That's you. The corporate mindset, unfortunately, would quite probably suggest in a policy document that you chew off your leg unless you can offer a compelling reason not to go to Windows.
Linux offers the price/performance advantage of x86 without the many drawbacks of Windows. But even without Linux the Unix workstation buisness would have been dead.
And then you'd be chewing on leg right now. With a corporate policy document to support that action.
"DNS doesn't know about protocols, DNS shouldn't _have_ to."
DNS does know about protocols. It makes a difference between MX (mail), NS (DNS) records and A (adress) records. In many cases it might make sense to diffrentiate on web too (for example, you might want to redirect http requests to foo.bar.com to www.bar.com if foo does not exist, while it still might not be desirable to redirect other protocol requests to www.bar.com).
Extending DNS in that way makes a whole lot more sense than using generic wildcards on A records. And apparently, wildcards is something that some people do want to use for specific protocols even when the vast majority of technical expertise advices against it. Ask them about the advantages of it. I suggest a way to solve the apparent problem of getting that 'advantage' without breaking everything else.
DNS needs to be extended with a protocol record for web, like MX for mail you could add a WX for web. In that case Verisign could go ahead and run WX records on wildcards and it wouldnt affect other protocols adveresly.
It's not technically difficult, it's just something that will take quite a while to implement the in everyones browsers (not to mention that some companies are unlikely to want to change to attempting to resolve to the wildcarded WX records as they have their own bright ideas for making money off typos).
"Overall it has been somewhat of a success for Sun except that Linux started becoming interesting (even to some degree being enabled by Java) and eroding their workstation/desktop sales."
In my experience that's not exactly what is happening. Unix desktop sales were a dead end in the mid/late 90's. Performance improvement on x86 made them irrelevant even in the high end desktop space. So, corporations were starting to look at replacing them with Windows where the workers also had access to other company standard products.
However, in the late 90's Linux started becoming a viable alternative. Combined with better desktop than CDE, more stable than Windows, less porting of unix applications needed, viable solutions for MS software through vmware/wine/ooffice, it became a usable compromise with the best of both worlds. An alternative to switching to Windows, not an alternative to staying with Sun/HP/SGI/IBM.
The marketshare that Linux is taking from Sun and other Unixes is marketshare they've already lost. The fact that it's going to Linux does not change that it would have gone to MS otherwise.
Sun shouldnt fret about marketshare lost to Linux. Sun should be grateful about it because that, at least, allows them to stay in the game, which they wouldnt be able to do if the marketshare was lost to Windows instead.
"If SCO's argument is found to be legally sound, and that the GPL is invalid, that means that all the programmers supporting Linux will have, essentially, been donating their work to a pirated project."
No, if SCO's argument is found legally sound, then the GPL becomes invalid for SCO. That means they succeed in terminating their own rights to distribute the GPL software in question.
As the GPL only grants you rights you dont have and places no limitations on you that copyright doesnt already place, the only thing you can accomplish by trying to challange the GPL in court is to get your own rights revoked. A not so very brilliant idea, and the reason why the GPL has not been challanged in court. You cant win. If you lose, you lose. If you win, you lose even more.
Considering that in the cases that the FSF has been involved in GPL enforcement the violators have folded each and every time, and never dared to go to court I'd say the FSF has all the power it needs. If it requires someone as terminally retarded as Darl McBride to get a challange, then it's quite watertight.
"Any company which was running a project like this would have picked one location, hired a bunch of people, and had them all working in the same building, speaking the same language."
And then tried to launch the grid project at multiple corporate sites, whereupon they discover the nice little problem that corporate politics and economics result in them not being able to run that project anywhere but at the site where the project was developed - your project, we're not contributing a cents worth of spare capacity, go buy your own machines.
If you want a project like this to have the faintest chance to succeed you get all the people who are expected to contribute anything out of their budget involved. Or you'll get sunk. Even in a corporation. And for a multinational, that means you have people with different native languages. This is usually not a problem in a multinational because the people involved in such projects usually have at least one language in common, and often more.
Of course, the monthly statistics show that IIS is shrinking in both marketshare and total number of sites. Unlike Apache, which grows in both marketshare and total numbers.
Many choose to run on IIS 6.0/2003, but many many more chose to run on Apache.
It's 5% of new Windows 2003 installations that come from Linux. Combine that with the fact that IIS actually decreases in total number of hosts (and marketshare) this month, while Apache grows with 447K hosts and it seems quite likely that a vast number of more people are switching from Windows to Linux than are switching from Linux to Windows.
The submitter of this story must be rolling on the floor laughing their ass off at the comments to this story (and at Taco), considering the statistic has to be close to the most horrendously misread and misinterpreted number ever published.
They probably got a mail-in rebate coupon that made Windows cheaper that month.
Seriously, people will switch back and forth all the time. Usually it's mass hosting providers deciding on this or that. The survey doesnt mention either how many of the new Linux sites were ex-Windows sites. Considering that there were 447 K increase of Apache sites and a 9 K _decrease_ for IIS sites in this months survey, that would be an interesting number to see and compare with.
"The dislike of the business world for the GPL is not a setback for RMS"
You mean, the dislike of some of the proprietary software vendors for the GPL.
The vast majority of the buisness world, which is paying money through the nose to the proprietary software vendors is in my experience more neutral to positive. Especially when they understand the idea and theory of the GPL, as it happens to coincide with many of their interests like avoiding vendor lock-in, being able to adapt the software if needed, and avoiding the risks of software vendors killing products.
I tend to use software on a pragmatic basis. However, I've found that several pragmatic reasons like the aforementioned ones very often coincide with the principles of the GPL.
You see, the amount of spam you recieve has nothing to do with success rates. The successrates of the actual 'spams' are more or less zero, but it doesnt matter, as spam is a con anyway.
Unfortunately, the con isnt on the recepient of the spam. The con is often on the sender of the spam. They have paid for spamware, adresslists or mass mailings. The ones who sell such services to gullible morons are the ones who actually make money off spam.
And those guys make more money the more morons they con. Which means more spam for you. Wether or not anyone ever buys anything because of any spam. Your mailbox is just collateral damage from a scam that isnt on you.
Who is going to lose their job because telemarketers wont be allowed to call people who arent going to buy their products anyway? Theoretically their job security would depend on wether or not they make successful sales rather than their ability to take verbal abuse from as many people as possible.
"1) Their CD will be sold for $20 of which they will get 20 cents."
No, not really. Their CD will be sold for $20 of which 20 cents will be discounted towards recording, studio and marketing costs. They themselves will get a letter with notice on how much they still owe the RIAA corp holding their contract. Until they've sold about half a million CD's. Which is about as likely to happen as winning the lottery.
At which point they get to realize that being an RIAA contracted artist is about as profitable as holding a minimum wage job for the rest of your life while in personal bankrupcy for unpayable credit card debts.
Very nice graph. It does make me wonder however, how does it correlate with, for example, the temperature peak during the medieval warm period when temperatures were on average a degree C warmer than today?
Personally, I dont think CO2 emissions really make a big difference. Even if we did manage to completely stop all CO2 emissions (which I think we should do anyway) we'd still get global warming. Historical temperature data tends to point out that we're not even in a very warm period for the moment, and with or without human interference we'll get far larger variations than we've seen the last century.
So, not buying that beachfront property might be a good idea. You never know when mother nature will conspire to make your house an experimental submerged water dwelling.
"They're a for-profit company, they *should* be pushing Solaris over Linux if that's what's going to maximize shareholder value."
They *should* also be improving Solaris to ensure it actually is better than Linux before trying to push it on enterprise techs who know better and who tend to get very annoyed with salespeople who outright lie to them.
Five years ago it was better without a doubt. Two years ago it was better in many ways. Today, Solaris will lose to Linux in more and more comparisons of enterprise features. (Get a real LVM. Please. And do something about the CPU speed. Now.) The current reliability advantage on 64 bit Sparc vs 64 bit x86 or Itanium wont last many months more now.
Indeed, this sounds exactly like Clippy. I read an article on Clippy a few years ago. Clippy was a great idea, that was supposed to help in just these ways. During R&D it worked very well.
Then MS marketing got involved. They decided that Clippy didnt get activated enough. Clippy in its research version might have popped up once a month when a user really needed help. However, once a month would not justify the expense of development and marketing, nor could it be hailed as a great new feature if the users almost never saw it.
Enter the new and marketing improved Clippy any MS office user over the last decade has had the misfortune to experience. Junk the I part of AI, and just make an annoying paperclip instead of a helpful tool. I can only imagine how the researchers felt about having their nice idea turned into something like what Clippy got to be.
Maybe we'll see a real implementation of this kind of technology at some point in time. But I'll bet any commercial application of this is more likely to get written by popup ad companies, and jog the ATC guys elbow by suggesting which airline he should be using or something...
"Heck, do these guys expect everyone to read the patent office library before we start coding?"
Reading patents is dangerous buisness. For pretty much any computer program a programmer is ever likely to write he is very likely to violate one or more patents in the process. The way the system is set up today it's close to impossible to avoid it, with all the overbroad and/or trivial patents granted.
If you read and know about the patents you are engaging in willful violation and you can be liable for larger damages than if you violated a patent inadvertantly. You're better off not knowing.
"If I spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to market only to have someone rip the idea and implementation off, then where is the incentive for me to try to create a new invention?"
That's a nice theory.
It's not, however, how the patent system appears to be working anymore.
These days you spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to the market only to get sued for any profit you'll ever make from it by a company that's never had either any intention of making it work or spent any time trying to get it to work at all but that owns the patent for the idea you had and worked to implement.
Unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems? Now, that's a hoot. Trust me, there are no unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems out there. Any unmodified Redhat 5.0 system would have been so haxxored so many years ago that the l33t haxxors would have upgraded it by now.
There are plenty of linux exploits and even several worms. If you have an unshielded unpatched box on the net you're most definitely going to have it cracked. Probably within hours of installing.
The only advantage that Linux has is really the slightly more secure default install these days, and the slightly higher chance of reasonably competent admins.
But its hardly unbreakable. You have nothing to prove, any halfway decent admin already knows there are such worms and that more could be written. The rest you arent going to convince anyway.
"They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if they could."
They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if it made buisness sense. As writing operating systems and maintaing them across all of IBM's platforms makes less buisness sense than getting a much cheaper one, maintained largely by other people and companies, working on all their platforms that is unlikely to happen. Especially as it has the added advantage of making ISV programs easily ported between the different IBM architectures, and makes support more easily streamlined within the corporation in the long term. IBM is _the_ company that linux makes buisness sense for.
"It'd be a real sweet plum if someone could take "ownership" of linux."
Not quite. It would be a rotten tomato if someone could take ownership of Linux. Take a quick look at how well buinsess has turned out for the non-free Linux distributions. Take a look at how well buisness was/is going for most other x86 proprietary unixes, even before Linux became more mainstream.
As you'd lose every developer, all support competence, all contracts, all evangelists in a single second, what do you think you could do with the ownership several millions of lines of unmaintained code without a single developer and with everyone in the computer industry hating you?
Proprietary Linux would not be a sweet plum. It would be a worthless pile of unsellable unmaintained code involved in litigation from every contributor to the end of computers as we know them.
Smart companies know the value of Linux is in its freedom. Idiots like SCO have a hard time realizing that there is no money in it for people who dont want to work to earn their money.
The problem is that it's not a problem that improved technologies will solve. It's not that biometrics in general are in their infancy. They'd have to be improved to the point where they'd be better than DNA samples to be suitable for these types of applications. Most biometrics cant be improved to that accuracy, and even if they could you couldn't set the system to use that level of accuracy as you'd have to give it enough slack to still recognize someone despite any possible changes in appearance.
With those parameters, the size of the attempted databases and the sheer number of passing people makes it certain that either the vast majority of flagged suspects will be the wrong guy (and a system that's wrong 99.99% of the time just isnt very useful, especially if you consider how well security guards will be doing their job when they get yet another alert from that damn system that hasnt been right, ever), or you just wont get a match at all, even if the right guy passes by.
This isnt really a failure of the technology, it's just a question of horrendous misapplication of technology to solve a problem that it isnt suited to solve.
I'm sure you can recognize your ten closest friends from a 2D photograph. So can a facial recognition system.
Now try picking out one out of your 40000 closest friends in a crowd of several million people.
How many times will you go 'oh, isnt that... no, wait, it wasnt', or pass your 23472'nd friend by without recogizing him?
It's not just difficult. It is impossible. The human mind is *good* at recogizing faces, but the problem is that human facial features just arent that unique, and varying conditions plays tricks on humans as well as software that tries to be smart. Smart software will fail as badly or even worse than humans when faced with the impossible odds that comparing crowds with large databses generates.
Not even the fact that it doesnt work is really interesting; the fact that face recognition technology used in this way is, and always will be, worthless was known already.
Face recognition is useful when comparing small groups against a large database, or a large group against a small database since you can trim the fuzzy factors to get more false positives or more false negatives. For example, if you want to find the identity of a certain suspect in a large database you can have it spit out 10 suggestions of who it could be and eliminate the false positives manually. Or if you use it for access control you can trim it to reject as much as possible, as someone going through an access control can adjust their face for optimal lighting and try again.
But to use it to scan random people under bad conditions and compare against a large database where you dont want either false positives or false negatives is idiocy and the system will be completely useless as you'll either get dozens of random false positives each day and haul in innocent people who probably look nothing like the match or you wont get the actual matches at all.
The companies like former Visionics trying to push these systems for crowd use are selling snake oil. It doesnt work today and as the factors making it unusable cant really be significantly improved upon it wont work in the future either.
There's a bit of difference between "Oracle will run on any Linux" and "Oracle is supported on any Linux".
Supported usually implies testing, education of support people, installers for the distribution, keeping track of distribution specific problems, etc. All of that costs money, so there has to be a credible buisness case for each extra supported distribution.
While I may wish Oracle would support more distributions than they do, I cant really fault them for not being willing to do so. It's not like Oracle is the only database there is.
This is one of the most annoying and dangerous failures in disaster protection these days in many organizations, I think. I remember it being brought up by auditing companies around the y2k problem too; most organizations dont have adequate paper fallbacks which gets to be a huge problem the day something actually happens.
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That's you. The corporate mindset, unfortunately, would quite probably suggest in a policy document that you chew off your leg unless you can offer a compelling reason not to go to Windows.
Linux offers the price/performance advantage of x86 without the many drawbacks of Windows. But even without Linux the Unix workstation buisness would have been dead.
And then you'd be chewing on leg right now. With a corporate policy document to support that action.
"DNS doesn't know about protocols, DNS shouldn't _have_ to."
DNS does know about protocols. It makes a difference between MX (mail), NS (DNS) records and A (adress) records. In many cases it might make sense to diffrentiate on web too (for example, you might want to redirect http requests to foo.bar.com to www.bar.com if foo does not exist, while it still might not be desirable to redirect other protocol requests to www.bar.com).
Extending DNS in that way makes a whole lot more sense than using generic wildcards on A records. And apparently, wildcards is something that some people do want to use for specific protocols even when the vast majority of technical expertise advices against it. Ask them about the advantages of it. I suggest a way to solve the apparent problem of getting that 'advantage' without breaking everything else.
DNS needs to be extended with a protocol record for web, like MX for mail you could add a WX for web. In that case Verisign could go ahead and run WX records on wildcards and it wouldnt affect other protocols adveresly.
It's not technically difficult, it's just something that will take quite a while to implement the in everyones browsers (not to mention that some companies are unlikely to want to change to attempting to resolve to the wildcarded WX records as they have their own bright ideas for making money off typos).
"Overall it has been somewhat of a success for Sun except that Linux started becoming interesting (even to some degree being enabled by Java) and eroding their workstation/desktop sales."
In my experience that's not exactly what is happening. Unix desktop sales were a dead end in the mid/late 90's. Performance improvement on x86 made them irrelevant even in the high end desktop space. So, corporations were starting to look at replacing them with Windows where the workers also had access to other company standard products.
However, in the late 90's Linux started becoming a viable alternative. Combined with better desktop than CDE, more stable than Windows, less porting of unix applications needed, viable solutions for MS software through vmware/wine/ooffice, it became a usable compromise with the best of both worlds. An alternative to switching to Windows, not an alternative to staying with Sun/HP/SGI/IBM.
The marketshare that Linux is taking from Sun and other Unixes is marketshare they've already lost. The fact that it's going to Linux does not change that it would have gone to MS otherwise.
Sun shouldnt fret about marketshare lost to Linux. Sun should be grateful about it because that, at least, allows them to stay in the game, which they wouldnt be able to do if the marketshare was lost to Windows instead.
"If SCO's argument is found to be legally sound, and that the GPL is invalid, that means that all the programmers supporting Linux will have, essentially, been donating their work to a pirated project."
No, if SCO's argument is found legally sound, then the GPL becomes invalid for SCO. That means they succeed in terminating their own rights to distribute the GPL software in question.
As the GPL only grants you rights you dont have and places no limitations on you that copyright doesnt already place, the only thing you can accomplish by trying to challange the GPL in court is to get your own rights revoked. A not so very brilliant idea, and the reason why the GPL has not been challanged in court. You cant win. If you lose, you lose. If you win, you lose even more.
Considering that in the cases that the FSF has been involved in GPL enforcement the violators have folded each and every time, and never dared to go to court I'd say the FSF has all the power it needs. If it requires someone as terminally retarded as Darl McBride to get a challange, then it's quite watertight.
Still, it will be fun to watch it.
"Any company which was running a project like this would have picked one location, hired a bunch of people, and had them all working in the same building, speaking the same language."
And then tried to launch the grid project at multiple corporate sites, whereupon they discover the nice little problem that corporate politics and economics result in them not being able to run that project anywhere but at the site where the project was developed - your project, we're not contributing a cents worth of spare capacity, go buy your own machines.
If you want a project like this to have the faintest chance to succeed you get all the people who are expected to contribute anything out of their budget involved. Or you'll get sunk. Even in a corporation. And for a multinational, that means you have people with different native languages. This is usually not a problem in a multinational because the people involved in such projects usually have at least one language in common, and often more.
Of course, the monthly statistics show that IIS is shrinking in both marketshare and total number of sites. Unlike Apache, which grows in both marketshare and total numbers.
Many choose to run on IIS 6.0/2003, but many many more chose to run on Apache.
The 5% number is meaningless period.
It's 5% of new Windows 2003 installations that come from Linux. Combine that with the fact that IIS actually decreases in total number of hosts (and marketshare) this month, while Apache grows with 447K hosts and it seems quite likely that a vast number of more people are switching from Windows to Linux than are switching from Linux to Windows.
The submitter of this story must be rolling on the floor laughing their ass off at the comments to this story (and at Taco), considering the statistic has to be close to the most horrendously misread and misinterpreted number ever published.
"why did they switch (back?) to Windows?"
They probably got a mail-in rebate coupon that made Windows cheaper that month.
Seriously, people will switch back and forth all the time. Usually it's mass hosting providers deciding on this or that. The survey doesnt mention either how many of the new Linux sites were ex-Windows sites. Considering that there were 447 K increase of Apache sites and a 9 K _decrease_ for IIS sites in this months survey, that would be an interesting number to see and compare with.
"The dislike of the business world for the GPL is not a setback for RMS"
You mean, the dislike of some of the proprietary software vendors for the GPL.
The vast majority of the buisness world, which is paying money through the nose to the proprietary software vendors is in my experience more neutral to positive. Especially when they understand the idea and theory of the GPL, as it happens to coincide with many of their interests like avoiding vendor lock-in, being able to adapt the software if needed, and avoiding the risks of software vendors killing products.
I tend to use software on a pragmatic basis. However, I've found that several pragmatic reasons like the aforementioned ones very often coincide with the principles of the GPL.
Not really.
You see, the amount of spam you recieve has nothing to do with success rates. The successrates of the actual 'spams' are more or less zero, but it doesnt matter, as spam is a con anyway.
Unfortunately, the con isnt on the recepient of the spam. The con is often on the sender of the spam. They have paid for spamware, adresslists or mass mailings. The ones who sell such services to gullible morons are the ones who actually make money off spam.
And those guys make more money the more morons they con. Which means more spam for you. Wether or not anyone ever buys anything because of any spam. Your mailbox is just collateral damage from a scam that isnt on you.
Who is going to lose their job because telemarketers wont be allowed to call people who arent going to buy their products anyway? Theoretically their job security would depend on wether or not they make successful sales rather than their ability to take verbal abuse from as many people as possible.
"1) Their CD will be sold for $20 of which they will get 20 cents."
No, not really. Their CD will be sold for $20 of which 20 cents will be discounted towards recording, studio and marketing costs. They themselves will get a letter with notice on how much they still owe the RIAA corp holding their contract. Until they've sold about half a million CD's. Which is about as likely to happen as winning the lottery.
At which point they get to realize that being an RIAA contracted artist is about as profitable as holding a minimum wage job for the rest of your life while in personal bankrupcy for unpayable credit card debts.
Very nice graph. It does make me wonder however, how does it correlate with, for example, the temperature peak during the medieval warm period when temperatures were on average a degree C warmer than today?
Personally, I dont think CO2 emissions really make a big difference. Even if we did manage to completely stop all CO2 emissions (which I think we should do anyway) we'd still get global warming. Historical temperature data tends to point out that we're not even in a very warm period for the moment, and with or without human interference we'll get far larger variations than we've seen the last century.
So, not buying that beachfront property might be a good idea. You never know when mother nature will conspire to make your house an experimental submerged water dwelling.
"They're a for-profit company, they *should* be pushing Solaris over Linux if that's what's going to maximize shareholder value."
They *should* also be improving Solaris to ensure it actually is better than Linux before trying to push it on enterprise techs who know better and who tend to get very annoyed with salespeople who outright lie to them.
Five years ago it was better without a doubt. Two years ago it was better in many ways. Today, Solaris will lose to Linux in more and more comparisons of enterprise features. (Get a real LVM. Please. And do something about the CPU speed. Now.) The current reliability advantage on 64 bit Sparc vs 64 bit x86 or Itanium wont last many months more now.
Indeed, this sounds exactly like Clippy. I read an article on Clippy a few years ago. Clippy was a great idea, that was supposed to help in just these ways. During R&D it worked very well.
Then MS marketing got involved. They decided that Clippy didnt get activated enough. Clippy in its research version might have popped up once a month when a user really needed help. However, once a month would not justify the expense of development and marketing, nor could it be hailed as a great new feature if the users almost never saw it.
Enter the new and marketing improved Clippy any MS office user over the last decade has had the misfortune to experience. Junk the I part of AI, and just make an annoying paperclip instead of a helpful tool. I can only imagine how the researchers felt about having their nice idea turned into something like what Clippy got to be.
Maybe we'll see a real implementation of this kind of technology at some point in time. But I'll bet any commercial application of this is more likely to get written by popup ad companies, and jog the ATC guys elbow by suggesting which airline he should be using or something...
"Heck, do these guys expect everyone to read the patent office library before we start coding?"
Reading patents is dangerous buisness. For pretty much any computer program a programmer is ever likely to write he is very likely to violate one or more patents in the process. The way the system is set up today it's close to impossible to avoid it, with all the overbroad and/or trivial patents granted.
If you read and know about the patents you are engaging in willful violation and you can be liable for larger damages than if you violated a patent inadvertantly. You're better off not knowing.
"If I spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to market only to have someone rip the idea and implementation off, then where is the incentive for me to try to create a new invention?"
That's a nice theory.
It's not, however, how the patent system appears to be working anymore.
These days you spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to the market only to get sued for any profit you'll ever make from it by a company that's never had either any intention of making it work or spent any time trying to get it to work at all but that owns the patent for the idea you had and worked to implement.
Unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems? Now, that's a hoot. Trust me, there are no unmodified Redhat 5.0 systems out there. Any unmodified Redhat 5.0 system would have been so haxxored so many years ago that the l33t haxxors would have upgraded it by now.
There are plenty of linux exploits and even several worms. If you have an unshielded unpatched box on the net you're most definitely going to have it cracked. Probably within hours of installing.
The only advantage that Linux has is really the slightly more secure default install these days, and the slightly higher chance of reasonably competent admins.
But its hardly unbreakable. You have nothing to prove, any halfway decent admin already knows there are such worms and that more could be written. The rest you arent going to convince anyway.
"They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if they could."
They'd pull the rug out from under linux in an instant if it made buisness sense. As writing operating systems and maintaing them across all of IBM's platforms makes less buisness sense than getting a much cheaper one, maintained largely by other people and companies, working on all their platforms that is unlikely to happen. Especially as it has the added advantage of making ISV programs easily ported between the different IBM architectures, and makes support more easily streamlined within the corporation in the long term. IBM is _the_ company that linux makes buisness sense for.
"It'd be a real sweet plum if someone could take "ownership" of linux."
Not quite. It would be a rotten tomato if someone could take ownership of Linux. Take a quick look at how well buinsess has turned out for the non-free Linux distributions. Take a look at how well buisness was/is going for most other x86 proprietary unixes, even before Linux became more mainstream.
As you'd lose every developer, all support competence, all contracts, all evangelists in a single second, what do you think you could do with the ownership several millions of lines of unmaintained code without a single developer and with everyone in the computer industry hating you?
Proprietary Linux would not be a sweet plum. It would be a worthless pile of unsellable unmaintained code involved in litigation from every contributor to the end of computers as we know them.
Smart companies know the value of Linux is in its freedom. Idiots like SCO have a hard time realizing that there is no money in it for people who dont want to work to earn their money.
The problem is that it's not a problem that improved technologies will solve. It's not that biometrics in general are in their infancy. They'd have to be improved to the point where they'd be better than DNA samples to be suitable for these types of applications. Most biometrics cant be improved to that accuracy, and even if they could you couldn't set the system to use that level of accuracy as you'd have to give it enough slack to still recognize someone despite any possible changes in appearance.
With those parameters, the size of the attempted databases and the sheer number of passing people makes it certain that either the vast majority of flagged suspects will be the wrong guy (and a system that's wrong 99.99% of the time just isnt very useful, especially if you consider how well security guards will be doing their job when they get yet another alert from that damn system that hasnt been right, ever), or you just wont get a match at all, even if the right guy passes by.
This isnt really a failure of the technology, it's just a question of horrendous misapplication of technology to solve a problem that it isnt suited to solve.
I'm sure you can recognize your ten closest friends from a 2D photograph. So can a facial recognition system.
Now try picking out one out of your 40000 closest friends in a crowd of several million people.
How many times will you go 'oh, isnt that... no, wait, it wasnt', or pass your 23472'nd friend by without recogizing him?
It's not just difficult. It is impossible. The human mind is *good* at recogizing faces, but the problem is that human facial features just arent that unique, and varying conditions plays tricks on humans as well as software that tries to be smart. Smart software will fail as badly or even worse than humans when faced with the impossible odds that comparing crowds with large databses generates.
Not even the fact that it doesnt work is really interesting; the fact that face recognition technology used in this way is, and always will be, worthless was known already.
Face recognition is useful when comparing small groups against a large database, or a large group against a small database since you can trim the fuzzy factors to get more false positives or more false negatives. For example, if you want to find the identity of a certain suspect in a large database you can have it spit out 10 suggestions of who it could be and eliminate the false positives manually. Or if you use it for access control you can trim it to reject as much as possible, as someone going through an access control can adjust their face for optimal lighting and try again.
But to use it to scan random people under bad conditions and compare against a large database where you dont want either false positives or false negatives is idiocy and the system will be completely useless as you'll either get dozens of random false positives each day and haul in innocent people who probably look nothing like the match or you wont get the actual matches at all.
The companies like former Visionics trying to push these systems for crowd use are selling snake oil. It doesnt work today and as the factors making it unusable cant really be significantly improved upon it wont work in the future either.
There's a bit of difference between "Oracle will run on any Linux" and "Oracle is supported on any Linux".
Supported usually implies testing, education of support people, installers for the distribution, keeping track of distribution specific problems, etc. All of that costs money, so there has to be a credible buisness case for each extra supported distribution.
While I may wish Oracle would support more distributions than they do, I cant really fault them for not being willing to do so. It's not like Oracle is the only database there is.
This is one of the most annoying and dangerous failures in disaster protection these days in many organizations, I think. I remember it being brought up by auditing companies around the y2k problem too; most organizations dont have adequate paper fallbacks which gets to be a huge problem the day something actually happens.