About 8 (?) years ago I was working on an architecture for a client server system - we had a mix of Unix and Microsoft servers and we wanted something that would tie them together so we could use the best that each had to offer.
I faced the same problem, but about 5 years ago. My solution was to use ONC (Sun) RPC instead of DCE. ONC RPC has been supported on Linux / Unix forever, and I found a port to Windows (from the original Sun code) that worked nicely.
Since then however, it looks like that port of ONC RPC to Windows has disappeared off the 'Net... I'm not sure what that's all about. But I can definitely say that RPC between Windows and Linux works, at least using Sun RPC.
I also think that the chosen dimensions are not orthogonal.
That was my first thought when I read the article. Too much overlap between those categories. Requirements flux is (potentially) addressed by your choice of methodology, for example.
Actually, "Use of inappropriate methodology" is proobably just a euphemism for "did a lot of stuff wrong," in this case. As such, that category is so broad, vague, and all-encompassing as to be useless for gathering any kind of metric. IMHO, of course.
Spoken like somebody who wasn't admitted to "UNC by the Sea".
Nope... I actually went to UNC-W, myself. I was just making a little dig at their reputation as a "party school." I Didn't finish my degree there though, and now that I live in Chapel Hill, my plan is to finish up at UNC.
I was wondering if the university you attend matters in the long term? I'm a freshman right now at a university close to home with a scholorship. The university isnt known for computerscience and the cs classes are really easy. I was wondering if it is worth it to transfer to another (more expensive, well known) university.
I think the answer is "it depends." Some hiring managers might put great stock in the "eliteness" of your school, some may not care at all. Myself, if I were doing any hiring, I admit I would be somewhat impressed by someone who graduated from Stanford or MIT, and might be a bit more tempted to call those folks in to interview. But I certainly wouldn't exclude someone just because they went to North Carolina Central or East Carolina (or, God forbid, UNC-Wilmington) instead.
All said, I think that going to a more prestigious school is more likely to help, than hurt, your career opportunities. So if you are accepted to, and can afford, the more prestigious school, I'd say go for it.
A high GPA score tells me that person has already done exactly that in an academic environment.
No it doesn't. Your conclusion is just one of many that you *could* infer from a high GPA. It could also indicate somebody who cheated like hell, slept with their teachers, "played the grade game" by taking the easiest possible classes, etc., etc. High GPA is not a guarantee of strong performance in the "real world."
There are so many factors that you have to evaluate beyond just a single number, to come to anything close to a meaningful conclusion. Who's better, the student with the 4.0 GPA who took things like "Basket Weaving" and "History of Pornography as an Art Form" as electives? Or the guy with a 3.4 GPA who took "Quantum Mechanics" and "Intro to Neural Networks" as electives?
or what about the difference between a student with, say, a 3.8 GPA, who had rich parents to pay his way through school, and didn't have to work at all - versus a guy with a 3.5 GPA who worked full-time, 3rd shift, and followed work with an 8:00 am section of "Discrete Mathematics?" Hmmm... who is more "competitive" and has more will between those two? Which one will outperform his/her colleagues in the working world?
Are you *really* comfortable just picking the higher GPA in either of these cases?
Why should I take the risk that someone with a mediocre score will suddenly decide to apply himself once he's on my payroll?
You're taking a risk either way. GPA is just one factor you should look at, IMHO. If I were evaluating a candidate, I'd want to see their transcript, and actually look at what courses the selected. I'd want to talk to the person and find out what their interests are, what motivates and drives them, etc.
and FWIW, my own GPA is a 3.75 at the moment, so none of this is an attempt to apologize for myself.
My company gets thousands of resumes a week. We absolutely need a first-line filter. It is GPA.
In my career I have found that GPA is a very good indicator of a whole host of things. When I get a pile of resumes on my desk, I skip the 4.0s and throw out the 3.0s, if nothing turns up in between, I go back to the 4.0s.
That's a fine approach, as long as you're comfortable with knowing that you're going to miss out on some really talented people that way. Sure, you'll hire some good people along the way, but you'll screw yourself by passing up some top notch people as well.
There's nothing intrinsic about GPA that makes it a meaningful indicator of how somebody will perform at a job. Come to think of it, there probably isn't *any* metric you can use to evaluate potential employees, that works out to much more than a crap-shoot.
Evaluating people, in any profession, is an imprecise art. If it were otherwise, you wouldn't see guys drafted in the 1st round of the NFL draft get cut before the regular season starts, and you wouldn't have undrafted free-agents in the Pro-Bowl.
The point of all this? That evaluating talent is difficult and error-prone, no matter what. And no matter what arbitrary standard you filter on ( 3.5+ GPA, 4.40 forty-yard dash, 38 inch vertical, whatever) you'll wind up missing out on somebody you should have hired (or drafted).
I've used PopTop in the past, and it works fine for the kind of scenario you're describing. It's free (as in speech and beer), has adequate - albeit not great - documentation, and is fairly easy to install and configure.
The biggest downside I'm aware of is that the MS-CHAPv2 protocol doesn't use the world's best encryption. Research MS-CHAP, see if it's secure enough for your needs; if so, I think PopTop would be a fine solution.
The next thing that comes to mind is something like FreeSWAN/OpenSWAN, which are IPSEC based, instead of PPTP, and which presumably offer better security.
Dude, did you travel through time from the year 1999 to make this comment? Who'd have thought libertarians still existed!
Ummm, yeah, whatever dude.
with zero insight into the actual workings of the state,
You do realize that "the state" is just an abstract thing, formed by "the people" as a convenience, right? "The State" is composed of individuals... without the individual, the state is nothing.
Geez, you'd think I was talking to the reincarnation of Karl Marx or something.... sheesh.
I suggest you look up some information about contributory and vicarious infringement, and how they're applied. Because printing a list can indeed be an illegal act, even in free countries.
Then the law is wrong. Too bad more people don't understand the concept that government has no intrinsic power, other than that which is granted to it by "the people." If the majority of "the people" decide they want things done a different way, then laws are irrelevant... The people can take away the law-making / law-enforcement power they granted the government.
For that matter, it's a shame that more people (in the USA at least) don't understand the principle of Jury Nullification. "We the people" do have the power to nullify bad laws, and it doesn't take an armed revolution to do it.
I donate money to these guys... yearly dues + the occassional one-off donation to help a particular project.
2. Civietown Volunteer Fire Department.
I was an active member of this VFD from about 1989 through 2000, during which time I held every position from "probie" to acting fire chief, and led the department in "calls answered" in 1999 while serving as assistant chief. I spent more hours than I care to recall conducting training meetings, working on equipment, filling out paperwork, answering calls, helping with fundraisers, going to county comissioners meetings to beg for money, etc, etc.
I have sinced moved out of their area, but I am still on the roster, and keep a set of turnout gear in my car, and answer calls when I'm down in the area visiting or on vacation or whatever. I miss being active in the fire service, but I don't miss getting up at 3:00 in the morning, when it's 10 degrees outside, to drive to the fire station to answer yet another false activation of some automatic alarm.
3. I intend to start giving more to groups like the EFF and FSF, when I get out of debt.
1. I like the way search is integrated into the URL bar, as opposed to having that separate search bar.
2. I use Mozilla Mail, Chatzilla, and Mozilla Calendar, and I like the way they are all nicely integrated.
3. I use Multizilla, which last time I checked, does not work on Firefox.
4. I don't like the Firefox preferences panel(s). It's too "dumbed down", plus I'm just used to the way that stuff works in Mozilla.
5. I prefer the Mozilla style sidebar over the Firefox sidebar.
Having said that, what I would like to see, is for the Mozilla developers to continue developing Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Composer, etc. as standalone apps, but create provide necessary hooks to integrate them. That is, I'd like to be able to use anywhere from none to all of the Mozilla products, and where I choose to use multiple ones (say Firefox and Thunderbird) they will have the kind of integration that Mozilla Suite has now.. but without the annoyance of having your email app shutdown if your browser crashes (or vice versa).
And of course they could offer downloads both as discrete pieces, or as packaged bundles with various combinations of the pieces.
Regular old Mozilla will still have a better UI, however, even in this scenario.
I personally think it's something of a waste to write yet another replacement for CVS, but if they feel they need it, then great. It's open-source, it's volunteer, so nobody has any business telling these people *not* to write OpenCVS.
That said, I (and many others) consider Subversion to be the logical successor to CVS, and it seems to me that any effort spent on revision control would be better spent contributing to Subversion (or Arch maybe) instead of writing yet another version of something that's essentially obsolete.
OTOH, if they have major disagreements with the fundamental architecture of Subversion (and I understand that some people do) then maybe it would be better to just start from scratch, and design their own vision of an ideal revision control system?
Either way, it probably means more quality open source code, and in the long run, everybody ultimately benefits.
m saying that other people distribute it beer free, so you are basically paying $300+ for a sticker on the box that says "Red Hat."
OK, I see what you mean now... and I agree, that it seems silly **to me** to pay that much just to get an "official" red-hat build, + support, when you can use WBEL, Tao, Centos, etc. for free. But I can understand why some people feel the desire to do so. And depending on the IT budget available, the money spent on RH support contracts might be almost negligible to some companies.
Some people have different priorities, and for certain companies I can see why they would pay for RH support as opposed to just relying on Google, newsgroups, and their internal staff. Maybe they are running an e-commerce site that costs the company a million dollars an hour if it's down... in that case, what's a few thousand a year to RH, to get some kind of guaranteed response to a critical situation?
Granted, having vendor support doesn't *guarantee* that things will get fixed quickly in that situation; but it might make it more likely. And it's all about comfort levels - if you're the IT manager, and the site crashes and costs the company a few billion dollars, do you really want to try and explain to the CEO why you didn't spend a few dollars on support? At least if you had support, you can "pass the buck" to some degree. It might make the difference in keeping or losing your job, ya know?
Paying 3 digit sums per license for free software boggles the mind.
Wrong definition of free. It's still free as in speech, which is what the GPL guarantees. Note that there is no requirement in the GPL that the software be free as in beer. Companies are allowed to charge for GPL software, and make money all they want.. as long as they honor their obligations and make the source available to anybody they distribute to, and make it available under the terms of the GPL.
If I understand correctly, RH aren't even required to make their source available for public download by just anybody... they're just required to provide it to anybody they distribute binaries to. So really, they are doing the world a favor by just sticking their SRPMs on a public FTP server for anybody to grab.
Which means, anybody can (and plenty have) come along and download their source, rebuild everything, create ISO's, and distribute them "free as in beer."
In short, I definitely recommend a boycott of Red Hat's products. You'll be doing yourself a favour in terms of just about any other distro out there being more technically sound, and you'll be doing Linux as a whole a favour by not giving money to a commercialist who wants to take the OS in a direction which is the opposite of what most of us stand for.
On a related issue, we need to find a way to do something about Red Hat's having moved the development of several GNU projects to their own servers as well, IMHO. This is a company in urgent need of a reminder that it surely is desirable to give back rather than just take.
You know, all of their GPL'ed source IS still available, just as required by the GPL. They aren't required to make binary downloads available for free, or provide free tech support, etc. They fulfill their obligations under the GPL, and they help the community in numerous ways.
If you want "free as in beer" RH, just use WhiteBox or CentOS or X/OS or Tao Linux, or any of the many other distros built from the source RH provides.
...about small and medium sized business. Or so it appears to me. I get the impression that they want to play with the big boys, who WILL pay the premium for RHEL 3.
For other businesses, there are always the "RHEL rebuild" projects, like Centos, WhiteBox Linux, Tao, X/OS, etc. And at some point, if they haven't already, some enterprising company will step in and offered fee-based support for one of these distros (or will roll their own rebuild distro ), and take that SMB business that RH is passing up.
For everybody else (well, everybody who is "Red Hat centric" ) there's Fedora.
So it all works out, really. RH is making decent money, apparently, by focusing on big business. SMB can take advantage of the fact that RHEL is Free software and use a rebuild distro, and hobbyists and those who want to be on the cutting edge use Fedora. There's something for everybody.
Re:But for the Grace of Gabe... there go ye?
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Given Up to Spyware?
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Heck, it's the same even if you're running totally Open Source software! Unless _you personally_ have gone through every.c and.h file to verify the code, that latest version of BitchX you just installed (or even the latest source-based security patch!) has potentially compromised your system integrity.
Just going through the source files and headers isn't sufficient, because you have no way of knowing if those same source files are the ones that were compiled into the binary you're running. Unless you build everything yourself.
But even then, there is still a fly in the ointment, as the compiler you're using could be compromised. And even if you re-compile the compiler, you **still** aren't guaranteed safe.
I suppose you could keep a base-jumping chute in your 30th floor apartment/office and worse comes to worse, give it a try. But I imagine a cluster of helium ballons would be so bulky, you'll never be able to jump far enough from the building to avoid hitting it. I'd say best bet: strap on a base-jumping chute and sit on man-size slingshot that'll propel you up and far enough from the building to make the descent relatively safe.
You might also try keeping around: a shitload of static kernmantle rope, a harness, some carabiners, and a figure-eight descender.
I, for one, do. I prefer Mozilla's mail/news client, and I use Chatzilla and Moz Calendar as well. For me, the Mozilla Suite is exactly what I need.
Additionally, despite the constant whining about 'bloat' from certain Mozilla developers, I find the Moz Suite to be perfectly fine performance wise, on modern hardware. The slowest machine I run it on is 700 mhz Celeron, and it's fine on there.
Not to mention I hate the fact that Firefox doesn't support the same "search in the url bar" feature as regular Mozilla. And yes, I know I can type "google " but I find having to do that annoying compared to the way Mozilla works.
I'm sorry, you seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that there are only two parties to pick from. Allow me to share some info with you. For convenience, let's consider only the Presidential election.
There are actually 6 candidates for President who are on enough (I believe) states ballots to have a chance to win the election. Bush and Kerry, obviously, but also:
In addition, Roger Calero, the candiate for the Socialist Workers Party, is on the ballots in 14 states.
Finally, there are at least four other candidates who are on the ballots in at least two states:
(from ballot-access.org): Socialist Party (Walt Brown) is on in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Socialist Equality Party (Bill Van Auken) is on in Colorado, Iowa, New Jersey, Minnesota, Washington, and is in court in Ohio.
Prohibition Party (Gene Amondsen) is on in Colorado and Louisiana.
Workers World Party (John Parker) is on in Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
... and I recall pretty much automatically disliking anything and anybody in authority and I would have done what these students are doing in a heartbeat.
Good for you.
It's part of growing up and learning. Now that I am an old fart of 46 I can also see the University's side of this as well.
That's not growing up and learning, it's selling out and sacrificing your principles. If you see anything remotely appropriate about a university being able to prevent somebody from displaying a picture of a building on a website, then you have completely lost touch with anything resembling a love of things like Freedom, Liberty and Justice.
I dunno about anybody else, but if I feel like you do now, when I'm 46, I hope I have the courage to just euthanize myself.
The Constitutions of most states clearly establish a two party system.
Interesting... I've never heard of such a thing. Would you mind posting a few snippets of the relevant sections of a few such State Constitutions, for our elucidation? And maybe a list of a handful of States that have such clauses in their Constitutions?
Not a troll, I'm seriously interested to see this info, as it's news to me.
I guess the Libertarian party only believes in hands-off government when it works to their advantage.
This is the Libertarian Party we're talking about, not the Anarchist Party. Libertarians aren't necessarily about having NO government, just the least government necessary.
Anwyay, as it is we have a system, laws, taxes, etc. in place... and while Libertarians would seek to make some fairly progressive changes in some of those areas, we have to work within the system in order to change it. It's not hypocritical, it's pragmatic.
I don't understand. I've never heard of a car with an engine that could overpower the brakes. Certainly no modern car fits into this category.
I smell a rat here.
Modern braking systems are often (at least partially) computer / electronic controlled as well. Ever hear of "ABS?" That's all done with sensors and electronics and such.
Sooooo, if there were some really hairy screw-up with the control system for the car, it is conceivable that stomping on the brakes really would be useless.
OTOH, most cars (at least here in America) have a mechnical brake for the emergency / paking brake.
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About 8 (?) years ago I was working on an architecture for a client server system - we had a mix of Unix and Microsoft servers and we wanted something that would tie them together so we could use the best that each had to offer.
I faced the same problem, but about 5 years ago. My solution was to use ONC (Sun) RPC instead of DCE. ONC RPC has been supported on Linux / Unix forever, and I found a port to Windows (from the original Sun code) that worked nicely.
Since then however, it looks like that port of ONC RPC to Windows has disappeared off the 'Net... I'm not sure what that's all about. But I can definitely say that RPC between Windows and Linux works, at least using Sun RPC.
I also think that the chosen dimensions are not orthogonal.
That was my first thought when I read the article. Too much overlap between those categories. Requirements flux is (potentially) addressed by your choice of methodology, for example.
Actually, "Use of inappropriate methodology" is proobably just a euphemism for "did a lot of stuff wrong," in this case. As such, that category is so broad, vague, and all-encompassing as to be useless for gathering any kind of metric. IMHO, of course.
Spoken like somebody who wasn't admitted to "UNC by the Sea".
Nope... I actually went to UNC-W, myself. I was just making a little dig at their reputation as a "party school." I Didn't finish my degree there though, and now that I live in Chapel Hill, my plan is to finish up at UNC.
I was wondering if the university you attend matters in the long term? I'm a freshman right now at a university close to home with a scholorship. The university isnt known for computerscience and the cs classes are really easy. I was wondering if it is worth it to transfer to another (more expensive, well known) university.
I think the answer is "it depends." Some hiring managers might put great stock in the "eliteness" of your school, some may not care at all. Myself, if I were doing any hiring, I admit I would be somewhat impressed by someone who graduated from Stanford or MIT, and might be a bit more tempted to call those folks in to interview. But I certainly wouldn't exclude someone just because they went to North Carolina Central or East Carolina (or, God forbid, UNC-Wilmington) instead.
All said, I think that going to a more prestigious school is more likely to help, than hurt, your career opportunities. So if you are accepted to, and can afford, the more prestigious school, I'd say go for it.
A high GPA score tells me that person has already done exactly that in an academic environment.
No it doesn't. Your conclusion is just one of many that you *could* infer from a high GPA. It could also indicate somebody who cheated like hell, slept with their teachers, "played the grade game" by taking the easiest possible classes, etc., etc. High GPA is not a guarantee of strong performance in the "real world."
There are so many factors that you have to evaluate beyond just a single number, to come to anything close to a meaningful conclusion. Who's better, the student with the 4.0 GPA who took things like "Basket Weaving" and "History of Pornography as an Art Form" as electives? Or the guy with a 3.4 GPA who took "Quantum Mechanics" and "Intro to Neural Networks" as electives?
or what about the difference between a student with, say, a 3.8 GPA, who had rich parents to pay his way through school, and didn't have to work at all - versus a guy with a 3.5 GPA who worked full-time, 3rd shift, and followed work with an 8:00 am section of "Discrete Mathematics?" Hmmm... who is more "competitive" and has more will between those two? Which one will outperform his/her colleagues in the working world?
Are you *really* comfortable just picking the higher GPA in either of these cases?
Why should I take the risk that someone with a mediocre score will suddenly decide to apply himself once he's on my payroll?
You're taking a risk either way. GPA is just one factor you should look at, IMHO. If I were evaluating a candidate, I'd want to see their transcript, and actually look at what courses the selected. I'd want to talk to the person and find out what their interests are, what motivates and drives them, etc.
and FWIW, my own GPA is a 3.75 at the moment, so none of this is an attempt to apologize for myself.
My company gets thousands of resumes a week. We absolutely need a first-line filter. It is GPA.
In my career I have found that GPA is a very good indicator of a whole host of things. When I get a pile of resumes on my desk, I skip the 4.0s and throw out the 3.0s, if nothing turns up in between, I go back to the 4.0s.
That's a fine approach, as long as you're comfortable with knowing that you're going to miss out on some really talented people that way. Sure, you'll hire some good people along the way, but you'll screw yourself by passing up some top notch people as well.
There's nothing intrinsic about GPA that makes it a meaningful indicator of how somebody will perform at a job. Come to think of it, there probably isn't *any* metric you can use to evaluate potential employees, that works out to much more than a crap-shoot.
Evaluating people, in any profession, is an imprecise art. If it were otherwise, you wouldn't see guys drafted in the 1st round of the NFL draft get cut before the regular season starts, and you wouldn't have undrafted free-agents in the Pro-Bowl.
The point of all this? That evaluating talent is difficult and error-prone, no matter what. And no matter what arbitrary standard you filter on ( 3.5+ GPA, 4.40 forty-yard dash, 38 inch vertical, whatever) you'll wind up missing out on somebody you should have hired (or drafted).
I've used PopTop in the past, and it works fine for the kind of scenario you're describing. It's free (as in speech and beer), has adequate - albeit not great - documentation, and is fairly easy to install and configure.
The biggest downside I'm aware of is that the MS-CHAPv2 protocol doesn't use the world's best encryption. Research MS-CHAP, see if it's secure enough for your needs; if so, I think PopTop would be a fine solution.
The next thing that comes to mind is something like FreeSWAN/OpenSWAN, which are IPSEC based, instead of PPTP, and which presumably offer better security.
Dude, did you travel through time from the year 1999 to make this comment? Who'd have thought libertarians still existed!
Ummm, yeah, whatever dude.
with zero insight into the actual workings of the state,
You do realize that "the state" is just an abstract thing, formed by "the people" as a convenience, right? "The State" is composed of individuals... without the individual, the state is nothing.
Geez, you'd think I was talking to the reincarnation of Karl Marx or something.... sheesh.
I suggest you look up some information about contributory and vicarious infringement, and how they're applied. Because printing a list can indeed be an illegal act, even in free countries.
Then the law is wrong. Too bad more people don't understand the concept that government has no intrinsic power, other than that which is granted to it by "the people." If the majority of "the people" decide they want things done a different way, then laws are irrelevant... The people can take away the law-making / law-enforcement power they granted the government.
For that matter, it's a shame that more people (in the USA at least) don't understand the principle of Jury Nullification. "We the people" do have the power to nullify bad laws, and it doesn't take an armed revolution to do it.
1. The Libertarian Party
I donate money to these guys... yearly dues + the occassional one-off donation to help a particular project.
2. Civietown Volunteer Fire Department.
I was an active member of this VFD from about 1989 through 2000, during which time I held every position from "probie" to acting fire chief, and led the department in "calls answered" in 1999 while serving as assistant chief. I spent more hours than I care to recall conducting training meetings, working on equipment, filling out paperwork, answering calls, helping with fundraisers, going to county comissioners meetings to beg for money, etc, etc.
I have sinced moved out of their area, but I am still on the roster, and keep a set of turnout gear in my car, and answer calls when I'm down in the area visiting or on vacation or whatever. I miss being active in the fire service, but I don't miss getting up at 3:00 in the morning, when it's 10 degrees outside, to drive to the fire station to answer yet another false activation of some automatic alarm.
3. I intend to start giving more to groups like the EFF and FSF, when I get out of debt.
1. I like the way search is integrated into the URL bar, as opposed to having that separate search bar.
2. I use Mozilla Mail, Chatzilla, and Mozilla Calendar, and I like the way they are all nicely integrated.
3. I use Multizilla, which last time I checked, does not work on Firefox.
4. I don't like the Firefox preferences panel(s). It's too "dumbed down", plus I'm just used to the way that stuff works in Mozilla.
5. I prefer the Mozilla style sidebar over the Firefox sidebar.
Having said that, what I would like to see, is for the Mozilla developers to continue developing Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Composer, etc. as standalone apps, but create provide necessary hooks to integrate them. That is, I'd like to be able to use anywhere from none to all of the Mozilla products, and where I choose to use multiple ones (say Firefox and Thunderbird) they will have the kind of integration that Mozilla Suite has now.. but without the annoyance of having your email app shutdown if your browser crashes (or vice versa).
And of course they could offer downloads both as discrete pieces, or as packaged bundles with various combinations of the pieces.
Regular old Mozilla will still have a better UI, however, even in this scenario.
I personally think it's something of a waste to write yet another replacement for CVS, but if they feel they need it, then great. It's open-source, it's volunteer, so nobody has any business telling these people *not* to write OpenCVS.
That said, I (and many others) consider Subversion to be the logical successor to CVS, and it seems to me that any effort spent on revision control would be better spent contributing to Subversion (or Arch maybe) instead of writing yet another version of something that's essentially obsolete.
OTOH, if they have major disagreements with the fundamental architecture of Subversion (and I understand that some people do) then maybe it would be better to just start from scratch, and design their own vision of an ideal revision control system?
Either way, it probably means more quality open source code, and in the long run, everybody ultimately benefits.
m saying that other people distribute it beer free, so you are basically paying $300+ for a sticker on the box that says "Red Hat."
OK, I see what you mean now... and I agree, that it seems silly **to me** to pay that much just to get an "official" red-hat build, + support, when you can use WBEL, Tao, Centos, etc. for free. But I can understand why some people feel the desire to do so. And depending on the IT budget available, the money spent on RH support contracts might be almost negligible to some companies.
Some people have different priorities, and for certain companies I can see why they would pay for RH support as opposed to just relying on Google, newsgroups, and their internal staff. Maybe they are running an e-commerce site that costs the company a million dollars an hour if it's down... in that case, what's a few thousand a year to RH, to get some kind of guaranteed response to a critical situation?
Granted, having vendor support doesn't *guarantee* that things will get fixed quickly in that situation; but it might make it more likely. And it's all about comfort levels - if you're the IT manager, and the site crashes and costs the company a few billion dollars, do you really want to try and explain to the CEO why you didn't spend a few dollars on support? At least if you had support, you can "pass the buck" to some degree. It might make the difference in keeping or losing your job, ya know?
Paying 3 digit sums per license for free software boggles the mind.
Wrong definition of free. It's still free as in speech, which is what the GPL guarantees. Note that there is no requirement in the GPL that the software be free as in beer. Companies are allowed to charge for GPL software, and make money all they want.. as long as they honor their obligations and make the source available to anybody they distribute to, and make it available under the terms of the GPL.
If I understand correctly, RH aren't even required to make their source available for public download by just anybody... they're just required to provide it to anybody they distribute binaries to. So really, they are doing the world a favor by just sticking their SRPMs on a public FTP server for anybody to grab.
Which means, anybody can (and plenty have) come along and download their source, rebuild everything, create ISO's, and distribute them "free as in beer."
In short, I definitely recommend a boycott of Red Hat's products. You'll be doing yourself a favour in terms of just about any other distro out there being more technically sound, and you'll be doing Linux as a whole a favour by not giving money to a commercialist who wants to take the OS in a direction which is the opposite of what most of us stand for.
On a related issue, we need to find a way to do something about Red Hat's having moved the development of several GNU projects to their own servers as well, IMHO. This is a company in urgent need of a reminder that it surely is desirable to give back rather than just take.
You know, all of their GPL'ed source IS still available, just as required by the GPL. They aren't required to make binary downloads available for free, or provide free tech support, etc. They fulfill their obligations under the GPL, and they help the community in numerous ways.
If you want "free as in beer" RH, just use WhiteBox or CentOS or X/OS or Tao Linux, or any of the many other distros built from the source RH provides.
...about small and medium sized business. Or so it appears to me. I get the impression that they want to play with the big boys, who WILL pay the premium for RHEL 3.
For other businesses, there are always the "RHEL rebuild" projects, like Centos, WhiteBox Linux, Tao, X/OS, etc. And at some point, if they haven't already, some enterprising company will step in and offered fee-based support for one of these distros (or will roll their own rebuild distro ), and take that SMB business that RH is passing up.
For everybody else (well, everybody who is "Red Hat centric" ) there's Fedora.
So it all works out, really. RH is making decent money, apparently, by focusing on big business. SMB can take advantage of the fact that RHEL is Free software and use a rebuild distro, and hobbyists and those who want to be on the cutting edge use Fedora. There's something for everybody.
Heck, it's the same even if you're running totally Open Source software! Unless _you personally_ have gone through every .c and .h file to verify the code, that latest version of BitchX you just installed (or even the latest source-based security patch!) has potentially compromised your system integrity.
a ck_door.html
Just going through the source files and headers isn't sufficient, because you have no way of knowing if those same source files are the ones that were compiled into the binary you're running. Unless you build everything yourself.
But even then, there is still a fly in the ointment, as the compiler you're using could be compromised. And even if you re-compile the compiler, you **still** aren't guaranteed safe.
See the following URL for more on that topic:
http://www.cs.umsl.edu/~sanjiv/sys_sec/security/b
You might also try keeping around: a shitload of static kernmantle rope, a harness, some carabiners, and a figure-eight descender.
I, for one, do. I prefer Mozilla's mail/news client, and I use Chatzilla and Moz Calendar as well. For me, the Mozilla Suite is exactly what I need.
Additionally, despite the constant whining about 'bloat' from certain Mozilla developers, I find the Moz Suite to be perfectly fine performance wise, on modern hardware. The slowest machine I run it on is 700 mhz Celeron, and it's fine on there.
Not to mention I hate the fact that Firefox doesn't support the same "search in the url bar" feature as regular Mozilla. And yes, I know I can type "google " but I find having to do that annoying compared to the way Mozilla works.
Neither party
I'm sorry, you seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that there are only two parties to pick from. Allow me to share some info with you. For convenience, let's consider only the Presidential election.
There are actually 6 candidates for President who are on enough (I believe) states ballots to have a chance to win the election. Bush and Kerry, obviously, but also:
Mike Badnarik - Libertarian
David Cobb - Green
Ralph Nader - Independent
Mike Peroutka - Constitution
In addition, Roger Calero, the candiate for the Socialist Workers Party, is on the ballots in 14 states.
Finally, there are at least four other candidates who are on the ballots in at least two states:
(from ballot-access.org):
Socialist Party (Walt Brown) is on in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Socialist Equality Party (Bill Van Auken) is on in Colorado, Iowa, New Jersey, Minnesota, Washington, and is in court in Ohio.
Prohibition Party (Gene Amondsen) is on in Colorado and Louisiana.
Workers World Party (John Parker) is on in Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
More details can be found at ballot-access.org
And a list of political parties in the United States is available as well.
seems to be fiscally conservative anymore.
The Libertarian Party is.
... and I recall pretty much automatically disliking anything and anybody in authority and I would have done what these students are doing in a heartbeat.
Good for you.
It's part of growing up and learning. Now that I am an old fart of 46 I can also see the University's side of this as well.
That's not growing up and learning, it's selling out and sacrificing your principles. If you see anything remotely appropriate about a university being able to prevent somebody from displaying a picture of a building on a website, then you have completely lost touch with anything resembling a love of things like Freedom, Liberty and Justice.
I dunno about anybody else, but if I feel like you do now, when I'm 46, I hope I have the courage to just euthanize myself.
The Constitutions of most states clearly establish a two party system.
Interesting... I've never heard of such a thing. Would you mind posting a few snippets of the relevant sections of a few such State Constitutions, for our elucidation? And maybe a list of a handful of States that have such clauses in their Constitutions?
Not a troll, I'm seriously interested to see this info, as it's news to me.
I guess the Libertarian party only believes in hands-off government when it works to their advantage.
This is the Libertarian Party we're talking about, not the Anarchist Party. Libertarians aren't necessarily about having NO government, just the least government necessary.
Anwyay, as it is we have a system, laws, taxes, etc. in place... and while Libertarians would seek to make some fairly progressive changes in some of those areas, we have to work within the system in order to change it. It's not hypocritical, it's pragmatic.
If Bush gets re-elected, expect more of this...
It's not just Bush... it's any Demopublican. It just might happen faster under Bush since he seems to be quite the wannabe Emperor.
Yes, unfortunately that's probably what it's going to take before this will be a free country again.
It sucks, but if that's the price of freedom then so be it.
I smell a rat here.
Modern braking systems are often (at least partially) computer / electronic controlled as well. Ever hear of "ABS?" That's all done with sensors and electronics and such.
Sooooo, if there were some really hairy screw-up with the control system for the car, it is conceivable that stomping on the brakes really would be useless.
OTOH, most cars (at least here in America) have a mechnical brake for the emergency / paking brake.