Yeah, the alpha-radiation may not penetrate my skin, but if I ingest alpha-emiting particles the rays will penetrate the cell-walls easily and ionize stuff.
The question is not "can the rays penetrate our skin?" it should be stated as "How big is the risk that dangerous amounts of this material enters our food-chain or is inhaled?". Considering how hard it is to keep heavy metals out of our dumps (and stored safely instead) this will probably be the one of the largest obstacles.
Don't waste your breath. The grandfather of this article is indeed a troll, albeit disguised. I have seen this post on several occasions here on slashdot. It's a simple cut-n-paste from a troll-text repository designed to provoce.
I think it's ridicules to tease other space agencies about their past failures. I didn't giggle when Mars polar lander crashed. It was a sad loss - not something to poke fun at.
Secondly; when will the slashdot-crowd finally get it? Beagle 2 was an all-British probe - not a ESA-project.
...is WLAN-enabled and it has been for quite some time I think. The link to the outside world seems to be managed with the help of 3G and satellites.
More info here
Debian will not be accepted in the enterprise world until the debian project change its goals. After a heated discussion on #debian I realised that the debian-developers do want to create a "universal operating system", but the universe they talk about is theirs. They care about need for stability and the use of free software, but not for much else it seems.
In order to illustrate this point I take the example of debian's un-scheduled releases: Me: When do you release the new stable? Developer: When it's done. Me: Okay, but when is it done? Do you have any idea? Developer: I already told you.
An enterprise want to be able to predict/plan for new releases, but with debian it's hard. They could have set target-date at least.
Current problems with debian according to me: * Non-scheduled releases * To old software (yes, it's problem for servers and not just desktops) * Developers want to create an OS for themself and not one that suits most people.
In short: Debian isn't written in order to be popular. It has been created by developers for the developers themself. Since very few of them own a company their is no place for the needs of an enterprise.
Hopefully, another distribution will soon take debian's place because it has gone rotten.
The article claims that "...the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software..."
Of course it is.
Most proprietary software are user-level apps where a bug here or a bug there isn't critical. The economic loss that can be atributed to a bug in MS Word's bullet-point-algorithm isn't as great as a datacenter going down due a Oops in the linux-box running the SQL-database. To put it simply: there are different requirements for different tasks. A comparison between the quality of WinXP's GUI and GNOME for example would have been much more interesting.
I don't understand how this story could make slashdot's frontpage.
I accomplished this task on my school's computer-system a year ago with the help of Samba 3, PAM and kerberos. It was a long and frustrating adventure that stretched out for several weeks, but finally I made it work partially. However, I soon realised that that there were too many shortcomings in my setup. I configured the system to mount the windows-user's homedir on logon, but the user couldn't run X since file-looking didn't seem to exist in the world of SMB (XFree86 needed it). Furthermore, smb-passwords containing characters outside of the standard en-ascii-table didn't work.
Sure, I could probably have fixed the last issues by rewriting some parts here and reconfigured other things there, but it just wasn't worth the effort. In the end I concluded that there couldn't be many cases where the intergration of a Linux-box in an AD-domain would make sense. It would have been easier for me to just swap the school's win2k-server and replaced it with a system running samba fetching authentication-information from an LDAP-server.
It is very dangerous to turn the key to zero (all electricity off) while the car is moving! I don't know about the rest of the world, but most cars here in Sweden have an anti-theft mechanism that locks the steering-wheel. I have tried engaging it myself a couple of times(while standing still) and it isn't always that easy to disengage quickly.
When studying OSS security vs the security of proprietary software I think one of the most important differences between the two is the fact that OSS software is far more diverse then its proprietary counterpart. MS RPC can be found in all Windows-boxes for example while a Linux-box may use AFS, Sun's NFS, Samba or ProFTP to share files. Thus, when a security flaw is found in MS RPC a worm can quickly mitigate itself, infecting a large number of computers in a very short time. This is harder in the world of OSS due to its inherent diversity - a product of its development-technique.
We often compare computer-viruses/worms with its biological counterparts due the close similarity. Another parallel can be drawn between DNA and source-code. A population whose individuals have no or a very small genetic diversity is doomed due to their common faults (such as MS RPC). Think about the potato-famine in Ireland during the early 20th century where most of the potato-harvest was destroyed due to the practice of asexual potato-reproduction.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is not "can the rays penetrate our skin?" it should be stated as "How big is the risk that dangerous amounts of this material enters our food-chain or is inhaled?". Considering how hard it is to keep heavy metals out of our dumps (and stored safely instead) this will probably be the one of the largest obstacles.
Don't waste your breath. The grandfather of this article is indeed a troll, albeit disguised. I have seen this post on several occasions here on slashdot. It's a simple cut-n-paste from a troll-text repository designed to provoce.
Parent has been moderated as "Funny", but he is in fact correct: Time dilation
I think it's ridicules to tease other space agencies about their past failures. I didn't giggle when Mars polar lander crashed. It was a sad loss - not something to poke fun at. Secondly; when will the slashdot-crowd finally get it? Beagle 2 was an all-British probe - not a ESA-project.
Talk about double standards
...is WLAN-enabled and it has been for quite some time I think. The link to the outside world seems to be managed with the help of 3G and satellites. More info here
Debian will not be accepted in the enterprise world until the debian project change its goals. After a heated discussion on #debian I realised that the debian-developers do want to create a "universal operating system", but the universe they talk about is theirs. They care about need for stability and the use of free software, but not for much else it seems.
In order to illustrate this point I take the example of debian's un-scheduled releases:
Me: When do you release the new stable?
Developer: When it's done.
Me: Okay, but when is it done? Do you have any idea?
Developer: I already told you.
An enterprise want to be able to predict/plan for new releases, but with debian it's hard. They could have set target-date at least.
Current problems with debian according to me:
* Non-scheduled releases
* To old software (yes, it's problem for servers and not just desktops)
* Developers want to create an OS for themself and not one that suits most people.
In short: Debian isn't written in order to be popular. It has been created by developers for the developers themself. Since very few of them own a company their is no place for the needs of an enterprise.
Hopefully, another distribution will soon take debian's place because it has gone rotten.
The article claims that "...the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software..."
Of course it is.
Most proprietary software are user-level apps where a bug here or a bug there isn't critical. The economic loss that can be atributed to a bug in MS Word's bullet-point-algorithm isn't as great as a datacenter going down due a Oops in the linux-box running the SQL-database. To put it simply: there are different requirements for different tasks. A comparison between the quality of WinXP's GUI and GNOME for example would have been much more interesting.
I don't understand how this story could make slashdot's frontpage.
I accomplished this task on my school's computer-system a year ago with the help of Samba 3, PAM and kerberos. It was a long and frustrating adventure that stretched out for several weeks, but finally I made it work partially. However, I soon realised that that there were too many shortcomings in my setup. I configured the system to mount the windows-user's homedir on logon, but the user couldn't run X since file-looking didn't seem to exist in the world of SMB (XFree86 needed it). Furthermore, smb-passwords containing characters outside of the standard en-ascii-table didn't work.
Sure, I could probably have fixed the last issues by rewriting some parts here and reconfigured other things there, but it just wasn't worth the effort. In the end I concluded that there couldn't be many cases where the intergration of a Linux-box in an AD-domain would make sense. It would have been easier for me to just swap the school's win2k-server and replaced it with a system running samba fetching authentication-information from an LDAP-server.
It is very dangerous to turn the key to zero (all electricity off) while the car is moving! I don't know about the rest of the world, but most cars here in Sweden have an anti-theft mechanism that locks the steering-wheel. I have tried engaging it myself a couple of times(while standing still) and it isn't always that easy to disengage quickly.
Are you crazy? The destruction that 250 kg of high-explosives cause is enormous.
When studying OSS security vs the security of proprietary software I think one of the most important differences between the two is the fact that OSS software is far more diverse then its proprietary counterpart. MS RPC can be found in all Windows-boxes for example while a Linux-box may use AFS, Sun's NFS, Samba or ProFTP to share files. Thus, when a security flaw is found in MS RPC a worm can quickly mitigate itself, infecting a large number of computers in a very short time. This is harder in the world of OSS due to its inherent diversity - a product of its development-technique.
We often compare computer-viruses/worms with its biological counterparts due the close similarity. Another parallel can be drawn between DNA and source-code. A population whose individuals have no or a very small genetic diversity is doomed due to their common faults (such as MS RPC). Think about the potato-famine in Ireland during the early 20th century where most of the potato-harvest was destroyed due to the practice of asexual potato-reproduction.