"Boxes that ask users to confirm whether they want to take a step such as deleting a document are another example of what he calls a bad feature."
Anyone care to guess where that feature came from? Anyone? Anyone?
That's right: the users.
Users complained about "accidentally" destroying their work, and repeatedly bitched and moaned about how programs should give them a chance to back out of whatever they did that was going to cause them to lose data. And now some schmuck is bitching and moaning about how programs should really just go ahead and lose the data anyway. Most of his other examples are just as stupid, though he has a very good point about bad error messages. There are classics such as: "Error Code 134553774. Continue?" How the hell should I know?!
In most cases, though, you just can't please everyone, especially some ass hat with a book to sell. Software will never reach a point where it accommodates everybody's pet idea of the perfect program. Computers are just not that flexible. People, however, are supposed to be smart enough to be able to bend a little bit. What this guy is preaching is that people should not have to adapt at all...ever, and that is unrealistic at best.
"...should we really criticize another operating system for coding that feature into their own product?"
Not at all. But then the makers of that other operating system shouldn't be screaming from the rafters about how they're innovating. Everyone borrows from everyone, which is how it should be. The best features from the industry should be adopted throughout the industry.
The reason that Microsoft takes so much flack for it is because its executives then refuse to admit that Microsoft didn't invent the borrowed features -- despite the obviousness of it all.
"I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry...."
1) If you consider Microsoft Windows to be malware (I do), then this is self-evident.
2) Even if you don't consider Windows to be malware, just wait until Vista. Microsoft is pushing anti-malware companies into bankruptcy by embedding its own anti-malware sofware (which is only marginally worse than the non-Microsoft counterparts). There may soon be no non-Microsoft anti-malware companies remaining, at which time the only money to be made in that sector is by the criminals. Since the difference between Microsoft's terrible anti-malware attempts and the currently terrible non-Microsoft anti-malware abortions will be negligible, nobody will buy the non-Microsoft stuff anymore. The criminals will have the industry cornered.
"The fact of the matter is that all they had to do is release register specs and the drivers would have been written...."
There may be less fact there than those of us not in the know believe(d). From what I've read, register based video cards are obsolete and have long since been replaced with cards with work in some other (mostly unspecified) way. It seems that modern cards are as much intricate firmware as they are hardware, so releasing specs is no longer a simple matter of specifying register values.
"Umm... No, they sued Microsoft, and won, settling for $2 billion for the dirty tricks MS played trying to embrace and extend Java."
There's a bit more to it than that. SUN didn't win. SUN and Microsoft settled. Part of the agreement was a patent truce protecting Star Office, but not protecting OpenOffice.org, and $2B from Microsoft to SUN. SUN took a lot of heat for not including OpenOffice.org in the patent protection agreement, though it's understandable that they couldn't get patent protection for something Microsoft desperately wants to destroy.
"Sun has licensed Unix System V from Santa Cruz Operation for several years now..."
No. SUN has 100% autonomous rights to Solaris, like IBM has 100% autonomous rights to AIX, and hasn't owed royalty payments to anyone for many years. SUN paid SCO millions of dollars that SUN was not obligated to pay, and to which SCO was not entitled to receive. At the time, several SUN executives were on an anti-Linux, anti-GPL, anti-IBM rampage. It was widely seen (and I agree 100%) as SUN giving SCO money to harm Linux.
"Sun [gave us] OpenOffice, out of pure generosity and to contribute to Free...Software."
SUN bought and freed Star Office as a strategic move against Microsoft. Period. EVERYTHING McNealy did in that era was to counter Microsoft. It was a great move, and should always be remembered as one of SUN's rare moments of cognitive clarity.
"I want to know why so many Slashdotters behold XBOX as a major technological innovation but shun Microsoft when Windows is mentioned."
No one with a grasp of the gaming market considers XBox to be a major innovation of any sort. It's a copy of what came before, from a company that has to have its nose in everything. That's the only reason Microsoft had someone else create the XBox (don't believe for a second that Microsoft actually designed and built it).
"Do some volunteer IT or try to make yourself visible on some open source projects."
I've been at my current development job for over five years now. When I got out of college, I listed all the skills I had and went through the resume writing process taught in my English classes. I got a few nibbles from employers, but they all said the same thing: not enough experience.
This was insulting, as I had been developing my own Free Software for nine years before even going to college. I started listing all of my Free projects on my resume, contrary to what my English teachers had unanimously instructed. The very first resume I sent out with those projects listed snagged a second interview at the place I now work.
The smoking gun was the Free Yahoo chat client I wrote based only on minimalist reverse engineered specifications from an acquaintance I met on Yahoo. That showed them that I had to drive and capacity that they wanted. The degree was the foot in the door, but the Free Software work examples were the welcome mat.
"We doctors are liable for any mistakes we make, if you can prove negligence or incompetence."
You doctors are also liable for offenses that are completely imagined by the accuser. When doctors malfunction, people die. When most software malfunctions, people have to retype a few paragraphs. If doctors could issue a bug fix that resolved death and injuries caused by their products, then everything would be fine. Medical mistakes tend to be severe and unfixable. Software mistakes generally are not (in most software fields).
Microsoft is the sole exception to my argument because it has repeatedly and intentionally sought to cause damage in order to gain and maintain its monopoly on desktop operating systems, and to illegally use that monopoly in attempts to gain monopolies in other markets. For that reason, Microsoft should be held uniquely and strictly liable for the damages its software continues to cause.
However, that will never happen. The United States governments have proven themselves to enjoy watching its citizens' sphincters get enlarged and inflamed. All that will happen is that Microsoft will be told to start using a rough stick instead of its own organ.
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own." If ever there was a test case for this, it has to be Bill O'Reilly. That guy has been living in a dreamland for years.
You're all missing the point. Microsoft is not in trouble because it has a monopoly. Having a monopoly is perfectly legal (though how Microsoft acquired its monopoly is a whole other ball of wax). Microsoft is in trouble for using that monopoly (desktop operating system) in an attempt (some mostly successful) to gain a monopoly in other markets (browser, server, document processing, etc.).
The EU is punishing Microsoft by requiring it to provide interoperability documentation (not actual code) for one market Microsoft is illegally attempting to monopolize. Failure to comply results in a small (relative to Microsoft's net wealth) daily fine.
I'm not a hard core gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do own both a PS2 and a Game Cube. Here's my take, in the order of expected market dominance, of the three consoles:
1) The Wii. The controller sells the console. It is the ONLY difference worth mentioning in this crop of game consoles. I think this will sweep the market.
2) The X-Box 360. Not because it's any better than the PS3. The PS3 and X-Box may as well come off the same assembly line, but the X-Box 360 is cheaper than the PS3.
3) This will be almost entirely limited to hard core gamers who have more money than sense. I expect Sony to bleed heavily on this until the PS3 is discontinued. The BluRay player will help this anchor sink fast.
"Make good music that I can buy, play on anything manufactured after the advent of mp3's, keep for the rest of my life, and I'll buy it."
It never ceases to amaze me how hard it is for the big labels to understand this simple concept. They really screwed themselves over years. They tried artificially controlling what we should like by dictating what music stores could and could not sell at any given period of time. That backfired horribly when Napster came about.
Then they tried suing their customer base, which drove away a large part of their market (me included) with remarks about what thieves we are for wanting to be able to pay and listen without restrictions.
They tried dipping their toes into downloadable music distribution, but cut everyone's throat by refusing to understand that we would not accept crippling technologically enforced listening restrictions.
They refuse to use the one route that will work: stop suing us; provide a convenient way for us to buy the music we want, and don't cripple the stuff we buy. That all assumes that they are capable of returning to the job they used to do well: filter out all the crap music. That was the only value the big labels had.
[Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination to [set my clock]...I just want to watch a goddamned movie."
[Typical User Later]: My goddamned movie didn't record! What the hell do you mean it would have recorded if I had set my clock?
[Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination to [change to root]."
[Typical User Later]: "My goddamned movie didn't record! What the hell do you mean some other user changed my clock as a prank? Why the hell doesn't the system provide some way to allow only me to change the time? What? What's a 'privilege level'?
I could go on and on. A person who doesn't learn even the bare minimum of how to use his computer ends up with something like Windows, and with all the headaches that come with it. Ironically, such a user ends up doing MUCH more work, and spending MUCH more time and money, babysitting Windows than he would spend on Linux if he learned a few basics.
There are some things that KDE and GNOME could to make things better, though.
When I need to move files from my user account to some other protected account, Konqueror's file IO slave should figure out not only that my current account doesn't have permissions to that protected account (which the IO slave does just fine), but it should prompt me for the password needed to gain those permissions (which the IO slave does not do). That means I have to become root to transfer those files. The added irony here is that the sftp IO slave does this very thing perfectly.
This isn't the "first" proof-of-concept for OS X that meets the definition of a "virus".
This doesn't even meet the definition of a virus at all. A virus has to not only attach itself to some other file, but also to spread. As you said in another post, there is no vector with which this thing can spread (aside from direct user intervention).
At best, this is proof of concept for a very primitive trojan: please download me, make me executable, then execute me. Pretty please? I'll do great things for you, I promise!
But at that point, it is proof of defective wetware rather than defective operating system software.
"Another group that's going to suffer under these outrageous restrictions on virtualization? Web developers, who just want to test their work under IE. Gee, thanks, Microsoft!"
My response: "Due to Microsoft's policy of not allowing Internet Explorer to be tested against our web site, we cannot offer support for that configuration. Firefox is a fully supported browser, and we recommend its use here."
"Don't underestimate what centuries of observation of human behaviour can produce."
Ancient Chinese observations lost a lot of credibility when they resulted in using mirrors to reflect bad luck. Feng-Shui falls squarely into the same hole.
How about starting by discontinuing litigation against your customer base? I stopped buying CDs when the lawsuits started. Granted, I was helped out by the music business itself. The stuff being sold today sucks so badly that I may not have bought it even if there weren't any lawsuits.
"As far as I can tell, this verdict means we will haul librarians to jail if they put a photocopier into the library: providing others with the means to violate copyright."
Copyright laws still provide for fair use (even after the DMCA). You are still allowed to make limited copies of small portions of copyrighted works for certain uses (such as education). If the librarian provided a means for wholesale copying of entire works, then that librarian would be hauled off to jail.
It is important to understand that this guy was not jailed for using Bittorrent, or for running a tracker. He was jailed for providing a means for the unauthorized wholesale copying of copyrighted works. A Bittorrent trackers was merely the means he chose to do so. He would have been just as guilty if he had used some other technology.
Trackers must target specific data. If you put up a Fedora Core tracker, Led Zepplin's greatest hits will not sneak itself into the feed. He chose to knowingly provide a means to continuously violate the copyrights of an organization world famous for suing people over copyright infringement, and he got caught. He got off with a slap on the wrist as a warning to others. He should be grateful he still has a life to lead.
In one respect, I can agree with the RIAA and the MPAA: don't copy other people's work without their permission. That is the part of the USC he violated. It is straight forward.
"They couldn't run DOS or Windows, which was the definition of PC ever since IBM applied the letters to its first home computer."
This is where I stopped reading, and knew that the author was talking out of his ass. There was never a hard and fast (and agreed upon) definition of a PC, with the sole exception of what that first letter means: Personal.
The notion that a PC wasn't a PC unless it ran MS-DOS is ludicrous to say the least. PC was an attempt at a brand name rather than a generic description, but that isn't how it actually worked. The term PC instantly came to describe a class of computer that could be purchased by individual consumers. I had personal computers from Radio Shack (CoCo 2 and 3) which didn't run MS-DOS long before I had a personal computer from an IBM compatible reseller.
Several years ago, I booted up my old CoCo 3 and found that the BASIC ROM had a Microsoft copyright. So it's easy to argue that RS-DOS (Radio Shack DOS) was really MS-DOS in disguise. The RS-DOS BASIC syntax was remarkably similar to GW-BASIC. But I hardly ever ran from RS-DOS after getting Microware's OS/9. If you want to see just how pathetic MSDOS+IBM were for the time, fire up an IBM clone running MS-DOS and the CoCo 3 running OS/9 Level 2. The latter cleanly blow the doors (and Windows) off the former.
Oracle can't even properly beta test its database before releasing the horrid mess to the world (10g RAC). I can only imagine the unmitigated disaster that awaits an Oracle operating system and database combination. It would be much smarter for Oracle and Red Hat to offer preinstalled and preconfigured boxes based on the customer's intended use, fully tested and certified to function.
"Part of the copy-protection mechanism is a non-standard UDF...file system which results in the IFO file on the DVD...appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long."
Then how does a dedicated DVD player read the data?
Slashdot Mirror
"Boxes that ask users to confirm whether they want to take a step such as deleting a document are another example of what he calls a bad feature."
Anyone care to guess where that feature came from? Anyone? Anyone?
That's right: the users.
Users complained about "accidentally" destroying their work, and repeatedly bitched and moaned about how programs should give them a chance to back out of whatever they did that was going to cause them to lose data. And now some schmuck is bitching and moaning about how programs should really just go ahead and lose the data anyway. Most of his other examples are just as stupid, though he has a very good point about bad error messages. There are classics such as: "Error Code 134553774. Continue?" How the hell should I know?!
In most cases, though, you just can't please everyone, especially some ass hat with a book to sell. Software will never reach a point where it accommodates everybody's pet idea of the perfect program. Computers are just not that flexible. People, however, are supposed to be smart enough to be able to bend a little bit. What this guy is preaching is that people should not have to adapt at all...ever, and that is unrealistic at best.
"...should we really criticize another operating system for coding that feature into their own product?"
Not at all. But then the makers of that other operating system shouldn't be screaming from the rafters about how they're innovating. Everyone borrows from everyone, which is how it should be. The best features from the industry should be adopted throughout the industry.
The reason that Microsoft takes so much flack for it is because its executives then refuse to admit that Microsoft didn't invent the borrowed features -- despite the obviousness of it all.
"I think the malware industry is making more money than the anti-malware industry...."
1) If you consider Microsoft Windows to be malware (I do), then this is self-evident.
2) Even if you don't consider Windows to be malware, just wait until Vista. Microsoft is pushing anti-malware companies into bankruptcy by embedding its own anti-malware sofware (which is only marginally worse than the non-Microsoft counterparts). There may soon be no non-Microsoft anti-malware companies remaining, at which time the only money to be made in that sector is by the criminals. Since the difference between Microsoft's terrible anti-malware attempts and the currently terrible non-Microsoft anti-malware abortions will be negligible, nobody will buy the non-Microsoft stuff anymore. The criminals will have the industry cornered.
"The fact of the matter is that all they had to do is release register specs and the drivers would have been written...."
There may be less fact there than those of us not in the know believe(d). From what I've read, register based video cards are obsolete and have long since been replaced with cards with work in some other (mostly unspecified) way. It seems that modern cards are as much intricate firmware as they are hardware, so releasing specs is no longer a simple matter of specifying register values.
"Umm... No, they sued Microsoft, and won, settling for $2 billion for the dirty tricks MS played trying to embrace and extend Java."
There's a bit more to it than that. SUN didn't win. SUN and Microsoft settled. Part of the agreement was a patent truce protecting Star Office, but not protecting OpenOffice.org, and $2B from Microsoft to SUN. SUN took a lot of heat for not including OpenOffice.org in the patent protection agreement, though it's understandable that they couldn't get patent protection for something Microsoft desperately wants to destroy.
"Sun has licensed Unix System V from Santa Cruz Operation for several years now..."
No. SUN has 100% autonomous rights to Solaris, like IBM has 100% autonomous rights to AIX, and hasn't owed royalty payments to anyone for many years. SUN paid SCO millions of dollars that SUN was not obligated to pay, and to which SCO was not entitled to receive. At the time, several SUN executives were on an anti-Linux, anti-GPL, anti-IBM rampage. It was widely seen (and I agree 100%) as SUN giving SCO money to harm Linux.
"Sun [gave us] OpenOffice, out of pure generosity and to contribute to Free...Software."
SUN bought and freed Star Office as a strategic move against Microsoft. Period. EVERYTHING McNealy did in that era was to counter Microsoft. It was a great move, and should always be remembered as one of SUN's rare moments of cognitive clarity.
"I want to know why so many Slashdotters behold XBOX as a major technological innovation but shun Microsoft when Windows is mentioned."
No one with a grasp of the gaming market considers XBox to be a major innovation of any sort. It's a copy of what came before, from a company that has to have its nose in everything. That's the only reason Microsoft had someone else create the XBox (don't believe for a second that Microsoft actually designed and built it).
"Do some volunteer IT or try to make yourself visible on some open source projects."
I've been at my current development job for over five years now. When I got out of college, I listed all the skills I had and went through the resume writing process taught in my English classes. I got a few nibbles from employers, but they all said the same thing: not enough experience.
This was insulting, as I had been developing my own Free Software for nine years before even going to college. I started listing all of my Free projects on my resume, contrary to what my English teachers had unanimously instructed. The very first resume I sent out with those projects listed snagged a second interview at the place I now work.
The smoking gun was the Free Yahoo chat client I wrote based only on minimalist reverse engineered specifications from an acquaintance I met on Yahoo. That showed them that I had to drive and capacity that they wanted. The degree was the foot in the door, but the Free Software work examples were the welcome mat.
"We doctors are liable for any mistakes we make, if you can prove negligence or incompetence."
You doctors are also liable for offenses that are completely imagined by the accuser. When doctors malfunction, people die. When most software malfunctions, people have to retype a few paragraphs. If doctors could issue a bug fix that resolved death and injuries caused by their products, then everything would be fine. Medical mistakes tend to be severe and unfixable. Software mistakes generally are not (in most software fields).
Microsoft is the sole exception to my argument because it has repeatedly and intentionally sought to cause damage in order to gain and maintain its monopoly on desktop operating systems, and to illegally use that monopoly in attempts to gain monopolies in other markets. For that reason, Microsoft should be held uniquely and strictly liable for the damages its software continues to cause.
However, that will never happen. The United States governments have proven themselves to enjoy watching its citizens' sphincters get enlarged and inflamed. All that will happen is that Microsoft will be told to start using a rough stick instead of its own organ.
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own." If ever there was a test case for this, it has to be Bill O'Reilly. That guy has been living in a dreamland for years.
You're all missing the point. Microsoft is not in trouble because it has a monopoly. Having a monopoly is perfectly legal (though how Microsoft acquired its monopoly is a whole other ball of wax). Microsoft is in trouble for using that monopoly (desktop operating system) in an attempt (some mostly successful) to gain a monopoly in other markets (browser, server, document processing, etc.).
The EU is punishing Microsoft by requiring it to provide interoperability documentation (not actual code) for one market Microsoft is illegally attempting to monopolize. Failure to comply results in a small (relative to Microsoft's net wealth) daily fine.
I'm not a hard core gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do own both a PS2 and a Game Cube. Here's my take, in the order of expected market dominance, of the three consoles:
1) The Wii. The controller sells the console. It is the ONLY difference worth mentioning in this crop of game consoles. I think this will sweep the market.
2) The X-Box 360. Not because it's any better than the PS3. The PS3 and X-Box may as well come off the same assembly line, but the X-Box 360 is cheaper than the PS3.
3) This will be almost entirely limited to hard core gamers who have more money than sense. I expect Sony to bleed heavily on this until the PS3 is discontinued. The BluRay player will help this anchor sink fast.
"Make good music that I can buy, play on anything manufactured after the advent of mp3's, keep for the rest of my life, and I'll buy it."
It never ceases to amaze me how hard it is for the big labels to understand this simple concept. They really screwed themselves over years. They tried artificially controlling what we should like by dictating what music stores could and could not sell at any given period of time. That backfired horribly when Napster came about.
Then they tried suing their customer base, which drove away a large part of their market (me included) with remarks about what thieves we are for wanting to be able to pay and listen without restrictions.
They tried dipping their toes into downloadable music distribution, but cut everyone's throat by refusing to understand that we would not accept crippling technologically enforced listening restrictions.
They refuse to use the one route that will work: stop suing us; provide a convenient way for us to buy the music we want, and don't cripple the stuff we buy. That all assumes that they are capable of returning to the job they used to do well: filter out all the crap music. That was the only value the big labels had.
[Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination to [set my clock]...I just want to watch a goddamned movie."
[Typical User Later]: My goddamned movie didn't record! What the hell do you mean it would have recorded if I had set my clock?
[Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination to [change to root]."
[Typical User Later]: "My goddamned movie didn't record! What the hell do you mean some other user changed my clock as a prank? Why the hell doesn't the system provide some way to allow only me to change the time? What? What's a 'privilege level'?
I could go on and on. A person who doesn't learn even the bare minimum of how to use his computer ends up with something like Windows, and with all the headaches that come with it. Ironically, such a user ends up doing MUCH more work, and spending MUCH more time and money, babysitting Windows than he would spend on Linux if he learned a few basics.
There are some things that KDE and GNOME could to make things better, though.
When I need to move files from my user account to some other protected account, Konqueror's file IO slave should figure out not only that my current account doesn't have permissions to that protected account (which the IO slave does just fine), but it should prompt me for the password needed to gain those permissions (which the IO slave does not do). That means I have to become root to transfer those files. The added irony here is that the sftp IO slave does this very thing perfectly.
This isn't the "first" proof-of-concept for OS X that meets the definition of a "virus".
This doesn't even meet the definition of a virus at all. A virus has to not only attach itself to some other file, but also to spread. As you said in another post, there is no vector with which this thing can spread (aside from direct user intervention).
At best, this is proof of concept for a very primitive trojan: please download me, make me executable, then execute me. Pretty please? I'll do great things for you, I promise!
But at that point, it is proof of defective wetware rather than defective operating system software.
"Another group that's going to suffer under these outrageous restrictions on virtualization? Web developers, who just want to test their work under IE. Gee, thanks, Microsoft!"
My response: "Due to Microsoft's policy of not allowing Internet Explorer to be tested against our web site, we cannot offer support for that configuration. Firefox is a fully supported browser, and we recommend its use here."
On the surface, this seems like a good thing. So was is my skin crawling?
"Don't underestimate what centuries of observation of human behaviour can produce."
Ancient Chinese observations lost a lot of credibility when they resulted in using mirrors to reflect bad luck. Feng-Shui falls squarely into the same hole.
"What material would you like to see?"
How about starting by discontinuing litigation against your customer base? I stopped buying CDs when the lawsuits started. Granted, I was helped out by the music business itself. The stuff being sold today sucks so badly that I may not have bought it even if there weren't any lawsuits.
"As far as I can tell, this verdict means we will haul librarians to jail if they put a photocopier into the library: providing others with the means to violate copyright."
Copyright laws still provide for fair use (even after the DMCA). You are still allowed to make limited copies of small portions of copyrighted works for certain uses (such as education). If the librarian provided a means for wholesale copying of entire works, then that librarian would be hauled off to jail.
It is important to understand that this guy was not jailed for using Bittorrent, or for running a tracker. He was jailed for providing a means for the unauthorized wholesale copying of copyrighted works. A Bittorrent trackers was merely the means he chose to do so. He would have been just as guilty if he had used some other technology.
Trackers must target specific data. If you put up a Fedora Core tracker, Led Zepplin's greatest hits will not sneak itself into the feed. He chose to knowingly provide a means to continuously violate the copyrights of an organization world famous for suing people over copyright infringement, and he got caught. He got off with a slap on the wrist as a warning to others. He should be grateful he still has a life to lead.
In one respect, I can agree with the RIAA and the MPAA: don't copy other people's work without their permission. That is the part of the USC he violated. It is straight forward.
I can give you the article summary, and you can save yourself a click:
"Error establishing a database connection"
"They couldn't run DOS or Windows, which was the definition of PC ever since IBM applied the letters to its first home computer."
This is where I stopped reading, and knew that the author was talking out of his ass. There was never a hard and fast (and agreed upon) definition of a PC, with the sole exception of what that first letter means: Personal.
The notion that a PC wasn't a PC unless it ran MS-DOS is ludicrous to say the least. PC was an attempt at a brand name rather than a generic description, but that isn't how it actually worked. The term PC instantly came to describe a class of computer that could be purchased by individual consumers. I had personal computers from Radio Shack (CoCo 2 and 3) which didn't run MS-DOS long before I had a personal computer from an IBM compatible reseller.
Several years ago, I booted up my old CoCo 3 and found that the BASIC ROM had a Microsoft copyright. So it's easy to argue that RS-DOS (Radio Shack DOS) was really MS-DOS in disguise. The RS-DOS BASIC syntax was remarkably similar to GW-BASIC. But I hardly ever ran from RS-DOS after getting Microware's OS/9. If you want to see just how pathetic MSDOS+IBM were for the time, fire up an IBM clone running MS-DOS and the CoCo 3 running OS/9 Level 2. The latter cleanly blow the doors (and Windows) off the former.
Oracle can't even properly beta test its database before releasing the horrid mess to the world (10g RAC). I can only imagine the unmitigated disaster that awaits an Oracle operating system and database combination. It would be much smarter for Oracle and Red Hat to offer preinstalled and preconfigured boxes based on the customer's intended use, fully tested and certified to function.
"Yeah, and it's amazing that it still adds up to 13 if you switch the numbers around, 1+1+3+2+6 = 13. WOW!"
Unless you get an old COBOL programmer to sum them up for you, in which case you get 11:
06+10+13 = 11
But then the results aren't as fun, which is the life story for COBOL programmers -ducks-.
"Part of the copy-protection mechanism is a non-standard UDF...file system which results in the IFO file on the DVD...appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long."
Then how does a dedicated DVD player read the data?
"...put up your own sudo-like prompt and hope they bite..."
Which requires your system to already be compromised in order for it to allow an intruder to compromise your system...
This all very much amounts to a giant yawn.