The whole point of giving vendors some time is to remain a credible partner of the vendor. CERT for the longest time went way overboard with this, but cutting the vendor some slack hopefully keeps the communications channels open.
Now that CERT is saying to the vendors, "look, 45 days is enough to do something, just feeping do it", I hope that corporate buyers will start demanding real action on structural issues. Take the LoveLetter "virus": if a significant number of buyers would tell Microsoft that they should address the issue of hiding important information from the users so that they could make an informed decision on whether or not to open a certain e-mail message, Microsoft might address the underlying issue and fix it once and for all: not just the e-mail case, but also shared file stores and web sites.
Sigh. It has surprised me from the outset that there hasn't been a buyers uprising. People overestimate Microsoft's Evil Empire nature and underestimate the delinquence on the part of users to make their concerns known.
this is the kind of thing you must expect from a typical slashdoter (doesn't
matter how ridiculous the story, as long as it's anti-m$)
Sigh... If it make you feel any better, I have three Microsoft Certified Professional certificates, and I still don't like IIS much.
I'm an acknowledged elitist. If you have no clue about using gdb, or if you cannot find a web designer that is fluent in HTML rather than FrontPage, then by all means use IIS.
Performance is a very relative commodity. "You go to pieces so fast, people get hit by the shrapnel", as Zaphod Beeblebrox put it so eloquently. All IIS servers that I know that are reliable from the users perspective that I am aware of, either have a highly trained staff of NT gurus on hand, have 24x7 operators to hit the reset button when a blue screen occurs, or reboot the server nightly. All in all, a rare sight.
This is not my idea of reliability, but it is good enough for the vast majority of web sites.
Really, people who are not prepared to deal with the hardships of UNIX should probably run NT. I hate the would-be UNIX experts that drive down the UNIX mailing lists with questions that are answered in the README.
Now, that said, considering the level of expertise it takes to keep IIS up reliably, the whole easiness argument falls flat on its face. IIS is no easier to keep up than Apache. And Apache in its default configuration may have been overtaken by IIS in speed, it will survive if a stoopid programmer goofs up some CGI script. IIS (especially when used according to MS recommendations) will just give a 403 Server Too Busy, or worse.
Errr, just for the record: an AC post starts out as zero, probably on the assumption that an AC better had something to say before relinquishing the minimal ID that slashdot users provide.
And as if that ain't scary enough, I still remember a few Z80 opcodes..
Which reminds me of a pop quiz I've wanted to take out for years... Who are the knights that say Nu, which processor did they use, and why is it a good thing that some opcodes have a printable ASCII representation?
I still am the proud owner of a PET 2001. Say what you will, the thing is built like a tank (well, a tank with a real cheap cassette player, but you get the idea). A real sharp display, the kind that to this date inspires movie directors, a well layed out motherboard, and the most yucky keyboard I've seen in my life. And, it had the GP-IP bus.
The thing worked, and the 6502 still is the hallmark of 8bit CPU design to me. Z80 is sort of... ugly. Sort of like Pentium, only slower.
Of course, the VIC was a real stupid thing to do marketing wise: it looked like a toy, but had more features than their business machine.
My next computer was an Atari ST, 'cause I couldn't afford a Mac.
And neither should anyone, if it's fixed. As you so rightly guessed, I don't have a Win2k server handy to verify. It's easy enough to check: just telnet to the w2k box, and run the dos EDIT command. If it no longer locks up (just telling the user "don't use this command, it is incompatible with NT I/O" would do), than I'll happily add this one to the list of things MS fixed as a result of listening to the customers.
The split had nothing to do with the quality of his coding work, and everything to do with his nasty attitude towards people...
Well, the good news is, BSD is not dying. Whether that's due to it's cockroach nature or something else I'll leave for a seperate discussion.
What strikes me is that the entire discussion about Theo is done by anonymous cowards. Why is it that people do this? As the original AC stated so eloquently, Theo is a rather nasty character with excellent coding skills, the kind of guy I would hire on the spot and isolate as far as possible from any actual customers (or colleague coders for that matter). But I'd still hire him.
Then, why this fear of putting one's name on a posting? Theo has insulted me, but never tried done me any bodily harm (and on technical issues was right most of the time and taught me a lot).
[ I sometimes wish Slashdot had a setting to browse without the AC's, but of course that means that an extra moderated user category of whistleblower would be needed, and no, I wouldn't know how to get that to work... So much to do, so little time... Sorry, CmdrTaco:-) ]
They could not possibly hope to hide from the folks that look at the important details -- like guys running nmap on the thing. If you know nmap, it's easy to fake (I undid some hacking on my BSD/OS box because nmap would start reporting the thing as unknown -- with a bit of hacking, I could probably have scored a Windows reading).
Maybe I'm overestimating the good folks in Redmond, but I sure as hell would hope they learned from some bad press they've gotten recently not to pull a stunt like that. As someone else pointed out, no one knows if they threw extra hardware at it (even though I can guess), and the biggest unknown factors are the staffing level, ease of staff acquisition, and the staff retention. Very hard to measure, very important for real life benchmarks.
Isn't a built-in telnet daemon [snip] good enough for advancement?
No. Not unless they fix their dain bramage of treating stdio differently between DOS and Windows apps (what is a command line windows app anyway?). It is next to impossible to tell a DOS command from an NT command remotely.
A very enthusiastic NT admin once demonstrated the telnet daemon he got from MS. I said, "hmmm, last time I checked I had to reboot the workstation I tried it on". Well, no problem, the admin even insisted on demoing the telnetd on a remote site. I asked him to edit a file with EDIT, warning him that my station was in need of a reboot after that, to get rid of the dangling telnet session.
Fortunately, neither digging in with regedit nor reinstalling was necessary, a simple reboot fixed it (but it involved calling the admin in the other end of the globe to do the reboot).
Listen carefully when you talk to NT experts. When you ask them how they deal with certain problems, they will usually sneak a re-install between "Easy" and "and that's all there is to it". Nothing inherently wrong with that by the way, "us" UNIX nerds do have a tendency to go too far wanting to find the root cause of a problem where a simple re-install would've resulted in less downtime.
Sigh. Off topic: I'm typing this from a Windows box, just to see what it's like. Or actually, I'm retyping it. I'm retyping it again. IE discarded my first two versions of this text. Technically, I asked for it, by hitting the ALT key accidentally and continuing typing, but does anyone know how I can turn the misfeature off that causes a lone ALT keypress to "stick" and cause the next character to be interpreted as a command (in this case "Close")? That's probably what I hate most about Windows: it looks so userfriendly on the surface, but the user interface is such a huge gun waiting for the hair trigger to go off, and no end user (well, not the 99% majority) even knows of the weird UI features like the sticky ALT.
I really recommend reading the CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter! If there is one person on the surface of this planet who knows what he's talking about, and especially what is unreasonable to expect of users and programmers, it's gotta be Bruce Schneier.
In you followup post, you seem to infer that the code you write is exempt from the emperical rule that every thousand lines of quality code will have three bugs on average. Of course, I've not read any of your code, but if you write error free code I've got a job for you. I think I'm a pretty good coder, but I come across the "how did I ever overlook *this*" kind of bug more often than I care for.
The article obviously was not written with coders as the primary audience, so you'll have to read through some of the parabole that's just to get peoples attention. As Bruce explains in his latest CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter, his biggest eye opener was that attaining perfect security (even if the code itself is perfect, which it is rarely if ever) is impossible, and therefore we (as coders and sysadmins alike) should focus more on detection and damage control, and less on perfection. I cannot fault any of his reasoning.
Anyway, when judging his work, I'd suggest to look more at his freely available writings and less on the secondhand hype like on Salon. Counterpane has a pretty complete history of his musings. They're free, and very entertaining to read (my favorite is his "doghouse" column), and it paints a much better picture of what to expect from the book.
So no one can EVER write a new FTP server because it emulates a current version?
Except, of course, that the FTP spec is publicly available, and has no end user license attached to it. Microsoft tried to pull this one with the Kerberos in W2K (well, one step further: they published it, but snuck wording into the EULA that takes rights away you wouldn't lose if you didn't read the spec but just reverse engineered it).
I'd steer clear from the lawyers, until the radical departure from the constitution embodied in UCITA and DMCA gets tested in court (whatever happened to furthering society and protecting the little guy?) I would just as soon spend my money on funnier things than court cases.
When I read the announcement of the book in the CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter (we all read it do we? www.counterpane.com), the thing that struck me was the use of the modern day buzzword Intrusion Detection. IDS certainly seems to become this years snake oil.
What is being sold today under the Intrusion Detection System label usually is a cobbled together set of attack signatures that spuriously trigger thousands of times per day. The ones I've seen do not have the flexibility to do things like suppress the check for ".asp." if a word consituent character follows it. And needless to say, the way they work, chances are that successful attempts to break in are overlooked.
This of course if yet another instance of false security. A lot of work has to be done still to make IDS systems work reasonably out of the box, and that is not even taking issues like training into account.
Mind you, people who actually read the book will know better, but I've lived in corporate hell for much too long to know just where this IDS thing will end. "Do we have a firewall? Check. Do we have an IDS? Check. Hey, what's this guy doing on our systems? Call legal and sue the IDS vendor."
That's probable not so much the IP overhead, but rather HTTP protocol overhead. Fortunately, I don't have to do chargeback, but for bandwidth planning purpuses I just add 1K to each hit.
And seeing that it's pretty hard to explain to customers what the difference is anyway between bandwidth and bytes of content, I don't care much...
So... how does one do useful things like this script under Windoze?
Don't go there. These things are trivial to do under Windows. You can do it with Visible Basic, you could install Cygwin or Perl, and with a little bit of effort, you can do it in a CMD file (no, really, I've done real useful stuff in CMD files).
Now, why anyone would want to turn Windows into a useful environment is beyond me. Speed, reliability, ease of backup/restore, sucky GUI bits etcetera are peanuts compared to the *clunky* feeling of the command line utils needed for scripting -- it's the feeling more than anything that turns me off.
Oh, that and a thin layer of coolness. I can't believe they put the kewl fading effect in the window title bars without an obvious way to turn it off.
If it's just one run of CPUs then why are all our replacement CPUs failing at the same rate, Einstein?
Vell...
I had this issue way, way back when with a Digital Equipment board. Its CPU would reboot after a certain uptime. The thing had been replaced, and that was the end of the story. Until another machine developed the symptom after servicing. Guess what? Its motherboard had been replaced by the broken one from the first machine (after applying the ECO's to bring it up to level for the amount of memory we put in it). Thank goodness for recording serial numbers.
I've had lengthy discussions with a third party service company about this policy, and the only answer I got was "well, the replacement parts are under warranty as well".
Why go through the pain of switching compilers when GCC/EGCS already does an excellent job? Remember that unlike linked-in code bits, which cannot legally be incorporated across licenses, there is nothing against lumping BSD style and GNU style licensed tools into one distribution.
GCC is not itself infectuous, unlike e.g. Bison.
Sigh... So much good work gets duplicated just because of those silly licenses, I often long for the good ol' days where everyone just slapped a one-liner "this is public domain code" on their code and was done.
The interface is definetly nicer then the one from netscape 6.0
I've got one big request for K-Meleon: get rid of the mouse-over behavior of the button bar. It may look cool to have the Stop button greyed out until you mouse over it, but it is plain wrong from a UI standpoint. A greyed out item in a user interface is supposed to indicate I shouldn't waste my time pressing it, it is supposed to be dead. At least in Netscrape, one can see whether or not something cancelable is going on by looking at the stop button. If it's grey, there's nothing to stop. I hate user interface designers who value looks over usefulness.
That said, I'm wondering how much bloat will be bolted on top of K-Meleon before it is functional enough to use as a browser. It is 4MB on-disk on my crash&burn NT workstation now. SSL support will likely weigh in at another 2MB, which for a total of 6MB ain't bad, but by the time more or less essential usability features are put into the UI I think the bloat will be significant. Things I can think of off the cuff are preferences for disregarding document font and color settings, cookie dialogs (I really like the "Remember my choice to never accept a cookie from doubleclick" feature), etcetera.
Oh well -- Galeon and K-Meleon do seem to fill an important niche!
It's technically trivial to port an HP-UX application to
Linux. I know, because I have.
So have I. What I haven't done is support it. If I put my devil's advocate hat on, I see a lot of distributions of Linux, each with subtly incompatible sets of libraries (has libc5 died by now?)
I can see anyones reluctance to support Linux (as opposed to making a port available without support).
Then again, if there's one company around that should have gotten used to supporting conflicting libraries it's Microsoft. It still baffles the mind that they let the CTL3D.DLL get out of whack so badly for so many releases, not to mention MFC42.DLL or MSVC40.DLL. One would expect that they'd at least make the latest and greatest version available for easy download and make sure they'd all be downward compatible, but no: they trust on their software developing customers to do the right thing here. Ordinal 6421 not found in MFC42.DLL.
Some time ago (one year? two?), MS announced IE for UNIX (for suitable values of UNIX, of course, I think they had it for one release of HP-UX and two releases of Solaris, all outdated at the time of the release).
They may have pulled it by now (all I could find at http://download.microsoft.com were updates), but obviously someone had ported the stuff before (probably MainSoft).
DES? Oh wow -- there *must* be truth to the rumor that the original DES implementation by IBM still has comments from the NSA explaining the weakening of it then:-)
May be the best they can do, and they do a lot...
on
IBM Open Sourcing AFS
·
· Score: 2
I just wonder, why would anybody want to partially open-source a product?
The wonderful ferroconcrete world we live in has more lawyers than rats. There are patents underlying the most obvious software designs (yes, a simple lawsuit showing prior art will defeat three quarters of them, but I for one won't spend my life savings on them, and companies with pockets that are deep enough prefer not to invalidate competitors patents for fear of getting blasted themselves).
Patent issues aside, there's the legal debate about licenses. If we (the Open Source developers) cannot put our legal squabbles aside (my license is more free than yours -- no, mine is), how would anyone expect to put big business to put theirs aside? Beside ego, they've got shareholders to take into account.
I've been mighty impressed with IBM's venture into the Open Source arena. I think they've taken the boldest steps of all. It's not just half-baked Java stuff (with tremendous investments behind them) or stuff without direct revenue potential (like jfs, which they couldn't sell as long as competitors think their mouse trap is better). If you search for "IBM Visual Data Explorer" on www.ibm.com, you'll get a price list with a rather hefty price tag (and if you dig deeper, you'll find an impressive array of Fortune 500 companies and research institutes that paid those prices and got their moneys worth). If you look at opendx.org, you'll see the same software, free. The stuff is awesome!
Whatever their motivation, I rate IBM highly for its commitment to Open Source. It's a rather stunning move, given their revenue streams and the fact that they spearheaded the move from free to paid-for software eons ago.
Won't running the install scripts built
for Linux (essentially) put the files in the right place?
Unfortunately, life is not easy when it comes to install scripts. 99% of it is due to extremely small stoopid things, that are easy to fix if the Linux developer has a FreeBSD or BSD/OS box available to just test and fix it. To fix it as an end user, the bar is raised much higher.
Two infamous examples that everyone seems to run into:
Linux uname is subtly different from BSD uname. For example, a lot of Linux install scripts install an optimized version if uname indicates you have a PentimumII, and refuse an install if you have a lowly 386. Unfortunately, neither BSD/OS nor FreeBSD care about the processor and report i386.
Lots of Linux scripts assume/bin/sh is implemented as Bash.
Harder stuff to port is code that uses threads or advanced system stuff, but games tend not to use those. The fact that Xfree86 drivers are binary compatible between Linux and FreeBSD these days will surely ease portability!
Where do you think Postgres CURRENTLY lacks in the "operational arena"? Given the timeframe you used Postgres
in, any comparison is akin to benchmarking the 1.0 or 1.2 Linux kernel against modern operating systems.
That is very true (but I picked BSDi 0.3.3 beta over Linux 0.9 around the same time and stuck to it, so at least there's consistency in my position:-)
I'm sorry if you got the impression I though PostgreSql still sucked as badly as when I stopped looking at it. I know a few folks that run PostgreSql and are very satisfied with it.
To answer the question, what keeps me from looking at PostgreSql are two things:
I do not need anything it offers over MySQL
From people that use it, I hear stories of index corruption, and I hear ooohs and aaahs when I show them how quickly I can rebuild a database with just a dump and a log file.
I fully realize that every persons situation is different (yes, I still use Berkeley db 1.86 if I feel it's the right screwdriver to hammer a particular nail).
I'm curious to hear if PostgreSql has the ease of rebuild these days that I so admire in MySQL. Frankly, the speed advantage MySQL used to have never was critical in my apps (at least not unless compared with Oracle).
My only question is: where did you learn reading comprehension?
Well, English is not my native language, especially not Southern American English, so if I misread anything in the message I replied to, please enlighten me. There was some language in that message that was, errr, hard to parse, so I cannot exclude the possibility of a hint of misunderstanding a priori.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that CERT is saying to the vendors, "look, 45 days is enough to do something, just feeping do it", I hope that corporate buyers will start demanding real action on structural issues. Take the LoveLetter "virus": if a significant number of buyers would tell Microsoft that they should address the issue of hiding important information from the users so that they could make an informed decision on whether or not to open a certain e-mail message, Microsoft might address the underlying issue and fix it once and for all: not just the e-mail case, but also shared file stores and web sites.
Sigh. It has surprised me from the outset that there hasn't been a buyers uprising. People overestimate Microsoft's Evil Empire nature and underestimate the delinquence on the part of users to make their concerns known.
Sigh... If it make you feel any better, I have three Microsoft Certified Professional certificates, and I still don't like IIS much.
I'm an acknowledged elitist. If you have no clue about using gdb, or if you cannot find a web designer that is fluent in HTML rather than FrontPage, then by all means use IIS.
Performance is a very relative commodity. "You go to pieces so fast, people get hit by the shrapnel", as Zaphod Beeblebrox put it so eloquently. All IIS servers that I know that are reliable from the users perspective that I am aware of, either have a highly trained staff of NT gurus on hand, have 24x7 operators to hit the reset button when a blue screen occurs, or reboot the server nightly. All in all, a rare sight.
This is not my idea of reliability, but it is good enough for the vast majority of web sites.
Really, people who are not prepared to deal with the hardships of UNIX should probably run NT. I hate the would-be UNIX experts that drive down the UNIX mailing lists with questions that are answered in the README.
Now, that said, considering the level of expertise it takes to keep IIS up reliably, the whole easiness argument falls flat on its face. IIS is no easier to keep up than Apache. And Apache in its default configuration may have been overtaken by IIS in speed, it will survive if a stoopid programmer goofs up some CGI script. IIS (especially when used according to MS recommendations) will just give a 403 Server Too Busy, or worse.
Life ain't easy and there's no magic bullit.
Errr, just for the record: an AC post starts out as zero, probably on the assumption that an AC better had something to say before relinquishing the minimal ID that slashdot users provide.
I wasn't aware they had obviated Congress and the Senate already. Silly me, I didn't notice they had already taken over government...
Sigh. Only half tongue in cheek.
Which reminds me of a pop quiz I've wanted to take out for years... Who are the knights that say Nu, which processor did they use, and why is it a good thing that some opcodes have a printable ASCII representation?
The thing worked, and the 6502 still is the hallmark of 8bit CPU design to me. Z80 is sort of ... ugly. Sort of like Pentium, only slower.
Of course, the VIC was a real stupid thing to do marketing wise: it looked like a toy, but had more features than their business machine.
My next computer was an Atari ST, 'cause I couldn't afford a Mac.
To this date it is beyond me why 808x won out.
And neither should anyone, if it's fixed. As you so rightly guessed, I don't have a Win2k server handy to verify. It's easy enough to check: just telnet to the w2k box, and run the dos EDIT command. If it no longer locks up (just telling the user "don't use this command, it is incompatible with NT I/O" would do), than I'll happily add this one to the list of things MS fixed as a result of listening to the customers.
Well, the good news is, BSD is not dying. Whether that's due to it's cockroach nature or something else I'll leave for a seperate discussion.
What strikes me is that the entire discussion about Theo is done by anonymous cowards. Why is it that people do this? As the original AC stated so eloquently, Theo is a rather nasty character with excellent coding skills, the kind of guy I would hire on the spot and isolate as far as possible from any actual customers (or colleague coders for that matter). But I'd still hire him.
Then, why this fear of putting one's name on a posting? Theo has insulted me, but never tried done me any bodily harm (and on technical issues was right most of the time and taught me a lot).
[ I sometimes wish Slashdot had a setting to browse without the AC's, but of course that means that an extra moderated user category of whistleblower would be needed, and no, I wouldn't know how to get that to work... So much to do, so little time... Sorry, CmdrTaco :-) ]
Maybe I'm overestimating the good folks in Redmond, but I sure as hell would hope they learned from some bad press they've gotten recently not to pull a stunt like that. As someone else pointed out, no one knows if they threw extra hardware at it (even though I can guess), and the biggest unknown factors are the staffing level, ease of staff acquisition, and the staff retention. Very hard to measure, very important for real life benchmarks.
No. Not unless they fix their dain bramage of treating stdio differently between DOS and Windows apps (what is a command line windows app anyway?). It is next to impossible to tell a DOS command from an NT command remotely.
A very enthusiastic NT admin once demonstrated the telnet daemon he got from MS. I said, "hmmm, last time I checked I had to reboot the workstation I tried it on". Well, no problem, the admin even insisted on demoing the telnetd on a remote site. I asked him to edit a file with EDIT, warning him that my station was in need of a reboot after that, to get rid of the dangling telnet session.
Fortunately, neither digging in with regedit nor reinstalling was necessary, a simple reboot fixed it (but it involved calling the admin in the other end of the globe to do the reboot).
Listen carefully when you talk to NT experts. When you ask them how they deal with certain problems, they will usually sneak a re-install between "Easy" and "and that's all there is to it". Nothing inherently wrong with that by the way, "us" UNIX nerds do have a tendency to go too far wanting to find the root cause of a problem where a simple re-install would've resulted in less downtime.
Sigh. Off topic: I'm typing this from a Windows box, just to see what it's like. Or actually, I'm retyping it. I'm retyping it again. IE discarded my first two versions of this text. Technically, I asked for it, by hitting the ALT key accidentally and continuing typing, but does anyone know how I can turn the misfeature off that causes a lone ALT keypress to "stick" and cause the next character to be interpreted as a command (in this case "Close")? That's probably what I hate most about Windows: it looks so userfriendly on the surface, but the user interface is such a huge gun waiting for the hair trigger to go off, and no end user (well, not the 99% majority) even knows of the weird UI features like the sticky ALT.
In you followup post, you seem to infer that the code you write is exempt from the emperical rule that every thousand lines of quality code will have three bugs on average. Of course, I've not read any of your code, but if you write error free code I've got a job for you. I think I'm a pretty good coder, but I come across the "how did I ever overlook *this*" kind of bug more often than I care for.
The article obviously was not written with coders as the primary audience, so you'll have to read through some of the parabole that's just to get peoples attention. As Bruce explains in his latest CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter, his biggest eye opener was that attaining perfect security (even if the code itself is perfect, which it is rarely if ever) is impossible, and therefore we (as coders and sysadmins alike) should focus more on detection and damage control, and less on perfection. I cannot fault any of his reasoning.
Anyway, when judging his work, I'd suggest to look more at his freely available writings and less on the secondhand hype like on Salon. Counterpane has a pretty complete history of his musings. They're free, and very entertaining to read (my favorite is his "doghouse" column), and it paints a much better picture of what to expect from the book.
Except, of course, that the FTP spec is publicly available, and has no end user license attached to it. Microsoft tried to pull this one with the Kerberos in W2K (well, one step further: they published it, but snuck wording into the EULA that takes rights away you wouldn't lose if you didn't read the spec but just reverse engineered it).
I'd steer clear from the lawyers, until the radical departure from the constitution embodied in UCITA and DMCA gets tested in court (whatever happened to furthering society and protecting the little guy?) I would just as soon spend my money on funnier things than court cases.
What is being sold today under the Intrusion Detection System label usually is a cobbled together set of attack signatures that spuriously trigger thousands of times per day. The ones I've seen do not have the flexibility to do things like suppress the check for ".asp." if a word consituent character follows it. And needless to say, the way they work, chances are that successful attempts to break in are overlooked.
This of course if yet another instance of false security. A lot of work has to be done still to make IDS systems work reasonably out of the box, and that is not even taking issues like training into account.
Mind you, people who actually read the book will know better, but I've lived in corporate hell for much too long to know just where this IDS thing will end. "Do we have a firewall? Check. Do we have an IDS? Check. Hey, what's this guy doing on our systems? Call legal and sue the IDS vendor."
And seeing that it's pretty hard to explain to customers what the difference is anyway between bandwidth and bytes of content, I don't care much...
Don't go there. These things are trivial to do under Windows. You can do it with Visible Basic, you could install Cygwin or Perl, and with a little bit of effort, you can do it in a CMD file (no, really, I've done real useful stuff in CMD files).
Now, why anyone would want to turn Windows into a useful environment is beyond me. Speed, reliability, ease of backup/restore, sucky GUI bits etcetera are peanuts compared to the *clunky* feeling of the command line utils needed for scripting -- it's the feeling more than anything that turns me off.
Oh, that and a thin layer of coolness. I can't believe they put the kewl fading effect in the window title bars without an obvious way to turn it off.
Vell...
I had this issue way, way back when with a Digital Equipment board. Its CPU would reboot after a certain uptime. The thing had been replaced, and that was the end of the story. Until another machine developed the symptom after servicing. Guess what? Its motherboard had been replaced by the broken one from the first machine (after applying the ECO's to bring it up to level for the amount of memory we put in it). Thank goodness for recording serial numbers.
I've had lengthy discussions with a third party service company about this policy, and the only answer I got was "well, the replacement parts are under warranty as well".
GCC is not itself infectuous, unlike e.g. Bison.
Sigh... So much good work gets duplicated just because of those silly licenses, I often long for the good ol' days where everyone just slapped a one-liner "this is public domain code" on their code and was done.
I've got one big request for K-Meleon: get rid of the mouse-over behavior of the button bar. It may look cool to have the Stop button greyed out until you mouse over it, but it is plain wrong from a UI standpoint. A greyed out item in a user interface is supposed to indicate I shouldn't waste my time pressing it, it is supposed to be dead. At least in Netscrape, one can see whether or not something cancelable is going on by looking at the stop button. If it's grey, there's nothing to stop. I hate user interface designers who value looks over usefulness.
That said, I'm wondering how much bloat will be bolted on top of K-Meleon before it is functional enough to use as a browser. It is 4MB on-disk on my crash&burn NT workstation now. SSL support will likely weigh in at another 2MB, which for a total of 6MB ain't bad, but by the time more or less essential usability features are put into the UI I think the bloat will be significant. Things I can think of off the cuff are preferences for disregarding document font and color settings, cookie dialogs (I really like the "Remember my choice to never accept a cookie from doubleclick" feature), etcetera.
Oh well -- Galeon and K-Meleon do seem to fill an important niche!
So have I. What I haven't done is support it. If I put my devil's advocate hat on, I see a lot of distributions of Linux, each with subtly incompatible sets of libraries (has libc5 died by now?)
I can see anyones reluctance to support Linux (as opposed to making a port available without support).
Then again, if there's one company around that should have gotten used to supporting conflicting libraries it's Microsoft. It still baffles the mind that they let the CTL3D.DLL get out of whack so badly for so many releases, not to mention MFC42.DLL or MSVC40.DLL. One would expect that they'd at least make the latest and greatest version available for easy download and make sure they'd all be downward compatible, but no: they trust on their software developing customers to do the right thing here. Ordinal 6421 not found in MFC42.DLL.
They may have pulled it by now (all I could find at http://download.microsoft.com were updates), but obviously someone had ported the stuff before (probably MainSoft).
DES? Oh wow -- there *must* be truth to the rumor that the original DES implementation by IBM still has comments from the NSA explaining the weakening of it then :-)
The wonderful ferroconcrete world we live in has more lawyers than rats. There are patents underlying the most obvious software designs (yes, a simple lawsuit showing prior art will defeat three quarters of them, but I for one won't spend my life savings on them, and companies with pockets that are deep enough prefer not to invalidate competitors patents for fear of getting blasted themselves).
Patent issues aside, there's the legal debate about licenses. If we (the Open Source developers) cannot put our legal squabbles aside (my license is more free than yours -- no, mine is), how would anyone expect to put big business to put theirs aside? Beside ego, they've got shareholders to take into account.
I've been mighty impressed with IBM's venture into the Open Source arena. I think they've taken the boldest steps of all. It's not just half-baked Java stuff (with tremendous investments behind them) or stuff without direct revenue potential (like jfs, which they couldn't sell as long as competitors think their mouse trap is better). If you search for "IBM Visual Data Explorer" on www.ibm.com, you'll get a price list with a rather hefty price tag (and if you dig deeper, you'll find an impressive array of Fortune 500 companies and research institutes that paid those prices and got their moneys worth). If you look at opendx.org, you'll see the same software, free. The stuff is awesome!
Whatever their motivation, I rate IBM highly for its commitment to Open Source. It's a rather stunning move, given their revenue streams and the fact that they spearheaded the move from free to paid-for software eons ago.
Unfortunately, life is not easy when it comes to install scripts. 99% of it is due to extremely small stoopid things, that are easy to fix if the Linux developer has a FreeBSD or BSD/OS box available to just test and fix it. To fix it as an end user, the bar is raised much higher.
Two infamous examples that everyone seems to run into:
Harder stuff to port is code that uses threads or advanced system stuff, but games tend not to use those. The fact that Xfree86 drivers are binary compatible between Linux and FreeBSD these days will surely ease portability!
Is this a great time or what<sm> :-)
That is very true (but I picked BSDi 0.3.3 beta over Linux 0.9 around the same time and stuck to it, so at least there's consistency in my position :-)
I'm sorry if you got the impression I though PostgreSql still sucked as badly as when I stopped looking at it. I know a few folks that run PostgreSql and are very satisfied with it.
To answer the question, what keeps me from looking at PostgreSql are two things:
I fully realize that every persons situation is different (yes, I still use Berkeley db 1.86 if I feel it's the right screwdriver to hammer a particular nail).
I'm curious to hear if PostgreSql has the ease of rebuild these days that I so admire in MySQL. Frankly, the speed advantage MySQL used to have never was critical in my apps (at least not unless compared with Oracle).
Well, English is not my native language, especially not Southern American English, so if I misread anything in the message I replied to, please enlighten me. There was some language in that message that was, errr, hard to parse, so I cannot exclude the possibility of a hint of misunderstanding a priori.