Of course it won't work. But it will sell, which has been Microsoft's secret since the beginning. But expect Microsoft to do it because not only is OLPC going ARM so are a bunch of upcoming netbooks. So they will slap something together, something more than Windows Mobile, less than full Windows and put a Windows decal on the boxes. Anything but Linux, which works perfectly well on ARM and would give the penguin far too valuable an opening.
It is clear Negroponte is, and almost certainly was from the start, in the Microsoft camp. Begging them for a port of Windows has to just stick in the craw of RedHat after they donated so much effort to getting Linux running on the origional OLPC... only to see those ship with Windows for most of the (pitifully few) large shipments. By now it is clear Negroponte was only waving the Penguin banner to get Microsoft's attention and a cut rate price.
> I can't repair my car. Doesn't mean I don't drive one.
No, but somebody can. Imagine your business depended on some specialized transportion device. It is a total black box that nobody can look into or repair and the people who made it are not to be found. Now you KNOW this thing is going to break eventually, right? So do you just ignore that issue or do you make it a point to be working like mad to find some way to do the critical task that machine performs before it breaks? Now explain why this is different because it is software.
Ask the industrial people who didn't think it was a problem.... until machines with ISA slots started getting rare even on eBay. Yours is enlightened enough to comminicate via serial port.. Ok, how long until those go the way of the dodo and no, USB won't do because DOS programs of that sort tend not to like NT and it's (quite sane) practice of forbidding direct hardware access. And DOS hasn't a clue what a USB to serial adaptor is. The software, if properly backed up, won't ever fade away but the hardware it expects goes out of production and eventually isn't available on eBay anymore. For example good luck finding a working Amiga 2000 to host a Video Toaster on these days. Those puppies are rare and expensive and will only get more so. A binary is not forever. Only source is, because it can be maintained. That means depending on a closed binary can only be a win for an important longterm task if the job it does can be easily replaced by something else.
> When we have energy in surplus, at the (general) expense of no one, the world > may move much more easily to peaceful respect and cooperation.
ROFLMAO! Energy abundance will more likely just shift the resource wars to different places. We won't need oil any more but we will need all sorts of rare minerals just like we do now, only with limitless energy we will develop all sorts of new exotic manufacturing processes. But telling the House of Saud to go pound sand will still be priceless.
We have been about thirty years away from having fusion power for the last forty or so years. Seems like they pick thirty years because it is far enough out that those making the predictions probably won't be around to be held to account.
And the NIF webpage says nothing about trying to actually achieve a stable fusion reaction, just general high energy research stuff with some carrots dangled out to keep the funding going. So we are still probably thirty years away from fusion plants.
If we were really serious about energy independence (or if ya still believe in AGW) we would be building fission plants as fast as we could pour concrete and dumping serious coin into R&D on fusion. The idea being fission is what we can do NOW but be sure we have something in the pipeline lest we, in a hundred years or so, find ourselves running out of Uranium and back in the same energy crisis and by then demand would be so great burning dinosaurs would be pissin' in the wind.
> That said, there's the question of why you'd want it on a netbook.
And that is their problem. Lets assume they really do make it faster than XP. (I know, but go with me here.)
You are looking at netbooks. Three options are lined up:
1. Linux. Cheapest on display, looks pretty but not Windows so it makes you a lottle nervous. (From POV of lifetime Windows user)
2. Windows XP. Only a few dollars more than Linux, familiar, safe choice. That's why it is smoking the Penguin now. Of course this is only because Microsoft is basically giving it away.
3. Windows 7. Folks say it actually runs a little faster than XP! Of course you pay even more than XP but you only get to have three apps open.... unless you pay a LOT more.
So hands up if you would pick option 3. Uh huh, and that's their problem. Cheap XP stopped the Linux threat but now XP is likely to kill Windows 7 just as dead on the netbook. And if they kill XP the odds are pretty good that the penguin will resume rampaging all over the netbook market. But if XP is kept available and security updates are kept going how the heck do they get the corporate desktops to do a full refresh? Because they WON'T believe Windows 7 will run so well they won't have to refresh most of their hardware. And in this economy that probably isn't in the budget, especially if staying put on XP is an option.
And all these careful plans are subject to being void if the ARM netbooks ever show up in force and live up to their prerelease publicity. Because then it is full Linux with OO.o, Firefox+Flash+plugins and repos with thousands of apps vs WinCE fighting it out in a segment where the prices will be falling into the $100-$200 range. Even if Microsoft 'wins' the hit to their revenue stream from competing with zero is going to start to hurt. Meanwhile those $400 x86 netbooks are falling to $300... at least if the cost of a Windows license stays cheap... but then it kinda has to since Linux isn't likely to have a price increase.
And it gets better. As more corporate IT peeps learn Microsoft is handing out XP licenses for darned near $0 but won't let them get it unless they pay extra on top of a full Vista Business license they just might start asking their Microsoft sales weasels questions that really have no good answers. Or run some Linux pilot projects and make sure word get back to Microsoft, since that seems to get their attention. More downward pressure on revenues.
> Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
You clearly don't know what the heck you are babbling on about. You were on target with the mainframe, that is reliability over the long term.
Windows? You think going back to Windows 95 is long term? Bah. Windows 95 wasn't even close to usable until OSR2 and that was practically Win98 and as I recall didn't ship until '97. So a puny dozen years.
> Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and > will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about > them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure.
Small midsize shops are the ones who fell into this trap, usually called Visual Basic. Crappy little apps written by long forgotten consultants. And nobody had enough sense to demand the source code so now changes aren't possible. I have about as much sympathy for these fools as the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street currently reaping their reward for being dumb. You base your business on stuff you can't repair, realize the problem and don't make fixing it a goal. Then someday when it does go foom they will be shocked! shocked! and probably be lining up at the nearest public teat looking for a bailout like the banks.
Oh, and see above about 'decades ago'. Now there ARE some industrial process controls still running DOS that can get over two decades old... barely. Go really get DECADES you have to look at mainframes and COBOL.
> But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten > if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with > the latest and greatest.
I won't argue about Apple, which is probably why it has had and has no future in the Enterprise outside of the occasional graphics arts dept full of Macheads nobody wants to piss off. Linux/Unix on the other hand.... Do you realize how old UNIX is? Even the POSIX standards predate Win32 and UNIX had a rich history already.... which was sorta the reason for POSIX in the first place but that is another tale for another day. Write to the specs and any end user app will probably be ok for the foreseeable future. Yea if you want to run an old 90s app today you will probably need to scrounge up the Motif libs but they are still available on supported Enterprise distributions. Sure it will LOOK like an old Motif app but then you want it to be the same, ya know, reliable. You could also get even older UNIX applications going but good grief, before Motif X programs were primitive, Gilligans's Island primitive, ugly things.
> Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
True enough, but they are learning of late. They were so hellbent on pushing OOXML they perverted the ISO. But enough people stood firm and resisted so they are putting ODF support into the next Office service pack. We will see if they manage to put a sting into it. I'd bet they won't make it possible to set ODF as the default save format. Or ensure subtle conversion errors force large instituitions to not use ODF as their primary interchange format.
Nope. A process that isn't alive is a zombie. And kill -9 won't kill a zombie. We need a grenade_launcher command. After all, to quote the old Quake manual:
"Thou can not kill that with doth not live. But you can blow it to chunky kibbles."
> In his original piece, he tries to update OpenOffice from the web because > the package manager isn't offering the update yet.
I looked into backporting OO.o 3 to RHEL5. Nightmare of dependencies. Which is why Ubuntu hasn't done it either. Again, adjust your mindset. Currently OO.o is part of the operating system on Linux. For Windows they just staticly link all of the myriad libs and bloat the thing up. So a bug in libpng means downloading a whole new copy of OO.o. Once you accept it is being treated as part of the OS it makes sense that it probably won't rev versions until the whole OS does.
> The fact that some projects now offer their own repositories is just a terrible band-aid.
No, that is the future. Imagine how wonderful it will be when the distro wars cool down and we have one or two who provide a basic operating system and by default install a bunch of repos for major projects. Instead of Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat all packaging up Firefox or OO.o they just point to the repo. New Firefox comes out everyone updates. And it all just works, the update app will be quietly tracking dozens of repos.
> My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice, and I didn't > have to touch a console - anyone could do it. I just go download the installer and run it, > without even bothering to uninstall the old version. And it's very easy because it's not > just a tarball full of crap - it's actually a well-tested package. This way, I get managed > installs - I have a list of programs and if I chose to remove one I just choose it and > click the uninstall button.
Have you looked at the OO.o site? They have packaged versions for RPM based linux distros. To make them work across a wide array of distros/versions they are all static linked of course, just like Windows. They just haven't bothered doing.debs. So figure out how to use alien, bitch at OO.o for neglecting your fav distro or contribute. Now as to that Windows version. Does Windows Update notify you when new versions are released? Does it cleanly update it automagically?
> Having millions of clueless newbies flocking to Linux is like building an > interstate highway next to my fishing spot.
The better analogy would be the Internet was a great place, full of helpful clueful people... the AOL unleashed their mindless hordes and it has never recovered.
In the quest for The Year of Linux on the Desktop we have put all this autoconfiguring crap in, all this GUI config crap in, etc. And now when dbus/udev/hal/etc get something wrong good luck dropping to a command line to fix it. None of the interconnects between all that plumbing is obvious, any documentation you find is outdated and often worse than no documentation at all because it is subtly wrong and even if you do figure it out the next distro update will wipe it all away and replace it with something even more bizarre. I went to Linux because I liked the UNIX computing model, not because I thought DOS sucked. And now the leading designers of Linux desktops say that even exposing a launcher for an (x|gnome)term is a defect. That DOS sucked was obvious to anyone who had ever seen anything else.... and probably would have been obvious anyway. So now we judge new features by whether they behave exactly like Windows (or worse, exactly like Apple).
> Yeah, the world would be such a happy fucking place without corporations.
I'm a Reagan conservative when I'm not all the way out in Ayn Rand territory. And I'm starting to think the corporation, at least as we know it, is a mistake. As soon as the founder is gone some clueless twit with an MBA is given control over billions in capital without any clue how capital is made or grown, no responsibility if (usually when) he fails or commits a major ethical lapse and a golden parachute when he screws the place up so bad it becomes takeover fodder. Stockholders have no moral hazzard other than their financial stake, which is often traded purely on such a short term horizon that the corporation is forced, even if the CEO isn't an idiot, to do stupid short sighted things.
The public chartered corporation once served a purpose in that it allowed huge capital intensive projects to be undertaken in the nominally private sector. There is still a need for something that serves that purpose but the rules need to be adjusted such that only such big infrastructure projects will be attractive investments.
> So what exactly about their wage isn't "living" enough for us?
As in citizens quickly discover that living on welfare/food stamps in a government apartment pays more. As soon as Obama and Congress begin to hand out the welfare credit cards and housing section 8 housing vouchers at the open border they won't want to work either. But right now illegals find working easier than figuring out how to get a welfare check. Or they are just too proud to become welfare leeches. Of course they still manage to scarf up a lot of other benefits like free medical[1] care, free school for their kids, etc. Big part of why California is broke and taxpayers are out migrating from the sinking ship.
[1] Yes, we already have nationalized medicine, it is called mandatory emergency room care. Not the most efficient way, but that's Dimmocrats for ya. Never fear though Obama is going to fix it.
> In linux world, there is yet to be a quick, 3 question and 1 button way > to add the computer to a domain and then receive straight away:
And I'm glad there isn't. Because it would get in the way of the old established, simple way to do those things.
> - group policies - security and software install
If the machine didn't need a package installed it should not be installed. Then you don't need to worry about a policy to prevent it from running. Not installed is more secure than trying to prevent it from running.
> - single password store (with cached passwords for notebooks that go away from the network)
NIS anyone? Granted I haven't dealt with notebooks that enter and leave, can someone else fill in how that works?
> - Patch update policy
If you don't trust your distro's patch update policy enough to enable auto updates then it is simple enough to establish a local one and set your machines to update from it. Then you can test every upstream update before you unleash it onto your network. And you probably want a local repo anyway just to save network bandwidth and to have a place to put locally created or modified packages.
> Ubuntu is not interested in those things, they're
That's the impression I get as well. Ubuntu does make a nice standalone desktop that a lot of people manage to get installed on their own though. But guess what, Ubuntu != Linux. If you are wanting Enterprise level features you might want to consider one of the distributions marketed to the Enterprise environment. XP Home doesn't work all that well in the Enterprise either ya know.
> Then how do we prevent people from bringing in USB printers from home and connecting them locally?
Well it seems to me you are dealing with one of two scenarios.
1. Users are so desperate to get work done they are working around IT stupidity. History repeats itself. Microcomputers were often brought into the workplace to get around the stupid restrictions the high priests of IT put on access to the minicomputer/mainframe. And a lot of minis initially came in to get local control of computing away from the lords of the mainframe at corporate HQ.
Solution: Replace the IT people and let employees so motivated they were bringing their own printer do their part to get the economy going again.
2. Users doing nefarious things like printing out company secrets.
Do you think they won't work around any restrictions short of putting epoxy in the USB ports? And if you do that they will clone the MAC address onto a laptop and connect it in place of the locked desktop. Money motivates.
Solution: In such a secure environment they should be using terminal services to keep them away from physical access to the hardware that can compromise security. When you catch someone probing the defenses get rid of them before they figure out a way in. If you can't trust them they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near secrets. If they have to the bastards will take screenshots with their damned cellphone.
> Just because it is written down doesn't mean it is true.
True enough. But the example you used is a poor one. That wording is just reminding you of something that is already the case. Playing a DVD in a school or prision would be a 'public exhibition' of the work and prohibited by copyright law. Unless you purchase a special license you can't do that, they were just reminding you of that. Yes they word it like all use of their 'precious IP' is theirs to control but public exhibition and reproduction are the only acts controlled by copyright.
I work in a public library. We have a lot of DVDs in our collection that we can circulate to our patrons without any additional permissions other than owning a copy of the work. But we couldn't play one as part of a children's program without a special license from the rights owner. We do have such a license that covers a fair range of material (pretty much anything that doesn't come from the House of Mouse) but we paid dearly for it.
> I still don't get why anyone would design a media browser that doesn't play flash.
Because Flash has enough functionality that, if it were the only way, people could write whole apps with it. And since the iPhone is a totally locked platform it had to go to close off that possibility. Because people would have done it, Apple was correct in their assessment of the risk to the App Store's monopoly. With Apple products you have to realize control is more important than being useful. It just has to look pretty, the Reality Distortion Field will sell the product regardless how many features are missing or how expensive it is.
> 1. $229 new from Apple, or you can get it cheaper used on eBay, Craigslist, etc.
Yea and an N810 is $259 and a lot more usable AS A WEB BROWSER. Yes the iPod is probably a better music player but that wasn't the question.
> 2. The screen is large and has great resolution.
No. 480x320 is NOT high resolution. Few non mobile phone optimized pages are going to display on that. The N8x0 series has 800x480. Do the math. Hopefully Apple fanbois can still do simple X > Y type reasoning.
> 4. Someone (you) could write a dedicated iPhone/iPod Touch App that does just what you want
And the Nokia runs Mameo, a Linux based open platform. Besides writing a full GTK app you can program something up in one of the SIMPLE SCRIPTING LANGUAGES THAT APPLE FORBIDS. And you don't need to get anything signed by Apple before passing it around. So your point was?
> 5. It's here to stay.
Because we all know Nokia is tettering on the brink of insolvency.
> Alternative: Sony Mylo
Discontinued, no replacement mentioned. You really should LOOK at a URL before you post it. But it really looked like an interesting product, hope Sony does get around to refreshing the line.
We can tell. Even though the question specifically excluded CELL PHONES you had to pimp your G1 anyway. The dev version is $400 so is probably out of this guy's budget so that would leave him with a contract with a cell carrier he doesn't want.
> Not sure if you've been to many library web sites... but they tend not to be heavy on Flash.
I dunno about that, we used to not have a lot of javascript crap on em either. The 'web designers' are killing the internet I tell ya. And you kids get off my lawn!
The point being if you do much Internet searching you are bound to hit Flash, Java, etc. And the i* products aren't designed for real Internet access, just the stuff Apple wants you to do on them. The same locked experience as any other browser on a phone, only more from being locked and less from being lame and crufty.
Compare to the Nokia I mentioned which runs a Mozilla based product with a real Adobe ARM port of Flash 9 on a display good enough (800x480) to display real web pages instead of a 'mobile phone' experience that often totally fails unless the site has a special reduced 'mobile' version. Sorry, Apple's stuff looks pretty but the tech is always second rate.
> iPod touch is probably going to be a good bet here,
Stupid choice for a web access device since it has a broken browser that can't be replaced with a working one and the stated purpose is something for web access. These days no flash == broken. Wish it weren't so but it is and no Apple handheld product will ever be allowed to have Flash it appears.
Go for the Nokia, it has Flash 9 and the N810 even has a real keyboard, something else you really really want in a device that is going to be mostly used for web browsing, especially since the use case described implies a lot of typing in of search text.
> Should we require users be Administrator in order to run a debugger, even on their own programs?
The difference is Linux doesn't yet have signed programs. Windows does but didn't bother to think through the security implications. Signed programs should be inviolate, even to root/admiinistrator. Granted nothing will stop root/admin for long until you get the TPM (and that just raises the bar a lot) into the act but somebody should have to crack their way around the locks even as root/admin to gain access to the memory space of a signed app.
> The only solution is to scrap Windows altogether and build a new multi-user OS from scratch.....
Someone else did a detailed rebuttal but I will just add a small observation. Windows NT was and is multiuser. By XP they had even bolted on the Win9x stuff fairly well. The problem is they can make Windows multiuser all they want, it solves nothing. The apps were still making assumptions from WfW 3.1 and many never truly adapted, instead Microsoft has been adapting by making changes to allow them to keep doing stupid things. That is what dooms them. They could have drawn a line and said beyond this date no app written correctly is going to run. And watched users not upgrade in droves. Because they don't care about security nearly as much as they do about backwards compatibility. Even it means allowing some damned game to write to the \Windows directory.
> MS is in the learning stages in designing security. I wonder how long they will take > to require an administrator login to perform administrator tasks.
Better question. Will Linux have forgotten by then? The current trend is to have 'admin' users on Linux able to do things with their password instead of root, many even ban root from logging in. The 'sudo for everything' mental disease all in the name of making Linux look like Windows/Mac.
Sudu is a wonderful tool when used to give occasional and controlled access to normal users. Replacing root with it is misusing an otherwise good tool.
Not only is the site horrible broken, poorly designed, etc. The home link goes somewhere that doesn't exist.
The feedback form is broken and there isn't a working email address anywhere to be found on the site.
EPIC FAIL!
The only hope would be that it hasn't really gone live yet and that looks like the most probable explanation. Strip away the URL to the main server and there isn't an obvious link to/Skills/* to be found.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't really see this working.
Of course it won't work. But it will sell, which has been Microsoft's secret since the beginning. But expect Microsoft to do it because not only is OLPC going ARM so are a bunch of upcoming netbooks. So they will slap something together, something more than Windows Mobile, less than full Windows and put a Windows decal on the boxes. Anything but Linux, which works perfectly well on ARM and would give the penguin far too valuable an opening.
It is clear Negroponte is, and almost certainly was from the start, in the Microsoft camp. Begging them for a port of Windows has to just stick in the craw of RedHat after they donated so much effort to getting Linux running on the origional OLPC... only to see those ship with Windows for most of the (pitifully few) large shipments. By now it is clear Negroponte was only waving the Penguin banner to get Microsoft's attention and a cut rate price.
> I can't repair my car. Doesn't mean I don't drive one.
No, but somebody can. Imagine your business depended on some specialized transportion device. It is a total black box that nobody can look into or repair and the people who made it are not to be found. Now you KNOW this thing is going to break eventually, right? So do you just ignore that issue or do you make it a point to be working like mad to find some way to do the critical task that machine performs before it breaks? Now explain why this is different because it is software.
Ask the industrial people who didn't think it was a problem.... until machines with ISA slots started getting rare even on eBay. Yours is enlightened enough to comminicate via serial port.. Ok, how long until those go the way of the dodo and no, USB won't do because DOS programs of that sort tend not to like NT and it's (quite sane) practice of forbidding direct hardware access. And DOS hasn't a clue what a USB to serial adaptor is. The software, if properly backed up, won't ever fade away but the hardware it expects goes out of production and eventually isn't available on eBay anymore. For example good luck finding a working Amiga 2000 to host a Video Toaster on these days. Those puppies are rare and expensive and will only get more so. A binary is not forever. Only source is, because it can be maintained. That means depending on a closed binary can only be a win for an important longterm task if the job it does can be easily replaced by something else.
> When we have energy in surplus, at the (general) expense of no one, the world
> may move much more easily to peaceful respect and cooperation.
ROFLMAO! Energy abundance will more likely just shift the resource wars to different places. We won't need oil any more but we will need all sorts of rare minerals just like we do now, only with limitless energy we will develop all sorts of new exotic manufacturing processes. But telling the House of Saud to go pound sand will still be priceless.
We have been about thirty years away from having fusion power for the last forty or so years. Seems like they pick thirty years because it is far enough out that those making the predictions probably won't be around to be held to account.
And the NIF webpage says nothing about trying to actually achieve a stable fusion reaction, just general high energy research stuff with some carrots dangled out to keep the funding going. So we are still probably thirty years away from fusion plants.
If we were really serious about energy independence (or if ya still believe in AGW) we would be building fission plants as fast as we could pour concrete and dumping serious coin into R&D on fusion. The idea being fission is what we can do NOW but be sure we have something in the pipeline lest we, in a hundred years or so, find ourselves running out of Uranium and back in the same energy crisis and by then demand would be so great burning dinosaurs would be pissin' in the wind.
> That said, there's the question of why you'd want it on a netbook.
And that is their problem. Lets assume they really do make it faster than XP. (I know, but go with me here.)
You are looking at netbooks. Three options are lined up:
1. Linux. Cheapest on display, looks pretty but not Windows so it makes you a lottle nervous. (From POV of lifetime Windows user)
2. Windows XP. Only a few dollars more than Linux, familiar, safe choice. That's why it is smoking the Penguin now. Of course this is only because Microsoft is basically giving it away.
3. Windows 7. Folks say it actually runs a little faster than XP! Of course you pay even more than XP but you only get to have three apps open.... unless you pay a LOT more.
So hands up if you would pick option 3. Uh huh, and that's their problem. Cheap XP stopped the Linux threat but now XP is likely to kill Windows 7 just as dead on the netbook. And if they kill XP the odds are pretty good that the penguin will resume rampaging all over the netbook market. But if XP is kept available and security updates are kept going how the heck do they get the corporate desktops to do a full refresh? Because they WON'T believe Windows 7 will run so well they won't have to refresh most of their hardware. And in this economy that probably isn't in the budget, especially if staying put on XP is an option.
And all these careful plans are subject to being void if the ARM netbooks ever show up in force and live up to their prerelease publicity. Because then it is full Linux with OO.o, Firefox+Flash+plugins and repos with thousands of apps vs WinCE fighting it out in a segment where the prices will be falling into the $100-$200 range. Even if Microsoft 'wins' the hit to their revenue stream from competing with zero is going to start to hurt. Meanwhile those $400 x86 netbooks are falling to $300... at least if the cost of a Windows license stays cheap... but then it kinda has to since Linux isn't likely to have a price increase.
And it gets better. As more corporate IT peeps learn Microsoft is handing out XP licenses for darned near $0 but won't let them get it unless they pay extra on top of a full Vista Business license they just might start asking their Microsoft sales weasels questions that really have no good answers. Or run some Linux pilot projects and make sure word get back to Microsoft, since that seems to get their attention. More downward pressure on revenues.
> Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
You clearly don't know what the heck you are babbling on about. You were on target with the mainframe, that is reliability over the long term.
Windows? You think going back to Windows 95 is long term? Bah. Windows 95 wasn't even close to usable until OSR2 and that was practically Win98 and as I recall didn't ship until '97. So a puny dozen years.
> Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and
> will still work. They're horrible, out of date, and make your butt itch just thinking about
> them, but they work, and it's cheaper to keep them going than to invest in an all-new infrastructure.
Small midsize shops are the ones who fell into this trap, usually called Visual Basic. Crappy little apps written by long forgotten consultants. And nobody had enough sense to demand the source code so now changes aren't possible. I have about as much sympathy for these fools as the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street currently reaping their reward for being dumb. You base your business on stuff you can't repair, realize the problem and don't make fixing it a goal. Then someday when it does go foom they will be shocked! shocked! and probably be lining up at the nearest public teat looking for a bailout like the banks.
Oh, and see above about 'decades ago'. Now there ARE some industrial process controls still running DOS that can get over two decades old... barely. Go really get DECADES you have to look at mainframes and COBOL.
> But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten
> if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with
> the latest and greatest.
I won't argue about Apple, which is probably why it has had and has no future in the Enterprise outside of the occasional graphics arts dept full of Macheads nobody wants to piss off. Linux/Unix on the other hand.... Do you realize how old UNIX is? Even the POSIX standards predate Win32 and UNIX had a rich history already.... which was sorta the reason for POSIX in the first place but that is another tale for another day. Write to the specs and any end user app will probably be ok for the foreseeable future. Yea if you want to run an old 90s app today you will probably need to scrounge up the Motif libs but they are still available on supported Enterprise distributions. Sure it will LOOK like an old Motif app but then you want it to be the same, ya know, reliable. You could also get even older UNIX applications going but good grief, before Motif X programs were primitive, Gilligans's Island primitive, ugly things.
> Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
True enough, but they are learning of late. They were so hellbent on pushing OOXML they perverted the ISO. But enough people stood firm and resisted so they are putting ODF support into the next Office service pack. We will see if they manage to put a sting into it. I'd bet they won't make it possible to set ODF as the default save format. Or ensure subtle conversion errors force large instituitions to not use ODF as their primary interchange format.
> > How can you kill that which does not live?
> By using sudo: ...
> sudo kill -9
Nope. A process that isn't alive is a zombie. And kill -9 won't kill a zombie. We need a grenade_launcher command. After all, to quote the old Quake manual:
"Thou can not kill that with doth not live. But you can blow it to chunky kibbles."
> In his original piece, he tries to update OpenOffice from the web because
> the package manager isn't offering the update yet.
I looked into backporting OO.o 3 to RHEL5. Nightmare of dependencies. Which is why Ubuntu hasn't done it either. Again, adjust your mindset. Currently OO.o is part of the operating system on Linux. For Windows they just staticly link all of the myriad libs and bloat the thing up. So a bug in libpng means downloading a whole new copy of OO.o. Once you accept it is being treated as part of the OS it makes sense that it probably won't rev versions until the whole OS does.
> The fact that some projects now offer their own repositories is just a terrible band-aid.
No, that is the future. Imagine how wonderful it will be when the distro wars cool down and we have one or two who provide a basic operating system and by default install a bunch of repos for major projects. Instead of Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat all packaging up Firefox or OO.o they just point to the repo. New Firefox comes out everyone updates. And it all just works, the update app will be quietly tracking dozens of repos.
> My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice, and I didn't
> have to touch a console - anyone could do it. I just go download the installer and run it,
> without even bothering to uninstall the old version. And it's very easy because it's not
> just a tarball full of crap - it's actually a well-tested package. This way, I get managed
> installs - I have a list of programs and if I chose to remove one I just choose it and
> click the uninstall button.
Have you looked at the OO.o site? They have packaged versions for RPM based linux distros. To make them work across a wide array of distros/versions they are all static linked of course, just like Windows. They just haven't bothered doing .debs. So figure out how to use alien, bitch at OO.o for neglecting your fav distro or contribute. Now as to that Windows version. Does Windows Update notify you when new versions are released? Does it cleanly update it automagically?
> Having millions of clueless newbies flocking to Linux is like building an
> interstate highway next to my fishing spot.
The better analogy would be the Internet was a great place, full of helpful clueful people... the AOL unleashed their mindless hordes and it has never recovered.
In the quest for The Year of Linux on the Desktop we have put all this autoconfiguring crap in, all this GUI config crap in, etc. And now when dbus/udev/hal/etc get something wrong good luck dropping to a command line to fix it. None of the interconnects between all that plumbing is obvious, any documentation you find is outdated and often worse than no documentation at all because it is subtly wrong and even if you do figure it out the next distro update will wipe it all away and replace it with something even more bizarre. I went to Linux because I liked the UNIX computing model, not because I thought DOS sucked. And now the leading designers of Linux desktops say that even exposing a launcher for an (x|gnome)term is a defect. That DOS sucked was obvious to anyone who had ever seen anything else.... and probably would have been obvious anyway. So now we judge new features by whether they behave exactly like Windows (or worse, exactly like Apple).
> Yeah, the world would be such a happy fucking place without corporations.
I'm a Reagan conservative when I'm not all the way out in Ayn Rand territory. And I'm starting to think the corporation, at least as we know it, is a mistake. As soon as the founder is gone some clueless twit with an MBA is given control over billions in capital without any clue how capital is made or grown, no responsibility if (usually when) he fails or commits a major ethical lapse and a golden parachute when he screws the place up so bad it becomes takeover fodder. Stockholders have no moral hazzard other than their financial stake, which is often traded purely on such a short term horizon that the corporation is forced, even if the CEO isn't an idiot, to do stupid short sighted things.
The public chartered corporation once served a purpose in that it allowed huge capital intensive projects to be undertaken in the nominally private sector. There is still a need for something that serves that purpose but the rules need to be adjusted such that only such big infrastructure projects will be attractive investments.
> So what exactly about their wage isn't "living" enough for us?
As in citizens quickly discover that living on welfare/food stamps in a government apartment pays more. As soon as Obama and Congress begin to hand out the welfare credit cards and housing section 8 housing vouchers at the open border they won't want to work either. But right now illegals find working easier than figuring out how to get a welfare check. Or they are just too proud to become welfare leeches. Of course they still manage to scarf up a lot of other benefits like free medical[1] care, free school for their kids, etc. Big part of why California is broke and taxpayers are out migrating from the sinking ship.
[1] Yes, we already have nationalized medicine, it is called mandatory emergency room care. Not the most efficient way, but that's Dimmocrats for ya. Never fear though Obama is going to fix it.
> In linux world, there is yet to be a quick, 3 question and 1 button way
> to add the computer to a domain and then receive straight away:
And I'm glad there isn't. Because it would get in the way of the old established, simple way to do those things.
> - group policies - security and software install
If the machine didn't need a package installed it should not be installed. Then you don't need to worry about a policy to prevent it from running. Not installed is more secure than trying to prevent it from running.
> - single password store (with cached passwords for notebooks that go away from the network)
NIS anyone? Granted I haven't dealt with notebooks that enter and leave, can someone else fill in how that works?
> - Patch update policy
If you don't trust your distro's patch update policy enough to enable auto updates then it is simple enough to establish a local one and set your machines to update from it. Then you can test every upstream update before you unleash it onto your network. And you probably want a local repo anyway just to save network bandwidth and to have a place to put locally created or modified packages.
> Ubuntu is not interested in those things, they're
That's the impression I get as well. Ubuntu does make a nice standalone desktop that a lot of people manage to get installed on their own though. But guess what, Ubuntu != Linux. If you are wanting Enterprise level features you might want to consider one of the distributions marketed to the Enterprise environment. XP Home doesn't work all that well in the Enterprise either ya know.
> Then how do we prevent people from bringing in USB printers from home and connecting them locally?
Well it seems to me you are dealing with one of two scenarios.
1. Users are so desperate to get work done they are working around IT stupidity. History repeats itself. Microcomputers were often brought into the workplace to get around the stupid restrictions the high priests of IT put on access to the minicomputer/mainframe. And a lot of minis initially came in to get local control of computing away from the lords of the mainframe at corporate HQ.
Solution: Replace the IT people and let employees so motivated they were bringing their own printer do their part to get the economy going again.
2. Users doing nefarious things like printing out company secrets.
Do you think they won't work around any restrictions short of putting epoxy in the USB ports? And if you do that they will clone the MAC address onto a laptop and connect it in place of the locked desktop. Money motivates.
Solution: In such a secure environment they should be using terminal services to keep them away from physical access to the hardware that can compromise security. When you catch someone probing the defenses get rid of them before they figure out a way in. If you can't trust them they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near secrets. If they have to the bastards will take screenshots with their damned cellphone.
> Just because it is written down doesn't mean it is true.
True enough. But the example you used is a poor one. That wording is just reminding you of something that is already the case. Playing a DVD in a school or prision would be a 'public exhibition' of the work and prohibited by copyright law. Unless you purchase a special license you can't do that, they were just reminding you of that. Yes they word it like all use of their 'precious IP' is theirs to control but public exhibition and reproduction are the only acts controlled by copyright.
I work in a public library. We have a lot of DVDs in our collection that we can circulate to our patrons without any additional permissions other than owning a copy of the work. But we couldn't play one as part of a children's program without a special license from the rights owner. We do have such a license that covers a fair range of material (pretty much anything that doesn't come from the House of Mouse) but we paid dearly for it.
> I still don't get why anyone would design a media browser that doesn't play flash.
Because Flash has enough functionality that, if it were the only way, people could write whole apps with it. And since the iPhone is a totally locked platform it had to go to close off that possibility. Because people would have done it, Apple was correct in their assessment of the risk to the App Store's monopoly. With Apple products you have to realize control is more important than being useful. It just has to look pretty, the Reality Distortion Field will sell the product regardless how many features are missing or how expensive it is.
> Uh, to many of us, no Flash == much more functional, not broken.
Not at all. You just have to install the flashblock plugin so you have control over the crap and can still access the useful stuff.
> 1. $229 new from Apple, or you can get it cheaper used on eBay, Craigslist, etc.
Yea and an N810 is $259 and a lot more usable AS A WEB BROWSER. Yes the iPod is probably a better music player but that wasn't the question.
> 2. The screen is large and has great resolution.
No. 480x320 is NOT high resolution. Few non mobile phone optimized pages are going to display on that. The N8x0 series has 800x480. Do the math. Hopefully Apple fanbois can still do simple X > Y type reasoning.
> 4. Someone (you) could write a dedicated iPhone/iPod Touch App that does just what you want
And the Nokia runs Mameo, a Linux based open platform. Besides writing a full GTK app you can program something up in one of the SIMPLE SCRIPTING LANGUAGES THAT APPLE FORBIDS. And you don't need to get anything signed by Apple before passing it around. So your point was?
> 5. It's here to stay.
Because we all know Nokia is tettering on the brink of insolvency.
> Alternative: Sony Mylo
Discontinued, no replacement mentioned. You really should LOOK at a URL before you post it. But it really looked like an interesting product, hope Sony does get around to refreshing the line.
> I absolutely love mine.
We can tell. Even though the question specifically excluded CELL PHONES you had to pimp your G1 anyway. The dev version is $400 so is probably out of this guy's budget so that would leave him with a contract with a cell carrier he doesn't want.
> Not sure if you've been to many library web sites... but they tend not to be heavy on Flash.
I dunno about that, we used to not have a lot of javascript crap on em either. The 'web designers' are killing the internet I tell ya. And you kids get off my lawn!
The point being if you do much Internet searching you are bound to hit Flash, Java, etc. And the i* products aren't designed for real Internet access, just the stuff Apple wants you to do on them. The same locked experience as any other browser on a phone, only more from being locked and less from being lame and crufty.
Compare to the Nokia I mentioned which runs a Mozilla based product with a real Adobe ARM port of Flash 9 on a display good enough (800x480) to display real web pages instead of a 'mobile phone' experience that often totally fails unless the site has a special reduced 'mobile' version. Sorry, Apple's stuff looks pretty but the tech is always second rate.
> iPod touch is probably going to be a good bet here,
Stupid choice for a web access device since it has a broken browser that can't be replaced with a working one and the stated purpose is something for web access. These days no flash == broken. Wish it weren't so but it is and no Apple handheld product will ever be allowed to have Flash it appears.
Go for the Nokia, it has Flash 9 and the N810 even has a real keyboard, something else you really really want in a device that is going to be mostly used for web browsing, especially since the use case described implies a lot of typing in of search text.
> Should we require users be Administrator in order to run a debugger, even on their own programs?
The difference is Linux doesn't yet have signed programs. Windows does but didn't bother to think through the security implications. Signed programs should be inviolate, even to root/admiinistrator. Granted nothing will stop root/admin for long until you get the TPM (and that just raises the bar a lot) into the act but somebody should have to crack their way around the locks even as root/admin to gain access to the memory space of a signed app.
> The only solution is to scrap Windows altogether and build a new multi-user OS from scratch.....
Someone else did a detailed rebuttal but I will just add a small observation. Windows NT was and is multiuser. By XP they had even bolted on the Win9x stuff fairly well. The problem is they can make Windows multiuser all they want, it solves nothing. The apps were still making assumptions from WfW 3.1 and many never truly adapted, instead Microsoft has been adapting by making changes to allow them to keep doing stupid things. That is what dooms them. They could have drawn a line and said beyond this date no app written correctly is going to run. And watched users not upgrade in droves. Because they don't care about security nearly as much as they do about backwards compatibility. Even it means allowing some damned game to write to the \Windows directory.
> MS is in the learning stages in designing security. I wonder how long they will take
> to require an administrator login to perform administrator tasks.
Better question. Will Linux have forgotten by then? The current trend is to have 'admin' users on Linux able to do things with their password instead of root, many even ban root from logging in. The 'sudo for everything' mental disease all in the name of making Linux look like Windows/Mac.
Sudu is a wonderful tool when used to give occasional and controlled access to normal users. Replacing root with it is misusing an otherwise good tool.
Not only is the site horrible broken, poorly designed, etc. The home link goes somewhere that doesn't exist.
The feedback form is broken and there isn't a working email address anywhere to be found on the site.
EPIC FAIL!
The only hope would be that it hasn't really gone live yet and that looks like the most probable explanation. Strip away the URL to the main server and there isn't an obvious link to /Skills/* to be found.