Here we have someone talking about NT, Linux and the Enterprise, who obviously knows very little about either NT or the Enterprise.
"How many "common customers" use 4-way NT boxes? Very few, in my experience"
We are talking about the Enterprise. We are talking about 1000+ users on systems - in these circumstances such servers would be common. Just because lots of Linux people work with single CPU linux boxen in small companies doesn't mean that multi CPU machines are at all uncommon in larger companies.
"(Linux supports many file systems6; NT supports far fewer). Among the file systems Linux supports is SGI's XFS, recently released to Open Source, with a max file size of nearly one million terabytes7. "
I was not aware that XFS was part of linux - perhaps it has been rolled into the latest kernel version. Or perhaps we are counting third party file systems that can be used with each OS. XFS is brand new to Linux, and I am aware of very few applications that make use of it - maybe Oracle 8 does?? NTFS has been around for years, and is well supported.
". Also, Windows NT clustering is limited to failover ONLY. Linux is capable of distributed clustering ("Beowulf" technology 12), which can enhance system performance dramatically. "
I'm not at all sure I see the relevance of Beowulf clusters in the Enterprise. We are talking about large corporate IT systems, not scientific type systems.
And do you _really_ believe that Linux failover clustering is as well tested as NT's? And have you administered both kinds of cluster? Or are you infact merely re-iterating a TurboLinux press release?
". While your support options for Windows are limited, your support options for Linux are not"
I see. So you are discounting the many many 3rd party Windows support operations? Are you really saying that HP's windows support is no good? Or that the many large resellers have no idea what they are doing? Are you saying that ICL doesn't support Windows when it uses it in projects? There are far, far more people able to support NT than Linux, especially when 'support' means support of large, complex developments, rather than simply supporting a distribution, or providing general Unix Q and A style help.
"Although you can purchase local support for Microsoft products, such support is strictly limited to training and workarounds. "
This is utterly untrue.
". Microsoft Windows support is simply not in the same league. "
Rubbish. Microsoft may be no good at supporing Windows, but there are plenty of 3rd parties who are.
If you have the cash available, I consider token systems (SecurID et al) fundamentally better than host-based systems such as ssh.
You almost always want to authenticate _people_ not machines. SSH or PGP like systems that rely on a key file that resides on a particular machine are fundamentally broken for most of the purposes they are used for. The security is there, it's the functionality that's broken. Of course SSH as an encryption feature, but I'm only speaking of authentication here.
Host-based authentication for general access is as bad as having to let your bank know which cash points you'd like to use - and then they would only let access your account from those machines.
Ideally, the public-key system used in SSH would operate from a smart card rather than an encrypted file on a hard-drive, but it will be a long time before many machines are fitted with compatible smart card readers. The systems used by SecurID are transparent technologically - I use plain ol' telnet, ftp, HTTP basic auth, Radius, whatever, and I get proper two-factor authentication based on known secret and possesed secret.
I like it. Ditch SSH and give your staff cards!:-)
I don't see the problem. When I was at university they would search our home directories for stuff like password cracking tools and portscanners and so on. Big deal. It's their network, and their hardware, and their software.
I've got no time for college kids running warez sites (albeit music warez not software warez).
What's really strange is that if they go to some lame copyright seminar they get a lenient punishment. This smacks of the kind of enforced education (I use the word loosely) increasingly popular in the US as a way of treating young people of apparent delinquent behaviour. Very odd. At UCL we lost our accounts, full stop, for serious breaches of the rules. If that meant you couldn't complete your CS course then you were in big trouble.
"On the other hand, PCI isn't really all that fast anymroe anyway, so something had to change"
Well, On a Sun e450 the PCI bus is quoted at a 1GB/sec throughput, which seems pretty fast to me. Sure, there are buses out there that approach double this speed (used in SGI kit and such), but the low cost and wide acceptance of PCI makes it more useful.
There's nothing wrong with FDD and Serial. I know whole companies that are not upgrading their Macs simply because they require floppy drives. Floppy drives are useful. They are a universal standard for transportable data. A text file on a floppy can easily be read on Sparc, Intel, Mac, SGI and most other hardware you care to mention. Sneakernet is a useful out-of-band comms system for use when the network is down or not there.
Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.
Removing floppy drives from computers because they have USB and Ethernet is about as smart as removing the staircase from a 20 story building because it's got plenty of lifts in.
"Microsoft's efforts to compete in the Web media, communications, electronic, portal and e-commerce fields have generally failed. "
Well let's see. Second most popular web server (netcraft stats), most popular browser, most popular HTML authoring package, very popular server-side scripting technology (ASP). Plus most popular web-email site, competent ISP (MSN), very successful news portal (ZDnet).
Sure, all of it on the back of an OS monopoly and much if it pretty dodgy in its own right, but hardly what you'd call a general failure...
Is it wrong to bomb hospitals? Is it better to hack the hospital records so that all blood-type and allergy information is corrupt?
Is it better to bomb sewage treatment plants so that the people die of disease, or is it better to hack the computers so that sewers are allowed to overflow into the streets?
Cyber-warfare is just another step in the attempted sanitisation of war. We already know that if you maim someone with a cruise missile it's OK, but if you maim them with a machete then you're war criminal. Good to know that morality is linked to military technology.
Presumably in 20 years while our brave lads kill the enemy with computers from underground, we'll be condeming the atrocity of indiscrimate killing by out-dated Serbian smart bombs.
So let's hear it for war-by-wire. Why travel to far away places, meet interesting people and kill them when you can just kill them, eh?
P.S. I use Serbia only as a recent example of 'hi-tech good low tech bad' reporting in the news. I have no particular view on who was/is right or wrong in that war.
Perl people take pains to point out that Perl is not a CGI language. It is a language. It is weak in areas such as GUI development, but for networking, database work, or many other things it is a good, solid application development language.
It is no longer, IMHO, the best web development language - if all you are doing is web development, PHP will probably serve you better. The reason people are using Perl, is because the same skill set can be applied in so many places. Since starting work at COLT (EU telco/ISP) I have used Perl for:
1. A few one liners to sort out a messy archive of documents left on a machine
2. Automated admin of Security Dynamics ACE server (a one time password system)
3. Writing an idiot-proof menu driven program for updating ipfilter rules on Solaris boxen
4. Writing an interface so that Veritas Netbackup logs are written to a database.
5. Writing a NOCOL client to alert if an Oracle database goes down for some reason.
Perl is simply a good language for doing these kinds of tasks and many others. Those familiar with Netcraft may be interested to know that their survey software, which polls 99.x% of every web server on the web _every month_ is written in Perl (Highly modified version of LWP). Not a lightweight app.
Goldman Sachs use Perl extensively to manage their mission critical databases.
Perl may be a good CGI language, but it is more intersting, and provides greater benefits when used as an application language.
We all know that the install is the part that each distro spends most effort customising. But what other parts really matter?
Much of it simply comes down to deciding what app to make the default - as in the case of Gnome vs KDE. Here the distro maker is simply giving a vote of confidence to a particular app, rather than doing anything very innovative.
Package management is an area where distros can stand apart from each other, but unlike the install process, it introduces the possibility of incompatibilities, so there is more incentive to be cautious rather than innovative. After all, if ACME Linux decide to write a better RPM, will it be worth their trouble fighting off the cries of 'incompatible' and 'embrace and extinguish'? Money that could be better spent on an ad campaign.
Multilingual support is one area where distros have a chance to shine, not least because there seems to be little support for it in the existing foundation of GNU tools that make up the meat of every distro.
But, it seems to be that what really sets distros apart is branding and mindshare. I use SuSE not for Yast, not for ISDN support, but because I see them as _strategically_ aligned with KDE, and I see KDE as being new and innovative (and European!) (no flames please).
If I was into clustering I might go with RH because I see them as aligned with relevant kernel development and the Beowulf project.
If I was into bsd style init scripts and curses, I'd go with Slackware. (Joke).
At the moment distros that really go for innovation run (even greater) risks. In the marketplace of openness, no one wants to be seen to break even de facto standards. No one wants to get too friendly with closed software. No one wants to say that another distro is wrong (solidarity, brothers!) - there's room for everyone.
I was chatting to Computacenter (massive EU reseller) about Linux on the Proliant range. They were big fans of the idea, and said that Compaq would be supporting Linux on all Proliant models shortly.
That doesn't mean Compaq are selling boxes direct with pre-installed Linux. It means that Compaq are supporting their resellers who wish to install Linux on Compaq boxes and ship those to customers.
For corporate sales, most of the market is via large resellers who provide value added services, so this is significant stuff.
Yes, I shifted from copyright to patent without mentioning it, and yes you are right to point out the differences.
After re-reading the BBC write up it does appear that they are trying to patent the actual data of the gene sequence, which is insane.
The only argument in defence of this that I can think of is to say that the human genome is a mechanism for describing the human, and they are patenting this mechanism - the data is simply "Human-ness". A pretty weak argument, rather like the Ordinance Survey try to patent the height datum for the UK because its a mechanism they invented to describe the data of "The UK".
As for related issues of patenting Genes that you have constructed yourself, I think that's less controversial - it may be a dubious claim, but it's not heinous in the same way patenting the Human Genome would be.
"it's original intention was to protect businesses I'd think, but at the same time to promote "innovation" and "creativity". "
No. The Patent system was introduced to promote innovation and creativity, full stop. It was considered that people would not be able to spend years working on new things if there was no way to get a reward at the end, so patents were set up so that the discovery was made public at once, but that the discoverer had commercial rights for a while so they could recoup their losses.
Things have been rather altered in recent times, in favour of business and away from the public domain.
First off, HUGO, the Human Genome Project, will in any event publish this particular information in due course.
A discovery can reasobaly considered IP in some situations, and so can a description. For instance, the Ordinance Survey have the rights to their particular description of the topology of Britain. All they've done is draw something that everyone has access to, but they've drawn it in a particular way. The OS can sue me if I use their maps in a book without permission. They can't sue me if I use their maps to work out how tall a mountain is, and then put that information in my book. Nor can they sue me if I draw my own maps from my own observations.
What is Celera proposing? That no-one may every make use of the human genome data without their permission? Or are they simply saying that if they go to the trouble of describing the genome in a useful way, and packaging it up, that people will have to pay to get that package. If the latter, I see no problem.
If they are trying to patent the Genome itself, then its farcical. If they are trying to patent their tools for working it out, or their method of displaying it, or their tools for making it searchable, that's fine.
A particular description of something is patentable, the thing described isn't necessarily.
Now there are grey areas. Could the first person (it may have been the OS) to come of with the idea of contour lines have declared them IP? Well, that's a grey area, and that's the controversial area, but it's unclear to what extent Celera are trying to do something like that.
Ooops. Don't get me wrong, I'm not _against_ non-linux apps - quite the opposite. I just think it's confusing and misleading when a generic app that is open source (and so runs on Linux) is labelled "A Linux app" in a way that makes it appear the two notions are deeply linked.
A pure Linux app, as you put it, would be one that required some feature of the Linux kernel, or relied on closed source software that was only released or Linux (or that was itself closed source and only compiled for Linux).
You are right in focussing on apps not OS's. That's why I think its silly to go on about "Linux apps like Gnome" becuase it makes people think that someone the functionality of Gnome requires or is linked to Linux, which it isn't.
"Seriously, this is the continuation of a wonderful trend - more time developing Linux applications is good for everyone. "
Gnome isn't a Linux app anymore than Netscape is, or MySql is or Apache is. It is an application that may or may not run on a number of platforms. Likewise KDE, or 98% of the other things you find on you linux box.
You may argue that this is just semantics, and that any app that runs on Linux is 'a linux app', but that's misleading.
However, as we see this more and more "Gnome, the linux desktop system" or "KDevelop, and IDE for Linux" it starts to look like people are thinking only in terms of Linux and its applications. This brings back the bad old days when OS's were judged on what apps were available, and apps were judged by what OS they ran on, or what OS they were native to (if they were later ported).
Linux isn't the de-facto host system for all OS apps, whatever you may think.
"Accept the cookie, but don't click the banner. They won't be getting any useful info from you."
Untrue, sadly. The gif is served from doubleclick, and your cookie is sent out with the GET request, so they will already know that you are looking at the site.
I have to say, although I dislike privacy invasion as much as the next person, I fail to see the problem as a big one in this case.
Cookies are a simple incentive. Turn them off, no tracking, and no personalisation. Turn them on, and you pay for you personalisation with tracking. Cookies simply allow tracking, how you use that tracking is up to you - either to customise a page, like/., or to work out what someone likes to buy. Hey, it's optional.
I realise most people don't know it's happening and don't know how to turn it off, but that's missing the point again.
Let's suppose there's a case of real abuse of the data gleaned through this, and that case comes to light. Newspapers everywhere will be able to publish info on how to turn cookies off, it will be well publicised, and brought to a stop. Already there are browsers like the KDE Konqueror that let you exclude certain sites from storing cookies, while allowing the rest to pass. It's a flexible technology that can grow around blatant abuse.
There are many invasions of privacy, from CCTV to office drug tests that are far more insidious than this.
Sure, it's cheap and tacky and insulting an annoying, but it's not the end of the world.
I think you are right, but its only a problem at the moment.
When I make a decision on what distro to use for a large internet hosting centre, I don't do it on the basis of who gives most community support, or employs known kernel hackers. I do it on the basis of which distro is best suited to the task and which distro I can get most support on (be it community support or commercial).
At the moment RedHat have brand recognition right across the Linux spectrum from hobbyist to corporation - but they have it on the merits of Linux primarily, and RedHat secondarily.
Let us suppose that a major company - say, Tarmac, decided it was fed up with client licenses for Windows and shifted all its planning and logistics departments onto Linux desktops - a rollout of perhaps 2000 boxes (I know nothing about Tarmac, these figues are fiction!).
Now that would get headlines, and if they use Caldera for that rollout, suddenly things would look different. Other companies think - well, we know Caldera works for large client roll-outs - but that RedHat just seems to be used for servers. Lets go with Caldera.
Suddenly, Caldera has a great image as the stable solid corporate distro, while RedHat is the bleeding edge server distro.
You'd think that if they were going to boost their credentials with the letters RMS they might have done the guy a favour and called it
RMS GNU/Linux
But then that would dilute the (de facto)Linux brand, and confuse the customers. After all, Linux is the cool late 90's phenomenon, while GNU is long-haired 1970's programmers.
Linux brand = Nice young man who works for All-American pioneers Transmeta, and who is taking on big bad Bill. Cool new OS that is surfing the Internet wave to steal a march on NT. Neat word with an 'x' and the end.
GNU brand = Old guy with long hair who doesn't work for anybody and hangs around at some university. Some wierd programs with two and three letter names. Named his movement after a smelly animal from Africa.
I rather like the idea of these two things being combined. But image is everything......
Um, I realise that these questions are probably vetted by technical chappies before getting to J. Paxman, but even so, how many BBC viewers would really understand the question, and how many of those would care?
Re:Fragmentation of KDE/GNOME components...
on
KDE Looks Ahead
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· Score: 5
OK, here's my take on it.
Unix apps are integrated. It's called a pipe. Crude in its native shell syntax form, but when the pipe is used behind the scenes, it becomes very transparent to the user. Some people like this, and use something like Emacs that integrates lots of bits of Unix with each other. Some people don't like it, and only use it occasionally from the shell.
The main interesting thing about the pipe is that it sends linear data back and forth. The second interesting thing is that the pipe connects applications.
In windows, something different happens. Linear data is considered obsolete. Data is expressed as an object. Pipes work badly with objects. Simple objects could be serialized and sent over pipes, which is slow. Complex objects can't even do this, as some structures are very hard to serialize.
Furthermore, windows doesn't join up applications, it joins up objects. Objects send objects to each other. The file browser object sends a file object to the uncompress object, rather than the filebrowser app reading a file, piping the file to the uncompress object and waiting to get the uncompressed data back.
Why the difference? Two reasons. Firstly, GUI programming is VASTLY easier with a comprehensive object oriented framework. Once you start working with objects, it becomes easier when everything is an object. And once everything is an object, it's easy to integrate everything with everything else.
Secondly, it does seem that new computer users are more data focussed than function focussed. When my mum has a document on her computer she expects to be able to read it by performing certain actions. She expects to be able to use the same actions if the document is compressed. Whether or not you consider this a reasonable expectation will place you in one of two different camps in the UI world.
If you agree that this is reasonable, it becomes sensible to put a decompress object in the document viewer, so that it can handle such data seamlessly. In fact, you might even decide to put the decompress object in the file, so it could decompress itself at will, in any context. That would depend on the file, the application and so on.
If you don't agree you'll be aghast at all this. Your draw will drop at the idea of bloating a file by adding functionality to it. The data should remain a nice simple blob of bytes that can be fed through nice simple functions one by one.
I like both. They are radically different approaches that work in radically different solutions. I like editing config files with vi. I like editing emails with Eudora. I would HATE to do it the other way round.
DCOM/COM (or equivalents) make patent sense to me. To ignore the power of distributed object systems seems daft. There is alot of head-in-the-sand 'ASCII always worked for us' attitude from the Unix camp which I think is stupid. But it is also stupid to think that just because you've gone to the trouble of creating a great object framework that you should put everything in it. Microsofts 'management console' app is a great example of unwanted objectification.
Like much of computing there are two camps, both of which see only the good points of themselves, and the bad points of the opposition. Neither camp is a great solution for everything, but both camps are too pig-headed to co-operate.
Already, I see KDE apps like Kwrite that accept no command line arguments, so I can't launch it with any specified options. Gack. Just because Kwrite can be passed a file object from Konqueror, why should you prevent it being passed data in a stream from the shell?
On on the other side, there are plenty of people who are opposed to C++ on principle, who think Unicode will go away if they ignore it, and who can't see the point in multi-threading.
Test for mechanical UI's have shown that most people expect the 'positive' pole of a modal device (positive == 'on' 'yes' 'OK' 'save' 'accept' etc) to be down for vertical switches and right for horizontal switches. (and 'in' for switches on the Z plane )
Thus, to switch a power socket on you press the switch down.
Accordingly, for Computer UI's the modal dialogue should have the OK on the right and the cancel on the left.
In my youth I was into radio controlled model airplanes, and read an article on radio transmitter interface design (a pretty complex interface for a plane, which has to be operated by two thumbs and two fingers, while your eyes are mostly looking at the plane, not the device), which highlighted these notions among others. I wish I'd kept the article - there was obviously a lot of thought around the area of physical interface design, that computer people would do well to read up on.
Slashdot Mirror
Here we have someone talking about NT, Linux and the Enterprise, who obviously knows very little about either NT or the Enterprise.
"How many "common customers" use 4-way NT boxes? Very few, in my experience"
We are talking about the Enterprise. We are talking about 1000+ users on systems - in these circumstances such servers would be common. Just because lots of Linux people work with single CPU linux boxen in small companies doesn't mean that multi CPU machines are at all uncommon in larger companies.
"(Linux supports many file systems6; NT supports far fewer). Among the file systems Linux supports is SGI's XFS, recently released to Open Source, with a max file size of nearly one million terabytes7. "
I was not aware that XFS was part of linux - perhaps it has been rolled into the latest kernel version. Or perhaps we are counting third party file systems that can be used with each OS. XFS is brand new to Linux, and I am aware of very few applications that make use of it - maybe Oracle 8 does?? NTFS has been around for years, and is well supported.
". Also, Windows NT clustering is limited to failover ONLY. Linux is capable of distributed clustering ("Beowulf" technology 12), which can enhance system performance dramatically. "
I'm not at all sure I see the relevance of Beowulf clusters in the Enterprise. We are talking about large corporate IT systems, not scientific type systems.
And do you _really_ believe that Linux failover clustering is as well tested as NT's? And have you administered both kinds of cluster? Or are you infact merely re-iterating a TurboLinux press release?
". While your support options for Windows are limited, your support options for Linux are not"
I see. So you are discounting the many many 3rd party Windows support operations? Are you really saying that HP's windows support is no good? Or that the many large resellers have no idea what they are doing? Are you saying that ICL doesn't support Windows when it uses it in projects?
There are far, far more people able to support NT than Linux, especially when 'support' means support of large, complex developments, rather than simply supporting a distribution, or providing general Unix Q and A style help.
"Although you can purchase local support for Microsoft products, such support is strictly limited to training and workarounds. "
This is utterly untrue.
". Microsoft Windows support is simply not in the same league.
"
Rubbish. Microsoft may be no good at supporing Windows, but there are plenty of 3rd parties who are.
If you have the cash available, I consider token systems (SecurID et al) fundamentally better than host-based systems such as ssh.
:-)
You almost always want to authenticate _people_ not machines. SSH or PGP like systems that rely on a key file that resides on a particular machine are fundamentally broken for most of the purposes they are used for. The security is there, it's the functionality that's broken. Of course SSH as an encryption feature, but I'm only speaking of authentication here.
Host-based authentication for general access is as bad as having to let your bank know which cash points you'd like to use - and then they would only let access your account from those machines.
Ideally, the public-key system used in SSH would operate from a smart card rather than an encrypted file on a hard-drive, but it will be a long time before many machines are fitted with compatible smart card readers. The systems used by SecurID are transparent technologically - I use plain ol' telnet, ftp, HTTP basic auth, Radius, whatever, and I get proper two-factor authentication based on known secret and possesed secret.
I like it. Ditch SSH and give your staff cards!
I don't see the problem. When I was at university they would search our home directories for stuff like password cracking tools and portscanners and so on. Big deal. It's their network, and their hardware, and their software.
I've got no time for college kids running warez sites (albeit music warez not software warez).
What's really strange is that if they go to some lame copyright seminar they get a lenient punishment. This smacks of the kind of enforced education (I use the word loosely) increasingly popular in the US as a way of treating young people of apparent delinquent behaviour. Very odd. At UCL we lost our accounts, full stop, for serious breaches of the rules. If that meant you couldn't complete your CS course then you were in big trouble.
"On the other hand, PCI isn't really all that fast anymroe anyway, so something had to change"
Well, On a Sun e450 the PCI bus is quoted at a 1GB/sec throughput, which seems pretty fast to me. Sure, there are buses out there that approach double this speed (used in SGI kit and such), but the low cost and wide acceptance of PCI makes it more useful.
There's nothing wrong with FDD and Serial. I know whole companies that are not upgrading their Macs simply because they require floppy drives. Floppy drives are useful. They are a universal standard for transportable data. A text file on a floppy can easily be read on Sparc, Intel, Mac, SGI and most other hardware you care to mention. Sneakernet is a useful out-of-band comms system for use when the network is down or not there.
Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.
Removing floppy drives from computers because they have USB and Ethernet is about as smart as removing the staircase from a 20 story building because it's got plenty of lifts in.
"Microsoft's efforts to compete in the Web media, communications, electronic, portal and e-commerce fields have generally failed. "
Well let's see. Second most popular web server (netcraft stats), most popular browser, most popular HTML authoring package, very popular server-side scripting technology (ASP). Plus most popular web-email site, competent ISP (MSN), very successful news portal (ZDnet).
Sure, all of it on the back of an OS monopoly and much if it pretty dodgy in its own right, but hardly what you'd call a general failure...
Is it wrong to bomb hospitals? Is it better to hack the hospital records so that all blood-type and allergy information is corrupt?
Is it better to bomb sewage treatment plants so that the people die of disease, or is it better to hack the computers so that sewers are allowed to overflow into the streets?
Cyber-warfare is just another step in the attempted sanitisation of war. We already know that if you maim someone with a cruise missile it's OK, but if you maim them with a machete then you're war criminal. Good to know that morality is linked to military technology.
Presumably in 20 years while our brave lads kill the enemy with computers from underground, we'll be condeming the atrocity of indiscrimate killing by out-dated Serbian smart bombs.
So let's hear it for war-by-wire. Why travel to far away places, meet interesting people and kill them when you can just kill them, eh?
P.S. I use Serbia only as a recent example of 'hi-tech good low tech bad' reporting in the news. I have no particular view on who was/is right or wrong in that war.
here
Perl people take pains to point out that Perl is not a CGI language. It is a language. It is weak in areas such as GUI development, but for networking, database work, or many other things it is a good, solid application development language.
It is no longer, IMHO, the best web development language - if all you are doing is web development, PHP will probably serve you better. The reason people are using Perl, is because the same skill set can be applied in so many places. Since starting work at COLT (EU telco/ISP) I have used Perl for:
1. A few one liners to sort out a messy archive of documents left on a machine
2. Automated admin of Security Dynamics ACE server (a one time password system)
3. Writing an idiot-proof menu driven program for updating ipfilter rules on Solaris boxen
4. Writing an interface so that Veritas Netbackup logs are written to a database.
5. Writing a NOCOL client to alert if an Oracle database goes down for some reason.
Perl is simply a good language for doing these kinds of tasks and many others. Those familiar with Netcraft may be interested to know that their survey software, which polls 99.x% of every web server on the web _every month_ is written in Perl (Highly modified version of LWP). Not a lightweight app.
Goldman Sachs use Perl extensively to manage their mission critical databases.
Perl may be a good CGI language, but it is more intersting, and provides greater benefits when used as an application language.
http://www.linux.org/dist/
Tells you about it.
We all know that the install is the part that each distro spends most effort customising. But what other parts really matter?
Much of it simply comes down to deciding what app to make the default - as in the case of Gnome vs KDE. Here the distro maker is simply giving a vote of confidence to a particular app, rather than doing anything very innovative.
Package management is an area where distros can stand apart from each other, but unlike the install process, it introduces the possibility of incompatibilities, so there is more incentive to be cautious rather than innovative. After all, if ACME Linux decide to write a better RPM, will it be worth their trouble fighting off the cries of 'incompatible' and 'embrace and extinguish'? Money that could be better spent on an ad campaign.
Multilingual support is one area where distros have a chance to shine, not least because there seems to be little support for it in the existing foundation of GNU tools that make up the meat of every distro.
But, it seems to be that what really sets distros apart is branding and mindshare. I use SuSE not for Yast, not for ISDN support, but because I see them as _strategically_ aligned with KDE, and I see KDE as being new and innovative (and European!) (no flames please).
If I was into clustering I might go with RH because I see them as aligned with relevant kernel development and the Beowulf project.
If I was into bsd style init scripts and curses, I'd go with Slackware. (Joke).
At the moment distros that really go for innovation run (even greater) risks. In the marketplace of openness, no one wants to be seen to break even de facto standards. No one wants to get too friendly with closed software. No one wants to say that another distro is wrong (solidarity, brothers!) - there's room for everyone.
for now.......
I was chatting to Computacenter (massive EU reseller) about Linux on the Proliant range. They were big fans of the idea, and said that Compaq would be supporting Linux on all Proliant models shortly.
That doesn't mean Compaq are selling boxes direct with pre-installed Linux. It means that Compaq are supporting their resellers who wish to install Linux on Compaq boxes and ship those to customers.
For corporate sales, most of the market is via large resellers who provide value added services, so this is significant stuff.
[reply to my own post in light of other replies]
Yes, I shifted from copyright to patent without mentioning it, and yes you are right to point out the differences.
After re-reading the BBC write up it does appear that they are trying to patent the actual data of the gene sequence, which is insane.
The only argument in defence of this that I can think of is to say that the human genome is a mechanism for describing the human, and they are patenting this mechanism - the data is simply "Human-ness". A pretty weak argument, rather like the Ordinance Survey try to patent the height datum for the UK because its a mechanism they invented to describe the data of "The UK".
As for related issues of patenting Genes that you have constructed yourself, I think that's less controversial - it may be a dubious claim, but it's not heinous in the same way patenting the Human Genome would be.
"it's original intention was to protect businesses I'd think, but at the same time to promote "innovation" and "creativity". "
No. The Patent system was introduced to promote innovation and creativity, full stop. It was considered that people would not be able to spend years working on new things if there was no way to get a reward at the end, so patents were set up so that the discovery was made public at once, but that the discoverer had commercial rights for a while so they could recoup their losses.
Things have been rather altered in recent times, in favour of business and away from the public domain.
First off, HUGO, the Human Genome Project, will in any event publish this particular information in due course.
A discovery can reasobaly considered IP in some situations, and so can a description. For instance, the Ordinance Survey have the rights to their particular description of the topology of Britain. All they've done is draw something that everyone has access to, but they've drawn it in a particular way. The OS can sue me if I use their maps in a book without permission. They can't sue me if I use their maps to work out how tall a mountain is, and then put that information in my book. Nor can they sue me if I draw my own maps from my own observations.
What is Celera proposing? That no-one may every make use of the human genome data without their permission? Or are they simply saying that if they go to the trouble of describing the genome in a useful way, and packaging it up, that people will have to pay to get that package. If the latter, I see no problem.
If they are trying to patent the Genome itself, then its farcical. If they are trying to patent their tools for working it out, or their method of displaying it, or their tools for making it searchable, that's fine.
A particular description of something is patentable, the thing described isn't necessarily.
Now there are grey areas. Could the first person (it may have been the OS) to come of with the idea of contour lines have declared them IP? Well, that's a grey area, and that's the controversial area, but it's unclear to what extent Celera are trying to do something like that.
Ooops. Don't get me wrong, I'm not _against_ non-linux apps - quite the opposite. I just think it's confusing and misleading when a generic app that is open source (and so runs on Linux) is labelled "A Linux app" in a way that makes it appear the two notions are deeply linked.
A pure Linux app, as you put it, would be one that required some feature of the Linux kernel, or relied on closed source software that was only released or Linux (or that was itself closed source and only compiled for Linux).
You are right in focussing on apps not OS's. That's why I think its silly to go on about "Linux apps like Gnome" becuase it makes people think that someone the functionality of Gnome requires or is linked to Linux, which it isn't.
"Seriously, this is the continuation of a wonderful trend - more time developing Linux applications is good for everyone.
"
Gnome isn't a Linux app anymore than Netscape is, or MySql is or Apache is. It is an application that may or may not run on a number of platforms. Likewise KDE, or 98% of the other things you find on you linux box.
You may argue that this is just semantics, and that any app that runs on Linux is 'a linux app', but that's misleading.
However, as we see this more and more "Gnome, the linux desktop system" or "KDevelop, and IDE for Linux" it starts to look like people are thinking only in terms of Linux and its applications. This brings back the bad old days when OS's were judged on what apps were available, and apps were judged by what OS they ran on, or what OS they were native to (if they were later ported).
Linux isn't the de-facto host system for all OS apps, whatever you may think.
"Accept the cookie, but don't click the banner. They won't be getting any useful info from you."
Untrue, sadly. The gif is served from doubleclick, and your cookie is sent out with the GET request, so they will already know that you are looking at the site.
But I agree, this isn't the end of the world.
I have to say, although I dislike privacy invasion as much as the next person, I fail to see the problem as a big one in this case.
/., or to work out what someone likes to buy. Hey, it's optional.
Cookies are a simple incentive. Turn them off, no tracking, and no personalisation. Turn them on, and you pay for you personalisation with tracking. Cookies simply allow tracking, how you use that tracking is up to you - either to customise a page, like
I realise most people don't know it's happening and don't know how to turn it off, but that's missing the point again.
Let's suppose there's a case of real abuse of the data gleaned through this, and that case comes to light. Newspapers everywhere will be able to publish info on how to turn cookies off, it will be well publicised, and brought to a stop. Already there are browsers like the KDE Konqueror that let you exclude certain sites from storing cookies, while allowing the rest to pass. It's a flexible technology that can grow around blatant abuse.
There are many invasions of privacy, from CCTV to office drug tests that are far more insidious than this.
Sure, it's cheap and tacky and insulting an annoying, but it's not the end of the world.
I think you are right, but its only a problem at the moment.
When I make a decision on what distro to use for a large internet hosting centre, I don't do it on the basis of who gives most community support, or employs known kernel hackers. I do it on the basis of which distro is best suited to the task and which distro I can get most support on (be it community support or commercial).
At the moment RedHat have brand recognition right across the Linux spectrum from hobbyist to corporation - but they have it on the merits of Linux primarily, and RedHat secondarily.
Let us suppose that a major company - say, Tarmac, decided it was fed up with client licenses for Windows and shifted all its planning and logistics departments onto Linux desktops - a rollout of perhaps 2000 boxes (I know nothing about Tarmac, these figues are fiction!).
Now that would get headlines, and if they use Caldera for that rollout, suddenly things would look different. Other companies think - well, we know Caldera works for large client roll-outs - but that RedHat just seems to be used for servers. Lets go with Caldera.
Suddenly, Caldera has a great image as the stable solid corporate distro, while RedHat is the bleeding edge server distro.
MainWin uses the Windows source, as far as I know, wine doesn't.
You'd think that if they were going to boost their credentials with the letters RMS they might have done the guy a favour and called it
RMS GNU/Linux
But then that would dilute the (de facto)Linux brand, and confuse the customers. After all, Linux is the cool late 90's phenomenon, while GNU is long-haired 1970's programmers.
Linux brand = Nice young man who works for All-American pioneers Transmeta, and who is taking on big bad Bill. Cool new OS that is surfing the Internet wave to steal a march on NT. Neat word with an 'x' and the end.
GNU brand = Old guy with long hair who doesn't work for anybody and hangs around at some university. Some wierd programs with two and three letter names. Named his movement after a smelly animal from Africa.
I rather like the idea of these two things being combined. But image is everything......
Um, I realise that these questions are probably vetted by technical chappies before getting to J. Paxman, but even so, how many BBC viewers would really understand the question, and how many of those would care?
OK, here's my take on it.
Unix apps are integrated. It's called a pipe. Crude in its native shell syntax form, but when the pipe is used behind the scenes, it becomes very transparent to the user. Some people like this, and use something like Emacs that integrates lots of bits of Unix with each other. Some people don't like it, and only use it occasionally from the shell.
The main interesting thing about the pipe is that it sends linear data back and forth. The second interesting thing is that the pipe connects applications.
In windows, something different happens. Linear data is considered obsolete. Data is expressed as an object. Pipes work badly with objects. Simple objects could be serialized and sent over pipes, which is slow. Complex objects can't even do this, as some structures are very hard to serialize.
Furthermore, windows doesn't join up applications, it joins up objects. Objects send objects to each other. The file browser object sends a file object to the uncompress object, rather than the filebrowser app reading a file, piping the file to the uncompress object and waiting to get the uncompressed data back.
Why the difference? Two reasons. Firstly, GUI programming is VASTLY easier with a comprehensive object oriented framework. Once you start working with objects, it becomes easier when everything is an object. And once everything is an object, it's easy to integrate everything with everything else.
Secondly, it does seem that new computer users are more data focussed than function focussed. When my mum has a document on her computer she expects to be able to read it by performing certain actions. She expects to be able to use the same actions if the document is compressed. Whether or not you consider this a reasonable expectation will place you in one of two different camps in the UI world.
If you agree that this is reasonable, it becomes sensible to put a decompress object in the document viewer, so that it can handle such data seamlessly. In fact, you might even decide to put the decompress object in the file, so it could decompress itself at will, in any context. That would depend on the file, the application and so on.
If you don't agree you'll be aghast at all this. Your draw will drop at the idea of bloating a file by adding functionality to it. The data should remain a nice simple blob of bytes that can be fed through nice simple functions one by one.
I like both. They are radically different approaches that work in radically different solutions. I like editing config files with vi. I like editing emails with Eudora. I would HATE to
do it the other way round.
DCOM/COM (or equivalents) make patent sense to me. To ignore the power of distributed object systems seems daft. There is alot of head-in-the-sand 'ASCII always worked for us' attitude from the Unix camp which I think is stupid. But it is also stupid to think that just because you've gone to the trouble of creating a great object framework that you should put everything in it. Microsofts 'management console' app is a great example of unwanted objectification.
Like much of computing there are two camps, both of which see only the good points of themselves, and the bad points of the opposition. Neither camp is a great solution for everything, but both camps are too pig-headed to co-operate.
Already, I see KDE apps like Kwrite that accept no command line arguments, so I can't launch it with any specified options. Gack. Just because Kwrite can be passed a file object from Konqueror, why should you prevent it being passed data in a stream from the shell?
On on the other side, there are plenty of people who are opposed to C++ on principle, who think Unicode will go away if they ignore it, and who can't see the point in multi-threading.
That's counter intuitive.
Test for mechanical UI's have shown that most people expect the 'positive' pole of a modal device (positive == 'on' 'yes' 'OK' 'save' 'accept' etc) to be down for vertical switches and right for horizontal switches. (and 'in' for switches on the Z plane )
Thus, to switch a power socket on you press the switch down.
Accordingly, for Computer UI's the modal dialogue should have the OK on the right and the cancel on the left.
In my youth I was into radio controlled model airplanes, and read an article on radio transmitter interface design (a pretty complex interface for a plane, which has to be operated by two thumbs and two fingers, while your eyes are mostly looking at the plane, not the device), which highlighted these notions among others. I wish I'd kept the article - there was obviously a lot of thought around the area of physical interface design, that computer people would do well to read up on.