the direction that Microsoft is going that is even more alarming One of the cheap shots for effective security is to never use the machine to be patched to download the patches. Use something else, anything else. I'm very comfortable using Microsoft Windows NT to download RedHat patches.
gives Microsoft complete control over your computer: They own it, not you. That's the My of My Computer. I think the "My" has to refer to whoever named it so.
The obvious solution is to have NT on a 2gig max DOS FAT16 partition and from a DOS boot, use DOS means to save/restore all the files in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG. But it really really bugs me to see people who clearly have no desire to learn, and show no technical competence go off trying to sound like an expert and offer advice. Self-referential?
He's not referring to ghosting, or rolling the same installation out to multiple different computers, he's referring to the ability, or more accurately the lack of ability, to recover from catastrophe. Lose a power supply, motherboard, cpu or such, and if you've got another computer you can cannabalize or take over you can be back in business very shortly. Microsoft seems to be throwing away at least one 9 in the high-reliability game. For FUD value, you pass that one degree of separation and that server will never play the violin again.
Like any kind of benchmark, TCO analyses have flaws. I'm sure there is some objective analysis that will show a Yugo superior to a Ferrari. Microsoft tends to be very good a something that at first glance resembles the desired objective. Do not pursue any shortcomings or adjustments. If you must, attribute them to the Linux side of the balance. For the Linux side, assume that any upkeep required on the Microsoft side is also required on the Linux side, at inflated UNIX guru prices. For the Microsoft side, there is not much point in trying to get it to do exactly what you want. It will follow Microsoft's vision, not yours. Lower cost. For the Linux side, it does tend to be worthwhile to bend, fold, and mutulate it to fit exactly what you want. Assign full cost. With Microsoft, TCO is what Microsoft decides. With Linux, TCO is what I decide. I can assure you that if my TCO for Linux is more than for Microsoft, I'm buying something valuable that Microsoft cannot provide.
A very old canard is that people only use about 10% of their brainpower. Probably more than a little truth to it, but I rather doubt the implied assumption that people would be better off using 100% of their brainpower. Speed reading. It's possible to dramatically up the rate and comprehension. At the expense of critical analysis and correlation with other things in our experience. You only use 10% of your automobile's horsepower traveling down the road. So? Seems like any conclusion anyone tried to draw would be rather faulty. Probably the best response is something like "Which 90% of your brain do you not need?"
No. Natural selection only works on the level of individuals (actually genes). Whole groups are not selected for. It has been theorized that group selection is possible, but in practice it does not occur on this planet at least. The gene is in the individual who is in the group. If the group dies, the individual dies, and the gene dies. If an individual has better survival odds in a cohesive group than "every man for himself", then the evolutionary forces will tend to favor whatever increases the cohesiveness of the group.
Over 25 years as a programmer I have witnessed the unending quest by management types to deskill the software engineering process -- unsuccessfully. Curious that. It might be partially explained in that there is about an 85% overlap in the skill set of a good manager and a good programmer. Presumably, PHBs tend to view competent programmers as unfriendly threats.
For fun with economics, what is the value of money? Does $2 have twice the value of $1? Why do I maintain subscriptions to FreeBSD and Slackware Linux when I can download them for free? What is relevant is (Value(Subscription CD) - Cost(Subscription)) versus (Value(Downloaded CD) - Cost(downloading CD)). Same reason I buy RedHat Office Professional and use the first two (now three) CDs. Would the value of your subscriptions be worth more or less if downloads were no longer free? Personally, if RedHat stopped the free downloads, I'd be looking for a different vendor.
No more shallow than the owner of an old classic automobile. There's a bit of peer recognition/approval but it is much more an internal sense of rightness. My own opinion of myself is much more important to me than anyone else's, but a bit of approval here and there doesn't hurt.
I provide free software because I have no reason not to. You are minimizing what I'd call the "hassle factor". It's possible to put some sort of monetary value on free software, but it's a lot of work to produce rather poor numbers which are misleading at best. The "enlightened self interest" does not apply to just Open Source software. There is such as the American Petroleum Institute where the major contributers are mostly really helping their competitors.
from man tar
-S, --sparse
handle sparse files efficiently
I'm not really familiar with them, but haven't seen any other mention here. I know it's possible to put a file on a floppy that won't fit on your hard drive.
You might add it to the list of all the other troubles in the middle. It was a wisecrack about the number of middling problems, noting one which was NOT in your list.
Why didn't you make informed decisions about your purchases? From a Microsoft advertisement????
It's not like Slashdot doesn't report every single flaw in MS stuff. "every". Hardly. Just the ones you need to know about if you're supposed to be supporting the stuff.
Re:A link to the article would have been nice...
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 2
The problem will become apparent when their software just does not work with apache's one day, because they goofed. Companies will deem Apache as unstable and move to the ever stable and compliant IIS solution. I hear you but. These things are extremely difficult to get right, and more so with increasing complexity. For long term stability I'm staying far, far away from.NET.
Microsoft "Soon would have.NET on all sorts of other platforms....like Java!". Like NT on all sorts of platforms? I would expect the FreeBSD/.NET to wind up a pretty lame stepchild. Judging from past performance, avoiding single vendor "lock-in" means avoiding Microsoft.
I can download the Java SDK from IBM. With that, I'm not too concerned with Java being, strictly speaking, proprietary to Sun. You can pretty well count on IBM and Sun keeping each other honest. I can't blame Sun for keeping tight reigns on the language. It's far too easy to make "improvements" which destroy the integrity of the language. Both IBM and Sun have an interest in Java on enterprise-class systems, where hidden pratfalls are very unwelcome. Many problems with Microsoft software can be explained to users as Microsoft has trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. This is not a desirable attribute for doing anything effective with.NET.
Atomically, how? Unless the writing side has some means of locking out the reading side until completion of the write, which should lead to some performance issues.
I can think of a case where it would be useful. The read-only monster has data you want/need to make public in something resembling real-time, but you can't or don't want to trust the public server that is serving that information to preserve the integrity of the data. Whenever somebody get a corrupted file, they'll just try again so a corrupted cache is not that much of a problem. Not a real good solution, since a compromised server can serve bogus data even if the disk it's reading from is not bogus.
All those drivers make assumptions about the disk they are reading NOT changing in the middle of reading them. Easiest way to visualise. Read something from a floppy. In the middle of the read, remove the floppy, take it to another machine. Delete the file the first machine was reading and put some other stuff on it. Then replace the floppy on the first machine where the first machine has no way to tell that anything has happened. Disclaimer: I have shared a disk between two systems. Crude and messy but better than messing with the tape drives on the two systems. There are NO proper drivers for this type of thing.
Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem. Plus there have to be some "interesting" cache-consistency problems with the "read-only" side of the disk. If the write-side is very active, the read-side, when and as read, may contain all sorts of integrity problems.
I am getting reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeleeeeeeeeeeeeee SICK of all the people on slashdot who insist on equating US Governments behavior to that of China. Get some effing perspective. Yeah. China's is improving.
Re:Why is this an unusual occurrence?
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 2
"It will be interesting to see if, ultimately, businesses do perform a complete about-turn on their strategies and, rather than going for licensed software, with maintence contracts etc., have maintenance in-house for software which, for the most part, has a bug patch written for it before the user finds the bug."
I'll probably get flamed for this, but where are all the open source Linux companies that are currently truely making a profit (and not just using some creative accounting tricks)? You're confusing producers for consumers.
Or maybe I'm just oblivious to all of the open source success stories.... Most likely. The major gain from open source seems to be about 1 or 2 more 9's of reliability for very little cost. Just look at the mechanics of Microsoft fixing a bothersome bug when you are the only one who encounters it. Even if they were willing.
Slashdot Mirror
the direction that Microsoft is going that is even more alarming
One of the cheap shots for effective security is to never use the machine to be patched to download the patches. Use something else, anything else. I'm very comfortable using Microsoft Windows NT to download RedHat patches.
gives Microsoft complete control over your computer: They own it, not you.
That's the My of My Computer. I think the "My" has to refer to whoever named it so.
The obvious solution is to have NT on a 2gig max DOS FAT16 partition and from a DOS boot, use DOS means to save/restore all the files in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG.
But it really really bugs me to see people who clearly have no desire to learn, and show no technical competence go off trying to sound like an expert and offer advice.
Self-referential?
He's not referring to ghosting, or rolling the same installation out to multiple different computers, he's referring to the ability, or more accurately the lack of ability, to recover from catastrophe. Lose a power supply, motherboard, cpu or such, and if you've got another computer you can cannabalize or take over you can be back in business very shortly. Microsoft seems to be throwing away at least one 9 in the high-reliability game. For FUD value, you pass that one degree of separation and that server will never play the violin again.
Like any kind of benchmark, TCO analyses have flaws. I'm sure there is some objective analysis that will show a Yugo superior to a Ferrari.
Microsoft tends to be very good a something that at first glance resembles the desired objective. Do not pursue any shortcomings or adjustments. If you must, attribute them to the Linux side of the balance.
For the Linux side, assume that any upkeep required on the Microsoft side is also required on the Linux side, at inflated UNIX guru prices.
For the Microsoft side, there is not much point in trying to get it to do exactly what you want. It will follow Microsoft's vision, not yours. Lower cost.
For the Linux side, it does tend to be worthwhile to bend, fold, and mutulate it to fit exactly what you want. Assign full cost.
With Microsoft, TCO is what Microsoft decides.
With Linux, TCO is what I decide. I can assure you that if my TCO for Linux is more than for Microsoft, I'm buying something valuable that Microsoft cannot provide.
A very old canard is that people only use about 10% of their brainpower.
Probably more than a little truth to it, but I rather doubt the implied assumption that people would be better off using 100% of their brainpower.
Speed reading. It's possible to dramatically up the rate and comprehension. At the expense of critical analysis and correlation with other things in our experience.
You only use 10% of your automobile's horsepower traveling down the road. So? Seems like any conclusion anyone tried to draw would be rather faulty.
Probably the best response is something like "Which 90% of your brain do you not need?"
No. Natural selection only works on the level of individuals (actually genes). Whole groups are not selected for. It has been theorized that group selection is possible, but in practice it does not occur on this planet at least.
The gene is in the individual who is in the group. If the group dies, the individual dies, and the gene dies. If an individual has better survival odds in a cohesive group than "every man for himself", then the evolutionary forces will tend to favor whatever increases the cohesiveness of the group.
Over 25 years as a programmer I have witnessed the unending quest by management types to deskill the software engineering process -- unsuccessfully.
Curious that. It might be partially explained in that there is about an 85% overlap in the skill set of a good manager and a good programmer. Presumably, PHBs tend to view competent programmers as unfriendly threats.
For fun with economics, what is the value of money? Does $2 have twice the value of $1?
Why do I maintain subscriptions to FreeBSD and Slackware Linux when I can download them for free?
What is relevant is (Value(Subscription CD) - Cost(Subscription)) versus (Value(Downloaded CD) - Cost(downloading CD)). Same reason I buy RedHat Office Professional and use the first two (now three) CDs.
Would the value of your subscriptions be worth more or less if downloads were no longer free? Personally, if RedHat stopped the free downloads, I'd be looking for a different vendor.
No more shallow than the owner of an old classic automobile.
There's a bit of peer recognition/approval but it is much more an internal sense of rightness. My own opinion of myself is much more important to me than anyone else's, but a bit of approval here and there doesn't hurt.
I provide free software because I have no reason not to.
You are minimizing what I'd call the "hassle factor". It's possible to put some sort of monetary value on free software, but it's a lot of work to produce rather poor numbers which are misleading at best.
The "enlightened self interest" does not apply to just Open Source software. There is such as the American Petroleum Institute where the major contributers are mostly really helping their competitors.
from man tar
-S, --sparse
handle sparse files efficiently
I'm not really familiar with them, but haven't seen any other mention here.
I know it's possible to put a file on a floppy that won't fit on your hard drive.
You might add it to the list of all the other troubles in the middle.
It was a wisecrack about the number of middling problems, noting one which was NOT in your list.
Undistributed Middle
All Russians were revolutionists, and all anarchists were revolutionist, therefore, all anarchists were Russians.
I'm confused. How is what Sony did or did not do at a convention a flaw in MS stuff?
Why didn't you make informed decisions about your purchases?
From a Microsoft advertisement????
It's not like Slashdot doesn't report every single flaw in MS stuff.
"every". Hardly. Just the ones you need to know about if you're supposed to be supporting the stuff.
The problem will become apparent when their software just does not work with apache's one day, because they goofed. Companies will deem Apache as unstable and move to the ever stable and compliant IIS solution. .NET.
I hear you but.
These things are extremely difficult to get right, and more so with increasing complexity. For long term stability I'm staying far, far away from
Microsoft "Soon would have .NET on all sorts of other platforms....like Java!".
Like NT on all sorts of platforms?
I would expect the FreeBSD/.NET to wind up a pretty lame stepchild.
Judging from past performance, avoiding single vendor "lock-in" means avoiding Microsoft.
I can download the Java SDK from IBM. With that, I'm not too concerned with Java being, strictly speaking, proprietary to Sun. You can pretty well count on IBM and Sun keeping each other honest. I can't blame Sun for keeping tight reigns on the language. It's far too easy to make "improvements" which destroy the integrity of the language. Both IBM and Sun have an interest in Java on enterprise-class systems, where hidden pratfalls are very unwelcome. .NET.
Many problems with Microsoft software can be explained to users as Microsoft has trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. This is not a desirable attribute for doing anything effective with
Atomically, how?
Unless the writing side has some means of locking out the reading side until completion of the write, which should lead to some performance issues.
I can think of a case where it would be useful.
The read-only monster has data you want/need to make public in something resembling real-time, but you can't or don't want to trust the public server that is serving that information to preserve the integrity of the data.
Whenever somebody get a corrupted file, they'll just try again so a corrupted cache is not that much of a problem. Not a real good solution, since a compromised server can serve bogus data even if the disk it's reading from is not bogus.
All those drivers make assumptions about the disk they are reading NOT changing in the middle of reading them.
Easiest way to visualise. Read something from a floppy. In the middle of the read, remove the floppy, take it to another machine. Delete the file the first machine was reading and put some other stuff on it. Then replace the floppy on the first machine where the first machine has no way to tell that anything has happened.
Disclaimer: I have shared a disk between two systems. Crude and messy but better than messing with the tape drives on the two systems. There are NO proper drivers for this type of thing.
Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem.
Plus there have to be some "interesting" cache-consistency problems with the "read-only" side of the disk. If the write-side is very active, the read-side, when and as read, may contain all sorts of integrity problems.
I am getting reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeleeeeeeeeeeeeee SICK of all the people on slashdot who insist on equating US Governments behavior to that of China. Get some effing perspective.
Yeah. China's is improving.
"It will be interesting to see if, ultimately, businesses do perform a complete about-turn on their strategies and, rather than going for licensed software, with maintence contracts etc., have maintenance in-house for software which, for the most part, has a bug patch written for it before the user finds the bug."
I'll probably get flamed for this, but where are all the open source Linux companies that are currently truely making a profit (and not just using some creative accounting tricks)?
You're confusing producers for consumers.
Or maybe I'm just oblivious to all of the open source success stories....
Most likely. The major gain from open source seems to be about 1 or 2 more 9's of reliability for very little cost. Just look at the mechanics of Microsoft fixing a bothersome bug when you are the only one who encounters it. Even if they were willing.
Microsoft still insists that such things are the fault of the user, not the software.
Microsoft is right. The user is using Microsoft software.