In a true lassiez faire system of political discourse, the big content producing companies would be able to shove the smaller ones off of the network entirely without facing any legal consequence. They would probably achieve this by owning the network. The goal of network neutrality is that the large content companies not have that power.
Yes, that's perfectly obvious. 8^)
What I'm suggesting is that there's a rhetorical point to be made that Network Neutrality allows competition to happen within the information market by barring the network operators from imposing arbitrary constraints upon that market.
In other words, the essence of Network Neutrality is freedom, not constraint. Constraint is the means, not the end.
I think we've established that lassez-faire capitalism isn't the answer.
I don't think that's entirely correct. Well, I don't think its entirely wrong, either, but there's an important point to be made about market freedom that often gets thrown out when we start talking about the need for intervention.
The prime motivation behind Network Neutrality is to allow free market forces to manifest themselves on the Internet without being constrained by those who control the physical networks. Network Neutrality actually enforces a laissez faire environment -from the perspective of the information services. It does so, however, by constraining the network owners from using their control over bandwidth/QoS/etc. to subvert the flow of information from particular sources.
Absent Net Neutrality, the potential for abuse of control over traffic by carriers is far too great. No compromise is possible in this regard, because degradation of Net Neutrality is a degradation of the market itself.
You should try to live in some of the harsh weather states, like Florida.
I was born in Canada, ran an ISP in the Arctic for 3 years and now live in the South Pacific, land of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanoes. I've lived for extended periods of time without power, including the Great Canadian Ice Storm and the blackout of 2002.
I accept what you're saying, but my conclusions from the same evidence differ a little. What we're talking is losing power over wide areas at a crucial moment:
12 hours of power loss in NYC is a problem;
12 hours of it in the immediate vicinity of a 9/11-style event would severely exacerbate the effects;
Er, yeah, those are the only ones they can talk about, because they're the only one they want the public to know about. If a problem's been detected and the damage report isn't complete yet, or if a fix hasn't been fully implemented or even if the damage done was embarrassing... there's no way you'd want to tip your hand and let the attacker know your reaction.
And so what if they knock out a small part of the grid for a few hours or days -- What damage does that actually cause? Unless it's part of a coordinated strike, it doesn't do much.
Asked and answered. At the right moment, a power cut can be catastrophic. Perhaps military channels remain open, but if civilian channels are closed, it throws the environment into chaos, making a coordinated response to the civilian crisis vastly more difficult to manage. This ties up resources that could have been focused on defence or counter-attack.
Disabling these services also denies the military the ability to fall back to using the civilian infrastructure in the event of excessive damage to its own capability. That's a great way to shorten the conflict. Why do you think the very first things to get hit during an attack are military and civilian communications and logistics?
The ability to do so over the Internet, without any significant expenditure of personnel or materiel, must seem like a godsend to some.
I other OLD news, men who ejaculate 5 times per week had a 66% less chance of prostate cancer EVER in their life than men who only did once or less per week.
5 times a week?!?
How am I ever going to keep count, let alone get the number down to 5?
Why fiddle with consistently formatting a long Word document when you can just load a document class in LaTeX?
I spend my days building systems to process legal documents from over twenty countries. Words like yours make me weep with despair.
If I had my way, I'd do away with word processors entirely. Really.
I couldn't agree more that a little bit of structure goes a long way. But the problem is, the benefits derive to people other than the document authors. In effect, the case you have to make is, "If you would only make a slightly greater effort. my life would be easier."
When it comes to closed systems (e.g. large organisations with strict documentation requirements) and very small, very specialised operations (academic researchers), you can make the benefits felt pretty quickly....
But try telling a Chief Justice that his Word documents aren't up to snuff and that he needs to get his already overworked staff to take some time from what they're doing in order to make things easier for everyone. More often than not, they'll glance at the document, decide that it's perfectly legible (which wasn't the issue) and tell you to get out of their office.
Sometimes you can make the case, and the results are a treat. But sustaining the new standards is a constant battle. Even when you do manage to establish standards and processes, it only takes one new manager to tear it all down.
So now, for my sins, I'm forced to content myself with trying to convince people to use Word styles instead of visual formatting.
Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals at the rate of US$0.15 per infected computer....
That's, like, US $3300 for the lot. He's not going to get much hookers and blow outta that.
If he did any programming at all to develop the exploit, then his wages are in the basement. (Probably right next to his 'office'.) Once you factor in the time it would have taken to propagate, test and market the botnet, this guy stood to earning the merest pittance.
Then again, he was stupid enough to turn the thing on his own ISP, so we shouldn't marvel too much over his lack of business acumen.
I sent 2 terabytes of mail today (Sold my soul right there)
It's the same old thing as yesterday (Sold my soul right there)
I'm a black hat burning out a thousand bots (Sold my soul right there)
Filtering's futile and I won't get caught....
chorus
They have blocked all your torrents, you can't even ping
They've been shaping your traffic into doughnut rings
But still they can't stop me 'cause of what I am
For now and forever I'm the King of Spa-am
And increases the 'dangers of... intellectual and moral relativism,' which can lead to 'multiple forms of degradation and humiliation' of the essence of a person, and to the 'pollution of the spirit.'
I actually agree with him on this one. If we understand 'intellectual relativism' to mean the ability to contrast numerous new sources of information against the reflexive dogmatism that existed before, and if we consider that exposure to new information about the clergy might actually lead to 'multiple forms of degradation and humiliation' for them, then we'd have to accept that our spirit, once pure in its certainty and unsullied by doubt, would indeed become polluted by reality.
A life without certainty in exchange for a world that constantly subverts and challenges my assumptions? A world that won't let me be at peace with centuries-old dogma? Sounds good to me.
I find it actually very stimulating to be limited to 140 characters. Forces you to think a little longer before you post.
As Goethe once said: Sorry for writing this long letter, I didn't have time for a shorter one.
And by Goethe, of course, you mean Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and/or George Bernard Shaw, all of whom were known to have used the witticism.
I'd have included the citations, but I haven't the time. 8^)
Ok, march into your boss's office right now, demand you change the entire operations OS because you don't like it's package management. threaten to quit if he doesn't.
be sure to time how long it takes him to burst into laughter at you.
Let's leave juvenile antics and threats out of the scenario for the moment.
On no less than two occasions in my career, I've done precisely that. In both cases, the boss trusted me enough to know I wasn't blowing smoke and allowed me to develop a transition plan that ultimately reduced costs and provided room for significantly more systems development. Time we'd been spending doing troubleshooting, maintenance and repair could now be devoted to actually making things better.
In the last 3 years alone, the number of clients who have agreed to base their operations on Linux servers outnumbers those who chose to stay with Windows.
Where I work right now, we've recreated almost all the basic management capabilities of the typical Windows AD setup on a FOSS stack. The users see no significant difference, except that suddenly everything just quietly hums along. Their PCs don't suffer from bit-rot that degrades performance in a matter of weeks. And the IT team actually has time to deal with real issues, like making our internal processes flow more smoothly.
So, if you contain your ridicule for a few moments, it's actually possible to see a path toward comprehensive use of FOSS and Linux in the Enterprise. No genie is going to transform everything overnight, but a properly developed integration plan can be made to work.
The majority of transition plans don't work, of course, but that's because Change Management is Hard. Nothing about that statement disqualifies FOSS as a viable tool in the workplace, though.
And most disheartening of all is that we can't write better software, outside of the FOSS world.
As much as I agree with your sentiment, you are not going to find any better quality on average in the FOSS world. Which I have never understood because there is no excuse for it in the FOSS world where there are no deadlines and no PHBs.
Let's agree that the majority of software is crap, regardless of its provenance.
But in saying that, we still need to recognise that most of the systems software that holds this rollicking, bollocked-up treasure trove that we call the Internet together is FOSS. And a lot of that software is pretty good.
Most software -FOSS or otherwise- is average to poor because most developers are average to poor. In rare cases you get inspired cases of suicidal mediocrity (Joomla, for instance), but for the most part, it's just run-of-the-mill people delivering run-of-the-mill crap.
Writing Good Software is hard, in part because it requires a high ratio of intelligence to ego. It requires the humility necessary to recognise that simpler is better and cleverness is almost always dangerous. And for any project longer than about 20,000 lines of code, it requires that a group of people share these attributes.
In my experience, adding management and quarterly profit-making only reduces the quality of the software. (Not all companies fall victim to this phenomenon, so yes, commercial software occasionally doesn't suck.) That's the main reason I stay with FOSS. It's true that most of it is average-to-poor, but the rest of it is better than an equivalent percentage of the proprietary world.
"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."
The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
Not compared to Debian.
I operate a number of servers running Ubuntu, due to decisions made in the past. Inertia is enough to keep us on the platform, in the sense that I don't object strongly enough to go through the pain of migrating them to another distro. The servers run well enough, I suppose, but there's nothing particularly attractive about running Ubuntu on them.
Where servers are concerned, conservatism is a virtue, and Debian Stable is my favourite brand of conservatism. I find it philosophically unappealing to be running on Testing and/or Unstable (which, effectively, is what Ubuntu is) because the benefits don't outweigh the liabilities. Happily, my servers have behaved well so far, in part because I use minimally simple configurations, I check everything that happens on them all the time and I read the changelogs before I patch.
On the desktop, however, I quite like Ubuntu. Pushing out closer to the edge in order to get better hardware support and cool features really appeals to me, because the promise of an improved user experience makes it worth enduring a few nagging issues.
That said, Lucid and Karmic have a few bugs that are really silly. One recent one is the Edit Network Connections applet which (rightly) disables the 'Apply' button when there's only partial address information, but never re-enables it. This is a really basic programming mistake, and frankly I'm amazed it was never caught. Issues with removable devices have become increasingly bothersome as well. Karmic saw intermittent problems mounting CDs as well as USB disks and flash drives.
Most -if not all- of these issues can be laid squarely at the feet of the GNOME devs, who seem to be making more and more amateur mistakes at every release. I'm starting to wonder if they have any QA & testing environment at all. But Ubuntu has made its bed by tightly aligning itself with GNOME's release schedule, so they get to share the blame.
As a poster just below observed, becoming popular makes you a target for criticism. I don't really see a problem (or a contradiction) there. While I support Ubuntu and suggest it to anyone who asks, I still think that prominence means that they should be prepared to meet a higher standard and to address such criticism effectively.
Full marks to them, by the way, for getting out ahead of this issue. If this were a proprietary OS, we'd likely have to wait for the first Service Pack before this issue was addressed. (And of course, it wouldn't be documented except for numerous blog and forum posts peppered across the Web.)
google could have so easily gone the traditional "sacrifice all your values for the pursuit of money route", but they actually showed they have principles and a backbone.
It just occurred to me that I haven't heard the old chestnut, "Honesty is the best policy" in years - possibly a decade.
It's a succinct, pragmatic statement, formal in nature, and it fits nicely with solid business practice. Too bad the majority of managers in the corporate world are too clever to understand it.
I discovered today that a patch for a vulnerability [microsoft.com] in the IIS SMTP service causes the settings for the service to be reset [microsoft.com] if you're running it on Server 2008 (2003 doesn't seem to be affected, AFAIK).
Well, there's your problem right there.
Doesn't it strike you as peculiar when software becomes so integrated that changes to your web server end up borking your mail server?
For all its shortcomings (and there are, admittedly, more than a few), the Unix toolkit approach at least allows individual services to be treated as separate and distinct entities. It can make managing their interactions kind of... interesting, from time to time, but at least patching one doesn't end up borking the next one.
Systems Integration is more art than science, and it requires long experience to know what works. I pity the fools who think that turnkey systems offer any kind of shortcut.
Please, for the love of $DEITY, learn Perl or Python or Ruby or SOMETHING. VB's syntax is not predictable or reasonable....
Amen. I just refactored a VBScript that runs during domain login and sets a few Firefox preferences. Moving from VB to Perl reduced the number of lines to 1/3 of its previous size and still increased the amount of white space, resulting in shorter lines and way more readable code[*]. The most egregious part was a search and replace block that went from about 25 lines to 3, and that's counting the trailing brace.
----------
[*] Yes, Grasshopper, Perl can be eminently readable. I'd show you, but the slashdot code filter would complain.
"theft raises the possibility that attackers could analyze the code to find new exploits to take advantage of in the future"
As Bruce Schenier said, security through obscurity does not work...
Are you sure he said that, or did he say that it was wrong to rely on security through obscurity? Obscurity (i.e. not telling tales out of school) is one valid element of an overall security model.
I know this is troll-ish, but the way I view it a script is just that.. a script. A series of commands to be executed in a specific order designed to automate a repetative task. Basic logic, control, and input are generally ok.. but interaction is in my opinion an indicator that your task is out of scope for a "script" and should become a full fledged application.
Well, there's interaction and then there's interaction. The grey area between script and application might be larger than your instinct tells you....
I do document processing for large volumes of legal materials. A number of my scheduled tasks require graduated responses. If the task completes as desired, then no interaction is necessary. If the task encounters one of a set of known issues, then some sort of logic is necessary to decide whether it needs a technical remedy or whether an expert legal editor needs to intervene.
Because the steps are somewhat malleable (we receive documents from 20 different countries), it makes sense to break the process down into a series of discrete stages. Perfect for scripted solutions. But because interaction with humans might be required at any stage, we also need something a little more receptive to input than a number of command-line parameters.
My scripts get wrapped into a proper framework that formalises the way in which they're run, their interfaces to syslog and email, as well as allowing custom logic (in the form of callbacks) in parsing STDOUT and STDERR. They're still scripts, but they run in an environment that smells a lot like userland[*].
I really can't praise Gtk2-Perl enough. Using Glade to quickly build your GUI, and Perl to quickly build your logic, it's a knock-out combination.
Heh, I'll see your GUI and raise you transparency. I've got a little dashboard applet that uses X11::Aosd to display a translucent status display for all my key servers. Yes, I know I just re-invented Conky, but because it's Perl I can use SSH::RPC in the back end to securely talk to my servers in order to get quick and dirty performance metrics.
One of the things scripting does well is to chop tasks into small, manageable steps. While system monitoring is a complex and demanding process, all I really need on my desktop is something about as sophisticated as a baby monitor. In the first instance, I don't need to know what's wrong; I just need to know that something's wrong.
Screenshot here, if you're into that kind of thing. It's simple and slightly boring, really, but that's by design. It's not supposed to sing and dance, and above all, it's not supposed to cry wolf. It's just supposed to sit there quietly and let me know that my servers are healthy and happily chugging along.
Barack Obama could effectively close Gitmo right now if he wanted to, with the stroke of a pen. He could sign an executive order and move those terrorists anywhere he wanted today. That doesn't require an act of Congress. What he wants is credit for doing it only if Congress gives him cover. In other words, he wants to do it if it's safe politically.
And how, pray tell, would he get them off the island of Cuba if Congress denies him the funds?
Checks and balances can be a bitch sometimes. In this case, the Senate refused to write the check.
Slashdot Mirror
In a true lassiez faire system of political discourse, the big content producing companies would be able to shove the smaller ones off of the network entirely without facing any legal consequence. They would probably achieve this by owning the network. The goal of network neutrality is that the large content companies not have that power.
Yes, that's perfectly obvious. 8^)
What I'm suggesting is that there's a rhetorical point to be made that Network Neutrality allows competition to happen within the information market by barring the network operators from imposing arbitrary constraints upon that market.
In other words, the essence of Network Neutrality is freedom, not constraint. Constraint is the means, not the end.
I think we've established that lassez-faire capitalism isn't the answer.
I don't think that's entirely correct. Well, I don't think its entirely wrong, either, but there's an important point to be made about market freedom that often gets thrown out when we start talking about the need for intervention.
The prime motivation behind Network Neutrality is to allow free market forces to manifest themselves on the Internet without being constrained by those who control the physical networks. Network Neutrality actually enforces a laissez faire environment -from the perspective of the information services. It does so, however, by constraining the network owners from using their control over bandwidth/QoS/etc. to subvert the flow of information from particular sources.
As I've written elsewhere:
Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison.
Bull!
Bison bully beef before becoming Bully Beef. Bully Beef becomes the bully, Bison.
You should try to live in some of the harsh weather states, like Florida.
I was born in Canada, ran an ISP in the Arctic for 3 years and now live in the South Pacific, land of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanoes. I've lived for extended periods of time without power, including the Great Canadian Ice Storm and the blackout of 2002.
I accept what you're saying, but my conclusions from the same evidence differ a little. What we're talking is losing power over wide areas at a crucial moment:
There's one concrete example of cyberwarfare.
... which was apparently detected and corrected.
Er, yeah, those are the only ones they can talk about, because they're the only one they want the public to know about. If a problem's been detected and the damage report isn't complete yet, or if a fix hasn't been fully implemented or even if the damage done was embarrassing... there's no way you'd want to tip your hand and let the attacker know your reaction.
And so what if they knock out a small part of the grid for a few hours or days -- What damage does that actually cause? Unless it's part of a coordinated strike, it doesn't do much.
Asked and answered. At the right moment, a power cut can be catastrophic. Perhaps military channels remain open, but if civilian channels are closed, it throws the environment into chaos, making a coordinated response to the civilian crisis vastly more difficult to manage. This ties up resources that could have been focused on defence or counter-attack.
Disabling these services also denies the military the ability to fall back to using the civilian infrastructure in the event of excessive damage to its own capability. That's a great way to shorten the conflict. Why do you think the very first things to get hit during an attack are military and civilian communications and logistics?
The ability to do so over the Internet, without any significant expenditure of personnel or materiel, must seem like a godsend to some.
5 times a week?!?
How am I ever going to keep count, let alone get the number down to 5?
Why fiddle with consistently formatting a long Word document when you can just load a document class in LaTeX?
I spend my days building systems to process legal documents from over twenty countries. Words like yours make me weep with despair.
If I had my way, I'd do away with word processors entirely. Really.
I couldn't agree more that a little bit of structure goes a long way. But the problem is, the benefits derive to people other than the document authors. In effect, the case you have to make is, "If you would only make a slightly greater effort. my life would be easier."
When it comes to closed systems (e.g. large organisations with strict documentation requirements) and very small, very specialised operations (academic researchers), you can make the benefits felt pretty quickly....
But try telling a Chief Justice that his Word documents aren't up to snuff and that he needs to get his already overworked staff to take some time from what they're doing in order to make things easier for everyone. More often than not, they'll glance at the document, decide that it's perfectly legible (which wasn't the issue) and tell you to get out of their office.
Sometimes you can make the case, and the results are a treat. But sustaining the new standards is a constant battle. Even when you do manage to establish standards and processes, it only takes one new manager to tear it all down.
So now, for my sins, I'm forced to content myself with trying to convince people to use Word styles instead of visual formatting.
That one sucks. I prefer "Ginuwine Sisqó Router" because its Web interface has lots of thongs and double entendres.
Bollocks. My Honour Brand Enlightened Crisco router also makes our fried chicken taste less greasy. It's true! I took the paper towel test!
The missus loves it.
That's, like, US $3300 for the lot. He's not going to get much hookers and blow outta that.
If he did any programming at all to develop the exploit, then his wages are in the basement. (Probably right next to his 'office'.) Once you factor in the time it would have taken to propagate, test and market the botnet, this guy stood to earning the merest pittance.
Then again, he was stupid enough to turn the thing on his own ISP, so we shouldn't marvel too much over his lack of business acumen.
I sent 2 terabytes of mail today
(Sold my soul right there)
It's the same old thing as yesterday
(Sold my soul right there)
I'm a black hat burning out a thousand bots
(Sold my soul right there)
Filtering's futile and I won't get caught....
chorus
They have blocked all your torrents, you can't even ping
They've been shaping your traffic into doughnut rings
But still they can't stop me 'cause of what I am
For now and forever I'm the King of Spa-am
King of Spam
I'll always be
King of Spam....
...With apologies to the Police.
I actually agree with him on this one. If we understand 'intellectual relativism' to mean the ability to contrast numerous new sources of information against the reflexive dogmatism that existed before, and if we consider that exposure to new information about the clergy might actually lead to 'multiple forms of degradation and humiliation' for them, then we'd have to accept that our spirit, once pure in its certainty and unsullied by doubt, would indeed become polluted by reality.
A life without certainty in exchange for a world that constantly subverts and challenges my assumptions? A world that won't let me be at peace with centuries-old dogma? Sounds good to me.
Most of us call this process Growing Up.
If only it ran Ubuntu, then we'd know what's the Shuttleworth.
Actually, the firmware for the original was written by a famous kernel dev, which explains why early headlines stated:
SHUTTLE COX BLOCKED
And by Goethe, of course, you mean Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and/or George Bernard Shaw, all of whom were known to have used the witticism.
I'd have included the citations, but I haven't the time. 8^)
"Irony of ironies, all is irony." - Ecclesiastes
Does rot26 count as encryption?
Xor( Xor( NO ) )
Ok, march into your boss's office right now, demand you change the entire operations OS because you don't like it's package management. threaten to quit if he doesn't. be sure to time how long it takes him to burst into laughter at you.
Let's leave juvenile antics and threats out of the scenario for the moment.
On no less than two occasions in my career, I've done precisely that. In both cases, the boss trusted me enough to know I wasn't blowing smoke and allowed me to develop a transition plan that ultimately reduced costs and provided room for significantly more systems development. Time we'd been spending doing troubleshooting, maintenance and repair could now be devoted to actually making things better.
In the last 3 years alone, the number of clients who have agreed to base their operations on Linux servers outnumbers those who chose to stay with Windows.
Where I work right now, we've recreated almost all the basic management capabilities of the typical Windows AD setup on a FOSS stack. The users see no significant difference, except that suddenly everything just quietly hums along. Their PCs don't suffer from bit-rot that degrades performance in a matter of weeks. And the IT team actually has time to deal with real issues, like making our internal processes flow more smoothly.
So, if you contain your ridicule for a few moments, it's actually possible to see a path toward comprehensive use of FOSS and Linux in the Enterprise. No genie is going to transform everything overnight, but a properly developed integration plan can be made to work.
The majority of transition plans don't work, of course, but that's because Change Management is Hard. Nothing about that statement disqualifies FOSS as a viable tool in the workplace, though.
And most disheartening of all is that we can't write better software, outside of the FOSS world.
As much as I agree with your sentiment, you are not going to find any better quality on average in the FOSS world. Which I have never understood because there is no excuse for it in the FOSS world where there are no deadlines and no PHBs.
Let's agree that the majority of software is crap, regardless of its provenance.
But in saying that, we still need to recognise that most of the systems software that holds this rollicking, bollocked-up treasure trove that we call the Internet together is FOSS. And a lot of that software is pretty good.
Most software -FOSS or otherwise- is average to poor because most developers are average to poor. In rare cases you get inspired cases of suicidal mediocrity (Joomla, for instance), but for the most part, it's just run-of-the-mill people delivering run-of-the-mill crap.
Writing Good Software is hard, in part because it requires a high ratio of intelligence to ego. It requires the humility necessary to recognise that simpler is better and cleverness is almost always dangerous. And for any project longer than about 20,000 lines of code, it requires that a group of people share these attributes.
In my experience, adding management and quarterly profit-making only reduces the quality of the software. (Not all companies fall victim to this phenomenon, so yes, commercial software occasionally doesn't suck.) That's the main reason I stay with FOSS. It's true that most of it is average-to-poor, but the rest of it is better than an equivalent percentage of the proprietary world.
"The firm's enormous security guard reacted quickly to the arrival of Carlos the Jackal. Reaching for the closest blunt instrument at hand, the guard picked up I. M. Pei and architected the terrorist to death."
Who said crime doesn't Pei?
The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
Not compared to Debian.
I operate a number of servers running Ubuntu, due to decisions made in the past. Inertia is enough to keep us on the platform, in the sense that I don't object strongly enough to go through the pain of migrating them to another distro. The servers run well enough, I suppose, but there's nothing particularly attractive about running Ubuntu on them.
Where servers are concerned, conservatism is a virtue, and Debian Stable is my favourite brand of conservatism. I find it philosophically unappealing to be running on Testing and/or Unstable (which, effectively, is what Ubuntu is) because the benefits don't outweigh the liabilities. Happily, my servers have behaved well so far, in part because I use minimally simple configurations, I check everything that happens on them all the time and I read the changelogs before I patch.
On the desktop, however, I quite like Ubuntu. Pushing out closer to the edge in order to get better hardware support and cool features really appeals to me, because the promise of an improved user experience makes it worth enduring a few nagging issues.
That said, Lucid and Karmic have a few bugs that are really silly. One recent one is the Edit Network Connections applet which (rightly) disables the 'Apply' button when there's only partial address information, but never re-enables it. This is a really basic programming mistake, and frankly I'm amazed it was never caught. Issues with removable devices have become increasingly bothersome as well. Karmic saw intermittent problems mounting CDs as well as USB disks and flash drives.
Most -if not all- of these issues can be laid squarely at the feet of the GNOME devs, who seem to be making more and more amateur mistakes at every release. I'm starting to wonder if they have any QA & testing environment at all. But Ubuntu has made its bed by tightly aligning itself with GNOME's release schedule, so they get to share the blame.
As a poster just below observed, becoming popular makes you a target for criticism. I don't really see a problem (or a contradiction) there. While I support Ubuntu and suggest it to anyone who asks, I still think that prominence means that they should be prepared to meet a higher standard and to address such criticism effectively.
Full marks to them, by the way, for getting out ahead of this issue. If this were a proprietary OS, we'd likely have to wait for the first Service Pack before this issue was addressed. (And of course, it wouldn't be documented except for numerous blog and forum posts peppered across the Web.)
It just occurred to me that I haven't heard the old chestnut, "Honesty is the best policy" in years - possibly a decade.
It's a succinct, pragmatic statement, formal in nature, and it fits nicely with solid business practice. Too bad the majority of managers in the corporate world are too clever to understand it.
Well, there's your problem right there.
Doesn't it strike you as peculiar when software becomes so integrated that changes to your web server end up borking your mail server?
For all its shortcomings (and there are, admittedly, more than a few), the Unix toolkit approach at least allows individual services to be treated as separate and distinct entities. It can make managing their interactions kind of... interesting, from time to time, but at least patching one doesn't end up borking the next one.
Systems Integration is more art than science, and it requires long experience to know what works. I pity the fools who think that turnkey systems offer any kind of shortcut.
Please, for the love of $DEITY, learn Perl or Python or Ruby or SOMETHING. VB's syntax is not predictable or reasonable....
Amen. I just refactored a VBScript that runs during domain login and sets a few Firefox preferences. Moving from VB to Perl reduced the number of lines to 1/3 of its previous size and still increased the amount of white space, resulting in shorter lines and way more readable code[*]. The most egregious part was a search and replace block that went from about 25 lines to 3, and that's counting the trailing brace.
----------
[*] Yes, Grasshopper, Perl can be eminently readable. I'd show you, but the slashdot code filter would complain.
"theft raises the possibility that attackers could analyze the code to find new exploits to take advantage of in the future"
As Bruce Schenier said, security through obscurity does not work...
Are you sure he said that, or did he say that it was wrong to rely on security through obscurity? Obscurity (i.e. not telling tales out of school) is one valid element of an overall security model.
Well, there's interaction and then there's interaction. The grey area between script and application might be larger than your instinct tells you....
I do document processing for large volumes of legal materials. A number of my scheduled tasks require graduated responses. If the task completes as desired, then no interaction is necessary. If the task encounters one of a set of known issues, then some sort of logic is necessary to decide whether it needs a technical remedy or whether an expert legal editor needs to intervene.
Because the steps are somewhat malleable (we receive documents from 20 different countries), it makes sense to break the process down into a series of discrete stages. Perfect for scripted solutions. But because interaction with humans might be required at any stage, we also need something a little more receptive to input than a number of command-line parameters.
My scripts get wrapped into a proper framework that formalises the way in which they're run, their interfaces to syslog and email, as well as allowing custom logic (in the form of callbacks) in parsing STDOUT and STDERR. They're still scripts, but they run in an environment that smells a lot like userland[*].
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[*] Yeah, I know.
I really can't praise Gtk2-Perl enough. Using Glade to quickly build your GUI, and Perl to quickly build your logic, it's a knock-out combination.
Heh, I'll see your GUI and raise you transparency. I've got a little dashboard applet that uses X11::Aosd to display a translucent status display for all my key servers. Yes, I know I just re-invented Conky, but because it's Perl I can use SSH::RPC in the back end to securely talk to my servers in order to get quick and dirty performance metrics.
One of the things scripting does well is to chop tasks into small, manageable steps. While system monitoring is a complex and demanding process, all I really need on my desktop is something about as sophisticated as a baby monitor. In the first instance, I don't need to know what's wrong; I just need to know that something's wrong.
Screenshot here, if you're into that kind of thing. It's simple and slightly boring, really, but that's by design. It's not supposed to sing and dance, and above all, it's not supposed to cry wolf. It's just supposed to sit there quietly and let me know that my servers are healthy and happily chugging along.
And how, pray tell, would he get them off the island of Cuba if Congress denies him the funds?
Checks and balances can be a bitch sometimes. In this case, the Senate refused to write the check.