I have always had a problem with people who say "Mission Critical" and talk about running apps in wine. I wouldn't do it, it's an emulation layer
(or implementation of the API, whatever) but the point it, it may not always work exactly like Windows.
Now if you're playing Diablo 2 or whatever no big deal. But what if, for example in your case with the software that uses all the norwegian tax laws programmed, something went wrong? And it just worked a little different? Well, I'm sure the norwegian govt. isn't gonna care if you start crying because Lindows screwed up the bottom line and told you to pay half of the taxes you should be paying.
Same thing with the health database, think of the disasterous effects if running under wine that sometimes it didn't return all the records, for say a query about allergies to medication. Someone may die then. The chances of finding that right away are even worse than usual because there are only 20 people using it, not like the thousands playing whatever game on wine.
I'm not saying wine is bad, but I believe under any circumstances that "Mission Critical" and wine/Lindows/emulation should never be used in the same sentence. Sure, wine is great for games, office apps, etc. But anything that the company depends on should not be run on anything it wasn't designed to run on.
Microsoft actually has a KB article about this, and it is intentional. Apparently, they don't believe a web developer is competent enough to handle mime types, IE has always tried to glean information from the file, be it by the extension or otherwise, to determine what it should think the file type is. At work especially I have been bitten by this "feature" many times.
The most irritating aspect of it is that you simply can't get around it. For example, we have a web-based flyer/catalog generation program at the office. The advertising department enters records such as item code, part number, color, size, etc, some text, and attaches items to the record. Hardware distribution (like shovels/rakes/nails/etc) has extremely low margins, so purchasing something like Quark Express or another database driven tool is out of the question. Well, we found Adobe Pagemaker to be sufficient, and lo and behold it supports importing tagged text. So from our database, they select items and it can export SGML-ish text to be imported into Pagemaker.
Now here comes the rub. Pagemaker wants the files to be.txt for finding easily in the import box, but if you send IE a content type of text/plain it will display it. No big deal, just save right? Well, IE also believes since it got < and > tags that it MUST be HTML, despite the fact that I'm saying it's plain text, so it's going to add the proper html header and footer along with content encoding tags. Pagemaker doesn't like that. And to be even more irritating, is that we'd like to be able to just have the save box pop up. Well, normal browsers that handle things standardly will accept the content type, and if they don't understand the content type they will usually pop up a "save as" box. OK, so now we pass back content type of application/x-hdi-export, surely no browser knows of this, and Netscape/Moz/Opera handle this correctly. But we also pass a default filename, in the Content-disposition part, with a name ending in.txt. So what's IE do? Display it in the window, still thinking it's HTML, all because of the extension.
So what it comes down to, is I also have to mangle the output name be making it.txt_ so that IE will not try and read it, along with passing it a bad content type, otherwise if it's application/octet-stream or some such, it will STILL RENDER IT IN THE DAMN WINDOW because for "common" types such as text/plain or application/octet stream, it examines the content of the file.
And for those of you who thing "why not right click -> save as", well the generation needs several arguments, such as sorting, template name, etc, so it's a form, and you can't click the button and tell a form you want to save the download.
This isn't the only time I've had a problem, I don't want to even get in to how IE badly handle dynamically generated PDF's, how since 5.5 it ignores the settings to not embed PDF since that's the only work-around, and how 5.5 also asks the "open here/save" question TWICE when passing it some file types.
Overall, they may tout it as a feature, but if they'd just follow the damn standard like everyone else I wouldn't have to waste so much time finding workarounds for their "features"
I agree with you... mostly. The music/package/etc is worth more than the media alone, and a lot of money is spent on advertising, etc. What I don't understand then is how come a CD costs $18 while a casette of the exact same thing only costs $8?
So is $18 a "fair" price or is $8 a "fair" price? After all the content is the same, only the media is different -- and I won't believe that it costs $10 more to create a CD. The CD doesn't have any moving parts, tapes have lots of stuff going on.
Well, while maybe a vulnerability, I don't see it as an issue. When I type what I'm thinking, i.e. passwords, code, etc, it almost doesn't matter what it is, my fingers know where to go and usually in about the same speed as any other word.
Anyways, even though I might not care, others might. Well, for everyone else, the solution seems pretty simple to me. Have the client read the whole password, then send the response to the server. Now, no matter how slowly you type, as soon as the client gets the password it'll zip it away as fast as possible.
You know you watch too much cartoon network when..
on
The Immortal Cell
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· Score: 1
You see the title "The Immortal Cell" and you think that you're going to get an interview with Gohan, Goku, and the oh-so-mighty Hercule.
Yeah, we all get the joke, but it may be of some interest to younger/. readers that there was a unix-like OS for the TRS-80 line of computers, though I don't think you could use it until the Model II or so with 32KB of ram. It was OS-9 with some info here.
It was a bear to work with though from what I remember. You like normal then loaded OS-9 and it took over the machine. Then you would load commands in to memory for use, kind of like a memory mount. Then you would have to constantly, it seemed anyway, swap disks to get everything you needed, though having 2 disk drives could help a lot. I didn't have enought money to spring for that HUGE 20 meg hard drive.:)
It was neat though, had an assembler, C compiler, BASIC compiler, and even pascal I think. Though I was young at the age, I do remember having to use it to run Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I know the article isn't about the same thing as the Amazon price fixing, but what really is the problem with it anyway? Is it just because it's at a consumer level? I know businesses charge different rates for different people, why is this wrong in the consumer space? If people don't like the price they can just go to another store.
Where I am employed full-time, we are a hardware (hammer and nails) wholesaler to small retail stores. We price things differently for various reasons, essentially coming down to 10 standard prices and any customer can be bound to a custom contract which modifies pricing further at the customer level. Essentially you go from a landed cost and through a pricing matrix for the customer to get their cost. And it may be as high as normal retail or as low as half of retail depending on the customer.
When I do contracting, I also have different pricing schemes for each of my clients, depending on a much more arbitrary rule of whether I like them or not.:) Maybe not that arbitrary, but it's still different prices for different customers.
Now, no one has a problem with this, lots of companies work the same way. But why is it wrong in consumer space? Just because it is consumer space? I guess I don't see a problem, as a consumer, if I don't like a price I will go somewhere else. Whether or not my price is the same as someone else is nothing I've ever considered to be gauranteed.
I was reading the onslaught of comments about free, Free, closed and proprietary, and thought,
What if MS GPL'd their code tommorrow?
Aside from people pushing away because "it's Microsoft" I'm sure some people would work on it.
What got me thinking though, is where would things be in a year? Aside from the obvious fact that there'd be distro's (RedHat Windows? Almost sadistic to think of it) but what would people add that's not already there? And I don't mean fix the BSOD, because I'm sure that'd be the first thing on the list.
But in a year, would it even resemble Windows as we know it? Would people shy away not because it's Microsoft, but because it's a fundamentally different API (To an extent in NT and definately under 9X/ME)? Would we just replace it with X and make it POSIX?
I personally use source tarballs all the time, since slackware's "package" management is just tarballs with an installer bootstrap. Do I feel any less succeptable?
NO
Why? I'm using the source right? Well, it's not like every time I download a new program I inspect every line of code. That would be rediculous. I don't know how everyone else is, but if there is a configure script, hell, I won't even read the INSTALL file. If I can get it working the first time, I won't even read the README. I've been through enough 'configure ; make ; make install' cycles that I try what looks right first and ask questions later. And I'd bet most others do to. Which makes us all just as vulnerable to attack as the 'binary downloading newbies'.
Contrary to popular belief here, MOST businesses could probably not just "up and switch" everyone over.
Custom software: Maybe companies have at least a little custom software, usually written for Windows. Some have more. Where I work we have over 3.5 million lines of COBOL code written with Microfocus extensions for Windows. You can't run that on Linux now, there is no compiler and the file formats would change, it would literally be a nightmare to switch. Sure, there's VMWare or Wine, but do you want an emulator managing your mission critical data? I'm talking all the financials, AP/AR/GL, ordering, purchasing, history, EVERYTHING. Well I don't trust it. You don't get away from this until you get to upper-mid sized companies that are using terminal emulation and a single mainframe.
Small businesses depend on Quick Books, Peach Tree, and other "Small Business" related management software. And no, GNU Cash does not replace it. It can't even generate invoices yet.
There isn't any decent group ware application for Linux that's not web-based. That means people will be leaving behind their Outlook/NDS/ADS/Notes stuff behind unless they licence some kind of shared server for that. You get practically no savings.
Most companies don't need to. Lots of companies still run Win95 through 98 or NT3 to NT4. They don't plan on upgrading their Windows licences. When they buy a new computer, it will come with Windows and a new licence anyway, and they're not the type to go off building their own computers and installing OS's. There is no cost since you already payed for it.
So basically you'd need to be a company that only used your computer for web/mail and office, then you might have a relatively smooth transition. Don't forget though, people use windows at home too, and they are familiar with it's tools. Just because Star Office looks similar to word doesn't mean it's the same. There will be things people can't figure out and there will be retraining.
As far as your 10,000 user example, I wouldn't want to retraing 10,000 users for anything.
We have wireless internet at work because it was available 2 years ago. That's 2 years before we got DSL access here, so it's all we could get for high-speed internet without grabbing a T1 or frame relay.
Anyway, it was more like $150 a month or something and was still line of site, and I think it's 2GHZ. All I can say is, it sucks. A lot. I think we get about 80% uptime with it and the latency is horrible, dare I say it, even worse than a modem. We're talking anywhere from 30 to 300ms ping time to the first hop on the other side, usually in the mid 100's.
The thing was though, the through put was still like 80K/sec or so, so as long as I wasn't streaming anything or playing games it was OK, say for like the web, except for that 80% uptime thing. Think about that, it doesn't sound too bad, but that means 1 in 5 times that I sit down to use the internet that the route is down.
It was also tedious to program over the link since our webserver was co-located on the other side and with the link going down so much I spent lots of time banging on my keyboard waiting for my cursor to move again, only to see like 5 extra lines deleted in vi or something.
We're getting a T1 now. I'm going to be very happy.:)
PS: About the streaming thing, I stream video with real server to work from my house with DSL, and the best I can get is using the 56.6K setting, and usually that gets all out of sync so I actually use 33.6K. How's that for "High Speed?"
I could go download RedHat Linux, and sell it for one million dollars a copy if I really wanted to.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't understand this simple point. How do you think Linux Mall, Cheap Bytes and others can sell RedHat, Suse, etc. for $1.50, even though they did not create it? Like he says, they could just as easily charge a million, there's nothing illegal there, yet people can't make the connection.
It's Free, not free software. You can do (almost) whatever you want with it. You can sell it, change it, give it to friends, you just can't keep it to yourself if you distribute anything based on it.
I didn't see this mentioned so I though I'd point it out. When getting started with SQL I was pretty familiar with MS Access, and I noticed they had an ODBC driver. I though 'wow, now I can create an application in an afternoon with an SQL server back end!' So I plunged in. Things worked well for the most part, but there were some irritating problems. The biggest problem I ran in to is the case of working with auto_increment fields, which if you use MySQL you realize is a lot.
Imagine you have an order entry form, with the top half devoted to order related fields and a sub form that has the line items for the order. Now both the main form table and subform table have pkeys that are auto_increment. In plain old access this is no big deal, but with access/(odbc)SQL you have a big problem.
When you key in the order information, since the ID is auto_increment access may not find the proper record to link to the subform.
For the subform, if you add say 5 items and need to edit the 3rd, you may or may not be able to depending on if Access can find the row.
According to the MySQL mailing list and the MSKB, this is because Access will re-select the data it just inserted to find the row it THINKS you are working on. That's how it get's the database default fields to take effect and the auto_inc fields. Since, for example, you might have many orders with the exact same order line information, it may or may not find what you want in that subform. Same thing for the order header, if it's a stock order from week to week, then it may not find it.
Their solution is to make every form that adds records have a field that inserts 'now' so Access can find your row better.
An ugly kludge if you ask me, but I worked with it. And when I was done I started installing ODBC drivers on every machine and making sure the DSN was right and making sure the proper version of Access was on the machine. This was the other big problem, the amount of software required to make the system work on the client side, it's un-believable. So I've abandoned Access/anySQL and now work with just web-based applications. Only software required is a browser and thanks to MS and the popularity of the internet, that means everyone will have it in one form or another. It also means people can work from home, the office, vacation, whatever.
The only drawback was rapid app development, sql forms and even forms in general require so much bitch-work to get working it's just frustrating. So I've built some perl modules that handle SQL forms generation, binding to fields, verification, and insert/update/delete functionality from data descriptions. The bonus of this is I can make the updated forms definition a module and re-use it. Now, in access, if they say "we want 1 more decimal of precision here..." you've gotta find the damn field on every form and change it there, no re-use. The only thing missing (and actively being developed) is a reporting module to generate text/html/pdf/etc reports.
I don't think it'll help much though. Think about it, I'm sure that most of the real "disk hogs" are things like mp3s, mpgs, tar.gz's and.zips. I included the tgz and zips because most people uncompress, compile, install, delete. Some keep them around, but most do not keep around the uncompressed tgz for most things.
All those things don't well, if at all, so a compressed filesystem would just be redundant. The exegz thing might help some, but stripping your binaries is probably just about as good without the runtime performance hit. And I'd think that even if you compressed your whole root partition with a scheme like this, the savings would be negligible but everything you did would require packing/unpacking stuff so the whole system would be generally slower.
With the ever expanding size of hard drives, I think this is a pretty small issue.
Yes, I realize that maybe single floppy distros and embedded devices may find this kind of thing useful, but I'm talking about the other 95% of the linux community here.
I checked the last/. article about this secure sharing thing:
The technology will enable the sharing of MP3 files to which a protection layer will be added as the file is transferred from one Napster user to the other. The Napster client will be enhanced to support this protection. The solution will not use any existing multi-purpose DRM but a new security architecture that is specially tailored to the requirements of file-sharing.
Unfortunately I've been unable to find any information about this "enhanced support." Does this mean I can't use Win/X11 Amp any more? My RIO? Anything else that uses MP3? They mention that it's enforced in the napster software, but the only real way to "enforce" it would be to make it unusable everywhere else, so does that mean that the nap. client is the only thing that can play these so called mp3s?
Like I said, I looked and found nothing about the tech, the background, or anything. Any links or ideas out there?
Also, while browsing the napster site looking for answers, I came accross this (stuff highlighted by me):
What will the pricing structure be?
Napster is planning a tiered membership model that includes a "Basic Membership" plan and a "Premium Membership" plan. Definitive pricing has not been set. However, Napster is looking at a price range of $2.95 to $4.95 per month for the Basic membership that would have a monthly file transfer limitation built in. The Premium membership, which could cost between $5.95 and $9.95 per month would offer unlimited file transfers.
I'm really getting tired of all the/. flaming going on here. Yes, CmdrTaco couldn't type to save his life and we see some duplication of articles, but I have a few things to say to anyone who thinks/. sucks now or whatever.
If you don't like it, then why are you reading? Do you need something to bash that badly? Do you routinly go to around LOOKING for things to rip apart?
Are you running your own news for nerds that is somehow superior? I doubt it. Now I understand that people may want to (constructively) criticize slashdot about things that don't work well, but do we need to re-discuss the mod system every week?
If you like most of/. but just not some of it, why not visit the users page and customize it so you don't see things you don't care about? That's what it's for.
Quite frankly #1 is the one that pisses me off the most. You don't like/.? Well no one is holding a gun to your head making you look at it, go somewhere else. I am here because I DO like Slash.
I just saw this the other day on Freshmeat, it's a Virtual Keyboard for just this kind of thing. (for the link paranoid: http://freshmeat.net/projects/xvkbd/) Personally I like this approach because I've never really got the hang of grafitti. I can always go faster if I use the little keyboard thing. Of coarse, then someone showed me that to really get going, you should just enter the data on your computer then hotsync it in. It's a lot easier that way.
I think that's the best way to go, but there does need to be a way to get data in "on the road." So far, this is all I've seen from the open source camp, and it does have it's issues.
X-Based, so the PDA needs to be X-Based
Not all X programs accept events from other applications, so they are effectively useless for this kind of thing
It takes up screen real-estate, you have to have it to type and to have it you give up screen space
Hopefully, these guys will embed some kind of graffiti in it making it a complete solution.
Palm programming is not hard, there are many VM's out there like satallite forms, waba, etc that make it easier. Just like you can use GTK or TCL in linux.
I would like to point out, though, that just because it runs Linux doesn't mean you can run perl on it or something like that. I just checked, and my perl modules alone are 16MB. Sure I have some extra stuff, but that's the stuff that makes it useful.
The reason most people write in C or C++ for PDA's is speed. I'm involved in a project right now where I'm porting a satallite forms app to Metrowerks C. Not that it didn't work, or wasn't pretty, etc, but it was too slow. PDA's are kinda like programming back in the old days when every pointer mattered and every byte accounted for. Unlike desktop PCs, you're looking at MHz in the double, not triple digits, and memory is usually less than 8M on the majority of palm pilots, and that's shared storage AND heap memory. Not to mention that there's this 32K of contiguous data thing to deal with.
So, just because linux is there doesn't mean you get all these great scripting languages for it, but on the other hand, just because it isn't doesn't mean you CAN'T have them either. The source is free, grab gcc-pila and start porting!
If they're not going to enforce the patent, then why get it? Isn't that the point for a commercial entity to get a patent, to protect their idea? Not that I think it's bad that they aren't, it means that people can write code that the patent covers without worrying some other corp will come by and smash them in legal battles, but what's the usefulness to a corporation for having a patent but not doing anything with it? Why not just not patent it in the first place?
I agree, I have also been a Linux Journal subscriber for some time. I tried the Max. Linux magazine on a trial offer and didn't really like it. The articles were too shallow, lacked any real information. It was like reading a collection of PC World articles about linux or something, just because of the lack of depth. It did not feel like a Linux magazine at all.
Linux Journal, however, is a great magazine, and not just because it's about Linux. The majority is about Linux, but even in this issue there were articles about programming SOAP in perl for 3 tier web applications, tools to help with consulting, finance and billing, book reviews, software reviews, and even witty quotes.
For anyone who hasn't ever read the Linux Journal I'd highly recommend it. I feel bad for the people of Max Linux for losing thier mag, but honestly I won't miss the actual print at all. Just because it's about Linux doesn't mean I won't buy it, it just has to be worth my money. Linux Journal has been, Max Linux was not.
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I have always had a problem with people who say "Mission Critical" and talk about running apps in wine. I wouldn't do it, it's an emulation layer
(or implementation of the API, whatever) but the point it, it may not always work exactly like Windows.
Now if you're playing Diablo 2 or whatever no big deal. But what if, for example in your case with the software that uses all the norwegian tax laws programmed, something went wrong? And it just worked a little different? Well, I'm sure the norwegian govt. isn't gonna care if you start crying because Lindows screwed up the bottom line and told you to pay half of the taxes you should be paying.
Same thing with the health database, think of the disasterous effects if running under wine that sometimes it didn't return all the records, for say a query about allergies to medication. Someone may die then. The chances of finding that right away are even worse than usual because there are only 20 people using it, not like the thousands playing whatever game on wine.
I'm not saying wine is bad, but I believe under any circumstances that "Mission Critical" and wine/Lindows/emulation should never be used in the same sentence. Sure, wine is great for games, office apps, etc. But anything that the company depends on should not be run on anything it wasn't designed to run on.
Microsoft actually has a KB article about this, and it is intentional. Apparently, they don't believe a web developer is competent enough to handle mime types, IE has always tried to glean information from the file, be it by the extension or otherwise, to determine what it should think the file type is. At work especially I have been bitten by this "feature" many times.
.txt for finding easily in the import box, but if you send IE a content type of text/plain it will display it. No big deal, just save right? Well, IE also believes since it got < and > tags that it MUST be HTML, despite the fact that I'm saying it's plain text, so it's going to add the proper html header and footer along with content encoding tags. Pagemaker doesn't like that. And to be even more irritating, is that we'd like to be able to just have the save box pop up. Well, normal browsers that handle things standardly will accept the content type, and if they don't understand the content type they will usually pop up a "save as" box. OK, so now we pass back content type of application/x-hdi-export, surely no browser knows of this, and Netscape/Moz/Opera handle this correctly. But we also pass a default filename, in the Content-disposition part, with a name ending in .txt. So what's IE do? Display it in the window, still thinking it's HTML, all because of the extension.
.txt_ so that IE will not try and read it, along with passing it a bad content type, otherwise if it's application/octet-stream or some such, it will STILL RENDER IT IN THE DAMN WINDOW because for "common" types such as text/plain or application/octet stream, it examines the content of the file.
The most irritating aspect of it is that you simply can't get around it. For example, we have a web-based flyer/catalog generation program at the office. The advertising department enters records such as item code, part number, color, size, etc, some text, and attaches items to the record. Hardware distribution (like shovels/rakes/nails/etc) has extremely low margins, so purchasing something like Quark Express or another database driven tool is out of the question. Well, we found Adobe Pagemaker to be sufficient, and lo and behold it supports importing tagged text. So from our database, they select items and it can export SGML-ish text to be imported into Pagemaker.
Now here comes the rub. Pagemaker wants the files to be
So what it comes down to, is I also have to mangle the output name be making it
And for those of you who thing "why not right click -> save as", well the generation needs several arguments, such as sorting, template name, etc, so it's a form, and you can't click the button and tell a form you want to save the download.
This isn't the only time I've had a problem, I don't want to even get in to how IE badly handle dynamically generated PDF's, how since 5.5 it ignores the settings to not embed PDF since that's the only work-around, and how 5.5 also asks the "open here/save" question TWICE when passing it some file types.
Overall, they may tout it as a feature, but if they'd just follow the damn standard like everyone else I wouldn't have to waste so much time finding workarounds for their "features"
I agree with you... mostly. The music/package/etc is worth more than the media alone, and a lot of money is spent on advertising, etc. What I don't understand then is how come a CD costs $18 while a casette of the exact same thing only costs $8?
So is $18 a "fair" price or is $8 a "fair" price? After all the content is the same, only the media is different -- and I won't believe that it costs $10 more to create a CD. The CD doesn't have any moving parts, tapes have lots of stuff going on.
Well, while maybe a vulnerability, I don't see it as an issue. When I type what I'm thinking, i.e. passwords, code, etc, it almost doesn't matter what it is, my fingers know where to go and usually in about the same speed as any other word.
Anyways, even though I might not care, others might. Well, for everyone else, the solution seems pretty simple to me. Have the client read the whole password, then send the response to the server. Now, no matter how slowly you type, as soon as the client gets the password it'll zip it away as fast as possible.
You see the title "The Immortal Cell" and you think that you're going to get an interview with Gohan, Goku, and the oh-so-mighty Hercule.
Yeah, we all get the joke, but it may be of some interest to younger /. readers that there was a unix-like OS for the TRS-80 line of computers, though I don't think you could use it until the Model II or so with 32KB of ram. It was OS-9 with some info here.
:)
It was a bear to work with though from what I remember. You like normal then loaded OS-9 and it took over the machine. Then you would load commands in to memory for use, kind of like a memory mount. Then you would have to constantly, it seemed anyway, swap disks to get everything you needed, though having 2 disk drives could help a lot. I didn't have enought money to spring for that HUGE 20 meg hard drive.
It was neat though, had an assembler, C compiler, BASIC compiler, and even pascal I think. Though I was young at the age, I do remember having to use it to run Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Where I am employed full-time, we are a hardware (hammer and nails) wholesaler to small retail stores. We price things differently for various reasons, essentially coming down to 10 standard prices and any customer can be bound to a custom contract which modifies pricing further at the customer level. Essentially you go from a landed cost and through a pricing matrix for the customer to get their cost. And it may be as high as normal retail or as low as half of retail depending on the customer.
When I do contracting, I also have different pricing schemes for each of my clients, depending on a much more arbitrary rule of whether I like them or not. :) Maybe not that arbitrary, but it's still different prices for different customers.
Now, no one has a problem with this, lots of companies work the same way. But why is it wrong in consumer space? Just because it is consumer space? I guess I don't see a problem, as a consumer, if I don't like a price I will go somewhere else. Whether or not my price is the same as someone else is nothing I've ever considered to be gauranteed.
Aside from people pushing away because "it's Microsoft" I'm sure some people would work on it.
What got me thinking though, is where would things be in a year? Aside from the obvious fact that there'd be distro's (RedHat Windows? Almost sadistic to think of it) but what would people add that's not already there? And I don't mean fix the BSOD, because I'm sure that'd be the first thing on the list.
But in a year, would it even resemble Windows as we know it? Would people shy away not because it's Microsoft, but because it's a fundamentally different API (To an extent in NT and definately under 9X/ME)? Would we just replace it with X and make it POSIX?
Anyway, a lot of rhetoric there, any thoughts?
I personally use source tarballs all the time, since slackware's "package" management is just tarballs with an installer bootstrap. Do I feel any less succeptable?
NO
Why? I'm using the source right? Well, it's not like every time I download a new program I inspect every line of code. That would be rediculous. I don't know how everyone else is, but if there is a configure script, hell, I won't even read the INSTALL file. If I can get it working the first time, I won't even read the README. I've been through enough 'configure ; make ; make install' cycles that I try what looks right first and ask questions later. And I'd bet most others do to. Which makes us all just as vulnerable to attack as the 'binary downloading newbies'.
For the href paranoid: http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com/?pic=CABG
I almost fell out of my chair when I saw:
- Custom software: Maybe companies have at least a little custom software, usually written for Windows. Some have more. Where I work we have over 3.5 million lines of COBOL code written with Microfocus extensions for Windows. You can't run that on Linux now, there is no compiler and the file formats would change, it would literally be a nightmare to switch. Sure, there's VMWare or Wine, but do you want an emulator managing your mission critical data? I'm talking all the financials, AP/AR/GL, ordering, purchasing, history, EVERYTHING. Well I don't trust it. You don't get away from this until you get to upper-mid sized companies that are using terminal emulation and a single mainframe.
- Small businesses depend on Quick Books, Peach Tree, and other "Small Business" related management software. And no, GNU Cash does not replace it. It can't even generate invoices yet.
- There isn't any decent group ware application for Linux that's not web-based. That means people will be leaving behind their Outlook/NDS/ADS/Notes stuff behind unless they licence some kind of shared server for that. You get practically no savings.
- Most companies don't need to. Lots of companies still run Win95 through 98 or NT3 to NT4. They don't plan on upgrading their Windows licences. When they buy a new computer, it will come with Windows and a new licence anyway, and they're not the type to go off building their own computers and installing OS's. There is no cost since you already payed for it.
So basically you'd need to be a company that only used your computer for web/mail and office, then you might have a relatively smooth transition. Don't forget though, people use windows at home too, and they are familiar with it's tools. Just because Star Office looks similar to word doesn't mean it's the same. There will be things people can't figure out and there will be retraining.As far as your 10,000 user example, I wouldn't want to retraing 10,000 users for anything.
Anyway, it was more like $150 a month or something and was still line of site, and I think it's 2GHZ. All I can say is, it sucks. A lot. I think we get about 80% uptime with it and the latency is horrible, dare I say it, even worse than a modem. We're talking anywhere from 30 to 300ms ping time to the first hop on the other side, usually in the mid 100's.
The thing was though, the through put was still like 80K/sec or so, so as long as I wasn't streaming anything or playing games it was OK, say for like the web, except for that 80% uptime thing. Think about that, it doesn't sound too bad, but that means 1 in 5 times that I sit down to use the internet that the route is down.
It was also tedious to program over the link since our webserver was co-located on the other side and with the link going down so much I spent lots of time banging on my keyboard waiting for my cursor to move again, only to see like 5 extra lines deleted in vi or something.
We're getting a T1 now. I'm going to be very happy. :)
PS: About the streaming thing, I stream video with real server to work from my house with DSL, and the best I can get is using the 56.6K setting, and usually that gets all out of sync so I actually use 33.6K. How's that for "High Speed?"
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't understand this simple point. How do you think Linux Mall, Cheap Bytes and others can sell RedHat, Suse, etc. for $1.50, even though they did not create it? Like he says, they could just as easily charge a million, there's nothing illegal there, yet people can't make the connection.
It's Free, not free software. You can do (almost) whatever you want with it. You can sell it, change it, give it to friends, you just can't keep it to yourself if you distribute anything based on it.
Imagine you have an order entry form, with the top half devoted to order related fields and a sub form that has the line items for the order. Now both the main form table and subform table have pkeys that are auto_increment. In plain old access this is no big deal, but with access/(odbc)SQL you have a big problem.
According to the MySQL mailing list and the MSKB, this is because Access will re-select the data it just inserted to find the row it THINKS you are working on. That's how it get's the database default fields to take effect and the auto_inc fields. Since, for example, you might have many orders with the exact same order line information, it may or may not find what you want in that subform. Same thing for the order header, if it's a stock order from week to week, then it may not find it.
Their solution is to make every form that adds records have a field that inserts 'now' so Access can find your row better.
An ugly kludge if you ask me, but I worked with it. And when I was done I started installing ODBC drivers on every machine and making sure the DSN was right and making sure the proper version of Access was on the machine. This was the other big problem, the amount of software required to make the system work on the client side, it's un-believable. So I've abandoned Access/anySQL and now work with just web-based applications. Only software required is a browser and thanks to MS and the popularity of the internet, that means everyone will have it in one form or another. It also means people can work from home, the office, vacation, whatever.
The only drawback was rapid app development, sql forms and even forms in general require so much bitch-work to get working it's just frustrating. So I've built some perl modules that handle SQL forms generation, binding to fields, verification, and insert/update/delete functionality from data descriptions. The bonus of this is I can make the updated forms definition a module and re-use it. Now, in access, if they say "we want 1 more decimal of precision here..." you've gotta find the damn field on every form and change it there, no re-use. The only thing missing (and actively being developed) is a reporting module to generate text/html/pdf/etc reports.
All those things don't well, if at all, so a compressed filesystem would just be redundant. The exegz thing might help some, but stripping your binaries is probably just about as good without the runtime performance hit. And I'd think that even if you compressed your whole root partition with a scheme like this, the savings would be negligible but everything you did would require packing/unpacking stuff so the whole system would be generally slower.
With the ever expanding size of hard drives, I think this is a pretty small issue.
Yes, I realize that maybe single floppy distros and embedded devices may find this kind of thing useful, but I'm talking about the other 95% of the linux community here.
The real problem for M$ is that when they submit diffs they'd get rejected because they'd resemble something like this:
*** ftp.c Tue Jan 24 10:38:38 1983
--- ftp.ms.c Tue Mar 27 21:39:00 1998
BR> *** 3,7 ****
! #define VERSION "ftp @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. "
--- 3,7 ----
! #define VERSION "ftp @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. (c) 1998 Microsoft "
Damn that 120 char limit!! It becomes:
When Windows crashes, at least it lets you click OK first. And if you're lucky and careful, you can get an a
I tried. :)
Unfortunately I've been unable to find any information about this "enhanced support." Does this mean I can't use Win/X11 Amp any more? My RIO? Anything else that uses MP3? They mention that it's enforced in the napster software, but the only real way to "enforce" it would be to make it unusable everywhere else, so does that mean that the nap. client is the only thing that can play these so called mp3s?
Like I said, I looked and found nothing about the tech, the background, or anything. Any links or ideas out there?
Also, while browsing the napster site looking for answers, I came accross this (stuff highlighted by me):
Did any one else notice these two little blurbs?
Quite frankly #1 is the one that pisses me off the most. You don't like /.? Well no one is holding a gun to your head making you look at it, go somewhere else. I am here because I DO like Slash.
Don't be so sure, check out these "chix". Only because of these fine women is Linux a sexy product to be grokked by geeks everywhere. :)
(for the link paranoid: http://linuxchix.glowingmonkey.org/)
I think that's the best way to go, but there does need to be a way to get data in "on the road." So far, this is all I've seen from the open source camp, and it does have it's issues.
Hopefully, these guys will embed some kind of graffiti in it making it a complete solution.
I would like to point out, though, that just because it runs Linux doesn't mean you can run perl on it or something like that. I just checked, and my perl modules alone are 16MB. Sure I have some extra stuff, but that's the stuff that makes it useful.
The reason most people write in C or C++ for PDA's is speed. I'm involved in a project right now where I'm porting a satallite forms app to Metrowerks C. Not that it didn't work, or wasn't pretty, etc, but it was too slow. PDA's are kinda like programming back in the old days when every pointer mattered and every byte accounted for. Unlike desktop PCs, you're looking at MHz in the double, not triple digits, and memory is usually less than 8M on the majority of palm pilots, and that's shared storage AND heap memory. Not to mention that there's this 32K of contiguous data thing to deal with.
So, just because linux is there doesn't mean you get all these great scripting languages for it, but on the other hand, just because it isn't doesn't mean you CAN'T have them either. The source is free, grab gcc-pila and start porting!
If they're not going to enforce the patent, then why get it? Isn't that the point for a commercial entity to get a patent, to protect their idea? Not that I think it's bad that they aren't, it means that people can write code that the patent covers without worrying some other corp will come by and smash them in legal battles, but what's the usefulness to a corporation for having a patent but not doing anything with it? Why not just not patent it in the first place?
Good lord, TNG, TOS, DS9, VOY, it goes on, but ST is getting as many TLA's as MIS!
Linux Journal, however, is a great magazine, and not just because it's about Linux. The majority is about Linux, but even in this issue there were articles about programming SOAP in perl for 3 tier web applications, tools to help with consulting, finance and billing, book reviews, software reviews, and even witty quotes.
For anyone who hasn't ever read the Linux Journal I'd highly recommend it. I feel bad for the people of Max Linux for losing thier mag, but honestly I won't miss the actual print at all. Just because it's about Linux doesn't mean I won't buy it, it just has to be worth my money. Linux Journal has been, Max Linux was not.