Just curious since we are in a 'redhat based topic' at the moment. I know it will run since RedHat is plain Linux, easy does it. But will it also update RPM databases and such if an user installed the rpm files?
I've seen a lot of comments in this group allready and most of them are 'complaining' about the amount of money or the fact you could easily donate $30 yourself & buy a cd cheap.
This is your change I'd say; proof RedHat wrong and put your money where your mouth is.
If you won't; fine. But then I would suggest you'd better shut up about the amount of money at all since you are then very busy proving that the idea of buying cheap & donating heavily does not work and that you're simply bashing.
I'd expect major donations to FSF after reading all the comments but I would not wager my money for it. Unfortunatly I might add.
Afaik you and a lot of people are missing a major point; has any of you actually seen the product you are buying? Is it boxed, does is have manuals or do you simply get 4 cd's in an enveloppe?
As long as no one can answer those questions I think its totally unfair to make comparisons the way you do. You are comparing a product which you know (cd at cheapbytes) with something you don't.
Oh; 2nd detail; $1 to FSF should be at least one dollar. $6 for making the cd's. How much for shipping? I live in Europe and would also like a copy...
IMHO a lot of people seem to keep forgetting that RedHat is a company and as such they have 1 major goal which is to make money. And if you can make that money but are still making sure others can also profit, which makes them different from Microsoft I might add, I think it is a very positive move indeed.
I get this eery feeling that a lot of people think this idea is bad simply because its RedHat who's doing it. IMVHO offcourse.
I see a lot of people doing some nice Windows bashing and IMHO its totally uncalled for. The article makes some good sense IMO, only some people are either overlooking some stuff or can't place the article in the correct context.
Lets start with the reason why this article is mentioned on/. anyway. My guess is due to the 'Linux line'. It's no big secret that Windows NT isn't an easy operating system to set up and configure (although it's miles ahead of Linux, OS/2, or even BeOS). So? IMHO he has a fair point here; Linux, OS/2 can be a pain to setup on some hardware (can't comment on BeOS myself). If it wasn't we wouldn't see so many people drop in on the #linux channel asking a very wide range of questions; a lot of them concerning the installation.
Sure... RTFM. Thats what I tell most of those people also. But you cannot shove away the fact that RTFM makes is harder to install when compared to an OS which any braindead idiot can install. Face it; NT is click click click, done. If it will work remains to be seen but thats another story.
Next, I think a lot of people give to much credit to this author. IMO its just an article focused on the beginning admins & NT users. After reading the part about passwords (which have these weird habits of escaping our minds;-)) This is more of a problem than you might think because of a security feature of Windows NT--the administrator account.. It has been some while for me but afaik you can easily boot from the NT cdrom & reinstall / reset the complete userdatabase using the recovery options. Afaik this will also reset the administrator account allthough I'm not 100% positive.
I know its not my job to moderate but I guess if no one tells you... is the code to stop the bold stuff. Sorry to say but I find your article very 'offensive' to read due to the bold. I'm quite sure many feel the same way
I recently discovered an URL where a company stated they we're letting people register a domain name for free. There are some commercial activities (like; when setting up an homepage you will have some header with ads on them) but nevertheless; your own (free) domain name sounds cool to me.
This offer is in an experimental / testing phase at the moment and they are planning to begin at the end of this year. You can register.org.com.net names only. I'd say; check it out... You can find this at http://www.namezero.com/default.htm. I allready registered my domain name hoping it will work out.
Really, thats all this article really is. A shame if you ask me but thats another story. The reason I call it flamebait (I tend not to bash, if I do so its based on fundamental reasons) speaks for itself I guess. For the record:
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices.
I guess we all know this is bull. On my system the only thing I have to do if I need another webmaster is to put him into the 'www' group. Same goes for FTP, INN, etc. Right.
The thing which scares me to death is the simple fact that I never saw MS lie like this. How many company managers will read this crap & start bashing their internal network operators / managers for implementing "lousy, crappy software" (yech)? Like it or not, a lot of people still believe MS. It seems, just like the article on software bugs stated a while ago(http://www.shift.com/shiftstd/SiteMap/frames/m ag7.6.asp?searchfor=7.6bombsquad); people complain but in the end they will put up with it anyway. Given this fact alone I fear the article could cause some damage but I doubt we will ever notice it.
The thing that puzzles me the most though... Were did MS got their information on Linux? To put it differently; this comparison is based on something but on what? I'm sure my fellow regular/. readers remember the article in which a MS employee was busy investigating Linux & needed major support because he could not even install it. At that time I felt it was a fair approach if they wanted to try a server comparison. Now I got this eery feeling that this article is based on the studies of those (as far as I know:) clueless endusers. Talk about fair comparisons;) As a NT administrator I would feel pretty insulted if my theory is correct.
Then, the positive side, this article also pleased me because the article gave me the feeling MS seems to be really getting scared off Linux. Hmm, are we really taking away more marketshare then MS put in their internal prognoses ? I guess so, and I really feel good about it. Marketshare or not; if MS was not worried they would not resort to trashing opponents but hey... Give them some credit for trying. I guess we are at the stage where Bill would order his staff to buy the upstirring company. Surprise; Linux cannot be bought
30 years indeed... I first watched the series at the age of 15 - 20 or so (now being 30 myself) and I still think its brilliant indeed (some local commercial channel is doing a re-run).
I wonder if other people also noticed but the Python jokes must have been the most copied ones I've ever seen. Which prooves to me that these idiots did far more then just silly things;-)) Time sure goes quickly. From a killer bunnie near a cave to a killer penguin. Oh well, its time for something completely different again I guess. My best wishes go out to the remaining Python team.
I got to hand it to Psion... Don't change a winning strategy which is exactly what they are doing so it seems. If you look back every Psion user will remember the success they had with the release of the Series 3 / 3c which also had a 'little brother' (Sienna).
Then the 5 came and it was IMHO way ahead in its time. Funny to see how the 5 still manages to compete with the rival CE machines. Next thing all machines around (3c & 5) got mx'ed and now the 5 range will have its own 'little brother'. Very good marketing strategy if you ask me. The 5mx is yet to come out (I'm planning to buy one as soon as there is one in my native language) but now a lot of people can reconsider and buy a 'lite' version of the 5mx. Sure, bottom line for Psion is to make money but then again I still feel this is a very kind way to approach the market. IMHO its better to release a lite version which is then followed by a 'bigger' version.
Being a Psion user/fan myself I do wonder where the series 7 will fit into this comparison I did. Perhaps instead of the workabout ? In that case it somehow proofs Psion is following an exact line on their, what I see, winning strategy.
btw. At the CeBIT last year Psion not only showed the series 7 (codename Jedi) but also a series 7 without keyboard but just a screen (codename Quantum). Does anyone know what happened to that concept ?
Right, after reading that article I can't help myself responding. IMO these cry babies are overlooking some major issues:
A lot of companies are selling Linux. And a lot of companies are developing Linux (note; 'developing' like making your own distro. For example the way SuSE does). Both ways are very supportive for Linux IMO and people deserve credit when they're working on projects like these.
I'm sure glad there are companies who are shipping / selling Linux. Thats great & what Linux IMO needs to get well known. However... Being such a company does not make you special. Face it; if you look at this worldwide (because Linux is known wordwide) you will see you are just one of the many. However; not special does not mean companies/people like that deserve no respect. On the contrary.
Back to our friends... They ship Linux and for that they should earn some respect from the Linux community. Unfortunatly they are throwing this away them selves (as far as I'm concerned).
Mandrake is, IMHO, a RedHat ripoff. And now we have a company who is dressing MD up (add (C) tools and some books) and selling it. You know what? I can live with this. Its great, helping MD out shipping their distro (whether I like it or not) helps the Linux cause in a way.
The thing that pisses me off is the simple fact that this company is acting like Jabberjaw; demanding respect for something everyone could have done. Investing money in a distro does not make you special. Many people want to make money out of Linux and this is just one other way to do it. As far as respect goes; the minute I see that those companies are also doing something back for the community (like RPM, Yast to name just 2) they got it. Whether I like the distro/company or not.
One website and some hardware detection module is not included here as far as I'm concerned. For a company who started out ripping other peoples work I expect a whole lot better then that.
I'm not so sure about this new concept. First of all I think that to many licences can get confusing very quickly which would cause exact the opposite of what you want to accomplish. But besides that; I don't think it will work.
Its true that companies are getting into the 'open source' area but allmost everyone passes the GPL and uses some licence of its own. IMO simply due to the fact they want to protect their business. I don't think this new licence will make a difference, if I got it right and your idea is to let companies use this license when they are 'publishing' their software. Not one company is the same and all companies have different priorities. Things that one company wishes to protect in a licence means nothing for another.
Afaik there are some environments for Linux allready but they are hardly used as far as I can tell. Personally I fail to see why they are needed. It is allready proven that one can write very powerfull software (like Linux for example) without the usage of such an IDE.
If you really need an IDE based environment you could always make some macro for Emacs which lets you compile the program. Comes very close. For the clued that is.
It is allways said that you can somehow 'predict' the future (to a certain degree) by looking at the events which happened in the past. By doing exactly that I really doubt if this is a good thing.
In the old days we had DOS and the developing was mostly done using Assembler or, later on, low level languages like C, Pascal, etc. This resulted in some very good software being developed. However, a lot of people (companies?) who developed software on a commercial basis also needed to shorten the needed development time as much as they could. Time, after all, is money commercially speaken.
This whole new development led to a situation in which 'high level' development environments were introduced. Unfortunatly this wasn't only shortening development time for the clued developers. It also gave a tool to the clueless developer "want to be's". The result is well known IMHO. Just take a look at the buttload of software which was coming out for Windows 3.x. One software package very often even worse then the other.
Besides these 'weird' programs the programs also tended to get bigger. Enourmous libraries, with many functions, were getting linked to programs even if the author only used 1 single option in the library itself. Basicly a lot of the software got bigger & slower which was somehow compisated with the hardware which was getting faster & faster. However; it still resulted in a lot of programmers who commited themself 100% to some programming environment which did a lot of the 'standard' work for them. A bug in this development environment also meant a bug in their program. Given the fact that most Linux (system) programs get installed as root one can only imagine what havoc some bugs in such a development environment can cause.
Open source? guess not. Sure, one can include the Delphi source code but can someone also tell me what this Delphi release -really- puts into the binary?
Its a personaly opinion, sounds normal to me, but I would not be surprised if the speed advantage which Linux currently holds drops a few months after the 'high level' development environments will be commonly used among the clued & clueless. Besides this I'm also afraid that the open source concept will be in a rough time. Like I said; Delphi source != open source IMVHO.
Nice plan but wil it work?
on
Linux Lite?
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· Score: 1
I personally doubt it. The author mentioned that NT allready implemented / covered this issue with the release of a server & workstation version. IMHO this same example can be used to "proove" (you can never be sure IMO) that the idea isn't working...
You are basicly trying to protect (clueless?) users from themselves. But being clueless as they are, do you really think that if you hand them 2 choices (full blown Linux / Linux Lite, safer for the newbie) they will actually choose the lite version? No way!
Think about it; why are they installing/Linux in the first place? Most of these people are attracted towards Linux because a lot of people use it and it gets commonly known being 'a more stable OS then Windows'. Put differently; many feel it looks cool to have a copy of Linux on your computer. And what would look cooler; a full blown Linux or a lite version?
IMVHO we are talking about the same people who are using Linux being root only dispite the fact its mentioned all over that you should not. The same people who are running NT Server on their PC because it can even do more things then a plain workstation. People who will not settle for a lite version even if they would benefit from it if they did
Personally I would really like to see how many (beginning or want to be) users installed RedHat 6 as a workstation instead of a server.
I proceeded carefully, I just didn't want to ruin my chance at getting normal moderator status. In a way, the whole meta moderation worries me a bit.. it seems, you can lose eligibility to moderate if you do badly,
I agree with you that some articles are hard to meta-moderate, if you want to be fair about it. For example; I allways tend to skip articles which are moderated 'offtopic' if I'm not 100% sure what the main story featured (in a rough way). If I don't know the main story I can't judge if something is, or is not, offtopic. Like you stated; going to the article again doesn't help because if you do you can be sure the 'meta moderation questions for the day' are altered (I used lynx during my very first meta-moderating).
The point I fail to see is that someone would act different because he/she doesn't want to loose the change to get moderator status.
Perhaps I'm missing something but to me/. isn't a certain way to gain more power in the swirling world of Linux. The ability to gain power by the root; a form of "Linux media" itself. IMVHO its crap to act differently because you want to become a moderator someday.
Slashdot is about news gathering and about discussing topics with other people and last but not least; having fun doing so. Moderation is only a necesary to make it harder for some idiots to spoil our fun we're having in reading/writing at slashdot.
Anyway, thats how I feel about this whole moderation thingie.
I guess that there will allways be a risk of things like this happening. But if M2's would start m2'ing biasly like that I can't help thinking someone would notice. The moderations will allways be something like judiging 2 major subjects and leaving the rest out.
I hope that I didn't miss anything but after reading the article I don't see the threat of one single biased m2 inflicting as much damage on a moderator like that. An article is m2't but afaik there are more than one m2'er me'ing.
...hmm, perhaps I should be a bit less lazy and type out the whole 'meta moderator' word next time.
Sure, it is kind of hard to be judged by the last thing you did. But its also a commonly known fact, which I'm sure is also known by Sir Alec. I believe this is common knowledge due to the fact this sort of thing happened very often in the past, and not only in the film industries. Many singers experienced the same; they made a great hit which sold very good. After the hit they made a song which was 'not as good' and people lost interest. Another one; why do you think groups like Abba are still very populair? They quit when they we're at a certain peak. People remember them being in that peak and remember them as being great. And like I said; this isn't just one occasion; these things happen. And being a professional actor (and we all know Sir Alec is) I can't believe that you are not familier with this.
hmm, when looking at the preview I think I should go back to Netscape in order to read/.:)
IMHO a good point but there is an easy way to prevent this from happening. Actually, when reading the main article I somewhat took this for granted:
Person C, D and E, who dislike B, get the article with the way B moderated it and are asked how they feel about the moderation. They never have to know it was person B doing the moderation.
I personally do not understand all this comotion about the whole topic. The article clearly states that amazone.com issued a warning 'on behalf off...'. The same article also stated that RedHat itself cannot comment yet on the subject. So whats the problem? If it isn't official we should not trouble ourselfs with this IMHO. Lets just wait until RedHat does give an official statement which would be a better discussion topic IMO.
Our company had the same amount of problems. Worse yet; sometimes, very rarely, the amount of non-business data tended to take too much bandwith for our regular datastreams. Since you got 2 problems in this matter (privacy of a persons mail & company propperty / violating of company rules) I decided to take 2 actions which lead to a drastic decrease of these activities. Offcourse all of this was implemented after I warned the users what was about to happen.
First we stripped incoming messages of any attachment while sending the contents of the message to its receipent. The obvious graphic files (bmp,gif,jpg) were moved to a different directory while the system made copies of all other files. Since most of the users on my network attached stuff this filtered out quite a lot of illegal activities without violating privacy issues.
Besides this we scanned the size of the email message itself. Normally no email msgs were intercepted due to privacy but when a message reached a certain size (approx. 50kB and above) we (my superior and myself) would intercept and check it.
I found this to be the best solution. Personally I don't think there is an "out of the box" solution for these sort of problems. The best way I can think of is to analyze the situation and take appropiate actions.
Indeed; people should indeed try and get a bit more involved in order to make the whole LDP work. BUT... IMHO the LDP itself should also take a very good look at the way things are going.
For example; earlier this year I dived into INN. I believed it should be possible for an end user to use only INN + a newsreader for all his/her usenet needs. After doing some major reading and trying out I finally managed to do exactly that. No suck, pull, whatever for me; only INN.
I got pretty excited over this since allmost everyone seems to think that its impossible to do this without using external software as Suck. So I decided to see if I could put my experiences into an HOWTO for others to use.
Since I actually do read docs I did as the HOWTO on this subject told me; I wrote an email to linux-howto@metalab.unc.edu telling what I did, how I did it (global) and that I wanted to write an HOWTO. I got no response.
I asked in some (local) usenet groups and on IRC if other people shared these experiences and indeed; the bottom line is that a lot of people thought the LDP staff to be very slow. Some even suggested you should ignore the HOWTO and just mail the stuff.
Because I personally feel just dumping the howto in someones mailbox it is kinda rude I wrote 2 more emails (1 - 2 month period between them) but still got no response what so ever.
At this point my motivation to write howto's has dropped below zero. Perhaps the discovery I did wasn't that special, sure, but IMHO at least someone could have told me so.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious since we are in a 'redhat based topic' at the moment. I know it will run since RedHat is plain Linux, easy does it. But will it also update RPM databases and such if an user installed the rpm files?
This is your change I'd say; proof RedHat wrong and put your money where your mouth is.
If you won't; fine. But then I would suggest you'd better shut up about the amount of money at all since you are then very busy proving that the idea of buying cheap & donating heavily does not work and that you're simply bashing.
I'd expect major donations to FSF after reading all the comments but I would not wager my money for it. Unfortunatly I might add.
As long as no one can answer those questions I think its totally unfair to make comparisons the way you do. You are comparing a product which you know (cd at cheapbytes) with something you don't.
Oh; 2nd detail; $1 to FSF should be at least one dollar. $6 for making the cd's. How much for shipping? I live in Europe and would also like a copy...
IMHO a lot of people seem to keep forgetting that RedHat is a company and as such they have 1 major goal which is to make money. And if you can make that money but are still making sure others can also profit, which makes them different from Microsoft I might add, I think it is a very positive move indeed.
I get this eery feeling that a lot of people think this idea is bad simply because its RedHat who's doing it. IMVHO offcourse.
Lets start with the reason why this article is mentioned on /. anyway. My guess is due to the 'Linux line'. It's no big secret that Windows NT isn't an easy operating system to set up and configure (although it's miles ahead of Linux, OS/2, or even BeOS). So? IMHO he has a fair point here; Linux, OS/2 can be a pain to setup on some hardware (can't comment on BeOS myself). If it wasn't we wouldn't see so many people drop in on the #linux channel asking a very wide range of questions; a lot of them concerning the installation.
Sure... RTFM. Thats what I tell most of those people also. But you cannot shove away the fact that RTFM makes is harder to install when compared to an OS which any braindead idiot can install. Face it; NT is click click click, done. If it will work remains to be seen but thats another story.
Next, I think a lot of people give to much credit to this author. IMO its just an article focused on the beginning admins & NT users. After reading the part about passwords (which have these weird habits of escaping our minds ;-)) This is more of a problem than you might think because of a security feature of Windows NT--the administrator account.. It has been some while for me but afaik you can easily boot from the NT cdrom & reinstall / reset the complete userdatabase using the recovery options. Afaik this will also reset the administrator account allthough I'm not 100% positive.
btw; I do not intend this as being a flame.
This offer is in an experimental / testing phase at the moment and they are planning to begin at the end of this year. You can register .org .com .net names only. I'd say; check it out... You can find this at http://www.namezero.com/default.htm. I allready registered my domain name hoping it will work out.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices.
I guess we all know this is bull. On my system the only thing I have to do if I need another webmaster is to put him into the 'www' group. Same goes for FTP, INN, etc. Right.
The thing which scares me to death is the simple fact that I never saw MS lie like this. How many company managers will read this crap & start bashing their internal network operators / managers for implementing "lousy, crappy software" (yech)? Like it or not, a lot of people still believe MS. It seems, just like the article on software bugs stated a while ago(http://www.shift.com/shiftstd/SiteMap/frames/m ag7.6.asp?searchfor=7.6bombsquad); people complain but in the end they will put up with it anyway. Given this fact alone I fear the article could cause some damage but I doubt we will ever notice it.
The thing that puzzles me the most though... Were did MS got their information on Linux? To put it differently; this comparison is based on something but on what? I'm sure my fellow regular /. readers remember the article in which a MS employee was busy investigating Linux & needed major support because he could not even install it. At that time I felt it was a fair approach if they wanted to try a server comparison. Now I got this eery feeling that this article is based on the studies of those (as far as I know:) clueless endusers. Talk about fair comparisons ;) As a NT administrator I would feel pretty insulted if my theory is correct.
Then, the positive side, this article also pleased me because the article gave me the feeling MS seems to be really getting scared off Linux. Hmm, are we really taking away more marketshare then MS put in their internal prognoses ? I guess so, and I really feel good about it. Marketshare or not; if MS was not worried they would not resort to trashing opponents but hey... Give them some credit for trying. I guess we are at the stage where Bill would order his staff to buy the upstirring company. Surprise; Linux cannot be bought
I wonder if other people also noticed but the Python jokes must have been the most copied ones I've ever seen. Which prooves to me that these idiots did far more then just silly things ;-)) Time sure goes quickly. From a killer bunnie near a cave to a killer penguin. Oh well, its time for something completely different again I guess. My best wishes go out to the remaining Python team.
Then the 5 came and it was IMHO way ahead in its time. Funny to see how the 5 still manages to compete with the rival CE machines. Next thing all machines around (3c & 5) got mx'ed and now the 5 range will have its own 'little brother'. Very good marketing strategy if you ask me. The 5mx is yet to come out (I'm planning to buy one as soon as there is one in my native language) but now a lot of people can reconsider and buy a 'lite' version of the 5mx. Sure, bottom line for Psion is to make money but then again I still feel this is a very kind way to approach the market. IMHO its better to release a lite version which is then followed by a 'bigger' version.
Being a Psion user/fan myself I do wonder where the series 7 will fit into this comparison I did. Perhaps instead of the workabout ? In that case it somehow proofs Psion is following an exact line on their, what I see, winning strategy.
btw. At the CeBIT last year Psion not only showed the series 7 (codename Jedi) but also a series 7 without keyboard but just a screen (codename Quantum). Does anyone know what happened to that concept ?
A lot of companies are selling Linux. And a lot of companies are developing Linux (note; 'developing' like making your own distro. For example the way SuSE does). Both ways are very supportive for Linux IMO and people deserve credit when they're working on projects like these.
I'm sure glad there are companies who are shipping / selling Linux. Thats great & what Linux IMO needs to get well known. However... Being such a company does not make you special. Face it; if you look at this worldwide (because Linux is known wordwide) you will see you are just one of the many. However; not special does not mean companies/people like that deserve no respect. On the contrary.
Back to our friends... They ship Linux and for that they should earn some respect from the Linux community. Unfortunatly they are throwing this away them selves (as far as I'm concerned).
Mandrake is, IMHO, a RedHat ripoff. And now we have a company who is dressing MD up (add (C) tools and some books) and selling it. You know what? I can live with this. Its great, helping MD out shipping their distro (whether I like it or not) helps the Linux cause in a way.
The thing that pisses me off is the simple fact that this company is acting like Jabberjaw; demanding respect for something everyone could have done. Investing money in a distro does not make you special. Many people want to make money out of Linux and this is just one other way to do it. As far as respect goes; the minute I see that those companies are also doing something back for the community (like RPM, Yast to name just 2) they got it. Whether I like the distro/company or not.
One website and some hardware detection module is not included here as far as I'm concerned. For a company who started out ripping other peoples work I expect a whole lot better then that.
Can't help wondering how long it will take before we can mount a WAD file using the loop device :-)
Its true that companies are getting into the 'open source' area but allmost everyone passes the GPL and uses some licence of its own. IMO simply due to the fact they want to protect their business. I don't think this new licence will make a difference, if I got it right and your idea is to let companies use this license when they are 'publishing' their software. Not one company is the same and all companies have different priorities. Things that one company wishes to protect in a licence means nothing for another.
If you really need an IDE based environment you could always make some macro for Emacs which lets you compile the program. Comes very close. For the clued that is.
In the old days we had DOS and the developing was mostly done using Assembler or, later on, low level languages like C, Pascal, etc. This resulted in some very good software being developed. However, a lot of people (companies?) who developed software on a commercial basis also needed to shorten the needed development time as much as they could. Time, after all, is money commercially speaken.
This whole new development led to a situation in which 'high level' development environments were introduced. Unfortunatly this wasn't only shortening development time for the clued developers. It also gave a tool to the clueless developer "want to be's". The result is well known IMHO. Just take a look at the buttload of software which was coming out for Windows 3.x. One software package very often even worse then the other.
Besides these 'weird' programs the programs also tended to get bigger. Enourmous libraries, with many functions, were getting linked to programs even if the author only used 1 single option in the library itself. Basicly a lot of the software got bigger & slower which was somehow compisated with the hardware which was getting faster & faster. However; it still resulted in a lot of programmers who commited themself 100% to some programming environment which did a lot of the 'standard' work for them. A bug in this development environment also meant a bug in their program. Given the fact that most Linux (system) programs get installed as root one can only imagine what havoc some bugs in such a development environment can cause.
Open source? guess not. Sure, one can include the Delphi source code but can someone also tell me what this Delphi release -really- puts into the binary?
Its a personaly opinion, sounds normal to me, but I would not be surprised if the speed advantage which Linux currently holds drops a few months after the 'high level' development environments will be commonly used among the clued & clueless. Besides this I'm also afraid that the open source concept will be in a rough time. Like I said; Delphi source != open source IMVHO.
You are basicly trying to protect (clueless?) users from themselves. But being clueless as they are, do you really think that if you hand them 2 choices (full blown Linux / Linux Lite, safer for the newbie) they will actually choose the lite version? No way!
Think about it; why are they installing/Linux in the first place? Most of these people are attracted towards Linux because a lot of people use it and it gets commonly known being 'a more stable OS then Windows'. Put differently; many feel it looks cool to have a copy of Linux on your computer. And what would look cooler; a full blown Linux or a lite version?
IMVHO we are talking about the same people who are using Linux being root only dispite the fact its mentioned all over that you should not. The same people who are running NT Server on their PC because it can even do more things then a plain workstation. People who will not settle for a lite version even if they would benefit from it if they did
Personally I would really like to see how many (beginning or want to be) users installed RedHat 6 as a workstation instead of a server.
I agree with you that some articles are hard to meta-moderate, if you want to be fair about it. For example; I allways tend to skip articles which are moderated 'offtopic' if I'm not 100% sure what the main story featured (in a rough way). If I don't know the main story I can't judge if something is, or is not, offtopic. Like you stated; going to the article again doesn't help because if you do you can be sure the 'meta moderation questions for the day' are altered (I used lynx during my very first meta-moderating).
The point I fail to see is that someone would act different because he/she doesn't want to loose the change to get moderator status.
Perhaps I'm missing something but to me /. isn't a certain way to gain more power in the swirling world of Linux. The ability to gain power by the root; a form of "Linux media" itself. IMVHO its crap to act differently because you want to become a moderator someday.
Slashdot is about news gathering and about discussing topics with other people and last but not least; having fun doing so. Moderation is only a necesary to make it harder for some idiots to spoil our fun we're having in reading/writing at slashdot.
Anyway, thats how I feel about this whole moderation thingie.
I guess that there will allways be a risk of things like this happening. But if M2's would start m2'ing biasly like that I can't help thinking someone would notice. The moderations will allways be something like judiging 2 major subjects and leaving the rest out.
I hope that I didn't miss anything but after reading the article I don't see the threat of one single biased m2 inflicting as much damage on a moderator like that. An article is m2't but afaik there are more than one m2'er me'ing.
...hmm, perhaps I should be a bit less lazy and type out the whole 'meta moderator' word next time.
Many singers experienced the same; they made a great hit which sold very good. After the hit they made a song which was 'not as good' and people lost interest. Another one; why do you think groups like Abba are still very populair? They quit when they we're at a certain peak. People remember them being in that peak and remember them as being great.
And like I said; this isn't just one occasion; these things happen. And being a professional actor (and we all know Sir Alec is) I can't believe that you are not familier with this.
hmm, when looking at the preview I think I should go back to Netscape in order to read /. :)
IMHO a good point but there is an easy way to prevent this from happening. Actually, when reading the main article I somewhat took this for granted:
Person C, D and E, who dislike B, get the article with the way B moderated it and are asked how they feel about the moderation. They never have to know it was person B doing the moderation.
I personally do not understand all this comotion about the whole topic. The article clearly states that amazone.com issued a warning 'on behalf off...'. The same article also stated that RedHat itself cannot comment yet on the subject. So whats the problem? If it isn't official we should not trouble ourselfs with this IMHO. Lets just wait until RedHat does give an official statement which would be a better discussion topic IMO.
Hi,
Our company had the same amount of problems. Worse yet; sometimes, very rarely, the amount of non-business data tended to take too much bandwith for our regular datastreams. Since you got 2 problems in this matter (privacy of a persons mail & company propperty / violating of company rules) I decided to take 2 actions which lead to a drastic decrease of these activities. Offcourse all of this was implemented after I warned the users what was about to happen.
First we stripped incoming messages of any attachment while sending the contents of the message to its receipent. The obvious graphic files (bmp,gif,jpg) were moved to a different directory while the system made copies of all other files. Since most of the users on my network attached stuff this filtered out quite a lot of illegal activities without violating privacy issues.
Besides this we scanned the size of the email message itself. Normally no email msgs were intercepted due to privacy but when a message reached a certain size (approx. 50kB and above) we (my superior and myself) would intercept and check it.
I found this to be the best solution. Personally I don't think there is an "out of the box" solution for these sort of problems. The best way I can think of is to analyze the situation and take appropiate actions.
Indeed; people should indeed try and get a bit more involved in order to make the whole LDP work. BUT... IMHO the LDP itself should also take a very good look at the way things are going.
For example; earlier this year I dived into INN. I believed it should be possible for an end user to use only INN + a newsreader for all his/her usenet needs. After doing some major reading and trying out I finally managed to do exactly that. No suck, pull, whatever for me; only INN.
I got pretty excited over this since allmost everyone seems to think that its impossible to do this without using external software as Suck. So I decided to see if I could put my experiences into an HOWTO for others to use.
Since I actually do read docs I did as the HOWTO on this subject told me; I wrote an email to linux-howto@metalab.unc.edu telling what I did, how I did it (global) and that I wanted to write an HOWTO. I got no response.
I asked in some (local) usenet groups and on IRC if other people shared these experiences and indeed; the bottom line is that a lot of people thought the LDP staff to be very slow. Some even suggested you should ignore the HOWTO and just mail the stuff.
Because I personally feel just dumping the howto in someones mailbox it is kinda rude I wrote 2 more emails (1 - 2 month period between them) but still got no response what so ever.
At this point my motivation to write howto's has dropped below zero. Perhaps the discovery I did wasn't that special, sure, but IMHO at least someone could have told me so.