I don't really see the logic. Linux in general used to get beat up severly because of installation difficulties. Over the years many distros heard these complaints and addressed them by developing better and better installers. Today, there are numerous distros available that have such excellent installers that installation is a moot topic, except for Debian, Slack and Gentoo.
Most, if not all, of these better installers are open source GPLed programs. It seems to me that "logical progression" would be Debian taking one or many of these better installers and adapting them to Debian. Instead they choose to reinvent the wheel and have produced a crude installer whose interface was passe years ago. Where is the logic?
It looks like Anaconda 0.0.2!! I'm not one of those that demands a GUI installer but, surely they can put together an ncurses app that looks better and less confusing that this abomination? This installer is crude to say the very least.
In Windows the network redirector intercepts calls to drives and routes them to the appropriate device whether it is a local disk or a network device. This makes mapped network drives transparrent to the application. This mean that the application sees no difference between drive C: (local) and dirve H: (network). This means that you don't need some fancy driver software, you already have it.
This should answer your question specifically, regarding Exchange
With all that said, I would recommend against running the likes of Exchange from a network drive anyway. The reason is that the bandwidth of the network is going to put a massive hit on your I/O performance and there is a massive amount of I/O with Exchange. If you must have remote disks for Exchange I would recommend a SAN. With a SAN you will have 1 or 2 gigabit I/O performance and you can put the disks anywhere you want. iSCSI will allow you to build a poor man's SAN across an ethernet network but this will create the I/O bottle neck I mentioned earlier, unless you are running 1 or 10 gigabit ethernet.
I know this is a blatant troll but, for the sake of any newbies that might put credence in your statements, I must respond. The amount of documentation that comes with open source applications and the quality of said documentation varies depending on the application. Just as it does in the Microsoft world. There is almost always a man page and usually a readme file with the necessary documentation for most open source apps. These are usually far more detailed than the Windows Help or.chm files. Additionally, one can usually find a detailed online how-to for the desired application which is usually harder to find for Windows applications.
Finally, if Windows documentation is so good, why are there so many books from Microsoft Press and third parties for so many Windows applications? Microsoft Exchange 2000 uses a.chm for its included documentation. It is incomplete, to say the least. That is why there are at least three very large books available from Microsoft Press on the subject and there are dozens of third party books that cover Exchange 2000. This is only one example but there are many many more. A casual stroll throught the Computer section of any book store clearly demonstrates this.
The fact of the matter is that there definitely is a lot of free documentation for open source software and some is excellent. That does not mean that there shouldn't be third party books for it too though.
where the acquire, compile, install instructions are in the appendix. So many books on Linux and Linux apps usually waste several of the first few chapters on this. Happily, Linux an Linux app installation has improved to the point that any more than a paragraph or two on compiling and installation is a waste.
The "information" on IRC is 99% crap. I'm concerned that, by integrating IRC searching in Google, the signal to noise ratio of Google will go way down. If however, Google keeps it as a separate service like Usenet I suspect that it will go away due to lack of interest.
Who really wants to search IRC, except the Justice Department?
The recent changes in the leading Linux vendors combine to make for a very interesting future. Novell first acquired Ximian which along with its Ximain Desktop, Evolution and Mono, also provided the Red Carpet update service for Red Hat distributions. Then Red Hat announced that they would not be providing further updates for the free/consumer version of their product. This left users in the cold forcing them to use Fedora or some other free disto or Novell/Ximian might have used Red Carpet to fill the gap.
Now Novell has also acquired SuSE, the number two vendor and alternative to the now defuct Red Hat Linux, which is also an RPM distribution but, uses a different update service.
Novell, looking to increase revenue, is unlikely to offer much in the arena of free services and is also unlikely to expend much effort supporting a distribution that is not their own, as SuSE now is. So, one is left wondering what the landscape will look like in the coming months.
Will Ximian's Red Carpet survive at all and if so, will it support the Red Hat distro or the SuSE distro or both? Will Novell/SuSE continue to develop using the KDE desktop or will they more likely shift SuSE to use the Ximian Desktop? Will SuSE, who had historically been somewhat "less free" than Red Hat, become even more "less free" with its acquisition by Novell?
Any which way it goes, the Linux landscape will change dramatically in the next few months, as it has in the past few weeks. One can't help but wonder if there will be a truely free Linux left with all of the commercial activity of late. Fortunately, Debian continues as it always has, at least for now.
Re:You're not going to like this reference
on
Linux in Movies?
·
· Score: 1
You might think so but, your thinking is incorrect. Earthlink now offers an add-on service that accelerates dial-up performance considerably. It works by using caching and compression. People who subscribe to the service for $5.00 per month above the regular dial-up costs, install a small application on their desktop that handles redirecting requests to the cache and also handles the decompression from the cache. On average, there is a significant performance increase.
Personally, it annoys me that someone can sell this as a service for $5.00 a month. Most browsers can already handle compression from the web server but, most web sites still don't turn it on.
I'm sure that the flames will now commence as many Slashdotters seem religiously opposed to tape. In fact a recent Slashdot artice cited some tech magazines prediction that tape was obsolete. But, tape is still an excellent storage medium.
The fact is that tapes last for a very long time with a shelf life of at least decades. Most especially when they are not used much, as is the case when tape is used to backup a hard drive and is only accessed again if the hard drive fails and a restore is required.
Tapes store much more than any other removable storage medium. CD-ROM and DVD can't hold anywhere near as much as most tapes can.
Tapes do not cost too much, contrary to what many people say. Right now, on eBay, Travan 8GB drives start at US$5.00 and DLT 30/70 GB drives start at US$50.00 and go on up to >US$300.00. The tapes themselves can be more expensive especially when one chooses the preferred new tapes but, again eBay has DLT tapes available for anywhere form US$2.00 to US$100.00 per tape.
You suggest that you may choose to use RAID. But, tape is still a better alternative. RAID is effective in protecting you from a single drive failure but, it does not protect you against accidental deletion, rogue applications, viruses, versioning or controller failure. On the other hand, tape and the right backup strategy can protect you from all these issues.
Almost always tape backups are the best alternative.
So, what happens when the lsaer is based in the Arizona desert and it is fired and satelite mounted reflectors? Line-of-site problems decrease a fair bit. Now if only the clouds would cooperate...
We back up 15-20 gigs each night and move it off site the next day.
If you think it would be tough to do this with hard drives, just wait until you are backing up and shipping out a terrabyte or more per day. In real networks where business continuity is important, tapes will always be there.
Only a small segment of the business community still uses them.
yea, I suppose you are right, if every point of sale system on the planet is considered a "small segment of the business community". Think about it the next time you are at a restaurant and they hand you the multi-copy bill to sign or any other time you use a credit card. Think about it the next time you take your car to the repair shop and they print up the work order and then later the bill. Does your paycheck get direct deposited? If not it is likely printed on a dot matrix printer. Also on the subject of banks, they usually use dot matrix printers for receipts and check endorsements.
Yea, dot matrix must be dead I haven't seen one for almost forever.;)
Windows 95 will of course die but, it's stiil a few years away.
VB6 will take even longer to be replaced that Windows 9X. Also, is it really being replaced? VB.NET doesn't really seem like a replacement to me.
Client server isn't going to die, the client is changing that's all. Old app specific clients are being replaced by browsers but it will remain a client server architecture.
Tape Backup - Step away from the crack pipe dude. Tape backup is going now where in the forseeable future.
My pet peeve is that the middle click doesn't work on Windows, unless they have configured the Unix mouse app, Also, when I select and paste it doesn't work and I have to go back, reselect and repaste to copy what I want. Man that ticks me off.
You can do this. Many of the KDE libraries are also under the LGPL. But the fact is that many of the KDE classes that you want to use are actually extensions of QT classes. If you want to use those particular QT classes and the functions that go with them you have two choices, pay TrollTech or GPL. It sounds reasonable to me.
If you don't like the choices then don't use KDE classes and functions. Write your own. The licensing is NOT stopping you from developing your own software for any desktop and licensing that software as you see fit.
Almost all of recorded history clearly shows that man has always operated on greed and the amassing of wealth. The measurement of that wealth may or may not have changed over the millenia but the greed has not. Since the dawn of man, people have robbed their neighbors and nations have gone to war primarily due to greed. Long before "feutal" times. Since the dawn of man greed has been a driving factor for mankind. The fact that a few people do not share this view or wish to accumulate wealth does not change the fact that society in general has always been that way.
Murders have happened since the dawn of time, but that doesn't mean we let people 'kill or be killed' nor do we assume that the level of violence on the planet has been constant since the dawn of time.
At the same time a desire or laws to prevent murder doesn't change the fact that, since the dawn of time murders have happened and will continue to do so.
The world hasn't become such a greedy place, as if overnight. It has always been this way. The world has always been a greed driven place. You are just opening your eyes to it and seeing it for what seems to be the first time.
I'll tell you what would NOT be a waste of time, though: spending money and attention to ensure that electronic voting cannot be tampered with. That means a paper trail. That means independent review of machines. That means source code that anyone can read, review and comment on before and after the election.
In short, assuring that there are no reasons for anyone to doubt the effectiveness of the voting mechanism, so that issues like the potential Diebold fraud(s) never come up in the first place. That would be a great use of taxpayer money.
On this we are in complete agreement.
And hey, here's a thought: how about purchasing voting machines from non-profits?
Can you name a non-profit that manufactures or sells electronic voting machines? I can't.
I'd also like to point out that contrary to the many conspiracy theories on this topic there were valid reasons for choosing Diebold voting machines. The first and most obvious is the fact that Diebold made them when few if any other companies did. When combined with Diebold's long standing (though undeserved) reputation as a trust worthy vendor to the banking and financial industry, Diebold becomes a natural choice. Unfortunately, Diebold have again failed to live up to their reputation and the opportunity for error and abuse continues to increase with the general populace having no clue about the issue.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it?
That's is a good question? Why do you suppose that they haven't?
Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square, and realize that their protests and complaints would not only be a pathetic waste of time but, also a waste of the tax payers money?
But, I'll bet that you think it is because the opposing party is somehow controlling them and making it impossible for them to complain. You see, when you post on what should be a non-partisan subject in an extraordinarily biased and partisan fashion, you lose credibility. Most reasonable people of any party will have already discounted you as biased and full of sour grapes the moment they read your whiny rant at the top of the post.
When it comes to network printers and print servers the authority has always been Hewlett Packard. You'll find what you need (is a 7GB spool enough for labels? ) here but at nearly US$2,000 I would think that you could build a Linux box running CUPS and Samba for a lot less.
Maybe you should look here and here bfore you get dollar signs in your eyes. That is unless you own the patent and want to pull a SCO in the fire fighting industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really see the logic. Linux in general used to get beat up severly because of installation difficulties. Over the years many distros heard these complaints and addressed them by developing better and better installers. Today, there are numerous distros available that have such excellent installers that installation is a moot topic, except for Debian, Slack and Gentoo.
Most, if not all, of these better installers are open source GPLed programs. It seems to me that "logical progression" would be Debian taking one or many of these better installers and adapting them to Debian. Instead they choose to reinvent the wheel and have produced a crude installer whose interface was passe years ago. Where is the logic?
It looks like Anaconda 0.0.2!! I'm not one of those that demands a GUI installer but, surely they can put together an ncurses app that looks better and less confusing that this abomination? This installer is crude to say the very least.
Please explain how one pings a web page. Is this a feature of AOL?
Web pages are NOT internet hosts.
Web servers are relatively few compared with other types of hosts on the internet.
The World Wide Web is NOT the internet.
The World Wide Web is NOT the internet.
The World Wide Web is NOT the internet.
The World Wide Web is NOT the internet.
In Windows the network redirector intercepts calls to drives and routes them to the appropriate device whether it is a local disk or a network device. This makes mapped network drives transparrent to the application. This mean that the application sees no difference between drive C: (local) and dirve H: (network). This means that you don't need some fancy driver software, you already have it.
This should answer your question specifically, regarding Exchange
With all that said, I would recommend against running the likes of Exchange from a network drive anyway. The reason is that the bandwidth of the network is going to put a massive hit on your I/O performance and there is a massive amount of I/O with Exchange. If you must have remote disks for Exchange I would recommend a SAN. With a SAN you will have 1 or 2 gigabit I/O performance and you can put the disks anywhere you want. iSCSI will allow you to build a poor man's SAN across an ethernet network but this will create the I/O bottle neck I mentioned earlier, unless you are running 1 or 10 gigabit ethernet.
I know this is a blatant troll but, for the sake of any newbies that might put credence in your statements, I must respond. The amount of documentation that comes with open source applications and the quality of said documentation varies depending on the application. Just as it does in the Microsoft world. There is almost always a man page and usually a readme file with the necessary documentation for most open source apps. These are usually far more detailed than the Windows Help or .chm files. Additionally, one can usually find a detailed online how-to for the desired application which is usually harder to find for Windows applications.
.chm for its included documentation. It is incomplete, to say the least. That is why there are at least three very large books available from Microsoft Press on the subject and there are dozens of third party books that cover Exchange 2000. This is only one example but there are many many more. A casual stroll throught the Computer section of any book store clearly demonstrates this.
Finally, if Windows documentation is so good, why are there so many books from Microsoft Press and third parties for so many Windows applications? Microsoft Exchange 2000 uses a
The fact of the matter is that there definitely is a lot of free documentation for open source software and some is excellent. That does not mean that there shouldn't be third party books for it too though.
Sorry for feeding the trolls.
where the acquire, compile, install instructions are in the appendix. So many books on Linux and Linux apps usually waste several of the first few chapters on this. Happily, Linux an Linux app installation has improved to the point that any more than a paragraph or two on compiling and installation is a waste.
The "information" on IRC is 99% crap. I'm concerned that, by integrating IRC searching in Google, the signal to noise ratio of Google will go way down. If however, Google keeps it as a separate service like Usenet I suspect that it will go away due to lack of interest.
Who really wants to search IRC, except the Justice Department?
The recent changes in the leading Linux vendors combine to make for a very interesting future. Novell first acquired Ximian which along with its Ximain Desktop, Evolution and Mono, also provided the Red Carpet update service for Red Hat distributions. Then Red Hat announced that they would not be providing further updates for the free/consumer version of their product. This left users in the cold forcing them to use Fedora or some other free disto or Novell/Ximian might have used Red Carpet to fill the gap.
Now Novell has also acquired SuSE, the number two vendor and alternative to the now defuct Red Hat Linux, which is also an RPM distribution but, uses a different update service.
Novell, looking to increase revenue, is unlikely to offer much in the arena of free services and is also unlikely to expend much effort supporting a distribution that is not their own, as SuSE now is. So, one is left wondering what the landscape will look like in the coming months.
Will Ximian's Red Carpet survive at all and if so, will it support the Red Hat distro or the SuSE distro or both? Will Novell/SuSE continue to develop using the KDE desktop or will they more likely shift SuSE to use the Ximian Desktop? Will SuSE, who had historically been somewhat "less free" than Red Hat, become even more "less free" with its acquisition by Novell?
Any which way it goes, the Linux landscape will change dramatically in the next few months, as it has in the past few weeks. One can't help but wonder if there will be a truely free Linux left with all of the commercial activity of late. Fortunately, Debian continues as it always has, at least for now.
You might think so but, your thinking is incorrect. Earthlink now offers an add-on service that accelerates dial-up performance considerably. It works by using caching and compression. People who subscribe to the service for $5.00 per month above the regular dial-up costs, install a small application on their desktop that handles redirecting requests to the cache and also handles the decompression from the cache. On average, there is a significant performance increase.
Personally, it annoys me that someone can sell this as a service for $5.00 a month. Most browsers can already handle compression from the web server but, most web sites still don't turn it on.
I'm sure that the flames will now commence as many Slashdotters seem religiously opposed to tape. In fact a recent Slashdot artice cited some tech magazines prediction that tape was obsolete. But, tape is still an excellent storage medium.
The fact is that tapes last for a very long time with a shelf life of at least decades. Most especially when they are not used much, as is the case when tape is used to backup a hard drive and is only accessed again if the hard drive fails and a restore is required.
Tapes store much more than any other removable storage medium. CD-ROM and DVD can't hold anywhere near as much as most tapes can.
Tapes do not cost too much, contrary to what many people say. Right now, on eBay, Travan 8GB drives start at US$5.00 and DLT 30/70 GB drives start at US$50.00 and go on up to >US$300.00. The tapes themselves can be more expensive especially when one chooses the preferred new tapes but, again eBay has DLT tapes available for anywhere form US$2.00 to US$100.00 per tape.
You suggest that you may choose to use RAID. But, tape is still a better alternative. RAID is effective in protecting you from a single drive failure but, it does not protect you against accidental deletion, rogue applications, viruses, versioning or controller failure. On the other hand, tape and the right backup strategy can protect you from all these issues.
Almost always tape backups are the best alternative.
but by the same token, realize that some knowledge is best not left available to the public.
Indeed. I really don't think that the public is ready to handle NASA's 1965 analisys of Kecksburg PA.
So, what happens when the lsaer is based in the Arizona desert and it is fired and satelite mounted reflectors? Line-of-site problems decrease a fair bit. Now if only the clouds would cooperate...
We back up 15-20 gigs each night and move it off site the next day.
If you think it would be tough to do this with hard drives, just wait until you are backing up and shipping out a terrabyte or more per day. In real networks where business continuity is important, tapes will always be there.
Only a small segment of the business community still uses them.
;)
yea, I suppose you are right, if every point of sale system on the planet is considered a "small segment of the business community". Think about it the next time you are at a restaurant and they hand you the multi-copy bill to sign or any other time you use a credit card. Think about it the next time you take your car to the repair shop and they print up the work order and then later the bill. Does your paycheck get direct deposited? If not it is likely printed on a dot matrix printer. Also on the subject of banks, they usually use dot matrix printers for receipts and check endorsements.
Yea, dot matrix must be dead I haven't seen one for almost forever.
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
Tell that to SGI and SCO.
The only accurate predictions I see is SNA
.NET doesn't really seem like a replacement to me.
Windows 95 will of course die but, it's stiil a few years away.
VB6 will take even longer to be replaced that Windows 9X. Also, is it really being replaced? VB
Client server isn't going to die, the client is changing that's all. Old app specific clients are being replaced by browsers but it will remain a client server architecture.
Tape Backup - Step away from the crack pipe dude. Tape backup is going now where in the forseeable future.
My pet peeve is that the middle click doesn't work on Windows, unless they have configured the Unix mouse app, Also, when I select and paste it doesn't work and I have to go back, reselect and repaste to copy what I want. Man that ticks me off.
You can do this. Many of the KDE libraries are also under the LGPL. But the fact is that many of the KDE classes that you want to use are actually extensions of QT classes. If you want to use those particular QT classes and the functions that go with them you have two choices, pay TrollTech or GPL. It sounds reasonable to me.
If you don't like the choices then don't use KDE classes and functions. Write your own. The licensing is NOT stopping you from developing your own software for any desktop and licensing that software as you see fit.
Is a lack of liquor for a few days really a crisis? If so, maybe there is a bigger problem than the state's computer woes.
Almost all of recorded history clearly shows that man has always operated on greed and the amassing of wealth. The measurement of that wealth may or may not have changed over the millenia but the greed has not. Since the dawn of man, people have robbed their neighbors and nations have gone to war primarily due to greed. Long before "feutal" times. Since the dawn of man greed has been a driving factor for mankind. The fact that a few people do not share this view or wish to accumulate wealth does not change the fact that society in general has always been that way.
Murders have happened since the dawn of time, but that doesn't mean we let people 'kill or be killed' nor do we assume that the level of violence on the planet has been constant since the dawn of time.
At the same time a desire or laws to prevent murder doesn't change the fact that, since the dawn of time murders have happened and will continue to do so.
The world hasn't become such a greedy place, as if overnight. It has always been this way. The world has always been a greed driven place. You are just opening your eyes to it and seeing it for what seems to be the first time.
I'll tell you what would NOT be a waste of time, though: spending money and attention to ensure that electronic voting cannot be tampered with. That means a paper trail. That means independent review of machines. That means source code that anyone can read, review and comment on before and after the election.
In short, assuring that there are no reasons for anyone to doubt the effectiveness of the voting mechanism, so that issues like the potential Diebold fraud(s) never come up in the first place. That would be a great use of taxpayer money.
On this we are in complete agreement.
And hey, here's a thought: how about purchasing voting machines from non-profits?
Can you name a non-profit that manufactures or sells electronic voting machines? I can't.
I'd also like to point out that contrary to the many conspiracy theories on this topic there were valid reasons for choosing Diebold voting machines. The first and most obvious is the fact that Diebold made them when few if any other companies did. When combined with Diebold's long standing (though undeserved) reputation as a trust worthy vendor to the banking and financial industry, Diebold becomes a natural choice. Unfortunately, Diebold have again failed to live up to their reputation and the opportunity for error and abuse continues to increase with the general populace having no clue about the issue.
What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it?
That's is a good question? Why do you suppose that they haven't?
Could it be that they truely did lose, fair and square, and realize that their protests and complaints would not only be a pathetic waste of time but, also a waste of the tax payers money?
But, I'll bet that you think it is because the opposing party is somehow controlling them and making it impossible for them to complain. You see, when you post on what should be a non-partisan subject in an extraordinarily biased and partisan fashion, you lose credibility. Most reasonable people of any party will have already discounted you as biased and full of sour grapes the moment they read your whiny rant at the top of the post.
When it comes to network printers and print servers the authority has always been Hewlett Packard. You'll find what you need (is a 7GB spool enough for labels? ) here but at nearly US$2,000 I would think that you could build a Linux box running CUPS and Samba for a lot less.
Maybe you should look here and here bfore you get dollar signs in your eyes. That is unless you own the patent and want to pull a SCO in the fire fighting industry.