"No offense, but I think you must know some really stupid "windows admins" then"
Of course, these are not the most clued in people ever. I find the Linux installers to be easy to use (a little on the feature-rich side, which can be confusing), but I know folks who see "what kind of keyboard are you using" and their brains lock up. AND THESE ARE PROFESSIONALS.
We live in a world where we're damn lucky most machines come with an OS because most people who do admin for a living could not install one to save their lives. Most of the admins I know wouldn't break a sweat on a Linux, Windows or BSD install. But, then most of the admins in the world are nothing like most of the admins I know....
That said, I've been baffled by Windows installs when they get... odd. The thing most people forget is that 99% of the time, when you're installing Windows you're doing so on a system that was meant to run Windows. When you try to install Windows on a home-grown system with a blend of old and new parts, it can be a refreshing dream to install Linux on it;-)
Friendly graphical installers like the one that comes with Red Hat, or like the one that comes with Windows? There are only 5 varieties of Windows, but their installer still confuses most 1-2year Windows admins I've seen.
Of course, most Windows desktops come pre-installed, which if that were the case for Linux, installers wouldn't really be the issue.
I just want to make a few things clear to those who are questioning why Randall thinks he was delt a bum rap.
Randall did what an awfull lot of us did (I certainly did). He circumvented a client's security (while still working for them) in order to hand them proof that they needed to fix the problem.
Beyond the financial burdon that this has placed on him (which, I understand to be astronomical), this case as resulted in a great deal of lost work and the requirement that he tell any prospective employer about the incident.
Intel was quite happy with Randall's work, and he NEVER did ANYTHING to harm the company or that resulted in a loss of money.
So, do I think Intel should have swatted him? Yes. Do I think that they should have fired him (terminated his contract)? Maybe. I wouldn't, but I'm a nice guy.
But, final analysis, was it worth nearly ruining the man's life over? What, exactly are whe exacting punishment FOR? A stupid mistake?
No, this is clearly a case where there were an awful lot of people who wanted to "set an example", and while this is not as extreme a case as some others, Randall was wronged by the system.
This seems like a horribly contrived lead-in, but I can't resist. I've been planning the announcement of the Passive Privacy System proposed specification for a week or so, but we seem to have a window.
PPS is a propposed way of getting everyone to exchange public keys and passivlely encrypt email without a) burdoning the average user with the details of cryptography or b) providing enough impact on the average non-PPS user to matter.
It requires a great deal of work, both on the spec side and the coding side to come up with plugins for MUAs. But, in the end I think that the world will benefit from the resulting increase in passive key exchange and encryption.
I've used Oracle and Sybase extensively. Sybase does not suffer from most of Oracle's speed problems, but neither one supports such features. Nice to see DB2 does, but please don't make sweeping assumptions about my experience.
More to the point, if you are willing to do the work of maintaining consistancy yourself where it counts, you can often not only do so, but your code benefits from it hugely. Example: my application has a few statements which must be atomic (everybody does this, AFAIK, certainly PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS, Ora, etc).
Now, I have one piece of code that needs to execute a complex batch of statements with consistency and rollback. I can easily write a library that supports rolling back this one transaction. Oh, and look, this one transaction also does not need to complete lightning fast, and happens rarely. That means I can take advantage of best speed everywhere else, and use table-level locking on this one transaction just to be safe. These are not options in most large RDBMS', but certainly are in something like MySQL. In fact, you can swap out which back-end storage system (MySQL, Berkely DB and soon Progress) to use on a table-by-table basis for best reliability/performance characteristics.
Bottom line is this: Oracle has it's place, but once you start to need high-end performance, it falls over in the price/ performance arena. I can run the same database on MySQL engine for 1/10 - 1/100 the cost and get the same reliability.
What most people really need out of a database is to never lose data. If your DB loses data, then get another one fast. Otherwise, you should be looking at how much you'll pay when you add the 4th processor....
Sorry, you are correct and I misspoke (I remember even seeing this before submitting and cannot figure out why I didn't fix it).
What I meant was that you do not have thr right to distribute a modified version of the software. Patches get gray. For example, if I change the formatting (say, with indent), and distribute a patch (which would be the entire program), that's clearly a violation.
I think that the key point is that the patch must contain only reference to the original code which can be construed as fair use, but IANAL.
Hatch has been working his butt off to get the show back into the general conciousness, and now Larsen and Singer are going to capitalize on this, but haven't even talked to Hatch or plan to have old characters in the show.
Not really the kind of thanks Hatch may have been expecting....:-(
It was a long time in coming. They had to get the standalone floppy (no computer required), circa 1987 Ethernet bridge, Timex Sinclair and ENIAC ports working first.;-)
People, let's get two things straight about the GPL:
Claims that the GPL is weak because it has not been tested in court are silly. Mostsoftware licenses have not been tested in court. The GPL is a very simple license which uses copyright law as its basis. It does not attempt to add restrictions, only grant limited rights, so I really don't see how it would be "struck down" as so many seem to fear.
You are never bound by the GPL unless you wish to be. Under standard copyright law, you have no right to modify and/or distribute other people's copyrighted software. If you wish to do that, the author must give you license to do so. The GPL is such a license. Arguments that people are not bound by the GPL because they did not read/agree to it are moot. If you did not read or agree to it, you have no distribution rights.
All things considered, I think people are over-reacting to one man's take on why people should not be taking his market share away.
Of course, Stallman didn't realize this and goes off on a rant protecting his "GPL". Face it, the GPL's days are limited.
These are unrelated statements. Please clarify. Why are the GPL's days numbered? What situation will strike down my right to impose distribution restrictions on a copyrighted work?
Argue away that there are problems with the GPL or with the particular restrictions it places, but I will not buy that something which makes such clear and simple use of copyright law has its "days limited" unless you provide some serious backing to the claim.
I will grant that in the embeded world, things can get dicey because the particular optimizations that people perform often involve modifying the OS. However, this will simply slow, stop or change the adoption of GPLed software in one market, not eliminate or strike down the GPL and its many uses.
Personally, if I were in the embedded market, I'd be looking at the BSDs anyhow since they have more of a track record in that regard. Perhaps this is the basic tool being employed: get people to pay attention to X product vs Linux and ignore the, better suited, BSDs....
There's also a product specifically for the embeded market from Red Hat (was Cygnus).
If EULAs in general are struck down, this could strike down the GPL as well. They're in the same family.
Not really. The MS EULA attempts to restrict my rights beyond those that I'm restricted to by copyright law. They actaully want to control what I do with the software BEFORE I try to modify, distribute or copy it.
The GPL gives me a loophole PAST copyright law.
Basically, the GPL says that you can do anything with the software that is allowed by copyright law. You can also copy the program, distribute it and sell it, BUT, such an exception to copyright law is ONLY made if you are willing to comply with the terms of the GPL.
You are never bound by the GPL unless you want to be (it says this explicitly), but (in the words of George Carlin) you havta wanna if you wish to do something copyright law does not allow (create a derived work, distribute, reproduce, etc).
If the GPL were struck down, it would mean that no one anywhere (other than the authors) has the right to distribute or modify copyrighted/GPLed software (as per the terms of copyright law).
I use Spamcop for this very reason. I want to shut down the people who spam me by getting their providers to harass them.
Now, someone is mis-using the providers to do the same to people who may have done nothing wrong.
What we really need is a formal (but government-independant) way of coordinating the complaints, arbirating them and deciding if a) the user should be removed b) the case merits being moved out of that forum and into the courts and c) which parties are actually involved. Something like Spamcop with more feedback (Spamcop's feedback process for ISPs is great, and there really is a lot of good you do for yourself by signing up if you send out ANY bulk email, even true opt-in). You track the complaints and allow ISPs to feed back the results of their research, closing a complaint if it's been resolved.
This would slow down our Mr Powell, but it would also give the pirates a force to fear, which, quite honestly is needed. It's *not* legal or even a particularly nice thing to steal someone's copyrighted work. At the same time, services like Napster should not have to pay the price for their users' indiscressions.
Ok, so I don't fill out the Census, I don't allow cookies from any but a select few sites (gods, I love Mozilla) and I never register software unless I need to. Do I still get targetted ads?
You betcha!
The funny thing is that I never got a targetted ad that I cared enough about to respond to (except the "I hunt gay pedophiles, give me money" one, but that response was to the FBI). So, my question is this: why do these people continue. Are they finding some secret population of rich stupid people (or poor, even stupider people)?
Ok, targetted ads asside, why should I worry? Well here' my list:
Da Gub'mint decides that <insert sub-culture group here> are evil and we must have a "war on <insert subculture group here>". I belong to a few subcultures, so this worries me (when they come for the people who write crypto in Perl, I'll be the first against the wall).
I really don't want my application for a home loan getting turned down because I happen to be a Linux user, and they default on loans.0002 percent more often than the baseline.
I worry about just how much of my life will be on that piece of paper the guy across the table is holding in a job interview.
This all seems remote and unlikely now, but so did reverse-engineering the Census data 10 years ago....:-(
There are several reasons that this would be a Bad Idea (tm):
Python cannot manage the processor. You'd have to drop down to C in order to wrap assembly at some point, anyway.
"Python is slow" does not begin to cover the problem. Imagine, if you will, going from some number of instructions (let's say less than 200 for argument's sake) involved in any given context-switch. You're now talking about PYTHON CODE executing in that span of time.
Two words: memory management
Right, so you got around everything else (likely by writing a C or C++ based OS kernel tailored to Python's design philosophy and then building everything else in Python). Now, you have to come to the cold, hard conclusion that what you've done is no harder or easier to use than your average system with a python interpreter on it.
I submit to you that what you would likely enjoy much more is re-writing everything BUT the OS, and the windowing system core, in Python (or any high-level language) with one consistent design philospohy. Heck, I'd sign on to that.
Getting tired of getting a copy of Oracle for Solaris 2.3, iPlanet for SunOS 4.1.3 and Veritas for Solaris 7 and finding that none of them support my Solaris 8 system. Dammit, what is Sun doing wrong!?
You'd think that you would actually have to pick an OS revision based on the least-common denominator of the supported platforms for your application needs!
Someone needs to go write a Python-based OS and then never change anything. That'll solve it.
1. Get everyone to know tht the SSH folks are being pains in the ass.
2. Hold a naming contest for OpenSSH.
3. Splash the resulting name around as "the new name of network security"
Get everyone to stop using the term "SSH", since we don't want to confuse anyone into using legacy software. Get them to use the real deal!
The largest costs in the companies that I've seen are: software and meetings.
Software licensing costs for anti-virus software are huge for a medium-to-large business. Also, the time spent in "what do we, as a company do about virii" is non-trivial.
In the ideal company, anti-xxxx tactics (where xxxx is any sort of intrusion, theft, vandalism, etc) would be left to the people who do the job, but this is rarely the case.
No, the original poster was describing a situation where a creature would sexually reproduce with itself. It is true that this would be highly inefficient, and that asexual reproduction would make more sense.
Either one would be a lose, though, for a higher form of life because there are too many negative traits need to be weeded out using sexual reproduction and natural selection.
Slashdot Mirror
"No offense, but I think you must know some really stupid "windows admins" then"
;-)
Of course, these are not the most clued in people ever. I find the Linux installers to be easy to use (a little on the feature-rich side, which can be confusing), but I know folks who see "what kind of keyboard are you using" and their brains lock up. AND THESE ARE PROFESSIONALS.
We live in a world where we're damn lucky most machines come with an OS because most people who do admin for a living could not install one to save their lives. Most of the admins I know wouldn't break a sweat on a Linux, Windows or BSD install. But, then most of the admins in the world are nothing like most of the admins I know....
That said, I've been baffled by Windows installs when they get... odd. The thing most people forget is that 99% of the time, when you're installing Windows you're doing so on a system that was meant to run Windows. When you try to install Windows on a home-grown system with a blend of old and new parts, it can be a refreshing dream to install Linux on it
Friendly graphical installers like the one that comes with Red Hat, or like the one that comes with Windows? There are only 5 varieties of Windows, but their installer still confuses most 1-2year Windows admins I've seen.
Of course, most Windows desktops come pre-installed, which if that were the case for Linux, installers wouldn't really be the issue.
- Randall did what an awfull lot of us did (I certainly did). He circumvented a client's security (while still working for them) in order to hand them proof that they needed to fix the problem.
- Beyond the financial burdon that this has placed on him (which, I understand to be astronomical), this case as resulted in a great deal of lost work and the requirement that he tell any prospective employer about the incident.
- Intel was quite happy with Randall's work, and he NEVER did ANYTHING to harm the company or that resulted in a loss of money.
So, do I think Intel should have swatted him? Yes. Do I think that they should have fired him (terminated his contract)? Maybe. I wouldn't, but I'm a nice guy.But, final analysis, was it worth nearly ruining the man's life over? What, exactly are whe exacting punishment FOR? A stupid mistake?
No, this is clearly a case where there were an awful lot of people who wanted to "set an example", and while this is not as extreme a case as some others, Randall was wronged by the system.
I would count the iPaq from Compaq as well as a few others.
This seems like a horribly contrived lead-in, but I can't resist. I've been planning the announcement of the Passive Privacy System proposed specification for a week or so, but we seem to have a window.
PPS is a propposed way of getting everyone to exchange public keys and passivlely encrypt email without a) burdoning the average user with the details of cryptography or b) providing enough impact on the average non-PPS user to matter.
It requires a great deal of work, both on the spec side and the coding side to come up with plugins for MUAs. But, in the end I think that the world will benefit from the resulting increase in passive key exchange and encryption.
Please, feel free to send mail about PPS to me.
Thanks.
I've used Oracle and Sybase extensively. Sybase does not suffer from most of Oracle's speed problems, but neither one supports such features. Nice to see DB2 does, but please don't make sweeping assumptions about my experience.
More to the point, if you are willing to do the work
of maintaining consistancy yourself where it counts,
you can often not only do so, but your code benefits
from it hugely. Example: my application has a few
statements which must be atomic (everybody does this,
AFAIK, certainly PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS, Ora, etc).
Now, I have one piece of code that needs to execute
a complex batch of statements with consistency and
rollback. I can easily write a library that supports
rolling back this one transaction. Oh, and look, this
one transaction also does not need to complete lightning
fast, and happens rarely. That means I can take advantage
of best speed everywhere else, and use table-level locking on this one transaction just to be safe. These are not options in most large RDBMS', but certainly are in something like MySQL. In fact, you can swap out which back-end storage system (MySQL, Berkely DB and soon Progress) to use on a table-by-table basis for best reliability/performance characteristics.
Bottom line is this: Oracle has it's place, but once you start
to need high-end performance, it falls over in the price/
performance arena. I can run the same database on
MySQL engine for 1/10 - 1/100 the cost and get the same
reliability.
What most people really need out of a database is to never
lose data. If your DB loses data, then get another
one fast. Otherwise, you should be looking at how
much you'll pay when you add the 4th processor....
Sorry, you are correct and I misspoke (I remember even seeing this before submitting and cannot figure out why I didn't fix it).
What I meant was that you do not have thr right to distribute a modified version of the software. Patches get gray. For example, if I change the formatting (say, with indent), and distribute a patch (which would be the entire program), that's clearly a violation.
I think that the key point is that the patch must contain only reference to the original code which can be construed as fair use, but IANAL.
G.C. did a routine about the catholic concept of sin, from which I was quoting "you havta wanna" (said in a very rough, low, leering voice).
Hatch has been working his butt off to get the show back into the general conciousness, and now Larsen and Singer are going to capitalize on this, but haven't even talked to Hatch or plan to have old characters in the show.
:-(
Not really the kind of thanks Hatch may have been expecting....
It was a long time in coming. They had to get the standalone floppy (no computer required), circa 1987 Ethernet bridge, Timex Sinclair and ENIAC ports working first. ;-)
Can someone post a mirror of this as either pure PostScript or PDF that ghostscript can read? I get nothing but errors when handing this to ggv.
- Claims that the GPL is weak because it has not been tested in court are silly. Most software licenses have not been tested in court. The GPL is a very simple license which uses copyright law as its basis. It does not attempt to add restrictions, only grant limited rights, so I really don't see how it would be "struck down" as so many seem to fear.
- You are never bound by the GPL unless you wish to be. Under standard copyright law, you have no right to modify and/or distribute other people's copyrighted software. If you wish to do that, the author must give you license to do so. The GPL is such a license. Arguments that people are not bound by the GPL because they did not read/agree to it are moot. If you did not read or agree to it, you have no distribution rights.
All things considered, I think people are over-reacting to one man's take on why people should not be taking his market share away.Argue away that there are problems with the GPL or with the particular restrictions it places, but I will not buy that something which makes such clear and simple use of copyright law has its "days limited" unless you provide some serious backing to the claim.
I will grant that in the embeded world, things can get dicey because the particular optimizations that people perform often involve modifying the OS. However, this will simply slow, stop or change the adoption of GPLed software in one market, not eliminate or strike down the GPL and its many uses.
Personally, if I were in the embedded market, I'd be looking at the BSDs anyhow since they have more of a track record in that regard. Perhaps this is the basic tool being employed: get people to pay attention to X product vs Linux and ignore the, better suited, BSDs....
There's also a product specifically for the embeded market from Red Hat (was Cygnus).
Not really. The MS EULA attempts to restrict my rights beyond those that I'm restricted to by copyright law. They actaully want to control what I do with the software BEFORE I try to modify, distribute or copy it.
The GPL gives me a loophole PAST copyright law.
Basically, the GPL says that you can do anything with the software that is allowed by copyright law. You can also copy the program, distribute it and sell it, BUT, such an exception to copyright law is ONLY made if you are willing to comply with the terms of the GPL.
You are never bound by the GPL unless you want to be (it says this explicitly), but (in the words of George Carlin) you havta wanna if you wish to do something copyright law does not allow (create a derived work, distribute, reproduce, etc).
If the GPL were struck down, it would mean that no one anywhere (other than the authors) has the right to distribute or modify copyrighted/GPLed software (as per the terms of copyright law).
I use Spamcop for this very reason. I want to shut down the people who spam me by getting their providers to harass them.
Now, someone is mis-using the providers to do the same to people who may have done nothing wrong.
What we really need is a formal (but government-independant) way of coordinating the complaints, arbirating them and deciding if a) the user should be removed b) the case merits being moved out of that forum and into the courts and c) which parties are actually involved. Something like Spamcop with more feedback (Spamcop's feedback process for ISPs is great, and there really is a lot of good you do for yourself by signing up if you send out ANY bulk email, even true opt-in). You track the complaints and allow ISPs to feed back the results of their research, closing a complaint if it's been resolved.
This would slow down our Mr Powell, but it would also give the pirates a force to fear, which, quite honestly is needed. It's *not* legal or even a particularly nice thing to steal someone's copyrighted work. At the same time, services like Napster should not have to pay the price for their users' indiscressions.
You betcha!
The funny thing is that I never got a targetted ad that I cared enough about to respond to (except the "I hunt gay pedophiles, give me money" one, but that response was to the FBI). So, my question is this: why do these people continue. Are they finding some secret population of rich stupid people (or poor, even stupider people)?
Ok, targetted ads asside, why should I worry? Well here' my list:
- Da Gub'mint decides that <insert sub-culture group here> are evil and we must have a "war on <insert subculture group here>". I belong to a few subcultures, so this worries me (when they come for the people who write crypto in Perl, I'll be the first against the wall).
- I really don't want my application for a home loan getting turned down because I happen to be a Linux user, and they default on loans
.0002 percent more often than the baseline. - I worry about just how much of my life will be on that piece of paper the guy across the table is holding in a job interview.
This all seems remote and unlikely now, but so did reverse-engineering the Census data 10 years ago....No. The implication is that it's a series. The goal is to figure out what the progression is, and then come up with the next in the series.
- Python cannot manage the processor. You'd have to drop down to C in order to wrap assembly at some point, anyway.
- "Python is slow" does not begin to cover the problem. Imagine, if you will, going from some number of instructions (let's say less than 200 for argument's sake) involved in any given context-switch. You're now talking about PYTHON CODE executing in that span of time.
- Two words: memory management
- Right, so you got around everything else (likely by writing a C or C++ based OS kernel tailored to Python's design philosophy and then building everything else in Python). Now, you have to come to the cold, hard conclusion that what you've done is no harder or easier to use than your average system with a python interpreter on it.
I submit to you that what you would likely enjoy much more is re-writing everything BUT the OS, and the windowing system core, in Python (or any high-level language) with one consistent design philospohy. Heck, I'd sign on to that.I understand that there are basically three reasons for Freenet:
- Abolition of censorship
- Archival of documents based on their percieved "usefulness"
- Elimination of standard bottlenecks in most peer-only networks (I hate the term peer-to-peer, but won't digress into the rant behind that statement)
So, do we really care that Gnutella lasts any longer than the time that it takes to get Freenet everywhere?Getting tired of getting a copy of Oracle for Solaris 2.3, iPlanet for SunOS 4.1.3 and Veritas for Solaris 7 and finding that none of them support my Solaris 8 system. Dammit, what is Sun doing wrong!?
;-) for those who did not guess....
You'd think that you would actually have to pick an OS revision based on the least-common denominator of the supported platforms for your application needs!
Someone needs to go write a Python-based OS and then never change anything. That'll solve it.
This is an ideal PR moment for OpenSSH.
Here's what you do:
1. Get everyone to know tht the SSH folks are being pains in the ass.
2. Hold a naming contest for OpenSSH.
3. Splash the resulting name around as "the new name of network security"
Get everyone to stop using the term "SSH", since we don't want to confuse anyone into using legacy software. Get them to use the real deal!
The largest costs in the companies that I've seen are: software and meetings.
Software licensing costs for anti-virus software are huge for a medium-to-large business. Also, the time spent in "what do we, as a company do about virii" is non-trivial.
In the ideal company, anti-xxxx tactics (where xxxx is any sort of intrusion, theft, vandalism, etc) would be left to the people who do the job, but this is rarely the case.
No, the original poster was describing a situation where a creature would sexually reproduce with itself. It is true that this would be highly inefficient, and that asexual reproduction would make more sense.
Either one would be a lose, though, for a higher form of life because there are too many negative traits need to be weeded out using sexual reproduction and natural selection.
You didn't mean bisexual, you meant hermaphrodite.
Bisexual means you will have sex with males or females, not that you have both sets of reproductive organs.