How about just uninstall it, or never install it in the first place. When I used SuSE, one of the first things I removed was the Flash plugin. The reason is that the vast majority of WWW Flash uses are quite simply very annoying.
With an atomic commit all changes are either into the repository, or they are not, unlike CVS. In this sense the CVS repository is "corrupt" until the failed commit has been corrected. Any users updating their working copy may find it unworkable. It can be quite a mess to resolve.
PS: I never tried Subversion, but i've heard it's quite good. Can anyone compare it against CVS and the competition?
Subversion has one thing that really makes it stand out from CVS : Atomic commits. If you during a CVS commit lose network connection, your repository will be corrupted. Another very nice thing is that directories are versioned (so you may actually "delete" a directory, unlike cvs) and you may rename files and still keep it's history.
For Windows users there is a very nice GUI client (TortoiseSVN) that integrates nicely with Explorer.
One of the less nice things about Subversion is that it's a memory hog.
Wouldn't it be better to switch to a RAID style hard drive system? As long as the data can be transferred quickly (no CD swapping) I don't need the hardware to last for decades if I can move the data over to another system without a problem before it fails.
Erh, food for thought : 1) Major power surge burning out most electronics. 2) A careless administrator (you?) drops the entire server on the floor from 1 meter 3) The fire alarm goes, and drenches everything in water. 4) The machines gets massively overheated and every harddisk start failing. 5) The list goes on.
The point is that magnetic media in genereral is a fragile media, and hard disks even more so. That said, tape backup technology is much less fragile than a hard disks.
Java is free, people. Java is probably already on most desktop computers. Sun gave us OOo, and still do 75% of the programming. Unless you're willing to reprogram the Base, HyperSQL, and the other components that require java in C++, then don't complain.
Java is not free, and this becomes painfully clear the moment one wants to build JDK/JRE on a non support platform like *BSD. As part of the build process you have to manually go to Sun site to
agree to a license (after registering) before you can download needed sources.
Making a free product by introducing non-free base functionality is not the way to go.
If your password is something you've ever written on your computer, its likely they'll crack it? Interesting.... moral of the story: dont use words found in the dictionary as your password. Inject spaces or numbers or punctuation into the word if you do.
It proves that it's easy to write devasting viruses on Windows. This does not mean that there is no security issues with OS, but beeing plagued with viruses is not one of them.
When you accuse others of not understanding statistics you should refrain yourself from comments of type "I've seen personally at least a couple of solaris attacks and a linux box attack back when I was in school.";-)
If you believe that number of viruses is only dependant upon market share, then one would expect OS X to have several hundred viruses, but they don't. Why is that?
The lack of viruses on OS X (there are a handful on MacOS 9 and earlier) is largely due to the difficulty to write an efficient virus. Similar for Unix/Linux/BSD. They exists, but they are far between and very few in numbers.
This assumes a linear relationship between market share and virus propagation. There is no evidence for such a relationship (one could plausible suggest a treshold model, for example). Furthermore the quoted number of "100000 viruses/trojans/worms" is baseless.
This is your assumption, but hey, you did not read the grand parent post that claimed that number of Windows virues was due to market share? Right?
regarding my "baseless" claim, someone
reported that there are indeed more than 100 000 viruses, and they are not all for Windows. If you don't believe this, try Google, assuming that you are able to search, that is. The troll community is clearly marked by excessive inbreeding.
One last point: the vast number of Windows machines are malware laden because of stupid users, at least for the latest versions. There were some ways (notably SASSER) of getting into a stock system without user intervention, and the sheer number of systems makes it easy for such a thing to spread quickly.
When I go into a car and turn the ignition key, I expect the car to start. Well, it might refuse and stay dead. However, I dont expect it to phone my bank and empty my account.
The common excuse of "stupid users" is just an attempt to force the users to accept shoddy programming.
A more interesting test would compare how hard it is to get spyware onto a user's computer via the default webbrowser since that seems to be the primary vector these days. However, this is problematic since it's heavily dependent on user stupidity
The only stupidity here is yours. When I click on a link I expect this to be safe. Anything else is a non-functional browser, be it Internet Explorer or anything else. Clicking on links and displaying pages is the main functionality of a web browser, right?
Nice balanced submission you got there. As far as I'm aware there is no conclusive evidence that shows Macs are inherently more secure and would not suffer the virus problem that Windows does if it had Windows' market share.
Microsoft Windows have about 100 000 viruses/trojans/worms, depending on how one counts. In any case, OS X has no known virues in the wild, unless you count macro viruses due to use of Microsoft Office on Mac.
If market share was the only reason for viruses, then OS X should have several thousands by now. They have none.
The flip side to their encouragement of extensive code-sharing is, how does a young programmer make a name for himself at Google? In my opinion, a system that merely strings prefab parts together is not nearly the accomplishment that a from-scratch system is. If everything you are assigned to do is already written, then what have YOU done, other than figure out other peoples' APIs?
Exactly! So when I needed to add some database capability to a program at work, the first thing I did was to design and implement an ACID compliant database with replication support!
As long as you're using the school's network, you have to abide by the school's policies. If they ask you not to do it, you pretty much have to comply if you want to keep your net connection.
It's the reason (i.e. need a court decision that P2P is legal) for not permitting P2P that is very odd, even by US standards. A policy based upon that P2P is not permitted due to excessive bandwidth usage is at least understandable.
Hobbs refers the interview reader to a whitepaper which defines scripting languages as follows:
"There is a category of programming languages which share the properties of being high-level, dynamically typed and open source..."
This is cool, the article author just eliminated one very commonly used scripting language by require it to be open source : Visual Basic.
Many widely used Microsoft applications has a scripting interface via Automation, and guess what, you can use Visual Basic for this! In general this works very well, actually, to well considering the number of scripting viruses. But as a scripting language with a common interface to other applications, it's very good.
The OpenBSD guys response was "Can't you read! I want documentation NOW or I'm going to take my OS and go home."
Adaptec has been stalling for four months already, and then they say they are going to release a closed SDK (perhaps) later this year. Why should OpenBSD believe them?
But the various BSDs have always been behind in hardware support.
This is not true, of course. BSD was in use when Linux was in it's infancy, and thus had more drivers. In general, *BSD is not far behind Linux when it comes to supporting new hardware with open source drivers, and in some cases are ahead. Lagging behind is often due to hardware manufacturers
refusing to give documentation.
That said, several hardware manufacturers offer binary-only drivers for Linux for hardware. A well known example is accellerated 3D where open source drivers are lagging far behind.
What matters in the end, of course, is the hardware that you want to use has drivers.
Your employer may apply for (and even receive) patents on the modifications, but *cannot* restrict anyone from using them under the GPL (as per the terms of the GPL.)
Yes, they can by showing that they have software patents (US "invention") covering the code.
Well. There's only one reasonable thing to do here. Gather 'em all up, send 'em to Pluto and nuke the whole damn thing from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Let me guess : You are what is coomonly know to some as an "American"?
In this case, the term "American" has been adopted to mean "one of the United States of America." And honestly, with good reason! The USA was the first country in America, therefore if anyone can claim that title, it should be them. Your argument is affected and arbitrary. Go fight for a real cause.
A childhood friend of mine studied at an US (Texas) university in the late eigthies. He summarized it like this "The US has some very great universities, but their high school system is awful." You're an example that some things has not improved for nearly two decades.
Slashdot Mirror
How about just uninstall it, or never install it in the first place. When I used SuSE, one of the first things I removed was the Flash plugin. The reason is that the vast majority of WWW Flash uses are quite simply very annoying.
With an atomic commit all changes are either into the repository, or they are not, unlike CVS. In this sense the CVS repository is "corrupt" until the failed commit has been corrected. Any users updating their working copy may find it unworkable. It can be quite a mess to resolve.
Subversion has one thing that really makes it stand out from CVS : Atomic commits. If you during a CVS commit lose network connection, your repository will be corrupted. Another very nice thing is that directories are versioned (so you may actually "delete" a directory, unlike cvs) and you may rename files and still keep it's history.
For Windows users there is a very nice GUI client (TortoiseSVN) that integrates nicely with Explorer.
One of the less nice things about Subversion is that it's a memory hog.
Erh, food for thought : 1) Major power surge burning out most electronics. 2) A careless administrator (you?) drops the entire server on the floor from 1 meter 3) The fire alarm goes, and drenches everything in water. 4) The machines gets massively overheated and every harddisk start failing. 5) The list goes on.
The point is that magnetic media in genereral is a fragile media, and hard disks even more so. That said, tape backup technology is much less fragile than a hard disks.
Uhh, just look a little deeper.
Are you demanding that a Slashdotter actually reads and understand an article before he posts? That he is informed? WTF?
Java is not free, and this becomes painfully clear the moment one wants to build JDK/JRE on a non support platform like *BSD. As part of the build process you have to manually go to Sun site to agree to a license (after registering) before you can download needed sources.
Making a free product by introducing non-free base functionality is not the way to go.
Erh, yes they can : The Diceware Passphrase Home Page
You can use dictinary words to generate strong passphrases that are fairly easy to remember. Check out How long should my passphrase be for a comparions of length of passphrase with physcial security.
in the thread. Several of the comments there are responses from the BSD certification people.
It proves that it's easy to write devasting viruses on Windows. This does not mean that there is no security issues with OS, but beeing plagued with viruses is not one of them.
If you believe that number of viruses is only dependant upon market share, then one would expect OS X to have several hundred viruses, but they don't. Why is that?
The lack of viruses on OS X (there are a handful on MacOS 9 and earlier) is largely due to the difficulty to write an efficient virus. Similar for Unix/Linux/BSD. They exists, but they are far between and very few in numbers.
This is your assumption, but hey, you did not read the grand parent post that claimed that number of Windows virues was due to market share? Right?
regarding my "baseless" claim, someone reported that there are indeed more than 100 000 viruses, and they are not all for Windows. If you don't believe this, try Google, assuming that you are able to search, that is. The troll community is clearly marked by excessive inbreeding.
When I go into a car and turn the ignition key, I expect the car to start. Well, it might refuse and stay dead. However, I dont expect it to phone my bank and empty my account.
The common excuse of "stupid users" is just an attempt to force the users to accept shoddy programming.
The only stupidity here is yours. When I click on a link I expect this to be safe. Anything else is a non-functional browser, be it Internet Explorer or anything else. Clicking on links and displaying pages is the main functionality of a web browser, right?
Microsoft Windows have about 100 000 viruses/trojans/worms, depending on how one counts. In any case, OS X has no known virues in the wild, unless you count macro viruses due to use of Microsoft Office on Mac.
If market share was the only reason for viruses, then OS X should have several thousands by now. They have none.
Exactly! So when I needed to add some database capability to a program at work, the first thing I did was to design and implement an ACID compliant database with replication support!
It's the reason (i.e. need a court decision that P2P is legal) for not permitting P2P that is very odd, even by US standards. A policy based upon that P2P is not permitted due to excessive bandwidth usage is at least understandable.
And why should student P2P be any less legal just because a student does it?
Now, if the letter had said something to the effect that P2P is consuming too much bandwidth, I could understand them.
This is cool, the article author just eliminated one very commonly used scripting language by require it to be open source : Visual Basic.
Many widely used Microsoft applications has a scripting interface via Automation, and guess what, you can use Visual Basic for this! In general this works very well, actually, to well considering the number of scripting viruses. But as a scripting language with a common interface to other applications, it's very good.
Adaptec has been stalling for four months already, and then they say they are going to release a closed SDK (perhaps) later this year. Why should OpenBSD believe them?
Not anymore. NVidia has several chipsets (like the NIC used in nforce)) that they do not release documentation for, as far as I know.
This is not true, of course. BSD was in use when Linux was in it's infancy, and thus had more drivers. In general, *BSD is not far behind Linux when it comes to supporting new hardware with open source drivers, and in some cases are ahead. Lagging behind is often due to hardware manufacturers refusing to give documentation.
That said, several hardware manufacturers offer binary-only drivers for Linux for hardware. A well known example is accellerated 3D where open source drivers are lagging far behind.
What matters in the end, of course, is the hardware that you want to use has drivers.
Yes, they can by showing that they have software patents (US "invention") covering the code.
Let me guess : You are what is coomonly know to some as an "American"?
A childhood friend of mine studied at an US (Texas) university in the late eigthies. He summarized it like this "The US has some very great universities, but their high school system is awful." You're an example that some things has not improved for nearly two decades.