Actually, lately, I've found newsgroup archives(groups.google.com) to be invaluable.
I'm no sysadmin, so I've gone through friends for all my major windows issues (not much anymore, but thats just experience), I know that sysadmins at many of my previous companies (including windows AND unix/linux sys admins) have called MS Support with much success, and enjoy using it.
Maybe its just me. Whenever I had problems, I asked on IRC (this was several years ago) and always got the "RTFM" when either there wasn't a manual, or one written so poorly that didn't have any answers. If I didn't have friends to help me out, I would have been very disenchanted with Linux. Maybe the times have changed, and you can ignore me, but you won't see me back in IRC asking questions.
Sidenote - I love it when people call me a troll at the end of their long critique of one of my posts. Isn't the point of fighting a troll not to reply to them?;-)
You can also get thrashed by the community (hence the anagram RTFM). Commercial software support is professional, open source CAN be professional, but most of the time you get some 13 year old 1337 punk insulting your lack of knowledge. Professional support CAN be bought by companies such as redhat, but at a large cost.
The open source community typically provides much better online support than closed source,
Funny, I was never told to RTFM when I asked for commercial support. The open source community direly needs to lose the punks for it to be reliable for education and commercial support.
Open source games? Want to make money? Offer marketing embeded WITHIN the game. It costs more money for your product to have 'good affects', etc. You could make a game, give it away for free AND make money.
The designers gets paid for his/her efforts.
The marketing people get tons of exposure for their products.
The gamer gets a quality game for free.
Pray. And give money and support funding to any program that maps the sky for asteroids. Cause if any are on their way (I'd say 30 years or less), well... we're just f*cked.
MS has only had a week or two with the knowledge of this bug (article mentions that MS learned in November aka this month some time). For such a huge exploit, I'd suspect it'll take a week to pinpoint the code error, a week to fix the code, and two to four weeks of testing it.
That's about a month/month-and-a-half. Don't you think they deserve a good solid two months before posting the exploit?
Its all about businesses and how they work.
Primarily, when they choose a webapp server, they are looking for reliability, maintainability, and (here's the big one) support. Price is on the lower end of the chart, withp olitics, like partnerships with IBM/BEA, being well above 'price'.
Now, you have tomcat and apache. Very reliable, easy to maintain, no support (unless you have an inhouse expert).
You have the commercial product (I'll use Weblogic) that is just as reliable, a little more difficult to configure but easy to maintain, full support (and more efficient of a server, for companies with high bandwidth sites). Oh, btw, the commercial product costs about ten grand more.
The company then forks over the ten grand. Why? Mostly for the support. Open Source has a great advantage of price, but a HUGE disadvantage of support. It'd be nice to see a national-wide company that does nothing more but install, configure, maintain, and support open source products.
However I'd also be quite upset at my vendor for letting this happen.
That's getting down to a different point. Did the vendor know of the bug and ignore it, or was it something that wasn't considered? Even Linux has security bugs. Its naive to think that any program is 100% secure.
The Wired talks more about bugtrack's handling of the whole thing, and how it essentially posted working code for the exploit. Was it irresponsible or not?
Easy question to answer.
If Linux had an exploit that allowed someone to ssh into your box, su to root, then fsck your harddrive, and a patch wasn't released yet, would you be pissed off that bugtraq posted the code to exploit the bug?
Don't say "it'll never happen," cause anything is possible.
Its nice to see either a.) An author of the book or b.) a wrox employee create a/. user to make post about this book.
...is aimed purely at Sys-admins, not programmers. Programmers will learn everything they need to know about configuring Tomcat...
OK, so we have a system that needs tomcat, complete with sysadmins and java developers. Why would you let the sysadmins configure tomcat, when you have developers to do it?
Ok, if you already have a product, the developers were consultants that already left, and the sysadmin is switching to tomcat, peruse the tomcat website, cause the doc is extremely easy to read and simple to understand.
Honestly, any sysadmin worth his salt should be able to understand how to configure tomcat in under an hour, and not need any book when the online doc is sufficient.
Besides, tomcat is mainly used for prototyping pages and making small internal sites. Anything larger goes into a full scale J2EE server like JBoss, Weblogic, or WebSphere. Any other type of tomcat site is a small majority that isn't enough for wrox to make money off this book, and is specialized enough to contact the tomcat mailing list and get your answers from the developers.
Tomcat's documentation is superior and it is so very simple to use. I don't think a book on the subject is really necessary. Perhaps if you are doing something extremely out-of-the-ordinary when you plug tomcat into JBoss, but it would be more of a JBoss issue than a tomcat issue.
Will the brain be intelligent to know that £184,000,000 isn't $184,000,000 (US)??
FYI: The US amount is almost $300,000,000 ($292,408,889.38 to be exact).
My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others).
Lets see, an OS that handles games, writing papers, chatting with friends, and browsing flash-based sites.
Windows does all these well, and very easily. Most of these things require loopholes and extra steps for Linux.
So my question becomes "Why are you switching them to Linux? You already have a good solution for the time being!"
Switching your children over to linux without any "real" reason. Sounds like a troll to me.
I think a better business practice would be to make the security feature defaultly installed, so clueless users will be protected, but those that aren't interested and are savvy enough can turn them off.
Nice to see Microsoft taking reponsibility for their mistakes, but they really should have done so when they designed Windows."
I mean, come on. When they do something right, you just GOTTA change it around to make it a negative. And you wonder why MS is after Linux, right? Who's being childish now?
I'd really like to know how many lines of code the submitter even wrote if he is naive enough to think that MS architects would design the perfect OS from the start.
So true.
I actually heard people bitch and moan at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, because the movie stopped in the middle of the story, and they'd have to wait a full year to find out the next part.
Eventually, someone yelled "Its a classic book! Go buy it and read it and you'll know the whole trilogy before the next movie comes out!"
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, lately, I've found newsgroup archives(groups.google.com) to be invaluable.
I'm no sysadmin, so I've gone through friends for all my major windows issues (not much anymore, but thats just experience), I know that sysadmins at many of my previous companies (including windows AND unix/linux sys admins) have called MS Support with much success, and enjoy using it.
Maybe its just me. Whenever I had problems, I asked on IRC (this was several years ago) and always got the "RTFM" when either there wasn't a manual, or one written so poorly that didn't have any answers. If I didn't have friends to help me out, I would have been very disenchanted with Linux. Maybe the times have changed, and you can ignore me, but you won't see me back in IRC asking questions.
;-)
Sidenote - I love it when people call me a troll at the end of their long critique of one of my posts. Isn't the point of fighting a troll not to reply to them?
This LARGE COST that you speak of is no larger then what you would to have paid for a license for the same product in MS land.
So now you are saying that if you hit any roadblocks in installation, you've just lost all money you 'saved' by switching to linux?
you can get support from the community
You can also get thrashed by the community (hence the anagram RTFM). Commercial software support is professional, open source CAN be professional, but most of the time you get some 13 year old 1337 punk insulting your lack of knowledge. Professional support CAN be bought by companies such as redhat, but at a large cost.
The open source community typically provides much better online support than closed source,
Funny, I was never told to RTFM when I asked for commercial support. The open source community direly needs to lose the punks for it to be reliable for education and commercial support.
Besides, he's got FortKnox [slashdot.org] beat by at least 400.
And I had no life (as per Michael) when I was at 713!!
EXACTLY!
Open source games? Want to make money? Offer marketing embeded WITHIN the game. It costs more money for your product to have 'good affects', etc. You could make a game, give it away for free AND make money.
The designers gets paid for his/her efforts.
The marketing people get tons of exposure for their products.
The gamer gets a quality game for free.
Its a win-win-win situation!!
So what do we do today??
Pray. And give money and support funding to any program that maps the sky for asteroids. Cause if any are on their way (I'd say 30 years or less), well... we're just f*cked.
MS has only had a week or two with the knowledge of this bug (article mentions that MS learned in November aka this month some time). For such a huge exploit, I'd suspect it'll take a week to pinpoint the code error, a week to fix the code, and two to four weeks of testing it.
That's about a month/month-and-a-half. Don't you think they deserve a good solid two months before posting the exploit?
Its all about businesses and how they work.
Primarily, when they choose a webapp server, they are looking for reliability, maintainability, and (here's the big one) support.
Price is on the lower end of the chart, withp olitics, like partnerships with IBM/BEA, being well above 'price'.
Now, you have tomcat and apache. Very reliable, easy to maintain, no support (unless you have an inhouse expert).
You have the commercial product (I'll use Weblogic) that is just as reliable, a little more difficult to configure but easy to maintain, full support (and more efficient of a server, for companies with high bandwidth sites). Oh, btw, the commercial product costs about ten grand more.
The company then forks over the ten grand. Why? Mostly for the support. Open Source has a great advantage of price, but a HUGE disadvantage of support. It'd be nice to see a national-wide company that does nothing more but install, configure, maintain, and support open source products.
However I'd also be quite upset at my vendor for letting this happen.
That's getting down to a different point. Did the vendor know of the bug and ignore it, or was it something that wasn't considered? Even Linux has security bugs. Its naive to think that any program is 100% secure.
(*grumble* putting the submit and preview button so close together *grumble*)
The point is, don't think of this as a "MS deserves it," because it isn't a matter of what the bug was, but how bugtraq handled it.
The Wired talks more about bugtrack's handling of the whole thing, and how it essentially posted working code for the exploit. Was it irresponsible or not?
Easy question to answer.
If Linux had an exploit that allowed someone to ssh into your box, su to root, then fsck your harddrive, and a patch wasn't released yet, would you be pissed off that bugtraq posted the code to exploit the bug?
Don't say "it'll never happen," cause anything is possible.
Wow, you make EJBs in your prototypes? No? JMS? No? Then you make your prototypes simple enough for tomcat to run.
Its nice to see either a.) An author of the book or b.) a wrox employee create a /. user to make post about this book.
...is aimed purely at Sys-admins, not programmers. Programmers will learn everything they need to know about configuring Tomcat...
OK, so we have a system that needs tomcat, complete with sysadmins and java developers. Why would you let the sysadmins configure tomcat, when you have developers to do it?
Ok, if you already have a product, the developers were consultants that already left, and the sysadmin is switching to tomcat, peruse the tomcat website, cause the doc is extremely easy to read and simple to understand.
Honestly, any sysadmin worth his salt should be able to understand how to configure tomcat in under an hour, and not need any book when the online doc is sufficient.
Besides, tomcat is mainly used for prototyping pages and making small internal sites. Anything larger goes into a full scale J2EE server like JBoss, Weblogic, or WebSphere. Any other type of tomcat site is a small majority that isn't enough for wrox to make money off this book, and is specialized enough to contact the tomcat mailing list and get your answers from the developers.
In Windows, its even easier. Install the installshield script, and place your jsps and servlets into the default directory. Voila.
You can even get struts installed by plopping the struts jar file into the deploy directory, and it'll autodeploy struts instantly.
Tomcat's documentation is superior and it is so very simple to use. I don't think a book on the subject is really necessary. Perhaps if you are doing something extremely out-of-the-ordinary when you plug tomcat into JBoss, but it would be more of a JBoss issue than a tomcat issue.
From the article:
£184 Million
Will the brain be intelligent to know that £184,000,000 isn't $184,000,000 (US)??
FYI: The US amount is almost $300,000,000 ($292,408,889.38 to be exact).
My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others).
Lets see, an OS that handles games, writing papers, chatting with friends, and browsing flash-based sites.
Windows does all these well, and very easily. Most of these things require loopholes and extra steps for Linux.
So my question becomes "Why are you switching them to Linux? You already have a good solution for the time being!"
Switching your children over to linux without any "real" reason. Sounds like a troll to me.
Isn't TiVo's PVR based on *BSD or Linux?
Just adding "Linux" to the title doesn't make it newsworthy.
Sorry, but its just following the trend of TiVo.
I think a better business practice would be to make the security feature defaultly installed, so clueless users will be protected, but those that aren't interested and are savvy enough can turn them off.
Amen, brother!
Nice to see Microsoft taking reponsibility for their mistakes, but they really should have done so when they designed Windows."
I mean, come on. When they do something right, you just GOTTA change it around to make it a negative. And you wonder why MS is after Linux, right? Who's being childish now?
I'd really like to know how many lines of code the submitter even wrote if he is naive enough to think that MS architects would design the perfect OS from the start.
So true.
I actually heard people bitch and moan at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, because the movie stopped in the middle of the story, and they'd have to wait a full year to find out the next part.
Eventually, someone yelled "Its a classic book! Go buy it and read it and you'll know the whole trilogy before the next movie comes out!"
Yes! Called a troll by a troll.
Next time remember to hit that "posy anonymously" checkbox.
Congrats! Now Mozilla will be on that hot list of stuff not able to download and use at the office!
GOOD THINKING!