Actually in Fedora (IIRC) you have that little red dot in the corner that tells you when there's updates to be installed. I don't know what Windows you're using, but that's what XP does - it tells me "Your updates have been downloaded! Click Here to install them!" or something like that. The only difference is in Fedora you might have to give it the admin password.
So it might not be fully automatic, but neither is Windows Update. Unless you set it to automatically install your updates without asking you, which you can do for both IIRC.
It depends if you're missing a set of parenthesis () or just one parenthesis.
If you use a set of parenthesis it will think you're calling a function. If you only have one parenthesis it'll spit out an error. If you have no parenthesis at all it will think you're calling a variable.
So you can have both a variable geteuid and a function geteuid(). I'm assuming this is what happened in this case, and calling the variable instead of the function was an ugly mistake but went unnoticed because the compiler didn't know it was wrong, and it looks right since they're so close.
"Oh sure, I'm trolling - but the point is this ISN'T updated on machines around the world. It's updated on a few machines that HAVE some sort of auto-update service (of which many required a fee with your "enterprise service license") and it may or may not be updated when you install a new machine."
All this time I was thinking you actually used Linux!
Red Hat and Fedora both have their own auto-updater. As does SuSE. And Ubuntu. And Mandriva. And Gentoo. And Linspire. And Xandros. And I'm sure many others do, too.
Red Hat/Fedora's is free. SuSE's is free. Mandriva's is free. Linspire's is free. Or at least they were back when I tried them. Not sure about the others - never tried them.
Even Slackware has SWareT, which isn't automatic but it will update your software - you could create a cron job or something.
Umm. . . next time you come across a word you don't understand, like "fiscally", look it up in the dictionary before you reply to prevent yourself from looking like a dumbass.
Parent was just saying that we in the OS community don't care about market share or how much money companies make off it - especially since most of us don't ever see a dime of it.
"PayPal is big, but google money could get just as big very quick."
Please.
People said this about Gmail and Google Talk, too. I'm guessing some of them said this about Google Pages. I'm using Gmail, but I still use AIM and my Google Page isn't in use.
Some people will switch, some won't. People will use whatever they prefer.
Don't be fooled. MS is NOT a victim of its success, it's a victim of its past.
MS played the game - and they won - but they didn't play fair. I read the bio - all they ever did was screw the other guy. They took the very idea of a GUI from Jobs (another programmer blurted out their secret that the cursors were handled by software, not hardware as Gates thought), they screwed IBM by originally allying with them to make OS/2, then pulling out of the project only to use the code and the UI for Windows. They screwed Apple by failing to ship Mac versions of their software.
In fact, Bill Gates coined the term "software piracy" when a minority of disgruntled users made copies of his Altair software. I guess some things never change - back then MS software was overpriced, now it still is.
More than likely they didn't know how to do it because they would've never even thought of doing it since they thought it was a bad idea, and therefore had never bothered learning how to do this.
And couldn't you just write a simple script to do this? Just make it listen for when you ping that machine or whatever, and then it opens a port, and then a couple seconds later it closes it.
3,000 deaths? That's what you call "psychological"?
The psychological effect 9/11 had was caused by these deaths. Had it been 300 it would've had no effect.
A dirty bomb would be pretty lucky if it caused more than 300 deaths (unless it was nuclear but that would ruin the point of the dirty bomb).
Yeah, the Holocaust had a psychological effect, too. Much more than 9/11, I should think. But I'd say that for the most part, the effect the Holocaust and 9/11 had was very physical. The Holocaust greatly affected the world's minority population, and 9/11 greatly affected not only the victims and their families, but also the US' economy. That's not a psychological effect.
"And this will limit the Federal government's ability to do what they want in what way?"
First of all, you said earlier that they already think a dirty bomb attack is likely. Information is freely available on dirty bombs on the 'net, so I'd think that when people google for what to do in the case of a dirty bomb attack, they'll also be able to read about the severity of a dirty bomb attack (relatively low).
Second of all, people know about dirty bombs. Who knows about how to destroy a huge building that was meant to withstand an attack by some of the biggest planes of its time? Much less with a plane? 9/11 was completely unexpected, and to those who knew alot about the Twin Towers, the idea would've seemed silly. In fact, I remember hearing about someone hitting the WTC with a smaller plane a few months before the attacks (although not as an attempt to destroy it IIRC), and it seems like no one else remembers this so either maybe I somehow dreamed of someone hitting the Towers before it happened, or it happened and was a nonevent and so everyone forgot about it.
But dirty bombs, on the other hand, are a threat that people know about and that many believe may happen. There's experts on the subject, and try as they might, the government can't block all of them. They might have some amount of control over TV networks and radio, and newspapers, but they don't have much over the Internet. That's worldwide - anyone from any country, or even anyone in the US if they know enough about encryption and proxies, can make this info available. Marshall Brain isn't the only person with info on dirty bombs on the 'net, I'm sure.
"Dismissing needs is probably the second cardinal sin of opensource developers."
The developers didn't dismiss your needs. You told/. your problems, not the developers. When there's a problem, don't come here to complain about it - go to a Linux help site where there may be someone who can help, and maybe even some developers who could fix the problem.
Plus, any dismissals might have been because others had better luck with ext2. I've had few problems with ext2. And I only stopped using ext2 just about a year ago.
Also, Linux has, in fact, had support for MANY other filesystems for quite some time now. It supports all the Unix filesystems, ext2, ext3, it's had ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS support for quite a while. . .
I've been using Linux for about 7 years now, and I've NEVER come across a "Linux snob" except for maybe a couple times.
If you don't mind me asking, where did you go for support? It sounds to me like you went to/. Well,/. is NOT a support site, it's a tech blog. A tech blog full of people who like to troll and flame people. They're not here to help you, they're here to read tech articles and ridicule other users. Yes, some of us will help you if we can, but most/. users. . . probably not. I'd say coming here for support is almost asking to be ridiculed.
You should go to a Linux help site if you want help with Linux. If you want (good, helpful, useful) Linux support you should go to http://www.linuxquestions.org/. That's where I've been going all these years.
My point exactly. People like Linux, and although some might dork around with other OSes, most of them don't drop Linux. They just do a dual-boot where they can boot into Linux or the other OS.
Although Darwin doesn't even install on my PC - I was going to try to dual-boot it, but no go - the installer kept freezing when it asked which HD to use.
Another way they try to do this is by looking for differences in sound levels. Some people might not notice it, but commercials are often louder than the shows you are watching. Don't ask me why - maybe they want you to know your show's not back yet so you have time for a bathroom break. Or so you can hear it over the dryer. I don't know.
FYI a "dirty bomb"'s impact is mostly psychological. It scares everybody, the thought of being around that nuclear waste, but it doesn't do much actual damage. Maybe some people will need to go to the hospital but - if they evacuate the area and get rid of their contaminated clothes - most of them can take a shower with clean water and they'll be fine.
Of course, the radiation would stick around and people couldn't live there for a while until all the radioactive material is either cleaned up or has deteriorated. But that's not too big of a deal - at least the people will stay alive.
The only channels I watch are Comedy Central and SciFi. And then I like to watch American Inventor when it's on (almost died laughing at some of the inventions!).
Here's the way I see it happening - company sells device forcing viewers to watch commercials - another company sells device to block these commercials - companies with devices forcing people to watch commercials sue company that makes device to block commercials . . . - some people who are stuck with the ad-forcer TV without the ad blocker learn what the inside of a TV looks like - the HARD way:)
Philips is being sued for the sum of $10,000,000,000 by a group of 1,000,000 disgruntled customers. After being forced to watch multiple ads in a row while channel surfing, they got angry and punched a hole through their television sets. Many of them had hospital bills of up to $5,000 due to static electricity from inside the television set.
Ah, good point! If Linux loses market share, I'll have a pay cut from $0/hr to $0/hr! Oh my god! That's HUGE!
Volunteers generally don't get paid. Duh! Yes, some of them do, but most of these only get paid by donations - or by outside companies. Hence why the Linux Kernel Archives run on donated servers, and why so many open-source projects ask for donations. They don't get paid.
That's what I hate about so many newcomers to the open-source movement. You think you know everything about it.
We didn't do all this free work in hopes of getting paid. It'd be nice if we did get paid, but if we don't that's fine.
Put your money where your mouth is, Frazbin. If you think we need so much market share, then go buy a commercial distro. Almost NONE of your money will go to the creators of the software. No matter how high Linux market share is, the programmers won't see a penny of it, other than a select few who are fairly well-known (such as Linus Torvalds).
Don't read into it too much. Dvorak isn't smart enough to realize that there's no way one open-source project can shut down another, very dedicated and well-known open-source project. Linux will always have its supporters - you can't shut it down.
"As far as I know, they are the only (stupid?) company to commercially support Linux platform"
Then you've got your head in your ass.
IBM. Novell. RedHat. Mandriva. Sun.
None of those names ring a bell?
"and have a DRM capable program since they (stupidly) care about your OS."
But they don't care about our ideals.
"One day, they remove "linux" from that drop down list, I wonder who loses."
They do.
Why do you think they ever started supporting Linux in the first place?
Because we've got a better OS than MS. They wanted an advantage over MS' Windows Media Player and the other commercial media players, so they came to us.
"After 3-5 unstable builds, your Mplayer supports half of the formats they currently give away for free. No worries."
Do you really think Mplayer is the only other media player? How about Xine? Kaffeine? Noatun?
"It becomes "microsoft". You know, the company which says "DIE" to other OSes they didn't ship themselves and still amazingly get supported more than Real networks."
MS doesn't say "DIE" to other OSes. They say "DIE" to other companies and their CEOs and throw a chair.
Say what you will about Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. They might be passionate, they might get angry, but at least they don't do such childish things as threatening competitors and throwing chairs.
Seriously, though - MS has never said "DIE" to another OS. Who have they killed off?
Apple's still alive and well. Be didn't die until Linux came around. SCO didn't start doing poorly until they changed from Caldera to SCO and left their Linux users in the dust. Novell and Sun are both still around, too, and doing reasonably well.
And DON'T say OS/2 because MS worked on it (that's probably why it sucked) and then backed out later, leaving IBM in the dust.
Slashdot Mirror
So it might not be fully automatic, but neither is Windows Update. Unless you set it to automatically install your updates without asking you, which you can do for both IIRC.
If you use a set of parenthesis it will think you're calling a function. If you only have one parenthesis it'll spit out an error. If you have no parenthesis at all it will think you're calling a variable.
So you can have both a variable geteuid and a function geteuid(). I'm assuming this is what happened in this case, and calling the variable instead of the function was an ugly mistake but went unnoticed because the compiler didn't know it was wrong, and it looks right since they're so close.
All this time I was thinking you actually used Linux!
Red Hat and Fedora both have their own auto-updater. As does SuSE. And Ubuntu. And Mandriva. And Gentoo. And Linspire. And Xandros. And I'm sure many others do, too.
Red Hat/Fedora's is free. SuSE's is free. Mandriva's is free. Linspire's is free. Or at least they were back when I tried them. Not sure about the others - never tried them.
Even Slackware has SWareT, which isn't automatic but it will update your software - you could create a cron job or something.
I could go for watching DOA:Extreme Beach Volleyball!
Parent was just saying that we in the OS community don't care about market share or how much money companies make off it - especially since most of us don't ever see a dime of it.
Please.
People said this about Gmail and Google Talk, too. I'm guessing some of them said this about Google Pages. I'm using Gmail, but I still use AIM and my Google Page isn't in use.
Some people will switch, some won't. People will use whatever they prefer.
MS played the game - and they won - but they didn't play fair. I read the bio - all they ever did was screw the other guy. They took the very idea of a GUI from Jobs (another programmer blurted out their secret that the cursors were handled by software, not hardware as Gates thought), they screwed IBM by originally allying with them to make OS/2, then pulling out of the project only to use the code and the UI for Windows. They screwed Apple by failing to ship Mac versions of their software.
In fact, Bill Gates coined the term "software piracy" when a minority of disgruntled users made copies of his Altair software. I guess some things never change - back then MS software was overpriced, now it still is.
I understood it. I started working with Linux almost 10 years ago, but I never had any problems to speak of.
And couldn't you just write a simple script to do this? Just make it listen for when you ping that machine or whatever, and then it opens a port, and then a couple seconds later it closes it.
The psychological effect 9/11 had was caused by these deaths. Had it been 300 it would've had no effect.
A dirty bomb would be pretty lucky if it caused more than 300 deaths (unless it was nuclear but that would ruin the point of the dirty bomb).
Yeah, the Holocaust had a psychological effect, too. Much more than 9/11, I should think. But I'd say that for the most part, the effect the Holocaust and 9/11 had was very physical. The Holocaust greatly affected the world's minority population, and 9/11 greatly affected not only the victims and their families, but also the US' economy. That's not a psychological effect.
"And this will limit the Federal government's ability to do what they want in what way?"
First of all, you said earlier that they already think a dirty bomb attack is likely. Information is freely available on dirty bombs on the 'net, so I'd think that when people google for what to do in the case of a dirty bomb attack, they'll also be able to read about the severity of a dirty bomb attack (relatively low).
Second of all, people know about dirty bombs. Who knows about how to destroy a huge building that was meant to withstand an attack by some of the biggest planes of its time? Much less with a plane? 9/11 was completely unexpected, and to those who knew alot about the Twin Towers, the idea would've seemed silly. In fact, I remember hearing about someone hitting the WTC with a smaller plane a few months before the attacks (although not as an attempt to destroy it IIRC), and it seems like no one else remembers this so either maybe I somehow dreamed of someone hitting the Towers before it happened, or it happened and was a nonevent and so everyone forgot about it.
But dirty bombs, on the other hand, are a threat that people know about and that many believe may happen. There's experts on the subject, and try as they might, the government can't block all of them. They might have some amount of control over TV networks and radio, and newspapers, but they don't have much over the Internet. That's worldwide - anyone from any country, or even anyone in the US if they know enough about encryption and proxies, can make this info available. Marshall Brain isn't the only person with info on dirty bombs on the 'net, I'm sure.
The developers didn't dismiss your needs. You told /. your problems, not the developers. When there's a problem, don't come here to complain about it - go to a Linux help site where there may be someone who can help, and maybe even some developers who could fix the problem.
Plus, any dismissals might have been because others had better luck with ext2. I've had few problems with ext2. And I only stopped using ext2 just about a year ago.
Also, Linux has, in fact, had support for MANY other filesystems for quite some time now. It supports all the Unix filesystems, ext2, ext3, it's had ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS support for quite a while. . .
Sure, ext3 and ReiserFS are better, but ext2 isn't that bad.
If you don't mind me asking, where did you go for support? It sounds to me like you went to /. Well, /. is NOT a support site, it's a tech blog. A tech blog full of people who like to troll and flame people. They're not here to help you, they're here to read tech articles and ridicule other users. Yes, some of us will help you if we can, but most /. users. . . probably not. I'd say coming here for support is almost asking to be ridiculed.
You should go to a Linux help site if you want help with Linux. If you want (good, helpful, useful) Linux support you should go to http://www.linuxquestions.org/. That's where I've been going all these years.
Although Darwin doesn't even install on my PC - I was going to try to dual-boot it, but no go - the installer kept freezing when it asked which HD to use.
Better yet, make a system that records the commercials and forces THEM to watch the commercials by e-mailing the commercials to them!
Another way they try to do this is by looking for differences in sound levels. Some people might not notice it, but commercials are often louder than the shows you are watching. Don't ask me why - maybe they want you to know your show's not back yet so you have time for a bathroom break. Or so you can hear it over the dryer. I don't know.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dirty-bomb.htm
Of course, the radiation would stick around and people couldn't live there for a while until all the radioactive material is either cleaned up or has deteriorated. But that's not too big of a deal - at least the people will stay alive.
Or so I've heard.
The only channels I watch are Comedy Central and SciFi. And then I like to watch American Inventor when it's on (almost died laughing at some of the inventions!).
Here's the way I see it happening :)
- company sells device forcing viewers to watch commercials
- another company sells device to block these commercials
- companies with devices forcing people to watch commercials sue company that makes device to block commercials
. . .
- some people who are stuck with the ad-forcer TV without the ad blocker learn what the inside of a TV looks like - the HARD way
Philips is being sued for the sum of $10,000,000,000 by a group of 1,000,000 disgruntled customers. After being forced to watch multiple ads in a row while channel surfing, they got angry and punched a hole through their television sets. Many of them had hospital bills of up to $5,000 due to static electricity from inside the television set.
sorry, didn't see your other comment there. . .
Volunteers generally don't get paid. Duh! Yes, some of them do, but most of these only get paid by donations - or by outside companies. Hence why the Linux Kernel Archives run on donated servers, and why so many open-source projects ask for donations. They don't get paid.
That's what I hate about so many newcomers to the open-source movement. You think you know everything about it.
We didn't do all this free work in hopes of getting paid. It'd be nice if we did get paid, but if we don't that's fine.
Put your money where your mouth is, Frazbin. If you think we need so much market share, then go buy a commercial distro. Almost NONE of your money will go to the creators of the software. No matter how high Linux market share is, the programmers won't see a penny of it, other than a select few who are fairly well-known (such as Linus Torvalds).
Don't read into it too much. Dvorak isn't smart enough to realize that there's no way one open-source project can shut down another, very dedicated and well-known open-source project. Linux will always have its supporters - you can't shut it down.
Then you've got your head in your ass.
IBM. Novell. RedHat. Mandriva. Sun.
None of those names ring a bell?
"and have a DRM capable program since they (stupidly) care about your OS."
But they don't care about our ideals.
"One day, they remove "linux" from that drop down list, I wonder who loses."
They do.
Why do you think they ever started supporting Linux in the first place?
Because we've got a better OS than MS. They wanted an advantage over MS' Windows Media Player and the other commercial media players, so they came to us.
"After 3-5 unstable builds, your Mplayer supports half of the formats they currently give away for free. No worries."
Do you really think Mplayer is the only other media player? How about Xine? Kaffeine? Noatun?
"It becomes "microsoft". You know, the company which says "DIE" to other OSes they didn't ship themselves and still amazingly get supported more than Real networks."
MS doesn't say "DIE" to other OSes. They say "DIE" to other companies and their CEOs and throw a chair.
Say what you will about Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. They might be passionate, they might get angry, but at least they don't do such childish things as threatening competitors and throwing chairs.
Seriously, though - MS has never said "DIE" to another OS. Who have they killed off?
Apple's still alive and well. Be didn't die until Linux came around. SCO didn't start doing poorly until they changed from Caldera to SCO and left their Linux users in the dust. Novell and Sun are both still around, too, and doing reasonably well.
And DON'T say OS/2 because MS worked on it (that's probably why it sucked) and then backed out later, leaving IBM in the dust.