i don't know many people who keep substantial quantities of windows executables on their linux drives

This is a really bad idea. I tried running a Windows XP program on ext2 once. While the program would start up and run, it gave me obscure error messages whenever I tried to change its configuration. After a couple of hours of hair-pulling troubleshooting, I moved the program to my NTFS file system, and everything worked again.

As a long-time user of Linux who is currently using Microsoft Windows XP, the whole vfat (FAT with Win95 long file names) patent and how Microsoft has handled this patent makes me feel that maybe Microsoft is engaging in the same kind of monopolistic behavior that they engaged in when they destroyed Netscape in the 1990s.

I'm sure people know about Microsoft's patent violation lawsuit against TomTom; if you don't the Wikipedia is your friend. What a lot of people don't know is that Microsoft made some changes to Vista so that you can no longer easily use an unpatented filesystem like ext2 (Linux's 1990s file system which nicely enough is supported in Windows with a couple of different 3rd party drivers).

For me, it seems very suspicious that Microsoft made some changes to Vista that make it very difficult to use filesystems not patented by Microsoft around the same time they used licenses for their filesystems as a revenue source.

I posted a blog about this back in March and to quote that blog entry:

it can be shown, with Vista, that Microsoft removed compatibility for non-patented filesystems, forcing people to license Microsoft's patents, not because the patents are novel, but because the patented filesystems must be used for interoperability purposes

I posted a blog about this yesterday. I tried Firefox 3.5 in a Windows XP VMware Virtual machine yesterday and quickly web back to Firefox 3.0.

The problem is that FF 3.5 freezes while loading a background tab. In Firefox 3.0, I have no problem clicking on some link that looks interesting, loading the link in a new tab, and continue reading the article I'm reading or what not.

This doesn't work in 3.5. When I load a page in a background tab, the entire Firefox client freezes up when it's processing Javascript, HTML, or whatever in the background tab. I can't scroll up or down in the foreground, write a posting or email (typing in text freezes and the letters I'm typing in aren't buffered), or do anything else with Firefox as it parses the page in the other tab.

Because of this issue, I quickly moved back to Firefox 3.0. I hope the Mozilla developers address this issue in the next six months, because if this issue isn't resolved in Firefox before they EOL security updates with Firefox 3.0, I will probably have to move to another browser.

Any modern browers besides Firefox with a "always use this font for text" option? Neither Opera, Safari, nor Chrome had this option last time I tried those browsers. (Don't get me started on IE8, which forces me to use anti-aliased text)

And, since you're too lazy to post links to DNSSEC howtos (like this one), you're not helping and only name calling. The issue is that there are 15 RFCs with DNSSEC in the title and no clear idea where to get started.

But, hey, this is Slashdot, where any idiot can get a lame name like "BitZream", and post insult anonymously.

No worries; I will email Dan and talk to him offline about it.

OK, since Mr. Kaminsky is following this thread, I figured this would be a good place to open up some questions and a discussion between a DNS implementor and Mr. Kaminsky.

Let me introduce myself: My name is Sam Trenholme and I am the implementor of MaraDNS, a recursive and caching DNS server. Right now, I am in the slow process of re-writing the recursive DNS resolver. While MaraDNS has always been as secure as non-DNSSEC can be against Mr. Kaminsky's bug (DJB knew about the problem back in 1999 and I implemented his solution to randomize both the query ID and the source port back in 2001), I am wondering:

How hard is it to implement DNSSEC in my recursive cache? How many RFCs am I going to have to toil over to understand DNSSEC well enough to implement it? About how long will it take me to code MaraDNS to have full DNSSEC support?

I have a bad feeling that DNSSEC is a monster to implement and that we will not see many independent implementations of it; right now BIND and Unbound appear to be the only DNS servers to support it. DjbDNS doesn't support it, of course, and probably never will. My own MaraDNS and PowerDNS also don't support.

What are your thoughts? Has a reasonable effort been made to make DNSSEC easy to implement?

In this economy, any IT job is a good job.

Of everyone who was in my circle of friends working in the IT and computer industry in the mid-to-late 1990s, the only people who have jobs today are in middle management. Not one non-manager I knew back then and know today is working today in the tech industry.

I became an ex-pat, teaching English, translating documents, and helping with the Windows machines in an accounting office in Mexico. I would like to return, but there are just no jobs stateside where I want to live right now.

One friend saved enough money to semi-retire; he, right now, is living with his family to minimize expenses and off of savings. He's not really sure he even wants to return to the industry; the last job he had a couple of years ago left him really burnt out.

Another friend lost his job at a video game company in the late 1990s. He never got hired in the tech industry again, and is currently living off of a military disability pension, paying his debts and planning on returning to college.

These are my luckier friends. Two friends, who have families to raise, both very recently lost jobs in the tech industry and have no idea when they will get work again. One is living off of savings and is really scared when he will get a job again. Another didn't have as much savings, had to leave the apartment he was leasing, and is currently shacked up with a buddy who lets him sleep in the extra bedroom in exchange for computer help; his wife and kids are living with their family.

I am sure either one of these guys would accept a job in Cleveland or Alabama or anywhere else where the company is willing to pay them enough to support their family.

It's a really scary time to work in the tech industry. If you have a job, and it pays enough to support your family, thank the lucky stars you're still working. Not everyone is as lucky as you right now.

These days, I use a free (beer) word processor called TextMaker for this kind of thing; it's an office suite that also has a spreadsheet, not to mention a presentation thingy and scripting language if you, like I did, pay for the updated version. Just set up a table with a budget for every day in a month, note what I paid on that day, and the program automagically calculates and puts at the bottom of the table the total I have paid for the entire month, and the total money I have left over for extra unplanned expenses.

I have also used Gawk for this kind of thing, but TextMaker has a prettier output if I want to print it out and, yeah, a slicker interface for entering data than vi.

RHEL is in its death throes.

Oh, really?

Seriously, buyers who are giving RedHat serious money have asked for fewer releases with longer lifetime cycles. When 2014 begins, RHEL 5 and its derivatives will still be supported and is the only currently available Linux distribution that will be supported at that time.

If you want bleeding edge, you have Fedora. If you want tested, true, and stable, you have RedHat.

I tried that, but Ubuntu had a lot of problems with crashes and instability.

- Sam

why does linux have so many release cycles

Because Fedora is a cutting-edge testing release that's done about twice a year. The RedHat Linux way is to take software that Microsoft would only make available to internal testers in Redmond, and make it available to the general public as "Fedora".

If you want something with fewer release cycles, you're best bet is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which every three years or so, takes a release of Fedora, declares it stable, renames it "RHEL", and updates that version of Fedora for seven years). If you're too cheap to buy RHEL, you can get CentOS, which is a free derivative of RHEL. CentOS 5.3 is the Linux equivalent of "CentOS 5, service pack 3" [1]

[1] Well, except that adding new drivers to older releases of CentOS is harder than it is to do with Microsoft Windows. What can I say, Linux isn't perfect.

This release of Fedora is the release that will probably be the basis for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This is a good thing, because I like using commercial software on Linux (read: I like using VMware Player to run virtual machines), and right now RHEL 5 does not run with the 2007-era hardware I have, being based on a version of Fedora from 2006.

Once this becomes RHEL, commercial ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) will start supporting the release and both the hardware I use and the commercial software I need to be productive (sorry guys, I find VirtualBox a lot more buggy and less intuitive to use than VMware) will be supported in a version of Linux that will have the stability I need.

Can anyone confirm that RHEL6 will be based on Fedora 11?