Sound legal logic (when you hit somebody with your car, always remember to back up and finish them off!) but not the way most people think. Thank God for small favors!
Said suburbians buy SUVs as steel security blankets — being in a big vehicle that's high off the ground gives them a sense of safety. That's an illusion, of course, but American carmakers have always relied on illusions to sell their products.
Yes, WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is not virtualization software. But you have to be pretty ignorant to call it a "hack". Making the Windows GUI APIs work under Linux takes some fairly sophisticated programming. You can't just say, "oh, the app wants me to create a Windows frame, I'll create a GTK frame instead." You have to do event handling, implement a lot of screen widgetry, and a lot of other stuff that's non-trivial.
You're also being a little dim if you think Xen is the reason Virtual PC is free. Xen does not run under Windows. Virtual PC runs only under Windows. Also, Xen does not run guest OSs "out of the box" — you have to have a special port.
Nor does Xen have anything to do with VMWare being free — because it's not. Yes, VMWare Server is free, but VMWare workstation is still $189.
However if I want to operate a private operation, or if I want to protect my business secrets, then I'd like to be able to. I don't want that option taken off the table, which is what online OSes will do.
What do you mean, "taken off the table"? Do you suppose they're going to pass a law requiring that everybody use online systems? In fact, many companies already have rules restricting the use of online systems for handling confidential data.
You already have such a tool in Captive NTFS. True, that requires the Microsoft driver, but if you're going around fixing NT-based systems, you have that.
I can see advantages to an open-source NTFS driver: usable from a non-Intel Linux/Unix box, or in an enterprise environment where you don't want to buy a Windows license for every system that needs to access an NTFS disk. (Though you can always cheat, and hope you don't get audited by the IP police, as many companies do.) But it's not exactly an earthshaking development.
You're actually understating the issue. For the software that most people use, your processor is three, maybe even four, times as powerful as necessary. (RAM is kind of beside the point: you can always upgrade, and it's cheap as hell.) So it isn't just 3-year-old machines that people see no reason to upgrade -- it's machines that are much older!
Come to think of it, there's probably some connection between this issue, and the fact that Vista has extreme hardware requirements. Does your P4 have good threading support? Does your motherboard include a PCI-E slot? No? Then dude, you better go out and buy a new system, or you won't get the "Vista Experience"!
The statement that people could introduce malicus code into Linux that then makes it's way into secure systems. Of course with companies outsourcing programming jobs to other countries the same thing could happen with a closed source system.
Forget outsourcing. Software companies that don't manage their development process closely enough (and that's most of them) often end up with unauthorized features. Usually they're added because somebody thought they were cool, but backdoors are not unknown.
I used to work at Borland, and the developers there are notorious for adding features totally on their own initiative. In one famous case, the unauthorized feature was a back door in a widely used database server. This back door was probably not created with malicious intent, but the security effect was the same. Any bets as to how many other similar back doors exist that haven't made the news?
The Interbase back door was only discovered when the product was open-sourced. And that nicely illustrates why open source is more secure than closed source. Borland's blunder demonstrates that you can't secure software simply by making source creation "employees only". A company can monitor the development process in order to prevent developers from creating security problems — as Borland should have done — but how do you separate companies with good auditing procedures from those that just claim they do? By contrast, opening up the source offers objective evidence as to the software's security — or lack thereof.
Here's one you can easily find, if you're looking for it. Pick an article at random. Preferably one that's on a noncontroversial scientific or technical topic. Odds are, its facts are 100% correct, 'cause if they weren't nitpickers browsing the article would have pointed out the errors.
All kosher, right? Wrong. If it's like most articles, it doesn't give its sources. This is totally against the rules of Wikipedia — or any other serious reference book. Against the rules or not, I'd estimate that 70 to 90% of Wikipedia articles have no attribution at all.
The upshot is that Wikipedia is handy for looking up unimportant trivia (its TV episode summaries are unsurpassed!) or browsing through factoids. But if you need to be assured that your facts are authoritative, and not just "probably right", you have to confirm any fact you get from Wikipedia in some other, more careful, source.
If you believe that Bin Laden really considers himself a freedom fighter then you should probably examine your life and find out where else you're being gulled by fast talking people out for personal gain.
Maybe you should look at the facts, instead of just insulting people you disagree with.
The sentence violates several of the Wiki community's guidelines for article authorship. Using the word "speculation" is not enough. There has to be a credible source cited to be behind the speculation so that the "fact" of the speculation can be established as either belonging to a majority or significant minority.
And how many Wikipedia authors follow these guidelines? From what I see, most have not even read them. Wikipedia encourages folks to jump in and start editing. Stopping to learn the rules is an optional step usually skipped.
And even if an author is motivated to read the rules, they're so complicated and disorganized, it's impossible to get a grasp on most of them.
Even when authors know the rules, they often don't have the background to apply them. When I used to play copy editor on WP, I would try to get authors to rewrite stuff that was clearly speculative — except to the author! One guy had written that a certain comic book character was obviously based on another character in a famous short story. The connection wasn't at all obvious to me, and he had no source for this information — he was just stating his own opinion. But I had a hell of a time convincing him to reword his statement: it was obvious to him what the facts were, and that was that.
One other note: you talk about "the Wiki [sic] community's guidelines" as if these rules somehow express a consensus of a large group of people. They do not. There is, in fact, little in the way of consensus building at Wikipedia. Most processes, including rule-making, are dominated by a few people. Sometimes those few people are just whoever's managed to bully everybody else into going away.
Has anybody stopped to think that the human immune system is a little less than perfect? It doesn't stop all diseases, not by a long shot. And sometimes it creates illness, as anybody with Hay Fever — or Multiple Sclerosis — will testify.
You seem to be assuming that I'm gay — which I am not. I simply saw a discussion where a lot of guys were making nervous jokes about other guys in speedos, and pointed out the implication.
Then I can only assume that you're heterosexual through-and-through — and you weren't one of the people making nervous jokes about guys in speedos, which is where you came in.
Google's products are more polished? Get real! My favorite example is to compare Google Maps with Yahoo Maps. Now, in terms of features and usability, Google Maps is far superior. But I still use Yahoo maps a lot. Why? Yahoo maps has a simple, not very interesting feature that I use a lot: you can maintain a list of addresses you refer to a lot, and then never have to enter them again when planning a trip. It's a very simple, basic feature, but nobody at Google can be bothered to implement it. They're too busy with fancy AJAX features.
Which is not to run down the fancy AJAX features. Google deserves a lot of credit, not just for having kewl features, but forcing all web application developers to rethink their art. Great! But the boring stuff is important too, if you ever want to claim your product is more than a toy.
Oops! I just looked at the new href=http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/index.php#maxp=loc ation&q2=675+S.+Sixth+St.+San+Jose,+CA&q1=4150+Net work+Circle+Santa+Clara,+CA+95054-1778&trf=0&mvt=m &lon=-121.915112&lat=37.362176&mag=5>maps beta version of Yahoo Maps. It's already somewhat more polished than Google maps. And I bet it doesn't stay beta for 3 years.
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Sound legal logic (when you hit somebody with your car, always remember to back up and finish them off!) but not the way most people think. Thank God for small favors!
Said suburbians buy SUVs as steel security blankets — being in a big vehicle that's high off the ground gives them a sense of safety. That's an illusion, of course, but American carmakers have always relied on illusions to sell their products.
Yes, WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is not virtualization software. But you have to be pretty ignorant to call it a "hack". Making the Windows GUI APIs work under Linux takes some fairly sophisticated programming. You can't just say, "oh, the app wants me to create a Windows frame, I'll create a GTK frame instead." You have to do event handling, implement a lot of screen widgetry, and a lot of other stuff that's non-trivial.
You're also being a little dim if you think Xen is the reason Virtual PC is free. Xen does not run under Windows. Virtual PC runs only under Windows. Also, Xen does not run guest OSs "out of the box" — you have to have a special port.
Nor does Xen have anything to do with VMWare being free — because it's not. Yes, VMWare Server is free, but VMWare workstation is still $189.
Good point.
You already have such a tool in Captive NTFS. True, that requires the Microsoft driver, but if you're going around fixing NT-based systems, you have that.
I can see advantages to an open-source NTFS driver: usable from a non-Intel Linux/Unix box, or in an enterprise environment where you don't want to buy a Windows license for every system that needs to access an NTFS disk. (Though you can always cheat, and hope you don't get audited by the IP police, as many companies do.) But it's not exactly an earthshaking development.
You're actually understating the issue. For the software that most people use, your processor is three, maybe even four, times as powerful as necessary. (RAM is kind of beside the point: you can always upgrade, and it's cheap as hell.) So it isn't just 3-year-old machines that people see no reason to upgrade -- it's machines that are much older!
Come to think of it, there's probably some connection between this issue, and the fact that Vista has extreme hardware requirements. Does your P4 have good threading support? Does your motherboard include a PCI-E slot? No? Then dude, you better go out and buy a new system, or you won't get the "Vista Experience"!
Only if they outsource software development to a Japanese game company!
I know an old LISP hacker who simply doesn't understand all the fuss over XML. To him XML documents are just S-Expressions, only klunkier!
The other 23.75 TBs is his personal archive of all the posts from Star Trek Usenet Groups.
Forget outsourcing. Software companies that don't manage their development process closely enough (and that's most of them) often end up with unauthorized features. Usually they're added because somebody thought they were cool, but backdoors are not unknown.
I used to work at Borland, and the developers there are notorious for adding features totally on their own initiative. In one famous case, the unauthorized feature was a back door in a widely used database server. This back door was probably not created with malicious intent, but the security effect was the same. Any bets as to how many other similar back doors exist that haven't made the news?
The Interbase back door was only discovered when the product was open-sourced. And that nicely illustrates why open source is more secure than closed source. Borland's blunder demonstrates that you can't secure software simply by making source creation "employees only". A company can monitor the development process in order to prevent developers from creating security problems — as Borland should have done — but how do you separate companies with good auditing procedures from those that just claim they do? By contrast, opening up the source offers objective evidence as to the software's security — or lack thereof.
All kosher, right? Wrong. If it's like most articles, it doesn't give its sources. This is totally against the rules of Wikipedia — or any other serious reference book. Against the rules or not, I'd estimate that 70 to 90% of Wikipedia articles have no attribution at all.
The upshot is that Wikipedia is handy for looking up unimportant trivia (its TV episode summaries are unsurpassed!) or browsing through factoids. But if you need to be assured that your facts are authoritative, and not just "probably right", you have to confirm any fact you get from Wikipedia in some other, more careful, source.
And how many Wikipedia authors follow these guidelines? From what I see, most have not even read them. Wikipedia encourages folks to jump in and start editing. Stopping to learn the rules is an optional step usually skipped.
And even if an author is motivated to read the rules, they're so complicated and disorganized, it's impossible to get a grasp on most of them.
Even when authors know the rules, they often don't have the background to apply them. When I used to play copy editor on WP, I would try to get authors to rewrite stuff that was clearly speculative — except to the author! One guy had written that a certain comic book character was obviously based on another character in a famous short story. The connection wasn't at all obvious to me, and he had no source for this information — he was just stating his own opinion. But I had a hell of a time convincing him to reword his statement: it was obvious to him what the facts were, and that was that.
One other note: you talk about "the Wiki [sic] community's guidelines" as if these rules somehow express a consensus of a large group of people. They do not. There is, in fact, little in the way of consensus building at Wikipedia. Most processes, including rule-making, are dominated by a few people. Sometimes those few people are just whoever's managed to bully everybody else into going away.
There were a lot of strange issues with Einstein's first marriage. I wouldn't judge the whole episode based on one document.
Has anybody stopped to think that the human immune system is a little less than perfect? It doesn't stop all diseases, not by a long shot. And sometimes it creates illness, as anybody with Hay Fever — or Multiple Sclerosis — will testify.
I'm not trying to convince anybody that they're a homophobe. I'm just pointing out a pretty common heterosexual response to homoerotic imagery.
You seem to be assuming that I'm gay — which I am not. I simply saw a discussion where a lot of guys were making nervous jokes about other guys in speedos, and pointed out the implication.
Then I can only assume that you're heterosexual through-and-through — and you weren't one of the people making nervous jokes about guys in speedos, which is where you came in.
Google's products are more polished? Get real! My favorite example is to compare Google Maps with Yahoo Maps. Now, in terms of features and usability, Google Maps is far superior. But I still use Yahoo maps a lot. Why? Yahoo maps has a simple, not very interesting feature that I use a lot: you can maintain a list of addresses you refer to a lot, and then never have to enter them again when planning a trip. It's a very simple, basic feature, but nobody at Google can be bothered to implement it. They're too busy with fancy AJAX features.
Which is not to run down the fancy AJAX features. Google deserves a lot of credit, not just for having kewl features, but forcing all web application developers to rethink their art. Great! But the boring stuff is important too, if you ever want to claim your product is more than a toy.
Oops! I just looked at the new href=http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/index.php#maxp=loc ation&q2=675+S.+Sixth+St.+San+Jose,+CA&q1=4150+Net work+Circle+Santa+Clara,+CA+95054-1778&trf=0&mvt=m &lon=-121.915112&lat=37.362176&mag=5>maps beta version of Yahoo Maps. It's already somewhat more polished than Google maps. And I bet it doesn't stay beta for 3 years.
I speak for any superficially heterosexual male who gets nervous when he sees another guy in a speedo.
When somebody mentions surgery, do you make self-conscious jokes about how ugly people look when they're cut open?
Yours is the first of several comments manifesting a rather a lot of homosexual anxiety. Proof that deep down, most of us are fags.