I'm hoping you mean "Boycott all Unix" until SCO kicks the can.. Why boycott Linux? There's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux, and if SCO comes to you seeking money, give them the middle finger and get a lawyer. Odds are that very soon SCO will have to go to court... I'm just anxiously awaiting...
My Guess is that it can run under KDE, but they're not supporting it. After all, they do OWN Ximian now, that does kinda put them in the GNOME support realm.
To tell you the truth, wonders tell me if the P4 line is still going to exist. It really looks as if Intel's scrambling inside to move all the P4 based technology up to the server market, and move in Pentium M technology into the desktop. Starting at 2GHz, a Pentium M could kick the pants off of a 3.5GHz Pentium 4, and produce far less heat in the process. This will allow them to really get back into the game. If 64-bit extensions really get popular for some unknown reason (next version of Windows perhaps?), maybe Intel will cut the prices of the higher end chips, but there's really no reason for 64-bit yet other than they look shiny and you're buying into one of the two's company's propaganda.
I'd rather have a super fast 32-bit processor than a kinda fast 64-bit processor that's shifting sockets and the future of it's technology is questionable...
Well... if anything though, this should give the rest of the world some time to adapt... China and Japan are undoubtedly two of the largest holders of IP's outside of the United States (maybe not China.. I don't understand how their nation-wide firewall works... could have the entire country under nat... but highly doubtful...)
Those subnets can be reallocated elsewhere to give other countries time to adapt, if they will adapt.
And even so, I don't believe Hubble should be obsolete then. It's still the 14 years tested platform for taking pictures; it can serve as a benchmark for new telescopes, and a fallback in case new telescopes aren't working the way they are planned.
Just because something is old, in no way makes it obsolete.. We still use virtually the same aircraft since the 1980's, the Boeing 737 and 747 have been obsoleted many times over by the 777 and other new aircraft, but the 737's and 747's are still in constant usage. Why? Expense and Risk Management. It's simply cheaper to use and maintain a working platform, than to build a new one and have it fail in some catastrophic way nobody could have planned for.
When Hubble was first launched, the disaster struck and it couldn't take pictures correctly, it taught us how to repair it, and since then, maintainance has been a breeze. Something tells me new telescopes will be prone to lots of problems like this, especially with the new ideas of building cheap and launching cheap that NASA's subscribed to.
I don't want to sound rude, but why must we take this to politics... this is a civilian space agency, and we should treat it as such (and not some government pet project as most administrations have used it: Kennedy for the space race, Bush for gaining a stab of popularity and spicing up discussions everywhere).
Politics aside, we've made an investment. 15 years of a working Hubble telescope. That time runs out next year and we're still a solid 6 years behind on a solid replacement (which, is still questionable, since everything I read tells me it is planned to be like the Spitzer telescope and take pictures in Infrared). We also made the investment on 200 Million USD on upgrades to Hubble. 200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
And I don't buy this Bullshit O'Queef is selling us about the worries of the shuttles. They're operable as is already, and what happened on Columbia was a freak accident that nobody thought to try to explain until it was too late. Maybe the money that could be going to building these "robots" could instead be used to build a wing crawler, to crawl out and service the underbelly of the Shuttle in case of such a disaster.
It's also worth noting that the costs to build upgrades to Hubble have already been incurred, since the development of more Hubble telescope additions has already completed (176 million USD worth). It'd be worth it just to put these new additions to the telescope into use, and upgrade it's batteries and gyros so that the instruments are given a real chance at life.
The James Webb cosmic observatory isn't ready yet (Hubble's successor), and won't be until 2011, whereas Hubble was due for retirement in 2005. That's an automatic 6 year wait, which is absolutely devastating to our scientists. On top of that, what happens if the rocket smokes on the pad and the James Webb observatory is no more? Another 6 year wait? These are things we need to think about before deciding Hubble's fate, which, IMO was never given a thought outside of the costs of getting three men up there to service the thing.
Only thing I can think that might be different between the time when Hubble was launched and now is the technology used in the collection of the image itself. We can make much more sensitive CCD's (or CMOS's, which NASA would probably prefer...) for cheaper now, allowing for a much higher resolution picture to be taken.. BUT: since we're already building another telescope, there's no reason at all to throw money at upgrading this piece of hardware, since it would undoubtedly require quite invasive work.
Sure, we have much better technology now to make a lighter, cheaper telescope with a much better eyesight, but nothing can escape the allure of those awesome pictures Hubble has returned to us. Since Webb is looking to be more like an infrared telescope, Hubble's the only imaging device we will have to take pictures like these..
It would be nice though to put Hubble into a maintainable orbit, maybe even rent it/sell it to a company who wants to take pictures of the heavens and sell them. Even with it being aging technology, I don't believe it should just be discarded like the other aging satelites.. it is a testimate to human ingeniuity that it lasted this long and I believe it should be preserved.
Maybe if we can't put it in a sustainable orbit (for repairs and such) why not bring it back to earth? AFAIK this has never been done and would be a huge test of the space agency... but once it was back on earth, not only could it be in a museum for all to see, we could also test all the different pieces of equipment on it for radiation exposure levels, and see just how well it held up to micrometorites and the like. There's a wealth of knowledge hubble still holds, discarding it now is a complete waste.
lol, my bad.. I love debian to death, and I didn't mean it in an offensive way.. I meant that they're building an archetecture, the basic, underlying stuff that can be used to make Graphical and other installers later. It's actually a very beautiful project and is quite awesome right now, and I hope they finish it soon...
Didn't mean to come off that way... my apologies to joey and the gang..
eh, I'm not gonna go into the desktop wars, saying why Novell did something one way or another, I'm not on the Board of Directors and I wouldn't know these things. But Ximian is doing a damned good job at making a desktop along with the rest of the GNOME and KDE world. By buying SuSE, they gave themselves a floor, walls, electricity, the basic framework of what they'd need if they want to move all their products to linux. By buying Ximian, they gave something to skin the house, make it look pretty, make people want to buy it. SuSE is a KDE distro, but there's no reason you couldn't install Ximian over it, and that's one reason they may have bought the two companies, to give themselves a more diverse enviroment to attack RedHat at their own game.
Could be another reason behind opensourcing YaST: give it a GTK2 interface and wala, you've got a complete, working corporate desktop platform, which of course, they can then use to sell their own eDirectory software, and others as well... It's all about building a platform. Microsoft understood this too, how do you think they became so powerful? They built two seperate houses, both very shady but they got the job done. Then they skinned one house when they realized it was about to collaspe. Moved the skin from the first, to the second, and poof, a solid platform. Now they can sell Active Directory, Office, and other software for it, and not look like bumbling rejects.
I don't think this is true either. An installer is a vital part of the whole solution. It gives you a chance to orient yourself with the operating system, to get the look and feel of things down, to understand what all is being installed, and to get to know the technologies at work. Microsoft honed the art of installing years ago, and ever since they've used the installer as a great billboard for their operating system. But since anyone who's likely to be looking at it is upgrading, reinstalling, or something of that like, it has to be friendly because they're probably already pissed as it is.
It's kinda like buying a new car. Shiny and pretty, plenty powerful under the hood, nice leather interior, cd player, all the good stuff you find in cars today. But would you buy that car without test driving it? Would you buy it before you knew how to drive it? Now apply this to an operating system, would you install it without getting some kind of a chance to orient yourself with it? Would you nosedive into it without having the slightest clue of what you're doing? Better yet, should you have to?
The installer's not all of the game, but it's defintely something you want to get right. If you get it to where even the most experienced users will feel just as at home as a complete computer newbie, than you're probably on the right path. YaST is close... closer than Anaconda IMO, but, as with everything.. could user a little work. Thank goodness now we get the chance.
This comes just a few months after Anaconda, the RedHat installer, started being used for another distro (is it Debian's new installer?). Novell obviously saw this move as a good thing.
Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian. Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff. Anaconda has, however, been ported to install Debian by Progeny. Pretty neat, but I don't see it eever taking precidence to the Debian Installer.
And I do agree with you that it probably won't take away any market share. If anything, it sets up SuSE as running against RedHat, which should be a very interesting battle. And we are the ones to benefit.
Thing is, I think Novell's got the idea. Once we can develop good, solid, working ways to install the operating system, supporting it should be a lot easier. And Novell knows that there's no reason to NOT tap the millions of people online willing to help code this platform. I personally believe Novell's trying to secure itself as the second large Linux supporting company. By buying Ximian, they gave themselves a very viable desktop, by buying SuSE, they gave themselves a stable platform. Now they just need to do the middle work such as getting it to work on all hardware, and making it easy to support. And IMO, open source is a hell of a lot easier to support, especially since the people with the problems, usually know how to go about fixing them, and will send patches.
Don't discredit the selling power either. This probably won't hurt the sells of SuSE at all, in fact, it very well might augment sales, due to the people without fast internet connections wanting to get a taste of the YaST code. Don't count on it, but the potential's definitely there. Novell's making a good move here, I commend them.
Considering it was written in python, anything with a complete python port can run it. Considering it was probably written and developed in a *nix environment, OF COURSE.
BitTorrent is a very sound idea, and a very nice technology. The only reason it's hyped at all is because it's new, fast, and revolutionary. It makes it 10x easier to get big pieces of data quickly, rather than waiting for hours on an FTP server choked by twenty thousand other people wanting the very same file. Sure BT's got some issues too, but you must understand that P2P is a very young technology; there's plenty to improve upon under any implementation: there's still no reliable way to search for material, and get what you're wanting. Mixing RSS with BT will help get you the content you want, faster, period. This is why this is a good idea.
Not well documented, but to people who want to "roll their own" knoppix-type CD, there are plentytutorials out there. Probably one of the more useful steps in remastering your knoppix is using what is unoffically known as a "kicklist"; a file simply listing all the packages you don't want. Then you can issue apt-get remove `cat kicklist` and poof, a great deal of the knoppix cruft removed in a flash. after that it's probably a good idea to run apt-get remove `deborphan` or something like that to further remove cruft.
Now for the interesting part of this story. I learned this because I too am new to debian. Started working with the userlinux project a while back because I thought it was something it most definitely isn't, so I decided to give debian a try. Fell in love quickly. It's really nice to have virtually any piece of software you want at your fingertips, and I feel they've done a great job at this. But having such a user-friendly software installation system, with such a rediculus installer is contradicting. Could *NOT* get the previous installers to work at all, never detected my network card, so I had to swim through modprobe and the like, trying to remember which module was the driver to my network card. After a few days of attempts.. I gave up, returned to redhat and read up on the many other ways to get debian.
Knoppix fell into my lap through discussion... well everywhere. I knew it was linux, but I figured it was Redhat based, since everything this day and age is. WRONG. So I did an HD install and experimented. Removing packages was a bitch for a long time, so much cruft I absolutely didn't want. One of the hardest parts I found was removing KDE *zips on flame retardant body suit*. Finally, after trying a great deal, I thought of just removing everything QT related: apt-get remove `apt-cache pkglist | grep qt*`, and this seemed to do the trick every time.
Long story short, knoppix is a great distro, but I'd love it more if there were a "knoppix lite", which only installed the base system, and absolutely nothing more, allowing users the choice of building an entirely new system on top of it.
*one last note: if you're having trouble removing nedit from knoppix, upgrade to the newest one from unstable, and then uninstall it... works every time.*
But that's just it..Net is already shipping with XP SP1 in a lot of cases. The.Net framework is solid and invariant by nature, this is the Microsoft way of doing things most of the time.
The serious thing to look at is where.Net is taking microsoft. The reason for developing.Net was so that they could become platform independent. Their underlying operating system is flawed by design in a lot of places, and they, much like Apple today, are evaluating running new technologies. But in order to make up for compatibilty, it's easier to run everything in a little invariant shell, the.Net framework.
If Linux was smart, we'd do this too. Since we all know that problems like library and package dependicies are probably the most common Linux problem today, why not design a system that allows any program access to what it needs? If joe-program needs liba version 2.3, but is incompatible with the new liba 2.4, but bob program needs liba 2.4 and is incompatible with liba 2.3, why not have both, with "Framework Selector" written to automatically load the correct binary for the correct situation.
Apple has security that their software will only ever run on their equipment. They've experimented thousands of times otherwise, but they always failed to make it out of Apple simply because they are a Hardware company. They sell hardware. Microsoft on the other hand, is exactly opposite. They sell software that will work on practically all hardware. They've done so by sacrificing a lot of speed, cutting corners, and so on and so forth. Linux on the other hand, is like neither. Sure we design software to work on all hardware, but we don't cut corners, and we don't give a damn if it doesn't work somewhere else, that's somewhere else's job to make it work. And then we expect people to give back what they've written, and claim it under our given name.
That's the Idea behind UserLinux. Set package defaults, so that when you go to install it, the least amount of user interaction is needed to set up, not only desktops, but corporate servers, etc etc. So what if there is choice? Users should be taught every early on that there is choice, and how to get that amount of choice is to use Apt-get install "choice". With choice, comes the responsibility of using it (think: voting).
my bad, i do mean ssl, 2 hours of sleep will do that to you....
and secondly, a post that seriously flame baited, you cant be too sure what was said at all.. I appologize for putting words in your mouth, but I do seriously think you need to rethink what grub was saying.
First of all, welcome to my foe's list. I don't like people who flame the hell out of insightful statements like the one Grub made.
Online bank servers are *very* well isolated from backbone servers so that they do not pose huge security risks to everyone's money in the database. This is done through the kind of "private" network you are speaking of.
Many, MANY places actually do connect to the internet do to banking, but once again, they connect via secure tools (ssh; the school I work for uses Munis for financial works, all passed through a VPN tunnel), and a number of checkpoints are set up on both ends to detur hacking. As I understand it, very few of these kinds of security enhancements were installed on the DoI's computers, if any at all.
So really now, who's spreading the FUD, the person who's trying to sell us that the internet's inheirently secure and should be trusted like any network, or the man who's saying that the security, or lack thereof, isn't good enough?
If it were linux or one of the BSD's, the government would be up and at arms about it, screaming how linux was insecure, and that *we* needed to fix this and that and that and that.. If it's microsoft, well, nobody ever got fired for choosing microsoft. They'll politely call Tech support and M$ will offer to "Upgrade" their security for a large sum, and the government will agree like usual.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping you mean "Boycott all Unix" until SCO kicks the can.. Why boycott Linux? There's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux, and if SCO comes to you seeking money, give them the middle finger and get a lawyer. Odds are that very soon SCO will have to go to court... I'm just anxiously awaiting...
Bill, is that you?!
My Guess is that it can run under KDE, but they're not supporting it. After all, they do OWN Ximian now, that does kinda put them in the GNOME support realm.
Statistics than you'll ever need...
To tell you the truth, wonders tell me if the P4 line is still going to exist. It really looks as if Intel's scrambling inside to move all the P4 based technology up to the server market, and move in Pentium M technology into the desktop. Starting at 2GHz, a Pentium M could kick the pants off of a 3.5GHz Pentium 4, and produce far less heat in the process. This will allow them to really get back into the game. If 64-bit extensions really get popular for some unknown reason (next version of Windows perhaps?), maybe Intel will cut the prices of the higher end chips, but there's really no reason for 64-bit yet other than they look shiny and you're buying into one of the two's company's propaganda.
I'd rather have a super fast 32-bit processor than a kinda fast 64-bit processor that's shifting sockets and the future of it's technology is questionable...
Well... if anything though, this should give the rest of the world some time to adapt... China and Japan are undoubtedly two of the largest holders of IP's outside of the United States (maybe not China.. I don't understand how their nation-wide firewall works... could have the entire country under nat... but highly doubtful...)
Those subnets can be reallocated elsewhere to give other countries time to adapt, if they will adapt.
And even so, I don't believe Hubble should be obsolete then. It's still the 14 years tested platform for taking pictures; it can serve as a benchmark for new telescopes, and a fallback in case new telescopes aren't working the way they are planned.
Just because something is old, in no way makes it obsolete.. We still use virtually the same aircraft since the 1980's, the Boeing 737 and 747 have been obsoleted many times over by the 777 and other new aircraft, but the 737's and 747's are still in constant usage. Why? Expense and Risk Management. It's simply cheaper to use and maintain a working platform, than to build a new one and have it fail in some catastrophic way nobody could have planned for.
When Hubble was first launched, the disaster struck and it couldn't take pictures correctly, it taught us how to repair it, and since then, maintainance has been a breeze. Something tells me new telescopes will be prone to lots of problems like this, especially with the new ideas of building cheap and launching cheap that NASA's subscribed to.
I don't want to sound rude, but why must we take this to politics... this is a civilian space agency, and we should treat it as such (and not some government pet project as most administrations have used it: Kennedy for the space race, Bush for gaining a stab of popularity and spicing up discussions everywhere).
Politics aside, we've made an investment. 15 years of a working Hubble telescope. That time runs out next year and we're still a solid 6 years behind on a solid replacement (which, is still questionable, since everything I read tells me it is planned to be like the Spitzer telescope and take pictures in Infrared). We also made the investment on 200 Million USD on upgrades to Hubble. 200 Million dollars is a lot of money to put towards something that can probably never be used with any other piece of equipment except Hubble, and not put it to use.
And I don't buy this Bullshit O'Queef is selling us about the worries of the shuttles. They're operable as is already, and what happened on Columbia was a freak accident that nobody thought to try to explain until it was too late. Maybe the money that could be going to building these "robots" could instead be used to build a wing crawler, to crawl out and service the underbelly of the Shuttle in case of such a disaster.
But it's an Infrared telescope. Hubble is Visible light. It's comparing apples to oranges really...
It's also worth noting that the costs to build upgrades to Hubble have already been incurred, since the development of more Hubble telescope additions has already completed (176 million USD worth). It'd be worth it just to put these new additions to the telescope into use, and upgrade it's batteries and gyros so that the instruments are given a real chance at life.
The James Webb cosmic observatory isn't ready yet (Hubble's successor), and won't be until 2011, whereas Hubble was due for retirement in 2005. That's an automatic 6 year wait, which is absolutely devastating to our scientists. On top of that, what happens if the rocket smokes on the pad and the James Webb observatory is no more? Another 6 year wait? These are things we need to think about before deciding Hubble's fate, which, IMO was never given a thought outside of the costs of getting three men up there to service the thing.
Only thing I can think that might be different between the time when Hubble was launched and now is the technology used in the collection of the image itself. We can make much more sensitive CCD's (or CMOS's, which NASA would probably prefer...) for cheaper now, allowing for a much higher resolution picture to be taken.. BUT: since we're already building another telescope, there's no reason at all to throw money at upgrading this piece of hardware, since it would undoubtedly require quite invasive work.
Sure, we have much better technology now to make a lighter, cheaper telescope with a much better eyesight, but nothing can escape the allure of those awesome pictures Hubble has returned to us. Since Webb is looking to be more like an infrared telescope, Hubble's the only imaging device we will have to take pictures like these..
It would be nice though to put Hubble into a maintainable orbit, maybe even rent it/sell it to a company who wants to take pictures of the heavens and sell them. Even with it being aging technology, I don't believe it should just be discarded like the other aging satelites.. it is a testimate to human ingeniuity that it lasted this long and I believe it should be preserved.
Maybe if we can't put it in a sustainable orbit (for repairs and such) why not bring it back to earth? AFAIK this has never been done and would be a huge test of the space agency... but once it was back on earth, not only could it be in a museum for all to see, we could also test all the different pieces of equipment on it for radiation exposure levels, and see just how well it held up to micrometorites and the like. There's a wealth of knowledge hubble still holds, discarding it now is a complete waste.
lol, my bad.. I love debian to death, and I didn't mean it in an offensive way.. I meant that they're building an archetecture, the basic, underlying stuff that can be used to make Graphical and other installers later. It's actually a very beautiful project and is quite awesome right now, and I hope they finish it soon...
Didn't mean to come off that way... my apologies to joey and the gang..
eh, I'm not gonna go into the desktop wars, saying why Novell did something one way or another, I'm not on the Board of Directors and I wouldn't know these things. But Ximian is doing a damned good job at making a desktop along with the rest of the GNOME and KDE world. By buying SuSE, they gave themselves a floor, walls, electricity, the basic framework of what they'd need if they want to move all their products to linux. By buying Ximian, they gave something to skin the house, make it look pretty, make people want to buy it. SuSE is a KDE distro, but there's no reason you couldn't install Ximian over it, and that's one reason they may have bought the two companies, to give themselves a more diverse enviroment to attack RedHat at their own game.
Could be another reason behind opensourcing YaST: give it a GTK2 interface and wala, you've got a complete, working corporate desktop platform, which of course, they can then use to sell their own eDirectory software, and others as well... It's all about building a platform. Microsoft understood this too, how do you think they became so powerful? They built two seperate houses, both very shady but they got the job done. Then they skinned one house when they realized it was about to collaspe. Moved the skin from the first, to the second, and poof, a solid platform. Now they can sell Active Directory, Office, and other software for it, and not look like bumbling rejects.
It's all about process, format, proceedure.
I don't think this is true either. An installer is a vital part of the whole solution. It gives you a chance to orient yourself with the operating system, to get the look and feel of things down, to understand what all is being installed, and to get to know the technologies at work. Microsoft honed the art of installing years ago, and ever since they've used the installer as a great billboard for their operating system. But since anyone who's likely to be looking at it is upgrading, reinstalling, or something of that like, it has to be friendly because they're probably already pissed as it is.
It's kinda like buying a new car. Shiny and pretty, plenty powerful under the hood, nice leather interior, cd player, all the good stuff you find in cars today. But would you buy that car without test driving it? Would you buy it before you knew how to drive it? Now apply this to an operating system, would you install it without getting some kind of a chance to orient yourself with it? Would you nosedive into it without having the slightest clue of what you're doing? Better yet, should you have to?
The installer's not all of the game, but it's defintely something you want to get right. If you get it to where even the most experienced users will feel just as at home as a complete computer newbie, than you're probably on the right path. YaST is close... closer than Anaconda IMO, but, as with everything.. could user a little work. Thank goodness now we get the chance.
This comes just a few months after Anaconda, the RedHat installer, started being used for another distro (is it Debian's new installer?). Novell obviously saw this move as a good thing.
Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian. Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff. Anaconda has, however, been ported to install Debian by Progeny. Pretty neat, but I don't see it eever taking precidence to the Debian Installer.
And I do agree with you that it probably won't take away any market share. If anything, it sets up SuSE as running against RedHat, which should be a very interesting battle. And we are the ones to benefit.
Thing is, I think Novell's got the idea. Once we can develop good, solid, working ways to install the operating system, supporting it should be a lot easier. And Novell knows that there's no reason to NOT tap the millions of people online willing to help code this platform. I personally believe Novell's trying to secure itself as the second large Linux supporting company. By buying Ximian, they gave themselves a very viable desktop, by buying SuSE, they gave themselves a stable platform. Now they just need to do the middle work such as getting it to work on all hardware, and making it easy to support. And IMO, open source is a hell of a lot easier to support, especially since the people with the problems, usually know how to go about fixing them, and will send patches.
Don't discredit the selling power either. This probably won't hurt the sells of SuSE at all, in fact, it very well might augment sales, due to the people without fast internet connections wanting to get a taste of the YaST code. Don't count on it, but the potential's definitely there. Novell's making a good move here, I commend them.
does BitTorrent even work under Linux?
Considering it was written in python, anything with a complete python port can run it. Considering it was probably written and developed in a *nix environment, OF COURSE.
BitTorrent is a very sound idea, and a very nice technology. The only reason it's hyped at all is because it's new, fast, and revolutionary. It makes it 10x easier to get big pieces of data quickly, rather than waiting for hours on an FTP server choked by twenty thousand other people wanting the very same file. Sure BT's got some issues too, but you must understand that P2P is a very young technology; there's plenty to improve upon under any implementation: there's still no reliable way to search for material, and get what you're wanting. Mixing RSS with BT will help get you the content you want, faster, period. This is why this is a good idea.
Not well documented, but to people who want to "roll their own" knoppix-type CD, there are plenty tutorials out there. Probably one of the more useful steps in remastering your knoppix is using what is unoffically known as a "kicklist"; a file simply listing all the packages you don't want. Then you can issue apt-get remove `cat kicklist` and poof, a great deal of the knoppix cruft removed in a flash. after that it's probably a good idea to run apt-get remove `deborphan` or something like that to further remove cruft.
Now for the interesting part of this story. I learned this because I too am new to debian. Started working with the userlinux project a while back because I thought it was something it most definitely isn't, so I decided to give debian a try. Fell in love quickly. It's really nice to have virtually any piece of software you want at your fingertips, and I feel they've done a great job at this. But having such a user-friendly software installation system, with such a rediculus installer is contradicting. Could *NOT* get the previous installers to work at all, never detected my network card, so I had to swim through modprobe and the like, trying to remember which module was the driver to my network card. After a few days of attempts.. I gave up, returned to redhat and read up on the many other ways to get debian.
Knoppix fell into my lap through discussion... well everywhere. I knew it was linux, but I figured it was Redhat based, since everything this day and age is. WRONG. So I did an HD install and experimented. Removing packages was a bitch for a long time, so much cruft I absolutely didn't want. One of the hardest parts I found was removing KDE *zips on flame retardant body suit*. Finally, after trying a great deal, I thought of just removing everything QT related: apt-get remove `apt-cache pkglist | grep qt*`, and this seemed to do the trick every time.
Long story short, knoppix is a great distro, but I'd love it more if there were a "knoppix lite", which only installed the base system, and absolutely nothing more, allowing users the choice of building an entirely new system on top of it.
*one last note: if you're having trouble removing nedit from knoppix, upgrade to the newest one from unstable, and then uninstall it... works every time.*
But that's just it. .Net is already shipping with XP SP1 in a lot of cases. The .Net framework is solid and invariant by nature, this is the Microsoft way of doing things most of the time.
.Net is taking microsoft. The reason for developing .Net was so that they could become platform independent. Their underlying operating system is flawed by design in a lot of places, and they, much like Apple today, are evaluating running new technologies. But in order to make up for compatibilty, it's easier to run everything in a little invariant shell, the .Net framework.
The serious thing to look at is where
If Linux was smart, we'd do this too. Since we all know that problems like library and package dependicies are probably the most common Linux problem today, why not design a system that allows any program access to what it needs? If joe-program needs liba version 2.3, but is incompatible with the new liba 2.4, but bob program needs liba 2.4 and is incompatible with liba 2.3, why not have both, with "Framework Selector" written to automatically load the correct binary for the correct situation.
Apple has security that their software will only ever run on their equipment. They've experimented thousands of times otherwise, but they always failed to make it out of Apple simply because they are a Hardware company. They sell hardware. Microsoft on the other hand, is exactly opposite. They sell software that will work on practically all hardware. They've done so by sacrificing a lot of speed, cutting corners, and so on and so forth. Linux on the other hand, is like neither. Sure we design software to work on all hardware, but we don't cut corners, and we don't give a damn if it doesn't work somewhere else, that's somewhere else's job to make it work. And then we expect people to give back what they've written, and claim it under our given name.
That's the Idea behind UserLinux. Set package defaults, so that when you go to install it, the least amount of user interaction is needed to set up, not only desktops, but corporate servers, etc etc. So what if there is choice? Users should be taught every early on that there is choice, and how to get that amount of choice is to use Apt-get install "choice". With choice, comes the responsibility of using it (think: voting).
Debian can be installed over the FreeBSD kernel: here's some more information on that
my bad, i do mean ssl, 2 hours of sleep will do that to you....
and secondly, a post that seriously flame baited, you cant be too sure what was said at all.. I appologize for putting words in your mouth, but I do seriously think you need to rethink what grub was saying.
First of all, welcome to my foe's list. I don't like people who flame the hell out of insightful statements like the one Grub made.
Online bank servers are *very* well isolated from backbone servers so that they do not pose huge security risks to everyone's money in the database. This is done through the kind of "private" network you are speaking of.
Many, MANY places actually do connect to the internet do to banking, but once again, they connect via secure tools (ssh; the school I work for uses Munis for financial works, all passed through a VPN tunnel), and a number of checkpoints are set up on both ends to detur hacking. As I understand it, very few of these kinds of security enhancements were installed on the DoI's computers, if any at all.
So really now, who's spreading the FUD, the person who's trying to sell us that the internet's inheirently secure and should be trusted like any network, or the man who's saying that the security, or lack thereof, isn't good enough?
Not to sound trollish, but why does it matter?
If it were linux or one of the BSD's, the government would be up and at arms about it, screaming how linux was insecure, and that *we* needed to fix this and that and that and that.. If it's microsoft, well, nobody ever got fired for choosing microsoft. They'll politely call Tech support and M$ will offer to "Upgrade" their security for a large sum, and the government will agree like usual.
Which, to you, sounds more likely to be the case?