But regarding MCSE, I still consider it to have been very helpful in my technical development (because I only used braindumps on one exam). If you study for it well, you CAN get something out of it (aside from the Network Infrastructure exam, where some of the networks look like they were designed by a 5-year old). In fact I think it is an excelent compliment to the LPIC exams (I am MCSE and LPIC-2 certified).
I have a friend who taught an MCSE training course for a while and said he could get me into it for cost, about half price. At the time I said something snotty like, "yeah, but then I'd have to work with NT." So now I'm between jobs and the headhunter I just spoke to said I should get an MCSE if I want to be sure to get a decent job quickly. But I still don't want to work with NT. And while I can understand that there are useful things to be learned from studying for it, and like your typical/. geek I am hesitant to support MS in any way.
Nevertheless, I have started collecting certifications. First was the LPIC-1, which I comfortably passed but found surprisingly difficult given that it was an entry-level exam. Next was the A+, which was a TOTAL joke. A monkey could pass the A+
I bought a study guide for the Network+ exam, but I'm a little hesitant given how ridiculous the A+ was. And I can't help but notice that CompTIA is pimping for Microsoft with its so-called Institute for Software Choice. Do I really want to give more money to these people?
I will almost certainly do the LPIC-2 exams sometime this fall. Not sure what else after that. It should be obvious by now that I'm something of an idealist, and really don't want to support corporations that engage in what I consider to be morally repugnant activities. Obviously with the collapse of the.coms the job market is really tight. I did decide on non-vendor specific, non-retireable certifications as a way of padding the resume, but not if it means paying a bunch of (increasingly scarce) money only to have the certification retired when $GREEDY_VENDOR decides to wring more cash out of its past graduates.
I know this is an old thread, but if anyone happens to read this post and has any suggestions, feel free to chime in.
I've used UNIX and Linux for close to ten years, and by now I have a pretty good idea how to do things in a secure and functional way. I've only had to admin an NT box once, and I migrated services off of it as quickly as I could.
Why? Not because I had any direct evidence of insecurity (this was before the real flood of NT vulnerabilities began), but because I knew I could do a better job with the tools I knew best.
But also:
- the NT machine tended to bluescreen every month or so for no apparent reason. The MCSE on staff was not overly troubled ("Oh I see the problem, it just needs a reboot"), but its flakiness did not fill me with confidence.
- the MS tactic of bundling the kitchen sink with the OS is just asking for trouble. Linux's modularity means you don't have to have a graphics layer on the server, for example, or any other unnecessary frills that provide opportunities for crackers.
- I believe the full-disclosure bug reporting model is orders of magnitude more responsive than what you get from proprietary vendors. Afaik, lots of reported linux bugs == lots of bugs get fixed because lots of people have access to the code.
- really excellent security tools are freely available: iptables, xinetd, snort, tripwire, nessus, nmap, chroot, etc. An interested beginner could make a linux server very hard to break into. I know {NT,W2K,XP} has more wizards and stuff, but is it easier (or even possible) to really see and control what's happening with the OS?
It also happens to be the best one, but that's another stuff.
I really like slackware's simplicity. For those of us who manually configure everything anyway, slack is the simplest, the fastest, the most stable, etc. Even better, the powerful installer allows you to cram it onto the smaller disks popular in older computers. It's really excellent for small servers and firewalls using otherwise useless hardware.
But I don't think slackware is for everyone. Linux is going to see huge growth in the next couple of years, and the n00bs can't reasonably be expected to do everything from a command line. There is a place for the relatively bloated redhats and mandrakes of the world that automagically work in (nearly) every case. If you were just getting started with linux, which would you prefer?
A best-of-both-worlds type compromise: slackware and webmin. Small, fast, stable, with an easy web-based configurator.
Great free programs I always install on windows boxes:
TclockEX A genuinely useful enhancement to the taskbar clock. It can show the date and has a resource monitor option, so you can tell at a glance if it's getting to be time for a pre-emptive strike (reboot). Very useful for all versions of windows.
Whisper Whisper is a password manager for windows. It's convenient to have all your passwords stored in one place, and the program itself is intuitive to use.
Transparent Makes icon text backgrounds transparent on the desktop. It's a small thing, but it really improves the look of windows. I've used it on 98 and 2000 and it works well.
Programmer's File Editor For people who need more power than notepad but are unwilling to learn vim, there's PFE, a very nice text editor. It's not vim, but it sure beats the hell out of notepad.
We all know full well how dangerous and restricting Palladium can and most likely be if it ever becomes the standard - open and free computing will end. If this happens, time to move out of the US where I can exercise my right to freely compute on the computer of my choice.
Don't count on it. America is exporting its copyright problems to the rest of the world. Living in a different country won't do us any good if all the hardware is infected and big {industry,gov't} traipses through my computer at will.
But I agree with your main point. There's an epic power grab going on that puts our future at risk, and we're all watching it happen. One of the real tragedies of the terrorist attacks is it was the beginning of the end of freedom in America.
Actually, it isn't. It's an excellent OS from what I hear, but I've never used it because back in the day I had a nifty-keen qic-80 floppy tape drive; linux supported it and freebsd didn't. But wait, you say. That was years ago, surely things have changed. Well, afaik freebsd still doesn't support qic-80 drives (no loss there, I admit), and linux still has better hardware autodetection and a wider range of drivers. This has much to do with why linux is more popular, despite the occasional problems you mention. For most users, it just works and works well.
...please cite examples where competent Windows administrators who kept up with Windows patches were stymied by a Windows problem...
Can you possibly be serious? I used to have to admin NT boxes, oh the pain. During my last tenure at a microsoft shop I migrated more and more services off NT until finally there was just one NT box doing secondary dns, and it couldn't even handle that without being rebooted all the time. And yes, I kept up with all the patches and all the other time consuming tasks NT boxes require. Fat lot of good it did.
The box that took over? A p2/300 with linux 2.2, 128mb ram and ide drives. Ran for months at a time doing mail, web, dns. Never hit swap, never crashed, never needed to be babysat. We had more serious hardware, but never bothered migrating because it just wasn't needed.
Money is a corrupting influence when tied in with politics, and I believe it goes against the very principles democracy is based upon.
It costs millions to get elected to anything these days. The fact that a successful election campaign needs vast financial support effectively eliminates responsible people who would act in our interest. What you end up with instead are whores who will do anything just to get to the show. I also think that campaign finance reform would go a long way toward stopping such abuses, which of course is why it'll never see the light of day.
Personally, I think that when introducing legislation to government, politicians should be required to come clean about all of their financial relationships with companies who stand to benefit from it. All such documents should be public, with heavy fines for cheaters. Since our interpid leaders in Washington do not seem inclined to wear f**k-me boots and day-glo miniskirts, this would be the next best way to tell the whores from that small, ineffective minority that actually has our best interests in mind. Chance of anything like this happening: same as snowball's chance in hell.
Re Bush: Mr. Bush got elected because his brother Jeb pushed through a new electoral districting scheme in Florida that negated the influence of thousands of lower income and/or non-white voters who traditionally voted Democrat. Yay democracy!
On the other hand, there's still a couple of years until the next election - plenty of time for voters to realize that Wubya is not a smart boy, and that more is needed in a President than Daddy's money and connections. Hopefully all the special interests who are running things today won't get us into too much trouble by then.
Sure, everything in linuxland is free anyway, but most of it just doesn't work for me. And I have tried to make it work, on and off for the past 4 years I have tried to be a linux desktop user. It just isn't happenening. No photoshop? dealkiller right there (don't even mention that toy GIMP). BTW I am a linux admin at work, so I do not have anything against using linux where it belongs.i
Having used linux since the rh5 & slack3 days, I do have sympathy for this. Setting up anything like a useable gui used to be an exercise in frustration. It's still frustrating in certain corner cases, the most noticable for beginning users is decent font handling. It should just work, and it often doesn't. Not without tweaking, anyway.
But times have changed, especially on the desktop. When was the last time you looked at kde and gnome? I have redhat 7.2 with ximian gnome and it's both pretty and functional. And unlike any version of windows, it *never* crashes. I have an extremely powerful and stable os that does exactly what I tell it, and I'll never go back.
I don't see how "CHOOSING linux" will get me away from palladium, when the warez crackers will help me avoid it without having to switch to an inferior desktop platform.
Because if enough people choose linux there'll be a big enough groundswell of resistance that palladium won't get off the ground. And warez crackers aren't the answer. The law will be used to bludgeon users, much as the DMCA is today, and only a tiny minority will attempt to get around it. Those that do will be subject to expensive legal harassment. We don't need a subculture of crackers. We need ordinary people to stand up and publically refuse to have anything to do with palladium.
Seriously folks, I don't think I am gonna convert anyone with this diatribe, but maybe all the "CHOOSE linux" people will read it and stop wondering why people are satisfied to "CHOOSE microsoft" even when they are an "evil corporation".
OK, you lost me there. Not everyone is willing to just sit by and let criminals dictate their computer use. The Bush administration is in Microsoft's pocket, therefore Microsoft is going to get away with their anti-trust crimes. But the difference *I* can make is to refuse to use their software. My first introduction to unix was 8 years ago in college and I fell in love with it. Even so, much of my motivation in using free software is moral. The more people who make this moral choice, the less chance the criminals in Redmond have of ramming palladium down our throats.
What's wrong with that? It's the right and good thing to do.
Free software represents a completely different worldview: openness, interaction, inclusiveness, community (/.), vs. closed, proprietary, trademarked, patented, set-top boxed, metered billed, monitored, televised, aol, hell.
Microsoft is walking a tightrope. On the one hand they want to squeeze as much money and choice from their users as humanly possible, even though these same policies are starting to drive users to free software.
The obvious superiority of Apache prevented Microsoft from taking over the web, and the same could happen to Palladium if enough people defect from the Microsoft camp and embrace free software. Linux is very close to being a viable alternative for unsophisticated users. We have mozilla, openoffice, kde and gnome. Every time I turn around there's some neat new feature. I think it'll happen by next year.
All we need is a critical mass of people to see the difference between being a Consumer, as Bill Gates insists on referring to us as, and a Person, and the rest will look after itself.
Palladium will never fly if users have any choice in the matter. Period. That's why there will continue to be a huge effort to marginalize the free software movement, just as there'll be an effort to legislate palladium's use in anything with a cpu that could conceivably manipulate data in any way. It will be very hard to avoid palladium once the hardware is polluted.
Yes, it will take some time to twist the arms of hardware manufacturers, and to make deals with all the content owners and and other interested parties. I don't see why that should detract from the basic premise. As for Microsoft admitting its software sucks, it's a setup for the bright future, i.e. palladium, which will be for our own good. Or so we will be assured.
Think of the money at stake, and who stands to benefit. Think of the larger issue our society is trying to hammer out: what's the line between fair use, and protecting the content of copyright owners? To what degree should our rights and freedoms be reduced now that it's feasible to monitor everyone, all the time?
My take on it is, the rights we enjoy now will continue to be taken away from us if we don't take steps to prevent it.
re: CHOOSING. Naturally, rational people will avoid palladium like the plague. That's why MS will do its best to remove any choice in the matter, something history has shown them to be extremely successful at. Two strategies:
1. Get support for palladium built into the hardware. They already have amd and intel onboard, and they're very talented at strong-arming hardware vendors. It would be very naive to underestimate them in this regard.
2. Have laws passed that mandate palladium, or whatever it morphs into in the coming years. All kinds of excuses will be made, most of them laughably stupid (it'll reduce spam!!). Obviously the real motives will be drm and in providing the various intelligence agencies with improved means to monitor computer activity.
Bingo. As Nathan Myhrvold once said, Microsoft wants to get a vig on every transaction going over the net. Tcp/ip doesn't have a built-in billing model, so they're trying to shoehorn one on top of it. Even though it will be a bloated, insecure mess, the government and the entertainment industry are and will remain enthusiastic supporters of palladium. All that data is an irresistable temptation: so much money to be made, so much monitoring to be done.
The real war will be between this plutocratic regime and the free software movement. The general public doesn't know it yet, but linux is very close to there on the desktop. This represents a serious threat to the universality of palladium, so Microsoft and its allies will try to have laws passed that criminalize free software use, and/or the use of general purpose (i.e. non-palladium equipped) computers.
Sound crazy? It's not. And the issue of freedom & privacy vs. big business & government is going to be huge, front page news as it gets closer and the general public gets a whiff of it. But Disney owns the news, so expect it to be more of a grassroots groundswell-type thing.
Who will win? I don't know. But I see a future that scares the hell out of me, and I really hope we're not too lazy to do something about it.
Well gee, if Disney didn't own the news maybe Joe Sixpack and his 200 million friends would learn enough about digital restrictions management to kill it before it got off the ground. Pretty convenient, that...
Why go with a relatively untested IA-64 arch when i could go with a Sun, IBM, or SGI box who have all been 64bit for years and have no x86 baggage at all? I'm certanly not saving any money going with Intel's chip plus the other 64bit architectures have much more software support in compairason to IA-64.
We all know that 64bit is going to replace 32bit. AMD and Intel are important because huge volumes and low costs are what will finally make 64bit machines ubiquitous, i.e. aunt Edna will be able to buy one at Walmart for a couple of hundred bucks. Like it or not one of these architectures will be the "new x86" and nearly all software will be written for it, displacing 32bit machines as well as all the 64bit niche architectures on the market now.
As for Sparc, Alpha, etc. being "better": Since when was the best solution guaranteed victory?
In the former Soviet Union everyone was required to vote, but all there was to pick from were interchangable Party henchmen with unibrows and cheap suits. Compulsary voting did not lead to any great flowering of liberalism there, and I doubt it would here either.
Refusing to vote at least allows you the privelege of not participating in the charade.
The goverment needs to make some decisions on this matter, and not just retarded stuff like the DCMA. They need to listen to the people, not just the Record companies's lobbyists.
This would be great if America wasn't already a plutocracy, which is to say a government by and for the wealthy. Very wealthy patrons bribe, oh I'm sorry, contribute to the political campaigns of, our elected representatives, effectively making them employees who protect their masters from inconvenient legal judgements (the MS antitrust conviction) and by passing business-friendly legislation (DMCA, etc.) that further cements the power of the corporate class.
This blatant whoring will never stop until strict legislation is put in place restricting huge political contributions and all the other less overt forms of bribery that go on today. But of course this will never happen while the wealthy minority is calling the shots. Kind of a catch-22 there...
Does he explain how software companies that go out of business leave their clients in the lurch?
The whole idea, you miserable excuse for a troll, is that if a free software company goes under the community can still use and improve the software. Now, if a closed source software vendor tanks, that's a whole other story.
Thank you for pointing out yet another advantage free software has over proprietary software.
And if you want windows, you get real windows disks, not those stupid "restore" disks.
This is an important consideration for linux users and others who dual-boot. Windows goes belly up, you pop in the restore cd, and it deletes ALL your partitions, wiping the entire disk just to restore one measly, bug-ridden OS.
I tell ya, there ought to be a law to stop anti-competitive practices like this. Oh, wait...
Good thing the rest of us have Linux! If Microsoft suceeds in doing this a vibrant underground market will spring up to supply hardware for PC's without Palladium. Only the ignorant will buy into this scheme.
Big deal! I use linux. What will it matter when all computer hardware has disney-approved encryption built-in, and it's illegal to circumvent it? 99% of computer users will still be f****d, and the net as a whole will become a vast cultural wasteland just like television is now.
The MS-Disneyfication of the net will be a tragedy for everyone, including all us linux geeks!!
And they'll get away with it if we don't put up more of a fight.
No one in their right mind is going to go along with all this drm crap. No one, that is, until the IP industry gets its bitches in Washington to pass legislation require all hardware manufacturers to build in support for it, and making it illegal for end users circumvent it.
Sound far-fetched? It isn't. In fact, there is an extremely good chance of this happening.
However, as a matter of principle, I prefer democracy.
Yes, its true that the security through obscurity claims of MS seem like blowing smoke, but obscurity is an accepted security paradigm.
Accepted by whom? Other than corporations with vested interests (i.e. Microsoft) and the book you mention above, I can't think of anyone who takes the obscurity model seriously. Bruce Schneier thoroughly debunks it in "Secrets and Lies," arguing that full disclosure and peer review is the only way to have any confidence at all in the security of a given piece of software. This is the method used by the free software movement, and it's why free software is in general so much more reliable and secure than proprietary software (i.e. Windows).
I agree that Microsoft likes the obscurity model for business reasons. They don't like revealing how their APIs function because that would promote interoperability with non-Microsoft software. Fortunately, there's a provision in the anti-trust agreement granted by the Bush administration that allows Microsoft to withhold information which could be used to compromise the security of Microsoft software. Hence, the Mundie speech. Hence, full-disclosure is dangerous and irresponsible, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Just a guess here, but Microsoft will use all this to completely deny interoperability with free software. In other words, it's business as usual for Microsoft and the anti-trust settlement isn't worth the paper it's written on.
The problem isn't a lack of text-based installers. It's that it's getting really hard to squeeze modern distributions like mandrake, redhat, suse, etc., onto older, slower computers. It's less effort to just start with a distribution like debian or slackware that gives you better control over the install process. I have an older pentium, and it runs slack8 like a champ.
However, I'm typing this on a redhat 7.2 box with ximian gnome. Not to single out redhat or anything, but I'm amazed at how polished modern distros are getting. Remember how painful it used to be to get X working? Well this time I just clicked ok a bunch of times. So it's bloated and hogs a couple of gigs of disk. Big deal, that's only 5% of the drive. It's worth it to have everything work out of the box.
It just depends on what you need. There's so many good distributions out there, there's bound to be one to suit just about any purpose.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but they've since killed winmag too.
Maybe they're agents of the sierra club or something, saving trees by buying up print magazines and killing them off. Crazy as it sounds, this makes more sense than cmp's business plan, whatever it is...
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, I have started collecting certifications. First was the LPIC-1, which I comfortably passed but found surprisingly difficult given that it was an entry-level exam. Next was the A+, which was a TOTAL joke. A monkey could pass the A+
I bought a study guide for the Network+ exam, but I'm a little hesitant given how ridiculous the A+ was. And I can't help but notice that CompTIA is pimping for Microsoft with its so-called Institute for Software Choice. Do I really want to give more money to these people?
I will almost certainly do the LPIC-2 exams sometime this fall. Not sure what else after that. It should be obvious by now that I'm something of an idealist, and really don't want to support corporations that engage in what I consider to be morally repugnant activities. Obviously with the collapse of the
I know this is an old thread, but if anyone happens to read this post and has any suggestions, feel free to chime in.
I've used UNIX and Linux for close to ten years, and by now I have a pretty good idea how to do things in a secure and functional way. I've only had to admin an NT box once, and I migrated services off of it as quickly as I could.
Why? Not because I had any direct evidence of insecurity (this was before the real flood of NT vulnerabilities began), but because I knew I could do a better job with the tools I knew best.
But also:
- the NT machine tended to bluescreen every month or so for no apparent reason. The MCSE on staff was not overly troubled ("Oh I see the problem, it just needs a reboot"), but its flakiness did not fill me with confidence.
- the MS tactic of bundling the kitchen sink with the OS is just asking for trouble. Linux's modularity means you don't have to have a graphics layer on the server, for example, or any other unnecessary frills that provide opportunities for crackers.
- I believe the full-disclosure bug reporting model is orders of magnitude more responsive than what you get from proprietary vendors. Afaik, lots of reported linux bugs == lots of bugs get fixed because lots of people have access to the code.
- really excellent security tools are freely available: iptables, xinetd, snort, tripwire, nessus, nmap, chroot, etc. An interested beginner could make a linux server very hard to break into. I know {NT,W2K,XP} has more wizards and stuff, but is it easier (or even possible) to really see and control what's happening with the OS?
But I don't think slackware is for everyone. Linux is going to see huge growth in the next couple of years, and the n00bs can't reasonably be expected to do everything from a command line. There is a place for the relatively bloated redhats and mandrakes of the world that automagically work in (nearly) every case. If you were just getting started with linux, which would you prefer?
A best-of-both-worlds type compromise: slackware and webmin. Small, fast, stable, with an easy web-based configurator.
Great free programs I always install on windows boxes:
TclockEX A genuinely useful enhancement to the taskbar clock. It can show the date and has a resource monitor option, so you can tell at a glance if it's getting to be time for a pre-emptive strike (reboot). Very useful for all versions of windows.
Whisper Whisper is a password manager for windows. It's convenient to have all your passwords stored in one place, and the program itself is intuitive to use.
Transparent Makes icon text backgrounds transparent on the desktop. It's a small thing, but it really improves the look of windows. I've used it on 98 and 2000 and it works well.
Programmer's File Editor For people who need more power than notepad but are unwilling to learn vim, there's PFE, a very nice text editor. It's not vim, but it sure beats the hell out of notepad.
But I agree with your main point. There's an epic power grab going on that puts our future at risk, and we're all watching it happen. One of the real tragedies of the terrorist attacks is it was the beginning of the end of freedom in America.
The box that took over? A p2/300 with linux 2.2, 128mb ram and ide drives. Ran for months at a time doing mail, web, dns. Never hit swap, never crashed, never needed to be babysat. We had more serious hardware, but never bothered migrating because it just wasn't needed.
Oh and btw, linux is free. HELLO?!
Personally, I think that when introducing legislation to government, politicians should be required to come clean about all of their financial relationships with companies who stand to benefit from it. All such documents should be public, with heavy fines for cheaters. Since our interpid leaders in Washington do not seem inclined to wear f**k-me boots and day-glo miniskirts, this would be the next best way to tell the whores from that small, ineffective minority that actually has our best interests in mind. Chance of anything like this happening: same as snowball's chance in hell.
Re Bush: Mr. Bush got elected because his brother Jeb pushed through a new electoral districting scheme in Florida that negated the influence of thousands of lower income and/or non-white voters who traditionally voted Democrat. Yay democracy!
On the other hand, there's still a couple of years until the next election - plenty of time for voters to realize that Wubya is not a smart boy, and that more is needed in a President than Daddy's money and connections. Hopefully all the special interests who are running things today won't get us into too much trouble by then.
But times have changed, especially on the desktop. When was the last time you looked at kde and gnome? I have redhat 7.2 with ximian gnome and it's both pretty and functional. And unlike any version of windows, it *never* crashes. I have an extremely powerful and stable os that does exactly what I tell it, and I'll never go back.
Because if enough people choose linux there'll be a big enough groundswell of resistance that palladium won't get off the ground. And warez crackers aren't the answer. The law will be used to bludgeon users, much as the DMCA is today, and only a tiny minority will attempt to get around it. Those that do will be subject to expensive legal harassment. We don't need a subculture of crackers. We need ordinary people to stand up and publically refuse to have anything to do with palladium. OK, you lost me there. Not everyone is willing to just sit by and let criminals dictate their computer use. The Bush administration is in Microsoft's pocket, therefore Microsoft is going to get away with their anti-trust crimes. But the difference *I* can make is to refuse to use their software. My first introduction to unix was 8 years ago in college and I fell in love with it. Even so, much of my motivation in using free software is moral. The more people who make this moral choice, the less chance the criminals in Redmond have of ramming palladium down our throats.
What's wrong with that? It's the right and good thing to do.
Free software represents a completely different worldview: openness, interaction, inclusiveness, community (/.), vs. closed, proprietary, trademarked, patented, set-top boxed, metered billed, monitored, televised, aol, hell.
Microsoft is walking a tightrope. On the one hand they want to squeeze as much money and choice from their users as humanly possible, even though these same policies are starting to drive users to free software.
The obvious superiority of Apache prevented Microsoft from taking over the web, and the same could happen to Palladium if enough people defect from the Microsoft camp and embrace free software. Linux is very close to being a viable alternative for unsophisticated users. We have mozilla, openoffice, kde and gnome. Every time I turn around there's some neat new feature. I think it'll happen by next year.
All we need is a critical mass of people to see the difference between being a Consumer, as Bill Gates insists on referring to us as, and a Person, and the rest will look after itself.
Palladium will never fly if users have any choice in the matter. Period. That's why there will continue to be a huge effort to marginalize the free software movement, just as there'll be an effort to legislate palladium's use in anything with a cpu that could conceivably manipulate data in any way. It will be very hard to avoid palladium once the hardware is polluted.
Yes, it will take some time to twist the arms of hardware manufacturers, and to make deals with all the content owners and and other interested parties. I don't see why that should detract from the basic premise. As for Microsoft admitting its software sucks, it's a setup for the bright future, i.e. palladium, which will be for our own good. Or so we will be assured.
Think of the money at stake, and who stands to benefit. Think of the larger issue our society is trying to hammer out: what's the line between fair use, and protecting the content of copyright owners? To what degree should our rights and freedoms be reduced now that it's feasible to monitor everyone, all the time?
My take on it is, the rights we enjoy now will continue to be taken away from us if we don't take steps to prevent it.
re: CHOOSING. Naturally, rational people will avoid palladium like the plague. That's why MS
will do its best to remove any choice in the matter, something history has shown them to be extremely successful at. Two strategies:
1. Get support for palladium built into the hardware. They already have amd and intel onboard, and they're very talented at strong-arming hardware vendors. It would be very naive to underestimate them in this regard.
2. Have laws passed that mandate palladium, or whatever it morphs into in the coming years. All kinds of excuses will be made, most of them laughably stupid (it'll reduce spam!!). Obviously the real motives will be drm and in providing the various intelligence agencies with improved means to monitor computer activity.
Bingo. As Nathan Myhrvold once said, Microsoft wants to get a vig on every transaction going over the net. Tcp/ip doesn't have a built-in billing model, so they're trying to shoehorn one on top of it. Even though it will be a bloated, insecure mess, the government and the entertainment industry are and will remain enthusiastic supporters of palladium. All that data is an irresistable temptation: so much money to be made, so much monitoring to be done.
The real war will be between this plutocratic regime and the free software movement. The general public doesn't know it yet, but linux is very close to there on the desktop. This represents a serious threat to the universality of palladium, so Microsoft and its allies will try to have laws passed that criminalize free software use, and/or the use of general purpose (i.e. non-palladium equipped) computers.
Sound crazy? It's not. And the issue of freedom & privacy vs. big business & government is going to be huge, front page news as it gets closer and the general public gets a whiff of it. But Disney owns the news, so expect it to be more of a grassroots groundswell-type thing.
Who will win? I don't know. But I see a future that scares the hell out of me, and I really hope we're not too lazy to do something about it.
Well gee, if Disney didn't own the news maybe Joe Sixpack and his 200 million friends would learn enough about digital restrictions management to kill it before it got off the ground. Pretty convenient, that...
We all know that 64bit is going to replace 32bit. AMD and Intel are important because huge volumes and low costs are what will finally make 64bit machines ubiquitous, i.e. aunt Edna will be able to buy one at Walmart for a couple of hundred bucks. Like it or not one of these architectures will be the "new x86" and nearly all software will be written for it, displacing 32bit machines as well as all the 64bit niche architectures on the market now.
As for Sparc, Alpha, etc. being "better": Since when was the best solution guaranteed victory?
In the former Soviet Union everyone was required to vote, but all there was to pick from were interchangable Party henchmen with unibrows and cheap suits. Compulsary voting did not lead to any great flowering of liberalism there, and I doubt it would here either.
Refusing to vote at least allows you the privelege of not participating in the charade.
Maybe that senator from Disney... ;-).
This blatant whoring will never stop until strict legislation is put in place restricting huge political contributions and all the other less overt forms of bribery that go on today. But of course this will never happen while the wealthy minority is calling the shots. Kind of a catch-22 there...
Thank you for pointing out yet another advantage free software has over proprietary software.
This is an important consideration for linux users and others who dual-boot. Windows goes belly up, you pop in the restore cd, and it deletes ALL your partitions, wiping the entire disk just to restore one measly, bug-ridden OS.
I tell ya, there ought to be a law to stop anti-competitive practices like this. Oh, wait...
Big deal! I use linux. What will it matter when all computer hardware has disney-approved encryption built-in, and it's illegal to circumvent it? 99% of computer users will still be f****d, and the net as a whole will become a vast cultural wasteland just like television is now.
The MS-Disneyfication of the net will be a tragedy for everyone, including all us linux geeks!!
And they'll get away with it if we don't put up more of a fight.
No one in their right mind is going to go along with all this drm crap. No one, that is, until the IP industry gets its bitches in Washington to pass legislation require all hardware manufacturers to build in support for it, and making it illegal for end users circumvent it.
Sound far-fetched? It isn't. In fact, there is an extremely good chance of this happening.
However, as a matter of principle, I prefer democracy.
Man waxes patriotic, truck.
!!!
Accepted by whom? Other than corporations with vested interests (i.e. Microsoft) and the book you mention above, I can't think of anyone who takes the obscurity model seriously. Bruce Schneier thoroughly debunks it in "Secrets and Lies," arguing that full disclosure and peer review is the only way to have any confidence at all in the security of a given piece of software. This is the method used by the free software movement, and it's why free software is in general so much more reliable and secure than proprietary software (i.e. Windows).
I agree that Microsoft likes the obscurity model for business reasons. They don't like revealing how their APIs function because that would promote interoperability with non-Microsoft software. Fortunately, there's a provision in the anti-trust agreement granted by the Bush administration that allows Microsoft to withhold information which could be used to compromise the security of Microsoft software. Hence, the Mundie speech. Hence, full-disclosure is dangerous and irresponsible, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Just a guess here, but Microsoft will use all this to completely deny interoperability with free software. In other words, it's business as usual for Microsoft and the anti-trust settlement isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Like I said, vested interests...
The problem isn't a lack of text-based installers. It's that it's getting really hard to squeeze modern distributions like mandrake, redhat, suse, etc., onto older, slower computers. It's less effort to just start with a distribution like debian or slackware that gives you better control over the install process. I have an older pentium, and it runs slack8 like a champ.
However, I'm typing this on a redhat 7.2 box with ximian gnome. Not to single out redhat or anything, but I'm amazed at how polished modern distros are getting. Remember how painful it used to be to get X working? Well this time I just clicked ok a bunch of times. So it's bloated and hogs a couple of gigs of disk. Big deal, that's only 5% of the drive. It's worth it to have everything work out of the box.
It just depends on what you need. There's so many good distributions out there, there's bound to be one to suit just about any purpose.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but they've since killed winmag too.
Maybe they're agents of the sierra club or something, saving trees by buying up print magazines and killing them off. Crazy as it sounds, this makes more sense than cmp's business plan, whatever it is...