Don't you have any friends outside of major metropolitan areas? Mine laugh when I tell them what I pay and what I'm getting for what I pay. I live in San Diego and the prices here (like a lot of other places) put shoe-box sized pieces of property into ranges I'd call pretty high.
Local economy, population density, there are a lot of things to take into account. So I don't think its so far off saying in a smaller part of the country, even with the reduced salary things like house-size will increase even as cost (often dramatically) decreases. Apple to oranges.
Anyhow, a lot of people live in urban areas for other reasons and the trade-offs to moving into a bigger house in a smaller town with a smaller economy might not do.
Personally I'm getting a little sick of the riduculous prices on just about everything. A quarter of a million dollars for a postage stamp sized piece of property far enough outside the actual metropolitan area that I can't actually enjoy it without commuting into it (with heavy, typical Southern California traffic) isn't sounding so good.
Thats a double-edged sword. If you keep no records (or few) you protect your users from things like this, if you keep no records your torrents get swamped by leechers and you lose your users (the ones you want anyway).
Bittorrent never was intended to shield users like this.
Seriously though, blue-ray wins all the way unless the price it wrong (er..high), it just sounds cooler. We've had these other ray hunks of stuff for way to long already.
Sounds like brilliant marketing until you get a pack of high paid lawers from Intel that will either A) try to sue you out of business, or more likely B) argue semantics and logistics and metrics until none of it means anything.
Meanwhile AMD seems to be building better chips and thats got to cost them some money (money you think would be better spent?).
Otherwise your production app would have used some kind of persistency and your job would have been a lot nicer. Thats what I would have explained to them anyway. Stupid as an excuse can only really go so far and even managers in such technical fields should be able to get that.
I can say one of the biggest hurdles Solaris is going to have is the user community and developer community support and I don't see that happening.
The difference between trying to get non-vendor application support on Linux and Solaris is like night and day, the sure volume of Linux users (not to mention Linux native developers) is astounding.
Stability, as they mention in TFA, at least on Sun hardware is the reason we are still using it but the application support is the reason behind each new Linux box we add to the network.
Linux killer? Hardly, but they're certainly still a option for a lot of businesses.
For my money if I was going that "killer" route I'd have said BSD, but there's more then enough room in this pool for everybody (and Linux is doing just fine).
With Mozilla you also have to take into account the downloads that didn't go through their own servers, which considering unlike Opera is probably a lot. My copy came with my distro, so the only way they are going to count that is...well telepathy (or counting distro's but that would get muddy).
Should really be the last of our worries. Chances are the mainstream will never get that and frankly, why should they?
Linux isn't ready for mainstream and I think the periodic reminders/check-ins are fine. Its good to get a veiw from the outside because we tend to get a little too wrapped up in the technical details for our own good.
I'm still a little surprised that UBCD for Windows (its a full featured Windows boot disk creation toolset) hasn't caught on more then it has.
I'm assuming you're trying to be silly even mentioning hash checking, because that would be overkill for the average desktop users (but certainly something you'd have already done on a production system, and there are plenty of tools for that already).
Just the boot disk should do fine for most peoples needs: from it run your AV (its always a good idea to run a second scan using another program, 3 were provided last time I checked) and run your AW scan (I don't recall if it includes more then one). Another good idea is running a tool like Cexx's lspfix which can be used to remove unwanted software directly from you TCP/IP stack (which of course means if you don't know what your doing you can ruin your stack).
99% of the average computer users problems can be solved with that toolset alone.
Of course your right, the correct procedure does start with shutting down the compromised system but after that most windows users can stick to a road more frequently traveled.:)
The fact is I use both proprietary and Open software in both my personal and profession work every day. I'm a systems administrator so I'm in a fairly good position to see what its like from a business prospective.
The idiom "anyone can support it" cuts right down to the problem with the OSS idealist. Do businesses really want to have to support it? But more importantly, do they want to bet their short, long or mid-term strategies on it?
This is exactly why Redhat does so well. In a year, they'll be here. In another year? They'll be here. In 5? Thats the kind of security business needs and part of the reason free or open in and of themselves doesn't really seem to be panacea you might think it is.
Your FUD comment is laughable. I'm not spreading fear, I'm encouraging realism. There are no sides. This is software, no matter what your idealogy. I'm simply trying to explain business.
The propsed reviews could be a win-win. Personally I don't see whats wrong with that.
A) there is no free, free costs money in support or special training, but more importantly free might cost PHB's (or more likely the tech person who was responsible for deploying it) their JOBs.
B) Support, support, support. If you're going to deploy something on a business critical production system the rules of the game change a little bit more as little issues like: is it well documented (no, forums only count for the poor sap trouble shooting it, you and I may have had to learn to suffer through them, but the MSCE they hire to replace me might not and no-one wants to worry about that), if it breaks, who do I call? Who do I blame? What is the software lifecycle? Will I need to build-out my entire system in another year when the developer decides to change the behavior of a critical system (or more).
Business needs conservative dependability, I'll assume the business you work in doesn't have some of the normal bureaucratic hurdles mine does, which is great, but not reflective of 99% of the business market where the MBA works at the top and the CS geeks stay more towards middle management (or lower).
But having come into this industry as more of a starry eye OSS geek I have to say I can see a lot of their reasoning, dependability is #1, innovation can be a risky endeavor and often doesn't provide the same rewards as say having a networked production system with 99.999% reliability.
Even if I said screw all the none-sense and built out a better, more flexable, cheaper system who would know how to support it? Me. How much would it cost them in, time, hassle, money, etc to replace me? Colleges aren't exactly rolling out OSS gurus left and right yet. What if I died. And what about the developers doing the software production? Do they have some understanding whats going into this system? A lot of people rely on these systems, and when they don't work as expect we lose customers, that can tank a business.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a OSS believer. But I believe in being realistic too. We use Apache in production (on Sun for now) with an Oracle backend, we'll be replacing Coldfusion with PHP. The revolution is hitting business, I see a formalized rating system as a win-win for those who are interested in using it, those who aren't can simply go on like nothing ever happened.
Finally, I have done a good deal of software research both personal and professional; commercial isn't perfect, but its still ahead of the OSS software archives or news group searches we are mainly limited too. And showing the PHB a shiny article from Enterprise is going to make a hell of a lot smoother argument then the freshmeat rating any day.
It could be, but I work in the industry. The truth is that while a lot of good projects get/become commercially supported a lot of good projects don't. And even out of the ones that do a lot still don't get the kind of thorough review that you'd find in the commercial software business (TMDA, Postfix, etc).
And of course they miss out on the stuctured feedback that kind of review provides.
But the truth is propriety software is quite well reviewed (there's an entire industry who makes it their business to review and recommend commercial software, usually somewhat usefully).
Reading reviews of you're favorite Windows Antivirus software or researching an enterprise class database package will turn up a wealth of infomation (of course you still need to dig into it and make the final decision, but some things simply can't be helped:).
OSS software is comparably a total mess, with only certain major projects (and not surpisingly usually projects with some sort commercial support, i.e. apache, mysql, sendmail, etc, but the water gets pretty muddy quickly).
And aside from all those mainly concrete (maybe to you and I anyway) worries there are other concerns when reviewing OSS software for deployment in a business/production environment: support, boss appeal; someone has to sign off even if the software is free, that the software is mature/will meet or exceed your needs and that (if you decide to leave the company) its reasonably well supported (so someone that comes in and doesn't know the particular software has a reasonably good chance of configuring and maintaining it).
Companies that develop intellectual property consider it an assets (be it movies, music, software, whatever).
So expecting them to give away software (not that I'm suggesting you expect anything) would be analogous to asking a closing restaurant to give away its plate and deep fryer that they hope to sell to pay debts/recoup losses/etc.
Its a nice idea, but I get the feeling that a lot of people think shelved software is zero value. Atari would tell you different...but even if that doesn't happen they can (and do) certainly hope someone might come along and buy the technology.
Linux distribution cost time and money to produce.
They also exert *some* influence on the software projects they choose to include or to fund.
Ok so far?
Linux projects choose to include and fund...
1) A complete CLI environment, that means supporting, bug-hunt/fixing, managing and updating as necessary.
2) A complete IOS. This is related to the other, but distinct enough.
3) A mind-blowing number for possible configurations of webserver. That includes support, updates and management for the oodles of wonderful Linux ready server packages.
4) A graphics ready workstation. X! X apps, games, gui configuration utilities. All sorts of stuff.
5) Of course we've moved WAY beyond CDE and its clumsy ilk! So we need what? At least two COMPLETE UI's subsystems? Gawd, and then we'd better throw in a bunch of applications designed specifically around Gnome or KDE to really complicate things!
There was a time when Linux distro's really needed to justify their lack of commercial software buy adding HEAPs of OSS ware.
Of course that time has past.
As a Linux user what I'd like to see is a Linux distro that can seriously focus on whatever its primary objective it.
I want my server to be solid, if it has a GUI I'd like to to be solely focused on the task I've installed the system to complete.
Likewise, if I'm going to install a desktop distro on my wifes machine it sure as hell had better know what it is supposed to do, and do it reliably. Right now there is no such distro. My wife did use Linux, for about 3 years. But its still a patchwork system. Distro's aren't designed to be GUI only and things regularly creep up that require you have a much more through understanding of the system internals then is really acceptable in this day and age. Its 2005.
My work predicates I will always have the need to use a hybrid desktop/CLI/IOS operating system and for that I'm very thankful to have Linux to use. But I have no doubt that there will always be a Gentoo or Debian thats ready to suite my needs.
What I take issue with is distro's/fan bois touting Linux as the mature desktop operating system, it so clearly isn't. Its adequate. No more. And for most of use who have been using it over the years that seems like leaps and bounds. But its still got a ways to go before we are really doing anyone any favors by pretending its really for the masses.
But most users don't need or want a server on their desktop.
Until a Linux distro strips the Linux server off the Linux desktop we will continue to have a geeks system being touted as desktop ready. Which is ridiculous.
There are a lot of other step, but none of it can really be taken seriously until companies/foundations really decide what kind of operating system it is they are working on.
The fact that these guys are A) doing this publically B) as noteworthy music icons makes this newsworthy. For every Magnatunes/Garageband/et al comment: your missing the fucking point.
And before anyone starts trying to jump up and down, I support independent music. I shop Magnatunes. Et al.
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Don't you have any friends outside of major metropolitan areas? Mine laugh when I tell them what I pay and what I'm getting for what I pay. I live in San Diego and the prices here (like a lot of other places) put shoe-box sized pieces of property into ranges I'd call pretty high.
Local economy, population density, there are a lot of things to take into account. So I don't think its so far off saying in a smaller part of the country, even with the reduced salary things like house-size will increase even as cost (often dramatically) decreases. Apple to oranges.
Anyhow, a lot of people live in urban areas for other reasons and the trade-offs to moving into a bigger house in a smaller town with a smaller economy might not do.
Personally I'm getting a little sick of the riduculous prices on just about everything. A quarter of a million dollars for a postage stamp sized piece of property far enough outside the actual metropolitan area that I can't actually enjoy it without commuting into it (with heavy, typical Southern California traffic) isn't sounding so good.
Thats a double-edged sword. If you keep no records (or few) you protect your users from things like this, if you keep no records your torrents get swamped by leechers and you lose your users (the ones you want anyway).
Bittorrent never was intended to shield users like this.
...wait
Seriously though, blue-ray wins all the way unless the price it wrong (er..high), it just sounds cooler. We've had these other ray hunks of stuff for way to long already.
How many frappichino's is too many?
Sounds like brilliant marketing until you get a pack of high paid lawers from Intel that will either A) try to sue you out of business, or more likely B) argue semantics and logistics and metrics until none of it means anything.
.02
Meanwhile AMD seems to be building better chips and thats got to cost them some money (money you think would be better spent?).
Otherwise your production app would have used some kind of persistency and your job would have been a lot nicer. Thats what I would have explained to them anyway. Stupid as an excuse can only really go so far and even managers in such technical fields should be able to get that.
Its go a bit of everything, its related to the audioscrobbler project mentioned on slashdot here and here.
I get the feeling it more geared towards independant music, but I would because I run my own station (and skip those other songs).
Its definately worth giving a listen from time to time.
I can say one of the biggest hurdles Solaris is going to have is the user community and developer community support and I don't see that happening.
The difference between trying to get non-vendor application support on Linux and Solaris is like night and day, the sure volume of Linux users (not to mention Linux native developers) is astounding.
Stability, as they mention in TFA, at least on Sun hardware is the reason we are still using it but the application support is the reason behind each new Linux box we add to the network.
Linux killer? Hardly, but they're certainly still a option for a lot of businesses.
For my money if I was going that "killer" route I'd have said BSD, but there's more then enough room in this pool for everybody (and Linux is doing just fine).
With Mozilla you also have to take into account the downloads that didn't go through their own servers, which considering unlike Opera is probably a lot. My copy came with my distro, so the only way they are going to count that is...well telepathy (or counting distro's but that would get muddy).
Just kidding about the chump thing, its Sunday.
Should really be the last of our worries. Chances are the mainstream will never get that and frankly, why should they?
:)
Linux isn't ready for mainstream and I think the periodic reminders/check-ins are fine. Its good to get a veiw from the outside because we tend to get a little too wrapped up in the technical details for our own good.
So hand onto your clue stick.
If I could afford it I'd thing I have better hearing then everybody else too!
I'm still a little surprised that UBCD for Windows (its a full featured Windows boot disk creation toolset) hasn't caught on more then it has.
:)
I'm assuming you're trying to be silly even mentioning hash checking, because that would be overkill for the average desktop users (but certainly something you'd have already done on a production system, and there are plenty of tools for that already).
Just the boot disk should do fine for most peoples needs: from it run your AV (its always a good idea to run a second scan using another program, 3 were provided last time I checked) and run your AW scan (I don't recall if it includes more then one). Another good idea is running a tool like Cexx's lspfix which can be used to remove unwanted software directly from you TCP/IP stack (which of course means if you don't know what your doing you can ruin your stack).
99% of the average computer users problems can be solved with that toolset alone.
Of course your right, the correct procedure does start with shutting down the compromised system but after that most windows users can stick to a road more frequently traveled.
come down off your moral high-ground and really take a good long look. Its not perfect, but then its not so bad either.
The fact is I use both proprietary and Open software in both my personal and profession work every day. I'm a systems administrator so I'm in a fairly good position to see what its like from a business prospective.
The idiom "anyone can support it" cuts right down to the problem with the OSS idealist. Do businesses really want to have to support it? But more importantly, do they want to bet their short, long or mid-term strategies on it?
This is exactly why Redhat does so well. In a year, they'll be here. In another year? They'll be here. In 5? Thats the kind of security business needs and part of the reason free or open in and of themselves doesn't really seem to be panacea you might think it is.
Your FUD comment is laughable. I'm not spreading fear, I'm encouraging realism. There are no sides. This is software, no matter what your idealogy. I'm simply trying to explain business.
The propsed reviews could be a win-win. Personally I don't see whats wrong with that.
With business the rules are different:
:)
A) there is no free, free costs money in support or special training, but more importantly free might cost PHB's (or more likely the tech person who was responsible for deploying it) their JOBs.
B) Support, support, support. If you're going to deploy something on a business critical production system the rules of the game change a little bit more as little issues like: is it well documented (no, forums only count for the poor sap trouble shooting it, you and I may have had to learn to suffer through them, but the MSCE they hire to replace me might not and no-one wants to worry about that), if it breaks, who do I call? Who do I blame? What is the software lifecycle? Will I need to build-out my entire system in another year when the developer decides to change the behavior of a critical system (or more).
Business needs conservative dependability, I'll assume the business you work in doesn't have some of the normal bureaucratic hurdles mine does, which is great, but not reflective of 99% of the business market where the MBA works at the top and the CS geeks stay more towards middle management (or lower).
But having come into this industry as more of a starry eye OSS geek I have to say I can see a lot of their reasoning, dependability is #1, innovation can be a risky endeavor and often doesn't provide the same rewards as say having a networked production system with 99.999% reliability.
Even if I said screw all the none-sense and built out a better, more flexable, cheaper system who would know how to support it? Me. How much would it cost them in, time, hassle, money, etc to replace me? Colleges aren't exactly rolling out OSS gurus left and right yet. What if I died. And what about the developers doing the software production? Do they have some understanding whats going into this system? A lot of people rely on these systems, and when they don't work as expect we lose customers, that can tank a business.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a OSS believer. But I believe in being realistic too. We use Apache in production (on Sun for now) with an Oracle backend, we'll be replacing Coldfusion with PHP. The revolution is hitting business, I see a formalized rating system as a win-win for those who are interested in using it, those who aren't can simply go on like nothing ever happened.
Finally, I have done a good deal of software research both personal and professional; commercial isn't perfect, but its still ahead of the OSS software archives or news group searches we are mainly limited too. And showing the PHB a shiny article from Enterprise is going to make a hell of a lot smoother argument then the freshmeat rating any day.
Anyway, welcome to my world.
It could be, but I work in the industry. The truth is that while a lot of good projects get/become commercially supported a lot of good projects don't. And even out of the ones that do a lot still don't get the kind of thorough review that you'd find in the commercial software business (TMDA, Postfix, etc).
And of course they miss out on the stuctured feedback that kind of review provides.
That just ain't right.
:)
(*cough* bite me *cough)
But the truth is propriety software is quite well reviewed (there's an entire industry who makes it their business to review and recommend commercial software, usually somewhat usefully).
Reading reviews of you're favorite Windows Antivirus software or researching an enterprise class database package will turn up a wealth of infomation (of course you still need to dig into it and make the final decision, but some things simply can't be helped:).
OSS software is comparably a total mess, with only certain major projects (and not surpisingly usually projects with some sort commercial support, i.e. apache, mysql, sendmail, etc, but the water gets pretty muddy quickly).
And aside from all those mainly concrete (maybe to you and I anyway) worries there are other concerns when reviewing OSS software for deployment in a business/production environment: support, boss appeal; someone has to sign off even if the software is free, that the software is mature/will meet or exceed your needs and that (if you decide to leave the company) its reasonably well supported (so someone that comes in and doesn't know the particular software has a reasonably good chance of configuring and maintaining it).
Those crazy business people.
Companies that develop intellectual property consider it an assets (be it movies, music, software, whatever).
So expecting them to give away software (not that I'm suggesting you expect anything) would be analogous to asking a closing restaurant to give away its plate and deep fryer that they hope to sell to pay debts/recoup losses/etc.
Its a nice idea, but I get the feeling that a lot of people think shelved software is zero value. Atari would tell you different...but even if that doesn't happen they can (and do) certainly hope someone might come along and buy the technology.
Linux distribution cost time and money to produce.
They also exert *some* influence on the software projects they choose to include or to fund.
Ok so far?
Linux projects choose to include and fund...
1) A complete CLI environment, that means supporting, bug-hunt/fixing, managing and updating as necessary.
2) A complete IOS. This is related to the other, but distinct enough.
3) A mind-blowing number for possible configurations of webserver. That includes support, updates and management for the oodles of wonderful Linux ready server packages.
4) A graphics ready workstation. X! X apps, games, gui configuration utilities. All sorts of stuff.
5) Of course we've moved WAY beyond CDE and its clumsy ilk! So we need what? At least two COMPLETE UI's subsystems? Gawd, and then we'd better throw in a bunch of applications designed specifically around Gnome or KDE to really complicate things!
There was a time when Linux distro's really needed to justify their lack of commercial software buy adding HEAPs of OSS ware.
Of course that time has past.
As a Linux user what I'd like to see is a Linux distro that can seriously focus on whatever its primary objective it.
I want my server to be solid, if it has a GUI I'd like to to be solely focused on the task I've installed the system to complete.
Likewise, if I'm going to install a desktop distro on my wifes machine it sure as hell had better know what it is supposed to do, and do it reliably. Right now there is no such distro. My wife did use Linux, for about 3 years. But its still a patchwork system. Distro's aren't designed to be GUI only and things regularly creep up that require you have a much more through understanding of the system internals then is really acceptable in this day and age. Its 2005.
My work predicates I will always have the need to use a hybrid desktop/CLI/IOS operating system and for that I'm very thankful to have Linux to use. But I have no doubt that there will always be a Gentoo or Debian thats ready to suite my needs.
What I take issue with is distro's/fan bois touting Linux as the mature desktop operating system, it so clearly isn't. Its adequate. No more. And for most of use who have been using it over the years that seems like leaps and bounds. But its still got a ways to go before we are really doing anyone any favors by pretending its really for the masses.
Agreed. Hawaii also skipped day light savings time and I really enjoyed that.
Linux is good on the server. No doubt.
But most users don't need or want a server on their desktop.
Until a Linux distro strips the Linux server off the Linux desktop we will continue to have a geeks system being touted as desktop ready. Which is ridiculous.
There are a lot of other step, but none of it can really be taken seriously until companies/foundations really decide what kind of operating system it is they are working on.
You can't be everything to everyone.
All your fancy-smancy gismos. Why don't you overclock my abacus!
Fuck man.
The fact that these guys are A) doing this publically B) as noteworthy music icons makes this newsworthy. For every Magnatunes/Garageband/et al comment: your missing the fucking point.
And before anyone starts trying to jump up and down, I support independent music. I shop Magnatunes. Et al.
(sorry thats all)
All be wearing their official Slashdot sponsor shirts. Like duh!!