The nicest Windows client I've found is FileZilla. It supports FTP, FTP over SSL and SFTP.
Sure it's nice but nothing works well on top of Windoze and it simply sucks less than not having it. We've been using that where I work for the last couple of weeks for a terminal Winblows person. Networking services that FileZilla must depend on are flaky at best. At worst they don't work at all. For one person in a temporary setting, it worked well enough. It would have been easier to give them a copy of Mepis and let them use OO and Konqueror.
Microsoft has been a disaster for Universities and the sooner it's use is discontinued the better. Every semester students bring their virused out laptops back and all hell breaks lose. Virus traffic is chronic and students who use M$ junk are venerable to key loggers and other busts which could easily be used to drop classes, delete assignments and other nasties. SSH clients should not be promoted for insecure Operating Systems. It defeats the purpose of SSH and opens everyone else up to attack by providing a easy path to server compromise.
I can't imagine anything new taking off without a suitable suite of applications for the most common applications, at the very least.
That depends what use you want. There may be room for a specialty OS for dedicated devices. You might consider Opie a specialty OS, though it's derived from KDE and uses a Linux kernel. FreeDOS or one of these other GPL'd could make a nice camera, cellphone, media device or any combination of dedicated device. Not everything needs Open Office and an email client to be useful.
The killer app is GCC. Once you have that, as does Syllable, you can port anything and everything. That makes building things like cameras easy.
school administraters who have forgotten why they are there and who they serve.
I agree. They have things completely backward and are seeking to limit what they don't own and should not care about. The problem is not using a computer to access porn in class, the problem is not paying attention and causing a distraction - something that's happened since "school" was invented.
... if the attacker gains unsupervised physical access to the box, game over. What in the world did they think was going to happen?
Funny how the school would think of their students as "attackers". They are supposed to be providing a tax paid service. Yet the computer model they follow requires all users to be considered "attackers." It's the non free way and mindset at work.
What's next, mandatory pencils that can't be used to write dirty words and call home when you do? Spies to watch your every move? That's what these stupid laptops are. That's more of the non free way.
The school should be setting up services that anyone with any computer can use. What they've got is a bunch of junk they bought from greedy vendors. Junk that the student must use if they are to pass, a double waste. The ability of students to break access rules should be viewed as a vendor failure not a crime on the part of the student.
See Wiki to know about "block erase cycles" which limit rewrite times and some of the ways around it.
does samsung have a new technology for flash chips?
Could be. According to this Samsung is using the NAND they first developed back in 1989. Performance is better than normal drives,
The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
Sounds great to me. My laptops only have 6 gigs of storage right now. I'm sure they give me 5MB/s or less. Samsung's device then would be bigger, have better speed, lower power consumption, noise and heat from one without losing anything. As is, I expect my laptop's drives to die due to mechanical abuse so I sync the contents via sftp frequently and make CD backups two or three times a year. If cheap enough, flash memory would be great to have as a hard drive. Sooner or later, they will be cheaper because moving parts are expensive.
Because most computers use legacy software with file systems that are not suited to flash, Samsung will have make their drives smart enough to avoid burning out.
Give people what they want, and they will come. Free is nice, but nice is better! People want convenience, quality and convenience, and will pay for that.
Oh what a nice bunch of pigopolists who:
Call their best fans theives and sue them for sharing.
Try to fill the sharing networks with crap, static and obscene insults from starving artist like Madonna.
Sue competitors out of business. mp3.com arguably did nothing wrong, but was put out of business. Even their investors were sued to make sure that no one ever tried competing again.
Most importantly, innact insane control freak laws designed to perpetuate their monopoly forever by crippling all computer hardware and outlawing all forms of sharing, recording and anything that's not "consuming" crap on schedule without complaint.
There's nothing on the above list that I want.
You want nice? Go visit any Creative Commons web site and learn how to dream on your own again. Musicians want people to hear and enjoy their work. Lawyers and dipshits want to own it. The musicians are in control of Creative Commons. Dipshits are in control of RIAA music services. You have your pick.
100% of Slashdotters who don't just download and share the music they want are doing all of these things:
Ripping their old CDs, tapes and LPs. I've got about 2,000 songs that way.
Recording live shows.
Making their own music, it's not that hard.
Enjoying Creative Commons music without charge.
They may also be swapping music with their friends by sftp, portable music devices and CDs as in the days of tapes, but I would not know anything about that.
People paying $1.00 for a song that they don't own are suckers. Music does not cost that much to make and costs much less to distribute.
As a Slashdot visitor, I've always been very concerned with things like "Brand Value". So it's great see news like this being put up.
Well, OK, it's a silly Forbes story. If it were not for the fact that people with money to invest listen to such drivel, you would have nothing to worry about. In this world, however, money talks and you might be interested in what Forbes has to say if you are interested in earing a living .
Another thing you might notice is what's not there with the other "hot", "next generation" growing companies, Microsoft.Yet they provide the same services Apple and Google does and then some Note also that stoggy companies like Toyota did make the list.
Does Apple just send big bags of money to the Slashdot editors or what?
Not that I know of, but I've seen plenty of M$ adverts here, so they DO send bags of money. They also send bags of money to Forbes. Those bags of money are not enough to change most people's minds about Microsoft's prospects, innovation, quality or future. Microsft has screwed the pooch. Their "loss leader" stratagy is a loser and people really don't think of them as a company with a furture.
[due to shitty bandwith] AOL hosts take far longer to compromise and provide far less "bang for the buck". No wonder they're compromised a smaller percentage of time.
Can you tell me why BellSouth and all of their dial up slowness and relatively small size is number 3 on the list? I think AOL is doing a better job protecting the Windozing masses than others. I'd have real respect for them if they offered their customers Mepis.
There is absolutely nothing that prevents PC vendors to bundle superior players and configure them as default, thus increasing the value for consumers.
Nothing but an OS that changes user defaults and a company known for breaking competitor's programs. Unless you mean, install an alternate OS, what you propose is doomed to fail.
I wonder why they stopped with the Gnome desktop. The installer used to throw both Gnome and KDE at the user. Both are free, excellent and deserve a show. For older hardware, and the speed hungry, there's also XFCE4, AfterStep, Window Maker, Fluxbox and Enlightenment. The diversity of packages and the ease of apt-get installing them are one of the best things about Debian and free software in general. Leaving those things out does Debian a disservice.
VBS is a peice of crap, and is way to complicated for what should be simple tasks, MSH looks pretty damn promising.
How many times are you going to buy the line, "It's going to be better next time and better than anything else out there." Even if it were true, five years is too long a time frame to wait for anything. Chances are, it will be like their "korn shell":
"Question 5) True Story?
by travisd (travisd_no_spam@tubas.net)
Was the story about you embarrassing a Microsoftie at a conference true? Specifically, that he was insisting that their implementation of ksh in their unix compatibility kit was true to the "real" thing and trying to argue the point with you. The argument ended when someone else finally stood up and informed the speaker who he was arguing with....
Korn: This story is true. It was at a USENIX Windows NT conference and Microsoft was presenting their future directions for NT. One of their speakers said that they would release a UNIX integration package for NT that would contain the Korn Shell.
I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the "real" Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn Shell. After a couple of exchanges, I shut up and let him dig himself in deeper. Finally someone in the audience stood up and told him what almost everyone in the audience knew, that I had written the 'real' Korn Shell. I think that this is symbolic about the way the company works."
MarcoAtWork wonders why Apple would not chose the best IA chips available. He might as well have wondered why they would be leaving Motorola at all. It's suicidal greed and it will destroy Apple.
The move is not about the tech, it's about lock down. The Linspire Rant is informative - this looks like M$'s tech because it is. Paladium is here, whether you call it Next Generation, La Grand or Lock Box. When you want to go monopoly stupid, you pick the biggest monopoly player there is and run with it. AMD has been pleasing end users with chips that do IA better than Intel for years. Intel is making crap to lock end user out. They have been doing it ever since they introduced individual ID numbers for chips way back in Pentium One days. Locking people out is always about keeping competition out, never about performance. It's as if DRM has made Bill Gates old demand - you take the creative market, we'll take everything else you have, or we'll take everything and give you nothing - has come to pass.
Apple's Intel embrace is clearly suicidal if it's total. Intel is Bill Gate's bitch. The very lockdown mechanism they want to use against their own customers will be used to hamper performace at Bill's wish. Motorola, will take the hit in lost chips and might not be there when Apple realizes what a mistake they are making. Intel is going to hose them down the same hole they flushed DEC, HP, Compaq and SGI. It's hard to imagine them making something cheaper than their mini mac out of IA junk. As soon as Motorola is gone, Intel will put the screws to Apple and that will be that.
AMD and Free Software are next. With continued lack of purchasing of AMD from Dell and other big dumb computer makers, AMD will have a harder and harder time staying around. Ironically, free software will help exterminate AMD by reducing the overall need for hardware purchases. As in gambling, the person with the most resources wins a game of attrition. Without significant chip competition, Intel imagines they can put the screws to everyone and their lockdown will be complete. Free software won't boot, end of story M$ rules in co-operation with big dumb publishers and free software only runs on "pirate" systems, themselves bugged at the firmware level, from the Communist China. Dystopia complete.
Apple needs to realize that Free Software and competition are in their best interest. Their old enemies are not going to keep them around forever once they are dependent.
So its pretty safe to say then that FOSS is not exactly being swamped with patent infringment [sic] claims, no matter how massively Mr Stallman like to exaggerate the 'threat'. So his point, other than FUD is what exactly?
as if RMS were a lonely voice. He must have missed this:
... most businesses in Europe are against software patents--a recent German government study found 85% opposition.
His point is to collect actual examples of abuse. Cease and desist letters to small businesses don't make the evening news, so there may be a "flood" you have no clue about.
... what is going to kill Microsoft is Windoes XP and Server 2003. These OSes are so much better than previous ones from Microsoft that I see no reason to upgrade in the remotely foreseaable future.
If that were true, half of M$'s corporate users would not still be running Win2k, 98 and other older stuff. XP is a dog, just like every other M$ OS before it and whatever they finally realease in the future.
If we went by his definition of unqualified amateurs, most OSS developers would have been in the same category, but look what these "unqualified amateurs" have done to OSS?
Sure. I posted the story because it:
Reflects what you find in the world, broken windoze.
Reflects general (ignorant) opinion amplified by the BBC of why things are this way.
I'd have loved it if the author realized that free software, such as Mepis, is the best solution. Unfortunately, the author is unaware of how software is created and thinks that there's some kind of "qualification" that will fix everything. If the author knew a little more, he would know that free software is generally of higher quality than non free due to constant review and people's ability to fix it. If the author carried his logic to it's ultimate conclusion, he would realize that THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A "QUALIFIED" M$ REPAIRMAN. M$ shares it's code with a few large agencies that pay for it, but does not tell them everything and won't let them do so much as compile their own OS, let alone release improvements or improved binaries to the public. If "Qualified" means knowing what's going on inside code, only free software repairmen can be qualified.
There's a huge difference between the "scorch and burn" fight between Unix vendors and the symbiosis of free software development and distribution. The author's marketing perspective is warped and incomplete. The conclusions he draws from that perspective are close to silly.
The biggest flaw in the author's perspective is seen right here:
Back in the UNIX wars, the vendors had two primary axes on which they could compete: hardware speed, and features of their flavor of UNIX.
He forgot the legal axe. Sun, IBM, DEC and others wasted their resources on court battles about "fat line" patents and other nonsense. How can you pay developers while fighting off everyone else's lawyers? The survivors largely blunted that axe by burring it in each other, but it's still around. It was thrown hard at BSD and idiots like Microsoft and SCO are still trying to wield it.
The legal attitude was the downfall of closed source Unix but it's not a factor in free software. The issues are worked out and best practices can be passed on. For all the author's complaints, Linux distributions are probably more coherent than different versions of Winblows.
The author then goes insane here:
It takes longer to configure code than to compile it these days, which is categorically not the case on Windows. Commercial grade Windows software just works and usually keeps working. Do you think that this might, just maybe, have something to do with the reason that major apps like Adobe's Photoshop, Macromedia's Director, Adobe Premiere, etc, are still not available on UNIX and, in my opinion _never_ will be...
Where to start? I'm to conclude that Winblows is easier to code for because Adobe does not have to reconfigure their code to compile it again and somehow that makes Winblows a more consistent platform? That's nuts and it's not even close to true. Adobe, I'm sure, has to do plenty of code rewrite when M$ forces them to pay for a new OS and SDK. Of course, Microsoft would break Adobe if they ever did anything free software friendly. But what does this have to do with differences between Linux and BSD? Absolutely Nothing. Free software is much easier to port to other free software than it will ever be port closed source crap. That's why thing like GIMP, ghostview, KDE and others run under BSD, Linux, OSX and even Winblows, though the Winblows ports are largely a waste of time.
I think I see the problem here:
I installed Linux on one of my systems the other day, so I could use it as a teaching vehicle for my class on system log analysis.
The author is a noob. MJR, I suggest that you actually use free software regularly before you predict it's demise due to a non existant lack of co-operation. Go here and tell me in a year or so if you still have problems with packages not working. I don't care how many years you have worked with hoary old Unix boxes, you are out of your mind to compare Microsoft junk with free software and conclude that M$ is more consistent in any way.
The list of things the author implies without saying is staggering. I can refute a few that popped into my head to show the absurdity of the whole article. You can do anything with available free software you can do with non free, it's easier to set up, works better and it costs a lot less. I don't need Adobe. Red Hat's market is not going away because Debian does things differently. They share code and each is gaining the strength of the other: Debian is getting easier for desktop users to configure, Red Hat is getting better package management. Red Hat will also never run out of people who want the consulting which is "Enterprise support". IBM made 2.6 billion dollars that way too without once saying a bad word about any free software project.
Any of us who've worked with the various free-nixes out there have run across the "vanity versions" and their related politics: so-and-so won't work with so-and-so-else, let's start a whole new operating system development tree! Wow. Grow up.
A tired, M$ style, flame. I'm not sure what problems he's had, but he's welcome to fix them and share them back anytime he wants. I would not call him vain for that.
When Apple has holes big enough for automated worms to destabilize DNS root servers, tells you that you can't criticize them using their dinky html editor, brags that they will own all of computing in 5 years, hires PR firms to post stock model photos as M$ switchers, sues public school systems for copying software, makes it impossible to remove Safari and difficult to use another browser, hires PR firms to write letters to law makers on behalf of people they don't know, send representatives to public school IT meetings with instructions to lie about who they who they work for, make the $500,000 offer.... and countless other evil things... then Apple might fairly be compared to Microsoft.
Permissions, who would think of that? Oh yeah, the researchers:
Recommendations for web site developers and owners.
A less intrusive solution may be to use access control in order to restrict the indexing to allowed material. Let us assume that the web server runs with a higher privilege than the search engine. Now, the visible files need to be assigned low privilege, so they are readable by both the web server user and the search engine user. The invisible (or inaccessible) files are assigned higher privileges, so they are readable only by the web server. Thus, those files can be accessed remotely by those that know about them, and possibly possess the required credentials (for the inaccessible files), yet they cannot be indexed....
Simple enough on a *nix system. The problem is that you want to index the files for your own employee's use! You might not even keep you confidential files on the same machine as your public web server until you want to share it but the indexing software can send information back to it's owners. The solution is to make your own indexing software or use something like mnogosearch, which is free and has a debian package, for non-publically exposed files you want to index.
Using Winblows desktops makes all of this a red herring. The best server set up is useless when your PR staff uses keylogger ridden desktops. The weakest link in the chain is where your confidential data will get out.
Would you like to produce some proof of that [Winblows born network congestion is also implicated in the huge 2003 power outage], or are you just going through your "I hate M$" mantra"?
and calls me a troll. Nice work.
The Wiki page you linked to says:
On November 19, 2003, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released an interim report placing the cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in the Cleveland, Ohio area went off-line amid high electrical demand and strained high-voltage power lines later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". It also found that FirstEnergy did not warn other control centers until it was too late because of faulty Microsoft Windows based monitoring equipment [2] and inadequate staff. The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
I've read the Canada?U.S. Power System Outage Task Force Interim Report: Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada too and it's very informative. In short, their state estimator (GE) went tits up in a way that's consistent with loss of SCADA (usually runs on M$) information due to network congestion (usually a direct result of M$ virus attack). GE's software noticed it was doing a bad job and told the operators so. The troubleshooting effort made things worse because they turned off alarms and forgot about it.
You might also take Kema Consulting's word for it:
The Blaster worm that flummoxed an estimated half-million computers around the world last month might have exacerbated utilities' problems during the August blackout, bringing down -- or perhaps blocking communications -- on computers used to monitor the grid, said Joe Weiss, a utility control system expert. It didn't cause what happened but it could've exacerbated what happened, said Weiss, with Kema Consulting in Cupertino, Calif., The blackout followed the Aug. 11 Blaster outbreak by just three days.
I tend to agree with the him. When you can't get the information you need you can't make the right decisions. When your corporate network is flooded with M$ problems, your IT staff is going to be stretched too thin to help you figure out what's wrong with your GE system, if indeed the traffic problem is not what causes it to fail.
Is that implication enough for you? Unreliable parts are worse than parts that you don't have at all.
At San Onofre, operators are trained and on the simulator (looks and acts identical) one week out of five where all sorts of stuff is thrown at them for them to deal with - so that they would have the training to be able to use the nifty, fancy technology and the redundant backups.
They did the same thing where I worked, though I can't vouch for the frequency. The training center has a control room that's an exact replica of the real room but fed by simulators. I suppose they failed the computer displays there too, but it's not a substitute for daily operation.
it is unacceptable for the operators to be unfamiliar with the 1969 technology.
It's not that they are not familiar with the old equipment, it's that they are not used to using it because most of the time the nice new systems work. Not all of them are Windoze based but all of them can have problems if their network gets DDoSed and then the operators are "burdened" as we hear again and again. The analog systems have their quirks and operators who have been there for years know them. At the same time, a change in routine is a dangerous thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it's nice but nothing works well on top of Windoze and it simply sucks less than not having it. We've been using that where I work for the last couple of weeks for a terminal Winblows person. Networking services that FileZilla must depend on are flaky at best. At worst they don't work at all. For one person in a temporary setting, it worked well enough. It would have been easier to give them a copy of Mepis and let them use OO and Konqueror.
Microsoft has been a disaster for Universities and the sooner it's use is discontinued the better. Every semester students bring their virused out laptops back and all hell breaks lose. Virus traffic is chronic and students who use M$ junk are venerable to key loggers and other busts which could easily be used to drop classes, delete assignments and other nasties. SSH clients should not be promoted for insecure Operating Systems. It defeats the purpose of SSH and opens everyone else up to attack by providing a easy path to server compromise.
That depends what use you want. There may be room for a specialty OS for dedicated devices. You might consider Opie a specialty OS, though it's derived from KDE and uses a Linux kernel. FreeDOS or one of these other GPL'd could make a nice camera, cellphone, media device or any combination of dedicated device. Not everything needs Open Office and an email client to be useful.
The killer app is GCC. Once you have that, as does Syllable, you can port anything and everything. That makes building things like cameras easy.
I agree. They have things completely backward and are seeking to limit what they don't own and should not care about. The problem is not using a computer to access porn in class, the problem is not paying attention and causing a distraction - something that's happened since "school" was invented.
Funny how the school would think of their students as "attackers". They are supposed to be providing a tax paid service. Yet the computer model they follow requires all users to be considered "attackers." It's the non free way and mindset at work.
What's next, mandatory pencils that can't be used to write dirty words and call home when you do? Spies to watch your every move? That's what these stupid laptops are. That's more of the non free way.
The school should be setting up services that anyone with any computer can use. What they've got is a bunch of junk they bought from greedy vendors. Junk that the student must use if they are to pass, a double waste. The ability of students to break access rules should be viewed as a vendor failure not a crime on the part of the student.
does samsung have a new technology for flash chips?
Could be. According to this Samsung is using the NAND they first developed back in 1989. Performance is better than normal drives,
The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
Sounds great to me. My laptops only have 6 gigs of storage right now. I'm sure they give me 5MB/s or less. Samsung's device then would be bigger, have better speed, lower power consumption, noise and heat from one without losing anything. As is, I expect my laptop's drives to die due to mechanical abuse so I sync the contents via sftp frequently and make CD backups two or three times a year. If cheap enough, flash memory would be great to have as a hard drive. Sooner or later, they will be cheaper because moving parts are expensive.
Because most computers use legacy software with file systems that are not suited to flash, Samsung will have make their drives smart enough to avoid burning out.
Oh what a nice bunch of pigopolists who:
There's nothing on the above list that I want.
You want nice? Go visit any Creative Commons web site and learn how to dream on your own again. Musicians want people to hear and enjoy their work. Lawyers and dipshits want to own it. The musicians are in control of Creative Commons. Dipshits are in control of RIAA music services. You have your pick.
They may also be swapping music with their friends by sftp, portable music devices and CDs as in the days of tapes, but I would not know anything about that.
People paying $1.00 for a song that they don't own are suckers. Music does not cost that much to make and costs much less to distribute.
Well, OK, it's a silly Forbes story. If it were not for the fact that people with money to invest listen to such drivel, you would have nothing to worry about. In this world, however, money talks and you might be interested in what Forbes has to say if you are interested in earing a living .
Another thing you might notice is what's not there with the other "hot", "next generation" growing companies, Microsoft.Yet they provide the same services Apple and Google does and then some Note also that stoggy companies like Toyota did make the list.
Does Apple just send big bags of money to the Slashdot editors or what?
Not that I know of, but I've seen plenty of M$ adverts here, so they DO send bags of money. They also send bags of money to Forbes. Those bags of money are not enough to change most people's minds about Microsoft's prospects, innovation, quality or future. Microsft has screwed the pooch. Their "loss leader" stratagy is a loser and people really don't think of them as a company with a furture.
Can you tell me why BellSouth and all of their dial up slowness and relatively small size is number 3 on the list? I think AOL is doing a better job protecting the Windozing masses than others. I'd have real respect for them if they offered their customers Mepis.
Nothing but an OS that changes user defaults and a company known for breaking competitor's programs. Unless you mean, install an alternate OS, what you propose is doomed to fail.
Or "Microsoft Works."
How many times are you going to buy the line, "It's going to be better next time and better than anything else out there." Even if it were true, five years is too long a time frame to wait for anything. Chances are, it will be like their "korn shell":
"Question 5) True Story? by travisd (travisd_no_spam@tubas.net)
Was the story about you embarrassing a Microsoftie at a conference true? Specifically, that he was insisting that their implementation of ksh in their unix compatibility kit was true to the "real" thing and trying to argue the point with you. The argument ended when someone else finally stood up and informed the speaker who he was arguing with. ...
Korn: This story is true. It was at a USENIX Windows NT conference and Microsoft was presenting their future directions for NT. One of their speakers said that they would release a UNIX integration package for NT that would contain the Korn Shell.
I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the "real" Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn Shell. After a couple of exchanges, I shut up and let him dig himself in deeper. Finally someone in the audience stood up and told him what almost everyone in the audience knew, that I had written the 'real' Korn Shell. I think that this is symbolic about the way the company works."
The move is not about the tech, it's about lock down. The Linspire Rant is informative - this looks like M$'s tech because it is. Paladium is here, whether you call it Next Generation, La Grand or Lock Box. When you want to go monopoly stupid, you pick the biggest monopoly player there is and run with it. AMD has been pleasing end users with chips that do IA better than Intel for years. Intel is making crap to lock end user out. They have been doing it ever since they introduced individual ID numbers for chips way back in Pentium One days. Locking people out is always about keeping competition out, never about performance. It's as if DRM has made Bill Gates old demand - you take the creative market, we'll take everything else you have, or we'll take everything and give you nothing - has come to pass.
Apple's Intel embrace is clearly suicidal if it's total. Intel is Bill Gate's bitch. The very lockdown mechanism they want to use against their own customers will be used to hamper performace at Bill's wish. Motorola, will take the hit in lost chips and might not be there when Apple realizes what a mistake they are making. Intel is going to hose them down the same hole they flushed DEC, HP, Compaq and SGI. It's hard to imagine them making something cheaper than their mini mac out of IA junk. As soon as Motorola is gone, Intel will put the screws to Apple and that will be that.
AMD and Free Software are next. With continued lack of purchasing of AMD from Dell and other big dumb computer makers, AMD will have a harder and harder time staying around. Ironically, free software will help exterminate AMD by reducing the overall need for hardware purchases. As in gambling, the person with the most resources wins a game of attrition. Without significant chip competition, Intel imagines they can put the screws to everyone and their lockdown will be complete. Free software won't boot, end of story M$ rules in co-operation with big dumb publishers and free software only runs on "pirate" systems, themselves bugged at the firmware level, from the Communist China. Dystopia complete.
Apple needs to realize that Free Software and competition are in their best interest. Their old enemies are not going to keep them around forever once they are dependent.
So its pretty safe to say then that FOSS is not exactly being swamped with patent infringment [sic] claims, no matter how massively Mr Stallman like to exaggerate the 'threat'. So his point, other than FUD is what exactly?
as if RMS were a lonely voice. He must have missed this:
His point is to collect actual examples of abuse. Cease and desist letters to small businesses don't make the evening news, so there may be a "flood" you have no clue about.
If that were true, half of M$'s corporate users would not still be running Win2k, 98 and other older stuff. XP is a dog, just like every other M$ OS before it and whatever they finally realease in the future.
This blatant protectionism and bribery brought the man to my attention.
I love the image text to make sure scripts no longer post. Eat me trolls, you are fucked!
Sure. I posted the story because it:
I'd have loved it if the author realized that free software, such as Mepis, is the best solution. Unfortunately, the author is unaware of how software is created and thinks that there's some kind of "qualification" that will fix everything. If the author knew a little more, he would know that free software is generally of higher quality than non free due to constant review and people's ability to fix it. If the author carried his logic to it's ultimate conclusion, he would realize that THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A "QUALIFIED" M$ REPAIRMAN. M$ shares it's code with a few large agencies that pay for it, but does not tell them everything and won't let them do so much as compile their own OS, let alone release improvements or improved binaries to the public. If "Qualified" means knowing what's going on inside code, only free software repairmen can be qualified.
The biggest flaw in the author's perspective is seen right here:
Back in the UNIX wars, the vendors had two primary axes on which they could compete: hardware speed, and features of their flavor of UNIX.
He forgot the legal axe. Sun, IBM, DEC and others wasted their resources on court battles about "fat line" patents and other nonsense. How can you pay developers while fighting off everyone else's lawyers? The survivors largely blunted that axe by burring it in each other, but it's still around. It was thrown hard at BSD and idiots like Microsoft and SCO are still trying to wield it.
The legal attitude was the downfall of closed source Unix but it's not a factor in free software. The issues are worked out and best practices can be passed on. For all the author's complaints, Linux distributions are probably more coherent than different versions of Winblows.
The author then goes insane here:
It takes longer to configure code than to compile it these days, which is categorically not the case on Windows. Commercial grade Windows software just works and usually keeps working. Do you think that this might, just maybe, have something to do with the reason that major apps like Adobe's Photoshop, Macromedia's Director, Adobe Premiere, etc, are still not available on UNIX and, in my opinion _never_ will be...
Where to start? I'm to conclude that Winblows is easier to code for because Adobe does not have to reconfigure their code to compile it again and somehow that makes Winblows a more consistent platform? That's nuts and it's not even close to true. Adobe, I'm sure, has to do plenty of code rewrite when M$ forces them to pay for a new OS and SDK. Of course, Microsoft would break Adobe if they ever did anything free software friendly. But what does this have to do with differences between Linux and BSD? Absolutely Nothing. Free software is much easier to port to other free software than it will ever be port closed source crap. That's why thing like GIMP, ghostview, KDE and others run under BSD, Linux, OSX and even Winblows, though the Winblows ports are largely a waste of time.
I think I see the problem here:
I installed Linux on one of my systems the other day, so I could use it as a teaching vehicle for my class on system log analysis.
The author is a noob. MJR, I suggest that you actually use free software regularly before you predict it's demise due to a non existant lack of co-operation. Go here and tell me in a year or so if you still have problems with packages not working. I don't care how many years you have worked with hoary old Unix boxes, you are out of your mind to compare Microsoft junk with free software and conclude that M$ is more consistent in any way.
The list of things the author implies without saying is staggering. I can refute a few that popped into my head to show the absurdity of the whole article. You can do anything with available free software you can do with non free, it's easier to set up, works better and it costs a lot less. I don't need Adobe. Red Hat's market is not going away because Debian does things differently. They share code and each is gaining the strength of the other: Debian is getting easier for desktop users to configure, Red Hat is getting better package management. Red Hat will also never run out of people who want the consulting which is "Enterprise support". IBM made 2.6 billion dollars that way too without once saying a bad word about any free software project.
Any of us who've worked with the various free-nixes out there have run across the "vanity versions" and their related politics: so-and-so won't work with so-and-so-else, let's start a whole new operating system development tree! Wow. Grow up.
A tired, M$ style, flame. I'm not sure what problems he's had, but he's welcome to fix them and share them back anytime he wants. I would not call him vain for that.
Recommendations for web site developers and owners.
A less intrusive solution may be to use access control in order to restrict the indexing to allowed material. Let us assume that the web server runs with a higher privilege than the search engine. Now, the visible files need to be assigned low privilege, so they are readable by both the web server user and the search engine user. The invisible (or inaccessible) files are assigned higher privileges, so they are readable only by the web server. Thus, those files can be accessed remotely by those that know about them, and possibly possess the required credentials (for the inaccessible files), yet they cannot be indexed. ...
Simple enough on a *nix system. The problem is that you want to index the files for your own employee's use! You might not even keep you confidential files on the same machine as your public web server until you want to share it but the indexing software can send information back to it's owners. The solution is to make your own indexing software or use something like mnogosearch, which is free and has a debian package, for non-publically exposed files you want to index.
Using Winblows desktops makes all of this a red herring. The best server set up is useless when your PR staff uses keylogger ridden desktops. The weakest link in the chain is where your confidential data will get out.
Yeah, and Microsoft has always been the king of No Execute.
Would you like to produce some proof of that [Winblows born network congestion is also implicated in the huge 2003 power outage], or are you just going through your "I hate M$" mantra"?
and calls me a troll. Nice work.
The Wiki page you linked to says:
On November 19, 2003, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released an interim report placing the cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in the Cleveland, Ohio area went off-line amid high electrical demand and strained high-voltage power lines later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". It also found that FirstEnergy did not warn other control centers until it was too late because of faulty Microsoft Windows based monitoring equipment [2] and inadequate staff. The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
I've read the Canada?U.S. Power System Outage Task Force Interim Report: Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada too and it's very informative. In short, their state estimator (GE) went tits up in a way that's consistent with loss of SCADA (usually runs on M$) information due to network congestion (usually a direct result of M$ virus attack). GE's software noticed it was doing a bad job and told the operators so. The troubleshooting effort made things worse because they turned off alarms and forgot about it.
You might also take Kema Consulting's word for it:
The Blaster worm that flummoxed an estimated half-million computers around the world last month might have exacerbated utilities' problems during the August blackout, bringing down -- or perhaps blocking communications -- on computers used to monitor the grid, said Joe Weiss, a utility control system expert. It didn't cause what happened but it could've exacerbated what happened, said Weiss, with Kema Consulting in Cupertino, Calif., The blackout followed the Aug. 11 Blaster outbreak by just three days.
I tend to agree with the him. When you can't get the information you need you can't make the right decisions. When your corporate network is flooded with M$ problems, your IT staff is going to be stretched too thin to help you figure out what's wrong with your GE system, if indeed the traffic problem is not what causes it to fail.
Is that implication enough for you? Unreliable parts are worse than parts that you don't have at all.
They did the same thing where I worked, though I can't vouch for the frequency. The training center has a control room that's an exact replica of the real room but fed by simulators. I suppose they failed the computer displays there too, but it's not a substitute for daily operation.
it is unacceptable for the operators to be unfamiliar with the 1969 technology.
It's not that they are not familiar with the old equipment, it's that they are not used to using it because most of the time the nice new systems work. Not all of them are Windoze based but all of them can have problems if their network gets DDoSed and then the operators are "burdened" as we hear again and again. The analog systems have their quirks and operators who have been there for years know them. At the same time, a change in routine is a dangerous thing.