor distribution incompatibilities are live problems. We just don't see them.
Yep, I'd have to agree. I don't ever recall having the.dll problems in Windows (though I'm sure it's been problematic for some folks) and haven't had a meaningful dependency problem in Linux in years. Once upon a time it was bad (like, when I started with Linux, on Red Hat 5.2), but these days with any of the popular distros you just won't see it.
I did have a problem with a FreeBSD port last week complaining it needed a version of Perl which was actually already installed...quite surprising, as that was the first time I'd ever seen the ports collection mess up a dep. As it turned out though, there's a script you have to run to choose your "active" version of Perl or whatever, and that just fixed it. So I'm not sure that really counts either.
Anyway, I think it's pretty weird that the discussion on this article has been entirely focused on dependency issues, and bitching about Linux package management. Has anyone here RTFAed?
You just can't get over wanting it to be just like Windows. That's your own problem, not Linux's. In particular, you're stuck to the software model where you go "get an installer and run it." That's really not the model most Linux distributions use at all, and in my opinion and that of a lot of people who use Linux, it's an inferior model to boot. Instead, most Linux distributions manage your software for you. You don't go download a Fedora RPM on Gentoo, because that would be silly. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't work (and by the way, lots of packages would work fine)....why would you ever want to do that when you could just use one command and have Gentoo use the Gentoo package? It just doesn't matter whether a package works from one distribution to the next...just use the package manager that came with your distro, and you'll be just fine.
The point is that we just don't install software the way Windows people do. But our way is extremely powerful, and once you're comfortable with it, it's actually easier than downloading and installing stuff in Windows. And that's true across a very large subset of distributions...pretty much every one that's not unabashedly experts-only.
So just come off it. You clearly don't have the familiarity needed to make these judgements; in fact, your completely uninformed assumption that Fedora and Debian were the only distros with a decent package collection makes me wonder whether you have even used Linux at all...certainly I suspect you haven't used enough distributions for any appreciable length of time to warrant all your whining about how different they all are. You just sound to me like somebody who has a set idea of a problem, and want to come on/. and bitch up a storm about it without even bothering to find out whether it's fixable, or even a real problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only Redhat and Debian that have large sets of packages, right?
Ok, I'm going to correct you, because you're wrong. Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, Lindows, Xandros, and probably lots more distros have truly massive package collections. I use Gentoo primarily, and there are thousands of ebuilds out there; the only things I've installed without using emerge were little obscure scripts and such which aren't typically packaged at all beyond source.
Also, if you want the ultimate Linux in general installation procedure, here it is:
tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz
cd foo ./configure
make
make install
Source tarballs aren't as scary as people make them out to be...and they typically work across distributions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, I sort of knew about this, though not to this detail. I'm not positive it's worth getting too bent about. It certainly does raise some questions:
1)If you own a TV in the UK, can you receive any broadcast programming other than the BBC?
2)Is cable service available there?
3)If cable is available, do the cable companies build the BBC channels in on their feed and then bill you (and presumably pay the BBC; you wouldn't have to twice), or if not can you tell the BBC to piss off because you don't watch them (showing your cable bill in explanation of your tele)?
4)Does any of this change if you can show you aren't using any broadcast functionality? Like, if it's plugged into your playstation, and when the BBC guys come in you show them that there's no antenna plugged in and the channels don't come in at all?
5)Do they sell TV's without broadcast capability? Owners of which the BBC presumably wouldn't harrass?
6)This local oscillator thingie...is that specific to CRT's?
7)Is the local oscillator specific to broadcast reception? (Would the hypothetical brodcastless TV's get picked up by the wardriving BBC guys?)
8)Is the local oscillator part of the tuner? Like, would a "monitor" that had inputs for rca/component/svideo/etc. qualify, if it didn't have a tuner? Could you plug an LCD projector into a digital cable box and not pay the BBC?
9)Are radios that pick up TV band sold in the UK? Are they taxed? Do they have local oscillators?
Sure...but the trick is you need hardware vendor support. Which you probably aren't going to get, unless Microsoft is getting involved.
Makes you wonder how it took law enforcement that long to think of this.
No, not really. I'm pretty sure the cops figured out google a while ago, all around the world. It's just that its successful use is not fucking news!
What it really makes me wonder is what on earth these guys at CNN were on when they decided to run this.
Oh wait, they DID find banned weapons which Iraq was destroying (or not since they apparently had SOME that were ready to fire at us when the invasion began).
Huh? Iraq fired WMD's at us? When was this?
I don't think anyone truely believed that Iraq was clean. We found out later that they weren't.
When did we find this out? When we utterly failed to find any evidence of any WMD programs? I'm having trouble reconciling what you've said with reality...my guess is you actually meant to type: "I don't think anyone truly believed that the Administration was clean. We found out later that they weren't."
Yep...that's got to be it.
But perhaps there is a solution that could kill two bird with one stone: make Linux-systems deliberately incompatible with Windows by supplying them with a legacy-free OpenFirmware-implementation, such as OpenBIOS
Well, it's an interesting idea. I would be worried about hardware compatibility with the OpenBIOS, and of course you couldn't expect MS to keep Windows incompatible with that standard if anyone actually started using it. Don't forget, while they'd like to see all these users pay for the OS, they would much rather have them running pirate Windows than Linux.
Thank god! I was wondering how many pages of inane suggestions as to what might be wrong (video drivers? seriously?) before encountering the first right one: "Dude, your monitor's busted."
Great. So now the cell-phone makers jump at the chance to enroll in the antivirus racket. These assholes perpetuate the threats and charge by the day for mobster-style "protection." And we're all supposed to eat it with a spoon.
Fuck these guys.
I just wanted to get into this, because it seems like a lot of people are missing an important point.
Sure, it's true, nothing is 100% secure, or at least nothing worthwhile is. You can put an unpatched SQL server on this quantum network and it won't matter that no one can sniff the network. I'll go back to a quote I remember wrong, and will (possibly wrongly) attribute to some openssl documentation: "SSL does not make your application secure. SSL only protects your application's network connections from eavesdropping."
It's not the same thing. The person who said Breaking quantum encryption would most likely net you a Nobel Prize in Physics, since it implies breaking QM. I guess was right...but his larger point, that this was a sea-change in overall security, was wrong.
This does tremendously raise the bar for network-layer security. It means a network that can unquestionably be trusted to be free from sniffing. Yet this is not a security panacea. We have had very good security of this variety (or emulating it) for some time. However, it is important that we keep going forward with it; note the slashdot story last week about SSL being declared insufficient for the truly hardcore.
In other words, this is a major breakthrough for secure local transmissions...but not so much for security in general.
uCLinux and Linux proper are different kernels. They share some code, obviously, but it's more than likely that so do the CE and XP kernels, and it will be somewhat tricky to show that one way or the other....
Error messages have always been more helpful for core applications with the exception of XFree86...
BWahaha! Yeah, those fuckers. I can picture them, sitting there writing the error logging routines, going, "Dude, make that error more general. We want them to sweat some here. Do you want them to appreciate what we're doing here, or not?"
And I'm sitting there, looking at "Module failed to load." Fuck you guys!
(In reality, I have something of a love-hate relationship with X. For some reason, I get off on fixing it when it gives me shit. But I'll be the first to admit it can be a serious bitch.)
If there are still any Mandrake users that haven't found this, go here.
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when the same app releases an update for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times.
Come now. Do you honestly not see how silly that reads? I'm just going to do a quick phrase substitution:
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when someone makes a package for me for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times.
Seriously! It's the same thing! Either way, somebody is making a package for you!
Dude, you got horribly ripped off. This might have been the best post in the whole thread Cereal started, and no mods were looking. Well, except for me, and I can't spend them after I've posted.
Sucks, man.
If the goal is to have an OS/distro that will compete with Windows and OSX, then the OS/distro will have to accommodate the millions (or Billions, even) who will view Linux through Windows-trained eyes.
Agreed. However, since this isn't the goal, your point is moot.
...you can't get a Toyota Tercel engine and expect to put it in a Toyota Celica...
Perhaps not...but you can put a porsche 911 engine in a VW Beetle!
Windows CE is only Windows by name. It's a completely different codebase, running on completely different processors.
Well, I've never seen the CE or XP codebase....but do you really think they are that much more different than, say, a uCLinux distribution and RedHat Advanced Server?
OK, all I'm proposing is that certain guidelines be followed in the spirit of mutual compatibility and platform-neutrality. That IN NO WAY hinders you, jusdisgi, from altering your distribution to do whatever wacky crap you feel necessary.
What if my "whacky crap" includes wanting all my software to be compiled from source with the options I choose? That will certainly not be OK for folks who desire quick and resource-friendly installation. Woops, suddenly we just broke package compatibility. What if I want to run the latest kernel and glibc, but other, more conservative, distro maintainers want to keep 2.4 and an older glibc? Whoa...that glibc part is going to break a whole shitload of compatibility.
It just is not feasible at all to make all distributions binary-compatible. It just isn't. That's why we have distributions in the first place, and that's why they occupy different niches. And frankly, that's what makes the whole family of systems so powerful.
It's also interesting that you start to make the right point, that about the availability of certain tools, like cd and grep. I wish you hadn't chosen bash, because I have a few servers that only have tcsh installed, but whatever. The point is the right one, you just don't see it.....standards are great for giving things base-level functionality. They ensure that I can scp a file from any of my halfway-*nix-esque systems to any of them. They ensure that my Windows-using clients can pull email from my FreeBSD mailserver. They do lots of great shit. BUT THEY DON'T GOVERN EVERY PART OF ANY SYSTEM, AND THEY SHOULDN'T!!!! To make every part of every system conform to standards would be to force the existence of only one system....and no one OS is going to make everybody happy, ever.
There is that level of standardization; it's called LSB (Linux Standards Base). Furthermore, this is a fictional problem...the minor differences in where distro's put things don't cause upheaval when other things are installed, because they are designed to be configurable and find things in different spots. Typically the installer script (or makefile, or configure script, or whatever is being used) just takes care of that for you. Not only that, but it's not even different from Windows, where installers ask you where you want to install things. I could choose differently than you....but things will still work. Same here; I don't think I have ever had an installation fail because the installing package had its dependency in the "wrong place." Perhaps if you have actually had that problem you could be more specific about it?
What's even better is the fact that there's "one" FreeBSD...
Uh...surely you jest. After all, there's only "one" Gentoo. But, like there are different Linux distributions, there are different BSD distributions also. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. They don't all work the same way any more than Linux distributions do, and the fact that there are simply fewer of them doesn't really make much of a difference. Well, except of course that it means there's a whole hell of a lot less developer talent pushing BSD forward.
Aren't you about done with this pointless bitching? Or at least done having me whip all your alleged arguments?
(btw to anyone who cares...I really dig FreeBSD too; not quite the way I love Gentoo, but not far off)
If I can find a package for one but not the other...
Damn it! I asked if your distro's lacked packages you need. You said no. And then you went right back to saying this bullshit in italics. For fuck's sake, you yourself just said you don't have that problem (i.e. that both distros have what you need). So shut the fuck up about it already.
Seems I heard someplace that software was one of only two industries that referred to clients as "users"...anybody guess the other one?
1)Your experience with Linux 5 years ago is probably not too relevant. Considering my experiences during that period, I would say "probably" may not be a strong enough word.
2)Your FreeBSD experience doesn't really count either, as it's not Linux...but on the other hand, is there really anything that ports isn't giving you?
3)Are you actually claiming that Red Hat Advanced Server and SuSE 9.1 lack packages for things you need? Or that you have actually experienced serious dependency problems on them? Because I'm not buying that.
It still sounds like you are waging a personal war against package management. If you are out there refusing to use the tools the distros gave you, installing RPMs from a bunch of sources and source tarballs for stuff that you could be installing with a single command, it's not surprising that you run into problems.
All I'm saying is if you actually do run Linux, and you are having these kind of problems, you are really doing something bad wrong. I take care of a bunch of machines on several distributions, I know lots of people who do the same, and neither dependencies nor distribution incompatibilities are live problems. We just don't see them.
Yep, I'd have to agree. I don't ever recall having the .dll problems in Windows (though I'm sure it's been problematic for some folks) and haven't had a meaningful dependency problem in Linux in years. Once upon a time it was bad (like, when I started with Linux, on Red Hat 5.2), but these days with any of the popular distros you just won't see it.
I did have a problem with a FreeBSD port last week complaining it needed a version of Perl which was actually already installed...quite surprising, as that was the first time I'd ever seen the ports collection mess up a dep. As it turned out though, there's a script you have to run to choose your "active" version of Perl or whatever, and that just fixed it. So I'm not sure that really counts either.
Anyway, I think it's pretty weird that the discussion on this article has been entirely focused on dependency issues, and bitching about Linux package management. Has anyone here RTFAed?
You just can't get over wanting it to be just like Windows. That's your own problem, not Linux's. In particular, you're stuck to the software model where you go "get an installer and run it." That's really not the model most Linux distributions use at all, and in my opinion and that of a lot of people who use Linux, it's an inferior model to boot. Instead, most Linux distributions manage your software for you. You don't go download a Fedora RPM on Gentoo, because that would be silly. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't work (and by the way, lots of packages would work fine)....why would you ever want to do that when you could just use one command and have Gentoo use the Gentoo package? It just doesn't matter whether a package works from one distribution to the next...just use the package manager that came with your distro, and you'll be just fine.
The point is that we just don't install software the way Windows people do. But our way is extremely powerful, and once you're comfortable with it, it's actually easier than downloading and installing stuff in Windows. And that's true across a very large subset of distributions...pretty much every one that's not unabashedly experts-only.
So just come off it. You clearly don't have the familiarity needed to make these judgements; in fact, your completely uninformed assumption that Fedora and Debian were the only distros with a decent package collection makes me wonder whether you have even used Linux at all...certainly I suspect you haven't used enough distributions for any appreciable length of time to warrant all your whining about how different they all are. You just sound to me like somebody who has a set idea of a problem, and want to come on /. and bitch up a storm about it without even bothering to find out whether it's fixable, or even a real problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only Redhat and Debian that have large sets of packages, right?
Ok, I'm going to correct you, because you're wrong. Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, Lindows, Xandros, and probably lots more distros have truly massive package collections. I use Gentoo primarily, and there are thousands of ebuilds out there; the only things I've installed without using emerge were little obscure scripts and such which aren't typically packaged at all beyond source.
Also, if you want the ultimate Linux in general installation procedure, here it is:
tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz
./configure
cd foo
make
make install
Source tarballs aren't as scary as people make them out to be...and they typically work across distributions.