One especially valid point is that the failures of open source do not get any attention. For every Apache there are probably dozens of aborted projects that never worked out. [...] But it does give us a skewed view of how effective the open source methodology is (because the successes are far more visible than the failures). .
Well I have to say especially this is a point which is not valid IMO. We are comparing open vs. closed source. I think nobody argues that danger of dying a premature death of an opensource project is smaller than with closed source. The real statement in this area in favor of open source is: "If an OSS Project dies - NO CODE/IDEAS IS/ARE LOST!!!"
OTOH, you can't tell whether OSS projects die more often than commercial project, because most commercial projects don't die in front of the public (Uhm, except amiga and ms bob). You are probably deeply wrong here. I bet some people here can tell some personal expiriences of putting alot of work in closed projects only to see the killed off by upper management after a year. Further, count the numerous shareware, freeware (as in free beer) projects, small companies or indivuals which canceled their product cause they couldn't compete against ms, adobe and other wealthy companies - even if their product may have been better. We will never ever see one line of source code.
Could anybody with more insight please explain to me (and probably to others, too) what _fundamental_technical_ obstacles exist which prevent you from building a nc-server network with one big and several small standart pc's and your favorite linux distribution? I mean Xfree, nfs/code etc, nis/kerberos, telnet/ssh. Not every package mentioned is perfect, but I want to know about fundamental problems. Isn't - in this context - the "network computer" just a buzzword? Take a large ramdisk and boot over the network using something as nilo.. Or don't use the all or nothing approach and use a local harddisc + apps over network.
I think one can argue more agressive here. One very important point of opensource is:
If you sell a closed source product, you are in danger to be wiped off the market sooner or later - more probably later, but for sure - by an open source project
This may sound a bit too optimistic (or pessimistic, choose your preference), but I think its true because:
(1) Most users have a finite set of demands for a software product. (2) Closed software product A, version 1.0, is brought to the market and meets 50 percent of the demands in (1). (3) A reaches version 2.0, reaching 80 percent of (1) (4) Open Source Project B 1.0 is started, meeting 30 percent of (1). (5) A advances, version 3.0 meeting 95 percent of (1) (6) B 2.0 meets 50 % and so on , A 3.0 97 percent
So the gap between closed A and open B gets smaller and smaller. And the consequences: a) After some time, people change from A to B cause of the points Bruce mentions above (faster, less buggy, more trustable) and - that's important - because of a much better user feedback, open source has not the tendency to get bloated (can you say "Office Agent"), alienating users who are used to efficiently "get their work done". b) A more heavyweight factor are the new users of sotware of type A or B. After some time, the small advantage (if any) A will have is not sufficient to get the newcomers to buy A. This factor is extremly important looking at the percentage of world population not using computers today.
Looking at the newest version of some standart software (cd creator, word, gui networking tools like wsping or ftp-clients, partly partion magic, winzip etc.) I get the strong impression that the point of "saturating" user needs is very near or reached here. It's very clear these software companies are in desperate search of new features, but sadly, they seem not to find any. They are not a moving target for an open source project any more and there are at least some freeware tools offering nearly the same functionality. On a side note, I think this companies have to be thankfull for the existence of software pirates. Without them, there would be a lot more open source (or at least freeware) replacments evolving.
They seem not to have any more advanced expierence with nt server, too. For a laugh, goto Sequences for Installing and Configuring Server Applications Running on Windows NT Server 4.0. Ask yourself: What do I have to do if I want to install more than one of the packages? And you know, one failure and you are fscked. And while talking about "enterprises" and the packages they don't want to install, here's a very nice one:Installing MS-Site Server 3.0. A summary, look at the original, you will fall from your chair, because the are more trapdoors than a suse-distro has packages. And remember, for every point you see above there's an average of one reboot (my guesstimate). First a bunch of pre-installation tips in the form of do not install ms-software xy version a.bcd together with mss 3.0, otherwise you're screwed, and then this:
Install Windows NT-Server 4.0
Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.
Install Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 Service Pack 2 using the Standard installation.
Install the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack.
Install Index Server, Windows Scripting Host, and under the IIS options, install the SMTP server.
Install the updated FrontPage 98 Server Extensions, version 3.0.2.1706.
Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack
Install Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0. For this configuration, Internet Explorer 5.0 is required.
Install Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.
Install SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 1. Q232570.[...}Installing SQL 7.0 SP1 can take up to 30 minutes, which does not include the time it takes to download the service pack.
Configure the SQL Server client default Network Library to Named Pipes.
Verify that the MSDTC service is started and that MSDTC is configured to start automatically.
Configure database connectivity.
Install Site Server 3.0.
(Optional) Install Commerce Server.
(Optional) Install Visual Studio 6.0 or Visual Studio 97.[...] If you installed Visual Studio, apply Visual Studio 97 Service Pack 3 or Visual Studio 6.0 Service Pack 3 appropriately.
Install Site Server 3.0 Service Pack 2.
(Optional) Install Commerce Interchange Pipeline Manager (CIPM) for Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition.
Install MDAC version 2.1.2.4202.3, which is also known as MDAC 2.1 SP2.
Install ADSI 2.5.
Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5.
After that there follow 8 "post-installation instructions, i.e. bugfixes and workarounds".
Believe the people from attrition or don't belive them. But here's a text from fyodor, the creator of nmap. He reacts to the publishing of a Carolyn Meinel article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. My god!!! It's a shame that they didn't react, 2 months later one could read the article in the foreign "brother" newspapers of scientific american. I wrote an angry letter to them, but they insisted mrs. meinel had a good reputation in security circles. I wonder why I have NEVER seen ANY information of her or her affiliates on bugtrag/ntbugtaq/comp.security.* . Argh, perhaps I'm just to idealistic to think there have to be some journalists who bother to get any information, but this makes me really angry.
... (because it is so specialized) can probably out-render any CPU available today (and probably for the next 6-8 months). And, one should note that hardware geometry is a new technology _in_the_consumer_market_. In 6-8 months we'll have the next geforce, and with it perhaps much higher clockrates, more pipelines, more features. The nvidia guys themselves seem to think of up to 8(!) times the geometry processing power. And I can belive this, it's just improving the given plattform, a lot easier than the step they have done now. No CPU will ever be able to catch up, it's the same as with DSPs. It's a big step, and in my opinion we'll see nvidia (and S3, Matrox, and perhaps ATI and 3dfx too, otherwise they'll die) fastly going in a direction where they will be able to get all specialized graphics hardware manufacturers into big trouble. Nobody who sells for a relativly small market segment is able to compete with a demanding monopoly free mass market which wants exactly these highend features. And - looking at the highend workstation-graphics companies - we see they all know it (SGI, Intergraph...).
I think the assumption that the number of participants - I mean programmers + mailing list subscribers - grows exponentially is unfounded. Why should it be? There are two fundamental limiting factors 1. The growth of the internet may be exponential, but it's not clear that this means exponential growth of the number of people who are _interested_ in participating (even with subscribing to a mailing list) grows exponential. One have to remember that the internet doesn't create "technical" people but in reality eats its way into "normal" population. Naturally the percentage of "technicians" who are newcomers to the internet will in fact drop very fast. 2. I guess the number of open source projects grows exponentially itself.
Cool, someone else who noticed that. That's the bass thingie, I wondered why nobody seemed to have noticed this before. Last year, someone on alt.hackers.malicious bothered everyone when he posted his ip-adress and told the people they would not be able to hack him, because his nt-box was so secure. This happens always by someone who wants to get somone else in trouble, but this time it was really the guys own machine. Three day later he posted from a different os (w95) and told that someone had broken into his machine and wiped his hd. He continued to say that this guy had contacted him afterwards and that this guy was a security pro. The pro explained him that he didn't have any chance from the beginning, despite following all ms security advisories - thats the joy of black box systems...
Well, I have to answer directly, IMO it isn't always a good idea to nmap the server. There is no important information to get anyway. One could go to www.four11.com to search for (alternate) email adresses. You could try a zone transfer of the domain, sometimes funnily the names of their machines tell you something. Watch the headers of the postings at dejanews (under "view original usenet format"). If you find an interesting post in dejanews, got to altavista and search in their usenet engine for the same message, they show you all headers if you push the "B" (retrive binary attachment, don't ask me...). Then you have normally the nntp-posting host, ergo the provider of the individual if he posted from home. Voila, perhaps he has a nice homepage... If you find some office documents on some pages, download the and view at the with an editor. If you're lucky you get his home adress, telephone number and some porn websites he visited sometimes. Really, I found www.penthouse.com and others in some business documents... Does anybody know how to do an _reverse_ whois search, i.e. person-record->domain-records this person owns? Oh, and at altavista, try link:domainname, perhaps some staff members or companies have a homepage on which they link to the company you want to check out.
This was reported by Nicko van Someren at the Crypto'98 rump session. Markus Kuhn was cited in a news-posting I read, and he mentioned the ncipher, who apparantly used this trick before to get their strong encryption (hardware!) into the windows api. One of their founders is said Nicko van Someren.
Today Slashdot Inc. (SLDI) today announced the beta testing phase of its new SlashMod 2000(TM). The successor of the well established SlashMod 97(TM) will include many new features including
MetaMod(TM) MetaMod gives users the ability to customize and control the quality of the ModeRate(TM)-System, providing a easy to use interface utilizing intelligent Agents. MetaMod includes a new "SlashMod Setup Assistant" that walks users through the basic steps required to set up accounts, moderate, flame and troll.
IntelliKarma(TM) With IntelliKarma, SlashMod 2000 is able to take previous actions of the user into account, giving the user appropriate feedback. IntelliKarma improves greatly the ergonomic quality of human - machine interaction. The software also includes a "Step-By-Step Navigation" feature that provides users with clear directions and easy access to the system activities they use most often. To help users plan their posting future, IntelliKarma delivers a "Karma Event Modeler" that evaluates the effect of different scenarios -- such as posting wise, or not at all -- on their overall Karma Strategie.
ActiveMod(TM) ActiveMod combines streamlined document creation with powerful Web functionality enabling the user to work more efficiently and communicate his ideas more effectively. ActiveMod includes a comprehensive set of features enabling to customize how they want to interact with SlashMod.
According to CmdrTaco, Product Manager of SlashMod2000, most portal software is too complicated to use and not friendly to sensible customers. "Slashmod 2000 will give new users the ability to adjust the system to fit their personal needs, dependend on how lighthearted they are", Taco said. "And experienced users will also see clearly the facilites." SlashMod 2000 is the result of 1 year of research and programming in the field of advanced group dynamics. "By integrating technologies like IntelliKarma an ActiveMod into SlashMod 2000, we are able to to a great step into the right direction. Improvements to SlashMod address top feature requests from users", said Taco. "We are very excited and really want to get the product in the marketplace". But SlashMod 2000 will go through extensive beta testing. "We will deliver when our customers tell us it's ready", said Taco. "SlasMod 2000 is the greatest we have ever done, and we want to do it right".
The final version of SlashMod 2000 is expected to be available in late autumn.
OTOH, they could simply have left everything as it was and watching while ms slowly eats away marketshare from their core business fields. No, I think it makes perfect sends for sun to give star office away for free, because this is a way to get people (I don't mean geeks here!) used to the fact that there are alternatives. But they have to face that they will not be able to compete with ms alone in the office field. So GPLing star office would have a much bigger impact in the market/PR + star office could help other free office suites too. IMO, that would be the best way cause the needed effect for sun, heterogenous desktop systems in order to be safer from the thread of msoffice/exchange/nt-server/mssql - integration games. And that should be worth a lot of money for sun...
This is an excerpt from a summa ry of the internet auditing project. Friday, our Japanese participants discover that a computer on their company network has been cracked into, one very secure Linux box running only SSH and Apache 1.3.4. Now this would definitely send a chill up your spine if you knew just how fanatic our friends are when it comes to network security. Furthermore, they only detected the intrusion three days after the fact, which is unbelievable when you consider the insane monitoring levels they've been keeping since they agreed to participate in the scan. They would have noticed any funny stuff, and in fact, they did, lots of it, but none of which came close enough to a security breach to raise any alarms. [..] The attacker knows the employee's username and password and is even connecting through the employee's Japanese ISP on the employee's account! (the phone company identified this was an untraceable overseas caller)
This information could not have been sniffed, since network services are only provided over encrypted SSH sessions.
Further investigation shows that this employee's personal NT box, connected over a dynamic dailup connection, had been cracked into 4 days earlier. [..] How the NT box was cracked into in the first place is still a mystery. The logs weren't helpful (surprise! surprise!) and the only way we were even able to confirm this had happened was by putting a sniff on the NT's traffic (following a hunch) and catching those sneaky packets redhanded, transmitting our SSH identification down under.
Open hardware tends to drive down prices very fast, but it doesn't seem to lead to innovation.
...
Voodoo1
Geforce
Athlon
...
Pleeease, if apple/sgi/beos would offer as crappy system as the standart wintel-pc, they would have been dead long before. They _have_ to be technically ahead, thats their only chance to survive, if they wouldn't, they simply wouldn't exist. And they are getting problems everytime one of their "innovations" is available by products from the intel-pc mass market.
This is very true, but I think no software company at all can take this risk alone. This is exactly what insurances are for. A software company which garantees to take the risk of their "important stuff"-controlling product will have an insurance themselves. I see two possibilities here: 1. The company which implements their product with linux gets this assurance. This is actually more secure then implementing with win nt or other closed source products. The insurance company could hire some experts to evaluate the risk. 2. Insurance companies which can specialize in insuring open source products.
Not id per se, but J.Carmack personally. To see it yourself, go to the g200-dev mailing list. He is a very keen participant of this list. Incredible, I wonder how he gets the time, but anyway, he seems to be really cool.
And as I posted above, linux is the only chance for sun to fight against the ms-stronghold of proprietary desktop "features" demanding for an proprietary server os. Let's spread the word to sun, just in case they don't know.
If sun lets star office/linux die, the only effect will be that the people at Corel (and abisource) will be very happy. Thats all, this isn't dangerous. Get real, nobody will buy Solaris in order to run an office suite. It's clear that nobody will get a food in the desktop market against ms unless he gives away at least the os for free. Hope sun knows this.
Sun may be vulnerable to Linux/Intel, but they really have to fear for their enterprise market in long term. Well yeah, they may have the best platform for database etc. in enterprise shops, but _this_is_where_ms_wants_to_go. When sun looses this, they are lost. Ever seen why corporations adopt exchange? Pleease, quality isn't a decision factor, its the desktop. The next logical steps from ms will be aimed to big servers (win2000 pretends to do 32 procs!), and they will again use the desktop as an attacking point. If you want to fight them in long term, fight them on the desktop or you are screwed. at
Slashdot Mirror
One especially valid point is that the failures of open source do not get any attention. For every Apache there are probably dozens of aborted projects that never worked out.
[...]
But it does give us a skewed view of how effective the open source methodology is (because the successes are far more visible than the failures). .
Well I have to say especially this is a point which is not valid IMO.
We are comparing open vs. closed source. I think nobody argues that danger of dying a premature death of an opensource project is smaller than with closed source. The real statement in this area in favor of open source is:
"If an OSS Project dies - NO CODE/IDEAS IS/ARE LOST!!!"
OTOH, you can't tell whether OSS projects die more often than commercial project, because most commercial projects don't die in front of the public (Uhm, except amiga and ms bob). You are probably deeply wrong here.
I bet some people here can tell some personal expiriences of putting alot of work in closed projects only to see the killed off by upper management after a year.
Further, count the numerous shareware, freeware (as in free beer) projects, small companies or indivuals which canceled their product cause they couldn't compete against ms, adobe and other wealthy companies - even if their product may have been better. We will never ever see one line of source code.
Could anybody with more insight please explain to me (and probably to others, too) what _fundamental_technical_ obstacles exist which prevent you from building a nc-server network with one big and several small standart pc's and your favorite linux distribution?
I mean Xfree, nfs/code etc, nis/kerberos, telnet/ssh. Not every package mentioned is perfect, but I want to know about fundamental problems. Isn't - in this context - the "network computer" just a buzzword? Take a large ramdisk and boot over the network using something as nilo..
Or don't use the all or nothing approach and use a local harddisc + apps over network.
How about showing your slashdot karma points in your resume, now that we are "approved"? ;)
I think one can argue more agressive here.
One very important point of opensource is:
If you sell a closed source product, you are in danger to be wiped off the market sooner or later - more probably later, but for sure - by an open source project
This may sound a bit too optimistic (or pessimistic, choose your preference), but I think its true because:
(1) Most users have a finite set of demands for a software product.
(2) Closed software product A, version 1.0, is brought to the market and meets 50 percent of the demands in (1).
(3) A reaches version 2.0, reaching 80 percent of (1)
(4) Open Source Project B 1.0 is started, meeting 30 percent of (1).
(5) A advances, version 3.0 meeting 95 percent of (1)
(6) B 2.0 meets 50 % and so on , A 3.0 97 percent
So the gap between closed A and open B gets smaller and smaller.
And the consequences:
a) After some time, people change from A to B cause of the points Bruce mentions above (faster, less buggy, more trustable) and - that's important - because of a much better user feedback, open source has not the tendency to get bloated (can you say "Office Agent"), alienating users who are used to efficiently "get their work done".
b) A more heavyweight factor are the new users of sotware of type A or B. After some time, the small advantage (if any) A will have is not sufficient to get the newcomers to buy A. This factor is extremly important looking at the percentage of world population not using computers today.
Looking at the newest version of some standart software (cd creator, word, gui networking tools like wsping or ftp-clients, partly partion magic, winzip etc.) I get the strong impression that the point of "saturating" user needs is very near or reached here. It's very clear these software companies are in desperate search of new features, but sadly, they seem not to find any.
They are not a moving target for an open source project any more and there are at least some freeware tools offering nearly the same functionality.
On a side note, I think this companies have to be thankfull for the existence of software pirates. Without them, there would be a lot more open source (or at least freeware) replacments evolving.
For a laugh, goto Sequences for Installing and Configuring Server Applications Running on Windows NT Server 4.0.
Ask yourself: What do I have to do if I want to install more than one of the packages? And you know, one failure and you are fscked.
And while talking about "enterprises" and the packages they don't want to install, here's a very nice one:Installing MS-Site Server 3.0.
A summary, look at the original, you will fall from your chair, because the are more trapdoors than a suse-distro has packages. And remember, for every point you see above there's an average of one reboot (my guesstimate).
First a bunch of pre-installation tips in the form of do not install ms-software xy version a.bcd together with mss 3.0, otherwise you're screwed, and then this:
If you installed Visual Studio, apply Visual Studio 97 Service Pack 3 or Visual Studio 6.0 Service Pack 3 appropriately.
After that there follow 8 "post-installation instructions, i.e. bugfixes and workarounds".
link to original bugtraq messages archieved at www.securityfocus.com
Believe the people from attrition or don't belive them. But here's a text from fyodor, the creator of nmap. He reacts to the publishing of a Carolyn Meinel article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. My god!!!
It's a shame that they didn't react, 2 months later one could read the article in the foreign "brother" newspapers of scientific american. I wrote an angry letter to them, but they insisted mrs. meinel had a good reputation in security circles.
I wonder why I have NEVER seen ANY information of her or her affiliates on bugtrag/ntbugtaq/comp.security.* . Argh, perhaps I'm just to idealistic to think there have to be some journalists who bother to get any information, but this makes me really angry.
... (because it is so specialized) can probably out-render any CPU available today (and probably for the next 6-8 months). ...).
And, one should note that hardware geometry is a new technology _in_the_consumer_market_.
In 6-8 months we'll have the next geforce, and with it perhaps much higher clockrates, more pipelines, more features. The nvidia guys themselves seem to think of up to 8(!) times the geometry processing power. And I can belive this, it's just improving the given plattform, a lot easier than the step they have done now. No CPU will ever be able to catch up, it's the same as with DSPs.
It's a big step, and in my opinion we'll see nvidia (and S3, Matrox, and perhaps ATI and 3dfx too, otherwise they'll die) fastly going in a direction where they will be able to get all specialized graphics hardware manufacturers into big trouble.
Nobody who sells for a relativly small market segment is able to compete with a demanding monopoly free mass market which wants exactly these highend features.
And - looking at the highend workstation-graphics companies - we see they all know it (SGI, Intergraph
I think the assumption that the number of participants - I mean programmers + mailing list subscribers - grows exponentially is unfounded.
Why should it be?
There are two fundamental limiting factors
1. The growth of the internet may be exponential,
but it's not clear that this means exponential growth of the number of people who are _interested_ in participating (even with subscribing to a mailing list) grows exponential.
One have to remember that the internet doesn't create "technical" people but in reality eats its way into "normal" population. Naturally the percentage of "technicians" who are newcomers to the internet will in fact drop very fast.
2. I guess the number of open source projects grows exponentially itself.
Cool, someone else who noticed that. That's the bass thingie, I wondered why nobody seemed to have noticed this before.
Last year, someone on alt.hackers.malicious bothered everyone when he posted his ip-adress and told the people they would not be able to hack him, because his nt-box was so secure. This happens always by someone who wants to get somone else in trouble, but this time it was really the guys own machine.
Three day later he posted from a different os (w95) and told that someone had broken into his machine and wiped his hd. He continued to say that this guy had contacted him afterwards and that this guy was a security pro. The pro explained him that he didn't have any chance from the beginning, despite following all ms security advisories - thats the joy of black box systems...
Well, I have to answer directly, IMO it isn't always a good idea to nmap the server. There is no important information to get anyway.
One could go to www.four11.com to search for (alternate) email adresses. You could try a zone transfer of the domain, sometimes funnily the names of their machines tell you something.
Watch the headers of the postings at dejanews (under "view original usenet format"). If you find an interesting post in dejanews, got to altavista and search in their usenet engine for the same message, they show you all headers if you push the "B" (retrive binary attachment, don't ask me...). Then you have normally the nntp-posting host, ergo the provider of the individual if he posted from home.
Voila, perhaps he has a nice homepage...
If you find some office documents on some pages, download the and view at the with an editor.
If you're lucky you get his home adress, telephone number and some porn websites he visited sometimes. Really, I found www.penthouse.com and others in some business documents...
Does anybody know how to do an _reverse_ whois search, i.e. person-record->domain-records this person owns?
Oh, and at altavista, try link:domainname, perhaps some staff members or companies have a homepage on which they link to the company you want to check out.
Some interesting links for this kind of stuff:
http://www.cotse.com/searchengineref.htm
The whole site is cool
and
http://www.cam.org/~intsci/,
perhaps a bit old, but most links work...
Before the great speculation begins,
heres some info.
whois www.winlinux.net gives
[...]
Registrant
Dinamerico Schwingel (WINLINUX-DOM)
[...]
A search in dejanews for Schwingel AND Dinamerico gives this (Date: 1999/06/25):
In newsgroup installshield.is5.general :
[...]
I'm trying to build my software distributions which is very large. Some thousands files and 219MB total.
The Media Build Wizard goes ok, until it tries to create layout.bin. Then it stucks for about an hour and comes whith this message
[...]
There show up some linux-specific postings (some old) too, so no microsoft, no panic...
[...]
huh?
why do you have to pay $1550*30,
isn't one license enough?
I'm just leeching what somenone said before on slashdot, but ...
N S A=Netscape + Sun + Aol , get the picture?
Poor Microsoft
This was reported by Nicko van Someren at the
Crypto'98 rump session.
Markus Kuhn was cited in a news-posting I read, and he mentioned the ncipher, who apparantly used this trick before to get their strong encryption (hardware!) into the windows api. One of their founders is said Nicko van Someren.
The successor of the well established SlashMod 97(TM) will include many new features including
- MetaMod(TM)
- IntelliKarma(TM)
- ActiveMod(TM)
According to CmdrTaco, Product Manager of SlashMod2000, most portal software is too complicated to use and not friendly to sensible customers.MetaMod gives users the ability to customize and control the quality of the ModeRate(TM)-System, providing a easy to use interface utilizing intelligent Agents.
MetaMod includes a new "SlashMod Setup Assistant" that walks users through the basic steps required to set up accounts, moderate, flame and troll.
With IntelliKarma, SlashMod 2000 is able to take previous actions of the user into account, giving the user appropriate feedback. IntelliKarma improves greatly the ergonomic quality of human - machine interaction. The software also includes a "Step-By-Step Navigation" feature that provides users with clear directions and easy access to the system activities they use most often. To help users plan their posting future, IntelliKarma delivers a "Karma Event Modeler" that evaluates the effect of different scenarios -- such as posting wise, or not at all -- on their overall Karma Strategie.
ActiveMod combines streamlined document creation with powerful Web functionality enabling the user to work more efficiently and communicate his ideas more effectively. ActiveMod includes a comprehensive set of features enabling to customize how they want to interact with SlashMod.
"Slashmod 2000 will give new users the ability to adjust the system to fit their personal needs, dependend on how lighthearted they are", Taco said. "And experienced users will also see clearly the facilites."
SlashMod 2000 is the result of 1 year of research and programming in the field of advanced group dynamics.
"By integrating technologies like IntelliKarma an ActiveMod into SlashMod 2000, we are able to to a great step into the right direction. Improvements to SlashMod address top feature requests from users", said Taco. "We are very excited and really want to get the product in the marketplace".
But SlashMod 2000 will go through extensive beta testing. "We will deliver when our customers tell us it's ready", said Taco. "SlasMod 2000 is the greatest we have ever done, and we want to do it right".
The final version of SlashMod 2000 is expected to be available in late autumn.
OTOH, they could simply have left everything as it was and watching while ms slowly eats away marketshare from their core business fields.
No, I think it makes perfect sends for sun to give star office away for free, because this is a way to get people (I don't mean geeks here!) used to the fact that there are alternatives. But they have to face that they will not be able to compete with ms alone in the office field. So GPLing star office would have a much bigger impact in the market/PR + star office could help other free office suites too.
IMO, that would be the best way cause the needed effect for sun, heterogenous desktop systems in order to be safer from the thread of msoffice/exchange/nt-server/mssql - integration games.
And that should be worth a lot of money for sun...
This is an excerpt from a summa ry of the internet auditing project.
Friday, our Japanese participants discover that a computer on their company network has been cracked into, one very secure Linux box running only SSH and Apache 1.3.4. Now this would definitely send a chill up your spine if you knew just how fanatic our friends are when it comes to network security. Furthermore, they only detected the intrusion three days after the fact, which is unbelievable when you consider the insane monitoring levels they've been keeping since they agreed to participate in the scan. They would have noticed any funny stuff, and in fact, they did, lots of it, but none of which came close enough to a security breach to raise any alarms.
[..]
The attacker knows the employee's username and password and is even connecting through the employee's Japanese ISP on the employee's account! (the phone company identified this was an untraceable overseas caller)
This information could not have been sniffed, since network services are only provided over encrypted SSH sessions.
Further investigation shows that this employee's personal NT box, connected over a dynamic dailup connection, had been cracked into 4 days earlier.
[..]
How the NT box was cracked into in the first place is still a mystery. The logs weren't helpful (surprise! surprise!) and the only way we were even able to confirm this had happened was by putting a sniff on the NT's traffic (following a hunch) and catching those sneaky packets redhanded, transmitting our SSH identification down under.
Hmmm...
huh?
Can't you do this even in win95?
Pleeease, if apple/sgi/beos would offer as crappy system as the standart wintel-pc, they would have been dead long before. They _have_ to be technically ahead, thats their only chance to survive, if they wouldn't, they simply wouldn't exist.
And they are getting problems everytime one of their "innovations" is available by products from the intel-pc mass market.
This is very true, but I think no software company at all can take this risk alone. This is exactly what insurances are for. A software company which garantees to take the risk of their "important stuff"-controlling product will have an insurance themselves.
I see two possibilities here:
1. The company which implements their product with linux gets this assurance. This is actually more secure then implementing with win nt or other
closed source products. The insurance company could hire some experts to evaluate the risk.
2. Insurance companies which can specialize in insuring open source products.
Not id per se, but J.Carmack personally.
To see it yourself, go to the g200-dev mailing list. He is a very keen participant of this list. Incredible, I wonder how he gets the time, but anyway, he seems to be really cool.
And as I posted above, linux is the only chance
for sun to fight against the ms-stronghold of
proprietary desktop "features" demanding for an
proprietary server os. Let's spread the word to
sun, just in case they don't know.
If sun lets star office/linux die, the only
effect will be that the people at Corel (and abisource) will be very happy. Thats all, this isn't dangerous.
Get real, nobody will buy Solaris in order to
run an office suite. It's clear that nobody will
get a food in the desktop market against ms unless
he gives away at least the os for free.
Hope sun knows this.
Sun may be vulnerable to Linux/Intel, but
they really have to fear for their enterprise
market in long term.
Well yeah, they may have the best platform for
database etc. in enterprise shops, but
_this_is_where_ms_wants_to_go.
When sun looses this, they are lost.
Ever seen why corporations adopt exchange?
Pleease, quality isn't a decision factor, its
the desktop. The next logical steps from ms will
be aimed to big servers (win2000 pretends to
do 32 procs!), and they will again use the desktop
as an attacking point. If you want to fight them
in long term, fight them on the desktop or you
are screwed.
at