I live in a high rise. My windows are on the North, and in every other direction, including straight up, there's a lot of steel.
Would I be able to receive XM signals? I can't get satellite TV, obviously.
I love radio, and would buy XM in an instant if I knew it would work. But I haven't seen very much information on reception. Most of their marketing and FAQs seem to be aimed at people in cars and trucks. I like to drive as much as the next guy (more, probably), but I'm just not on the road that often.
I don't know if it needs to be an SQL database, but it needs to be some system that will let you update the zone files dynamically and instantaneously.
The official BIND 4.x and 8.x trees are full of bad code that will probably yield serious bugs down the road. OpenBSD's audited BIND is based on 4.x, and as such lacks some important features that you really need. Theo and the gang have said that they have no intention of auditing the 8.x code, because it's so sloppy, and because they don't feel it adds enough to the 4.x tree.
I'm paranoid about the MySQL enabled version of BIND, because I'm not confident that it would be patched quickly in the event that an exploit was discovered.
I've been meaning to try to tie djbdns into a web application that could modify zone data -- the command line programs seem like they could be called easily by php, although I haven't actually installed it yet, so I could be all wet. If you don't do many modifications, it might be a reasonable compromise between a full blown SQL system and something more lightweight and secure.
A fully featured SQL database could probably keep itself in sync with djbdns with triggers, so long as you weren't pounding on the data and changing it frequently. That would eliminate SQL bottlenecks on the serving side, although I have no idea how it would stand up under heavy zone editing.
I wish the government would throw a couple of million bucks at this problem, and open source all the results. It would make the world a much better place.
I have a Dell that came with W2K preinstalled. I've patched it, but I haven't done any major tweaking. So I've always assumed it was reasonably well configured.
I have a vague sense that BSD and Solaris stand up better than linux under heavy loads, but I'm not sure why, if it's the VM, the scheduler, or the way the various systems interact.
But the thing that I don't understand is the controversy surrounding the VM. I can understand controversey about whether to change horses in the middle of 2.4 -- it seems like there would be legitimate arguments on both sides.
But isn't an optimal VM design something that's been clarified by research, or at least by the experiences of those who have built other kernels?
I guess what I don't understand is why there would be a gap between Solaris and Linux, or BSD and Linux. Can't Linux just do it the BSD way? Is it an inertia thing, a matter of not wanting to break things?
To ask the question another way, my big pet peeve with Windows 2K is that copying a big file (100's of megs) locks up the system. Solaris doesn't do that, Linux doesn't do that. Why does NT do it? Can't they look at the code in the Linux kernel and do something similar? I can't believe that the NT developers don't think it's a problem, I can't believe that they're not very smart guys. So what's the problem?
BSD's missing some things that are hard to do without -- their java support isn't as good, and they don't have the device drivers that Linux has. It seems like it would be easier for linux to pick up what it lacks that BSD has, than the other way around.
How does this graphics portion of the API compare to MFC?
I'm not a strong GUI programmer, but I've heard people say that MFC is more robust and powerful than the APIs we have in Linux. But I've also heard people rave about programming NeXT.
Is anyone here able to put ideology aside and give a comparison based on real experience?
I use ghost to do backups, and to swap OSs around, and I love it.
But aren't individual machines supposed to have their own license numbers? With their new activation technology, isn't MS going to start making it impossible to slide on this?
I'm not saying that any of this stuff is impossible for MS to figure out. I'm really just saying that NT administration is hard, and that there is room for improvement here.
I know you can write code that will do anything, including installing other programs. But I don't have to do anything so complicated with Debian to use apt-get -- I just type the command, and boom, it's over. You don't have to reboot, login, or any of that.
I do admit that I was off target on a big part of my post -- if I knew more about NT administration, I'm sure I'd acknowlege it's ability to admin things centrally.
I don't think the thin client thing is the answer, though. There's a real difference between using the old school NFS installs, where the storage is remote but the cpu is local, and the Citrix/Terminal Server strategy. TS is an inefficient way to get central management, it's stupid to have to throw away 97% of the power of the local CPU just for that.
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to MS Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 10,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for RedHat (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux has a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
I agree that knowing the implementation details of advanced 3D acceleration would be valuable, but won't the competitors know that already? They have to have people on the payroll who slip them the specs, NDA or not. I can't believe that open source is the only place people get this info.
And anyway, the technology is usually not bleeding edge by the time it's supported by Linux.
I think the question, "Why?" is a good one, and I'm still curious about what other people think.
Wait a minute -- on the one hand, the net is horrible because people can distribute copyrighted material, and on the other hand the net is horrible because big corporations control everything?
I think the 50% stat is a little misleading. People spend a lot of time using free web applicaitons that sites like MSN and Yahoo give them. But should a person's time on Hotmail really be counted as the same sort of thing as a person's time reading the NY Times? If AOL forces its users to hit their page first, how does that compare to a site like this one (/.), where people choose to view it?
The Drudge Report is a good example of what the net can do. It's one guy with a massive audience. Andrew Sullivan's site is another example of a single guy with a big audience. I think sites like Indy Media have big audiences as well. Even if they don't, when compared to Time/Warner/AOL, it's an enormously powerful tool for getting the word out.
I think there's a parallel here to Linux vs. MS. People started businesses, everyone started talking about "world domination" and all of a sudden Linux is failing if it can't compete on MS's home court, the corporate world. But that's not the way Linux started -- it was a great way to learn, it was something that allowed everyone to participate. It's still great for that stuff, and it always will be.
Debian can't be killed, it will probably go on for decades. Seriously -- what possible scenario could you think of that would cause it stop existing? Why isn't that the relevant fact, instead of the VA Linux stock price?
Alternative media don't have to compete with commercial media to succeed. They just have to survive and provide high quality information. The net makes that possible, and it's going to continue to make that possible. And the net's going to make sure that almost every family in America, and in most of the industrialized world, is going to have access to that information.
Sure, most people aren't going to bother with it. But what did anyone expect? That the net would change human nature? Most people don't care. But a lot of people are going to take the trouble. They already do. And those people can make a difference.
You can run X86 to learn Solaris. There are lots of reasons to run Solaris on Sparc, and a lot of jobs out there for people who know how to do it.
If you DL x86 for free, you can learn a lot about Solaris. You can learn almost everything you need to know to pass the certification exam.
I'm not suggesting that you should learn Solaris, anymore than I'd suggest you learn Japaneese or Art History. If it's not useful, don't bother. But the notion that it's not useful for *anyone* is silly.
The new variant of Code Red might turn out to be the most damaging worm yet launched. That's happening today, while I'm writing this. My DSL connection will be hit a couple of times, in all probability, as I type this up.
That has to be the context of any discussion of passport.
Even well designed security fails. For that reason, if single choke point that will plunge the world into chaos if security fails is a bad idea. Passport is a bad idea.
The most important flaw isn't in the protocol, or in the fact that it's built on insecure services. A well designed passport type system would still be flawed, because it would present a single point of failure.
The fact that they want to do this at all proves that they're not thinking about security first.
MS has a track record of doing dumb things security wise because their business models demand them. They wanted to tie word and visual basic together so they opened up the world to the threat of macro viruses. They wanted to tie email and office together, so they made email systems that would run programs embedded in documents automatically if someone sends it to a MS user via the email.
These are not obscure problems, and they're not difficult to predict. You don't need to be a security guru to realize that they're trouble. MS did it anyway, because it was in their interest to do it. It wasn't in their customer's interests.
Passport isn't in anyone's interest by MS's. It's a bad design because it's centralized, because all of the eggs are in one basket. Most people want privacy. Most people want their credit card information to be secure. Most people want to control the information they give to various sites -- they don't want it passed around in the background, in the name of convenience.
Apart from all of that, it has to be pointed out that the company that's building and marketing passport has the worst record in computer security on the planet. By that I mean that MS security holes have cost more money -- billions and billions of dollars -- than any other company's security problems. How long did it take them to close the outlook macrovirus hole? How long was it obvious to everyone that it was a bad idea, before they closed it? Years. Why? Because they put their business model above their customer's security interests. And they're doing the same thing here.
Passport is a horrible idea. And even if it was a good idea, these are the last guys who should be trusted to build it.
I agree with 90% of what you're saying here. But I believe MS deserves special credit for the virus plagues we've seen.
Why? Because the vulnerability of MS machines to viruses is a direct result of business considerations colliding with technical/security ones, and the business considerations rolling over the others.
MS's whole schtick is to leverage dominance in one product to another. That's why they're so into integration. It just doesn't make any sense to have an email program automatically open a file that someone sends you -- at least not for many kinds of files. And it doesn't make sense to have complex vb macros in word processor documents.
Think about how much pain office macro viruses have caused, and how little benefit the average person gets from them. One user in 10,000 probably writes vb code to manipulate office documents. I'm not saying don't make word scriptable -- let people program it through COM. But that would put Delphi on an even footing with VB.
Despite the flames you read here, MS has some of the smartest tech people on the planet. Plenty of people inside of MS knew it was stupid to make an email system that would run programs that come in through the email. People outside of MS complained about it from the start. But the business logic won.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't get nearly enough grief for this stuff. It's different from a buffer overflow in IIS. That's an honest mistake, and you're right, there are plenty of those in Linux.
MS's decision making process about security is corrupt. You can see it in these macroviruses, and you can see it in their lame explanations for why they're pulling Java out of the OS. The security policy dances to the tune of the business logic people. They don't care about the billions it costs their customers.
I know they fixed the outlook hole. And I would even say that they have the right to leave java out, as long as OEMs have the freedom to put it in. (Whether or not they really do -- contract aside -- remains to be seen. If I were at Dell, I'd be afraid of po'ing MS, no matter what their press releases say.) They are getting better on security. After years of outlook viruses they plugged the hole -- for the small percentage of users smart enough to dl the patches.
Let's roast them for their real problems. Because when the press gets bad, they do respond, and that will make the world a better place. As everyone who uses the product knows, the MS-SQL Server story was BS, a cheap shot. This is proof that there are still plenty of fair shots to go around.
I don't think the problem is the money. If I could surf around and get good content all day for $50/month, I'd do it. People pay that for their cable tv.
I see three problems.
First of all, as someone has pointed out, there isn't a good micropayment standard in place.
Second of all, I'd be very reluctant to participate in a micropayment system that wasn't anonymous. I think we need something similar to digicash.
I stopped buying non-geek books online, because I don't want big companies to have databases of the things I'm interested in or thinking about. Any micropayment system that's likely to be put into place will probably allow the coordinating company to put together a horribly intrusive database about its users. I'm amazed that people buy porn online -- some day that db will come back and bite them.
Finally, there are plenty of sites like this one that keep me entertained reasonably well for free. I don't feel the need for more content. I wish there was less, so I'd spend time doing more productive things.
I don't claim to be a debian expert. All I know is that I went into the #debian IRC channel and asked, and people reacted very badly when I talked about upgrading my perl. They said it would break Potato up and down the block. I didn't try it, because I figured they knew what they were talking about.
Slackware was easier, and it works, so that's what I did.
I've wondered that myself. That's certainly a big name from the past. I used to install it from floppies on a 386sx with a 20MB hard disk. I'm pretty sure it was from Manchester, in the UK, and that a prof rolled his own distro to roll out machines for a class he was teaching.
I started with MCC, went to SLS, because all the docs seemed to assume you were running SLS. When SLS died I moved to Slackware. I think I cut over to RedHat around version 4, and jumped to Debian when RH broke the compiler. Somewhere in the middle of that I played with SuSE a little.
I think it was more fun in those days. There was something cool about having to roll a new kernel just to get your ethernet card working. Although there wasn't anything cool about having to do X configuration by hand.
Taco's comments make it seem as if Slackware is a kind of museum piece, relevant only as a historical artifact.
But in my opinion if you want a distro to run a specific kind of server (like a name server, or even a data driven web server), and you want to build your own software and not depend on someone else's packages, Slackware is still hard to beat.
Let's say you're running Potato, and you need SSL and Apache. The latest Apache needs a certain version of the SSL module. The SSL module needs the latest Perl to compile. But you can't upgrade your Perl because it's tied into everything Potato in your distro. Sure, you can install debs with Apache/SSL, but what if you need other stuff too?
Package management is a wonderful thing, but it does have some drawbacks. It's not the best way to go in every circumstance. Luckily, we have Slackware for those times.
Are they going to try to bundle the copy protection stuff with this upgrade? Or are the two issues completely disconnected?
It's easy to say that we'll stick with the uncrippled technology we already have. But as it ages and becomes obsolete (ie., can't handle normal sized disks), we'll be pushed into the next generation whether we like it or not. If that next generation includes copy protection, we'll have to live with it.
When I first started to run Linux, years ago, there was an enormous gap in reliability between Linux and Windows. Although ideologues are loathe to admit it, MS has substantially narrowed that gap with Windows 2000. For the first time ever, I'm pretty happy with Windows as technology.
Now the issues that drive my loyalty to Linux have more to do with a fear of MS's power in the industry and what they might do with it. I'm talking about issues like privacy and crippled systems that serve the interests of large intellectual property owners rather than the people who buy the machines.
I've always assumed that IBM's interest in Linux derives from a wariness of MS's power and what they might do with it as well -- although I suspect that IBM is more worried about being muscled financially and technologically.
As a marketing guy, can you tell us if IBM willing to take the issues I'm afraid of to the public? A MS monopoly isn't in anyone's interests but MS's, and I know that issues of privacy are important to the public. People want the machines that they pay for to be working for them, not some big company.
I know companies have to look towards the bottom line, but IBM could do a lot to make the world a better place by stepping up to the plate here and taking on.NET, MS, Passport, and all the rest. People will listen to you -- despite the ill fated graffiti campaign, you guys have a lot of corporate gravitas behind you.
And a world where MS controls authentication and transactions isn't in IBM's interest either.
We need you to back out of the crippled hardware business (the hard drives), and tell people why IBM and Linux are in the public interest. Cartoon penguins aren't going to do anything to the MS juggernaut.
New way for /. to make money (serious)
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It's very common for servers hosting the stories linked from/. to sink. We even have a name for it -- the server was "slashdotted".
They should offer a premium service -- so much per month or year -- that will let you see the new stories 15 or 30 minutes before they go out to the masses.
I'm not talking about giving anyone an edge in discusions. I wouldn't let people post comments until everyone can see the story.
But it would be cool to be able to get in before the servers sink. I'd pay for it. I think other people would, too.
Most local MLSs (multiple listing services) have sites that are open to the public. Here in Chicago, the site is called www.mlsni.com.
Although MLSs aren't national, they tend to be the most complete databases around. But sometimes there isn't a single MLS you can use. I think there are something like 20 MLSs in Cleveland, and I'm pretty sure that at least parts of Manhattan don't have one at all. So depending on where you are, you might have some luck with your local newspaper's site.
It also makes sense to look at the company specific sites. Most towns have one or two large players who control most of the listings -- searching their sites will turn up most of the stuff you're interested in.
In order to understand the situation, you have to start with the fact that Realtors make their money in large part from their privilaged access to MLS systems. If you want to sell your house getting listed in the MLS is important, and if you want to do that, you have to pay a Realtor.
And on the flip side, a great deal of the profits from the business come from selling things like mortgages to home buyers. That's why you see companies like GMAC running their own real estate companies.
How does this affect the web? Well, in a universe where MS's Home Advisor functions as a national real estate marketing database, MS gets to sell the banner ads to the mortgage companies. Large realtors want to keep control over the customer -- they want to steer him or her to their own mortgage company. So the national aggregator web sites like Realtor.com and Home Advisor were seen as threats.
Just because the rise of the web has rendered the proprietary systems of the past obsolete technically doesn't mean that Realtors want to give up their leverage. None of the 800 lb. gorillas in the current dynamic have an interest in an efficient web based system where everyone has equal access to the market.
The big companies definitely saw things like Home Advisor as a real threat. And they've done what they can to block it.
So why do the aggregators exist at all? Well, MLSs are run by local boards of realtors. And those guys tend to be dominated by small realtors who have lots of votes. Coldwell Banker might sell 40% of the houses in your town, but they probably get pushed around a bit on the local realty board by small companies with a few offices at most. And those small companies user their votes to allow the MLS to sell all of its listings to the homestore.com and homeadvisor.com's of the world.
There are an awful lot of complicated power struggles going on behind the scenes.
The long and the short of it is that an open, efficient web based marketplace for homes is only slightly more likely to happen than open, efficient, online sales of GM cars. Too many people with too much money and clout will lose if it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it -- the lack of solid java support is the biggest problem I have with FreeBSD.
Now if only the same thing would happen with OpenBSD -- we could write tomcat based web apps, and wouldn't have to worry so much about being hacked.
Thanks... I guess that means that I'll have to wait awhile for the repeaters to go up, though.
I live in a high rise. My windows are on the North, and in every other direction, including straight up, there's a lot of steel.
Would I be able to receive XM signals? I can't get satellite TV, obviously.
I love radio, and would buy XM in an instant if I knew it would work. But I haven't seen very much information on reception. Most of their marketing and FAQs seem to be aimed at people in cars and trucks. I like to drive as much as the next guy (more, probably), but I'm just not on the road that often.
This is a great use of p2p -- something that doesn't involve piracy. I wish I had heard of it before.
Are there any other innovative non-piracy p2p apps out there that we should know about?
I don't know if it needs to be an SQL database, but it needs to be some system that will let you update the zone files dynamically and instantaneously.
The official BIND 4.x and 8.x trees are full of bad code that will probably yield serious bugs down the road. OpenBSD's audited BIND is based on 4.x, and as such lacks some important features that you really need. Theo and the gang have said that they have no intention of auditing the 8.x code, because it's so sloppy, and because they don't feel it adds enough to the 4.x tree.
I'm paranoid about the MySQL enabled version of BIND, because I'm not confident that it would be patched quickly in the event that an exploit was discovered.
I've been meaning to try to tie djbdns into a web application that could modify zone data -- the command line programs seem like they could be called easily by php, although I haven't actually installed it yet, so I could be all wet. If you don't do many modifications, it might be a reasonable compromise between a full blown SQL system and something more lightweight and secure.
A fully featured SQL database could probably keep itself in sync with djbdns with triggers, so long as you weren't pounding on the data and changing it frequently. That would eliminate SQL bottlenecks on the serving side, although I have no idea how it would stand up under heavy zone editing.
I wish the government would throw a couple of million bucks at this problem, and open source all the results. It would make the world a much better place.
I have a Dell that came with W2K preinstalled. I've patched it, but I haven't done any major tweaking. So I've always assumed it was reasonably well configured.
Maybe I'm doing something stupid...
I'd like to second this post.
I have a vague sense that BSD and Solaris stand up better than linux under heavy loads, but I'm not sure why, if it's the VM, the scheduler, or the way the various systems interact.
But the thing that I don't understand is the controversy surrounding the VM. I can understand controversey about whether to change horses in the middle of 2.4 -- it seems like there would be legitimate arguments on both sides.
But isn't an optimal VM design something that's been clarified by research, or at least by the experiences of those who have built other kernels?
I guess what I don't understand is why there would be a gap between Solaris and Linux, or BSD and Linux. Can't Linux just do it the BSD way? Is it an inertia thing, a matter of not wanting to break things?
To ask the question another way, my big pet peeve with Windows 2K is that copying a big file (100's of megs) locks up the system. Solaris doesn't do that, Linux doesn't do that. Why does NT do it? Can't they look at the code in the Linux kernel and do something similar? I can't believe that the NT developers don't think it's a problem, I can't believe that they're not very smart guys. So what's the problem?
BSD's missing some things that are hard to do without -- their java support isn't as good, and they don't have the device drivers that Linux has. It seems like it would be easier for linux to pick up what it lacks that BSD has, than the other way around.
How does this graphics portion of the API compare to MFC?
I'm not a strong GUI programmer, but I've heard people say that MFC is more robust and powerful than the APIs we have in Linux. But I've also heard people rave about programming NeXT.
Is anyone here able to put ideology aside and give a comparison based on real experience?
I use ghost to do backups, and to swap OSs around, and I love it.
But aren't individual machines supposed to have their own license numbers? With their new activation technology, isn't MS going to start making it impossible to slide on this?
I'm not saying that any of this stuff is impossible for MS to figure out. I'm really just saying that NT administration is hard, and that there is room for improvement here.
I know you can write code that will do anything, including installing other programs. But I don't have to do anything so complicated with Debian to use apt-get -- I just type the command, and boom, it's over. You don't have to reboot, login, or any of that.
I do admit that I was off target on a big part of my post -- if I knew more about NT administration, I'm sure I'd acknowlege it's ability to admin things centrally.
I don't think the thin client thing is the answer, though. There's a real difference between using the old school NFS installs, where the storage is remote but the cpu is local, and the Citrix/Terminal Server strategy. TS is an inefficient way to get central management, it's stupid to have to throw away 97% of the power of the local CPU just for that.
I was curious about this as well. W2K is pretty solid -- maybe not as solid as Unix, but the gap is closing.
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to MS Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 10,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for RedHat (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux has a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
I agree that knowing the implementation details of advanced 3D acceleration would be valuable, but won't the competitors know that already? They have to have people on the payroll who slip them the specs, NDA or not. I can't believe that open source is the only place people get this info.
And anyway, the technology is usually not bleeding edge by the time it's supported by Linux.
I think the question, "Why?" is a good one, and I'm still curious about what other people think.
Wait a minute -- on the one hand, the net is horrible because people can distribute copyrighted material, and on the other hand the net is horrible because big corporations control everything?
I think the 50% stat is a little misleading. People spend a lot of time using free web applicaitons that sites like MSN and Yahoo give them. But should a person's time on Hotmail really be counted as the same sort of thing as a person's time reading the NY Times? If AOL forces its users to hit their page first, how does that compare to a site like this one (/.), where people choose to view it?
The Drudge Report is a good example of what the net can do. It's one guy with a massive audience. Andrew Sullivan's site is another example of a single guy with a big audience. I think sites like Indy Media have big audiences as well. Even if they don't, when compared to Time/Warner/AOL, it's an enormously powerful tool for getting the word out.
I think there's a parallel here to Linux vs. MS. People started businesses, everyone started talking about "world domination" and all of a sudden Linux is failing if it can't compete on MS's home court, the corporate world. But that's not the way Linux started -- it was a great way to learn, it was something that allowed everyone to participate. It's still great for that stuff, and it always will be.
Debian can't be killed, it will probably go on for decades. Seriously -- what possible scenario could you think of that would cause it stop existing? Why isn't that the relevant fact, instead of the VA Linux stock price?
Alternative media don't have to compete with commercial media to succeed. They just have to survive and provide high quality information. The net makes that possible, and it's going to continue to make that possible. And the net's going to make sure that almost every family in America, and in most of the industrialized world, is going to have access to that information.
Sure, most people aren't going to bother with it. But what did anyone expect? That the net would change human nature? Most people don't care. But a lot of people are going to take the trouble. They already do. And those people can make a difference.
You can run X86 to learn Solaris. There are lots of reasons to run Solaris on Sparc, and a lot of jobs out there for people who know how to do it.
If you DL x86 for free, you can learn a lot about Solaris. You can learn almost everything you need to know to pass the certification exam.
I'm not suggesting that you should learn Solaris, anymore than I'd suggest you learn Japaneese or Art History. If it's not useful, don't bother. But the notion that it's not useful for *anyone* is silly.
The new variant of Code Red might turn out to be the most damaging worm yet launched. That's happening today, while I'm writing this. My DSL connection will be hit a couple of times, in all probability, as I type this up.
That has to be the context of any discussion of passport.
Even well designed security fails. For that reason, if single choke point that will plunge the world into chaos if security fails is a bad idea. Passport is a bad idea.
The most important flaw isn't in the protocol, or in the fact that it's built on insecure services. A well designed passport type system would still be flawed, because it would present a single point of failure.
The fact that they want to do this at all proves that they're not thinking about security first.
MS has a track record of doing dumb things security wise because their business models demand them. They wanted to tie word and visual basic together so they opened up the world to the threat of macro viruses. They wanted to tie email and office together, so they made email systems that would run programs embedded in documents automatically if someone sends it to a MS user via the email.
These are not obscure problems, and they're not difficult to predict. You don't need to be a security guru to realize that they're trouble. MS did it anyway, because it was in their interest to do it. It wasn't in their customer's interests.
Passport isn't in anyone's interest by MS's. It's a bad design because it's centralized, because all of the eggs are in one basket. Most people want privacy. Most people want their credit card information to be secure. Most people want to control the information they give to various sites -- they don't want it passed around in the background, in the name of convenience.
Apart from all of that, it has to be pointed out that the company that's building and marketing passport has the worst record in computer security on the planet. By that I mean that MS security holes have cost more money -- billions and billions of dollars -- than any other company's security problems. How long did it take them to close the outlook macrovirus hole? How long was it obvious to everyone that it was a bad idea, before they closed it? Years. Why? Because they put their business model above their customer's security interests. And they're doing the same thing here.
Passport is a horrible idea. And even if it was a good idea, these are the last guys who should be trusted to build it.
I agree with 90% of what you're saying here. But I believe MS deserves special credit for the virus plagues we've seen.
Why? Because the vulnerability of MS machines to viruses is a direct result of business considerations colliding with technical/security ones, and the business considerations rolling over the others.
MS's whole schtick is to leverage dominance in one product to another. That's why they're so into integration. It just doesn't make any sense to have an email program automatically open a file that someone sends you -- at least not for many kinds of files. And it doesn't make sense to have complex vb macros in word processor documents.
Think about how much pain office macro viruses have caused, and how little benefit the average person gets from them. One user in 10,000 probably writes vb code to manipulate office documents. I'm not saying don't make word scriptable -- let people program it through COM. But that would put Delphi on an even footing with VB.
Despite the flames you read here, MS has some of the smartest tech people on the planet. Plenty of people inside of MS knew it was stupid to make an email system that would run programs that come in through the email. People outside of MS complained about it from the start. But the business logic won.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't get nearly enough grief for this stuff. It's different from a buffer overflow in IIS. That's an honest mistake, and you're right, there are plenty of those in Linux.
MS's decision making process about security is corrupt. You can see it in these macroviruses, and you can see it in their lame explanations for why they're pulling Java out of the OS. The security policy dances to the tune of the business logic people. They don't care about the billions it costs their customers.
I know they fixed the outlook hole. And I would even say that they have the right to leave java out, as long as OEMs have the freedom to put it in. (Whether or not they really do -- contract aside -- remains to be seen. If I were at Dell, I'd be afraid of po'ing MS, no matter what their press releases say.) They are getting better on security. After years of outlook viruses they plugged the hole -- for the small percentage of users smart enough to dl the patches.
Let's roast them for their real problems. Because when the press gets bad, they do respond, and that will make the world a better place. As everyone who uses the product knows, the MS-SQL Server story was BS, a cheap shot. This is proof that there are still plenty of fair shots to go around.
I don't think the problem is the money. If I could surf around and get good content all day for $50/month, I'd do it. People pay that for their cable tv.
I see three problems.
First of all, as someone has pointed out, there isn't a good micropayment standard in place.
Second of all, I'd be very reluctant to participate in a micropayment system that wasn't anonymous. I think we need something similar to digicash.
I stopped buying non-geek books online, because I don't want big companies to have databases of the things I'm interested in or thinking about. Any micropayment system that's likely to be put into place will probably allow the coordinating company to put together a horribly intrusive database about its users. I'm amazed that people buy porn online -- some day that db will come back and bite them.
Finally, there are plenty of sites like this one that keep me entertained reasonably well for free. I don't feel the need for more content. I wish there was less, so I'd spend time doing more productive things.
I don't claim to be a debian expert. All I know is that I went into the #debian IRC channel and asked, and people reacted very badly when I talked about upgrading my perl. They said it would break Potato up and down the block. I didn't try it, because I figured they knew what they were talking about.
Slackware was easier, and it works, so that's what I did.
I've wondered that myself. That's certainly a big name from the past. I used to install it from floppies on a 386sx with a 20MB hard disk. I'm pretty sure it was from Manchester, in the UK, and that a prof rolled his own distro to roll out machines for a class he was teaching.
I started with MCC, went to SLS, because all the docs seemed to assume you were running SLS. When SLS died I moved to Slackware. I think I cut over to RedHat around version 4, and jumped to Debian when RH broke the compiler. Somewhere in the middle of that I played with SuSE a little.
I think it was more fun in those days. There was something cool about having to roll a new kernel just to get your ethernet card working. Although there wasn't anything cool about having to do X configuration by hand.
Taco's comments make it seem as if Slackware is a kind of museum piece, relevant only as a historical artifact.
But in my opinion if you want a distro to run a specific kind of server (like a name server, or even a data driven web server), and you want to build your own software and not depend on someone else's packages, Slackware is still hard to beat.
Let's say you're running Potato, and you need SSL and Apache. The latest Apache needs a certain version of the SSL module. The SSL module needs the latest Perl to compile. But you can't upgrade your Perl because it's tied into everything Potato in your distro. Sure, you can install debs with Apache/SSL, but what if you need other stuff too?
Package management is a wonderful thing, but it does have some drawbacks. It's not the best way to go in every circumstance. Luckily, we have Slackware for those times.
Are they going to try to bundle the copy protection stuff with this upgrade? Or are the two issues completely disconnected?
It's easy to say that we'll stick with the uncrippled technology we already have. But as it ages and becomes obsolete (ie., can't handle normal sized disks), we'll be pushed into the next generation whether we like it or not. If that next generation includes copy protection, we'll have to live with it.
When I first started to run Linux, years ago, there was an enormous gap in reliability between Linux and Windows. Although ideologues are loathe to admit it, MS has substantially narrowed that gap with Windows 2000. For the first time ever, I'm pretty happy with Windows as technology.
.NET, MS, Passport, and all the rest. People will listen to you -- despite the ill fated graffiti campaign, you guys have a lot of corporate gravitas behind you.
Now the issues that drive my loyalty to Linux have more to do with a fear of MS's power in the industry and what they might do with it. I'm talking about issues like privacy and crippled systems that serve the interests of large intellectual property owners rather than the people who buy the machines.
I've always assumed that IBM's interest in Linux derives from a wariness of MS's power and what they might do with it as well -- although I suspect that IBM is more worried about being muscled financially and technologically.
As a marketing guy, can you tell us if IBM willing to take the issues I'm afraid of to the public? A MS monopoly isn't in anyone's interests but MS's, and I know that issues of privacy are important to the public. People want the machines that they pay for to be working for them, not some big company.
I know companies have to look towards the bottom line, but IBM could do a lot to make the world a better place by stepping up to the plate here and taking on
And a world where MS controls authentication and transactions isn't in IBM's interest either.
We need you to back out of the crippled hardware business (the hard drives), and tell people why IBM and Linux are in the public interest. Cartoon penguins aren't going to do anything to the MS juggernaut.
It's very common for servers hosting the stories linked from /. to sink. We even have a name for it -- the server was "slashdotted".
They should offer a premium service -- so much per month or year -- that will let you see the new stories 15 or 30 minutes before they go out to the masses.
I'm not talking about giving anyone an edge in discusions. I wouldn't let people post comments until everyone can see the story.
But it would be cool to be able to get in before the servers sink. I'd pay for it. I think other people would, too.
What kind of a moron would rent a car from ACME when they have this kind of policy in place?
I used to work on real estate web sites.
Most local MLSs (multiple listing services) have sites that are open to the public. Here in Chicago, the site is called www.mlsni.com.
Although MLSs aren't national, they tend to be the most complete databases around. But sometimes there isn't a single MLS you can use. I think there are something like 20 MLSs in Cleveland, and I'm pretty sure that at least parts of Manhattan don't have one at all. So depending on where you are, you might have some luck with your local newspaper's site.
It also makes sense to look at the company specific sites. Most towns have one or two large players who control most of the listings -- searching their sites will turn up most of the stuff you're interested in.
In order to understand the situation, you have to start with the fact that Realtors make their money in large part from their privilaged access to MLS systems. If you want to sell your house getting listed in the MLS is important, and if you want to do that, you have to pay a Realtor.
And on the flip side, a great deal of the profits from the business come from selling things like mortgages to home buyers. That's why you see companies like GMAC running their own real estate companies.
How does this affect the web? Well, in a universe where MS's Home Advisor functions as a national real estate marketing database, MS gets to sell the banner ads to the mortgage companies. Large realtors want to keep control over the customer -- they want to steer him or her to their own mortgage company. So the national aggregator web sites like Realtor.com and Home Advisor were seen as threats.
Just because the rise of the web has rendered the proprietary systems of the past obsolete technically doesn't mean that Realtors want to give up their leverage. None of the 800 lb. gorillas in the current dynamic have an interest in an efficient web based system where everyone has equal access to the market.
The big companies definitely saw things like Home Advisor as a real threat. And they've done what they can to block it.
So why do the aggregators exist at all? Well, MLSs are run by local boards of realtors. And those guys tend to be dominated by small realtors who have lots of votes. Coldwell Banker might sell 40% of the houses in your town, but they probably get pushed around a bit on the local realty board by small companies with a few offices at most. And those small companies user their votes to allow the MLS to sell all of its listings to the homestore.com and homeadvisor.com's of the world.
There are an awful lot of complicated power struggles going on behind the scenes.
The long and the short of it is that an open, efficient web based marketplace for homes is only slightly more likely to happen than open, efficient, online sales of GM cars. Too many people with too much money and clout will lose if it happens.