FSF: Free Software Foundation DRM: Digital Rights Management RMS: Richard M. Stallman (founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom). OSTG: The Open Source Technology Group. GPLv3: GNU Public License version 3.
I Recommend that you subscribe to a couple of english language Mailing Lists (or Yahoo Groups), which you can then filter and move to a mail subfolder of their own easily through the Subject line or From Address. That way you can have good english non-spam mails going through your Bayes daily.
I think when the article talks about "Open Source Software" it actually means "Programmers that work for free"... and there's a big difference between the two.
Is there a large community of developers with access to a "giant robotic parking structure" [sic] interested in an open source alternative to the software it comes with? I don't think so... So we'd need a project sponsor that can give some willing developers access to a couple of "giant robotic parking structures" for development and testing purpouses... which certainly won't be the company that manufactures them, since they'd rather sell their expensive software license. If the developers get paid (since FOSS doesn't necessarily mean they won't get paid), they'd still make less than the company currently selling the software. So what they want is free or cheaper programmers... get in line.
There is a learning curve with Linux, but there is with Windows too. Just ask anyone who has switched from a Mac to Windows. If you're not willing to learn, then you're just lazy.
The people that have trouble switching from Mac to Windows would probably never survive the switch from Windows to Linux, except for switching to a friendly desktop distro and never looking under the hood (hey! Just like Mac OS X!:) ). There are learning curves and then there are learning curves.
Lazyness aside, the fact that you should be willing learn doesn't make the switch easier. Sometime's it's not about advancing to a higher level as a human being, but about bussiness. I might be more than willing to learn about different Linux distros and become the "Master of FOSS Portability (tm)", but my boss might not be such as willing as employing my time thus (which he pays for).
Microsoft's argument is not directed to me, but rather to my boss.
Microsoft develops tons of experimental projects that are not meant to see the light of day (at least commercially) at Microsoft Research and MS Live Labs. Some of those are not publicly divulged, but are shown internally to other MS Employees. This is nothing new...
Yes, I realize this... but I started with Slackware when there was little choice... moved to Mandrake but then support for nonpaying customers seemed faltering, and free Red-Hat became Fedora (not the same). Perhaps if I'd started with Debian to begin with, it'd all would have been peachy... but there's no way of knowing if the distro you choose is going to stick, right?
Is being needlesly agressive the norm in Slashdot?
Wow... I must be new here.
For over ten years (not like ten years, but over ten years) I've been a System Administrator for various companies, both big and small. I've worked with POP3/SMTP, Samba, DNS, NFS, NIS/NIS+, et. al. Through the years, I've had to upgrade or perform initial installations on a number of servers, for a wide variety of reasons. Only once was I obliged to upgrade a *NIX OS because it had been EOL'ed, and that was Solaris2.6 -> Solaris 8 (but that wasn't open source at the time, still isn't really open source).
We had to jump off the SCO boat like rats. But that's beside the point I was trying to make. Linux has a fast and sometimes radical evolution, which forces you regularly switch to different tools. One I forgot to mention was all the different types of NAT I had to use... iptables, ipchains, and whatever I had in Slackware (ipmasqsomething).
Perhaps I switched distributions more than the avarage administrator does... but still within the same distribution standard packages change, just like Debian itself moved from Sendmail to Exim4, or from ipchains to iptables. Whatever the case, each re-installation forces me to learn new software and migrate configurations. This, for me, is hidden cost of Linux.
A very important point is that Windows products have graphical and generally user-friendly configurations, whereas Linux products only began getting these more or less recently and they're not allways good. Samba's SWAT is totally great and you'll never hear me complaining about reconfiguring it... but I hate graphical front-ends such as those provided by Mandrake or Red Hat, which many times don't work correctly or just enable the most basic options.
Then again, we all know that WindowsXP is virtually identical to Windows 3.1, right? Oh, except . . . for virtually everything.
Not so... each new version adds new stuff, but most of the old stuff is still in place, more or less. Like the registry is still there, the event viewer is the same, Virtual Memory configuration hasn't changed much, neither did network setup, etc. The only changes I had slight troubles with from Windows version to Windows version is whenever the location of something changes.
If I really have the urge, I can still locate older versions of most distributions through what would be considered proper channels. Uh, where (except for a garage sale or e-Bay) am I going to find Windows 3.1? Windows 3.11? Windows 95? Windows NT? Boy, I hope everybody likes Vista, 'cuz XP's days are numbered already! Incidentally, who supports the thousands of NT machines still churning away out there?
I don't remember the name of the program... but a couple of years ago I found out that a subscription service (MSDN? TechNet?) distributed many old operating systems (like MSDOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, 3.11, etc.) to certain subscribers.
Still... your point is quite valid, since it's much easier to get an old version of a Linux distribution.
You are probably the first and only Administrator with more than two months' experience to suggest that forced migration up the Windows evolutionary path hasn't caused you tremendous grief. Oh, and note the words forced migration. Not "I bought unsupported hardware and have to upgrade the OS/drivers", but "We have to remove from a perfectly good running machine and install because M$ has declared EOL."
Migrations are forced but I always did them before they were mandatory and two or three years after the new OS was released. And yes, they were mostly hassle-free.
Based on the overall content of your post, I'm coming to the conclusion that you simply don't want to earn your way - you'd rather have the boys at Redmond do all the work for you. When it breaks, you get to blame somebody else instead of rolling up your sleeves and fixing it. I for one never had any trouble rebu
What the article completely ignores is why geeks prefer Linux. It's not hard to understand. When you're setting up infrastructure, you want to plan for the long term.
I don't mean to bash your argument... but in my experience I had worse luck with Linux planning for the long term.
For like eight years I've been Administrator to my company's server. It's a small company with a few programmers... I work as a programmer full time but I also install and manage all the software in the server which hosts POP3 and SMPT server, a Samba file server, DNS, Apache, NFS and some web apps like Mediawiki, Mantis, dotProject and myPHPAdmin. Through this years we've had to reinstall the server a number of times... a couple of times it was to do a major kernel upgrade because we've decided to upgrade the motherboard and CPU, I think another time it was because of a hard disk failure and the last one was because upon enabling DMA for the HDD it got SERIOUSLY corrupted (a problem it seems many people with certain VIA chipsets had).
Our first Linux was Slackware I think... we decided to switch to Red Hat, but since I live in Argentina and this was before the days of Broadband we couldn't get a Red Hat CD... so we bought a Mandrake distro CD instead. For the next upgrade I meant to download Mandrake, but though I don't remember exactly why (I think it was because they were limiting the support options for non-paying customers or something like that) I decided to switch over to Red Hat... when the time came to upgrade the Red Hat (we had bought an AMD Athlon and new motherboard), the project had split in Fedora and Red Hat... so I switched over to Debian. Since the joke of town is that Debian doesn't update their distribution enough, I guess I'd switch to Ubuntu if I had to reinstall the server tomorrow.
In this of this switches I got a lot of new stuff I didn't have before: easier configuration... new kernel... support for new hardware... new software. But each time I had to learn a whole lot of new things. Example: I started with a Sendmail configured by hand... then the m4 configurations became the norm but I didn't know what to do with those... and now I'm running with Exim4, since it's the standard in Debian and was way easier to configure to my liking. The same with printing: I had lpq, but then I got CUPS with the Red-Hat and it was the standard for the distribution, thus easier to configure, had more support, was nicer... and now I don't even remember what I run my printers with (I think I still have CUPS... but perhaps I was offered a newer one at some point...). Besides changing programs each distribution came with different paths, different startup scripts, different location for the logs, different update mechanisms, different security measures and different best practices.
Perhaps I could have stuck around a bit more with some of my old distributions... but the hardware support is important, and recompiling a Kernel is something I like to avoid if possible (specially since the last HDD blew up after I enabled DMA, which then worked fine upon switching to a new distribution that had a much newer Kernel).
As for Windows, changing from NT4 to 2000 didn't present any problems, neither did XP... and I recently installed our software on a 2003 Server with no trouble whatsoever. I expect that switching from Debian to Ubuntu would require much more of my time and much more tweaking and migrating from our current installation than switching from 2000 to Longhorn would.
To some extent that's true... but there's a limit at how useful Asteroids and Donkey Kong experience is in today FPSs and MMORPGs. Computer Games will probably be a whole different thing ten years from now.
Just as I was reading this article a window popped up telling me that Firefox 1.5.0.5 has finished downloading and I need to restart Firefox for it to install. My options are "Restart now" or "Restart later", but there's no option to avoid the update.
ActiveX isn't "permanently browser dependant". It's easy to have your own browser host ActiveX controls, just like you can host them in any other Win32 application. That's what they were made for.
Granted, they're not portable...
Quite a number of feel-good news coming from Redmon lately.
Maybe Ballmer is stepping down and doing some policy/image changes requested by the new guy to make it look more like he's starting on a clean slate rather than cleaning up the mess.
I don't care that MySpace didn't know that an exploitive ad was being served, they're still responsible for choosing that certain ad serving company. MySpace certainly must expect a number of things from this company, such as not serving ads for pr0n (at least in pages viewed by minors), among others. I can assume they're not happy about having served adware since they don't specifically profit from it and it ruins their image.
So, should they have ran an extensive background check on the ad serving company? That's entirely up to them and the risks they're willing to take. Detecting sleazeballs is not a precise science, but it's standard procedure when looking for a business partner (and if your revenue model is somewhat based around banner ads, then the company providing those ads certainly is a business partner).
What I do expect from MySpace is to give a damn about this and sue the sleazeballs for whatever they're worth on the grounds of breaching the expected quality of service, messing with their users' computers and ultimately ruining their image (an intangible asset) and reducing their number of users. They don't need anti-adware laws for this, I guess.
No, actually the mistake was all mine.
I hereby declare to be a complete tool, and my only defense is the fact that the amount of caffeine in my blood was not enough to compensate my sleepy state.
A 8 character password has C^8 possible combinations (where C is the number of available characters). A 16 character password has C^16 possible combinations... and C^16 == (C^8)^2.
So doubling the length squares the search space, and you were correct.
If flashy filesystem features like this can't be translated to other filesystems, they become more of a problem than a feature. Think trying to copy those files to other filesystems, CDs, flash drives, ftp, http, etc.
Cool, but worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
FSF: Free Software Foundation
DRM: Digital Rights Management
RMS: Richard M. Stallman (founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom).
OSTG: The Open Source Technology Group.
GPLv3: GNU Public License version 3.
Video cards aren't a series of tubes. They're a truck.
I Recommend that you subscribe to a couple of english language Mailing Lists (or Yahoo Groups), which you can then filter and move to a mail subfolder of their own easily through the Subject line or From Address. That way you can have good english non-spam mails going through your Bayes daily.
Yes, that's why whenever I travel by plane I carry my own bomb.
Funny... searching for UID 17556639 in the Search Database (http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/) yields no results.
Perhaps the number whas changed for the blog?
I think when the article talks about "Open Source Software" it actually means "Programmers that work for free"... and there's a big difference between the two. Is there a large community of developers with access to a "giant robotic parking structure" [sic] interested in an open source alternative to the software it comes with? I don't think so... So we'd need a project sponsor that can give some willing developers access to a couple of "giant robotic parking structures" for development and testing purpouses... which certainly won't be the company that manufactures them, since they'd rather sell their expensive software license. If the developers get paid (since FOSS doesn't necessarily mean they won't get paid), they'd still make less than the company currently selling the software. So what they want is free or cheaper programmers... get in line.
Lazyness aside, the fact that you should be willing learn doesn't make the switch easier. Sometime's it's not about advancing to a higher level as a human being, but about bussiness. I might be more than willing to learn about different Linux distros and become the "Master of FOSS Portability (tm)", but my boss might not be such as willing as employing my time thus (which he pays for).
Microsoft's argument is not directed to me, but rather to my boss.
How does a blackout in most of the northeast of the US come even close to a Doomsday scenario?
I live in Argentina, so maybe I'm biased.
Microsoft develops tons of experimental projects that are not meant to see the light of day (at least commercially) at Microsoft Research and MS Live Labs. Some of those are not publicly divulged, but are shown internally to other MS Employees. This is nothing new...
Yes, I realize this... but I started with Slackware when there was little choice... moved to Mandrake but then support for nonpaying customers seemed faltering, and free Red-Hat became Fedora (not the same). Perhaps if I'd started with Debian to begin with, it'd all would have been peachy... but there's no way of knowing if the distro you choose is going to stick, right?
I know tons of people working as off-shore help desk here in Argentina. They mostly work here:
i na.html
http://www.teletech.com.ar/global.lat.html
I'm not sure, but I think they did tech support for Dell, among others.
Another one here:
http://www.teleperformanceusa.com/offshore/argent
Wow... I must be new here.
We had to jump off the SCO boat like rats. But that's beside the point I was trying to make. Linux has a fast and sometimes radical evolution, which forces you regularly switch to different tools. One I forgot to mention was all the different types of NAT I had to use... iptables, ipchains, and whatever I had in Slackware (ipmasqsomething).
Perhaps I switched distributions more than the avarage administrator does... but still within the same distribution standard packages change, just like Debian itself moved from Sendmail to Exim4, or from ipchains to iptables. Whatever the case, each re-installation forces me to learn new software and migrate configurations. This, for me, is hidden cost of Linux.
A very important point is that Windows products have graphical and generally user-friendly configurations, whereas Linux products only began getting these more or less recently and they're not allways good. Samba's SWAT is totally great and you'll never hear me complaining about reconfiguring it... but I hate graphical front-ends such as those provided by Mandrake or Red Hat, which many times don't work correctly or just enable the most basic options.
Not so... each new version adds new stuff, but most of the old stuff is still in place, more or less. Like the registry is still there, the event viewer is the same, Virtual Memory configuration hasn't changed much, neither did network setup, etc. The only changes I had slight troubles with from Windows version to Windows version is whenever the location of something changes.
I don't remember the name of the program... but a couple of years ago I found out that a subscription service (MSDN? TechNet?) distributed many old operating systems (like MSDOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, 3.11, etc.) to certain subscribers. Still... your point is quite valid, since it's much easier to get an old version of a Linux distribution.
Migrations are forced but I always did them before they were mandatory and two or three years after the new OS was released. And yes, they were mostly hassle-free.
For like eight years I've been Administrator to my company's server. It's a small company with a few programmers... I work as a programmer full time but I also install and manage all the software in the server which hosts POP3 and SMPT server, a Samba file server, DNS, Apache, NFS and some web apps like Mediawiki, Mantis, dotProject and myPHPAdmin. Through this years we've had to reinstall the server a number of times... a couple of times it was to do a major kernel upgrade because we've decided to upgrade the motherboard and CPU, I think another time it was because of a hard disk failure and the last one was because upon enabling DMA for the HDD it got SERIOUSLY corrupted (a problem it seems many people with certain VIA chipsets had).
Our first Linux was Slackware I think... we decided to switch to Red Hat, but since I live in Argentina and this was before the days of Broadband we couldn't get a Red Hat CD... so we bought a Mandrake distro CD instead. For the next upgrade I meant to download Mandrake, but though I don't remember exactly why (I think it was because they were limiting the support options for non-paying customers or something like that) I decided to switch over to Red Hat... when the time came to upgrade the Red Hat (we had bought an AMD Athlon and new motherboard), the project had split in Fedora and Red Hat... so I switched over to Debian. Since the joke of town is that Debian doesn't update their distribution enough, I guess I'd switch to Ubuntu if I had to reinstall the server tomorrow.
In this of this switches I got a lot of new stuff I didn't have before: easier configuration... new kernel... support for new hardware... new software. But each time I had to learn a whole lot of new things. Example: I started with a Sendmail configured by hand... then the m4 configurations became the norm but I didn't know what to do with those... and now I'm running with Exim4, since it's the standard in Debian and was way easier to configure to my liking. The same with printing: I had lpq, but then I got CUPS with the Red-Hat and it was the standard for the distribution, thus easier to configure, had more support, was nicer... and now I don't even remember what I run my printers with (I think I still have CUPS... but perhaps I was offered a newer one at some point...). Besides changing programs each distribution came with different paths, different startup scripts, different location for the logs, different update mechanisms, different security measures and different best practices.
Perhaps I could have stuck around a bit more with some of my old distributions... but the hardware support is important, and recompiling a Kernel is something I like to avoid if possible (specially since the last HDD blew up after I enabled DMA, which then worked fine upon switching to a new distribution that had a much newer Kernel).
As for Windows, changing from NT4 to 2000 didn't present any problems, neither did XP... and I recently installed our software on a 2003 Server with no trouble whatsoever. I expect that switching from Debian to Ubuntu would require much more of my time and much more tweaking and migrating from our current installation than switching from 2000 to Longhorn would.
To some extent that's true... but there's a limit at how useful Asteroids and Donkey Kong experience is in today FPSs and MMORPGs. Computer Games will probably be a whole different thing ten years from now.
How? Easy... ... those skills you mentioned are usually for life, while coaching for a specific video game lasts at most a couple of years.
Just as I was reading this article a window popped up telling me that Firefox 1.5.0.5 has finished downloading and I need to restart Firefox for it to install. My options are "Restart now" or "Restart later", but there's no option to avoid the update.
ActiveX isn't "permanently browser dependant". It's easy to have your own browser host ActiveX controls, just like you can host them in any other Win32 application. That's what they were made for. Granted, they're not portable...
Quite a number of feel-good news coming from Redmon lately.
Maybe Ballmer is stepping down and doing some policy/image changes requested by the new guy to make it look more like he's starting on a clean slate rather than cleaning up the mess.
I don't care that MySpace didn't know that an exploitive ad was being served, they're still responsible for choosing that certain ad serving company. MySpace certainly must expect a number of things from this company, such as not serving ads for pr0n (at least in pages viewed by minors), among others. I can assume they're not happy about having served adware since they don't specifically profit from it and it ruins their image.
So, should they have ran an extensive background check on the ad serving company? That's entirely up to them and the risks they're willing to take. Detecting sleazeballs is not a precise science, but it's standard procedure when looking for a business partner (and if your revenue model is somewhat based around banner ads, then the company providing those ads certainly is a business partner).
What I do expect from MySpace is to give a damn about this and sue the sleazeballs for whatever they're worth on the grounds of breaching the expected quality of service, messing with their users' computers and ultimately ruining their image (an intangible asset) and reducing their number of users. They don't need anti-adware laws for this, I guess.
No, actually the mistake was all mine.
I hereby declare to be a complete tool, and my only defense is the fact that the amount of caffeine in my blood was not enough to compensate my sleepy state.
A 8 character password has C^8 possible combinations (where C is the number of available characters). A 16 character password has C^16 possible combinations... and C^16 == (C^8)^2.
So doubling the length squares the search space, and you were correct.
It wouldn't square the time, it'd 2^8 it.
If flashy filesystem features like this can't be translated to other filesystems, they become more of a problem than a feature. Think trying to copy those files to other filesystems, CDs, flash drives, ftp, http, etc. Cool, but worthless.
Because there's nothing cooler than pirates. Yar!
How do we know this wasn't a rigged laptop planted at the conference by one of Dell's competitors?
It's great bad publicity... and note how they could tell it was a Dell but not what specific model.
As much as this things can heat up, bursting up in flames is something else altogether.
In Argentina we ask "Levanta?" when we want to know if a system/computer/program etc is booting up alright.