In addition, many linux users are well informed, but more importantly are prepared and take precautions. Take for instance Fedora Core. It comes with SELinux and some really nice default policies, as well as a basic policy editor with a gui. I mean SELinux, while improperly configured can really screw things up, properly configured will make root access pointless to a hacker who may have exploited some service that shouldn't have been running as root. Services shouldn't be running as root in the first place, and I can't think of a distro that does that, but still SELinux can be applied to many areas and is very effective. In addition to that, Red Hat created and maintains exec-shield which marks data as executable/non-executable on any x86 CPU, prevents many common security exploits like buffer overflows, and randomizes the memory layout for mmap(). (It does other things, but that's the gist of it) Red Hat also has contributed quite a few security related patches to GCC (in addition to their other work on GCC), that protect against buffer overflows and other common exploits. On a modern linux system, taking advantage of an exploit from an external location is *near* impossible, even if you get access to memory, with randomized memory layouts you'll have no idea where in memory you are making it essentially useless. If you did somehow take advantage of an exploit in a running service or something, a properly configured SELinux policy will make your access more or less worthless in many cases. Taking the additional step of mounting/home on a seperate partition and mounting the partition as no-exec will knock out just about any threat a system administrator, or home user, would have to deal with. At that point it comes down social engineering which simply requires an informed user. Even anti-virus software can't protect against that (it's not hard to convince a user to right-click the systray icon and click disable because "Your anti-virus software is incompatible with this screensaver installer and will need to be disabled while installing it") I guess the point I'm making is simply that a modern linux distro has defenses in place for future unknown attacks and venues of attack. In order to be infected, you'd need to be willing to install something as an administrator. The nice thing about most distros is that the installation of most applications is done through a package manager. If users or administrators were used to installing everything through package managers (like yum or apt), being asked to run an executable to install something would seem dumb. It just seems to me that linux, and FOSS in general, as you said is very security aware. Concerning ourselves over this stuff would be pointless (assuming we remain proactive). Regards, Steve
My original thinking was along those same lines, but perhaps in this case the patent is valid. I mean in 1993 an MPEG 2 decoder probably was non-obvious, and certainly advanced the field, assuming Lucent was the first company to do it. It doesn't mean I like the patent system, and I wish it'd be done away with, but this case isn't necessarily as bad as some of the abuses we've seen. It certainly is not "one-click shopping". Regards, Steve
You forgot some of the most important ones, namely they coded and maintain the entire 2.6 linux CPU Scheduler and the 2.6 Virtual Memory Manager. Yes, you can contribute a large part of 2.6's great performance to Red Hat. They also wanted an open source Java implementation so they started GCJ to compile java code natively. Open Source runs all the down from the top to bottom at Red Hat, even one of their VP's is the guy who originally coded the GNU C++ compiler. Here are two non-complete lists of other projects Red Hat either entirely codes and maintains, or contributes large portions of code to, keep in mind that they don't list everything: Sourceware Projects and Red Hat Contributions. This move by Red Hat has been given a bad spin by those reporting it, the Fedora Foundation's expenses and other requirements would have killed off Fedora, if anyone read the e-mail they'd see that as it is all clearly laid out including some numbers. Its good to see not everyone is buying into the sensationalist headlines and/. trolls though. Regards, Steve
Maybe, just maybe, you should read the e-mail rather than the sensationalist headline. It is nothing like the headline/summary are saying. Regards, Steve
Umm... Red Hat is worth about 60% more than Novell so there is no chance of Novell buying them (but Red Hat buying them has been rumore once or twice). Red Hat also isn't screwing the community, read the damn email rather than the sensationalist headline. The original intention of the Fedora Foundation was to be a patent repository, giving unlimited access to any open source project, and using them defensivley against businesses if linux, or open source in general, was threatened. Red Hat, in the e-mail, said that they realized the Open Invention Network had already made significant head way with this, and that OIN would be "the 800-lb gorilla" in this area of open source. Rather than compete and divide resources with OIN, they decided that they'd rather join forces. That right there knocked out the main and initial reason for the foundation.
One of the other motivations behind the Fedora Foundation was for legal standing. Just like the FSF makes contributors sign over their rights so that there is one entity in control of all the copyrights, the Fedora Foundation was going to serve that purpose for Fedora. The problem being that the Fedora Documentation is released under a very liberal license, no sense on signing over there, the Core and Extra repositories are collections of projects coded by other entities (such as Red Hat, Novell, or individual contributors), so standing doesn't make sense there, and for specific Fedora projects like the Fedora Directory Server, Red Hat bought and open sourced all of that source code so Red Hat has the standing for the time being. There is no purpose for starting the Fedora Foundation to cover legal issues like "standing" because it is a non-issue for Fedora right now. Fedora has access to all of Red Hat's lawyers, but as a separate foundation, they'd need to fund their own lawyers and track many other expenses. Just because its non-profit doesn't mean those problems go away.
And this one was the real killer, a non-profit needs to have 33% of its revenue come from public donations (thats how you prove you're benfitting the public). Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Fedora, but here is an excerpt of things they'd have to track from the email:
* The cost of bandwidth for distributing Fedora to the world;
* Every hour that Red Hat engineers spend working on Fedora, whether that is the actual writing of code, release engineering, testing, etc.;
* Legal expenses of running a Foundation;
* Administrative expenses of running a Foundation.
As an intellectual exercise, let's ignore all of those numbers for now except for bandwidth. Back in the day, when Red Hat would release a distro, we would regularly get angry calls from network admins at big datacenters, complaining that we were eating all of their bandwidth. If you ever meet any of our IT guys over a beer, be sure to ask them about the time we melted a switch at UUNet.
The demand for Fedora is every bit as high, and the March 20 release of Fedora Core 5 was no exception. So let's take a conservative guess and say that the bandwidth cost for distributing Fedora comes to $1.5 million a year. Yes, even though we have BitTorrent trackers and Fedora mirror sites worldwide.
That means that a public Fedora Foundation would have to raise $750k in public funds -- remember the one-third public support test -- every single year, just to pay for *bandwidth*, assuming no growth and no other expenses.
So what would happen, under such a scenario, if Red Hat were to decide to spend more money on Fedora? Because that's exactly what Red Hat wants to do.
To sum it up, Red Hat wants to keep dumping more money into Fedora to make it even better, but if the Fedora Foundation was created then every dollar Red Hat put into Fedora would be another 30 cents that needs to be raised through charitable donations. Essentially, putting more money into t
People were saying the same thing about the DS, which is a fraction of the power of the PSP, yet on my college campus the DS is goddamn everywhere. If the success of the DS vs PSP says anything, then Nintendo will be laughing at the competition very soon. Regards, Steve
I know you were joking around, but some people will not understand that. The 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC in the Sun T2000 has recently set a few world records for performance, outperforming 4 dual core Xeons. It is a multi-cored chip, but that is only one reason why it performs so well. Anyone who has taken any hardware architecutre course quickly learns that clock speed is just about meaningless, in fact if you only increase clock speed and don't change anything else, you'll typically see higher percentages of your processing time being used to handle hazards and other nonsense. Another example is the Pentium M, which often runs at under half the clock cycle of the P4, but leaves the P4 in its dust for just about every benchmark. A high clock cycle amounts to nothing but outrageous amounts of heat and energy when you can be processing the data faster and more efficiently as Intel has learned in recent years. The Mhz myth needs to end.
What's even better for Nintendo is that these chips are custom built for Nintendo's needs, and a chip designed for a purpose always performs very well against generic processors (even if the generic processor is supposed to be several times faster). I mean noone would expect their P4 to match up against any modern Nvidia or ATI GPU for graphics performance, thats just how it is. Nintendo also knows how to squeeze performance out of its hardware (i.e. the often cited Resident Evil 4, if I can get graphics twice as good as that on this new console, then really Sony and Microsoft will have nothing to stand on). The cell processor doesn't even have a good compiler yet, and its developers don't know how to effectively use its resources, same thing goes for the XBox (but not to as bad of an extent). By the time the XBox and PS3 are being effectively used, it'll be time for the 4th gen consoles. I am betting that Revolution will be capable of graphics on par if not better than PS3's release titles.
And as a final point, this is only a dev box we are talking about and not final production specs, so the whole argument is pointless. Regards, Steve
The reason we vote for everything at once is because these things used to be spread out over time in certain states but it was found that just about everyone stopped voting. They didn't have the time and it became a regular thing rather than a special once a year thing. Voting became nothing but background noise in the typical busy day. Also keeping all voting on one day allows employers to let their employees out early to go vote, which many employers do. Regards, STeve
Considering that Linus is worth a few million, I think not. Red Hat alone gave him 12 million in stock a few years back to show appreciation to him. Thats why Linus drives 3 pretty expensive cars and has a big house. Regards, Steve
What ajaxWrite did is nothing more than most blogging applications do anymore when writing posts. ajaxWrite barely did anything, seriously. For something impressive, check out the open source FCKEditor. I have no connection with the project, but it's always the most impressive editor to me. Regards, Steve
Seriously, my GMail composer has more features, including spell check, just for writing an email. This ajaxWrite just took firefox's rich text editor and threw tabbed DOMs into the picture. Completely unoriginal, there are significantly more advanced open source editors like the FCKEditor out already(That's a link to their demo, not their index just fyi). Regards, Steve
Well then, my apologies (seriously), I misinterpreted your statement and your intention. Your wording did seem to be chosen in such a way as to instigate a flame though, but at least a common ground has been found. Regards, Steve
The whole point of open source is to benefit from other's work. This is why there are no monetary restrictions on what you do with it. It is perfectly fine to sell GPL software, if you don't like it as an OSS developer, then there are licenses which will restrict that. By using the GPL, or similar licenses, you are saying it is okay and acceptable for people to sell this code, as long as changes made to it are given back. There are just as many people profiting from their work, as they are from others, you're acting like this is bad or against OSS or something. This is the way it works. Regards, Steve
Red Hat is fine with them doing this, infact a few Red Hat engineers help them out everynow and then if they can't get something working right. Seriously, Red Hat is a way cooler corpoartion than the slashdot groupthink would have you believe. Regards, Steve
You dumbass, the entire 2.6 scheduler, virtual memory manager, and auditing subsystem are all written and maintained by Red Hat. Let us not forget the countless other contributions they make to the kernel and the development of one of the most often used filesystems, ext3 (its not the fastest, but it is one of the most feature filled and stable). The majority of GCC is also maintained and/or coded by them. They didn't like using a proprietary virtual machine so they started GCJ too, a native compiler for java. Shall we start about how they pay the salary of Chris Blizzard, the big firefox developer and mozilla board member, or Alan Cox, one of the most important kernel developers alive. Red Hat has contributed more code to linux and OSS in general than any other entity, and they don't even brag about it. They also do the majority of the development for Gnome (even the Gnome.org site is hosted by them, read the bottom of the site). Red Hat has spent millions making sure that Linux stays competitive, they bought GFS and Logical Volume Managing from Sistina and gave it away for free, the bought eCos and Cygwin, gave them away for free, spent a few million on the Netscape Directory Server and gave it away for free, and I could go on for much longer. You really have no idea how important Red Hat is to the OSS movement, if something ever happens to them we'll all be set back years as far as development pace goes. Even a good chunk of GLibc is written by them. Unlike most distributions, Red Hat actually codes a good portion of that which they sell, they aren't just repackaging other people's work in an easy to use fashion, they are responsible for where the movement is today. (They also gave 12 million dollars worth of stock to Linus Torvalds to show appreciation for what he's done, thats why Linus never has to worry about work, owns a big home, and drives 3 cars, a Mercedes SLK32, a BMW convertible, and an Acura SUV) Get your facts straight. Regards, Steve
Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though. Regards, Steve
Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui. Regards, Steve
Yea Bill Gates is an ass. he wouldn't know what mobile was if it was shoved up his ass, seriously. The new "ultra mobile" computers only have a 2 hour battery life, and thats in good conditions with new batteries. Cranking a computer in a 3rd world country where the electrical infastructure is close to nil is not only the best and most cost effective option that these people have, but its often the only one that these people have and the people will get many many more hours of usage than they could on those wimpy 2 hour UMCP things. Did I mention that you need to plug a UMCP product in? That is a problem for the majority of the world.
As far as software goes, well hell the article is misleading because, as most know, The Fedora Project, Red Hat, and the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) have been working very closely together to get very usable and feature rich software onto these things, read more about it here. The $100 laptops are designed to be very rugged, kicked around, thrown into sand, etc... The software is being specifically designed to keep the administration costs just about non-existstent. From the Goals page in th above link: To create a solid operating system base for the OLPC hardware which anyone can deploy, requires no administration and provides a clear platform on which to build applications for educational computing.
And from what I hear, everything is going along just great. Bill Gates is so used to creating software that requires constant administration that I don't think the concept of software that just works is familiar to him. He sees a great oppurtunity for profit here, if a small little MIT firm can convince the U.N. to buy millions of laptops at $100 each, Bill thinks that he can convince them to instead buy millions of "more capable" computers for "just 6 times" as much money. What an ass, he seriously has no idea about the conditions that these laptops will be used in. Not to mention, this laptop was designed for a small screen and usage, the UMCP just runs Windows XP Tablet Edition which causes nothing but unnecessary bloat and viruses and administration. Worse off is that the Origami only has a 7 inch screen, but Microsoft claims running MS Office on it is a good thing. Talk about not being able to read the damn thing, and if you're out away from electrical sources you get 2 hours and that's it. Bill Gates is just pissed that he missed an oppurtunity to milk the governments of the world for billions of dollars. Regards, Steve
I'm responding to a troll, but I'd have to disagree with you. I've e-mailed Taco personally about some really really stupid issues over my time here at Slashdot. I mean one time it was something like "Did I get blacklisted from getting mod points?", because I hadn't gotten mod points in a while and at the time they had 'value' to me I guess. I was a n00b and probably had read some dumbass propganda on anti-slash or something. Anyway, the point is, even something as stupid as that (all of my emails to him weren't that stupid), he personally responded to, sometimes writing a paragraph or two. He's always gone above and beyond what I would have expected a reasonable response to be. To top it off, he responds quickly. Regards, Steve
You are certainly right in most cases, but what I was getting at is that a local user vulnerability would allow someone to attack through a web browser of an unprivileged user and still gain root access. There aren't many, but I do recall a few severe vulnerabilities allowing one to execute arbitrary code through firefox or thunderbird on linux machines. Regards Steve
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, many linux users are well informed, but more importantly are prepared and take precautions. Take for instance Fedora Core. It comes with SELinux and some really nice default policies, as well as a basic policy editor with a gui. I mean SELinux, while improperly configured can really screw things up, properly configured will make root access pointless to a hacker who may have exploited some service that shouldn't have been running as root. Services shouldn't be running as root in the first place, and I can't think of a distro that does that, but still SELinux can be applied to many areas and is very effective. In addition to that, Red Hat created and maintains exec-shield which marks data as executable/non-executable on any x86 CPU, prevents many common security exploits like buffer overflows, and randomizes the memory layout for mmap(). (It does other things, but that's the gist of it) Red Hat also has contributed quite a few security related patches to GCC (in addition to their other work on GCC), that protect against buffer overflows and other common exploits. On a modern linux system, taking advantage of an exploit from an external location is *near* impossible, even if you get access to memory, with randomized memory layouts you'll have no idea where in memory you are making it essentially useless. If you did somehow take advantage of an exploit in a running service or something, a properly configured SELinux policy will make your access more or less worthless in many cases. Taking the additional step of mounting /home on a seperate partition and mounting the partition as no-exec will knock out just about any threat a system administrator, or home user, would have to deal with. At that point it comes down social engineering which simply requires an informed user. Even anti-virus software can't protect against that (it's not hard to convince a user to right-click the systray icon and click disable because "Your anti-virus software is incompatible with this screensaver installer and will need to be disabled while installing it") I guess the point I'm making is simply that a modern linux distro has defenses in place for future unknown attacks and venues of attack. In order to be infected, you'd need to be willing to install something as an administrator. The nice thing about most distros is that the installation of most applications is done through a package manager. If users or administrators were used to installing everything through package managers (like yum or apt), being asked to run an executable to install something would seem dumb. It just seems to me that linux, and FOSS in general, as you said is very security aware. Concerning ourselves over this stuff would be pointless (assuming we remain proactive).
Regards,
Steve
My original thinking was along those same lines, but perhaps in this case the patent is valid. I mean in 1993 an MPEG 2 decoder probably was non-obvious, and certainly advanced the field, assuming Lucent was the first company to do it. It doesn't mean I like the patent system, and I wish it'd be done away with, but this case isn't necessarily as bad as some of the abuses we've seen. It certainly is not "one-click shopping".
Regards,
Steve
You forgot some of the most important ones, namely they coded and maintain the entire 2.6 linux CPU Scheduler and the 2.6 Virtual Memory Manager. Yes, you can contribute a large part of 2.6's great performance to Red Hat. They also wanted an open source Java implementation so they started GCJ to compile java code natively. Open Source runs all the down from the top to bottom at Red Hat, even one of their VP's is the guy who originally coded the GNU C++ compiler. Here are two non-complete lists of other projects Red Hat either entirely codes and maintains, or contributes large portions of code to, keep in mind that they don't list everything: Sourceware Projects and Red Hat Contributions. This move by Red Hat has been given a bad spin by those reporting it, the Fedora Foundation's expenses and other requirements would have killed off Fedora, if anyone read the e-mail they'd see that as it is all clearly laid out including some numbers. Its good to see not everyone is buying into the sensationalist headlines and /. trolls though.
Regards,
Steve
Maybe, just maybe, you should read the e-mail rather than the sensationalist headline. It is nothing like the headline/summary are saying.
Regards,
Steve
One of the other motivations behind the Fedora Foundation was for legal standing. Just like the FSF makes contributors sign over their rights so that there is one entity in control of all the copyrights, the Fedora Foundation was going to serve that purpose for Fedora. The problem being that the Fedora Documentation is released under a very liberal license, no sense on signing over there, the Core and Extra repositories are collections of projects coded by other entities (such as Red Hat, Novell, or individual contributors), so standing doesn't make sense there, and for specific Fedora projects like the Fedora Directory Server, Red Hat bought and open sourced all of that source code so Red Hat has the standing for the time being. There is no purpose for starting the Fedora Foundation to cover legal issues like "standing" because it is a non-issue for Fedora right now. Fedora has access to all of Red Hat's lawyers, but as a separate foundation, they'd need to fund their own lawyers and track many other expenses. Just because its non-profit doesn't mean those problems go away.
And this one was the real killer, a non-profit needs to have 33% of its revenue come from public donations (thats how you prove you're benfitting the public). Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Fedora, but here is an excerpt of things they'd have to track from the email:
To sum it up, Red Hat wants to keep dumping more money into Fedora to make it even better, but if the Fedora Foundation was created then every dollar Red Hat put into Fedora would be another 30 cents that needs to be raised through charitable donations. Essentially, putting more money into t
People were saying the same thing about the DS, which is a fraction of the power of the PSP, yet on my college campus the DS is goddamn everywhere. If the success of the DS vs PSP says anything, then Nintendo will be laughing at the competition very soon.
Regards,
Steve
I know you were joking around, but some people will not understand that. The 1.2Ghz UltraSPARC in the Sun T2000 has recently set a few world records for performance, outperforming 4 dual core Xeons. It is a multi-cored chip, but that is only one reason why it performs so well. Anyone who has taken any hardware architecutre course quickly learns that clock speed is just about meaningless, in fact if you only increase clock speed and don't change anything else, you'll typically see higher percentages of your processing time being used to handle hazards and other nonsense. Another example is the Pentium M, which often runs at under half the clock cycle of the P4, but leaves the P4 in its dust for just about every benchmark. A high clock cycle amounts to nothing but outrageous amounts of heat and energy when you can be processing the data faster and more efficiently as Intel has learned in recent years. The Mhz myth needs to end.
What's even better for Nintendo is that these chips are custom built for Nintendo's needs, and a chip designed for a purpose always performs very well against generic processors (even if the generic processor is supposed to be several times faster). I mean noone would expect their P4 to match up against any modern Nvidia or ATI GPU for graphics performance, thats just how it is. Nintendo also knows how to squeeze performance out of its hardware (i.e. the often cited Resident Evil 4, if I can get graphics twice as good as that on this new console, then really Sony and Microsoft will have nothing to stand on). The cell processor doesn't even have a good compiler yet, and its developers don't know how to effectively use its resources, same thing goes for the XBox (but not to as bad of an extent). By the time the XBox and PS3 are being effectively used, it'll be time for the 4th gen consoles. I am betting that Revolution will be capable of graphics on par if not better than PS3's release titles.
And as a final point, this is only a dev box we are talking about and not final production specs, so the whole argument is pointless.
Regards,
Steve
The reason we vote for everything at once is because these things used to be spread out over time in certain states but it was found that just about everyone stopped voting. They didn't have the time and it became a regular thing rather than a special once a year thing. Voting became nothing but background noise in the typical busy day. Also keeping all voting on one day allows employers to let their employees out early to go vote, which many employers do.
Regards,
STeve
Considering that Linus is worth a few million, I think not. Red Hat alone gave him 12 million in stock a few years back to show appreciation to him. Thats why Linus drives 3 pretty expensive cars and has a big house.
Regards,
Steve
Is *anyone* qualified for this?
Yea, I think his name is Steve Jobs.
He also owns apple stock. Tell me that isn't biased or a conflict of interests.
Regards,
Steve
What ajaxWrite did is nothing more than most blogging applications do anymore when writing posts. ajaxWrite barely did anything, seriously. For something impressive, check out the open source FCKEditor. I have no connection with the project, but it's always the most impressive editor to me.
Regards,
Steve
Seriously, my GMail composer has more features, including spell check, just for writing an email. This ajaxWrite just took firefox's rich text editor and threw tabbed DOMs into the picture. Completely unoriginal, there are significantly more advanced open source editors like the FCKEditor out already(That's a link to their demo, not their index just fyi).
Regards,
Steve
Right, I completely agree, if I seemed to disagree my apologies as that wasn't my intention.
Regards,
Steve
Well then, my apologies (seriously), I misinterpreted your statement and your intention. Your wording did seem to be chosen in such a way as to instigate a flame though, but at least a common ground has been found.
Regards,
Steve
The whole point of open source is to benefit from other's work. This is why there are no monetary restrictions on what you do with it. It is perfectly fine to sell GPL software, if you don't like it as an OSS developer, then there are licenses which will restrict that. By using the GPL, or similar licenses, you are saying it is okay and acceptable for people to sell this code, as long as changes made to it are given back. There are just as many people profiting from their work, as they are from others, you're acting like this is bad or against OSS or something. This is the way it works.
Regards,
Steve
Red Hat is fine with them doing this, infact a few Red Hat engineers help them out everynow and then if they can't get something working right. Seriously, Red Hat is a way cooler corpoartion than the slashdot groupthink would have you believe.
Regards,
Steve
You dumbass, the entire 2.6 scheduler, virtual memory manager, and auditing subsystem are all written and maintained by Red Hat. Let us not forget the countless other contributions they make to the kernel and the development of one of the most often used filesystems, ext3 (its not the fastest, but it is one of the most feature filled and stable). The majority of GCC is also maintained and/or coded by them. They didn't like using a proprietary virtual machine so they started GCJ too, a native compiler for java. Shall we start about how they pay the salary of Chris Blizzard, the big firefox developer and mozilla board member, or Alan Cox, one of the most important kernel developers alive. Red Hat has contributed more code to linux and OSS in general than any other entity, and they don't even brag about it. They also do the majority of the development for Gnome (even the Gnome.org site is hosted by them, read the bottom of the site). Red Hat has spent millions making sure that Linux stays competitive, they bought GFS and Logical Volume Managing from Sistina and gave it away for free, the bought eCos and Cygwin, gave them away for free, spent a few million on the Netscape Directory Server and gave it away for free, and I could go on for much longer. You really have no idea how important Red Hat is to the OSS movement, if something ever happens to them we'll all be set back years as far as development pace goes. Even a good chunk of GLibc is written by them. Unlike most distributions, Red Hat actually codes a good portion of that which they sell, they aren't just repackaging other people's work in an easy to use fashion, they are responsible for where the movement is today. (They also gave 12 million dollars worth of stock to Linus Torvalds to show appreciation for what he's done, thats why Linus never has to worry about work, owns a big home, and drives 3 cars, a Mercedes SLK32, a BMW convertible, and an Acura SUV) Get your facts straight.
Regards,
Steve
Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though.
Regards,
Steve
Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui.
Regards,
Steve
Yea Bill Gates is an ass. he wouldn't know what mobile was if it was shoved up his ass, seriously. The new "ultra mobile" computers only have a 2 hour battery life, and thats in good conditions with new batteries. Cranking a computer in a 3rd world country where the electrical infastructure is close to nil is not only the best and most cost effective option that these people have, but its often the only one that these people have and the people will get many many more hours of usage than they could on those wimpy 2 hour UMCP things. Did I mention that you need to plug a UMCP product in? That is a problem for the majority of the world.
As far as software goes, well hell the article is misleading because, as most know, The Fedora Project, Red Hat, and the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) have been working very closely together to get very usable and feature rich software onto these things, read more about it here. The $100 laptops are designed to be very rugged, kicked around, thrown into sand, etc... The software is being specifically designed to keep the administration costs just about non-existstent. From the Goals page in th above link:
To create a solid operating system base for the OLPC hardware which anyone can deploy, requires no administration and provides a clear platform on which to build applications for educational computing.
And from what I hear, everything is going along just great. Bill Gates is so used to creating software that requires constant administration that I don't think the concept of software that just works is familiar to him. He sees a great oppurtunity for profit here, if a small little MIT firm can convince the U.N. to buy millions of laptops at $100 each, Bill thinks that he can convince them to instead buy millions of "more capable" computers for "just 6 times" as much money. What an ass, he seriously has no idea about the conditions that these laptops will be used in. Not to mention, this laptop was designed for a small screen and usage, the UMCP just runs Windows XP Tablet Edition which causes nothing but unnecessary bloat and viruses and administration. Worse off is that the Origami only has a 7 inch screen, but Microsoft claims running MS Office on it is a good thing. Talk about not being able to read the damn thing, and if you're out away from electrical sources you get 2 hours and that's it. Bill Gates is just pissed that he missed an oppurtunity to milk the governments of the world for billions of dollars.
Regards,
Steve
It's not a typical distro, its designed for business environments.It is not targeted to typical consumers.
Regards,
Steve
I'm responding to a troll, but I'd have to disagree with you. I've e-mailed Taco personally about some really really stupid issues over my time here at Slashdot. I mean one time it was something like "Did I get blacklisted from getting mod points?", because I hadn't gotten mod points in a while and at the time they had 'value' to me I guess. I was a n00b and probably had read some dumbass propganda on anti-slash or something. Anyway, the point is, even something as stupid as that (all of my emails to him weren't that stupid), he personally responded to, sometimes writing a paragraph or two. He's always gone above and beyond what I would have expected a reasonable response to be. To top it off, he responds quickly.
Regards,
Steve
While you are right to an extent about remote access, please see this comment of mine.
Regards,
Steve
You are certainly right in most cases, but what I was getting at is that a local user vulnerability would allow someone to attack through a web browser of an unprivileged user and still gain root access. There aren't many, but I do recall a few severe vulnerabilities allowing one to execute arbitrary code through firefox or thunderbird on linux machines.
Regards
Steve