Looks like the Gnome Project has finally arrived: after years of bending and twisting to get Windows-like behavior out of the Linux desktop (you know, the "sad face" screen that appears when it crashes, oh wait... that would be MacOS!), they've finally done one better -- made Linux vulnerable to Windows malware. This time the trade off was decorations for security. Having already banned smb from our networks, we thought we were safe. Maybe it's time to look for a new DE. I think twm is still in the Fedora repo...
I think Stalin also had a problem with the whole popular will thing. I suppose our overlords think we should be grateful that they're simply ignoring us.
Although some major hardware vendors offer Linux configurations, these are usually hard to find and often cost more than the equivalent Windows build. Driver and tech support for Linux by these vendors can sometimes be wanting (although Windows support is often no better).
For larger enterprises that have wisely decided to deploy Linux, none of this is an impediment. These companies rarely use the shipping build for the PCs they deploy. Instead, the use internal desktop engineering talent to create custom images for their machines.
Individuals who are savvy enough to understand the advantages Linux provides usually have the ability and desire to overcome the shortcomings of obstacles the current hardware market presents.
Even in the "good old days" when IBM manufactured and sold PCs and laptops most installations of Linux were done on machines that shipped with Windows, usually with little assistance from Big Blue. Linux drivers were not available for many devices, and users had to resort to the much more reliable (and genuinely committed) open source community for solutions (solutions which are the only thing that made it possible for the vendors themselves to preload Linux).
So Lenovo's marketing position here is really inconsequential. What's more important are continuing efforts to support open source development of device driver solutions for Linux, and to identify compatibility issues when they exist.
The current situation is the result of a purposeful effort by business and IT management to get IT salaries "under control". The fact is that they just couldn't bear to see the big $$$ getting paid to technical professionals because of *what* they knew. Offshoring was their trump card, but the roots of this go back further with things like tax code provisions that favor agency over direct employment. Well, they've succeeded. Salaries have been depressed, and direct employment opportunities have dwindled. Now they don't like the result -- the flight of talent away from tech and the consequent depletion of the reserve pool of people who can actually get the job done (as opposed to simply reporting on it). The pendulum is swinging back in our favor, friends. Let's all keep that in mind when the rollercoaster ride starts again.
I'm not sure where sudo originated, but if MS were called to account for all the UC Berkeley code it still uses today (as supplied in BSD UNIX), they'd have a heck of a legal battle on their hands. So, what I want to know is -- do any of those FreeBSD machines running over at the MS development labs have sudo installed? No much of a "clean room" environment for a patent applicant, I'd say. The USPTO has long been a complete sham when it comes to dealing with obvious prior art situations like this, time to shut it down and start over. Fdisk, and fdisk/mbr.
Good story. Unfortuntely this kind of moronic behavior is not confined to academia, it's been an epidemic in private business for as long as I can remmember (which is a long time, I was a junior in high school when I got my first job -- the summer of the first OPEC oil embargo). About a year or two ago someone wrote a book about what it takes to be successful as a business or government leader. Pretty much the thesis was that being mean was the key. That's why I.T. people can't rule the world, most of us are just too damn considerate of others, no matter what we might want everyone else to believe.
Yes. The FCC, like most quasi-legislative administrative agencies (e.g. SEC, EPA) has outlived its usefulness. It now serves mostly the interests of the big media/telecom conglomerates it is supposed to regulate, and often acts to soften the impact of Congressional legislation directed against particular abuses. The favoring of commercial interest over public safety in assigning new radio frequencies is only the most outrageous example that comes to mind (the FCC's failure to provide enough radio frequencies for public safety was cited by NYC officials as a major cause of fire and police communications problems on 9/11). The Treasury Department can handle the licensing and enforcement functions performed by the FCC, developing this as a source of revenue -- while giving preference to public entities when scarce resources are being divided. Congress should take responsibility for lawmaking in these areas, instead of delegating legislative authority to an agency of unelected bureaucrats.
When Red Hat first came out with they're "We're getting out of the desktop market to focus on the Data Center" (or words to that effect) policy my first reaction was to criticise their lack of consistency in veering off the course they'd followed since the original release of RHL. Over time I came to accept this as what was probably an astute business decision. RH needed to focus their efforts where they were and could be most competitive -- on servers in the data center. RHE 3.0 pretty much delivers on the promise of a stable, no-nonsense distribution tailored for the enterprise. What I expected was that as versions incremented upwards, RHE would draw farther and farther away from its RHL 9.0 base and continue improving in enterprise-ready features. With the entire company focused on serving that narrow but profitable market they could be a significant force in corporate computing. Other people must have agreed, because RH stock kept climbing steadily. What I see now is... well, disarray. Or maybe just hubris. I'm wondering what the impact of a vacillating corporate strategy will have on customers, end-users and even saavy investors (once the latter wake up tommorrow morning to really think about what just happened). Here's the question: How can anyone trust that Red Hat Enterprise Linux will stick to a corporate-friendly 18 month development cycle when they can't keep their marketing strategy on the same track for more than 6?
Let's face it. One of the main reasons that the specialty magazines and sites that do these reviews exist is to make people feel so good about their previous "purchase" that they'll "buy" more. It was true of the old car (and gun) magazines and is true of the computer mags and sites today. Linux, open source, are being merchandized just as aggressively as the sports car was years ago. So it should surprise no one that there's 'nary a negative word to be said about a particular software product being reviewed, whether an O/S or an application. Although not as easy to navigate as a magazine review, the various mail lists set up to support particular distros are probably the best source of info on them. After browsing the archives awhile for comments, problems and solutions you can get a pretty comprehensive picture of what's what. Of course it also helps to have a few junk boxes around that you can load up with the latest release from each publisher to experience the thing for yourself. *That's* a tradition that comes right out of the beginnings of the personal computer movement...
ActiveState Perl for Windows is compiled using VC++, so you're going to have a hard time compiling Perl modules using MinGW. Having this toolkit freely available will make it easier (and cheaper) for Windows hackers to build those Perl modules that ActiveState does not have ppm packages for. I've had the advantage for years of having a licensed copy of VC++ through my job. Now that this toolkit is available for free, I'll install it on all my servers (as I have the recently made available free distribution of Windows Services for UNIX).
To have been a really effective propaganda weapon the entire report would have to have been free, instead of just the summary that formed the basis of the miniscule press coverage it has gotten so far. No one is going to trust a study they can't read for themselves, and even fewer people will be willing to shell out dough for one that's as obviously limited in scope as this one. Apart from serving as a nice slogan for Apple, I don't see this one getting much traction -- not even from a rabid "FreeBSD on the desktop" advocate like myself.
Everyone has a right to be ignorant sometime, and a right to help learning something new. I always tell the less experienced guys "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers". After all, that's what newbies lists are for. The big problem is twofold: IT execs who shortchange on quality to hit a budget goal and, I'm sorry to say, co-workers who are *not* willing to pull the all nighters it sometimes takes to stay up to speed. The trade schools were actually very good through the late 80's to mid 90's, but went over the cliff during the dot bomb days because all managers were looking for was cheaper labor with the veneer of respectibility that certs provided. Outsourcing to India is just an extension of this strategy. The biggest problem is a culture of denial among our higher ups (something they share with the rest of the business world). I think this whole thing is going to turn our (you know, us guys who actually care about getting the job done right) way when the whole outsourcing craze hits the wall (probably through some kind of punitive tax policy). There's going to be alot of work fixing the mistakes that have been made...
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Looks like the Gnome Project has finally arrived: after years of bending and twisting to get Windows-like behavior out of the Linux desktop (you know, the "sad face" screen that appears when it crashes, oh wait... that would be MacOS!), they've finally done one better -- made Linux vulnerable to Windows malware. This time the trade off was decorations for security. Having already banned smb from our networks, we thought we were safe. Maybe it's time to look for a new DE. I think twm is still in the Fedora repo...
I think Stalin also had a problem with the whole popular will thing. I suppose our overlords think we should be grateful that they're simply ignoring us.
Although some major hardware vendors offer Linux configurations, these are usually hard to find and often cost more than the equivalent Windows build. Driver and tech support for Linux by these vendors can sometimes be wanting (although Windows support is often no better).
For larger enterprises that have wisely decided to deploy Linux, none of this is an impediment. These companies rarely use the shipping build for the PCs they deploy. Instead, the use internal desktop engineering talent to create custom images for their machines.
Individuals who are savvy enough to understand the advantages Linux provides usually have the ability and desire to overcome the shortcomings of obstacles the current hardware market presents.
Even in the "good old days" when IBM manufactured and sold PCs and laptops most installations of Linux were done on machines that shipped with Windows, usually with little assistance from Big Blue. Linux drivers were not available for many devices, and users had to resort to the much more reliable (and genuinely committed) open source community for solutions (solutions which are the only thing that made it possible for the vendors themselves to preload Linux).
So Lenovo's marketing position here is really inconsequential. What's more important are continuing efforts to support open source development of device driver solutions for Linux, and to identify compatibility issues when they exist.
"The Tank Man".
The current situation is the result of a purposeful effort by business and IT management to get IT salaries "under control". The fact is that they just couldn't bear to see the big $$$ getting paid to technical professionals because of *what* they knew. Offshoring was their trump card, but the roots of this go back further with things like tax code provisions that favor agency over direct employment. Well, they've succeeded. Salaries have been depressed, and direct employment opportunities have dwindled. Now they don't like the result -- the flight of talent away from tech and the consequent depletion of the reserve pool of people who can actually get the job done (as opposed to simply reporting on it). The pendulum is swinging back in our favor, friends. Let's all keep that in mind when the rollercoaster ride starts again.
I'm not sure where sudo originated, but if MS were called to account for all the UC Berkeley code it still uses today (as supplied in BSD UNIX), they'd have a heck of a legal battle on their hands. So, what I want to know is -- do any of those FreeBSD machines running over at the MS development labs have sudo installed? No much of a "clean room" environment for a patent applicant, I'd say. The USPTO has long been a complete sham when it comes to dealing with obvious prior art situations like this, time to shut it down and start over. Fdisk, and fdisk /mbr.
Good story. Unfortuntely this kind of moronic behavior is not confined to academia, it's been an epidemic in private business for as long as I can remmember (which is a long time, I was a junior in high school when I got my first job -- the summer of the first OPEC oil embargo). About a year or two ago someone wrote a book about what it takes to be successful as a business or government leader. Pretty much the thesis was that being mean was the key. That's why I.T. people can't rule the world, most of us are just too damn considerate of others, no matter what we might want everyone else to believe.
Yes. The FCC, like most quasi-legislative administrative agencies (e.g. SEC, EPA) has outlived its usefulness. It now serves mostly the interests of the big media/telecom conglomerates it is supposed to regulate, and often acts to soften the impact of Congressional legislation directed against particular abuses. The favoring of commercial interest over public safety in assigning new radio frequencies is only the most outrageous example that comes to mind (the FCC's failure to provide enough radio frequencies for public safety was cited by NYC officials as a major cause of fire and police communications problems on 9/11). The Treasury Department can handle the licensing and enforcement functions performed by the FCC, developing this as a source of revenue -- while giving preference to public entities when scarce resources are being divided. Congress should take responsibility for lawmaking in these areas, instead of delegating legislative authority to an agency of unelected bureaucrats.
When Red Hat first came out with they're "We're getting out of the desktop market to focus on the Data Center" (or words to that effect) policy my first reaction was to criticise their lack of consistency in veering off the course they'd followed since the original release of RHL. Over time I came to accept this as what was probably an astute business decision. RH needed to focus their efforts where they were and could be most competitive -- on servers in the data center. RHE 3.0 pretty much delivers on the promise of a stable, no-nonsense distribution tailored for the enterprise. What I expected was that as versions incremented upwards, RHE would draw farther and farther away from its RHL 9.0 base and continue improving in enterprise-ready features. With the entire company focused on serving that narrow but profitable market they could be a significant force in corporate computing. Other people must have agreed, because RH stock kept climbing steadily. What I see now is ... well, disarray. Or maybe just hubris. I'm wondering what the impact of a vacillating corporate strategy will have on customers, end-users and even saavy investors (once the latter wake up tommorrow morning to really think about what just happened). Here's the question: How can anyone trust that Red Hat Enterprise Linux will stick to a corporate-friendly 18 month development cycle when they can't keep their marketing strategy on the same track for more than 6?
Let's face it. One of the main reasons that the specialty magazines and sites that do these reviews exist is to make people feel so good about their previous "purchase" that they'll "buy" more. It was true of the old car (and gun) magazines and is true of the computer mags and sites today. Linux, open source, are being merchandized just as aggressively as the sports car was years ago. So it should surprise no one that there's 'nary a negative word to be said about a particular software product being reviewed, whether an O/S or an application. Although not as easy to navigate as a magazine review, the various mail lists set up to support particular distros are probably the best source of info on them. After browsing the archives awhile for comments, problems and solutions you can get a pretty comprehensive picture of what's what. Of course it also helps to have a few junk boxes around that you can load up with the latest release from each publisher to experience the thing for yourself. *That's* a tradition that comes right out of the beginnings of the personal computer movement...
ActiveState Perl for Windows is compiled using VC++, so you're going to have a hard time compiling Perl modules using MinGW. Having this toolkit freely available will make it easier (and cheaper) for Windows hackers to build those Perl modules that ActiveState does not have ppm packages for. I've had the advantage for years of having a licensed copy of VC++ through my job. Now that this toolkit is available for free, I'll install it on all my servers (as I have the recently made available free distribution of Windows Services for UNIX).
To have been a really effective propaganda weapon the entire report would have to have been free, instead of just the summary that formed the basis of the miniscule press coverage it has gotten so far. No one is going to trust a study they can't read for themselves, and even fewer people will be willing to shell out dough for one that's as obviously limited in scope as this one. Apart from serving as a nice slogan for Apple, I don't see this one getting much traction -- not even from a rabid "FreeBSD on the desktop" advocate like myself.
Everyone has a right to be ignorant sometime, and a right to help learning something new. I always tell the less experienced guys "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers". After all, that's what newbies lists are for. The big problem is twofold: IT execs who shortchange on quality to hit a budget goal and, I'm sorry to say, co-workers who are *not* willing to pull the all nighters it sometimes takes to stay up to speed. The trade schools were actually very good through the late 80's to mid 90's, but went over the cliff during the dot bomb days because all managers were looking for was cheaper labor with the veneer of respectibility that certs provided. Outsourcing to India is just an extension of this strategy. The biggest problem is a culture of denial among our higher ups (something they share with the rest of the business world). I think this whole thing is going to turn our (you know, us guys who actually care about getting the job done right) way when the whole outsourcing craze hits the wall (probably through some kind of punitive tax policy). There's going to be alot of work fixing the mistakes that have been made...