In A.D. 2001 Recession was beginning US: What Happen? Dubya: Somebody set up us the 9/11 NASDAQ: We get sell signal dot.coms: Venture capital turn off US Business: It's you!! Cheap foreign labor: How are you gentlemen!! Cheap foreign labor: All your jobs are belong to us Cheap foreign labor: You have no chance to survive in the US, move your jobs in time! Cheap foreign labor: HA HA HA HA.... US Business: Outsource every 'business function' US Execs: You know whose job you're saving Outsourcing companies: Move 'jobs' US Business: For great quarterly report
Aztec was cool - I always liked kicking around the piles looking for anything but snakes...
but let's be honest....
Swashbuckler - now there was a game! I can kill any spider with my mighty sword, and I can shuffle forward and poke my enemies with a quick jab that makes them disappear! Heh.
and Castle Wolfenstein: 9 keys for movement and 9 keys for shooting! Those darn SS...
Requires state government to consider using open source software when acquiring new software. Sets other requirements for acquiring software.
In many cases where highly specialized applications are required, the consideration of opensource alternatives will show that while linux has multiple nice desktops, multiple nice office suites, multiple nice browsers, multiple nice email clients... it still has a number of fronts to work on.
When you compare all enterprise commercial apps against the most mature and most turnkey opensource ones, you'll find a lot of projects with good intentions but little functionality compared to commercial offerings.
The free software world is all about code and component reuse and sharing, and the attitude of 'hope someone can find use for this thing that I wrote - if it doesn't meet your needs or doesn't work, let me know and I might choose to do something about it... better yet, can you help? Here's the sourcecode'
If the government is committed to hiring software developers to *MAKE* opensource software work by *ENHANCING* it and *EXTENDING* it's functionality, then... HORRAY! We all Win.
...Is there such a thing as a FREE SOFTWARE LEECH?
The jetsons promised a really cushy future where we all sit around in chairs that move us where we need to go (like a segway with a seat -- or a wheelchair?)
...and we have little to do most of the day because robots do it all for you.
... and then of course, the cost of doing any business in US will be so burdened by litigation that no companies will do business in the US and there will be no jobs left except for government jobs, food service jobs, and patent attorneys.
Government jobs are starting to sound pretty good.
Scorp1us' proposed US Economic Plan:
1) Patent Everything and sue everyone 2) ? 3) Economic Prosperity in the US
Send the giant moon rocks down the space elevator -
http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/elevat or.asp "Pearson thought about building a tower on the Moon. He determined that the center of gravity needed to be at the L1 or L2 Lagrangian points, which are special stable points that exist about any two orbiting bodies where the gravitational forces are balanced. The cable would have to be 291,901 kilometers long for the L1 point and 525,724 kilometers long for the L2 point. Compared to the 351,000 kilometers from the Earth to the Moon, that's a long cable, and the material would have to be gathered and manufactured on the Moon."
Some could argue that Linus himself resists change.
Didn't he say something to the effect of being 'Human CVS'?
Seriously, though - aside from us Linux propeller heads, some unix users aren't comfortable with the blinding rate of change in the linux world because they have to retrain or be retrained to remain productive.
Herein lies the problem with automount on linux...
everyone says: I use amd and it works for me...
when you happen to find that amd doesn't work for you, you discover the ugly truth that amd is dead and buried and you'll get no developer support.
So, then you look at autofs and find out that it's still alive, but it's constantly in beta and still has a lot of issues.
Automounters have a historical propensity to suck.
Both amd and autofs are a steaming pile compared to Sun's automount (probably because fortune 500 companies have nagged at Sun so much about glaring automounter bugs that they've now fixed most of them and are left with a relatively reasonable implementation).
If you've ever worked somewhere that actually takes advantage of the automounter and pushes it to it's limits as opposed to using it for once in a while file access from the commandline, you're already painfully aware how feeble the linux automounter options are and how woefully inadequate their documentation is.
How self-referential! Referring to http://googlefight.com in an article about Google on slashdot, replying to a post that is using google to determine to accuracy of 'Ask Slashdot'... and providing links that rates two google searches about slashdot against each other.
Regardless of wheteher people see my point as 'flamebait', it's happening -- and the Internet Boom and failed startups in the bay area worked dilligently to develop technologies that enable companies to not need workers to be close to a company headquarters.
Facts take their toll, no matter how hard we try to ignore them.
Just go to the job sites of the companies in the Nasdaq 100 and look at how many job posting are not in the US.
3 years ago, companies were starved for specific talent and they filled those gaps with H1B visa workers that they brought to the US.
Today, there is no US talent shortage, and H1B is not nearly the issue it used to be... US Companies are hiring skilled foreign nationals in their country of origin as opposed to bringing them to the US.
It works out to be good for the companies, but bad for US workers (many of whom are still caught up in H1B visa issues and haven't realized that our beloved corporations are shipping the "US jobs" overseas at a rate that makes the H1B visa hires look miniscule.)
As a shareholder for some large tech companies, I fully support the reduction of costs by moving jobs outside one of the most expensive places to do business in the world (the bay area).
I do have to wonder wonder what jobs will be left in the bay area for the next generation of workers, though
I believe this is a good thing and will have positive impact for all of Asia.
Taiwan has a lot of computer-savvy people, and one of the things that is holding back opensource and linux in Asia are the less-than seamless integration of CJK/Unicode character display, input methods, and font rendering for Unix/Linux when compared with Windows.
I know all about the efforts underway to systematically resolve those issues (and wish them well), but you still need to be a UNIX guru and in some cases a programmer, if you want to get a Linux system set up that can support all of the popular asian language input methods and have them be consistent across all apps in all environments.
One thing micros~1 has done exceptionally well is operating system internationalization and providing a common consistent method for display, and changing of IMEs.
If Taiwan can contribute efforts to making linux more multibyte-friendly, it makes linux more accessible and practical to the fastest growing segment of computer users in the world -- who likely can run any software they want for only the cost of a CD from the local software street vendor.
When people who can pirate all the software they want actually *CHOOSE* to run linux, that will be a major turning point for opensource.
I remember the old joke: "you can only sell one copy of any software in Asia" - Imagine if the creative talents of all those crackers/hackers/pirates were focused on creating free software...
I spent a lot of cycles building and debugging mozilla in the past, and haven't built it recently. Can anyone help answe a few assorted questions that will impact how quickly I start devoting time to mozilla again?
- Does Mozilla 'do the right thing' with a read-only NFS mounted directoy yet? In the past, user prefs were stored under all various subdirs of the product, and it was unusable for a network-based install to production read-only/usr/local NFS server
- How does one install Netscape plugins into mozilla on unix and windows? I can do the mime-type mapping on unix (which really should have been the only way to do this all along)... but can I use NS4 plugins with mozilla on unix and windows? -- the windows install didn't seem to 'understand' how to install plugins for itself when I browse pages that needed them, so I *ASSUME* it doesn't work. Do all NS4 plugins work for Netscape 6.X?
- why aren't mozilla binaries for all various platforms statically linked to gtk and glib? -- In my opinion, a browser shouldn't have any OS dependencies for other software that isn't part of the default OS. For any OS other than linux, gtk and glib shared libs are not in a basic OS install.
- Will there *EVER* be a release of mozilla or netscape 6.X that runs on glibc-2.0 systems? I have one that is still very functional, with the exception of me having to use netscape 4.74 and live with it's bugs forever. I would even accept a mozilla binary for libc5 that was statically linked...
- can mozilla come with an 'install' script?? The last seen-by-me method of building and installing mozilla is a MESS! so many files, so many scripts, so unclear what a 'default mozilla' install really means and where it should go.
Umm.. Are you suggesting that every company go around the web browser, and return to client/server computing by requiring a local app that connects to a central server via PROPRIETARY protocols to exchange data?
Actually gotta hand it to Macromedia, they've been quite successful getting their 'flash client' installed all over the place. But like everyone else who frequents slashdot, I find flash a waste of bandwidth and website developers' time.
If your site doesn't work in a text browser, I'm not going to see it. If you only use flash, and don't develop a standard web site as well, you might be in trouble.
Wow! what an idea! I thought that the whole internet buzz was all about burying client/server architecture...
PS2 weakness is inability to make bootable disc
on
Sony vs Modchips
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· Score: 2
The way I see it, Sony may have kept some software pirates at bay by making it very difficult to boot a copied game, but they've also severely hurt the CONSOLE'S POTENTIAL by making it impossible for users to create their own software titles for PS2 (i.e. a linux bootable disc with a web browser or any other unix app).
Whatever game console eventually wins the majority of the market needs to have the ability for users to create their own bootable titles and burn them on ordinary CDR drives.
Imagine how much more powerful a device the PS2 could be if you could burn a photo-cd-like disc with an image viewer that runs on PS2? Imagine making a browser-on-a-disk for ps2. Imagine AOL for PS2 (note: AOL could still do that because they could pay sony whatever it costs to burn special PS2 cd/dvds.
My point is that there are a lot of killer apps that could be ported to ps2 easily and put on a CD with a bootable OS and some files that would be *fantastic* and really spur development on PS2 and PS2 *AS* *A* *HARDWARE* *PLATFORM*
We could have networked games for the PS2 already, we could have XMMS mp3/ogg players, we could have mame for ps2, we could have GNOME and KDE desktops on our TVs....
Frustrating....
I hope that some console makers start to realize that we need a console that is hacker-friendly to be used as a developer and hobbyist platform.
In a global computing community where packets travel around the world crossing countries based on fastest route, not politics or tarrifs, any antivirus software that aligns itself with a particular government's intelligence agency is *not* going to be the dominant antivirus software package.
Bye Bye McAfee and Symantec. You're coming off my computers. Not that I'm paranoid, but why would I go the trouble of having PGP/GPG keys and signing email and then let the FBI install a keystroke logger. Would I voluntary install keystroke loggers for *ANYONE* on my production UNIX boxes (and still keep my job)?!? HECK NO!
Any bets on how long before these antivirus software companies start making alliances with other companies to install spyware and track users and display advertising while trying to stay alive?? I can see it now - NAV coming bundled with Magic Lantern *and* Gator (... to help you out, of course) and once installed there won't be any uninstall option until ad-aware gets updated. Great tool, that ad-aware - if you have a few brain cells and need to run windows anyway, it's a must - http://www.lavasoftusa.com
Windows is a petri dish, not an OS. As such, antivirus software is absolutely Critical. Why would I lock down my unix boxes, scan my servers, and then allow FBI keystroke loggers on windows boxes??
If only everyone I work with didn't use email as a vector for transmission of Microsoft office docs and other proprietary file formats, I wouldn't be in the predicamant I am now of needing to use windows for email instead of Mutt (No, Staroffice doesn't do it - ever try opening ppt95, visio, or an Office binder?:( )
Of course Microsoft is just trying to extend their reach into other areas and get more kids hooked on their 'crack'.
Everyone knows that poor schools have no money for software purchases.
Everyone knows that Apple used to rule the education market.
Everyone knows that Linux deployment in schools and 3rd world countries is the only alternative to flat out software piracy.
So, Microsoft gives away current versions of software that costs them nothing. They display Apple. The keep Linux at a distance. They get the kids hooked into an OS that provides no development environment, is not as manageable, is harder to administer, is a petri dish for viruses, and requires that the schools eventually bow down to Micros~1, and sign up for SOFTWARE ASSURANCE support.
That's the real agenda -- Microsoft is semi-secretly moving towards a subscription software model.
No more upgrades, just by a year's support contract. Heck, they can give away the software for FREE! Just pay them support every year, and you'll get the newest software. If you don't join Software Assurance, they're not going to fix your bugs in old versions, so you'd better upgrade! If Microsoft doesn't make enough money, they can just threaten a site audit for license compliance, and that's enough to scare organizations into lock-step with Microsoft's subscription software model.
Giving Windows software to a poor school is going to end up costing the US taxpayers money.
I support windowsNT/2000/xp (32&64-bit), linux, hpux, solaris, tru64, AIX.
I personally prefer unix, but realize that lots of people at work just care about MS project, MS Office, MSIE, their bookmarks, their mp3's, their email. MSIE on Windows beats netscape on any platform with Konqueror being a distant second favorite.
I take issue with your 'any OS is only as good as the person administering it'. Compare the remote management/multiuser functionality ONLY of solaris versus windows and tell me with a straight face that Site-wide administration of Windows isn't either crippled or medieval given out of the box or freely available tools.
My point in comparing ONE SR UNIX SA to *THREE* JR Unix SA is that the previous post said it was harder to hire unix SA's -- It's not hard, you just have to pay them more.
A SR unix SA can take a buggy product, code some scripts and wrappers to make it do lots of great things. A whole team of JR NT SA's would be stuck reinstalling and waiting for patches. The whole thing is about what solution is best for what case. If the only thing going for a windows solution is that someone with less experience can set it up quickly, you're missing lots of important variables like 'abiity to customize', 'dependence on vendor', 'SA time required to manage and maintain', 'security', 'susceptibility to viruses and compromise', scalability, (in)ability to manage remotely.
I appreciate that windows is easier for users to learn. My mom and dad use windows. I run it on my laptop. But... it's got a long way to go to come close to UNIX's flexibility/multiuseredness/managability/uptime/sc alability
BTW: Anyone else notice that Windows XP has crippled the terminal services so that you can't have multiple connections to an XP box? Talk about a step in the wrong direction!
To be objective, the difference is experience. An NT admin might be a 'reboot monkey'. An NT admin might be someone who clicks OK after putting the CD in the drive. An NT admin might be someone who upgrades users applications one machine at a time.
I realize there are NT admins who are developers, write code, manage hundreds of systems via sms, etc. But, that's not your average NT admin.
Now a unix admin... anything more than a junior unix admin almost by definition requires scripting or programming experience.
You get what you pay for. I'll take one Senior unix sysadmin over 3 junior NT admins any day of the week. Do the math.
So, what happens when like 40% of these boxes get put down on to thick carpet and left turned on for days on end? Lemme guess... add-on fans? recall? No. I'll bet that they'll offer competetive trade-ins on Microsoft XboX XP release2.
(reminds me of that movie with Chevy Chase where they are selling super-duper spy planes that can do everything except when they get wet, they go haywire... someone shouts out, "have you ever heard of RAIN?!?"
Re: point and click slumlords - gui for autoconf?
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
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· Score: 2
I remember a tagline from around 5 years ago announcing that the internet had been hijacked by the 'point and click slumlords'
nonetheless, I'll acknowledge that we want to invite everyone into linux, but it's never going to be windows - and shouldn't
Any GUI install needs to be an *OPTION*, not the default and only install method.
I do most of my work in an xterm, and don't want GUI's launching all over. I also want more control.
Perhaps the best solution is to have some sort of GUI for autoconf that does the same thing you can do from cmdline, but is also able to read rpm.spec files and take a list of files, and run through and install them in order based on some config file.
An example would be: a gui that uses wget, lynx or something similar to download the latest kde packages, uses autoconf to check some default vaules, comes back with some config boxes -- it could look 'windows-install-ish', and then these values are passed to all of the configure scripts as tarball after tarball is built and installed and results are logged.
But... I don't want some heavy setup.exe that uses java or something that takes over my whole screen. Just something simple, and it has to work with *SOURCE* distributions.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I was over this cliche. Guess not...
....
In A.D. 2001
Recession was beginning
US: What Happen?
Dubya: Somebody set up us the 9/11
NASDAQ: We get sell signal
dot.coms: Venture capital turn off
US Business: It's you!!
Cheap foreign labor: How are you gentlemen!!
Cheap foreign labor: All your jobs are belong to us
Cheap foreign labor: You have no chance to survive in the US, move your jobs in time!
Cheap foreign labor: HA HA HA HA
US Business: Outsource every 'business function'
US Execs: You know whose job you're saving
Outsourcing companies: Move 'jobs'
US Business: For great quarterly report
Aztec was cool - I always liked kicking around the piles looking for anything but snakes...
but let's be honest....
Swashbuckler - now there was a game! I can kill any spider with my mighty sword, and I can shuffle forward and poke my enemies with a quick jab that makes them disappear! Heh.
and Castle Wolfenstein: 9 keys for movement and 9 keys for shooting! Those darn SS...
Requires state government to consider using open source software when acquiring new software. Sets other requirements for acquiring software.
In many cases where highly specialized applications are required, the consideration of opensource alternatives will show that while linux has multiple nice desktops, multiple nice office suites, multiple nice browsers, multiple nice email clients... it still has a number of fronts to work on.
When you compare all enterprise commercial apps against the most mature and most turnkey opensource ones, you'll find a lot of projects with good intentions but little functionality compared to commercial offerings.
The free software world is all about code and component reuse and sharing, and the attitude of 'hope someone can find use for this thing that I wrote - if it doesn't meet your needs or doesn't work, let me know and I might choose to do something about it... better yet, can you help? Here's the sourcecode'
If the government is committed to hiring software developers to *MAKE* opensource software work by *ENHANCING* it and *EXTENDING* it's functionality, then... HORRAY! We all Win.
The jetsons promised a really cushy future where we all sit around in chairs that move us where we need to go (like a segway with a seat -- or a wheelchair?)
...and we have little to do most of the day because robots do it all for you.
...and a single salary supports a family of four!
Found one!
F -8 &oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=vaporware
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
Funny that it was associated with an amiga site that is now dead.
... and then of course, the cost of doing any business in US will be so burdened by litigation that no companies will do business in the US and there will be no jobs left except for government jobs, food service jobs, and patent attorneys.
Government jobs are starting to sound pretty good.
Scorp1us' proposed US Economic Plan:
1) Patent Everything and sue everyone
2) ?
3) Economic Prosperity in the US
Egads! I remember turning the crank on the ditto machine to make the magical blue copies in school.
We had our ditto machine in a not so well ventilated room, and you could almost get a contact high.
I had a hard time reading your link to the hazard.com site due to my impaired vision and persistant headaches.
Smelly Purple Faxes
Send the giant moon rocks down the space elevator -
t or .asp
http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/eleva
"Pearson thought about building a tower on the Moon. He determined that the center of gravity needed to be at the L1 or L2 Lagrangian points, which are special stable points that exist about any two orbiting bodies where the gravitational forces are balanced. The cable would have to be 291,901 kilometers long for the L1 point and 525,724 kilometers long for the L2 point. Compared to the 351,000 kilometers from the Earth to the Moon, that's a long cable, and the material would have to be gathered and manufactured on the Moon."
Some could argue that Linus himself resists change.
Didn't he say something to the effect of being 'Human CVS'?
Seriously, though - aside from us Linux propeller heads, some unix users aren't comfortable with the blinding rate of change in the linux world because they have to retrain or be retrained to remain productive.
Herein lies the problem with automount on linux...
everyone says: I use amd and it works for me...
when you happen to find that amd doesn't work for you, you discover the ugly truth that amd is dead and buried and you'll get no developer support.
So, then you look at autofs and find out that it's still alive, but it's constantly in beta and still has a lot of issues.
Automounters have a historical propensity to suck.
Both amd and autofs are a steaming pile compared to Sun's automount (probably because fortune 500 companies have nagged at Sun so much about glaring automounter bugs that they've now fixed most of them and are left with a relatively reasonable implementation).
If you've ever worked somewhere that actually takes advantage of the automounter and pushes it to it's limits as opposed to using it for once in a while file access from the commandline, you're already painfully aware how feeble the linux automounter options are and how woefully inadequate their documentation is.
Slashdot is right vs. Slashdot is wrong:
slashdot sucks vs. slashdot rules:
slashdot correct vs. slashdot incorrect:
Cmdrtaco vs. cowboyneal
News for nerds vs. Stuff that Matters
Regardless of wheteher people see my point as 'flamebait', it's happening -- and the Internet Boom and failed startups in the bay area worked dilligently to develop technologies that enable companies to not need workers to be close to a company headquarters.
Facts take their toll, no matter how hard we try to ignore them.
Just go to the job sites of the companies in the Nasdaq 100 and look at how many job posting are not in the US.
3 years ago, companies were starved for specific talent and they filled those gaps with H1B visa workers that they brought to the US.
Today, there is no US talent shortage, and H1B is not nearly the issue it used to be... US Companies are hiring skilled foreign nationals in their country of origin as opposed to bringing them to the US.
It works out to be good for the companies, but bad for US workers (many of whom are still caught up in H1B visa issues and haven't realized that our beloved corporations are shipping the "US jobs" overseas at a rate that makes the H1B visa hires look miniscule.)
As a shareholder for some large tech companies, I fully support the reduction of costs by moving jobs outside one of the most expensive places to do business in the world (the bay area).
I do have to wonder wonder what jobs will be left in the bay area for the next generation of workers, though
I believe this is a good thing and will have positive impact for all of Asia.
Taiwan has a lot of computer-savvy people, and one of the things that is holding back opensource and linux in Asia are the less-than seamless integration of CJK/Unicode character display, input methods, and font rendering for Unix/Linux when compared with Windows.
I know all about the efforts underway to systematically resolve those issues (and wish them well), but you still need to be a UNIX guru and in some cases a programmer, if you want to get a Linux system set up that can support all of the popular asian language input methods and have them be consistent across all apps in all environments.
One thing micros~1 has done exceptionally well is operating system internationalization and providing a common consistent method for display, and changing of IMEs.
If Taiwan can contribute efforts to making linux more multibyte-friendly, it makes linux more accessible and practical to the fastest growing segment of computer users in the world -- who likely can run any software they want for only the cost of a CD from the local software street vendor.
When people who can pirate all the software they want actually *CHOOSE* to run linux, that will be a major turning point for opensource.
I remember the old joke: "you can only sell one copy of any software in Asia" - Imagine if the creative talents of all those crackers/hackers/pirates were focused on creating free software...
> I'm still waiting for the:
> Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
> to be documented as being wrong. =)
there must be a whole slew of people who were fired for buying Microsoft... anyone want to speak out?
I spent a lot of cycles building and debugging mozilla in the past, and haven't built it recently. Can anyone help answe a few assorted questions that will impact how quickly I start devoting time to mozilla again?
/usr/local NFS server
- Does Mozilla 'do the right thing' with a read-only NFS mounted directoy yet? In the past, user prefs were stored under all various subdirs of the product, and it was unusable for a network-based install to production read-only
- How does one install Netscape plugins into mozilla on unix and windows? I can do the mime-type mapping on unix (which really should have been the only way to do this all along)... but can I use NS4 plugins with mozilla on unix and windows? -- the windows install didn't seem to 'understand' how to install plugins for itself when I browse pages that needed them, so I *ASSUME* it doesn't work. Do all NS4 plugins work for Netscape 6.X?
- why aren't mozilla binaries for all various platforms statically linked to gtk and glib? -- In my opinion, a browser shouldn't have any OS dependencies for other software that isn't part of the default OS. For any OS other than linux, gtk and glib shared libs are not in a basic OS install.
- Will there *EVER* be a release of mozilla or netscape 6.X that runs on glibc-2.0 systems? I have one that is still very functional, with the exception of me having to use netscape 4.74 and live with it's bugs forever. I would even accept a mozilla binary for libc5 that was statically linked...
- can mozilla come with an 'install' script?? The last seen-by-me method of building and installing mozilla is a MESS! so many files, so many scripts, so unclear what a 'default mozilla' install really means and where it should go.
Umm.. Are you suggesting that every company go around the web browser, and return to client/server computing by requiring a local app that connects to a central server via PROPRIETARY protocols to exchange data?
Actually gotta hand it to Macromedia, they've been quite successful getting their 'flash client' installed all over the place. But like everyone else who frequents slashdot, I find flash a waste of bandwidth and website developers' time.
If your site doesn't work in a text browser, I'm not going to see it. If you only use flash, and don't develop a standard web site as well, you might be in trouble.
Wow! what an idea! I thought that the whole internet buzz was all about burying client/server architecture...
The way I see it, Sony may have kept some software pirates at bay by making it very difficult to boot a copied game, but they've also severely hurt the CONSOLE'S POTENTIAL by making it impossible for users to create their own software titles for PS2 (i.e. a linux bootable disc with a web browser or any other unix app).
Whatever game console eventually wins the majority of the market needs to have the ability for users to create their own bootable titles and burn them on ordinary CDR drives.
Imagine how much more powerful a device the PS2 could be if you could burn a photo-cd-like disc with an image viewer that runs on PS2? Imagine making a browser-on-a-disk for ps2. Imagine AOL for PS2 (note: AOL could still do that because they could pay sony whatever it costs to burn special PS2 cd/dvds.
My point is that there are a lot of killer apps that could be ported to ps2 easily and put on a CD with a bootable OS and some files that would be *fantastic* and really spur development on PS2 and PS2 *AS* *A* *HARDWARE* *PLATFORM*
We could have networked games for the PS2 already, we could have XMMS mp3/ogg players, we could have mame for ps2, we could have GNOME and KDE desktops on our TVs....
Frustrating....
I hope that some console makers start to realize that we need a console that is hacker-friendly to be used as a developer and hobbyist platform.
In a global computing community where packets travel around the world crossing countries based on fastest route, not politics or tarrifs, any antivirus software that aligns itself with a particular government's intelligence agency is *not* going to be the dominant antivirus software package.
:( )
Bye Bye McAfee and Symantec. You're coming off my computers. Not that I'm paranoid, but why would I go the trouble of having PGP/GPG keys and signing email and then let the FBI install a keystroke logger. Would I voluntary install keystroke loggers for *ANYONE* on my production UNIX boxes (and still keep my job)?!? HECK NO!
Any bets on how long before these antivirus software companies start making alliances with other companies to install spyware and track users and display advertising while trying to stay alive?? I can see it now - NAV coming bundled with Magic Lantern *and* Gator (... to help you out, of course) and once installed there won't be any uninstall option until ad-aware gets updated. Great tool, that ad-aware - if you have a few brain cells and need to run windows anyway, it's a must - http://www.lavasoftusa.com
Windows is a petri dish, not an OS. As such, antivirus software is absolutely Critical. Why would I lock down my unix boxes, scan my servers, and then allow FBI keystroke loggers on windows boxes??
If only everyone I work with didn't use email as a vector for transmission of Microsoft office docs and other proprietary file formats, I wouldn't be in the predicamant I am now of needing to use windows for email instead of Mutt (No, Staroffice doesn't do it - ever try opening ppt95, visio, or an Office binder?
Of course Microsoft is just trying to extend their reach into other areas and get more kids hooked on their 'crack'.
Everyone knows that poor schools have no money for software purchases.
Everyone knows that Apple used to rule the education market.
Everyone knows that Linux deployment in schools and 3rd world countries is the only alternative to flat out software piracy.
So, Microsoft gives away current versions of software that costs them nothing. They display Apple. The keep Linux at a distance. They get the kids hooked into an OS that provides no development environment, is not as manageable, is harder to administer, is a petri dish for viruses, and requires that the schools eventually bow down to Micros~1, and sign up for SOFTWARE ASSURANCE support.
That's the real agenda -- Microsoft is semi-secretly moving towards a subscription software model.
No more upgrades, just by a year's support contract. Heck, they can give away the software for FREE! Just pay them support every year, and you'll get the newest software. If you don't join Software Assurance, they're not going to fix your bugs in old versions, so you'd better upgrade! If Microsoft doesn't make enough money, they can just threaten a site audit for license compliance, and that's enough to scare organizations into lock-step with Microsoft's subscription software model.
Giving Windows software to a poor school is going to end up costing the US taxpayers money.
Catch-22 - Microsoft wins either way.
What is VA other than Sourceforge and Slashdot?
SFRG?
SDOT?
SLSH?
I support windowsNT/2000/xp (32&64-bit), linux, hpux, solaris, tru64, AIX.
c alability
I personally prefer unix, but realize that lots of people at work just care about MS project, MS Office, MSIE, their bookmarks, their mp3's, their email. MSIE on Windows beats netscape on any platform with Konqueror being a distant second favorite.
I take issue with your 'any OS is only as good as the person administering it'. Compare the remote management/multiuser functionality ONLY of solaris versus windows and tell me with a straight face that Site-wide administration of Windows isn't either crippled or medieval given out of the box or freely available tools.
My point in comparing ONE SR UNIX SA to *THREE* JR Unix SA is that the previous post said it was harder to hire unix SA's -- It's not hard, you just have to pay them more.
A SR unix SA can take a buggy product, code some scripts and wrappers to make it do lots of great things. A whole team of JR NT SA's would be stuck reinstalling and waiting for patches. The whole thing is about what solution is best for what case. If the only thing going for a windows solution is that someone with less experience can set it up quickly, you're missing lots of important variables like 'abiity to customize', 'dependence on vendor', 'SA time required to manage and maintain', 'security', 'susceptibility to viruses and compromise', scalability, (in)ability to manage remotely.
I appreciate that windows is easier for users to learn. My mom and dad use windows. I run it on my laptop. But... it's got a long way to go to come close to UNIX's flexibility/multiuseredness/managability/uptime/s
BTW: Anyone else notice that Windows XP has crippled the terminal services so that you can't have multiple connections to an XP box? Talk about a step in the wrong direction!
'cause most of them suck.
To be objective, the difference is experience. An NT admin might be a 'reboot monkey'. An NT admin might be someone who clicks OK after putting the CD in the drive. An NT admin might be someone who upgrades users applications one machine at a time.
I realize there are NT admins who are developers, write code, manage hundreds of systems via sms, etc. But, that's not your average NT admin.
Now a unix admin... anything more than a junior unix admin almost by definition requires scripting or programming experience.
You get what you pay for. I'll take one Senior unix sysadmin over 3 junior NT admins any day of the week. Do the math.
So, what happens when like 40% of these boxes get put down on to thick carpet and left turned on for days on end? Lemme guess... add-on fans? recall? No. I'll bet that they'll offer competetive trade-ins on Microsoft XboX XP release2.
(reminds me of that movie with Chevy Chase where they are selling super-duper spy planes that can do everything except when they get wet, they go haywire... someone shouts out, "have you ever heard of RAIN?!?"
I remember a tagline from around 5 years ago announcing that the internet had been hijacked by the 'point and click slumlords'
.spec files and take a list of files, and run through and install them in order based on some config file.
nonetheless, I'll acknowledge that we want to invite everyone into linux, but it's never going to be windows - and shouldn't
Any GUI install needs to be an *OPTION*, not the default and only install method.
I do most of my work in an xterm, and don't want GUI's launching all over. I also want more control.
Perhaps the best solution is to have some sort of GUI for autoconf that does the same thing you can do from cmdline, but is also able to read rpm
An example would be: a gui that uses wget, lynx or something similar to download the latest kde packages, uses autoconf to check some default vaules, comes back with some config boxes -- it could look 'windows-install-ish', and then these values are passed to all of the configure scripts as tarball after tarball is built and installed and results are logged.
But... I don't want some heavy setup.exe that uses java or something that takes over my whole screen. Just something simple, and it has to work with *SOURCE* distributions.