- As a European, I feel I must inform those in the US that the ID theory does *not* have any following to speak of outside the
United States. Even in the United States I believe it's only the fundamentalist christians that seem to think it has any merit, could be wrong, I don't take polls there.
- I feel this theory and it's arguments were specially fabricated for religious purposes which I find worse then appalling.
- There are many examples of people thinking outside the box and being right in the end, I must regret to inform the proponents of
the ID theory that it is neither thinking out of the box (it was inspired by organized religion) nor does it serve any
purpose after looking at Darwins theories and applying Occam's razor.
- I'm sorry to see so much time wasted in the US by retorting this theory time and again while media keep digging it up again.
- I'm sorry to see so many children being fed bullshit during science classes in the US.
I call on everyone to googlebomb the phrase "Intelligent design" to the parent of this post by Ckwop who imo gave the perfect explanation on the situation which is perfectly clear.
Yeah, too bad all that "free" stuff is below human shit in terms of quality.
You might want to check out why people are trying to convince you of that. 'Cause to me, someone living there and enjoying said benefits, it sounds like horse manure at the very least, and an immensely dumb generalization as well. Fed to you by your republican overlords PR agency perhaps?
Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.
Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.
My *proffessional* experience with their products have been nothing short of disappointing, all the advantages that Linux has, like flexibility and standardisation, RH has eliminated them one by one with their stringent support policies and nothing less then time consuming and awkward ways of keeping machines updated. They don't even guarantee API compatibility within major releases so I can't even update machines without testing the updates first.
I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" argument but why would I go through all the aformentioned trouble when there a distro like Debian does guarentee API compatibility within major releases, can do security updates automatically without any worries, and is commercially supported by multiple companies as well? In every way I can think of it their commercial server products feel antiquated and awkward to administer.
IMNSHO The products RH sells have nothing in common with Linux and the reason why it got so popular in the first place.
Yes, redhat has a webbased update page, but you can do it semi-automatically as well now. Doesn't work as good as with some other distro's in my experience.
Debian and Gentoo have built software management policies right into their core system. Just click on update and let the machine take care of itself. All annoying dependency stuff gets taken care off by itself and security updates can be scheduled to run automatically.
I don't see any correlation between us stopping with CFC's and the ozone hole getting smaller *compared* to the measurements dating back oh... 5 years or so!
We don't know jack shit about the cycles in our atmosphere, stating that there is a correlation shows you're not dealing with this objectively.
It's the same as with all these people claiming catastrophic temperature changes in the near future.
Yes, they might happen, but face it temperature on this planet doesn't have a baseline, if you check the data from the records we kept the last few hundred years and the clues we discovered in the antarctic ice there's only one conclusion. Temperature averages wobble all over the place and it's been that way all the friggin' time!
Hans Bakker was the organizer of several NE2000 camps. Ne2000 is a yearly event where about 200 people show up with their tents/campers/caravans and plug into the network, it's a fairly open source oriented happening. I've seen and spoken Hans around there although I wasn't a close friend of him or anything. He has also participated in several open source projects.
The people involved in this car accident are all from the same fairly big group of "young" open source fans in The Netherlands that keep contact with each other over IRC and also IRL. Therefore I'm not surprised that this story was submitted by several readers. I hope this explains why it is important, I know I was shocked and saddened by the loss.
Re:It's pretty amazing when you think about it.
on
Making Tracks on Mars
·
· Score: 1
I know we can all go into a big flam^H^H^H^Hdebate about the state of american elections and the positions many americans are taking behind the democratic and republican parties.
But we don't seem to be getting anywhere, so I searched my browser history a bit and found this gem:
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/aflevering en/18247440/
(click the link under "Video" on the right side)
It's a dutch documentary, but over 75% is in english and subtitled in dutch. It's a great piece with a balanced view on democracy in this time and I feel a lot of Americans can learn a few things about the European perspective that you can find a lot here on/. (I will likely post this again since this article is almost dead).
And what should we do with all those people who have microphones and stuff to hook them up to...
In all its absurdity this plan is even dumber then it looks, the only guys who will own recording equipment will be the bad guys.
Oh Wait...
I've installed 10s, maybe 100s of debian boxes and never had any problem with the installer. It's short, logical and to the point. It's 15 minutes of work to do partitioning, basic hardware config and bootstrapping, reboot, select the packages you need, let it update and pur for a while. Depending on your net connection and cpu/ram/hd speed you're done in about 45 minutes. If you have real problems with the installer you should ask yourself if Debian's the right distro for you, maybe something that hides the complexity (as you see it) like Knoppix or Lindows is better for you.
Since I'm posting anyway, could people please stop making a fuss about Debian's release cycle!? I've been using Debian for over 5 years now and you know what? I don't care *one flying fuck* about new releases or version numbers. My software gets updated every single day and I really don't care if someone has bothered to bump up the major release version or not.
Actually i think my "demands" as you call them are very realistic, I'm just asking them to support the linux *kernel* on their hardware. I don't give a rats ass which distro anyone is going to run on it.
HP manufactures hardware, they only have to certify their hardware against the kernel. All other distro specific things can be supported by the distro builders themselves. I'm not asking for distro X support, I'm asking them to support the kernel in it's pure form, not some modified redhat or suse kernel but the plain vanilla linux kernel. If rh or suse make modifications to the kernel source *they* should have to support that, not HP or anyone else!.
My experience with the Linux offerings from HP is that they don't really mean Linux, but just RedHat or SUSE. I spoke with one of their european account managers a few weeks ago concerning their blade server solutions and basicly, if I wasn't going to run RH or SUSE on their hardware they couldn't offer support or anything. Since both redhat and suse don't meet our needs (not without rebuilding the kernels that came with them - thus voiding support responsibility) there's no choice at all.
It's the vendor lockin story all over *again*. I have no doubt that they will try to approach the desktop market in the same way. At least until HP proves me wrong and announces support for the linux *kernel* and promises at least a best effort policy on the different distros.
Now this is just my experience with HP, a talk with IBM went much smoother and their bladeservers are already on their way, just have to install debian on them and I'm all set. (yay! got to mention debian afterall!)
Speaking as an admin for some 130 linux boxes in The Netherlands I can assure SCO that they will be wasting their time. Mr. McBride can go and stick his license where the sun don't shine.
The second they start spewing their bullshit over here I will not be surprised when they get sued for slander (like in Germany), I know of several companies over here that are already preparing a combined legal strategy in case SCO starts getting uppity. There are a lot of large hosting providers and ISP's/ASP's around Amsterdam who rely heavily on Linux, there's no way they will allow SCO to intterrupt their business.
Actually, I can't wait for SCO to enter the justice system, dutch courts are very wary of corporate greed at the moment.
This claim from netcraft bugged me since the first time I read it when it was linked to the last sco story. Let's spend some time debunking it.
Let us assume that the resolution of netcrafts measurements has a resolution of 1 minute, hell, make it 10 seconds. How long do you think it takes for an average zombie machine to start churning out syn packets at full speed? I'd say after maybe a second or two, and I'm being generous. There's a >90% chance the zombies are all recieving commands through IRC or a similar set-up, this adds maybe 2 to 3 seconds to the response time. All in all it's fair to assume that within 5 seconds of the attackers push of the button all zombies will be spewing syn packets at their maximum rate.
So in conclusion; Any attacker with a sufficient amount of zombies can push an amount of traffic into any network enough to saturate its bandwidth contraints within a mere *5* seconds. There is no reason *at all* why an attack like this should always look like a slow (1 - 10 minute) degradation of network performance, it can be done close to instantanious.
Of course depending on your relation with your backbone provider you can always try to block it higher-up. Although, don't be surprised when some attackers actually saturate gigabit links...
Actually the file tranfer part of kazaa (and a few other p2p apps) works according to the http 1.1 specs. So in some way it is a "Web site", just not on port 80 and no clue about anything besides the GET command.
This is very difficult to respond to, because your analysis of the issues and of the reasons for the Open Source community's anger is, in the words of the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, "so bad it's not even wrong."
But of course we all know Wolfgang Pauli actually said:
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." --Wolfgang Pauli
But other than that it seems to be ok:P
ps. I actually got this quote after logging in on a linux 2.6test3 machine which greets with a random fortune, just after I read the article. It's a sign... I know it:P
As far as I know this is the only way to minimize the delay to something between 20ms and a whole second.
You could try something like Helix from real but you will experience a delay anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Mainly because the player wants to have a buffer to buy time if the network craps out. Probably every streaming technology has this but maybe there's one who can cope without needing a buffer.
If I put RedHat9 next to Windows Server 2003 I have significantly more updates to apply to my Linux box.
As I mentioned earlier, the amount of patches doesn't matter. Patches are here to stay and we can't avoid them. I don't really care what the public's perception is about the amount of patches, if we start taking that into consideration we'll get to MS's level of security soon enough. The amount of open source software you get with any single distribution is mind boggling, you simply can't go around telling everybody to wait with their patches until the holy trinity of say, suse, debian and redhat give the ok to incorporate all fixes in a single patch released every three months... That would be lunacy...
As I see it patch management is already under control in the linux community, just take a look at how debian does that or even gentoo. It's already been figured out for years.
There's only one way to look good in patch management, and that is making sure that the patches are authentic, not introducing new problems and actually fix the problem. The linux community does this by peer review, testing and hashes to ensure that everything is ok. MS is trying to do something with "trusted computing" which is all about doing the same thing but only at a much higher price. I can see MS having a bit of a PR problem there so there's no real need to worry about this whole thing now is there?
For one thing I don't care how many patches my OS needs. Patches won't just go away, rather they seem to be an integral part of *any* OS there is.
And the thing is, most Linux (or *bsd) user and admins are all perfectly aware of that fact.
I just want to be sure the patch is on time, that it works, doesn't fuck something else up and doesn't introduce new vulnerabilities. Frankly I dont think MS can really guarantee any of the above.
Debian has more than 10 updates listed just for August alone, almost all buffer-overflows.
And how many of these were in the kernel? Please understand that debian releases much more code and software than microsoft does with their OS and personally I'm not to worried about a buffer overflow in something obscure that I have never even thought about installing. And even then there's always the simple solution of running apt-get which fixes all your patch problems like magic...
Anyone want me to go on? Because I could. Remember the filesystem-corrupting kernel "turkey" release? Heck, 2.4.x was riddled with problems its entire run. But that doesn't matter when we've got hatred to burn on Microsoft, right? Sigh.
Ok, so 2.4.x wasn't the best, but to say it was all bad would be complete nonsense. Why do you seem to be trying very hard to over-generalize? Of course there are people posting anti-ms things but it's not like the whole story thread is littered with those posts... this is slashdot what do you expect?
I got problems with MS, sure, but I fixed that problem by simply not using it and it has been working out pretty good for the last 5 years or so. You don't see me trolling slashdot about it... (wait, I just did?)
Show me a distro that doesn't hide the whole kernel updating process and just works, and I'll show you a distro for proffessionals!
This whole madness of the kernel building proces being to hard for the average user is a non-topic. Do you ever see a windows user compile the new redmond kernel? MS doesn't think anyone is qualified enough to make decisions about the exact kernel config so they just make one monolithic kernel that works for everyone. Popular Linux distro's like RH and SuSe do the same thing, but at least you still have the choice to do it yourself!!!
It's one of the reasons I run Linux, I'm in complete control to build a kernel that is perfectly suited for a specific task, or I can just build a kernel which will run on just about every x86 machine ever made. It's about CHOICE people, and MS simply can't give you any even if they wanted to because the only reason for their existance is their closed source code.
Slashdot Mirror
My thoughts on Intelligent Design then:
6 &cid=12406089
- As a European, I feel I must inform those in the US that the ID theory does *not* have any following to speak of outside the
United States. Even in the United States I believe it's only the fundamentalist christians that seem to think it has any merit, could be wrong, I don't take polls there.
- I feel this theory and it's arguments were specially fabricated for religious purposes which I find worse then appalling.
- There are many examples of people thinking outside the box and being right in the end, I must regret to inform the proponents of
the ID theory that it is neither thinking out of the box (it was inspired by organized religion) nor does it serve any
purpose after looking at Darwins theories and applying Occam's razor.
- I'm sorry to see so much time wasted in the US by retorting this theory time and again while media keep digging it up again.
- I'm sorry to see so many children being fed bullshit during science classes in the US.
I call on everyone to googlebomb the phrase "Intelligent design" to the parent of this post by Ckwop who imo gave the perfect explanation on the
situation which is perfectly clear.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14804
Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.
Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.
My *proffessional* experience with their products have been nothing short of disappointing, all the advantages that Linux has, like flexibility and standardisation, RH has eliminated them one by one with their stringent support policies and nothing less then time consuming and awkward ways of keeping machines updated. They don't even guarantee API compatibility within major releases so I can't even update machines without testing the updates first. I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" argument but why would I go through all the aformentioned trouble when there a distro like Debian does guarentee API compatibility within major releases, can do security updates automatically without any worries, and is commercially supported by multiple companies as well? In every way I can think of it their commercial server products feel antiquated and awkward to administer.
IMNSHO The products RH sells have nothing in common with Linux and the reason why it got so popular in the first place.
Yes, redhat has a webbased update page, but you can do it semi-automatically as well now. Doesn't work as good as with some other distro's in my experience.
Debian and Gentoo have built software management policies right into their core system. Just click on update and let the machine take care of itself. All annoying dependency stuff gets taken care off by itself and security updates can be scheduled to run automatically.
Running untrusted code can result in system compromise.
Everyone checks the gpg signatures right?
I don't see any correlation between us stopping with CFC's and the ozone hole getting smaller *compared* to the measurements dating back oh... 5 years or so!
We don't know jack shit about the cycles in our atmosphere, stating that there is a correlation shows you're not dealing with this objectively.
It's the same as with all these people claiming catastrophic temperature changes in the near future.
Yes, they might happen, but face it temperature on this planet doesn't have a baseline, if you check the data from the records we kept the last few hundred years and the clues we discovered in the antarctic ice there's only one conclusion. Temperature averages wobble all over the place and it's been that way all the friggin' time!
Hans Bakker was the organizer of several NE2000 camps. Ne2000 is a yearly event where about 200 people show up with their tents/campers/caravans and plug into the network, it's a fairly open source oriented happening. I've seen and spoken Hans around there although I wasn't a close friend of him or anything. He has also participated in several open source projects.
The people involved in this car accident are all from the same fairly big group of "young" open source fans in The Netherlands that keep contact with each other over IRC and also IRL. Therefore I'm not surprised that this story was submitted by several readers. I hope this explains why it is important, I know I was shocked and saddened by the loss.
You are talking about Astronomy ofcourse
The link should be: http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/aflevering en/18247440/
I know we can all go into a big flam^H^H^H^Hdebate about the state of american elections and the positions many americans are taking behind the democratic and republican parties.
g en/18247440/
/. (I will likely post this again since this article is almost dead).
But we don't seem to be getting anywhere, so I searched my browser history a bit and found this gem:
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleverin
(click the link under "Video" on the right side)
It's a dutch documentary, but over 75% is in english and subtitled in dutch. It's a great piece with a balanced view on democracy in this time and I feel a lot of Americans can learn a few things about the European perspective that you can find a lot here on
And what should we do with all those people who have microphones and stuff to hook them up to... In all its absurdity this plan is even dumber then it looks, the only guys who will own recording equipment will be the bad guys. Oh Wait...
What is wrong with you people?
I've installed 10s, maybe 100s of debian boxes and never had any problem with the installer. It's short, logical and to the point. It's 15 minutes of work to do partitioning, basic hardware config and bootstrapping, reboot, select the packages you need, let it update and pur for a while. Depending on your net connection and cpu/ram/hd speed you're done in about 45 minutes. If you have real problems with the installer you should ask yourself if Debian's the right distro for you, maybe something that hides the complexity (as you see it) like Knoppix or Lindows is better for you.
Since I'm posting anyway, could people please stop making a fuss about Debian's release cycle!? I've been using Debian for over 5 years now and you know what? I don't care *one flying fuck* about new releases or version numbers. My software gets updated every single day and I really don't care if someone has bothered to bump up the major release version or not.
Actually i think my "demands" as you call them are very realistic, I'm just asking them to support the linux *kernel* on their hardware. I don't give a rats ass which distro anyone is going to run on it.
HP manufactures hardware, they only have to certify their hardware against the kernel. All other distro specific things can be supported by the distro builders themselves. I'm not asking for distro X support, I'm asking them to support the kernel in it's pure form, not some modified redhat or suse kernel but the plain vanilla linux kernel. If rh or suse make modifications to the kernel source *they* should have to support that, not HP or anyone else!.
My experience with the Linux offerings from HP is that they don't really mean Linux, but just RedHat or SUSE. I spoke with one of their european account managers a few weeks ago concerning their blade server solutions and basicly, if I wasn't going to run RH or SUSE on their hardware they couldn't offer support or anything. Since both redhat and suse don't meet our needs (not without rebuilding the kernels that came with them - thus voiding support responsibility) there's no choice at all.
It's the vendor lockin story all over *again*. I have no doubt that they will try to approach the desktop market in the same way. At least until HP proves me wrong and announces support for the linux *kernel* and promises at least a best effort policy on the different distros.
Now this is just my experience with HP, a talk with IBM went much smoother and their bladeservers are already on their way, just have to install debian on them and I'm all set. (yay! got to mention debian afterall!)
And it's called the GPL.
.sig away, earning rent.
Speaking as an admin for some 130 linux boxes in The Netherlands I can assure SCO that they will be wasting their time. Mr. McBride can go and stick his license where the sun don't shine.
The second they start spewing their bullshit over here I will not be surprised when they get sued for slander (like in Germany), I know of several companies over here that are already preparing a combined legal strategy in case SCO starts getting uppity. There are a lot of large hosting providers and ISP's/ASP's around Amsterdam who rely heavily on Linux, there's no way they will allow SCO to intterrupt their business.
Actually, I can't wait for SCO to enter the justice system, dutch courts are very wary of corporate greed at the moment.
--
This claim from netcraft bugged me since the first time I read it when it was linked to the last sco story. Let's spend some time debunking it.
Let us assume that the resolution of netcrafts measurements has a resolution of 1 minute, hell, make it 10 seconds. How long do you think it takes for an average zombie machine to start churning out syn packets at full speed? I'd say after maybe a second or two, and I'm being generous. There's a >90% chance the zombies are all recieving commands through IRC or a similar set-up, this adds maybe 2 to 3 seconds to the response time. All in all it's fair to assume that within 5 seconds of the attackers push of the button all zombies will be spewing syn packets at their maximum rate.
So in conclusion; Any attacker with a sufficient amount of zombies can push an amount of traffic into any network enough to saturate its bandwidth contraints within a mere *5* seconds. There is no reason *at all* why an attack like this should always look like a slow (1 - 10 minute) degradation of network performance, it can be done close to instantanious.
Of course depending on your relation with your backbone provider you can always try to block it higher-up. Although, don't be surprised when some attackers actually saturate gigabit links...
-- Witty saying #52; 404: file not found
There's a box in the background of this picture which has written on it "IBM Confidential trash".
I guess corporate espionage is quite real for these guys.
you're watching too much tv dude, commercials are being rerun all the friggin' time!
--
$witty_sig
Actually the file tranfer part of kazaa (and a few other p2p apps) works according to the http 1.1 specs. So in some way it is a "Web site", just not on port 80 and no clue about anything besides the GET command.
-- COBOL is for morons. -- E.W. Dijkstra
This thread is a friggin' gem... :)
Did you cheat or did you actually remember this scene of Red Dwarf by heart?
I'm sorry but there is a flaw in this rebuttal.
:P
:P
This is very difficult to respond to, because your analysis of the issues and of the reasons for the Open Source community's anger is, in the words of the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, "so bad it's not even wrong."
But of course we all know Wolfgang Pauli actually said:
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." --Wolfgang Pauli
But other than that it seems to be ok
ps. I actually got this quote after logging in on a linux 2.6test3 machine which greets with a random fortune, just after I read the article. It's a sign... I know it
As far as I know this is the only way to minimize the delay to something between 20ms and a whole second.
You could try something like Helix from real but you will experience a delay anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Mainly because the player wants to have a buffer to buy time if the network craps out. Probably every streaming technology has this but maybe there's one who can cope without needing a buffer.
If I put RedHat9 next to Windows Server 2003 I have significantly more updates to apply to my Linux box.
/dev/urandom | ..oh wait, nevermind
As I mentioned earlier, the amount of patches doesn't matter. Patches are here to stay and we can't avoid them. I don't really care what the public's perception is about the amount of patches, if we start taking that into consideration we'll get to MS's level of security soon enough. The amount of open source software you get with any single distribution is mind boggling, you simply can't go around telling everybody to wait with their patches until the holy trinity of say, suse, debian and redhat give the ok to incorporate all fixes in a single patch released every three months... That would be lunacy...
As I see it patch management is already under control in the linux community, just take a look at how debian does that or even gentoo. It's already been figured out for years.
There's only one way to look good in patch management, and that is making sure that the patches are authentic, not introducing new problems and actually fix the problem. The linux community does this by peer review, testing and hashes to ensure that everything is ok. MS is trying to do something with "trusted computing" which is all about doing the same thing but only at a much higher price. I can see MS having a bit of a PR problem there so there's no real need to worry about this whole thing now is there?
--
cat
This is getting really old really fast...
/dev/urandom | ..oh wait, nevermind.
For one thing I don't care how many patches my OS needs. Patches won't just go away, rather they seem to be an integral part of *any* OS there is. And the thing is, most Linux (or *bsd) user and admins are all perfectly aware of that fact.
I just want to be sure the patch is on time, that it works, doesn't fuck something else up and doesn't introduce new vulnerabilities. Frankly I dont think MS can really guarantee any of the above.
Debian has more than 10 updates listed just for August alone, almost all buffer-overflows.
And how many of these were in the kernel? Please understand that debian releases much more code and software than microsoft does with their OS and personally I'm not to worried about a buffer overflow in something obscure that I have never even thought about installing. And even then there's always the simple solution of running apt-get which fixes all your patch problems like magic...
Anyone want me to go on? Because I could. Remember the filesystem-corrupting kernel "turkey" release? Heck, 2.4.x was riddled with problems its entire run. But that doesn't matter when we've got hatred to burn on Microsoft, right? Sigh.
Ok, so 2.4.x wasn't the best, but to say it was all bad would be complete nonsense. Why do you seem to be trying very hard to over-generalize? Of course there are people posting anti-ms things but it's not like the whole story thread is littered with those posts... this is slashdot what do you expect?
I got problems with MS, sure, but I fixed that problem by simply not using it and it has been working out pretty good for the last 5 years or so. You don't see me trolling slashdot about it...
(wait, I just did?)
--
cat
arghh..
/dev/urandom > /opt/slashdot.sig
Show me a distro that doesn't hide the whole kernel updating process and just works, and I'll show you a distro for proffessionals!
This whole madness of the kernel building proces being to hard for the average user is a non-topic. Do you ever see a windows user compile the new redmond kernel? MS doesn't think anyone is qualified enough to make decisions about the exact kernel config so they just make one monolithic kernel that works for everyone. Popular Linux distro's like RH and SuSe do the same thing, but at least you still have the choice to do it yourself!!!
It's one of the reasons I run Linux, I'm in complete control to build a kernel that is perfectly suited for a specific task, or I can just build a kernel which will run on just about every x86 machine ever made. It's about CHOICE people, and MS simply can't give you any even if they wanted to because the only reason for their existance is their closed source code.
--
cat