I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on ELECTORAL COLLEGE (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where politics are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:
1. MICROPOLITICS VS MONOLITHIC ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Most states are Monolithic Electoral Systems. Votes are tallied in each state and the winner of each state recieves all of the electoral votes for that state. Even if 49.9% of voters are for candidate #2, the 50.1% for candidate #1 means he gets all of the state's electoral votes.
While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually are in politics, the debate is essentially over. Micropolitics have won.
The only real argument for monolithic electoral systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that micropolitics systems can be just as fast as monolithic electoral systems systems (e.g., Florida 2000 never would have happened if we would have just counted up every American's vote and the candidate with the greatest percent over 40% would win) that it is now all over but the shoutin'.
2. Portability
The Micropolitical Voting system was made to be portable to other future democracies such as Iraq, Afghanistan and has proven that it is scalable to nation states as large as China and India, the Monolithic electoral system would involve much more work in creating districts, states, commonwealths, etc. to the point that it is really not worth porting and would need to be started from scratch.
Don't get me wrong, I am not unhappy with the Electoral System. It will get all the people who want to turn Micropolitics into a true democracy off my back. But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" nation look around for a micropolitical-based, portable political system.
Unless Google's engineers are stupid (hint: they're not) or the lawyers step in, I'm betting it'll be gecko based with Google customized Search, relavance and security features. If they're really smart they'll make it open sourced. That'd be nice. Yeah
Otherwise known for...
on
Linux Clustering
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· Score: 2, Informative
Donald Becker also has done a large amount of work on Linux Network drivers. Grep through linux/drivers/networking and you'll find he's done work on Intel NICs, Realtek 8139s, even the ne2000 (I think he said he puked a few time while working on that one). Thanks for all your hard work Donald!
OK, I was comparing to Win98, but to be fair, WinXP RTM was Aug. 15 2001, RedHat 7.2 was released in September. So put an unpatched 7.2 system up and see how long it lasts, might be a little bit longer than XP but it will still get owned, I promise. I'm no MS fan, but some blame has to sit on these users that are putting old code on a very dangerous net. MS could make it easier (like RedHat does, no one installs 7.2 when FC2 can be d/l for free...)
Honestly, isn't it obvious by now that if you put a old machine on the net it's going to get exploited? That's the case with Windows and Linux, put a Redhat 5 box up on a cable line and see how long before it's serving up the warez...
Would it really do any better? Remember, the firewall was disabled by default and most, if not all services are enabled by default. It would be a warez shop in no time. The only thing this proves is that old code shouldn't be left exposed to the internet.
The guy could of used g4u and saved himself a lot of time. It's a open source ghost like program. It doesn't do partition resizing yet but for lab installs of 20 identical machines it works great. But like others have said, he really needs to push the admin into giving him some sort of budget for imaging... sheesh
Our IT Dept. is cramming these things down user's throats as the ultimate floppy replacement. I've had one friend though who's usb drive went completely dead, no power, no chance at all of recovery, any body else want to comment on issues of reliablity with these things? Obviously, users should be storing their files elsewhere as a backup but these are the geniouses that save a semester worth of papers to an old floppy and store it in their book bag underneath their 7 lb. math book and the sand from the beach last summer...
Re:Fedora Core 2 wins the vote of this Debianite
on
Fedora Core 2 Review
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· Score: 5, Funny
Wouldn't Redhat 7.3 be a more suitable distribution for someone switching from the Debian Camp to the Redhat camp. Redhat 7.3 is about as "bleeding edge" as Debian unstable:)
I've never understood why they don't move to ReiserFS, at least for new installations. With Fedora you have to use a kernel option to enable ReiserFS installation and with RHEL you can't install to a ReiserFS root, even the reiserfs kernel module is in their kernel-unsupported RPM which means don't call for help. I love RH but they need to get the ball rolling on this one!
One interesting question this raises is which MS would prefer the poor countries to do: Pirate MS Products or use Linux. My guess is MS would prefer them to use pirated Windows than Linux because MS at least then has the vendor lockin. MS change of heart concerning WinXP SP2 installation on pirated machines would certainly argue for this.
No, any IMAP client will not do this. They will properly create folders, etc, but they will still show other folders as children of INBOX. Trust me, I've done exstensive testing with this.
I wouldn't say that Mozilla has lost grasp on real world problems. They're simply attacking the issues from a user's perspective rather than from a sysadmin or organizational perspective. Firefox allows users to have a safe secure and powerful browser, an admin could accomplish about the same feats by locking down IE network wide, blocking ad sites and spyware downloads, etc. Thunderbird is the same way, SPAM can be blocked at the client level. Mozilla simply gives the user's and the admins the choice to make it a client issue or a network/sysadmin issue.
You could accomplish this by including a ISP customized option, this allows you to add your own radio button instead of just Email Account and Newsgroup account. The file you wish to create is \defaults\isp\US\custom.rdf. This allows you to set defaults for your user's such as the IMAP and SMTP server addresses, SSL support and preference settings. I was unable to find a definitive site for creating the customizations but Google helped me piece things together.
As my post above suggests,.6 adds IMAP IDLE support which is an advanced IMAP function only available in a handful of IMAP Clients/Servers but well worth it if you have it. I've found TB's IMAP support to be excellent. It's one of the few clients that can correctly show my Courier IMAP Server's folder tree with all other folders *not* being children of INBOX. It's very fast in grabbing message headers, even on large folders it seems limited only by the bandwidth. It also does a good job of cacheing the info so that the 2nd time I open up a large folder is much quicker than the 1st (unless of course another IMAP client has significantlly changed the existing mail messages). Offline support has also been added with a plugin although I have little reason to try it since most of the time I use TB, I'm connected.
For me, the most important new feature is IMAP IDLE Support. What this means is I can deploy TB to my 1500+ users. They can leave TB open all of the time and recieve instant notification of new messages. Our Courier IMAP Server which uses FAM for Enhanced IDLE Support means IDLE connections are using virtually NILL resources. Rather than polling every x number of minutes which causes a filesystem stat of the mailbox, FAM hooks into the Linux kernel, catches any changes to the mail folder, notifies Courier which in turn notifies the IMAP Client. This rocks!
I'm not following you here. rpm -q changelog provides a complete changelog of what occurred with each revision of the rpm package. In my experience , RedHat has done an excellent job of keeping these logs accurately. If you're reffering to the fact that they keep a package at a certain version and only apply security patches, that's not laziness that's stability. If you want to always run the latest version, use Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you're a real sysadmin and have other things to worry about, use RedHat.
That RedHat's backports and modifications are also *feeding* the 2.6 vanilla source. Just take a look at the Changelogs sometime and see how many @redhat.com's there are. RedHat does not apply any propriety patches to their kernel, all patches are made available for possible inclusion in a future vanilla release and many of them make it. Not to mention the testing the they provide for these patches. I hold RedHat directly responsible (alongside Linus, IBM and others) for the current state of the Linux kernel, it rocks!
RedHat backports 2.6 features (actually they'd be 2.5 features) to provide the most powerful kernel that they can support (i.e. make it run stable). If RedHat was planning on taking 2.4 and moving in a different direction that would be a fork and it would be a problem. But RedHat has already announced that RHEL 4 will use the 2.6 kernel. Any vendor who builds an app that depends on backport patches and won't run on 2.4 or 2.6 vanilla is just plain stupid. Yeah, it can be done, heck you can lock yourself into pretty much any platform you want as a developer, but why? RedHat has made it clear that 2.6 is the future. That's good enough for me
Two boxes huh? So you just doubled the number of systems a admin has to manage. Plus, they need to be able to talk to each other and move data back and forth easily. You've doubled your chances of hard disk, cpu, motherboard or network failure... Have fun with that then...
No Complaints here...
on
Red Hat Recap
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I work at a University so we can purchas RH Enterprise Workstation licenses for $25 and Advanced Server licenses for $50. I've found RHEL to be an excellent, stable distro. RHN in particular is very well done. I love being able to reboot or update my systems through rhn.redhat.com and have errata automatically applied with no interaction on my part. I realize businesses pay considerably more $$$ for RHEL but remember, you're still paying for services (errata, installation support, etc). If you don't have the dough, Fedora is still an excellent product. FC1 started out a little shaky but has stabilized considerably. FC2 is on it's way to becoming an excellent modern Linux distro. RedHat remains committed to Open Source (they still don't deal with *any* closed source code), they still are one of the largest organizational contributors to the Linux Kernel project, Apache, Samba, etc. RedHat has a great future IMHO....
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven't commented much on ELECTORAL COLLEGE (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where politics are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:
1. MICROPOLITICS VS MONOLITHIC ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Most states are Monolithic Electoral Systems. Votes are tallied in each state and the winner of each state recieves all of the electoral votes for that state. Even if 49.9% of voters are for candidate #2, the 50.1% for candidate #1 means he gets all of the state's electoral votes.
While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually are in politics, the debate is essentially over. Micropolitics have won.
The only real argument for monolithic electoral systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that micropolitics systems can be just as fast as monolithic electoral systems systems (e.g., Florida 2000 never would have happened if we would have just counted up every American's vote and the candidate with the greatest percent over 40% would win) that it is now all over but the shoutin'.
2. Portability
The Micropolitical Voting system was made to be portable to other future democracies such as Iraq, Afghanistan and has proven that it is scalable to nation states as large as China and India, the Monolithic electoral system would involve much more work in creating districts, states, commonwealths, etc. to the point that it is really not worth porting and would need to be started from scratch.
Don't get me wrong, I am not unhappy with the Electoral System. It will get all the people who want to turn Micropolitics into a true democracy off my back. But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" nation look around for a micropolitical-based, portable political system.
Unless Google's engineers are stupid (hint: they're not) or the lawyers step in, I'm betting it'll be gecko based with Google customized Search, relavance and security features. If they're really smart they'll make it open sourced. That'd be nice. Yeah
There's talk on the Fedora-devel list of getting Gnome 2.8 final into the already slightly delayed FC3 T2... Here's to hoping....
Donald Becker also has done a large amount of work on Linux Network drivers. Grep through linux/drivers/networking and you'll find he's done work on Intel NICs, Realtek 8139s, even the ne2000 (I think he said he puked a few time while working on that one). Thanks for all your hard work Donald!
OK, I was comparing to Win98, but to be fair, WinXP RTM was Aug. 15 2001, RedHat 7.2 was released in September. So put an unpatched 7.2 system up and see how long it lasts, might be a little bit longer than XP but it will still get owned, I promise. I'm no MS fan, but some blame has to sit on these users that are putting old code on a very dangerous net. MS could make it easier (like RedHat does, no one installs 7.2 when FC2 can be d/l for free...)
Honestly, isn't it obvious by now that if you put a old machine on the net it's going to get exploited? That's the case with Windows and Linux, put a Redhat 5 box up on a cable line and see how long before it's serving up the warez...
Would it really do any better? Remember, the firewall was disabled by default and most, if not all services are enabled by default. It would be a warez shop in no time. The only thing this proves is that old code shouldn't be left exposed to the internet.
The guy could of used g4u and saved himself a lot of time. It's a open source ghost like program. It doesn't do partition resizing yet but for lab installs of 20 identical machines it works great. But like others have said, he really needs to push the admin into giving him some sort of budget for imaging... sheesh
Perl: PHP for the masochistic.
Our IT Dept. is cramming these things down user's throats as the ultimate floppy replacement. I've had one friend though who's usb drive went completely dead, no power, no chance at all of recovery, any body else want to comment on issues of reliablity with these things? Obviously, users should be storing their files elsewhere as a backup but these are the geniouses that save a semester worth of papers to an old floppy and store it in their book bag underneath their 7 lb. math book and the sand from the beach last summer...
Wouldn't Redhat 7.3 be a more suitable distribution for someone switching from the Debian Camp to the Redhat camp. Redhat 7.3 is about as "bleeding edge" as Debian unstable :)
I've never understood why they don't move to ReiserFS, at least for new installations. With Fedora you have to use a kernel option to enable ReiserFS installation and with RHEL you can't install to a ReiserFS root, even the reiserfs kernel module is in their kernel-unsupported RPM which means don't call for help. I love RH but they need to get the ball rolling on this one!
Apples aren't near as easy to peel as oranges...
One interesting question this raises is which MS would prefer the poor countries to do: Pirate MS Products or use Linux. My guess is MS would prefer them to use pirated Windows than Linux because MS at least then has the vendor lockin. MS change of heart concerning WinXP SP2 installation on pirated machines would certainly argue for this.
No, any IMAP client will not do this. They will properly create folders, etc, but they will still show other folders as children of INBOX. Trust me, I've done exstensive testing with this.
I wouldn't say that Mozilla has lost grasp on real world problems. They're simply attacking the issues from a user's perspective rather than from a sysadmin or organizational perspective. Firefox allows users to have a safe secure and powerful browser, an admin could accomplish about the same feats by locking down IE network wide, blocking ad sites and spyware downloads, etc. Thunderbird is the same way, SPAM can be blocked at the client level. Mozilla simply gives the user's and the admins the choice to make it a client issue or a network/sysadmin issue.
You could accomplish this by including a ISP customized option, this allows you to add your own radio button instead of just Email Account and Newsgroup account. The file you wish to create is \defaults\isp\US\custom.rdf. This allows you to set defaults for your user's such as the IMAP and SMTP server addresses, SSL support and preference settings. I was unable to find a definitive site for creating the customizations but Google helped me piece things together.
As my post above suggests, .6 adds IMAP IDLE support which is an advanced IMAP function only available in a handful of IMAP Clients/Servers but well worth it if you have it. I've found TB's IMAP support to be excellent. It's one of the few clients that can correctly show my Courier IMAP Server's folder tree with all other folders *not* being children of INBOX. It's very fast in grabbing message headers, even on large folders it seems limited only by the bandwidth. It also does a good job of cacheing the info so that the 2nd time I open up a large folder is much quicker than the 1st (unless of course another IMAP client has significantlly changed the existing mail messages). Offline support has also been added with a plugin although I have little reason to try it since most of the time I use TB, I'm connected.
For me, the most important new feature is IMAP IDLE Support. What this means is I can deploy TB to my 1500+ users. They can leave TB open all of the time and recieve instant notification of new messages. Our Courier IMAP Server which uses FAM for Enhanced IDLE Support means IDLE connections are using virtually NILL resources. Rather than polling every x number of minutes which causes a filesystem stat of the mailbox, FAM hooks into the Linux kernel, catches any changes to the mail folder, notifies Courier which in turn notifies the IMAP Client. This rocks!
I'm not following you here. rpm -q changelog provides a complete changelog of what occurred with each revision of the rpm package. In my experience , RedHat has done an excellent job of keeping these logs accurately. If you're reffering to the fact that they keep a package at a certain version and only apply security patches, that's not laziness that's stability. If you want to always run the latest version, use Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you're a real sysadmin and have other things to worry about, use RedHat.
That RedHat's backports and modifications are also *feeding* the 2.6 vanilla source. Just take a look at the Changelogs sometime and see how many @redhat.com's there are. RedHat does not apply any propriety patches to their kernel, all patches are made available for possible inclusion in a future vanilla release and many of them make it. Not to mention the testing the they provide for these patches. I hold RedHat directly responsible (alongside Linus, IBM and others) for the current state of the Linux kernel, it rocks!
rpm -q --changelog httpd was that so hard???!!!
RedHat backports 2.6 features (actually they'd be 2.5 features) to provide the most powerful kernel that they can support (i.e. make it run stable). If RedHat was planning on taking 2.4 and moving in a different direction that would be a fork and it would be a problem. But RedHat has already announced that RHEL 4 will use the 2.6 kernel. Any vendor who builds an app that depends on backport patches and won't run on 2.4 or 2.6 vanilla is just plain stupid. Yeah, it can be done, heck you can lock yourself into pretty much any platform you want as a developer, but why? RedHat has made it clear that 2.6 is the future. That's good enough for me
Two boxes huh? So you just doubled the number of systems a admin has to manage. Plus, they need to be able to talk to each other and move data back and forth easily. You've doubled your chances of hard disk, cpu, motherboard or network failure... Have fun with that then...
I work at a University so we can purchas RH Enterprise Workstation licenses for $25 and Advanced Server licenses for $50. I've found RHEL to be an excellent, stable distro. RHN in particular is very well done. I love being able to reboot or update my systems through rhn.redhat.com and have errata automatically applied with no interaction on my part. I realize businesses pay considerably more $$$ for RHEL but remember, you're still paying for services (errata, installation support, etc). If you don't have the dough, Fedora is still an excellent product. FC1 started out a little shaky but has stabilized considerably. FC2 is on it's way to becoming an excellent modern Linux distro. RedHat remains committed to Open Source (they still don't deal with *any* closed source code), they still are one of the largest organizational contributors to the Linux Kernel project, Apache, Samba, etc. RedHat has a great future IMHO....