This is a very ineffective way of solving the problem. You remove the symptoms but not the root cause of the problem. You still have more than a million computers constantly trying to infect/crack other computers. And it's taking up a majority of the bandwidth on many networks.
The point is to go after the ISP's and make them responsible, but only in part. The ultimate responsiblity relies on the end user who owns the infected computer. It should be the ISP's responsibility to notify/contain those computers that are causing the damage.
When Code Red was first on the scene, there were reports of several ISP's who suspended certain accounts pending proof that the customers computers had been cleaned and updated to prevent reinfection.
If this practice by the ISP had become more main stream then many of the problems today would at least be reduced.
With a multi billion dollar reported earnings last year and well over 50% of the internet traffic, your arguements are far too little, far too late. There is a lot of information that can be gathered on the origins of spam.
But what do you do with that information? I can go through my mail logs daily and get a list of owned DSL/Cablemodem users. But when I've attempted to contact the ISP's about these owned machines and having them approach their customers, they do nothing. The closest I came was the response from my own ISP, "You aren't supposed to run a mail server on your machine." If I depended upon their mail server I would be inundated with spam.
Considering the damage and costs involved, I would have expected the ISP's to take more action then they have, but then it's a matter of economics. They are not responsible for the security of the network, which is a good thing. If they were, their reaction would be too Draconian.
My opinion is that the ISP should be responsible for identification and elimination of owned machines on their subnets, or at least to help others achieve that goal. This can all be done today without taking some heavy handed approach to the matter, I just hope that fact doesn't get lost in the process.
These have been around for a few years now in Europe. You can find a ton of stuff here that specializes in low power, low noise computers.
While I have not been using one of these for MultiMedia applications, I have been using them for mail and web servers. They are excellent machines, but I can't afford the Hush computers.
But I think that they are on the right track of making silent computers. We don't really need that much horsepower to check email and do 99% of our jobs
This one is a silly bug for him to mention. The problem comes up when you want to have intelligent part numbers where two digits, though next to each other, are not to be construed as a base 10 representation.
This particular bug is something that I consider to be a great example of someone who really pisses me off. He is assuming that I will always want things sorted a certain way and that it will never ever change. He sounds like Microsoft and their Stupid Cow design methodology
Hello, This is your operating system. I noticed you attempting to do something. I think you want to do 'X' so I'll just go ahead and do it for you...
No I didn't. I wanted to do it that way. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You only think you want to do it that way but in reality you really want to do it my way. So I'll just pop off and take care of it for you.
Push off! I want it the way I want it and now I want you to push off! I'm sorry you feel like that. I've reported you to the Department of Homeland Security for being a non-conformist
I think you found your ethical beliefs eroded by the intrusions of reality.
No matter how you quit smoking, you can only succeed by making that decision to quit and then figuring out how to get on with the rest of your life. That's the only way I've ever seen do it without relapsing later on. And yes, my wife and I smoked for years. Cold Turkey tests the metal.
Similarly, the decision to take a bribe on an issue or not is independent of the amount of money involved. If it's a matter of degree, then you are one of those who has preferential ethical erosion rather than any true integrity.
But this is irrelevant. No one who wants that position will have the integrity necessary to do the right thing. You have to be a whore to get there in the first place.
Before I left Government contracting, they were in a fierce cost reduction effort after the fall of USSR. This was necessary simply because there was no more funding for the military spending arena.
What's really shameful for the military is that while they made some real progress in cost reductions and beaurocratic simplification in hardware, it seems that they've completely failed when it comes to software.
Everyone with any experience with software will understand that
going with a mono-culture may or may not actually save problems.
Custom software, especially for an OS, is going to be VERY expensive
And going with a Microsoft Custom package is fantastically stupid. This is obviously a case of a beaurocratic decision being made and not a militarily based one. Fortunately it doesn't say that the new F-22 will be flying with XP SP2 installed.
But I'm pretty certain that the USAF is wasting their money thinking they can get better security by paying extra for an "early warning" security update program with MSFT. It just means they'll be the first one's to find out that the patch doesn't work.
Looks like somewhere around $8,000 US maybe? Not sure. It is not easy to find on the net regardless of what some bone head things. zapworld doesn't list prices.
With a little more details avaible on the costs it might be worth looking into.
But second is a far more damaging effect. If you read the FT story it is very clear that the journalist is calling this a clear case of bribery. Now why would you bribe a witness unless the witness has really seen something? I give it a couple more years before most of the real press will have decided that yes MS is a clearly corrupt company. This will cast suspicion on all their dealings.
How old are you? You seem to be ignorant of the fact that this kind of behaviour has been going on with MSFT longer then the Internet has been public. The real press, as you so delicately put it, will do nothing. They can't sell copies based on some geeky shit like this. It's Mad Cow and Presidential blowjobs that sell papers.
Many people that I talk to are in strict denial about all of this MSFT Monopoly thing. They either dismiss it as Free Market and Capitalism at it's finest or simply can't cope with the idea of an alternative.
Microsoft is fucking huge! I don't think anyone really understands how much power that brings. Until you can find someone who will refuse a $250 million bribe you won't get anywhere. It's going to take some extremely ethical people to turn Microsoft around. And I don't see them in business or politics.
Anyone who has used Debian or Gentoo will know that these dependency problems that they speak of are all a problem related to RPM.
Did anyone else notice that all the package management tools they cited are all RPM centric? Hmmm.. Maybe they missed the point the Gentoo's emerge and Debians dpkg (apt-get) don't have these problems.
I don't know what to think about this article other than it's suffering from some denial of the reality of the situation.
Now for the troll points: if every just built everything for Debian, there wouldn't be a problem with dependencies would there?
And I'm sure now I'll hear about the millions that didn't have a great success story. Well, we have all had someone piss in our wheaties at some point in our lives. But for me, Debian has never failed me.
Cable Modem services charging in excess of $50 a month and inconsistent in performance.
DSL availability is limited and also very expensive.
The US DSL high speed network costs are generally higher than most other nations.
It's expensive and oppressed with corporate rules and regulations of what you can and can't do with it, your selection of OS, the networks you can access, and the protocols you are allowed to use.
Certificates only indicate that you MAY have the capability to meet the requirements requested in the certification process. But it is not gaurantee of future quality. I worked in Quality Assurance for 10 years. I know the value of a Certificate. It's merely an indication of demonstrated capability against a predefined set of requirements.
Postgresql has a higher entry barrier than MySQL
I have a very good idea what J2EE is all about, but to compare it to PHP is even less accurate than trying to compare it to Perl
I realize that this article won't get much review here other than, "Yeah, right!". But I think that's underrating what this persons thinking represents. From the perspective of stock investments he has a very good point for modding up Sun (SUNW, not SUN). What I am about to state herein is not my personal opinions, but the opinions that have been expressed to me by people who are shills, tools, and investors.
Sun has an established history and Name Recognition with corporations as being an Enterprise product with lots of Enterprise Support. The Name Recognition comes from decades of successful implimentation of Sun Servers in thousands of corporations. The fact that their recent performance has been less than stellar hasn't gone unnoticed. But companies are very slow to migrate their OS and if they can avoid it they'll save money. At least that's their thinking. They hate change and they hate risk.
Corporations hate any kind of change, unless they are the harbinger of that change.
The Enterprise Support that Sun has over RedHat comes in the flavor of really huge support contract houses like EDS. Much larger with a longer history than RedHat itself. EDS has proven itself mostly useful for most corporations throughout the last 15 years of history.
Generally speaking the fact that RedHat is Open Source or GPL or FOSS doesn't really mean anything to corporations. They spend millions of dollars on this stuff and if the price is too low, they'll assume that something is wrong, not that it's a cost savings. Would you buy a car for $500 that was labelled "new"?
Solaris 10 going Open Source might actually hurt them if they Corporate mindset is against Open Source as a doctrine. Where I work, they unilaterally reject anything that can be associated with GNU, GPL, FREE, Open Source and use that as a mechanism to reject many ideas. However they are also completely dependent upon Apache, Perl, Python. But it's OK. These are installed on Solaris Servers and are Supported by EDS. See, it's covered.
Where this guy misses the mark is the same area that SUNW messed up. They assume that by simply going Open Source you will have a active community over night. You have to build it. That's going to take a huge investment and a lot of non-corporate minded choices being made. I am sceptical that SUN can do this. I think there was an article where someone said, "See me in two years". I think that's about right.
I think the SUNW stock will lift short term because of pondits like this, then it will drop and then it will be two years from now...
That's how I like my fire. Much more capable than MySQL or PHP.
So who do people compare LAMP to J2EE? Because they are both application development approaches that are crawling with cheap plentiful labor. Any dweeb can set up LAMP with a minimal understanding of reliability, security, or fundamental concepts. Please do not construe this as a statement that all LAMP developers are dweebs. But the entry barrier is low.
Similarly the entry barrier to J2EE can be artificially low because all you need is a certificate to wave around and some PHB will hire you. My work has hired a series of J2EE developer contract houses and they are without question the dumbest bunch of assholes I've ever worked with in my life. They are fundamentally clueless on how to write good code, but they are just so cheap!
The entry barrier to Mason and Postgresql are much higher. Not because they suck, but because of what they can do and what they can't do. Once you get started it's pretty amazing what you can do.
It's the higher entry barrier that helps insure that the developers you do get are better qualified in terms of fundamentals, security, and reliability.
Oh yeah, PHP and J2EE are different beasts. You would be better off comparing J2EE and mod_perl variants for a more similar architecture.
I've been around a variety of distributions of Linux and for dependency resolution, IMHO, the best is far and away Debian. They use a tool called apt-get. Perhaps you've heard of apt4rpm?
Where do you thing the RPM package managers got the idea for apt4rpm? Debian. They have an excellent dependency management system and with their tiered product release of unstable, testing, and stable, they have any kind of distro you want, from rock solid to bleeding edge to hemorrhaging at the seams.
I don't think it would be that difficult to provide generic API's for various drivers. But you first have to establish generic hardware that uses those drivers.
How many drivers are there for EIDE hard drives? Answer: one
How many drivers are there for PCMCIA Wireless NIC's? Answer: Too many to count
How many drivers are there for PCMCIA protocol? Answer: two or three
The older technology has settled down to a precious few protocols and they have been arund long enough to evolve into generic chipsets and generic enough hardware that it's no longer an issue. But when everyone single company is trying to develope hardware that doesn't follow any standard protocols, you can not have a generic API interface.
USB has settled down reasonably well, but it's still a bit flakey from time to time. But not nearly as oftwn as it once was. There are probably hundreds of examples like this. Remember the Micro Channel Architecture?
If you want simplicity, then Linux should probably only support the best of breed technologies. As an example, they might only provide API's for UW-SCSI-2, SATA, USB, Firewire, PCI-X and forget the rest of the architectures that are out there.
But isn't that kind of what SUN did? Provide a limited, but highly compatable, set of hardware for their operating system. Where are they now? Where were they ten years ago?
You ask for generic API's and yet you also ask for ultimate flexibility and choice. Which one is more important to you will decide your direction. And for this, Linux may very well fork, but the invariant one will always fail.
The point of my argument was that it's absolutely annoying to no end to hear people claim that just because a piece of software is open source, it can't be that software's fault. Certainly at some point in ones life, they have to accept the things that they like as "good" without needing to consider it "flawless."
No where did I ever say FireFox was innocent. But I would recommend a more thorough avenue of Root Cause Analysis by making sure that there is nothing in the core OS which changed between the pre-release and the final release.
If nothing changed (no updates or downloads from MSFT) then that should be cited and recognized as a point of consideration.
I'm not in any way suggesting that FireFox is bug free. That would be, as you have already stated, unrealistic. I'm simply suggesting that bugs are sometimes not internal to a single application but the result of poor interaction between two applications or through the API
Yes and No. They don't have a Black Ops department specifically, but there is more than sufficient evidence that Microsoft has taken deliberate and misleading actions to discredit the competition. Case in point: Dr-DOS, WordPerfect. There are probably others as well, but I don't feel it necessary to conduct those searches. After all, they have been convicted on two continents of these behaviors already. It's not Black Ops per se, but they appear compete by oppression not innovation.
Your statement about voting with your pocket book is encouraging. But there is a tremendous perception that must be overcome first. Many of the problems that present a global shift from Microsoft to Linux (or any other) are non-technical. People are used to the interface. They are convinced they won't be able to do what they do today. They are unfamiliar with the concept of a command line interface. And most of them do not want to become sys admins.
I think a lot of Linux OSes are fast approaching a viable solution to the non-technical consumer. The risk is that they are also becoming just another Microsoft through poor customer support, veiled documentation.
I don't think FireFox is bug free. But considering that this is an Anonymous post and that it is discrediting an Open Source application in direct competition of one of MSFT's cornerstones products. I think it would be prudent to exercise some caution. Nothing more.
As for me, I have been Microsoft Free for over five years.
I know you aren't serious about this. At least I hope now, otherwise I'm wasting my time responding to a troll. But you may actually have some truth in what you say.
My first question to ask the original poster would be, "Have you done any OS updates between the two versions?" It would not surprise me in the least if MSFT was busy making patches to interfere with the FireFox application.
You might consider me a troll, but you do have to first recognize the rather extensive number of current lawsuits, convictions, investigations, and other forms of inquiry that Microsoft is currently trying to defend for just this kind of behavior.
Before you accuse the FireFox application of having a problem with Windows you had better prove the Windows doesn't have a problem with FireFox. Based on past performance I would trust FireFox long before I would trust Microsoft.
And you would be better off posting to Mozilla.org instead of trying to effectively FUD the competition against MSIE.
I finally figured out how to simplify all this tech support for the family stuff.
When they start belly-aching to me about how fucked up Windows is, I hand them a Debian installation CD.
I offer unlimited free support for family members running Debian. Support that I can for other distros like RedHat and SuSE. And nothing for anything Microsoft.
Debian is my distro of choice. But my brother runs with SuSE right now. It's been a few years since he started using Linux and he may never become some uber-geek, but he and I stick with it and I help him all I can.
My in-laws are all MSFT fanatics so I don't talk to them about it much. They bitch about virus and spyware problems and I smile. They know my position and if they ever cared to try it out I would spend weekends with them.
I even gave my daughter a notebook PC on the grounds that she only runs Linux on it. She didn't care, it has some cool games and does what she wants it to.
But until then, I get to enjoy the turkey and stuffing and good company all tech-support free!
It might carry more force than you suspect. I'm not sure but I suspect that a majority of the EU nations have ratified it, to such an extent that it might be expected that the EU will enforce it through sanctions and other economic incentives.
You have to realize that last year when Bush changed to laws on Steel production and export/import it wasn't because he wanted to, it was because the EU forced him to change the laws of the US. And they knew and that is exactly what they intended on doing.
The consolidation of the EU has resulted in their becoming the new Super Power. While they do not have the military forces to claim the title, they have greater economic and representative influences on the World economies, organizations, and the UN.
The consequences, if we refuse to do anything because it might harm our economy, could be much more damaging to our economy if the rest of the world decides to exercise Trade Sanctions against us. After all, we import just about everything.
Why don't they have a 2005 target? Why did they set the implementation date so far into the future? If reducing CO2 emissions is important, shouldn't those concerned start reducing today?
Because the amount of effort involved is amazing. While I believe it's vitally important that we do what we can and now, you simply can't tell industries to discard the technology they use today that are still economically viable for minor gain.
The problem is two fold:
No industry will willingly replace anything without a cost benefit to it. It simply won't happen. The only possible method to get them to change is to either offer a cost saving alternative or a very expensive price to not migrate.
The other problem is that for a lot of sectors of industry and consumer patterns, there are no alternatives that are truely viable.
Take myself. I live in a house. There may be things I can do to lower my costs. But industry takes up a huge majority of the green house gas generation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very ineffective way of solving the problem. You remove the symptoms but not the root cause of the problem. You still have more than a million computers constantly trying to infect/crack other computers. And it's taking up a majority of the bandwidth on many networks.
The point is to go after the ISP's and make them responsible, but only in part. The ultimate responsiblity relies on the end user who owns the infected computer. It should be the ISP's responsibility to notify/contain those computers that are causing the damage.
When Code Red was first on the scene, there were reports of several ISP's who suspended certain accounts pending proof that the customers computers had been cleaned and updated to prevent reinfection.
If this practice by the ISP had become more main stream then many of the problems today would at least be reduced.
This is the draconian measures part of the problem. As it is, most of my email I have to relay through my ISP because of DYNDNS-RBLS
And even that doesn't fix any of the problems.
With a multi billion dollar reported earnings last year and well over 50% of the internet traffic, your arguements are far too little, far too late. There is a lot of information that can be gathered on the origins of spam.
But what do you do with that information? I can go through my mail logs daily and get a list of owned DSL/Cablemodem users. But when I've attempted to contact the ISP's about these owned machines and having them approach their customers, they do nothing. The closest I came was the response from my own ISP, "You aren't supposed to run a mail server on your machine." If I depended upon their mail server I would be inundated with spam.
Considering the damage and costs involved, I would have expected the ISP's to take more action then they have, but then it's a matter of economics. They are not responsible for the security of the network, which is a good thing. If they were, their reaction would be too Draconian.
My opinion is that the ISP should be responsible for identification and elimination of owned machines on their subnets, or at least to help others achieve that goal. This can all be done today without taking some heavy handed approach to the matter, I just hope that fact doesn't get lost in the process.
These have been around for a few years now in Europe. You can find a ton of stuff here that specializes in low power, low noise computers.
While I have not been using one of these for MultiMedia applications, I have been using them for mail and web servers. They are excellent machines, but I can't afford the Hush computers.
But I think that they are on the right track of making silent computers. We don't really need that much horsepower to check email and do 99% of our jobs
Horsepower is over rated.
Obviously what the OP overlooked is not the problem of sorting on ASCII versus numbers, but the fact that there are more than one nation in the world.
We'll have to work on that just as soon as we finish the rest of the Republican Agenda...
ASCII Sort
This one is a silly bug for him to mention. The problem comes up when you want to have intelligent part numbers where two digits, though next to each other, are not to be construed as a base 10 representation.
This particular bug is something that I consider to be a great example of someone who really pisses me off. He is assuming that I will always want things sorted a certain way and that it will never ever change. He sounds like Microsoft and their Stupid Cow design methodology
Hello, This is your operating system. I noticed you attempting to do something. I think you want to do 'X' so I'll just go ahead and do it for you...
No I didn't. I wanted to do it that way.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You only think you want to do it that way but in reality you really want to do it my way. So I'll just pop off and take care of it for you.
Push off! I want it the way I want it and now I want you to push off!
I'm sorry you feel like that. I've reported you to the Department of Homeland Security for being a non-conformist
THX-1138 anyone?
Fucking Great!
More Pop-Ups! Only now their in the OS!!
I think you found your ethical beliefs eroded by the intrusions of reality.
No matter how you quit smoking, you can only succeed by making that decision to quit and then figuring out how to get on with the rest of your life. That's the only way I've ever seen do it without relapsing later on. And yes, my wife and I smoked for years. Cold Turkey tests the metal.
Similarly, the decision to take a bribe on an issue or not is independent of the amount of money involved. If it's a matter of degree, then you are one of those who has preferential ethical erosion rather than any true integrity.
But this is irrelevant. No one who wants that position will have the integrity necessary to do the right thing. You have to be a whore to get there in the first place.
Before I left Government contracting, they were in a fierce cost reduction effort after the fall of USSR. This was necessary simply because there was no more funding for the military spending arena.
What's really shameful for the military is that while they made some real progress in cost reductions and beaurocratic simplification in hardware, it seems that they've completely failed when it comes to software.
Everyone with any experience with software will understand that
And going with a Microsoft Custom package is fantastically stupid. This is obviously a case of a beaurocratic decision being made and not a militarily based one. Fortunately it doesn't say that the new F-22 will be flying with XP SP2 installed.
But I'm pretty certain that the USAF is wasting their money thinking they can get better security by paying extra for an "early warning" security update program with MSFT. It just means they'll be the first one's to find out that the patch doesn't work.
Looks like somewhere around $8,000 US maybe? Not sure. It is not easy to find on the net regardless of what some bone head things. zapworld doesn't list prices.
With a little more details avaible on the costs it might be worth looking into.
How old are you? You seem to be ignorant of the fact that this kind of behaviour has been going on with MSFT longer then the Internet has been public. The real press, as you so delicately put it, will do nothing. They can't sell copies based on some geeky shit like this. It's Mad Cow and Presidential blowjobs that sell papers.
Many people that I talk to are in strict denial about all of this MSFT Monopoly thing. They either dismiss it as Free Market and Capitalism at it's finest or simply can't cope with the idea of an alternative.
Microsoft is fucking huge! I don't think anyone really understands how much power that brings. Until you can find someone who will refuse a $250 million bribe you won't get anywhere. It's going to take some extremely ethical people to turn Microsoft around. And I don't see them in business or politics.
This is a silly project.
Anyone who has used Debian or Gentoo will know that these dependency problems that they speak of are all a problem related to RPM.
Did anyone else notice that all the package management tools they cited are all RPM centric? Hmmm.. Maybe they missed the point the Gentoo's emerge and Debians dpkg (apt-get) don't have these problems.
I don't know what to think about this article other than it's suffering from some denial of the reality of the situation.
Now for the troll points: if every just built everything for Debian, there wouldn't be a problem with dependencies would there?
And I'm sure now I'll hear about the millions that didn't have a great success story. Well, we have all had someone piss in our wheaties at some point in our lives. But for me, Debian has never failed me.
Cable Modem services charging in excess of $50 a month and inconsistent in performance.
DSL availability is limited and also very expensive.
The US DSL high speed network costs are generally higher than most other nations.
It's expensive and oppressed with corporate rules and regulations of what you can and can't do with it, your selection of OS, the networks you can access, and the protocols you are allowed to use.
Obviously you are one of those Java People.
Certificates only indicate that you MAY have the capability to meet the requirements requested in the certification process. But it is not gaurantee of future quality. I worked in Quality Assurance for 10 years. I know the value of a Certificate. It's merely an indication of demonstrated capability against a predefined set of requirements.
Postgresql has a higher entry barrier than MySQL
I have a very good idea what J2EE is all about, but to compare it to PHP is even less accurate than trying to compare it to Perl
I realize that this article won't get much review here other than, "Yeah, right!". But I think that's underrating what this persons thinking represents. From the perspective of stock investments he has a very good point for modding up Sun (SUNW, not SUN). What I am about to state herein is not my personal opinions, but the opinions that have been expressed to me by people who are shills, tools, and investors.
Sun has an established history and Name Recognition with corporations as being an Enterprise product with lots of Enterprise Support. The Name Recognition comes from decades of successful implimentation of Sun Servers in thousands of corporations. The fact that their recent performance has been less than stellar hasn't gone unnoticed. But companies are very slow to migrate their OS and if they can avoid it they'll save money. At least that's their thinking. They hate change and they hate risk.
Corporations hate any kind of change, unless they are the harbinger of that change.
The Enterprise Support that Sun has over RedHat comes in the flavor of really huge support contract houses like EDS. Much larger with a longer history than RedHat itself. EDS has proven itself mostly useful for most corporations throughout the last 15 years of history.
Generally speaking the fact that RedHat is Open Source or GPL or FOSS doesn't really mean anything to corporations. They spend millions of dollars on this stuff and if the price is too low, they'll assume that something is wrong, not that it's a cost savings. Would you buy a car for $500 that was labelled "new"?
Solaris 10 going Open Source might actually hurt them if they Corporate mindset is against Open Source as a doctrine. Where I work, they unilaterally reject anything that can be associated with GNU, GPL, FREE, Open Source and use that as a mechanism to reject many ideas. However they are also completely dependent upon Apache, Perl, Python. But it's OK. These are installed on Solaris Servers and are Supported by EDS. See, it's covered.
Where this guy misses the mark is the same area that SUNW messed up. They assume that by simply going Open Source you will have a active community over night. You have to build it. That's going to take a huge investment and a lot of non-corporate minded choices being made. I am sceptical that SUN can do this. I think there was an article where someone said, "See me in two years". I think that's about right.
I think the SUNW stock will lift short term because of pondits like this, then it will drop and then it will be two years from now...
Apache
Mason:HTML
Postgresql
That's how I like my fire. Much more capable than MySQL or PHP.
So who do people compare LAMP to J2EE? Because they are both application development approaches that are crawling with cheap plentiful labor. Any dweeb can set up LAMP with a minimal understanding of reliability, security, or fundamental concepts. Please do not construe this as a statement that all LAMP developers are dweebs. But the entry barrier is low.
Similarly the entry barrier to J2EE can be artificially low because all you need is a certificate to wave around and some PHB will hire you. My work has hired a series of J2EE developer contract houses and they are without question the dumbest bunch of assholes I've ever worked with in my life. They are fundamentally clueless on how to write good code, but they are just so cheap!
The entry barrier to Mason and Postgresql are much higher. Not because they suck, but because of what they can do and what they can't do. Once you get started it's pretty amazing what you can do.
It's the higher entry barrier that helps insure that the developers you do get are better qualified in terms of fundamentals, security, and reliability.
Oh yeah, PHP and J2EE are different beasts. You would be better off comparing J2EE and mod_perl variants for a more similar architecture.
I've been around a variety of distributions of Linux and for dependency resolution, IMHO, the best is far and away Debian. They use a tool called apt-get. Perhaps you've heard of apt4rpm?
Where do you thing the RPM package managers got the idea for apt4rpm? Debian. They have an excellent dependency management system and with their tiered product release of unstable, testing, and stable, they have any kind of distro you want, from rock solid to bleeding edge to hemorrhaging at the seams.
I don't think it would be that difficult to provide generic API's for various drivers. But you first have to establish generic hardware that uses those drivers.
How many drivers are there for EIDE hard drives? Answer: one
How many drivers are there for PCMCIA Wireless NIC's? Answer: Too many to count
How many drivers are there for PCMCIA protocol? Answer: two or three
The older technology has settled down to a precious few protocols and they have been arund long enough to evolve into generic chipsets and generic enough hardware that it's no longer an issue. But when everyone single company is trying to develope hardware that doesn't follow any standard protocols, you can not have a generic API interface.
USB has settled down reasonably well, but it's still a bit flakey from time to time. But not nearly as oftwn as it once was. There are probably hundreds of examples like this. Remember the Micro Channel Architecture?
If you want simplicity, then Linux should probably only support the best of breed technologies. As an example, they might only provide API's for UW-SCSI-2, SATA, USB, Firewire, PCI-X and forget the rest of the architectures that are out there.
But isn't that kind of what SUN did? Provide a limited, but highly compatable, set of hardware for their operating system. Where are they now? Where were they ten years ago?
You ask for generic API's and yet you also ask for ultimate flexibility and choice. Which one is more important to you will decide your direction. And for this, Linux may very well fork, but the invariant one will always fail.
My flash plugin is OK, but I'm also running an old version of FireFox.
But this is the most informative thing I've seen here, other than the multiple comments about MSFT security patches have an effect.
No where did I ever say FireFox was innocent. But I would recommend a more thorough avenue of Root Cause Analysis by making sure that there is nothing in the core OS which changed between the pre-release and the final release.
If nothing changed (no updates or downloads from MSFT) then that should be cited and recognized as a point of consideration.
To reply to your items:
Your statement about voting with your pocket book is encouraging. But there is a tremendous perception that must be overcome first. Many of the problems that present a global shift from Microsoft to Linux (or any other) are non-technical. People are used to the interface. They are convinced they won't be able to do what they do today. They are unfamiliar with the concept of a command line interface. And most of them do not want to become sys admins.
I think a lot of Linux OSes are fast approaching a viable solution to the non-technical consumer. The risk is that they are also becoming just another Microsoft through poor customer support, veiled documentation.
I don't think FireFox is bug free. But considering that this is an Anonymous post and that it is discrediting an Open Source application in direct competition of one of MSFT's cornerstones products. I think it would be prudent to exercise some caution. Nothing more.
As for me, I have been Microsoft Free for over five years.
I know you aren't serious about this. At least I hope now, otherwise I'm wasting my time responding to a troll. But you may actually have some truth in what you say.
My first question to ask the original poster would be, "Have you done any OS updates between the two versions?" It would not surprise me in the least if MSFT was busy making patches to interfere with the FireFox application.
You might consider me a troll, but you do have to first recognize the rather extensive number of current lawsuits, convictions, investigations, and other forms of inquiry that Microsoft is currently trying to defend for just this kind of behavior.
Before you accuse the FireFox application of having a problem with Windows you had better prove the Windows doesn't have a problem with FireFox. Based on past performance I would trust FireFox long before I would trust Microsoft.
And you would be better off posting to Mozilla.org instead of trying to effectively FUD the competition against MSIE.
I finally figured out how to simplify all this tech support for the family stuff.
When they start belly-aching to me about how fucked up Windows is, I hand them a Debian installation CD.
I offer unlimited free support for family members running Debian. Support that I can for other distros like RedHat and SuSE. And nothing for anything Microsoft.
Debian is my distro of choice. But my brother runs with SuSE right now. It's been a few years since he started using Linux and he may never become some uber-geek, but he and I stick with it and I help him all I can.
My in-laws are all MSFT fanatics so I don't talk to them about it much. They bitch about virus and spyware problems and I smile. They know my position and if they ever cared to try it out I would spend weekends with them.
I even gave my daughter a notebook PC on the grounds that she only runs Linux on it. She didn't care, it has some cool games and does what she wants it to.
But until then, I get to enjoy the turkey and stuffing and good company all tech-support free!
It might carry more force than you suspect. I'm not sure but I suspect that a majority of the EU nations have ratified it, to such an extent that it might be expected that the EU will enforce it through sanctions and other economic incentives.
You have to realize that last year when Bush changed to laws on Steel production and export/import it wasn't because he wanted to, it was because the EU forced him to change the laws of the US. And they knew and that is exactly what they intended on doing.
The consolidation of the EU has resulted in their becoming the new Super Power. While they do not have the military forces to claim the title, they have greater economic and representative influences on the World economies, organizations, and the UN.
The consequences, if we refuse to do anything because it might harm our economy, could be much more damaging to our economy if the rest of the world decides to exercise Trade Sanctions against us. After all, we import just about everything.
Because the amount of effort involved is amazing. While I believe it's vitally important that we do what we can and now, you simply can't tell industries to discard the technology they use today that are still economically viable for minor gain.
The problem is two fold:
Take myself. I live in a house. There may be things I can do to lower my costs. But industry takes up a huge majority of the green house gas generation.