I knew somebody would bring up greylisting.:) During the business day[1], I work for a company that produces several widely-used anti-spam appliances and a service-based filter as well. We see about 2,000 networks a week, and get a pretty good feel for spam trends and countermeasure effectiveness. I can say with all honesty that in my experiences, greylisting hurts more than it helps for most organizations.
Basically, greylisting is putting an email transaction on hold to see if the sender will retry. The idea is that if the sender is illigitimate, they won't bother resending. However, spammers have been onto this method for as long as it's existed, much moreso lately. All they have to do is take greylisted hosts and move them to the end of their script for later processing. The second time around, the spam gets through anyway. Even with its meager benefits, most organizations want email to come through as quickly as possible, and greylisting delays email by its very nature. It's also much less effective than existing technology that won't hinder most legitimate mail like DNSBL and/or SPF, spamwords+OCR (for image spam), and blocking on unknown recipients.
To summate, if greylisting makes you happy, then don't let me dissuade you from using it. it does indeed stop some spam. But please don't give the false impression that it's a magic bullet; most of the complaints we receive are from clients who've enabled greylisting and can't figure out why their mail is delayed.
[1] I am also a consultant to another firm who hosts manged email with spam filtering. Due to the complaints above, we have also disabled greylisting there. It was only effective at stopping about 5% of spam reliably, but a delay is put on all mail that isn't otherwise whitelisted. There are plenty of other methods which are both more effective and don't slow down the mailflow or tie up much resources on the MTA.
Windows is just as stable if you are a competant admin these days, and don't use CheapAss(R) hardware The entire underlying principles behind the UNIX design lend themselves much better to a flexible, highly-available multiuser environment. I say this as a sysadmin who's done my time with Windows as a server platform and also multiple variants of UNIX, primarily Linux. With all due respect, here's why you're wrong. For the sake of argument, let's for a moment choose to ignore all the other factors such as performance, scalability, memory handling, durability, security and flexibility and instead simply measure "stability" by the most simple metric possible: uptime. If you have an uptime any greater than 30 days on a Windows server, it's probably because the box hasn't been patched, or because it's been patched but not rebooted (which is fundamentally the same thing). In either case, the OS is in a less than optimal state, either due to outstanding bugs or vulnerabilities, or both. So while it's technically possible to have a high uptime on Windows, it's not best practice by a mile. On a UNIX system like Linux, the updates are performed live with no reboot necessary. The clients already connected to a running service which is updated out from under them don't even realize the server's been updated, everything just works.
More often than not, the UNIX-based servers I've managed average about 10x higher uptime, literally. Before you say it, it's not from lack of Windows skill on my part, nor that of any of the other admins I work with. First there's updates... most require a reboot to become fully active. And then there's those times the servers slow down inexplicably and a reboot seems to be only cure. Other times a minor configuration change requires a reboot to go into effect, and there's not a lot one can do about that either. I haven't even mentioned availability under stress, which is a factor. It's just not as cut & dry as many make it out to be. And come now, Windows has a registry. It's a spaghetti tangle of cryptic and archaic settings, many of which are purposefully obfuscated, and is prone to corruption. UNIX systems use flat config files, usually in plain old English. These are two very different platforms, nevermind the advertising campaigns.
Agreed. While I recognise and appreciate the humor in your comment, this is the main reason I use Debian on the desktop rather than OS X -- I multitask heavily. A Linux kernel with a Desktop preemption model and 1000Hz Timer frequency is a Godsend for those who push their PC's a tad too hard on a regular basis. I would like to see a simplified version of the scheduler, but all said CFS isn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be.
...that's essentially what the presenter is saying. The 'chroot' style jail is essentially a fake system root designed for development purposes, so you can have a little fake clean-room environment in which to build. Later, this concept was adapted for security purposes -- hence systrace, sysjail... What he's suggesting is that this userland approach is easily circumvented, and the best approach would be to use a mandatory access control approach at the kernel level, ala SELinux. To me, it's not so much that these programs are vulnerable as they are ineffective as security tools. I'm glad this is getting some publicity and opening a few eyes. Not to say that SELinux is the do-all end-all be-all of security, rather that false security is sometimes worse than no security.
DSLExtreme resells lines from both Verizon and ATT/SBC. They are relatively small, but do offer 24/7 TS and most importantly, have no bandwidth caps. I'm actually hosting a web server and SSH/SFTP from my home DSLExtreme account right now... and from a dynamic IP no less (they give you long leases). No throttling, no threats, and so far, no layer-7 filtering either.
Even free speech involves responsibilities.
Why is the parent modded flamebait? This seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constructors of the US Constitution drafted the first amendment, I'm sure that yelling "fire!" maliciously in a crowded public building wasn't what they had in mind. Instead, it's a specific type of freedom which has a few limitations. However, these limitations are important to preserve the function and spirit of said rights. The same goes for the GPL.
By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying effectively, "you can have my code for free, and even change whatever you want, provided you don't restrict anyone else from doing the same." The BSD license allows the author to say, "use whatever you like, and you can close up my source code and not share with anybody if you want to." If that license is more attractive to you, than by all means, release your code under the BSD license instead of GPL. But like me, many people want the guarantee of the continuing freedom of the code they release. For those of us who feel that way, the GPL is exactly the right license.
Debian Sid also lacks a lot of preconfiguration that Ubuntu has. Have you ever chosen to run the expert installation routine?
...the last time I tried Ubuntu it indeed had more breakage then Debian, however that was a few years ago. Well, I can vouch that it still exists. In fact, breakage almost seems to be a culture in Ubuntu. Maybe it's because most of their users have migrated straight from Windows to Ubuntu without experiencing any other Linux or UNIX systems at all, and they are used to things breaking when upgraded. I'm also quite displeased with the current state and functionality of *ubuntu, especially their implementation of KDE. It's slow enough to make Gnome appear comparatively fast on that platform. Same goes for the crazy sudoers thing; I'd strongly argue that sudoers will only improve security when used for select operations, not root access. Root is root, call it what you will. And when root also = user, that's a bad thing.
I don't understand why so many desktop users are flocking to Ubuntu, which seems slow to me and has had quite a few show-stoppers, especially since they are essentially repackaging Deb at this point. On a desktop, Debian "Sid" (the unstable development branch) is quite bleeding edge, yet with less breakage than a "stable" build of Gentoo after a few make-worlds, or even Ubuntu right out of the box. This makes it very attractive to me as a powerful and current desktop for general use and development. Plus, the community itself is very knowledgeable, if not a bit grizzled. What's wrong with Sid on the desktop? For most people, absolutely nothing. For others, the biggest hangup is that there's just not a lot of exposure for it, and a net-inst can be tricky for n00bs. So while that can be improved, it still seems like a walk in the park compared to installing Win95 from floppy.
On the server however, it's a totally different beast. Be it webhost or data center, most admins are understandably wary of "unstable" distros -- as they should be. Now don't misunderstand me, Debian "unstable" is a damn site more stable -- in a reliability sense -- than the so-called "enterprise-grade" product which currently holds monopoly status in the industry. But as an admin, I don't want a system who's core packages change often, even if they are changes for the best. So the release candidate, "Etch", may be reliable and basically finished, but is effectively excluded for server usage en masse because it's not officially finalized. Again, this is because if the server changes and breaks part of the app stack, there's nothing but blood and tears for you as an admin. With that in mind, I hope to see Etch released and accepted abroad, so that Debian can get out of this rut of negative public perception, and consider being one of the best Linux distros anywhere.
At a previous IT company where I worked, we had a ratio of roughly 1 admin for every 40 Linux/UNIX servers (a bit of Solaris and OpenBSD in there also). Conversely, we had a ratio of around 1 Windows admin to about 4 servers. The interesting part is each set of admins were pretty much equally busy in their duties. I can verify it's true that the *nix guys got more pay than the Windows ones. However, it was nothing like 10x more pay, more like 30%. So while I can *maybe* buy MS's claims about CTO on very small networks (or with largely incompetent IT who must rely solely on consultants), I just can't make the numbers work based on what I've seen it real life.
For reference, nowadays I work for a different company who doesn't have nearly as many servers, but is primarily a Windows shop. It's really culture shock for me to see servers go up and down so often for maintenance, be it scheduled or unscheduled. OTOH, I also do quite a bit of *nix consulting on the side. I can confirm that there's not a lot of return business in that market unless you're doing development, since the *nix servers I've setup for customers years ago are still running perfectly to this day. Eh, sucks to work yourself out of a job.;-)
...on the matter.:-) On topic, this man is clearly an egotistical idiot. Most people would just try to get it worked out with Wikipedia (get the info corrected / removed), or failing that, just shrug something like this off. However, the fact that he's suing about it (how utterly infantile) is counter-productive to his goal: to not look like an ass in front of the Internet-using world. Well, congratulations "Fuz", I had no idea who you were until today. But now that you're suing somebody over a wiki entry, now I know you're an idiot.
Saying that Linux and Macs are "still firmly in the toy department" is like saying Beethoven and Brahms can't be considered serious composers because Brittany Spears has sold more records. Or perhaps that McDonald's has the best food in the world because they've sold more burgers than anyone else? Man, you really earned that (Score:0, Troll) rating. WTG, champ.
On what, exactly, are you basing this assumption that "a significant proportion" of BitTorrent traffic is legitimate? If you are actually interested in an answer, take Blizzard for example. They use BitTorrent technology to push updates for World of Warcraft which would normally be cost and logistically prohibitive to do. Also take into account that many smaller companies/sites/individuals which host their own multimedia content (e.g. freeware games, independent films, indie music) but don't have unlimited funds/bandwidth will often make their content available by torrent. Indeed, it's about the only option that makes sense for them. And when I download my Debian Linux discs, legally under the terms of the GPL and compatible licenses, where do you think those downloads come from? Sometimes from donated space/bandwidth on corporate or university FTP servers, but more often then not, it's via BitTorrent.
Most businesses use email to almost completely replace the traditional uses of the FAX. That means that more often than not, the timeliness of the delivered mail is important to them. What you failed to mention is that greylisting will delay incoming mail anywhere from 15 minutes to days, depending on how the sender's mail server is configured.
So, greylisting is a great idea for those businesses who don't care about the timeliness of their email (as long as it gets there eventually) and for most home users as well. But for others, it's not even an option unfortunately.
but why is this on Slashdot? Because it mentions youTube? That's all it takes, now? Ever worked in an IT-related trade? If so, you'd know that IT is fueled almost exclusively by coffee. Viva la java!;-)
Back on topic though, Starbucks is not a good place to buy coffee if you actually enjoy the taste of coffee. The reason is that they burn the beans pretty badly so you can taste a bit of coffee flavor over the fru-fru. It's also not a good place to buy coffee if you care about the well-being of the 3rd-world coffee farmers in question, as Starbucks apparently only buy a minuscule portion of their product at Fair Trade pricing; look for yourself. Also, it's not a good place to buy coffee if you don't want to deal with dishonest corporations. As it turns out, the Starbucks spokesperson in the 'tube video is a bit on the dishonest side, as it's fairly well-known that Starbucks went out of their way to block the trademarks in question, verifiable by a quick search via Google .
Can you guess the name of the operating system with the best security track record is called? I'll give you a hint: it has the word "open" right in its name. Give up? It's OpenBSD, a completely open-source operating system.
"If it were Google doing this, no doubt it would be hailed as a killer app, the next big thing to come from the Mountain View wunderkinds." Speak for yourself. If Google put their name on something like that, I'd be scratching my head even harder about how badly-implemented it is. With Microsoft, crappy products simply have less shock value.
I'm definitely not a lawyer, but when you're wandering around outdoors I'm pretty sure you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Unless they figure out a way to drive those vans into our restrooms, I don't see it as a huge problem.
That being said, I think it's a gimmicky piece of crap, and honestly I can't foresee it being useful for anything Google Earth can't already do better. Yes, yes, I know, that makes me sound like a Google fanboy. But to me, it really looks like Microsoft is trying to steal mindshare much more than actually provide something worthwhile.
Personally, I think the thing that sets Linus apart from others in the open source movement is that he has quite a bit of charisma for an engineer (I hesitate to say "free" because that often implies "cheap quality" in our day & age). Others, like our good friend RMS, contribute a huge amount as hackers and in other important respects but lack the some of the trickier diplomatic skills which are required to hold things together. I agree with RMS on almost every issue, but I think it's important to have a relatively moderate personality like Linus' in a position of such high visibility, to really humanize things for everyone. Some people may disagree, but that's what I feel on the matter.
That said, congrats Linus! You're certainly my hero, and I've been living the open-source dream for years now. Also to RMS, the FSF, and the rest of the GNU, Linux and open-source community. Hats off to you all; without your hard work and ideals, there would be no Linux!
Some of these replies are so fucking ignorant that I don't even know where to begin....OK, I'm taking a deep breath here. I promise the rest will not be a rant or a troll-fest.
Some are saying things to effect of "The guy was breaking the law, so he deserved it!" What about the fact that the officers who behave as such, meting out their own justice whenever it suits them? Are they obeying the law, or are they breaking it also? Why is one any better than the other? Should I, seeing an officer behaving badly, beat the living shit out of him, or should I record him acting badly and report him to his authorities?
By the way, I have seen this argument from both sides. I have been thrown on many hoods of many cruisers for no good reason. I have been harassed by police officers who later claimed "they were just bored". Also, 3 of my uncles are cops, and every one of them is crooked. Then again, when I was falsely accused, one particularly stand-up cop was my strongest advocate, and the charges were dropped. So what I'm saying here is that cops require no special modicum of trust outside of that which we afford them in their commission as an officer of the law.
NoScript of course easily thwarts this, truly my favorite plugin for Firefox for a reason. It's amazing how many sites want Java but don't need it to function correctly. Most of what they're trying to unleash on you is various flavors of popups and other such unwanted nonsense.
All that being said, it's pretty ridiculous that Firefox 2.0 is still vulnerable to this. I can see why the Deb people would want to develop Iceweasel. Still, this bug is young compared to all these vulnerabilities from 2004 in IE6 (yes, and 7 also): http://secunia.com/product/11/?task=advisories
There are ubiquitous installers that are totally distro-independent, assuming your OS is recent enough to support its most basic features. All the libraries and dependencies are included in such apps, they are more or less self-contained. This is a bit like the Windows way of doing things, even the installers have a striking similarity. However, the disadvantage here is that your distro's package manager has no part to play in this transaction, so updating, maintaining or removing said software is at almost as much of disadvantage as it is on Windows, except without the registry garbage.
So I guess my point is this: It's great for games to install using such a method, but I think you'll find it far better to have the OS (read the package manager) handle the software installation and upkeep rather than trusting the software to do so. Imagine installing Apache that way, then going on vacation to the Bahamas. Who will they call when it needs a critical update? If the package manager was handling that, plus a cron job or two, you'd be sipping coronas with lime on the beach instead of conference calling in the hotel lobby.
...anymore, Ubuntu people, as there's nothing Ubuntu can really do that Deb can't. It's true that Debian is more geared towards proficient Linux users, but that's one of the reasons many of us love it so; it is clean, powerful, and stays the hell out of our way. For me personally, just the fact that it has a properly implemented root account rather than that crazy sudoers implementation in Ubuntu is enough to keep me with Deb. (What's up with that, anyway?)
They already migrated in 2002. TFA is about extending this decision even further. FTA:
"The new decision will extend the use of LinEx from schools to all civil servants and finally all of the region's administrative offices. The government didn't say how many systems would be migrated. The plan calls for all applications to be open source as well. The standard document format will be ODF (Open Document Format), with PDF used when exact visual appearance must be preserved."
Slashdot Mirror
I knew somebody would bring up greylisting. :) During the business day[1], I work for a company that produces several widely-used anti-spam appliances and a service-based filter as well. We see about 2,000 networks a week, and get a pretty good feel for spam trends and countermeasure effectiveness. I can say with all honesty that in my experiences, greylisting hurts more than it helps for most organizations.
Basically, greylisting is putting an email transaction on hold to see if the sender will retry. The idea is that if the sender is illigitimate, they won't bother resending. However, spammers have been onto this method for as long as it's existed, much moreso lately. All they have to do is take greylisted hosts and move them to the end of their script for later processing. The second time around, the spam gets through anyway. Even with its meager benefits, most organizations want email to come through as quickly as possible, and greylisting delays email by its very nature. It's also much less effective than existing technology that won't hinder most legitimate mail like DNSBL and/or SPF, spamwords+OCR (for image spam), and blocking on unknown recipients.
To summate, if greylisting makes you happy, then don't let me dissuade you from using it. it does indeed stop some spam. But please don't give the false impression that it's a magic bullet; most of the complaints we receive are from clients who've enabled greylisting and can't figure out why their mail is delayed.
[1] I am also a consultant to another firm who hosts manged email with spam filtering. Due to the complaints above, we have also disabled greylisting there. It was only effective at stopping about 5% of spam reliably, but a delay is put on all mail that isn't otherwise whitelisted. There are plenty of other methods which are both more effective and don't slow down the mailflow or tie up much resources on the MTA.
Hmmm, ever heard of nice?
Agreed. While I recognise and appreciate the humor in your comment, this is the main reason I use Debian on the desktop rather than OS X -- I multitask heavily. A Linux kernel with a Desktop preemption model and 1000Hz Timer frequency is a Godsend for those who push their PC's a tad too hard on a regular basis. I would like to see a simplified version of the scheduler, but all said CFS isn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be.
...that's essentially what the presenter is saying. The 'chroot' style jail is essentially a fake system root designed for development purposes, so you can have a little fake clean-room environment in which to build. Later, this concept was adapted for security purposes -- hence systrace, sysjail... What he's suggesting is that this userland approach is easily circumvented, and the best approach would be to use a mandatory access control approach at the kernel level, ala SELinux. To me, it's not so much that these programs are vulnerable as they are ineffective as security tools. I'm glad this is getting some publicity and opening a few eyes. Not to say that SELinux is the do-all end-all be-all of security, rather that false security is sometimes worse than no security.
...I honestly expected to see an "oldnews" tag on this article.
DSLExtreme resells lines from both Verizon and ATT/SBC. They are relatively small, but do offer 24/7 TS and most importantly, have no bandwidth caps. I'm actually hosting a web server and SSH/SFTP from my home DSLExtreme account right now... and from a dynamic IP no less (they give you long leases). No throttling, no threats, and so far, no layer-7 filtering either.
Why is the parent modded flamebait? This seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constructors of the US Constitution drafted the first amendment, I'm sure that yelling "fire!" maliciously in a crowded public building wasn't what they had in mind. Instead, it's a specific type of freedom which has a few limitations. However, these limitations are important to preserve the function and spirit of said rights. The same goes for the GPL.
By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying effectively, "you can have my code for free, and even change whatever you want, provided you don't restrict anyone else from doing the same." The BSD license allows the author to say, "use whatever you like, and you can close up my source code and not share with anybody if you want to." If that license is more attractive to you, than by all means, release your code under the BSD license instead of GPL. But like me, many people want the guarantee of the continuing freedom of the code they release. For those of us who feel that way, the GPL is exactly the right license.
...the last time I tried Ubuntu it indeed had more breakage then Debian, however that was a few years ago. Well, I can vouch that it still exists. In fact, breakage almost seems to be a culture in Ubuntu. Maybe it's because most of their users have migrated straight from Windows to Ubuntu without experiencing any other Linux or UNIX systems at all, and they are used to things breaking when upgraded. I'm also quite displeased with the current state and functionality of *ubuntu, especially their implementation of KDE. It's slow enough to make Gnome appear comparatively fast on that platform. Same goes for the crazy sudoers thing; I'd strongly argue that sudoers will only improve security when used for select operations, not root access. Root is root, call it what you will. And when root also = user, that's a bad thing.I don't understand why so many desktop users are flocking to Ubuntu, which seems slow to me and has had quite a few show-stoppers, especially since they are essentially repackaging Deb at this point. On a desktop, Debian "Sid" (the unstable development branch) is quite bleeding edge, yet with less breakage than a "stable" build of Gentoo after a few make-worlds, or even Ubuntu right out of the box. This makes it very attractive to me as a powerful and current desktop for general use and development. Plus, the community itself is very knowledgeable, if not a bit grizzled. What's wrong with Sid on the desktop? For most people, absolutely nothing. For others, the biggest hangup is that there's just not a lot of exposure for it, and a net-inst can be tricky for n00bs. So while that can be improved, it still seems like a walk in the park compared to installing Win95 from floppy.
On the server however, it's a totally different beast. Be it webhost or data center, most admins are understandably wary of "unstable" distros -- as they should be. Now don't misunderstand me, Debian "unstable" is a damn site more stable -- in a reliability sense -- than the so-called "enterprise-grade" product which currently holds monopoly status in the industry. But as an admin, I don't want a system who's core packages change often, even if they are changes for the best. So the release candidate, "Etch", may be reliable and basically finished, but is effectively excluded for server usage en masse because it's not officially finalized. Again, this is because if the server changes and breaks part of the app stack, there's nothing but blood and tears for you as an admin. With that in mind, I hope to see Etch released and accepted abroad, so that Debian can get out of this rut of negative public perception, and consider being one of the best Linux distros anywhere.
At a previous IT company where I worked, we had a ratio of roughly 1 admin for every 40 Linux/UNIX servers (a bit of Solaris and OpenBSD in there also). Conversely, we had a ratio of around 1 Windows admin to about 4 servers. The interesting part is each set of admins were pretty much equally busy in their duties. I can verify it's true that the *nix guys got more pay than the Windows ones. However, it was nothing like 10x more pay, more like 30%. So while I can *maybe* buy MS's claims about CTO on very small networks (or with largely incompetent IT who must rely solely on consultants), I just can't make the numbers work based on what I've seen it real life.
;-)
For reference, nowadays I work for a different company who doesn't have nearly as many servers, but is primarily a Windows shop. It's really culture shock for me to see servers go up and down so often for maintenance, be it scheduled or unscheduled. OTOH, I also do quite a bit of *nix consulting on the side. I can confirm that there's not a lot of return business in that market unless you're doing development, since the *nix servers I've setup for customers years ago are still running perfectly to this day. Eh, sucks to work yourself out of a job.
...on the matter. :-) On topic, this man is clearly an egotistical idiot. Most people would just try to get it worked out with Wikipedia (get the info corrected / removed), or failing that, just shrug something like this off. However, the fact that he's suing about it (how utterly infantile) is counter-productive to his goal: to not look like an ass in front of the Internet-using world. Well, congratulations "Fuz", I had no idea who you were until today. But now that you're suing somebody over a wiki entry, now I know you're an idiot.
Saying that Linux and Macs are "still firmly in the toy department" is like saying Beethoven and Brahms can't be considered serious composers because Brittany Spears has sold more records. Or perhaps that McDonald's has the best food in the world because they've sold more burgers than anyone else? Man, you really earned that (Score:0, Troll) rating. WTG, champ.
Most businesses use email to almost completely replace the traditional uses of the FAX. That means that more often than not, the timeliness of the delivered mail is important to them. What you failed to mention is that greylisting will delay incoming mail anywhere from 15 minutes to days, depending on how the sender's mail server is configured.
So, greylisting is a great idea for those businesses who don't care about the timeliness of their email (as long as it gets there eventually) and for most home users as well. But for others, it's not even an option unfortunately.
Back on topic though, Starbucks is not a good place to buy coffee if you actually enjoy the taste of coffee. The reason is that they burn the beans pretty badly so you can taste a bit of coffee flavor over the fru-fru. It's also not a good place to buy coffee if you care about the well-being of the 3rd-world coffee farmers in question, as Starbucks apparently only buy a minuscule portion of their product at Fair Trade pricing; look for yourself. Also, it's not a good place to buy coffee if you don't want to deal with dishonest corporations. As it turns out, the Starbucks spokesperson in the 'tube video is a bit on the dishonest side, as it's fairly well-known that Starbucks went out of their way to block the trademarks in question, verifiable by a quick search via Google .
Can you guess the name of the operating system with the best security track record is called? I'll give you a hint: it has the word "open" right in its name. Give up? It's OpenBSD, a completely open-source operating system.
Speak for yourself. If Google put their name on something like that, I'd be scratching my head even harder about how badly-implemented it is. With Microsoft, crappy products simply have less shock value.
I'm definitely not a lawyer, but when you're wandering around outdoors I'm pretty sure you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Unless they figure out a way to drive those vans into our restrooms, I don't see it as a huge problem.
That being said, I think it's a gimmicky piece of crap, and honestly I can't foresee it being useful for anything Google Earth can't already do better. Yes, yes, I know, that makes me sound like a Google fanboy. But to me, it really looks like Microsoft is trying to steal mindshare much more than actually provide something worthwhile.
Personally, I think the thing that sets Linus apart from others in the open source movement is that he has quite a bit of charisma for an engineer (I hesitate to say "free" because that often implies "cheap quality" in our day & age). Others, like our good friend RMS, contribute a huge amount as hackers and in other important respects but lack the some of the trickier diplomatic skills which are required to hold things together. I agree with RMS on almost every issue, but I think it's important to have a relatively moderate personality like Linus' in a position of such high visibility, to really humanize things for everyone. Some people may disagree, but that's what I feel on the matter.
That said, congrats Linus! You're certainly my hero, and I've been living the open-source dream for years now. Also to RMS, the FSF, and the rest of the GNU, Linux and open-source community. Hats off to you all; without your hard work and ideals, there would be no Linux!
Some of these replies are so fucking ignorant that I don't even know where to begin. ...OK, I'm taking a deep breath here. I promise the rest will not be a rant or a troll-fest.
Some are saying things to effect of "The guy was breaking the law, so he deserved it!" What about the fact that the officers who behave as such, meting out their own justice whenever it suits them? Are they obeying the law, or are they breaking it also? Why is one any better than the other? Should I, seeing an officer behaving badly, beat the living shit out of him, or should I record him acting badly and report him to his authorities?
By the way, I have seen this argument from both sides. I have been thrown on many hoods of many cruisers for no good reason. I have been harassed by police officers who later claimed "they were just bored". Also, 3 of my uncles are cops, and every one of them is crooked. Then again, when I was falsely accused, one particularly stand-up cop was my strongest advocate, and the charges were dropped. So what I'm saying here is that cops require no special modicum of trust outside of that which we afford them in their commission as an officer of the law.
NoScript of course easily thwarts this, truly my favorite plugin for Firefox for a reason. It's amazing how many sites want Java but don't need it to function correctly. Most of what they're trying to unleash on you is various flavors of popups and other such unwanted nonsense.
All that being said, it's pretty ridiculous that Firefox 2.0 is still vulnerable to this. I can see why the Deb people would want to develop Iceweasel. Still, this bug is young compared to all these vulnerabilities from 2004 in IE6 (yes, and 7 also): http://secunia.com/product/11/?task=advisories
There are ubiquitous installers that are totally distro-independent, assuming your OS is recent enough to support its most basic features. All the libraries and dependencies are included in such apps, they are more or less self-contained. This is a bit like the Windows way of doing things, even the installers have a striking similarity. However, the disadvantage here is that your distro's package manager has no part to play in this transaction, so updating, maintaining or removing said software is at almost as much of disadvantage as it is on Windows, except without the registry garbage.
So I guess my point is this: It's great for games to install using such a method, but I think you'll find it far better to have the OS (read the package manager) handle the software installation and upkeep rather than trusting the software to do so. Imagine installing Apache that way, then going on vacation to the Bahamas. Who will they call when it needs a critical update? If the package manager was handling that, plus a cron job or two, you'd be sipping coronas with lime on the beach instead of conference calling in the hotel lobby.
...anymore, Ubuntu people, as there's nothing Ubuntu can really do that Deb can't. It's true that Debian is more geared towards proficient Linux users, but that's one of the reasons many of us love it so; it is clean, powerful, and stays the hell out of our way. For me personally, just the fact that it has a properly implemented root account rather than that crazy sudoers implementation in Ubuntu is enough to keep me with Deb. (What's up with that, anyway?)
"The new decision will extend the use of LinEx from schools to all civil servants and finally all of the region's administrative offices. The government didn't say how many systems would be migrated. The plan calls for all applications to be open source as well. The standard document format will be ODF (Open Document Format), with PDF used when exact visual appearance must be preserved."