While it is true that employees are usually the last to know. Certain companies are known for certain behaviors. Microsoft is known for certain things, which I wont get into. If you work for Microsoft you are one of their drones. You do what they say. The only difference between you and a borg is that you can quit while a borg cannot. If you dislike a companies policies then you need to leave the company when you find out wyhat kind of company they are.
It took me 2 years in my last company to find out what kind of company they were and they are involved with several law suits, for failing to deliver a product. Since I did not agree with there business practices I left. My suggestion is taht if you find yourself working for a company and you do not like the way that they are then you have 2 choices. Oneis to change them the second is to leave. IF you aare in a position to make the changes then do so. If not then leave. It may take you a while to find a new job but it will be worth it in th elong run. I know that leaving M$ may be difficult as I have heard that they have great benifits and probably pay the best in the Seattle are, but I think that you have to ask your self is the money worth it? If you can live with yourself because of the money then you are a borg / drone. If not then get out and stop complaining about what people are calling you.
Lets face it people you are and always will be associated with who you work for. Microsoft is a company that has a reputation for swallowing up little companies like the borg. Resistance is usually futile, just look at all the companies that they ate. Viseo, Frontpage (yes they were a company), web TV, lets see any more..yes! This is who they are. If you work for them don't pretend that you don't know.If you are saying but I need the money then you are just using the money as an excuse to justify there behavior and you are just as bad as they are. If you say, but I like what I do, then again you need to find that job at a company that you can live with the reputaion of. This is not just M$ that I am refering to either. Any company has corporate culture and a 'way of doing business'. YOu have to find out these ways an dthen get in a company that fits how you are and what you want to be associted with.
I'd have to agree. I like my palm V also. I do like the colors that they are coming out with. Believe it or not this is actually a marketing ploy. Look at the iMacs. People loved those colors. Also look at the handspring. They originally thought the color idea with the handsprings were out there, but it worked. These new palms are actually targeted at the handspring market. They both cost 149 (handspring and new palm), they both come in colors. What really sets the handspring above the palms is the springboard that the handsprings have.
I think if palm were to take the palm 5, and make it with 8Meg of RAM (like the Vx) then add color screens, as well as built in wireless (like the palm VII), and color cases as well as an expansion slot on the side (instead of the top like the handsprings) They would have something really hot. Probably expensive too. Oh FYI the handspring has the IR port on the side which I felt made it hard to interface with. I tried transferring my business card to someone with a handspring and it was kind of clumsy.
It seems that Windows is also suseptable(sp?) to buffer overruns. It is good that they already have fixes for some of the programs, but they need to escalate fixing the problem quickly, before some hacker decides to create another virus. Lets see how long this takes them to get a fix for the rest of there versions. If it is more than a week they are moving to slow. If it is a matter of telling people to upgrade then that is what they should do. Linux and other UNIXes do this all the time.
I'd actually recommend StartOffice 5.2 over Word Perfect. In the event that your users need to deal with Microsoft Office files StartOffice does a better job with word files. It is bulkier though and you'd need the 64Meg of RAM.
As far as debian, caldera, or redhat goes, it depends on your admins. All have package management, and rpm vs dpkg could be debaited till the univers collapses and the truth is it depends on what you prefer. I personally found installing debian to be tough cause the last version I tried did the dependency checking at each step where redhat does it after you select the packages. At least that was my experience. 64 Meg of RAM is plenty for Linux boxes.
alien will convert packages between the two systems, and gnorpm and kpackage will handle rpms and kpackage also handles debs as well.
My personal feeling on teh deb vs RH debate is that many companies look at RH because there is a company behind it where debian there is not. Yes there is storm and corel which are based on debian, but if you look at the different software ports that are done to Linux many large companies go with RH first. Just look at IBM. IBM released there via voice technology for Linux (you can buy the software for 59.95 or so) and they recommend RH 6.0 or later.
Others may feel different and they can, but this is my opinion and experience. Incidentally I have been enjoying RH since I first tried 5.1
It depends on what you are doing as an ISP> IF you are a web portal then you should log certain data so you can analyze who is comint to your traffic and possible why. If you have asearch engin then you need to log the search data so you can analyze it and find out what is being searched on most frequently so you can work at building a better search engine that returns better results. If you also do web hosting you may need to log IP addresses and more so that you can provide your customers with who is visitng their web site and let then have the information that they need.
Yes you must respect privacy, but you shoudl also state clearly and in laymans terms what your privacy policy is, and stick with it even when times are tough.
What you should log depends on what your needs are and also what services you provide. Remeber though that you may be held responsibe for someone abusing your network, so it may be wise to keep track of who is on it and from where.
I think the reason that Microsoft went with this C# is to make Java Obsolete. If I understand C# correctly it is basically going to offer you some of the features of Java & VB ie Objects, Inheritance, etc, but with the speed and contraol you get with C or C++. I don't think Microsoft would create C# to be portable. They are not like that, just look at there VB, the MFC and J++. If C# is as easy to program as Java many windows programers will have an easier time dealing with COM/DCOM.
Java is supposed to be cross platforms, but it does not work this way all the time. There are so many different versions of the JDK and they have so many incompatibilities, which Java version would the C# to Java convert to anyway? What would it buy you to convert to Java when there would probably be COM/DCOM or COM+ code in there too?
I used to love the comic tv series. I wonder now that we have the human genome project and all these genes decoded if people will start to tamper with them and try and create 'mutants' like telepaths, super smart people or what.
On a note about the trailers, I feel like I have seen half the movie already. THere are 4 or 5 trailers out there and they show some hot action. Never the less, my team is going to see the X-men this friday when it opens:-). I really wonder how many copies of this movie area already floating around on the net bootlegged even though the movie is not out yet.
I'd blame the sys admins. As many other here do also. Why?
First he did not have adequate backups. While I know that this happens at many sites, I personally have backups of my home system. At most I'd have to reinstall, but most of my config files I back up often enough that reconfiguring my system would be at most a few hours. Granted I have one system, and he has many, but that being the case is just more of a reason to make sure that you have adequate backups of your system.
Second why did he talk to the hacker in the first place? He should have just started going through machine by machine and make sure that they were secure. Checking ALL of the software and looking to see what he was using that may have exploits. Yes a good place to go to find this info is on the net as the hacker said, but that is probably where the hacker went to find this out.
Thirdly the sys admins should have been rebuilding and updating their system when they first found out they had been hacked. Box by box.
Lastly if they did not catch this hacker and lock him away, I am sure that they have not heard the last of him, and if they are not careful they are going to get hacked again.
I don't really think that this law applies here. I'm no lawyer, but here is why: you can still access other sites through your book marks so you are not really 'locked in'. They do not control your browser completely so you can still exit by typing in a URL in the location bar. Since both Netscape and IE browsers support searching through the location bar you can always exit one of these site.
While I do agree that this is bad practice on the site developers side, I do not think that it is against the law. Also how are you going to sue someone or take legal action if they are not in Arazona, or even the US? I imagine that since these sites have basically ben blacklisted on slashdot it is only a matter of time before most of them stop that practice anyway. I know that it is a cheezy way to keep visitors. Obviously if a site needs to do something like this then they have no content that will make people want to return.
But since it is here, I did think it was rather interesting that they use their layers to deal with many of the problems. It sounds like the carbon layer is the one that will deal with some of the issues between aqua / cocoa and darwin. I am not sure about this. I know that in Linux the filenames that have spaces in them are quoted strings when used on the command line. I don't think that this should have been such a big issue for BSD or OS X. I am looking forward to seeing the finished product and it will be interesting if they have a version of OS X that runs on Intel as well. I have heard that darwin has been ported, but the question is will Apple port carbon, cocoa, and aqua to Intel as well. If OS X runs on Intel, I'd be interested in trying it out. I am not inteested in buying a new Mac box only to find out that I do't like OS X because of some reason.
You know it is rather funny that I have seen more benchmarks between windows and Linux since I started reading slashdot so many years ago that it is amazing. The best part is that you can clearly see these benchmarks show one os to be better than the other os. La la la. It really means nothing, but some people think that this will persuade people to move to os 'whatever'.
The reality is that most web servers are needed for stability and uptimes, and performance is second. The company I work at has both Linux and Solaris, as well I think that there may be some BSD here too. Solaris is stable and its hardware is also pretty good BUT not great. Most of the problems that we have had were because of hardware failures or defective hardware, not the OS. We also use multiple servers so clustering is a must and loadbalancing also.
Who puts a 4 procesor box on a web site? We do! We have many boxes that are 2 to 8 processor boxes. Of course we don't use that many intel boxes either except for Linux.
What makes this really funny are all the people who defend windows all the time probably not realizing that Yahoo, MS Hotmail, and yes slashdot all use UNIX or Linux. Yahoo uses Solaris and FreeBSD, Microsoft Hotmail does too. And guess what slashdot uses Linux / perl / and mysql. Hmm you visit a site that runs hardware you hate. hmm aren't you the hypocrite?
What windows 2000 really needs to prove is not that it can outperform LInux or Solaris, cause I am sure you can tweak it to be just as good if not better, it needs to prove that it can have 200+ days of uptimes on an extremely busy web site. So what company will be the first to have a large scale site and use win2k?
Lastly we recently bought a site that uses windows servers and we are moving them all to Solaris. Hmmm. Can we see some Solaris 4 processor boxes benchmarked against Linux and Windows? Oh we have and it blew both of them away!
"I also noticed when checking out the articles that CNet uses doubleclick so you may want to browse the articles with cookies off." While this may be a good idea it is a little false. Cnet serves its own ads and has what are know as '3rd party ads' that flow through it site. Some of those ads are from doubleclick as well as other companies like adsmart.
On the note of personal information, just think how much info yahoo and slashdot have on you if you have an account on either. Slashdot know what sites you like as well as what authors you don't like, and what your opinions are. Hmm makes you think a bit. If you have yahoo mail, they have all your sent mail if they want to keep it as well as all your recieved mail if they want to keep that too. If you have any of their other services, like calendar or my.yahoo, they know more about you. The www is not an information trading formum. YOu want a service you must give up information on your self. If they hav laws about protecting childrenm why do we not start to implemnet laws to protect the adults as well?
I guess this would mean that there would be requirements on companies like Redhat as well as Microsoft. This would mean that you should not get buggy software from either. Nor should you get any buggy cad software company or graphic software form companies X and Y. Keywords here are should and would and this does not exclude any other OS or distro maker, these are just two that I use so don't take this as a ding at any company.
I wonder how much this would slow down the software industry. Rather than get a product out to market ASAP, they would need to now make sure that all the bugs were out of it. I know at a company that I worked for we had lots of known bugs that were not fixed and the underlying API that we used had bugs in it that we could not get fixed.
How would one enforce waranties(sp) on free software? Or would this be a case where all software would have to come with a file describing the warrenty(sp) on the software. Even with a warrenty(sp) what would the software have to be required of doing? Never crashing?
While I think that this is great that they have png now, I want to know when are they going to fix the javascript event model? Their is a lot of Javascript that does not work with mozilla and I think for this browser to make a hit it needs to be fixed. My page currently displays fine, as I have fixed most of HTML to be 'proper' syntax with the / and the b font/font b kind of sytaxing. I want to add more to my site and use JavaScript events and they do not seem to work the way that they are documented in mozilla. Does anyone know more information on their JavaScript events implementation and when can developers expect it to be fixed?
More and more I am looking at Mac OS X. I finally got a chance to read what it takes to put Mac HFS+ and carbon and cocoa on top of a BSDish layer such as darwin.
First let me say, that this was something I one said (here on slashdot about a year ago.. hmm whos readiong my posts?) would make a killer OS. MAC GUI with a UNIX kernel. Their is no denying that UNIX as an OS is stable, it has had over 20 years to get this way. Their is also no denying that Mac makes some really easy to use GUI, after all they were one of the first ones to actually market one. (first apples then macs).
That being said and probably flamed by now. I think that I should state what I think MAC will have to do to get its OS X flying into the masses. The GUI will need to be able to configure everything. I mean everything, else it will be only half done. However you will still need to be able to edit the files manually. This can be done. Linuxconf is a good example of a GUI that can be modified. Although it is not perfect as linuxconf does not do everything people will expect a mac to. I mean when they advertise plug in the phone line and plug in the power and you are connected to the internet, I think people will expect the same of everything else. Just like most mac stuff is supposed to be. EASY. The reason that I say that they will need to let people be able to edit the files is because some people just hate GUI. Since this is based on BSD you will get those command line people, who think that the command line is faster or easier. Well that depends on what you are used to too. Personally I use both but that is another arguemnt.
The next thing that they will have to do is come up with some way of allowing people access to the source code of not just darwin, but also carbon and cocoa and aqua. Either this or be quick to fix bugs that may arrise. And there will be bugs! There is always bugs in software. If they have bugs that do not get fixed they will turn off many developers. My suggestion is that they implement a bugzilla method or something like it where people can search and enter bugs.
That this the end of that rant, and my.02 cents on that subject. On the topic of ESR, I'd have to say good luck. There is a lot of beaurocracy(sp?) in the patent office. Personally I think it needs to become privitized like the US postal service and regulated. I also think that it needs to have more interaction with the outside community. Maybe patent application announcements. When someone files for a patent maybe they should have a message board about this. A place where the public can see what applications have been submitted. Then if someone knows of some relevant prior art there can be a way for this person on the outside to contact the patent examiner or the patent office with this information. If they need to they could implement a screening process of all this data that would flood into their office. money would not be an issue to the USPTO either as they are one of the few goverment agencies that actually make revenues. In the year that I worked their that took in 119 million dollars. 98 million of which billy clinton took to balance the budget. If they were privitized like the post office this would not have happened and the money would have been able to go back into the USPTO. I hope that ESR has some good karma going for him and wish him the best of luck in this endeavor.
It would be nice to know what the requirements are of this spec. If the spec were or is an open spec it would then be possible to make Linux, OpenBSD, or any other OS abide by this spec.
I think that it is important to understand as some have pointed out that trusted does not mean secure. This is one of those english language semantic things. Trusted means that they have a set of requirements that this OS / program is supposed to do and it does them. Basically they can trust that if this happens the software will do what they wanted it to do. Secure means that if someone tries to hack in or exploit a buffer overrun then the system wont let them. OpenBSD is secure, NT is trusted. This does not mean that NT is not secure, it is in its own right, but I wont get into that. It also does not mean that OpenBSD cannot be made to be trusted either.
The advantage to them of Open Source would be that if the sytem is not trusted, they have the source and can make or have the system made into a trusted system. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to take a secure system and make it trusted as well?
Just my.02 cents, but I think that the goverment needs to start rethinking some of its policies of doing things.
.. if this actually happens it will be really good. I personally use parts of kde and parts of gnome. For instance I use kfm as my file manager. I like it a little better than gnome file manager. The gnome file manager is just to windows like, where as kfm is not (IMHO). I also like to run gnome rather than kde. I like the gnome panel better than the kde panel. Why? Cause when you put the gnome panel in the bottom right portion of the screen and then hide it or whatever it is hidden or it is that little arrow in the bottom left corner of the screen. With kde's panel, when you hide it it seems to apear in the top righ corner of the screen. This overlaps my icons that I have up their. At least that has been my experience.
However their is another reason that this is good. It means that efforts will not have to be duplicated across the board anymore. While it is still possible and probable, it will make more apps for a linux desktop. Those who want to run kde can still run kde and those who want to run gnome can still do that (personally I use windomaker with gnome panel and kfm).
The only issue that I see arrising is that this may mean that in order to use this functionality that you must have qt installed along with the kde base, libs and sup, and some other parts opf kde as wel as gnome core and gnome libs. It they can make an independant common set of libs that depend neither on kde nor gnome it will work. This is not much of an issue as most people will be willing to install both sets of libs if need be. However this would be problems with distros like debian. Also how would the license for these libs read? If it uses gnome which is gpl would this become a gpl library or qpl? I know that this is in the early stages, but with the recent incident with debian this should be something that the developers need to think about. How can they do this and keep their seperate license in tact?
It will certainly be interesting to see this acomplished.
What I am ammazed at is the fact that these developers are actually showing corporate society a thing or two.For instance even competing groups can come to work together for the betterment of the software community. If UNIX vendonrs had done this years ago rather than competing against each other their may not be a windows OS today or it may not have as strong a hold on the OS market as it does.
Shut up or I'll replace you with a very small script!
It is more of a need I think. For some reason, people over time have moved to Microsoft Office. I think it is sort of a domino effect. One company uses it, then they do business with another company, and so on. As they send documents between each other it ends up bing in either.doc or some other format. Because one person starts using.doc and the only way to see these files really as they were meant to be seen everyone involved ends up using.doc. Now we have a large percentage of people all over the planet using.doc. I get them at work through our office mail all the time informaing us of this or that. How do I read them? With word. The only reason to make this transulation system is so that people can still read word docs without having word.
Now I have tried wordperfect 8 for Linux, and the word filter does not work on more than half the documents that i have. StartOffice 5.1 does a pretty good job of this and from what I hear is it is getting better. However I know that if you start doing some complex things in word then startoffice may not read all of the document. They are working on this though. Apparently startoffice 5.2 is supposed to have pretty good support for word files.
On another note their are several project that are open source that are working to reading these formats, on of which Ibelieve is called AbiWord. Although it's native output will not be word, last time I talked with them they were working on a word filter.
Chances are that there will be hooks to the Tk toolkit for perl and python, and the undelying OS is BSDish so people WILL be able to write for BSD cross platfom if they want to. AQUA may end up becoming Open Source we don't know that and so could cocoa and carbon. Chances are that gtk and qt and other toolkits and API's will be available to use on MAC OS X. As well as the JDK which has swing. Ye sit wil be integrated into the OS, but you shoudl still be able to write pure swing apps. Obviously you don't program but in one language.
hmm last time I checked both India and was it China, did produce nuclear devices. I don't think that the data on those hard drives is a 'sensitive' as everyone thinks.
This is true, but something else people can do is write in Java, python, perl, C, C++, POSIX, etc. Personally I think that if the base is BSDish then cocoa and carbon, have to run on top of the BSD layer. It should be a fairly easy to port cocoa and carbon to other UNIXes in theory then. Also hardware drivers for OS X will still have to be done at the BSD level, so that more drivers for the Mac should be ported rather quickly to BSD. Once ported to BSD then moving them to Linux or other UNIXes should be fairly easy. THe kernel to OS X is open source ish.
Who the hell leaves nuclear secretes on hard drives just lying around? Even if this is a secure area, why were they left out? Don't they normally put these things in secure volts? Also why would you take the HD's out of the computer in the first place, unless you were planning on moving the data? Personally I think this shows gov mentality at its best. But that is just my opinion.
Lets face it. Someone really screwed up. The data is probably copied. The damage is done. Who's the spy? Also what kind of secretes about nuclear tech can these drives have? Can't you find that stuff on the internet or in your local library?.. let see take some uranium, or is it pletonium.. hmmm
As for recovery CD.. I think that I can understand doing this if the cdrom is configured specifically for a computer. The BIOS may be used as as key, when the software detects thsi key it installs the necessary files to recovery this sytem. Hopefully this would include the proper sound drivers, cdrom drivers and all the other. If that is what they are planning then it is a good idea.
Something to consider is that most computer retail companies in the past were not giving any cdrom with the machines that they sold> If it does crash or something happens, the user would have to take it back to them. They were not giving them a cdrom nor were they giving them the software to reinstall from a crash. The manufactures (mostly small companies) were taking the cdroms and using them to install copies on dozons of computers. M$ sued some of these companies, over lost revenue. I am not sure that this is directed at the end user, but at computer companies. To prevent computer companies from taking one copy of M$ and installing it on dozons of computers. Personally I use RH Linux, so M$ can do what they want. I don't need their stuff at home. They way it is going, with OS X coming next year, M$ OS may be on its way out. If OS X is stable and works well, many people I know will be turning to Macs AT WORK TOO!
I am not sure but I think that this may be just a UNIX problem. I bought a scanner a while back and it came with windows software to do the conversion for me. I have not tried mixed images and text yet, as I have not had a need. TextBridge is the name of the software. I found some info about it here http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10? SP=10023&PN=1&V1=160950&xid=19198 It is not open source and it is fairly inexpensive IMHO. If you buy a scanner I think that they come with this software. It says it can retain color and images. Maybe this and wine? OR maybe enough people will ask them to port to Linux. I think that right now it outputs to word and wordperfect.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me 2 years in my last company to find out what kind of company they were and they are involved with several law suits, for failing to deliver a product. Since I did not agree with there business practices I left. My suggestion is taht if you find yourself working for a company and you do not like the way that they are then you have 2 choices. Oneis to change them the second is to leave. IF you aare in a position to make the changes then do so. If not then leave. It may take you a while to find a new job but it will be worth it in th elong run. I know that leaving M$ may be difficult as I have heard that they have great benifits and probably pay the best in the Seattle are, but I think that you have to ask your self is the money worth it? If you can live with yourself because of the money then you are a borg / drone. If not then get out and stop complaining about what people are calling you.
Lets face it people you are and always will be associated with who you work for. Microsoft is a company that has a reputation for swallowing up little companies like the borg. Resistance is usually futile, just look at all the companies that they ate. Viseo, Frontpage (yes they were a company), web TV, lets see any more ..yes! This is who they are. If you work for them don't pretend that you don't know.If you are saying but I need the money then you are just using the money as an excuse to justify there behavior and you are just as bad as they are. If you say, but I like what I do, then again you need to find that job at a company that you can live with the reputaion of. This is not just M$ that I am refering to either. Any company has corporate culture and a 'way of doing business'. YOu have to find out these ways an dthen get in a company that fits how you are and what you want to be associted with.
QYB
send flames > /dev/null
I think if palm were to take the palm 5, and make it with 8Meg of RAM (like the Vx) then add color screens, as well as built in wireless (like the palm VII), and color cases as well as an expansion slot on the side (instead of the top like the handsprings) They would have something really hot. Probably expensive too. Oh FYI the handspring has the IR port on the side which I felt made it hard to interface with. I tried transferring my business card to someone with a handspring and it was kind of clumsy.
send flames > /dev/null
send flames > /dev/null
As far as debian, caldera, or redhat goes, it depends on your admins. All have package management, and rpm vs dpkg could be debaited till the univers collapses and the truth is it depends on what you prefer. I personally found installing debian to be tough cause the last version I tried did the dependency checking at each step where redhat does it after you select the packages. At least that was my experience. 64 Meg of RAM is plenty for Linux boxes.
alien will convert packages between the two systems, and gnorpm and kpackage will handle rpms and kpackage also handles debs as well.
My personal feeling on teh deb vs RH debate is that many companies look at RH because there is a company behind it where debian there is not. Yes there is storm and corel which are based on debian, but if you look at the different software ports that are done to Linux many large companies go with RH first. Just look at IBM. IBM released there via voice technology for Linux (you can buy the software for 59.95 or so) and they recommend RH 6.0 or later.
Others may feel different and they can, but this is my opinion and experience. Incidentally I have been enjoying RH since I first tried 5.1
send flames > /dev/null
Yes you must respect privacy, but you shoudl also state clearly and in laymans terms what your privacy policy is, and stick with it even when times are tough.
What you should log depends on what your needs are and also what services you provide. Remeber though that you may be held responsibe for someone abusing your network, so it may be wise to keep track of who is on it and from where.
send flames > /dev/null
Java is supposed to be cross platforms, but it does not work this way all the time. There are so many different versions of the JDK and they have so many incompatibilities, which Java version would the C# to Java convert to anyway? What would it buy you to convert to Java when there would probably be COM/DCOM or COM+ code in there too?
send flames > /dev/null
On a note about the trailers, I feel like I have seen half the movie already. THere are 4 or 5 trailers out there and they show some hot action. Never the less, my team is going to see the X-men this friday when it opens :-). I really wonder how many copies of this movie area already floating around on the net bootlegged even though the movie is not out yet.
send flames > /dev/null
First he did not have adequate backups. While I know that this happens at many sites, I personally have backups of my home system. At most I'd have to reinstall, but most of my config files I back up often enough that reconfiguring my system would be at most a few hours. Granted I have one system, and he has many, but that being the case is just more of a reason to make sure that you have adequate backups of your system.
Second why did he talk to the hacker in the first place? He should have just started going through machine by machine and make sure that they were secure. Checking ALL of the software and looking to see what he was using that may have exploits. Yes a good place to go to find this info is on the net as the hacker said, but that is probably where the hacker went to find this out.
Thirdly the sys admins should have been rebuilding and updating their system when they first found out they had been hacked. Box by box.
Lastly if they did not catch this hacker and lock him away, I am sure that they have not heard the last of him, and if they are not careful they are going to get hacked again.
send flames > /dev/null
While I do agree that this is bad practice on the site developers side, I do not think that it is against the law. Also how are you going to sue someone or take legal action if they are not in Arazona, or even the US? I imagine that since these sites have basically ben blacklisted on slashdot it is only a matter of time before most of them stop that practice anyway. I know that it is a cheezy way to keep visitors. Obviously if a site needs to do something like this then they have no content that will make people want to return.
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But since it is here, I did think it was rather interesting that they use their layers to deal with many of the problems. It sounds like the carbon layer is the one that will deal with some of the issues between aqua / cocoa and darwin. I am not sure about this. I know that in Linux the filenames that have spaces in them are quoted strings when used on the command line. I don't think that this should have been such a big issue for BSD or OS X. I am looking forward to seeing the finished product and it will be interesting if they have a version of OS X that runs on Intel as well. I have heard that darwin has been ported, but the question is will Apple port carbon, cocoa, and aqua to Intel as well. If OS X runs on Intel, I'd be interested in trying it out. I am not inteested in buying a new Mac box only to find out that I do't like OS X because of some reason.
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The reality is that most web servers are needed for stability and uptimes, and performance is second. The company I work at has both Linux and Solaris, as well I think that there may be some BSD here too. Solaris is stable and its hardware is also pretty good BUT not great. Most of the problems that we have had were because of hardware failures or defective hardware, not the OS. We also use multiple servers so clustering is a must and loadbalancing also.
Who puts a 4 procesor box on a web site? We do! We have many boxes that are 2 to 8 processor boxes. Of course we don't use that many intel boxes either except for Linux.
What makes this really funny are all the people who defend windows all the time probably not realizing that Yahoo, MS Hotmail, and yes slashdot all use UNIX or Linux. Yahoo uses Solaris and FreeBSD, Microsoft Hotmail does too. And guess what slashdot uses Linux / perl / and mysql. Hmm you visit a site that runs hardware you hate. hmm aren't you the hypocrite?
What windows 2000 really needs to prove is not that it can outperform LInux or Solaris, cause I am sure you can tweak it to be just as good if not better, it needs to prove that it can have 200+ days of uptimes on an extremely busy web site. So what company will be the first to have a large scale site and use win2k?
Lastly we recently bought a site that uses windows servers and we are moving them all to Solaris. Hmmm. Can we see some Solaris 4 processor boxes benchmarked against Linux and Windows? Oh we have and it blew both of them away!
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On the note of personal information, just think how much info yahoo and slashdot have on you if you have an account on either. Slashdot know what sites you like as well as what authors you don't like, and what your opinions are. Hmm makes you think a bit. If you have yahoo mail, they have all your sent mail if they want to keep it as well as all your recieved mail if they want to keep that too. If you have any of their other services, like calendar or my.yahoo, they know more about you. The www is not an information trading formum. YOu want a service you must give up information on your self. If they hav laws about protecting childrenm why do we not start to implemnet laws to protect the adults as well?
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I wonder how much this would slow down the software industry. Rather than get a product out to market ASAP, they would need to now make sure that all the bugs were out of it. I know at a company that I worked for we had lots of known bugs that were not fixed and the underlying API that we used had bugs in it that we could not get fixed.
How would one enforce waranties(sp) on free software? Or would this be a case where all software would have to come with a file describing the warrenty(sp) on the software. Even with a warrenty(sp) what would the software have to be required of doing? Never crashing?
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First let me say, that this was something I one said (here on slashdot about a year ago.. hmm whos readiong my posts?) would make a killer OS. MAC GUI with a UNIX kernel. Their is no denying that UNIX as an OS is stable, it has had over 20 years to get this way. Their is also no denying that Mac makes some really easy to use GUI, after all they were one of the first ones to actually market one. (first apples then macs).
That being said and probably flamed by now. I think that I should state what I think MAC will have to do to get its OS X flying into the masses. The GUI will need to be able to configure everything. I mean everything, else it will be only half done. However you will still need to be able to edit the files manually. This can be done. Linuxconf is a good example of a GUI that can be modified. Although it is not perfect as linuxconf does not do everything people will expect a mac to. I mean when they advertise plug in the phone line and plug in the power and you are connected to the internet, I think people will expect the same of everything else. Just like most mac stuff is supposed to be. EASY. The reason that I say that they will need to let people be able to edit the files is because some people just hate GUI. Since this is based on BSD you will get those command line people, who think that the command line is faster or easier. Well that depends on what you are used to too. Personally I use both but that is another arguemnt.
The next thing that they will have to do is come up with some way of allowing people access to the source code of not just darwin, but also carbon and cocoa and aqua. Either this or be quick to fix bugs that may arrise. And there will be bugs! There is always bugs in software. If they have bugs that do not get fixed they will turn off many developers. My suggestion is that they implement a bugzilla method or something like it where people can search and enter bugs.
That this the end of that rant, and my .02 cents on that subject. On the topic of ESR, I'd have to say good luck. There is a lot of beaurocracy(sp?) in the patent office. Personally I think it needs to become privitized like the US postal service and regulated. I also think that it needs to have more interaction with the outside community. Maybe patent application announcements. When someone files for a patent maybe they should have a message board about this. A place where the public can see what applications have been submitted. Then if someone knows of some relevant prior art there can be a way for this person on the outside to contact the patent examiner or the patent office with this information. If they need to they could implement a screening process of all this data that would flood into their office. money would not be an issue to the USPTO either as they are one of the few goverment agencies that actually make revenues. In the year that I worked their that took in 119 million dollars. 98 million of which billy clinton took to balance the budget. If they were privitized like the post office this would not have happened and the money would have been able to go back into the USPTO. I hope that ESR has some good karma going for him and wish him the best of luck in this endeavor.
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It would be nice to know what the requirements are of this spec. If the spec were or is an open spec it would then be possible to make Linux, OpenBSD, or any other OS abide by this spec.
I think that it is important to understand as some have pointed out that trusted does not mean secure. This is one of those english language semantic things. Trusted means that they have a set of requirements that this OS / program is supposed to do and it does them. Basically they can trust that if this happens the software will do what they wanted it to do. Secure means that if someone tries to hack in or exploit a buffer overrun then the system wont let them. OpenBSD is secure, NT is trusted. This does not mean that NT is not secure, it is in its own right, but I wont get into that. It also does not mean that OpenBSD cannot be made to be trusted either.
The advantage to them of Open Source would be that if the sytem is not trusted, they have the source and can make or have the system made into a trusted system.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to take a secure system and make it trusted as well?
Just my .02 cents, but I think that the goverment needs to start rethinking some of its policies of doing things.
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However their is another reason that this is good. It means that efforts will not have to be duplicated across the board anymore. While it is still possible and probable, it will make more apps for a linux desktop. Those who want to run kde can still run kde and those who want to run gnome can still do that (personally I use windomaker with gnome panel and kfm).
The only issue that I see arrising is that this may mean that in order to use this functionality that you must have qt installed along with the kde base, libs and sup, and some other parts opf kde as wel as gnome core and gnome libs. It they can make an independant common set of libs that depend neither on kde nor gnome it will work. This is not much of an issue as most people will be willing to install both sets of libs if need be. However this would be problems with distros like debian. Also how would the license for these libs read? If it uses gnome which is gpl would this become a gpl library or qpl? I know that this is in the early stages, but with the recent incident with debian this should be something that the developers need to think about. How can they do this and keep their seperate license in tact?
It will certainly be interesting to see this acomplished.
Shut up or I'll replace you with a very small script!
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Now I have tried wordperfect 8 for Linux, and the word filter does not work on more than half the documents that i have. StartOffice 5.1 does a pretty good job of this and from what I hear is it is getting better. However I know that if you start doing some complex things in word then startoffice may not read all of the document. They are working on this though. Apparently startoffice 5.2 is supposed to have pretty good support for word files.
On another note their are several project that are open source that are working to reading these formats, on of which Ibelieve is called AbiWord. Although it's native output will not be word, last time I talked with them they were working on a word filter.
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Who the hell leaves nuclear secretes on hard drives just lying around? Even if this is a secure area, why were they left out? Don't they normally put these things in secure volts? Also why would you take the HD's out of the computer in the first place, unless you were planning on moving the data? Personally I think this shows gov mentality at its best. But that is just my opinion.
Lets face it. Someone really screwed up. The data is probably copied. The damage is done. Who's the spy? Also what kind of secretes about nuclear tech can these drives have? Can't you find that stuff on the internet or in your local library?.. let see take some uranium, or is it pletonium.. hmmm
As for recovery CD.. I think that I can understand doing this if the cdrom is configured specifically for a computer. The BIOS may be used as as key, when the software detects thsi key it installs the necessary files to recovery this sytem. Hopefully this would include the proper sound drivers, cdrom drivers and all the other. If that is what they are planning then it is a good idea.
Something to consider is that most computer retail companies in the past were not giving any cdrom with the machines that they sold> If it does crash or something happens, the user would have to take it back to them. They were not giving them a cdrom nor were they giving them the software to reinstall from a crash. The manufactures (mostly small companies) were taking the cdroms and using them to install copies on dozons of computers. M$ sued some of these companies, over lost revenue. I am not sure that this is directed at the end user, but at computer companies. To prevent computer companies from taking one copy of M$ and installing it on dozons of computers. Personally I use RH Linux, so M$ can do what they want. I don't need their stuff at home. They way it is going, with OS X coming next year, M$ OS may be on its way out. If OS X is stable and works well, many people I know will be turning to Macs AT WORK TOO!
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Does this help??
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