For people with the view that having multiple versions and flavors of *nix out there, so that applications are broadly developed for a wide range of platforms, it is NOT a win for anybody who I or any of us care about that one Freenix is decimating a lot of the other Unix-like OSes out there. As HP-UX and AIX fade away, a part of the *nix universe fades away with them. And that isn't good, unless we're in favor of a world with two or three 'titan' OS platforms being all there is. When giants fight, all the little people get trampled, so to speak.
I, for one, LIKE it when makefiles and build environments are robust and broad. Multi-platform tarballs are generally more robust than apps written for a single architecture.
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I suspect they did NOT switch to GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is a particular OS based on the Linux kernel, one that Debian among other integrates and distributes. I suspect this HP variant is not all GNU and probably amounts to Linux gelled by HP with their own integration effort. It probably is version controlled by HP. I doubt if there's an anonymous CVS site we can grab it from. For HP to be making the uptime guarantees that they are, it has a thick layer of their own people watching it over. You ain't gonna download the.iso or grab a CD copy from cheapbytes.
Any specific conglomeration of software, Free Software or not, becomes proprietary when it is bundled and integrated in a specific way by a vendor. Now, granted, some software is less proprietary, i.e one composed of Open Source elements is less proprietary than one only available as binaries from one or a very few vendors... But it would probably be no more or less difficult to switch Linux vendors/supporters than a Commercial Unix variant.
Also, people need to remember whose market share is being eaten away by this particular 'win' by Linux: the legacy Unix market is being eroded. Not Microsoft at all.
One of the surprising things my dad once said in my youth was when he suggested we should get a cannon and shot at Target's sign across the parking log.
He usually never came up with that sort of creative idea.
You need to stick a piece of scotch tape onto something, then take it to a pitch dark room (i.e. a bathroom with no outside window works) turn out the lights and peel the tape off. This also works with masking tape. That light you see as the tape peels off is a ton of static discharge.
Secondly, I'm afraid you vastly overestimate the importance of Firefox. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you have 80-90% of the market share, you define the standard for all practical purposes. Right now, that means that Microsoft has all the power and anyone aiming to run a commercial enterprise based on supplying video or audio over the web is going to prioritise supporting IE over anything else. Those who believe in open standards and OSS may not like this, but that's the reality today and there's no use denying it.
Nobody is denying that. You seem to be denying that it's a problem. And you're blatantly ignorning the fact that your denial is the point of this whole thread.
Really? What proportion of people who browse the web do you think use Firefox on Linux? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%?
There are forces at play working hard to make it 0%.
And that's fine for them, as long as they're doing it with their commercial efforts, and not by hamstringing open standards bodies.
you actively chose to use a system with a limited user base in the full knowledge that it is non-standard and has some limitations.
Now you're twisting the terminology. Until there is an open published standard, preferrably with some public domain reference code included, you are NOT the one to be saying anybody else is advocating 'non-standard' technology. So let's see the source tarball, Adobe/Apple/etc.!!
It told me what to click and asked for the password. I restarted the web-browser and haven't had troubles since.
With a cavalier attitude like that regarding security, I am sure there are plenty of people here who would be willing to give you URLs to websites that will tell you where to click and ask for the password.
And that is REALLY the point for some of us, regarding closed trade-secret tech like Flash becoming required on important websites.
Yes, that is all you are saying. It happens to work on one implementation of Linux when it happens to be run on certain hardware configurations. Thats ALL you are saying. As long as we're clear and agree that's all you said. But you were trying to use that to make the implication there was fairly broad support.
Hell, there is clickthrough language that makes it essentially IMPOSSIBLE for some people to accept Flash-rendering binaries on their systems.
I'm using a machine right now that doesn't 'understand.mov.' I know that there is probably something in pkgsrc that I could install that would allow Mozilla/Seamonkey on this platform (NetBSD-i386) to render a sizeable subset of the files that happen to have a.mov extension attached to them. What happens when I decide to run NetBSD-ARM or NetBSD-Mac68K where crappy closed binary codecs can't be coerced into working??
So when is Apple cutting loose the.mov extension? When will they stop extending it further to break third party tools that render it? When will it stop being their own little private domain?
because the alternative people are proposing is no recommendation, not a recommendation for competing formats.
'people' is a funny way of referencing several rather loud business organizations. You make it sound like 'the people have been heard on the subject' or something.
Further, you're correct that Apple and Nokia want no standard. They'd rather have the freedom to troll around in the chaos.
It's disconcerting how many people have barely hidden partisan points of view favoring commercial outfits in these discussions. It's as if shilling was an acceptable part of geek/nerd culture. However, it is not.
Mozilla shouldn't actively make it impossible to run a Mozilla-type browser on Windows 3.1 or OS/2 by keeping parts of the source code secret. If I am not mistaken there is at least one build of Mozilla that has been ported to OS/2. And the point is that as long as there are no secrets or hidden 'twists' in the codebase, it will always be conceivable that an enthusiast can port it to whatever ancient, offbeat, or arcane OS they choose.
One series I have had difficulty in assembling is the Collected Works of Josef Stalin. I have about 3/4 of the 12 volumes, but have had difficulty tracking down the last several.
There are tons and tons of books too old to have a barcode. There are many books in my library of that sort. For instance, my copy of Banfield's Uniteds States History is pre-civil war. And you don't even have to reach far back into the 20th century to find books like that. Many don't have any ISBN reference number at all.
The 'prototype' generic PC boards at Fry's are a complete disaster, similar to DigiKey offerings. They sell 'blue ribbon grade' boards that are suitable for engineering prototypes at big companies with huge budgets. The fact that Radio Shack can sell nice little perfboards (even in fiberglass, not always just crummy phenolic) for $2-5 proves that those 'Vector' and 'Page' boards are shockingly overpriced.
Nope. Autorun has nothing to do with the problem. All disabling autorun does is remove the top-most layer of the problem. The 'doze desktop still freezes and 'My Computer' becomes unavailable while the system churns and whirrs to automount the CD. It should be possible for Windows Explorer to be configured so removable media volumes have to be explicitly mounted, by Explorer, the shell, or on an application-by-application basis (i.e. with API support)
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
Except initiatives like OLPC are enabling technology, which educate people and are intended to reduce the dependency of poor people on handouts. If we just do what Dvorak seems to imply is adquate, and dump bags of rice into villages, it does two things:
1. Increases dependency of the people on handouts to survive. 2. Destroys any possibility that a local producer of rice can realize a profit growing rice.
'Dump free food on them' initiatives destroy marketplaces and discourage people from learning to produce their own food. I'm not saying this as a 'market-worshipper' type, just as somebody who advocates a common sense approach.
...and storage devices are as dangerous on the network as they are on USB or FireWire in a corporate environment.
They sure are. But an external 'network connected storage device' can also be a laptop, which you can then run nmap and ethereal on. I imagine it wouldn't be much work at all to set up a laptop running a freenix (a BSD or a Linux-kernel based OS) to 'mimic' a commercial off-the-shelf NAS but have additional 'features.' The easiest solution at most shops is to just disallow any extra unapproved devices to connect to the net.
Slashdot Mirror
The US are paying /too little/.
You're welcome to send whatever extra money you think the Big Oil companies are entitled to yourself. Please stop trying to make the rest of us do it.
For people with the view that having multiple versions and flavors of *nix out there, so that applications are broadly developed for a wide range of platforms, it is NOT a win for anybody who I or any of us care about that one Freenix is decimating a lot of the other Unix-like OSes out there. As HP-UX and AIX fade away, a part of the *nix universe fades away with them. And that isn't good, unless we're in favor of a world with two or three 'titan' OS platforms being all there is. When giants fight, all the little people get trampled, so to speak.
I, for one, LIKE it when makefiles and build environments are robust and broad. Multi-platform tarballs are generally more robust than apps written for a single architecture.
I suspect they did NOT switch to GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is a particular OS based on the Linux kernel, one that Debian among other integrates and distributes. I suspect this HP variant is not all GNU and probably amounts to Linux gelled by HP with their own integration effort. It probably is version controlled by HP. I doubt if there's an anonymous CVS site we can grab it from. For HP to be making the uptime guarantees that they are, it has a thick layer of their own people watching it over. You ain't gonna download the .iso or grab a CD copy from cheapbytes.
Any specific conglomeration of software, Free Software or not, becomes proprietary when it is bundled and integrated in a specific way by a vendor. Now, granted, some software is less proprietary, i.e one composed of Open Source elements is less proprietary than one only available as binaries from one or a very few vendors... But it would probably be no more or less difficult to switch Linux vendors/supporters than a Commercial Unix variant.
Also, people need to remember whose market share is being eaten away by this particular 'win' by Linux: the legacy Unix market is being eroded. Not Microsoft at all.
Yes, and everybody will be happy drilling the holes to run thicknet throughout their home. heh.
In the case of CDs, do just like the freenixes do. Disable the eject button until the disk is umounted.
One of the surprising things my dad once said in my youth was when he suggested we should get a cannon and shot at Target's sign across the parking log.
He usually never came up with that sort of creative idea.
You need to stick a piece of scotch tape onto something, then take it to a pitch dark room (i.e. a bathroom with no outside window works) turn out the lights and peel the tape off. This also works with masking tape. That light you see as the tape peels off is a ton of static discharge.
Nobody is denying that. You seem to be denying that it's a problem. And you're blatantly ignorning the fact that your denial is the point of this whole thread.
Perhaps you should take a look at Gnash, the open source Flash player. Works for me.
Give the publishers of the Flash binaries a little time and they'll fix that.
Really? What proportion of people who browse the web do you think use Firefox on Linux? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%?
There are forces at play working hard to make it 0%.
And that's fine for them, as long as they're doing it with their commercial efforts, and not by hamstringing open standards bodies.
you actively chose to use a system with a limited user base in the full knowledge that it is non-standard and has some limitations.
Now you're twisting the terminology. Until there is an open published standard, preferrably with some public domain reference code included, you are NOT the one to be saying anybody else is advocating 'non-standard' technology. So let's see the source tarball, Adobe/Apple/etc.!!
It told me what to click and asked for the password. I restarted the web-browser and haven't had troubles since.
With a cavalier attitude like that regarding security, I am sure there are plenty of people here who would be willing to give you URLs to websites that will tell you where to click and ask for the password.
And that is REALLY the point for some of us, regarding closed trade-secret tech like Flash becoming required on important websites.
Yes, that is all you are saying. It happens to work on one implementation of Linux when it happens to be run on certain hardware configurations. Thats ALL you are saying. As long as we're clear and agree that's all you said. But you were trying to use that to make the implication there was fairly broad support.
Hell, there is clickthrough language that makes it essentially IMPOSSIBLE for some people to accept Flash-rendering binaries on their systems.
I'm using a machine right now that doesn't 'understand .mov.' I know that there is probably something in pkgsrc that I could install that would allow Mozilla/Seamonkey on this platform (NetBSD-i386) to render a sizeable subset of the files that happen to have a .mov extension attached to them. What happens when I decide to run NetBSD-ARM or NetBSD-Mac68K where crappy closed binary codecs can't be coerced into working??
.mov extension? When will they stop extending it further to break third party tools that render it? When will it stop being their own little private domain?
So when is Apple cutting loose the
because the alternative people are proposing is no recommendation, not a recommendation for competing formats.
'people' is a funny way of referencing several rather loud business organizations. You make it sound like 'the people have been heard on the subject' or something.
Further, you're correct that Apple and Nokia want no standard. They'd rather have the freedom to troll around in the chaos.
It's disconcerting how many people have barely hidden partisan points of view favoring commercial outfits in these discussions. It's as if shilling was an acceptable part of geek/nerd culture. However, it is not.
Should Mozilla also support Win3.1, or OS/2 Warp?
Mozilla shouldn't actively make it impossible to run a Mozilla-type browser on Windows 3.1 or OS/2 by keeping parts of the source code secret. If I am not mistaken there is at least one build of Mozilla that has been ported to OS/2. And the point is that as long as there are no secrets or hidden 'twists' in the codebase, it will always be conceivable that an enthusiast can port it to whatever ancient, offbeat, or arcane OS they choose.
One series I have had difficulty in assembling is the Collected Works of Josef Stalin. I have about 3/4 of the 12 volumes, but have had difficulty tracking down the last several.
There are tons and tons of books too old to have a barcode. There are many books in my library of that sort. For instance, my copy of Banfield's Uniteds States History is pre-civil war. And you don't even have to reach far back into the 20th century to find books like that. Many don't have any ISBN reference number at all.
And when you want to reference those annotations twelve years from now???
Oh, that's right. Nothing matters twelve years later.
Yes, but some people don't have any hard-wired phone service at all. I know, I know. But they made that choice.
Dubya is at most a rhinestone cowboy.
The 'prototype' generic PC boards at Fry's are a complete disaster, similar to DigiKey offerings. They sell 'blue ribbon grade' boards that are suitable for engineering prototypes at big companies with huge budgets. The fact that Radio Shack can sell nice little perfboards (even in fiberglass, not always just crummy phenolic) for $2-5 proves that those 'Vector' and 'Page' boards are shockingly overpriced.
Nope. Autorun has nothing to do with the problem. All disabling autorun does is remove the top-most layer of the problem. The 'doze desktop still freezes and 'My Computer' becomes unavailable while the system churns and whirrs to automount the CD. It should be possible for Windows Explorer to be configured so removable media volumes have to be explicitly mounted, by Explorer, the shell, or on an application-by-application basis (i.e. with API support)
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
Except initiatives like OLPC are enabling technology, which educate people and are intended to reduce the dependency of poor people on handouts. If we just do what Dvorak seems to imply is adquate, and dump bags of rice into villages, it does two things:
1. Increases dependency of the people on handouts to survive.
2. Destroys any possibility that a local producer of rice can realize a profit growing rice.
'Dump free food on them' initiatives destroy marketplaces and discourage people from learning to produce their own food. I'm not saying this as a 'market-worshipper' type, just as somebody who advocates a common sense approach.
...and storage devices are as dangerous on the network as they are on USB or FireWire in a corporate environment.
They sure are. But an external 'network connected storage device' can also be a laptop, which you can then run nmap and ethereal on. I imagine it wouldn't be much work at all to set up a laptop running a freenix (a BSD or a Linux-kernel based OS) to 'mimic' a commercial off-the-shelf NAS but have additional 'features.' The easiest solution at most shops is to just disallow any extra unapproved devices to connect to the net.