That's one of the biggest advantages of Linux and OSS in general, it's not controlled by a single company so the actions of a single company don't screw everyone over...
Look at the damage done by a bad windows release (vista) compared to a bad release of a given linux distro... If one linux vendor comes out with an unwanted version and try to stop support for the previous version that people wanted to use instead, those customers could just move to another distro.
third world countries can educate those folks for very little money and therefore, flood the market with really cheap tech workers
This is capitalism at work, the very system the "first world" countries have been telling the whole world is so perfect for years. The third world countries can offer better value for money. First world countries will have no choice but to adapt or fail. Eventually the two groups will converge...
Admin work is already farmed out to third world countries and using closed source software won't slow down that process...
Companies already hire extremely cheap low skilled workers, and this has more to do with the microsoft "so easy you don't need expensive trained staff to run it" marketing... The problem is that you can get away with cheap unskilled staff to get a windows network limping along, but it won't work very well and won't be very secure. But this is all part of MS's marketing strategy because these untrained staff wouldn't have been able to set up a unix/linux/novell based network at all.
As linux becomes easier to use, you will get cheap unskilled workers running it, but the same thing will apply, unskilled workers get a system that limps along while being inefficient and insecure.
Yes, there are a lot of people who completely dismiss open source as being "freeware", relating it to the closed source freeware apps you can download for windows, many of which are buggy and unmaintained...
Some people buy right into the marketing and won't buy anything unless it's come top of a "best of breed" list, meaning the manufacturer has paid a lot of money to have it there...
But what these people do buy, are commercial products which are actually open source under the hood, because some company has built a product using open source, sometimes disguised it as something completely proprietary, and then spent big money marketing it. These same people who won't touch anything that they consider to be "freeware", will happily buy various things like cisco firewalls and cisco call manager without realizing that they run linux.
Have you never used anything other than MYSQL? Postgres is open source and perfectly capable... Oracle is considerably more powerful than MSSQL, and Linux is Oracle's preferred platform these days... Linux can also run on considerably more powerful hardware than windows can (mainframes, supercomputers etc) which is important if you have a huge database. Oracle for linux outperforms the windows version by a considerable margin by all accounts too.
And yes, Oracle isn't free but you'd just be paying for the DB and getting the OS for free.
I believe Google use MYSQL too, so it must be pretty capable if used correctly.
When it comes to databases windows is a pretty poor choice, as is mssql since it's not even cross platform and therefore tied to windows.
If you want to complain about something Linux doesn't do very well, try gaming.
School is meant to prepare kids for adult life, but this kid is dying and won't reach adulthood, so is there really any point in him attending school? Why not just let him enjoy what time he has rather than trying to force him to learn stuff he will never use?
Yes, the A1200 and A500 systems didn't come with floating point hardware by default, so they were pretty slow at rendering with things like Imagine and Lightwave.. The A3000 and some A4000s came with FPU hardware, these higher end Amigas were basically targeted at people wanting to do 3d rendering on them, the Amiga had quite a niche in this market for a while. The speed difference between an A1200 with 14mhz 68020 and an A4000 with 50mhz 68060 is pretty massive.
MS have a higher profit margin as they sell products of marginal cost to produce, so more of the money goes into the bank accounts of the company and it's shareholders (where is just gets stockpiled)... RedHat have higher operating costs as most of their business is based on consultancy, so more of the money goes back into the economy (mostly wages etc).
There is a PHP library called Text_Wiki which handles conversion from wiki markup to LaTeX and several other formats, it wasn't perfect last time i tried it but it does the job.
It would be interesting to know what exactly those sites send to the browsers (many sites check your user agent and serve up different files depending on your browser, mainly because of ie behaving differently to every other browser out there)...
It would also make more sense to load local caches of the sites, or network conditions could affect things (especially things like dns caching etc)...
IE is massively behind other browsers when it comes to things like CSS, so i would imagine it has a lot less processing to do (Seeing as it ignores big parts of the spec), lynx also ignores big parts of the html/css specs and it subsequently loads sites very quickly.
Also, comparing IE8 (in beta) Chrome (in beta) against firefox 3.05 (production and fairly old) seems a rather unfair and pointless test... And where were Opera and Safari in these tests?
But if it's that old it probably doesn't need much in the way of performance, so you could probably install win98 under a vm and play the game there...
The problem is console manufacturers not building in compatibility with mice and keyboards, despite the fact all the modern consoles have usb ports... There's absolutely no reason a console couldn't support all kinds of usb based input devices.
You can use 2003, the 32bit version supports more than 4gb of ram (xp could too, its artificially crippled and aparrently non service packed versions do) and the 64bit version works a lot better than xp64 ever did.
group policy doesn't mitigate this attack at all, you can just configure the machine to completely ignore it next time it boots.
Thats why, as someone else said, you should implement policies at the network level so that users who control the physical hardware can't do anything to the rest of the network. Use dumb terminals, configure the server appropriately and put a firewall between the two that ensures anything connected to the terminal network can only connect to the login service on the server (ie the terminal network is useless for anything other than logging in to the server).
Corporate desktops use network printers, they don't have usb connected printers... So, remove the kernel drivers that provide usb printer support. Users won't be able to reinstall those drivers unless they have root.
Block users supplying their own software? Simple, just mount any areas that users can write to (/tmp and/home) with the noexec flag, users won't be able to run any programs that haven't been installed by root.
Disallow programs is easy... Only install what you need users to have (ie no games), mount all the user writable (home, tmp) areas with the noexec flag so users can't install anything else and can only run admin supplied apps.
Force all connections through a proxy - configure your network (firewall) so that the only route to the internet is through an authenticated proxy, and configure that as the default in the browser... If users try to turn it off, the web stops working.
Forcing the use of printers is easy too, simply put authentication on the printers, you can keep track of who printed what, you can lock people to certain printers based on their IP address (different subnets for different offices so you get a local printer) and use authentication on the printers so only certain people can print to certain printers - all doable server side with cups. Policies are much better enforced server side as users won't be able to bypass them, even by using their own equipment or booting the machine from hostile removable media.
Nevertheless, we face many problems with: - OpenOffice files locked over NFS (not to mention that frequent OpenOffice MS-Office format interchange suffers from several problems).
Interchange is a relatively short term problem, even MS will be supporting ODF in a few months apparently, and if you are using all OO internally then you won't have any interchange problems internally at least, and files sent out of the company should really be PDF.
Usually firefox can detect stale lockfiles when it's restarted, thunderbird should do the same too... Or are you trying to run it on multiple nfs clients at once?
- non-technical users always finding new ways to download and install software on their home dirs that behaves badly over NFS.
Mount the NFS shares with the noexec flag, and they won't be able to put their own stuff there... Mount/tmp and/dev/shm with noexec aswell so users will have nowhere to write to that they can execute stuff, and they will only be able to run programs installed by the admin staff.
Well, it's the sale of counterfeit movies which can provide revenue to the groups producing them... When you go to buy a movie, it's hard to tell wether it's counterfeit or not, so you *could* be giving money to these evil groups, wether they be terrorists or the MPAA.
So the answer? Download for free, that way nobody evil makes any profit.
Or just wait for it to come out on DVD, and then get a DVDRIP... In fact, depending where you live you might be able to download a foreign DVDRip long before it even comes on at the local cinema.
Slashdot Mirror
That's one of the biggest advantages of Linux and OSS in general, it's not controlled by a single company so the actions of a single company don't screw everyone over...
Look at the damage done by a bad windows release (vista) compared to a bad release of a given linux distro... If one linux vendor comes out with an unwanted version and try to stop support for the previous version that people wanted to use instead, those customers could just move to another distro.
third world countries can educate those folks for very little money and therefore, flood the market with really cheap tech workers
This is capitalism at work, the very system the "first world" countries have been telling the whole world is so perfect for years. The third world countries can offer better value for money. First world countries will have no choice but to adapt or fail. Eventually the two groups will converge...
Admin work is already farmed out to third world countries and using closed source software won't slow
down that process...
Companies already hire extremely cheap low skilled workers, and this has more to do with the microsoft "so easy you don't need expensive trained staff to run it" marketing... The problem is that you can get away with cheap unskilled staff to get a windows network limping along, but it won't work very well and won't be very secure. But this is all part of MS's marketing strategy because these untrained staff wouldn't have been able to set up a unix/linux/novell based network at all.
As linux becomes easier to use, you will get cheap unskilled workers running it, but the same thing will apply, unskilled workers get a system that limps along while being inefficient and insecure.
Yes, there are a lot of people who completely dismiss open source as being "freeware", relating it to the closed source freeware apps you can download for windows, many of which are buggy and unmaintained...
Some people buy right into the marketing and won't buy anything unless it's come top of a "best of breed" list, meaning the manufacturer has paid a lot of money to have it there...
But what these people do buy, are commercial products which are actually open source under the hood, because some company has built a product using open source, sometimes disguised it as something completely proprietary, and then spent big money marketing it.
These same people who won't touch anything that they consider to be "freeware", will happily buy various things like cisco firewalls and cisco call manager without realizing that they run linux.
Have you never used anything other than MYSQL?
Postgres is open source and perfectly capable...
Oracle is considerably more powerful than MSSQL, and Linux is Oracle's preferred platform these days... Linux can also run on considerably more powerful hardware than windows can (mainframes, supercomputers etc) which is important if you have a huge database.
Oracle for linux outperforms the windows version by a considerable margin by all accounts too.
And yes, Oracle isn't free but you'd just be paying for the DB and getting the OS for free.
I believe Google use MYSQL too, so it must be pretty capable if used correctly.
When it comes to databases windows is a pretty poor choice, as is mssql since it's not even cross platform and therefore tied to windows.
If you want to complain about something Linux doesn't do very well, try gaming.
School is meant to prepare kids for adult life, but this kid is dying and won't reach adulthood, so is there really any point in him attending school? Why not just let him enjoy what time he has rather than trying to force him to learn stuff he will never use?
But a graphics company choosing a graphics related name, their target market will understand what it means even if noone else does.
Yes, the A1200 and A500 systems didn't come with floating point hardware by default, so they were pretty slow at rendering with things like Imagine and Lightwave..
The A3000 and some A4000s came with FPU hardware, these higher end Amigas were basically targeted at people wanting to do 3d rendering on them, the Amiga had quite a niche in this market for a while.
The speed difference between an A1200 with 14mhz 68020 and an A4000 with 50mhz 68060 is pretty massive.
MS have a higher profit margin as they sell products of marginal cost to produce, so more of the money goes into the bank accounts of the company and it's shareholders (where is just gets stockpiled)...
RedHat have higher operating costs as most of their business is based on consultancy, so more of the money goes back into the economy (mostly wages etc).
There is a PHP library called Text_Wiki which handles conversion from wiki markup to LaTeX and several other formats, it wasn't perfect last time i tried it but it does the job.
It would be interesting to know what exactly those sites send to the browsers (many sites check your user agent and serve up different files depending on your browser, mainly because of ie behaving differently to every other browser out there)...
It would also make more sense to load local caches of the sites, or network conditions could affect things (especially things like dns caching etc)...
IE is massively behind other browsers when it comes to things like CSS, so i would imagine it has a lot less processing to do (Seeing as it ignores big parts of the spec), lynx also ignores big parts of the html/css specs and it subsequently loads sites very quickly.
Also, comparing IE8 (in beta) Chrome (in beta) against firefox 3.05 (production and fairly old) seems a rather unfair and pointless test... And where were Opera and Safari in these tests?
Ofcourse IE loads mozilla.com faster, that's the only site you'd ever need to open with IE...
But if it's that old it probably doesn't need much in the way of performance, so you could probably install win98 under a vm and play the game there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
The problem is console manufacturers not building in compatibility with mice and keyboards, despite the fact all the modern consoles have usb ports...
There's absolutely no reason a console couldn't support all kinds of usb based input devices.
You can use 2003, the 32bit version supports more than 4gb of ram (xp could too, its artificially crippled and aparrently non service packed versions do) and the 64bit version works a lot better than xp64 ever did.
group policy doesn't mitigate this attack at all, you can just configure the machine to completely ignore it next time it boots.
Thats why, as someone else said, you should implement policies at the network level so that users who control the physical hardware can't do anything to the rest of the network. Use dumb terminals, configure the server appropriately and put a firewall between the two that ensures anything connected to the terminal network can only connect to the login service on the server (ie the terminal network is useless for anything other than logging in to the server).
Corporate desktops use network printers, they don't have usb connected printers...
So, remove the kernel drivers that provide usb printer support. Users won't be able to reinstall those drivers unless they have root.
Block users supplying their own software? Simple, just mount any areas that users can write to (/tmp and /home) with the noexec flag, users won't be able to run any programs that haven't been installed by root.
Disallow programs is easy...
Only install what you need users to have (ie no games), mount all the user writable (home, tmp) areas with the noexec flag so users can't install anything else and can only run admin supplied apps.
Force all connections through a proxy - configure your network (firewall) so that the only route to the internet is through an authenticated proxy, and configure that as the default in the browser... If users try to turn it off, the web stops working.
Forcing the use of printers is easy too, simply put authentication on the printers, you can keep track of who printed what, you can lock people to certain printers based on their IP address (different subnets for different offices so you get a local printer) and use authentication on the printers so only certain people can print to certain printers - all doable server side with cups. Policies are much better enforced server side as users won't be able to bypass them, even by using their own equipment or booting the machine from hostile removable media.
Nevertheless, we face many problems with:
- OpenOffice files locked over NFS (not to mention that frequent OpenOffice MS-Office format interchange suffers from several problems).
Interchange is a relatively short term problem, even MS will be supporting ODF in a few months apparently, and if you are using all OO internally then you won't have any interchange problems internally at least, and files sent out of the company should really be PDF.
- thunderbird crashes requiring expertise for .lock file removal .lock file removal
- firefox crashes requiring expertise for
Usually firefox can detect stale lockfiles when it's restarted, thunderbird should do the same too... Or are you trying to run it on multiple nfs clients at once?
- non-technical users always finding new ways to download and install software on their home dirs that behaves badly over NFS.
Mount the NFS shares with the noexec flag, and they won't be able to put their own stuff there... /tmp and /dev/shm with noexec aswell so users will have nowhere to write to that they can execute stuff, and they will only be able to run programs installed by the admin staff.
Mount
Well, it's the sale of counterfeit movies which can provide revenue to the groups producing them...
When you go to buy a movie, it's hard to tell wether it's counterfeit or not, so you *could* be giving money to these evil groups, wether they be terrorists or the MPAA.
So the answer?
Download for free, that way nobody evil makes any profit.
Those with poor hearing must be pirates, better stop broadcasting like that in the name of piracy prevention.
Or just wait for it to come out on DVD, and then get a DVDRIP...
In fact, depending where you live you might be able to download a foreign DVDRip long before it even comes on at the local cinema.
Spellchecker do check spelling not grammar. "do" is spelled correctly.
Have you tried the web developer extension for firefox? It lets you modify the stylesheets on the fly at least, not sure about html source.