True; if Ulteo is going to be the easiest Linux distro, it'll have to modify KDE a fair bit, along with its default applications. Ubuntu's standard installer is pretty much the most basic possible in terms of ease of use, except that it asks you about partitioning your hard drive, so there's not much improvement available there.
Not only lower Windows license prices, but lower Windows system requirements. Since Dell's low-end hardware suffices for all a basic user's needs on XP or Linux, and the price of that hardware is going down continuously, they can start selling their low-end PCs for a decent profit. Currently, they have towers with 512MB of RAM and Sempron 3400s for $360, running Vista; a well-configured Linux on 256MB RAM will probably perform as well, and in five years, Vista's minimum requirements will still suffice for Linux.
For those.NET developers, either they're using VB.NET, J# (which Microsoft is using strictly as a transitional tool to Sun Java or C#), or C#.
If they're using VB, they should shoot themselves.
If they're using C#, they can use Mono and get 95% of the functionality immediately, plus replacement functionality for everything they miss (or near enough). And there's nothing wrong with having a heterogeneous environment.
Dell has a diagnostic partition and CD that comes with their computers (at least their corporate lines). That way, no matter what the user does to the software, they have that known software configuration, and much more reliably than depending on your users not to change the default installation that much.
It works better, so it probably saves a fair bit of time and money, but it costs a bit more up front.
GNU didn't create GNOME or X or KDE or Amarok or Gaim or OpenOffice. They currently maintain most of the basic utilities for UNIX, but most non-developer desktop users don't directly interact with any GNU tools.
So it's GNU/MIT/Sun/GNOME Foundation/KDE foundation/Gaim project/Linux.
Might as well add Berlios and Sourceforge, since, though they don't control or own many projects, they help out a fair bit. And I use tetex, so add that, too. And nongnu.org hosts CVS...
I haven't had a firewall on either of my computers in all the time I've owned them. No viruses or intrusions of any kind. You don't have to filter out packets that'll just be ignored anyway.
If Windows were properly designed, firewalls would be nearly useless.
"Our terms are not discriminatory; we charge the same price to every licensee."
Still, I expect the C and C++ standards to be a precedent in this case; there are open source implementations that you can use to create alternate documentation of the standards, which would be your intellectual property, but the original standards cost money.
Standards are good when there are a few well defined ones; that way, everyone can implement every standard, or near enough. I do not welcome MS's standards drive because theirs are not well-defined.
So don't convert the content to the new format -- port the viewer / player / codec. Then if the new formats are that much better (or simply more common), convert to the new one whenever you play back anything in the old format. That'd be much cheaper on computation and disk transfers (or at least it would deamortize them), though it might incur additional lag in playback.
If you have a decent partition scheme, you can have Dell's rescue disk wipe out/boot and/, but leave/home intact. Then you'd have to reset all your passwords, but other than that you'd be fine -- no lost data, just applications (and most of them easy enough to reinstall).
What's so half-assed? They would have to prioritize functionality to provide and product lines; they're doing that by asking the potential users. They have to pick a distribution; they're doing that by asking the potential users. Should they ask whether to use GNOME or KDE by default? Amarok or XMMS? Xine or gstreamer? LILO or GRUB Legacy or GRUB 2?
I don't see much more they could have usefully asked. Besides, if you buy your laptop with KDE on it, it's a matter of a few minutes to install GNOME. (And since this is Dell, you can probably expect a set of CDs with at least the most common packages on them. When I purchased Debian CDs once, they came with pretty much the entire repository.)
Try reading ESR on asking smart questions. Hackers don't necessarily have the time to devote to public relations; they have better things to do. Larger projects sometimes devote people to public relations -- Gentoo does, even if the effectiveness in that case is dubious. Smaller projects usually don't, and don't have enough people working on them to answer all questions many times over. Thus the instant response to read the manual.
Authentication is not about agreeing on reality. It's about convincing someone else that I am who I say I am. Besides, being in the right timezone is hardly a difficult requirement; the system warns you that your clock is wrong and tells you to change it, so an attacker would correct the error after the first attempt.
You can make an argument that it's to provide session timeouts more easily, but you'd need to alter one line of code to allow people to log in with any system time, and could get rid of the rest of the time checking code. (Which PeopleSoft seem to have done recently, or maybe they just don't know how to check it in Linux.)
That only works if you're using time as a key, but you couldn't get accuracy beyond about five minutes, so that's almost useless. Not to mention, if the replay attack is possible, you can change the timestamp and replay. Besides which, you can just use Diffie-Hellman key exchange and make replay attacks unreasonable.
Patent 6,379,553: Method to Display Failure Information
A method and system are provided for displaying failure information on a limited resource computing device. Unparseable textual messages are displayed upon failure....
4. The method of claim 3, in which the screen is blanked before the message is displayed.
5. The method of claim 4, in which the message is displayed on a blue background.
---
As you see, React cannot legally implement the Blue Screen of Death.
Unless they had the whole firmware as a single work, they wouldn't have needed to open source the whole thing due to iptables; they'd just produce their modified iptables source. And a halfway decent lawyer could have shown that the iptables functionality was a separate work. Either substantial portions of their firmware infringed on OSS copyright, or they chose to open the rest of their firmware for unrelated reasons.
It's a matter of software licenses. Legal should be involved. And should have a clue what they're talking about. In an hour, they could determine that the people issuing these licenses claim that you can use their software as an end user with no charge and no caveats, that the license only matters for distribution, and if their developers want to use open source tools, no problem, as long as that doesn't get into the final product.
You don't have to release the source to your modifications of GPL code unless you distribute your modifications. If your company wants to roll out a heavily modified version of GNOME for internal use, the GPL allows that, and they don't need to share the source with anyone until they distribute the binaries outside the company.
With a spreadsheet, I need to load a hefty graphical application to manage it. That means I am subject to its size limitations. They probably aren't that bad, and won't matter much in this case.
The submitter had about a thousand IPs to hand out. That's either a reasonably significant server farm or client machines. In either case, I don't want to have to pull a config file from a central server every time I reimage or replace a machine; instead, I just register the MAC address with the DHCP server and put the unaltered standard image on the machine. Granted, I could put a script on the image to retrieve or generate a config file from information on a central database, which would reduce the load.
DHCP with MAC-based ip assignment is ideal in situations where you have enough machines that managing configs manually is annoying and having a full-fledged database for them is overkill; and also when you don't have control of the client machines. If I knew of simple tools for managing ip configurations, I'd say the latter is the only situation where DHCP is necessary. Still, it's simple to implement.
My point is, why should some random webapp care if I want my computer to say it's 4 July 1982, 3:52AM in Tijuana when it's really 8 March 2007, 2:14AM and in London? PeopleSoft requires that, and I can't fathom a reason for that.
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True; if Ulteo is going to be the easiest Linux distro, it'll have to modify KDE a fair bit, along with its default applications. Ubuntu's standard installer is pretty much the most basic possible in terms of ease of use, except that it asks you about partitioning your hard drive, so there's not much improvement available there.
Not only lower Windows license prices, but lower Windows system requirements. Since Dell's low-end hardware suffices for all a basic user's needs on XP or Linux, and the price of that hardware is going down continuously, they can start selling their low-end PCs for a decent profit. Currently, they have towers with 512MB of RAM and Sempron 3400s for $360, running Vista; a well-configured Linux on 256MB RAM will probably perform as well, and in five years, Vista's minimum requirements will still suffice for Linux.
For those .NET developers, either they're using VB.NET, J# (which Microsoft is using strictly as a transitional tool to Sun Java or C#), or C#.
If they're using VB, they should shoot themselves.
If they're using C#, they can use Mono and get 95% of the functionality immediately, plus replacement functionality for everything they miss (or near enough). And there's nothing wrong with having a heterogeneous environment.
Look for further proliferation of binary-only drivers for Linux.
Dell has a diagnostic partition and CD that comes with their computers (at least their corporate lines). That way, no matter what the user does to the software, they have that known software configuration, and much more reliably than depending on your users not to change the default installation that much.
It works better, so it probably saves a fair bit of time and money, but it costs a bit more up front.
GNU didn't create GNOME or X or KDE or Amarok or Gaim or OpenOffice. They currently maintain most of the basic utilities for UNIX, but most non-developer desktop users don't directly interact with any GNU tools.
So it's GNU/MIT/Sun/GNOME Foundation/KDE foundation/Gaim project/Linux.
Might as well add Berlios and Sourceforge, since, though they don't control or own many projects, they help out a fair bit. And I use tetex, so add that, too. And nongnu.org hosts CVS...
GNU/MIT/Sun/GNOME Foundation/KDE foundation/Gaim project/Berlios/Sourceforge/tetex/nongnu/Linux...
That's a name to inspire generations of users.
I haven't had a firewall on either of my computers in all the time I've owned them. No viruses or intrusions of any kind. You don't have to filter out packets that'll just be ignored anyway.
If Windows were properly designed, firewalls would be nearly useless.
Know of a decent shell for it? A bash equivalent would be nice -- rc seemed to have rather fewer features than sh.
"Our terms are not discriminatory; we charge the same price to every licensee."
Still, I expect the C and C++ standards to be a precedent in this case; there are open source implementations that you can use to create alternate documentation of the standards, which would be your intellectual property, but the original standards cost money.
Standards are good when there are a few well defined ones; that way, everyone can implement every standard, or near enough. I do not welcome MS's standards drive because theirs are not well-defined.
So don't convert the content to the new format -- port the viewer / player / codec. Then if the new formats are that much better (or simply more common), convert to the new one whenever you play back anything in the old format. That'd be much cheaper on computation and disk transfers (or at least it would deamortize them), though it might incur additional lag in playback.
If you have a decent partition scheme, you can have Dell's rescue disk wipe out /boot and /, but leave /home intact. Then you'd have to reset all your passwords, but other than that you'd be fine -- no lost data, just applications (and most of them easy enough to reinstall).
They already do that--though the CDs may not be Linux-based.
What's so half-assed? They would have to prioritize functionality to provide and product lines; they're doing that by asking the potential users. They have to pick a distribution; they're doing that by asking the potential users. Should they ask whether to use GNOME or KDE by default? Amarok or XMMS? Xine or gstreamer? LILO or GRUB Legacy or GRUB 2?
I don't see much more they could have usefully asked. Besides, if you buy your laptop with KDE on it, it's a matter of a few minutes to install GNOME. (And since this is Dell, you can probably expect a set of CDs with at least the most common packages on them. When I purchased Debian CDs once, they came with pretty much the entire repository.)
Try reading ESR on asking smart questions. Hackers don't necessarily have the time to devote to public relations; they have better things to do. Larger projects sometimes devote people to public relations -- Gentoo does, even if the effectiveness in that case is dubious. Smaller projects usually don't, and don't have enough people working on them to answer all questions many times over. Thus the instant response to read the manual.
Authentication is not about agreeing on reality. It's about convincing someone else that I am who I say I am. Besides, being in the right timezone is hardly a difficult requirement; the system warns you that your clock is wrong and tells you to change it, so an attacker would correct the error after the first attempt.
You can make an argument that it's to provide session timeouts more easily, but you'd need to alter one line of code to allow people to log in with any system time, and could get rid of the rest of the time checking code. (Which PeopleSoft seem to have done recently, or maybe they just don't know how to check it in Linux.)
It wasn't new. It was the first popular game of its genre, an early paragon of adventure games. And that's the point of the list.
Which is why SPACETRAVEL (the game that is responsible for the creation of UNIX) is also not included.
That only works if you're using time as a key, but you couldn't get accuracy beyond about five minutes, so that's almost useless. Not to mention, if the replay attack is possible, you can change the timestamp and replay. Besides which, you can just use Diffie-Hellman key exchange and make replay attacks unreasonable.
Patent 6,379,553: Method to Display Failure Information
...
A method and system are provided for displaying failure information on a limited resource computing device. Unparseable textual messages are displayed upon failure.
4. The method of claim 3, in which the screen is blanked before the message is displayed.
5. The method of claim 4, in which the message is displayed on a blue background.
---
As you see, React cannot legally implement the Blue Screen of Death.
Unless they had the whole firmware as a single work, they wouldn't have needed to open source the whole thing due to iptables; they'd just produce their modified iptables source. And a halfway decent lawyer could have shown that the iptables functionality was a separate work. Either substantial portions of their firmware infringed on OSS copyright, or they chose to open the rest of their firmware for unrelated reasons.
It's a matter of software licenses. Legal should be involved. And should have a clue what they're talking about. In an hour, they could determine that the people issuing these licenses claim that you can use their software as an end user with no charge and no caveats, that the license only matters for distribution, and if their developers want to use open source tools, no problem, as long as that doesn't get into the final product.
You don't have to release the source to your modifications of GPL code unless you distribute your modifications. If your company wants to roll out a heavily modified version of GNOME for internal use, the GPL allows that, and they don't need to share the source with anyone until they distribute the binaries outside the company.
With a spreadsheet, I need to load a hefty graphical application to manage it. That means I am subject to its size limitations. They probably aren't that bad, and won't matter much in this case.
The submitter had about a thousand IPs to hand out. That's either a reasonably significant server farm or client machines. In either case, I don't want to have to pull a config file from a central server every time I reimage or replace a machine; instead, I just register the MAC address with the DHCP server and put the unaltered standard image on the machine. Granted, I could put a script on the image to retrieve or generate a config file from information on a central database, which would reduce the load.
DHCP with MAC-based ip assignment is ideal in situations where you have enough machines that managing configs manually is annoying and having a full-fledged database for them is overkill; and also when you don't have control of the client machines. If I knew of simple tools for managing ip configurations, I'd say the latter is the only situation where DHCP is necessary. Still, it's simple to implement.
My point is, why should some random webapp care if I want my computer to say it's 4 July 1982, 3:52AM in Tijuana when it's really 8 March 2007, 2:14AM and in London? PeopleSoft requires that, and I can't fathom a reason for that.