It's hardly a "Microsoft" solution, it's the solution on essentially every platform except Linux (or those using software primarily derived from Linux sources).
That's because Linux implemented a proper solution first, you dumbass. Everyone else is far behind.
Your definition of "third party" is broken.
No, it is not. For the user there should be no distinction between components provides by OS vendor and by everyone else.
Well that's the problem with foaming zealots. You can never be sure when they're serious.
Microsoft fanboys call everyone else zealots.
Name some.
HP printer drivers. A whole CD of dependencies. Surprisingly, HP maintains software with the same functionality for Linux -- in packaged form it has no built-in dependencies, and properly interacts with CUPS, SANE, KDE, GNOME and every frontend in existence.
Perhaps you missed the point of %PROGRAMFILES\Common Files, or just %SYSTEMROOT%\System[32] for poorly written applications.
I don't think, you recognize anything you are supposedly arguing with. To be honest, I can't even determine which part of things you actually know anything about because you bring up random facts about Windows installation mechanism, that have absolutely nothing to do with its deficiencies I am talking about. Are you just trying to get the last word by sprinkling some idiotic statements with insults? It doesn't work that way.
For a counter-example, Apple (shockingly enough, given their history of Windows software) put a set of DLLs used by their applications in %PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support.
This is exactly the problem -- same DLLs of slightly different versions end up in multiple locations. Then, when applications run, DLLs are simultaneously mapped into multiple location in memory. As context switches between processes, there is no performance gain from reusing library image in RAM that would happen otherwise, and that was the reason for creating dynamic libraries in the first place (CPU cache lines can persist across context switches, less page-out/page-in of read-only pages when memory is full, etc).
Or did you think, it's all harmless as long as you have enough memory?
That's because you're so desparate to go Windows-bashing you ignored the actual topic of discussion.
Let me refresh your memory:
Someone (not me) said:
Package management in the rpm sense also means to me easier control for the sysadmin to be able to install/uninstall software. The greatest feature is batch non-interactive installs/upgrades. You simply do not have this with commercial software.
You replied:
You can absolutely do batch and non-interactive installs with MSI (and other third-party Windows installation systems). Active Directory and Group Policy can do software distribution for anything that's an MSI, and there are third-party solutions for apps without MSI installers.
I replied: Packaging system has nothing to do with non-interactive installation. The fact that interactive installers exist, just shows how idiotic the whole Windows software distribution model is.
So first and foremost , you are arguing with the wrong person.
Second, you have claimed:
Hate to break it to you, but 'apt-get install blah' or 'yum install blah' are interactive.
and then went on a long chain of rebuttals "explaining" that you can still call package managers "interactive" because they can run interactively by the user.
I guess, this was intended to somehow counter my position that existence of interactive installers is broken. This means, you are either too stupid or pretend to be too stupid to realize the obviou
Face it, if you believe in the concept of democracy, you have to accept that stupid people will govern themselves stupidly.
"Democracy" does not go that far. Society has to have a way to oppress a small bunch of fuckheads that act against the interests of much larger group by overriding decisions made far above the level they are supposed to govern.
Er, yeah, that's kind of the point. The solution to dependency hell is a properly controlled set of stable, binary compatible (forwards and backwards) base libraries,
Typical Microsoft -- solution to progress creating problem is to stop progress.
and standardised locations for third parties to install their own.
There are no "third parties" (unsupported second class citizens) in a properly designed system.
Uh huh. Even our whole install point for Office 2007 is less than a gig, and I can see at least a dozen "trivial applications" in our software distribution share whose installers are less than 20MB.
Exaggeration apparently is completely lost on you. 20M for an application that has 100K of original code is not acceptable in any sanely developed system -- considering that all this code will end up separately loaded into memory.
Can you point to some examples of applications that do this ?
All of them. Try to find any dynamically linked library that is not shipped by Microsoft in any package that is known to use that library, and you will either find none (so it is statically linked) or a separate copy. And this happens with each and every application/library combination. This duplication causes performance degradation because CPU can't re-use library code in its cache across context switches.
Absolutely it does. You can automate and batch unattended installs. Individual application developers might write their application in such a way that you can't do that, but that's not the fault of Windows.
And those automated installs will still create massive amounts of duplicated copies of everything, or cause failures, or both. The fact they are running without you clicking on icons is absolutely irrelevant, I am talking about installers actually doing something useful.
Struggling to see the relevance between automating software installation and this.
This means, you are stupid.
Not to mention your scenario is also quite common with Linux VMs, in no small part because of dependency hell (though being able to run the ideal scenario of one service per server is also nice).
This only happens when those "Linux VMs" are administered by Windows admins such as yourself. Using VM as a replacement for package manager is a typical Windows technique, that exists because Windows has no usable package manager. Obviously Windows admins do it on Linux for the same purpose.
That using yum (or whatever) on Linux to install something is an interactive task.
Stop bringing up this stupid strawman, this is completely irrelevant to anything I am talking about. init can be run interactively -- does it matter, too?
What's even better is when you have a platform that doesn't need to do all that work in the first place, because it actually has some understanding of "standard functionality" and "binary compatibility".
Windows does not have such thing, unless you are talking about compatibility between Microsoft products with other Microsoft products of the same generation.
Yet strangely you've described an implementation of the standard practice I've been using for around a decade, across Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux servers.
On Windows, if Microsoft-sanctioned update breaks anything, you have only two choices -- not to update, or break and replace everything. Without a package manager on any system you have to manually produce a consistent configuration on every such update, what takes entirety of sysadmin's time. With package manager sysadmin most of the time relies on updates and only occasionally has to perform configuration that he didn't initiate himself.
I can understand if you're caught up in the Linux mindset of "updating
Something that happens quite rarely these days, which is my point.
Only because libraries are now are either Microsoft products, or everything is tied to the executables -- they can just as well be statically linked now.
Can you give some examples of "trivial programs being distributed as 1G packages"
Each and every piece of software released after 2000.
, and/or common, contemporary software that has or causes DLL conflicts ?
Only because they all come with their own copy of everything, and it stays that way in memory, causing performance problems. How many copies of, say, JPEG library do you have in your RAM right now?
And.... Your point is ?
My point is, Windows does not have it. If it did, people would not have 8-core boxes running 10 VMWare instances, each running a single "server" product.
I'm responsible for a couple of hundred Linux machines, I probably run yum at least once a day, on average. Admittedly I don't use apt much since we're pretty much completely a CentOS/RHEL shop
Then you are incompetent at your job.
, but I have some personal VMs with Ubuntu installed.
Oh wow.
Which is relevant how, exactly ? My point was that and end user using those tools to install or update software *is an interactive task*. The fact that they can also be scripted to do stuff as well is utterly irrelevant.
What the Hell are you arguing about? If you run a single, customized desktop installation, you would want update started manually and running interactively. If you run large number of boxes with predictable or identical configuration, you launch can have everything running with a cron job.
However if you are a competent sysadmin maintaining a large system, you run the update on a staging box, check if it is safe to run with default settings on production hosts, then run cssh to update everything at once (possibly after some other updates that you find necessary -- you may, for example, revert some customization, produce pre-merged configuration, etc). Anything less is unsafe -- you either delay security-related fixes or apply upgrades that may be incompatible with your setup. Anything more wastes time that can be used for something more productive.
Windows is so far behind this, "sysadmins" like you can't even imagine what responsible maintenance procedure looks like. "Interactivity" and "scripting" are of about the same relevance as the color of the box installation media came in -- what matters is the amount of work package manager does to keep things consistent, so human doesn't have to.
And you seem completely incapable of actually understanding and contributing anything to the discussion except rhetoric and comical exaggeration.
My understanding is that you are an experienced Windows sysadmin (a.k.a. VMWare jockey), who does not realize that it's possible to have efficient and straightforward package manager and reliable installation and update procedure, so he makes idiotic claims about irrelevant details.
In email there is no fundamental difference between "message" and "attachments" -- email may be single-part or multi-part, and parts may be of various types identified by MIME headers. Mail readers display text and HTML parts of the message (or only first such part) as the "message" and everything else as "attachments", however it's up to the mail client (or webmail server) to choose how and what to show to the user.
Then Windows users have strange definition of a "problem". Every time one has to combine products that use incompatible versions of libraries, havoc ensues unless each products drags absolutely everything with itself. It became easier for software vendors to distribute trivial programs as 1G packages, however users still have to deal with incompatibilities and duplication of everything at runtime.
I think you need to complain to the poster I was replying to. He was the one using automated installation as an example of why a packaging system is good.
"Automated" means that it handles dependencies, configuration and resolves conflicting settings.
Hate to break it to you, but 'apt-get install blah' or 'yum install blah' are interactive.
You obviously never used those tools. They have interactive mode used to give the user choice of settings and merge user-modified configuration with modifications in a package, however both can (and should) be turned off when performed unattended or when user intends to always rely on updates in the package.
Interactivity is not the issue in the first place -- you seem to unable to realize that functionality is not the same as presence or absence of user interface doodads.
Er, yeah. That ceased being a real issue back around the 1997-98 timeframe.
Really?
The "platform" exists, it's called Windows Update.
I see, you work at Microsoft.
You can absolutely do batch and non-interactive installs with MSI (and other third-party Windows installation systems). Active Directory and Group Policy can do software distribution for anything that's an MSI, and there are third-party solutions for apps without MSI installers.
Packaging system has nothing to do with non-interactive installation. The fact that interactive installers exist, just shows how idiotic the whole Windows software distribution model is.
That would require a huge amount of resources, far beyond anything used existing mail services, webmail or otherwise. A much more sane approach would be to process everything with a very simple HTML parser that only recognizes "legitimate" tags and stylesheets, extract and sanitize all text, then re-assemble the document using completely different tags and stylesheet, throwing away everything that is not text and marking all links in the same way Slashdot does it in comments. The "original" document can be available as a link/attachment, not identified as text/html, so browser won't try to render it.
Are you claiming that there are less people in US willing to mess with other people in US, than people in China willing to mess with people in US?
While recent trend is "steal locally, scam globally", malware usually originated from someone who is willing to benefit from scams, and US has no shortage of those people.
"From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by 33 percent"
That's between number of illiterate people in 2000 and number of illiterate people in 2005 one. If there were three illiterate adults in China in 2000 and four in 2005, that would be 33% increase.
Not if a "vector format" is a proprietary CAD format that can be only edited in a CAD that costs tens of thousands dollars to license. CAD viewing-only programs are notoriously bad at printing and usually only available for Windows, so on any other OS you also have to deal with emulation or virtual machines just to see the drawing.
PDF is actually great for EPS pseudo-encapsulation -- any "print to PDF" program that uses Ghostscript as its engine, does a reasonably good job at converting vector formats.
I would really love to be able to run the resulting MP3 or WAV files through some software a get a text file out. I know that software like this exists commercially.
No. Automated arbitrary speech recognition is an unsolved problem -- all voice recognition systems require speaker to make an effort to pronounce words clearly, or make the number of mistakes that take more effort to fix than to write manually.
It will make more sense to write a transcription assistance software -- an equivalent to the tape player with a foot pedal commonly used for this purpose, except with capability to play and repeat short sequences of words or phrases, speed adjustment, etc.
And then you will have to determine how to comment it in some obfuscated sequence of comments, quotes and escapes that may or may not be formally valid and may or may not produce consistent results in multiple rendering engines.
The state of journalism is really sad. So much focus on scandals, not enough on important stories. So much focus on whether politicians' rhetoric is being successful in moving the polls, not enough on whether the politicians' actions are helping people.
It's called "human interest stories". Everything is supposed to be focused around few pretty faces. Journalists elevate personal feelings and achievements of individuals above significance and consequences of those individuals' actions. They can't explain what some scientific discovery, achievement in technology, natural disaster, decision of politicians or any other newsworthy event means in a way relevant to their audience, so they expect that audience will out of the blue care about participants' emotions. With this approach all they can do is to talk nonstop about popular actors, as those are the only people whose overblown display of emotion has any significance for the public.
The only imaginable goal of this is to provide driver-level compatibility without writing any new software. What would be utterly pointless on anything but Windows.
I herd, you like Windows drivers, so we have put a low-level low-latency bus protocol supported by Windows driver on top of a low-reliability high-latency protocol supported by Windows driver, so you can use Windows drivers while you use Windows drivers.
Seriously, there is no excuse for this, other than providing this kind of illusory compatibility. Properly engineered systems have protocols optimized to efficiently use media throughput while taking latency into account. This thing can be best described as DMA over Jenga.
Would it actually work that way with schoolkids in a hostile environment?
More likely a bully would not even understand that a person is trying to defuse the situation. Bully's perception of his own role within a group always trumps any individual's actions, so bully will only stop if he is unsuccessful in his attacks (he can't fulfill his own perceived role), or an authority figure stops it (authority figure has a different role that bully accepts as superior). It might help if "bully" actually acts as an enforcer of existing social hierarchy, however antisocial bully will not even notice anything being communicated, once a target is chosen.
That is a lie, or at best, you are mistaken. But stating it as fact when you are wrong makes you a liar of a special sort, the kind who runs his mouth when he does not know what he is talking about.
There is a very fundamental difference between a word being used once in some conversation, and a term that is published and accepted in general use by a worldwide community.
The only reference in the linked text that can in any way be verified, is to Caldera press release that reads:
Caldera enables its partners to integrate stable, low-cost Internet devices with the most powerful Internet server platforms and commercial add-on products. Caldera's support for the open-source code model provides partners with maximum flexibility in providing more complete product and service solutions.
Individuals can use OpenDOS source for personal use at no cost. Individuals and organizations desiring to commercially redistribute Caldera OpenDOS must acquire a license with an associated small fee.
This is very far from anything that "Open Source" meant at any point, and in this form it was not used by anyone before or after that release.
The term "Open" has been used in computing since long before ESR's problem with a printer driver.
"Open" was, and is used to describe things that have nothing to do with open source.
Open means interoperable. Full stop.
"Open" is not the same as "Open Source".
Caldera used the term "Open Source" to mean "you can get the source" over a year before Bruce even claims to have invented the term, and almost two years before anyone else claims that he invented it.
Caldera did not establish any kind of definition -- it used the same words once, to describe something completely different. It did not produce any kind of established meaning, either in its own documents or as a term accepted by anyone else.
Your view of history is revisionistic at best and if you continue to promote it I will conclude that you have a vested interest in Perens being named as the coiner of the phrase. Please further note that ESR does not claim the term, only to have been present at the meeting at VA Software where it was supposedly invented, a full year after I can find the term being used in a press release from Caldera.
I care about preventing subversion of established terms that describe ideas and principles important in the modern culture. Any particular person's role in this is insignificant compared to the effect of establishing the term.
Open source was not a term that was in use before the the open source definition. It was described as "comes with source code" or "source code available" or similar.
No.
Open Source, as applied to software, was never in use before Eric Raymond/Open Source Initiative started using it. The term "Open Source" was invented to be distinct from more strict definition of "Free Software". Please note that similar definition used by the other OSI founder, Bruce Perens, is called "Debian Free Software Guidelines" and does not mention anything "open" -- when it was created, the term Open Source Software did not exist.
The term "Open" (without "source") was routinely applied to software that is most definitely closed source (for example, everything by Open Systems Foundation), and has absolutely nothing to do with Open Source.
So wait, you recommend kids to learn something that will remain ineffective for the whole time they will need it, and will become effective at the time they will become adults, and therefore will have easier ways to avoid being attacked?
Wouldn't that be the most useless, stupid and irresponsible advice imaginable?
Slashdot Mirror
It's hardly a "Microsoft" solution, it's the solution on essentially every platform except Linux (or those using software primarily derived from Linux sources).
That's because Linux implemented a proper solution first, you dumbass. Everyone else is far behind.
Your definition of "third party" is broken.
No, it is not. For the user there should be no distinction between components provides by OS vendor and by everyone else.
Well that's the problem with foaming zealots. You can never be sure when they're serious.
Microsoft fanboys call everyone else zealots.
Name some.
HP printer drivers. A whole CD of dependencies. Surprisingly, HP maintains software with the same functionality for Linux -- in packaged form it has no built-in dependencies, and properly interacts with CUPS, SANE, KDE, GNOME and every frontend in existence.
Perhaps you missed the point of %PROGRAMFILES\Common Files, or just %SYSTEMROOT%\System[32] for poorly written applications.
I don't think, you recognize anything you are supposedly arguing with. To be honest, I can't even determine which part of things you actually know anything about because you bring up random facts about Windows installation mechanism, that have absolutely nothing to do with its deficiencies I am talking about. Are you just trying to get the last word by sprinkling some idiotic statements with insults? It doesn't work that way.
For a counter-example, Apple (shockingly enough, given their history of Windows software) put a set of DLLs used by their applications in %PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support.
This is exactly the problem -- same DLLs of slightly different versions end up in multiple locations. Then, when applications run, DLLs are simultaneously mapped into multiple location in memory. As context switches between processes, there is no performance gain from reusing library image in RAM that would happen otherwise, and that was the reason for creating dynamic libraries in the first place (CPU cache lines can persist across context switches, less page-out/page-in of read-only pages when memory is full, etc).
Or did you think, it's all harmless as long as you have enough memory?
That's because you're so desparate to go Windows-bashing you ignored the actual topic of discussion.
Let me refresh your memory:
Someone (not me) said:
Package management in the rpm sense also means to me easier control for the sysadmin to be able to install/uninstall software. The greatest feature is batch non-interactive installs/upgrades. You simply do not have this with commercial software.
You replied:
You can absolutely do batch and non-interactive installs with MSI (and other third-party Windows installation systems). Active Directory and Group Policy can do software distribution for anything that's an MSI, and there are third-party solutions for apps without MSI installers.
I replied:
Packaging system has nothing to do with non-interactive installation. The fact that interactive installers exist, just shows how idiotic the whole Windows software distribution model is.
So first and foremost , you are arguing with the wrong person.
Second, you have claimed:
Hate to break it to you, but 'apt-get install blah' or 'yum install blah' are interactive.
and then went on a long chain of rebuttals "explaining" that you can still call package managers "interactive" because they can run interactively by the user.
I guess, this was intended to somehow counter my position that existence of interactive installers is broken. This means, you are either too stupid or pretend to be too stupid to realize the obviou
Face it, if you believe in the concept of democracy, you have to accept that stupid people will govern themselves stupidly.
"Democracy" does not go that far. Society has to have a way to oppress a small bunch of fuckheads that act against the interests of much larger group by overriding decisions made far above the level they are supposed to govern.
Er, yeah, that's kind of the point. The solution to dependency hell is a properly controlled set of stable, binary compatible (forwards and backwards) base libraries,
Typical Microsoft -- solution to progress creating problem is to stop progress.
and standardised locations for third parties to install their own.
There are no "third parties" (unsupported second class citizens) in a properly designed system.
Uh huh. Even our whole install point for Office 2007 is less than a gig, and I can see at least a dozen "trivial applications" in our software distribution share whose installers are less than 20MB.
Exaggeration apparently is completely lost on you. 20M for an application that has 100K of original code is not acceptable in any sanely developed system -- considering that all this code will end up separately loaded into memory.
Can you point to some examples of applications that do this ?
All of them. Try to find any dynamically linked library that is not shipped by Microsoft in any package that is known to use that library, and you will either find none (so it is statically linked) or a separate copy. And this happens with each and every application/library combination. This duplication causes performance degradation because CPU can't re-use library code in its cache across context switches.
Absolutely it does. You can automate and batch unattended installs. Individual application developers might write their application in such a way that you can't do that, but that's not the fault of Windows.
And those automated installs will still create massive amounts of duplicated copies of everything, or cause failures, or both. The fact they are running without you clicking on icons is absolutely irrelevant, I am talking about installers actually doing something useful.
Struggling to see the relevance between automating software installation and this.
This means, you are stupid.
Not to mention your scenario is also quite common with Linux VMs, in no small part because of dependency hell (though being able to run the ideal scenario of one service per server is also nice).
This only happens when those "Linux VMs" are administered by Windows admins such as yourself. Using VM as a replacement for package manager is a typical Windows technique, that exists because Windows has no usable package manager. Obviously Windows admins do it on Linux for the same purpose.
That using yum (or whatever) on Linux to install something is an interactive task.
Stop bringing up this stupid strawman, this is completely irrelevant to anything I am talking about. init can be run interactively -- does it matter, too?
What's even better is when you have a platform that doesn't need to do all that work in the first place, because it actually has some understanding of "standard functionality" and "binary compatibility".
Windows does not have such thing, unless you are talking about compatibility between Microsoft products with other Microsoft products of the same generation.
Yet strangely you've described an implementation of the standard practice I've been using for around a decade, across Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux servers.
On Windows, if Microsoft-sanctioned update breaks anything, you have only two choices -- not to update, or break and replace everything. Without a package manager on any system you have to manually produce a consistent configuration on every such update, what takes entirety of sysadmin's time. With package manager sysadmin most of the time relies on updates and only occasionally has to perform configuration that he didn't initiate himself.
I can understand if you're caught up in the Linux mindset of "updating
Something that happens quite rarely these days, which is my point.
Only because libraries are now are either Microsoft products, or everything is tied to the executables -- they can just as well be statically linked now.
Can you give some examples of "trivial programs being distributed as 1G packages"
Each and every piece of software released after 2000.
, and/or common, contemporary software that has or causes DLL conflicts ?
Only because they all come with their own copy of everything, and it stays that way in memory, causing performance problems. How many copies of, say, JPEG library do you have in your RAM right now?
And.... Your point is ?
My point is, Windows does not have it. If it did, people would not have 8-core boxes running 10 VMWare instances, each running a single "server" product.
I'm responsible for a couple of hundred Linux machines, I probably run yum at least once a day, on average. Admittedly I don't use apt much since we're pretty much completely a CentOS/RHEL shop
Then you are incompetent at your job.
, but I have some personal VMs with Ubuntu installed.
Oh wow.
Which is relevant how, exactly ? My point was that and end user using those tools to install or update software *is an interactive task*. The fact that they can also be scripted to do stuff as well is utterly irrelevant.
What the Hell are you arguing about? If you run a single, customized desktop installation, you would want update started manually and running interactively. If you run large number of boxes with predictable or identical configuration, you launch can have everything running with a cron job.
However if you are a competent sysadmin maintaining a large system, you run the update on a staging box, check if it is safe to run with default settings on production hosts, then run cssh to update everything at once (possibly after some other updates that you find necessary -- you may, for example, revert some customization, produce pre-merged configuration, etc). Anything less is unsafe -- you either delay security-related fixes or apply upgrades that may be incompatible with your setup. Anything more wastes time that can be used for something more productive.
Windows is so far behind this, "sysadmins" like you can't even imagine what responsible maintenance procedure looks like. "Interactivity" and "scripting" are of about the same relevance as the color of the box installation media came in -- what matters is the amount of work package manager does to keep things consistent, so human doesn't have to.
And you seem completely incapable of actually understanding and contributing anything to the discussion except rhetoric and comical exaggeration.
My understanding is that you are an experienced Windows sysadmin (a.k.a. VMWare jockey), who does not realize that it's possible to have efficient and straightforward package manager and reliable installation and update procedure, so he makes idiotic claims about irrelevant details.
You mean, someone will buy those phones on ebay?
In email there is no fundamental difference between "message" and "attachments" -- email may be single-part or multi-part, and parts may be of various types identified by MIME headers. Mail readers display text and HTML parts of the message (or only first such part) as the "message" and everything else as "attachments", however it's up to the mail client (or webmail server) to choose how and what to show to the user.
As a common problem ? Absolutely.
Then Windows users have strange definition of a "problem". Every time one has to combine products that use incompatible versions of libraries, havoc ensues unless each products drags absolutely everything with itself. It became easier for software vendors to distribute trivial programs as 1G packages, however users still have to deal with incompatibilities and duplication of everything at runtime.
I think you need to complain to the poster I was replying to. He was the one using automated installation as an example of why a packaging system is good.
"Automated" means that it handles dependencies, configuration and resolves conflicting settings.
Hate to break it to you, but 'apt-get install blah' or 'yum install blah' are interactive.
You obviously never used those tools. They have interactive mode used to give the user choice of settings and merge user-modified configuration with modifications in a package, however both can (and should) be turned off when performed unattended or when user intends to always rely on updates in the package.
Interactivity is not the issue in the first place -- you seem to unable to realize that functionality is not the same as presence or absence of user interface doodads.
Er, yeah. That ceased being a real issue back around the 1997-98 timeframe.
Really?
The "platform" exists, it's called Windows Update.
I see, you work at Microsoft.
You can absolutely do batch and non-interactive installs with MSI (and other third-party Windows installation systems). Active Directory and Group Policy can do software distribution for anything that's an MSI, and there are third-party solutions for apps without MSI installers.
Packaging system has nothing to do with non-interactive installation. The fact that interactive installers exist, just shows how idiotic the whole Windows software distribution model is.
That would require a huge amount of resources, far beyond anything used existing mail services, webmail or otherwise. A much more sane approach would be to process everything with a very simple HTML parser that only recognizes "legitimate" tags and stylesheets, extract and sanitize all text, then re-assemble the document using completely different tags and stylesheet, throwing away everything that is not text and marking all links in the same way Slashdot does it in comments. The "original" document can be available as a link/attachment, not identified as text/html, so browser won't try to render it.
Are you claiming that there are less people in US willing to mess with other people in US, than people in China willing to mess with people in US?
While recent trend is "steal locally, scam globally", malware usually originated from someone who is willing to benefit from scams, and US has no shortage of those people.
"From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by 33 percent"
That's between number of illiterate people in 2000 and number of illiterate people in 2005 one. If there were three illiterate adults in China in 2000 and four in 2005, that would be 33% increase.
Not if a "vector format" is a proprietary CAD format that can be only edited in a CAD that costs tens of thousands dollars to license. CAD viewing-only programs are notoriously bad at printing and usually only available for Windows, so on any other OS you also have to deal with emulation or virtual machines just to see the drawing.
PDF is actually great for EPS pseudo-encapsulation -- any "print to PDF" program that uses Ghostscript as its engine, does a reasonably good job at converting vector formats.
It's as if they are... trolling.
,=====. /
/=--'/
\ ^L^
I would really love to be able to run the resulting MP3 or WAV files through some software a get a text file out. I know that software like this exists commercially.
No. Automated arbitrary speech recognition is an unsolved problem -- all voice recognition systems require speaker to make an effort to pronounce words clearly, or make the number of mistakes that take more effort to fix than to write manually.
It will make more sense to write a transcription assistance software -- an equivalent to the tape player with a foot pedal commonly used for this purpose, except with capability to play and repeat short sequences of words or phrases, speed adjustment, etc.
And then you will have to determine how to comment it in some obfuscated sequence of comments, quotes and escapes that may or may not be formally valid and may or may not produce consistent results in multiple rendering engines.
The state of journalism is really sad. So much focus on scandals, not enough on important stories. So much focus on whether politicians' rhetoric is being successful in moving the polls, not enough on whether the politicians' actions are helping people.
It's called "human interest stories". Everything is supposed to be focused around few pretty faces. Journalists elevate personal feelings and achievements of individuals above significance and consequences of those individuals' actions. They can't explain what some scientific discovery, achievement in technology, natural disaster, decision of politicians or any other newsworthy event means in a way relevant to their audience, so they expect that audience will out of the blue care about participants' emotions. With this approach all they can do is to talk nonstop about popular actors, as those are the only people whose overblown display of emotion has any significance for the public.
Citrix
Dammit, there is nothing they can't ruin.
eh, Windows Embedded is an embedded OS
Windows Embedded is a Windows OS, not an embedded OS.
The only imaginable goal of this is to provide driver-level compatibility without writing any new software. What would be utterly pointless on anything but Windows.
I herd, you like Windows drivers, so we have put a low-level low-latency bus protocol supported by Windows driver on top of a low-reliability high-latency protocol supported by Windows driver, so you can use Windows drivers while you use Windows drivers.
Seriously, there is no excuse for this, other than providing this kind of illusory compatibility. Properly engineered systems have protocols optimized to efficiently use media throughput while taking latency into account. This thing can be best described as DMA over Jenga.
Would it actually work that way with schoolkids in a hostile environment?
More likely a bully would not even understand that a person is trying to defuse the situation. Bully's perception of his own role within a group always trumps any individual's actions, so bully will only stop if he is unsuccessful in his attacks (he can't fulfill his own perceived role), or an authority figure stops it (authority figure has a different role that bully accepts as superior). It might help if "bully" actually acts as an enforcer of existing social hierarchy, however antisocial bully will not even notice anything being communicated, once a target is chosen.
That is a lie, or at best, you are mistaken. But stating it as fact when you are wrong makes you a liar of a special sort, the kind who runs his mouth when he does not know what he is talking about.
There is a very fundamental difference between a word being used once in some conversation, and a term that is published and accepted in general use by a worldwide community.
The only reference in the linked text that can in any way be verified, is to Caldera press release that reads:
Caldera enables its partners to integrate stable, low-cost Internet devices with the most powerful Internet server platforms and commercial add-on products. Caldera's support for the open-source code model provides partners with maximum flexibility in providing more complete product and service solutions.
Individuals can use OpenDOS source for personal use at no cost. Individuals and organizations desiring to commercially redistribute Caldera OpenDOS must acquire a license with an associated small fee.
This is very far from anything that "Open Source" meant at any point, and in this form it was not used by anyone before or after that release.
The term "Open" has been used in computing since long before ESR's problem with a printer driver.
"Open" was, and is used to describe things that have nothing to do with open source.
Open means interoperable. Full stop.
"Open" is not the same as "Open Source".
Caldera used the term "Open Source" to mean "you can get the source" over a year before Bruce even claims to have invented the term, and almost two years before anyone else claims that he invented it.
Caldera did not establish any kind of definition -- it used the same words once, to describe something completely different. It did not produce any kind of established meaning, either in its own documents or as a term accepted by anyone else.
Your view of history is revisionistic at best and if you continue to promote it I will conclude that you have a vested interest in Perens being named as the coiner of the phrase. Please further note that ESR does not claim the term, only to have been present at the meeting at VA Software where it was supposedly invented, a full year after I can find the term being used in a press release from Caldera.
I care about preventing subversion of established terms that describe ideas and principles important in the modern culture. Any particular person's role in this is insignificant compared to the effect of establishing the term.
Open source was not a term that was in use before the the open source definition. It was described as "comes with source code" or "source code available" or similar.
No.
Open Source, as applied to software, was never in use before Eric Raymond/Open Source Initiative started using it. The term "Open Source" was invented to be distinct from more strict definition of "Free Software". Please note that similar definition used by the other OSI founder, Bruce Perens, is called "Debian Free Software Guidelines" and does not mention anything "open" -- when it was created, the term Open Source Software did not exist.
The term "Open" (without "source") was routinely applied to software that is most definitely closed source (for example, everything by Open Systems Foundation), and has absolutely nothing to do with Open Source.
Ralph Wiggum
Fictional character is fictional.
(Yes, I will gb2/b/ in a moment).
So wait, you recommend kids to learn something that will remain ineffective for the whole time they will need it, and will become effective at the time they will become adults, and therefore will have easier ways to avoid being attacked?
Wouldn't that be the most useless, stupid and irresponsible advice imaginable?