"While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up."
George Carlin would love this. There is no proverb involving a tortoise or a hare. There's a fable, but no proverb. As such, there is no "proverbial tortoise".
I hate it when corporate agendas are this obvious, it makes me think I'm missing something, but I can't discern it from the obvious scheming. The crafty and subtle plot gets obfuscated by the blatant one.
Let's see if I got this right...
1. Distribute a development platform called.NET that allegedly does away with insecure coding practices.
2. Influence laws and regs such that any software not coded on a "secure platform" such as yours is illegal.
3. Let the feds regulate your competition out of existence.
4. Profit!
If this comes about, the only way F/OSS software will survive in the US is if both a Linux distribution and a Linux development platform can be constructed that will meet the same requirements that the conglomerate is pushing for. Of course, we're screwed with a capital F if the regs call for technology that Microsoft (or one of the other member companies) has patented.
So I guess now it's "If you can't innovate, litigate... unless of course you have political influence, in which case, regulate!"
Here are the assignments, exams, and notes for that course as zip files.
Are the mods on crack again? Why on earth would somebody mod the previous posts down? C'mon guys, mod the frosty pits and goatse links down, not the posts with links to programming course material!
"...Novell had also learned from its negative experiences with Microsoft and wanted a very tight integration between what happened on the desktop and what happened on the server."
One of the things that help Microsoft pull ahead of Novell in the mid/late 90's was that any tool that could find the start button could suddenly call himself an SE. Whether that was Microsoft's goal in making a server OS that had the same desktop environment as the workstation OS or not, who knows. That's the integration I was referring to.
Interestingly enough, an environment of both linux servers and linux workstations improves on that motif. If you were so inclined, you could install {KDE|Gnome|Ximian} on a server and use that, combined with VNC or SSH X11 forwarding to have the same environment on your servers as your desktop. Not that you would, but you could, just like you can in a Windows environment. What you can't do in a Windows environment though is easily get a shell on your workstations. In a pure linux environment, you can ssh into workstations and administer them just as easily as you could a server. For all Microsoft's efforts, they still haven't come up with a secure way to quickly get a command shell on a remote machine.
yet they still want "very tight integration"? Isn't this what got Microsoft in trouble in the first place?
Having a desktop environment that was similar to the server environment, along with their vorpal sword of marketing +5, is also what helped Micorosft take a huge chunk of Novell's market share away from them.
I guess it goes to show that the slashdot audience has changed over the years....
Actually, after looking through the moderated comments, most of them are discussing the way.tor's work or alternative means of hosting video content, or they're echoing a sentiment similar to yours. I'm sure browsing thorugh at 0 or -1 will show the usual smothering of fr1st p0ts as well as the d00d +|-|15 \/1d30 15 t3h 7337!!!!! posts, but it seems to me that the/. moderating system is scaling with the numbers of such posts and keeping them modded down.
Still no tabs browsing in IE , so I'll stick to the Geckos.
I haven't heard opinions from other/.ers on this, but for me one of the biggest time savers is search engine prefixes. For example, my browser is set so that if I type "g tacos" into my url bar, I get the results of a google search on, you guessed it, tacos. I have a list of about two dozen: sd points to slashdot, sf to security focus, rfc to the ietf rfc listing. Does anyone know if this has been incorporated into one of the linux web browsers yet?
I don't believe I made any assumptions about what they would do. My intent was to approach both scenarios: a full-fledged server install vs. a sripped down custom install. The Xbox is a very good point, but then again the xbox is essentially a client, not a server. If they run on a modified kernel, in many ways it looks bad for them. It sends the message "We couldn't efficiently use this operating system we pimp out in this environment because it was too bloated. We managed to strip it down to the point that it was useful to us, but that's something only we can do, because it's our product."
That's a very good point. Now would be a very good time for google to star encouragung, rather than fighting, the adoption of the word google as an intransitive verb meaning to search the web. That way they could fight microsoft's market share with google's brand recognition.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
Let's take a look at some of the primary factors that will come into play when running a server farm for web-spidering purposes:
Operating System:
Google runs a strpped-down linux kernel specifically tweaked to facilitate two tasks: crawling web pages and returning search engine results. Assuming that Microsoft eats their own dog food, they will either run their own bloated Server 2003, or they'll come up with a customized windows installation with a bunch of the extraneous crap excluded. Edge: Most likely Google.
Hardware:
Microsoft has the revenue stream to build server farms of mammoth porportions, and they have multiple sites across which they can distribute their spider farms at little to no additional cost. On the other hand, if Micorosft serves its searches off of an unmodified 2003 kernel, they'll need much more in the way of hardware resources than Google will. OTOH, Google has by and large rewritten the book on maximizing the efficiency of the systems that serve up searches. They also have incrementally more experience trending hardware utilization for a high-volume search engine than Microsoft. Edge: Most likely Google.
System Administration:
If google rewrote the book efficient utilization of resources on search engines, they wrote the book on system administration of a high volume search engine completely from scratch. With their incredibly low ratio of sysadmins to supported systems, Google has a head start on running a sustainable operation than Microsoft. OTOH, MS has the extra hands to throw at this endeavor, and it's possible that they could use tools like Windows Services for Unix and Windows Scripting host to automate sysadmin tasks on their servers much like google did. What will factor in the most here is the internal politics at Redmond. If the busness center responsible for SMS decides that this needs to be a case study on SMS deployment, than Microsoft will surely fail on this objective. If on the other hand they avoid SMS like the plague, then they'll be in better shape, but again they'll be trying to reinvent the wheel while google is already racing around on radials with phat 20" rims and neon lights. Edge: Most likely Google.
System Security:
It will be interesting to see how the new MSN will be impacted by the next blaster worm. This search engine will have one of the biggest sets of crosshairs in the world painted all over it, and it will be interesting to see how the next IIS vulnerability is handled. Look for a mysterious outage at about the same time as a new vulnerability is discovered, or look for a vulnerability that affects everyone running IIS, except for the servers running MSN. Edge: Google.
Integrity of Searches:
Here, google outshines Microsoft. While google has had its share of search engine results controversies, I don't see how Microsoft will be able to risk the temptation of tampering with search engine results. Both companies have very clear agendas. Microsoft's agenda is to push Microsoft products and line Microsoft pockets, while Google's agenda is to provide a low-overhead search engine while providing the best possible user experience. Edge: Most certainly Google.
At the end of the day, there are two benefits we are likely to see. One of them is competition driving down the price of paid search engine advertisements. The other is whatever OS customization, system management, and automation techniques Microsoft cooks up in the process of building and maintaining the server farms. If Microsoft chooses to share this info, then Windows administrators can better secure their machines, and the Internet becomes a safer place. If not, then at least there's the chance that Microsoft's ludicrous claims about them having a shorter window from vulnerability discovery to patch availability than Linux can be shattered.
there isn't anything overly blatant like a google bar for MSN.
Yup, good thing there isn't a google bar for MSN. Really though, there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It's when the OS ships with the browser integrated, and the browser has the toolbar installed and enabled by default, not to mention IE's default and uncustomizable behavior that invalid URL's are converted to MSN searches...that's when they're engaging in anti-competitive behavior.
Keep in mind also that the hawkers of pr0n, spam, etc. are at odds with most network admins. If there's a.sex or.xxx domain, it's that much easier to restrict access to it. Porn webmasters don't care if their traffic is from home users or people surfing at their jobs, in fact they'd probably prefer both so the bandwidth would be more evenly distributed throughout the day. Anything that makes it easy to categorize porn sites is not in their best interests.
Then maybe they'd accomplish something useful and I wouldn't have to read drivel like this.
Expand your vocabulary. learn to communicate. Try to go a whole day without using any profanity or expletives and I bet you will find that you too might have a problem.
I beg to fucking differ. How the fuck does your inability to handle what I have to say equate to me having a problem?
Here's a better idea: How about you try going through a whole day without casting judgment on everyone else around you and focusing on your own flaws for once? I bet you'll find that you too have a fucking problem.
Actually, didn't someone develop a *n*x distro a while back that had all potentially offensive religious implications reversed? "Daemons" were replaced with "angels" and other such madness?
This raises an excellent point. The original purpose of the FCC was to regulate the airwaves simply because there's only so much EM spectrum that's usable. The fact that their role has been warped from "regulate the use of the EM spectrum" to "regulate the content going out over the air" shows how willing the conservatives are to impose their views on the rest of us, all while wasting our taxpayer dollars. I really wish the moral majority would leave the other 90% of us the hell alone.
As much as the FCC would love to, they cannot regulate XM on their best day. The sooner people move off the FCC regulated portions of the EM spectrum, the sooner the FCC will become irrelevant.
According to a seminar I attended that was done done by Novell SE's, the desired end state for Novell is for different components of what was in the past "netware" to become modular, and for those closed-source apps to be run on a machine running suse. If I want to use Novell's radius server, there's no reason I should have to install edirectory on the same machine, I can just point the radius server's LDAP queries to my existing edirectory server(s). And since I'm not going to run edirectory on that machine, I shouldn't have to pay for a license for it. (Just try telling microsoft that you want to pay for a license for a win2k3 server, but they need to knock some off the price because you won't install ADS) If novell chooses to open source their software, that's up to them. Considering that their revenue stream is going to undergo major changes as they shift from OS sales to service and support, the logical migration plan is for them to still charge for their software while offering support for suse on the desktop and on the server, then in the future if they choose to open source some of their software that will be up to them. Furthermore, the GPL prevents them from taking existing GPL'd software and taking it closed source unless they rewrite it from the ground up.
Novell is doing what FOSS has wanted proprietary OS vendors to do for some time, and all you want to do is flame them for it.
Just what can they do better than Red Hat? or Gentoo or Debian for that matter?
Umm, how about directory services? You may have heard of NDS - y'know, the architecture MS ripped off when they came up with ADS? I'm not a novell fanboy, but this is a matter of giving credit where it's due.
What's pathetic is, by and large Microsft is horribly ensconced in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as community colleges. Everyone teaches basic MS in their computer classes because that's what students are likely to encounter out there in the "real world". What's worse, the people teaching those classes are often the same adults that have gator, bonzi buddy, and a crapload of other spyware sitting on their PC at home.
Actually the army PFT is based on push ups, situps, and a 2 mile run. Pull ups are required for entry into ranger school, but they otherwise aren't a factor. There are however height&weight/body fat requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
George Carlin would love this. There is no proverb involving a tortoise or a hare. There's a fable, but no proverb. As such, there is no "proverbial tortoise".
Let's see if I got this right...
1. Distribute a development platform called .NET that allegedly does away with insecure coding practices.
2. Influence laws and regs such that any software not coded on a "secure platform" such as yours is illegal.
3. Let the feds regulate your competition out of existence.
4. Profit!
If this comes about, the only way F/OSS software will survive in the US is if both a Linux distribution and a Linux development platform can be constructed that will meet the same requirements that the conglomerate is pushing for. Of course, we're screwed with a capital F if the regs call for technology that Microsoft (or one of the other member companies) has patented.
So I guess now it's "If you can't innovate, litigate... unless of course you have political influence, in which case, regulate!"
Are the mods on crack again? Why on earth would somebody mod the previous posts down? C'mon guys, mod the frosty pits and goatse links down, not the posts with links to programming course material!
Like chicken.
One of the things that help Microsoft pull ahead of Novell in the mid/late 90's was that any tool that could find the start button could suddenly call himself an SE. Whether that was Microsoft's goal in making a server OS that had the same desktop environment as the workstation OS or not, who knows. That's the integration I was referring to.
Interestingly enough, an environment of both linux servers and linux workstations improves on that motif. If you were so inclined, you could install {KDE|Gnome|Ximian} on a server and use that, combined with VNC or SSH X11 forwarding to have the same environment on your servers as your desktop. Not that you would, but you could, just like you can in a Windows environment. What you can't do in a Windows environment though is easily get a shell on your workstations. In a pure linux environment, you can ssh into workstations and administer them just as easily as you could a server. For all Microsoft's efforts, they still haven't come up with a secure way to quickly get a command shell on a remote machine.
Having a desktop environment that was similar to the server environment, along with their vorpal sword of marketing +5, is also what helped Micorosft take a huge chunk of Novell's market share away from them.
Actually, after looking through the moderated comments, most of them are discussing the way .tor's work or alternative means of hosting video content, or they're echoing a sentiment similar to yours. I'm sure browsing thorugh at 0 or -1 will show the usual smothering of fr1st p0ts as well as the d00d +|-|15 \/1d30 15 t3h 7337!!!!! posts, but it seems to me that the /. moderating system is scaling with the numbers of such posts and keeping them modded down.
Yup. Now it has tools like you thrown into the mix as well.
I haven't heard opinions from other /.ers on this, but for me one of the biggest time savers is search engine prefixes. For example, my browser is set so that if I type "g tacos" into my url bar, I get the results of a google search on, you guessed it, tacos. I have a list of about two dozen: sd points to slashdot, sf to security focus, rfc to the ietf rfc listing. Does anyone know if this has been incorporated into one of the linux web browsers yet?
I don't believe I made any assumptions about what they would do. My intent was to approach both scenarios: a full-fledged server install vs. a sripped down custom install. The Xbox is a very good point, but then again the xbox is essentially a client, not a server. If they run on a modified kernel, in many ways it looks bad for them. It sends the message "We couldn't efficiently use this operating system we pimp out in this environment because it was too bloated. We managed to strip it down to the point that it was useful to us, but that's something only we can do, because it's our product."
That's a very good point. Now would be a very good time for google to star encouragung, rather than fighting, the adoption of the word google as an intransitive verb meaning to search the web. That way they could fight microsoft's market share with google's brand recognition.
Let's take a look at some of the primary factors that will come into play when running a server farm for web-spidering purposes:
Operating System:
Google runs a strpped-down linux kernel specifically tweaked to facilitate two tasks: crawling web pages and returning search engine results. Assuming that Microsoft eats their own dog food, they will either run their own bloated Server 2003, or they'll come up with a customized windows installation with a bunch of the extraneous crap excluded. Edge: Most likely Google.
Hardware:
Microsoft has the revenue stream to build server farms of mammoth porportions, and they have multiple sites across which they can distribute their spider farms at little to no additional cost. On the other hand, if Micorosft serves its searches off of an unmodified 2003 kernel, they'll need much more in the way of hardware resources than Google will. OTOH, Google has by and large rewritten the book on maximizing the efficiency of the systems that serve up searches. They also have incrementally more experience trending hardware utilization for a high-volume search engine than Microsoft. Edge: Most likely Google.
System Administration:
If google rewrote the book efficient utilization of resources on search engines, they wrote the book on system administration of a high volume search engine completely from scratch. With their incredibly low ratio of sysadmins to supported systems, Google has a head start on running a sustainable operation than Microsoft. OTOH, MS has the extra hands to throw at this endeavor, and it's possible that they could use tools like Windows Services for Unix and Windows Scripting host to automate sysadmin tasks on their servers much like google did. What will factor in the most here is the internal politics at Redmond. If the busness center responsible for SMS decides that this needs to be a case study on SMS deployment, than Microsoft will surely fail on this objective. If on the other hand they avoid SMS like the plague, then they'll be in better shape, but again they'll be trying to reinvent the wheel while google is already racing around on radials with phat 20" rims and neon lights. Edge: Most likely Google.
System Security:
It will be interesting to see how the new MSN will be impacted by the next blaster worm. This search engine will have one of the biggest sets of crosshairs in the world painted all over it, and it will be interesting to see how the next IIS vulnerability is handled. Look for a mysterious outage at about the same time as a new vulnerability is discovered, or look for a vulnerability that affects everyone running IIS, except for the servers running MSN. Edge: Google.
Integrity of Searches:
Here, google outshines Microsoft. While google has had its share of search engine results controversies, I don't see how Microsoft will be able to risk the temptation of tampering with search engine results. Both companies have very clear agendas. Microsoft's agenda is to push Microsoft products and line Microsoft pockets, while Google's agenda is to provide a low-overhead search engine while providing the best possible user experience. Edge: Most certainly Google.
At the end of the day, there are two benefits we are likely to see. One of them is competition driving down the price of paid search engine advertisements. The other is whatever OS customization, system management, and automation techniques Microsoft cooks up in the process of building and maintaining the server farms. If Microsoft chooses to share this info, then Windows administrators can better secure their machines, and the Internet becomes a safer place. If not, then at least there's the chance that Microsoft's ludicrous claims about them having a shorter window from vulnerability discovery to patch availability than Linux can be shattered.
Yup, good thing there isn't a google bar for MSN. Really though, there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It's when the OS ships with the browser integrated, and the browser has the toolbar installed and enabled by default, not to mention IE's default and uncustomizable behavior that invalid URL's are converted to MSN searches...that's when they're engaging in anti-competitive behavior.
Keep in mind also that the hawkers of pr0n, spam, etc. are at odds with most network admins. If there's a .sex or .xxx domain, it's that much easier to restrict access to it. Porn webmasters don't care if their traffic is from home users or people surfing at their jobs, in fact they'd probably prefer both so the bandwidth would be more evenly distributed throughout the day. Anything that makes it easy to categorize porn sites is not in their best interests.
I beg to fucking differ. How the fuck does your inability to handle what I have to say equate to me having a problem?
Here's a better idea: How about you try going through a whole day without casting judgment on everyone else around you and focusing on your own flaws for once? I bet you'll find that you too have a fucking problem.
Actually, didn't someone develop a *n*x distro a while back that had all potentially offensive religious implications reversed? "Daemons" were replaced with "angels" and other such madness?
This raises an excellent point. The original purpose of the FCC was to regulate the airwaves simply because there's only so much EM spectrum that's usable. The fact that their role has been warped from "regulate the use of the EM spectrum" to "regulate the content going out over the air" shows how willing the conservatives are to impose their views on the rest of us, all while wasting our taxpayer dollars. I really wish the moral majority would leave the other 90% of us the hell alone.
As much as the FCC would love to, they cannot regulate XM on their best day. The sooner people move off the FCC regulated portions of the EM spectrum, the sooner the FCC will become irrelevant.
And I suppose it does need more people like you?
S now does that mean every post in the last Suse article that flamed Suse for Yast being closed source can be modded down -1, DOH?
Screw that, according to Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, & crew they're committing acts of cyberterrorism.
Novell is doing what FOSS has wanted proprietary OS vendors to do for some time, and all you want to do is flame them for it.
Umm, how about directory services? You may have heard of NDS - y'know, the architecture MS ripped off when they came up with ADS? I'm not a novell fanboy, but this is a matter of giving credit where it's due.
What's pathetic is, by and large Microsft is horribly ensconced in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as community colleges. Everyone teaches basic MS in their computer classes because that's what students are likely to encounter out there in the "real world". What's worse, the people teaching those classes are often the same adults that have gator, bonzi buddy, and a crapload of other spyware sitting on their PC at home.
Actually the army PFT is based on push ups, situps, and a 2 mile run. Pull ups are required for entry into ranger school, but they otherwise aren't a factor. There are however height&weight/body fat requirements.