I am moving away from RedHat 8 and I'm still doubting between Mandrake and Fedora. Which one should I choose?
While it's been awhile since I've worked with Mandrake, and I have never worked with Fedora, I have worked quite a bit with RedHat. My advice depends on what you want to do with the OS. If you are wanting a GNU/Linux OS with all the whiz-bang autoconfigure tools you could ever hope for, use Mandrake. If you want something that is more likely to include the latest (which does not neccessarily mean greatest) beta version of $SOFTWARE, use Fedora.
If on the other hand, you are predominantly interested in running a stable OS without a lot of layers of abstraction, choose Slackware. RedHat/Fedora is too unstable (I would say the same about Mandrake IMO) and Mandrake is too complicated. Sure you have the latest version of KOffice, but really, what does it do for you that the previous stable version didn't? Sure you have all these whiz-bang autoconfigure tools and rarely need to go to the commandline, but what are you really learning, and what performance are you sacrificing to get that? Slackware offers the latest stable versions of most all the software you need (being a thin distro it doesn't include everything under the sun like SuSE and Mandrake), typically runs as fast as if not faster than all the other major distros out there, and rarely ever gives you problems. The learning curve is albeit higher than other distros, and Slackware users are perhaps justifiably titled elitest at times, but there are good reasons for that. It takes a certain dedication to learning Slackware, because it doesn't bother with needless gui config tools, with bloated SYS-V init, and similar pieces of software that tend to offer little and take a lot, but the rewards are worth it.
the deer population in the United States is much higher now than it was 200 years ago
I don't have the stats on hand to back it up, but I've heard and read in several places that here in Georgia the deer population is larger than it was even before the English colonists arrived, which was far longer than 200 years.
If you have a security flaw that helps 13 year old kids break in and take the credit card information of a few thousand people out there, I think I can say with reasonable assurance that YOU are at fault.
But what exactly are you at fault for? You're certainly not at fault for stealing those credit cards. You are not at fault for giving away those credit cards. If you do not know about the security fault, you probably can't be held liable for any damages. If, however, you are given specific information concerning the security fault, and do nothing, you are negligent.
It all boils down to this:
How diligent were you in protecting sensitive data that can affect the lives of your customers? We are yet a long way away from having sensible laws in this area. There needs to be a required base level of security that is strong enough to keepp out all but the most skilled and determined crackers in cases where SSN, PIN, credit card numbers, and other personal information from being leaked.
From glancing over the article (not a thorough read) and browsing slashdot, it doesn't sound like this guy really knew what he was doing. Whether he actually found a real vulnerability or not is still up for debate. ALl we do know, is that he (alledgedly) black-mailed BestBuy saying that he had information that could be used against them to ruin their online business. I don't think we can say for certain that BestBuy has done anything wrong in this case.
If someone leverages that to their advantage, don't blame them - fix your holes first. Thats the way security works.
So if some one is blackmailing me to the tune of millions of dollars I am supposed to ignore them and work on repairing what they haven't told me is broken? That's not the way security works.
Maybe his actions were wrong, who cares? As long as companies get shit scared in their pants about whats going to happen if they don't secure their servers, its good.
I care, and the law apparently cares as well. I don't think anyone would convincingly argue that blackmailing some one is ok because they are not saints either. Two wrongs do not make a right. So the ends in this case justify the means? It's alright for me to threaten a corporation because it will scare them?
When they started blocking "unknown relays" they dropped a pile of legitimate email
Legitimate e-mail shouldn't be coming through an unknown relay. Really, your e-mail server should be setup with a proper reverse lookup. There is absolutely nothing wrong with denying mail from unknown e-mail servers (e-mail servers that don't reverse look-up to the correct name). many people and ISPs do this specifically to get rid of SPAM, as anyone running a real mail server should be spending the time to setup his e-mail server correctly.
Aren't many of the companies in the e-voting business heavily funded and/or backed by Republican interests?
Republicans in the U.S. will basically do anything to preserve power.
Oh please. Yes many of them are funded/backed/owned/whatever by Republicans. What difference does this make? Your paranoia may be well founded, but so far there has not been a shred of evidence that any illegal tampering with the voting system has been done specifically to give one party or another an advantage. I won't say it hasn't happened, but neither will I go around spouting off conspiracy theories without a shred of non-circumstantial evidence.
She swears she put the interests of the voters ahead of Bush's.
Again, can you prove otherwise? Do you have any non-circumstantial evidence, or are you simply assuming some one did something illegal because it was convienient?
For the record I am not a Republican, though as a conservative I typically vote that way. What you are doing, it quite simply spreading FUD. Fear that crooked republicans are fixing elections. Uncertainty that they can be trusted. Doubt that they should ever be elected. You have not offered any proof to support your claims.
I challenge you to name the last time you saw something that was in the public domain
I downloaded most of Beetohven's symphonies the other day from Kazaa using Kazaa Lite. I didn't check, but I'm pretty damn sure they are in the public domain!
Given that your company is backing out of the low-end "consumer" market for linux distributions, RedHat obviously feels that profit margins aren't strong enough there to justify continuing that business model. Why do you feel this is so? Services like up2date seemed to me to be a wonderful method of turning a profit. It seems to me that a linux distriution that offers something like that would be able to make plenty of profit. Could overhead be too high at RedHat to make this possible, particularly given RedHat's history of instability and insecurity compared to other linux distributions (notable Debian and Slackware, and to a lesser extent SuSE)? If that is the case, why do you feel that Enterprise Linux will turn a higher profit margin?
large sheets of polar ice in craters permanently in the shade.
This is a common misunderstanding of the moon. No place on the moon is ever permanently in the shade (excepting something like a cave of course). This comes from the mishandled use of the phrase "dark side of the moon". The moon i tidally locked with earth, meaning that its rotation is such that as it revolves around earth, we always see the same face of the moon. The far face that we do not see is termed "the dark side of the moon". This dark side is actually not always dark. At times when the moon moves between the earth and the sun (the new moon phase) this far side is brightly lit by the sun's light.
And even if Germany is far smaller than the US it has still a not too small voting population.
I think you're dead on here. E-voting is just a thing politicians use to appear cutting-edge to the public. Pen and paper ballots are reliable, easily understood, and not so slow as to be unusuable. The fact that Germany is a smaller country than the USA in population size doesn't really matter because of the way we vote. Only one official is elected by the nation, the President. He is really elected by the States' elctoral college, who traditionally (though not neccessarily) votes according to the way the members of their States vote. You don't have to count all the ballots for the entire country in one big pile, but rather 51 smaller piles, one for each State and the District of Columbia. I doubt Germany is much smaller than most States.
This thing appears to smack of parody, though it isn't specifically mentioned as satire anywhere. If this truelly represents his beliefs, this guy is off his rocker. He repeatedly equates OSS with the Nigerian scam, but gets his facts all wrong. He claims that they are both scams, attempts to get people to fall for the "something for nothing" desire in us all. This specifically forgets that the Nigerian scam is not "something for nothing", but rather "nothing for your money". This scam asks you to send in a good faith deposit to procure a much larger sum of money in the future. OSS gives you the software, and then only asks that you obey it's license, which typically does not require any fee at all.
Additionally, if Linux is trying to move towards a more desktop-friendly environment, how many average users that would be looking at Linux would be using 512MB of system RAM?
In a buisiness environment, quite a lot of them. Your average home user (whom you seem to be considering here) paid at least $1k US for his machine, and likely has a seperate video card with at least 32 MB RAM (probably 64 these days). However, many businesses that have to buy computers for 30 people or more buy the really cheap Dells that have onboard video and constantly eat system RAM like candy. They get these machines because in bulk, they can get them in many cases for less than $500 a pop. Personally, I think the business world is going to be the first place to adopt linux desktops, like home gamers like you're thinking. Requiring an uber graphics card just to run X is a mistake.
i was minutes away from buying a g3 ibook for my wife yesterday, but decided to wait.
I ordered a G3 iBook two weeks ago tommorrow. It was shipping out slow (expected ship date was the 28th. I was having trouble accessing my order to see if it might have shipped early last night. This morning, I checked the order and it had a hold placed on it with instructions to call the good people at Apple. They politely canceled my order for a G3 and I'll now be receiving the 12" G4 for the same price, albeit the expected ship date is the 29th. I can't way. Anyhow, you would have probably gotten the same deal as I did.
I've never personally tried them myself on a hard-drive, but for reducing minor vibrations and thus eliminating some amount of sound, rubbers whickers can be very effective. Hunters have been using a similar setup for hundreds of years to reduce the level of noise put out by a vibrating bow string. Some example can be found on this page (look for #95 WHISKER SILENCER). While I doubt the gain from such a technique would be substantial for a hard-drive, gluing a small felt strip to the top of sides of a hard drive should be relatively in-expensive, and could potentially drop your hard drive noise a decibel or two. Personally, I can't hear my drives over the noise fo my fans, so it's not worth the bother for me.:^)
Where oh where is it written that the "Slackware way" is the official way?
It isn't written anywhere. It's one of those unwritten rules that everyone understands without having to carve it in rock or pen it to paper. By Linux the way it should be, he means that Slackware doesn't change things the developers decided on. A Gnu/Linux distribution is made up of a lot of different pieces of software. No one knows these individual pieces better than the people who wrote them. To go about madly patching half the system and placing libraries in places the developers' didn't intend them to be, distributions like RedHat show their arrogance. Frankly when the OpenSSH Portable team says there's a problem with a past version and I should upgrade, I take their word for it. I don't try to back-port a patch three or four minor versions because I don't know what may be different that many versions behind that might not play nice with my patch. I use Slackware in part because Pat has that same philosophy.
Red Hat is the one packaging things up and and making a "more complete" linux distro. Last time I checked when it came to admin tools Slackware was severely lacking. They also unlike distros like Red Hat are apt just to throw a bunch of standard linux packages together as opposed to Red Hat who is known to customizes at the source level to add needed performance or security improvements.
What planet have you been living on? Of course Slackware doesn't include those "gee-whiz ain't that nifty?" admin tools such as the numerous "/usr/sbin/redhat-*" tools. Those are provided by redhat as nothing more than a layer of abstraction. Slackware users abhor such layers like nature abhors a vacuum. Common editors, the binutils package, man pages, and google are all you should rely on to admin your boxen. At least, that's the SLackware philosophy. And for what it's worth, a good Slackware admin is worth any 10 RedHat wizard admins.
To say the Slack just focuses on stability and simpilcity as opposed to Red Hat who actually spends a ton of time and money on stability testing is misleading to say the least.
Then how come the RedHat machines I inherited at work crash? Ask anyone who uses both Slackware and RedHat which of the two is more stable.
When Red Hat patches as I mentioned just above its [sic] for a reason, and usually a good one. Slackware's lack of patches and "little things which make using linux easier" is really just a reflection that they don't have the manpower or money to add needed improvements which make the a distro perform better.
Well, I certainly doubt it's for a good reason.
RedHat advisories Slackware advisories
Granted RedHat includes more software than Slackware, but look at how many times RedHat is vulnerable on a package that Slackware isn't. There can be no doubt in those cases that RedHat's either used a half-beta version of that software, or has poorly patched it, introducing a security vulnerability. As for performance, again ask anyone who uses both RedHat and Slackware which of the two performs better.
I didn't reply to slam Slackware...
No, you replied to troll. You obviously have no experience with Slackware, and thus aren't equiped to speak critically of it.
If you look at the Slack Book's HTML, you'll see that it was created with MS Word
That depends on which book you're looking at. I assure you mine is written with vi (and I think some guys on our team use emacs). Take a look for yourself at what will one-day be the Second Edition of Slackware Linux Essentials.
Wanted to throw my two-cents in. This is the second time in as many years that Slackware has been immune to a vulnerability in SSH that involved PAM. Since the majority of users don't need or use PAM, deciding not to include it is a good decision. Thanks Pat, and for what it's worth, I can't wait for 9.1.
Blockquoteth the poster:
I don't think you will have the option of recovering damages from the manufacturer. You ultimately pulled the switch that told the car to auto-park.
How long before we come across cars with something like:
Shamelessly stolen from the BSD copyright notification
THIS PARKING SYSTEM IS PROVIDED``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE MANUFACTURER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
This is simply some text included to beat the damned lameness filter. Some one should really see about removing the lameness filter for people with positive karma. It's just too damn much trouble to re-type that copyright notification to make it all lower-case. Staroffice wasn't able to change the caps to all lowercase and read it in a form
Slashdot Mirror
While it's been awhile since I've worked with Mandrake, and I have never worked with Fedora, I have worked quite a bit with RedHat. My advice depends on what you want to do with the OS. If you are wanting a GNU/Linux OS with all the whiz-bang autoconfigure tools you could ever hope for, use Mandrake. If you want something that is more likely to include the latest (which does not neccessarily mean greatest) beta version of $SOFTWARE, use Fedora.
If on the other hand, you are predominantly interested in running a stable OS without a lot of layers of abstraction, choose Slackware. RedHat/Fedora is too unstable (I would say the same about Mandrake IMO) and Mandrake is too complicated. Sure you have the latest version of KOffice, but really, what does it do for you that the previous stable version didn't? Sure you have all these whiz-bang autoconfigure tools and rarely need to go to the commandline, but what are you really learning, and what performance are you sacrificing to get that? Slackware offers the latest stable versions of most all the software you need (being a thin distro it doesn't include everything under the sun like SuSE and Mandrake), typically runs as fast as if not faster than all the other major distros out there, and rarely ever gives you problems. The learning curve is albeit higher than other distros, and Slackware users are perhaps justifiably titled elitest at times, but there are good reasons for that. It takes a certain dedication to learning Slackware, because it doesn't bother with needless gui config tools, with bloated SYS-V init, and similar pieces of software that tend to offer little and take a lot, but the rewards are worth it.
I don't have the stats on hand to back it up, but I've heard and read in several places that here in Georgia the deer population is larger than it was even before the English colonists arrived, which was far longer than 200 years.
But what exactly are you at fault for? You're certainly not at fault for stealing those credit cards. You are not at fault for giving away those credit cards. If you do not know about the security fault, you probably can't be held liable for any damages. If, however, you are given specific information concerning the security fault, and do nothing, you are negligent.
It all boils down to this: How diligent were you in protecting sensitive data that can affect the lives of your customers? We are yet a long way away from having sensible laws in this area. There needs to be a required base level of security that is strong enough to keepp out all but the most skilled and determined crackers in cases where SSN, PIN, credit card numbers, and other personal information from being leaked.
From glancing over the article (not a thorough read) and browsing slashdot, it doesn't sound like this guy really knew what he was doing. Whether he actually found a real vulnerability or not is still up for debate. ALl we do know, is that he (alledgedly) black-mailed BestBuy saying that he had information that could be used against them to ruin their online business. I don't think we can say for certain that BestBuy has done anything wrong in this case.
So if some one is blackmailing me to the tune of millions of dollars I am supposed to ignore them and work on repairing what they haven't told me is broken? That's not the way security works.
I care, and the law apparently cares as well. I don't think anyone would convincingly argue that blackmailing some one is ok because they are not saints either. Two wrongs do not make a right. So the ends in this case justify the means? It's alright for me to threaten a corporation because it will scare them?
Slashdot really needs a "-l, Ignorant" mod.
Oh please. Yes many of them are funded/backed/owned/whatever by Republicans. What difference does this make? Your paranoia may be well founded, but so far there has not been a shred of evidence that any illegal tampering with the voting system has been done specifically to give one party or another an advantage. I won't say it hasn't happened, but neither will I go around spouting off conspiracy theories without a shred of non-circumstantial evidence.
She swears she put the interests of the voters ahead of Bush's.
Again, can you prove otherwise? Do you have any non-circumstantial evidence, or are you simply assuming some one did something illegal because it was convienient?
For the record I am not a Republican, though as a conservative I typically vote that way. What you are doing, it quite simply spreading FUD. Fear that crooked republicans are fixing elections. Uncertainty that they can be trusted. Doubt that they should ever be elected. You have not offered any proof to support your claims.
Darl, is that you?"
I downloaded most of Beetohven's symphonies the other day from Kazaa using Kazaa Lite. I didn't check, but I'm pretty damn sure they are in the public domain!
Why on Earth would you want an unladen Beowulf cluster?
If I went around saying I got a +5 funny because some laudry tart hurled a scimitar at me; they'd lock me away!
They will change from a holstein to a jersey. If the chameleon blood is particularly powerful, it may morph into an angus.
Given that your company is backing out of the low-end "consumer" market for linux distributions, RedHat obviously feels that profit margins aren't strong enough there to justify continuing that business model. Why do you feel this is so? Services like up2date seemed to me to be a wonderful method of turning a profit. It seems to me that a linux distriution that offers something like that would be able to make plenty of profit. Could overhead be too high at RedHat to make this possible, particularly given RedHat's history of instability and insecurity compared to other linux distributions (notable Debian and Slackware, and to a lesser extent SuSE)? If that is the case, why do you feel that Enterprise Linux will turn a higher profit margin?
This is a common misunderstanding of the moon. No place on the moon is ever permanently in the shade (excepting something like a cave of course). This comes from the mishandled use of the phrase "dark side of the moon". The moon i tidally locked with earth, meaning that its rotation is such that as it revolves around earth, we always see the same face of the moon. The far face that we do not see is termed "the dark side of the moon". This dark side is actually not always dark. At times when the moon moves between the earth and the sun (the new moon phase) this far side is brightly lit by the sun's light.
I think you're dead on here. E-voting is just a thing politicians use to appear cutting-edge to the public. Pen and paper ballots are reliable, easily understood, and not so slow as to be unusuable. The fact that Germany is a smaller country than the USA in population size doesn't really matter because of the way we vote. Only one official is elected by the nation, the President. He is really elected by the States' elctoral college, who traditionally (though not neccessarily) votes according to the way the members of their States vote. You don't have to count all the ballots for the entire country in one big pile, but rather 51 smaller piles, one for each State and the District of Columbia. I doubt Germany is much smaller than most States.
This thing appears to smack of parody, though it isn't specifically mentioned as satire anywhere. If this truelly represents his beliefs, this guy is off his rocker. He repeatedly equates OSS with the Nigerian scam, but gets his facts all wrong. He claims that they are both scams, attempts to get people to fall for the "something for nothing" desire in us all. This specifically forgets that the Nigerian scam is not "something for nothing", but rather "nothing for your money". This scam asks you to send in a good faith deposit to procure a much larger sum of money in the future. OSS gives you the software, and then only asks that you obey it's license, which typically does not require any fee at all.
In a buisiness environment, quite a lot of them. Your average home user (whom you seem to be considering here) paid at least $1k US for his machine, and likely has a seperate video card with at least 32 MB RAM (probably 64 these days). However, many businesses that have to buy computers for 30 people or more buy the really cheap Dells that have onboard video and constantly eat system RAM like candy. They get these machines because in bulk, they can get them in many cases for less than $500 a pop. Personally, I think the business world is going to be the first place to adopt linux desktops, like home gamers like you're thinking. Requiring an uber graphics card just to run X is a mistake.
I ordered a G3 iBook two weeks ago tommorrow. It was shipping out slow (expected ship date was the 28th. I was having trouble accessing my order to see if it might have shipped early last night. This morning, I checked the order and it had a hold placed on it with instructions to call the good people at Apple. They politely canceled my order for a G3 and I'll now be receiving the 12" G4 for the same price, albeit the expected ship date is the 29th. I can't way. Anyhow, you would have probably gotten the same deal as I did.
I've never personally tried them myself on a hard-drive, but for reducing minor vibrations and thus eliminating some amount of sound, rubbers whickers can be very effective. Hunters have been using a similar setup for hundreds of years to reduce the level of noise put out by a vibrating bow string. Some example can be found on this page (look for #95 WHISKER SILENCER). While I doubt the gain from such a technique would be substantial for a hard-drive, gluing a small felt strip to the top of sides of a hard drive should be relatively in-expensive, and could potentially drop your hard drive noise a decibel or two. Personally, I can't hear my drives over the noise fo my fans, so it's not worth the bother for me. :^)
It's quite obvious that he's talking about the rate at which they are finding vulnerabilities, not the rate at which they are fixing vulnerabilities.
Dock yourself one sys-admin point for unneccessary use of a wildcard.
GUIs are generally good for picking from a large and possibly dynamic list of options for example.
Let me introduce you to my friend, grep.
I'll bite.
Where oh where is it written that the "Slackware way" is the official way?
It isn't written anywhere. It's one of those unwritten rules that everyone understands without having to carve it in rock or pen it to paper. By Linux the way it should be, he means that Slackware doesn't change things the developers decided on. A Gnu/Linux distribution is made up of a lot of different pieces of software. No one knows these individual pieces better than the people who wrote them. To go about madly patching half the system and placing libraries in places the developers' didn't intend them to be, distributions like RedHat show their arrogance. Frankly when the OpenSSH Portable team says there's a problem with a past version and I should upgrade, I take their word for it. I don't try to back-port a patch three or four minor versions because I don't know what may be different that many versions behind that might not play nice with my patch. I use Slackware in part because Pat has that same philosophy.
Red Hat is the one packaging things up and and making a "more complete" linux distro. Last time I checked when it came to admin tools Slackware was severely lacking. They also unlike distros like Red Hat are apt just to throw a bunch of standard linux packages together as opposed to Red Hat who is known to customizes at the source level to add needed performance or security improvements.
What planet have you been living on? Of course Slackware doesn't include those "gee-whiz ain't that nifty?" admin tools such as the numerous "/usr/sbin/redhat-*" tools. Those are provided by redhat as nothing more than a layer of abstraction. Slackware users abhor such layers like nature abhors a vacuum. Common editors, the binutils package, man pages, and google are all you should rely on to admin your boxen. At least, that's the SLackware philosophy. And for what it's worth, a good Slackware admin is worth any 10 RedHat wizard admins.
To say the Slack just focuses on stability and simpilcity as opposed to Red Hat who actually spends a ton of time and money on stability testing is misleading to say the least.
Then how come the RedHat machines I inherited at work crash? Ask anyone who uses both Slackware and RedHat which of the two is more stable.
When Red Hat patches as I mentioned just above its [sic] for a reason, and usually a good one. Slackware's lack of patches and "little things which make using linux easier" is really just a reflection that they don't have the manpower or money to add needed improvements which make the a distro perform better.
Well, I certainly doubt it's for a good reason.
RedHat advisories
Slackware advisories
Granted RedHat includes more software than Slackware, but look at how many times RedHat is vulnerable on a package that Slackware isn't. There can be no doubt in those cases that RedHat's either used a half-beta version of that software, or has poorly patched it, introducing a security vulnerability. As for performance, again ask anyone who uses both RedHat and Slackware which of the two performs better.
I didn't reply to slam Slackware...
No, you replied to troll. You obviously have no experience with Slackware, and thus aren't equiped to speak critically of it.
If you look at the Slack Book's HTML, you'll see that it was created with MS Word
That depends on which book you're looking at. I assure you mine is written with vi (and I think some guys on our team use emacs). Take a look for yourself at what will one-day be the Second Edition of Slackware Linux Essentials.
Wanted to throw my two-cents in. This is the second time in as many years that Slackware has been immune to a vulnerability in SSH that involved PAM. Since the majority of users don't need or use PAM, deciding not to include it is a good decision. Thanks Pat, and for what it's worth, I can't wait for 9.1.
goatse.cx ?
How long before we come across cars with something like:
Shamelessly stolen from the BSD copyright notification
THIS PARKING SYSTEM IS PROVIDED``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE MANUFACTURER BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
This is simply some text included to beat the damned lameness filter. Some one should really see about removing the lameness filter for people with positive karma. It's just too damn much trouble to re-type that copyright notification to make it all lower-case. Staroffice wasn't able to change the caps to all lowercase and read it in a form
Hmmm....
/usr/share/terminfo -name "*"
% find
That yields 2353 independent results.