Viewers which are only "free" to users who have already purchased a relatively recent version of windows.. They are not available for users with old versions of windows, nor are they available for mac or unix/linux users..
The government are dictating the file format which they themselves will use, they are not ordering anyone else to use it, merely saying that they will use a particular format and users wishing to interoperate with them must be compatible. They would be doing this, regardless of what format they used. At least with a freely accessible format like opendocument they impose the least financial burden on people wishing to interoperate.
On the other hand i think governments should mandate the use of open published standards. They do so already in many other fields, why should file formats be any different? Or would you prefer it if each cable company decided to use a different format for their TV system (NTSC, PAL, something totally proprietary) and you had to buy a completely new set if you moved or changed cable provider. Standards should be controlled by non-profit organisations, with a process for individuals and organisations to propose improvements over time. With a standard format there is nothing to prevent anyone from competing in the market segment and it substantially lowers the barrier to entry.
The use of opendocument benefits everyone except microsoft.
Try getting an active directory deployment through a penetration test.. It will fail, and there`s no way to make it pass.. In order to make it pass government requirements the accreditor has to overlook many issues that you just can`t solve. A pentest report against active directory will often include lots of security issues where the only advice is "disable active directory" or "use a non windows os". It`s just like the old C2 security accreditation that NT got, but which only applied when it was standalone without network or removeable media.
Which is where companies like IBM, RedHat, Novell and SUN step in.. You can buy Open Source solutions from these companies, they`re still cheaper than microsoft, still have all the other advantages like low maintenence cost, low risk of viruses etc, but there is a vendor you can blame just like microsoft. Ofcourse, you have no real comeback against the vendor, just like you don`t with microsoft... you can simply point the finger. But at least with open source and open standards you can threaten to move to another vendor more easily.
Return to castle wolfenstein has a linux client, and if your using an nvidia card it should run about 5% faster than the windows version... As for your phone, most cameras i`ve seen come up as standard usb-storage devices and work flawlessly with linux, but not too sure about camera phones.. There is atleast a stack for nokia phones, but you didn`t specify your brand of phone..
You forgot the time that it takes to search for the program, download it, find where it was downloaded to, unzip it, click setup.exe, click next repeatedly.. Not to mention the hoops many places make you jump through to download something, selecting a mirror site, registering your email address to recieve spams, clicking through a splash page that pops up for 5 seconds telling you "your download will start soon" bla bla bla.. Very irritating, and actually locating the program you want is a hassle, and locating it from a source you trust is even harder.. Who knows what malicious content may have been included from $RANDOM_DOWNLOAD_SITE.
On the other hand, modern linux programs have graphical equivalents to apt-get/emerge.. you select the program through kde/gnome/whatever, find the program you want in the list and click install. Thousands of programs can be found in the same place, and theyre checksummed by the linux distro provider to prevent malicious content from being added.
Also, linux lets you update all your apps from a central place, whereas windows update doesn`t even update all microsoft applications, let alone third party apps.
Winterms are amusing.. They run an embedded version of windows xp, that suffers from many of the same security flaws as the full version... It also comes on 256mb of flash memory, very far removed from a true thin client.
But you need to install a seperate version, you can`t just install the language packs and change the language in a snap.. Most people in finland can speak english, swedish or both.. and a lot of foreign workers may not speak finnish, so a computer locked in the finnish language is useless in a large company with english speaking employees.
IE has a habit of poorly caching, and causing additional hits... Firefox does this a lot less, and opera less still... This tends to inflate the statistics somewhat. As for different IP addresses, a lot of large isp`s use proxies which may have many thousands of users behind a single IP or dynamic ip addressing. It`s very difficult to identify multiple unique users from a large isp.
I beg to differ.. I tried a multitude of browsers, opera, netscape, galeon, dillo etc.. I settled on firefox mainly because of the extensions availability, and partly because my previous choice - galeon - deteriorated after version 1.2 when it was completely redesigned.
The format should. The format is vendor independant and no vendor is excluded from providing compatible software, including microsoft. At least the individual consumers have a choice of several applications they can use, some of which are available at no-cost. If the government tax forms or driving license applications were in a proprietary microsoft format, individual consumers would have no choice but to purchase microsoft applications at whatever price microsoft decided to charge. Such a situation only benefits microsoft at the expense of consumers.
15GB a month isn`t much really, it`s quite easy to go over that in 1 day.. As for X11 over ssh, why not try NX (www.nomachine.com) - a compression technology for X that improves speed and latency over wan links.. i can run kde remotely at a useable speed from my home dsl (256kb upstream) to my system at work.
Not so long ago, windows was exactly the same.. RDP is a relatively recent development and didn`t seem to be that difficult to do.. OSX, with it`s display-pdf style approach could be modified to work in a similar way.. but it`s true that the current options are laughably slow.
It`s not about being 64bit per se, it`s about running it on pure 64bit systems without the need to keep a load of 32bit backwards compatibility libs sitting around.. Also to load it on a pure 64bit architecture such as IA64 or Alpha which has no 32bit backwards compatibility mode it`s necessary to be 64bit clean. The usage of 64bit machines is only going to increase.. Also, there was a version of openoffice (1.1.3) which was ported to alpha, but i`m not sure if the changes got rolled back in.
It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems.. Also, when loading word files openoffice seems to emulate word 2000, when loading files from 2003 it seems to exhibit the same problems that word 2000 does loading the same files.
Only the openoffice build system is not multithreaded, so you`d not benefit from 4 cpus, and 2 wouldn`t help you much over 1. I run daily builds on a quad xeon, and it spends most of the time hogging a single cpu.
Not exactly.. Remember some windows 2000 sourcecode was leaked a while ago? IE was included in that sourcecode.. People who are planning to illegally break into people`s systems won`t care about posessing illegally obtained sourcecode aswell, and it`s also possible they might have newer versions than the one everyone knows was leaked.. After all, how many organisations signed up to shared source? what`s the chances that one of those organisations could be compromised by a determined attacker?
If i was going to break the law by breaking into peoples machines to setup zombie networks or harvest credit cards etc, i wouldn`t think twice about committing a furthur crime of stealing source code.
Firefox being open source means hackers can LEGALLY obtain the sourcecode, as can whitehack hackers.. The malicious people who will find vulnerabilities and keep them secret while exploiting them for personal gain, clearly don`t care about legality and will likely also have a copy of the windows sourcecodes which leaked recently and are also highly likely to have illegal access to newer versions. The white hats won`t have this access, so they are more likely to find vulnerabilities in mozilla.. The black hats, are more likely to find holes in ie because the white hats will quickly find and fix the low hanging fruit from mozilla, but this does mean more publicly disclosed vulneratilities in the short term.
Firefox has only just appeared on the radar for most security researchers.. And the sourcecode is available, so ofcourse there will be more vulnerabilities discovered for a short time.. However it will settle down after a while.. Also remember that all the beta versions of firefox are in the public eye, how many vulnerabilities did microsoft fix in beta versions of ie that the world never got to hear about?
Not to mention the mandatory gui, wasting your resources multiplied by the number of nodes you have.. But now that you mention it.. there is one windows based cluster in the top500 list, it consists of about 640 dual 2.8ghz dell poweredge 2650 machines.. About 100 places above it, is a redhat 7.1 based cluster running on 600 dual 2.8ghz dell poweredge 2650 machines.. The windows cluster is only there, because microsoft paid a LOT of money to build it.. I doubt anyone will build a windows based cluster unless microsoft pays for it, especially considering the performance difference between linux on the same hardware.
Bittorrent doesn`t work very well with nat.. Also, if multiple machines are behind the same nat and downloading the same file then bittorrent should be smart enough to only bring 1 copy of the file down through the natbox and distribute it throughout the local peers..
Because as long as windows is a dominant desktop os, microsoft will be able to make it difficult for those few running anything else in an attempt to force them over.... Working alongside would be all well and good, if we had truly open standards in the industry.
However, msoffice often has the same problems, in some cases they are worse than openoffice at opening their own documents... Especially if you have a mix of different versions.. Also, if you ever tried to use ms publisher to import/export word files, it makes a much bigger mess of it than openoffice does, microsoft's own app, written by people who have full access to sourcecode and file format specs! If you use microsoft's proprietary format, you will have problems opening files whatever program you use, this problem will always occur with a format so poorly designed.
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Many people have old versions at home which came with the hardware, and never bother buying a newer version.
Viewers which are only "free" to users who have already purchased a relatively recent version of windows.. They are not available for users with old versions of windows, nor are they available for mac or unix/linux users..
The government are dictating the file format which they themselves will use, they are not ordering anyone else to use it, merely saying that they will use a particular format and users wishing to interoperate with them must be compatible. They would be doing this, regardless of what format they used. At least with a freely accessible format like opendocument they impose the least financial burden on people wishing to interoperate.
On the other hand i think governments should mandate the use of open published standards. They do so already in many other fields, why should file formats be any different?
Or would you prefer it if each cable company decided to use a different format for their TV system (NTSC, PAL, something totally proprietary) and you had to buy a completely new set if you moved or changed cable provider.
Standards should be controlled by non-profit organisations, with a process for individuals and organisations to propose improvements over time. With a standard format there is nothing to prevent anyone from competing in the market segment and it substantially lowers the barrier to entry.
The use of opendocument benefits everyone except microsoft.
Try getting an active directory deployment through a penetration test..
It will fail, and there`s no way to make it pass.. In order to make it pass government requirements the accreditor has to overlook many issues that you just can`t solve. A pentest report against active directory will often include lots of security issues where the only advice is "disable active directory" or "use a non windows os".
It`s just like the old C2 security accreditation that NT got, but which only applied when it was standalone without network or removeable media.
Which is where companies like IBM, RedHat, Novell and SUN step in..
You can buy Open Source solutions from these companies, they`re still cheaper than microsoft, still have all the other advantages like low maintenence cost, low risk of viruses etc, but there is a vendor you can blame just like microsoft.
Ofcourse, you have no real comeback against the vendor, just like you don`t with microsoft... you can simply point the finger. But at least with open source and open standards you can threaten to move to another vendor more easily.
Return to castle wolfenstein has a linux client, and if your using an nvidia card it should run about 5% faster than the windows version...
As for your phone, most cameras i`ve seen come up as standard usb-storage devices and work flawlessly with linux, but not too sure about camera phones.. There is atleast a stack for nokia phones, but you didn`t specify your brand of phone..
You forgot the time that it takes to search for the program, download it, find where it was downloaded to, unzip it, click setup.exe, click next repeatedly..
Not to mention the hoops many places make you jump through to download something, selecting a mirror site, registering your email address to recieve spams, clicking through a splash page that pops up for 5 seconds telling you "your download will start soon" bla bla bla..
Very irritating, and actually locating the program you want is a hassle, and locating it from a source you trust is even harder.. Who knows what malicious content may have been included from $RANDOM_DOWNLOAD_SITE.
On the other hand, modern linux programs have graphical equivalents to apt-get/emerge.. you select the program through kde/gnome/whatever, find the program you want in the list and click install. Thousands of programs can be found in the same place, and theyre checksummed by the linux distro provider to prevent malicious content from being added.
Also, linux lets you update all your apps from a central place, whereas windows update doesn`t even update all microsoft applications, let alone third party apps.
Winterms are amusing.. They run an embedded version of windows xp, that suffers from many of the same security flaws as the full version... It also comes on 256mb of flash memory, very far removed from a true thin client.
But you need to install a seperate version, you can`t just install the language packs and change the language in a snap.. Most people in finland can speak english, swedish or both.. and a lot of foreign workers may not speak finnish, so a computer locked in the finnish language is useless in a large company with english speaking employees.
IE has a habit of poorly caching, and causing additional hits... Firefox does this a lot less, and opera less still... This tends to inflate the statistics somewhat.
As for different IP addresses, a lot of large isp`s use proxies which may have many thousands of users behind a single IP or dynamic ip addressing. It`s very difficult to identify multiple unique users from a large isp.
I beg to differ..
I tried a multitude of browsers, opera, netscape, galeon, dillo etc.. I settled on firefox mainly because of the extensions availability, and partly because my previous choice - galeon - deteriorated after version 1.2 when it was completely redesigned.
The format should. The format is vendor independant and no vendor is excluded from providing compatible software, including microsoft.
At least the individual consumers have a choice of several applications they can use, some of which are available at no-cost.
If the government tax forms or driving license applications were in a proprietary microsoft format, individual consumers would have no choice but to purchase microsoft applications at whatever price microsoft decided to charge. Such a situation only benefits microsoft at the expense of consumers.
The experimental mpm-peruser for apache is good for this...
http://www.telana.com/peruser.php
It runs each vhost under a different userid, including any php/cgi which are executed by each vhost..
http://tw1.ev6.net/test.php
http://tw2.ev6.net/test.php
http://tw3.ev6.net/test.php
http://tw4.ev6.net/test.php
These are some example urls, a simply php script which executes the "id" command.
15GB a month isn`t much really, it`s quite easy to go over that in 1 day..
As for X11 over ssh, why not try NX (www.nomachine.com) - a compression technology for X that improves speed and latency over wan links.. i can run kde remotely at a useable speed from my home dsl (256kb upstream) to my system at work.
Not so long ago, windows was exactly the same.. RDP is a relatively recent development and didn`t seem to be that difficult to do..
OSX, with it`s display-pdf style approach could be modified to work in a similar way.. but it`s true that the current options are laughably slow.
It`s not about being 64bit per se, it`s about running it on pure 64bit systems without the need to keep a load of 32bit backwards compatibility libs sitting around..
Also to load it on a pure 64bit architecture such as IA64 or Alpha which has no 32bit backwards compatibility mode it`s necessary to be 64bit clean.
The usage of 64bit machines is only going to increase..
Also, there was a version of openoffice (1.1.3) which was ported to alpha, but i`m not sure if the changes got rolled back in.
It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems..
Also, when loading word files openoffice seems to emulate word 2000, when loading files from 2003 it seems to exhibit the same problems that word 2000 does loading the same files.
Only the openoffice build system is not multithreaded, so you`d not benefit from 4 cpus, and 2 wouldn`t help you much over 1. I run daily builds on a quad xeon, and it spends most of the time hogging a single cpu.
Not exactly..
Remember some windows 2000 sourcecode was leaked a while ago? IE was included in that sourcecode..
People who are planning to illegally break into people`s systems won`t care about posessing illegally obtained sourcecode aswell, and it`s also possible they might have newer versions than the one everyone knows was leaked.. After all, how many organisations signed up to shared source? what`s the chances that one of those organisations could be compromised by a determined attacker?
If i was going to break the law by breaking into peoples machines to setup zombie networks or harvest credit cards etc, i wouldn`t think twice about committing a furthur crime of stealing source code.
Firefox being open source means hackers can LEGALLY obtain the sourcecode, as can whitehack hackers..
The malicious people who will find vulnerabilities and keep them secret while exploiting them for personal gain, clearly don`t care about legality and will likely also have a copy of the windows sourcecodes which leaked recently and are also highly likely to have illegal access to newer versions. The white hats won`t have this access, so they are more likely to find vulnerabilities in mozilla..
The black hats, are more likely to find holes in ie because the white hats will quickly find and fix the low hanging fruit from mozilla, but this does mean more publicly disclosed vulneratilities in the short term.
Firefox has only just appeared on the radar for most security researchers.. And the sourcecode is available, so ofcourse there will be more vulnerabilities discovered for a short time..
However it will settle down after a while..
Also remember that all the beta versions of firefox are in the public eye, how many vulnerabilities did microsoft fix in beta versions of ie that the world never got to hear about?
How?
I would like to run 2003 headless here..
Not to mention the mandatory gui, wasting your resources multiplied by the number of nodes you have..
But now that you mention it.. there is one windows based cluster in the top500 list, it consists of about 640 dual 2.8ghz dell poweredge 2650 machines..
About 100 places above it, is a redhat 7.1 based cluster running on 600 dual 2.8ghz dell poweredge 2650 machines..
The windows cluster is only there, because microsoft paid a LOT of money to build it.. I doubt anyone will build a windows based cluster unless microsoft pays for it, especially considering the performance difference between linux on the same hardware.
Bittorrent doesn`t work very well with nat..
Also, if multiple machines are behind the same nat and downloading the same file then bittorrent should be smart enough to only bring 1 copy of the file down through the natbox and distribute it throughout the local peers..
Because as long as windows is a dominant desktop os, microsoft will be able to make it difficult for those few running anything else in an attempt to force them over....
Working alongside would be all well and good, if we had truly open standards in the industry.
However, msoffice often has the same problems, in some cases they are worse than openoffice at opening their own documents... Especially if you have a mix of different versions..
Also, if you ever tried to use ms publisher to import/export word files, it makes a much bigger mess of it than openoffice does, microsoft's own app, written by people who have full access to sourcecode and file format specs!
If you use microsoft's proprietary format, you will have problems opening files whatever program you use, this problem will always occur with a format so poorly designed.