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Sure, Linux is excellent, but until a critical mass of support confidence arrives managers won't even look at it (at least from my own experiences)

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

You must be kidding. He already sued BarnesAndNobel.com for One Click and got a big settelement. He is running a business for god sake. You think he is doing a service to humanity.
Now if you dont know amazon is sued by Cendant Publishing for offering online book buyers recommendations. Here if you want to read about it More

Can't assume an attack's going to be over the network. Could just as easy be a trojan. They do tend to be single threaded. All of which is a bit beside the point.

But what would the trojan do? Would it simply run a program just to crash it? That seems kind of pointless. The point isn't that threads don't die. It's that it's impossible for an attacker to use this in any meaningful way.

However, until someone tries to crack it in earnest and out in the wild then we can't be sure that nothing has been overlooked.

It HAS been tested in earnest. Applets are an example of an area where the Java security model is in effect. There was exactly ONE semi-successful virus (see: Strange Brew), and it was only able to spread on systems where the Security Manager was not in effect. i.e. Your standard desktop applications. There is one other issue that I'm aware of, but it was a flaw in the JVM->Native mapping (specifically the JavaScript support). On a fully code-managed system, this is impossible.

Trust me, crackers would LOVE to use Java for malware. Unfortunately (for them), no one has yet managed to break the Security Manager.

The question is whether the language is the proper place to add such protection.

Whoa! Hold up there! The protection is not in the language. It's in the platform. The Java Language is independent from its platform, and provides very little in the way of security features. However, the Platform is as secure as it gets, no matter *what* language you use in it. Python, Ruby, BeanShell, JavaScript and many other languages have been made to work on the Java Platform.

Remember, your OS/CPU combination are one type of platform. Java is higher level platform that solves many of the issues with previous platforms.

Granted, you need an OS that does its job properly, but then a buggy java runtime would have the same problems as a buggy OS.

It's far easier to prove the correct execution of Java Bytecode than it is to prove the security of today's OSes. In fact, even the most secure OSes (e.g. OpenBSD) have been shown to have root exploits. You can't do that in Java. You just can't. There's no ledge on which you can grab a purchase. The best you can hope for is something like the TENEX flaw which allowed programs to hook into the paging notifier to check if something was paged from disk. By aligning the password characters with the end of the page and swapping the next page out to disk, an attacker was able to know that a password character was correct based on if a page fault happened.

Of course, security has moved on quite a bit from there, so I seriously doubt such flaws would be present.

I think there's a lot to recommend the idea of letting the OS handle security

If Java is the OS, it WOULD be handling security.

One of the BSDs, OpenBSD I think, demonstrates how well this can work. Currently it has zero outstanding security advisories and a policy of full disclosure.

You can't get much better than that.

Yes, yes you can. You can have an OS *never* have a root exploit, or even a critical exploit. Java can do that. Think, with all the J2EE servers running out there, and all the webbrowsers with Java installed, how many have experienced major flaws in the Java architecture or VM? The answer is a resounding ONE. (The one I described above.) Even programming flaws in J2EE systems fail to lead to system security issues like gaining root access. Usually, it's a matter of allowing web clients access to data they shouldn't have. (That's a whole other problem unrelated to system design.)

And C's parameter passing mechanism is secure so long as the programmer always checks buffer lengths.

And Java's is secure even if the programmer DOESN'T check buffer lengths. "ArrayOut

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

i can understand that it's really too trivial to have mentioned in his Bio intro, but Alan Kay also won some minor award recently -- think it's called the TURING AWARD. i can't imagine why anyone would want to employ such a slacker. http://internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/33425 11/ -craig

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Remember when you could get the Internet via the TV?

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I'd say the Itanium is getting a bit of respect in the highly available/high performance arena, with the HP/Tandem NonStop Platform moving to Itanium

IBM sold off some of their embedded PowerPC processors to AMCC. See here and here

The court could've labeled P2P as being promoted for "infringement", and then all items that can be classified as P2P would be considered criminal

I think this would upset Microsoft. They know own groove, a "collaboration tools" for work teams disconnected from their corporate network. Uses P2P inside the work team. I'm sure they could also share mp3s with it ;)

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

You really need to be more careful about throwing words around recklessly like that. Just because someone does not agree with you, or they have done more research than you on a given subject does not make them foolish.

You said

"they certainly don't track you across sites"

They've been investigated by the Attorney General and the FTC over it.

According to DoubleClick's own web site (the source):

"DoubleClick does not use your name, address, email address, or phone number to deliver Internet ads. DoubleClick does use information about your browser and Web surfing to determine which ads to show your browser. "

Therein lies the problem with DoubleClick, and the level of community anger towards them. They do track people, they have been doing it for years, and the scope has been increasing gradually. While I'll concede that I haven't heard of them installing spyware, I can't say I would put it past them.

You also said:

"Take a look at Doubleclick's SEC filings and their 300M or so in revenue."

Aside from the fact that you're off on the numbers, why would I? They're a private company?

Oh, and last one:

" They do not throw pop-ups in your face"

Not only do they throw pop ups in your face, they help people get around your popup blockers. Great guys you're defending here.

I think it's important to point out that your defending DoubleClick as though they were the only option. They're not. There are other companies out there that behave ethically and haven't even been investigated once by the FTC or the Attorney General. There are at least three I can think of off the top of my head that are not compiling illegal databases designed to profile the spending habits of every man woman and child on earth. You can choose to work with a company that will be honest, and adhere to their privacy policies, and not exploit you or your visitors without consent. There are lots of companies out there that do will pay you as much or more than DoubleClick does for your space. Or you could do what I do with Microsoft. Nothing. If it works, why would you care how they behave or what they do? Who cares about business practices.. right? C'mon, apathy is actually a nice place to be, but it doesn't give you the right to be an idiot.

You really need to be more careful about throwing words around recklessly like that. Just because someone does not agree with you, or they have done more research than you on a given subject does not make them foolish.

You said

"they certainly don't track you across sites"

They've been investigated by the Attorney General and the FTC over it.

According to DoubleClick's own web site (the source):

"DoubleClick does not use your name, address, email address, or phone number to deliver Internet ads. DoubleClick does use information about your browser and Web surfing to determine which ads to show your browser. "

Therein lies the problem with DoubleClick, and the level of community anger towards them. They do track people, they have been doing it for years, and the scope has been increasing gradually. While I'll concede that I haven't heard of them installing spyware, I can't say I would put it past them.

You also said:

"Take a look at Doubleclick's SEC filings and their 300M or so in revenue."

Aside from the fact that you're off on the numbers, why would I? They're a private company?

Oh, and last one:

" They do not throw pop-ups in your face"

Not only do they throw pop ups in your face, they help people get around your popup blockers. Great guys you're defending here.

I think it's important to point out that your defending DoubleClick as though they were the only option. They're not. There are other companies out there that behave ethically and haven't even been investigated once by the FTC or the Attorney General. There are at least three I can think of off the top of my head that are not compiling illegal databases designed to profile the spending habits of every man woman and child on earth. You can choose to work with a company that will be honest, and adhere to their privacy policies, and not exploit you or your visitors without consent. There are lots of companies out there that do will pay you as much or more than DoubleClick does for your space. Or you could do what I do with Microsoft. Nothing. If it works, why would you care how they behave or what they do? Who cares about business practices.. right? C'mon, apathy is actually a nice place to be, but it doesn't give you the right to be an idiot.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I think the OP is correct that other sites' offering of free video likely played somewhat into the decision to go free on CNN.com, but I doubt that was the primary motivation. More compelling is the theory that CNN saw an improving Web ad market and decided that the balance sheet finally worked out in their favor again. (I say "again" because cnn.com video was free once before, way back in the day.) Indeed, a big part of this story is that CNN was able to line up major sponsors for the free-video launch.

As for pressure from Fox, CNN has been losing in the TV ratings for some time, but the people at CNN (I worked there for a while) take great pride in the fact that the website has held its own and remains one of the most-visited news sources on the Internet. Foxnews.com, while definitely drawing a large audience, isn't even close to CNN.com, so the "pressure" on that front would be more of a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses deal for CNN.com than anything else.

MSNBC.com, however, is hardly a slouch when it comes to site traffic, and their free-video service has become very popular. If any significant pressure is being placed on CNN.com in the online space, it's from MSNBC rather than Fox.

the foreign intelligence services and other spy types that are interested... oh and the Chinese Cyber Warriors... Oh - Organized crime is on the rampage such that the Feds miss old fashioned hackers. And Spammer botnets, and so on. Yep, way to blame those poor Stereotypical H4x0rz to get your name in the press yet again.

I don't wanna be a troll here, but please, there are a dozen other sites that have the same article. Do we have to rely on a site that requires u to log in?
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3 513866/

All of which highlights Netscape's apparently losing battle with a product, Internet Explorer, given away by its rival Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). You cannot compete with free giveaways. And you cannot cry foul if you also built your business on giving away your own product free, Navigator, but now charge for it since it's a large part of revenue

First of all, IBM and HP are two of Sun's biggest competitors. It's not surprising to hear them talk down sun. Sun was started by a couple of true geeks, an mba and a guy with a lot of money and vision. They were always very technology focused and anti microsoft. They worked with open technologies before someone decided to put a capitalize O and S in open source. IBM has a shady reputation, not a lot has changed. IBM will say anything to get their products in the door. I've seen it first hand. This is one of my favorite IBM /Sun stories from a while back.

The Sun/MS thing is a recent occurence. Before that, Sun was doing it's own thing competing against Microsoft. IBM and HP were MS partners the whole time. Who do you think has benefitted more from their relationship with MS, Sun or IBM and HP?

The reason this whole MS/Sun deal came about was because MS was abusing Sun's license on Java. Sun always seemed to be about open standards and level technological playing fields. Their chips are open, they built their OS on open source, they released a lot of open source and published a lot of information to allow compatability and competition. Look at what they're doing with Java. They're trying to keep the process open to all with the JCP so that one vender can't wrestle control. If Sun was as underhanded as you think, they'd at least be the number one or number two java server vendor. They're not. IBM's been trying to get more control over Java for years, not as bad as MS though, but it is a situation that needs to be watched. IBM has recently been championing linux but other than that, how have they supported openness in the past? Have a look at the Compuware suite which was settled for $400 million a couple of months ago.

MS tried to screw that over and take control of the Java market. Sun stood up against MS. Hell, they stood up for all developers that MS has tried to screw. Most of the times MS succeeds. Sun and Oracle really pushed for the anti trust cases here and in Europe. They put a lot of effort into the fight. It really was "Mankind vs Microsoft", not Sun vs Microsoft. MS had screwed over a lot of smaller software companies and now they were getting together to put an end to it, with Sun leading the pack. Oracle was a big player too but none of them were as anti-microsoft as Sun. So after a long, world-wide legal battle, MS loses and gets declared a monopoly. Woohoo! Ok, hold your horses because a new team just came into the Justice Dept and things don't look as rosey as they did before. On top of that IBM and HP have been nipping away at Sun's market share with their own Unix lines as well as using Linux. Now the open source community is starting to boo and hiss at Sun too. The main reason was because Sun liked Solaris better than Linux. Some of Sun's managers might have been a bit colorful but in interviews with developers, including Bill Joy you heard good things about Linux. Sun really didn't say anything about linux that was different from what IBM said about Linux vs AIX back then. What else did they say? Oh yeah, they'd indemnify their customers that use Linux. How is that bad and OSRM not?

With the justice dept dropping the ball, the community that should have been more supportive of Sun being against them and MS having made inroads into Sun's server turf Sun decides to settle. The settlement includes a big fee for infringment as well as an agreement to interoperate better. Sun's customers have been wanting this for a long time. They use Sun and they use Windows. They want them to work together. Not only that, but MS now has to be more cooperative in general. MS has also taken the initiative to end other lawsuits

Some OEM's TRIED to do this, until MS threatened to never let them sell Windows again ~.

Oh man, you've been in that coma for a while.

"the rigid OO structure and sophisticated APIs"

Alot of people just don't really like rigid and sophisticated:-)

You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot
For taste of your sophisticated API
I may not have a rigid OO structure, babe
But at least I'm enjoying the ride, at least I'll enjoy the ride.

I guess the other thing is that Apache/PHP seems to scale better (or at least easier/cheaper than Tomcat.

I may be going to hell on an elephant, babe
But at least I'm enjoying the ride, at least I'll enjoy the ride.

Source

NYSE is an IBM shop, using DB2, websphere. Its competitor, NASDAQ is using a Microsoft solution. Not a good week to be IBM.

Um, yeah. Nearly the same thing happened with an Iron Mountain truck in April. It may be time to review your archive plan, there, chuckles.

My crystal ball predictions:

MS files patent on XML and then sues others for using "their" technology. Oh, wait...deja vu?

here...
here...
here...

Open standard? My ass. If MS has their way, XML will be THEIR technology and you can use it if you pay for it. At the very least, it seems that their patent licensing allows you to read their format.

There are other efforts (in addition to RBL style lists) to fix some of the problems which derive from the assumed trust that's built into the SMTP protocol. For a brief shining moment last year, I thought that we might all hold hands and sing together on this one, but Microsoft managed to drive of their early Sender ID adopters and alienate potential allies in the battle against spam by making vague patent claims and apparently refusing to even clarify.

Adoption of the Sender Policy Framework seems to have slowed, probably caught up in the confusion around Sender ID and the Microsoft patent claims. The linked site claims that SPF is unencumbered.

The original poster, who said:

Given the current state of Windows security and advances in spyware, probably any company has become a very easy target for such spy attack from competitors

is more concerned with bashing windows than raising security awareness in general. Anyone serious into security knows Linux has a huge number of vulnerabilities and must constantly be on the alert (just as Windows admins must) for new and evolving threats.

Even Linux maintainers themselves have security breaches again and again

You do not see articles here very often deriding Linux about its security failures

Even when Linux has shown to be attacked more often than Windows.

And all of this is exascerbated by the loss of the kernel management tool, bitkeeper

My point here is not to argue about which OS is better, but that all OSes have huge security issues to deal with, and people in the trenches, not in the ivory tower, understand that.

Does your firm have any problem with you partially basing your purchasing decisions on personal political beliefs? Why do I suspect you haven't asked your manager if this boycott is ok?
BTW, while the typical AMD system does NOT have Intel ethernet silcon in it (which I'm sure you're happy about) I regret to inform you that it very likely has Broadcom ethernet components and since Broadcom just purchased an Israeli company, I guess that's out too. You might find some old DEC 'Tulip' chipset-based network cards available... but -oops! that semiconductor business is owned by Intel.
Don't worry, I'm sure your fellow workers will have no problem supporting your principles by using dial-up to get to the internet AND your internal servers.

"Does anyone really care about writing for a webbrowser with a marketshare ceiling of ~3%?"

Yes, when that 3% tends to include the smartest and wealthiest among us:

. . . And it turns out that users of Apple computers are a more desirable demographic to advertisers than are PC users.

"With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population presents a very attractive target for marketers, both online and offline," says NetRatings director and principal analyst T.S. Kelly.

The report notes that Mac computer users tend to be creative, loyal and tech-savvy. . . .

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-943519.html?tag=fd_t op
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2002/jul02/ju l22/1_mon/news4monday.html
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/1403 581
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/07/15.1.sh tml

In the development and staging environments it was great. As other posters mentioned you could get from zero to something usable in less than 30 minutes. Everything was as you would expect.

However... in the -production- environment, with 10's of millions of ldap objects connected to SprintPCS's provisioning systems which were making 1,000+ ldap writes --a minute-- the SunOne system absolutely blew chunks.

LDAP architects will ask what the hell we were doing with the entire database in one ldap instance rather than partition the dataset, and they'd be right, but we were acting under Sun's direction since at the time we had one of (if not) the largest LDAPs in the world.

LDAP architects would also wonder why on earth you would ask an ldap server to live under such a write intensive churn, and they'd be right again.

That being said...

-- Multimaster replication would never ever work. Most of the time the entire SprintPCS userbase was hanging off one master and less than 4 replication slaves. For several months the entire messaging system was wedged into a single point of failure nightmare. (to be fair, this wasn't all slapd's fault and had 1/2 of the root cause in Sprint Datacenter practices which produced predictable results)

-- Other posters asked for SunOne Calendar server to be opensourced. My first response is to suggest you have your head examined since that thing would die for absolutely no reason on a regular basis. We actually automated the process of detecting its death and restoring from last night's backup. If you were a SprintPCS customer and your calendar ever seemed screwy now you know why. Of course further reflection suggested opensourcing it is probably the only thing that could help at this point because...

-- We used to get hotfix builds from Sun which were missing entire sections of the binaries. Whoever was managing the code would forget to use the same compilation flags for hotfixes as original code so we would receive webmail frontend builds which couldn't talk to imap backends, or calendar backends which wouldn't accept connections from calendar front ends.

-- SOL if you wanted to run more than 4G of memory in slapd.

Dont consider this post a rant, just let any CIO's/etc. reading this know that this opensource release will probably work great for you if you dont load it heavily (unlike exchange 5x, which would grenade just sitting there)

On the other hand, if you want to push the performance envelope, pretty much expect it to take alot of time and cause a bunch of headaches -in production-. Get help from people who have pushed the performance of the tools you are considering running.

Weird mood tonight.

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

> > Too bad windows is where the users are.
> Not on embedded devices.

Microsoft Now Leads in PDA, Embedded OS

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

America Online Buys MapQuest.com (December 1999)

Microsoft Buys Vicinity (October 2002) and announces plans to "phase out" MapBlast because it competes with Microsoft's own MapPoint.

Most of the map data is owned by companies like NavTech; even Google didn't go out and write maps from scratch. The major difference between all these products is in the front-end, and it is the front-end that really sets Google above the rest in terms of slickness.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The Mozilla Foundation has moved quickly to patch three critical issues in its browsers that were discovered just last weekend. FireFox 1.0.4 and Mozilla 1.7.8 were released today to patch vulnerabilities that could have allowed malicious users to execute arbitrary code. The development has caught some attention in the blogosphere thanks to a post about the security issue from a blogger for Microsoft, itself no stranger to security problems and patches. In a recent post, Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer's IE Product Unit Manager, wrote that browser security is an industry problem, in a bid to adjust the script usually that casts the issue as Microsoft vs. Mozilla, or us versus them.

"The only us versus them distinction I want to make around security is to put responsible software developers, security researchers, and customers together as 'us' and malicious (whether it's intentionally or not) software developers, security researchers, and their customers together as 'them.'"

Credit: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3 504661

Google went evil a long time ago. The biggest piece of evidence toward that is this.

There are several other examples including the one you list.

It's well established they've become evil. The only question in my mind is whether they're incompetent or not. Check out the site webmasterworld.com to see discussions in regard to this. People are guessing that Google is trying to get rid of spammers, but in actuality they may just be screwing up. There is substantial evidence toward this conclusion.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Isn't Borders part of Amazon.com?

Actually, Borders made a deal with Amazon whereby Amazon would handle their online business. Which (in English) means that Amazon was allowed to license the Border's name on a royalty basis.

Here is a link to a news story on the subject. (Mods: This is an example of an informative post.) No, there are no associates links embedded in that link. (Mods: This is a joke. It may optionally be modded as "Funny" *if you laughed*.)

(Mods: Don't bother to mod up this post. The "VOID" across it means that it is an example intended for demonstration purposes only. Yes, that's another joke. Ha ha. Funny. Rolling on the floor. Yeash, I really need to get over this cold.)

Reality, it turns out, is even funnier. The machine they gave them runs AIX.

I'm sure Bill is paying attention... with at least $10 million invested in SCO's lawyers and the purchase of a submarine patent, he has a lot riding on it.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

You would have succeeded, if only you had used the speedy next version of Java, codenamed Mustang.

Letter

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Macromedia had countersued.

Sound almost like the Spanish American War Tax that we've been paying for the last 100 years on our telephone bills.

How the hell do thes companies get away with these idiotic taxes?