Anyone else notice a problem here?
In the next year expect Legend, which will take OpenServer and update it. Longer term, expect SVR 6, which will be 64-bit Unix on Intel. That is a few years out.
64-bit Unix on Intel?
If by "Intel" he means x86... The only x86-compatible processors that can do 64-bit are the AMD64 family. That's not Intel. "Intel" as in Wintel and Lintel means x86.
I'd say that McBride is a liar, but that's already been well established. Now he's a damn liar.
All the people suggesting dd are absolutely right. It's simple and it works. And you can put a regular file for "of" if you want to create a disk image file.
I don't see why g4u's use of FTP for uploading drive images is that bad. Surely it isn't hard to throw up a Linux box running an ftp daemon, or enable FTP on IIS on your NT box.
I for one don't even bother with Symantec products anymore. If you know how to use Linux or BSD, fixing Windows problems through them is a snap. And from the looks of it, I'm glad I stopped supporting Symantec. They've become dirty with their DRM, and they haven't updated many of the Norton SystemWorks tools for Windows XP.
At the risk of sounding arrogant... Ghost and friends have devolved into handholders for Unix-illiterate MCSEs. Phooey, Symantec.
The WinFX announcement confirms something that I had suspected for quite a while, and that is that.NET was meant to be a replacement for the Win32 API. Win32 is the "familiar" application framework for Windows, but as many have noted (and most Win32 developers know), it is a complicated, cumbersome beast. Give me a choice between Win32 and raw Xlib and I'd take Xlib, thank you very much (but Win32 is a full blown C API with windowing functions just one of many facets, so don't read into this comparison too much.)
Anyway, Win32 is implemented as one of many subsystems on NT and all its successor operating systems..NET, and now WinFX, are/will be implemented in the same way, as just another set of APIs. But this is significant, because Microsoft hasn't done this just for kicks. I believe they are on the way to offing Win32. Why?
1) It's 32-bit, and the IA32/x86 market has its days numbered now. Honestly, not many of us need 64-bit computing, but at some point, killer apps will appear. As we all know, Microsoft's preferred method of forcing an OS "upgrade" down people's throats is bundling it with hardware. Aha.
2) It's not portable. This ties into the first point, but why might Microsoft be interested in portability? I don't just mean hardware, I'm talking about OS portability. Microsoft wants a contingency in case Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003/Longhorn...) finds itself becoming a legacy system (I think it already is, but that's just my opinion.) Maybe it's finally dawned on Microsoft that a VMS-based kernel with heavy process invocation fees isn't going to be able to win benchmarks while Linux keeps getting faster and better. Microsoft is only winning server benchmarks by virtue of building their SMB/CIFS and HTTP daemons into the kernel, you know. Who cares about stability? Benchmarks sell software to IT-ignorant PHBs.
3) Win32 is messy, and most Windows C(++) programmers avoid using Win32 directly at all costs (that's what MFC and ATL are for). Microsoft likes DRM, and DRM requires kernel/subsystem-level API calls. Likewise DirectX, which Microsoft is truly investing in; they know multimedia is their strong point and that the enterprise server market is something they can never corner. SMEs running VB apps using MS SQL, maybe, but not Fortune 500. So, they want a framework that is as "open" and "powerful" as Microsoft believes it can be, without opening up the source, of course.
Gaim is a universal client... I think the poster was referring to wanting completely open IM system, soup to nuts, client and server, etc. Gaim can certainly connect to all the proprietary IM systems but that doesn't make AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc. suddenly anything but the black boxes that they are.</pedantic>
Gaim supports it and there are a host of clients as well. It also has some concepts such as multiple "resources" (PC, phone, etc.) for one account that other IMers haven't adopted.
That's "Take off every 'ZIG'!" For great justice, of course. CATS is behind this. Or some other affiliated force. The tradename "ZigBee" is clearly an amalgamation of bad Japanese shoot-'em-ups (TwinBee and Zero Wing!)
But seriously. I could see this replacing/augmenting RFID at high-ticket stores, and perhaps being integrated into name badges or pagers... now you can take your IMs and emails with you.
But it's basically text-only due to the low bandwidth, so... this is an interesting development, and if the price tag gets low enough surely we can think of many more applications.
Unfortunately, reality dictates that the majority of cellphone users aren't exactly going to be running *nix.
Own-brew operating systems made by cellphone manufacturers still rule in the US. We're waiting for Linux/ELKS and Symbian to take hold, and in the meantime, I really don't want to think about remote root exploits against my cellphone.
NAT is ugly, but it protects the lambs. Sysadmins can get a real IP address for their phone to go with their fat minute plan (come now, I KNOW you have an exorbitant number of minutes for all the users and management who call you/page you. I sure do.) Likewise for corporate users that have a sysadmin to coach them in proper network hygeine.
If you work in system administration or tech support, you deal with NAT and you learn to appreciate it. It keeps the script kiddies away.
People said the same thing before CIDR and NAT caught on... and we still have people shouting "Class A!" "Class B!" who are proclaiming the sky is falling on IPv4.
Cellphones eating your IP space? NAT 'em, except for the business users who want to VPN and pay for the priveledge (and stop kicking us off for inactivity while they're at it!). I'll bet that alone would save the Verizons and Sprints enough coins for an extra life.
IPv4 will be around for a good long time. At least a decade more. IPv6 is cool, yes, but there's so much architecture dedicated to IPv4 (and many paper MCSEs who don't know much else -- and their enslaved employers have more money and clout than we do at this point) that we can't just ask the world to change in a year, five years, or a decade. Patience, grasshoppers. Don't fix what ain't broken.
Considering the usage of Linux within the US Government, particularly in the intelligence area (see NSA SELinux), I wouldn't be half surprised if the government wasn't already up to something regarding SCO. With a good volume of slashdotters filing complaints with the SEC and FTC, something powerful could indeed be drawn from the woodwork.
The SCO Group has three core businesses now. One is OpenServer and UnixWare, which as we all know, suck to high heaven and have never had more than 2% market share in the Unix market. They also hav-- er, had their UnitedLinux offering, but now that we have discovered just how much Darl McBride hates Linux, it's safe to say that SCO OpenLinux is history.
That leaves us with SCO's newest business: SCOsource, their gambit in the lawsuit industry. Now, every time I think about SCO and the lawsuit and the questions being raised, I am reminded of a certain Texas energy trading company that is no longer among the living. SCO can't even confirm how much Unix IP they actually own. Novell says they have the patents as a certainty and some of the copyrights as well, and SCO won't say what they actually own. Meanwhile, SCO says that SCOsource is a key business unit, allowing them to record their extortion fees as regular income, suddenly making them a "profitable" company.
Consider Enron. They inflated their revenues by trading energy that didn't exist and raping their customers for doing so. Now look at SCO. They're suing their customers, claiming infringement of IP that may not exist (they certainly won't confirm or deny the existence of it!).
You'd think investors would have learned from the Enron incident, but nope. SCOX is over $10 for the first time in its history, and McBride and his FUD-spewing lawyer-demons are just waiting for the perfect opportunity to cash out. I just pray that justice is done and that this fscked-up company will be wiped off the face of the planet.
So we know that the 2.4 kernel has over 3.3 million lines of code. SCO says the copied code consists of 80 lines, comments included.
In CS class, my first few assignments were about 80 lines of code. And this is stuff like reading a flat file, spitting it out on the screen, writing it to another file...
Algorithms are just solutions to a problem. Remember your first IQ test? How many solutions were there to the problems there? One or two, maybe a couple more? How many ways can you solve a New York Times crossword puzzle anyway?
SCO is preying off media dullards who think 80 lines of, say, text in a book is significant. In computer science, 80 lines of code may well consist of two algorithms to solve two problems. And as for the comments being identical, how do we know the comments aren't something like:
int x;// Counter for allocating files
Maybe someone who worked on Unixware/AT&T Unix/whatever went to the same CS department at the same university as a Linux hacker and they learned to comment their variables the same way?
80 lines? Ridiculous. SCO has no case. IBM needs to get some CS professors or other experts on the stand to explain this to the court.
We should be wary of the Canopy Group
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
As most of you know, Canopy Group is a backer of both SCO and Trolltech, which has lead many an Anonymous Coward to decry them. Most of these comments have been dismissed as irrelevant, but...
This
CNet story has me a little worried. Quoth the article:
"The Canopy Group said SCO has got to hire somebody in-house to manage the IBM litigation," Tibbitts said. "My background is litigation. With the firestorm that has started, they need someone who can manage and oversee the litigation."
I think we have reason to believe that Canopy not only knows about the lawsuit but is encouraging it. I'm seriously thinking that the hordes of AC's have a point now. Should we be concerned about the Canopy-KDE connection? (I'd divest from them simply because they like the word "synergy"...)
The behavior you see in many online RPGs, in which "familial associations" form between groups of players, is basically similar to the formation of cliques in high and middle (US) schools. The only difference is that the cliques have weapons, magic, booty and lots of XP; the sum of these is what determines the worth of a person in the online world, just as "fashion" and "who you know" are the determinants of self-worth in cliques IRL.
In fact, if you take some steps back and look at the most infamous mobs, could it not be argued that they are simply cliques with guns that join together to commit crime and bribe those in power?
And then there's the issue of newbie hazing, which is analogous to cliques blackballing those who are not members of the "in" crowd, again quite similar to what happens when the mob gains control over a city and "elects" its officials. Online RPGs, especially and notoriously Everquest, are extremely culpable in this regard. Newbies who do not join a guild or other crowd of "in", upper-level characters will find themselves ostracized and devoured by trolls (not necessarily the Slashdot variety).
The issue of newbie hazing wasn't really touched on by the paper, but I argue that it is a huge problem and that it is not just limited to online RPGs, but also many websites with "experience" systems. Everything2 specifically comes to mind but I'm sure there are many other examples of sites where an attempt by a newbie to contribute to the community at large will be rejected because the newbie doesn't have the right connections nor the XP to stand on their own. What about Slashdot? The karma system works because trolls are controlled and a newbie can stand on their own, and the only real privelege granted by "experience" is a +1 karma bonus to initial posts. Newbies can do everything those with "Excellent" karma can do and the moderation system cares a lot more about the age of an account than its karma. Again, contrast with Everything2, and with Everquest.
So, I argue that the points the paper makes are quite valid outside the world of Everquest and are applicable to many, many online and offline environments. (Apologies to Everythingers who might be rubbed the wrong way by the above comments, but I have seen with my own eyes that Everything and Everquest have an awful lot in common from the newbie's perspective.)
I'd imagine they'd just use a "captive firewall" application, like some hotels use for their in-room DSL access. In other words, you fire up your web browser, and all traffic goes to their box which asks you for a credit card payment before opening you up to the world.
IOW, there's no need for some quickly-hacked Visual Basic program to do this.
I'd love to see payphones miniaturized and extended into both wireless broadband hotspots and VoIP phone points. This could lead to more bang for the buck for Verizon.
> Excactly how is offering a solution to companies
> and helping them implement it "no good"?
Granted, if you are a Solaris fan, you'll be cheering for Sun (maybe...), but you'll still do a double-take at the news that Sun is out to try and "invent" distributed clustering. Read the CNet article carefully:
Sun Microsystems has come up with a way to insulate computer networks from fires, floods and bomb attacks: Split up the machines and put them in different cities.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server manufacturer on Tuesday will unveil its Enterprise Continuity program, a collection of services and technology designed to prevent network failure by physically separating computers that work together in a unified cluster.
CNet may be totally off their rocker (which wouldn't surprise me), but I think it's more likely Sun provided this misinformation, verbatim, in a press kit to CNet. Sun's trying to be the first out the door when they're not; they're offering their service at a premium, saying 'this is the only way you can distribute your data centre'. That's what I call misleading advertisment.
Good. I hope this will convince CEOs in large companies that Linux clusters and scales better than Windows (well, that's obvious) or proprietary Unices. But the penguins can't be too confident, as Sun is up to no good here, hawking distributed clustering as a brand new technology when it certainly isn't, and catering to Fortune 500s and other large companies.
The main benefit of UL is that it will present a united spec to compete against Red Hat. From the ISV and hardware vendor perspective, this is good, because there will be only two Linux distro specs being used in the business world where they will hawk their goods. Debian ought to count as a third but it doesn't have the marketshare or mindshare (except among diehard admins, of course).
Only good can come of this, though I really don't see UL being able to overcome Red Hat.
In my experience, Windows 2000's support for IPSec is one reason why it has snared a foothold in many businesses. Having IPSec in mainstream Linux distributions would let us cut Bill off at the pass.
I hope we're not far from seeing adoption of Linux in places like the financial services industry. If the distributors can make IPSec painless to configure, Linux will make inroads in such industries very quickly.
Sun Tzu argued that a soverign (or business) required knowledgeable leadership (executives), the blessing of the Heavens and the Earth (the cooperation of the Powers That Be, in this case the court, which it seems they have now) and Justice (doing what's right -- I'd say they've learned their lesson) to overcome adversity and opponents (their creditors.)
I'd say WorldCom is doing a good job of getting back on their feet. 'Tis a good thing. UUNet falling into the hands of say, a Baby Bell like SBC (as FCC Chairman Michael Powell wanted at first) would not be a good thing at all.
So far, I really don't see much that distinguishes this "personal robot" from, say,
Microsoft ActiMates Barney. Well, it _does_ have the thermal sensor thing... why does this suddenly seem like Barney meets the Terminator?
Seriously, though... this seems like agent technology done right. I'd much prefer Dr. Robot to Clippit, thank you very much. However, I forsee that this will be considered nothing but a very expensive toy. Perhaps he can contend with rand(verb); Me Elmo 5 years from now for Christmas domination.
POSIX is all about portability. The day I can take a Unix program and recompile it on Windows without the use of an intermediary API or environment (Cygwin, MS-SFU) is the day Windows is truly POSIX compliant.
FTR, for drivers, Windows provides some POSIX support. This is why your hosts file is in a directory called etc in system32\drivers, for example. But Windows breaks POSIX in many other smaller ways. I'd really question how MS got that certification for Win2k.
POSIX systems have extensibility, portability, multiple programming languages, a networked windowing system with your choice of WM/DE, TRUE multiuser capability, efficiency and stability.
What does Windows have? Most of the above, specifically minus portability, the networked windows system (Terminal Services doesn't cut the cheese), efficiency (in recent versions) and stability. What Windows doesn't give you is choice. I argue Windows is not any more "designed for the user" than Unix, but rather that in Windows (or at least in each version) everything is only One Microsoft Way, and you cannot do much to change that. Microsoft also has mindshare and a $50+ stock price.
To the topic at hand now. Apple now more or less equals Unix as far as the OS is concerned. Specifically, OS X is POSIX plus everything being pretty, and there being an Apple Way (often, multiple Apple ways such as the choice of APIs) and a BSD Way to do most things.
This is why I argue OS X, now that it is proving itself as a server, can advance ground on the desktop and on the server.
This goes to show that Mac OS X Server does compare very well to other Unices (okay, Unix-LIKE systems) in terms of performance. With its preeeety GUI anemeties, OS X Server could be just the stepping stone we need to get more admins to switch over from M$.
Now let's see OS X Server kill, er, compared to Windows 2000/.NET... Run, Bill, run!:P
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else notice a problem here? In the next year expect Legend, which will take OpenServer and update it. Longer term, expect SVR 6, which will be 64-bit Unix on Intel. That is a few years out. 64-bit Unix on Intel? If by "Intel" he means x86... The only x86-compatible processors that can do 64-bit are the AMD64 family. That's not Intel. "Intel" as in Wintel and Lintel means x86. I'd say that McBride is a liar, but that's already been well established. Now he's a damn liar.
All the people suggesting dd are absolutely right. It's simple and it works. And you can put a regular file for "of" if you want to create a disk image file.
I don't see why g4u's use of FTP for uploading drive images is that bad. Surely it isn't hard to throw up a Linux box running an ftp daemon, or enable FTP on IIS on your NT box.
I for one don't even bother with Symantec products anymore. If you know how to use Linux or BSD, fixing Windows problems through them is a snap. And from the looks of it, I'm glad I stopped supporting Symantec. They've become dirty with their DRM, and they haven't updated many of the Norton SystemWorks tools for Windows XP.
At the risk of sounding arrogant... Ghost and friends have devolved into handholders for Unix-illiterate MCSEs. Phooey, Symantec.
The WinFX announcement confirms something that I had suspected for quite a while, and that is that .NET was meant to be a replacement for the Win32 API. Win32 is the "familiar" application framework for Windows, but as many have noted (and most Win32 developers know), it is a complicated, cumbersome beast. Give me a choice between Win32 and raw Xlib and I'd take Xlib, thank you very much (but Win32 is a full blown C API with windowing functions just one of many facets, so don't read into this comparison too much.)
Anyway, Win32 is implemented as one of many subsystems on NT and all its successor operating systems. .NET, and now WinFX, are/will be implemented in the same way, as just another set of APIs. But this is significant, because Microsoft hasn't done this just for kicks. I believe they are on the way to offing Win32. Why?
1) It's 32-bit, and the IA32/x86 market has its days numbered now. Honestly, not many of us need 64-bit computing, but at some point, killer apps will appear. As we all know, Microsoft's preferred method of forcing an OS "upgrade" down people's throats is bundling it with hardware. Aha.
2) It's not portable. This ties into the first point, but why might Microsoft be interested in portability? I don't just mean hardware, I'm talking about OS portability. Microsoft wants a contingency in case Windows (NT/2000/XP/2003/Longhorn...) finds itself becoming a legacy system (I think it already is, but that's just my opinion.) Maybe it's finally dawned on Microsoft that a VMS-based kernel with heavy process invocation fees isn't going to be able to win benchmarks while Linux keeps getting faster and better. Microsoft is only winning server benchmarks by virtue of building their SMB/CIFS and HTTP daemons into the kernel, you know. Who cares about stability? Benchmarks sell software to IT-ignorant PHBs.
3) Win32 is messy, and most Windows C(++) programmers avoid using Win32 directly at all costs (that's what MFC and ATL are for). Microsoft likes DRM, and DRM requires kernel/subsystem-level API calls. Likewise DirectX, which Microsoft is truly investing in; they know multimedia is their strong point and that the enterprise server market is something they can never corner. SMEs running VB apps using MS SQL, maybe, but not Fortune 500. So, they want a framework that is as "open" and "powerful" as Microsoft believes it can be, without opening up the source, of course.
So... whew. There you go.
Gaim is a universal client... I think the poster was referring to wanting completely open IM system, soup to nuts, client and server, etc. Gaim can certainly connect to all the proprietary IM systems but that doesn't make AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc. suddenly anything but the black boxes that they are.</pedantic>
Try Jabber.
Gaim supports it and there are a host of clients as well. It also has some concepts such as multiple "resources" (PC, phone, etc.) for one account that other IMers haven't adopted.
That's "Take off every 'ZIG'!" For great justice, of course. CATS is behind this. Or some other affiliated force. The tradename "ZigBee" is clearly an amalgamation of bad Japanese shoot-'em-ups (TwinBee and Zero Wing!)
But seriously. I could see this replacing/augmenting RFID at high-ticket stores, and perhaps being integrated into name badges or pagers... now you can take your IMs and emails with you.
But it's basically text-only due to the low bandwidth, so... this is an interesting development, and if the price tag gets low enough surely we can think of many more applications.
Unfortunately, reality dictates that the majority of cellphone users aren't exactly going to be running *nix.
Own-brew operating systems made by cellphone manufacturers still rule in the US. We're waiting for Linux/ELKS and Symbian to take hold, and in the meantime, I really don't want to think about remote root exploits against my cellphone.
NAT is ugly, but it protects the lambs. Sysadmins can get a real IP address for their phone to go with their fat minute plan (come now, I KNOW you have an exorbitant number of minutes for all the users and management who call you/page you. I sure do.) Likewise for corporate users that have a sysadmin to coach them in proper network hygeine.
If you work in system administration or tech support, you deal with NAT and you learn to appreciate it. It keeps the script kiddies away.
People said the same thing before CIDR and NAT caught on... and we still have people shouting "Class A!" "Class B!" who are proclaiming the sky is falling on IPv4.
Cellphones eating your IP space? NAT 'em, except for the business users who want to VPN and pay for the priveledge (and stop kicking us off for inactivity while they're at it!). I'll bet that alone would save the Verizons and Sprints enough coins for an extra life.
IPv4 will be around for a good long time. At least a decade more. IPv6 is cool, yes, but there's so much architecture dedicated to IPv4 (and many paper MCSEs who don't know much else -- and their enslaved employers have more money and clout than we do at this point) that we can't just ask the world to change in a year, five years, or a decade. Patience, grasshoppers. Don't fix what ain't broken.
So is the SEC.
Considering the usage of Linux within the US Government, particularly in the intelligence area (see NSA SELinux), I wouldn't be half surprised if the government wasn't already up to something regarding SCO. With a good volume of slashdotters filing complaints with the SEC and FTC, something powerful could indeed be drawn from the woodwork.
Friends, I have seen the future.
The SCO Group has three core businesses now. One is OpenServer and UnixWare, which as we all know, suck to high heaven and have never had more than 2% market share in the Unix market. They also hav-- er, had their UnitedLinux offering, but now that we have discovered just how much Darl McBride hates Linux, it's safe to say that SCO OpenLinux is history.
That leaves us with SCO's newest business: SCOsource, their gambit in the lawsuit industry. Now, every time I think about SCO and the lawsuit and the questions being raised, I am reminded of a certain Texas energy trading company that is no longer among the living. SCO can't even confirm how much Unix IP they actually own. Novell says they have the patents as a certainty and some of the copyrights as well, and SCO won't say what they actually own. Meanwhile, SCO says that SCOsource is a key business unit, allowing them to record their extortion fees as regular income, suddenly making them a "profitable" company.
Consider Enron. They inflated their revenues by trading energy that didn't exist and raping their customers for doing so. Now look at SCO. They're suing their customers, claiming infringement of IP that may not exist (they certainly won't confirm or deny the existence of it!).
You'd think investors would have learned from the Enron incident, but nope. SCOX is over $10 for the first time in its history, and McBride and his FUD-spewing lawyer-demons are just waiting for the perfect opportunity to cash out. I just pray that justice is done and that this fscked-up company will be wiped off the face of the planet.
So we know that the 2.4 kernel has over 3.3 million lines of code. SCO says the copied code consists of 80 lines, comments included.
In CS class, my first few assignments were about 80 lines of code. And this is stuff like reading a flat file, spitting it out on the screen, writing it to another file...
Algorithms are just solutions to a problem. Remember your first IQ test? How many solutions were there to the problems there? One or two, maybe a couple more? How many ways can you solve a New York Times crossword puzzle anyway?
SCO is preying off media dullards who think 80 lines of, say, text in a book is significant. In computer science, 80 lines of code may well consist of two algorithms to solve two problems. And as for the comments being identical, how do we know the comments aren't something like:
Maybe someone who worked on Unixware/AT&T Unix/whatever went to the same CS department at the same university as a Linux hacker and they learned to comment their variables the same way?
80 lines? Ridiculous. SCO has no case. IBM needs to get some CS professors or other experts on the stand to explain this to the court.
As most of you know, Canopy Group is a backer of both SCO and Trolltech, which has lead many an Anonymous Coward to decry them. Most of these comments have been dismissed as irrelevant, but...
This CNet story has me a little worried. Quoth the article:
I think we have reason to believe that Canopy not only knows about the lawsuit but is encouraging it. I'm seriously thinking that the hordes of AC's have a point now. Should we be concerned about the Canopy-KDE connection? (I'd divest from them simply because they like the word "synergy"...)
My two cents (more like five dollars):
The behavior you see in many online RPGs, in which "familial associations" form between groups of players, is basically similar to the formation of cliques in high and middle (US) schools. The only difference is that the cliques have weapons, magic, booty and lots of XP; the sum of these is what determines the worth of a person in the online world, just as "fashion" and "who you know" are the determinants of self-worth in cliques IRL.
In fact, if you take some steps back and look at the most infamous mobs, could it not be argued that they are simply cliques with guns that join together to commit crime and bribe those in power?
And then there's the issue of newbie hazing, which is analogous to cliques blackballing those who are not members of the "in" crowd, again quite similar to what happens when the mob gains control over a city and "elects" its officials. Online RPGs, especially and notoriously Everquest, are extremely culpable in this regard. Newbies who do not join a guild or other crowd of "in", upper-level characters will find themselves ostracized and devoured by trolls (not necessarily the Slashdot variety).
The issue of newbie hazing wasn't really touched on by the paper, but I argue that it is a huge problem and that it is not just limited to online RPGs, but also many websites with "experience" systems. Everything2 specifically comes to mind but I'm sure there are many other examples of sites where an attempt by a newbie to contribute to the community at large will be rejected because the newbie doesn't have the right connections nor the XP to stand on their own. What about Slashdot? The karma system works because trolls are controlled and a newbie can stand on their own, and the only real privelege granted by "experience" is a +1 karma bonus to initial posts. Newbies can do everything those with "Excellent" karma can do and the moderation system cares a lot more about the age of an account than its karma. Again, contrast with Everything2, and with Everquest.
So, I argue that the points the paper makes are quite valid outside the world of Everquest and are applicable to many, many online and offline environments. (Apologies to Everythingers who might be rubbed the wrong way by the above comments, but I have seen with my own eyes that Everything and Everquest have an awful lot in common from the newbie's perspective.)
I'd imagine they'd just use a "captive firewall" application, like some hotels use for their in-room DSL access. In other words, you fire up your web browser, and all traffic goes to their box which asks you for a credit card payment before opening you up to the world. IOW, there's no need for some quickly-hacked Visual Basic program to do this.
I'd love to see payphones miniaturized and extended into both wireless broadband hotspots and VoIP phone points. This could lead to more bang for the buck for Verizon.
> and helping them implement it "no good"?
Granted, if you are a Solaris fan, you'll be cheering for Sun (maybe...), but you'll still do a double-take at the news that Sun is out to try and "invent" distributed clustering. Read the CNet article carefully:
CNet may be totally off their rocker (which wouldn't surprise me), but I think it's more likely Sun provided this misinformation, verbatim, in a press kit to CNet. Sun's trying to be the first out the door when they're not; they're offering their service at a premium, saying 'this is the only way you can distribute your data centre'. That's what I call misleading advertisment.
Good. I hope this will convince CEOs in large companies that Linux clusters and scales better than Windows (well, that's obvious) or proprietary Unices. But the penguins can't be too confident, as Sun is up to no good here, hawking distributed clustering as a brand new technology when it certainly isn't, and catering to Fortune 500s and other large companies.
If we want to make our inroads we must do so now.
The main benefit of UL is that it will present a united spec to compete against Red Hat. From the ISV and hardware vendor perspective, this is good, because there will be only two Linux distro specs being used in the business world where they will hawk their goods. Debian ought to count as a third but it doesn't have the marketshare or mindshare (except among diehard admins, of course).
Only good can come of this, though I really don't see UL being able to overcome Red Hat.
In my experience, Windows 2000's support for IPSec is one reason why it has snared a foothold in many businesses. Having IPSec in mainstream Linux distributions would let us cut Bill off at the pass.
I hope we're not far from seeing adoption of Linux in places like the financial services industry. If the distributors can make IPSec painless to configure, Linux will make inroads in such industries very quickly.
Sun Tzu argued that a soverign (or business) required knowledgeable leadership (executives), the blessing of the Heavens and the Earth (the cooperation of the Powers That Be, in this case the court, which it seems they have now) and Justice (doing what's right -- I'd say they've learned their lesson) to overcome adversity and opponents (their creditors.)
I'd say WorldCom is doing a good job of getting back on their feet. 'Tis a good thing. UUNet falling into the hands of say, a Baby Bell like SBC (as FCC Chairman Michael Powell wanted at first) would not be a good thing at all.
So far, I really don't see much that distinguishes this "personal robot" from, say, Microsoft ActiMates Barney. Well, it _does_ have the thermal sensor thing... why does this suddenly seem like Barney meets the Terminator?
Seriously, though... this seems like agent technology done right. I'd much prefer Dr. Robot to Clippit, thank you very much. However, I forsee that this will be considered nothing but a very expensive toy. Perhaps he can contend with rand(verb); Me Elmo 5 years from now for Christmas domination.
POSIX is all about portability. The day I can take a Unix program and recompile it on Windows without the use of an intermediary API or environment (Cygwin, MS-SFU) is the day Windows is truly POSIX compliant.
FTR, for drivers, Windows provides some POSIX support. This is why your hosts file is in a directory called etc in system32\drivers, for example. But Windows breaks POSIX in many other smaller ways. I'd really question how MS got that certification for Win2k.
Agreed... but let me throw you a curve.
POSIX systems have extensibility, portability, multiple programming languages, a networked windowing system with your choice of WM/DE, TRUE multiuser capability, efficiency and stability.
What does Windows have? Most of the above, specifically minus portability, the networked windows system (Terminal Services doesn't cut the cheese), efficiency (in recent versions) and stability. What Windows doesn't give you is choice. I argue Windows is not any more "designed for the user" than Unix, but rather that in Windows (or at least in each version) everything is only One Microsoft Way, and you cannot do much to change that. Microsoft also has mindshare and a $50+ stock price.
To the topic at hand now. Apple now more or less equals Unix as far as the OS is concerned. Specifically, OS X is POSIX plus everything being pretty, and there being an Apple Way (often, multiple Apple ways such as the choice of APIs) and a BSD Way to do most things.
This is why I argue OS X, now that it is proving itself as a server, can advance ground on the desktop and on the server.
Because "paper MCSEs" are trained to admin with a mouse, and need to be shown the light.
OS X can be a stepping stone either to Darwin alone, BSD in general, or Unix in general (NB: That includes Linux.)
This goes to show that Mac OS X Server does compare very well to other Unices (okay, Unix-LIKE systems) in terms of performance. With its preeeety GUI anemeties, OS X Server could be just the stepping stone we need to get more admins to switch over from M$.
:P
Now let's see OS X Server kill, er, compared to Windows 2000/.NET... Run, Bill, run!