The idea of loading up an unsupported OS from download
I'm an IT manager and it doesn't make me nervous. I can purchase a CD set of RedHat 7.x with whatever level of support I want. I can purchase one copy of it and install it on ALL of my PC's and servers. That means I can purchase all of my computer equipment that will run Linux with no OS installed, saving anywhere from $100 to $10,000 on the price of the equipment.
For a long time the media took everything MS said as the literal truth. So today, when a newspaper that lives and dies by it's advertising is running a front page article that praises Linux and doesn't fully support Microsoft, it's an interesting situation. I'm sure that Microsoft is an advertising customer of USA Today and this article is hardly in their best interests. Will Microsoft use the same sort of threat tactics against the newspaper that they did against PC manufacturers? Probably not, since the media usually doesn't threaten easily, but MS isn't known for being smart about PR either.
This sort of thing will become more and more prevalent though because people are interested in it, and newspaper/magazine readership drives advertising sales. Media coverage will help to build momentum for Open Source software, which will help to build interest in reading about it, creating a neat little circle that helps immensely.
Over all a good article for the non-IT folks and helpful to the Open Source cause.
Think about it. If you are accused of breaking law you either: A. Didn't do it and plead innocent and stand by that plea B. Did do it, plead guilty and throw yourself on the court's mercy. C. Did do it, have no intention of pleading guilty, and try every trick in the book to not get punished. Now look at Microsoft's behavior and decide which of these options fits them.
The big difference though is that with Linux (or Solaris or AIX or HP-UX or.... ) I can choose to just install the core operating system. If I don't want a browser, I don't install, or remove it easily. If I don't want a media player, ditto. Using Solaris as an example, if I don't like Netscape 4.x I can remove it (I have) and install Mozilla (or whatever I prefer).
Now, when I installed Win2K I didn't have those options. I had to install IE and Windows Media Player 6.4 and so forth. If I decide I don't like IE 5.x it doesn't matter, I have to install it.
Re:I installed SP3 on my Win2K laptop
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More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 1
Solaris packages ask if it's okay to install with root permissions or modify permissions. When is the last time a Windows package asked you that?
Never. But it doesn't have to since you can't install OS updates without Administrator privileges, anyway. Something which Win2k *will* quite happily inform you of if you try to do such a thing as a non-Administrator.
You can't install OS updates in UNIX without administrator privileges either. However, Solaris packages (I won't speak for other UNIX versions) tell you what they are doing and ask if it is okay to do it. Even when you are logged in as root. Windows updates don't bother to tell me that they are doing something, they just do it.
Your post is so loaded with assumptions and emotional responses that it really isn't worth replying to. So I won't, except to say that most of your assumptions and comments are way off base.
Sun Gold and Platinum service is at the same level as IBM's. Our data center (I'm one of the senior infrastructure guys) has both IBM and Sun platforms in it, and the service is outstanding from both. Now the Windows guys in the set of cubes over have to hassle with a nightmare of phone support and then usually their vendors ship the drive (or whatever) to them and they get to install it themselves.
I personally don't use Admintool, or any other graphic interface for administration. If it's a one time deal I do it on the command line. If it's something I do more than once, I have a script to do it for me.
Shark has problems. My personal preference is Hitachi Lightning. The 9960 supports 27 TB raw, about 22 in RAID 5. Since Sun resells Hitachi I get all my storage support from them as well, even for the Hitachi that has IBM and Win2K boxes connected.
We run SunFire 6800's with Sun Platinum support. We have one Sun ES guy permanently onsite (we're a big shop) and any other support we need shows up within 4 hours.
Now back to the Mac OS X on Power 4 idea. Why on earth would I WANT Mac OS X on there? I'd much rather run AIX 5L, a far better and more mature OS. Same with Sun UltraSPARC boxes, why put Mac on it when Solaris 8 or 9 is mature, stable and powerful? However, Mac on a commodity desktop 64-bit CPU (Itanium or Hammer), which should lower the price and make it easier to tinker with? Yeah baby.
Non-terroristic Americans always obey and support the law 100%.
Civil disobedience is often necessary. Or do you think that Martin Luther King, Jr. and all the other people in the Civil Rights movement during the last half of the past century are terrorists? When a law is wrong you have to speak up and say so. When speaking up gets you in trouble with the law, then civil disobedience and protest is the next avenue. If that doesn't work, actual revolution may be needed.
This is embedded in our political tradition. If you don't think so, here's what the Declaration of Independence says:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
In other words, if there is just cause it is okay to do things that the American Colonists did, the protests (Colonists went to England to plead the case with the King and Parliament), the civil disobedience (The Boston Tea Party), and finally to revolt, if need be.
When we see our civil liberties and privacy removed by our government and large corporations we have a civic responsibility to stop it, as do all like minded people.
you set up an e-mail address with an e-mail provider which is very popular, and you set yourself up for spam.
Well, hmmm, my wife uses Yahoo mail for her "anonymous mail" and never gets spam, although the ads are annoying. So, if Yahoo can manage to filter out spam, why can't Hotmail?
Well I'll be.. you change to the e-mail address Your ISP assigned to you, an e-mail addres that doesn't end in @icrediblyPopularFreeE-MailProvider.com , and you get less spam.
If you paid attention to my post you will notice that: 1. We switched the email account once it was available, originally it wasn't. 2. We don't do anything differently between the two accounts and yet Hotmail has a massive amount of pornographic spam. EVEN THOUGH they are supposedly protecting minors when you tell them the account is for a minor. 3. I just pointed, as have many other posters, that Yahoo doesn't have this problem, but Hotmail does. Hmmmmmm. And finally 4. I was replying to someone's claim that you only get spam on Hotmail if you do something to cause it, and giving my own experience that says that isn't true.
Here's what Hotmail's FAQ says about spam:
How to protect yourself from spam: Use the Junk Mail Filter
When it is activated, the Junk Mail Filter examines incoming messages and automatically sends e-mail it has identified as "junk" to your Junk Mail folder. You can choose your own level of protection: low, high, or exclusive; each with varying degrees of protection. Once e-mail is sent to your Junk Mail folder, messages are automatically deleted after a specified number of days; or, if you use the Junk Mail Deletion options, you can choose to have messages deleted as soon as they are sent to the Junk Mail folder.
We did this with our son's account, setting the junk mail to it's highest possible setting, so only email from addresses we allowed supposedly would come to the inbox. Only half the spam got filtered, the rest still ended up in the inbox.
Maybe you posted anonymously cause you like flamebait and didn't have your facts straight?
Most spam is the result of an account owner's own actions (direct and indirect).
So, my 8 year old son, who is not allowed to use email without supervision, is responsible for all the pornographic spam he gets in his Hotmail account? My wife specifically set his account up as being a minor. He gets to send email to family only. And yet he receives 30+ unsolicited emails a day, 90% of which are pornographic in nature. And yes, we did set all the privacy options available on Hotmail. I'm guessing that our direct actions of trying to protect our son's email account so he can stay in touch easily with his grandparents is the issue. We have since switched to cable internet access and our son now uses one of our ISP provided emails (we get 6, which is a bit of an overkill). No difference in email patterns. Voila, suddenly he gets no spam.
I installed SP3 on my Win2K laptop
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More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My work provided laptop is Win2K. I don't have any choice in the matter, that is the company required OS. I installed SP3 last night. It changed my auto-update setting to automatic without telling me. At work and at home I am behind firewalls. In the work environment all updating of Windows is handled internally, not by windowsupdate.microsoft.com. At home I patch manually. I don't want auto-update turned on. Since I always turn it off, I didn't realize it had been turned on until I checked, after reading this story on slashdot.
I have submitted a formal request for exception to be allowed to install Solaris or Linux on my laptop since I all of my work is primarily done on Solaris platforms. As of right now I have no intention of any of my own PC's having Windows ever again (my personal workstation is RedHat 7.1) and if I get this exception same rule goes at work. My wife uses Mac, and so does my son.
I have never seen RedHat or Solaris updates change settings on my PC/server/etc without asking if it was okay to do so. Solaris packages ask if it's okay to install with root permissions or modify permissions. When is the last time a Windows package asked you that? I've been using computers since about 1979, I'm tired of being treated like I'm stupid. I suspect a major part of the reason users are stupid is because software companies taught them to be stupid.
For the millions of PC users who exists, only a small fraction of them have any data that anyone gives two cents about.
What about the large number of PC users who bank online, purchase with credit cards online, etc. Almost all of them use IE, which uses "Auto Complete", a bland way of saying "we are storing all of your personal information in IE files on your PC". I'm sure that those files can be found and broken into. Do you suppose that someone might like those credit card #'s, names and social security numbers, password hints, etc.?
It's really only the people who are afraid of having their warez/MP3 collection deleted or who are pirating Windows itself that are afraid of these remarks in the EULA. Most users are not worried about those things because they have nothing to hide.
The "if you have nothing to hide, why are you worried" argument is a refuge. It's like saying that if you have nothing to hide you won't worry about the police being granted the right to enter your home without a warrant. Whether I have something to hide, or not, I don't want MS, or Apple, or Sun, or any other computer software/hardware manufacturer to check what's on my computer without my explicit consent. It's about privacy and who really controls my computer, me or some corporation, not whether I have anything to hide.
Regatta (or the mainframe for that matter) partitioning is different from SunFire partitioning. You are comparing apples to oranges. On a Sun box if you want to run two servers, one with a data warehouse on it, and the other with an OLTP system on it, and not worry about them stepping on each other, you can. You can't do that on Regatta. The hardware still impacts the whole system. On the other hand, since you can LPAR a Regatta down to 1 CPU, you can consolidate a butt load of servers onto one Regatta box.
Of course, with Sun's Resource Manager you can control workload management at the CPU and process level (kinda like TSO regions). And with Sun's cluster server you get all sorts of nifty virtual server capabilities in a Sun Plex. Basically it is a SysPlex for the UNIX world. For my $$ Sun's approach beats the heck out of IBM's. And I really prefer Solaris to AIX (yes, I've used both, as well as SCO, RedHat, FreeBSD and HP-UX). But, the last couple sentences are just my opinion.
But, and I'm sure you will admit this, Itanium is NOT in general use in the Enterprise. It will be some time before it is. How many people who work in a typical Enterprise IT environment have seen Itanium systems? Almost none.
These benchmarks are great. There are problems though, even with SPEC. One of the biggest problems is that we still aren't looking at the real world. The one where you have to integrate Oracle, J2EE, Apache, WebSphere and C++ (as an example, there are so many combinations it's pretty much impossible to list them). Since it's darn near impossible to build a benchmark that measures performance under real world conditions, benchmarks are half the battle, or less.
So we use a variety of benchmarks, our own experience and bidding by the vendors, throw in what our organization is experienced in, and go from there. Based on what I know about SuperDome architecture I seriously doubt that HP's Itanium servers will outperform Regatta or SunFire in "the wild", although it should be a solid performer in general. And the price will probably be very competitive.
Also, the Regatta p690 machine is THE BEST in my opinion. Only thing that comes close might be the top level Sun machines.
Have you ever really compared Sun's SunFire servers to the IBM pSeries? If you had you would know that each has their own arena where they are "best". The SunFire x800 and 15K, for example, are much better SMP boxes than Regatta. Their SMP is nearly linear in terms of scalability. This makes them a fantastic box for Data Warehousing.
Regatta, on the other hand, has some very interesting mainframe features, including LPARs and workload management, that should prove extremely useful for cost effective server consolidation and application servers. LPARs, however, are not nearly as "safe" from a hardware perspective as SunFire domains, which partition in hardware rather than software, thereby effectively isolating each domain in the server.
For my money the big iron UNIX ranks Sun, IBM, and then HP/Compaq a distant third. If I had to choose a 64-bit processor it would the UltrSPARC III Cu, although the Power4 is pretty impressive too. BUT, who the heck is going to run a desktop OS on a 64-bit RISC processor that costs $15,000 or more just for the CPU.
Here's where we get down to the important part. Itanium and Hammer will be commodity items. They won't be on par with IBM and Sun big iron, although they will probably be very effective at the workgroup/departmental server level. I hope that Apple seriously considers porting to a commodity CPU, it might actually bring competition back to the desktop OS market. Plenty of people out there just want their OS to work. And most people believe that Mac is a better, more user friendly OS than Windows. They just don't want to pay the price for Apple's hardware. Competition and an Intel/AMD platform would make Mac far more affordable and likely to be used.
The consumer is worried that they will buy a HDTV today and have it be outdated tomorrow, and when they cost thousands of dollars, compared to under $1000 for a reasonably high quality analog TV, what do you expect? The consumer isn't jumping on the bandwagon. There aren't enough broadcasts, there are frequent news stories about the standards changing and not being able to record HDTV in the future and so on. Nobody is confident in HDTV. Not to mention that we are not in the best of times economically and who the heck wants to shell out that much for a TV when you aren't sure about your job?
Yes, some browser based apps use ActiveX, but many more are written in Java and run on Java App Servers.
Re:why are we securing it this way?
on
Future of Wi-Fi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, he's suggesting, correctly, that your wireless net be in a DMZ, rather than in your private network. If you wireless net is in your private network it violates one of the key principles of securing systems, which is to prevent physical access to the network. The wireless network, by its very nature, is not restricted by walls, cables, etc. If physical access to the network is possible, then it needs to be separated from your private network by firewalls.
I think it's happening outside the IT industry, but it's like UNIX, perceived as something used in the IT industry and by computer nerds/geeks. My wife, who used to work for one of the Fortune 100 IT companies (one with a 3 letter abbreviation) frequently describes text based applications in MVS and UNIX as "DOS based" and when I try to tell her they aren't "DOS based" she says "They all came from DOS". DOS is seen as difficult and not user friendly. If people think Linux/UNIX is DOS based (which apparently even people who should know better do) you can see a glimmer of the problem in the consumer market to be overcome.
Bottom line, consumers want to worry about how to use their apps, whether browser, or email or games or multimedia. They don't want to have to deal with installing libraries and dependencies and how to restart X and so forth. They would rather power the PC off and back on than learn how to restart X.
The consumer won't care what OS they use as long as:
1. It is perceived as stable and useful.
2. The apps they want to use run on it (they don't want "file compatability, they want to use Word).
3. It is not expensive (thus the bundling of MS works, they don't know how much it costs)
4. They don't have to learn how to use the OS beyond file system navigation and simple to use installation routines.
5. The OS and apps are well marketed to the consumer.
Apple screwed up on #3. OS/2 screwed up on #3 and #5. Linux major problem is #2 and #5.
Of course Galileo was forced to publicly recant his theories by the Catholic Church, which happens to believe in the Almighty and being saved. Kinda ironic.
The thing is that most of the companies I've seen are gradually reducing their dependance on Windows.
I'll give you the Technical Architect point of view on why this is. It has nothing to do with shifting away from Windows. It is because then we don't have to worry about what DLL's, lib's, etc. are on a user's PC. We don't have to maintain the code on the user's PC. We don't have to roll out version changes to the user's PC. What Linux kernel, Solaris patch level or NT service pack they have is irrelevant. All we (the project team) have to do is tell desktop support to make sure all browsers are IE5 or Netscape 4 or better, for example, and the roll out is done. We develop once, test once, roll out to the server, train the users. We can connect users across the WAN, the Internet, the whatever. The OS is on it's way to becoming irrelevant on the corporate desktop.
Now when will Linux go mainstream on the desktop as it has on the server?
Linux will go mainstream on the desktop when two things happen.
First, the average consumer has to perceive Linux as being more than just a playground for computer nerds and an inexpensive server alternative. This will take some doing. Between MS FUD and the behavior of many people in the Linux community there is a lot to overcome.
Second, Linux has to become easier to use for the average consumer. I'm in the industry and don't want ease of use, but rather power and stability, flexibility and reliability. The consumer market measures those things differently than IT professionals or developers or hardcore hobbyists do. Stability means no blue screens for the 2 hours of web surfing, it means their games run fine and they can send and receive email. Windows does that, by and large. And they don't have to know anything about the OS. They mostly don't even have to know how to install it. If they download something they still don't have to know anything about the OS or how to install things.
This is bad you say? That's cause you either are a masochist, or you enjoy computing at a different level, or this is your profession. The consumer wants his computer to be an appliance, like his TV, VCR or toaster. If it's more complex than that, he has fits.
I've been on the edge of cancelling for years. PC Mag doesn't seem very relevant, most of the time, to what I do (Enterprise Technical Architect). But it's nice to be able to keep up with what my colleagues in the PC world are doing, and every time I get ready to cancel, I read an article that actually interests me. One of these (if they survive the bankruptcy) I'll go three or so issues in a row absolutely bored by PC Mag and give up my subscription.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of loading up an unsupported OS from download
I'm an IT manager and it doesn't make me nervous. I can purchase a CD set of RedHat 7.x with whatever level of support I want. I can purchase one copy of it and install it on ALL of my PC's and servers. That means I can purchase all of my computer equipment that will run Linux with no OS installed, saving anywhere from $100 to $10,000 on the price of the equipment.
Get the facts a bit straighter
For a long time the media took everything MS said as the literal truth. So today, when a newspaper that lives and dies by it's advertising is running a front page article that praises Linux and doesn't fully support Microsoft, it's an interesting situation. I'm sure that Microsoft is an advertising customer of USA Today and this article is hardly in their best interests. Will Microsoft use the same sort of threat tactics against the newspaper that they did against PC manufacturers? Probably not, since the media usually doesn't threaten easily, but MS isn't known for being smart about PR either.
This sort of thing will become more and more prevalent though because people are interested in it, and newspaper/magazine readership drives advertising sales. Media coverage will help to build momentum for Open Source software, which will help to build interest in reading about it, creating a neat little circle that helps immensely.
Over all a good article for the non-IT folks and helpful to the Open Source cause.
Think about it. If you are accused of breaking law you either:
A. Didn't do it and plead innocent and stand by that plea
B. Did do it, plead guilty and throw yourself on the court's mercy.
C. Did do it, have no intention of pleading guilty, and try every trick in the book to not get punished.
Now look at Microsoft's behavior and decide which of these options fits them.
The big difference though is that with Linux (or Solaris or AIX or HP-UX or .... ) I can choose to just install the core operating system. If I don't want a browser, I don't install, or remove it easily. If I don't want a media player, ditto. Using Solaris as an example, if I don't like Netscape 4.x I can remove it (I have) and install Mozilla (or whatever I prefer).
Now, when I installed Win2K I didn't have those options. I had to install IE and Windows Media Player 6.4 and so forth. If I decide I don't like IE 5.x it doesn't matter, I have to install it.
Solaris packages ask if it's okay to install with root permissions or modify permissions. When is the last time a Windows package asked you that?
Never. But it doesn't have to since you can't install OS updates without Administrator privileges, anyway. Something which Win2k *will* quite happily inform you of if you try to do such a thing as a non-Administrator.
You can't install OS updates in UNIX without administrator privileges either. However, Solaris packages (I won't speak for other UNIX versions) tell you what they are doing and ask if it is okay to do it. Even when you are logged in as root. Windows updates don't bother to tell me that they are doing something, they just do it.
Your post is so loaded with assumptions and emotional responses that it really isn't worth replying to. So I won't, except to say that most of your assumptions and comments are way off base.
Sun Gold and Platinum service is at the same level as IBM's. Our data center (I'm one of the senior infrastructure guys) has both IBM and Sun platforms in it, and the service is outstanding from both. Now the Windows guys in the set of cubes over have to hassle with a nightmare of phone support and then usually their vendors ship the drive (or whatever) to them and they get to install it themselves.
I personally don't use Admintool, or any other graphic interface for administration. If it's a one time deal I do it on the command line. If it's something I do more than once, I have a script to do it for me.
Shark has problems. My personal preference is Hitachi Lightning. The 9960 supports 27 TB raw, about 22 in RAID 5. Since Sun resells Hitachi I get all my storage support from them as well, even for the Hitachi that has IBM and Win2K boxes connected.
We run SunFire 6800's with Sun Platinum support. We have one Sun ES guy permanently onsite (we're a big shop) and any other support we need shows up within 4 hours.
Now back to the Mac OS X on Power 4 idea. Why on earth would I WANT Mac OS X on there? I'd much rather run AIX 5L, a far better and more mature OS. Same with Sun UltraSPARC boxes, why put Mac on it when Solaris 8 or 9 is mature, stable and powerful? However, Mac on a commodity desktop 64-bit CPU (Itanium or Hammer), which should lower the price and make it easier to tinker with? Yeah baby.
Non-terroristic Americans always obey and support the law 100%.
Civil disobedience is often necessary. Or do you think that Martin Luther King, Jr. and all the other people in the Civil Rights movement during the last half of the past century are terrorists? When a law is wrong you have to speak up and say so. When speaking up gets you in trouble with the law, then civil disobedience and protest is the next avenue. If that doesn't work, actual revolution may be needed.
This is embedded in our political tradition. If you don't think so, here's what the Declaration of Independence says:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
In other words, if there is just cause it is okay to do things that the American Colonists did, the protests (Colonists went to England to plead the case with the King and Parliament), the civil disobedience (The Boston Tea Party), and finally to revolt, if need be.
When we see our civil liberties and privacy removed by our government and large corporations we have a civic responsibility to stop it, as do all like minded people.
you set up an e-mail address with an e-mail provider which is very popular, and you set yourself up for spam.
Well, hmmm, my wife uses Yahoo mail for her "anonymous mail" and never gets spam, although the ads are annoying. So, if Yahoo can manage to filter out spam, why can't Hotmail?
Well I'll be.. you change to the e-mail address Your ISP assigned to you, an e-mail addres that doesn't end in @icrediblyPopularFreeE-MailProvider.com , and you get less spam.
If you paid attention to my post you will notice that:
1. We switched the email account once it was available, originally it wasn't.
2. We don't do anything differently between the two accounts and yet Hotmail has a massive amount of pornographic spam. EVEN THOUGH they are supposedly protecting minors when you tell them the account is for a minor.
3. I just pointed, as have many other posters, that Yahoo doesn't have this problem, but Hotmail does. Hmmmmmm.
And finally 4. I was replying to someone's claim that you only get spam on Hotmail if you do something to cause it, and giving my own experience that says that isn't true.
Here's what Hotmail's FAQ says about spam:
How to protect yourself from spam:
Use the Junk Mail Filter
When it is activated, the Junk Mail Filter examines incoming messages and automatically sends e-mail it has identified as "junk" to your Junk Mail folder. You can choose your own level of protection: low, high, or exclusive; each with varying degrees of protection. Once e-mail is sent to your Junk Mail folder, messages are automatically deleted after a specified number of days; or, if you use the Junk Mail Deletion options, you can choose to have messages deleted as soon as they are sent to the Junk Mail folder.
We did this with our son's account, setting the junk mail to it's highest possible setting, so only email from addresses we allowed supposedly would come to the inbox. Only half the spam got filtered, the rest still ended up in the inbox.
Maybe you posted anonymously cause you like flamebait and didn't have your facts straight?
Most spam is the result of an account owner's own actions (direct and indirect).
So, my 8 year old son, who is not allowed to use email without supervision, is responsible for all the pornographic spam he gets in his Hotmail account? My wife specifically set his account up as being a minor. He gets to send email to family only. And yet he receives 30+ unsolicited emails a day, 90% of which are pornographic in nature. And yes, we did set all the privacy options available on Hotmail. I'm guessing that our direct actions of trying to protect our son's email account so he can stay in touch easily with his grandparents is the issue. We have since switched to cable internet access and our son now uses one of our ISP provided emails (we get 6, which is a bit of an overkill). No difference in email patterns. Voila, suddenly he gets no spam.
My work provided laptop is Win2K. I don't have any choice in the matter, that is the company required OS. I installed SP3 last night. It changed my auto-update setting to automatic without telling me. At work and at home I am behind firewalls. In the work environment all updating of Windows is handled internally, not by windowsupdate.microsoft.com. At home I patch manually. I don't want auto-update turned on. Since I always turn it off, I didn't realize it had been turned on until I checked, after reading this story on slashdot.
I have submitted a formal request for exception to be allowed to install Solaris or Linux on my laptop since I all of my work is primarily done on Solaris platforms. As of right now I have no intention of any of my own PC's having Windows ever again (my personal workstation is RedHat 7.1) and if I get this exception same rule goes at work. My wife uses Mac, and so does my son.
I have never seen RedHat or Solaris updates change settings on my PC/server/etc without asking if it was okay to do so. Solaris packages ask if it's okay to install with root permissions or modify permissions. When is the last time a Windows package asked you that? I've been using computers since about 1979, I'm tired of being treated like I'm stupid. I suspect a major part of the reason users are stupid is because software companies taught them to be stupid.
For the millions of PC users who exists, only a small fraction of them have any data that anyone gives two cents about.
What about the large number of PC users who bank online, purchase with credit cards online, etc. Almost all of them use IE, which uses "Auto Complete", a bland way of saying "we are storing all of your personal information in IE files on your PC". I'm sure that those files can be found and broken into. Do you suppose that someone might like those credit card #'s, names and social security numbers, password hints, etc.?
It's really only the people who are afraid of having their warez/MP3 collection deleted or who are pirating Windows itself that are afraid of these remarks in the EULA. Most users are not worried about those things because they have nothing to hide.
The "if you have nothing to hide, why are you worried" argument is a refuge. It's like saying that if you have nothing to hide you won't worry about the police being granted the right to enter your home without a warrant. Whether I have something to hide, or not, I don't want MS, or Apple, or Sun, or any other computer software/hardware manufacturer to check what's on my computer without my explicit consent. It's about privacy and who really controls my computer, me or some corporation, not whether I have anything to hide.
Regatta (or the mainframe for that matter) partitioning is different from SunFire partitioning. You are comparing apples to oranges. On a Sun box if you want to run two servers, one with a data warehouse on it, and the other with an OLTP system on it, and not worry about them stepping on each other, you can. You can't do that on Regatta. The hardware still impacts the whole system. On the other hand, since you can LPAR a Regatta down to 1 CPU, you can consolidate a butt load of servers onto one Regatta box.
Of course, with Sun's Resource Manager you can control workload management at the CPU and process level (kinda like TSO regions). And with Sun's cluster server you get all sorts of nifty virtual server capabilities in a Sun Plex. Basically it is a SysPlex for the UNIX world. For my $$ Sun's approach beats the heck out of IBM's. And I really prefer Solaris to AIX (yes, I've used both, as well as SCO, RedHat, FreeBSD and HP-UX). But, the last couple sentences are just my opinion.
But, and I'm sure you will admit this, Itanium is NOT in general use in the Enterprise. It will be some time before it is. How many people who work in a typical Enterprise IT environment have seen Itanium systems? Almost none.
These benchmarks are great. There are problems though, even with SPEC. One of the biggest problems is that we still aren't looking at the real world. The one where you have to integrate Oracle, J2EE, Apache, WebSphere and C++ (as an example, there are so many combinations it's pretty much impossible to list them). Since it's darn near impossible to build a benchmark that measures performance under real world conditions, benchmarks are half the battle, or less.
So we use a variety of benchmarks, our own experience and bidding by the vendors, throw in what our organization is experienced in, and go from there. Based on what I know about SuperDome architecture I seriously doubt that HP's Itanium servers will outperform Regatta or SunFire in "the wild", although it should be a solid performer in general. And the price will probably be very competitive.
Also, the Regatta p690 machine is THE BEST in my opinion. Only thing that comes close might be the top level Sun machines.
Have you ever really compared Sun's SunFire servers to the IBM pSeries? If you had you would know that each has their own arena where they are "best". The SunFire x800 and 15K, for example, are much better SMP boxes than Regatta. Their SMP is nearly linear in terms of scalability. This makes them a fantastic box for Data Warehousing.
Regatta, on the other hand, has some very interesting mainframe features, including LPARs and workload management, that should prove extremely useful for cost effective server consolidation and application servers. LPARs, however, are not nearly as "safe" from a hardware perspective as SunFire domains, which partition in hardware rather than software, thereby effectively isolating each domain in the server.
For my money the big iron UNIX ranks Sun, IBM, and then HP/Compaq a distant third. If I had to choose a 64-bit processor it would the UltrSPARC III Cu, although the Power4 is pretty impressive too. BUT, who the heck is going to run a desktop OS on a 64-bit RISC processor that costs $15,000 or more just for the CPU.
Here's where we get down to the important part. Itanium and Hammer will be commodity items. They won't be on par with IBM and Sun big iron, although they will probably be very effective at the workgroup/departmental server level. I hope that Apple seriously considers porting to a commodity CPU, it might actually bring competition back to the desktop OS market. Plenty of people out there just want their OS to work. And most people believe that Mac is a better, more user friendly OS than Windows. They just don't want to pay the price for Apple's hardware. Competition and an Intel/AMD platform would make Mac far more affordable and likely to be used.
The consumer is worried that they will buy a HDTV today and have it be outdated tomorrow, and when they cost thousands of dollars, compared to under $1000 for a reasonably high quality analog TV, what do you expect? The consumer isn't jumping on the bandwagon. There aren't enough broadcasts, there are frequent news stories about the standards changing and not being able to record HDTV in the future and so on. Nobody is confident in HDTV. Not to mention that we are not in the best of times economically and who the heck wants to shell out that much for a TV when you aren't sure about your job?
What's your point?
Yes, some browser based apps use ActiveX, but many more are written in Java and run on Java App Servers.
No, he's suggesting, correctly, that your wireless net be in a DMZ, rather than in your private network. If you wireless net is in your private network it violates one of the key principles of securing systems, which is to prevent physical access to the network. The wireless network, by its very nature, is not restricted by walls, cables, etc. If physical access to the network is possible, then it needs to be separated from your private network by firewalls.
I think it's happening outside the IT industry, but it's like UNIX, perceived as something used in the IT industry and by computer nerds/geeks. My wife, who used to work for one of the Fortune 100 IT companies (one with a 3 letter abbreviation) frequently describes text based applications in MVS and UNIX as "DOS based" and when I try to tell her they aren't "DOS based" she says "They all came from DOS". DOS is seen as difficult and not user friendly. If people think Linux/UNIX is DOS based (which apparently even people who should know better do) you can see a glimmer of the problem in the consumer market to be overcome.
Bottom line, consumers want to worry about how to use their apps, whether browser, or email or games or multimedia. They don't want to have to deal with installing libraries and dependencies and how to restart X and so forth. They would rather power the PC off and back on than learn how to restart X.
The consumer won't care what OS they use as long as: 1. It is perceived as stable and useful. 2. The apps they want to use run on it (they don't want "file compatability, they want to use Word). 3. It is not expensive (thus the bundling of MS works, they don't know how much it costs) 4. They don't have to learn how to use the OS beyond file system navigation and simple to use installation routines. 5. The OS and apps are well marketed to the consumer.
Apple screwed up on #3. OS/2 screwed up on #3 and #5. Linux major problem is #2 and #5.
Of course Galileo was forced to publicly recant his theories by the Catholic Church, which happens to believe in the Almighty and being saved. Kinda ironic.
The thing is that most of the companies I've seen are gradually reducing their dependance on Windows.
I'll give you the Technical Architect point of view on why this is. It has nothing to do with shifting away from Windows. It is because then we don't have to worry about what DLL's, lib's, etc. are on a user's PC. We don't have to maintain the code on the user's PC. We don't have to roll out version changes to the user's PC. What Linux kernel, Solaris patch level or NT service pack they have is irrelevant. All we (the project team) have to do is tell desktop support to make sure all browsers are IE5 or Netscape 4 or better, for example, and the roll out is done. We develop once, test once, roll out to the server, train the users. We can connect users across the WAN, the Internet, the whatever. The OS is on it's way to becoming irrelevant on the corporate desktop.
Now when will Linux go mainstream on the desktop as it has on the server?
Linux will go mainstream on the desktop when two things happen.
First, the average consumer has to perceive Linux as being more than just a playground for computer nerds and an inexpensive server alternative. This will take some doing. Between MS FUD and the behavior of many people in the Linux community there is a lot to overcome.
Second, Linux has to become easier to use for the average consumer. I'm in the industry and don't want ease of use, but rather power and stability, flexibility and reliability. The consumer market measures those things differently than IT professionals or developers or hardcore hobbyists do. Stability means no blue screens for the 2 hours of web surfing, it means their games run fine and they can send and receive email. Windows does that, by and large. And they don't have to know anything about the OS. They mostly don't even have to know how to install it. If they download something they still don't have to know anything about the OS or how to install things.
This is bad you say? That's cause you either are a masochist, or you enjoy computing at a different level, or this is your profession. The consumer wants his computer to be an appliance, like his TV, VCR or toaster. If it's more complex than that, he has fits.
I've been on the edge of cancelling for years. PC Mag doesn't seem very relevant, most of the time, to what I do (Enterprise Technical Architect). But it's nice to be able to keep up with what my colleagues in the PC world are doing, and every time I get ready to cancel, I read an article that actually interests me. One of these (if they survive the bankruptcy) I'll go three or so issues in a row absolutely bored by PC Mag and give up my subscription.