...but with Linux (and for that matter many of the BSDs now as well) it's fairly straightforward to ship a kit on a CD (or hard disk) which auto-installs the entire network with a known (set of) configuration(s). Plug it into the server, boot, wait for it to install, boot everything else, you're live.
It's kind of moving the install side of the administration from the site to the support company rather than waiving it entirely, but from a customer's perspective the difference is moot. I routinely manage Linux boxes in Kalgoorlie, 400km away, and have managed boxes in the USA (half a planet away), England and Germany (not much closer).
Linux's RMS (Real Market Share, as opposed to pre-installed box counts) is probably up over 10%, which will start to interest the game producers. More and more games have Linux clients, and more of them are working either under WINE or WINEX. This all adds up to a greater Linux presence in the gaming universe.
Usually, the justification for it is the calendaring features - which then sit around essentially unused forever. Many times, I have seen MS-Exchange-based sites using a different calendaring system. Size can't be the issue, there are heaps of MTAs which are at least as scalable and reliable, much less demanding on hardware, and considerably cheaper to roll out.
The reason you see PostFix et al on so many gateways is in large part due to MS-Exchange's vulnerability and/or processing demands. I have put in several PostFix-based mail gateways which were explicitly emplaced to either defend an MS-Exchange server from external attack, or pre-process out the viruses and spam to reduce the MS-Exchange server's workload, and maintain another two sites at which QMail was already installed and providing both of those functions.
As to MS-Exchange's gross (as in obvious) features like calendaring and group contact lists, Kolab and a few other different FOSS MTA systems are already providing those. What has not yet happened is the awakening of decision-makers to this fact. If MS-Exchange does have some new killer features just around the corner (and by "killer features" I don't just mean Yet Another Obfuscated Authentication Method designed to put a stick through competitors' spokes - or some frobnule that MS bolted on just because they could - but genuinely useful features), then well and good, for it will spur innovation in the whole market as its competitors have been doing for so long.
It brings back the bad old days of programming in C and using abortions like "C:\\\\\\\\MSDOS\\\\\\\\COMMAND.COM" to make sure it survived enough layers of C, MS library and command-line parsing to actually work. If Microsoft hadn't made that -ing stupid choice just to be different and broken what would otherwise be a de facto standard, nobody except programmers would know that \ existed, and users wouldn't inevitably stop and ask, "do you mean the question-mark slash or the other one?" multiple times in the simplest instruction sequence.
It knows where to find all manner of legitimately free stuff, and some if that free stuff is excellent.
You rate tracks (including kiboshing them completely), and it selects new ones based on what people like you liked, plus a small seeding of totally random stuff (not all of which is G or PGR or anything like it, be warned). It works pretty well, I have a growing collection of totally non-mainstream stuff that I like. The only thing you need to give up is the herd mentality you picked up as a teenager, where you have to be different, but different in fundamentally the same way all yer mates.
Sure, you got Sodomy Insane eventually, hoorah for that, but how are you going to set about repairing your rep with the circa 5-10% of the remaining population who are now hurting everyone in sight for "revenge", and how are you going to deal with all of those nations who watched you roll in, and thought to themselves, "what if those self-blind, meddling vigilantes pick me next time around?"
So much for subtlety, now how are you going to deal with the consequences of you collective actions?
What are you all acting so surprised about? ServicePack2 evidently does hobble the networking, and a few of the ther items list. Truth in advertising, I guess. Accidental, but nevertheless true.
A natural monopoly is total control over, for example, a specific herbal remedy. An unnatural monopoly is, for example, a headlock on spring-loaded flouro-blue double-ended dildoes.
I whomped up a Linux-based cafe system called lincaf, going to be uploaded somewhere public soon (weeks) and it's GPLed.
While we were testing it, two girls who had never seen Linux before trotted up, sat down, and edited up their CVs, one on OpenOffice Writer and one on KWord, and they never noticed that it wasn't MS-Word they were using. They were especially happy to be able to turn their CVs into PDF on the spot.
While some sites require MSIE (and we don't provide it), one customer was delighted to report that while his bank rarely worked for him using MSIE at another establishment related to the one using lincaf, it worked every time using FireFox and telling it to lie about who it was.
Another random customer who deals with GIS was absolutely floored that we were able to provide GRASS for him in a matter of seconds. No, hah, hah, not that kind of grass, got it off your chest now?
He added GRASS-on-Linux to his resume and got a job the next day (with a firm that, oddly enough, doesn't use Linux).
This Linux system, despite being highly prototypical, is already far easier to maintain than the comparable MS-Windows systems at peer establishments, which regularly break, and regularly hand out free time despite being heavily locked down and Sherrif carded.
I replaced such a system with Linux. Unless you lock the MS-Windows browsers down to the point of total uselessness (especially MSIE), there's always a way to slip a crack in under the radar. Every gap you close leaves another ten.
Using Linux,/bin/false as a shell, mounting the guest-users' $HOME with noexec, and tightening the screws on a handful of KDE's Kiosk Admin config items ended all of that instantly, and so far permanently.
Mandrake Terminal Server available since, I think, 9.0. If you're running audio, video or just lots of screens, go for "diskless fat client" mode rather than "thin client" mode; NFS + Linux's caching makes the network bandwidth much nicer that way, and lots of things like plugging in USB thumbs, cameras or PDAs are easier to manage.
If you want to charge for it, I've cobbled up an infrastructure based on Ruby and PostgreSQL which seems to work fine. It'll be released soon (weeks) under the name "lincaf" (GPL, natch). It will probably learn how to be coin-op within a few weeks as well.
You can actually use the Kiosk tool with any KDE from 3.2.0, and most of the setting effects from it (by hand-editing config files) from KDE 3.0. The Kiosk structure allows you to default changes back to a system config file, so you can make changes for all users (or all in a group) post facto.
What I did for lincaf was set up a template user, tell useradd to borrow that filetree, then do a pass over it with a few lines of Ruby to re-sanitise config files and the like.
WAVe files are based on a structure called RIFF, which Microsoft have some kind of claim on. Try Ogg Vorbis, or for losslessly compressed sounds, Shorten (SHN) files.
If these companies had been using proprietary software, nobody would have known what technologies they were using, so they wouldn't have been sued, would they?
another wave going the other way will simply pass through the first one (Hollywood science notwithstanding), and then destroy whatever is on the western seaboard headed the other way; the original wave will continue unabated.
tsunamis at sea are not very impressive in size, generally only a few meters high, but they do an enormous speed, and when they ramp up a coastal shelf at the other end, all of that wave gets compressed, mostly upwards.
if you want impressive waves at sea, search for "rogue waves".
I also helped a customer past a BSAA audit threat (got the notice mid-afternoon, got inspected mid the following morning) by counting their holo stickers and hastily Linuxifying some of their generic workstations to make up the difference, and slapping the OpenOffice.org suite (and Mozilla for good measure) on all of the machines.
Highlights of the visit were the BSAA dudes (local agents, I think, rather than BSAA proper) trying hard not to ask why nobody was using MS-Office (they eventually broke down and asked, I told them it was because it helped to avoid licence hassles like this one - IRL everyone was ostentatiously using OOo and Mozilla not MSO and MSIE because they'd been told to for that day:-) and the allegedly technical dude shoving a diagnostic CD into the reception machine, which was at the time running Mandrake Linux (I think 9.2) and XPDE and - after a few minutes - asking where "My Computer" was so he could run the nice diagnostics.
IIRC, we'd renamed the XPDE equivalent "Not Bill's Computer". Said dude's look of disbelief upon being appraised of the truth was worth framing; it took the Mandrake Control Centre to half-convince him. I don't think he was ever quite sure.
DECsystem-10's for example, sometimes broke their 36-bit words up into four nine-bit bytes, and other machines had.LT. 8 bit bytes. The word you're looking for is "octet".
Then you need to decide whether you're measuring in kb, kib, ko or kio, because "kilo" can be 1000 or 1024 in digital-land.
No sweat. But most admins prefer a stable system and so will rely on upgrading with the distro to stay moderately current.
Sure, you could do a one-size-fits-all Linux package for FireFox, but it's better to let the distros add their own touches, like Mandrake and its menuing system, Gentoo and its optimisation. The end result will have better fit and finish.
The only reason Microsoft gets to be so externally consistent (and, my goodness, isn't there some frantic pedalling going on behind the scenes to make it so despite some immense internalised differences?) across "distributions" is because they're not really distributions. Win32s is kind of like a cut-down LSB, and MS-Windows developers target it. As more Linux developers and distributors target LSB, so will their efforts better integrate. LSB hasn't been around for anything like as long as win32s. Linux developers are generally less willing (and rightly so, IMESHO) to bundle libraries and link things statically because it erodes Linux's native ability to manage shared objects better than MS-Windows.
The bottom line is that the convenience of one-size-fits-all is nice, but I think we should target it differently to the way Microsoft has done. In actual practice, this is what's happening, and perhaps what we really need is talking heads from the half-dozen most popular distros to sit down and agree on some authoring and packaging standards. I don't mean forcing everything to RPM, but including common meta-information from which various styles of RPMs, DEBs and other packages can be conveniently and automatically built.
Most distributors already run build hosts, and MVP-equivalent external (not in-house) developers are often granted access to them. All that's really needed is meta-information that can be tossed into the pot with the application proper, from which the build host can construct a.spec file or similar, and build the package to suit the distribution. As long as the application's maintainer (Mozilla Org in this case) keeps the meta information correct, the process could in principle be totally automated. App provider announces new revision, distro build hosts bustle in and pick up source, a rebuild happens and is announced, then the finished RPM is picked up by the app provider and integrated into their download page. It would be a trivial matter for an incoming downloader to identify their distribution, version number and architecture in the User-Agent header.
Slashdot Mirror
...but with Linux (and for that matter many of the BSDs now as well) it's fairly straightforward to ship a kit on a CD (or hard disk) which auto-installs the entire network with a known (set of) configuration(s). Plug it into the server, boot, wait for it to install, boot everything else, you're live.
It's kind of moving the install side of the administration from the site to the support company rather than waiving it entirely, but from a customer's perspective the difference is moot. I routinely manage Linux boxes in Kalgoorlie, 400km away, and have managed boxes in the USA (half a planet away), England and Germany (not much closer).
Linux's RMS (Real Market Share, as opposed to pre-installed box counts) is probably up over 10%, which will start to interest the game producers. More and more games have Linux clients, and more of them are working either under WINE or WINEX. This all adds up to a greater Linux presence in the gaming universe.
Usually, the justification for it is the calendaring features - which then sit around essentially unused forever. Many times, I have seen MS-Exchange-based sites using a different calendaring system. Size can't be the issue, there are heaps of MTAs which are at least as scalable and reliable, much less demanding on hardware, and considerably cheaper to roll out.
The reason you see PostFix et al on so many gateways is in large part due to MS-Exchange's vulnerability and/or processing demands. I have put in several PostFix-based mail gateways which were explicitly emplaced to either defend an MS-Exchange server from external attack, or pre-process out the viruses and spam to reduce the MS-Exchange server's workload, and maintain another two sites at which QMail was already installed and providing both of those functions.
As to MS-Exchange's gross (as in obvious) features like calendaring and group contact lists, Kolab and a few other different FOSS MTA systems are already providing those. What has not yet happened is the awakening of decision-makers to this fact. If MS-Exchange does have some new killer features just around the corner (and by "killer features" I don't just mean Yet Another Obfuscated Authentication Method designed to put a stick through competitors' spokes - or some frobnule that MS bolted on just because they could - but genuinely useful features), then well and good, for it will spur innovation in the whole market as its competitors have been doing for so long.
PLEASE don't use -ing \ where you mean /
It brings back the bad old days of programming in C and using abortions like "C:\\\\\\\\MSDOS\\\\\\\\COMMAND.COM" to make sure it survived enough layers of C, MS library and command-line parsing to actually work. If Microsoft hadn't made that -ing stupid choice just to be different and broken what would otherwise be a de facto standard, nobody except programmers would know that \ existed, and users wouldn't inevitably stop and ask, "do you mean the question-mark slash or the other one?" multiple times in the simplest instruction sequence.
It knows where to find all manner of legitimately free stuff, and some if that free stuff is excellent.
You rate tracks (including kiboshing them completely), and it selects new ones based on what people like you liked, plus a small seeding of totally random stuff (not all of which is G or PGR or anything like it, be warned). It works pretty well, I have a growing collection of totally non-mainstream stuff that I like. The only thing you need to give up is the herd mentality you picked up as a teenager, where you have to be different, but different in fundamentally the same way all yer mates.
...pounded the living hell out of the target.
And missed.
Sure, you got Sodomy Insane eventually, hoorah for that, but how are you going to set about repairing your rep with the circa 5-10% of the remaining population who are now hurting everyone in sight for "revenge", and how are you going to deal with all of those nations who watched you roll in, and thought to themselves, "what if those self-blind, meddling vigilantes pick me next time around?"
So much for subtlety, now how are you going to deal with the consequences of you collective actions?
What has he got to lose now?
What are you all acting so surprised about? ServicePack2 evidently does hobble the networking, and a few of the ther items list. Truth in advertising, I guess. Accidental, but nevertheless true.
...makes mark in air about where Jon's slate would be. (-:
Hello from Oz.
A natural monopoly is total control over, for example, a specific herbal remedy. An unnatural monopoly is, for example, a headlock on spring-loaded flouro-blue double-ended dildoes.
- While we were testing it, two girls who had never seen Linux before trotted up, sat down, and edited up their CVs, one on OpenOffice Writer and one on KWord, and they never noticed that it wasn't MS-Word they were using. They were especially happy to be able to turn their CVs into PDF on the spot.
- While some sites require MSIE (and we don't provide it), one customer was delighted to report that while his bank rarely worked for him using MSIE at another establishment related to the one using lincaf, it worked every time using FireFox and telling it to lie about who it was.
- Another random customer who deals with GIS was absolutely floored that we were able to provide GRASS for him in a matter of seconds. No, hah, hah, not that kind of grass, got it off your chest now?
This Linux system, despite being highly prototypical, is already far easier to maintain than the comparable MS-Windows systems at peer establishments, which regularly break, and regularly hand out free time despite being heavily locked down and Sherrif carded.He added GRASS-on-Linux to his resume and got a job the next day (with a firm that, oddly enough, doesn't use Linux).
I replaced such a system with Linux. Unless you lock the MS-Windows browsers down to the point of total uselessness (especially MSIE), there's always a way to slip a crack in under the radar. Every gap you close leaves another ten.
/bin/false as a shell, mounting the guest-users' $HOME with noexec, and tightening the screws on a handful of KDE's Kiosk Admin config items ended all of that instantly, and so far permanently.
Using Linux,
Mandrake Terminal Server available since, I think, 9.0. If you're running audio, video or just lots of screens, go for "diskless fat client" mode rather than "thin client" mode; NFS + Linux's caching makes the network bandwidth much nicer that way, and lots of things like plugging in USB thumbs, cameras or PDAs are easier to manage.
If you want to charge for it, I've cobbled up an infrastructure based on Ruby and PostgreSQL which seems to work fine. It'll be released soon (weeks) under the name "lincaf" (GPL, natch). It will probably learn how to be coin-op within a few weeks as well.
You can actually use the Kiosk tool with any KDE from 3.2.0, and most of the setting effects from it (by hand-editing config files) from KDE 3.0. The Kiosk structure allows you to default changes back to a system config file, so you can make changes for all users (or all in a group) post facto.
What I did for lincaf was set up a template user, tell useradd to borrow that filetree, then do a pass over it with a few lines of Ruby to re-sanitise config files and the like.
If these companies had been using proprietary software, nobody would have known what technologies they were using, so they wouldn't have been sued, would they?
<G/D/R>
another wave going the other way will simply pass through the first one (Hollywood science notwithstanding), and then destroy whatever is on the western seaboard headed the other way; the original wave will continue unabated.
tsunamis at sea are not very impressive in size, generally only a few meters high, but they do an enormous speed, and when they ramp up a coastal shelf at the other end, all of that wave gets compressed, mostly upwards.
if you want impressive waves at sea, search for "rogue waves".
There's a fair swag of evidence which says that most if not all of it was ghost-written for him.
To teach kids about health. Funny? your call.
I also helped a customer past a BSAA audit threat (got the notice mid-afternoon, got inspected mid the following morning) by counting their holo stickers and hastily Linuxifying some of their generic workstations to make up the difference, and slapping the OpenOffice.org suite (and Mozilla for good measure) on all of the machines.
:-) and the allegedly technical dude shoving a diagnostic CD into the reception machine, which was at the time running Mandrake Linux (I think 9.2) and XPDE and - after a few minutes - asking where "My Computer" was so he could run the nice diagnostics.
Highlights of the visit were the BSAA dudes (local agents, I think, rather than BSAA proper) trying hard not to ask why nobody was using MS-Office (they eventually broke down and asked, I told them it was because it helped to avoid licence hassles like this one - IRL everyone was ostentatiously using OOo and Mozilla not MSO and MSIE because they'd been told to for that day
IIRC, we'd renamed the XPDE equivalent "Not Bill's Computer". Said dude's look of disbelief upon being appraised of the truth was worth framing; it took the Mandrake Control Centre to half-convince him. I don't think he was ever quite sure.
DECsystem-10's for example, sometimes broke their 36-bit words up into four nine-bit bytes, and other machines had .LT. 8 bit bytes. The word you're looking for is "octet".
Then you need to decide whether you're measuring in kb, kib, ko or kio, because "kilo" can be 1000 or 1024 in digital-land.
After that lovable, cuddly character from A Christmas Carol, and in the hope that he, too, will undergo a positive change of heart.
A ferret is a highly appropriate symbol for the BSA, as they are both engaged in killing off bunnies. Dumb, in one case, and furry, in the other.
$1400.00, now count the digits...
$1234.56
IW4M.
No sweat. But most admins prefer a stable system and so will rely on upgrading with the distro to stay moderately current.
.spec file or similar, and build the package to suit the distribution. As long as the application's maintainer (Mozilla Org in this case) keeps the meta information correct, the process could in principle be totally automated. App provider announces new revision, distro build hosts bustle in and pick up source, a rebuild happens and is announced, then the finished RPM is picked up by the app provider and integrated into their download page. It would be a trivial matter for an incoming downloader to identify their distribution, version number and architecture in the User-Agent header.
Sure, you could do a one-size-fits-all Linux package for FireFox, but it's better to let the distros add their own touches, like Mandrake and its menuing system, Gentoo and its optimisation. The end result will have better fit and finish.
The only reason Microsoft gets to be so externally consistent (and, my goodness, isn't there some frantic pedalling going on behind the scenes to make it so despite some immense internalised differences?) across "distributions" is because they're not really distributions. Win32s is kind of like a cut-down LSB, and MS-Windows developers target it. As more Linux developers and distributors target LSB, so will their efforts better integrate. LSB hasn't been around for anything like as long as win32s. Linux developers are generally less willing (and rightly so, IMESHO) to bundle libraries and link things statically because it erodes Linux's native ability to manage shared objects better than MS-Windows.
The bottom line is that the convenience of one-size-fits-all is nice, but I think we should target it differently to the way Microsoft has done. In actual practice, this is what's happening, and perhaps what we really need is talking heads from the half-dozen most popular distros to sit down and agree on some authoring and packaging standards. I don't mean forcing everything to RPM, but including common meta-information from which various styles of RPMs, DEBs and other packages can be conveniently and automatically built.
Most distributors already run build hosts, and MVP-equivalent external (not in-house) developers are often granted access to them. All that's really needed is meta-information that can be tossed into the pot with the application proper, from which the build host can construct a
Given that the alternative is MS-Exchange or some block-box guiltware from TuCows, I'd be delighted to run EXIM if it had to be on MS-Windows.