I fail to see how trashing DNF and starting a new project will help improve the situation. If I were in the same situation, I'd do what they're doing. They restarted the project several times (last one in 2002?) and are quietly working on it since then. This recent interest (2 stories) in Slashdot were not something they created, and in fact their comments about it have been a couple of posts in their forums. Let them concentrate, work and hopefully finish the game. Is it going to be profitable? They care, I don't. Is it going to be released? They care, I don't. Is it going to be good? Well, let's hope it is. A good game will benefit everyone.
That would be very nice. I didn't know it worked before, and now that I know it I'd like them to bring the feture back. I noticed that problem many times while editing a Wikipedia entry, for example, that many times consists of a big text area with a lot of text and a mispelled word you want to correct.
I don't understand what you mean. MacOSX is a *nix system that works very nicely as a desktop. I don't think the *nix systems in general have something that prevents them from being successful at the desktop market. Unless you mean that, for market matters, nobody will ever be able to have a significant marketshare and compete with Windows. That may or may not be true, but sugesting *nix systems are technologically incapable of working as desktop computers is... bullshit?
Another example of this approach is libusb. Instead of providing drivers for USB devices inside the kernel, you can do that with libusb. It gives you an interface to the USB system. Many scanner and printer drivers use it, and the drivers are included in the CUPS or SANE packages.
Being an MPlayer user, it's fair to say that xine-lib is the "good side" of Xine. I've only used it once in a program, and it made trivial for me to play a sound (and it accepted WAV, MP3...). ffmpeg is a much more low-level library. You can use it in your project, but it does not provide the same level of convenience or abstraction as xine-lib. That's why Amarok uses xine-lib, for example.
I think you have an important point here: national ID numbers can be abused in private hands because they provide a convenient universal identifier for you.
Exactly.
So corporations can now share and correlate data about you where, without an ID number, they would have a much harder time matching up the records they all hold to get "complete" knowledge of a particular individual.
Not really, IMHO. You can get a unique identifier for somebody using several other data or data combinations. Like, for example, when you are requested an e-mail address and you don't want to receive spam so you give them that other address that you don't use for anything but that it's the same one you give all third parties and only belongs to you, or the telephone number, which is something that barely changes when you already have a life somewhere, or your cell phone if you move a lot, or... I think it's not that hard.
In my country (which has national ID) its use is somewhat different. You can't get a bank account, a cell phone, a landline, or just about any arrears-payment service without disclosing your ID number. Nor can you open a credit account with a retail store. And you can't even rent property without providing the landlord with your ID number (unless you deal with really dodgy landlords) because of responsibilities placed on landlords to know their tenants in order to reduce crime. There are no effective data protection laws restricting what can be done with that information by service providers.
I've always had the feeling that national ID should be "your account number with the government". It allows you access to government services, and you have to make payments to the government for that (tax). So in the same way as you wouldn't give your telephone account number to the grocer, your national ID is something between you and the government only.
I agree with that last part. But if the man that's renting you an apartment, for example, has a problem with you because you don't pay and/or leave before paying, he should be able to tell the authorities who you are. And, another example, at least in my country the houses you own make a difference in the taxes you have to pay, so it's normal that they require your national ID number.
What I think it's important is not to require it when it's really not necessary. If you buy something at the supermarket, they don't need it. If a problem arises with the stuff you bought, it's you who is going to come back to the supermarket with the ticket in hand to protest.
And, on top of that, make strict laws about how private corporations must deal with the customer's private data, especially the national ID numbers. It would be a good thing that you could report a supermarket that requires your number to buy there. Just my two cents.
You raised two points here. The first one is about the ease of making a false national ID card. I agree with you here and I already said such a thing in my previous comment. This is one of the reasons why you are forced to get a new card periodically. For example, mine was expedited in 2002 and will expire in 2007.
The second point is about the privacity of the number and the consecuences of such a thing. My country laws forbid the situation you are suggesting here about the public availability of national ID numbers. However, it is true that once you sign a contract with somebody they will know your number, and the "Big Brother" fear starts to appear. However, I'm not worried about the goverment being the Big Brother in this case. My ID number helps the goverment know who I am, what important things I own (driving license, house, etc), if I was arrested or in jail, the taxes I have to pay and if I have already voted in an eventual election process. But they don't know if I'm at home at this moment, if I like the red or blue colors, if I go out, if I have a girl/boyfriend... The goverment, in this case, is expected to be "with me".
The problem here are corporations, *private* corporations. The electricity company knows my ID number, and they may sell that data to the water company, and there could be a Big Brother Corporation that, with all this data, is able to know when I go to sleep, when I have a shower, when I arrive at home. So I expect, as a citizen, that the goverment lends me a hand in such a thing and puts out laws that say "If you are going to request private data to somebody, you have to warn them about how you are going to deal with that data, and that database must have a number so we know it exists, and you cannot trade that data unless you are authorized by that person". That is, more or less, already happening.
I know such laws are difficult to enforce, but let me make a final comment about this. When I bought my cell phone I wasn't asked my national ID number. This is the case when you buy a phone without a contract, with a card that holds the balance and phone number. However, I was given one of those promotional sheets that said "Hey, if you fill this form with your private data and send that to us, we'll give you this amount of money to your balance". And, guess what? The national ID number is not one of the requested data. So, what does this mean? That, IMHO, Big Brother is dangerous for my privacy because it's a *private* company, that it is already happening and that the national ID number is *not* an important factor in this situation. Just my two cents here.
I have never lived in a country without a national ID card so I'm not sure what are the advantages of having or not having such a document. In Spain, we've had national ID cards since before I was born, and I have one, of course.
My general feeling is that they're a good idea if used right, which I think is the situation now. National ID cards are used mostly in situations when they want to establish exactly who is going to participate in a given event. The national ID number is a private data, like your phone number. Nobody knows which is your national ID number and when you're requested to give it, you have the impression you are going to establish a formal and serious relationship/business with something or somebody.
For example, it's usually requested in contracts. Let's suppose you buy a house. Your contract says the amount you are going to pay, the conditions, etc, *and* your national ID. So it is *you* who is buying the house and not somebody else. And the house will belong to *you* and not somebody else. And it's also requested for the company to have a similar number that will be in the contract. So it's *that* company. But, for example, you are not requested to give your national ID when you buy a PC.
I was requested to give my national ID number (and show the card, of course) when I started my studies at the university. While not a common practice, some teachers requested the cards at the final exams. They have a list of people who has paid to assist their classes and go to the exams, they bring that list to the exam and ask people for the card to enter the exam room. That way, they make sure it's really *you* who is doing the exam and not somebody else in your behalf.
Another usual situation in which you are requested to show your ID card is when paying with a credit card at some supermarket or shop in general. Instead of checking that your signature matches the one in the credit card, which is a loose relationship IMHO (and easy to fake), you show your credit card and your ID card. The shop assistant holds both cards in their hands and checks that you are the one in the ID card by looking at the picture and that the name in the credit card matches the name in the ID card. This way you couldn't use a stolen card unless your name and the owner's name match. Note that in Spain you have one name and two surnames (one from each parent), making coincidences slightly more unusual.
And a final word about the cards themselves: they have the typical security measures used for bills and other "official" documents (probably on a higher paranoid level I'd say). Of course, they can be faked, like everything, but it's not easy at all for a common individual to do it. Currently it's made of plastic, with special ink and your picture, of course, it not attached to it, it's printed on the card itself.
I'm curious to know, since I have no idea about the topic, what does market revenue (which is what grew 27.1% according to TFA) exactly mean and how does it relate to the number of people or computers using or running Linux.
Yes, I made a mistake. It should read "As everyone who follows the Slackware changelog knows." I was merely trying to explain where I got that information from, and trying to point out your vendor would probably have a fix out. Sorry if that's not the impression you got.
As everyone who follows the Slackware changelog, new packages were available yesterday. It seems there is still no exploit for this flaw, and it's somehow hard to exploit. That's the impression I got from the changelog entry. I'll paste it here:
n/sendmail-8.13.6-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to sendmail-8.13.6.
This new version of sendmail contains a fix for a security problem
discovered by Mark Dowd of ISS X-Force. From sendmail's advisory:
Sendmail was notified by security researchers at ISS that, under some
specific timing conditions, this vulnerability may permit a specifically
crafted attack to take over the sendmail MTA process, allowing remote
attackers to execute commands and run arbitrary programs on the system
running the MTA, affecting email delivery, or tampering with other
programs and data on this system. Sendmail is not aware of any public
exploit code for this vulnerability. This connection-oriented
vulnerability does not occur in the normal course of sending and
receiving email. It is only triggered when specific conditions are
created through SMTP connection layer commands.
Sendmail's complete advisory may be found here: http://www.sendmail.com/company/advisory/index.sht ml
The CVE entry for this issue may be found here: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE- 2006-0058
(* Security fix *)
I think your best option is to read the comments at www.distrowatch.com and test them by yourself. The differences cover the package management tools, specific distribution tools, slightly different filesystem hierarchy and boot scripts, and finally the set of packages available for that distribution among others.
In Spain, a blank CD costs about 50 euro cents, more or less. Of those, a small percentage go directly to the SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores), which is the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA. This "tax" (it's not a real tax because it's not for the state) is mandatory, according to Spanish laws. It also applies to other media like blank VHS tapes. It is based on the assumption, as the SGAE mentions in its webpage, that for every copied CD, obviously (?), a sale is lost. Yes, there's a lot of controversy about this. More information (in Spanish) at the Spanish Wikipedia:
Several years ago I used to read almost daily the 3DRealms DNF forums, at least for some minutes. It got really boring, so what I do know (because, after all, I'm interested in this game) is what I think everybody should do:
* Stop caring about the release date. When it comes out, IMHO, it will probably be a very fun game after all. There's no need to "wait" for it. There are dozens of good games out there and at least one or two every year.
* Periodically, read the latest posts by George Broussard. I have bookmarked his recent posts page and I check it from time to time. He barely posts, but you'll know everything he said, which is virtually everything that appears on the Wikipedia about the game and the only information you can trust. As the Wikipedia article claims, GB has said several times they restarted the game and, since some months now he claims the game is in production, that all previous problems are solved, technology is always finished in time and they are creating content as fast as they can.
Good luck, 3DR. I'm a gamer after all, so I hope this game is good and worth playing. If not, well, I'll buy something else:D.
I am a dial-up user now. Due to technical problems, I can't have broadband now where I live. I don't run Windows but let me tell you something. In my Linux box, I decided some months ago to add a couple of firewall rules to log any traffic that was going to be "dropped". You'd be surprised to find out how many connections I receive every day directed to NetBIOS ports and services, MS-SQL and more. You'll receive those worm attacks as soon as you're online, believe me. You won't be safer. You'll need a proper firewall and you'll be infected by malicious websites like everyone else. And, as many other people pointed out, having a dial-up connection may prevent you from patching your computer properly due to the inconvenience all those downloads are. If that was your only reason not to have broadband, don't hesitate and get it.
It would have faced the same problems. The study started on June 2004 and the latest stable Debian version is from June 2005. By using Debian stable as you suggest, they would have gone with Debian Woody. The couldn't have installed the required MySQL version from official stable packages, etc. The GLIBC would have also been too old. I think that wouln't have changed many things. Besides, remember that the Suse version they used was the Enterprise Server edition. I don't think it's a bad choice at all.
I don't think it uses ActiveX since it works flawlessly under Linux with Firefox, where ActiveX is not available. It happens to use some advanced Javascript technics that have a fancy sounding name that I don't remember.
I was pointed to this program some days ago. I don't know if it's good or bad, but some serious people have told me it's good and a serious competitor for MS Project in some aspects. At least it's free and you can test it to see if it fits your needs.
Mostly because of one important feature, which is AddressGuard. Sure, both Yahoo! and GMail spam filters do a nice work. However, that is a "new" approach and it's what makes me not to receive any spam at all. You have an explanation here:
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see how trashing DNF and starting a new project will help improve the situation. If I were in the same situation, I'd do what they're doing. They restarted the project several times (last one in 2002?) and are quietly working on it since then. This recent interest (2 stories) in Slashdot were not something they created, and in fact their comments about it have been a couple of posts in their forums. Let them concentrate, work and hopefully finish the game. Is it going to be profitable? They care, I don't. Is it going to be released? They care, I don't. Is it going to be good? Well, let's hope it is. A good game will benefit everyone.
That would be very nice. I didn't know it worked before, and now that I know it I'd like them to bring the feture back. I noticed that problem many times while editing a Wikipedia entry, for example, that many times consists of a big text area with a lot of text and a mispelled word you want to correct.
I don't understand what you mean. MacOSX is a *nix system that works very nicely as a desktop. I don't think the *nix systems in general have something that prevents them from being successful at the desktop market. Unless you mean that, for market matters, nobody will ever be able to have a significant marketshare and compete with Windows. That may or may not be true, but sugesting *nix systems are technologically incapable of working as desktop computers is... bullshit?
Another example of this approach is libusb. Instead of providing drivers for USB devices inside the kernel, you can do that with libusb. It gives you an interface to the USB system. Many scanner and printer drivers use it, and the drivers are included in the CUPS or SANE packages.
Being an MPlayer user, it's fair to say that xine-lib is the "good side" of Xine. I've only used it once in a program, and it made trivial for me to play a sound (and it accepted WAV, MP3...). ffmpeg is a much more low-level library. You can use it in your project, but it does not provide the same level of convenience or abstraction as xine-lib. That's why Amarok uses xine-lib, for example.
Exactly.
Not really, IMHO. You can get a unique identifier for somebody using several other data or data combinations. Like, for example, when you are requested an e-mail address and you don't want to receive spam so you give them that other address that you don't use for anything but that it's the same one you give all third parties and only belongs to you, or the telephone number, which is something that barely changes when you already have a life somewhere, or your cell phone if you move a lot, or... I think it's not that hard.
I agree with that last part. But if the man that's renting you an apartment, for example, has a problem with you because you don't pay and/or leave before paying, he should be able to tell the authorities who you are. And, another example, at least in my country the houses you own make a difference in the taxes you have to pay, so it's normal that they require your national ID number.
What I think it's important is not to require it when it's really not necessary. If you buy something at the supermarket, they don't need it. If a problem arises with the stuff you bought, it's you who is going to come back to the supermarket with the ticket in hand to protest.
And, on top of that, make strict laws about how private corporations must deal with the customer's private data, especially the national ID numbers. It would be a good thing that you could report a supermarket that requires your number to buy there. Just my two cents.
You raised two points here. The first one is about the ease of making a false national ID card. I agree with you here and I already said such a thing in my previous comment. This is one of the reasons why you are forced to get a new card periodically. For example, mine was expedited in 2002 and will expire in 2007.
The second point is about the privacity of the number and the consecuences of such a thing. My country laws forbid the situation you are suggesting here about the public availability of national ID numbers. However, it is true that once you sign a contract with somebody they will know your number, and the "Big Brother" fear starts to appear. However, I'm not worried about the goverment being the Big Brother in this case. My ID number helps the goverment know who I am, what important things I own (driving license, house, etc), if I was arrested or in jail, the taxes I have to pay and if I have already voted in an eventual election process. But they don't know if I'm at home at this moment, if I like the red or blue colors, if I go out, if I have a girl/boyfriend... The goverment, in this case, is expected to be "with me".
The problem here are corporations, *private* corporations. The electricity company knows my ID number, and they may sell that data to the water company, and there could be a Big Brother Corporation that, with all this data, is able to know when I go to sleep, when I have a shower, when I arrive at home. So I expect, as a citizen, that the goverment lends me a hand in such a thing and puts out laws that say "If you are going to request private data to somebody, you have to warn them about how you are going to deal with that data, and that database must have a number so we know it exists, and you cannot trade that data unless you are authorized by that person". That is, more or less, already happening.
I know such laws are difficult to enforce, but let me make a final comment about this. When I bought my cell phone I wasn't asked my national ID number. This is the case when you buy a phone without a contract, with a card that holds the balance and phone number. However, I was given one of those promotional sheets that said "Hey, if you fill this form with your private data and send that to us, we'll give you this amount of money to your balance". And, guess what? The national ID number is not one of the requested data. So, what does this mean? That, IMHO, Big Brother is dangerous for my privacy because it's a *private* company, that it is already happening and that the national ID number is *not* an important factor in this situation. Just my two cents here.
I have never lived in a country without a national ID card so I'm not sure what are the advantages of having or not having such a document. In Spain, we've had national ID cards since before I was born, and I have one, of course.
My general feeling is that they're a good idea if used right, which I think is the situation now. National ID cards are used mostly in situations when they want to establish exactly who is going to participate in a given event. The national ID number is a private data, like your phone number. Nobody knows which is your national ID number and when you're requested to give it, you have the impression you are going to establish a formal and serious relationship/business with something or somebody.
For example, it's usually requested in contracts. Let's suppose you buy a house. Your contract says the amount you are going to pay, the conditions, etc, *and* your national ID. So it is *you* who is buying the house and not somebody else. And the house will belong to *you* and not somebody else. And it's also requested for the company to have a similar number that will be in the contract. So it's *that* company. But, for example, you are not requested to give your national ID when you buy a PC.
I was requested to give my national ID number (and show the card, of course) when I started my studies at the university. While not a common practice, some teachers requested the cards at the final exams. They have a list of people who has paid to assist their classes and go to the exams, they bring that list to the exam and ask people for the card to enter the exam room. That way, they make sure it's really *you* who is doing the exam and not somebody else in your behalf.
Another usual situation in which you are requested to show your ID card is when paying with a credit card at some supermarket or shop in general. Instead of checking that your signature matches the one in the credit card, which is a loose relationship IMHO (and easy to fake), you show your credit card and your ID card. The shop assistant holds both cards in their hands and checks that you are the one in the ID card by looking at the picture and that the name in the credit card matches the name in the ID card. This way you couldn't use a stolen card unless your name and the owner's name match. Note that in Spain you have one name and two surnames (one from each parent), making coincidences slightly more unusual.
And a final word about the cards themselves: they have the typical security measures used for bills and other "official" documents (probably on a higher paranoid level I'd say). Of course, they can be faked, like everything, but it's not easy at all for a common individual to do it. Currently it's made of plastic, with special ink and your picture, of course, it not attached to it, it's printed on the card itself.
I'm curious to know, since I have no idea about the topic, what does market revenue (which is what grew 27.1% according to TFA) exactly mean and how does it relate to the number of people or computers using or running Linux.
Check this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/03/130214
Yes, I made a mistake. It should read "As everyone who follows the Slackware changelog knows." I was merely trying to explain where I got that information from, and trying to point out your vendor would probably have a fix out. Sorry if that's not the impression you got.
As everyone who follows the Slackware changelog, new packages were available yesterday. It seems there is still no exploit for this flaw, and it's somehow hard to exploit. That's the impression I got from the changelog entry. I'll paste it here:
t ml- 2006-0058
n/sendmail-8.13.6-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to sendmail-8.13.6.
This new version of sendmail contains a fix for a security problem
discovered by Mark Dowd of ISS X-Force. From sendmail's advisory:
Sendmail was notified by security researchers at ISS that, under some
specific timing conditions, this vulnerability may permit a specifically
crafted attack to take over the sendmail MTA process, allowing remote
attackers to execute commands and run arbitrary programs on the system
running the MTA, affecting email delivery, or tampering with other
programs and data on this system. Sendmail is not aware of any public
exploit code for this vulnerability. This connection-oriented
vulnerability does not occur in the normal course of sending and
receiving email. It is only triggered when specific conditions are
created through SMTP connection layer commands.
Sendmail's complete advisory may be found here:
http://www.sendmail.com/company/advisory/index.sh
The CVE entry for this issue may be found here:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE
(* Security fix *)
I think your best option is to read the comments at www.distrowatch.com and test them by yourself. The differences cover the package management tools, specific distribution tools, slightly different filesystem hierarchy and boot scripts, and finally the set of packages available for that distribution among others.
In Spain, a blank CD costs about 50 euro cents, more or less. Of those, a small percentage go directly to the SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores), which is the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA. This "tax" (it's not a real tax because it's not for the state) is mandatory, according to Spanish laws. It also applies to other media like blank VHS tapes. It is based on the assumption, as the SGAE mentions in its webpage, that for every copied CD, obviously (?), a sale is lost. Yes, there's a lot of controversy about this. More information (in Spanish) at the Spanish Wikipedia:
a da_(Espa%C3%B1a)
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_por_copia_priv
Several years ago I used to read almost daily the 3DRealms DNF forums, at least for some minutes. It got really boring, so what I do know (because, after all, I'm interested in this game) is what I think everybody should do:
:D.
* Stop caring about the release date. When it comes out, IMHO, it will probably be a very fun game after all. There's no need to "wait" for it. There are dozens of good games out there and at least one or two every year.
* Periodically, read the latest posts by George Broussard. I have bookmarked his recent posts page and I check it from time to time. He barely posts, but you'll know everything he said, which is virtually everything that appears on the Wikipedia about the game and the only information you can trust. As the Wikipedia article claims, GB has said several times they restarted the game and, since some months now he claims the game is in production, that all previous problems are solved, technology is always finished in time and they are creating content as fast as they can.
Good luck, 3DR. I'm a gamer after all, so I hope this game is good and worth playing. If not, well, I'll buy something else
I am a dial-up user now. Due to technical problems, I can't have broadband now where I live. I don't run Windows but let me tell you something. In my Linux box, I decided some months ago to add a couple of firewall rules to log any traffic that was going to be "dropped". You'd be surprised to find out how many connections I receive every day directed to NetBIOS ports and services, MS-SQL and more. You'll receive those worm attacks as soon as you're online, believe me. You won't be safer. You'll need a proper firewall and you'll be infected by malicious websites like everyone else. And, as many other people pointed out, having a dial-up connection may prevent you from patching your computer properly due to the inconvenience all those downloads are. If that was your only reason not to have broadband, don't hesitate and get it.
Can't you use this trick to download the video completely?
It would have faced the same problems. The study started on June 2004 and the latest stable Debian version is from June 2005. By using Debian stable as you suggest, they would have gone with Debian Woody. The couldn't have installed the required MySQL version from official stable packages, etc. The GLIBC would have also been too old. I think that wouln't have changed many things. Besides, remember that the Suse version they used was the Enterprise Server edition. I don't think it's a bad choice at all.
You probably meant "cojones". "cajones" means "drawers" and does not make sense :/.
I don't think it uses ActiveX since it works flawlessly under Linux with Firefox, where ActiveX is not available. It happens to use some advanced Javascript technics that have a fancy sounding name that I don't remember.
ImageShack won't be slashdotted, I think (/me crosses fingers).
n g
http://img15.imageshack.us/my.php?image=64018ud.p
http://www.taskjuggler.org/
I was pointed to this program some days ago. I don't know if it's good or bad, but some serious people have told me it's good and a serious competitor for MS Project in some aspects. At least it's free and you can test it to see if it fits your needs.
Many recent laptops (like the one I bought some days ago) come with SiS cards that have *zero* support for 3D graphics, AFAIK.
Mostly because of one important feature, which is AddressGuard. Sure, both Yahoo! and GMail spam filters do a nice work. However, that is a "new" approach and it's what makes me not to receive any spam at all. You have an explanation here:
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools?tool=3
And a Flash animation/tour/explanation at the end of that page.
I'm using Firefox 1.0.6 under Slackware Linux. Everything works as expected.