it all reads to me like canonical has realised just what is involved in real LTS and is begging redhat to provide a common source base for them to leach ^h^h^h^h contribute to where there is less differentiation between distributions.
certainly, ubuntu has gone from zero to hero in a fairly short time, but reading between the lines here, i think the more likely end game is that a future ubuntu will hitch its wagon to the redhat sources rather than debians.
as far as ubuntu moving into the corporate space goes, redhat provides figures on paid up subs, and centos can show reasonable approximations of install/update repository access, as discussed on TFA.
canonical? why dont they put their cards on the table? this discussion is around mr. shuttleworths desire to 'align releases', but i cant quite see whats in it for redhat ( and novell of course ).
( not like i do all that often, but in this case, dag is a pretty wise head in the arena, and the linked article is pretty short, with a perty picture in the middle to make it all clear ).
its probably the best high level description of just what is involved in long term support for OS distributions/releases, particularly during the overlap periods of multiple distinct releases of any one distribution.
fedora is great, i've used it on my desktop since it was called red hat 6.0... but god, keep it away from the servers!
we run centos in-house for development/testing hosts, and advise our customers to pony up for redhat. we get cheap platforms, they get quality support and maintenance.
meanwhile, every 6 months or so, the nice people at fedora provide me with a bleeding edge distro that has all the core components that reasonably closely match up to the redhat/centos bases, and i get to play with funky new stuff on the desktop for 10 mins. until i get bored of the spinny cube, and go back to my ide:)
The real issue is that US dollars are no longer backed by gold but by oil. Oil is priced, bought and sold with dollars. This is how the dollar gets its value and one reason other governments must hold dollars as a reserve currency it also appears to be the real underlying reason the bush/chaney regime went in to iraq: the formerly pliant iraqi administration was considering trading their oil exclusively in euros, leaving the Fiat Currency without its real underlying value, and they couldnt have that.
what, with all the haliburon stock those guys have.
minimize iconifies the window down to task bar, restore ( or click, or tab through ) return it from whence it came: size location and all. ( windows, linux, mac, all the same behaviour iirc ).
you probably already use non-maximised windows for things like new emails, instant messenger chats/buddy lists, etc, so realising you can do the same with web browsers/word processors is a pretty easy step... 16:9 res only makes it all the more usable.
pretty easy to get the hang of too, and most window managers ( again, windows, linux, mac ) allow customisation of the behaviour when you double click a title bar, just in case you cant break old habits.
oh, and you can always maximise a window with a quick click to cover the full viewport if your application ( and use ) is suitable for it.
how is it you think you lose 'maximise' behaviour?
If I want wide screen, I'll use dual monitors so web pages and documents are still 4:3. or, get a 16:9, and not maximise every window you have open. maybe even have 2 windows open across half the sceen at a time? eg: have space for 2 docs on one screen lets you read a main document, click links throughout and have them open up on a second window in your main desktop viewport.
i've been on 1920x1280 17" laptops for a couple o yrs now, and simply cant abide by 4:3 when i sit down in front of one.
( esp. given the 'panel' arrangements of the various ide's i use day to day)
and of course, using dual screen still puts an ugly great blob of monitor bezel between the bits you want to look at.
ever used ebay, or known what path your requests take through a google page request?
or any other high volume transactional website? for banks, stock trading, so-called e-commerce, java really is the king, particularly in web front ends.
perhaps you've confused a platform with some crappy swing app you once downloaded off some freeware site, or an equally crappy applet on some website?
a poor application implementation is really not the fault of the platform, but seeing where jdesktop.org, jgoodies and spring-rich-client projects are going, i expect to see a lot more quality java DESKTOP apps popping up in the near future.
i recall seeing a documentary about this sort of stuff, but they skirted around most of the economic theory along the way.
interstellar mining operations where the crew went out on multi-year tours, lessening the effects of time with deep sleep/hibernation.
i beleive it was called 'aliens' and revolved around the working day of one 'lt. ripley' aboard the cargo/mining ship 'the nostromo'.
a difficult hitch-hiking insect problem too IIRC.
anyway, it was an earth -> deep space -> earth round trip over a prolonged period, with long-lived corporate interests footing the bills ( and reaping the profits from bulk cargo & some medical research on the side )
and there's no way to slipstream or download those for the other 3 computers I'm installing later... off the top of my head, i can think of a couple of ways:
- set up a http proxy/cache like squid and configure all the machines network settins to use it - set up a local mirror to sync up overnight, and tweak your machines to go there for updates instead of the public servers
dont know about ubuntu, but i do knwo one of the big steps fedora has taken in the last year or so has been a new 'spin' system, which makes it a lot easier to push out 'rollup' distributions ( and allows anyone to easily produce custom spins to their hearts content. see http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ for starters, google 'fedora spins' for the rest )
all the recent distros have a little 'taskbar' icon that pops up and tells the user when updates are available, and also a gui tool to wrap the actual package manager ( dpkg or rpm ) when talking to the published update services.
nicely abstracted away from the internals, the repository manager will just go about its business and prompt for an administrator password, and advise whats available.
it'll then go and grab all the updates, install them, and away you go. no apt-get, no yum ( thats the redhat one ) or rpms on the command line ( unless you really want to ).
running a headless box? you're probably more interested in looking into how to run stuff from the command line, and google is your friend.
( FYI: adobe has recently started publishing its own apt/yum repository, its really not too hard to add it to your systems 'update' locations and have the updates for acrobat checked at the same time as the rest of your system - i'd say thats a pretty good indication of direction adobe is gonna take for their linux apps update services. google has a similar deal for picassa and a couple other linux apps...you can probably expect this to land in ubuntu's default repository locations eventually, and nice easy instructions on the fedora website to get you there too).
I'm rather surprised at the vehemence of the responses to my original post, as if the responders thought that I was in favor of businesses being the way they are. I'm not - and never said that I was. I merely described how things are. Sorry if you folks don't like it, but please don't shoot the messenger. i'm not.
your original line implied that even mentioning something different to co-workers would leave you at least open to derision ( presumably from all the good little sheep running the management line on all things ), probably putting your job at risk if you took it further.
like many slashdotters, i work in IT, have tertiary education, and use my brain to think up solutions to problems. much of IT is problem solving, so the code i write aims to solve whatever problem in the best way, constrained by time, cost or quality ( pick any 2:) ). what your post was saying was 'we dont pay you to think', which is pretty much about the quickest way to offend anyone who, well, thinks!
so when your business fails due to high staff turnover, and you apply for an interview at {my|any} firm, would you mind volunteering your slashdot id? that might help reduce costs involved with time, etc.
I'm a business owner. Been one for over two decades, with employees. I know how employers think. heh, and if you're like most of the 'business owners' i've ever met, you probably think you're the only one who knows how to do things, and everyone else smokes crack!.
If you never never go, you'll never never know will ya?
+1 take it to the company and try your luck, they can only say yay or ney, right?
(BTW, only a truly terrible employee would be worried about mentioning this to a coworker, Harmonious Beach, let alone worry about mentioning to co-workers. and if it made an employer uneasy, probably time to get the fuck out of whatever business Harmonious Beach runs... do you run your business as some kind of fiefdom? or would you be happy to surround yourself with yes-men like the emperor with his new clothes? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes ) )
... run as admin.... Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network. why should you have to run as admin? and should you really be running an app as admin which accesses the network?
imap/imaps ( turn on the standard protocol handler at the exchange server, might need to futz with AD and sort out certificates for imaps )
same deal for pop3/pop3s
evolution exchange connector: talks to exchange through its webmail system ( enabled by default on the exchange server as http://your.exchange.host.local/exchange )
or is there some issue with exchange 2007 specifically that i havent had to fight yet?
really, i fucking hate exchange. why? some project manager/exec demands integrated calendaring in their email... hears only exchange can provide it, so it gets mandated as the corp mail server, which as luck would have it ( for microsoft ) REQUIRES active directory to run, which really needs to run the dns and dhcp services ( never mind they're broken in the MS implementation ), which then needs to handle all the desktop authentication in order for outlook to ntlm authenticate to the mail service in order to provide the shared calendars. and there you have it. nice lightweight dovecot or courier imap on linux solution completely turned to crap with multiple DC's, a backup mailbox server and NETBEUI domain names and windows desktops all fofr the sake of integrated calendaring. gargh.
back OT, gnome actually integrates with Active Directory pretty well too, just so long as you're prepared to have crippled unix posix accounts & group memberships on your linux box.
i've worked in many companies, of varying sizes. from a handful through to the cube farms.
one of the reasons i get hired is to implement systems that relieve the burden of vendor lock-in, which overall usually means stripping back several layers of cruft, re-writing a few apps to meet business practices needs, and giving a roadmap for where to go next.
i promote my services in such a way, and have had most of my work over the last 5-10 years coming through referrals from happy customers. we'll go in, clean up the mess, and leave them with real choice of direction.
if you're finding your job a soul-destroying monotony, i highly recommend you get out and start doing things the way you think they should be done. if you have the relevant experience, companies will listen, and you can actually affect positive change.
( i sincerely hope thats what 'the business' from your link above is all about..)
While Sun declined to comment directly for this story, it pointed to some public statements from company executives. Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun, wrote a blog post congratulating Google on the day of Android's launch. Notably, he refers to Android as a "Java/Linux" platform
where is the trouble? the article is pure beat-up.
the reason for dalvik is entirely technical. check out the youtube presentations, it makes it pretty clear that you develop in pretty much pure java, but the runtime needed a little more than the standard jme could provide.
the GP postulates the problems of the IT department that laptops present, and the specifics of viruses & other nasties being brought back into the corporate lan by bedhopping laptops..
'there's nothing in Linux that will stop an idiot user from installing malware'
in *nix, user has to do it on purpose: ie the execution model is such that user intervention is required to install said malware. the windows model is somewhat more lax, and leads directly to the GP issue of virii finding their way onto the corporate lan.
as a couple of others have pointed out in this thread, the tight coupling of application and working processes ( eg: need powerpoint, or some in house system that needs active directory and exchange and office and internet explorer ) leads directly to being completely at the whim of the vendor.
my original point about my linux laptop never having had a virus, and i drag it from LAN to LAN was entirely meant to illustrate that a large part of the problems IT departments face is the result of letting vendors tell them what they need, and end up with systems that can work with a lot of babysitting, but usually at a much greater cost overall.
things like proprietary VPNS to allow user access to an intranet are just the wrong solution to the problem: why not just make the intranet available over https after authentication? and if the information it contains is really taht sensitive, why let a laptop connect to it at all? its pretty simple to drag files onto the laptop, walk out the door, have laptop disappear, and boom, there goes your security.
same deal for email. same deal for internal corporate application XYZ. if company wants their employees to work from anywhere, and provide a laptop to enable this, all these layers of crap they end up putting in for the sake of 'security' just couple them and their business processes ever tighter to the vendor products.
( and yes, i'm a software engineer, and so my company does sell IT, but most of my work is professional services in medium to large enterprises implementing business systems, so i see how they work, and how they all too often try to solve the wrong part of a problem with ever more complex solutions, and so i do my best to steer them clear of those tightly coupled style systems..)
i am in IT, and its pretty safe bet to say the sales types will use whatever is put in front of them, including double clicking that cutesly looking [trojaned] crap on msn or elsewhere.
need a presentation tool? use open office 'impress'. once its up on the projector, what does it matter?
most of it is fluffy lies anyway!.
all my original reply was saying is they're often given the wrong tool for the job.
i guess a bunch of MS apologists are dishing out mods today... OT??
( and no, it doesnt exist to support sales, sales exists to overcharge for it. and of course take their cut. same as any industry.)
Slashdot Mirror
you also need to RTFA.
and the link to mr. shuttleworths pledge.
it all reads to me like canonical has realised just what is involved in real LTS and is begging redhat to provide a common source base for them to leach ^h^h^h^h contribute to where there is less differentiation between distributions.
certainly, ubuntu has gone from zero to hero in a fairly short time, but reading between the lines here, i think the more likely end game is that a future ubuntu will hitch its wagon to the redhat sources rather than debians.
as far as ubuntu moving into the corporate space goes, redhat provides figures on paid up subs, and centos can show reasonable approximations of install/update repository access, as discussed on TFA.
canonical? why dont they put their cards on the table? this discussion is around mr. shuttleworths desire to 'align releases', but i cant quite see whats in it for redhat ( and novell of course ).
RTFA.
:)
( not like i do all that often, but in this case, dag is a pretty wise head in the arena, and the linked article is pretty short, with a perty picture in the middle to make it all clear ).
its probably the best high level description of just what is involved in long term support for OS distributions/releases, particularly during the overlap periods of multiple distinct releases of any one distribution.
fedora is great, i've used it on my desktop since it was called red hat 6.0... but god, keep it away from the servers!
we run centos in-house for development/testing hosts, and advise our customers to pony up for redhat. we get cheap platforms, they get quality support and maintenance.
meanwhile, every 6 months or so, the nice people at fedora provide me with a bleeding edge distro that has all the core components that reasonably closely match up to the redhat/centos bases, and i get to play with funky new stuff on the desktop for 10 mins. until i get bored of the spinny cube, and go back to my ide
heh,
:)
doesnt that just indicate more people have to do more searches for issues with ubuntu than fedora?
try the livecd image.
you can boot straight up into it, and theres a double-click 'install to hard drive' desktop icon.
single cd image, and once installed, you can pick and choose additional packages from the public repositories.
$> yum install [package]
:)
$> yum remove [package]
yeah, i can see how your dependedncy hell transpired.
( heres a hint though, after yum works out all the dependencies, enter 'y' or 'n' to accept/reject the dependency resolution yum works out for ya...)
oh, and theres a graphical tool for command line averse.
the much shorter ( and accurate ) response to this A/C would of course be 'bullshit'
what, with all the haliburon stock those guys have.
careful, that sticker is load bearing
heh,
.. needless to say, didnt last long.
i had a girlfriend in university whose honours thesis was on 'femminist themes in mary shelleys frankenstein'
so, naturally i retort with 'monster story, MONSTER STORY'...
lose the maximise feature?
que?
minimize iconifies the window down to task bar, restore ( or click, or tab through ) return it from whence it came: size location and all. ( windows, linux, mac, all the same behaviour iirc ).
you probably already use non-maximised windows for things like new emails, instant messenger chats/buddy lists, etc, so realising you can do the same with web browsers/word processors is a pretty easy step... 16:9 res only makes it all the more usable.
pretty easy to get the hang of too, and most window managers ( again, windows, linux, mac ) allow customisation of the behaviour when you double click a title bar, just in case you cant break old habits.
oh, and you can always maximise a window with a quick click to cover the full viewport if your application ( and use ) is suitable for it.
how is it you think you lose 'maximise' behaviour?
i've been on 1920x1280 17" laptops for a couple o yrs now, and simply cant abide by 4:3 when i sit down in front of one.
( esp. given the 'panel' arrangements of the various ide's i use day to day)
and of course, using dual screen still puts an ugly great blob of monitor bezel between the bits you want to look at.
ever used ebay, or known what path your requests take through a google page request?
or any other high volume transactional website? for banks, stock trading, so-called e-commerce, java really is the king, particularly in web front ends.
perhaps you've confused a platform with some crappy swing app you once downloaded off some freeware site, or an equally crappy applet on some website?
a poor application implementation is really not the fault of the platform, but seeing where jdesktop.org, jgoodies and spring-rich-client projects are going, i expect to see a lot more quality java DESKTOP apps popping up in the near future.
i recall seeing a documentary about this sort of stuff, but they skirted around most of the economic theory along the way.
interstellar mining operations where the crew went out on multi-year tours, lessening the effects of time with deep sleep/hibernation.
i beleive it was called 'aliens' and revolved around the working day of one 'lt. ripley' aboard the cargo/mining ship 'the nostromo'.
a difficult hitch-hiking insect problem too IIRC.
anyway, it was an earth -> deep space -> earth round trip over a prolonged period, with long-lived corporate interests footing the bills ( and reaping the profits from bulk cargo & some medical research on the side )
- set up a http proxy/cache like squid and configure all the machines network settins to use it
- set up a local mirror to sync up overnight, and tweak your machines to go there for updates instead of the public servers
dont know about ubuntu, but i do knwo one of the big steps fedora has taken in the last year or so has been a new 'spin' system, which makes it a lot easier to push out 'rollup' distributions ( and allows anyone to easily produce custom spins to their hearts content. see http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ for starters, google 'fedora spins' for the rest )
trolling aside,
all the recent distros have a little 'taskbar' icon that pops up and tells the user when updates are available, and also a gui tool to wrap the actual package manager ( dpkg or rpm ) when talking to the published update services.
nicely abstracted away from the internals, the repository manager will just go about its business and prompt for an administrator password, and advise whats available.
it'll then go and grab all the updates, install them, and away you go. no apt-get, no yum ( thats the redhat one ) or rpms on the command line ( unless you really want to ).
running a headless box? you're probably more interested in looking into how to run stuff from the command line, and google is your friend.
( FYI: adobe has recently started publishing its own apt/yum repository, its really not too hard to add it to your systems 'update' locations and have the updates for acrobat checked at the same time as the rest of your system - i'd say thats a pretty good indication of direction adobe is gonna take for their linux apps update services. google has a similar deal for picassa and a couple other linux apps...you can probably expect this to land in ubuntu's default repository locations eventually, and nice easy instructions on the fedora website to get you there too).
your original line implied that even mentioning something different to co-workers would leave you at least open to derision ( presumably from all the good little sheep running the management line on all things ), probably putting your job at risk if you took it further.
like many slashdotters, i work in IT, have tertiary education, and use my brain to think up solutions to problems. much of IT is problem solving, so the code i write aims to solve whatever problem in the best way, constrained by time, cost or quality ( pick any 2
so when your business fails due to high staff turnover, and you apply for an interview at {my|any} firm, would you mind volunteering your slashdot id? that might help reduce costs involved with time, etc.
If you never never go, you'll never never know will ya?
+1 take it to the company and try your luck, they can only say yay or ney, right?
(BTW, only a truly terrible employee would be worried about mentioning this to a coworker, Harmonious Beach, let alone worry about mentioning to co-workers. and if it made an employer uneasy, probably time to get the fuck out of whatever business Harmonious Beach runs... do you run your business as some kind of fiefdom? or would you be happy to surround yourself with yes-men like the emperor with his new clothes? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes ) )
... run as admin.Second run; works like a charm. One more popup asking whether Soldat may access the network. why should you have to run as admin? and should you really be running an app as admin which accesses the network?
sounds like a compelling argument against to me.
evolution talks to exchange just fine.
... hears only exchange can provide it, so it gets mandated as the corp mail server, which as luck would have it ( for microsoft ) REQUIRES active directory to run, which really needs to run the dns and dhcp services ( never mind they're broken in the MS implementation ), which then needs to handle all the desktop authentication in order for outlook to ntlm authenticate to the mail service in order to provide the shared calendars. and there you have it. nice lightweight dovecot or courier imap on linux solution completely turned to crap with multiple DC's, a backup mailbox server and NETBEUI domain names and windows desktops all fofr the sake of integrated calendaring. gargh.
multiple ways in fact:
imap/imaps ( turn on the standard protocol handler at the exchange server, might need to futz with AD and sort out certificates for imaps )
same deal for pop3/pop3s
evolution exchange connector: talks to exchange through its webmail system ( enabled by default on the exchange server as http://your.exchange.host.local/exchange )
or is there some issue with exchange 2007 specifically that i havent had to fight yet?
really, i fucking hate exchange. why? some project manager/exec demands integrated calendaring in their email
back OT, gnome actually integrates with Active Directory pretty well too, just so long as you're prepared to have crippled unix posix accounts & group memberships on your linux box.
just stop trying to steal their oil?
too easy perhaps?
actually,
i've worked in many companies, of varying sizes. from a handful through to the cube farms.
one of the reasons i get hired is to implement systems that relieve the burden of vendor lock-in, which overall usually means stripping back several layers of cruft, re-writing a few apps to meet business practices needs, and giving a roadmap for where to go next.
i promote my services in such a way, and have had most of my work over the last 5-10 years coming through referrals from happy customers. we'll go in, clean up the mess, and leave them with real choice of direction.
if you're finding your job a soul-destroying monotony, i highly recommend you get out and start doing things the way you think they should be done. if you have the relevant experience, companies will listen, and you can actually affect positive change.
( i sincerely hope thats what 'the business' from your link above is all about..)
FTA:
While Sun declined to comment directly for this story, it pointed to some public statements from company executives. Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun, wrote a blog post congratulating Google on the day of Android's launch. Notably, he refers to Android as a "Java/Linux" platform
where is the trouble? the article is pure beat-up.
the reason for dalvik is entirely technical. check out the youtube presentations, it makes it pretty clear that you develop in pretty much pure java, but the runtime needed a little more than the standard jme could provide.
move on..
eh?
ensuring an independence of business practice from vendor lock-in will never get funding?
how did you get a 5 digit slashdot uid & not learn anything along the way?
the GP postulates the problems of the IT department that laptops present, and the specifics of viruses & other nasties being brought back into the corporate lan by bedhopping laptops..
'there's nothing in Linux that will stop an idiot user from installing malware'
in *nix, user has to do it on purpose: ie the execution model is such that user intervention is required to install said malware. the windows model is somewhat more lax, and leads directly to the GP issue of virii finding their way onto the corporate lan.
as a couple of others have pointed out in this thread, the tight coupling of application and working processes ( eg: need powerpoint, or some in house system that needs active directory and exchange and office and internet explorer ) leads directly to being completely at the whim of the vendor.
my original point about my linux laptop never having had a virus, and i drag it from LAN to LAN was entirely meant to illustrate that a large part of the problems IT departments face is the result of letting vendors tell them what they need, and end up with systems that can work with a lot of babysitting, but usually at a much greater cost overall.
things like proprietary VPNS to allow user access to an intranet are just the wrong solution to the problem: why not just make the intranet available over https after authentication? and if the information it contains is really taht sensitive, why let a laptop connect to it at all? its pretty simple to drag files onto the laptop, walk out the door, have laptop disappear, and boom, there goes your security.
same deal for email. same deal for internal corporate application XYZ. if company wants their employees to work from anywhere, and provide a laptop to enable this, all these layers of crap they end up putting in for the sake of 'security' just couple them and their business processes ever tighter to the vendor products.
( and yes, i'm a software engineer, and so my company does sell IT, but most of my work is professional services in medium to large enterprises implementing business systems, so i see how they work, and how they all too often try to solve the wrong part of a problem with ever more complex solutions, and so i do my best to steer them clear of those tightly coupled style systems..)
pfft.
i am in IT, and its pretty safe bet to say the sales types will use whatever is put in front of them, including double clicking that cutesly looking [trojaned] crap on msn or elsewhere.
need a presentation tool? use open office 'impress'. once its up on the projector, what does it matter?
most of it is fluffy lies anyway!.
all my original reply was saying is they're often given the wrong tool for the job.
i guess a bunch of MS apologists are dishing out mods today... OT??
( and no, it doesnt exist to support sales, sales exists to overcharge for it. and of course take their cut. same as any industry.)
arent they still teaching 'god did it'
*ducks*