Lots of companies have contributed to Linux, many of them would most likely have created closed source forks of BSD because of the permissive license (see nokia ipso, juniper etc)...
The machine only runs ssh to the outside, and has multiple instances of bitchx/irssi irc clients, esniper (ebay sniping tool), a couple of irc bots, several mutt or pine mail clients, a few instances of finch (cli based version of pidgin), and a number of custom scripts either running or started by crontab at various times of the day. There are about 40 user accounts added and the number who are actually logged in varies depending on the time of day, sometimes there can be 30+ individual logins (including duplicates) and most users have screen sessions running. The accounts are either friends of mine, or friends of friends.
Most of the applications, being text based programs, would (and often did) run happily on machines made many years ago, the current hardware is a monster compared to some of the systems people used to run pine and irc clients on.
Another part is that linux users are typically far more clued up, and commercial software (especially the closed source kind) has to fight much harder for such people to consider it...
Commercial apps are rarely distributed in package repositories, even if they are distributed as standard packages for your distro they still have to be downloaded and installed manually.
Closed source apps are typically not ported to non x86 architectures, making them useless if i wanted an ARM or MIPS based laptop for instance.
If you are proficient in programming, not having the sourcecode can be a significant detriment... Also you may not be able to program, but you know or employ someone who can.
Commercial software will have an "end of life", open source you can support yourself if it's sufficiently important
Commercial software depends on the goodwill of the vendor, they can drop support, make changes you don't want/need/like, go bust, sell out etc...
Commercial software is often designed to lock people in.
Commercial vendors are interested purely in profit, so their goals will often not coincide with what you (the users) want, it wasn't commercial browser vendors that implemented ad blocking software for instance, and vendors will often implement functions that only benefit them to the detriment of their users (license checking code, drm etc)...
Closed source apps don't have to be worth their cost, they have to be sufficiently better than free alternatives to justify their cost, i wont pay $100 for a marginal improvement over something free, and i wont pay anything for something which is functionally equivalent but closed source and thus suffers the disadvantages described above.
Closed source apps have to reinvent the wheel, whereas open apps can reuse code from other similarly licensed projects.
The only closed apps i used to run on my linux workstation were netscape and vmware, both of which have been replaced with open alternatives now, and both of which used to cause me significant problems at the time, and which i only used because there were no alternatives.
Are you sure? I thought old 32bit linux used to wrap around at 497 days, because it counted timer interrupts (100 per second) using a 32bit integer... I had an x86 machine which wrapped around, and an alpha (64bit) that kept going.
Fine tuned and carefully tweaked? My fine tuned and carefully tweaked linux box has nearly 1000 days of uptime:
15:10:41 up 991 days, 22:18, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(it says 0 users because i ran the uptime command as a non root user who doesn't have privileges to see who's logged in)
But a finely tuned system is hardly indicative, especially when talking about end users, and considering the microsoft marketing claims that their software is "easy" and doesn't require any fine tuning, tweaking, or any technical competence whatsoever.
On the other hand i have an (online) friend with extremely limited technical skills, who now runs ubuntu because he was unable to reinstall windows (xp) on his only laptop (ubuntu supported all his hardware out out the box, xp left him with no network and he wasn't sure what wireless card he had anyway)... He currently has just over 100 days of uptime, when he had the factory supplied install of xp he never managed more than a couple of days without a reboot and managed to break the system so badly it was unable to boot (hence the need for reinstall).
Point is, this guy is just a typical user, doesn't know how to do any complex tweaking or fine tuning of his system so he largely uses it as it was supplied... Stability in situations like this is what matters, not how well someone competent can tweak their system.
Yeah, i got stung by an automated anti-fraud system when i tried to book a flight ticket (relatively large purchase), had to call up the card provider and explain that i really did want to go there.. Then when i arrived, my card again got suspended because i was using it out of my normal country, in the place i had just bought a ticket to and told them all about it. I then had to pay exorbitant phone charges to call them and explain again.
Terrorism is the action of a weak force facing an enemy too strong to attack in an up front military way... By invading iraq and afghanistan, the end result is to encourage more people to fight back against the invaders in the only way that they can - terrorism... What other course of action do they have?
Historically, this kind of guerilla war would be put a stop to by finding out what they care about and then threatening them, and attacking anyone supporting or hiding them indiscriminately... Threatening to execute thousands of civilians soon stops them hiding terrorists... They hate you even more but don't dare do anything about it, and after a few generations they forget.
The problem is that MS implement something, and samba has to play catch up... If samba would implement something first, MS would simply ignore it and do their own thing instead. Also if MS implements something, they keep it as secret and obfuscated as possible - making it difficult for someone else to reverse engineer and implement, groups like samba openly document what they do making it easy for third parties to create their own implementations.
What we really need are standards which are decided independently, with equal access for everyone.
Protocols requiring authentication just make things more interesting, you can hijack the connection and then steal or man in the middle the authentication details when the client sends them.
Yeah, host in a proper data center, but supply your own hardware (ISPs that provide hardware typically buy the absolute cheapest hardware they can get hold of) and absolutely ensure that your server has some kind of lights out management support... That way you can recover from any software problem (even sofar as reinstalling the os) and should be easily able to diagnose any hardware or network related problems.
It depends on the provider, the technical skills of the customer, and what level of technical skill the provider assumes the customer has...
A lot of providers assume the customers are idiots and need them to do everything..
Personally i would let customers get on with it, and provide support only so far as ensuring the customer is able to log in. From there, it would be up to them to diagnose problems and correct any other issues. If they want an increased level of support, then they can pay me to manage their server for them (in which case i would obviously need root access)...
There are DRM schemes used for TV broadcasts, they usually rely on a piece of hardware to compute the key every few seconds. No reason why the software that talks to the hardware can't be open (google for dreambox) and reverse engineering a piece of hardware is far more difficult than hacking software.
Right, this is the key. Apple and Linux control their essential drivers very directly, Microsoft does not. Legacy 32-bit apps work fine on a 64-bit OS, legacy drivers do not, because they're not insulated from the hardware. So MS has to pressure an immense number of third-party driver developers to update all their drivers to work on 64-bit, Apple and Linux don't.
Yes, and this is the main reason why MS should have followed Apple's route, they would benefit from this route more than Apple does...
What i said about 64bit kernel 32bit userland is just that, i can take a completely 32bit linux distribution and use a 64bit kernel to boot it... So it won't support 64bit applications, but will benefit from larger memory support without requiring PAE... I'm not sure if this is possible with windows at all.
Not sure about sonicwall, but other ssl/vpn setups i've seen required that your browser support activex and you permit the site to execute arbitrary code, where it installs a kernel driver (like a normal vpn client would)... I always thought the idea of allowing your browser sufficient privileges to load kernel drivers seemed extremely insane.
This is also likely to hurt RIM if it's only their handsets being affected by this, nodoubt MS are hoping some of those users will switch to windows mobile devices instead.
Only if the admin installed it, and then because you simply aren't able to update system installed software as an unprivileged user. If you install your own copy as an unprivileged user then you can still update it...
Linux behaves in exactly the same way, except that on linux boxes there is typically a system wide method for updating everything (windows update wont update firefox for you).
Funny you should mention that, i speak to several people online in various eastern european or asian countries who are almost all running pirated versions of windows... Their attitude to WGA is usually to think that they got a bad copy, and that they need to acquire a new pirated copy from somewhere else - which is what they've all done, usually going out and paying someone to reinstall their machine with a new pirated copy that includes appropriate cracks for wga.
MS seem to have handled the 64bit thing very badly...
Run a 64bit browser but lose 99% of third party plugins = noone will run the 64bit version... OSX snow leopard has a 64bit safari build, and it runs with flash just fine, linux has native 64bit flash and a plugin wrapper..
OSX/Linux will let you use up to 64gb ram on a 32bit os, ms artificially restrict you unless you buy the expensive "enterprise server" version...
OSX will let you run a 32bit kernel with a 64bit userland incase your drivers aren't ported to 64bit yet... Linux will let you use a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland, or a mixed userland...
MS force you to use a 64bit kernel if you want a 64bit userland or support for more than 4gb of address space, but the 64bit kernel is often totally unusable if you don't have the drivers you need.. MS would have benefitted from doing what Apple did, Apple/Linux have less of an issue with drivers anyway because most come with source code enabling a 64bit recompile, or in the case of apple most of the hardware is supplied by them anyway.
64bit linux has made sense for years, 64bit osx is a pretty seamless transition for most osx users i know, and yet most windows users i know are actively avoiding 64bit or complaining about it if they're forced to use it (eg lots of memory)
Versions do matter, especially for IE because significant differences exist between the versions that make it difficult to target all versions at once.. Other browsers tend to add support for new standards in an incremental fashion so merely not using anything not supported by an older version typically ensures support for older versions. IE on the other hand has significant differences between versions such that you need to be careful, designing specifically for 6 will often create sites that don't work correctly in 7 or 8 (or any other browser for that matter)...
No, but i also wouldn't acquire DRM encumbered movies precisely because they restrict how and where i can play them, forcing me to carry bulky optical disk reading equipment or install a whole extra os on my laptop for the sole purpose of playing them...
I also hate how tv shows and movies often come out months later in some countries than others... I speak to a lot of people in other countries online, and they will be talking about a movie or tv show which i won't be able to watch legitimately for several months. Torrents are the only option if i don't want to watch the movie months late when i've already heard from friends and various sites exactly what's going to happen in it.
Incidentally, i used to torrent music too, but i haven't torrented any mp3 files for quite some time because the legitimate services now offer me the same benefits the torrents used to (ie no drm). I have a reasonably sized collection of legitimately purchased music on my laptop too.
If legit movie download services start offering a competitive level of features to the torrent sites i might consider using them.
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Lots of companies have contributed to Linux, many of them would most likely have created closed source forks of BSD because of the permissive license (see nokia ipso, juniper etc)...
No, although the load is not very high anyway:
17:14:04 up 992 days, 22 min, 5 users, load average: 0.19, 0.14, 0.05
The machine only runs ssh to the outside, and has multiple instances of bitchx/irssi irc clients, esniper (ebay sniping tool), a couple of irc bots, several mutt or pine mail clients, a few instances of finch (cli based version of pidgin), and a number of custom scripts either running or started by crontab at various times of the day.
There are about 40 user accounts added and the number who are actually logged in varies depending on the time of day, sometimes there can be 30+ individual logins (including duplicates) and most users have screen sessions running. The accounts are either friends of mine, or friends of friends.
Most of the applications, being text based programs, would (and often did) run happily on machines made many years ago, the current hardware is a monster compared to some of the systems people used to run pine and irc clients on.
Another part is that linux users are typically far more clued up, and commercial software (especially the closed source kind) has to fight much harder for such people to consider it...
Commercial apps are rarely distributed in package repositories, even if they are distributed as standard packages for your distro they still have to be downloaded and installed manually.
Closed source apps are typically not ported to non x86 architectures, making them useless if i wanted an ARM or MIPS based laptop for instance.
If you are proficient in programming, not having the sourcecode can be a significant detriment... Also you may not be able to program, but you know or employ someone who can.
Commercial software will have an "end of life", open source you can support yourself if it's sufficiently important
Commercial software depends on the goodwill of the vendor, they can drop support, make changes you don't want/need/like, go bust, sell out etc...
Commercial software is often designed to lock people in.
Commercial vendors are interested purely in profit, so their goals will often not coincide with what you (the users) want, it wasn't commercial browser vendors that implemented ad blocking software for instance, and vendors will often implement functions that only benefit them to the detriment of their users (license checking code, drm etc)...
Closed source apps don't have to be worth their cost, they have to be sufficiently better than free alternatives to justify their cost, i wont pay $100 for a marginal improvement over something free, and i wont pay anything for something which is functionally equivalent but closed source and thus suffers the disadvantages described above.
Closed source apps have to reinvent the wheel, whereas open apps can reuse code from other similarly licensed projects.
The only closed apps i used to run on my linux workstation were netscape and vmware, both of which have been replaced with open alternatives now, and both of which used to cause me significant problems at the time, and which i only used because there were no alternatives.
Are you sure?
I thought old 32bit linux used to wrap around at 497 days, because it counted timer interrupts (100 per second) using a 32bit integer...
I had an x86 machine which wrapped around, and an alpha (64bit) that kept going.
Fine tuned and carefully tweaked?
My fine tuned and carefully tweaked linux box has nearly 1000 days of uptime:
15:10:41 up 991 days, 22:18, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(it says 0 users because i ran the uptime command as a non root user who doesn't have privileges to see who's logged in)
But a finely tuned system is hardly indicative, especially when talking about end users, and considering the microsoft marketing claims that their software is "easy" and doesn't require any fine tuning, tweaking, or any technical competence whatsoever.
On the other hand i have an (online) friend with extremely limited technical skills, who now runs ubuntu because he was unable to reinstall windows (xp) on his only laptop (ubuntu supported all his hardware out out the box, xp left him with no network and he wasn't sure what wireless card he had anyway)... He currently has just over 100 days of uptime, when he had the factory supplied install of xp he never managed more than a couple of days without a reboot and managed to break the system so badly it was unable to boot (hence the need for reinstall).
Point is, this guy is just a typical user, doesn't know how to do any complex tweaking or fine tuning of his system so he largely uses it as it was supplied... Stability in situations like this is what matters, not how well someone competent can tweak their system.
Yeah, i got stung by an automated anti-fraud system when i tried to book a flight ticket (relatively large purchase), had to call up the card provider and explain that i really did want to go there..
Then when i arrived, my card again got suspended because i was using it out of my normal country, in the place i had just bought a ticket to and told them all about it. I then had to pay exorbitant phone charges to call them and explain again.
Terrorism is the action of a weak force facing an enemy too strong to attack in an up front military way...
By invading iraq and afghanistan, the end result is to encourage more people to fight back against the invaders in the only way that they can - terrorism... What other course of action do they have?
Historically, this kind of guerilla war would be put a stop to by finding out what they care about and then threatening them, and attacking anyone supporting or hiding them indiscriminately... Threatening to execute thousands of civilians soon stops them hiding terrorists... They hate you even more but don't dare do anything about it, and after a few generations they forget.
And people complain that using a commandline on linux is difficult...
The problem is that MS implement something, and samba has to play catch up... If samba would implement something first, MS would simply ignore it and do their own thing instead.
Also if MS implements something, they keep it as secret and obfuscated as possible - making it difficult for someone else to reverse engineer and implement, groups like samba openly document what they do making it easy for third parties to create their own implementations.
What we really need are standards which are decided independently, with equal access for everyone.
Protocols requiring authentication just make things more interesting, you can hijack the connection and then steal or man in the middle the authentication details when the client sends them.
Yeah, host in a proper data center, but supply your own hardware (ISPs that provide hardware typically buy the absolute cheapest hardware they can get hold of) and absolutely ensure that your server has some kind of lights out management support... That way you can recover from any software problem (even sofar as reinstalling the os) and should be easily able to diagnose any hardware or network related problems.
It depends on the provider, the technical skills of the customer, and what level of technical skill the provider assumes the customer has...
A lot of providers assume the customers are idiots and need them to do everything..
Personally i would let customers get on with it, and provide support only so far as ensuring the customer is able to log in. From there, it would be up to them to diagnose problems and correct any other issues. If they want an increased level of support, then they can pay me to manage their server for them (in which case i would obviously need root access)...
Not all of the licence fee goes to the BBC, the vast majority does yes but some of it also goes to the other main channels.
You can modify the functions without having the source, it just takes a different (and rarer) skillset.
There are DRM schemes used for TV broadcasts, they usually rely on a piece of hardware to compute the key every few seconds. No reason why the software that talks to the hardware can't be open (google for dreambox) and reverse engineering a piece of hardware is far more difficult than hacking software.
Right, this is the key. Apple and Linux control their essential drivers very directly, Microsoft does not. Legacy 32-bit apps work fine on a 64-bit OS, legacy drivers do not, because they're not insulated from the hardware. So MS has to pressure an immense number of third-party driver developers to update all their drivers to work on 64-bit, Apple and Linux don't.
Yes, and this is the main reason why MS should have followed Apple's route, they would benefit from this route more than Apple does...
Incidentally, windows xp has always used PAE, PAE is required in order to enable NX support, it's just that xp is not "licensed" for use with more than 4gb of ram.. I couldn't find the original article, but there is one describing how to enable vista and windows 7 32bit to support more than 4gb:
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/08/19/make-windows-7-and-vista-32-bit-x86-support-more-than-4gb-memory/
What i said about 64bit kernel 32bit userland is just that, i can take a completely 32bit linux distribution and use a 64bit kernel to boot it... So it won't support 64bit applications, but will benefit from larger memory support without requiring PAE... I'm not sure if this is possible with windows at all.
Not sure about sonicwall, but other ssl/vpn setups i've seen required that your browser support activex and you permit the site to execute arbitrary code, where it installs a kernel driver (like a normal vpn client would)... I always thought the idea of allowing your browser sufficient privileges to load kernel drivers seemed extremely insane.
This is also likely to hurt RIM if it's only their handsets being affected by this, nodoubt MS are hoping some of those users will switch to windows mobile devices instead.
T-mobile is run by the same kind of large monopolizing telco assholes, they just happen to be in germany instead...
Only if the admin installed it, and then because you simply aren't able to update system installed software as an unprivileged user.
If you install your own copy as an unprivileged user then you can still update it...
Linux behaves in exactly the same way, except that on linux boxes there is typically a system wide method for updating everything (windows update wont update firefox for you).
Funny you should mention that, i speak to several people online in various eastern european or asian countries who are almost all running pirated versions of windows...
Their attitude to WGA is usually to think that they got a bad copy, and that they need to acquire a new pirated copy from somewhere else - which is what they've all done, usually going out and paying someone to reinstall their machine with a new pirated copy that includes appropriate cracks for wga.
MS seem to have handled the 64bit thing very badly...
Run a 64bit browser but lose 99% of third party plugins = noone will run the 64bit version...
OSX snow leopard has a 64bit safari build, and it runs with flash just fine, linux has native 64bit flash and a plugin wrapper..
OSX/Linux will let you use up to 64gb ram on a 32bit os, ms artificially restrict you unless you buy the expensive "enterprise server" version...
OSX will let you run a 32bit kernel with a 64bit userland incase your drivers aren't ported to 64bit yet...
Linux will let you use a 64bit kernel with a 32bit userland, or a mixed userland...
MS force you to use a 64bit kernel if you want a 64bit userland or support for more than 4gb of address space, but the 64bit kernel is often totally unusable if you don't have the drivers you need.. MS would have benefitted from doing what Apple did, Apple/Linux have less of an issue with drivers anyway because most come with source code enabling a 64bit recompile, or in the case of apple most of the hardware is supplied by them anyway.
64bit linux has made sense for years, 64bit osx is a pretty seamless transition for most osx users i know, and yet most windows users i know are actively avoiding 64bit or complaining about it if they're forced to use it (eg lots of memory)
Versions do matter, especially for IE because significant differences exist between the versions that make it difficult to target all versions at once..
Other browsers tend to add support for new standards in an incremental fashion so merely not using anything not supported by an older version typically ensures support for older versions.
IE on the other hand has significant differences between versions such that you need to be careful, designing specifically for 6 will often create sites that don't work correctly in 7 or 8 (or any other browser for that matter)...
No, but i also wouldn't acquire DRM encumbered movies precisely because they restrict how and where i can play them, forcing me to carry bulky optical disk reading equipment or install a whole extra os on my laptop for the sole purpose of playing them...
I also hate how tv shows and movies often come out months later in some countries than others... I speak to a lot of people in other countries online, and they will be talking about a movie or tv show which i won't be able to watch legitimately for several months. Torrents are the only option if i don't want to watch the movie months late when i've already heard from friends and various sites exactly what's going to happen in it.
Incidentally, i used to torrent music too, but i haven't torrented any mp3 files for quite some time because the legitimate services now offer me the same benefits the torrents used to (ie no drm). I have a reasonably sized collection of legitimately purchased music on my laptop too.
If legit movie download services start offering a competitive level of features to the torrent sites i might consider using them.
The ones downloadable from torrent sites?