Kinda difficult when most of the back story had been written long before WWII. He started writing parts of it when he was in the trenches during WWI. LOTR was meant to be just one more chapter (possibly the final one, although I can't remember for sure) of a long mythology. Don't take my word for it. Take the time to read all of his other works to get a feel for where the LOTR and The Hobbit fit in to that larger view.
Then you've clearly been very lucky in life. Slimeballs who will lie to you and about you, and take every advantage of you that they can do exist. Unfortunately, they tend to gravitate to professions that allow them to do this where they hold all the cards.
Used car salesmen, for example, are notorious because they know that once the vehicle is off the lot they are pretty much free and clear. They are in a business pretty much defined by caveat emptor.
Lawyers, for whatever reason, seem to come in just two flavors; those who are passionate about the law and its ability to create a set of circumstances that allow a civilized society to flourish, and the bottom feeders preying upon the weak. Guess which type I think the partners of these two law firms are?
True to some extent. Part of the issue was the sheer cost of MCA based machines compared to ISA and PCI based ones. I vividly remember working at 3M as a contractor technician in one of the research divisions at the time. One of the research fellows decided he needed a top end machine to explore imaging technology for something. We dropped a cool $15,000 on an IBM box that I thought was nothing more than a souped up PC. Heck, real workstations from IBM, Sun, DEC, and HP were available for that kind of money!
Just for the heck of it, I priced out a roughly equivalent PCI based clone. I couldn't quite reach the kind of performance numbers of that IBM MCA box, but I could get 80+ percent of the performance for less than half price. I didn't tell anyone, but someone else must have run the same exercise. That was the last IBM MCA machine that lab bought.
My ISP says I can use my DSL link maxed out 24/7 and they don't care. Why? Because they are a small outfit specializing in selling services to geeks.:) I pay a little more ($45/mo instead of $20/mo) but it's worth it to me.
As someone who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the absolute low point of the US military recruiting efforts (1977), I call bullshit on Every. Single. Point. It has/never/ been as bad as you make it out to be.
Yes, the bulk of the guys in uniform are poor and are poorly educated. So? How is this different from any military anywhere in the world? The real difference is how those grunts are treated once they do enlist or are drafted.
The truth is that the U.S. military is the single most egalitarian institution in the country. It has always been the most color blind, especially on the battlefield. It has always been the most tolerant of religious faith. It has historically provided an avenue for upward mobility for the poor and disadvantaged by providing education far beyond the simple "How to Carry a Rifle and Kill People" that you seem to think it is.
You think I'm lying? Then compare the ability for any minority to advance in the military at any point in history to their civilian counterparts. I defy you to find a situation where they had fewer opportunities than they did in civilian life. If you are honest in your evaluations, at best you will only be able to show that they have rough parity between the two.
The fact that you don't have a clue tells me that you never had the honor of wearing a uniform alongside a black from the slums of Chicago or Detroit. Or a hillbilly from Kentucky. Or a Filipino from the mountains of Mindanao. Or an American Samoan. Or a Mexican from the barrios of east LA. (or from Monterrey, Acapulco, Mexico City, or lord knows where).
I did. Those sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guard, and soldiers were some of the finest individuals that it has ever been my privilege to know. The career people were virtually all dedicated, hardworking, loyal, honest individuals who took pride in doing a very difficult job under very trying circumstances. The rest of us were there because we also chose to. Putting us down by saying someone forced us to enlist at gunpoint or by lying to us simply shows just how ignorant you and everyone who modded you up really is.
The law is fine for what it is, the only bad part was handing control of its execution over to the most corrupt set of money-grabbing companies out there... the big consulting firms.
You can always do what we did when PWC said we were fine and the OCC fined us $25M; throw the bums out and get back to doing our own auditing. It's amazing what a good sized fine will do to get executive management focus on an accounting or compliance problem that IT and/or a business unit has been trying to get them to pay to fix.:)
On the whole, I think SOX compliance has definitely benefitted us as a company. We already know more about where our real expenses are than we did before we started.
The term "International Law" is objectionable not as a catch all term for law which is applied in multiple countries in a similar manner but as a concept of an enforceable mode of legislation.
OK, in that sense we are entirely in agreement. It's a point my great-uncle was fond of making regularly. However, he was also passionately convinced that nations and societies could safely interact was through the completely voluntary acceptance of their mutual agreements. He used to argue that no nation could be safe (nor would their international trade amount to much) if they chose to ignore both the vast body of interlocking agreements that currently exist and the long history of practice that has been built up over the centuries. For example, I think some of the material that he donated to the law library were historical analysis of trade agreements dating back to time of the Roman empire.
It was the practice of those agreements that he was convinced was so necessary. Ignoring or downplaying them by continuing to insist that the concept of international law doesn't exist at all only serves to give justification to those who practice things like 'extraordinary rendition' in clear violation of the Geneva Convention.
however for the most part, there is almost no chance that 'International law' (the phrase itself is an anathema and complete and utter crap btw, anyone who mentions it needs their heads examined or their phony law degree torn up)
Strange. My great uncle was Dean Emeritus of the Law College U of MN Twin Cities. His specialty was "International Law". When he died, he donated his personal library of more than 10,000 books to the law library of the University, most of which was works relating to 'international law'; its history, current agreements between individual countries, the League of Nations records, UN records, etc. Funny that he should have been able to build such a library when, according to you, the subject doesn't exist.
Will you please just accept the fact that international law is a phrase that does have a well understood meaning, both in common usage and legally and quit trying to change the world's understanding of the term?
I find the practice of Americans labelling anything different to their values of the day as "Communist" to be one of the most depraved and disgusting habits
Please don't lump all of us Yanks into that particular bucket. Like Brits, Canucks, Ozzies, Kiwis, and the rest of the Commonwealth, we come in a wide variety of flavors.:)
second only to their distortion of history - the Pilgrims didn't "flee persecution", they were kicked out for acts of terrorism.
One of my ancestors landed at Plymouth in 1638 (about 18 years after the original landings). I'd be very interested in hearing another side of that story, as I love history. Can you cite any sources that a curious Yank might read?
I do know, for example, that England at that time was on the brink of civil war. As I understand it, one of the secondary causes of that war was the question of freedom of religion. Again, as I understand it, some Englishmen of the time suspected Charles I of wanting to re-instate the Catholic church as the state church based upon his choosing a Catholic wife over the objections of Parliament. Passions were running high on all sides of that particular debate. I can see how some minor, uncondoned acts by individuals of a small church might be construed as 'acts of terrorism' (in quotes because I don't think that was really a legal concept at the time) by some who were looking to keep a lid on things by quietly getting rid of some troublemakers. The fact that the Pilgrims were allowed to emigrate instead of being imprisoned, hung, beheaded, and/or drawn and quartered in job lots would tend to substantiate that. (Our common ancestors did have some very imaginative ways of performing executions, don't you think?)
So how well does a Yank understand his English history?:)
They were loose with the truth then, and they seem to have learned little since.
Oh, please. Like everyone doesn't write their own legends as history! Churchill said, "History is written by the victors." Well, actually, I think it's more accurate to say that history is written by the survivors.
For example, another branch of my ancestry is Serbian. The defining moment in history for a lot of Serbs was the defeat of the Serbian nobility by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 or 1390. Serbian poets, artists, and writers still spend more time on that battle and its aftermath than they do just about anything else. Knowing that helps explain Milosevic's almost obsessive desire to reconquer it.
What people think of as their history is what their ancestors chose to document. Determining the truth still requires cross checking every source. At best you'll have to accept the fact that we will never know exactly what people were thinking, only what they chose to write.
Let me add some relevant commentary from about 2500 years ago:
"No country has ever profited from protracted warfare. Those who do not thoroughly comprehend the dangers inherent in employing the army are incapable of truly knowing the potential advantages of military actions."...
"Those in proximity to the army will sell their goods expensively. When goods are expensive, the hundred surnames' wealth will be exhausted. When their wealth is exhausted, they will be extremely hard-pressed [to supply] their village's military impositions.
When their strength has been expended and their wealth depleted, then the houses in the central plains will be empty. The expenses of the hundred surnames will be some sevenths of whatever they have. The ruler's irrevocable expenditures -- such as ruined chariots, exhausted horses, arrows and crossbows, halberd-tipped and spear-tipped [large, movable] protective shields, strong oxen, and larger wagons -- will consume six-tenths of his resources."
From the 1994 English translation by Ralph D. Sawyer of "Sun-Tzu: The Art of War" ISBN 1-56619-297-8 casebound ISBN 1-56619-298-6 special
I'm reminded of one of my favorite Bible quotations:
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
Unfortunately, we do seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over, don't we?
What's the biggest difference between us? Even if you say we do nearly exactly the same level of work in Java, he's getting paid nearly twice as much because he's been with the company for 20 years.
How can it ever be in a company's interest to pay someone so much money for the same level/quality of work as someone that makes half as much? Why not hire two of "me?"
Because he knows the company, the industry that the company competes in, and the company's systems. All are very valuable commodities that can only be learned over time. Only companies that prefer to constantly re-invent the wheel think it's a good idea to throw out their experienced staff and replace them with kids fresh out of school.
Granted, many companies do take this approach. Most don't perform well over the long haul, though.
Will this effort address automatically discovering and displaying (as icons on the desktop) new devices like USB attached cameras, USB drives, printers, etc? Those are the real pain points that I deal with nowadays.
(1) The Captain Kirk school managers: Ignore enginering's time estimates because you don't want to believe them and have unwavering faith in your personal charisma's power to alter reality. Also known as the "assume we had a can-opener" manager.
Or its variant; the salesman school of tech management: "I just promised the customer that we'd have the new fnobwonker on our box by next week. What's a fnobwonker?"
Ballmer.:)
(4) The "I'm manager because I can everybody's job better than they could" manager. Hardly bears description.
Strangely enough, it wasn't uncommon to hear stories of Bill Gates saying that he could outcode anyone in the room and that therefore his opinion was the only one that really mattered. This was back in the late 90s, IIRC.
She (PJ) was asked two questions. Her first answer was one of the main points of the article: hierarchy is an integral part of successful open source development.
The tone of the Economist's article was that this meant that OSS had failed somehow because they had to be organized the same way that businesses are organized:
However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be. The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property.
But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does. This leaves projects open to abuse, either by well-meaning dilettantes or intentional disrupters. Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.
Clearly, the writer had never read Producing Open Source Software:How to Run a Sucessful Free Software Project. The book does a fine job of explaining that yes, some projects do attempt to run as some sort of anarchistic society. Most if not all of those projects fail. People are still people, after all. They still need a community with a strong leadership in order to succeed at any long term project. Why did the writer not know this? Why the assumption that this meant OSS had failed?
As for the factual inaccuracies, what exactly were they? The fact that the author didn't get the "groklaw-approved" exact wording right for telling us SCO is suing IBM, DaimlerChrysler and Autozone?
Oh, come on! You're kidding, right? Here's what the Economist article said:
But more troubling is copyright: if the code comes from many authors, who really owns it? This issue took centre stage in 2003, when a company called SCO sued users of Linux, including IBM and DaimlerChrysler, saying that portions of the code infringed its copyrights. The lines of programming code upon which SCO based its claims had changed owners through acquisitions over time; at some point they were added into Linux.
To sceptics, the suit seems designed to thwart the growth of Linux by spreading unease over open source in corporate boardrooms--a perception fuelled by Microsoft's involvement with SCO. The software giant went out of its way to connect SCO with a private-equity fund that helped finance the lawsuits, and it paid the firm many millions to license the code. Fittingly, Microsoft indemnifies its customers against just this sort of intellectual-property suit--something that open-source products are only starting to do.
For the moment, users of Linux say that SCO-like worries have not affected their adoption of open-source software. But they probably would be leery if, over time, the code could not be vouched for. In response, big open-source projects such as Linux, Apache and Mozilla have implemented rigid procedures so that they can attest to the origins of the code. In other words, the openness of open source does not necessarily mean it is anonymous. Strikingly, even more monitoring of operations is required in open source than in other sorts of businesses.
Here's what PJ said in response:
Heh heh. Not exactly. IBM wasn't sued for using Linux. It was sued for contributing code to Linux. SCO mainly is suing IBM by means of a theory of contract, as best as anyone can make out, a ladder theory by which somehow the contract can be interpreted in a novel way so that any code IBM writes, if it ever touches UNIX SystemV, or
Off topic:..*real* killer distributed application?
on
Point and Click Cracking
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We saw the same thing with the Internet, when a bunch or DARPA eggheads (no offense, I love you guys) built an academic network that turned into what may prove to be the newest and most effective mass media tool in the history of the human race. I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the original research, or even anyone engineering TCP/IP networks in the 70s and 80s, imagined what would happen after 1990.
I've got to question that assumption at least a little bit. Many (most?) of the scientists working on computer science related projects have always been fans of science fiction. Are you trying to tell me that they wouldn't have been aware of stories by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Sturgeon, and others who all envisioned ubiquitous communications networks? Many of those authors wrote stories where ubiquitous computer systems of varying degrees of complexity were a factor. And some of those stories included all kinds of fascinating elements revolving around hacking past security measures. Certainly Gibson developed the themes far more completely later, but the elements were already there in the '50s at the latest.
I will concede that the original design(s) were never intended to grow into the global network that we have today. They were merely prototypes. The second one based upon IPv4 was so outstandingly successful that it took off before anyone really understood what was going on.
Suggesting that the original developers never thought about security issues also does them a disservice. They were researching communications for the DoD, for Pete's sake! The original design goal was to come up with a communications systems that would be capable of surviving a nuclear war. While that particular scenario has never been tested (thank Ghu!), faulting them for not thinking through every implication of every design choice doesn't do them justice. They still designed and built a system that just runs (partial network meltdowns are always due to economic reasons, not design). This was a truly remarkable achievement. It's especially true since we see systems in place that are essentially immune to the bulk of the common attack vectors in use today. It's not the original designers' fault that so many implementations are so badly broken. It's especially not the designers' fault that the single most dominant OS in use today is also the most porous.
How is that simpler than double clicking the downloaded file (or inserting the cd), clicking the "Next" button a couple times, and then clicking the "Done" button?
Well, to start with you are forgetting that apt, yum, etc. (and all the GUI front ends for them) manage the DL process for you. Even better, they'll manage the process of updating their list of software and the process of upgrading software cleanly. (Something that's only possible on an app by app basis with Windows). IMO that's the true strength of the package management tools over standard MS Windows app management; centralized control of app upgrades saves a HUGE amount of headaches.
I personally believe many people would be better served by dabbling their toes in distros like Ubuntu and Knoppix but convert to Debian before they get too serious. Why? Several reasons, actually. HUGE repository. Easy to use GUI (Snyaptic) for package management available. Install is relatively painless now (if still kind of ugly). Get it working once and forget about it. Run Debian unstable if you want the same level of instability that Suse/ RedHat/ Slackware/ Gentoo gives you. IOW, hardly any to speak of.
Mind you, I say this as a dedicated Gentoo user. I've got two desktops and a server running Gentoo that I've had up and operational for 3 or 4 years. I still put Debian on my wife's laptop, though. Why should she worry about maintaining CPU cycles and drive space for Gentoo portage when Debian is so much less resource dependent?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda difficult when most of the back story had been written long before WWII. He started writing parts of it when he was in the trenches during WWI. LOTR was meant to be just one more chapter (possibly the final one, although I can't remember for sure) of a long mythology. Don't take my word for it. Take the time to read all of his other works to get a feel for where the LOTR and The Hobbit fit in to that larger view.
Then you've clearly been very lucky in life. Slimeballs who will lie to you and about you, and take every advantage of you that they can do exist. Unfortunately, they tend to gravitate to professions that allow them to do this where they hold all the cards.
Used car salesmen, for example, are notorious because they know that once the vehicle is off the lot they are pretty much free and clear. They are in a business pretty much defined by caveat emptor.
Lawyers, for whatever reason, seem to come in just two flavors; those who are passionate about the law and its ability to create a set of circumstances that allow a civilized society to flourish, and the bottom feeders preying upon the weak. Guess which type I think the partners of these two law firms are?
True to some extent. Part of the issue was the sheer cost of MCA based machines compared to ISA and PCI based ones. I vividly remember working at 3M as a contractor technician in one of the research divisions at the time. One of the research fellows decided he needed a top end machine to explore imaging technology for something. We dropped a cool $15,000 on an IBM box that I thought was nothing more than a souped up PC. Heck, real workstations from IBM, Sun, DEC, and HP were available for that kind of money!
Just for the heck of it, I priced out a roughly equivalent PCI based clone. I couldn't quite reach the kind of performance numbers of that IBM MCA box, but I could get 80+ percent of the performance for less than half price. I didn't tell anyone, but someone else must have run the same exercise. That was the last IBM MCA machine that lab bought.
My ISP says I can use my DSL link maxed out 24/7 and they don't care. Why? Because they are a small outfit specializing in selling services to geeks. :) I pay a little more ($45/mo instead of $20/mo) but it's worth it to me.
One word: Webmin
OK, OK, I know it's interface can be clumsy, but seriously. It's the closest thing that we've got that's truly cross-distro.
As someone who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the absolute low point of the US military recruiting efforts (1977), I call bullshit on Every. Single. Point. It has /never/ been as bad as you make it out to be.
Yes, the bulk of the guys in uniform are poor and are poorly educated. So? How is this different from any military anywhere in the world? The real difference is how those grunts are treated once they do enlist or are drafted.
The truth is that the U.S. military is the single most egalitarian institution in the country. It has always been the most color blind, especially on the battlefield. It has always been the most tolerant of religious faith. It has historically provided an avenue for upward mobility for the poor and disadvantaged by providing education far beyond the simple "How to Carry a Rifle and Kill People" that you seem to think it is.
You think I'm lying? Then compare the ability for any minority to advance in the military at any point in history to their civilian counterparts. I defy you to find a situation where they had fewer opportunities than they did in civilian life. If you are honest in your evaluations, at best you will only be able to show that they have rough parity between the two.
The fact that you don't have a clue tells me that you never had the honor of wearing a uniform alongside a black from the slums of Chicago or Detroit. Or a hillbilly from Kentucky. Or a Filipino from the mountains of Mindanao. Or an American Samoan. Or a Mexican from the barrios of east LA. (or from Monterrey, Acapulco, Mexico City, or lord knows where).
I did. Those sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guard, and soldiers were some of the finest individuals that it has ever been my privilege to know. The career people were virtually all dedicated, hardworking, loyal, honest individuals who took pride in doing a very difficult job under very trying circumstances. The rest of us were there because we also chose to. Putting us down by saying someone forced us to enlist at gunpoint or by lying to us simply shows just how ignorant you and everyone who modded you up really is.
You can always do what we did when PWC said we were fine and the OCC fined us $25M; throw the bums out and get back to doing our own auditing. It's amazing what a good sized fine will do to get executive management focus on an accounting or compliance problem that IT and/or a business unit has been trying to get them to pay to fix.
On the whole, I think SOX compliance has definitely benefitted us as a company. We already know more about where our real expenses are than we did before we started.
OK, in that sense we are entirely in agreement. It's a point my great-uncle was fond of making regularly. However, he was also passionately convinced that nations and societies could safely interact was through the completely voluntary acceptance of their mutual agreements. He used to argue that no nation could be safe (nor would their international trade amount to much) if they chose to ignore both the vast body of interlocking agreements that currently exist and the long history of practice that has been built up over the centuries. For example, I think some of the material that he donated to the law library were historical analysis of trade agreements dating back to time of the Roman empire.
It was the practice of those agreements that he was convinced was so necessary. Ignoring or downplaying them by continuing to insist that the concept of international law doesn't exist at all only serves to give justification to those who practice things like 'extraordinary rendition' in clear violation of the Geneva Convention.
Will you please just accept the fact that international law is a phrase that does have a well understood meaning, both in common usage and legally and quit trying to change the world's understanding of the term?
One of my ancestors landed at Plymouth in 1638 (about 18 years after the original landings). I'd be very interested in hearing another side of that story, as I love history. Can you cite any sources that a curious Yank might read?
I do know, for example, that England at that time was on the brink of civil war. As I understand it, one of the secondary causes of that war was the question of freedom of religion. Again, as I understand it, some Englishmen of the time suspected Charles I of wanting to re-instate the Catholic church as the state church based upon his choosing a Catholic wife over the objections of Parliament. Passions were running high on all sides of that particular debate. I can see how some minor, uncondoned acts by individuals of a small church might be construed as 'acts of terrorism' (in quotes because I don't think that was really a legal concept at the time) by some who were looking to keep a lid on things by quietly getting rid of some troublemakers. The fact that the Pilgrims were allowed to emigrate instead of being imprisoned, hung, beheaded, and/or drawn and quartered in job lots would tend to substantiate that. (Our common ancestors did have some very imaginative ways of performing executions, don't you think?)
So how well does a Yank understand his English history?
For example, another branch of my ancestry is Serbian. The defining moment in history for a lot of Serbs was the defeat of the Serbian nobility by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 or 1390. Serbian poets, artists, and writers still spend more time on that battle and its aftermath than they do just about anything else. Knowing that helps explain Milosevic's almost obsessive desire to reconquer it.
What people think of as their history is what their ancestors chose to document. Determining the truth still requires cross checking every source. At best you'll have to accept the fact that we will never know exactly what people were thinking, only what they chose to write.
Let me add some relevant commentary from about 2500 years ago:
...
"No country has ever profited from protracted warfare. Those who do not thoroughly comprehend the dangers inherent in employing the army are incapable of truly knowing the potential advantages of military actions."
"Those in proximity to the army will sell their goods expensively. When goods are expensive, the hundred surnames' wealth will be exhausted. When their wealth is exhausted, they will be extremely hard-pressed [to supply] their village's military impositions.
When their strength has been expended and their wealth depleted, then the houses in the central plains will be empty. The expenses of the hundred surnames will be some sevenths of whatever they have. The ruler's irrevocable expenditures -- such as ruined chariots, exhausted horses, arrows and crossbows, halberd-tipped and spear-tipped [large, movable] protective shields, strong oxen, and larger wagons -- will consume six-tenths of his resources."
From the 1994 English translation by Ralph D. Sawyer of "Sun-Tzu: The Art of War"
ISBN 1-56619-297-8 casebound
ISBN 1-56619-298-6 special
I'm reminded of one of my favorite Bible quotations:
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
Unfortunately, we do seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over, don't we?
Hey, teenagers need community, too. :)
/. Well, unless they're proto-geeks. ;)
Look at it this way: If they're on myspace, they aren't on
Because he knows the company, the industry that the company competes in, and the company's systems. All are very valuable commodities that can only be learned over time. Only companies that prefer to constantly re-invent the wheel think it's a good idea to throw out their experienced staff and replace them with kids fresh out of school.
Granted, many companies do take this approach. Most don't perform well over the long haul, though.
Please don't feed the trolls. It's a waste of your time and energy.
Will this effort address automatically discovering and displaying (as icons on the desktop) new devices like USB attached cameras, USB drives, printers, etc? Those are the real pain points that I deal with nowadays.
Coupling :)
Enjoy.
Probably because of the paperwork involved. Maybe they haven't heard of this new effort?
Or its variant; the salesman school of tech management: "I just promised the customer that we'd have the new fnobwonker on our box by next week. What's a fnobwonker?"
Ballmer.
Strangely enough, it wasn't uncommon to hear stories of Bill Gates saying that he could outcode anyone in the room and that therefore his opinion was the only one that really mattered. This was back in the late 90s, IIRC.
Sigh. Doesn't anyone recognize a joke these days?
OK. Hopefully I can help fill in the blanks. :)
The tone of the Economist's article was that this meant that OSS had failed somehow because they had to be organized the same way that businesses are organized:
Clearly, the writer had never read Producing Open Source Software:How to Run a Sucessful Free Software Project. The book does a fine job of explaining that yes, some projects do attempt to run as some sort of anarchistic society. Most if not all of those projects fail. People are still people, after all. They still need a community with a strong leadership in order to succeed at any long term project. Why did the writer not know this? Why the assumption that this meant OSS had failed?
Oh, come on! You're kidding, right? Here's what the Economist article said:
Here's what PJ said in response:
I've got to question that assumption at least a little bit. Many (most?) of the scientists working on computer science related projects have always been fans of science fiction. Are you trying to tell me that they wouldn't have been aware of stories by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Sturgeon, and others who all envisioned ubiquitous communications networks? Many of those authors wrote stories where ubiquitous computer systems of varying degrees of complexity were a factor. And some of those stories included all kinds of fascinating elements revolving around hacking past security measures. Certainly Gibson developed the themes far more completely later, but the elements were already there in the '50s at the latest.
I will concede that the original design(s) were never intended to grow into the global network that we have today. They were merely prototypes. The second one based upon IPv4 was so outstandingly successful that it took off before anyone really understood what was going on.
Suggesting that the original developers never thought about security issues also does them a disservice. They were researching communications for the DoD, for Pete's sake! The original design goal was to come up with a communications systems that would be capable of surviving a nuclear war. While that particular scenario has never been tested (thank Ghu!), faulting them for not thinking through every implication of every design choice doesn't do them justice. They still designed and built a system that just runs (partial network meltdowns are always due to economic reasons, not design). This was a truly remarkable achievement. It's especially true since we see systems in place that are essentially immune to the bulk of the common attack vectors in use today. It's not the original designers' fault that so many implementations are so badly broken. It's especially not the designers' fault that the single most dominant OS in use today is also the most porous.
Amen, hallelujah!
You forgot:
Windows 2000 is the most secure OS we've ever fielded.
WindowsXP will be the most secure OS we've ever fielded.
Windows NT is the most secure OS we've ever fielded.
Windows 2000 will be the most secure OS we've ever fielded.
Repeat backwards to the launch of MS-DOS 1.0.
A guy I work with loves to quote a fake Chinese proverb:
:lol:
"Man digging hole should drop shovel when he can't see out!"
Well, to start with you are forgetting that apt, yum, etc. (and all the GUI front ends for them) manage the DL process for you. Even better, they'll manage the process of updating their list of software and the process of upgrading software cleanly. (Something that's only possible on an app by app basis with Windows). IMO that's the true strength of the package management tools over standard MS Windows app management; centralized control of app upgrades saves a HUGE amount of headaches.
I personally believe many people would be better served by dabbling their toes in distros like Ubuntu and Knoppix but convert to Debian before they get too serious. Why? Several reasons, actually. HUGE repository. Easy to use GUI (Snyaptic) for package management available. Install is relatively painless now (if still kind of ugly). Get it working once and forget about it. Run Debian unstable if you want the same level of instability that Suse/ RedHat/ Slackware/ Gentoo gives you. IOW, hardly any to speak of.
Mind you, I say this as a dedicated Gentoo user. I've got two desktops and a server running Gentoo that I've had up and operational for 3 or 4 years. I still put Debian on my wife's laptop, though. Why should she worry about maintaining CPU cycles and drive space for Gentoo portage when Debian is so much less resource dependent?