What gives MS the right to maintain market share and consequently leech money out of india. It makes absoloutely no sense for the indian government to use software sold by a foreign corporation when a local company can provide and support an open source based solution. Any profit that local company makes, will ultimately be taxed by the government, as will their staff, so a chunk of the money the government spends comes right back to them. Plus it helps keep jobs locally, and any improvements they make can also be used by other government departments without additional cost to them. It makes absoloutely no sense for the indian government to keep giving huge amounts of money to a foreign corporation, when there's a local alternative. Infact, not using the local alternative is pretty irresponsible and harmfull to the local economy.
However, the more checks they put in to make sure nothing untoward is happening with the system, the greater the chance of a false positive taking the entire system offline.
Disabling raw sockets in the OS won't get you anywhere, not so long as users are running with full privileges. If you disable raw sockets, the backdoors will just start re-enabling them, sending raw ethernet frame instead of raw tcp, or even installing a replacement tcp stack which supports raw sockets properly.
Gentoo runs fine for me, the only problems i've encountered are with proprietary apps (flash player) which are only available in 32bit form, which would necessitate the use of a 32bit browser too (you can always install the precompiled 32bit firefox from their site), however i just do without flash player.
The only problem with 64bit, is proprietary apps holding people back and stifling the move to 64bit. Pretty much everything that comes with sourcecode has been compileable and runnable on 64bit linux for years, linux on alpha was once very popular and has always been 64bit, and had the same problem - no proprietary apps.
Such vehicles are already available, although they're quite expensive. The lowend type are called "taxis" or "cabs", whereas the higher end versions are normal cars which have been upgraded with something called a "chauffer".
A competent driver can usually brake more efficiently than an ABS system... As for traction control, most traction systems are a bit over zealous and sap the power away too soon. Power steering systems can also make the steering far too light (dangerous) at speed (some of the better ones will stiffen the steering as you go faster)
There are many situations when having these features in a car is actually undesireable. The difference is, car drivers have a choice, whereas office workers usually don't.
So what you need, is an open format to become the standard. That way, you'l have a choice of apps to use, ranging from bloated ones with tons of features, to small minimalist ones that only do what you need.
Competition is good, and microsoft are stifling competition and forcing people to use a product that quite often doesn't suit their needs at all.
This reminds me of school... Whenever something bad had been done, and the teachers had no idea who did it, they would announce the incident infront of the whole school. They would give us a talk about owning up to our actions, and then claim that they knew exactly who had committed the incident in question, and that they were giving this person the opportunity to own up to it. And that if they did, they would be in far less trouble.
On several occasions, they were talking about things that I had done... I never once owned up to any of them, and never got in any trouble as a result. On the other hand, some people were often foolish enough to admit to what they'd done, and invariably got in a lot of trouble for it.
While i don't disagree that the oil companies are ripping people off left right and center, there is a difference: The oil still has to be pumped out of the ground, put into barrels, transported, refined, and transported some more. Every single drop has to go through this long laborious process. Microsoft on the other hand, can simply keep generating short textual license keys, which costs virtually no time or effort, the oil companies are gouging people, microsoft are doing it twice as hard.
ODF exists, but it not widely used. If microsoft didn't have such a grip, then ODF would very quickly become the dominant standard simply because it could be used as an interchange format between competing programs. Aside from that, openoffice would have significantly higher market share simply due to being free.
Yes, the last place i saw using sunrays had 20+ clients connecting to an ageing sun ultra-5, ofcourse they complained it was slow and their "solution" was to replace the entire sunray infrastructure with citrix clients and much beefier servers... The problem is, theyre now far less secure, consume far more power, and once running all their bloat, aren't really much faster. Replacing the ageing ultra-5 with an up to date sun machine would have been much easier.
realtek nics are fine for most typical uses, and are good for the price.. but:
the cpu usage with them will be higher than a better more expensive nic (tho still pretty negligible on a modern system) if your flooded (dossed) with small packets, the realtek will fall over much quicker (they generate more interrupts per packet, which means they can handle less packets/second, which makes very little difference under normal use where the packets are quite large, but has a significant impact when your being attacked by floods of small packets)
Cheap nics do more of the work in software that better nics do in hardware, thus you get many more interrupts per packet (so you can handle less packets/sec, which really bites you when theres small packets floating around)...
And i have had many problems with nics playing up:
3com 3c905 (original, not a/b/c) - worked at dialup rates on any system over 1ghz broadcom bcm4400 + netgear gigabit switches - only achieved about 30mb (the card could do 100mb when connected to a catalyst)
and there have been other cases, just can't think of them right now...
That sounds wrong, OpenOffice should use shared memory for most of the program code, so each user only has their own scratch space... But you are right about it being far too big, we need a modular openoffice, something like the linux kernel where you can turn features on/off/module before compiling, and then at runtime choose which modules to use (and only have each module loaded when you try to access it's feature)
Can't speak for RDP... but X11 with the XVideo extension plays video nicely over a 100mb network, even opengl (games, like quake3) work quite well over it a network using X11.
The difference is: RDP renders the video, scales it up to the appropriate size etc, and then sends it... X11/XV sends the raw stream, and your local box scales it
X11 was designed with remote displays in mind RDP was a kludge on top of an interface that was never designed to support networking at all
Yes, there needs to be a common way for packages to install, and it really should include an option to install within your $HOME if your not root (if you really dont want users doing that, you can mount/home noexec).
It should be useable from commandline and gui, so you can click on a package within whatever program, and have it launch the installer, which should work out if your root, try to use sudo or let you install to your homedir if your not.
It should be integrate with the existing package manager database, so you can update the packages from a single place, and it can recognise if necessary dependencies are installed... It should be able to call the standard system package manager to install dependencies, or install lowest-common-denominator prebuilt libraries from the package supplier if necessary.
It should support "online" and "offline" packages, wit the former being little more than a stub listing where to download the actual data from (where it selects the latest available version, including the latest patches by default, and perhaps provides an option to install an older ver)...
And finally it should have advanced options available to users who want them, including ability to rebuild the package from source etc...
In which case, they could go back to the old tactic of disabling the defective parts of the CPUs, and selling them as cut down models... If a core is defective, then sell it as a single or dual core chip... Motorola used to do it with the 68k range, chips with defective MMUs or FPUs were sold as inferior models with these units disabled, such as the 68EC030, 68EC040 etc
It's highly unintuitive when there's nothing on the screen telling you how to enter a manual path... I found out quite by accident that pressing / lets you enter a manual path.
The GTK 1.0 open file dialog is much better than the newer gtk 2.0 one, the file dialogs in the latest firefox are incredibly irritating.... Trying to manually enter a path is completely unintuitive and cumbersome.
Surely a program having very few bugs is reason for it to be stagnant, very little work needs doing in the way of bugfixing and the program already provides all the features it needs (i personally hate programs which suffer from feature bloat - pointless features added for the sake of it, that usually result in the core program not doing it's original task as well as it used to)
They could create linux-based livecd's/dvd's which boot the game... This would make games plug+play (like a console), and they wouldn't be affected by whatever misconfigured/spyware infested os is installed on the system's drive.
A sensible gui environment will work out the DPI of your screen (Dots Per Inch) and ensure the default font size is actually a default physical size as viewed by you, and not a default size in pixels (and therefore smaller on a higher DPI screen).
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What gives MS the right to maintain market share and consequently leech money out of india.
It makes absoloutely no sense for the indian government to use software sold by a foreign corporation when a local company can provide and support an open source based solution. Any profit that local company makes, will ultimately be taxed by the government, as will their staff, so a chunk of the money the government spends comes right back to them. Plus it helps keep jobs locally, and any improvements they make can also be used by other government departments without additional cost to them.
It makes absoloutely no sense for the indian government to keep giving huge amounts of money to a foreign corporation, when there's a local alternative. Infact, not using the local alternative is pretty irresponsible and harmfull to the local economy.
However, the more checks they put in to make sure nothing untoward is happening with the system, the greater the chance of a false positive taking the entire system offline.
Disabling raw sockets in the OS won't get you anywhere, not so long as users are running with full privileges.
If you disable raw sockets, the backdoors will just start re-enabling them, sending raw ethernet frame instead of raw tcp, or even installing a replacement tcp stack which supports raw sockets properly.
Gentoo runs fine for me, the only problems i've encountered are with proprietary apps (flash player) which are only available in 32bit form, which would necessitate the use of a 32bit browser too (you can always install the precompiled 32bit firefox from their site), however i just do without flash player.
The only problem with 64bit, is proprietary apps holding people back and stifling the move to 64bit. Pretty much everything that comes with sourcecode has been compileable and runnable on 64bit linux for years, linux on alpha was once very popular and has always been 64bit, and had the same problem - no proprietary apps.
Such vehicles are already available, although they're quite expensive.
The lowend type are called "taxis" or "cabs", whereas the higher end versions are normal cars which have been upgraded with something called a "chauffer".
A competent driver can usually brake more efficiently than an ABS system...
As for traction control, most traction systems are a bit over zealous and sap the power away too soon.
Power steering systems can also make the steering far too light (dangerous) at speed (some of the better ones will stiffen the steering as you go faster)
There are many situations when having these features in a car is actually undesireable.
The difference is, car drivers have a choice, whereas office workers usually don't.
So what you need, is an open format to become the standard.
That way, you'l have a choice of apps to use, ranging from bloated ones with tons of features, to small minimalist ones that only do what you need.
Competition is good, and microsoft are stifling competition and forcing people to use a product that quite often doesn't suit their needs at all.
This reminds me of school...
Whenever something bad had been done, and the teachers had no idea who did it, they would announce the incident infront of the whole school. They would give us a talk about owning up to our actions, and then claim that they knew exactly who had committed the incident in question, and that they were giving this person the opportunity to own up to it. And that if they did, they would be in far less trouble.
On several occasions, they were talking about things that I had done... I never once owned up to any of them, and never got in any trouble as a result. On the other hand, some people were often foolish enough to admit to what they'd done, and invariably got in a lot of trouble for it.
While i don't disagree that the oil companies are ripping people off left right and center, there is a difference:
The oil still has to be pumped out of the ground, put into barrels, transported, refined, and transported some more. Every single drop has to go through this long laborious process.
Microsoft on the other hand, can simply keep generating short textual license keys, which costs virtually no time or effort, the oil companies are gouging people, microsoft are doing it twice as hard.
ODF exists, but it not widely used.
If microsoft didn't have such a grip, then ODF would very quickly become the dominant standard simply because it could be used as an interchange format between competing programs.
Aside from that, openoffice would have significantly higher market share simply due to being free.
Yes, the last place i saw using sunrays had 20+ clients connecting to an ageing sun ultra-5, ofcourse they complained it was slow and their "solution" was to replace the entire sunray infrastructure with citrix clients and much beefier servers...
The problem is, theyre now far less secure, consume far more power, and once running all their bloat, aren't really much faster. Replacing the ageing ultra-5 with an up to date sun machine would have been much easier.
realtek nics are fine for most typical uses, and are good for the price.. but:
the cpu usage with them will be higher than a better more expensive nic (tho still pretty negligible on a modern system)
if your flooded (dossed) with small packets, the realtek will fall over much quicker (they generate more interrupts per packet, which means they can handle less packets/second, which makes very little difference under normal use where the packets are quite large, but has a significant impact when your being attacked by floods of small packets)
Cheap nics do more of the work in software that better nics do in hardware, thus you get many more interrupts per packet (so you can handle less packets/sec, which really bites you when theres small packets floating around)...
And i have had many problems with nics playing up:
3com 3c905 (original, not a/b/c) - worked at dialup rates on any system over 1ghz
broadcom bcm4400 + netgear gigabit switches - only achieved about 30mb (the card could do 100mb when connected to a catalyst)
and there have been other cases, just can't think of them right now...
That sounds wrong, OpenOffice should use shared memory for most of the program code, so each user only has their own scratch space...
But you are right about it being far too big, we need a modular openoffice, something like the linux kernel where you can turn features on/off/module before compiling, and then at runtime choose which modules to use (and only have each module loaded when you try to access it's feature)
Can't speak for RDP... but X11 with the XVideo extension plays video nicely over a 100mb network, even opengl (games, like quake3) work quite well over it a network using X11.
The difference is:
RDP renders the video, scales it up to the appropriate size etc, and then sends it...
X11/XV sends the raw stream, and your local box scales it
X11 was designed with remote displays in mind
RDP was a kludge on top of an interface that was never designed to support networking at all
Yes, there needs to be a common way for packages to install, and it really should include an option to install within your $HOME if your not root (if you really dont want users doing that, you can mount /home noexec).
It should be useable from commandline and gui, so you can click on a package within whatever program, and have it launch the installer, which should work out if your root, try to use sudo or let you install to your homedir if your not.
It should be integrate with the existing package manager database, so you can update the packages from a single place, and it can recognise if necessary dependencies are installed...
It should be able to call the standard system package manager to install dependencies, or install lowest-common-denominator prebuilt libraries from the package supplier if necessary.
It should support "online" and "offline" packages, wit the former being little more than a stub listing where to download the actual data from (where it selects the latest available version, including the latest patches by default, and perhaps provides an option to install an older ver)...
And finally it should have advanced options available to users who want them, including ability to rebuild the package from source etc...
In which case, they could go back to the old tactic of disabling the defective parts of the CPUs, and selling them as cut down models... If a core is defective, then sell it as a single or dual core chip...
Motorola used to do it with the 68k range, chips with defective MMUs or FPUs were sold as inferior models with these units disabled, such as the 68EC030, 68EC040 etc
Would it not make sense for the quad core chips to use more memory controllers, or more memory channels?
It's highly unintuitive when there's nothing on the screen telling you how to enter a manual path...
I found out quite by accident that pressing / lets you enter a manual path.
The GTK 1.0 open file dialog is much better than the newer gtk 2.0 one, the file dialogs in the latest firefox are incredibly irritating.... Trying to manually enter a path is completely unintuitive and cumbersome.
Surely a program having very few bugs is reason for it to be stagnant, very little work needs doing in the way of bugfixing and the program already provides all the features it needs (i personally hate programs which suffer from feature bloat - pointless features added for the sake of it, that usually result in the core program not doing it's original task as well as it used to)
They could create linux-based livecd's/dvd's which boot the game...
This would make games plug+play (like a console), and they wouldn't be affected by whatever misconfigured/spyware infested os is installed on the system's drive.
You can pick up a 20 or 21" CRT for virtually nothing nowadays, i just threw a few of them out.
A sensible gui environment will work out the DPI of your screen (Dots Per Inch) and ensure the default font size is actually a default physical size as viewed by you, and not a default size in pixels (and therefore smaller on a higher DPI screen).
A heavy weight OS such as vista is not good for gaming, all the extra memory, cpu and gpu time consumed by the OS is no longer available for the game.