The thing is the French political system is built only on ideas, not people (politicians). As such, there is right wing party, left wing party... but most of our politicians are professional bureaucrats (and the rest are professional politicians, often with a lawyer background). Very very few of our politicians have a clue on science (i mean physics, medicine,...) in general, let alone IT. All this gives a pretty one-sided view on a lot of problems, "culture"-related issues being one of them. About these stupid laws TFA is referring to, the worst is yet to come: a new big law (nicknamed Hadopi) is about to pass, as well as new ISP rules (they want ISPs to filter everything, using such wonderful technologies as DNS blacklisting). And you know what, most of these topics are handled by our culture minister, which, as a job reference, is the former director of the Versailles Palace museum. But the worst part is that they will sell the ideals of the French Revolution to pure incompetence, helped by our undemocratic mass media system.
Well, thanks god, everybody in France know that freedom and human rights problems are only in Iran, China, Russia and Guantanamo...
Problem is that your "2" doesn't exist... the way SSL (and most other secure protocols, as SSH) is designed, having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up. With SSL, the real 3 options you have are: 1- no ssl 2- "1 way authentication" SSL (usually only the server has a certificate: this ensures the client it is reaching the right server, but the server cannot trust the client) 3- mutual authentification SSL (aka "strong authentication": server and client have a certificate)
I think TFA is completely out of topic and blatantly ignorant: what would you think if SSH wouldn't warn you when the host you're trying to connect to has changed ?
The problem about SSL isn't to warn or not about self signed certificate (you HAVE to be warned about self-signed, and strongly, else anybody can easily get "average user's" bank account info, for instance). What is at stake is the lack of competition among public SSL Certification Authorities.
In general, don't try to solve a political/competition problem through technical/IT means, this won't work. Solve such problems through political/competition means (such as laws, regulators or open standards).
But then I live in a country (Belgium) where generally the customer is more important then the companies. aha ? can you spell "Belgacom" ? I believe it's spelled "r-i-p-o-f-f", with prices twice as expensive (even more) than in France and the Netherlands. Actually, it's one pretty good example of crony capitalism, as i heard...
Except that we had no other choice, provided what we had to do, due to the poor API offered by default by MS. As i wrote, it works fine under Firefox (we don't even need a Java applet or an extension).
I work for a software editor. Several months ago, we had to port a part of our software to Vista. Since our software is web-based, the only part at stake was an ActiveX. It was the worst nightmare we ever had. After finguring out for several months what was going on, we came to the conclusion that it simply wasn't possible. To summarize (sorry for simplifying): - UAC is the worst design/implementation ever. Windows has several execution environments (unlike UNIX, which has... 2: user(s) and root), and UAC asks you for permission each time you cross a fence ! (in UNIX, sudo at leasts reminds the password for several minutes or so) - ActiveX are simply impossible to use under Vista+IE7. Problem is that Microsoft didn't care to offer a replacement technology. The consequence of all this is that our application was no longer available under Vista/IE. It worked well under Vista/Firefox, though. Finally, we hired an ex-microsoftie, who re-implemented the ActiveX part entirely, using MS _private_ APIs, and now it works - more ore less. Going through all this, i wonder if the NT platform can be secured at all. Since we also have a support department, i can tell you that users have fare more problems with Vista than XP. This is going to kill MS. Almost all techies i know, plus lots of "power users" are switching to Linux or OSX (even the ex-microsoftie we hired was using OSX as his primary OS). Only big companies are sticking to MS, because of the total lack of competence that reigns there.
IT department run by geeks != business run by geeks
Fact is that, in most big companies, IT departments aren't run by geeks, but by "a bunch of PHB's who flail around with no idea what they're doing". Another fact is that in most big companies, there is nothing whatsoever like "Darwinian management". It's rather "anti-darwinian management", as people get promoted on incompetence rather than competence, especially in IT, because IT is generally vastly underestimated by top-level management: this leads to an IT top manager (CTO or so) that is the least brilliant guy from the direction board (the most being usually the legal or financial guy). And this guy then only promotes people that are even less brilliant than him, so that they won't be a threat. Each management level does that (top-down), and the lowest level, in contact with contractors, is usually totally dumb. In such organizations, competent IT people (contractors) are viewed as what they are: a threat. That is what really what keeps IT geeks from the boardroom.
Now, i believe that if, as an IT guy, you get an MBA as well, you have more chances to get to the boardroom, but just avoid to say you come from IT;-)
And in general, there ARE successful businesses run by geeks (Google and the old HP for instance would qualify, i believe). And the HP example shows us that when MBAs/PHBs take power in IT, they ARE destructing value. Just for the reasons mentioned above, nobody really wants to realize it...
Most of Europe has ID cards, and nobody ever heard it's police states. The thing is to emit cards, you need a database. So the card becomes a key to your entry in the ID database. So far, so good. Now, if you use it also to pay your taxes, the same card has become a key to your tax records and earnings. The same if you use it for your medical insurance, and so on. Here's the privacy breach: the "one card does all" scheme is really very bad, because it allows easily to retrieve personal data from different databases.
Take France. There is one of the most advanced computer-related privacy law (IT and Freedom Act): - there is a "national" ID card, that is connected to nothing, except maybe the passports database - there is a medical state insurance ID card (Vitale card), that is connected to nothing, except other medical insurances, and your record at your doctor's - for the rest (taxes,...), where you don't need an ID card, there aren't ID cards. All the systems have different unique identification numbers ("national" ID card number, medical state insurance number, tax payer number,...) and it is disallowed by the law (for anyone, including the state), to make a database that references all those id numbers. So where's the problem there ? (except that it's for sure more expensive that having a "one card does all", but privacy has its price).
Not quite. ESA was studying Hermes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(shuttle) : note the design that looks a lot more like Buran than the American Space Shuttle), Japan, too, was building its first generation of heavy launchers, and could have been interested. I tend to think that, by then end of the 1980s, everybody knew that the Space Shuttle / Buran designed was an expensive failure. This opinion is reinforced by what i heard from French and Russian people involved in the "business", and by comments publicly said on TV after the crash of Columbia by French astronauts.
You do know that the soviet union was collapsing at the time, right? The lack of funding for Buran had nothing to do with the program and everything to do with the economic and political state of the union. Buran could have been the greatest space program ever conceived and it still would have been cancelled. Actually, you have it reversed: precisely because the USSR was collapsing, if the Buran project had some value, they would have sold it in some way, like they did with most of the technologies that had some value (that included planes, helicopters, rockets, nukes, and so on...)
No, no, the French equivalent of the RIAA is the SNEP (Syndicat national de l'édition phonographique), whose president is Pascal Nègre, who happens to be also president of Universal Music France. This guy is the French "pope" of the old style business model (that is: press CDs, send "pirates" to jail, rip off artists as much as possible, sell junk,...).
Well, about roaming, the thing is that because we all speak different languages, people travel less inside the EU than inside the US. Hence companies have nothing to gain from making roaming cheap. However, i'd say it'll change in the future, because new generations are better are speaking foreign languages.
Then, about SMS, i tend to agree. Moreover, here, in France, SMS are horribly expensive to send. Now, except roaming and SMS, mobile phones aren't expensive at all.
Finally, i know very much about the US system, i was just elaborating on your the reply to the parent post, and, to say the truth, was quite surprised...
The thing is that when it works, it works. But when you start to have problems, for one reason or another, it goes quickly straight to hell.
One thing the grandparent forgot to tell, is that GAMOT calls by other operators to FT are charged by FT, unless FT proves it's FT fault (yes, you read well). So of course, when you have a problem, the operators aren't very keen on calling GAMOT, they prefer to do a lot of tests before, and it takes a lot of time.
But since "when it works, it works well", and that for about 97,5% of people it's the case, it allows France to have a very much growing market on boradband.
Now, i think most european goverments made mistakes when they deregulated and sold their telecoms administrations. The old state monopolies should have been splitted in two: one side for the "operator" business, and one side for the "network" business. And probably, they shouldn't have sold completely the "netowrk" business part (after all, roads aren't privately owned as well, are they ?). I think most of the problem everybody encounters in various EU countries with the telecoms have their roots there, and then the final result vary, depending on the clueness and power of the various "[de]regulation" bodies.
No, no, no. If i understood well the parent, things could have been done a lot better in the US.
Let's compare what can be compared: US to EU, and even EU+Russia (that's a lot bigger in both population and superficy): - you can keep the same _phone_ in all the countries (you just change the SIM when you move in another country, or you have roaming when you're on travel, without changing anything - though roaming isn't usually cheap...). also, right, some networks do SIM-lock the phones, but usually it's not very difficult to have them de-SIM-locked by the network.
- i've never heard you pay for receiving text messages in any network in any country (but then maybe sometimes it's the case, i'm not a big text messages user as well).
- usually you can send text messages between networks (well, to be fair, it's not always the case between networks of different countries, and especially with countries as Russia or Romania).
So if you think that there is no government body over that, that it's just that several countries government agreed on GSM, you'll see that the result is, as compared to what the parent describes about the US, amazing.
1- woody + backports or handmade packages is NOT woody. why ? because you have to _maintain_ it by hand (or trust the backporters to do so efficiently). in other words, woddy+backports or handmade packages is NOT anymore a stable distro. and, i agree, stability is something important for a server, and especially in a company. 2- it's becoming almost impossible to be able to use an unmodified woody on a server, because of the various reasons i've written down. and i'd say it's the case if you've been trying to set up a server with woody on a modern machine in the past 18 months (personnal experience: you want GE, SATA, or so, and, for software, try to set up a mail server in a SME without antivirus & so on).
now 1+2 = Debian sucks for servers. since it sucks also for desktops, this means that Debian has no future if they can't get themeselves out of that big problem.
now of course, if you use woody only as a DNS server on a 3 years old machine, it's ok. in any other situation, you might run quickly into trouble.
if it's too old for _you_ use something else. Until then, Debian stable is fine. thing is that it's not that simple: - when woody came out, for instance, you could set up a mail server without antivirus and spam filtering (it was really another era...). since then, you had to add these features. but you can't do it while keeping an unmodified Debian stable. that means that not only Debian is getting obsolete on new installs, it's also getting obsolete on old installs. and it means too that it can be ok today, and not tomorrow. - if Debian isn't able to provide a solution in stable for all/most of these problems, that leaves no choice but not using Debian on servers. developping a distro that nobody can use is pretty much pointless isn't it ?
"use something else" is not an answer to the question "is Debian stable useable on servers ?", and the answer to that question is, i'd say, 75% no, 25% yes. Now if it's good for _you_, that's great, but it's very far from being the case for everybody (i've installed or administrate about 20 Debian servers).
I happen to run several servers on woody, and i can tell you: it's almost impossible to run it without using backports or handmade packages. The reasons: - hardware support (2.4.18 linux kernel is very very very old in that aspect) - lacking (at all, or partially) big recent software/features (amavis/clamav/spamassassin/samba/...) that HAVE to be there - blocking bugs that will never be corrected for various reasons (ex. faulty FTP client in woody's PHP, that is so old that it's unmaintaned by the PHP team). - old packages that make running recent advanced software on top of woody impossible (think apache2+subversion and so on)
So, no, woody sucks for servers too, and a lot. And i can provide you with a lot of instances in which i had big problem with too old woody's packages on a _server_ (nss-ldap, unrar,...)
Exactly how a screen prevents you from cycling through the songs ? On most flash mp3 players, the screen barely displays the song's title from ID3 infos, and you cannot manage any playlist or so. And it's generally a pain in the a** because you have to try to build your playlist by naming appropriately folders and files. Moreover, the song's title is generally a lot bigger than the screen, so you actually have to wait as it scrolls. Most people don't seem to understand that the real big advantage of the Apple's solution isn't the iPod (as stylish/convenient/marketing boasted as it is), but iTunes itself, because it's a very well designed interface, and it's damn easy to manage playlist on it. All the rest is a matter of taste. Some prefer AAA batteries, some rechargeable, some like iPod's great sound, some don't, and so on. And for all these points you can usually find a solution as an iPod accessory.
For me the problem never was the change to Fedora. I used FC1&2, and you could tell from the two that they were just following RH8&9.
The problem is that RH8&9 were in no way comparable to the RH 5.X, 6.X & 7.X i used before: - i was accustomed to the ".0 is shitty, but.1 is better, and.2.3 rocks" RH8,9, FC1,2, were all really all.0. They changed too many things inside every time, and broke a lot of apps. (think NPTL, KDE, SELinux, Xorg, a huge ton of kernel patches [1], and so on) - why the hell did they choose YUM ? this thing was a big load of sh**. the only first useable version of YUM is the new 2.1 lines. to me it really looks like the NIH syndrom (well, ok, it was yellow dog's system, but the development changed at all with the involvment of RH). so i know there were arch support problems with APT, but they could have helped the APT guys with that. and of course there's also URPMI, that works great too. - support, combined with no "online upgrade path" through, precisely, YUM. this is big issue. you have to download and burn CD every time. it just plain sucks (on a sidenote, i live in France, where bandwidth costs nothing, but CDs/DVDs are quite expensive because of an (in)famous tax for "protecting" musicians). and anyway, there are a lot of machines i do not want to upgrade every 6 months or so. i tried to go fedoralegacy for a while, on a 7.3, but the updates are coming slow, and while it could be ok for a desktop or even server behind a good firewall, for non-critical jobs, i'd never recommend it as firewall or mission-critical internet server. - the price for RHEL. it's madly expensive. unaffordable for a home user or a small company.
so now i don't use any RHEL/FC. i have debians[2], a mandrake, few WBELs, and even an OSX. and i won't go back.
[1] i don't know what they did with these patches, but in FC2, around 2.6.8, they introduced something that just prevented my old loki games from working. this being a wife's requirement, i had no choice but using a 2.6.7, and then changed to Mandrake, on which everything works like a breezes, despite its 2.6.10. [2] actually Debian isn't very much a better option. these guys f*cked up their distro as well. now hardcore geeks prefer gentoo, and for most "normal" users/geeks, their stable is just too old. didn't try any Debian-based distro, though, but heard some were great.
if you have to include MacOSX as part of your solution, pay attention, their solution is pretty much non-standard. all the OSX components have been modified to include Apple hooks, mostly Netinfo & pals. integrating a multi-platform (linux+OSX+windows) single authentication system with LDAP _is_ possible, but you have to think about it from the beginning, and certainly no distro will do it out of the box.
Actually, i've experienced some problems installing WBEL3 on UML, whereas RHEL3 worked fine. So certainly the installers are different. However, once installed, everything worked fine. I've even transformed one RHEL3 into WBEL3 without any problem. So, to summarize: installers are different, but RPMs are absolutely the same, and thus, once installed, it's not possible to tell the difference between Whitebox and RHEL
Yes, from what i've read, you are right. However, nobody knows exactly how it works. All this is just based on wild observing how all this work (and especially that what counts to get TV is your ATM download rate, not your IP download rate - since download rates on ADSL depends on the distance to the DSLAM, this is quite important to know, because the IP download rate is a lot lower than ATM). Someone wrote a paper (in french) about that. Basically, he guesses that channel hopping is done through IGMP requests, but it's only his guess. Fact is that Free.fr does not say much about their architecture and solution, since it's a big competitive advantage.
Well, i'm quite skeptical about what you say. On Free.fr's STB, the Freebox, you already get a lot of channels, there's already some interactivity (you can check your VoIP's answering machine from the OSD menus on the TV), and they're working on VoD (there's an external IDE port on the freebox). And i'm not sure at all the freebox system works with IPTV. My understanding was that most of the work was done on the DSLAM, and that resulting MPEG2 video packets were sent directly to the STB using raw ATM.
Now, about the revenue stream, VoD is for sure the future, especially as HDTV and Home Cinema grow in market share.
First, why do you need IP for TV ? over ADSL, it's a lot better to send it in raw ATM. Of course, you can use IP to broadcast TV to the DSLAMs. And if it's IPTV to play TV on the computer, what exactly is the use ? Isn't it better to get it directly on TV ?
Then, why do you need Microsoft for that ? Are these Bells not using MPEG2 or MPEG4 for TV ?
And, 1mln users in Europe for TV over ADSL ? It's very very low ! There are about 700 000-800 000 only in France: France #2 ISP provides TV over ADSL as part of their triple play solution, and they have reached 600 000 people subscribed to the triple play offer. Also, their triple play offer, and especially the freebox, is running Linux, like most of their whole architecture, so how exactly the Bells' choice is a coup for Microsoft: thet are entering a market very late. In France, all of it has already been taken, with the 3 major ISPs already offering TV over ADSL. And I can't see how Italy could top that, with their currently expensive ADSL. Moreover, they're already working on providing HDTV through their triple play offering.
So i think either i missed the point, or both articles are (at least partially) wrong: some other people explain here that several ISPs are also offering triple play offers in the US or Canada. Can someone explain me ?
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What you're describing is a Lumia with Windows 10 for phones, managed by Intune.
And no, it's not what businesses want. Intune/SCCM is full of proprietary stuff, that doesn't stick to the diversity of a modern information system.
There are two: the RAID (police forces) and the GIGN (gendarmerie - the army).
And yes they are involved at least in one of the ongoing attacks (the Bataclan concert hall).
Unfortunately, the Netherlands are part of the EU, and EU has its (in)famous DMCA counterpart, aka EUCD .
The thing is the French political system is built only on ideas, not people (politicians). As such, there is right wing party, left wing party... but most of our politicians are professional bureaucrats (and the rest are professional politicians, often with a lawyer background). Very very few of our politicians have a clue on science (i mean physics, medicine, ...) in general, let alone IT.
All this gives a pretty one-sided view on a lot of problems, "culture"-related issues being one of them.
About these stupid laws TFA is referring to, the worst is yet to come: a new big law (nicknamed Hadopi) is about to pass, as well as new ISP rules (they want ISPs to filter everything, using such wonderful technologies as DNS blacklisting). And you know what, most of these topics are handled by our culture minister, which, as a job reference, is the former director of the Versailles Palace museum.
But the worst part is that they will sell the ideals of the French Revolution to pure incompetence, helped by our undemocratic mass media system.
Well, thanks god, everybody in France know that freedom and human rights problems are only in Iran, China, Russia and Guantanamo...
Problem is that your "2" doesn't exist... the way SSL (and most other secure protocols, as SSH) is designed, having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up.
With SSL, the real 3 options you have are:
1- no ssl
2- "1 way authentication" SSL (usually only the server has a certificate: this ensures the client it is reaching the right server, but the server cannot trust the client)
3- mutual authentification SSL (aka "strong authentication": server and client have a certificate)
I think TFA is completely out of topic and blatantly ignorant: what would you think if SSH wouldn't warn you when the host you're trying to connect to has changed ?
The problem about SSL isn't to warn or not about self signed certificate (you HAVE to be warned about self-signed, and strongly, else anybody can easily get "average user's" bank account info, for instance). What is at stake is the lack of competition among public SSL Certification Authorities.
In general, don't try to solve a political/competition problem through technical/IT means, this won't work. Solve such problems through political/competition means (such as laws, regulators or open standards).
But then I live in a country (Belgium) where generally the customer is more important then the companies.
aha ? can you spell "Belgacom" ? I believe it's spelled "r-i-p-o-f-f", with prices twice as expensive (even more) than in France and the Netherlands. Actually, it's one pretty good example of crony capitalism, as i heard...
For French-speaking readers: http://cretin.be/
Except that we had no other choice, provided what we had to do, due to the poor API offered by default by MS. As i wrote, it works fine under Firefox (we don't even need a Java applet or an extension).
I work for a software editor. Several months ago, we had to port a part of our software to Vista. Since our software is web-based, the only part at stake was an ActiveX.
It was the worst nightmare we ever had. After finguring out for several months what was going on, we came to the conclusion that it simply wasn't possible. To summarize (sorry for simplifying):
- UAC is the worst design/implementation ever. Windows has several execution environments (unlike UNIX, which has... 2: user(s) and root), and UAC asks you for permission each time you cross a fence ! (in UNIX, sudo at leasts reminds the password for several minutes or so)
- ActiveX are simply impossible to use under Vista+IE7. Problem is that Microsoft didn't care to offer a replacement technology.
The consequence of all this is that our application was no longer available under Vista/IE. It worked well under Vista/Firefox, though.
Finally, we hired an ex-microsoftie, who re-implemented the ActiveX part entirely, using MS _private_ APIs, and now it works - more ore less.
Going through all this, i wonder if the NT platform can be secured at all. Since we also have a support department, i can tell you that users have fare more problems with Vista than XP.
This is going to kill MS. Almost all techies i know, plus lots of "power users" are switching to Linux or OSX (even the ex-microsoftie we hired was using OSX as his primary OS). Only big companies are sticking to MS, because of the total lack of competence that reigns there.
IT department run by geeks != business run by geeks
;-)
Fact is that, in most big companies, IT departments aren't run by geeks, but by "a bunch of PHB's who flail around with no idea what they're doing". Another fact is that in most big companies, there is nothing whatsoever like "Darwinian management". It's rather "anti-darwinian management", as people get promoted on incompetence rather than competence, especially in IT, because IT is generally vastly underestimated by top-level management: this leads to an IT top manager (CTO or so) that is the least brilliant guy from the direction board (the most being usually the legal or financial guy). And this guy then only promotes people that are even less brilliant than him, so that they won't be a threat. Each management level does that (top-down), and the lowest level, in contact with contractors, is usually totally dumb.
In such organizations, competent IT people (contractors) are viewed as what they are: a threat. That is what really what keeps IT geeks from the boardroom.
Now, i believe that if, as an IT guy, you get an MBA as well, you have more chances to get to the boardroom, but just avoid to say you come from IT
And in general, there ARE successful businesses run by geeks (Google and the old HP for instance would qualify, i believe). And the HP example shows us that when MBAs/PHBs take power in IT, they ARE destructing value. Just for the reasons mentioned above, nobody really wants to realize it...
Most of Europe has ID cards, and nobody ever heard it's police states.
...), where you don't need an ID card, there aren't ID cards. ...) and it is disallowed by the law (for anyone, including the state), to make a database that references all those id numbers.
The thing is to emit cards, you need a database. So the card becomes a key to your entry in the ID database. So far, so good.
Now, if you use it also to pay your taxes, the same card has become a key to your tax records and earnings. The same if you use it for your medical insurance, and so on.
Here's the privacy breach: the "one card does all" scheme is really very bad, because it allows easily to retrieve personal data from different databases.
Take France. There is one of the most advanced computer-related privacy law (IT and Freedom Act):
- there is a "national" ID card, that is connected to nothing, except maybe the passports database
- there is a medical state insurance ID card (Vitale card), that is connected to nothing, except other medical insurances, and your record at your doctor's
- for the rest (taxes,
All the systems have different unique identification numbers ("national" ID card number, medical state insurance number, tax payer number,
So where's the problem there ? (except that it's for sure more expensive that having a "one card does all", but privacy has its price).
Not quite. ESA was studying Hermes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(shuttle) : note the design that looks a lot more like Buran than the American Space Shuttle), Japan, too, was building its first generation of heavy launchers, and could have been interested. I tend to think that, by then end of the 1980s, everybody knew that the Space Shuttle / Buran designed was an expensive failure. This opinion is reinforced by what i heard from French and Russian people involved in the "business", and by comments publicly said on TV after the crash of Columbia by French astronauts.
No, no, the French equivalent of the RIAA is the SNEP (Syndicat national de l'édition phonographique), whose president is Pascal Nègre, who happens to be also president of Universal Music France. This guy is the French "pope" of the old style business model (that is: press CDs, send "pirates" to jail, rip off artists as much as possible, sell junk, ...).
Well, about roaming, the thing is that because we all speak different languages, people travel less inside the EU than inside the US. Hence companies have nothing to gain from making roaming cheap. However, i'd say it'll change in the future, because new generations are better are speaking foreign languages.
Then, about SMS, i tend to agree. Moreover, here, in France, SMS are horribly expensive to send. Now, except roaming and SMS, mobile phones aren't expensive at all.
Finally, i know very much about the US system, i was just elaborating on your the reply to the parent post, and, to say the truth, was quite surprised...
The thing is that when it works, it works. But when you start to have problems, for one reason or another, it goes quickly straight to hell.
One thing the grandparent forgot to tell, is that GAMOT calls by other operators to FT are charged by FT, unless FT proves it's FT fault (yes, you read well). So of course, when you have a problem, the operators aren't very keen on calling GAMOT, they prefer to do a lot of tests before, and it takes a lot of time.
But since "when it works, it works well", and that for about 97,5% of people it's the case, it allows France to have a very much growing market on boradband.
Now, i think most european goverments made mistakes when they deregulated and sold their telecoms administrations. The old state monopolies should have been splitted in two: one side for the "operator" business, and one side for the "network" business. And probably, they shouldn't have sold completely the "netowrk" business part (after all, roads aren't privately owned as well, are they ?). I think most of the problem everybody encounters in various EU countries with the telecoms have their roots there, and then the final result vary, depending on the clueness and power of the various "[de]regulation" bodies.
No, no, no. If i understood well the parent, things could have been done a lot better in the US.
:
Let's compare what can be compared: US to EU, and even EU+Russia (that's a lot bigger in both population and superficy)
- you can keep the same _phone_ in all the countries (you just change the SIM when you move in another country, or you have roaming when you're on travel, without changing anything - though roaming isn't usually cheap...). also, right, some networks do SIM-lock the phones, but usually it's not very difficult to have them de-SIM-locked by the network.
- i've never heard you pay for receiving text messages in any network in any country (but then maybe sometimes it's the case, i'm not a big text messages user as well).
- usually you can send text messages between networks (well, to be fair, it's not always the case between networks of different countries, and especially with countries as Russia or Romania).
So if you think that there is no government body over that, that it's just that several countries government agreed on GSM, you'll see that the result is, as compared to what the parent describes about the US, amazing.
Ok, what basically i'm saying:
1- woody + backports or handmade packages is NOT woody. why ? because you have to _maintain_ it by hand (or trust the backporters to do so efficiently).
in other words, woddy+backports or handmade packages is NOT anymore a stable distro. and, i agree, stability is something important for a server, and especially in a company.
2- it's becoming almost impossible to be able to use an unmodified woody on a server, because of the various reasons i've written down. and i'd say it's the case if you've been trying to set up a server with woody on a modern machine in the past 18 months (personnal experience: you want GE, SATA, or so, and, for software, try to set up a mail server in a SME without antivirus & so on).
now 1+2 = Debian sucks for servers.
since it sucks also for desktops, this means that Debian has no future if they can't get themeselves out of that big problem.
now of course, if you use woody only as a DNS server on a 3 years old machine, it's ok. in any other situation, you might run quickly into trouble.
if it's too old for _you_ use something else. Until then, Debian stable is fine.
thing is that it's not that simple:
- when woody came out, for instance, you could set up a mail server without antivirus and spam filtering (it was really another era...). since then, you had to add these features. but you can't do it while keeping an unmodified Debian stable. that means that not only Debian is getting obsolete on new installs, it's also getting obsolete on old installs. and it means too that it can be ok today, and not tomorrow.
- if Debian isn't able to provide a solution in stable for all/most of these problems, that leaves no choice but not using Debian on servers. developping a distro that nobody can use is pretty much pointless isn't it ?
"use something else" is not an answer to the question "is Debian stable useable on servers ?", and the answer to that question is, i'd say, 75% no, 25% yes. Now if it's good for _you_, that's great, but it's very far from being the case for everybody (i've installed or administrate about 20 Debian servers).
This comment is totally insane.
...)
I happen to run several servers on woody, and i can tell you: it's almost impossible to run it without using backports or handmade packages.
The reasons:
- hardware support (2.4.18 linux kernel is very very very old in that aspect)
- lacking (at all, or partially) big recent software/features (amavis/clamav/spamassassin/samba/...) that HAVE to be there
- blocking bugs that will never be corrected for various reasons (ex. faulty FTP client in woody's PHP, that is so old that it's unmaintaned by the PHP team).
- old packages that make running recent advanced software on top of woody impossible (think apache2+subversion and so on)
So, no, woody sucks for servers too, and a lot. And i can provide you with a lot of instances in which i had big problem with too old woody's packages on a _server_ (nss-ldap, unrar,
Exactly how a screen prevents you from cycling through the songs ?
On most flash mp3 players, the screen barely displays the song's title from ID3 infos, and you cannot manage any playlist or so. And it's generally a pain in the a** because you have to try to build your playlist by naming appropriately folders and files. Moreover, the song's title is generally a lot bigger than the screen, so you actually have to wait as it scrolls.
Most people don't seem to understand that the real big advantage of the Apple's solution isn't the iPod (as stylish/convenient/marketing boasted as it is), but iTunes itself, because it's a very well designed interface, and it's damn easy to manage playlist on it.
All the rest is a matter of taste. Some prefer AAA batteries, some rechargeable, some like iPod's great sound, some don't, and so on. And for all these points you can usually find a solution as an iPod accessory.
For me the problem never was the change to Fedora. I used FC1&2, and you could tell from the two that they were just following RH8&9.
.1 is better, and .2 .3 rocks" RH8,9, FC1,2, were all really all .0. They changed too many things inside every time, and broke a lot of apps. (think NPTL, KDE, SELinux, Xorg, a huge ton of kernel patches [1], and so on)
The problem is that RH8&9 were in no way comparable to the RH 5.X, 6.X & 7.X i used before:
- i was accustomed to the ".0 is shitty, but
- why the hell did they choose YUM ? this thing was a big load of sh**. the only first useable version of YUM is the new 2.1 lines. to me it really looks like the NIH syndrom (well, ok, it was yellow dog's system, but the development changed at all with the involvment of RH). so i know there were arch support problems with APT, but they could have helped the APT guys with that. and of course there's also URPMI, that works great too.
- support, combined with no "online upgrade path" through, precisely, YUM. this is big issue. you have to download and burn CD every time. it just plain sucks (on a sidenote, i live in France, where bandwidth costs nothing, but CDs/DVDs are quite expensive because of an (in)famous tax for "protecting" musicians). and anyway, there are a lot of machines i do not want to upgrade every 6 months or so. i tried to go fedoralegacy for a while, on a 7.3, but the updates are coming slow, and while it could be ok for a desktop or even server behind a good firewall, for non-critical jobs, i'd never recommend it as firewall or mission-critical internet server.
- the price for RHEL. it's madly expensive. unaffordable for a home user or a small company.
so now i don't use any RHEL/FC. i have debians[2], a mandrake, few WBELs, and even an OSX. and i won't go back.
[1] i don't know what they did with these patches, but in FC2, around 2.6.8, they introduced something that just prevented my old loki games from working. this being a wife's requirement, i had no choice but using a 2.6.7, and then changed to Mandrake, on which everything works like a breezes, despite its 2.6.10.
[2] actually Debian isn't very much a better option. these guys f*cked up their distro as well. now hardcore geeks prefer gentoo, and for most "normal" users/geeks, their stable is just too old. didn't try any Debian-based distro, though, but heard some were great.
if you have to include MacOSX as part of your solution, pay attention, their solution is pretty much non-standard. all the OSX components have been modified to include Apple hooks, mostly Netinfo & pals.
integrating a multi-platform (linux+OSX+windows) single authentication system with LDAP _is_ possible, but you have to think about it from the beginning, and certainly no distro will do it out of the box.
Actually, i've experienced some problems installing WBEL3 on UML, whereas RHEL3 worked fine. So certainly the installers are different.
However, once installed, everything worked fine. I've even transformed one RHEL3 into WBEL3 without any problem.
So, to summarize:
installers are different, but RPMs are absolutely the same, and thus, once installed, it's not possible to tell the difference between Whitebox and RHEL
Yes, from what i've read, you are right. However, nobody knows exactly how it works. All this is just based on wild observing how all this work (and especially that what counts to get TV is your ATM download rate, not your IP download rate - since download rates on ADSL depends on the distance to the DSLAM, this is quite important to know, because the IP download rate is a lot lower than ATM).
Someone wrote a paper (in french) about that. Basically, he guesses that channel hopping is done through IGMP requests, but it's only his guess. Fact is that Free.fr does not say much about their architecture and solution, since it's a big competitive advantage.
Well, i'm quite skeptical about what you say. On Free.fr's STB, the Freebox, you already get a lot of channels, there's already some interactivity (you can check your VoIP's answering machine from the OSD menus on the TV), and they're working on VoD (there's an external IDE port on the freebox). And i'm not sure at all the freebox system works with IPTV. My understanding was that most of the work was done on the DSLAM, and that resulting MPEG2 video packets were sent directly to the STB using raw ATM.
Now, about the revenue stream, VoD is for sure the future, especially as HDTV and Home Cinema grow in market share.
From the two articles, i don't get everything.
First, why do you need IP for TV ? over ADSL, it's a lot better to send it in raw ATM. Of course, you can use IP to broadcast TV to the DSLAMs. And if it's IPTV to play TV on the computer, what exactly is the use ? Isn't it better to get it directly on TV ?
Then, why do you need Microsoft for that ? Are these Bells not using MPEG2 or MPEG4 for TV ?
And, 1mln users in Europe for TV over ADSL ? It's very very low ! There are about 700 000-800 000 only in France: France #2 ISP provides TV over ADSL as part of their triple play solution, and they have reached 600 000 people subscribed to the triple play offer.
Also, their triple play offer, and especially the freebox, is running Linux, like most of their whole architecture, so how exactly the Bells' choice is a coup for Microsoft: thet are entering a market very late. In France, all of it has already been taken, with the 3 major ISPs already offering TV over ADSL. And I can't see how Italy could top that, with their currently expensive ADSL.
Moreover, they're already working on providing HDTV through their triple play offering.
So i think either i missed the point, or both articles are (at least partially) wrong: some other people explain here that several ISPs are also offering triple play offers in the US or Canada. Can someone explain me ?