Why are you talking about Linux? The issue is with Mac OS X... The only things common between the two are a) they have Unix at the core b) they're not Windows
Besides that, Linux is excellent as a workstation OS. Take it from someone who used Debian as his only OS for 4 years after having used it as the secondary OS over the 4 previous years.
Incidentally I also happen to be a new OS X convert;) Of course I plan to dual boot OS X and Debian when I get the time to set things up properly...
First of all, thank you for participating in this flamefest;) I read the Executive Summary of your report and skimmed the rest, so pardon me if I failed to notice something vital.
It seems to me that the demand that your Linux Admins were asked to upgrade Glibc led them to fail the majority of tasks, creating an artificial bias against Linux.
Any Admin worth his weight in pizza knows that you Just Don't Do That. If you absolutely, positively need some component, you get the version which works with your Glibc. All hell will break loose as soon as you upgrade Glibc and especially if you don't recompile the rest of the system. For an organization which needs commercial support from the OS vendor, this is unacceptable and your Admin should have refused to comply. If your web programmers need a specific component, they should get the component which works with your system. I understand that this induces "pain" on your organization, but that pain should be much milder than the one your Admins experienced, and as a result, your organization.
My question is therefore: How can you defend the demand to upgrade Glibc when it is so obviously designed to force the Admin to fail?
Thank you very much for your answer, I look forward to reading your reply.
First of all you roll up your sleeves, because you are determined to succede or die trying.
You would best: 1. Plan to make the popcorn at the house 2. Fill the house interior 3. Use 2-3 days to get the job done. 4. Get an insider to cooperate.
The logistics of transporting several tens of thousand cubic feet of popped corn is too expensive. Transporting the corn unpopped is much less conspicuous. Same reason for filling the interior. He probably has neighbors who would call the cops, so you need to do this inside the house so everything looks fine from the outside. Imagine his face when he opens his front door and finds a wall of popcorn. It's no fun if he saw it a mile away and you didn't get to see the reaction.
It would probably be a good idea to do it while he's away for a weekend or some such time. That would give you plenty of time to set up your gear and pop the corn. This creates a need for an insider who knows his travel plans, a brother or mutual friend. I'm guessing that you already have a copy of the house key to get in... I'm guessing that both a hot air popper and a microwave are too slow and/or messy. I think a 200 litre oil drum as a pot (maybe cut in half) over a gas heater in the back yard is best. You will need to have an efficient way of emptying the popcorn and putting more corn into the pot without the popcorn burning in the meantime. Some sort of air suction device could be used to empty the popcorn from the pot. Something like the insulation blower someone else mentioned. That way you also have an efficient delivery system you could use to fill every crevice of every room with popcorn. Perhaps a leaf blower and wheelbarrow is sufficient (cheaper). The unpopped corn should be heavy enough to stay at the bottom where it will eventually pop and be sucked out. I will leave it up to you to figure out what to do with the kernels that don't pop...
There you have it, a complete, DOABLE, plan. Hope you post the pictures for our amusement...;)
Almost all articles on LinuxInsider seem to have one thing in common: look legit to the PHB's out there, but contain a grain of FUD, that when joined could fill a FUD-shaker...
The (now seemingly proven) fact that bystanders find people talking on their mobile phone more annoying than two people having a conversation is quite understandable. It is the fact that they seem to be talking to themselves that is disturbing. Usually that is a sign of a mental illness and as I'm sure you are aware makes people quite uneasy.
The article says nothing about the demographic selection of the bystanders. I would be willing to bet real money that (the majority of) the people who participated in the study were over twenty. That is likely to be important since kids today are more used to mobile phones and would be less likely to be disturbed by their use. On the other hand people who grew up before mobile phones were common are subconsciously conditioned to regard people talking into their hand as lunatics.
Unfortunately I have no study to back up my teory, it's just a hunch...
I was referring to the "leap to the newest version" move. This newest version supposedly doesn't interact properly with PAM, which is used extensively in Debian.(Complete list of problems in the security advisory.)
The move was however justifiable due to the way this particular hole was (not properly) disclosed at the time. Since Woody was released a month after this security fix it wasn't actually the security team that made the decision, but the release manager and this version of ssh was the one originally released with Woody. Some searching on the mailing lists will probably turn up the reasoning behind this.
I did actually get in trouble when I upgraded my home server to the latest version, but it wasn't due to PAM. Something went wrong during postinstall and the sshd user wasn't created. This user is needed for the new privilege separation feature and sshd wouldn't start without it. So, I had to go to the trouble of lugging a monitor and keyboard into the closet in order to solve the problem. A little annoying, but nothing serious, hence the smiley...
That said, I haven't run into any problems with ssh after the upgrade but this is just my home setup, not the production machines.
We got bit in the behind a few weeks ago. Red Hat decided that it was a good idea to close a recent security hole in PHP by upgrading the PHP packages in 7.2 from 4.0.6 -> 4.1.2.
The only problem was that some of our customers were using custom modules for PHP. For them the upgrade was time consuming (costly) and happened later than necessary.
Right now there is a memory leak in the PHP 4.1.2 packages from RH due to shared memory not being released, and the QA people have been letting it sit there for a whole month!!
The result will probably be that they introduce PHP 4.2.2 as a fix...
I've been using Debian at home for 4 years now, and I think their security team does an excellent job! Especially wrt not upgrading a package version unless it is absolutely necessary. (Then they dropped the ball with SSH a few weeks ago.;)
The net result is that we are considering a move from RH to Debian so we will get better bugfix handling as well as better overall quality of the packages. If we need bleeding edge software we can in most cases fetch the source package from unstable and compile it for woody... (that's what i've done on my home workstation).
<plug severity="shameless">
You can visit our website at http://www.rackserv.com.
(Sorry, danish only since our target is the danish hosting market:-/) </plug>
Reading the other replies really takes me back to the time I was working for an IBM Business Partner coding RPG/400 for a CRM system.
What they neglected to mention was something I used to do quite often. Since everyting is actually a database, you can also create output as a database. You would almost always get the choice to receive output to *SCREEN, *PRINTER or *FILE. So if you e.g. needed to "grep" through source code in a few members of a PF, you could create a report (SQL query), enter your search criteria and the correct members of the SRCPF, and output the results to a *TEMP file for further analysis. Same goes for almost all other operations.
Of course, it is much more trouble than it is worth, compared to pipes and stdout/stdin redirection in Unix like OSs.;)
Re:Things I would stress. (one more)
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 1
Then there's one thing that might be important from a support point of view:
#11. Once you learned one kind of Unix, you can (pretty easily) transfer your knowledge on to another flavor of Unix.
I recently tried RedHat and OpenBSD after about 4 years of Debian experience and I found out that the missing pieces were usually found on their respective websites.
I haven't tried it, but phpGroupware has a timetrack module.
Since I haven't tried it I can't really comment further, maybe someone else here can?
I agree with a previous poster, that you should start by taking a look at what software your HR department is using. The list of employees needs to stay in sync with their database and they need to extract values from the timetracking software you choose.
Last time I checked (and it's been a while) potato had kernel 2.2 which didn't have sophisticated USB support.
Like many have said before me: install stable and apt-get dist-upgrade to testing on your desktop boxes. Then you get X 4.1 and kernel 2.4.13 (with USB support).
APT makes it definitely worth the (IMHO nonexisting) extra effort to use Debian.
This is basically just a shrunken desktop computer.
The EZGo is the size of four CD cases stacked on top of each other. I didn't compare the specs, but the EZGo has enough.
As he says in the article, the company owner had decided to move to a browser based interface. The technical people then recommended going with PHP/Apache on Win32 instead of ASP/IIS on Win32.
So you see it wasn't a business decision but a technical one, which tools to use, just like asking "Are we going to use Visual C++ or Visual Basic?".
Besides, it looks like a rather small firm (or medium size if you like) if you can assemble the entire development staff in one room... and discuss things... and consider their recommendation...;)
P.s. read the article. The author spells out their reasoning quite clearly.
I read somewhere that you should regard the various distributions as distinct, yet fairly compatible OSes.
Therefore, Red Hat 7.1 is a complete OS with a well defined (perhaps only internally documented) list of utilities/applications at well known individual version stages. Then you can compare RedHat 7.1 with FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE to find out how they compare.
To answer your question: Linux is the kernel used by compatible OSes, known as "Linux distributions".
Let's not forget the original statement that sparked my reply: "... denying someone the ability to profit from the fruits of one's own labor."
As I see it, if Alice (the original author of a piece of software) chooses to go the GPL way she makes the choice to make her source code freely available. She is presumably aware that it will be quite difficult to get people to pay for it, on the grounds of the parasitism effect mentioned in the article. She expresses her desire to keep all future versions of her software free by choosing the GPL, over say, the BSD license. That may be because she doesn't like the idea of others profiting from her hard work, by simply releasing her software in binary form under a new name with minor additions, under a different license, demanding payment. She may not mind that others simply use it (in the GPL sense) without payment and in exchange contribute improvements to her software. It is her right as the original author to make this choice.
Noone has forced her at gunpoint to release her software under the GPL, but in a sense she forces others at gunpoint (the gun being the law) to adhere to the license under which her software was released. The point I was trying to make in my post was that she could just as well choose to release her software under a different license if her motive was to profit as much as possible from her work. That is not something the GPL can forbid her.
G Neric got it right. I didn't mention the issues (s)he brings up because I was merely addressing the profit issue brought up by Maynard.
I've been reading this thread as it emerges and I simply cannot hold back any longer.
Because it adopts that favorite tactic of Communists, denying someone the ability to profit from the fruits of one's own labor. The viral nature of the GPV prevents someone from profiting from his own work.
You just don't seem to get it. It's not about denying someone the ability to profit from their own labor. It's about denying someone else the ability to profit from your labor.
Go release your own code under a different license and let others release their code under the GPL. That's what freedom of choice is about.
Your use of Microsoft FUD on the GPL makes me laugh. You don't seem to get the fact that the so called "viral" property of the GPL is a good thing. It's just being called a bad name in the hope that something bad will rub off on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you talking about Linux? The issue is with Mac OS X...
;)
The only things common between the two are
a) they have Unix at the core
b) they're not Windows
Besides that, Linux is excellent as a workstation OS. Take it from someone who used Debian as his only OS for 4 years after having used it as the secondary OS over the 4 previous years.
Incidentally I also happen to be a new OS X convert
Of course I plan to dual boot OS X and Debian when I get the time to set things up properly...
Hello Dr. Thompson
;)
First of all, thank you for participating in this flamefest
I read the Executive Summary of your report and skimmed the rest, so pardon me if I failed to notice something vital.
It seems to me that the demand that your Linux Admins were asked to upgrade Glibc led them to fail the majority of tasks, creating an artificial bias against Linux.
Any Admin worth his weight in pizza knows that you Just Don't Do That.
If you absolutely, positively need some component, you get the version which works with your Glibc. All hell will break loose as soon as you upgrade Glibc and especially if you don't recompile the rest of the system. For an organization which needs commercial support from the OS vendor, this is unacceptable and your Admin should have refused to comply. If your web programmers need a specific component, they should get the component which works with your system.
I understand that this induces "pain" on your organization, but that pain should be much milder than the one your Admins experienced, and as a result, your organization.
My question is therefore: How can you defend the demand to upgrade Glibc when it is so obviously designed to force the Admin to fail?
Thank you very much for your answer, I look forward to reading your reply.
First of all you roll up your sleeves, because you are determined to succede or die trying.
;)
You would best:
1. Plan to make the popcorn at the house
2. Fill the house interior
3. Use 2-3 days to get the job done.
4. Get an insider to cooperate.
The logistics of transporting several tens of thousand cubic feet of popped corn is too expensive. Transporting the corn unpopped is much less conspicuous. Same reason for filling the interior. He probably has neighbors who would call the cops, so you need to do this inside the house so everything looks fine from the outside.
Imagine his face when he opens his front door and finds a wall of popcorn. It's no fun if he saw it a mile away and you didn't get to see the reaction.
It would probably be a good idea to do it while he's away for a weekend or some such time. That would give you plenty of time to set up your gear and pop the corn. This creates a need for an insider who knows his travel plans, a brother or mutual friend. I'm guessing that you already have a copy of the house key to get in...
I'm guessing that both a hot air popper and a microwave are too slow and/or messy.
I think a 200 litre oil drum as a pot (maybe cut in half) over a gas heater in the back yard is best.
You will need to have an efficient way of emptying the popcorn and putting more corn into the pot without the popcorn burning in the meantime.
Some sort of air suction device could be used to empty the popcorn from the pot. Something like the insulation blower someone else mentioned. That way you also have an efficient delivery system you could use to fill every crevice of every room with popcorn. Perhaps a leaf blower and wheelbarrow is sufficient (cheaper).
The unpopped corn should be heavy enough to stay at the bottom where it will eventually pop and be sucked out. I will leave it up to you to figure out what to do with the kernels that don't pop...
There you have it, a complete, DOABLE, plan.
Hope you post the pictures for our amusement...
Just a "me too", nothing to see here... ;)
Almost all articles on LinuxInsider seem to have one thing in common: look legit to the PHB's out there, but contain a grain of FUD, that when joined could fill a FUD-shaker...
Hi Wil
;)
In your opinion, should music be kept
a) Good
b) Evil
c) You are going to Hay-ell!
d) All of the above
In any case, Rock on
I'm no expert, but I became curious about the difference between IBM AFS and OpenAFS and it seems that they are the same.
;)
This means I will probably check it out for my next fileserver project...
Remember, you read it here first:
The (now seemingly proven) fact that bystanders find people talking on their mobile phone more annoying than two people having a conversation is quite understandable.
It is the fact that they seem to be talking to themselves that is disturbing. Usually that is a sign of a mental illness and as I'm sure you are aware makes people quite uneasy.
The article says nothing about the demographic selection of the bystanders. I would be willing to bet real money that (the majority of) the people who participated in the study were over twenty. That is likely to be important since kids today are more used to mobile phones and would be less likely to be disturbed by their use. On the other hand people who grew up before mobile phones were common are subconsciously conditioned to regard people talking into their hand as lunatics.
Unfortunately I have no study to back up my teory, it's just a hunch...
one more time...
;)
root@powerplant12:/# apt-get update && apt-get -s upgrade
Get:1 ftp://ftp.gepower.com stable/main Packages [2726kB]
Hit ftp://ftp.gepower.com stable/main Release
Fetched 2.8MB in 2s (1408kB/s)
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Inst xa-21-base (2.1-3 GE-whoops:stable)
Conf xa-21-base (2.1-3 GE-whoops:stable)
Yup, its official...
So basically, he got hit by the virus, looked up Symantec and saw Linux. Then got pissed and wrote something inflammatory and submitted an article.
/. ;)
I didn't know the BBC was so much like
Uh... Simple ^ Complex == Simplex
;)
It appears complex while it is actually quite simple.
Dear mr. Barry
Do you think "Slashing Dots" would be a good band name?
As I write this the top story is this one.
;)
The site receiving the poinding (www.thefreeworld.net) is down so you could check with them after the dust settles and find out what it was like...
No, you didn't miss anything.
I was referring to the "leap to the newest version" move. This newest version supposedly doesn't interact properly with PAM, which is used extensively in Debian.(Complete list of problems in the security advisory.)
The move was however justifiable due to the way this particular hole was (not properly) disclosed at the time. Since Woody was released a month after this security fix it wasn't actually the security team that made the decision, but the release manager and this version of ssh was the one originally released with Woody. Some searching on the mailing lists will probably turn up the reasoning behind this.
I did actually get in trouble when I upgraded my home server to the latest version, but it wasn't due to PAM. Something went wrong during postinstall and the sshd user wasn't created. This user is needed for the new privilege separation feature and sshd wouldn't start without it. So, I had to go to the trouble of lugging a monitor and keyboard into the closet in order to solve the problem. A little annoying, but nothing serious, hence the smiley...
That said, I haven't run into any problems with ssh after the upgrade but this is just my home setup, not the production machines.
We got bit in the behind a few weeks ago. Red Hat decided that it was a good idea to close a recent security hole in PHP by upgrading the PHP packages in 7.2 from 4.0.6 -> 4.1.2.
;)
:-/)
The only problem was that some of our customers were using custom modules for PHP. For them the upgrade was time consuming (costly) and happened later than necessary.
Right now there is a memory leak in the PHP 4.1.2 packages from RH due to shared memory not being released, and the QA people have been letting it sit there for a whole month!!
The result will probably be that they introduce PHP 4.2.2 as a fix...
I've been using Debian at home for 4 years now, and I think their security team does an excellent job! Especially wrt not upgrading a package version unless it is absolutely necessary. (Then they dropped the ball with SSH a few weeks ago.
The net result is that we are considering a move from RH to Debian so we will get better bugfix handling as well as better overall quality of the packages. If we need bleeding edge software we can in most cases fetch the source package from unstable and compile it for woody... (that's what i've done on my home workstation).
<plug severity="shameless">
You can visit our website at http://www.rackserv.com.
(Sorry, danish only since our target is the danish hosting market
</plug>
Reading the other replies really takes me back to the time I was working for an IBM Business Partner coding RPG/400 for a CRM system.
;)
What they neglected to mention was something I used to do quite often. Since everyting is actually a database, you can also create output as a database. You would almost always get the choice to receive output to *SCREEN, *PRINTER or *FILE. So if you e.g. needed to "grep" through source code in a few members of a PF, you could create a report (SQL query), enter your search criteria and the correct members of the SRCPF, and output the results to a *TEMP file for further analysis. Same goes for almost all other operations.
Of course, it is much more trouble than it is worth, compared to pipes and stdout/stdin redirection in Unix like OSs.
Then there's one thing that might be important from a support point of view:
#11. Once you learned one kind of Unix, you can (pretty easily) transfer your knowledge on to another flavor of Unix.
I recently tried RedHat and OpenBSD after about 4 years of Debian experience and I found out that the missing pieces were usually found on their respective websites.
Check out http://qvcs-guide.sourceforge.net
Since I haven't tried it I can't really comment further, maybe someone else here can?
I agree with a previous poster, that you should start by taking a look at what software your HR department is using. The list of employees needs to stay in sync with their database and they need to extract values from the timetracking software you choose.
Last time I checked (and it's been a while) potato had kernel 2.2 which didn't have sophisticated USB support.
Like many have said before me: install stable and apt-get dist-upgrade to testing on your desktop boxes. Then you get X 4.1 and kernel 2.4.13 (with USB support).
APT makes it definitely worth the (IMHO nonexisting) extra effort to use Debian.
This is basically just a shrunken desktop computer.
The EZGo is the size of four CD cases stacked on top of each other. I didn't compare the specs, but the EZGo has enough.
Check out the Taiwanese manufacturer, a product page at directron or a review at Ars Technica.
Best of all. It supposedly runs Linux!
(I probably should mention that I have nothing to do with this product. I just saw it a while ago and thought I should mention it.)
It's funny to note that the list you mentioned doesn't include the billion second date...
;)
That must mean they're all just making this up
As he says in the article, the company owner had decided to move to a browser based interface. The technical people then recommended going with PHP/Apache on Win32 instead of ASP/IIS on Win32.
;)
So you see it wasn't a business decision but a technical one, which tools to use, just like asking "Are we going to use Visual C++ or Visual Basic?".
Besides, it looks like a rather small firm (or medium size if you like) if you can assemble the entire development staff in one room... and discuss things... and consider their recommendation...
P.s. read the article. The author spells out their reasoning quite clearly.
I read somewhere that you should regard the various distributions as distinct, yet fairly compatible OSes.
Therefore, Red Hat 7.1 is a complete OS with a well defined (perhaps only internally documented) list of utilities/applications at well known individual version stages. Then you can compare RedHat 7.1 with FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE to find out how they compare.
To answer your question: Linux is the kernel used by compatible OSes, known as "Linux distributions".
"
As I see it, if Alice (the original author of a piece of software) chooses to go the GPL way she makes the choice to make her source code freely available. She is presumably aware that it will be quite difficult to get people to pay for it, on the grounds of the parasitism effect mentioned in the article. She expresses her desire to keep all future versions of her software free by choosing the GPL, over say, the BSD license. That may be because she doesn't like the idea of others profiting from her hard work, by simply releasing her software in binary form under a new name with minor additions, under a different license, demanding payment. She may not mind that others simply use it (in the GPL sense) without payment and in exchange contribute improvements to her software. It is her right as the original author to make this choice.
Noone has forced her at gunpoint to release her software under the GPL, but in a sense she forces others at gunpoint (the gun being the law) to adhere to the license under which her software was released. The point I was trying to make in my post was that she could just as well choose to release her software under a different license if her motive was to profit as much as possible from her work. That is not something the GPL can forbid her.
G Neric got it right. I didn't mention the issues (s)he brings up because I was merely addressing the profit issue brought up by Maynard.
Because it adopts that favorite tactic of Communists, denying someone the ability to profit from the fruits of one's own labor. The viral nature of the GPV prevents someone from profiting from his own work.
You just don't seem to get it. It's not about denying someone the ability to profit from their own labor. It's about denying someone else the ability to profit from your labor.
Go release your own code under a different license and let others release their code under the GPL. That's what freedom of choice is about.
Your use of Microsoft FUD on the GPL makes me laugh. You don't seem to get the fact that the so called "viral" property of the GPL is a good thing. It's just being called a bad name in the hope that something bad will rub off on it.