Apache is migrating many of their projects to Subversion. I think they have about half of them converted right now. So the viability of Subversion for large codebases has already been proven.
There are quite a number of FOSS projects using Subversion listed here.
What I'd like to see is criminal charges brought on descision makers in corporations who knowingly use unsafe methods to produce a product that they know to be dangerous. In other words, a manager who makes the decision to save $0.02 on each product produced by using a less safe part won't be hedging those cost savings against the potential court costs from the families his company's product kills, he'll be hedging it against the very real possibility that he himself may face prison time for multiple murder charges.
I think this is a really great idea, but I see two problems :
Proving intent
Administrative focus on white collar crime
Being able to prove in a court of law that a CEO knowingly chose to market an unsafe product would be incredibly difficult. It's sort of like proving a bait and switch scam. You know they're doing it, the cops know they're doing it, but proving that there is an intent to commit fraud is still a difficult thing to do.
Also , it seems to me that few government officials are interested in cracking down on white collar crime. Corporations donate extensively to political campaigns for just this very reason. Look at Enron. There's plenty of criminal wrongdoing there to go around, but how many of those guys got away with it or got a pitifully short sentence? Tougher laws regulating corporate behavior would be a great start, but until there is a commitment on the part of law enforcement to crack down on corporate crime nothing will happen.
"[H]elping to protect its customers" seems awfully euphemistic to me. Wouldn't it help their customers more to release software without the security holes that allow malware in the first place?
Yeah, but currently the only emails that the yellow banner shows up for for me are email accounts from gmail itself. I'm not sure if I should be amused or disturbed.
MSI is packaging format much like RPM in concept. It has an internal database to keep track of all of the files and registry entries that go along with an application installation. At one point Microsoft was encouraging Windows developers to standardize on that format. I don't know if they still do or if they've changed direction. They offer an SDK
for MSI packaging if you want to roll your own, or Wise and InstallShield both offer commercial options to create MSI packages.
We use MSI internally for several reasons. One is that we have a legacy VB app that is broken down into about 25 separate dlls and ocxs and the VB Setup.exe tool proved completely inadequate for creating updated installations. With the budget we had for software ($0) we found that we could use the MSI tool that came with VS 6 and at least make the upgrade process work.
The other primary reason we use MSIs is that Active Directory prevents users from installing applications via Setup.exe, and we were able to create a loophole in the policy allowing execution of setup.msi.
Unix System Administration Handbook: A wonderful reference, and much better than the Linux version.
Running Linux: The standard from O'Reilly.
How Linux Works: A nice overview and tutorial introduction to Linux.
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: A shell script cookbook. You might want to pick up an introductory bash book as well if you aren't familiar with it.
I would also agree with the recommendation to install Gentoo. I ran Mandrake for two years, but I learned more about Linux in the week it took me to install Gentoo than I ever did with Mandrake.
I think Groklaw is the biggest thorn in SCO's side. The media has been pretty content to just print whatever random press release SCO throws at them without doing much (if any) verification at all. Groklaw has been consistenly documenting SCO's actions, court filings, and contradictory statements to the press, which makes it much harder for SCO to try their case in the media rather than a courtroom.
Groklaw is also something that SCO could never have forseen because it's never been done before. Hundreds of volunteers donating their time to get court procedings and transcribe them, research and debunk questionable claims to the press, and write thoughtful articles explaining the technology being used so those who don't have the background can understand what's going on. It's the power of the open source model applied to law. It's anti-FUD, and it's been the worst possible thing for SCO's media campaigns. Go PJ!
Another I would add is the cost of tracking licensing. Generally any company that's bigger than 10 or 20 people will need to have someone keep track of what's been purchased and all the reciepts (in case of the BSA.) In a large company that can be a full-time job.
I have to use XP at work, and what I found made it much more usable is TweakUI from the Windows XP Power Toys. It exposes a lot of interface options that are hard to adjust otherwise.
Regarding jobs getting lost, I also agree. The problem is NOT as big as Gates says atm, but if OSS becomes much more popular in the future, it will be a problem for software engineers. You devalue your own profession.
The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of software engineers don't work at places like Microsoft. They work doing in-house corporate development.
For example, I work at a company that does credit card processing. Do you know how much COTS software there is for credit card processing companies? We build everything we use ourselves.
By using open source languages and tools that means we aren't spending money on licenses. We aren't having to pay someone to spend their time making sure that we have enough seat licenses now that we've hired 10 more people. We don't have to purchase "service agreements" just to use software to get a job done and hope that if a new version comes out it won't break the stuff we're already doing. We aren't having to contend with forced upgrades because one VP got a laptop with a new version of Office and no one else can open his documents.
I think businesses will always need smart people to write and maintain custom software for them. Using OSS tools for the job doesn't devalue programmers; it lets the business use its money for the business. You know, for things like paying programmers.
Agreed. I used to hate to have to try and find anything on microsoft.com or MSDN until I learned about using site:msdn.microsoft.com with Google.
It makes me laugh when Microsoft says that they're trying to win the search engine war. When their search technology can find things on their own site better than Google can, then maybe they'll have something.
It reminds me of something in a foreward to one of the Shakespearing plays I was reading for a class. In mentioning the supposition that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays the author discussed how some people have difficulty accepting the idea that somone outside of the establishment could create the greatest works ever written in the English language.
I think the quote he used was, "genuis tends to crop up in the most unlikely of places."
I tried that when I upgraded from 98 to 2000 at home. I set up a regular account that had as few priviledges as possible for day to day work and an administrator account for everything else. I lasted about a day and a half before I changed my account to have administrative access.
Nothing worked properly. I would get all sorts of weird access denied errors for things that shouldn't have required administrative access to begin with (like changing default settings in Word). I had to log off the machine and log back on as administrator to install games. When I tried to play them under my user account it would prompt for the administrator password.
I don't think that users running as administrators is the fundamental problem. The fault lies with software developers who don't write software under the theory of least priviledge and with Microsoft for designing their OS so that gaining superuser access for administrative tasks is so awkward.
I would like to buy a laptop and put Linux on it. I can't order one from IBM, Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, or any other major distributor without also paying for Windows XP. So my choices are:
Buy from a major distributor and pay the Windows tax, install Linux, and hope to hell that I can get Linux drivers for all the hardware
Buy a machine preloaded with Linux from somewhere like Emperor Linux where I'm still paying the Windows tax, but it's hidden
Buy a laptop with no operating system from a smaller company
Buy a PowerBook
Now granted, I do have options 3 and 4 which don't involve giving money to Microsoft. But until I have the choice to buy a Linux laptop from a major distributor with no Windows tax I don't think free market forces are working against the abuse of a monopoly.
I'm wondering if this has something to do with Longhorn.
My understanding of Longhorn is that the file system is so different that no existing software will run on it (except for possibly.Net stuff because the framework will be ported). The only reason I even have a Windows box anymore is that most of my games won't run in Linux (and I'm a gaming addict:). I can't imagine that people would be very quick to move to Longhorn if they wouldn't be able to play the games that they've already paid for.
If game developers are using this toolkit it may mean that the games will be playable on Longhorn when they wouldn't be otherwise, therefore leaping a huge hurdle in widespread adoption whenever Longhorn is released.
Another difference is the philosophy of designing for the command line first in *nix with the GUI tacked on later and designing a GUI first for Windows with command line support as an afterthought.
This was one of the biggest changes for me to get used to in switching from Windows to Linux, but once I became accustomed to using the command line it's really hard to go back to clicking through multiple dialog boxes to do something that I could do in one line in bash. (I use Linux at home, but Windows at work. Sigh.)
Not only that, but all of the answers to the puzzles are available online for free.
I grew up playing Sierra's adventure games. It usually took me at least a couple of weeks to get through one of them. I'd get stuck and try everything I could think of, and then come back the next day and try again. Kids today don't have that kind of attention span for games; they'd rather just find a walkthrough, and text adventure games aren't very interesting without the puzzles.
Actually, I think most new.NET development is in C#. VB.NET might be favored for legacy VB6 apps, but I see a lot more newsgroup postings about C# than VB.
I think he's also comparing Windows installations, which generally come pre-installed with a new machine, to installing Linux on a machine that's never had it before, where you have to choose your desktop somewhere during the installation process. If an average user bought a machine with Linux preinstalled and configured with a GUI the distro came with, they wouldn't have to think about configuration issues either.
Slashdot Mirror
Apache is migrating many of their projects to Subversion. I think they have about half of them converted right now. So the viability of Subversion for large codebases has already been proven.
There are quite a number of FOSS projects using Subversion listed here.
I think this is a really great idea, but I see two problems :
- Proving intent
- Administrative focus on white collar crime
Being able to prove in a court of law that a CEO knowingly chose to market an unsafe product would be incredibly difficult. It's sort of like proving a bait and switch scam. You know they're doing it, the cops know they're doing it, but proving that there is an intent to commit fraud is still a difficult thing to do.Also , it seems to me that few government officials are interested in cracking down on white collar crime. Corporations donate extensively to political campaigns for just this very reason. Look at Enron. There's plenty of criminal wrongdoing there to go around, but how many of those guys got away with it or got a pitifully short sentence? Tougher laws regulating corporate behavior would be a great start, but until there is a commitment on the part of law enforcement to crack down on corporate crime nothing will happen.
"[H]elping to protect its customers" seems awfully euphemistic to me. Wouldn't it help their customers more to release software without the security holes that allow malware in the first place?
Yeah, but currently the only emails that the yellow banner shows up for for me are email accounts from gmail itself. I'm not sure if I should be amused or disturbed.
We use MSI internally for several reasons. One is that we have a legacy VB app that is broken down into about 25 separate dlls and ocxs and the VB Setup.exe tool proved completely inadequate for creating updated installations. With the budget we had for software ($0) we found that we could use the MSI tool that came with VS 6 and at least make the upgrade process work.
The other primary reason we use MSIs is that Active Directory prevents users from installing applications via Setup.exe, and we were able to create a loophole in the policy allowing execution of setup.msi.
Hope this answers your question.
Some recommended books:
Unix System Administration Handbook: A wonderful reference, and much better than the Linux version.
Running Linux: The standard from O'Reilly.
How Linux Works: A nice overview and tutorial introduction to Linux.
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: A shell script cookbook. You might want to pick up an introductory bash book as well if you aren't familiar with it.
I would also agree with the recommendation to install Gentoo. I ran Mandrake for two years, but I learned more about Linux in the week it took me to install Gentoo than I ever did with Mandrake.
I think Groklaw is the biggest thorn in SCO's side. The media has been pretty content to just print whatever random press release SCO throws at them without doing much (if any) verification at all. Groklaw has been consistenly documenting SCO's actions, court filings, and contradictory statements to the press, which makes it much harder for SCO to try their case in the media rather than a courtroom.
Groklaw is also something that SCO could never have forseen because it's never been done before. Hundreds of volunteers donating their time to get court procedings and transcribe them, research and debunk questionable claims to the press, and write thoughtful articles explaining the technology being used so those who don't have the background can understand what's going on. It's the power of the open source model applied to law. It's anti-FUD, and it's been the worst possible thing for SCO's media campaigns. Go PJ!
Another I would add is the cost of tracking licensing. Generally any company that's bigger than 10 or 20 people will need to have someone keep track of what's been purchased and all the reciepts (in case of the BSA.) In a large company that can be a full-time job.
I have to use XP at work, and what I found made it much more usable is TweakUI from the Windows XP Power Toys. It exposes a lot of interface options that are hard to adjust otherwise.
r toys/xppowertoys.mspx/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powe
[OT:] I also really, really like the desktop manager. Virtual desktops are one of my favorite features of Linux and it's really nice to have at work.
The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of software engineers don't work at places like Microsoft. They work doing in-house corporate development.
For example, I work at a company that does credit card processing. Do you know how much COTS software there is for credit card processing companies? We build everything we use ourselves.
By using open source languages and tools that means we aren't spending money on licenses. We aren't having to pay someone to spend their time making sure that we have enough seat licenses now that we've hired 10 more people. We don't have to purchase "service agreements" just to use software to get a job done and hope that if a new version comes out it won't break the stuff we're already doing. We aren't having to contend with forced upgrades because one VP got a laptop with a new version of Office and no one else can open his documents.
I think businesses will always need smart people to write and maintain custom software for them. Using OSS tools for the job doesn't devalue programmers; it lets the business use its money for the business. You know, for things like paying programmers.
Yeah, but then how are they going to get highlights from Expos games?
It makes me laugh when Microsoft says that they're trying to win the search engine war. When their search technology can find things on their own site better than Google can, then maybe they'll have something.
It reminds me of something in a foreward to one of the Shakespearing plays I was reading for a class. In mentioning the supposition that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays the author discussed how some people have difficulty accepting the idea that somone outside of the establishment could create the greatest works ever written in the English language.
I think the quote he used was, "genuis tends to crop up in the most unlikely of places."
Actually, when I first heard the term (quite some time ago) I read it as Fucked-Up Drivel.
It generally applies as well.
I tried that when I upgraded from 98 to 2000 at home. I set up a regular account that had as few priviledges as possible for day to day work and an administrator account for everything else. I lasted about a day and a half before I changed my account to have administrative access.
Nothing worked properly. I would get all sorts of weird access denied errors for things that shouldn't have required administrative access to begin with (like changing default settings in Word). I had to log off the machine and log back on as administrator to install games. When I tried to play them under my user account it would prompt for the administrator password.
I don't think that users running as administrators is the fundamental problem. The fault lies with software developers who don't write software under the theory of least priviledge and with Microsoft for designing their OS so that gaining superuser access for administrative tasks is so awkward.
"Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." -- Martin Golding
Now granted, I do have options 3 and 4 which don't involve giving money to Microsoft. But until I have the choice to buy a Linux laptop from a major distributor with no Windows tax I don't think free market forces are working against the abuse of a monopoly.
Interesting - for some reason, I was thinking that Longhorn's file system was SQL Server based and existing stuff wouldn't work with it.
I'm wondering if this has something to do with Longhorn.
My understanding of Longhorn is that the file system is so different that no existing software will run on it (except for possibly .Net stuff because the framework will be ported). The only reason I even have a Windows box anymore is that most of my games won't run in Linux (and I'm a gaming addict :). I can't imagine that people would be very quick to move to Longhorn if they wouldn't be able to play the games that they've already paid for.
If game developers are using this toolkit it may mean that the games will be playable on Longhorn when they wouldn't be otherwise, therefore leaping a huge hurdle in widespread adoption whenever Longhorn is released.
Another difference is the philosophy of designing for the command line first in *nix with the GUI tacked on later and designing a GUI first for Windows with command line support as an afterthought.
This was one of the biggest changes for me to get used to in switching from Windows to Linux, but once I became accustomed to using the command line it's really hard to go back to clicking through multiple dialog boxes to do something that I could do in one line in bash. (I use Linux at home, but Windows at work. Sigh.)
I grew up playing Sierra's adventure games. It usually took me at least a couple of weeks to get through one of them. I'd get stuck and try everything I could think of, and then come back the next day and try again. Kids today don't have that kind of attention span for games; they'd rather just find a walkthrough, and text adventure games aren't very interesting without the puzzles.
Actually, I think most new .NET development is in C#. VB.NET might be favored for legacy VB6 apps, but I see a lot more newsgroup postings about C# than VB.
I'm really glad you took the ethical high road in refusing work for spammers.
How's the porn business?
I think he's also comparing Windows installations, which generally come pre-installed with a new machine, to installing Linux on a machine that's never had it before, where you have to choose your desktop somewhere during the installation process. If an average user bought a machine with Linux preinstalled and configured with a GUI the distro came with, they wouldn't have to think about configuration issues either.