Come on, man, if you use your phone to plan to murder the President, and you leave a message on somebody's machine about it, don't you think the Secret Service is going to look into that?
If you drive down the highway with five keys of coke on the back seat, don't you think the cops will search the rest of your car?
And if you participate in an activity that is blatantly illegal (a union sickout), don't you expect to get prosecuted? If we were talking about handwritten notes on somebody's fridge ("Call in sick on next Monday") would you still be horrified? The employee owns the paper and pen, but that's still subject to search and seizure.
Relax, stop being a knee-jerk. They did something illegal, and their stuff got searched. It doesn't matter who owned the computer, or that it was even a computer. They did something illegal, and that's what happens when you do something illegal - or even look like you did. You get seached. C'est la vie.
Northwest asked the court for permission to check the computers for evidence of an illegal activity. Wake up, folks, it's no different than any other search & seizure.
If you deal drugs, The Man will get a search warrant and comb your house looking for evidence.
If you call a sickout at work when it's illegal, The Man will get a search warrant and comb your house looking for evidence.
In both cases, computers are just as fair game as your answering machine, your fridge, or your trash can. Why are you all suddenly so paranoid? Don't you realize they've had this same right for a long, long time? Nothing's changed about this. Even Al Capone had to let the feds look through his cooked books, and this is no different. He owned his accounting papers, you own your computer, but if you use it for illegal activities and The Man gets a warrant, you're wide open.
That's exactly what gets so many users in trouble, man. Why would you think that no one at your business would be smart enough to figure out how to boot Linux when you can stroll down to any major bookstore and pick up a copy of Linux for Dummies?
That's the point behind every pie-in-the-sky competition. When JFK got up on the podium and said he wanted a man on the moon, he was really standing in front of a hundred thousand engineers and saying, "I dare you." This group is doing the same thing.
Will we get a new make out of it? You and I would say no, but all it takes is a few kids sitting around somewhere listening to us laugh, and they get even more fired up.
The money isn't going to be what drags the programmers out of the woodwork - it's going to be the recognition that goes along with the money. (Sadly, the only way to get recognition in these IPO days is money, but that's another rant.) Ten years ago, someone could have waved a hundred thousand dollar check in front of Linus's nose, and it wouldn't have got us to this point any faster.
As if. How would weather.com KNOW if we've already had our LOW temp for the day? That would be akin to saying we've already had our high temp for the day, which is also impossible. The temperature drops in the evenings, remember?
If you look up your local weather on weather.com by using their zip code box on the main page, it says that your low temperature today will be zero. Doesn't matter where you live, your low will be zero. The high is correct, though. Can't say for certain that this is y2k-related, but you know how it goes. Us users are going to see everything with y2k written all over it.
I'm glad they finally gave up the ghost on that. Let's face it, the Amiga was awesome, but the name wasn't going to sell PC's. I mean, think about it - if you're Gateway, what name do you want to use? Gateway, or Amiga? They've got a heck of a lot of money invested in the Gateway brand, cow spots and all, and they'd be foolish to dilute that investment by adding a second name.
Some people on here have suggested that you simply change the image on the monitor so that bodies don't show up - only the bad stuff does, i.e. metal, thick plastic, etc.
So you're suggesting that the security officers watch a blank screen all day? How do they know when the system isn't working? Sure, you could put a little indicator on the screen showing that a human was passing through, but I don't think it would accomplish the same goal as the alternative: being patted down. And I don't think that having my (unattractive) image on a screen is worse that being patted down.
I agree that the long-term possibilities for this thing are insiduous, though.
Uptime is irrelevant for home users because of a few simple facts:
Home users turn off their computers at night. Most of the Windows users I know aren't running mail servers or FTP servers that require constant uptime, so they power down at night to save some pennies on the juice bill.
Home users don't have uninterruptible power supplies. If the power goes out, the last thing they want to be doing is sitting in front of their computer. The $100 investment just doesn't make sense for them, and thus, they experience downtime with every power drop.
Home computers are used by children. Your spiffy FreeBSD machine is probably locked in a wiring closet somewhere, well away from six year olds with a penchant for DirectX games and dripping their Cokes on the keyboard.
Home computers are moved around. It might sound odd, but you're much more likely to shut down and pull the plug on a home system than a server just to move it over a few feet or to clean underneath it.
I'm not meaning to slam Windows as a home operating system, but isn't it fair to say that Windows (all flavors, even NT) has more home users than FreeBSD? Isn't it thereby, safe to assume, that if you really have an accurate survey of uptime, Windows will naturally be lower? Just something to keep in mind.
It's amazing how much positive feedback that one man generates. There's not a lot of computer people we can point to that we can say, "Now THAT person embodies a lot of good things in the computer community, and good things to come."
Even MS boosters don't rally behind Bill like this. (I should know.)
Patent #93,593,376: A method of testing web servers by writing an interesting story for nerds, adding a few large JPG's, and then posting said link to slashdot.org. The result of posting is a large and immediate increase in web traffic, not for purposes of advertising (because said nerds don't have any money to buy things) but only to test the reliability of one's web server.
Licensing will be a no-brainer. If a company wants to test their servers, they can just mirror a six-month old news story and tell Hemos about it. "Psst - there's an article on here about why Linux web servers aren't as good as NT. It's only six months old - it's still news!"
That's it! That's the answer! You cheated and read it in a book, didn't cha?
Re:Discuss why Linux didn't do as well as you hope
on
Web Server Comparisons
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· Score: 1
Right on. I'll also add a few things:
One of the knee-jerk posters complained that ZD didn't use the latest kernel, then somebody re-read it and realized that this article was written way back in May when that kernel wasn't available. Even if it had been written yesterday, the NT camp could then legitimately complain that ZD should have used Windows 2000, which is a better web server and is theoretically available today (check your newsgroups.)
Every time one of these gets posted, people scream and moan about the box not being configured correctly. "If only we'd have been at the helm, we'd have won that race," they say, complaining about how ZD didn't do hours and hours of tuning work to get the Linux box just right. You know what? They didn't put hours and hours into tuning the NT box, either, and the result still stands.
Remember that this article was reviewing e-commerce site tools, not just regular site tools. They made it pretty apparent in the beginning of the article that Linux has a virtual lock on things that don't involve e-commerce.
If you're implying that lawyers could do anything about the y2k problem, I'm not sure how I follow you. I certainly wouldn't want them modifying code.
But seriously, they did quite a bit. If you've applied for a business loan in the last two years, you've probably had to fill out y2k disclosures. They've worked hard with the SEC to get notifications. They've done a lot to make sure the public can get access to company information about y2k. (Of course, most of that info is BS, but what else can we do?)
I agreed with you right up until the part about the tollbooths. (haha) Here's why:
3M patented the Post-It Note and made a fortune. If they would have "open-sourced" it as you suggest, and allowed anybody and their brother to use the technology, do you really think the office supply industry would have benefitted "from further innovation and not entrenched battles" as you suggest? Do you think we would have had a sticky-note revolution?
Of course not. There are plenty of products out there that are indeed truly revolutionary, and that can't really be improved a whole heck of a lot. Banner ads are a perfect example.
Yes, Slashdot would have existed. Things similar to Slashdot existed for a long, long time - they were called local BBS's. We had this discussion here a while back. There will always be free forums for informed individuals to discuss ideas.
Maybe Geocities might not have come to fruition - but is that such a bad thing?
(Don't get me wrong - I loved the rest of your post!)
It's not me who does the hiring, speedy. If it was me doing the hiring, we'd have a crack team of Linux professionals to do everything from load the paper in the copier to make the financial decisions. But that doesn't quite make sense to the big guys with the dough. Why should we hire computer engineers for secretaries? That's why the Good Lord created network admins.
Keep in mind that even the title of the article pretty well portrays how these lawyers are seen in the eyes of their own community. I hang out with a lot of lawyers (don't ask) and they rank patent suits right down there with ambulance chasers.
Lawyers are just like CS guys in a way: they want to be involved in important, meaningful projects. Suits like the etoy/Etoys thing are nowhere near important or meaningful. Get a bunch of lawyers in a room and ply them with drinks, and pretty soon you hear that they don't give a rip about things like this.
Now, y2k, on the other hand...that's bad news. They smack their lips greedily at our plight, because it's so incredibly easy to prove that the year 2000 was a foreseeable problem that we should have taken into account...
As a network admin, you'd have to be crazy to foist Linux on a group of unsuspecting secretaries for exactly the same reasons you discuss.
People at work don't have the time to learn awk. They don't have the time to grapple the finer points of command lines. As a network admin, I can vouch for the fact that most users don't even have the time to go into "Tools, Options" in Microsoft Office when they're trying to get their work done. They race around, looking for a button that says, "Analyze All My Data And Print The Good Stuff In Arial 12, Landscape." If it's not that easy, then they don't have the time to use it. Of course you don't care about the average user, because not only are you brighter than one, but you're also not tasked with helping them on their computers.
Those of us who actually have to deal with the average user wish, beg, pray for a super-usable version of Linux and applications to match. I'm right there with you, man - I *know* how stable Linux is, I know how powerful it is, I know how flexible it is. But you and I have taken literally years to play around with Unix & Linux, and I can't ask that from a secretary when her next sentence to me is, "I don't know why I'm learning this anyway. I'm looking for another job over at Company Y where they pay another fifty cents an hour."
I care about using my computer, too. But I also care about using my VCR, and I was really happy when VCR Plus came out. I'm not stupid, but wow, it's great to just push five numbers and hit GO, and know that it's definitely going to tape Futurama in its entirety. Sure, I know how to program it, but I don't even have to think when I use VCR Plus. It just works, bam, done.
Is vi as fast as VCR Plus? Sure. But it ain't easy for a secretary to walk in and create a two-column report with a bar graph in vi. It can be done in a matter of seconds with Word without ever having to read a single word of text.
I'm not slamming the usability of Linux - I'm just saying that yes, it is good enough for you as a mathematician familiar with awk and vi, but it's not good enough yet for the secretaries. And there's a lot more secretaries than mathematicians.
In a sense, yes, it *IS* news when a Linux company has its act together enough to put out a press release like this.
How many of us work for technology companies that put out stunning products, but nobody ever hears about them? RedHat didn't skyrocket to great stock heights just because they have a Linux distribution that's easy to use: they also have a business model that makes sense, and PR people who know how to push the right buttons. Being a great tech company isn't about making great products - it's about getting the right spin. Think Micro$oft, for example. The press oohs and aahs over products with "less bugs than last year" because the reps are kind enough to show them how it works.
So many Linux users sit around and grumble about RedHat, but nobody ever thinks to talk to their local newspaper and invite the tech columnist to user's group meetings. The next time you have a Linux install party, think about inviting someone from your local media. You've read your local paper, right? The tech column is always horribly uninformed. Those guys are starving for information from people JUST LIKE YOU AND ME, and it's our job to get the good news out.
It's up to you and me, folks. Nobody else is writing press releases for your favorite distribution. Who's the local PR guy for Linux? YOU are. Show the press how it works, and it'll pay off.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, man, if you use your phone to plan to murder the President, and you leave a message on somebody's machine about it, don't you think the Secret Service is going to look into that?
If you drive down the highway with five keys of coke on the back seat, don't you think the cops will search the rest of your car?
And if you participate in an activity that is blatantly illegal (a union sickout), don't you expect to get prosecuted? If we were talking about handwritten notes on somebody's fridge ("Call in sick on next Monday") would you still be horrified? The employee owns the paper and pen, but that's still subject to search and seizure.
Relax, stop being a knee-jerk. They did something illegal, and their stuff got searched. It doesn't matter who owned the computer, or that it was even a computer. They did something illegal, and that's what happens when you do something illegal - or even look like you did. You get seached. C'est la vie.
Northwest asked the court for permission to check the computers for evidence of an illegal activity. Wake up, folks, it's no different than any other search & seizure.
If you deal drugs, The Man will get a search warrant and comb your house looking for evidence.
If you call a sickout at work when it's illegal, The Man will get a search warrant and comb your house looking for evidence.
In both cases, computers are just as fair game as your answering machine, your fridge, or your trash can. Why are you all suddenly so paranoid? Don't you realize they've had this same right for a long, long time? Nothing's changed about this. Even Al Capone had to let the feds look through his cooked books, and this is no different. He owned his accounting papers, you own your computer, but if you use it for illegal activities and The Man gets a warrant, you're wide open.
That's exactly what gets so many users in trouble, man. Why would you think that no one at your business would be smart enough to figure out how to boot Linux when you can stroll down to any major bookstore and pick up a copy of Linux for Dummies?
Loved the post, but there's something ironic about getting your technology news via the History Channel, eh?
That's the point behind every pie-in-the-sky competition. When JFK got up on the podium and said he wanted a man on the moon, he was really standing in front of a hundred thousand engineers and saying, "I dare you." This group is doing the same thing.
Will we get a new make out of it? You and I would say no, but all it takes is a few kids sitting around somewhere listening to us laugh, and they get even more fired up.
The money isn't going to be what drags the programmers out of the woodwork - it's going to be the recognition that goes along with the money. (Sadly, the only way to get recognition in these IPO days is money, but that's another rant.) Ten years ago, someone could have waved a hundred thousand dollar check in front of Linus's nose, and it wouldn't have got us to this point any faster.
Now's your chance to do some good with those zillions of dollars you made from the RedHat and VA Linux IPO's. Let's make some donations.
(I say "Let's", even though I didn't get in on the IPO. )
If uptime is measured for servers, why do they include Windows 98? ???
When was the last time you flew? You don't carry your suitcases through the metal detector, speedy.
As if. How would weather.com KNOW if we've already had our LOW temp for the day? That would be akin to saying we've already had our high temp for the day, which is also impossible. The temperature drops in the evenings, remember?
If you look up your local weather on weather.com by using their zip code box on the main page, it says that your low temperature today will be zero. Doesn't matter where you live, your low will be zero. The high is correct, though. Can't say for certain that this is y2k-related, but you know how it goes. Us users are going to see everything with y2k written all over it.
Here's a link for an example.
I'm glad they finally gave up the ghost on that. Let's face it, the Amiga was awesome, but the name wasn't going to sell PC's. I mean, think about it - if you're Gateway, what name do you want to use? Gateway, or Amiga? They've got a heck of a lot of money invested in the Gateway brand, cow spots and all, and they'd be foolish to dilute that investment by adding a second name.
Some people on here have suggested that you simply change the image on the monitor so that bodies don't show up - only the bad stuff does, i.e. metal, thick plastic, etc.
So you're suggesting that the security officers watch a blank screen all day? How do they know when the system isn't working? Sure, you could put a little indicator on the screen showing that a human was passing through, but I don't think it would accomplish the same goal as the alternative: being patted down. And I don't think that having my (unattractive) image on a screen is worse that being patted down.
I agree that the long-term possibilities for this thing are insiduous, though.
Uptime is irrelevant for home users because of a few simple facts:
Home users turn off their computers at night. Most of the Windows users I know aren't running mail servers or FTP servers that require constant uptime, so they power down at night to save some pennies on the juice bill.
Home users don't have uninterruptible power supplies. If the power goes out, the last thing they want to be doing is sitting in front of their computer. The $100 investment just doesn't make sense for them, and thus, they experience downtime with every power drop.
Home computers are used by children. Your spiffy FreeBSD machine is probably locked in a wiring closet somewhere, well away from six year olds with a penchant for DirectX games and dripping their Cokes on the keyboard.
Home computers are moved around. It might sound odd, but you're much more likely to shut down and pull the plug on a home system than a server just to move it over a few feet or to clean underneath it.
I'm not meaning to slam Windows as a home operating system, but isn't it fair to say that Windows (all flavors, even NT) has more home users than FreeBSD? Isn't it thereby, safe to assume, that if you really have an accurate survey of uptime, Windows will naturally be lower? Just something to keep in mind.
It's amazing how much positive feedback that one man generates. There's not a lot of computer people we can point to that we can say, "Now THAT person embodies a lot of good things in the computer community, and good things to come."
Even MS boosters don't rally behind Bill like this. (I should know.)
Patent #93,593,376:
A method of testing web servers by writing an interesting story for nerds, adding a few large JPG's, and then posting said link to slashdot.org. The result of posting is a large and immediate increase in web traffic, not for purposes of advertising (because said nerds don't have any money to buy things) but only to test the reliability of one's web server.
Licensing will be a no-brainer. If a company wants to test their servers, they can just mirror a six-month old news story and tell Hemos about it. "Psst - there's an article on here about why Linux web servers aren't as good as NT. It's only six months old - it's still news!"
- Sorry, Hemos, you walked right into that one.
That's it! That's the answer! You cheated and read it in a book, didn't cha?
Right on. I'll also add a few things:
One of the knee-jerk posters complained that ZD didn't use the latest kernel, then somebody re-read it and realized that this article was written way back in May when that kernel wasn't available. Even if it had been written yesterday, the NT camp could then legitimately complain that ZD should have used Windows 2000, which is a better web server and is theoretically available today (check your newsgroups.)
Every time one of these gets posted, people scream and moan about the box not being configured correctly. "If only we'd have been at the helm, we'd have won that race," they say, complaining about how ZD didn't do hours and hours of tuning work to get the Linux box just right. You know what? They didn't put hours and hours into tuning the NT box, either, and the result still stands.
Remember that this article was reviewing e-commerce site tools, not just regular site tools. They made it pretty apparent in the beginning of the article that Linux has a virtual lock on things that don't involve e-commerce.
Even if I could, I wouldn't. She's a fox. :-D But to answer your question, she graduated from film school.
If you're implying that lawyers could do anything about the y2k problem, I'm not sure how I follow you. I certainly wouldn't want them modifying code.
But seriously, they did quite a bit. If you've applied for a business loan in the last two years, you've probably had to fill out y2k disclosures. They've worked hard with the SEC to get notifications. They've done a lot to make sure the public can get access to company information about y2k. (Of course, most of that info is BS, but what else can we do?)
I agreed with you right up until the part about the tollbooths. (haha) Here's why:
3M patented the Post-It Note and made a fortune. If they would have "open-sourced" it as you suggest, and allowed anybody and their brother to use the technology, do you really think the office supply industry would have benefitted "from further innovation and not entrenched battles" as you suggest? Do you think we would have had a sticky-note revolution?
Of course not. There are plenty of products out there that are indeed truly revolutionary, and that can't really be improved a whole heck of a lot. Banner ads are a perfect example.
Yes, Slashdot would have existed. Things similar to Slashdot existed for a long, long time - they were called local BBS's. We had this discussion here a while back. There will always be free forums for informed individuals to discuss ideas.
Maybe Geocities might not have come to fruition - but is that such a bad thing?
(Don't get me wrong - I loved the rest of your post!)
It's not me who does the hiring, speedy. If it was me doing the hiring, we'd have a crack team of Linux professionals to do everything from load the paper in the copier to make the financial decisions. But that doesn't quite make sense to the big guys with the dough. Why should we hire computer engineers for secretaries? That's why the Good Lord created network admins.
Keep in mind that even the title of the article pretty well portrays how these lawyers are seen in the eyes of their own community. I hang out with a lot of lawyers (don't ask) and they rank patent suits right down there with ambulance chasers.
Lawyers are just like CS guys in a way: they want to be involved in important, meaningful projects. Suits like the etoy/Etoys thing are nowhere near important or meaningful. Get a bunch of lawyers in a room and ply them with drinks, and pretty soon you hear that they don't give a rip about things like this.
Now, y2k, on the other hand...that's bad news. They smack their lips greedily at our plight, because it's so incredibly easy to prove that the year 2000 was a foreseeable problem that we should have taken into account...
As a network admin, you'd have to be crazy to foist Linux on a group of unsuspecting secretaries for exactly the same reasons you discuss.
People at work don't have the time to learn awk. They don't have the time to grapple the finer points of command lines. As a network admin, I can vouch for the fact that most users don't even have the time to go into "Tools, Options" in Microsoft Office when they're trying to get their work done. They race around, looking for a button that says, "Analyze All My Data And Print The Good Stuff In Arial 12, Landscape." If it's not that easy, then they don't have the time to use it. Of course you don't care about the average user, because not only are you brighter than one, but you're also not tasked with helping them on their computers.
Those of us who actually have to deal with the average user wish, beg, pray for a super-usable version of Linux and applications to match. I'm right there with you, man - I *know* how stable Linux is, I know how powerful it is, I know how flexible it is. But you and I have taken literally years to play around with Unix & Linux, and I can't ask that from a secretary when her next sentence to me is, "I don't know why I'm learning this anyway. I'm looking for another job over at Company Y where they pay another fifty cents an hour."
I care about using my computer, too. But I also care about using my VCR, and I was really happy when VCR Plus came out. I'm not stupid, but wow, it's great to just push five numbers and hit GO, and know that it's definitely going to tape Futurama in its entirety. Sure, I know how to program it, but I don't even have to think when I use VCR Plus. It just works, bam, done.
Is vi as fast as VCR Plus? Sure. But it ain't easy for a secretary to walk in and create a two-column report with a bar graph in vi. It can be done in a matter of seconds with Word without ever having to read a single word of text.
I'm not slamming the usability of Linux - I'm just saying that yes, it is good enough for you as a mathematician familiar with awk and vi, but it's not good enough yet for the secretaries. And there's a lot more secretaries than mathematicians.
In a sense, yes, it *IS* news when a Linux company has its act together enough to put out a press release like this.
How many of us work for technology companies that put out stunning products, but nobody ever hears about them? RedHat didn't skyrocket to great stock heights just because they have a Linux distribution that's easy to use: they also have a business model that makes sense, and PR people who know how to push the right buttons. Being a great tech company isn't about making great products - it's about getting the right spin. Think Micro$oft, for example. The press oohs and aahs over products with "less bugs than last year" because the reps are kind enough to show them how it works.
So many Linux users sit around and grumble about RedHat, but nobody ever thinks to talk to their local newspaper and invite the tech columnist to user's group meetings. The next time you have a Linux install party, think about inviting someone from your local media. You've read your local paper, right? The tech column is always horribly uninformed. Those guys are starving for information from people JUST LIKE YOU AND ME, and it's our job to get the good news out.
It's up to you and me, folks. Nobody else is writing press releases for your favorite distribution. Who's the local PR guy for Linux? YOU are. Show the press how it works, and it'll pay off.