Not damages awarded by a court, not even to settle a pending suit - To avoid a potential lawsuit!
If that doesn't meet the textbook definition of extortion, I don't know what would.
If RIAA came by with all the proof they needed to get a court case through and they'd be asking for $30M, it might really be worth it if their case would likely result in a higher compensation. Can't see anything wrong with the victim (as defined by law) directly asking for compensation. In fact I see it as a better option than going through the huge court process, employing loads of lawyers and wasting many hours of MetaMachine Inc. workers' time supplying the lawyers with all the details.
Apart from the business side, it's more humane for the workers too.
She succeeded in that, but to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that would be legal and wouldn't cause major heat from the media
So you're saying she was just unlucky that her methods were illegal?
I made a decision to keep low on the speculating part. Dunn could have just told the private investigation company to find out who was the leaker. Or she could have given the investigation company confidential information about all board members, say "find out who of these crooks it was, by any means necessary let the law be no limit". Or anything in between or totally different.
Not only that, but for you and me, that means at least a significant fine (like 3-4 years worth of salary) and a trip to the slammer. But, if you are rich and powerful enough, it just means you get to relinquish a title. Those are the fucking problems. Not that she had the misfortune to choose illegal methods. Nitwit.
(Above bold emphasis is mine.) Somebody has worked their way to a position where they earn a lot of money and have influence over certain things. I don't know whether you did just misinterpret what I was trying to communicate in my post or do you actually feel that because there has been media coverage on something probably illegal happening, the person getting the most attention should be grilled especially as she earns more a year than most of us in a lifetime. The bolded part above would suggest the latter -- we haven't seen nearly all of the case yet, no decisions on whether charges will be raised or not have been made, and still I hear implications of... what? That Dunn can afford to buy the court? That the law is different to people who Have More?
In case it was the misinterpretation, with "to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that" I mean "she did a decision which was bad for her" (mind you, "misfortune" can mean both "bad luck" or "bad thing"). I wanted to choose my wording to reflect that I don't know whether she tried other methods first but failed and "had" to choose an unethical method like this or did she want to walk straight over the rights of others to eg. display ultimate power.
In any case, if she really was repeatedly requested by the board members to solve the situation, not being able to do so could have been even worse results for her. But it's important for us to realize that we can only speculate. Taking strong opinions based on speculations based on what has been written in media after CNET began its campaign against HP and Dunn would be rather short-sighted of us.
Hope I answered your questions here. If I still left something unclear, just ask and I'll see if I can clarify.
Many in here seem to be dedicated to mocking Patricia Dunn using variously insulting names of her. It might be justified or not, but many replies display the posters seeing only one side of the story, and only with a single interpretation: Private investigation company impersonated HP board members et al to gain their private information from AT&T, the investigation was requested by Dunn, so she is evil.
Having spent a few hours reading all about the case from CNET News.com, I try to explain to you the whole story in a bit more detail but leaving out everything non-critical. I start with quoting the article HP chairman: Use of pretexting 'embarrassing', bold emphasis mine:
"This is a board who has suffered for a long period of time from egregious breaches of standards of business conduct. The board asked me to do something about it," she said. "Many directors thought the top priority was to figure out how to plug the leaks. We couldn't function as a board with these leaks continuing. This was not my spying on the board."
The leaking also has hurt HP's image, she said.
I don't doubt any of the claims above. Companies depend on their ability to do great business before everyone else is doing the same, so everyone involved in upper-level management understands that keeping certain things secret is critical to the company. So does every major shareholder, ie. the people who actually own the company.
Now if leaking one single time certain small details about the company could have negative impact, that's small compared to what HP has faced. Like the above citation shows, there had been repetitive leaks for a while already, and they weren't small ones either: HP outlines long-term strategy.
When a company cannot decide when to publish this kind of information, it is in serious trouble. HP wasn't ready to publish any of this yet, but someone sitting in HP board of directors made it all public ahead of time. Maybe some parts were never intended for anyone outside the board to know. Read the article to get a view on what the press got to publish.
The leaks were a serious problem for HP, so I bet Patricia Dunn as the chairman of the board was put under a lot of pressure to solve the case. She succeeded in that, but to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that would be legal and wouldn't cause major heat from the media (CNN has been keeping the flame up a big time, probably wanting a payback for Reporter's records accessed in HP probe).
In the process board member Tom Perkins resigned, and stated afterwards that "I did not resign from the board for frivolous reasons, but because HP was standing into dangerous waters--waters hazardous with both illegal and unconscionable governance practices--and because my advice was being ignored". CNET's articles try to draw a picture of him having resigned simply because he suspected immoral and/or illegal methods to have been used in the probe, but somebody replying in a previous Slashdot story on the subject claimed that he got only mad because it was among his duties to solve the whole leaking case and Dunn had thus stepped on his toes. Haven't seen a link to any data backing that up though so I wouldn't encourage making any judgments yet.
HP's stock, meanwhile, remained immune to the spying scandal. It continued a steady climb that began not long after the company revealed the questionable tactics of its leak investigation in a regulatory filing last week.
Whether or not us non-experts in corporate management decide to take an opinion or anot
Here's the Wikipedia link for those wondering what RSI stands for:
Repetitive strain injury, also called repetitive stress injury or typing injury, is an occupational overuse syndrome affecting muscles, tendons and nerves in the arms and upper back. It occurs when muscles in these areas are kept tense for very long periods of time, due to poor posture and/or repetitive motions.
It is most common among assembly line and computer workers. Good posture and ergonomic working conditions can help prevent or halt the progress of the disorder; stretches, strengthening exercises and massages can help heal existing disorders.
I checked a few Drupal-based sites and they all seemed to use text/html as their content-type so it seems to be the default in Drupal. AFAIK Sending XHTML as text/html is harmful, so could someone please clarify why is a project as big as Drupal using it?
+ Easy linking. Links can be shared anywhere: in web pages, IRC, email. The single 100-200 character link contains everything that is needed to download the file.
+ Supports usage with and without a server (in eMule, ed2k server and serverless Kademlia)
- If you run a server, you can't make it private
- If you run a server, you cannot control what is shared there
+ Server (tracker) admin can have total control of what is shared choosing a directory where he uploads allowed torrents
+ A single.torrent file can contain instructions on how to download multiple files
- No serverless mode
- No searching
- To share download instructions for a file(set), you have to be able to transfer a.torrent file, a plaintext link isn't enough
This has been the situation for a while. In ed2k nothing big has changed for a year. DC++ (incl. Reverse Connect) is evolving, but magnet (TTH) linking has been the only major change in years. When DC++ gets its support for ADC complete, the evolution of Direct Connect is predicted to get a major boost.
What trackerless BitTorrent does is to make every client a small tracker. So it doesn't just enable searching and serverless usage, it also makes sharing illegal files easier (more than it does for legal). Previously, to share content, you had to find a tracker that allows posting.torrents. To share copyrighted content, you also had to find a tracker that didn't care about legal aspects. So sharing legal and illegal content is now equally easy, while it previously was (at least in theory) a little bit easier to share legal content.
Overall, the changes of trackerless BitTorrent would still make it the best available p2p techonology. For certain special cases, Direct Connect could be better, and both DC and ed2k support easier linking than BT, but even that can change in the future: BT could implement a meta-p2p engine, so that you could share plaintext links that make your client download the right.torrent file and add it to your queue. This would make BT superior to eMule in every aspect.
Why is the already released stable kernel line getting new features? Why isn't it so that once announced stable kernel lines get feature-frozen and the x.x.xx updates would only correct problems, never introduce new features.
Isn't that the whole purpose of having separate unstable and stable lines? Each stable standing for certain features, the subnumber telling how many fixes have been applied, and the newest unstable being the ground where new features are introduced and tested before releasing them in the next stable line.
[Torvalds] ranted against Tridgell, but that's misplaced, I think. Torvalds isn't fully into the "Free Software" philosophy (despite his use of the GPL for Linux), and so doesn't see any value in Tridgell's work and calls it "evil."
[Tridgell] didn't write a "better SCM than BK". He didn't even try - it wasn't his goal. He just wanted to see what the protocols and data was, without actually producing any replacement for the (inevitable) problems he caused and knew about.
He didn't create something new and impressive. He just tore down something new (and impressive) because he could, and rather than helping others, he screwed people over. And you expect me to _respect_ that kind of behaviour?
Everyone having any feelings about this Linux SCM change topic, I urge you to hold your comments until you've read Linus's explanation of his feelings and actions and also his other replies in the thread, like this, this, this and this. It's really worth the little time it takes, for you'll find detailed explanations on what made BitKeeper so great, what's Linus's opinion of reverse engineering, why isn't he pissed off at BitMover, Inc. and much more.
CA wants Linus and Andrew to spend all of their time working on "Enterprise" features and none of it on things like improving Linux's real-time performance and integrating drivers for non-server hardware. I think that they're being selfish and unreasonable...
It's a plain and simple fact that Linux kernel is really insecure. After you install any Linux with whatever Grsec configurations, if the server is running common web serving software and having several user accounts, I can make a bet that inside 6 months one or more critical security exploits have been found that can be used against your system.
I do agree that the underlying issue is a human issue one, but not solely. A huge part of the issue is that too many users still agree that Linux is secure enough for everyone. Because of this mass, developers aren't interested enough to make Linux kernel not blush when its security is compared to different BSD kernels.
CA's point seems valid to me: Gaming features of Linux kernel are pretty good, but security is lacking even when Grsec is applied with excellent settings. But the way FOSS community is reacting here is pretty odd. CA is being accused of being greedy or talking total BS. But the whole development of FOSS software lags behind when every Linux user from a teenage gamer or a corporate admin has to follow every day Linux kernel news and be ready to patch and reboot every Linux-running machine he runs. Many aren't willing to put up with this at all and stick to Windows to avoid the hassle.
Big companies and single users both shouldn't have to spend their time that way. Everyone deserves a free open souce operating system that you can rely on. That's the whole idea of GNU. Anyone who feels he hasn't done enough good to deserve a FOSOS, go ahead and donate to a project you appreciate. You can donate money, code, feedback or just spread the word.
No. If that were true, then they would have seen far greater adoption rates. PostgreSQL has a history of difficult installations
I'll second that. Last autumn I tried to switch my phpBB-centric sites from MySQL 4.0 to PostgreSQL 7.4. After a week's efforts to get my databases converted, the results were these:
I can tell anyone is lying who says getting PostgreSQL up and running for the first time is not harder than MySQL.
I had found tons of URLs that used to contain tools designed for the purpose.
I had found several Perl-tools that I wasn't able to get to produce anything more useful than several error messages. Several other tools I found that were written C or other languages were as lucky...
...except one simple PHP script. After some modifying and changing the allowed memory usage in php.ini to about 20-fold.
And finally, that when I did things in things in the order of 1) installing phpBB normally, 2) deleting the contents of the created tables with phpPgAdmin and 3) importing the newly converted ex-mysqldump which had to be created by phpBB's backup database option without the table structure, I could have my sites working as read-only archives.
So, while I knew the best solution for my current and future database needs (in terms of license and features) was PostgreSQL, I wasn't able to find a way to move my sites from MySQL to PostgreSQL without sacrificing all the messages and user accounts in my forums.
Seems that the home page of mysql2psql at least has been updated since I last checked, so it could finally do what it is supposed to. It sure should if switchers from MySQL to PostgreSQL were considered welcome.
Microsoft sure got it right: Most of all things from software, people want features, everything else can be added afterwards. The parent sure did mention "Solaris has some cool features" when comparing to Linuces, and "Linux is easier to get up and running". Not a single word like security or stability, which really aren't things Linux could be proud of having. Yes, Linux is more secure than some alternatives, I guess, but comparing root exploits in Linuces and Solaris, BSDs, HP-UX and so on doesn't really display results nice for Linux enthusiasts.
That being said, I can carry out my responsibility as a basic human being and go on ranting about features and ease of use: The last time I checked, Solaris' tar couldn't handle j and z switches like GNU tar did; Solaris' ps didn't display nicely user's own processes with ps x but with a clumsier ps -u username; and both of these commands required dash in front of the switches.
So Linuces give me ease of use through GNU utils, and for what I've heard Solaris gives easy administratibility and excellent scalability. As I don't want to patch any kernels annually, but neither do I want my users to go on whining about how stuff works the wrong (hard) way around, the best option available seems to be to stick with BSDs.
By the way, does anyone have coverage on how Macs do as servers compared to Linuces / Solaris / (other) BSDs? Would it be worth the cost to buy a Power Mac and a Mac OS X license for the next server instead of sticking with x86 and *BSD? Why?
It's not SlashDot, it's not FireFox, it's not MicroSoft.. when do people start getting these right? Is it only us trolls who know that size does matter?
Windows users who have problems with Mozilla software (Firefox, Thunderbird or Suite) being too slow or using too much memory and CPU, check out the Moox optimized builds.
One of my friends reported having constantly about 100 MB more free memory after switching to Moox M2 in his Athlon XP. A bit of a warning though: I tried to install original 1.0.1 over Moox M2 1.0, and it now crashes every time I press enter in the URL bar. Now typing in Internet Explorer, I'm anxiously waiting for Moox optimized 1.0.1 builds to come out and solve the situation.
So does this Royal Linux OS need all the forecoming kernel patches pre-applied? I'd hate to have to recompile the kernel to be safe enough to watch the DVD / Blu-ray / whatever I just bought without random goatse popups appearing in the middle of the movie.
I might have missed something here but I really don't understand all the fuzz about Linux nowadays. I thought I did back in the days when I had no first hand experience about any Unix variants. After I got familiar with GNU/Linux I realized how messy it was, having to be all the time ready to build a new kernel and reboot. Repeat for every single machine. Shame on the admin that dared to go for a vacation. Anyone who has heard about Murphy must realize those are the most likely days for a brand new vulnerability to be released.
As I sought for alternative I heard that BSDs can do the same things as GNU/Linuxes but without all the hassle. Since no media had ever mentioned a word about them, I though they were only for 24 / 7 hackers and not have the least bit of user-friendliness. But as soon as I heard that FreeBSD is easier to install than Gentoo I gave it a try.
Now, a year later, security hasn't been a reason for even a single boot for the server I set up. This is the first BSD server I've installed and I succeeded in first try. Meanwhile I hear all the time my fellow Linux admins having to suppress their normal use while compiling a new kernel and swearing a lot when having to do this at short notice, which does happen many times a year. Quite a lot of them have now switched to some BSD or are looking forward to switching.
For what I've heard from NetBSD admins, it's quite about the same as FreeBSD but without a menu-based installer and a better alternative for ports, pkgsrc. Luckily pkgsrc is a multi-platform software, being available as source but also as pre-built binaries for many BSD and GNU/Linux distros, including FreeBSD, Debian, OpenBSD, Slackware, Solaris, Darwin and so on.
Since I've found ports being sometimes a bit clumsy and I don't like its principle of "all software being updated as soon as possible" as much as pkgsrc's "software being updated after testing giving updates for many programs at a time", my next Unix variant of choice could be NetBSD or FreeBSD with pkgsrc installed instead of ports.
The big question is, what better do GNU/Linuxes really offer than BSDs? And which of these things could have already been achieved with a larger user and developer base, ie. if all the hype wasn't just about Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
If RIAA came by with all the proof they needed to get a court case through and they'd be asking for $30M, it might really be worth it if their case would likely result in a higher compensation. Can't see anything wrong with the victim (as defined by law) directly asking for compensation. In fact I see it as a better option than going through the huge court process, employing loads of lawyers and wasting many hours of MetaMachine Inc. workers' time supplying the lawyers with all the details.
Apart from the business side, it's more humane for the workers too.
If they haven't yet collected the evidence needed to get their case through in court, then nothing.
I made a decision to keep low on the speculating part. Dunn could have just told the private investigation company to find out who was the leaker. Or she could have given the investigation company confidential information about all board members, say "find out who of these crooks it was, by any means necessary let the law be no limit". Or anything in between or totally different.
(Above bold emphasis is mine.) Somebody has worked their way to a position where they earn a lot of money and have influence over certain things. I don't know whether you did just misinterpret what I was trying to communicate in my post or do you actually feel that because there has been media coverage on something probably illegal happening, the person getting the most attention should be grilled especially as she earns more a year than most of us in a lifetime. The bolded part above would suggest the latter -- we haven't seen nearly all of the case yet, no decisions on whether charges will be raised or not have been made, and still I hear implications of... what? That Dunn can afford to buy the court? That the law is different to people who Have More?
In case it was the misinterpretation, with "to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that" I mean "she did a decision which was bad for her" (mind you, "misfortune" can mean both "bad luck" or "bad thing"). I wanted to choose my wording to reflect that I don't know whether she tried other methods first but failed and "had" to choose an unethical method like this or did she want to walk straight over the rights of others to eg. display ultimate power.
In any case, if she really was repeatedly requested by the board members to solve the situation, not being able to do so could have been even worse results for her. But it's important for us to realize that we can only speculate. Taking strong opinions based on speculations based on what has been written in media after CNET began its campaign against HP and Dunn would be rather short-sighted of us.
Hope I answered your questions here. If I still left something unclear, just ask and I'll see if I can clarify.
Many in here seem to be dedicated to mocking Patricia Dunn using variously insulting names of her. It might be justified or not, but many replies display the posters seeing only one side of the story, and only with a single interpretation: Private investigation company impersonated HP board members et al to gain their private information from AT&T, the investigation was requested by Dunn, so she is evil.
Having spent a few hours reading all about the case from CNET News.com, I try to explain to you the whole story in a bit more detail but leaving out everything non-critical. I start with quoting the article HP chairman: Use of pretexting 'embarrassing', bold emphasis mine:
I don't doubt any of the claims above. Companies depend on their ability to do great business before everyone else is doing the same, so everyone involved in upper-level management understands that keeping certain things secret is critical to the company. So does every major shareholder, ie. the people who actually own the company.
Now if leaking one single time certain small details about the company could have negative impact, that's small compared to what HP has faced. Like the above citation shows, there had been repetitive leaks for a while already, and they weren't small ones either: HP outlines long-term strategy.
When a company cannot decide when to publish this kind of information, it is in serious trouble. HP wasn't ready to publish any of this yet, but someone sitting in HP board of directors made it all public ahead of time. Maybe some parts were never intended for anyone outside the board to know. Read the article to get a view on what the press got to publish.
The leaks were a serious problem for HP, so I bet Patricia Dunn as the chairman of the board was put under a lot of pressure to solve the case. She succeeded in that, but to her misfortune, wasn't able to get it done in a manner that would be legal and wouldn't cause major heat from the media (CNN has been keeping the flame up a big time, probably wanting a payback for Reporter's records accessed in HP probe).
In the process board member Tom Perkins resigned, and stated afterwards that "I did not resign from the board for frivolous reasons, but because HP was standing into dangerous waters--waters hazardous with both illegal and unconscionable governance practices--and because my advice was being ignored". CNET's articles try to draw a picture of him having resigned simply because he suspected immoral and/or illegal methods to have been used in the probe, but somebody replying in a previous Slashdot story on the subject claimed that he got only mad because it was among his duties to solve the whole leaking case and Dunn had thus stepped on his toes. Haven't seen a link to any data backing that up though so I wouldn't encourage making any judgments yet.
Whether or not us non-experts in corporate management decide to take an opinion or anot
Here's the Wikipedia link for those wondering what RSI stands for:
Parrots 2 - 0 Men
I checked a few Drupal-based sites and they all seemed to use text/html as their content-type so it seems to be the default in Drupal. AFAIK Sending XHTML as text/html is harmful, so could someone please clarify why is a project as big as Drupal using it?
There are quite a lot of differences in the three major P2P technologies. Here I try to cover the most important of each:
ed2k (eMule)
Direct Connect (DC++, Reverse Connect)
BitTorrent (Azureus, BitComet)
This has been the situation for a while. In ed2k nothing big has changed for a year. DC++ (incl. Reverse Connect) is evolving, but magnet (TTH) linking has been the only major change in years. When DC++ gets its support for ADC complete, the evolution of Direct Connect is predicted to get a major boost.
What trackerless BitTorrent does is to make every client a small tracker. So it doesn't just enable searching and serverless usage, it also makes sharing illegal files easier (more than it does for legal). Previously, to share content, you had to find a tracker that allows posting .torrents. To share copyrighted content, you also had to find a tracker that didn't care about legal aspects. So sharing legal and illegal content is now equally easy, while it previously was (at least in theory) a little bit easier to share legal content.
Overall, the changes of trackerless BitTorrent would still make it the best available p2p techonology. For certain special cases, Direct Connect could be better, and both DC and ed2k support easier linking than BT, but even that can change in the future: BT could implement a meta-p2p engine, so that you could share plaintext links that make your client download the right .torrent file and add it to your queue. This would make BT superior to eMule in every aspect.
Why is the already released stable kernel line getting new features? Why isn't it so that once announced stable kernel lines get feature-frozen and the x.x.xx updates would only correct problems, never introduce new features.
Isn't that the whole purpose of having separate unstable and stable lines? Each stable standing for certain features, the subnumber telling how many fixes have been applied, and the newest unstable being the ground where new features are introduced and tested before releasing them in the next stable line.
I think you are mistaken here. Please read Linus's own words on the subject before judging him. A quote:
Everyone having any feelings about this Linux SCM change topic, I urge you to hold your comments until you've read Linus's explanation of his feelings and actions and also his other replies in the thread, like this, this, this and this. It's really worth the little time it takes, for you'll find detailed explanations on what made BitKeeper so great, what's Linus's opinion of reverse engineering, why isn't he pissed off at BitMover, Inc. and much more.
CA wants Linus and Andrew to spend all of their time working on "Enterprise" features and none of it on things like improving Linux's real-time performance and integrating drivers for non-server hardware. I think that they're being selfish and unreasonable...
It's a plain and simple fact that Linux kernel is really insecure. After you install any Linux with whatever Grsec configurations, if the server is running common web serving software and having several user accounts, I can make a bet that inside 6 months one or more critical security exploits have been found that can be used against your system.
I do agree that the underlying issue is a human issue one, but not solely. A huge part of the issue is that too many users still agree that Linux is secure enough for everyone. Because of this mass, developers aren't interested enough to make Linux kernel not blush when its security is compared to different BSD kernels.
CA's point seems valid to me: Gaming features of Linux kernel are pretty good, but security is lacking even when Grsec is applied with excellent settings. But the way FOSS community is reacting here is pretty odd. CA is being accused of being greedy or talking total BS. But the whole development of FOSS software lags behind when every Linux user from a teenage gamer or a corporate admin has to follow every day Linux kernel news and be ready to patch and reboot every Linux-running machine he runs. Many aren't willing to put up with this at all and stick to Windows to avoid the hassle.
Big companies and single users both shouldn't have to spend their time that way. Everyone deserves a free open souce operating system that you can rely on. That's the whole idea of GNU. Anyone who feels he hasn't done enough good to deserve a FOSOS, go ahead and donate to a project you appreciate. You can donate money, code, feedback or just spread the word.
I'll second that. Last autumn I tried to switch my phpBB-centric sites from MySQL 4.0 to PostgreSQL 7.4. After a week's efforts to get my databases converted, the results were these:
So, while I knew the best solution for my current and future database needs (in terms of license and features) was PostgreSQL, I wasn't able to find a way to move my sites from MySQL to PostgreSQL without sacrificing all the messages and user accounts in my forums.
Seems that the home page of mysql2psql at least has been updated since I last checked, so it could finally do what it is supposed to. It sure should if switchers from MySQL to PostgreSQL were considered welcome.
Microsoft sure got it right: Most of all things from software, people want features, everything else can be added afterwards. The parent sure did mention "Solaris has some cool features" when comparing to Linuces, and "Linux is easier to get up and running". Not a single word like security or stability, which really aren't things Linux could be proud of having. Yes, Linux is more secure than some alternatives, I guess, but comparing root exploits in Linuces and Solaris, BSDs, HP-UX and so on doesn't really display results nice for Linux enthusiasts.
That being said, I can carry out my responsibility as a basic human being and go on ranting about features and ease of use: The last time I checked, Solaris' tar couldn't handle j and z switches like GNU tar did; Solaris' ps didn't display nicely user's own processes with ps x but with a clumsier ps -u username; and both of these commands required dash in front of the switches.
So Linuces give me ease of use through GNU utils, and for what I've heard Solaris gives easy administratibility and excellent scalability. As I don't want to patch any kernels annually, but neither do I want my users to go on whining about how stuff works the wrong (hard) way around, the best option available seems to be to stick with BSDs.
By the way, does anyone have coverage on how Macs do as servers compared to Linuces / Solaris / (other) BSDs? Would it be worth the cost to buy a Power Mac and a Mac OS X license for the next server instead of sticking with x86 and *BSD? Why?
It's not SlashDot, it's not FireFox, it's not MicroSoft.. when do people start getting these right? Is it only us trolls who know that size does matter?
Windows users who have problems with Mozilla software (Firefox, Thunderbird or Suite) being too slow or using too much memory and CPU, check out the Moox optimized builds.
One of my friends reported having constantly about 100 MB more free memory after switching to Moox M2 in his Athlon XP. A bit of a warning though: I tried to install original 1.0.1 over Moox M2 1.0, and it now crashes every time I press enter in the URL bar. Now typing in Internet Explorer, I'm anxiously waiting for Moox optimized 1.0.1 builds to come out and solve the situation.
How about microsoft.co.uk?
So does this Royal Linux OS need all the forecoming kernel patches pre-applied? I'd hate to have to recompile the kernel to be safe enough to watch the DVD / Blu-ray / whatever I just bought without random goatse popups appearing in the middle of the movie.
I might have missed something here but I really don't understand all the fuzz about Linux nowadays. I thought I did back in the days when I had no first hand experience about any Unix variants. After I got familiar with GNU/Linux I realized how messy it was, having to be all the time ready to build a new kernel and reboot. Repeat for every single machine. Shame on the admin that dared to go for a vacation. Anyone who has heard about Murphy must realize those are the most likely days for a brand new vulnerability to be released.
As I sought for alternative I heard that BSDs can do the same things as GNU/Linuxes but without all the hassle. Since no media had ever mentioned a word about them, I though they were only for 24 / 7 hackers and not have the least bit of user-friendliness. But as soon as I heard that FreeBSD is easier to install than Gentoo I gave it a try.
Now, a year later, security hasn't been a reason for even a single boot for the server I set up. This is the first BSD server I've installed and I succeeded in first try. Meanwhile I hear all the time my fellow Linux admins having to suppress their normal use while compiling a new kernel and swearing a lot when having to do this at short notice, which does happen many times a year. Quite a lot of them have now switched to some BSD or are looking forward to switching.
For what I've heard from NetBSD admins, it's quite about the same as FreeBSD but without a menu-based installer and a better alternative for ports, pkgsrc. Luckily pkgsrc is a multi-platform software, being available as source but also as pre-built binaries for many BSD and GNU/Linux distros, including FreeBSD, Debian, OpenBSD, Slackware, Solaris, Darwin and so on.
Since I've found ports being sometimes a bit clumsy and I don't like its principle of "all software being updated as soon as possible" as much as pkgsrc's "software being updated after testing giving updates for many programs at a time", my next Unix variant of choice could be NetBSD or FreeBSD with pkgsrc installed instead of ports.
The big question is, what better do GNU/Linuxes really offer than BSDs? And which of these things could have already been achieved with a larger user and developer base, ie. if all the hype wasn't just about Linux?