Yup. I am a very early Linux adopter (ran a Fidonet node on 0.99), but I decided to just leave XP Pro on my new laptop, because it's just soo much easier - no messing around with drivers that either don't work or are outdated, MSN just works, there's decent graphics software available (as long as Gimp is 8 bit don't ask me to call it decent), etcetera etcetera. And Cygwin+putty do a nice job of supporting my sysadmin thingies.
Besides, current Linux desktops are just as bloated and unusable as current Windows desktops. The difference simply isn't worth the effort.
Cloudscape was originally crated by Cloudscape, Inc. (I contracted for them at one time), which was later acquired by Informix.
At the time, it was a fairly complete and well-performing database with some nifty multi-database synchronization features, so even though I'm not involved in Java programming anymore this can turn out to be a quite interesting addition to Joe. A. Opensourcecoder's toolkit.
I just happened to run Freenet (latest stable snapshot) over the weekend, because I like the idea a lot. Being written in Java, I thought that my spanking new XP2600+/1G RAM box could cope with the load, and indeed it managed to stay running after I added some extra swap space. But even major popular content (index pages and porn, probably;-)) failed to load (I let it run during ~24 hours), and when I did too many parallel requests, the thing hung up.
So as far as I'm concerned, they're a bit too early being proud of themselves. And I'll leave out the rant about why they have chosen the completely wrong language for this experiment....
It can be simple, the problem is that you have to start with a good foundation, and neither Windows nor Linux provide that at the moment (as much as a Linux-lover as I am, Linux' security design is just as fundamentally broken as Windows, the difference is just bugs and a slightly more secure default configuration. Plus the lack of popularity and higher diversity, which makes it a less attractive target).
It can be done better, by building - from the ground up - a capability-based system. It has been done as well: see EROS and The E Programming Language for example. Like other good ideas, however, it just doesn't take off because of the inertia built into the market. However, with the current rate of worms, viruses, spams, and whatnot, it won't be long before moving to a new and secure OS becomes an attractive proposal.
Thanks for the story. Now I know again why I buy IBM (no 'on hold', support within contractual time, and they just dispatch an engineer instead of asking me to fiddle around). More expensive? Well, if every call I logged with IBM during the last three years would be a call to Dell, it'd cost me probably a full-time job;-).
Predictions are, by the way, that Dell will continue to keep growing and service quality will continue its decline.
If you *really* want to learn photography, go manual. Use slide film - that'll teach you to learn how to assess various ligthing conditions, because slide film is unforgiving (in fact, it's just as forgiving as negative film, but you don't have the printing process to correct mistakes).
I'm heavily into Yashica and Contax gear - the Yashica FX-3 is a dead-cheap fully manual body (but good quality), and the great thing is that you can put Contax Carl Zeiss lenses on it. $200 would get you quite a way towards an FX-3 with a CZ 50mm lens (second-hand, of course), and you will make everyone absolutely jealous with the quality of the resulting pictures. There's nothing more frustrating than really trying to make a nice shot and then discovering that the camera+lens isn't up to your expectations, so go for the best glass available.
Disadvantage: the upgrade path is a bit expensive. There's a lot of good quality Yashica and Contax gear, including even digital, but you'll quickly blow a lot of cash;-).
Second disadvantage: maybe you won't like all-manual. In that case, go for any consumer-level SLR from one of the big names - Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Minolta; it doesn't really matter, the quality is mostly similar in the consumer lines, so just surf websites until you see blue in the face and - most important - go to a big camera store (if you're near NY, B&H Photo) and TRY THEM OUT! You can't make pictures with rave reviews, you need to be able to handle the thing as well as possible. Oh, and try to buy at least one 'real' lens - if only a 50mm/1.7. You will appreciate the difference with consumer-grade zoom lenses.
Well, tell me how to let sound follow my desktop with esd and I'll grant you the point.
I'm hopping from place to place, taking my desktop with me (thanks to X and especially Xvnc), but when I'm sitting in an office in Amsterdam and press 'play' on xmms, the music goes off at home...
If Xouvert solves this, that'd be absolutely insanely great news.
Change to something like IM2000 (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html), spam vanishes in a poof. Keep around with the current broken system, and we'll have ever more draconian laws in ever more futile attempts to suppress it.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I don't even build the PHP module anymore. As a shared platform hoster, having all my customer sites running under a single UID is just plain too much risk. I don't think FastCGI allows, what'll we call it, 'session setuid affinity', but something like that would be cool.
Until then, PHP is an executable just like Perl and Python, and if that costs too much performance I'll shove another cheap pizzabox in the rack (that's why everyone is using a load-balancer these days:-)).
My 2 eurocents: I run a webhosting company. 1.3 works, and I've waited for 2.0 to stabilize a bit - just like with Linux kernels, I like to skip the first 10 or 15 dot-releases if possible;-).
Now, we've setup a test platform, and when our customers are happy we'll move it into production in a month or so, but secondary to our 1.3 setup. In about a year, we'll shut down the old setup and 'force-migrate' anyone that's still using it.
Targeting the SME market, we need to provide that sort of stability because my customers typically are not I-want-to-run-the-latest-and-greatest geeks and, having paid a lot of cash for their website, they're happy it runs and they don't care on what version it runs.
I think that most of my colleagues are in the same position, so 1.3 will probably be the major version for at least a year to come.
(Modules aren't the issue for me - in fact, I've not built the PHP module for 2.x because with all the script kiddies hacking around, I have decided to forward.php requests to a cgi-bin PHP interpreter sitting behind sbox).
At least engineers make time to do drawings, documentation and inspections. If software people would be qualified engineers, they'd ask for that time as well.
A bridge engineer is responsible enough not to use the equivalent of sprintf() and other buffer-overflow-inducing things (in fact, he'd probably not use C but some safer language).
Both of these would arguably slow down software development, cut back heavily on features (and on feature bloat), and would improve quality and security. When society finds the latter more important than the former, we'll see licensed software engineers.
Build a brand. Give away the source, but sell the binaries for a lot of money by branding them. When you brand the binaries, it means you compiled them (no viruses or trojans), you tested them, and you will support them. Essentially you are asking money for your reputation - as you were the original coders, you are the best experts, thus stand the best chance to build a brand around it.
I think that proprietary software necessarily needs to reinvent lots of wheels before it lands at the point where it can start making a difference. Whereas a lot of competing open source projects start with all the basics in place and immediately jump to the making a difference point. So I don't buy that "advantage" of proprietary software.
Why are you referring to the EU here? All the ligitation is done on the US side of the pond, we are much more reasonable here.
I live in the Netherlands and I have connection and a secondary website (apart from my main website in the US) with an ISP that has shown a firm dislike of organizations that try to influence the contents of their user's websites, generally not giving in before seizures and search warrants are actually executed. Among others, they host a lot of anti-Scientology stuff and sponsor radio B-92 over the Internet (radio B-92 is the Yougoslavian opposition radio station).
All the politically correct stuff is on my main website, while stuff like DeCSS resides in the Netherlands. As reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is explicitely legal in the EU, I don't see anyone taking/that/ one down.
AFAIK, the only exception in the EU is the UK, where things seem to be really going wrong, but we're more-or-less used to that and basically ignore them;-)
When I reason from first principles, I think that proprietary software is bad, too. Rather than whining about how hard it is too make money without it, I'd rather have that people spend their creative energy on thinking how to make money with it.
Two reasons why I think proprietary software is bad:
It forces competition, not cooperation. Even between KDE and Gnome, there's a lot of code and idea-sharing. With proprietary software, that's a no-no.
It somehow assumes that ideas are yours and yours only to exploit. A very strange notion which has been countered over and over again by the fact that important inventions typically are done by multiple people, independently. A great software idea isn't yours! It has been build up in hundreds of minds, you just applied some final thinking work! (a shitty idea typically is yours;-))
That leaves us with the problem how to sustain a healthy software industry without proprietary software. This is an extremely hard problem, but still not a reason to throw your axioms overboard (and that's what you should admire in RMS, whatever you think from him personally).
Funny. Yesterday I was cleaning out some old stuff and hit an attempt by yours truly to write a SF novel some eight years ago - chips glued to fingernails in order to control computers were very prominent in it. I should probably sue someone, shouldn't I?;-)
Luckily, I was wrong on the Net - mine was based on a CCITT standard, not on TCP/IP...
Sorry, but from Sun's perspective, selling hardware is all that matters. They never have made huge profits from Solaris licensing, because Solaris comes for free with their boxes.
Now and then Sun's a bit hard to follow, but if you keep in mind their (hugely succesful) strategy of using all these actions in order to sell more of these expensive purple boxes, a lot of pieces fall in place. With software, at best they'll try to recover expenses.
If Sun thinks it can cut costs by dropping Solaris and switching to Linux and it won't hurt their sales a bit, it'll disappear in the blink of an eye.
One of the things you're going to have to consider that these corporations have been dealing with TIGHTLY CLOSED source for the last several DECADES.
Sorry, but check your local NIS and NFS sources. Chances are good they're still full of Sun copyrights. If there's one company that has a longstanding experience with releasing source code, it's Sun.
There's of course one large fringe benefit here in the Netherlands: unlimited supplies of semi-legal marihuana and a fully legal red light district;-).
Between.nl and.us, I've heard that $1=NLG1 when talking about salaries. I've worked in Germany and Switzerland as well, and strangely enough that holds there, too (more or less): $1 = DEM 1 = SFR 1 = NLG 1, if you ask around 100.000 of the local things you have a nice salary to live off...
OBTW: if you're a Java coder and want to try out Dutch fringe benefits, mail me.
I've just returned from the session Dick Gabriel was referring to: the second Jini community meeting, held this week in Annapolis, MD.
Ok, this guy isn't sold on freeware (let's use the technically correct term instead of some marketing buzzword here, it is important). However, especially for Jini, the alternative he's come up with sounds very promising: a community of people and organizations who mutually agree on the SCSL, guide Jini to acceptance, and make sure that standards are abided by.
I do happen to think that for Jini standards are a bit more important than for Linux. The idea is to put Jini in all sorts of devices, and if I were Canon I'd wanted to have some guarantees that the stuff would be long-term compatible before adding expensive hardware to millions of consumer devices (a dollar of hardware added on the design table is like $5-10 added to the street price...). So a community with a clear common interest (making Jini work benefits everybody, this is not a place where it is very useful to have many competing platforms) with some legal protection against Microsoft doing the embrace-and-extend thingy is the idea here.
The word from Richard, but also from other senior Sun employees at the meeting who were closely involved with agreeing with lawyers upon the terms of the SCSL were clear. First, there's going to be a second-generation SCSL which is better to understand - the lawyers overshot a bit here. Second, Sun is entirely neutral with either of the possible Jini business models: Sun being the benevolent dictator or Sun handing over IP, license rights, etcetera to the Jini Community. Remember, this were Sun geeks speeking from their heart (I vouch for this), not a PR bureau defending the party line. For me, it means that Sun is thinking about what's going on, trying to find new models, and doing their best to belong to the Good Guys.
For me, that's all you can expect from a major public corporation.
Cool. It essentially means you're forced to run MSIE with Administrator rights, the equivalent of which (running Netscape as root) I'd never dream of under Unix. Basically, my strategy is to mirror the FTP update site of my favorite-Linux-vendor-of-the-day (SuSE at the moment) and only become root to install the rpm's after I have verified what the rpm patches, what the impact could be, and why I would want to apply the patch in the first place. No vendor can make that decision for me, what's critical to one user is totally unimportant to another one.
And, as others have said, security of a system comes down to the competence of the people administrating it. However, Microsoft is doing such an optimal job of shielding information from the average user that it takes above-average competence just to get the information needed to make informed decisions (applying an SP, IMNSHO, is not making an informed decision).
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. I am a very early Linux adopter (ran a Fidonet node on 0.99), but I decided to just leave XP Pro on my new laptop, because it's just soo much easier - no messing around with drivers that either don't work or are outdated, MSN just works, there's decent graphics software available (as long as Gimp is 8 bit don't ask me to call it decent), etcetera etcetera. And Cygwin+putty do a nice job of supporting my sysadmin thingies.
Besides, current Linux desktops are just as bloated and unusable as current Windows desktops. The difference simply isn't worth the effort.
Cloudscape was originally crated by Cloudscape, Inc. (I contracted for them at one time), which was later acquired by Informix.
At the time, it was a fairly complete and well-performing database with some nifty multi-database synchronization features, so even though I'm not involved in Java programming anymore this can turn out to be a quite interesting addition to Joe. A. Opensourcecoder's toolkit.
I just happened to run Freenet (latest stable snapshot) over the weekend, because I like the idea a lot. Being written in Java, I thought that my spanking new XP2600+/1G RAM box could cope with the load, and indeed it managed to stay running after I added some extra swap space. But even major popular content (index pages and porn, probably ;-)) failed to load (I let it run during ~24 hours), and when I did too many parallel requests, the thing hung up.
So as far as I'm concerned, they're a bit too early being proud of themselves. And I'll leave out the rant about why they have chosen the completely wrong language for this experiment....
It can be done better, by building - from the ground up - a capability-based system. It has been done as well: see EROS and The E Programming Language for example. Like other good ideas, however, it just doesn't take off because of the inertia built into the market. However, with the current rate of worms, viruses, spams, and whatnot, it won't be long before moving to a new and secure OS becomes an attractive proposal.
Thanks for the story. Now I know again why I buy IBM (no 'on hold', support within contractual time, and they just dispatch an engineer instead of asking me to fiddle around). More expensive? Well, if every call I logged with IBM during the last three years would be a call to Dell, it'd cost me probably a full-time job ;-).
Predictions are, by the way, that Dell will continue to keep growing and service quality will continue its decline.
If you *really* want to learn photography, go manual. Use slide film - that'll teach you to learn how to assess various ligthing conditions, because slide film is unforgiving (in fact, it's just as forgiving as negative film, but you don't have the printing process to correct mistakes).
;-).
I'm heavily into Yashica and Contax gear - the Yashica FX-3 is a dead-cheap fully manual body (but good quality), and the great thing is that you can put Contax Carl Zeiss lenses on it. $200 would get you quite a way towards an FX-3 with a CZ 50mm lens (second-hand, of course), and you will make everyone absolutely jealous with the quality of the resulting pictures. There's nothing more frustrating than really trying to make a nice shot and then discovering that the camera+lens isn't up to your expectations, so go for the best glass available.
Disadvantage: the upgrade path is a bit expensive. There's a lot of good quality Yashica and Contax gear, including even digital, but you'll quickly blow a lot of cash
Second disadvantage: maybe you won't like all-manual. In that case, go for any consumer-level SLR from one of the big names - Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Minolta; it doesn't really matter, the quality is mostly similar in the consumer lines, so just surf websites until you see blue in the face and - most important - go to a big camera store (if you're near NY, B&H Photo) and TRY THEM OUT! You can't make pictures with rave reviews, you need to be able to handle the thing as well as possible. Oh, and try to buy at least one 'real' lens - if only a 50mm/1.7. You will appreciate the difference with consumer-grade zoom lenses.
Well, tell me how to let sound follow my desktop with esd and I'll grant you the point.
I'm hopping from place to place, taking my desktop with me (thanks to X and especially Xvnc), but when I'm sitting in an office in Amsterdam and press 'play' on xmms, the music goes off at home...
If Xouvert solves this, that'd be absolutely insanely great news.
Change to something like IM2000 (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html), spam vanishes in a poof. Keep around with the current broken system, and we'll have ever more draconian laws in ever more futile attempts to suppress it.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I don't even build the PHP module anymore. As a shared platform hoster, having all my customer sites running under a single UID is just plain too much risk. I don't think FastCGI allows, what'll we call it, 'session setuid affinity', but something like that would be cool.
:-)).
Until then, PHP is an executable just like Perl and Python, and if that costs too much performance I'll shove another cheap pizzabox in the rack (that's why everyone is using a load-balancer these days
My 2 eurocents: I run a webhosting company. 1.3 works, and I've waited for 2.0 to stabilize a bit - just like with Linux kernels, I like to skip the first 10 or 15 dot-releases if possible ;-).
.php requests to a cgi-bin PHP interpreter sitting behind sbox).
Now, we've setup a test platform, and when our customers are happy we'll move it into production in a month or so, but secondary to our 1.3 setup. In about a year, we'll shut down the old setup and 'force-migrate' anyone that's still using it.
Targeting the SME market, we need to provide that sort of stability because my customers typically are not I-want-to-run-the-latest-and-greatest geeks and, having paid a lot of cash for their website, they're happy it runs and they don't care on what version it runs.
I think that most of my colleagues are in the same position, so 1.3 will probably be the major version for at least a year to come.
(Modules aren't the issue for me - in fact, I've not built the PHP module for 2.x because with all the script kiddies hacking around, I have decided to forward
- At least engineers make time to do drawings, documentation and inspections. If software people would be qualified engineers, they'd ask for that time as well.
- A bridge engineer is responsible enough not to use the equivalent of sprintf() and other buffer-overflow-inducing things (in fact, he'd probably not use C but some safer language).
Both of these would arguably slow down software development, cut back heavily on features (and on feature bloat), and would improve quality and security. When society finds the latter more important than the former, we'll see licensed software engineers.Build a brand. Give away the source, but sell the binaries for a lot of money by branding them. When you brand the binaries, it means you compiled them (no viruses or trojans), you tested them, and you will support them. Essentially you are asking money for your reputation - as you were the original coders, you are the best experts, thus stand the best chance to build a brand around it.
I think that proprietary software necessarily needs to reinvent lots of wheels before it lands at the point where it can start making a difference. Whereas a lot of competing open source projects start with all the basics in place and immediately jump to the making a difference point. So I don't buy that "advantage" of proprietary software.
I live in the Netherlands and I have connection and a secondary website (apart from my main website in the US) with an ISP that has shown a firm dislike of organizations that try to influence the contents of their user's websites, generally not giving in before seizures and search warrants are actually executed. Among others, they host a lot of anti-Scientology stuff and sponsor radio B-92 over the Internet (radio B-92 is the Yougoslavian opposition radio station).
All the politically correct stuff is on my main website, while stuff like DeCSS resides in the Netherlands. As reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is explicitely legal in the EU, I don't see anyone taking /that/ one down.
AFAIK, the only exception in the EU is the UK, where things seem to be really going wrong, but we're more-or-less used to that and basically ignore them ;-)
Two reasons why I think proprietary software is bad:
- It forces competition, not cooperation. Even between KDE and Gnome, there's a lot of code and idea-sharing. With proprietary software, that's a no-no.
- It somehow assumes that ideas are yours and yours only to exploit. A very strange notion which has been countered over and over again by the fact that important inventions typically are done by multiple people, independently. A great software idea isn't yours! It has been build up in hundreds of minds, you just applied some final thinking work! (a shitty idea typically is yours
;-))
That leaves us with the problem how to sustain a healthy software industry without proprietary software. This is an extremely hard problem, but still not a reason to throw your axioms overboard (and that's what you should admire in RMS, whatever you think from him personally).'40s: "machine language has it virtues but can never substitute for rewiring the computer"
'50s: "assembly has it virtues but can never substitute for machine language"
'60s: "high-level languages have their virtues but can never substitute for assembly"
I smell a pattern here...
Luckily, I was wrong on the Net - mine was based on a CCITT standard, not on TCP/IP...
Now and then Sun's a bit hard to follow, but if you keep in mind their (hugely succesful) strategy of using all these actions in order to sell more of these expensive purple boxes, a lot of pieces fall in place. With software, at best they'll try to recover expenses.
If Sun thinks it can cut costs by dropping Solaris and switching to Linux and it won't hurt their sales a bit, it'll disappear in the blink of an eye.
I just hope they've learned something here...
Sorry, but check your local NIS and NFS sources. Chances are good they're still full of Sun copyrights. If there's one company that has a longstanding experience with releasing source code, it's Sun.
Between .nl and .us, I've heard that $1=NLG1 when talking about salaries. I've worked in Germany and Switzerland as well, and strangely enough that holds there, too (more or less): $1 = DEM 1 = SFR 1 = NLG 1, if you ask around 100.000 of the local things you have a nice salary to live off...
OBTW: if you're a Java coder and want to try out Dutch fringe benefits, mail me.
I've just returned from the session Dick Gabriel
was referring to: the second Jini community meeting, held this week in Annapolis, MD.
Ok, this guy isn't sold on freeware (let's use the
technically correct term instead of some marketing
buzzword here, it is important). However, especially for Jini, the alternative he's come up
with sounds very promising: a community of people and organizations who mutually agree on the SCSL, guide Jini to acceptance, and make sure that standards are abided by.
I do happen to think that for Jini standards are a bit more important than for Linux. The idea is to put Jini in all sorts of devices, and if I were Canon I'd wanted to have some guarantees that the stuff would be long-term compatible before adding expensive hardware to millions of consumer devices (a dollar of hardware added on the design table is like $5-10 added to the street price...). So a community with a clear common interest (making Jini work benefits everybody, this is not a place where it is very useful to have many competing platforms) with some legal protection against Microsoft doing the embrace-and-extend thingy is the idea here.
The word from Richard, but also from other senior Sun employees at the meeting who were closely involved with agreeing with lawyers upon the terms of the SCSL were clear. First, there's going to be a second-generation SCSL which is better to understand - the lawyers overshot a bit here. Second, Sun is entirely neutral with either of the possible Jini business models: Sun being the benevolent dictator or Sun handing over IP, license rights, etcetera to the Jini Community. Remember, this were Sun geeks speeking from their heart (I vouch for this), not a PR bureau defending the party line. For me, it means that Sun is thinking about what's going on, trying to find new models, and doing their best to belong to the Good Guys.
For me, that's all you can expect from a major public corporation.
Yeah, "they" pioneered it in, err.., VMS...
And, as others have said, security of a system comes down to the competence of the people administrating it. However, Microsoft is doing such an optimal job of shielding information from the average user that it takes above-average competence just to get the information needed to make informed decisions (applying an SP, IMNSHO, is not making an informed decision).
7. Where can I buy MS Word for 50 dollars? I don't agree with their pricing data at all..