Another won't take its place. The business model doesnt work. Its dying and there arent a lot of Venture Capatalists willing to throw money away on companies with a business plan predicated on giving away its product.
succesfull companies sell product and make money because people buy them. In this case Mandrake make an excellent distribution and one of the best ive used but because everyone gives it away they have to - and thus they havent got the money they need to continue development on a stable and easy to install linux which is what is needed to bring linux to the masses.
Open source as a business is dying and the number of times you can say 'another company will come along' is diminishing.
You all attack Microsoft but when it comes to actually investing some money in the crusade and keep a company alive that is a leader in this open source that you all hold up as superior to them you cannot be bothered !
What does that say about the moral attitude of open source? or are people finally admitting they are only attacking other companies because they HEAVEN FORBID make money off software instead of giving it away to you for FREE.
Right now im having a hard time seeing the difference between this and warez - both want something for nothing and wont pay for it.
Sit down and think about this for a minute - If Mandrake goes broke, then next maybe is SUSE, or Redhat, or Lindows or Sun.... Whens it enough, when all the companies that sell Linux as an alternative to the corporates are gone what hope is there for money to develop the software you take for free ?
you dont have to worry about Microsoft - at this rate they've won the fight without trying and you can all thump youre chests and proclaim the horror of the death of Open Source and how Microsoft killed it and spend the $5 on some more Jolt.
The fact is this points out the dichotomy in the 'free'and open source movement - the fact is that giving away things for free is not a good business plan when you have to develop those things. The flaw i see in the GPL is that it encourages people to use other peoples code and incorporate it into their own, this is a wonderfull idea except in the fact that you are trying to make money or stay alive on it alone, then youre in trouble.
I see so many people on here commenting that they dont use mandrake so they wont join, or that they downloaded the software and its free so they wont pay, or even some claiming that corporations they have encouraged to use Open Source should pay.
What sort of hypocrisy do you function under?
Your money goes to helping a company survive, its $5 dollars for christs sake! If you think that the company is in trouble and that doesnt affect you then youre dreaming, what about Loki and the many other open source companies that have gone under, did they affect you ? what will ?
The attack on corporates is even more laughable as im pretty sure in 99% of cases they are the ones who actually purchase boxed software and DONT download it, thus they have already contributed more than you have.
The fact is this should scare all of you - open source is not at this moment in time a viable business plan and that means its dying and the pace is accelerating. Invariably it means that Open source will once again retreat to the dedicated coders and the academic arena and that will mean the death of Linux in corporates and home user environments.
Donating to mandrake is supporting the movement you are part of. I have just joined even though i now use exclusively MS OS'es (issues with some things OSS and Linux wont do NOT a philosphical anti linux position) becuase i think this is something worth saving - there has to be an alternative and its time you all draw a line in the sand.
Support Open Source or find another crusade - anything else makes you a hypocrite of the worst type as you wont put your money where your mouth is (and your heart is supposed to be).
bill gates wrote both BASIC and DOS for the altair - he wrote DOS longhand in an Alberqurque motel toom (Fire in the Valley amongst other books will cofnirm this for you) we are talking about a period BEFORE the IBM project and at that stage microsoft were working on a DOS but bought QDOS anyway.
I never said he did anything other than being in the right place at the right time.
I dont personally have a crystal ball but i dont know if there would have been a GUI or not - my comment was that Microsoft moved development forward, maybe its their money or rapacious and anti comptetitve business attitude, i dont know and i dont want to comment (Notice i didnt defend one action of the company in my post) but IMHO i think the computing world would look very different without it and i was attempting to say that we should not dismiss everything out of hand simply because gates or MS had a hand in it.
If theUS govt kills MS today whats the immediate desktop alternative for ALL users (NOTE linux DOES not fit this description) and what impact would it have on the PC marketplace (you know all those home lusers you all look down on who buy all the stuff that keeps the market alive) - the industry would be killed dead or at least suffer massive damage.
Im sure you wont into the windows drove mac development foward - but as a long time Mac user and admin i can tell you that without the competition from Microsoft apple would have let the OS ossify - check out copland or taligent pink if you want examples of their ability to develop and OS. Until OSX mac oses contained mass kludges and legacy code and apple despite all of its claims of being for the common man has consistenly until the last 2-3 years offered lousy support for its softwarer. I dont see how anyone can seriously claim MS products be it their instability in some cases or the little innovations they developed in others (and they have come up with a few) have driven other Oses (including Linux - what state was X in 10 years ago, 5 years ago - look at it know) forward as it gave customers a GUI which they expected to be the standard desktop - its not unthinkable to the man in the street to have a computer that hasnt got a gui (note - i said man in the street NOT linux expert).
Maybe i have a warped view at times - but after spending nearly 20 years of my life in the computer industry i have seen a lot of things come and go and a lot of history, over the years i have supported Unix in many flavours, Novell, OS2, al windows os's and even linux, i see good and bad in all of them and i try to be flexible and not get a set mind.
What i tried to say in my article is that we need to be open minded enough to see good things in all areas as well as bad, we cannot ever become one eyed and closed minded in any way - thats why i cant stand the Linux is god people any more that i can stand the Bill is god people - lets just get on with what we do and stop worrying about what other people do.
Good point - my spelling and grammar tend to suck lately - too many years working in abbreviated speak i suspect - pretty lousy for someone who started out as a journalist !
I know i risk taking yet more damage on this but what they hell.
Can someone explain how the hell my comment is flamebait?
I was aware that posting a non abusive microsft comment might be seen as slightly controversial but can you actually deny ANYTHING in the comment as incorrect ?
The meaningless microsoft is evil bashing on/. is pointless, instead how about some intelligent comment on what they do wrong and what they do right - they must have done some things well, or are well all denying that they have done one thing for it?
I dont mind being modded down but i dislike immensely the flamebait tag - it shows that the moderator simply takes personal dislike to the post and marks it as such not on the merits. I moderate too and try to always be honest and on occasion i have also posted a comment to explain why i moderate down. Perhaps we need to attach a user name to moderations to stop this stuff ?
If you want to attack anything that does not toe the party line line then/. and open source is doomed - inflexibility and an unwillingness to compromise or discuss issues is what has put Microsoft in the poisition they are in and yet day in and day out slashdot proves its not isolated to closed source.
do you all seriously think Microsoft are going to go away and die?
What the government will shut down a multi billion dollar company and plunge the industry into collapse in the process ?
Youre still going to have to put up with MS and they will still make and sell OS products, even if split up, bashing anything to do with them is a negative waste of time - if you can do something better do it, the world is your oyster and open source has so many wonderful reasons to succeed, but bitching and whining about MS wont make linux the worlds premiere operaiting system, it wont fix the numerous issues that prevent it being the desktop choice for everyman, it wont bring a unified face to kernel development or drivers, it wont convince companies to switch, all it will do is make the open source movement as a whole look petty and childish and thats not what we are at all.
I have used and supported open source for a long time, i started my career on HP UX and have never forgotten it and up until recently i ran a number of linux servers and desktops at home and work -i stopped because i couldnt take the lack of support and drivers, the endless make and configures and patches and work arounds and lack of documentation and a million other little things, i stopped because so many of you would rather attack anyone with a rational opinion as a flamebaiter or troll.
The sad thing is that so many people in the world get their opinions on what open source is about from sites like slashdot, god knows what they think.
Oh for the days when open source meant open minded as well.
I dont mean to sound funny but dig out some books and do some reading on the subject - pirates of silicon valley is a good start - read about bill gates the 13 year old working finding busgs in Digital software - finding more than anyone, read about him getting caught hacking into systems by the police, read about him writing DOS on paper having never seen a the altair it was for, read about him developing most of the early microsoft sofwtare himself.
We all simply treat this guy as evil and stupid forgetting that he was there at the birth of the PC market, his DOS was the first one for the first microcomputer and the most widely copied piece of software for it, without him it didnt exist. Maybe we should all step back and look at what he has built from that.
Im not defending microsoft in any way but i am against the microsoft is evil so everything they have ever done is wrong.
If it wasnt for them what would we have on the PC? Would there be a GUI as sophisticated as windows (love it or hate it you can argue it drove the Mac development forward better than anything) Would Office software have progressed to the level it has? What about Development languages - we all throw off at VB and the like but how many programmers got started on it ? Plug and Plag and USB - without windows where would these be (i know PnP has problems but its getting a lot better fast)?
Im simply saying that to attack a man based on what you feel he has done is to bypass the fact he was and is a geek like us.
Whatever microsoft has become (and i wont defend their undefensible business practicies) they helped give birth to the industry and the technologies we use today , we dont need to thank them for it and it doesn't excuse their actions (nothing can) but it is something worth thinking about.
PS and everyone knew the 640k statement was apocraphyl over 10 years ago - and at the time it was not the arrogant statement you all make it out to be - its easy to look back and laugh at the past but unless you have lived there you have no idea - it wasnt so long ago that a 486DX33 with 16mb of ram was blisteringly fast and the most computer you would ever need.
This is an example of an increasing bias in Cnet and Zdnet reporting - the desire to push out information as fast as possible and as loosely checked as possible grows daily.
But i have to take the/. team to task a little - a small amount of research would have seen that the virus may be the first written in C# but its not designed to attack.NET. It makes use of some.NET frameworks components to spread but its simply a mass mailing worm and an exe file to boot, it creates a VBS.
Now to look at at that in another way.
1. Systems vulnerable to this are 2 years behind the curve - if you still allow.exe and.vbs into your environment in any form your not qualified to work in it. 2. Not keeping virus scanners up to date is asking for it 3. These guys simply did the invitable and made a virus in the new language - its been done with every language and OS platform since computers began and will no doubt continue.
I dont want to attack anyone but i would suggest that we might all be benefited by spending 5 minutes researching before we comment (and to the anti MS crowd - if you cant be bothere finding out the truth dont comment - to be honest the attacks on every mention of microsoft is getting tedious and pointless and i suspect is driving people away from open source - enough is enough - you dont like MS - they are evil - we know so dont keep telling us)
It depresses me that the level of technical discussion of anything non linux on here is lower than a snakes arse - i wish we could see the same passion that is applied to Kernal Updates applied to other areas.
Actually as a big user of Winterms we have hacked them apart and played with them - they dont run Windows NT they Run a WINCE solution customised and theres not much else you can do with them - we have hacked them apart and they wont work outside of citrix networks - thats firmware designed and even with the flash disk theres nothing you can do - plus they cost about $500 and come with a security point for a standard notebook lock - you would be more likely to lose the keyboard or mouse.
On another note i put locks on the back of all of my pcs - users cant get them open, they cost about $2 in bulk (lockwood or yale) and they can be reused.
Actually the issue with windows terminal server (if you mean that) is that its not diskless - you need an os to run it - i dont know if there are linux clients for it or not so that may not be a problem.
The great thing about citrix is the range of clients available - i have as a test done an install on a 486SX16 notebook and dialed in - dos client only for dial in (configuration was a breeze) and then it runs a full Citrix Desktop - i have seen it done with 485 machines and i know of at least one company using P166 machines with slakware running a linux client for Full windows desktop - its a great cheap solution to dedicated thin terminals.
The thing about many other terminal server solutions is they need an os to run on top of - windows or otherwise - with citrix you can use terminals or i believe there is even a bootable floppy client for it so no internal harddrives are needed on older machinery.
Im told it will run on XT's but have never seen it done. This is one product that is worth the money.
Same for us - we run a large environment which has to encompass a lot of remote sites and we have been running citrix metaframe 1.8 and now Xp with NT and 2000 terminal server. We use WYSE thin client boxes and they are good value, invredibly reliable and the newer ones have a customised windows CE configuration - you dont even need to have an ip for the server you can configure for a domain and load balance the farm as we do, the first available server (we run 18 load balanced) picks up the client connection and runs with it - if you get your links up to a decent speed this is an option but if not (in the case of remote sites) i adivse setting them to connect to a specific server and then if thats not availble they will choose another - this cuts down on profile copying between boxes (citrix is heavily profile based - stored on the home server of the user).
Publishing APPS is extremely simple and is easier than Windows Terminal Server - this solution is not the best and citrix offers advantages over it.
The things to be aware of / cons 1. Bandwidth - citrix claim 32kb is used by each full delivered client - dont believe them if your users use large databases or financial sofwtare - aim for an overhead of at least half this again and spec the link accordingly x number of users and add an extra 10% - i run 10 people over a 320k link which can be slow under heavy load - increasing this to 384k seemed to give me better performance and 512k made it very fast. 2. User issues - the clients will piss users of if they have had PC's - they have NO cd roms, no floppy drives and the things you can do on a normal PC (like installing software) cannot be done on metaframe - it's a very secure solution and if you are smart and want to lower support you will lock down the desktop and scrensavers and set the default screen res to 1024x768 - this is what we have found to be best, when a user logs into my farm they get a blank screen with no icons and a limited programs selection in the start menu - all of their applications are delivered in a program neighbourhood window. also lock the size of caches and internet files down to a minimum size - long login times are often related to large internet caches.
Users do like it once they get used to it and from a support view the thing is great full remote control built in means you can see instantly what a user is doing, the admin tools are fantastic and support is a cinch. All drives and printers are simply login script homed (we use Kixstart but are moving to an active directory domain so thats changing) and file perissions and access to application farms are as simple as configuring domain groups.
Once you get it worked out its worth the considerable cost, run a license gateway and you dont need overtly large licenses - a license not in use on one server can be used by another and by using load balancing a fault tolerance can be built in (a session will be terminated is a server goes down but a user can log straight back into another)
I liked it so much that even though im the manager i got my CCA (citrix Certified Administrator) and im working on my CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) if youre looking for a cert which offers returns on investment the CCEA is it but YOU MUST be a REAL mcse as it needs a pretyy deep knowledge base (Paper MCSE should not bother)
Citrix is used heavily in University environmments (i know of 6 here in australia alone) so check it out at them.
PS a note - The downside to citrix is it needs MEATY server - i buy Quad Xeon's with 2.5gb ram and 80gb raids for them - it needs it.
You asked - If you mean the Open Source developers or small-fry programmers then I don't think they are appropriate. The bnetd project took nothing from Blizzard. The code was the result of years of hard work and the fact someone else decided to use it to harm Blizzard should not reflect upon them.
They spent years working to get around blizzard's system for battlenet thus circumventing their protection and authentication - to do this from what i can see they had to pull apart and reverse engineer the client - thus they are in the shit - if the had spent years designing their own version of the game of writing some original software i would be applauding them but as they set out to break a system for their own use (and as shitty as battlenet is it is STILL blizzards system which you agree to use when you install the game) I think yours is an incorrect analogy - if you want a better one than the poem try this - if you spend years working out a way to break into the defence department computer system to launch nuclear missiles BUT you dont do it yourself you just give someone else who does it ARE you considered an accomplice under the law?
yes you are and youre going to get done for it.
And yes if blizzard want you to only use their product in the manner intended and licensed to you then they have a perfect legal right to restrict access to that said product in the way they have - this is the legal system and i wonder if you were the developer of the original product how would you feel.
They are a company - companies exist to make profits - if they dont make profits they go broke and people lose their jobs - this is the risk in business and companies do everything in their power to lower that risk as blizzard did with CD key authentication and battlenet.
Breaking this because it seems like a good idea is no legal defence and anyone who set out to do it has to be aware there are consequences to their actions (as these guys no doubt knew from day one)
You cannot tell me that they didn't know the software could be used for this purpose when they wrote it ? it was very easily modified and these guys obviously had an excellent understanding of the API's used in this product so how could they be ingorant of the ability for their software to allow circumvention of the copy protection ?
Im not the bnetd team so i dont know what they did or didnt do but i do think you all need to go back and read the EULA on products and then do some research on fair use and copyright.
The depressing thing is this sort of argument shows how many of you have never worked in the real world - reality is my company is laying off staff again due to economic issues and thus we would sue anyone who damaged out IP and copyright - Blizzard are doing the same thing - if this can be used either out of modification or out of the box to 'break' their protection then they will sell less product and people will lose jobs - they have to go after this for simple economic reasons.
The open source community has seen company after company go broke in the last 12 months because it was unable to make a profit yet you persist in the concept that anything is fair and right and you can do what you want with other peoples sofware because you want to or disagree with the law or dont agree with EULA's or whatever - thats why companies stay closed source and will continue to do so.
PS i would appreciate it if you can use a name when attacking me - i have the guts to risk karma and ridicule by using my name and i really think anonymous criticisim is wothless, show some guts and risk some karma - as i pointed out EVERYTHING in life has consequences.
Actually i dont disagree with your comment but the fact is this is not a case of a competitive product its a case of a tool that can be used to illegally use a product developed by a company. These guys didnt set up a company to develop a new product or improve a new product, they set out to find a way around a part of the user agreement with a company they didnt agree with whether it was legal or not.
Most of us just gloss over the EULA but maybe we should read it and we might find out that you dont have the right unless explicitly stated to modify another companies software to suit yourself UNLESS it is open sourced which blizzard software is not.
there rights are not limited to any of the above as to do 1 you need to find a way to capture and re direct their data stream and circumvent their systems and in the case of 2 fair use does not apply to this case as you specifically agree not to do it in the EULA which is a license awarded to you to use a product. Whether you agree with that or not you cannot claim modification is fair use.
Their legal rights under the law also include Logos, fonts, copyright, look and feel, music, characters and many other things.
bnetd designed a tool that could be used to break the software or cause it to perform in a way not designed and thus circumvent the agreed usage of the product - trust me if Blizzard takes this to court they will win comfortably on the evidence and facts.
Nope it allows you to circumvent the EULA and use non blizzard servers - the fact that it is extensible to enable cheating and circumvention of security measures is what has got these guys in trouble.
Bnetd allows you to use cracked version in that it specifically ignores the CD key section and allows the establishment of servers outside the legal system blizzard setup - i've used battle net in the past and will do again and the only reason i can see to want to go around it is to use cracked or tampered with software.
We never need to lose sight of the fact that this company spent many millions developing software to make a return on that investment, they setup the systems and infrastructure to support it and all they ask is that you use their system to play online.
I dont disagree with bnetd - its good software and likely written from the best of intentions and maybe blizzard should sit down and see if they cannot use this software in a good way - BUT that would mean closed source beacuse the fact is that whether it was in the spirit of the design of the software (i can't say it was or wasn't) to allow the circumvention of CD keys, it certainly was in the means of the software to make it easy to modify to do it and thats the problem blizzard has with it.
As to the non infringing use - there is none - read the license you agreed to when you bought the software - it doesnt have a loophole in it to allow you to set up your own server, thus any attempt to do it is infringement and thats the case im sure blizzard will present in court.
Whilst its true that Free Speech is the most popular for Pro bono there is NO way in hell you could ever cast this as a free speech case, its not. The question will hinge on whether the software infringes blizzard copyrights or circumvents legal anti copying or access control measures to facilitate use of a hacked or copied version of the software. Getting around copy protection is not the spirit or the letter of free speech - its violation of copyright or theft of intellectual property (whatever your politcal beliefs the law is the law) if getting around
Theres no free speech angle in it - Blizzard spent the money to develop a product with a reasonable expectation of security, they provide the servers and bandwith for the BattleNet system and they have an expectation that people using this system will have paid for the software. To attempt to prevent piracy (albeit not very succesfully if Diablo and Starcraft are any example) they use a CD key system.
The BNETD developers designed software that circumventes this by 'ignoring' the cd key and thus it breaks the protection. (note it did this for older blizzard releases - thus blizzard could possibly prove they have a case WITHOUT WC3)
Whether the person who modified the system or not is reponsible the unfortunate fact if that bnetd as the original developer of the product will be the first ones toe get sued as their software allowed modification (a good lawyer can argue that it encouraged it) to circumvent the copy protection system and allow illegal use of the clients IP.
In short i wouldnt waste a cent of my money in a lawsuit if i was bnetd - i would find a way to modify my software to block blizzard products and pray that my software doesnt allow any circumvention of other companies copy protection (i bet it does).
I like bnetd, its interesting software, but it can and has been used to get around the protection on blizzards software and it is very easy to prove, ultimately Blizzard will win and wasting piles of money defending what many will see as the indefensible is plain insane.
PS i read tim's letter on this and i would point out that anyone here who gets worked up about the talk about lawyers being agressive and yelling has never dealt with lawyers before - this is what they get paid for.
Open source does not mean break any and all copyrights - and the downside of collective development is that when something like this happens the courts are going to go after the most identifiable person they can get their hands on - and in most cases that will be the original developer.
Want to avoid this happening to you ? get a lwayer or IP expert to review your license agreement to ensure you are covered. Sure it costs money but then again so does getting sued.
All the talk about DMCA and fair use and everything else is a very good thing but i think missing a very important point, what happened to old fashioned right and wrong ?
I mean beacuse the bnetd developers developed an open source product and then someone els modified it then they and the owner of the copyright product they are using to circumvent it is in the wrong and the poor guys from bnetd are in the right.
The fact is blizzard spent the money, many millions of dollars in fact, to develop a product and they have a right to ensure their intellectual property, copyrights and investment are protected. They own the intellectual property to the product and thus they can and will take action to protect it.
The information on this case thus far presented doesnt seem to be asking for anything exceptional, and i dont see them going after the bnetd guys for every cent they have, so why the outcry?
This is a pitfall of open source, that a product you develop MAY be modified in a way that you did not intend and then used for a reason you did not forsee. This is fine and in most cases a good thing BUT like everything we do in life it has consequences and crying about it is not going to solve the issue - sitting down like proffesionals and talking to blizzard would be a good first step (one i suspect they are in the process of doing)
And my final comment is this - all of you out there riding the white horse of Anti DMCA and Anti Big Company - Tell me
is it right to take someone elses property and use it without paying ?
is it right to ignore licenses and other agreements because you 'dont care for them' ? Is it right to damage a companies profits and endanger jobs for people ? people with families to feed ? Is it right to defend anyone who comes along and finds a way around 'iritating things' like security?
If you answer yes to these then i thing you have bigger problems that you can ever imagine - youre abetting criminals and its hard to morally accept one form of it and reject another.
i was disgusted with open source over Skylarov and now i dont know what to think - it seems that the concept or right and wrong no longer means anything to so many of you.
This is a machine with zip or removable drive (a must have for my needs)
ADD 256MB ram - $252 (why is thi so dear?) Bring the HDD up to the same as my PC (80gb) $231 Add a monitor - 17" cheapest $2299 (gues what YOU cannot buy a G3 from them with a CRT only a flatscreen) Zip Drive $231 I want a DVD like my PC - $231 (superdrive not available in this box)
Our 'Cheap' mac is now Subtotal $6,929.00
Thats exactly 3 times the cost of MY 1.5gb PC and i used name brand gear (motherboards etc) to build it.
A notebook
yes a notebook i hear you say
OK on my desk i have a Dell Latitude C600 with 80gb HDD,512mb ram, Nvidia Video Card, Wireless 100mb network, CDRW/DVD, 15.1 screen etc. The apple i need to match it is a G4
So lets go entry level.
Summary 256MB SDRAM - 1 SO DIMM 550MHz PowerPC G4 @ 100MHz - 16MB VRAM 20GB Ultra ATA drive 15.2-inch TFT display Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW) Gigabit Ethernet 56K internal modem 1 FireWire 2 USB ports Mac OS 9 boot-up (Mac OS X included)
Subtotal $5,495.00
Add RAM - $242 Add HDD (only goes to 48gb) $935 Add Air Port - $199
Subtotal $6,871.00
I mean MY dell cost $5100 and it was DEAR.\
I love Apple - i supported them for 2 years in advertising and would kill for one but at these prices i couldnt afford the badge - and thats BEFORE $3500 for a copy of photoshop.
read the book - Deckard is a replicant, dick was making the point of the hypocrisy of deckard killing his own kind and not ebing aware of it, yet the morality that he displays is a comment on the humanity of humans, in many ways deckard is a vulnerable and weak character (especially in the book) yet he turns out to have a human and moral core that supercedes his weakness. The concept of humanity and intelligence is one recurring thru this boo.
the thing is if you read the book a few times things will jump out that tell you that deckard suspects he's a replicant but isnt willing to look deeper into it - the fact he passes the Voight Kampf and other occurences are there to keep us guessing - and the Voight Kampf isn't perfect (this is mentioned in the book) if Deckard is a Nexus 6 then he can show real emotion or a facsimilie of such.
The hints in the movie - More Human Than Human, "how can it no know what it is" are ironies that point us toward it from the start
Read some of the works on the making of the movie and it becomes clear ridley didnt want Deckard to be a replicant but the fact that he is hinges the entire story - he's a doomed man walking thru a doomed world yet he doesnt stop caring and dreaming and striving for more.
Your defenition of spam might be a bit off but i suspect you have NOT removed all the check boxes in your affiliates and hotmail partners section when you sign up.
I have had the same hotmail for years and the only SPAM i get is about fake university degrees - alsways the same message but from different domains. I get more spam on my work account than my hotmail. far from being unusable i find it gets less spam than Altavista or Yahoo (which should be called spamhoo), the blocking in hotmail works pretty well as well.
And as the spam in these accounts is sent to a preditcion list (john1@, john2@ and so on please indicate the address you chose (HINT : notpublic@hotmail would be a great way to collect spam) The point on these types of services is that if you want to avoid spam dont use a common address - hotmail and other free mail providers cannot defend against every spammer out there using a dictionary type list against them - they are just enetering name@hotmail.com over and over to get responses and as hotmail has so many clients an addres like mik12567@hotmail is as great a spam target as bob_smith
Hotmail is a free service and thats what pisses me - its free so if you dont like it dont use it - its not like you have to - and as free services go its not bad for what you pay for it, or is it simply that its owned by Microsoft ?
id mark you down as a troll if i had any points left
I have read this case study before and its an excellent one but it does not prove anything about open source or debunk myths. As the writer posits the company was already running a lot of open source and made the decision to go to it fully and replace all closed source software. Also bearing in mind that they are a software company the level of basic user knowledge is higher than say a law firm.
Let apply this point to my firm - 15000 staff worldwide running a mixed environment (win 2k AB Global Domain, Exchange Mail, Linux Firewall and SCO for SAP, Win 2k Desktops - now would you care to count the cost of replacing it all at the same time (and we would have to as suddenly we would run into major issues with docuements and spreadsheets etc. My company is driven by fee earning staff and these guys are on average almost totally computer illiterate, with win2k they logon and open outlook and they can work, they can cope with explorer to find a file (its logical and graphical) and they can surf the web, they dont care aboout anything else.
The company discusse i this email has one office and is medium sized - i expect a couple of hundred staff - so a big difference
I dont want to be seen as putting linux down on the desktop i simply point out that if you are going to use this argument to prove linux on the corporate desktop then find a corporate implementation - NOT a medium company - show me a major company on a global basis that does this and i will listen.
Show me arguments on a TCO, Retraining, Infrastructure and systems replacement and repogramming, Desktop Rollout etc, give me some costs on what it costs me to hire the right staff to do this properly and how i cope with 2 enviroments while it happens.
I think linux has a place, i have said it before - i also said ive stopped using it and i have - only because IMHO its not ready for the desktop yet and all the evangelical singing and dancing wont make it so and neither will comments based on Bill Gates Megalomania or ms evil intentions (you cannot say anything about Bill Gates personality with certainty unless you have met him - the rest is bias an supposition)
This article doesnt debunk anything as the writer has a clear and plain PRO linux bias - give us some stuff written by independant parties and we will then be able to make our own decisions - PS we in corporate IT are'nt the fools and stooges you guys make us out to be - most of us are very skilled and many of us started out like me on UNIX - HINT we also dont like being treated like morons by people who see themselves as superior.
Linux isnt winning anything - this should not be a war its software- the minute you make it so you lose as companies like MS can and will eat you alive.
XP is selling very strongly actually and MS own the applications market in Office Software, Internet (yes even IIS) and many other areas - they dont need to pop rollaids but many of their managers likely do so as the only thing that keeps you on top is constant improvement and an eye on the ball.
Microsoft dont sell perfect software, hell some of their stuff isnt even good, but they do back it up with support (especially in the corporate market) proper documentation, training and certification and they produce software that considering the work it does is stable for desktop users and trust me more than stable enough for the business market place.
A case in point is the Nimda/Code Red issue - sure IIS might be insecure if you dont know what you are doing or keep it maintained or secure it but guess what so is linux and apache.
The fact that people will stay Win98 is not surprising at all - MS fucked up with ME - big time so that makes some users cautious, XP had a lot of press on activation (a non issue i can assure you) and that also hurts. (PS i would note that at no stage in my life have i ever listened to advice on a radio and TV talk show and taken it as gospel - the people who do those things do so because they work well as presenters, not as computer experts(the so called anti virus gurus prove that)
But that doesnt mean you can sit back and say well we are superior and you are in deep shit, the fact is when a company has power and reach and deep pockets like MS they can react a lot faster than people think and the fact is you can never get complacent about anything. The very things open source misses in many case such as clear and easily readable training and documention information are the things that have put MS on top.
In closing i would ask which insurance companies charge more for insurance for MS servers ? Weblinks and proof please? There are enough real reasons to use open source without making bullshit assertions like this one.
PS - My disclaimer - i am a State IT manager for a multinational company supporting over 300 staff in a mixed environment (NT,2000,SCO,Linux) working with software from ERP (SAP) throught to office applications and secure web applications)
Im not a stooge for MS (though i have an MCSE i studied for myself - goes nice with my CNE and my CCNA - all 3 of which will get you a cup of cofee at most) i just support the system and i will attest to anyone they are nowwhere near as bad as many./ posters make out and that Microsoft are now where near the fools and incompetents you think they are - never underestimate them - many companies who no longer exist did.
Perhaps this is an umpopular opinion but just for a minute stop thinking the party line and have a look at the events of the last 12 months (leaving aside the anti trust crap)
Gates quit as every day head of MS to devote himself to special projects and areas of interest.
MS manages to release a stable and fully functional os in XP (look past the crap on activation which i can assure you is a non issue)
They start talking for the first time about fixing security flaws and exploits in software instead of simply denying it.
Now this announcment - fix the major issues.
Its smart and shows a company becoming increasingly smarter.
Now posit this - MS does not make major money of OS products, never has - the money is in applications - larger unit cost and better profit, longer lifecyle etc. MS are fixing bugs and issues and the question has to be asked why ?
Its not the open source movement pressuring them - the general man in the street uses MS products and so does their employers.
The bad press from code red, i love you etc has meant little more to MS that so more public relations work.
but look at it in another light - if MS decided to release their OS software for minimal cost or free to non corporates and the home user (Public Domain not GPL) then this would be a smart move ahead of such a move and i would point out would fuck up the anti trust case in a huge way - the clamour to split the company into OS and APPS divisons would be muted as the OS one would not make any money.
Say for a minute they set up (already have it actually) seperate business units for consumer and corporate/business. They public domain windows 95, 98 and millenium and maybe XP home thus giving them away free (they can afford it trust me)
Where does that leave linux ? how many home users chose SUSE and MANDRAKE because of the price?
Even better - give away the Desktop OS for free and licence the server os, and GPL IIS.
Its worth a long hard thought, and dont forget that MR Gates started out as a pogrammer and hacker himself (do some history reading) and is well aware of the lessons of freely available OSes and their ability to grow a market (it can be argued that the piracy of DOS led to the first boom in PC software and development - and it was his MS dos that was the most pirated)
Perhaps instead of rubbishing MS for this we should start thinking why ?
Installing the OS is only half the start - anyone can do it - my point is linux has to be as easy to use as windows to get user uptake, it should be - the talent in the open source community is incredible and broader that anything closed source can offer - yet we fight about linux not being another OS or the preffered X windows client or some other piece of fluff without solving the inherent problems in the OS to make it a total alternative.
Its cool - i understand what you mean - a lot of the issue with rolling linux for me on a croporate is increaased staff requirements - we did a small scle rollout for 20 staff testing Redhat 7.1, KDE and K Office etc, the general user feeling was that it was really cool but the issues we had with domain connections (win2k Active directory), proxy and file shares, but the problem i found was it increased the support time my guys needed per call, these are skilled staff who work damn hard for me and they had no trouble understanding the OS it just took longer to do things but im prepared to accept that part of that may be unfamliarity with the OS.
We simply found linux not up to our standards - were a global company and we require full interconnectedness at all times, linux cannot offer that with our existing backend infrastrucutre(not yet anyway).
I dont want you to believe i dont like linux, i do actually, rather a lot, im simply frustrated with it in so many ways as its no going forward. Developers dont think about the end user and documentation is not existand, libraries ar the wrong version and software behaves in unpredictable ways, i understand the freedom of the GPL but as an end user i dont want the issues.
I agree that Linux on UNIX environment is dead easy and if all of your apps and network run it then its dead easy - but you see corporates dont have the luxury - we use stuff like Exchange and SAP on global envronments and that means a change has to roll across them all.
My point about Linux and i keep singing it is that it will win as the OS for everyman only when everyman can use it with ease, the constant anti MS evil empire stuff and religious zealoutry that leads to attituded of read the source code for doc is defeatis, MS wont stand still forever, they will take the best bits of open source and move ahead unless we as a community work together.
I personally have never had a problem with a windows OS on a machine, sure sometimes they need a little fiddling but im prepared for that - and linux will work on most machines without to much work - Distros like Mandrake making it easier and for firewall and web serving i would not use anyother solution.
I apologise if i was a little harsh - its just that im sick of the religious aspect (an attitude which Linus himself dislikes in many ways) and the way people attack me, like you my knowledge is hard won and learned through years of work and the common/. attitude that if you dont rave over Linux youre a mental defective or an MS employee/troll is insulting and defeatist.
Eveyone has a point of view and if you disagree you point out why, you reply to me is excellent and points out some more good reasons - its a pleasure to talk to you.
Yeah yeah linux is too hard - Thats not what i said at all.
I started out 10 years ago on HP-UX and moved from there to solaris and onto BSD and VMS - i have varied experience and worked as a System Admin, NEtware Admin, Server Manager, SOE specialist and Now i manage 15 staff. I hold a CCNE, CCNA, MSCE+1, Exchange admin and various other shit - NOT ONE COURSE - ALL STUDIED FOR.
In short im not a moron or some newbie MS lover you can throw this shit at - ive been working with MS software in a corporate environment since 3.1 came out.
Linux isnt to hard - i simply cant be fucked to open a console every time i want to do something simple (and very little in Linux is ever simple)- i have over 60 servers in my environment running Windows NT4, 2000 Enterprise, SCO and RED Hat and i use my home computers for movies and pleasure - linux is not too hard for me its pointlessly complex.
Ive supported open source, pushed it and even replaced our firewalls with an open source solution, i would never be considered anti linux or anti open source, im anti whiners and religious zealots, be they christian, muslim or linuxite.
Linux is not ready for the corporate desktop - full fucking stop - if you do a bit of checking on the subject (HINT - Linux sites are just as biased as MS sites - look further) you will find that Linux on the desktop does not save costs it increases them , then add on the costs for replacing all of my backend management and application database, a complete mail system rebuild and replacement for my SAP system (yeah it can run on linux as well, and they only butt fuck you a littl bit if you change over - like about 10 million in programming fees)
Install another OS and learn about the enemy - i just installed it on this box again (XP) - 41 mins running fully and no issues - guess what it now works out of the box on most machines - in fact having installed numerous linux distros it works better and quicker than even red hat and mandrake.
As for the wierd hardware this is what put me off my linux systems - Dell CSR400GT notenook, standard with 256 mb of ram and a NeoMagic 128 Video Card (the same card in millions of compaq, Dell and generic notebooks) - Mandrake 8.1 wont even run the Xfree server out of Dev mode and Red Hat doesnt like it much either - weird effects (slakware seems to work ok most of the time tho....) but i simply wanted to see how easy it was to do the simple things like play a div-x (i wanted to give my mother Linux on her desktop) - after downgrading the GCC and attempting several different software installs i gave up in a welter of make and config files and decided this was too much trouble to fuck with.
until it is AS EASY to do this shit on Linux as it is on Windows it will NEVER be ready for the corporate desktop and may i suggest that if you got out in the corporate world and actually worked in it you would find reality to be very different.
Linux is a fantastic OS - BUt its an OS - not a religion. It needs improvement and work - like MS products do - but im only saying that if that work doesnt get done and it keeps being a religious movement and you dont progress then MS will do so (XP is a massive leap forward) and Linux will die - and that is a major tragedy
PS - I read some of your other stuff and seems really interseting and you have some good points but dont you dare throw off at my skills whilst working in the protected world of academia and universities - in the real world its very very different - i admire your knowledge and skills but i pose this point - have you EVER used a MS Operating System - im assuming you have a CS degree and that would have been pretty much nothing but UNIX and then you went to Linux so if you havent used MS Product then how can you comment. Im not being a smart arse im just sick of the/. mentality of attacking ANY disssenting opionion with a personal insult regarding someones skills - it pisses me off and i respond in kind.
Slashdot Mirror
But thats the point
Another won't take its place. The business model doesnt work. Its dying and there arent a lot of Venture Capatalists willing to throw money away on companies with a business plan predicated on giving away its product.
succesfull companies sell product and make money because people buy them. In this case Mandrake make an excellent distribution and one of the best ive used but because everyone gives it away they have to - and thus they havent got the money they need to continue development on a stable and easy to install linux which is what is needed to bring linux to the masses.
Open source as a business is dying and the number of times you can say 'another company will come along' is diminishing.
You all attack Microsoft but when it comes to actually investing some money in the crusade and keep a company alive that is a leader in this open source that you all hold up as superior to them you cannot be bothered !
What does that say about the moral attitude of open source? or are people finally admitting they are only attacking other companies because they HEAVEN FORBID make money off software instead of giving it away to you for FREE.
Right now im having a hard time seeing the difference between this and warez - both want something for nothing and wont pay for it.
Sit down and think about this for a minute - If Mandrake goes broke, then next maybe is SUSE, or Redhat, or Lindows or Sun.... Whens it enough, when all the companies that sell Linux as an alternative to the corporates are gone what hope is there for money to develop the software you take for free ?
you dont have to worry about Microsoft - at this rate they've won the fight without trying and you can all thump youre chests and proclaim the horror of the death of Open Source and how Microsoft killed it and spend the $5 on some more Jolt.
The fact is this points out the dichotomy in the 'free'and open source movement - the fact is that giving away things for free is not a good business plan when you have to develop those things. The flaw i see in the GPL is that it encourages people to use other peoples code and incorporate it into their own, this is a wonderfull idea except in the fact that you are trying to make money or stay alive on it alone, then youre in trouble.
I see so many people on here commenting that they dont use mandrake so they wont join, or that they downloaded the software and its free so they wont pay, or even some claiming that corporations they have encouraged to use Open Source should pay.
What sort of hypocrisy do you function under?
Your money goes to helping a company survive, its $5 dollars for christs sake! If you think that the company is in trouble and that doesnt affect you then youre dreaming, what about Loki and the many other open source companies that have gone under, did they affect you ? what will ?
The attack on corporates is even more laughable as im pretty sure in 99% of cases they are the ones who actually purchase boxed software and DONT download it, thus they have already contributed more than you have.
The fact is this should scare all of you - open source is not at this moment in time a viable business plan and that means its dying and the pace is accelerating. Invariably it means that Open source will once again retreat to the dedicated coders and the academic arena and that will mean the death of Linux in corporates and home user environments.
Donating to mandrake is supporting the movement you are part of. I have just joined even though i now use exclusively MS OS'es (issues with some things OSS and Linux wont do NOT a philosphical anti linux position) becuase i think this is something worth saving - there has to be an alternative and its time you all draw a line in the sand.
Support Open Source or find another crusade - anything else makes you a hypocrite of the worst type as you wont put your money where your mouth is (and your heart is supposed to be).
bill gates wrote both BASIC and DOS for the altair - he wrote DOS longhand in an Alberqurque motel toom (Fire in the Valley amongst other books will cofnirm this for you) we are talking about a period BEFORE the IBM project and at that stage microsoft were working on a DOS but bought QDOS anyway.
I never said he did anything other than being in the right place at the right time.
I dont personally have a crystal ball but i dont know if there would have been a GUI or not - my comment was that Microsoft moved development forward, maybe its their money or rapacious and anti comptetitve business attitude, i dont know and i dont want to comment (Notice i didnt defend one action of the company in my post) but IMHO i think the computing world would look very different without it and i was attempting to say that we should not dismiss everything out of hand simply because gates or MS had a hand in it.
If theUS govt kills MS today whats the immediate desktop alternative for ALL users (NOTE linux DOES not fit this description) and what impact would it have on the PC marketplace (you know all those home lusers you all look down on who buy all the stuff that keeps the market alive) - the industry would be killed dead or at least suffer massive damage.
Im sure you wont into the windows drove mac development foward - but as a long time Mac user and admin i can tell you that without the competition from Microsoft apple would have let the OS ossify - check out copland or taligent pink if you want examples of their ability to develop and OS. Until OSX mac oses contained mass kludges and legacy code and apple despite all of its claims of being for the common man has consistenly until the last 2-3 years offered lousy support for its softwarer. I dont see how anyone can seriously claim MS products be it their instability in some cases or the little innovations they developed in others (and they have come up with a few) have driven other Oses (including Linux - what state was X in 10 years ago, 5 years ago - look at it know) forward as it gave customers a GUI which they expected to be the standard desktop - its not unthinkable to the man in the street to have a computer that hasnt got a gui (note - i said man in the street NOT linux expert).
Maybe i have a warped view at times - but after spending nearly 20 years of my life in the computer industry i have seen a lot of things come and go and a lot of history, over the years i have supported Unix in many flavours, Novell, OS2, al windows os's and even linux, i see good and bad in all of them and i try to be flexible and not get a set mind.
What i tried to say in my article is that we need to be open minded enough to see good things in all areas as well as bad, we cannot ever become one eyed and closed minded in any way - thats why i cant stand the Linux is god people any more that i can stand the Bill is god people - lets just get on with what we do and stop worrying about what other people do.
Good point - my spelling and grammar tend to suck lately - too many years working in abbreviated speak i suspect - pretty lousy for someone who started out as a journalist !
I know i risk taking yet more damage on this but what they hell.
/. is pointless, instead how about some intelligent comment on what they do wrong and what they do right - they must have done some things well, or are well all denying that they have done one thing for it?
/. and open source is doomed - inflexibility and an unwillingness to compromise or discuss issues is what has put Microsoft in the poisition they are in and yet day in and day out slashdot proves its not isolated to closed source.
Can someone explain how the hell my comment is flamebait?
I was aware that posting a non abusive microsft comment might be seen as slightly controversial but can you actually deny ANYTHING in the comment as incorrect ?
The meaningless microsoft is evil bashing on
I dont mind being modded down but i dislike immensely the flamebait tag - it shows that the moderator simply takes personal dislike to the post and marks it as such not on the merits. I moderate too and try to always be honest and on occasion i have also posted a comment to explain why i moderate down. Perhaps we need to attach a user name to moderations to stop this stuff ?
If you want to attack anything that does not toe the party line line then
do you all seriously think Microsoft are going to go away and die?
What the government will shut down a multi billion dollar company and plunge the industry into collapse in the process ?
Youre still going to have to put up with MS and they will still make and sell OS products, even if split up, bashing anything to do with them is a negative waste of time - if you can do something better do it, the world is your oyster and open source has so many wonderful reasons to succeed, but bitching and whining about MS wont make linux the worlds premiere operaiting system, it wont fix the numerous issues that prevent it being the desktop choice for everyman, it wont bring a unified face to kernel development or drivers, it wont convince companies to switch, all it will do is make the open source movement as a whole look petty and childish and thats not what we are at all.
I have used and supported open source for a long time, i started my career on HP UX and have never forgotten it and up until recently i ran a number of linux servers and desktops at home and work -i stopped because i couldnt take the lack of support and drivers, the endless make and configures and patches and work arounds and lack of documentation and a million other little things, i stopped because so many of you would rather attack anyone with a rational opinion as a flamebaiter or troll.
The sad thing is that so many people in the world get their opinions on what open source is about from sites like slashdot, god knows what they think.
Oh for the days when open source meant open minded as well.
I dont mean to sound funny but dig out some books and do some reading on the subject - pirates of silicon valley is a good start - read about bill gates the 13 year old working finding busgs in Digital software - finding more than anyone, read about him getting caught hacking into systems by the police, read about him writing DOS on paper having never seen a the altair it was for, read about him developing most of the early microsoft sofwtare himself.
We all simply treat this guy as evil and stupid forgetting that he was there at the birth of the PC market, his DOS was the first one for the first microcomputer and the most widely copied piece of software for it, without him it didnt exist. Maybe we should all step back and look at what he has built from that.
Im not defending microsoft in any way but i am against the microsoft is evil so everything they have ever done is wrong.
If it wasnt for them what would we have on the PC?
Would there be a GUI as sophisticated as windows (love it or hate it you can argue it drove the Mac development forward better than anything)
Would Office software have progressed to the level it has?
What about Development languages - we all throw off at VB and the like but how many programmers got started on it ?
Plug and Plag and USB - without windows where would these be (i know PnP has problems but its getting a lot better fast)?
Im simply saying that to attack a man based on what you feel he has done is to bypass the fact he was and is a geek like us.
Whatever microsoft has become (and i wont defend their undefensible business practicies) they helped give birth to the industry and the technologies we use today , we dont need to thank them for it and it doesn't excuse their actions (nothing can) but it is something worth thinking about.
PS and everyone knew the 640k statement was apocraphyl over 10 years ago - and at the time it was not the arrogant statement you all make it out to be - its easy to look back and laugh at the past but unless you have lived there you have no idea - it wasnt so long ago that a 486DX33 with 16mb of ram was blisteringly fast and the most computer you would ever need.
This is an example of an increasing bias in Cnet and Zdnet reporting - the desire to push out information as fast as possible and as loosely checked as possible grows daily.
/. team to task a little - a small amount of research would have seen that the virus may be the first written in C# but its not designed to attack .NET. It makes use of some .NET frameworks components to spread but its simply a mass mailing worm and an exe file to boot, it creates a VBS.
.exe and .vbs into your environment in any form your not qualified to work in it.
But i have to take the
Now to look at at that in another way.
1. Systems vulnerable to this are 2 years behind the curve - if you still allow
2. Not keeping virus scanners up to date is asking for it
3. These guys simply did the invitable and made a virus in the new language - its been done with every language and OS platform since computers began and will no doubt continue.
I dont want to attack anyone but i would suggest that we might all be benefited by spending 5 minutes researching before we comment (and to the anti MS crowd - if you cant be bothere finding out the truth dont comment - to be honest the attacks on every mention of microsoft is getting tedious and pointless and i suspect is driving people away from open source - enough is enough - you dont like MS - they are evil - we know so dont keep telling us)
It depresses me that the level of technical discussion of anything non linux on here is lower than a snakes arse - i wish we could see the same passion that is applied to Kernal Updates applied to other areas.
Editors - check your sources please !!
Actually as a big user of Winterms we have hacked them apart and played with them - they dont run Windows NT they Run a WINCE solution customised and theres not much else you can do with them - we have hacked them apart and they wont work outside of citrix networks - thats firmware designed and even with the flash disk theres nothing you can do - plus they cost about $500 and come with a security point for a standard notebook lock - you would be more likely to lose the keyboard or mouse.
On another note i put locks on the back of all of my pcs - users cant get them open, they cost about $2 in bulk (lockwood or yale) and they can be reused.
Actually the issue with windows terminal server (if you mean that) is that its not diskless - you need an os to run it - i dont know if there are linux clients for it or not so that may not be a problem.
The great thing about citrix is the range of clients available - i have as a test done an install on a 486SX16 notebook and dialed in - dos client only for dial in (configuration was a breeze) and then it runs a full Citrix Desktop - i have seen it done with 485 machines and i know of at least one company using P166 machines with slakware running a linux client for Full windows desktop - its a great cheap solution to dedicated thin terminals.
The thing about many other terminal server solutions is they need an os to run on top of - windows or otherwise - with citrix you can use terminals or i believe there is even a bootable floppy client for it so no internal harddrives are needed on older machinery.
Im told it will run on XT's but have never seen it done. This is one product that is worth the money.
Same for us - we run a large environment which has to encompass a lot of remote sites and we have been running citrix metaframe 1.8 and now Xp with NT and 2000 terminal server. We use WYSE thin client boxes and they are good value, invredibly reliable and the newer ones have a customised windows CE configuration - you dont even need to have an ip for the server you can configure for a domain and load balance the farm as we do, the first available server (we run 18 load balanced) picks up the client connection and runs with it - if you get your links up to a decent speed this is an option but if not (in the case of remote sites) i adivse setting them to connect to a specific server and then if thats not availble they will choose another - this cuts down on profile copying between boxes (citrix is heavily profile based - stored on the home server of the user).
Publishing APPS is extremely simple and is easier than Windows Terminal Server - this solution is not the best and citrix offers advantages over it.
The things to be aware of / cons
1. Bandwidth - citrix claim 32kb is used by each full delivered client - dont believe them if your users use large databases or financial sofwtare - aim for an overhead of at least half this again and spec the link accordingly x number of users and add an extra 10% - i run 10 people over a 320k link which can be slow under heavy load - increasing this to 384k seemed to give me better performance and 512k made it very fast.
2. User issues - the clients will piss users of if they have had PC's - they have NO cd roms, no floppy drives and the things you can do on a normal PC (like installing software) cannot be done on metaframe - it's a very secure solution and if you are smart and want to lower support you will lock down the desktop and scrensavers and set the default screen res to 1024x768 - this is what we have found to be best, when a user logs into my farm they get a blank screen with no icons and a limited programs selection in the start menu - all of their applications are delivered in a program neighbourhood window. also lock the size of caches and internet files down to a minimum size - long login times are often related to large internet caches.
Users do like it once they get used to it and from a support view the thing is great full remote control built in means you can see instantly what a user is doing, the admin tools are fantastic and support is a cinch. All drives and printers are simply login script homed (we use Kixstart but are moving to an active directory domain so thats changing) and file perissions and access to application farms are as simple as configuring domain groups.
Once you get it worked out its worth the considerable cost, run a license gateway and you dont need overtly large licenses - a license not in use on one server can be used by another and by using load balancing a fault tolerance can be built in (a session will be terminated is a server goes down but a user can log straight back into another)
I liked it so much that even though im the manager i got my CCA (citrix Certified Administrator) and im working on my CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) if youre looking for a cert which offers returns on investment the CCEA is it but YOU MUST be a REAL mcse as it needs a pretyy deep knowledge base (Paper MCSE should not bother)
Citrix is used heavily in University environmments (i know of 6 here in australia alone) so check it out at them.
PS a note - The downside to citrix is it needs MEATY server - i buy Quad Xeon's with 2.5gb ram and 80gb raids for them - it needs it.
You asked - If you mean the Open Source developers or small-fry programmers then I don't think they are appropriate. The bnetd project took nothing from Blizzard. The code was the result of years of hard work and the fact someone else decided to use it to harm Blizzard should not reflect upon them.
They spent years working to get around blizzard's system for battlenet thus circumventing their protection and authentication - to do this from what i can see they had to pull apart and reverse engineer the client - thus they are in the shit - if the had spent years designing their own version of the game of writing some original software i would be applauding them but as they set out to break a system for their own use (and as shitty as battlenet is it is STILL blizzards system which you agree to use when you install the game)
I think yours is an incorrect analogy - if you want a better one than the poem try this - if you spend years working out a way to break into the defence department computer system to launch nuclear missiles BUT you dont do it yourself you just give someone else who does it ARE you considered an accomplice under the law?
yes you are and youre going to get done for it.
And yes if blizzard want you to only use their product in the manner intended and licensed to you then they have a perfect legal right to restrict access to that said product in the way they have - this is the legal system and i wonder if you were the developer of the original product how would you feel.
They are a company - companies exist to make profits - if they dont make profits they go broke and people lose their jobs - this is the risk in business and companies do everything in their power to lower that risk as blizzard did with CD key authentication and battlenet.
Breaking this because it seems like a good idea is no legal defence and anyone who set out to do it has to be aware there are consequences to their actions (as these guys no doubt knew from day one)
You cannot tell me that they didn't know the software could be used for this purpose when they wrote it ? it was very easily modified and these guys obviously had an excellent understanding of the API's used in this product so how could they be ingorant of the ability for their software to allow circumvention of the copy protection ?
Im not the bnetd team so i dont know what they did or didnt do but i do think you all need to go back and read the EULA on products and then do some research on fair use and copyright.
The depressing thing is this sort of argument shows how many of you have never worked in the real world - reality is my company is laying off staff again due to economic issues and thus we would sue anyone who damaged out IP and copyright - Blizzard are doing the same thing - if this can be used either out of modification or out of the box to 'break' their protection then they will sell less product and people will lose jobs - they have to go after this for simple economic reasons.
The open source community has seen company after company go broke in the last 12 months because it was unable to make a profit yet you persist in the concept that anything is fair and right and you can do what you want with other peoples sofware because you want to or disagree with the law or dont agree with EULA's or whatever - thats why companies stay closed source and will continue to do so.
PS i would appreciate it if you can use a name when attacking me - i have the guts to risk karma and ridicule by using my name and i really think anonymous criticisim is wothless, show some guts and risk some karma - as i pointed out EVERYTHING in life has consequences.
Actually i dont disagree with your comment but the fact is this is not a case of a competitive product its a case of a tool that can be used to illegally use a product developed by a company. These guys didnt set up a company to develop a new product or improve a new product, they set out to find a way around a part of the user agreement with a company they didnt agree with whether it was legal or not.
Most of us just gloss over the EULA but maybe we should read it and we might find out that you dont have the right unless explicitly stated to modify another companies software to suit yourself UNLESS it is open sourced which blizzard software is not.
there rights are not limited to any of the above as to do 1 you need to find a way to capture and re direct their data stream and circumvent their systems and in the case of 2 fair use does not apply to this case as you specifically agree not to do it in the EULA which is a license awarded to you to use a product. Whether you agree with that or not you cannot claim modification is fair use.
Their legal rights under the law also include
Logos, fonts, copyright, look and feel, music, characters and many other things.
bnetd designed a tool that could be used to break the software or cause it to perform in a way not designed and thus circumvent the agreed usage of the product - trust me if Blizzard takes this to court they will win comfortably on the evidence and facts.
Nope it allows you to circumvent the EULA and use non blizzard servers - the fact that it is extensible to enable cheating and circumvention of security measures is what has got these guys in trouble.
Bnetd allows you to use cracked version in that it specifically ignores the CD key section and allows the establishment of servers outside the legal system blizzard setup - i've used battle net in the past and will do again and the only reason i can see to want to go around it is to use cracked or tampered with software.
We never need to lose sight of the fact that this company spent many millions developing software to make a return on that investment, they setup the systems and infrastructure to support it and all they ask is that you use their system to play online.
I dont disagree with bnetd - its good software and likely written from the best of intentions and maybe blizzard should sit down and see if they cannot use this software in a good way - BUT that would mean closed source beacuse the fact is that whether it was in the spirit of the design of the software (i can't say it was or wasn't) to allow the circumvention of CD keys, it certainly was in the means of the software to make it easy to modify to do it and thats the problem blizzard has with it.
As to the non infringing use - there is none - read the license you agreed to when you bought the software - it doesnt have a loophole in it to allow you to set up your own server, thus any attempt to do it is infringement and thats the case im sure blizzard will present in court.
Whilst its true that Free Speech is the most popular for Pro bono there is NO way in hell you could ever cast this as a free speech case, its not. The question will hinge on whether the software infringes blizzard copyrights or circumvents legal anti copying or access control measures to facilitate use of a hacked or copied version of the software. Getting around copy protection is not the spirit or the letter of free speech - its violation of copyright or theft of intellectual property (whatever your politcal beliefs the law is the law) if getting around
Theres no free speech angle in it - Blizzard spent the money to develop a product with a reasonable expectation of security, they provide the servers and bandwith for the BattleNet system and they have an expectation that people using this system will have paid for the software. To attempt to prevent piracy (albeit not very succesfully if Diablo and Starcraft are any example) they use a CD key system.
The BNETD developers designed software that circumventes this by 'ignoring' the cd key and thus it breaks the protection. (note it did this for older blizzard releases - thus blizzard could possibly prove they have a case WITHOUT WC3)
Whether the person who modified the system or not is reponsible the unfortunate fact if that bnetd as the original developer of the product will be the first ones toe get sued as their software allowed modification (a good lawyer can argue that it encouraged it) to circumvent the copy protection system and allow illegal use of the clients IP.
In short i wouldnt waste a cent of my money in a lawsuit if i was bnetd - i would find a way to modify my software to block blizzard products and pray that my software doesnt allow any circumvention of other companies copy protection (i bet it does).
I like bnetd, its interesting software, but it can and has been used to get around the protection on blizzards software and it is very easy to prove, ultimately Blizzard will win and wasting piles of money defending what many will see as the indefensible is plain insane.
PS i read tim's letter on this and i would point out that anyone here who gets worked up about the talk about lawyers being agressive and yelling has never dealt with lawyers before - this is what they get paid for.
Open source does not mean break any and all copyrights - and the downside of collective development is that when something like this happens the courts are going to go after the most identifiable person they can get their hands on - and in most cases that will be the original developer.
Want to avoid this happening to you ? get a lwayer or IP expert to review your license agreement to ensure you are covered. Sure it costs money but then again so does getting sued.
All the talk about DMCA and fair use and everything else is a very good thing but i think missing a very important point, what happened to old fashioned right and wrong ?
I mean beacuse the bnetd developers developed an open source product and then someone els modified it then they and the owner of the copyright product they are using to circumvent it is in the wrong and the poor guys from bnetd are in the right.
The fact is blizzard spent the money, many millions of dollars in fact, to develop a product and they have a right to ensure their intellectual property, copyrights and investment are protected. They own the intellectual property to the product and thus they can and will take action to protect it.
The information on this case thus far presented doesnt seem to be asking for anything exceptional, and i dont see them going after the bnetd guys for every cent they have, so why the outcry?
This is a pitfall of open source, that a product you develop MAY be modified in a way that you did not intend and then used for a reason you did not forsee. This is fine and in most cases a good thing BUT like everything we do in life it has consequences and crying about it is not going to solve the issue - sitting down like proffesionals and talking to blizzard would be a good first step (one i suspect they are in the process of doing)
And my final comment is this - all of you out there riding the white horse of Anti DMCA and Anti Big Company - Tell me
is it right to take someone elses property and use it without paying ?
is it right to ignore licenses and other agreements because you 'dont care for them' ?
Is it right to damage a companies profits and endanger jobs for people ? people with families to feed ?
Is it right to defend anyone who comes along and finds a way around 'iritating things' like security?
If you answer yes to these then i thing you have bigger problems that you can ever imagine - youre abetting criminals and its hard to morally accept one form of it and reject another.
i was disgusted with open source over Skylarov and now i dont know what to think - it seems that the concept or right and wrong no longer means anything to so many of you.
intersting logic applied - the guys who arent in the wrong are the open source ones and everyone else is in the right
Slasdhot logic at its best
Why didnt you throw in Microsoft for making the OS that runs the product - that would make it complete bullshit
Actually i agree - i would love a mac myself, but at australian prices i cannot ever hope to afford it.
www.apple.com.au\store
Summary
800MHz PowerPC G4
256MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
40GB Ultra ATA - 7200rpm
CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500 dual
56K internal modem
$3695 PLUS monitor
This is a machine with zip or removable drive (a must have for my needs)
ADD 256MB ram - $252 (why is thi so dear?)
Bring the HDD up to the same as my PC (80gb) $231
Add a monitor - 17" cheapest $2299 (gues what YOU cannot buy a G3 from them with a CRT only a flatscreen)
Zip Drive $231
I want a DVD like my PC - $231 (superdrive not available in this box)
Our 'Cheap' mac is now Subtotal $6,929.00
Thats exactly 3 times the cost of MY 1.5gb PC and i used name brand gear (motherboards etc) to build it.
A notebook
yes a notebook i hear you say
OK on my desk i have a Dell Latitude C600 with 80gb HDD,512mb ram, Nvidia Video Card, Wireless 100mb network, CDRW/DVD, 15.1 screen etc. The apple i need to match it is a G4
So lets go entry level.
Summary
256MB SDRAM - 1 SO DIMM
550MHz PowerPC G4 @ 100MHz - 16MB VRAM
20GB Ultra ATA drive
15.2-inch TFT display
Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW)
Gigabit Ethernet
56K internal modem
1 FireWire 2 USB ports
Mac OS 9 boot-up (Mac OS X included)
Subtotal $5,495.00
Add RAM - $242
Add HDD (only goes to 48gb) $935
Add Air Port - $199
Subtotal $6,871.00
I mean MY dell cost $5100 and it was DEAR.\
I love Apple - i supported them for 2 years in advertising and would kill for one but at these prices i couldnt afford the badge - and thats BEFORE $3500 for a copy of photoshop.
read the book - Deckard is a replicant, dick was making the point of the hypocrisy of deckard killing his own kind and not ebing aware of it, yet the morality that he displays is a comment on the humanity of humans, in many ways deckard is a vulnerable and weak character (especially in the book) yet he turns out to have a human and moral core that supercedes his weakness. The concept of humanity and intelligence is one recurring thru this boo.
the thing is if you read the book a few times things will jump out that tell you that deckard suspects he's a replicant but isnt willing to look deeper into it - the fact he passes the Voight Kampf and other occurences are there to keep us guessing - and the Voight Kampf isn't perfect (this is mentioned in the book) if Deckard is a Nexus 6 then he can show real emotion or a facsimilie of such.
The hints in the movie - More Human Than Human, "how can it no know what it is" are ironies that point us toward it from the start
Read some of the works on the making of the movie and it becomes clear ridley didnt want Deckard to be a replicant but the fact that he is hinges the entire story - he's a doomed man walking thru a doomed world yet he doesnt stop caring and dreaming and striving for more.
Your defenition of spam might be a bit off but i suspect you have NOT removed all the check boxes in your affiliates and hotmail partners section when you sign up.
I have had the same hotmail for years and the only SPAM i get is about fake university degrees - alsways the same message but from different domains. I get more spam on my work account than my hotmail. far from being unusable i find it gets less spam than Altavista or Yahoo (which should be called spamhoo), the blocking in hotmail works pretty well as well.
And as the spam in these accounts is sent to a preditcion list (john1@, john2@ and so on please indicate the address you chose (HINT : notpublic@hotmail would be a great way to collect spam) The point on these types of services is that if you want to avoid spam dont use a common address - hotmail and other free mail providers cannot defend against every spammer out there using a dictionary type list against them - they are just enetering name@hotmail.com over and over to get responses and as hotmail has so many clients an addres like mik12567@hotmail is as great a spam target as bob_smith
Hotmail is a free service and thats what pisses me - its free so if you dont like it dont use it - its not like you have to - and as free services go its not bad for what you pay for it, or is it simply that its owned by Microsoft ?
id mark you down as a troll if i had any points left
I have read this case study before and its an excellent one but it does not prove anything about open source or debunk myths. As the writer posits the company was already running a lot of open source and made the decision to go to it fully and replace all closed source software. Also bearing in mind that they are a software company the level of basic user knowledge is higher than say a law firm.
Let apply this point to my firm - 15000 staff worldwide running a mixed environment (win 2k AB Global Domain, Exchange Mail, Linux Firewall and SCO for SAP, Win 2k Desktops - now would you care to count the cost of replacing it all at the same time (and we would have to as suddenly we would run into major issues with docuements and spreadsheets etc. My company is driven by fee earning staff and these guys are on average almost totally computer illiterate, with win2k they logon and open outlook and they can work, they can cope with explorer to find a file (its logical and graphical) and they can surf the web, they dont care aboout anything else.
The company discusse i this email has one office and is medium sized - i expect a couple of hundred staff - so a big difference
I dont want to be seen as putting linux down on the desktop i simply point out that if you are going to use this argument to prove linux on the corporate desktop then find a corporate implementation - NOT a medium company - show me a major company on a global basis that does this and i will listen.
Show me arguments on a TCO, Retraining, Infrastructure and systems replacement and repogramming, Desktop Rollout etc, give me some costs on what it costs me to hire the right staff to do this properly and how i cope with 2 enviroments while it happens.
I think linux has a place, i have said it before - i also said ive stopped using it and i have - only because IMHO its not ready for the desktop yet and all the evangelical singing and dancing wont make it so and neither will comments based on Bill Gates Megalomania or ms evil intentions (you cannot say anything about Bill Gates personality with certainty unless you have met him - the rest is bias an supposition)
This article doesnt debunk anything as the writer has a clear and plain PRO linux bias - give us some stuff written by independant parties and we will then be able to make our own decisions - PS we in corporate IT are'nt the fools and stooges you guys make us out to be - most of us are very skilled and many of us started out like me on UNIX - HINT we also dont like being treated like morons by people who see themselves as superior.
Linux isnt winning anything - this should not be a war its software- the minute you make it so you lose as companies like MS can and will eat you alive.
XP is selling very strongly actually and MS own the applications market in Office Software, Internet (yes even IIS) and many other areas - they dont need to pop rollaids but many of their managers likely do so as the only thing that keeps you on top is constant improvement and an eye on the ball.
./ posters make out and that Microsoft are now where near the fools and incompetents you think they are - never underestimate them - many companies who no longer exist did.
Microsoft dont sell perfect software, hell some of their stuff isnt even good, but they do back it up with support (especially in the corporate market) proper documentation, training and certification and they produce software that considering the work it does is stable for desktop users and trust me more than stable enough for the business market place.
A case in point is the Nimda/Code Red issue - sure IIS might be insecure if you dont know what you are doing or keep it maintained or secure it but guess what so is linux and apache.
The fact that people will stay Win98 is not surprising at all - MS fucked up with ME - big time so that makes some users cautious, XP had a lot of press on activation (a non issue i can assure you) and that also hurts. (PS i would note that at no stage in my life have i ever listened to advice on a radio and TV talk show and taken it as gospel - the people who do those things do so because they work well as presenters, not as computer experts(the so called anti virus gurus prove that)
But that doesnt mean you can sit back and say well we are superior and you are in deep shit, the fact is when a company has power and reach and deep pockets like MS they can react a lot faster than people think and the fact is you can never get complacent about anything. The very things open source misses in many case such as clear and easily readable training and documention information are the things that have put MS on top.
In closing i would ask which insurance companies charge more for insurance for MS servers ? Weblinks and proof please? There are enough real reasons to use open source without making bullshit assertions like this one.
PS - My disclaimer - i am a State IT manager for a multinational company supporting over 300 staff in a mixed environment (NT,2000,SCO,Linux) working with software from ERP (SAP) throught to office applications and secure web applications)
Im not a stooge for MS (though i have an MCSE i studied for myself - goes nice with my CNE and my CCNA - all 3 of which will get you a cup of cofee at most) i just support the system and i will attest to anyone they are nowwhere near as bad as many
Perhaps this is an umpopular opinion but just for a minute stop thinking the party line and have a look at the events of the last 12 months (leaving aside the anti trust crap)
Gates quit as every day head of MS to devote himself to special projects and areas of interest.
MS manages to release a stable and fully functional os in XP (look past the crap on activation which i can assure you is a non issue)
They start talking for the first time about fixing security flaws and exploits in software instead of simply denying it.
Now this announcment - fix the major issues.
Its smart and shows a company becoming increasingly smarter.
Now posit this - MS does not make major money of OS products, never has - the money is in applications - larger unit cost and better profit, longer lifecyle etc. MS are fixing bugs and issues and the question has to be asked why ?
Its not the open source movement pressuring them - the general man in the street uses MS products and so does their employers.
The bad press from code red, i love you etc has meant little more to MS that so more public relations work.
but look at it in another light - if MS decided to release their OS software for minimal cost or free to non corporates and the home user (Public Domain not GPL) then this would be a smart move ahead of such a move and i would point out would fuck up the anti trust case in a huge way - the clamour to split the company into OS and APPS divisons would be muted as the OS one would not make any money.
Say for a minute they set up (already have it actually) seperate business units for consumer and corporate/business. They public domain windows 95, 98 and millenium and maybe XP home thus giving them away free (they can afford it trust me)
Where does that leave linux ? how many home users chose SUSE and MANDRAKE because of the price?
Even better - give away the Desktop OS for free and licence the server os, and GPL IIS.
Its worth a long hard thought, and dont forget that MR Gates started out as a pogrammer and hacker himself (do some history reading) and is well aware of the lessons of freely available OSes and their ability to grow a market (it can be argued that the piracy of DOS led to the first boom in PC software and development - and it was his MS dos that was the most pirated)
Perhaps instead of rubbishing MS for this we should start thinking why ?
Im sure you did
Now play a DIV-X movie ?
Or a DVD
Install a game and get it working out of the box?
You will see what i mean
Installing the OS is only half the start - anyone can do it - my point is linux has to be as easy to use as windows to get user uptake, it should be - the talent in the open source community is incredible and broader that anything closed source can offer - yet we fight about linux not being another OS or the preffered X windows client or some other piece of fluff without solving the inherent problems in the OS to make it a total alternative.
Its cool - i understand what you mean - a lot of the issue with rolling linux for me on a croporate is increaased staff requirements - we did a small scle rollout for 20 staff testing Redhat 7.1, KDE and K Office etc, the general user feeling was that it was really cool but the issues we had with domain connections (win2k Active directory), proxy and file shares, but the problem i found was it increased the support time my guys needed per call, these are skilled staff who work damn hard for me and they had no trouble understanding the OS it just took longer to do things but im prepared to accept that part of that may be unfamliarity with the OS.
/. attitude that if you dont rave over Linux youre a mental defective or an MS employee/troll is insulting and defeatist.
We simply found linux not up to our standards - were a global company and we require full interconnectedness at all times, linux cannot offer that with our existing backend infrastrucutre(not yet anyway).
I dont want you to believe i dont like linux, i do actually, rather a lot, im simply frustrated with it in so many ways as its no going forward. Developers dont think about the end user and documentation is not existand, libraries ar the wrong version and software behaves in unpredictable ways, i understand the freedom of the GPL but as an end user i dont want the issues.
I agree that Linux on UNIX environment is dead easy and if all of your apps and network run it then its dead easy - but you see corporates dont have the luxury - we use stuff like Exchange and SAP on global envronments and that means a change has to roll across them all.
My point about Linux and i keep singing it is that it will win as the OS for everyman only when everyman can use it with ease, the constant anti MS evil empire stuff and religious zealoutry that leads to attituded of read the source code for doc is defeatis, MS wont stand still forever, they will take the best bits of open source and move ahead unless we as a community work together.
I personally have never had a problem with a windows OS on a machine, sure sometimes they need a little fiddling but im prepared for that - and linux will work on most machines without to much work - Distros like Mandrake making it easier and for firewall and web serving i would not use anyother solution.
I apologise if i was a little harsh - its just that im sick of the religious aspect (an attitude which Linus himself dislikes in many ways) and the way people attack me, like you my knowledge is hard won and learned through years of work and the common
Eveyone has a point of view and if you disagree you point out why, you reply to me is excellent and points out some more good reasons - its a pleasure to talk to you.
Yeah yeah linux is too hard - Thats not what i said at all.
/. mentality of attacking ANY disssenting opionion with a personal insult regarding someones skills - it pisses me off and i respond in kind.
I started out 10 years ago on HP-UX and moved from there to solaris and onto BSD and VMS - i have varied experience and worked as a System Admin, NEtware Admin, Server Manager, SOE specialist and Now i manage 15 staff. I hold a CCNE, CCNA, MSCE+1, Exchange admin and various other shit - NOT ONE COURSE - ALL STUDIED FOR.
In short im not a moron or some newbie MS lover you can throw this shit at - ive been working with MS software in a corporate environment since 3.1 came out.
Linux isnt to hard - i simply cant be fucked to open a console every time i want to do something simple (and very little in Linux is ever simple)- i have over 60 servers in my environment running Windows NT4, 2000 Enterprise, SCO and RED Hat and i use my home computers for movies and pleasure - linux is not too hard for me its pointlessly complex.
Ive supported open source, pushed it and even replaced our firewalls with an open source solution, i would never be considered anti linux or anti open source, im anti whiners and religious zealots, be they christian, muslim or linuxite.
Linux is not ready for the corporate desktop - full fucking stop - if you do a bit of checking on the subject (HINT - Linux sites are just as biased as MS sites - look further) you will find that Linux on the desktop does not save costs it increases them , then add on the costs for replacing all of my backend management and application database, a complete mail system rebuild and replacement for my SAP system (yeah it can run on linux as well, and they only butt fuck you a littl bit if you change over - like about 10 million in programming fees)
Install another OS and learn about the enemy - i just installed it on this box again (XP) - 41 mins running fully and no issues - guess what it now works out of the box on most machines - in fact having installed numerous linux distros it works better and quicker than even red hat and mandrake.
As for the wierd hardware this is what put me off my linux systems - Dell CSR400GT notenook, standard with 256 mb of ram and a NeoMagic 128 Video Card (the same card in millions of compaq, Dell and generic notebooks) - Mandrake 8.1 wont even run the Xfree server out of Dev mode and Red Hat doesnt like it much either - weird effects (slakware seems to work ok most of the time tho....) but i simply wanted to see how easy it was to do the simple things like play a div-x (i wanted to give my mother Linux on her desktop) - after downgrading the GCC and attempting several different software installs i gave up in a welter of make and config files and decided this was too much trouble to fuck with.
until it is AS EASY to do this shit on Linux as it is on Windows it will NEVER be ready for the corporate desktop and may i suggest that if you got out in the corporate world and actually worked in it you would find reality to be very different.
Linux is a fantastic OS - BUt its an OS - not a religion. It needs improvement and work - like MS products do - but im only saying that if that work doesnt get done and it keeps being a religious movement and you dont progress then MS will do so (XP is a massive leap forward) and Linux will die - and that is a major tragedy
PS - I read some of your other stuff and seems really interseting and you have some good points but dont you dare throw off at my skills whilst working in the protected world of academia and universities - in the real world its very very different - i admire your knowledge and skills but i pose this point - have you EVER used a MS Operating System - im assuming you have a CS degree and that would have been pretty much nothing but UNIX and then you went to Linux so if you havent used MS Product then how can you comment. Im not being a smart arse im just sick of the