Buzzwords, the Red Pill, and Web Development
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
I was leafing through this book at B&N the other day and was intrigued, but in the end I was too "embarrassed" to buy it. AJAX is the bandwagon of the moment and so, any and all technical merits aside, it's too hard to get involved now just on the basis of a couple of very successful prototypes (Microsoft OWA, Google Maps).
Prepare yourselves because within 12 months you will see that for every well-executed, appropriately-applied, ground-breaking AJAX design, there will be a hundred haphazard, broken, ill-conceived sites using AJAX on principle, at the directive of clueless PHBs and excited marketing departments.
Ultimately it does seem quite inevitable that AJAX-style development will forever change the web development landscape, for the better: there are real advantages with enough technical merit to overcome the status of being a fad. Still, I'd like to see some serious evolution of the toolsets available - not merely third party APIs, but full-fledged development environments to get away from the tired old dog that is JavaScript.
I must echo many comments I've seen here and elsewhere by interested programmers who, but for the sake of having to code in JavaScript, would otherwise readily embrace this new paradigm (ok let's just call it a trend for now). JavaScript is about the worst language imaginable for serious development. Sure it's great for image rollovers, form validation, and intermittently grabbing an XML file from the server. But what AJAX is asking us to do is to turn these loose collections of one-off functions into a true, genuine application. Pardon me for being a little concerned about that prospect.
Now if browser makers would just supply a Python interpreter to run client-side code, not only would I buy the book and the T-shirt, I'd swallow the pill, drink the cool-ade, and get "AJAX" tatooed on my forehead.
I wouldn't say that public ownership necessarily leads to "evil" companies, despite the strong correlation readily observed in today's (or any day's) business pages. But, shareholders care first about profit, and secondly about any other sticky issues like human rights, let alone basic human decency.
So I too worry that Google will be negatively impacted and can only hope that the (until now) strong leadership will continue to steer the course in that direction. After all, if the bottom line remains more black than red, shareholders are generally more inclined to be hands-off, allowing the company to continue thriving in its own special way. However, the minute there is any trouble, heads will roll, the gourmet chef will be replaced by a Micky D's franchise, and buildings e and pi will be renamed to something far more drably corporate.
Interestingly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the two founders) have I am sure a healthy desire for profit, but their own salaries have been celebrated by analysts as very fair, especially in comparison to the sick depravity of many in the S.V. (uh, does the name Larry Ellison ring a bell?). If those two were truly evil, they could have easily demanded an order of magnitude higher salary be paid to them instead. Of course, after the IPO they'll be billionnaires so the point is kinda moot.
Your respect for Apple, which I too have held in mostly high regard, will certainly be shaken by this: Cringely's Notes in Infoworld from a few weeks ago.
Also, in response to Ubergrendle: it is SAS that is privately owned (SAP is a German company I believe, and it is also publicly traded). SAS on the other hand, is run as The SAS Institute out of Cary, NC. I have used their software for many many years, it is bar-none the most well designed software product I've ever come across, expecially given its complexity. Also, everything I have heard about the company as a company is that it's an incredibly cool place to work. They are always in the top 10 of any employee survey of best (small to mid) companies to work.
It's just too hard to find software that can diagnose hardware - given the variety of the sources to hardware faults and the many many interaction effects of different chipsets, cpus, RAM modules, power supplies, etc. Not to mention the os.
...may yet be exaggerated. Whether this will truly be a setback for the space program depends on you, and people like you, who care about progress and the future of humanity. Look around yourself today and I bet you'll find that most people don't care about what just happened - most people are preoccupied with the menial simple tasks we all have to do to get by.
But some of you out there do care about the future, and it is up to you to convince everyone else that if we don't focus our efforts on furthering our reach as a species then we will be doomed to a brief and pointless existence as a tiny fungus on an insignificant planet whose overall contribution to the universe has been nill.
Our only hope for progress is to eventually get off this planet. If the world would stop arguing for a minute over what color God's dick is and what chosen people he best likes to swing it over, then perhaps we could see that we are all sitting on the same goddam rock and eventually it's going to get old.
It's up to you, most people don't care because I'm talking about the long view which means a thousand years. Today's tragedy is insignificant in that timeframe, but it is significant to us today. If we are not careful, the ignorant and self-serving politicians among us may seize on this as an opportunity to laugh at scientific progress and dismiss it as an idea which has failed. But one failure does not fail the idea. IF you believe in progress, you must help now and prevent the stupid people from destroying the dream - the dream that some day we can rise up and leave this earth together and ultimately fulfill the true potential of humanity.
I will certainly agree that one should not pretend after reading a few chapters of NR to be ready to write even a small library that can perform anywhere close to an existing, stable, highly optimized code base. Furthermore, to rely on only one source (no matter how highly one thinks of it) is foolish.
What I do like about NR is that it offers the opposite of the incomprehensible black box that robust and optimal numerical libraries must be. You are right to point out that most such libraries are awash with various tricks to deal with special cases - they are that way because reducing a problem to a known special subset can greatly improve efficiency by applying only those methods that are needed in that case. Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're aware, it is neither easy nor fun to attempt to learn anything by reading such code! I use NR to get a feel for the problem area and see what algorithms are popular. After that, then it's off to the library stacks to check the journals.
In this way, NR is great as a survey text. It will give you ideas, show you the math so you can see what the algorithms are all about - a learning tool in an area where so much code is unreadable because of the intense specialization.
Numerical Recipes is the only book that has taken on the mammoth task of codifying a vast amount of material related to scientific computing. Nothing else comes close! In some instances, yes, their references don't make it past 1975 but nowhere else can you find as complete a reference to just about any numerical problem imaginable.
And to criticize N.R. for being out of date while recommending Netlib is ridiculous - most of the code on Netlib is truly ancient!
You are advocating something that is completely appalling from a
consumer's standpoint. Yes, NAT does allow some pirates to share with
others outside their household, it also allows legal subscribers to set
up firewalls so their computers are not constantly bombarded by all the
crackers who tirelessly assail the tempting always-on cable modem
users. Were it not for NAT, I would be a sitting duck to every 14 year
old script kiddie on the block.
Further, I see in your argument the same tired story parroted by the
likes of the MPAA in their stand against Napster and similar
file-sharing technologies: that anything offering more choices to the
consumer is surely bad for big business and the solution is to limit
choice to the consumer. You state: "At the very least, cable MSOs
involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by
them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices." I cannot
help but assume that the "maximum number of connected devices" which the
MSOs would prefer the consumer to have is one. And probably one that
would be required to push advertisements in our faces at regular
intervals.
It amuses me to picture the reactions of cable execs pondering the
drawing of Carol, Ted, and Alice, the "Non-Subscribers" (aka potential
revenue streams) who are sharing Bob's bandwidth, to think of the
self-righteous rage welling up within them as they call an emergency
meeting with their engineering staff directing them to come up with a
way to stop this profit-stealing piracy. It amuses me that they are so
hopelessly out of touch with the world, that the Internet to them is
nothing if it can't be commoditized at $4.95 a month.
Have you sold your soul, Leslie, is it all about the money?
When the RIAA decides to pursue a service for copyright infringement (first Napster, now Grokster and MusicCity) they have the ability to amass untold financial and legal resources which cannot possibly be matched by the creators of the software or their allies. Since the RIAA's lobbying power is so strong, they can prosecute, seek court injunctions, pass more stringent laws, etc. The inevitable result is the destruction of that service.
Yet, GPL'ed code is ripped off all the time. However, those writing such code rarely have the resources needed to pursue what is usually a large corporate entity that has pirated free or open source software and incorporated it into their own proprietary products.
As a lobbyist on the front lines, how do you see this situation changing for the better in the future? How will the open source community ever be able to compete with the vastly more powerful corporate lawyers and lobbyists who care only about protecting proprietary software and services?
Waitaminute...Does this mean that all those people weren't really asking for my advice? I've spent the last 3 days correcting grammer mistakes, making content suggestions and it's all a hoax?!?
I just thought maybe my editorial skills were so widely known.
One of the major lessons of the civil rights movement, and the reason it succeeded when it did, is that it gained a critical mass of support among whites.
As long as the public sees this as "a bunch of hackers" or "hippie anarchists" running around demanding the release of foreign national accused of committing a felony, nobody will take it seriously.
What we need is to have some establishment companies themselves coming out publicly against this as an abuse of the law they lobbied to pass, in the same way that the civil rights movement only gained popularity when a significant number of whites stood up and said these Jim Crow laws were wrong. Adobe has already recanted on their desire to prosecute Dmitri, if they went one step further and condemned the FBI action as overstepping the DMCA, it would make more people sympathetic to the cause.
If Corporation X payes college Y to do research in Z, not only does the college have more funds to spend, the researchers (grad students) get to do interesting work.
This is a double-edged sword: is it any guarantee that the work will be interesting? What if Corporation X wants boring work? If you're a grad student at a university department and the only option for funding is to do the work that Corporation X wants you to do, you have no choice.
Allowing third-parties like this to influence the choices of what research will and will not be done is dangerous!
So long as they aren't releasing false results to boost the price of the stock (happens from time to time), that's fine with me.
What if they're releasing false results that cause the death of 10 people? 100? 1000? All to protect the interests of the research sponsors?
Researchers are human, yes, but this does not excuse misrepresenting or burying data. It is precisely because scientists are people too that the code of science is so adamant in its insistence that research be independent. It is like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine: no, I'm not going to save everybody, but I'm going to try. Likewise, no we can't all be objective in our research, but dammit, we should try. And when abuses like this are brought to light, they should be punished.
Alas, it has come to this. Now we need an encryption scheme to encode what we actually type into the keyboard. Shouldn't be too hard, just use a good md5 hash and compile it into the readline library. Then just do the conversions in your head before you type in a letter. For example, 'a' would be 'bb86e686cd925adbf14b3e9e9302c2c8'. Maybe a little more time consuming - but hey, at least it's secure!
This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.
And, later:
This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
While most of this article can be dismissed as the usual FUD (blaming dotcom failures on free software models?) which we've all seen and heard before, and how awesome Microsoft is because they "protect their intellectual property", the above two lines reveal what they really really hate about open source: they can't steal it!
Read that second line again. There are two critical assumptions here. 1) commercial software companies should have every right to incorporate OSS into their products; and 2) by incorporating free code into commercial products, it then becomes their own ("fruits of their labor" - never mind the countless numbers who worked on the code to release it GPL in the first place!!!), and thus they should have every right to close it, and charge for it.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! MS and friends (all the execs who will show up eager-eyed at Stern) are planning to pound on the GPL, steal code from the public domain, and then charge the people who wrote it to use it.
Where do you want to go today? NOTE: Going anywhere is subject to the restrictions listed in the EULA, to which you agree in its entirety simply by wanting to go anywhere.
NOTE2: Going places is copyright, Microsoft, 2001. Any attempt to go anywhere will be viewed as circumvention of our intellectual property rights, and you will be prosecuted.
If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's work.
My correction: If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's not the work I want.
Seriously folks, forget the dotcom lottery of stock options and just look for a job that you will enjoy. That will be far more rewarding on a daily basis than killing yourself in hopes of becoming the next billgates.
IMHO, the proportion of IT folks who are "in it for the money" is far far lower than what you find in most industries. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, these are the occupations people flock to in search of big bucks. Granted, there are plenty of lusers around now [I recall reading about an html coder with 2 months exp who demanded 100k], but these are relatively few and fortunately far between - since they keep getting their asses kicked.
As for management of IT departments - I find it's more a factor of maintaining a balance among personalities. If you have too many fun-loving geeks, nothing gets done. Too many reclusive geeks, nobody has a clue what they do and can't talk to them. Too many button-down professional types, and the place is simply too boring. Managers should actively seek to strike a balance to keep things running smoothly. Variety works. IT certainly doesn't *need* the formality of a law school to work well; but it certainly needs a bit more professionalism than pre-school.
For all of you out there saying, "it's not so bad, all you have to do is change a registry key," remember the browser wars? What lesson did we learn from that?
..."it's not so bad, just download Netscape, and change the file associations." Well, what happened after a year of IE bundled with win95? That's right folks, 60% marketshare. The trouble with defaults is that most people don't change them. So, the fact that all you have to do is change one lousy registry key means that most people won't, they'll try recording mp3s at 56k, it will suck, so they'll move to the proprietary formats. Byebye mp3!
Goddamit people! The ability to circumvent a default does not render the default harmless! Why oh why would a software company intentionally set a default option to a non-optimal setting? A: To discourage its use!!! This kind of strategy is called "leveraging". It happens when you have so much marketshare in one area which enables you to bulldoze any competitive products or standards that don't benefit you.
That's the key here and the reason this MS bashing is going on. This does nothing for the consumer, it benefits only MS and there ought to be loud voices raised up in response.
No, it can be a good thing. If it means my mom can install the only easy-enough-to-use-but-still-secure-enough-to-sell commercial distro.
Oxymoron. The easier it is to use, the less secure the distro.
Personally, I like TurboLinux's server offerings. Their package list is predominantly based on redhat, but unlike the latter, TLS default install does not, I repeat, DOES NOT leave you with anon-ftp on, rpc.statd holes, an old vulnerable version of bind, etc. etc.
It's just a shame they didn't go public earlier. Then we could lament their poor stock price like we do for redhat and valinux.
Slashdot Mirror
Prepare yourselves because within 12 months you will see that for every well-executed, appropriately-applied, ground-breaking AJAX design, there will be a hundred haphazard, broken, ill-conceived sites using AJAX on principle, at the directive of clueless PHBs and excited marketing departments.
Ultimately it does seem quite inevitable that AJAX-style development will forever change the web development landscape, for the better: there are real advantages with enough technical merit to overcome the status of being a fad. Still, I'd like to see some serious evolution of the toolsets available - not merely third party APIs, but full-fledged development environments to get away from the tired old dog that is JavaScript.
I must echo many comments I've seen here and elsewhere by interested programmers who, but for the sake of having to code in JavaScript, would otherwise readily embrace this new paradigm (ok let's just call it a trend for now). JavaScript is about the worst language imaginable for serious development. Sure it's great for image rollovers, form validation, and intermittently grabbing an XML file from the server. But what AJAX is asking us to do is to turn these loose collections of one-off functions into a true, genuine application. Pardon me for being a little concerned about that prospect.
Now if browser makers would just supply a Python interpreter to run client-side code, not only would I buy the book and the T-shirt, I'd swallow the pill, drink the cool-ade, and get "AJAX" tatooed on my forehead.
czep
OMG, you are severely deluded if you think the Census Bureau's budget is responsible for high tax rates.
I wouldn't say that public ownership necessarily leads to "evil" companies, despite the strong correlation readily observed in today's (or any day's) business pages. But, shareholders care first about profit, and secondly about any other sticky issues like human rights, let alone basic human decency.
So I too worry that Google will be negatively impacted and can only hope that the (until now) strong leadership will continue to steer the course in that direction. After all, if the bottom line remains more black than red, shareholders are generally more inclined to be hands-off, allowing the company to continue thriving in its own special way. However, the minute there is any trouble, heads will roll, the gourmet chef will be replaced by a Micky D's franchise, and buildings e and pi will be renamed to something far more drably corporate.
Interestingly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the two founders) have I am sure a healthy desire for profit, but their own salaries have been celebrated by analysts as very fair, especially in comparison to the sick depravity of many in the S.V. (uh, does the name Larry Ellison ring a bell?). If those two were truly evil, they could have easily demanded an order of magnitude higher salary be paid to them instead. Of course, after the IPO they'll be billionnaires so the point is kinda moot.
Your respect for Apple, which I too have held in mostly high regard, will certainly be shaken by this: Cringely's Notes in Infoworld from a few weeks ago.
Also, in response to Ubergrendle: it is SAS that is privately owned (SAP is a German company I believe, and it is also publicly traded). SAS on the other hand, is run as The SAS Institute out of Cary, NC. I have used their software for many many years, it is bar-none the most well designed software product I've ever come across, expecially given its complexity. Also, everything I have heard about the company as a company is that it's an incredibly cool place to work. They are always in the top 10 of any employee survey of best (small to mid) companies to work.
czep
Q: Does 0.99999999 (repeating forever) equal 1?
A: Yes, for sufficiently small values of 1.
Reformat, reinstall, and if that fails...replace!
It's just too hard to find software that can diagnose hardware - given the variety of the sources to hardware faults and the many many interaction effects of different chipsets, cpus, RAM modules, power supplies, etc. Not to mention the os.
Overrated? James Joyce? Personally, I would be crying with joy if someone refered to me as the James Joyce of anything! Oh well, just an opinion.
...may yet be exaggerated. Whether this will truly be a setback for the space program depends on you, and people like you, who care about progress and the future of humanity. Look around yourself today and I bet you'll find that most people don't care about what just happened - most people are preoccupied with the menial simple tasks we all have to do to get by.
But some of you out there do care about the future, and it is up to you to convince everyone else that if we don't focus our efforts on furthering our reach as a species then we will be doomed to a brief and pointless existence as a tiny fungus on an insignificant planet whose overall contribution to the universe has been nill.
Our only hope for progress is to eventually get off this planet. If the world would stop arguing for a minute over what color God's dick is and what chosen people he best likes to swing it over, then perhaps we could see that we are all sitting on the same goddam rock and eventually it's going to get old.
It's up to you, most people don't care because I'm talking about the long view which means a thousand years. Today's tragedy is insignificant in that timeframe, but it is significant to us today. If we are not careful, the ignorant and self-serving politicians among us may seize on this as an opportunity to laugh at scientific progress and dismiss it as an idea which has failed. But one failure does not fail the idea. IF you believe in progress, you must help now and prevent the stupid people from destroying the dream - the dream that some day we can rise up and leave this earth together and ultimately fulfill the true potential of humanity.
It is up to you.
What I do like about NR is that it offers the opposite of the incomprehensible black box that robust and optimal numerical libraries must be. You are right to point out that most such libraries are awash with various tricks to deal with special cases - they are that way because reducing a problem to a known special subset can greatly improve efficiency by applying only those methods that are needed in that case. Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're aware, it is neither easy nor fun to attempt to learn anything by reading such code! I use NR to get a feel for the problem area and see what algorithms are popular. After that, then it's off to the library stacks to check the journals.
In this way, NR is great as a survey text. It will give you ideas, show you the math so you can see what the algorithms are all about - a learning tool in an area where so much code is unreadable because of the intense specialization.
czep
And to criticize N.R. for being out of date while recommending Netlib is ridiculous - most of the code on Netlib is truly ancient!
czep
Not true. Your rent in Boston will run $1400 whereas your rent in Kalamazoo will run $650. This is what cost of living means.
Leslie,
You are advocating something that is completely appalling from a
consumer's standpoint. Yes, NAT does allow some pirates to share with
others outside their household, it also allows legal subscribers to set
up firewalls so their computers are not constantly bombarded by all the
crackers who tirelessly assail the tempting always-on cable modem
users. Were it not for NAT, I would be a sitting duck to every 14 year
old script kiddie on the block.
Further, I see in your argument the same tired story parroted by the
likes of the MPAA in their stand against Napster and similar
file-sharing technologies: that anything offering more choices to the
consumer is surely bad for big business and the solution is to limit
choice to the consumer. You state: "At the very least, cable MSOs
involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by
them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices." I cannot
help but assume that the "maximum number of connected devices" which the
MSOs would prefer the consumer to have is one. And probably one that
would be required to push advertisements in our faces at regular
intervals.
It amuses me to picture the reactions of cable execs pondering the
drawing of Carol, Ted, and Alice, the "Non-Subscribers" (aka potential
revenue streams) who are sharing Bob's bandwidth, to think of the
self-righteous rage welling up within them as they call an emergency
meeting with their engineering staff directing them to come up with a
way to stop this profit-stealing piracy. It amuses me that they are so
hopelessly out of touch with the world, that the Internet to them is
nothing if it can't be commoditized at $4.95 a month.
Have you sold your soul, Leslie, is it all about the money?
Mr. Reed:
When the RIAA decides to pursue a service for copyright infringement (first Napster, now Grokster and MusicCity) they have the ability to amass untold financial and legal resources which cannot possibly be matched by the creators of the software or their allies. Since the RIAA's lobbying power is so strong, they can prosecute, seek court injunctions, pass more stringent laws, etc. The inevitable result is the destruction of that service.
Yet, GPL'ed code is ripped off all the time. However, those writing such code rarely have the resources needed to pursue what is usually a large corporate entity that has pirated free or open source software and incorporated it into their own proprietary products.
As a lobbyist on the front lines, how do you see this situation changing for the better in the future? How will the open source community ever be able to compete with the vastly more powerful corporate lawyers and lobbyists who care only about protecting proprietary software and services?
I just thought maybe my editorial skills were so widely known.
LOL:)
czep
As long as the public sees this as "a bunch of hackers" or "hippie anarchists" running around demanding the release of foreign national accused of committing a felony, nobody will take it seriously.
What we need is to have some establishment companies themselves coming out publicly against this as an abuse of the law they lobbied to pass, in the same way that the civil rights movement only gained popularity when a significant number of whites stood up and said these Jim Crow laws were wrong. Adobe has already recanted on their desire to prosecute Dmitri, if they went one step further and condemned the FBI action as overstepping the DMCA, it would make more people sympathetic to the cause.
No, I don't know how to do this.
czep
This is a double-edged sword: is it any guarantee that the work will be interesting? What if Corporation X wants boring work? If you're a grad student at a university department and the only option for funding is to do the work that Corporation X wants you to do, you have no choice.
Allowing third-parties like this to influence the choices of what research will and will not be done is dangerous!
czep
What if they're releasing false results that cause the death of 10 people? 100? 1000? All to protect the interests of the research sponsors?
Researchers are human, yes, but this does not excuse misrepresenting or burying data. It is precisely because scientists are people too that the code of science is so adamant in its insistence that research be independent. It is like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine: no, I'm not going to save everybody, but I'm going to try. Likewise, no we can't all be objective in our research, but dammit, we should try. And when abuses like this are brought to light, they should be punished.
czep
czep
This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.
And, later:
This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
While most of this article can be dismissed as the usual FUD (blaming dotcom failures on free software models?) which we've all seen and heard before, and how awesome Microsoft is because they "protect their intellectual property", the above two lines reveal what they really really hate about open source: they can't steal it!
Read that second line again. There are two critical assumptions here. 1) commercial software companies should have every right to incorporate OSS into their products; and 2) by incorporating free code into commercial products, it then becomes their own ("fruits of their labor" - never mind the countless numbers who worked on the code to release it GPL in the first place!!!), and thus they should have every right to close it, and charge for it.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! MS and friends (all the execs who will show up eager-eyed at Stern) are planning to pound on the GPL, steal code from the public domain, and then charge the people who wrote it to use it.
Where do you want to go today? NOTE: Going anywhere is subject to the restrictions listed in the EULA, to which you agree in its entirety simply by wanting to go anywhere.
NOTE2: Going places is copyright, Microsoft, 2001. Any attempt to go anywhere will be viewed as circumvention of our intellectual property rights, and you will be prosecuted.
NOTE3: 2+2=5
czep
My correction: If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's not the work I want.
Seriously folks, forget the dotcom lottery of stock options and just look for a job that you will enjoy. That will be far more rewarding on a daily basis than killing yourself in hopes of becoming the next billgates.
Just my 2c, from work, which I kinda like.
czep
As for management of IT departments - I find it's more a factor of maintaining a balance among personalities. If you have too many fun-loving geeks, nothing gets done. Too many reclusive geeks, nobody has a clue what they do and can't talk to them. Too many button-down professional types, and the place is simply too boring. Managers should actively seek to strike a balance to keep things running smoothly. Variety works. IT certainly doesn't *need* the formality of a law school to work well; but it certainly needs a bit more professionalism than pre-school.
czep
Anyone who has been slashdotted live to tell the tale?
Goddamit people! The ability to circumvent a default does not render the default harmless! Why oh why would a software company intentionally set a default option to a non-optimal setting? A: To discourage its use!!! This kind of strategy is called "leveraging". It happens when you have so much marketshare in one area which enables you to bulldoze any competitive products or standards that don't benefit you.
That's the key here and the reason this MS bashing is going on. This does nothing for the consumer, it benefits only MS and there ought to be loud voices raised up in response.
Keep trying,
czep
Oxymoron. The easier it is to use, the less secure the distro.
Personally, I like TurboLinux's server offerings. Their package list is predominantly based on redhat, but unlike the latter, TLS default install does not, I repeat, DOES NOT leave you with anon-ftp on, rpc.statd holes, an old vulnerable version of bind, etc. etc.
It's just a shame they didn't go public earlier. Then we could lament their poor stock price like we do for redhat and valinux.
czep
"all your spam are belong to us"
"Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves."
An excellent thing to keep in mind when coding.
czep
we do not use your personal information for any other purpose and we do not sell or distribute it to any third party.
Suggested addendum: "but we won't care if someone else posts it to another website."
czep