Passing it to the U.N. is a bad idea. The U.N. is not only corrupt, but its nearly impossible for them to ever all agree on something, which results in nothing but inaction. Not to mention, many countries with different views on religion and freedom would all of the sudden have a say in how the internet is ran. You should read up on how many things the U.N. has screwed up, how many times corruption has openly plagued the system, how many times U.N. peacekeepers have been found guilty of raping those who they are protecting and those who they are fighting. Could you imagine China pushing to get freedom related things blocked, or one of the many religious states pushing to get anti-religion things blocked? The U.S. may have its problems but they are no where near as bad as the U.N. It may appear that way sometimes because its hip to insult America, but the truth is that America is still the most free country and media around the world just likes to keep focus on America because it sells(England being a close second as far as freedom goes, but they have cameras at every corner and their country is currently trying to significantly cut into their free speech by banning many things, even religious jokes). If anything was ever attempted to be blocked by the U.S., you'd see 5 different civil groups suing the government within a week and the decision to block it would be turned around fairly quickly. The U.N. moves slow, that is great for staying out of wars but not acceptable when dealing with something like the internet. There is nothing wrong with how the internet is ran right now, why change it? The U.S. invented it, the U.S. is doing good things with it, the only reason to change it would be because other countries are power hungry, which just isn't acceptable. Say what you will about America, but out of all the countries to be in control, they are the country that should be it. Regards, Steve
Yea and a web based application that allows you view the entire world, get directions in real time, and find local stores and businesses marked on the map in real time would be way too much for any web based application. I mean and even if they did do it, it could only be vector based graphics because satellite imagery is just too much for the client to download and handle.
The truth is that a web application can do just about anything except gaming, graphics design, and 3d modeling. If nothing else, Google has proved this with Google Maps. If you're viewing a 65,000 row spreadsheet, chances are that you're only viewing about 30 rows at any given time, have your browser cache say 50 or 60 lines and then as you scroll it will be smooth, and the browser can update the cache with the next series of lines in a continuous fashion so it seams seamless to you (very similar to what Google Maps does). In reality, the web application might be faster than a local one as all the heavy duty processing would be done on most likely a cluster of good hardware in the backend. Other details still need to be worked out, but as far as claiming that you can't do something like spreadsheets with a well designed web based application is nonsense. Regards, Steve
Just FYI, zimbra borked my system. Apache doesn't work anymore and zimbra is spitting out java exceptions. I'm not mad, as this was a test system, and I'm looking into resolving the issue and what caused it. If you guys have a bug tracking area or something I'll post my results there. I just wanted to let you know and this was my easiest way of contacting you. Thanks for releasing Zimbra, the community really needed something like this. Regards, Steve
Unless I missed something, red hat cerified engineers came in and configured the box. The guy had previously ran SAP under AIX (which is not linux by any means). The rest of the time it was under control of the regular admin whether it be an AIX guy or Windows guy. Red Hat Australia support asked if they could run a diagnostic test, but the customer never got back to them. I don't care what that article stated, what they are claiming just doesn't happen. It was either a faulty piece of hardware despite what IBM stated, or a faulty admin and no people are pointing fingers in other directions. The only other thing would be if they were running a custom kernel. This is not linux's fault, if the same exact thing happened under Windows, I'd also be claiming that this series of events is most likely wrongly being correlated to the OS. Regards, Steve
Well apparently since they were running Windows then switched to Linux then back to Windows, most likely the admins are at fault here. The admins were probably dumb microsoft certified mouse clickers. I've installed many systems in many environments using many distributions and nothing like this has ever happened. It is completely faulty hardware or faulty administrators, and if it is the latter, they probably don't know how to properly run windows either and are probably running a horribly insecure environment. A user process just doesn't take down the system under linux, something else is going on there. Regards, Steve
1) No major linux distribution uses a vanilla kernel.
2) Linus has stated that he wishes to speed kernel development up by putting the job of patching, testing, and distributing to the individual distributions completely refuting your argument.
3) A large portion of the code in the vanilla kernel is from Red Hat. Grep for redhat sometime in your kernel sources. Also Red Hat hires some of the industries best hackers, including Alan Cox. Regards, Steve
Umm... Red Hat has been the best thing the community has going for it. Red Hat is the only reason the kernel is of enterprise quality. Red Hat is the only reason the kernel has any kind of serious testing going on behind the scense. Red Hat has some defensive patents, but they come attached with an unrevokable allowance of OSS projects to use them in any way. Red Hat contributes more code to the kernel than anyone else, they also supply most of the security upates for it. They bought and gave us Cygwin, Fedora Directory Server, GFS (Global File System) and many other things. They maintain GCC and libc. They created GCJ so we can run java applications natively (its still under heavy development but compiles Eclipse and OpenOffice fine). They have done many other things for the community as well, but I won't go on as I've already done that in another post in this thread. Everything they release is GPLed, I could only hope that Red Hat eventually knocks Microsoft out of its position. Its not like they can get to that point and then undo their GPLed code... and by that time they will have invested billions in that GPL code, they aren't just going to turn their backs on it. They are currently a mulitbillion dollar company (I believe their market cap is around 3 billion) and they have yet to turn on the community. I can only hope that companies like Red Hat and Google dominate the future, it'd be in our best interest. Regards, Steve
Well Red Hat already is a key innovator into securing the kernel. As most know, Red Hat contributes more code to the kernel than any other entity. The kernel is their livelihood. SELinux patches work with the kernel now because Red Hat engineers worked closely with the SELinux NSA guys to get it to that point. Red Hat also created exec-shield which implements a number of security benefits including NX (NoExecute) and PIE (Position Independant Executables). They release both RHEL and Fedora with sane but secure SELinux policies, compile their major services with FORTIFY_SOURCE and other GCC options that find and/or block many types of overflows and other bugs. PIE is pretty neat in that it randomizes the memory layout so an attacker executing an attack can't know what memory lays ahead, often making the overflow useless. PIE has some performance impedements, so its only typically used on public facing services. Red Hat already forces yum and up2date to verify all gpg signatures by default, and they designed the RPM format so it is highly secure and you know what you're getting when you get it (gpg signing, double hashes (MD5 and SHA1 so that even if one is cracked, the other can act as a crutch until a new solution is found). Red Hat is also reknowned for getting security updates out sometimes days before others. Red Hat is responsible for many of those security patches, and one of the reasons Linux has such a good reputation for getting patches out quickly is a direct result of Red Hat. Anyway... if I had to put my money on someone doing this for Linux, Red Hat would be where I'd put it. They've already shown that they do much for the community, they gave us cygwin, they maintain GCC and libc, they created GCJ so we can run about 95% of java programs natively, including OpenOffice and Eclipse (albeit GCJ is still under heavy development), plus many more things from writing lots of code for projects like Apache and Gnome. (I can't forget to mention buying Netscape Directory Server and giving it to the community, as well as GFS, Global File System). Red Hat's legal department sometimes stirs trouble with derivatives using thier trademark, but the Red Hat engineers actively help CentOS and others. Red Hat is the only major linux player who depends on linux to succeed. All the others, IBM, Novell, Sun, etc.. have come onto the linux "train" to see if it can make them lots of money, if Linux fails however they'll just move on to the next big thing, like they've always done. Red Hat's entire being revolves around linux and its success, they have the motivation that is needed. Regards, Steve
Wow, ignorant. Closed source is not safer, anyone can still step through a program with a debugger, analyze its memory and find exploits. IE is closed source yet bugs are found all the time. ISS is closed source, yet many bugs have been found (more so in earlier versions than current versions). Closed source doesn't make anything more secure, it simply takes away your ability to easily manipulate and recompile the program. Getting the source code is like getting an architect's design of a building. You know exactly how everything is laid out, and how it works, but it doesn't mean you can get in. If the locks on the building are good, then the building is safe (metaphorically speaking). Closed or open has nothing to do with the security of a program, sure open source might allow more people to find exploits (arguably a good thing, because the faster they are found, the faster they are squashed), but closed source is not impenetrable by any means. Regards, Steve
SS1 goes no where near as far as NASA needs to go, and SS1 is still fairly immature technology. SS1 had a few good test flights, that means nothing... the Shuttles had over 100 flights (and spent over 1045 days in space), only 2 failed. If you want to know the many ways that NASA has not only helped the Nation, but the entire world with technologies they've developed read this. The formatting is screwy under firefox, if you highlight the text, its easier to read. In short, NASA has done a lot, and you live a better life because of it and their research, their failures, their software all helped SS1 come into being. One of the best things you can do is learn form others mistakes, NASA was the only one willing to take the risks on things like the shuttle, so they were the only one that could make mistakes, now we are learning from them and improving, this is how its supposed to work. Regards, Steve
SELinux is enabled by default with a good default policy in place.
ExecShield introduces other security benefits besides NX and PIE. Those were just the two I listed.
SELinux was in large part integrated into the kernel because of the work of RedHat engineers, and ExecShield was coded and patched into the kernel by RedHat engineers. Read this for more info. The security benefits I listed are not comprehensive and there are many more in Fedora, I simply pointed out the most obvious ones which Ubunutu, and most other distros, lack. I have nothing against Ubuntu, but you seem to have something against people spreading truthful information just because you don't like what is said. In addition to that, you spread some misinformation in your post. Also, I clearly stated that Fedora caters to both the Desktop and Server whereas Ubuntu is much more towards the Desktop. Many linux users like to also use their desktop as a server and I simply listed some advantages that Fedora might offer them if they have a more complex setup (yes I've seen plenty of home geeks use those features, granted on a small scale). Stop starting distro wars, I was just giving people the information they need to make an informed decision. Regards, Steve
Sorry, when I wrote that comment, I wrote it with haste and was actually thinking of a different, but similar coding challenge. Regardless, what I was getting at was that in the real world the problems presented in the challenge are non-existant for the most part or non-realistic, so using it to judge the quality of a programmer is useless. Its kind of theory versus reality. In this challenge you need to know theory and have to apply it quickly. Ben Googder, the guy mostly responsible for Firefox, has shown himself to be a great real world coder, but he admits to struggling through some computer science courses at his college. The challenge represents a small set of problems, and they aren't even a very diverse set either. Things like distribution of loads, efficient protocols, speed, memory usage, bandwidth considerations, maintainability, secure code, validating code, etc... are not tested in this challenge. The list could go on quite a bit. Its a fun little challenge, but nothing to place too much merit with. This is why companies like IBM stopped supporting TopCoder, they realized that the coders often didn't pan out in the real world. Google may have more of a use for this kind of coder, I don't know, and I'm not saying that the person who won is a bad coder, I'm just saying that just because someone wins this does not imply that they would be a great programmer to hire for a job. You would still need to look at other factors. Regards, Steve
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking of a different high profile coding challenge, my apologies. I still agree with the rest of my post however. Regards, Steve
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking of a different high profile coding challenge, my apologies. I still agree with the rest of my post however. Regards, Steve
It doesn't matter. Any problem worth solving by the best programmers in the world take more then a couple hours and I'm sure they are paid well for it. TopCoder receives much criticism. It is mostly highschool aged students pushed by their respective schools so the school can get some local press. If anything this just shows that hopefully the really good programmers are off doing better things. Regardless, being able to make a program output a predetermined output given some input (every challenge in this contest is like that because all results are automatically checked) is hardly anything worth bragging about, not saying its a bad thing, it could be useful, but its not going to get a shuttle out of the atmosphere. Regards, Steve
Red Hat doesn't have "official" forums because you call them or email them your problem directly and their engineers or tech people get back to you. They win awards yearly based on the quality of their service and I've always been impressed by their responses myself. If for some reason that doesn't work out, go to one of the unofficial forums or go to a fedora forum (there are many) and get your answer, or there is always the mailing list. The whole point of paying for RHEL is that you don't have to go scouring for answers, you pay Red Hat to give you the answers. Fedora is the base of RHEL and fedora has a gigantic community, I'm sure they can help you if all else fails. Regards, Steve
That number on distrowatch is not the number of hits they get from an operating system, it is the number of times someone clicked on that distro's link to read about it. It is not a count of how many people are using it, just how many people have wanted to read a review or something about it. Regards, Steve
Ubunutu is nice, but installing Fedora or others takes no longer if you do a standard desktop or workstation install (which only requires the first and possibly second cd). If you do a full install then yes you'll need 4 cds and an hour or so depending on your system, but your getting a hell of alot of more software then with Ubuntu (arguably a good or bad thing depending on who you talk to). Fedora is designed with both the server and the desktop in mind and so it caters to both crowds, Ubuntu however leans far more toward the desktop crowd (but being based on debian is usually just a few apt commands away from a good server too).
Fedora from a security point of view though is significantly better. Fedora implements SELinux, execshield with NoExecute and PIE (position independant executables), and programs compiled with FORTIFY_SOURCE. Those features greatly increase security while also helping to prevent future unknown attacks.(Note, I dont believe all programs use those features for performance reasons, only those likely to be attacked like public facing services) Fedora also gives you easy access to XEN (virtualization), GFS (Global File System), and the Fedora Directory Server. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are nice, and people must choose based on their needs, but in many environments Fedora offers, what I feel, are certain benefits. Fedora also tends to get out security updates as quickly as 4 days faster then the others in some cases. Just my 2 cents on the issue. Regards, Steve
In a slight aside from your joke... DistroWatch gets those numbers by pretty much whichever distro is making the most buzz in the geek news world at the time. It in no way reflects actual download counts or user counts. For instance, if you run Mandriva, Suse, or Fedora and click on Ubuntu on distrowatch, the Ubuntu number goes up. So I guess what that number represents is the number of folks who are interested in reading about it, or reading a review about it. Regards, Steve
My understanding was that Iraq stopped letting the U.N. in and the U.N. didn't penalize Saddam in any way. Iraq had the scientists already (that was well known) and that is the key, if they had materials without knowledge then the materials are useless, but they had the knowledge and just needed materials which are fairly easy to aquire. Also, many smaller stockpiles of various gases were found, larger stockpiles, or more deadly weapons, had plenty of time to be hidden or moved out of country while the U.N. delayed things. The truth is, the U.N. is not very effective, they don't enforce things that need to be enforced, and its too hard to get everyone to agree. They were letting this guy off way too easily. Saddam kept breaking agreements and treaties without repricussions. It was damn near a mirror image of Hitler pushing Europe around and Europe giving into demands until it escalated out of control and resulted in a war the scale of the world. The U.S. may not of had perfect intelligence, but they damn well may have prevented a major war (especially if N. Korea got into the game). The U.S. acted when the U.N. failed to act and probably saved millions of lives as a result, but noone will ever admit it because its trendy to hate America. Regards, Steve
The U.S. already uses several robots in battle with them, mostly drones for mapping things. Some drones have missiles. There is also a smaller land robot that infantry can carry with them to inspect suspicious areas. There are easily about 500 other forms of robots on the drawing boards among various defense contractors. The idea is that robots can be made in any number and are dispensable, so eventually a soldier should be replaced by a robot. The robots we know exist are most likley nothing compared to what is behind closed doors. We often don't hear about the really good stuff until its about 50 to 75 years passed. With something like a robot that can fight as a soldier can, the U.S. probably would keep that under tight secrecy until the public needed to know(i.e. because we needed to use them for a large scale war). Something like that is not something you want your enemies to know about. As it is right now, if we ever had to battle a country like China where the government literally controls how many think and act and at the drop of a dime could send billions of people to war, we would need to scale up our forces, robots are the answer. One popular robot idea in the early research phase is obviously autonomous vehicles, as is shown by DARPA's annual grand challenge. Regards, Steve
I bet two mars rovers that European space engineering isn't the supreme quality that you claim it be. Also, NASA's space shuttle is the most innovative thing in the whole industry right now. They took a chance, they did the math and they figured rather then play it safe that they'd do their best to move the field of space aviation forward. NASA did all of this with a reusable spacecraft that lands like a plane. NASA is the only agency taking chances, taking things to a new level. They have a shitty budget so to claim that they don't engineer well because they can afford to blow things up is ridiculous and ignorant.
Alot of people are making dumb claims about ISS and the russians doing everything. Its funyy how NASA's shuttle is responsible for delivering nearly every piece of ISS except for about 3. NASA's shuttle is the only spacecraft capable of carrying and assembling some of the very large and heavy payloads. There are 6 space agencies involved with ISS, you don't find it ironic how the Americans and Russians are the only ones that have done anything to help it?
The European space agency does few things, and those few things it does do take a long time. If they've had less failures its because they've had less to fail at. Until a year or two ago, space shuttle flights were very routine and made fairly often. It was one mistake that made the public freak out simply because they are used to safe airplanes and dont realize the risks of going to space. Finally all of that beauracracy has started to end. If you count all the time that the 5 shuttles have spent in space, it amounts to about 4 constant years (1045 days in flight), what is ESA's time? Oh thats right, they don't have manned space vehicles, rather they pay the Americans or Russians to fly with them.
I'm not saying ESA is useless, they are far from it and have done many useful things, but you opened your mouth and nothing but ignorance came out. One more thing, up until the 90's when the U.S. military decided to stop sharing its space secrets with ESA, ESA was pretty damn dependant on NASA and often only achieved things with NASA's assistance. This post isn't intended as a flame, I just find it amusing how NASA doesn't get one tenth of the recognition it deserves. Regards, Steve
Replying to myself. It appears that the nano-itx has been released, everywhere I looked just was saying out of stock. I thought they were saying out of stock because it hasn't been released yet. I'm a moron, ignore my post. Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Passing it to the U.N. is a bad idea. The U.N. is not only corrupt, but its nearly impossible for them to ever all agree on something, which results in nothing but inaction. Not to mention, many countries with different views on religion and freedom would all of the sudden have a say in how the internet is ran. You should read up on how many things the U.N. has screwed up, how many times corruption has openly plagued the system, how many times U.N. peacekeepers have been found guilty of raping those who they are protecting and those who they are fighting. Could you imagine China pushing to get freedom related things blocked, or one of the many religious states pushing to get anti-religion things blocked? The U.S. may have its problems but they are no where near as bad as the U.N. It may appear that way sometimes because its hip to insult America, but the truth is that America is still the most free country and media around the world just likes to keep focus on America because it sells(England being a close second as far as freedom goes, but they have cameras at every corner and their country is currently trying to significantly cut into their free speech by banning many things, even religious jokes). If anything was ever attempted to be blocked by the U.S., you'd see 5 different civil groups suing the government within a week and the decision to block it would be turned around fairly quickly. The U.N. moves slow, that is great for staying out of wars but not acceptable when dealing with something like the internet. There is nothing wrong with how the internet is ran right now, why change it? The U.S. invented it, the U.S. is doing good things with it, the only reason to change it would be because other countries are power hungry, which just isn't acceptable. Say what you will about America, but out of all the countries to be in control, they are the country that should be it.
Regards,
Steve
Yea and a web based application that allows you view the entire world, get directions in real time, and find local stores and businesses marked on the map in real time would be way too much for any web based application. I mean and even if they did do it, it could only be vector based graphics because satellite imagery is just too much for the client to download and handle.
The truth is that a web application can do just about anything except gaming, graphics design, and 3d modeling. If nothing else, Google has proved this with Google Maps. If you're viewing a 65,000 row spreadsheet, chances are that you're only viewing about 30 rows at any given time, have your browser cache say 50 or 60 lines and then as you scroll it will be smooth, and the browser can update the cache with the next series of lines in a continuous fashion so it seams seamless to you (very similar to what Google Maps does). In reality, the web application might be faster than a local one as all the heavy duty processing would be done on most likely a cluster of good hardware in the backend. Other details still need to be worked out, but as far as claiming that you can't do something like spreadsheets with a well designed web based application is nonsense.
Regards,
Steve
Just FYI, zimbra borked my system. Apache doesn't work anymore and zimbra is spitting out java exceptions. I'm not mad, as this was a test system, and I'm looking into resolving the issue and what caused it. If you guys have a bug tracking area or something I'll post my results there. I just wanted to let you know and this was my easiest way of contacting you. Thanks for releasing Zimbra, the community really needed something like this.
Regards,
Steve
Unless I missed something, red hat cerified engineers came in and configured the box. The guy had previously ran SAP under AIX (which is not linux by any means). The rest of the time it was under control of the regular admin whether it be an AIX guy or Windows guy. Red Hat Australia support asked if they could run a diagnostic test, but the customer never got back to them. I don't care what that article stated, what they are claiming just doesn't happen. It was either a faulty piece of hardware despite what IBM stated, or a faulty admin and no people are pointing fingers in other directions. The only other thing would be if they were running a custom kernel. This is not linux's fault, if the same exact thing happened under Windows, I'd also be claiming that this series of events is most likely wrongly being correlated to the OS.
Regards,
Steve
Well apparently since they were running Windows then switched to Linux then back to Windows, most likely the admins are at fault here. The admins were probably dumb microsoft certified mouse clickers. I've installed many systems in many environments using many distributions and nothing like this has ever happened. It is completely faulty hardware or faulty administrators, and if it is the latter, they probably don't know how to properly run windows either and are probably running a horribly insecure environment. A user process just doesn't take down the system under linux, something else is going on there.
Regards,
Steve
For distributed compiling use distcc.
Regards,
Steve
1) No major linux distribution uses a vanilla kernel.
2) Linus has stated that he wishes to speed kernel development up by putting the job of patching, testing, and distributing to the individual distributions completely refuting your argument.
3) A large portion of the code in the vanilla kernel is from Red Hat. Grep for redhat sometime in your kernel sources. Also Red Hat hires some of the industries best hackers, including Alan Cox.
Regards,
Steve
Umm... Red Hat has been the best thing the community has going for it. Red Hat is the only reason the kernel is of enterprise quality. Red Hat is the only reason the kernel has any kind of serious testing going on behind the scense. Red Hat has some defensive patents, but they come attached with an unrevokable allowance of OSS projects to use them in any way. Red Hat contributes more code to the kernel than anyone else, they also supply most of the security upates for it. They bought and gave us Cygwin, Fedora Directory Server, GFS (Global File System) and many other things. They maintain GCC and libc. They created GCJ so we can run java applications natively (its still under heavy development but compiles Eclipse and OpenOffice fine). They have done many other things for the community as well, but I won't go on as I've already done that in another post in this thread. Everything they release is GPLed, I could only hope that Red Hat eventually knocks Microsoft out of its position. Its not like they can get to that point and then undo their GPLed code... and by that time they will have invested billions in that GPL code, they aren't just going to turn their backs on it. They are currently a mulitbillion dollar company (I believe their market cap is around 3 billion) and they have yet to turn on the community. I can only hope that companies like Red Hat and Google dominate the future, it'd be in our best interest.
Regards,
Steve
Well Red Hat already is a key innovator into securing the kernel. As most know, Red Hat contributes more code to the kernel than any other entity. The kernel is their livelihood. SELinux patches work with the kernel now because Red Hat engineers worked closely with the SELinux NSA guys to get it to that point. Red Hat also created exec-shield which implements a number of security benefits including NX (NoExecute) and PIE (Position Independant Executables). They release both RHEL and Fedora with sane but secure SELinux policies, compile their major services with FORTIFY_SOURCE and other GCC options that find and/or block many types of overflows and other bugs. PIE is pretty neat in that it randomizes the memory layout so an attacker executing an attack can't know what memory lays ahead, often making the overflow useless. PIE has some performance impedements, so its only typically used on public facing services. Red Hat already forces yum and up2date to verify all gpg signatures by default, and they designed the RPM format so it is highly secure and you know what you're getting when you get it (gpg signing, double hashes (MD5 and SHA1 so that even if one is cracked, the other can act as a crutch until a new solution is found). Red Hat is also reknowned for getting security updates out sometimes days before others. Red Hat is responsible for many of those security patches, and one of the reasons Linux has such a good reputation for getting patches out quickly is a direct result of Red Hat. Anyway... if I had to put my money on someone doing this for Linux, Red Hat would be where I'd put it. They've already shown that they do much for the community, they gave us cygwin, they maintain GCC and libc, they created GCJ so we can run about 95% of java programs natively, including OpenOffice and Eclipse (albeit GCJ is still under heavy development), plus many more things from writing lots of code for projects like Apache and Gnome. (I can't forget to mention buying Netscape Directory Server and giving it to the community, as well as GFS, Global File System). Red Hat's legal department sometimes stirs trouble with derivatives using thier trademark, but the Red Hat engineers actively help CentOS and others. Red Hat is the only major linux player who depends on linux to succeed. All the others, IBM, Novell, Sun, etc.. have come onto the linux "train" to see if it can make them lots of money, if Linux fails however they'll just move on to the next big thing, like they've always done. Red Hat's entire being revolves around linux and its success, they have the motivation that is needed.
Regards,
Steve
Wow, ignorant. Closed source is not safer, anyone can still step through a program with a debugger, analyze its memory and find exploits. IE is closed source yet bugs are found all the time. ISS is closed source, yet many bugs have been found (more so in earlier versions than current versions). Closed source doesn't make anything more secure, it simply takes away your ability to easily manipulate and recompile the program. Getting the source code is like getting an architect's design of a building. You know exactly how everything is laid out, and how it works, but it doesn't mean you can get in. If the locks on the building are good, then the building is safe (metaphorically speaking). Closed or open has nothing to do with the security of a program, sure open source might allow more people to find exploits (arguably a good thing, because the faster they are found, the faster they are squashed), but closed source is not impenetrable by any means.
Regards,
Steve
Excellent, thanks for the great product. I'm checking it out on FC4 right now.
Regards,
Steve
SS1 goes no where near as far as NASA needs to go, and SS1 is still fairly immature technology. SS1 had a few good test flights, that means nothing... the Shuttles had over 100 flights (and spent over 1045 days in space), only 2 failed. If you want to know the many ways that NASA has not only helped the Nation, but the entire world with technologies they've developed read this. The formatting is screwy under firefox, if you highlight the text, its easier to read. In short, NASA has done a lot, and you live a better life because of it and their research, their failures, their software all helped SS1 come into being. One of the best things you can do is learn form others mistakes, NASA was the only one willing to take the risks on things like the shuttle, so they were the only one that could make mistakes, now we are learning from them and improving, this is how its supposed to work.
Regards,
Steve
SELinux is enabled by default with a good default policy in place.
ExecShield introduces other security benefits besides NX and PIE. Those were just the two I listed.
SELinux was in large part integrated into the kernel because of the work of RedHat engineers, and ExecShield was coded and patched into the kernel by RedHat engineers. Read this for more info. The security benefits I listed are not comprehensive and there are many more in Fedora, I simply pointed out the most obvious ones which Ubunutu, and most other distros, lack. I have nothing against Ubuntu, but you seem to have something against people spreading truthful information just because you don't like what is said. In addition to that, you spread some misinformation in your post. Also, I clearly stated that Fedora caters to both the Desktop and Server whereas Ubuntu is much more towards the Desktop. Many linux users like to also use their desktop as a server and I simply listed some advantages that Fedora might offer them if they have a more complex setup (yes I've seen plenty of home geeks use those features, granted on a small scale). Stop starting distro wars, I was just giving people the information they need to make an informed decision.
Regards,
Steve
Sorry, when I wrote that comment, I wrote it with haste and was actually thinking of a different, but similar coding challenge. Regardless, what I was getting at was that in the real world the problems presented in the challenge are non-existant for the most part or non-realistic, so using it to judge the quality of a programmer is useless. Its kind of theory versus reality. In this challenge you need to know theory and have to apply it quickly. Ben Googder, the guy mostly responsible for Firefox, has shown himself to be a great real world coder, but he admits to struggling through some computer science courses at his college. The challenge represents a small set of problems, and they aren't even a very diverse set either. Things like distribution of loads, efficient protocols, speed, memory usage, bandwidth considerations, maintainability, secure code, validating code, etc... are not tested in this challenge. The list could go on quite a bit. Its a fun little challenge, but nothing to place too much merit with. This is why companies like IBM stopped supporting TopCoder, they realized that the coders often didn't pan out in the real world. Google may have more of a use for this kind of coder, I don't know, and I'm not saying that the person who won is a bad coder, I'm just saying that just because someone wins this does not imply that they would be a great programmer to hire for a job. You would still need to look at other factors.
Regards,
Steve
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking of a different high profile coding challenge, my apologies. I still agree with the rest of my post however.
Regards,
Steve
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking of a different high profile coding challenge, my apologies. I still agree with the rest of my post however.
Regards,
Steve
It doesn't matter. Any problem worth solving by the best programmers in the world take more then a couple hours and I'm sure they are paid well for it. TopCoder receives much criticism. It is mostly highschool aged students pushed by their respective schools so the school can get some local press. If anything this just shows that hopefully the really good programmers are off doing better things. Regardless, being able to make a program output a predetermined output given some input (every challenge in this contest is like that because all results are automatically checked) is hardly anything worth bragging about, not saying its a bad thing, it could be useful, but its not going to get a shuttle out of the atmosphere.
Regards,
Steve
Red Hat doesn't have "official" forums because you call them or email them your problem directly and their engineers or tech people get back to you. They win awards yearly based on the quality of their service and I've always been impressed by their responses myself. If for some reason that doesn't work out, go to one of the unofficial forums or go to a fedora forum (there are many) and get your answer, or there is always the mailing list. The whole point of paying for RHEL is that you don't have to go scouring for answers, you pay Red Hat to give you the answers. Fedora is the base of RHEL and fedora has a gigantic community, I'm sure they can help you if all else fails.
Regards,
Steve
That number on distrowatch is not the number of hits they get from an operating system, it is the number of times someone clicked on that distro's link to read about it. It is not a count of how many people are using it, just how many people have wanted to read a review or something about it.
Regards,
Steve
Ubunutu is nice, but installing Fedora or others takes no longer if you do a standard desktop or workstation install (which only requires the first and possibly second cd). If you do a full install then yes you'll need 4 cds and an hour or so depending on your system, but your getting a hell of alot of more software then with Ubuntu (arguably a good or bad thing depending on who you talk to). Fedora is designed with both the server and the desktop in mind and so it caters to both crowds, Ubuntu however leans far more toward the desktop crowd (but being based on debian is usually just a few apt commands away from a good server too).
Fedora from a security point of view though is significantly better. Fedora implements SELinux, execshield with NoExecute and PIE (position independant executables), and programs compiled with FORTIFY_SOURCE. Those features greatly increase security while also helping to prevent future unknown attacks.(Note, I dont believe all programs use those features for performance reasons, only those likely to be attacked like public facing services) Fedora also gives you easy access to XEN (virtualization), GFS (Global File System), and the Fedora Directory Server. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are nice, and people must choose based on their needs, but in many environments Fedora offers, what I feel, are certain benefits. Fedora also tends to get out security updates as quickly as 4 days faster then the others in some cases. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
Regards,
Steve
In a slight aside from your joke... DistroWatch gets those numbers by pretty much whichever distro is making the most buzz in the geek news world at the time. It in no way reflects actual download counts or user counts. For instance, if you run Mandriva, Suse, or Fedora and click on Ubuntu on distrowatch, the Ubuntu number goes up. So I guess what that number represents is the number of folks who are interested in reading about it, or reading a review about it.
Regards,
Steve
My understanding was that Iraq stopped letting the U.N. in and the U.N. didn't penalize Saddam in any way. Iraq had the scientists already (that was well known) and that is the key, if they had materials without knowledge then the materials are useless, but they had the knowledge and just needed materials which are fairly easy to aquire. Also, many smaller stockpiles of various gases were found, larger stockpiles, or more deadly weapons, had plenty of time to be hidden or moved out of country while the U.N. delayed things. The truth is, the U.N. is not very effective, they don't enforce things that need to be enforced, and its too hard to get everyone to agree. They were letting this guy off way too easily. Saddam kept breaking agreements and treaties without repricussions. It was damn near a mirror image of Hitler pushing Europe around and Europe giving into demands until it escalated out of control and resulted in a war the scale of the world. The U.S. may not of had perfect intelligence, but they damn well may have prevented a major war (especially if N. Korea got into the game). The U.S. acted when the U.N. failed to act and probably saved millions of lives as a result, but noone will ever admit it because its trendy to hate America.
Regards,
Steve
The U.S. already uses several robots in battle with them, mostly drones for mapping things. Some drones have missiles. There is also a smaller land robot that infantry can carry with them to inspect suspicious areas. There are easily about 500 other forms of robots on the drawing boards among various defense contractors. The idea is that robots can be made in any number and are dispensable, so eventually a soldier should be replaced by a robot. The robots we know exist are most likley nothing compared to what is behind closed doors. We often don't hear about the really good stuff until its about 50 to 75 years passed. With something like a robot that can fight as a soldier can, the U.S. probably would keep that under tight secrecy until the public needed to know(i.e. because we needed to use them for a large scale war). Something like that is not something you want your enemies to know about. As it is right now, if we ever had to battle a country like China where the government literally controls how many think and act and at the drop of a dime could send billions of people to war, we would need to scale up our forces, robots are the answer. One popular robot idea in the early research phase is obviously autonomous vehicles, as is shown by DARPA's annual grand challenge.
Regards,
Steve
I bet two mars rovers that European space engineering isn't the supreme quality that you claim it be. Also, NASA's space shuttle is the most innovative thing in the whole industry right now. They took a chance, they did the math and they figured rather then play it safe that they'd do their best to move the field of space aviation forward. NASA did all of this with a reusable spacecraft that lands like a plane. NASA is the only agency taking chances, taking things to a new level. They have a shitty budget so to claim that they don't engineer well because they can afford to blow things up is ridiculous and ignorant.
Alot of people are making dumb claims about ISS and the russians doing everything. Its funyy how NASA's shuttle is responsible for delivering nearly every piece of ISS except for about 3. NASA's shuttle is the only spacecraft capable of carrying and assembling some of the very large and heavy payloads. There are 6 space agencies involved with ISS, you don't find it ironic how the Americans and Russians are the only ones that have done anything to help it?
The European space agency does few things, and those few things it does do take a long time. If they've had less failures its because they've had less to fail at. Until a year or two ago, space shuttle flights were very routine and made fairly often. It was one mistake that made the public freak out simply because they are used to safe airplanes and dont realize the risks of going to space. Finally all of that beauracracy has started to end. If you count all the time that the 5 shuttles have spent in space, it amounts to about 4 constant years (1045 days in flight), what is ESA's time? Oh thats right, they don't have manned space vehicles, rather they pay the Americans or Russians to fly with them.
I'm not saying ESA is useless, they are far from it and have done many useful things, but you opened your mouth and nothing but ignorance came out. One more thing, up until the 90's when the U.S. military decided to stop sharing its space secrets with ESA, ESA was pretty damn dependant on NASA and often only achieved things with NASA's assistance. This post isn't intended as a flame, I just find it amusing how NASA doesn't get one tenth of the recognition it deserves.
Regards,
Steve
Replying to myself. It appears that the nano-itx has been released, everywhere I looked just was saying out of stock. I thought they were saying out of stock because it hasn't been released yet. I'm a moron, ignore my post.
Regards,
Steve