Actually the Apache install base is not a good measure of the linux install base. Netcraft at one time tracked operating systems but they stopped sometime in 2001.
However, the older Netcraft surveys do suggest a significant linux presence and the author of the NBR article is misrepresenting the article to which he references.
Based on old Netcraft surveys linux likely has around a 30% market share in web servers and Windows has around 50%. That is far from tiny and insignificant and based on information from the report to which the NBR article refers I suspect that linux market share may be increasing.
And for anyone who actualy reads the IDC article to which the NBR tripe refers they will discover that while linux only holds 11.5% of quarterly revenues for servers shipped from large system builders, which again is not tiny and insignificant, the growth of linux revenue and shipments is 3 to 4 times that of Windows. So with Windows server revenue at $12 billion and linux revenue at $1 billion and 3 to 4 times the growth it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that linux is going to eat somebodies lunch.
The author of the NBR article seems to have a preconcieved notion of the world around him and even when he reads contradictory facts he maintains his illusion.
Agreed. This guy is just pissed off that his favorite convicted monopolist is not going to get a free ride from his government.
The funny thing is he can only back up his view of how things out to be by attacking the people instead of the issue and using paid for reports and studies as counter points. But this seems to be his MO:
Sorry but you shouldn't believe everything you read.
The Red Hat Enterprise distribution includes some trademarks, logos and what not, but it is in no way proprietary. You can download all the source code directly from Red Hat's own ftp servers for free. And you can even create your own linux distribution based off the source, however, you must remove the trademark logos and what not before you distribute as you are not Red Hat.
If you don't believe then try checking out http://centos.org/ Or just peruse the Red Hat website and read their licensing agreements for their products.
It seems you've bought into FUD spread by both the anti-OSS crowd saying "...Red Hat is no different, its proprietary just like Windows..." and the Red Hat bashing linux elitists "...Red Hat is the next Microsoft, they took our linux and made it proprietary...". Its all BS.
There ya go, and the coward proves my point. Not once did I say abolish any laws and in reality THERE ARE NO IP LAWS. Don't you get it? There are no laws to protect the crap floating around in your head, the laws are there to protect what you produce from your ideas. Those pushing this conecept of IP are trying to confuse and befuddle everyone so they can claim ownership of thoughts and ideas in peoples heads.
And if you think this is about creating new movies, writing original novels, or utilizing skill to create art work you are completely brain washed. This is about making money off those who do exactly that. It is not about protecting or assisting them, its about claiming ownership of the skills of those who create by those who do not.
But you go right ahead and swallow all that crap and wave it over your head like some symbolic flag worthy of pride.
"In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s."
Wrong, the reason intellectual property has been recieving a lot more attention is because its the easiest way to milk capital from a technology dependant society without having to actually produce anything. Don't get me wrong, there are some valid legal complaints in the courts but, as most people here have noted over and over again, many of the companies submitting these complaints don't actually produce anything, they simply lay claim to some idea, label it as Intellectual Property, and make plans to profit from the work of others.
This whole Intellectual Property scam has got to go. So keep these concepts in mind in your day to day workings:
Copyrights are not Intellectual Property. Somebody did some significant work to express a story, a concept, an solution, whatever, in a written document, a film, a painting, a song, etc., and once the expression was completed the duplication of that expression is easy and inexpensive due to the technology we have for duplication and distribution. The copyright provides protection to those who expressed the work, however, the expression is NOT INTELLECTUAL! Its a peice of paper, a plastic disk, magnetic media inside a harddrive, its no longer intellectual. Since it is so easy to duplicate the work that has been done a copyright is a nice protection to those who did the work so that they may have some say over the duplication and distribution. If however, somebody comes up with a similar idea or is even influenced by someone elses expression and they go through and do the work over again then they have not infringed on anyones copyright or intellectual property.
Trademarks are not intellectual property. If you concieve a name, an image, whatever, and you express that conception onto paper, in writing, in any way, and you register it as your trademark then you can use the registration to ensure that others do not use your trademark in ways that would confuse others as you or your product. However, again, this physical thing which is an expression is no longer intellectual. The final product, the trademark is not some intangible asset, if it was intangible it would be useless.
Patents are not intellectual property. You come up with an idea and build a prototype or write down a conceptual design and present this for registration at the patent office so you will have the opportunity to profit from the idea by producing an end product. And once again none of the end results are intellectual, they are hard cold physical results. Even software code is physical, the CPU doesn't read your mind to run the code and the RAM and harddrive on which it is stored is not some magical ethereal thing, its a tangible chunk of hardware you use when you do the work of turning the ideas into something.
I think this entire intellectual property circus is just a scam to confuse the masses and make them believe that any thought in their head belongs to some corporation somewhere for whom they should be working. And nobody should be attempting to do any work outside of what they do for the corporation as that would in some way be stealing some "intangible asset" from the company. Well forget it, its just one big smoke and mirrors freak show designed to rape the masses for every penny they have and any penny they may ever have.
I mean really, can you believe this crap, "As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets". Does anybody really believe that everyone is paying all this cash to companies in America because some marketing guy, the salesman, and the chair slinging CEO said "I have this great idea, and if you pay me I'll tell you wh
Perhaps I am getting the wrong impression, but it seems you are implying that the article lacks "Intellectual Honesty" and yet you yourself point out that it clearly states in the article that linux is "regarded as" more secure.
Your implication and the article seem to be in contradiction. Anyhow, since you brought up the issue I'd like to point out a few flaws in your arguement:
Firefox was "regarded as" bullet proof until it started gaining market share, and as soon as it did, there came the holes.
I think there is some truth the to bullet proof remark as many people assumed there would be no holes in Firefox because they had not seen continual bug reports like they had seen for the Intenet Explorer counter part. However, I think there is still some justification to the perception of a more secure product from the mozilla foundation than from Microsoft. I am basing this opinion off the statistics at secunia.com:
Pay close attention to the statistics charts and you can draw the following conclusions: 1) The rate at which bugs are found in the two applications is very nearly the same. On average about 2 per month for each application.
2) Internet Explorer tends to have more bugs which are unpatched or partialy fixed. Fire Fox is much better at patching.
3) The severity of the bugs found in Internet Explorer tend to be much higher than those of Fire Fox. The bugs in Internet Explorer are more than 3 times likely to be of extreme severity when compared to Fire Fox.
4) And more of the bugs found in Internet Explorer tend to give system access when exploited than Fire Fox bugs.
So the perception that Fire Fox is more secure than Internet Explorer is justified. But bullet proof, far from it.
The Linux market is so incredibly tiny that no hacker looking to make money takes the time to hack Linux.
Somehow I doubt that most of the hackers out there do what they do to make money. But I'm more concerned with you "incredibly tiny" market share theory. Perhaps in desktops the linux market share is small, however, there are a significant number of linux servers out there especially in the web server space. I tried searching for data but the only thing I could find was some old 2001 data from a Netcraft survey.
But based on that survey in June of 2001 there were about 8.5 million linux web servers alone. That is 29% of the market. And if the market share numbers are the same today that number is over 21 million. So I'd say there are plenty of linux boxes just waiting to be hacked.
And interestingly, when you compare the secunia reports for similar products, Windows 2003 Web Server and Red Hat Enterprise AS 3, you find similar results to the web browsers:
One may look at the number of reported vulnerabilities and say ooh open source security sucks, but then when you dig a little deeper you see that on average Windows security bugs are patched slower, the severity is greater, and they are more likely to provide system access if exploited.
Others spread FUD about MS just as much as MS spreads FUD about Linux.
I'd say its rather dishonest to put some Slashdot poster FUD on the same level as the expensive marketing campaigns used by Microsoft to spread FUD. Not quite the same thing. And besides, could you give some examples of non-blog/message board FUD spread about Mic
Oh there is an angle. Microsoft has been struggling to take over the living room for years now. It started around the mid 1990s and Microsoft has been sinking billions ever since into X-box, Windows Media Centers, DVRs and embedded Windows for set top boxes and such.
Bill has this vision of taking on the lucrative home entertainment electronics market. He sees all the hardware sold around the world to play media from the likes of Sony, Toshiba, Pioneer, Kenwood, Yamaha, etc. etc. and he doesn't make a nickle of a single box. If he could just get his software into all those boxes imagine the wealth.
This vision has been driving Microsoft for several years now but they are not making very much head way. I suspect that part of the reason is that all those boxes really don't need Microsoft's software, it really doesn't add any value. I mean when it comes right down to it once you get beyond all the fancy do-hicky thinga-ma-bob features and add-ons of any hardware or software package all you really want to do is watch the damn movie or listen to some music, and those millions of hardware boxes sold each year with not one bit of Microsoft code already do an excellent job of achieving that goal.
So the angle? Try to head off the technology which continues to bypass the Microsoft toll booth by monkeying around with hardware specifcations and standards, and cohorting with the Pol Potish IP regime of Hollywood to force Microsoft code onto the hardware manufacturers.
They seem to be having some success with their X-box initiative, but I think we are still safe as the general impression of Microsoft's ability to create a product which works as reliably as a $40 DVD player from Walmart is that they can't do it. But they have no plans to wait for the public's impression of Microsoft to change, they intend to force Bill's vision on us all one way or another.
A little history first. In the early 90s Novell was doing less than $500 million in revenue, but they were experiencing astounding growth. They were pulling in profit margins in the 80% range and the net income was in the hundreds of millions. By 1995 they were doing $2 billion in sales, after that things aren't quite so rosey. In two years Novell lost half of their 1995 revenue and were down to $1 billion in sales and net income on average was in the tens of millions. The peachy days of 80% profit margins and 50% year over year growth were gone. Up to today Novell has done a good job of maintaining their level of revenue at around $1 billion per year, however, the margins and net income are still in the gutter.
As one of the average guys I hate it when we get nailed with layoffs, however, in 1995 when revenues were at the $2 billion level there were just over 7,000 employees at Novell, today at $1 billion in revenue there are over 6,000. To bring expenses in line with revenues I think there is no choice but to cut the head count. It sucks but its a fact.
I don't think this spells the end for Novell and I don't think the open source projects supported by Novell need to worry, that is where Novell's future will be made. And Novell does have a future. If you look at how well Novell managed to hang on to their business with $1 billion in revenue from 1995 to 2005 with Microsoft trying to kill them off I think its obvious they still have lots of fight left in them. Now with open source upsetting the balance in the market Novell seems to be aligning themselves with the change. I think they are doing the right thing and they will succeed.
With the largest installed userbase, they will still benefit from a full migration to web services. You will still need an OS to get to the internet regardless of whether everything is web-based.
There is the possibility of delivering the OS in the same way you deliver the web-based applications.
Obviously streaming an entire Linux or Windows desktop OS across dial up is not going to work, however, a highly targeted OS that only delivers code that is needed by the client could be small enough that existing broadband speeds would be acceptable.
Other techniques could be used to speed up the process as well, i.e. caching the OS in flash memory and updating on the fly and adding features as needed.
So there is potential still to break the monopoly, but I do agree that in all likelihood the web clients of tomorrow will be the same thick clients that are used today.
I did something similar to what you are proposing back in 1997, it was called ringChat.
It was a peer to peer client and you had to either enter the IP address of someone in the ring or have the application query a cgi script on a web server. The script on the server would record your IP address and tell you the addresses of others who had queried the web server.
Once you connected to one of the clients in the peer to peer ring you would discover the IP addresses of all the other clients in the ring and all UDP/IP packets would be transmitted among the peer to peer clients, no server interaction once your in the ring.
The app is written in java and the cgi script was written in C. It was very basic and would need lots of work to get to where the current IM clients are. But I'll tack on the GPL and put the code on the web if anyone wants to pick up where I left off.
...noisy fanatics in the open source software community...
...die-hard open-source zealots...
...it's a holy war...
...ripe with paranoia and nonsensical conspiracy theories, and replete with loads of self-righteous huffing and puffing about morality...
...open source crunchies...
Hmm, I'm sure this guy isn't working from an agenda, he is definitely not thinking from some squewed hair brained bias, then again....
...Open source fans hate SCO for drumming up trouble...
Oh, so thats what it is to demand money from people so they can keep what is rightfully theirs. And here I thought the correct term for demanding money from people to leave them alone was extortion. And looking back through history it seems the hard working people of this planet usually get pretty steamed up over extortion and have taken down or defied criminal and governmental organizations who commited extortion crimes. And I do believe that extortion is still a crime so SCO is not "drumming up trouble" they are running an extortion racket.
Retail sales are meaningless without integrating direct sales (Dell, etc).
Wrong. The article was specifically about retail sales. If you throw in sales from a non-retail vendor who chooses the CPU manufacturer for you then you are truely playing with numbers by squewing the retail sales numbers.
First, retailers will generally maximize margins buy promoting less expensive costing products.
Wrong again. You have it backwards. Retailers will promote the product which will produces the largest margins and greatest amount of revenue. Sometimes this is the cheaper product but in many cases its the more expensive product. The selling price alone is not what drives margins and revenue for a retailer.
Don't believe any sales figures any more. They're ignorant of the true market, which is retail, e-commerce, eBay, and buying in pieces from your local OEM "wholesaler."
Again, the article was about retail sales. Throwing in all segments may be an interesting study, but it would not be a study of the retail market.
Furthermore, considering that retail tends to give the consumer many choices while certain non-retail vendors give the consumer no choice, I think the retail market figures give an interesting perspective on what the consumer really wants.
And lastly I would like to point out that in the article the author published a chart which shows the market data for the last 9 months. I truely appreciate this because I do agree with you that throwing out a single data point and making a headline out of it can be deceptive. However, by including the data for the last 9 months we can look at trends and follow up the article with our own research if we are curious.
Note the downward trend from Jan to May and then the sudden jump from Jun to Jul. Rather than being too concerned about who has more market share than the other I'd be interested to know what took place in the market that would cause the sudden shift between June and July.
I'm not curious enough to actually do any research myself:P but I do find it interesting that the author mentions this shift took place during the back to school period and then suggests part of the shift is due to interest in Media Center PCs. What do Media Center PCs have to do with back to school? Weird.
It is quite possible for the resultant scenario to be peachy, however, I'd like to throw a wrench into your "likely" conclusion.
Perhaps the EU and others are pushing for more control of the DNS root server administration simply out of spite for the US. Or they could have intentions which are contradictory to current DNS administration policies.
If it is the later and they do setup their own DNS servers then the synchronization will eventually become borked as they add their own flavor to the DNS results. If that happens then I predict an exodus from the borked EU system, or whoever's system, back to what already works being administered by ICANN.
If on the other hand they do intend to run the DNS as before but with shared control then I see no reason to argue over it and they SHOULD setup their own DNS system. There is nothing forcing anyone to use the system which is controlled by ICANN.
What would be nice is to hear some specifics from both sides as to the WHYS of their demands. So far it sounds like the EU and other nations are saying "give us more control of it because" and so far the only arguement out of the US is "we wont because you guys will use the control to censor". Both arguements are weak, but the just because arguement is definitely the weaker.
The State should be a reflection of the people governed, not a role model. Choosing to support a standard virtually ignored by the constituents is callous and ignorant.
I think Microsoft is on the opposite side of the continent, they are not a constituent of Massachusetts.
Yeah, I do know what you mean but I'm being facetious because I think that your statement is just as ludicrous as mine. The fact that the constituency for some time now has been forced into using a document format from a convicted monopolist does not mean they "virtually ignored" the open standard. If the public documents from their governement were only available in a proprietary format which required purchasing expensive software from a single vendor then they did not "virtually ignore" the open standard, they were forced into using a standard from a monopoly.
And please explain how saving 90% of taxpayers money on an IT budget is callous and ignorant. What is callous and ignorant is utilizing closed proprietary standards for government information which requires the constituency to spend additional money to purchase software so they can access the information from the government which they already paid for with tax dollars. For several years now there has been no excuse for the idiocy of government agencies setting up systems that require the purchase and continual upgrades of proprietary software when perfectly capable open standards have been available for years. The open document standard may be relatively new but open standards are not.
Perhaps you should be explaining to the constiuency why they should be paying taxes to their governement for services and then turn around and pay taxes to Microsoft to access those services.
Every one of my customers is unwilling to change formats.
Heh, we'll see. When your competitors start taking away all your business because you refuse to use an open standard available to everyone then I'm sure your tune will change fast.
When the project required changes to our customers' standards, by State Decree, the costs ballooned.
I can understand how this could happen but you should be more specific about the details. Were they cases where it was an open stand rather than some custom standard from the customer? And were there already many software applications available you could utilize with the open standard? Or are we talking about from the ground up changes from one proprietary standard to some other proprietary standard?
Do you really think eBay wants "eBay.com" to resolve to "ChineseEBayClone.com" in China and something else in the EU?
Do you really think that the average Chinese person is more interested in using American sites than in local Chinese-language sites?
I think you answered your own questions. Here in the states ebay.com will resolve to the correct address so the American user will not see a problem.
And in China when their DNS resolves www.ebay.com.cn to the address of chineseebayclone.com then the chinese users are likely to stop using the DNS resolution provided in China.
I agree that the alternative may be that ebay signs up with the Chinese DNS provider, we'll just have to see how it goes.
Another interesting alternative would be for portals and search engines like Google to start providing their own DNS for search results.:)
It could get crazy but I still don't think its going to impact the American web user. I also highly doubt there will be anything like a "meltdown" of the web.
"So let's say that China and the EU decide to get together and do that? What will happen is that Americans will start to get different resolutions for domains than people in other countries will. This could cause massive disruption of e-commerce and Internet usage in general."
Actually I think it would have minimal affect on Americans. I doubt there is much e-commerce going on between your average American on the web and Chinese or Brazillian web sites, at least not intentionally.:)
What is more likely to happen is web users in China and Brazil no longer get correct resolution of names to sites everywhere else in the world, including each other, and their own DNS solution will fall flat on its face. If possible the users in those countries will stop using their governments DNS root servers and go back to the ICANN DNS roots. This is why they are trying to wrest control from ICANN.
First the difficulty making money off their product. IMO they did a poor job of marketing whatever it was they were selling. From their website it is difficult to figure out not only what you are paying for but when and how your supposed to pay. I think they were trying to sell priority access to plugin updates or something like that.
They need a big BUY NESSUS front and center on the website if they plan on selling anything. And they need to be very clear and up front on exactly what your buying and who should be buying.
Second I'm not surprised to see them change licensing as their current licensing seems incompatible with the GPL and the open source movement. Try downloading the package and read the licensing.
That said I've checked out nessus and I think they have a nice product. Its disappointing to see this change of heart but I still hope they succeed.
What on earth makes them think consumers will want self-destructing DVDs this time?
They could care less about what the public wants. It should be pretty obvious that what people want is real time access to digital media with no strings attached. People are willing to pay for the hardware, software, and service to access digital media and they pay a premium for fresh media.
Unfortunately the media moguls are so hung up on their fears of losing control of their "intellectual property" for which every living being should pay them for that they are missing out on the potential for a massive multi-billion dollar market. Yeah, they are making money now, but history has shown that new markets and innovations create frenzies where lots of money is to be made.
If they would feed the market it would grow immensely and the media giants would make incredible amounts of money along with lots of other existing companies and new ones that would pop up to be part of the new market.
I see all the new technology today with amazing possibiities (HDTV, WiFi, broad band internet, etc.) and the market is suppressed by a few greedy bastards who would likely make even more if they would just let go.
Well, actually you can take the same steps in linux to mitigate damage when you server is comprimised. But more importantly, it has more to do with taking those steps than running BSD versus linux. Before you start flaming take a look for yourself....
I take it your admitting to be the Iranian hacker? You seem to be aware of a linux exploit which allowed you to hack into the opensuse.org web server.
Or I suppose its more likely you don't have a clue and there is a greater probability that the exploit was in the php application they were running on top of linux+apache and rather than being hacked the website was defaced.
And if that turns out to be the case then it would have made no difference whether they were running on linux, BSD, or any other OS. The site still would have been defaced.
Go with a diskless cluster. Buy all in one motherboards, video, ethernet. Cases are pretty cheap, but you can save by creating a custom rack solution. Spend a little extra on 80% efficiency power supplies ( http://www.seasonic.com/co/index.jsp ).
with that route you could build a decent little cluster for under $2k (USD).
Will it make you cool, doubt it, but the path to the solution will teach you many lessons.
But you can also roll your own. I did mine with Fedora by taking a fresh Fedora install, duplicating the common parts into a common NFS share, duplicating the distinct parts into a template and subsequent node NFS shares, compiled a custom NFSroot Fedora kernel, then setup a DHCP and TFTP server for the diskless nodes to PXE boot from.
But you can also roll your own. I did mine with Fedora by taking a fresh Fedora install, duplicating the common parts into a common NFS share, duplicating the distinct parts into a template and subsequent node NFS shares, compiled a custom NFSroot Fedora kernel, then setup a DHCP and TFTP server for the diskless nodes to PXE boot from.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/
They are both full of comedy and farce, perhaps one is unintentional but is full of it none the less.
Actually the Apache install base is not a good measure of the linux install base. Netcraft at one time tracked operating systems but they stopped sometime in 2001.
2 3005
However, the older Netcraft surveys do suggest a significant linux presence and the author of the NBR article is misrepresenting the article to which he references.
Based on old Netcraft surveys linux likely has around a 30% market share in web servers and Windows has around 50%. That is far from tiny and insignificant and based on information from the report to which the NBR article refers I suspect that linux market share may be increasing.
http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200106.html
And for anyone who actualy reads the IDC article to which the NBR tripe refers they will discover that while linux only holds 11.5% of quarterly revenues for servers shipped from large system builders, which again is not tiny and insignificant, the growth of linux revenue and shipments is 3 to 4 times that of Windows. So with Windows server revenue at $12 billion and linux revenue at $1 billion and 3 to 4 times the growth it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that linux is going to eat somebodies lunch.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS002
The author of the NBR article seems to have a preconcieved notion of the world around him and even when he reads contradictory facts he maintains his illusion.
burnin
Agreed. This guy is just pissed off that his favorite convicted monopolist is not going to get a free ride from his government.
= 13097&cid=0&cname=Results
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The funny thing is he can only back up his view of how things out to be by attacking the people instead of the issue and using paid for reports and studies as counter points. But this seems to be his MO:
http://www.nbr.co.nz/search/search_article.asp?id
google & sun CEOs belittled
http://www.nbr.co.nz/search/search_article.asp?id
patching windows cost less than patching open source, MS funded report
http://www.nbr.co.nz/search/search_article.asp?id
linux growth slows, business model weakens
Perhaps he has just had too much koolaid.
Sorry but you shouldn't believe everything you read.
The Red Hat Enterprise distribution includes some trademarks, logos and what not, but it is in no way proprietary. You can download all the source code directly from Red Hat's own ftp servers for free. And you can even create your own linux distribution based off the source, however, you must remove the trademark logos and what not before you distribute as you are not Red Hat.
If you don't believe then try checking out http://centos.org/
Or just peruse the Red Hat website and read their licensing agreements for their products.
It seems you've bought into FUD spread by both the anti-OSS crowd saying "...Red Hat is no different, its proprietary just like Windows..." and the Red Hat bashing linux elitists "...Red Hat is the next Microsoft, they took our linux and made it proprietary...". Its all BS.
burnin
There ya go, and the coward proves my point. Not once did I say abolish any laws and in reality THERE ARE NO IP LAWS. Don't you get it? There are no laws to protect the crap floating around in your head, the laws are there to protect what you produce from your ideas. Those pushing this conecept of IP are trying to confuse and befuddle everyone so they can claim ownership of thoughts and ideas in peoples heads.
And if you think this is about creating new movies, writing original novels, or utilizing skill to create art work you are completely brain washed. This is about making money off those who do exactly that. It is not about protecting or assisting them, its about claiming ownership of the skills of those who create by those who do not.
But you go right ahead and swallow all that crap and wave it over your head like some symbolic flag worthy of pride.
Wrong, the reason intellectual property has been recieving a lot more attention is because its the easiest way to milk capital from a technology dependant society without having to actually produce anything. Don't get me wrong, there are some valid legal complaints in the courts but, as most people here have noted over and over again, many of the companies submitting these complaints don't actually produce anything, they simply lay claim to some idea, label it as Intellectual Property, and make plans to profit from the work of others.
This whole Intellectual Property scam has got to go. So keep these concepts in mind in your day to day workings:
Copyrights are not Intellectual Property. Somebody did some significant work to express a story, a concept, an solution, whatever, in a written document, a film, a painting, a song, etc., and once the expression was completed the duplication of that expression is easy and inexpensive due to the technology we have for duplication and distribution. The copyright provides protection to those who expressed the work, however, the expression is NOT INTELLECTUAL! Its a peice of paper, a plastic disk, magnetic media inside a harddrive, its no longer intellectual. Since it is so easy to duplicate the work that has been done a copyright is a nice protection to those who did the work so that they may have some say over the duplication and distribution. If however, somebody comes up with a similar idea or is even influenced by someone elses expression and they go through and do the work over again then they have not infringed on anyones copyright or intellectual property.
Trademarks are not intellectual property. If you concieve a name, an image, whatever, and you express that conception onto paper, in writing, in any way, and you register it as your trademark then you can use the registration to ensure that others do not use your trademark in ways that would confuse others as you or your product. However, again, this physical thing which is an expression is no longer intellectual. The final product, the trademark is not some intangible asset, if it was intangible it would be useless.
Patents are not intellectual property. You come up with an idea and build a prototype or write down a conceptual design and present this for registration at the patent office so you will have the opportunity to profit from the idea by producing an end product. And once again none of the end results are intellectual, they are hard cold physical results. Even software code is physical, the CPU doesn't read your mind to run the code and the RAM and harddrive on which it is stored is not some magical ethereal thing, its a tangible chunk of hardware you use when you do the work of turning the ideas into something.
I think this entire intellectual property circus is just a scam to confuse the masses and make them believe that any thought in their head belongs to some corporation somewhere for whom they should be working. And nobody should be attempting to do any work outside of what they do for the corporation as that would in some way be stealing some "intangible asset" from the company. Well forget it, its just one big smoke and mirrors freak show designed to rape the masses for every penny they have and any penny they may ever have.
I mean really, can you believe this crap, "As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets". Does anybody really believe that everyone is paying all this cash to companies in America because some marketing guy, the salesman, and the chair slinging CEO said "I have this great idea, and if you pay me I'll tell you wh
Your implication and the article seem to be in contradiction. Anyhow, since you brought up the issue I'd like to point out a few flaws in your arguement:
I think there is some truth the to bullet proof remark as many people assumed there would be no holes in Firefox because they had not seen continual bug reports like they had seen for the Intenet Explorer counter part. However, I think there is still some justification to the perception of a more secure product from the mozilla foundation than from Microsoft. I am basing this opinion off the statistics at secunia.com:
Internet Explorer stats
http://secunia.com/product/11/
Fire Fox stats
http://secunia.com/product/4227/
Pay close attention to the statistics charts and you can draw the following conclusions:
1) The rate at which bugs are found in the two applications is very nearly the same. On average about 2 per month for each application.
2) Internet Explorer tends to have more bugs which are unpatched or partialy fixed. Fire Fox is much better at patching.
3) The severity of the bugs found in Internet Explorer tend to be much higher than those of Fire Fox. The bugs in Internet Explorer are more than 3 times likely to be of extreme severity when compared to Fire Fox.
4) And more of the bugs found in Internet Explorer tend to give system access when exploited than Fire Fox bugs.
So the perception that Fire Fox is more secure than Internet Explorer is justified. But bullet proof, far from it.
Somehow I doubt that most of the hackers out there do what they do to make money. But I'm more concerned with you "incredibly tiny" market share theory. Perhaps in desktops the linux market share is small, however, there are a significant number of linux servers out there especially in the web server space. I tried searching for data but the only thing I could find was some old 2001 data from a Netcraft survey.
http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200106.html
But based on that survey in June of 2001 there were about 8.5 million linux web servers alone. That is 29% of the market. And if the market share numbers are the same today that number is over 21 million. So I'd say there are plenty of linux boxes just waiting to be hacked.
And interestingly, when you compare the secunia reports for similar products, Windows 2003 Web Server and Red Hat Enterprise AS 3, you find similar results to the web browsers:
Windows 2003 Web Server
http://secunia.com/product/1176/
Red Hat Enterprise AS 3
http://secunia.com/product/2534/
One may look at the number of reported vulnerabilities and say ooh open source security sucks, but then when you dig a little deeper you see that on average Windows security bugs are patched slower, the severity is greater, and they are more likely to provide system access if exploited.
I'd say its rather dishonest to put some Slashdot poster FUD on the same level as the expensive marketing campaigns used by Microsoft to spread FUD. Not quite the same thing. And besides, could you give some examples of non-blog/message board FUD spread about Mic
Oh there is an angle. Microsoft has been struggling to take over the living room for years now. It started around the mid 1990s and Microsoft has been sinking billions ever since into X-box, Windows Media Centers, DVRs and embedded Windows for set top boxes and such.
Bill has this vision of taking on the lucrative home entertainment electronics market. He sees all the hardware sold around the world to play media from the likes of Sony, Toshiba, Pioneer, Kenwood, Yamaha, etc. etc. and he doesn't make a nickle of a single box. If he could just get his software into all those boxes imagine the wealth.
This vision has been driving Microsoft for several years now but they are not making very much head way. I suspect that part of the reason is that all those boxes really don't need Microsoft's software, it really doesn't add any value. I mean when it comes right down to it once you get beyond all the fancy do-hicky thinga-ma-bob features and add-ons of any hardware or software package all you really want to do is watch the damn movie or listen to some music, and those millions of hardware boxes sold each year with not one bit of Microsoft code already do an excellent job of achieving that goal.
So the angle? Try to head off the technology which continues to bypass the Microsoft toll booth by monkeying around with hardware specifcations and standards, and cohorting with the Pol Potish IP regime of Hollywood to force Microsoft code onto the hardware manufacturers.
They seem to be having some success with their X-box initiative, but I think we are still safe as the general impression of Microsoft's ability to create a product which works as reliably as a $40 DVD player from Walmart is that they can't do it. But they have no plans to wait for the public's impression of Microsoft to change, they intend to force Bill's vision on us all one way or another.
A little history first. In the early 90s Novell was doing less than $500 million in revenue, but they were experiencing astounding growth. They were pulling in profit margins in the 80% range and the net income was in the hundreds of millions. By 1995 they were doing $2 billion in sales, after that things aren't quite so rosey. In two years Novell lost half of their 1995 revenue and were down to $1 billion in sales and net income on average was in the tens of millions. The peachy days of 80% profit margins and 50% year over year growth were gone. Up to today Novell has done a good job of maintaining their level of revenue at around $1 billion per year, however, the margins and net income are still in the gutter.
As one of the average guys I hate it when we get nailed with layoffs, however, in 1995 when revenues were at the $2 billion level there were just over 7,000 employees at Novell, today at $1 billion in revenue there are over 6,000. To bring expenses in line with revenues I think there is no choice but to cut the head count. It sucks but its a fact.
I don't think this spells the end for Novell and I don't think the open source projects supported by Novell need to worry, that is where Novell's future will be made. And Novell does have a future. If you look at how well Novell managed to hang on to their business with $1 billion in revenue from 1995 to 2005 with Microsoft trying to kill them off I think its obvious they still have lots of fight left in them. Now with open source upsetting the balance in the market Novell seems to be aligning themselves with the change. I think they are doing the right thing and they will succeed.
There is the possibility of delivering the OS in the same way you deliver the web-based applications.
Obviously streaming an entire Linux or Windows desktop OS across dial up is not going to work, however, a highly targeted OS that only delivers code that is needed by the client could be small enough that existing broadband speeds would be acceptable.
Other techniques could be used to speed up the process as well, i.e. caching the OS in flash memory and updating on the fly and adding features as needed.
So there is potential still to break the monopoly, but I do agree that in all likelihood the web clients of tomorrow will be the same thick clients that are used today.
burnin
Are you ready to start coding? :)
I did something similar to what you are proposing back in 1997, it was called ringChat.
It was a peer to peer client and you had to either enter the IP address of someone in the ring or have the application query a cgi script on a web server. The script on the server would record your IP address and tell you the addresses of others who had queried the web server.
Once you connected to one of the clients in the peer to peer ring you would discover the IP addresses of all the other clients in the ring and all UDP/IP packets would be transmitted among the peer to peer clients, no server interaction once your in the ring.
The app is written in java and the cgi script was written in C. It was very basic and would need lots of work to get to where the current IM clients are. But I'll tack on the GPL and put the code on the web if anyone wants to pick up where I left off.
burnin
Hmm, I'm sure this guy isn't working from an agenda, he is definitely not thinking from some squewed hair brained bias, then again....
Oh, so thats what it is to demand money from people so they can keep what is rightfully theirs. And here I thought the correct term for demanding money from people to leave them alone was extortion. And looking back through history it seems the hard working people of this planet usually get pretty steamed up over extortion and have taken down or defied criminal and governmental organizations who commited extortion crimes. And I do believe that extortion is still a crime so SCO is not "drumming up trouble" they are running an extortion racket.
burnin
Wrong. The article was specifically about retail sales. If you throw in sales from a non-retail vendor who chooses the CPU manufacturer for you then you are truely playing with numbers by squewing the retail sales numbers.
Wrong again. You have it backwards. Retailers will promote the product which will produces the largest margins and greatest amount of revenue. Sometimes this is the cheaper product but in many cases its the more expensive product. The selling price alone is not what drives margins and revenue for a retailer.
Again, the article was about retail sales. Throwing in all segments may be an interesting study, but it would not be a study of the retail market.
Furthermore, considering that retail tends to give the consumer many choices while certain non-retail vendors give the consumer no choice, I think the retail market figures give an interesting perspective on what the consumer really wants.
And lastly I would like to point out that in the article the author published a chart which shows the market data for the last 9 months. I truely appreciate this because I do agree with you that throwing out a single data point and making a headline out of it can be deceptive. However, by including the data for the last 9 months we can look at trends and follow up the article with our own research if we are curious.
Note the downward trend from Jan to May and then the sudden jump from Jun to Jul. Rather than being too concerned about who has more market share than the other I'd be interested to know what took place in the market that would cause the sudden shift between June and July.
I'm not curious enough to actually do any research myself
burnin
"Or more likely:"
It is quite possible for the resultant scenario to be peachy, however, I'd like to throw a wrench into your "likely" conclusion.
Perhaps the EU and others are pushing for more control of the DNS root server administration simply out of spite for the US. Or they could have intentions which are contradictory to current DNS administration policies.
If it is the later and they do setup their own DNS servers then the synchronization will eventually become borked as they add their own flavor to the DNS results. If that happens then I predict an exodus from the borked EU system, or whoever's system, back to what already works being administered by ICANN.
If on the other hand they do intend to run the DNS as before but with shared control then I see no reason to argue over it and they SHOULD setup their own DNS system. There is nothing forcing anyone to use the system which is controlled by ICANN.
What would be nice is to hear some specifics from both sides as to the WHYS of their demands. So far it sounds like the EU and other nations are saying "give us more control of it because" and so far the only arguement out of the US is "we wont because you guys will use the control to censor". Both arguements are weak, but the just because arguement is definitely the weaker.
burnin
I think Microsoft is on the opposite side of the continent, they are not a constituent of Massachusetts.
Yeah, I do know what you mean but I'm being facetious because I think that your statement is just as ludicrous as mine. The fact that the constituency for some time now has been forced into using a document format from a convicted monopolist does not mean they "virtually ignored" the open standard. If the public documents from their governement were only available in a proprietary format which required purchasing expensive software from a single vendor then they did not "virtually ignore" the open standard, they were forced into using a standard from a monopoly.
And please explain how saving 90% of taxpayers money on an IT budget is callous and ignorant. What is callous and ignorant is utilizing closed proprietary standards for government information which requires the constituency to spend additional money to purchase software so they can access the information from the government which they already paid for with tax dollars. For several years now there has been no excuse for the idiocy of government agencies setting up systems that require the purchase and continual upgrades of proprietary software when perfectly capable open standards have been available for years. The open document standard may be relatively new but open standards are not.
Perhaps you should be explaining to the constiuency why they should be paying taxes to their governement for services and then turn around and pay taxes to Microsoft to access those services.
Heh, we'll see. When your competitors start taking away all your business because you refuse to use an open standard available to everyone then I'm sure your tune will change fast.
I can understand how this could happen but you should be more specific about the details. Were they cases where it was an open stand rather than some custom standard from the customer? And were there already many software applications available you could utilize with the open standard? Or are we talking about from the ground up changes from one proprietary standard to some other proprietary standard?
I think you answered your own questions. Here in the states ebay.com will resolve to the correct address so the American user will not see a problem.
And in China when their DNS resolves www.ebay.com.cn to the address of chineseebayclone.com then the chinese users are likely to stop using the DNS resolution provided in China.
I agree that the alternative may be that ebay signs up with the Chinese DNS provider, we'll just have to see how it goes.
Another interesting alternative would be for portals and search engines like Google to start providing their own DNS for search results.
It could get crazy but I still don't think its going to impact the American web user. I also highly doubt there will be anything like a "meltdown" of the web.
burnin
"So let's say that China and the EU decide to get together and do that? What will happen is that Americans will start to get different resolutions for domains than people in other countries will. This could cause massive disruption of e-commerce and Internet usage in general."
:)
Actually I think it would have minimal affect on Americans. I doubt there is much e-commerce going on between your average American on the web and Chinese or Brazillian web sites, at least not intentionally.
What is more likely to happen is web users in China and Brazil no longer get correct resolution of names to sites everywhere else in the world, including each other, and their own DNS solution will fall flat on its face. If possible the users in those countries will stop using their governments DNS root servers and go back to the ICANN DNS roots. This is why they are trying to wrest control from ICANN.
burnin
First the difficulty making money off their product. IMO they did a poor job of marketing whatever it was they were selling. From their website it is difficult to figure out not only what you are paying for but when and how your supposed to pay. I think they were trying to sell priority access to plugin updates or something like that.
They need a big BUY NESSUS front and center on the website if they plan on selling anything. And they need to be very clear and up front on exactly what your buying and who should be buying.
Second I'm not surprised to see them change licensing as their current licensing seems incompatible with the GPL and the open source movement. Try downloading the package and read the licensing.
That said I've checked out nessus and I think they have a nice product. Its disappointing to see this change of heart but I still hope they succeed.
In TFA they state that Nessus version 2 will remain under the GPL. Their new version 3 will not be open source or GPL.
They could care less about what the public wants. It should be pretty obvious that what people want is real time access to digital media with no strings attached. People are willing to pay for the hardware, software, and service to access digital media and they pay a premium for fresh media.
Unfortunately the media moguls are so hung up on their fears of losing control of their "intellectual property" for which every living being should pay them for that they are missing out on the potential for a massive multi-billion dollar market. Yeah, they are making money now, but history has shown that new markets and innovations create frenzies where lots of money is to be made.
If they would feed the market it would grow immensely and the media giants would make incredible amounts of money along with lots of other existing companies and new ones that would pop up to be part of the new market.
I see all the new technology today with amazing possibiities (HDTV, WiFi, broad band internet, etc.) and the market is suppressed by a few greedy bastards who would likely make even more if they would just let go.
Well, actually you can take the same steps in linux to mitigate damage when you server is comprimised. But more importantly, it has more to do with taking those steps than running BSD versus linux. Before you start flaming take a look for yourself....
http://defaced.projectgamma.com/
http://www.zone-h.com/en/defacements
burnin
I take it your admitting to be the Iranian hacker? You seem to be aware of a linux exploit which allowed you to hack into the opensuse.org web server.
Or I suppose its more likely you don't have a clue and there is a greater probability that the exploit was in the php application they were running on top of linux+apache and rather than being hacked the website was defaced.
And if that turns out to be the case then it would have made no difference whether they were running on linux, BSD, or any other OS. The site still would have been defaced.
But I guess thinking that way isn't as much fun.
burnin
linux cluster on the cheap:
Go with a diskless cluster.
Buy all in one motherboards, video, ethernet.
Cases are pretty cheap, but you can save by creating a custom rack solution.
Spend a little extra on 80% efficiency power supplies ( http://www.seasonic.com/co/index.jsp ).
with that route you could build a decent little cluster for under $2k (USD).
Will it make you cool, doubt it, but the path to the solution will teach you many lessons.
burnin
There are other cluster solutions, i.e. http://warewulf.lbl.gov/pmwiki/
But you can also roll your own. I did mine with Fedora by taking a fresh Fedora install, duplicating the common parts into a common NFS share, duplicating the distinct parts into a template and subsequent node NFS shares, compiled a custom NFSroot Fedora kernel, then setup a DHCP and TFTP server for the diskless nodes to PXE boot from.
burnin
There are other cluster solutions, i.e. http://warewulf.lbl.gov/pmwiki/
But you can also roll your own. I did mine with Fedora by taking a fresh Fedora install, duplicating the common parts into a common NFS share, duplicating the distinct parts into a template and subsequent node NFS shares, compiled a custom NFSroot Fedora kernel, then setup a DHCP and TFTP server for the diskless nodes to PXE boot from.
burnin