If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public.
Why would they give it away? Because they have no interest in trying to sell it. Selling shrinkwrap software is a tough business, most people would rather focus on whatever it is they're better at. They stand to gain much more by open sourcing it than they would keeping it in a vault, or trying to sell it.
The telehouse facility stayed up during 9/11 while World Trade Plaza was crumbling to the ground 4 blocks away. If they can stay up through that, everything that calls itself a colo should be able to.
Well, it did go down a few days later because their UPS ran out of fuel, but it was because of political issues. The national guard wouldn't let the refueling truck into the area. I will admit that having your colo quarantined by a military force is an exceptional circumstance.
No. It can't. We have two concrete examples in this very page - one provided by Wikimedia, one provided by me - which directly contradict your statement. Maybe under some circumstances MySQL can handle reboots, but it's been proven already that it can't always do so. Perhaps your MySQL experience is not with high-load applications (at least not the level of load Wikimedia and my employer see).
I don't mean to diminish what you guys do, or question your abilities. I simply want to offer my perspective because I've been in similar situations.
I ran an extremely high load site off of MySQL for about 4 years. It started out modestly and went up to around 2000-3000 queries/sec hitting the RDBMS, about 30% of them data updates.
There were genuine cases where MySQL annoyed the hell out of me.
For example, the use of pthreads is a huge pain in the ass under Linux because all of the thread stacks share address space. On a 32-bit platform and a large InnoDB buffer pool, it's easy to run out of pointer bits. Once we switched to a replicated setup this wasn't such a big deal anymore. Moving to a 64-bit platform would've made this a non-issue too, but we didn't have the luxury of doing this at the time.
Regarding data corruption? Every time I've blamed MySQL 4 + InnoDB for ruining my data, I've been too soon to do so. MySQL is often the messenger of a real underlying problem.
What underlying problem? Well, OS, disk, or RAM for starters. And these aren't always easy to find.
I went to enormous lengths to verify that all of those things were working properly so I could blame MySQL. Kernel updates, memtest86, I even ran (VA-)CTCS on it for a week and the machine showed no problems. But every time we'd bring MySQL up on it we'd encounter data corruption within 20 days or so.
The site continued to run off of the remaining servers and we just hoped MySQL wouldn't "corrupt" those as well while we tried to figure out what the problem was.
Anyway, one day a few weeks later someone was playing around with the retired machine and found that 1 time out of 20, on boot it wouldn't find one of the hard disks. Oh, and this disk just happened to be used in the MySQL data partition. We replaced the disk container and the machine hasn't had a problem since and runs in production.
We should've just thrown the fucker away.
I've wasted a lot of time because I had more confidence in machines than I should've. Most computers have terrible reliability, even the ones that are marketed as being reliable. Most people just don't notice. MySQL notices.:(
Unable to take directions, especially bureaucratic direction that doesn't make any sense to anyone
Will be constantly interrupted (offices) and freak out
Not to be trusted with national secrets?
Not every issue that comes up can be easily broken into a neat little math problem that you can email to someone and have them email you back the answer?
On the other hand, judging by how many straight-edge fully qualified nerds fail the NSA entrance test, maybe they ARE full of autistic savants.
However, Blockbuster has said that they do not carry X rated films not for a moral reason but because they are making enough money without carrying them that the hassle isn't worth it (iow it probably wouldn't improve their revenue stream enough to redesign all their stores to include the movies and pissed off parents when little Johnny wanders in there because they weren't watching their brat.
In a 2000 square foot video store, the manager told me that the little 150 square foot adult video area is responsible for 25% of their revenue.
Either this doesn't work on a nationwide level, or Blockbuster is just full of shit.
Violence in video games are not real. The violence that the President of the United States does on a daily basis is.
Is it? The President is a man I've never had a conversation with, never met, never even seen in person. For all I know he could be fictional. I've only seen him on some glowing box that just moments earlier portrayed a story based around a group of "Friends" who entertain with their wacky hijinks. Oh, I've also seen him in newspapers, which also feature things like recently discovered bat-people, Elvis sightings, and endless blather about Julia Roberts's new movies.
Yeah, so this guy who I can't relate to in any way at all is launching missiles at some country I would never think twice about if he didn't keep talking about it, certainly a place I don't think I'd ever visit in my lifetime, and people I'll never meet who live a completely different way of life that I do are dying as a result of it.
You want to talk real? Real is when I manipulate a video avatar with my game controller into stealing a police car and going on a murderous rampage with it.
..then so is suing priests, politicians, and Dr. Phil.
If I said the President of the United States taught me that solving problems with violence was appropriate, which is why I shot my next door neighbor, I'd be called a lunatic. But if I say video games made me do it, I'm just a victim?
Example: I started losing weight around the same time as I started exercising. Because I started exercising, I lost weight.
The logical fallacy is that two events are linked when there's nothing to link them other than their concurrency. There are other possible explanations, such as dieting, intestinal parasites, or other diseases. Regardless, I don't need to suggest alternate explanations to show the fallacy, simply the fact that there's no illustration of cause through effect is enough.
Dieting is what actually caused the weight loss. I carefully measured what I ate every day, calculated how many calories a day my body requires, and scheduled meals to reduce my calorie intake by 1000 calories per day and charted on the calendar what my target weights should be at the end of the week, then confirmed that they were so using a scale. To rule out faults in the scale, I used a control object whose weight it can be assumed stayed the same over the same period of time. In spite of all of this, there could be other alternate explanations for my weight loss, but there's a definite difference between this explanation and the blind faith used in the previous paragraph, and also the blind faith in accepting the global warming arguments.
What's important about my statement is that my methods are documented, faults can be pointed out, and countermeasures can be taken and the trial repeated. Others can repeat the tests too, without limit, and should they verify my results, we can start saying that yes, dieting does lead to weight loss, with authority.
Does this happen with the global warming theories? I haven't seen it, but I'll admit that I haven't looked too hard.
If your system has an md5sum command, it will also have a sha1sum command. Same idea, different output: feed each of them a file and they will give you a hash of that file that fits in 128-bits (md5) or 160-bits (sha1).
In practice, no two files (or period of a data stream) will have the same signature. Hashing algorithms are used in data integrity checks and authentication.
An sha1 crack likely means that they found a way to make tampered data still hash to a desired value, maybe.
sha1 and md5 are generally considered so weak that they should only be used to combat error or accidents, not fraud.
Re:Broken or not?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
when they dropped the ball on claiming the palmtop/handheld device market.
The dominant platform for hand-held devices is not one of Microsoft's, and it looks less likely today than it did years ago that it would be Microsoft's.
Of course, there is no dominant platform today, but of all of the players, Microsoft's is not too high on the list.
The only thing I can see reversing it is some new earth-shatteringly awesome device coming out that runs Microsoft-something that everyone jumps into bed with.
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
You mention all of these things like they're faults, but I consider them to be features of cell phones. Sporadic coverage? Bad reception inside buildings? Low battery life? Cell phones offer all of the political capital of being 24/7 reachable while still offering a million excuses for why you never answer or call back.
It pisses me off that GOOD IT people are undervalued so much, and I blame that on the fact that "everyone knows computers"
Everyone knows computers when it comes to installing Windows, but nobody knows shit when the computer suddenly won't boot and every technician they talk to says the data is lost and reinstalling is their only option.
When you recover it, then they see why you charge the rate you do. Then they go an entire month or so without complaining about it.;)
You feel bad because this crap is so easy for you because you're an alpha geek. But consider, others are not alpha geeks because while you were tinkering with computers, they were out getting laid and partying.
Now they're calling you.
You gave up sex, drugs and rock and roll to be this good. Make it pay off.;)
Sure, they're trivial differences. A different shell prompt, different file locations, different packaging systems, different set of kernel patches, different ideas of how optional emacs really is, different political goals, different window manager, different windowing system, different theme, different way of auto-detecting hardware, different boot scripts, different MTAs, different place for optional packages, et cetera. Individually, they can all be overcome pretty quickly.
However, these differences do add up. And the unnerving part for me is that there are more differences today, not less. Sure, we've all gotten past the libc5 to glibc2 nightmare, but at least you knew what to expect there.
These differences aren't necessarily evil. But, they do increase the cost of switching distros, and that some of them are probably intentional.
Maybe it's not what you call forking, but I don't know what it is in that case.
I've ignored Red Hat and SuSE for about 5 years now, focusing mainly on Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.
Now that I've used a Red Hat system again, I was completely dazzled by how drastically different the experiences are. I expect the GUI to be more polished, naturally, but so many underlying things are different as well. All in all, they're things I can learn, and binary and source compatibility are still there, but it's the trend that's disturbing.
All of the traditional UNIX vendors forked in order to raise the barrier of exit for people who wanted to switch platforms. Sun's platform is still alive today because Solaris is such a unique beast that you have administrators trained solely in the art of this platform. All the UNIX part does is allow for some kind of source compatibility. Maybe.
Cisco took TCP/IP, which was practically invented (and perfected?) on a BSD box and threw it away to build a new proprietary OS to run specifically on their routers.
It's hard to find a major distribution shipping the vanilla kernel these days. When does, for example, SuSE decide that binary compatibility with other distros is keeping them from "enhancing" the user experience? Can they resist?
As I remember reading, Kazaa was such a hard legal target to bring down because of how decentralized the business is. Servers in one jurisdiction, employees in another, the company registered in a third, bank accounts in another, and onwards, etc.
While it offers an extraordinarily complex legal knot to untangle for anyone trying to bring a suit against them, once they do land in court, the company's internal workings will all be well documented because everyone communicates through email or IM. Oops.
I'm driving a higher end 2002 and the rampant software that's embedded in the thing can be, in spite of how convenient, infuriatingly stupid. Further, because everything's done in software, the manufacturers start cutting functionality that used to be done in hardware. This is a VERY bad thing.
Case in point, I decide to check the oil on my new car. I pop the hood and have a look around. I can't seem to find the dip stick. Figuring that I might just be a moron, I grab the manual. The manual says nothing about a dipstick. How am I supposed to check the oil?!
I find the "checking your oil" section in the manual, and it says "with your car turned off for several hours and parked on a level surface, put your key in the ignition, switch the computer display to `engine', and now turn the car on". I do so. The car display comes up and says "OIL LEVEL: OK!"
Not quite satisfied with that answer, I look around on the internet for information about the engine and have it confirmed for me that there really actually is no dipstick in my car.
I check the oil level occasionally over the next few weeks, and every time the car says "OIL LEVEL: OK!". Finally, one day I bring the car in for servicing (on an unrelated matter) and the technicians put on this expression, the kind of expression that men have whenever women talk about how they didn't know that cars preferred gas of such and such minimum octane. With this expression on, they scold me "DID YOU KNOW THAT YOUR OIL LEVEL WAS DANGEROUSLY LOW?!"
So I contain my anger for a second and play stupid "Gosh, really? I'm not very good at cars or these computer doodads or anything. How do you guys check the oil?!" to which they say "We checked the dipstick"(!!) At this point I go "YOU MEAN THE DIPSTICK THAT THE MANUAL NEVER MENTIONS, YOU MEAN THE DIPSTICK THAT ALLEGEDLY DOES NOT EXIST? YOU MEAN HOW THE MANUAL TELLS ME TO USE THAT OBTUSE COMPUTER INTERFACE TO CHECK THE OIL LEVEL AND JUST THE OTHER DAY IT SAID OIL LEVEL OK?"
Well, apparantly the car has a "modular dipstick", and technicians don't bother with the oil sensor because YOU DON'T REALLY KNOW FOR SURE, BUT THE DIPSTICK, THAT GIVES YOU ACCURATE RESULTS!
He's being interviewed by a Joe Sixpack, but Gates's answers are meant to speak to a CTO.
For a Joe Sixpack, Linux is more secure with faster security updates, etc. I read about a security hole and custom develop a patch for myself, instantly, or find someone else's patch. On Windows, I have to wait.
The CTO rarely learns about security holes, he simply hears that Microsoft releases a patch, and that he needs to apply this patch to all of the computers in the company. With Windows Update, all of the workstations automatically update themselves. He's probably even suprised to see that updates are ready to fix a hole he's never heard of. All his IT staff has to do is go around and push OK for the users who ignore the box that asks if they want to apply the new updates. In his eyes, cost savings are high.
Slashdot Mirror
If you choose to write open source code, you are chosing to have no money. That's your choice. But dont complain about it.
Open source is not an end itself. With some celebrity exceptions, open source exists because someone solved a problem--often a business problem--and released the solution to the public.
Why would they give it away? Because they have no interest in trying to sell it. Selling shrinkwrap software is a tough business, most people would rather focus on whatever it is they're better at. They stand to gain much more by open sourcing it than they would keeping it in a vault, or trying to sell it.
The telehouse facility stayed up during 9/11 while World Trade Plaza was crumbling to the ground 4 blocks away. If they can stay up through that, everything that calls itself a colo should be able to.
Well, it did go down a few days later because their UPS ran out of fuel, but it was because of political issues. The national guard wouldn't let the refueling truck into the area. I will admit that having your colo quarantined by a military force is an exceptional circumstance.
No. It can't. We have two concrete examples in this very page - one provided by Wikimedia, one provided by me - which directly contradict your statement. Maybe under some circumstances MySQL can handle reboots, but it's been proven already that it can't always do so. Perhaps your MySQL experience is not with high-load applications (at least not the level of load Wikimedia and my employer see).
I don't mean to diminish what you guys do, or question your abilities. I simply want to offer my perspective because I've been in similar situations.
I ran an extremely high load site off of MySQL for about 4 years. It started out modestly and went up to around 2000-3000 queries/sec hitting the RDBMS, about 30% of them data updates.
There were genuine cases where MySQL annoyed the hell out of me.
For example, the use of pthreads is a huge pain in the ass under Linux because all of the thread stacks share address space. On a 32-bit platform and a large InnoDB buffer pool, it's easy to run out of pointer bits. Once we switched to a replicated setup this wasn't such a big deal anymore. Moving to a 64-bit platform would've made this a non-issue too, but we didn't have the luxury of doing this at the time.
Regarding data corruption? Every time I've blamed MySQL 4 + InnoDB for ruining my data, I've been too soon to do so. MySQL is often the messenger of a real underlying problem.
What underlying problem? Well, OS, disk, or RAM for starters. And these aren't always easy to find.
I went to enormous lengths to verify that all of those things were working properly so I could blame MySQL. Kernel updates, memtest86, I even ran (VA-)CTCS on it for a week and the machine showed no problems. But every time we'd bring MySQL up on it we'd encounter data corruption within 20 days or so.
The site continued to run off of the remaining servers and we just hoped MySQL wouldn't "corrupt" those as well while we tried to figure out what the problem was.
Anyway, one day a few weeks later someone was playing around with the retired machine and found that 1 time out of 20, on boot it wouldn't find one of the hard disks. Oh, and this disk just happened to be used in the MySQL data partition. We replaced the disk container and the machine hasn't had a problem since and runs in production.
We should've just thrown the fucker away.
I've wasted a lot of time because I had more confidence in machines than I should've. Most computers have terrible reliability, even the ones that are marketed as being reliable. Most people just don't notice. MySQL notices. :(
it said that the top 2 and 3 most visited sites in the world were "daum.net" and "naver.com"
Korean portal sites.
On the other hand, judging by how many straight-edge fully qualified nerds fail the NSA entrance test, maybe they ARE full of autistic savants.
He can, among other things, tell you how many bpms the metronome is set to by ear.
And it's not an answer like "around 70 or 80". It's an answer he gives with full authority, like "Oh, that's 78".
Aren't these rarely isolated incidents?
Isn't the probability of discovering further compromises by widespread cryptanalysis of this discovery extremely high?
However, Blockbuster has said that they do not carry X rated films not for a moral reason but because they are making enough money without carrying them that the hassle isn't worth it (iow it probably wouldn't improve their revenue stream enough to redesign all their stores to include the movies and pissed off parents when little Johnny wanders in there because they weren't watching their brat.
In a 2000 square foot video store, the manager told me that the little 150 square foot adult video area is responsible for 25% of their revenue.
Either this doesn't work on a nationwide level, or Blockbuster is just full of shit.
Violence in video games are not real. The violence that the President of the United States does on a daily basis is.
Is it? The President is a man I've never had a conversation with, never met, never even seen in person. For all I know he could be fictional. I've only seen him on some glowing box that just moments earlier portrayed a story based around a group of "Friends" who entertain with their wacky hijinks. Oh, I've also seen him in newspapers, which also feature things like recently discovered bat-people, Elvis sightings, and endless blather about Julia Roberts's new movies.
Yeah, so this guy who I can't relate to in any way at all is launching missiles at some country I would never think twice about if he didn't keep talking about it, certainly a place I don't think I'd ever visit in my lifetime, and people I'll never meet who live a completely different way of life that I do are dying as a result of it.
You want to talk real? Real is when I manipulate a video avatar with my game controller into stealing a police car and going on a murderous rampage with it.
Stupidity has bipartisan support. The Daily Show can be enjoyed by both sides.
..then so is suing priests, politicians, and Dr. Phil.
If I said the President of the United States taught me that solving problems with violence was appropriate, which is why I shot my next door neighbor, I'd be called a lunatic. But if I say video games made me do it, I'm just a victim?
Correlation is not causation.
Example: I started losing weight around the same time as I started exercising. Because I started exercising, I lost weight.
The logical fallacy is that two events are linked when there's nothing to link them other than their concurrency. There are other possible explanations, such as dieting, intestinal parasites, or other diseases. Regardless, I don't need to suggest alternate explanations to show the fallacy, simply the fact that there's no illustration of cause through effect is enough.
Dieting is what actually caused the weight loss. I carefully measured what I ate every day, calculated how many calories a day my body requires, and scheduled meals to reduce my calorie intake by 1000 calories per day and charted on the calendar what my target weights should be at the end of the week, then confirmed that they were so using a scale. To rule out faults in the scale, I used a control object whose weight it can be assumed stayed the same over the same period of time. In spite of all of this, there could be other alternate explanations for my weight loss, but there's a definite difference between this explanation and the blind faith used in the previous paragraph, and also the blind faith in accepting the global warming arguments.
What's important about my statement is that my methods are documented, faults can be pointed out, and countermeasures can be taken and the trial repeated. Others can repeat the tests too, without limit, and should they verify my results, we can start saying that yes, dieting does lead to weight loss, with authority.
Does this happen with the global warming theories? I haven't seen it, but I'll admit that I haven't looked too hard.
If your system has an md5sum command, it will also have a sha1sum command. Same idea, different output: feed each of them a file and they will give you a hash of that file that fits in 128-bits (md5) or 160-bits (sha1).
In practice, no two files (or period of a data stream) will have the same signature. Hashing algorithms are used in data integrity checks and authentication.
An sha1 crack likely means that they found a way to make tampered data still hash to a desired value, maybe.
sha1 and md5 are generally considered so weak that they should only be used to combat error or accidents, not fraud.
It is when Bruce Schneir says so.
"Oops! You probably meant to type this domain instead, here's a link. BTW, here are some ads."
Who could get mad about that?
when they dropped the ball on claiming the palmtop/handheld device market.
The dominant platform for hand-held devices is not one of Microsoft's, and it looks less likely today than it did years ago that it would be Microsoft's.
Of course, there is no dominant platform today, but of all of the players, Microsoft's is not too high on the list.
The only thing I can see reversing it is some new earth-shatteringly awesome device coming out that runs Microsoft-something that everyone jumps into bed with.
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
You mention all of these things like they're faults, but I consider them to be features of cell phones. Sporadic coverage? Bad reception inside buildings? Low battery life? Cell phones offer all of the political capital of being 24/7 reachable while still offering a million excuses for why you never answer or call back.
It pisses me off that GOOD IT people are undervalued so much, and I blame that on the fact that "everyone knows computers"
Everyone knows computers when it comes to installing Windows, but nobody knows shit when the computer suddenly won't boot and every technician they talk to says the data is lost and reinstalling is their only option.
When you recover it, then they see why you charge the rate you do. Then they go an entire month or so without complaining about it. ;)
What the heck is a Messaging System?
Just about everything you can do over a network is a messaging system.
I feel bad in some ways
You feel bad because this crap is so easy for you because you're an alpha geek. But consider, others are not alpha geeks because while you were tinkering with computers, they were out getting laid and partying.
Now they're calling you.
You gave up sex, drugs and rock and roll to be this good. Make it pay off. ;)
Sure, they're trivial differences. A different shell prompt, different file locations, different packaging systems, different set of kernel patches, different ideas of how optional emacs really is, different political goals, different window manager, different windowing system, different theme, different way of auto-detecting hardware, different boot scripts, different MTAs, different place for optional packages, et cetera. Individually, they can all be overcome pretty quickly.
However, these differences do add up. And the unnerving part for me is that there are more differences today, not less. Sure, we've all gotten past the libc5 to glibc2 nightmare, but at least you knew what to expect there.
These differences aren't necessarily evil. But, they do increase the cost of switching distros, and that some of them are probably intentional.
Maybe it's not what you call forking, but I don't know what it is in that case.
I've ignored Red Hat and SuSE for about 5 years now, focusing mainly on Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.
Now that I've used a Red Hat system again, I was completely dazzled by how drastically different the experiences are. I expect the GUI to be more polished, naturally, but so many underlying things are different as well. All in all, they're things I can learn, and binary and source compatibility are still there, but it's the trend that's disturbing.
All of the traditional UNIX vendors forked in order to raise the barrier of exit for people who wanted to switch platforms. Sun's platform is still alive today because Solaris is such a unique beast that you have administrators trained solely in the art of this platform. All the UNIX part does is allow for some kind of source compatibility. Maybe.
Cisco took TCP/IP, which was practically invented (and perfected?) on a BSD box and threw it away to build a new proprietary OS to run specifically on their routers.
It's hard to find a major distribution shipping the vanilla kernel these days. When does, for example, SuSE decide that binary compatibility with other distros is keeping them from "enhancing" the user experience? Can they resist?
I'd like to be wrong about all of this.
As I remember reading, Kazaa was such a hard legal target to bring down because of how decentralized the business is. Servers in one jurisdiction, employees in another, the company registered in a third, bank accounts in another, and onwards, etc.
While it offers an extraordinarily complex legal knot to untangle for anyone trying to bring a suit against them, once they do land in court, the company's internal workings will all be well documented because everyone communicates through email or IM. Oops.
I'm driving a higher end 2002 and the rampant software that's embedded in the thing can be, in spite of how convenient, infuriatingly stupid. Further, because everything's done in software, the manufacturers start cutting functionality that used to be done in hardware. This is a VERY bad thing.
Case in point, I decide to check the oil on my new car. I pop the hood and have a look around. I can't seem to find the dip stick. Figuring that I might just be a moron, I grab the manual. The manual says nothing about a dipstick. How am I supposed to check the oil?!
I find the "checking your oil" section in the manual, and it says "with your car turned off for several hours and parked on a level surface, put your key in the ignition, switch the computer display to `engine', and now turn the car on". I do so. The car display comes up and says "OIL LEVEL: OK!"
Not quite satisfied with that answer, I look around on the internet for information about the engine and have it confirmed for me that there really actually is no dipstick in my car.
I check the oil level occasionally over the next few weeks, and every time the car says "OIL LEVEL: OK!". Finally, one day I bring the car in for servicing (on an unrelated matter) and the technicians put on this expression, the kind of expression that men have whenever women talk about how they didn't know that cars preferred gas of such and such minimum octane. With this expression on, they scold me "DID YOU KNOW THAT YOUR OIL LEVEL WAS DANGEROUSLY LOW?!"
So I contain my anger for a second and play stupid "Gosh, really? I'm not very good at cars or these computer doodads or anything. How do you guys check the oil?!" to which they say "We checked the dipstick"(!!) At this point I go "YOU MEAN THE DIPSTICK THAT THE MANUAL NEVER MENTIONS, YOU MEAN THE DIPSTICK THAT ALLEGEDLY DOES NOT EXIST? YOU MEAN HOW THE MANUAL TELLS ME TO USE THAT OBTUSE COMPUTER INTERFACE TO CHECK THE OIL LEVEL AND JUST THE OTHER DAY IT SAID OIL LEVEL OK?"
Well, apparantly the car has a "modular dipstick", and technicians don't bother with the oil sensor because YOU DON'T REALLY KNOW FOR SURE, BUT THE DIPSTICK, THAT GIVES YOU ACCURATE RESULTS!
Seriously, keep computers the fuck out of my car.
He's being interviewed by a Joe Sixpack, but Gates's answers are meant to speak to a CTO.
For a Joe Sixpack, Linux is more secure with faster security updates, etc. I read about a security hole and custom develop a patch for myself, instantly, or find someone else's patch. On Windows, I have to wait.
The CTO rarely learns about security holes, he simply hears that Microsoft releases a patch, and that he needs to apply this patch to all of the computers in the company. With Windows Update, all of the workstations automatically update themselves. He's probably even suprised to see that updates are ready to fix a hole he's never heard of. All his IT staff has to do is go around and push OK for the users who ignore the box that asks if they want to apply the new updates. In his eyes, cost savings are high.