How is trusting Redhat/Debian/Suse to make sure their distribution is safe any different from trusting AIX or HPUX? The difference is you're not *only* trusting Redhat/Debian/Suse in keeping their distribution safe. Other people all over the world (with no affiliation with the distros) ALSO tinker with the code, and there is a fair chance that anything malicious would be uncovered.
Note that I said "fair chance" instead of "will", but that's still better than close source products where you have to trust a single vendor for everything.
Besides, take the Linux kernel as an example. Linus releases the vanilla kernel, which is already being worked on by hundreds of people, dozens of distributions add patches to the vanilla kernel and package it, etc. You don't have to trust Linus for anything... you just need to trust the majority of (non-affiliated) kernel developers that they aren't going to spot a rootkit in the kernel and not speak up about it.
Of course, your distro can insert malicious code between their patches to upstream code... but the amount of code is relatively much smaller, and I think there is a hope of auditing that piece of code for the truly paranoid.
Fair enough. No offense intended. The reason I asked is that many people who complain about installation on Linux haven't tried the XP install. I doubt it. He bitches that his graphics card drivers in Linux are "worse than in Windows". I wonder whether he has ever tried installing vanilla XP (not the "rescue disk" kind where things are guaranteed to be perfect once you pop the disk in), and using the vanilla XP graphic drivers. Unless his card is really old, I doubt XP has "good" drivers and he'll have to get it from the card vendor anyway.
Oh did I mention that out of the box it's pretty much useless without thousands of dollars of other people's software? Exactly. People bitch about Linux "not working out of the box", then say Windows is so much better -- after they patch up their installation (hopefully before it's rooted), find all the drivers, download their cracked versions of photoshop, MS Office, Alcohol 120%, etc.
The only reasonable explanation to this logic is that they already had their conclusion (that Linux is inferior to Windows), and their "reasons" are merely to give an impression that they weren't biased.
This is the flamebait response: Since when *didn't* you have to download extra drivers to fully utilize your shiny display card on Windows?
This is the reasonable response: MP3 players are not in Linux because the patent holder charges a royalty for every MP3 player distributed. It's not like the Fedora guys tossed out MP3 functionality simply for "purity" (but that's what Debian does), but because they're not going to pay the royalty for you. You didn't pay for Fedora/Ubuntu did you?
Funny how people bitch about "shortcomings" of Linux when they're just lazy and don't bother to download a few files from the Internet, and then fill their windows installation with dozens of third party apps (usually cracked?) which, *surprise*, they download off the Internet. And funny how you bitch about the "warning" dialogs when in Vista they have like seven dialogs when you run a downloaded executable...
like being apparently unable to switch the bit depth of the screen at runtime (affects at least Wine) and having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes I think at least GNOME and KDE have utilities to switch screen resolutions without restarting X, for some time already. Sometimes I still tinker with the X config files but that's just because I'm too lazy to bother finding out the way to do it within the graphical environment.
I agree with your general point of X being the weakest link though. My personal hypothesis is that it was hindered greatly by XFree for years until X.org came together.
Mircosoft does a lot of bad things, but giving away software is not one of them. Their competitors (various open source projects) give away much higher quality code for free. Every time Microsoft tries to add a new feature, they get their asses sued off by every company that hacked in that new feature before, and are now charging ridiculous amounts of money for it.
As mentioned by many others, they don't "give away software" (for free). The problem is that they are forcing Windows customers to subsidize development costs of IE, WMP and other "bundled" apps even if they don't want to. If Microsoft reduced the price of Windows, and covered development costs of IE,WMP,etc by selling those software as separate packages like everybody else, the market would instantly become MUCH more competitive.
Your post was consistent with criminal sanctions (I don't see "civil suit", "class action" anywhere in your original post). I don't read crystal balls.
Besides, potential civil liability sometimes simply isn't enough detriment. Since the money goes to the plaintiffs if they succeed, they will be awarded an amount of at least what they have lost due to the defendant's wrongdoings, and maybe a bit more punitive damages, but not a HUGE windfall.
Say if the organization is Microsoft, and the damages in the class action suit sums up to some hundreds of millions. They can simply write it off. But if the liability was criminal then the court could potentially give a fine that really hurts. That's where the detriment comes in.
Your comments on penalties, if correct, would render the whole criminal system useless. eg. "Penalties for murder don't help the individuals who were murdered."
And why is targeted advertising bad? I'd rather see ads that I'm genuinely interested in, instead of Viagra ads.
I've been discussing personal freedom and rights with a friend who's moved to the USA for a few years. What strikes me was a line he said: "It's not 1984 yet".
To me it's evidence of a wrong focus. When defending our civic rights we shouldn't be aiming to avoid the things *specifically* in 1984 (and ignoring other more relevant things), but understanding how the whole system works, and why. I'd bet the whole "Terrorism" thing wouldn't have happened if there was a similar plot in 1984....
The disclaimer is that I haven't read 1984, but from what I've heard and know about it, 1984 to politics is like The Matrix is to science.
On slashdot people like to reply to individual paragraphs with short and witty comments. And forget about the original point. The original point was that MS Windows makes rebooting the "default" fix, regardless of the problem, whereas in Linux there are usually other valid options. We're talking about technical merits here, for discussion sake (we're on slashdot after all), and I don't care what your PHB boss thinks.
It's easy to start a flamewar by nit-picking individual sentences or paragraphs.
You say it is the kernel fault if it requires a reboot, but that is absolute BS. The linux kernel will include a crap load of drivers, the monolithic nature of it forces an incredibly large amount of reboots if you really are keeping it up to date, hell I can't see a month in the last 2 years where there wasn't a kernel update for my sled box and they all force me to reboot. How is a kernel upgrade not the kernel's fault? If it's a critical upgrade (a serious bug or a security vulnerability) then it's the kernel's fault. If it's simply because you want the latest bleeding edge and upgrade the kernel for every release candidate, well then that's your choice. Most people don't upgrade the kernel of a production machine except when a serious problem in the kernel is found.
I don't understand why the 'monolithic nature" of the linux kernel and the large amount of drivers mean anything. Do you upgrade the kernel every time a new USB webcam driver is updated?
I live in Hong Kong. And particularly in an area where there is a relatively high concentration of foreigners take residence.
There is an interesting phenomenon where people get on/off taxi's. Since roads in Hong Kong are REALLY narrow, a single vehicle stopping sometimes blocks the whole traffic behind, so to avoid being stared at we generally try to get off the taxi with as little fuss as possible. With local Hong Kong (Chinese ethnicity) people, the time taken to pay the driver, get change and get off can be as short as 5-10 seconds. If a taxi stops for more than half a minute without anybody getting out, it's a good bet that a "foreigner" is there. (By "foreigner" I don't mean tourists who are confused with local currency etc...)
I'm definitely not trying to be a racist here (well unless you consider the parent post to be racist too), just mentioning the fact that maybe Chinese people tend to be a bit quicker in pace than their western counterparts. (I dunno, or maybe it's just that they aren't aware of the impatient stares of a dozen vehicles behind them?)
For the Windows crowd: Before Win2k: Win95/98: Reboot every few hours. WinME: Reboot every hour. After Win2k: Reboot every few days. Conclusion: "Frequent" reboots are not required.
For the *NIX crowd: Under *NIx: Reboot after a blackout. After Win2k: Reboot every few days. Conclusion: Reboots are "EXTREMELY COMMON"!!
You're pretty messed up. I wonder why you get modded up.
I know most businessmen are not interested in "wtf is wrong". And I agree. They shouldn't be. That's not their business. It's the engineers and technicians to find out the cause of the problem, and to avoid having the problem again. If nobody finds out the cause of the problem, chances are that the problem will come up again and again, sometimes with increasing frequency, that your supposed 99.9999% slowly becomes 99.999% then 99.99%, etc...
Throwing more machines (or money) to the problem doesn't always work, despite what they taught you in business school. If the cause is a software error, and if it can be triggered simutaneously across a couple of so-called "redundant" machines, then you're fscked anyway. Let's say a bug makes the machine fail at Monday midnight (maybe a messed up cron job?). Do you simply "DO IT", reboot and forget about the problem?
And this.... I have no idea how you got to this conclusion:
When thousands of dollars (or more) are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable[0], you don't fuck around with idiotic philosophising about how "its UNIX, I shouldn't need to reboot for anything"[1], you just DO IT. When thousands of dollars are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable, you just DON'T TOUCH THE DAMN THING FOR NO GOOD REASON. Rebooting the machine because a minor update fixes a BROWSER bug is a fscking bad reason to reboot a machine, even if you have 10 of them chugging along.
Yes you just reboot it (i.e. "DO IT") if you're messed up enough to rely on inherently unreliable systems under critical environments, but the discussion we're having now is not "how to respond to a failing machine on critical systems" but how to avoid these situations in the first place.
I've been there myself and had arguments with my (at the time) boss about it. It is the difference between how geeks think and how businesspeople think. You're right. But there's no necessary conflict. The right thing to do is not "reboot the damn thing and forget about it", the right thing is to "reboot the damn thing and find out the cause of the problem afterwards".
Yes, it is. People who use Windows, when using Linux, are going to respond exactly the same way to problems - by rebooting.
Well you have to look at the other way round. People who use Linux, when using Windows, respond to problems by rebooting, sometimes after researching for the "real fix" and gets told by MSKB to do exactly that.
Anyone that's ever installed software, or run "windows update" knows that rebooting is a very likely part of this process. The dependencies and non-modular approach of Windows are quite apparent. Software vendors say "just reboot" because of all the complexities and dependencies within windows.
No, they do it because it's a simple step for the ignorant end user to understand.
I hope you're not the ignorant one here. Are you sure you understand the fundamental differences in handling libraries (DLL's/shared objects) in Windows and Linux? The architecture of Windows makes it extremely difficult to upgrade libraries safely without a reboot, whereas in Linux there's basically no special handling required. An "ignorant user" in Linux can simply type "apt-get upgrade" (or yum or whatever) and expect things to be done perfectly. Without a reboot. This simply isn't the case for Windows.
I've been administrating Linux machines for 13+ years. I can count on one hand the number of times a reboot solved any problem. The only class of problem this solved is a kernel bug, or the kernel crashing (usually from a hardware problem).
Not done much work with NFS then, I take it ? Or services that have long timeout periods and don't die nicely ?
I struggle to believe anyone has been using Linux for "13+ years" and can only "count on one hand the number of times a reboot solved any problem". Either you've not used Linux anything close to "13+ years" or you've not used it in a very wide range of situations.
I've only worked on Linux for a few years, and I've seen NFS lockups (IIRC). It's not pretty but it doesn't fsck up the machine, and usually resolves OK when the timeouts expire. If they don't, then that's a kernel bug. What's your point?
I'd say the GP is correct by definition. Anything that by design *requires* a reboot other than a kernel upgrade is by default a problem of the kernel. I think this holds for most *nix systems which prides itself for stability.
On the other hand how many times have you been forced to reboot after a trivial "Windows Update", brought to you by none other than Microsoft itself?
The point is that Linux simply has less "good reasons", and requires less reboots. Linux requires FAR less reboots for "patching".
Linux also makes a lot more assumptions about its users (and "users" in this sense reaches from Grandma to software developers).
Look, if Grandma uses a computer preinstalled with, say, Ubuntu, and enables some auto update program, she doesn't get prompted to reboot the computer every other week just to fix a web browser vulnerability.
The only meaningful difference between a "reboot" and a hardware failure is the amount of warning. I'll say it again. If your business continuity is vulnerable to individual machine outages (be they from reboots or motherboards going up in smoke), then it's broken. Period. If you can't afford "multiple machine redundancy" then you don't need 24/7 uptime. If you don't need 24/7 uptime, then either scheduled machine reboots (eg: for patching) are irrelevant, or brief outages are acceptable.
Any sysadmin who thinks he can run a high-availability operation without multiple machine redundancy is incompetent. Any sysadmin who is purporting to do so, is grossly negligent. The fact that there's a hell of a lot of people whose Linux (and UNIX in general) bias puts them into these categories, does not make them any less incompetent or negligent.
False dichotomy. There aren't only two groups of people
"why does this matter?" The only time I ever see Javascript run too slow or tax my CPU is when it's buggy Because you're probably using a relatively fast machine, and most (good) web designers have to cater for those still running PIIIs. They're limiting the features put into their Javascript code because Javascript is slow. If Javascript runs faster, then it opens up more possibilities for a "richer" web experience (for the better or the worse, depending on whether you buy into those Web2.0 stuff).
Maybe you don't use those so called "Web2.0" stuff. Maybe it's the problem of my machine, but even gmail feels a bit slow and I'd be happy if it speeds up a bit.
What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash The Firefox people don't make Flash, ask Adobe.
Not all passwords are passed through the HTTP(S) protocol. Sometimes it's passed through the "higher" application layer. And sometimes you don't trust the webserver with your data/passwords. etc.
Not that I'm buying into all the AJAX/Web2.0 craze (though admittedly I've been involved in some "Web2.0" stuff a while ago), but given the amount of applications out there that runs on your browser, not having "higher level" crypto capabilities is simply disabling. I really can't recall the number of times I've come across a problem and thought "man, it'd be sure nice if I had some working crypto functions in Javascript..."
There *are* situations in which I would find crypto useful in Javascript. Particularly public key crypto systems. With all the AJAX fever these days, there are times when I actually don't trust the webserver, but I need to communicate across this bloated HTTP/HTML/XML channel to some other third party, and since there are no builtin JS crypto functions, and JS was traditionally horrendously slow, it just wouldn't work.
A rather obscure example would be an (ajax) online chatroom. You don't want your plans for world domination to be logged by the webserver...
A better example would be PGP-compatible signatures/encryption for webmail. Obviously doing all the work on the host's servers defeat the purpose. If you're going to have PGP/GPG on a webmail system, all the crypto stuff has to be done on the client.
Not to mention the possibility of encrypting all those love letters that you type in Google docs....
The biggest things separating the people who suffer from depression from those who don't are:
1) Healthy Diet 2) Healthy amount of sleep 3) Healthy amount of exercise/activity I'll assume your raw data is correct. Yet I'm not sure whether your claimed implications are correct. Sure, the cause might be those that you listed. But then it works the other way too:
1) Person gets depressed 2) Person loses interest in living a healthy life 3) Person adapts an unhealthy diet, loses sleep due to depression, and is too depressed to exercise.
And before you say "but you can choose to live a more healthy life!" I suggest you read what some other posters are saying.
I've suffered from depression, but I didn't go to a doctor because I knew it would pass eventually - IF I took care of myself. There's a difference between "feeling down" and "clinical depression". Those that "passes eventually" usually belong to the former, whereas the latter is usually diagnosed by a doctor or some other professional. No offense but I think you don't know what the topic is about...
Unless you can claim you have control over feelings like pain and hunger. I'm undecided on whether there's control over what you do with those feelings (this basically goes to the "free will" question), but to say that one can control whether to feel sad is to trivialize those that are depressed...
A logic puzzle: if you believe that you have control over what you feel, then why is rape so bad (emotionally) since the victim can always "think away" all her emotional problems and brush it off by thinking that she (or he) simply had sex with her/his biggest crush?
Disclaimer: I am not trivializing rape. I'm simply pointing out what I believe is a logical flaw in your argument.
On the one hand, I don't want myself to be subjected to the same overpowered government that the Chinese citizens must bear, that's selfish and fine, how could you possibly argue otherwise? A rather small point, but I don't see how you'd be subjected to the same overpowered government, unless your own government "degenerates" into a similar regime. I dunno, maybe some Americans are sht scared that the Chinese may one day invade USA? Well let me tell you that although China may be somewhat aggressive to neighboring/border regions (Taiwan, Tibet), I cannot foresee any possibility that China would be interested in physically invading the USA. Not because the Chinese probably won't win, but because there's simply nothing to gain from trying to overtake a piece of land on the other side of the planet... (ok, I'd be happy to assume that you were against the Iraq war etc. from the very beginning... well, welcome to the rest of the world.)
misconception... that the current administration is the US A similar misconception some people have towards the Chinese government is that the crazy government during the Cultural Revolution era, is the same Chinese government today. Not that your point is invalid, just something that came to my mind when I read this.
I have no problem letting the government do something I want it to do, even if not for the same reason. Here's another bad analogy of mine: Suppose you hear a knock on the door, you answer it and see two people. One is your friend, and another is the big bad bully from your neighborhood, and you know he's up to no good. Do you let them in? Well the obvious answer is to let your friend in while shunting out the fiend, but in real life it's not that easy to differentiate between people with good/bad intentions. And with so many people in the world having an opinion in Chinese "internal" politics/policies (you might have heard how many people are claiming to boycott Beijing Olympics 2008 for political reasons), it's just easier to say, "fsck off" than to do a detailed background check on everybody...
I'm not try to disguise my selfish desire for not living under a hand of tyranny by dressing up my presentation with a care for human decency. (emphasis mine, obviously) My impression is that many do.:-/
I have nothing to gain by advocating for freedom and prosperity for more human beings other than trying to raise awareness that might initiate real change, positive change. (emphasis mine, obviously) This statement entrenches my impression.:-/ I thought you admitted to some "selfish" intentions besides these "selfless" ones? (See quote right above this one)
Sigh.
Sometimes people respond to my posts saying that it's all the fault of the current US administration, blah blah blah, we "Americans" are not like that, we are good people, etc. Well, knowing that your administration is bad doesn't automatically make you "good". It's not even something to be proud of, since apparently the "Americans" were generally the last ones on this planet to see that the Iraq thing wasn't a good idea.
You wrote a long reply to my post, and I'm very grateful that you took the time to write up the reply. But did you really try to understand what I was trying to say? I wasn't saying that the GWBush administration is bad (we all know that, and we all can agree on that), I'm not saying that you (or like minded people) are bad. I'm simply asking you to think through why you are apparently so interested in what's happening inside China, and why you are apparently so interested in changing what's going on in there. And unless I've misunderstood something, the above two quotes indicate that you haven't fully understood my message.
PS: Oh, and I never intended to say that the USA is "bad"... what's with all the Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib references?
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Note that I said "fair chance" instead of "will", but that's still better than close source products where you have to trust a single vendor for everything.
Besides, take the Linux kernel as an example. Linus releases the vanilla kernel, which is already being worked on by hundreds of people, dozens of distributions add patches to the vanilla kernel and package it, etc. You don't have to trust Linus for anything... you just need to trust the majority of (non-affiliated) kernel developers that they aren't going to spot a rootkit in the kernel and not speak up about it.
Of course, your distro can insert malicious code between their patches to upstream code... but the amount of code is relatively much smaller, and I think there is a hope of auditing that piece of code for the truly paranoid.
Most tools that lack GUI in Linux fall under your category.
But then I really don't think there are GUI tools which could replace the bash shell (and commands like grep/sed/awk/etc) for example....
The only reasonable explanation to this logic is that they already had their conclusion (that Linux is inferior to Windows), and their "reasons" are merely to give an impression that they weren't biased.
This is the flamebait response: Since when *didn't* you have to download extra drivers to fully utilize your shiny display card on Windows?
This is the reasonable response: MP3 players are not in Linux because the patent holder charges a royalty for every MP3 player distributed. It's not like the Fedora guys tossed out MP3 functionality simply for "purity" (but that's what Debian does), but because they're not going to pay the royalty for you. You didn't pay for Fedora/Ubuntu did you?
Funny how people bitch about "shortcomings" of Linux when they're just lazy and don't bother to download a few files from the Internet, and then fill their windows installation with dozens of third party apps (usually cracked?) which, *surprise*, they download off the Internet. And funny how you bitch about the "warning" dialogs when in Vista they have like seven dialogs when you run a downloaded executable...
I agree with your general point of X being the weakest link though. My personal hypothesis is that it was hindered greatly by XFree for years until X.org came together.
Mircosoft does a lot of bad things, but giving away software is not one of them. Their competitors (various open source projects) give away much higher quality code for free. Every time Microsoft tries to add a new feature, they get their asses sued off by every company that hacked in that new feature before, and are now charging ridiculous amounts of money for it.
As mentioned by many others, they don't "give away software" (for free). The problem is that they are forcing Windows customers to subsidize development costs of IE, WMP and other "bundled" apps even if they don't want to. If Microsoft reduced the price of Windows, and covered development costs of IE,WMP,etc by selling those software as separate packages like everybody else, the market would instantly become MUCH more competitive.
Your post was consistent with criminal sanctions (I don't see "civil suit", "class action" anywhere in your original post). I don't read crystal balls.
Besides, potential civil liability sometimes simply isn't enough detriment. Since the money goes to the plaintiffs if they succeed, they will be awarded an amount of at least what they have lost due to the defendant's wrongdoings, and maybe a bit more punitive damages, but not a HUGE windfall.
Say if the organization is Microsoft, and the damages in the class action suit sums up to some hundreds of millions. They can simply write it off. But if the liability was criminal then the court could potentially give a fine that really hurts. That's where the detriment comes in.
Your comments on penalties, if correct, would render the whole criminal system useless. eg. "Penalties for murder don't help the individuals who were murdered."
And why is targeted advertising bad? I'd rather see ads that I'm genuinely interested in, instead of Viagra ads.
Good question.
I've been discussing personal freedom and rights with a friend who's moved to the USA for a few years. What strikes me was a line he said: "It's not 1984 yet".
To me it's evidence of a wrong focus. When defending our civic rights we shouldn't be aiming to avoid the things *specifically* in 1984 (and ignoring other more relevant things), but understanding how the whole system works, and why. I'd bet the whole "Terrorism" thing wouldn't have happened if there was a similar plot in 1984....
The disclaimer is that I haven't read 1984, but from what I've heard and know about it, 1984 to politics is like The Matrix is to science.
Wake up.
Nobody gives a d@mn on what you're doing.
Nobody is going to spend time "monitoring" you.
On slashdot people like to reply to individual paragraphs with short and witty comments. And forget about the original point. The original point was that MS Windows makes rebooting the "default" fix, regardless of the problem, whereas in Linux there are usually other valid options. We're talking about technical merits here, for discussion sake (we're on slashdot after all), and I don't care what your PHB boss thinks.
It's easy to start a flamewar by nit-picking individual sentences or paragraphs.
I don't understand why the 'monolithic nature" of the linux kernel and the large amount of drivers mean anything. Do you upgrade the kernel every time a new USB webcam driver is updated?
I live in Hong Kong. And particularly in an area where there is a relatively high concentration of foreigners take residence.
There is an interesting phenomenon where people get on/off taxi's. Since roads in Hong Kong are REALLY narrow, a single vehicle stopping sometimes blocks the whole traffic behind, so to avoid being stared at we generally try to get off the taxi with as little fuss as possible. With local Hong Kong (Chinese ethnicity) people, the time taken to pay the driver, get change and get off can be as short as 5-10 seconds. If a taxi stops for more than half a minute without anybody getting out, it's a good bet that a "foreigner" is there. (By "foreigner" I don't mean tourists who are confused with local currency etc...)
I'm definitely not trying to be a racist here (well unless you consider the parent post to be racist too), just mentioning the fact that maybe Chinese people tend to be a bit quicker in pace than their western counterparts. (I dunno, or maybe it's just that they aren't aware of the impatient stares of a dozen vehicles behind them?)
Let me introduce some relativism here.
For the Windows crowd:
Before Win2k:
Win95/98: Reboot every few hours.
WinME: Reboot every hour.
After Win2k:
Reboot every few days.
Conclusion:
"Frequent" reboots are not required.
For the *NIX crowd:
Under *NIx:
Reboot after a blackout.
After Win2k:
Reboot every few days.
Conclusion:
Reboots are "EXTREMELY COMMON"!!
I know most businessmen are not interested in "wtf is wrong". And I agree. They shouldn't be. That's not their business. It's the engineers and technicians to find out the cause of the problem, and to avoid having the problem again. If nobody finds out the cause of the problem, chances are that the problem will come up again and again, sometimes with increasing frequency, that your supposed 99.9999% slowly becomes 99.999% then 99.99%, etc...
Throwing more machines (or money) to the problem doesn't always work, despite what they taught you in business school. If the cause is a software error, and if it can be triggered simutaneously across a couple of so-called "redundant" machines, then you're fscked anyway. Let's say a bug makes the machine fail at Monday midnight (maybe a messed up cron job?). Do you simply "DO IT", reboot and forget about the problem?
And this.... I have no idea how you got to this conclusion: When thousands of dollars (or more) are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable[0], you don't fuck around with idiotic philosophising about how "its UNIX, I shouldn't need to reboot for anything"[1], you just DO IT. When thousands of dollars are being lost every minute that a service is unavailable, you just DON'T TOUCH THE DAMN THING FOR NO GOOD REASON. Rebooting the machine because a minor update fixes a BROWSER bug is a fscking bad reason to reboot a machine, even if you have 10 of them chugging along.
Yes you just reboot it (i.e. "DO IT") if you're messed up enough to rely on inherently unreliable systems under critical environments, but the discussion we're having now is not "how to respond to a failing machine on critical systems" but how to avoid these situations in the first place. I've been there myself and had arguments with my (at the time) boss about it. It is the difference between how geeks think and how businesspeople think. You're right. But there's no necessary conflict. The right thing to do is not "reboot the damn thing and forget about it", the right thing is to "reboot the damn thing and find out the cause of the problem afterwards".
This is simply not true.
Yes, it is. People who use Windows, when using Linux, are going to respond exactly the same way to problems - by rebooting.
Well you have to look at the other way round. People who use Linux, when using Windows, respond to problems by rebooting, sometimes after researching for the "real fix" and gets told by MSKB to do exactly that.
Anyone that's ever installed software, or run "windows update" knows that rebooting is a very likely part of this process. The dependencies and non-modular approach of Windows are quite apparent. Software vendors say "just reboot" because of all the complexities and dependencies within windows.
No, they do it because it's a simple step for the ignorant end user to understand.
I hope you're not the ignorant one here. Are you sure you understand the fundamental differences in handling libraries (DLL's/shared objects) in Windows and Linux? The architecture of Windows makes it extremely difficult to upgrade libraries safely without a reboot, whereas in Linux there's basically no special handling required. An "ignorant user" in Linux can simply type "apt-get upgrade" (or yum or whatever) and expect things to be done perfectly. Without a reboot. This simply isn't the case for Windows.
I've been administrating Linux machines for 13+ years. I can count on one hand the number of times a reboot solved any problem. The only class of problem this solved is a kernel bug, or the kernel crashing (usually from a hardware problem).
Not done much work with NFS then, I take it ? Or services that have long timeout periods and don't die nicely ?
I struggle to believe anyone has been using Linux for "13+ years" and can only "count on one hand the number of times a reboot solved any problem". Either you've not used Linux anything close to "13+ years" or you've not used it in a very wide range of situations.
I've only worked on Linux for a few years, and I've seen NFS lockups (IIRC). It's not pretty but it doesn't fsck up the machine, and usually resolves OK when the timeouts expire. If they don't, then that's a kernel bug. What's your point?
I'd say the GP is correct by definition. Anything that by design *requires* a reboot other than a kernel upgrade is by default a problem of the kernel. I think this holds for most *nix systems which prides itself for stability.
On the other hand how many times have you been forced to reboot after a trivial "Windows Update", brought to you by none other than Microsoft itself?
The point is that Linux simply has less "good reasons", and requires less reboots. Linux requires FAR less reboots for "patching".
Linux also makes a lot more assumptions about its users (and "users" in this sense reaches from Grandma to software developers).
Look, if Grandma uses a computer preinstalled with, say, Ubuntu, and enables some auto update program, she doesn't get prompted to reboot the computer every other week just to fix a web browser vulnerability.
The only meaningful difference between a "reboot" and a hardware failure is the amount of warning. I'll say it again. If your business continuity is vulnerable to individual machine outages (be they from reboots or motherboards going up in smoke), then it's broken. Period. If you can't afford "multiple machine redundancy" then you don't need 24/7 uptime. If you don't need 24/7 uptime, then either scheduled machine reboots (eg: for patching) are irrelevant, or brief outages are acceptable.
Any sysadmin who thinks he can run a high-availability operation without multiple machine redundancy is incompetent. Any sysadmin who is purporting to do so, is grossly negligent. The fact that there's a hell of a lot of people whose Linux (and UNIX in general) bias puts them into these categories, does not make them any less incompetent or negligent.
False dichotomy. There aren't only two groups of people
Maybe you don't use those so called "Web2.0" stuff. Maybe it's the problem of my machine, but even gmail feels a bit slow and I'd be happy if it speeds up a bit. What matters to me is the imperfect implementation of Flash The Firefox people don't make Flash, ask Adobe.
Not all passwords are passed through the HTTP(S) protocol. Sometimes it's passed through the "higher" application layer. And sometimes you don't trust the webserver with your data/passwords. etc.
Not that I'm buying into all the AJAX/Web2.0 craze (though admittedly I've been involved in some "Web2.0" stuff a while ago), but given the amount of applications out there that runs on your browser, not having "higher level" crypto capabilities is simply disabling. I really can't recall the number of times I've come across a problem and thought "man, it'd be sure nice if I had some working crypto functions in Javascript..."
See my other post for some examples.
There *are* situations in which I would find crypto useful in Javascript. Particularly public key crypto systems. With all the AJAX fever these days, there are times when I actually don't trust the webserver, but I need to communicate across this bloated HTTP/HTML/XML channel to some other third party, and since there are no builtin JS crypto functions, and JS was traditionally horrendously slow, it just wouldn't work.
A rather obscure example would be an (ajax) online chatroom. You don't want your plans for world domination to be logged by the webserver...
A better example would be PGP-compatible signatures/encryption for webmail. Obviously doing all the work on the host's servers defeat the purpose. If you're going to have PGP/GPG on a webmail system, all the crypto stuff has to be done on the client.
Not to mention the possibility of encrypting all those love letters that you type in Google docs....
1) Healthy Diet
2) Healthy amount of sleep
3) Healthy amount of exercise/activity I'll assume your raw data is correct. Yet I'm not sure whether your claimed implications are correct. Sure, the cause might be those that you listed. But then it works the other way too:
1) Person gets depressed
2) Person loses interest in living a healthy life
3) Person adapts an unhealthy diet, loses sleep due to depression, and is too depressed to exercise.
And before you say "but you can choose to live a more healthy life!" I suggest you read what some other posters are saying. I've suffered from depression, but I didn't go to a doctor because I knew it would pass eventually - IF I took care of myself. There's a difference between "feeling down" and "clinical depression". Those that "passes eventually" usually belong to the former, whereas the latter is usually diagnosed by a doctor or some other professional. No offense but I think you don't know what the topic is about...
> one scenario you have control over
Unless you can claim you have control over feelings like pain and hunger. I'm undecided on whether there's control over what you do with those feelings (this basically goes to the "free will" question), but to say that one can control whether to feel sad is to trivialize those that are depressed...
A logic puzzle: if you believe that you have control over what you feel, then why is rape so bad (emotionally) since the victim can always "think away" all her emotional problems and brush it off by thinking that she (or he) simply had sex with her/his biggest crush?
Disclaimer: I am not trivializing rape. I'm simply pointing out what I believe is a logical flaw in your argument.
You obviously overlook the flamewars he started...
:)
Emacs vs Vi
GPL vs BSDL
GNU/Linux vs Linux
Free vs Open Source
etc etc...
Not that I'm trying to discredit his contributions to Free/Opensource Software, but a "peace" award might be a bit off the mark
Hi fellow slashdotters!!
You might be interested in knowing what the author of TFA thinks about his article and the discussion here
Sigh.
Sometimes people respond to my posts saying that it's all the fault of the current US administration, blah blah blah, we "Americans" are not like that, we are good people, etc. Well, knowing that your administration is bad doesn't automatically make you "good". It's not even something to be proud of, since apparently the "Americans" were generally the last ones on this planet to see that the Iraq thing wasn't a good idea.
You wrote a long reply to my post, and I'm very grateful that you took the time to write up the reply. But did you really try to understand what I was trying to say? I wasn't saying that the GWBush administration is bad (we all know that, and we all can agree on that), I'm not saying that you (or like minded people) are bad. I'm simply asking you to think through why you are apparently so interested in what's happening inside China, and why you are apparently so interested in changing what's going on in there. And unless I've misunderstood something, the above two quotes indicate that you haven't fully understood my message.
PS: Oh, and I never intended to say that the USA is "bad"... what's with all the Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib references?