As I understand, the article was about a hacker who got access to a non-root account, and was able to shoot everybody on the same machine in the foot by use of a fork-bomb.
*tries to set keyboard type to devorak -- ACCESS GRANTED*
Linux also lets unprivileged (guest) users to set the keyboard type to devorak, but not *globally*. Since I had made my account guest I had assumed that I wouldn't not be able to accidently mess up global settings. I was wrong.
Running XP as guest means most applications won't work correctly; You will have to deal with hundreds of popups on startup warning you that various quick start applications can't run; You may not be able to access the "public" documents stored in "All Users"; You will still be able to accidentally screw the machine you are on; as I understand viruses will still be able to root your system.
I don't really see the point of running as "guest" on an XP box.
Why should I take the political opinions of some halfwit humanities "Professor" pushing failed socialist ideas in what is billed as a English class more seriously than I would from some other schmuck?
I kind of agree with you there. But - why do you think that a humanities professor in a English class is a "Scientist". Isn't English on the Arts side of the Arts/Science divide? Also, the article even mentioned that is important that so called expert have expirence in the field in question. I do not see how English relates to global warming, except that maybe most of the hot air on the web is in English.
The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives.
Maybe he meant Star Trek the Next Generation, you know the series where a couple of hours in paranormal training by native Americans allows Commander Riker to do weird shit like stopping time that 500 years of space age science hasn't achieved.
they ask 3,000 out of millions of registered voters. With 3,000 voters the standard deviation will be under 1%, so the probability that too few samples will cause an error of more than +/- 5% is less one in a million. This analysis doesn't consider biased sampling methods and voters changing their minds, but increasing the number of samples won't help with these problems anyway.
a. A "unsolved problem" is registered for a small fee with the patent office by a potential inventor or licensee. A $1000 bond is held by the patent office. b. Patent office is required to publish problem in a clear and unambiguous fashion. c. If a solution is discovered in under 12 months the discoverer may claim the $1000 bond, in exchange for giving up the right to patent their discovery. d. If after one year the bond has not been claimed the bond will be returned, a solution to the problem may be patented.
An action shall only infringe a patent if it is with respect to a problem the patent was intended to solve.
It seems that this would provide a disincentive to spamming the patent office with trivial and overbroadly defined problems. I also don't think that it would put too big a burden on the inventor, as it would usually take well over a year to develop and market a solution to a real world problem.
I regard atheism as a religious belief that there is no god. Someone who will disregard any possibility of there being a god, even if he were given a logical proof that a god must exist. That is what Wikipedia would call strong atheism, or what I would call religious atheism.
The actual definition of "strong atheism" given by Wikipedia is "the lack of belief in any god or gods with the strong conviction that no gods exist". There is no requirement that the conviction be stronger than their belief in logic. In fact Wikipedia notes that many atheists conviction derives from
The Problem of Evil, an apparent logical flaw in the theists position.
It is all to common that a poster will misstate a opponents position to strenthen their own (the strawman fallacy), but given that the penguinoid gave a obviously phony reference I can only assume it is a troll. I am just surprised so many people took it at face value.
People do choose to die, so would not prove to a theist that their divine entity lacked omnipotence, let alone the ability to fly. Remember that Christians believe that Jesus died because he choose to, not because he lacked the power to save himself.
The "existance of evil" is often used as a proof of the non-existance of God, but it only "disproves" the existance of a omnipotents and omnibenevolent christian god. It cannot disprove any of the pagan gods who are not omnipotent (and frequently not omnibenevolent either).
In general it *is* very hard to prove a negative. I don't believe in unicorns, but I cannot prove they don't exist. If I checked every inch of earth and did not find them, it is still possible that they are living on mars, or even another galaxy.
"What I am saying is that many people don't understand why highlighting something would copy it."
As I understand the way UNIX works is: Left-Drag: Select text. Middle-Click: Copy(Paste) current selection here.
BTW. I don't understand what you mean by "Middle click required to copy text". If you mean copy as in "copy to clipboard" then what button would we use to paste?
21-25 year olds are a minority group, so this is called 'affirmative action', which means its discrimination, but it's good discrimination.
Nothing to see here folks, move along...
GUI editors can't fix XF86Config, want edit clone
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Clearly GUI editors aren't much use until you can get X running.
I use vi my self, but none of the existing Linux text mode editors use the "standard" keyboard shortcuts such as cntl-c for copy.
To old win/dos users I would recommend pico as the least esoteric of the non-X editors. Does anyone know of a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
...And the fact that you seem to believe it just shows how dangerous muddled thinking about this sort of thing can be...
Vague statements may indeed lead to `muddled thinking'. I would go further, and say that `muddled thinking' is a better term than sexist. Explaining why a statement is `muddled' or `vague' can lead to a more precise statement. Calling a statement sexist doesn't help generate a more accurate statement. As the article states, calling the statement sexist would simply cause the argument to degenerate further.
In this case, I think evil viper was actually quite clear that although women were currently not as good at maths, on average, this could be changed.
...It's not ok to call women as a class stupid because women as a class were considered stupid for centuries, and men as a class were not. So when you call women stupid, there's an underlying force to your words that makes it not by just a joke or a flippant comment...
Perhaps, but we have not been alive for centuries. A women being called stupid 100 years ago does not directly cause psychological harm to women today. If all your life it has been encouraged to find and discuss the natural advantages of women, and forbidden to discuss the possibility of natural advantages of men, then an insult to women (but not men) would be a flippant comment.
If making money from 'free' products was something relatively new, we couldn't really blame conservative analysts for knee jerk reactions against Linux. However, the concept of making money without charging for your main service is as old as the hills.
Every other disco has no door charge, charging only for drinks sold. Since the 1970's there have been free advertising papers allow adverts to be placed for free (I used to work for http://www.quokka.com.au); only paper sales are charged for.
Furthermore, many things are simply not products. You crack some funny joke, then your friends tell their friends, and the rough corners get cut off with every retelling. Sure you don't make any money of it, but that was never the purpose of the joke. Who really thinks that people will stop telling the jokes they want to tell; instead telling expensive pre-packaged jokes which aren't funny in the current situation because you can't adapt the `source code' to your current needs.
I would have thought that it would always be "only" a copyright violation unless you intended to distribute under the GPL, but that if the damages were too high you could cut your losses and release your code under the GPL.
In other words if you would only be forced to release under the GPL in cases were you would be utterly screwed if you had copied e.g. MS "Shared Source".
The SCO case is a bit odd, because they claim that the did not knowingly release the code under the GPL. However when they learned of the alledged violation they did not request that Red Hat remove the code, and infact refused to allow Red Hat to remove the code. If distributing code under the GPL and then refusing to allow the code to *not* be distributed doesn't count as knowingly accepting the GPL, I don't know what is.
Well, it could be programmed to lock the drive when writing, but not when reading.
Having supermount installed doesn't mean you have to enable it. In a server all sorts of crud included in the main kernel source such as sound drivers, fb, video acceleration are kind of pointless. My vote would be to merge supermount into the main source tree. You could always compile it out or just not use it. Still, I am quite happy patching the kernel myself, or using Mandrake's prepatched binary.
A common conversation regarding an open source project goes like this:
A) Linux is great.
B) But it doesn't do foo or bar, and I need foo and bar.
A) Well you should spend the next year of you life deciphering obscure code and learning C so you can fix it your self, pay $50,000 dollars to some other programmer, or shut the f*** up.
At which point B thinks "Oh, well then I'll pay just pay $5000 and use Windows/AIX/Whatever which has foobar."
True B has no right to complain to Linus Torvalds, but he does have a right to complain to Linux Advocates who insist that anyone who doesn't use Linux is an idiot.
I spent two hours reading and posting to Slashdot today, as a computer programmer I could have earned $70 dollars in that time and donated it to Debian. Given the average value of Slashdot posts I recon that my contribution was worth about 0.004 cents to the Linux community. Even at $5/hr I think that Linux Advocates would better serve the cause of "World Domination" by getting a job to donate the proceeds to Debian/FSF/whoever to fix common complaints than going to zdnet to flame Neanderthals who refuse to use Linux.
BTW. I have donated $800 to Debian so I am even kind of practicing what I preach.
Mandrake has the supermount patch in by default, so you can press the eject button and it just comes out. Woohooo!
I am not sure why even a server would need 24/7 access to its CD-ROM drives. Generally any important files would be copied to the hdd first. In any case, a file server should be able to, and can, go down without waiting for all remote processes to close open files so assuming that no drives will be forcably umounted is never really 100% safe.
When you say "there are no controls" are you just stating the obvious - that nobody can tell if they have been slipped stolen code?
Are you instead implying that SCO, Napster, Microsoft etc. have some way to tell if the code their employee submitted matchs someones elses closed source hidden code, and that Linus' lack of "controls" is therefore unusual?
BTW, have you thought of adopting the nick "I OVERUSE CAPTIALS"?
It is public knowledge that all but 8 files of AT&T UNIX came from BSD UNIX. Also it is known that Linus can and has copied code from BSD. Thus it was public knowledge that there are huge areas of duplicate code between the Linux and SCO kernel, long before this lawsuit happened.
This is not a problem for Linux as it is in compliance with the BSD license; it is also not a problem for SCO since AT&T had an out-of-court settlement with the Regents of California.
As the duplication is undisputed, presenting evidence of duplication is highly redundant. The only evidence of any interest would be showing that some of the areas of duplication are both owned by SCO and not added to Linux by a SCO employee.
Remember that a Company is simply a collection of employees, so anything a company does is by definition "by an employee". Companies can be held responsible for almost anything an employee does. If a random employee of Microsoft released XP into the public domain it would be clear that they had overstepped their bounds - however in this case SCO was a Linux company releasing a few pages of code would have been entirely in keeping with the rhetoric of the company of the time, their behaviour was public and SCO management has *still* not publicly countermanded their employee's actions.
I found why at least one of the symbol dependancies failed. The nvidia driver requires the symbol agp_memory_reserved. Adding the line EXPORT_SYMBOL(agp_memory_reserved); to generic.c fixes this. Presumably the other dependacies suffer a similar problem.
This raises an issue, why would Linus release a kernel with hundreds of missing EXPORT_SYMBOL statements for end-user testing. I can think of two answers:
1. Opps, well thats what testing is for.
2. These symbols are now private. If this breaks drivers, somebody should fix those drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand, the article was about a hacker who got access to a non-root account, and was able to shoot everybody on the same machine in the foot by use of a fork-bomb.
The Government is banning their employees from playing Solitaire? What next, Microsoft banning Monopoly? Sheesh! ;)
*tries to set keyboard type to devorak -- ACCESS GRANTED*
Linux also lets unprivileged (guest) users to set the keyboard type to devorak, but not *globally*. Since I had made my account guest I had assumed that I wouldn't not be able to accidently mess up global settings. I was wrong.
Running XP as guest means most applications won't work correctly; You will have to deal with hundreds of popups on startup warning you that various quick start applications can't run; You may not be able to access the "public" documents stored in "All Users"; You will still be able to accidentally screw the machine you are on; as I understand viruses will still be able to root your system.
I don't really see the point of running as "guest" on an XP box.
I kind of agree with you there. But - why do you think that a humanities professor in a English class is a "Scientist". Isn't English on the Arts side of the Arts/Science divide? Also, the article even mentioned that is important that so called expert have expirence in the field in question. I do not see how English relates to global warming, except that maybe most of the hot air on the web is in English.
I imagine Wesley Crusher stopped time at some point too, but I didn't see that episode.
Maybe he meant Star Trek the Next Generation, you know the series where a couple of hours in paranormal training by native Americans allows Commander Riker to do weird shit like stopping time that 500 years of space age science hasn't achieved.
they ask 3,000 out of millions of registered voters. With 3,000 voters the standard deviation will be under 1%, so the probability that too few samples will cause an error of more than +/- 5% is less one in a million. This analysis doesn't consider biased sampling methods and voters changing their minds, but increasing the number of samples won't help with these problems anyway.
a. A "unsolved problem" is registered for a small fee with the patent office by a potential inventor or licensee. A $1000 bond is held by the patent office.
b. Patent office is required to publish problem in a clear and unambiguous fashion.
c. If a solution is discovered in under 12 months the discoverer may claim the $1000 bond, in exchange for giving up the right to patent their discovery.
d. If after one year the bond has not been claimed the bond will be returned, a solution to the problem may be patented.
An action shall only infringe a patent if it is with respect to a problem the patent was intended to solve. It seems that this would provide a disincentive to spamming the patent office with trivial and overbroadly defined problems. I also don't think that it would put too big a burden on the inventor, as it would usually take well over a year to develop and market a solution to a real world problem.
The actual definition of "strong atheism" given by Wikipedia is "the lack of belief in any god or gods with the strong conviction that no gods exist". There is no requirement that the conviction be stronger than their belief in logic. In fact Wikipedia notes that many atheists conviction derives from The Problem of Evil, an apparent logical flaw in the theists position.
It is all to common that a poster will misstate a opponents position to strenthen their own (the strawman fallacy), but given that the penguinoid gave a obviously phony reference I can only assume it is a troll. I am just surprised so many people took it at face value.
People do choose to die, so would not prove to a theist that their divine entity lacked omnipotence, let alone the ability to fly. Remember that Christians believe that Jesus died because he choose to, not because he lacked the power to save himself.
The "existance of evil" is often used as a proof of the non-existance of God, but it only "disproves" the existance of a omnipotents and omnibenevolent christian god. It cannot disprove any of the pagan gods who are not omnipotent (and frequently not omnibenevolent either).
In general it *is* very hard to prove a negative. I don't believe in unicorns, but I cannot prove they don't exist. If I checked every inch of earth and did not find them, it is still possible that they are living on mars, or
even another galaxy.
"What I am saying is that many people don't understand why highlighting something would copy it."
As I understand the way UNIX works is:
Left-Drag: Select text.
Middle-Click: Copy(Paste) current selection here.
BTW. I don't understand what you mean by "Middle click required to copy text". If you mean copy as in "copy to clipboard" then what button would we use to paste?
21-25 year olds are a minority group, so this is called 'affirmative action', which means its discrimination, but it's good discrimination. Nothing to see here folks, move along...
Clearly GUI editors aren't much use until you can get X running. I use vi my self, but none of the existing Linux text mode editors use the "standard" keyboard shortcuts such as cntl-c for copy. To old win/dos users I would recommend pico as the least esoteric of the non-X editors. Does anyone know of a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
They are `violating' a patent, not copyright, and the FSF is against all patents.
Vague statements may indeed lead to `muddled thinking'. I would go further, and say that `muddled thinking' is a better term than sexist. Explaining why a statement is `muddled' or `vague' can lead to a more precise statement. Calling a statement sexist doesn't help generate a more accurate statement. As the article states, calling the statement sexist would simply cause the argument to degenerate further.
In this case, I think evil viper was actually quite clear that although women were currently not as good at maths, on average, this could be changed.
Perhaps, but we have not been alive for centuries. A women being called stupid 100 years ago does not directly cause psychological harm to women today. If all your life it has been encouraged to find and discuss the natural advantages of women, and forbidden to discuss the possibility of natural advantages of men, then an insult to women (but not men) would be a flippant comment.
Every other disco has no door charge, charging only for drinks sold. Since the 1970's there have been free advertising papers allow adverts to be placed for free (I used to work for http://www.quokka.com.au); only paper sales are charged for.
Furthermore, many things are simply not products. You crack some funny joke, then your friends tell their friends, and the rough corners get cut off with every retelling. Sure you don't make any money of it, but that was never the purpose of the joke. Who really thinks that people will stop telling the jokes they want to tell; instead telling expensive pre-packaged jokes which aren't funny in the current situation because you can't adapt the `source code' to your current needs.
In other words if you would only be forced to release under the GPL in cases were you would be utterly screwed if you had copied e.g. MS "Shared Source".
The SCO case is a bit odd, because they claim that the did not knowingly release the code under the GPL. However when they learned of the alledged violation they did not request that Red Hat remove the code, and infact refused to allow Red Hat to remove the code. If distributing code under the GPL and then refusing to allow the code to *not* be distributed doesn't count as knowingly accepting the GPL, I don't know what is.
Having supermount installed doesn't mean you have to enable it. In a server all sorts of crud included in the main kernel source such as sound drivers, fb, video acceleration are kind of pointless. My vote would be to merge supermount into the main source tree. You could always compile it out or just not use it. Still, I am quite happy patching the kernel myself, or using Mandrake's prepatched binary.
A) Linux is great.
B) But it doesn't do foo or bar, and I need foo and bar.
A) Well you should spend the next year of you life deciphering obscure code and learning C so you can fix it your self, pay $50,000 dollars to some other programmer, or shut the f*** up.
At which point B thinks "Oh, well then I'll pay just pay $5000 and use Windows/AIX/Whatever which has foobar."
True B has no right to complain to Linus Torvalds, but he does have a right to complain to Linux Advocates who insist that anyone who doesn't use Linux is an idiot.
I spent two hours reading and posting to Slashdot today, as a computer programmer I could have earned $70 dollars in that time and donated it to Debian. Given the average value of Slashdot posts I recon that my contribution was worth about 0.004 cents to the Linux community. Even at $5/hr I think that Linux Advocates would better serve the cause of "World Domination" by getting a job to donate the proceeds to Debian/FSF/whoever to fix common complaints than going to zdnet to flame Neanderthals who refuse to use Linux.
BTW. I have donated $800 to Debian so I am even kind of practicing what I preach.
Mandrake has the supermount patch in by default, so you can press the eject button and it just comes out. Woohooo!
I am not sure why even a server would need 24/7 access to its CD-ROM drives. Generally any important files would be copied to the hdd first. In any case, a file server should be able to, and can, go down without waiting for all remote processes to close open files so assuming that no drives will be forcably umounted is never really 100% safe.
Are you instead implying that SCO, Napster, Microsoft etc. have some way to tell if the code their employee submitted matchs someones elses closed source hidden code, and that Linus' lack of "controls" is therefore unusual?
BTW, have you thought of adopting the nick "I OVERUSE CAPTIALS"?
This is not a problem for Linux as it is in compliance with the BSD license; it is also not a problem for SCO since AT&T had an out-of-court settlement with the Regents of California.
As the duplication is undisputed, presenting evidence of duplication is highly redundant. The only evidence of any interest would be showing that some of the areas of duplication are both owned by SCO and not added to Linux by a SCO employee.
Remember that a Company is simply a collection of employees, so anything a company does is by definition "by an employee". Companies can be held responsible for almost anything an employee does. If a random employee of Microsoft released XP into the public domain it would be clear that they had overstepped their bounds - however in this case SCO was a Linux company releasing a few pages of code would have been entirely in keeping with the rhetoric of the company of the time, their behaviour was public and SCO management has *still* not publicly countermanded their employee's actions.
Also OSS is depreciated in 2.6. ALSA doesn't seem to support my sound card. Maybe using the depreciated OSS support would help.
EXPORT_SYMBOL(agp_memory_reserved);
to generic.c fixes this. Presumably the other dependacies suffer a similar problem.
This raises an issue, why would Linus release a kernel with hundreds of missing EXPORT_SYMBOL statements for end-user testing. I can think of two answers:
1. Opps, well thats what testing is for.
2. These symbols are now private. If this breaks drivers, somebody should fix those drivers.
2 sounds more plausible to me.
>WTF..... gcc 3.95.4 Doh... I meant gcc 2.95.4