If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?
Gee, this won't start flame wars.:P But in any case, I might personally choose Mandriva Linux, since they are a very non-proprietary Linux vendor who's practices jive well with the spirit of the GPL. Mandriva is definately one of the most desktop-ready distros out there, strikes a good balance between the stability and freshness of packages, and has a huge amount of community-contributed software available for it. It's also a good distro to ease ex-Windows users and admins into, as it has a great many powerful GUI tools.
Of course, there's always a 100% community distro like Debian, or if they had the resources they could even roll their own in-house distro. That would certainly ensure a custom fit, wouldn't it? Of course, since they're going OSS, there's nothing saying they can't go that route later down the road.
I stand corrected, the definately LGPL seems to be closer to what I was thinking. Regardless, my original point was that whether or not the license is "better" really depends on the underlying philosophy behind the software in question. For some purposes, BSD seems preferable. For others, GPL or LGPL, or one of the lesser know OSS licenses.
I did RTFGPL.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#TOC1...could you kindly point out in the GNU GPL exactly where it says anything about what you are talking about?
I know I'm following an obvious rabbit trail here, but I feel it's important. The BSD license may be arguably more vendor-friendly, but the GPL does a better job ensuring the sustained freedom of the code. Besides, there isn't anything in the GPL which makes it difficult to marry GPL'ed code with closed-source code, as long as credit is given where due and the source is available for the OSS portions.
I've recently implemented an inter-office Jabber server for a client, a medium-sized manufacturing company. It's great! It works with popular clients like GAIM, a good thing for them since they are a multi-platform show (Win & Lin), so I can have GAIM in their standard software rollout accross the board. Jabber also goes hand-in-hand with SSL and costs nothing by means of license fees. The only issue I've had with it so far wasn't really an issue with jabber at all; it was when the financial director called me at home demanding to know why she "couldn't see any of her buddies". I eventually figured out that she was trying to add her AOL buddies to their internal, non-public jabber server and of course failing. I walked her through adding her AIM account to GAIM, and she was happy as a clam... but it would be nice to see all of the major player unified in at least basic functionality by some centralized servers and an open protocoll like XMPP. Sure, let them fight about proprietary video garbage and the like, but if they at least adopted XMPP or another open XML format eveyone could have basic chat connectivity with minimal hassle. Heh, yeah, that'll be the day.
You're right that Creative's Windows drivers are bloated, unstable and downright nasty. But the open-source emu10k1 drivers for Linux are actually quite good, and I've found that with a little tinkering, I can get my Audigy2 sounding better in Linux/ALSA than I can in Windows/DirectX. The best part? Zero bloat, and the drivers just work with no extra crazy software required. I just want to hear sound for goodness sake, not run friggin' Creative OS. I wonder if this new card will also have open-source drivers?
"I see a market for RFID-killers. Shouldn't need more than a watt or so at the right frequency to kill the chip."
Indeed. Of course, we already have blatently freedom-stifling acts like DMCA, Patriot Act (I & II) and many, many more in existance. It would suprise me if the powers that be miss an opportunity to nip this one in the bud. After all, "privacy is for people with something to hide, like terrorists!!!1", right? Nevermind that dusty old document; the founding fathers didn't consider freedom to be more important than personal safety, did they?...Did they?
I know, I know, trolling and all that -- feel free to mod me into oblivion. But I can't really think of any two companies who are more evil than those two (although a few come to mind which are equally so). If MS and AOL combine, could it even get any more evil than that? Unless..!
This isn't trolling or trying to start a flame-war (intentionally anyway), but an honest observation about the current topic. I'm honestly not sure to think about/. anymore. It seems that I see more and more "C'mon guys, MS isn't that bad, really!" stories all the time (and follow it up with a little anti-*nix FUD). Frankly, I'm getting pretty sick of it. Most of us here are professional IT or IS guys, and we know MS all too well. Some of us even have some *nix experience to help contrast MS from, IMHO, how a multi-user OS should be built. Anyway, am I the only way who feels this way or what?
This is something I've been trying to get across to my MS-fanboy friends for years now. It's not about playing cheerleader for one company or another, it's that healthy competition brings about big-picture improvements that ultimately benefit the consumer and even the economy. If MS (or any other large corperation) is allowed to dictate the course of IT in their favor, it's good for them and their shareholders and very bad for everyone else (even MS fanboys). If they have foresight, fans of MS should be cheering on FOSS and any other strong and long-standing competition to the Redmond behemoth. At the very least they will serve to light a fire under MS to innovate and to improve the overall quality of their offerings.
Courtney Love is not very high on my list of favorite people, but if there's anybody who would know anything about the way the big labels treat their artists it'd be her. Incidentally, she whote up an interesting article about that very thing.
...I guess they couldn't be bothered to write one? I mean, isn't that's all it would take to keep search engines from craling in places they're not welcome? Well, at least the less scandelous ones.
Maybe the discrepency here is that I'm talking about Acrobat Reader for Unix. Sometimes I forget that a majority of Slashdotters are Windows users. To clarify a bit, in *nix Adobe 7 most certainly doesn't start on boot and it looks & runs substantially better than 5 did. Acrobat 5 in Unix looks jagged and nasty, runs horribly and drags on resources like crazy. And that's not to mention the crashes. You can tell it was really half-assed on Adobe's part. Seven is a marked improvement for *nix users, being lighter, faster & cleaner than previous Unix releases.
"...just because the number is higher doesnt make it better, want proof, look at Adobe Reader, what can 7 do that 5 can not?"
Load on my AMD 3000+ in under 20 minutes, for starters. There's also font antialiasing. Adobe 5 looks like butt compared to 7. I'm no Adobe fan, but that's still kind of a bad example.
Let's not forget the thing which made it possible for Roby to carry out these attacks in the first place. FTA:
"In his plea agreement, Ashley admitted he knowingly allowed clients and employees to control networks of compromised Windows machines, or 'bots,' from Foonet."
Now I realize that this may come across as trolling, but it doesn't make it any less true. If Windows wasn't so difficult for Joe Sixpack to lock down to the point where it can be used in a semi-secure fashion, it might be a different story. As it stands, you need a good antivirus, multiple spyware tools, browser hardening tools (if you continue to use IE) or a new browser, patches, service packs and more. And that's just the software end, not even best practice. In an average user's hands, it seems it's not a question of whether the system will be compromised, rather of who cracks it first. In this case, it seems to have been a script kiddie from Ohio.
What you're saying is true (I'm sorry I spent my mod points, you're surely due some). This has been frustrating me about Windows since I was an NT4 admin years back. On the recommendation of a certain famous web designer, I tried out Linux.That really opened up my eyes to the beautifully simple approach Unices take towards multiuser security.
Doesn't anybody use VLANs anymore? Maybe I'm ignorant here (it's a big world and all), but why should Windows clients be allowed to talk to eachother on the network? Especially if there are VPN nodes and/or soft-spots in the network implementation? Simple VLANs and the usage of DMZ's for outward-facing servers have worked for us so far; any virus infections have been localized to a PC at a time. There's always the ol' email entry point, but that's what clamav is for, right?;)
Parent is right, this technology is astounding and it's only in the prototype phase for crying out loud. Will the technology improve in the future? Almost certainly. Does it have useful implications right now in its current form? Absolutely. I wouldn't be incredibly surprised if paper displays become the successor to plasma (when/if plasma becomes more mainstream), but isn't it a bit unfair to expect something to be technologically perfected right out of the starting gate?
I'd like to see one of these babies on an iPod-like device. They are supposed to use very low power, maintain high contrast even in bright light, and can literally roll out so the device can be as compact as possible when you don't need the benefit of a whole screen. Even the 4-color grayscale wouldn't be too big of a drawback if you were just dealing with playlists.
I can't afford the $250 at present, but I wonder if they finally did away with raised floors. It wasn't too bad of idea around 40 years ago, but we've got cool modular racks now that make that concept moot, at least IMHO. Plus raised floors look weird, are fairly expensive to implement (especially for smaller firms with little cash), and get really nasty under there over time. Besides, telco has done without that design for quite a long time, seems to have worked out fine for them.
Coffee does contain a small amount of antioxidents, which eliminates "free radicals" in the bloodstream. This is good. However, coffee is a powerful diarrhetic, which ultimately means it removes more water from your body than it provides. This can cause dehydration, probably the foremost cause of cancer (whether people realize it or not). My personal ideology for this kind of thing is "everything in moderation", but calling coffee a health drink just seems silly to me. After all, other caffeine drinks like iced black tea or especially green tea provide substantially more antioxidants than coffee and have a less severe diarrhetic effect. Not to prosteltize, but try switching to tea over coffee for your daily energy needs and I think you'll notice a difference in the way you feel.
There are two reasons I can think of why there should be a precedent set against this kind of thing. First of all, it would be excruciatingly easy to frame someone by intentionally planting illegal material on their HDD and reporting them. Secondly, in many cases the actual servers which are dishing up this filth are situated on compromised home PCs with a fast broadband pipe. A lot of these people don't even know they're serving it!
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, this won't start flame wars. :P But in any case, I might personally choose Mandriva Linux, since they are a very non-proprietary Linux vendor who's practices jive well with the spirit of the GPL. Mandriva is definately one of the most desktop-ready distros out there, strikes a good balance between the stability and freshness of packages, and has a huge amount of community-contributed software available for it. It's also a good distro to ease ex-Windows users and admins into, as it has a great many powerful GUI tools.
Of course, there's always a 100% community distro like Debian, or if they had the resources they could even roll their own in-house distro. That would certainly ensure a custom fit, wouldn't it? Of course, since they're going OSS, there's nothing saying they can't go that route later down the road.
-AT
I stand corrected, the definately LGPL seems to be closer to what I was thinking. Regardless, my original point was that whether or not the license is "better" really depends on the underlying philosophy behind the software in question. For some purposes, BSD seems preferable. For others, GPL or LGPL, or one of the lesser know OSS licenses.
I did RTFGPL. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#TOC1 ...could you kindly point out in the GNU GPL exactly where it says anything about what you are talking about?
I know I'm following an obvious rabbit trail here, but I feel it's important. The BSD license may be arguably more vendor-friendly, but the GPL does a better job ensuring the sustained freedom of the code. Besides, there isn't anything in the GPL which makes it difficult to marry GPL'ed code with closed-source code, as long as credit is given where due and the source is available for the OSS portions.
-AT
That being said, there are even more questionable musical adaptations out there.
Filtering of email and blocking of web ads considered a subvertive terrorist activity.
-AT
Indeed. Of course, we already have blatently freedom-stifling acts like DMCA, Patriot Act (I & II) and many, many more in existance. It would suprise me if the powers that be miss an opportunity to nip this one in the bud. After all, "privacy is for people with something to hide, like terrorists!!!1", right? Nevermind that dusty old document; the founding fathers didn't consider freedom to be more important than personal safety, did they? ...Did they?
-AT
I know, I know, trolling and all that -- feel free to mod me into oblivion. But I can't really think of any two companies who are more evil than those two (although a few come to mind which are equally so). If MS and AOL combine, could it even get any more evil than that? Unless..!
-AT
-AT
-AT
...I guess they couldn't be bothered to write one? I mean, isn't that's all it would take to keep search engines from craling in places they're not welcome? Well, at least the less scandelous ones.
Maybe the discrepency here is that I'm talking about Acrobat Reader for Unix. Sometimes I forget that a majority of Slashdotters are Windows users. To clarify a bit, in *nix Adobe 7 most certainly doesn't start on boot and it looks & runs substantially better than 5 did. Acrobat 5 in Unix looks jagged and nasty, runs horribly and drags on resources like crazy. And that's not to mention the crashes. You can tell it was really half-assed on Adobe's part. Seven is a marked improvement for *nix users, being lighter, faster & cleaner than previous Unix releases.
Load on my AMD 3000+ in under 20 minutes, for starters. There's also font antialiasing. Adobe 5 looks like butt compared to 7. I'm no Adobe fan, but that's still kind of a bad example.
"In his plea agreement, Ashley admitted he knowingly allowed clients and employees to control networks of compromised Windows machines, or 'bots,' from Foonet."
Now I realize that this may come across as trolling, but it doesn't make it any less true. If Windows wasn't so difficult for Joe Sixpack to lock down to the point where it can be used in a semi-secure fashion, it might be a different story. As it stands, you need a good antivirus, multiple spyware tools, browser hardening tools (if you continue to use IE) or a new browser, patches, service packs and more. And that's just the software end, not even best practice. In an average user's hands, it seems it's not a question of whether the system will be compromised, rather of who cracks it first. In this case, it seems to have been a script kiddie from Ohio.
What you're saying is true (I'm sorry I spent my mod points, you're surely due some). This has been frustrating me about Windows since I was an NT4 admin years back. On the recommendation of a certain famous web designer, I tried out Linux.That really opened up my eyes to the beautifully simple approach Unices take towards multiuser security.
Thanks,
-AT
-AT
-AT
Problem is, they're getting sued for _uploads_, not downloads.
-AT
-AT
There are two reasons I can think of why there should be a precedent set against this kind of thing. First of all, it would be excruciatingly easy to frame someone by intentionally planting illegal material on their HDD and reporting them. Secondly, in many cases the actual servers which are dishing up this filth are situated on compromised home PCs with a fast broadband pipe. A lot of these people don't even know they're serving it!