A closed set of poorly documented APIS doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code"
I disagree. Source code does not equal documentation, and if you have to trawl through source code to find the API, that's wasteful and time consuming (and just plain difficult). What source code does give though is the opportunity to trace down problems where the API isn't working as documented (or intended). That's a plus - but it's not necessarily a big plus.
But a much more interesting example is when they checked to see if DR DOS was running and flashed a FUD-filled error message to the user.
...in a beta version of the operating system. It never showed that message in a released version of the OS. While it might have been FUD, it was also true - Windows wasn't supported on DR DOS and Microsoft couldn't guarantee that it would run correctly. (Yeah, yeah, I know that the code was still **in** the released version, not active)
That didn't help at all - it's still horribly ugly and looks like it's based on Netscape 1.0 or something. It's hideous, I don't know how they could even come up with something this ugly on purpose. Thank god for Qute. If you want to make a good impression, appearances count!
I don't know if I've got some beta release of 0.9 on Windows, but "spiffy" would be the last word I would use to describe the default theme. Butt ugly springs to mind. It reminds me of Netscape 1.0. I had to download Qute to get it to look decent again. Presentation is everything, and the default theme just makes it look like a crappy browser (which it isn't).
I consider it a bug because it does it in Firefox and not IE (there's many other places it happens as well. As a user, this is annoying when you change from one browser to the other. It's not enough to make me stop using Firefox as my default browser though.
Have you ever tried to figure out why a program was crashing? No logging of any sort
Yep, and have been successful. Have you heard of event viewer? Have you heard of Dr Watson? These tools can provide a lot of information about crashes. If an application doesn't provide logging, then it might be wise to complain about the application writer...
The guy didn't say what apps he uses, or even hint that he had the first clue about X's copy/paste and selection buffers.
Which I guess illustrates part of the problem - if you have to have a clue about the selection buffers it's probably not an optimal design for average users.
Eg. I can't think of any two programs that can copy/paste graphics between each other.
So it doesn't work like Windows then. Windows CTRL+C/V or right click Copy & Paste works on graphics as well as text in Windows.
Not only do no MS tech support people see source code, apparently, but they wouldn't know how to understand it if they did.
Incorrect. Ever dealt with the Microsoft Premier support people? Their escalation path leads up through a couple of levels, then goes to the coders. If you're ringing the support line for your Office installation, then you're right, you don't get people who can see the source code. If you're using Premier and it needs escalation, eventually you will.
when you install your copy of XP professional where is your support agreement...
YOU DONT HAVE ONE
That's a good strawman, but he never actually claimed that there was a support agreement with XP. If I was pushed to make a guess, I would guess that it would be cost neutral supporting Linux over MS. I think you'd take a hit somewhere in there purely on volume - MS can do lower prices for support over more contracts where Linux doesn't have that luxury (yet). That will probably change in the future.
No, he's talking about Active Directory Group Policy which provides all the functionality of local group policy but centralised. The file permissions area is just one part of it though, there are plenty of other bits (service startup state etc etc). Local Group Policy is a subset of the AD based group policy, not the other way round
Thanks for totally ignoring the content of my post and posting a response to something I never claimed. Just to refresh your memory, and to make sure that you don't have to read the parent posts either, the post I responded to said that the problem was that the default volume is zero. I responded that it was quite clearly not the problem. Then you come in ranting about Virtual PC - I didn't even address this, it's probably a valid concern and all, but totally and utterly nothing to do with my comment.
Any way you try to back it up, Langa fails to acknowledge this important fact. It wasn't a real soundcard. It was a CPU emulated device
For christ's sake man, read the article. He explicitly covers that scenario - and it wasn't that ALSA volume defaults to 0. It was that the soundcard just wasn't there.
He's obviously a little confused - he makes a leap from there being security issues to wanting to get rid of the registry and seems to confuse issues with the registry with patch issues. I don't think he quite knows what he's doing....
Well, for a start the bit that's making you money isn't the bit that's GPL'ed. It's the bit that is under a totally different license that makes money.
Stop smoking crack : ) Do you have any idea how much money MS makes from support contracts?
I don't suppose you noticed my statement in the paragraph you responded to: it only works on a large scale. I would consider SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Microsoft large scale - I don't know about you.
There are _tons_ of ways to make big bucks off of software besides the selling price of the software. Actaully, for many large enterprise type applications, the software is the least expensive part of the deal.
Well there must be something stopping all those companies who are based on selling Open Source products from making big bucks - Red Hat is the only one who is even close to making money. They have revenue, sure, but they don't have big profits...
Most people wouldn't notice if you swapped Windows XP and XPde on their machines until they realized that their desktop had been running for a couple of months without a virus attack bringing their system to its knees.
You know, this sort of rhetoric isn't really helpful to any debate about the merits of different operating systems. In a professionally managed environment, it's relatively simple to prevent viruses. This sort of statement is about the same as "GPL is a cancer"
If want to use MySQL in proprietary software, you can buy a license and you can also buy support. The GPL allows you to make as much money as your talents will allow.
I wonder if you can see the obvious conflict in these statements. (Hint: You're not making money using the GPL - you're making it in spite of the GPL by working around it).
Now say I make an application and release it under the GPL. I start to sell this application and also sell support. You come along and try to sell it for half the price. Do you think people would buy a non-official version from you?
That's how a market works - I can offer the same product at a reduced rate. In terms of offering support, support is a really shitty way of making money from software development. You've got a lot of costs to recover if you're only charging for support, and it only works on a large scale (e.g. RedHat).
I don't know if Sun is violating the letter of the GPL, but it sounds like they might be violating the spirit.
But the spirit of the GPL is totally irrelevant. It's how the legalese is interpreted that matters - all that can be enforced is the letter of the law, not the spirit.
The GNU GPL doesn't prevent people from making a profit.
Of course it does - it allows you to redistribute anything released under the GPL for nothing, or for as low a cost as you like. It doesn't matter how much money the original author wants to sell it for, someone else could buy it and redistribute it for nothing. The only way people really get around this is to use trademarks (you can't resell RedHat as Redhat - it's theirs) or include some proprietary value add with it.
When I read through the comments to this story, there are a lot of situations where RAID cards are failing. But why?
It seems that most (all?) of those stories relate to controllers doing IDE RAID. I suspect the answer to the question of why so many are failing is that it's still a relatively new technology, only really widely available in the last 18 months. SCSI RAID controllers on the other hand don't seem to be plagued with the same issues.
This is a new problem. Did Microsoft do something to break mirroring controllers so that customers will buy Microsoft's far more expensive solution? Is there some problem with modern hardware no one has discovered?
Exactly what is Microsoft's far more expensive solution - software RAID?
Not at all. It just serves to illustrate the point that there obviously aren't many changes taking place to the database (i.e. light load) and therefore the database is returning most of it's results from cache. All you can really take from these benchmarks is that MySQL has a fast cache - not that it's "faster" than Oracle, MSSQL or Postgre.
If you read the article, it seems that MySQL performs so well because it basically returns most of the results from cache - i.e. the tables aren't changing much - which means the server isn't under load. Doing a select isn't really a load generating exercise. Try the same test when the database is doing considerable amounts of updates and the results will be very different. You'll also notice that the performance of MySQL drops by 2/3rds (according to the article) when you disable the in memory query results cache.
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doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code"
I disagree. Source code does not equal documentation, and if you have to trawl through source code to find the API, that's wasteful and time consuming (and just plain difficult). What source code does give though is the opportunity to trace down problems where the API isn't working as documented (or intended). That's a plus - but it's not necessarily a big plus.
...in a beta version of the operating system. It never showed that message in a released version of the OS. While it might have been FUD, it was also true - Windows wasn't supported on DR DOS and Microsoft couldn't guarantee that it would run correctly. (Yeah, yeah, I know that the code was still **in** the released version, not active)
That didn't help at all - it's still horribly ugly and looks like it's based on Netscape 1.0 or something. It's hideous, I don't know how they could even come up with something this ugly on purpose. Thank god for Qute. If you want to make a good impression, appearances count!
I don't know if I've got some beta release of 0.9 on Windows, but "spiffy" would be the last word I would use to describe the default theme. Butt ugly springs to mind. It reminds me of Netscape 1.0. I had to download Qute to get it to look decent again. Presentation is everything, and the default theme just makes it look like a crappy browser (which it isn't).
I consider it a bug because it does it in Firefox and not IE (there's many other places it happens as well. As a user, this is annoying when you change from one browser to the other. It's not enough to make me stop using Firefox as my default browser though.
Yep, and have been successful. Have you heard of event viewer? Have you heard of Dr Watson? These tools can provide a lot of information about crashes. If an application doesn't provide logging, then it might be wise to complain about the application writer...
Which I guess illustrates part of the problem - if you have to have a clue about the selection buffers it's probably not an optimal design for average users.
Eg. I can't think of any two programs that can copy/paste graphics between each other.
So it doesn't work like Windows then. Windows CTRL+C/V or right click Copy & Paste works on graphics as well as text in Windows.
Incorrect. Ever dealt with the Microsoft Premier support people? Their escalation path leads up through a couple of levels, then goes to the coders. If you're ringing the support line for your Office installation, then you're right, you don't get people who can see the source code. If you're using Premier and it needs escalation, eventually you will.
YOU DONT HAVE ONE
That's a good strawman, but he never actually claimed that there was a support agreement with XP. If I was pushed to make a guess, I would guess that it would be cost neutral supporting Linux over MS. I think you'd take a hit somewhere in there purely on volume - MS can do lower prices for support over more contracts where Linux doesn't have that luxury (yet). That will probably change in the future.
No, he's talking about Active Directory Group Policy which provides all the functionality of local group policy but centralised. The file permissions area is just one part of it though, there are plenty of other bits (service startup state etc etc). Local Group Policy is a subset of the AD based group policy, not the other way round
Any way you try to back it up, Langa fails to acknowledge this important fact. It wasn't a real soundcard. It was a CPU emulated device
And I never claimed it wasn't.
For christ's sake man, read the article. He explicitly covers that scenario - and it wasn't that ALSA volume defaults to 0. It was that the soundcard just wasn't there.
He's obviously a little confused - he makes a leap from there being security issues to wanting to get rid of the registry and seems to confuse issues with the registry with patch issues. I don't think he quite knows what he's doing....
Neither does lsass. What listens on port 445 is SMB - SMB requires authentication, so the worm connects and overflows the authentication mechanism.
Well, for a start the bit that's making you money isn't the bit that's GPL'ed. It's the bit that is under a totally different license that makes money.
Stop smoking crack : ) Do you have any idea how much money MS makes from support contracts?
I don't suppose you noticed my statement in the paragraph you responded to: it only works on a large scale. I would consider SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Microsoft large scale - I don't know about you.
There are _tons_ of ways to make big bucks off of software besides the selling price of the software. Actaully, for many large enterprise type applications, the software is the least expensive part of the deal.
Well there must be something stopping all those companies who are based on selling Open Source products from making big bucks - Red Hat is the only one who is even close to making money. They have revenue, sure, but they don't have big profits...
You know, this sort of rhetoric isn't really helpful to any debate about the merits of different operating systems. In a professionally managed environment, it's relatively simple to prevent viruses. This sort of statement is about the same as "GPL is a cancer"
I wonder if you can see the obvious conflict in these statements. (Hint: You're not making money using the GPL - you're making it in spite of the GPL by working around it).
Now say I make an application and release it under the GPL. I start to sell this application and also sell support. You come along and try to sell it for half the price. Do you think people would buy a non-official version from you?
That's how a market works - I can offer the same product at a reduced rate. In terms of offering support, support is a really shitty way of making money from software development. You've got a lot of costs to recover if you're only charging for support, and it only works on a large scale (e.g. RedHat).
Ok, maybe it doesn't prevent you from making a profit, but it certainly makes it very difficult.
But the spirit of the GPL is totally irrelevant. It's how the legalese is interpreted that matters - all that can be enforced is the letter of the law, not the spirit.
Of course it does - it allows you to redistribute anything released under the GPL for nothing, or for as low a cost as you like. It doesn't matter how much money the original author wants to sell it for, someone else could buy it and redistribute it for nothing. The only way people really get around this is to use trademarks (you can't resell RedHat as Redhat - it's theirs) or include some proprietary value add with it.
Which one - Asterix? Obelix? Vitalstatistix? Or just some random Frenchman?
Please, if anyone has the Gaul, return him to Bowie J. Poag. He can't sleep without him.
But Microsoft only recommend software RAID for small environments. They don't even use it themselves - they use massive HP EVA SAN's.
It seems that most (all?) of those stories relate to controllers doing IDE RAID. I suspect the answer to the question of why so many are failing is that it's still a relatively new technology, only really widely available in the last 18 months. SCSI RAID controllers on the other hand don't seem to be plagued with the same issues.
This is a new problem. Did Microsoft do something to break mirroring controllers so that customers will buy Microsoft's far more expensive solution? Is there some problem with modern hardware no one has discovered?
Exactly what is Microsoft's far more expensive solution - software RAID?
Not at all. It just serves to illustrate the point that there obviously aren't many changes taking place to the database (i.e. light load) and therefore the database is returning most of it's results from cache. All you can really take from these benchmarks is that MySQL has a fast cache - not that it's "faster" than Oracle, MSSQL or Postgre.
If you read the article, it seems that MySQL performs so well because it basically returns most of the results from cache - i.e. the tables aren't changing much - which means the server isn't under load. Doing a select isn't really a load generating exercise. Try the same test when the database is doing considerable amounts of updates and the results will be very different. You'll also notice that the performance of MySQL drops by 2/3rds (according to the article) when you disable the in memory query results cache.