Hmm hen scheme is NOT a language that I'd choose to use if it does not define some type of record or structure, and neither is asm. I knew that they had a 'looping' construct, and had seen it as loop or let loop yes. I had also heard of the do to.
I'm glad you like scheme, and know so much. not having records or something like that to me would make it a more primitive language than C or even pascal. If you read my initial post one of the requirements of my ideal language would include this construct. Since you have pointed out neither asm or scheme include these constructs then these are not going to be languages that I am going to move to.
If I knew more about asemblers and creating new programming languages I'd write my own. I am considering working on the design of one though.
scheme does not call them for/next and while/do, it calls them "loop". The principal of looping in scheme is still present just under another name. Assembly also has loops, I believe they are called jumps. I think any language that did not have some way of looping would be pretty worthless. Any programmer knows that there are often times when data needs to be iterated through.
As far as records / structures. I find that hard to believe that there is no way to declare a record in scheme. Even pascal and basic can do records. A C/C++ structure is very similar to a record. Heck even vax Basic has records.
I don't do to many C macros cause they are joke.
The point I was trying to make is that no one language has encompased the best of all the languages with a easy to use gui as well.
Yes I am primarily talking mainstream languages. Java, C, Perl, php, python, C++, JavaScript, ASP/VB, scheme, and shell programming. Outside of assembly what language does not fit this build?
.. on my web site.. that all languages are essentially the same. Yes there are slight differences, but they all have if, then, else, for / next, while / do, records/structures, and many other features that are similar. Once you have learned one languages you can move to just about any other programming language and then it becomes a matter of what do you like most about language X, Y or Z. Basically it comes down to pick your poison and it has its plusses and minuses. You want feature foo, its in language X, but it also has feature bar which you probably don't want.
IMHO the ideal language would have the following: objects/classes, inheritance, polymorphism, private data, public data, NO MEMORY allocation or automatic like perl/Java and a good clean garbage collector (like perl), i.e this leaves out C/C++ as both require either you write a garbage collector or you do the alloc/free. Compiled to executable code, with a fast easy to use GUI IDE for graphics, cross platform capability with NO "if window do this else if mac do that etc. (Java is not compiled to native exe). Also it needs the standard for/next, switch/case, while/do, etc. Visual basic comes close but it is not cross platform compatible. Lastly it needs to be fast. What language do you know of that fits this? Oh and there is more......
If you have a residential DSL they can cut you off if you are doing web hosting. Many DSL providers specify that they will do this. I think at home did this to its customers as well as some others do this. Make sure yours does not.
You'd be better off if you got a business DSL. That was you can claim it as a business expense or set it up as a none profit on your taxes and take advantage of that aspect. (If you are in the US).
Last time I checked porn filters were worthless. They block stuff that they THINK is porn.
What about if someone wants to do research on abortion, sex education or anything like that? Is it porn because it may mention the word penis or uterus?
What about all the porn on yahoo clubs and msn clubs? Should you block all the clubs or just some of the clubs? How do you determine if the data is porn?
Also what happen when porn gets through and the kids see it? Do you expell the kids cause the filter is broken?
I have no problems with implementing filters, but make sure that they are truely filtering out porn and not just censoring data. Think about it, what is to stop someone from adding in to these filters information on being a gay teen, or puberty information where a kid may feel more comfortable looking up info on the web than talking with his parents or teachers.
I have had friends who got blocked by earthlink because they looked like spam. IN one case someone got a virus on the mail server at work and it tried spaming me at home and they blacklisted all email from that email address. So this could be the case.
Alternately it could be RR just being an a**. They should have a way of undoing the blacklist. I'm not sure how do undo that with earthlink and I need to ask them about it cause this has happened to a few people I know.
This sounds like FUD news.. actually it sounds like something Microsoft would spread. I guess Sun see Linux as competition. The question then becomes which is really more powerful on a cost basis: Linux/MF or Sun/Solaris. Now one would have to look at the actual cost of the MF running Linux and how it performs vs a Sun comparaible hardware running Solaris 8-9 or whatever. Yes Sun does have MF sized servers.
Next thing to do would be to ask someone that recently switched to linux on the mainframe, like ebay... hope one of the links below still works...
http://www.cio.com/archive/010101_et_content.htm l
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/ib ml inux000517.html
I'd agree, you could think of it that way. Excel macros wont run without the vb runtime engine. The real question is, is your spread sheet just a csv in discuise or do you have macros that you customized to your spread sheets.
I wonder if this means I can sell spreadsheets that do the 1040 tax form calculations.... Schedules A, B & D, and CA state... hmmm
.. need I say more.. read the book.. it is very before its time.. it deals with this very thing.
I heard that somewhere in Europe they were putting in cameras all over the place. I Think it was England, in high crime areas. One guy ended up getting busted cause he LOOKED like one of the criminals on camera.
I'm told I look like a lot of poeple. I guess I am just your average 'joe'. This is kinda scary.
Problem #3) What about security issues. The biotech info that is on your computer is on someone elses and traveling through the internet which is inherently insecure. Wouldn't that open up to things like hackers using your computer to crack the biotech info that is on your computer in the same kind of distributed maner? This may work better in a work environment where the company has a lan and at night all employees log out of their computers but leave it on for the big jobs to run, but not at peoples homes. Gee just think your rival companies employees are helping to solve your problems.....
It may help the wine project. They would not have to implement teh Direct X stuff they could require this instead. This may give games a little more speed when running under wine on Linux/UNIX.
I think at some point Linux will have added enought window's ness and windows will have added enought BSDisms that at some point they will be not that far from each other. Of course that will be the end of the 'OS wars'.
Some do. They get caught, more so in the US. Look at Gary Condit, Clinton, lets see what unfolds from Enron && Bush. You know they got lots of money from that. I wont say more at this point it will just be interesting to see what unfolds.
"Hell, I wouldn't be suprised to find that Bin-Laden was paid to do his dasterdly deed just so Bush could bomb the crap out of the middle east like "dear ol' dad"."
Or to just increase his popularity or something. I have wondered that my self. I'm glad that I am not the only one that has questioned weather or not the Bush Administration knew about that or that they knew something was going to happen. I don't think they knew that it would be that disasterous though.
"Can a patent be rejected after it has already been accepted, and been in place for years ? "
Yes, definately. A patent can be challenged at any time in its life as being invalid for many reasons. The drawback is that once a patent is challenged it can also be determined that it is valid. In this case a company can start going after people.
"However, according to the UK Patent Office, patents are, by nature, vague so such an argument might not prove to be sufficient defence."
In the USPTO they should get rejected as being 'vague and indefinite' if they are to vague. This is a basic patent rejection. So if the language of this patent is to vague to understand today that should be sufficient to invalidate the patent. Boy would that suck for them to be told that the patent is no longer valid and never really was.
I wonder if I can do this with my aquariums? It would be nice to have the pH, ammonia, nitrites and nitrates, Kh and GK automagically measured or easily accessable. Rather than having to use drops for each test.
"Who said they were only spending 28 days on security? I thought it was bugfixes. "
I read that somewhere. I also read that it was for bug fixes. Still 28 days is not enought for bug fixes either. I work at a software company and we do it every release. We even back code many of the bug fixes that clients want. We also listen to our clients.
"True, but a bit disingenuous:"
Your analogy of cars is.. well off. Cars and operating systems are two completely different things. But since you made the comparison... cars have one button push door locks and some cars have 'automatic seat belts'. Also cars have air bags that just work most of the time. Cars think about security cause the goverment and people make regulations on how they should function and how they need to be safe. Air bags in teh front were found to save lives and then it became a requirement that ALL cars in the US have them. They don't have any regulations like that for software. Maybe we should require all software to have some sort of waranty and exchange. Maybe a firewall or something should be a requirement of ALL operating systems. Maybe virus software should too. If you look at Microsoft though they started with DOS, no security there. Then Win 3.1, no security there, just virus software. Then Win 3.51 NT, which had some security. Then Windows 95 which had little to none more like fake security. Then NT4.0 which had some. Now NT 2k I believe is the first offering that has a firewall or so I am told. Wow it only took them 10 years of working on the OS to figure out that it may be good to ship with a firewall. Hmm Linux started a firewall when? Ipchains was the first I remember using in about 98, but I know they had ipfwadm earlier than that. Hmmm OpenBSD worked solely on the premise of security since when?? Sun, the other BSD's?? Lets face it they are finally realizing that it is more important to users to have easy security and easy use and less bugs and less features.
I'd like them to have there OS secure and stable as my parents use the OS. They don't and shouldn't have to learn about the OS and the computer. Microsoft also markets to people who don't want to learn about computers. Isn't doing things 'easier' supposed to be part of their XP marketing??? It is so easy to reinstall your OS cause it fell victum to a script virus that you got in an email.
"The security responsibility lies with the infrastructure, NOT the language."
Well acutally both. Since the language is reflective of the infrastructure. If the infrastructure allows for security holes so will the language. Then it is up to the programmer. I know I am not perfect. I like perl and scripting languages cause they handle most of that crap. I can code.
"Your attempt to bash C# fails."
I was not attempting to bash C#. I am only pointing out that like all things Microsoft it is uncertain as to how well it will actually be.
Examples of how well they think things out and there track record are in the article. Word / Excel macros that let you open up other files. Ohh great, but security was never an issue. VB script in the email. Do users really want this? Do they need this? What are the security issues? They never though of any of this.
Do we really need C#? Probably as much as we need Ruby, and the myrid of all the other languages that are poping up. Not really, but people will use them. You like C# great use it. Someone hacks your site cause of it, then don't come to me and don't complain about it.
On Linux while(1) fork() may take down the whole system. Also while (1) malloc(1024) may start to cause problems as well. Other UNIXes can be attacked by runaway proceses as well. Windows and UNIX have that problem. One process that goes awire can take down just about any system if it has the provelidges. Especially if it is run suid or as root.
Building a system with the sandbox design in minds is easier than taking an existing system and putting it in a sandbox. Active X is already out there. How do you handle the existing Active X and put that in a box? You'd basically have to redesign active X. Word, Excell and Access all rely heavily on VB macros. How do you put them in a sandbox? Actually that may be easier to do but it would also be limiting. In the sandbox that Javascript runs in you are not supposed to be able to access files on the users filesystem. (note not supposed to there have been errors on that though). The idea was there though.
Okay so you operate it in a GUEST account. If that guest is set up or can access files there goes security.
The reality is that 28 days is not enought time to focus on security and Microsoft does not have a good track record when it comes to security. While it may be possible to start building in security into the existing system. Security is a continuous effort that must be thought of as part of the design. When a programmer creates a new language they must start to think security right off the bat. This was done with Java, but not C#.
I say good luck Microsoft, but you have a lot of work ahead of you to prove to me that you can get security right without comprimising usability.
THi sis interesting data. They aggregate all the linux distributions into one and do the same for BSD, but they do not aggregate all the windows version into one.
Anyone who has used linux knows that all the different distros are slightly different and that this is not a fair comparison.
In looking into the data further it would be more plausable to compare the aggregate of Linux vs the aggregate of BSD. Then you could say that the BSD's ahve less security flaws.
If you compare lets say Redhat to WinNT4.0/2k then you have an almost even amount of bugs per year. Okay so neither has less security issues.
The real questions then become 1) how serious the bugs? 2) how long a fix took? 3) Were people who installed the OS and then used NOTHING but what came with the OS to secure still affected?
In the case of Redhat or BSD you can turn off all your services and thus you are not affected by bugs in the ftp daemon. You can do this on NT as well, but by default NT does not come with an ftp daemon. (NT server maybe?)
In the case of BSD and Linux you can enable the firewall that comes with the distro/OS. Once again NT 4 (maybe 2k does?) does not have one by default install.
Lastly how many windows machines were takes over last year by the security flaws vs Linux? Now rather than do this on a 1 to 1 comparison a more reasonalbe level of comparison would be a perscent, like % of linux boxes take over by a security flaw out of the total linux server numbers, vs the % of Windows boxes taken over due to security flaws. I.E. if you have 1000 windows boxes adn 100 linux boxes but 10 of the linux boxes were taken over and 50 of the windows boxes were taken over then you have 50/1000 or.05 and 10/100 or.1 which is 5% and 10% respectivly, thus windows would be better but these number I have made up so real numbers are needed. The same could be done with BSD as well as Sun and the other OSes they mention.
BIOS used to not be all upgradable. It used to be that you would have to replace the chip. Then it dawned on someone to make them software upgradable for bugs and features fixes. Like LBA enhancements.
Palm pilots (maybe not all, but many and mine) are upgradable. They do this cause they know that software needs to be upgradable. Just about ALL software has bugs.
If your product goes out and has bugs in it and it causes people loss of data, or worse, you will build yourself a reputation. Sort of like the release of Windows 95 did for Microsoft. No matter how they try they now have a reputation for buggy crashing software. Even if your product is the best on the market if it gets a reputation of bugginess, it will be harder to over come if people have to BUY an upgrade to fix it or BUY a whole new device instead of download bug fixes that makes it worse. While many people will do it they do it till something better comes a long.
Features are nice, but FIXES are essential to people staying with a product. I stopped useing Microsoft products whenever possible cause I'd rather use a *nix flavor that is less likely to crash on me while typing. This was after my experiences with Win 3.1/95/98 and NT 4.0. I am not impressed enought and do not trust Win2k, Me, or XP. They just don't have the reputation that Sun, BSD, UNIX and Linux have built. I never used a Windows BOX that could stay up for 275 days, but I have seen and used many Sun, BSD, and Linux boxes that were. In fact many of the IT staff people that I have worked with would not support a windows box if you did not reboot it atleast once a day. Also most people I knew or know who do not reboot about once a day end up rebooting when the system crashes.
So ask your boss, or the person who makes that decision, "Do you want to be a company that works with the consumer to fix the problem and help make their experience with the product better, or do you want to be one that gets a reputation for bad buggy software?"
"the whole point of a package management system to is put software _where it belongs_"
No the whole purpose of package management is to keep track of what you have installed on your system not to put it in a particular place. This allows one to upgrade packages or remove packages.
As far as the BSD being different Operatins sytems, yes that is true, but they all share some code. They DO exchange code between them. And that is kernel code that I am talking about as well as system code. If you look where they all derived from they all came from the same BSD base and they are all just branches of the same tree. Try looking at the history of UNIX and you will see why people say this.
Wow there are so many replys to my initla post I thought I'd address them all.
I was referring to the article NOT FreeBSD. The article makes little or no mention of all the things that people have pointed out that are better reasons for switching to FreeBSD.
1) yes they say FreeBSD is all in one as opposd to Linux distros, but they don't mention why that is really bad. Maybe it would help if they mentioned that the different distros are not always binary compatible with each other and the libc issue and that the different kernels mean you may have to upgrade some programs and recompile programs when upgrading kernels.
As far as the windows installer goes I was referring to it as an installer. RPM, gnorpm are not real installers. Neither is make install. The plusses in windows installer are that it lets you choose full, custom, or small install usually, and also lets YOU the user decise what directory to put stuff in and more often than not if they got it right then you can uninstall stuff too by just a click. Nice easey to use GUI that lets YOU in easier. No it is not an upgrade utiltiy nor does it clain to be. Windows update is just that WINDOWS. Windows add on programs that you install are not part of windows. But if you get XP part of windows update will update internet exploiter.
"Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries".. installer and updater are two completely differnet entities. Thus this was not what I was talking about.. learn to read..
"Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries".. yes I and I work with such software. Which even running under linux can be tricky. You need this version of this distribution.. blah blah..
What they fail to mention is that FreeBSD is actually already a branch that is part of NetBSD, OpenBSD and all the rest of the BSD's. Oh and don't forget that Mac OS X is a splinter off of FreeBSd. FreeBSD came from BSD and now has become only one. They are also different schools of thought. At some point Linux distros will die and there will be only one or two. Currently there are many yes, but only a few of them are acutally big time players, like RedHat, mandrake, SuSe, debian and Slackware. yes others exist but any polls show these as the top 5 most used.
Lastly the first comment I made was basically why should anyone migrate from one OS to anther. People will test them and if they like one better than another they will use it. Persoanlly I think they all kind byte and that there is yet to be a real "killer OS". Mac OS X is looking good, but it only runs on Mac hardware. (exlude darwin as I want the WHOLE OS GUI and all).
How about how to Migrate away from that whole PC thing to Mac OS X.
On another note though. After reading this article it really does not tell you anything and it has a few flaws.
1) I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm. It does this by running ldd or ldconfig or something. Also if you know you have it on your system you can use the --nodeps to install it. You can also get the source rpm and install that which you can then edit the spec of. Also the newest rpm can handle some tar.gz files if they are built with rpm in mind with the --tarbuild command (I think this is it).
2) Keeping your system 'up to date' Redhat has an update program, ximian has an update program, and I believe Mandrake has an update program. And they even mention that debian has apt-get. What about a better article of moving from rpm to apt-get / deselect. Or even why BSD is really better than deselect. Also they fail to mention why you want your system up to date. Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
3) They fail to mention any real advanatges of why should one want to go from Linux, which they clasify as the 'kernel', to FreeBSD, which they classify as the system, or any other BSD. Like weather it has better SMP or support for hardware. Package management is not a good argument. If that were the case I think windows installer is better. It allows more options than rpm -Uvh or make && make install and it is menu driven.
4) While the mention the linux compatiblity layer, they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible. I know some software that we use where I work would probably not work on FreeBSD.
This article is a start I think, but they really need to do a series of articles that describe this rather than a 2 pager.
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system? If so how many? How do they compare to ext3 or JFS?
Does it support all the same audio hardware that Linux does? If not what does it lack or what does it support more of? (Video is done mostly through XFree so both are about equal in that respect).
someone stole my email address.. and now they are spaming the hell out of it.
On a more serious note. I have an earthlink account (call them what you will) and they have their spaminator that catches lots of spam, but somehow loads more still gets through. I wish I could access their servers and create an "acceptance list" rather than a denial list.
Wouldn't it be nice (or is there?) if there was a CLIENT email program, that one could program with smart filters that could delete mail on the server before ever downloading it (I think pine can do some of this, but I want a full GUI). You could put people who you would accept mail from reguardless like family and friends that are in your address book. You could set it up so that if you heard about a virus with a specific title you could reject it, even if it was from family or move it to a special folder. You could even set it up so that it validated email addresses, or accept email addresses from corporations that you were potentially interested in or were sending you through a job message bord like hotjobs or dice. Hmm.. this sounds like I should modify my java SMTP and POP beans to do some of this. I think it would make mail take longer to download, but it would help reduce spam in my mail box.
Maybe I just need to filter out messages that say "grow your penis larger" and "tighten up your vagina". Oh and my favorite one is "come see Me and my girl friends play with each other". I shudder to think of what my pre-teen neices and nephews, who are all on lilne at this time, get in the way of email. Oh and my favorite are the HTML pages that take so long to download hang my email program or slow it down. Why should anyone have to suffer like this, just because they allow viewing of HTML!
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I'm glad you like scheme, and know so much. not having records or something like that to me would make it a more primitive language than C or even pascal. If you read my initial post one of the requirements of my ideal language would include this construct. Since you have pointed out neither asm or scheme include these constructs then these are not going to be languages that I am going to move to.
If I knew more about asemblers and creating new programming languages I'd write my own. I am considering working on the design of one though.
As far as records / structures. I find that hard to believe that there is no way to declare a record in scheme. Even pascal and basic can do records. A C/C++ structure is very similar to a record. Heck even vax Basic has records.
I don't do to many C macros cause they are joke.
The point I was trying to make is that no one language has encompased the best of all the languages with a easy to use gui as well.
Yes I am primarily talking mainstream languages. Java, C, Perl, php, python, C++, JavaScript, ASP/VB, scheme, and shell programming. Outside of assembly what language does not fit this build?
IMHO the ideal language would have the following: objects/classes, inheritance, polymorphism, private data, public data, NO MEMORY allocation or automatic like perl/Java and a good clean garbage collector (like perl), i.e this leaves out C/C++ as both require either you write a garbage collector or you do the alloc/free. Compiled to executable code, with a fast easy to use GUI IDE for graphics, cross platform capability with NO "if window do this else if mac do that etc. (Java is not compiled to native exe). Also it needs the standard for/next, switch/case, while/do, etc. Visual basic comes close but it is not cross platform compatible. Lastly it needs to be fast. What language do you know of that fits this? Oh and there is more......
You'd be better off if you got a business DSL. That was you can claim it as a business expense or set it up as a none profit on your taxes and take advantage of that aspect. (If you are in the US).
What about if someone wants to do research on abortion, sex education or anything like that? Is it porn because it may mention the word penis or uterus?
What about all the porn on yahoo clubs and msn clubs? Should you block all the clubs or just some of the clubs? How do you determine if the data is porn?
Also what happen when porn gets through and the kids see it? Do you expell the kids cause the filter is broken?
I have no problems with implementing filters, but make sure that they are truely filtering out porn and not just censoring data. Think about it, what is to stop someone from adding in to these filters information on being a gay teen, or puberty information where a kid may feel more comfortable looking up info on the web than talking with his parents or teachers.
Alternately it could be RR just being an a**. They should have a way of undoing the blacklist. I'm not sure how do undo that with earthlink and I need to ask them about it cause this has happened to a few people I know.
Next thing to do would be to ask someone that recently switched to linux on the mainframe, like ebay... hope one of the links below still works...
http://www.cio.com/archive/010101_et_content.htm l
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/ib ml inux000517.html
http://www.zdnetindia.com/biztech/resources/ebusin ess/ecommerce/stories/45234.html
I'd agree, you could think of it that way. Excel macros wont run without the vb runtime engine. The real question is, is your spread sheet just a csv in discuise or do you have macros that you customized to your spread sheets.
I wonder if this means I can sell spreadsheets that do the 1040 tax form calculations .... Schedules A, B & D, and CA state... hmmm
I heard that somewhere in Europe they were putting in cameras all over the place. I Think it was England, in high crime areas. One guy ended up getting busted cause he LOOKED like one of the criminals on camera.
I'm told I look like a lot of poeple. I guess I am just your average 'joe'. This is kinda scary.
Problem #3) What about security issues. The biotech info that is on your computer is on someone elses and traveling through the internet which is inherently insecure. Wouldn't that open up to things like hackers using your computer to crack the biotech info that is on your computer in the same kind of distributed maner? This may work better in a work environment where the company has a lan and at night all employees log out of their computers but leave it on for the big jobs to run, but not at peoples homes. Gee just think your rival companies employees are helping to solve your problems.....
I think at some point Linux will have added enought window's ness and windows will have added enought BSDisms that at some point they will be not that far from each other. Of course that will be the end of the 'OS wars'.
Some do. They get caught, more so in the US. Look at Gary Condit, Clinton, lets see what unfolds from Enron && Bush. You know they got lots of money from that. I wont say more at this point it will just be interesting to see what unfolds.
"Hell, I wouldn't be suprised to find that Bin-Laden was paid to do his dasterdly deed just so Bush could bomb the crap out of the middle east like "dear ol' dad"."
Or to just increase his popularity or something. I have wondered that my self. I'm glad that I am not the only one that has questioned weather or not the Bush Administration knew about that or that they knew something was going to happen. I don't think they knew that it would be that disasterous though.
Yes, definately. A patent can be challenged at any time in its life as being invalid for many reasons. The drawback is that once a patent is challenged it can also be determined that it is valid. In this case a company can start going after people.
In the USPTO they should get rejected as being 'vague and indefinite' if they are to vague. This is a basic patent rejection. So if the language of this patent is to vague to understand today that should be sufficient to invalidate the patent. Boy would that suck for them to be told that the patent is no longer valid and never really was.
How dumb do you have to be to put electronics in the oven? I think he got what he deserved.
I wonder if I can do this with my aquariums? It would be nice to have the pH, ammonia, nitrites and nitrates, Kh and GK automagically measured or easily accessable. Rather than having to use drops for each test.
I read that somewhere. I also read that it was for bug fixes. Still 28 days is not enought for bug fixes either. I work at a software company and we do it every release. We even back code many of the bug fixes that clients want. We also listen to our clients.
"True, but a bit disingenuous:"
Your analogy of cars is .. well off. Cars and operating systems are two completely different things. But since you made the comparison... cars have one button push door locks and some cars have 'automatic seat belts'. Also cars have air bags that just work most of the time. Cars think about security cause the goverment and people make regulations on how they should function and how they need to be safe. Air bags in teh front were found to save lives and then it became a requirement that ALL cars in the US have them. They don't have any regulations like that for software. Maybe we should require all software to have some sort of waranty and exchange. Maybe a firewall or something should be a requirement of ALL operating systems. Maybe virus software should too. If you look at Microsoft though they started with DOS, no security there. Then Win 3.1, no security there, just virus software. Then Win 3.51 NT, which had some security. Then Windows 95 which had little to none more like fake security. Then NT4.0 which had some. Now NT 2k I believe is the first offering that has a firewall or so I am told. Wow it only took them 10 years of working on the OS to figure out that it may be good to ship with a firewall. Hmm Linux started a firewall when? Ipchains was the first I remember using in about 98, but I know they had ipfwadm earlier than that. Hmmm OpenBSD worked solely on the premise of security since when?? Sun, the other BSD's?? Lets face it they are finally realizing that it is more important to users to have easy security and easy use and less bugs and less features.
I'd like them to have there OS secure and stable as my parents use the OS. They don't and shouldn't have to learn about the OS and the computer. Microsoft also markets to people who don't want to learn about computers. Isn't doing things 'easier' supposed to be part of their XP marketing??? It is so easy to reinstall your OS cause it fell victum to a script virus that you got in an email.
"The security responsibility lies with the infrastructure, NOT the language."
Well acutally both. Since the language is reflective of the infrastructure. If the infrastructure allows for security holes so will the language. Then it is up to the programmer. I know I am not perfect. I like perl and scripting languages cause they handle most of that crap. I can code.
"Your attempt to bash C# fails."
I was not attempting to bash C#. I am only pointing out that like all things Microsoft it is uncertain as to how well it will actually be.
Examples of how well they think things out and there track record are in the article. Word / Excel macros that let you open up other files. Ohh great, but security was never an issue. VB script in the email. Do users really want this? Do they need this? What are the security issues? They never though of any of this.
Do we really need C#? Probably as much as we need Ruby, and the myrid of all the other languages that are poping up. Not really, but people will use them. You like C# great use it. Someone hacks your site cause of it, then don't come to me and don't complain about it.
Building a system with the sandbox design in minds is easier than taking an existing system and putting it in a sandbox. Active X is already out there. How do you handle the existing Active X and put that in a box? You'd basically have to redesign active X. Word, Excell and Access all rely heavily on VB macros. How do you put them in a sandbox? Actually that may be easier to do but it would also be limiting. In the sandbox that Javascript runs in you are not supposed to be able to access files on the users filesystem. (note not supposed to there have been errors on that though). The idea was there though.
Okay so you operate it in a GUEST account. If that guest is set up or can access files there goes security.
The reality is that 28 days is not enought time to focus on security and Microsoft does not have a good track record when it comes to security. While it may be possible to start building in security into the existing system. Security is a continuous effort that must be thought of as part of the design. When a programmer creates a new language they must start to think security right off the bat. This was done with Java, but not C#.
I say good luck Microsoft, but you have a lot of work ahead of you to prove to me that you can get security right without comprimising usability.
Anyone who has used linux knows that all the different distros are slightly different and that this is not a fair comparison.
In looking into the data further it would be more plausable to compare the aggregate of Linux vs the aggregate of BSD. Then you could say that the BSD's ahve less security flaws.
If you compare lets say Redhat to WinNT4.0/2k then you have an almost even amount of bugs per year. Okay so neither has less security issues.
The real questions then become 1) how serious the bugs? 2) how long a fix took? 3) Were people who installed the OS and then used NOTHING but what came with the OS to secure still affected?
In the case of Redhat or BSD you can turn off all your services and thus you are not affected by bugs in the ftp daemon. You can do this on NT as well, but by default NT does not come with an ftp daemon. (NT server maybe?)
In the case of BSD and Linux you can enable the firewall that comes with the distro/OS. Once again NT 4 (maybe 2k does?) does not have one by default install.
Lastly how many windows machines were takes over last year by the security flaws vs Linux? Now rather than do this on a 1 to 1 comparison a more reasonalbe level of comparison would be a perscent, like % of linux boxes take over by a security flaw out of the total linux server numbers, vs the % of Windows boxes taken over due to security flaws. I.E. if you have 1000 windows boxes adn 100 linux boxes but 10 of the linux boxes were taken over and 50 of the windows boxes were taken over then you have 50/1000 or .05 and 10/100 or .1 which is 5% and 10% respectivly, thus windows would be better but these number I have made up so real numbers are needed. The same could be done with BSD as well as Sun and the other OSes they mention.
Palm pilots (maybe not all, but many and mine) are upgradable. They do this cause they know that software needs to be upgradable. Just about ALL software has bugs.
If your product goes out and has bugs in it and it causes people loss of data, or worse, you will build yourself a reputation. Sort of like the release of Windows 95 did for Microsoft. No matter how they try they now have a reputation for buggy crashing software. Even if your product is the best on the market if it gets a reputation of bugginess, it will be harder to over come if people have to BUY an upgrade to fix it or BUY a whole new device instead of download bug fixes that makes it worse. While many people will do it they do it till something better comes a long.
Features are nice, but FIXES are essential to people staying with a product. I stopped useing Microsoft products whenever possible cause I'd rather use a *nix flavor that is less likely to crash on me while typing. This was after my experiences with Win 3.1/95/98 and NT 4.0. I am not impressed enought and do not trust Win2k, Me, or XP. They just don't have the reputation that Sun, BSD, UNIX and Linux have built. I never used a Windows BOX that could stay up for 275 days, but I have seen and used many Sun, BSD, and Linux boxes that were. In fact many of the IT staff people that I have worked with would not support a windows box if you did not reboot it atleast once a day. Also most people I knew or know who do not reboot about once a day end up rebooting when the system crashes.
So ask your boss, or the person who makes that decision, "Do you want to be a company that works with the consumer to fix the problem and help make their experience with the product better, or do you want to be one that gets a reputation for bad buggy software?"
No the whole purpose of package management is to keep track of what you have installed on your system not to put it in a particular place. This allows one to upgrade packages or remove packages.
As far as the BSD being different Operatins sytems, yes that is true, but they all share some code. They DO exchange code between them. And that is kernel code that I am talking about as well as system code. If you look where they all derived from they all came from the same BSD base and they are all just branches of the same tree. Try looking at the history of UNIX and you will see why people say this.
I was referring to the article NOT FreeBSD. The article makes little or no mention of all the things that people have pointed out that are better reasons for switching to FreeBSD.
1) yes they say FreeBSD is all in one as opposd to Linux distros, but they don't mention why that is really bad. Maybe it would help if they mentioned that the different distros are not always binary compatible with each other and the libc issue and that the different kernels mean you may have to upgrade some programs and recompile programs when upgrading kernels.
As far as the windows installer goes I was referring to it as an installer. RPM, gnorpm are not real installers. Neither is make install. The plusses in windows installer are that it lets you choose full, custom, or small install usually, and also lets YOU the user decise what directory to put stuff in and more often than not if they got it right then you can uninstall stuff too by just a click. Nice easey to use GUI that lets YOU in easier. No it is not an upgrade utiltiy nor does it clain to be. Windows update is just that WINDOWS. Windows add on programs that you install are not part of windows. But if you get XP part of windows update will update internet exploiter.
"Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries".. installer and updater are two completely differnet entities. Thus this was not what I was talking about .. learn to read..
"Where you will have a problem is with programs that depend on Linux kernel-only features, software dependent on drivers only written for Linux, and trying to link FreeBSD applications to Linux libraries".. yes I and I work with such software. Which even running under linux can be tricky. You need this version of this distribution.. blah blah..
What they fail to mention is that FreeBSD is actually already a branch that is part of NetBSD, OpenBSD and all the rest of the BSD's. Oh and don't forget that Mac OS X is a splinter off of FreeBSd. FreeBSD came from BSD and now has become only one. They are also different schools of thought. At some point Linux distros will die and there will be only one or two. Currently there are many yes, but only a few of them are acutally big time players, like RedHat, mandrake, SuSe, debian and Slackware. yes others exist but any polls show these as the top 5 most used.
Lastly the first comment I made was basically why should anyone migrate from one OS to anther. People will test them and if they like one better than another they will use it. Persoanlly I think they all kind byte and that there is yet to be a real "killer OS". Mac OS X is looking good, but it only runs on Mac hardware. (exlude darwin as I want the WHOLE OS GUI and all).
On another note though. After reading this article it really does not tell you anything and it has a few flaws.
1) I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm. It does this by running ldd or ldconfig or something. Also if you know you have it on your system you can use the --nodeps to install it. You can also get the source rpm and install that which you can then edit the spec of. Also the newest rpm can handle some tar.gz files if they are built with rpm in mind with the --tarbuild command (I think this is it).
2) Keeping your system 'up to date' Redhat has an update program, ximian has an update program, and I believe Mandrake has an update program. And they even mention that debian has apt-get. What about a better article of moving from rpm to apt-get / deselect. Or even why BSD is really better than deselect. Also they fail to mention why you want your system up to date. Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
3) They fail to mention any real advanatges of why should one want to go from Linux, which they clasify as the 'kernel', to FreeBSD, which they classify as the system, or any other BSD. Like weather it has better SMP or support for hardware. Package management is not a good argument. If that were the case I think windows installer is better. It allows more options than rpm -Uvh or make && make install and it is menu driven.
4) While the mention the linux compatiblity layer, they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible. I know some software that we use where I work would probably not work on FreeBSD.
This article is a start I think, but they really need to do a series of articles that describe this rather than a 2 pager.
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system? If so how many? How do they compare to ext3 or JFS?
Does it support all the same audio hardware that Linux does? If not what does it lack or what does it support more of? (Video is done mostly through XFree so both are about equal in that respect).
On a more serious note. I have an earthlink account (call them what you will) and they have their spaminator that catches lots of spam, but somehow loads more still gets through. I wish I could access their servers and create an "acceptance list" rather than a denial list.
Wouldn't it be nice (or is there?) if there was a CLIENT email program, that one could program with smart filters that could delete mail on the server before ever downloading it (I think pine can do some of this, but I want a full GUI). You could put people who you would accept mail from reguardless like family and friends that are in your address book. You could set it up so that if you heard about a virus with a specific title you could reject it, even if it was from family or move it to a special folder. You could even set it up so that it validated email addresses, or accept email addresses from corporations that you were potentially interested in or were sending you through a job message bord like hotjobs or dice. Hmm .. this sounds like I should modify my java SMTP and POP beans to do some of this. I think it would make mail take longer to download, but it would help reduce spam in my mail box.
Maybe I just need to filter out messages that say "grow your penis larger" and "tighten up your vagina". Oh and my favorite one is "come see Me and my girl friends play with each other". I shudder to think of what my pre-teen neices and nephews, who are all on lilne at this time, get in the way of email. Oh and my favorite are the HTML pages that take so long to download hang my email program or slow it down. Why should anyone have to suffer like this, just because they allow viewing of HTML!