And I assume there will be a version for Solaris, a version for Linux/sparc, Linux/ppc and Linux/arm, Free|Net|OpenBSD, ReactOS, Plan9 and RISC OS, yes?
Or if not, they will at least release enough information about how they do the streaming that anyone who wishes may write their own.
Seriously. With e-wallpaper I could change the entire look of my house without having to pay decorators, move furniture or get paint/wallpaper paste all over the carpets.
With the added bonus that if I don't like how it looks, I'm not stuck with it until I can afford the time/money to do it again.
Next time someone complains about the PCI-DSS requiring antivirus software on Linux/UNIX systems, you can point them to the fact that the standard specifically excluded these systems from the antivirus requirements.
When nonsense complaints like that are made, what they generally mean is not "this regulation is bad".
What it means is "This regulation has the potential to make my life harder in some impossible to define way which I can't very easily argue, so I'm clutching at straws".
IME, a moments analysis will show that the regulation doesn't actually have to make life harder at all, and is something that probably should be done anyway. But then all the consultancy companies offering to sell you compliance would go out of business.
How useful that is depends on what grounds the customer is contesting it.
If the grounds are "somebody's cloned/stolen my card and is making transactions on it", the authorisation code is useless - you need the slip that the customer has supposedly signed.
(Of course, the fact that the signature is thoughtfully RIGHT THERE ON THE BACK OF THE FREAKIN' CARD FOR A FRAUDSTER TO COPY AS THEY PLEASE is not relevant to this case. Honest.)
I have Thunderbird, Firefox, iTunes, VMWare and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. In their default "automatically hassle user for updates every time they're available", you'd be lucky to go more than a few days without discovering that something needed to be upgraded and therefore restarted.
to this is to maintain a "shitlist" of companies that have been known to use deceptive marketing practices, or other abuses such as Sony's rootkit,
I started doing this.
Unfortunately, following it religiously would have resulted in having to go back to using abacuses.
Seriously:
Dell: Didn't accept there was a battery problem with their laptops for months. Sony: Make spare parts deliberately difficult to obtain. (You ever tried buying a genuine Sony battery a few months after one of their laptops gets discontinued?) Apple: Have had faults with their laptops which they won't even admit exist. Fujitsu: Had the most almighty QA cockup with their hard drives, refused to even acknowledge there was a problem in the face of overwhelming evidence. IBM: Sold computer equipment to the Nazis, despite there being significant evidence of what it was being used for. At the time, no other company had the kind of technology IBM did so the rationale "we may as well, if we don't someone else will" did not apply.
If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.
That replaces the SMTP transport part of Exchange. How about the group directory and the shared calendar support?
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Exchange and Active Directory - for what it's worth, it's probably the best solution to that particular problem on the market right now.
But I keep on hearing of stories like "OpenOffice volunteers believe their product can beat Microsoft on its home ground by including an email client" and all they do is demonstrate that the people who make these packaging decisions and think Outlook is used as nothing more than an email client have spent zero time working in the real world.
The world has moved beyond "I need a word processor, spreadsheet and email client so this product which can give me them all at the same time is better than that product which can only provide one item". It's now about solutions - which is a fancy way of saying "everything works neatly together and modules can be added when necessary. When modules are added, they integrate just as neatly as everything else". Where is the module to give OpenOffice shared calendaring features?
Outlook's shared calendar integration, while being a minor thing to most geeks, is one of the major features which get Exchange installed in businesses.
And Exchange requires Active Directory, which requires a domain driven by Windows Server rather than Samba, so even if you weren't planning to before, you may as well authenticate other systems through that. Then people start looking at other things like Sharepoint and third-party applications which expect a Windows domain, and before you know it you've got an entire infrastructure built around Windows.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how Windows became a popular server platform in places where you might otherwise expect to see Unix, Netware or OpenVMS.
Choose the right shades and you run into issues with colour blindness hardly ever. Frankly, you have bigger problems with people who are entitled to vote but don't have particularly good motor control, or the totally blind.
You do realise that most of the "advances" you tout existed on various other systems for years before Windows.
And I'm not talking about some exotic "spend $$$$$ because you're a massive business with a budget to match" - many were available to the average end user. For instance, in the UK Acorn had 32-bit processors (well, 24 bits in some parts of the CPU and 32 bits in others) in 1987, complete with a printer driver system similar to what's in Windows, a bar showing programs and disk drives along the bottom of the screen. About the only big thing it did not have which you would expect on something today was protected memory support.
Not really. The car may only weigh 2 tons (or if it's in Europe, more likely about 1 ton), but the train still hits it at high speed and it's quite enough to derail the train.
I have a great deal of trouble believing that the entirety of government is unaware of how ineffective any of their ideas are in terms of actually solving the problem. It requires me to attribute a level of stupidity to a bunch of people which I have trouble attributing to a retarded frog.
I can think of only one other rational reason for all this theatrics: convince the general public that "something is being done" rather than be seen as "the people who were in charge when whatever terrible thing happened and did nothing about it".
The US is still in the 19th century as far as rail travel goes compared to the rest of the world. Maybe this will help us realize that there are other options.
It is still possible to kill/injure a lot of people at the same time on a train and screw up large areas of a transport network for some time. The only thing you can't do is take it off the rails and point it at an important building.
It follows that sooner or later, rail travel will almost certainly be subject to similar regulations, for much the same reason.
(Oh, and rail travel works well in most of Europe because by and large, Europe is more densely populated and cities are closer together).
M.A.D. is simply a fancy acronym for an idea which has been around for years, and it faces the same problems today as it always did.
Edmund Blackadder summed it up beautifully:
Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs
developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the
Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two
vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way
there could never be a war.
Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?
Edmund: Yes, that's right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
The product is actually a hook, designed to get you tied into Microsoft's other products and services - Office, MSN, media content through their partners, etc.
That's been the case for Windows and related products ever since they decided that they wanted a slice of the server market.
Outlook - it's not a mail client. It's an Exchange client, with generic POP/IMAP email thrown in as an afterthought. And since Exchange 2000, it also requires Active Directory. And if you're going to go down the active directory route anyway, you may as well base the entire domain on AD.
Windows - yes, you can run just standalone Windows machines in your business with local accounts. It'll be fine in a very small organisation but sooner or later you're going to want to centralise logins and security, which means a domain. You can go down the Samba route, but then (AIUI), you can't get WSUS so every PC has to download updates individually. You also don't get GPO - you're stuck with NT4-style policies which are really starting to look tired.
Now with Vista, I'm given to understand business copies still need to be authorised for it to work. Which means that you'll probably want your own authorisation server. Can someone confirm whether or not that server needs to be part of an AD domain? I wouldn't be even remotely surprised if it does.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't claim to be an expert in these things, but isn't most of the Netherlands fairly flat?
;)
I'd imagine your broadcasters probably had rather fewer analogue masts to turn off
And I assume there will be a version for Solaris, a version for Linux/sparc, Linux/ppc and Linux/arm, Free|Net|OpenBSD, ReactOS, Plan9 and RISC OS, yes?
Or if not, they will at least release enough information about how they do the streaming that anyone who wishes may write their own.
Seriously. With e-wallpaper I could change the entire look of my house without having to pay decorators, move furniture or get paint/wallpaper paste all over the carpets.
With the added bonus that if I don't like how it looks, I'm not stuck with it until I can afford the time/money to do it again.
Or you could run Linux.
Every commercial server OS which isn't directly Linux based that I can remember has had some sort of client-access licensing imposed.
Have you priced up CALs for Windows lately? Lots more than $999 for unlimited clients.
ITYM "spelling as Microsoft as M$".
Microsoft have referred to themselves as MS since the days of DOS.
Well, computers as we know them weren't. They were mainly invented as a means of cracking the german Engima code.
But there were various machines which simply sorted through punchcards availble, which is exactly what IBM were selling.
Next time someone complains about the PCI-DSS requiring antivirus software on Linux/UNIX systems, you can point them to the fact that the standard specifically excluded these systems from the antivirus requirements.
When nonsense complaints like that are made, what they generally mean is not "this regulation is bad".
What it means is "This regulation has the potential to make my life harder in some impossible to define way which I can't very easily argue, so I'm clutching at straws".
IME, a moments analysis will show that the regulation doesn't actually have to make life harder at all, and is something that probably should be done anyway. But then all the consultancy companies offering to sell you compliance would go out of business.
How useful that is depends on what grounds the customer is contesting it.
If the grounds are "somebody's cloned/stolen my card and is making transactions on it", the authorisation code is useless - you need the slip that the customer has supposedly signed.
(Of course, the fact that the signature is thoughtfully RIGHT THERE ON THE BACK OF THE FREAKIN' CARD FOR A FRAUDSTER TO COPY AS THEY PLEASE is not relevant to this case. Honest.)
Auto updates are the work of Satan's own bum.
Seriously.
I have Thunderbird, Firefox, iTunes, VMWare and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. In their default "automatically hassle user for updates every time they're available", you'd be lucky to go more than a few days without discovering that something needed to be upgraded and therefore restarted.
to this is to maintain a "shitlist" of companies that have been known to use deceptive marketing practices, or other abuses such as Sony's rootkit,
I started doing this.
Unfortunately, following it religiously would have resulted in having to go back to using abacuses.
Seriously:
Dell: Didn't accept there was a battery problem with their laptops for months.
Sony: Make spare parts deliberately difficult to obtain. (You ever tried buying a genuine Sony battery a few months after one of their laptops gets discontinued?)
Apple: Have had faults with their laptops which they won't even admit exist.
Fujitsu: Had the most almighty QA cockup with their hard drives, refused to even acknowledge there was a problem in the face of overwhelming evidence.
IBM: Sold computer equipment to the Nazis, despite there being significant evidence of what it was being used for. At the time, no other company had the kind of technology IBM did so the rationale "we may as well, if we don't someone else will" did not apply.
If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.
That replaces the SMTP transport part of Exchange. How about the group directory and the shared calendar support?
KDE4 will run under Windows.
And come out at around the same time as Duke Nukem Forever.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Exchange and Active Directory - for what it's worth, it's probably the best solution to that particular problem on the market right now.
But I keep on hearing of stories like "OpenOffice volunteers believe their product can beat Microsoft on its home ground by including an email client" and all they do is demonstrate that the people who make these packaging decisions and think Outlook is used as nothing more than an email client have spent zero time working in the real world.
The world has moved beyond "I need a word processor, spreadsheet and email client so this product which can give me them all at the same time is better than that product which can only provide one item". It's now about solutions - which is a fancy way of saying "everything works neatly together and modules can be added when necessary. When modules are added, they integrate just as neatly as everything else". Where is the module to give OpenOffice shared calendaring features?
But Thunderbird is not a replacement for Outlook.
Outlook's shared calendar integration, while being a minor thing to most geeks, is one of the major features which get Exchange installed in businesses.
And Exchange requires Active Directory, which requires a domain driven by Windows Server rather than Samba, so even if you weren't planning to before, you may as well authenticate other systems through that. Then people start looking at other things like Sharepoint and third-party applications which expect a Windows domain, and before you know it you've got an entire infrastructure built around Windows.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how Windows became a popular server platform in places where you might otherwise expect to see Unix, Netware or OpenVMS.
Choose the right shades and you run into issues with colour blindness hardly ever. Frankly, you have bigger problems with people who are entitled to vote but don't have particularly good motor control, or the totally blind.
Sun managed to do it, and they had a hardware change as well between Sparc32 and Sparc64.
Digital managed it with OpenVMS.
IBM seemed to do OK with their AS/400 range - even with a major architecture change thrown in for good measure.
You do realise that most of the "advances" you tout existed on various other systems for years before Windows.
And I'm not talking about some exotic "spend $$$$$ because you're a massive business with a budget to match" - many were available to the average end user. For instance, in the UK Acorn had 32-bit processors (well, 24 bits in some parts of the CPU and 32 bits in others) in 1987, complete with a printer driver system similar to what's in Windows, a bar showing programs and disk drives along the bottom of the screen. About the only big thing it did not have which you would expect on something today was protected memory support.
Not really. The car may only weigh 2 tons (or if it's in Europe, more likely about 1 ton), but the train still hits it at high speed and it's quite enough to derail the train.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3989277.stm
Or just leave a car on the tracks.
I have a great deal of trouble believing that the entirety of government is unaware of how ineffective any of their ideas are in terms of actually solving the problem. It requires me to attribute a level of stupidity to a bunch of people which I have trouble attributing to a retarded frog.
I can think of only one other rational reason for all this theatrics: convince the general public that "something is being done" rather than be seen as "the people who were in charge when whatever terrible thing happened and did nothing about it".
The US is still in the 19th century as far as rail travel goes compared to the rest of the world. Maybe this will help us realize that there are other options.
It is still possible to kill/injure a lot of people at the same time on a train and screw up large areas of a transport network for some time. The only thing you can't do is take it off the rails and point it at an important building.
It follows that sooner or later, rail travel will almost certainly be subject to similar regulations, for much the same reason.
(Oh, and rail travel works well in most of Europe because by and large, Europe is more densely populated and cities are closer together).
but none of them represent a threat to people that demonstrably warrants the kind of reaction we are having.
Neither did the Jews, communists, homosexuals or what the Soviets called "fascist".
M.A.D. is simply a fancy acronym for an idea which has been around for years, and it faces the same problems today as it always did.
Edmund Blackadder summed it up beautifully:
Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs
developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the
Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two
vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way
there could never be a war.
Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?
Edmund: Yes, that's right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
George: What was that, sir?
Edmund: It was bollocks.
The product is actually a hook, designed to get you tied into Microsoft's other products and services - Office, MSN, media content through their partners, etc.
That's been the case for Windows and related products ever since they decided that they wanted a slice of the server market.
Outlook - it's not a mail client. It's an Exchange client, with generic POP/IMAP email thrown in as an afterthought. And since Exchange 2000, it also requires Active Directory. And if you're going to go down the active directory route anyway, you may as well base the entire domain on AD.
Windows - yes, you can run just standalone Windows machines in your business with local accounts. It'll be fine in a very small organisation but sooner or later you're going to want to centralise logins and security, which means a domain. You can go down the Samba route, but then (AIUI), you can't get WSUS so every PC has to download updates individually. You also don't get GPO - you're stuck with NT4-style policies which are really starting to look tired.
Now with Vista, I'm given to understand business copies still need to be authorised for it to work. Which means that you'll probably want your own authorisation server. Can someone confirm whether or not that server needs to be part of an AD domain? I wouldn't be even remotely surprised if it does.
This isn't phpBB. Nobody apart from /. staff can go back and edit someone else's post, and that's only happened once or twice due to legal reasons.