The 99.9% uptime figure is likely for a failover cluster. That would leave only 8 hours of downtime a year and while NT isn't as horrible as most of/. makes it out to be, it isn't that good either. The only way I can imagine having less than 8 hours of downtime a year without redundant servers would be if you needed no service packs or hotfixes and you did not have to install or upgrade any software on it.
As for the people who have noted slow boot times on high-end machines, I have too. I seriously think that NT takes significantly longer to boot on a large machine though I have only my personal experience to back that one up and that's not worth much, eh? At my last job I had the 'pleasure' of administering a whole mess of NT boxen and the PII/233 with basic SCSI booted SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the quad Xeon with hardware RAID-5. Of course, once they were running the Xeon was a wee bit faster.
This isn't designed to avoid the taxes on your paycheck. It's to avoid taxes on "other income".
Example #1, let's say that you run a company worth $500,000,000. Now let's say you want to give yourself a "raise". You hire a "consultant" who happens to bill you to an account fron one of these offshore banks in the amount of $10,000,000. Your company sends the money for "work rendered" and wow, that's odd your company just sent those ten million dollars to YOUR secret account and you've just evaded taxes on $10,000,000.
Example #2: you run a profitable "business" from traditional organized crime, or large-scale drug dealing, or assassinations or even working as $5,000/day call girl. Now you have a whole lot of money and if you legitimize it within the U.S. you'll end up with a lot of taxes on it. But what if this money gets deposited to your offshore account? Well, now suddenly there are no taxes involved. Neat, eh?
As for the laws about foreign income, the IRS even admits it's basically honour system. There's no way to trace this so basically as long as said random rich person reports enough income to be credible, they can hide the rest without fear of the authorities find out. After all, there isn't a real difference in lifestyle between somebody who makes $100,000,000/year and somebody who makes $10,000,000/year, so you hide $90,000,000 and report that you make $10,000,000/year and meanwhile become worth billions without taxation difficulties.
Your book E-mail Security offers an analysis of some of the more popular commercial e-mail systems at the date of publication. What, in your eyes, are the most dangerous potential problems with current non-commercial e-mail systems and their likely direction of development?
I recently finished reading The Electronic Privacy Papers, as a counterpart to Applied Cryptography. I was left wondering now that it's been two years since you wrote that book, what political and technological actions do you feel are most vital for individuals to take with regard to cryptography?
In an odd occurance, I'm currently reading the book in question, and the prize does seem horridly redundant. In order to participate in this contest, you really need to own a copy of the book. I'd be VERY interested in the results though, as it's an interesting and fairly useful concept presented in the book.
As for those who claim this is a "do our drudge work, get a book" type endeavour, I heartily disagree. There is no relationship between the authors of Design Patterns and mozilla. It's purely an exercise of application of their concepts, which if proven useful will help drive sales of the book. Publicity stunt? yes. But only if the book presents decent material.
While there is some amount of logical justification, I find it very hard to believe that the phone companies are losing money. Bell Atlantic, for instance, is expecting $3.00/share annual earnings this year. Bell South has estimated earnings of $2.00/share. These do not sound like companies who are in need of additional capital.
I believe those hardest hit by this will be people who work from home. Assuming a rate of 2 cents per minute, and 40 hours/week, it suddenly costs $250/month to work from home. This is effectively a $3000/year after-tax salary deduction which, while not a fortune, is certainly the difference between being able to save enough money to send your child to college, and having a child who graduates with $50,000 in loans.
I'd be very interested in hearing a compelling counter-argument in favor of the charges. I have a lot of trouble believing that the ACTUAL telco costs caused by an ISP cause it to become unprofitable. Assuming a 10,000 user ISP, one can assume that there's around 1,000 telephone lines on the ISP side, and probably 3,000 dedicated lines for clients. Assuming charges similar to what I pay ($30/month), that's $120,000/month. If the phone company can't route those calls for that amount of money, I have to believe it's the phone comapny's own fault.
But I'm doubtful. Intel doesn't have a particularly stunning record with delivering chips early and I'd rather not buy one of their step 0 chips anyway.
Let's see, AMD gets market share and major recognition with a quality product, and now suddenly Intel is claiming that it can suddenly make much faster chips RSN. Whatever.
I'm personally sick of talks of vaporware. I love new technology and reading about the future, but I don't buy my computers based on speculation from unnamed sources regarding the possible date that a chip will get put to paper. It's utterly irrelevant.
While I am solidly against software piracy, the argument that microsoft geeks are in danger of losing their jobs due to it is solidly rediculous.
BillG himself is worth $400,000/employee.
I refuse to pay for software which does not meet needs and expectations. Does this mean I pirate Microsoft software? nope, I just don't use it.
As for the anti-patent/IP/copyright people, I don't think many of them realize the implications of what they're arguing for. Personally, I like the fact that if I write an industry changing program, that I'll be very very rich.
My personal feeling is that if you want to change software, learn to program and code the weaknesses.
I love the idea of internet over television, and integration between the two, but is this going to be a cable settop box, or is this going to be a stand-alone telephone based product like WebTV?
It's such a great idea, Internet on TV, but I don't see how they'll get this in a settop box at a price that cable companies will like, which would relegate it to the job of being a computer which happens to display on a digital TV, which doesn't really impress me at all.
5) Creates another company which has detailed records of your spending profile complete with name, address, phone number, etc. Hooray for "targeted marketing".
4) Creates a massive SPOF. What happens if the passport servers are off-line? Can I still shop with my AmEx or are the stores basically out of business?
3) Okay, now instead of Visa charging 1% on all of my transactions, I'll have Visa charging the retailer 1% AND Microsoft charging the retailer 1%. Likely result? They'll pass the costs to me!
2) If a large amount of people start using this, then smaller on-line retailers will suffer. Yay, monopolistic control of another market!
1) Who will audit this? Who will ensure the security? Microsoft? This isn't a microsoft bash, I wouldn't trust ANY company to audit themselves properly.
I've seen this coming a mile away from the beginning of the browser wars and the rumbles about microsoft owned websites. The obvious hope is that by having control of the desktop operating system they have control of the browser. By having control of the browser they have control of the sites initially visited by the user (an exceedingly large percentage of people don't change their startup page). By having control of the sites initially visited, and leveraging this "e-wallet" they also make money from every purchase.
I've got a Fostex COP-1 (I think that's the model number) that ran about $80 or the Midiman CO2 which is an almost identically capable product though the Fostex has automatic switching and the Midiman has a mechanical switch.
For a mid-range solution the Midiman CO3 adds SCMS switching and reclocks the data. If your output is SCMS 10 or 11, you might want to spend the money on this (or just spend your money on something that can output SCMS 00 natively:)
the SB Live samples only at 44.1 which is fine if all your recordings are 44.1, however in the case of somebody who has an archive, there's likely to be a lot of stuff recorded at 48 in there. Also, even when you go 44.1->44.1 with the SB Live, it does NOT do 1:1, bit-accurate sampling.
There's a bevy of inexpensive devices (the Midiman CO2 comes to mind) which are capable of reading digital audio in to a machine. Or on the higher end you have things like the Zefiro ZA2 (bad with higher bus speed machines) and any number of high-end cards like the Motu 2408, etc (these guys will set you back a pretty penny and offer capabilities you're probably not interested in though. read: overkill)
Also is the issue of outs, I believe the SB Live only has a coaxial s/pdif in, whereas he might need to come from AES/EBU on XLR, or S/PDIF on optical. I know converters even for optical->coaxial (Fostex COP-2, I think? not sure) run around $85. This plus the cost of a live is enough to purchase something with a better input if they're interested in doing something other than coax.
And now for content... http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/dat2wav.htm contains info on reading from DDS drives to wave files.
I just don't understand the logic (or rather the lack thereof) on the part of these companies. If reznor.com is taken, look at reznorheaters.com or something along those lines. It's effective to customers, and saves on legal fees. If you really HAVE to have reznor.com, work with the owner. See if you can buy it. See if you can strike a deal where you'll pay to host their pages for a year, and include a pointer and keep their mail bouncing to the new address for a year or three.
A company that I used to work for took this approach on a domain we wanted and it worked wonderfully. Cost us $10,000 plus another two grand in hosting fees. $12,000 is about what, 24 hours of time for legal counsel? Much, much cheaper AND we didn't upset the current owner and risk the associated bad press.
A comparison I have noted in many comments is one of 'euthanasia for disabled babies v. euthanasia for terminally ill patients'. This model of comparison is convenient due to the fact that many of us have already faced decisions about "pulling the plug" and already questioned the ethics of euthanasia for terminally ill adult patients, but the comparison is fundamentally flawed, in my humble opinion.
The questions that come to my mind are:
Might the child's life be anything more than a chore?
Will the child understand joy or happiness, or will it's life consist almost solely of pain?
(the one that will get me moderated down) Would you do this to a puppy?
I think there are a lot of interesting questions raised here about the value of human life versus other life, and whether the value of a single, joyless, handicapped "life" is worth sacrificing resources that could be used for others
Personally I would be in favor of this, but only if it was ensured that an amount of money equivalent to the lifetime care of the child was donated to actually help feed the hungry or another worthwhile cause. If the baby was simply "put down" without purposefully directing the saved resources into helping the human race in another way, then I would be strongly opposed to such actions.
Sure to folks like you and me, it seems like quite a bit, but it's nothing to a corporation.
Case in point, I recently read that one of the area high schools found a way to offset the cost of a new stadium. They switch to selling coke exclusively and they get $2e6 to help offset the costs of the stadium. This is at a high school which only has around 500 students/class.
I think the fact that we're talking about it proves that it was money well spent for the pizza hut execs. Granted, I wouldn't touch a Pizza Hut pizza with a 10 parsec pole, but it did make me think about Pizza Hut, and the fact that they just helped out science. If they made good pizza, I'd buy some.
What i meant by the "Linux install" was the particular server installation used in the competition including all software, even non-distribution stuff.
PCWeek installed the braindead cgi, I don't debate this. If it shipped with Linux, I wouldn't have been defending Linux as it would've been a distribution defect.
Next time please consider logging in, or perhaps even dropping me an e-mail (my email address may look fake, but it works) before you flame me. This was a miscommunication based on terminology.
Thank you for reminding me why I browse at +1 and why I'm against no-account AC posting.
There's a lot of arguing about whether or not updating is fair. Here's the facts of the case.
The Linux install DOES NOT have vendor distributed patches installed.
The NT install DOES have vendor distributed patches installed.
The Linux install runs a braindead cgi
The NT install does not run a cgi with the same vulnerabilities.
If we're going to argue about whether or not it's fair to have skipped a patch on the RedHat machine, then you are also arguing that the NT machine should be at whatever SP level their installation disk uses. Thus, according to this argument NT should probably be a "properly configured" NT4SP1 machine while the RedHat machine should probably be a "properly configured" RH6.0 machine.
This argument has gone far enough. If you want to defend the test, you have to apply the same standards of due diligence to BOTH servers. Unfamiliarity with one operating system is not an acceptable reason to skip updates. Finding out update procedures is a very basic and elementary step in a procedure of proper due diligence.
An improperly installed version of Linux got cracked due to a combination of an unpatched bug and a braindead cgi script. This proves to me that Linux is worse about as much as the 'Linux runs on a 386 with 2 megs of RAM' argument proves to me that it's better.
'How to setup X without setting your video card on fire'.
Does anybody else remember this? and I remember being thrilled at something that would allow me to sit with a calculator and figure out my modelines.
That, in a nutshell, is why I like things that make *nices easy to use. I want to code, I want to solve new problems. I don't want to spend all day trying to solve previously solved problems.
I concur 100%. Yes, I know what kind of scsi controller, video card, etc, i have. But I'd really prefer an installation that says 'Detected a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra with a NEC multi-sync 90 monitor, is this correct?' or if you're in dummy mode perhaps just decrement the 'time remaining' clock and don't say anything at all.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about a good OS to hack on, and one that can be userfriendly. I just want to make sure it's not JUST userfriendly, I appreciate the ability to twiddle the bits when neccessary.
Yes, you have the machine up in 5 minutes, due to the fact that you use... Novell! Software distribution with Novell is insanely simple and IMO, the best thing that I've used. It kills SMS and SMS 2.0. (SMS 2 is nice, but can it verify that the machines installed correctly? is the message informative if not? no and no.) If we want to be accurate about the install time, please also include the time neccessary for the home user to setup a lan, and install and configure novell properly. I think even Slackware 1.0 wins for ease of use there:)
As for me, my average Linux install time is about 20 minutes, FreeBSD is about 20 minutes as well, NT is about an hour, and 98 was about three hours on my last machine, due perhaps to the fact that it was on bleeding edge hardware which win98 second edition didn't support out of the box. (Note: windows 98 comes with USB mouse support only AFTER the installation is finished)
For machines with SMP and RAID, I stick to Linux and NT though seeing as 9x is a bit... bass ackwards in that arena. I wish 9x supported dual processors well, my NT machine runs nicely on a dual celeron 468mhz system.:)
I don't think convergence between computers and TV is for everyone, and I think the only company that's done it right is WorldGate (settop box requires 0.5% of a PC to run, and communication is entirely over two-way cable instead of the WebTV type telephone connection solution, generally priced between $4-$15/month, depending on the cable system)
Just realize though that while everyone on/. has the money to pay for "real" computers and internet access, $5/month, with no additional equipment neccessary looks REALLY good compared to a $600 computer, plus $20/month internet access, and then it'll block your phone line unless you spend another $20-$30 for a dedicated line.
I do however agree that videophones are overhyped technology at it's finest. Anybody who can afford one of these can afford a computer and a cam for it which is a TON safer considering your average soccer mom doesn't know how to hook up a laptop into her car, etc etc.
At the bottom of ESRs page is a link to this image which displays a graph of the linux kernel with files/1000, lines/10,000, words/100,000 and source tree size (MB).
My personal theory on this problem is that people tend to work on things that don't work for them. For me, I've never had a need to work on fetchmail, as it's always dealt with my environment and desired setup flawlessly.
I'd love to come up with a more detailed analysis of this stuff, as you mentioned though. Perhaps somebody taking some sort of sociology class could find an excuse to write this paper?
The odds are negated on that one, so you're actually betting against firearms sales increasing. That would seem to me to be a bit of a losing proposition.
Personally, I'm sticking five hundred bucks on a utility failure. It's worth it just for the entertainment value.
Slashdot Mirror
The 99.9% uptime figure is likely for a failover cluster. That would leave only 8 hours of downtime a year and while NT isn't as horrible as most of /. makes it out to be, it isn't that good either. The only way I can imagine having less than 8 hours of downtime a year without redundant servers would be if you needed no service packs or hotfixes and you did not have to install or upgrade any software on it.
As for the people who have noted slow boot times on high-end machines, I have too. I seriously think that NT takes significantly longer to boot on a large machine though I have only my personal experience to back that one up and that's not worth much, eh? At my last job I had the 'pleasure' of administering a whole mess of NT boxen and the PII/233 with basic SCSI booted SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the quad Xeon with hardware RAID-5. Of course, once they were running the Xeon was a wee bit faster.
Coke recently signed an exclusive contract with my old high school (a 1500 total student, public school).
Cost of exclusivity: $2,500,000.
This isn't designed to avoid the taxes on your paycheck. It's to avoid taxes on "other income".
Example #1, let's say that you run a company worth $500,000,000. Now let's say you want to give yourself a "raise". You hire a "consultant" who happens to bill you to an account fron one of these offshore banks in the amount of $10,000,000. Your company sends the money for "work rendered" and wow, that's odd your company just sent those ten million dollars to YOUR secret account and you've just evaded taxes on $10,000,000.
Example #2: you run a profitable "business" from traditional organized crime, or large-scale drug dealing, or assassinations or even working as $5,000/day call girl. Now you have a whole lot of money and if you legitimize it within the U.S. you'll end up with a lot of taxes on it. But what if this money gets deposited to your offshore account? Well, now suddenly there are no taxes involved. Neat, eh?
As for the laws about foreign income, the IRS even admits it's basically honour system. There's no way to trace this so basically as long as said random rich person reports enough income to be credible, they can hide the rest without fear of the authorities find out. After all, there isn't a real difference in lifestyle between somebody who makes $100,000,000/year and somebody who makes $10,000,000/year, so you hide $90,000,000 and report that you make $10,000,000/year and meanwhile become worth billions without taxation difficulties.
Your book E-mail Security offers an analysis of some of the more popular commercial e-mail systems at the date of publication. What, in your eyes, are the most dangerous potential problems with current non-commercial e-mail systems and their likely direction of development?
I recently finished reading The Electronic Privacy Papers, as a counterpart to Applied Cryptography. I was left wondering now that it's been two years since you wrote that book, what political and technological actions do you feel are most vital for individuals to take with regard to cryptography?
Everybody here is saying "he should've just lied or not said he's underage". That seems great, but then he wouldn't have gotten Free Advertising.
Personally I think the move to follow the rules was brilliant as they just got a pile of publicity for $0 USD. Keep up the good work.
In an odd occurance, I'm currently reading the book in question, and the prize does seem horridly redundant. In order to participate in this contest, you really need to own a copy of the book. I'd be VERY interested in the results though, as it's an interesting and fairly useful concept presented in the book.
As for those who claim this is a "do our drudge work, get a book" type endeavour, I heartily disagree. There is no relationship between the authors of Design Patterns and mozilla. It's purely an exercise of application of their concepts, which if proven useful will help drive sales of the book. Publicity stunt? yes. But only if the book presents decent material.
While there is some amount of logical justification, I find it very hard to believe that the phone companies are losing money. Bell Atlantic, for instance, is expecting $3.00/share annual earnings this year. Bell South has estimated earnings of $2.00/share. These do not sound like companies who are in need of additional capital.
I believe those hardest hit by this will be people who work from home. Assuming a rate of 2 cents per minute, and 40 hours/week, it suddenly costs $250/month to work from home. This is effectively a $3000/year after-tax salary deduction which, while not a fortune, is certainly the difference between being able to save enough money to send your child to college, and having a child who graduates with $50,000 in loans.
I'd be very interested in hearing a compelling counter-argument in favor of the charges. I have a lot of trouble believing that the ACTUAL telco costs caused by an ISP cause it to become unprofitable. Assuming a 10,000 user ISP, one can assume that there's around 1,000 telephone lines on the ISP side, and probably 3,000 dedicated lines for clients. Assuming charges similar to what I pay ($30/month), that's $120,000/month. If the phone company can't route those calls for that amount of money, I have to believe it's the phone comapny's own fault.
But I'm doubtful. Intel doesn't have a particularly stunning record with delivering chips early and I'd rather not buy one of their step 0 chips anyway.
Let's see, AMD gets market share and major recognition with a quality product, and now suddenly Intel is claiming that it can suddenly make much faster chips RSN. Whatever.
I'm personally sick of talks of vaporware. I love new technology and reading about the future, but I don't buy my computers based on speculation from unnamed sources regarding the possible date that a chip will get put to paper. It's utterly irrelevant.
Call me when it's in silicon.
While I am solidly against software piracy, the argument that microsoft geeks are in danger of losing their jobs due to it is solidly rediculous.
BillG himself is worth $400,000/employee.
I refuse to pay for software which does not meet needs and expectations. Does this mean I pirate Microsoft software? nope, I just don't use it.
As for the anti-patent/IP/copyright people, I don't think many of them realize the implications of what they're arguing for. Personally, I like the fact that if I write an industry changing program, that I'll be very very rich.
My personal feeling is that if you want to change software, learn to program and code the weaknesses.
I love the idea of internet over television, and integration between the two, but is this going to be a cable settop box, or is this going to be a stand-alone telephone based product like WebTV?
It's such a great idea, Internet on TV, but I don't see how they'll get this in a settop box at a price that cable companies will like, which would relegate it to the job of being a computer which happens to display on a digital TV, which doesn't really impress me at all.
5) Creates another company which has detailed records of your spending profile complete with name, address, phone number, etc. Hooray for "targeted marketing".
4) Creates a massive SPOF. What happens if the passport servers are off-line? Can I still shop with my AmEx or are the stores basically out of business?
3) Okay, now instead of Visa charging 1% on all of my transactions, I'll have Visa charging the retailer 1% AND Microsoft charging the retailer 1%. Likely result? They'll pass the costs to me!
2) If a large amount of people start using this, then smaller on-line retailers will suffer. Yay, monopolistic control of another market!
1) Who will audit this? Who will ensure the security? Microsoft? This isn't a microsoft bash, I wouldn't trust ANY company to audit themselves properly.
I've seen this coming a mile away from the beginning of the browser wars and the rumbles about microsoft owned websites. The obvious hope is that by having control of the desktop operating system they have control of the browser. By having control of the browser they have control of the sites initially visited by the user (an exceedingly large percentage of people don't change their startup page). By having control of the sites initially visited, and leveraging this "e-wallet" they also make money from every purchase.
Ah well, such is life in corporate America.
I've got a Fostex COP-1 (I think that's the model number) that ran about $80 or the Midiman CO2 which is an almost identically capable product though the Fostex has automatic switching and the Midiman has a mechanical switch.
:)
For a mid-range solution the Midiman CO3 adds SCMS switching and reclocks the data. If your output is SCMS 10 or 11, you might want to spend the money on this (or just spend your money on something that can output SCMS 00 natively
the SB Live samples only at 44.1 which is fine if all your recordings are 44.1, however in the case of somebody who has an archive, there's likely to be a lot of stuff recorded at 48 in there. Also, even when you go 44.1->44.1 with the SB Live, it does NOT do 1:1, bit-accurate sampling.
There's a bevy of inexpensive devices (the Midiman CO2 comes to mind) which are capable of reading digital audio in to a machine. Or on the higher end you have things like the Zefiro ZA2 (bad with higher bus speed machines) and any number of high-end cards like the Motu 2408, etc (these guys will set you back a pretty penny and offer capabilities you're probably not interested in though. read: overkill)
Also is the issue of outs, I believe the SB Live only has a coaxial s/pdif in, whereas he might need to come from AES/EBU on XLR, or S/PDIF on optical. I know converters even for optical->coaxial (Fostex COP-2, I think? not sure) run around $85. This plus the cost of a live is enough to purchase something with a better input if they're interested in doing something other than coax.
And now for content... http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/dat2wav.htm contains info on reading from DDS drives to wave files.
I just don't understand the logic (or rather the lack thereof) on the part of these companies. If reznor.com is taken, look at reznorheaters.com or something along those lines. It's effective to customers, and saves on legal fees. If you really HAVE to have reznor.com, work with the owner. See if you can buy it. See if you can strike a deal where you'll pay to host their pages for a year, and include a pointer and keep their mail bouncing to the new address for a year or three.
A company that I used to work for took this approach on a domain we wanted and it worked wonderfully. Cost us $10,000 plus another two grand in hosting fees. $12,000 is about what, 24 hours of time for legal counsel? Much, much cheaper AND we didn't upset the current owner and risk the associated bad press.
A comparison I have noted in many comments is one of 'euthanasia for disabled babies v. euthanasia for terminally ill patients'. This model of comparison is convenient due to the fact that many of us have already faced decisions about "pulling the plug" and already questioned the ethics of euthanasia for terminally ill adult patients, but the comparison is fundamentally flawed, in my humble opinion.
The questions that come to my mind are:
I think there are a lot of interesting questions raised here about the value of human life versus other life, and whether the value of a single, joyless, handicapped "life" is worth sacrificing resources that could be used for others
Personally I would be in favor of this, but only if it was ensured that an amount of money equivalent to the lifetime care of the child was donated to actually help feed the hungry or another worthwhile cause. If the baby was simply "put down" without purposefully directing the saved resources into helping the human race in another way, then I would be strongly opposed to such actions.
Sure to folks like you and me, it seems like quite a bit, but it's nothing to a corporation.
Case in point, I recently read that one of the area high schools found a way to offset the cost of a new stadium. They switch to selling coke exclusively and they get $2e6 to help offset the costs of the stadium. This is at a high school which only has around 500 students/class.
I think the fact that we're talking about it proves that it was money well spent for the pizza hut execs. Granted, I wouldn't touch a Pizza Hut pizza with a 10 parsec pole, but it did make me think about Pizza Hut, and the fact that they just helped out science. If they made good pizza, I'd buy some.
What i meant by the "Linux install" was the particular server installation used in the competition including all software, even non-distribution stuff.
PCWeek installed the braindead cgi, I don't debate this. If it shipped with Linux, I wouldn't have been defending Linux as it would've been a distribution defect.
Next time please consider logging in, or perhaps even dropping me an e-mail (my email address may look fake, but it works) before you flame me. This was a miscommunication based on terminology.
Thank you for reminding me why I browse at +1 and why I'm against no-account AC posting.
There's a lot of arguing about whether or not updating is fair. Here's the facts of the case.
If we're going to argue about whether or not it's fair to have skipped a patch on the RedHat machine, then you are also arguing that the NT machine should be at whatever SP level their installation disk uses. Thus, according to this argument NT should probably be a "properly configured" NT4SP1 machine while the RedHat machine should probably be a "properly configured" RH6.0 machine.
This argument has gone far enough. If you want to defend the test, you have to apply the same standards of due diligence to BOTH servers. Unfamiliarity with one operating system is not an acceptable reason to skip updates. Finding out update procedures is a very basic and elementary step in a procedure of proper due diligence.
An improperly installed version of Linux got cracked due to a combination of an unpatched bug and a braindead cgi script. This proves to me that Linux is worse about as much as the 'Linux runs on a 386 with 2 megs of RAM' argument proves to me that it's better.
'How to setup X without setting your video card on fire'.
Does anybody else remember this? and I remember being thrilled at something that would allow me to sit with a calculator and figure out my modelines.
That, in a nutshell, is why I like things that make *nices easy to use. I want to code, I want to solve new problems. I don't want to spend all day trying to solve previously solved problems.
I concur 100%. Yes, I know what kind of scsi controller, video card, etc, i have. But I'd really prefer an installation that says 'Detected a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra with a NEC multi-sync 90 monitor, is this correct?' or if you're in dummy mode perhaps just decrement the 'time remaining' clock and don't say anything at all.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about a good OS to hack on, and one that can be userfriendly. I just want to make sure it's not JUST userfriendly, I appreciate the ability to twiddle the bits when neccessary.
Yes, you have the machine up in 5 minutes, due to the fact that you use... Novell! Software distribution with Novell is insanely simple and IMO, the best thing that I've used. It kills SMS and SMS 2.0. (SMS 2 is nice, but can it verify that the machines installed correctly? is the message informative if not? no and no.) If we want to be accurate about the install time, please also include the time neccessary for the home user to setup a lan, and install and configure novell properly. I think even Slackware 1.0 wins for ease of use there :)
:)
As for me, my average Linux install time is about 20 minutes, FreeBSD is about 20 minutes as well, NT is about an hour, and 98 was about three hours on my last machine, due perhaps to the fact that it was on bleeding edge hardware which win98 second edition didn't support out of the box. (Note: windows 98 comes with USB mouse support only AFTER the installation is finished)
For machines with SMP and RAID, I stick to Linux and NT though seeing as 9x is a bit... bass ackwards in that arena. I wish 9x supported dual processors well, my NT machine runs nicely on a dual celeron 468mhz system.
I don't think convergence between computers and TV is for everyone, and I think the only company that's done it right is WorldGate (settop box requires 0.5% of a PC to run, and communication is entirely over two-way cable instead of the WebTV type telephone connection solution, generally priced between $4-$15/month, depending on the cable system)
/. has the money to pay for "real" computers and internet access, $5/month, with no additional equipment neccessary looks REALLY good compared to a $600 computer, plus $20/month internet access, and then it'll block your phone line unless you spend another $20-$30 for a dedicated line.
Just realize though that while everyone on
I do however agree that videophones are overhyped technology at it's finest. Anybody who can afford one of these can afford a computer and a cam for it which is a TON safer considering your average soccer mom doesn't know how to hook up a laptop into her car, etc etc.
At the bottom of ESRs page is a link to this image which displays a graph of the linux kernel with files/1000, lines/10,000, words/100,000 and source tree size (MB).
My personal theory on this problem is that people tend to work on things that don't work for them. For me, I've never had a need to work on fetchmail, as it's always dealt with my environment and desired setup flawlessly.
I'd love to come up with a more detailed analysis of this stuff, as you mentioned though. Perhaps somebody taking some sort of sociology class could find an excuse to write this paper?
The odds are negated on that one, so you're actually betting against firearms sales increasing. That would seem to me to be a bit of a losing proposition.
Personally, I'm sticking five hundred bucks on a utility failure. It's worth it just for the entertainment value.