apt and rpm are rather young. There is an actual POSIX draft for a UNIX package. Though I do not know anyone using it;-)
I kinda doubt the commerical unicies are using it, but even they have package management. HP/UX has swinstall, swremove, swlist. Solaris has pkgadd, pkginfo, pkgrm, and so on. Basically unix has plenty of prior art out there that M$ is just trying to copy. Think of it in their usual terms...it's simply embrace and extend.
Now only if the patent office would be as anal as they were under Jefferson we wouldn't have all of these stupid patents floating around anyway.
I honestly have no idea why/. cares about such a topic. Honestly I don't care too much, but considering I work at a mutual fund company and our IT budget is set according to projections on how well the market is doing, I figure I'd better go buy the equipment I need for the rest of the year before they slash the budget like they did last year (3 times).
Anyway, news about the stock market here is a bit off-topic and out of place. Yeah it has bearings on our jobs and the kewl stuff that tech companies may or may not develop. But in the long run, who cares? The market will always need some sort of correction, short term is sucks, long term it's a good thing (TM).:-) Heck, I didn't know that the market took a big dump until I walked through our customer service area and saw the customer service reps going nuts on the phones and saw the call board with a backlog of callers. Back in the IT area it was just business as usual.
If the system is anonymous, then it seems that anyone could malign a minor with impunity, with almost certianty as to their safety in doing so. What mechanisms would be in place to ensure that the system does not turn into a way to earn money via libel?
If that is truely the case, and you are anonymous, I can see major abuse in the system, and kids using this as another way to torment those students who aren't a part of the "in crowd." Pretty much from K to 12 I kept to myself and didn't deal much with my peers. In fact, I was grateful to make it to college and get away from those people. My life has been much better since, and I have my cadre of geek friends.
Had this system been in place back when I was in High School and where anyone can call in and say that I was depressed or whatever, I know that this would scar me for life. Let alone the thoughts of revenge would have been running through my mind more. Even with the immense amount of shit I was given on a daily basis back then, at least I could take comfort that they were only words from stupid people, and easily dismissed. If this system was in place, being tramutized by profiling and counseling that I didn't need, I would have honestly considered harsher methods of revenge. It wouldn't be something that I could have easily shrugged off. And then the media would have something else to report on, then the system would be tightened and then the spiral continues. *sigh*
Micro$oft not a monopoly? Only in their eyes...
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 4
Microsoft complained that "this case was rushed to trial in four months" and that the findings of fact released last year did not support the Department of Justice's claim that Microsoft had misused a monopoly.
I don't remember this case being "rushed to trial" in fact it seemed to take forever for this case to get moving, let alone all of the delays M$ threw at the DOJ/State Attorny Generals.
In fact I read half of the Findings of Fact, I've still got to finish that 200 page document...damn good reading. I can't see given the findings of fact, how M$ can claim that the document didn't show they were a monopoly. I'm going to curl up with Judge Jacksons's Conclusions, and sit back and watch the appeals and the other lawsuits that are opened up due to this ruling. All I can say is "Burn Micro$oft, Burn!" You get what you deserved. Let's hope that the punishment is as stiff as Judge Jackson's Finding of Facts document was worded.
Heck even if Judge Jackson only slaps them on the wrist with something as minor as not being allowed to preannounce hardware/software, they'd be royally screwed. Think of it, who would want to buy something called an X-Box when they could have a Playstation 3? I'll take the Playstation, at least all of the games I've currently got for the Playstation 1 will work on the 3, but much better...:-)
...and I'm deeply skeptical that it is, who's to say they wouldn't retain a few undocumented calls for their apps?
I'm guessing Microsoft will do what they did with the Caldera case, basically Caldera had to keep hounding Microsoft for all of the Win 3.x code. Finally when the courts forced them to release the last bit they refused to give to Caldera, they found the "smoking gun" as it were.
Do you honestly think the DOJ would be able to tell if the entire code base was opened? Besides, with Microsoft being Microsoft, they will most likely only release a small part of an old version of windows, and say "Look, it's Windows source code!" Never mind it's source to Win 1.X. *sigh* I'll be so happy when this case is done with and the judge makes his decision.
Can we say this lady is living in the past? I mean seriously, it's like "let's protect people from themselves, and claim it's for a greater good we're doing it for."
Really, this would be extreemly tough to pull off. For example I know of a few school where they're co-ed by room. (One room of females next to a room of guys, and so on) How are they going to watch everyone's room to make sure the females just don't happen to walk in a guys room or vice versa...install cameras, biometrics to get into rooms? That's just a ridiculious waste of time and money.
Besides I'd love to see these "room inspections" granted she was nice enough to remove that from the bill.
As for the network firewalling / monitoring. I don't know of many universities that would spend the time or have people on staff who are compentent enought to to run such a system. For example at a university that I know pretty well, they have switched over to almost a pure micro$oft implementation of everything, and in the past their computer science department had an easily rootable server.
I'm sure there may be some bright students who can run such a system for the university...but a lot of things are learned by screwing up. ie if they aren't experienced at this sort of things, along comes another bright student who finds a hole in the firewall and exploits it. So much for filtering and firewalling.:)
Okay, DOS. It was secure out of the box on a network...mainly cause it couldn't understand networks. Granted if you didn't have console access it wasn't going to do anything for you. It's kinda like how NT got C2 certification...stand alone and not on a network. It just seems to me that as long as there are systems out there, there are always some sort of flaws...besides it's us flawed humans that are coding it. Nevertheless this takes on a HAL sort of tone then.
This is probabally the last major step that is needed to give people who are used to developing in an IDE something familiar and sufficiently powerful for them to code and develop in.
I wouldn't mind giving it a try, but I'd imagine there is someone out there that this would be the killer app for them to switch to Linux.
It's a shame to see management sitting on a good project, and one that I could see them making money on. It seems to never fail when a PHB gets involved with stuff they know or understand.
Welp, in a way I'd wish it were so, but then most of us geeks would most likely be working at HAL labs then. Honestly, with HAL's out there, would they need UNIX admins? Suits would love that idea, less people to have to pay in that "cost center" of IT.
Anyhow it's kinda a shame some of the tech in the book/movie hasn't come true. Most of it was very much within our reach, granted AI hasn't advanced as much as Clarke forsaw. But videophones are within reach now (Voice-over-ip and a webcam, or some of that closed source stuff like NetMeeting, Intel ProShare (I think that's what it is called)). As far as the space science, NASA seems to be proving Ion-Drives with Deep Space 1, Hibernation (not there yet), Space Planes (research is underway, at least from what I've read in Scientific American), Space Stations (Int'l Space Station being built), moon base (why is it we haven't been back since the late 60's and early 70's?).
In any case, most of what Clarke forsaw was pretty much within humanities' grasp by this time. Granted science is kinda like Linus in a way...it will be released when it's ready. The only difference is the peer review of results in science, in the Linux Kernel it's a peer review of the code...:)
Yes, I regularly checked the RedHat Errata, and in this case the fix came out long after the exploit was used. (I don't anymore since I don't run RedHat)
Slightly off topic here, but I saw a posting to debian's security mailing list that RedHat posed a exploit in one of their packages, and debian had fixed that hole long ago. If I still had that announcement, I'd post it here. And besides I'd rather control and know what level of patches my systems are running at. That way if there is a finger to point I'd know where to point it, rather than cron'ing some job to do it. Yeah, it may be more work for me, but as soon as I get a mailing from Debian's security list, I install the update, no problem.
Yeah, debian may be a bit dated when it rolls out a release, but nevertheless I can feel confident to put it into production on our 12 linux boxes at work. These boxes rule the network, DNS, NIS, DHCP, central syslog server, ftp servers, and a firewall to a fairly trusted vendor.
With these boxes being so important to my network and my reputation, no way in hell do I want RedHat in there (wtih all of it's cute features, many many open ports, and many ways to be compromised). I want stability and ease of maintenance, I have to deal with HP/UX on 9 other machines, and they are a pain in the ass to maintain as easily as apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade. But if we're going to compare comerical unixes to linux, debian shines brightly in comparision, it's rock solid, stable and secure. HP/UX on the other hand isn't as up to date, it's stable thou (if you configure it right), and secure if ya beat it into submission.
Nevertheless I used to be a RedHat user, it's what I started using when I got into Linux. It's great for newbies on standalone machines, but once ya learn, debian can very much be your friend (don't bitch to me about slackware--I tried that first, could never get the damn thing to run, although I probabally could now, but why? I've got enough gnu utilities to compile on my HP and Sun boxes to add functionality and fix broken utils.) An example of this for a few years I ran a RedHat box at college, and it was a webserver, majordomo server and a few other things for my college organization, Circle K International. It was all fine and dandy until I got hacked (hard core). By this point I was messing around with Debian on my home box, and decided when I went to re-install that machine, I would put in a kick ass and bolted down Debian box. I put the Debian box in and it was up for several months at a time...the only things that took it down was 1) a power outage, 2) some moron pressing control-alt-delete on the keyboard, 3) some other moron unplugging it from the network.
All in all, I'm grateful to the Debian developers for all their time and attention to detail, this is what makes this distribution kick some serious butt. I've even got my friends (who were big time RedHat lovers) to even switch to Debian, especially when they look on freshmeat, find some kewl new update and gee, there happens to be a debian package for it.
So in the meantime potato may be delayed in becomming the stable release, I'll be happy to wait until the developers are happy with it, and not until then. If I'm overly anxious, I can always upgrade to potato anytime, ya gotta love how debian is set up.:)
From my experience I have seen people get hired where I work with fairly high GPA's in computer science, yet couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Most of the stuff that I have learned related to my job, I either learned on my own through running my own server on the net, or through training classes work has sent me to. Besides sitting in my Comp Science classes learning why the sun rises doesn't seem to have much impact on running a computer system/network or coding.
Yeah, they seem pretty nice. It's just when you need to get real work done on a HP/UX (HP 9000) system, their own OS gets in the way. Let's take for example, a processor goes bad on a HP 9000. You have to power the whole system down and remove the processor. With a Sun box you just power the processor down and replace it, power the new processor up, and you're back in full business with no downtime.
What HP really excels at is printers, calculators and test equipment. Their servers are a pain to deal with at best beyond, "ohh, a problem, let's reboot."
Hell, yeah I'd buy a tux and a/. strangulation device. I'm forced to wear one where I currently work. It's a kewl place in terms of being able to play with enterprise systems and designing better systems that our consultants couldn't figure out for themselves. (read as not understanding DNS and networking concepts, as well as many other things...but anyway)
I already wear goofy strangulation devices (tie), gumby, goofy, donald duck, cleveland indians, and so forth. A tux and a/. one would fit in nicely. Especially considering me and a co-worker are bringing in the onslaught of penguin boxes (8 VAReasearch boxes) to handle DNS and other things that we don't want to let WinblowsNT to mutilate.
Slashdot Mirror
I kinda doubt the commerical unicies are using it, but even they have package management. HP/UX has swinstall, swremove, swlist. Solaris has pkgadd, pkginfo, pkgrm, and so on. Basically unix has plenty of prior art out there that M$ is just trying to copy. Think of it in their usual terms...it's simply embrace and extend.
Now only if the patent office would be as anal as they were under Jefferson we wouldn't have all of these stupid patents floating around anyway.
I honestly have no idea why /. cares about such a topic. Honestly I don't care too much, but considering I work at a mutual fund company and our IT budget is set according to projections on how well the market is doing, I figure I'd better go buy the equipment I need for the rest of the year before they slash the budget like they did last year (3 times).
:-) Heck, I didn't know that the market took a big dump until I walked through our customer service area and saw the customer service reps going nuts on the phones and saw the call board with a backlog of callers. Back in the IT area it was just business as usual.
Anyway, news about the stock market here is a bit off-topic and out of place. Yeah it has bearings on our jobs and the kewl stuff that tech companies may or may not develop. But in the long run, who cares? The market will always need some sort of correction, short term is sucks, long term it's a good thing (TM).
If that is truely the case, and you are anonymous, I can see major abuse in the system, and kids using this as another way to torment those students who aren't a part of the "in crowd." Pretty much from K to 12 I kept to myself and didn't deal much with my peers. In fact, I was grateful to make it to college and get away from those people. My life has been much better since, and I have my cadre of geek friends.
Had this system been in place back when I was in High School and where anyone can call in and say that I was depressed or whatever, I know that this would scar me for life. Let alone the thoughts of revenge would have been running through my mind more. Even with the immense amount of shit I was given on a daily basis back then, at least I could take comfort that they were only words from stupid people, and easily dismissed. If this system was in place, being tramutized by profiling and counseling that I didn't need, I would have honestly considered harsher methods of revenge. It wouldn't be something that I could have easily shrugged off. And then the media would have something else to report on, then the system would be tightened and then the spiral continues. *sigh*
I don't remember this case being "rushed to trial" in fact it seemed to take forever for this case to get moving, let alone all of the delays M$ threw at the DOJ/State Attorny Generals.
In fact I read half of the Findings of Fact, I've still got to finish that 200 page document...damn good reading. I can't see given the findings of fact, how M$ can claim that the document didn't show they were a monopoly. I'm going to curl up with Judge Jacksons's Conclusions, and sit back and watch the appeals and the other lawsuits that are opened up due to this ruling. All I can say is "Burn Micro$oft, Burn!" You get what you deserved. Let's hope that the punishment is as stiff as Judge Jackson's Finding of Facts document was worded.
Heck even if Judge Jackson only slaps them on the wrist with something as minor as not being allowed to preannounce hardware/software, they'd be royally screwed. Think of it, who would want to buy something called an X-Box when they could have a Playstation 3? I'll take the Playstation, at least all of the games I've currently got for the Playstation 1 will work on the 3, but much better... :-)
I'm guessing Microsoft will do what they did with the Caldera case, basically Caldera had to keep hounding Microsoft for all of the Win 3.x code. Finally when the courts forced them to release the last bit they refused to give to Caldera, they found the "smoking gun" as it were.
Do you honestly think the DOJ would be able to tell if the entire code base was opened? Besides, with Microsoft being Microsoft, they will most likely only release a small part of an old version of windows, and say "Look, it's Windows source code!" Never mind it's source to Win 1.X. *sigh* I'll be so happy when this case is done with and the judge makes his decision.
Can we say this lady is living in the past? I mean seriously, it's like "let's protect people from themselves, and claim it's for a greater good we're doing it for."
:)
Really, this would be extreemly tough to pull off. For example I know of a few school where they're co-ed by room. (One room of females next to a room of guys, and so on) How are they going to watch everyone's room to make sure the females just don't happen to walk in a guys room or vice versa...install cameras, biometrics to get into rooms? That's just a ridiculious waste of time and money.
Besides I'd love to see these "room inspections" granted she was nice enough to remove that from the bill.
As for the network firewalling / monitoring. I don't know of many universities that would spend the time or have people on staff who are compentent enought to to run such a system. For example at a university that I know pretty well, they have switched over to almost a pure micro$oft implementation of everything, and in the past their computer science department had an easily rootable server.
I'm sure there may be some bright students who can run such a system for the university...but a lot of things are learned by screwing up. ie if they aren't experienced at this sort of things, along comes another bright student who finds a hole in the firewall and exploits it. So much for filtering and firewalling.
maybe forced video rentals of the crappiest Warner movies ever made?
Yeah, we'll get more and more movies like "You've Got Mail"
Okay, DOS. It was secure out of the box on a network...mainly cause it couldn't understand networks. Granted if you didn't have console access it wasn't going to do anything for you. It's kinda like how NT got C2 certification...stand alone and not on a network. It just seems to me that as long as there are systems out there, there are always some sort of flaws...besides it's us flawed humans that are coding it. Nevertheless this takes on a HAL sort of tone then.
This is probabally the last major step that is needed to give people who are used to developing in an IDE something familiar and sufficiently powerful for them to code and develop in.
I wouldn't mind giving it a try, but I'd imagine there is someone out there that this would be the killer app for them to switch to Linux.
It's a shame to see management sitting on a good project, and one that I could see them making money on. It seems to never fail when a PHB gets involved with stuff they know or understand.
Welp, in a way I'd wish it were so, but then most of us geeks would most likely be working at HAL labs then. Honestly, with HAL's out there, would they need UNIX admins? Suits would love that idea, less people to have to pay in that "cost center" of IT.
:)
Anyhow it's kinda a shame some of the tech in the book/movie hasn't come true. Most of it was very much within our reach, granted AI hasn't advanced as much as Clarke forsaw. But videophones are within reach now (Voice-over-ip and a webcam, or some of that closed source stuff like NetMeeting, Intel ProShare (I think that's what it is called)). As far as the space science, NASA seems to be proving Ion-Drives with Deep Space 1, Hibernation (not there yet), Space Planes (research is underway, at least from what I've read in Scientific American), Space Stations (Int'l Space Station being built), moon base (why is it we haven't been back since the late 60's and early 70's?).
In any case, most of what Clarke forsaw was pretty much within humanities' grasp by this time. Granted science is kinda like Linus in a way...it will be released when it's ready. The only difference is the peer review of results in science, in the Linux Kernel it's a peer review of the code...
Yes, I regularly checked the RedHat Errata, and in this case the fix came out long after the exploit was used. (I don't anymore since I don't run RedHat)
Slightly off topic here, but I saw a posting to debian's security mailing list that RedHat posed a exploit in one of their packages, and debian had fixed that hole long ago. If I still had that announcement, I'd post it here. And besides I'd rather control and know what level of patches my systems are running at. That way if there is a finger to point I'd know where to point it, rather than cron'ing some job to do it. Yeah, it may be more work for me, but as soon as I get a mailing from Debian's security list, I install the update, no problem.
Yeah, debian may be a bit dated when it rolls out a release, but nevertheless I can feel confident to put it into production on our 12 linux boxes at work. These boxes rule the network, DNS, NIS, DHCP, central syslog server, ftp servers, and a firewall to a fairly trusted vendor.
:)
With these boxes being so important to my network and my reputation, no way in hell do I want RedHat in there (wtih all of it's cute features, many many open ports, and many ways to be compromised). I want stability and ease of maintenance, I have to deal with HP/UX on 9 other machines, and they are a pain in the ass to maintain as easily as apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade. But if we're going to compare comerical unixes to linux, debian shines brightly in comparision, it's rock solid, stable and secure. HP/UX on the other hand isn't as up to date, it's stable thou (if you configure it right), and secure if ya beat it into submission.
Nevertheless I used to be a RedHat user, it's what I started using when I got into Linux. It's great for newbies on standalone machines, but once ya learn, debian can very much be your friend (don't bitch to me about slackware--I tried that first, could never get the damn thing to run, although I probabally could now, but why? I've got enough gnu utilities to compile on my HP and Sun boxes to add functionality and fix broken utils.) An example of this for a few years I ran a RedHat box at college, and it was a webserver, majordomo server and a few other things for my college organization, Circle K International. It was all fine and dandy until I got hacked (hard core). By this point I was messing around with Debian on my home box, and decided when I went to re-install that machine, I would put in a kick ass and bolted down Debian box. I put the Debian box in and it was up for several months at a time...the only things that took it down was 1) a power outage, 2) some moron pressing control-alt-delete on the keyboard, 3) some other moron unplugging it from the network.
All in all, I'm grateful to the Debian developers for all their time and attention to detail, this is what makes this distribution kick some serious butt. I've even got my friends (who were big time RedHat lovers) to even switch to Debian, especially when they look on freshmeat, find some kewl new update and gee, there happens to be a debian package for it.
So in the meantime potato may be delayed in becomming the stable release, I'll be happy to wait until the developers are happy with it, and not until then. If I'm overly anxious, I can always upgrade to potato anytime, ya gotta love how debian is set up.
From my experience I have seen people get hired where I work with fairly high GPA's in computer science, yet couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Most of the stuff that I have learned related to my job, I either learned on my own through running my own server on the net, or through training classes work has sent me to. Besides sitting in my Comp Science classes learning why the sun rises doesn't seem to have much impact on running a computer system/network or coding.
Yeah, they seem pretty nice. It's just when you need to get real work done on a HP/UX (HP 9000) system, their own OS gets in the way. Let's take for example, a processor goes bad on a HP 9000. You have to power the whole system down and remove the processor. With a Sun box you just power the processor down and replace it, power the new processor up, and you're back in full business with no downtime.
What HP really excels at is printers, calculators and test equipment. Their servers are a pain to deal with at best beyond, "ohh, a problem, let's reboot."
Hell, yeah I'd buy a tux and a /. strangulation device. I'm forced to wear one where I currently work. It's a kewl place in terms of being able to play with enterprise systems and designing better systems that our consultants couldn't figure out for themselves. (read as not understanding DNS and networking concepts, as well as many other things...but anyway)
/. one would fit in nicely. Especially considering me and a co-worker are bringing in the onslaught of penguin boxes (8 VAReasearch boxes) to handle DNS and other things that we don't want to let WinblowsNT to mutilate.
I already wear goofy strangulation devices (tie), gumby, goofy, donald duck, cleveland indians, and so forth. A tux and a