If the data is really sensitive, you might consider the old 'air gap' solution; have a private network that isn't connected to the outside in ANY WAY, and then an external network that employees use on a day-to-day basis. If you put that network on a hub, or on a switch that suppport mirroring, you should be able to monitor all traffic on that private network (assuming you don't exceed, in aggregate, the bandwidth on your monitoring port if you're switch-based) and ensure that no foreign MAC addresses show up on the network, and that all the traffic stays local. You can't, of course, control what users do with things like floppy disks.
Sure you can control what people do with floppy disks: have computers without floppy disk drives. Of course this applies to all other removable media. If you need removable media, then make sure that access is limited to authorized individuals only (via physical security methods).
But, you still can't control what people do with information they see. If I find out that Joe Sixpack has $500,000 in his account, there is NOTHING to stop me from taking that information from the internal, private network, and typing into the external network connected to the Internet.
The only way to be absolutely sure that NO data gets out is not have any external network connections at all. People will at least have to PHYSICALLY walk this stuff out the door.
It all goes back to the old adage: information wants to be free.:)
Because it's just better than Gnome. More mature codebase, less flakey and more stable (at least, the non CVS versions are) than Gnome, and runs a lot faster. Plus, it's C++. Who would want to code a GUI in C?
Lots of people. And that's one reason why GNOME is becoming the "official" desktop and KDE isn't. C++ libs just don't jive with C programs. Especially for libraries, C is the lowest common denominator, and you CAN write GTK+ applications in C++, but you CAN'T write KDE/Qt applications in C.
Not to rant, but I cannot understand how such specious reasoning would find its way out of the mouth of a Microsoft representative.
Ummmm...we are talking about a Microsoft representative here...:)
Maybe it's time that end-users insist on better [more immediate] documentation from Microsoft, especially with regards to things categorized under the heading of security
<facetious mode%gt; But Microsoft's applications are so easy to use, they don't need documentation. I mean, you know, Linux is so much harder to use than Windows, so they actually need it, but Microsoft....nahh...it's just point and click. </facetious mode>
If Napster is illegal, then so is Usenet, the World Wide Web, ftp, K-Mart, General Motors, Smith & Wesson, Chicago Cutlery, etc.
These things all provide services or products that allow people to break the law.
For instance, GM produces cars. Cars can be used to facilitate bank robberies, murder, fraud, all sorts of illegal activities. Are you saying we should outlaw cars?
Smith & Wesson produces guns. I can use a gun to kill someone, which would be illegal. But I can also use a gun to defend myself (which is not illegal).
Clinton/Gore is against Napster because it bolsters their case for gun control: if you can outlaw Napster because it facilitates the breaking of the law, then you can outlaw guns because it facilitates the breaking of the law.
Let's just overthrow the U.S. government. We'll have to start by eliminating the damn media!
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning
I don't think your analogy is quite correct here. The Microsoft Office "hidden" menus are hiding functionality that cannot be duplicated with other features. If you were talking about how Microsoft hides things like the status of the disk cache or the the number of free clusters or something like that, you'd be correct.
But what we're talking about here is more akin to car makers who might, for example, hide the cruise control buttons or the car's stereo behind panels for fear that new users would find them to difficult to use. Imagine walking into a car where everything but the minimal tools you need to get you to work in the morning were hidden behind panels. The only things visible would be the ignition, the shifter, the steering wheel, the pedals, and the speedometer. The fuel gauge, the temperature gauge, the stereo, A/C controls, cruise control, etc. are all hidden behind panels that must be opened first before they can be used. That's what MS Office is doing.
Hey, I just patented the whole idea of coming up with with patents that won't pass, so anyone that comes up with anything must pay me $20,000 in licensing fees.
Well, let's add another perspective of this. At General Motors, we've used a traditionally Unix-based CAD/CAM/CAE system known as Unigraphics
Recently Unigraphics Solutions ported UG to Win32. Thus, there has been a recent move, both internally and externally to GM, to move to Windows NT and Windows 2000 as the CAD/CAM/CAE platform of choice.
Why? #1 reason is that it is supposed to be somehow "cheaper." Sure, an average Unix CAD workstation costs, what? $30-40K (U.S.)? Versus a Wintel CAD workstation of about $10-15K. Sounds good right?
Wrong. GM is learning the Total Cost of Ownership lesson the hard way. Sure, the workstation is cheaper. Is the software license cheaper? No. Is the cost of UG designer any cheaper? Of course not. Is the cost of system administration cheaper? Not at first...while NT sysadmins typically make less than their Unix counterparts, until the system is completely migrated over (which will take AT LEAST 3-5 years), GM and its suppliers have to have BOTH types of admins. And they have to support Unix-NT connectivity issues, such as the above mentioned Samba issues (they call it "CIFS" because they don't want nnyone to know they're violating their own systems administration policy by using "freeware"! )
First off, we're in the middle of porting GM's customizations to Unigraphics (known internally as the PDL or externally as the "GM Supplier Toolkit"). This has costed HUNDREDS, possibly THOUSANDS of man-hours. And now they're doing pilots. And in the pilots the designers are finding Windows 2000 to be far less stable than Unix (we're talking HP-UX 10.20 and Slowlaris 7 here), having to reboot the stupid things AT LEAST daily. If a guy decides he's going to save once and hour, and 59 minutes into the job he crashes, that's nearly an hour's worth of work he has lost! I've witnessed this phenomenon personally. Windows 2000 crashes more than HP-UX or Slowlaris. I can't REMEMBER the last time any of the Unix boxes were booted in my building (I could always issue an uptime command to find out, I suppose:).
(BTW--we didn't experience the printing problems with samba, because we are going with Unix servers, running Windows 2000 clients for our pilot...samba seems to work great if it is acting as the PDC).
Fortunately, there are rumours flying around about a Linux port of unigraphics. Maybe GM management will use the same logic (cheaper is better) and invest in Linux.:)
the line "I have never pined for Outlook" is hilarious.
I thought so, too. I wondered if anyone would catch that.:)
I wouldn't say that NO ONE is going to install MS apps on Linux. But you're right in thinking that many Linux hackers aren't going to. OTOH, like it or not, if you want to do business with the world, you're going to have to create nice looking Microsoft-format documents. And when you consider that StarOffice's Microsoft filters are notoriously broken (not their fault that MS won't give out enough information about their file formats:-), AbiSuite is hardly complete, GNOME Office is still in early development, KOffice has been in beta testing for at least the last year, and is not likely to do much better on Microsoft conversion, that means sooner or later, you, too will be bend over, grease up, and install Microsoft Office. Heck, just last week I was told to submit a resume for a Unix sysadmin position in Word 97 format.:)
Microsoft Office on Linux would also put an end to the claim that "Linux doesn't run mainstreams apps like Microsoft Office." Microsoft is hurting themselves more than they are hurting Linux by porting apps to it.
Well, I just looked at the binaries and shared libraries and stuff on IE 5.0 for HP-UX, and I didn't see any references to CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT, but I did find lots and lots of debug symbols for what seem to be Win32 API calls. Meaning, of course, that Microsoft merely ported some portion of the Win32 API to UNIX.
Development work. Plain and simple. If you are one of the guys who really wants to seee Linux handhelds, then you will get one, put Linux on it, and develop some really cool X or GNOME/GTK or KDE or whatever apps for handhelds. Think about taking KOrganizer, for instance, and hacking it to have handwriting recognition (knowing my luck, I'll say this and someone is already doing such a thing or such a thing already exists...:)
Anyways, no you would't put Linux on it for day-to-day use. But you would put it on there if you wanted to develop stuff for it without the burden of having to emulate the hardware.
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Yeah, you're right, they are talking about the floating dialog boxes with the separatable tables. But other programs have similar functionality as well, such as Corel Draw, although their rollups don't use quite the same interface, but they are customizable (you can group different palettes together, but its not as cool as it is in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator)
Don't forget that this is really a bitter feud that has gone on with these companies forever: Macromedia was started by a bunch of ex-Aldus employees when Adobe bought Aldus to get PageMaker. They dumped Freehand (because it competed with Illustrator), so the Freehand guys went and started Macromedia. Both camps have been bitter since.
Yeah! And when they move the network to mostly Windows machines, let's all hit www.hotmail.com and sign up for an account -- all at the same time. Then we'll see just how well Windows 2000 can stand the heat!:-)
I can see it now! Caldera OpenXenix! "The closest thing you'll ever get to Microsoft Linux!" Features KDE running on top of SCO (formerly Micros~1) Xenix! Regular crashes! You'll think you're running Win95, except it'll look like Unix! Yeah!
Well, this is exactly the problem. It's not whether or not the *government* has faith in NASA and the Mars program, as the story says, its whether the *general public* has faith in NASA and the Mars program.
I see public support for space exploration waning. You, I and John Q. Geek might fully support NASA and the Mars program, but what about the average joe on the street? If public support isn't there, it's going to get hard to find money to keep throwing spacecraft at Mars at high-speeds...:)
Sure you don't mean the various other DOSes, like, say the Operating Systems called DOS for the IBM 370 mainframes?
Or DOS 3.3 on the Apple 2?
I know, I know... But you'll just have to face the fact that people refer to MS-DOS as DOS and those other operating systems.... 370/DOS, AppleDOS 3.3.... etc...
As to the original question, can Linux handle a 30 GB database, my answer would be "Yes, but it will hurt". Ever try staging more than 2GB of data on ext2? Ever try moving more than 1GB of data on ext2 with less than a 4KB block size? It hurts!
My understanding is that Oracle can now use its own filesystem on Linux...I don't know very much about Oracle's properietary FS... but my thinking is that it would make life easier. I dunno. Anyone else know?
But the poster of such information could be held liable as aiding and abetting to a crime. If DVD's start being pirated, couldn't MPAA start suing all the distributors of DeCSS? (Even if thay can't prove a specific site led to it - sue them all and hope one sticks)
Lots of books have been made that describe the creation of bombs. Does that make them liable?
Firearms instructors aren't held liable for aiding and abetting if one of their students uses a gun to murder someobdy, either.
How about these security sites on the Web? They post known exploits and other security loopholes in popular operating systems. If someone uses that information to crack a Linux box, for instance, should that site be held liable for aiding and abetting?
Let's compound kuro5hin's problems with DOS attacks by posting not one, but 2 links to their site on the front page of/. That should definately help them get their bandwidth back...
Pesky Microsoft operating systems, always bringing down web sites... why would Kuro5hin be running DOS on a Web server anyways? That's crazy.:)
Slashdot Mirror
If the data is really sensitive, you might consider the old 'air gap' solution; have a private network that isn't connected to the outside in ANY WAY, and then an external network that employees use on a day-to-day basis. If you put that network on a hub, or on a switch that suppport mirroring, you should be able to monitor all traffic on that private network (assuming you don't exceed, in aggregate, the bandwidth on your monitoring port if you're switch-based) and ensure that no foreign MAC addresses show up on the network, and that all the traffic stays local. You can't, of course, control what users do with things like floppy disks.
:)
Sure you can control what people do with floppy disks: have computers without floppy disk drives. Of course this applies to all other removable media. If you need removable media, then make sure that access is limited to authorized individuals only (via physical security methods).
But, you still can't control what people do with information they see. If I find out that Joe Sixpack has $500,000 in his account, there is NOTHING to stop me from taking that information from the internal, private network, and typing into the external network connected to the Internet.
The only way to be absolutely sure that NO data gets out is not have any external network connections at all. People will at least have to PHYSICALLY walk this stuff out the door.
It all goes back to the old adage: information wants to be free.
Because it's just better than Gnome. More mature codebase, less flakey and more stable (at least, the non CVS versions are) than Gnome, and runs a lot faster. Plus, it's C++. Who would want to code a GUI in C?
Lots of people. And that's one reason why GNOME is becoming the "official" desktop and KDE isn't. C++ libs just don't jive with C programs. Especially for libraries, C is the lowest common denominator, and you CAN write GTK+ applications in C++, but you CAN'T write KDE/Qt applications in C.
We aren't allowed to turn off exectuable attachments, or even "speed bump" them, because "somebody might need them."
:) Of course, we have Lotus Notes, so executable attachments are already "speed bumped".
Sounds like General Motors...
HP 9000s were out ages ago... :)
Not to rant, but I cannot understand how such specious reasoning would find its way out of the mouth of a Microsoft representative.
... :)
Ummmm...we are talking about a Microsoft representative here
Maybe it's time that end-users insist on better [more immediate] documentation from Microsoft, especially with regards to things categorized under the heading of security
<facetious mode%gt; But Microsoft's applications are so easy to use, they don't need documentation. I mean, you know, Linux is so much harder to use than Windows, so they actually need it, but Microsoft....nahh...it's just point and click. </facetious mode>
Nay, it is YOU that lack common sense!
If Napster is illegal, then so is Usenet, the World Wide Web, ftp, K-Mart, General Motors, Smith & Wesson, Chicago Cutlery, etc.
These things all provide services or products that allow people to break the law.
For instance, GM produces cars. Cars can be used to facilitate bank robberies, murder, fraud, all sorts of illegal activities. Are you saying we should outlaw cars?
Smith & Wesson produces guns. I can use a gun to kill someone, which would be illegal. But I can also use a gun to defend myself (which is not illegal).
Clinton/Gore is against Napster because it bolsters their case for gun control: if you can outlaw Napster because it facilitates the breaking of the law, then you can outlaw guns because it facilitates the breaking of the law.
Let's just overthrow the U.S. government. We'll have to start by eliminating the damn media!
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning
I don't think your analogy is quite correct here. The Microsoft Office "hidden" menus are hiding functionality that cannot be duplicated with other features. If you were talking about how Microsoft hides things like the status of the disk cache or the the number of free clusters or something like that, you'd be correct.
But what we're talking about here is more akin to car makers who might, for example, hide the cruise control buttons or the car's stereo behind panels for fear that new users would find them to difficult to use. Imagine walking into a car where everything but the minimal tools you need to get you to work in the morning were hidden behind panels. The only things visible would be the ignition, the shifter, the steering wheel, the pedals, and the speedometer. The fuel gauge, the temperature gauge, the stereo, A/C controls, cruise control, etc. are all hidden behind panels that must be opened first before they can be used. That's what MS Office is doing.
Hey, I just patented the whole idea of coming up with with patents that won't pass, so anyone that comes up with anything must pay me $20,000 in licensing fees.
Well, let's add another perspective of this. At General Motors, we've used a traditionally Unix-based CAD/CAM/CAE system known as Unigraphics
:).
:)
Recently Unigraphics Solutions ported UG to Win32. Thus, there has been a recent move, both internally and externally to GM, to move to Windows NT and Windows 2000 as the CAD/CAM/CAE platform of choice.
Why? #1 reason is that it is supposed to be somehow "cheaper." Sure, an average Unix CAD workstation costs, what? $30-40K (U.S.)? Versus a Wintel CAD workstation of about $10-15K. Sounds good right?
Wrong. GM is learning the Total Cost of Ownership lesson the hard way. Sure, the workstation is cheaper. Is the software license cheaper? No. Is the cost of UG designer any cheaper? Of course not. Is the cost of system administration cheaper? Not at first...while NT sysadmins typically make less than their Unix counterparts, until the system is completely migrated over (which will take AT LEAST 3-5 years), GM and its suppliers have to have BOTH types of admins. And they have to support Unix-NT connectivity issues, such as the above mentioned Samba issues (they call it "CIFS" because they don't want nnyone to know they're violating their own systems administration policy by using "freeware"! )
First off, we're in the middle of porting GM's customizations to Unigraphics (known internally as the PDL or externally as the "GM Supplier Toolkit"). This has costed HUNDREDS, possibly THOUSANDS of man-hours. And now they're doing pilots. And in the pilots the designers are finding Windows 2000 to be far less stable than Unix (we're talking HP-UX 10.20 and Slowlaris 7 here), having to reboot the stupid things AT LEAST daily. If a guy decides he's going to save once and hour, and 59 minutes into the job he crashes, that's nearly an hour's worth of work he has lost! I've witnessed this phenomenon personally. Windows 2000 crashes more than HP-UX or Slowlaris. I can't REMEMBER the last time any of the Unix boxes were booted in my building (I could always issue an uptime command to find out, I suppose
(BTW--we didn't experience the printing problems with samba, because we are going with Unix servers, running Windows 2000 clients for our pilot...samba seems to work great if it is acting as the PDC).
Fortunately, there are rumours flying around about a Linux port of unigraphics. Maybe GM management will use the same logic (cheaper is better) and invest in Linux.
the line "I have never pined for Outlook" is hilarious.
:)
:-), AbiSuite is hardly complete, GNOME Office is still in early development, KOffice has been in beta testing for at least the last year, and is not likely to do much better on Microsoft conversion, that means sooner or later, you, too will be bend over, grease up, and install Microsoft Office. Heck, just last week I was told to submit a resume for a Unix sysadmin position in Word 97 format. :)
I thought so, too. I wondered if anyone would catch that.
I wouldn't say that NO ONE is going to install MS apps on Linux. But you're right in thinking that many Linux hackers aren't going to. OTOH, like it or not, if you want to do business with the world, you're going to have to create nice looking Microsoft-format documents. And when you consider that StarOffice's Microsoft filters are notoriously broken (not their fault that MS won't give out enough information about their file formats
Microsoft Office on Linux would also put an end to the claim that "Linux doesn't run mainstreams apps like Microsoft Office." Microsoft is hurting themselves more than they are hurting Linux by porting apps to it.
Oh yeah, I should point out, to be on topic, that IE 5.0 Unix has this statement in the copyright: "Unix version contains code from Mainsoft"
:)
Well, I just looked at the binaries and shared libraries and stuff on IE 5.0 for HP-UX, and I didn't see any references to CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT, but I did find lots and lots of debug symbols for what seem to be Win32 API calls. Meaning, of course, that Microsoft merely ported some portion of the Win32 API to UNIX.
Microsoft can't freely hack Mac OS...
Hmmm... I agree with the guy who's tag line says: a moderation "Insightful" says more about the moderator than the poster. :)
Why not use source RPMs when you want to mess with the code? That's what they're for. :)
Development work. Plain and simple. If you are one of the guys who really wants to seee Linux handhelds, then you will get one, put Linux on it, and develop some really cool X or GNOME/GTK or KDE or whatever apps for handhelds. Think about taking KOrganizer, for instance, and hacking it to have handwriting recognition (knowing my luck, I'll say this and someone is already doing such a thing or such a thing already exists... :)
Anyways, no you would't put Linux on it for day-to-day use. But you would put it on there if you wanted to develop stuff for it without the burden of having to emulate the hardware.
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Yeah, you're right, they are talking about the floating dialog boxes with the separatable tables. But other programs have similar functionality as well, such as Corel Draw, although their rollups don't use quite the same interface, but they are customizable (you can group different palettes together, but its not as cool as it is in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator)
Don't forget that this is really a bitter feud that has gone on with these companies forever: Macromedia was started by a bunch of ex-Aldus employees when Adobe bought Aldus to get PageMaker. They dumped Freehand (because it competed with Illustrator), so the Freehand guys went and started Macromedia. Both camps have been bitter since.
How does *that* deserve a patent? My *dog* could write that program!
Yeah! And when they move the network to mostly Windows machines, let's all hit www.hotmail.com and sign up for an account -- all at the same time. Then we'll see just how well Windows 2000 can stand the heat! :-)
I can see it now! Caldera OpenXenix! "The closest thing you'll ever get to Microsoft Linux!" Features KDE running on top of SCO (formerly Micros~1) Xenix! Regular crashes! You'll think you're running Win95, except it'll look like Unix! Yeah!
:)
Well, this is exactly the problem. It's not whether or not the *government* has faith in NASA and the Mars program, as the story says, its whether the *general public* has faith in NASA and the Mars program.
:)
I see public support for space exploration waning. You, I and John Q. Geek might fully support NASA and the Mars program, but what about the average joe on the street? If public support isn't there, it's going to get hard to find money to keep throwing spacecraft at Mars at high-speeds...
Sure you don't mean the various other DOSes, like, say the Operating Systems called DOS
for the IBM 370 mainframes?
Or DOS 3.3 on the Apple 2?
I know, I know... But you'll just have to face the fact that people refer to MS-DOS as DOS and those other operating systems.... 370/DOS, AppleDOS 3.3.... etc...
Get over it.
As to the original question, can Linux handle a 30 GB database, my answer would be "Yes, but it will hurt". Ever try staging more than 2GB of data on ext2? Ever try moving more than 1GB of data on ext2 with less than a 4KB block size? It hurts!
My understanding is that Oracle can now use its own filesystem on Linux...I don't know very much about Oracle's properietary FS... but my thinking is that it would make life easier. I dunno. Anyone else know?
But the poster of such information could be held liable as aiding and abetting to a crime. If DVD's start being pirated, couldn't MPAA start suing all the distributors of DeCSS? (Even if thay can't prove a specific site led to it - sue them all and hope one sticks)
Lots of books have been made that describe the creation of bombs. Does that make them liable?
Firearms instructors aren't held liable for aiding and abetting if one of their students uses a gun to murder someobdy, either.
How about these security sites on the Web? They post known exploits and other security loopholes in popular operating systems. If someone uses that information to crack a Linux box, for instance, should that site be held liable for aiding and abetting?
No, I don't think so.
Let's compound kuro5hin's problems with DOS attacks by posting not one, but 2 links to their site on the front page of /. That should definately help them get their bandwidth back...
:)
Pesky Microsoft operating systems, always bringing down web sites... why would Kuro5hin be running DOS on a Web server anyways? That's crazy.