The details might not be correct, but essentially, there is no known counter-evidence, and no reason to suggest it is incorrect.
Gentry's haloes are a good start; the absence of intermediate fossils launched Punctuated Equilibrium (which otherwise has no leg to stand on); simple maths shows that it's impossible anyway and the list of ``reasons to suggest it is incorrect'' rolls on towards the horizon.
(as opposed to counting curly braces in other languages, which really has happened to me)
Ooh, time for an editor crusade! (-:
Further, Python too can be run in a JVM or converted to C.
Knew about Jython (which see-crash can't do for political reasons) but didn't know about C as a compiler target.
I hope that there will never be a JVB compiler, but would find a VB compiler with Python, Ruby or even something ruder like Java or C for a target highly useful as a stopgap from time to time.
I'm sorry, thanks for playing, but the Object Manager covers devices.
By ``covers'' I assume you mean ``inters'' since OM doesn't do a lot of the things that devfs does.
Xv... I'm assuming you're not referring to the image viewer.
By golly gosh, you're right! (-:
What am I referring to then, smartass? If you don't even know what's out there, how can you comment on it so authoritatively? Oh, hang on, maybe you're talking out of your a...behind. Bzzzzt! Here's your gold tie-pin, thanks for playing, scrytch one more player off the list, now bugger off. Hint: search for Xnest as well.
NTFS CDs: Even windows 9x has modular filesystem drivers.
Yah, but while Linux can read and write NTFS CDs, Windows NT (2k, XP) refuses to, because the filesystem is special-cased all over the place. Likewise, a virtual disk in any format is nothing special on Unix (mount -o loop file mountpoint) but a whole special application under Windows. And so on.
it looks like a feature point you pulled out of your hind end to fill out the list.
You're absolutely right. And I could go on pulling out feature points for days, because Unix is generalised and Windows isn't. If I could be bothered thinking about it (but this is SlashDot, so that's anathema) there would be hundreds.
It does. But it doesn't help much and measn you have to reload the whole RAMdrive (generally over a LAN) when the box dies. Admittedly, it is a more efficient use of RAM than just handing it to Windows, since Windows (particularly the 9X stream) is a hopelessly inefficient user of RAM.
AFAIK Linux and Open BSD cannot do this either.
You must really have spent a lot of time and looked hard before saying that... )-:
``And death and hell were cast into the lake of RAM. Diskless Windows is the second death.'' -- Revelation 20:14, Geek Modified Version
...he might as well learn a language that's actually useful, rather than C# (pronounced ``see-crash''). Ruby is not only extremely useful, but you also don't spend too much time counting spaces to make sure your code blocks are where you think they are... (-:
Oh, and you can run it in a JVM (did I mention portability?) and spit it out as C if you like.
I notice that MS finally got NT4.0 (SP6 plus a specific C2 patch) C2'ed, and were even allowed a network card this time. A pity that it's one and a half generations obselete. I wonder how hard it would be get get a Free OS C2'ed or even B3'ed?
Those of us hit by the AMD AGP bug, or who have nVidia cards, might have a different view of the legend of Linux stability.
That view might be, ``and we pre-empt unforeseen hardware bugs. How, I don't know.'' Linux has more pre-emptive/corrective workarounds for CPU and other hardware bugs than any other OS I know of. WINE even has specific coding in it to fix application bugs! You can't expect better than that - at least, unless you're a looney...
Yes, during that day, 6000 children shat themselves to death, and 24,000 people of various ages died of starvation.
And it happened again on the 12th, 13th, 14th of September - and so on - and will have happened again by midnight today. Every two days, a town the size of Geraldton or Albany starves to death, and more children than there are people in my entire home shire die from the effects of diarrhoea.
a small number of people (i.e. the Spanish Conquistadors in Mexico) can complet[e]ly overturn an existing society.
The Conquistadors had a special advantage in that the natives were expecting them. The natives had a long-held and detailed prophecy about a white man arriving to be their messiah, and the representatives of the Roman Church matched the prophecies exactly in several important ways. In the best tradition of the Papacy, they responded to an open invitation into the natives' most sacred temple by locking the doors and massacring everyone inside, and so it went.
It is Roman policy that heathen have no rights, so you can kill and lie to them as much as you like without even losing any brownie points. Atheists, Protestants, Jews and Mohammedans are considered heathen for the purposes of this exercise. In practice, the same rule applies to your minions and to competing orders within your church.
it is a lot of fun and you sometimes learn a little history in the process.
So it's a lot like SlashDot: set your bullshit filter on ``high'' and verify each fact elsewhere before believing it? I bet you still soak up an awful lot of misleading information as if it were gospel.
This is the timeless war between the haves and have nots. It is just that in the past, the have nots did not have the easy means to strike back.
To put this into focus: on 11 September 2001, five thousand Americans died by violence. On that day, and on all of the other days of 2001, an average of over six thousand children shat themselves to death, and over twenty four thousand people of all ages died of starvation.
IMHO, when America collectively expresses at least the same outrage over 30,000 slow, inevitable, painful deaths every day as it does over 5000 deaths on only one day, the rest of the world (ie, the non-NATO nations) might start taking America as a country seriously.
Until then, it seems evident that national pride is dear to America, and everyday pain and suffering are most definitely not.
Yes, Americans give generously through charities, but so do a lot of other places, many of them at a much higher per-capita rate, and those other places seem less interested in tying control to the gifts.
This is like totting up Bill Gates' charity donations and calling him a nice man because of it: but pro rata, the average American single mother gives more, and doesn't insist in her donations being named after her or being applied
using only her technologies.
Because Americans are human (like the rest of us), they generally can't see their own personal or collective deficiencies very well. If you are American - and offended by this post - tell me: is the offense a matter of blind pride with you, or am I really wrong in fact?
The biggest flurry of discussion was about two months ago. You can apparently grab a normal CD plus a source RPM (SRPM) set from the same version and do the entire rebuild yourself, there was some discussion about the arcana needed to glue all of the needed utilities together.
the website has subtly changed in the past few months to encourage donations
On user request (ie, they listened to and obeyed their users), Mandrake put a Donate link on their front page. On request from corporate partners and other corporate-image-sensitive businesses, they moved the link one level off the front page lest they tarnish their, er, professional look.
To most of the whingers: (1) if you don't even *ask* them to fix stuff, why do you complain when it doesn't get fixed? (2) if you want something fixed, why not pitch in and fix it yourself or at least make constructive suggestions instead of ``it's broken, Mandrake fscked up''? Do you have a *right* to have stuff fixed for free? Would Microsoft fix the same bug in their stuff if only one user (you) asked? (3) a very few of you did actually post useful bug reports and got trampled or triaged in the rush; I've had both bugs fixed and bugs not fixed, them's the breaks, welcome to Real Life, try again this time in case it works.
Clearly RedHat is better, which is why it's the most popular
By your own reasoning, Windows is much better than Linux. Since this is evidently not the case, I suggest you try replacing your reasoning with something that works, and rebooting.
Now I'm debating whether to try out 8.2, or go for a more "pure" Linux distro, like Slackware.
Not to start a distro-Jihad, but if I dropped Mandrake, it would be for Debian. Mandrake takes a lot of the hard work out of installing a system (many of the defaults are useful, you can tweak stuff en bloc, and a novice will generally have more success with installing Mandrake 8.1 than Windows 2000), but doesn't (nobody does, AFAICT) take as much care with dependencies as Debian, and makes some assumptions (such as: performance is top priority) which don't sit well with older hardware.
Usually, I can wear the disadvantages with little pain, but if I can have my ease-of-installation cake and eat it (better dependencies, 486 CPUs) as well, fabulous, let's do it.
I have yet to see someone make a clear case for Slackware, other than ``the packaging system is really simple at heart'' or ``I'm used to it.''
For the record, I started with Slackware, soon switched to RedHat, and picked up Mandrake as a default/favourite when 6.0 was released.
Given that Dell officially don't support Linux on the beast, this was excellent. Sound worked wonderfully, video, DVD, the whole nine yards.
Three caveats: you *must* run the screen at full blast (2000x1600 OTTOMH) or you get a ripping effect about 1/3 of the way across it and an unstable system; the ``standby'' which should happen when you close the lid simply results in catatonia (machine still on, black screen, no response); you have to download and install the modem code yourself, since it's non-free.
You get about 3 hours of battery life on ``boring'' games like NetHack, PySol or JezzBall, but only about 90 minutes of 3D+noisy games like TuxKart, TuxRacer and Chromium.
Oh, and Windows XP reacts really badly when you run out of batteries while resizing its partition. (-: 1,$cLinuxZZ:-)
It's not like once the cameras are barred MS will be able to do something sneaky
Well, I could say ``good point, it's not like Microsoft were at all subtle about raping their competitors and tying their customers' limbs to the bedposts (or was it the other way around?)'' but in reality Microsoft lose a lot of public image as people discover from reports of court proceedings just how selfish, blind and ruthless Microsoft really is (or at least, the people controlling it really are). What Microsoft has essentially gained is protection against people finding out quite so directly what they're really like.
Now MS can make their own press releases, the AGs can make theirs, and because there are no direct quotes it looks to the public more like two approximately equal powers having a spat - spouting their opinions - and less like policemen carefully reining in the excesses of a thoroughly-proven criminal behemoth.
Also, Bill only stopped talking long enough to change feet when he was making his video testimony, so when the next similar event arrives MS will want to sweep the results carefully under the publicity carpet.
i came upon an interesting article that talks about a reverse firewall
*All* of my servers block all traffic to/from private IPs - except subnets they know - and block outbound traffic not from an externally visible IP that they own; they've done this for years, it's a fairly simple set of ipchains/iptables rules. The 2.4 kernels have a heap more options such as automatic martian (alien packet, ``it can't have come from there'') assassination.
Oh, and they complain in the logs, which are monitored. They also use tools like portsentry to temporarily block all traffic from IPs that sniff them.
And they all stay updated (thanks Mandrake, even if it's not quite as simple as Debian).
These things are all easy under Linux, presumably most BSDs, and probably not that difficult under Solaris, HP-UX, OS/X et al. But Windows? Hmmm...
Shortlist of private IP subnets to drop: 0.0.0.0/8 10.0.0.0/8 127.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 169.127.0.0/16; there are a few others you could use as well.
Do a traceroute 192.168.99.99 from your box (try a few other private IPs as well) and see what happens. From here, RadioWAN don't filter, EfTel don't filter, Paradox don't filter, and AlterNet only drop private IPs after a few hops into their LAN (hey, at least they don't route it!), which is all very sad from a bullshit-deterring POV.
...because if you have a look at the platforms that the most damaging DDoS tools run on, it comes down to a choice of Windows, Windows or Windows.
That has to tell you something about the platform and the mindset of those who choose it (choose one or more of purchasers, users, admins, or meatheaded script kiddies to consider. Discuss).
BTW, I wonder what happened to Bill, to give him a security epiphany? Maybe Jennifer's copy of XP got free porn wallpapers all of a sudden, or he's suddenly figured out how all of those confidential emails are leaking?
Slashdot Mirror
Gentry's haloes are a good start; the absence of intermediate fossils launched Punctuated Equilibrium (which otherwise has no leg to stand on); simple maths shows that it's impossible anyway and the list of ``reasons to suggest it is incorrect'' rolls on towards the horizon.
Argh! Why couldn't he have called to pytusi or at least py2c? There's already a p2c for Pascal which is in wide use.
Ooh, time for an editor crusade! (-:
Knew about Jython (which see-crash can't do for political reasons) but didn't know about C as a compiler target.
I hope that there will never be a JVB compiler, but would find a VB compiler with Python, Ruby or even something ruder like Java or C for a target highly useful as a stopgap from time to time.
Cheers; Leon
By ``covers'' I assume you mean ``inters'' since OM doesn't do a lot of the things that devfs does.
By golly gosh, you're right! (-:
What am I referring to then, smartass? If you don't even know what's out there, how can you comment on it so authoritatively? Oh, hang on, maybe you're talking out of your a...behind. Bzzzzt! Here's your gold tie-pin, thanks for playing, scrytch one more player off the list, now bugger off. Hint: search for Xnest as well.
Yah, but while Linux can read and write NTFS CDs, Windows NT (2k, XP) refuses to, because the filesystem is special-cased all over the place. Likewise, a virtual disk in any format is nothing special on Unix (mount -o loop file mountpoint) but a whole special application under Windows. And so on.
You're absolutely right. And I could go on pulling out feature points for days, because Unix is generalised and Windows isn't. If I could be bothered thinking about it (but this is SlashDot, so that's anathema) there would be hundreds.
It does. But it doesn't help much and measn you have to reload the whole RAMdrive (generally over a LAN) when the box dies. Admittedly, it is a more efficient use of RAM than just handing it to Windows, since Windows (particularly the 9X stream) is a hopelessly inefficient user of RAM.
You must really have spent a lot of time and looked hard before saying that... )-:
``And death and hell were cast into the lake of RAM. Diskless Windows is the second death.'' -- Revelation 20:14, Geek Modified Version
...he might as well learn a language that's actually useful, rather than C# (pronounced ``see-crash''). Ruby is not only extremely useful, but you also don't spend too much time counting spaces to make sure your code blocks are where you think they are... (-:
Oh, and you can run it in a JVM (did I mention portability?) and spit it out as C if you like.
I notice that MS finally got NT4.0 (SP6 plus a specific C2 patch) C2'ed, and were even allowed a network card this time. A pity that it's one and a half generations obselete. I wonder how hard it would be get get a Free OS C2'ed or even B3'ed?
That view might be, ``and we pre-empt unforeseen hardware bugs. How, I don't know.'' Linux has more pre-emptive/corrective workarounds for CPU and other hardware bugs than any other OS I know of. WINE even has specific coding in it to fix application bugs! You can't expect better than that - at least, unless you're a looney...
We get the first BSD to crash thrice daily, but the Windows TCP stack works properly for the first time ever, would be my guess.
Yes, during that day, 6000 children shat themselves to death, and 24,000 people of various ages died of starvation.
And it happened again on the 12th, 13th, 14th of September - and so on - and will have happened again by midnight today. Every two days, a town the size of Geraldton or Albany starves to death, and more children than there are people in my entire home shire die from the effects of diarrhoea.
Never forget. Never forgive.
Or did you have something more selective in mind?
Didn't the Samba team post a bugfix for that some time ago?
<tic>Y'know, I think Netscape started to do something about that a few years ago, Godzilla or something, they called it.</tic>
I wouldn't know. I use Konqueror. (-:
The Conquistadors had a special advantage in that the natives were expecting them. The natives had a long-held and detailed prophecy about a white man arriving to be their messiah, and the representatives of the Roman Church matched the prophecies exactly in several important ways. In the best tradition of the Papacy, they responded to an open invitation into the natives' most sacred temple by locking the doors and massacring everyone inside, and so it went.
It is Roman policy that heathen have no rights, so you can kill and lie to them as much as you like without even losing any brownie points. Atheists, Protestants, Jews and Mohammedans are considered heathen for the purposes of this exercise. In practice, the same rule applies to your minions and to competing orders within your church.
So it's a lot like SlashDot: set your bullshit filter on ``high'' and verify each fact elsewhere before believing it? I bet you still soak up an awful lot of misleading information as if it were gospel.
To put this into focus: on 11 September 2001, five thousand Americans died by violence. On that day, and on all of the other days of 2001, an average of over six thousand children shat themselves to death, and over twenty four thousand people of all ages died of starvation.
IMHO, when America collectively expresses at least the same outrage over 30,000 slow, inevitable, painful deaths every day as it does over 5000 deaths on only one day, the rest of the world (ie, the non-NATO nations) might start taking America as a country seriously.
Until then, it seems evident that national pride is dear to America, and everyday pain and suffering are most definitely not.
Yes, Americans give generously through charities, but so do a lot of other places, many of them at a much higher per-capita rate, and those other places seem less interested in tying control to the gifts.
This is like totting up Bill Gates' charity donations and calling him a nice man because of it: but pro rata, the average American single mother gives more, and doesn't insist in her donations being named after her or being applied
using only her technologies.
Because Americans are human (like the rest of us), they generally can't see their own personal or collective deficiencies very well. If you are American - and offended by this post - tell me: is the offense a matter of blind pride with you, or am I really wrong in fact?
The biggest flurry of discussion was about two months ago. You can apparently grab a normal CD plus a source RPM (SRPM) set from the same version and do the entire rebuild yourself, there was some discussion about the arcana needed to glue all of the needed utilities together.
True. Oops.
On user request (ie, they listened to and obeyed their users), Mandrake put a Donate link on their front page. On request from corporate partners and other corporate-image-sensitive businesses, they moved the link one level off the front page lest they tarnish their, er, professional look.
To most of the whingers: (1) if you don't even *ask* them to fix stuff, why do you complain when it doesn't get fixed? (2) if you want something fixed, why not pitch in and fix it yourself or at least make constructive suggestions instead of ``it's broken, Mandrake fscked up''? Do you have a *right* to have stuff fixed for free? Would Microsoft fix the same bug in their stuff if only one user (you) asked? (3) a very few of you did actually post useful bug reports and got trampled or triaged in the rush; I've had both bugs fixed and bugs not fixed, them's the breaks, welcome to Real Life, try again this time in case it works.
By your own reasoning, Windows is much better than Linux. Since this is evidently not the case, I suggest you try replacing your reasoning with something that works, and rebooting.
I think someone (a user) either has done or will do this. Follow the bouncing links to the Mandrake Cooker list archives and see if I'm right.
Not to start a distro-Jihad, but if I dropped Mandrake, it would be for Debian. Mandrake takes a lot of the hard work out of installing a system (many of the defaults are useful, you can tweak stuff en bloc, and a novice will generally have more success with installing Mandrake 8.1 than Windows 2000), but doesn't (nobody does, AFAICT) take as much care with dependencies as Debian, and makes some assumptions (such as: performance is top priority) which don't sit well with older hardware.
Usually, I can wear the disadvantages with little pain, but if I can have my ease-of-installation cake and eat it (better dependencies, 486 CPUs) as well, fabulous, let's do it.
I have yet to see someone make a clear case for Slackware, other than ``the packaging system is really simple at heart'' or ``I'm used to it.''
For the record, I started with Slackware, soon switched to RedHat, and picked up Mandrake as a default/favourite when 6.0 was released.
Three caveats: you *must* run the screen at full blast (2000x1600 OTTOMH) or you get a ripping effect about 1/3 of the way across it and an unstable system; the ``standby'' which should happen when you close the lid simply results in catatonia (machine still on, black screen, no response); you have to download and install the modem code yourself, since it's non-free.
You get about 3 hours of battery life on ``boring'' games like NetHack, PySol or JezzBall, but only about 90 minutes of 3D+noisy games like TuxKart, TuxRacer and Chromium.
Oh, and Windows XP reacts really badly when you run out of batteries while resizing its partition. (-: 1,$cLinuxZZ :-)
Well, I could say ``good point, it's not like Microsoft were at all subtle about raping their competitors and tying their customers' limbs to the bedposts (or was it the other way around?)'' but in reality Microsoft lose a lot of public image as people discover from reports of court proceedings just how selfish, blind and ruthless Microsoft really is (or at least, the people controlling it really are). What Microsoft has essentially gained is protection against people finding out quite so directly what they're really like.
Now MS can make their own press releases, the AGs can make theirs, and because there are no direct quotes it looks to the public more like two approximately equal powers having a spat - spouting their opinions - and less like policemen carefully reining in the excesses of a thoroughly-proven criminal behemoth.
Also, Bill only stopped talking long enough to change feet when he was making his video testimony, so when the next similar event arrives MS will want to sweep the results carefully under the publicity carpet.
*All* of my servers block all traffic to/from private IPs - except subnets they know - and block outbound traffic not from an externally visible IP that they own; they've done this for years, it's a fairly simple set of ipchains/iptables rules. The 2.4 kernels have a heap more options such as automatic martian (alien packet, ``it can't have come from there'') assassination.
Oh, and they complain in the logs, which are monitored. They also use tools like portsentry to temporarily block all traffic from IPs that sniff them.
And they all stay updated (thanks Mandrake, even if it's not quite as simple as Debian).
These things are all easy under Linux, presumably most BSDs, and probably not that difficult under Solaris, HP-UX, OS/X et al. But Windows? Hmmm...
Shortlist of private IP subnets to drop: 0.0.0.0/8 10.0.0.0/8 127.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 169.127.0.0/16; there are a few others you could use as well.
Do a traceroute 192.168.99.99 from your box (try a few other private IPs as well) and see what happens. From here, RadioWAN don't filter, EfTel don't filter, Paradox don't filter, and AlterNet only drop private IPs after a few hops into their LAN (hey, at least they don't route it!), which is all very sad from a bullshit-deterring POV.
That has to tell you something about the platform and the mindset of those who choose it (choose one or more of purchasers, users, admins, or meatheaded script kiddies to consider. Discuss).
BTW, I wonder what happened to Bill, to give him a security epiphany? Maybe Jennifer's copy of XP got free porn wallpapers all of a sudden, or he's suddenly figured out how all of those confidential emails are leaking?