Yeah, but that's exactly the same as with Red Hat. Except at least Sun will give you the OS to play with and charge you for the patches.
Red Hat won't give you anything other than a Beta version of the OS to play with. Even if you do buy a license from them, if you don't pay them the same amount of money next year, they STOP giving you security patches.
Sun don't seem too bad in this light. Hell, Microsoft seems pretty damn good when compared to this!
It's all you people with pratically any phone in existance today... They can all have applications installed on them, so this must be what is causing the network problems.
This is the answer - force everyone to buy an iPhone that you can't install these pesky applications on and the network will be perfect!
I _HAVE_ to buy a machine capable of running Windows for my univesity course. I am studying through the Open University (distance learning) and many of their courses are Windows only:(
This means that I am forced to give money to a company that I do not wish to support (can't vote with my wallet) as well as incur all of the risk that comes from using their products, and if I want a degree I have no choice.
For some people, pron is free on the interweb. For many people, it's still something you buy. You don't think the studios would be making films with $1M+ budgets if people weren't buying them do you ?
It's not FUD when it's true. If we had a stable API / ABI in the kernel, we wouldn't have drivers limited to a specific version of the kernel.
Why do you think enterprises still rely so heavily on Sun? It's partly because a driver made for Solaris 8 will still work on Solaris 8 later. You don't get that guarantee with many Linux distros.
I have no drivers to be afraid or embarrassed about, but if you think that is the only thing stopping companies open sourcing their drivers then you have a lot to learn about how corporations build devices and the patent and other licensing deals that they have to enter into.
Since you seem convinced that in-tree things are guaranteed to work, could you please take a few moments to reconcile that point of view with the death of the Phillips webcam driver? Of the failure of CD / DVD burning to work in a few kernels ?
While you're at it, please explain what I need to do to get consistent performance from stable kernel to stable kernel? Look at the major benchmarks for the 2.6 tree and you'll see wildly differing performance from kernel to kernel. Can you honestly tell me that is expected behavior for a STABLE kernel ?
To be fair, I'm talking about a commercial situation. Our initial RH purchase was for just over GBP300,000.00. When we give Oracle that much money, they give us free dev and DR licenses. RH won't. And RH are the ones making money off of the 'free' software!
RH wouldn't even give us a test Satellite license, so we had two choices - fork out ANOTHER 8k or do all upgrades without testing. Obviously option 2 wasn't viable (if for no other reason than audit points) so we shelled the cash.
We could just use dev machines without support, but we had a limited number of provisioning licenses (per seat licensing to allow you to use kickstart) in Satellite and RH insisted on matching those to purchased support licenses, so you really don't get a choice.
I'm VERY glad that Oracle have thrown their hat into the ring if for no other reason than they will force RH to compete again.
The 2.6.x.y tree is there to solve a completely different problem to what was solved by the 2.even.x and 2.odd.x scheme. With 2.6.x.y, only fixes to that kernel are added. No new features are added. Ever.
With the 2.even.x tree, new features were added, but they were stabilised first. The aim (although not always achieved, see NPTL threads for example) was to NOT break the API / ABI during the life of that kernel series. So if I had a driver or a piece of software that worked on 2.4.1, it should STILL work on 2.4.16. My graphics card shouldn't stop working just because I upgrade my kernel.
Like I say, this wasn't always the case and the NPTL threads issue caused me no end of nightmares. Hint - never set NPTL_VERSION=2.4.1 and the install RPMs:) But it was better than it is now and at least the developers were making an effort to provide something that people could download and compile themselves and use. Now, they just have the distros do that, and the hobbyist is out in the cold. More importantly, as I said in my other post, this is causing fragmentation between distros over time.
I agree on CentOS - I should have mentioned that, my bad.
With that said, what is the cost of these distros providing long term support? Firstly, there is more and more divergence between the distros over time. The patches that each comes up with the backport specific security features will be different, if only slightly. The patches that each comes up with to backport a highly requested feature will be slightly different. Over time these slight differences will add up to become real differences between the distros.
We don't want fragmentation - we want to know that if something works on 'Linux' it should work on any distro we choose. Getting the userspace right was hard enough, but the LSB went some way towards standardising libraries, etc. Now that we have userspace on the mend, the frikking kernel starts going of at tangents all over the place.
Just look at the differences between a SLES and a RHEL kernel - fragmentation is already starting. And I don't want to know how both of these differ from Ubuntu:(
I miss Alan Cox maintaining the stable kernel tree. Doing maintenance isn't sexy or cool, but he was bloody good at it and with him, stability was a primary concern, not new features.
Beyond just allowing for better drivers, this would allow other ISVs who write software that interacts with the kernel to better support Linux and thus grow the Linux ecosystem. But making developers lives easier and more fun was apparently more important.
I've been ranting and railing about the stable API / ABI issue since the new development process was announced. I now have to wait for my distro to stabilise / patch 'their' kernel six ways from Sunday. Even today if you look at the differences between the SLES and RHEL kernels, they are significant, and they are only going to diverge further.
The new kernel development model encourages, nay, demands fragmentation. Welcome to the Unix wars part deux:(
Actually, in the UK ambulances use GPS to kill people... An ambulance crew recently turned what should have been a 20 minute drive across town into a 4+ hour trip between major cities because they just trusted what the GPS told them:(
I feel your pain, deeply! A stable API / ABI is absolutely vital for ISV support and the new development model means that you can only get this if you're prepared to pay a large amount of money for your distribution. I don't want to have to pay $1500 for RHEL, but that's the only way I can run an Oracle dev server on a quad box with 16GB ram. The amusing thing is that RHEL is the ONLY piece of software I have to pay for on that machine - our site license gives us free licenses for dev and DR:)
Anyone other than SLES or RHEL is a second class Linux citizen today. Without vendor support you can forget about trying to run a stable Linux kernel anymore. Bring back the old odd / even split!
That information is outdated really. The main developers decided that we wouldn't have a development kernel anymore, and would instead just develop in the stable tree. Genius! Now we have all the benefits of an unstable API / ABI combined with the benefits of flaky support... Go team!
I went with FC4 because of the Fedora legacy project. This meant that I could have a lifespan around what I wanted. Then they binned that with just a few months to go of FC4's lifespan. Arse!
I would move to Debian / Ubuntu, but they just make my blood boil. Worse, they make it difficult to get support for the core things I run (Exim and Apache) because of their own special, non-standard way of handling the config.
That's just rubbish. A decent XP install will last for 2 years easily. Install and patch behind a firewall, ensure regular patching and use firefox as a browser. And at least the vendor won't pull the rug out from under you like Fedora have just done.
In November last year I thought I had at least 1.5 years left on this box - I would just have to use -legacy. In december I found that I have 5 months to migrate to a new platform. Microsoft have never screwed me like that!
Yeah, you get that redhat feel - a frozen platform with no recent packages or major upgrades to userspace tools (e.g. Firefox). You get that redhat feel with shedloads of crap installed by default and you can't remove it because the OS is dependant on that package being there. Please explain to me WHY I need to have a cdburner installed on a machine without a cd-writer (nautilus-cd-burner)? Why should I be forced to have wireless tools installed to be able to run NetworkManager on my wired connections?
Red Hat do not support or advise upgrading any server either. RHEL support calls about upgrades are responded to with instructions to backup and re-install. That's not always helpful, but at least CentOS does provide a meta package to do that. I'm not sure about between major versions.
OpenBSD allows for simple upgrades between versions, good security and very few spurious dependencies.
It is an event for sure. It's an event because we were promised by the banks when they forced us to exchange liability for fraud, that these new devices COULD NOT BE TAMPERED WITH. We were promised that if someone tried to tamper with the unit, it would look damaged and not function in any way.
Now it turns out that you can get in, totally change it, and from the outside there is no sign of damage.
From what I understand, there are two pins on a card. There is the bank PIN, which is used in ATMs around the world and other swipe devices. There is also the card pin which is tied to the chip. As it happens, these are synchronised so that people only have to remember one pin per card, no matter how they are using it.
To all of you people in the Land of the Free (somerestrictionsmayapply, offernotvalidatalllocations, etc.), Home of the Brave that aren't worried by this kind of thing, here is why you should be... Tourism and jobs.
I can't remember the stats exactly from back home, but I think the deal was that every 1 tourist visiting the country creates 2 jobs. That is in a largely unskilled market, so let's assume that it's just one job for the US. This means that every person who decides to stay away means that one more of your countrymen is unemployed.
I am a classic example. I used to make around 5 trips to the US per year. My flights were with American companies (AA for preference, Continental as a second choice). On personal trips (1 - 2) these would be 2 x flights for my wife and I at around £1000 (so call it $1500 to be conservative). That's $3000 per year. On business (2 - 3 trips) it would just be 1 flight for myself, but then this would be around the £3000 mark per trip. That's $12,000 per year lost to the US economy just on my flights.
Then there are hotels. On business, I only ever stayed in 4* hotels, so costs were around $290 per night in NY, $100 per night in NC. On vacation, nightly costs varied between $70 in towns per night to $200 per night in national parks / bigger cities. Worst case scenario, that is $700 per personal trip ($1400 per year) and $2030 per business trip ($4000 per year). Then there is car hire, eating out, shopping, training ($1000 for skydiving instruction, etc.), national park entrance fees, costs for guided tours in national parks, entrance to attractions, food at attractions, etc. Lets call that £2000 per trip for pleasure and £2000 per trip for business (although it was always more).
So to use me as an example, by implementing these draconian security measures (and the unfriendly, overly aggresive TSA staff who enforce them), you have cost yourself a minimum of $25,000.00 PER YEAR!
Armored and completely isolated - audio, video, access - the cockpits on commercial aircraft (requires new and separate external entry doors for the pilots)
And how are the flightdeck crew supposed to take a leak or get food on a 11+ hour flight ?
Armored the skins and ports of commercial aircraft against small arms
That's not really needed. You can punch a lot of small holes in a plane before decompression becomes a problem. And between the time that the first hole is created and the time it would become a problem, the pilot can declare an emergency and descend to a safe altitude that does not require compression. Hell, I spend a lot of time at 15,000 feet above ground level with no oxygen or compression in the plane.
Issued small arms to any adult passenger that didn't have same at boarding
That's just a HORRIBLE idea. Untrained armed people are far more likely to kill innocent people than hijackers!
The other issue you don't address is emotional blackmail. You have to be able to communicate with the cockpit in case the cabin crew need to declare an emergency to the pilot. This same communication system could be used to tell the pilot that you will kill everyone on board or blow up the plane if he doesn't follow your instructions. How do any of your solutions (besides the one where grandma kills everyone in a turban with her newly issued cannon just because they look like a terrorist or a furrin devil) address this issue ?
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Yeah, but that's exactly the same as with Red Hat. Except at least Sun will give you the OS to play with and charge you for the patches.
Red Hat won't give you anything other than a Beta version of the OS to play with. Even if you do buy a license from them, if you don't pay them the same amount of money next year, they STOP giving you security patches.
Sun don't seem too bad in this light. Hell, Microsoft seems pretty damn good when compared to this!
It's all you people with pratically any phone in existance today... They can all have applications installed on them, so this must be what is causing the network problems.
This is the answer - force everyone to buy an iPhone that you can't install these pesky applications on and the network will be perfect!
I _HAVE_ to buy a machine capable of running Windows for my univesity course. I am studying through the Open University (distance learning) and many of their courses are Windows only :(
This means that I am forced to give money to a company that I do not wish to support (can't vote with my wallet) as well as incur all of the risk that comes from using their products, and if I want a degree I have no choice.
For some people, pron is free on the interweb. For many people, it's still something you buy. You don't think the studios would be making films with $1M+ budgets if people weren't buying them do you ?
It does have a button. Ok, just the one ;)
It's working now - what about the number of kernels when it WASN'T working because the driver was pulled with almost no notification ?
It's not FUD when it's true. If we had a stable API / ABI in the kernel, we wouldn't have drivers limited to a specific version of the kernel.
Why do you think enterprises still rely so heavily on Sun? It's partly because a driver made for Solaris 8 will still work on Solaris 8 later. You don't get that guarantee with many Linux distros.
I have no drivers to be afraid or embarrassed about, but if you think that is the only thing stopping companies open sourcing their drivers then you have a lot to learn about how corporations build devices and the patent and other licensing deals that they have to enter into.
Since you seem convinced that in-tree things are guaranteed to work, could you please take a few moments to reconcile that point of view with the death of the Phillips webcam driver? Of the failure of CD / DVD burning to work in a few kernels ?
While you're at it, please explain what I need to do to get consistent performance from stable kernel to stable kernel? Look at the major benchmarks for the 2.6 tree and you'll see wildly differing performance from kernel to kernel. Can you honestly tell me that is expected behavior for a STABLE kernel ?
To be fair, I'm talking about a commercial situation. Our initial RH purchase was for just over GBP300,000.00. When we give Oracle that much money, they give us free dev and DR licenses. RH won't. And RH are the ones making money off of the 'free' software!
RH wouldn't even give us a test Satellite license, so we had two choices - fork out ANOTHER 8k or do all upgrades without testing. Obviously option 2 wasn't viable (if for no other reason than audit points) so we shelled the cash.
We could just use dev machines without support, but we had a limited number of provisioning licenses (per seat licensing to allow you to use kickstart) in Satellite and RH insisted on matching those to purchased support licenses, so you really don't get a choice.
I'm VERY glad that Oracle have thrown their hat into the ring if for no other reason than they will force RH to compete again.
The 2.6.x.y tree is there to solve a completely different problem to what was solved by the 2.even.x and 2.odd.x scheme.
:) But it was better than it is now and at least the developers were making an effort to provide something that people could download and compile themselves and use. Now, they just have the distros do that, and the hobbyist is out in the cold. More importantly, as I said in my other post, this is causing fragmentation between distros over time.
With 2.6.x.y, only fixes to that kernel are added. No new features are added. Ever.
With the 2.even.x tree, new features were added, but they were stabilised first. The aim (although not always achieved, see NPTL threads for example) was to NOT break the API / ABI during the life of that kernel series. So if I had a driver or a piece of software that worked on 2.4.1, it should STILL work on 2.4.16. My graphics card shouldn't stop working just because I upgrade my kernel.
Like I say, this wasn't always the case and the NPTL threads issue caused me no end of nightmares. Hint - never set NPTL_VERSION=2.4.1 and the install RPMs
I agree on CentOS - I should have mentioned that, my bad.
:(
With that said, what is the cost of these distros providing long term support? Firstly, there is more and more divergence between the distros over time. The patches that each comes up with the backport specific security features will be different, if only slightly. The patches that each comes up with to backport a highly requested feature will be slightly different. Over time these slight differences will add up to become real differences between the distros.
We don't want fragmentation - we want to know that if something works on 'Linux' it should work on any distro we choose. Getting the userspace right was hard enough, but the LSB went some way towards standardising libraries, etc. Now that we have userspace on the mend, the frikking kernel starts going of at tangents all over the place.
Just look at the differences between a SLES and a RHEL kernel - fragmentation is already starting. And I don't want to know how both of these differ from Ubuntu
I miss Alan Cox maintaining the stable kernel tree. Doing maintenance isn't sexy or cool, but he was bloody good at it and with him, stability was a primary concern, not new features.
Ya think? Pity the kernel developers don't.
:(
Beyond just allowing for better drivers, this would allow other ISVs who write software that interacts with the kernel to better support Linux and thus grow the Linux ecosystem. But making developers lives easier and more fun was apparently more important.
I've been ranting and railing about the stable API / ABI issue since the new development process was announced. I now have to wait for my distro to stabilise / patch 'their' kernel six ways from Sunday. Even today if you look at the differences between the SLES and RHEL kernels, they are significant, and they are only going to diverge further.
The new kernel development model encourages, nay, demands fragmentation. Welcome to the Unix wars part deux
Actually, in the UK ambulances use GPS to kill people... An ambulance crew recently turned what should have been a 20 minute drive across town into a 4+ hour trip between major cities because they just trusted what the GPS told them :(
How about... This shit is messed up? We have no proof that this is shit, or that it is messed up, but I truly believe that this shit is messed up :)
I feel your pain, deeply! A stable API / ABI is absolutely vital for ISV support and the new development model means that you can only get this if you're prepared to pay a large amount of money for your distribution. I don't want to have to pay $1500 for RHEL, but that's the only way I can run an Oracle dev server on a quad box with 16GB ram. The amusing thing is that RHEL is the ONLY piece of software I have to pay for on that machine - our site license gives us free licenses for dev and DR :)
Anyone other than SLES or RHEL is a second class Linux citizen today. Without vendor support you can forget about trying to run a stable Linux kernel anymore. Bring back the old odd / even split!
That information is outdated really. The main developers decided that we wouldn't have a development kernel anymore, and would instead just develop in the stable tree. Genius! Now we have all the benefits of an unstable API / ABI combined with the benefits of flaky support... Go team!
What about the rest of the world?
Apple aim to grab 1% of the global market within a year. That's a little hard to do with standards that aren't common outside the USA.
5 hours TALK time... That's not 5 hours!
I went with FC4 because of the Fedora legacy project. This meant that I could have a lifespan around what I wanted. Then they binned that with just a few months to go of FC4's lifespan. Arse!
I would move to Debian / Ubuntu, but they just make my blood boil. Worse, they make it difficult to get support for the core things I run (Exim and Apache) because of their own special, non-standard way of handling the config.
It uses an Intel processor. No idea which one though.
That's just rubbish. A decent XP install will last for 2 years easily. Install and patch behind a firewall, ensure regular patching and use firefox as a browser. And at least the vendor won't pull the rug out from under you like Fedora have just done.
In November last year I thought I had at least 1.5 years left on this box - I would just have to use -legacy. In december I found that I have 5 months to migrate to a new platform. Microsoft have never screwed me like that!
Yeah, you get that redhat feel - a frozen platform with no recent packages or major upgrades to userspace tools (e.g. Firefox). You get that redhat feel with shedloads of crap installed by default and you can't remove it because the OS is dependant on that package being there. Please explain to me WHY I need to have a cdburner installed on a machine without a cd-writer (nautilus-cd-burner)? Why should I be forced to have wireless tools installed to be able to run NetworkManager on my wired connections?
Red Hat do not support or advise upgrading any server either. RHEL support calls about upgrades are responded to with instructions to backup and re-install. That's not always helpful, but at least CentOS does provide a meta package to do that. I'm not sure about between major versions.
OpenBSD allows for simple upgrades between versions, good security and very few spurious dependencies.
It is an event for sure. It's an event because we were promised by the banks when they forced us to exchange liability for fraud, that these new devices COULD NOT BE TAMPERED WITH. We were promised that if someone tried to tamper with the unit, it would look damaged and not function in any way.
Now it turns out that you can get in, totally change it, and from the outside there is no sign of damage.
From what I understand, there are two pins on a card. There is the bank PIN, which is used in ATMs around the world and other swipe devices. There is also the card pin which is tied to the chip. As it happens, these are synchronised so that people only have to remember one pin per card, no matter how they are using it.
To all of you people in the Land of the Free (somerestrictionsmayapply, offernotvalidatalllocations, etc.), Home of the Brave that aren't worried by this kind of thing, here is why you should be... Tourism and jobs.
I can't remember the stats exactly from back home, but I think the deal was that every 1 tourist visiting the country creates 2 jobs. That is in a largely unskilled market, so let's assume that it's just one job for the US. This means that every person who decides to stay away means that one more of your countrymen is unemployed.
I am a classic example. I used to make around 5 trips to the US per year. My flights were with American companies (AA for preference, Continental as a second choice). On personal trips (1 - 2) these would be 2 x flights for my wife and I at around £1000 (so call it $1500 to be conservative). That's $3000 per year. On business (2 - 3 trips) it would just be 1 flight for myself, but then this would be around the £3000 mark per trip. That's $12,000 per year lost to the US economy just on my flights.
Then there are hotels. On business, I only ever stayed in 4* hotels, so costs were around $290 per night in NY, $100 per night in NC. On vacation, nightly costs varied between $70 in towns per night to $200 per night in national parks / bigger cities. Worst case scenario, that is $700 per personal trip ($1400 per year) and $2030 per business trip ($4000 per year). Then there is car hire, eating out, shopping, training ($1000 for skydiving instruction, etc.), national park entrance fees, costs for guided tours in national parks, entrance to attractions, food at attractions, etc. Lets call that £2000 per trip for pleasure and £2000 per trip for business (although it was always more).
So to use me as an example, by implementing these draconian security measures (and the unfriendly, overly aggresive TSA staff who enforce them), you have cost yourself a minimum of $25,000.00 PER YEAR!
That is why this should matter to you.
I have a couple of curious questions here...
Armored and completely isolated - audio, video, access - the cockpits on commercial aircraft (requires new and separate external entry doors for the pilots)
And how are the flightdeck crew supposed to take a leak or get food on a 11+ hour flight ?
Armored the skins and ports of commercial aircraft against small arms
That's not really needed. You can punch a lot of small holes in a plane before decompression becomes a problem. And between the time that the first hole is created and the time it would become a problem, the pilot can declare an emergency and descend to a safe altitude that does not require compression. Hell, I spend a lot of time at 15,000 feet above ground level with no oxygen or compression in the plane.
Issued small arms to any adult passenger that didn't have same at boarding
That's just a HORRIBLE idea. Untrained armed people are far more likely to kill innocent people than hijackers!
The other issue you don't address is emotional blackmail. You have to be able to communicate with the cockpit in case the cabin crew need to declare an emergency to the pilot. This same communication system could be used to tell the pilot that you will kill everyone on board or blow up the plane if he doesn't follow your instructions. How do any of your solutions (besides the one where grandma kills everyone in a turban with her newly issued cannon just because they look like a terrorist or a furrin devil) address this issue ?