Garbage, you say? I saw the Microsoft regional rep delete his NTOSKRNL.EXE off of his laptop. Windows 2000 promptly extracted it from the driver cab back into \WINNT\system32. Also, Windows guards DLLs with its life with the driver signing process (unless, of course, you're sure of the driver's quality [or are willing to take the risk] and you say, "Yes, install this driver). After seeing the demonstration of Win2K's protection of system files, I decided to shun Linux, since you could delete/etc/fstab without any action taken by Linux to correct this.
So an OS should be able to guard itself even from its own trusted administrator making even the most utterly stupid of errors? If I ever delete/etc/fstab, I have a damn good reason for it. (well, once it did get deleted (I forgot how) and I just stuck a disk in and replaced it..big deal) This is the same sort of assinine behavior word often exhibits when I try to get my work done and I have to filter through a bunch of autocorrect rules to figure out which one to delete.
If I put my car in drive in the garage, it goes into the wall. This is not a design flaw of the car, it is my own stupid fault. If I willingly take the engine out of my car, I dont expect the car to put it back in. If I remove the kernel from my OS, I probably wanted a different kernel to begin with, and I certainly dont want the OS trying to replace it before shutdown. How come it knows that I deleted it? It doesnt need to know that unless I tell it. That is SICK.
As I said, some companies (*cough*NETSCAPE*cough*) would do anything to Windows to make Microsoft look bad. It's unfortunate that so many people and companies have succumbed to this BillVengeance.
That is crazy. Netscape wants to produce a viable browser, not sabotage windows. It is destroying win32 out of its own buggy code, which should NOT be possible. That is conspiracy theory. Netscape is a buggy browser, not a virus, and it was not designed to be a piece of bad PR for MS.
As for the C$300 price tag I paid, compare it to C$75.00/hr for the typical consulting firm. Let's face it, the money in Linux comes from the support.
The last thing I would do is get a consultant. You can try #linux on EFNet, irc.linpeople.org, attend a local Linux Users Group Meeting, or contact the programmer if none of the other avenues work.
There is a LUG (Linux Users Group) in every geographic area, usually full of enthusiasts, professionals, and coders who want nothing more than to teach you for free.
I used to use NT, but moved to linux mainly because it was so easy to obtain help and documentation for complex tasks, and also to use a system where I was only limited by my own knowledge. If you want to learn *nix admin, I would reccomend slackware, as redhat distros try and configure everything for you, and the slack init scripts are much easier to configure. The difficulty of UNIX is mainly due to its flexibility, but once you learn the syntax of a few scripting languages, everything begins to fall into place. After that you can learn bash to the point that it outperforms any GUI in terms of speed of operation.
I know that 2.4 is not "official" yet, but that hasnt stopped many from using the new OS. I would like to see some charts between NT4, win2000, linux 2.2, and linux 2.4
Try recording episodes of DBZ and watch them in the slowest fast forward. This causes the action to occur at a reasonable pace (that is, energy moves and dialog, hand-to-hand just gets more absurdly fast)
In theory, one could do narration, perhaps using the plot synopsis at Planet Namek or any other reputable DBZ site. By combining this with digitally fast forwarded episodes, one could condense multiple sagas into only a few hours, without losing any content whatsoever!
Really though, it would take all the fun out of watching 3 hour long combat scenes.
Open source this. Open source that. I personally have yet to see anything that is in anyway competitive with closed source software. There isn't anything. I'm willing to debate it to!!!
Apache. Go to Netcraft and I think you can agree that there is little standing in its way.
I dont run apache, but I use it every day, whenever I am surfing the web. I also use BIND, and I use sendmail and qmail quite a bit. You use these programs as well.
Before calling anyone biased, one has to remember what/. is for: a bunch of digital grease monkeys poking around in their computers. This is a Nerd news site.
For the casual web surfing game player, windows is clearly easier to get set up and use. It came with the computer to begin with...so the install process never even took place, and wizards are provided so that 97% of the populace can get their AOL up and running without cracking a manual.
However, if you are more interested in poking around and just looking at what all that nifty hardware actually does and how it interacts, I think poking around in the/proc tree is much more easy to do than navigating through a bunch of meaningless windows in the control panel. As a friend of mine demonstrated, it is easier to hook a remote control car up to the parallel port with joystick control in linux than in windows NT or 98. Try to get ttyquake running in windows, I imagine it is difficult.
The point is, for Nerds linux provides a better platform for monkeying around and doing inane things with computer science than windows. To do nerdy things, (outside of gaming which does not really count) linux is just easier to play with. Since/. caters to nerds and not normal people, one shouldn't consider normal uses when arguing about regular uses. The question should be: upon which os is it easier to write a driver for your homemade usb blender? On which os is it easier to pipe revving noises to the speaker when the load goes up? Under which os is it easier to send a message to your beeper when the ports get scanned?
Outside of the enigmatic and mysterious sect of the BSDs, I cant understand why any computer geek could not enjoy linux for just being nerdy.
Berlin is not a replacement to GTK/Qt or to GNOME/KDE or to any of the window managers that run on top of any of the previous. It is a replacement for X, an attempt to redo what X did, only more intelligently, with a knowledge of the limitations of X and taking into account the developments of the computer industry and for that matter the new needs of the computer industry.
Actually, Berlin chose to implement its own widget set, so it does try to replace gtk/qt. Unfortunately, the widgets look just about as pretty as motif widgets, and theming is going to come in the future. The name of the Berlin widget API is Warsaw. The Berlin people describe their consistent user interface policy as follows:
One of the problems with the X Window System's flexibility was the accumulation of several inconsistant GUI toolkits. New users are often puzzled when they see that their Netscape window looks different than there Gimp window, which in turn looks different than the rest of their KDE desktop.
Berlin takes care of the user interface by itself without calling upon the use of GUI toolkits to render buttons, menus, and scrollbars. This way, all widgets in the applications on the desktop look alike. Eventually Berlin will support theming which will be truly universal theming.
I dunno how I feel about this. Although I dont know much about KDE, as of GNOME 1.2 the UI is simply incredible in terms of configurability and usability. By the time these people get anywhere near 1.0, GNOME 2.0 should be out, and programmers will be loathe to redo everything in ugly Warsaw widgets.
I wish the Berlin people had designed gtk+ source compatible widgets (which look the same as in X) rather than try to reinvent the wheel in every aspect of the desktop.
Right on...and a little advice to artists
on
Napster Wars
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· Score: 1
The "Recording Industry" is more accurately called the recording distribution industry. When you buy a CD for $17 at a store, the store gets $2; the shipper gets $0.50; the manufacturer gets $0.50; the copyright holder gets $2 (which may or may not ever get to the artist-just ask John Fogerty how much he makes off of Fortunate Son)
You are pretty much right...except for in the case of a singer songwriter, that is, nearly every rock and electronic musician there is. These people make a maximum of $0.52 for every albumn sold. However, these royalties have to first go to paying off $30,000 or so of studio time, which the recording industry (already making megabucks off the recording) has only loaned the artist, not given in exchange for distribution rights.
For this reason, only a small handful of singer-songwriters have ever made a dime off of a recording. The record industry claims that the $18 you paid for a CD mostly goes toward promotion, which is true. The sad thing is that this money does not go towards promoting the artist who made the CD, but rather this months boy-band top 40 group.
Truthfully, with the advent of home recording, and advances in CD manufacturing, there is no need for a record industry outside of that which actually prints up media. I would encourage artists to not seek record contracts, but record their own CDs, print up a few thousand, and distribute the CDs themselves. Typically, local record stores love to stock local acts, and will buy the CDs. Artists can also make revenue by selling CDs at their concerts. (Remember to register your songs though...it is only $20 or so)
Artists can also alleviate the need to deal with these snakes by auditing a music business course. Belmont University in Nashville does an excellent intro to music business, which can help struggling artists not be taken advantage of by the megas.
That kind of thing can't really happen with windows, yeah you can get back orifice but norton antivirus takes care of that. For someone moving from windows to linux (say like my dad) if he hears that he has to check some web page and subscribe to mailing lists to keep on top of latest exploits that will root his box, it's a good reason to stay with windows.
What you are really giving are reasons not to run BIND when you have no use for it. I had some friends get cracked due to an old version of imap they had running (and they were not even running a mail server).
Linux distributors tend to like all services running by default, boosting ease of setup at the expense of security (even slack is this way). When you initially set up a network server, turn off all services that you arent sure that you need.
For desktop *nix boxes, one should even be more restrictive. do you need ftp running? Is anyone going to telnet into your box? Is there any reason for X to host apps over IP? I would suggest turning nearly everything off, so that crackers are faced with something as simplistic as a win98 box. Lets face it, win98 is nearly uncrackable because from a network perspective, it does not do anything (except run malicious vbs). Run your *nix desktop box the same way.
Furthermore, for every service you have running, make sure you have the newest version. This applies for every operating system. The best road to security has more to do with reading bugtraq than choosing an OS.
Are you implying that Netscape on your Unix box is just as responsive and well behaved as IE on Windows ?
Actually, the difference is really too subtle for me to care. On a P3 they are both fast to load, run and don't tend to crash. Most of the browser software available is good enough that isnt really worth fussing over which one is slightly better.
I will admit that IE5 is a little better than NS4, but the 'well behavedness' of IE5 is dependant on how foobared the 98 install is. IE5 does not crash on my box, but my little brother's computer has issues all the time (since he constantly adds and removes software). It crashes every few hours. Netscape isnt hooked into the system in that manner on a *nix box, so unless you have really messed up X, it tends to perform independently of system foobaredness, and stay away from nasty segfaults. Plus, installing and removing games does not contribute to system foobaredness...not that there are many games to install.
On the desktop, people use applications, not operating systems, to get work done.
Until Linux gets some applications that are clearly superior to the ones in Windows, it will never get any significant penetration. People need a really good reason to switch, and there just isn't one when it comes to Linux -- but there are a whole slew of negatives.
I mean, what's the "killer app" in Linux for the desktop? There are no end-user apps that I can get that are better under Windows. With Win2K, Linux doesn't even have the stability advantage anymore.
This is so true.. Honestly, when I am reading mail and the web, I really dont care if I am booted into linux or win98. Furthermore, I dont even care what machine I am on.
The old amiga operating system from the 1000 days would probably be fine for 95% of todays computer users. The majority of people don't need a good OS, just a good set o widgets. That is why 90% of them are still using DOS.
I am sure that if people cared at all about OS, they would not be running DOS hidden under win98, and would cry out for a kernel based OS. The advantages of linux are simply unknown and unneeded by the average user. Most people dont have the time to learn perl, cron, the init scripts, regexps, bash, etc...and so never see the utility of linux.
On the other hand, I think that the 'killer app' will never come to linux, but instead the 'killer bonobo components' and 'killer containers' will eventually remove the need for giant monolithic apps, and greatly accelerate the development of desktop functionality. The GNOME people really have some good work in progress.
If MS published the full source code, then pennyless 16 year old geeks would put out a release for free. MS would lose more revenue that it could get back suing those who infringe its copyright.
I doubt that MS would loose any money over a free hacker distribution. MS already has the ultimate solution to piracy of their OS software: they just make sure it is preinstalled and paid for on the majority of systems purchased. Same goes for office nowadays.
Since nearly everyone pays for windows when a computer is purchased, they could actually put win98 up for download and not loose much money to piracy. The only thing they would loose money on would be people upgrading from 95 to 98 or from 98 to 98 SE, but then again who else makes people pay $90 for an upgrade from v4.0 to v4.1 of some software?
This would be a very similar situation to the one I had in my college dorms. We had 10baseT in the building without switching. Naturally, privacy was more or less a joke unless you encrypted everything, but on the other hand most people on your segment didnt have much of a reason to eavesdrop.
Bandwidth was not a problem due to the fact that the universities outbound line was the real bottleneck. However, I could see this becoming a problem in a large building where everyone has different providers. Perhaps this could be solved by apartment buildings leasing their own frame relay lines and including power line networking in the lease.
The security issue is really the reason that people need to move towards encrypted layer 4 protocals (authentication is nice too). TLS sounds like a great solution for this, as you dont need to worry what is being sniffed (it is like tcp but fully encrypted).
Digital and Real Ownership and Social Class
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The Leased Life?
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· Score: 5
What you are talking about is the main delineation between the 'upper' and 'lower' classes in the United States. Throughout the history of this country, a minority of people have owned the majority of land, goods, and means of production, while the rest are generally shackled in debt and lease nearly everything they need.
The trick to joining the rich in America is to be very careful about spending your money and making sure to actually OWN things that you throw money at. Living below your means will give one the ability to purchase the means of production (stocks), more money in the future (bonds), and real estate (get a mortgage, you dont pay much more than rent and it goes into a real investment, rather than the landlord). You also pay less for everything when you are able to pay up front.
This principle works similarly in the digital world. One difference is that companies may have more power to keep users in 'rental space' rather than 'ownership space' by only putting digital property up for lease. As in the real world, one should always try to pay up front and attempt to gain true ownership of the 'goods' which you acquire.
I believe that this relates to the holy crusade of RMS for free software. When you get win98, you are essentially giving money to MS with no return ownership of anything. When you download gnu/linux, you have true ownership of the software on your computer. This may seem economically irrelevant right now, but as the real world further integrates with the internet (go watch lain) the economic importance of digital property will become very economically important, and ownership of webspace, software, and customized services will make you rich. For this reason, companies carefully guard the ownership of their goods.
One may easily draw their own conclusions, but to me it seems that ms has easily been just as much of a follower as the open source movement is often described as. (which I believe is incorrect in many ways)
A black hole is a singularity, meaning that all the matter/energy stuck in it is confined to a single point in space. Basically the force of gravity has become so strong in the localized area that it overcomes all other forces, squishing all of the particles into a single point in space. One can measure the mass of this singularity by observing the gravitational effect it has on nearby bodies.
The singularity has no volume whatsoever, and as density is defined as mass/volume, the density of a black hole is undefined. One can say that the density of a black hole in formation approaches infinity as all the particles move into smaller and smaller spaces.
Anyone that downloads a vbs file on gnutella...
on
Gnutella VBS Worm
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· Score: 1
Good god...anyone who is so absurdly stupid to download a vbs file on gnutella and then actually runs the thing without looking at it deserves whatever they get.
Distributed file sharing is NOT good for trading executable code. No one should ever just download some script from some unknown host and then just run it without examining what it does.
This is simply the digital equivalent of taking candy from strangers. Society needs to wake up to the handling of code downloaded from the net. If someone comes up to you on the street and offers you a swig of some green liquid, do you take it? I hope not.
This 'worm' is not a weakness in gnutella, windows, or any program whatsoever. This is just proof positive that people will run whatever crap comes to their machine without batting an eye.
Now I am going OT: This is an issue of security education. One day, people will learn that computers are simply (and this is from a theoretical standpoint) hard to learn. Everyone wants a little text box that you can tell the computer exactly what to do and it will do it like that. We have had this technology for a long time. It is called bash. It works very well and is easy to use. However, one does not learn it in a few minutes.
People who take the time and effort to learn how to properly use computers understand the raw power available in a few lines of code. They are very careful about naughty little scripts that go around the network. The other people dont know how to use computers, and should have devices that do not run executable code of any sort other than the five or so apps that they dont do anything stupid like get code from some random machine.
Currently there aren't that many non-proprietary options, so I can understand the drive to port games to linux. However, I think that the philosophy behind UNIX is somewhat incompatable with hardware intensive gaming. When one wishes to have their machine concentrate entirely on a single application, a timesharing kernel just gets in the way. Furthermore, UNIX greatly discourages direct access to hardware, creating headaches for both users and developers. What needs to be done for hardware intensive gaming is the creation of a good non-multitasking OS with optional networking modules and some fast OpenGL and OpenAL libs. In the absence of a kernel, the games will theoretically run much faster. (Kinda like DOS with some more advanced features) For simpler gaming, web surfing, etc, everything is so fast that OS does not matter much. For these kinds of tasks I dont really care if I am in win98 or gnome/X/linux. Development, modeling, or networking is a different matter. The idea that a single OS can be the best for every possible task is a bit flawed. Anyone who wants to turn their $2500 machine into a gaming console would probably not wish to run something as robust as *nix. This is the sort of avenue where simple and primitive may be better.
Slashdot Mirror
Well...I meant to implement the template, but it is a dumb debate anyway.
So an OS should be able to guard itself even from its own trusted administrator making even the most utterly stupid of errors? If I ever delete /etc/fstab, I have a damn good reason for it. (well, once it did get deleted (I forgot how) and I just stuck a disk in and replaced it..big deal) This is the same sort of assinine behavior word often exhibits when I try to get my work done and I have to filter through a bunch of autocorrect rules to figure out which one to delete.
If I put my car in drive in the garage, it goes into the wall. This is not a design flaw of the car, it is my own stupid fault. If I willingly take the engine out of my car, I dont expect the car to put it back in. If I remove the kernel from my OS, I probably wanted a different kernel to begin with, and I certainly dont want the OS trying to replace it before shutdown. How come it knows that I deleted it? It doesnt need to know that unless I tell it. That is SICK.
As I said, some companies (*cough*NETSCAPE*cough*) would do anything to Windows to make Microsoft look bad. It's unfortunate that so many people and companies have succumbed to this BillVengeance.
That is crazy. Netscape wants to produce a viable browser, not sabotage windows. It is destroying win32 out of its own buggy code, which should NOT be possible. That is conspiracy theory. Netscape is a buggy browser, not a virus, and it was not designed to be a piece of bad PR for MS.
As for the C$300 price tag I paid, compare it to C$75.00/hr for the typical consulting firm. Let's face it, the money in Linux comes from the support.
The last thing I would do is get a consultant. You can try #linux on EFNet, irc.linpeople.org, attend a local Linux Users Group Meeting, or contact the programmer if none of the other avenues work.
There is a LUG (Linux Users Group) in every geographic area, usually full of enthusiasts, professionals, and coders who want nothing more than to teach you for free.
I used to use NT, but moved to linux mainly because it was so easy to obtain help and documentation for complex tasks, and also to use a system where I was only limited by my own knowledge. If you want to learn *nix admin, I would reccomend slackware, as redhat distros try and configure everything for you, and the slack init scripts are much easier to configure. The difficulty of UNIX is mainly due to its flexibility, but once you learn the syntax of a few scripting languages, everything begins to fall into place. After that you can learn bash to the point that it outperforms any GUI in terms of speed of operation.
You can also pay to wait on hold
I know that 2.4 is not "official" yet, but that hasnt stopped many from using the new OS. I would like to see some charts between NT4, win2000, linux 2.2, and linux 2.4
In theory, one could do narration, perhaps using the plot synopsis at Planet Namek or any other reputable DBZ site. By combining this with digitally fast forwarded episodes, one could condense multiple sagas into only a few hours, without losing any content whatsoever!
Really though, it would take all the fun out of watching 3 hour long combat scenes.
What the Top 25 most popular websites (at home) run
Webserver: 8 Chose Apache, 6 Chose Netscape, and 6 Chose IIS (2 didnt have much of a choice). 3 did their own thing and 2 I dont know about.
OS: 9 chose Solaris, 6 chose windows, 4 chose BSD, 3 chose linux, 2 chose Tru64 UNIX, and some fool chose IRIX.
Ummm...what big companies were you talking about?
This weeks nielson netratings (at home) with server info
Property Unique Audience (000) Time Per Person (hrs:min:sec)
1. AOL Websites 28,628 0:13:31 running NaviServer/2.0 AOLserver/2.3.3 on Solaris
2. Yahoo! 25,720 0:30:15 running unknown on FreeBSD
3. MSN 19,847 0:21:12 running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
4. Microsoft 16,686 0:05:42 running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
5. Lycos Network 9,550 0:09:24 running Microsoft-IIS/5.0
6. Excite@Home 8,934 0:14:52 running Apache/1.2.6 Red Hat on Linux
7. GO Network 7,649 0:14:12 running unknown on Solaris
8. eUniverse Network 5,264 0:08:36 running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
9. Time Warner 5,114 0:09:16 running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris
10. eBay 5,071 0:52:51 running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
11. About.com 5,032 0:06:48 running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on FreeBSD
12. AltaVista 5,023 0:09:17 running AV/1.0.1 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX
13. NBC Internet 4,602 0:07:41 running Netscape-Communications/1.12 on Solaris
14. Amazon 3,971 0:08:43 running Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) on Compaq Tru64 UNIX
15. iWon.com Inc. 3,842 0:26:29 running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris
16. LookSmart 3,738 0:05:44 running Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) on Solaris
17. EarthLink 3,254 0:08:27 running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 on Solaris
18. Ask Jeeves 3,157 0:06:39 running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
19. CNET Networks 2,920 0:06:12 running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on Solaris
20. SmartBot.NET Inc. 2,827 0:03:53 running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) on BSD/OS
21. The Go2Net Network 2,739 0:05:51 running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.0 g2am/1.39 adutil/1.8 g2ad/1.66 PHP/3.0.16 mod_perl/1.16_03-dev on Linux
22. Real Networks 2,693 0:04:06 running Thisisarealoperatingsystemfromthefreeworld1.2alpha 12 on Linux
23. Gator.com 2,598 0:06:17 running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) PHP/3.0.7 on FreeBSD
24. American Greetings 2,553 0:08:56 running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2 on IRIX
25. iVillage 2,472 0:08:45 running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP1 on Solaris
I think the data speaks for itself
Apache. Go to Netcraft and I think you can agree that there is little standing in its way.
I dont run apache, but I use it every day, whenever I am surfing the web. I also use BIND, and I use sendmail and qmail quite a bit. You use these programs as well.
For the casual web surfing game player, windows is clearly easier to get set up and use. It came with the computer to begin with...so the install process never even took place, and wizards are provided so that 97% of the populace can get their AOL up and running without cracking a manual.
However, if you are more interested in poking around and just looking at what all that nifty hardware actually does and how it interacts, I think poking around in the /proc tree is much more easy to do than navigating through a bunch of meaningless windows in the control panel. As a friend of mine demonstrated, it is easier to hook a remote control car up to the parallel port with joystick control in linux than in windows NT or 98. Try to get ttyquake running in windows, I imagine it is difficult.
The point is, for Nerds linux provides a better platform for monkeying around and doing inane things with computer science than windows. To do nerdy things, (outside of gaming which does not really count) linux is just easier to play with. Since /. caters to nerds and not normal people, one shouldn't consider normal uses when arguing about regular uses. The question should be: upon which os is it easier to write a driver for your homemade usb blender? On which os is it easier to pipe revving noises to the speaker when the load goes up? Under which os is it easier to send a message to your beeper when the ports get scanned?
Outside of the enigmatic and mysterious sect of the BSDs, I cant understand why any computer geek could not enjoy linux for just being nerdy.
Berlin is not a replacement to GTK/Qt or to GNOME/KDE or to any of the window managers that run on top of any of the previous. It is a replacement for X, an attempt to redo what X did, only more intelligently, with a knowledge of the limitations of X and taking into account the developments of the computer industry and for that matter the new needs of the computer industry.
Actually, Berlin chose to implement its own widget set, so it does try to replace gtk/qt. Unfortunately, the widgets look just about as pretty as motif widgets, and theming is going to come in the future. The name of the Berlin widget API is Warsaw. The Berlin people describe their consistent user interface policy as follows:
One of the problems with the X Window System's flexibility was the accumulation of several inconsistant GUI toolkits. New users are often puzzled when they see that their Netscape window looks different than there Gimp window, which in turn looks different than the rest of their KDE desktop.
Berlin takes care of the user interface by itself without calling upon the use of GUI toolkits to render buttons, menus, and scrollbars. This way, all widgets in the applications on the desktop look alike. Eventually Berlin will support theming which will be truly universal theming.
I dunno how I feel about this. Although I dont know much about KDE, as of GNOME 1.2 the UI is simply incredible in terms of configurability and usability. By the time these people get anywhere near 1.0, GNOME 2.0 should be out, and programmers will be loathe to redo everything in ugly Warsaw widgets.
I wish the Berlin people had designed gtk+ source compatible widgets (which look the same as in X) rather than try to reinvent the wheel in every aspect of the desktop.
The "Recording Industry" is more accurately called the recording distribution industry. When you buy a CD for $17 at a store, the store gets $2; the shipper gets $0.50; the manufacturer gets $0.50; the copyright holder gets $2 (which may or may not ever get to the artist-just ask John Fogerty how much he makes off of Fortunate Son)
You are pretty much right...except for in the case of a singer songwriter, that is, nearly every rock and electronic musician there is. These people make a maximum of $0.52 for every albumn sold. However, these royalties have to first go to paying off $30,000 or so of studio time, which the recording industry (already making megabucks off the recording) has only loaned the artist, not given in exchange for distribution rights.
For this reason, only a small handful of singer-songwriters have ever made a dime off of a recording. The record industry claims that the $18 you paid for a CD mostly goes toward promotion, which is true. The sad thing is that this money does not go towards promoting the artist who made the CD, but rather this months boy-band top 40 group.
Truthfully, with the advent of home recording, and advances in CD manufacturing, there is no need for a record industry outside of that which actually prints up media. I would encourage artists to not seek record contracts, but record their own CDs, print up a few thousand, and distribute the CDs themselves. Typically, local record stores love to stock local acts, and will buy the CDs. Artists can also make revenue by selling CDs at their concerts. (Remember to register your songs though...it is only $20 or so)
Artists can also alleviate the need to deal with these snakes by auditing a music business course. Belmont University in Nashville does an excellent intro to music business, which can help struggling artists not be taken advantage of by the megas.
That kind of thing can't really happen with windows, yeah you can get back orifice but norton antivirus takes care of that. For someone moving from windows to linux (say like my dad) if he hears that he has to check some web page and subscribe to mailing lists to keep on top of latest exploits that will root his box, it's a good reason to stay with windows.
What you are really giving are reasons not to run BIND when you have no use for it. I had some friends get cracked due to an old version of imap they had running (and they were not even running a mail server).
Linux distributors tend to like all services running by default, boosting ease of setup at the expense of security (even slack is this way). When you initially set up a network server, turn off all services that you arent sure that you need.
For desktop *nix boxes, one should even be more restrictive. do you need ftp running? Is anyone going to telnet into your box? Is there any reason for X to host apps over IP? I would suggest turning nearly everything off, so that crackers are faced with something as simplistic as a win98 box. Lets face it, win98 is nearly uncrackable because from a network perspective, it does not do anything (except run malicious vbs). Run your *nix desktop box the same way.
Furthermore, for every service you have running, make sure you have the newest version. This applies for every operating system. The best road to security has more to do with reading bugtraq than choosing an OS.
Are you implying that Netscape on your Unix box is just as responsive and well behaved as IE on Windows ?
Actually, the difference is really too subtle for me to care. On a P3 they are both fast to load, run and don't tend to crash. Most of the browser software available is good enough that isnt really worth fussing over which one is slightly better.
I will admit that IE5 is a little better than NS4, but the 'well behavedness' of IE5 is dependant on how foobared the 98 install is. IE5 does not crash on my box, but my little brother's computer has issues all the time (since he constantly adds and removes software). It crashes every few hours. Netscape isnt hooked into the system in that manner on a *nix box, so unless you have really messed up X, it tends to perform independently of system foobaredness, and stay away from nasty segfaults. Plus, installing and removing games does not contribute to system foobaredness...not that there are many games to install.
On the desktop, people use applications, not operating systems, to get work done.
Until Linux gets some applications that are clearly superior to the ones in Windows, it will never get any significant penetration. People need a really good reason to switch, and there just isn't one when it comes to Linux -- but there are a whole slew of negatives.
I mean, what's the "killer app" in Linux for the desktop? There are no end-user apps that I can get that are better under Windows. With Win2K, Linux doesn't even have the stability advantage anymore.
This is so true.. Honestly, when I am reading mail and the web, I really dont care if I am booted into linux or win98. Furthermore, I dont even care what machine I am on.
The old amiga operating system from the 1000 days would probably be fine for 95% of todays computer users. The majority of people don't need a good OS, just a good set o widgets. That is why 90% of them are still using DOS.
I am sure that if people cared at all about OS, they would not be running DOS hidden under win98, and would cry out for a kernel based OS. The advantages of linux are simply unknown and unneeded by the average user. Most people dont have the time to learn perl, cron, the init scripts, regexps, bash, etc...and so never see the utility of linux.
On the other hand, I think that the 'killer app' will never come to linux, but instead the 'killer bonobo components' and 'killer containers' will eventually remove the need for giant monolithic apps, and greatly accelerate the development of desktop functionality. The GNOME people really have some good work in progress.
If MS published the full source code, then pennyless 16 year old geeks would put out a release for free. MS would lose more revenue that it could get back suing those who infringe its copyright.
I doubt that MS would loose any money over a free hacker distribution. MS already has the ultimate solution to piracy of their OS software: they just make sure it is preinstalled and paid for on the majority of systems purchased. Same goes for office nowadays.
Since nearly everyone pays for windows when a computer is purchased, they could actually put win98 up for download and not loose much money to piracy. The only thing they would loose money on would be people upgrading from 95 to 98 or from 98 to 98 SE, but then again who else makes people pay $90 for an upgrade from v4.0 to v4.1 of some software?
This would be a very similar situation to the one I had in my college dorms. We had 10baseT in the building without switching. Naturally, privacy was more or less a joke unless you encrypted everything, but on the other hand most people on your segment didnt have much of a reason to eavesdrop.
Bandwidth was not a problem due to the fact that the universities outbound line was the real bottleneck. However, I could see this becoming a problem in a large building where everyone has different providers. Perhaps this could be solved by apartment buildings leasing their own frame relay lines and including power line networking in the lease.
The security issue is really the reason that people need to move towards encrypted layer 4 protocals (authentication is nice too). TLS sounds like a great solution for this, as you dont need to worry what is being sniffed (it is like tcp but fully encrypted).
What you are talking about is the main delineation between the 'upper' and 'lower' classes in the United States. Throughout the history of this country, a minority of people have owned the majority of land, goods, and means of production, while the rest are generally shackled in debt and lease nearly everything they need.
The trick to joining the rich in America is to be very careful about spending your money and making sure to actually OWN things that you throw money at. Living below your means will give one the ability to purchase the means of production (stocks), more money in the future (bonds), and real estate (get a mortgage, you dont pay much more than rent and it goes into a real investment, rather than the landlord). You also pay less for everything when you are able to pay up front.
This principle works similarly in the digital world. One difference is that companies may have more power to keep users in 'rental space' rather than 'ownership space' by only putting digital property up for lease. As in the real world, one should always try to pay up front and attempt to gain true ownership of the 'goods' which you acquire.
I believe that this relates to the holy crusade of RMS for free software. When you get win98, you are essentially giving money to MS with no return ownership of anything. When you download gnu/linux, you have true ownership of the software on your computer. This may seem economically irrelevant right now, but as the real world further integrates with the internet (go watch lain) the economic importance of digital property will become very economically important, and ownership of webspace, software, and customized services will make you rich. For this reason, companies carefully guard the ownership of their goods.
To understand where innovation in computer systems has occured, one might be inclined to look at this timeline of the history of microcomputers.
One may easily draw their own conclusions, but to me it seems that ms has easily been just as much of a follower as the open source movement is often described as. (which I believe is incorrect in many ways)
A black hole is a singularity, meaning that all the matter/energy stuck in it is confined to a single point in space. Basically the force of gravity has become so strong in the localized area that it overcomes all other forces, squishing all of the particles into a single point in space. One can measure the mass of this singularity by observing the gravitational effect it has on nearby bodies.
The singularity has no volume whatsoever, and as density is defined as mass/volume, the density of a black hole is undefined. One can say that the density of a black hole in formation approaches infinity as all the particles move into smaller and smaller spaces.
Good god...anyone who is so absurdly stupid to download a vbs file on gnutella and then actually runs the thing without looking at it deserves whatever they get.
Distributed file sharing is NOT good for trading executable code. No one should ever just download some script from some unknown host and then just run it without examining what it does.
This is simply the digital equivalent of taking candy from strangers. Society needs to wake up to the handling of code downloaded from the net. If someone comes up to you on the street and offers you a swig of some green liquid, do you take it? I hope not.
This 'worm' is not a weakness in gnutella, windows, or any program whatsoever. This is just proof positive that people will run whatever crap comes to their machine without batting an eye.
Now I am going OT: This is an issue of security education. One day, people will learn that computers are simply (and this is from a theoretical standpoint) hard to learn. Everyone wants a little text box that you can tell the computer exactly what to do and it will do it like that. We have had this technology for a long time. It is called bash. It works very well and is easy to use. However, one does not learn it in a few minutes.
People who take the time and effort to learn how to properly use computers understand the raw power available in a few lines of code. They are very careful about naughty little scripts that go around the network. The other people dont know how to use computers, and should have devices that do not run executable code of any sort other than the five or so apps that they dont do anything stupid like get code from some random machine.
Currently there aren't that many non-proprietary options, so I can understand the drive to port games to linux. However, I think that the philosophy behind UNIX is somewhat incompatable with hardware intensive gaming. When one wishes to have their machine concentrate entirely on a single application, a timesharing kernel just gets in the way. Furthermore, UNIX greatly discourages direct access to hardware, creating headaches for both users and developers. What needs to be done for hardware intensive gaming is the creation of a good non-multitasking OS with optional networking modules and some fast OpenGL and OpenAL libs. In the absence of a kernel, the games will theoretically run much faster. (Kinda like DOS with some more advanced features) For simpler gaming, web surfing, etc, everything is so fast that OS does not matter much. For these kinds of tasks I dont really care if I am in win98 or gnome/X/linux. Development, modeling, or networking is a different matter. The idea that a single OS can be the best for every possible task is a bit flawed. Anyone who wants to turn their $2500 machine into a gaming console would probably not wish to run something as robust as *nix. This is the sort of avenue where simple and primitive may be better.