The problem with all libel laws is that they don't stop this kind of abuse. The Daily Mail and others in Britain take the rare libel cases as a cost of doing business and continue printing bullshit. The libel cases against them are rare because it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring a case, effectively restricting usage of these laws to a fraction of 1% of the population.
It's not such much that these crimes aren't considered serious it's more that the German constitution is very strict at protecting citizen's privacy, including from the state. The reason for this is of course the Stasi and the Nazi eras, both times when people were rounded up for collective punishment by the state's law enforcement.
The 'law' being referred to is a ruling by the German constitutional court that interpreted the constitution to explicitly forbid this kind of surveillence in all but the most serious cases - when there was a direct threat to life or limb or a direct threat to democracy or the state (meaning the rise of another Nazi-like group or similar).
Indeed, and of all the political parties trying to use this mess to their advantage at the moment the only ones who grasp this point are the Pirate Party.
""Es gibt keinerlei Möglichkeit, einen Trojaner zu installieren, der den rechtlichen Erfordernissen entspricht." Ein Richter könne nie nachweisen, ob Beweismittel auf Computern eines Überwachten nachträglich verändert wurden."
In English: "There is no possible way to install a trojan that satisfies the legal requirements*. A judge can never prove whether evidence on the computer of a person who has been monitored has been altered after the fact or not."
(*referring to an earlier judgement by the constitutional court that spying programs can only be used to record VOIP conversations and email exchanges and strictly nothing else)
1000mb or not you might need to grow a thicker skin if you want to post on discussion boards. I am an Aussie, I was just pointing out that even with the NBN we still pay a lot for what we get.
In Germany we're getting 100Mbit down 6mbit up and truly unlimited bandwidth on fibre for 20 Euro a month. That's a normal residential connection with Kabel Deutschland.
The NBN is an improvement but Australia is still a rip-off for internet connections.
Australia too, before the GFC our net government debt was around zero after years of consistent surpluses. The government plans a surplus again next year too.
SL is based on, and closely tracks, Redhat's Enterprise Linux product, which has been designed to offer stability and very long support periods (at least 7 years after release I think). That's what makes it suitable for servers, whereas most other* Linux distro's have shorter release and support cycles (12-18 months) and tend to use more recent versions of software, which makes them arguably more unstable.
* Note there are other 'enterprise ready' long-support cycle distros such as Debian Stable, or Suse Linux Enterprise.
Have you used KDE recently? It has both features - a pause button and file transfers are done as a queue. You just click on the little notification area icon that comes up. This is on KDE 4.6 at least.
/dev/sda1 is not a mount point. A mount point is something like/media/BACKUPHD, which is what my backup USB drive shows up as when I plug it into my Linux computer, or/media/VIDEOHD which is what the USB drive with my movies and TV shows on it appears as. This system does make a lot more sense and is much more intuitive to a user than random alphabetical drive letters.
It may not be the most important issue in the usability world but it is something where the Unix world is ahead of Windows.
Exactly, with that and the comments about making a 'GNOME OS' they have some huge problems with the 're-invent the wheel' and 'not invented here' syndromes.
There are already quite capable GTK-based programs that manage photos, music, downloads and whatever else you can think of. They've been in development for years and years, often with real money (ie. paid developers) behind them at various times. It sounds like they want to create a perfect little GNOME3 world where all the apps are specifically designed for GNOME3 and follow the GNOME3 developers' user interface guidelines to the letter. They're free to try of course but it's not going to work, and even if it does it'd be pointless duplication of what we already have.
Even worse is the comment about suspend in Linux. Huge amounts of effort and resources (both paid and not) have gone into the Linux kernel and the major 'plumbing' components such as X, open-source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA, D-Bus, udev and so on to get things running as smoothly as they do today on different hardware. Starting off with a GNOME OS (even if it uses the base Linux kernel) is not going to somehow magically require less effort to get everything running smoothly, even in the extremely unlikely event that gets enough traction and developers to get off the ground.
I'm a KDE user and this confirms what I've always thought about GNOME's politics - they are focused on creating their own little world and really not that interested in interoperability.
Konqueror is 'fixed' in that it's no longer the file manager - Dolphin is, and it's a much cleaner implementation of the idea of a 'file manager'. As for a browser every distro uses Firefox as default and you can install Chrome or Opera if you don't like that.
(Konqueror is still there and still maintained if you want to use it as file manager or web browser)
Re:Best Distro to try this new KDE with?
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Opensuse, they aim to support KDE and GNOME equally and don't do it as an afterthought or side project (*cough* *cough* Linux Mint, Kubuntu).
Me too. I was as annoyed as anyone by KDE 4.0-4.2 and the way distro's switched to it when it was only beta (perhaps even alpha) quality. But since 4.3 or 4.4 it's got much better, and the current KDE 4.6 on Opensuse is like night and day compared to 4.0.
It's well integrated, just like it was on 4.6, 4.5, 4.4 and so on.
What exactly is wrong with it? Maybe it's a distro thing because I've been using Opensuse for the past 2 or 3 years and GTK apps have always looked good out of the box.
The BBC iPlayer is available on Linux, DRM support and all. Just because the OS is open source doesn't mean you can't write closed-source software on it, including software that implements DRM.
And I prefer to install only the programs I want to use. I hear of people who have issues with not keeping everything patched or turning off unwanted services. Possibly FUD but I'm not a Linux guy.
This is either FUD or you're talking about Windows. With Windows every application needs to run it's own update service in the background or annoy the user for updates when they start the program. The difference couldn't be more stark with Linux where the system update handles all the programs you've installed (since ordinary users are installing things from their distro's packages, not compiling.tar.gz files these days).
As for turning off services I just go into the GUI in the 'control panel' and click 'enable' or 'disable' - what's so difficult about that.
This is only because of the EU regulations though. And it only applies inside the EU, go outside with a German sim card and you'll be charged eye watering amounts.
I was charged over 40 euro for downloading 2mb of data un the Ukraine last month on my German o2 contract.
Yes unfortunately that's par for the course with the Daily Mail, the UK's answer to Fox News.
If you search around their website in amongst the horseshit about celebrities and completely made-up articles about crazy new EU 'laws' you'd also find their ongoing effort to divide all inanimate objects in the world (especially foods) into those that either cause cancer or cure it.
I'll believe in miracle new treatments when there's a more credible source article.
On the contrary when I want to fly somewhere I want to put the origin, destination, dates (and even times of day if that's important for the trip) into a website and get a list of all the options sorted by price. I can then pick the cheapest one that's not at ridiculous times (eg. 6am flight from London Stanstead or something equally awful).
That's how it works in Europe at the moment with sites like expedia, opodo, skyscanner etc. and it's a godsend, it's also one of the strongest drivers of real competition between the airlines. The alternative, which American Airlines is hoping other airlines will also adopt, is that you must go to each separate carriers website and enter those details manually.
Of course no one will do this for the 10-30 airline options that exist between most European destinations so you'll get people going with whatever airline they have some crappy royalty program with or have flown with before.
Even in 2011 their service is fairly shoddy. We had major problems with Xen and despite lots of back and forth, and prompting them after they seemed to 'forget' our tickets a few times it turned out they couldn't help. And this is with a few dozen machines on commercial support contracts with them.
Surprisingly, the Novell SLES support people were very responsive. And provided extremely detailed answers that covered all the possibilities of what we were trying to do. Consequently the Xen servers are now going to be SLES.
June 2011 Linux Kernel 3.0 released to continue the recent development work that has enabled Linux to become seriously popular and widespread in mobile devices and servers, while vastly improved driver support has made it's use on laptops and desktops viable for many.
No, the 'odd-number means a development release' scheme was dropped many years ago. All the 2.6 kernels from 2.6.0 onwards are considered 'stable' releases, as will all the 3.X ones.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about laptops and netbooks, which are the majority of the 'PC' market today?
"Linux distros would do well to do what the BSDs do - offer a wide choice of desktops, so that everyone can pick their own w/ minimum heartburn."
They already do, have a look at Opensuse for example. Even in Ubuntu your favourite DE is only a package install away.
The problem with all libel laws is that they don't stop this kind of abuse. The Daily Mail and others in Britain take the rare libel cases as a cost of doing business and continue printing bullshit. The libel cases against them are rare because it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring a case, effectively restricting usage of these laws to a fraction of 1% of the population.
It's not such much that these crimes aren't considered serious it's more that the German constitution is very strict at protecting citizen's privacy, including from the state. The reason for this is of course the Stasi and the Nazi eras, both times when people were rounded up for collective punishment by the state's law enforcement.
The 'law' being referred to is a ruling by the German constitutional court that interpreted the constitution to explicitly forbid this kind of surveillence in all but the most serious cases - when there was a direct threat to life or limb or a direct threat to democracy or the state (meaning the rise of another Nazi-like group or similar).
Indeed, and of all the political parties trying to use this mess to their advantage at the moment the only ones who grasp this point are the Pirate Party.
""Es gibt keinerlei Möglichkeit, einen Trojaner zu installieren, der den rechtlichen Erfordernissen entspricht." Ein Richter könne nie nachweisen, ob Beweismittel auf Computern eines Überwachten nachträglich verändert wurden."
In English:
"There is no possible way to install a trojan that satisfies the legal requirements*. A judge can never prove whether evidence on the computer of a person who has been monitored has been altered after the fact or not."
(*referring to an earlier judgement by the constitutional court that spying programs can only be used to record VOIP conversations and email exchanges and strictly nothing else)
Source: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/streit-um-staatstrojaner-spaehprogramm-entzweit-schwarz-gelb-1.1160102-2
1000mb or not you might need to grow a thicker skin if you want to post on discussion boards. I am an Aussie, I was just pointing out that even with the NBN we still pay a lot for what we get.
In Germany we're getting 100Mbit down 6mbit up and truly unlimited bandwidth on fibre for 20 Euro a month. That's a normal residential connection with Kabel Deutschland.
The NBN is an improvement but Australia is still a rip-off for internet connections.
Australia too, before the GFC our net government debt was around zero after years of consistent surpluses. The government plans a surplus again next year too.
Are you sure? That patent was issue in 1980, meaning it's long since expired.
Software patents should be illegal but this particular one is long gone.
SL is based on, and closely tracks, Redhat's Enterprise Linux product, which has been designed to offer stability and very long support periods (at least 7 years after release I think). That's what makes it suitable for servers, whereas most other* Linux distro's have shorter release and support cycles (12-18 months) and tend to use more recent versions of software, which makes them arguably more unstable.
* Note there are other 'enterprise ready' long-support cycle distros such as Debian Stable, or Suse Linux Enterprise.
Have you used KDE recently? It has both features - a pause button and file transfers are done as a queue. You just click on the little notification area icon that comes up. This is on KDE 4.6 at least.
/dev/sda1 is not a mount point. A mount point is something like /media/BACKUPHD, which is what my backup USB drive shows up as when I plug it into my Linux computer, or /media/VIDEOHD which is what the USB drive with my movies and TV shows on it appears as. This system does make a lot more sense and is much more intuitive to a user than random alphabetical drive letters.
It may not be the most important issue in the usability world but it is something where the Unix world is ahead of Windows.
Exactly, with that and the comments about making a 'GNOME OS' they have some huge problems with the 're-invent the wheel' and 'not invented here' syndromes.
There are already quite capable GTK-based programs that manage photos, music, downloads and whatever else you can think of. They've been in development for years and years, often with real money (ie. paid developers) behind them at various times. It sounds like they want to create a perfect little GNOME3 world where all the apps are specifically designed for GNOME3 and follow the GNOME3 developers' user interface guidelines to the letter. They're free to try of course but it's not going to work, and even if it does it'd be pointless duplication of what we already have.
Even worse is the comment about suspend in Linux. Huge amounts of effort and resources (both paid and not) have gone into the Linux kernel and the major 'plumbing' components such as X, open-source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA, D-Bus, udev and so on to get things running as smoothly as they do today on different hardware. Starting off with a GNOME OS (even if it uses the base Linux kernel) is not going to somehow magically require less effort to get everything running smoothly, even in the extremely unlikely event that gets enough traction and developers to get off the ground.
I'm a KDE user and this confirms what I've always thought about GNOME's politics - they are focused on creating their own little world and really not that interested in interoperability.
Konqueror is 'fixed' in that it's no longer the file manager - Dolphin is, and it's a much cleaner implementation of the idea of a 'file manager'. As for a browser every distro uses Firefox as default and you can install Chrome or Opera if you don't like that.
(Konqueror is still there and still maintained if you want to use it as file manager or web browser)
Opensuse, they aim to support KDE and GNOME equally and don't do it as an afterthought or side project (*cough* *cough* Linux Mint, Kubuntu).
Me too. I was as annoyed as anyone by KDE 4.0-4.2 and the way distro's switched to it when it was only beta (perhaps even alpha) quality. But since 4.3 or 4.4 it's got much better, and the current KDE 4.6 on Opensuse is like night and day compared to 4.0.
It's well integrated, just like it was on 4.6, 4.5, 4.4 and so on.
What exactly is wrong with it? Maybe it's a distro thing because I've been using Opensuse for the past 2 or 3 years and GTK apps have always looked good out of the box.
The BBC iPlayer is available on Linux, DRM support and all. Just because the OS is open source doesn't mean you can't write closed-source software on it, including software that implements DRM.
And I prefer to install only the programs I want to use. I hear of people who have issues with not keeping everything patched or turning off unwanted services. Possibly FUD but I'm not a Linux guy.
This is either FUD or you're talking about Windows. With Windows every application needs to run it's own update service in the background or annoy the user for updates when they start the program. The difference couldn't be more stark with Linux where the system update handles all the programs you've installed (since ordinary users are installing things from their distro's packages, not compiling .tar.gz files these days).
As for turning off services I just go into the GUI in the 'control panel' and click 'enable' or 'disable' - what's so difficult about that.
This is only because of the EU regulations though. And it only applies inside the EU, go outside with a German sim card and you'll be charged eye watering amounts.
I was charged over 40 euro for downloading 2mb of data un the Ukraine last month on my German o2 contract.
Yes unfortunately that's par for the course with the Daily Mail, the UK's answer to Fox News.
If you search around their website in amongst the horseshit about celebrities and completely made-up articles about crazy new EU 'laws' you'd also find their ongoing effort to divide all inanimate objects in the world (especially foods) into those that either cause cancer or cure it.
I'll believe in miracle new treatments when there's a more credible source article.
On the contrary when I want to fly somewhere I want to put the origin, destination, dates (and even times of day if that's important for the trip) into a website and get a list of all the options sorted by price. I can then pick the cheapest one that's not at ridiculous times (eg. 6am flight from London Stanstead or something equally awful).
That's how it works in Europe at the moment with sites like expedia, opodo, skyscanner etc. and it's a godsend, it's also one of the strongest drivers of real competition between the airlines. The alternative, which American Airlines is hoping other airlines will also adopt, is that you must go to each separate carriers website and enter those details manually.
Of course no one will do this for the 10-30 airline options that exist between most European destinations so you'll get people going with whatever airline they have some crappy royalty program with or have flown with before.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/fast_track/9369897.stm
Even in 2011 their service is fairly shoddy. We had major problems with Xen and despite lots of back and forth, and prompting them after they seemed to 'forget' our tickets a few times it turned out they couldn't help. And this is with a few dozen machines on commercial support contracts with them.
Surprisingly, the Novell SLES support people were very responsive. And provided extremely detailed answers that covered all the possibilities of what we were trying to do. Consequently the Xen servers are now going to be SLES.
June 2011 Linux Kernel 3.0 released to continue the recent development work that has enabled Linux to become seriously popular and widespread in mobile devices and servers, while vastly improved driver support has made it's use on laptops and desktops viable for many.
Where's the problem with that milestone?
No, the 'odd-number means a development release' scheme was dropped many years ago. All the 2.6 kernels from 2.6.0 onwards are considered 'stable' releases, as will all the 3.X ones.