Linus has shown that he will take pig headed decisions in the name of pragmatism or that he just does not care and buries his head in the sand when it comes to some serious issues.
What got Linux and the rest of the FOSS to the point where they are (worldwide acceptance as a legitimate, useful way to produce software) are the foundations put in place by Stallman. Linux stood in Stallman shoulders, not the other way around.
Stallman is not jealous (jealous about what exactly?) but weary of a self proclaimed apathetic pragmatist.
.... is a bomba in Italian and a pump in English. Or something like that, but you better do not scream "Tengo una bomba!" (I have a bomb) in any crowded places in Spanish speaking countries.
I want an operating system, not a political movement. Windows, OSX, HPUX, AIX.
Your choice.
If you use Linux you are buying into an ideology of how to ensure users are free to modify the software they are using. Don't like it? Don't use it, quite simple frankly, or use a distribution where you get a list of supported hardware and a provider with whom to whine, at least you would be paying for the privilege and would expect some service from your hard earned cash.
Linux and FOSS in general are not a promise of a free lunch, you may get one, but nobody is offering that.
As for being aggravated for spending in hardware, add up how much it would cost you to have equivalent versions of all the software you use in Linux and soon you will realize that the few bucks you spend in a Wireless card pale in comparison with the spiraling costs of running a Windows machine.
You not only had a Civil War (a revolution by another name) in which a King lost his head, poor sod, you had religious revolutions, in which a Queen lost her head, and if you don't count the US independence war, or India's independence struggle as revolution in what was then your country (the British Empire) then you are clearly raising your hands, covering your eyes and singuing loud "lah, lah, lah I can't hear the revolutions, lah, lah,lah"
He loved freedom, not enough for his slaves and African people in general, not enough to fight for it in the political arena, but yeah, he was perfect.
I can't blame you though, there are things far more important in India that keyloggers, still saying this is not Orwellian shows a monumental ignorance about 1984 and other works of Mr Orwell.
I am almost appalled that only one person has mentioned Cosmos.
Cosmos was a phenomenon on its day, it really beats me why on these days when every piece of crap that TV has splattered on us is repeated in one of the 500 channels we have on TV, but Cosmos is not seen as often (or maybe I have the wrong TV package, who knows). Perhaps the unashamed atheism of Carl Sagan has played some part in ostracizing his divulgation work, as far as I am concerned it should be obligatory material when introducing science into somebody's life. For bunnies sakes, my mates and I used to talk about Cosmos instead of football or the latest cartoon show.
Cosmos (the TV series) is engaging and talks to you assuming you are not knowledgeable about the topics at hand but without patronizing you, a very difficult feat, it introduces you to complex subjects (Newtonian physics, planetary movement laws, relativity theory) with ease.
Going even further back in time I would say the "Ascent of Man" and "Civilization" would also make great contributions.
I grew up with documentaries as well (on commercial TV mind you, when the original owners of TV companies understood that they had a social responsibility) where people like Jacques Cousteau would introduce you to biological sciences in the best way there is: watching the beasties.
Although some may mention Discovery Channel and such, they have fallen well below the standards they originally have, I would have recommended them some years ago, but not now that they mix genuine good documentaries with complete nonsense.
NO question it is a good book, but it is not something I would try to use to insitigate curiosity about science, if anything such a book would put off somebody undecided about the matter.
We live in an era of anti-intellectualism. We all assume we know best about any field of expertise that is not ours.
Thusly, according to the derided parent post (moded insightful nonetheless) children would be better doing arithmetic by colours. Oh yeah, and the indo-arabic numeric system is boring. Well yeah, but it is the standard in all the civilized world, bare some tribes in Africa that do not need to count beyond 3.
So all the expertise of education specialists, teachers, etc. is wrong because you say so.
I showed the above comment to my mother, a retired teacher with 40 years teaching experience and several masters degrees in the education field, she told me if the poster would be happy to pay half his salary or more to educate one person in that way (irrespective of who would provide such kind of education, either fees or taxes, it makes no difference, she worked both in private and public schools, so I think she knows what she is talking about).
The education system has a tricky balance to play with limited resources (something the poster should have learned somewhere, but on his dreamland obviously resources, both material and human, seem to be limitless).
It is easy to use fluffy goody feely ideas that don't have to be encumbered with the harsh realities of budgets and competing interests (political, parental and even religious in some localities that do not know better). In that hazy world we can have a loving substitute parent that pampers the student to allow him to do what he wants, forgetting what he may need to know. But that is alright I suppose, in an era where parents do not have the moral fortitude to direct the childhood of their children it is to be expected that many people expect that "natural curiosity" will be the best educational guide....
Those guys are prepared to put 12 hour days or longer for peanuts, I am pretty sure they don't care if they can access facebook or other time sinks like this venerable site....
But if the group of people with overall strategic control decide that users must not use instant messaging, then the users have to suck it up and it is our job to make sure it gets done and implemented.
If we know it can be useful then it is certainly our position to inform the people in positions of decision about the benefits of a given technology, what would not be admissible is to ignore the overall policies and use "submarine" applications.
... legal requirements, supportability and other little nuisances that affect software deployment nowadays.
Companies are not there to be cutting edge just to give their employees a warm fuzzy feeling. Cutting edge is untried, untested, and as such a business risk that should not be considered lightly.
And who will vouch for the security of your FOSS applications? If you have an internal team checking security issues for FOSS applications, then you should be OK, but how many companies have the resources to keep an internal FOSS support team or equivalent?
I have worked in many big companies and only one could afford to keep a team that actually checked the FOSS code (things like OpenSSH, perl, sudo ant other utilities) and added changes to comply with proper security and even legal audit requirements.
Some of you see IT as a nice shiny thing to be tinkered with, other people see it as a vector of attack against corporations (and very often this people are your colleagues, having somewhere in the Intranet does not make it any more safer, who really thinks the Intranet is intrinsically safer to the wider Internet is naive on extreme), IT department's work is to strike a balance and the balance by obvious reasons is normally not in the side of "cutting edge".
If what you develop is actually a breakthrough it will be difficult to copy. If you can't make money given your initial advantage in the market, though, it should not be the business of governments to prop up people with lousy marketing skills, no matter how innovative they are.
If what you "invent" is a trivial improvement then you deserve to be copied to death.
I want society to benefit, society benefits by fast incremental advancements in technology, not by fat cats with deep pockets trolling the patent system.
Because when Heads of State violently die it tends to cause chaos, political/economic instability and/or wars This is patently untrue. This only applies where heads of state have too much real power concentrated on them.
In parlamentary democracies it is not uncommon to find politicians on the streets, no guards.
Even Tony Blair had minimal security around him in most of his trips in the UK.
In the datacentre you don't have screens connected to the machines. Since this is where most Linux machines are (fact) we will treat your anecdotal evidence as cute, misguided and uninformed.
1) Cost, and the ability to use gray boxes (AMD + SuperMicro rocks!).
Fair point. You get what you pay for though.
2) Sun's hardware failings. The more they outsourced the less stable the hardware got, to the point that we were replacing a piece of hardware at least every 4 days in a 2-year old block of 1,100 Sun boxes. It was most often failed RAM sticks but we ran the whole gauntlet of failures many times.
This is completely and utterly ludicrous.
So you have 1100 machines, this is 2200 disks (you do mirror in all your machines, right?), lets say around 2000 memory modules, thereabout power supplies (because you would expect to have redundant ones in some of the servers), so a conservative estimate is that you had around 6000 components and you are whining about instability for changing one every week?
Sorry, but your expectations are completely unrealistic. I have been in no computing shop of a similar size where you did not have a dedicated team to address hardware failures, independently of the platform and OS.
How is your AMD stuff faring? I would be surprised that in a similarly sized datacentre you don't have the same or more failures.
3) Linux provides much more modern and complete shells and tools. Trying to use things like BASH (especially the little things like using the up arrow to scroll your console history) and VI (instead of VIM) on Solaris is painful. I often found myself trying to use utilities that weren't present, as well... the kinds of things we SysAdmins use every day in Linux. I know a lot of these things can be added to Solaris, but Linux "just has them" out of the box.
Where is your alternate universe? Really, bash is in Solaris as standard, I do not know if the damned arrow works because I don't use bash (memory hog if there ever was one), I prefer a lighter shell (ksh) and at least there the arrow works fine. Like vim? What is stopping you to install it and make it part of your corporate installation server? Which utilities are not available in Solaris? For dogs years Sun provided GNU utilities in their downloads area plus the ones provided elsewhere. This is a lame excuse to switch to Linux, somebody coming to me with this as a reason to migrate would pretty much become a candidate for the next round of redundancies frankly.
4) Ease of administration. From the openness of everything to the ability to easily identify network interfaces on Solaris it's always, "Hey - is that bge0 on the board, the quad Ethernet or the fiber?!") to the more logical naming of disk partitions to Webmin to advanced grep'ing and standardized PERL available to the shell, Linux is much faster and easier to navigate, troubleshoot and make changes to (at least for my team and I).
The bge0 is the first one in the main board, if there are no bgs in the board then the slots are scanned in a very precise order at boot time and interfaces names are assigned accordingly. You only get confused if you don't know what you are doing. My personnel doesn't, but they are knowledgeable and RTFM.
More logical name of partitions? Is that a reason for switching OS??? So why is any better/dev/sda1 to/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 ???
So you are using Webmin. How are you securing the connection to the tool?
egrep is as good as any other grep incarnation out there, perl has been standard part of Solaris for dogs years, and you can always install the latest and greatest if you must. I still do not see reasons for switching OS.
As I mentioned before, much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings, and moving back and forth between the two highlights this in the most unflattering way.
This is complete nonsense. you will have to mention which parts of GNU where born as you claim. This is not the case with the most important GNU tools (compilers, utilities), so I am really curious whic
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Linus has shown that he will take pig headed decisions in the name of pragmatism or that he just does not care and buries his head in the sand when it comes to some serious issues.
What got Linux and the rest of the FOSS to the point where they are (worldwide acceptance as a legitimate, useful way to produce software) are the foundations put in place by Stallman. Linux stood in Stallman shoulders, not the other way around.
Stallman is not jealous (jealous about what exactly?) but weary of a self proclaimed apathetic pragmatist.
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/frattini/index_en.htm
.... is a bomba in Italian and a pump in English. Or something like that, but you better do not scream "Tengo una bomba!" (I have a bomb) in any crowded places in Spanish speaking countries.
Your choice.
If you use Linux you are buying into an ideology of how to ensure users are free to modify the software they are using. Don't like it? Don't use it, quite simple frankly, or use a distribution where you get a list of supported hardware and a provider with whom to whine, at least you would be paying for the privilege and would expect some service from your hard earned cash.
Linux and FOSS in general are not a promise of a free lunch, you may get one, but nobody is offering that.
As for being aggravated for spending in hardware, add up how much it would cost you to have equivalent versions of all the software you use in Linux and soon you will realize that the few bucks you spend in a Wireless card pale in comparison with the spiraling costs of running a Windows machine.
You not only had a Civil War (a revolution by another name) in which a King lost his head, poor sod, you had religious revolutions, in which a Queen lost her head, and if you don't count the US independence war, or India's independence struggle as revolution in what was then your country (the British Empire) then you are clearly raising your hands, covering your eyes and singuing loud "lah, lah, lah I can't hear the revolutions, lah, lah,lah"
He loved freedom, not enough for his slaves and African people in general, not enough to fight for it in the political arena, but yeah, he was perfect.
I can't blame you though, there are things far more important in India that keyloggers, still saying this is not Orwellian shows a monumental ignorance about 1984 and other works of Mr Orwell.
I am almost appalled that only one person has mentioned Cosmos.
Cosmos was a phenomenon on its day, it really beats me why on these days when every piece of crap that TV has splattered on us is repeated in one of the 500 channels we have on TV, but Cosmos is not seen as often (or maybe I have the wrong TV package, who knows). Perhaps the unashamed atheism of Carl Sagan has played some part in ostracizing his divulgation work, as far as I am concerned it should be obligatory material when introducing science into somebody's life. For bunnies sakes, my mates and I used to talk about Cosmos instead of football or the latest cartoon show.
Cosmos (the TV series) is engaging and talks to you assuming you are not knowledgeable about the topics at hand but without patronizing you, a very difficult feat, it introduces you to complex subjects (Newtonian physics, planetary movement laws, relativity theory) with ease.
Going even further back in time I would say the "Ascent of Man" and "Civilization" would also make great contributions.
I grew up with documentaries as well (on commercial TV mind you, when the original owners of TV companies understood that they had a social responsibility) where people like Jacques Cousteau would introduce you to biological sciences in the best way there is: watching the beasties.
Although some may mention Discovery Channel and such, they have fallen well below the standards they originally have, I would have recommended them some years ago, but not now that they mix genuine good documentaries with complete nonsense.
NO question it is a good book, but it is not something I would try to use to insitigate curiosity about science, if anything such a book would put off somebody undecided about the matter.
We live in an era of anti-intellectualism. We all assume we know best about any field of expertise that is not ours.
Thusly, according to the derided parent post (moded insightful nonetheless) children would be better doing arithmetic by colours. Oh yeah, and the indo-arabic numeric system is boring. Well yeah, but it is the standard in all the civilized world, bare some tribes in Africa that do not need to count beyond 3.
So all the expertise of education specialists, teachers, etc. is wrong because you say so.
I showed the above comment to my mother, a retired teacher with 40 years teaching experience and several masters degrees in the education field, she told me if the poster would be happy to pay half his salary or more to educate one person in that way (irrespective of who would provide such kind of education, either fees or taxes, it makes no difference, she worked both in private and public schools, so I think she knows what she is talking about).
The education system has a tricky balance to play with limited resources (something the poster should have learned somewhere, but on his dreamland obviously resources, both material and human, seem to be limitless).
It is easy to use fluffy goody feely ideas that don't have to be encumbered with the harsh realities of budgets and competing interests (political, parental and even religious in some localities that do not know better). In that hazy world we can have a loving substitute parent that pampers the student to allow him to do what he wants, forgetting what he may need to know. But that is alright I suppose, in an era where parents do not have the moral fortitude to direct the childhood of their children it is to be expected that many people expect that "natural curiosity" will be the best educational guide....
Those guys are prepared to put 12 hour days or longer for peanuts, I am pretty sure they don't care if they can access facebook or other time sinks like this venerable site....
Pray tell us, why do you need those websites to work?
But if the group of people with overall strategic control decide that users must not use instant messaging, then the users have to suck it up and it is our job to make sure it gets done and implemented.
If we know it can be useful then it is certainly our position to inform the people in positions of decision about the benefits of a given technology, what would not be admissible is to ignore the overall policies and use "submarine" applications.
... legal requirements, supportability and other little nuisances that affect software deployment nowadays.
Companies are not there to be cutting edge just to give their employees a warm fuzzy feeling. Cutting edge is untried, untested, and as such a business risk that should not be considered lightly.
And who will vouch for the security of your FOSS applications? If you have an internal team checking security issues for FOSS applications, then you should be OK, but how many companies have the resources to keep an internal FOSS support team or equivalent?
I have worked in many big companies and only one could afford to keep a team that actually checked the FOSS code (things like OpenSSH, perl, sudo ant other utilities) and added changes to comply with proper security and even legal audit requirements.
Some of you see IT as a nice shiny thing to be tinkered with, other people see it as a vector of attack against corporations (and very often this people are your colleagues, having somewhere in the Intranet does not make it any more safer, who really thinks the Intranet is intrinsically safer to the wider Internet is naive on extreme), IT department's work is to strike a balance and the balance by obvious reasons is normally not in the side of "cutting edge".
Better to be safe than to be sorry.
Somebody needs or wants to access a website, he can ask, no problem.
Surfing the web in the office is not a right, it is a privilege.
Only one version of each OS, otherwise you don't support it. Is the least you should ask from your users.
The IT team was managed poorly, they get the sack, the management? Got a bonus for sure, for their wonderful people management skills.
You outsourced to a company with good management (more by chance than by planning for sure) and, ho and behold, now things work.
In a properly managed company IT people have specific tasks and can't get so out of whack in regards to the objectives of the company.
If what you develop is actually a breakthrough it will be difficult to copy. If you can't make money given your initial advantage in the market, though, it should not be the business of governments to prop up people with lousy marketing skills, no matter how innovative they are.
If what you "invent" is a trivial improvement then you deserve to be copied to death.
I want society to benefit, society benefits by fast incremental advancements in technology, not by fat cats with deep pockets trolling the patent system.
In parlamentary democracies it is not uncommon to find politicians on the streets, no guards.
Even Tony Blair had minimal security around him in most of his trips in the UK.
In the datacentre you don't have screens connected to the machines. Since this is where most Linux machines are (fact) we will treat your anecdotal evidence as cute, misguided and uninformed.
1) Cost, and the ability to use gray boxes (AMD + SuperMicro rocks!).
Fair point. You get what you pay for though.
2) Sun's hardware failings. The more they outsourced the less stable the hardware got, to the point that we were replacing a piece of hardware at least every 4 days in a 2-year old block of 1,100 Sun boxes. It was most often failed RAM sticks but we ran the whole gauntlet of failures many times.
This is completely and utterly ludicrous.
So you have 1100 machines, this is 2200 disks (you do mirror in all your machines, right?), lets say around 2000 memory modules, thereabout power supplies (because you would expect to have redundant ones in some of the servers), so a conservative estimate is that you had around 6000 components and you are whining about instability for changing one every week?
Sorry, but your expectations are completely unrealistic. I have been in no computing shop of a similar size where you did not have a dedicated team to address hardware failures, independently of the platform and OS.
How is your AMD stuff faring? I would be surprised that in a similarly sized datacentre you don't have the same or more failures.
3) Linux provides much more modern and complete shells and tools. Trying to use things like BASH (especially the little things like using the up arrow to scroll your console history) and VI (instead of VIM) on Solaris is painful. I often found myself trying to use utilities that weren't present, as well... the kinds of things we SysAdmins use every day in Linux. I know a lot of these things can be added to Solaris, but Linux "just has them" out of the box.
Where is your alternate universe? Really, bash is in Solaris as standard, I do not know if the damned arrow works because I don't use bash (memory hog if there ever was one), I prefer a lighter shell (ksh) and at least there the arrow works fine. Like vim? What is stopping you to install it and make it part of your corporate installation server? Which utilities are not available in Solaris? For dogs years Sun provided GNU utilities in their downloads area plus the ones provided elsewhere. This is a lame excuse to switch to Linux, somebody coming to me with this as a reason to migrate would pretty much become a candidate for the next round of redundancies frankly.
4) Ease of administration. From the openness of everything to the ability to easily identify network interfaces on Solaris it's always, "Hey - is that bge0 on the board, the quad Ethernet or the fiber?!") to the more logical naming of disk partitions to Webmin to advanced grep'ing and standardized PERL available to the shell, Linux is much faster and easier to navigate, troubleshoot and make changes to (at least for my team and I).
The bge0 is the first one in the main board, if there are no bgs in the board then the slots are scanned in a very precise order at boot time and interfaces names are assigned accordingly. You only get confused if you don't know what you are doing. My personnel doesn't, but they are knowledgeable and RTFM.
/dev/sda1 to /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 ???
More logical name of partitions? Is that a reason for switching OS??? So why is any better
So you are using Webmin. How are you securing the connection to the tool?
egrep is as good as any other grep incarnation out there, perl has been standard part of Solaris for dogs years, and you can always install the latest and greatest if you must. I still do not see reasons for switching OS.
As I mentioned before, much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings, and moving back and forth between the two highlights this in the most unflattering way.
This is complete nonsense. you will have to mention which parts of GNU where born as you claim. This is not the case with the most important GNU tools (compilers, utilities), so I am really curious whic
As for the userland part of the system, what is stopping you to get GNOME or KDE if you don't like what is in offering?
The Zune was never competition, it was DOA.