No, installation should not require root priviledges.
If I want to install say, SDL, on my school's unix servers so I can compile against it, do I go and ask the guy who runs the cluster of servers "Oh, please install SDL for me, please please please"? They'd be spending all their time installing every app everyone needs.
Only installing things for the whole system should require root.
I very much doubt this will help Windows security-wise. People won't sit there and read every time something asks for a password (and if 90% of things ask for them, you bet everyone will just type it in automatically).
Nix security is strong because so few programs ask for root, that when I see one, I either know the program, or quickly look it up.
The point is, there is no best window manager, or desktop manager. I use Fluxbox, I install for some people gnome and for others KDE. Some prefer one, some the other, competition is NOT BAD! It's excellent, lets likeminded developers get togeather and do what they love, without fighting over little pointless things.
Oh, and the old mantra that you can throw more developers at an issue and get better results is very very false. If you had every gnome developer join KDE you would not have a doubling in patches/upgrades. If anything, development would slow down considerably, because of opposing views.
Funny you should mention filesystems and standards. You might want to look that up on google before you talk about a lack thereof. Here, I'll spare you the trouble:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
Maybe you want to read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for Linux? Quite a few distros respect it, some don't, but look at real world standards (IE7 and CSS is a great example).
XOrg/XFree86 had nothing to do with companies, at all. XFree86 development was preety stagntant, and people were always talking about upgrading/replacing it. The decision to change licences killed them because people didn't like it.
No.. It's a tad more stable, sure. But it still dies very regularly. I repair computers for people in my building and around the university and windows is as crappy as it's always been.
Sure, it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, but every 10. The new spyware makes up for that. I see BSODs because of the old "OO, too many processes running" which is great. I've seen it BSOD after MS updates. I've seen it crash because of a program that I just installed, even a regular game can crash it. "Yes, but that's the programs fault" Right, a real OS should never crash because of what an unpriviledged userland program does.
"Oh, but Linux will have spyware when people use it" No it won't or at least not nearly as much. Ever tried doing ps -A and killall -9 on a nix? Try the same on windows? Good luck, it won't let you on occasion. Or even better spyware may not even show up there. And let's not begin with the whole editing/etc and the registry story.
Hidden settings can start the spyware right back up as soon as you kill it, I see that regularly. It comes with the turf when you're using closed source software, you can never know what windows is actually doing, hence you get spyware.
Windows is a disorganized mess, it's paying for it with spyware now. One day, it'll pay for it very highly when the next worm decides "Hey, Norton is running, better format before someone detects me."
You should be happy you're feeling safe with windows, simply because noone bothers to actually wreck your computer for you.
The crossplatform comment is entirely untrue.
Everything I write I make sure runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Writing crossplatform code, without a VM is trivial. I use C++ and C for this in general, well with haskell and scheme, but those can be compiled as well.
Now.. the wrapper stuff, yeah, sure. But what exactly do you lose?
Your OS is a wrapper by the way, that saves you from having to write ASM and developing drivers for interacting with every possible device every time.
Foreign function interfaces can be designed to be just as fast as regular code, the language iterop issue that you mentioned.
1 function call that's inlined and most likely optimized by the compiler to a pulp will not take any overhead.
SOAP has nothing to do with FFI, at all. It's a method of using the web to call functions on another computer (like launching a utility, for example MSN uses it to launch whiteboard). I'll assume the XML Web services falls in the same category.
Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:
* How partition and disk structure works
* How GCC actually functions
* How the kernel is installed and configured
* At least something about runlevels and init scripts
This is definitely very untrue.
I've seen friends install Gentoo who have barely touched Linux. They've worked on a shell before, but that's it. Some of them don't particularly know what gcc is, much less how it works.
Do you? Do you need to know what a CFG is? or how lambda calculus and formal semantics work? No.. most people who use gcc have no clue about formal languages and compiler concepts.
I can assure you, nothing is needed in the way of runlevels or init. If you'll note, the guide tells them to use 5 for updating init scripts and it says they get run at startup.
For that matter, genkernel handles kernel installation and configuration. You don't need to know that either.
Getting a graphical installer is a great step for Gentoo. It's a very easy to use distro all in all. Save for some of the merging problems (etc-update should really not touch fstab unless there's a very good reason, but then again you can just say no)
You're doing the same thing that the grandfather post was complaining about. Just because more people use it doesn't mean everyone will dumb down.
Installing Gentoo right now goes something like this, get x86 install guide, follow to the letter, done! It requires very little knowledge all in all, so your point is invalid, all it does is scare people at this point. Not only that, it's a great candidate for automation.
If I want a speed demon or something that's going to get really big (a large game that has OpenGL support + shaders for example), I'll use C++.
If I want something just so I can perfom a few quick tasks, and that I can carry around or just for showing people proof that a certain thing works, I'll use perl.
If I want something that works, I want it now, quick and dirty I'll do it in lisp. I say dirty because most people get lost with lisp so they can't read it at all.
It all depends on what I have to do, it's why I don't use java, I don't see a point or something lacking in what I do.
Lisp isn't ugly, I've been writing lisp programs for quite a bit of time now and it's both amazingly fast and entirely flexible. I can do anything with it, and faster then I possibly could in C/C++/perl (and I've been working with those for.. about 4 times longer)
I've found that after a little code-writing lisp becomes amazingly legible and simple to write.
It's been mostly ignored because there hasn't been any serious standardisation (say.. something like the standard headers in most languages, the common lisp standard is so small that nothing like that is part of it (scheme is a tad different but not by much)), or a very good compiler. I guess the most important reason is the fact that it has been slow to run (ok.. it still kind of is) it is getting better though. I really think all lisp needs is one really good toolchain (that's free).
Look deeper into the Windows docs, you'll see a lot of the structures have different versions (before and after a certain revision), lots of useless archaic API which never get updated (converted to call the new API)
Even more recent things like DirectX suffer from this (well.. recent compared to the win16/32 mess)
Many listings are outdated, some are blatantly wrong. It's also not well structured, and not everything is there.
It's also very hard to understand how things actually work from the API docs, I remember reading the window handler API docs to find some things out (2 weeks ago, was trying to implement a bugfix for wine) and I had to go look the API up elsewhere.
For anything big or more complex (or if you just don't remember things too well) MSDN isn't very good.
I may be being naive, but if it's as good as people say it is. Why won't the kernel team commit it?
What are the disadvantages to having more security in the kernel to begin with? If it were unstable I could understand (but.. I'm gathering that because it's secure it's also stable). There's also the little bit of then not having 1 developer handling it. As the new patches break it, it will slowly be updated before the next release and so on. I'm sure some kernel maintainer out there is interested in security.
They can make it optional, even if it's automatically off by default, it'd make things a lot simpler.
I normally wouldn't comment, on things like this but I feel I have to.
Honest politicians are very easy to attain. You just need a few things. 1, don't allow them to take campaign contriubtions from companies. 2, don't allow companies to be persons under the law but with no legal responsibilities (eg: you steal 10 million, you go to jail as if you stole it off an old lady (and you might well have)) (my favourite story in today's news.. Martha Steward telling people she'll help women start buisnesses if they keep her out of jail, that's ridiculous, she deserves jail, teach her a lesson.. but moving on)
What you need is to fix the way the gov't works in respect to companies and that problem might well be solved.
Getting rid of the patriot act isn't that hard either. Take to the streets and seriously protest it. If the Senators and Congressmen see thousands of people in every city in the streets waveing banners and wanting to have it repelled they will do so.
The last thing I want to say, I remember reading a comment on how terrorism doesn't change a country, internal dissent does. Terrorism has changed the US. I remember living in the US (now I live in Canada, still go visiting in the US) and I remember feeling proud and free. Today I don't anymore, a quick look at the new anti-terrorism laws will tell you why (there's also the bit of the US' image in the world, which is ridiculously bad (even in Canada and we're your ally))
Someone should explain that to CNN and other news stations. It seems that every time I look at anything on terrorism on CNN (which is quite rare) they talk about the train bombings in Spain. They say that the terrorists would maybe want to try something like that to get a change in government.
That's a huge mistake. Not on the terrorist part but on CNNs. The idea is that by keeping the current gov't (and if there were attacks, Bush would most likely get relected, remember what happened to his popularity after 9/11?). The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is creating more and more terrorists.
It's also going to give the current administration 4 more years to turn the US into a more totalitarian gov't. As we've seen from these laws and similar ones (abuses in Iraq, and foregin citizens (event a few US onse) held in Guantanamo bay without any right to legal advice, they denied having lists of who was there at one point) it's getting more and more totalitarian.
Bush is the greatest asset the terrorists have, and they'll try to get him reelected, unfortunately they'll probably succeed.
IBM is not serious about Linux.
Not yet anyway.
Sure they threw a little money at it. The facts remain, can I buy a Linux laptop from them in Canada? I've tried.. I called, I was told no.
On their website they still recommend Windows XP.
What do they use internally? Windows. Don't tell people to switch when you won't. It's ridiculous. It's like MS running everything on Linux but telling people to use Windows, they'd flop (I remember something like that in connection to Hotmail, and them using (or rather a company that works for them) BSD to protect their networks against attack)
Until IBM swtiches to Linux and actually lets people buy Linux computers (Home users I mean), or even some without Windows installed (It's really notebooks that irk me, I can't build those, no problem assembling my desktops but even those should be offered) they're simply being hyprocritcal.
So no... IBM has invested really almost nothing into Linux in comparison to their cash flow/reserves. Except for a few ads there's no real change.
There are many speculations that they are human creations. HIV, SARS etc.. Thank a scientist.
HIV/AIDS was first found in the 70s wasn't it?
I really don't think people had the technology for anything like that at the time. Even so, it's much more likely it is natural, I can't see how it was made by humans when monkeys have it naturally (which means it been around for a long time, so they've adapted)
Then agian Science can't explain how life forms(today), Science can't explain out of the billions of permutations that evolution requires why is there only one Intelligent species, Why hasn't another one exsisted? The probalities would say it should of happened.
Really.. I'd love to see the calculation for this one. The thing is, it's not a random occurance, that happens with very minor things. The real differences come from enviromental stresses, adaptation. Now... how likely is it that a creature with the required brain size and appendages would have been exposed to comparable enviromental pressures. Not only that, that it would have evolved twoards intelligence istead of going extinct, or that even if it did develop some form of intelligence it didn't die out.
It's very unlikely that something like this would happen.
Why Science does every corner of the planet have a belief about dragons of all various sizes, yet man was 62 million years to late for Dinosaures?
I remember these vague stories about something called reptiles. Maybe if you search on google you might find something...
On a serious note, they're everywhere, and it's easy to imagine a big one comming at you.
Somethings don't make sense, some need help from other points of view, and some never will. Expand your mind.
Expand your mind by accepting things on faith thereby ignoring any possible evidence. Sounds like the opposite. Also take note that there's no evidence that somet hings won't be explained, and a lot of things that didn't make sense 40000 years ago do today. I find it short sighted to think that just because we're at a certain stage in our development we shouldn't look forward and assume things will increase comparably (a lot faster too, because there are a lot more of us, and we all have more free time)
Agreed, but that's saying only Dell does this.
I've been looking to buy a laptop for myself over summer, and I can't find one without Windows installed.
I don't use Windows, and it's getting formatted over immediately. I don't want to contribute to MS by buying an XP license. I refuse to.
In all of Toronto (and I've been to a lot of computer stores) I can't find 1 decent laptop without Windows.
Is it a problem now? (I'd say yes)
Read today's Slashback
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/12/192322 6
They are not allowing pirates to install copes of SP2.
As for #1, it has to do with how much money they make. People would be weary of them if they discontinued products every week and never offered support again. RedHat is not a good example, open source so things can easily be patched up. MS needs to updated it's own code and release binaries.
What would people say if every 3 years MS told them to update or be faced with no support or any amount of minimal updates? They'd be angry and less likely to buy MS again.
Like many companies, MS simply wants to make money. That's the purpose of a publicaly traded company like MS, make money for shareholders and increase stock value. They're not going to do anything that they think will cause them to loose money (or in this case market dominance)
MS has repeatedly shown they simply don't do things that they can't get money from. Including acting without scrupules and abusing a monopoly. Nothing special, just your average moneymaking machine.
There are numerous articles around debunking the "many eyes" myth, but here's an executive summary:
* Almost no-one who uses OSS, even those who download the source and compile it themselves, actually reads the source in any detail first.
Yup, but as I said before, those who know how to and have the time (or a serious itch to scratch) will actually read the code and modify it for what they need. I've done it before numerous times (and still do), I couldn't do that with closed source software.
Doesn't matter that most people ignore it, those who don't take advantage of it and actually make important modifications.
* Most OSS projects are small, with a small number of contributors, and little or no formal review process.
Yup, small isn't bad. Most Windows software is made by small companies. And.. I've worked for larger companies, the review process is a lot worse than what I've seen in the open source world. There are good project leads that review things, and bad ones that don't. Same as in closed source. Just when it's open other people can see plainly what's going on.
* On larger OSS projects -- Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc. -- there are more people but also more code, and it's still unlikely than any individual piece of code is reviewed signficantly more often than in a good CSS development group.
Not necessarely. Might be for some projects, though how many companies have a good development group (most don't, even large companies) How many find bugs but never bother to fix them? or how many don't even know about some bugs (or are labeled live-with). I don't think it's possible to back up a statement like that with any proof (there isn't any, noone knows how many times a particular bit of kernel code has been looked over, or how competent one set of developers is compared to another)
* Of course it's easier to fix bugs after they happen, in the sense that anyone with the necessary background knowledge can do it. Of course, very few people have that background knowledge, and in practice most bugs in OSS projects are fixed by the original developers and/or specialist professional developers.
Look at the number of patches Debian or Gentoo keep in their trees because they haven't gotten around to submitting them to the original sources (or they haven't made it in a particular release). There's also the little fact that you can pay someone to add things to a particular project (bounties for example), and anyone can do it.
* Finally, the real security problem is how many bugs are there in the first place -- if you fix a bug but only after an exploit has taken down half the servers in the world, that's a bit late. OSS software -- even the big names like Linux and the popular networking tools -- consistently gets a similar number of critical bugs reported as CSS.
I'd like some real numbers on that one. Simlpy because I don't know them, and I have a suspicion as to how they got the numbers (comparing for example RedHat bugs to Windows bugs, that isn't a reflection of OSS software).
Also Linux is a kernel, and it depends if they were using the newest version of it, and if they didn't taint it (I suspect most of the bugs would be caused by other factors). A link to an article that contains this would be nice.
As for your Windows patches problems, I can only say that having used Windows for years, and been a sysadmin for several Windows-based and cross-platform systems, I've rarely if ever seen this terrible problem you describe. And if you think it's unique to Windows, hop over to the Red Hat support forum and look at the thread about RPM database corruption, where someone's insisting that it's "not a bug" if running an update on a perfectly valid system set-up shafts your package database.
RPM sucks, I'll give you that. RedHat isn't the ultimate in OSS, you can't compare just with it. How many problems have you had with apt or portage? I've used both extensivly and I've had 0.
... any claim that many eyes make for few bugs and thus OSS is fundamentally safer than Windows-based equivalents can be discredited with the slightest thought about reality rather than theory.
I'd like some proof of that? I can give plenty of proofs against it.
For example outstanding bugs in IE, they can be fixed when you have the source. Don't say that people don't fix bugs because most don't have the skills or the time, fact remains that a lot of people have access to the source and a few of those will fix the bugs because it affects them.
Linux is not security centered, I don't understand why people keep insisting it's the ultimate security tool. I use Linux.. I develop on it and I'm a developer for Gentoo so I'm not biased against it. I just know it's not the most secure thing, it is a a lot more secure than the Windows servers I've had to admin, because when bugs crop up MS can only fix them (and they tend to do a horrible job with those patches, most Windows computers I've repaired died due to patching)
For a real example of security check out OpenBSD.
Now tell me OSS isn't more secure than closed source alternatives.
1) I'm a developer on Gentoo 2) I develop a lot of open source software 3) I've been using Linux since 1997 and started to develop software at that time (I was 11 at the time)
The fact that it doesn't work everywhere is because it's not statically linked (sure it's huge, but it works everywhere). That's a design choice made by the developer.
Try compiling from source too, 1 source package for everything (I tend to never give out binaries except for Windows, no point Linux can compile it's own)
Binary compatible means it runs the same binary files (the same type as in Linux ELF or a.out and Windows MZ and PE so on) The kernel is the same, that's what determines binary compatibility. Libaries have nothing to do with that.
Now.. you also mentioned writing an installer to check for all the libs, I think you've tried the basic GNU configure before. Noone in their right minds is going to bundle binaries for everything, jsut tell you you're missing something. (again configure scripts nothign to rewrite)
Apart from GUI frontends the only real difference is the package management (yeah some scripts too like the init scripts so on, but that isn't pertinent)
The locations of the libs are given by pkg-config and many of them have standard locations that can be probed (again configure)
If you've had issues try debian or gentoo. You'll be pleasantly surprised. (no package management hell)
Slashdot Mirror
No, installation should not require root priviledges.
If I want to install say, SDL, on my school's unix servers so I can compile against it, do I go and ask the guy who runs the cluster of servers "Oh, please install SDL for me, please please please"? They'd be spending all their time installing every app everyone needs.
Only installing things for the whole system should require root.
I very much doubt this will help Windows security-wise. People won't sit there and read every time something asks for a password (and if 90% of things ask for them, you bet everyone will just type it in automatically).
Nix security is strong because so few programs ask for root, that when I see one, I either know the program, or quickly look it up.
They all counted, it's per-mission.
The Columbia's crash was STS-107, because that particular mission was supposed to happen in 2001, but kept getting delayed.
Which should tell you how well construction of the ISS is going. They have new modules ready, but no means of launching them.
The point is, there is no best window manager, or desktop manager.
I use Fluxbox, I install for some people gnome and for others KDE. Some prefer one, some the other, competition is NOT BAD! It's excellent, lets likeminded developers get togeather and do what they love, without fighting over little pointless things.
Oh, and the old mantra that you can throw more developers at an issue and get better results is very very false. If you had every gnome developer join KDE you would not have a doubling in patches/upgrades. If anything, development would slow down considerably, because of opposing views.
Funny you should mention filesystems and standards. You might want to look that up on google before you talk about a lack thereof. Here, I'll spare you the trouble:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
Maybe you want to read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for Linux? Quite a few distros respect it, some don't, but look at real world standards (IE7 and CSS is a great example).
XOrg/XFree86 had nothing to do with companies, at all. XFree86 development was preety stagntant, and people were always talking about upgrading/replacing it. The decision to change licences killed them because people didn't like it.
Ultimately, I like choice!
No..
/etc and the registry story.
It's a tad more stable, sure.
But it still dies very regularly. I repair computers for people in my building and around the university and windows is as crappy as it's always been.
Sure, it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, but every 10. The new spyware makes up for that. I see BSODs because of the old "OO, too many processes running" which is great. I've seen it BSOD after MS updates. I've seen it crash because of a program that I just installed, even a regular game can crash it. "Yes, but that's the programs fault" Right, a real OS should never crash because of what an unpriviledged userland program does.
"Oh, but Linux will have spyware when people use it" No it won't or at least not nearly as much.
Ever tried doing ps -A and killall -9 on a nix? Try the same on windows? Good luck, it won't let you on occasion. Or even better spyware may not even show up there. And let's not begin with the whole editing
Hidden settings can start the spyware right back up as soon as you kill it, I see that regularly. It comes with the turf when you're using closed source software, you can never know what windows is actually doing, hence you get spyware.
Windows is a disorganized mess, it's paying for it with spyware now. One day, it'll pay for it very highly when the next worm decides "Hey, Norton is running, better format before someone detects me."
You should be happy you're feeling safe with windows, simply because noone bothers to actually wreck your computer for you.
Read Kafka, The Trial.
The crossplatform comment is entirely untrue. Everything I write I make sure runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Writing crossplatform code, without a VM is trivial. I use C++ and C for this in general, well with haskell and scheme, but those can be compiled as well. Now.. the wrapper stuff, yeah, sure. But what exactly do you lose? Your OS is a wrapper by the way, that saves you from having to write ASM and developing drivers for interacting with every possible device every time. Foreign function interfaces can be designed to be just as fast as regular code, the language iterop issue that you mentioned. 1 function call that's inlined and most likely optimized by the compiler to a pulp will not take any overhead. SOAP has nothing to do with FFI, at all. It's a method of using the web to call functions on another computer (like launching a utility, for example MSN uses it to launch whiteboard). I'll assume the XML Web services falls in the same category.
Can't get much cheaper. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:
* How partition and disk structure works
* How GCC actually functions
* How the kernel is installed and configured
* At least something about runlevels and init scripts
This is definitely very untrue.
I've seen friends install Gentoo who have barely touched Linux. They've worked on a shell before, but that's it. Some of them don't particularly know what gcc is, much less how it works.
Do you? Do you need to know what a CFG is? or how lambda calculus and formal semantics work? No.. most people who use gcc have no clue about formal languages and compiler concepts.
I can assure you, nothing is needed in the way of runlevels or init. If you'll note, the guide tells them to use 5 for updating init scripts and it says they get run at startup.
For that matter, genkernel handles kernel installation and configuration. You don't need to know that either.
Getting a graphical installer is a great step for Gentoo. It's a very easy to use distro all in all. Save for some of the merging problems (etc-update should really not touch fstab unless there's a very good reason, but then again you can just say no)
You're doing the same thing that the grandfather post was complaining about. Just because more people use it doesn't mean everyone will dumb down.
Installing Gentoo right now goes something like this, get x86 install guide, follow to the letter, done! It requires very little knowledge all in all, so your point is invalid, all it does is scare people at this point. Not only that, it's a great candidate for automation.
How I think of it is this:
If I want a speed demon or something that's going to get really big (a large game that has OpenGL support + shaders for example), I'll use C++.
If I want something just so I can perfom a few quick tasks, and that I can carry around or just for showing people proof that a certain thing works, I'll use perl.
If I want something that works, I want it now, quick and dirty I'll do it in lisp. I say dirty because most people get lost with lisp so they can't read it at all.
It all depends on what I have to do, it's why I don't use java, I don't see a point or something lacking in what I do.
Lisp isn't ugly, I've been writing lisp programs for quite a bit of time now and it's both amazingly fast and entirely flexible. I can do anything with it, and faster then I possibly could in C/C++/perl (and I've been working with those for.. about 4 times longer)
I've found that after a little code-writing lisp becomes amazingly legible and simple to write.
It's been mostly ignored because there hasn't been any serious standardisation (say.. something like the standard headers in most languages, the common lisp standard is so small that nothing like that is part of it (scheme is a tad different but not by much)), or a very good compiler. I guess the most important reason is the fact that it has been slow to run (ok.. it still kind of is) it is getting better though. I really think all lisp needs is one really good toolchain (that's free).
He doesn't really,
Look deeper into the Windows docs, you'll see a lot of the structures have different versions (before and after a certain revision), lots of useless archaic API which never get updated (converted to call the new API)
Even more recent things like DirectX suffer from this (well.. recent compared to the win16/32 mess)
MSDN isn't a very good site for docs.
Many listings are outdated, some are blatantly wrong. It's also not well structured, and not everything is there.
It's also very hard to understand how things actually work from the API docs, I remember reading the window handler API docs to find some things out (2 weeks ago, was trying to implement a bugfix for wine) and I had to go look the API up elsewhere.
For anything big or more complex (or if you just don't remember things too well) MSDN isn't very good.
I may be being naive, but if it's as good as people say it is. Why won't the kernel team commit it?
What are the disadvantages to having more security in the kernel to begin with? If it were unstable I could understand (but.. I'm gathering that because it's secure it's also stable). There's also the little bit of then not having 1 developer handling it. As the new patches break it, it will slowly be updated before the next release and so on. I'm sure some kernel maintainer out there is interested in security.
They can make it optional, even if it's automatically off by default, it'd make things a lot simpler.
I normally wouldn't comment, on things like this but I feel I have to.
Honest politicians are very easy to attain. You just need a few things. 1, don't allow them to take campaign contriubtions from companies. 2, don't allow companies to be persons under the law but with no legal responsibilities (eg: you steal 10 million, you go to jail as if you stole it off an old lady (and you might well have)) (my favourite story in today's news.. Martha Steward telling people she'll help women start buisnesses if they keep her out of jail, that's ridiculous, she deserves jail, teach her a lesson.. but moving on)
What you need is to fix the way the gov't works in respect to companies and that problem might well be solved.
Getting rid of the patriot act isn't that hard either. Take to the streets and seriously protest it. If the Senators and Congressmen see thousands of people in every city in the streets waveing banners and wanting to have it repelled they will do so.
The last thing I want to say, I remember reading a comment on how terrorism doesn't change a country, internal dissent does. Terrorism has changed the US. I remember living in the US (now I live in Canada, still go visiting in the US) and I remember feeling proud and free. Today I don't anymore, a quick look at the new anti-terrorism laws will tell you why (there's also the bit of the US' image in the world, which is ridiculously bad (even in Canada and we're your ally))
Someone should explain that to CNN and other news stations. It seems that every time I look at anything on terrorism on CNN (which is quite rare) they talk about the train bombings in Spain. They say that the terrorists would maybe want to try something like that to get a change in government.
That's a huge mistake. Not on the terrorist part but on CNNs. The idea is that by keeping the current gov't (and if there were attacks, Bush would most likely get relected, remember what happened to his popularity after 9/11?). The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is creating more and more terrorists.
It's also going to give the current administration 4 more years to turn the US into a more totalitarian gov't. As we've seen from these laws and similar ones (abuses in Iraq, and foregin citizens (event a few US onse) held in Guantanamo bay without any right to legal advice, they denied having lists of who was there at one point) it's getting more and more totalitarian.
Bush is the greatest asset the terrorists have, and they'll try to get him reelected, unfortunately they'll probably succeed.
IBM is not serious about Linux. Not yet anyway. Sure they threw a little money at it. The facts remain, can I buy a Linux laptop from them in Canada? I've tried.. I called, I was told no. On their website they still recommend Windows XP. What do they use internally? Windows. Don't tell people to switch when you won't. It's ridiculous. It's like MS running everything on Linux but telling people to use Windows, they'd flop (I remember something like that in connection to Hotmail, and them using (or rather a company that works for them) BSD to protect their networks against attack) Until IBM swtiches to Linux and actually lets people buy Linux computers (Home users I mean), or even some without Windows installed (It's really notebooks that irk me, I can't build those, no problem assembling my desktops but even those should be offered) they're simply being hyprocritcal. So no... IBM has invested really almost nothing into Linux in comparison to their cash flow/reserves. Except for a few ads there's no real change.
There are many speculations that they are human creations. HIV, SARS etc.. Thank a scientist.
HIV/AIDS was first found in the 70s wasn't it?
I really don't think people had the technology for anything like that at the time. Even so, it's much more likely it is natural, I can't see how it was made by humans when monkeys have it naturally (which means it been around for a long time, so they've adapted)
Then agian Science can't explain how life forms(today), Science can't explain out of the billions of permutations that evolution requires why is there only one Intelligent species, Why hasn't another one exsisted? The probalities would say it should of happened.
Really.. I'd love to see the calculation for this one. The thing is, it's not a random occurance, that happens with very minor things. The real differences come from enviromental stresses, adaptation. Now... how likely is it that a creature with the required brain size and appendages would have been exposed to comparable enviromental pressures. Not only that, that it would have evolved twoards intelligence istead of going extinct, or that even if it did develop some form of intelligence it didn't die out.
It's very unlikely that something like this would happen.
Why Science does every corner of the planet have a belief about dragons of all various sizes, yet man was 62 million years to late for Dinosaures?
I remember these vague stories about something called reptiles. Maybe if you search on google you might find something... On a serious note, they're everywhere, and it's easy to imagine a big one comming at you.
Somethings don't make sense, some need help from other points of view, and some never will. Expand your mind.
Expand your mind by accepting things on faith thereby ignoring any possible evidence. Sounds like the opposite. Also take note that there's no evidence that somet hings won't be explained, and a lot of things that didn't make sense 40000 years ago do today. I find it short sighted to think that just because we're at a certain stage in our development we shouldn't look forward and assume things will increase comparably (a lot faster too, because there are a lot more of us, and we all have more free time)
Agreed, but that's saying only Dell does this. I've been looking to buy a laptop for myself over summer, and I can't find one without Windows installed. I don't use Windows, and it's getting formatted over immediately. I don't want to contribute to MS by buying an XP license. I refuse to. In all of Toronto (and I've been to a lot of computer stores) I can't find 1 decent laptop without Windows. Is it a problem now? (I'd say yes)
#2,
2 6
Read today's Slashback
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/12/19232
They are not allowing pirates to install copes of SP2.
As for #1, it has to do with how much money they make. People would be weary of them if they discontinued products every week and never offered support again. RedHat is not a good example, open source so things can easily be patched up. MS needs to updated it's own code and release binaries.
What would people say if every 3 years MS told them to update or be faced with no support or any amount of minimal updates? They'd be angry and less likely to buy MS again.
Like many companies, MS simply wants to make money. That's the purpose of a publicaly traded company like MS, make money for shareholders and increase stock value. They're not going to do anything that they think will cause them to loose money (or in this case market dominance)
MS has repeatedly shown they simply don't do things that they can't get money from. Including acting without scrupules and abusing a monopoly. Nothing special, just your average moneymaking machine.
Wine is not GPLed, it's under the LGPL. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html There's a big difference between the two licenses.
It does actually, and quite well. Only a few bugs here and there. Try a newer version of wine.
There are numerous articles around debunking the "many eyes" myth, but here's an executive summary: * Almost no-one who uses OSS, even those who download the source and compile it themselves, actually reads the source in any detail first.
Yup, but as I said before, those who know how to and have the time (or a serious itch to scratch) will actually read the code and modify it for what they need. I've done it before numerous times (and still do), I couldn't do that with closed source software.
Doesn't matter that most people ignore it, those who don't take advantage of it and actually make important modifications.
* Most OSS projects are small, with a small number of contributors, and little or no formal review process.
Yup, small isn't bad. Most Windows software is made by small companies. And.. I've worked for larger companies, the review process is a lot worse than what I've seen in the open source world. There are good project leads that review things, and bad ones that don't. Same as in closed source. Just when it's open other people can see plainly what's going on.
* On larger OSS projects -- Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc. -- there are more people but also more code, and it's still unlikely than any individual piece of code is reviewed signficantly more often than in a good CSS development group.
Not necessarely. Might be for some projects, though how many companies have a good development group (most don't, even large companies) How many find bugs but never bother to fix them? or how many don't even know about some bugs (or are labeled live-with). I don't think it's possible to back up a statement like that with any proof (there isn't any, noone knows how many times a particular bit of kernel code has been looked over, or how competent one set of developers is compared to another)
* Of course it's easier to fix bugs after they happen, in the sense that anyone with the necessary background knowledge can do it. Of course, very few people have that background knowledge, and in practice most bugs in OSS projects are fixed by the original developers and/or specialist professional developers.
Look at the number of patches Debian or Gentoo keep in their trees because they haven't gotten around to submitting them to the original sources (or they haven't made it in a particular release). There's also the little fact that you can pay someone to add things to a particular project (bounties for example), and anyone can do it.
* Finally, the real security problem is how many bugs are there in the first place -- if you fix a bug but only after an exploit has taken down half the servers in the world, that's a bit late. OSS software -- even the big names like Linux and the popular networking tools -- consistently gets a similar number of critical bugs reported as CSS.
I'd like some real numbers on that one. Simlpy because I don't know them, and I have a suspicion as to how they got the numbers (comparing for example RedHat bugs to Windows bugs, that isn't a reflection of OSS software). Also Linux is a kernel, and it depends if they were using the newest version of it, and if they didn't taint it (I suspect most of the bugs would be caused by other factors). A link to an article that contains this would be nice.
As for your Windows patches problems, I can only say that having used Windows for years, and been a sysadmin for several Windows-based and cross-platform systems, I've rarely if ever seen this terrible problem you describe. And if you think it's unique to Windows, hop over to the Red Hat support forum and look at the thread about RPM database corruption, where someone's insisting that it's "not a bug" if running an update on a perfectly valid system set-up shafts your package database.
RPM sucks, I'll give you that. RedHat isn't the ultimate in OSS, you can't compare just with it. How many problems have you had with apt or portage? I've used both extensivly and I've had 0.
... any claim that many eyes make for few bugs and thus OSS is fundamentally safer than Windows-based equivalents can be discredited with the slightest thought about reality rather than theory.
I'd like some proof of that? I can give plenty of proofs against it.
For example outstanding bugs in IE, they can be fixed when you have the source. Don't say that people don't fix bugs because most don't have the skills or the time, fact remains that a lot of people have access to the source and a few of those will fix the bugs because it affects them.
Linux is not security centered, I don't understand why people keep insisting it's the ultimate security tool. I use Linux.. I develop on it and I'm a developer for Gentoo so I'm not biased against it. I just know it's not the most secure thing, it is a a lot more secure than the Windows servers I've had to admin, because when bugs crop up MS can only fix them (and they tend to do a horrible job with those patches, most Windows computers I've repaired died due to patching)
For a real example of security check out OpenBSD.
Now tell me OSS isn't more secure than closed source alternatives.
I got the 'impression' because
1) I'm a developer on Gentoo
2) I develop a lot of open source software
3) I've been using Linux since 1997 and started to develop software at that time (I was 11 at the time)
The fact that it doesn't work everywhere is because it's not statically linked (sure it's huge, but it works everywhere). That's a design choice made by the developer.
Try compiling from source too, 1 source package for everything (I tend to never give out binaries except for Windows, no point Linux can compile it's own)
Binary compatible means it runs the same binary files (the same type as in Linux ELF or a.out and Windows MZ and PE so on) The kernel is the same, that's what determines binary compatibility. Libaries have nothing to do with that.
Now.. you also mentioned writing an installer to check for all the libs, I think you've tried the basic GNU configure before. Noone in their right minds is going to bundle binaries for everything, jsut tell you you're missing something. (again configure scripts nothign to rewrite)
Apart from GUI frontends the only real difference is the package management (yeah some scripts too like the init scripts so on, but that isn't pertinent)
The locations of the libs are given by pkg-config and many of them have standard locations that can be probed (again configure)
If you've had issues try debian or gentoo. You'll be pleasantly surprised. (no package management hell)