This is the wrong solution on many levels. Whether the solution to the ICANN problem is alternate registries is not up for discussion here. More relevant is the fact that browsers all suck. We don't need more "plugins" for already broken crash-prone browsers. We don't need a solution that makes what you can see from your browser different from what you can see from your terminal. The solution to this problem, if you want to use alternate registries, is to set up your own nameserver (takes anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes to do) and feed it the appropriate hints database so that your resolver library will ask the nameservers you choose. This is simple, it's orthogonal, and it's fast. No coding necessary, no browser involved. Doing this any other way is simply not sane.
Readily available commodity memory instead of some weird ass thing that costs as much as the system itself - reliable commodity memory I might add...
If it's so reliable why am I seeing about 5 times the failure rate for Sun's new-style peecee memory than I used to see with their 200-pin (published standard) not-quite-but-almost-commodity memory?
PCI is the standard, it's here to stay.
Pestilence, warfare, and strife are the standard, they're here to stay. Just because something is widespread doesn't mean it's desirable or that you can't do anything about it.
It's
cheaper than some oddball propietary solution.
Let's see...SBUS is an IEEE standard. Your definition of oddball might differ from mine, but since anyone can go buy the standard for 40 bucks or whatever and make as many compliant SBUS devices as they like royalty-free, I'd hardly say it's proprietary. What you really mean is that it doesn't have the Microsoft Good-For-Every-Home Seal of Approval on it. Because that's really the only non-technical difference.
...Sun's reputation for high-quality hardware...
Has in my and many of my colleagues' views been sliding badly ever since the introduction of the Ultra 5 and the corresponding shift in Sun's philosophy away from quality and toward price.
I bet
you don't like it because the "unwashed masses" can afford one so having it on your desk won't make you feel "special" anymore. Boohoo. Stop slamming
Sun just because their new product doesn't make you feel "31337" enough and keep on smoking whatever it is you're high on.
Be realistic. I don't care what other people have, I care what I have; if you want to pay the cooling bills you can all have a damn e10k in your living room for all I care. But the time is passing when decent workstations are available at all. It's not a bad thing that you can buy a Sun Peecee for 1000 bucks. If you don't want to spend more or don't need anything better than a peecee, it's actually good. But it is a bad thing that you can't buy a decent workstation at any price - because they are no longer being made. It's about choice, and Sun's (and SGI's, and others') fanatical low-cost-workstation philosophy is taking away choice. Sun's Blade 1000, the top-of-the-line system, contains commodity parts and is surprisingly poorly made. In 1990 a similarly manufactured system with the same relative power would have been considered a midrange workstation at best. But now, even if you are willing to spend twice that much, you find that you can't buy a better system, because nobody is making them anymore. The simple fact is that the product lines of most major vendors are heavily stacked toward the low end, and true high-end workstations are essentially unavailable.
If I just wanted a high-end workstation to feel "31337" then my ranting would be silly. But I consider the design and manufacture of a true high-end custom workstation something of a work of art. The entire process - from the silicon to the buses to the boards to the overall architecture to the design of the cases, slots, and other physical aspects - is - or was - a labor of love, an expression of the engineers' fantasies. They could put all the bells and whistles in, use new standards instead of everyone else's, and take a lot of risks because they were designing something that was supposed to be fundamentally new and different, and better than anyone else's. The design criteria were performance, elegance, and innovation. Cost was never a factor because there will always be people who need so much computing power that they will pay almost any price to get the best available.
Now tell, how many machines are designed that way today? When you think about it, doesn't it seem at least a little sad that building a high-end workstation is becoming a lost art?
the idea that the connection of a particular OS to the internet has adversely affected it from a non-technical standpoint is absurd
Really? You don't think the tools people design and use reflect their philosophy? An odd view indeed. I'm willing to bet any decent anthropologist or philosopher will dispute that.
What the hell is an "internet supporting OS"?
Remember passing around floppies that contained "winsock.dll"? If it doesn't support IP out of the box, it doesn't support the internet. Grafting it on after realizing you're 10 years behind the competition doesn't count.
In addition, I didn't realize it was beneficial to the net for every machine to have every possible internet-related daemon/service running by default. Actually, I thought the exact opposite was true...
In our post-September times, you are right. Once, though, when people didn't have to worry about the millions of skript kiddies, thieves, and other hooligans on the net (that, or maybe everyone on the net was a hooligan of some sort), most machines ran every service they could support. Even rexd.
an ultra 5 with a gray case. IDE disks, check. Peecee memory, check. Integrated PCI controller chipset, check. Low-end graphics, check. Save your money and buy a Blade 1000, kids. This one's not worth it unless you think the cute little Sun logo and a few pieces of sexy-looking gray and purple plastic are worth 500 bucks. It's a little better than a 5 (and will kill the market for them) but it's still a peecee. Now that the U2 has been discontinued, Sun no longer makes a system I would want - though I would probably use a Blade 1000 if someone gave me one, which is more than I can say for this hunk of junk.
The Internet has *always* been a peer-to-peer network, from day one. Only for a brief period of about 5 years in the mid-90s when a large number of non-wealthy new users came on board and were forced to live without bandwidth was this not the case. If you look at the design of the protocols, and the way the internet actually works, it's fairly obvious to me that it was always fundamentally designed to be peer-to-peer. Not in the hip new let's-steal-music way, but in the sense that every machine would function as both a client and a server. Remember when every machine ran telnetd? When there were no firewalls? When "PPP" meant going to the bathroom? This ain't new, folks.
But I did like it better when peer-to-peer meant the Internet was a community, not just a place to steal stuff and run DoS attacks on irc servers. The model didn't really break until people started being allowed on the Internet without an Internet-supporting OS. They never joined the community, just babbled senselessly and joined AOL in droves. It's amazing how well their OS reflects their attitude and behaviour - no services provided, but a client for everything. Take, take, take, give nothing. That's peer-to-peer? Fuck this noise.
1. Microsoft isn't looking to increase its mind share or product awareness. Solaris and QNX are products that, once you try them, you might like them enough to include them in your business. I don't think the same can be said for anything from Microsoft, and in any case the odds are pretty good that your business is already stuck with them.
2. The target markets are different. When you market a product like QNX or Solaris, you are marketing reliability and performance, qualities that appeal mainly to commercial customers. Keeping track of and billing non-commercial customers, given their number, is not cost-effective, especially given the mindshare issue (see (1)). Microsoft, on the other hand, targets the non-commercial user as much as anyone. They make an insane amount of money forcing everyone who buys a peecee to buy a license for some version or other of their products. Giving it away makes no sense since they've already got the squeeze on everyone.
If it's all that easy, then quit bitching and compile mozilla yourself.
Ah, if only Mozilla didn't suck so much ass. Sure, I've built it in the past; try it every few months to see if they've gotten it working. Hasn't happened yet.
There's a difference between running 20-year-old hardware and software and running current, modern software on current, modern hardware that doesn't happen to fit the Fortune 10's idea of what you should be using. When my Sun is 20 years old, I won't expect any support for it either. But I think it's not unreasonable to expect it now.
It's not identical, and it's not always as easy as "make".
It *IS* identical, and it *IS* as easy as typing make, at least it is if you already support big-endian targets, which Netscape does. Look, Netscape supports SPARC. It supports Linux. They've been supported together in the past. Furthermore, sparc-linux and i386-linux are 100% compatible for standards-compliant userland code. Therefore, there is no excuse for not supporting it now.
Get stuffed. Anyone who uses the word "kewl" is a fucking moron. I'm just a wee bit older than 12, see. As a professional admin, I see lots of systems and lots of OSs, and I have yet to find anything as reliable and well-built as Sun hardware. From that basis, I choose my operating systems as appropriate - OBSD for the firewall, Solaris for the NFS server, and Linux for my personal workstations...this is a reasonable and intelligent approach and is not to be mocked.
Likewise it is reasonable to expect that if one architecture is supported with a given OS, then any architecture should be supported with that OS. The *ONLY* difference between sparc-linux and ix86-linux is the endianness. EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE PROGRAMMER INTERFACE IS IDENTICAL. THE SAME BUILD ENVIRONMENT, LIBRARIES, AND SYSTEM CALLS ARE AVAILABLE, WITH THE SAME SEMANTICS. Therefore there is absolutely no reason for AOL not to provide a binary - unsupported is fine - for this platform.
Well, if you want easily available software, use a mainstream system, it's that
easy.
With the single exception of Navigator, every piece of software I want is distributed in source form, so it's never an issue. And besides, this *IS* a mainstream system, sufficiently so that NS6 was made available for it first. In porting software, it's the OS that makes the difference, not the architecture. Only very badly written software will break moving across architectures within an OS.
I don't really know why I respond to trolls like this, but it pisses me off to have children mock the decisions I make. If you like Windows or Peecees or the as400-ibm-penix platform, I don't care - you won't hear me try to convince you that it sucks, because it's not my fucking problem. In the same fashion, I don't think it's too much to ask that you either contribute intelligently to a discussion on cross-platform interoperability or stay the hell out of here and go back to playing Starcraft.
Frankly, I don't *want* massive Java/Flash/DXQRCIHTML/XML/super-special effects-enabled web sites. I just want the damn content. Text, and the ability to display PNG and JPG graphics. That's really all I need or want.
It's not about market share, it's about standards compliance. If your web site follows the standards as written, and the browsers do the same, you can reach the largest audience possible. It's in everyone's best interest to follow these standards.
for me to upgrade my browser. Netscape hasn't supported sparc*-sun-linux since 4.51. Someone, please tell me, how am I to upgrade to NS6 when AOL can't be bothered to telnet over to their sparclinux system and type make for me? I'd very much like to rid myself of this down-rev, POS browser and get something that looks like the authors have at least heard of the W3C. But until either AOL gets its collective head out of its collective ass, or Mozilla runs for more than 10 seconds between crashes, I can't, really...
Let's face it most linux development is done on 32 bit little endian. And quite a lot of people do not
recheck their stuff for endian issues.
And virtually all of those people are the hotshot intel developers. Almost never do I see a non-endian-clean patch from the MIPS or SPARC crowds. They're all from the i386/ia64 people. So if the kernel has an endianness problem you can bet good money where it came from. This is absolutely not the reason patches for (some) big-endian platforms get rejected.
It costs this, it costs that. So what? There's an easy solution: drop windows. Failing that, put a statement into your new hire/contractor terms of employment agreement to the effect that:
It is company policy not to open electronic mail messages containing attachments, or to receive or transmit electronic messages of a non-work-related nature. It is agreed by all parties that violating this policy will result in immediate dismissal.
That is, if you define Linux as "the Linux industry." The decisions Linus makes are often based on the idea of making what Linus considers a better, cleaner piece of code. In business, it's much more profitable to build and release pieces of code that are impossible to maintain and badly integrated with the rest of the project so long as they provide the feature of the week that customers crave. I don't necessarily agree with every decision that Linus makes about what's technically best, but it's his OS, not mine, and so he can make whatever choices he damn well pleases. This product bears his name, not Red Hat's or Oracle's or SGI's. The choices are his to make, and he may make them using whatever criteria he may choose. And if those choices happen to make the stock kernel less saleable for the Industry, tough luck.
This is typically argued three ways: Linus is killing Linux by insisting on certain kinds of changes that generally leave out the things the Industry wants. The Industry is killing Linux by forking off and releasing all kinds of weird patches, many of which don't work as advertised (probably why Linus rejected them), and giving Linux a bad name when in fact their products are not Linux any more than any hacker's mangled, broken source tree is Linux. Nobody is killing Linux because the entire process is demonstrating the strengths of the open development model that's so hip today.
To be honest, I consider a fourth argument more accurate: Linus is killing Linux by proxy; he is actually accepting too many patches. The kind of patches that are needed are things like the PCI rewrite and Softnet and Netfilter. To me there is no similar effort more important than analogous rewrites for the block and scsi layers, with a FreeBSD-style VM close behind. Therefore, no major patches should be accepted until that work is done and has been tested. To continue all kinds of unrelated development when much of the core code is in total disarray, a mess of hacks and black magic that break half the time, is simply foolish. The 2.5 series should be dedicated to three major points: Dead code removal, major structural overhauls with substantial and rigorous testing, and a complete and systematic review of all existing code to ensure that it is using the most up-to-date and efficient ways of doing things (ie make sure that drivers aren't using the back-compatibility PCI cruft, then remove the cruft). This would result in a 3.0.0 that contains not one new feature, and probably would have fewer drivers since unmaintained drivers would be dropped completely from the codebase. But the tarball you download would probably be 20-30% smaller, and the entire system would be much more reliable and predictable. The greatest advantage is that 3.x would have a solid foundation to build on, free of back-compatibility cruft, broken code, dead code, unmaintained code, spaghetti code, and all other manner of obnoxiousness. The interfaces specified during the rewrites would be considered fixed (ie minor bugfixes are ok but no rewrites no matter how clever the idea) for the entire major version (as opposed to the current plan to preserve them only within a minor version). This gives some stability to the project and helps industry, as well as independent hackers who have to maintain code.
Many smaller businesses can barely afford an in-house guy who can
setup Windows.
If you can't afford a technical staff (of size appropriate to the size of your infrastructure) to manage your systems then you cannot afford the systems. TCO was a buzzword, but the concept is 100% sound - the maintenance and administration costs are part of the machines and are not optional.
If an inhouse open-source programming team is considered essential then I guess I can't use open source.
Well, think of it this way - do problems get fixed faster (in the complete absence of such an inhouse team) using Free or binary-only software? It's a legitimate question; I suspect it strongly depends on the specifics of the software in question. There are very responsive and very unresponsive maintainers in both camps. So I don't really think the maintenance team is necessary, especially for smaller firms. It's only necessary if your organization can't stand any down time at all. And I suspect that anybody in that position can afford a maintainer or two. Bear in mind that if you go with a proprietary solution you're likely looking at high service contract costs there as well. So I think overall you misinterpreted my assessment; we weren't really talking about smaller companies here anyway.
Who gives a rat's ass whose fault a problem is? Assigning blame doesn't get it fixed any faster. Yes, it's nice to be able to tell your boss that the problem is an OS bug or an app bug or in some way a bug that wasn't your fault. But that still doesn't fix it. To get your operation back up and running as quickly as possible, you need two things:
The source to the faulty software, and
A person or small team with good debugging skills and knowledge of the software you use
The best way to get (1) is to use Free Software. The best way to get (2) is to hire an appropriate number of experienced systems administrators and Free Software developers to your internal staff. Why? Well, if you go through a commercial support vendor, you'll have the same problems as with any other technical support - your trouble ticket has to work its way up the chain to the people who actually understand it, the people answering the phones usually have virtually no ability to understand the problem, and the back-and-forth is time-consuming. The cost, assuming you have a reasonably large installation, isn't going to be any less than the in-house contracts anyway. So is it worth the extra time to get back up to be able to "blame" somebody if something doesn't work? Not when you're losing money while a phone monkey at Joe's Linux Support asks you to repeat, for the third time, just what exactly isn't working with your SCSI controller.
These guys need to learn to appeal to everyone in the nation.
In fact they do not. By virtue of the electoral college system, they could easily win - or give themselves the opportunity to win - by appealing to a region or a specific demographic concentrated in certain states. For example, one could concentrate on urban voters, winning some of the states with the greatest urban populations. Or, one could appeal to agricultural states, or states near your home. Whatever. In fact, in the past most candidates were regional candidates. In this election, as well, the patterns are very clear; urban voters fell for Gore's lies and rural voters fell for Bush's lies.
All that said, the original poster was dead-on right: nobody in either of the major parties gives a rat's ass about anything but holding onto the reins of power. This situation, of course, is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution hoped to avoid by limiting the power of the federal government so much that nobody would go on a power trip over it.
The reality is that you can thank Abraham Lincoln for all of this. It wasn't until he decided that there existed a pressing need to keep the union together (in spite of the fact that the neither the union nor the confederate states really wanted to be together) that the states were really subjugated. I am saying that the vast majority of Americans (depending on when slavery would have ended in the confederacy, maybe all Americans including CSA citizens) would be much better off today had the CSA won. Fun to play What If, isn't it?
It's more interesting to me how states' rights issues seem to come up only at election time now. Nobody even bothers questioning any more the numerous Constitutional violations that go on day to day and are propagated by all levels of the federal government, but suddenly when we go to count votes nobody is willing to ignore the Constitution. I haven't any real idea why this is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the wrong solution on many levels. Whether the solution to the ICANN problem is alternate registries is not up for discussion here. More relevant is the fact that browsers all suck. We don't need more "plugins" for already broken crash-prone browsers. We don't need a solution that makes what you can see from your browser different from what you can see from your terminal. The solution to this problem, if you want to use alternate registries, is to set up your own nameserver (takes anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes to do) and feed it the appropriate hints database so that your resolver library will ask the nameservers you choose. This is simple, it's orthogonal, and it's fast. No coding necessary, no browser involved. Doing this any other way is simply not sane.
If it's so reliable why am I seeing about 5 times the failure rate for Sun's new-style peecee memory than I used to see with their 200-pin (published standard) not-quite-but-almost-commodity memory?
PCI is the standard, it's here to stay.
Pestilence, warfare, and strife are the standard, they're here to stay. Just because something is widespread doesn't mean it's desirable or that you can't do anything about it.
It's cheaper than some oddball propietary solution.
Let's see...SBUS is an IEEE standard. Your definition of oddball might differ from mine, but since anyone can go buy the standard for 40 bucks or whatever and make as many compliant SBUS devices as they like royalty-free, I'd hardly say it's proprietary. What you really mean is that it doesn't have the Microsoft Good-For-Every-Home Seal of Approval on it. Because that's really the only non-technical difference.
Has in my and many of my colleagues' views been sliding badly ever since the introduction of the Ultra 5 and the corresponding shift in Sun's philosophy away from quality and toward price.
I bet you don't like it because the "unwashed masses" can afford one so having it on your desk won't make you feel "special" anymore. Boohoo. Stop slamming Sun just because their new product doesn't make you feel "31337" enough and keep on smoking whatever it is you're high on.
Be realistic. I don't care what other people have, I care what I have; if you want to pay the cooling bills you can all have a damn e10k in your living room for all I care. But the time is passing when decent workstations are available at all. It's not a bad thing that you can buy a Sun Peecee for 1000 bucks. If you don't want to spend more or don't need anything better than a peecee, it's actually good. But it is a bad thing that you can't buy a decent workstation at any price - because they are no longer being made. It's about choice, and Sun's (and SGI's, and others') fanatical low-cost-workstation philosophy is taking away choice. Sun's Blade 1000, the top-of-the-line system, contains commodity parts and is surprisingly poorly made. In 1990 a similarly manufactured system with the same relative power would have been considered a midrange workstation at best. But now, even if you are willing to spend twice that much, you find that you can't buy a better system, because nobody is making them anymore. The simple fact is that the product lines of most major vendors are heavily stacked toward the low end, and true high-end workstations are essentially unavailable.
If I just wanted a high-end workstation to feel "31337" then my ranting would be silly. But I consider the design and manufacture of a true high-end custom workstation something of a work of art. The entire process - from the silicon to the buses to the boards to the overall architecture to the design of the cases, slots, and other physical aspects - is - or was - a labor of love, an expression of the engineers' fantasies. They could put all the bells and whistles in, use new standards instead of everyone else's, and take a lot of risks because they were designing something that was supposed to be fundamentally new and different, and better than anyone else's. The design criteria were performance, elegance, and innovation. Cost was never a factor because there will always be people who need so much computing power that they will pay almost any price to get the best available.
Now tell, how many machines are designed that way today? When you think about it, doesn't it seem at least a little sad that building a high-end workstation is becoming a lost art?
Really? You don't think the tools people design and use reflect their philosophy? An odd view indeed. I'm willing to bet any decent anthropologist or philosopher will dispute that.
What the hell is an "internet supporting OS"?
Remember passing around floppies that contained "winsock.dll"? If it doesn't support IP out of the box, it doesn't support the internet. Grafting it on after realizing you're 10 years behind the competition doesn't count.
In addition, I didn't realize it was beneficial to the net for every machine to have every possible internet-related daemon/service running by default. Actually, I thought the exact opposite was true...
In our post-September times, you are right. Once, though, when people didn't have to worry about the millions of skript kiddies, thieves, and other hooligans on the net (that, or maybe everyone on the net was a hooligan of some sort), most machines ran every service they could support. Even rexd.
an ultra 5 with a gray case. IDE disks, check. Peecee memory, check. Integrated PCI controller chipset, check. Low-end graphics, check. Save your money and buy a Blade 1000, kids. This one's not worth it unless you think the cute little Sun logo and a few pieces of sexy-looking gray and purple plastic are worth 500 bucks. It's a little better than a 5 (and will kill the market for them) but it's still a peecee. Now that the U2 has been discontinued, Sun no longer makes a system I would want - though I would probably use a Blade 1000 if someone gave me one, which is more than I can say for this hunk of junk.
The Internet has *always* been a peer-to-peer network, from day one. Only for a brief period of about 5 years in the mid-90s when a large number of non-wealthy new users came on board and were forced to live without bandwidth was this not the case. If you look at the design of the protocols, and the way the internet actually works, it's fairly obvious to me that it was always fundamentally designed to be peer-to-peer. Not in the hip new let's-steal-music way, but in the sense that every machine would function as both a client and a server. Remember when every machine ran telnetd? When there were no firewalls? When "PPP" meant going to the bathroom? This ain't new, folks. But I did like it better when peer-to-peer meant the Internet was a community, not just a place to steal stuff and run DoS attacks on irc servers. The model didn't really break until people started being allowed on the Internet without an Internet-supporting OS. They never joined the community, just babbled senselessly and joined AOL in droves. It's amazing how well their OS reflects their attitude and behaviour - no services provided, but a client for everything. Take, take, take, give nothing. That's peer-to-peer? Fuck this noise.
No way, man, that site is funny as hell. And besides, there are even women in several of them.
It would be surprising, for two reasons:
1. Microsoft isn't looking to increase its mind share or product awareness. Solaris and QNX are products that, once you try them, you might like them enough to include them in your business. I don't think the same can be said for anything from Microsoft, and in any case the odds are pretty good that your business is already stuck with them.
2. The target markets are different. When you market a product like QNX or Solaris, you are marketing reliability and performance, qualities that appeal mainly to commercial customers. Keeping track of and billing non-commercial customers, given their number, is not cost-effective, especially given the mindshare issue (see (1)). Microsoft, on the other hand, targets the non-commercial user as much as anyone. They make an insane amount of money forcing everyone who buys a peecee to buy a license for some version or other of their products. Giving it away makes no sense since they've already got the squeeze on everyone.
Ah, if only Mozilla didn't suck so much ass. Sure, I've built it in the past; try it every few months to see if they've gotten it working. Hasn't happened yet.
There's a difference between running 20-year-old hardware and software and running current, modern software on current, modern hardware that doesn't happen to fit the Fortune 10's idea of what you should be using. When my Sun is 20 years old, I won't expect any support for it either. But I think it's not unreasonable to expect it now.
It *IS* identical, and it *IS* as easy as typing make, at least it is if you already support big-endian targets, which Netscape does. Look, Netscape supports SPARC. It supports Linux. They've been supported together in the past. Furthermore, sparc-linux and i386-linux are 100% compatible for standards-compliant userland code. Therefore, there is no excuse for not supporting it now.
Now see, that's funny. Starting a post with "Gee, I'm kewl..." is not. Some people just don't know how to poke fun properly. :-)
Get stuffed. Anyone who uses the word "kewl" is a fucking moron. I'm just a wee bit older than 12, see. As a professional admin, I see lots of systems and lots of OSs, and I have yet to find anything as reliable and well-built as Sun hardware. From that basis, I choose my operating systems as appropriate - OBSD for the firewall, Solaris for the NFS server, and Linux for my personal workstations...this is a reasonable and intelligent approach and is not to be mocked.
Likewise it is reasonable to expect that if one architecture is supported with a given OS, then any architecture should be supported with that OS. The *ONLY* difference between sparc-linux and ix86-linux is the endianness. EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THE PROGRAMMER INTERFACE IS IDENTICAL. THE SAME BUILD ENVIRONMENT, LIBRARIES, AND SYSTEM CALLS ARE AVAILABLE, WITH THE SAME SEMANTICS. Therefore there is absolutely no reason for AOL not to provide a binary - unsupported is fine - for this platform.
Well, if you want easily available software, use a mainstream system, it's that easy.
With the single exception of Navigator, every piece of software I want is distributed in source form, so it's never an issue. And besides, this *IS* a mainstream system, sufficiently so that NS6 was made available for it first. In porting software, it's the OS that makes the difference, not the architecture. Only very badly written software will break moving across architectures within an OS.
I don't really know why I respond to trolls like this, but it pisses me off to have children mock the decisions I make. If you like Windows or Peecees or the as400-ibm-penix platform, I don't care - you won't hear me try to convince you that it sucks, because it's not my fucking problem. In the same fashion, I don't think it's too much to ask that you either contribute intelligently to a discussion on cross-platform interoperability or stay the hell out of here and go back to playing Starcraft.
It's not about market share, it's about standards compliance. If your web site follows the standards as written, and the browsers do the same, you can reach the largest audience possible. It's in everyone's best interest to follow these standards.
Um...why? It's a dual-processor Ultra 2. Very fast, with fast 24-bit graphics. Why *not* run X on it?
Wrong, IRIX is very current, at least 4.75 is available and I have no reason to believe full support for 6 won't happen.
for me to upgrade my browser. Netscape hasn't supported sparc*-sun-linux since 4.51. Someone, please tell me, how am I to upgrade to NS6 when AOL can't be bothered to telnet over to their sparclinux system and type make for me? I'd very much like to rid myself of this down-rev, POS browser and get something that looks like the authors have at least heard of the W3C. But until either AOL gets its collective head out of its collective ass, or Mozilla runs for more than 10 seconds between crashes, I can't, really...
No, I suggest "SSHsucks," with the subsequent registration of sshsucks.org.
And virtually all of those people are the hotshot intel developers. Almost never do I see a non-endian-clean patch from the MIPS or SPARC crowds. They're all from the i386/ia64 people. So if the kernel has an endianness problem you can bet good money where it came from. This is absolutely not the reason patches for (some) big-endian platforms get rejected.
It costs this, it costs that. So what? There's an easy solution: drop windows. Failing that, put a statement into your new hire/contractor terms of employment agreement to the effect that:
It is company policy not to open electronic mail messages containing attachments, or to receive or transmit electronic messages of a non-work-related nature. It is agreed by all parties that violating this policy will result in immediate dismissal.
1. Become root (choose your favourite exploit).
2. insmod fuck-vmware.o
3. Proceed to read and/or write all the address space your heart desires.
The entire idea is ridiculous. Nothing can be as secure as having separate networks, except not having secrets.
This is typically argued three ways: Linus is killing Linux by insisting on certain kinds of changes that generally leave out the things the Industry wants. The Industry is killing Linux by forking off and releasing all kinds of weird patches, many of which don't work as advertised (probably why Linus rejected them), and giving Linux a bad name when in fact their products are not Linux any more than any hacker's mangled, broken source tree is Linux. Nobody is killing Linux because the entire process is demonstrating the strengths of the open development model that's so hip today.
To be honest, I consider a fourth argument more accurate: Linus is killing Linux by proxy; he is actually accepting too many patches. The kind of patches that are needed are things like the PCI rewrite and Softnet and Netfilter. To me there is no similar effort more important than analogous rewrites for the block and scsi layers, with a FreeBSD-style VM close behind. Therefore, no major patches should be accepted until that work is done and has been tested. To continue all kinds of unrelated development when much of the core code is in total disarray, a mess of hacks and black magic that break half the time, is simply foolish. The 2.5 series should be dedicated to three major points: Dead code removal, major structural overhauls with substantial and rigorous testing, and a complete and systematic review of all existing code to ensure that it is using the most up-to-date and efficient ways of doing things (ie make sure that drivers aren't using the back-compatibility PCI cruft, then remove the cruft). This would result in a 3.0.0 that contains not one new feature, and probably would have fewer drivers since unmaintained drivers would be dropped completely from the codebase. But the tarball you download would probably be 20-30% smaller, and the entire system would be much more reliable and predictable. The greatest advantage is that 3.x would have a solid foundation to build on, free of back-compatibility cruft, broken code, dead code, unmaintained code, spaghetti code, and all other manner of obnoxiousness. The interfaces specified during the rewrites would be considered fixed (ie minor bugfixes are ok but no rewrites no matter how clever the idea) for the entire major version (as opposed to the current plan to preserve them only within a minor version). This gives some stability to the project and helps industry, as well as independent hackers who have to maintain code.
If you can't afford a technical staff (of size appropriate to the size of your infrastructure) to manage your systems then you cannot afford the systems. TCO was a buzzword, but the concept is 100% sound - the maintenance and administration costs are part of the machines and are not optional.
If an inhouse open-source programming team is considered essential then I guess I can't use open source.
Well, think of it this way - do problems get fixed faster (in the complete absence of such an inhouse team) using Free or binary-only software? It's a legitimate question; I suspect it strongly depends on the specifics of the software in question. There are very responsive and very unresponsive maintainers in both camps. So I don't really think the maintenance team is necessary, especially for smaller firms. It's only necessary if your organization can't stand any down time at all. And I suspect that anybody in that position can afford a maintainer or two. Bear in mind that if you go with a proprietary solution you're likely looking at high service contract costs there as well. So I think overall you misinterpreted my assessment; we weren't really talking about smaller companies here anyway.
The best way to get (1) is to use Free Software. The best way to get (2) is to hire an appropriate number of experienced systems administrators and Free Software developers to your internal staff. Why? Well, if you go through a commercial support vendor, you'll have the same problems as with any other technical support - your trouble ticket has to work its way up the chain to the people who actually understand it, the people answering the phones usually have virtually no ability to understand the problem, and the back-and-forth is time-consuming. The cost, assuming you have a reasonably large installation, isn't going to be any less than the in-house contracts anyway. So is it worth the extra time to get back up to be able to "blame" somebody if something doesn't work? Not when you're losing money while a phone monkey at Joe's Linux Support asks you to repeat, for the third time, just what exactly isn't working with your SCSI controller.
In fact they do not. By virtue of the electoral college system, they could easily win - or give themselves the opportunity to win - by appealing to a region or a specific demographic concentrated in certain states. For example, one could concentrate on urban voters, winning some of the states with the greatest urban populations. Or, one could appeal to agricultural states, or states near your home. Whatever. In fact, in the past most candidates were regional candidates. In this election, as well, the patterns are very clear; urban voters fell for Gore's lies and rural voters fell for Bush's lies.
All that said, the original poster was dead-on right: nobody in either of the major parties gives a rat's ass about anything but holding onto the reins of power. This situation, of course, is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution hoped to avoid by limiting the power of the federal government so much that nobody would go on a power trip over it.
The reality is that you can thank Abraham Lincoln for all of this. It wasn't until he decided that there existed a pressing need to keep the union together (in spite of the fact that the neither the union nor the confederate states really wanted to be together) that the states were really subjugated. I am saying that the vast majority of Americans (depending on when slavery would have ended in the confederacy, maybe all Americans including CSA citizens) would be much better off today had the CSA won. Fun to play What If, isn't it?
It's more interesting to me how states' rights issues seem to come up only at election time now. Nobody even bothers questioning any more the numerous Constitutional violations that go on day to day and are propagated by all levels of the federal government, but suddenly when we go to count votes nobody is willing to ignore the Constitution. I haven't any real idea why this is.
Oh, I thought you meant, for the whole company.