If the government were to decided the standards, we'd all be writing programs in Ada.
Well that certainly cut through all the crap! While there certainly should be standards, they should be designed and enforced by committee bound bureaucracies.
And now reading this I feel that smugness just draining in a really hideous way. I use Linux and FreeBSD...what of it?
If you have a problem, you go find the root cause. Not the symptoms, but all the way back to the root cause. The problem with computer security has a cause too. But buffer overflows aren't it. Higher level languages and extensive code audits address the symptoms but not the cause.
Here's the real cause of the problem: people don't understand on a visceral level the basic fact that all software has bugs. They may say they do, but they sure aren't acting like it.
That includes me, by the way.
We need to deeply understand that the software system we are using right now has a bug in it that will cause all of our data to be destroyed or compromised. This isn't a hypothetical, it's reality. That this bug hasn't been discovered yet is beside the point. It still exists. Along with dozens of others equally destructive.
Even if the Slashdot zealots are correct, and Linux and BSD has significantly fewer bugs than Windows, all it takes is just one...
So what do we do about it? I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is, but I do know one thing. We need to change our naive behavior. Religiously patching our systems needs to be done. Finding and eliminating bugs needs to continue. Discarding bad programming practices is necessary. But we should NOT pretend that these are solutions. They are not. They are merely flimsy bandages.
All the better reason for us to begin starting Linux (and open source) focused ISPs now.
Why Linux? What's wrong with FreeBSD, which has a huge presence among ISPs? Not everything that is Free and Open is "Linux". And even if you correct yourself and admit all free operating systems into your mix, why leave out the Mac users? Won't they get just as screwed by this as everyone else? Or what about the shops running Solaris, IRIX or HP-UX? Stop imagining the world as consisting only of Windows and Linux.
Frankly, I want an ISP that is NOT "focused" on ANY particular operating system. And if you're smart, so will you.
About the routers. I'd reckon that it would be horrible if an ISP used this, but they won't.
Of course they won't! Considering the prices for Cisco routers no ISP in their right mind is going to ship one free-with-one-year-signup to their customers:-)
Sure, you'd be perfectly free to do so. However you would be locked out of the real internet. Your new "freenet" would not have access to any of the millions of existing websites.
Nonsense! Linux and *BSD would instantly implement freenet2inet bridges, enable them by default, and 90% of the ISPs would have it running for you within six months.
Fred Brooks made a lot of insightful observations about software. But they can all be boiled down into one: "Software is unlike anything else in our experience, so don't treat it like it is." (that wasn't his observation, that's my high level executive summary). If you treat software like manufacturing you'll get it wrong. If you treat it like service you'll get it wrong. If you treat it like anything else in the world, you'll get it wrong.
The next time someone says "we have to treat software like [anything other than software]", rest assured that they're wrong. But or course, your boss is paying attention to them, so you might as well learn the new buzzwords for the month...
For someone who knows MSOffice reasonably well, retraining for OpenOffice should be a quick stroll through the park.
Of course, that's just me talking. I look out on the real world and I still see OfficeXP "upgrade" classes for Office2K users, and people who actually think they need to take them.
Who avoided being raped by Enron, et al? LA County
And why did the rest of the state get raped? Because the state government gave monopoly power to SoCal Edison and PG&E. There was no deregulation, only a change in the form of the regulation. The California power industry always was, and continues to remain, regional monopolies decreed by law.
That new game in town is still going to be the only game in town. And being a government game, it might actually be a worse solution, as it's pretty hard to compete against someone who can lower their prices simply by raising taxes.
You're absolutely right. The only reason the EU decision isn't being called a "slap on the wrist" is because of the current anti-US attitude prevalent in Europe and on Slashdot. The world runs on double standards, and this is one of them. If the DoJ had imposed a similar decision there would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth everywhere but Redmond.
And the next president will collect even more. And then the one after that. Forever and ever, amen. If Gore had been elected, then HE would have been the one which " collected more bribes er I mean donations then anybody else in history".
It depends on what you mean by "most publications". For that quick memo to your group, yes. For your weekly status report, maybe. For any sort of documentation, definitely not.
All of my routine documentation at work is done in FrameMaker because it's frankly easier to use than that constant struggle known as MS Word. With a halfway decent template you spend 99.99% of your FrameMaker time writing content. But with even the best MSWord template you're doing good if you don't spend half the time fixing the layout and styles.
Doesn't that say more about Linux than it does about Sun?
No, it says a lot more about Sun.
Not being a FSF groupie, I could care less what license Sun puts on Java. It's their software and they can do whatever they want with it. But I am sure as hell not going to put it on my distro and get the shit sued out of me for distributing it!
When a worthwhile product isn't selling well, and your margins are huge (eg. software), then you lower the price. Simply killing the product is only losing you money. If you don't want to provide support, then simply don't provide support. Any bad will because of non-support is going to be much less than the bad will resulting from killing it off entirely.
Hardly a pain in the ass. The price maybe, but not the product. Once you learn the basics of it then it becomes very easy to use. It's only a pain in the ass if you expect it to be a MSWord clone. It is not.
Problem is, they had a Linux version three years ago.
They had a BETA version three years ago. I was one of the testers. It worked very well. But about a month before it was to be released they canned the project. Very sad, because Framemaker is the best document processing system (eg. word processor) there is.
I've never tried putting the swap on its own channel or controller - or even on its own drive - under any OS. Like you, I'd be interested in hearing whether or not this is worth the trouble.
I still do this, but with 1G of RAM, I never swap anymore. Back back when I had a 100MHz system and 32M RAM, putting the swap on another harddrive made a significant difference. That was with Linux. Since Windows uses a swap file instead of a raw partition, so it might not make much of a difference.
This script will only be used in-house in order to provide our customer service personnel with maintenance passwords. This is for an embedded system that customers will not have login access to, but which our support people will need. The SAP database has nothing to do with it, other than the fact that customer service uses SAP a lot, so this might just be the normal IT guy assigned to support customer service.
You make good points, but they're coming from wrong assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government were to decided the standards, we'd all be writing programs in Ada.
Well that certainly cut through all the crap! While there certainly should be standards, they should be designed and enforced by committee bound bureaucracies.
And now reading this I feel that smugness just draining in a really hideous way. I use Linux and FreeBSD...what of it?
If you have a problem, you go find the root cause. Not the symptoms, but all the way back to the root cause. The problem with computer security has a cause too. But buffer overflows aren't it. Higher level languages and extensive code audits address the symptoms but not the cause.
Here's the real cause of the problem: people don't understand on a visceral level the basic fact that all software has bugs. They may say they do, but they sure aren't acting like it.
That includes me, by the way.
We need to deeply understand that the software system we are using right now has a bug in it that will cause all of our data to be destroyed or compromised. This isn't a hypothetical, it's reality. That this bug hasn't been discovered yet is beside the point. It still exists. Along with dozens of others equally destructive.
Even if the Slashdot zealots are correct, and Linux and BSD has significantly fewer bugs than Windows, all it takes is just one...
So what do we do about it? I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is, but I do know one thing. We need to change our naive behavior. Religiously patching our systems needs to be done. Finding and eliminating bugs needs to continue. Discarding bad programming practices is necessary. But we should NOT pretend that these are solutions. They are not. They are merely flimsy bandages.
Similar arguments against closed standards can be made against zip drives
Except that it doesn't explain the poor showing of MO drives. Same size and price point, but with larger capacity and multiple vendors.
All the better reason for us to begin starting Linux (and open source) focused ISPs now.
Why Linux? What's wrong with FreeBSD, which has a huge presence among ISPs? Not everything that is Free and Open is "Linux". And even if you correct yourself and admit all free operating systems into your mix, why leave out the Mac users? Won't they get just as screwed by this as everyone else? Or what about the shops running Solaris, IRIX or HP-UX? Stop imagining the world as consisting only of Windows and Linux.
Frankly, I want an ISP that is NOT "focused" on ANY particular operating system. And if you're smart, so will you.
About the routers. I'd reckon that it would be horrible if an ISP used this, but they won't.
:-)
Of course they won't! Considering the prices for Cisco routers no ISP in their right mind is going to ship one free-with-one-year-signup to their customers
Sure, you'd be perfectly free to do so. However you would be locked out of the real internet. Your new "freenet" would not have access to any of the millions of existing websites.
Nonsense! Linux and *BSD would instantly implement freenet2inet bridges, enable them by default, and 90% of the ISPs would have it running for you within six months.
Fred Brooks made a lot of insightful observations about software. But they can all be boiled down into one: "Software is unlike anything else in our experience, so don't treat it like it is." (that wasn't his observation, that's my high level executive summary). If you treat software like manufacturing you'll get it wrong. If you treat it like service you'll get it wrong. If you treat it like anything else in the world, you'll get it wrong.
The next time someone says "we have to treat software like [anything other than software]", rest assured that they're wrong. But or course, your boss is paying attention to them, so you might as well learn the new buzzwords for the month...
Why oh why oh why oh why doesn't Google have a "Get Firefox" link?
Because the minute they put it up the name of the browser would change...
Where does Microsoft find these turkeys? Every time Ballmer opens his mouth something stupid comes out.
For someone who knows MSOffice reasonably well, retraining for OpenOffice should be a quick stroll through the park.
Of course, that's just me talking. I look out on the real world and I still see OfficeXP "upgrade" classes for Office2K users, and people who actually think they need to take them.
Who avoided being raped by Enron, et al? LA County
And why did the rest of the state get raped? Because the state government gave monopoly power to SoCal Edison and PG&E. There was no deregulation, only a change in the form of the regulation. The California power industry always was, and continues to remain, regional monopolies decreed by law.
That new game in town is still going to be the only game in town. And being a government game, it might actually be a worse solution, as it's pretty hard to compete against someone who can lower their prices simply by raising taxes.
You're absolutely right. The only reason the EU decision isn't being called a "slap on the wrist" is because of the current anti-US attitude prevalent in Europe and on Slashdot. The world runs on double standards, and this is one of them. If the DoJ had imposed a similar decision there would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth everywhere but Redmond.
And the next president will collect even more. And then the one after that. Forever and ever, amen. If Gore had been elected, then HE would have been the one which " collected more bribes er I mean donations then anybody else in history".
It depends on what you mean by "most publications". For that quick memo to your group, yes. For your weekly status report, maybe. For any sort of documentation, definitely not.
All of my routine documentation at work is done in FrameMaker because it's frankly easier to use than that constant struggle known as MS Word. With a halfway decent template you spend 99.99% of your FrameMaker time writing content. But with even the best MSWord template you're doing good if you don't spend half the time fixing the layout and styles.
I've actually run a business, so I know a tiny bit about it.
Doesn't that say more about Linux than it does about Sun?
No, it says a lot more about Sun.
Not being a FSF groupie, I could care less what license Sun puts on Java. It's their software and they can do whatever they want with it. But I am sure as hell not going to put it on my distro and get the shit sued out of me for distributing it!
When a worthwhile product isn't selling well, and your margins are huge (eg. software), then you lower the price. Simply killing the product is only losing you money. If you don't want to provide support, then simply don't provide support. Any bad will because of non-support is going to be much less than the bad will resulting from killing it off entirely.
Hardly a pain in the ass. The price maybe, but not the product. Once you learn the basics of it then it becomes very easy to use. It's only a pain in the ass if you expect it to be a MSWord clone. It is not.
Problem is, they had a Linux version three years ago.
They had a BETA version three years ago. I was one of the testers. It worked very well. But about a month before it was to be released they canned the project. Very sad, because Framemaker is the best document processing system (eg. word processor) there is.
I've never tried putting the swap on its own channel or controller - or even on its own drive - under any OS. Like you, I'd be interested in hearing whether or not this is worth the trouble.
I still do this, but with 1G of RAM, I never swap anymore. Back back when I had a 100MHz system and 32M RAM, putting the swap on another harddrive made a significant difference. That was with Linux. Since Windows uses a swap file instead of a raw partition, so it might not make much of a difference.
This script will only be used in-house in order to provide our customer service personnel with maintenance passwords. This is for an embedded system that customers will not have login access to, but which our support people will need. The SAP database has nothing to do with it, other than the fact that customer service uses SAP a lot, so this might just be the normal IT guy assigned to support customer service.
You make good points, but they're coming from wrong assumptions.
Another look. No, Mozilla isn't running the Plastik theme. Must have been a brain fart.
"The Complete FreeBSD", 4th Edition, Greg Lehey, O'Reilly and Associates.
Heck, I have karma to burn...
"Conquer your Desktop!" you insensitive clod!