Sort of. Linux has DEP and a few other features (ASLR and SEHOP for example.) Redhat created ExecShield that can contribute. I don't know if PaX has been merged yet (haven't followed in quiet a while now) but it also does something similar. While not the same, they all provide different answers to the problem.
Then JIT languages come along and screw everything up.;-)
W^X is just one method OpenBSD championed, but it's not an exclusive technology.
Shouldn't feed the trolls, but it seems kind of fun sometimes.
Discovering the Higgs Boson doesn't suddenly mean that we now know everything there is to know about matter. All that did was verify a hypothesis that there was a particle that made it possible for Energy to become Matter and vice versa. We now know with certainty that the particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 exists, as predicted, and that it fits into our Standard Model as we were expecting a particle of that size would.
To suddenly expect that we should now be advancing scientifically at a rapid rate simply because we have confirmed the particle exists is nonsense. It took us 40 years between the time of the hypothesis being put forward by Higgs and his co-authors, until it was genuinely confirmed in 2012. In that time technology had to advance significantly for us to be able to get there. But that didn't stop people trying through out those 40 years. In the end, the largest man-made machine ever was created. A machine so massive it stretches across 2 countries and consumes more power than a large city. A machine that is itself at the very limits of what our current technology allows.
Your argument is like saying that the instant Yuri Gregarin got into orbit, he should have been able to land on the moon and make it back to Earth after taking a quick spin to visit our distant relatives on Mars.
Dark matter is just another thing we have yet to figure out. We still don't know what it is. We only know it exists because we can't account for the gravity it produces. But we can't actually measure it directly. Because we can neither see it, nor touch it, nor hear it, nor taste it, and but we can observe the effects it has on the space around it, we know it's there. Isaac Newton knew that something existed to make the apple fall to the ground, or the planets orbit the sun, but until he spent time studying it, he didn't know what gravity actually was. Same is true for Infrared light. Until Newton started playing with prisms near a thermometer on his wall, no one knew that infrared light existed.
So should we say that studying Dark Matter is a waste of time because we don't know what it is or what use it will be to us in the future? It makes up magnitudes more of the matter in the universe than all the matter we can actually see and account for combined. Yet we shouldn't try to learn about it and discover what it might be?
Maybe Dark Matter is the energy source of the future. We just don't know it yet because our own technology hasn't advanced to the point where we can figure it out. Just like we knew there was this particle 40 years ago that we had yet to account for in our standard model, but in the last 2 years we have now confirmed exists and are actually starting to understand what it really is.
You, Sir, are ignorant and should keep your mouth shut.
LOL. Maybe with the command line based log reader? Or maybe you have never used the last command to parse the binary log file which is wtmp either.
Have you ever had to monitor server logs remotely?
Explain to me how to easily set up an alert to trigger on an event in a binary log? I can handle that easily in a syslog text log, but I'd love to know how *you* easily do that with a binary log. Could you give me the awk script for it? No? How about just a simple regexp for locating a single type of event that I can have running against the stream of log data as it gets logged into the file?
Binary logs are basically useless to me. I cannot automate them in real time. I cannot filter them easily in a script. I essentially have to parse them manually, or dump them to text and then filter them. What a huge waste of time.
I can leave a script running against a syslog text log, tracking everything as it gets streamed into the file, and I can instantly trigger an alert against an event. Very easily. Very simply.
Talking to a megalomaniac is a waste of time. You are not going to reach him, regardless of the validity of your arguments. The whole systemd discussion amply demonstrates this. This guy thinks he is Linus reincarnated and since he cannot do a new kernel, he has fixated on the next best thing.
Which worked out oh so well in the whole PulseAudio fiasco a few years ago.
You'd have thought that one thing alone would have taught Red Hat a thing or two about the guy they're trusting to manage the very core functionality of their primary business product.
By contrast, UNIX/LINUX servers are much more difficult to configure and generally require a lot more man-hours and a more experienced (and expensive) staff.
This is a fallacy. There are numerous studies that have shown that a single Unix admin is able to manage more Unix/Linux/BSD servers than a single Windows Admin. It is far more cost effective, in larger environments, to run Unix servers than Windows servers when it comes to ongoing maintenance. It is also well documented that a Unix/Linux server build can be online and running significantly faster than a comparable Windows build.
Simply put, how long does it take to get something like an Oracle DB up, running and usable on Windows vs Linux? What is the cost of that build, including the licensing and the time it takes to put together? I can image a Linux based server with only the stuff I need significantly faster than I can do the same in Windows Server 2012.
The fact that Windows Server is still able to survive on expensive license fees when Linux and BSD are free is pretty telling. Companies are doing a cost-benefit comparison and finding that they are saving more money going with the paid solution than the free solution.
No, generally cost has nothing to do with whether a company chooses Windows over Unix/Linux or not. Convenience plays a huge part in it. Most small and medium sized businesses probably don't even realise they have options. Windows is often picked as the default because that is what the kids from the past 20 years have been taught or all they've managed to pick up through school. Again, convenience and knowledge over cost.
It also comes down to ease of management. Its a lot easier to implement Active Directory for user and device management than to do the same with OpenLDAP. Many companies pick Windows because they can do simple tasks like manage users themselves and not need to pay an admin to do that kind of thing for them.
It is very similar to what you see happening on the desktop with the domination of easy-to-use and configure Mac and Windows over KDE or Gnome, except on the server-side it is mainly an issue of the ease of use for the system administrator, and the fact that a good Unix admin is much more expensive and harder to find than an MCSE certified admin.
A good Unix admin can manage a larger pool of servers, off-setting the cost of having to hire multiple Windows admins. However, the cost of Unix admins is not significantly different from the cost of Windows admins. In fact, most Unix Admins are also very capable Windows Admins and so you get a two-for when they're hired.
Easy-to-configure Windows and Mac are a strawman. Gnome and KDE are no more difficult to configure than Windows or Mac. The difference is in actually having taken the time to learn them. Arguably you have more control over the Gnome and KDE environments. What puts Windows up there is that through the 90s no one had a choice when buying from OEMs, so everyone learned the basics of Windows. That then bled into the 2000s where it was easier to stick with the devil you knew rather than learn everything over again.
It has very little to do with the cost of the systems and far more to do with people being comfortable with what they know. Look at how badly Windows 8.x and Windows Server 2012 are doing at the moment. They are such major changes that require significant relearning of some major fundamentals, that people are simply not switching to them. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 still dominate the corporate/business market. People aren't upgrading to Win8/2012 for the same reason they're not switching to Linux. They have to make a significant effort learn how to use the systems.
If it was just replacing the/etc/init.d mess, that'd be fine.
My main problem with SystemD is that it is turning into this massive black hole that's trying to replace many different systems in one. And not very well at that.
Why replace pam.d, crond, init, and add complexities like dbus in a single package that runs at PID1 when it doesn't need to? So now a single flaw in its crond could allow a vector that lets dbus provide a way to trick pam.d into letting users escalate their privileges? Sure, it hasn't happened yet, but when you start intertwining these apps into a single super app....
Worse, the logging it provides is next to useless. If I have a headless server with no GUI, how the hell am I supposed to read binary logs? It doesn't even give me useful information during the boot process. At least my old init scripts could do that much.
It completely goes against the core principles of UNIX in general. Do one thing, and do it damn well. Make it interoperable with other processes. Log to text. Configure with text.
I don't want this massive beast of a process that replaces my options. And I especially don't want one that isn't even very good at performing the original single task its supposed to be replacing, let alone all the franken-tasks its taken on.
If this were just about replacing init, I doubt I'd be anywhere near as bothered. But as an active admin, this bothers me significantly more than just having to redo my startup scripts.
You still have to license RHEL if you intend to have support. I suppose if you don't mind going at it your own...
You're not licensing RHEL, you're licensing a support agreement for 12 months. There's a pedantic difference.
The difficulty with RHEL is that if you want to run it without support, you have to compile it yourself. They do not release binaries outside of their support agreements. Which is why CentOS (and others) exists in its current implementation.
I think you are confusing patent protection with copyright protection. Software is still covered by copyright law, and the licensing agreements you choose to put on your software product is still what defines how people can use your software product, and what their access to that software is.
If I write a program and release it under a license that does not allow access to the source code, and does not allow users to distribute it further, that is still perfectly valid. But if someone decides that they want to write their own software that does the same thing, as long as they do not use anything from my product, they are well within their rights to do so.
UNIX platforms have been around for 50 years and the model they use has become essentially a standard. But until recently, UNIX was costly and the licensing was rather prohibitive. So in the 1980s, this man decided that he'd like to write his own version of a UNIX-like platform, and release it freely and openly for everyone to use. That platform was GNU and the man that started it was Richard Stallman. GNU is now one of the most widely used platforms on the market. Even some UNIX vendors use some of the GNU utilities themselves. It also became the system that sits on top of the Linux kernel.
But while GNU replicates a lot of the functionality from UNIX utilities, it uses absolutely none of the code from UNIX. It was written independently to ensure that it was freely available to everyone.
That hasn't stopped UNIX platforms from continuing to be sold, or continuing to be innovative. But it has pushed UNIX vendor to improve their platform significantly to differentiate themselves from the free platforms.
Software Patents would not have allowed GNU to exist at all. Software patents are, without exception, patenting ideas rather than implementation. This means that if one entity holds a patent for an idea, no other entity can come up with an alternate way of achieving the same/similar end result. This gives the patent holder an extended monopoly on an idea and stifles innovation in the software industry.
Software copyrights allow you to release and protect your software from blatant copying, while still allowing people to improve upon and innovate beyond your original idea. Software patents do not.
Completely pedantic of me, but relevant. In New Zealand a Bill is always a draft. There is no difference between a "draft bill" and a "bill." Once the Bill passes its 3rd and final reading in the House, it becomes an Act at which point it is law.
In regards to your comment about "Big Money," New Zealand is very small, but it doesn't really have the same problems with lobbyists that the US or other large nations do. In fact, the majority of lobbyists in New Zealand are Greenies and Climate Change doomsayers trying to save each and every tree, bug or animal. Well, them and media companies trying to get nasty copyright law changes made.
Fortunately, while NZ is based on the Westminster model of Parliament, but with Europe's MMP, its sufficiently different enough that its not quite so easy to game. And with only 120 Members of Parliament, lobbyists tend to have to convince an entire political party rather than just a few members with seats in the Parliament.
The whole reason Sun opened up Solaris in the first place was to try and get it a wider audience and more of a community around it. Linux was encroaching on Solaris as much as it was on any other Unix, if not faster.
Oracle will probably find that the only way they can sell Solaris is to bundle it as a database appliance OS or something stupid like that. Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it.
Solaris wasn't the healthiest until the OpenSolaris project gave it a significantly greater audience that allowed anyone to use it and get familiar with it. OpenSolaris sold Sun hardware and the proprietary Solaris. It is what kept Solaris from dead ending and stagnating.
Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.
Microsoft do exactly the same. Microsoft's contract with Facebook allows them more access to info than Google's does, so they can flood your bing.com results with even more social crud than Google does at the moment. Both have similar or equivalent access to Twitter's stream. Both have similar access to LinkedIn. Google has slightly better access to MySpace than Microsoft, but no where near AOL in that regard.
But in the end, everyone is doing it. Bing, Google, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else that has products in the search result market. And to my knowledge, Google and Microsoft both allow you to disable live/social results in your search queries quite easily (and I'm guessing the others must also.)
My, how quickly people forget. IE really won because Netscape 4 sucked. Sure, IE stagnated after that and it's hard to forgive MS for that, but let's not pretend that IE6 was an inferior browser that came to dominance simply through underhanded techniques despite superior offerings from competitors.
Hmmm... I think your memory is slightly misleading there. Netscape losing the Browser War had nothing to do with Netscape Navigator being inferior to IE6.
IE4 bundled with Windows 95C was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Up until that point, IE3 had been a separate entity and most people had no idea how to get it installed, let alone that it existed. Windows 95C included IE4 as a "bonus" CD on OEM distributions and if you wanted a lot of the new features tht made 95C "better" you needed to install it. If an OEM left it off, their version of Windows 95C was seen as being "inferior" when compared with those that did install it.
It was at this point that Microsoft started releasing builds if Memphis (later known Windows 98) that had IE built into the core of the OS by default. All the new features, such as active desktop, nice looking folder browsers, CHM Help and so on, relied on IE being left on the machine. By the time Windows 98 was released, the browser wars were essentially over. Why? Because people got IE4 for free when they bought a new computer that had Windows 95C on it, and when Windows 98 was available, the OEM didn't even need to make the effort to install it any more.
Netscape lost their browser war, not because their browser sucked (and I agree that it did) but because they could not compete with Microsoft's strategy of tying the browser to the operating system on desktop releases of the Windows platform. This is partly what started the whole anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. People no longer felt compelled to pay for the shareware Netscape Navigator when they get Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for free with their new computer. Why spend the hour downloading Netscape at dialup speeds (which the majority of the internet user base still had back then) when something just as good was already installed.
The OEM contracts that Microsoft had with the majority of the OEM companies was also another factor, but irrelevant here. Maybe in another BeOS discussion it might prove pertinent.
IE6 wasn't released until 2001, a few months before Windows XP was released in August. It was available for all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. It was a free upgrade. But IE6 in no way had any effect on Netscape. It was all over by then for Netscape. The Mozilla engine had already been released as open source by then and the Phoenix browser project was already in its infancy.
This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?
Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.
Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.
Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.
No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue.
Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees.
Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there.;-)
Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.
NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.
The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.
As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone.
The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.
The GV app is still just an app. It doesn't replace any of the Apple apps. They're still there and still fully functional. What it does do is make them redundant.
Instead of giving people your cell number, you give them your Google number. At that point, all your voicemail is kept on the Google service, all your calls are routed through the Google service to whatever phone(s) you choose to have the calls go to. You are no longer tied to Apple's Visual Voicemail (which by most people's accounts hasn't worked properly in quite a while anyway) nor are you limited to AT&T's network anymore. The same applies to SMS and so on as well. Use your Google number instead of your iPhone number and you can get the messages on any/all your phones rather than just your iPhone.
The GV app also allows you to make calls out through Google's network. Your phone dials Google, then dials out from Google to where ever. With the apps on the various platforms, this is essentially transparent. You just use the dialer in the GV app instead of the Apple dialer. It doesn't sync your contacts to the Google servers as such. Like all apps on an iPhone, it has access to your contacts directly, so doesn't need to store them on the server. Not that it matters much given you can use Google Sync to do it, or even us iTunes itself.
Having said all that, the Apple phone apps are still all there and you can use those as well if you want. But if you do, CallerID will show your cell # instead of your Google number. If people call that number, you lose things like voicemail transcription features and so on.
I am basing this on the functionality in the applications on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. I doubt the app for the iPhone would be any different in functionality, only in appearance.
But no, the app doesn't replace the Apple ones. It merely supersedes them and essentially makes them redundant.
I agree... I had a similar issue at a school a few years back. Windows + Mac clients on the network. Rather than try to run two directories, we just used Novell eDirectory with (then available) Novell dirXML which allowed all the clients to use a single directory without realising they weren't native Active Directory or OpenDirectory platforms they were talking to.
It saved a lot of effort down the line and proved extremely scalable. Also had the benefit of allowing the network to integrate other platforms in the future without much effort if the school wanted to.
I'm sure there are plenty of great FOSS solutions out there, but eDirectory make it so much easier and reduced the cost of implementation significantly, even taking into account licensing costs. Sometimes you do just have to weigh up all the angles.
Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.
I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.
The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.
There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.
Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.
Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.
Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.
The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.
All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.
You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.
Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.
There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.
No, but then, I found that real life was a far better teacher than living in the bubble of a university.
The great thing about the internet, no body knows if you're a dog.
Certificates and diplomas and little letters after your name mean nothing online. Its what you do with all that education that matters. And living in a University doesn't really do anything with it except prove you can study. Whip-di-do. I can study too. I have quite a few professional trade certificates in ICT that prove I know those companies products. Red Hat, Microsoft, Cisco, among others. I have an income generating job (rather than relying on tuition fees and donations) that is actually using those trade certificates. I keep networks, servers and more running every single day, and I write software and fix bugs when those networks and hosts don't need any work.
What have you done with your Ph.D that makes it better than anyone elses real-life knowledge of computer sciences? An education just proves you can learn. Even monkeys can learn. The trick is taking what you've learned and using it in the real world.
Sorry, but with that single sentence you completely lost any of my respect your post might have earned.
However, their monopoly in search is something that is forced on people, nor is anyone locked in to using Google Search if they don't want to. Google Search has a monopoly because the product is better than the others. It has become the benchmark of what search needs to become.
The back end of Google's Search technology is massive and requires billions of dollars of investment before anyone else could come up with something similar. Of that there is no doubt. But that doesn't stop anyone else doing what Google did and coming up with a better algorithm or a better crawler or any other number of possible ways in which search technology could be improved. Thats how Google started. They built a better AltaVista and tried to sell it. When no one would buy it (including Yahoo, Excite, and others) they decided to run it themselves and the rest is history. They literally started in a garage, just like Apple or a lot of others out there.
Google doesn't leverage its search technology to gain market share in the Advertising. It uses its advertising platform (one that is also considered a benchmark of the online advertising industry) to sell space on its own web properties. It also acts as a mediator to allow third party website owners to sell space on their web properties to people wanting to buy ad space.
Just because Google's Search is the defacto standard doesn't mean it can't use it any way it chooses. Its providing a service by allowing people to put their ads on its own web properties.
And now its doing the same for 3% of pages loaded on Yahoo's search results.
Its a service. And you are not forced to use it or view it:-)
Internet advertising is a tax for using Internet Explorer and Safari. Use crap, see crap.
Surely there is a difference here in that Google's so called Monopoly is borne of natural migration. People use Google because its better than the other options. Yahoo had its opportunity in the 90s and even at the beginning of this decade and did nothing. They could even have *bought* PageRank when Page and Brin first made the sales pitch to them.
Microsoft is no different in that regard. If it hadn't been too busy looking at AOL and CompuServe and trying to reproduce it with the original MSN, the could have gotten a head start. Instead they're at least half a decade behind everyone else and only making ground by tying their online products into their offline products (Look at MS Office 2007 running on Vista for an example.)
Google created a better product and captured the market share naturally. There is absolutely no impediment to people switching from Google to Yahoo's Overture (or whatever they call it now) or MS AdCenter. In fact, Google make it damn easy for you to get your information out of any of their products to take it to another company. From GMail (and Google Apps) all the way through to their AdWords platforms.
While the DOJ may have an obligation to investigate a monopoly, they cannot rightly charge Google with any anti-trust violations given it does not impede people leaving and the marketshare it has was generated simply by having a better product. They have not in any way used that dominance to force people to only use their product at the expense of others.
Remember BeOS vs Windows 98?
If anything comes of these investigations, it will be a very dark day for the so-called Justice system in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of. Linux has DEP and a few other features (ASLR and SEHOP for example.) Redhat created ExecShield that can contribute. I don't know if PaX has been merged yet (haven't followed in quiet a while now) but it also does something similar. While not the same, they all provide different answers to the problem.
Then JIT languages come along and screw everything up. ;-)
W^X is just one method OpenBSD championed, but it's not an exclusive technology.
Shouldn't feed the trolls, but it seems kind of fun sometimes.
Discovering the Higgs Boson doesn't suddenly mean that we now know everything there is to know about matter. All that did was verify a hypothesis that there was a particle that made it possible for Energy to become Matter and vice versa. We now know with certainty that the particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 exists, as predicted, and that it fits into our Standard Model as we were expecting a particle of that size would.
To suddenly expect that we should now be advancing scientifically at a rapid rate simply because we have confirmed the particle exists is nonsense. It took us 40 years between the time of the hypothesis being put forward by Higgs and his co-authors, until it was genuinely confirmed in 2012. In that time technology had to advance significantly for us to be able to get there. But that didn't stop people trying through out those 40 years. In the end, the largest man-made machine ever was created. A machine so massive it stretches across 2 countries and consumes more power than a large city. A machine that is itself at the very limits of what our current technology allows.
Your argument is like saying that the instant Yuri Gregarin got into orbit, he should have been able to land on the moon and make it back to Earth after taking a quick spin to visit our distant relatives on Mars.
Dark matter is just another thing we have yet to figure out. We still don't know what it is. We only know it exists because we can't account for the gravity it produces. But we can't actually measure it directly. Because we can neither see it, nor touch it, nor hear it, nor taste it, and but we can observe the effects it has on the space around it, we know it's there. Isaac Newton knew that something existed to make the apple fall to the ground, or the planets orbit the sun, but until he spent time studying it, he didn't know what gravity actually was. Same is true for Infrared light. Until Newton started playing with prisms near a thermometer on his wall, no one knew that infrared light existed.
So should we say that studying Dark Matter is a waste of time because we don't know what it is or what use it will be to us in the future? It makes up magnitudes more of the matter in the universe than all the matter we can actually see and account for combined. Yet we shouldn't try to learn about it and discover what it might be?
Maybe Dark Matter is the energy source of the future. We just don't know it yet because our own technology hasn't advanced to the point where we can figure it out. Just like we knew there was this particle 40 years ago that we had yet to account for in our standard model, but in the last 2 years we have now confirmed exists and are actually starting to understand what it really is.
You, Sir, are ignorant and should keep your mouth shut.
(Unless it is to ask questions.)
Heh, funny you should say that. I've been trialing FreeBSD 10-RELEASE lately, primarily because of the whole systemd fiasco.
So far, most of my apps look like they'll cope without a hassle. A few others while probably just have to be run in VMs on Slackware or something.
LOL. Maybe with the command line based log reader? Or maybe you have never used the last command to parse the binary log file which is wtmp either.
Have you ever had to monitor server logs remotely?
Explain to me how to easily set up an alert to trigger on an event in a binary log? I can handle that easily in a syslog text log, but I'd love to know how *you* easily do that with a binary log. Could you give me the awk script for it? No? How about just a simple regexp for locating a single type of event that I can have running against the stream of log data as it gets logged into the file?
Binary logs are basically useless to me. I cannot automate them in real time. I cannot filter them easily in a script. I essentially have to parse them manually, or dump them to text and then filter them. What a huge waste of time.
I can leave a script running against a syslog text log, tracking everything as it gets streamed into the file, and I can instantly trigger an alert against an event. Very easily. Very simply.
I cannot do that with systemd binary logs.
Talking to a megalomaniac is a waste of time. You are not going to reach him, regardless of the validity of your arguments. The whole systemd discussion amply demonstrates this. This guy thinks he is Linus reincarnated and since he cannot do a new kernel, he has fixated on the next best thing.
Which worked out oh so well in the whole PulseAudio fiasco a few years ago.
You'd have thought that one thing alone would have taught Red Hat a thing or two about the guy they're trusting to manage the very core functionality of their primary business product.
By contrast, UNIX/LINUX servers are much more difficult to configure and generally require a lot more man-hours and a more experienced (and expensive) staff.
This is a fallacy. There are numerous studies that have shown that a single Unix admin is able to manage more Unix/Linux/BSD servers than a single Windows Admin. It is far more cost effective, in larger environments, to run Unix servers than Windows servers when it comes to ongoing maintenance. It is also well documented that a Unix/Linux server build can be online and running significantly faster than a comparable Windows build.
Simply put, how long does it take to get something like an Oracle DB up, running and usable on Windows vs Linux? What is the cost of that build, including the licensing and the time it takes to put together? I can image a Linux based server with only the stuff I need significantly faster than I can do the same in Windows Server 2012.
The fact that Windows Server is still able to survive on expensive license fees when Linux and BSD are free is pretty telling. Companies are doing a cost-benefit comparison and finding that they are saving more money going with the paid solution than the free solution.
No, generally cost has nothing to do with whether a company chooses Windows over Unix/Linux or not. Convenience plays a huge part in it. Most small and medium sized businesses probably don't even realise they have options. Windows is often picked as the default because that is what the kids from the past 20 years have been taught or all they've managed to pick up through school. Again, convenience and knowledge over cost.
It also comes down to ease of management. Its a lot easier to implement Active Directory for user and device management than to do the same with OpenLDAP. Many companies pick Windows because they can do simple tasks like manage users themselves and not need to pay an admin to do that kind of thing for them.
It is very similar to what you see happening on the desktop with the domination of easy-to-use and configure Mac and Windows over KDE or Gnome, except on the server-side it is mainly an issue of the ease of use for the system administrator, and the fact that a good Unix admin is much more expensive and harder to find than an MCSE certified admin.
A good Unix admin can manage a larger pool of servers, off-setting the cost of having to hire multiple Windows admins. However, the cost of Unix admins is not significantly different from the cost of Windows admins. In fact, most Unix Admins are also very capable Windows Admins and so you get a two-for when they're hired.
Easy-to-configure Windows and Mac are a strawman. Gnome and KDE are no more difficult to configure than Windows or Mac. The difference is in actually having taken the time to learn them. Arguably you have more control over the Gnome and KDE environments. What puts Windows up there is that through the 90s no one had a choice when buying from OEMs, so everyone learned the basics of Windows. That then bled into the 2000s where it was easier to stick with the devil you knew rather than learn everything over again.
It has very little to do with the cost of the systems and far more to do with people being comfortable with what they know. Look at how badly Windows 8.x and Windows Server 2012 are doing at the moment. They are such major changes that require significant relearning of some major fundamentals, that people are simply not switching to them. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 still dominate the corporate/business market. People aren't upgrading to Win8/2012 for the same reason they're not switching to Linux. They have to make a significant effort learn how to use the systems.
If it was just replacing the /etc/init.d mess, that'd be fine.
My main problem with SystemD is that it is turning into this massive black hole that's trying to replace many different systems in one. And not very well at that.
Why replace pam.d, crond, init, and add complexities like dbus in a single package that runs at PID1 when it doesn't need to? So now a single flaw in its crond could allow a vector that lets dbus provide a way to trick pam.d into letting users escalate their privileges? Sure, it hasn't happened yet, but when you start intertwining these apps into a single super app....
Worse, the logging it provides is next to useless. If I have a headless server with no GUI, how the hell am I supposed to read binary logs? It doesn't even give me useful information during the boot process. At least my old init scripts could do that much.
It completely goes against the core principles of UNIX in general. Do one thing, and do it damn well. Make it interoperable with other processes. Log to text. Configure with text.
I don't want this massive beast of a process that replaces my options. And I especially don't want one that isn't even very good at performing the original single task its supposed to be replacing, let alone all the franken-tasks its taken on.
If this were just about replacing init, I doubt I'd be anywhere near as bothered. But as an active admin, this bothers me significantly more than just having to redo my startup scripts.
You still have to license RHEL if you intend to have support. I suppose if you don't mind going at it your own...
You're not licensing RHEL, you're licensing a support agreement for 12 months. There's a pedantic difference.
The difficulty with RHEL is that if you want to run it without support, you have to compile it yourself. They do not release binaries outside of their support agreements. Which is why CentOS (and others) exists in its current implementation.
Does this mean that the Basic Rules that WotC made available for free a few weeks back are no longer legitimately available for free?
http://www.imore.com/get-dd-ba...
Looks like the WotC 5E page says they're $20 now.
I think you are confusing patent protection with copyright protection. Software is still covered by copyright law, and the licensing agreements you choose to put on your software product is still what defines how people can use your software product, and what their access to that software is.
If I write a program and release it under a license that does not allow access to the source code, and does not allow users to distribute it further, that is still perfectly valid. But if someone decides that they want to write their own software that does the same thing, as long as they do not use anything from my product, they are well within their rights to do so.
UNIX platforms have been around for 50 years and the model they use has become essentially a standard. But until recently, UNIX was costly and the licensing was rather prohibitive. So in the 1980s, this man decided that he'd like to write his own version of a UNIX-like platform, and release it freely and openly for everyone to use. That platform was GNU and the man that started it was Richard Stallman. GNU is now one of the most widely used platforms on the market. Even some UNIX vendors use some of the GNU utilities themselves. It also became the system that sits on top of the Linux kernel.
But while GNU replicates a lot of the functionality from UNIX utilities, it uses absolutely none of the code from UNIX. It was written independently to ensure that it was freely available to everyone.
That hasn't stopped UNIX platforms from continuing to be sold, or continuing to be innovative. But it has pushed UNIX vendor to improve their platform significantly to differentiate themselves from the free platforms.
Software Patents would not have allowed GNU to exist at all. Software patents are, without exception, patenting ideas rather than implementation. This means that if one entity holds a patent for an idea, no other entity can come up with an alternate way of achieving the same/similar end result. This gives the patent holder an extended monopoly on an idea and stifles innovation in the software industry.
Software copyrights allow you to release and protect your software from blatant copying, while still allowing people to improve upon and innovate beyond your original idea. Software patents do not.
Completely pedantic of me, but relevant. In New Zealand a Bill is always a draft. There is no difference between a "draft bill" and a "bill." Once the Bill passes its 3rd and final reading in the House, it becomes an Act at which point it is law.
In regards to your comment about "Big Money," New Zealand is very small, but it doesn't really have the same problems with lobbyists that the US or other large nations do. In fact, the majority of lobbyists in New Zealand are Greenies and Climate Change doomsayers trying to save each and every tree, bug or animal. Well, them and media companies trying to get nasty copyright law changes made.
Fortunately, while NZ is based on the Westminster model of Parliament, but with Europe's MMP, its sufficiently different enough that its not quite so easy to game. And with only 120 Members of Parliament, lobbyists tend to have to convince an entire political party rather than just a few members with seats in the Parliament.
The whole reason Sun opened up Solaris in the first place was to try and get it a wider audience and more of a community around it. Linux was encroaching on Solaris as much as it was on any other Unix, if not faster.
Oracle will probably find that the only way they can sell Solaris is to bundle it as a database appliance OS or something stupid like that. Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it.
Solaris wasn't the healthiest until the OpenSolaris project gave it a significantly greater audience that allowed anyone to use it and get familiar with it. OpenSolaris sold Sun hardware and the proprietary Solaris. It is what kept Solaris from dead ending and stagnating.
Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.
Fare thee well, old friend.
Microsoft do exactly the same. Microsoft's contract with Facebook allows them more access to info than Google's does, so they can flood your bing.com results with even more social crud than Google does at the moment. Both have similar or equivalent access to Twitter's stream. Both have similar access to LinkedIn. Google has slightly better access to MySpace than Microsoft, but no where near AOL in that regard.
But in the end, everyone is doing it. Bing, Google, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else that has products in the search result market. And to my knowledge, Google and Microsoft both allow you to disable live/social results in your search queries quite easily (and I'm guessing the others must also.)
Hmmm... I think your memory is slightly misleading there. Netscape losing the Browser War had nothing to do with Netscape Navigator being inferior to IE6.
IE4 bundled with Windows 95C was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Up until that point, IE3 had been a separate entity and most people had no idea how to get it installed, let alone that it existed. Windows 95C included IE4 as a "bonus" CD on OEM distributions and if you wanted a lot of the new features tht made 95C "better" you needed to install it. If an OEM left it off, their version of Windows 95C was seen as being "inferior" when compared with those that did install it.
It was at this point that Microsoft started releasing builds if Memphis (later known Windows 98) that had IE built into the core of the OS by default. All the new features, such as active desktop, nice looking folder browsers, CHM Help and so on, relied on IE being left on the machine. By the time Windows 98 was released, the browser wars were essentially over. Why? Because people got IE4 for free when they bought a new computer that had Windows 95C on it, and when Windows 98 was available, the OEM didn't even need to make the effort to install it any more.
Netscape lost their browser war, not because their browser sucked (and I agree that it did) but because they could not compete with Microsoft's strategy of tying the browser to the operating system on desktop releases of the Windows platform. This is partly what started the whole anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. People no longer felt compelled to pay for the shareware Netscape Navigator when they get Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for free with their new computer. Why spend the hour downloading Netscape at dialup speeds (which the majority of the internet user base still had back then) when something just as good was already installed.
The OEM contracts that Microsoft had with the majority of the OEM companies was also another factor, but irrelevant here. Maybe in another BeOS discussion it might prove pertinent.
IE6 wasn't released until 2001, a few months before Windows XP was released in August. It was available for all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. It was a free upgrade. But IE6 in no way had any effect on Netscape. It was all over by then for Netscape. The Mozilla engine had already been released as open source by then and the Phoenix browser project was already in its infancy.
This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?
Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.
Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.
Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.
Or am I completely missing something?
No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue. Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees. Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there. ;-)
Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.
NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.
The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.
http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.
As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone. The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.
The GV app is still just an app. It doesn't replace any of the Apple apps. They're still there and still fully functional. What it does do is make them redundant.
Instead of giving people your cell number, you give them your Google number. At that point, all your voicemail is kept on the Google service, all your calls are routed through the Google service to whatever phone(s) you choose to have the calls go to. You are no longer tied to Apple's Visual Voicemail (which by most people's accounts hasn't worked properly in quite a while anyway) nor are you limited to AT&T's network anymore. The same applies to SMS and so on as well. Use your Google number instead of your iPhone number and you can get the messages on any/all your phones rather than just your iPhone.
The GV app also allows you to make calls out through Google's network. Your phone dials Google, then dials out from Google to where ever. With the apps on the various platforms, this is essentially transparent. You just use the dialer in the GV app instead of the Apple dialer. It doesn't sync your contacts to the Google servers as such. Like all apps on an iPhone, it has access to your contacts directly, so doesn't need to store them on the server. Not that it matters much given you can use Google Sync to do it, or even us iTunes itself.
Having said all that, the Apple phone apps are still all there and you can use those as well if you want. But if you do, CallerID will show your cell # instead of your Google number. If people call that number, you lose things like voicemail transcription features and so on.
I am basing this on the functionality in the applications on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. I doubt the app for the iPhone would be any different in functionality, only in appearance.
But no, the app doesn't replace the Apple ones. It merely supersedes them and essentially makes them redundant.
I agree... I had a similar issue at a school a few years back. Windows + Mac clients on the network. Rather than try to run two directories, we just used Novell eDirectory with (then available) Novell dirXML which allowed all the clients to use a single directory without realising they weren't native Active Directory or OpenDirectory platforms they were talking to. It saved a lot of effort down the line and proved extremely scalable. Also had the benefit of allowing the network to integrate other platforms in the future without much effort if the school wanted to. I'm sure there are plenty of great FOSS solutions out there, but eDirectory make it so much easier and reduced the cost of implementation significantly, even taking into account licensing costs. Sometimes you do just have to weigh up all the angles.
Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.
I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.
The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.
There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.
Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.
Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.
Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.
The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.
All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.
You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.
Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.
There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.
No, but then, I found that real life was a far better teacher than living in the bubble of a university.
The great thing about the internet, no body knows if you're a dog.
Certificates and diplomas and little letters after your name mean nothing online. Its what you do with all that education that matters. And living in a University doesn't really do anything with it except prove you can study. Whip-di-do. I can study too. I have quite a few professional trade certificates in ICT that prove I know those companies products. Red Hat, Microsoft, Cisco, among others. I have an income generating job (rather than relying on tuition fees and donations) that is actually using those trade certificates. I keep networks, servers and more running every single day, and I write software and fix bugs when those networks and hosts don't need any work.
What have you done with your Ph.D that makes it better than anyone elses real-life knowledge of computer sciences? An education just proves you can learn. Even monkeys can learn. The trick is taking what you've learned and using it in the real world.
Sorry, but with that single sentence you completely lost any of my respect your post might have earned.
However, their monopoly in search is something that is forced on people, nor is anyone locked in to using Google Search if they don't want to. Google Search has a monopoly because the product is better than the others. It has become the benchmark of what search needs to become.
The back end of Google's Search technology is massive and requires billions of dollars of investment before anyone else could come up with something similar. Of that there is no doubt. But that doesn't stop anyone else doing what Google did and coming up with a better algorithm or a better crawler or any other number of possible ways in which search technology could be improved. Thats how Google started. They built a better AltaVista and tried to sell it. When no one would buy it (including Yahoo, Excite, and others) they decided to run it themselves and the rest is history. They literally started in a garage, just like Apple or a lot of others out there.
Google doesn't leverage its search technology to gain market share in the Advertising. It uses its advertising platform (one that is also considered a benchmark of the online advertising industry) to sell space on its own web properties. It also acts as a mediator to allow third party website owners to sell space on their web properties to people wanting to buy ad space.
Just because Google's Search is the defacto standard doesn't mean it can't use it any way it chooses. Its providing a service by allowing people to put their ads on its own web properties.
And now its doing the same for 3% of pages loaded on Yahoo's search results.
Its a service. And you are not forced to use it or view it :-)
Internet advertising is a tax for using Internet Explorer and Safari. Use crap, see crap.
Nothing stopping Microsoft signing up for Google Adsense like everyone else ;-) They could join the party too.
Come on... you know you want to see "Ads by Goooooooogle" next time you visit the MSDN site. :-)
Surely there is a difference here in that Google's so called Monopoly is borne of natural migration. People use Google because its better than the other options. Yahoo had its opportunity in the 90s and even at the beginning of this decade and did nothing. They could even have *bought* PageRank when Page and Brin first made the sales pitch to them.
Microsoft is no different in that regard. If it hadn't been too busy looking at AOL and CompuServe and trying to reproduce it with the original MSN, the could have gotten a head start. Instead they're at least half a decade behind everyone else and only making ground by tying their online products into their offline products (Look at MS Office 2007 running on Vista for an example.)
Google created a better product and captured the market share naturally. There is absolutely no impediment to people switching from Google to Yahoo's Overture (or whatever they call it now) or MS AdCenter. In fact, Google make it damn easy for you to get your information out of any of their products to take it to another company. From GMail (and Google Apps) all the way through to their AdWords platforms.
While the DOJ may have an obligation to investigate a monopoly, they cannot rightly charge Google with any anti-trust violations given it does not impede people leaving and the marketshare it has was generated simply by having a better product. They have not in any way used that dominance to force people to only use their product at the expense of others.
Remember BeOS vs Windows 98?
If anything comes of these investigations, it will be a very dark day for the so-called Justice system in the US.