An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Well, Windows doesn't require any less maintenance... except when you run it on a single desktop. But Windows Server really require a lot of maintenance (as do Sun, HP-UX,...). Theres no real difference here... of course you can run a windows server unmaintaned, but then it will... well, let's say "open".
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
"Stuff is known to break when you hit it with other heavy stuff" Nothing new here... every non-journaled FS breaks when not unmounted correctly (besides, it never lost so much data on me, but that might have been luck).
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS.
So you don't like ReiserFS? How about XFS? Thats definitely not Beta and has been used for years in IRIX now... (besides, reiserfs has definitely been in productive years for quite some time as well, but never mind)
All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS.
Which drawbacks would that be? The one you mentioned before? No... ext3 is journaled, so it doesn't break so badly, when not unmounted...
I'll just skip the part that has has no whatsoever arguments. it is left as an exercise to the reader.
Wine can't make more than a fraction of windoze apps run even though all the requisite win32 APIs are published and have been for years.
Far from it! There are lots of functions that are not documented and tons of parameters that are marked "reserved" but used nevertheless. The documentation sometimes is just plain wrong and wine has to be bug-for-bug compatible with the existing win32 implementations (if you'd make a win32-implementation that works exactly like the specs suggest, I'd doubt that many programs would run on it). And guess what: The bugs aren't that well documented.
it'll automatically bring the system up to the current patch level _before_ bringing the entire system
Wow, now this would be great! Bringing it up to a secure patch level before going online... buthow will they do this? Do you have to call a number and they dictate you a hex-dump of the RPMs to enter into the installer? (Yes, I did realize, that he probably ment that they wont start all the "here-I-am!-crack-me"-services, while doing the update).
"For instance, I could just fly over the US, buy/borrow/steal a copy of whatever software I wanted, dupe the CD and label it "Backstreet Boy's Greatest Hits" for my carry-on CD case."
And you could do that as much as you want, I imagine, as long as your name doesn't sent off any warning bells when the FBI does a cursory scan of the passenger list.
Even then you could do it (assuming your name only sets of warning bells, and doesn't get you arrested, of course, if it did, flying would not be such a smart idea at all...): Use some steganography and burry your encryption software in some of the audio-tracks. Granted you would make it rather redundant, 'cause you got no error-correction in CD-Audio-Tracks, but it would be possible. And AFAIK steganography-software can be freely exportet....
( an FTP client + net connection ) |
( the ability to send an CD-ROM containing the source of GnuPG & Co + a compiler) |
( Crypto Textbook (with one-time-pads in it) + a pen + some paper (>= 2 sheets)) =
Man, I hate Legalese and it's dialects. There are plenty of questions on these pages, but technically only one answer (I think, answers to yes/no-questions should containe one of "yes", "no" and "that depends on..." (or similar phrases). The only question they really give an answer to (in the gramatical sense) is "Can I get a copy of this CD without the copy protection?". I think at least "* Can I listen to the songs from this CD on my MP3 player?" would be easy to answer: "We don't want you to be able to produce MP3-files of this discs, because you can copy it!". (Wrap it in leagalese and it almost looks nice!).
You're talking about an Directory? Like directory.google.com (or dmoz.org which is the exact same thing with a different look)? They are human edited! Take a look at their description of how to add a site. The description you find there are all entered-directly-into-the-directory. If you don't like the quality of them, you can update them. (Sounds familiar? It should.)
I hope that Linus and Alan Cox have learned to manage things better now. If not, someone else will have to pick up the slack (maybe RedHat) and manage a stable kernel.
Neither Linus, nor Alan Cox maintain 2.4 at the moment. Marcelo Tosatti does, and from what I read on LKML some ppl thought that to be a bad move at the beginning, but I think it works out just great (the first release he made was 2.4.17 IIRC)
Apart from the entire 'slashdot is not freshmeat'-discussion I'd like to note, that maybe slashdot should not mention the URL to the kernel archive, but only the URL for the mirrors-list. I'm sure everyone able to compile and use a 2.5.x kernel is able to find the correct download directory, should he be confronted with a mirror list.
I said it before and I'll say it again. I definitely won't use it for my daily work, but I will definitely have it installed on my home machine just for this 'Johny Mnemonic can do it, so can I'-feeling. Isn't eye candy something you want every now and then? Aren't you fascinated by aaquake? It's exactly the same thing: Noone will ever really use it, but it's a nice hack.
Full ACK, in Outlook it is at least possible to write in a good style ('though you generally go through a lot of pain to be able to do so), but in Notes it is just not possible (at least I haven't found a sane way to do it, after I've used it for 3 years).
I see the entire topic mainly from an Usenet-Perspective. Usenet is a bit better in this respect. The three groups I read frequently have almost consistent quoting style, others I read every now and then have not so great, but still good quoting habbits. It seems that the more technical a discussion gets, the better the quoting gets.
And should you ever read the LKML archive you'll find that although you'll find 'Outlook default quotings' none of the gurus use it...
Single message archiving only works if you can trust the person you're conversing with.
Or if you can trust that the person you're conversiong don't even know that they could edit this 'single message archive', which is fairly rare with ppl who don't know how to quote.
And great for people who want to play with circuits, but don't have a way to fab their own chips. Which is pretty much all of us. We can now go along and make our own Z80 and 6502 derivatives running at a slower speed then the original, but very light and plasticy. Sounds like great fun.
I don't know which fact I should find more alerting:
That I read a site where ppl post such things
That I understand what you are saying
That I agree on the "Sounds like great fun."-part.
So we should spam to prevent evil corporations from supressing other companies and to tell those other companies to use free software.
Now if we'd use some high-tech widget (which is subject to an copyright infringement suit and driven by the newest experimental Linux kernel) to mail them, we'd have the perfect slashdot-story
When I think of dolphins, I think of these unreliable, playful creatures that basically live the life of riley, eating fish and playing tricks on sailors all day long.
Well, go read Illuminatus and you'll get quite a different impresion;-)
Whereas an elephant...well, they never forget, do they?
On a more serious note this quite correctly describes the difference between MySQL and Postgresql. MySQL is the faster, but less reliable one of the two, mainly for simple, not-really-mission-critical Databases, whereas PostgreSQL is the more Oracle-like heavyweight.
D'oh! You beat me on that one, should've checked more carefully. Btw, do they check for double submits? If so I managed to suggest it first. I'd love to see it named Howard.
Maybe O'Reilly is influencing some open source developers? (I am influenced for sure, 'though I can't really call myself an open source developer). AFAIK at least the perl camel was initially used by O'Reilly and not by the Perl-crowd.
This is the mentality that the anti-gun lobbyists use against the gun industry.
Maybe, since I'm not from the US I don't follow on this topic,...
Joe User is a complete moron and shoots himself in the face while cleaning his gun therefore all guns are dangerous and should be outlawed.;-)
Well, there are two differences: Once shotting himself in the face and crashing his personal desktop are two different pairs of shoes. Second: I don't think scripting languages should be outlawed, I just stated the dangers.
Maybe what we need are a little less stupid users.
Slashdot Mirror
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but ...
Well, Windows doesn't require any less maintenance ... except when you run it on a single desktop. But Windows Server really require a lot of maintenance (as do Sun, HP-UX, ...). Theres no real difference here ... of course you can run a windows server unmaintaned, but then it will ... well, let's say "open".
"Stuff is known to break when you hit it with other heavy stuff" Nothing new here... every non-journaled FS breaks when not unmounted correctly (besides, it never lost so much data on me, but that might have been luck).
So you don't like ReiserFS? How about XFS? Thats definitely not Beta and has been used for years in IRIX now ... (besides, reiserfs has definitely been in productive years for quite some time as well, but never mind)
Which drawbacks would that be? The one you mentioned before? No ... ext3 is journaled, so it doesn't break so badly, when not unmounted ...
I'll just skip the part that has has no whatsoever arguments. it is left as an exercise to the reader.
Far from it! There are lots of functions that are not documented and tons of parameters that are marked "reserved" but used nevertheless. The documentation sometimes is just plain wrong and wine has to be bug-for-bug compatible with the existing win32 implementations (if you'd make a win32-implementation that works exactly like the specs suggest, I'd doubt that many programs would run on it). And guess what: The bugs aren't that well documented.
Wow, now this would be great! Bringing it up to a secure patch level before going online ... buthow will they do this? Do you have to call a number and they dictate you a hex-dump of the RPMs to enter into the installer? (Yes, I did realize, that he probably ment that they wont start all the "here-I-am!-crack-me"-services, while doing the update).
Those youngsters playing 3d-shooters? Perhaps it's because the do pay them money...
They don't seem to think the history of their site would be interesting: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://web.archive.or g/ lredirects you to their index.html! boring!
Now, that would really be a test for their apps. Same as if Google indexed www.google.com (entirely).
Even then you could do it (assuming your name only sets of warning bells, and doesn't get you arrested, of course, if it did, flying would not be such a smart idea at all ...): Use some steganography and burry your encryption software in some of the audio-tracks. Granted you would make it rather redundant, 'cause you got no error-correction in CD-Audio-Tracks, but it would be possible. And AFAIK steganography-software can be freely exportet....
( an FTP client + net connection ) |
... Anywhere in the world.
( the ability to send an CD-ROM containing the source of GnuPG & Co + a compiler) |
( Crypto Textbook (with one-time-pads in it) + a pen + some paper (>= 2 sheets)) =
High Grad Encryption
Man, I hate Legalese and it's dialects. There are plenty of questions on these pages, but technically only one answer (I think, answers to yes/no-questions should containe one of "yes", "no" and "that depends on ..." (or similar phrases). The only question they really give an answer to (in the gramatical sense) is "Can I get a copy of this CD without the copy protection?". I think at least "* Can I listen to the songs from this CD on my MP3 player?" would be easy to answer: "We don't want you to be able to produce MP3-files of this discs, because you can copy it!". (Wrap it in leagalese and it almost looks nice!).
You're talking about an Directory? Like directory.google.com (or dmoz.org which is the exact same thing with a different look)? They are human edited! Take a look at their description of how to add a site. The description you find there are all entered-directly-into-the-directory. If you don't like the quality of them, you can update them. (Sounds familiar? It should.)
Neither Linus, nor Alan Cox maintain 2.4 at the moment. Marcelo Tosatti does, and from what I read on LKML some ppl thought that to be a bad move at the beginning, but I think it works out just great (the first release he made was 2.4.17 IIRC)
Ok, I'm not really serious on this one ...
(Emphasis mine) So private customers do get the same EULA, with a different wording?
So moderating via a computer with a TFT monitor or without a mouse (or using only a mouse) is not yet patented?
Apart from the entire 'slashdot is not freshmeat'-discussion I'd like to note, that maybe slashdot should not mention the URL to the kernel archive, but only the URL for the mirrors-list. I'm sure everyone able to compile and use a 2.5.x kernel is able to find the correct download directory, should he be confronted with a mirror list.
I said it before and I'll say it again. I definitely won't use it for my daily work, but I will definitely have it installed on my home machine just for this 'Johny Mnemonic can do it, so can I'-feeling. Isn't eye candy something you want every now and then? Aren't you fascinated by aaquake? It's exactly the same thing: Noone will ever really use it, but it's a nice hack.
Full ACK, in Outlook it is at least possible to write in a good style ('though you generally go through a lot of pain to be able to do so), but in Notes it is just not possible (at least I haven't found a sane way to do it, after I've used it for 3 years). ...
I see the entire topic mainly from an Usenet-Perspective. Usenet is a bit better in this respect. The three groups I read frequently have almost consistent quoting style, others I read every now and then have not so great, but still good quoting habbits. It seems that the more technical a discussion gets, the better the quoting gets.
And should you ever read the LKML archive you'll find that although you'll find 'Outlook default quotings' none of the gurus use it
Or if you can trust that the person you're conversiong don't even know that they could edit this 'single message archive', which is fairly rare with ppl who don't know how to quote.
I don't know which fact I should find more alerting:
So we should spam to prevent evil corporations from supressing other companies and to tell those other companies to use free software.
Now if we'd use some high-tech widget (which is subject to an copyright infringement suit and driven by the newest experimental Linux kernel) to mail them, we'd have the perfect slashdot-story
Man! You just did an first post that contributed something! What do you think? Great move, 'though...
Well, go read Illuminatus and you'll get quite a different impresion ;-)
On a more serious note this quite correctly describes the difference between MySQL and Postgresql. MySQL is the faster, but less reliable one of the two, mainly for simple, not-really-mission-critical Databases, whereas PostgreSQL is the more Oracle-like heavyweight.
D'oh! You beat me on that one, should've checked more carefully. Btw, do they check for double submits? If so I managed to suggest it first. I'd love to see it named Howard.
Why not call it Howard, now thats one cool dolphin.
And for those who don't get the reference it still doesn't sound offensive or anything.
Maybe O'Reilly is influencing some open source developers? (I am influenced for sure, 'though I can't really call myself an open source developer). AFAIK at least the perl camel was initially used by O'Reilly and not by the Perl-crowd.
Maybe, since I'm not from the US I don't follow on this topic, ...
Well, there are two differences: Once shotting himself in the face and crashing his personal desktop are two different pairs of shoes. Second: I don't think scripting languages should be outlawed, I just stated the dangers.
Definitely!