Re:So long as there are astronauts.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Driving your car to work every day for a year gives you a one in 124 chance of dying or being seriously disabled.
Where did this statistic come from? If 1% of our driving population become non-driving each year, then suburban sprawl would probably have become impractial. The American "give me a car or give me death" attitude probably wouldn't have happened, either.
There are 100s of millions of cars in the U.S. and tens of millions of drivers. By your statistic, this would mean hundreds of thousands of people are at least disabled each year in car accidents. This seems a bit much.
Also, don't forget that nearly all car accidents are preventable. Every accident I know of was either caused by negligence (overloaded trailers, no seatbelts, etc.), drunkenness, or visual obstructions (overgrown trees, poorly designed intersections, etc.). The only unpreventable accidents tend to fall under the "natural disaster" category.
1) Microsoft wouldn't have a clue how to manage Sun. Sun is a hardware-engineering firm with a different corporate culture than Microsoft.
2) Most of Sun's employees would either quit or sight tight until they can quit.
3) Sun's customers would leave for IBM or HP; they would not eat MS' dog food.
4) The Justice Dept. would actually do something for once, because J2EE is the only big competitor to.NET, and Solaris is the biggest commercial competitor to Windows Server.
what if ibm buys sun?
Bye bye, UltraSPARC. This would probably alientate lots of Sun customers.
Java would cease being as open as it is. The JCP would close down.
I doubt that is any different from *nix world or any other piece of software, excluding maybe OpenBSD. Your speculation about MS not disclosing bugs unlike people in the *nix world has nothing to do with the argument you just made - probably because you are running out of things to say.
Any commercial UNIX is a fraction the size of Windows. Linux and the BSDs are probably even smaller. Statistically, there are fewer bugs to disclose, and in Open Source, at least, more of them do get disclosed due to the transparency of the code and the lack of financial conflicts of interest of the authors. In commercial UNIX, it varies by company, but no commercial UNIX vendor is in a position to screw customers for long (otherwise they end up like SCO). Often, if a vulerability shows up in one UNIX, it is probably present in the others, as well.
Windows, on the other hand, is a monolithic code base protected by one company in a position of significant conflict of interest with respect to disclosure. If Microsoft doesn't have to do something, they probably won't. For example, how long was that Passport hole covered up? We will never know, and we will never know the true damage done to Microsoft's customers. The Register stated yesterday that the FCC can potentially fine MS $11,000 per violation of customer privacy, due to an earlier ruling about MS' lackluster behavior ($11,000 times millions of users, potentially). This is just the tip of the iceberg, IMO.
So lets make it complex, so an elite few can show off their pseudo-intelligence when it comes to knowing what configs relate to what parts of the system?
Again, the complexity is the same. Regardless, being able to read and think are hardly high expectations for a system administrator. I don't consider this elitist at all.
Every piece of windows has a set of orginized dialogs that allow you to tweak it in almost every way possible.
There are many many things hidden in the Windows registry. It doesn't take long before the GUI dialogs run out of steam, because they really only cover the basic configurations.
What the alternative in linux?
The better Linux distributions, such as Slackware, have everything consolodated under/etc. Most service daemons need only a SIGHUP to reload the configuration with only an momentary interuption in service. Managing Linux is actually very procedural and repeatable (and often scriptable). The BSDs share this trait, also.
Some distributions, such as Red Hat, attempt Windows-like GUIs for most things, but, like Windows, they are putting only a sugar coating on the complexity. I would never put a Red Hat box on a network without at least one pass through/etc.
Once your life is half over you need to cue up the recording and start watching what happened in the first half of your life. Then when that is over you drop dead.
How long until Fox or TNN have reality shows showing time-lapse "coffin cam" footage?
At moments of boredom I'll be able to relive any part of my life.
Another thing I just thought of: would you want the IRS to be able to supoena your life record? Suit #1 says, "I see you earned $200 each summer mowing your neighbors lawn...." Suit #2 says, "You really only spent 49.95% of the child care expenses...." And so on. There are very good reasons for not keeping records beyond three or five years. Even a totally legitimate person would want to make sure honest mistakes and minor slip-ups are lost to history...just to be safe.
Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
Well, at maximum physical memory capacity, a modern CPU would still take several seconds to process all the data in memory. Think 2 or 4 GB/sec bandwidth over 16GB of RAM. In CPU-time, that's an eternity...and a lot of page faults.
Now, consider 200GB of hard disk at 60MB/sec...that's downright ugly. Genuine SCSI RAID over multpile controllers might be necessary to get acceptable throughput.
I'd hope that storage throughput gets in the many GB/sec when the capacity reaches TB levels. Otherwise, I'll let you do the format and mkfs process--oh what fun that will be!
Hard drives will have to come with surgeon general warnings: "Waiting for this hard drive to complete large tasks may result in old age."
Guarenteed quality. Guarenteed speed. Instant preview streaming. No one cuts off your download because they're shutting down, or just being an asshole. Guarenteed complete albums. Cover art. Exclusive artist news and videos which are also free with the service.
Very true. An analogy: which is more desirable, eating at a chain restaurant with a consistent branding and franchising scheme or eating at Billy's Roadkill Shack? Maybe this week's roadkill is really good...then gain, maybe not.
I don't know much about FreeBSD and what it's current NSS capabilities are. This could be one of those things where Linux is stronger in some things but FreeBSD stronger in others. FreeBSD has a very good reputation, so I wouldn't expect the current limitations are show-stoppers.
So, my question is, why are/bin and/sbin traditionally static?
Safety. When trying to repair a broken system, the dynamic linker and libraries become one less thing to worry about when the essential tools are staticly linked. I can't imagine that all the tools in/bin would need to be dynamic, so there's a good chance that many would remain static.
Computer operating systems and application software are complex. They are among the most complex works of technology created by humans. Being able to poke around in the "Control Panel" does not make a person a competent system administrator.
Windows makes things appear easy, when they are not. Truth is, there are approximately the same number of things to learn in Windows as there are in Linux, with significant overlap. This is simply a fact.
Oh are we insulting to bring some weight to our orgument?
There is a difference between an insult and a suggestion. That difference lies in the honesty and attitude of the listener or reader.
Too bad you got nothing to prove this.
Windows consists of tens of millions of lines of source code written on a rushed release schedule. I estimate there are tens of thousands of bugs in Windows if not more than 100,000. Ask any programmer, and he/she would probably agree with these numbers.
Some of the comments at the link in the article would suggest new or improved LDAP support. That's pretty significant. NSS stands for Name Service Switch, which allows alternative datasources for many of the databases traditionally stored in/etc.
Solaris, for example, can use local files, DNS, NIS, NIS+, and LDAP for the hosts database. Minus DNS, these datasources can also provide the users database, the RBAC databases, the automounter configuration, bootparams, to name a few. To say it is useful is an understatement.
...setting up the simplest things on Linux is a torture.
It is? The important programs available for Linux are well documented and not difficult to install...at least no more difficult than Windows. Oracle, SunONE, etc., are available for Linux, too, and how can Linux make them more difficult? If anything, Windows brings the appearance of being easy, when it fundamentally is not. The other aspects of Linux, such as basic networking, package management, etc. are also not difficult. If you think they are, you need an education in computing fundamentals (which applies equally well to Windows!).
Windows also reports less annual bugs than Linux...
This is incorrect. The correct statement is "Microsoft reports less annual bugs than Linux...." Microsoft does this by choice, and it is to their advantage to do so. You, their customer, will never know how much dirt is under that rug, and you will be only be more blissful for it.
Because Chairman Bill is a controlling shareholder
I have seen the Register article before but had trouble believing it. It's such a blatant conflict of interest. Do lives not matter anymore? Does Bill Gates not know where to draw the line in his conquest?
Re:Next we tested IIS on both Linux and Windows
on
What's Microsoft Up To?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Take a native protocol to Microsoft and stack it up against a re-implementation on another operating system... sounds pretty weighted against Linux to me.
I just realized: does this mean Microsoft officially recognizes Samba as legitimate competition?
Privilege escalation exploits are already illegal (am I correct?), so DRM doesn't really change things. The root user, by definition, is the "copyright holder", anyway.
287th Rule of Acquisition, "DRM is an opportunity, not a prison."
The fact that a Ferengi saying this would not be suprising at all speaks volumes about DRM.
So what is Ballmer, anyway? Borg, monkey, or Ferengi??? Perhaps he is a monkey that emigrated to the Ferengi homeworld and was caught by the Borg on his way home from Risa. Hmmm....
most production code is a prototype that was 'good enough'...
Yeah, I've seen this happen myself. The end result was rather unsavory in the long run. A lot of the problem with software development is that few people look past the next milestone.
Sounds like a retail/POS (er, point-of-sale) network or a private application network (e.g., tax accounting). I definitely agree that "upgrades" in these kinds of environments can ruin a business, when the new-fangled technology craps out. I'm very happy to hear that you skipped Win95/98/ME entirely. Basing anything that handles money on these operating sytems would have been a disaster.
Make sure you read (and understand) the EULAs shipping with Windows XP. Just so you know where everything stands. Watch out for EULAs that come with automatic updates, too. Microsoft patches them too, sometimes!
Brooks' The Mythical Man Month reads "...plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." However, I read this to mean a real working prototype rather than a production system that simply gets tossed. If you are wondering whether a genuine production system needs rewriting, it's probably too late. If you can tolerate the pain, factor where you can; if not, brave the job market for a better opportunity.
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Driving your car to work every day for a year gives you a one in 124 chance of dying or being seriously disabled.
Where did this statistic come from? If 1% of our driving population become non-driving each year, then suburban sprawl would probably have become impractial. The American "give me a car or give me death" attitude probably wouldn't have happened, either.
There are 100s of millions of cars in the U.S. and tens of millions of drivers. By your statistic, this would mean hundreds of thousands of people are at least disabled each year in car accidents. This seems a bit much.
Also, don't forget that nearly all car accidents are preventable. Every accident I know of was either caused by negligence (overloaded trailers, no seatbelts, etc.), drunkenness, or visual obstructions (overgrown trees, poorly designed intersections, etc.). The only unpreventable accidents tend to fall under the "natural disaster" category.
what if microsoft buys sun?
.NET, and Solaris is the biggest commercial competitor to Windows Server.
What happens when matter meets anti-matter?
1) Microsoft wouldn't have a clue how to manage Sun. Sun is a hardware-engineering firm with a different corporate culture than Microsoft.
2) Most of Sun's employees would either quit or sight tight until they can quit.
3) Sun's customers would leave for IBM or HP; they would not eat MS' dog food.
4) The Justice Dept. would actually do something for once, because J2EE is the only big competitor to
what if ibm buys sun?
Bye bye, UltraSPARC. This would probably alientate lots of Sun customers.
Java would cease being as open as it is. The JCP would close down.
I've been finding redhat to be a progressivly more and more annyoing linux distro...
This is because they are trying to attract people who don't find Windows annoying and want more of the same.
I doubt that is any different from *nix world or any other piece of software, excluding maybe OpenBSD. Your speculation about MS not disclosing bugs unlike people in the *nix world has nothing to do with the argument you just made - probably because you are running out of things to say.
/etc. Most service daemons need only a SIGHUP to reload the configuration with only an momentary interuption in service. Managing Linux is actually very procedural and repeatable (and often scriptable). The BSDs share this trait, also.
/etc.
Any commercial UNIX is a fraction the size of Windows. Linux and the BSDs are probably even smaller. Statistically, there are fewer bugs to disclose, and in Open Source, at least, more of them do get disclosed due to the transparency of the code and the lack of financial conflicts of interest of the authors. In commercial UNIX, it varies by company, but no commercial UNIX vendor is in a position to screw customers for long (otherwise they end up like SCO). Often, if a vulerability shows up in one UNIX, it is probably present in the others, as well.
Windows, on the other hand, is a monolithic code base protected by one company in a position of significant conflict of interest with respect to disclosure. If Microsoft doesn't have to do something, they probably won't. For example, how long was that Passport hole covered up? We will never know, and we will never know the true damage done to Microsoft's customers. The Register stated yesterday that the FCC can potentially fine MS $11,000 per violation of customer privacy, due to an earlier ruling about MS' lackluster behavior ($11,000 times millions of users, potentially). This is just the tip of the iceberg, IMO.
So lets make it complex, so an elite few can show off their pseudo-intelligence when it comes to knowing what configs relate to what parts of the system?
Again, the complexity is the same. Regardless, being able to read and think are hardly high expectations for a system administrator. I don't consider this elitist at all.
Every piece of windows has a set of orginized dialogs that allow you to tweak it in almost every way possible.
There are many many things hidden in the Windows registry. It doesn't take long before the GUI dialogs run out of steam, because they really only cover the basic configurations.
What the alternative in linux?
The better Linux distributions, such as Slackware, have everything consolodated under
Some distributions, such as Red Hat, attempt Windows-like GUIs for most things, but, like Windows, they are putting only a sugar coating on the complexity. I would never put a Red Hat box on a network without at least one pass through
Once your life is half over you need to cue up the recording and start watching what happened in the first half of your life. Then when that is over you drop dead.
How long until Fox or TNN have reality shows showing time-lapse "coffin cam" footage?
At moments of boredom I'll be able to relive any part of my life.
Another thing I just thought of: would you want the IRS to be able to supoena your life record? Suit #1 says, "I see you earned $200 each summer mowing your neighbors lawn...." Suit #2 says, "You really only spent 49.95% of the child care expenses...." And so on. There are very good reasons for not keeping records beyond three or five years. Even a totally legitimate person would want to make sure honest mistakes and minor slip-ups are lost to history...just to be safe.
At moments of boredom I'll be able to relive any part of my life.
Do you really want to relive the Seventh Grade? Some things are best left to fading memory.
I used to be blasted away at the large number. Sometimes I could get it up to 1 or 2 pedabytes.
The lastest quarterly release of Solaris 9 can handle this much data. I'll let you buy the hardware, though.
Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
Well, at maximum physical memory capacity, a modern CPU would still take several seconds to process all the data in memory. Think 2 or 4 GB/sec bandwidth over 16GB of RAM. In CPU-time, that's an eternity...and a lot of page faults.
Now, consider 200GB of hard disk at 60MB/sec...that's downright ugly. Genuine SCSI RAID over multpile controllers might be necessary to get acceptable throughput.
I'd hope that storage throughput gets in the many GB/sec when the capacity reaches TB levels. Otherwise, I'll let you do the format and mkfs process--oh what fun that will be!
Hard drives will have to come with surgeon general warnings: "Waiting for this hard drive to complete large tasks may result in old age."
I hope my neighbor doesn't mind me parking on his lawn, because, well, Why Not? Right?
Well, in the South, your neighbor's car would get in the way. Sorry to spoil your mischievous plot.
Guarenteed quality. Guarenteed speed. Instant preview streaming. No one cuts off your download because they're shutting down, or just being an asshole. Guarenteed complete albums. Cover art. Exclusive artist news and videos which are also free with the service.
Very true. An analogy: which is more desirable, eating at a chain restaurant with a consistent branding and franchising scheme or eating at Billy's Roadkill Shack? Maybe this week's roadkill is really good...then gain, maybe not.
Linux has had this for ages?
I don't know much about FreeBSD and what it's current NSS capabilities are. This could be one of those things where Linux is stronger in some things but FreeBSD stronger in others. FreeBSD has a very good reputation, so I wouldn't expect the current limitations are show-stoppers.
So, my question is, why are /bin and /sbin traditionally static?
/bin would need to be dynamic, so there's a good chance that many would remain static.
Safety. When trying to repair a broken system, the dynamic linker and libraries become one less thing to worry about when the essential tools are staticly linked. I can't imagine that all the tools in
Lets have some more of these baseless comments.
Computer operating systems and application software are complex. They are among the most complex works of technology created by humans. Being able to poke around in the "Control Panel" does not make a person a competent system administrator.
Windows makes things appear easy, when they are not. Truth is, there are approximately the same number of things to learn in Windows as there are in Linux, with significant overlap. This is simply a fact.
Oh are we insulting to bring some weight to our orgument?
There is a difference between an insult and a suggestion. That difference lies in the honesty and attitude of the listener or reader.
Too bad you got nothing to prove this.
Windows consists of tens of millions of lines of source code written on a rushed release schedule. I estimate there are tens of thousands of bugs in Windows if not more than 100,000. Ask any programmer, and he/she would probably agree with these numbers.
Who the hell needs this!?
/etc.
Some of the comments at the link in the article would suggest new or improved LDAP support. That's pretty significant. NSS stands for Name Service Switch, which allows alternative datasources for many of the databases traditionally stored in
Solaris, for example, can use local files, DNS, NIS, NIS+, and LDAP for the hosts database. Minus DNS, these datasources can also provide the users database, the RBAC databases, the automounter configuration, bootparams, to name a few. To say it is useful is an understatement.
...setting up the simplest things on Linux is a torture.
It is? The important programs available for Linux are well documented and not difficult to install...at least no more difficult than Windows. Oracle, SunONE, etc., are available for Linux, too, and how can Linux make them more difficult? If anything, Windows brings the appearance of being easy, when it fundamentally is not. The other aspects of Linux, such as basic networking, package management, etc. are also not difficult. If you think they are, you need an education in computing fundamentals (which applies equally well to Windows!).
Windows also reports less annual bugs than Linux...
This is incorrect. The correct statement is "Microsoft reports less annual bugs than Linux...." Microsoft does this by choice, and it is to their advantage to do so. You, their customer, will never know how much dirt is under that rug, and you will be only be more blissful for it.
Don't be a stupid troll.
This thread is getting childish.
Because Chairman Bill is a controlling shareholder
I have seen the Register article before but had trouble believing it. It's such a blatant conflict of interest. Do lives not matter anymore? Does Bill Gates not know where to draw the line in his conquest?
Take a native protocol to Microsoft and stack it up against a re-implementation on another operating system... sounds pretty weighted against Linux to me.
I just realized: does this mean Microsoft officially recognizes Samba as legitimate competition?
It's called chmod!
Privilege escalation exploits are already illegal (am I correct?), so DRM doesn't really change things. The root user, by definition, is the "copyright holder", anyway.
(Score:0, Funny)
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
287th Rule of Acquisition, "DRM is an opportunity, not a prison."
The fact that a Ferengi saying this would not be suprising at all speaks volumes about DRM.
So what is Ballmer, anyway? Borg, monkey, or Ferengi??? Perhaps he is a monkey that emigrated to the Ferengi homeworld and was caught by the Borg on his way home from Risa. Hmmm....
Sheesh, lets at least use a "real" computer:
save %sp, -0x70, %sp
mov 0x1, %o1
st %o1, [%fp - 0xc]
mov 0x2, %o0
st %o0, [%fp - 0x10]
add %o1, %o0, %o0
st %o0, [%fp - 0x8]
st %o0, [%fp - 0x4]
or %o0, %g0, %i0
ret
restore
For more info, check this Register article...
.NET benchmarks referenced above are a scam.
Right at the end of your precious Register article is a link to another article that shows The Middleware Company to be the liars that they are.
The J2EE vs.
most production code is a prototype that was 'good enough'...
Yeah, I've seen this happen myself. The end result was rather unsavory in the long run. A lot of the problem with software development is that few people look past the next milestone.
(over 300 facilities nationwide)
Sounds like a retail/POS (er, point-of-sale) network or a private application network (e.g., tax accounting). I definitely agree that "upgrades" in these kinds of environments can ruin a business, when the new-fangled technology craps out. I'm very happy to hear that you skipped Win95/98/ME entirely. Basing anything that handles money on these operating sytems would have been a disaster.
Make sure you read (and understand) the EULAs shipping with Windows XP. Just so you know where everything stands. Watch out for EULAs that come with automatic updates, too. Microsoft patches them too, sometimes!
Brooks' The Mythical Man Month reads "...plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." However, I read this to mean a real working prototype rather than a production system that simply gets tossed. If you are wondering whether a genuine production system needs rewriting, it's probably too late. If you can tolerate the pain, factor where you can; if not, brave the job market for a better opportunity.