Spent fuel rods would probably not have posed much of a threat. You can't exactly stuff them down your trouser legs.
I imagine the terrorist approach to exploiting the reactor would involve simply driving a vehicle with a bomb into the reactor building. The terrorists don't have the human resources to steal fuel and escape, and they probably don't have the technology to build a real bomb, they're just going to make a "dirty bomb" anyway. So they'd skip a few unnecessary steps.
The reactor at OSU has been under greater guard during some of the big football games, out of more or less similar fears, I suppose.
It hasn't really disappeared. It is less conspicuous.
Even so, the statement you're responding to, "At the same time, the government, which funds most scientific research in the country", has always been true. There is not any former golden age of private research funding or something.
In America the burden might have switched from the states (while building the land-grant schools) to the federal government (during the cold war), but the government has always been the biggest player in research. I imagine that's true all over the world and has been for all of recorded history. Think tanks and corporations are a new phenomenon, and who else might have had the money to fund research beyond a very small scale?
Is this the sort of creativity we can expect from loosening up copyright? Parodies, satires, mashups, mixups, etc. I'll probably be modded down but I simply want to know.
Come on! You know you just can't wait for an endless stream of Brittney Spears remixes.
CentOS is not just "like" RedHat - it literally *IS* RedHat Linux! Same sources, same compile tree.
The/ONLY/ thing different is the manufacturing date! (compile time)
Not quite. CentOS is self-hosting, some of the RHEL packages and their updates are actually built on RH 9. If you want something that's truly identical you need Taolinux, which is explicitly not self-hosting, for this reason. To make some of the packages truly identical you need RH 9, perhaps some other things.
But yes, it's very similar. Compatibility is a primary feature of open-source software.
RedHat is being very, very good about this.
That's preposterous. You coca-cola example doesn't seem even vaguely analogous, either. "CentOS" doesn't sound anything like "redhat". CentOS isn't trying to trick anybody.
First of all, trademarks can't be "enforced later on"
To dumb down my comments a few IQ points for the slow: "later on" refers to "after the trademarks are placed in the software and the software is released."
In any case, I don't see how you've addressed the question at all. If I riddle software with trademarked names and copyrighted graphics and all sorts of other things that make life hard for anyone who wants to redistribute a derivitive product, at what point have I completely deviated from the sharing spirit of the GPL?
Sounds like it is time for everyone who has software in the major Linux distributions to trademark their projects. The results could be interesting if people start holding Redhat to the same standard Redhat are holding CentOS to.
That's fascinating, but it's really missing the point IMO. If trademark can be used to prevent the kind of sharing the GPL is meant to insure, something has to give. I would rather it be the enforcement of the trademark in question.
So how do you judge a vendor who fills GPLed software full of trademarks they intend to enforce later on? Yes, someone who wants to use the software can probably strip it of all that crap. Beyond a certain point I'm not sure they should be expected to.
How is it that a company could be trying to "enforce" trademark recognition but obviously has released the trademark into public domain through its own contributions?
Going beyond the pure legal issue you mention, which I'm not sure about, you have to wonder why they think having their trademark diluted (ala Kleenex Tissues) would hurt them. If everyone in the new user community were to associate "Redhat" with "linux" and type www.redhat.com into their browser first thing, that would be... bad?
Can't afford a support contract, but want an enterprise proven stable OS?
Never mind that, how about an OS where software versions don't change all the freaking time when you try to keep everything patched and secure? Debian realizes this fairly well with their stable/unstable/testing paradigm, Fedora just doesn't. The RHEL clones are a good option for the people who want an rpm-based distro roughly equivalent to debian stable.
I enjoy the effort that Red Hat's lawyers seem to be applying to this, but I think that the statement above may have simply been a stock, typical IT notion used by lawyers and not something that Red Hat either believes or enforces. I could be wrong, though....
You're wrong. Sending their lawyers after CentOS definitely qualifies as "enforcing."
Whether what they're doing or not conforms with their "beliefs," in other words whether or not they are hypocrites, is harder to determine.
Are they trying to enforce trademarks which are displayed when you use the software? I'm not a GPL fanatic but I think they ought to lose the right to enforce those trademarks if they're included in a GPLed srpm.
Enforcing the trademarks on bits of the CentOS website or documentation is obviously another matter.
From the support perspective, it makes sense. A person using CentOS might call Red Hat for support if they see Red Hat CentOS.
The funny part is, these rules ruthlessly enforced prevent CentOS or someone in a similar position from placing in their documentation the message "do not contact Red Hat for support."
when this bug was being discussed in a meeting, the first thing that was said was something to the effect of "oh, and if you tell anybody--anybody--about this, you might as well look for a new job at the same time, and a good lawyer."
The only odd thing about that statement was that someone felt it needed to be said. Normally it would be understood.
You're completely full of beans as anonymous cowards so often are but even still, I have to thank you, since you actually responded to my message instead of just modding it, as several others have done. (both up and down)
Anyway, those are two totally disparate examples, since Terraserver uses a fancy-schmancy SAN and Google's strategy has been to stuff as many drives as possible into commodity hardware. And it's irrelevant to anything anyhow since if you're benchmarking a database configuration you might as well benchmark one that people use.
Okay, that's not totally fair, I'm sure a lot of people use the article's configuration. I'm sure a lot of MySQL admins have all their stuff on one big drive rather than moving data out across spindles. Because they're so clever and ahead of the curve.
I only skimmed the article but it's funny to see Linux kiddies criticizing a Microsoft guy for making true statements that would serve to clarify the distinction between "linux the kernel" and "linux the distribution".
Bad Microsoft guy! Start up the FUD again, this truth thing is horrible! Bad bad!
That NetBSD performed worse than FreeBSD for disk IO is really strange. I have never seen this happen in any of the machines I've tried both on (hint: a lot), so either he has a very exotic disk controller which isn't supported properly (weird) or there's a disturbance in the force. Members of the mailing lists are talking it over with him now, and a follow-up should arrive eventually.
I wouldn't worry about it. Running the OS software, the swap space, the database software, and all the database storage on the same disc is going to torpedo I/O performance regardless. Having to rattle the drive head back and forth between all that stuff is ridiculous, and the test results would have been skewed by simple problems like where on the disc the database files are in relation to the OS files, and crap like that.
Slightly off topic, but if it's really performance you want, why don't people just use Postgres?
If it's really performance you want from a database, you setup multiple disk volumes before you even begin worrying about multiple CPUs. The test machine this guy used is sort of symbolic of the knowledge level of the average MySQL user.
Seriously, the BushCo people, and espcially the religious fanatic Busheviks, apparently think there's some kind of statute of limitations on scientific reality. If they stall long enough it will just go away. Not.
It's not that they think it will go away. It's that they only have to stall until the rapture. Coming soon!
Okay, this guy is not a database person. Now, the choice of database product to benchmark with might have been a dead giveaway, but so is the choice of configuration. If you're not going to test with a real database configuration (which the author of the article has probably never seen) why bother? Funny that he'd test on a machine with two CPUs and one drive, though. Great judgement in hardware selection.
Releasing the results against an old build of Solaris x86 a few days after the general release of Solaris 10 is pretty funny, too.
Compiling his own versions of the software without even looking at the patches the maintainers of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports of MySQL use was really good judgemenet. I mean, heck, they might know something about how to make that software perform properly on their platforms, and we wouldn't want that skewing the results! "After all, I'm testing the operating systems, not their pre-packaged MySQL distributions or source builds."
Perl fills a 'tiny short-term need'? Is that why Morgan Stanley, RyanAir [ryanair.com], Amazon [amazon.com], Ticketmaster [ticketmaster.com] and even increasingly Google [google.com] to name but a few are using it for real, business-critical applications?
In a word, yes. And lucky for all of us their business isn't making heart-lung machines or something, and they're only using it on their webpages.
Slashdot Mirror
this bio suggests that he worked for a total of five administrations, four at the cabinet level:a dministration_units/officeofcyberspacesecurity/spe cialassistanttothepresidentandchairpresidentscriti calinfrastructureboard/richardaclarke/a_index.shtm l
http://www.americanpresident.org/action/orgchart/
I imagine the terrorist approach to exploiting the reactor would involve simply driving a vehicle with a bomb into the reactor building. The terrorists don't have the human resources to steal fuel and escape, and they probably don't have the technology to build a real bomb, they're just going to make a "dirty bomb" anyway. So they'd skip a few unnecessary steps.
The reactor at OSU has been under greater guard during some of the big football games, out of more or less similar fears, I suppose.
By using an emulator designed for the sole purpose of running their stuff?
It hasn't really disappeared. It is less conspicuous.
Even so, the statement you're responding to, "At the same time, the government, which funds most scientific research in the country", has always been true. There is not any former golden age of private research funding or something.
In America the burden might have switched from the states (while building the land-grant schools) to the federal government (during the cold war), but the government has always been the biggest player in research. I imagine that's true all over the world and has been for all of recorded history. Think tanks and corporations are a new phenomenon, and who else might have had the money to fund research beyond a very small scale?
Come on! You know you just can't wait for an endless stream of Brittney Spears remixes.
Thanks, I stand corrected. :) How many of the packages still need to be built with RH 9?
Not quite. CentOS is self-hosting, some of the RHEL packages and their updates are actually built on RH 9. If you want something that's truly identical you need Taolinux, which is explicitly not self-hosting, for this reason. To make some of the packages truly identical you need RH 9, perhaps some other things.
But yes, it's very similar. Compatibility is a primary feature of open-source software.
That's preposterous. You coca-cola example doesn't seem even vaguely analogous, either. "CentOS" doesn't sound anything like "redhat". CentOS isn't trying to trick anybody.
To dumb down my comments a few IQ points for the slow: "later on" refers to "after the trademarks are placed in the software and the software is released."
In any case, I don't see how you've addressed the question at all. If I riddle software with trademarked names and copyrighted graphics and all sorts of other things that make life hard for anyone who wants to redistribute a derivitive product, at what point have I completely deviated from the sharing spirit of the GPL?
Sounds like it is time for everyone who has software in the major Linux distributions to trademark their projects. The results could be interesting if people start holding Redhat to the same standard Redhat are holding CentOS to.
That's fascinating, but it's really missing the point IMO. If trademark can be used to prevent the kind of sharing the GPL is meant to insure, something has to give. I would rather it be the enforcement of the trademark in question.
So how do you judge a vendor who fills GPLed software full of trademarks they intend to enforce later on? Yes, someone who wants to use the software can probably strip it of all that crap. Beyond a certain point I'm not sure they should be expected to.
Going beyond the pure legal issue you mention, which I'm not sure about, you have to wonder why they think having their trademark diluted (ala Kleenex Tissues) would hurt them. If everyone in the new user community were to associate "Redhat" with "linux" and type www.redhat.com into their browser first thing, that would be... bad?
Maybe, but I really doubt it.
/me raises hand
Although those looking for a FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX should also consider Scientific Linux, Taolinux, and Whitebox Linux.
That is all.
Never mind that, how about an OS where software versions don't change all the freaking time when you try to keep everything patched and secure? Debian realizes this fairly well with their stable/unstable/testing paradigm, Fedora just doesn't. The RHEL clones are a good option for the people who want an rpm-based distro roughly equivalent to debian stable.
The word is "hypocritical". And yes, it sure is.
You're wrong. Sending their lawyers after CentOS definitely qualifies as "enforcing."
Whether what they're doing or not conforms with their "beliefs," in other words whether or not they are hypocrites, is harder to determine.
Are they trying to enforce trademarks which are displayed when you use the software? I'm not a GPL fanatic but I think they ought to lose the right to enforce those trademarks if they're included in a GPLed srpm.
Enforcing the trademarks on bits of the CentOS website or documentation is obviously another matter.
The funny part is, these rules ruthlessly enforced prevent CentOS or someone in a similar position from placing in their documentation the message "do not contact Red Hat for support."
The only odd thing about that statement was that someone felt it needed to be said. Normally it would be understood.
You're completely full of beans as anonymous cowards so often are but even still, I have to thank you, since you actually responded to my message instead of just modding it, as several others have done. (both up and down)
Anyway, those are two totally disparate examples, since Terraserver uses a fancy-schmancy SAN and Google's strategy has been to stuff as many drives as possible into commodity hardware. And it's irrelevant to anything anyhow since if you're benchmarking a database configuration you might as well benchmark one that people use.
Okay, that's not totally fair, I'm sure a lot of people use the article's configuration. I'm sure a lot of MySQL admins have all their stuff on one big drive rather than moving data out across spindles. Because they're so clever and ahead of the curve.
I only skimmed the article but it's funny to see Linux kiddies criticizing a Microsoft guy for making true statements that would serve to clarify the distinction between "linux the kernel" and "linux the distribution".
Bad Microsoft guy! Start up the FUD again, this truth thing is horrible! Bad bad!
I wouldn't worry about it. Running the OS software, the swap space, the database software, and all the database storage on the same disc is going to torpedo I/O performance regardless. Having to rattle the drive head back and forth between all that stuff is ridiculous, and the test results would have been skewed by simple problems like where on the disc the database files are in relation to the OS files, and crap like that.
But he could afford 2 CPUs for some reason.
If it's really performance you want from a database, you setup multiple disk volumes before you even begin worrying about multiple CPUs. The test machine this guy used is sort of symbolic of the knowledge level of the average MySQL user.
It's not that they think it will go away. It's that they only have to stall until the rapture. Coming soon!
(1) 9 GB SCSI-160 (7200 RPM)
Okay, this guy is not a database person. Now, the choice of database product to benchmark with might have been a dead giveaway, but so is the choice of configuration. If you're not going to test with a real database configuration (which the author of the article has probably never seen) why bother? Funny that he'd test on a machine with two CPUs and one drive, though. Great judgement in hardware selection.
Releasing the results against an old build of Solaris x86 a few days after the general release of Solaris 10 is pretty funny, too.
Compiling his own versions of the software without even looking at the patches the maintainers of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports of MySQL use was really good judgemenet. I mean, heck, they might know something about how to make that software perform properly on their platforms, and we wouldn't want that skewing the results! "After all, I'm testing the operating systems, not their pre-packaged MySQL distributions or source builds."
What... a... loser...
In a word, yes. And lucky for all of us their business isn't making heart-lung machines or something, and they're only using it on their webpages.