The problem with this is that, if I can get "Pong Deathmatch Arena" for either the XBox 2 (for which I must pay ~$200) or for the PC (for which I must press the "On" button on the box that's already sitting next to my desk), I'm going to do the latter. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with this, since, as another reply to this post pointed out, what matters is the games that are available. So if all the XBox games are also on Windows, then all of the gamer geeks out there are going to stick with Windows and tell the XBox to go frag itself.
My mom certainly has no clue that there even IS anything other than IE to use. Most of our mothers probably don't even realize that IE is not "the Internet".
I recently installed Firefox on my family's computers. Most of them had the same reaction: "But how will we use the Internet?" When I told them that they'd use Firefox, their reaction was: "Right, but how will we use the Internet?" Then it was time for a patient explanation of browsers and other such-like, after which they finally understood sufficiently.
P.S. Q: What's a Yankee? A: It's like a quickie, but you're by yourself.
Worth an invite?
Instead of buying a large tape jukebox, buy a SECOND large raid-5 array that is about 5x larger than the first and then write backup images of the first one to the second.
'Cause, you know, that's cheap.
When did I say anything about buying a jukebox? I noted that for us, like for many, many schools and businesses, our current solutions work great. So buying a new RAID-5, even at the prices you noted in another post (we'd need about 15 Tb, a tidy investment for an underfunded IT department at a small school), is so phenomenally out of our budget it's not even funny. Keeping the backup solution we have now -- slow, but reliable as hell and looking to be around for years to come -- costs us next to nothing. (TCO is obviously not free, but the 10 minutes a day I spend changing tapes isn't exactly breaking the bank.)
What's more, if we did ever decide to upgrade our backup solution, it would probably still be cheaper to buy a new autoloader, simply because we already have the media.
Finally, your solution of two RAID-5s (RRAID? Redundant redundant arrays...?) still suffers from the bandwidth problems: If it's onsite, then bandwidth is relatively cheap, but it's suscepitble to hacking, fires, what have you, and thus not a good backup solution. If it's offsite, then bandwidth becomes heinously expensive and the backup becomes horribly slow. On the other hand, bandwidth down the SCSI connection to a tape drive is essentially free, and the cost of driving to the bank weekly to put the tapes in a safety deposit box is negligible.
It seems to me that the majority of users on here have one of two problems: they work for a small school or business, like me, where our needs can't justify the expenditures necessary to support dual RAID-5s; or they work for a large enterprise, where their needs greatly exceed the potential offered by this solution. No one is at the level where their backup needs can fit into a dual RAID-5 schema, but where their budget allows it.
Bah. We backup our RAID-5, and for good reason. We have 1600 students and 400 faculty and staff, any number of whom can come to us begging for their lost Powerpoint project or thesis. When we got hit by a hacker a few years ago, after we had expelled him from the system we just restored from tape. Show me your RAID-5 doing that.
We want to backup lots of stuff over 40Gb. May I introduce you to my good friend the autoloader?
Moreover, we use good ol' DDS-3 tapes. Cheap, reliable, fixed standards. We can't read anything new, but we don't have to; it's not like tape is supposed to be a portable medium.
As many posters have pointed out, tape Just Works, and it works damn well. Speed is the only issue we have, but we still do full backups of our major servers every night. Frankly, your idea of "a remote backup site" (over Internet? Hah!) would take just as long as tape, or longer.
You're probably not a big enough fucktard to get published. You'd have to make a really stupid trip to the grocery store.
"So I went back to the store for the fifth time -- I still didn't have enough limes! Who would have thought that you needed more than one to make a batch of margaritas?
"On the way back, I accidentally ran over the bag of limes with my car, but figured it probably wouldn't matter. A little gravel never hurt anything, after all.
"I finally got back to my house, dumped all the limes in the blender, hit on -- nothing happened! I eventually figured out you have to plug it in, or something like that."
I think the OP had his tongue firmly in his cheek. What kind of respect/loyalty does it show when a company hacks at your salary and benefits to prop up the bottom line of whatever PHB is sitting on top?
When times are bad, you grin and bear it, because you've got a job, as shitty as it may be. When times are good, and the job market is more favorable, you return the "favors" and tell the PHB to go fuck him/herself; after all, fucking one's self is something done by people.
Bah! If the average user doesn't need all these extensions, explain the popularity of all of the various toolbars, extensions, and pop-up blockers for IE. When I'm trying to proselytize, I don't explain that Opera has mouse gestures and tabbed browsing; that interests me, but not them. I explain that it has native, intelligent pop-up blocking. That gets people interested.
IE is not just woefully inadequate for power users. It's woefully inadequate for anyone who wants a reasonable (not to mention decent!) Internet experience.
It's only "good enough" as long as people don't know about alternatives. Then the immediately start downloading extensions to IE -- extensions that you and I know come standard with a real modern browser.
Although I only had a minor in CS, I can safely say that we learned nothing (as in nada) about security; it just wasn't taught. They've already got to teach data structures and algorithms and OOP and multi-processor programming and so on and so forth that security gets lost underfoot.
Consequently, when I worked as a PHP programmer for several years, I got to teach myself about security.
Of course, I don't expect teachers to go over every little security hole; they can't possibly do that, any more than they can teach you every language, or even all of C. But if they teach students to think primarily of security, then they'll be able to identify potential problems given their specific language/platform/implementation/whatever. It's the same idea as teaching algorithms and letting students figure out GTK or DirectX or whatever on their own.
From the patent text: "wherein the transceiver means receives the information via any one of telephone, ISDN, broadband ISDN, satellite, common carrier, computer channels, cable television systems, metropolitan area networks, and microwave."
They gave a list of 9 instances of prior art, right in the patent! Any time you stream media, this patent covers it. So, for instance, the telephone (invented 1876), the television (patented 1948), and "computer channels" (Z3 built in 1941) all operate primarily (exclusively!) by the means described in this patent.
Inconceivable!
Still, it should make the defense a little easier when Acacia has been nice enough to catalogue prior art for us! It's like shooting wealthy, very well-defended ducks in a barrel.
I stuck with Apache 1 for a while, just because 2 didn't work, but I've been on 2 for a long time now. We even run it production, without problems.
We looked at PostgreSQL. Once. Ease of use pushed us away even before we looked at benchmarks, which are all triumphantly in MySQL's favor. I can't think of a single reason to prefer PostgreSQL over it, in fact.
Technically, not that I'd advise it, you could avoid running IE, Outlook Express, etc...and forgo patching them in a server environment.
Actually, you can't. Many of the things that Windows Update passes off as patches for IE or Outlook are really patches for libraries that are used in Explorer (you know, the desktop environment) or other standard things. Even if you don't use IE, you still have to download all the patches for it because it's (still) so damn integrated into Windows.
Personally, I just connect through a LinkSys router (already mentioned), in part because our house is wired and we have anywhere between six and ten computers in it at any given time, and in part because the problems of viruses and worms go away.
I definitely install a web browser first, whether I'm doing Windows or Linux. I'm an Opera fanatic, which, thankfully, comes with some Linux distros, but I absolutely cannot stand IE or Mozilla, and once I've tried a few mouse gestures in FireFox, I'm ready to have my Opera back.:)
After that, it depends on my OS. For most of the Linux installs I do, the next few things I install will be MySQL, OpenLDAP, Apache, and PHP, which takes care of most of my needs.
My Windows box (which, I admit, I use at home) is a little more fun:
2. iTunes 3. Whatever freeware Shisen-Sho app I can find
4. Starcraft
5. Several games later, OpenOffice.org
Let's be honest: does a computer really need anything else? I certainly don't think so.
He claims to have proven it empirically, but all he's shown is that Linux doesn't play well with *one* sound card. As the posters here have already said, and as I can confirm, I've never had a problem with a sound card. What this writer needs to do to really prove a problem is a survey of sound cards as well as a survey of distros; this only proves that some hardware is unsupported.
And frankly, we already knew that: Linux is a low priority for most hardware manufacturers, as is openness of protocols, which makes Linux drivers frequenly dodgy. But hey: blame Linux when a community of programmers freely giving their time and code can't overcome Windows-centric drivers and closed standards, while a group of highly-paid programmers in Redmond can take advantage of the luxury of having nearly all hardware come prepackaged to work with their product.
Bah.
One particular paragraph from the Stanford CIS site reminded me of abandonware:
...[Many books fall into a nether region. These are works that are not commercially viable and therefore not widely available to the public, but are nevertheless subject to continuing copyright protection. The Internet Archive wants to include many of these books, which we refer to as ?orphan works,? in the Million Book Project, but current law makes that very difficult.
Requiring even renewal would eliminate this problem; the more-than-generous term of 28 years (the original term of a copyright?) was mentioned also on the CIS site. If someone doesn't want to copyright a work, there are a wealth of public licences out there (I certainly don't need to mention the most famous) to let them give their work to the public, but freeing a work requires positive action.
For authors (etc.) who have abandoned their work, though, it should be freed by default: requiring renewal of copyright would let Disney keep their mouse, but would also free lots of IP that has been long abandoned by their authors (70 years of protection is a long time!). It seems to be a darn good compromise, if nothing else.
They will be marketed only for Windows PCs, but the external one should work on Macintosh computers with the proper third-party software.
I suppose Linux is right out. You gotta love desktop dominance.
And, of course:
The Sony and Philips drives will use somewhat different discs. Sony calls its variant DVD-R DL. The Philips equivalent is DVD+R DL.
Standards!?!? We don't need no stinkin' standards!
This is basically everything wrong with current peripherals, writ large. Give me a Linux-compatible DVD writer and a standard DVD format (+ or -, I don't care; leave that to the wonks), and that will be something to care about.
Much more likely is that distributions will be created... with the express purpose of marketing them to governments at cut-rate pricing. As anyone can create and market a distribution, it's not far-fetched to imagine a version... that may not have U.S. or other government interests at heart.
This kind of reasoning takes idiocy to a new height. Because Open Source is open, he's claiming, someone might get the source (gasp!), make it evil, and resell it to the government. If the government is dumb enough to buy J. Random Distro over, say, Redhat or Mandrake or IBM or any of the bazillions of well-maintained and supported, secure, accountable distros, they deserve what's coming to them. I could rig a jar of peanut butter to explode and sell it on the street, but if G.W. Bush buys it, it's his damn fault. No one's calling for peanut butter jars to be irreversably sealed, though.
Third, an individual or group of IT insiders could target a single organization by obtaining a good copy of Linux, and then customizing it for an organization, including malevolent code as they do so.
In other words, an organization could hire a bunch of 14-year-olds who \/\/r1t3 l1k3 t#15 to do their software customization, but again: the fault is theirs when the software goes bad. If you hire criminals to do your programming, is the code to blame? If I hire Charles Manson to be my gardener, can I blame the shovel industry when I turn up dead?
This guy seems not so much to be cataloging bad things about OS, but bad things you can do with OS, if you're dumb enough to let criminals run your enterprise. The fact that people are capable of both evil and stupidity is hardly surprising, and hardly encouraged (probably mitigated) by Open Source. What a bitch.
An even bigger nightmare: installing any of the big commercial Linux distros. Redhat has probably *thousands* of packages, mostly covered under GNU, BSD, or something similar, but with required click-thru licencing, one would think we'd have to click "Yes" for each package, not just for the distro. Windows can do this, since the whole thing is one package, built by one company, but any linux box is a conglomeration of thousands of pieces of software written by thousands of individual entities, each of which would have its own click-thru EULA. Ugly indeed.
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The problem with this is that, if I can get "Pong Deathmatch Arena" for either the XBox 2 (for which I must pay ~$200) or for the PC (for which I must press the "On" button on the box that's already sitting next to my desk), I'm going to do the latter. Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot with this, since, as another reply to this post pointed out, what matters is the games that are available. So if all the XBox games are also on Windows, then all of the gamer geeks out there are going to stick with Windows and tell the XBox to go frag itself.
turgid confirms: Itanium is dying.
Cruel paradox confirms: VAX sysadmins heads a splode.
When did I say anything about buying a jukebox? I noted that for us, like for many, many schools and businesses, our current solutions work great. So buying a new RAID-5, even at the prices you noted in another post (we'd need about 15 Tb, a tidy investment for an underfunded IT department at a small school), is so phenomenally out of our budget it's not even funny. Keeping the backup solution we have now -- slow, but reliable as hell and looking to be around for years to come -- costs us next to nothing. (TCO is obviously not free, but the 10 minutes a day I spend changing tapes isn't exactly breaking the bank.)
What's more, if we did ever decide to upgrade our backup solution, it would probably still be cheaper to buy a new autoloader, simply because we already have the media.
Finally, your solution of two RAID-5s (RRAID? Redundant redundant arrays...?) still suffers from the bandwidth problems: If it's onsite, then bandwidth is relatively cheap, but it's suscepitble to hacking, fires, what have you, and thus not a good backup solution. If it's offsite, then bandwidth becomes heinously expensive and the backup becomes horribly slow. On the other hand, bandwidth down the SCSI connection to a tape drive is essentially free, and the cost of driving to the bank weekly to put the tapes in a safety deposit box is negligible.
It seems to me that the majority of users on here have one of two problems: they work for a small school or business, like me, where our needs can't justify the expenditures necessary to support dual RAID-5s; or they work for a large enterprise, where their needs greatly exceed the potential offered by this solution. No one is at the level where their backup needs can fit into a dual RAID-5 schema, but where their budget allows it.
We want to backup lots of stuff over 40Gb. May I introduce you to my good friend the autoloader?
Moreover, we use good ol' DDS-3 tapes. Cheap, reliable, fixed standards. We can't read anything new, but we don't have to; it's not like tape is supposed to be a portable medium.
As many posters have pointed out, tape Just Works, and it works damn well. Speed is the only issue we have, but we still do full backups of our major servers every night. Frankly, your idea of "a remote backup site" (over Internet? Hah!) would take just as long as tape, or longer.
When times are bad, you grin and bear it, because you've got a job, as shitty as it may be. When times are good, and the job market is more favorable, you return the "favors" and tell the PHB to go fuck him/herself; after all, fucking one's self is something done by people.
WTF?!?
What's worse: it's apparently true. Crazy fucking Brits.
IE is not just woefully inadequate for power users. It's woefully inadequate for anyone who wants a reasonable (not to mention decent!) Internet experience.
It's only "good enough" as long as people don't know about alternatives. Then the immediately start downloading extensions to IE -- extensions that you and I know come standard with a real modern browser.
And who would know better?
Although I only had a minor in CS, I can safely say that we learned nothing (as in nada) about security; it just wasn't taught. They've already got to teach data structures and algorithms and OOP and multi-processor programming and so on and so forth that security gets lost underfoot.
Consequently, when I worked as a PHP programmer for several years, I got to teach myself about security.
Of course, I don't expect teachers to go over every little security hole; they can't possibly do that, any more than they can teach you every language, or even all of C. But if they teach students to think primarily of security, then they'll be able to identify potential problems given their specific language/platform/implementation/whatever. It's the same idea as teaching algorithms and letting students figure out GTK or DirectX or whatever on their own.
Give me a foundation in security at least!
They gave a list of 9 instances of prior art, right in the patent! Any time you stream media, this patent covers it. So, for instance, the telephone (invented 1876), the television (patented 1948), and "computer channels" (Z3 built in 1941) all operate primarily (exclusively!) by the means described in this patent.
Inconceivable!
Still, it should make the defense a little easier when Acacia has been nice enough to catalogue prior art for us! It's like shooting wealthy, very well-defended ducks in a barrel.
We looked at PostgreSQL. Once. Ease of use pushed us away even before we looked at benchmarks, which are all triumphantly in MySQL's favor. I can't think of a single reason to prefer PostgreSQL over it, in fact.
Actually, you can't. Many of the things that Windows Update passes off as patches for IE or Outlook are really patches for libraries that are used in Explorer (you know, the desktop environment) or other standard things. Even if you don't use IE, you still have to download all the patches for it because it's (still) so damn integrated into Windows.
Personally, I just connect through a LinkSys router (already mentioned), in part because our house is wired and we have anywhere between six and ten computers in it at any given time, and in part because the problems of viruses and worms go away.
After that, it depends on my OS. For most of the Linux installs I do, the next few things I install will be MySQL, OpenLDAP, Apache, and PHP, which takes care of most of my needs. My Windows box (which, I admit, I use at home) is a little more fun:
2. iTunes
3. Whatever freeware Shisen-Sho app I can find
4. Starcraft
5. Several games later, OpenOffice.org
Let's be honest: does a computer really need anything else? I certainly don't think so.
He claims to have proven it empirically, but all he's shown is that Linux doesn't play well with *one* sound card. As the posters here have already said, and as I can confirm, I've never had a problem with a sound card. What this writer needs to do to really prove a problem is a survey of sound cards as well as a survey of distros; this only proves that some hardware is unsupported. And frankly, we already knew that: Linux is a low priority for most hardware manufacturers, as is openness of protocols, which makes Linux drivers frequenly dodgy. But hey: blame Linux when a community of programmers freely giving their time and code can't overcome Windows-centric drivers and closed standards, while a group of highly-paid programmers in Redmond can take advantage of the luxury of having nearly all hardware come prepackaged to work with their product. Bah.
Requiring even renewal would eliminate this problem; the more-than-generous term of 28 years (the original term of a copyright?) was mentioned also on the CIS site. If someone doesn't want to copyright a work, there are a wealth of public licences out there (I certainly don't need to mention the most famous) to let them give their work to the public, but freeing a work requires positive action.
For authors (etc.) who have abandoned their work, though, it should be freed by default: requiring renewal of copyright would let Disney keep their mouse, but would also free lots of IP that has been long abandoned by their authors (70 years of protection is a long time!). It seems to be a darn good compromise, if nothing else.
An even bigger nightmare: installing any of the big commercial Linux distros. Redhat has probably *thousands* of packages, mostly covered under GNU, BSD, or something similar, but with required click-thru licencing, one would think we'd have to click "Yes" for each package, not just for the distro. Windows can do this, since the whole thing is one package, built by one company, but any linux box is a conglomeration of thousands of pieces of software written by thousands of individual entities, each of which would have its own click-thru EULA. Ugly indeed.