Reading the FAQ and TFA, this is more about BusyBox than the Linux Kernel.
No, it started with BusyBox, but it's now mostly about the Linux kernel. The BusyBox issues are largely or completely resolved. As explained in the FAQ: "VMware made substantial and good efforts toward compliance on BusyBox. However, VMware still refused to fix a few minor and one major compliance problem that we discovered during the process. Namely, there was a major violation regarding Linux itself that ultimately became Christoph's key complaint in this lawsuit."
I wonder what the performance penalty would be for thunking to kernel space would on every such operation would be?
What's being discussed here is system call wrapping, and system calls by definition go to kernel space anyway. No extra thunk to kernel space is required.
Exactly how "not evil" can an ad company be? "Don't be evil" directly conflicts with Google's raison d'etre.
It's debatable to what extent Google is an ad company. Personally, I think they're a search/information company (with a stated goal of "organizing all of the world's information"), and ads happen to be how they generate revenue.
This isn't too different from other companies and other industries - Red Hat is an open source software company that happens to generate revenue from support, NBC makes their revenue from selling commercials but isn't a "commercial company," etc.
... is one with each other. Some sort of mutual defense agreement.
That's already been done, more or less, with the Linux Foundation and the Open Invention Network. Groups like Red Hat and IBM are members of both; Novell, somewhat ironically, is even a member of OIN.
The OLPC team is at least considering this: see here, here and here. To summarize those links, it's a very green laptop, there are strong incentives to not simply throw the laptops away, and plans for recycling are (apparently) in the works.
Linux has had filesystem snapshots (via LVM) for quite a while too.
Ext3cow, as I understand it, differs in that it lets users access previous versions of individual files from within the current filesystem, rather than creating a snapshot of an entire filesystem or disk. As far as I know, it takes space out of the existing ext3 filesystem to do this, rather than using previously unallocated space within the disk volume group.
It should be noted that there are third-party projects to add the flexibility and newer versions you want, like CentOS Plus (includes PHP 5, Postgres 8, MySQL 5, and others) and PyVault (Python 2.4).
The proper way to handle errors and avoid inconsistent states is not all that clear (see comments #53 and #57 in the bug report you linked).
RPM's main developer (Jeff Johnson) is, by the accounts I've read, a very talented developer. He asked about fixing this bug, was told by management that it was not important enough to risk destabilizing RPM for RHEL 4, and so marked the bug closed. Once he no longer worked for Red Hat, he promptly fixed it, as part of his continuing to maintain RPM on his own time. (Slightly more details on this thread, although it's horribly long.)
Yum, a popular RPM-based manager (like apt, but specifically for RPM) was certainly a total piece of shit the last time I tried it. Took about 10 times as long to do anything as apt would have for the same operation, and I'm not exaggerating. Maybe it's gotten better, but as recently as a couple years ago it was a huge pain in the ass to use.
Yum has indeed improved in the last couple of years. It's my understanding that it is (or was) slower than apt for two reasons:
Lousy data storage backend.
Always fetched data off over the network (rather than having separate "update" and "upgrade" commands as apt does and using locally cached data unless specifically told to update).
Issue 1 has been fixed by switching to SQLite for storage backend, issue 2 has been fixed by having yum use its cache if it last updated within a certain time period (which is still less flexible than separate "update" and "upgrade" commands, but it at least works). From what I can tell, yum is continuing to be developed fairly rapidly.
TechNewsWorld has an interesting article by an IP lawyer explaining why lititgation risks with Open Source aren't as great as they're often made out to be.
Actually, Ranum tends to speak out against blind panics and failed attempts at security (see point #6) and attention-whoring. While I understand your point, I'm not sure that it's fair to accuse him of doing what he speaks against just because he says that the state of a particular facet of computer security is scary.
I'm going to get modded flamebait, but their business model is identical to Microsoft's. The only way to get Red Hat Linux is to buy it from them. If you aren't a paying customer, you mean zero to them.
Hmm... Microsoft's apparent business model: sell subscriptions that give you the license to use (not modify, not own) software, then fail to deliver any new versions of the subscribed software for years; charge extra for support; buy or bury competition; flex monopoly power as much as possible. Red Hat's apparent business model: sell subscriptions that include support; invest heavily in developing OSS software and then give all of that back to the community; make all of their sources available for rebuilders like the CentOS team.
I'm not seeing much similarity.
Sure it's possible to build a system that is mostly the same at no cost, but you aren't running Red Hat and they won't give you any support if you run into problems.
Of course they won't give you any support; you're not paying them anything. They're a company; they don't give tech support as a charity.
How does one force goddamn Less to display the contents of a html file instead of trying to render it?
less -L? Or check your LESSOPEN environment variable and lesspipe configuration.
Although I'm curious to know what distro you're using; Red Hat / Fedora less displays raw HTML, and I'm surprised to hear that another distro thought it would be a Good Idea to try and render it.
"This file may be binary, are you sure to open it?" on a text file containing native ISO-8859-2 characters, then showing inverse video hex codes junk in place of the characters instead of using properly configured console font to display them.
less -r? Or try futzing with your TERM and LANG variables; sorry, this isn't really something I've dealt with.
Or user ClusterSSH or a similar tool - it opens up xterms to each of your 10 servers, then you type your command once and watch as it executes on all 10 servers simultaneously.
Cfengine is a great Linux admin tool. Define configuration scripts once on a server, then they're automatically pushed out to each configured computer.
Saves a lot of manual work keeping a bunch of servers consistent, and when I set up a new server, it's automatically configured by Cfengine.
And that is a large part of the reason why Google's corporate motto is, "Do no evil." They recognize the importance of people's trust to their business, and they try to maintain it.
As you say, Microsoft has not earned people's trust: breaking antitrust laws, spreading FUD, trying to bury any companies that get in their way, etc. I certainly wouldn't trust their search results.
We're in the middle of a Nitrobit deployment right now, and I'd have reservations about recommending it. It's a great idea (Group Policy without Active Directory), a reasonable price, and they seem to have a fairly fast release schedule and quick, helpful tech support, but we've had one problem after another getting it to work (so we've had to rely on that tech support more often than we'd like). I expect that we'll be able to get all of the bugs worked out, and it should be very nice once that's done, but it's been a headache getting there.
Nitrobit gives you a few limitations that you wouldn't have with a full fledged AD deployment. For example, AD allows laptops to have two separate firewall profiles, one for when it's connected to the domain and one for when it isn't. With Nitrobit, as far as Windows is concerned, it's never connected to a W2K/2K3 domain, so you only have one profile.
Feel free to drop me a message if you'd like any more details.
My grandfather got annoyed at all of his fellow college students who used his typewriter and didn't take proper care of it. So he removed the keys, happily continued touch-typing, and stumped everyone else, who wasn't as familiar with such technology.
Now someone wants to charge $80 for this "unique" idea that will "double" your typing speed. How odd...
Basically, Netreg is designed to have two classifications - registered and unregistered, it's not designed to have 3 classes (i.e. + infected).
There are at least three different versions of NetReg that I'm aware of. Saint Mary's College's version supports three classes (registered, unregistered, quarantined), and you can quarantine students for several different reasons (with correspondingly different web pages to each quarantined user).
What makes StarOffice so much better than OOo? The only difference that I was aware of was a builtin database app for StarOffice.
Sun's web site is of no help in answering this question; the only specific statement they offer on the differences is, "For a detailed comparison, please see TBD."
As long as your internet connection is secure, ie, you have a good firewall or router (as you would have in a large corporate environment)...
Except that even large corporate environments, as far as I know, benefit from defense in depth, whereby a compromised desktop or laptop within the perimeter doesn't have the run of the network.
...with no real extra security (compare vulnerabilities found before and after SP2 on sites like Secunia).
I don't frequent Secunia, but in the vulnerability newsletters that I do receive, there are quite a few XP vulnerabilities that do not affect SP2 due to its security enhancements.
Slashdot Mirror
It's particularly interesting since VMware seems, in many respects, friendly to open source. They distribute a bunch of open source in their products and extensively document this, they partner with open source projects like Docker and OpenStack, and they're on GitHub. The sticking point here seems to be that they have kernel-level code that they think isn't covered by the GPL and Hellwig and the Conservancy do.
Reading the FAQ and TFA, this is more about BusyBox than the Linux Kernel.
No, it started with BusyBox, but it's now mostly about the Linux kernel. The BusyBox issues are largely or completely resolved. As explained in the FAQ: "VMware made substantial and good efforts toward compliance on BusyBox. However, VMware still refused to fix a few minor and one major compliance problem that we discovered during the process. Namely, there was a major violation regarding Linux itself that ultimately became Christoph's key complaint in this lawsuit."
What's being discussed here is system call wrapping, and system calls by definition go to kernel space anyway. No extra thunk to kernel space is required.
As good (bad?) as Zero Wing was, it cannot compare with Bangai-O, whose script is so bad, and yet so incredibly funny, that it has to be intentional.
Bangai-O is also one of the better space shooters that I've played; highly recommended, if you get a chance.
It's debatable to what extent Google is an ad company. Personally, I think they're a search/information company (with a stated goal of "organizing all of the world's information"), and ads happen to be how they generate revenue.
This isn't too different from other companies and other industries - Red Hat is an open source software company that happens to generate revenue from support, NBC makes their revenue from selling commercials but isn't a "commercial company," etc.
That's already been done, more or less, with the Linux Foundation and the Open Invention Network. Groups like Red Hat and IBM are members of both; Novell, somewhat ironically, is even a member of OIN.
The OLPC team is at least considering this: see here, here and here. To summarize those links, it's a very green laptop, there are strong incentives to not simply throw the laptops away, and plans for recycling are (apparently) in the works.
Linux has had filesystem snapshots (via LVM) for quite a while too. Ext3cow, as I understand it, differs in that it lets users access previous versions of individual files from within the current filesystem, rather than creating a snapshot of an entire filesystem or disk. As far as I know, it takes space out of the existing ext3 filesystem to do this, rather than using previously unallocated space within the disk volume group.
It should be noted that there are third-party projects to add the flexibility and newer versions you want, like CentOS Plus (includes PHP 5, Postgres 8, MySQL 5, and others) and PyVault (Python 2.4).
That's a bit of an oversimplification:
The proper way to handle errors and avoid inconsistent states is not all that clear (see comments #53 and #57 in the bug report you linked).
RPM's main developer (Jeff Johnson) is, by the accounts I've read, a very talented developer. He asked about fixing this bug, was told by management that it was not important enough to risk destabilizing RPM for RHEL 4, and so marked the bug closed. Once he no longer worked for Red Hat, he promptly fixed it, as part of his continuing to maintain RPM on his own time. (Slightly more details on this thread, although it's horribly long.)
Yum has indeed improved in the last couple of years. It's my understanding that it is (or was) slower than apt for two reasons:
Issue 1 has been fixed by switching to SQLite for storage backend, issue 2 has been fixed by having yum use its cache if it last updated within a certain time period (which is still less flexible than separate "update" and "upgrade" commands, but it at least works). From what I can tell, yum is continuing to be developed fairly rapidly.
TechNewsWorld has an interesting article by an IP lawyer explaining why lititgation risks with Open Source aren't as great as they're often made out to be.
Swallow that funky music.
Actually, Ranum tends to speak out against blind panics and failed attempts at security (see point #6) and attention-whoring. While I understand your point, I'm not sure that it's fair to accuse him of doing what he speaks against just because he says that the state of a particular facet of computer security is scary.
Greasemonkey + WGA Workaround
Hmm... Microsoft's apparent business model: sell subscriptions that give you the license to use (not modify, not own) software, then fail to deliver any new versions of the subscribed software for years; charge extra for support; buy or bury competition; flex monopoly power as much as possible. Red Hat's apparent business model: sell subscriptions that include support; invest heavily in developing OSS software and then give all of that back to the community; make all of their sources available for rebuilders like the CentOS team.
I'm not seeing much similarity.
Of course they won't give you any support; you're not paying them anything. They're a company; they don't give tech support as a charity.
less -L? Or check your LESSOPEN environment variable and lesspipe configuration.
Although I'm curious to know what distro you're using; Red Hat / Fedora less displays raw HTML, and I'm surprised to hear that another distro thought it would be a Good Idea to try and render it.
less -r? Or try futzing with your TERM and LANG variables; sorry, this isn't really something I've dealt with.
Or user ClusterSSH or a similar tool - it opens up xterms to each of your 10 servers, then you type your command once and watch as it executes on all 10 servers simultaneously.
Cfengine is a great Linux admin tool. Define configuration scripts once on a server, then they're automatically pushed out to each configured computer. Saves a lot of manual work keeping a bunch of servers consistent, and when I set up a new server, it's automatically configured by Cfengine.
And that is a large part of the reason why Google's corporate motto is, "Do no evil." They recognize the importance of people's trust to their business, and they try to maintain it.
As you say, Microsoft has not earned people's trust: breaking antitrust laws, spreading FUD, trying to bury any companies that get in their way, etc. I certainly wouldn't trust their search results.
We're in the middle of a Nitrobit deployment right now, and I'd have reservations about recommending it. It's a great idea (Group Policy without Active Directory), a reasonable price, and they seem to have a fairly fast release schedule and quick, helpful tech support, but we've had one problem after another getting it to work (so we've had to rely on that tech support more often than we'd like). I expect that we'll be able to get all of the bugs worked out, and it should be very nice once that's done, but it's been a headache getting there.
Nitrobit gives you a few limitations that you wouldn't have with a full fledged AD deployment. For example, AD allows laptops to have two separate firewall profiles, one for when it's connected to the domain and one for when it isn't. With Nitrobit, as far as Windows is concerned, it's never connected to a W2K/2K3 domain, so you only have one profile.
Feel free to drop me a message if you'd like any more details.
My grandfather got annoyed at all of his fellow college students who used his typewriter and didn't take proper care of it. So he removed the keys, happily continued touch-typing, and stumped everyone else, who wasn't as familiar with such technology.
Now someone wants to charge $80 for this "unique" idea that will "double" your typing speed. How odd...
There are at least three different versions of NetReg that I'm aware of. Saint Mary's College's version supports three classes (registered, unregistered, quarantined), and you can quarantine students for several different reasons (with correspondingly different web pages to each quarantined user).
What makes StarOffice so much better than OOo? The only difference that I was aware of was a builtin database app for StarOffice.
Sun's web site is of no help in answering this question; the only specific statement they offer on the differences is, "For a detailed comparison, please see TBD."
Except that even large corporate environments, as far as I know, benefit from defense in depth, whereby a compromised desktop or laptop within the perimeter doesn't have the run of the network.
I don't frequent Secunia, but in the vulnerability newsletters that I do receive, there are quite a few XP vulnerabilities that do not affect SP2 due to its security enhancements.