Hey RMS, ever do any online banking? How about use an ATM?
Guess what? they aren't going to give you the source!
So go get your beard deloused and chill.
A benefit of SaaS is that you aren't the one who needs to patch it. If it needs patching, and they won't do it; ditch them. And if you fail to negotiate that into your contract, that's your mistake.
it totally breaks all that added security you were supposed to get through virtualization
Virtualization does not add any security to the overall system.
Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition.
You need less code running in the system to have less bugs in the system that malware authors can exploit.
Adding virtualization adds yet another attack vector for malware: attacking the hypervisor.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(malware), for example.
There are good reasons for using virtualization, but improving overall system security isn't one of them.
Unless you happen to be running your web server in one VM, app server in another, and database in yet a third.
So you are saying that you are all knowing and you can say that there is not a God? The only way to know whether there is or is not an powerful being that created everything is for you to be all knowing yourself or know someone who is. Both evolution and Intelligent Design require faith. Both are theology, just opposite sides.
You can't argue with something when you don't understand the difference between science and theology.
I suggest you study papers on Evolution that are less than 100 years old, and have not been written by the Discover Institute.
Bill Gates took a common good, walled it off and called it his property. He wasn't a shrewd businessman. He was a thief who destroyed massive amounts of value, created chaos, misunderstanding and distrust among technical workers and set both ethics and technology back decades. There are few if any individuals in the history of mankind who have caused more damage to our species than Bill Gates did. He ought to be shot in the face and forced to apologize to the person who shot him.
Wait... maybe that was Dick...
What would've been the alternative if Gates didn't do what he did? Either it would be chaos in the marketplace with different incompatible and expensive computers or Apple would have a monopoly and would be selling $3000 computers to this day, both of which are way worse than today. Microsoft licensing DOS to Compaq's IBM clones was the biggest reason that computers are as cheap and affordable as they are today. Even Linux became popular because of inexpensive x86 machines. Imagine having to buy a Apple machine with a compulsory Apple tax to run Linux on.
What do you mean "What would the alternative have been?". Commodore was selling in expensive systems for far less than $3000. There used to be plenty of competition and capable systems out there.
In a car you can have the manufacturer add a tape player, cd player, in addition to the AM/FM radio. In computers, the manufacturer of the pc was prevented contractually from adding other browsers to the machines they were sending out.
Two things for that:
1) Don't sign a contract and do business with the company
2) Sell a different computer with only the other OS (companies do this all the time..the fact that Dell did not is their choice, but if other companies could do it so could Dell)
3) Even if this is anti-competative, what does it have to do with IE? Thats a totally different subject. I could see the anti-competative argument of MS "forcing" companies to only sell MS products (though "force" is subjective), but the IE bundled totally loses the argument with me.
An Illegal Monopoly prevents these 3 things from happening if you want to stay in business.
Which only proves that ID has nothing to do with science. Since is so perfect it appears to be natural; ID cannot be shown to actually exist, because any such proof would only show that it wasn't perfect and undermines the perfection of the designer.
So give it up already. ID is nothing but theology.
Just here to toot my own horn I guess but I usually find the opposite to be true. I have rarely found support to be overly helpful in solving issues. I trust the Internet before I trust a support contract.
You must have a lot of products from the company formerly known as BEA.
PS-Is it wrong for a sysadmin to hate his user base? Even if they're really, really stupid, because your company is cheap and only hires incompetent morons (excluding the sysadmin, naturally...)?
Its wrong to hate end users. But its okay to hate idiots.
Nothing good should be said about MS? That's kind of nuts.
MS has performed a TREMENDOUS service to MANY of those who like to use computers. Bill Gates' quest to dominate has much helped the x86 chipset to become a standard and has created a standardized operating system so that developers can reach more people more easily. Computers are really ubiquitous now largely because of Microsoft. This ubiquity has resulted in lower prices and more variety.
Maybe MS has served its purpose and should soon become extinct. Time will tell. But dont' say that NOTHING good should be said about MS!
The x86 chipset, noticibly inferior to the to the 68K chips of the time. Thanks Microsoft for helping to kill off a superior architecture.
They don't have a standard platform, they have an illegal monopoly platform. UNIX is built around a series of standards, providing for independent implementation of multiple compliant operating systems which allow for easy transport of compliant applications. Solaris, AIX, BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and others. The standards that can even be reimplemented without permission, Linux.
Affordable ubiquitous computers, perhaps you never heard of the C-64.
Only the most rabid Apple fanboy (who thinks NOTHING good should ever be said of MS, and Apple can do no wrong) would think there is anything even resembling a "pro-Microsoft press conspiracy" out there. Most of the positive press coverage I see about MS is either when they have a MAJOR launch (the 360, a new Halo game, etc.) or is related to Bill Gates' considerable charitable activities (which *deserves* to be covered and extolled, if nothing more than to encourage other rich guys to do it). Most of their stuff barely gets a nod. I don't remember a single mainstream, non tech-press, story on the Zune launch, for example.
I'm not an Apple fan; but I still think nothing good should be said about M$. The company is still getting nailed for illegal business practices like the price fixing scheme in Germany.
Everything the company does is suspect, and part same old embrace, extend, and extinguish business model.
No, no. I'm not loving Superfetch - it's turned off on my systems (for reasons other than those being discussed).
But Superfetch is the topic, since that is what essentially ensures that Vista (and 7) have roughly zero free RAM at all times.
I recognize that Window's memory management sucks. But I also recognize that unused RAM is wasted RAM, which is my main point.
As the GP stated, all this cache is taking up RAM, when I need that RAM it doesn't dump it instantly, instead it pages stuff to the HD. So by using all the RAM for cache, you create a need for the page file.
Not fully utilizing RAM is not necessarily a good thing; but not having enough RAM available to avoid pagefile/swap hits really sucks.
So. ..you want ram to be idle at all times just in case you want to fill it? When you are batch processing your images, you would rather the OS not use all the ram it can?
Sorry, pre fetching based on time / date is a WONDERFUL idea.
If you can't see that trying to utilize your ram at all times is better than letting it sit idle. ..
If you have to have a swap file; you don't have enough RAM.
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing? Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
I'm actually typing this in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista Business SP1 32-bit on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB RAM, and it's actually quite snappy.
Any RAM on my system that's doing nothing on my System is at my beck and call anytime I want it. The OS never knows when I want to start up Eclipse and JBoss to do some development, or maybe digiKam and convert a couple of hundred RAW images to jpegs. And while that batch is running, I probably want to start doing some image post processing with Gimp.
Normal companies that have to compete just have to just suck it up, and take it as a loss of profit, or perhaps even a loss on the books; because they have to keep their prices low in order to compete.
If they could just jack-up their prices without loss of sales, they would. Because that would mean that could make more profit.
Anti-trust laws exist to protect the market as a whole
I believe they harm the market by undermining the very rights that make the market possible. People must be free to succeed or fail by their own actions. Any company that would attempt to artificially inflate prices would see their previous customers no longer buy their product, and move on to another product.
You can believe all you want, but you're wrong.
Companies artificially inflate their prices by forming cartels to fix the price. Then the Cartel uses its economic dominance to force the smaller vendors out of business or get them to join the cartel. Why sell your product for $50, when you can sell it for $100?
And that's better than the incompetent buffoon who can't string together words in a coherent fashion unless they're printed for him on his teleprompter, or the lying, plagiarizing faux pas factory he selected as his vice president?
On the other side of the story, there are incandescents I've not changed in my house since I bought it 15 years ago, and I'm constantly replacing CFLs.
More expensive and shorter life is a real problem. Getting rid of them isn't, they fit into the regular garbage bags just fine.
CFLs are penny-wise and pound foolish. Some day there will be a report of all the damage to the environment being caused by discarded CFLs and people will wonder what the hell we in this century were thinking, replacing low-pollution cheap lights with mercury-containing costly electronics gizmos. By then, they'll be using LED lighting for everything.
The tin-foil from your hat appears to have gotten into your food supply.
No, that would be an urban legend. Electric meters don't care about power factor, they measure real power. Also, keep in mind that modern electronic meters have a lot of features to detect tampering. So if you try to play games with the meter, the utility will know about it.
The real problem with CFLs is waveform distortion. They use rectifiers, which draw power at the peak of the cycle. This creates nonlinear currents, which cannot be fixed simply by adding inductors. If the lamps had a purely capacitive power factor, the utilities would love them, since that would help balance out the loads from various motors (which are very inductive). Also, this problem isn't unique to CFLs. Light dimmers cause exactly the same problem with incandescents, too.
You're missing the point, the real issue is CFLs cause a noticeable drop in power consumption. That drop in power consumption causes a drop in revenue.
If there were no drop in revenue due to CFLs, the power company would have no problem with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey RMS, ever do any online banking? How about use an ATM?
Guess what? they aren't going to give you the source!
So go get your beard deloused and chill.
A benefit of SaaS is that you aren't the one who needs to patch it. If it needs patching, and they won't do it; ditch them. And if you fail to negotiate that into your contract, that's your mistake.
Virtualization does not add any security to the overall system. Adding more code to a system cannot make it more secure by definition. You need less code running in the system to have less bugs in the system that malware authors can exploit. Adding virtualization adds yet another attack vector for malware: attacking the hypervisor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(malware), for example. There are good reasons for using virtualization, but improving overall system security isn't one of them.
Unless you happen to be running your web server in one VM, app server in another, and database in yet a third.
So you are saying that you are all knowing and you can say that there is not a God? The only way to know whether there is or is not an powerful being that created everything is for you to be all knowing yourself or know someone who is. Both evolution and Intelligent Design require faith. Both are theology, just opposite sides.
You can't argue with something when you don't understand the difference between science and theology.
I suggest you study papers on Evolution that are less than 100 years old, and have not been written by the Discover Institute.
Are you for real?!?
Bill Gates took a common good, walled it off and called it his property. He wasn't a shrewd businessman. He was a thief who destroyed massive amounts of value, created chaos, misunderstanding and distrust among technical workers and set both ethics and technology back decades. There are few if any individuals in the history of mankind who have caused more damage to our species than Bill Gates did. He ought to be shot in the face and forced to apologize to the person who shot him.
Wait... maybe that was Dick...
What would've been the alternative if Gates didn't do what he did? Either it would be chaos in the marketplace with different incompatible and expensive computers or Apple would have a monopoly and would be selling $3000 computers to this day, both of which are way worse than today. Microsoft licensing DOS to Compaq's IBM clones was the biggest reason that computers are as cheap and affordable as they are today. Even Linux became popular because of inexpensive x86 machines. Imagine having to buy a Apple machine with a compulsory Apple tax to run Linux on.
What do you mean "What would the alternative have been?". Commodore was selling in expensive systems for far less than $3000. There used to be plenty of competition and capable systems out there.
In a car you can have the manufacturer add a tape player, cd player, in addition to the AM/FM radio. In computers, the manufacturer of the pc was prevented contractually from adding other browsers to the machines they were sending out.
Two things for that: 1) Don't sign a contract and do business with the company 2) Sell a different computer with only the other OS (companies do this all the time..the fact that Dell did not is their choice, but if other companies could do it so could Dell) 3) Even if this is anti-competative, what does it have to do with IE? Thats a totally different subject. I could see the anti-competative argument of MS "forcing" companies to only sell MS products (though "force" is subjective), but the IE bundled totally loses the argument with me.
An Illegal Monopoly prevents these 3 things from happening if you want to stay in business.
Which only proves that ID has nothing to do with science. Since is so perfect it appears to be natural; ID cannot be shown to actually exist, because any such proof would only show that it wasn't perfect and undermines the perfection of the designer.
So give it up already. ID is nothing but theology.
Just here to toot my own horn I guess but I usually find the opposite to be true. I have rarely found support to be overly helpful in solving issues. I trust the Internet before I trust a support contract.
You must have a lot of products from the company formerly known as BEA.
Yeah, but the mother's life is far more valuable than that of the fetus.
There I corrected you.
PS-Is it wrong for a sysadmin to hate his user base? Even if they're really, really stupid, because your company is cheap and only hires incompetent morons (excluding the sysadmin, naturally...)?
Its wrong to hate end users. But its okay to hate idiots.
Nothing good should be said about MS? That's kind of nuts.
MS has performed a TREMENDOUS service to MANY of those who like to use computers. Bill Gates' quest to dominate has much helped the x86 chipset to become a standard and has created a standardized operating system so that developers can reach more people more easily. Computers are really ubiquitous now largely because of Microsoft. This ubiquity has resulted in lower prices and more variety.
Maybe MS has served its purpose and should soon become extinct. Time will tell. But dont' say that NOTHING good should be said about MS!
The x86 chipset, noticibly inferior to the to the 68K chips of the time. Thanks Microsoft for helping to kill off a superior architecture.
They don't have a standard platform, they have an illegal monopoly platform. UNIX is built around a series of standards, providing for independent implementation of multiple compliant operating systems which allow for easy transport of compliant applications. Solaris, AIX, BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and others. The standards that can even be reimplemented without permission, Linux.
Affordable ubiquitous computers, perhaps you never heard of the C-64.
Only the most rabid Apple fanboy (who thinks NOTHING good should ever be said of MS, and Apple can do no wrong) would think there is anything even resembling a "pro-Microsoft press conspiracy" out there. Most of the positive press coverage I see about MS is either when they have a MAJOR launch (the 360, a new Halo game, etc.) or is related to Bill Gates' considerable charitable activities (which *deserves* to be covered and extolled, if nothing more than to encourage other rich guys to do it). Most of their stuff barely gets a nod. I don't remember a single mainstream, non tech-press, story on the Zune launch, for example.
I'm not an Apple fan; but I still think nothing good should be said about M$. The company is still getting nailed for illegal business practices like the price fixing scheme in Germany.
Everything the company does is suspect, and part same old embrace, extend, and extinguish business model.
No, no. I'm not loving Superfetch - it's turned off on my systems (for reasons other than those being discussed).
But Superfetch is the topic, since that is what essentially ensures that Vista (and 7) have roughly zero free RAM at all times.
I recognize that Window's memory management sucks. But I also recognize that unused RAM is wasted RAM, which is my main point.
As the GP stated, all this cache is taking up RAM, when I need that RAM it doesn't dump it instantly, instead it pages stuff to the HD. So by using all the RAM for cache, you create a need for the page file.
Not fully utilizing RAM is not necessarily a good thing; but not having enough RAM available to avoid pagefile/swap hits really sucks.
... "God did it", don't you think?
You give the Higgs boson too much credit, there are many other particles in the Standard Model that deserve recognition as well.
So. . .you want ram to be idle at all times just in case you want to fill it? When you are batch processing your images, you would rather the OS not use all the ram it can?
Sorry, pre fetching based on time / date is a WONDERFUL idea.
If you can't see that trying to utilize your ram at all times is better than letting it sit idle. . .
If you have to have a swap file; you don't have enough RAM.
really? you muight want to think about that statment some more.
You seem to imply that the OS won't release it when you need it.
It know you want to do those thing the moment you tell it you are going to use those thing.
What's makes you think its not going to put stuff to swap?
You do know that Linux uses all available RAM for disk buffers, but quickly releases it for use when an application requests some.
You also know that that can be tweaked and disabled. I think that's a brain dead default and was one of the many people complaining that too.
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing? Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
I'm actually typing this in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista Business SP1 32-bit on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB RAM, and it's actually quite snappy.
Any RAM on my system that's doing nothing on my System is at my beck and call anytime I want it. The OS never knows when I want to start up Eclipse and JBoss to do some development, or maybe digiKam and convert a couple of hundred RAW images to jpegs. And while that batch is running, I probably want to start doing some image post processing with Gimp.
Companies do not pay fines, consumers do.
They do pay fines when they're not monopolies.
Normal companies that have to compete just have to just suck it up, and take it as a loss of profit, or perhaps even a loss on the books; because they have to keep their prices low in order to compete.
If they could just jack-up their prices without loss of sales, they would. Because that would mean that could make more profit.
You say that like its a bad thing?
Unfortunately Germany is too large a country for the even M$ to ignore.
Anti-trust laws exist to protect the market as a whole
I believe they harm the market by undermining the very rights that make the market possible. People must be free to succeed or fail by their own actions. Any company that would attempt to artificially inflate prices would see their previous customers no longer buy their product, and move on to another product.
You can believe all you want, but you're wrong.
Companies artificially inflate their prices by forming cartels to fix the price. Then the Cartel uses its economic dominance to force the smaller vendors out of business or get them to join the cartel. Why sell your product for $50, when you can sell it for $100?
And that's better than the incompetent buffoon who can't string together words in a coherent fashion unless they're printed for him on his teleprompter, or the lying, plagiarizing faux pas factory he selected as his vice president?
Yep!
Those who support said whackjob with ever more ridiculous excuses are worse.
Unlike the whackjobs who support Obama and the ever more ridiculous excuses for his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia?
The Couric interview was obviously hostile and Palin was trying to avoid getting caught in a trap. What's Obama's excuse?
If she can't deal with a hostile interviewer, how she going to deal with a real diplomatic situation?
The lady's incompetent, and McCain was incompetent for choosing her.
I've cleaned up plenty of mercury spills before.
The standard procedure what to dump sulphur on the spill and sweep it up.
So put away the hazmat gear and just take care of your mess. If its small enough to fit into a thermometer, its not significant.
The EPA is first and foremost bureaucracy, second its a bureaucracy that has been managed by a bunch of cronies for the past 8 years.
On the other side of the story, there are incandescents I've not changed in my house since I bought it 15 years ago, and I'm constantly replacing CFLs.
More expensive and shorter life is a real problem. Getting rid of them isn't, they fit into the regular garbage bags just fine.
CFLs are penny-wise and pound foolish. Some day there will be a report of all the damage to the environment being caused by discarded CFLs and people will wonder what the hell we in this century were thinking, replacing low-pollution cheap lights with mercury-containing costly electronics gizmos. By then, they'll be using LED lighting for everything.
The tin-foil from your hat appears to have gotten into your food supply.
No, that would be an urban legend. Electric meters don't care about power factor, they measure real power. Also, keep in mind that modern electronic meters have a lot of features to detect tampering. So if you try to play games with the meter, the utility will know about it.
The real problem with CFLs is waveform distortion. They use rectifiers, which draw power at the peak of the cycle. This creates nonlinear currents, which cannot be fixed simply by adding inductors. If the lamps had a purely capacitive power factor, the utilities would love them, since that would help balance out the loads from various motors (which are very inductive). Also, this problem isn't unique to CFLs. Light dimmers cause exactly the same problem with incandescents, too.
You're missing the point, the real issue is CFLs cause a noticeable drop in power consumption. That drop in power consumption causes a drop in revenue.
If there were no drop in revenue due to CFLs, the power company would have no problem with them.