I understand what you are saying and I feel passionate about digital rights, but the choice of subject and telling of that ProPublica article are far far more important to Humanity than copyright law will ever be. Please feel free to ask Pamela if she agrees with that, but I think she might.
I'm a dispassionate geek. I understand logical and pragmatic choices. That's what I trained to do and to be honest, I'm extremely good at it.
This story still moved me.
I don't think I would be able to make the life and death choices outlined in the Article. I honestly hope to the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster that I will *never* have to make such choices. My significant other is a Dr - I don't know how she makes choices that are even slightly related to this, but thankfully I will never have to make them.
I understand that PJ has done fantastic work, but exactly how many people died for that? None? OK, lets move on then.
And FWIW, I've got a couple of hundred machines running varieties of Linux (but no Fedora 8) and I haven't seen any silly reboots. I think you might be making mountains out of a coincidental mole hill.
I don't often post to Slashdot, but as a single white guy who has absolutely no insight into the hardships you must face day-to-day (listening to that rubbish), I have to say that you Sir, are a legend.
This is one of the most succinct put-downs I've ever seen.
We have a dual approach (by "we" I mean the IT and Business side of a large educational institution).
For document management, we use Sharepoint. This contains both product documentation, project documentation and other types of document generated by management types. If you already have Sharepoint and want to keep everything in one place then it also does Wikis, however they are appallingly bad in that there is no WikiMarkup - you either use the WYSIWYG editor or you type fluent HTML. It's good for non-technical users and may be all you need to fill in the gaps between Sharepoints "big binder full of documents no-one ever reads" approach. Sharepoint iss basically just a web-based file-store that is searchable.
For documenting processes, procedures and textual information we use a Wiki. The one we use is called Confluence from Atlassian Systems, but it costs money (although for non-profits it can be free/cheap). For your organisation something less Enterprisey might be a better cost/benefit calculation... The advantages of a Wiki are that it's a bit more freeform and accessible - good for documenting quick fixes, simple procedures and information you might easily forget.
Users documenting things generally like a Wiki better, because they don't have to load up Word, find the standard template, work out how to lay things out etc. They can concentrate on the information and let something else deal with layout.
Yes, make sure the people who can watch them with regular UHF TV set can pay for them!
No, to make sure only the people who have a £135 license to own a UHF TV in the UK, which funds the BBC to produce this content, can watch it.
The issue is: Content BELONGS to BBC, not a MPAA Hollywood movie company.
Again, No. The BBC produces less original programming than it once did. The vast majority is commissioned from third parties and it is entirely possible that such agreements allow only for UK distribution. This allows the original production company to sell the programme or the concept overseas and reduces the cost to the BBC.
I really don't understand why people who don't live in the UK somehow think they've got the right to watch something they haven't paid for. Perhaps I am missing something...
I think you've missed the point. The user has a single machine which he dual-boots. It is a laptop, he mentions no other resources available to him which he could use to create this "Network Sharing" you talk of. When Linux is on, Windows is off and vice-versa.
Based on that evidence, we have to assume that, like me he is the proud owner of one and only one computer. You are not allowed to distort the facts to fit the solution you use/prefer.
Having said that rant, I actually have a Powerbook running OSX and a Linux/Windows Laptop (belonging to my employer). To access my USB Flash, I use FAT32. To access my USB Hard Drive, I use NTFS.
The reason I use NTFS is because Windows is the weakest link and I wouldn't trust it to support anything other than it's own native filesystem. The NTFS-3G project provides drivers which work on FUSE (for Linux) and MacFUSE (for OSX), so I'm happy.
And my carbon footprint it low because I don't have a (insert your favourite linux distro) box running 24x7 just so I can access my files.
1) autocomplete - does if you have bash-completion rules (i do - the caveat being completion speed is dependent on the same factors as your 1 and 2), or you can do "yum install packa*". How does apt autocomplete package names?
2/3) The difference would be that "apt-cache search" is running from the cached headers. That's equivalent to "yum -C search" - yes apt-cache is faster than yum normally because yum is downloading all the headers, unzipping the xml and combining before it does the search. I haven't benchmarked cached yum against cached apt - you may still be right that Yum is still slower.
4) again, you're not comparing apples to apples. Aptitude is a frontend to the functionality of apt and dselect. Yum is only a package manager. Comparing the features of apt to yum would be a more equal choice - and apt doesn't do redundant package notification, because that's a dselect feature.
I'd say that Aptitude is more like Pirut rather than Yum.
I'd really love to know why you consider Yum "atrocious", but without that context, I'm going to have to consider you a troll.
Disclaimer: I use Yum, I like it.
"OS agnostic, eh? What OS is running your website, the babbages difference engine? "
Uh, some kind of Linux flavour, I don't really care. I don't run that server, so I bought whatever was cheap at the time. At the end of the day, it's only PHP and MySQL which can quite happily live on any Webserver.
I've never heard of this HP/Unix stuff of which you speak. Do you perhaps mean HP/UX which is actually the name of the operating system to which you are referring? Of course I know that because I use it... you clearly only know Ubuntu. Used the terminal window much? No, I thought not.
You are a prime example of what I hate about Ubuntu. Ubuntu users see their personal OS as being the best, most userfriendly solution to any trouble with Windows. They fail to recognise that what Ubuntu does can be done to any other Linux system under the sun and there are still downsides to Ubuntu - Ubuntu is not special. It is quite well configured for your average 1-computer owning user, that I'll grant you, but it is not the solution to the problem you recognised, nor is it the best way to advocate Linux use.
One of the prime motivations for the creation of GNU/Linux was personal freedom - In this case freedom of choice. You should not be saying Ubuntu is the solution to every Windows problem, you should be suggesting that the User picks up ANY Linux distribution that takes their fancy and tries it.
I personally puke every time I see the shit-stained colour scheme of Ubuntu, so I try not to use it. Some of my supportees do and I don't have a problem with that, just as I don't have a problem with them using Fedora Core or something more esoteric like PC-BSD, whatever floats their boat.
Any to call me narrow minded is a bit rich. I am pretty much OS agnostic, supporting as I do BSD, Solaris and Linux systems numbering in the thousands on a day-to-day basis, plus I have some uses for Windows (shock! horror!). I use Fedora on my workstation, OSX at home and plenty of other OSes in between. I haven't fixated on one distribution as the answer to everyone's problems.
Oh FFS. Your comment would be interesting if you hadn't tacked the "go ubuntu" crap on the end. A simple "use an OS that gives you the freedom to do a complete install, such as any fucking Linux distribution" would suffice.
Your particular flavour Linux distro is not interesting. It just makes you a tosser and Linux is wasted on you.
(I use most major Linux distributions, that's my Job... but I can make any one replace Windows, not just Ubuntu!!!)
and point it to either an HTTP/FTP/NFS server, HD archive or the CDs...
That's been supported on almost every RedHat I've ever seen and certainly is on FC5 and RHEL4. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it can't be done. I for one do it almost daily because we have a massive network-install infrastructure.
I have a somewhat balanced view of this, as I work for a University and have a variety of different interactions with Solaris and Linux. What follows is a few notes on Linux vs. Solaris and Access Rights across different categories of system
Firstly, our Production MIS Systems:
Almost without exception, these run on Solaris on Sparc. Why is this? Simply because it is very very very reliable and the support contract is excellent. Ours runs on SunFire and midrange stuff like 1280s and 890s for the backend DB with a variety of frontends from Netras to 490s.
Show me a linux machine (apart from an HP superdome possibly, but that's Itanic) that you can partition into multiple physical systems, has 6 power supplies, has the possibility of over 100 CPU cores in a physical partition, can have hardware swapped in and out live and so on and I bet you it will have a pricetag like a SunFire. I am aware that a cluster of linux machines could do the same job for less buck, but for this stuff it's much more effective to have one very large highly resilient and available server.
We do use sudo; The production DBAs can Sudo as environment users and the admins (there is more than one because unlike some poster I just read I think a single key to the kingdom is a very bad idea - but then our team has already had one auto-accident death this year.) can Sudo to root. This is purely for a tracking point of view - we could have passwords for the root and application users and let people su, but it's harder to manage. They probably could use some shennanigans to get themselves a root shell if they really tried, but we'd see them because we have good (live) log monitoring and we trust them not to jeapordise their own jobs.
Nextly, our Development MIS Systems
Some of these run on Linux (RedHat Enterprise on HP hardware if you must know), Some of them run on Solaris. Typically the ones that are developing for things that talk to existing Solaris stuff stay Solaris, new stuff goes to Linux.
The reasons for this are manyfold - but they mainly hinge around the fact that Dev systems need not be highly resilient so the bang:buck ratio for Linux on HP is better than Solaris on Sun.
Sudo gets more relaxed here - our full-time (as opposed to Contract) DBAs are allowed to Sudo to root and we watch what they are doing a little less carefully. The rationale we have as sysadmins is we don't care what they are doing on our dev system (we can rebuild the OS in minutes, if they've fscked Oracle, that's their problem); Provided they can rebuild the code in Test and DR environments consistently and documentably as part of the project deliverables, we will release it into Production.
Thirdly, Academic Development Systems
Note that I am distinguishing between MIS and Academic systems... screwups in the former cost us money, the latter may cost us Grant money in the long run but at least Payroll still goes through. Think of Academic Development as the systems people write real code on (as opposed to tinkering with Databases or SQL).
These systems mostly (if they need *nix at all) run on Linux. Flavor depends on the moment and the supplier, but there's only two Research Groups out of all the departments in College still using Suns and Solaris, and that's only because their big-money code won't yet run on Linux.
Our access rights policy is something along the lines of: sysadmins and grant owner get to do what they like. Unfortunately I as a sysadmin don't get the right to tell Professor X that he can't have full access to his £Ymillion system, so he gets the same kind of access we do with appropriate disclaimers about how we'll charge
I'm not knocking GCC, it's great - but ICC creates the fastest code for Intel processors and probably the fastest code for AMD processors too. I expect a barrage of flames for saying this, but there's loads of evidence out there for it.
Imagine an x86 Mac and a PPC64 Mac (G5) of equivalent specs, running OSX of the right flavour, both compiled with GCC. You'd expect them to both perform the same right? Now take your x86 OSX and recompile it with ICC and you get an immediate speed improvement... wouldn't you?
Just because Apple support GCC (and will continue doing so unless ICC for OSX suddenly becomes free or they start charging for XCode) doesn't mean they shouldn't compile their entire O/S with ICC to take advantage of the speed.
I run RHEL WS (3 and 4) for a University. There are some great things you can do for automated deployment, it's rock solid stable, works on everything but bleeding edge hardware and it does everything most people want.
That said, it's crippled in that it ships without mp3 and avi support. This is fixable (on an enterprise scale if you know what you are doing), but annoying.
If something's broken (ACLs over NFS for one) it takes RedHat a long time to acknowledge that it's broken and even longer to release a fix - despite the fact we have 16000 licences and a support contract! This is however a disadvantage of any "Enterprise" distribution.
RedHat is also gnome-centric. This is not a bad thing in itself unless you must have KDE - in which case you must be prepared for RH to say "I'm sorry we won't include because we focus on Gnome."
That said, the enterprise management tools (RedHat Network) absolutely rocks my world, but will be much less useful for 6 machines. I don't think SuSE/Novell have anything that come close to rivalling this. But YMMV of course.
I haven't used Novell Desktop 9, but I have used SuSE extensively and nominally support it for academic use. YaST is good, but then so are the redhat-config-* tools. Novell is much more KDE driven - if you like that kind of thing. SuSE Pro is much better with newer hardware and automating NVidia binary driver install (among others) - but NLD may well suffer from the same stale odour as RHEL (in the same way that Fedora Core works much better on newer hardware than RHEL - but then it is the test-bed for stuff to be included in RHEL)
To be honest, I would push your IT department to either recruit or train one or two guys up to a minimum level of Linux experience alongside their Windows Duties and pick whichever Enterprise Distribution has the best support/price balance for you. At your scale of deployment, you won't see the benefits of RHEL over NLD.
yeah yeah, but as anyone who checked the page will know, that Y Window System hasn't been touched since 1998...
i think it's probably dead, and you're just bitching for the sake of it.;o)
--
Sam Sharpe
Slashdot Mirror
No, she doesn't. She's not in this league.
I understand what you are saying and I feel passionate about digital rights, but the choice of subject and telling of that ProPublica article are far far more important to Humanity than copyright law will ever be. Please feel free to ask Pamela if she agrees with that, but I think she might.
I'm a dispassionate geek. I understand logical and pragmatic choices. That's what I trained to do and to be honest, I'm extremely good at it.
This story still moved me.
I don't think I would be able to make the life and death choices outlined in the Article. I honestly hope to the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster that I will *never* have to make such choices. My significant other is a Dr - I don't know how she makes choices that are even slightly related to this, but thankfully I will never have to make them.
I understand that PJ has done fantastic work, but exactly how many people died for that? None? OK, lets move on then.
--
Sam
You sir, are a legend - I bet you get loads of women!
... but still fail to notice that he is a she and hence the moniker of sadistic bitch would be more appropriate ;o)
(I should really post this as A/C just in case my other half reads Slashdot)
Fedora 8 EOL is 7th January, you should think about upgrading it to something newer...
Fedora 8 EOL Announcement
And FWIW, I've got a couple of hundred machines running varieties of Linux (but no Fedora 8) and I haven't seen any silly reboots. I think you might be making mountains out of a coincidental mole hill.
Ebay? That's where I bought one last month.
I don't often post to Slashdot, but as a single white guy who has absolutely no insight into the hardships you must face day-to-day (listening to that rubbish), I have to say that you Sir, are a legend. This is one of the most succinct put-downs I've ever seen.
We have a dual approach (by "we" I mean the IT and Business side of a large educational institution).
For document management, we use Sharepoint. This contains both product documentation, project documentation and other types of document generated by management types. If you already have Sharepoint and want to keep everything in one place then it also does Wikis, however they are appallingly bad in that there is no WikiMarkup - you either use the WYSIWYG editor or you type fluent HTML. It's good for non-technical users and may be all you need to fill in the gaps between Sharepoints "big binder full of documents no-one ever reads" approach. Sharepoint iss basically just a web-based file-store that is searchable.
For documenting processes, procedures and textual information we use a Wiki. The one we use is called Confluence from Atlassian Systems, but it costs money (although for non-profits it can be free/cheap). For your organisation something less Enterprisey might be a better cost/benefit calculation... The advantages of a Wiki are that it's a bit more freeform and accessible - good for documenting quick fixes, simple procedures and information you might easily forget.
Users documenting things generally like a Wiki better, because they don't have to load up Word, find the standard template, work out how to lay things out etc. They can concentrate on the information and let something else deal with layout.
Err, you're being a bit of a prat old son:
Yes, make sure the people who can watch them with regular UHF TV set can pay for them!No, to make sure only the people who have a £135 license to own a UHF TV in the UK, which funds the BBC to produce this content, can watch it.
The issue is: Content BELONGS to BBC, not a MPAA Hollywood movie company.Again, No. The BBC produces less original programming than it once did. The vast majority is commissioned from third parties and it is entirely possible that such agreements allow only for UK distribution. This allows the original production company to sell the programme or the concept overseas and reduces the cost to the BBC.
I really don't understand why people who don't live in the UK somehow think they've got the right to watch something they haven't paid for. Perhaps I am missing something...
erm, I care not to correct your verbification of nouns, but I will tell you this:
It's grammAr dammit, grammAAAAAAAAAr!
(no, it's not Talk Like A Pirate day again, but it is the Queen's English and she spells it with an A, so you will too.)
Love and Hugs,
Spelling Nazi
I think you've missed the point. The user has a single machine which he dual-boots. It is a laptop, he mentions no other resources available to him which he could use to create this "Network Sharing" you talk of. When Linux is on, Windows is off and vice-versa.
Based on that evidence, we have to assume that, like me he is the proud owner of one and only one computer. You are not allowed to distort the facts to fit the solution you use/prefer.
Having said that rant, I actually have a Powerbook running OSX and a Linux/Windows Laptop (belonging to my employer). To access my USB Flash, I use FAT32. To access my USB Hard Drive, I use NTFS.
The reason I use NTFS is because Windows is the weakest link and I wouldn't trust it to support anything other than it's own native filesystem. The NTFS-3G project provides drivers which work on FUSE (for Linux) and MacFUSE (for OSX), so I'm happy.
And my carbon footprint it low because I don't have a (insert your favourite linux distro) box running 24x7 just so I can access my files.
1) autocomplete - does if you have bash-completion rules (i do - the caveat being completion speed is dependent on the same factors as your 1 and 2), or you can do "yum install packa*". How does apt autocomplete package names?
2/3) The difference would be that "apt-cache search" is running from the cached headers. That's equivalent to "yum -C search" - yes apt-cache is faster than yum normally because yum is downloading all the headers, unzipping the xml and combining before it does the search. I haven't benchmarked cached yum against cached apt - you may still be right that Yum is still slower.
4) again, you're not comparing apples to apples. Aptitude is a frontend to the functionality of apt and dselect. Yum is only a package manager. Comparing the features of apt to yum would be a more equal choice - and apt doesn't do redundant package notification, because that's a dselect feature.
I'd say that Aptitude is more like Pirut rather than Yum.
I'd really love to know why you consider Yum "atrocious", but without that context, I'm going to have to consider you a troll. Disclaimer: I use Yum, I like it.
Primarily the fact that since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, it's been removed in favour of Yum. Users of non-crusty Red Hat versions can't use it.
"OS agnostic, eh? What OS is running your website, the babbages difference engine? "
Uh, some kind of Linux flavour, I don't really care. I don't run that server, so I bought whatever was cheap at the time. At the end of the day, it's only PHP and MySQL which can quite happily live on any Webserver.
And, while I'm here demonstrating my knowledge:
I've never heard of this HP/Unix stuff of which you speak. Do you perhaps mean HP/UX which is actually the name of the operating system to which you are referring? Of course I know that because I use it... you clearly only know Ubuntu. Used the terminal window much? No, I thought not.
Moron.
Ok, I'll bite.
You are a prime example of what I hate about Ubuntu. Ubuntu users see their personal OS as being the best, most userfriendly solution to any trouble with Windows. They fail to recognise that what Ubuntu does can be done to any other Linux system under the sun and there are still downsides to Ubuntu - Ubuntu is not special. It is quite well configured for your average 1-computer owning user, that I'll grant you, but it is not the solution to the problem you recognised, nor is it the best way to advocate Linux use.
One of the prime motivations for the creation of GNU/Linux was personal freedom - In this case freedom of choice. You should not be saying Ubuntu is the solution to every Windows problem, you should be suggesting that the User picks up ANY Linux distribution that takes their fancy and tries it.
I personally puke every time I see the shit-stained colour scheme of Ubuntu, so I try not to use it. Some of my supportees do and I don't have a problem with that, just as I don't have a problem with them using Fedora Core or something more esoteric like PC-BSD, whatever floats their boat.
Any to call me narrow minded is a bit rich. I am pretty much OS agnostic, supporting as I do BSD, Solaris and Linux systems numbering in the thousands on a day-to-day basis, plus I have some uses for Windows (shock! horror!). I use Fedora on my workstation, OSX at home and plenty of other OSes in between. I haven't fixated on one distribution as the answer to everyone's problems.
Tosser.
Oh FFS. Your comment would be interesting if you hadn't tacked the "go ubuntu" crap on the end. A simple "use an OS that gives you the freedom to do a complete install, such as any fucking Linux distribution" would suffice. Your particular flavour Linux distro is not interesting. It just makes you a tosser and Linux is wasted on you. (I use most major Linux distributions, that's my Job... but I can make any one replace Windows, not just Ubuntu!!!)
It's all documented here, you do believe Wikipedia don't you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithy_code
I have a somewhat balanced view of this, as I work for a University and have a variety of different interactions with Solaris and Linux. What follows is a few notes on Linux vs. Solaris and Access Rights across different categories of system
Firstly, our Production MIS Systems:
Nextly, our Development MIS Systems
Thirdly, Academic Development Systems
I'm not knocking GCC, it's great - but ICC creates the fastest code for Intel processors and probably the fastest code for AMD processors too. I expect a barrage of flames for saying this, but there's loads of evidence out there for it.
Imagine an x86 Mac and a PPC64 Mac (G5) of equivalent specs, running OSX of the right flavour, both compiled with GCC. You'd expect them to both perform the same right? Now take your x86 OSX and recompile it with ICC and you get an immediate speed improvement... wouldn't you?
Just because Apple support GCC (and will continue doing so unless ICC for OSX suddenly becomes free or they start charging for XCode) doesn't mean they shouldn't compile their entire O/S with ICC to take advantage of the speed.
I run RHEL WS (3 and 4) for a University. There are some great things you can do for automated deployment, it's rock solid stable, works on everything but bleeding edge hardware and it does everything most people want.
That said, it's crippled in that it ships without mp3 and avi support. This is fixable (on an enterprise scale if you know what you are doing), but annoying.
If something's broken (ACLs over NFS for one) it takes RedHat a long time to acknowledge that it's broken and even longer to release a fix - despite the fact we have 16000 licences and a support contract! This is however a disadvantage of any "Enterprise" distribution.
RedHat is also gnome-centric. This is not a bad thing in itself unless you must have KDE - in which case you must be prepared for RH to say "I'm sorry we won't include because we focus on Gnome."
That said, the enterprise management tools (RedHat Network) absolutely rocks my world, but will be much less useful for 6 machines. I don't think SuSE/Novell have anything that come close to rivalling this. But YMMV of course.
I haven't used Novell Desktop 9, but I have used SuSE extensively and nominally support it for academic use. YaST is good, but then so are the redhat-config-* tools. Novell is much more KDE driven - if you like that kind of thing. SuSE Pro is much better with newer hardware and automating NVidia binary driver install (among others) - but NLD may well suffer from the same stale odour as RHEL (in the same way that Fedora Core works much better on newer hardware than RHEL - but then it is the test-bed for stuff to be included in RHEL)
To be honest, I would push your IT department to either recruit or train one or two guys up to a minimum level of Linux experience alongside their Windows Duties and pick whichever Enterprise Distribution has the best support/price balance for you. At your scale of deployment, you won't see the benefits of RHEL over NLD.
Mandrake 10.0
(it's already shipped to Club Members)
yeah yeah, but as anyone who checked the page will know, that Y Window System hasn't been touched since 1998... i think it's probably dead, and you're just bitching for the sake of it. ;o)
--
Sam Sharpe
bleh,
He's just wrong and ignorant - someone should bash him with a copy of www.gimp.org
From Luxuriosity:
General Image Manipulation Project
From www.gimp.org
The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program
so last time i checked, that G stands for GNU