If Linux were as popular as Windows, you can bet we'd be in the same situation. Why? Because the problem is only partially software.
I can download any Linux virus I want, and I can click on it as much as I want but guess what? It still won't run unless I mark it to execute. That practically eliminates email viruses that require people run them. Not to mention that hiding file extensions by default is really not user friendly in any way, and when your OS depends on the file extension to determine its action, HIDING the file extension is the last thing you want to do.
I can't wait for the new robot world where a robot will ask me if I want my soda refilled, or will replace it if it's flat. Oh yeah, we have those already - they're called waitresses. Sometimes they're pretty cute too. And if you play your cards right, you might even be able to date one.
What people are missing nowdays is going out to eat and enjoying yourself. You go to McDonalds, you get your crap meal (really quick), you shovel it down and leave with a bad feeling in your gut for [insert time varable here]. You know, it's probably worth it to go to a decent resturant, waiting a little while - read a book or talk with friends. Enjoy a good meal. And actually feel like you ate something instead of some processed cardboard. People seem so concerned about how fast they get their meal. For what? You can't sit down for 45 minutes and eat? Gotta fix that time saving computer again? Chat with friends on that cell phone which supposidly keeps you connected to them? All robots will probably due is farther remove yet another thing people can enjoy in life - having a good meal. (That doesn't address how service has gone down hill, but that's another topic)
And when the majority of people use MSN running the MS client - that's when they start charging for it
MS wouldn't charge for it, it's not in their best interest. What they'll do instead is try to keep it as a windows only technology as much as possible, integrate it into the OS, and try to leverage it in other ways. That way they have another method of locking people into windows - which is a big concern of theirs now days.
The only way for us to get the pendulum back the other way is for the voters to get upset and start a revolt then laws get passed, some good, others reactionary and bad.
I wouldn't say it's the only way. You touched on another way it could be done. Stop the greed, and put faith back in American products. Many people are willing to pay for better quality, so why is it that we still aim at the lowest denominator? (redundant question, because of the profit margin of course). We can't be cheapest, but in many cases we can make things better. I work for a business that buys quite a bit of machinery from Europe. It's not cheap but it's extremely well built which is more important to us than the cost.
The CEO's in this country do not care about creating jobs and performing a valuable service to society. It has become a pure greedfest.
I recall reading a quote somewhere that a democracy can only exist until the people figure out they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. I wonder if this isn't a similar real world scenario we're starting to see, where the corporate top people figured out that they're on top and can continually give themselves pay raises, while essentially gutting their infrastructure.
"In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy. Some IT workers here may be forced to leave the "computer industry" and move into non-offshorable jobs,"
The problem with all of this is that the U.S. is NOT going to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide economy, until it's too late. You ship the majority of jobs overseas and guess what? Most people don't have jobs, and your country just hemorages money.
The dilema the U.S. is facing, is becoming a service economy - a economy which cannot sustain itself. What jobs are non-offshorable? IT jobs such as he described like fixing computers, and general maintenance - things which are important, but do not produce. The other other non offshorable jobs being those of the top execs who just keep voting themselvs pay rases from all the money their saving by shipping all these jobs overseas.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but the U.S. is heading down the road where it's economy is going to take a nose dive (which might be a good thing in the end). It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that they keep axing American jobs (not just I.T.) but nothing ever gets CHEAPER.
They could always host their OWN site like pretty much all other companies that produce an OS. They could even run it on rock solid SCO Unix. Of course at that point it would be like they DOS'd themselves unless they payed a guy to just keep hitting the reset button.
Try to explain OS concepts with Microsoft as an example. You can sort of guess what's going on, but you could never say for sure because the code is closed. I wasn't exactly hardcore into Linux when I was in college, but any professor that wanted to explain wat an OS was doing could use Linux as an example, and you could go look at the code yourself if you wanted to see how it really worked (yeah right). Pretty much every Linux distro comes with gcc, and you can look up functions and such in man pages if you need help. I'd say that generally Linux is pretty good for beginning programmers. As for Visual C++, I've had so many problems with Visual Studio f'ing up my computer that I just avoid it like the plague.
When I went to college they taught C++, and it was pretty standard stuff so you could use whatever machine you wanted (no gui or whatnot) - which is what CS departments should be doing anyway. After that they moved to Java which I thought was a mistake for various reasons, but at least you could compile it on whatever you want. It's supposed to be about the concepts anyway, right?
As others have said, any lazy admin can fuck up a perfectly secure system. And now days it really doesn't even take that much effort. In the network I'm on I have multiple Linux servers which I consider to be quite secure, but there is the one server I DON'T admin that's so bad that I consider it a total write off - all other servers actually drop all packets from it. And the guys who run the server refuse to fix it (redhat 7.0) because "something might break". Well whatever, I'm sure when the shit hits the fan, I'll get blamed - but it made me realize that Linux isn't by itself secure.
Is it more secure than windows? Yes. Download a virus and double click on it in windows, chances are you just got the virus. Do the same thing on Linux. Now you have to assume that A) you're running as root, or that the virus can exploit something to gain root. B) it would have to be marked as executable in the first place to run.
The difference comes in the tools that are available to increase security. Mounting partitions as noexec, chroot, etc. Better yet, when you go to the BSD side there even more security tools to mess with. One thing that Microsoft will probably never understand is that it isn't always that "x" is cheaper than "y" or that "x" is faster than "y" - sometimes it's the tools, mindset, power and flexibility that count the most - and in this area, Linux will probably always be ahead.
We're not willing to trade lives for anything anymore. It's the new world order. Look back a mere 100 years and see how things were done. I live in PA, and believe me it's rather scary how many people died just digging up lumps of coal. In fact just about any large scale operation was considered to have some amount of a death toll.
In modern times it's considered a "hard battle" during an actual WAR when 10 people are killed. I mean do people even know WWII happened? Did they pay attention during the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan? That crap really happened.
It's sad that people lost their lives helping mankind into space, but it's a dangerous job! But compared to what tolls were taken in lives for even menial work a century ago, it's hardly noticeable. We're simply losing touch with reality on some levels - although some would argue that overweighing the value of life is a virtue, not a weakness.
Other benchmarks include a leaf blower and a flaming jar of gasoline. The leaf blower actually did quite well in the noise tests against the Nvidia card but lost out due to the fact that it consumes less power than the video card. Ati unfortunately did not fare as well, and lagged behind with the noise factor. An ATI spokesman recommended that the card be coupled with a "cheap ass Athlon CPU fan" which would develop a good rattle to help the card become more obnoxious.
The jar of flaming gasoline also did pretty good in the heat department against both cards, but unfortunately had to be refilled which was considered a drawback. Aside from that the life like animation the fire produced only ran at one frame rate, but was always consistent. Unfortunately the jar of gas lost out big time in the cost arena, but it seems that can be compensated for by tossing $1 bills into the flames at various intervals to get the costs up higher.
Some wondered why we didn't benchmark a toaster as well, or instead of a jar of gasoline - but as we pointed out before, a toaster is far to practical to compare in a contest of flushing money down the toilet.
Actually I just ran into that problem not so long ago. I work for a small business, and while our servers are important - they aren't Red Hat Enterprise cost important just to get support longer than a measly year. I mean that negates most of the cost savings with Linux over Win2k (flexibility, control and other issues aside). I'm certainly not going to upgrade all of our Red Hat servers every new version, especially after the disaster I had with version 8.
Support is important as my boss likes to feel someone is behind it. The next in line is SuSE - but I really don't want to fork over money just to mess with a distro. And seeing how a distro is layed out is especially important with Linux, in order to see if what they're doing is going to jive with what you want to do with it. So basically I'm probably just going to say "screw the support" anyway, and use FreeBSD or possibly Debian.
seems to me if you had an expensive critical system you'd have a firewall JUST for that system. That's not practical for a university perhaps, but a for nuclear power plant...
That of course doesn't address the network bandwidth drop, but I have no idea why they wouldn't have a segmented network just for the critical systems either
This is pretty typical of Microsoft though, so it isn't really any surprise is it?
[1] Attempt to crack market with new software [2] Bundle software with OS - make pain in ass to remove [3] wait for large user base to build [4] close off to other vendors (you are here) [5] wait for competition to die off
[6?] China decides to make it's own impementation =P
Perhaps the rest of the world should be asking itself, how do we exchange documents with China?
Actually that's less of a problem then you think. China already has a natural barrier that makes it easier to break the ties to MS: it's their language. If the Chinese need information that's probably ALL they need, and they can run some filter to get the text. They certainly aren't going to be circulating stuff that aren't in native Chinese anyway.
Drawing from my experience with Japanese, having a word processor doesn't help you much by just having one. You can install a language pack to read kanji, but how do input stuff without the Japanese version? Being able to do a kanji lookup, or see possibilities of kanji based off of what you type is pretty much an essential of Asian word processing. And how many of us have the Chinese/Japanese version of MS Word? Very few.
It works the other way as well, but it's probably much easier for an office to have one person running that one copy of MS Office, than to have the entire office running MS so the one person can correspond with foreigners. Not to mention that it isn't extracting the text/information that is the problem with importing MS documents; it's the formating/macros that are the problem. Besides which, it's not like PDF isn't a standard.
I don't think encouragement is necessarily needed. Those who stand with Linux are those who are showing a REAL commitment to it and stand to gain recognition for what they say in this case. The next case that comes up there will be a lot more band wagon jumping, but now is where the stakes are higher. Look at Novel. They could have dropped off the face of the earth and I wouldn't have noticed. Now they suddenly show up defending Linux, and are moving towards the benefits of open source themselves. I'm seriously interested in what Novel will have to offer in the future. Saying you're moving towards Linux looks really shallow by just saying it (Corel anyone), but the stand that Novel has taken is showing their commitment. Companies that want to play it safe right now (and seriously, as crazy as SCO's claims are, there really is very little risk) will take a back seat to those who at least make themselves heard.
Anyone know how the wins support is? It looks like samba 3 will finally be able to replicate. Currently Samba can't replicate with NT servers, or as far as I know, even with other Samba servers. That sort of limits Samba in terms of redundancy. Is adding static entries to WINS new as well? I don't recall ever seeing that in the samba 2 documentation - that's been an unfortunate hang up where I work.
Actually I think less desk space is the right way to go. It needs like a 1.5 x 1.5 foot tray with a huge trash can underneath. That way as people put stuff onto the tray and the pile gets too high, slides into the trash.
China isn't only developing their own infastructure, it looks like they're actually working on positioning themselves in competition with everything that's in place now.
Using their own processor, their own linux distro, among other things they seem to be comming up with (DVD standard etc). I'm actually glad too. As the west ends up strangled by power struggles for control over the computer (MS) and control over your media (DRM), China may very well be the last hope feilding open technology. Sad to say, but because of our own short sightedness; it may very well be this openess that gives them the advantage.
Hopefully this will break the diamond cartel permenantly. I can't wait for diamonds to become like salt. Hard to believe the romans actually paid soldiers with salt. Now everyone will have diamonds cheaply, and western culture can wonder about all that brainwashing they've endured thinking that investing in a diamond ring was worth it.
well it's definitely a correlation, definitely NOT a cause and effect - usually the media doesn't know the difference. That said I know a lot of people who were once perfectly normal (not exactly "brilliant") who have basically forsaken normal socializing for internet surfing/chatting/gameplay. It's the whole "game addiction" thing in another sense. Some people are just more prone to it than others. And out of those people, some can keep a handle on it with enough self control.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you're curious, the offical reason cited by MS is that they need the CD to verify the integrity of the installation.
Whether we all believe that or not... that's another story.
If Linux were as popular as Windows, you can bet we'd be in the same situation. Why? Because the problem is only partially software.
I can download any Linux virus I want, and I can click on it as much as I want but guess what? It still won't run unless I mark it to execute. That practically eliminates email viruses that require people run them. Not to mention that hiding file extensions by default is really not user friendly in any way, and when your OS depends on the file extension to determine its action, HIDING the file extension is the last thing you want to do.
I can't wait for the new robot world where a robot will ask me if I want my soda refilled, or will replace it if it's flat. Oh yeah, we have those already - they're called waitresses. Sometimes they're pretty cute too. And if you play your cards right, you might even be able to date one.
What people are missing nowdays is going out to eat and enjoying yourself. You go to McDonalds, you get your crap meal (really quick), you shovel it down and leave with a bad feeling in your gut for [insert time varable here]. You know, it's probably worth it to go to a decent resturant, waiting a little while - read a book or talk with friends. Enjoy a good meal. And actually feel like you ate something instead of some processed cardboard. People seem so concerned about how fast they get their meal. For what? You can't sit down for 45 minutes and eat? Gotta fix that time saving computer again? Chat with friends on that cell phone which supposidly keeps you connected to them? All robots will probably due is farther remove yet another thing people can enjoy in life - having a good meal. (That doesn't address how service has gone down hill, but that's another topic)
And when the majority of people use MSN running the MS client - that's when they start charging for it
MS wouldn't charge for it, it's not in their best interest. What they'll do instead is try to keep it as a windows only technology as much as possible, integrate it into the OS, and try to leverage it in other ways. That way they have another method of locking people into windows - which is a big concern of theirs now days.
The only way for us to get the pendulum back the other way is for the voters to get upset and start a revolt then laws get passed, some good, others reactionary and bad.
I wouldn't say it's the only way. You touched on another way it could be done. Stop the greed, and put faith back in American products. Many people are willing to pay for better quality, so why is it that we still aim at the lowest denominator? (redundant question, because of the profit margin of course). We can't be cheapest, but in many cases we can make things better. I work for a business that buys quite a bit of machinery from Europe. It's not cheap but it's extremely well built which is more important to us than the cost.
The CEO's in this country do not care about creating jobs and performing a valuable service to society. It has become a pure greedfest.
I recall reading a quote somewhere that a democracy can only exist until the people figure out they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. I wonder if this isn't a similar real world scenario we're starting to see, where the corporate top people figured out that they're on top and can continually give themselves pay raises, while essentially gutting their infrastructure.
This text stuck out to me in the article:
"In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy. Some IT workers here may be forced to leave the "computer industry" and move into non-offshorable jobs,"
The problem with all of this is that the U.S. is NOT going to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide economy, until it's too late. You ship the majority of jobs overseas and guess what? Most people don't have jobs, and your country just hemorages money.
The dilema the U.S. is facing, is becoming a service economy - a economy which cannot sustain itself. What jobs are non-offshorable? IT jobs such as he described like fixing computers, and general maintenance - things which are important, but do not produce. The other other non offshorable jobs being those of the top execs who just keep voting themselvs pay rases from all the money their saving by shipping all these jobs overseas.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but the U.S. is heading down the road where it's economy is going to take a nose dive (which might be a good thing in the end). It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that they keep axing American jobs (not just I.T.) but nothing ever gets CHEAPER.
They could always host their OWN site like pretty much all other companies that produce an OS. They could even run it on rock solid SCO Unix. Of course at that point it would be like they DOS'd themselves unless they payed a guy to just keep hitting the reset button.
Try to explain OS concepts with Microsoft as an example. You can sort of guess what's going on, but you could never say for sure because the code is closed. I wasn't exactly hardcore into Linux when I was in college, but any professor that wanted to explain wat an OS was doing could use Linux as an example, and you could go look at the code yourself if you wanted to see how it really worked (yeah right). Pretty much every Linux distro comes with gcc, and you can look up functions and such in man pages if you need help. I'd say that generally Linux is pretty good for beginning programmers. As for Visual C++, I've had so many problems with Visual Studio f'ing up my computer that I just avoid it like the plague.
When I went to college they taught C++, and it was pretty standard stuff so you could use whatever machine you wanted (no gui or whatnot) - which is what CS departments should be doing anyway. After that they moved to Java which I thought was a mistake for various reasons, but at least you could compile it on whatever you want. It's supposed to be about the concepts anyway, right?
As others have said, any lazy admin can fuck up a perfectly secure system. And now days it really doesn't even take that much effort. In the network I'm on I have multiple Linux servers which I consider to be quite secure, but there is the one server I DON'T admin that's so bad that I consider it a total write off - all other servers actually drop all packets from it. And the guys who run the server refuse to fix it (redhat 7.0) because "something might break". Well whatever, I'm sure when the shit hits the fan, I'll get blamed - but it made me realize that Linux isn't by itself secure.
Is it more secure than windows? Yes. Download a virus and double click on it in windows, chances are you just got the virus. Do the same thing on Linux. Now you have to assume that A) you're running as root, or that the virus can exploit something to gain root. B) it would have to be marked as executable in the first place to run.
The difference comes in the tools that are available to increase security. Mounting partitions as noexec, chroot, etc. Better yet, when you go to the BSD side there even more security tools to mess with. One thing that Microsoft will probably never understand is that it isn't always that "x" is cheaper than "y" or that "x" is faster than "y" - sometimes it's the tools, mindset, power and flexibility that count the most - and in this area, Linux will probably always be ahead.
cheap, efficient politicians
isn't that an oxymoron?
We're not willing to trade lives for anything anymore. It's the new world order. Look back a mere 100 years and see how things were done. I live in PA, and believe me it's rather scary how many people died just digging up lumps of coal. In fact just about any large scale operation was considered to have some amount of a death toll.
In modern times it's considered a "hard battle" during an actual WAR when 10 people are killed. I mean do people even know WWII happened? Did they pay attention during the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan? That crap really happened.
It's sad that people lost their lives helping mankind into space, but it's a dangerous job! But compared to what tolls were taken in lives for even menial work a century ago, it's hardly noticeable. We're simply losing touch with reality on some levels - although some would argue that overweighing the value of life is a virtue, not a weakness.
Other benchmarks include a leaf blower and a flaming jar of gasoline. The leaf blower actually did quite well in the noise tests against the Nvidia card but lost out due to the fact that it consumes less power than the video card. Ati unfortunately did not fare as well, and lagged behind with the noise factor. An ATI spokesman recommended that the card be coupled with a "cheap ass Athlon CPU fan" which would develop a good rattle to help the card become more obnoxious.
The jar of flaming gasoline also did pretty good in the heat department against both cards, but unfortunately had to be refilled which was considered a drawback. Aside from that the life like animation the fire produced only ran at one frame rate, but was always consistent. Unfortunately the jar of gas lost out big time in the cost arena, but it seems that can be compensated for by tossing $1 bills into the flames at various intervals to get the costs up higher.
Some wondered why we didn't benchmark a toaster as well, or instead of a jar of gasoline - but as we pointed out before, a toaster is far to practical to compare in a contest of flushing money down the toilet.
Actually I just ran into that problem not so long ago. I work for a small business, and while our servers are important - they aren't Red Hat Enterprise cost important just to get support longer than a measly year. I mean that negates most of the cost savings with Linux over Win2k (flexibility, control and other issues aside). I'm certainly not going to upgrade all of our Red Hat servers every new version, especially after the disaster I had with version 8.
Support is important as my boss likes to feel someone is behind it. The next in line is SuSE - but I really don't want to fork over money just to mess with a distro. And seeing how a distro is layed out is especially important with Linux, in order to see if what they're doing is going to jive with what you want to do with it. So basically I'm probably just going to say "screw the support" anyway, and use FreeBSD or possibly Debian.
wait until they integrate clippy and he keeps moving randomly and getting in the way while asking if you'd like help moving your mouse cursor.
seems to me if you had an expensive critical system you'd have a firewall JUST for that system. That's not practical for a university perhaps, but a for nuclear power plant...
That of course doesn't address the network bandwidth drop, but I have no idea why they wouldn't have a segmented network just for the critical systems either
This is pretty typical of Microsoft though, so it isn't really any surprise is it?
[1] Attempt to crack market with new software
[2] Bundle software with OS - make pain in ass to remove
[3] wait for large user base to build
[4] close off to other vendors (you are here)
[5] wait for competition to die off
[6?] China decides to make it's own impementation =P
Perhaps the rest of the world should be asking itself, how do we exchange documents with China?
Actually that's less of a problem then you think. China already has a natural barrier that makes it easier to break the ties to MS: it's their language. If the Chinese need information that's probably ALL they need, and they can run some filter to get the text. They certainly aren't going to be circulating stuff that aren't in native Chinese anyway.
Drawing from my experience with Japanese, having a word processor doesn't help you much by just having one. You can install a language pack to read kanji, but how do input stuff without the Japanese version? Being able to do a kanji lookup, or see possibilities of kanji based off of what you type is pretty much an essential of Asian word processing. And how many of us have the Chinese/Japanese version of MS Word? Very few.
It works the other way as well, but it's probably much easier for an office to have one person running that one copy of MS Office, than to have the entire office running MS so the one person can correspond with foreigners. Not to mention that it isn't extracting the text/information that is the problem with importing MS documents; it's the formating/macros that are the problem. Besides which, it's not like PDF isn't a standard.
I don't think encouragement is necessarily needed. Those who stand with Linux are those who are showing a REAL commitment to it and stand to gain recognition for what they say in this case. The next case that comes up there will be a lot more band wagon jumping, but now is where the stakes are higher. Look at Novel. They could have dropped off the face of the earth and I wouldn't have noticed. Now they suddenly show up defending Linux, and are moving towards the benefits of open source themselves. I'm seriously interested in what Novel will have to offer in the future. Saying you're moving towards Linux looks really shallow by just saying it (Corel anyone), but the stand that Novel has taken is showing their commitment. Companies that want to play it safe right now (and seriously, as crazy as SCO's claims are, there really is very little risk) will take a back seat to those who at least make themselves heard.
Anyone know how the wins support is? It looks like samba 3 will finally be able to replicate. Currently Samba can't replicate with NT servers, or as far as I know, even with other Samba servers. That sort of limits Samba in terms of redundancy. Is adding static entries to WINS new as well? I don't recall ever seeing that in the samba 2 documentation - that's been an unfortunate hang up where I work.
Actually I think less desk space is the right way to go. It needs like a 1.5 x 1.5 foot tray with a huge trash can underneath. That way as people put stuff onto the tray and the pile gets too high, slides into the trash.
An automatic work management system!
I donno about that. I think a lot of people would pich in the bullet if you asked.
China isn't only developing their own infastructure, it looks like they're actually working on positioning themselves in competition with everything that's in place now.
Using their own processor, their own linux distro, among other things they seem to be comming up with (DVD standard etc). I'm actually glad too. As the west ends up strangled by power struggles for control over the computer (MS) and control over your media (DRM), China may very well be the last hope feilding open technology. Sad to say, but because of our own short sightedness; it may very well be this openess that gives them the advantage.
Hopefully this will break the diamond cartel permenantly. I can't wait for diamonds to become like salt. Hard to believe the romans actually paid soldiers with salt. Now everyone will have diamonds cheaply, and western culture can wonder about all that brainwashing they've endured thinking that investing in a diamond ring was worth it.
He's already using the next kernel already.
It seems to be a bug in 2.6.0-test3 which has bugs. As you can see I'm using it too as you can see.
well it's definitely a correlation, definitely NOT a cause and effect - usually the media doesn't know the difference. That said I know a lot of people who were once perfectly normal (not exactly "brilliant") who have basically forsaken normal socializing for internet surfing/chatting/gameplay. It's the whole "game addiction" thing in another sense. Some people are just more prone to it than others. And out of those people, some can keep a handle on it with enough self control.