Doc Ruby is no scholar, as any first semester student of architectural history could tell you. The "Victorian era" began in the 1880s and lasted well into the 1940s. It encompasses Craftsmans, Prairies, Monterey Revivals, Tudors, and yes, even "Edwardians".
You have to admire a guy like Weitse, who dreamed about a well designed MTA and made it happen, even made a career out of it. He didn't resort to anti-competitive BS like MS or keep portions of it closed-source like McNealy.
What came out of the Postfix project is an MTA that is so far ahead of the competition, in every respect, that sendmail gurus are becoming as irrelevant as their cobol counterparts. Even a brief comparison between Postfix source and Sendmail or other MTA's is enough to see the huge difference in the quality, object oriented design, and overall organization. Postfix' best aspect, however, is the administrative time it saves over sendmail, exchange, etc.
It is interesting, however, how a superior piece of software like Postfix illustrates the legacy-limited aspects of Unix and Linux, most distributions of which are still mired in their sendmail mc-m4-cf sendmail hells. To be sure sendmail was great in it's time, but postfix is the future.
> "security" in Java is so trivially easy to circumvent
Are you confusing encryption with obfuscation? If not I agree that class-level encryption has no ROI.
Obfuscation, on the other hand, is an excellent tool for protecting IP. I use Proguard http://proguard.sourceforge.net/ via Ant and am happy with the result, having tried to grok the resulting byte code (using jad...) Good luck trying to work with that!
The downside of this news is the failure of open-source hardware. Odd too that Linux and GPL advocates are _happy_ about being stuck with proprietary hardware. I guess it just goes to show that the open source movement isn't really about free as in "source" but about free as in "what's it going to cost me".
On the other hand Sun made a number of strategic mistakes in the manufacture and marketing (but not design) of the Sparc. Outsourcing 100% of the fabrication to Texas Instruments was mistake #1. Charging non-OEMs such large margins was mistake #2. Not pushing commodity form factors (like ATX and mini-ITX) was mistake #3. (I still have an IPX. Beautiful design. 15+ years ahead of it's time) Icing on the cake is Sun's insistence on wringing every dollar out of old/slow chips. Can you believe they are still selling 550MHz CPUs (in the Blade 150) in this day of 3K MHzs! Talk about dead-end.
>now realise that it doesn't matter whether you vote Republican or Democrat
Spoken by someone who either doesn't know the differences or doesn't want you to know.
The relatives of 1,000 soldiers who died needlessly in Iraq disagree with you. Those of us who live near toxic waste sites that were slated for cleanup until Bush was appointed disagree with you. Minotities in Florida whose votes were not counted disagree with you. Women who value their right to choose abortion disagree with you. Even judges who value the constitution disagree with you.
>it shows the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are more than willing to honor our military and let the small stuff slide. We're even willing to forgive Kerry for lying about his service and for admitting to committed war crimes.
Actually I think this better illustrates the differences. Republicans repeat fabrications questioning a Democratic who served in Vietnam and at the same time ignore what everyone knows is Bush's AWOL (an actual crime).
There is perhaps no better illustration of Rep/Dem differences than how lies about AWOL, WMD, the Geneva Convention,... are ignored whereas an extra martial affair is grounds for Impeachment.
You have to give Republicans credit for being true to their central plans i.e, "might makes right".
> With the vast address space utilized by Office97, it was the first software that enabled the masses to write truly enterprise-class memos, emails and status reports. Only recently have competitors like KDE and Gnome
Except, of course, that FrameMaker was available on Unix and Windows. It beat the pants out of Word then and still does today. To get a good idea of just how far ahead print a PDF from Word and then Frame... It is too bad Bush/Ashcroft's anti-trust failures handicapped Adobe's ability to market their products. Vive la MS monopoly:-( and la Bush economy)
> There are lighter bikes that have been proven to be faster that cannot be ridden in this race.
This will likely change over time as light bikes become safer. As it stands the Bianchi EV4s and other bikes in that weight range will fail from cracked frames, broken axles, failed stems, and other seriously dangerous mechanicals, at an average of 7,500 miles!
They're also impossible to ride in a cross-wind, and don't corner well, are difficult to get on and off of, are heavy, take up a lot more space than traditional bikes... HPVs are really only good for are setting records on straight, flat, stop-free, roads (or tracks).
>Who remembers Fabio Casartelli, a young Italian racer who died in a fatal crash on a steep descent in the 1995 Tour. No helmet.
Americans have the most advertising-defined memories. Who remembers, for example, that a helmet would not have made a difference to Fabio, or that there has never been an injury in the 100 year history of the tour that helmets could have prevented.
Ah but the ads, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and sales!, Now everyone must wear one no matter the conditions. I fear many more accidents as a result of the heat under a helmet which is considerable.
>It's really not hard to make an app that works pretty much the same just about anywhere.
That sums up my cross-platform Java experience as well. The only thing you'd need to port would be explicitly platform-dependent code i,e. native methods.
I find the "I don't like Java" diatriabes funny. I mean come on, do you think it's not obvious you're either too lazy to learn the language or a MS bogot?
>BSD is dying, yet they keep on releasing new stuff.
And we keep on using it. There's no better platform for avoiding library skew (dll-hell, rpm dependencies,...) Even apt-get doesn't compare with/usr/ports.
We do have fewer and fewer machines running FreeBSD though, because of poor support for Java/Tomcat, lack of iSCSI, and decrepit NFS. Ever try to setup an NFS-IMAP server with 100MB+ quotas and maildir? Can't do it in FreeBSD:-(
> I'm no techno-protectionist I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s
Outsourcing is in the news today but it's been around for many, many years. The difference here has nothing to do with WHERE outsourcing was going to, it could just have easily been IBM or EDS. The issue is HOW the outsourcing was handled.
I was at one of Cringley's speeches (which was even better than his films or articles!) when he was taking Q&A from the audience. Outsourcing came up and his first example was AWE and how they announced the plan and the next day the CIO drove to work in a Ferrari! I sold my stock the next day (all the sorrier I held it long).
What could have been a good paper was, sadly, another example of researcher bias. Perhaps the the worst of it is their cite of a 2001 IDC comparison of Linux vs. Unix TCO. IDC claims that "Linux, which is open source, and Unix, which is proprietary"! Really? Haven't they heard of BSD? How about OSX? They really dig themselves into a hole further down where they explain this claim!
There's a table comparing Unix and Linix item costs. Somehow "deinstallation and disposal" costs 7x more for Unix (RICS/Unix) than Linux. This may be true for really cheap x86 hardware vis-a-vis mid to high end RISC, but a more realistinc RISC system like the Blade100 would be at most 2x its x86 analog. They completely left out Solaris x86, Mac OSX, and Linux SPARC? A monkey could see that this is comparing apples and oranges.
The Danish Board of Technology/IDC also indicates that "website management" administrative costs are 60% higher for Unix than Linux, among the other similarly biased garbage out.
The very next table indicates about the same level of selective garbage in for software cost comparisons. Makes you wonder exactly what they're smoking^H^H^H^H^H using.
It's too bad too. You'll never sell MS buyers on Linux or Unix, much less MacOS, with such shoddy and easily shot down "research". 5 to 10 SuSE funded the paper and supplied the "researchers".
Democrat or not, you don't seem to understand the reasons we have anti-trust laws in the first place. These are the same reasons we need campaign finance reform i.e, because justice can be bought. Just like MS bought RAV, and fired its Unix developers, they have enough money to do the same with your favorite non-MS software too.
Only one party can claim that a majority of its members support anti-trust enforcement and campaign finance reform. That party is not the Republican party.
> Corporations are a good thing.
Corporations are neither good nor bad, they can be either depending on their behavior. Enron, Worldcom, et al are all corporations. These are not "a good thing" in my book, nor were they good to all the millions of investors who lost their retirement when their fraud and corruption reached critical mass.
>It's time consumers got their minds off of autopilot and excersized their right to demonstrate and boycott
Nice thought but free markets don't work like that. You can only boycott what you're not forced to buy. If you want to run Project, for example, you have to buy it from MS. Why? Because MS bought the company, effectively removing your ability to boycott.
> Microsoft will be beaten by people not buying Microsoft products
Nice try but no cookie. Anyone who has taken economics 101 knows better.. As long as corrupt justices like Kollar-Kotelly will sell out to the highest bidder (aka campaign financer) there's really not much people can do except vote Democrat.
The case is clear to anyone without a bias. Kollar-Kotelly is only attempting to spin the fact that justice in the US can be bought (If you have enough money, and there's a Republican administration).
MS' anti-competitive actions have not changed, and will not change until we elect an honest and ethical president. New technologies which do not benefit MS will continue to be supressed, the economy will not improve, the deficit will continue to grow, viruses will continue to get worse, and consumers will have fewer real choices as long as the current DOJ remains in office.
The root of the problem is corporate America's (RIAA, MPAA, Clear Channel, big oil, MS, et al) control of campaign finance. Let them watch (corporate) TV, read (corporate) newspapers, and eat (MS) cake!
>Recently, the.museum TLD went live. It's just like >any other TLD except that domains that don't exist >diect you to a page saying the domain doesn't exist >... What's different here?
The difference, in a nutshell, is that this wildcard was only implemented after discussion by, and agreement from, the subdomains under.museum.
Thanks to the Microsoft marketing department for that fact-free opinion. Trouble is it is inaccurate.
Exchange requires many times more systems administration hours per user or server than Postfix (or qmail/exim/sendmail). Exchange crashes far more often, and is the single most frequently exploited (virused/trojaned) MTA-capable software available.
Ah but "it does calendaring" I hear you saying, and "groupware", though not nearly as well as dedicated calendaring and groupware software. Leave it to MS marketing to call a sow's ear a silk purse...
"Not that I'm against Java, but if you want Java included "out of the box" I'm afraid you understand neither FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java (on any platform)."
And yet/.ers still portray *BSD'ers as elitist assholes. How the hell can this be so?
Disappointing this off-topic flame was scored 2 'insightful'. Reflects the bias and lack of professionalism on the part of many reviewers.
What the poster and reviewers probably aren't aware of is how little effort it takes to add the latest Perl via FreeBSD's ports:
1) cd/usr/ports/perl5, 2) make install. Even that is only necessary if Perl wasn't selected during system installation.
>So yes, I'm sure MS would like to further strengthen its dominance in the market, but I don't see it happening.
What don't you see.NET? License 6? A profit margin 700% higher than the industry average? Software incompatibilities which obviously exist solely to impede compeition (Java et al)?
>IBM was a 13-year federal investigation that was abandoned when IBM itself sank in market relevance, and is generally regarded as a disaster.
Who thinks the IBM trial was a disaster? Certainly not anyone who owns a PC or clone. If it weren't for the trial IBM would never have made an "open" PC based on Intel's x86.
>But tech antitrust has proved a whole new animal.
Fine rhetoric but pure FUD nonetheless. The IBM trial WAS tech, as was Standard oil in its day.
>This just seems like a colossal waste of time and money.
As do all laws, to criminals.
Wouldn't those billions (that's thousands of millions) of dollars going to Redmond be better spent in a more open and competitive software marketplace?
If you believe democracy is better than other types of governments then you have to believe that anti-trust enforcement is the government's job. To fail to enforce the law is to undermine the very fundamentals of democratic government. This is what happened during the crash of '28 resulting in a decades-long depression and a very popular socialist movement.
This is _great_ news for those well-funded businesses who might profit from violating anti-trust law.
Sorry GPLers, it should now be obvious that your license is unenforceable because. You don't have the money to defend it.
And sorry Democrats, Republican ethics have triumphed again. Long live government by "might makes right" and long live the influence of money over democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
> the period of 1901-1910 is known as "Edwardian"
Doc Ruby is no scholar, as any first semester student of architectural history could tell you. The "Victorian era" began in the 1880s and lasted well into the 1940s. It encompasses Craftsmans, Prairies, Monterey Revivals, Tudors, and yes, even "Edwardians".
r7
You have to admire a guy like Weitse, who dreamed about a well designed MTA and made it happen, even made a career out of it. He didn't resort to anti-competitive BS like MS or keep portions of it closed-source like McNealy.
What came out of the Postfix project is an MTA that is so far ahead of the competition, in every respect, that sendmail gurus are becoming as irrelevant as their cobol counterparts. Even a brief comparison between Postfix source and Sendmail or other MTA's is enough to see the huge difference in the quality, object oriented design, and overall organization. Postfix' best aspect, however, is the administrative time it saves over sendmail, exchange, etc.
It is interesting, however, how a superior piece of software like Postfix illustrates the legacy-limited aspects of Unix and Linux, most distributions of which are still mired in their sendmail mc-m4-cf sendmail hells. To be sure sendmail was great in it's time, but postfix is the future.
r7
> "security" in Java is so trivially easy to circumvent
Are you confusing encryption with obfuscation? If not I agree that class-level encryption has no ROI.
Obfuscation, on the other hand, is an excellent tool for protecting IP. I use Proguard http://proguard.sourceforge.net/ via Ant and am happy with the result, having tried to grok the resulting byte code (using jad...) Good luck trying to work with that!
R7
The downside of this news is the failure of open-source hardware. Odd too that Linux and GPL advocates are _happy_ about being stuck with proprietary hardware. I guess it just goes to show that the open source movement isn't really about free as in "source" but about free as in "what's it going to cost me".
On the other hand Sun made a number of strategic mistakes in the manufacture and marketing (but not design) of the Sparc. Outsourcing 100% of the fabrication to Texas Instruments was mistake #1. Charging non-OEMs such large margins was mistake #2. Not pushing commodity form factors (like ATX and mini-ITX) was mistake #3. (I still have an IPX. Beautiful design. 15+ years ahead of it's time) Icing on the cake is Sun's insistence on wringing every dollar out of old/slow chips. Can you believe they are still selling 550MHz CPUs (in the Blade 150) in this day of 3K MHzs! Talk about dead-end.
r7
>now realise that it doesn't matter whether you vote Republican or Democrat
Spoken by someone who either doesn't know the differences or doesn't want you to know.
The relatives of 1,000 soldiers who died needlessly in Iraq disagree with you. Those of us who live near toxic waste sites that were slated for cleanup until Bush was appointed disagree with you. Minotities in Florida whose votes were not counted disagree with you. Women who value their right to choose abortion disagree with you. Even judges who value the constitution disagree with you.
r7
>it shows the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are more than willing to honor our military and let the small stuff slide. We're even willing to forgive Kerry for lying about his service and for admitting to committed war crimes.
... are ignored whereas an extra martial affair is grounds for Impeachment.
Actually I think this better illustrates the differences. Republicans repeat fabrications questioning a Democratic who served in Vietnam and at the same time ignore what everyone knows is Bush's AWOL (an actual crime).
There is perhaps no better illustration of Rep/Dem differences than how lies about AWOL, WMD, the Geneva Convention,
You have to give Republicans credit for being true to their central plans i.e, "might makes right".
r7
> With the vast address space utilized by Office97, it was the first software that enabled the masses to write truly enterprise-class memos, emails and status reports. Only recently have competitors like KDE and Gnome
:-( and la Bush economy)
Except, of course, that FrameMaker was available on Unix and Windows. It beat the pants out of Word then and still does today. To get a good idea of just how far ahead print a PDF from Word and then Frame... It is too bad Bush/Ashcroft's anti-trust failures handicapped Adobe's ability to market their products. Vive la MS monopoly
Frame on Solaris has been 64 bit for years now.
> There are lighter bikes that have been proven to be faster that cannot be ridden in this race.
This will likely change over time as light bikes become safer. As it stands the Bianchi EV4s and other bikes in that weight range will fail from cracked frames, broken axles, failed stems, and other seriously dangerous mechanicals, at an average of 7,500 miles!
> they suck as far as hill climbing is concerned
They're also impossible to ride in a cross-wind, and don't corner well, are difficult to get on and off of, are heavy, take up a lot more space than traditional bikes... HPVs are really only good for are setting records on straight, flat, stop-free, roads (or tracks).
>Who remembers Fabio Casartelli, a young Italian racer who died in a fatal crash on a steep descent in the 1995 Tour. No helmet.
Americans have the most advertising-defined memories. Who remembers, for example, that a helmet would not have made a difference to Fabio, or that there has never been an injury in the 100 year history of the tour that helmets could have prevented.
Ah but the ads, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and sales!, Now everyone must wear one no matter the conditions. I fear many more accidents as a result of the heat under a helmet which is considerable.
>It's really not hard to make an app that works pretty much the same just about anywhere.
That sums up my cross-platform Java experience as well. The only thing you'd need to port would be explicitly platform-dependent code i,e. native methods.
I find the "I don't like Java" diatriabes funny. I mean come on, do you think it's not obvious you're either too lazy to learn the language or a MS bogot?
>BSD is dying, yet they keep on releasing new stuff.
...) Even apt-get doesn't compare with /usr/ports.
:-(
And we keep on using it. There's no better platform for avoiding library skew (dll-hell, rpm dependencies,
We do have fewer and fewer machines running FreeBSD though, because of poor support for Java/Tomcat, lack of iSCSI, and decrepit NFS. Ever try to setup an NFS-IMAP server with 100MB+ quotas and maildir? Can't do it in FreeBSD
R7
>It's also called "astroturf" (as in fake grassroots) in the offline/PR world.
/. by Microsoft after the USDOJ comment period in '02.
And it was first widely used right here on
Microsoft's phantom anonymous marketing is still orders of magnitude ahead of jboss' and others. You don't need to read slashdot to see that.
> I'm no techno-protectionist I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s
Outsourcing is in the news today but it's been around for many, many years. The difference here has nothing to do with WHERE outsourcing was going to, it could just have easily been IBM or EDS. The issue is HOW the outsourcing was handled.
I was at one of Cringley's speeches (which was even better than his films or articles!) when he was taking Q&A from the audience. Outsourcing came up and his first example was AWE and how they announced the plan and the next day the CIO drove to work in a Ferrari! I sold my stock the next day (all the sorrier I held it long).
R7
What could have been a good paper was, sadly, another example of researcher bias. Perhaps the the worst of it is their cite of a 2001 IDC comparison of Linux vs. Unix TCO. IDC claims that "Linux, which is open source, and Unix, which is proprietary"! Really? Haven't they heard of BSD? How about OSX? They really dig themselves into a hole further down where they explain this claim!
There's a table comparing Unix and Linix item costs. Somehow "deinstallation and disposal" costs 7x more for Unix (RICS/Unix) than Linux. This may be true for really cheap x86 hardware vis-a-vis mid to high end RISC, but a more realistinc RISC system like the Blade100 would be at most 2x its x86 analog. They completely left out Solaris x86, Mac OSX, and Linux SPARC? A monkey could see that this is comparing apples and oranges.
The Danish Board of Technology/IDC also indicates that "website management" administrative costs are 60% higher for Unix than Linux, among the other similarly biased garbage out.
The very next table indicates about the same level of selective garbage in for software cost comparisons. Makes you wonder exactly what they're smoking^H^H^H^H^H using.
It's too bad too. You'll never sell MS buyers on Linux or Unix, much less MacOS, with such shoddy and easily shot down "research". 5 to 10 SuSE funded the paper and supplied the "researchers".
r7
> Please. You may agree with Democratic politics
Democrat or not, you don't seem to understand the reasons we have anti-trust laws in the first place. These are the same reasons we need campaign finance reform i.e, because justice can be bought. Just like MS bought RAV, and fired its Unix developers, they have enough money to do the same with your favorite non-MS software too.
Only one party can claim that a majority of its members support anti-trust enforcement and campaign finance reform. That party is not the Republican party.
> Corporations are a good thing.
Corporations are neither good nor bad, they can be either depending on their behavior. Enron, Worldcom, et al are all corporations. These are not "a good thing" in my book, nor were they good to all the millions of investors who lost their retirement when their fraud and corruption reached critical mass.
>It's time consumers got their minds off of autopilot and excersized their right to demonstrate and boycott
Nice thought but free markets don't work like that. You can only boycott what you're not forced to buy. If you want to run Project, for example, you have to buy it from MS. Why? Because MS bought the company, effectively removing your ability to boycott.
> Microsoft will be beaten by people not buying Microsoft products
Nice try but no cookie. Anyone who has taken economics 101 knows better.. As long as corrupt justices like Kollar-Kotelly will sell out to the highest bidder (aka campaign financer) there's really not much people can do except vote Democrat.
r7
The judge said it was unclear
The case is clear to anyone without a bias. Kollar-Kotelly is only attempting to spin the fact that justice in the US can be bought (If you have enough money, and there's a Republican administration).
MS' anti-competitive actions have not changed, and will not change until we elect an honest and ethical president. New technologies which do not benefit MS will continue to be supressed, the economy will not improve, the deficit will continue to grow, viruses will continue to get worse, and consumers will have fewer real choices as long as the current DOJ remains in office.
The root of the problem is corporate America's (RIAA, MPAA, Clear Channel, big oil, MS, et al) control of campaign finance. Let them watch (corporate) TV, read (corporate) newspapers, and eat (MS) cake!
r7
>Recently, the .museum TLD went live. It's just like
.museum.
>any other TLD except that domains that don't exist
>diect you to a page saying the domain doesn't exist
>... What's different here?
The difference, in a nutshell, is that this wildcard was
only implemented after discussion by, and agreement
from, the subdomains under
r7
Ian wrote:
>I use UUCP with qmail. It's easy.
Though not as easy as Postfix with Postconf's GUI front-end.
R7
>exchange server works, and works quite well
Thanks to the Microsoft marketing department for that fact-free opinion. Trouble is it is inaccurate.
Exchange requires many times more systems administration hours per user or server than Postfix (or qmail/exim/sendmail). Exchange crashes far more often, and is the single most frequently exploited (virused/trojaned) MTA-capable software available.
Ah but "it does calendaring" I hear you saying, and "groupware", though not nearly as well as dedicated calendaring and groupware software. Leave it to MS marketing to call a sow's ear a silk purse...
R7
And yet /.ers still portray *BSD'ers as elitist assholes. How the hell can this be so?
Disappointing this off-topic flame was scored 2 'insightful'. Reflects the bias and lack of professionalism on the part of many reviewers.
What the poster and reviewers probably aren't aware of is how little effort it takes to add the latest Perl via FreeBSD's ports: 1) cd /usr/ports/perl5, 2) make install. Even that is only necessary if Perl wasn't selected during system installation.
r7
>So yes, I'm sure MS would like to further strengthen its dominance in the market, but I don't see it happening.
.NET? License 6? A profit margin 700% higher than the industry average? Software incompatibilities which obviously exist solely to impede compeition (Java et al)?
What don't you see
>IBM was a 13-year federal investigation that was abandoned when IBM itself sank in market relevance, and is generally regarded as a disaster.
Who thinks the IBM trial was a disaster? Certainly not anyone who owns a PC or clone. If it weren't for the trial IBM would never have made an "open" PC based on Intel's x86.
>But tech antitrust has proved a whole new animal.
Fine rhetoric but pure FUD nonetheless. The IBM trial WAS tech, as was Standard oil in its day.
>This just seems like a colossal waste of time and money.
As do all laws, to criminals.
Wouldn't those billions (that's thousands of millions) of dollars going to Redmond be better spent in a more open and competitive software marketplace?
If you believe democracy is better than other types of governments then you have to believe that anti-trust enforcement is the government's job. To fail to enforce the law is to undermine the very fundamentals of democratic government. This is what happened during the crash of '28 resulting in a decades-long depression and a very popular socialist movement.
This is _great_ news for those well-funded businesses who might profit
from violating anti-trust law.
Sorry GPLers, it should now be obvious that your license is unenforceable because. You don't have the money to defend it.
And sorry Democrats, Republican ethics have triumphed again. Long live government by "might makes right" and long live the influence of money over democracy.