This may certainly be true right now, while there are still enterprise UNIX systems to migrate over to Linux. They're the "squeaky wheel" that gets the grease -- if you look around your business, and realize you're paying tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees for a handful of UNIX workstations, those are the things you're going to want to ditch first for free alternatives. The $300-a-head Windows machines seem like small beans in comparison.
But, once you've replaced all the UNIX workstations, and all your competitor companies have too, you naturally start to look to other ways of saving overhead dollars. Okay, so you get rid of the free coffee, turn the thermostat down ten degrees and tell your employees to wear sweaters. And your competitors do that too.
Eventually, once you've cut overhead and costs in every other place -- and we're coming up on this point in a lot of highly competitive business areas -- that "Microsoft tax" starts to look more and more onerous.
Now, Microsoft, not being stupid (and because they're selling a product--software licenses--that has basically zero marginal cost to distribute) will lower the prices, constantly keeping it just below the "point of pain" that would cause most businesses to switch.
Microsoft, as much as I dislike saying this, is going to be around for a long time, barring some Enron-esque mismanagement (although a man can dream). However, as competition becomes more intense across business sectors; once companies have realized all the gains they can squeeze out of oursourcing, integrated logistics, supply chain optimization, and all the other cost-reduction buzzwords, and find themselves competing with shops in other countries that aren't paying the MS tax because they've never experienced vendor lock-in, are going to force Microsoft to reduce its prices if it wants to remain on top.
And to be perfectly honest, if Linux as a platform and as a technology did nothing else but provide a threat that large companies could use in their negotiations with Microsoft, and force them to reduce prices, that's a pretty big deal.
I'd like to believe this, but sometimes I question IBM's commitment to Linux. Before I get flamed -- yes, I know how much R&D money they've pumped into various projects. But I think that they've figured out that they can make money hand over fist selling services (particularly consulting) regardless of what OS people are using. At the end of the day, I'm not sure they really care a whole lot what OS everyone uses.
If they really wanted to be the "Microsoft of Linux," it would be pretty trivial for them to put out an "IBM Desktop Linux." Port Lotus Notes over to it, along with the rest of the old Lotus suite (or throw money at OO.org for optimization), license the configuration tools from RedHat or SuSE (or build their own), generally make something that would be easy to roll out large deployments of. Make the desktop blue, and roll it out to all 300,000 or whatever they have internal employees.
I don't think they could crush Windows, but they'd probably run over RedHat and SuSE/Novell's marketshare in a hurry. The internal use alone would probably make it one of the most popular distributions in existence overnight, and they'd be able to leverage their relationships with hardware vendors to get compatible peripherals and configurations. That compatibility would draw a lot of home users -- heck, I know I'd install it, if there was a free version, just to have a Linux that was backed up by a company the size of IBM.
They would be the Microsoft of Linux. They would not, however, be the Microsoft of PC operating systems.
Of course, it might result in them going out of business, which is why I suspect they don't do it -- as a company, IBM got pretty close to death in the 90s, and I don't think they're really up for anything that smells in the slightest like OS/2. The move of their internal workforce away from Windows and to Linux might make their consulting services less attractive to businesses who are on Windows -- "what do you mean, none of your people use Windows?" -- and selling services is their lifeblood now, apparently.
In short, I'd love to see IBM jump into the Linux pool with both feet, just to see the splash it would make. But I'm fearful after the waves subsided, they'd end up drowning in it.
This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the.xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves.
I don't see that happening. Oh sure, maybe in the US, in the current political climate, we'd see a rush of laws to require "adult" sites to be in.xxx, but I don't think you'd get that in other countries. And in case you haven't trolled around the internet recently, there's a lot of porn out there that doesn't call the Estados Unidos home.
I'd wager once you had all of the good, wholesome, American style big-boobies-and-sultry-lips porn locked up behind nanny filters, instead you'd just have kids seeing what kind of new and different Japanese tentacle porn they could turn up. Or German schiesse porn -- now that's what I want to see at my local library.
So what do you do about all the porn from the foreign countries that don't have.xxx laws? Build a giant National Internet Filter? I'm sure Cisco could get right on that, but then I think you've created a solution that's a thousand times worse than the problem. (Which I'm not convinced is that severe anyway -- I saw my share of porn growing up, and some of it was really filthy shit, and I didn't turn into some sort of maniacal sex pervert as a result. Just one sample, but I'm unconvinced of the "danger" of pure porn. Anyway...)
Everything about the.xxx TLD was stupid. Just dumb. It was a regulation being promulgated by politicians and pundits and a whole lot of other people who either don't know or choose to ignore the complexities of the Internet, and never wanted to think about the enforcement aspects of such a rule.
Partial protection is NOT better than no protection at all. That's where I fundamentally disagree with you. Any level of protection is just going to cause parents to get lazier, and feel that they can send their kids down to the library to use the internet in lieu of daycare or a babysitter (or actually spending time with them), because someone on TV told them the internet was now "safer." A false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
Sadly you can only recover from them the declared value of the parcel...and there's usually a maximum amount on it, and it often doesn't cover the destruction of non-physical stuff like data, doesn't cover loss of business, etc.
Otherwise, everyone who's ever had a contract or CD of data lost in the FedEx system would have sued the living shit out of them.
The law surrounding freight shippers is pretty well hammered out, the most you'd be able to do is insure it for a lot of money, hope they destroyed it, then claim he full value of the insurance.
I have yet to meet anyone in business who really cares that much about Microsoft one way or the other. Many (I'd venture perhaps to say 'most') people find aspects of Windows annoying or obnoxious, but in general it's "good enough."
In fact, if I had to pick a single phrase that sums up Microsoft, that's what it would be: "good enough."
It's not wonderful, and it's not cheap, but it basically does what it says it's going to do, and the pricing is such that most businesses can afford it (or that they've rolled the cost of it up into their products and passed it onto their customers).
The only people that probably 'hate' Microsoft are probably at competitor companies (insofar as they exist anymore), and that only people who really 'love' them are probably at companies that are making money off of their dominance in some direct or indirect fashion.
To the very great majority of people, Microsoft software is like 120VAC electricity: they understand that there are other ways to run their toaster, and perhaps are even dimly aware that in other places, things work differently, but it's not particularly relevant to their business, and as a result they don't care.
If people dislike Microsoft for something, it's mostly for their licensing structure. That's why you see most people trying to advocate Linux use to businesses focus on the small-F "free" aspect: very few people really care about the capital-F/libre definition of "Free," the only advantage of Linux is that it costs less.
However, I think during periods of market contraction, as companies look towards their overhead for ways to cut costs and maintain profitability, you'll see increased interest in free replacements for expensive software. Right now, most companies aren't under so much pressure that it's worth the transition problems to get rid of Windows (although it's worth transitioning from UNIX to Linux in many cases). As the market becomes more and more competitive and commoditized, I think eventually people are going to see the price of a Windows+Office license for every computer as a competitive disadvantage.
Hello... oh, it's for you. It's 1995 calling, they want their bullshit back.
Your whole ease-of-use angle just falls completely flat. Configuring a modern Linux desktop is no harder nor any more metaphorically abstract than the average Windows or Mac OS X desktop, in fact I'd say that it's probably easier to configure a secure Linux machine than a Windows machine, because you don't have to do anything to the Linux machine, while on the Windows one, after you have it running, you have to install your anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. I don't know where you're getting your FUD about using the command-line; with something like Linspire or Xandros, you can avoid the CLI completely for administrative functions if you really want to. I think that all but the most thickheaded users eventually realize that there are tasks for which the terminal is more efficient than a GUI (even some of the most diehard MacOS 9 fans had to grudgingly admit this after the OS X transition, prior to which the idea of a command line to most Mac users was anathema), but they don't have to use it if they don't want to.
But anyway, this is all a moot point because your straw man about Ma and Pa Kettle is irrelevant in a discussion about corporate desktops and servers.
Linux is quite useable right now for a corporate desktop, where you want to give the users something that's basically pre-configured and locked down. "Here's your standard-issue computer. Don't change the settings. Don't install any software. Don't run any funny email attachments. Don't install stupid wallpaper. Don't install [verboten application]." It's much more practical to have Linux machines configured to run everything as non-root users than it is on Windows, due to the number of Win applications that are retardedly designed to be run by an Administrator.
The thing that keeps companies on Windows despite the vast downsides, in terms of security, stability and expense (that last one being the biggest and the most germane to this discussion) is because of the vast amount of legacy code that most businesses have. It only takes one non-portable application to make switching seem less practical, and many businesses have multiple non-portable applications (e.g. maybe they have Exchange for email, use Access for a database, and have some custom junk written in VB that lacks sources; any one of of those problems is probably solvable, but together it starts to really increase the complexity of a move).
The thing driving Windows in the enterprise isn't ease of use -- that might have been true in the Slackware days, but it's not anymore (and if it was true that ease-of-use was such a concern, it wouldn't explain why businesses haven't just migrated to Mac, which has long been considered an easier-to-use platform) -- and it's certainly not TCO: it's the perceived availability of software and support, and consequent Microsoft vendor lock-in.
Does anyone know what percentage of mail servers these days use Sendmail?
Personally I dumped it for Postfix at the first opportunity, as did most other people I know. It just seems so much more painful to use.
I guess migrating a large enterprise from one to the other could be quite a bitch, so there's a lot of inertia to keep with what you know, but I'm just curious if Sendmail's time as one of the "killer apps" that drives the internet is waning.
Actually on OSX, the system just opens ".dmg" and ".iso" files with a little application called "DiskImageMounter.app" (I think that's its name, I am likewise not at a Mac right now) which calls hdiutil (presumably) and mounts it on the desktop. (Actually, in/Volumes/, but to the user it appears on the desktop.)
If you right-click on an image file, you can choose to open it either with the mounting program, or in Disk Copy, or in Adaptec's Toast if you have it installed.
Excellent point. Actually I'd argue that the big research universitites may in fact give poor-quality educations, at least at the undergraduate level, because all the courses are taught either by grad students (teaching usually in exchange for free tuition or room/board) or by professors who would really rather be working in their lab than standing in front of a lecture hall. In other words, the people teaching there (with exceptions, of course) rarely want to be teaching. It's just something they have to do, for whatever reason.
That said, it can be a great resource to have true experts in their fields available to you, so there are definite advantages to the big paper-mill Unis, but I think at the undergraduate level these are overwhelmed by the disadvantages.
If I was advising someone now as to which college to choose, I'd say pick a smaller one where every class is taught by a professor, and those professors are easily accessible after hours to ask questions of. Pick a place, in other words, where teaching is the primary focus of the faculty and not churning out papers or winning grants. Then, when you're looking for grad school, go to one of the big Unis -- get them to pay for your tuition, room and board, and a stipend if you can -- and seek out the experts to work with one-on-one (research projects, working in their lab, etc.).
My recommendation is colored by my personal experience (which didn't follow the path I just described), of course, but I still think it's good advice.
I think that the attitude you describe is definitely to blame, but I think it long predates NCLB. That act has only been around for a few years, not nearly long enough to affect anyone who's in University right now.
But the attitude that a teacher should spend 80% of their time teaching the lowest-performing 10% of the class is nothing new, I experienced it when I was in school and that was decades ago.
It's basically SOP to throw 20-30 kids in a room with one teacher, regardless of their individual needs, and if the teacher spends all her time trying to keep the ADHDers in line, the rest of the class just suffers. Everyone realizes this is a problem, but rather than addressing the issue directly (why are you allowing problem students who are sapping resources from 15 or 20 other kids to remain in that classroom?), the move is just to "smaller class sizes," which is really just another way of throwing resources at the problem. It's an improvement but not a solution.
IMO, it's because we've lost the ability in this country to call a spade a spade: no teacher is willing to go to a parent and say "your child isn't up to the standard of this class," or even to claim what is patently obvious to anyone who's spent some time around gifted children -- some kids are just generally smarter than their peers. That claim shouldn't even be controversial! After all, we accept obviously that some kids are taller than others, some run faster than others, but yet we get all uncomfortable when anyone points out that this also suggests that some people are going to be better thinkers and learners than others. Denying that some kids are smarter than average (and at the other end of the bell curve, that some are less intelligent than average) is like trying to deny that some kids are taller than others, or have bigger feet. It should be plain, but we've chosen to cover our eyes and come up with all manner of complicated rationalizations for why some kids perform better, because reality is harsh and nobody wants to tell a parent that their child might just be slow.
We've created an educational system based on the false premise that all children are the same and learn the same, and will succeed the same if given the same treatment. This is false. Some kids need a lot more attention and time than others in order to learn the same basic things; and while we should make sure that they receive this time, we should not be doing it at the expense of what to me is our most valuable resource as a society: our best and brightest kids, who can learn things quickly and easily and should be allowed to learn as fast as they can handle the material.
Instead, we punish fast learners with boredom by teaching to the lowest-common-denominator in the classroom. This does a disservice to bright kids everywhere, and frankly to society as a whole, which is depending on our educational system to produce the next generation of leaders.
Interesting. I use a Motorola, however, so I'm not sure what the story is on installing additional software on it.
At any rate, I've never been particularly interested in using the Internet, in any fashion, from my cell phone. I suppose maybe if I had it I'd find ways to use it, but I just don't have the desire to do google searches or look up sports scores while on the subway or in my car, and those are basically the only times that I'm more than twenty feet away from a computer in a typical day, and where it wouldn't be more desirable to pop open a laptop.
What interested me about GPRS was that I could plug the cellphone into my computer and get regular internet access on my laptop while travelling (I do a fair amount of long-distance train travel) -- so I could do email, access the corporate VPN, and do instant messenging with a full-size keyboard.
TMobile is pretty bad about advertising the GPRS service, but they do have it, as evidenced by the PCMCIA cards that they will happily sell you (along with a dedicated service plan) if you say you want cellular internet from your laptop. Basically I just wanted that service, but without the hassle or expense of buying a dedicated card for the laptop (with it's own SIM/phone number). I just wanted it on my regular phone, and then connect it to my computer via a cable or Bluetooth to get internet access.
They don't do a good job about advertising the GPRS addon plans, but they do exist. Pity it's kinda slow compared to Verizon's offerings, but I wouldn't go back to Verizon if they were selling $5 bills for $3.
When people go and by a new computer, many are willing to spend hundreds of dollars more to get a little extra performance. They will not like to have that taking away from them just so that they can run a microkernel.
These people are really not the kind of people who are going to use microkernels, or really care that much about stability. Home users, in general, appear pretty far down the "stability/performance" tradeoff scale, towards the performance end. The advantage for them to use a microkernel, or any other architecture which trades performance for increased stability, may be minimal.
But then again, they're not really the market for high-reliability systems: real time systems, command-and-control applications, and embedded systems are. Increasingly, servers are going to fall into this category as well.
I have used many Linux computers the last 10 years. They never went down with a virus, and I have not had problems with lack of protection between kernel drivers.
This is a straw man. I'm sure somebody out there is willing to pipe up and say that they've used an unpatched Windows ME box for some obscene length of time, but we all know it's insecure. Likewise, just because you've never seen a Linux box go down doesn't mean they're immune, or that if you were designing a system that needed "five nines" reliability, that you'd have a basis for making a selection. The point of a microkernel, as someone further up in the thread (GP?) said, is that it's easier to analyze the code and prove, to an acceptable degree, that it is secure and stable. The fact that a server has run for a year or 10 without crashing isn't enough; you need to be able to demonstrate basically a priori that the system will be reliable, in addition to having test cases.
So anyway, in a limited way I'm agreeing with you. Joe Blow the 3D gamer probably isn't going to give a crap about microkernels, and isn't going to find their advantages convincing. But someone running any kind of production server might, and certainly anyone building high-reliability or embedded equipment should.
The question then becomes: which group of people is Linux being built for? Where, on the performance versus stability continuum does it reside?
So, what we have here is a big fat pity party where everyone and their grab ass brother is trying to get into the "screw the end user" game so they can make more money? Wow, they're all turning into the RIAA and the petroleum companies!
Yes. That's pretty much it. I think your oil company analogies are fundamentally flawed, as are all analogies drawn between electronic content distribution and distribution of a physical good: although oil is controlled in large part by a cartel, at the end of the day it is a nonrenewable resource. "Content" is not; I can copy Disney's Fantasia and give it to as many people as I want, and when I'm done, we all still have it. It's tough doing that with gasoline (though don't we all wish). Basically, DRM tries to make physical-goods distribution models work with strings of numbers, with mixed results. Or alternately, even if Disney decides to take their ball and go home, it's not as if "content" is in short supply, or is in any way a limited resource -- in fact, I would argue that the supply of content always exactly equals demand, no more and no less. People make content basically out of thin air when there is sufficent demand, and don't make it when there's not. The distribution companies have tried to create and perpetuate an artifical scarcity in order to maintain demand, and it's not working very well.
But this is all sort of unrelated to the issue at hand (tiered internet). The point here is simply one where the backbone providers and telcos/ISPs have turned loose a few MBAs to try and figure out how to increase revenue. Their solution is, in the absence of real competition, to try and extort people into paying for the same thing (transfer of bits from point A to B in a timely manner) two or three times. On the receiving end (direct payment to the end-user's ISP), the transmitting end (via however Google/Yahoo/etc. pays the bills, i.e. advertising), and in transit (by twisting Google's or the end-user's arm for increased QoS).
From a dirty business standpoint, it's like they took a look at the business model of the RIAA's member companies and decided they'd try to take it to a whole new level.
It would not -- if you want "real" internet access, as opposed to "email only" or "TMobile web" service, you need to ask for GPRS service as opposed to the TMobile Web service, and the cost is $30 as opposed to $6 per month or so.
I spent a while talking to some braindead rep at a TMobile store a while back about this. I kept telling her that I wanted internet access through my phone, and it took a while to pound through that I wanted more than just to be able to use that idiotically lame browser that's built into the phone, I wanted to connect my PC to my phone and use it as a modem for internet access, to everything on the internet. Needless to say, that costs more.
Actually I knew a blind guy once who programmed just fine, using a Braille terminal and some sort of very basic text editor. Just like any other programmer using a text shell, except the output was through the braille terminal instead of a VDT. IIRC he had some sort of non-QWERTY keyboard also, but I never inquired as to how it worked.
He always maintained that screen-readers were a huge step down, and were being pushed onto sight-impaired people because they were a lot cheaper than full-size (40 or 80 column) Braille terminals.
When you think about it, basically any command-line application is much better suited to use by a sight-imparied person than a GUIed app, because it can be more easily transformed into a serial data stream (which can be read or felt linearly). So really, Linux ought to be the platform of choice for accessibility, since you can use it in so many more ways: if you don't want to use a GUI, no GUI for you. You don't ever have to use a graphical control panel to change a system setting, check email, even search the internet, etc.
(Unless of course people send you raster PDFs as email attachments, but not like a screenreader is really going to help you much with those, either.)
In all fairness, IBM does make supercomputers/HPC kit, but they're not the same as their mainframes. Probably a whole different internal division makes them; they're designed entirely differently.
Makes sense, but you're right, that only works on a locked-down platform: otherwise why couldn't user A just send user B both the encrypted file and the key? That way user B wouldn't have to call the rights-controller in order to get the key (which has to be the same as the one user A has), and nobody ever knows that the transfer occured.
I'm sure such a system is exactly what WB or Vivendi would like to have -- they don't have to do any work besides supply the key in trade for money (not even much bandwidth) -- and I'm sure we'll see more crap like that once the Trusted Computing model becomes reality. I don't think that it's practical right now on a PC-based system, though.
Billions of dollars a year in extortion--I mean, revenue--for the telecommunications companies?
That's really all there is to it. They've figured out that they can't maintain the sort of growth that they've had over the past decade or so (because there's nowhere to expand to), so now they're trying to figure out ways to squeeze more money out of their existing customers. Because even if you don't realize it, everyone using the Internet is an indirect customer of the backbone providers. You pay your ISP, your ISP maybe pays another ISP, that ISP pays for a connection to the backbone. They get their tithe, it just goes via your local provider first.
And there's really no way to rake in the dough like making people pay for something twice. Here's what the backbone providers want: the source of the packets pays for access (a portion of which makes its way up the chain to them), the destination of the packets pays for access (also trickles up to them), and the source and the destination both pay directly for increased QoS if they don't want said packets to spend a few seconds in the purgatorial "low-rent buffer" on their way across the network.
It's just a protection racket, but without any of that messy kneecap-smashing business.
On the contrary, I much prefer a patchwork, redundant, basically ineffective system, similar to what we have now viewed internationally, than the sort of international entity you'd get if it was designed in the current climate. At least today if you really don't like the IP laws in the U.S., you can go to Russia, Sweden, or China; true national "harmonization," which would be the first step towards any sort of international patent/trademark/copyright office, would remove the last holdouts that haven't submitted to the Disney/Vivendi/**AA view of reality. Any new system that would be created today, would be built to their specifications, full stop: they are that powerful, and the stakes would be that high.
I have no doubt that, given the opportunity, some of the finest minds at the large corporations of the world would love to design an international Patent Office. I'm also sure that it would be ruthlessly efficient at transferring the rights of individuals to the media conglomerates, and carving the IP landscape up into chunks to be divided between its corporate masters, into monopolies that would last until the end of time.
On the whole, I much prefer our current mess: sometimes bureucratic inefficiency is perferable to the creation of a juggernaut, and I fear that's what you'd get if you concentrated power in a single place in the pursuit of efficiency.
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This may certainly be true right now, while there are still enterprise UNIX systems to migrate over to Linux. They're the "squeaky wheel" that gets the grease -- if you look around your business, and realize you're paying tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees for a handful of UNIX workstations, those are the things you're going to want to ditch first for free alternatives. The $300-a-head Windows machines seem like small beans in comparison.
But, once you've replaced all the UNIX workstations, and all your competitor companies have too, you naturally start to look to other ways of saving overhead dollars. Okay, so you get rid of the free coffee, turn the thermostat down ten degrees and tell your employees to wear sweaters. And your competitors do that too.
Eventually, once you've cut overhead and costs in every other place -- and we're coming up on this point in a lot of highly competitive business areas -- that "Microsoft tax" starts to look more and more onerous.
Now, Microsoft, not being stupid (and because they're selling a product--software licenses--that has basically zero marginal cost to distribute) will lower the prices, constantly keeping it just below the "point of pain" that would cause most businesses to switch.
Microsoft, as much as I dislike saying this, is going to be around for a long time, barring some Enron-esque mismanagement (although a man can dream). However, as competition becomes more intense across business sectors; once companies have realized all the gains they can squeeze out of oursourcing, integrated logistics, supply chain optimization, and all the other cost-reduction buzzwords, and find themselves competing with shops in other countries that aren't paying the MS tax because they've never experienced vendor lock-in, are going to force Microsoft to reduce its prices if it wants to remain on top.
And to be perfectly honest, if Linux as a platform and as a technology did nothing else but provide a threat that large companies could use in their negotiations with Microsoft, and force them to reduce prices, that's a pretty big deal.
I'd like to believe this, but sometimes I question IBM's commitment to Linux. Before I get flamed -- yes, I know how much R&D money they've pumped into various projects. But I think that they've figured out that they can make money hand over fist selling services (particularly consulting) regardless of what OS people are using. At the end of the day, I'm not sure they really care a whole lot what OS everyone uses.
If they really wanted to be the "Microsoft of Linux," it would be pretty trivial for them to put out an "IBM Desktop Linux." Port Lotus Notes over to it, along with the rest of the old Lotus suite (or throw money at OO.org for optimization), license the configuration tools from RedHat or SuSE (or build their own), generally make something that would be easy to roll out large deployments of. Make the desktop blue, and roll it out to all 300,000 or whatever they have internal employees.
I don't think they could crush Windows, but they'd probably run over RedHat and SuSE/Novell's marketshare in a hurry. The internal use alone would probably make it one of the most popular distributions in existence overnight, and they'd be able to leverage their relationships with hardware vendors to get compatible peripherals and configurations. That compatibility would draw a lot of home users -- heck, I know I'd install it, if there was a free version, just to have a Linux that was backed up by a company the size of IBM.
They would be the Microsoft of Linux. They would not, however, be the Microsoft of PC operating systems.
Of course, it might result in them going out of business, which is why I suspect they don't do it -- as a company, IBM got pretty close to death in the 90s, and I don't think they're really up for anything that smells in the slightest like OS/2. The move of their internal workforce away from Windows and to Linux might make their consulting services less attractive to businesses who are on Windows -- "what do you mean, none of your people use Windows?" -- and selling services is their lifeblood now, apparently.
In short, I'd love to see IBM jump into the Linux pool with both feet, just to see the splash it would make. But I'm fearful after the waves subsided, they'd end up drowning in it.
I think you were looking for today's Myspace-related thread. It's over here.
Or for that matter, why don't they declare war on the Netherlands, particularly Amsterdam?
It's "XXX" for the whole world. Literally.
Still, it's good to see social conservatives and pornographers united like this. Who knows where this alliance could go?
....
I don't know about you, but I think some really disturbing porn could come out of it
This is all very well and good, but it relies on porn sites having 100% compliance with the .xxx TLD -- that is, they have to agree to be in the porn ghetto themselves.
.xxx, but I don't think you'd get that in other countries. And in case you haven't trolled around the internet recently, there's a lot of porn out there that doesn't call the Estados Unidos home.
.xxx laws? Build a giant National Internet Filter? I'm sure Cisco could get right on that, but then I think you've created a solution that's a thousand times worse than the problem. (Which I'm not convinced is that severe anyway -- I saw my share of porn growing up, and some of it was really filthy shit, and I didn't turn into some sort of maniacal sex pervert as a result. Just one sample, but I'm unconvinced of the "danger" of pure porn. Anyway...)
.xxx TLD was stupid. Just dumb. It was a regulation being promulgated by politicians and pundits and a whole lot of other people who either don't know or choose to ignore the complexities of the Internet, and never wanted to think about the enforcement aspects of such a rule.
I don't see that happening. Oh sure, maybe in the US, in the current political climate, we'd see a rush of laws to require "adult" sites to be in
I'd wager once you had all of the good, wholesome, American style big-boobies-and-sultry-lips porn locked up behind nanny filters, instead you'd just have kids seeing what kind of new and different Japanese tentacle porn they could turn up. Or German schiesse porn -- now that's what I want to see at my local library.
So what do you do about all the porn from the foreign countries that don't have
Everything about the
Partial protection is NOT better than no protection at all. That's where I fundamentally disagree with you. Any level of protection is just going to cause parents to get lazier, and feel that they can send their kids down to the library to use the internet in lieu of daycare or a babysitter (or actually spending time with them), because someone on TV told them the internet was now "safer." A false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
Sadly you can only recover from them the declared value of the parcel...and there's usually a maximum amount on it, and it often doesn't cover the destruction of non-physical stuff like data, doesn't cover loss of business, etc.
Otherwise, everyone who's ever had a contract or CD of data lost in the FedEx system would have sued the living shit out of them.
The law surrounding freight shippers is pretty well hammered out, the most you'd be able to do is insure it for a lot of money, hope they destroyed it, then claim he full value of the insurance.
I have yet to meet anyone in business who really cares that much about Microsoft one way or the other. Many (I'd venture perhaps to say 'most') people find aspects of Windows annoying or obnoxious, but in general it's "good enough."
In fact, if I had to pick a single phrase that sums up Microsoft, that's what it would be: "good enough."
It's not wonderful, and it's not cheap, but it basically does what it says it's going to do, and the pricing is such that most businesses can afford it (or that they've rolled the cost of it up into their products and passed it onto their customers).
The only people that probably 'hate' Microsoft are probably at competitor companies (insofar as they exist anymore), and that only people who really 'love' them are probably at companies that are making money off of their dominance in some direct or indirect fashion.
To the very great majority of people, Microsoft software is like 120VAC electricity: they understand that there are other ways to run their toaster, and perhaps are even dimly aware that in other places, things work differently, but it's not particularly relevant to their business, and as a result they don't care.
If people dislike Microsoft for something, it's mostly for their licensing structure. That's why you see most people trying to advocate Linux use to businesses focus on the small-F "free" aspect: very few people really care about the capital-F/libre definition of "Free," the only advantage of Linux is that it costs less.
However, I think during periods of market contraction, as companies look towards their overhead for ways to cut costs and maintain profitability, you'll see increased interest in free replacements for expensive software. Right now, most companies aren't under so much pressure that it's worth the transition problems to get rid of Windows (although it's worth transitioning from UNIX to Linux in many cases). As the market becomes more and more competitive and commoditized, I think eventually people are going to see the price of a Windows+Office license for every computer as a competitive disadvantage.
Hello ... oh, it's for you. It's 1995 calling, they want their bullshit back.
Your whole ease-of-use angle just falls completely flat. Configuring a modern Linux desktop is no harder nor any more metaphorically abstract than the average Windows or Mac OS X desktop, in fact I'd say that it's probably easier to configure a secure Linux machine than a Windows machine, because you don't have to do anything to the Linux machine, while on the Windows one, after you have it running, you have to install your anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. I don't know where you're getting your FUD about using the command-line; with something like Linspire or Xandros, you can avoid the CLI completely for administrative functions if you really want to. I think that all but the most thickheaded users eventually realize that there are tasks for which the terminal is more efficient than a GUI (even some of the most diehard MacOS 9 fans had to grudgingly admit this after the OS X transition, prior to which the idea of a command line to most Mac users was anathema), but they don't have to use it if they don't want to.
But anyway, this is all a moot point because your straw man about Ma and Pa Kettle is irrelevant in a discussion about corporate desktops and servers.
Linux is quite useable right now for a corporate desktop, where you want to give the users something that's basically pre-configured and locked down. "Here's your standard-issue computer. Don't change the settings. Don't install any software. Don't run any funny email attachments. Don't install stupid wallpaper. Don't install [verboten application]." It's much more practical to have Linux machines configured to run everything as non-root users than it is on Windows, due to the number of Win applications that are retardedly designed to be run by an Administrator.
The thing that keeps companies on Windows despite the vast downsides, in terms of security, stability and expense (that last one being the biggest and the most germane to this discussion) is because of the vast amount of legacy code that most businesses have. It only takes one non-portable application to make switching seem less practical, and many businesses have multiple non-portable applications (e.g. maybe they have Exchange for email, use Access for a database, and have some custom junk written in VB that lacks sources; any one of of those problems is probably solvable, but together it starts to really increase the complexity of a move).
The thing driving Windows in the enterprise isn't ease of use -- that might have been true in the Slackware days, but it's not anymore (and if it was true that ease-of-use was such a concern, it wouldn't explain why businesses haven't just migrated to Mac, which has long been considered an easier-to-use platform) -- and it's certainly not TCO: it's the perceived availability of software and support, and consequent Microsoft vendor lock-in.
And this surprises you ... why?
Does anyone know what percentage of mail servers these days use Sendmail?
Personally I dumped it for Postfix at the first opportunity, as did most other people I know. It just seems so much more painful to use.
I guess migrating a large enterprise from one to the other could be quite a bitch, so there's a lot of inertia to keep with what you know, but I'm just curious if Sendmail's time as one of the "killer apps" that drives the internet is waning.
My apologies if I start a flamewar here...
Actually on OSX, the system just opens ".dmg" and ".iso" files with a little application called "DiskImageMounter.app" (I think that's its name, I am likewise not at a Mac right now) which calls hdiutil (presumably) and mounts it on the desktop. (Actually, in /Volumes/, but to the user it appears on the desktop.)
If you right-click on an image file, you can choose to open it either with the mounting program, or in Disk Copy, or in Adaptec's Toast if you have it installed.
The goal is usually to explore the basic underpinnings of something of interest,
I think you misspelled "bring in grant money" and "write publishable papers."
If the grants happen to go to, or the papers happen to be written by, somebody who's interested in the subject, that's a bonus. It's not required.
When did /. become Popular Science?
They haven't. If they did, they'd have to hire editors and fact-checkers. Clearly, we have neither.
Excellent point. Actually I'd argue that the big research universitites may in fact give poor-quality educations, at least at the undergraduate level, because all the courses are taught either by grad students (teaching usually in exchange for free tuition or room/board) or by professors who would really rather be working in their lab than standing in front of a lecture hall. In other words, the people teaching there (with exceptions, of course) rarely want to be teaching. It's just something they have to do, for whatever reason.
That said, it can be a great resource to have true experts in their fields available to you, so there are definite advantages to the big paper-mill Unis, but I think at the undergraduate level these are overwhelmed by the disadvantages.
If I was advising someone now as to which college to choose, I'd say pick a smaller one where every class is taught by a professor, and those professors are easily accessible after hours to ask questions of. Pick a place, in other words, where teaching is the primary focus of the faculty and not churning out papers or winning grants. Then, when you're looking for grad school, go to one of the big Unis -- get them to pay for your tuition, room and board, and a stipend if you can -- and seek out the experts to work with one-on-one (research projects, working in their lab, etc.).
My recommendation is colored by my personal experience (which didn't follow the path I just described), of course, but I still think it's good advice.
I think that the attitude you describe is definitely to blame, but I think it long predates NCLB. That act has only been around for a few years, not nearly long enough to affect anyone who's in University right now.
But the attitude that a teacher should spend 80% of their time teaching the lowest-performing 10% of the class is nothing new, I experienced it when I was in school and that was decades ago.
It's basically SOP to throw 20-30 kids in a room with one teacher, regardless of their individual needs, and if the teacher spends all her time trying to keep the ADHDers in line, the rest of the class just suffers. Everyone realizes this is a problem, but rather than addressing the issue directly (why are you allowing problem students who are sapping resources from 15 or 20 other kids to remain in that classroom?), the move is just to "smaller class sizes," which is really just another way of throwing resources at the problem. It's an improvement but not a solution.
IMO, it's because we've lost the ability in this country to call a spade a spade: no teacher is willing to go to a parent and say "your child isn't up to the standard of this class," or even to claim what is patently obvious to anyone who's spent some time around gifted children -- some kids are just generally smarter than their peers. That claim shouldn't even be controversial! After all, we accept obviously that some kids are taller than others, some run faster than others, but yet we get all uncomfortable when anyone points out that this also suggests that some people are going to be better thinkers and learners than others. Denying that some kids are smarter than average (and at the other end of the bell curve, that some are less intelligent than average) is like trying to deny that some kids are taller than others, or have bigger feet. It should be plain, but we've chosen to cover our eyes and come up with all manner of complicated rationalizations for why some kids perform better, because reality is harsh and nobody wants to tell a parent that their child might just be slow.
We've created an educational system based on the false premise that all children are the same and learn the same, and will succeed the same if given the same treatment. This is false. Some kids need a lot more attention and time than others in order to learn the same basic things; and while we should make sure that they receive this time, we should not be doing it at the expense of what to me is our most valuable resource as a society: our best and brightest kids, who can learn things quickly and easily and should be allowed to learn as fast as they can handle the material.
Instead, we punish fast learners with boredom by teaching to the lowest-common-denominator in the classroom. This does a disservice to bright kids everywhere, and frankly to society as a whole, which is depending on our educational system to produce the next generation of leaders.
Interesting. I use a Motorola, however, so I'm not sure what the story is on installing additional software on it.
At any rate, I've never been particularly interested in using the Internet, in any fashion, from my cell phone. I suppose maybe if I had it I'd find ways to use it, but I just don't have the desire to do google searches or look up sports scores while on the subway or in my car, and those are basically the only times that I'm more than twenty feet away from a computer in a typical day, and where it wouldn't be more desirable to pop open a laptop.
What interested me about GPRS was that I could plug the cellphone into my computer and get regular internet access on my laptop while travelling (I do a fair amount of long-distance train travel) -- so I could do email, access the corporate VPN, and do instant messenging with a full-size keyboard.
TMobile is pretty bad about advertising the GPRS service, but they do have it, as evidenced by the PCMCIA cards that they will happily sell you (along with a dedicated service plan) if you say you want cellular internet from your laptop. Basically I just wanted that service, but without the hassle or expense of buying a dedicated card for the laptop (with it's own SIM/phone number). I just wanted it on my regular phone, and then connect it to my computer via a cable or Bluetooth to get internet access.
They don't do a good job about advertising the GPRS addon plans, but they do exist. Pity it's kinda slow compared to Verizon's offerings, but I wouldn't go back to Verizon if they were selling $5 bills for $3.
When people go and by a new computer, many are willing to spend hundreds of dollars more to get a little extra performance. They will not like to have that taking away from them just so that they can run a microkernel.
These people are really not the kind of people who are going to use microkernels, or really care that much about stability. Home users, in general, appear pretty far down the "stability/performance" tradeoff scale, towards the performance end. The advantage for them to use a microkernel, or any other architecture which trades performance for increased stability, may be minimal.
But then again, they're not really the market for high-reliability systems: real time systems, command-and-control applications, and embedded systems are. Increasingly, servers are going to fall into this category as well.
I have used many Linux computers the last 10 years. They never went down with a virus, and I have not had problems with lack of protection between kernel drivers.
This is a straw man. I'm sure somebody out there is willing to pipe up and say that they've used an unpatched Windows ME box for some obscene length of time, but we all know it's insecure. Likewise, just because you've never seen a Linux box go down doesn't mean they're immune, or that if you were designing a system that needed "five nines" reliability, that you'd have a basis for making a selection. The point of a microkernel, as someone further up in the thread (GP?) said, is that it's easier to analyze the code and prove, to an acceptable degree, that it is secure and stable. The fact that a server has run for a year or 10 without crashing isn't enough; you need to be able to demonstrate basically a priori that the system will be reliable, in addition to having test cases.
So anyway, in a limited way I'm agreeing with you. Joe Blow the 3D gamer probably isn't going to give a crap about microkernels, and isn't going to find their advantages convincing. But someone running any kind of production server might, and certainly anyone building high-reliability or embedded equipment should.
The question then becomes: which group of people is Linux being built for? Where, on the performance versus stability continuum does it reside?
So, what we have here is a big fat pity party where everyone and their grab ass brother is trying to get into the "screw the end user" game so they can make more money? Wow, they're all turning into the RIAA and the petroleum companies!
Yes. That's pretty much it. I think your oil company analogies are fundamentally flawed, as are all analogies drawn between electronic content distribution and distribution of a physical good: although oil is controlled in large part by a cartel, at the end of the day it is a nonrenewable resource. "Content" is not; I can copy Disney's Fantasia and give it to as many people as I want, and when I'm done, we all still have it. It's tough doing that with gasoline (though don't we all wish). Basically, DRM tries to make physical-goods distribution models work with strings of numbers, with mixed results. Or alternately, even if Disney decides to take their ball and go home, it's not as if "content" is in short supply, or is in any way a limited resource -- in fact, I would argue that the supply of content always exactly equals demand, no more and no less. People make content basically out of thin air when there is sufficent demand, and don't make it when there's not. The distribution companies have tried to create and perpetuate an artifical scarcity in order to maintain demand, and it's not working very well.
But this is all sort of unrelated to the issue at hand (tiered internet). The point here is simply one where the backbone providers and telcos/ISPs have turned loose a few MBAs to try and figure out how to increase revenue. Their solution is, in the absence of real competition, to try and extort people into paying for the same thing (transfer of bits from point A to B in a timely manner) two or three times. On the receiving end (direct payment to the end-user's ISP), the transmitting end (via however Google/Yahoo/etc. pays the bills, i.e. advertising), and in transit (by twisting Google's or the end-user's arm for increased QoS).
From a dirty business standpoint, it's like they took a look at the business model of the RIAA's member companies and decided they'd try to take it to a whole new level.
It would not -- if you want "real" internet access, as opposed to "email only" or "TMobile web" service, you need to ask for GPRS service as opposed to the TMobile Web service, and the cost is $30 as opposed to $6 per month or so.
I spent a while talking to some braindead rep at a TMobile store a while back about this. I kept telling her that I wanted internet access through my phone, and it took a while to pound through that I wanted more than just to be able to use that idiotically lame browser that's built into the phone, I wanted to connect my PC to my phone and use it as a modem for internet access, to everything on the internet. Needless to say, that costs more.
Actually I knew a blind guy once who programmed just fine, using a Braille terminal and some sort of very basic text editor. Just like any other programmer using a text shell, except the output was through the braille terminal instead of a VDT. IIRC he had some sort of non-QWERTY keyboard also, but I never inquired as to how it worked.
He always maintained that screen-readers were a huge step down, and were being pushed onto sight-impaired people because they were a lot cheaper than full-size (40 or 80 column) Braille terminals.
When you think about it, basically any command-line application is much better suited to use by a sight-imparied person than a GUIed app, because it can be more easily transformed into a serial data stream (which can be read or felt linearly). So really, Linux ought to be the platform of choice for accessibility, since you can use it in so many more ways: if you don't want to use a GUI, no GUI for you. You don't ever have to use a graphical control panel to change a system setting, check email, even search the internet, etc.
(Unless of course people send you raster PDFs as email attachments, but not like a screenreader is really going to help you much with those, either.)
In all fairness, IBM does make supercomputers/HPC kit, but they're not the same as their mainframes. Probably a whole different internal division makes them; they're designed entirely differently.
Makes sense, but you're right, that only works on a locked-down platform: otherwise why couldn't user A just send user B both the encrypted file and the key? That way user B wouldn't have to call the rights-controller in order to get the key (which has to be the same as the one user A has), and nobody ever knows that the transfer occured.
I'm sure such a system is exactly what WB or Vivendi would like to have -- they don't have to do any work besides supply the key in trade for money (not even much bandwidth) -- and I'm sure we'll see more crap like that once the Trusted Computing model becomes reality. I don't think that it's practical right now on a PC-based system, though.
What more is there to this?
Billions of dollars a year in extortion--I mean, revenue--for the telecommunications companies?
That's really all there is to it. They've figured out that they can't maintain the sort of growth that they've had over the past decade or so (because there's nowhere to expand to), so now they're trying to figure out ways to squeeze more money out of their existing customers. Because even if you don't realize it, everyone using the Internet is an indirect customer of the backbone providers. You pay your ISP, your ISP maybe pays another ISP, that ISP pays for a connection to the backbone. They get their tithe, it just goes via your local provider first.
And there's really no way to rake in the dough like making people pay for something twice. Here's what the backbone providers want: the source of the packets pays for access (a portion of which makes its way up the chain to them), the destination of the packets pays for access (also trickles up to them), and the source and the destination both pay directly for increased QoS if they don't want said packets to spend a few seconds in the purgatorial "low-rent buffer" on their way across the network.
It's just a protection racket, but without any of that messy kneecap-smashing business.
On the contrary, I much prefer a patchwork, redundant, basically ineffective system, similar to what we have now viewed internationally, than the sort of international entity you'd get if it was designed in the current climate. At least today if you really don't like the IP laws in the U.S., you can go to Russia, Sweden, or China; true national "harmonization," which would be the first step towards any sort of international patent/trademark/copyright office, would remove the last holdouts that haven't submitted to the Disney/Vivendi/**AA view of reality. Any new system that would be created today, would be built to their specifications, full stop: they are that powerful, and the stakes would be that high.
I have no doubt that, given the opportunity, some of the finest minds at the large corporations of the world would love to design an international Patent Office. I'm also sure that it would be ruthlessly efficient at transferring the rights of individuals to the media conglomerates, and carving the IP landscape up into chunks to be divided between its corporate masters, into monopolies that would last until the end of time.
On the whole, I much prefer our current mess: sometimes bureucratic inefficiency is perferable to the creation of a juggernaut, and I fear that's what you'd get if you concentrated power in a single place in the pursuit of efficiency.