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Submission + - G.M.'s Electric Lemon 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On a day that saw him test-drive the new Chevy Volt, President Obama declared the federal rescue of automakers a success, delivering a message to 'naysayers' who have criticized a robust government role. Presumably one of those naysayers would be NYT Op-Ed contributor Edward Niedermeyer, who said the Volt 'appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build.' The future of G.M. and the $50B taxpayer investment in it, adds Niedermeyer, 'now depends on a vehicle that costs $41,000 but offers the performance and interior space of a $15,000 economy car.'

Submission + - Could bad economic times be a boom for *nix?

Submitted by NobleSavage
NobleSavage writes: A lot of prominent economists are saying things are going to get worse. The g20 is calling for austerity measures, which will force deflation on the EU. The possibility looms for sovereign default in several EU Nations (Greece and others).

In the US most states are near bankruptcy or have major budget shortfalls. At the Federal level we are running out of rope. The Fed has pulled just about every trick it it's hat and the stimulus spending seem to have made a small blip with respect to GDP. Now it seems to be sliding. The US Federal government is running out of rope and it's unlikely that Obamba will be able to pass any more stimulus/jobs bills.

In this environment of cost cutting and layoff is it possible that countries and the private sector may take a second look at Linux as a way of saving money?

Submission + - Slashdot is Dying, New York Times Confims It (nytimes.com) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is running a story about how Slashdot has dropped in popularity compared to other news sites in social web space. Quote: "Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community."

Comment What about the Yellow Pages?? (Score 2, Insightful) 258

by NobleSavage (#28002371) Attached to: Craigslist Fires Back Over Adult Services Accusations
Just look at the Yellow Pages for any moderately large city... it will have hundreds of ads for "escorts" and "escort agencies'. This kind of activity has been going on for ages, but no one ever made a big stink. Now that it's on the intewebs prosecutors somehow feel that there is cause for concern? I say, Quit wasting my tax money!

Comment This is why I switched to Ubuntu (Score 1) 1127

by NobleSavage (#26881523) Attached to: Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7
I forced my self to go 100% without Windows. I did this specifically because I had a hunch that after XP things would just get worse in terms of annoying restrictive crap. Vista came out after I made the switch and I was really happy that I had broken free of the MS habit. I put Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop. It took a little time getting used to. Granted I keep a copy of XP in a virtual machine just in for that occasional Windows only program I have to run. But I'm very happy now, some things I like a lot better. It rocks having a full Bash shell just a click away. If Windows diapered I wouldn't miss it one bit. The best part is the freedom of knowing I don't NEED Microsoft.
United States

Journal SPAM: Special Counsel Removes Potential Evidence with "DoD-Wipe"

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

A U.S. official overseeing a probe of former Bush aide Karl Rove yesterday refused to give federal investigators copies of "personal files" he deleted from his office computer, after it was discovered he hired a private computer-help company to erase all the hard drives belonging to him and two deputies. Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch hired a firm to perform a D
Operating Systems

Submission + - Review: Linux System Administration

Submitted by
Bob Uhl
Bob Uhl writes: "I've just finished reading O'Reilly's latest GNU/Linux title, Linux System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer's copy). Bottom line up front: it's a handy introduction for the beginner GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin's bookshelf.

The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they're enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the material presented. I've been working with Apache for almost a decade now, but I've not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.

I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux 'administration' books focus on GUI tools — I've seen some which don't even bother addressing the command line! I've long said that if one isn't intimately familiar with the shell — if one cannot get one's job done with it — then one isn't really a sysadmin. Linux System Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the get-go. Kudos!

The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there's very, very little reason to use Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don't. Postfix is more stable and far more secure.

Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware; Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux in particular is choice — it's good to see a reference work which implicitly acknowledges that.

The authors are also pretty good about calling out common pitfalls — several got me, once upon a time. It'd have been nice to have had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth...

Lastly, I liked that the authors & their editor weren't afraid to refer readers to books from other publishers, in addition to O'Reilly's (uniformly excellent) offerings. Not all publishers would be so forthright; O'Reilly merits recognition for their openness.

The book's not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn't actually need to register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these are pretty minor quibbles.

I'd say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium business admin who'd like to start using Linux, or who already is but doesn't really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will probably find some useful stuff in here."

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