True, but not as much trouble as `bankruptcy protection' suggests; what they are in is a kind of pre-bankruptcy for which the USA appears to have no equivalent. It is not Chapter 11. The idea is to continue the company as a going concern (stop creditors foreclosing), the French gummint has approved their plan, they seem to be full steam ahead for financial bliss later this year.
Go read your LUG's list archives. If your LUG's not big enough to draw data points from, go find a few others.
Knoppix is unbeatable for auto-detecting stuff, and ironically they got the code for doing that out of a Mandrake installer. Mandrake seems to be just ahead of SuSE but it seems to vary lots. SuSE seems to be better at video cards, for example, not so good at scanners, printers and other peripherals. RedHat, it goes without saying, lags both but with one or two exceptions for stuff like specific video card drivers.
I could say that Debian's hardware detection sucks, but Knoppix is Debian-based: you can boot it, play with it, then install it and just apt-get from the standard Debian trees if you want any extras.
eDonkey and why you should pay for SuSE
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SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 1
why should we pay SuSE just because they don't?
Because it's easier to install and supports more hardware than RedHat (and they don't charge for updates), but more stable than Mandrake. Because you don't want to fart around with day-long compiles to get your machine working (Gentoo, Sourcerer) and don't care that much about squeezing 10% more horsepower out of it. Because it uses RPMs (although Mandrake's URPMI is nearly as good as Debian's apt-get on that score, and RPMs might be an anti-feature for a Debianite or Slackie). Because you ist ein Deutschlander, and their German support is pretty good (like Mandrake's French support). Because you don't want a US-and-allies-centric distro. I'm sure there's scores more reasons.
Mandrake know about eDonkey and warez meets, that's what MandrakeClub is for. Debian know and don't care because they're not a sales-supported organisation. RedHat and Slackware seem to get by. Caldera don't know what hit them, and LindowsOS is a bloody circus. And Yoper are mana-whoring (-: no, just kidding, mana doesn't work like karma:-).
such decisions are part of the global orientation and general culture of the enterprises.
That might explain why SuSE don't GPL as much stuff as Mandrake, and why Mandrake's download edition has always been available before shop stock. To compensate, they opened MandrakeClub - where's the SuSE equivalent, or indeed the need for one? I note that Mandrake didn't join the apparently-ill-fated United Linux cabal. From all this you can learn that their corporate culture is less grasping, and also less conservative. Whether that latter is a boon or a bummer depends on your viewpoint.
Mandrake DIDN'T file for bankruptcy...
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SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 1
...they filed for Bankruptcy Protection, which is quite a different thing, and for which there seems to be no US equivalent.
Mandrake are (and have been) making a profit for some time, now, and have chewed through most of their.COM-days debts, the protection was basically to give their creditors legal excuse to get off their backs (ie not foreclose) for six months while they put a big enough dent in those debts to survive. And so far, they are.
I'm looking forward to them getting the financial monkey off their collective back, because then they can re-hire some more developers and get on with pushing along important Linux-centric projects like KDE. Mandrake have so far GPLed everything that goes into their distros, and yet they're making a profit right now.
Not as stupid as it sounds starting from stability
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SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 1
10 days for bug freeness?
First off, he didn't say bug-free, he said bug-fixing (typical careless AC, dare you to step forward and be content-policed!), second off, Mandrake and the Cooker crew are only clobbering obvious bugs (as in, cause crashes or don't work) not trivial stuff or non-present features.
Having said that, they've already contributed quite a few new features to various projects in the last month or so since the list exploded (think circa 1000 messages a day) in the ramp-up to release.
What about [...] MS SQL Server, which featured a unrightfully bundled third party software, for which now MS customers see[m] to have to pay license fees?
Microsoft may well argue that the problem is not with their software, it is with the third party's software. The PR to bury that would probably cost less than the legal fees (at least in the short term, and The Road Behind certainly demonstrates short-term thinking), and good luck to the suers chasing down and confronting a zillion individual MS SQL users.
Hands up all those who think MS'd miss an opportunity like that if it was available to them?
Speaking of which, Mandrake 9.1 final is due out next week, also with KDE 3.1 and other goodies. Free to download, 650MB ISOs so even the most antique CD drives and burners should be happy.
Looking forward to Kolab maturing (due I think with KDE 3.2), will be an excellent tool for chasing the Borg-remnants out of many enterprises.
I presume KDE libraries are available for OS X for free but suspect that the Qt component is pay-for on Macs. I don't know how hard it would be to Aquafy Kolab.
KMail is being groomed as an Exchange client and married to Kolab, which is being constructed (indirectly by the German government) as a FOSS replacement for Exchange.
1. Walking into a distressed customer's site and in 17 minutes (including loading up content and bringing it on-line) turning one of their workstations into a secured, up-to-date DNS (BIND9), mail (PostFix), webserver (Apache), file (Samba) and proxy (Squid) server to replace their smoked rackmount multiprocessor w2k box. It had been running half a day before either their insurer or their hardware supplier got back to them about replacing the deader. It never quit; the company's parent went bust (and took them with it) before it had any reboots. Very happy campers, they were, although I did connect again the next day because they'd forgotten to tell me to switch on a DHCP server. (-:
2. Watching the look on two people's faces (the boss and a resident incompetent) as I explained that PostgreSQL was free and wouldn't even require a separate server; RI had proposed about $45k of MS SQL Server licences and had a $14k monster box all lined up to run it on. I don't know what kind of kickbacks he was getting from the suppliers, but he just about exploded when I reduced that to zero in about three minutes; meanwhile, the boss looked like sunrise; maybe he could afford that little fishing boat after all...
3. Another RI (he had, for example, installed a time-clock program on his Windows 98 workstation and come in three days running to find that it had crashed overnight, went wobbly when I suggested plugging the (RS-232 no-brainer interface) time-clock into the Linux server to produce a comma-delimited file for him, and eventually settled for scheduling a shutdown at 18:00 in case he forgot to do it by hand, having the machine's RTC power up the '98 box at 04:30 - it still died before the workers got in about once a month) had after giving me much grief for a number of weeks, finally weaselled his way into the owner's confidences enough to get me `fired'. They had a power failure the next day, but their Linux everything-server was on a UPS... but some dolt heard the UPS screaming, figured it was distressed (correct) and that the solution was to power it off (oh... dear). This was back in the days of ext2, when a 13GB drive was huge (the machine had two, RAID-1'ed) and they called me back in, panicking and promising to pay their outstandings ($3500 including a lot of work on their mongrel Windows workstations, which they never did pay) when their server didn't come back on with the power 15 minutes later. I looked, and the machine was still fsck'ing, and would be finished in a few minutes, which I told the owner. I turned around from having done this to find RI behind me, livid with rage - get this - that his company's data was going to be OK! I met his eye, and he knew that I knew he was being a complete asshole and a loser, and knew that he knew that too. I don't normally get pleasure out of the holier-than-thou experience, but this day I most certainly did. He gritted his teeth, turned around and stormed off, but unfortunately the owner missed the entire tableau and I didn't get paid.
4. Two similar experiences with StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. A mate had a 14MB MS-Word-2000 file that a customer in the USA (we're in Oz) needed but couldn't read on his MS-Word-97. I had mate email me the file, sucked it into StarOffice 5.2 and blew it out as MS-Word-6, instant hero 'coz it all worked. Another customer had an MS-Word document known to harbour a macro virus which at the time had no known cure; read into OpenOffice.org 6.0, delete macros, write back out again, instant hero take 2.
You can use OpenOffice.org with a rootless X server right now. Apple are rumoured to be doing a Carbonised version Real Soon Now(tm), too, and all the time it gets better. KMail is ramping up to be better than Outlook in all respects except the matter of being a virus incubator. Safari AKA Konqueror is now a Carbonised Apple-ication. And so it goes.
Unless each new MS-Office has some amazingly useful new features, assessors won't be asking of OpenOffice.org, `is it good enough to replace MS-Office' but `why shouldn't we replace MS-Office with this faster, portable, safer and more useful office suite'? Especially since it's both Free and free.
There are quite a few webmail apps, but since web and direct connection are quite different environments, it's not really that flash an idea to try to make them indistinguishable.
XP Home adds new users (including the first) without passwords by default, and as Administrators by default. This makes all default shares accessible sans password.
SQL Server is installed by many workstations apps with a blank or well-known-default password.
Many services install vulnerable by default. I had a mate replace Linux with Win2k on his box, hook up to the internet and start downloading updates... and his box was trash 11 minutes later. Needless to say, he's back on Linux.
Name me one operating system that is reasonably safe with its default install and configuration settings.
VMS (from which NT/2k/XP descends, I think literally descends as in stoops lower than). VMS has security clearances that Windows can only fantasise about, with special creams. Which really does make the security issues Microsoft's fault, doesn't it?
Mandrake Linux also does pretty well, at least as far as remote access is concerned. Services only listen on 127.0.0.1 by default and so on. (-: Install it in `paranoid' mode if you really like having to think up imaginative passwords and enable each service at three different levels before the world can see any of them.:-)
The fact that your aunt has breast cancer is Microsoft's fault.
Absolutely! She should have deleted the password to her breasts completely and replaced it with a DSA key.
In this case, Microsoft by default allow you to choose pathetic passwords (including no password), so they're a contributor. Mind you, that decision was probably taken back in LanMan days when the most excellent of passwords still did you no good.
At a customer site where stricter password checking is enforced on the Windows boxen, the users pick random filenames from their main public share to use. <thwack>
Gravity still plays a role on the ISS. It sinks so many feet everyday.
That's air friction working gently but steadily to deorbit ISS. It won't be significant on a space elevator under any sort of tension, especially a geosynchronous one because that will orbit at roughly the same rate as the atmosphere that slows ISS.
Even if IBM took all $100 Million from SCO, SCO still wins by $900 Million.
Not if enough of IBM's patents happen to be easier (quicker) to prove, because if SCO has to fork over 4-6x what they're worth before their $1G is decided on, then they're screwed.
...and when SCO's shareholders see that coming, they won't even be worth that. They'll be screwed even before the invoice arrives from IBM.
...and they way SCO've been acting lately, they deserve it.
MHD, for example, would probably take a while (few minutes) to warm up, but have enough power at that point to throw gigajoule pulses once or twice a minute. If the exhaust was pointed backwards, you could probably do without the jets while the MHD operating. You would have to fire it at *something* after every recharge, which would probably make "insurance" shots worthwhile unless you had more targets than you could deal with.
IMHO, this would be more effectivelt done from space and/or another missile. The advantage of space is that you could use a very dirty, very fast-acting nuke to power it (ie fast response time, high and sustainable power), and you'd be shooting through much less atmosphere. The disadvantage is it's very expensive and hard to hide. You would expect to be able to fire every few seconds.
The advantage of missile is again that you can use a relatively dirty power source (in fact, you could actually use a nuclear explosion to directly pump the laser, as long as you could aim it fast) and it's difficult to predict; disadvantage is that it suffers a launch delay and might be killed by a similar enemy device before deployment. Combination of airborne platform and multiple deployable missiles might work. If you pumped the laser directly, you'd expect a few seconds of very intense continuous laser fire. If you could contain and stretch out the pumping explosion using some amazing Robert-Forward-style device, maybe 120 consecutive quarter-second shots in the tens-of-gigajoules range.
Of course, I could be talking out of my ass, it's late and I've not bothered with an actual calculator. Give it to the Aussies to build, it'll work better and for 1/10th the cost. (-:
Genetic engineering != eugenics. They're two completely different ideas.
Not exactly. Eugenics is just a primitive way of doing genetic engineering, and in both cases you kill anything less than the best.
Darwin, and consequently Hitler, thought Eugenics was a great idea. You will still find people of that mold (White Supremacists and their counterparts from every other race and (anti-)religion).
Uh... drag? On a stationery object? What?
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 1
No matter how strong the cable is, movement in the atmosphere (ie wind) will cause an extreme amount of drag on any such space elevator.
Does the term `geosynchronous' mean anything to you? The thing spins at the same rate as the atmosphere, wind would more or less average out, excess weight on the end of the cable provides all the tension it needs to stay up. Next question...?
Slashdot Mirror
True, but not as much trouble as `bankruptcy protection' suggests; what they are in is a kind of pre-bankruptcy for which the USA appears to have no equivalent. It is not Chapter 11. The idea is to continue the company as a going concern (stop creditors foreclosing), the French gummint has approved their plan, they seem to be full steam ahead for financial bliss later this year.
Go read your LUG's list archives. If your LUG's not big enough to draw data points from, go find a few others.
Knoppix is unbeatable for auto-detecting stuff, and ironically they got the code for doing that out of a Mandrake installer. Mandrake seems to be just ahead of SuSE but it seems to vary lots. SuSE seems to be better at video cards, for example, not so good at scanners, printers and other peripherals. RedHat, it goes without saying, lags both but with one or two exceptions for stuff like specific video card drivers.
I could say that Debian's hardware detection sucks, but Knoppix is Debian-based: you can boot it, play with it, then install it and just apt-get from the standard Debian trees if you want any extras.
Agree. And I don't even use it. (-:
Download and try Mandrake 9.1 next week as well.
Because it's easier to install and supports more hardware than RedHat (and they don't charge for updates), but more stable than Mandrake. Because you don't want to fart around with day-long compiles to get your machine working (Gentoo, Sourcerer) and don't care that much about squeezing 10% more horsepower out of it. Because it uses RPMs (although Mandrake's URPMI is nearly as good as Debian's apt-get on that score, and RPMs might be an anti-feature for a Debianite or Slackie). Because you ist ein Deutschlander, and their German support is pretty good (like Mandrake's French support). Because you don't want a US-and-allies-centric distro. I'm sure there's scores more reasons.
Mandrake know about eDonkey and warez meets, that's what MandrakeClub is for. Debian know and don't care because they're not a sales-supported organisation. RedHat and Slackware seem to get by. Caldera don't know what hit them, and LindowsOS is a bloody circus. And Yoper are mana-whoring (-: no, just kidding, mana doesn't work like karma :-).
That might explain why SuSE don't GPL as much stuff as Mandrake, and why Mandrake's download edition has always been available before shop stock. To compensate, they opened MandrakeClub - where's the SuSE equivalent, or indeed the need for one? I note that Mandrake didn't join the apparently-ill-fated United Linux cabal. From all this you can learn that their corporate culture is less grasping, and also less conservative. Whether that latter is a boon or a bummer depends on your viewpoint.
...they filed for Bankruptcy Protection, which is quite a different thing, and for which there seems to be no US equivalent.
.COM-days debts, the protection was basically to give their creditors legal excuse to get off their backs (ie not foreclose) for six months while they put a big enough dent in those debts to survive. And so far, they are.
Mandrake are (and have been) making a profit for some time, now, and have chewed through most of their
I'm looking forward to them getting the financial monkey off their collective back, because then they can re-hire some more developers and get on with pushing along important Linux-centric projects like KDE. Mandrake have so far GPLed everything that goes into their distros, and yet they're making a profit right now.
First off, he didn't say bug-free, he said bug-fixing (typical careless AC, dare you to step forward and be content-policed!), second off, Mandrake and the Cooker crew are only clobbering obvious bugs (as in, cause crashes or don't work) not trivial stuff or non-present features.
Having said that, they've already contributed quite a few new features to various projects in the last month or so since the list exploded (think circa 1000 messages a day) in the ramp-up to release.
...I'm impressed that you can ask work for a USD$250,000 toy and get one!
Microsoft may well argue that the problem is not with their software, it is with the third party's software. The PR to bury that would probably cost less than the legal fees (at least in the short term, and The Road Behind certainly demonstrates short-term thinking), and good luck to the suers chasing down and confronting a zillion individual MS SQL users.
Hands up all those who think MS'd miss an opportunity like that if it was available to them?
Both Mandrake and Knoppix clearly out-detect SuSE in some areas.
Speaking of which, Mandrake 9.1 final is due out next week, also with KDE 3.1 and other goodies. Free to download, 650MB ISOs so even the most antique CD drives and burners should be happy.
Looking forward to Kolab maturing (due I think with KDE 3.2), will be an excellent tool for chasing the Borg-remnants out of many enterprises.
I presume KDE libraries are available for OS X for free but suspect that the Qt component is pay-for on Macs. I don't know how hard it would be to Aquafy Kolab.
KMail is being groomed as an Exchange client and married to Kolab, which is being constructed (indirectly by the German government) as a FOSS replacement for Exchange.
1. Walking into a distressed customer's site and in 17 minutes (including loading up content and bringing it on-line) turning one of their workstations into a secured, up-to-date DNS (BIND9), mail (PostFix), webserver (Apache), file (Samba) and proxy (Squid) server to replace their smoked rackmount multiprocessor w2k box. It had been running half a day before either their insurer or their hardware supplier got back to them about replacing the deader. It never quit; the company's parent went bust (and took them with it) before it had any reboots. Very happy campers, they were, although I did connect again the next day because they'd forgotten to tell me to switch on a DHCP server. (-:
2. Watching the look on two people's faces (the boss and a resident incompetent) as I explained that PostgreSQL was free and wouldn't even require a separate server; RI had proposed about $45k of MS SQL Server licences and had a $14k monster box all lined up to run it on. I don't know what kind of kickbacks he was getting from the suppliers, but he just about exploded when I reduced that to zero in about three minutes; meanwhile, the boss looked like sunrise; maybe he could afford that little fishing boat after all...
3. Another RI (he had, for example, installed a time-clock program on his Windows 98 workstation and come in three days running to find that it had crashed overnight, went wobbly when I suggested plugging the (RS-232 no-brainer interface) time-clock into the Linux server to produce a comma-delimited file for him, and eventually settled for scheduling a shutdown at 18:00 in case he forgot to do it by hand, having the machine's RTC power up the '98 box at 04:30 - it still died before the workers got in about once a month) had after giving me much grief for a number of weeks, finally weaselled his way into the owner's confidences enough to get me `fired'. They had a power failure the next day, but their Linux everything-server was on a UPS... but some dolt heard the UPS screaming, figured it was distressed (correct) and that the solution was to power it off (oh... dear). This was back in the days of ext2, when a 13GB drive was huge (the machine had two, RAID-1'ed) and they called me back in, panicking and promising to pay their outstandings ($3500 including a lot of work on their mongrel Windows workstations, which they never did pay) when their server didn't come back on with the power 15 minutes later. I looked, and the machine was still fsck'ing, and would be finished in a few minutes, which I told the owner. I turned around from having done this to find RI behind me, livid with rage - get this - that his company's data was going to be OK! I met his eye, and he knew that I knew he was being a complete asshole and a loser, and knew that he knew that too. I don't normally get pleasure out of the holier-than-thou experience, but this day I most certainly did. He gritted his teeth, turned around and stormed off, but unfortunately the owner missed the entire tableau and I didn't get paid.
4. Two similar experiences with StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. A mate had a 14MB MS-Word-2000 file that a customer in the USA (we're in Oz) needed but couldn't read on his MS-Word-97. I had mate email me the file, sucked it into StarOffice 5.2 and blew it out as MS-Word-6, instant hero 'coz it all worked. Another customer had an MS-Word document known to harbour a macro virus which at the time had no known cure; read into OpenOffice.org 6.0, delete macros, write back out again, instant hero take 2.
You can use OpenOffice.org with a rootless X server right now. Apple are rumoured to be doing a Carbonised version Real Soon Now(tm), too, and all the time it gets better. KMail is ramping up to be better than Outlook in all respects except the matter of being a virus incubator. Safari AKA Konqueror is now a Carbonised Apple-ication. And so it goes.
Unless each new MS-Office has some amazingly useful new features, assessors won't be asking of OpenOffice.org, `is it good enough to replace MS-Office' but `why shouldn't we replace MS-Office with this faster, portable, safer and more useful office suite'? Especially since it's both Free and free.
There are quite a few webmail apps, but since web and direct connection are quite different environments, it's not really that flash an idea to try to make them indistinguishable.
XP Home adds new users (including the first) without passwords by default, and as Administrators by default. This makes all default shares accessible sans password.
SQL Server is installed by many workstations apps with a blank or well-known-default password.
Many services install vulnerable by default. I had a mate replace Linux with Win2k on his box, hook up to the internet and start downloading updates... and his box was trash 11 minutes later. Needless to say, he's back on Linux.
...many Windows versions and apps didn't install stuff like shares with empty passwords.
VMS (from which NT/2k/XP descends, I think literally descends as in stoops lower than). VMS has security clearances that Windows can only fantasise about, with special creams. Which really does make the security issues Microsoft's fault, doesn't it?
Mandrake Linux also does pretty well, at least as far as remote access is concerned. Services only listen on 127.0.0.1 by default and so on. (-: Install it in `paranoid' mode if you really like having to think up imaginative passwords and enable each service at three different levels before the world can see any of them. :-)
Absolutely! She should have deleted the password to her breasts completely and replaced it with a DSA key.
In this case, Microsoft by default allow you to choose pathetic passwords (including no password), so they're a contributor. Mind you, that decision was probably taken back in LanMan days when the most excellent of passwords still did you no good.
At a customer site where stricter password checking is enforced on the Windows boxen, the users pick random filenames from their main public share to use. <thwack>
That's air friction working gently but steadily to deorbit ISS. It won't be significant on a space elevator under any sort of tension, especially a geosynchronous one because that will orbit at roughly the same rate as the atmosphere that slows ISS.
Not if enough of IBM's patents happen to be easier (quicker) to prove, because if SCO has to fork over 4-6x what they're worth before their $1G is decided on, then they're screwed.
...and when SCO's shareholders see that coming, they won't even be worth that. They'll be screwed even before the invoice arrives from IBM.
...and they way SCO've been acting lately, they deserve it.
MHD, for example, would probably take a while (few minutes) to warm up, but have enough power at that point to throw gigajoule pulses once or twice a minute. If the exhaust was pointed backwards, you could probably do without the jets while the MHD operating. You would have to fire it at *something* after every recharge, which would probably make "insurance" shots worthwhile unless you had more targets than you could deal with.
IMHO, this would be more effectivelt done from space and/or another missile. The advantage of space is that you could use a very dirty, very fast-acting nuke to power it (ie fast response time, high and sustainable power), and you'd be shooting through much less atmosphere. The disadvantage is it's very expensive and hard to hide. You would expect to be able to fire every few seconds.
The advantage of missile is again that you can use a relatively dirty power source (in fact, you could actually use a nuclear explosion to directly pump the laser, as long as you could aim it fast) and it's difficult to predict; disadvantage is that it suffers a launch delay and might be killed by a similar enemy device before deployment. Combination of airborne platform and multiple deployable missiles might work. If you pumped the laser directly, you'd expect a few seconds of very intense continuous laser fire. If you could contain and stretch out the pumping explosion using some amazing Robert-Forward-style device, maybe 120 consecutive quarter-second shots in the tens-of-gigajoules range.
Of course, I could be talking out of my ass, it's late and I've not bothered with an actual calculator. Give it to the Aussies to build, it'll work better and for 1/10th the cost. (-:
Not sure on the wingspan, but a 747SP has no trouble building up flight speed on the deck of a modenr carrier.
Not exactly. Eugenics is just a primitive way of doing genetic engineering, and in both cases you kill anything less than the best.
Darwin, and consequently Hitler, thought Eugenics was a great idea. You will still find people of that mold (White Supremacists and their counterparts from every other race and (anti-)religion).
Does the term `geosynchronous' mean anything to you? The thing spins at the same rate as the atmosphere, wind would more or less average out, excess weight on the end of the cable provides all the tension it needs to stay up. Next question...?