but the overhead of MySQL is often pretty absurd for very simple dynamic websites (hell, a lot of kinds of dynamic web sites) and desktop apps managing a relatively small amount of information. You're right, but "high overhead" is not what I ever expected to see in conjunction with MySQL. Your point is well made. I would hate to see init (or anything more "basic" than MySQL) having to depend on it. That point also explains a lot of the success of MySQL. For a lot of things, MySQL is more than enough. The key thing to remember is that slow readers and fast writers is not what MySQL is designed for. If you can live within MySQL's limitations, I don't think anything else will touch it, even at the enterprise level.
Enlightened self-interest would be more accurate but "ethically obliged" looks more intelligible. If I do manage to run into something "interesting", I think I do have an ethical obligation to put out some effort to help get to the bottom of things. (After checking latest updates which will most likely have already solved the problems;) This is in contrast with commercial software where it's just not worth the hassle. Too much like a pot-luck supper. While you can free-load, it's not comfortable feeling.
use it for whatever they want, but in so doing they become ethically obliged to share any modifications with the company. There is a legal requirement to make any modification available to any idiot that would buy TonySQL. (However I'd be a bigger idiot to try to keep up with the original;) I think what CNN is trying to get at, is that if I've a few things that are actually useful (to me at least), it is strongly in my own self-interest to go to a lot of extra effort to get the stuff into the main line. Calling it "ethically obliged" is a misnomer, but it is an effective way of viewing the situation.
managed to instill in its employees a perfect conformity in purpose and beliefs, a perfectly machined set of values and opinions unshakeable except by a new edict from the top. That's exactly the characteristics you want to find in an enemy you want to anihilate.
I wonder if Open Source could contribute to an economic comeback in any way. "He who lives by the crystal ball shall learn to enjoy ground glass". In a word, yes. For how and why, take a close look at IBM. Don't confuse free with cheap. Microsoft makes a glitzy facade with no real substance behind it. The required real substance is expensive. Very expensive. Large business systems that must interoperate reliably, with no funny business going on in dark corners. The future isn't B2B, it's B2B2B...2B with a few Cs thrown into the brew, where the whole mess is sufficiently open that I do not have to trust my neighbors.
I'm still wondering what this story has to do with 'Your Rights Online'. (Someone from Harvard would explain it far better than I, but here goes anyway;-) The real reason for OSS in government is that government records, and by extension the records of and about its citizens, cannot be held hostage to the whims or (mis)fortunes of any private company (or organization). Your actual rights depend as much or more on the way governments keep records as on the laws which have been enacted.
Yep, and you tax the hell out of it. There is a fundamental difference between cheap land that you develop and make productive and cheap land that is just left sitting there. There is a sort of poetic justice if a book that is out of print is also out of copyright.
Can someone explain why a magnet apparently won't damage a black-and-white TV, but it will damage a color TV? I think the magnet messes with both but the effects are dramatically different. For B&W, if the beam hitting a spot is displaced by several pixels, its neighbors will be similarly displaced and only a small bit of overall distortion would be noticed. Color depends on some rather precise alignments so that the red gun hits the red dots and only the red dots. If the magnet messes with this alignment (which has to be at subpixel level) the colors get messed up. To complicate matters, for color it's the path or angle that is critical.
Moral of the story? KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) (IIRC came out of the Skunk Works where "it is exactly rocket science";-)
most of the credit should go to the 386 implementors Yep. The 386 architecture looks more like supporting something more like Multics than Unix, but to my limited knowledge, nothing even remotely takes advantage of it. The main advantage of a segmented address space is that things you shouldn't be messing with are not even addressable.
Openbsd is about qualtiy. It has les bugs, which equal less possible exploits, but security is not their objective. Hell, they only recently got a basic acl and added stack protection, stuff that has been available for *ages*
Oh, and theo's stubborn incorrect opinion that users don't need security models. This is wrong, as we need stuff like rsbac or grsecurity to bring *nix security up to a powerfull level.
With OpenBSD not implementing such a basic ideaology, They might suceed as a hobbiest OS, but never as a *secure* os.
Partially correct, but my impression is that if you want Multics, then use Multics.
Regarding OpenBSD and it security models or lack thereof. Theo's opinion matters. Yours does not. Mine does not. They are responsible to themselves for their own definition of what OpenBSD should be. ONLY. They happen to be nice enough to share the fruits of their labors, but that is their decision not our right.
as a hobbiest OS Yep, but that's one hell of a hobby. It strikes me as what paranoid professionals use on their own private systems when they like to sleep peacefully at night.
OK, I'd classify myself as still somewhat of a Linux newbie, but I have installed and run OpenBSD on a few boxes. Those were where it was easier to install OpenBSD than mess with some not-quite-cooperative hardware. The documentation looks intimidating but it is extremely complete and accurate. Probably the main hurdle is that if you are very familiar with DOS partition tables, OpenBSD does not think that way. Partition does not mean what you think it means. That said, its not that hard to bull your way through it. Just make sure you are using disks that you can afford to lose ALL content on. Currently I've got an older OpenBSD running on an older Toshiba laptop. No idea why other than at the time it was probably easier to get OpenBSD up and running that any of several versions of RedHat. Oh, you probably want the bash shell;-)
Kind of like how Microsoft keeps its code private for security reasons too....
Nothing at all like it, unless you're counting cases where Microsoft choses not to run their own code, but that's keeping the knowledge of which code Microsoft is running private rather than keeping the code itself private.
It's more like banks not heavily advertising what brand of safe they use.
Methinks it helps BSD more when those "in the know" quietly use one of them instead of blandishing their choice.
A world with OpenBSD is much safer than a world OpenBSD. This holds even more if you do not use OpenBSD. (Like cars are much safer in a world with crash dummies;)
the mathematical probability... is nil Rubbish. That's like saying it's statistically impossible for all Brits to drive on the left hand side of the road. There's lots of parameters to lots of functions, but there's always a lot of effort put into making them as consistent as possible. This means that a very few design choices dictate how everything else is put together. Move source,destination -or- Move destination,source
Further, access to almost any code that uses the library gives most all the information required to create a binary compatible library. SCO might have a point if numerous deliberate errors and inconsistencies were put into their code, but I kinda doubt that SCO's code is that bad.
Looks like that ownership may be a bit tainted. (emphasis added)
The suit was settled after the University threatened to countersue over license violations by AT&T and USL. It seems that from as far back as before 1985, the historical Bell Labs codebase had been incorporating large amounts of software from the BSD sources. The University's cause of action lay in the fact that AT&T, USL and Novell had routinely violated the terms of the BSD license by removing license attributions and copyrights.
The exact terms of final settlement, and much of the judicial record, were sealed at Novell's insistence.
Methinks it could tend to be very dangerous. It should be very easy to plant bogus information or other "bad stuff" so that screen scrapers will pick it up and normal viewers will not. This is similar to deliberate errors on maps, but unless your system is extremely secure, it probably could be taken out and you wouldn't even be able to find any sympathy.
For the (few) things absolutely critical to how you operate, methinks you would be better going the./configure;./make route instead of using rpms. Security through obscurity can work, but to do so it should first be obscure. But you're right in that 12 months (that's RedHat months, not your months) is definately too short a time. Oh well, surely there'll be some kind of Pink Bow Tie Linux that keeps up with critical updates to obsolete Red Hat.
"there's no way it can be any good at those prices."
There's more to price than (just) money. There is excellent support to be had for no money. Oversimplifying, the price is to understand the problem (from the developer's viewpoint) and to Read The Fine Manual (whether or not it's been written). If you have the right problem at the right time, you get superior support for free, but this is because it fits the developer's agenda, not because you have a problem. The CIO cannot afford to only have problems that are currently interesting to developers.
Expensive is no guarantee of being good, Enron and Authur Anderson attest to that. Expensive does buy one thing. A phone number and the moral right to complain until things get fixed. Even better is not having to complain;-)
Methinks you're not in as bad a situation as you think. (Oh, that's a minimum of 12 months, not a maximum of 12 months;) Exploits will be primarily against unpatched new versions, somewhat lesser against unpatched older versions. You can go a long time by watching security updates and then turning off or uninstalling anything vulnerable. What you will lose are the latest updates to the old versions of the desktop apps, etc. Whenever the current desktop starts feeling a bit seedy, try out the latest version (on your timetable), and if it's decidedly better, it's probably time to start switching the users. Methinks things are progressing that quickly. Whether the things that are progressing quickly are the things you are interested in is a different matter. (Don't throw out the older versions. Sometimes they work when the newer ones do not;)
Finally, CIOs who don't know much don't like stuff that's dirt cheap. They seem to associate it with bad or unprofessional. Dumb, but true. Not that dumb. They have a problem. They want it fixed. Fast. They want it fixed because they have a problem and do not want to have to research it themselves. This takes resources, and the resources take money. To be able to supply the required support, Red Hat needs to be profitable, even lucratively profitable.
What Red Hat is doing is offering a wide array of different price points from very cheap to very expensive. (I suppose you could get IBM to support it for even more;)
The "dumb" CIO can target the price, and the support will fall nicely into line with what is reasonable at that price level.
How do you figure this is anti-trust? Microsoft has been judged a monopolist. Since past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior, there is a presumption that this is anti-competitive behavior until proven otherwise.
This is simply a company who has the dominant product protecting their lead. For a monopolist, nothing is simply any more. In the absense of market forces to correct misbehavior, exactly how they attempt to protect their lead does matter.
And quite honestly, I dont see anything wrong with that, as long as they confine their practices to their product (ie. they arent making Office the only suite that can run on windows) [emphasis added] As long as nothing in the Office Suite promotes the Desktop OS monopoly. As long as nothing in the Desktop OS monopoly promotes their own Office Suite.
But this isnt a game, this is business. And screwing your customers is bad business. And screwing your suppliers is bad business. And screwing your investors is bad business. And screwing your employees is bad business. Even screwing your competitors is bad business.
And since businesses are SUPPOSED to make money, they need to make sure people continue to buy MS Office. And General Motors needs to make sure people continue to buy Chevrolets.
And making an office suite that shares documents with all the various third-tier office suites just doesnt do that. It just makes incomprehensible gibberish unless the recipient happens to have the exact same sooper-dooper magic decoder ring. Unless I can read my stuff, under circumstances of my own choosing, I have a problem. Unless I can send stuff to my correspondents and they can read it un circumstances of their own choosing, I have a problem. If my documents are hostage to the whims of a supplier, I have a problem.
Why should my company buy MS Office if the documents it produces are exactly the same as those of FreeBeerOffice? New twist on Clippy? No reason they should. That's Microsoft's problem, not yours or your company's (unless you work for Microsoft;)
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but the overhead of MySQL is often pretty absurd for very simple dynamic websites (hell, a lot of kinds of dynamic web sites) and desktop apps managing a relatively small amount of information.
You're right, but "high overhead" is not what I ever expected to see in conjunction with MySQL. Your point is well made. I would hate to see init (or anything more "basic" than MySQL) having to depend on it.
That point also explains a lot of the success of MySQL. For a lot of things, MySQL is more than enough. The key thing to remember is that slow readers and fast writers is not what MySQL is designed for. If you can live within MySQL's limitations, I don't think anything else will touch it, even at the enterprise level.
Enlightened self-interest would be more accurate but "ethically obliged" looks more intelligible. If I do manage to run into something "interesting", I think I do have an ethical obligation to put out some effort to help get to the bottom of things. (After checking latest updates which will most likely have already solved the problems;) This is in contrast with commercial software where it's just not worth the hassle.
Too much like a pot-luck supper. While you can free-load, it's not comfortable feeling.
use it for whatever they want, but in so doing they become ethically obliged to share any modifications with the company.
There is a legal requirement to make any modification available to any idiot that would buy TonySQL. (However I'd be a bigger idiot to try to keep up with the original;)
I think what CNN is trying to get at, is that if I've a few things that are actually useful (to me at least), it is strongly in my own self-interest to go to a lot of extra effort to get the stuff into the main line. Calling it "ethically obliged" is a misnomer, but it is an effective way of viewing the situation.
managed to instill in its employees a perfect conformity in purpose and beliefs, a perfectly machined set of values and opinions unshakeable except by a new edict from the top.
That's exactly the characteristics you want to find in an enemy you want to anihilate.
I wonder if Open Source could contribute to an economic comeback in any way.
"He who lives by the crystal ball shall learn to enjoy ground glass".
In a word, yes. For how and why, take a close look at IBM. Don't confuse free with cheap. Microsoft makes a glitzy facade with no real substance behind it. The required real substance is expensive. Very expensive. Large business systems that must interoperate reliably, with no funny business going on in dark corners. The future isn't B2B, it's B2B2B...2B with a few Cs thrown into the brew, where the whole mess is sufficiently open that I do not have to trust my neighbors.
I'm still wondering what this story has to do with 'Your Rights Online'.
(Someone from Harvard would explain it far better than I, but here goes anyway;-)
The real reason for OSS in government is that government records, and by extension the records of and about its citizens, cannot be held hostage to the whims or (mis)fortunes of any private company (or organization). Your actual rights depend as much or more on the way governments keep records as on the laws which have been enacted.
Yep, and you tax the hell out of it.
There is a fundamental difference between cheap land that you develop and make productive and cheap land that is just left sitting there.
There is a sort of poetic justice if a book that is out of print is also out of copyright.
Another MS bashing post from someone who cant use windows.....
I much prefer a MS bashing post from someone who can use Microsft Windows.
Which means that with just the right kind of distortion, it sounds better than the original.
Can someone explain why a magnet apparently won't damage a black-and-white TV, but it will damage a color TV?
;-)
I think the magnet messes with both but the effects are dramatically different.
For B&W, if the beam hitting a spot is displaced by several pixels, its neighbors will be similarly displaced and only a small bit of overall distortion would be noticed.
Color depends on some rather precise alignments so that the red gun hits the red dots and only the red dots. If the magnet messes with this alignment (which has to be at subpixel level) the colors get messed up.
To complicate matters, for color it's the path or angle that is critical.
Moral of the story? KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
(IIRC came out of the Skunk Works where "it is exactly rocket science"
To add to the convolutions, it seems like the Department of State decides what is a munition.
most of the credit should go to the 386 implementors
Yep. The 386 architecture looks more like supporting something more like Multics than Unix, but to my limited knowledge, nothing even remotely takes advantage of it. The main advantage of a segmented address space is that things you shouldn't be messing with are not even addressable.
LOL
Now that OpenBSD has been subsidised by the US government, what can we expect? Strings attached.
That does not sound like Theo.
Openbsd is about qualtiy. It has les bugs, which equal less possible exploits, but security is not their objective. Hell, they only recently got a basic acl and added stack protection, stuff that has been available for *ages*
Oh, and theo's stubborn incorrect opinion that users don't need security models. This is wrong, as we need stuff like rsbac or grsecurity to bring *nix security up to a powerfull level.
With OpenBSD not implementing such a basic ideaology, They might suceed as a hobbiest OS, but never as a *secure* os.
Partially correct, but my impression is that if you want Multics, then use Multics.
Regarding OpenBSD and it security models or lack thereof. Theo's opinion matters. Yours does not. Mine does not. They are responsible to themselves for their own definition of what OpenBSD should be. ONLY. They happen to be nice enough to share the fruits of their labors, but that is their decision not our right.
as a hobbiest OS
Yep, but that's one hell of a hobby. It strikes me as what paranoid professionals use on their own private systems when they like to sleep peacefully at night.
OK, I'd classify myself as still somewhat of a Linux newbie, but I have installed and run OpenBSD on a few boxes. Those were where it was easier to install OpenBSD than mess with some not-quite-cooperative hardware. The documentation looks intimidating but it is extremely complete and accurate. Probably the main hurdle is that if you are very familiar with DOS partition tables, OpenBSD does not think that way. Partition does not mean what you think it means. That said, its not that hard to bull your way through it. Just make sure you are using disks that you can afford to lose ALL content on. Currently I've got an older OpenBSD running on an older Toshiba laptop. No idea why other than at the time it was probably easier to get OpenBSD up and running that any of several versions of RedHat. Oh, you probably want the bash shell ;-)
Kind of like how Microsoft keeps its code private for security reasons too....
Nothing at all like it, unless you're counting cases where Microsoft choses not to run their own code, but that's keeping the knowledge of which code Microsoft is running private rather than keeping the code itself private.
It's more like banks not heavily advertising what brand of safe they use.
Methinks it helps BSD more when those "in the know" quietly use one of them instead of blandishing their choice.
A world with OpenBSD is much safer than a world OpenBSD.
This holds even more if you do not use OpenBSD.
(Like cars are much safer in a world with crash dummies;)
the mathematical probability ... is nil
Rubbish. That's like saying it's statistically impossible for all Brits to drive on the left hand side of the road. There's lots of parameters to lots of functions, but there's always a lot of effort put into making them as consistent as possible. This means that a very few design choices dictate how everything else is put together.
Move source,destination -or- Move destination,source
Further, access to almost any code that uses the library gives most all the information required to create a binary compatible library. SCO might have a point if numerous deliberate errors and inconsistencies were put into their code, but I kinda doubt that SCO's code is that bad.
Looks like that ownership may be a bit tainted. (emphasis added)
The suit was settled after the University threatened to countersue over license violations by AT&T and USL. It seems that from as far back as before 1985, the historical Bell Labs codebase had been incorporating large amounts of software from the BSD sources. The University's cause of action lay in the fact that AT&T, USL and Novell had routinely violated the terms of the BSD license by removing license attributions and copyrights.
The exact terms of final settlement, and much of the judicial record, were sealed at Novell's insistence.
Methinks it could tend to be very dangerous.
It should be very easy to plant bogus information or other "bad stuff" so that screen scrapers will pick it up and normal viewers will not. This is similar to deliberate errors on maps, but unless your system is extremely secure, it probably could be taken out and you wouldn't even be able to find any sympathy.
For the (few) things absolutely critical to how you operate, methinks you would be better going the ./configure; ./make route instead of using rpms. Security through obscurity can work, but to do so it should first be obscure. But you're right in that 12 months (that's RedHat months, not your months) is definately too short a time. Oh well, surely there'll be some kind of Pink Bow Tie Linux that keeps up with critical updates to obsolete Red Hat.
"there's no way it can be any good at those prices."
;-)
There's more to price than (just) money.
There is excellent support to be had for no money. Oversimplifying, the price is to understand the problem (from the developer's viewpoint) and to Read The Fine Manual (whether or not it's been written). If you have the right problem at the right time, you get superior support for free, but this is because it fits the developer's agenda, not because you have a problem. The CIO cannot afford to only have problems that are currently interesting to developers.
Expensive is no guarantee of being good, Enron and Authur Anderson attest to that. Expensive does buy one thing. A phone number and the moral right to complain until things get fixed. Even better is not having to complain
Methinks you're not in as bad a situation as you think. (Oh, that's a minimum of 12 months, not a maximum of 12 months;)
Exploits will be primarily against unpatched new versions, somewhat lesser against unpatched older versions. You can go a long time by watching security updates and then turning off or uninstalling anything vulnerable. What you will lose are the latest updates to the old versions of the desktop apps, etc.
Whenever the current desktop starts feeling a bit seedy, try out the latest version (on your timetable), and if it's decidedly better, it's probably time to start switching the users.
Methinks things are progressing that quickly. Whether the things that are progressing quickly are the things you are interested in is a different matter. (Don't throw out the older versions. Sometimes they work when the newer ones do not;)
Finally, CIOs who don't know much don't like stuff that's dirt cheap. They seem to associate it with bad or unprofessional. Dumb, but true.
Not that dumb.
They have a problem. They want it fixed. Fast. They want it fixed because they have a problem and do not want to have to research it themselves.
This takes resources, and the resources take money. To be able to supply the required support, Red Hat needs to be profitable, even lucratively profitable.
What Red Hat is doing is offering a wide array of different price points from very cheap to very expensive. (I suppose you could get IBM to support it for even more;)
The "dumb" CIO can target the price, and the support will fall nicely into line with what is reasonable at that price level.
How do you figure this is anti-trust? Microsoft has been judged a monopolist. Since past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior, there is a presumption that this is anti-competitive behavior until proven otherwise.
This is simply a company who has the dominant product protecting their lead.
For a monopolist, nothing is simply any more. In the absense of market forces to correct misbehavior, exactly how they attempt to protect their lead does matter.
And quite honestly, I dont see anything wrong with that, as long as they confine their practices to their product (ie. they arent making Office the only suite that can run on windows) [emphasis added]
As long as nothing in the Office Suite promotes the Desktop OS monopoly.
As long as nothing in the Desktop OS monopoly promotes their own Office Suite.
But this isnt a game, this is business.
And screwing your customers is bad business.
And screwing your suppliers is bad business.
And screwing your investors is bad business.
And screwing your employees is bad business.
Even screwing your competitors is bad business.
And since businesses are SUPPOSED to make money, they need to make sure people continue to buy MS Office.
And General Motors needs to make sure people continue to buy Chevrolets.
And making an office suite that shares documents with all the various third-tier office suites just doesnt do that.
It just makes incomprehensible gibberish unless the recipient happens to have the exact same sooper-dooper magic decoder ring. Unless I can read my stuff, under circumstances of my own choosing, I have a problem. Unless I can send stuff to my correspondents and they can read it un circumstances of their own choosing, I have a problem. If my documents are hostage to the whims of a supplier, I have a problem.
Why should my company buy MS Office if the documents it produces are exactly the same as those of FreeBeerOffice?
New twist on Clippy?
No reason they should. That's Microsoft's problem, not yours or your company's (unless you work for Microsoft;)