...is that most ISPs setup DNS servers that serve everyone. This is wrong.
Checkout both Sympatico and Rogers here in Toronto. You can switch ISPs, given you manually entered the DNS, and it works.
We discovered this in Pakistan, when the national ISPs (Paknet) DNS servers would go down. We would keep a list of IPs of DNS servers from ISPs in the USA, and just use those. They'd work 90% of the time.
This is a problem for a couple of reasons. To begin with the DNS tree gets more complicated as some computers might retain old DNS IPs across ISPs, and its simply not designed for this. Its an example of bad System Administration.
This is what I wrote: "In short, you should be able to print the rules on one sheet of paper to handout/post." This is what I meant: Shouldnt be too complicated for helpdesk employees to remember.
Ticketing problems is really the only way to go, even if that takes too much time or bothers customes a lot. Its the only mechanism that works across many days, many breakdowns and many helpdesk employees. One of the biggest frustrations of the customer is seeing a new helpdesk employee try all the old methods of fixing the problem thats been already tried. The only way out: ticket everything in a database.
About girls: we had a really nice geeky girl at our place who would lug casings herself, open em up and fix jumper problems in a jiffy. That blows gender discrimination right there, but hiring for the sake of voice or looks does suck. You call someone with a problem, get someone with a really nice voice that goes uh-huh as you describe the problem, then hands it over to a scruffy-sounding guy who ends up fixing it. In this case, remove the middleman or middlewoman and connect the customers directly to the geek. Of course if you have billing issues, or stuff other than a Technical Helpdesk, you can be choosy in this way.
We also had the 30-minute rule. Noone obeyed. Why? because 60% of the people seemed to have Pentium 1s. That means trying to run windows95 on em, installing and config itself takes an hour. For some reason they even accepted 486s, and we had to work on them. As frustrating as they were, they made time pass faster. When asked why it took me 2 hours on a prob, Id just say it was a 486dx4 with windows95. Theyd just say OK.
Start out by defining the list of things the Helpdesk will help out with, like Reinstallation of Windows 95-Xp yes, Windows 3.1 no. Then the hardware Pentium133+ yes, 80386 no.
Then have knowledgeable staff. Test them once in a while and simply explain the steps to them. Dont forget to rotate em between taking calls and either answering emails or working on computers clients dropped off. Constantly being on the phone is extremely frustrating due to the hard rules of good helpdesk support. A rule of 1 or 2 hours stretch on the phone, then sent back is good.
Dont hire girls JUST because they have a nice voice. Dont discriminate on gender, age, race etc. This is because if you do, you might end up with a bunch of teenagers in the department fooling around. With enough difference between them, they'd be professional.
Now the rules. Dont make rediculous rules that might anger clients. In short, you should be able to print the rules on one sheet of paper to handout/post.
Hope this helps. Ive been part of a successful and highly-regarded Helpdesk Team, so the opinions spewed out.
Every person has a public and private key assigned by the govt. He sends his public key in each of the emails with the email has. The recepients mail app checks the key via a database run by the govt. The database can be very redundant since keys dont change much, just like DNS.
Now if the root key servers go down, after a latency the cache values go bad, email clients would then automatically accept all email. This would hold any sender accountable, at the price and risk of lack of privacy in say political mailing lists.
What is with your crowd?? I need features so I have to get lost to Windows. I need stability so I should use FreeBSD.
While a lot of middle-grounders and hardcore Linux users acknowledge FreeBSD's positive points, some FreeBSD users' distastes go to the extreme, denouncing Linux below Microsoft. This debate has been going on since around 1998 and some very vocal FreeBSD users have become the Taliban of the free software world. FreeBSD or nothing at all!
Look, theres a reason why more computers run Linux than FreeBSD and its neither the marketing nor anti-BSDism. Its pragmatism. Agreeing that FreeBSD is more stable is not giving you any ground. I'm not saying more stable by how small a margin. But youre not acknowledging the virtues of other free OSes shows how strongly biased you are.
Then again, its so hard for you to believe youre talking to a primarily FreeBSD user. Youve made it into a cult. Ive used FreeBSD on a high-traffic Internet server for over a year with a lot of things running on top of it. I continue to use it sometimes and keep an eye on its features, in case it matches my requirements AGAIN. I am a FreeBSD user too whether your vocal pack likes it or not.
It would be nice to see HP sell Alpha as standalone processors and with a chipset offering, like in x86, for AT and ATX mobos. Custom Made-in-Taiwan parts will augument the system to produce very high power to cost ratios, and might allow the Alphas survival against the Itanium, UltraSparc, PowerPC and others.
Has anyone seen the cheapest-ever duron+mobo combos from ECS where the processor is actually mounted without a holder, via solder onto the board to make the thing really cheap? I know I would buy an offering like that using Alpha. Sure I know stability and secure hardware are the main reasons people buy full servers in the first place, but not all applications demand stability and flexibility to match the power, and I havent seen offerings in this region outside of the Wintel arena.
Question # 1723971723913
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Hi Kev, (1) From what youve seen on the software landscape recently, would you say OSes and apps are getting more or less secure??
(2) How did you feel about the response of the HACKER stamp put on you?? Did you enjoy the fan mail and attention (girls?), or hated the lack of access and FBI eyes more?
(3) Do you think being a 'hacker' is worth it for the sake of improving your knowledge of OSes and protocols, and eventually ending up a security expert somewhere? Or could the result be achieved without unsuspecting attacks on other live systems?
(4) Why do you think the court let you connect to the NET now? Do you think theyve achieved their goal?
(5) Without Internet to distract you, dont you feel more focused on learning the computer in front rather than constantly checking emails/news/slashdot and tending to IM?
Moderator: sorry for the list of questions. Pick n choose.
Linux without unstable components is extremely stable. Then again we cant live without features or drivers. Theres a reason why I replaced my FreeBSD server with RedHat, just a couple of things FreeBSD didnt have despite the stability and me getting so used to it. I keep a very close eye on FreeBSD's development, but opposite of Linux, its slow on picking up features. I just have to use Linux and make sure I dont compile it with experimental stuff.
I'm a pragmatist. I go for whatever best suits my purposes, with a slight bias towards free software. In my present set of requirements (token ring + NAT + Apache+SSL+J2EE+SAMBA+Qmail), it now feels like I should head for Solaris from RedHat. To be perfect, I'll buy a Sparc machine and run solaris 9. At the end, its really the survival of the fittest for each situation among the OSes. None of them is indespensible, all need a balance of features, drivers, stability, marketing, freedom.
Not only this is a repeat AND a scam, its a very lousy one. Wording like every possible media player sounds crap and puts off any really technically minded person reading this. Hey I can write an article that claims I made a version of Linux that runs windows binaries natively and has every driver on the planet, can I get that posted on slashdot??
(1) Dont waste time posting problems on Slashdot and waiting for replys. (2) Your reputation is more important, and this is especially true during times of recession. (3) Do your best, keep awake more hours on it. Drink more Coffee. (4) Profit!
FreeBSD itself is a very unique OS, being a real UNIX, yet very free, even for commercially modified versions (unlike the GPL license). Its focus is on robustness, yet supporting a large variety of hardware, unlike Open/NetBSD. Sure NetBSD supports more architecture, but sacrifices on many other features, OpenBSD may try to be more robust but sacrifices other flexibilities.
Linux has a motherload of features, everything from Supercomputer support to watches, more hardware than FreeBSD and many other experimental crap that most OSes didnt even think about, but at that point it sacrifices stability. Sure Ive run high-availibility servers on Linux but using newer features and drivers breaks it. Linux will take its time maturing, given attention shifts to stability more than features; FreeBSD is already there.
Ever heard of MULTIPLE CHANNELS that the 802.11 uses in its bandwidth? Since that bandwidth would be mostly empty, channels of around 64k can be added to potentially half a megabit.
I really think the data per session was 1TB. This was last time I visited, when they had just started gold nucleuses. Maybe after filtering and compression it comes down to 1GB?
They were smashing gold nucleuses a while ago...
on
Visiting the Big Bang
·
· Score: 2
I went down there, right up to the gate of BNL and requested a visit. The guards denyed entry, but after a bit of whining and.5 hr wait, got me a German scientist in a little car to show me around.
Good to see security was tighter than SUNY Stonybrook. I remember walking into their radiation area without a hinderance, badging myself a radiation detector and taking a tour among the huge tanks, and old books on fission and fusion...
Anyway, in BNL, the guy took me to the Star detector area, and we met a Russian scientist who showed me the data capture machinery. The detector is connected with 10,000s of yellow ethernet-like wires in very thick bundles and entering an area where rows over rows of shelves contained custimzed cards where the cables ended. Looked MASSIVELY parallel. I think the cards (size of 1u server each) had buffers to hold the data, that then got serially taken away and compressed into ANOTHER building that did nothing but crunch data. Sadly that computer building was closed.
Later we went to his office in the theory department. There are several theoretical groups from 5 ppl to sometimes over 100. They join their heads against specific problems and the whole thing results in boring papers. But this guy had Linux on a nice VaLinux machine, running X and I think WordPerfect, and lots of proprietary apps. Oh yeah I saw Mathematica. They all know that app.
Working on now to get qualifications to be able to work there. Ive always hated corporate life.:)
I had long planned to build a very long wave radio connection with a radio guy in Pakistan, to connect them to the Internet here. I had been visiting sites to find the best way to encode digital, but this sounds perfect for the job.
802.11 over radio will also radically increase the area(useable by ISPs) . I can see it now: sitting on a remote mountain deep in Canadas country, with my solar-powered transmeta laptop, playing counterstrike with my friend, deep in the australian outback.
Cant wait to buy laptops with 802.11 over radio built in.
(1) Ethernet is below $20. TR is $2. And I mean PCI cards made in 1998.
(2) TR hubs (16 ports) are $14 CDN. Same switch for ethernet 10baseT is at least $50.
(3) Its a better technology. Handles packets by tokens rather than ad-hoc random timer transmit. On larger networks, measure the latency (networks with heavy netbios elections all the time) and you'll see a BIT of a difference.
(4) Most TR cards do most of their processing on a huge chip on the card. Equivalent ethernet cards are the Dlink 550tx and 3Com 590, but you might end up with lousy ones that offload processing to the CPU.
(5) Even an HP JetDirect TR card was $14CDN last time I checked (used).
(6) Because its cool and you can add it to your resume. I have TR, Ethernet, 802.11a/b, Fibre, arcnet and X.25 cards. Looking for more.
(7) Because I already have a huge pile of them, and the thrown away pentium1 systems I pick up arent worth buying fancy ethernets for.
(8) Because I can brag about it on slashdot.
Now give it a think. Cost should be the single biggest factor. And BTW they take CAT5.
P2P is working all fine for me ( legal stuff of course;-). Either way Kazaa isnt the only P2P software out there, and different apps use different security models. This would not only cost the RIAA alot in programming hours, its a very short-term solution. Newer versions of P2P patched against exploits and worms come out in days.
The RIAA is much better off suing popular P2P groups while newer ones mushroom all over. I'd say theyre running out of options and hacking the P2P networks isnt one of them.
... is driver support. I run my entire home network (12 hosts) on token-ring, but was forced to switch to redhat due to a buggy oltr (OC3140) driver. Beside this, FreeBSD never had another token-ring driver.
Even Linux has its own problems, not counting TX packets and lots of Soft errors on heavy traffic pausing sometimes for upto 10 sec. This is a bummer for online games.
It seems I'll be further forced to use Solaris x86 which naturally has drivers MADE by the madge/olicom people themselves. I dont yet know the quiality of their SNAT code, neet testing. Then again, I run a website on PHP/MYSQL on the same server (one ip ), and theres no PHP for Solaris. Adding GNU GCC and compiling PHP isnt a very tested solution and I'll have trouble there, but gotta try that before switching.
Would have been nice to have ONE real token-ring driver for FreeBSD. I miss its simplicity and standard on Linux, but am discovering so many new networking features on Linux its mind-boggling.
Hardware companies should release a standard driver code (based on XML) that can be translated to C for the platform and natively compiled. Token-ring equipment isnt bad for its price, but only the VERY proprietary OSes get drivers from hardware OEMs. Companies like SUN just sit back while the driver list grows (stability is also the manufacturers problem). *BSD and Linux have to rely on the developer community which is increasingly getting splintered between Linux distros and BSD flavors.
Thats exactly where we'll bite first, the little apple, then move onto bigger game. I dont think seclusion will help apple against Linux, theyve already taken up UNIX to prepare for the war, might end up being a hardware company. I'd give that 2008
There are probably more such people not popularized much. This is really a geek popularity contest, not the most influential list. Businessmen who helped UNIX advance would probably make that list, and so might professors who taught at University of California.
How about Corporate decision-makers who decided to buy UNIX when they badly needed to sell it, even in the days of the PDP?
Samba and Wine are two of the most important projects that will push Linux onto desktops and betterment of the world. Its not just a networking thingy like some people think. Having a CIFS server BETTER than windows 2000/xp is the first step into world domination.
Slashdot Mirror
Checkout both Sympatico and Rogers here in Toronto. You can switch ISPs, given you manually entered the DNS, and it works.
We discovered this in Pakistan, when the national ISPs (Paknet) DNS servers would go down. We would keep a list of IPs of DNS servers from ISPs in the USA, and just use those. They'd work 90% of the time.
This is a problem for a couple of reasons. To begin with the DNS tree gets more complicated as some computers might retain old DNS IPs across ISPs, and its simply not designed for this. Its an example of bad System Administration.
This is what I wrote:
"In short, you should be able to print the rules on one sheet of paper to handout/post."
This is what I meant:
Shouldnt be too complicated for helpdesk employees to remember.
Ticketing problems is really the only way to go, even if that takes too much time or bothers customes a lot. Its the only mechanism that works across many days, many breakdowns and many helpdesk employees. One of the biggest frustrations of the customer is seeing a new helpdesk employee try all the old methods of fixing the problem thats been already tried. The only way out: ticket everything in a database.
About girls: we had a really nice geeky girl at our place who would lug casings herself, open em up and fix jumper problems in a jiffy. That blows gender discrimination right there, but hiring for the sake of voice or looks does suck. You call someone with a problem, get someone with a really nice voice that goes uh-huh as you describe the problem, then hands it over to a scruffy-sounding guy who ends up fixing it. In this case, remove the middleman or middlewoman and connect the customers directly to the geek. Of course if you have billing issues, or stuff other than a Technical Helpdesk, you can be choosy in this way.
We also had the 30-minute rule. Noone obeyed. Why? because 60% of the people seemed to have Pentium 1s. That means trying to run windows95 on em, installing and config itself takes an hour. For some reason they even accepted 486s, and we had to work on them. As frustrating as they were, they made time pass faster. When asked why it took me 2 hours on a prob, Id just say it was a 486dx4 with windows95. Theyd just say OK.
Start out by defining the list of things the Helpdesk will help out with, like Reinstallation of Windows 95-Xp yes, Windows 3.1 no. Then the hardware Pentium133+ yes, 80386 no.
Then have knowledgeable staff. Test them once in a while and simply explain the steps to them. Dont forget to rotate em between taking calls and either answering emails or working on computers clients dropped off. Constantly being on the phone is extremely frustrating due to the hard rules of good helpdesk support. A rule of 1 or 2 hours stretch on the phone, then sent back is good.
Dont hire girls JUST because they have a nice voice. Dont discriminate on gender, age, race etc. This is because if you do, you might end up with a bunch of teenagers in the department fooling around. With enough difference between them, they'd be professional.
Now the rules. Dont make rediculous rules that might anger clients. In short, you should be able to print the rules on one sheet of paper to handout/post.
Hope this helps. Ive been part of a successful and highly-regarded Helpdesk Team, so the opinions spewed out.
Every person has a public and private key assigned by the govt. He sends his public key in each of the emails with the email has. The recepients mail app checks the key via a database run by the govt. The database can be very redundant since keys dont change much, just like DNS.
Now if the root key servers go down, after a latency the cache values go bad, email clients would then automatically accept all email. This would hold any sender accountable, at the price and risk of lack of privacy in say political mailing lists.
No
What is with your crowd?? I need features so I have to get lost to Windows. I need stability so I should use FreeBSD.
While a lot of middle-grounders and hardcore Linux users acknowledge FreeBSD's positive points, some FreeBSD users' distastes go to the extreme, denouncing Linux below Microsoft. This debate has been going on since around 1998 and some very vocal FreeBSD users have become the Taliban of the free software world. FreeBSD or nothing at all!
Look, theres a reason why more computers run Linux than FreeBSD and its neither the marketing nor anti-BSDism. Its pragmatism. Agreeing that FreeBSD is more stable is not giving you any ground. I'm not saying more stable by how small a margin. But youre not acknowledging the virtues of other free OSes shows how strongly biased you are.
Then again, its so hard for you to believe youre talking to a primarily FreeBSD user. Youve made it into a cult. Ive used FreeBSD on a high-traffic Internet server for over a year with a lot of things running on top of it. I continue to use it sometimes and keep an eye on its features, in case it matches my requirements AGAIN. I am a FreeBSD user too whether your vocal pack likes it or not.
It would be nice to see HP sell Alpha as standalone processors and with a chipset offering, like in x86, for AT and ATX mobos. Custom Made-in-Taiwan parts will augument the system to produce very high power to cost ratios, and might allow the Alphas survival against the Itanium, UltraSparc, PowerPC and others.
Has anyone seen the cheapest-ever duron+mobo combos from ECS where the processor is actually mounted without a holder, via solder onto the board to make the thing really cheap? I know I would buy an offering like that using Alpha. Sure I know stability and secure hardware are the main reasons people buy full servers in the first place, but not all applications demand stability and flexibility to match the power, and I havent seen offerings in this region outside of the Wintel arena.
Hi Kev,
(1) From what youve seen on the software landscape recently, would you say OSes and apps are getting more or less secure??
(2) How did you feel about the response of the HACKER stamp put on you?? Did you enjoy the fan mail and attention (girls?), or hated the lack of access and FBI eyes more?
(3) Do you think being a 'hacker' is worth it for the sake of improving your knowledge of OSes and protocols, and eventually ending up a security expert somewhere? Or could the result be achieved without unsuspecting attacks on other live systems?
(4) Why do you think the court let you connect to the NET now? Do you think theyve achieved their goal?
(5) Without Internet to distract you, dont you feel more focused on learning the computer in front rather than constantly checking emails/news/slashdot and tending to IM?
Moderator: sorry for the list of questions. Pick n choose.
IDE harddisks getting cheaper?? Its lowest cost is stable at about $100CDN. Its getting cheaper per megabyte, but not just cheaper.
Linux without unstable components is extremely stable. Then again we cant live without features or drivers. Theres a reason why I replaced my FreeBSD server with RedHat, just a couple of things FreeBSD didnt have despite the stability and me getting so used to it. I keep a very close eye on FreeBSD's development, but opposite of Linux, its slow on picking up features. I just have to use Linux and make sure I dont compile it with experimental stuff.
I'm a pragmatist. I go for whatever best suits my purposes, with a slight bias towards free software. In my present set of requirements (token ring + NAT + Apache+SSL+J2EE+SAMBA+Qmail), it now feels like I should head for Solaris from RedHat. To be perfect, I'll buy a Sparc machine and run solaris 9. At the end, its really the survival of the fittest for each situation among the OSes. None of them is indespensible, all need a balance of features, drivers, stability, marketing, freedom.
Not only this is a repeat AND a scam, its a very lousy one. Wording like every possible media player sounds crap and puts off any really technically minded person reading this. Hey I can write an article that claims I made a version of Linux that runs windows binaries natively and has every driver on the planet, can I get that posted on slashdot??
(1) Dont waste time posting problems on Slashdot and waiting for replys.
(2) Your reputation is more important, and this is especially true during times of recession.
(3) Do your best, keep awake more hours on it. Drink more Coffee.
(4) Profit!
FreeBSD itself is a very unique OS, being a real UNIX, yet very free, even for commercially modified versions (unlike the GPL license). Its focus is on robustness, yet supporting a large variety of hardware, unlike Open/NetBSD. Sure NetBSD supports more architecture, but sacrifices on many other features, OpenBSD may try to be more robust but sacrifices other flexibilities.
Linux has a motherload of features, everything from Supercomputer support to watches, more hardware than FreeBSD and many other experimental crap that most OSes didnt even think about, but at that point it sacrifices stability. Sure Ive run high-availibility servers on Linux but using newer features and drivers breaks it. Linux will take its time maturing, given attention shifts to stability more than features; FreeBSD is already there.
Ever heard of MULTIPLE CHANNELS that the 802.11 uses in its bandwidth? Since that bandwidth would be mostly empty, channels of around 64k can be added to potentially half a megabit.
By radio signals, | meant the lower unaccessable (medium and higher level) frequencies. Whats moronic about this exactly??
Umm lemme check did I mention megabits per sec?? hmmm. Nope cant find it.
I really think the data per session was 1TB. This was last time I visited, when they had just started gold nucleuses. Maybe after filtering and compression it comes down to 1GB?
I went down there, right up to the gate of BNL and requested a visit. The guards denyed entry, but after a bit of whining and .5 hr wait, got me a German scientist in a little car to show me around.
:)
Good to see security was tighter than SUNY Stonybrook. I remember walking into their radiation area without a hinderance, badging myself a radiation detector and taking a tour among the huge tanks, and old books on fission and fusion...
Anyway, in BNL, the guy took me to the Star detector area, and we met a Russian scientist who showed me the data capture machinery. The detector is connected with 10,000s of yellow ethernet-like wires in very thick bundles and entering an area where rows over rows of shelves contained custimzed cards where the cables ended. Looked MASSIVELY parallel. I think the cards (size of 1u server each) had buffers to hold the data, that then got serially taken away and compressed into ANOTHER building that did nothing but crunch data. Sadly that computer building was closed.
Later we went to his office in the theory department. There are several theoretical groups from 5 ppl to sometimes over 100. They join their heads against specific problems and the whole thing results in boring papers. But this guy had Linux on a nice VaLinux machine, running X and I think WordPerfect, and lots of proprietary apps. Oh yeah I saw Mathematica. They all know that app.
Working on now to get qualifications to be able to work there. Ive always hated corporate life.
I had long planned to build a very long wave radio connection with a radio guy in Pakistan, to connect them to the Internet here. I had been visiting sites to find the best way to encode digital, but this sounds perfect for the job.
802.11 over radio will also radically increase the area(useable by ISPs) . I can see it now: sitting on a remote mountain deep in Canadas country, with my solar-powered transmeta laptop, playing counterstrike with my friend, deep in the australian outback.
Cant wait to buy laptops with 802.11 over radio built in.
OK heres why I still use token ring:
(1) Ethernet is below $20. TR is $2. And I mean PCI cards made in 1998.
(2) TR hubs (16 ports) are $14 CDN. Same switch for ethernet 10baseT is at least $50.
(3) Its a better technology. Handles packets by tokens rather than ad-hoc random timer transmit. On larger networks, measure the latency (networks with heavy netbios elections all the time) and you'll see a BIT of a difference.
(4) Most TR cards do most of their processing on a huge chip on the card. Equivalent ethernet cards are the Dlink 550tx and 3Com 590, but you might end up with lousy ones that offload processing to the CPU.
(5) Even an HP JetDirect TR card was $14CDN last time I checked (used).
(6) Because its cool and you can add it to your resume. I have TR, Ethernet, 802.11a/b, Fibre, arcnet and X.25 cards. Looking for more.
(7) Because I already have a huge pile of them, and the thrown away pentium1 systems I pick up arent worth buying fancy ethernets for.
(8) Because I can brag about it on slashdot.
Now give it a think. Cost should be the single biggest factor. And BTW they take CAT5.
P2P is working all fine for me ( legal stuff of course ;-). Either way Kazaa isnt the only P2P software out there, and different apps use different security models. This would not only cost the RIAA alot in programming hours, its a very short-term solution. Newer versions of P2P patched against exploits and worms come out in days.
The RIAA is much better off suing popular P2P groups while newer ones mushroom all over. I'd say theyre running out of options and hacking the P2P networks isnt one of them.
... is driver support. I run my entire home network (12 hosts) on token-ring, but was forced to switch to redhat due to a buggy oltr (OC3140) driver. Beside this, FreeBSD never had another token-ring driver.
Even Linux has its own problems, not counting TX packets and lots of Soft errors on heavy traffic pausing sometimes for upto 10 sec. This is a bummer for online games.
It seems I'll be further forced to use Solaris x86 which naturally has drivers MADE by the madge/olicom people themselves. I dont yet know the quiality of their SNAT code, neet testing. Then again, I run a website on PHP/MYSQL on the same server (one ip ), and theres no PHP for Solaris. Adding GNU GCC and compiling PHP isnt a very tested solution and I'll have trouble there, but gotta try that before switching.
Would have been nice to have ONE real token-ring driver for FreeBSD. I miss its simplicity and standard on Linux, but am discovering so many new networking features on Linux its mind-boggling.
Hardware companies should release a standard driver code (based on XML) that can be translated to C for the platform and natively compiled. Token-ring equipment isnt bad for its price, but only the VERY proprietary OSes get drivers from hardware OEMs. Companies like SUN just sit back while the driver list grows (stability is also the manufacturers problem). *BSD and Linux have to rely on the developer community which is increasingly getting splintered between Linux distros and BSD flavors.
Thats exactly where we'll bite first, the little apple, then move onto bigger game. I dont think seclusion will help apple against Linux, theyve already taken up UNIX to prepare for the war, might end up being a hardware company. I'd give that 2008
There are probably more such people not popularized much. This is really a geek popularity contest, not the most influential list. Businessmen who helped UNIX advance would probably make that list, and so might professors who taught at University of California.
How about Corporate decision-makers who decided to buy UNIX when they badly needed to sell it, even in the days of the PDP?
Samba and Wine are two of the most important projects that will push Linux onto desktops and betterment of the world. Its not just a networking thingy like some people think. Having a CIFS server BETTER than windows 2000/xp is the first step into world domination.
Cheers Samba team.