Now everything works fine. Total money spent: $310.00. Total time spent: just under four hours.
Some things in life are needlessly fucking complicated and obscure. For everything else (fun, productivity, selection, support, choice) there's Windows.
This message is brought to you by the Common Sense League Of Wisconsin. "Vacating Parent's Basements And Saving Minds One Copy Of Windows At A Time (TM)".
but they should be hit with rotten eggs for taking a shot at the Lindows name
Why? They feel that it's basically the same thing. This crowd doesn't like to think it is, but it probably is. If this works for Mythic then it pretty much validates Microsoft's claims over Lindows, assuming there wasn't enough precedent to begin with.
Oh, and as follow up, I just checked on Gateway. They also include RealPlayer in their home systems. And MusicMatch. And something called "Viewpoint Media Player", whatever that is.
So, go ahead and post links with proof of your claims. Thanks!
They should not have the power to dictate what is done with that afterwards [...] Including another Media player is not illegal, it doesn't damage Microsoft in any way. Ergo, Microsoft, once again, are abusing their monopoly by using strong arm tactics to "keep OEM's in line".
I'd like you to provide some proof that Microsoft currently forces OEMs to include WMP and omit any other music players in their systems. Your post is a bit confusing to me because every single Dell box nowadays ships with WMP and Real. Dell is pretty much the biggest OEM of them all. And believe me, I just bought two Dell laptops and the first thing I did was to kill the AOL and Real crap.
So, again, please provide some backing proof of your claims. A link or something. It seems to me that if you're going to mouth off like this you should have some solid evidence to back what you're saying.
application failed because of incompatibility in MS's own software layers
This incompatibility you talk about is interesting. All of these products are based on the COM binary format specification. And again, they are designed to work with each other. I don't know how to try and prove this to you - I've been using them for the better part of six years. They have bugs, yes. All software has bugs. But I've never had to cancel a project because I couldn't figure out how to make them work together. Sorry, that's how it is.
- assistance from Redmond failed to solve problem
I've had Microsoft support people come on site, solve a particularly nasty problem and then use their laptop to compile a patch in front of me. I don't know what your problem was (and apparently you don't either) but in general Microsoft can identify issues with their software and then issue a fix. I don't know what your support arrangement was, either. But that's my personal experience.
project eventually deemed unworkable and killed
This happens on the mainframe as well. It's irrelevant insofar as your other points are dubious at best.
My story may even be false, it's possible. IT is so complex that the real story is often hard to uncover.
So... you weren't actually there, right? This is hearsay?
But the conclusion that MS products are heavily vertical and often interoperable only within tight margins (specific OS, specific SP) remains, and is well-known to anyone who has developed for Windows.
Oh, most definitely true. No question about it. If I want to make XP and NT4 talk to each other I normally use the lowest common denominator: TCP/IP. Or a subset of RPC/DCOM. If I want to use the "elegant" vertical tight protocols with lots of flash and bang and transaction support and whatnot, I think it's only fair to assume that my environment should be pretty much homogeneous. Right down to the service pack. But this is true for all platforms that provide anything more advanced than sockets, not just Windows.
Attacking my credentials is not a response.
I wasn't attacking your credentials as much as the validity of your anecdote and your point in posting it to begin with. Like I said, I have no problem with people going off like this, but you should expect someone to call you on it. If you were talking about a botched project involving DirectX you wouldn't have gotten a peep from me, because that's a technology I don't understand or otherwise use. But large distributed systems on Windows using COM+/MSMQ/BizTalk/AC2K/HIS2K/etc... well, that's what I do for a living. And when I say they work it's because they do. Whenever I see someone assert how some company cancelled a project and lost a bazillion dollars because these technologies "don't work" I get a bit worked up.
Actually I've seen projects like these scrapped - but because someone couldn't get some Microsoft technology to work with some Oracle or IBM or PeopleSoft technology. That's where things get dicey, regardless of vendors' claims to the contrary.
Showing me the well-defined Microsoft APIs that have been used by Microsoft's own application development teams without compromise... now that would be a worthy response
I'm not sure what you mean. For example, everything in Windows uses COM. From the shell down to the graphics subsystem. COM+ and MSMQ are perfectly interoperable if you know what you're doing. And so on. Just because Windows has a pretty GUI it doesn't mean you can write complex applications using wizards and widgets. It doesn't work that way.
The architecture basically fell apart about 75% through the project.
Translation: We didn't know what we were doing, so we fucked it up. And now when I remember, I blame it on the vendor. It's so much better that way.
I guess around the time they stopped making use cases and actually tried to scale the prototypes up to work on their clusters.
See above. Because I surmise you're concluding that the same group of people with the same design using some CORBA implementation and MQSeries or some other IBM software would have actually managed to finish the project.
[...] it was an engineer from the bank who finally discovered the real problem, apparently.[...]
Do you or do you not know what actually happened? "Apparently"? I thought you were talking as a sort of authority on why COM+ and MSMQ couldn't talk to each other.
The COM+ developers and the MSMQ developers knew their own products very well but were unable to figure out what was happening between the two.
Statistics are a bitch. Especially when they come in a single data point. You know, because I've successfully designed and implemented extremely complex systems using these two technologies. Yes, using clusters (AC2K) actually. In fact you could say they're my bread and butter. I think you're just like everyone else who has a chip on their shoulder and a dubious anecdote to tell to anyone who will listen. After all, you don't get the code and Microsoft is evil, so ergo whatever technology they produce can be reasonably expected to suck. There's always the very valuable "well I can't see their code so I can't fix mine" argument. Oh and, of course the whole debacle made the company cautious about using any other Microsoft technologies. Classic.
So I'd suggest that in the future, unless you have some technical backing and cold hard facts to go with it, to just keep this little story to yourself. Not because I fear FUD, but because it simply proves that, if you're an idiot, you won't be able to design decent systems or write good code, no matter what the platform or middleware technologies happen to be. Seems to me that this is quite evident from your case study.
Interoperable with what? If you're hoping that MSFT will port this to some other OS, don't hold your breath.
OTOH, since it's just XML you can theoretically create an implementation of the engine in any platform where you have an XML parser available, which is pretty much any meaningful platform in existence. Just bind it to your GUI/widget set/rendering engine and you're all set.
I mean, if Mono can create a complete (or almost complete) CLR implementation that runs on Linux I don't see why they or someone else can implement this as well.
You people said the exact same thing about the last version. And the previous one. And three versions ago. And so on. Exactly the same thing. Every time a new version of [KDE|GNOME|OO|whatever] comes out, Microsoft (I'm sorry, "M$") is doomed and its days as the dominant software company are counted and etc, etc. Linux was going to take over the desktop and the world in 1997 and 1998. And then in 1999. And in 2000 and 2001 and 2002. 2003 is almost over, but it was going to take the world over this year as well, at least that's what I heard in January and February.
I surmise next year when KDE 3.3 is released we'll be having the same conversation. Some dude will breathlessly post to Slashbork about how he has seen the future. Yes, it's so bright we gotta wear shades. There will be nasal laughter and pointless lame jokes by the metric ton coming out of basements everywhere. And "M$" will be doomed for good this time. No, really. This time it's for real.
I mean, for god's sake. I can't even install a stupid font without borking X and having it dump me in a console. Don't even get me started on changing resolutions or color depths.
In the immortal words of little children everywhere who believe in fairy tales,
FUD is FUD, regardless of where it comes from. People have a conception of the effects of using GPLed code, and that comes from reading the stupid license to begin with, not from thin air. This is not a misconception, it's just a different interpretation. I.e., it can be interpreted that way. And it can be interpreted as in this article, using the finer points of contract vs. license. But until the GPL is proven in court, all interpretations are just that, FUD. It doesn't matter if they come from The People Who Defend Open Source (TM), Dickie "GNU/Linux" Stallman or SCO.
As an aside, maybe now the zealots will stop clamoring for the code when Linksys or some other hardware manufacturer is determined to be in breach of the GPL by some LKML poster with too much time on his hands. It's only fair, I think.
Ahh. Perhaps that explains why they asked for donations. No wait, it doesn't. You know, donations. As in "give us money or we will die". The club deal would have been fine except that it did not work. Ergo, beg for cash. What part of that did you not understand?[1]
I applaud Mandrake
Yes, I'm you sure do. Now be a good little zealot and fuck off.
[1] This is a rethorical question, so don't try to answer.
What? Begging for money to get out of bankruptcy? I seriously doubt that can be called a "business model". Call it anything you want, but don't call it a "business model". The submitter was just playing fanboi and not being very successful at it.
You might as well go back to the tried and true
Sell free software
???
Profit!!1!
That's about a valid "business model" as any.
I don't want to see them go out of business - that's no skin off my ass, really. But to wax poetic about how "this proves that Linux companies can make money" is stupid. RedHat - now there's a business model.
The hull plating of the Galactica is MIGHTY impressive to withstand a point blank nuke. They don't state the tonnage, but I have to assume it's at least a megaton since they kept referring to 50 megaton bombs used on the cities.
I'll nitpitck your nitpick. This particular attack was followed by one of the flag officers saying it was a 50 kiloton nuke. Quite different from a 50 megaton device.
I can see surviving a 50KT airburst (or spaceburst I guess) as being actually viable with proper physical shielding. Heck, you can survive that today in a sufficiently hardened underground bunker. Also, keep in mind that only a fraction of the blast wave hits the ship (because the blast travels equally in all directions), and there is no wind or firestorm in space. So it's just energy and radiation.
Rather, I'd nitpick the use of the 50MT figure. Clearly the writers were looking for a super-sized bomb and they probably heard that 50MT is about the highest yield achieved from a detonation to date (this was a theoretical 100MT clean device exploded by the Soviets in 1961 that vaporized a small island). However, why would the Cylons bother with such a large bomb? Most devices over 5MT are extremely inefficient, with a 50% actual yield expected under the best of circumstances. Detonating a concentric pattern of 7 to 11 smaller (200-375KT) devices would have been much better - no city would survive the merging blast fronts. In fact that's what modern nuclear warfare strategy dictates. The era of the >5MT bomb was over by 1968.
This is very interesting. When the "best" alternative to IE was that piece of unbridled crap closed source Netscape Navigator you wouldn't hear a peep from anyone about "standards". Mozilla and friends have been viable products for what, a year and a half? And now IE is a piece of crap.
As for this particular problem, as always Bashdork makes it seem like the end of the world, front and center. Check the other responses on this article - Mozilla is also vulnerable. I'm running Mozilla 1.6a (2003110515) and I see the "http://www.microsoft.com/" URL on the Secunia spoof page. This kind of puts it in perspective, eh?
Mozilla is an excellent browser, that's for sure. But it is what it is because IE4 raised the bar so high (compared to NSN) that there was really nowhere to go. I personally use both, and I'm glad that Mozilla is (finally) giving IE a run for its money. But to go from embarrassed silence to this... well, as so many other areas where open source had to play catch up, the FUD tends to convey the idea that Microsoft has always produced non-functional "crap" and everyone else has been running circles around them forever.
Very funny. Oh, and the "economy cereal" thing? Brilliant. I've heard the same thing said about Mozilla (albeit with a different angle), with its 40-second load times and cluncky one-size-fits-all non standard GUI. Not that I'd agree though. But hey, don't let that put a dent in your superb flaming skillz.
And let's see how long it takes for the Mozilla folks to patch this one. And of course, for all those people running older builds to actually download and install.
This works occasionally. Not every codec can be found at codecs.microsoft.com, obviously. Unlike the other poster, my experience is about say, 50-50. But it's still not a sure thing for WMP to find and install it every time.
You don't like Eugenia because she doesn't mince words. When [free software] sucks, she says it does, and when it rocks, she says that as well. The problem with people like you is that you can't take criticism without automatically seeing it as a direct attack on your ideals. Not only that, but you can't understand that she writes reviews using both a user's and techie's perspective, which in my opinion is the right thing to do. This little detail is lost on all of you. If it quacks then it must be a duck, and that's how she calls it. As opposed to LinuxThis.com and LinuxThat.com who simply gloss over anything that is wrong with any distro or open source application. And then you turn around and complain about the tech rags being in Microsoft's pockets. Heh.
BTW, that's not the only thing in Fedora she complained about - do you have a valid counterpoint about anything else in the review, or just that in your opinion she was too stupid to compile Gaim?
She's borderline obnoxious and she basically games slashbork by submitting links to OSNews to drive her ad views through the roof, but other than that her reviews are perfectly valid. That you don't like them because you don't get a woody when you read them is besides the point.
So I guess we'll take whatever you say with a gran of salt, hmmmm?
My experience with Windows is that a full setup (inluding Office and all regular software + drivers to take it somewhat close to the functionality of the linux setup) takes around 5-7 hours. The time taken to continually reboot the machine is included in this
Um, bullshit. Installing XP takes about 1 hour and 1 (exactly one) reboot. Installing the base Office 2000 takes about 20 minutes, assuming you fiddled a little with the settings. Office does not require a reboot, especially not on XP. It might on Windows 9x. Running Windows Update takes about 30 more minutes and one reboot (minus the download time, which you conveniently chose not to include in your estimate).
I don't see where you're getting your 7 hour figure here. Oh wait, maybe I do.
In any case, you're installing RH almost completely through apt. The typical user is not going to do that, they'll install from the CDs. This is just another example of how disconnected from reality you people are. That you can do it doesn't mean that everyone else can, and ultimately this thread is talking about users. You know, non-programmers or sysadmins.
Next time you find your computer DDOS'ing some corporation
Which means you fucked up and let the virus in to begin with, whereby it ceased to be an annoyance and became a problem. I can probably turn your Linux machine into a zombie just as easily, especially if you let me. Or, maybe I could use a kernel exploit to root you. Or, maybe I could go through SSH if you're running an old enough version you forgot to patch. OTOH, if you don't rely on the idea that your OS is impenetrable by design and takes steps to secure it, that won't happen, will it? It works the same way on Windows, regardless of whether you'd like to admit that or not.
They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.
Well, you must know about building a business model more than people who already run a company. I guess that makes you an expert.
The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".
That's the way it works in the real world my man. You write software for a commercial OS, and then you sell it. Microsoft will give you nothing more than IBM will if you write an application for OS/390. And would you care to clarify and back up how TT "pays" Microsoft for the "privilege"?
It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms
Really? Last I looked (five minutes ago actually, since I happen to be coding) there are exactly two "widget" sets in Win32, one of which hasn't changed in 10 years. If you want more power you can extend them easily, or use something else, like wxWindows. And how is writing software for Windows more difficult again? More difficult than what?
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation
OK now, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. What the hell are you talking about? Documentation segfaults and experts??
The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work
This is about as pathetic an argument as you can humanly come up with. DirectX is a graphics API and it's used to write games. Games. Get some perspective here. The Win32 API is bar none the most stable and backwards-compatible I've ever worked with (and yes, I've worked with commerical Unices and Linux).
I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.
Typical "you poor idiots you don't know how green the grass is over here" zealot. Here's a newsflash: There are people out there who are not "chained to their desks" and enjoy writing software for Windows. You might conjure up images of slaves hitting keyboards all day if that makes you feel better, but that doesn't make it true. And "whims of Redmond"? I'd like to see you run a GUI-based application written in 1989 on RedHat 9. I mean, I can still run Windows 3.0 apps on Windows XP, so that would be a fair comparison.
Oh wait, there was no GUI Linux in 1989. Never mind.
The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end.
Really now. "I can't see the code so it must suck". Hundreds of thousands of developers writing successfull applications for Windows must be figments of my imagination. And BTW, I'd just as well have the vendor fix the problem instead of wading through and trying to understand their code. It's called "productivity", not tinkering. Well, at least if you expect to get paid for what you're doing.
Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows
Yes, because everyone thinks like you do, all over the world. Everyone wants to code for Linux, with its seventeen mutually incompatible widget libraries. Yeah, I can't believe I hadn't seen the light until now. Oh and of course we all want to be freed of the "slavery", yes. Damn, that makes sense.
Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
In other words, you are about as disconnected from reality as the average open source code monkey. Which I guess doesn't surprise me that much.
This French bashing is lame, and shows you to be an uneducated, ignorant oaf, and a very bad troll.
Nobody had brought up the lame French behavior in WW2 until they started blasting the american people for the actions of the government currently in power. In this regard, I think it's more than fair to condemn the "entire French people" for the actions (or rather, inactions) of their government.
Who's the "stupid cunt" now? "Go off and get killed for your country"? What is is it exactly you think americans are doing in Iraq? While the french wring their hands and lament the fact that they've lost an important customer and so this year it will be a bit more difficult to cover up the deficits brought on by their massively corrupt government?
No my friend, fuck you, and fuck the stupid crackhead moderators that think you're somehow insightful. You're just an ignorant stupid cunt with a chip on your shoulder.
Slashdot Mirror
- I went here and ordered.
- I followed the instructions provided here.
- Installed a bunch of stuff from Windows Update. You know, stuff like this, but for Windows.
- Rebooted
- I downloaded this.
- Rebooted one more time.
Now everything works fine. Total money spent: $310.00. Total time spent: just under four hours.Some things in life are needlessly fucking complicated and obscure. For everything else (fun, productivity, selection, support, choice) there's Windows.
This message is brought to you by the Common Sense League Of Wisconsin. "Vacating Parent's Basements And Saving Minds One Copy Of Windows At A Time (TM)".
My GOD you people are insane.
Mod away, like I give a flying fuck.
Why? They feel that it's basically the same thing. This crowd doesn't like to think it is, but it probably is. If this works for Mythic then it pretty much validates Microsoft's claims over Lindows, assuming there wasn't enough precedent to begin with.
It always works both ways.
Slashdot's comments are next to worthless. It's mostly a bunch of cows following the ass in front of them
A keeper!
You might want to warn him about the high cost and poor customer support of open source packages. Different costs, but costs nonetheless.
Vertical applications is one area where free software has a long way to catch up still.
So, go ahead and post links with proof of your claims. Thanks!
I'd like you to provide some proof that Microsoft currently forces OEMs to include WMP and omit any other music players in their systems. Your post is a bit confusing to me because every single Dell box nowadays ships with WMP and Real. Dell is pretty much the biggest OEM of them all. And believe me, I just bought two Dell laptops and the first thing I did was to kill the AOL and Real crap.
So, again, please provide some backing proof of your claims. A link or something. It seems to me that if you're going to mouth off like this you should have some solid evidence to back what you're saying.
Thanks!
This incompatibility you talk about is interesting. All of these products are based on the COM binary format specification. And again, they are designed to work with each other. I don't know how to try and prove this to you - I've been using them for the better part of six years. They have bugs, yes. All software has bugs. But I've never had to cancel a project because I couldn't figure out how to make them work together. Sorry, that's how it is.
- assistance from Redmond failed to solve problem
I've had Microsoft support people come on site, solve a particularly nasty problem and then use their laptop to compile a patch in front of me. I don't know what your problem was (and apparently you don't either) but in general Microsoft can identify issues with their software and then issue a fix. I don't know what your support arrangement was, either. But that's my personal experience.
project eventually deemed unworkable and killed
This happens on the mainframe as well. It's irrelevant insofar as your other points are dubious at best.
My story may even be false, it's possible. IT is so complex that the real story is often hard to uncover.
So... you weren't actually there, right? This is hearsay?
But the conclusion that MS products are heavily vertical and often interoperable only within tight margins (specific OS, specific SP) remains, and is well-known to anyone who has developed for Windows.
Oh, most definitely true. No question about it. If I want to make XP and NT4 talk to each other I normally use the lowest common denominator: TCP/IP. Or a subset of RPC/DCOM. If I want to use the "elegant" vertical tight protocols with lots of flash and bang and transaction support and whatnot, I think it's only fair to assume that my environment should be pretty much homogeneous. Right down to the service pack. But this is true for all platforms that provide anything more advanced than sockets, not just Windows.
Attacking my credentials is not a response.
I wasn't attacking your credentials as much as the validity of your anecdote and your point in posting it to begin with. Like I said, I have no problem with people going off like this, but you should expect someone to call you on it. If you were talking about a botched project involving DirectX you wouldn't have gotten a peep from me, because that's a technology I don't understand or otherwise use. But large distributed systems on Windows using COM+/MSMQ/BizTalk/AC2K/HIS2K/etc... well, that's what I do for a living. And when I say they work it's because they do. Whenever I see someone assert how some company cancelled a project and lost a bazillion dollars because these technologies "don't work" I get a bit worked up.
Actually I've seen projects like these scrapped - but because someone couldn't get some Microsoft technology to work with some Oracle or IBM or PeopleSoft technology. That's where things get dicey, regardless of vendors' claims to the contrary.
Showing me the well-defined Microsoft APIs that have been used by Microsoft's own application development teams without compromise... now that would be a worthy response
I'm not sure what you mean. For example, everything in Windows uses COM. From the shell down to the graphics subsystem. COM+ and MSMQ are perfectly interoperable if you know what you're doing. And so on. Just because Windows has a pretty GUI it doesn't mean you can write complex applications using wizards and widgets. It doesn't work that way.
Translation: We didn't know what we were doing, so we fucked it up. And now when I remember, I blame it on the vendor. It's so much better that way.
I guess around the time they stopped making use cases and actually tried to scale the prototypes up to work on their clusters.
See above. Because I surmise you're concluding that the same group of people with the same design using some CORBA implementation and MQSeries or some other IBM software would have actually managed to finish the project.
[...] it was an engineer from the bank who finally discovered the real problem, apparently.[...]
Do you or do you not know what actually happened? "Apparently"? I thought you were talking as a sort of authority on why COM+ and MSMQ couldn't talk to each other.
The COM+ developers and the MSMQ developers knew their own products very well but were unable to figure out what was happening between the two.
Statistics are a bitch. Especially when they come in a single data point. You know, because I've successfully designed and implemented extremely complex systems using these two technologies. Yes, using clusters (AC2K) actually. In fact you could say they're my bread and butter. I think you're just like everyone else who has a chip on their shoulder and a dubious anecdote to tell to anyone who will listen. After all, you don't get the code and Microsoft is evil, so ergo whatever technology they produce can be reasonably expected to suck. There's always the very valuable "well I can't see their code so I can't fix mine" argument. Oh and, of course the whole debacle made the company cautious about using any other Microsoft technologies. Classic.
So I'd suggest that in the future, unless you have some technical backing and cold hard facts to go with it, to just keep this little story to yourself. Not because I fear FUD, but because it simply proves that, if you're an idiot, you won't be able to design decent systems or write good code, no matter what the platform or middleware technologies happen to be. Seems to me that this is quite evident from your case study.
OTOH, since it's just XML you can theoretically create an implementation of the engine in any platform where you have an XML parser available, which is pretty much any meaningful platform in existence. Just bind it to your GUI/widget set/rendering engine and you're all set.
I mean, if Mono can create a complete (or almost complete) CLR implementation that runs on Linux I don't see why they or someone else can implement this as well.
I surmise next year when KDE 3.3 is released we'll be having the same conversation. Some dude will breathlessly post to Slashbork about how he has seen the future. Yes, it's so bright we gotta wear shades. There will be nasal laughter and pointless lame jokes by the metric ton coming out of basements everywhere. And "M$" will be doomed for good this time. No, really. This time it's for real.
I mean, for god's sake. I can't even install a stupid font without borking X and having it dump me in a console. Don't even get me started on changing resolutions or color depths.
In the immortal words of little children everywhere who believe in fairy tales,
Well, if I'm a troll, you're just pathetic.
As an aside, maybe now the zealots will stop clamoring for the code when Linksys or some other hardware manufacturer is determined to be in breach of the GPL by some LKML poster with too much time on his hands. It's only fair, I think.
I applaud Mandrake
Yes, I'm you sure do. Now be a good little zealot and fuck off.
[1] This is a rethorical question, so don't try to answer.
You might as well go back to the tried and true
- Sell free software
- ???
- Profit!!1!
That's about a valid "business model" as any.I don't want to see them go out of business - that's no skin off my ass, really. But to wax poetic about how "this proves that Linux companies can make money" is stupid. RedHat - now there's a business model.
What's that? Showing ads during installation or begging for donations because you're going under? Or releasing a product that fries hardware?
Don't know about the submitter, but in the normal world this is not considered a "business model". It's called something else.
How this idiot got modded up so far I'll never know.
Oh wow. What should we call you? Hysterical asshole with no mod points to spare?
Go cry somewhere else.
Hope that helps.
I'll nitpitck your nitpick. This particular attack was followed by one of the flag officers saying it was a 50 kiloton nuke. Quite different from a 50 megaton device.
I can see surviving a 50KT airburst (or spaceburst I guess) as being actually viable with proper physical shielding. Heck, you can survive that today in a sufficiently hardened underground bunker. Also, keep in mind that only a fraction of the blast wave hits the ship (because the blast travels equally in all directions), and there is no wind or firestorm in space. So it's just energy and radiation.
Rather, I'd nitpick the use of the 50MT figure. Clearly the writers were looking for a super-sized bomb and they probably heard that 50MT is about the highest yield achieved from a detonation to date (this was a theoretical 100MT clean device exploded by the Soviets in 1961 that vaporized a small island). However, why would the Cylons bother with such a large bomb? Most devices over 5MT are extremely inefficient, with a 50% actual yield expected under the best of circumstances. Detonating a concentric pattern of 7 to 11 smaller (200-375KT) devices would have been much better - no city would survive the merging blast fronts. In fact that's what modern nuclear warfare strategy dictates. The era of the >5MT bomb was over by 1968.
But oh well, whatever. Just wanted to nitpick =)
As for this particular problem, as always Bashdork makes it seem like the end of the world, front and center. Check the other responses on this article - Mozilla is also vulnerable. I'm running Mozilla 1.6a (2003110515) and I see the "http://www.microsoft.com/" URL on the Secunia spoof page. This kind of puts it in perspective, eh?
Mozilla is an excellent browser, that's for sure. But it is what it is because IE4 raised the bar so high (compared to NSN) that there was really nowhere to go. I personally use both, and I'm glad that Mozilla is (finally) giving IE a run for its money. But to go from embarrassed silence to this... well, as so many other areas where open source had to play catch up, the FUD tends to convey the idea that Microsoft has always produced non-functional "crap" and everyone else has been running circles around them forever.
Very funny. Oh, and the "economy cereal" thing? Brilliant. I've heard the same thing said about Mozilla (albeit with a different angle), with its 40-second load times and cluncky one-size-fits-all non standard GUI. Not that I'd agree though. But hey, don't let that put a dent in your superb flaming skillz.
And let's see how long it takes for the Mozilla folks to patch this one. And of course, for all those people running older builds to actually download and install.
This works occasionally. Not every codec can be found at codecs.microsoft.com, obviously. Unlike the other poster, my experience is about say, 50-50. But it's still not a sure thing for WMP to find and install it every time.
*snort*
BTW, that's not the only thing in Fedora she complained about - do you have a valid counterpoint about anything else in the review, or just that in your opinion she was too stupid to compile Gaim?
She's borderline obnoxious and she basically games slashbork by submitting links to OSNews to drive her ad views through the roof, but other than that her reviews are perfectly valid. That you don't like them because you don't get a woody when you read them is besides the point.
So I guess we'll take whatever you say with a gran of salt, hmmmm?
Um, bullshit. Installing XP takes about 1 hour and 1 (exactly one) reboot. Installing the base Office 2000 takes about 20 minutes, assuming you fiddled a little with the settings. Office does not require a reboot, especially not on XP. It might on Windows 9x. Running Windows Update takes about 30 more minutes and one reboot (minus the download time, which you conveniently chose not to include in your estimate).
I don't see where you're getting your 7 hour figure here. Oh wait, maybe I do.
In any case, you're installing RH almost completely through apt. The typical user is not going to do that, they'll install from the CDs. This is just another example of how disconnected from reality you people are. That you can do it doesn't mean that everyone else can, and ultimately this thread is talking about users. You know, non-programmers or sysadmins.
Next time you find your computer DDOS'ing some corporation
Which means you fucked up and let the virus in to begin with, whereby it ceased to be an annoyance and became a problem. I can probably turn your Linux machine into a zombie just as easily, especially if you let me. Or, maybe I could use a kernel exploit to root you. Or, maybe I could go through SSH if you're running an old enough version you forgot to patch. OTOH, if you don't rely on the idea that your OS is impenetrable by design and takes steps to secure it, that won't happen, will it? It works the same way on Windows, regardless of whether you'd like to admit that or not.
Hope that helps.
Well, you must know about building a business model more than people who already run a company. I guess that makes you an expert.
The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".
That's the way it works in the real world my man. You write software for a commercial OS, and then you sell it. Microsoft will give you nothing more than IBM will if you write an application for OS/390. And would you care to clarify and back up how TT "pays" Microsoft for the "privilege"?
It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms
Really? Last I looked (five minutes ago actually, since I happen to be coding) there are exactly two "widget" sets in Win32, one of which hasn't changed in 10 years. If you want more power you can extend them easily, or use something else, like wxWindows. And how is writing software for Windows more difficult again? More difficult than what?
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation
OK now, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. What the hell are you talking about? Documentation segfaults and experts??
The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work
This is about as pathetic an argument as you can humanly come up with. DirectX is a graphics API and it's used to write games. Games. Get some perspective here. The Win32 API is bar none the most stable and backwards-compatible I've ever worked with (and yes, I've worked with commerical Unices and Linux).
I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.
Typical "you poor idiots you don't know how green the grass is over here" zealot. Here's a newsflash: There are people out there who are not "chained to their desks" and enjoy writing software for Windows. You might conjure up images of slaves hitting keyboards all day if that makes you feel better, but that doesn't make it true. And "whims of Redmond"? I'd like to see you run a GUI-based application written in 1989 on RedHat 9. I mean, I can still run Windows 3.0 apps on Windows XP, so that would be a fair comparison.
Oh wait, there was no GUI Linux in 1989. Never mind.
The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end.
Really now. "I can't see the code so it must suck". Hundreds of thousands of developers writing successfull applications for Windows must be figments of my imagination. And BTW, I'd just as well have the vendor fix the problem instead of wading through and trying to understand their code. It's called "productivity", not tinkering. Well, at least if you expect to get paid for what you're doing.
Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows
Yes, because everyone thinks like you do, all over the world. Everyone wants to code for Linux, with its seventeen mutually incompatible widget libraries. Yeah, I can't believe I hadn't seen the light until now. Oh and of course we all want to be freed of the "slavery", yes. Damn, that makes sense.
Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
In other words, you are about as disconnected from reality as the average open source code monkey. Which I guess doesn't surprise me that much.
Nobody had brought up the lame French behavior in WW2 until they started blasting the american people for the actions of the government currently in power. In this regard, I think it's more than fair to condemn the "entire French people" for the actions (or rather, inactions) of their government.
Who's the "stupid cunt" now? "Go off and get killed for your country"? What is is it exactly you think americans are doing in Iraq? While the french wring their hands and lament the fact that they've lost an important customer and so this year it will be a bit more difficult to cover up the deficits brought on by their massively corrupt government?
No my friend, fuck you, and fuck the stupid crackhead moderators that think you're somehow insightful. You're just an ignorant stupid cunt with a chip on your shoulder.