This is one of the standard FUD lines from MS's PR machine lately. He is just trying to convince the 'masses' that the reason their security sucks ass is that Windows was largely developed "in more innocent times", or whatever, and "therefore Microsoft is innocent of negligence and everyone else has bad security too". Utter bollocks, of course. But the public don't know about nearly four decades of UNIX, TCP/IP etc., so now they'll really believe that Microsoft pioneered the whole "Internet security" thing in the early 2000s.
If you work a service job, what if managers from companies worldwide in your industry started manager forums to talk about your performance and possibilies for hiring. Its way too unreliable. If you work a professional job at a desk-- same deal. And if you're a manager, what if clients all started forum-ing about your business?
Honestly, if you or your business are any good, chances are it's going to work to your ADVANTAGE and that most people would say positive things. That is in fact exactly how my small business gets most its new clients - word of mouth of existing customers who are saying good things about us / our products etc. It's mainly those who aren't so good at what they do who need to be worried --- why are you worried again?
OK, granted, there is a definite danger of people with an agenda posting false statements (e.g. the competition masquerading as a disgruntled customer), but I'm not sure this risk outweighs the right of people to know whether the doctor they are entrusting their LIVES to is good or bad.
If a particular professional (e.g. doctor) has had lots of good things said about them though in a public forum, and only one bad thing, the bad thing is likely to stand out as being obviously incorrect. If you're mediocre, well then, maybe you want to wonder about why you're mediocre and whether or not it's justifiable to expect the fact that you are mediocre to be censored from the public.
But ordinary second-level domains don't really have natural scarcity either, do they? I mean, it's all just 'entries in a database', so the service you're paying for when you buy a 2nd-level domain (e.g. mydomain.com) is not that much different from the service you're paying for when you buy a third-level domain from the owner of a 2nd-level domain. There are millions of potential 2nd-level domains too, and it's not as if they're any harder to enter into a database and charge for than a third-level domain. The costs are the same, hire people, buy servers, etc.
Many variables! Here's my hypothesis: It may be that "newly minted" doctors on average give worse "care" but are more knowledgeable and up-to-date about the best, modern medicines to prescribe for various conditions, and know more about various conditions etc., and maybe on average this means better outcomes for patients but doesn't necessarily mean that dada21 isn't correct - because as I said, there would be MANY variables covered in such a study, and the study would clearly not isolate any of the variables. It might well be that if you combine new knowledgeable doctors with 'proper care' that you would get even better outcomes.
My own (anecdotal) perception is that doctors in "modern" practices don't have time to give proper care to patients... they are run like factories / assembly lines where the goal appears to be to push as many patients through as possible, so each patient has perhaps ten or fifteen minutes and then you're pushed out again with a prescription in your hand before you've even had a chance to really explain what the problem is - and most of the time, my problems DON'T end up being solved AT ALL, the doctors effectively give a "don't know" shrug and push you off to the next "specialist" because their are ten people still in the waiting room behind me. Eventually you give up and literally just live with health problems because it's costing so much and nothing is changing (btw if I don't come back and complain would that count as a "success" in that study you cite?). You can't properly troubleshoot problems in any field without giving proper time and care to each problem case. I know as a programmer even to debug programs you really have to take your time and "get into it". I think this is the biggest difference between 'old-school' doctors and new doctors - fewer patients and more time per patient.
Uh, yes, it really proves that slashdot has double standards to consider that they would respond differently to, um, an entirely different situation with different parties and different intentions. The hypocrits, I tell you!
They are fuckwits who just want to blame anyone better off for their miserable self-made condition.
Uh, yes, I can't imagine why a 16-year old Arab boy who watched his mother and sister get blown into pieces by a US missile from an Apache helicopter wouldn't hate the US - it's his own fault, the situation. Sure. OK, that's a hypothetical example, but that kind of thing happens nearly every day now in the middle east. Where do you think terrorists come from? Where do you think the hate comes from?
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome.
Maybe, but what makes you think that the above three types of people were all the same people? Did it occur to you for a moment that of the tens of thousands of people at the Superdome, some of those who were looting/shooting might have actually, well, not have been the same people who were (legitimately) complaining that no help came for a week? Could it be that many of those stuck at the Superdome were actually decent, honest, hardworking people who just didn't have much? You think every single person there was living off welfare and complaining?
Sorry, I guess that logic doesn't fit into your misguided ideological generalisations, but as a South African I recognise all those same tired arguments from old Apartheid supporters.
Actually that is exactly how engineering works, but you have (perhaps deliberately?) misinterpreted me: I obviously do not mean that engineers specifically design to "a maximum", but in practice, and in effect, this is de facto what happens when you design to a minimum. The reason is that in construction, you by and large know the strength of the materials you use. (If engineers didn't have knowledge of material strength, buildings would be falling over all the time!) And because you know (within a narrow margin) the material strength of the materials used in a construction, you know what are the maximum forces that can be applied to that construction before the materials pretty much will fail. The choice of what materials to use then and what the minimum will be are based on e.g. funding, importance and so on. But a material that is known to only be able to handle a certain force, is not 'mysteriously' going to 'sometimes' handle a much greater force applied to it.
There are occasional exceptions to this kind of, such as in electronic engineering with the rating of CPU clock speeds. But this sort of thing generally does NOT happen in construction... "oh, let's just build with any old material that is several times stronger than is necessary".. yeah right, that's a huge additional cost, and unnecessary given that one knows in advance that the more expensive material is N times stronger. The other exception is when it's more cost effective to work with a much wider margin of uncertainty on the strength of a material, if a material is abundantly available but of greatly variable quality.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
It's worse than that. The levees were specifically only designed to be able to withstand a category 3 hurricane. In other words, the science/math/engineering all basically says that the levees would break in a category 4 hurricane - they were breaking as designed, they didn't just "break by chance"... in fact there was no way the levees could really have held up to a category 4 hurricane, by design they were too weak to do so. If you have a truck that is designed to carry a maximum of, say, 3 tonnes, and you load it with 4, then it's not "random chance" when it breaks - you expect that it will break. The limitations of the levees have been known since they were built decades ago, and the dangers that they were going to break known. The problem is that nobody in power (this adminstration or previous ones) has been willing to make the funds available to upgrade the levees, on a 'gamble' that a major hurricane would not hit during their terms. The Bush adminstration gambled again, and lost (even worse drastically cutting funding for the levees).
The politicians have been playing Russian Roulette with New Orleans. In Russian Roulette, if you keep playing, you KNOW for a FACT you're going to get fscked, you just don't know when. This is 100% a human-engineered disaster. You can't tell me Taiwan can build the world's tallest building to hold up in an area that gets many earthquakes and typhoons, but the US doesn't know how to build a levee that can withstand a category 4 hurricane? It's not an "act of God" when the world's tallest building does or doesn't fall down in a 7.0 earthquake - it's an "act of Engineering" (and funding). Likewise for the levees.
And what better way than the "world leading superpower" (and biggest polluter) to stand up and be a role model of how things should be done?
I'm sick of this "gee we'll stop fscking up the planet only if other people also stop fscking up the planet" argument, it makes no sense, if you have to stop, you have to stop.
Anyway, I don't hear any other country being "blind to its own faults", most do admit there is a problem, in fact the US stands out quite singularly in refusing to admit there is even a problem. And if the most powerful economy in the world claims that it would be "too harmful to their economy" to implement a sustainable system, then no country can afford it. But that's not the truth.
Loans do stimulate the economy and "create money" (or more specifically "create wealth") in that having to pay off a loan compels people to "work", otherwise known as "making stuff".
There is a small difference though; the limitations in the lower end versions of Vista are artifically created. There is no 'natural scarcity' of the features that are available only in the higher end versions, and it actually costs Microsoft extra limit the lower end versions. This may not be price diminiscration according to the letter of the law, but it definitely is 'in spirit', and it definitely is the intent of Microsoft.
Not to sound like a Microsoft apologist, but what says product segmentation is going for money
Uh, yeah, like Microsoft would be doing this if they thought it wasn't going to make them more money. Right. The entire point of artificial fragmentation / differential pricing is to make more money, not to make less money. Like Bill Gates woke up one morning and thought, "hey, I know, let's come up with a way for our customers to save money!"... last I checked, they still didn' t have much competition to speak of.
That's a separate issue, that has to do with market regulation closing a market or keeping a market closed. Data standards also require a FREE MARKET to work their magic.
So you don't use TCP/IP to connect computers together or to connect to the Internet, you don't use standards like SMTP/POP3 to send/receive e-mail, you don't use standards like HTTP to access the Web, your networking hardware doesn't use 802.3 or 802.11 standards, your storage hardware doesn't use IDE/SATA/SCSI, your computer mouse doesn't connect to your computer with USB or PS/2, your sound card output, telephone etc. don't use standard jacks, your doors aren't a standard size, etc. etc.
Standards are everywhere, in all the things you take for granted because you aren't paying a premium for them.
If the market forces vendors to build things to standards, then the vendors are forced to differentiate their products on the basis of useful things like price, quality etc. rather than lock-in.
If the TCO study was done over say a 5 year cycle, then Linux wins hands down as you've then got to factor in at least one forced upgrade of all your MS and non-MS applications
Yup, that's exactly the problem with all these (funded) TCO studies (and Microsoft ads) about the "cost of switching to Linux". OF COURSE the cost of switching to, well, anything is going to be higher than "staying with whatever you already have" in the short term. (The short-term cost of switching to Windows if you're on Linux would also be higher than the cost of doing nothing!) The whole friggin' point of switching is to save money in the long term.
In my experience though, most managers only make short-term decisions and cannot make long-term decisions --- most just cannot see when spending a bit more up front will save them money further down the road.
It would be easy to blast Linux for not automatically doing everything and retreat to M$ land, except that Windows 64 bit doesn't even have drivers out of the box for my SATA hard drive
You hit the nail on the head. People hold Linux up to different standards than Windows. If you try bring Linux into an organisation, even the smallest hiccup will be met with criticism and "told you so"s that you 'shoulda stuck with Windows'. But the Windows server can crash several times a month and nobody even blinks, because, well, "that's just normal"... the "server down again guys" routine. The fact that so many other people on the planet also have problems with Windows somehow "validates" its crappiness in the minds of its users - managers often don't really understand computers, so they probably subconsciously reason "as long as everyone else has these problems it must be normal" right? Meanwhile you're bringing in Linux because it's presumably better, so people automatically look for flaws, especially if you're basically trying to "prove the managers wrong" for their decision to use Windows... managers who like to think they know a lot do not like people who know more than them about something questioning their decisions. (This pretty much describes the situation at my last job.)
The study is more about the market state than the technical readiness of either Windows or Linux, don't confuse the two. Technically Linux may well be ready and in many ways is better than Windows as a server, but this doesn't automatically translate to higher adoption in the market, as Windows has massive unfair advantages e.g. huge marketing budget & sales team, 'network effects', critical mass, desktop monopoly etc. When they say Linux is "ready" to start becoming "mainstream" they don't mean it is now technically 'good enough', they mean, the market is at a point where it is willing to adopt Linux enough that Linux is poised to reach the required critical mass. In other words, in five years or so a significant percentage of companies will be 'ready' to adopt Linux as a server platform. It's not so much a case of "is Linux ready for the market", it's more about "is the market ready for Linux".
mission critical "Vital to the operation of the organization. The term is very popular for describing the applications required to run the day-to-day business."
It may once have been a military term, but its usage has long ago become more generalised, so that usage is now strictly a part of the etymology i.e. history of the phrase. Language changes, and the correct version of a word is the one in use today.
Ah, yes, the Great Myth that you can save money by hiring someone cheap and poorly qualified to do something complex. How does the old saying go? "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys".
The exploit grows in popularity in the darker parts of society, and GM cars around the country are now being broken into becuase you thought you were doing society a "favor".
But you ARE doing society a favour --- people will know next time that they should not buy GM cars because GM doesn't care enough to produce cars without such problems or to fix the problems in time! GM doesn't have a 'right' to retain its market share, and certainly not if it is culpably releasing and selling known defective cars. No matter how you twist it, you cannot get away from the fact that a customer ALWAYS has a right to know if they are purchasing or using a defective product.
You are advocating a cover-up. The "moral obligation" we have to society is to make sure we don't do cover-ups when it is discovered products have defects. Trying to keep such flaws a secret is only going to serve to protect and reward companies that do shoddy QA. And the irony is, the thieves are going to find out about that flaw in the GM car sooner or later anyway, and when they do, it's going to be even worse because a lot more people would have bought GM cars because you thought it was a good idea to keep the problems secret.
Sorry, but I have a right to know what I'm buying, what I'm about to buy, what I've bought and am using.
If Windows has flaws that Microsoft has known about for months but doesn't care enough to fix, and my business has many confidential documents entrusted to the 'security' of Windows, then I damn well have a right to know about it so that I can to something else rather, like Linux.
Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it
"Linux" is not a monopoly and can never be.. there are DOZENS if not hundreds of companies supplying Linux, working on Linux, supporting Linux, improving Linux etc., and due to the Linux, it will always be this way. Always.
The GPL levels all uneven market entry barriers - anyone can get in to the market, and everyone can come in at exactly the same level as existing players, because the entire codebase of each competitor is available.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the standard FUD lines from MS's PR machine lately. He is just trying to convince the 'masses' that the reason their security sucks ass is that Windows was largely developed "in more innocent times", or whatever, and "therefore Microsoft is innocent of negligence and everyone else has bad security too". Utter bollocks, of course. But the public don't know about nearly four decades of UNIX, TCP/IP etc., so now they'll really believe that Microsoft pioneered the whole "Internet security" thing in the early 2000s.
If you work a service job, what if managers from companies worldwide in your industry started manager forums to talk about your performance and possibilies for hiring. Its way too unreliable. If you work a professional job at a desk-- same deal. And if you're a manager, what if clients all started forum-ing about your business?
Honestly, if you or your business are any good, chances are it's going to work to your ADVANTAGE and that most people would say positive things. That is in fact exactly how my small business gets most its new clients - word of mouth of existing customers who are saying good things about us / our products etc. It's mainly those who aren't so good at what they do who need to be worried --- why are you worried again?
OK, granted, there is a definite danger of people with an agenda posting false statements (e.g. the competition masquerading as a disgruntled customer), but I'm not sure this risk outweighs the right of people to know whether the doctor they are entrusting their LIVES to is good or bad.
If a particular professional (e.g. doctor) has had lots of good things said about them though in a public forum, and only one bad thing, the bad thing is likely to stand out as being obviously incorrect. If you're mediocre, well then, maybe you want to wonder about why you're mediocre and whether or not it's justifiable to expect the fact that you are mediocre to be censored from the public.
But ordinary second-level domains don't really have natural scarcity either, do they? I mean, it's all just 'entries in a database', so the service you're paying for when you buy a 2nd-level domain (e.g. mydomain.com) is not that much different from the service you're paying for when you buy a third-level domain from the owner of a 2nd-level domain. There are millions of potential 2nd-level domains too, and it's not as if they're any harder to enter into a database and charge for than a third-level domain. The costs are the same, hire people, buy servers, etc.
Many variables! Here's my hypothesis: It may be that "newly minted" doctors on average give worse "care" but are more knowledgeable and up-to-date about the best, modern medicines to prescribe for various conditions, and know more about various conditions etc., and maybe on average this means better outcomes for patients but doesn't necessarily mean that dada21 isn't correct - because as I said, there would be MANY variables covered in such a study, and the study would clearly not isolate any of the variables. It might well be that if you combine new knowledgeable doctors with 'proper care' that you would get even better outcomes.
My own (anecdotal) perception is that doctors in "modern" practices don't have time to give proper care to patients ... they are run like factories / assembly lines where the goal appears to be to push as many patients through as possible, so each patient has perhaps ten or fifteen minutes and then you're pushed out again with a prescription in your hand before you've even had a chance to really explain what the problem is - and most of the time, my problems DON'T end up being solved AT ALL, the doctors effectively give a "don't know" shrug and push you off to the next "specialist" because their are ten people still in the waiting room behind me. Eventually you give up and literally just live with health problems because it's costing so much and nothing is changing (btw if I don't come back and complain would that count as a "success" in that study you cite?). You can't properly troubleshoot problems in any field without giving proper time and care to each problem case. I know as a programmer even to debug programs you really have to take your time and "get into it". I think this is the biggest difference between 'old-school' doctors and new doctors - fewer patients and more time per patient.
Uh, yes, it really proves that slashdot has double standards to consider that they would respond differently to, um, an entirely different situation with different parties and different intentions. The hypocrits, I tell you!
</sarcasm>
They are fuckwits who just want to blame anyone better off for their miserable self-made condition.
Uh, yes, I can't imagine why a 16-year old Arab boy who watched his mother and sister get blown into pieces by a US missile from an Apache helicopter wouldn't hate the US - it's his own fault, the situation. Sure. OK, that's a hypothetical example, but that kind of thing happens nearly every day now in the middle east. Where do you think terrorists come from? Where do you think the hate comes from?
A lot of journalists seem to think they are experts on everything under the sun
Funny, that describes most of slashdot too :)
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome.
Maybe, but what makes you think that the above three types of people were all the same people? Did it occur to you for a moment that of the tens of thousands of people at the Superdome, some of those who were looting/shooting might have actually, well, not have been the same people who were (legitimately) complaining that no help came for a week? Could it be that many of those stuck at the Superdome were actually decent, honest, hardworking people who just didn't have much? You think every single person there was living off welfare and complaining?
Sorry, I guess that logic doesn't fit into your misguided ideological generalisations, but as a South African I recognise all those same tired arguments from old Apartheid supporters.
Actually that is exactly how engineering works, but you have (perhaps deliberately?) misinterpreted me: I obviously do not mean that engineers specifically design to "a maximum", but in practice, and in effect, this is de facto what happens when you design to a minimum. The reason is that in construction, you by and large know the strength of the materials you use. (If engineers didn't have knowledge of material strength, buildings would be falling over all the time!) And because you know (within a narrow margin) the material strength of the materials used in a construction, you know what are the maximum forces that can be applied to that construction before the materials pretty much will fail. The choice of what materials to use then and what the minimum will be are based on e.g. funding, importance and so on. But a material that is known to only be able to handle a certain force, is not 'mysteriously' going to 'sometimes' handle a much greater force applied to it.
There are occasional exceptions to this kind of, such as in electronic engineering with the rating of CPU clock speeds. But this sort of thing generally does NOT happen in construction ... "oh, let's just build with any old material that is several times stronger than is necessary" .. yeah right, that's a huge additional cost, and unnecessary given that one knows in advance that the more expensive material is N times stronger. The other exception is when it's more cost effective to work with a much wider margin of uncertainty on the strength of a material, if a material is abundantly available but of greatly variable quality.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
It's worse than that. The levees were specifically only designed to be able to withstand a category 3 hurricane. In other words, the science/math/engineering all basically says that the levees would break in a category 4 hurricane - they were breaking as designed, they didn't just "break by chance" ... in fact there was no way the levees could really have held up to a category 4 hurricane, by design they were too weak to do so. If you have a truck that is designed to carry a maximum of, say, 3 tonnes, and you load it with 4, then it's not "random chance" when it breaks - you expect that it will break. The limitations of the levees have been known since they were built decades ago, and the dangers that they were going to break known. The problem is that nobody in power (this adminstration or previous ones) has been willing to make the funds available to upgrade the levees, on a 'gamble' that a major hurricane would not hit during their terms. The Bush adminstration gambled again, and lost (even worse drastically cutting funding for the levees).
The politicians have been playing Russian Roulette with New Orleans. In Russian Roulette, if you keep playing, you KNOW for a FACT you're going to get fscked, you just don't know when. This is 100% a human-engineered disaster. You can't tell me Taiwan can build the world's tallest building to hold up in an area that gets many earthquakes and typhoons, but the US doesn't know how to build a levee that can withstand a category 4 hurricane? It's not an "act of God" when the world's tallest building does or doesn't fall down in a 7.0 earthquake - it's an "act of Engineering" (and funding). Likewise for the levees.
And what better way than the "world leading superpower" (and biggest polluter) to stand up and be a role model of how things should be done?
I'm sick of this "gee we'll stop fscking up the planet only if other people also stop fscking up the planet" argument, it makes no sense, if you have to stop, you have to stop.
Anyway, I don't hear any other country being "blind to its own faults", most do admit there is a problem, in fact the US stands out quite singularly in refusing to admit there is even a problem. And if the most powerful economy in the world claims that it would be "too harmful to their economy" to implement a sustainable system, then no country can afford it. But that's not the truth.
Loans do stimulate the economy and "create money" (or more specifically "create wealth") in that having to pay off a loan compels people to "work", otherwise known as "making stuff".
There is a small difference though; the limitations in the lower end versions of Vista are artifically created. There is no 'natural scarcity' of the features that are available only in the higher end versions, and it actually costs Microsoft extra limit the lower end versions. This may not be price diminiscration according to the letter of the law, but it definitely is 'in spirit', and it definitely is the intent of Microsoft.
Not to sound like a Microsoft apologist, but what says product segmentation is going for money
Uh, yeah, like Microsoft would be doing this if they thought it wasn't going to make them more money. Right. The entire point of artificial fragmentation / differential pricing is to make more money, not to make less money. Like Bill Gates woke up one morning and thought, "hey, I know, let's come up with a way for our customers to save money!" ... last I checked, they still didn' t have much competition to speak of.
That's a separate issue, that has to do with market regulation closing a market or keeping a market closed. Data standards also require a FREE MARKET to work their magic.
So you don't use TCP/IP to connect computers together or to connect to the Internet, you don't use standards like SMTP/POP3 to send/receive e-mail, you don't use standards like HTTP to access the Web, your networking hardware doesn't use 802.3 or 802.11 standards, your storage hardware doesn't use IDE/SATA/SCSI, your computer mouse doesn't connect to your computer with USB or PS/2, your sound card output, telephone etc. don't use standard jacks, your doors aren't a standard size, etc. etc.
Standards are everywhere, in all the things you take for granted because you aren't paying a premium for them.
If the market forces vendors to build things to standards, then the vendors are forced to differentiate their products on the basis of useful things like price, quality etc. rather than lock-in.
If the TCO study was done over say a 5 year cycle, then Linux wins hands down as you've then got to factor in at least one forced upgrade of all your MS and non-MS applications
Yup, that's exactly the problem with all these (funded) TCO studies (and Microsoft ads) about the "cost of switching to Linux". OF COURSE the cost of switching to, well, anything is going to be higher than "staying with whatever you already have" in the short term. (The short-term cost of switching to Windows if you're on Linux would also be higher than the cost of doing nothing!) The whole friggin' point of switching is to save money in the long term.
In my experience though, most managers only make short-term decisions and cannot make long-term decisions --- most just cannot see when spending a bit more up front will save them money further down the road.
It would be easy to blast Linux for not automatically doing everything and retreat to M$ land, except that Windows 64 bit doesn't even have drivers out of the box for my SATA hard drive
You hit the nail on the head. People hold Linux up to different standards than Windows. If you try bring Linux into an organisation, even the smallest hiccup will be met with criticism and "told you so"s that you 'shoulda stuck with Windows'. But the Windows server can crash several times a month and nobody even blinks, because, well, "that's just normal" ... the "server down again guys" routine. The fact that so many other people on the planet also have problems with Windows somehow "validates" its crappiness in the minds of its users - managers often don't really understand computers, so they probably subconsciously reason "as long as everyone else has these problems it must be normal" right? Meanwhile you're bringing in Linux because it's presumably better, so people automatically look for flaws, especially if you're basically trying to "prove the managers wrong" for their decision to use Windows ... managers who like to think they know a lot do not like people who know more than them about something questioning their decisions. (This pretty much describes the situation at my last job.)
The study is more about the market state than the technical readiness of either Windows or Linux, don't confuse the two. Technically Linux may well be ready and in many ways is better than Windows as a server, but this doesn't automatically translate to higher adoption in the market, as Windows has massive unfair advantages e.g. huge marketing budget & sales team, 'network effects', critical mass, desktop monopoly etc. When they say Linux is "ready" to start becoming "mainstream" they don't mean it is now technically 'good enough', they mean, the market is at a point where it is willing to adopt Linux enough that Linux is poised to reach the required critical mass. In other words, in five years or so a significant percentage of companies will be 'ready' to adopt Linux as a server platform. It's not so much a case of "is Linux ready for the market", it's more about "is the market ready for Linux".
puts it at 25% of the ssl web server market -- considerably lower than Microsoft's 40%
SSL servers alone are hardly representative of the entire web.
It au pair with OSX
It lives with a foreign family and helps do housework and look after the children? :) (Think you meant "on par" ...)
"Mission Critical" is not a military term:
mission critical "Vital to the operation of the organization. The term is very popular for describing the applications required to run the day-to-day business."
It may once have been a military term, but its usage has long ago become more generalised, so that usage is now strictly a part of the etymology i.e. history of the phrase. Language changes, and the correct version of a word is the one in use today.
Ah, yes, the Great Myth that you can save money by hiring someone cheap and poorly qualified to do something complex. How does the old saying go? "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys".
The exploit grows in popularity in the darker parts of society, and GM cars around the country are now being broken into becuase you thought you were doing society a "favor".
But you ARE doing society a favour --- people will know next time that they should not buy GM cars because GM doesn't care enough to produce cars without such problems or to fix the problems in time! GM doesn't have a 'right' to retain its market share, and certainly not if it is culpably releasing and selling known defective cars. No matter how you twist it, you cannot get away from the fact that a customer ALWAYS has a right to know if they are purchasing or using a defective product.
You are advocating a cover-up. The "moral obligation" we have to society is to make sure we don't do cover-ups when it is discovered products have defects. Trying to keep such flaws a secret is only going to serve to protect and reward companies that do shoddy QA. And the irony is, the thieves are going to find out about that flaw in the GM car sooner or later anyway, and when they do, it's going to be even worse because a lot more people would have bought GM cars because you thought it was a good idea to keep the problems secret.
Sorry, but I have a right to know what I'm buying, what I'm about to buy, what I've bought and am using.
If Windows has flaws that Microsoft has known about for months but doesn't care enough to fix, and my business has many confidential documents entrusted to the 'security' of Windows, then I damn well have a right to know about it so that I can to something else rather, like Linux.
Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it
"Linux" is not a monopoly and can never be .. there are DOZENS if not hundreds of companies supplying Linux, working on Linux, supporting Linux, improving Linux etc., and due to the Linux, it will always be this way. Always.
The GPL levels all uneven market entry barriers - anyone can get in to the market, and everyone can come in at exactly the same level as existing players, because the entire codebase of each competitor is available.