Sky is smart for using a P2P architecture, a cool solution to an engineering problem. I have serious concerns about the partial uninstallation issue though.
Was the broken uninstaller a mistake or a "feature"? They have something to gain from using your computer as a P2P host. If, say, an investigation produced emails showing it was in the design spec, has a fraud been comitted? Deceiving someone to profit at their expense (resources--bandwith, CPU, etc) sounds like fraud. Have they broken the law?
If I download an mp3 off a file-sharing network, that's stealing. Because I'm not going to buy the album now, and that's a tangible loss of revenue for the record label. Lost revenue = stealing.
But what if I had no intention of ever buying the album. In other words, the probablity of revenue from me from that album was exactly zero. Then I download the tracks off kazaa. How am I hurting the label? How am I stealing?
The labels imply that the Opportunity Cost of an "illegal" download is buying the album. What if it's not?
Hydrogen by itself is dangerous and poisonous, but the greatest danger lies in Hydrogen's ability to bond with oxygen (and like 40% of our atmosphere is oxygen by the way) to form di-hydrogen monoxide. Have you ever seen the damage that does to human lungs? scary stuff.
Just a thought: The rest of the world lumps all of us IT people together; the distinction between, say, a "developer" and "sysadmin" means nothing to my non-geek friends.
I don't think stuff like this happens often to sysadmins or DBAs. How often do you come into work on a monday and decide to migrate to xfs because you read on slashdot over the weekend that SGI ported it to linux, and SGI is cool? Likewise, how often does an Oracle DBA decide on Monday to move some production tablespaces over to rawfs from cooked, because she read a whitepaper from Oracle on Saturday that talked about performance increases from raw filesystems?
I've written a lot of code, and also sysadmin'd an awful lot of servers, and in my experience probably 90% of "production outages" are software changes--exactly like the article said--poor change control, etc etc. So, what's the point of dynamic multipathing, patching, dual power supplies, etc etc, when most problems occur because someone got excited and forgot a semicolon somewhere?
Is it fair to say that sysadmins fix things and developers break them? What is different about a software engineer's brain than a systems engineers? Talk amongst yourselves:)
This isn't so crazy, so let's calm down. Windows NT is a POSIX-compliant operating system, so I'm not surprised if there's a non-trival amount of Unix-like development going on in Redmond.
This is a big win for Linux, and that is cool, but performance is only half the battle.
The executives at my company are very interested in linux, because of the outrageous leap in processing power per dollar, and the reductions in CPU-based licensing costs for software like Oracle is staggering. The concern, though, is stability.
Sun Fire and Enterprise servers are really expensive, but they stay up all the time. Swapping a failed processor or NIC or memory stick without halting the box is really important on a mission-critical server. Likewise, a well built Sun box never panics, and if it ever does, Sun will insist that their engineers look at the crash dump to figure out what went wrong.
I think Linux has won the performance battle, but what about the stability battle? You need to win both to win the war.
At $23.50/month, AOL has less customers than at $20.00/month.
Price goes up, quantity goes down-- that's a demand curve.
nb: There's other reasons for the decline too, AOL and MSN blow as ISPS and don't support linux and censor tons of content in the newsgroups, and break your Network Connections and...
Good troll, but I could definitely use it. I own tons of NT apps, and this would be cheaper (and easier) than buying another copy of NT. You troll about "flawed architecture" is irrelevant.
MS isnt here to make your life easier, they're here to make money.
Hehe actually, according to Microsoft, you're the irrelevant one. That's not a personal insult, because to them I'm irelevant too. You own tons of NT apps? How much revenue did you generate for MS this year in NT licensing?
The enterprise is what counts because that's where the money is. And I think that's where NT fails. So will clones, even if they're free.
OK, i'll give as specific of an example as I can think of...
My example is about Oracle, the cornerstone of enterprise computing, and the engine that drives the infrastructure of most companies on the planet.
We had Oracle 8.1.7 up and running on Windows NT 4.0 SP6.0. It would lock up, it wasn't very fast, and was a generally unreliable system. This box talked to our bank about taxes and stuff for our e-commerce site so this was a problem. So we backed the box up, installed RedHat 6.2 on the same machine, installed Oracle, restored the data, and found...
a 40% increase in transactions per minute, and a crash rate that fell below the noise threshold of the network as a whole.
We didn't change anything other the operating system. Same amount of RAM, same CPUs, etc. The only difference is the thing that sits on top of the processor and schedules things to run and communicate with the disks and network, the OS. That sold linux to quite a few skeptics in our IT department, as it should.
Were there optimizations to NT that we don't know about? I'm sure. Is that fair? Absolutely! Folks who have your level of internals experience aren't working in corporate IT departments, they're at MS or IBM and/or contributing to projects like ReactOS. I'm your typical IT guy, and my example is a typical IT project. And in this project, linux put NT to shame:)
I certainly don't want to start a flamewar here, but I'm not sure if I think this is a useful product. It sounds like the objective of this project is to create a free clone of Windows NT, so people have choice. In order for this to be useful, I need to be able to install an app on either Windows NT 4.0 or ReactOS X.Y, and have the application not know the difference, right?
In order to make that work, the OS must look the same to the app. That means APIs and, at a higher level, the architecture, has to be the same. The reason we don't run any Windows NT based systems in production is that the architecture is flawed. It's a desktop OS with "enterprise" features tacked on. The fundamental architecture of NT is why it sucks, in my mind. To emulate that, even if you give it away for free, doesn't solve the security issues, the performance issues, etc etc.
I have a lot of respect for these guys, kernel hacking from the ground up is tough stuff, but I'd rather see them contributing their talent to the Linux or BSD projects rather than copying a flawed architecture.
Of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.
*Microsoft Windows98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Mac OS compatible
First off, how can it be OS independent and have a list of compatible OS's? If it's a hardware-based solution, then how can some OS's not work with it?
I heard that the Challenger disaster was the beginning of the end for NASA, and it took them a decade to regain trust and confidence. I'm sure we can forget about Mars by 2010
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the tax credit is for development/production but not usage/consumption of OSS.
Sky is smart for using a P2P architecture, a cool solution to an engineering problem. I have serious concerns about the partial uninstallation issue though.
Was the broken uninstaller a mistake or a "feature"? They have something to gain from using your computer as a P2P host. If, say, an investigation produced emails showing it was in the design spec, has a fraud been comitted? Deceiving someone to profit at their expense (resources--bandwith, CPU, etc) sounds like fraud. Have they broken the law?
Can anyone familiar with UK law comment?
http://www.jerriblank.com/swcep205.html
What if the file system supported an index attribute that proper search programs (windows search, google desktop, UNIX locate, etc) could respect?
chmod -i file
With the search vendors racing to own desktop search and microsoft working on WinFS, is "indexability" now an important security attribute for a file?
Why is this map any more controversial than any other network map?
Prior Screenshot with dots
Disclaimer - IANAL, I'm also Canadian ...not that there's anything wrong with that
If I download an mp3 off a file-sharing network, that's stealing. Because I'm not going to buy the album now, and that's a tangible loss of revenue for the record label. Lost revenue = stealing.
But what if I had no intention of ever buying the album. In other words, the probablity of revenue from me from that album was exactly zero. Then I download the tracks off kazaa. How am I hurting the label? How am I stealing?
The labels imply that the Opportunity Cost of an "illegal" download is buying the album. What if it's not?
'High above the internet where packets never reach, satellites may be able to detect the slashdot effect--before it strikes.'
...If maintaining the security of networked machines running Microsoft Windows is part of your job...
I had a nightmare about that last week. wierd.
Hydrogen by itself is dangerous and poisonous, but the greatest danger lies in Hydrogen's ability to bond with oxygen (and like 40% of our atmosphere is oxygen by the way) to form di-hydrogen monoxide. Have you ever seen the damage that does to human lungs? scary stuff.
>>>>"Windows NT is a POSIX-compliant operating system....."
>>So your saying SCO now owns POSIX!
No, I'm saying Windows NT is a POSIX-compliant operating system
Just a thought: The rest of the world lumps all of us IT people together; the distinction between, say, a "developer" and "sysadmin" means nothing to my non-geek friends.
I don't think stuff like this happens often to sysadmins or DBAs. How often do you come into work on a monday and decide to migrate to xfs because you read on slashdot over the weekend that SGI ported it to linux, and SGI is cool? Likewise, how often does an Oracle DBA decide on Monday to move some production tablespaces over to rawfs from cooked, because she read a whitepaper from Oracle on Saturday that talked about performance increases from raw filesystems?
I've written a lot of code, and also sysadmin'd an awful lot of servers, and in my experience probably 90% of "production outages" are software changes--exactly like the article said--poor change control, etc etc. So, what's the point of dynamic multipathing, patching, dual power supplies, etc etc, when most problems occur because someone got excited and forgot a semicolon somewhere?
Is it fair to say that sysadmins fix things and developers break them? What is different about a software engineer's brain than a systems engineers? Talk amongst yourselves :)
This isn't so crazy, so let's calm down. Windows NT is a POSIX-compliant operating system, so I'm not surprised if there's a non-trival amount of Unix-like development going on in Redmond.
Invalid procedure call or argument [WebClass::WebClass_Start] AnalystWebReporting
real nice that their product breaks their slashdotted website.
The executives at my company are very interested in linux, because of the outrageous leap in processing power per dollar, and the reductions in CPU-based licensing costs for software like Oracle is staggering. The concern, though, is stability.
Sun Fire and Enterprise servers are really expensive, but they stay up all the time. Swapping a failed processor or NIC or memory stick without halting the box is really important on a mission-critical server. Likewise, a well built Sun box never panics, and if it ever does, Sun will insist that their engineers look at the crash dump to figure out what went wrong.
I think Linux has won the performance battle, but what about the stability battle? You need to win both to win the war.
At $23.50/month, AOL has less customers than at $20.00/month.
...
Price goes up, quantity goes down-- that's a demand curve.
nb: There's other reasons for the decline too, AOL and MSN blow as ISPS and don't support linux and censor tons of content in the newsgroups, and break your Network Connections and
I agree with you 100% If I hadn't posted in this i'd mod ya up :)
Anonymous coward, would you say:
"Blame it on the driver, not Kia, dumbass"
if we found out that a BMW M5 is 40% faster than a Kia, being driven by the same driver on the same racetrack?
MS isnt here to make your life easier, they're here to make money.
Hehe actually, according to Microsoft, you're the irrelevant one. That's not a personal insult, because to them I'm irelevant too. You own tons of NT apps? How much revenue did you generate for MS this year in NT licensing?
The enterprise is what counts because that's where the money is. And I think that's where NT fails. So will clones, even if they're free.
OK, i'll give as specific of an example as I can think of ...
My example is about Oracle, the cornerstone of enterprise computing, and the engine that drives the infrastructure of most companies on the planet.
We had Oracle 8.1.7 up and running on Windows NT 4.0 SP6.0. It would lock up, it wasn't very fast, and was a generally unreliable system. This box talked to our bank about taxes and stuff for our e-commerce site so this was a problem. So we backed the box up, installed RedHat 6.2 on the same machine, installed Oracle, restored the data, and found ...
a 40% increase in transactions per minute, and a crash rate that fell below the noise threshold of the network as a whole.
We didn't change anything other the operating system. Same amount of RAM, same CPUs, etc. The only difference is the thing that sits on top of the processor and schedules things to run and communicate with the disks and network, the OS. That sold linux to quite a few skeptics in our IT department, as it should.
Were there optimizations to NT that we don't know about? I'm sure. Is that fair? Absolutely! Folks who have your level of internals experience aren't working in corporate IT departments, they're at MS or IBM and/or contributing to projects like ReactOS. I'm your typical IT guy, and my example is a typical IT project. And in this project, linux put NT to shame :)
I certainly don't want to start a flamewar here, but I'm not sure if I think this is a useful product. It sounds like the objective of this project is to create a free clone of Windows NT, so people have choice. In order for this to be useful, I need to be able to install an app on either Windows NT 4.0 or ReactOS X.Y, and have the application not know the difference, right?
In order to make that work, the OS must look the same to the app. That means APIs and, at a higher level, the architecture, has to be the same. The reason we don't run any Windows NT based systems in production is that the architecture is flawed. It's a desktop OS with "enterprise" features tacked on. The fundamental architecture of NT is why it sucks, in my mind. To emulate that, even if you give it away for free, doesn't solve the security issues, the performance issues, etc etc.
I have a lot of respect for these guys, kernel hacking from the ground up is tough stuff, but I'd rather see them contributing their talent to the Linux or BSD projects rather than copying a flawed architecture.
Of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Good point, but then why isn't linux or solaris on the list? I've used USB with both.
From the article:
*Device driver free, operating system independent
*Microsoft Windows98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Mac OS compatible
First off, how can it be OS independent and have a list of compatible OS's? If it's a hardware-based solution, then how can some OS's not work with it?
I heard that the Challenger disaster was the beginning of the end for NASA, and it took them a decade to regain trust and confidence. I'm sure we can forget about Mars by 2010