1. Linux
Killing a fly with a shotgun for desktop power. Its server origins betray it and the best useage is for technically savvy users as a workstation OS in the higher-end sense. Really doesn't belong in front of people who can't make sense of Windows XP and think there is such a thing as an "any key".
2. BSD
Killing a fly with a tactical nuke with a flaky timer and faulty fuse for desktop usage. It shouldn't even be on a workstation. It shines on servers and is most at home there. Will burble along to itself happily if fed and cared for by a true BSD techie.
3. Windows
So easy to use, it is embarassing to admit to having family members or friends who cannot comprehend looking on the screen for the "start button" and instead scour their keyboard. Excellent for the casual user and Pro is great as a low end workstation OS unless to pack it with lots of hardware to eat. The server version is notoriously easy to compromise by teenagers with way too much free time on their hands. Point, click, throw dice, maybe crash, maybe work.
Each has its place. I would not use a naked Windows box on a public IP as a home LAN gatway, I'd use a carefully installed Linux distro like FC3 or 4. I'd not throw FC anything in front of my family, I'd give them WinXP home. I'd put BSD on a must-stay-up workhorse server over any common Linux package short of maybe Red Hat AS or Novell Suse. Each to where it belongs.
They need to create a list of sites that are NON pornographic and then block access to everything else. That list will fit on a DVD and the other way it would likely require a small country to fit the firewall in. A whitelist would be so much easier.
Oh look, Google can have its safe search turned off and look for porn. Better block it.
Linux boosters never seem to grasp one very important thing:
Technically inclined Linux users and other nerds are NOT remotely representative of the majority of PC users in the USA or anywhere else on the planet.
Do desktop support for any length of time, compare honestly and without fanaticism and blind hatred of Microsoft the actuall requirements of both operating systems (FC4 and WinXP) and you will quickly see that FC4 is far and away the harder of the two.
I feel like a broken record but I will say it again in case someone is bothering to listen and be honest. Linux is currently about as difficult to use and administer and support as DOS 6.22 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was when it was new. Lots of text based configuration, lots of inconsistancies, lots of time taken to do anything, very frustrating for the average user, many of whom find installing AOL successfully on the first shot to be a total mystery.
These same exact things, even when cut by 5000% with Windows 95 first release were still cause for opprobrium leveled at Microsoft by all the haters. They celebrate Linux for the same exact reasons: hard is beautiful to today's geeks. My generation merely thought hard was a challenge, but should be made easy for others. The result was Windows and Macintosh. If today's geeks have their way, we will eventually be playing Doom 5 by way of a numeric keypad and having to input trigonometric calculations of shot trajectories and our desktop will be green phosphor CRTs.
Linux also is still relatively insecure by default because many people to avoid problems simply install everything all at once and end up with all sorts of things running that should not. Even a careful install requires good knowledge of TCP/IP-Internet networking and security for it to be proper. This issue of being open by default is what Windows has been time and again excoriated for but the same thing is ignored in Linux.
Linux is great. FC is wonderful, I use it myself and will install FC4 within a few days when I have time. It is NOT easier to install, it is NOT as well supported, it has TONS of IDIOTS providing a bad image, and those same IDIOTS keep trying to avoid dealing with the fact that they are totally counterproductive to the advancement of the platform and acceptance by society by their dogged refusal to approach Windows XP level of ease of installation, configuartion, and daily usage as well as wrapping it in their inane anti-corporate socialist politics.
Thankfully, the idiot nonsense about "free, free, free!" has been bypassed, serious analysis done, and corporate America has seen that all the zealot guff aside, Linux does have a place here and there for them. And with Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and others providing professional packages with professional support and well-heeled Unix veterans availible to work the trenches that they can make this work at a cost savings over previous contracts with people like SCO or HP or whoever.
But the consumer desktop? Please don't make me laugh. People who think an OS with ten thousand text configuration files in ten thousand directories with ten billion chances for fat fingering typos flying in the face of Occam's Razor will overtake an operating system with a major corporation load of support behind it and the most third party support on this entire planet are obviously letting emotion and dreaming get way ahead of logic and reality.
"Okay, it says back, next, and cancel. Which should I press to go to the next step?"
(Support tech bangs head on desk and thanks G-d he is not trying to talk this dipstick through configuring SSH...)
By all means feel free to donate your entire paycheck to charity and live at the mercy of others on welfare or in a commune. Me, I rather like owning my own home, driving my own car, putting food on my family's table, paying for my kid's college future, and saving for my retirement. I also would like to have disposable income and that means profit.
Profit != greed != envy != hatred. Such simplistic thinking removes human free will, human spirit, and accountability from the equation and is a cheap view of humanity. I think more of them than that.
...lots of metallic parts sticking out of you on a job that requires working near live electrical appliances of which some are equipped with high speed moving parts is a bad idea.
Not to mention turning yourself into two minute spot on That's Incredible by way of using your body as a canvas doesn't exactly scream "able to deal with standards and normality" which are good things to be able to convince interviewers of.
I don't even want to get into genital piercings and tattoos inside of lips.
Accepted in IT? More often adopted by geeks who are hoping to convince someone they're tough. I see very few genuine stereotypical tough body modders with any nerd cred. And a snake fighting an eagle taking up your whole chest is a lot more normal on a biker than let's say a penguin bending over and mooning Bill Gates on a support tech wearing coke bottle glasses, but either one doesn't exactly say "mentally stable and totally dependent" to me.
Grouse about superficial judgements all you like. The world doesn't work according to idealism.
and it really needs a DVD iso ASAP. Doing the CD shuffle is a colossal pain in the arse, especially if you do a custom install with less than everything. I usually do everything the first few times to test it and see what I can break or make work for production, but when it comes to a custom, a DVD is the only way to go.
Disk Druid was already fairly competent as a partition tool, even on multiboot systems so that wasn't hard on the last release.
Mysteriously, the sound system set itself to MUTE so if you didn't hear a test sound during initial config on first boot but it reported successfully finding your hardware, don't panic. Tell it you heard it and troubleshoot after when you get to Gnome.
Can hardly wait to see how long it takes to make this thing collapse in a gibbering heap of endless loops. I hope they've nailed some of the pesky bugs from FC3 and give me a new challenge because I'd use FC every day in my business if just a few problems went away. At least I rate it way higher than Ubuntu or anything else short of Red Hat ES.
Google is the number one search agent for me as more often than not with a short list of carefully chosen starting terms, and a little refinement from sleuthing, I can find what I need pretty quickly.
Do the search engines have to be so smart they find what we meant to find or even what we think we meant to find as opposed to what we literally asked for? They're tools, like library cards, not servants there to do our work for us and stop us from thinking about the search process. Are we complaining because this all isn't as brainless as AOL?
Conclusion: We have seen that there are many pairs (proxy/firewall servers and web servers) of
vulnerable systems. Particularly, we demonstrated that the following pairs are vulnerable:
PCCA
o IIS/5.0
o Tomcat 5.0.19 (probably with Tomcat 4.1.x as well)
Squid 2.5stable4 (Unix) and Squid 2.5stable5 for NT
o IIS/5.0
o WebLogic 8.1 SP1
Apache 2.0.45
o IIS/5.0
o IS/6.0
o Apache 1.3.29
o Apache 2.0.45
o WebSphere 5.1 and 5.0
o WebLogic 8.1 SP1
o Oracle9iAS web server 9.0.2
o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4
ISA/2000
o IIS/5.0
o Tomcat 5.0.19
o Tomcat 4.1.24
o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4
DeleGate 8.9.2
o IIS/6.0
o Tomcat 5.0.19
o Tomcat 4.1.24
o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4
Oracle9iAS cache server 9.0.2
o WebLogic 8.1 SP1
SunONE proxy server 3.6 SP4
o Tomcat 5.0.19
o Tomcat 4.1.24
o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4
FW-1 Web Intelligence kernel 55W beta (the IIS 48K technique probably works with R55W)
o IIS/5.0
This is a partial list - there are many pairs we did not test and there are likely many other web servers
and cache servers we did not test for lack of hardware and software. Of course, there are probably many
more similar techniques.
Yeah, really? I'd like to see a much broader list laid out, and preferably before it becomes another net disaster.
If this was strictly a Microsoft thing we'd be hearing cries for blood, or at least an app to check if your setup was vulnerable. Since it is much broader than that, if checking for this doesn't become part of a security toolkit, we may well wish it had.
Oh well. At least we got this much warning this much in advance. Anyone want to take bets on how long till some malware weasels make this a point and click thing in another script kiddie kit? My guess is before the security world makes a test app to check for it.
Eventually we may see electric motor equipped dumpsters that take themselves to the dump, with an empty coming in at the same time to replace it for the week. If not all the way to the dump, possibly to a nearby flatbed carrier that would take it down the highway and back from a designated meeting spot.
Larger trash bins on city streets equipped with wireless net cams could double as police eyes on the street and clean-up crew, and rudimentary robotic arms could pick up and dispose of garbage.
Your cat's automatic self-cleaning cat box could dump its own storage bin when full and then roll off to another spot, perhaps wherever the cat happens to be for its convenience.
Really cool would be a cubicle-less office with wide open floors and much smaller kioskified desk/chair assemblies that came over to you when you called, and could even carry you like an electric scooter to another area of the complex.
And of course we could use mall robots that were programmed with the current inventory of every store and could answer basic questions of people looking for something and direct them to it, roving around helping all day.
There's a lot we could do with this sort of technology. Combined with rudimentary AI and A-Life code, Internet based sharing of learning files including speaker-independent voice recognition (ask yourself why every voice recognition app hasn't been sharing your app's learned information with others and synthesizing a superior recognition database for years; no paranoids, I mean the raw recognition modelling database and not recorded words of yours), and proper useful tasks, we could see rapid successful adoption.
"So like, when you set out to overclock this thing, did you like, uh, intend to melt the desk with it or was that an accident?"
I was only joking when I mentioned this not that far back. Damn. Maybe I shouldn't joke about pyroclastic flows and pyrotechnic processors. They might do it.
"The new Intel ArcLamp. Sixteen sixty-four bit cores, each running at 4Ghz, with a maximum memory size of 17,179,869,184 gigabytes (availible pre-loaded with second mortgage approval). Frag your friends on Duke Nukem Forever when it is released (tentatively by the time we release the one hundred and twenty-eight core model running at 12Ghz). Run circles around your fellow SETI@Home users and even do quantum electrodynamics calculations to refine your spectral analysis at the same time. Compile code faster than the finished product will ever run on Windows. Toast bread. Cook whole sides of beef for your company picnic. Weld steel at your desk. Simulate fusion reactions by actually fusing tritium and deuterium (government contract purchasers only)."
What we need then is an app, probably to be written on Linux (what else?) and we could call it Slash'em or SlashDotThis. All it would have to do is contact the site acting like a web browser, identify itself as IE running Win and do the usual http get process as if someone were browsing. And do it again. And again. Multiply by a few thousand Slashdoters and we could put them down and keep them that way. How would they tell if we're spoofing or actually browsing? What are they going to do? Block almost every subnet and provider out there? Limit it to AOL's space?
I find it odd that so many experienced Linux people find dual-booting on the same drive Linux to be "risky". With System Commander and its partition program, or even with Disk Druid during the FC3 install process, it is a snap to do it and I've never had an issue.
But then I'm an experienced Windows user as well. I do note the majority of experienced Linux people are absolutely lost when it comes to Windows. Odd, because it is easier to use and less idiosyncratic than any variety of Unix. Point, click, done. Been multi-booting for a very long time now without a hitch, including OS/2 (it had a tendency to write things to FAT partitions that Windows/DOS couldn't read).
Sagan and his predecessors postulate that this one narrow band would be used by aliens since it doesn't get absorbed the way everything else would by nebulae and whatnot and we go spending millions on listening to it.
Meanwhile, even NASA admits that the speed of light may not be a constant, warp may be possible, so no one dares think that anyone advanced enough to make it work might choose some other method of communication that worked faster than some arbitrary wavelength of radio waves?
Hello, the people on Trek have been using "subspace" for decades on television. Did it occur to no one in science to ditch the old ideas and try checking out other methods of transmitting information, such as the workings of other kinds of electromagnetic waves? Did anyone pay attention to electrodynamics discoveries?
Anyone advanced enough to be worth speaking with is not going to be talking on the same port SETI is listening on to use an Internet comparison. It's like running Telnet and the other side is trying to use SSH.
And if geeks actually tended to keep their nails cut short and kept them clean, that might actually matter. Seriously guys, women don't care if you can bend your fingers like a rubber gag pencil. One scratch and a woman is likely to neuter you.
Now we're saying, "that's not a feature, it's a bug."
Remember, useless wonkiness == feature, useful function == bug. The goal is to make it not work any way you'd expect or want but instead the way some suit said it should.
No problem for me. I never got to use calculators in school, we were taught to calculate pi via interpolation on paper with pencils (not pens) to eight decimal places, taught to do trig to five places on paper, etc. In machining, old timers still tend to use paper and pencil and recheck their figures with, not a calculator, but someone else using a paper and pencil.
And by environment I mean the work being done using those passes as well as where the machines are versus the passwords written down.
For instance, I never write down my PGP passwords and take advantage of the long passphrase feature to use long but easily remembered phrases memorable only to me personally. Why would I leave a PGP password where anyone could get sensitive financial files decrypted?
For IM and such, I often do write them down, but keep them altogether in a place so safe, even I can rarely find it. : )
Okay, that was partly a joke. I have a secured storage place where I keep those passwords that are to things that aren't extremely important, but a pain in the backside to do the forgotten e-mail password routine when I restore a box.
I'd love OS-independent USB keys with password challenge ability to replace much of the passwords I have to remember.
While both have cords, mice lend themselves to seconday use as garottes due to the small size of the mouse, espcially mini USB models for laptops. Keyboards meanwhile have a definite edge as a blunt instrument, able to focus the full power along one edge or to spread the impact across the face of the bottom, or even cause the embedding of key shrapnel.
Other than these thoughts, WTF? is definitely going through my mind as in "WTF is this article for anyhow? Should be kiss Gnome and KDE goodbye and go back to text where we can commune with our keyboards? Should we do everything by mouse in a gui to strike back? Does this article have any point to it?
Now... back to the real uses of keyboards and mice...
Why bother doing all that when you could just spend 40 minutes installing one of the already user friendly enough Linux distros on the market
I'll repeat this again. The same people who confound desktop support on Windows, easily the single easiest to use desktop OS ever made, are the yardstick by which you judge "user friendly". People who can't install and run AOL 9.0 are the yardstick. Your mother who can't make the VCR stop flashing 12:00 is the yardstick. NOT GEEKS WHO THINK IN SHORTHAND AND BINARY.
Can we please stop this nonsense about using "user friendly" and "Linux" in the same sentence already? The only people who believe it are defining user==technowizard. If you don't believe me, then try moving a user from Windows XP Home to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and then support them for a month. If they can't make DOS work right then they aren't going to work Linux right either. Simple as that. It was funny at first, a veritable lolacaust, but it's getting tired and inane now.
The odds of people believing Linux will somehow overtake, replace, otherwise compete with Windows on the consumer and workplace desktop are inversely proportional to the odds of those people ever spending any time in programming and end-user customer support.
Linux is the fitting shoe being worn by an army of geeks who believe that difficult and esoteric is better than easy and obvious. Some of them are merely children who aren't old enough to have fought with DOS to get things like Doom and Syndicate to run properly. Most aren't old enough to have ever had to twiddle bits day in and day out and grow tired of it before the age of modern professionally supported GUIs. There are however a huge number who should definitely know better, especially those who did years in the Unix early days.
Do time in the end-user support trenches and you should quickly realize that they aren't ready for Linux and never will be as it currently exists. Of course, those who do realize this, instead of re-examining their position, will quickly conclude that the end-users are mentally retarded and they the Linux users are demigods of intellect who know better.
It's that arrogance in the Linux community regarding Windows and its users that is consistantly going to be its undoing. That inability to recognize that Linux was dumped out of the bowels of one of the most horrendous OS species ever to slouch across a computer, is a server OS and not an end-user desktop OS, and is at roughly the same stage of useability as DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 but instead is celebrated for precisely those reasons is mind boggling and rightfully so to the outside Windows workaday world.
It's like trying to make your people do a production run of seven thousand parts on a two-axis CNC retrofit Bridgeport with manual Z quill running on hand input codes and looking down on a five-axis center running from point and click cad/cam just because someone was throwing out the Bridgeports and you got them for free while the center would cost money being paid to, gasp, a corporation.
How dare anyone be expected to pay for something that works? That's awful. Better they should get their tools for free, even if they don't work right and have to in fact be made by scratch from blueprints noted in a language you don't read. Any manufacturing plant that tried to work their shop the way Linux works, would be put out of business by their local tech high school's junior class, never mind a competitor who had half a brain. "So we have to make all the shell mills, flute mills, lathe bits, and pretty much everything else from scratch before we start this work? And we have to finish in the same amount of time as if we had the centers you should have bought? Uh boss, come over here to the bandsaw and put your head down there under the blade for a minute. I want to show you something."
This statement comes from a programmer, software/hardware and network support tech, Linux and Windows user/dual-booter, former OS/2 user/supporter (I'm free, I'm free!). Not some Windows luser, no matter how much you want to think otherwise. Difficult is not beautiful, hand written configuration files for everything is moronic and asking for a cut from Occam's Razor, and free does not beat paid support. I'd rather keep chasing AV and AS definitions on Windows than trying to step the same people who can't execute "ipconfig/all" at a prompt on XP through the nail removal with pliers like torture of dependency resolution.
...being about con and insult, two favorite things of his.
That came to mind when I read this both for the consultants part and also for the fact that my intelligence has been insulted by an attempted con at trying to make me think Linux is ready to go anywhere near business desktops.
The same people who can't manage Windows, can barely use AOL, they're going to make work efficiently an OS which is the orgasmic manna for geeks firmly of the "difficult is beautiful" mindset? Yeah, right. Maybe the server department, but I don't think any of the middle aged women in my family, who've worked XP Pro, NT4, OS/2 Warp 3, DOS 6, DOS 5, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, on their company desktops are going to be remotely interested in another paradigm shifting without a clutch.
If I had to use Gnome or KDE at work all day, I'd want to strangle someone. If it was Red Hat or Fedora underneath, I would merely choke them to unconsciousness. If it was Debian, to a coma. If it was Gentoo, straight to the grave. BSD is right out.
Little did those who suffered in the early years of Unix ever realize that their kids would one day be masochists on a level undreamt of even by the Marquis de Sade and actually find Unix cool. "Waitaminute, you said DOS sucked because of text. Now you think Linux is 'da bomb'? Are you researching bombs now with the Internet?"
do you send jobs around the other side of the planet done over a globe spanning network to work with databases hosted on servers back in the west where the jobs used to be worked, and then send the westerners who used to do them to the far east to do the work there instead of simply doing it here where the servers and customers are in the first place.
Now we're not just outsourcing jobs, we're outsourcing the workers themselves. "Get packed Johnson and start developing a taste for curry. You're going back to your old job, but you're going to do it in Bangalore."
"But I'll still be paid as much as before and it won't cost you less."
Slashdot Mirror
1. Linux
Killing a fly with a shotgun for desktop power. Its server origins betray it and the best useage is for technically savvy users as a workstation OS in the higher-end sense. Really doesn't belong in front of people who can't make sense of Windows XP and think there is such a thing as an "any key".
2. BSD
Killing a fly with a tactical nuke with a flaky timer and faulty fuse for desktop usage. It shouldn't even be on a workstation. It shines on servers and is most at home there. Will burble along to itself happily if fed and cared for by a true BSD techie.
3. Windows
So easy to use, it is embarassing to admit to having family members or friends who cannot comprehend looking on the screen for the "start button" and instead scour their keyboard. Excellent for the casual user and Pro is great as a low end workstation OS unless to pack it with lots of hardware to eat. The server version is notoriously easy to compromise by teenagers with way too much free time on their hands. Point, click, throw dice, maybe crash, maybe work.
Each has its place. I would not use a naked Windows box on a public IP as a home LAN gatway, I'd use a carefully installed Linux distro like FC3 or 4. I'd not throw FC anything in front of my family, I'd give them WinXP home. I'd put BSD on a must-stay-up workhorse server over any common Linux package short of maybe Red Hat AS or Novell Suse. Each to where it belongs.
They need to create a list of sites that are NON pornographic and then block access to everything else. That list will fit on a DVD and the other way it would likely require a small country to fit the firewall in. A whitelist would be so much easier.
Oh look, Google can have its safe search turned off and look for porn. Better block it.
Linux boosters never seem to grasp one very important thing:
Technically inclined Linux users and other nerds are NOT remotely representative of the majority of PC users in the USA or anywhere else on the planet.
Do desktop support for any length of time, compare honestly and without fanaticism and blind hatred of Microsoft the actuall requirements of both operating systems (FC4 and WinXP) and you will quickly see that FC4 is far and away the harder of the two.
I feel like a broken record but I will say it again in case someone is bothering to listen and be honest. Linux is currently about as difficult to use and administer and support as DOS 6.22 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was when it was new. Lots of text based configuration, lots of inconsistancies, lots of time taken to do anything, very frustrating for the average user, many of whom find installing AOL successfully on the first shot to be a total mystery.
These same exact things, even when cut by 5000% with Windows 95 first release were still cause for opprobrium leveled at Microsoft by all the haters. They celebrate Linux for the same exact reasons: hard is beautiful to today's geeks. My generation merely thought hard was a challenge, but should be made easy for others. The result was Windows and Macintosh. If today's geeks have their way, we will eventually be playing Doom 5 by way of a numeric keypad and having to input trigonometric calculations of shot trajectories and our desktop will be green phosphor CRTs.
Linux also is still relatively insecure by default because many people to avoid problems simply install everything all at once and end up with all sorts of things running that should not. Even a careful install requires good knowledge of TCP/IP-Internet networking and security for it to be proper. This issue of being open by default is what Windows has been time and again excoriated for but the same thing is ignored in Linux.
Linux is great. FC is wonderful, I use it myself and will install FC4 within a few days when I have time. It is NOT easier to install, it is NOT as well supported, it has TONS of IDIOTS providing a bad image, and those same IDIOTS keep trying to avoid dealing with the fact that they are totally counterproductive to the advancement of the platform and acceptance by society by their dogged refusal to approach Windows XP level of ease of installation, configuartion, and daily usage as well as wrapping it in their inane anti-corporate socialist politics.
Thankfully, the idiot nonsense about "free, free, free!" has been bypassed, serious analysis done, and corporate America has seen that all the zealot guff aside, Linux does have a place here and there for them. And with Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and others providing professional packages with professional support and well-heeled Unix veterans availible to work the trenches that they can make this work at a cost savings over previous contracts with people like SCO or HP or whoever.
But the consumer desktop? Please don't make me laugh. People who think an OS with ten thousand text configuration files in ten thousand directories with ten billion chances for fat fingering typos flying in the face of Occam's Razor will overtake an operating system with a major corporation load of support behind it and the most third party support on this entire planet are obviously letting emotion and dreaming get way ahead of logic and reality.
"Okay, it says back, next, and cancel. Which should I press to go to the next step?"
(Support tech bangs head on desk and thanks G-d he is not trying to talk this dipstick through configuring SSH...)
By all means feel free to donate your entire paycheck to charity and live at the mercy of others on welfare or in a commune. Me, I rather like owning my own home, driving my own car, putting food on my family's table, paying for my kid's college future, and saving for my retirement. I also would like to have disposable income and that means profit.
Profit != greed != envy != hatred. Such simplistic thinking removes human free will, human spirit, and accountability from the equation and is a cheap view of humanity. I think more of them than that.
...lots of metallic parts sticking out of you on a job that requires working near live electrical appliances of which some are equipped with high speed moving parts is a bad idea.
Not to mention turning yourself into two minute spot on That's Incredible by way of using your body as a canvas doesn't exactly scream "able to deal with standards and normality" which are good things to be able to convince interviewers of.
I don't even want to get into genital piercings and tattoos inside of lips.
Accepted in IT? More often adopted by geeks who are hoping to convince someone they're tough. I see very few genuine stereotypical tough body modders with any nerd cred. And a snake fighting an eagle taking up your whole chest is a lot more normal on a biker than let's say a penguin bending over and mooning Bill Gates on a support tech wearing coke bottle glasses, but either one doesn't exactly say "mentally stable and totally dependent" to me.
Grouse about superficial judgements all you like. The world doesn't work according to idealism.
and it really needs a DVD iso ASAP. Doing the CD shuffle is a colossal pain in the arse, especially if you do a custom install with less than everything. I usually do everything the first few times to test it and see what I can break or make work for production, but when it comes to a custom, a DVD is the only way to go.
Disk Druid was already fairly competent as a partition tool, even on multiboot systems so that wasn't hard on the last release.
Mysteriously, the sound system set itself to MUTE so if you didn't hear a test sound during initial config on first boot but it reported successfully finding your hardware, don't panic. Tell it you heard it and troubleshoot after when you get to Gnome.
Can hardly wait to see how long it takes to make this thing collapse in a gibbering heap of endless loops. I hope they've nailed some of the pesky bugs from FC3 and give me a new challenge because I'd use FC every day in my business if just a few problems went away. At least I rate it way higher than Ubuntu or anything else short of Red Hat ES.
Can you say Dogpile?
Google is the number one search agent for me as more often than not with a short list of carefully chosen starting terms, and a little refinement from sleuthing, I can find what I need pretty quickly.
Do the search engines have to be so smart they find what we meant to find or even what we think we meant to find as opposed to what we literally asked for? They're tools, like library cards, not servants there to do our work for us and stop us from thinking about the search process. Are we complaining because this all isn't as brainless as AOL?
From TFA:
Conclusion: We have seen that there are many pairs (proxy/firewall servers and web servers) of vulnerable systems. Particularly, we demonstrated that the following pairs are vulnerable: PCCA o IIS/5.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 (probably with Tomcat 4.1.x as well) Squid 2.5stable4 (Unix) and Squid 2.5stable5 for NT o IIS/5.0 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 Apache 2.0.45 o IIS/5.0 o IS/6.0 o Apache 1.3.29 o Apache 2.0.45 o WebSphere 5.1 and 5.0 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 o Oracle9iAS web server 9.0.2 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 ISA/2000 o IIS/5.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 DeleGate 8.9.2 o IIS/6.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 Oracle9iAS cache server 9.0.2 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 SunONE proxy server 3.6 SP4 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 FW-1 Web Intelligence kernel 55W beta (the IIS 48K technique probably works with R55W) o IIS/5.0 This is a partial list - there are many pairs we did not test and there are likely many other web servers and cache servers we did not test for lack of hardware and software. Of course, there are probably many more similar techniques.
Yeah, really? I'd like to see a much broader list laid out, and preferably before it becomes another net disaster.
If this was strictly a Microsoft thing we'd be hearing cries for blood, or at least an app to check if your setup was vulnerable. Since it is much broader than that, if checking for this doesn't become part of a security toolkit, we may well wish it had.
Oh well. At least we got this much warning this much in advance. Anyone want to take bets on how long till some malware weasels make this a point and click thing in another script kiddie kit? My guess is before the security world makes a test app to check for it.
Eventually we may see electric motor equipped dumpsters that take themselves to the dump, with an empty coming in at the same time to replace it for the week. If not all the way to the dump, possibly to a nearby flatbed carrier that would take it down the highway and back from a designated meeting spot.
Larger trash bins on city streets equipped with wireless net cams could double as police eyes on the street and clean-up crew, and rudimentary robotic arms could pick up and dispose of garbage.
Your cat's automatic self-cleaning cat box could dump its own storage bin when full and then roll off to another spot, perhaps wherever the cat happens to be for its convenience.
Really cool would be a cubicle-less office with wide open floors and much smaller kioskified desk/chair assemblies that came over to you when you called, and could even carry you like an electric scooter to another area of the complex.
And of course we could use mall robots that were programmed with the current inventory of every store and could answer basic questions of people looking for something and direct them to it, roving around helping all day.
There's a lot we could do with this sort of technology. Combined with rudimentary AI and A-Life code, Internet based sharing of learning files including speaker-independent voice recognition (ask yourself why every voice recognition app hasn't been sharing your app's learned information with others and synthesizing a superior recognition database for years; no paranoids, I mean the raw recognition modelling database and not recorded words of yours), and proper useful tasks, we could see rapid successful adoption.
"Yeah?"
"So like, when you set out to overclock this thing, did you like, uh, intend to melt the desk with it or was that an accident?"
I was only joking when I mentioned this not that far back. Damn. Maybe I shouldn't joke about pyroclastic flows and pyrotechnic processors. They might do it.
"The new Intel ArcLamp. Sixteen sixty-four bit cores, each running at 4Ghz, with a maximum memory size of 17,179,869,184 gigabytes (availible pre-loaded with second mortgage approval). Frag your friends on Duke Nukem Forever when it is released (tentatively by the time we release the one hundred and twenty-eight core model running at 12Ghz). Run circles around your fellow SETI@Home users and even do quantum electrodynamics calculations to refine your spectral analysis at the same time. Compile code faster than the finished product will ever run on Windows. Toast bread. Cook whole sides of beef for your company picnic. Weld steel at your desk. Simulate fusion reactions by actually fusing tritium and deuterium (government contract purchasers only)."
Just give it time...
...the prize seems to be you keep your job and get to work the next project. O.o
Seems like people have a harder time doing things like this on purpose once a year than doing them by accident on a daily basis.
What we need then is an app, probably to be written on Linux (what else?) and we could call it Slash'em or SlashDotThis. All it would have to do is contact the site acting like a web browser, identify itself as IE running Win and do the usual http get process as if someone were browsing. And do it again. And again. Multiply by a few thousand Slashdoters and we could put them down and keep them that way. How would they tell if we're spoofing or actually browsing? What are they going to do? Block almost every subnet and provider out there? Limit it to AOL's space?
I find it odd that so many experienced Linux people find dual-booting on the same drive Linux to be "risky". With System Commander and its partition program, or even with Disk Druid during the FC3 install process, it is a snap to do it and I've never had an issue.
But then I'm an experienced Windows user as well. I do note the majority of experienced Linux people are absolutely lost when it comes to Windows. Odd, because it is easier to use and less idiosyncratic than any variety of Unix. Point, click, done. Been multi-booting for a very long time now without a hitch, including OS/2 (it had a tendency to write things to FAT partitions that Windows/DOS couldn't read).
Sagan and his predecessors postulate that this one narrow band would be used by aliens since it doesn't get absorbed the way everything else would by nebulae and whatnot and we go spending millions on listening to it.
Meanwhile, even NASA admits that the speed of light may not be a constant, warp may be possible, so no one dares think that anyone advanced enough to make it work might choose some other method of communication that worked faster than some arbitrary wavelength of radio waves?
Hello, the people on Trek have been using "subspace" for decades on television. Did it occur to no one in science to ditch the old ideas and try checking out other methods of transmitting information, such as the workings of other kinds of electromagnetic waves? Did anyone pay attention to electrodynamics discoveries?
Anyone advanced enough to be worth speaking with is not going to be talking on the same port SETI is listening on to use an Internet comparison. It's like running Telnet and the other side is trying to use SSH.
- we have *excellent* finger dexterity :-D
And if geeks actually tended to keep their nails cut short and kept them clean, that might actually matter. Seriously guys, women don't care if you can bend your fingers like a rubber gag pencil. One scratch and a woman is likely to neuter you.
Worse yet, The Sims.
"Dad, why are all these guys wearing leather on Castro Street?"
"Er..."
Now we're saying, "that's not a feature, it's a bug."
Remember, useless wonkiness == feature, useful function == bug. The goal is to make it not work any way you'd expect or want but instead the way some suit said it should.
No problem for me. I never got to use calculators in school, we were taught to calculate pi via interpolation on paper with pencils (not pens) to eight decimal places, taught to do trig to five places on paper, etc. In machining, old timers still tend to use paper and pencil and recheck their figures with, not a calculator, but someone else using a paper and pencil.
Besides, when I do use a calc, I only use Casios.
And by environment I mean the work being done using those passes as well as where the machines are versus the passwords written down.
For instance, I never write down my PGP passwords and take advantage of the long passphrase feature to use long but easily remembered phrases memorable only to me personally. Why would I leave a PGP password where anyone could get sensitive financial files decrypted?
For IM and such, I often do write them down, but keep them altogether in a place so safe, even I can rarely find it. : )
Okay, that was partly a joke. I have a secured storage place where I keep those passwords that are to things that aren't extremely important, but a pain in the backside to do the forgotten e-mail password routine when I restore a box.
I'd love OS-independent USB keys with password challenge ability to replace much of the passwords I have to remember.
So SourceForge now hosts a project to help me keep my ass? Cool. I was soooo afraid I'd lost it during the next project.
While both have cords, mice lend themselves to seconday use as garottes due to the small size of the mouse, espcially mini USB models for laptops. Keyboards meanwhile have a definite edge as a blunt instrument, able to focus the full power along one edge or to spread the impact across the face of the bottom, or even cause the embedding of key shrapnel.
Other than these thoughts, WTF? is definitely going through my mind as in "WTF is this article for anyhow? Should be kiss Gnome and KDE goodbye and go back to text where we can commune with our keyboards? Should we do everything by mouse in a gui to strike back? Does this article have any point to it?
Now... back to the real uses of keyboards and mice...
Why bother doing all that when you could just spend 40 minutes installing one of the already user friendly enough Linux distros on the market
I'll repeat this again. The same people who confound desktop support on Windows, easily the single easiest to use desktop OS ever made, are the yardstick by which you judge "user friendly". People who can't install and run AOL 9.0 are the yardstick. Your mother who can't make the VCR stop flashing 12:00 is the yardstick. NOT GEEKS WHO THINK IN SHORTHAND AND BINARY.
Can we please stop this nonsense about using "user friendly" and "Linux" in the same sentence already? The only people who believe it are defining user==technowizard. If you don't believe me, then try moving a user from Windows XP Home to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and then support them for a month. If they can't make DOS work right then they aren't going to work Linux right either. Simple as that. It was funny at first, a veritable lolacaust, but it's getting tired and inane now.
The odds of people believing Linux will somehow overtake, replace, otherwise compete with Windows on the consumer and workplace desktop are inversely proportional to the odds of those people ever spending any time in programming and end-user customer support.
/all" at a prompt on XP through the nail removal with pliers like torture of dependency resolution.
Linux is the fitting shoe being worn by an army of geeks who believe that difficult and esoteric is better than easy and obvious. Some of them are merely children who aren't old enough to have fought with DOS to get things like Doom and Syndicate to run properly. Most aren't old enough to have ever had to twiddle bits day in and day out and grow tired of it before the age of modern professionally supported GUIs. There are however a huge number who should definitely know better, especially those who did years in the Unix early days.
Do time in the end-user support trenches and you should quickly realize that they aren't ready for Linux and never will be as it currently exists. Of course, those who do realize this, instead of re-examining their position, will quickly conclude that the end-users are mentally retarded and they the Linux users are demigods of intellect who know better.
It's that arrogance in the Linux community regarding Windows and its users that is consistantly going to be its undoing. That inability to recognize that Linux was dumped out of the bowels of one of the most horrendous OS species ever to slouch across a computer, is a server OS and not an end-user desktop OS, and is at roughly the same stage of useability as DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 but instead is celebrated for precisely those reasons is mind boggling and rightfully so to the outside Windows workaday world.
It's like trying to make your people do a production run of seven thousand parts on a two-axis CNC retrofit Bridgeport with manual Z quill running on hand input codes and looking down on a five-axis center running from point and click cad/cam just because someone was throwing out the Bridgeports and you got them for free while the center would cost money being paid to, gasp, a corporation.
How dare anyone be expected to pay for something that works? That's awful. Better they should get their tools for free, even if they don't work right and have to in fact be made by scratch from blueprints noted in a language you don't read. Any manufacturing plant that tried to work their shop the way Linux works, would be put out of business by their local tech high school's junior class, never mind a competitor who had half a brain. "So we have to make all the shell mills, flute mills, lathe bits, and pretty much everything else from scratch before we start this work? And we have to finish in the same amount of time as if we had the centers you should have bought? Uh boss, come over here to the bandsaw and put your head down there under the blade for a minute. I want to show you something."
This statement comes from a programmer, software/hardware and network support tech, Linux and Windows user/dual-booter, former OS/2 user/supporter (I'm free, I'm free!). Not some Windows luser, no matter how much you want to think otherwise. Difficult is not beautiful, hand written configuration files for everything is moronic and asking for a cut from Occam's Razor, and free does not beat paid support. I'd rather keep chasing AV and AS definitions on Windows than trying to step the same people who can't execute "ipconfig
...being about con and insult, two favorite things of his.
That came to mind when I read this both for the consultants part and also for the fact that my intelligence has been insulted by an attempted con at trying to make me think Linux is ready to go anywhere near business desktops.
The same people who can't manage Windows, can barely use AOL, they're going to make work efficiently an OS which is the orgasmic manna for geeks firmly of the "difficult is beautiful" mindset? Yeah, right. Maybe the server department, but I don't think any of the middle aged women in my family, who've worked XP Pro, NT4, OS/2 Warp 3, DOS 6, DOS 5, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, on their company desktops are going to be remotely interested in another paradigm shifting without a clutch.
If I had to use Gnome or KDE at work all day, I'd want to strangle someone. If it was Red Hat or Fedora underneath, I would merely choke them to unconsciousness. If it was Debian, to a coma. If it was Gentoo, straight to the grave. BSD is right out.
Little did those who suffered in the early years of Unix ever realize that their kids would one day be masochists on a level undreamt of even by the Marquis de Sade and actually find Unix cool. "Waitaminute, you said DOS sucked because of text. Now you think Linux is 'da bomb'? Are you researching bombs now with the Internet?"
do you send jobs around the other side of the planet done over a globe spanning network to work with databases hosted on servers back in the west where the jobs used to be worked, and then send the westerners who used to do them to the far east to do the work there instead of simply doing it here where the servers and customers are in the first place.
Now we're not just outsourcing jobs, we're outsourcing the workers themselves. "Get packed Johnson and start developing a taste for curry. You're going back to your old job, but you're going to do it in Bangalore."
"But I'll still be paid as much as before and it won't cost you less."
"Don't confuse me with logic and common sense."
Tacking up photoshopped nudes of Margaret Thatcher on every wall in place of Mao would kill the sexual reproduction rate quicker.