Doesn't really matter tho, it uses open standard formats to store the data which is the most important part. I don't care what software other people use, so long as their choices don't reduce my choice (like proprietary formats often do).
Vendors should really rethink this... Whatever they sell, they will have to support anyway... If they sell an MS product they might get 6%, but if they sell OSS then they get 100% of whatever they sell it for... OSS isn't about zero cost, it's about freedom to use and modify the code in any way you choose. You can sell the OSS products for 7% of the cost of the MS products and still make more money off them.... It's win win for ISVs really, if the client wants to pay for something, let them pay for OSS and you keep the whole cost, and it can still be a cheaper option... If they don't want to pay then OSS is your only choice but you can afford to give it away for free because you didn't pay for it in the first place.
That's perfectly doable on Linux, and SunRay systems have been doing it for years... There are all kinds of ways to do this... LDAP, Kerberos, SSH keys and client certs (if you've authenticated to your user account and got access to your homedir then all your user specific keys/certs are there)..
On the other hand, having a single password to access anything is not the most secure option, it's a case of convenience over security.
Companies these days are deploying OSS all over the place, they just tend to use commercially supported distributions of it.... The trick to getting something installed, is to have a recognized vendor sell it.
A lot of OSS is deployed without companies even realizing what it is, a lot of commercial products use OSS heavily but don't say so in the marketing literature... You might get one or two paragraphs buried deep in the technical documentation or an offer to provide sourcecode to some components as required by the GPL. Although someone could easily clone these products for free, they exist because companies won't use something that's "zero cost", but they will happily use exactly the same code if they paid money for it and bought it from a source they recognize.
Not having to pay for it isn't the biggest benefit of OSS anyway, the freedom to modify, reuse, and use open standards is... If you buy an OSS based product from a major vendor today, you should be able to migrate to the pure OSS zero cost version in the future if you need to save money.
It is perfectly sensible to evaluate something before you commit to using it in production, but if a company is unwilling to let you evaluate their products properly then they don't really deserve the sale.
Storing your data off site or placing your data in the hands of a third party doesn't seem to both most companies these days... Single points of failure seem to be acceptable when it comes to computing.
It doesnt require physical access, it requires root level access, ie ring0 (which can almost always be gained trivially when you have physical access) even if you have to swap the hard disk for one that contains your malicious code.
Some machines have a jumper that needs to be set in order to make the bios writable, otherwise it is readonly and there's nothing you can do to it. Signing the BIOS would just cut out third parties like LinuxBIOS...
If it works well then it will silently infect lots of machines... A virus that destroys it's host is pretty ineffective at spreading because it gets noticed and destroys it's host that might have been usable to bring it to more victims.
Does anyone use EFI outside of Apple and IA64 based machines? Microsoft don't support EFI, even tho Vista promised support for it... EFI is really only of benefit to run OSX or possibly Linux.
I hardly ever use optical drives, i might use it once to install a system and then not use it again for months... I guess they might fail more quickly if they were heavily used. The drives in consoles are typically used a lot more heavily... Except the first xbox, where you could copy the games to HD.
Short term thinking is the cause of many problems... Proprietary lock-in, flimsy vehicles, flimsy equipment, short sighted investments crippling the banking industry... At least there are still better trucks available which will last and for which you pay a premium...
Simple software is not the design goal for MS tho... DOS was simple, and several compatible clones sprang up... Unix is simple and has many clones...
Windows is extremely complex and has far less clones which themselves are incomplete and not fully functional. Windows is massively more complex than any other system on the market, and this complexity makes it difficult to maintain and causes stability and security problems. And much of the complexity was intentional to make it harder for third party clones to exist.
They stood behind the products because the console market is competitive and not standing behind them would have severely damaged their market position. I don't know about Toyota, but companies will always try to get out of providing costly repairs/replacements if they possibly can... On the other hand, i had a Jaguar engine replaced for free because it failed (google for jaguar v8 nikasil)..
Remember companies are out for profit... They will weigh up the cost of fixing the problems vs the cost of the bad publicity etc, and determine if it's worth doing or not.
Microsoft products have always been produced as cheaply as possible, with all kinds of corners being cut... In software they could provide patches effectively for free, but with hardware it's proving more costly. Microsoft software has always been notorious for being unstable and crashing, is it really any surprise they would use the same strategy when producing hardware?
I too find the charging for live a bit rich, especially when many games no longer support LAN play anymore... Some people have connections too slow for live, but want to play lan games with friends... Or play lan games in places with no internet connection (we used to get together for lan games at a local village hall).
The first xbox was a lot better, most games supported lan play for free and you could use programs like xlink to fool the system into thinking it was playing against lan users when it was tunneled over the internet.
Yes, i still have an xbox with a broken DVD reader... I put a larger hard drive in and use it exclusively to run xbmc... MS seems to have completely dropped support for it now.
The third argument is adaptability... A lot of the top10 systems are Power/PPC based, windows doesn't run on that in any form that would be useful for HPC...
Also Windows won't boot without a videocard present, it has no serial console mode of operation (does HPC 2008 change this?) meaning you need to have video hardware present in all your nodes even tho it will never be used... It still increases costs and consumes power.
The idea of machines getting faster every year has not just harmed parallel processing, it has resulted in slower and more bloated code written in increasingly inefficient languages...
Java seems to perform quite well, but has a significant memory and startup overhead (java -server where the runtime is already loaded performs massively better).. Ruby which seems to be fashionable right now performs terribly...
The OS isn't really the problem, both Windows and Linux will happily use more than 8 cores... In the server space boxes with 4 or more quad core chips are very common, and machines with 16 physical cpus have been around for years. Linux scales especially well, you can buy a system with 512 dual core cpus from SGI (http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/configs.html) which is designed to run Linux, and Linux accounts for over 80% of the top500 supercomputers list and most of the top 10.
It's end users apps that aren't optimized for multiple cores/cpus, as most server software can easily be multi threaded by handling multiple user connections at once...
Surely the 80% shareholder, ie the government, can step up and stop this case... Surely when you own 80% of a company you should have sufficient power over it.
Favoring ODF is not really favoring one vendor over another, there are several vendors who support ODF. You could also argue that requiring tenders to be submitted in english is favoring one vendor over another, but the fact is you need to set a standard and one that is openly documented is the only sensible choice.
Anyone can learn english if they want to tender for contracts in an english speaking country, anyone is free to implement ODF into their program, as they are also free to implement PDF or XHTML.
You said the problem occurred when the machine had 2 months left of it's warranty, assuming your extended warranty was 3 or 5 years as the vast majority are, your machine must have failed when it was 34 or 58 months old respectively.
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Doesn't really matter tho, it uses open standard formats to store the data which is the most important part.
I don't care what software other people use, so long as their choices don't reduce my choice (like proprietary formats often do).
Vendors should really rethink this...
Whatever they sell, they will have to support anyway...
If they sell an MS product they might get 6%, but if they sell OSS then they get 100% of whatever they sell it for... OSS isn't about zero cost, it's about freedom to use and modify the code in any way you choose. You can sell the OSS products for 7% of the cost of the MS products and still make more money off them....
It's win win for ISVs really, if the client wants to pay for something, let them pay for OSS and you keep the whole cost, and it can still be a cheaper option... If they don't want to pay then OSS is your only choice but you can afford to give it away for free because you didn't pay for it in the first place.
That's perfectly doable on Linux, and SunRay systems have been doing it for years...
There are all kinds of ways to do this... LDAP, Kerberos, SSH keys and client certs (if you've authenticated to your user account and got access to your homedir then all your user specific keys/certs are there)..
On the other hand, having a single password to access anything is not the most secure option, it's a case of convenience over security.
Companies these days are deploying OSS all over the place, they just tend to use commercially supported distributions of it.... The trick to getting something installed, is to have a recognized vendor sell it.
A lot of OSS is deployed without companies even realizing what it is, a lot of commercial products use OSS heavily but don't say so in the marketing literature... You might get one or two paragraphs buried deep in the technical documentation or an offer to provide sourcecode to some components as required by the GPL.
Although someone could easily clone these products for free, they exist because companies won't use something that's "zero cost", but they will happily use exactly the same code if they paid money for it and bought it from a source they recognize.
Not having to pay for it isn't the biggest benefit of OSS anyway, the freedom to modify, reuse, and use open standards is... If you buy an OSS based product from a major vendor today, you should be able to migrate to the pure OSS zero cost version in the future if you need to save money.
It is perfectly sensible to evaluate something before you commit to using it in production, but if a company is unwilling to let you evaluate their products properly then they don't really deserve the sale.
Storing your data off site or placing your data in the hands of a third party doesn't seem to both most companies these days... Single points of failure seem to be acceptable when it comes to computing.
It doesnt require physical access, it requires root level access, ie ring0 (which can almost always be gained trivially when you have physical access) even if you have to swap the hard disk for one that contains your malicious code.
Some machines have a jumper that needs to be set in order to make the bios writable, otherwise it is readonly and there's nothing you can do to it.
Signing the BIOS would just cut out third parties like LinuxBIOS...
If it works well then it will silently infect lots of machines...
A virus that destroys it's host is pretty ineffective at spreading because it gets noticed and destroys it's host that might have been usable to bring it to more victims.
Does anyone use EFI outside of Apple and IA64 based machines?
Microsoft don't support EFI, even tho Vista promised support for it... EFI is really only of benefit to run OSX or possibly Linux.
But Windows 2000 had 65,000 known bugs when released... So more likely the xbox 360 has 11700 (multiplied by 32.5) bugs.
I hardly ever use optical drives, i might use it once to install a system and then not use it again for months... I guess they might fail more quickly if they were heavily used. The drives in consoles are typically used a lot more heavily... Except the first xbox, where you could copy the games to HD.
Quite a lot of people have bought 2, or more, of them... Because the first one(s) they bought died and they had invested too much in games for it.
Short term thinking is the cause of many problems... Proprietary lock-in, flimsy vehicles, flimsy equipment, short sighted investments crippling the banking industry...
At least there are still better trucks available which will last and for which you pay a premium...
Broke the TV, not the Wiimote...
Simple software is not the design goal for MS tho...
DOS was simple, and several compatible clones sprang up...
Unix is simple and has many clones...
Windows is extremely complex and has far less clones which themselves are incomplete and not fully functional.
Windows is massively more complex than any other system on the market, and this complexity makes it difficult to maintain and causes stability and security problems. And much of the complexity was intentional to make it harder for third party clones to exist.
They stood behind the products because the console market is competitive and not standing behind them would have severely damaged their market position.
I don't know about Toyota, but companies will always try to get out of providing costly repairs/replacements if they possibly can... On the other hand, i had a Jaguar engine replaced for free because it failed (google for jaguar v8 nikasil)..
Remember companies are out for profit... They will weigh up the cost of fixing the problems vs the cost of the bad publicity etc, and determine if it's worth doing or not.
Microsoft products have always been produced as cheaply as possible, with all kinds of corners being cut...
In software they could provide patches effectively for free, but with hardware it's proving more costly. Microsoft software has always been notorious for being unstable and crashing, is it really any surprise they would use the same strategy when producing hardware?
I too find the charging for live a bit rich, especially when many games no longer support LAN play anymore... Some people have connections too slow for live, but want to play lan games with friends... Or play lan games in places with no internet connection (we used to get together for lan games at a local village hall).
The first xbox was a lot better, most games supported lan play for free and you could use programs like xlink to fool the system into thinking it was playing against lan users when it was tunneled over the internet.
Yes, i still have an xbox with a broken DVD reader... I put a larger hard drive in and use it exclusively to run xbmc... MS seems to have completely dropped support for it now.
The third argument is adaptability...
A lot of the top10 systems are Power/PPC based, windows doesn't run on that in any form that would be useful for HPC...
Also Windows won't boot without a videocard present, it has no serial console mode of operation (does HPC 2008 change this?) meaning you need to have video hardware present in all your nodes even tho it will never be used... It still increases costs and consumes power.
The idea of machines getting faster every year has not just harmed parallel processing, it has resulted in slower and more bloated code written in increasingly inefficient languages...
At http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ you can see various benchmarks tested in different languages...
Java seems to perform quite well, but has a significant memory and startup overhead (java -server where the runtime is already loaded performs massively better)..
Ruby which seems to be fashionable right now performs terribly...
The OS isn't really the problem, both Windows and Linux will happily use more than 8 cores... In the server space boxes with 4 or more quad core chips are very common, and machines with 16 physical cpus have been around for years.
Linux scales especially well, you can buy a system with 512 dual core cpus from SGI (http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/configs.html) which is designed to run Linux, and Linux accounts for over 80% of the top500 supercomputers list and most of the top 10.
It's end users apps that aren't optimized for multiple cores/cpus, as most server software can easily be multi threaded by handling multiple user connections at once...
Surely the 80% shareholder, ie the government, can step up and stop this case... Surely when you own 80% of a company you should have sufficient power over it.
Favoring ODF is not really favoring one vendor over another, there are several vendors who support ODF.
You could also argue that requiring tenders to be submitted in english is favoring one vendor over another, but the fact is you need to set a standard and one that is openly documented is the only sensible choice.
Anyone can learn english if they want to tender for contracts in an english speaking country, anyone is free to implement ODF into their program, as they are also free to implement PDF or XHTML.
You said the problem occurred when the machine had 2 months left of it's warranty, assuming your extended warranty was 3 or 5 years as the vast majority are, your machine must have failed when it was 34 or 58 months old respectively.