If a hacker gets root in a hole in Apache, only the VM instance gets compromised. Its alot like the BSD jails but more popular.
What I like about it is when I take my assembly course next year in college I can run it in a VM state. Assembly is a great way to freeze up and fuck up your computer. With Vmware or Xen I just type the code in Vim and cut n paste it in the vm session running Linux and execute the code. If it freeze its a no biggie and I just restart the session. No long reboots and lost saved work.
But there are free altenatives like Ogg/vorbis. Why not support them?
Besides Thompson let Linux and others have it for free until it saturated the market then pulled the plug and demanded ownership of standard audio. Pretty sleazy in my book.
Have you used previous versions of X11 before 2001?
No true type font support, poor graphics performance, hell to write any code with the api, no sound support, no 3d support, slow as hell even on fast systems, etc.
FOr a good laugh read what the authors of the Unix Haters manual have to say about it?
X is not that bad but the FreeX86 X11R6 is a poor implementation but it is improving. Ask anyone who uses X on another platform? True type font support and support for Mesa finally made it in during the last few years. Hopefully Xorg will improve it.
THere has been talk several years ago about the Berlin project which was going to be a replacement for X and would be moddeled after Apple's aqua. Unfortunately it was written in an obscure langauge called Forth so no one knew how to work on it. THe project was abandoned.
Win32 GDI as buggy as it is can run on a 486 with 8 megs of ram. Can Xfree86 do that?
KDE or Gnome is a whole integrated environment! Big difference.
Kde is a little bloated and so are the later releases of gnome unfortunately. The new support for c++ symbols in gcc3.4 will make KDe much faster. About time that gnu c/c++ and gnu software which is only 10 years behind commercial software is finally doing these things.
OS/2 and Windows offer limited functionality due to their age and I think kde 1.x and gnome 1.x offer similiar functionaility and features.
If you do not like an integrated environment than use a wm or start a terminal and do what you need to do. Not everyone is a beared Unix admin who has a need to run batch jobs.
Thats the great thing about Unix or Linux. The power is in your hands if you do not like something unlike Windows. Dont use it.
If you never design a system for anyone but beared unix admins then no one else but them will use it.
There are many geek uses too for a full integrated environment including scripting support for gui apps(kde is leaps and bounds ahead of windows in this area), to apps using the same protocal to communicate, to development work where using including code from kde or gnome libs instead of writing your own, can save alot of time. You do not get that with a wm. The exception is gnustep which is a clone of nextstep which is very out of date and limited for obvious reasons.
Also if you need to do things like write documentation for a program you can use kthml's libraries to accomplish the task quickly for your users.
Kde can organize yours apps in the title bar and you can zoom each icon by moving your mouse cursor. This and other enhancements make work easier.
Gmessenger has been mentioned in slashdot before and is being worked on. I think Google plans to make it archivable like gmail with unique features. Who knows.
But yes I was thinking of the same thing when I read the story. WHen MS does it they are evil and taking over the world and the net. When Google does it they are innovative.
MS has alot to fear with google. They are the number one threat probably over Linux if I were Billy Gates.:-)
If Google makes inroads with the desktop then it would leave MS's advantage on using Windows on the server mute which is the only reason people run w2k in the server room.
I heard the same thing with MS Media player and IIS taking over apache since apache required Unix.
OMG MS is going to bundle it with Windows and kill the market. Well Media player is number 2 but still can't budge winamp and custom video players. IIS is not going anywhere either besides corporate America.
Livejournal also has the private feature if you have to read your private entries outside of your computer/house.
Livejournal supports custom groups who can read your journal. This means your close friends, work associates, or your friends excluding your wife when you want to bitch about your relationship or work without certain people reading it.
Livejournal also supports communities you can hide for porn viewing....looks innocent.
I prefer an online portal like Livejournal because it has a ton of features and is ahead of blogger and everything else plus communities to meet people with all sorts of interests.
As long as its bundled with Windows it will be a killer. It doesn't have to be as good. Just more installed and popular. Microsoft learned this along time ago and I still appauled how Windows 3.11 and 95 beat Os/2 as a result.
That would be illegal and unethical. This is Microsoft we are talking about here. Last thing they want is the DOJ investigating them and breaking them up.
My old man use to program back in the mid 70's and early 80's. Since the days of the IBM 360 it was fairly easy to insert code and get into memory from another program running. These same techniques as well as stack smashing and buffer overflowing which causes a buffer that holds data to execute code after it runs out of its bounds is still being used today.
All the worms still infect pc's and execute using the same old tired methods outlined above. They just try stress different components of an OS or program in a hope that a buffer or data stack is being used and to insert the code right when it finishes a bound in a buffer for execution.
Anyway my old man was shocked when I told him that is the problem today with worms infecting computers.
Problems also are language based. C is horrible and something simple like getting the length of a string of text can be used to execute code. Unix is number 2 behind Windows on the most insecure systems for the reason that it is dependant on C/C++. Linux is not that great folks just because its alot better than Windows. The whole reason to migrate to NT back in the 90's was to avoid the security problems of Unix oddly enough.
Today that is laughable as Windows was discovered to be more insecure but it shows there is a fundalmental design flaw tih modern processors and languages.
I support a non drm pallidium like architecture which demands an encryption key for each set of data that needs to be executed. It sounds insane but its the only way to stop unathorized code from executing. Cpu level bound checking would also be nice.
You can try to have your programmers and users more knowledgable but it will never be 100% secure. After all your code will never appear insecure because its really the resulting assembly level code from the compiler which really leaves the door open for hackers.
I think AMD is working on buffer safe cpu's which can do array bound size checking at the CPU level and I do not know if the new Opterons support this. At least its a start.
C++ is slowly being replaced with C# and Java in today's academic and corporate environments just like C++ began to take over C 15 years ago when Windows came out.
But C++ is still taught in many universities and still is used in many old corporate apps just like C is still around here and there. People use it because they are familiar with it.
C++ can be nasty but it can also be used for procedural programing and as long as you don't go crazy with pointers and some of the less documented STL its not too bad. I use to use C++ and it can be tollerable if you watch yourself.
I prefer Java or C# much much more for real object oriented work with great libraries and api''s with a fraction of the amount of code and errors.
I was going to recommend ODBC or ADO's and port it to win32...gasp.
I would just explain the costs involved and offer to port it to their database but charge an extravagant fee for the development. After that then say use database A since this is what my program is designed to use and it will be hell of alot cheaper. But if you want to spend more money that is up to you.
If its a unix apps there probably is a Solaris port. If its a Linux app you can run it under Solaris10 x86 in a seperate zone.
Similiar to FreeBSD Jails you can totally isolate the process but I think Solaris Zones partition a whole instance of the OS which gives it more functionality than BSD Jails. For example you can access ports lower than 1024 as root but in a seperate Solaris partition.
I am a little ignorant about this since I have just been reading about it. Anyone here know more info?
I haven't touched VB in 5 years when I played with it for a little bit.
But there is an option for explicit declarations. You can type it in or select if for the menu's. Unfortantely I forgot since its been awhile and most enterprise VB developers have it on by default to make it strict typed.
VB.NET is a total rewrite and is a strict typed language. Infact people tell me its alot more like python than classic VB. It got a very bad name understandbly due to its past releases. C#.net is quite powerfull and has a gui editor so must businesses prefer to use just that.
But businesses have standards. All you are doing is adding another language that needs to be supported which would make matters worse.
You need as little platforms as possible and you can work wonders from just about any language if you have good programmers. Hell FedEx has some indexing that runs on all the customer orders written in Visual Basic. No you did not read that. Its part of their tracking system. Yes VB was not a perfect language for the job but the programers did what they had to do for standards reasons.
Same is true with anything else. Yes Unix is being replaced because in some situations because IT wants one platform to support. Its the same situation with lisp. Who is going to support the app if the lisp programmer quits?
With the right tools and programmers you can use any OS/language for the proper results.
But here is the problem. All the complex systems don't talk to each other.
The IT manager who quit from JP Morgan was a perfect example. You have 450 applications talking to each other and a user calls the helpdesk and demands an answer right away. What caused the problem? Which layer? Which application was doing what to the data?
Microsoft was hot for awhile with the IT managers in corporations because all the dcom/com/ole applications can interact with each and become one. This can help the problem tremendously.
However there is no standard protocal between all the vendors. That needs to change before vendors start with their own proprietary versions that only work with their products.
If an application uses several layers and it screws up there has to be a way to trace and find out what happened.
Perhaps a new opensource protocal could help? I like that idea.
Using a strange langauge that is not standard is what causes the problems in the first place. Did you read the articles at all?
Its about a multitude of systems from many vendors running middleware from many vendors which run custom applications written from many different languages from different vendors that somehow all must communicate together. Not just which editor do you use or which language do you think is cool.
Why is Microsoft still gaining marketshare ahead of the supperior Unix? Its because they want one platform and guess which one runs on everyone's desktops? See the picture?
The 90's brought outrageous IT spending with bosses wanting all the coolest new in things. Now they have to support them.
Judging by the article it looks like those with high tech degree's may still be in demand due to neglect, mergers, and other issues that are plaguing the datacenter.
Slashdot Mirror
The BSD folks like to look at the linux drivers and check the hardware documentation. From there porting the drivers are not hard.
I imagine the same with Solaris or BSD drivers being ported to it.
Price fixing is the norm in the industry. Especially if you own a monopoly in say operating systems and Office suites.
You do not see the government go after them do you? Oh wait its because we need to defend innovation and capitalism.
Since IBM is their friend now who makes their chips and motherboards I would say no.
They are now bedfellows and without IBM we would still be stuck with G4's. Motorrola screwed Apple over and they are still behind to this day.
If a hacker gets root in a hole in Apache, only the VM instance gets compromised. Its alot like the BSD jails but more popular.
What I like about it is when I take my assembly course next year in college I can run it in a VM state. Assembly is a great way to freeze up and fuck up your computer. With Vmware or Xen I just type the code in Vim and cut n paste it in the vm session running Linux and execute the code. If it freeze its a no biggie and I just restart the session. No long reboots and lost saved work.
But there are free altenatives like Ogg/vorbis. Why not support them?
Besides Thompson let Linux and others have it for free until it saturated the market then pulled the plug and demanded ownership of standard audio. Pretty sleazy in my book.
Have you used previous versions of X11 before 2001?
No true type font support, poor graphics performance, hell to write any code with the api, no sound support, no 3d support, slow as hell even on fast systems, etc.
FOr a good laugh read what the authors of the Unix Haters manual have to say about it?
X is not that bad but the FreeX86 X11R6 is a poor implementation but it is improving. Ask anyone who uses X on another platform? True type font support and support for Mesa finally made it in during the last few years. Hopefully Xorg will improve it.
THere has been talk several years ago about the Berlin project which was going to be a replacement for X and would be moddeled after Apple's aqua. Unfortunately it was written in an obscure langauge called Forth so no one knew how to work on it. THe project was abandoned.
Win32 GDI as buggy as it is can run on a 486 with 8 megs of ram. Can Xfree86 do that?
A windowmanager is a windowmanager.
KDE or Gnome is a whole integrated environment! Big difference.
Kde is a little bloated and so are the later releases of gnome unfortunately. The new support for c++ symbols in gcc3.4 will make KDe much faster. About time that gnu c/c++ and gnu software which is only 10 years behind commercial software is finally doing these things.
OS/2 and Windows offer limited functionality due to their age and I think kde 1.x and gnome 1.x offer similiar functionaility and features.
If you do not like an integrated environment than use a wm or start a terminal and do what you need to do. Not everyone is a beared Unix admin who has a need to run batch jobs.
Thats the great thing about Unix or Linux. The power is in your hands if you do not like something unlike Windows. Dont use it.
If you never design a system for anyone but beared unix admins then no one else but them will use it.
There are many geek uses too for a full integrated environment including scripting support for gui apps(kde is leaps and bounds ahead of windows in this area), to apps using the same protocal to communicate, to development work where using including code from kde or gnome libs instead of writing your own, can save alot of time. You do not get that with a wm. The exception is gnustep which is a clone of nextstep which is very out of date and limited for obvious reasons.
Also if you need to do things like write documentation for a program you can use kthml's libraries to accomplish the task quickly for your users.
Kde can organize yours apps in the title bar and you can zoom each icon by moving your mouse cursor. This and other enhancements make work easier.
Wonder why people complain that redhat does not even support mp3's and switched back to Windows?
Patents are the reason and I do not want to support such a company. Do you?
Gmessenger has been mentioned in slashdot before and is being worked on. I think Google plans to make it archivable like gmail with unique features. Who knows.
:-)
But yes I was thinking of the same thing when I read the story. WHen MS does it they are evil and taking over the world and the net. When Google does it they are innovative.
MS has alot to fear with google. They are the number one threat probably over Linux if I were Billy Gates.
If Google makes inroads with the desktop then it would leave MS's advantage on using Windows on the server mute which is the only reason people run w2k in the server room.
I heard the same thing with MS Media player and IIS taking over apache since apache required Unix.
OMG MS is going to bundle it with Windows and kill the market. Well Media player is number 2 but still can't budge winamp and custom video players. IIS is not going anywhere either besides corporate America.
Livejournal also has the private feature if you have to read your private entries outside of your computer/house.
Livejournal supports custom groups who can read your journal. This means your close friends, work associates, or your friends excluding your wife when you want to bitch about your relationship or work without certain people reading it.
Livejournal also supports communities you can hide for porn viewing....looks innocent.
I prefer an online portal like Livejournal because it has a ton of features and is ahead of blogger and everything else plus communities to meet people with all sorts of interests.
As long as its bundled with Windows it will be a killer. It doesn't have to be as good. Just more installed and popular. Microsoft learned this along time ago and I still appauled how Windows 3.11 and 95 beat Os/2 as a result.
They wouldn't do that.
That would be illegal and unethical. This is Microsoft we are talking about here. Last thing they want is the DOJ investigating them and breaking them up.
My old man use to program back in the mid 70's and early 80's. Since the days of the IBM 360 it was fairly easy to insert code and get into memory from another program running. These same techniques as well as stack smashing and buffer overflowing which causes a buffer that holds data to execute code after it runs out of its bounds is still being used today.
All the worms still infect pc's and execute using the same old tired methods outlined above. They just try stress different components of an OS or program in a hope that a buffer or data stack is being used and to insert the code right when it finishes a bound in a buffer for execution.
Anyway my old man was shocked when I told him that is the problem today with worms infecting computers.
Problems also are language based. C is horrible and something simple like getting the length of a string of text can be used to execute code. Unix is number 2 behind Windows on the most insecure systems for the reason that it is dependant on C/C++. Linux is not that great folks just because its alot better than Windows. The whole reason to migrate to NT back in the 90's was to avoid the security problems of Unix oddly enough.
Today that is laughable as Windows was discovered to be more insecure but it shows there is a fundalmental design flaw tih modern processors and languages.
I support a non drm pallidium like architecture which demands an encryption key for each set of data that needs to be executed. It sounds insane but its the only way to stop unathorized code from executing. Cpu level bound checking would also be nice.
You can try to have your programmers and users more knowledgable but it will never be 100% secure. After all your code will never appear insecure because its really the resulting assembly level code from the compiler which really leaves the door open for hackers.
I think AMD is working on buffer safe cpu's which can do array bound size checking at the CPU level and I do not know if the new Opterons support this. At least its a start.
C++ STl's generate a ton of code which is probably the reason.
Java micro edition is making some headway as well as some scripting languages. Still I see assembler being used as well.
Embedded systems remind me of pc's 15 years ago in power and memory available.
C++ is slowly being replaced with C# and Java in today's academic and corporate environments just like C++ began to take over C 15 years ago when Windows came out.
But C++ is still taught in many universities and still is used in many old corporate apps just like C is still around here and there. People use it because they are familiar with it.
C++ can be nasty but it can also be used for procedural programing and as long as you don't go crazy with pointers and some of the less documented STL its not too bad. I use to use C++ and it can be tollerable if you watch yourself.
I prefer Java or C# much much more for real object oriented work with great libraries and api''s with a fraction of the amount of code and errors.
I was going to recommend ODBC or ADO's and port it to win32...gasp.
I would just explain the costs involved and offer to port it to their database but charge an extravagant fee for the development. After that then say use database A since this is what my program is designed to use and it will be hell of alot cheaper. But if you want to spend more money that is up to you.
If its a unix apps there probably is a Solaris port. If its a Linux app you can run it under Solaris10 x86 in a seperate zone.
Similiar to FreeBSD Jails you can totally isolate the process but I think Solaris Zones partition a whole instance of the OS which gives it more functionality than BSD Jails. For example you can access ports lower than 1024 as root but in a seperate Solaris partition.
I am a little ignorant about this since I have just been reading about it. Anyone here know more info?
Also I may point out if this vendor uses a Solaris that Solaris zones is supported in Solaris10.
You can still access ports lower than 1024 without an egg SUID function in a seperate zone running a partitioned instance of Solaris.
Quite nice.
My brother is the IT manager of Fedex and the shipping system uses VB Dcom and SQL Server to index all the millions of transactions a day.
The main tracking sytem however is mainframe and I have no idea if they use lisp or not.
I haven't touched VB in 5 years when I played with it for a little bit.
But there is an option for explicit declarations. You can type it in or select if for the menu's. Unfortantely I forgot since its been awhile and most enterprise VB developers have it on by default to make it strict typed.
VB.NET is a total rewrite and is a strict typed language. Infact people tell me its alot more like python than classic VB. It got a very bad name understandbly due to its past releases. C#.net is quite powerfull and has a gui editor so must businesses prefer to use just that.
But businesses have standards. All you are doing is adding another language that needs to be supported which would make matters worse.
You need as little platforms as possible and you can work wonders from just about any language if you have good programmers. Hell FedEx has some indexing that runs on all the customer orders written in Visual Basic. No you did not read that. Its part of their tracking system. Yes VB was not a perfect language for the job but the programers did what they had to do for standards reasons.
Same is true with anything else. Yes Unix is being replaced because in some situations because IT wants one platform to support. Its the same situation with lisp. Who is going to support the app if the lisp programmer quits?
With the right tools and programmers you can use any OS/language for the proper results.
But here is the problem. All the complex systems don't talk to each other.
The IT manager who quit from JP Morgan was a perfect example. You have 450 applications talking to each other and a user calls the helpdesk and demands an answer right away. What caused the problem? Which layer? Which application was doing what to the data?
Microsoft was hot for awhile with the IT managers in corporations because all the dcom/com/ole applications can interact with each and become one. This can help the problem tremendously.
However there is no standard protocal between all the vendors. That needs to change before vendors start with their own proprietary versions that only work with their products.
If an application uses several layers and it screws up there has to be a way to trace and find out what happened.
Perhaps a new opensource protocal could help? I like that idea.
Using a strange langauge that is not standard is what causes the problems in the first place. Did you read the articles at all?
Its about a multitude of systems from many vendors running middleware from many vendors which run custom applications written from many different languages from different vendors that somehow all must communicate together. Not just which editor do you use or which language do you think is cool.
Why is Microsoft still gaining marketshare ahead of the supperior Unix? Its because they want one platform and guess which one runs on everyone's desktops? See the picture?
The 90's brought outrageous IT spending with bosses wanting all the coolest new in things. Now they have to support them.
Judging by the article it looks like those with high tech degree's may still be in demand due to neglect, mergers, and other issues that are plaguing the datacenter.