Enterprise needs one thing, that applies to most OTS vendors as well. They need a stable API. There's really nothing to argue about that unless you believe the should bow to your personal political belief system and be forced to open all their software/drives. But of course that will not happen.
So the solution seems kind of simple. Split. Let Novell, Redhat, Oracle and anyone else interested in developing for a more static Linux environment can fund this project. I think its time that at least those parties interested in bringing Linux into the enterprise (or even serious/usable desktop) market place make some decisions that might not be popular.
But if you complain about this your missing the whole point. Linux is GPL. It is open so we lose nothing. Maybe it will work out well in which case we only gain. Otherwise there will always be hackers working on a version of Linux thats exactly what they want. Linux is already free. I don't think there's much to fight about.
Does my company "pay through the nose" for Centos?
on
Open Source Not That Open?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure where the pay through the nose thing came from but between Taos, Whitebox, Centos et al I don't see having a supported distro a big expense. If you want changes that might break something you make sure you don't. Big deal. How Microsoft competing against that? And on what planet wouldn't changes to the core operating system be problematic?
Back in the eighties I wanted to build a PC, but I was terrified. I didn't even know where to begin. I thought building PC's was for engineering students or professional technicians. A I was interested.
I believe most people don't install OS'es themselves for similar reasons, but of course you have to add to that the fact that they probably aren't interested in the process anyway. They've got the money, why waste the time?
Installation wise between xp and any decent modern linux install system (that counts out debian and gentoo (vahnilla) of course) its all about the same. With Linux I still get to/have to make a few decisions (do I want auto or custom partitioning? extra packages or a pre-selected set? firewall/no firewall? Extra users? Whats my administrator password? Etc) which are honestly quite minor (and helpful).
Back in the day (say pre SCO) Caldera had the install process wrapped up. Great hardware detection (wow, I don't have to set up X11 by hand??) that let you play tetris while you waited. That was when I realised Linux was (or would be at some point) something more then a hobbiests OS.
I don't think its there yet, but I'm not worried about it. I'll get there when the time is right. Until then it makes my life both on the desktop and in the server room easier.
culture of elitism and is a desktop that spends less time listening to its users then most of the others. KDE has been a leader in both usability, flexibility and responsiveness. Unless the core Gnome development group starts making some serious cultural changes I think this is a lose-lose for both Novell and its users.
Standardization *needs* to happen. But why choose the desktop that most frequently alienates it's own user base?
I'm sure there are a lot of people who would argue against everything I've just said, but look at the trends. I'm not saying Gnome is a bad project or the developers aren't good/respectful/worthy as those in any other project. But KDE has managed to pull itself up as a desktop for the people, and I respect that (even if I use Blackbox still most of the time).
I'll be sticking with RHEL for the time being anyway. Supports both and runs solidly.
Realisticly we'd probably be looking at government and edu pc's replacing Windows, with hobbyists or poor, law abiding citizens maybe using it for the computer basics Linux is perfectly capable of (aside from the already mentioned ActiveX snafu's some would experience). The rest will still be able to A) pirate (like a lot of the rest of the world) or B) purchase abroad.
Personally, I think its a great idea. I can be used in a lot of places and the real-world $$$ savings would significant. But everyone dumping their gaming/msn client/etc is silly. As I understand internet cafes for gaming (and gaming in general) are quite popular, Linspire won't be a big hit there.
I've had HDTV for a few years now and honestly I never was blown away. What I did get was a big hard to move cini-screen set that I'd be more then happy to part with for something better and thinner/lighter.
Its all about how they position it. You plasm screen owners might be a little harder to convince, but that resolution is a big jump and by the time the rest of the technology catches up you might be ready for an upgrade anyway (we don't have 21TB dvd's yet and at least here in the US streaming that kind of data to a regular home would be out of the question).
With options? Ya, its a real server with a price-tag to match. As far as software, maybe you've never done an IT budget but you can't spec prices on one without the other. Otherwise you've got no budget, and no approval.
Anyway, this is your tangent. If you can hit that funny back button a couple of times you'll see I was asking someone else a legitimate question before you decided to drop you tidbits.
Maybe you need to talk to your finance department about those prices. $800 for a "real" server is a fairy tale. Or maybe your just a basement dweller using refurbished dells to run p2p out of your mom's closet.
Here's what it looks like in the real world:
Xeon processor: $299.95 (your buying at least two, even if you used this vendor).
1 GB low-end ECC memory (2 to 4 sticks depending on the load the server will be under): $124 (that vendor doesn't use low-end, I just added a 512 kit to a 350 for > $200, but I'm sure in Candy-Land things are different)
Motherboard? Supermicro's retail for about $279
1U case (your certainly not one of those idiots trying to run production software on a desktop system..): $250
Oh, you want hard drives with that? You'll need at least 2 because NO mission critical box goes without raid1 and hot-swap bays.
And of course after you've covered all that you've still got $5000 for a single-processor Oracle license which you can add $1995 if you'd like hot-fixes and support for a single year. SBS? OEM is still another $500 for a 5 CAL.
Back in the pre-dot.bubble days we wasted oddles of money on "real" servers. 350's, 250's and a couple of Spark 5 workstations, dual homed with redundant T1's. Times have changed.
You speak with absolutely NO idea of how, what, or why I do what I do. I'm glad you can afford this and if I had the final say we'd be running enterprise level hardware all around.
But guess fucking what? Thats not the way it works for a lot of us in the *gasp* real world.
As far as you tidbit goes I agree 100%. Frankly I think you're just being an asshole to A) brag about your leet warez B) just another blow-hard who likes to try to cut people down who has neither the attention nor capability to grasp the big picture.
We've been building out a lot of systems for our (web) apps. They've ALL been based on Xeon processors despite the fact that the dual-core Opteron is clearly the way to go. The catch has always been availability of a solid dual socket board (we try to get as much raw power in a 1U case as we can so dual chips are kind of company culture around here).
If you've been using the Opteron, and it sounds like in production, I'd love to hears some details about good/compatable/stable hardware. I really, really, really don't want the next system I purchase to be another hot, slow Xeon.
But some seamingly important pieces seem to be missing from most major commercial distros.
lsscsi (list SCSI device info including nodes and ID's)
scsiadd (is there a new/better way to do this? Scsiadd is fine, but it wasn't part of the Centos toolkit and required some research and a compile. I'm not complaining, but adding and removing drives from arrarys seems like a pretty important function.)
after that I supose I'm just going to be repeating variations of what everyone else says:
sh/bash/ksh/etc
vi
wget
ssh/sftp/scp
telnet client (for general testing)
nmap (god I love this program)
smb client at least for mixed networks
mdadm if your stuck with software raid
grep
less
cat
gawk
Of course thats more then 10 already, but who really uses 10 or less tools to do the work? And frankly IMHO they are all favorites. Everytime I remote onto our SBS I'm reminded why.
I did it because I felt like Windows was artificially limited in its flexability (which it is, for reason I appreaciate and understand better now). The business I work for is switching because Linux servers are A) better supported, both through companies and the community B) cost. Of course we switched from Solaris which has...erm, dropped in price. But I still prefer trouble shooting a semi-obscure Linux problem then just about any Solaris problems I've seen.
I think its refreshing to hear someone articulate something original. Getting rubber-stamped, reguritated news is fine and all but this reminded me there are people in here. And even better, people that think about the times they are writting in.
But look at dvdcss. It started out exactly as you say, but then something else happened...people took the open source code (or at least the solutions) and started putting it into Windows applications. Thing DVD Shrink.
The end result? Computer users in general had the option to benifit equally despite their OS of choice. Name 1 major Linux distro that supports encrypted DVD playback out of the box? I know there are packages available for probably every single one, but you have to install them yourself.
With stronger DRM OSS doesn't "win". It just means there will be a period where we won't have support followed by a small window where we might have the only work around before it filters into any number of software/OS solutions.
Basically DRM sucks and its certainly isn't going to do any Linux user any favors. Oh, and you think WMP won't support it out of the box?
quite there yet and I don't think anyone is disagreeing about that. There are examples of decent photorealism out there but their few and far between. When the toolsets get better the realism will too so until then your absolutely right, stylism is the work-around. But thats more or less what everyones been saying isn't it?
Seriously, I work for a company that does internet based market research (I'm the admin) and have thought about this a bit myself. I do block ads, I use any number of measures. I find them intrusive and distracting, and thats the well behaved ones.
I believe the biggest problems with ads is that they are generally totally off target. Googles been interesting in this way by pushing ads that are both less obtrusive and somewhat targeted. But their still are a lot of companies that don't seem to understand good manners.
I also think ads tend to be fairly useless most of the time, not taking advantage of even a quarter of the available technology (that might be the programmers talking, but we've got some interesting embedded survey technology).
I get the feeling that advertisers don't much respect their market, and with things like the pop-up fiascoes, browser hi-jackers, pop-unders, dhtml roll-in-front-of's, blinkers, javascript rollers I feel like their just begging for a fight their bound to lose.
You want to get your message across on the internet? DON'T SPELL IT OUT LIKE ITS ALL IN CAPS. People just won't listen.
Ya, I like googles approach the best so far (right, and my companies).
I dug into this recently because we are setting up a number of systems running dual-core chips. Microsofts licencing policy was surprizingly reasonable (at the time) and it was Oracle who appeared to be looking to gouge us (but only if your running more then 1 dual-core processor, so we left a socket open).
If you don't like them don't buy one. No need to wax poetic. For all the complaining some people do about technology you'd think there was no escaping it. Thats simply not the case. There are days I wish I didn't have to carry a phone with me everywhere, but I *chose* to be a sys admin. I could just as well choose to be a rancher, a farmer, a clerk, a logger, a priest. You get my point.
Like most things, technology is neither 100% good nor 100% evil (accept Solaris, but I'm not sure which 100% it is yet).:)
Major movies like the Matrix have made a big point of doing world-wide releases. Region coding was a bad idea, the consumers lose and the studios don't actually gain much of anything for it. Maybe it stopped a few people from ordering cheap DVD's from abroad. But really, those people who would would also be the people who knew how to bypass the coding anyway.
It solved a problem that didn't really exsist and probably actually ended up costing the studios in lost revenue for potential niche markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Enterprise needs one thing, that applies to most OTS vendors as well. They need a stable API. There's really nothing to argue about that unless you believe the should bow to your personal political belief system and be forced to open all their software/drives. But of course that will not happen.
So the solution seems kind of simple. Split. Let Novell, Redhat, Oracle and anyone else interested in developing for a more static Linux environment can fund this project. I think its time that at least those parties interested in bringing Linux into the enterprise (or even serious/usable desktop) market place make some decisions that might not be popular.
But if you complain about this your missing the whole point. Linux is GPL. It is open so we lose nothing. Maybe it will work out well in which case we only gain. Otherwise there will always be hackers working on a version of Linux thats exactly what they want. Linux is already free. I don't think there's much to fight about.
I'm not sure where the pay through the nose thing came from but between Taos, Whitebox, Centos et al I don't see having a supported distro a big expense. If you want changes that might break something you make sure you don't. Big deal. How Microsoft competing against that? And on what planet wouldn't changes to the core operating system be problematic?
I've tooled around the site a few times and really, it never impressed me. Maybe I'm jaded, but sites like kde-look seem to hit the mark much closer.
Back in the eighties I wanted to build a PC, but I was terrified. I didn't even know where to begin. I thought building PC's was for engineering students or professional technicians. A I was interested.
I believe most people don't install OS'es themselves for similar reasons, but of course you have to add to that the fact that they probably aren't interested in the process anyway. They've got the money, why waste the time?
Installation wise between xp and any decent modern linux install system (that counts out debian and gentoo (vahnilla) of course) its all about the same. With Linux I still get to/have to make a few decisions (do I want auto or custom partitioning? extra packages or a pre-selected set? firewall/no firewall? Extra users? Whats my administrator password? Etc) which are honestly quite minor (and helpful).
Back in the day (say pre SCO) Caldera had the install process wrapped up. Great hardware detection (wow, I don't have to set up X11 by hand??) that let you play tetris while you waited. That was when I realised Linux was (or would be at some point) something more then a hobbiests OS.
I don't think its there yet, but I'm not worried about it. I'll get there when the time is right. Until then it makes my life both on the desktop and in the server room easier.
culture of elitism and is a desktop that spends less time listening to its users then most of the others. KDE has been a leader in both usability, flexibility and responsiveness. Unless the core Gnome development group starts making some serious cultural changes I think this is a lose-lose for both Novell and its users.
Standardization *needs* to happen. But why choose the desktop that most frequently alienates it's own user base?
I'm sure there are a lot of people who would argue against everything I've just said, but look at the trends. I'm not saying Gnome is a bad project or the developers aren't good/respectful/worthy as those in any other project. But KDE has managed to pull itself up as a desktop for the people, and I respect that (even if I use Blackbox still most of the time).
I'll be sticking with RHEL for the time being anyway. Supports both and runs solidly.
Realisticly we'd probably be looking at government and edu pc's replacing Windows, with hobbyists or poor, law abiding citizens maybe using it for the computer basics Linux is perfectly capable of (aside from the already mentioned ActiveX snafu's some would experience). The rest will still be able to A) pirate (like a lot of the rest of the world) or B) purchase abroad.
Personally, I think its a great idea. I can be used in a lot of places and the real-world $$$ savings would significant. But everyone dumping their gaming/msn client/etc is silly. As I understand internet cafes for gaming (and gaming in general) are quite popular, Linspire won't be a big hit there.
I've had HDTV for a few years now and honestly I never was blown away. What I did get was a big hard to move cini-screen set that I'd be more then happy to part with for something better and thinner/lighter.
Its all about how they position it. You plasm screen owners might be a little harder to convince, but that resolution is a big jump and by the time the rest of the technology catches up you might be ready for an upgrade anyway (we don't have 21TB dvd's yet and at least here in the US streaming that kind of data to a regular home would be out of the question).
Anyway, its innovation, thats exciting.
With options? Ya, its a real server with a price-tag to match. As far as software, maybe you've never done an IT budget but you can't spec prices on one without the other. Otherwise you've got no budget, and no approval.
Anyway, this is your tangent. If you can hit that funny back button a couple of times you'll see I was asking someone else a legitimate question before you decided to drop you tidbits.
Don't be an asshole and make me spell it all out for you.
Sun Sparc Ultra 5.
You're right, I'm abso-fucking-lutely clueless.
Here's what it looks like in the real world: Oh, you want hard drives with that? You'll need at least 2 because NO mission critical box goes without raid1 and hot-swap bays.
And of course after you've covered all that you've still got $5000 for a single-processor Oracle license which you can add $1995 if you'd like hot-fixes and support for a single year. SBS? OEM is still another $500 for a 5 CAL.
Back in the pre-dot.bubble days we wasted oddles of money on "real" servers. 350's, 250's and a couple of Spark 5 workstations, dual homed with redundant T1's. Times have changed.
Now stop trying so hard to be a prick.
You speak with absolutely NO idea of how, what, or why I do what I do. I'm glad you can afford this and if I had the final say we'd be running enterprise level hardware all around.
But guess fucking what? Thats not the way it works for a lot of us in the *gasp* real world.
As far as you tidbit goes I agree 100%. Frankly I think you're just being an asshole to A) brag about your leet warez B) just another blow-hard who likes to try to cut people down who has neither the attention nor capability to grasp the big picture.
I build some servers. Get fucking over it.
Sincerly.
We've been building out a lot of systems for our (web) apps. They've ALL been based on Xeon processors despite the fact that the dual-core Opteron is clearly the way to go. The catch has always been availability of a solid dual socket board (we try to get as much raw power in a 1U case as we can so dual chips are kind of company culture around here).
If you've been using the Opteron, and it sounds like in production, I'd love to hears some details about good/compatable/stable hardware. I really, really, really don't want the next system I purchase to be another hot, slow Xeon.
But some seamingly important pieces seem to be missing from most major commercial distros.
lsscsi (list SCSI device info including nodes and ID's) scsiadd (is there a new/better way to do this? Scsiadd is fine, but it wasn't part of the Centos toolkit and required some research and a compile. I'm not complaining, but adding and removing drives from arrarys seems like a pretty important function.) after that I supose I'm just going to be repeating variations of what everyone else says: sh/bash/ksh/etc vi wget ssh/sftp/scp telnet client (for general testing) nmap (god I love this program) smb client at least for mixed networks mdadm if your stuck with software raid grep less cat gawk Of course thats more then 10 already, but who really uses 10 or less tools to do the work? And frankly IMHO they are all favorites. Everytime I remote onto our SBS I'm reminded why.
I did it because I felt like Windows was artificially limited in its flexability (which it is, for reason I appreaciate and understand better now). The business I work for is switching because Linux servers are A) better supported, both through companies and the community B) cost. Of course we switched from Solaris which has...erm, dropped in price. But I still prefer trouble shooting a semi-obscure Linux problem then just about any Solaris problems I've seen.
I think its refreshing to hear someone articulate something original. Getting rubber-stamped, reguritated news is fine and all but this reminded me there are people in here. And even better, people that think about the times they are writting in.
Let the lamers moan. Good article Cmdr.
Buying top-of-the-range CPUs is just a waste of money. Gamers are the biggest fools of the bunch with their obsession to have the latest and greatest.
Just like people who buy luxury cars or anything else that exchanges cost for a little additional benifit.
But fool seems a little harsh.
But look at dvdcss. It started out exactly as you say, but then something else happened...people took the open source code (or at least the solutions) and started putting it into Windows applications. Thing DVD Shrink.
The end result? Computer users in general had the option to benifit equally despite their OS of choice. Name 1 major Linux distro that supports encrypted DVD playback out of the box? I know there are packages available for probably every single one, but you have to install them yourself.
With stronger DRM OSS doesn't "win". It just means there will be a period where we won't have support followed by a small window where we might have the only work around before it filters into any number of software/OS solutions.
Basically DRM sucks and its certainly isn't going to do any Linux user any favors. Oh, and you think WMP won't support it out of the box?
And yet you can't see how an IP attorney would suggest such a thing..
:)
How is this easier to tamper with than the current system?
You don't have to actually be there to do it.
tamper with. Corruption is the end of every good governing system.
quite there yet and I don't think anyone is disagreeing about that. There are examples of decent photorealism out there but their few and far between. When the toolsets get better the realism will too so until then your absolutely right, stylism is the work-around. But thats more or less what everyones been saying isn't it?
Seriously, I work for a company that does internet based market research (I'm the admin) and have thought about this a bit myself. I do block ads, I use any number of measures. I find them intrusive and distracting, and thats the well behaved ones.
I believe the biggest problems with ads is that they are generally totally off target. Googles been interesting in this way by pushing ads that are both less obtrusive and somewhat targeted. But their still are a lot of companies that don't seem to understand good manners.
I also think ads tend to be fairly useless most of the time, not taking advantage of even a quarter of the available technology (that might be the programmers talking, but we've got some interesting embedded survey technology).
I get the feeling that advertisers don't much respect their market, and with things like the pop-up fiascoes, browser hi-jackers, pop-unders, dhtml roll-in-front-of's, blinkers, javascript rollers I feel like their just begging for a fight their bound to lose.
You want to get your message across on the internet? DON'T SPELL IT OUT LIKE ITS ALL IN CAPS. People just won't listen.
Ya, I like googles approach the best so far (right, and my companies).
I dug into this recently because we are setting up a number of systems running dual-core chips. Microsofts licencing policy was surprizingly reasonable (at the time) and it was Oracle who appeared to be looking to gouge us (but only if your running more then 1 dual-core processor, so we left a socket open).
If you don't like them don't buy one. No need to wax poetic. For all the complaining some people do about technology you'd think there was no escaping it. Thats simply not the case. There are days I wish I didn't have to carry a phone with me everywhere, but I *chose* to be a sys admin. I could just as well choose to be a rancher, a farmer, a clerk, a logger, a priest. You get my point.
:)
Like most things, technology is neither 100% good nor 100% evil (accept Solaris, but I'm not sure which 100% it is yet).
Major movies like the Matrix have made a big point of doing world-wide releases. Region coding was a bad idea, the consumers lose and the studios don't actually gain much of anything for it. Maybe it stopped a few people from ordering cheap DVD's from abroad. But really, those people who would would also be the people who knew how to bypass the coding anyway.
It solved a problem that didn't really exsist and probably actually ended up costing the studios in lost revenue for potential niche markets.