That's all supposing you believe that public key crypto is secure. Which it's not feasible as being. Everything you need to decrypt PGP is accessible through the public key. When it was first created, RSA provided a sensible way of encrypting information. It is *extremeley* vulnerable to plain-text attack. When you break that, you can decrypt the session key, and hence the message. The only reason you haven't read about this is in the fact that it's much more valuable and useful if people continue relying on PGP/RSA being a "secure" means of communication. As soon as their patent expires (next year?) you'll be sure to read of exploits...
With that said, and given that PGP is decryptible, what the NSA really wants is to contain all further breakthroughs to the US. With projects such as Echelon, when these further breakthroughs take place, they'll be able to determine who sent the file, and even perform a substitution routine which will insert their public key into the whole process...
Yes, PGP is available all over. Is it secure? That's what you all'd like to believe. Not really though, to anyone willing to invest the resources, though. The NSA has resources. Therefore, this is an inconvienence... They need to retrieve public keys prior to decryption... So, given that, and given the inconvience of needing to discover how to break further crypto breakthroughs, it's quite sensible to think that the cats out of the bag with PGP...
Symetric key pose no problem now or in the future... How will you ever exchange them without the risk of inteception?!? Face to face works... but then, that's a trackable occurance. Public key was feasible before, but now??? If you believe it still is 99% secure, you're mistaken.
--- if you believe that the NSA or another government agency is after you, you've got bigger problems than the security that PGP can provide for you.
paraphrased from a PGP FAQ that's out there, floating across the net.
Okay. I'm sorry. I was just recalling the discussion about Netscape/Sun - iPlanet's decision not to port NAS to Linux. In that one it seemed the overwhelming sentiment was that "Hey, why should they have the right to charge me for this when i can get Apache for free?"
I happened to have also recieved the Oracle CD... My business currently uses MS-SQL... So, it is nice to get Oracle 8 for "free" so as to be able to develop a system and only actually have to pay for it once it's been implemented in the workflow.
Like i said - sorry! I was in a very poor mood last night!
Okay. I'm wrong you don't. I'm sure lots of people around here don't. But, doesn't it get you that the AC's around here overwelmingly do?
And yes, free software that is as good or better than commercial software is a great thing! But I can't agree with people like RMS that would rather use inferior free software than paying for a product that makes it easier to get the job done. It seems that that's artificially constraining our ability to be creative, solely so that you can view & alter the source code.
And i grant that for developers, the ability to be creative is highly dependant on the availablity of source code. Now what? I just backed myself in to a corner!
That's ALL they're trying to do! They're not even trying to deny americans the right use crypto to protect themselves... They simply do not want it to go past the national borders...
Granted, then you have people like the NSA trying to artificially weaken domestic products, but that's a completely different argument than allowing the export of commercial products.
Well, for instance, I also don't agree with the fact that we export arms to countries that aren't our official allies. They can get weapons elsewhere, just not from us.
Why is this such a hard concept to grasp?
If the crypto is available overseas, just get it there! If US software developers (ahem - Microsoft!) wrote more intellegently structured products it'd be a cinch to add crypto "plug-ins" (a la photoshop, netscape, etc) that supplement the weak crypto in their products with whatever algorithm you choose.
I'm not at all against strong crypto - I'm just wondering why everyone is all conspiratory in thinking that the US is out to get US citizens. They're not. They're just trying to make it harder for other countries to get at them.
The internet is a wonderful mechanism for communciation. But, from the govenrments stand point, it makes protecting ourselves/themselves much more difficult. Prior to this, they could detect the amassing of arms and people and know to look out for an event. Now, all the organization can be done remotely, with all communcation taking place over the internet, will no clue being let on that there's something amiss.
Sure it hasnt' happened. But do you want that to happen (US citizens?)? No. There's more at stake than boosting our GNP...
No... Because blockbust can lose money here but make it up due to sales in Georgia, North carolina, Tennesseee, California, etc. It just is not fair that they can leverage themselve upon every community. The local place has been here for 10 or 15 years. If they don't stock a movie you want, they go and find it somewhere and call you when you can rent it. They carry foriegn films. They carry the NC-17 versions of movies. These are things that blockbuster doesn't do. If blockbust wipes them out, there goes all the options that I very rarely exercize, yet love the idea of having.
They can charge me more, the can have less movies in stock at any given time, but as long as they don't ask for my license, that makes me happy.
No you've got it all wrong. Slashdotters want to pay NO taxes and get free healthcare (and ISP's and hardware and blowjobs, etc). Higher taxes just don't work for this crowd.
(Sorry to any girl (or guy) that may or maynot be offended)
Microsoft seems to make quite a living selling insecure software products.
SGI, Sun, HP, IBM, they all make decent bucks selling under current guidelines.
Yes, if we never ever faced the possibility of a confict again, exporting strong crypto would be fine. We don't have that guarentee. Therefore, this is the US's way of trying to not say OOPS 20 years from now. I'm all for the privacy of my communciations. I just don't understand why it's such a big deal that we *slightly* cripple our software companies by not letting them export ONE type of product (in this argument)
Plus, Canada's... well, they're Canada. Let's face it, unless the news has completely masked this out, they just don't have as many adversaries as the US. Oh wait - they all talk dirty up there... isn't that why Kenny died and the southpark kids moms went to war with them?
Anyways.
We do seem to be in the top notch in the world, so everyone guns at us... Kinda like everyone going after MSFT, but that's another argument.
Canada can afford to enourage it's citizens to use strong security. The US doesn't deny us this right either. The ONLY thing they're saying is "Don't export it"... Just like you can't send guns to Ireland, or drugs to germany, don't export strong crypto software (or any other extremely "powerful" application (such as enterprise level DBMS') to a hostile country.
This just doesn't seem to be a big deal. The only reason that it runs the risk of hampering Americans from using strong crypto is because we insist on being able to export it.
Digital signatures use the same basic technology as some crypto systems, but past that, they completely differ. Governments, even the US, and within that, even the NSA, endorse the idea of utilizing strong crypo technologies for use in digital signatures. That's not even close to a "win". That enables much better and reliable tracking. When you sign something, it doesn't in any way hide what you actually signed. It actually makes it much easier to track an individual if everything he sends is signed. It only adds a mathematical hash to the beginning of the file that anyone is able to strip out. They can't substitute it, but if you're not looking for it and it's not there, you won't miss it.
Fighting for crypto and being enthused for receiving digital signatures is adsurd. I forgot the other word i was gonna use...
Great. Are you going to install it? Are you going to create something it's meant for (by that i mean something that MySQL can't quite handle)? And when that happens, are you actually gonna pay Oracle one day?
Or freeload, as seems to be so common.
I wonder if these companies even read slashdot. If they did, they'ed realize that there's no money to be made from the Linux community (that's a very very generalized statement). They want Free PC's that don't display ads, free ISP's that don't track their comings and goings, free operating systems (ok, that one actually is a reality), and free versions of popular software from ported from other OS's. And when it does get ported, they can then study it, lobby (on Slashdot, mind you!) for lower prices, and when that fails, create an opensource clone of if. What innovation!
SO SORRY!!! I just happen to be in an especially poor mood tonight.
Let's theorize that my DBA has left me... For the sake of this, we'll assume that my company uses DB2.
I've now got two applicants in front of me... One has experience, and is even certified to develop, Oracle 8 databases. The other, says he's been developing in Postgres or MySQl. All other things being equal, I'll choose the Oracle admin any day.
Why?
Regardless as to how little you value certification, it means something. If nothing else, it means that the applicant is dedicated enough, or an ex-employer saw enough potential, to spring the money to get the certification (never mind the actual work involved).
Second. In my mind, an Oracle DBA will have a much better mindset as to what's required in an enterprize than one whose experience lies soley in MySQL on Linux (or any other 32 bit platform). Why? Oracle is a corporate application. These people are used to meetings and structure. From what I've read here, Linux-ites are opposed to it.
Oracle can SCALE. MySQL??? Even if it can address a 64 bit address space, can it really utilize it? How about optimizations? Oracle is supported on many platforms. By supported, I mean that I can call them in, shell out $$$, and they'll get the thing to work. MySQL? Oh. I get the source code. That's not the same as support in my book. If MySQL could scale, how come Slashdot only keeps my postings accessible for what 30 days?
I've never seen benchmarks with MySQL or Postgres vs. Oracle. If Oracle would allow, I'd love to see the comparison. I'm sure you'd cringe, though, and say, "well, wait for the 3.2 kernel to come out. That doesn't cut it in my book."
And yes, once you know the theory of RDBMs' you can probably get around in any of them. But do you trully know the specific one? NO. You may know a little about all of them, but there's nuances to be learned. That's why a Linux admin can't say they know Solaris (unless they do). Configurations are different - text files in different places, etc... You can get around in it, do the basic stuff, but to really shine, you'd need to buckle down and specialize.
Actually, they probably couldn't care less about people migrating to MySQL, because everyone WILL come crawling back to them, that is, if their business didn't fold during the process.... And if they managed and everything was fine - they probably didn't need oracle in the first place, hence their too small scale and probably won't have the $$$ they'ed like to see from customers. That's my hunch. Slash runs MySQL - it works for this... but you'd be crazy to deploy an enterprise wide solution on MySQL... #1 where are all the skilled admins? Yes, there are a few, but compared to people who know Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Informix, etc?
You're allowed to make outrageous claims, but not unsubstanntiated claims. And keep in mind, this wasn't just a commericial, it was a contest. A commercial would say Drink Pepsi, whereas a contest states Drink pespsi if you collect enough points you can get a prize...
Therefore, I think, Pepsi screwed up in a bigtime way. If it'd been the company i used to work for (Direct Marketing - YEP JUNK MAIL!!!), we'd have gotten nailed to the wall for something like that... But they screwed up on so many levels - advertising, the legal team, etc...
They should be very thankful that they have the $$$ for a great legal team to bail them out of that.
Screw loyalty???? That's got to be the most innane statement I've heard in a long time. Loyalty is what drives businesses.... There's a small video store in my town. They carry less movies and charge about the same as the Blockbuster that opened down the street. I still go to my local place due to a sense of "loyalty." Loyalty is what lets a business thrive.
Free internet acess works in the UK because everyone has to pay the phone companies acceess charges for local calls. A portion of this money gets rolled back to the ISP. It just can't work here, free internet access, no strings attatched. Not even by the ISP inserting a banner advertisment at the top of each page... There's no assurance a user has images turned on, is using http (as opposed to ftp, etc...).
Flamebait: What will you pay money for? Not the OS (Linux) - the argument goes that the money distributing linux will be from value added services. Not for internet service - for some reason that should be free, too... and that's for a "value added service", in that they provided easy to access content, software, and a relative sense of "security" for the newbie. It's not targetted (nor even accessible, so far as i can to) for linux users.
What company exists besides VA Research that ships solely Linux boxes?
SGI is probably the most visible supporter of Linux yet, compared to say, Dell IBM and others.
They're moving in directions that hear customers asking for - first with NT boxes to combat the flood of animator moving away from their platform to Wintel. Then they tweak the boxes and/or Linux to and sell that to people desiring Linux systems.
Sun seems to be the only company that bids a customer farewell when they switch platforms.
Problem with forgoing NT and moving straight to Linux is that the apps aren't all there yet. It'd be suicide for them to drop NT and move into Linux... at least NT had professional 3d apps available when they moved there... By showing support for Linux, hopefully that'll mean that companies like Barco (do they still exist?), Alias etc... will see that there's sufficient demand to deliver ports of their products to the SGI Linux platform. I doubt that they'll do a full on "Linux" port however... Software for SGI's have for years been serialized so as to only run on one machine. I'm certain SGI provides unique hardware keys in their new machines. . . Oops! Did I just ramble?
Geez! I use Linux where I see fit. It's been extremely stable in my experience. But I also use the Mac OS, Be OS, Win 98, Win NT... whatever platform which has the tools to complete the project I'm performing. And it's completely valid to point out that the linux community has some percieved shortcomings. Those need to be addressed in order to achieve the World-Wide Domination that is so often stated on these message boards.
Redhat makes no money past their IPO price - so if they go public at $14 a share, that's what they bring in. Private investors and banks make the real money - as well as employees who have equity. If you want to show support and play a part of their sucess, go buy their software and give it to your friends.
The IPO is when the stock is released to the masses. Currently, it's in the hands of an investment bank and other investors. That's where the money is...
Look at MP3.com. It went public at what? $20 or $28? That's what the investors bought it for. If you had an e-trade account and put in a buy order, you'd probably have gotten it near it's peak (near $100? $96?) This past week, all you really do with the MPPP you bought is try to cut your losses, otherwise be prepared to be in it for the "long haul".
And lastly, even though Redhat will be publicly traded, you'll either need a broker or an online investment account to get access to it. Brokers will laugh at you if you try to buy stocks one at a time. Online brokers seem to require a deposit between $1000 and $5000 to get started and then just charge a small commission on each trade.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all supposing you believe that public key crypto is secure. Which it's not feasible as being. Everything you need to decrypt PGP is accessible through the public key. When it was first created, RSA provided a sensible way of encrypting information. It is *extremeley* vulnerable to plain-text attack. When you break that, you can decrypt the session key, and hence the message. The only reason you haven't read about this is in the fact that it's much more valuable and useful if people continue relying on PGP/RSA being a "secure" means of communication. As soon as their patent expires (next year?) you'll be sure to read of exploits...
With that said, and given that PGP is decryptible, what the NSA really wants is to contain all further breakthroughs to the US. With projects such as Echelon, when these further breakthroughs take place, they'll be able to determine who sent the file, and even perform a substitution routine which will insert their public key into the whole process...
Yes, PGP is available all over. Is it secure? That's what you all'd like to believe. Not really though, to anyone willing to invest the resources, though. The NSA has resources. Therefore, this is an inconvienence... They need to retrieve public keys prior to decryption... So, given that, and given the inconvience of needing to discover how to break further crypto breakthroughs, it's quite sensible to think that the cats out of the bag with PGP...
Symetric key pose no problem now or in the future... How will you ever exchange them without the risk of inteception?!? Face to face works... but then, that's a trackable occurance. Public key was feasible before, but now??? If you believe it still is 99% secure, you're mistaken.
--- if you believe that the NSA or another government agency is after you, you've got bigger problems than the security that PGP can provide for you.
paraphrased from a PGP FAQ that's out there, floating across the net.
Right. They can make money doing it. That's what makes it s a good decision!
Comparing Oracle to Postgres or MySQL is just a poor decision. As is comparing Oracle on a 64 CPU Sun box vs. SQL Server running on a Quad Xeon...
Okay. I'm sorry. I was just recalling the discussion about Netscape/Sun - iPlanet's decision not to port NAS to Linux. In that one it seemed the overwhelming sentiment was that "Hey, why should they have the right to charge me for this when i can get Apache for free?"
I happened to have also recieved the Oracle CD... My business currently uses MS-SQL... So, it is nice to get Oracle 8 for "free" so as to be able to develop a system and only actually have to pay for it once it's been implemented in the workflow.
Like i said - sorry! I was in a very poor mood last night!
:)
Okay. I'm wrong you don't. I'm sure lots of people around here don't. But, doesn't it get you that the AC's around here overwelmingly do?
And yes, free software that is as good or better than commercial software is a great thing! But I can't agree with people like RMS that would rather use inferior free software than paying for a product that makes it easier to get the job done. It seems that that's artificially constraining our ability to be creative, solely so that you can view & alter the source code.
And i grant that for developers, the ability to be creative is highly dependant on the availablity of source code. Now what? I just backed myself in to a corner!
That's ALL they're trying to do! They're not even trying to deny americans the right use crypto to protect themselves... They simply do not want it to go past the national borders...
Granted, then you have people like the NSA trying to artificially weaken domestic products, but that's a completely different argument than allowing the export of commercial products.
Well, for instance, I also don't agree with the fact that we export arms to countries that aren't our official allies. They can get weapons elsewhere, just not from us.
Why is this such a hard concept to grasp?
If the crypto is available overseas, just get it there! If US software developers (ahem - Microsoft!) wrote more intellegently structured products it'd be a cinch to add crypto "plug-ins" (a la photoshop, netscape, etc) that supplement the weak crypto in their products with whatever algorithm you choose.
I'm not at all against strong crypto - I'm just wondering why everyone is all conspiratory in thinking that the US is out to get US citizens. They're not. They're just trying to make it harder for other countries to get at them.
The internet is a wonderful mechanism for communciation. But, from the govenrments stand point, it makes protecting ourselves/themselves much more difficult. Prior to this, they could detect the amassing of arms and people and know to look out for an event. Now, all the organization can be done remotely, with all communcation taking place over the internet, will no clue being let on that there's something amiss.
Sure it hasnt' happened. But do you want that to happen (US citizens?)? No. There's more at stake than boosting our GNP...
No... Because blockbust can lose money here but make it up due to sales in Georgia, North carolina, Tennesseee, California, etc. It just is not fair that they can leverage themselve upon every community. The local place has been here for 10 or 15 years. If they don't stock a movie you want, they go and find it somewhere and call you when you can rent it. They carry foriegn films. They carry the NC-17 versions of movies. These are things that blockbuster doesn't do. If blockbust wipes them out, there goes all the options that I very rarely exercize, yet love the idea of having.
They can charge me more, the can have less movies in stock at any given time, but as long as they don't ask for my license, that makes me happy.
No you've got it all wrong. Slashdotters want to pay NO taxes and get free healthcare (and ISP's and hardware and blowjobs, etc). Higher taxes just don't work for this crowd.
(Sorry to any girl (or guy) that may or maynot be offended)
Microsoft seems to make quite a living selling insecure software products.
SGI, Sun, HP, IBM, they all make decent bucks selling under current guidelines.
Yes, if we never ever faced the possibility of a confict again, exporting strong crypto would be fine. We don't have that guarentee. Therefore, this is the US's way of trying to not say OOPS 20 years from now. I'm all for the privacy of my communciations. I just don't understand why it's such a big deal that we *slightly* cripple our software companies by not letting them export ONE type of product (in this argument)
Plus, Canada's... well, they're Canada. Let's face it, unless the news has completely masked this out, they just don't have as many adversaries as the US. Oh wait - they all talk dirty up there... isn't that why Kenny died and the southpark kids moms went to war with them?
Anyways.
We do seem to be in the top notch in the world, so everyone guns at us... Kinda like everyone going after MSFT, but that's another argument.
Canada can afford to enourage it's citizens to use strong security. The US doesn't deny us this right either. The ONLY thing they're saying is "Don't export it"... Just like you can't send guns to Ireland, or drugs to germany, don't export strong crypto software (or any other extremely "powerful" application (such as enterprise level DBMS') to a hostile country.
This just doesn't seem to be a big deal. The only reason that it runs the risk of hampering Americans from using strong crypto is because we insist on being able to export it.
Digital signatures use the same basic technology as some crypto systems, but past that, they completely differ. Governments, even the US, and within that, even the NSA, endorse the idea of utilizing strong crypo technologies for use in digital signatures. That's not even close to a "win". That enables much better and reliable tracking. When you sign something, it doesn't in any way hide what you actually signed. It actually makes it much easier to track an individual if everything he sends is signed. It only adds a mathematical hash to the beginning of the file that anyone is able to strip out. They can't substitute it, but if you're not looking for it and it's not there, you won't miss it.
Fighting for crypto and being enthused for receiving digital signatures is adsurd. I forgot the other word i was gonna use...
Uh-huh. Yeah sure you will. And if it ever becomes as bad as you think - you won't make it to Canada. So best be on your way right now...
Great. Are you going to install it? Are you going to create something it's meant for (by that i mean something that MySQL can't quite handle)? And when that happens, are you actually gonna pay Oracle one day?
Or freeload, as seems to be so common.
I wonder if these companies even read slashdot. If they did, they'ed realize that there's no money to be made from the Linux community (that's a very very generalized statement). They want Free PC's that don't display ads, free ISP's that don't track their comings and goings, free operating systems (ok, that one actually is a reality), and free versions of popular software from ported from other OS's. And when it does get ported, they can then study it, lobby (on Slashdot, mind you!) for lower prices, and when that fails, create an opensource clone of if. What innovation!
SO SORRY!!! I just happen to be in an especially poor mood tonight.
Let's theorize that my DBA has left me... For the sake of this, we'll assume that my company uses DB2.
:)
I've now got two applicants in front of me... One has experience, and is even certified to develop, Oracle 8 databases. The other, says he's been developing in Postgres or MySQl. All other things being equal, I'll choose the Oracle admin any day.
Why?
Regardless as to how little you value certification, it means something. If nothing else, it means that the applicant is dedicated enough, or an ex-employer saw enough potential, to spring the money to get the certification (never mind the actual work involved).
Second. In my mind, an Oracle DBA will have a much better mindset as to what's required in an enterprize than one whose experience lies soley in MySQL on Linux (or any other 32 bit platform). Why? Oracle is a corporate application. These people are used to meetings and structure. From what I've read here, Linux-ites are opposed to it.
Oracle can SCALE. MySQL??? Even if it can address a 64 bit address space, can it really utilize it? How about optimizations? Oracle is supported on many platforms. By supported, I mean that I can call them in, shell out $$$, and they'll get the thing to work. MySQL? Oh. I get the source code. That's not the same as support in my book. If MySQL could scale, how come Slashdot only keeps my postings accessible for what 30 days?
I've never seen benchmarks with MySQL or Postgres vs. Oracle. If Oracle would allow, I'd love to see the comparison. I'm sure you'd cringe, though, and say, "well, wait for the 3.2 kernel to come out. That doesn't cut it in my book."
And yes, once you know the theory of RDBMs' you can probably get around in any of them. But do you trully know the specific one? NO. You may know a little about all of them, but there's nuances to be learned. That's why a Linux admin can't say they know Solaris (unless they do). Configurations are different - text files in different places, etc... You can get around in it, do the basic stuff, but to really shine, you'd need to buckle down and specialize.
That's all in my opinion!
Or upgrade to Oracle ;)
Actually, they probably couldn't care less about people migrating to MySQL, because everyone WILL come crawling back to them, that is, if their business didn't fold during the process.... And if they managed and everything was fine - they probably didn't need oracle in the first place, hence their too small scale and probably won't have the $$$ they'ed like to see from customers. That's my hunch. Slash runs MySQL - it works for this... but you'd be crazy to deploy an enterprise wide solution on MySQL... #1 where are all the skilled admins? Yes, there are a few, but compared to people who know Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Informix, etc?
You're allowed to make outrageous claims, but not unsubstanntiated claims. And keep in mind, this wasn't just a commericial, it was a contest. A commercial would say Drink Pepsi, whereas a contest states Drink pespsi if you collect enough points you can get a prize...
Therefore, I think, Pepsi screwed up in a bigtime way. If it'd been the company i used to work for (Direct Marketing - YEP JUNK MAIL!!!), we'd have gotten nailed to the wall for something like that... But they screwed up on so many levels - advertising, the legal team, etc...
They should be very thankful that they have the $$$ for a great legal team to bail them out of that.
Screw loyalty???? That's got to be the most innane statement I've heard in a long time. Loyalty is what drives businesses.... There's a small video store in my town. They carry less movies and charge about the same as the Blockbuster that opened down the street. I still go to my local place due to a sense of "loyalty." Loyalty is what lets a business thrive.
Free internet acess works in the UK because everyone has to pay the phone companies acceess charges for local calls. A portion of this money gets rolled back to the ISP. It just can't work here, free internet access, no strings attatched. Not even by the ISP inserting a banner advertisment at the top of each page... There's no assurance a user has images turned on, is using http (as opposed to ftp, etc...).
Flamebait:
What will you pay money for?
Not the OS (Linux) - the argument goes that the money distributing linux will be from value added services.
Not for internet service - for some reason that should be free, too... and that's for a "value added service", in that they provided easy to access content, software, and a relative sense of "security" for the newbie. It's not targetted (nor even accessible, so far as i can to) for linux users.
What company exists besides VA Research that ships solely Linux boxes?
SGI is probably the most visible supporter of Linux yet, compared to say, Dell IBM and others.
They're moving in directions that hear customers asking for - first with NT boxes to combat the flood of animator moving away from their platform to Wintel. Then they tweak the boxes and/or Linux to and sell that to people desiring Linux systems.
Sun seems to be the only company that bids a customer farewell when they switch platforms.
Problem with forgoing NT and moving straight to Linux is that the apps aren't all there yet. It'd be suicide for them to drop NT and move into Linux... at least NT had professional 3d apps available when they moved there... By showing support for Linux, hopefully that'll mean that companies like Barco (do they still exist?), Alias etc... will see that there's sufficient demand to deliver ports of their products to the SGI Linux platform. I doubt that they'll do a full on "Linux" port however... Software for SGI's have for years been serialized so as to only run on one machine. I'm certain SGI provides unique hardware keys in their new machines. . . Oops! Did I just ramble?
Geez! I use Linux where I see fit. It's been extremely stable in my experience. But I also use the Mac OS, Be OS, Win 98, Win NT... whatever platform which has the tools to complete the project I'm performing. And it's completely valid to point out that the linux community has some percieved shortcomings. Those need to be addressed in order to achieve the World-Wide Domination that is so often stated on these message boards.
I sincerey hope that this doesn't get moderated down to Flamebait! :)
Redhat makes no money past their IPO price - so if they go public at $14 a share, that's what they bring in. Private investors and banks make the real money - as well as employees who have equity. If you want to show support and play a part of their sucess, go buy their software and give it to your friends.
I'd bet that there were more than a few slashdotters who tried (not me, thank you!), thinking hmmmm... it's IPO price is $28 - cool!
You can be a genius of a programmer, but because you don't know how the stock market works, does that therefore make you a moron?
Everyone made money, except the ones who bought it when it became generally available, in which case they lost 40% of their money in one day.
The IPO is when the stock is released to the masses. Currently, it's in the hands of an investment bank and other investors. That's where the money is...
Look at MP3.com. It went public at what? $20 or $28? That's what the investors bought it for. If you had an e-trade account and put in a buy order, you'd probably have gotten it near it's peak (near $100? $96?) This past week, all you really do with the MPPP you bought is try to cut your losses, otherwise be prepared to be in it for the "long haul".
And lastly, even though Redhat will be publicly traded, you'll either need a broker or an online investment account to get access to it. Brokers will laugh at you if you try to buy stocks one at a time. Online brokers seem to require a deposit between $1000 and $5000 to get started and then just charge a small commission on each trade.