So the argument is someone steals my password, steals my money, gives it to a money mule... then I get my money back from the bank, and someone that doesn't cost me in the end? Even disregarding the fact that those costs are going to get passed on to me somehow... The inconvenience of having to deal with identity theft is not always minor (and there's probably collateral damage here as well).
My biggest beef with banking is that I don't, but should, have the ability to send money with end-to-end authorization, by way public key crypto. If, say, Amazon could verify that I authorized a purchase using my public key, then network security, and banking security, is irrelevant. Bitcoins have offered a very secure example of how this could work, assuming that you have good local security (your private keys are safe).
A nice solution I use for myself (home and work) is to use the ssh-agent distributed with GnuPG. I have an OpenPGP card (http://g10code.com/p-card.html) which holds my private key and cannot be retrieved. The card itself is PIN protected. I don't have to worry about my private key ever showing up in the filesystem or backups.
This works nicely with the -A option to ssh, which sets up a control channel back to the authentication agent on my desktop. I can ssh to server A, then ssh from A to B using my local smart card. If I'm ssh'd to server A and need to leave my desk, I can unplug the card and immediately break the authentication chain.
If I were setting up an SSH scheme in a large organization, this would be my first line of defense.
Linux/*BSD servers offer some rather flexible alternatives to these:
AD: OpenLDAP + Heimdal DNS/DHCP: ISC Bind + ISC DHCP (with ddns) GPO: OpenLDAP, PAM, RADIUS + your preferred hacks Exchange: A capable IMAP server (i.e. Cyrus or Dovecot) + ICal server (Cyrus plus patches) SQL/IIS: The usual suspects
It's easy to get into the mindset that a proprietary Ecosystem is hard to replace. If you take away the implied requirement that Microsoft has to exist on the Desktop (but but... it doesn't support Outlook Calendaring), the pieces start to fall into place.
In all cases, the open alternatives offer a more flexible solution, and in most cases, a far more efficient one.
Whatever flexibility you get from a graphical interface (Server Manager) is going to get trumped by a well honed script.
You have publicly advocated for teaching evolution as fact, rather than theory.
In an imprecise world, scientific theory serves a purpose of assigning better understood, and predictable, behavior to large systems, like evolution and the theory of relativity. Most don't dispute the theory of relativity because it is testable. Due to its very nature, the theory of evolution is difficult to use as a yardstick to predict what happens when, say, you put a petri dish of living organisms in a dark room over night.
Shouldn't it be more important to teach the scientific method, and the understanding of what scientific theory is, than to teach that scientific theories are important only when they are taught as fact?
At work, we use gpg to encrypt our password file for specific recipients, and place that file in a dropbox share. On occasion, we'll generate a snippet of the file and encrypt it for a specific user (junior admin) and place it in the same location.
Arbitrary complexity is often contrary to trustable security. If you really trust your encryption scheme, then it shouldn't matter where you store it (windows share).
I rather doubt that. I have all of my important equipment protected by surge protectors, including the phone line which enters my house and plugs into my DSL modem. I've gotten hit via lightening over the phone line before. But if you want to trust the "I'll unplug everything when I hear lightning" approach to test your theory, be my guest.
This is about selling services, and being able to provide better services than the competition.
I believe the mistake being made here is in trying to argue that providers don't have the right to build tiered infrastructure. They own their own infrastructure, and have the right to build and offer any kind of tiered services they wish... and the pricing of those offerings are drastically dropping thanks to technologies like MPLS, as apposed to dedicated circuits such as T3s...
The debate should be focused on whether a provider can give QOS to a customer who's data competes with other public internet traffic... along a shared path.
Tiered *networking* is going to continue to develop. We just need to to make sure it doesn't develop into a tiered internet.
>They mean to say that a network with arbitrary caps and rate limiting consumes less bandwidth than an unrestricted one? Say it ain't so!
To look at it another way. A provider desiring to guarantee QOS... latency, jitter and minimum bandwidth for services such as VoIP, without having the benifit of having control over that bandwidth, would need to have a lot more bandwidth to meet those expectations.
This is just restating the idea that QOS enforcement becomes irrelevant with enough bandwidth.
Have any of you programmers actually used Dvorak or Maltron keyboards. I have. I can still type on either one, but programming on one sucks! The curly bracket is one of my most used keys and it's totally not in the right place for *me*.
> Stop being an idiot. > >If you write consumer software and it doesn't run >on Windows, you aren't getting more than 1% >market-share. Ever. > >It doesn't matter how many of you put penguin >bumper stickers on your car. The world is going >to do what it has always done to hardcore >computer nerds who act like this is some sort of >struggle between good and evil.... > >Ignore you. > >The rest of us have more important things to do >with our lives.
Perhaps you should expand your horizon a little, or make new aquaintances. The fact is we're making converts to Linux every day.
Go have a chat with your local Linux Users Group and I'm sure you'll see the same. Or go have a chat with the CS students at your local college. Talk to the guys running your ISP. Monitor usenet and web message boards.
The battle for the hearts and minds of our future CTOs, the education of our IT departments, the freedom to choose the combinations of software we use without fear of vendor lock, all combine into our motives in putting penguim bumper stickers on our cars.
I don't recall that I've ever seen a Microsoft bumper sticker... Linux inspires passions about technology that Microsoft never will. Microsoft buys their "grass roots" efforts, whereas we stump the old fashion way.
> 2. Despite all the rhetoric, despite all the > pandering, deception, etc there is a fundemental > unanswered question about wide-scale OSS that > remains out there. How will it, and moreover, can > it suceed financially. The answer is unclear. You > suggest microdonations. That is interesting, but > probably not long term stable.
Consider another (the main?) driving force in OSS software development. Consultants develop software for their own needs, and for their customers. OSS allows them the luxary of incorporating the work of others and cheaply customing it to provide a more efficient product.
Devlopers make their money but not having to purchase expensive licenses for similar software. They make their money by being able to underbid most other consultants using proprietary software. The have a huge head start because they can taking existing code and customize to their heart's content.
Stop to think about the revenue generated on the internet... the sheer number of companies making money using OSS software (Apache, MySQL...) and now multiply that number by the license fees they would have otherwise been forced to use. *That* is a concrete example of OSS suceeding financially.
> I suspect what is meant is that the OS supplied > with the machine is not meant to go anywhere but > on that machine. As for force of law, that seems > dubious. Why shouldn't anyone be able to move it > to another machine, provided they remove it from > the first? > > What should be said, rather than what is said, > "If you are going to put a commercially licensed > OS on a computer, or are given a computer with a > commercial OS, you must have a valid license for > that instance of that OS." Of course, they > didn't say that. They said something far sillier > instead.
I keep this hearing appologetic line of reasoning. Microsoft means exactly what they say in the article... and they know exactly what they can get away with. You can bet that any such article has gone through internal review to determine marketing and legal implications.
They've probably determined they can't be held legally liable for such a statement. Microsoft has no morals, and has no reason to reign in such rubbish. They are obviously only concerned about the bottom line and articles such as this one can only serve to squash competition. Why else would they publish it? I rather suspect that it's a made up list of questions they're trying to answer.
That's a rather restrictive definition of mission critical. There are many applications that are clearly critical to an organization's survival that don't fall into a life or death situation.
Take for instance an ISP, which needs to mitigate the failure of one server. The MCL approach is: General purpose internet servers, NFS failover, and shared SCSI/RAID storage.
Linux and clustering software like what MCL sells do serve that need. Microcontrollers don't.
Mission Critical Linux is not a distro. It amounts to a custom kernel and a clustering software for which Redhat and Debian packages are available. The fact that Redhat recently announced very similar clustering features in an upcoming version certainly didn't help.
My biggest problem with dvorak is that the punctuation seems to be in UNIX unfriendly locations, as it is with qwerty but I find it really difficult to make the jump to a new layout when you fumble at the command line, so I tried my hand at designing a layout for the UNIX/programmer type:
Anybody know where to get a copy of an early, or the very first distro of Linux? I'd love to get ahold of one for our next LUG meeting in celebration of the Anniversary.
Imagine sitting down at your computer to vote and as you read each question you can research each one thoroughly, without time contraints.
We'll be able to get around the restrictive state voting laws which attempt to negate third parties, with online petitions, thanks to Digital Signature reform.
What if candidates ran on the platform of promising to vote the will of his or her constituents? What if before each vote, he informed and polled his constituents for their views? Not only would it lead to a true democracy, but it would circumvent the middle man and the lobbyist altogether. Think Just in Time Democracy.
I think the time is ripe for such a political movement to begin!
Open Windows will inherit the first level, DOS, from the GPL'd FreeDOS project, which is quite nice. Another plus is that they will be able to boot strap better than a project like WINE. Once the kernel starts to develop, they will be able to use current 16-bit, then 32-bit drivers straight from hardware vendors.
Also consider that if Microsoft ever open sources parts of their OS, whether by choice or force, Open Windows will be well positioned to take advantave of that.
Here's the difference. These tests were ran by the hardware vendors themselves. The point being that they get to throw as much hardware as they like to make their systems look good.
Most likely they had their Windows gurus find the ideal hardware configuration for Windows 2000, and their Linux gurus find the ideal configuration for Linux. So within Dell's product line, these two systems should represent the most optimal configurations for the respective OS's.
Look at it another way. Would Dell purposefully configure an inferior box for Win2000 to scare away their Windows customers to other vendors?
Here's the important part of a proposed split you're missing. No executive will be allowed to invest in, or have direct interest in any of the other entities. The companies' stocks will be entirely split into 3.
Consider that Microsoft attracts employees by having a high flying stock, and they offer stock options to keep talented employees. So Microsoft gets caught a tight rope act with its stock. If it falls, then it really begins to hurt because it can no longer offer relatively low salaries and high stock benefits to keep their talent.
Now apply this to the 3 company model. It's the problem mentioned above times 3. *Each* company can only survive by bowing to the almighty dollar. Each company will have to make money it its own to survive, otherwise it will fail.
If the OS division sees that 60% of internet web servers run Apache, it no longer is in its own interest to only offer IIS. It makes more money by offering a (windows) Apache with its product also. The OS company can no longer depend on the Applications company being around in 5 years. Smart business practice dictates that it must expand to meet customer's demand or find itself losing sales and stock value.
The same goes for the Applications and browser companies. They must explore alternative OSes or feel the rath of their stock holders. If Linux only has 4% of the desktop market, that's OK, since it is an expanding market. Porting development tools or Office to Linux makes perfect since as that 4% becomes 10% and it adds a few percentage points to its own growth rate.
Slashdot Mirror
So the argument is someone steals my password, steals my money, gives it to a money mule... then I get my money back from the bank, and someone that doesn't cost me in the end? Even disregarding the fact that those costs are going to get passed on to me somehow... The inconvenience of having to deal with identity theft is not always minor (and there's probably collateral damage here as well).
My biggest beef with banking is that I don't, but should, have the ability to send money with end-to-end authorization, by way public key crypto. If, say, Amazon could verify that I authorized a purchase using my public key, then network security, and banking security, is irrelevant. Bitcoins have offered a very secure example of how this could work, assuming that you have good local security (your private keys are safe).
A nice solution I use for myself (home and work) is to use the ssh-agent distributed with GnuPG. I have an OpenPGP card (http://g10code.com/p-card.html) which holds my private key and cannot be retrieved. The card itself is PIN protected. I don't have to worry about my private key ever showing up in the filesystem or backups.
This works nicely with the -A option to ssh, which sets up a control channel back to the authentication agent on my desktop. I can ssh to server A, then ssh from A to B using my local smart card. If I'm ssh'd to server A and need to leave my desk, I can unplug the card and immediately break the authentication chain.
If I were setting up an SSH scheme in a large organization, this would be my first line of defense.
Linux/*BSD servers offer some rather flexible alternatives to these:
AD: OpenLDAP + Heimdal
DNS/DHCP: ISC Bind + ISC DHCP (with ddns)
GPO: OpenLDAP, PAM, RADIUS + your preferred hacks
Exchange: A capable IMAP server (i.e. Cyrus or Dovecot) + ICal server (Cyrus plus patches)
SQL/IIS: The usual suspects
It's easy to get into the mindset that a proprietary Ecosystem is hard to replace. If you take away the implied requirement that Microsoft has to exist on the Desktop (but but... it doesn't support Outlook Calendaring), the pieces start to fall into place.
In all cases, the open alternatives offer a more flexible solution, and in most cases, a far more efficient one.
Whatever flexibility you get from a graphical interface (Server Manager) is going to get trumped by a well honed script.
You have publicly advocated for teaching evolution as fact, rather than theory.
In an imprecise world, scientific theory serves a purpose of assigning better understood, and predictable, behavior to large systems, like evolution and the theory of relativity. Most don't dispute the theory of relativity because it is testable. Due to its very nature, the theory of evolution is difficult to use as a yardstick to predict what happens when, say, you put a petri dish of living organisms in a dark room over night.
Shouldn't it be more important to teach the scientific method, and the understanding of what scientific theory is, than to teach that scientific theories are important only when they are taught as fact?
At work, we use gpg to encrypt our password file for specific recipients, and place that file in a dropbox share. On occasion, we'll generate a snippet of the file and encrypt it for a specific user (junior admin) and place it in the same location.
Arbitrary complexity is often contrary to trustable security. If you really trust your encryption scheme, then it shouldn't matter where you store it (windows share).
I rather doubt that. I have all of my important equipment protected by surge protectors, including the phone line which enters my house and plugs into my DSL modem. I've gotten hit via lightening over the phone line before. But if you want to trust the "I'll unplug everything when I hear lightning" approach to test your theory, be my guest.
> This is not about QOS, ii is about control.
This is about selling services, and being able to provide better services than the competition.
I believe the mistake being made here is in trying to argue that providers don't have the right to build tiered infrastructure. They own their own infrastructure, and have the right to build and offer any kind of tiered services they wish... and the pricing of those offerings are drastically dropping thanks to technologies like MPLS, as apposed to dedicated circuits such as T3s...
The debate should be focused on whether a provider can give QOS to a customer who's data competes with other public internet traffic... along a shared path.
Tiered *networking* is going to continue to develop. We just need to to make sure it doesn't develop into a tiered internet.
>They mean to say that a network with arbitrary caps and rate limiting consumes less bandwidth than an unrestricted one? Say it ain't so!
To look at it another way. A provider desiring to guarantee QOS... latency, jitter and minimum bandwidth for services such as VoIP, without having the benifit of having control over that bandwidth, would need to have a lot more bandwidth to meet those expectations.
This is just restating the idea that QOS enforcement becomes irrelevant with enough bandwidth.
Nothing's stopping you from modifying it:
ftp://208.20.194.110/dvorak_dan.jpg
ftp://208.20.194.110/xmodmap.dvorak-h4x0r
Kind of a nice novelty, but it's too hard for me to give up qwerty.
> Stop being an idiot.
>
>If you write consumer software and it doesn't run
>on Windows, you aren't getting more than 1%
>market-share. Ever.
>
>It doesn't matter how many of you put penguin
>bumper stickers on your car. The world is going
>to do what it has always done to hardcore
>computer nerds who act like this is some sort of
>struggle between good and evil....
>
>Ignore you.
>
>The rest of us have more important things to do
>with our lives.
Perhaps you should expand your horizon a little, or make new aquaintances. The fact is we're making converts to Linux every day.
Go have a chat with your local Linux Users Group and I'm sure you'll see the same. Or go have a chat with the CS students at your local college. Talk to the guys running your ISP. Monitor usenet and web message boards.
The battle for the hearts and minds of our future CTOs, the education of our IT departments, the freedom to choose the combinations of software we use without fear of vendor lock, all combine into our motives in putting penguim bumper stickers on our cars.
I don't recall that I've ever seen a Microsoft bumper sticker... Linux inspires passions about technology that Microsoft never will. Microsoft buys their "grass roots" efforts, whereas we stump the old fashion way.
> 2. Despite all the rhetoric, despite all the
> pandering, deception, etc there is a fundemental
> unanswered question about wide-scale OSS that
> remains out there. How will it, and moreover, can
> it suceed financially. The answer is unclear. You
> suggest microdonations. That is interesting, but
> probably not long term stable.
Consider another (the main?) driving force in OSS software development. Consultants develop software for their own needs, and for their customers. OSS allows them the luxary of incorporating the work of others and cheaply customing it to provide a more efficient product.
Devlopers make their money but not having to purchase expensive licenses for similar software. They make their money by being able to underbid most other consultants using proprietary software. The have a huge head start because they can taking existing code and customize to their heart's content.
Stop to think about the revenue generated on the internet... the sheer number of companies making money using OSS software (Apache, MySQL...) and now multiply that number by the license fees they would have otherwise been forced to use. *That* is a concrete example of OSS suceeding financially.
> I suspect what is meant is that the OS supplied
> with the machine is not meant to go anywhere but
> on that machine. As for force of law, that seems
> dubious. Why shouldn't anyone be able to move it
> to another machine, provided they remove it from
> the first?
>
> What should be said, rather than what is said,
> "If you are going to put a commercially licensed
> OS on a computer, or are given a computer with a
> commercial OS, you must have a valid license for
> that instance of that OS." Of course, they
> didn't say that. They said something far sillier
> instead.
I keep this hearing appologetic line of reasoning.
Microsoft means exactly what they say in the article... and they know exactly what they can get away with. You can bet that any such article has gone through internal review to determine marketing and legal implications.
They've probably determined they can't be held legally liable for such a statement. Microsoft has no morals, and has no reason to reign in such rubbish. They are obviously only concerned about the bottom line and articles such as this one can only serve to squash competition. Why else would they publish it? I rather suspect that it's a made up list of questions they're trying to answer.
That's a rather restrictive definition of mission critical. There are many applications that are clearly critical to an organization's survival that don't fall into a life or death situation.
Take for instance an ISP, which needs to mitigate the failure of one server. The MCL approach is: General purpose internet servers, NFS failover, and shared SCSI/RAID storage.
Linux and clustering software like what MCL sells do serve that need. Microcontrollers don't.
FYI,
Mission Critical Linux is not a distro. It amounts to a custom kernel and a clustering software for which Redhat and Debian packages are available. The fact that Redhat recently announced very similar clustering features in an upcoming version certainly didn't help.
pic
xmodmap
Anybody know where to get a copy of an early, or the very first distro of Linux? I'd love to get ahold of one for our next LUG meeting in celebration of the Anniversary.
Since much of the hardware was designed in house (as far as rack mounts go), I doubt it... as least not until all the engineers pop up somewhere else.
I'm thinking all this is in preparation for a buyout anyway. IBM? DELL?
Convolo addresses some of these concerns.
The questions isn't if but when.
Imagine sitting down at your computer to vote and as you read each question you can research each one thoroughly, without time contraints.
We'll be able to get around the restrictive state voting laws which attempt to negate third parties, with online petitions, thanks to Digital Signature reform.
What if candidates ran on the platform of promising to vote the will of his or her constituents? What if before each vote, he informed and polled his constituents for their views? Not only would it lead to a true democracy, but it would circumvent the middle man and the lobbyist altogether. Think Just in Time Democracy.
I think the time is ripe for such a political movement to begin!
Also consider that if Microsoft ever open sources parts of their OS, whether by choice or force, Open Windows will be well positioned to take advantave of that.
Why in the world would you want to run Microsft Office in a clustering environment?
This also pretty accurately decribes what the Global Filesystem is addressing.
Here's the difference. These tests were ran by the hardware vendors themselves. The point being that they get to throw as much hardware as they like to make their systems look good.
Most likely they had their Windows gurus find the ideal hardware configuration for Windows 2000, and their Linux gurus find the ideal configuration for Linux. So within Dell's product line, these two systems should represent the most optimal configurations for the respective OS's.
Look at it another way. Would Dell purposefully configure an inferior box for Win2000 to scare away their Windows customers to other vendors?
You certainly have the right to prove your own inferiority...
Here's the important part of a proposed split you're missing. No executive will be allowed to invest in, or have direct interest in any of the other entities. The companies' stocks will be entirely split into 3.
Consider that Microsoft attracts employees by having a high flying stock, and they offer stock options to keep talented employees. So Microsoft gets caught a tight rope act with its stock. If it falls, then it really begins to hurt because it can no longer offer relatively low salaries and high stock benefits to keep their talent.
Now apply this to the 3 company model. It's the problem mentioned above times 3. *Each* company can only survive by bowing to the almighty dollar. Each company will have to make money it its own to survive, otherwise it will fail.
If the OS division sees that 60% of internet web servers run Apache, it no longer is in its own interest to only offer IIS. It makes more money by offering a (windows) Apache with its product also. The OS company can no longer depend on the Applications company being around in 5 years. Smart business practice dictates that it must expand to meet customer's demand or find itself losing sales and stock value.
The same goes for the Applications and browser companies. They must explore alternative OSes or feel the rath of their stock holders. If Linux only has 4% of the desktop market, that's OK, since it is an expanding market. Porting development tools or Office to Linux makes perfect since as that 4% becomes 10% and it adds a few percentage points to its own growth rate.