Gnome developers just have some unexplainable love for Windows.Forms as opposed to Swing.
This may have a reason. Swing doesn't work properly on Linux. At least not if you don't use an US keyboard and US locale. In many European locales some characters will be untypable, what exact charaters depends on the locale.
This is of course a bug, but its been around ever since swing was born. It was almost emediatly bug reported. After a couple of years sun closed the bug with the bug still UNFIXED. I guess it got embarassingly high bug votes on their top 25 list.
Now the bug is reported again (under a new bug id) and has been on the top 25 list for a couple of years now.
Any Linux programmer know by now, that Sun either is too incompetent or fix this, or have some other agenda that make them unwilling to fullfil the promis of compile once run everywhere that once was used to promote java.
If you like you can even cast your vote for it to be fixed. Not that I think it will make much of a difference. To Sun java is something for the serverside only.
Not true. Software patents is too complex to evaluate to most businesses. They will simply treat it like any other financial risk.
The result is that some software that we otherwise would have the benefit of using will never be produced and that those who chose to produce software inspite of this risk wants higher compensation for taking that risk. I.e. higher software prices.
The fact that some will not take the risk will mean that less software hits the market. In turn this lead to less competition and that too will have a negative effect on software prices.
Higher software prices makes it more expensive to set up any business that in some way needs software. Today that would be almost any business. This leads to higher prices even in markets that are not directly software related.
Higher prices mean that it is harder to compete on an international market. This strengthens the trend of moving jobs abroad to keep the prices down...
You assume that will spend as much time writing malware as they do for windows when the Linux usage reaches some certain level.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. In many cases the motivaiton for making malware is the intellectual challange. People want to make themselves noticed by others. In windows you have no way to make a differee other than by distroy for others. In the world of free software you can show off and make a difference by improving the software instead of destroying it.
Besides with things like SELinux in place, it is much harder to elevate permissions in Linux than in Windows. If you manage to elevate your privileges to root in such systems you might even find that you can do less than the ordinary user unless you are in the right security role.
Yes, 40:1 ratio for windows sounds a bit pessimistic. But so does 400:1 for Linux. I have seen installations with 10 times as many users per sysadmin both in the windows and the Linux case.
I suppose it's all about what level of service you want to provide to your users. The basic message that Linux is easier to admin still holds true though.
It must have been quite some time since you last used some free desktop environment. Nowdays cut and paste between applictions generally work. E.g. if I paste your post into OOo even the links work. Apart from cut and paste you can usually do drag & drop as well. Sure, there are exceptions, but not worse than in Windows or MacOS-X that have their dark spots too.
As for editing LaTeX in Abiword or OpenOffice is a little strange, I suppose you could save as text. LaTeX was never designed to be a WYSIWYG word processor. At the time TeX and LaTeX was developed most typesetting systems was text based, so this is hardly a surprise.
As for xcf not being able to open in anything but gimp, try opening photoshops native format in anything but photoshop. However, gimp will be able to export into a very long list of image formats, as well as it will open other formats. I don't really think you can complain about gimp interoperability.
Speaking of interoperability, when did you last save to an ftp, sftp, http from the standard windows file dialog. At best you will be able to do ftp and http but not even that would be very common. When did you last use your file browser to edit sieve sorting rules on your imap server. When did you last remotely open your neighbours Linux desktop in your standard winXP without any add on software.
In your wonderful windows world it is sometimes hard to interchange documents between different versions of MS-Word or even the same version but different localization may cause major trouble.
Sorry, but compared to the interoperability in environments like KDE windows, is just a pale shadow.
The ability to read, and only read, old data formats into new versions of software from the same vender. The aim of interoperability is to simplify upgrade from one version of software to the next.
If we look back in history, we will see that what was acceptable have varied over time. Think Gallileo Gallilei. Think Geordano Bruno. Had the inquisiton the rigth to stop their research and even as in Brunos execution by burning. No I think not. The established society should not interfer with the exploration of new ideas to increase our knowledge.
Then there is the matter what ethics should be applied when aquiring new knowledge. But that is a different question from if we should expand our knowledge. Your example of reasearch on non volontare subjects falls in this category, and is of course totally unacceptable in what we today call a civilized society.
The users was already in an unsafe position. If you fortget to lock your door, putting on a blindfold that prevents you from seeing the open door, will not protect you from burglary.
If he could find the open door, so could sombody else. But he was kind enough show the open door rather than leaving it open.
It doesn't really matter if he works at Harvard or not. As long as he follows good scientific tradition, where he works or not work doesn't matter.
It is extremely important that research can be carried out without penalties. What if he had found out that a particular type of car was unsecure, should he still have been stopped for in detail describing what was wrong. I think not.
With the long list of potential arguments with this post, all I can say is that nobody said you had to use XML to do your message passing, there's always RPC or just use a custom protocol.
You could, but your development tools advantages of the.net platform would be gone. If you want to do that type of development you will find better tools on the Java side.
What patent issue, you ask. And so does Miguel Icazza at Novell, but so far Microsoft gives no promises regarding all the.net stuff not covered by the ECMA standards. This gives some reason for causion.
Besides looking the same is not good enough, to make crossplatform development possible you would need the same API calls. Or are you suggesting that Gtk, wxWindows and others should beat Microsoft at their own platform, so that mono became the defacto standard for web service development. Somehow I don't think that will happen.
"Second problem: A programmer who uses Java 90% of the time simply will not have the skills to write efficient C or C++, although they will probably know techniques to make the most efficient possible Java."
This is a common missconception made by many skilled C/C++ programmers. Experieced C++ programmers writing java on the side, is the problem in many slow java programs.
I have not much experience of installing the latest version of Oracle, does it use java in the install proceess? That would not be all that surprising, starting applications is something that is quite slow in Java.
However this doesn't mean that running them once started is slow. From my experience.net is not that a fast starter either for that matter. I really don't know if its faster than java I have run too few.net programs to know if they were bad examples of.net just like Oracle JDeveloper is a bad example of java or it is something more general.
One thing is clear the.net is made as a clone of java and use similar technology, so I would be surprised if there was any major differences in speeed.
Or do you have your oppinion that java is slow from using Oracle JDeveloper, that is painfully slow, but that is not representative for Java apps in general. E.g. look at HSQLDB that is will be the database of the next version of OpenOffice in most cases it is 5-10 times faster than SQL server. And is in fact one of the fastest relational databases you can get.
So prhaps you should rephrase to Oracle is slow, rather than Java is slow.
If you are considering J2EE vs.Net then you start your application and than it just runs and runs (well perhaps not.nat). The startup time will be very small compared to the total time the application runs. Once Java is up and running it will not run any slower than C++, apart from mathematical trigonometry functions that seam to be misdesigned somehow in JDK 1.5. However I doubt that helthcare services will use these functions much.
Speaking of slow. Have you ever seen Microsoft showing you any real performance figures from a distributed application running.net. I would be suprised if you have. The problem with.net and distributed applications is that the XML format is too verbose, unless you invest in really fast networking infrastrukture.Net is best on applications that can run on one single machine.
One other thing to consider is what platforms is used..Net runs only on Microsoft and nothing else. Well, there is mono, but its not 100% compaitble yet, and I doubt that it ever will, due to potential patent problems. Using Microsoft for mission critical servers is perhaps not the best choise for security as well as stability reasons.
A helthcare system will contain a lot of sensitive information and should really be run on a secure OS. Trusted Solaris, or some Linux with SELinux Mandatory Access control enabled comes to mind. You could raise the security in Windows as well by introduceing DRM servers, but this introduces single point of failure.
Last you have to consider the service you can get from your system provider. If you contact Microsoft support they will tell you to upgrade to the latest version of everythign before they even make a real effort solve your problem. They normally refuse to confirm that there are bugs in their software. Its almost like Microsoft employees are forbidden to mention it. They even have had to invent the word servicepack as euphemism for bug fix.
The most important thing to a Microsoft support person is that you have a valid licence, the second most important thing is that you have upgraded to the latest version, the third most important thing is that it is not their fault. And last to actually help you with your problem To support organization of e.g. IBM, Sun, the most important thing is to help you, and then fix other stuff if necessary.
I agree,these ads are really annoying. I guess they are sort of counter productive. I no longer buy Disney movies no matter what because of this. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one that react that way.
What I feel is even worse is when they start adding anti piracy ads that paint me as a potential thief of their IP. One movie distributer had a film that started with a film showing portraits in black and white all with a black square patch over the eyes of the persons like they do with not yet convicted criminals in newspapers. At the same time the speaker reads fictive senteces for IP crimes.
I really felt offended, I had after all paid to see their film. I certainly didn't pay to be called a thief. I did in fact not even see the film, it went out of the DVD player and into the trash can.
Do I have to mention, I will never ever again buy anything from that film distributer either.
The same will probably happen if they use some hard to use or offending DRM technology to their DVDs. I can live without seeing movies or listening to CDs.
I wonder if the film industry and music can live without customers.
Perhaps thats true, but this just as easily done as using windows update to get the the latest windows servicepack. So, whats your point?
To make it even better the automatic update functions available in almost all linux distros doesn't just update the OS like windows update, they update word processors, databases, webbrowsers,...
Having one update tool that works for all or at least the majority of your installed software makes life easier to the sysadmin. You still seam to think that updates in the Linux world is done by downloading the source code and compileing it. Even though this is still possible most people use things that is very similar and in most cases better than windows update.
And once you have your 60? patches, you can have a much more secure system than you can if you run a fully patched windows. In fact it might be more secure even before you install all or most of the patches. Why is that?
The simple answer is Linux support mandatory access control. Each process runs in its own security role and the transition beween roles is carefully controlled. You can also control what resources each role is allowed to access. E.g. you could prevent Firefox from altering shared libraries (dlls in windowsspeak), you could prevent it from seeing most of your computer settings, you could prevent it from dowloading files to other places than a specific download folder. And even then the files could be made impossible to execute even for root (Administrator in widows). All programs or processes that was started by Firefox would inherrit the security settings of Firefox. It would also be possible to control what programs that was allowed to have network access. All this happens at OS level and have nothing to do with user programs like Firefox, it doesn't even have anything to do with standard unix security permissions (that continue to work like they always have)
If the mandatory access control is turned on most of the vulnerabilities that was to be fixed by your aleged 60 kernel patches would be quite harmless. Not, that you shouldn't fix them.
Many admins are much too lazy, and avoid doing something about security problems unless they are remote exploits. But what if you someday get hit by a remote exploit, then the machine is open to a much more serious attack.
By the way, I don't manage to get 60 kernel vulnerabilites from your link, not even if i count all versions of Linux ever made. Not that it matters though. On a reasonably fast internet connection I doubt that an upgrade will take more than five minutes.
The protection only worked if he actually bought a copy of the CD. Given the artistic quality quality of most of the new music, chances are that he won't bother if he have to pay full price.
The problem is that it is likely to be payd to some US bank. And not being from the US my fear is that I will have to pay $75 for the banktransfers and $0.75 for the domain.
I really hope that they make it possilb to pay for many years at the time.
I guess people would be much more secure if they switched to Linux and configured a good SELinux policy. One that prevented webbrowsers and e-mail clients from modifying binary files like shared libraries and applications.It could also prevent files that was downloaded by webbrowsers or e-mail clients to be executed by root. Make sure that only approved applications that really needs it are allowed to open sockets or connect to the internet. That would make life very difficult to most virus developers.
Today, Red Hat Fedora Core 3 turns on SELinux by default. Unfortunately the policy is mostly targeted at servers. Perhaps they (and other Linux distros) should target the desktop as well in their upcomming releases.
The problem is probably that most windows users will not go the Linux road. Instead they are likely to apply TCPA strategies that not only will lock out virus writers but also the owner of the computer.
50 GB is a lot of space. The current DVD format is large enough for normal movies. Naturally this larger format could be used for one disk collections of some famous director.
The other use would be high definition video, this of course what the developers have in mind.
The problem with this is that people in general doesn't have any display units that handle that quality, and it will take a long time for that to get common.
A 50GB writable DVD would be great for backups though.
It all depends on what you are doing. The main advantage of EJB as I see it is declarative security on a per method basis and transaction management that is not all that easy to replace and maintain.
If you don't need all that, and that is often true if you are working with web stuff, you should use servlets and POJOs.
However, J2EE is often used for ERP purposes and here the demands are quite different, at least for the backends. You have to remember that in these type of system servlet is considered to be user interface components and as such your statment applies as the heavy lifting is all done in the background with EJBs
Well, if the security of the average Linux distro will not get better this is an accident just waiting to happen.
Most Linux distros relies on the same types of protection of illegitimate use as windows. Just like in windows we have users and groups with read, write and execute permissions. It is therefore likely to have similar problem if sombody decides to write malware like viruses.
So far this has been fairly uncommon, perhaps because there are more constructive ways for hackers to make a difference in the open source world than in the land of Microsoft.
Furthermore, Linux have the advantage of having more skilled users than windows. The average Linux user would be much harder to fool into open e-mail attachments etc than the average Windows user. But as the use of Linux becomes more widespread we can assume that it will get into the hands of users just as badly educated as the average windows user usually is. They will run their systems as root and do stupid things just like they do in windows today. As a result we will see more problems on the Linux platform.
The fact is, that if you avoid MS-Outlook, don't open attachments from unknown people, make sure that you always have the latest security patches from Microsoft installed, the chance of getting hin in windows is quite small. So far I have never had a windows virus, neither have my wife and we have used windows since the release of NT4.
Clearly both Linux and Windows needs enhancements to protect it from clueless users. Microsoft will probably try to do this by shutting the user out of his computer and only allow trusted software to run through the use of their TCPA system.
In Linux we have the SELinux stuff NSA put into the latest 2.6x kernel series that provides mandatory security. It makes it possible to on an application basis control what files an application may read. write, execute or even see regardless of what user that runs the application including root. In similar way it is possible to control what capabilities an application have with regards to e.g. networking or memory.
In this kind of system anything that isn't explicitly allowed is forbidden so if you have a good security policy a virus would be allowed to do very little harm and have limited ability to spread.
E.g you could configure your system to refuse to execute anything downloaded by mozilla or you favorite e-mail client until you explicitly allow it from a password protected user role. This would of course not prevent mozilla from doing some harm if the virus was running within the mozilla process perhaps as a result of a buffer overflow security breach. But even here SELinux could help. If mozilla only could see html files and only was allowed to alter them if you had the role of webmaser the damage would be limited.
So, Linux already have the tools to be secure. The problem is that they are not widely used, and in the cases they are, security policys are often to lenient. One reason for this might be that the tools for creating policys are too hard to use. I'm happy to see that SELinux is enabled by default in the new Fedora Core 3 test release.
What harm is there in allowing someone who is clever enough to come up with something new, that other people can use, to profit from his or her discovery?
I have no problem having patents for new and innovative things. The problem is that, at least in the US, most of the patented stuff is obvious to an experienced worker in his field of expertiese, or it just reimplements something from real life on a computer.
E.g. nobody would ever try to patent sorting papers on you real life desktop into stacks, but doing so on your computer desktop all of a sudden becomes worhty a patent even though the task of fixing this is trivial.
If the things patented are trivial, then we can expect that any person with a university degree and/or some years of experience is extremely likely to produce patented solutions without knowing it just by coding what naturall comes to his mind. He could do patent searches, but this is quite hard since much in software design is about general ideas with sometimes overlapping contexts, chances are that he will not find what he is looking for as he expresses the same idea in different terms.
If we let a couple of monkeys hammer away at a keyboard they will sooner or later have written the complete works of Shakespeare. Now imagine that Shakesspeare had written all his stuff in a language containing the only words if, then, else, while. The time for that to happen would have been greately reduced. Now, replace the monkeys with humans that use this very limited language to express themselves, and you will very soon see sentences that look quite Shaksperian even if the never ever read a line from the original auther.
So if you like software patents, why not patents on litterature, and art. After all if I think that I'm the first person who write a crime story where sombody is killed by a knife why shouldn't I patent it. I'm quite sure that such patent have never been filed. As I privately have a slight suspicion that sombody actually may have written such a story before me, I am happy to licence the idea to other authers for a fee slightly less than it would cost to take the dispute to court. The only one who would not go to court would be sombody that positively would know that he could prove prior art, but as that person is most likely to be dead there is little risk.
Now it strikes me, why write a book in the first place. After all, the part where sombody is killed by the knife is a very minor part of a normal crime novel. Why spend all that time. Why risk to be sued by the auther holding the patent on having characters being transported by a car, or having a conversation, or kissing, or..., In fact by actually writing a book I open myself to all kinds of liabilities. Besides I'm not much of a writer anyway.
I think I just stick to just filing the patent on the knife usage. Then I can wait for some real auther to get a bestseller using my knife concept. After all people are known to have been killed by knifes as early as Julius Ceasar, so its bound to get into a novel soner or later. So I sit back and wait unitl somebody actually write such a story and get what is rightfully mine from him. That way the risk of being sued is much less, not to mention that it is much less work. I don't have any costs for marketing either.
Now, If software patents are so important for the software industry, the same thing would be valid for other ways of expression like litterature and art. So why should it not be possible to have patents in this field as well? After all there is big money in this business just as in software. Look at the movie and record industry, or that software industry such as Microsoft buy the rights to digital publishing of classic art.
The strange thing is that you seldom hear people argue that patents on art would be a good thing, even though my guess is that there are more artists in need of some extra income than there are software developers. Why should they not be able to get some money from their way of express themselves, when the software developer can?
Or is it just that patenting peoples way of expression themselves is a bad idea?
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This may have a reason. Swing doesn't work properly on Linux. At least not if you don't use an US keyboard and US locale. In many European locales some characters will be untypable, what exact charaters depends on the locale.
This is of course a bug, but its been around ever since swing was born. It was almost emediatly bug reported. After a couple of years sun closed the bug with the bug still UNFIXED. I guess it got embarassingly high bug votes on their top 25 list.
Now the bug is reported again (under a new bug id) and has been on the top 25 list for a couple of years now.
Any Linux programmer know by now, that Sun either is too incompetent or fix this, or have some other agenda that make them unwilling to fullfil the promis of compile once run everywhere that once was used to promote java.
You can get more information on this bug from:d =4799499
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
If you like you can even cast your vote for it to be fixed. Not that I think it will make much of a difference. To Sun java is something for the serverside only.
>None of us will be affected in the slightest.
Not true. Software patents is too complex to evaluate to most businesses. They will simply treat it like any other financial risk.
The result is that some software that we otherwise would have the benefit of using will never be produced and that those who chose to produce software inspite of this risk wants higher compensation for taking that risk. I.e. higher software prices.
The fact that some will not take the risk will mean that less software hits the market. In turn this lead to less competition and that too will have a negative effect on software prices.
Higher software prices makes it more expensive to set up any business that in some way needs software. Today that would be almost any business. This leads to higher prices even in markets that are not directly software related.
Higher prices mean that it is harder to compete on an international market. This strengthens the trend of moving jobs abroad to keep the prices down...
You assume that will spend as much time writing malware as they do for windows when the Linux usage reaches some certain level.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. In many cases the motivaiton for making malware is the intellectual challange. People want to make themselves noticed by others. In windows you have no way to make a differee other than by distroy for others. In the world of free software you can show off and make a difference by improving the software instead of destroying it.
Besides with things like SELinux in place, it is much harder to elevate permissions in Linux than in Windows. If you manage to elevate your privileges to root in such systems you might even find that you can do less than the ordinary user unless you are in the right security role.
Yes, 40:1 ratio for windows sounds a bit pessimistic. But so does 400:1 for Linux. I have seen installations with 10 times as many users per sysadmin both in the windows and the Linux case.
I suppose it's all about what level of service you want to provide to your users. The basic message that Linux is easier to admin still holds true though.
If you live in EU, this is exactly the sort of patents you should talk your polititiance about.
That way they may be less inclined to do something stupid in their next try to make directives on software patent laws.
Thank you Microsoft!
It must have been quite some time since you last used some free desktop environment. Nowdays cut and paste between applictions generally work. E.g. if I paste your post into OOo even the links work.
Apart from cut and paste you can usually do drag & drop as well. Sure, there are exceptions, but not worse than in Windows or MacOS-X that have their dark spots too.
As for editing LaTeX in Abiword or OpenOffice is a little strange, I suppose you could save as text. LaTeX was never designed to be a WYSIWYG word processor. At the time TeX and LaTeX was developed most typesetting systems was text based, so this is hardly a surprise.
As for xcf not being able to open in anything but gimp, try opening photoshops native format in anything but photoshop. However, gimp will be able to export into a very long list of image formats, as well as it will open other formats. I don't really think you can complain about gimp interoperability.
Speaking of interoperability, when did you last save to an ftp, sftp, http from the standard windows file dialog. At best you will be able to do ftp and http but not even that would be very common. When did you last use your file browser to edit sieve sorting rules on your imap server. When did you last remotely open your neighbours Linux desktop in your standard winXP without any add on software.
In your wonderful windows world it is sometimes hard to interchange documents between different versions of MS-Word or even the same version but different localization may cause major trouble.
Sorry, but compared to the interoperability in environments like KDE windows, is just a pale shadow.
According to Bills dictionary:
The ability to read, and only read, old data formats into new versions of software from the same vender. The aim of interoperability is to simplify upgrade from one version of software to the next.
If we look back in history, we will see that what was acceptable have varied over time. Think Gallileo Gallilei. Think Geordano Bruno. Had the inquisiton the rigth to stop their research and even as in Brunos execution by burning. No I think not. The established society should not interfer with the exploration of new ideas to increase our knowledge.
Then there is the matter what ethics should be applied when aquiring new knowledge. But that is a different question from if we should expand our knowledge. Your example of reasearch on non volontare subjects falls in this category, and is of course totally unacceptable in what we today call a civilized society.
The users was already in an unsafe position. If you fortget to lock your door, putting on a blindfold that prevents you from seeing the open door, will not protect you from burglary.
If he could find the open door, so could sombody else. But he was kind enough show the open door rather than leaving it open.
It doesn't really matter if he works at Harvard or not. As long as he follows good scientific tradition, where he works or not work doesn't matter.
It is extremely important that research can be carried out without penalties. What if he had found out that a particular type of car was unsecure, should he still have been stopped for in detail describing what was wrong. I think not.
With the long list of potential arguments with this post, all I can say is that nobody said you had to use XML to do your message passing, there's always RPC or just use a custom protocol.
You could, but your development tools advantages of the
What patent issue, you ask. And so does Miguel Icazza at Novell, but so far Microsoft gives no promises regarding all the
Besides looking the same is not good enough, to make crossplatform development possible you would need the same API calls. Or are you suggesting that Gtk, wxWindows and others should beat Microsoft at their own platform, so that mono became the defacto standard for web service development. Somehow I don't think that will happen.
Nowdays, java have templates as well. But both in C++ and in Java this is mostly something that speeds the code writing rather than the execution
"Second problem: A programmer who uses Java 90% of the time simply will not have the skills to write efficient C or C++, although they will probably know techniques to make the most efficient possible Java."
This is a common missconception made by many skilled C/C++ programmers. Experieced C++ programmers writing java on the side, is the problem in many slow java programs.
I have not much experience of installing the latest version of Oracle, does it use java in the install proceess? That would not be all that surprising, starting applications is something that is quite slow in Java.
.net is not that a fast starter either for that matter. I really don't know if its faster than java I have run too few .net programs to know if they were bad examples of .net just like Oracle JDeveloper is a bad example of java or it is something more general.
.net is made as a clone of java and use similar technology, so I would be surprised if there was any major differences in speeed.
.Net then you start your application and than it just runs and runs (well perhaps not .nat). The startup time will be very small compared to the total time the application runs. Once Java is up and running it will not run any slower than C++, apart from mathematical trigonometry functions that seam to be misdesigned somehow in JDK 1.5. However I doubt that helthcare services will use these functions much.
.net. I would be suprised if you have. The problem with .net and distributed applications is that the XML format is too verbose, unless you invest in really fast networking infrastrukture .Net is best on applications that can run on one single machine.
.Net runs only on Microsoft and nothing else. Well, there is mono, but its not 100% compaitble yet, and I doubt that it ever will, due to potential patent problems. Using Microsoft for mission critical servers is perhaps not the best choise for security as well as stability reasons.
However this doesn't mean that running them once started is slow. From my experience
One thing is clear the
Or do you have your oppinion that java is slow from using Oracle JDeveloper, that is painfully slow, but that is not representative for Java apps in general. E.g. look at HSQLDB that is will be the database of the next version of OpenOffice in most cases it is 5-10 times faster than SQL server. And is in fact one of the fastest relational databases you can get.
So prhaps you should rephrase to Oracle is slow, rather than Java is slow.
If you are considering J2EE vs
Speaking of slow. Have you ever seen Microsoft showing you any real performance figures from a distributed application running
One other thing to consider is what platforms is used.
A helthcare system will contain a lot of sensitive information and should really be run on a secure OS. Trusted Solaris, or some Linux with SELinux Mandatory Access control enabled comes to mind. You could raise the security in Windows as well by introduceing DRM servers, but this introduces single point of failure.
Last you have to consider the service you can get from your system provider. If you contact Microsoft support they will tell you to upgrade to the latest version of everythign before they even make a real effort solve your problem. They normally refuse to confirm that there are bugs in their software. Its almost like Microsoft employees are forbidden to mention it. They even have had to invent the word servicepack as euphemism for bug fix.
The most important thing to a Microsoft support person is that you have a valid licence, the second most important thing is that you have upgraded to the latest version, the third most important thing is that it is not their fault.
And last to actually help you with your problem
To support organization of e.g. IBM, Sun, the most important thing is to help you, and then fix other stuff if necessary.
True, but what if they allready have toilet paper?
I agree,these ads are really annoying. I guess they are sort of counter productive. I no longer buy Disney movies no matter what because of this. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one that react that way.
What I feel is even worse is when they start adding anti piracy ads that paint me as a potential thief of their IP. One movie distributer had a film that started with a film showing portraits in black and white all with a black square patch over the eyes of the persons like they do with not yet convicted criminals in newspapers. At the same time the speaker reads fictive senteces for IP crimes.
I really felt offended, I had after all paid to see their film. I certainly didn't pay to be called a thief. I did in fact not even see the film, it went out of the DVD player and into
the trash can.
Do I have to mention, I will never ever again buy anything from that film distributer either.
The same will probably happen if they use some hard to use or offending DRM technology to their DVDs. I can live without seeing movies or listening to CDs.
I wonder if the film industry and music can live without customers.
Perhaps thats true, but this just as easily done as using windows update to get the the latest windows servicepack. So, whats your point?
To make it even better the automatic update functions available in almost all linux distros doesn't just update the OS like windows update, they update word processors, databases, webbrowsers,...
Having one update tool that works for all or at least the majority of your installed software makes life easier to the sysadmin. You still seam to think that updates in the Linux world is done by downloading the source code and compileing it. Even though this is still possible most people use things that is very similar and in most cases better than windows update.
And once you have your 60? patches, you can have a much more secure system than you can if you run a fully patched windows. In fact it might be more secure even before you install all or most of the patches. Why is that?
The simple answer is Linux support mandatory access control. Each process runs in its own security role and the transition beween roles is carefully controlled. You can also control what resources each role is allowed to access. E.g. you could prevent Firefox from altering shared libraries (dlls in windowsspeak), you could prevent it from seeing most of your computer settings, you could prevent it from dowloading files to other places than a specific download folder. And even then the files could be made impossible to execute even for root (Administrator in widows). All programs or processes that was started by Firefox would inherrit the security settings of Firefox. It would also be possible to control what programs that was allowed to have network access. All this happens at OS level and have nothing to do with user programs like Firefox, it doesn't even have anything to do with standard unix security permissions (that continue to work like they always have)
If the mandatory access control is turned on most of the vulnerabilities that was to be fixed by your aleged 60 kernel patches would be quite harmless. Not, that you shouldn't fix them.
Many admins are much too lazy, and avoid doing something about security problems unless they are remote exploits. But what if you someday get hit by a remote exploit, then the machine is open to a much more serious attack.
By the way, I don't manage to get 60 kernel vulnerabilites from your link, not even if i count all versions of Linux ever made. Not that it matters though. On a reasonably fast internet connection I doubt that an upgrade will take more than five minutes.
The protection only worked if he actually bought a copy of the CD. Given the artistic quality quality of most of the new music, chances are that he won't bother if he have to pay full price.
The problem is that it is likely to be payd to some US bank. And not being from the US my fear is that I will have to pay $75 for the banktransfers and $0.75 for the domain.
I really hope that they make it possilb to pay for many years at the time.
I guess people would be much more secure if they switched to Linux and configured a good SELinux policy. One that prevented webbrowsers and e-mail clients from modifying binary files like shared libraries and applications.It could also prevent files that was downloaded by webbrowsers or e-mail clients to be executed by root. Make sure that only approved applications that really needs it are allowed to open sockets or connect to the internet. That would make life very difficult to most virus developers.
Today, Red Hat Fedora Core 3 turns on SELinux by default. Unfortunately the policy is mostly targeted at servers. Perhaps they (and other Linux distros) should target the desktop as well in their upcomming releases.
The problem is probably that most windows users will not go the Linux road. Instead they are likely to apply TCPA strategies that not only will lock out virus writers but also the owner of the computer.
50 GB is a lot of space. The current DVD format is large enough for normal movies. Naturally this larger format could be used for one disk collections of some famous director.
The other use would be high definition video, this of course what the developers have in mind.
The problem with this is that people in general doesn't have any display units that handle that quality, and it will take a long time for that to get common.
A 50GB writable DVD would be great for backups though.
It all depends on what you are doing. The main advantage of EJB as I see it is declarative security on a per method basis and transaction management that is not all that easy to replace and maintain.
If you don't need all that, and that is often true if you are working with web stuff, you should use servlets and POJOs.
However, J2EE is often used for ERP purposes and here the demands are quite different, at least for the backends. You have to remember that in these type of system servlet is considered to be user interface components and as such your statment applies as the heavy lifting is all done in the background with EJBs
Well, if the security of the average Linux distro will not get better this is an accident just waiting to happen.
Most Linux distros relies on the same types of protection of illegitimate use as windows. Just like in windows we have users and groups with read, write and execute permissions. It is therefore likely to have similar problem if sombody decides to write malware like viruses.
So far this has been fairly uncommon, perhaps because there are more constructive ways for hackers to make a difference in the open source world than in the land of Microsoft.
Furthermore, Linux have the advantage of having more skilled users than windows. The average Linux user would be much harder to fool into open e-mail attachments etc than the average Windows user. But as the use of Linux becomes more widespread we can assume that it will get into the hands of users just as badly educated as the average windows user usually is. They will run their systems as root and do stupid things just like they do in windows today. As a result we will see more problems on the Linux platform.
The fact is, that if you avoid MS-Outlook, don't open attachments from unknown people, make sure that you always have the latest security patches from Microsoft installed, the chance of getting hin in windows is quite small. So far I have never had a windows virus, neither have my wife and we have used windows since the release of NT4.
Clearly both Linux and Windows needs enhancements to protect it from clueless users. Microsoft will probably try to do this by shutting the user out of his computer and only allow trusted software to run through the use of their TCPA system.
In Linux we have the SELinux stuff NSA put into the latest 2.6x kernel series that provides mandatory security. It makes it possible to on an application basis control what files an application may read. write, execute or even see regardless of what user that runs the application including root. In similar way it is possible to control what capabilities an application have with regards to e.g. networking or memory.
In this kind of system anything that isn't explicitly allowed is forbidden so if you have a good security policy a virus would be allowed to do very little harm and have limited ability to spread.
E.g you could configure your system to refuse to execute anything downloaded by mozilla or you favorite e-mail client until you explicitly allow it from a password protected user role. This would of course not prevent mozilla from doing some harm if the virus was running within the mozilla process perhaps as a result of a buffer overflow security breach. But even here SELinux could help. If mozilla only could see html files and only was allowed to alter them if you had the role of webmaser the damage would be limited.
So, Linux already have the tools to be secure. The problem is that they are not widely used, and in the cases they are, security policys are often to lenient. One reason for this might be that the tools for creating policys are too hard to use.
I'm happy to see that SELinux is enabled by default in the new Fedora Core 3 test release.
I have no problem having patents for new and innovative things. The problem is that, at least in the US, most of the patented stuff is obvious to an experienced worker in his field of expertiese, or it just reimplements something from real life on a computer.
E.g. nobody would ever try to patent sorting papers on you real life desktop into stacks, but doing so on your computer desktop all of a sudden becomes worhty a patent even though the task of fixing this is trivial.
If the things patented are trivial, then we can expect that any person with a university degree and/or some years of experience is extremely likely to produce patented solutions without knowing it just by coding what naturall comes to his mind. He could do patent searches, but this is quite hard since much in software design is about general ideas with sometimes overlapping contexts, chances are that he will not find what he is looking for as he expresses the same idea in different terms.
If we let a couple of monkeys hammer away at a keyboard they will sooner or later have written the complete works of Shakespeare. Now imagine that Shakesspeare had written all his stuff in a language containing the only words if, then, else, while. The time for that to happen would have been greately reduced. Now, replace the monkeys with humans that use this very limited language to express themselves, and you will very soon see sentences that look quite Shaksperian even if the never ever read a line from the original auther.
So if you like software patents, why not patents on litterature, and art. After all if I think that I'm the first person who write a crime story where sombody is killed by a knife why shouldn't I patent it. I'm quite sure that such patent have never been filed. As I privately have a slight suspicion that sombody actually may have written such a story before me, I am happy to licence the idea to other authers for a fee slightly less than it would cost to take the dispute to court. The only one who would not go to court would be sombody that positively would know that he could prove prior art, but as that person is most likely to be dead there is little risk.
Now it strikes me, why write a book in the first place. After all, the part where sombody is killed by the knife is a very minor part of a normal crime novel. Why spend all that time. Why risk to be sued by the auther holding the patent on having characters being transported by a car, or having a conversation, or kissing, or..., In fact by actually writing a book I open myself to all kinds of liabilities. Besides I'm not much of a writer anyway.
I think I just stick to just filing the patent on the knife usage. Then I can wait for some real auther to get a bestseller using my knife concept. After all people are known to have been killed by knifes as early as Julius Ceasar, so its bound to get into a novel soner or later. So I sit back and wait unitl somebody actually write such a story and get what is rightfully mine from him. That way the risk of being sued is much less, not to mention that it is much less work. I don't have any costs for marketing either.
Now, If software patents are so important for the software industry, the same thing would be valid for other ways of expression like litterature and art. So why should it not be possible to have patents in this field as well? After all there is big money in this business just as in software. Look at the movie and record industry, or that software industry such as Microsoft buy the rights to digital publishing of classic art.
The strange thing is that you seldom hear people argue that patents on art would be a good thing, even though my guess is that there are more artists in need of some extra income than there are software developers. Why should they not be able to get some money from their way of express themselves, when the software developer can?
Or is it just that patenting peoples way of expression themselves is a bad idea?
How true. I'm still waiting for:
The hourly cost of a person doing windows is much less than the hourly cost of a Linux sys admin.