There is in fact quite a bit stopping most people from setting up an OEM of their own. If someone asks me to build them a computer, I would try to convince them to use Linux. But I know I couldn't, without some serious capital, form my own Linux-based OEM.
Michael Dell started his OEM (Dell, maybe you've heard of them) while he was still a student, working out of a garage. Hewlett-Packard and Apple got their start in the same way.
Another example, what do you think the whole Venture Capital industry is for? It's so people with lots of ideas but little money can start their own companies.
Now, maybe when you're successful, you'll regret signing away 51% of your equity to a VC house, but at the time, it was the right thing to do, so you did it. And at the time, signing OEM deals with MS was the right thing for those OEMs to do, and they reaped significant economic benefit from doing so. That's life. You're free not to do business with them, but you aren't free to expect that contracts freely entered into by both parties can so easily be discarded.
What the article fails to address is that fact that OEMs CAN'T bundle Linux with Windows, or else it violates their Agreement with Microsoft.
Nothing's stopping you setting up an OEM business and then not signing an agreement with MS. That's what the free market is all about. If you don't, well, you automatically lose the right to complain about it.
Five hours and 450+ posts later, I finally get to read the article instead of a MySQL error. It's proabbly pointless to post now, but...
Indeed, I think this has more to do with perception of Linux than anything else:
Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in/N5/html/maindb.php on line 44
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in/N5/html/maindb.php on line 44
Unable to select database
Can somebody tell me what these features are, compared to what you'd get with sendmail/qmail / some-random-pop/imap-client ?
Well, for example, if I want to schedule a meeting, I can invite all the people I want via Outlook/Exchange, and it will check their calendars to see if they're free, and if they are, send them a message that when it is opened will automatically fill in their calendars for them, if they say they do want to come. That's just a simple example. The reason all these macro virii can be written at all is that Outlook/Exchange isn't really an email solution per se: it's intended to be a platform for building groupware / workflow / directory applications on, so it's all very scriptable. Shared folders, contacts, task lists and diaries are wonderfully useful in an office where people move around a lot and can be hard to get hold of in person. And all this ties into project management software (MS Project) for really serious tracking.
Email's the easy bit, and you can't compete with sendmail+popper+imapd if that's all you need, because they're free and easy to use. Exchange, like Lotus Notes, is sold on value-add. Just think of Notes as document management with messaging functionality, and Exchange as messaging with document management functionality.
Oh, and if anyone can dig up a link to Red Flag Linux... I definately want a copy
Ironic, isn't it, that Open Source is being used to support the activities of governments that are resolutely anti-freedom. I don't expect we'll ever know if the Chinese government respect the GPL... or if they use Linux to monitor the email of dissidents or hold databases of citizens who stray from Maoist thought.
But hey, to the average Slashbot, torturing political prisoners in concentration camps is preferable to Microsoft, whose only crime is that given the choice, some people like to buy their stuff.
Except, of course, for the permanent existence of a 1 km tall concrete tower occupying 20 sq km of land...
That bit of Australia is kinda flat anyway. I'm sure the top could be used for other stuff, like comms or even stellar observation, which should work really well with little ambient light pollution, and relatively clean air. It would also be a massive tourist attraction, especially if the greenhouses could be cultivated.
Plus, you'd be able to see airliners coming from a long way off. Sadly, you gotta think about that whenever you talk about tall structures these days.
Does anyone else find it odd that all verions of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are supported by Microsoft longer than Win95? They've still got another couple of weeks on 'em for some reason... Nothing major, just seems... odd.
Probably because Win 3.11, aka "Windows for Workgroups" was targeted at corporates rather than consumers. Some companies are notoriously slow at upgrading ("don't fix what ain't broke") and I wouldn't be at all surprised if WfWG was still in use.
Microsoft will expect to lose money on a certain number of sold machines. Any machine morethen that will make profit.
You are assuming that the "losses" Microsoft are making is due to capital investment, and it makes an operating income on each unit. But it is widely believed that each unit actually costs more to manufacture than it is sold for, meaning that every sale will result in a loss, on top of capital investment. Under this model, the cost is recouped from the games. The percentage of the profit made on total games sales that Microsoft receives must cover the loss on the consoles, and the capex plus interest, and anything left on top of that is the only profit MS will see.
So the question is, what is the average number of games/merchandise that must be sold per console in order to make a profit?
Where everyone looking at it is having fits of laughter having a look at the "security" features...
You say that, but let me tell you, I don't think you could take over a Unix host if the SQL*Net port was the only one open to you. And I have never in my years of working with Oracle come across someone with a password on one schema being able to get at any other schemas that they hadn't been granted. Certainly the quality of Oracle's "security" is higher than that in almost every Unix.
If I read this correctly, terrorist cells qualify as "other organizations". I couldn't find any mention of export limitations, civilian key strength limitations, or bans on use by criminal organizations.
This really is no big deal. There a many high-quality hard crypto techniques around. If al-Queda really want strong crypto they can just FTP it from ssh.com like anyone else. Or PGP. Or OpenBSD.
But historically, they have relied on codes (as opposed to cyphers), trusted intermediaries and one time pads.
Here's a free clue for you: terrorists and other criminals, by definition, don't obey laws. So what if there's a "civilian key strength limitation" when you can download the source, change a #define and type make. So what if there's a ban, that's trivial to people who destroy skyscrapers just to make a point. So what if the algorithm is a secret, the US govt. doesn't have a monopoly on talented mathematicians.
This genie is already out of the bottle. Trying to put it back will only help the terrorists by disrupting and harming the commercial interests of the West further.
<rant>
The Feds never really had a chance of keeping crypto out of the hands of anyone, but they were too stupid to realize it, too busy banning metal cutlery in airports and nonsense like that. I am English, have you ever tried to eat a proper English breakfast with plastic cutlery?!
</rant>
That's exactly what capatilism is all about. Cutting corners: how little effort can you put into making the largest profit? How many people can you anally rape in the wages department before no one will work you for? How shitty of an excuse for software can you throw together and still have it look pretty and work for a few hours? Who cares if 36 solder is insufficient to guarantee safety? It works doesn't it? That's where the bottom line is: the almighty buck. Don't kid yourself -- capatilism has always been all about this shit and always will be.
That's why the good people of the Soviet Empire enjoyed high standards of living, reliable high tech products and a great track record of industrial safety then?
Capitalism is about giving the market what it wants - nothing more, and nothing less. If free people, making their own purchasing decisions with their own money want something, the Capitalist system will find a way to sell it to them. If they choose not to buy it, either because it's not a good product, or they don't like the corporation making it, then Capitalism will make sure that this corporation soon ceases to exist.
That's what terrifies Socialists, the concept that the People and not the Party really are in control of the means of production in a Capitalist society.
And if you don't like it, try living in a non-capitalist society for a while... like Afghanistan.
Microsoft just did not borrow "Ideas" from it. They borrowed the actual code. Look at the file c:/winnt/system32/os2/oso001.009, which contains the OS error messages. I mean, they talk about formatting disks and OS/2 boot disks there.
If I remember correctly, NT was originally developed for i960 processors, and only later moved to x86. It also ran on MIPS, PPC and Alpha. There was a SPARC port at one point too, but I don't think it was ever released as a product. The OS/2 bits you are referring to are the OS/2 compatibility subsystem. There is also a POSIX subsystem. (Actually, Win32 itself is a subsystem, running on "real" NT).
So I doubt very much that NT is just a rehashed OS/2, which as far as I know, was only ever an x86 product.
windows series of operating systems are all made with the intent of being backwards compatible and reusing core parts back to early DOS systems. Backwards compatability and code reuse is nice and all, but there is a limit to it and a time to give up.
I don't doubt that MS would have been happy to see the back of DOS even in the days of Win 3.1, but they couldn't, too much DOS software in the world that people rely on. Order inputting, inventory management, point of sales, industrial control, all sorts of unglamorous software that just works, has done so for the last couple of decades, and doesn't change. This sort of stuff is everywhere in factories and depots across the world. For better or worse, DOS compatibility had to be kept in, even now there's still a lot of DOS software around, people are only moving off it slowly still. For similar reasons, IBM keeps developing and supporting their COBOL compilers on mainframes. The web has bred the mentality that you can just throw your tech away and start again whenever you need to, in fact you have to because everything changes so fast. This just isn't realistic when you have software that works in the "real world".
So I happily install XP Professional because it has the ability to use encrypted file stores. This would be just the thing to carry files from one machine to another on a 128Mb Compact flash or so.
You'd be better off with PGP7 and it's PGPdisk utility. I use it all the time to move around an encrypted file system on an Iomega Zip disk. The down size is that you need to have PGP installed on every machine you intend to use, and a way to move your keyring around too.
scp is where it's at. If it doesn't have a 'net connection, it isn't really a computer, and I don't really want to use it anyway.
I've done a lot of work on very serious computers behind very serious firewalls - air gaps in some cases. All networked, sure, but absolutely no chance of getting to anything on the public Internet, let alone installing un-audited software (within the next n weeks, anyway). Removeable media is the only way to move data between installations like that. Write-only, cryptographically signed media at that.
If SecurID can be trusted by places like this, I expect there will be USB solid-state storage devices certified soon. Ultimately, once the technology is trusted, it's about trusting the people carrying it.
The EU is trying very hard to push freer markets (including diminishing the public service's wheight) down national government's throats. National governments and national populations are the real obstacle to massive deregulation (Britain being, unsurprisingly, an exception).
I'll believe that when I see CAP and the Social Chapter abolished.
Simple answer: Because we're an order of magnitude bigger. More population. More beaurocracy
That's simply not true. The US has a smaller population than the EU (285M and 376M) and a proportionally smaller public sector (the EU tax burden is 41.5%, US 29%).
The real root of the matter is that the EU has far too many politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants, too much money, and too little idea or inclination to do anything other than expand their role.
I am currently working on a homeland security project involving military forces.
I'll sleep safer in my bed tonight knowing that Slashbots are looking out for evil terrorists lurking in libraries. Because there are no libraries outside the United States, and no books in private ownership either.
The HIV epidemic in Africa is putting whole territories in danger of having an average age under 20 as often more than 60% of adults are HIV positive. The US and UK based drug companies and governments aren't doing anything about this - they have the drugs to slow the spread of HIV right now - they choose not to use them.
How is this the West's fault - like everything else in the world seems to be? The real problem in Africa isn't anything to do with drugs, it's a lack of both condoms and the inclination to use them. You see, apart from the tiny minority of cases in which a victim receives contaminated blood through transfusion, or is deliberatly and maliciously infected, AIDS is completely avoidable. Just don't have unprotected sex with strangers, and don't share needles if you insist on injecting drugs. Simple, isn't it? Until the Africans learn that, tho', there isn't enough medicine in the universe to make a difference.
A bio-terror attack is something completely different, it is a cold-blooded attack on innocent people. It doesn't even compare at all. And let's not forget, us potential victims of bio attacks are paying for our own defences through our taxes. There's no-one there to help us, so we rely on ourselves. There's a lesson there.
You need SourcePro from Rogue Wave, formerly Threads.h++ etc. It provides a high level, easy to use C++ API for cross platform application development. Even if you're not going cross platform, the Rogue Wave stuff is excellent, provides loads of useful classes for threading, database access, network protocol handling and more.
Having worked for HP, I can only be glad they would scrap it. The application that are still running on this are nightmarish stuff coming from the seventies... So it's all COBOL and EDI. Yuk
In other words, important stuff that makes the world work, and has had millions of man-hours of development work put into it. These aren't your typical brochureware web sites, coded up in a few days where you can re-boot the server if anything goes wrong. Migrating these applications onto a more modern platform, including all the testing that needs to be done, is a distinctly non-trivial undertaking (these aren't like AS/400 where moving OS/400 applications from 48-bit CISC to 64-bit RISC was all taken care of by a virtual machine layer).
Think of all the time lost to update and maintain that crap!
And rewriting those applications... that's probably never going to happen. You think they're hard to maintain, they will be even more difficult to reverse-engineer when the original coders aren't around and the documentation is sketchy at best. There may not even be complete source code for any of these applications any more. C++ isn't an especially easier language to maintain than COBOL anyway.
Any guesses why they're pushing Windows 2000 as a substitute for Linux instead of Windows XP?
Because they're not competing on the desktop, but at the workgroup / data center level. This is clear in the article, why they are inventorying server rooms and competing with Sun, who don't have a much of a workstation presence outside specialist markets (engineering, finance, etc). Windows 2000 is the main server OS produced by Microsoft. I don't even know if there are plans for a server-optimized version of XP, possibly not, since the strategic objective of XP is to get the consumer market onto an NT kernel.
Note the emphasis of the article. Microsoft believe that they are being very successful in migrating people away from Unix. Linux is eating into Sun, HP, IBM et al at the low end. Microsoft don't appear to be worried about people replacing Windows with Linux, they are worried about people *not* replacing Unix with Windows, which isn't quite as triumphalist as the Slashdot story suggests.
And the worry is not to do with TCO and administration and operations, areas in which many people believe Unix has a clear advantage (altho' Windows 2K and XP are catching up fast). It's the porting of existing applications, which is perceived to be easier from Unix to Linux than it is from Unix to Windows. But remember that you can buy tools (MKS Toolkit for example) that make it very easy to do, and that Rogue Wave et al sell APIs that make it easy, and that in a world of Java/EJB, the virtual machines on Windows are very good indeed - often faster than VMs from the same vendors on Sun.
So what I'm saying is, Microsoft are taking Linux seriously, like they take *all* existing and even potential competitors. And, my general feeling from reading sources like/. is that Linux developers like to compete against MS, but haven't givin much thought to cannibalizing the existing Unix user base, and *that* is where this particular battle is being fought,
You are not too old to become a tech person at 33. As a matter of fact, you are more likely to be taken seriously then someone who is 20.
Well, yes and no. The issue is that as you are older, it is more difficult to change industries. Not because older people are slower, more set in their ways or anything, but because you will be starting from scratch with little or no experience. And you will have financial commitments (mortgage, school fees for the kids, whatever) that a fresh graduate won't. Which leaves you with two options, attempt to persuade and employer to pay you enough to cover your commitments, which may be more than a junior sysadmin is worth to the organization, or cut back and reorganize your own lifestyle while you get up to speed.
The best route is not to do this while changing jobs, try to make a lateral move within an organization you have been with for a long time, one where you are a known contributor. Maybe to cover a vacancy, maybe in addition to your other responsibility. Bear in mind that the economic downturn means that there are (or will be) experienced people coming into the job market with lots of skills and experience.
I still think anyone who sets out to become a sysadmin is crazy, it's something that people tend to fall into by accident. Like, do people wake up one morning and say, I want to work in bomb disposal, or bioweapon quarantine control? Crazy!
Slashdot Mirror
There is in fact quite a bit stopping most people from setting up an OEM of their own. If someone asks me to build them a computer, I would try to convince them to use Linux. But I know I couldn't, without some serious capital, form my own Linux-based OEM.
Michael Dell started his OEM (Dell, maybe you've heard of them) while he was still a student, working out of a garage. Hewlett-Packard and Apple got their start in the same way.
Another example, what do you think the whole Venture Capital industry is for? It's so people with lots of ideas but little money can start their own companies.
Now, maybe when you're successful, you'll regret signing away 51% of your equity to a VC house, but at the time, it was the right thing to do, so you did it. And at the time, signing OEM deals with MS was the right thing for those OEMs to do, and they reaped significant economic benefit from doing so. That's life. You're free not to do business with them, but you aren't free to expect that contracts freely entered into by both parties can so easily be discarded.
What the article fails to address is that fact that OEMs CAN'T bundle Linux with Windows, or else it violates their Agreement with Microsoft.
Nothing's stopping you setting up an OEM business and then not signing an agreement with MS. That's what the free market is all about. If you don't, well, you automatically lose the right to complain about it.
Indeed, I think this has more to do with perception of Linux than anything else:
Can somebody tell me what these features are, compared to what you'd get with sendmail/qmail / some-random-pop/imap-client ?
Well, for example, if I want to schedule a meeting, I can invite all the people I want via Outlook/Exchange, and it will check their calendars to see if they're free, and if they are, send them a message that when it is opened will automatically fill in their calendars for them, if they say they do want to come. That's just a simple example. The reason all these macro virii can be written at all is that Outlook/Exchange isn't really an email solution per se: it's intended to be a platform for building groupware / workflow / directory applications on, so it's all very scriptable. Shared folders, contacts, task lists and diaries are wonderfully useful in an office where people move around a lot and can be hard to get hold of in person. And all this ties into project management software (MS Project) for really serious tracking.
Email's the easy bit, and you can't compete with sendmail+popper+imapd if that's all you need, because they're free and easy to use. Exchange, like Lotus Notes, is sold on value-add. Just think of Notes as document management with messaging functionality, and Exchange as messaging with document management functionality.
Oh, and if anyone can dig up a link to Red Flag Linux... I definately want a copy
Ironic, isn't it, that Open Source is being used to support the activities of governments that are resolutely anti-freedom. I don't expect we'll ever know if the Chinese government respect the GPL... or if they use Linux to monitor the email of dissidents or hold databases of citizens who stray from Maoist thought.
But hey, to the average Slashbot, torturing political prisoners in concentration camps is preferable to Microsoft, whose only crime is that given the choice, some people like to buy their stuff.
Except, of course, for the permanent existence of a 1 km tall concrete tower occupying 20 sq km of land...
That bit of Australia is kinda flat anyway. I'm sure the top could be used for other stuff, like comms or even stellar observation, which should work really well with little ambient light pollution, and relatively clean air. It would also be a massive tourist attraction, especially if the greenhouses could be cultivated.
Plus, you'd be able to see airliners coming from a long way off. Sadly, you gotta think about that whenever you talk about tall structures these days.
Does anyone else find it odd that all verions of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are supported by Microsoft longer than Win95? They've still got another couple of weeks on 'em for some reason... Nothing major, just seems... odd.
Probably because Win 3.11, aka "Windows for Workgroups" was targeted at corporates rather than consumers. Some companies are notoriously slow at upgrading ("don't fix what ain't broke") and I wouldn't be at all surprised if WfWG was still in use.
Microsoft will expect to lose money on a certain number of sold machines. Any machine morethen that will make profit.
You are assuming that the "losses" Microsoft are making is due to capital investment, and it makes an operating income on each unit. But it is widely believed that each unit actually costs more to manufacture than it is sold for, meaning that every sale will result in a loss, on top of capital investment. Under this model, the cost is recouped from the games. The percentage of the profit made on total games sales that Microsoft receives must cover the loss on the consoles, and the capex plus interest, and anything left on top of that is the only profit MS will see.
So the question is, what is the average number of games/merchandise that must be sold per console in order to make a profit?
Where everyone looking at it is having fits of laughter having a look at the "security" features...
You say that, but let me tell you, I don't think you could take over a Unix host if the SQL*Net port was the only one open to you. And I have never in my years of working with Oracle come across someone with a password on one schema being able to get at any other schemas that they hadn't been granted. Certainly the quality of Oracle's "security" is higher than that in almost every Unix.
If I read this correctly, terrorist cells qualify as "other organizations". I couldn't find any mention of export limitations, civilian key strength limitations, or bans on use by criminal organizations.
This really is no big deal. There a many high-quality hard crypto techniques around. If al-Queda really want strong crypto they can just FTP it from ssh.com like anyone else. Or PGP. Or OpenBSD.
But historically, they have relied on codes (as opposed to cyphers), trusted intermediaries and one time pads.
Here's a free clue for you: terrorists and other criminals, by definition, don't obey laws. So what if there's a "civilian key strength limitation" when you can download the source, change a #define and type make. So what if there's a ban, that's trivial to people who destroy skyscrapers just to make a point. So what if the algorithm is a secret, the US govt. doesn't have a monopoly on talented mathematicians.
This genie is already out of the bottle. Trying to put it back will only help the terrorists by disrupting and harming the commercial interests of the West further.
<rant>
The Feds never really had a chance of keeping crypto out of the hands of anyone, but they were too stupid to realize it, too busy banning metal cutlery in airports and nonsense like that. I am English, have you ever tried to eat a proper English breakfast with plastic cutlery?!
</rant>
That's exactly what capatilism is all about. Cutting corners: how little effort can you put into making the largest profit? How many people can you anally rape in the wages department before no one will work you for? How shitty of an excuse for software can you throw together and still have it look pretty and work for a few hours? Who cares if 36 solder is insufficient to guarantee safety? It works doesn't it? That's where the bottom line is: the almighty buck. Don't kid yourself -- capatilism has always been all about this shit and always will be.
That's why the good people of the Soviet Empire enjoyed high standards of living, reliable high tech products and a great track record of industrial safety then?
Capitalism is about giving the market what it wants - nothing more, and nothing less. If free people, making their own purchasing decisions with their own money want something, the Capitalist system will find a way to sell it to them. If they choose not to buy it, either because it's not a good product, or they don't like the corporation making it, then Capitalism will make sure that this corporation soon ceases to exist.
That's what terrifies Socialists, the concept that the People and not the Party really are in control of the means of production in a Capitalist society.
And if you don't like it, try living in a non-capitalist society for a while... like Afghanistan.
Microsoft just did not borrow "Ideas" from it. They borrowed the actual code. Look at the file c:/winnt/system32/os2/oso001.009, which contains the OS error messages. I mean, they talk about formatting disks and OS/2 boot disks there.
If I remember correctly, NT was originally developed for i960 processors, and only later moved to x86. It also ran on MIPS, PPC and Alpha. There was a SPARC port at one point too, but I don't think it was ever released as a product. The OS/2 bits you are referring to are the OS/2 compatibility subsystem. There is also a POSIX subsystem. (Actually, Win32 itself is a subsystem, running on "real" NT).
So I doubt very much that NT is just a rehashed OS/2, which as far as I know, was only ever an x86 product.
windows series of operating systems are all made with the intent of being backwards compatible and reusing core parts back to early DOS systems. Backwards compatability and code reuse is nice and all, but there is a limit to it and a time to give up.
I don't doubt that MS would have been happy to see the back of DOS even in the days of Win 3.1, but they couldn't, too much DOS software in the world that people rely on. Order inputting, inventory management, point of sales, industrial control, all sorts of unglamorous software that just works, has done so for the last couple of decades, and doesn't change. This sort of stuff is everywhere in factories and depots across the world. For better or worse, DOS compatibility had to be kept in, even now there's still a lot of DOS software around, people are only moving off it slowly still. For similar reasons, IBM keeps developing and supporting their COBOL compilers on mainframes. The web has bred the mentality that you can just throw your tech away and start again whenever you need to, in fact you have to because everything changes so fast. This just isn't realistic when you have software that works in the "real world".
So I happily install XP Professional because it has the ability to use encrypted file stores. This would be just the thing to carry files from one machine to another on a 128Mb Compact flash or so.
You'd be better off with PGP7 and it's PGPdisk utility. I use it all the time to move around an encrypted file system on an Iomega Zip disk. The down size is that you need to have PGP installed on every machine you intend to use, and a way to move your keyring around too.
scp is where it's at. If it doesn't have a 'net connection, it isn't really a computer, and I don't really want to use it anyway.
I've done a lot of work on very serious computers behind very serious firewalls - air gaps in some cases. All networked, sure, but absolutely no chance of getting to anything on the public Internet, let alone installing un-audited software (within the next n weeks, anyway). Removeable media is the only way to move data between installations like that. Write-only, cryptographically signed media at that.
If SecurID can be trusted by places like this, I expect there will be USB solid-state storage devices certified soon. Ultimately, once the technology is trusted, it's about trusting the people carrying it.
The EU is trying very hard to push freer markets (including diminishing the public service's wheight) down national government's throats. National governments and national populations are the real obstacle to massive deregulation (Britain being, unsurprisingly, an exception).
I'll believe that when I see CAP and the Social Chapter abolished.
Simple answer: Because we're an order of magnitude bigger. More population. More beaurocracy
That's simply not true. The US has a smaller population than the EU (285M and 376M) and a proportionally smaller public sector (the EU tax burden is 41.5%, US 29%).
The real root of the matter is that the EU has far too many politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants, too much money, and too little idea or inclination to do anything other than expand their role.
I am currently working on a homeland security project involving military forces.
I'll sleep safer in my bed tonight knowing that Slashbots are looking out for evil terrorists lurking in libraries. Because there are no libraries outside the United States, and no books in private ownership either.
Just because XML is a hierarchical markup language does not mean that it can only be used for hierarchical things.
Yes, but XML is hugely inefficient for table structures, because of all the redundant metadata.
The HIV epidemic in Africa is putting whole territories in danger of having an average age under 20 as often more than 60% of adults are HIV positive. The US and UK based drug companies and governments aren't doing anything about this - they have the drugs to slow the spread of HIV right now - they choose not to use them.
How is this the West's fault - like everything else in the world seems to be? The real problem in Africa isn't anything to do with drugs, it's a lack of both condoms and the inclination to use them. You see, apart from the tiny minority of cases in which a victim receives contaminated blood through transfusion, or is deliberatly and maliciously infected, AIDS is completely avoidable. Just don't have unprotected sex with strangers, and don't share needles if you insist on injecting drugs. Simple, isn't it? Until the Africans learn that, tho', there isn't enough medicine in the universe to make a difference.
A bio-terror attack is something completely different, it is a cold-blooded attack on innocent people. It doesn't even compare at all. And let's not forget, us potential victims of bio attacks are paying for our own defences through our taxes. There's no-one there to help us, so we rely on ourselves. There's a lesson there.
You need SourcePro from Rogue Wave, formerly Threads.h++ etc. It provides a high level, easy to use C++ API for cross platform application development. Even if you're not going cross platform, the Rogue Wave stuff is excellent, provides loads of useful classes for threading, database access, network protocol handling and more.
Having worked for HP, I can only be glad they would scrap it. The application that are still running on this are nightmarish stuff coming from the seventies... So it's all COBOL and EDI. Yuk
In other words, important stuff that makes the world work, and has had millions of man-hours of development work put into it. These aren't your typical brochureware web sites, coded up in a few days where you can re-boot the server if anything goes wrong. Migrating these applications onto a more modern platform, including all the testing that needs to be done, is a distinctly non-trivial undertaking (these aren't like AS/400 where moving OS/400 applications from 48-bit CISC to 64-bit RISC was all taken care of by a virtual machine layer).
Think of all the time lost to update and maintain that crap!
And rewriting those applications... that's probably never going to happen. You think they're hard to maintain, they will be even more difficult to reverse-engineer when the original coders aren't around and the documentation is sketchy at best. There may not even be complete source code for any of these applications any more. C++ isn't an especially easier language to maintain than COBOL anyway.
Any guesses why they're pushing Windows 2000 as a substitute for Linux instead of Windows XP?
Because they're not competing on the desktop, but at the workgroup / data center level. This is clear in the article, why they are inventorying server rooms and competing with Sun, who don't have a much of a workstation presence outside specialist markets (engineering, finance, etc). Windows 2000 is the main server OS produced by Microsoft. I don't even know if there are plans for a server-optimized version of XP, possibly not, since the strategic objective of XP is to get the consumer market onto an NT kernel.
Note the emphasis of the article. Microsoft believe that they are being very successful in migrating people away from Unix. Linux is eating into Sun, HP, IBM et al at the low end. Microsoft don't appear to be worried about people replacing Windows with Linux, they are worried about people *not* replacing Unix with Windows, which isn't quite as triumphalist as the Slashdot story suggests.
/. is that Linux developers like to compete against MS, but haven't givin much thought to cannibalizing the existing Unix user base, and *that* is where this particular battle is being fought,
And the worry is not to do with TCO and administration and operations, areas in which many people believe Unix has a clear advantage (altho' Windows 2K and XP are catching up fast). It's the porting of existing applications, which is perceived to be easier from Unix to Linux than it is from Unix to Windows. But remember that you can buy tools (MKS Toolkit for example) that make it very easy to do, and that Rogue Wave et al sell APIs that make it easy, and that in a world of Java/EJB, the virtual machines on Windows are very good indeed - often faster than VMs from the same vendors on Sun.
So what I'm saying is, Microsoft are taking Linux seriously, like they take *all* existing and even potential competitors. And, my general feeling from reading sources like
You are not too old to become a tech person at 33. As a matter of fact, you are more likely to be taken seriously then someone who is 20.
Well, yes and no. The issue is that as you are older, it is more difficult to change industries. Not because older people are slower, more set in their ways or anything, but because you will be starting from scratch with little or no experience. And you will have financial commitments (mortgage, school fees for the kids, whatever) that a fresh graduate won't. Which leaves you with two options, attempt to persuade and employer to pay you enough to cover your commitments, which may be more than a junior sysadmin is worth to the organization, or cut back and reorganize your own lifestyle while you get up to speed.
The best route is not to do this while changing jobs, try to make a lateral move within an organization you have been with for a long time, one where you are a known contributor. Maybe to cover a vacancy, maybe in addition to your other responsibility. Bear in mind that the economic downturn means that there are (or will be) experienced people coming into the job market with lots of skills and experience.
I still think anyone who sets out to become a sysadmin is crazy, it's something that people tend to fall into by accident. Like, do people wake up one morning and say, I want to work in bomb disposal, or bioweapon quarantine control? Crazy!