Samba has had domain login support for years, including roaming profiles and home directory "auto-mounts", which you can organize however you like. You can create any kind of shares you want, and the number of people that can connect to them is only limited by your hardware. Have you ever even tried samba before??
Linux will never work perfectly in a Windows environment, because unlike Linux, Windows does not conform to open standards in a rigorous way. Sure Microsoft includes support for open network protocols, but it is their proprietary ones which define a Windows environment as such: SMB/NMB/CIFS, MAPI, etc.. Since the protocols are proprietary, and change every time the wind blows, open source platforms will constantly be playing catch-up, since they must reverse-engineer the secret protocols for interoperability.
Wouldn't it be nice if all of the platforms in your IT environment used only open protocols?
You don't even need to use a glizty word processor for formatting your papers. Just use LaTeX. It's pretty easy to get used to, and once you're good with it it's faster...
I second that motion! I learned LaTeX in my last year of study, and I really really really regretted not picking it up when I started university. I thought of the countless hours I wasted with word processors over the years, messing with the formatting of footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies. The formatting in LaTeX is sort of automated; you can concentrate on the content without worrying about how it will look on paper. The finished paper always looks extremely professional, which probably has a positive effect on the marker.
Another very usefull tool to use for paper writing is CVS.
And by "Trustworthy", what Gates means is that "Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA and other content producers can trust that our fiendish users won't pirate our goods". It is a campaign of control and profiteering, and has little to do with improving the security situation for M$ users.
Yes... and there are probably lots of exploits that never get published, just used. Now do you want your government relying on this software to store data such as the Total Information Awareness Program, for example? (Oh, I see they renamed it...)
Would you want your business to rely on it? I find it utterly astounding that so many PHB's still think its a good idea. A German beaurocrat who was pitching open source insightfully quipped, "'Security through obscurity' is the model of yesterday. The model of the future is 'Security through transparency'". Thats a paraphrase, and I'm too lazy to look it up. Great point, though. Maybe this new vulnerability will lead to another "slammer" worm...
I really thought that trustworthy computing was starting to live up to its name.
The motivation behind Trustworthy Computing is all about Digital Rights Management and copyright enforcement - it has little to do with fixing the seemingly infinite number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities that lead to total system compromise in Micro$soft's operating systems.
it's not profitable to sell games on any platform except closed consoles and PCs running Microsoft Windows
Bullshit. There is nothing about open source platforms that prevent you from selling games written for them, at a profit. If more companies did, more people would move to open source platforms.
As for consoles, everyone's favorite monopolist is now proceeding to take over that market, too.
The time I spend not in the browser (counting NetNewsWire as a Web browser, which I do) is substantially spent in Emacs (where I create code and ongoing), Email/Chat (text that goes right out on the wire), Word (text destined for a printer), Excel (numerical models), and Photoshop (pictures).
Funny, I can't say I see that MS Paint or even Adobe PhotoShop (btw, by his logic, Adobe are sharecroppers) have prevented PaintShopPro from becoming successfull...
You can't honestly claim that MS Paint is a competitor to Photoshop. He didn't say that the land-owner had to give away competing products, either. An example of underhanded anti-competitive behavior that leveraged operating system monopoly ("land owner") to drive out a competitor ("sharecropper"), is the story of Corel & WordPerfect.
despite the fact that a certain company bundles a browser with their OS, Opera and other alternative browsers seems to be gathering followers by the minute.
Netscape might have something to say about that... I'm positive that the sales of CD-burning software will be affected by the inclusion of a free one with Windows. How could it not? Anti-virus apps are next (which is ironic). Its only a matter of time before the Vole gets around to other markets, like graphics apps.
If this held even remoptly true, each and every firm that makes any sort of software... would provide their own underlying OS..."
Funny you say that... Corel tried exactly this, to save WordPerfect, but it didn't work - at least, not fast enough. Monopolies take a long time to topple, and programmers need to be paid in the mean time.
if you develop for closed source, it's more accepted to actually ask for some money to compensate for the time you too to write the code.
There are thousands of proprietary apps written for open source platforms.
Building only free stuff would be okay if you're independently wealthy and have no life.
Who suggested that one build only free stuff? The analogy was growing crops on land that is owned by a 3rd party. Building your apps on platforms that are not owned by a particular vendor is better for you, and for everyone else. No one said anything about how you license/price your apps...
Re:Kroupware/Kolab 1.0
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Kroupware looks pretty cool, but its missing an essential (IMO) component: a web-interface. I'd rather go with something like OpenExchange, which is mainly a web-based solution, rather than one that depends on being at a desktop computer with specific software installed. Even though its not free.
Re:Alternative: Open source web based groupware
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
(currently supports MS platform only with Linux / Moz version in development).
Client Requirements
* Microsoft® Internet Explorer® version 5.5+
Yeah, that really sucks. Their online demo wouldn't even display in Mozilla. It would be totally useless to my organization.
If you use portable languages and portable GUI toolkits, then the OS itself matters very, very little. You could run a solid payroll application under Windows, OS X, BSD, you name it.
Of course it matters: why would you want to develop and run your application framework on an OS that costs you licensing fees, requires proprietary hardware, has a security track record that resembles swiss cheese, has frequent downtime or requires constant babysitting?
I don't buy these "they're just defending their IP" arguments -- the FreeCraft project is clearly no threat to this goliath software company that is technically years ahead of the hobby project. Besides, even if there is some potential of the free version catching up, Blizzard could have asked them to change the name and not try to mimick the graphics, etc., rather than forcing them to shut down completely. They're just being bullies.
Since they're shutting down free alternatives and being general assholes, people should have no qualms about pirating their commercial software. What goes around...
the "ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2" argument doesn't stand on its own
Yeah, but as mentioned, they can't afford lawyers. They probably also have jobs and lives to tend to, so can't afford the time it would take to defend themselves in court...
There was a lot of speculation in the security community that this is effectively what the "Slammer" worm was -- a non-malicous worm that forced everyone to patch their software. Remember that although this worm could have executed any code it wanted on all of those hosts, it had no malicious payload. All it did was propogate itself. The DoS effect was just a result of the massive increase in network traffic from its propogation. It could have been way, way worse.
Oooh.. all weekend. I recently attended a talk in applied math where a researcher presented results of a simulation that ran on 47 CPUs for two years to reveal many hitherto unknown facts about hydrogen bonding...
Perhaps the nodes are not all physically located in the same building, or are otherwise vulnerable to physical man-in-the-middle intrusions. If one adopts secure practices as a matter of principle, it saves having to go back and implement security as an afterthought someday when the situation changes in an unanticipated way.
Ideally, one would never want 100 PCs to deal with. I've worked in such environments before, and there are constantly parts breaking, etc, - its just a major headache. Thin clients with no moving parts are a much better solution. Check out this article on Largo, Florida, and the link to the original article: http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/12/04/234 62 15
However, suppose you already made the mistake of buying a big pile of PCs, so you want to make use of them until you migrate to something that makes more sense. Rolling out Linux on them all would be relatively painless, and there are numerous ways of doing this. One method would be to go with the Linux Terminal Server project:
Supposing you want to keep the "PC" model, because, say, you don't have the network or server resources for a central login server setup, then there are many ways of rolling out a group of linux PC installs as well. Here's an article that discusses some of them:
http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-12/cloning_01.html
In UNIX/Linux, by default, normal users do not have the ability to modify the system. They have authority only over their own home directories. There is a great deal of security measures that one could take to "lock down" the system to a far greater degree than the average defaults, but the default configuration for most distributions likely offers more protection to the systems integrity than a professionally locked down Windows box.
You can set up Linux in several ways for centralized system accounts and authentication, to achieve, in effect, the type of "domain-like" logins that you are used to in Windows. LDAP servers are a great mechanism to do this (LDAP is actually the protocol on which MS DS is based).
There are numerous ways to centrally manage all of the software installs, configuration files (which determine all system settings), etc., on a network of Linux machines. Linux/UNIX philosophy is that tools are made to be simple and flexible, and to work easily with other tools. This gives the administrator the freedom to set things up the way s/he sees fit for his/her specific environment. Rsync is a good example of a tool with remarkable flexibility for keeping files in sync: http://rsync.samba.org/index.html
Perl has infinite potential and flexibility in systems management. http://www.perl.org
So basically you can patch together a system that works best for you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tools that you can use. Many of them are built in, others you might have to download and install.
If you want a commercial "out-of-the-box" management solution, those are available too. Ximian's Red Carpet product is an example of centralized package management. I think I read that Novell was working on some type of management software... I've never looked into commercial solutions, since the free & roll-your-own ones are more than sufficient for me.
As for your quip about no support and problems with drivers - that just shows your lack of experience with the platform. Support is generally a lot better with open source software than it is for commercial software, and its usually free. As for drivers, wouldn't you check to make sure they exist before buying the hardware? Chances are extremely high that any hardware you have in the enterprise today is fully supported in Linux. Its the bleeding edge, just released this month gaming hardware that isn't.
You have a business opportunity then, assuming there are actual broadband providers in town. Get a real 10Mbit connection, turn your linux box into a gateway on the building's LAN, and you can sell access at "real" broadband speeds.
128Kbit would suck ass... Throughout much of Canada you can get 3 to 5Mbit (300-600kbit upstream) for ~$45 CAD/mo. I'd be very disappointed with less than 1Mbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Samba has had domain login support for years, including roaming profiles and home directory "auto-mounts", which you can organize however you like. You can create any kind of shares you want, and the number of people that can connect to them is only limited by your hardware. Have you ever even tried samba before??
Linux will never work perfectly in a Windows environment, because unlike Linux, Windows does not conform to open standards in a rigorous way. Sure Microsoft includes support for open network protocols, but it is their proprietary ones which define a Windows environment as such: SMB/NMB/CIFS, MAPI, etc.. Since the protocols are proprietary, and change every time the wind blows, open source platforms will constantly be playing catch-up, since they must reverse-engineer the secret protocols for interoperability.
Wouldn't it be nice if all of the platforms in your IT environment used only open protocols?
You don't even need to use a glizty word processor for formatting your papers. Just use LaTeX. It's pretty easy to get used to, and once you're good with it it's faster...
I second that motion! I learned LaTeX in my last year of study, and I really really really regretted not picking it up when I started university. I thought of the countless hours I wasted with word processors over the years, messing with the formatting of footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies. The formatting in LaTeX is sort of automated; you can concentrate on the content without worrying about how it will look on paper. The finished paper always looks extremely professional, which probably has a positive effect on the marker.
Another very usefull tool to use for paper writing is CVS.
And by "Trustworthy", what Gates means is that "Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA and other content producers can trust that our fiendish users won't pirate our goods". It is a campaign of control and profiteering, and has little to do with improving the security situation for M$ users.
Yes... and there are probably lots of exploits that never get published, just used. Now do you want your government relying on this software to store data such as the Total Information Awareness Program, for example? (Oh, I see they renamed it...)
Would you want your business to rely on it? I find it utterly astounding that so many PHB's still think its a good idea. A German beaurocrat who was pitching open source insightfully quipped, "'Security through obscurity' is the model of yesterday. The model of the future is 'Security through transparency'". Thats a paraphrase, and I'm too lazy to look it up. Great point, though. Maybe this new vulnerability will lead to another "slammer" worm...
I really thought that trustworthy computing was starting to live up to its name.
The motivation behind Trustworthy Computing is all about Digital Rights Management and copyright enforcement - it has little to do with fixing the seemingly infinite number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities that lead to total system compromise in Micro$soft's operating systems.
Here's some links about it if you want more information.
I was refering to the hardware required to run things like AIX, HP-UX, IRIX...
it's not profitable to sell games on any platform except closed consoles and PCs running Microsoft Windows
Bullshit. There is nothing about open source platforms that prevent you from selling games written for them, at a profit. If more companies did, more people would move to open source platforms.
As for consoles, everyone's favorite monopolist is now proceeding to take over that market, too.
Funny, I can't say I see that MS Paint or even Adobe PhotoShop (btw, by his logic, Adobe are sharecroppers) have prevented PaintShopPro from becoming successfull...
... would provide their own underlying OS..."
You can't honestly claim that MS Paint is a competitor to Photoshop. He didn't say that the land-owner had to give away competing products, either. An example of underhanded anti-competitive behavior that leveraged operating system monopoly ("land owner") to drive out a competitor ("sharecropper"), is the story of Corel & WordPerfect.
despite the fact that a certain company bundles a browser with their OS, Opera and other alternative browsers seems to be gathering followers by the minute.
Netscape might have something to say about that... I'm positive that the sales of CD-burning software will be affected by the inclusion of a free one with Windows. How could it not? Anti-virus apps are next (which is ironic). Its only a matter of time before the Vole gets around to other markets, like graphics apps.
If this held even remoptly true, each and every firm that makes any sort of software
Funny you say that... Corel tried exactly this, to save WordPerfect, but it didn't work - at least, not fast enough. Monopolies take a long time to topple, and programmers need to be paid in the mean time.
if you develop for closed source, it's more accepted to actually ask for some money to compensate for the time you too to write the code.
There are thousands of proprietary apps written for open source platforms.
Building only free stuff would be okay if you're independently wealthy and have no life.
Who suggested that one build only free stuff? The analogy was growing crops on land that is owned by a 3rd party. Building your apps on platforms that are not owned by a particular vendor is better for you, and for everyone else. No one said anything about how you license/price your apps...
Kroupware looks pretty cool, but its missing an essential (IMO) component: a web-interface. I'd rather go with something like OpenExchange, which is mainly a web-based solution, rather than one that depends on being at a desktop computer with specific software installed. Even though its not free.
(currently supports MS platform only with Linux / Moz version in development).
Client Requirements
* Microsoft® Internet Explorer® version 5.5+
Yeah, that really sucks. Their online demo wouldn't even display in Mozilla. It would be totally useless to my organization.
If you use portable languages and portable GUI toolkits, then the OS itself matters very, very little. You could run a solid payroll application under Windows, OS X, BSD, you name it.
Of course it matters: why would you want to develop and run your application framework on an OS that costs you licensing fees, requires proprietary hardware, has a security track record that resembles swiss cheese, has frequent downtime or requires constant babysitting?
The OS does matter.
I don't buy these "they're just defending their IP" arguments -- the FreeCraft project is clearly no threat to this goliath software company that is technically years ahead of the hobby project. Besides, even if there is some potential of the free version catching up, Blizzard could have asked them to change the name and not try to mimick the graphics, etc., rather than forcing them to shut down completely. They're just being bullies.
Since they're shutting down free alternatives and being general assholes, people should have no qualms about pirating their commercial software. What goes around...
the "ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2" argument doesn't stand on its own
Yeah, but as mentioned, they can't afford lawyers. They probably also have jobs and lives to tend to, so can't afford the time it would take to defend themselves in court...
There was a lot of speculation in the security community that this is effectively what the "Slammer" worm was -- a non-malicous worm that forced everyone to patch their software. Remember that although this worm could have executed any code it wanted on all of those hosts, it had no malicious payload. All it did was propogate itself. The DoS effect was just a result of the massive increase in network traffic from its propogation. It could have been way, way worse.
--
http://oss.netmojo.ca
Oooh.. all weekend. I recently attended a talk in applied math where a researcher presented results of a simulation that ran on 47 CPUs for two years to reveal many hitherto unknown facts about hydrogen bonding...
--
http://oss.netmojo.ca
Perhaps the nodes are not all physically located in the same building, or are otherwise vulnerable to physical man-in-the-middle intrusions. If one adopts secure practices as a matter of principle, it saves having to go back and implement security as an afterthought someday when the situation changes in an unanticipated way.
--
http://oss.netmojo.ca
...its the only right thing to do.
Ideally, one would never want 100 PCs to deal with. I've worked in such environments before, and there are constantly parts breaking, etc, - its just a major headache. Thin clients with no moving parts are a much better solution. Check out this article on Largo, Florida, and the link to the original article:
4 62 15
l
http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/12/04/23
However, suppose you already made the mistake of buying a big pile of PCs, so you want to make use of them until you migrate to something that makes more sense. Rolling out Linux on them all would be relatively painless, and there are numerous ways of doing this. One method would be to go with the Linux Terminal Server project:
http://www.ltsp.org/
Supposing you want to keep the "PC" model, because, say, you don't have the network or server resources for a central login server setup, then there are many ways of rolling out a group of linux PC installs as well. Here's an article that discusses some of them:
http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-12/cloning_01.htm
In UNIX/Linux, by default, normal users do not have the ability to modify the system. They have authority only over their own home directories. There is a great deal of security measures that one could take to "lock down" the system to a far greater degree than the average defaults, but the default configuration for most distributions likely offers more protection to the systems integrity than a professionally locked down Windows box.
You can set up Linux in several ways for centralized system accounts and authentication, to achieve, in effect, the type of "domain-like" logins that you are used to in Windows. LDAP servers are a great mechanism to do this (LDAP is actually the protocol on which MS DS is based).
There are numerous ways to centrally manage all of the software installs, configuration files (which determine all system settings), etc., on a network of Linux machines. Linux/UNIX philosophy is that tools are made to be simple and flexible, and to work easily with other tools. This gives the administrator the freedom to set things up the way s/he sees fit for his/her specific environment. Rsync is a good example of a tool with remarkable flexibility for keeping files in sync: http://rsync.samba.org/index.html
Perl has infinite potential and flexibility in systems management. http://www.perl.org
Cfengine is a powerful distributed configuration system: http://www.cfengine.org/
So basically you can patch together a system that works best for you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tools that you can use. Many of them are built in, others you might have to download and install.
If you want a commercial "out-of-the-box" management solution, those are available too. Ximian's Red Carpet product is an example of centralized package management. I think I read that Novell was working on some type of management software... I've never looked into commercial solutions, since the free & roll-your-own ones are more than sufficient for me.
As for your quip about no support and problems with drivers - that just shows your lack of experience with the platform. Support is generally a lot better with open source software than it is for commercial software, and its usually free. As for drivers, wouldn't you check to make sure they exist before buying the hardware? Chances are extremely high that any hardware you have in the enterprise today is fully supported in Linux. Its the bleeding edge, just released this month gaming hardware that isn't.
Well, the man page at least:
n ux .html
http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/ieli
You missed the point entirely (ironically); the point was about the depth of documentation available.
You have a business opportunity then, assuming there are actual broadband providers in town. Get a real 10Mbit connection, turn your linux box into a gateway on the building's LAN, and you can sell access at "real" broadband speeds.
128Kbit would suck ass... Throughout much of Canada you can get 3 to 5Mbit (300-600kbit upstream) for ~$45 CAD/mo. I'd be very disappointed with less than 1Mbit.