how wrong can you be. linux has exellent documentation either through man and/or info pages. which are very detailed and complete. almost every problem i have come across on linux has it's answers somewhere in those pages. got a question on either unix commands or programming (shell, perl, c,...) it is all there. however everytime i find myself on a NT system and want to know what a command does i might get lucky and try the/? param (come to think of it, even DOS had better documentation with the 'help' command or something). and for API documentation on windows, how can you be sure it is complete or even correct? i remember somebody released a book with 'secret' API calls from windows and microsoft dragged his ass to court.
Oh boy, like i needed a benchmark to tell me a trident card isn't the fastest around. Trident vga cards, conner hard drives and pcchips mb's are all part of my traumatic pc past. Everybody avoided those things like the plague. They came standard in the cheapest pc's money could buy, and that was the only thing they were good for. (even though the products with a higher quality weren't that much higher in price, they we worth it because you had less problems in the end.)
At work i have to admin HPUX, Solaris and Linux machines. I don't touch HPUX that much because i really don't like it (luckily for me i'm not the main hpux contact:P), so in fact i should be able to make good comparison between these 3 beast. I've seen all three of them panic over time, though all of them should be considered stable. solaris and hpux machines tend to panic more due to some memory or cpu gone bad. linux has some more problems with certain drivers which can cause very weird things, but if you use hardware from a respectable source you should be (mostly) ok too. (besides a server doesn't have/need exotic hardware, and has no need for X running). solaris and hpux have very good diagnostic tools, which i most certainly miss in linux. but what it all comes down to is that the big win for sun/solaris (and hp/hpux) is that they run on big ass machines which those crazy dba people _insist_ on having to keep their multi-terabyte oracle db running with respectable responce times. that's not all ofcourse, but the serviceability of these machines hardware is also fabulous. i'm sure linux will get there one day, like with the sgi 64cpu machine introduced some weeks ago.
I'm sure this is all fine and true for FedEx US, but there's FedEx EMEA and APAC too. we get all our main feeds of data from the mainframe at the US that is true, so you may say that at the core FedEx is run on a mainframe. When i started to work for FedEx, there was a policy in place - no NT allowed. Oh, how i longer for those days, because at the moment we are 50/50 unix and NT. The reason for this is surely that in our region the load isn't that high as in the US and mostly every country has his seperate little system fullfilling their specific needs (consolidation project has been started just now). This means a bunch of in house developed applications. These applications are written in C or Java, but there are some VB creations running on NT too. Only in the last half year or so there has been interest in linux (before that time there were projects that were not allowed to run on linux, even though the NT server was just acting as web server running IIS). Anyway at the time of speaking NT has been depreciated unless you have a valid reasons in favor for linux. Even for development, the new strategy is to run/develop on linux and later port over to your UNIX of choice (solaris of hpux). So yes, there is a high volume of NT in our region, which is not the case for the US.
>> I doubt a third party would have access to the source code to inject the trojaned backdoor, modify the FTP server and set up a bizarre distribution method
Oh, but I remember an incident a few years back when windows2000 got released, and some group broke into the microsoft server where the source was stored. they downloaded the source, and they claimed they changed the source too, ofcourse microsoft denied it, but who was/is able to check if they were telling the truth?
Where i work we have about every UNIX available running. but our main focus is on HPUX and Solaris.
first, use your brain!! unix admin are normally not stupied. and you should be able to figure out the _main_ differences between all variants quickly.
second, get a small test machine, just for the purpose of testing. (test machines always come in handy, get your one now!:))
third, you have a support contract on those machines right? don't be ashamed to open a support-call for some stupied question (if you cannot find it on the (use)net/manuals first)
forth, consider training, but do NOT go to the basic training courses, they will teach you nothing new there! go to: performance tuning, troubleshooting (this one is always good),...
fifth, be carefull with your shell scripts, not every unix has the same commands in the same place, but you should be able to script around this.
at work, we all have our focus area, i'm the solaris/linux guy, sombody else has most HPUX expierence, another guy AIX, etc... needless to say we learn a lot from eachother. maybe your boss should consider hiring somebody with a lot of expierence on that platform so you can all share knowledge between eachother.
as somebody else pointed out already, this whole setup is basicly remote X with CDE. they did a demo once at work, because management was looking at citrix/nt and sun's solution. well, the.pps presentation was all very nice, until they turned on the sunray and showed the 'famous' cde interface to our poor managers. that was pretty much the end for sun's solution right there. sure, I would had no problems with cde (although it is not my favorite x environment), but imagine all those other people in the company used to win95. 'poor poor helpdesk', is about the only thing that came to all our minds. anyway, I think that is the reason SUN is putting so much effort in GNOME (usability report, code contribution, etc). gnome is not windows (some people may argue:P), but i think most people will be able to adept faster to gnome then to cde. (i'm talking normal people here, not us, the/.-reading crowd)
Reading articles like that make me feel old. I was sysop once, had my own BBS running on two nodes, man it was great! (the fun i had with the users together with my co-ops) I was running that thing on a AMD486/40 with 16Mb ram and 1Gig HD space and two 28.8 USR modems running desqview in dos 6 with PCBoard. (this was at the end, i started with a 386 with 120Mb HD space 14.4 modem, no kidding!). But having a BBS with 1Gb storage space was like BBS heaven, people could upload whatever they wanted it would never get full. anyway my board was specialised in the demo/art-scene. the demo scene was so alive back then, but what was even more great was the ANSI-scene! ACiD vs iCE vs Apathy vs Fuel vs... there were even ansi magazines like blender etc. viewing these ansi-drawings in acidview, switching from ansi to vga mode and drawing ansis yourself in aciddraw/thedraw. I too was an ansi artist (fuel member) and won several prices in several demo parties here in europe. Articles like this makes me want to grab my CD's i burned when i took my board offline and wade through those megs of ansi packs again... (oh yeah and no spam in my mail either, those were days)
1. What is the added value compared to the competition (redhad, mandrake, debian,...)? Those 'extra' tools and the available support will have to be pretty damn good to have people willing to pay for this. I acknowledge RH is the leader in linux distro's, and it is about the nr.1 distro everybody else in the world knows about. when evaluating different distro's and comparing the pricing of RH and UnitedLinux, what will drive people to choose UL? Google is using RH too, but they only paid for 5 cd's or so; out of respect! they don't even pay for RH support. This is a real strength for RH: download cd's, play with it/evaluate it, buy support if needed. you won't be able to do that with UL.
2. so, if GPL software cannot be seat-licensed, and UL is only asking you to pay licenses for those closed source tools they have included themself, i can remove these packages/binaries/etc? and then as a result i won't have to pay a license fee since i'm not using any licensed software, would that work?
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
on
Debian And WineX
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· Score: 0
"Those of us who use GPL do it to get back some fruits of our hands. I WANT that any of my modified code will come back to me."
That is not correct at all. People that use the GPL want modifications to come back to everybody!
Nothing is stopping you in the GPL to take some code, and develop it further on your own. Ofcourse your additional code has to be open to everybody to see. (the original author may even not use your code, but could, or somebody else could modify your code again for a new project and so on...)
As mentioned in the article, and on the project plan page, we will support other browsers. NT/IIS was just quick and easy, and we knew a lot of readers use it anyway.
It doesn't mather if the howto for beo-cluster are +200 pages compared to 1 page for osx-clusters.
1. I haven't read the beo-howto, but mostly you do not read the *whole* howto to get things running. you pick the topics that apply to you.
2. you can buy beo-clusters now from vendors, so if you really are not into tech stuff, you can let them manage it. it will cost you, but it will work - good.
3. what happens if a distribution comes out specialised for building beo-clusters that makes it as easy as to set this up as apple has done now. whatever apple is doing on osx, we can do too, it's a unix if we had all their sources they would probably compile with a little tweaking.
> One concern I've heard voiced is that no company
> providing support for Linux will take ultimate
> responsiblity for a product that isn't theirs.
that is not 100% true, because NT/W2k/XP isn't theirs either. But they can put the blame on Microsoft though.
Then again i wonder, since these vendors, (ibm, hp, dell,...) which also do linux, have some arrangements with distributions like red hat, suse, caldera etc.
And since these distributions have kernel hackers working for them i really think that 'responsibility' argument of yours is just outdated.
The nice and old Amiga 1200 has combined 68k and PPC add-on boards. no wait, even G4 boards. ofcourse it's not cool for/.-readers 'coz it has the word "Amiga" in it. The amiga with G4 will even be able to run Tao/elate! (these things even run linuxppc:) anyway, you don't know how cool this is until you've seen one in action...
the reasons are simple: - speeding tickets are a great income for the state. using this system they would be the same as disallowing the sale of cigarettes. - the car industry won't allow it. why for god sake would somebody buy a porsche/bmw/audi/merc? i mean, hell my fiat can go as just fast and i'm not gonna pay 10 times the price for "just" more comfort. - it's dangerous, i think in the beginning there will be more accidents instead of avoiding them. btw: i don't have a fiat it was just an example:))
i work at FedEx were the corporate standard browser still is Navigator. (btw: the standard webserver is Fasttrack) sure some people are using IE inside the company, but when they call the helpdesk with a IE problem they are not declined to help that person. also i dont think we'll be changing from this policy anytime soon...
indeed, linux out of the box is so insecure that nobody managed to crack the famous mac running linuxppc on it (competition still open?). no, they were so unsure of the security that they quickly gave the root password away... lucky me, that during my +150 days uptime i never got cracked on my internet gateway/firewall box. i will quickly install openBSD now for even *more* security, thx.
I have been keeping myself updated on the latest amiga developments, and there is a difference between the amiga operating SYSTEM and the amiga operating ENVIRONMENT. new amigas are comming, and that is a fact (what HW they will be using we do not know yet etc...) the OS they will be running is based on QNX (with screenshots seen in an earlier/. article). now there is also the amiga operating ENVIRONMENT, this will be an environment that will run on ALL platforms, PCs, MACs, old amigas, etc... therefor it comes to me as no surprise they choose linux (as it covers the most platforms)
i never liked the adventure games of sierra. well, i did, but when i saw a lucasarts game (zak mc cracken) i never wanted to play an other sierra adventure again...
Slashdot Mirror
how wrong can you be. linux has exellent documentation either through man and/or info pages. which are very detailed and complete. /? param (come to think of it, even DOS had better documentation with the 'help' command or something).
almost every problem i have come across on linux has it's answers somewhere in those pages. got a question on either unix commands or programming (shell, perl, c,...) it is all there.
however everytime i find myself on a NT system and want to know what a command does i might get lucky and try the
and for API documentation on windows, how can you be sure it is complete or even correct? i remember somebody released a book with 'secret' API calls from windows and microsoft dragged his ass to court.
Oh boy, like i needed a benchmark to tell me a trident card isn't the fastest around. Trident vga cards, conner hard drives and pcchips mb's are all part of my traumatic pc past. Everybody avoided those things like the plague. They came standard in the cheapest pc's money could buy, and that was the only thing they were good for. (even though the products with a higher quality weren't that much higher in price, they we worth it because you had less problems in the end.)
> Feel my pain. I admin many large HP-UX machines.
I can feel your pain soooo good...
Ofcourse the winnings are from running Linux on cheap intel hardware, which is not possible with any of the other commercial unix versions out there.
At work i have to admin HPUX, Solaris and Linux machines. I don't touch HPUX that much because i really don't like it (luckily for me i'm not the main hpux contact :P), so in fact i should be able to make good comparison between these 3 beast.
I've seen all three of them panic over time, though all of them should be considered stable. solaris and hpux machines tend to panic more due to some memory or cpu gone bad. linux has some more problems with certain drivers which can cause very weird things, but if you use hardware from a respectable source you should be (mostly) ok too. (besides a server doesn't have/need exotic hardware, and has no need for X running).
solaris and hpux have very good diagnostic tools, which i most certainly miss in linux.
but what it all comes down to is that the big win for sun/solaris (and hp/hpux) is that they run on big ass machines which those crazy dba people _insist_ on having to keep their multi-terabyte oracle db running with respectable responce times. that's not all ofcourse, but the serviceability of these machines hardware is also fabulous.
i'm sure linux will get there one day, like with the sgi 64cpu machine introduced some weeks ago.
I'm sure this is all fine and true for FedEx US, but there's FedEx EMEA and APAC too. we get all our main feeds of data from the mainframe at the US that is true, so you may say that at the core FedEx is run on a mainframe.
When i started to work for FedEx, there was a policy in place - no NT allowed. Oh, how i longer for those days, because at the moment we are 50/50 unix and NT. The reason for this is surely that in our region the load isn't that high as in the US and mostly every country has his seperate little system fullfilling their specific needs (consolidation project has been started just now). This means a bunch of in house developed applications. These applications are written in C or Java, but there are some VB creations running on NT too. Only in the last half year or so there has been interest in linux (before that time there were projects that were not allowed to run on linux, even though the NT server was just acting as web server running IIS).
Anyway at the time of speaking NT has been depreciated unless you have a valid reasons in favor for linux. Even for development, the new strategy is to run/develop on linux and later port over to your UNIX of choice (solaris of hpux).
So yes, there is a high volume of NT in our region, which is not the case for the US.
>> I doubt a third party would have access to the source code to inject the trojaned backdoor, modify the FTP server and set up a bizarre distribution method
0 3/ 001103hnhacker.xmll ?sid=00/12/30/173120 0&mode=thread&tid=109
Oh, but I remember an incident a few years back when windows2000 got released, and some group broke into the microsoft server where the source was stored. they downloaded the source, and they claimed they changed the source too, ofcourse microsoft denied it, but who was/is able to check if they were telling the truth?
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/
http://slashdot.org/article.p
Where i work we have about every UNIX available running. but our main focus is on HPUX and Solaris.
:))
...
first, use your brain!! unix admin are normally not stupied. and you should be able to figure out the _main_ differences between all variants quickly.
second, get a small test machine, just for the purpose of testing. (test machines always come in handy, get your one now!
third, you have a support contract on those machines right? don't be ashamed to open a support-call for some stupied question (if you cannot find it on the (use)net/manuals first)
forth, consider training, but do NOT go to the basic training courses, they will teach you nothing new there! go to: performance tuning, troubleshooting (this one is always good),
fifth, be carefull with your shell scripts, not every unix has the same commands in the same place, but you should be able to script around this.
at work, we all have our focus area, i'm the solaris/linux guy, sombody else has most HPUX expierence, another guy AIX, etc... needless to say we learn a lot from eachother. maybe your boss should consider hiring somebody with a lot of expierence on that platform so you can all share knowledge between eachother.
as somebody else pointed out already, this whole setup is basicly remote X with CDE. they did a demo once at work, because management was looking at citrix/nt and sun's solution. .pps presentation was all very nice, until they turned on the sunray and showed the 'famous' cde interface to our poor managers. that was pretty much the end for sun's solution right there. :P), but i think most people will be able to adept faster to gnome then to cde. (i'm talking normal people here, not us, the /.-reading crowd)
well, the
sure, I would had no problems with cde (although it is not my favorite x environment), but imagine all those other people in the company used to win95.
'poor poor helpdesk', is about the only thing that came to all our minds.
anyway, I think that is the reason SUN is putting so much effort in GNOME (usability report, code contribution, etc). gnome is not windows (some people may argue
Reading articles like that make me feel old. ... there were even ansi magazines like blender etc.
I was sysop once, had my own BBS running on two nodes, man it was great! (the fun i had with the users together with my co-ops)
I was running that thing on a AMD486/40 with 16Mb ram and 1Gig HD space and two 28.8 USR modems running desqview in dos 6 with PCBoard. (this was at the end, i started with a 386 with 120Mb HD space 14.4 modem, no kidding!). But having a BBS with 1Gb storage space was like BBS heaven, people could upload whatever they wanted it would never get full. anyway my board was specialised in the demo/art-scene.
the demo scene was so alive back then, but what was even more great was the ANSI-scene! ACiD vs iCE vs Apathy vs Fuel vs
viewing these ansi-drawings in acidview, switching from ansi to vga mode and drawing ansis yourself in aciddraw/thedraw.
I too was an ansi artist (fuel member) and won several prices in several demo parties here in europe.
Articles like this makes me want to grab my CD's i burned when i took my board offline and wade through those megs of ansi packs again...
(oh yeah and no spam in my mail either, those were days)
1. What is the added value compared to the competition (redhad, mandrake, debian,...)?
Those 'extra' tools and the available support will have to be pretty damn good to have people willing to pay for this.
I acknowledge RH is the leader in linux distro's, and it is about the nr.1 distro everybody else in the world knows about. when evaluating different distro's and comparing the pricing of RH and UnitedLinux, what will drive people to choose UL?
Google is using RH too, but they only paid for 5 cd's or so; out of respect! they don't even pay for RH support.
This is a real strength for RH: download cd's, play with it/evaluate it, buy support if needed. you won't be able to do that with UL.
2. so, if GPL software cannot be seat-licensed, and UL is only asking you to pay licenses for those closed source tools they have included themself, i can remove these packages/binaries/etc? and then as a result i won't have to pay a license fee since i'm not using any licensed software, would that work?
"Those of us who use GPL do it to get back some fruits of our hands. I WANT that any of my modified code will come back to me."
That is not correct at all. People that use the GPL want modifications to come back to everybody!
Nothing is stopping you in the GPL to take some code, and develop it further on your own. Ofcourse your additional code has to be open to everybody to see. (the original author may even not use your code, but could, or somebody else could modify your code again for a new project and so on...)
As mentioned in the article, and on the project plan page, we will support other browsers. NT/IIS was just quick and easy, and we knew a lot of readers use it anyway.
It doesn't mather if the howto for beo-cluster are +200 pages compared to 1 page for osx-clusters.
1. I haven't read the beo-howto, but mostly you do not read the *whole* howto to get things running. you pick the topics that apply to you.
2. you can buy beo-clusters now from vendors, so if you really are not into tech stuff, you can let them manage it. it will cost you, but it will work - good.
3. what happens if a distribution comes out specialised for building beo-clusters that makes it as easy as to set this up as apple has done now. whatever apple is doing on osx, we can do too, it's a unix if we had all their sources they would probably compile with a little tweaking.
> The bad news is -- how the hell was I supposed to know to do this?
Ha! you seem to forget that Linux is and X are OPEN. meaning you have access to everything you need: documentation and source.
The problem is not that the information is not available. but it is hard to find if you don't know what to look for.
This is why i don't like the windows environment. how the hell are you ever supposed to find out how to do things/how things work?
> I for one own every game Loki released,
> and I paid for every one of them,
> even one or two I didn't care for,
> just to support Linux gaming.
yeah, me too. (well not all, but almost) just because i believed they deserved our support. knowing they would have it hard enough as it is.
i really saw loki growing up as the 'standard' in linux gaming.
> One concern I've heard voiced is that no company
...) which also do linux, have some arrangements with distributions like red hat, suse, caldera etc.
> providing support for Linux will take ultimate
> responsiblity for a product that isn't theirs.
that is not 100% true, because NT/W2k/XP isn't theirs either. But they can put the blame on Microsoft though.
Then again i wonder, since these vendors, (ibm, hp, dell,
And since these distributions have kernel hackers working for them i really think that 'responsibility' argument of yours is just outdated.
The nice and old Amiga 1200 has combined 68k and PPC add-on boards. no wait, even G4 boards. ofcourse it's not cool for /.-readers 'coz it has the word "Amiga" in it.
The amiga with G4 will even be able to run Tao/elate! (these things even run linuxppc:)
anyway, you don't know how cool this is until you've seen one in action...
the reasons are simple: - speeding tickets are a great income for the state. using this system they would be the same as disallowing the sale of cigarettes. - the car industry won't allow it. why for god sake would somebody buy a porsche/bmw/audi/merc? i mean, hell my fiat can go as just fast and i'm not gonna pay 10 times the price for "just" more comfort. - it's dangerous, i think in the beginning there will be more accidents instead of avoiding them. btw: i don't have a fiat it was just an example :))
i work at FedEx were the corporate standard browser still is Navigator. (btw: the standard webserver is Fasttrack) sure some people are using IE inside the company, but when they call the helpdesk with a IE problem they are not declined to help that person.
also i dont think we'll be changing from this policy anytime soon...
indeed, linux out of the box is so insecure that nobody managed to crack the famous mac running linuxppc on it (competition still open?). no, they were so unsure of the security that they quickly gave the root password away...
lucky me, that during my +150 days uptime i never got cracked on my internet gateway/firewall box.
i will quickly install openBSD now for even *more* security, thx.
I have been keeping myself updated on the latest amiga developments, and there is a difference between the amiga operating SYSTEM and the amiga operating ENVIRONMENT. /. article). now there is also the amiga operating ENVIRONMENT, this will be an environment that will run on ALL platforms, PCs, MACs, old amigas, etc... therefor it comes to me as no surprise they choose linux (as it covers the most platforms)
new amigas are comming, and that is a fact (what HW they will be using we do not know yet etc...)
the OS they will be running is based on QNX (with screenshots seen in an earlier
http://www.amiga.de/pics/products/concept/01_kyoto .jpg -- some more concept drawings.
it represents the real world, were windows is still the most used os on pc's (i'm part of the 28% though :))
i never liked the adventure games of sierra.
well, i did, but when i saw a lucasarts game (zak mc cracken) i never wanted to play an other sierra adventure again...