But seriously, don't make the purchase of 1 gig of freaking ram the definition of a life worth living.
No, it's the groveling. Let me put it in perspective:
For you, it's a gig of RAM. For her, it's $20. Neither is worth fighting over -- but then, a modern computer with 2 gigs will most likely be quite a lot faster and more useful than one with 1 gig. If that matters to you, she should respect that.
Let's suppose she's the one with a high-paying job. Probably fair to assume she drinks Starbucks. If you really don't have the $20, she can skip her latte for a few weeks. She doesn't even have to go off caffeine, just drink from the coffee machine for a few cents instead of a few dollars per cup.
That's a week of bad coffee versus the useful lifetime of a computer, probably at least a year, that you'd have to put up with not enough RAM.
Gadgets suck compared to people.
Depends on the person. She married a geek, she knows gadgets matter to him, and she's not willing to spend $20 on one? That does not sound like a person I'd want as a friend, much less a wife.
Am I suggesting divorce, in that situation? No. I'm suggesting you talk about it -- with professional help, if you need it, but if this is actually something you're fighting over, that relationship is in trouble.
"I'm getting the 2 gig version. In fact, you know what? I'm getting the 4 gig version." "Honey, we can't..." "No, but I can." "That's it! You're sleeping on the couch!" "On the couch with my new laptop! Sounds good!"
If she's going to divorce you over twenty fucking dollars, she is not worth it. That's when you say, "Your latte for the next week, or me. Choose."
I know this will probably come off as advice on how to be an asshole. It's not -- you do want to be reasonable, you do want to listen to her needs. You want to be sensitive, and caring, and responsible. But that has to go both ways, or you end up with this situation.
And believe it or not, that also goes both ways -- chances are, she was the one who wanted the commitment. That's even true when she's the one with the high-paying job. So, clearly, you have something she wants.
Dude! Way to totally reverse priorities. Did it occur to you that maybe she's the one with the high-paying job,
Irrelevant. Would she be groveling for permission to spend $20 extra on a nicer pair of shoes, if he had the high-paying job? No, if she's already buying the shoes, she'll write the check, or swipe the card, and tell you later -- easier to get forgiveness than permission.
What's more, if it's a high-paying job, $20 is nothing.
if I had to choose between self-respect and gadgets...
Your choice.
I would certainly choose self-respect over marriage, though.
Ew. It's not as though database abstraction layers are hard to come by.
But whatever. Embedded means it doesn't expose ports, doesn't need to be secured, etc, right?
That is, of course, not the biggest thing Amarok 2 fucked up. And pardon the profanity, but letting functionality break in the "stable" release, marking it "wontfix" because you're all working on the new release, though said functionality is not present in the new release, is a fucked up development process.
If you have that conscience telling you to pay for your stuff, pay amazons price then just download the DRM-free version elsewhere.
My conscience tells me not to be an enabler. They are treating me like a criminal, and there are other people who will be affected by the DRM, and I want no part of that.
I'd much sooner just write a check to the author directly.
It's not necessarily DRM. You're just missing the content to the next levels.
Well, true, but it is relying on DRM to prevent you from instantly redistributing that content once you buy it. While I believe DRM ultimately fails, I think the fact that game publishers are (mostly) still so enamored with it would be an obstacle to the rest of this idea.
Of course, that hasn't stopped some games from being released on Linux with no DRM, and some to be released with only online activation (and no hint of disc authentication)...
Actually, this would work great if Steam was available for linux.
Well, in a way... Greenhouse is available for Linux.
But Steam is redundant as a package manager. Sure, it'd be great to have that nice view of "my games", the integrated chat and everything, but the distribution, I'd rather see handled through something like apt.
(Or maybe not -- I'm guessing apt wouldn't be the most extensible for this purpose, without it feeling hackish. Steam downloads don't need an extra extraction/installation step -- once they're downloaded, sometimes half-downloaded, they're ready to play. But something like it.)
For what it's worth, Steam works pretty flawlessly under Wine. Obviously, not all the games do...
The terms actually kind of suck, but aren't enforced. Nothing evil, just some interesting language on what is considered "excessive bandwidth" -- apparently, more than five hours of video per week is excessive. Funny, they never seem to complain when I download an entire TV series in a week...
Linux is awfull crap on desktop IF you need to be productive,
Having used all three extensively, I can say with confidence that I was at my most productive on KDE 3, on Kubuntu Hardy.
Let me define "extensively". In college, I mostly used Linux on the desktop, and OS X (Tiger) on a Powerbook. I didn't mind OS X much, but I wasn't trying to do much with it, either -- taking notes in vim is about as productive in either case, as is writing a paper in OpenOffice.
For my most recent job, I started out using Windows exclusively, as it was HD-DVD. It wasn't fun to use Windows, but there really wasn't a choice -- it took a delicate balance to get Microsoft's HDiSim to work (Windows XP, not 2K or Vista; Media Player 10, not 9 or 11...) and my few experiments with Wine and virtual machines didn't go anywhere. So I used Eclipse, with Visual Studio.NET to debug, Firefox for web browsing, etc.
After that was web development, in Ruby on Rails. I immediately booted over to the Linux partition I was keeping on that machine, and ran that exclusively until that laptop died.
When it did, the only real choice was to borrow an OS X machine (an iMac), running Leopard, and get to work. And that was a love-hate relationship. So many things done right, but so many simple things, day after day, that infuriated me -- the biggest being lack of keyboard shortcuts/navigation, and lack of sloppy focus. Less than two weeks until I got a new Dell with Ubuntu on it.
The difference was profound -- I hadn't seen it as clearly illustrated before. Just simple things like having a keystroke to pack windows around, not to mention a package manager that doesn't suck.
So, your mileage may vary, but I am definitely at my most productive on Linux -- unfortunately, it can still access Slashdot, so there is that...
as a professional web dev, i get spooked if i have to use Linux as my workstation, most of the software i need is not there.
Are you a.NET developer, or are you referring to some amazing new tools I hadn't heard of?
Firefox runs on Linux. Firebug runs on Firefox. Ruby also runs on Linux, and Rails runs pretty much anywhere Ruby will. My favorite text editors (Kate and Vim) run on Linux.
The only irritation is that everyone and their dog seems to have latched onto these TextMate URLs in error messages. These are very cool, but I haven't gotten them working with things other than TextMate yet.
And that is per second, yes. There is no cap. There is vague mention of not being a bandwidth hog in the terms, and some unfortunate language (apparently watching five hours of video is not considered "normal use", so clearly these terms were written by people who've never seen YouTube).
However, I never got a single complaint for all the torrents I ran.
Unfortunately, I just moved across town, and the fiber hasn't come here yet, so I'm back to 1 mbit DSL until spring.
You yourself are a well known troll, but I'll bite.
And yet, my karma is still excellent. How's yours?
Oh, I forgot, it must be the massive conspiracy of people who want to see SanityInAnarchy modded up, no matter what he says. I guess I'm more popular than I realized.
He is indeed off topic, but he's right.
What, that Linux isn't ready for "the desktop"? I guess I should tell my mother to buy a Mac, then...
Problem is, the post you replied to made no claim that Linux was insecure.
Nor was I making any claim that it was. I was responding to both of the ACs -- the first seemed to be claiming that by merely switching to "a secure OS", by which I was assuming Linux or BSD, they would prevent a SQL injection attack.
So, if anything, I was arguing against Linux being magical security sauce.
why make the absurd claim that Linux is ready for mainstream use.
I don't believe I made that claim -- I said "the desktop". Most criteria people bring up for evaluating that are either pure troll (You have to use the commandline for everything! Ten years ago, maybe...) or something which is impossible for anything other than Windows to qualify for, no matter how well written (Will it run all the apps I have now and some I haven't thought of?)
But, I was avoiding opening that discussion, because it's so offtopic.
Since I don't have mod points... Just so you know, you're absurdly offtopic, and you're both wrong.
Linux can't prevent a SQL injection attack. Not writing shitty software prevents SQL injection attacks, no matter what OS you're on.
Linux is ready for the desktop, and is likely still easier to install than Windows. But the desktop is even less relevant to a discussion about a server-side SQL injection attack.
Now this won't work with Oracle or MS Office as they can just download the package and never pay
Missing the point about a demo. Granted, the shareware model works better for games, where you can simply withhold the actual content until they pay -- but either method is relying on DRM, which ultimately fails.
But you are right -- an MMO doesn't have that problem. The smarter ones just offer the full game as a free download, and make you pay for an account -- expansions are tied to an account, for example.
I agree -- we could use a little less hype. But, this sentence alone:
just because the 3270 have given way to the AJAX enabled browser and everyone is talking community we don't have a different situation.
Actually, that really does.
A dumb terminal, or even a relatively smart terminal, is nowhere near the capabilities of a programmable modern browser. And that's before you factor in things like Google Gears, allowing you to take the same application offline.
So, technically, it is better.
Then there's the fact that you'd be foolish not to provide an API -- in fact, a good REST API will probably be easy to develop both web/AJAX and other clients. I somehow doubt that your application running on an IBM mainframe would be exposing services to other mainframes, perhaps even selling access.
As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes.
start realising how much it's just the successor to the mainframe and thing stats making sense.
What does that have to do with the context of this article, by the way? Or are you saying there's something in how mainframes answered the question of "ownership" that we should be considering?
'cloud computing' is hype and a buzzword which is used to obtain credibility, money and publicity.
That's true. It would be very helpful if it was more clearly defined...
Then again, that hasn't stopped other hypey buzzwords from taking over. Look at AJAX. All the technology was there already, but once we gave it a name, people started thinking about the effect of those pieces as a whole.
I would not say that everything that is done under that label is stupid though.
The question is, can you take those things which are done under that label and give them a better label? If you were to talk about "Utility computing" instead of "Cloud computing", would more people understand you (or at least pretend to)?
I think that determines the value of a term. Can it be replaced?
Now let's say the provider has options to, say, limit access to that app to a certain IP range. Certainly that's meta-data, right? It's not inherent to the app, it's not crucial to the app's workings, it's just additional data related to the app.
Yes, I'd assume that's what they're talking about.
And depending on the particular cloud, I'd say it's definitely yours. Say you're on Amazon EC2 -- your entire access to the cloud is going to be through an API. While it's worth reading the agreements, I think you could safely claim that if you wrote a script that generated these particular security policies, and booted this particular configuration of servers, that the script, at least, is your property.
a standard may apply here for some common tasks/options and exporting this to a common file format (and I really don't care if that's plaintext, XML, a BLOB or whatever
The closest thing to a standard right now is Amazon's API, mainly because it's the only one I know has at least two independent implementations -- one at Amazon, and one open source version.
But the article seems to be about a bunch of people -at the provider- having a peek at your app and making tweaks in their own 'cloud' to make your app be delivered faster, be delivered more securely, etc. I fail to see how -that- meta-data is yours to own.
True. But I don't see how that meta-data is crucial, either. If the new provider isn't capable of tweaking things fast enough, migrate the app slowly. You do have a shared-nothing architecture, right?
I would say, look at the URL of that second article -- F5. Now, start thinking about motivation. Why would F5 want to play up this particular aspect?
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API
That's a troll argument. It doesn't have to be unified, as long as the systems talk to each other -- which they do.
For games? Use OpenAL. That's a no-brainer, that gets you 3D surround, and handles plugging into whatever they've got, hardware or software, any OS. Then the user, or the distro, can configure OpenAL to use ALSA natively, or use Jack, or whatever other layer they want to put in there.
whatever KDE went with that I forget,
KDE wrote a wrapper for all of the above, plus native ALSA (on Linux), and whatever Windows/OS X provide.
For codecs, you have
the same set of codecs you have on Windows, if you're licensing them. Or, if you'd like to save yourself some money, you use Vorbis/FLAC, available both in native libraries and through gstreamer/SDL.
This is as retarded as people claiming that the fact that both GNOME and KDE exists means Linux will never be a good desktop. OH NOES, choice, whatever shall we do. JUST PICK ONE! And no, you don't need the community to pick one for you -- close your eyes and play pin-the-tail-on-the-audio-library.
They all work. The existence of others, especially when the one you want (OpenAL) will plug into all of them, is not something you even have to think about.
a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need
Or you include those libraries with the game -- it's really not that difficult to configure the game to use your libraries instead of the system libraries. Or you distribute a demo under a license that allows redistribution, and let the distros work it out -- when people want the full game, they put in a key and download the rest of the content.
But really, how is it a "nightmare", even if you had to spell out dependencies? How is it in any way harder than "communicating" what version of DirectX you need on Windows?
Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when
when people who might potentially port start looking at what's already there, and how hard it's not. If an indie game with close to no budget can provide native Linux support (think: every Introversion game, every Penny Arcade game, a few from Chronic Logic...), I would think that a company with 300+ employees could find one who knows at least as much as one of those guys.
So you want to rewrite not only the OS but also all of the programs?
Well, not me, I have plenty of less ambitious things to focus on.
The guy writing it seems to want to have a low barrier to porting existing apps which are written in sufficiently dynamic languages. Chances are your C app won't work.
Put another way, the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X was handled much the same way, as was DOS to Windows. Sometimes, you do need something radically different, and when that happens, the best you can do for legacy apps is to put them in a virtual machine.
Alright, fine. So I go and I buy a hot tub, and I get it installed. A few weeks later, I come home and find the hot tub repairman has let himself into my house to make some "necessary upgrades". It seems there was a safety flaw, so...uh...OK, I guess.
No, at this point, you tell him that he doesn't get to keep a key to your front door, and he needs your explicit permission to come over.
Which is beside the point. Your analogy seems to be about suspicious stuff happening in the background.
At which point should I have called the police? Now, what if we're talking about Google? Apple? Microsoft? Sony?
We're not, since Google won't start tracking you unless you explicitly ask them to, which is the big difference between that and the "hot tub repairman" analogy.
If you scroll up, you'll find that this particular thread was about the possibility that someone else who physically has access to your device, could then install this software and turn it on. And the simple answer to that is, don't let other people touch your phone.
And as far as i know linux is open source. Or most of the distros.
Whoops, that'd be better written as:
Open source != Linux.
However, while we're on the subject, most distros now rely on large chunks of proprietary code, even in the kernel.
Also, why is linux a dinosaur? (Fanboy sense is tingling XD)
All modern OSes are based on very old ideas, and few have any kind of clean design. That is essentially what this guy is trying to say, but I'm not convinced his design will ultimately be better.
A trivial example: There is a Unix philosophy that everything is a file. There are a few major problems with the POSIX API for this, which could really only be improved by adding wholly new APIs.
For example: Files do not allow data to be added in the middle. That is, you can append data to the end, and you can overwrite data in the middle, but you can't insert data in the middle. The way around this is either to keep everything in such small files that you never have to do that -- which can get impractical very quickly, with most filesystems -- or to rewrite the entire file (impractical for large files) -- or to instead append that data to the end of the file, and make a file format flexible enough that data can be located in such a haphazard fashion.
What this inevitably leads to is applications re-implementing many of the same things the OS does. You see games packing everything into zipfiles, because if they had to store each texture in a separate file, it would use much more space, as most filesystems will allocate a 4k block even for a 100-byte file. You also see various databases implementing ways to relocate data inside the file, leaving gaps, and to later "vacuum" or "compact" the database to recover them -- in other words, they're completely re-implementing filesystem allocation and defragmentation.
Now, technically, if you had an efficient enough filesystem, you might be able to use the POSIX API to store everything in individual files. But then you have the problem of trying to keep it consistent. For example, if you save a text file in your editor, it's probably reasonable for the editor to flush it to a temporary file, then rename that file on top of the one that's there.
Keep in mind, though, that's flushing to disk, whether or not the data is that critical. It's not difficult to imagine a situation where you'd rather have a transaction -- you don't care if the data makes it to disk immediately, as long as it's all in a consistent state when it gets there. For example, installing a new package from your package manager -- you'd rather either all of the changes make it to disk, or none of them do, but you don't care which parts are written to disk, when, and in what order. In fact, you'd rather the filesystem reorder things, to optimize it -- so long as you can synchronize the whole thing at the end, you're good.
Unfortunately, neither POSIX nor any POSIX filesystem I know of supports transactions -- you have to hack your own, either within one giant file, or by flushing tempfiles to disk. Package managers tend to have a concept of a "half-installed" state -- if the system crashed at that exact moment, the filesystem wouldn't be able to roll back, but the package manager might be able to at least retry the installation.
If you've read this far, great! But keep in mind, all of that is just about the filesystem -- and that's not the end of it; I've got quite a few more complaints which are addressed by ZFS, but not by Linux (yet). I haven't even touched on things like IPC, library usage, or that session concept.
I'm not saying that this idea of using objects instead of files is necessarily better. In fact, I'd rather see it go another direction -- something more like ZFS, where you have a storage engine which just allocates extents for you, and a POSIX filesystem is just one of the applications built on top of that layer. Then, you could build something like that object system,
Slashdot Mirror
But seriously, don't make the purchase of 1 gig of freaking ram the definition of a life worth living.
No, it's the groveling. Let me put it in perspective:
For you, it's a gig of RAM. For her, it's $20. Neither is worth fighting over -- but then, a modern computer with 2 gigs will most likely be quite a lot faster and more useful than one with 1 gig. If that matters to you, she should respect that.
Let's suppose she's the one with a high-paying job. Probably fair to assume she drinks Starbucks. If you really don't have the $20, she can skip her latte for a few weeks. She doesn't even have to go off caffeine, just drink from the coffee machine for a few cents instead of a few dollars per cup.
That's a week of bad coffee versus the useful lifetime of a computer, probably at least a year, that you'd have to put up with not enough RAM.
Gadgets suck compared to people.
Depends on the person. She married a geek, she knows gadgets matter to him, and she's not willing to spend $20 on one? That does not sound like a person I'd want as a friend, much less a wife.
Am I suggesting divorce, in that situation? No. I'm suggesting you talk about it -- with professional help, if you need it, but if this is actually something you're fighting over, that relationship is in trouble.
you think those circumstances are the same?
Why not?
Here's how that conversation could have gone:
"I'm getting the 2 gig version. In fact, you know what? I'm getting the 4 gig version."
"Honey, we can't..."
"No, but I can."
"That's it! You're sleeping on the couch!"
"On the couch with my new laptop! Sounds good!"
If she's going to divorce you over twenty fucking dollars, she is not worth it. That's when you say, "Your latte for the next week, or me. Choose."
I know this will probably come off as advice on how to be an asshole. It's not -- you do want to be reasonable, you do want to listen to her needs. You want to be sensitive, and caring, and responsible. But that has to go both ways, or you end up with this situation.
And believe it or not, that also goes both ways -- chances are, she was the one who wanted the commitment. That's even true when she's the one with the high-paying job. So, clearly, you have something she wants.
Listen spineless losers: only grovel for 4GB.
Fuck that, if I'm groveling, it'll be for this beast.
Dude! Way to totally reverse priorities. Did it occur to you that maybe she's the one with the high-paying job,
Irrelevant. Would she be groveling for permission to spend $20 extra on a nicer pair of shoes, if he had the high-paying job? No, if she's already buying the shoes, she'll write the check, or swipe the card, and tell you later -- easier to get forgiveness than permission.
What's more, if it's a high-paying job, $20 is nothing.
if I had to choose between self-respect and gadgets...
Your choice.
I would certainly choose self-respect over marriage, though.
Ew. It's not as though database abstraction layers are hard to come by.
But whatever. Embedded means it doesn't expose ports, doesn't need to be secured, etc, right?
That is, of course, not the biggest thing Amarok 2 fucked up. And pardon the profanity, but letting functionality break in the "stable" release, marking it "wontfix" because you're all working on the new release, though said functionality is not present in the new release, is a fucked up development process.
If you have that conscience telling you to pay for your stuff, pay amazons price then just download the DRM-free version elsewhere.
My conscience tells me not to be an enabler. They are treating me like a criminal, and there are other people who will be affected by the DRM, and I want no part of that.
I'd much sooner just write a check to the author directly.
it is hopefully the last time I will have to buy that book.
Given you've bought it in yet another DRM format, I can pretty much guarantee it's not the last time you'll have to buy that book.
(no I'm not going to hyperlink it)
But Slashdot is, apparently.
Really? I don't see it -- my Amarok seems to use sqlite, and that seems to be the default.
It's not necessarily DRM. You're just missing the content to the next levels.
Well, true, but it is relying on DRM to prevent you from instantly redistributing that content once you buy it. While I believe DRM ultimately fails, I think the fact that game publishers are (mostly) still so enamored with it would be an obstacle to the rest of this idea.
Of course, that hasn't stopped some games from being released on Linux with no DRM, and some to be released with only online activation (and no hint of disc authentication)...
Actually, this would work great if Steam was available for linux.
Well, in a way... Greenhouse is available for Linux.
But Steam is redundant as a package manager. Sure, it'd be great to have that nice view of "my games", the integrated chat and everything, but the distribution, I'd rather see handled through something like apt.
(Or maybe not -- I'm guessing apt wouldn't be the most extensible for this purpose, without it feeling hackish. Steam downloads don't need an extra extraction/installation step -- once they're downloaded, sometimes half-downloaded, they're ready to play. But something like it.)
For what it's worth, Steam works pretty flawlessly under Wine. Obviously, not all the games do...
http://liscofiber.com/
The terms actually kind of suck, but aren't enforced. Nothing evil, just some interesting language on what is considered "excessive bandwidth" -- apparently, more than five hours of video per week is excessive. Funny, they never seem to complain when I download an entire TV series in a week...
They are suspicious of Firefox and other alternative browsers because their update services are separate from Windows.
These can be separated. Case in point: I run Firefox on Ubuntu, and it never even tries to update itself, it lets the system package manager do that.
That's the first step. Next step is convincing Microsoft to include it in WSUS, unless people know how to do it independently.
Linux is awfull crap on desktop IF you need to be productive,
Having used all three extensively, I can say with confidence that I was at my most productive on KDE 3, on Kubuntu Hardy.
Let me define "extensively". In college, I mostly used Linux on the desktop, and OS X (Tiger) on a Powerbook. I didn't mind OS X much, but I wasn't trying to do much with it, either -- taking notes in vim is about as productive in either case, as is writing a paper in OpenOffice.
For my most recent job, I started out using Windows exclusively, as it was HD-DVD. It wasn't fun to use Windows, but there really wasn't a choice -- it took a delicate balance to get Microsoft's HDiSim to work (Windows XP, not 2K or Vista; Media Player 10, not 9 or 11...) and my few experiments with Wine and virtual machines didn't go anywhere. So I used Eclipse, with Visual Studio .NET to debug, Firefox for web browsing, etc.
After that was web development, in Ruby on Rails. I immediately booted over to the Linux partition I was keeping on that machine, and ran that exclusively until that laptop died.
When it did, the only real choice was to borrow an OS X machine (an iMac), running Leopard, and get to work. And that was a love-hate relationship. So many things done right, but so many simple things, day after day, that infuriated me -- the biggest being lack of keyboard shortcuts/navigation, and lack of sloppy focus. Less than two weeks until I got a new Dell with Ubuntu on it.
The difference was profound -- I hadn't seen it as clearly illustrated before. Just simple things like having a keystroke to pack windows around, not to mention a package manager that doesn't suck.
So, your mileage may vary, but I am definitely at my most productive on Linux -- unfortunately, it can still access Slashdot, so there is that...
as a professional web dev, i get spooked if i have to use Linux as my workstation, most of the software i need is not there.
Are you a .NET developer, or are you referring to some amazing new tools I hadn't heard of?
Firefox runs on Linux. Firebug runs on Firefox. Ruby also runs on Linux, and Rails runs pretty much anywhere Ruby will. My favorite text editors (Kate and Vim) run on Linux.
The only irritation is that everyone and their dog seems to have latched onto these TextMate URLs in error messages. These are very cool, but I haven't gotten them working with things other than TextMate yet.
http://liscofiber.com/
And that is per second, yes. There is no cap. There is vague mention of not being a bandwidth hog in the terms, and some unfortunate language (apparently watching five hours of video is not considered "normal use", so clearly these terms were written by people who've never seen YouTube).
However, I never got a single complaint for all the torrents I ran.
Unfortunately, I just moved across town, and the fiber hasn't come here yet, so I'm back to 1 mbit DSL until spring.
You yourself are a well known troll, but I'll bite.
And yet, my karma is still excellent. How's yours?
Oh, I forgot, it must be the massive conspiracy of people who want to see SanityInAnarchy modded up, no matter what he says. I guess I'm more popular than I realized.
He is indeed off topic, but he's right.
What, that Linux isn't ready for "the desktop"? I guess I should tell my mother to buy a Mac, then...
Problem is, the post you replied to made no claim that Linux was insecure.
Nor was I making any claim that it was. I was responding to both of the ACs -- the first seemed to be claiming that by merely switching to "a secure OS", by which I was assuming Linux or BSD, they would prevent a SQL injection attack.
So, if anything, I was arguing against Linux being magical security sauce.
why make the absurd claim that Linux is ready for mainstream use.
I don't believe I made that claim -- I said "the desktop". Most criteria people bring up for evaluating that are either pure troll (You have to use the commandline for everything! Ten years ago, maybe...) or something which is impossible for anything other than Windows to qualify for, no matter how well written (Will it run all the apps I have now and some I haven't thought of?)
But, I was avoiding opening that discussion, because it's so offtopic.
Since I don't have mod points... Just so you know, you're absurdly offtopic, and you're both wrong.
Linux can't prevent a SQL injection attack. Not writing shitty software prevents SQL injection attacks, no matter what OS you're on.
Linux is ready for the desktop, and is likely still easier to install than Windows. But the desktop is even less relevant to a discussion about a server-side SQL injection attack.
Now this won't work with Oracle or MS Office as they can just download the package and never pay
Missing the point about a demo. Granted, the shareware model works better for games, where you can simply withhold the actual content until they pay -- but either method is relying on DRM, which ultimately fails.
But you are right -- an MMO doesn't have that problem. The smarter ones just offer the full game as a free download, and make you pay for an account -- expansions are tied to an account, for example.
I agree -- we could use a little less hype. But, this sentence alone:
just because the 3270 have given way to the AJAX enabled browser and everyone is talking community we don't have a different situation.
Actually, that really does.
A dumb terminal, or even a relatively smart terminal, is nowhere near the capabilities of a programmable modern browser. And that's before you factor in things like Google Gears, allowing you to take the same application offline.
So, technically, it is better.
Then there's the fact that you'd be foolish not to provide an API -- in fact, a good REST API will probably be easy to develop both web/AJAX and other clients. I somehow doubt that your application running on an IBM mainframe would be exposing services to other mainframes, perhaps even selling access.
As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes.
start realising how much it's just the successor to the mainframe and thing stats making sense.
What does that have to do with the context of this article, by the way? Or are you saying there's something in how mainframes answered the question of "ownership" that we should be considering?
'cloud computing' is hype and a buzzword which is used to obtain credibility, money and publicity.
That's true. It would be very helpful if it was more clearly defined...
Then again, that hasn't stopped other hypey buzzwords from taking over. Look at AJAX. All the technology was there already, but once we gave it a name, people started thinking about the effect of those pieces as a whole.
I would not say that everything that is done under that label is stupid though.
The question is, can you take those things which are done under that label and give them a better label? If you were to talk about "Utility computing" instead of "Cloud computing", would more people understand you (or at least pretend to)?
I think that determines the value of a term. Can it be replaced?
Now let's say the provider has options to, say, limit access to that app to a certain IP range. Certainly that's meta-data, right? It's not inherent to the app, it's not crucial to the app's workings, it's just additional data related to the app.
Yes, I'd assume that's what they're talking about.
And depending on the particular cloud, I'd say it's definitely yours. Say you're on Amazon EC2 -- your entire access to the cloud is going to be through an API. While it's worth reading the agreements, I think you could safely claim that if you wrote a script that generated these particular security policies, and booted this particular configuration of servers, that the script, at least, is your property.
a standard may apply here for some common tasks/options and exporting this to a common file format (and I really don't care if that's plaintext, XML, a BLOB or whatever
The closest thing to a standard right now is Amazon's API, mainly because it's the only one I know has at least two independent implementations -- one at Amazon, and one open source version.
But the article seems to be about a bunch of people -at the provider- having a peek at your app and making tweaks in their own 'cloud' to make your app be delivered faster, be delivered more securely, etc. I fail to see how -that- meta-data is yours to own.
True. But I don't see how that meta-data is crucial, either. If the new provider isn't capable of tweaking things fast enough, migrate the app slowly. You do have a shared-nothing architecture, right?
I would say, look at the URL of that second article -- F5. Now, start thinking about motivation. Why would F5 want to play up this particular aspect?
Given that Linux is yet to even standardise on a single unified sound output API
That's a troll argument. It doesn't have to be unified, as long as the systems talk to each other -- which they do.
For games? Use OpenAL. That's a no-brainer, that gets you 3D surround, and handles plugging into whatever they've got, hardware or software, any OS. Then the user, or the distro, can configure OpenAL to use ALSA natively, or use Jack, or whatever other layer they want to put in there.
whatever KDE went with that I forget,
KDE wrote a wrapper for all of the above, plus native ALSA (on Linux), and whatever Windows/OS X provide.
For codecs, you have
the same set of codecs you have on Windows, if you're licensing them. Or, if you'd like to save yourself some money, you use Vorbis/FLAC, available both in native libraries and through gstreamer/SDL.
This is as retarded as people claiming that the fact that both GNOME and KDE exists means Linux will never be a good desktop. OH NOES, choice, whatever shall we do. JUST PICK ONE! And no, you don't need the community to pick one for you -- close your eyes and play pin-the-tail-on-the-audio-library.
They all work. The existence of others, especially when the one you want (OpenAL) will plug into all of them, is not something you even have to think about.
a nightmare of communicating to customers what extra libraries they'll need
Or you include those libraries with the game -- it's really not that difficult to configure the game to use your libraries instead of the system libraries. Or you distribute a demo under a license that allows redistribution, and let the distros work it out -- when people want the full game, they put in a key and download the rest of the content.
But really, how is it a "nightmare", even if you had to spell out dependencies? How is it in any way harder than "communicating" what version of DirectX you need on Windows?
Linux will get people bothering to provide native support when
when people who might potentially port start looking at what's already there, and how hard it's not. If an indie game with close to no budget can provide native Linux support (think: every Introversion game, every Penny Arcade game, a few from Chronic Logic...), I would think that a company with 300+ employees could find one who knows at least as much as one of those guys.
That specific point was mentioned in the summary.
So you want to rewrite not only the OS but also all of the programs?
Well, not me, I have plenty of less ambitious things to focus on.
The guy writing it seems to want to have a low barrier to porting existing apps which are written in sufficiently dynamic languages. Chances are your C app won't work.
Put another way, the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X was handled much the same way, as was DOS to Windows. Sometimes, you do need something radically different, and when that happens, the best you can do for legacy apps is to put them in a virtual machine.
Alright, fine. So I go and I buy a hot tub, and I get it installed. A few weeks later, I come home and find the hot tub repairman has let himself into my house to make some "necessary upgrades". It seems there was a safety flaw, so...uh...OK, I guess.
No, at this point, you tell him that he doesn't get to keep a key to your front door, and he needs your explicit permission to come over.
Which is beside the point. Your analogy seems to be about suspicious stuff happening in the background.
At which point should I have called the police? Now, what if we're talking about Google? Apple? Microsoft? Sony?
We're not, since Google won't start tracking you unless you explicitly ask them to, which is the big difference between that and the "hot tub repairman" analogy.
If you scroll up, you'll find that this particular thread was about the possibility that someone else who physically has access to your device, could then install this software and turn it on. And the simple answer to that is, don't let other people touch your phone.
And as far as i know linux is open source. Or most of the distros.
Whoops, that'd be better written as:
Open source != Linux.
However, while we're on the subject, most distros now rely on large chunks of proprietary code, even in the kernel.
Also, why is linux a dinosaur? (Fanboy sense is tingling XD)
All modern OSes are based on very old ideas, and few have any kind of clean design. That is essentially what this guy is trying to say, but I'm not convinced his design will ultimately be better.
A trivial example: There is a Unix philosophy that everything is a file. There are a few major problems with the POSIX API for this, which could really only be improved by adding wholly new APIs.
For example: Files do not allow data to be added in the middle. That is, you can append data to the end, and you can overwrite data in the middle, but you can't insert data in the middle. The way around this is either to keep everything in such small files that you never have to do that -- which can get impractical very quickly, with most filesystems -- or to rewrite the entire file (impractical for large files) -- or to instead append that data to the end of the file, and make a file format flexible enough that data can be located in such a haphazard fashion.
What this inevitably leads to is applications re-implementing many of the same things the OS does. You see games packing everything into zipfiles, because if they had to store each texture in a separate file, it would use much more space, as most filesystems will allocate a 4k block even for a 100-byte file. You also see various databases implementing ways to relocate data inside the file, leaving gaps, and to later "vacuum" or "compact" the database to recover them -- in other words, they're completely re-implementing filesystem allocation and defragmentation.
Now, technically, if you had an efficient enough filesystem, you might be able to use the POSIX API to store everything in individual files. But then you have the problem of trying to keep it consistent. For example, if you save a text file in your editor, it's probably reasonable for the editor to flush it to a temporary file, then rename that file on top of the one that's there.
Keep in mind, though, that's flushing to disk, whether or not the data is that critical. It's not difficult to imagine a situation where you'd rather have a transaction -- you don't care if the data makes it to disk immediately, as long as it's all in a consistent state when it gets there. For example, installing a new package from your package manager -- you'd rather either all of the changes make it to disk, or none of them do, but you don't care which parts are written to disk, when, and in what order. In fact, you'd rather the filesystem reorder things, to optimize it -- so long as you can synchronize the whole thing at the end, you're good.
Unfortunately, neither POSIX nor any POSIX filesystem I know of supports transactions -- you have to hack your own, either within one giant file, or by flushing tempfiles to disk. Package managers tend to have a concept of a "half-installed" state -- if the system crashed at that exact moment, the filesystem wouldn't be able to roll back, but the package manager might be able to at least retry the installation.
If you've read this far, great! But keep in mind, all of that is just about the filesystem -- and that's not the end of it; I've got quite a few more complaints which are addressed by ZFS, but not by Linux (yet). I haven't even touched on things like IPC, library usage, or that session concept.
I'm not saying that this idea of using objects instead of files is necessarily better. In fact, I'd rather see it go another direction -- something more like ZFS, where you have a storage engine which just allocates extents for you, and a POSIX filesystem is just one of the applications built on top of that layer. Then, you could build something like that object system,