Or...
Folks will find out this patch is badly badly broken and may contain malicious code. Thereafter everyone will only trust MS patches from MS, and take claims of better security through open-source sources with a grain of salt.
(P.S. The code IS badly badly broken, and may contain malicious code)
Right. They are going to sell him 400 liters of their *emergency* fuel. Now they are low/out of *emergency* fuel. What if after he's off on his merry way, their own resupply planes get cancelled due to bad weather? Their 40 scientists can cancel all experiments and maybe freeze to death since they no longer have enough fuel to keep themselves warm/working until the weather breaks. Wonderful idea.
Once again, it's extremely expensive and dangerous to get stuff there. Every bit is planned for and there for a specific reason. Work or emergency use. They don't stockpile extra fuel just for the convienience of tourists. Consuming the emergency stuff for non-emergiencies is stupid. Then there's none left for the emergency. Getting his plane off 'now' is not an emergency. If he wants it off, he can contract, schedule, and pay for, a company to ship it in himself, where the fuel is brought in for that specified purpose, and not taking away what they have on hand at a research facility for work or emergency purposes.
My girlfriend considers it an emergency when we run out of ice cream. For some reason the Red Cross does not see fit to mobilize under those conditions and bring us more. That's because it's not a real emergency, it's an inconvienince for her. She has to wait, and maybe work got get more into the apartment. This guy is safe. Getting his plane back is not an emergency.
I hope you never have a job where you are responsible for resource management. I can imagine you explaining to your boss in the middle of a power outage that the emergency generators aren't running power to your company because you gave their fuel to your buddy who's car was low on gas. You weren't using the fuel for them at the time so why not... That's going to go over real well.
Now imagine you can't schedule a resupply of fuel for the generators for several weeks or even months. Now imagine if the generators run out of fuel, people may die. Your NSHO is WRONG.
I'm confused - you say that if he had checked, he would have found that the bases do not have fuel to spare, yet you also say that they have contingency for emergencies? So, do they have the fuel to spare or not? Answer - yes they do! They have the fuel, they are just refusing to sell him any.
Yes, because it is no longer an emergency condition. He is nice and safe in their selter, and they will fly him out safely on one of their scheduled transports. Getting his private plane itself out is not an emergency, it's a luxury. (See above, an emergency is a life threatening condition. No one is going to die if his plane sits there for a month, a year, or a decade) Their emergency fuel is in case they have a life threatening emergency, it's not to be squandered on luxeries. I'm sure they would GIVE the fuel to the New Zealanders if they had an actual emergency. I don't see the New Zealanders down there rushing a shipment of over 400 liters of fuel to him, so I guess they don't consider it an emergency either!
They are helping the guy, they just aren't going to put themselves at unnecessary risk for the luxury of getting his plane home quick. Didn't you see the post above about how rescuing the scientific equipment was also not the important thing, but human life was?
Was this guy stupid to do what he did? Perhaps. Does this mean that he should not be helped?
Have you never done anything foolish? If you did, were you helped? Should you have been???
A stupid stupid statement. They already helped him. They saved his life and are feeding and sheltering him, and getting him home safely. That's one hell of a lot of help when you are stuck in Antarctica.
The bases are not gas stations, but it appears that they are happy enough to provide food and shelter to "foolhardy" travellers. Whatever about food, why are they compromising their principles by giving this guy shelter - he has an airplane that he can shelter from the elements in!
I don't see anywhere that they are 'happy' about having to privide food to the foolhardy moron, but they will do it to save human life. The plane is another story. As for giving him shelter, once again it goes towards saving human life, and being where they are, since they are giving him food, keeping those BTU's his body puts off from it in their own shelter might make more sense then sending him back to his plane.
But they are not giving him the "help" he is looking for (in the form of a business transaction). Should they? Both him and the plane need to be removed from Antarctica, and there are two ways of doing it. The base commanders are making it as hard as possible, and all to try and make a silly "point".
It's too damn bad he doesn't get all his wishes granted, isn't it. It's not a silly point to keep others from doing it. It's silly only to you. Not giving away extremely limited safety resources for luxury purposes is not a 'mean' thing. It's a smart thing.
For the base commanders to say that they fear that they will become Antarctic search-and-rescue bases is a bit silly, IMNSHO. I, for one, am certainly not going to get into a small airplane and fly to Antarctica "safe" in the knowledge that there are a dozen or so bases on a continent the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined that I can land at!!!
You might not, but there are other nimrods like this guy who would. It doesn't take many idiots like this to put a serious strain on the limited manpower and resouces they have avaible down there.
You seem to think that they either have vast stockpiles of extra resources, or that it's no problem for them to magically snap their fingers and replace the resources. Neither is true. This isn't some guy breaking down 50 miles from the nearest town. It's thousands of miles from the nearest resupply stocks, and it's dangerous for the people who deliver them to get them there. Resources of all types down there are limited and precious. Sending the signal that they aren't going to waste them on idiots is a 'good thing'.
An emergency is a life threatening condition. They already rescued him from that and are providing him food and shelter, and a safe trip home. They have already given him some of their precious reserves of food to keep him alive and healthy.
Getting his toy plane home does NOT constitute an emergency!
This was not an accident, this was stupid carelessness. If he has to take a while to get his toy plane back, so be it. That's the price he pays for being an idiot.
So you are saying that people being caught on the hop by the weather conditions in Antarctica is possible occurrance, even for American scientists!? If that were to happen, would you rather or rather not be able to count on some sort of reasonable support from your friends?
Getting caught by bad weather conditions in Antarcica is a definite possibility for anyone. That's why this guy was such an idiot to try the flight with so little thought planning for such a contingency. (Saying he knew there was bases to land doesn't matter, checking at all would have told them they don't have fuel to spare, and wouldn't sell him any) The scientists there, American or not, have already ensured they have emergency contingency plans in place. If they were to get trapped by an emergency, I'd expect anyone who was in a position to to help them get the people safely out. I would NOT expect in any way for those helpers to sacrifice their own emergency resources to get the scientific equipment out. That would take an enourmously stupid sense of entitlement on my part.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm an American and I'm a scientist. I had no idea I was required to sell any of my possesions to another at a whim. We all do that eh? Even when they are precious reserves in a dangerous climate. Wow, I had no idea that that was mandated just because I'm an American.
In all seriousness, the guy is an idiot who didn't plan ahead.
He didn't land at a freaking BP gas station, he landed at a research facility. They need the gas for their own research use and for emergency use. They don't keep extra around to sell to morons. If they sold him some, they are at risk for either their research or their safety in case weather conditions prevent the next supply flight from coming in. The next supply flight has probably already been planned with necessary fuel and supplies and might not have room for extra fuel to replace what he takes. That might require extra flights. (Putting at potential risk those flight crews. Flight in that region is dangerous).
If he wants to refuel, he can arrange to pay some company to fly/ship in more fuel himself. A research facility is under no obligation to put themselves or their research in danger just so he can get his homemade toy back home quickly.
Oh, your right. It would have been much more convincing if he had said:
"We have a bunch of morons over here, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content"
Get a grip. He's saying they have some of the brightest people around working for them, and that's their opinion on the matter. My guess is a bunch of Ph.D.'s working for Apple just 'might' have a idea or two about digital data.
Anyone reasonable person would have read that into it. It sounds like your awefully insecure about not having an advanced degree.
Notice I said "could have" and "if". I had read the article and knew those facts. I was just stating that it IS news when a machine like this gets compromised. Luckily the admins found and fixed it quickly in this case. It easily could have been much much worse. There are still at least 20 folks out there who needed to know it happened tho (and anyone they may have passed on files to). I was saying that this IS news, and a good warning to others to keep monitoring tripwire or whatever else they are using to keep tabs on their system. Especially if the machine is used as a mirror.
Just the kind of idiotic zealotry that would requires someone to post as an anonymous coward. No one said the exploit has anything to do with Gentoo itself. The problem is a lot of folks us that mirror to set up their own machines. Way more than 20 people could now have compromised machines if they got into the portage tree.
Mirrors being exploited IS news. Keep it quiet and lots of folks could end up with rooted boxes and be none the wiser. Ignoring it is stupid.
"How much do you think Lance Bass, Kenny Blankenship, or Julie Ahoolian would pay to travel to space to look through the telescope with their own eyes?"
Can't be done. The hubble isn't set up with an eyepiece, it's set up only for digital imaging.
"Then, they could even turn the telescope around, and use it to peer back at our own home, Mother Earth. I bet you could see your house from up there!"
Sorry, that's been thought of before and dismissed. The Hubble can't focus on anything that close to itself. It was designed for looking across the galaxy +, and it's nearest focal point is far beyond earth orbital dimensions.
Exactly how many rich folks are going to pay for a useless trip up there anyhow? Did you read the cost for keeping it up? 600 million. That would take quite a few rich folks. Not gonna happen, even if it was a decent destination.
They need to take it down before it fails mechanically. It's a rather large satellite, and several large pieces might survive reentry to impact on some unsuspecting person below. They will take it down deliberately while it is still working, so that they can ensure they will land in the ocean somewhere, and not on someone's house.
I think your missing the point. Of course it will survive, but will it flourish?
What is the chant you hear all the time on/.? "BSD is Dying". BSD can't die either, because it's open source. Someone can always still use it. The question is if the following is large enough (mainly including contributors) to continue to have it evolve, stay patched, up to date, and current with other technologies. BSD's can't die, but the chant more goes to the posibility of the idea of them falling out of date. The same is possible with Linux or any software, open source or not.
Right now Linux is flourishing, but it's getting a lot of backing from corporate entities, if that backing fails, it will still continue, but will it flourish compared to the competition (BSD's, Hurd, commercial OS's, something new)?
As to your last comment. There was an enormous amount of work being put into the RedHat distribution too at one point. These things can wax and wane with so many distributions out there. The flavor-of-the-month distribution that's popular may change in a year. One of the great things about opensource software is that it allows variations according to taste. One of the disadvanages that point is resources get split up and duplicated between the variations. You can't separate that great advantage from the disadvantage that comes along with it. It's the yin and yang of it.
I think rebranding(if that's what it really is) is a huge mistake. I don't think they now lose that much money by confusion of the free vs Enterprise versions. Folks now get free RedHat with the understanding that it's kind of a RedHat 'lite', and they can get additional software/support with the Enterprise version.
The Fedora project seems to be different, and it doesn't seem as clear that it will move in lockstep as a 'lite' version. Moreover, there is no longer a name association with the Enterprise version.
The free RedHat distro was the greatest advertising possible for the Enterprise version. (PHB's have all heard of RedHat, and of course they all love anything with 'Enterprise' in the description, as well as big support contracts) Fedora will not have that instant name recognition/association with RedHat Enterprise. Once all home users have moved to Fedora or other distro's, RedHat will become a lot less chic in the news. Less name recognition for the PHBs. And if it's not just a rebranding, the differences in the Fedora disro and RedHat Enterprise may be enough to lose any training/familiarity of it with RH Enterprise vs any other distro/commercial distro.
Yep. I suspect reality will smack RedHat in the face soon. History repeats itself.
Sun tried a somewhat similar thing before when it tried to discontinue the x86 version of Solaris. They quickly found out it was all those folks learning and playing on it on the cheap lead to those folks requesting buying it on real Sun big iron at work.
I'm sure this is has been a somewhat similar situation, Linux users 'playing/learning' with it on their home machines, and recommending it at work, with a nice fat support contract.
This is going to cause folks to run other distro's at home, and those distros will then migrate into their workplace. This is a bad move by RedHat. Supporting (at least a little) a free RedHat distro gets their foot in the door for work. I can see notching down support a little on the free version, but ditching/rebranding it to fedora is just not going to link people in to their Enterprise version. I think they just shot themselves in the foot.
Yes, yes I have, but apparenty you didn't read my above post. Where did I suggest the right job for it was to run a farm of x86 servers? (Not to say it couldn't be, there are some folks with exceptional requirements who it might be the best fit for, but those are the minority).
I said it's for learning or as an admin's workstation. How many college students, or Windows/Linux admins are going to buy a blade just to learn the OS? Why do that when you can get a cheap/free x86 version? They can learn the OS, then only have to deal with the hardware specific details when you actually get an opportunity/cash to work on a real Sparc machine.
And as an admin workstation, you are don't just play with configurations on your own box all day. Maintaining a mixed environment when only your workstation and test machines are x86 is just not that difficult, sorry.
Yes, there are a few folks who run it just to brag about running Solaris, but that isn't the right job that I was talking about.
Solaris for x86 has always been for training or utility. Cheap or free x86 versions mean people who want to eventually admin Solaris on Sparc equipment can easily get ahold of it to try without having the capital to purchase a Sparc just for learning purposes.
The other common job for it has been as a utility/admin machine. When you have 20 Solaris Sparc servers to admin, it's just easier and more consistant to also run Solaris on the admin's workstation. Why throw on another *nix with it's own individual setup and quirks when you can run something integrated and consistant. It doesn't really matter if the admin's box is 20% slower than an equivalent Linux machine, it still works fine to admin the big iron.
For some jobs, it is the right tool. Except to idiots who don't understand the job.
Unless your Windows admin is not an idiot. Only a Linux admin on a windows network would make this mistake. A Windows admin will use SUSadmin to roll out windows updates to all his machines from a server every day. Check off the updates you want to roll out, and your done.
A lot of this MS vs Linux bashing is done by folks incompetent at the other system. Either Linux, BSDs, or Windows machines can be run efficiently by a good admin who knows the system, or totally abysmally by someone who doesn't. ROI on your network relies MUCH more on the admin you hire than most folks will admit.
"Correlation, by definition, implies a fundamental level of causality (and therefore, a relationship)"
from your earlier post and then
"The very term corRELATION implies that it DOES test whether a relationship exists."
It does NOT test whether the relationship exists, it shows the LIKELYHOOD that a relationship MAY exist. And it certainly says nothing about any causal nature of the relationship.
"In your example, sure there's the possibilty that the relationship you describe might happen by chance (that is ALWAYS possible) but what do you think the likelihood is that such a correlation will be found ? "
That is EXACTLY what the correlation is, the statistical likelihood that similarity in two sets of numbers may represent a relationship versus a statistical 'coincidence'. It doesn't test if they are related, only the likelihood. And it doesn't imply or show that there is any causality.
Sorry, but your wrong. "Correlation != Causation" is exactly because there is no reason just because there is a corrolation that there is a real relationship. Read that again. There may be *NO* relationship. Just a an interesting coincedence in similarity of numbers.
If you can't understand that point, you can't understand science. Correlation does NOT imply a level of cusality. It simply implies a corrolation of the numbers. Further tests may find there is NO relationship.
Roll some dice a few hundred times, by chance a graph of your results may corrolate with the fluctuation of the stock market during a 6 month period during the 90's. Does that mean there is a relationship between your rolling of the dice and the investment decisions made by millions of stockholders? No. But the numbers may still corrolate. See the problem yet?
FUD!
You have obviously never used it. The SUS server downloads all patches from MS servers. It then presents you with a nice list of them. You *MUST* check off a checkbox in order to approve each patch for distribution to your network. Leave it unchecked and it won't be installed on any of your machines. MS does give you control over what patches you want installed.
Exactly. They will never get another dime of my money. TaxCut has a new regular customer now.
Let the companies know they have to check with some of their customers before they try any type of major restriction like this, and they can't just shove it down our throats and expect us to just take it. I'm sure a focus group would have quickly told them that people did NOT want this sort of restriction. They weren't concerned about that. They are the 'top dog' in tax software so they figured we'd be stuck with it. Thank god for competition. Support the companies that actually think about their users.
Your joking right? People who are running a pirated pre-release are the most likely ones to run a pirated version of the release... i.e., Valve won't be getting any money from them anyhow, so there's no point spending 6 months writing 'special' stuff for the thieves.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34618.html
"But I have the source!!" doesn't mean squat unless you can read it, and actually take the time to do so, very very carefully.
Or... Folks will find out this patch is badly badly broken and may contain malicious code. Thereafter everyone will only trust MS patches from MS, and take claims of better security through open-source sources with a grain of salt. (P.S. The code IS badly badly broken, and may contain malicious code)
Once again, it's extremely expensive and dangerous to get stuff there. Every bit is planned for and there for a specific reason. Work or emergency use. They don't stockpile extra fuel just for the convienience of tourists. Consuming the emergency stuff for non-emergiencies is stupid. Then there's none left for the emergency. Getting his plane off 'now' is not an emergency. If he wants it off, he can contract, schedule, and pay for, a company to ship it in himself, where the fuel is brought in for that specified purpose, and not taking away what they have on hand at a research facility for work or emergency purposes.
My girlfriend considers it an emergency when we run out of ice cream. For some reason the Red Cross does not see fit to mobilize under those conditions and bring us more. That's because it's not a real emergency, it's an inconvienince for her. She has to wait, and maybe work got get more into the apartment. This guy is safe. Getting his plane back is not an emergency.
I hope you never have a job where you are responsible for resource management. I can imagine you explaining to your boss in the middle of a power outage that the emergency generators aren't running power to your company because you gave their fuel to your buddy who's car was low on gas. You weren't using the fuel for them at the time so why not... That's going to go over real well.
Now imagine you can't schedule a resupply of fuel for the generators for several weeks or even months. Now imagine if the generators run out of fuel, people may die. Your NSHO is WRONG.
Yes, because it is no longer an emergency condition. He is nice and safe in their selter, and they will fly him out safely on one of their scheduled transports. Getting his private plane itself out is not an emergency, it's a luxury. (See above, an emergency is a life threatening condition. No one is going to die if his plane sits there for a month, a year, or a decade) Their emergency fuel is in case they have a life threatening emergency, it's not to be squandered on luxeries. I'm sure they would GIVE the fuel to the New Zealanders if they had an actual emergency. I don't see the New Zealanders down there rushing a shipment of over 400 liters of fuel to him, so I guess they don't consider it an emergency either!
They are helping the guy, they just aren't going to put themselves at unnecessary risk for the luxury of getting his plane home quick. Didn't you see the post above about how rescuing the scientific equipment was also not the important thing, but human life was?
Was this guy stupid to do what he did? Perhaps. Does this mean that he should not be helped?
Have you never done anything foolish? If you did, were you helped? Should you have been???
A stupid stupid statement. They already helped him. They saved his life and are feeding and sheltering him, and getting him home safely. That's one hell of a lot of help when you are stuck in Antarctica.
The bases are not gas stations, but it appears that they are happy enough to provide food and shelter to "foolhardy" travellers. Whatever about food, why are they compromising their principles by giving this guy shelter - he has an airplane that he can shelter from the elements in!
I don't see anywhere that they are 'happy' about having to privide food to the foolhardy moron, but they will do it to save human life. The plane is another story. As for giving him shelter, once again it goes towards saving human life, and being where they are, since they are giving him food, keeping those BTU's his body puts off from it in their own shelter might make more sense then sending him back to his plane.
But they are not giving him the "help" he is looking for (in the form of a business transaction). Should they? Both him and the plane need to be removed from Antarctica, and there are two ways of doing it. The base commanders are making it as hard as possible, and all to try and make a silly "point".
It's too damn bad he doesn't get all his wishes granted, isn't it. It's not a silly point to keep others from doing it. It's silly only to you. Not giving away extremely limited safety resources for luxury purposes is not a 'mean' thing. It's a smart thing.
For the base commanders to say that they fear that they will become Antarctic search-and-rescue bases is a bit silly, IMNSHO. I, for one, am certainly not going to get into a small airplane and fly to Antarctica "safe" in the knowledge that there are a dozen or so bases on a continent the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined that I can land at!!!
You might not, but there are other nimrods like this guy who would. It doesn't take many idiots like this to put a serious strain on the limited manpower and resouces they have avaible down there.
You seem to think that they either have vast stockpiles of extra resources, or that it's no problem for them to magically snap their fingers and replace the resources. Neither is true. This isn't some guy breaking down 50 miles from the nearest town. It's thousands of miles from the nearest resupply stocks, and it's dangerous for the people who deliver them to get them there. Resources of all types down there are limited and precious. Sending the signal that they aren't going to waste them on idiots is a 'good thing'.
Getting his toy plane home does NOT constitute an emergency!
This was not an accident, this was stupid carelessness. If he has to take a while to get his toy plane back, so be it. That's the price he pays for being an idiot.
So you are saying that people being caught on the hop by the weather conditions in Antarctica is possible occurrance, even for American scientists!? If that were to happen, would you rather or rather not be able to count on some sort of reasonable support from your friends?
Getting caught by bad weather conditions in Antarcica is a definite possibility for anyone. That's why this guy was such an idiot to try the flight with so little thought planning for such a contingency. (Saying he knew there was bases to land doesn't matter, checking at all would have told them they don't have fuel to spare, and wouldn't sell him any) The scientists there, American or not, have already ensured they have emergency contingency plans in place. If they were to get trapped by an emergency, I'd expect anyone who was in a position to to help them get the people safely out. I would NOT expect in any way for those helpers to sacrifice their own emergency resources to get the scientific equipment out. That would take an enourmously stupid sense of entitlement on my part.
In all seriousness, the guy is an idiot who didn't plan ahead. He didn't land at a freaking BP gas station, he landed at a research facility. They need the gas for their own research use and for emergency use. They don't keep extra around to sell to morons. If they sold him some, they are at risk for either their research or their safety in case weather conditions prevent the next supply flight from coming in. The next supply flight has probably already been planned with necessary fuel and supplies and might not have room for extra fuel to replace what he takes. That might require extra flights. (Putting at potential risk those flight crews. Flight in that region is dangerous). If he wants to refuel, he can arrange to pay some company to fly/ship in more fuel himself. A research facility is under no obligation to put themselves or their research in danger just so he can get his homemade toy back home quickly.
"We have a bunch of morons over here, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content"
Get a grip. He's saying they have some of the brightest people around working for them, and that's their opinion on the matter. My guess is a bunch of Ph.D.'s working for Apple just 'might' have a idea or two about digital data.
Anyone reasonable person would have read that into it. It sounds like your awefully insecure about not having an advanced degree.
Notice I said "could have" and "if". I had read the article and knew those facts. I was just stating that it IS news when a machine like this gets compromised. Luckily the admins found and fixed it quickly in this case. It easily could have been much much worse. There are still at least 20 folks out there who needed to know it happened tho (and anyone they may have passed on files to). I was saying that this IS news, and a good warning to others to keep monitoring tripwire or whatever else they are using to keep tabs on their system. Especially if the machine is used as a mirror.
Mirrors being exploited IS news. Keep it quiet and lots of folks could end up with rooted boxes and be none the wiser. Ignoring it is stupid.
If you want some alpha MS-ware, just hoof it on over to Malaysia.
This is just more fodder for the anti-MS community.
"How much do you think Lance Bass, Kenny Blankenship, or Julie Ahoolian would pay to travel to space to look through the telescope with their own eyes?" Can't be done. The hubble isn't set up with an eyepiece, it's set up only for digital imaging. "Then, they could even turn the telescope around, and use it to peer back at our own home, Mother Earth. I bet you could see your house from up there!" Sorry, that's been thought of before and dismissed. The Hubble can't focus on anything that close to itself. It was designed for looking across the galaxy +, and it's nearest focal point is far beyond earth orbital dimensions. Exactly how many rich folks are going to pay for a useless trip up there anyhow? Did you read the cost for keeping it up? 600 million. That would take quite a few rich folks. Not gonna happen, even if it was a decent destination.
They need to take it down before it fails mechanically. It's a rather large satellite, and several large pieces might survive reentry to impact on some unsuspecting person below. They will take it down deliberately while it is still working, so that they can ensure they will land in the ocean somewhere, and not on someone's house.
What is the chant you hear all the time on /.? "BSD is Dying". BSD can't die either, because it's open source. Someone can always still use it. The question is if the following is large enough (mainly including contributors) to continue to have it evolve, stay patched, up to date, and current with other technologies. BSD's can't die, but the chant more goes to the posibility of the idea of them falling out of date. The same is possible with Linux or any software, open source or not.
Right now Linux is flourishing, but it's getting a lot of backing from corporate entities, if that backing fails, it will still continue, but will it flourish compared to the competition (BSD's, Hurd, commercial OS's, something new)?
As to your last comment. There was an enormous amount of work being put into the RedHat distribution too at one point. These things can wax and wane with so many distributions out there. The flavor-of-the-month distribution that's popular may change in a year. One of the great things about opensource software is that it allows variations according to taste. One of the disadvanages that point is resources get split up and duplicated between the variations. You can't separate that great advantage from the disadvantage that comes along with it. It's the yin and yang of it.
You can't just review it. You have to realize... there is no movie.
I think rebranding(if that's what it really is) is a huge mistake. I don't think they now lose that much money by confusion of the free vs Enterprise versions. Folks now get free RedHat with the understanding that it's kind of a RedHat 'lite', and they can get additional software/support with the Enterprise version.
The Fedora project seems to be different, and it doesn't seem as clear that it will move in lockstep as a 'lite' version. Moreover, there is no longer a name association with the Enterprise version. The free RedHat distro was the greatest advertising possible for the Enterprise version. (PHB's have all heard of RedHat, and of course they all love anything with 'Enterprise' in the description, as well as big support contracts) Fedora will not have that instant name recognition/association with RedHat Enterprise. Once all home users have moved to Fedora or other distro's, RedHat will become a lot less chic in the news. Less name recognition for the PHBs. And if it's not just a rebranding, the differences in the Fedora disro and RedHat Enterprise may be enough to lose any training/familiarity of it with RH Enterprise vs any other distro/commercial distro.
Sun tried a somewhat similar thing before when it tried to discontinue the x86 version of Solaris. They quickly found out it was all those folks learning and playing on it on the cheap lead to those folks requesting buying it on real Sun big iron at work.
I'm sure this is has been a somewhat similar situation, Linux users 'playing/learning' with it on their home machines, and recommending it at work, with a nice fat support contract.
This is going to cause folks to run other distro's at home, and those distros will then migrate into their workplace. This is a bad move by RedHat. Supporting (at least a little) a free RedHat distro gets their foot in the door for work. I can see notching down support a little on the free version, but ditching/rebranding it to fedora is just not going to link people in to their Enterprise version. I think they just shot themselves in the foot.
I said it's for learning or as an admin's workstation. How many college students, or Windows/Linux admins are going to buy a blade just to learn the OS? Why do that when you can get a cheap/free x86 version? They can learn the OS, then only have to deal with the hardware specific details when you actually get an opportunity/cash to work on a real Sparc machine.
And as an admin workstation, you are don't just play with configurations on your own box all day. Maintaining a mixed environment when only your workstation and test machines are x86 is just not that difficult, sorry.
Yes, there are a few folks who run it just to brag about running Solaris, but that isn't the right job that I was talking about.
Solaris for x86 has always been for training or utility. Cheap or free x86 versions mean people who want to eventually admin Solaris on Sparc equipment can easily get ahold of it to try without having the capital to purchase a Sparc just for learning purposes.
The other common job for it has been as a utility/admin machine. When you have 20 Solaris Sparc servers to admin, it's just easier and more consistant to also run Solaris on the admin's workstation. Why throw on another *nix with it's own individual setup and quirks when you can run something integrated and consistant. It doesn't really matter if the admin's box is 20% slower than an equivalent Linux machine, it still works fine to admin the big iron.
For some jobs, it is the right tool. Except to idiots who don't understand the job.
A lot of this MS vs Linux bashing is done by folks incompetent at the other system. Either Linux, BSDs, or Windows machines can be run efficiently by a good admin who knows the system, or totally abysmally by someone who doesn't. ROI on your network relies MUCH more on the admin you hire than most folks will admit.
from your earlier post and then
"The very term corRELATION implies that it DOES test whether a relationship exists."
It does NOT test whether the relationship exists, it shows the LIKELYHOOD that a relationship MAY exist. And it certainly says nothing about any causal nature of the relationship.
"In your example, sure there's the possibilty that the relationship you describe might happen by chance (that is ALWAYS possible) but what do you think the likelihood is that such a correlation will be found ? "
That is EXACTLY what the correlation is, the statistical likelihood that similarity in two sets of numbers may represent a relationship versus a statistical 'coincidence'. It doesn't test if they are related, only the likelihood. And it doesn't imply or show that there is any causality.
If you can't understand that point, you can't understand science. Correlation does NOT imply a level of cusality. It simply implies a corrolation of the numbers. Further tests may find there is NO relationship. Roll some dice a few hundred times, by chance a graph of your results may corrolate with the fluctuation of the stock market during a 6 month period during the 90's. Does that mean there is a relationship between your rolling of the dice and the investment decisions made by millions of stockholders? No. But the numbers may still corrolate. See the problem yet?
FUD! You have obviously never used it. The SUS server downloads all patches from MS servers. It then presents you with a nice list of them. You *MUST* check off a checkbox in order to approve each patch for distribution to your network. Leave it unchecked and it won't be installed on any of your machines. MS does give you control over what patches you want installed.
Let the companies know they have to check with some of their customers before they try any type of major restriction like this, and they can't just shove it down our throats and expect us to just take it. I'm sure a focus group would have quickly told them that people did NOT want this sort of restriction. They weren't concerned about that. They are the 'top dog' in tax software so they figured we'd be stuck with it. Thank god for competition. Support the companies that actually think about their users.
Your joking right? People who are running a pirated pre-release are the most likely ones to run a pirated version of the release... i.e., Valve won't be getting any money from them anyhow, so there's no point spending 6 months writing 'special' stuff for the thieves.