I actually had mod points, were ready to mod you down, but let's do the decent thing.
You are being unfair. Sure, there are tons of incomplete OSS projects out there, but Linux (kernel), KDE, Gnome, Xine... Everything you need for this project is stable and very mature.
If HP chose Linux for their 4-way workstations, which will be used in poor, rural areas, why not this?
Btw all of the projects mentioned above "actually work in some fashion".
Your only valid point was that MS may be footing part of the R&D bill, which they should be applauded for.
Well, just my 2c. I've been a RH user since 1997. For a long time they made the best, most well supported (by 3rd parties, their own support is crap, even when you've paid for it) distro around. About a week ago I decided to give Suse 9.1 a try, and I'm pleasantly impressed. For the first time everything seems well integrated and without the couple of dozens of quirks I'm used to tweaking myself in RH. What's more, I only used the command line for sys admin type tasks. I didn't mind at all, but mostly with RH you didn't really have a choice. Their GUI tools were just that bad and inflexible. However, now with Suse I find that Yast is so good I use it all the time, it is however a bit too slow.
> The United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world, the country the rest of the world looks to for morality.
I don't think anyone outside the US looks to the US for morality. Maybe the US media "protects" you from the real view the world has of you. That doesn't make it right.
Yes, you're right. Credibility is a huge concern for the online gaming industry, especially sine many sites were (are?) fly-by-nights, associated with porn and so on. However, there are a huge number of credible sites run by companies that want to build a long term business, not make a quick buck. These sites are audited by the big 5 auditors, and there's also industry associations springing up that dictates a code of conduct to it members and so on. In turn they will be able to show a "seal" or something on their web site say that they are [member org] accredited. I think the perception issue will become less and less for credible sites in future.
I'm writing this from a Mac myself, but the information you posted is wrong. If you look at the Google reports for Feb 2004, the Mac users are 4%. Now look at report for June 2001. The amount reported for Mac users....... 4%
'power users', 'Windows'... in the same sentance.. what are you smoking?:P
Actually... When I started my career about 7 years ago, I had a clear choice before me: Become a guru at either Windows NT or UNIX. At that time, the hype was so great that everyone thought NT would totally take over. HP announced its migration path away from HP-UX, SGI had a terrible time to stay afloat with IRIX, and Linux has just entered the radar, but was generally dismissed as a toy. To their credit, Sun said no thanks to have NT ported to the SPARC, and kept their weight behind UNIX. In any case, back to my choice. I was young and full of energy (still am, actually), and I wanted to be one of the best at something, not a jack-of-all trades. I read the most technical material I could find about both Windows and UNIX, to try and understand the guts of both systems. In the end I came to the conclusion that it would be much simpler to become a UNIX guru, since the concepts and philosophy is so much cleaner and simpler to understand (everything is a file! and then you take it from there). With NT 4 I had a much harder time getting my head around everything. Some things you do in files, others in registry and some only has a GUI that does god-knows-what. But more confusing even were the communication/resource sharing models: OLE, COM, DCOM, RPC, dlls etc. I just came to the conclusion that it would be much, much harder to become a true NT guru, and keep up with all the latest and greatest from MS.
For what it's worth, I learned a great deal about both systems, and I think I wrote the first (or at least one of the first), NT security scanners (as part of a university project). But in the end, I'm glad I went the UNIX route. It gave me opportunities in big data centers that didn't have any NT machines at the time, and that's where I built up most of my experience. Plus I've grown to love UNIX, in way that wouldn't have been possible with NT (pipe this-and-that, fork this, mount that - it make you feel like a king!). But that said, big hats off to the true NT gurus - you've got balls of steal!
You're 100% correct. Binary compatibility in Linux is a major PITA. In an ideal world all software would be OSS, and you could compile it for your platform and it would work. However, on real projects some proprietry software may be needed, and there's nothing much you can do about it. Just this week I tried to install eDirectory 8.7.1 on RHAS3, and it core'd the whole time. Would it have been so difficult to keep binary compatibility between RHAS2.1 and RHAS3?
I work for a consulting firm that, amongst others, provide services based on OSS products. Some of them are quite big projects, running at $3 million+. However, I found that Red Hat's pre sales support is appalling (compared to HP, IBM, Veritas, Sun etc). Simple questions go unanswered, and when you're busy with a tender document, you can't wait around for a week to find out if X will work with Y.
Last week I requested pricing about the CMS system advertised on your web site (Also as part of a huge tender). The page said I should get into contact with sales through the web site. I requested the info, and I'm still waiting for something as simple as a price!
So my question: Why don't you care about potential customers, or are too arrogant to answer questions, or even help with tenders that want to use your products. Do you plan to change this any time soon?
Btw, this is not a troll, I've been stuck waiting for RH answers many time, and it's frustrating.
And a last comment, your London offices are the worst. Nobody around there with a clue is ever available. They never return calls and emails. And questions like "is it advisable to run SAMBA with LDAP on a clustered setup" gets answered with "there's some HOWTOs on the Internet, go read it". Very unacceptable.
Interesting. Ross Anderson describes in his Security Engineering book how the military these days don't always use "active" radar to track enemy movement. Because if the enemy detects radar, they know that you are somewhere in the area, which you might not want. So they developed passive radar technology that measures the influence of, say enemy airplanes on publicly available signals, like TV or satellite. That way they can track the enemy without the enemy knowing that they're being watched. Wickedly cool technology.
Excellent review. Glad to see an all the pros and cons of the browsers in one place. There's a couple of things that I would like to add. Although I like Safari, some basic stuff sometimes makes me want to toss it completely.
- SSL doesn't work through a proxy that needs authentication. - Sometimes with web sites that require authentication and have lots of graphics, authentication boxes just keeps popping up - over each other. Like it expects you to enter your auth info for each and every graphic file. This is so crazy it makes me want to throw my iBook out the window sometimes. - Integration with keychain is really very lame. I don't know why they have an option to remember authentication info, it just doesn't work.
And lastly if any (ex) Camino developers are listening, it's a great browser, and almost there. If you can just fix the occasional crashes it would be my default browser. Especially with 10 tabs open at a time you really can't afford to have a browser crashing. (btw Safari also has this problem about once a week...).
Someone please explain. People who have spam filters on don't want receive spam, and will most likely just ignore/delete any spam that does get through. Why do the spammers waste so much time trying to get past the filters? Is it to reach the unwashed masses behind ISP filters?
You can hire someone to kill for you for less than $1 US. They can eat for a week on that.
You can live like a King there for $300 US/month.
Sorry, that's just wrong. You'll need about $15 a week at least for food to stay (barely) alive. $300/month ain't that much either. That's a little more than minimum wage. You won't, for example, really be able to afford your own car and house with $300/month.
Unfortunatley, you're wrong. I'm a South African, and the masses over here does not have the level of skills they have in India or China. The education programs are lacking too much. The privileged few, sure, they are well trained at top universities. The rest can hardly afford a computer.
Not to start a flame war, but rather some pragmatic advice from people who've used RH8.0 & MDK9.0 - what do you prefer, and what might work best for me?
I've been using Linux for 6 years and know it very well, so in the end I know I can tweak anything to work the way I want it to. But between RH8 and MDK9, which will make my life easier?
I currently run RH7.3 and KDE. It works very well, but I had to spend way too much time getting OpenOffice to launch when I click a MS Office file, installing Mosfet's liquid, trying to get a decent DVD player that works great (found none, sometimes xine works better, other times mplayer).
In any case, for a desktop system that: 1. Looks good or has decent themes 2. Plays mp3s 3. Plays DivX & DVD movies well 4. Connect to the Internet via modem 5. Can do DHCP & SMB serving
from the article: "Something you will miss when coming from a Linux distribution are tools like apt-get or rpm to easily get and install packages and resolve dependencies. "
well, i most certainly, definitley don't miss rpm, but apt-get for the mac is called fink
Slashdot Mirror
will the coffee be digitally signed?
disfranchise:
To deprive of a privilege, an immunity, or a right of citizenship, especially the right to vote; disenfranchise.
To deprive (a corporation, for example) of a privilege or franchise.
I actually had mod points, were ready to mod you down, but let's do the decent thing.
You are being unfair. Sure, there are tons of incomplete OSS projects out there, but Linux (kernel), KDE, Gnome, Xine... Everything you need for this project is stable and very mature.
If HP chose Linux for their 4-way workstations, which will be used in poor, rural areas, why not this?
Btw all of the projects mentioned above "actually work in some fashion".
Your only valid point was that MS may be footing part of the R&D bill, which they should be applauded for.
JuK is painfully slow with 600+ albums...
Well, just my 2c. I've been a RH user since 1997. For a long time they made the best, most well supported (by 3rd parties, their own support is crap, even when you've paid for it) distro around. About a week ago I decided to give Suse 9.1 a try, and I'm pleasantly impressed. For the first time everything seems well integrated and without the couple of dozens of quirks I'm used to tweaking myself in RH. What's more, I only used the command line for sys admin type tasks. I didn't mind at all, but mostly with RH you didn't really have a choice. Their GUI tools were just that bad and inflexible. However, now with Suse I find that Yast is so good I use it all the time, it is however a bit too slow.
> The United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world, the country the rest of the world looks to for morality.
I don't think anyone outside the US looks to the US for morality. Maybe the US media "protects" you from the real view the world has of you. That doesn't make it right.
"Most people realize that fundamentally there's nothing going on inside the silicon except the cold calculation of ones and zeros"
Guess he's not running AMD then?
>which I feel is much more valuable than 5+ yrs coding in x-language which might dissapear in 5 years
like c#?
Yes, you're right. Credibility is a huge concern for the online gaming industry, especially sine many sites were (are?) fly-by-nights, associated with porn and so on. However, there are a huge number of credible sites run by companies that want to build a long term business, not make a quick buck. These sites are audited by the big 5 auditors, and there's also industry associations springing up that dictates a code of conduct to it members and so on. In turn they will be able to show a "seal" or something on their web site say that they are [member org] accredited. I think the perception issue will become less and less for credible sites in future.
I'm writing this from a Mac myself, but the information you posted is wrong. If you look at the Google reports for Feb 2004, the Mac users are 4%. Now look at report for June 2001. The amount reported for Mac users....... 4%
'power users', 'Windows'... in the same sentance.. what are you smoking? :P
Actually... When I started my career about 7 years ago, I had a clear choice before me: Become a guru at either Windows NT or UNIX. At that time, the hype was so great that everyone thought NT would totally take over. HP announced its migration path away from HP-UX, SGI had a terrible time to stay afloat with IRIX, and Linux has just entered the radar, but was generally dismissed as a toy. To their credit, Sun said no thanks to have NT ported to the SPARC, and kept their weight behind UNIX. In any case, back to my choice. I was young and full of energy (still am, actually), and I wanted to be one of the best at something, not a jack-of-all trades. I read the most technical material I could find about both Windows and UNIX, to try and understand the guts of both systems. In the end I came to the conclusion that it would be much simpler to become a UNIX guru, since the concepts and philosophy is so much cleaner and simpler to understand (everything is a file! and then you take it from there). With NT 4 I had a much harder time getting my head around everything. Some things you do in files, others in registry and some only has a GUI that does god-knows-what. But more confusing even were the communication/resource sharing models: OLE, COM, DCOM, RPC, dlls etc. I just came to the conclusion that it would be much, much harder to become a true NT guru, and keep up with all the latest and greatest from MS.
For what it's worth, I learned a great deal about both systems, and I think I wrote the first (or at least one of the first), NT security scanners (as part of a university project). But in the end, I'm glad I went the UNIX route. It gave me opportunities in big data centers that didn't have any NT machines at the time, and that's where I built up most of my experience. Plus I've grown to love UNIX, in way that wouldn't have been possible with NT (pipe this-and-that, fork this, mount that - it make you feel like a king!). But that said, big hats off to the true NT gurus - you've got balls of steal!
No mod points, so a reply is in order.
You're 100% correct. Binary compatibility in Linux is a major PITA. In an ideal world all software would be OSS, and you could compile it for your platform and it would work. However, on real projects some proprietry software may be needed, and there's nothing much you can do about it. Just this week I tried to install eDirectory 8.7.1 on RHAS3, and it core'd the whole time. Would it have been so difficult to keep binary compatibility between RHAS2.1 and RHAS3?
Mr Szulik,
I work for a consulting firm that, amongst others, provide services based on OSS products. Some of them are quite big projects, running at $3 million+. However, I found that Red Hat's pre sales support is appalling (compared to HP, IBM, Veritas, Sun etc). Simple questions go unanswered, and when you're busy with a tender document, you can't wait around for a week to find out if X will work with Y.
Last week I requested pricing about the CMS system advertised on your web site (Also as part of a huge tender). The page said I should get into contact with sales through the web site. I requested the info, and I'm still waiting for something as simple as a price!
So my question: Why don't you care about potential customers, or are too arrogant to answer questions, or even help with tenders that want to use your products. Do you plan to change this any time soon?
Btw, this is not a troll, I've been stuck waiting for RH answers many time, and it's frustrating.
And a last comment, your London offices are the worst. Nobody around there with a clue is ever available. They never return calls and emails. And questions like "is it advisable to run SAMBA with LDAP on a clustered setup" gets answered with "there's some HOWTOs on the Internet, go read it". Very unacceptable.
Interesting. Ross Anderson describes in his Security Engineering book how the military these days don't always use "active" radar to track enemy movement. Because if the enemy detects radar, they know that you are somewhere in the area, which you might not want. So they developed passive radar technology that measures the influence of, say enemy airplanes on publicly available signals, like TV or satellite. That way they can track the enemy without the enemy knowing that they're being watched. Wickedly cool technology.
Thank you Mr AC for that highly insightful reply. I'll take your advice to heart. Maybe someday I can be an expert surfer like you too!
Excellent review. Glad to see an all the pros and cons of the browsers in one place. There's a couple of things that I would like to add. Although I like Safari, some basic stuff sometimes makes me want to toss it completely.
- SSL doesn't work through a proxy that needs authentication.
- Sometimes with web sites that require authentication and have lots of graphics, authentication boxes just keeps popping up - over each other. Like it expects you to enter your auth info for each and every graphic file. This is so crazy it makes me want to throw my iBook out the window sometimes.
- Integration with keychain is really very lame. I don't know why they have an option to remember authentication info, it just doesn't work.
And lastly if any (ex) Camino developers are listening, it's a great browser, and almost there. If you can just fix the occasional crashes it would be my default browser. Especially with 10 tabs open at a time you really can't afford to have a browser crashing. (btw Safari also has this problem about once a week...).
Someone please explain. People who have spam filters on don't want receive spam, and will most likely just ignore/delete any spam that does get through. Why do the spammers waste so much time trying to get past the filters? Is it to reach the unwashed masses behind ISP filters?
Check this:
$ nslookup
Default Server: ns
Address: 10.3.0.1
> set type=mx
> microsoft.co.za
Server: ns
Address: 10.3.0.1
Non-authoritative answer:
microsoft.co.za preference = 0, mail exchanger = smtp02.iafrica.com
> exit
$ telnet smtp02.iafrica.com 25
Trying 196.7.0.140...
Connected to mailspool.ops.uunet.co.za.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mailspool.ops.uunet.co.za ESMTP Exim 3.36 #1 Tue, 03 Jun 2003 10:36:18 +0200
ok sure, it is hosted by some ISP, but still interesting.
To decode/encode ROT13 save the text in a file called foo. Open your Mac OS X terminal an type:
tr A-Ma-mN-Zn-z N-Zn-zA-Ma-m < foo
No need to mess with Google and other fancy things.
You can do other fun things with tr, like if you want to be the 1337357 dude on the block, type your text and save it in a file called foo, then run:
tr aeios 43105 < foo
Have fun!
You can hire someone to kill for you for less than $1 US. They can eat for a week on that.
You can live like a King there for $300 US/month.
Sorry, that's just wrong. You'll need about $15 a week at least for food to stay (barely) alive. $300/month ain't that much either. That's a little more than minimum wage. You won't, for example, really be able to afford your own car and house with $300/month.
Fungai
Unfortunatley, you're wrong. I'm a South African, and the masses over here does not have the level of skills they have in India or China. The education programs are lacking too much. The privileged few, sure, they are well trained at top universities. The rest can hardly afford a computer.
Fungai
delaying for a week to get IS to approve and install some kind of utility or program you need is rediculous
Yeah, like a spell checker.
hey man, this made my day. haven't seen something this funny in a loonnnggg time. thanks!
Not to start a flame war, but rather some pragmatic advice from people who've used RH8.0 & MDK9.0 - what do you prefer, and what might work best for me?
I've been using Linux for 6 years and know it very well, so in the end I know I can tweak anything to work the way I want it to. But between RH8 and MDK9, which will make my life easier?
I currently run RH7.3 and KDE. It works very well, but I had to spend way too much time getting OpenOffice to launch when I click a MS Office file, installing Mosfet's liquid, trying to get a decent DVD player that works great (found none, sometimes xine works better, other times mplayer).
In any case, for a desktop system that:
1. Looks good or has decent themes
2. Plays mp3s
3. Plays DivX & DVD movies well
4. Connect to the Internet via modem
5. Can do DHCP & SMB serving
Which way to go?
from the article: "Something you will miss when coming from a Linux distribution are tools like apt-get or rpm to easily get and install packages and resolve dependencies. "
well, i most certainly, definitley don't miss rpm, but apt-get for the mac is called fink