> Shouldn't need to be; most of that should be handed off to the PAM modules.
A quote from the changelogs of Slackware 9.1, just to offer a different perspective:
openssh-3.7.1p2.
This fixes security problems with PAM authentication. It also includes
several code cleanups from Solar Designer. Slackware does not use PAM and is
not vulnerable to any of the fixed problems.
Please indulge me for this brief aside (as requests for PAM are on the rise):
If you see a security problem reported which depends on PAM, you can be
glad you run Slackware. I think a better name for PAM might be SCAM, for
Swiss Cheese Authentication Modules, and have never felt that the small
amount of convenience it provides is worth the great loss of system
security. We miss out on half a dozen security problems a year by not
using PAM, but you can always install it yourself if you feel that
you're missing out on the fun. (No, don't do that)
OK, I'm done ranting here.:-)
> I enjoy playing with LiveCDs, but I always find that we are not taking advantage of the writing ability of many CD drives.
[...] > If I download a neat application and install it or save a word doc in my directory, I want it automatically cued up to be burned when I shutdown.
First, most LiveCD systems are already packed to the brim, and don't allow you to unmount you're main CD during operation, so you'd need at least two drives. Second, there are two ways to add files to a cd-rw: multisession and packet writing. Multisession is widely supported, but not suitable for small files as there is a overhead of about 15MB for each new session. Packet writing requires the UDF filesystem. AFAIK, neither Linux nor FreeBSD have good UDF support in read-write mode, and I'm not sure if anyone is actively working on it.
A much better bet would be a LiveCD in conjunction with USB flash memory for your personal files. If you want to install apps, the new version of the SLAX-Live CD supports ovlfs (Overlay Filesystem), which lets you insert files on a read-only root filesystem. For FreeBSD, unionfs might do the trick.
I estimate that the iTunes music store holds around 500.000 songs, which requires about 2TB storage. At the moment, it costs only around $1300 in harddisks for consumers to store the entire iTunes collection. It is likely that in a few years, it will only costs about, say $300 bucks. Another few years and it will be affordable (in terms of storage) for consumers to have the entire library of songs ever published in their pocket. Does having copyright on music still make sense then?
The primary motivation for copyright is to stimulate more output by giving creators limited-time protection of their work. But do we really need stimulation for more musical output if you can a million songs with you at anytime? If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether. The benefits is that everybody can, for little costs, enjoy about the complete published musical output of the past with them. Is this a good tradeoff?
The fork has already happened.
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It appears to be pretty recent, and not yet advertised, but freedesktop.org has forked Xfree86 from
4.4 RC2. Note: this independent from their own experimental X server to which everybody is referring (but which is not really ready for consumption yet). If XFree86 doesn't revert to the old license, distributors are likely going to package the freedesktop fork. It remains to be seen if the major XFree86 developers will follow.
Re:So they stick to the new license...
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The FSF doesn't like the new license and begins telling people that it is incompatible with the GPL. Does that mean they are right?
I don't know, but from the FAQ it seems that The XFree86 Project Inc. agrees with the FSF here.
They are not attempting to make any changes to how anyone uses their code, only asking that they receive recognition for their work. Isn't that something that RMS has been whining about for years with his GNU/Linux nonsense? He "corrects" people for calling Linux Linux every chance he gets.
RMS can ask recognition from distributors, but he can't legally demand it. XFree86 just changed their license so that they can.
According to the changelogs, Debian and Slackware already have the patches for the bounds checking error in place. I didn't check the other distributions. (Or rather, I don't know where to check most of them quickly.)
Don't buy too much into hype, Quartz Extreme does NOT accelerate everything. Only the windows compositor is offloaded to the GPU, all Quartz2D operations are still handled by the CPU.
... in Europe. Seriously, compare the prices at the current exchange rates, especially for Powerbooks (but do remember to substract the VAT, which is included in most European Apple stores). Apple sells it's stuff for hundreds of dollars more in Europe. Same goes for many brand stuff electronics and PCs. But with PCs, at least you can buy separate components, which are usually not much more expensive than in the US.
Also, get a USB2/FW 2.5" HD enclosure, and synchronization software like unison. Synchronize every day/week/month (depending how valuable your data is to you) for backup. If you go somewhere with a computer present, you don't need to bring the laptop, just sync, bring the HD, and sync again when you're home.
If your laptop HD dies, just swap in the backup and buy a new one for the enclosure.
Having to stop shooting to change media half as often is WELL worth it. You don't want to have to tell your editor "There was a pulitzer-prize shot, but I missed it because I had my head down changing CF cards right at that moment."
A 2GB card costs under $200 and stores about 300 pictures in RAW mode from a 6MP camera. If you still can't see well in time that you need to change your card, maybe you shouldn't be in the professional photo business. How many pictures fitted on a 35mm roll again?
> How feasible is it to make a 'boot from USB' option to a PC BIOS? > I know its not an option currently, [...]
Actually, it's been in lots of PC BIOSes in for a few years now. The problem is that it is still not as reliable as floppy/hd/cdrom boot: some usb devices work, some don't. Also, there seem to be a number of different usb boot standards, usb-fdd, usb-zip, usb-cdrom, usb-hdd.
what would the access times be like? comparable to a 42000 rpm drive? 5400? 10,000 sata?
I would guess that access time is much faster than hard disks, but throughput is much lower. Current CF cards operate in PIO mode, with a max of 8MB/s. The new specification allows up to 16MB/s (still PIO I think). But the speed of current flash chips are still way below that.
Sure, but the essential thing is, you have something to sell (your labor) to get the company's money. You have to make your product attractive to the buyer, just as the buyer has to make their latest gadgets attractive to you if they want your money. The problem is that too many people are stuck in the mindset of a consumer even when they act as a producer.
This is the essential question. Is there something wrong with the cheaper service? If there isn't, why would you go to the expensive doctor or mechanic? Or the American worker? The theory about this can get rather complicated (look for example at the Nobel prize winning work on asymmetric information and signaling games).
But more on topic, is there something wrong with the service provided by cheaper Indian programmers? Most companies will only find out after trying. Some will find the quality lacking, some won't. If a-posteriori the provided labor turned out to be of comparable quality, they obviously made a good decision. If the quality turned out to be substandard, they can either turn to higher prices American labor (who may or may not provide higher quality) or they can try a different low-cost supplier. The situation is not different from you shopping for cheaper Korean cars or Chinese DVD players.
Due to the costs of living, American programmers can never compete on costs. The only options left are 1) to convince the buyers (i.e. hiring companies) that the quality of your work is higher, or 2) offer some different kind of labor in a different sector. To restrict the choice of the buyer is not the way to go.
What people don't realize is that jobs are not products that are offered by companies to people, jobs are what people offer to companies. Everyone on the labor market is a salesman, offering his time and skills in return for money. Restricting companies to shop for labor in the US makes as much sense as restricting consumers to buy goods in the US. If nobody buys your labor and skills, it means that there is insufficient demand at the current price. Either sell it for less or sell something else. That's what companies do.
>... because I can't see an easy way to keep FireFox in memory like I do with Mozilla
I just never close it, just minimize:)
>... because FireFox lacks the wonderful Mozilla ability to simply type text into the URL bar, hit the up key and then enter, and run a Google search.
For newbies, Firefox is much better, because there is a constant reminder. When I started using Mozilla, I forgot to use the up-button half of the time. Now that I'm used to it, on Firefox I just press ctrl-k to search (or hit tab if I happen to be in the url-box).
So, I don't know if I should compile/install KDE 3.2 myself, or wait until my distribution includes it in its next release (I'm using Slackware).
What do you guys think?
You don't need to wait for the next Slackware release. Just wait until it shows up in your slackware-current/slackware/kde/, download from there, and use upgradepkg (or removepkg and installpkg) to install on your current system.
Slashdot Mirror
A quote from the changelogs of Slackware 9.1, just to offer a different perspective:
> when you could just get a 17" powerbook?
Because it costs about $1500 less.
> I enjoy playing with LiveCDs, but I always find that we are not taking advantage of the writing ability of many CD drives.
[...]
> If I download a neat application and install it or save a word doc in my directory, I want it automatically cued up to be burned when I shutdown.
First, most LiveCD systems are already packed to the brim, and don't allow you to unmount you're main CD during operation, so you'd need at least two drives. Second, there are two ways to add files to a cd-rw: multisession and packet writing. Multisession is widely supported, but not suitable for small files as there is a overhead of about 15MB for each new session. Packet writing requires the UDF filesystem. AFAIK, neither Linux nor FreeBSD have good UDF support in read-write mode, and I'm not sure if anyone is actively working on it.
A much better bet would be a LiveCD in conjunction with USB flash memory for your personal files. If you want to install apps, the new version of the SLAX-Live CD supports ovlfs (Overlay Filesystem), which lets you insert files on a read-only root filesystem. For FreeBSD, unionfs might do the trick.
I estimate that the iTunes music store holds around 500.000 songs, which requires about 2TB storage. At the moment, it costs only around $1300 in harddisks for consumers to store the entire iTunes collection. It is likely that in a few years, it will only costs about, say $300 bucks. Another few years and it will be affordable (in terms of storage) for consumers to have the entire library of songs ever published in their pocket. Does having copyright on music still make sense then?
The primary motivation for copyright is to stimulate more output by giving creators limited-time protection of their work. But do we really need stimulation for more musical output if you can a million songs with you at anytime? If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether. The benefits is that everybody can, for little costs, enjoy about the complete published musical output of the past with them. Is this a good tradeoff?
It appears to be pretty recent, and not yet advertised, but freedesktop.org has forked Xfree86 from 4.4 RC2. Note: this independent from their own experimental X server to which everybody is referring (but which is not really ready for consumption yet). If XFree86 doesn't revert to the old license, distributors are likely going to package the freedesktop fork. It remains to be seen if the major XFree86 developers will follow.
All alternatives suffer from a lack of (accelerated) drivers.
that some large organization moving to Linux on the desktop is not considered news anymore.
Windows 98 release: June 1998
According to the changelogs, Debian and Slackware already have the patches for the bounds checking error in place. I didn't check the other distributions. (Or rather, I don't know where to check most of them quickly.)
Don't buy too much into hype, Quartz Extreme does NOT accelerate everything. Only the windows compositor is offloaded to the GPU, all Quartz2D operations are still handled by the CPU.
... in Europe. Seriously, compare the prices at the current exchange rates, especially for Powerbooks (but do remember to substract the VAT, which is included in most European Apple stores). Apple sells it's stuff for hundreds of dollars more in Europe. Same goes for many brand stuff electronics and PCs. But with PCs, at least you can buy separate components, which are usually not much more expensive than in the US.
Pay lawyer fees and awarded lawsuit damages in Indian Rupees.
> sony mdr-ex71sl's for example, they're excellent
Or Sennheiser MX-500, which are also excelent and much cheaper.
> backup HD with an image of your OS
Also, get a USB2/FW 2.5" HD enclosure, and synchronization software like unison. Synchronize every day/week/month (depending how valuable your data is to you) for backup. If you go somewhere with a computer present, you don't need to bring the laptop, just sync, bring the HD, and sync again when you're home. If your laptop HD dies, just swap in the backup and buy a new one for the enclosure.
> How feasible is it to make a 'boot from USB' option to a PC BIOS?
> I know its not an option currently, [...]
Actually, it's been in lots of PC BIOSes in for a few years now. The problem is that it is still not as reliable as floppy/hd/cdrom boot: some usb devices work, some don't. Also, there seem to be a number of different usb boot standards, usb-fdd, usb-zip, usb-cdrom, usb-hdd.
Forgot to link to the new specification.
Sure, but the essential thing is, you have something to sell (your labor) to get the company's money. You have to make your product attractive to the buyer, just as the buyer has to make their latest gadgets attractive to you if they want your money. The problem is that too many people are stuck in the mindset of a consumer even when they act as a producer.
This is the essential question. Is there something wrong with the cheaper service? If there isn't, why would you go to the expensive doctor or mechanic? Or the American worker? The theory about this can get rather complicated (look for example at the Nobel prize winning work on asymmetric information and signaling games).
But more on topic, is there something wrong with the service provided by cheaper Indian programmers? Most companies will only find out after trying. Some will find the quality lacking, some won't. If a-posteriori the provided labor turned out to be of comparable quality, they obviously made a good decision. If the quality turned out to be substandard, they can either turn to higher prices American labor (who may or may not provide higher quality) or they can try a different low-cost supplier. The situation is not different from you shopping for cheaper Korean cars or Chinese DVD players.
Due to the costs of living, American programmers can never compete on costs. The only options left are 1) to convince the buyers (i.e. hiring companies) that the quality of your work is higher, or 2) offer some different kind of labor in a different sector. To restrict the choice of the buyer is not the way to go.
What people don't realize is that jobs are not products that are offered by companies to people, jobs are what people offer to companies. Everyone on the labor market is a salesman, offering his time and skills in return for money. Restricting companies to shop for labor in the US makes as much sense as restricting consumers to buy goods in the US. If nobody buys your labor and skills, it means that there is insufficient demand at the current price. Either sell it for less or sell something else. That's what companies do.
> ... because I can't see an easy way to keep FireFox in memory like I do with Mozilla
:)
... because FireFox lacks the wonderful Mozilla ability to simply type text into the URL bar, hit the up key and then enter, and run a Google search.
I just never close it, just minimize
>
For newbies, Firefox is much better, because there is a constant reminder. When I started using Mozilla, I forgot to use the up-button half of the time. Now that I'm used to it, on Firefox I just press ctrl-k to search (or hit tab if I happen to be in the url-box).