Well if you use a FAT file-system then you are asking for trouble. Most modern file-systems use journalling which are fairly reliable although I do recommend you find the best file-system that suites you, which in the case of a Microsoft OS is normally NTFS. If you use Linux then you really have a choice such as Ext3 and 4 (Ext2 does not support journalling) which are supported by Redhat. Other file-systems are BtrFS (supported by Redhat), ZFS (not supported on Linux by Oracle), JFS (supported by IBM), JFS (Silicon Graphics) and NTFS (not supported on Linux by Microsoft) - just to name a few.

Of course you are really asking for trouble if you don't backup your data no matter what file-system you choose. In fact with a journalling file-system there is more chance of wilful or accidental removal of data than you would have of corruption caused by a journalling file-system.

Personally I really cant see the attraction for ZFS on Linux when BtrFS will pretty much do the same job. Still if you want it it is available as OpenZFS.

If you look at Manga and Anime today and in the past most female and even male central characters are 14 and under. Also nudity of children (exception are explicit sexual acts) is not frowned upon like it is done in so called moral countries. I guess the UK will have to put most of the population of Japan behind bars :) . In addition China and Korea also produce the equivalent of Manga and Anime so maybe the moral minority will have to act on these countries as well.

Yes it is kind of worrying.

You originally wrote "vim /var/log/auth.log.2.gz"

"vim" can open a gzip'ed file but you will only see the "text based" result which is not really human readable. You would be better off using (you basically did say this BTW):

zcat /var/log/auth.log.2.gz" | less (or on some *nix systems "more")

Using a text based editor on any log file is not good practice since it is fairly easy to make a mistake which would effectively compromise that file. Also most vanilla Unix systems don't have "vim" installed although they do have "vi". Nitpicking maybe but basically every thing you said was valid.

No problem, every heard of "wtmp" or " "utmp" which have been in Unix for over 30 years. How about the "sar" logs which also came from Unix (Solaris) but are available on pretty much all Unix/Linux platforms.

You could also look at AIX which maybe a big shock to you since many system administration logs and configuration files are binary. The thing is AIX is Unix but that is IBM's way of doing things. :)

To accurately determine a cell phones location you need three or more towers which can be the case in a city. Without GPS being turned on and with three cell towers it is possible to get a location accuracy of a few 10's of meters or if you live in a none metric country approximately a few 10's of yards. A quick search will confirm what I have just said but you could look at this site or you can try one of the 100 million plus hits I got with my search.

As per the above URL the accuracy was 100 m which if you have done basic trigonometry (assuming a circle which is A = pi x r^2) is 7,850 square meters. Actually the area of location would be an ellipse (area = pi x small radius x large radius) not a circle (I used this for simplicity) which would be an even smaller area again. Of course if GPS was turned on then location accuracy would be down to a few meters such that the cell phone being tracked could be accurately located to a small room within a building.

I think the bottom line is to ask the question "Do you trust your applications?" if you don't then don't use a smart phone or if you are really paranoid don't carry a cell phone, make sure you have checked your clothing for bugs and carefully check to make sure no one is following you. :)

When considering transmission infrastructure you only have to consider the cost of the transmission lines to the central power substation transformers not the all up transmission infrastructure which has to exist no matter what type of power generation system you are using so that should not be a major factor when considering other types of power generation.

Consider this you have two power resources 1) Coal fired power station to offset the shortfall in wind power located 100 km from the main substations and 2) A wind farm also located some 100 km away what would be the costs associated with the transmission feeds assuming flat ground between both power resources and the main substation? The answer is the costs would most likely be the same although allot depends on where each resource is located and if some of the primary transmission lines can be shared. Basically the all up costs of transmission lines from the power source to the distribution grid feed is only a tiny fraction of the power distribution infrastructure costs.

The problem you have with any solar solution (can equally be applied to other energy resources) is availability, serviceability and long term cost benefits. Out of all the solar energy solutions wind farming scores very highly but not all places on this planet are suitable for wind farming so other forms of solar energy solutions and more conventional methods of power generation are still required.

Microsoft Sharepoint first came out in 2001. I think if it ran on NT at the time it could run on an Alpha, but why would any company want to have an run MS Sharepoint on unsupported architecture today? It is not that difficult to transfer the MS Sharepoint infrastructure to current X86 architecture. Of course maintaining a Sharepoint structure or even a Wiki is a totally different thing.

Correct, but without a kernel (we are talking about MS Windows NT here) nothing works so it is the most important part of the OS hence all applications, libraries and services are dependent, although not necessarily directly on the kernel and what version it is.

Basically any program or service should have enough smarts built in to determine if the libraries it is going to use will allow it to run properly and those libraries should be updated to work (if appropriate) with the kernel. Looking for "Windows" anything in a library is IMHO stupid since the only thing a program should care about is the minimum and sometimes in rare cases the maximum version number of those libraries it is going to use. Basically Unix, Linux and even VMS on which MS Windows NT is based uses the above concepts and those OS's don't seem to have any issues.

Yes, it is supposed to be the "Xbox" that is is going to be the "one" device for all things in your living room. Pity no one told Microsoft that "Xbox one" can be abbreviated to "XBone" and after the numerous 180's the XB1's name should have been changed to XB180 or to keep the revisions correct XB540 which would be more in-line with their current numbering system.

Actually the XBox's numbering system can be better explained in simple maths terms. "X" is normally used to designate an unknown number so "Xbox" would translate to "Unknown Box" so being fair and using the abbreviations that the Playstation uses "XB1" would translate to "Unknown Box version 1" which we know that can't be true since there is already an "Unknown Box" and version 2 should translate to "Unknown Box version 2" or XB360 as it is more popularly known.

No! No! that can't be right. The original "Unknown Box" must be version 0 then the next release must be "Unknown Box version 1" (XB360) therefore the next release should be "Unknown Box version 2" (XB1), This now proves that 0 is greater than 360 (great so far), and 1 is greater then 360 Err!!

All this shows that Microsoft is really bad as simple maths :)

Normally a user's poor experience on any OS is usually a result of them not being able to utilise properly one of the most powerful analogue computers on this planet, their brain. No one here would deny that some software has bugs which should be fixed and in the Unix/Linux environment bugs, when they are found are usually fixed fairly quickly.

The whole article is Bull since MS Windows uses the NT kernel and their so called Windows 10 has an NT 6.4 kernel (see here ). For those that won't read the article the following is a list of NT versions from MS Windows Vista.

NT6.0 - MS Windows Vista, Server 2008
NT6.1 - MS Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, Home Server 2011
NT6.2 - MS Windows 8
NT6.3 - MS Windows 8.1
NT6.4 - MS Windows 10

Sure some of the apps my be different (slightly :)) but the basic kernel is only a minor increment. If the developers find difficulty in writing software that can't determine revision difference then I suggest they go back to school. Basically the whole reason to go to version 10 is IMHO marketing hype of which the Microsoft PR department excels (pun intended).

As per your link to bash , if you look at the "COPYING" part under the "bash-3.3" directory you will see the bash they are using is V3.2 and is under the GPLv2. This is not denigrate Apple's use of a GPLv2 product since it is open source, however it is an older version of bash.

If you look at the later releases of bash version 4.2 is actually under the GPLv3 license. The following is from my Fedora 20 distribution.

> rpm -q --queryformat="%{NAME}\t%{LICENSE}\n" bash-4.2.48-2.fc20.x86_64

bash GPLv3+

The above version of bash has been patched and is available as an update as per 2 days ago.

That is assuming that the so called "major foreign government" has the people who can do a code review and they trust the release is the same one they did the code review on. For all but the most paranoid governments this type of thing really belongs in the "too hard basket" so most choose to believe that the closed source company is all "sweetness and light" and would never screw us over. :)

Why on earth do you want to do that? If you are running a Rehat distribution on a production machine that is a great way to get fired unless you have the appropriate change requests filled out and even then you would have to install dash which adds an extra level of complexity.

On Fedora 20 as per two days ago:

> env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"
this is a test

This is with "bash-4.2.48-2.fc20.x86_64" which does not require a reboot, although if you are like me the latest updates did contain a kernel update as well which does require a reboot.

So at least the latest release of Fedora is patched. As is Redhat 4 thorough 7 see here.

That is fine for Debian / Ubuntu distributions however for RHEL / Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora Linux the Apache error file location is /var/log/httpd/error_log.

For FreeBSD the Apache error log file location is /var/log/httpd-error.log.

It must be noted that the above are the defaults and can be changed.

Correct me if I am wrong, who in their right mind would write a suid script that would give a normal user "root" privileges? I can even go back to the early 1980's and writing a script and setting it suid for root was considered very poor system administration practice.

A quick check in Fedora 20 results in a few suid programs (24 to be precise) however they are not scripts.