Unfortunately many voters vote for the party not the policies that party stands on. Even though Australians are in general well educated and have a high standard of living many voters don't seem to want to be aware of anything that does not directly affect them. This is the same sort of attitude that all democratic societies have to confront and politicians are very astute in making sure that any so called packages are warped up in simple words (ie. "Think of your children") that sound reasonable to voters that aren't really interested in looking at the long term consequences.
While I was not born in Australia (Originally UK from Scottish and Irish parents) I have lived in Australia for over 40 years. Australian society is in general fairly easy going with the majority of people well educated and having a very good standard of living. As far as the structure of the Australian Government a good source is here.
There is a saying "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance", well this apples to all societies but when you have politicians or lobbyists who want to shape society in a way that conforms to what they believe in and push their beliefs on society then you are going to have problems. This is not to say that these people have bad intentions however to force one's beliefs on society is IMHO very wrong.
Since the Federal Labour party came to power it has been strongly influenced by what I would call "bible bashers" or "bible thumper's" if you like who seem to want to shape society in their own image since they seem to perceive that they know best. Basically no politician in their right mind wants to be seen as forcing rapid change so they make incremental changes coupled with sayings like "Think of the children" (lets censor the internet more) or (sigh!) "Speeding kills" (lets have more speed cameras) just to name a few.
Australian society is not any different to any other democratic society but like any democracy, people need to be aware of issues which could in the long run affect their freedoms and vote accordingly. At least we do have that right at the moment..
Unfortunately the Labour Party (Current Federal Government) seems to be strongly influenced by people who have the attitude of "We must protect the Children" or "We know what is best for this county" or some such "Holy than thou" ideas. I would be fairly sure that the people who dream up these ideas are genuinely concerned with improving society however you cannot improve society by forcing society to adopt your point of view. This reminds me of the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Since the document in question is so heavily censored you really have to ask what is are the Government afraid off. After-all it not as if the document could be classified as top secret and with so much censorship the mind boggles.
Since I am a swinging voter I will not be voting for Labour this coming Federal election the problem is I am not to keen on the opposition either.
You can fully "undress" it, down to the bare basics, and it is incredibly stable. You'll definitely run it from a 4 Gb USB stick - and your students, most importantly, will LEARN from it.
I don't think just pushing your favourite distribution is appropriate here, you really need to breakdown the myriad of Linux distributions to the basics and then let the user decide. Nearly all Linux distributions are based on Debian, Redhat and SuSE so I have given a very brief description of each group and their most popular distributions:
Debian - very customisable.
Ubuntu - Based on Debian. Usually the best when coming from a Microsoft environment.
Redhat - Commercial distribution.
CenTOS -A free supported clone of Redhat.
Fedora - This is fairly bleeding edge but is good if you are predominately using Redhat distributions.
SuSE - Commercial distribution from Novel.
OpenSuSE - Free well supported distribution IMHO looks nicer than Fedora although IMHO Fedora is better supported.
All the above allow you to run the following window managers right out of the box if you want:
KDE - Very customisable window/session manager.
Gnome - Excellent customisation however IMHO not as good as KDE.
Deciding on a window/session manager (there are others such as "xfce") is a personal choice so try them and decide which is best for you. When you run a window/session manager basically your Linux distribution is actually hidden from you unless you are updating packages or running specific distribution commands. The one thing about Linux is choice be is a full featured distribution taking up to 10GB to one that will easily run from a 1GB pen drive.
It must be noted that the Linux kernel is common to all Linux distributions the only things that may be different are some modules which actually can be propriety in some instances.
For further reading and most likely confusion take a look at the following .
Thing is: You can only be expert in ONE of them. Period.
You can easily be expert or well informed in more than one field.
I for one, choose CS. Waaayy more interesting, and compared to the nerdiness level of statistics, we look like Joe Sixpack coming to the club in his sports car, with two girls in the back.;)
If I want to do statistics, I can always hire someone.
I suppose if I really want programming done I can hire someone. There problem you have here is trusting the person you hired to have done their job properly so you want to have some understanding of what is actually required.:)
If you are a consultant you have to have an understanding of all the fundamentals that are required to get the job done. You don't have to be an expert in all fields but you have to be able to communicate with the people that are giving input and if that requires learning what can sometimes be a difficult field then so be it.
Any type of computing requires knowledge of "Numerical Analysis", "Statistics and Probability", "Logical thought" and surprisingly "Art". You also should be open to input from a wide variety of sometimes conflicting ideas and have to the ability to determine what is the correct solution rather than just a solution as well as having the ability to reason and sometimes compromise with all parties. This is actually called human communication (sometimes diplomacy) and no one would say this is an easy thing to do.
The ext3 file-system is widely supported on all Linux systems (well over 100 million machines) and it is free to use by any manufacturer so there is little if any development costs. Any USB or Memory card can be formatted with an ext2, ext3 or even ext4 file-system from just about any Linux distribution. The mke2fs (there are others) command that can do this is only 65kB in size.
Even if you need to transfer data from an ext3 file-system to an MS Windows machine you can always get software that can read that file-system. Here is a MS Windows ext2/3 reader if you don't believe me. Even Mac's have software that can read and format ext3 file-systems. So were are the development costs since the products are already available and are, shock/horror free?
Convincing PC administrators to install the appropriate software to read say an ext3 file-system is easy, it would go something like this. "We require software that can read ext3 file-systems. Here is a change request that is signed by the appropriate people to install the appropriate software". This normally works in the corporate world and it is not a problem for a vendor of a product that uses an ext3 file-system to provide the reader for the average PC home user. They do that now anyway for printers and many other peripherals so the same can be done for storage devices.
The only thing holding back manufacturers from using unencumbered file-systems are Microsoft apologists. It really is quite sad when you think about it.
I very much doubt that the "Industry" is moving to BSD licenses however if the the Industry want's to produce packages for Linux and there is huge money to be made doing this then they are going to have to get use to working with the GPL otherwise they may as well produce packages for MS Windows and all that can entail.
From Fedora 12
Total packages on my system:
# rpm -qa |wc -l
1687
Total packages under the BSD license:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep BSD|wc -l
169
I think the following shows how BSD licenses are moving to the GPL:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep BSD|grep -v GPL|wc -l
121
Total packages under the GPL (note LGPL is included under this as well):
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep GPL|wc -l
1108
You can get more creative and get further statistics such as GPL3:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep GPLv3|wc -l
99
Also I did not take into account mixed licenses and other licenses such as Samba and MySQL, with the above commands you can get some interesting results.
I am quite sure that if you look at Debian distributions you are going to see similar results although you will have to use the Debian package manager to do this.
You have a point about Linux users but the Mac users, especially the switchers are a fickle bunch who would happily go back to Windows if it meant their MSN Messenger would work the same as it used to.
Well I use MSN Messenger and I don't run a Microsoft OS on my corporate machine but Fedora 11. What I use is "Pidgin" with the Messenger plug-in. In addition I use Kmail and Open Office and these work quite well with everyone who has locked themselves into MS Windows, in fact they can't tell the difference when I communicate with them. I do run MS Windows XP under virtualisation but only because there are some things that the company locked themselves into that I need to use however most of what I use is MS Windows free. For home use I don't run MS Windows at all.
Personally I only recommend dual booting for the first month and then make a decision to move to Linux with MS Windows being virtualised for those jobs that are MS Windows specific (ie. games) although you should have at the very least 3 to 4 GB of memory for this (dual or quad core CPU's are also an advantage) or just give up and just stick with MS Windows.
Are you sure people are upgrading from XP to MS Windows 7?
Take a look at the upgrade guide, the only way you can "upgrade" MS Windows XP to MS Windows 7 is to install MS Windows 7 or upgrade XP to Vista then upgrade to MS Windows 7. This is not a cheap exercise since an installable version of MS Windows 7 is more expensive than an upgrade and lets be honest here how many Joe six-packs know how to do an install of MS Windows 7 much less decide on which of the versions to pick.
This story is rather pointless since in most first world countries if you purchase a PC (laptop or desktop) then you will have MS Windows 7 installed on it. What would be more interesting is the percentage of people who then install a Linux distribution. For the article to state that Linux is 1% of the desktop is really drinking the Microsoft Cool-aid or believing people who can't be bothered doing some simple research. World wide Linux is very much more than 1% of the desktop and exceeds Microsoft in the server market and embedded systems.
I believe there is a place for software patents, but I also think software patents are vastly over-issued. For some reason patent officials seem to think "on a computer" is not obvious and deserves a patent.
I respectively disagree. All software is based on "Numerical Analysis" which is a branch of mathematics which in itself can not or should I say "should not" be patentable.
I also think that if Patents apply to compiled software, copyright should only apply to the source code. If we consider software a "work of art", then it should not be patentable at all.
For source code it would be better under a License that is enforcible. You can take out a copyright on a suite of software which would effectively prevent people calling their functionally equivalent software the same as yours. Actually the best way to make money from software is to provide support and companies like Redhat and Novel are doing quite well even thought they provide the source for most of their products.
All software can be considered not only part of mathematics but also a "work of art" especially if there is any graphical output which could be considered copyright and therefore not patentable. An excellent example are "fonts" which can only be protected under copyright but not under patent, however this still allows someone to bring out a font which is functionally equivalent to the copyright font as long as they call said font a different name unless there is an agreement with the copyright holder.
Using the Lawyer speak or jargon from the patent is meaningless however this "drivel" actually describes in great but muddy detail what sudo can be made to do. Graphical Interface - oh please I could knock one up in about an hour or so using Tk/Tcl. I find this patent so stupid it should be laughed at and I particularly love the part were Microsoft has only gone back to 1998 as if the 1980's did not exist.
Occasionally when I try to run a command that requires su privileges on my Kubuntu box, the system prompts me to enter my sudo password.
Setting up sudo to allow the user to run any task which requires privilege is almost the same of logging in as root. If you are the system admin then you have the root password so sudo is pointless. The idea of sudo is to provide certain users with the ability to run specific "set" tasks requiring elevated privileges without them needing to know the root password. This also means not allowing users to use "sudo" to install, copy, move, remove, edit... etc as root.
When people ask for sudo access which would give them full root accerss I politely decline, if they persist then they can put their request in writing and submit it to management to which I will reply to by pointing at the companies' own security policy. If said company does not care then I want in writing for my people to be absolved of any responsibility that may result if there is a stuff-up made by the user.
I am quite sure I am going to get many people try to point out the advantages of using sudo to install. To which I will reply "rubbish" and I am being polite here. What I have stated still stands. I could concede some more dangerous elevated commands being run under sudo providing a password is required, but not having to provide a password is just plain stupid which is again just like logging in as root.
It must be noted I am not against sudo if used correctly but I am against setting up in sudo a user that will have full root privileges and especially one where a password is not required (you actually can do this in sudo).
There needs to be *something* which protects software developers from having their products ripped off and all their innovative functionality duplicated. Exactly how that *something* should work is best left to people far more expert in the field than me...but before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
There are plenty of somethings that can protect software developers:
Copyright
Proprietary software. In other words don't publish your code.
Licences such as GPL, LGPL, BSD (if you want to give it away), Creative Commons,... etc
I am sure this can easily be added to without resorting to stupid software patents, which IMHO don't contribute to innovation in developing software. The only people that stand to gain from software patents are the Lawyers and patent Trolls.
Why am I so down on Software Patents? Well try to read one sometime, although be sure to have plenty of headache pills and a couple of belts of the hard stuff also helps. It is almost impossible for a professional person to understand the description let alone the Lawyer who wrote it.:)
I have set up my Fedora Linux machine such that non technical wife does not need to know the root password. Since I have been using Linux as my desktop (over three years) I don't configure "sudo" either since my wife does not need to do anything on my machine that requires elevated privileges.
Using "sudo" should only be used when delegating certain administration responsibilities to specific people and in the majority of cases should require a user password. When allowing "sudo" privileges a great deal of thought must always be given into what commands are going to be allowed and those commands should always be defined with their fully qualified path. You don't need "sudo" when you know the root password but "With great power comes great responsibility" (sorry could not resist).
Allowing users using "sudo" to run commands like "cp", "mv" and "rm" to name just a few is just plain stupid and I would suggest the System Admin who allowed that should be forced back to using MS windows:).
But for that matter, Linux doesn't have malware only because it's desktop share is next to nothing (not the same amount atleast, there are Linux viruses out too). Mac OSX has been getting more and more viruses lately as it's marketshare has been growing. So would Linux aswell if it ever gained more users.
I suppose 20 to 60 million Linux desktops world wide is next to nothing and I have two of them, however the main reason why Linux distributions are difficult to write viruses for is because most distributions insist on you working as a normal user and not with elevated privileges like you have with MS Windows distributions. Writing a virus for Linux or Unix for that matter is easy however it requires the user to deliberately run the mall-ware and running it with normal user privileges is next to useless. Ok you stuff up that user but you have not rooted the machine. Another reason why Linux distributions are not popular with mall-ware writers is the fact that Linux users are normally more computer literate and it is much more of a effort and risk targeting Linux since there are many distributions and you do have very smart people who would take it as a challenge to track down the writers of the mall-ware. This is not something the average mall-ware writer wants.
Actually Linux is extremely popular with mall-ware writers since it is an excellent platform to develop mall-ware on. If you were a mall-ware developer why would you want to target Linux when it is so much easier to target MS Windows? As for targeting Mac's. Even though Mac's run a Unix OS the easiest way to compromise a user (Linux is vulnerable here as well) is to use social networking in that the black-hat tries to get personal information from the unsuspecting user by pandering to social worries such as "This is YOUR_BANK, we need to check our customers security. Please send us your financial details and relevant passwords so we can check that your account has not been compromised. Please don't send any details via normal email or registered post, login the the following URL and enter your details". Who would fall for something like that? I don't think that many but you only need 0.001% of the total population of computer users and the scammer has rich pickings.
Try this forum, I followed the configuration method as detailed in by the person in the forum for pulseaudio and it worked on my machine. Baring that try a search on "pulseaudio howto". Ok I am repeating myself in this discussion but the configuration as detailed (it is very quick and simple) actually worked for me. It could also work for you so at least give it a try.
Pulseaudio has never quite worked right for me, either, and I use Fedora. In my case, audio either works or it doesn't, and I haven't quite been able to nail down a consistent pattern.
Try this forum . Pulseaudio is now working fine for me.
Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.
on
Fedora 12 Beta Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
A friend of mine downloaded Fedora 12 Beta and found it would not boot on his laptop. I tried the same CD on mine and it worked without any issues. It is rather odd considering my Fedora 11 DVD works on both machines so there could be a problem with his laptop reading CD's although my laptop is over 2 years older than his.. To say Fedora is shit because the media does not boot in your machine is not trying to analyse the issue and deserving the label of "troll".
The most annoying issue with Fedora 11 was KDE 4 which IMHO should have been a beta or even an alpha. I did persevere for a short while but I had to revert my family to Gnome until KDE 4.3 came out. Yes KDE is different to KDE 3 but I rather like KDE 4.3 now.
Another issue I found was pulseaudio (we have discussed this recently) and found it annoying to the point were I actually removed it. Only yesterday I was doing a search on pulseaudio and I noticed the following and followed the procedure. It only took a few minutes and now my pulseaudio actually works.
Basically the above were the only issues I had with Fedora 11 and I have installed it as the primary OS on my company laptop with WinXP Sp2 under virtualisation (I am allowed to do this although MS Windows with company bits was an absolute PITA) so I am looking forward to Fedora 12 which I will install on my home PC first.
When you download a game to the PS3, Xbox360 or even the Wii you have the game effectively locked to your console. This is the main reason why I don't like this style of game purchase since you only own the game with your console, you cannot actually give it to a friend or even sell it unless you sell or loan it with your console. I still prefer media be it Bluray, CD or DVD and don't mind paying for it if there is only a few dollars in difference and once I am done with the game I can loan or even sell it, with downloadable games you cannot do that.
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Unfortunately many voters vote for the party not the policies that party stands on. Even though Australians are in general well educated and have a high standard of living many voters don't seem to want to be aware of anything that does not directly affect them. This is the same sort of attitude that all democratic societies have to confront and politicians are very astute in making sure that any so called packages are warped up in simple words (ie. "Think of your children") that sound reasonable to voters that aren't really interested in looking at the long term consequences.
While I was not born in Australia (Originally UK from Scottish and Irish parents) I have lived in Australia for over 40 years. Australian society is in general fairly easy going with the majority of people well educated and having a very good standard of living. As far as the structure of the Australian Government a good source is here .
There is a saying "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance", well this apples to all societies but when you have politicians or lobbyists who want to shape society in a way that conforms to what they believe in and push their beliefs on society then you are going to have problems. This is not to say that these people have bad intentions however to force one's beliefs on society is IMHO very wrong.
Since the Federal Labour party came to power it has been strongly influenced by what I would call "bible bashers" or "bible thumper's" if you like who seem to want to shape society in their own image since they seem to perceive that they know best. Basically no politician in their right mind wants to be seen as forcing rapid change so they make incremental changes coupled with sayings like "Think of the children" (lets censor the internet more) or (sigh!) "Speeding kills" (lets have more speed cameras) just to name a few.
Australian society is not any different to any other democratic society but like any democracy, people need to be aware of issues which could in the long run affect their freedoms and vote accordingly. At least we do have that right at the moment..
Unfortunately the Labour Party (Current Federal Government) seems to be strongly influenced by people who have the attitude of "We must protect the Children" or "We know what is best for this county" or some such "Holy than thou" ideas. I would be fairly sure that the people who dream up these ideas are genuinely concerned with improving society however you cannot improve society by forcing society to adopt your point of view. This reminds me of the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Since the document in question is so heavily censored you really have to ask what is are the Government afraid off. After-all it not as if the document could be classified as top secret and with so much censorship the mind boggles.
Since I am a swinging voter I will not be voting for Labour this coming Federal election the problem is I am not to keen on the opposition either.
Actually for Universities "Scientific Linux" (especially in Europe) is very popular.
You can fully "undress" it, down to the bare basics, and it is incredibly stable. You'll definitely run it from a 4 Gb USB stick - and your students, most importantly, will LEARN from it.
I don't think just pushing your favourite distribution is appropriate here, you really need to breakdown the myriad of Linux distributions to the basics and then let the user decide. Nearly all Linux distributions are based on Debian, Redhat and SuSE so I have given a very brief description of each group and their most popular distributions:
Debian - very customisable.
Ubuntu - Based on Debian. Usually the best when coming from a Microsoft environment.
Redhat - Commercial distribution.
CenTOS -A free supported clone of Redhat.
Fedora - This is fairly bleeding edge but is good if you are predominately using Redhat distributions.
SuSE - Commercial distribution from Novel.
OpenSuSE - Free well supported distribution IMHO looks nicer than Fedora although IMHO Fedora is better supported.
All the above allow you to run the following window managers right out of the box if you want:
KDE - Very customisable window/session manager.
Gnome - Excellent customisation however IMHO not as good as KDE.
Deciding on a window/session manager (there are others such as "xfce") is a personal choice so try them and decide which is best for you. When you run a window/session manager basically your Linux distribution is actually hidden from you unless you are updating packages or running specific distribution commands. The one thing about Linux is choice be is a full featured distribution taking up to 10GB to one that will easily run from a 1GB pen drive.
It must be noted that the Linux kernel is common to all Linux distributions the only things that may be different are some modules which actually can be propriety in some instances.
For further reading and most likely confusion take a look at the following .
Thing is: You can only be expert in ONE of them. Period.
You can easily be expert or well informed in more than one field.
I for one, choose CS. Waaayy more interesting, and compared to the nerdiness level of statistics, we look like Joe Sixpack coming to the club in his sports car, with two girls in the back. ;)
If I want to do statistics, I can always hire someone.
I suppose if I really want programming done I can hire someone. There problem you have here is trusting the person you hired to have done their job properly so you want to have some understanding of what is actually required.:)
If you are a consultant you have to have an understanding of all the fundamentals that are required to get the job done. You don't have to be an expert in all fields but you have to be able to communicate with the people that are giving input and if that requires learning what can sometimes be a difficult field then so be it.
Any type of computing requires knowledge of "Numerical Analysis", "Statistics and Probability", "Logical thought" and surprisingly "Art". You also should be open to input from a wide variety of sometimes conflicting ideas and have to the ability to determine what is the correct solution rather than just a solution as well as having the ability to reason and sometimes compromise with all parties. This is actually called human communication (sometimes diplomacy) and no one would say this is an easy thing to do.
Everything I needed to know about statistics I learned playing poker.
Err no! what you are talking about there is "Probability" not "Statistics". There is a difference :)
The UDF file-system is for Optical Storage not magnetic or even solid state storage. So this is not really a contender.
The ext3 file-system is widely supported on all Linux systems (well over 100 million machines) and it is free to use by any manufacturer so there is little if any development costs. Any USB or Memory card can be formatted with an ext2, ext3 or even ext4 file-system from just about any Linux distribution. The mke2fs (there are others) command that can do this is only 65kB in size.
Even if you need to transfer data from an ext3 file-system to an MS Windows machine you can always get software that can read that file-system. Here is a MS Windows ext2/3 reader if you don't believe me. Even Mac's have software that can read and format ext3 file-systems. So were are the development costs since the products are already available and are, shock/horror free?
Convincing PC administrators to install the appropriate software to read say an ext3 file-system is easy, it would go something like this. "We require software that can read ext3 file-systems. Here is a change request that is signed by the appropriate people to install the appropriate software". This normally works in the corporate world and it is not a problem for a vendor of a product that uses an ext3 file-system to provide the reader for the average PC home user. They do that now anyway for printers and many other peripherals so the same can be done for storage devices.
The only thing holding back manufacturers from using unencumbered file-systems are Microsoft apologists. It really is quite sad when you think about it.
I very much doubt that the "Industry" is moving to BSD licenses however if the the Industry want's to produce packages for Linux and there is huge money to be made doing this then they are going to have to get use to working with the GPL otherwise they may as well produce packages for MS Windows and all that can entail.
From Fedora 12
Total packages on my system:
# rpm -qa |wc -l
1687
Total packages under the BSD license:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep BSD|wc -l
169
I think the following shows how BSD licenses are moving to the GPL:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep BSD|grep -v GPL|wc -l
121
Total packages under the GPL (note LGPL is included under this as well):
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep GPL|wc -l
1108
You can get more creative and get further statistics such as GPL3:
# rpm -qa --queryformat %{License}"\n"|sort|grep GPLv3|wc -l
99
Also I did not take into account mixed licenses and other licenses such as Samba and MySQL, with the above commands you can get some interesting results.
I am quite sure that if you look at Debian distributions you are going to see similar results although you will have to use the Debian package manager to do this.
LOL, I almost thought this was serious until I hit the part about the MS Shared Source license.
Yes I was almost going to reply when I noticed "AC" + "huge quote" and came to the conclusion of "troll" :)
You have a point about Linux users but the Mac users, especially the switchers are a fickle bunch who would happily go back to Windows if it meant their MSN Messenger would work the same as it used to.
Well I use MSN Messenger and I don't run a Microsoft OS on my corporate machine but Fedora 11. What I use is "Pidgin" with the Messenger plug-in. In addition I use Kmail and Open Office and these work quite well with everyone who has locked themselves into MS Windows, in fact they can't tell the difference when I communicate with them. I do run MS Windows XP under virtualisation but only because there are some things that the company locked themselves into that I need to use however most of what I use is MS Windows free. For home use I don't run MS Windows at all.
Personally I only recommend dual booting for the first month and then make a decision to move to Linux with MS Windows being virtualised for those jobs that are MS Windows specific (ie. games) although you should have at the very least 3 to 4 GB of memory for this (dual or quad core CPU's are also an advantage) or just give up and just stick with MS Windows.
Are you sure people are upgrading from XP to MS Windows 7?
Take a look at the upgrade guide, the only way you can "upgrade" MS Windows XP to MS Windows 7 is to install MS Windows 7 or upgrade XP to Vista then upgrade to MS Windows 7. This is not a cheap exercise since an installable version of MS Windows 7 is more expensive than an upgrade and lets be honest here how many Joe six-packs know how to do an install of MS Windows 7 much less decide on which of the versions to pick.
This story is rather pointless since in most first world countries if you purchase a PC (laptop or desktop) then you will have MS Windows 7 installed on it. What would be more interesting is the percentage of people who then install a Linux distribution. For the article to state that Linux is 1% of the desktop is really drinking the Microsoft Cool-aid or believing people who can't be bothered doing some simple research. World wide Linux is very much more than 1% of the desktop and exceeds Microsoft in the server market and embedded systems.
I believe there is a place for software patents, but I also think software patents are vastly over-issued. For some reason patent officials seem to think "on a computer" is not obvious and deserves a patent.
I respectively disagree. All software is based on "Numerical Analysis" which is a branch of mathematics which in itself can not or should I say "should not" be patentable.
I also think that if Patents apply to compiled software, copyright should only apply to the source code. If we consider software a "work of art", then it should not be patentable at all.
For source code it would be better under a License that is enforcible. You can take out a copyright on a suite of software which would effectively prevent people calling their functionally equivalent software the same as yours. Actually the best way to make money from software is to provide support and companies like Redhat and Novel are doing quite well even thought they provide the source for most of their products.
All software can be considered not only part of mathematics but also a "work of art" especially if there is any graphical output which could be considered copyright and therefore not patentable. An excellent example are "fonts" which can only be protected under copyright but not under patent, however this still allows someone to bring out a font which is functionally equivalent to the copyright font as long as they call said font a different name unless there is an agreement with the copyright holder.
Using the Lawyer speak or jargon from the patent is meaningless however this "drivel" actually describes in great but muddy detail what sudo can be made to do. Graphical Interface - oh please I could knock one up in about an hour or so using Tk/Tcl. I find this patent so stupid it should be laughed at and I particularly love the part were Microsoft has only gone back to 1998 as if the 1980's did not exist.
Occasionally when I try to run a command that requires su privileges on my Kubuntu box, the system prompts me to enter my sudo password.
Setting up sudo to allow the user to run any task which requires privilege is almost the same of logging in as root. If you are the system admin then you have the root password so sudo is pointless. The idea of sudo is to provide certain users with the ability to run specific "set" tasks requiring elevated privileges without them needing to know the root password. This also means not allowing users to use "sudo" to install, copy, move, remove, edit ... etc as root.
When people ask for sudo access which would give them full root accerss I politely decline, if they persist then they can put their request in writing and submit it to management to which I will reply to by pointing at the companies' own security policy. If said company does not care then I want in writing for my people to be absolved of any responsibility that may result if there is a stuff-up made by the user.
I am quite sure I am going to get many people try to point out the advantages of using sudo to install. To which I will reply "rubbish" and I am being polite here. What I have stated still stands. I could concede some more dangerous elevated commands being run under sudo providing a password is required, but not having to provide a password is just plain stupid which is again just like logging in as root.
It must be noted I am not against sudo if used correctly but I am against setting up in sudo a user that will have full root privileges and especially one where a password is not required (you actually can do this in sudo).
There needs to be *something* which protects software developers from having their products ripped off and all their innovative functionality duplicated. Exactly how that *something* should work is best left to people far more expert in the field than me...but before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
There are plenty of somethings that can protect software developers:
I am sure this can easily be added to without resorting to stupid software patents, which IMHO don't contribute to innovation in developing software. The only people that stand to gain from software patents are the Lawyers and patent Trolls.
:)
Why am I so down on Software Patents? Well try to read one sometime, although be sure to have plenty of headache pills and a couple of belts of the hard stuff also helps. It is almost impossible for a professional person to understand the description let alone the Lawyer who wrote it.
I have set up my Fedora Linux machine such that non technical wife does not need to know the root password. Since I have been using Linux as my desktop (over three years) I don't configure "sudo" either since my wife does not need to do anything on my machine that requires elevated privileges.
Using "sudo" should only be used when delegating certain administration responsibilities to specific people and in the majority of cases should require a user password. When allowing "sudo" privileges a great deal of thought must always be given into what commands are going to be allowed and those commands should always be defined with their fully qualified path. You don't need "sudo" when you know the root password but "With great power comes great responsibility" (sorry could not resist).
:).
/etc/sudoers: Permission denied /etc/sudoers: Permission denied
/
Allowing users using "sudo" to run commands like "cp", "mv" and "rm" to name just a few is just plain stupid and I would suggest the System Admin who allowed that should be forced back to using MS windows
Here is a fix that will stop your script cold:
guest $ visudo
visudo:
visudo:
guest $ sudo rm -rf
[sudo] password for guest:
guest is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
BTW the "guest" user did put in the correct password.
But for that matter, Linux doesn't have malware only because it's desktop share is next to nothing (not the same amount atleast, there are Linux viruses out too). Mac OSX has been getting more and more viruses lately as it's marketshare has been growing. So would Linux aswell if it ever gained more users.
I suppose 20 to 60 million Linux desktops world wide is next to nothing and I have two of them, however the main reason why Linux distributions are difficult to write viruses for is because most distributions insist on you working as a normal user and not with elevated privileges like you have with MS Windows distributions. Writing a virus for Linux or Unix for that matter is easy however it requires the user to deliberately run the mall-ware and running it with normal user privileges is next to useless. Ok you stuff up that user but you have not rooted the machine. Another reason why Linux distributions are not popular with mall-ware writers is the fact that Linux users are normally more computer literate and it is much more of a effort and risk targeting Linux since there are many distributions and you do have very smart people who would take it as a challenge to track down the writers of the mall-ware. This is not something the average mall-ware writer wants.
Actually Linux is extremely popular with mall-ware writers since it is an excellent platform to develop mall-ware on. If you were a mall-ware developer why would you want to target Linux when it is so much easier to target MS Windows? As for targeting Mac's. Even though Mac's run a Unix OS the easiest way to compromise a user (Linux is vulnerable here as well) is to use social networking in that the black-hat tries to get personal information from the unsuspecting user by pandering to social worries such as "This is YOUR_BANK, we need to check our customers security. Please send us your financial details and relevant passwords so we can check that your account has not been compromised. Please don't send any details via normal email or registered post, login the the following URL and enter your details". Who would fall for something like that? I don't think that many but you only need 0.001% of the total population of computer users and the scammer has rich pickings.
Try this forum, I followed the configuration method as detailed in by the person in the forum for pulseaudio and it worked on my machine. Baring that try a search on "pulseaudio howto". Ok I am repeating myself in this discussion but the configuration as detailed (it is very quick and simple) actually worked for me. It could also work for you so at least give it a try.
Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me.
Pulseaudio has never quite worked right for me, either, and I use Fedora. In my case, audio either works or it doesn't, and I haven't quite been able to nail down a consistent pattern.
Try this forum . Pulseaudio is now working fine for me.
A friend of mine downloaded Fedora 12 Beta and found it would not boot on his laptop. I tried the same CD on mine and it worked without any issues. It is rather odd considering my Fedora 11 DVD works on both machines so there could be a problem with his laptop reading CD's although my laptop is over 2 years older than his.. To say Fedora is shit because the media does not boot in your machine is not trying to analyse the issue and deserving the label of "troll".
The most annoying issue with Fedora 11 was KDE 4 which IMHO should have been a beta or even an alpha. I did persevere for a short while but I had to revert my family to Gnome until KDE 4.3 came out. Yes KDE is different to KDE 3 but I rather like KDE 4.3 now.
Another issue I found was pulseaudio (we have discussed this recently) and found it annoying to the point were I actually removed it. Only yesterday I was doing a search on pulseaudio and I noticed the following and followed the procedure. It only took a few minutes and now my pulseaudio actually works.
Basically the above were the only issues I had with Fedora 11 and I have installed it as the primary OS on my company laptop with WinXP Sp2 under virtualisation (I am allowed to do this although MS Windows with company bits was an absolute PITA) so I am looking forward to Fedora 12 which I will install on my home PC first.
When you download a game to the PS3, Xbox360 or even the Wii you have the game effectively locked to your console. This is the main reason why I don't like this style of game purchase since you only own the game with your console, you cannot actually give it to a friend or even sell it unless you sell or loan it with your console. I still prefer media be it Bluray, CD or DVD and don't mind paying for it if there is only a few dollars in difference and once I am done with the game I can loan or even sell it, with downloadable games you cannot do that.