I have no idea what connection any of your rant is supposed to have with linux... but it sounds like you're confused about a few things, and have several wacky misconceptions about linux.
I certainly don't work for free - in fact I make better money than most of my windows specialist acquaintances.
Nah, that's just a troll - no evidence whatsoever, linux networking is excellent - although I will admit, 10 years ago his ideas about bsd networking being better would have been true.
Companies can still write proprietary applications to run on Linux (although why should they?)
Why shouldn't they? Linux makes a fine platform for closed source apps, as well as open source ones.
So forget it. It's not good enough, they have to interoperate with too many subcontracters, government agencies, etc, etc
Sure, let's just ignore all the problems and incompatibilities that plague those using different versions of ms office...
At any rate, I hate to break it to you, but we are finding that we like open office better than ms office - and have been using OO 1.1 to share ms docs with coworkers and vendors, as well as reports to management, for some months now without a single problem.
This silly ms-office elitism really needs to stop. standards, not vendor lock-ins, are the key to interoperability.
Bash can now store timestamps in the history and save them to the history file. This alone is worth the upgrade for me. The option to erase duplicates is pretty nice too.
Awesome - that is a killer feature when you need to find out the exact time that a command was issued... that's the one thing I liked about tcsh - well, now bash does have it all.
Rather than trying to overtake MS on the filesystem market (something that isn't going to make/break anything, see the "shiny thing" bit above), let's just develop something that works correctly. Quickly would be cool as well, but I'm patient.
Let's say I knew that DoD used a certain package in gunnery firmware. Let's say a math library that would be used to make calculations to calibrate the weapon. How hard would it be to build in a small tiny bit of error that would only be useful in cases of calibration of high-tech weapons? If 3000 lines of dense mathematically rich C were checked in and a dozen lines acted in concert to create a miscalculation, how much expertise would be needed to catch that?
Please explain how using closed source would prevent this from happening.
Ah, you're assuming I hadn't seen the changelogs or heard of the potential security issues which have been found (and no doubt will continue to be found) and corrected by apache developers in the course of the ongoing development of apache.
While continual security fixes are the norm in the open source world, I suppose it could be alarming to an outsider when taken out of context, but I think the point is, that apache security issues are generally a matter of an developer's entry in the release notes, while iis security issues are generally a matter of a significant number of businesses suffering downtime or worse due to bugs in iis.
I'd wager that if you could look at the source code for iis, you'd probably have a stroke.
Once a few sites start rejecting me for not using it, I guess I'll have to add the records.
um, no... You don't get rejected for "not using it" - what happens is that, if you try sending a message directly from your windoze peecee with e.g. a forged "hotmail.com" sender address to a mail server that checks spf records, they will know your from address is forged.
For email messages purporting to be from a domain without spf records, spf doesn't enter into it, mail is simply processed as in the pre-spf era.
does this mean I will no longer be able to use this function of Eudora?
Of course, not, there are several ways to work with this.
One way is to simply have the earthlink email servers added to the list of allowed mail servers for example.com.
Another way would be to simply connect to a remote mail server using authenticated smtp on port 587 - more ISPs are going this route, and port 587 is usually not blocked, even if port 25 is.
Am I the only geek who just doesn't get it with FPS games? I guess you might be -
But pretending you're Rambo and shooting up the place? Yawn
Methinks you're missing the whole point of 3D FPS games, perhaps you've never even played one. Even an old classic like Q3A is a challenging test of timing, reflexes, strategy and teamwork.
If you dislike violence, there are some nice Q3A mods like freeze tag, where players are not killed, but rather suspended. The strategy comes in thawing your frozen teammates while avoiding campers, and keeping the other team from thawing their frozen players. First team to have all players simultaneously frozen loses the round.
Quite a few of the players are still running the q3demo, a free 50 MB download for linux, mac and windows. (I'm happy to report that q3demo, from 1999, runs quite nicely on my suse 9.1 gaming machine, right alongside ut2004 etc al)
As well, many players seem to use Q3A as their form of irc or im, using it as a sort of 3D chatroom. lotsa fun!
OK, I'm a fan of Linux hmm, it seems that every anti-linux troll these days begins with this sort of thing...
but I also have a bullshit detector, and anyone claiming that Apache has a good security track record is full of it.
Actually, the security record of apache has been exemplary over the years, especially when cmpared to microsoft iis. Even though apache runs the lion's share of internet sites, guess what the lion's share of the worms & virri have infected?
hmm, how does this silly troll get modded as insightful? My $600 Hammerfall works like a charm...
Seriously, though, one would think someone buying a "professional audio card" for linux would actually check that it actually supports linux, before purchasing.
You sure don't play with Nvidia or VIA. Some hardwares are known to give famous low level lockups on Linux.
While it's true that some hardware combos are very bad under linux, recommended hardware is quit easy to find, and nvidia video cards are not a problem. I have nvidia cards in nearly all my linux systems, and they are all rock solid, even the desktops where I play q3a, ut2004, run 3D screensavers, watch DVDs, quicktime movies etc.
I switched from windows to linux in 1995 and haven't looked back.This was during the time when the internet was becoming popular, while microsoft was trying to herd their users into microsoft network instead (msn was something like prodigy at the time).
It's nice that someone has finally offered a standards-compliant, cross-platform browser platform, since the microsoft folks certainly weren't going to do it.
I understand windows has a web browser now too. I also just heard that I don't give a damn. Let someone new into the desktop market. but not anything microsoft-y. They had their chance, and blew it. Bury them.
How does this silly troll get modded as insightful? It appears to be nothing more than some bizzare propoganda with no basis in fact..
Let's look at what they're peddling for just a moment: For instance, in comparing installation of programs, the microsoft zealot assumes unquestioningly that every program comes with a well-designed, easy-to-use installer when you install it on windows, and somehow, magically, that same program only comes as a tarball of source code if you want to install it on linux.
May I introduce a brief reality check here? When I installed ut2004 on linux a few months ago, I clicked on the install program, and fed CDs in when requested. That is pretty much the standard. Can you also compile and install programs on linux from scratch, at the commmand line? Yes, of course you can - you can do pretty much whatever you want! but the windows zealots would try to make that nice extra feature a weakness of linux by pretending that's the only method available to install programs. He did obliquely refer to apt, but the fact is, for programs that ship with the OS, a cron job and apt-get keeps those up to date with no human intervention - and not just on debian, I use apt-get for redhat, fedora and suse systems too.
The other subjects he touches upon: installing drivers, changing settings, etc, are just as bogus. Anyone who is familiar with linux knows just how bogus, so I won't beat a dead horse. As the man once said, these microsoft zealots love to compare the linux of 1996 with the microsoft windows of tomorrow.
You totally misunderstood my remark. I did not say that people use windows because they are conditioned to do so - (however there may be something to that as well, since the average Joe six-pack who goes to kmart to buy a computer would never be told that he has any choice but to use ms windows - but I digress) - but rather that the microsoft customer's conditioned "reboot" response is a time honored method for solving windows problems. You may not realize this, but I have daily contact with friends, relatives and co-workers who use ms windows, and I get plenty of information from them, as well as my own light use of windows from time to time.
As to your question about why linux has not taken over the desktop from windows, there are a number of basic and immediately obvious reasons, which make me suspect you are a troll, Mr "I love linux"... You seem to forget that microsoft had years of monopoly power on the desktop, years of vendors writing programs for microsoft windows only, and careers that have been (naively) built on the assumption that windows everywhere would be the reality. Just because linux is better, doesn't immediately erase all those formidable obstacles. It will take time, and in the meanwhile, microsoft will use every dirty trick in the book to avoid the emergence of a viable, competitive market. Expect an increase in the already shrill cacaphony of microsoft shills, anti-linux FUD in the press, anti-linux lawsuits, bought and paid for legislators and politicians, and bogus "studies".
Ultimately, however, even against this frantic opposition from a hideously wealthy company dedicated to killing it, linux is slowly and surely making inroads.
If I switch consoles or quit X, my linux machine locks up hard. Linux isn't that great.
This is "newbie 101" stuff, sounds like outdated OS or blacklisted hardware doing what it is known to do. Obviously, if everyone had that experience, nobody would be using linux, would they?
That doesn't happen for me, and I'm a real person. no telling who you might be, anonymous coward, or if you have any existence in the real world.
Just on the off chance that there might be something to your story, are you using an ATI video card?
I spend about 10% of my time in them vs. Windows, and I 'shrug and reboot' more times in Linux.
This is your conditioned behaviour due to your familiarity with microsoft products. By your own admission you are a linux newbie, so when you see something you don't understand, it's easy to fall back on the old habits. I can't remember the last time I've booted a linux box, other than for hardware maintenance or a new kernel. My expee using friends boast about how they've gone a whole month without rebooting, and I show them my 450 day uptime, just to put things into perspective.
Much as microsoft has improved their stability, and taken some baby steps towards being a wee bit more linux-like in that regard, they still have a long way to go. I spent some time with expeee in the past week, upgrading several relatives from ie and outlook to mozilla/firefox, and I have to say, I found expee to be the same old windows I left years ago.
Oh, it was cuter, microsoft has put a lot of effort into making it cute - and it doesn't seem to crash quite as much as win95/98/nt (thanks no doubt to the generous helpings of bsd unix code they've helped themselves to - gee, you don't have to reboot now just to change IP address) but after a few days of expee, I still felt like I'd been forced to work while squeezed into one of those tiny kindergartner desks. blech, give me my SuSE 9.1 desktop anyday.
OMG How did I screw that up? What was I thinking? (hangs head in shame)... Hard to believe I wrote that, which will teach me not to post before coffee...
I don't imagine wintendo is a high priority for the gnome developers - gotta take care of the core linux market, the windows port is more of an afterthought.
Meanwhile, enterprise Linux could use some improvements in convenient, secure, scalable directory services. People testing prototype desktop Linux solutions want to move beyond the/etc/passwd and local home directory stage of life.
Welcome to 1994, Rip Van Winkle! Even back then, we managed quite a few linux, solaris and sgi systems centrally via nis, and with nfs automounted home directories, so that users get their same environment, whether they log in on a sun, sgi or linux box.
Nowdays nis is a bit long in the tooth, and we would use openldap, or novell edirectory as the centralized user data store.
The SUSE distro is ok but hasn't really changed since the Novell takeover.
Huh? If you don't see any difference between suse 9.0 and suse 9.1, you're not looking.
Suse 9.0 was a nice distro, one I could have lived with, but I stuck with redhat (and fedora). When 9.1 came out, it was so good I simply had to switch to suse - and have been doing so, on my desktops, and servers.
BTW netcraft shows that in the past month, redhat has lost web server market share and suse, the 2nd distro, has gained ground. I expect the trend to continue.
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I have no idea what connection any of your rant is supposed to have with linux... but it sounds like you're confused about a few things, and have several wacky misconceptions about linux.
I certainly don't work for free - in fact I make better money than most of my windows specialist acquaintances.
Just an observation -
Perhaps you're right on the stack thing,
Nah, that's just a troll - no evidence whatsoever, linux networking is excellent - although I will admit, 10 years ago his ideas about bsd networking being better would have been true.
Companies can still write proprietary applications to run on Linux (although why should they?)
Why shouldn't they? Linux makes a fine platform for closed source apps, as well as open source ones.
So forget it. It's not good enough, they have to interoperate with too many subcontracters, government agencies, etc, etc
Sure, let's just ignore all the problems and incompatibilities that plague those using different versions of ms office...
At any rate, I hate to break it to you, but we are finding that we like open office better than ms office - and have been using OO 1.1 to share ms docs with coworkers and vendors, as well as reports to management, for some months now without a single problem.
This silly ms-office elitism really needs to stop. standards, not vendor lock-ins, are the key to interoperability.
Bash can now store timestamps in the history and save them to the history file. This alone is worth the upgrade for me. The option to erase duplicates is pretty nice too.
Awesome - that is a killer feature when you need to find out the exact time that a command was issued... that's the one thing I liked about tcsh - well, now bash does have it all.
Rather than trying to overtake MS on the filesystem market (something that isn't going to make/break anything, see the "shiny thing" bit above), let's just develop something that works correctly. Quickly would be cool as well, but I'm patient.
(shrug) we've had that for years...
Let's say I knew that DoD used a certain package in gunnery firmware. Let's say a math library that would be used to make calculations to calibrate the weapon. How hard would it be to build in a small tiny bit of error that would only be useful in cases of calibration of high-tech weapons? If 3000 lines of dense mathematically rich C were checked in and a dozen lines acted in concert to create a miscalculation, how much expertise would be needed to catch that?
Please explain how using closed source would prevent this from happening.
Ah, you're assuming I hadn't seen the changelogs or heard of the potential security issues which have been found (and no doubt will continue to be found) and corrected by apache developers in the course of the ongoing development of apache.
While continual security fixes are the norm in the open source world, I suppose it could be alarming to an outsider when taken out of context, but I think the point is, that apache security issues are generally a matter of an developer's entry in the release notes, while iis security issues are generally a matter of a significant number of businesses suffering downtime or worse due to bugs in iis.
I'd wager that if you could look at the source code for iis, you'd probably have a stroke.
I too run linux as my main OS -
I have no problem viewing wmv, quicktime or other multimedia. xine, mplayer, vlc are your friends.
Once a few sites start rejecting me for not using it, I guess I'll have to add the records.
um, no... You don't get rejected for "not using it" - what happens is that, if you try sending a message directly from your windoze peecee with e.g. a forged "hotmail.com" sender address to a mail server that checks spf records, they will know your from address is forged.
For email messages purporting to be from a domain without spf records, spf doesn't enter into it, mail is simply processed as in the pre-spf era.
does this mean I will no longer be able to use this function of Eudora?
Of course, not, there are several ways to work with this.
One way is to simply have the earthlink email servers added to the list of allowed mail servers for example.com.
Another way would be to simply connect to a remote mail server using authenticated smtp on port 587 - more ISPs are going this route, and port 587 is usually not blocked, even if port 25 is.
Probably neither, I wouldn't come to slashdot looking for facts.
A cute little slogan, but I think you're confusing the articles with the comments - world of difference.
Am I the only geek who just doesn't get it with FPS games?
I guess you might be -
But pretending you're Rambo and shooting up the place? Yawn
Methinks you're missing the whole point of 3D FPS games, perhaps you've never even played one. Even an old classic like Q3A is a challenging test of timing, reflexes, strategy and teamwork.
If you dislike violence, there are some nice Q3A mods like freeze tag, where players are not killed, but rather suspended. The strategy comes in thawing your frozen teammates while avoiding campers, and keeping the other team from thawing their frozen players. First team to have all players simultaneously frozen loses the round.
Quite a few of the players are still running the q3demo, a free 50 MB download for linux, mac and windows. (I'm happy to report that q3demo, from 1999, runs quite nicely on my suse 9.1 gaming machine, right alongside ut2004 etc al)
As well, many players seem to use Q3A as their form of irc or im, using it as a sort of 3D chatroom. lotsa fun!
OK, I'm a fan of Linux
hmm, it seems that every anti-linux troll these days begins with this sort of thing...
but I also have a bullshit detector, and anyone claiming that Apache has a good security track record is full of it.
Actually, the security record of apache has been exemplary over the years, especially when cmpared to microsoft iis. Even though apache runs the lion's share of internet sites, guess what the lion's share of the worms & virri have infected?
Yep, microsoft iis.
hmm, how does this silly troll get modded as insightful? My $600 Hammerfall works like a charm...
Seriously, though, one would think someone buying a "professional audio card" for linux would actually check that it actually supports linux, before purchasing.
You sure don't play with Nvidia or VIA. Some hardwares are known to give famous low level lockups on Linux.
While it's true that some hardware combos are very bad under linux, recommended hardware is quit easy to find, and nvidia video cards are not a problem. I have nvidia cards in nearly all my linux systems, and they are all rock solid, even the desktops where I play q3a, ut2004, run 3D screensavers, watch DVDs, quicktime movies etc.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
I switched from windows to linux in 1995 and haven't looked back.This was during the time when the internet was becoming popular, while microsoft was trying to herd their users into microsoft network instead (msn was something like prodigy at the time).
It's nice that someone has finally offered a standards-compliant, cross-platform browser platform, since the microsoft folks certainly weren't going to do it.
I understand windows has a web browser now too. I also just heard that I don't give a damn. Let someone new into the desktop market. but not anything microsoft-y. They had their chance, and blew it. Bury them.
How does this silly troll get modded as insightful? It appears to be nothing more than some bizzare propoganda with no basis in fact..
Let's look at what they're peddling for just a moment: For instance, in comparing installation of programs, the microsoft zealot assumes unquestioningly that every program comes with a well-designed, easy-to-use installer when you install it on windows, and somehow, magically, that same program only comes as a tarball of source code if you want to install it on linux.
May I introduce a brief reality check here? When I installed ut2004 on linux a few months ago, I clicked on the install program, and fed CDs in when requested. That is pretty much the standard. Can you also compile and install programs on linux from scratch, at the commmand line? Yes, of course you can - you can do pretty much whatever you want! but the windows zealots would try to make that nice extra feature a weakness of linux by pretending that's the only method available to install programs. He did obliquely refer to apt, but the fact is, for programs that ship with the OS, a cron job and apt-get keeps those up to date with no human intervention - and not just on debian, I use apt-get for redhat, fedora and suse systems too.
The other subjects he touches upon: installing drivers, changing settings, etc, are just as bogus. Anyone who is familiar with linux knows just how bogus, so I won't beat a dead horse. As the man once said, these microsoft zealots love to compare the linux of 1996 with the microsoft windows of tomorrow.
There are many more people that would say Windows is better.
There are all sorts of people who say all sorts of things.
In the end it makes no odds, as linux usage is increasing, and will continue to do so.
Another common fallacy by an obvious Linux user.
You totally misunderstood my remark. I did not say that people use windows because they are conditioned to do so - (however there may be something to that as well, since the average Joe six-pack who goes to kmart to buy a computer would never be told that he has any choice but to use ms windows - but I digress) - but rather that the microsoft customer's conditioned "reboot" response is a time honored method for solving windows problems. You may not realize this, but I have daily contact with friends, relatives and co-workers who use ms windows, and I get plenty of information from them, as well as my own light use of windows from time to time.
As to your question about why linux has not taken over the desktop from windows, there are a number of basic and immediately obvious reasons, which make me suspect you are a troll, Mr "I love linux"... You seem to forget that microsoft had years of monopoly power on the desktop, years of vendors writing programs for microsoft windows only, and careers that have been (naively) built on the assumption that windows everywhere would be the reality. Just because linux is better, doesn't immediately erase all those formidable obstacles. It will take time, and in the meanwhile, microsoft will use every dirty trick in the book to avoid the emergence of a viable, competitive market. Expect an increase in the already shrill cacaphony of microsoft shills, anti-linux FUD in the press, anti-linux lawsuits, bought and paid for legislators and politicians, and bogus "studies".
Ultimately, however, even against this frantic opposition from a hideously wealthy company dedicated to killing it, linux is slowly and surely making inroads.
If I switch consoles or quit X, my linux machine locks up hard. Linux isn't that great.
This is "newbie 101" stuff, sounds like outdated OS or blacklisted hardware doing what it is known to do. Obviously, if everyone had that experience, nobody would be using linux, would they?
That doesn't happen for me, and I'm a real person. no telling who you might be, anonymous coward, or if you have any existence in the real world.
Just on the off chance that there might be something to your story, are you using an ATI video card?
I spend about 10% of my time in them vs. Windows, and I 'shrug and reboot' more times in Linux.
This is your conditioned behaviour due to your familiarity with microsoft products. By your own admission you are a linux newbie, so when you see something you don't understand, it's easy to fall back on the old habits. I can't remember the last time I've booted a linux box, other than for hardware maintenance or a new kernel. My expee using friends boast about how they've gone a whole month without rebooting, and I show them my 450 day uptime, just to put things into perspective.
Much as microsoft has improved their stability, and taken some baby steps towards being a wee bit more linux-like in that regard, they still have a long way to go. I spent some time with expeee in the past week, upgrading several relatives from ie and outlook to mozilla/firefox, and I have to say, I found expee to be the same old windows I left years ago.
Oh, it was cuter, microsoft has put a lot of effort into making it cute - and it doesn't seem to crash quite as much as win95/98/nt (thanks no doubt to the generous helpings of bsd unix code they've helped themselves to - gee, you don't have to reboot now just to change IP address) but after a few days of expee, I still felt like I'd been forced to work while squeezed into one of those tiny kindergartner desks. blech, give me my SuSE 9.1 desktop anyday.
OMG How did I screw that up? What was I thinking? (hangs head in shame)... Hard to believe I wrote that, which will teach me not to post before coffee...
--
Meine Seele brennt!
I don't imagine wintendo is a high priority for the gnome developers - gotta take care of the core linux market, the windows port is more of an afterthought.
This is insightful?
/etc/passwd and local home directory stage of life.
Meanwhile, enterprise Linux could use some improvements in convenient, secure, scalable directory services. People testing prototype desktop Linux solutions want to move beyond the
Welcome to 1994, Rip Van Winkle! Even back then, we managed quite a few linux, solaris and sgi systems centrally via nis, and with nfs automounted home directories, so that users get their same environment, whether they log in on a sun, sgi or linux box.
Nowdays nis is a bit long in the tooth, and we would use openldap, or novell edirectory as the centralized user data store.
The SUSE distro is ok but hasn't really changed since the Novell takeover.
Huh? If you don't see any difference between suse 9.0 and suse 9.1, you're not looking.
Suse 9.0 was a nice distro, one I could have lived with, but I stuck with redhat (and fedora). When 9.1 came out, it was so good I simply had to switch to suse - and have been doing so, on my desktops, and servers.
BTW netcraft shows that in the past month, redhat has lost web server market share and suse, the 2nd distro, has gained ground. I expect the trend to continue.