It means the person saying it is clueless. "The cloud" is really a euphemism for moving back to the old mainframe paradigm -- data centers and servers maintained by the IT priesthood that the masses access using low-powered "terminals". The terminals may be a lot more sophisticated these days than they were in 1975, and the content a lot richer, but the overall model has come full circle.
That implies that you're sitting around doing nothing. IMO as long as you stay engaged and resist the urge to "coast" you can stay sharp until you retire or keel over.
There is supposed to be a BIOS option to disable Secure Boot. This workaround is a last resort for broken BIOSes that fail to include the option (e.g. stripped down laptop BIOSes like those used by the big OEMs), and users who are too lazy to figure out how to change the BIOS option. Given that many servers run Linux, a server vendor who failed to include the BIOS option would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Please read up on how Secure Boot is supposed to work. The bootloader needs to be digitally signed by whoever is in charge of certifying that the Secure Boot bootloaders are "secure". They're not going to sign something that is obviously designed to trick the end user.
It's still better than the alternative (completely invisible rootkit); and it will be immediately obvious to anyone who does have a clue that something has replaced the bootloader.
This workaround seems like a case of "making the best of a bad situation" to me. If Secure Boot is here to stay, something like this is absolutely necessary.
RTFA. I think you'd notice if your Windows PC suddenly started displaying a Linux Foundation splash screen and waiting for you to hit Enter before booting the OS.
On punch cards. I had already taken a FORTRAN class (offered at a local college) the previous summer, and was teaching myself BASIC and 8080 assembly language on the side, so the high school FORTRAN class didn't really do much for me. At least it was an easy A.
When my son was in high school he took classes in Visual Basic and Java.
BTW, why no "50-year olds" in your list of age ranges? Are we too old to be reading/.?
We already know that there's a congressman who believes you can't get pregnant from "legitimate rape," so the fact that idiocy like this exists on the Hill isn't surprising at all. I do wonder how he managed to get on the Science, Space and Technology committee though. How are committee appointments determined? My guess is that he volunteered (and almost certainly has an ulterior agenda).
Yup, fanatical atheists are their own special breed of crazy. Insisting that there must not be a God is no more rational than insisting that there must be a God.
Never thought I'd need to remove pre-installed crapware from a Linux system (needing to remove early versions of Network Manager a few years back doesn't count).
My original plan was to switch to Kubuntu when I finally ditch Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. But given the direction they seem to be heading in, I may reconsider and go with a straight Debian system instead.
If you want to attract more 3rd party developers and desktop users, the ABIs need to stabilize. Developers should be able to provide generic application binaries that will run unmodified on a majority of distros released over the past ~5 years. Drivers too (yes I know that's a tall order); it is irksome that I need to manually rebuild the drivers for my motherboard's audio codec and fan speed monitoring chip from source every time there's a kernel patch.
IMO the Linux desktop isn't going to gain more traction as long as it continues to require that users either A) use only the versions of apps/drivers that are available from their distro's repository; or B) build from source (dealing with the library version dependency hell this often entails, and drivers that break every time there's a kernel patch). True believers are willing to deal with these irritants, but we shouldn't need to.
Yes, there's some risk of abuse and/or false positives. But if a system is spewing spam e-mails, or probing thousands of random servers with brute-force root password crack attempts, odds are very good that something nefarious is going on and cutting the affected system off is not only good for the 'net as a whole, but good for the owner of the infected system as well.
Bingo. I really don't get the logic behind allowing the users of the infected machines to remain oblivious to the problem for so long (up to several years). Where there's one infection, there's likely to be more (especially given that DNSChanger also blocked anti-virus updates). Treating the symptom instead of the root cause is rarely a good idea.
I agree that PostgreSQL is a superior database technically. But the fact remains that many existing (and widely deployed!) apps rely on MySQL, and don't play nice with PostgreSQL. You are also a bad engineer if you dismiss a "good enough" solution out-of-hand, while completely ignoring external constraints like time, budget, or manpower. As an engineer, yes this bothers me. But it is part of doing engineering in the real world.
Way to miss the point. His "don't have the technical skills" comment was referring to evaluation of the database engine specifically. And if you put the MySQL database engine under a microscope, yup it ain't so great. But you don't have to be a database expert to see that MySQL is still the best supported database back-end for most web application frameworks. And like it or not, this makes it the logical choice for most web stack deployments unless you know your applications all run well with PostgreSQL.
If you don't mind the extra overhead, and have some apps that work with PostgreSQL and some that require MySQL, then go ahead and run both. Or if you're a militant database purist, I suppose you could refuse to run anything that requires MySQL; but this seems a bit self-defeating.
Sometimes you need to take a step back and view the whole forest...
...SCO was a respectable UNIX vendor. Then the bean counters and lawyers took over; they became hungry for power, and turned to the Dark Side. They built a Death Star of litigation, confident that they could use it to crush the rebel Linux alliance. But ultimately the rebels prevailed. (The End?)
For a few years now I've been telling people "letting other people store your data for you means you don't control your data any more". I'm willing to use "the cloud" for some things, but any data I really care about is stored on hard drives and/or optical media that I own.
You would think the loss of legitimate users' files in the Megaupload takedown, and the near-weekly reports of user databases of various online services getting broken into would drive this point home, but most people still seem to be blissfully ignorant of the issues.
Desktop environments and toolkits have been horribly fragmented on *NIX systems since the beginning of X. I guess the Linux community is just carrying on that grand tradition.
I've been a GNOME (on Ubuntu) user for about 4 years, and was more or less planning to migrate to KDE when I finally upgrade to 12.04 as I really detest Unity and GNOME 3 just feels incomplete. I've also considered XFCE... I guess I really ought to give MATE a closer look too.
Incorrect. You can in fact file a "Statement of Abandonment" with the Copyright Office disclaiming copyright in a work you own. Also, any content created by a US government employee in the course of their duties is automatically NOT covered by copyright (i.e. it is in the public domain) from day 1. There are also some grey areas; e.g. there have been court rulings which have held that intentionally destroying all of your OWN copies of a work amounts to copyright abandonment (implicitly placing the work in the public domain), if you have already distributed copies to the public.
Most methodologies work well in a "development team where everyone is technically solid and works well with others."
Agreed.
But IMO more structured methodologies can mitigate the negative effects of team members with less effective development and/or communications skills. Unfortunately, this also limits the productivity of the star performers, by bringing everyone's productivity down closer to the lowest common denominator. And will hold back the entire effort if the team has the skills to pull off an agile development effort.
IMO agile methodologies can work phenomenally well if you have a development team where everyone is technically solid and works well with others. Take either of those factors away and it is a recipe for chaos; with an "average" development team you're probably better off with something more structured.
At my company, we tell employees that they are free to use computers for personal use on breaks, but we also tell them that we monitor usage and recommend that they not use our network for anything of a private or personal nature.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. It's the company's network, they can do as they please with it. Consent to being monitored is a reasonable trade-off for being allowed to use the company Internet connection on breaks. If you don't like it, don't use the company network for sensitive personal tasks.
There are certainly technical ways around this (e.g. tunneled SSH SOCKS proxy through a machine you control that is outside the company network), but this could get you reprimanded or even fired if it is against the rules and you get caught.
If the parties involved didn't even bother to nail down something as basic as how much support is included in the contract, do you really think anyone bothered to ensure that there were reasonable and unambiguous specifications up front? Who pays to determine what's a bug in the application code (developer's fault), what's a bug in the requirements or user error (customer's fault), or what's a bug in the OS or any third party libraries (someone else's fault)? And once that determination is made, who pays to fix it?
What if the application needs to be moved to a new OS a couple of years down the road because the existing OS gets EOLed and stops receiving security updates? What if the new OS breaks the application, necessitating rework?
I agree that software doesn't "wear out". But that doesn't mean every malfunction is automatically the developer's responsibility to fix gratis. Malfunctions can arise from things that aren't under the developer's control, and which aren't the developer's fault. The developer should not be expected to bear the full burden for things which are A) unanticipated; or B) not their fault, unless this level of support was written into the original contract.
Yeah, that's my fallback option; I've tried Xubuntu off and on in VMs going back to around 9.10, and it seems reasonable. But I like some of what I see in KDE, so I'm willing to make a go of getting up to speed on a new DE. If KDE pisses me off too much, I'll go with XFCE instead.
Slashdot Mirror
It means the person saying it is clueless. "The cloud" is really a euphemism for moving back to the old mainframe paradigm -- data centers and servers maintained by the IT priesthood that the masses access using low-powered "terminals". The terminals may be a lot more sophisticated these days than they were in 1975, and the content a lot richer, but the overall model has come full circle.
That implies that you're sitting around doing nothing. IMO as long as you stay engaged and resist the urge to "coast" you can stay sharp until you retire or keel over.
There is supposed to be a BIOS option to disable Secure Boot. This workaround is a last resort for broken BIOSes that fail to include the option (e.g. stripped down laptop BIOSes like those used by the big OEMs), and users who are too lazy to figure out how to change the BIOS option. Given that many servers run Linux, a server vendor who failed to include the BIOS option would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Please read up on how Secure Boot is supposed to work. The bootloader needs to be digitally signed by whoever is in charge of certifying that the Secure Boot bootloaders are "secure". They're not going to sign something that is obviously designed to trick the end user.
It's still better than the alternative (completely invisible rootkit); and it will be immediately obvious to anyone who does have a clue that something has replaced the bootloader.
This workaround seems like a case of "making the best of a bad situation" to me. If Secure Boot is here to stay, something like this is absolutely necessary.
RTFA. I think you'd notice if your Windows PC suddenly started displaying a Linux Foundation splash screen and waiting for you to hit Enter before booting the OS.
On punch cards. I had already taken a FORTRAN class (offered at a local college) the previous summer, and was teaching myself BASIC and 8080 assembly language on the side, so the high school FORTRAN class didn't really do much for me. At least it was an easy A.
When my son was in high school he took classes in Visual Basic and Java.
BTW, why no "50-year olds" in your list of age ranges? Are we too old to be reading /.?
We already know that there's a congressman who believes you can't get pregnant from "legitimate rape," so the fact that idiocy like this exists on the Hill isn't surprising at all. I do wonder how he managed to get on the Science, Space and Technology committee though. How are committee appointments determined? My guess is that he volunteered (and almost certainly has an ulterior agenda).
Yup, fanatical atheists are their own special breed of crazy. Insisting that there must not be a God is no more rational than insisting that there must be a God.
Never thought I'd need to remove pre-installed crapware from a Linux system (needing to remove early versions of Network Manager a few years back doesn't count).
My original plan was to switch to Kubuntu when I finally ditch Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. But given the direction they seem to be heading in, I may reconsider and go with a straight Debian system instead.
If you want to attract more 3rd party developers and desktop users, the ABIs need to stabilize. Developers should be able to provide generic application binaries that will run unmodified on a majority of distros released over the past ~5 years. Drivers too (yes I know that's a tall order); it is irksome that I need to manually rebuild the drivers for my motherboard's audio codec and fan speed monitoring chip from source every time there's a kernel patch.
IMO the Linux desktop isn't going to gain more traction as long as it continues to require that users either A) use only the versions of apps/drivers that are available from their distro's repository; or B) build from source (dealing with the library version dependency hell this often entails, and drivers that break every time there's a kernel patch). True believers are willing to deal with these irritants, but we shouldn't need to.
Yes, there's some risk of abuse and/or false positives. But if a system is spewing spam e-mails, or probing thousands of random servers with brute-force root password crack attempts, odds are very good that something nefarious is going on and cutting the affected system off is not only good for the 'net as a whole, but good for the owner of the infected system as well.
Bingo. I really don't get the logic behind allowing the users of the infected machines to remain oblivious to the problem for so long (up to several years). Where there's one infection, there's likely to be more (especially given that DNSChanger also blocked anti-virus updates). Treating the symptom instead of the root cause is rarely a good idea.
I agree that PostgreSQL is a superior database technically. But the fact remains that many existing (and widely deployed!) apps rely on MySQL, and don't play nice with PostgreSQL. You are also a bad engineer if you dismiss a "good enough" solution out-of-hand, while completely ignoring external constraints like time, budget, or manpower. As an engineer, yes this bothers me. But it is part of doing engineering in the real world.
Way to miss the point. His "don't have the technical skills" comment was referring to evaluation of the database engine specifically. And if you put the MySQL database engine under a microscope, yup it ain't so great. But you don't have to be a database expert to see that MySQL is still the best supported database back-end for most web application frameworks. And like it or not, this makes it the logical choice for most web stack deployments unless you know your applications all run well with PostgreSQL.
If you don't mind the extra overhead, and have some apps that work with PostgreSQL and some that require MySQL, then go ahead and run both. Or if you're a militant database purist, I suppose you could refuse to run anything that requires MySQL; but this seems a bit self-defeating.
Sometimes you need to take a step back and view the whole forest...
...SCO was a respectable UNIX vendor. Then the bean counters and lawyers took over; they became hungry for power, and turned to the Dark Side. They built a Death Star of litigation, confident that they could use it to crush the rebel Linux alliance. But ultimately the rebels prevailed. (The End?)
For a few years now I've been telling people "letting other people store your data for you means you don't control your data any more". I'm willing to use "the cloud" for some things, but any data I really care about is stored on hard drives and/or optical media that I own.
You would think the loss of legitimate users' files in the Megaupload takedown, and the near-weekly reports of user databases of various online services getting broken into would drive this point home, but most people still seem to be blissfully ignorant of the issues.
Desktop environments and toolkits have been horribly fragmented on *NIX systems since the beginning of X. I guess the Linux community is just carrying on that grand tradition.
I've been a GNOME (on Ubuntu) user for about 4 years, and was more or less planning to migrate to KDE when I finally upgrade to 12.04 as I really detest Unity and GNOME 3 just feels incomplete. I've also considered XFCE... I guess I really ought to give MATE a closer look too.
Incorrect. You can in fact file a "Statement of Abandonment" with the Copyright Office disclaiming copyright in a work you own. Also, any content created by a US government employee in the course of their duties is automatically NOT covered by copyright (i.e. it is in the public domain) from day 1. There are also some grey areas; e.g. there have been court rulings which have held that intentionally destroying all of your OWN copies of a work amounts to copyright abandonment (implicitly placing the work in the public domain), if you have already distributed copies to the public.
What if the choice is to deliver 2 years late or not at all? 50% of development teams are of average skill or worse!
Most methodologies work well in a "development team where everyone is technically solid and works well with others."
Agreed.
But IMO more structured methodologies can mitigate the negative effects of team members with less effective development and/or communications skills. Unfortunately, this also limits the productivity of the star performers, by bringing everyone's productivity down closer to the lowest common denominator. And will hold back the entire effort if the team has the skills to pull off an agile development effort.
IMO agile methodologies can work phenomenally well if you have a development team where everyone is technically solid and works well with others. Take either of those factors away and it is a recipe for chaos; with an "average" development team you're probably better off with something more structured.
At my company, we tell employees that they are free to use computers for personal use on breaks, but we also tell them that we monitor usage and recommend that they not use our network for anything of a private or personal nature.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. It's the company's network, they can do as they please with it. Consent to being monitored is a reasonable trade-off for being allowed to use the company Internet connection on breaks. If you don't like it, don't use the company network for sensitive personal tasks.
There are certainly technical ways around this (e.g. tunneled SSH SOCKS proxy through a machine you control that is outside the company network), but this could get you reprimanded or even fired if it is against the rules and you get caught.
If the parties involved didn't even bother to nail down something as basic as how much support is included in the contract, do you really think anyone bothered to ensure that there were reasonable and unambiguous specifications up front? Who pays to determine what's a bug in the application code (developer's fault), what's a bug in the requirements or user error (customer's fault), or what's a bug in the OS or any third party libraries (someone else's fault)? And once that determination is made, who pays to fix it?
What if the application needs to be moved to a new OS a couple of years down the road because the existing OS gets EOLed and stops receiving security updates? What if the new OS breaks the application, necessitating rework?
I agree that software doesn't "wear out". But that doesn't mean every malfunction is automatically the developer's responsibility to fix gratis. Malfunctions can arise from things that aren't under the developer's control, and which aren't the developer's fault. The developer should not be expected to bear the full burden for things which are A) unanticipated; or B) not their fault, unless this level of support was written into the original contract.
Yeah, that's my fallback option; I've tried Xubuntu off and on in VMs going back to around 9.10, and it seems reasonable. But I like some of what I see in KDE, so I'm willing to make a go of getting up to speed on a new DE. If KDE pisses me off too much, I'll go with XFCE instead.