What do you mean good open source software is a myth? Linux is great open source software, I had a web server with an uptime of 230 days that only went down because the UPS didn't have enough capacity to power it during all the power outage.
Nobody said it was perfect though, nor it can be. Nothing made by humans is.
Anyway, what I like the most about OSS is being able to fix it myself. I don't need to wait for Red Hat, Debian or somebody else. I can go and see if somebody made a patch. I can also try to patch it myself. I don't have any experience with kernel programming, but I'm pretty sure I could at least disable ptrace until a fix was ready. That's a very good thing, IMO.
If a bug in IIS causes a remote exploit then that's a bug in IIS, and that's it. Now, if there's a bug in the Windows TCP/IP stack, networking components, some kernel call, etc, which causes an exploit then that *is* a bug in Windows.
A bug in wu-ftpd doesn't just affect Linux. It will also affect the other supported platforms: BSD/OS 1.1, and 3.1, FreeBSD 2.2.6, SCO OpenServer 5.x, SCO UnixWare 2.1, Solaris 2.4, 2.5.1 and 2.6, Sun Sparc Platforms, Solaris 2.6, Solaris 2.5.1, SunOS 4.1.4
The only real security vulnerabilities in Linux are the ones that affect only the kernel and Linux specific tools. Everything else is just a vulnerability in some other program.
Say, somebody would call me a moron. I normally either wouldn't answer, or mumble something like "If you say so" or just shrug. It got especially funny when somebody was really annoyed and yelling at me. They'd ask something like "Are you stupid, or what?" and I'd happily say "Yeah, I suppose so", or "what".
What actually happens is that I've got *way* too much self-esteem. I've been seeing that I just don't give a damn about what anybody thinks about me, as long they aren't a close friend. Everybody else can think that I'm idiot and that's fine by me. There's practically nothing that somebody I don't know well could say to me that'd make me feel annoyed. It gets to the point where I don't even need to be successful. I'm good at my stuff, and I'm happy with that. Failing PE, or anything else didn't worry me at all.
That combines with my introversion. I not only don't care about what some random person thinks about me, I usually don't even care enough to try to solve whatever problem s/he has with me. Simply because I don't see a point in it. I've already got my 2-3 good friends, and I'm happy with that.
Uh, I don't see what's the point in complaining about that.
Deal with it, RMS is an idealist. A quite awesome one in fact. Seriously, how many people have whatever got him to practically replace Unix with something better (excluding the kernel) because of a printer driver?
You may complain all you want, but FSF matches RMS' ideals. If you don't agree with such extreme idealism you can always start your own movement, although I doubt you're one of the very few capable of that.
Yes, RMS sometimes looks too fanatical. But it's quite possible that all this wouldn't have started if he wasn't.
Sounds like a logical reply to me. With the exception of the "scumbag" thing.
After all, most Free software is free (as in beer). There's no corporation behind it, nobody paid for it to be written. Most of it was written to scratch an itch. So of course, you're going to get that reply, especially from somebody who wrote his/her own software. After all s/he added what was needed, so why couldn't you do the same?
If you don't like that reply, then try to ask around politely. Somebody might think you have a good idea and write it. If not, then either write it yourself or pay somebody to write it.
Same as you're starting from the assumption that the fact that Windows has a "My Documents" folder means that it's somehow better than calling it say "doc". Why "My", to begin with? Who else's could they be?
Not even Win98 handles spaces in filenames perfectly. IIRC, either Win95 or Win98 had a bug where the registry editor couldn't register files if they were inside a directory that contained spaces, because it didn't see "C:\My Documents\file.reg", it saw "C:\My" and "Documents\file.reg"
You rarely see incompatibilities on windows? Come on, you see them all the time!
One of the biggest reasons why Windows tends to fail for misterious reasons is exactly due to consistent lack of packaging. Some programs throw DLLs in the system directory. Some will write them to their own. Some will forget to increment the usage counter, and some to decrement it. Some braindead installers will overwrite files without checking the version. Others will leave with a mix where the errors of the program appear in English while the rest appears in say, Spanish.
All this results in a really horrible mess after a few months. 300MB of DLLs in the system directory that you don't know what they're for, DLLs being uninstalled because the usage counter was too low, or left lying around uselessly because it was too high. DLLs being replaced with newer but incompatible versions...
As a programmer who makes Windows apps I can say that making an installer for a large Windows programs takes quite a lot of time and experience to get it right. Meanwhile, in Gentoo I learned to make to create simple packages in a day.
All Linux package managers ensure all library versions are adequate and that no package overwrites another package's files. It might be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes to make sure everything is of the right version, but would you really prefer to have the Windows mess instead?
I've heard that FAT32 is very bad to have on Flash because it keeps updating the disk space counter almost with every write. If this effect happens on a card of this size it might not last for more than a month if you fill it often.
Oh yeah, I've seen Win95 on a 386 DX 40 with 4MB RAM. I suppose it kind of works. You boot it (slowly), open Explorer and it takes a while to appear due to the swapping.
I've also used Win2K on a P133 with 64MB, and even played Mechwarrior 3 on it. It was very slow, and MW3 took quite a while to load. On my current machine (Dual Athlon MP 2000+ with 1GB RAM) it's pretty much instant. After seeing how this new computer runs using a GUI on anything slower than a P3 is just painful.
Well, it depends on what you run on it. Maybe try Enlightenment. In its day it looked horribly bloated and slow, but on that machine it's very fast. One problem with remote desktops is animations. Maybe disable animations, or set them to play only once. Perhaps also lower the priority of Java applets.
Heh, why would be anybody be surprised at having their IP address logged? Apache logs all accesses by default, it's nothing new. And not very related to robots.txt, anyway.
You should be careful about trusting IP addresses in logs, though. A smart attacker would use a cybercafe, hacked computer or proxy instead of his/her own computer. Getting the wrong person in trouble won't help you much.
It's supposed to be used to tell bots not to access some parts of your site due to other reasons.
Common reasons would be that you host a site with a forum on a DSL line and don't want google to index all 5000 threads on it. It's also good for dynamic pages, for example it makes no sense to index a generated page that will be out of date tomorrow. It'll be much better to let it index the archive instead.
Using this for security is just stupid though, as it'd contain a list of vulnerable places. Maybe it will make harder for people to find your vulnerabilities from google, but it will help a lot whoever wants to attack you specifically.
Security problems have to be fixed by setting proper permissions and keeping your server up to date, and not by relying on that every spider that comes to your site will be polite enough to follow robots.txt
Imagine: i386 (32 bit, 4GB address space without extenstions), Visual Basic 6 (which has serious IDE bugs in SP5), Windows, (depending on what messaging you refer to) propietary MSN protocol.
You might think that this is good, but the fact is when you need to run a program that uses more than 4 GB RAM, use something that's not VB because it's too slow or buggy, want virtual desktops or whatever feature is not available in the Windows GUI, and don't like to be restricted to a fixed protocol, then being limited to just one thing isn't that good.
It wouldn't be good for users either. If there's no choice, and MS wants 3 times more money for upgrades this time, you're screwed.
True, after living for so long with 3 computers, one of which sounds like a jet, TV, people walking around, cars on the street, the hum of the fans, computers and air conditioners at work, and people walking everywhere, complete silence is quite creepy.
I don't even watch TV these days, with the ocassional exception for the Simpsons and maybe a movie or two. The internet is much better. It doesn't show you 30 minutes of ads per movie, content is just available there and not during a specific day and time, and the content is much more interesting.
Here (Spain) it seems that the producers of some shows are brain damaged. A while ago I turned on the TV to see if there was anything, saw a bit of some "Putin's daughter" crap, and went back to my computer.
that trick won't help you much. Say, your password is "pass" and you type "mypaxxssstuff". The attacker simply has to try the possible combinations, and you already gave him/her the right order. All the attacker needs to do is trying combinations.
But then, they could just install a decent logger. Or measure the time between letters.
Try the Tyan Tiger MPX. Not very expensive, dual, with two 66 Mhz 64 bit slots. There's the Tyan Tiger MP too, which is also dual, supports somewhat slower CPUs, and somewhat cheaper.
Visual Basic is often described in VB books as the "system glue". This means that you usually don't write huge amounts of code in it, you use it to put components together. A database app would usually be made of standard controls, ADO objects, data bound controls, perhaps some third party spread/grid control and often Crystal Reports or something similar.
Having a VB compiler won't help much, unless they also plan to make Linux versions of ADO libraries and other useful things that are used often. And then there are the tons of WinAPI calls many VB programs are full of, because VB's capabilities even in version 6 aren't very impressive.
I'm currently considering how to move from VB to Linux, and my current best idea is to isolate the evil parts, like Crystal Reports by moving them to a separate program. This way I could use just one Windows computer to print reports, and rewrite most things in Linux more easily.
Well, you said it was an enterprise application. I doubt you have Linux, Mac and Windows desktops there all at once. Depends on what you use to develop too. As much as I hate it, it's possible to produce quite nice looking stuff with VB pretty fast. There's also Delphi/Kylix which has the advantage of running on both Windows and Linux. Qt looks nice as well and supports all 3 platforms.
Deployment is not that hard to automate. Take NSIS or some other installer, make it ask no questions, and make your app check the latest version on startup, and run the installer from the network if needed.
Right, VPN. I have tried a VPN on Win2K before. Saying that it was horribly slow would be an understatement. This is 256/128K DSL connections we're talking about. Perhaps on a T1 it would be decent, but what I had was pretty horrible and I got rid of it as fast as I could.
Besides, I think there are issues with making PPTP VPNs work with Linux routers. It's been proved to be insecure too, although for this particular application it doesn't matter much.
Pfft. It's definitely not going to be "state of the art". It will be a poor and laggy immitation of what you could have done with a proper GUI. I've seen no web interface that was better than a program running locally.
For example, compare phpmyadmin and any other GUI mySQL database tool. phpmyadmin is slow and annoying to use in comparison with pretty much anything else. It does have its uses, like letting people admin their database without opening the port to the whole internet, but if I can use any other tool I will take it over phpmyadmin.
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What do you mean good open source software is a myth? Linux is great open source software, I had a web server with an uptime of 230 days that only went down because the UPS didn't have enough capacity to power it during all the power outage.
Nobody said it was perfect though, nor it can be. Nothing made by humans is.
Anyway, what I like the most about OSS is being able to fix it myself. I don't need to wait for Red Hat, Debian or somebody else. I can go and see if somebody made a patch. I can also try to patch it myself. I don't have any experience with kernel programming, but I'm pretty sure I could at least disable ptrace until a fix was ready. That's a very good thing, IMO.
They shouldn't be.
If a bug in IIS causes a remote exploit then that's a bug in IIS, and that's it. Now, if there's a bug in the Windows TCP/IP stack, networking components, some kernel call, etc, which causes an exploit then that *is* a bug in Windows.
A bug in wu-ftpd doesn't just affect Linux. It will also affect the other supported platforms: BSD/OS 1.1, and 3.1, FreeBSD 2.2.6, SCO OpenServer 5.x, SCO UnixWare 2.1, Solaris 2.4, 2.5.1 and 2.6, Sun Sparc Platforms, Solaris 2.6, Solaris 2.5.1, SunOS 4.1.4
The only real security vulnerabilities in Linux are the ones that affect only the kernel and Linux specific tools. Everything else is just a vulnerability in some other program.
People used to get this wrong about me in school.
Say, somebody would call me a moron. I normally either wouldn't answer, or mumble something like "If you say so" or just shrug. It got especially funny when somebody was really annoyed and yelling at me. They'd ask something like "Are you stupid, or what?" and I'd happily say "Yeah, I suppose so", or "what".
What actually happens is that I've got *way* too much self-esteem. I've been seeing that I just don't give a damn about what anybody thinks about me, as long they aren't a close friend. Everybody else can think that I'm idiot and that's fine by me. There's practically nothing that somebody I don't know well could say to me that'd make me feel annoyed. It gets to the point where I don't even need to be successful. I'm good at my stuff, and I'm happy with that. Failing PE, or anything else didn't worry me at all.
That combines with my introversion. I not only don't care about what some random person thinks about me, I usually don't even care enough to try to solve whatever problem s/he has with me. Simply because I don't see a point in it. I've already got my 2-3 good friends, and I'm happy with that.
Uh, I don't see what's the point in complaining about that.
Deal with it, RMS is an idealist. A quite awesome one in fact. Seriously, how many people have whatever got him to practically replace Unix with something better (excluding the kernel) because of a printer driver?
You may complain all you want, but FSF matches RMS' ideals. If you don't agree with such extreme idealism you can always start your own movement, although I doubt you're one of the very few capable of that.
Yes, RMS sometimes looks too fanatical. But it's quite possible that all this wouldn't have started if he wasn't.
Sounds like a logical reply to me. With the exception of the "scumbag" thing.
After all, most Free software is free (as in beer). There's no corporation behind it, nobody paid for it to be written. Most of it was written to scratch an itch. So of course, you're going to get that reply, especially from somebody who wrote his/her own software. After all s/he added what was needed, so why couldn't you do the same?
If you don't like that reply, then try to ask around politely. Somebody might think you have a good idea and write it. If not, then either write it yourself or pay somebody to write it.
Same as you're starting from the assumption that the fact that Windows has a "My Documents" folder means that it's somehow better than calling it say "doc". Why "My", to begin with? Who else's could they be?
Not even Win98 handles spaces in filenames perfectly. IIRC, either Win95 or Win98 had a bug where the registry editor couldn't register files if they were inside a directory that contained spaces, because it didn't see "C:\My Documents\file.reg", it saw "C:\My" and "Documents\file.reg"
You rarely see incompatibilities on windows? Come on, you see them all the time!
One of the biggest reasons why Windows tends to fail for misterious reasons is exactly due to consistent lack of packaging. Some programs throw DLLs in the system directory. Some will write them to their own. Some will forget to increment the usage counter, and some to decrement it. Some braindead installers will overwrite files without checking the version. Others will leave with a mix where the errors of the program appear in English while the rest appears in say, Spanish.
All this results in a really horrible mess after a few months. 300MB of DLLs in the system directory that you don't know what they're for, DLLs being uninstalled because the usage counter was too low, or left lying around uselessly because it was too high. DLLs being replaced with newer but incompatible versions...
As a programmer who makes Windows apps I can say that making an installer for a large Windows programs takes quite a lot of time and experience to get it right. Meanwhile, in Gentoo I learned to make to create simple packages in a day.
All Linux package managers ensure all library versions are adequate and that no package overwrites another package's files. It might be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes to make sure everything is of the right version, but would you really prefer to have the Windows mess instead?
I've heard that FAT32 is very bad to have on Flash because it keeps updating the disk space counter almost with every write. If this effect happens on a card of this size it might not last for more than a month if you fill it often.
I mean, did anybody write a completely new game for ScummVM? Or, are there any tools for making them at least?
Oh yeah, I've seen Win95 on a 386 DX 40 with 4MB RAM. I suppose it kind of works. You boot it (slowly), open Explorer and it takes a while to appear due to the swapping.
I've also used Win2K on a P133 with 64MB, and even played Mechwarrior 3 on it. It was very slow, and MW3 took quite a while to load. On my current machine (Dual Athlon MP 2000+ with 1GB RAM) it's pretty much instant. After seeing how this new computer runs using a GUI on anything slower than a P3 is just painful.
Well, it depends on what you run on it. Maybe try Enlightenment. In its day it looked horribly bloated and slow, but on that machine it's very fast. One problem with remote desktops is animations. Maybe disable animations, or set them to play only once. Perhaps also lower the priority of Java applets.
Heh, why would be anybody be surprised at having their IP address logged? Apache logs all accesses by default, it's nothing new. And not very related to robots.txt, anyway.
You should be careful about trusting IP addresses in logs, though. A smart attacker would use a cybercafe, hacked computer or proxy instead of his/her own computer. Getting the wrong person in trouble won't help you much.
It's supposed to be used to tell bots not to access some parts of your site due to other reasons.
Common reasons would be that you host a site with a forum on a DSL line and don't want google to index all 5000 threads on it. It's also good for dynamic pages, for example it makes no sense to index a generated page that will be out of date tomorrow. It'll be much better to let it index the archive instead.
Using this for security is just stupid though, as it'd contain a list of vulnerable places. Maybe it will make harder for people to find your vulnerabilities from google, but it will help a lot whoever wants to attack you specifically.
Security problems have to be fixed by setting proper permissions and keeping your server up to date, and not by relying on that every spider that comes to your site will be polite enough to follow robots.txt
Nah, it would suck.
Imagine: i386 (32 bit, 4GB address space without extenstions), Visual Basic 6 (which has serious IDE bugs in SP5), Windows, (depending on what messaging you refer to) propietary MSN protocol.
You might think that this is good, but the fact is when you need to run a program that uses more than 4 GB RAM, use something that's not VB because it's too slow or buggy, want virtual desktops or whatever feature is not available in the Windows GUI, and don't like to be restricted to a fixed protocol, then being limited to just one thing isn't that good.
It wouldn't be good for users either. If there's no choice, and MS wants 3 times more money for upgrades this time, you're screwed.
In case anybody cares, "strelka" means "arrow", and "belca" means "squirrel"
Wonder what naming system they're using. I use names from Alice in Wonderland.
True, after living for so long with 3 computers, one of which sounds like a jet, TV, people walking around, cars on the street, the hum of the fans, computers and air conditioners at work, and people walking everywhere, complete silence is quite creepy.
I don't even watch TV these days, with the ocassional exception for the Simpsons and maybe a movie or two. The internet is much better. It doesn't show you 30 minutes of ads per movie, content is just available there and not during a specific day and time, and the content is much more interesting.
Here (Spain) it seems that the producers of some shows are brain damaged. A while ago I turned on the TV to see if there was anything, saw a bit of some "Putin's daughter" crap, and went back to my computer.
that trick won't help you much. Say, your password is "pass" and you type "mypaxxssstuff". The attacker simply has to try the possible combinations, and you already gave him/her the right order. All the attacker needs to do is trying combinations.
But then, they could just install a decent logger. Or measure the time between letters.
No, you don't. It's considered a good thing to do, but it's definitely not necessary.
That doesn't look like any language I know. If that was VB then it would have been:
For i = 0 To 100
array(i) = 0
Next
Brain fart, I suppose.
Try the Tyan Tiger MPX. Not very expensive, dual, with two 66 Mhz 64 bit slots. There's the Tyan Tiger MP too, which is also dual, supports somewhat slower CPUs, and somewhat cheaper.
Visual Basic is often described in VB books as the "system glue". This means that you usually don't write huge amounts of code in it, you use it to put components together. A database app would usually be made of standard controls, ADO objects, data bound controls, perhaps some third party spread/grid control and often Crystal Reports or something similar.
Having a VB compiler won't help much, unless they also plan to make Linux versions of ADO libraries and other useful things that are used often. And then there are the tons of WinAPI calls many VB programs are full of, because VB's capabilities even in version 6 aren't very impressive.
I'm currently considering how to move from VB to Linux, and my current best idea is to isolate the evil parts, like Crystal Reports by moving them to a separate program. This way I could use just one Windows computer to print reports, and rewrite most things in Linux more easily.
Well, you said it was an enterprise application. I doubt you have Linux, Mac and Windows desktops there all at once. Depends on what you use to develop too. As much as I hate it, it's possible to produce quite nice looking stuff with VB pretty fast. There's also Delphi/Kylix which has the advantage of running on both Windows and Linux. Qt looks nice as well and supports all 3 platforms.
Deployment is not that hard to automate. Take NSIS or some other installer, make it ask no questions, and make your app check the latest version on startup, and run the installer from the network if needed.
Right, VPN. I have tried a VPN on Win2K before. Saying that it was horribly slow would be an understatement. This is 256/128K DSL connections we're talking about. Perhaps on a T1 it would be decent, but what I had was pretty horrible and I got rid of it as fast as I could.
Besides, I think there are issues with making PPTP VPNs work with Linux routers. It's been proved to be insecure too, although for this particular application it doesn't matter much.
Pfft. It's definitely not going to be "state of the art". It will be a poor and laggy immitation of what you could have done with a proper GUI. I've seen no web interface that was better than a program running locally.
For example, compare phpmyadmin and any other GUI mySQL database tool. phpmyadmin is slow and annoying to use in comparison with pretty much anything else. It does have its uses, like letting people admin their database without opening the port to the whole internet, but if I can use any other tool I will take it over phpmyadmin.