The word network can be used in many contexts. Here it looks like TradeElect fell flat.
Danska Banken and others pushing a M$ Uber Alles agenda (and willing to bankrupt their own company to achieve it) have has similar problems and also use similar caged, vaguely worded statements that dance around the cause. You'll get a few articles that will point out that using M$.Not, especially Sharepoint, is a major cause. The rest will avoid the topic or be vague.
I wish people would get into the habit of linking to the single page version of the FA.
Oh come off it. If it were a permanent link, then you'd have a point, but that Reuters article will vanish in a few days like all good wirefeeds do. It's not really worth it for Slashdot, or anywhere else, to link to wirefeeds since they're gone quickly. So it matters little if it's the all-in-one or multi-page if it's a wirefeed. For permanent articles, however, I'm with you: all in one is easier to manage and read.
What you need is a major paper who has taken the wirefeed and put their name at the top. That will be around a few months or even years from now.
On version 8 of any software, this is alarming. Considering that IE8 is not rewriten from scrach, they will have to work hard to convince.
No they won't. They'll do it just like they got versions 4, 5, 6, and 7 out there: bundling and forced upgrades.
Fortunately, there are portable Opera and portable Firefox... at least until some "security" "upgrade" blocks them permanently or something.
MSIE is one of the ongoing embarrassments for MSFTers. If quality were an issue, it would make since to send MSIE to the bit bucket and skin Opera or FF, but lock-in trumps function so it won't happen.
I guess a small, good effect is that to get rid of MSIE, you do have to leave Windows behind completely.
For some of the older IBM laptops we're experimenting with PuppyLinux. Seeing if we can get some more mileage out of them. But Ubuntu is getting a warm reception. Even caught one of the staff borging the Windows box in the flex work area with a live CD. Hiring hasn't been any problem....
Once the top staff notice that they using the computer for work rather than spending all their time fighting Windows, you can probably zap that last box, too.
PuppyLinux is good. There's also "Damn Small Linux" and "SliTaz" to try. Fluxbox on ubuntu (see also Fluxbuntu) is not too bad. I had it for a while on an old PII w/128MB RAM. It was fine except swapping between applications could take a second or three.
As far as it goes in countries where one is presumed innocent until proven guilty:
They are innocent.
And as such, the court cannot find them innocent because they already are. However, the court might later find them not-guilty (status quo) or guilty (new status).
Ok. So now all I have to do is scan the crowd to see which rich bastard will give the best ROI on an abduction. A side effect of being wealthy is that they are often usually healthier than the masses and even if they can't provide a good ransom, they can give better prices when sold for parts.
Now that they are electronically tagged for my shopping convenience and cross-referenced with financial databases, there is a lot less shot-in-the-dark guessing.
Most software does disclaim liabilities and suitabilities. That part is about equal, and that part probably could be overcome in court. But if you take your easy shots first, there usually won't be any hard ones. The easy way is to focus on the difference where it is a disadvantage.
The difference being that, in contrast, the other products actually work fairly well especially in regards to maintenance and interoperability. However, in shoot outs, MS products tend to get rated so poorly that some of the licenses even prohibit publishing benchmarks.
So by choosing a product that costs more, is more trouble, and works more poorly/less reliably than the established products the decision maker is signalling: 1) that they are not keeping abreast of the current state of tools in their field (gross negligence) or 2) ignoring the variety and quality of other tools (willful negligence) or 3) intentionally pushing Bill's political agenda (criminal mischief) or a smorgasbord of all three.
No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.
And as much as Bliar appears to like to pretend that the UK is the 51st state, it is still in the EU. Here is what the European Commissioner for Competition Policy,
Neelie Kroes, has to say on the topic:
"When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information."
.
"for all future IT developments and procurement procedures, the Commission shall promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards. Interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission, and usage of well-established open standards is a key factor to achieve and endorse it."
.
The key decisions of this policy are as follows:... UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments. (3) UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services...
.
In short, the BBC is indefensibly wrong to lock people into proprietary standards and systems and all the more so in regards to MS cruft, given MS legal standing in the EU.
FireFury03 wrote:
Saying "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver" is fine, but "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver manufactured by Sony" (for example) is not.
Fortunately even politicians are waking up and less and less turning a blind eye towards anything hidden under the label "computer".
In most ways, but since the licenses, rightly or wrongly, legally or illegally, disclaim liability or suitability of the software for any purpose, there are easier targets: the dipshits who bring MS products into a business or institution in the first place. The interoperability, maintenance, security and pricing problems have been so well documented that you'd either have to be functionally living in a cave (gross negligence) or ignoring the world around you (willful negligence) or intentionally pushing Bill's political agenda (criminal mischief) or a smorgasbord of all three.
Things like this are old hat to me. I run OS/2 and one of the reasons OS/2 failed was due to MS paid astroturfers posting in various forums about how much better Windows was then OS/2.
The saddest part was that even when the astroturfers were outed most people only remembered the negative posts, not that they were part of a propaganda campaign and should of been taken with a large grain of salt.
Had the same problem with magazines. Some database would be reviewed and you would get reviews like,
We couldn't get SMP working on OS/2, so even with one CPU it was faster then NT with 2 CPU's we fail OS/2 due to only using one CPU. People, especially the pointed headed CEO's would only remember the words fail. It is the same with net neutrality, even with lots of evidence of astroturfing, people will only remember that the corn growers association came out against net neutrality. The corn growers association must be neutral right:)
Part of that problem was also that IBM had signed M$ to produce some core applications for OS/2 to jumpstart the market. M$ reneged shortly before release, way to late to find other software companies let alone have time to develop.
Stop peddling the idea that it is acceptable for systems to fail catastrophically. Sure MS is synonymous for unreliable, but no need to turn it into a case of sour grapes and pretend that everything else is as poorly designed or manufactured.
MS certification of drivers has not improved "quality" of the drivers over the years. It is, as predicted, more related to the ability to pay and accept harsh licensing terms. It simply allows MS to further restrict development of Windows devices and applications to parties willing to toe the party line.
A "bad" driver should not be able to bring down the system. Using MS products is simply helping Bill and his minions make bad engineering acceptable. Some anthropologists and psychologists might claim that acceptance for failure becomes generalized beyond that one domain and into society in general. Now that's evil with hair on it.
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
Cheers,
Ian
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one. Making bad engineering acceptable will probably be Bill Gates' largest "contribution" to society.
In fairness to software engineering, if the "bad" hardware driver can crash the system, then the system is not ready for production and has more than a few show-stopping (no pun intended) bugs. Take a look at basic kernel or micro-kernel design principles and stop spreading the view that catastrophically bad design is acceptable.
... There is no market for Linux versions of Adobe apps. There cannot be a market for what doesn't exist. There can be a demand. Demand does not create a market. Only the combination of supply and demand create a market.
If you wish to say that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market, than say so. Don't try to insinuate that Adobe hates open systems or that they are in bed with MS.
Even without using the correct definition of a market (supply + demand) you figured it out. No I do not wish to say that I think that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market. Neither you nor I can say what Adobe execs really are thinking.
Regardless, I don't have to insinuate. I can make accusations based on circumstances and past transgressions. It could be something as simple as an NDA for some MS SDK which prohibits work on competing platforms, like the NT SDK appeared to do for OS/2.
For
several decades, MS has put pressure on software houses and OEMs to curb their activities with competing systems. Even Apple, which has an on-again, off-again, relationship with the Microsoftians was under strong pressure to drop technologies MS was gunning for. That includes Quicktime and the now defunct OLE-like OpenDoc, and quite possibly the OpenDocument Format.
We could have seen a GTA clone on the Linux front by now, but we don't for two reasons, no one is sponsoring any project and no one really is motivated enough to start one.
Why a clone? Are you so assimilated into the MS religion that you cannot fathom a market for software on normal systems?
Besides, that in general is a dying market. No one plays games on the desktop anymore. That's for work, or at least surfing and e-mail and such. Games do much better on the console. You're better off spending money on a mid-range desktop and a good console and then use the savings for a lot of beer and pizza. Top three selling consoles (Wii, PS3, PS2) have a lot of games available.
However, something seems to be holding that back just like with work-related applications. Adobe's been receiving requests for years and years about porting its apps to Linux. There's a market, but somehow the normal rules supply and demand appear to be interfered with here...
...employs some of the brightest, most motivated and insightful programmers out there.
Yeah, right. Then who wrote that stuff that's infamous for security, performance and interoperability failue? The <sarcasm> tags seem to be missing. Or was it a reference to cases like buying out Borland's developers and sending them to the beach indefinitely?
If MS is employing "some of the brightest, most motivated and insightful programmers out there", how come all they can do is copy existing products or buy out bottom of the barrel competitors' products? Most of MS product line seems based on purchases of small, floundering companies. Most of subsequent develpment
WE DON'T TRUST THEM. Is that so hard to understand? We don't believe they're being open and straightforward, why should we? They've never been open and straightforward with anyone ever.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over and over for twenty years, shame on me.
Some people are slow learners.
If Microsoft wants our trust they're going to have to earn it.
Chump. Assuming the improbable, that MS minions are really sincere about interoperability etc, just how do you propose to let them demonstrate that without either putting yourself into a vulnerable position or allowing them to waste your time or resources evaluating vaporware?
The BSD style licensed projects get more momentum and make forward progress.
I am having a little trouble figuring out if you are sarcastic or serious.
I have great respect for the BSD kernel projects, they do some things a lot better than Linux. But if you compare the pace of kernel development, by source-code line count, Linux tremendously outpaces BSD kernel development.
What you're left with after that is a lot of Java projects. Which are great for enterprise, right now. But building a stack of new Java code is definitely building today's code for today, not tomorrow's code. Java is the conservative choice of enterprise at the moment.
And then there are community issues, like the Spring bug that showed us that this enterprise-critical code wasn't getting the eyes that an Open Source project with more non-company programmers does.
MS has been getting free labor from BSD for decades and lately appears to be trying to create an opposition between complementary projects in order to trouble the GPL. MS has as much or more to lose from the GPL than from anything else. The rest of us, we gain from the GPL. However, it is important to remember that the license chosen, is part of the game and that to play in any given sandbox, you must agree to the rules, whether ISC or GPL, or else find a different sandbox. So keep that in mind when MS trolls or pawns try to play BSD/ISC vs GPL licensing.
One caveat for non-ascetics is that in this day and age, especially when going up against a competitor known for 'embrace, extend, extinguish' breaking of technology, is that it isn't enough to just give away source code like we could back before MS politicized technology at the end of the 1990's. There now has to be something to keep the software free as a public resource while it evolved, sort of a payment-in-kind, rather than letting bad players not just walk away with free labor, but use it to undermine the developers.
To steer towards the technical aspects, the BSDs are interesting in that there is a lot of cross-pollenation between them. An advance in one usually rather quickly propagates to the others. Any of the four are excellent tools and complement Linux-based projects like Debian, Fedora, Busybox or UClinux. Any can be used in conjunction with just about any Free or Open Source Software including the various GNU-project tools we have come to use and rely upon, such as Apache, Perl or GCC.
The weakest one of the lot, strategically mind you, is FreeBSD. That is in part due to the mistake of allowing binary objects in the base. First, blackbox binaries are a security hole in and of themselves. Second, they make you as fully dependent on the vendor providing the binary as you are on the binary itself. That is a double kick in the nads for anyone that plans ahead. Increasingly businesses and governments are realizing that binary-only anything should not be touched even with the shitty end of a barge pole.
Technically, aside from the above, FreeBSD has good performance on the x86. e.g. streaming video
DragonflyBSD is interesting in that it aims for clustered and multi-processor computing. e.g. rendering
OpenBSD prioritizes standards, encryption and pro-active security. PF and OpenSSH start here. It is also famous for its founder's technical genius which is offset by being too direct and occasionally even exhibiting a Gates-like personality. e.g. network packet filter / router, OpenAFS server
NetBSD focuses on portability and embedded systems. e.g. automation, data acquisition
My brother is a high up in the military and complains of this 'seal of approval' constantly. Microsoft salespeople and other constantly will send their products to get 'evaluated' and get the seal of approval the next day as if someone can evaluate their product in 24 hours. Whereas other products that are open source or actually supply the source code can take MONTHS!
It's totally arbitrary and has very little to do with security.
I also spoke with someone who does application and system security certification for a national government. Basically companies pay, the team then plays around and tries to guess what's in the blackbox and what it's doing in there, and then after a while rubber stamps the approval. The tools audited that way are not ones selected by the government, for that matter. The vendors present something and then provide the money for the certification. No money == no review == no certification.
The dude was rather proud that they only did such audits for domestic companies. However, the weakness I spotted was that "foreign" companies only needed an office, subsidiary or representative and that feeble barrier was circumvented.
Certification simplifies "security" evaluation to a more or less straightforward financial bidding process.
The point there is that you have to have the code for the whole stack not just an isolated application. For an application to be secure, you have to be able to do a valid code audit. For the code audit to be worth anything it has to be done all the way down to the core: compiler, libraries, utilities and operating system. So you can be sure when you have the source code, but you do have to have all of the source code.
So without even touching on the quality issues with MS, lack of code access rules out all MS products from the system on up to user applications. "Shared" source might be fine for specific, limited, platform-specific development contexts, but is basically the same as "escrow" And "escrow" is just another name for closed source, namely, as Ken Thompson point out, insecure. Ditching MS products won't automagically make your site secure, but it is a necessary first step.
Now there are some short cuts one can take in Ken Thompson's example. However, they all boil down to having the code for the whole system as he points out, not just parts. Even diverse double compiling requires, at the end of the day, a system that has been vetted top to bottom to use as the baseline.
Now the next step is to deal with smaller, more modular units of code. They're not only good design but also easier to manage. Again, that rules out a certain party...
FWIW it's interesting that the ACM recently pulled the Thompson article. It had been available for over a decade. One wonders how much longer the ACM will be a useful source of technical information.
It's not as if the road is not littered with corpses of companies suckered into delay or inaction by false overtures of cooperation or peaceful co-existence. e.g.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." - Jean-Louis Gassée
Until such time as MS comes to the table with full support for Open Standars, such as Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, OpenDocument (to name a few), or for that matter even DNS, there is no point in giving MS pud-pullers the spotlight. MS wants to play? Comply with EU law and banish WMA and WMV formats from the default Windows distros. Or MS can lay off subnotebooks like Asus and even OLPC and let them get back to distributing Linux as the market demands.
I dunno. To me it looks a whole lot like harassing Jobs just for the sake of harassing him, especially in light of other similarly timed items in Mad Magazine and in MS' Slate. Smear campaigns have been common in politics when the opponents can't compete on the issues, someone is bothered by Apple making a good product and/or a good profit. Let's see who's doing poorly these days and objects to Jobs (pun intended)...
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
One of the last times I flew into LAX, I recall my surprise as the plane hit a bump as we descended from the clear air into the brown air. It took me a moment to recall the temperature inversion and that the change in density probably caused the bump. Even in LA the air can't get so nasty it has lumps in it. Corrosive and toxic, yes, but lumps, no.
Slashdot Mirror
The word network can be used in many contexts. Here it looks like TradeElect fell flat.
Danska Banken and others pushing a M$ Uber Alles agenda (and willing to bankrupt their own company to achieve it) have has similar problems and also use similar caged, vaguely worded statements that dance around the cause. You'll get a few articles that will point out that using M$ .Not, especially Sharepoint, is a major cause. The rest will avoid the topic or be vague.
I wish people would get into the habit of linking to the single page version of the FA.
Oh come off it. If it were a permanent link, then you'd have a point, but that Reuters article will vanish in a few days like all good wirefeeds do. It's not really worth it for Slashdot, or anywhere else, to link to wirefeeds since they're gone quickly. So it matters little if it's the all-in-one or multi-page if it's a wirefeed. For permanent articles, however, I'm with you: all in one is easier to manage and read.
What you need is a major paper who has taken the wirefeed and put their name at the top. That will be around a few months or even years from now.
On version 8 of any software, this is alarming. Considering that IE8 is not rewriten from scrach, they will have to work hard to convince.
No they won't. They'll do it just like they got versions 4, 5, 6, and 7 out there: bundling and forced upgrades.
Fortunately, there are portable Opera and portable Firefox... at least until some "security" "upgrade" blocks them permanently or something.
MSIE is one of the ongoing embarrassments for MSFTers. If quality were an issue, it would make since to send MSIE to the bit bucket and skin Opera or FF, but lock-in trumps function so it won't happen.
I guess a small, good effect is that to get rid of MSIE, you do have to leave Windows behind completely.
For some of the older IBM laptops we're experimenting with PuppyLinux. Seeing if we can get some more mileage out of them. But Ubuntu is getting a warm reception. Even caught one of the staff borging the Windows box in the flex work area with a live CD. Hiring hasn't been any problem. ...
Once the top staff notice that they using the computer for work rather than spending all their time fighting Windows, you can probably zap that last box, too.
PuppyLinux is good. There's also "Damn Small Linux" and "SliTaz" to try. Fluxbox on ubuntu (see also Fluxbuntu) is not too bad. I had it for a while on an old PII w/128MB RAM. It was fine except swapping between applications could take a second or three.
wrong. Stopp spreading bullshit. that's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, and unrelated to the Nobel prizes.
As far as it goes in countries where one is presumed innocent until proven guilty: They are innocent.
And as such, the court cannot find them innocent because they already are. However, the court might later find them not-guilty (status quo) or guilty (new status).
Ok. So now all I have to do is scan the crowd to see which rich bastard will give the best ROI on an abduction. A side effect of being wealthy is that they are often usually healthier than the masses and even if they can't provide a good ransom, they can give better prices when sold for parts.
Now that they are electronically tagged for my shopping convenience and cross-referenced with financial databases, there is a lot less shot-in-the-dark guessing.
Put microsoft's hand in warm water while they're at it. We'll get the next version of Windows a year early!
I think you might be confusing output ports #1 and #2.
Most software does disclaim liabilities and suitabilities. That part is about equal, and that part probably could be overcome in court. But if you take your easy shots first, there usually won't be any hard ones. The easy way is to focus on the difference where it is a disadvantage.
The difference being that, in contrast, the other products actually work fairly well especially in regards to maintenance and interoperability. However, in shoot outs, MS products tend to get rated so poorly that some of the licenses even prohibit publishing benchmarks. So by choosing a product that costs more, is more trouble, and works more poorly/less reliably than the established products the decision maker is signalling: 1) that they are not keeping abreast of the current state of tools in their field (gross negligence) or 2) ignoring the variety and quality of other tools (willful negligence) or 3) intentionally pushing Bill's political agenda (criminal mischief) or a smorgasbord of all three.
FireFury03 wrote:
No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.
And as much as Bliar appears to like to pretend that the UK is the 51st state, it is still in the EU. Here is what the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, Neelie Kroes, has to say on the topic:
"When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information." .Here's what the European Commission has to say:
"for all future IT developments and procurement procedures, the Commission shall promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards. Interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission, and usage of well-established open standards is a key factor to achieve and endorse it." .And to top it off, here's what the UK government itself has to say about it:
The key decisions of this policy are as follows:In short, the BBC is indefensibly wrong to lock people into proprietary standards and systems and all the more so in regards to MS cruft, given MS legal standing in the EU.
FireFury03 wrote:
Saying "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver" is fine, but "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver manufactured by Sony" (for example) is not.
Fortunately even politicians are waking up and less and less turning a blind eye towards anything hidden under the label "computer".
... Microsoft = Fraud in many ways.
In most ways, but since the licenses, rightly or wrongly, legally or illegally, disclaim liability or suitability of the software for any purpose, there are easier targets: the dipshits who bring MS products into a business or institution in the first place. The interoperability, maintenance, security and pricing problems have been so well documented that you'd either have to be functionally living in a cave (gross negligence) or ignoring the world around you (willful negligence) or intentionally pushing Bill's political agenda (criminal mischief) or a smorgasbord of all three.
Things like this are old hat to me. I run OS/2 and one of the reasons OS/2 failed was due to MS paid astroturfers posting in various forums about how much better Windows was then OS/2. :)
The saddest part was that even when the astroturfers were outed most people only remembered the negative posts, not that they were part of a propaganda campaign and should of been taken with a large grain of salt.
Had the same problem with magazines. Some database would be reviewed and you would get reviews like,
We couldn't get SMP working on OS/2, so even with one CPU it was faster then NT with 2 CPU's we fail OS/2 due to only using one CPU. People, especially the pointed headed CEO's would only remember the words fail. It is the same with net neutrality, even with lots of evidence of astroturfing, people will only remember that the corn growers association came out against net neutrality. The corn growers association must be neutral right
Part of that problem was also that IBM had signed M$ to produce some core applications for OS/2 to jumpstart the market. M$ reneged shortly before release, way to late to find other software companies let alone have time to develop.
Stop peddling the idea that it is acceptable for systems to fail catastrophically. Sure MS is synonymous for unreliable, but no need to turn it into a case of sour grapes and pretend that everything else is as poorly designed or manufactured.
MS certification of drivers has not improved "quality" of the drivers over the years. It is, as predicted, more related to the ability to pay and accept harsh licensing terms. It simply allows MS to further restrict development of Windows devices and applications to parties willing to toe the party line.
A "bad" driver should not be able to bring down the system. Using MS products is simply helping Bill and his minions make bad engineering acceptable. Some anthropologists and psychologists might claim that acceptance for failure becomes generalized beyond that one domain and into society in general. Now that's evil with hair on it.
...It's not uncommon to get a BSOD from time to time.
And unless you do something about it, like vote with your wallet, you are simply helping Bill and his minions make bad engineering acceptable.
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
Cheers,
Ian
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one. Making bad engineering acceptable will probably be Bill Gates' largest "contribution" to society.
In fairness to software engineering, if the "bad" hardware driver can crash the system, then the system is not ready for production and has more than a few show-stopping (no pun intended) bugs. Take a look at basic kernel or micro-kernel design principles and stop spreading the view that catastrophically bad design is acceptable.
... There is no market for Linux versions of Adobe apps. There cannot be a market for what doesn't exist. There can be a demand. Demand does not create a market. Only the combination of supply and demand create a market.
If you wish to say that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market, than say so. Don't try to insinuate that Adobe hates open systems or that they are in bed with MS.
Even without using the correct definition of a market (supply + demand) you figured it out. No I do not wish to say that I think that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market. Neither you nor I can say what Adobe execs really are thinking.
What can be said is that there is demand for Adobe applications for Linux, natively. There is also enough demand that Photoshop has been a goal of WINE. There is demand, but strangely no supply.
Regardless, I don't have to insinuate. I can make accusations based on circumstances and past transgressions. It could be something as simple as an NDA for some MS SDK which prohibits work on competing platforms, like the NT SDK appeared to do for OS/2.
For several decades, MS has put pressure on software houses and OEMs to curb their activities with competing systems. Even Apple, which has an on-again, off-again, relationship with the Microsoftians was under strong pressure to drop technologies MS was gunning for. That includes Quicktime and the now defunct OLE-like OpenDoc, and quite possibly the OpenDocument Format.
...
We could have seen a GTA clone on the Linux front by now, but we don't for two reasons, no one is sponsoring any project and no one really is motivated enough to start one.
Why a clone? Are you so assimilated into the MS religion that you cannot fathom a market for software on normal systems?
Besides, that in general is a dying market. No one plays games on the desktop anymore. That's for work, or at least surfing and e-mail and such. Games do much better on the console. You're better off spending money on a mid-range desktop and a good console and then use the savings for a lot of beer and pizza. Top three selling consoles (Wii, PS3, PS2) have a lot of games available.
However, something seems to be holding that back just like with work-related applications. Adobe's been receiving requests for years and years about porting its apps to Linux. There's a market, but somehow the normal rules supply and demand appear to be interfered with here...
...employs some of the brightest, most motivated and insightful programmers out there.
Yeah, right. Then who wrote that stuff that's infamous for security, performance and interoperability failue? The <sarcasm> tags seem to be missing. Or was it a reference to cases like buying out Borland's developers and sending them to the beach indefinitely?
If MS is employing "some of the brightest, most motivated and insightful programmers out there", how come all they can do is copy existing products or buy out bottom of the barrel competitors' products? Most of MS product line seems based on purchases of small, floundering companies. Most of subsequent develpment
WE DON'T TRUST THEM. Is that so hard to understand? We don't believe they're being open and straightforward, why should we? They've never been open and straightforward with anyone ever.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over and over for twenty years, shame on me.
Some people are slow learners.
If Microsoft wants our trust they're going to have to earn it.
Chump. Assuming the improbable, that MS minions are really sincere about interoperability etc, just how do you propose to let them demonstrate that without either putting yourself into a vulnerable position or allowing them to waste your time or resources evaluating vaporware?
I am having a little trouble figuring out if you are sarcastic or serious.
I have great respect for the BSD kernel projects, they do some things a lot better than Linux. But if you compare the pace of kernel development, by source-code line count, Linux tremendously outpaces BSD kernel development.
What you're left with after that is a lot of Java projects. Which are great for enterprise, right now. But building a stack of new Java code is definitely building today's code for today, not tomorrow's code. Java is the conservative choice of enterprise at the moment.
And then there are community issues, like the Spring bug that showed us that this enterprise-critical code wasn't getting the eyes that an Open Source project with more non-company programmers does.
MS has been getting free labor from BSD for decades and lately appears to be trying to create an opposition between complementary projects in order to trouble the GPL. MS has as much or more to lose from the GPL than from anything else. The rest of us, we gain from the GPL. However, it is important to remember that the license chosen, is part of the game and that to play in any given sandbox, you must agree to the rules, whether ISC or GPL, or else find a different sandbox. So keep that in mind when MS trolls or pawns try to play BSD/ISC vs GPL licensing.
One caveat for non-ascetics is that in this day and age, especially when going up against a competitor known for 'embrace, extend, extinguish' breaking of technology, is that it isn't enough to just give away source code like we could back before MS politicized technology at the end of the 1990's. There now has to be something to keep the software free as a public resource while it evolved, sort of a payment-in-kind, rather than letting bad players not just walk away with free labor, but use it to undermine the developers.
To steer towards the technical aspects, the BSDs are interesting in that there is a lot of cross-pollenation between them. An advance in one usually rather quickly propagates to the others. Any of the four are excellent tools and complement Linux-based projects like Debian, Fedora, Busybox or UClinux. Any can be used in conjunction with just about any Free or Open Source Software including the various GNU-project tools we have come to use and rely upon, such as Apache, Perl or GCC.
The weakest one of the lot, strategically mind you, is FreeBSD. That is in part due to the mistake of allowing binary objects in the base. First, blackbox binaries are a security hole in and of themselves. Second, they make you as fully dependent on the vendor providing the binary as you are on the binary itself. That is a double kick in the nads for anyone that plans ahead. Increasingly businesses and governments are realizing that binary-only anything should not be touched even with the shitty end of a barge pole.
YMMV
My brother is a high up in the military and complains of this 'seal of approval' constantly. Microsoft salespeople and other constantly will send their products to get 'evaluated' and get the seal of approval the next day as if someone can evaluate their product in 24 hours. Whereas other products that are open source or actually supply the source code can take MONTHS!
It's totally arbitrary and has very little to do with security.
I also spoke with someone who does application and system security certification for a national government. Basically companies pay, the team then plays around and tries to guess what's in the blackbox and what it's doing in there, and then after a while rubber stamps the approval. The tools audited that way are not ones selected by the government, for that matter. The vendors present something and then provide the money for the certification. No money == no review == no certification.
The dude was rather proud that they only did such audits for domestic companies. However, the weakness I spotted was that "foreign" companies only needed an office, subsidiary or representative and that feeble barrier was circumvented.
Certification simplifies "security" evaluation to a more or less straightforward financial bidding process.
You can't even be sure when you have the source code.
The point there is that you have to have the code for the whole stack not just an isolated application. For an application to be secure, you have to be able to do a valid code audit. For the code audit to be worth anything it has to be done all the way down to the core: compiler, libraries, utilities and operating system. So you can be sure when you have the source code, but you do have to have all of the source code.
So without even touching on the quality issues with MS, lack of code access rules out all MS products from the system on up to user applications. "Shared" source might be fine for specific, limited, platform-specific development contexts, but is basically the same as "escrow" And "escrow" is just another name for closed source, namely, as Ken Thompson point out, insecure. Ditching MS products won't automagically make your site secure, but it is a necessary first step.
Now there are some short cuts one can take in Ken Thompson's example. However, they all boil down to having the code for the whole system as he points out, not just parts. Even diverse double compiling requires, at the end of the day, a system that has been vetted top to bottom to use as the baseline.
Now the next step is to deal with smaller, more modular units of code. They're not only good design but also easier to manage. Again, that rules out a certain party ...
FWIW it's interesting that the ACM recently pulled the Thompson article. It had been available for over a decade. One wonders how much longer the ACM will be a useful source of technical information.
http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/h
Until such time as MS comes to the table with full support for Open Standars, such as Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, OpenDocument (to name a few), or for that matter even DNS, there is no point in giving MS pud-pullers the spotlight. MS wants to play? Comply with EU law and banish WMA and WMV formats from the default Windows distros. Or MS can lay off subnotebooks like Asus and even OLPC and let them get back to distributing Linux as the market demands.
I dunno. To me it looks a whole lot like harassing Jobs just for the sake of harassing him, especially in light of other similarly timed items in Mad Magazine and in MS' Slate. Smear campaigns have been common in politics when the opponents can't compete on the issues, someone is bothered by Apple making a good product and/or a good profit. Let's see who's doing poorly these days and objects to Jobs (pun intended) ...
The boundary you saw between the smog and clean air above is from an inversion layer
One of the last times I flew into LAX, I recall my surprise as the plane hit a bump as we descended from the clear air into the brown air. It took me a moment to recall the temperature inversion and that the change in density probably caused the bump. Even in LA the air can't get so nasty it has lumps in it. Corrosive and toxic, yes, but lumps, no.