If not, does the future hold a scenario in which the Internet is split into several separate networks, only to be connected at the whims of large corporations?
But that's exactly what the Internet is (well, sometime's they're connected at the whim of educational institutions, but the whole point of the internet is that it's a network of networks).
Does anyone know the usage of the word "punter" in the article, though? I've heard the root word "punt" in several different ways in the last year or so when I had only heard it in the American Football context.
In English slang, "to take a punt" means "to take a bet (or chance)". So a "punter" is the person taking the chance. In the context of talking about buying stuff, it would identify the customer (since they're the one taking the chance).
That's the original meaning, anyway. It's often used just to indicate "the average Joe".
It's pretty common slang in the (native) English speaking world outside of the US, particularly amongst older people.
As others have said, perhaps they're working on a minimum OS that loads in a few seconds and just provides a browser to access the Googleverse.
Ah, so you think they'll reinvent Compuserve ?
The more things change....
;)
On the upside, it would at least have the advantage of siphoning all the people who shouldn't be on the internet off it.
Would be nice to have something like the little data-pads that were on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were almost a perfect size. Maybe one day before I die I'll see a company that actually does it right and is a success with it.
Personally I'd consider them horribly small for viewing anything that required more than a few minutes attention. Give me a decent-sized monitor any day.
What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS? An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX. And on x86 machines it will be able to run Windows software. And then they make the whole thing all open source.
Even ignoring the whole lack-of-revenue-source-from-massive-expense and massive-barriers-to-entry things, such an undertaking would be a/minimum/ five year project. I don't think Google has had the time.
Garbage. I spent a LOT more time setting up, cleaning up and generally stuffing around with their Windows installs.
Then you're not setting them up properly, to the same standard as the Linux machines.
For example, do you leave the Windows users with Administrator accounts by default ? Do you leave the Linux users with root accounts by default ? Do you enable the Windows firewall ?
They still managed to get hosed on a regular basis.
I set up an XP machine for my mum nearly two years ago. It hasn't been hosed yet - "despite" the lack of a full-time background virus or malware scanner and quite possibly one of the most computer-phobic people in the world using it every day.
That you may lack the knowledge necessary to do it on Windows, is not the fault of Windows.
I'd have to say it is the absurd requirements to run the OS alone; not the total lack of features. I mean seriously what are they thinking? People shouldn't need multiple GHz, gigabytes of ram, harddrives the size of buses, and videocards with 128MB of ram just to make the OS pretty. Scaling be damned, its ridiculous.
Longhorn^WVista betas run fine *now* on hardware several years old. Don't tell me you're assuming the hardware requirements based on that idiotic multi-Ghz dual core machine, 2GB RAM, etc comment made ages ago ?
T managers are looking at it like this, $200+ for a new CPU, $120 for a Mobo, $500 for the video card, $200 for the 2GB of ram, and $200 for harddrives just to run an OS that will be outdated compared to its alternatives?
[Most] IT Managers don't upgrade existing PCs, they buy new ones - it's usually cheaper. They certainly don't consider things the way are you are suggesting.
Why for example do they need to make a new IE and not just bundle a modified firefox with vista?
Because Firefox does not provide the same capabilities and functionality as IE, and the effort involved in making it do so would be better spent making IE better (not least because it means other products/projects will have to expend time and resources duplicating it).
To be honest, I couldn't think of any good reasons when I wrote my response earlier, but obviously they're still planning on using it... they must have their reasons...
It's just possible it might having something to do with the way IE is an extensively re-used shared component and Firefox is just a standalone application.
Firefox is not a drop-in replacement for IE, for perfectly valid technical reasons. For exactly the same reasons, Firefox is not a drop-in replacement for OS X's WebCore, or KDE's khtml. Firefox does not have the functionality or featureset to replace IE without extensive work (which could just as easily be used making IE better).
IE IS NOT A STANDALONE APPLICATION, IT IS A SET OF SHARED COMPONENTS. Why, nearly a decade after implementation and several other platforms copying the design, do so many people still have difficult grasping this simple concept ?
The average Joe does not hate Microsoft like most Slashdotters seem to. But of those average users, how many aren't frustrated in some way by Microsoft or their products?
What's entertaining is that lots of people here think they'll be any/less/ frustrated by Linux.
What I fear is hardware that requires that in order to be executed, binaries be digitally singed. I fear that the encryption keys needed to sign code such that it may be executed will be licenced and expensive. I fear that MS may try and sidestep the challenge posed by free software by changing the platform so that Linux and other competitor code simply cannot run.
Sounds to me like you just fear the (slim) possibility of having to pay for software...
I set up Debian KDE (from a Knoppix install) desktops for them, cut back the KDE menus to just the apps they needed, wrote a few little scripts and OOo macros to help with MS Office compatibility, and left them to it.
Not one of the Debian installs has been hosed. I'm still getting the occasional "How do I do this?" call, but there's about 1/10th of the dramas I used to get with Windows.
Guess what ? If you spend as much time properly setting up, and restricting access to, a Windows machine,/it won't get hosed either/.
Not for servers its not. You never "auto-patch" any server, much less a production server.
Ah, you must be one of these people that gets paid by the hour. Manually visiting every machine to perform the same thing over and over again is nice way to rack up the hours without actually doing any work, isn't it ?
If you don't understand why, they you've never been involved with operations or supported a mission critical application.
If I found out one of my staff was manually performing such a trivially automatable action as applying software updates, I'd seriously question their capabilities. If I caught a contractor or consultant doing it, I'd terminate their contract immediately because of either incompetence or fraud.
"Mission critical applications" have - at least in remotely well-run shops - *identical* testing environments used for ensuring software updates, configuration changes and the like don't break things. The reason they're identical is so that if something doesn't break the test environment, it can be guaranteed it won't break the production environment. If some software patch passes QA in the test environment then its rollout into the production environment can be automated - and if you *aren't* doing this sort of thing, then you're not involved in a sufficiently large or "mission critical" environment (or you're a contractor rorting the system to rack up chargable hours).
When dealing with SAP, on ANY operating system, you NEVER EVER NEVER turn on autopatching of the OS.
Even when that "autopatch" is coming from an internal patching system, after being tested on an identical development environment and approved ?
Do you *enjoy* manually visiting each machine to patch it, or are you just getting paid by the hour ?
I agree with the parent, this admin is an idiot and its only a matter of time before he hoses up his Windows SAP install as well.
Only if he means "automatic updates from windowsupdate.com", which is highly unlikely.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
Anyone here actually like Windows? I'm not trolling, just want to know. If you do, what do you like about it?
It's easy, and it works consistently. I switched from OS/2 to NT4 at the beginning of 1996 and haven't looked back. I frequently and regularly use other platforms (I'm a Solaris/*BSD/Linux/Windows sysadmin by trade, and I own several Macs), but Windows is my platform of choice for actually getting work done.
I quite like OS X as well, except that you need to buy a monster machine to run it with anything approaching decent performance, thus requiring very expensive hardware - and even then, it's still chunky compared to Windows on hardware with only about half the performance.
I've struggled several times to try and start using Linux as a desktop, but each time I give up because I fail to discern any payoff for the massive amount of effort required to make it work. When I was a kid I used to enjoy playing around with computers just for the sake of it. Now I just want them to work. Desktop Linux is good for the former, bad for the latter.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
And it's not just because I'm an MS fanboy either. It's a good operating system.
Let me add something else many people probably don't bump into - non-trivial multi-monitor use.
My work machine has 4 screens attached, with 3 video cards (two heads off a dual-DVI nvidia card, two more off two no-name video cards). Grand total time to set them up in a usable configuration under Windows: 10 minutes (and that includes downloading drivers). After several *hours* of stuffing around, trial-and-erroring in xorg.conf under Linux, I had a setup that was usable, but missing out on many of the niceties found in Windows (like graphical tools for rearranging the screen positioning, resolution, etc). FC4's display configuration tool was worthless - it couldn't even figure out multiple screens were there, let alone configure them - and had a nasty tendency to overwrite my xorg.conf, blowing away the configuration I had worked hours to figure out.
(Heck, even just getting it up an running with a basic dual-head setup from a single nvidia card required manual installation of the nvidia driver and editing of xorg.conf - as does any customising of the monitor configuration).
Then a couple of weeks ago I installed some xorg updates. Now X won't even start (hangs the machine completely) with more than the nvidia driver loaded, so two of the four screens are useless under Linux. I tried troubleshooting for a few hours, but when it's so much trouble, and Linux offers zero advantages as a desktop platform, I simply can't be arsed *making* it work when Windows works perfectly out of the box.
This is about the 8th or 9th time (since ~1996) I've tried to get going with Linux on the desktop, and it's a familiar story. You can sorta-maybe get a usable setup - maybe even feature-parity with Windows, Mac or OS/2 - if what you want is basic and "just like everyone else", but step off the beaten track even a little bit and you're in for a world of hurt digging into config files, poor documentation and mailing-lists for guidance.
I admin several dozen Linux servers, and have been a Solaris/*BSD/Linux/Windows/Mac sysadmin for many years. Linux does a reasonable job on the server-side, but as a desktop ? No bloody way.
The point of the GPL is to protect the users (NOT the software itself!), by giving them the freedom to modify the software they use as they see fit. A remote user is still a user!
What do users care about source code ?
The point of the GPL is (ostensibly) to help *developers*. Users couldn't give a damn about source code.
The/real/ point of the GPL is to prevent people from being able to sell software. It's interesting to see RMS has expanded his philosophy to (effectively) say that it should be impossible to have any business advantage from software - I thought he was saner that that (although it is a logical expansion of his previous ideas).
Apple has made their hardware such a black box that no one really notices that the hardware is generally several steps above the PC realm in terms of performance (though you wouldn't always know it).
You seem to have the bass-ackwards. Apple is typically several steps *below* the PC realm in terms of hardware specifications and performance (carefully scripted photoshop benchmarks aside and occasional brief periods of time after the introduction of brand new hardware excepted) - and that's ignoring the situations where comparable hardware on the Mac simply doesn't exist.
I work in a Windows shop but we don't do automatic patching. We don't patch until we've done extensive testing on our own to make sure it works in our environment first. SUS/WUSS/whatever is great in the sense that it allows you to control how patches to your Windows workstations are distributed. You can change the workstations' auto-update behavior so they only update from your SUS servers, etc. But the automatic update thing, from what I've heard, is rarely used in a production environment. In fact, Microsoft gives you a considerable amount of control over its behavior, probably because in recognition of the dangers of auto updating in a production environment.
What they mean by "automatic patching" is doing all the testing of the patch first, then approving it in WSUS and having servers automatically install (ie: so you don't have to do it manually from each machine).
They're *not* talking about setting servers to automatically patch willy-nilly off windowsupdate.com.
To the best of my knowledge, a Windows Blue Screen and a kernel panic differ because the NT kernel will not halt when something violates the kernel space. The last Blue Screen I have seen was on an XP SP2 unit and there's the option to continue.
You are mistaken. A BSOD *is* a "kernel panic". It's non-recoverable, and you have to hard-reset the machine to recover.
You may be getting confused with the blue screens that occasionally pop up in Windows 9x derivatives. Many of these can be recovered from (at least temporarily). On Windows NT, BSOD == hard reboot.
I have NEVER heard the term "Random Reboot" outside of lusers describing Windows behaviour. Unix and its derivatives have Console messages that would eliminate anything "random" happening and, unless you are doing a "shutdown -now", I'm unaware of any way to make a Unix or derivative do anything like it unless there's a hardware issue.
I've seen both X and dodgy drivers take out unix systems with instant resets or hard lockups that don't even give the kernel a chance to print any errors. They're certainly not common, but they do happen.
Reading between the lines, I reckon this guy came in, didn't like the Linux install, and wanted an excuse to move back to his beloved Microsoft.
"Having previously run SAP on AIX - IBM's version of Unix - Horton was comfortable with deploying such a mission-critical application on Linux."
Yep, he sure sounds like someone who would go running back to "beloved Microsoft".
And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!
No, it's efficiency and good systems management.
Of course, what they mean here by "automatic updates" are updates distributed from an internal updates service (WSUS) after being approved, not "automatic updates" from windowsupdate.com.
My other friend (yes, I have two!) put it best I think, when he said "I hope the guy got a major payout from Microsoft, because such a public display of incompetence makes him unemployable.".
The numbers say he's saved his company money and made their systems more reliable. That usually makes you *more* employable, not less - at least with the people who actually do the hiring that don't care about Operating System holy wars, at any rate.
Anyone who says that if they made 3.5 million, they would live like they made 50k or 100k is either full of crap [...]
While I can agree with this, anyone pulling in US$3.5m for even one year, who hasn't made appropriate arrangements by the end of that year to guarantee a comfortable standard of living for the rest of their life, is either grossly irresponsible or simply stupid. Pulling in that sort of money for any length of time, they should have investments that will nigh-on guarantee a top-tax-bracket income forever.
While it certainly sounds like the bloke got shafted, it's hard to find a great deal of sympathy for someone who/should/ have more than enough wealth in reserve to live luxuriously for the rest of their life.
So yes, it can bankrupt someone even if their lifestyle is not so extreme.
Bollocks. There's no justifiable reason whatsoever for being bankrupt after earning more money in a year (for multiple years) than most people will make their entire working lives. If we were talking about few hundred grand a year, you'd have a good point - but multiple millions/year ? No way.
You see the same thing all the time with lottery winners - they win multi-tens-of-millions but are bankrupt and often homeless only a few years later. The mind boggles at the kind of bahaviour that can produce this result.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's exactly what the Internet is (well, sometime's they're connected at the whim of educational institutions, but the whole point of the internet is that it's a network of networks).
In English slang, "to take a punt" means "to take a bet (or chance)". So a "punter" is the person taking the chance. In the context of talking about buying stuff, it would identify the customer (since they're the one taking the chance).
That's the original meaning, anyway. It's often used just to indicate "the average Joe".
It's pretty common slang in the (native) English speaking world outside of the US, particularly amongst older people.
Ah, so you think they'll reinvent Compuserve ?
The more things change....
;)
On the upside, it would at least have the advantage of siphoning all the people who shouldn't be on the internet off it.
Would be nice to have something like the little data-pads that were on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were almost a perfect size. Maybe one day before I die I'll see a company that actually does it right and is a success with it.
Personally I'd consider them horribly small for viewing anything that required more than a few minutes attention. Give me a decent-sized monitor any day.
Even ignoring the whole lack-of-revenue-source-from-massive-expense and massive-barriers-to-entry things, such an undertaking would be a /minimum/ five year project. I don't think Google has had the time.
The two biggies are greater control over what can and can't be executed with root privileges and an audit trail.
Uh, no, they released a JVM that spanked everyone else's in performance. It sure as hell wasn't "crippled".
Then you're not setting them up properly, to the same standard as the Linux machines.
For example, do you leave the Windows users with Administrator accounts by default ? Do you leave the Linux users with root accounts by default ? Do you enable the Windows firewall ?
They still managed to get hosed on a regular basis.
I set up an XP machine for my mum nearly two years ago. It hasn't been hosed yet - "despite" the lack of a full-time background virus or malware scanner and quite possibly one of the most computer-phobic people in the world using it every day.
That you may lack the knowledge necessary to do it on Windows, is not the fault of Windows.
Longhorn^WVista betas run fine *now* on hardware several years old. Don't tell me you're assuming the hardware requirements based on that idiotic multi-Ghz dual core machine, 2GB RAM, etc comment made ages ago ?
T managers are looking at it like this, $200+ for a new CPU, $120 for a Mobo, $500 for the video card, $200 for the 2GB of ram, and $200 for harddrives just to run an OS that will be outdated compared to its alternatives?
[Most] IT Managers don't upgrade existing PCs, they buy new ones - it's usually cheaper. They certainly don't consider things the way are you are suggesting.
Because Firefox does not provide the same capabilities and functionality as IE, and the effort involved in making it do so would be better spent making IE better (not least because it means other products/projects will have to expend time and resources duplicating it).
C2 security didn't evaluate networking or removable media.
It's just possible it might having something to do with the way IE is an extensively re-used shared component and Firefox is just a standalone application.
Firefox is not a drop-in replacement for IE, for perfectly valid technical reasons. For exactly the same reasons, Firefox is not a drop-in replacement for OS X's WebCore, or KDE's khtml. Firefox does not have the functionality or featureset to replace IE without extensive work (which could just as easily be used making IE better).
IE IS NOT A STANDALONE APPLICATION, IT IS A SET OF SHARED COMPONENTS. Why, nearly a decade after implementation and several other platforms copying the design, do so many people still have difficult grasping this simple concept ?
What's entertaining is that lots of people here think they'll be any /less/ frustrated by Linux.
Sounds to me like you just fear the (slim) possibility of having to pay for software...
Not one of the Debian installs has been hosed. I'm still getting the occasional "How do I do this?" call, but there's about 1/10th of the dramas I used to get with Windows.
Guess what ? If you spend as much time properly setting up, and restricting access to, a Windows machine, /it won't get hosed either/.
FFS, talk about apples and oranges...
How so ?
Really sounds like they don't have a clue what they were doing.
Well if the people /recommended by Red Hat/ don't know what they're doing, what hope has the customer got ?
Ah, you must be one of these people that gets paid by the hour. Manually visiting every machine to perform the same thing over and over again is nice way to rack up the hours without actually doing any work, isn't it ?
If you don't understand why, they you've never been involved with operations or supported a mission critical application.
If I found out one of my staff was manually performing such a trivially automatable action as applying software updates, I'd seriously question their capabilities. If I caught a contractor or consultant doing it, I'd terminate their contract immediately because of either incompetence or fraud.
"Mission critical applications" have - at least in remotely well-run shops - *identical* testing environments used for ensuring software updates, configuration changes and the like don't break things. The reason they're identical is so that if something doesn't break the test environment, it can be guaranteed it won't break the production environment. If some software patch passes QA in the test environment then its rollout into the production environment can be automated - and if you *aren't* doing this sort of thing, then you're not involved in a sufficiently large or "mission critical" environment (or you're a contractor rorting the system to rack up chargable hours).
Even when that "autopatch" is coming from an internal patching system, after being tested on an identical development environment and approved ?
Do you *enjoy* manually visiting each machine to patch it, or are you just getting paid by the hour ?
I agree with the parent, this admin is an idiot and its only a matter of time before he hoses up his Windows SAP install as well.
Only if he means "automatic updates from windowsupdate.com", which is highly unlikely.
It's easy, and it works consistently. I switched from OS/2 to NT4 at the beginning of 1996 and haven't looked back. I frequently and regularly use other platforms (I'm a Solaris/*BSD/Linux/Windows sysadmin by trade, and I own several Macs), but Windows is my platform of choice for actually getting work done.
I quite like OS X as well, except that you need to buy a monster machine to run it with anything approaching decent performance, thus requiring very expensive hardware - and even then, it's still chunky compared to Windows on hardware with only about half the performance.
I've struggled several times to try and start using Linux as a desktop, but each time I give up because I fail to discern any payoff for the massive amount of effort required to make it work. When I was a kid I used to enjoy playing around with computers just for the sake of it. Now I just want them to work. Desktop Linux is good for the former, bad for the latter.
Let me add something else many people probably don't bump into - non-trivial multi-monitor use.
My work machine has 4 screens attached, with 3 video cards (two heads off a dual-DVI nvidia card, two more off two no-name video cards). Grand total time to set them up in a usable configuration under Windows: 10 minutes (and that includes downloading drivers). After several *hours* of stuffing around, trial-and-erroring in xorg.conf under Linux, I had a setup that was usable, but missing out on many of the niceties found in Windows (like graphical tools for rearranging the screen positioning, resolution, etc). FC4's display configuration tool was worthless - it couldn't even figure out multiple screens were there, let alone configure them - and had a nasty tendency to overwrite my xorg.conf, blowing away the configuration I had worked hours to figure out.
(Heck, even just getting it up an running with a basic dual-head setup from a single nvidia card required manual installation of the nvidia driver and editing of xorg.conf - as does any customising of the monitor configuration).
Then a couple of weeks ago I installed some xorg updates. Now X won't even start (hangs the machine completely) with more than the nvidia driver loaded, so two of the four screens are useless under Linux. I tried troubleshooting for a few hours, but when it's so much trouble, and Linux offers zero advantages as a desktop platform, I simply can't be arsed *making* it work when Windows works perfectly out of the box.
This is about the 8th or 9th time (since ~1996) I've tried to get going with Linux on the desktop, and it's a familiar story. You can sorta-maybe get a usable setup - maybe even feature-parity with Windows, Mac or OS/2 - if what you want is basic and "just like everyone else", but step off the beaten track even a little bit and you're in for a world of hurt digging into config files, poor documentation and mailing-lists for guidance.
I admin several dozen Linux servers, and have been a Solaris/*BSD/Linux/Windows/Mac sysadmin for many years. Linux does a reasonable job on the server-side, but as a desktop ? No bloody way.
What do users care about source code ?
The point of the GPL is (ostensibly) to help *developers*. Users couldn't give a damn about source code.
The /real/ point of the GPL is to prevent people from being able to sell software. It's interesting to see RMS has expanded his philosophy to (effectively) say that it should be impossible to have any business advantage from software - I thought he was saner that that (although it is a logical expansion of his previous ideas).
You seem to have the bass-ackwards. Apple is typically several steps *below* the PC realm in terms of hardware specifications and performance (carefully scripted photoshop benchmarks aside and occasional brief periods of time after the introduction of brand new hardware excepted) - and that's ignoring the situations where comparable hardware on the Mac simply doesn't exist.
What they mean by "automatic patching" is doing all the testing of the patch first, then approving it in WSUS and having servers automatically install (ie: so you don't have to do it manually from each machine).
They're *not* talking about setting servers to automatically patch willy-nilly off windowsupdate.com.
You are mistaken. A BSOD *is* a "kernel panic". It's non-recoverable, and you have to hard-reset the machine to recover.
You may be getting confused with the blue screens that occasionally pop up in Windows 9x derivatives. Many of these can be recovered from (at least temporarily). On Windows NT, BSOD == hard reboot.
I have NEVER heard the term "Random Reboot" outside of lusers describing Windows behaviour. Unix and its derivatives have Console messages that would eliminate anything "random" happening and, unless you are doing a "shutdown -now", I'm unaware of any way to make a Unix or derivative do anything like it unless there's a hardware issue.
I've seen both X and dodgy drivers take out unix systems with instant resets or hard lockups that don't even give the kernel a chance to print any errors. They're certainly not common, but they do happen.
Yep, he sure sounds like someone who would go running back to "beloved Microsoft".
And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!
No, it's efficiency and good systems management.
Of course, what they mean here by "automatic updates" are updates distributed from an internal updates service (WSUS) after being approved, not "automatic updates" from windowsupdate.com.
My other friend (yes, I have two!) put it best I think, when he said "I hope the guy got a major payout from Microsoft, because such a public display of incompetence makes him unemployable.".
The numbers say he's saved his company money and made their systems more reliable. That usually makes you *more* employable, not less - at least with the people who actually do the hiring that don't care about Operating System holy wars, at any rate.
While I can agree with this, anyone pulling in US$3.5m for even one year, who hasn't made appropriate arrangements by the end of that year to guarantee a comfortable standard of living for the rest of their life, is either grossly irresponsible or simply stupid. Pulling in that sort of money for any length of time, they should have investments that will nigh-on guarantee a top-tax-bracket income forever.
While it certainly sounds like the bloke got shafted, it's hard to find a great deal of sympathy for someone who /should/ have more than enough wealth in reserve to live luxuriously for the rest of their life.
So yes, it can bankrupt someone even if their lifestyle is not so extreme.
Bollocks. There's no justifiable reason whatsoever for being bankrupt after earning more money in a year (for multiple years) than most people will make their entire working lives. If we were talking about few hundred grand a year, you'd have a good point - but multiple millions/year ? No way.
You see the same thing all the time with lottery winners - they win multi-tens-of-millions but are bankrupt and often homeless only a few years later. The mind boggles at the kind of bahaviour that can produce this result.