Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
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· Score: 1
At the university where I teach, we do a second year module about web site admin and maintenance.
This year, we're still teaching our students how to do config and install off the 1.3.x tree.
Why? Well, gut feeling tells me that the installed base is still overwhelmingly 1.3.x and the install process is a little easier for beginners to manage (apart from mod_ssl but we don't cover that till later anyway). Although many of the new 2.x features are pretty neat, they're a little more fiddly to sort out - like the filter model. Thankfully the DSO system is much better now and doesn't seem to have all the ordering problems that were common with 1.3.x.
Having said that, we use Apache 2.0.48/PHP4.3.4 to serve a number of domains on our production servers. We're generally not excessively loaded (but it can get high sometimes) so I don't know how it would perform under v high stress. Generally, Apache 2.0.48 is running great for us on our Linux box
I must admit to reading the SCO letter with more than a little wry amusement. It's a bit like a stereogram picture, where if you look at it most ways, it makes no sense and then suddenly, your eye catches it right, et voila! If you're in the first mode, most of what he says looks almost plausible for a while.
Then you actually start to think.
Do SCO actaully own most of the code they're talking about? OR is some of that code under licence from other sources? If not, what right do they have to enforce the IP rights of others?
SCO must be fairly rattled by Novell's acquisition of Suse, demonstrating a fair level of confidence that SCO's case is not the strongest
If SCO are suspending involvement in linux projects, some parts of the company haven't heard, other wise they wouldn't be issuing security advsiories and fixes. After all, given the terms of GPL and related licenses, they do not guarantee fitness for purpose or any warranty so they have no obligation to do so
Why are Microsoft one of the principal organisations to take up the SCO licence. Answers on a postcard , please...
Many organisations would quite rightly tell SCO where to get off if they attempted to enfoce audits, for example, seeing as their IP rights are questionable - aand that is a major part of the issue at hand.
This is going to be a long messy business, all smoke and mirrors no doubt. In the end though, I think SCO will lose : IBM will be simply too strong. Hopefully then we can see some sense prevail.
Anyone know if PAnther has support for YP/NIS services. It was a know issue with early OSX releases and it's fairly hard find out. Believe mew, I've tried...
BG: Our cxampus is about to get a nice spanknig 50 seat G% lab with 50 or som machines. Our dept has an existing infrastructure underpinned by NIS for authentication, with some samba. We'd like to be able to get some of our existing users to use new facilities more easily and beinfg able to integrate with new servers installed specifically for that lab. We really don't want to go down an LDAP route if we can avoid it, which is why I'm asking about NIS
Conspiracy Theories Number 5 in a series of 56658
on
Debian Turning 10
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· Score: 1
I am not a Microsoft apologist but isn't this just good business. A company as large as M$ (and with rhe R&D budget it has) will try and bring a lot of new products to market.
Many of them will fail
If one or two don't, then that justifies the failure rate.
The X-Box hasn't been the behemoth M$ had hoped. But, the console has given them a presence in the marketplace. They are currently not in a position to control the market in consoles becasue of Sony's power. I bet Sega and Nintendo thought they were invincible at one stage too. I'm sure Sony will not be so complacent...
The smartphone issue is much more of a problem. SPV is being heavily discounted in the UK (Orange are offering them free for contract users) and even the Pocket PC market is not a huge success. They are making inroads but OS5+ and Palm's acquisition of Handspring means that the market will become much more rationalised.
Much as I dislike some of M$'s sharp practice, I seriously believe the computer industry would be poorer for their absence in many respects. We certainly would not have have had the evolution in UI that has happened. KDE, Gnome and even Apple's offerings may have been very different. Some of them may not have even been there in their current form at all. Linux may have been very different too.
I think this article is more than a little dumb. Effectively it's like saying that if you drive a car for 20 years without topping up the oil and the car fails, then it's the car's fault.
No. It's a tool, just like Google is a tool. To gain the greatest utility from a tool, you must learn how to use the tool properly. In this case it means not being utterly stupid and having at least some idea what you're going to search for.
Let's take point 2 of the article as an example. Who is going to type apple into google in the expectation of not getting 13.6 million hits?
If you're going to search, what kind of apple are you looking for? Golden Delicious, Cox,whatever. This is the user's problem. If you're going to use a search engine, at least have some vague idea of what you want to look for before you start. However, in using the web as a reference one pitfall is the principle of provenance. PageRank is not enough in itself. I'm not entirely sure how the PAgeRank algorithm works ( and I'm fairly certain we're not going to get someone from google telling us either;-) ) but it would be nice to allow for authorities to be defined, so that in the case of academic content, if an item appears in a certain source (like ACM journals, for example) then it is given higher weighting by the engine.
In addition, point 3 in the slate article is flawed. Google doesn't divert people from books. It is not the tool's fault if people do not choose to publish in that way. Also, if the New York Times choose to fence off their content, it's hardly Google's fault that it can't spider the stuff. Talk to the NY Times and ask them why they use the registration system in that way.
Let's just make this clear. Google spiders what is generally available. It is not the fault of google if content providers wish to publish in ways that may limit the scope of viewing. Google isn't perfect by any means but this article doesn't really say anything useful. And hey, don't MSN run an engine of their own too. What possible gain could they have from rubbishing Google? [Cynical? Me? How could you possibly think that...]
It's also happened in the UK too, if I remember correctly
In early 1974, Harold Wilson's Labour Party won more of the popular vote but it was Edward Heath's Conservatives who ended up forming the governemnt
The moral is: any system that involves levels of indirection from straight counts is likely to fail occasionally. Deal with it.
More generally, I don't buy the common GWB=stupid argument. Looking at the position that he and his supporters are in suggests anything other than stupidity to me(some may call it low cunning - that's their look-out).
Actually, it's Rumsfeld who scares the living shit out of me. God alone knows what colour the sea is on the planet he came from.
Perhaps Bush's appeal to many Americans (but by no means all) is his similarity in many ways to Reagan. It's certainly who GWB reminds me of.
They stir emotions in Americans, I fancy, like those stirred by Margaret Thatcher in the UK. There is no middle ground, you either love or hate them. I personally go for the latter with Thatcher.
Perhaps it's just that, living in an increasingly uncertain world, some people want the certainty of the white-hatted cowboy, even when it's not really possible any longer.
Well, you can't actually blame the american people for GWB, seeing as they didn't actually vote for him.
Still, enough people did vote for him to give the US Supreme Court the opportunity to appoint him. That's depressing enough.
anyway, getting back to the original point:
Open Source may give rogue nations/organisations access to technology they may not otherwise have had.
Conversely, this also gives enforcement authorities a baseline to work from. It's not like they're playing with a blindfold on.
More genrally, I'd like to comment on the tone of some of the posts here and some of the points they raise:
Being British, I have to ask myself why the Arab world hates 'us' (i.e the US and UK) as much as they appear to.
Humans are not entirely rational I know, but is it unreasonable to assume that this antipathy is nothing to do with
anything we may have done or said.
Steadfastly insisting that the "war" in Iraq was not based on religion and then having GWB use the word "crusade"
is either a Freudian slip or boneheadedly stupid. I can't decide which.
This war is only partly about oil. In the longer term, this operation has been all about exercising power,influence and control in the middle East
(this may make a middle-east peace plan easier to force through in the longer term).
Imposing "democracy" on Iraq may not be a good long term aim, especailly becasue eastern philosphies are not as
individualistic as those of the West Ouer notions of democaracy may not be compatible with the indigenous culture.
We may see the rise of fundamentalist governments. This may be the will of the people, but could the US stomach this. If not, is it hypocrisy?
As evil as Saddam is, you have to be hard-headed and look at the situation. An Iraq with Saddam in control was a known quantity and the middle east
was in some kind of dynamic equlibrium. UN weapons inspectors were finding weapons difficult to locate.
This makes it resonable to assuime they would be difficult to deploy also.
Saddam is not a madman - he is a pragmatist, which is why he was in control for so long in Iraq. Such a man has a keenly deveoped skill of
self-preservation. In order to maintain position, the threat of even possibly possessing weapons is powerful in iteslf, even if
no such weapons exist. Cloaking the whole thing in secrecy makes it even harder to tell what's going on.
Certain elements in the US administration have been pushing for action of this type for a long time. September 11 gave those
people the excuse to push their agenda (I'm speaking partiucularly here about Cheney and Rumsfeld - who I believe is the
major threat to any knid of peace), even when the evidence didn't point to a connection. Look at the knots they tied themselves in
trying to connect Saddam and Osama. Unsuccessfully, it turned out. The longer it went on, the more desperate it looked.
In the long term I believe this war has done US interests a great deal of harm. There is now a major barrier between the US and Europe. The UK
is trapped right in the middle and however much bridge-builidng goes on I believe a rubicon has been crossed and that this rift may be a partingf of the ways. Europe is now a major power block in its own right - it's only a matter of time before some one says, "Who needs America?". BBritain will then have a tough decision to make, because I don't think it can keep a foot in both camps.
The Arab world is now even more distrustful of the US and its aims. The veiled threats against Syria havbe only helped to make that more obvious.
The only thing this "war" has done is to make the world a more dangerous and paranoid place. The US's influence is indeed imperialism of
a sort. The British know all about imperialism and the trouble it can cause you...
In the UK, it's always been "The Pope Must Die". We don't wuss out on stuff like that:-)
Re:Not to be a troll here but...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
(as a non-American)
Yeah well, kind of a nice argument, but then there's a whole lot of American Culture that isn't that bad at all, most Americans I have met were not slack-jawed morons (I'll forgive you for the President you have seeing as most of you didn't actually vote for him).
Still, American popular culture (i.e the dross that you are force-fed routinely) is a bit of a wasteland. I would quite happliy like the directors of McDonalds, Starbucks et al. lined up against a wall and force-fed their own product until dead. On the other hand, quite a lot of the music I like is American and that certainly isn't brainless - I wouldn't listen to it otherwise.
Unfortunately not. You have purchased a licence to use the product and only own the medium upon which the licensed material is provided to you. You still do not own the product.
"I don't care what the EULA says. I didn't agree to it before the purchase, so it's not a binding contract."
Something with which I have a great deal of sympathy, but you are still on unsafe ground. I too find the idea of agreeing to a contract before you can actually read it as ludicrous.
"...With FCC requiring the use of copy prevention mechanisms in future generations of television sets..."
<sarcasm>
Would these the the same hardware manufacturers who have produced all of those "single region" DVD players with no capacity for being configured for multi-region use?
</sarcasm>
Hardware manufacturers are not stupid. If there's a financial incentive to include bypass mechanisms, then they'll provide them.
Slashdot Mirror
At the university where I teach, we do a second year module about web site admin and maintenance. This year, we're still teaching our students how to do config and install off the 1.3.x tree.
Why? Well, gut feeling tells me that the installed base is still overwhelmingly 1.3.x and the install process is a little easier for beginners to manage (apart from mod_ssl but we don't cover that till later anyway). Although many of the new 2.x features are pretty neat, they're a little more fiddly to sort out - like the filter model. Thankfully the DSO system is much better now and doesn't seem to have all the ordering problems that were common with 1.3.x.
Having said that, we use Apache 2.0.48/PHP4.3.4 to serve a number of domains on our production servers. We're generally not excessively loaded (but it can get high sometimes) so I don't know how it would perform under v high stress. Generally, Apache 2.0.48 is running great for us on our Linux box
I must admit to reading the SCO letter with more than a little wry amusement. It's a bit like a stereogram picture, where if you look at it most ways, it makes no sense and then suddenly, your eye catches it right, et voila! If you're in the first mode, most of what he says looks almost plausible for a while.
Then you actually start to think.
Do SCO actaully own most of the code they're talking about? OR is some of that code under licence from other sources? If not, what right do they have to enforce the IP rights of others?
SCO must be fairly rattled by Novell's acquisition of Suse, demonstrating a fair level of confidence that SCO's case is not the strongest
If SCO are suspending involvement in linux projects, some parts of the company haven't heard, other wise they wouldn't be issuing security advsiories and fixes. After all, given the terms of GPL and related licenses, they do not guarantee fitness for purpose or any warranty so they have no obligation to do so
Why are Microsoft one of the principal organisations to take up the SCO licence. Answers on a postcard , please...
Many organisations would quite rightly tell SCO where to get off if they attempted to enfoce audits, for example, seeing as their IP rights are questionable - aand that is a major part of the issue at hand.
This is going to be a long messy business, all smoke and mirrors no doubt. In the end though, I think SCO will lose : IBM will be simply too strong. Hopefully then we can see some sense prevail.
Anyone know if PAnther has support for YP/NIS services. It was a know issue with early OSX releases and it's fairly hard find out. Believe mew, I've tried... BG: Our cxampus is about to get a nice spanknig 50 seat G% lab with 50 or som machines. Our dept has an existing infrastructure underpinned by NIS for authentication, with some samba. We'd like to be able to get some of our existing users to use new facilities more easily and beinfg able to integrate with new servers installed specifically for that lab. We really don't want to go down an LDAP route if we can avoid it, which is why I'm asking about NIS
August 16: Debian reaches 10 years
August 16: MSBLASTER due to launch DDOS on M$
I think we should be told... ;-)
I am not a Microsoft apologist but isn't this just good business. A company as large as M$ (and with rhe R&D budget it has) will try and bring a lot of new products to market.
Many of them will fail
If one or two don't, then that justifies the failure rate.
The X-Box hasn't been the behemoth M$ had hoped. But, the console has given them a presence in the marketplace. They are currently not in a position to control the market in consoles becasue of Sony's power. I bet Sega and Nintendo thought they were invincible at one stage too. I'm sure Sony will not be so complacent...
The smartphone issue is much more of a problem. SPV is being heavily discounted in the UK (Orange are offering them free for contract users) and even the Pocket PC market is not a huge success. They are making inroads but OS5+ and Palm's acquisition of Handspring means that the market will become much more rationalised.
Much as I dislike some of M$'s sharp practice, I seriously believe the computer industry would be poorer for their absence in many respects. We certainly would not have have had the evolution in UI that has happened. KDE, Gnome and even Apple's offerings may have been very different. Some of them may not have even been there in their current form at all. Linux may have been very different too.
Everyone needs pricks to kick against...
I think this article is more than a little dumb. Effectively it's like saying that if you drive a car for 20 years without topping up the oil and the car fails, then it's the car's fault.
No. It's a tool, just like Google is a tool. To gain the greatest utility from a tool, you must learn how to use the tool properly. In this case it means not being utterly stupid and having at least some idea what you're going to search for.
Let's take point 2 of the article as an example. Who is going to type apple into google in the expectation of not getting 13.6 million hits? If you're going to search, what kind of apple are you looking for? Golden Delicious, Cox,whatever. This is the user's problem. If you're going to use a search engine, at least have some vague idea of what you want to look for before you start. However, in using the web as a reference one pitfall is the principle of provenance. PageRank is not enough in itself. I'm not entirely sure how the PAgeRank algorithm works ( and I'm fairly certain we're not going to get someone from google telling us either ;-) ) but it would be nice to allow for authorities to be defined, so that in the case of academic content, if an item appears in a certain source (like ACM journals, for example) then it is given higher weighting by the engine.
In addition, point 3 in the slate article is flawed. Google doesn't divert people from books. It is not the tool's fault if people do not choose to publish in that way. Also, if the New York Times choose to fence off their content, it's hardly Google's fault that it can't spider the stuff. Talk to the NY Times and ask them why they use the registration system in that way.
Let's just make this clear. Google spiders what is generally available. It is not the fault of google if content providers wish to publish in ways that may limit the scope of viewing. Google isn't perfect by any means but this article doesn't really say anything useful. And hey, don't MSN run an engine of their own too. What possible gain could they have from rubbishing Google? [Cynical? Me? How could you possibly think that...]
It's also happened in the UK too, if I remember correctly
In early 1974, Harold Wilson's Labour Party won more of the popular vote but it was Edward Heath's Conservatives who ended up forming the governemnt
The moral is: any system that involves levels of indirection from straight counts is likely to fail occasionally. Deal with it.
More generally, I don't buy the common GWB=stupid argument. Looking at the position that he and his supporters are in suggests anything other than stupidity to me(some may call it low cunning - that's their look-out). Actually, it's Rumsfeld who scares the living shit out of me. God alone knows what colour the sea is on the planet he came from.
Perhaps Bush's appeal to many Americans (but by no means all) is his similarity in many ways to Reagan. It's certainly who GWB reminds me of.
They stir emotions in Americans, I fancy, like those stirred by Margaret Thatcher in the UK. There is no middle ground, you either love or hate them. I personally go for the latter with Thatcher.
Perhaps it's just that, living in an increasingly uncertain world, some people want the certainty of the white-hatted cowboy, even when it's not really possible any longer.
Well, you can't actually blame the american people for GWB, seeing as they didn't actually vote for him.
Still, enough people did vote for him to give the US Supreme Court the opportunity to appoint him. That's depressing enough.
anyway, getting back to the original point:
Open Source may give rogue nations/organisations access to technology they may not otherwise have had.
Conversely, this also gives enforcement authorities a baseline to work from. It's not like they're playing with a blindfold on.
More genrally, I'd like to comment on the tone of some of the posts here and some of the points they raise:
Being British, I have to ask myself why the Arab world hates 'us' (i.e the US and UK) as much as they appear to. Humans are not entirely rational I know, but is it unreasonable to assume that this antipathy is nothing to do with anything we may have done or said.
Steadfastly insisting that the "war" in Iraq was not based on religion and then having GWB use the word "crusade" is either a Freudian slip or boneheadedly stupid. I can't decide which.
This war is only partly about oil. In the longer term, this operation has been all about exercising power,influence and control in the middle East (this may make a middle-east peace plan easier to force through in the longer term). Imposing "democracy" on Iraq may not be a good long term aim, especailly becasue eastern philosphies are not as individualistic as those of the West Ouer notions of democaracy may not be compatible with the indigenous culture. We may see the rise of fundamentalist governments. This may be the will of the people, but could the US stomach this. If not, is it hypocrisy?
As evil as Saddam is, you have to be hard-headed and look at the situation. An Iraq with Saddam in control was a known quantity and the middle east was in some kind of dynamic equlibrium. UN weapons inspectors were finding weapons difficult to locate. This makes it resonable to assuime they would be difficult to deploy also. Saddam is not a madman - he is a pragmatist, which is why he was in control for so long in Iraq. Such a man has a keenly deveoped skill of self-preservation. In order to maintain position, the threat of even possibly possessing weapons is powerful in iteslf, even if no such weapons exist. Cloaking the whole thing in secrecy makes it even harder to tell what's going on.
Certain elements in the US administration have been pushing for action of this type for a long time. September 11 gave those people the excuse to push their agenda (I'm speaking partiucularly here about Cheney and Rumsfeld - who I believe is the major threat to any knid of peace), even when the evidence didn't point to a connection. Look at the knots they tied themselves in trying to connect Saddam and Osama. Unsuccessfully, it turned out. The longer it went on, the more desperate it looked.
In the long term I believe this war has done US interests a great deal of harm. There is now a major barrier between the US and Europe. The UK is trapped right in the middle and however much bridge-builidng goes on I believe a rubicon has been crossed and that this rift may be a partingf of the ways. Europe is now a major power block in its own right - it's only a matter of time before some one says, "Who needs America?". BBritain will then have a tough decision to make, because I don't think it can keep a foot in both camps.
The Arab world is now even more distrustful of the US and its aims. The veiled threats against Syria havbe only helped to make that more obvious.
The only thing this "war" has done is to make the world a more dangerous and paranoid place. The US's influence is indeed imperialism of a sort. The British know all about imperialism and the trouble it can cause you...
ho ho.
Can we call the evil bit the "ming" bit instead?
In the UK, it's always been "The Pope Must Die". We don't wuss out on stuff like that :-)
(as a non-American)
Yeah well, kind of a nice argument, but then there's a whole lot of American Culture that isn't that bad at all, most Americans I have met were not slack-jawed morons (I'll forgive you for the President you have seeing as most of you didn't actually vote for him).
Still, American popular culture (i.e the dross that you are force-fed routinely) is a bit of a wasteland. I would quite happliy like the directors of McDonalds, Starbucks et al. lined up against a wall and force-fed their own product until dead. On the other hand, quite a lot of the music I like is American and that certainly isn't brainless - I wouldn't listen to it otherwise.
...especially when the "London Times" is actually, really called The Times
Unfortunately not. You have purchased a licence to use the product and only own the medium upon which the licensed material is provided to you. You still do not own the product.
"I don't care what the EULA says. I didn't agree to it before the purchase, so it's not a binding contract."
Something with which I have a great deal of sympathy, but you are still on unsafe ground. I too find the idea of agreeing to a contract before you can actually read it as ludicrous.
If you don't want to use it - don't install it. If it's installed - turn it off.
(I also encourage people not to use Passport in my academic capacity - and I tell them why).
I fail to see why MS is providng ports to platforms where the user base is so hostile to the concept of the massively insecure single sign-in
<sarcasm>
Would these the the same hardware manufacturers who have produced all of those "single region" DVD players with no capacity for being configured for multi-region use?
</sarcasm>
Hardware manufacturers are not stupid. If there's a financial incentive to include bypass mechanisms, then they'll provide them.
There will certainly be an incentive.