But with most OSS titles, there is no tech support. Sure, there are many forums to post on, but that takes time.
I'm sorry but when was the last time you called tech support? Spending 2-3 hours tied to the phone to get a question answered is in my opinion a larger waste of time than checking a forum at the end of the day to get your answer.
And the forum is a worst case scenario. In most cases you will find it in 5 minutes on google. If it's the type of problem you can't find on Google then it's the type of problem tech support is going to escalate you 5 times for and then tell you the developer "is out of the office and can he call you back tomorrow?" I'd rather just email the developer of an OSS project myself. I've only had to do that once and I got a response back within hours. No hold music necessary. Contrast that with the Many Tech Support calls I've had to make for School Management and Financial Management Software in Eductation. Usually it takes about 1 week for them to get back to me on my problem.
You may like being able to talk to someone on the phone but don't tell me that gets you an answer quicker than posting on a forum or emailing a developer.
No offense but the vast majority of educational software out there is total crap, and I'm not just talking from a coders perspective but also from a background as a tutor and teacher. You're better off using the computers to teach computing and leaving the phonics, math and other stuff to more traditional methods. The two peices of software you mentioned are two very rare exceptions. Even their quality has slipped a great deal in recent years.
The inability to use those educational software packages that are available for windows can hardly be considered a valid reason to not use linux. I do think having a mix in the schools is good idea though. The purpose of computers in school is to show students how to do "work" with "technology". Familiarity with mulitiple OS's can only enhance the educational experience. Using Linux to banish fear of the command line before it even starts can only be a bonus. Think of it as a value added proposition. Chances are when elementary school kids get into the workplace or get into IT careers they will be working with multiple platforms and environments. Giving them a headstart is a good educational practice. I would try to keep a mix using the older hardware to run linux and the newer to run windows. Even throw in some Mac OSX if you can. Your kids will be aware that computing doesn't just mean windows and their technology experience can only be improved by that.
Strange I do this all the time. Maybe I'm special or something.
The reality is that Fedora Core and Debian for the most part do all share the same core set of libaries and helper apps. They may differ some in the the file locations and standard configs but I'd be willing to bet that for most of the common apps that the average joe might want to use he will have no problem getting them on either OS. The cutting edge user may have a little more trouble but then again he probably knows how to get the libaries and install by hand anyway. If you're talking average joe home user I don't really think it's all that much different.
there is a big difference between turned off and not installed. Can you guarantee that the libraries have not been loaded into memory and you didn't lose a gig or more of space on your drive even when you turned it off.
I didn't say you had no choice on Windows you just have less. Mainly the choice to not have it at all.
Your talking about the difference between aiding and abetting a crime and knowing how to do the crime.
For instance: if I were to give you all those items knowing you planned to rob a bank and you robbed a bank I could be charged as a co-conspirator.
However. If I run a search engine that locates a page on the internet which has all this information and you use my search engine to locate that information all without my knowledge then then at most I can be charged with some sort of irresponsible conduct.
The difference here is intent. In the first example I am knowingly helping you rob a bank. The second example I just failed to keep you from that content. I had no idea that you planned to rob a bank neither did I know that my engine had indexed the content.
Now while in the case of the Razorback servers you might be able to argue that the intent was to aid and abett an illegal activity you can not make that case across the board. And it might very well be possible that they can prove the intent was not there. Either way the crime is not file sharing it's aiding and abetting in an illegal act. That is perhaps what bugs me the most about all these news stories and press releases. They misstate the crime and that misleads people.
You are right though bad analogies don't help clarify the issue
Linux (or even *BSD) doesn't require you to install the eyecandy and gives you choice as to which EyeCandy implementation you can use. I don't think anyone is arguing that EyeCandy is bad. I happen to like it on my desktop and I'm a command line junkie. I just object to having it forced on me if I don't want it but do want the latest in high performance computing under the hood.
Actually I'd much rather see a solution that built in some sort of versioning system. I'd like to be able to carry my office suite on a flash drive use it from any machine and when an internet connection was available it would sync with my repository. In the meantime though I could perform offline editing from any machine. That way I get the benefits of binary clients with the benefits of online storage. I don't really relish the thought of a web based wordprocessor per se. I just want to be able to access all my data from anywhere and sync it from anywhere. An SVN UCB content provider for Open Office anyone? hrmmm that sounds pretty darn awesome actually I must think about this further.
Perhaps more importantly Google is showing where and why the censorship happens. Something other portals and engines in China probably aren't doing. This means users of Google will know the information is out there but their government is blocking it. That kind of knowledge is a very powerful thing. I wouldn't be surprised to see some rapid change in china as a result. Google's commitment to transparency bolsters their Don't Be Evil stance.
I think you understimate the market OSS has. We aren't "only" a hobbiest group anymore. I make a living off of it myself. And the numbers are growing. Even if we never outnumber Closed Source market segments we are becoming a segment with significant purchasing power that should not be ignored. And the acceleration of DRM Adoption I have a feeling will drive even more into our market segment. After all Microsoft's licensing and DRM policies were what drove me into the Open Source market. And that was quite a while ago before they were even close to the level they are now.
The answer is marketing the value of non-DRM not fighting the technology that makes DRM possible.
Because Microsoft can't lock "all" hardware vendors into DRM. All it takes is one company to see an opportunity to compete with $BigNameHardwareVendor. There will always be a market for DRM hardware and there will always be a market for non-DRM hardware. I can pretty much guarantee you that as long as there is OSS there will be non-DRM hardware to run it on. That's the way free market economies work. That's also why using DRM to protect content will never work. Someone somewhere will offer non DRM hardware.
We live in a world economy. Just because US companies (for example) may be forced to implement DRM doesn't mean Taiwanese companies will. That very fact is what made it possible to use GPG software to encrypt your data at more than 256 bit encryption. They tried legislating a restriction on exporting encryption larger than a certain limit. But in the era of the internet and a world economy it was an unenforceable restriction and ultimately dissappeared. If a country ever does go this route they will only accelerate the the demise of their hardware manufacturing sector. The market for non-DRM hardware will always be larger than the market for DRM restricted hardware. At least that's my prediction anyway.
What if their OS-tied antivirus program is compromised by a virus? That may be hard to correct without breaking other things. Better to keep a separate program that's easy to upgrade.
This would indicate a complete reversal of all previouse design decisions. Pardon me if I have trouble believing it. They never cared before why would they care now.
Not that it's a bad thing if they did this. It's just historically they've demonstrated that architecture design plays less of a part in these decisions than marketing and business plans do.
Re:I disagree with his statement...
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 1
Yes but if your talking about a comparison between development model's then those statistics don't mean anything. I could easily point to the statistics about the relative security of various closed source applications. Neither one has bearing in a discussion of the development models however. The fact is that for any given project Open Source provides the opportunity for more peer review and more testing on more platforms, in more environments, and for more realisitic uses than any closed source project.
Does this guarantee perfect code? NO. But it can be a valuable tool. It is also a tool that closed source development quite simply cannot match.
The only way to guarantee perfect code is to account for all the variables that might occur when it runs and then handle them all. Open Source can make a case that it can find more of them than any other development model. Closed source can't make that kind of claim.
Re:I disagree with his statement...
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Having contributed to OSS projects and seen the process of contributing. I can say that yes code is generally checked out. A common practice is getting automated emails of CVS/SVN commits and seeing what happened. There are people on projects whose primary job is monitoring those commits. Patches get reviewed before getting put into CVS. But the Primary benefit is the testing. People run the software and report bugs. Lot's of bugs. They find those holes and they find them quicker than in Closed Source development. They use them in production environments (not necessarily for production) and report on real world results across a wide range of platforms and environments. They do those things the developer never expected and report on the results. That kind of asset is nothing to sneeze at. Not every project has this kind of community but the popular ones tend to.
I was doing dynamic web stuff with this before xml was even a buzzword. You can do a lot of cool stuff just passing javascript objects back and forth without even touching xml. In some ways it's even more usefull than xmlhttprequest objects.
But everyone got so swept up in the hype of all this AJAX stuff that hardly anyone even remembers this stuff anymore
You obviously didn't read it carefully enough. The issue he addresses is that currently all the data from each layer is considered out of context. This makes certain types of attacks more difficult to identify. If you can consider all the data in the context of the other layers you have a more complete picture of your networks status. Most solutions right now though don't offer that kind of functionality. I think he's on to something.
I'm saying that given enough time and enough space the free market will sort it self out. And Microsoft's position is slowly being lost in part because they have to compete in the internet market. When they became big the internet wasn't a player. Now that it is they have real competition for the first time.
Microsoft may have been helped in their monopoly position with questionable marketing tactics but those can't help them in a market like the internet. I don't know when or the exact details but even Microsoft will lose it's monopoly status eventually. You can already see the signs of it today.
Free markets work that way. If you leave them alone there might be spikes and temporary monopolies that spring up but they can never last. Unless, that is, someone gets in there and starts trying to "fix" it. That's when it goes all cockeyed.
You also have to be aware that those Search engines only stay on top by being the best. If google starts doing what you suggest then MSNSearch or Yahoo will be more than happy to take their market share. The Internet is the closest thing to a pure "free market" economy we have. The product is information and the currency is our attention. If you forget what kind of economy you are in you'll fail, whether you're Google, or Microsoft.
Google doesn't operate in a vacuum. No matter what you might think.
The good thing is that the analog hole is really unpluggable. I mean analog is still recordable if the device ignores the the codes. And you can't prevent someone hooking into your speaker wires. When are they going to learn that it's a losing battle?
You my friend have nailed the problem square on the head. When you teach to the lowest common denominator all your students come out below or at that denominator. Which of course results in the kind of scores our students in the US have been showing.
Ajax on my CMS admin interface is good. Ajax on my site's homepage is not neccessary. Lets not confuse what Ajax is with how people use it. There is a reason backbuttons don't exist in a lot of desktop applications. It's because there isn't a use for them. The undo button perhaps but not a back button. The same thing goes for web applications. A web application isn't there to to be spidered by search engines, or browsed like wikipedia. The real problem they are talking about is people treating their online information sites like web applications. There is a difference between a site of howto's and an interface to manage those howto's. It would be nice if people would clarify their terms and speak in context on these things but then I guess that would be too sensible.
Instead of trying to interface with all those why not create your own schema that the purchasers can import into the variouse directory types. Surely you could set it up so that you didn't have to use the proprietary protocols. Then your clients could just import that schema into their particular directory service. You could even link it into the current accounts with a little creative scripting I think. (not sure on that one though haven't messed with LDAP much yet Though I'm starting to)
I don't know about you but if I can store xvid videos at really high resolutions on this and display them on a computer monitor that gets better resolution than my television screen then who cares if there is a "player" for it. Data is Data. I don't technically need a DVD player for my television anymore. Especially since when the television finally dies I'm replacing it with a media PC possibly with a projector. The TV DVD VCR combo setup is on the way out.
I was first introduced to the game by an andre norton book. I used to spend hours laboriously working out patterns on paper. It helped break up the monotony of long car rides. My first program ever written was a Life Game simulator. You had to enter in your patterns as program arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but when was the last time you called tech support? Spending 2-3 hours tied to the phone to get a question answered is in my opinion a larger waste of time than checking a forum at the end of the day to get your answer.
And the forum is a worst case scenario. In most cases you will find it in 5 minutes on google. If it's the type of problem you can't find on Google then it's the type of problem tech support is going to escalate you 5 times for and then tell you the developer "is out of the office and can he call you back tomorrow?" I'd rather just email the developer of an OSS project myself. I've only had to do that once and I got a response back within hours. No hold music necessary. Contrast that with the Many Tech Support calls I've had to make for School Management and Financial Management Software in Eductation. Usually it takes about 1 week for them to get back to me on my problem.
You may like being able to talk to someone on the phone but don't tell me that gets you an answer quicker than posting on a forum or emailing a developer.
No offense but the vast majority of educational software out there is total crap, and I'm not just talking from a coders perspective but also from a background as a tutor and teacher. You're better off using the computers to teach computing and leaving the phonics, math and other stuff to more traditional methods. The two peices of software you mentioned are two very rare exceptions. Even their quality has slipped a great deal in recent years.
The inability to use those educational software packages that are available for windows can hardly be considered a valid reason to not use linux. I do think having a mix in the schools is good idea though. The purpose of computers in school is to show students how to do "work" with "technology". Familiarity with mulitiple OS's can only enhance the educational experience. Using Linux to banish fear of the command line before it even starts can only be a bonus. Think of it as a value added proposition. Chances are when elementary school kids get into the workplace or get into IT careers they will be working with multiple platforms and environments. Giving them a headstart is a good educational practice. I would try to keep a mix using the older hardware to run linux and the newer to run windows. Even throw in some Mac OSX if you can. Your kids will be aware that computing doesn't just mean windows and their technology experience can only be improved by that.
Strange I do this all the time. Maybe I'm special or something.
The reality is that Fedora Core and Debian for the most part do all share the same core set of libaries and helper apps. They may differ some in the the file locations and standard configs but I'd be willing to bet that for most of the common apps that the average joe might want to use he will have no problem getting them on either OS. The cutting edge user may have a little more trouble but then again he probably knows how to get the libaries and install by hand anyway. If you're talking average joe home user I don't really think it's all that much different.
there is a big difference between turned off and not installed. Can you guarantee that the libraries have not been loaded into memory and you didn't lose a gig or more of space on your drive even when you turned it off.
I didn't say you had no choice on Windows you just have less. Mainly the choice to not have it at all.
Your talking about the difference between aiding and abetting a crime and knowing how to do the crime.
For instance: if I were to give you all those items knowing you planned to rob a bank and you robbed a bank I could be charged as a co-conspirator.
However. If I run a search engine that locates a page on the internet which has all this information and you use my search engine to locate that information all without my knowledge then then at most I can be charged with some sort of irresponsible conduct.
The difference here is intent. In the first example I am knowingly helping you rob a bank. The second example I just failed to keep you from that content. I had no idea that you planned to rob a bank neither did I know that my engine had indexed the content.
Now while in the case of the Razorback servers you might be able to argue that the intent was to aid and abett an illegal activity you can not make that case across the board. And it might very well be possible that they can prove the intent was not there. Either way the crime is not file sharing it's aiding and abetting in an illegal act. That is perhaps what bugs me the most about all these news stories and press releases. They misstate the crime and that misleads people.
You are right though bad analogies don't help clarify the issue
IANAL so take all this with a grain of salt
The difference? (which I assume is confusing you)
Linux (or even *BSD) doesn't require you to install the eyecandy and gives you choice as to which EyeCandy implementation you can use. I don't think anyone is arguing that EyeCandy is bad. I happen to like it on my desktop and I'm a command line junkie. I just object to having it forced on me if I don't want it but do want the latest in high performance computing under the hood.
So to respond... You missed the point.
Actually I'd much rather see a solution that built in some sort of versioning system. I'd like to be able to carry my office suite on a flash drive use it from any machine and when an internet connection was available it would sync with my repository. In the meantime though I could perform offline editing from any machine. That way I get the benefits of binary clients with the benefits of online storage. I don't really relish the thought of a web based wordprocessor per se. I just want to be able to access all my data from anywhere and sync it from anywhere. An SVN UCB content provider for Open Office anyone? hrmmm that sounds pretty darn awesome actually I must think about this further.
Perhaps more importantly Google is showing where and why the censorship happens. Something other portals and engines in China probably aren't doing. This means users of Google will know the information is out there but their government is blocking it. That kind of knowledge is a very powerful thing. I wouldn't be surprised to see some rapid change in china as a result. Google's commitment to transparency bolsters their Don't Be Evil stance.
It's amazing what a few facts can do.
I think you understimate the market OSS has. We aren't "only" a hobbiest group anymore. I make a living off of it myself. And the numbers are growing. Even if we never outnumber Closed Source market segments we are becoming a segment with significant purchasing power that should not be ignored. And the acceleration of DRM Adoption I have a feeling will drive even more into our market segment. After all Microsoft's licensing and DRM policies were what drove me into the Open Source market. And that was quite a while ago before they were even close to the level they are now.
The answer is marketing the value of non-DRM not fighting the technology that makes DRM possible.
Because Microsoft can't lock "all" hardware vendors into DRM. All it takes is one company to see an opportunity to compete with $BigNameHardwareVendor. There will always be a market for DRM hardware and there will always be a market for non-DRM hardware. I can pretty much guarantee you that as long as there is OSS there will be non-DRM hardware to run it on. That's the way free market economies work. That's also why using DRM to protect content will never work. Someone somewhere will offer non DRM hardware.
We live in a world economy. Just because US companies (for example) may be forced to implement DRM doesn't mean Taiwanese companies will. That very fact is what made it possible to use GPG software to encrypt your data at more than 256 bit encryption. They tried legislating a restriction on exporting encryption larger than a certain limit. But in the era of the internet and a world economy it was an unenforceable restriction and ultimately dissappeared. If a country ever does go this route they will only accelerate the the demise of their hardware manufacturing sector. The market for non-DRM hardware will always be larger than the market for DRM restricted hardware. At least that's my prediction anyway.
This would indicate a complete reversal of all previouse design decisions. Pardon me if I have trouble believing it. They never cared before why would they care now.
Not that it's a bad thing if they did this. It's just historically they've demonstrated that architecture design plays less of a part in these decisions than marketing and business plans do.
Yes but if your talking about a comparison between development model's then those statistics don't mean anything. I could easily point to the statistics about the relative security of various closed source applications. Neither one has bearing in a discussion of the development models however. The fact is that for any given project Open Source provides the opportunity for more peer review and more testing on more platforms, in more environments, and for more realisitic uses than any closed source project.
Does this guarantee perfect code? NO. But it can be a valuable tool. It is also a tool that closed source development quite simply cannot match.
The only way to guarantee perfect code is to account for all the variables that might occur when it runs and then handle them all. Open Source can make a case that it can find more of them than any other development model. Closed source can't make that kind of claim.
Having contributed to OSS projects and seen the process of contributing. I can say that yes code is generally checked out. A common practice is getting automated emails of CVS/SVN commits and seeing what happened. There are people on projects whose primary job is monitoring those commits. Patches get reviewed before getting put into CVS. But the Primary benefit is the testing. People run the software and report bugs. Lot's of bugs. They find those holes and they find them quicker than in Closed Source development. They use them in production environments (not necessarily for production) and report on real world results across a wide range of platforms and environments. They do those things the developer never expected and report on the results. That kind of asset is nothing to sneeze at. Not every project has this kind of community but the popular ones tend to.
yeah we used to call it iframe rpc.
I was doing dynamic web stuff with this before xml was even a buzzword. You can do a lot of cool stuff just passing javascript objects back and forth without even touching xml. In some ways it's even more usefull than xmlhttprequest objects.
But everyone got so swept up in the hype of all this AJAX stuff that hardly anyone even remembers this stuff anymore
actually no. I never pay any attention to slashdot ads so I don't even know who they are :-)
You obviously didn't read it carefully enough. The issue he addresses is that currently all the data from each layer is considered out of context. This makes certain types of attacks more difficult to identify. If you can consider all the data in the context of the other layers you have a more complete picture of your networks status. Most solutions right now though don't offer that kind of functionality. I think he's on to something.
I'm saying that given enough time and enough space the free market will sort it self out. And Microsoft's position is slowly being lost in part because they have to compete in the internet market. When they became big the internet wasn't a player. Now that it is they have real competition for the first time.
Microsoft may have been helped in their monopoly position with questionable marketing tactics but those can't help them in a market like the internet. I don't know when or the exact details but even Microsoft will lose it's monopoly status eventually. You can already see the signs of it today.
Free markets work that way. If you leave them alone there might be spikes and temporary monopolies that spring up but they can never last.
Unless, that is, someone gets in there and starts trying to "fix" it. That's when it goes all cockeyed.
You also have to be aware that those Search engines only stay on top by being the best. If google starts doing what you suggest then MSNSearch or Yahoo will be more than happy to take their market share. The Internet is the closest thing to a pure "free market" economy we have. The product is information and the currency is our attention. If you forget what kind of economy you are in you'll fail, whether you're Google, or Microsoft.
Google doesn't operate in a vacuum. No matter what you might think.
The good thing is that the analog hole is really unpluggable. I mean analog is still recordable if the device ignores the the codes. And you can't prevent someone hooking into your speaker wires. When are they going to learn that it's a losing battle?
I almost worked for those guys just before they tanked :-)
You my friend have nailed the problem square on the head. When you teach to the lowest common denominator all your students come out below or at that denominator. Which of course results in the kind of scores our students in the US have been showing.
Ajax on my CMS admin interface is good. Ajax on my site's homepage is not neccessary. Lets not confuse what Ajax is with how people use it. There is a reason backbuttons don't exist in a lot of desktop applications. It's because there isn't a use for them. The undo button perhaps but not a back button. The same thing goes for web applications. A web application isn't there to to be spidered by search engines, or browsed like wikipedia. The real problem they are talking about is people treating their online information sites like web applications. There is a difference between a site of howto's and an interface to manage those howto's. It would be nice if people would clarify their terms and speak in context on these things but then I guess that would be too sensible.
Instead of trying to interface with all those why not create your own schema that the purchasers can import into the variouse directory types. Surely you could set it up so that you didn't have to use the proprietary protocols. Then your clients could just import that schema into their particular directory service. You could even link it into the current accounts with a little creative scripting I think. (not sure on that one though haven't messed with LDAP much yet Though I'm starting to)
I don't know about you but if I can store xvid videos at really high resolutions on this and display them on a computer monitor that gets better resolution than my television screen then who cares if there is a "player" for it. Data is Data. I don't technically need a DVD player for my television anymore. Especially since when the television finally dies I'm replacing it with a media PC possibly with a projector. The TV DVD VCR combo setup is on the way out.
I was first introduced to the game by an andre norton book. I used to spend hours laboriously working out patterns on paper. It helped break up the monotony of long car rides. My first program ever written was a Life Game simulator. You had to enter in your patterns as program arguments.
Ahhh those were the days.