...and likely because their wares are useless until activated by an idiot enduser but mostly because government neither is competent enough to go after this or should be trusted enough, then I don't see why extending antibodies to the malware problem doesn't deserve a shot.
With honeypots and careful use of infectable machines, the code that makes up these beasts can be examined and anti-malware can be released into the wild to destroy the infections whereever the anti-malware gets installed by an end-user.
"Wow, I just cleaned spyware off my machine by looking for pr0n." Sort of like accidentally giving yourself life-saving medication because someone knew you were a pill popping idiot and they put the right stuff where you'd find it.
The question is, how would the corporate antimalware forces of right now react? "Symantec finds the W32.SpamZapFly2 to be a highly dangerous worm capable of closing far too many open smtp relays (which is eating into our business) and recommends using our new tool to remove it as well as purchasing our latest antivirus software (which will be as ineffective as the last one) instead of relying on accidental infection with this so-called anti-bodyware (because while it has equal chance of happening, we'd prefer to be paid).
See how many anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-malware apps there are on sale there, with names you've likely never ever heard of. People who cannot even write semi-reliable shareware are now writing these things, and people like gullible fools are buying them.
On the other side, you have companies like Symantec and McAfee whose best written and supported products have been known to totally hose business PCs at the drop of a hat. Secure? I don't trust them to run correctly, never mind actually do what they were installed for.
None of this is very new, most of it seems obvious, and it is truly sad that it so many will read this and think it a groundbreaking notice instead of an afterthought by the IT world which it is. The horses are out of the barn, and now people are realizing that they got out because the tried using screen doors to hold them in, and they will predictably go look for spline and a tool to put more screening in.
They just don't get it, do they? Any more than spammers get it. Or spyware writers and purveyors. They act as though any personal computer hooked up to the public Internet for any reason is fair game and should be wide open to them. The user's identities, their viewing habits, they personal lives and personal information. Just like hackers who won't stay out of computers they have no right to access.
I note that Slashdot has cookies in my cache. I think if cookie users are above-board, they will make a point of showing in the browser window in a frame the exact content of the cookies they are putting on and the format and an explanation. Anything that doesn't hold water should be tossed and the site not visited and listed as untrustworthy.
Another poster in a previous article referred to this trend as 'the balkanization of Linux', and I believe that that is a very apt description. If Linux really wants to become a player in the regular user market, one distro (or a few, at the most) must claim ascendancy.
Just one question...which one will it be?
Okay, so would that make the paring-down phase "the Higlanderization of Linux" and who would you put money on? My take is that Torvalds might survive the first few rounds but DeRaadt would probably take his head from behind and we'd end up with BSD.
Joking aside, it is very true. And is Linspire the bunch to do it? Or Red Hat? Or Novell? Well since people want what they find at work to work with what they find at home, and not what their kids find as school no matter what Apple zealots think, it would depend on the corporate market.
Therein lies the rub. Unless and until a distribution comes out that is easy to use for all those idiot end users whose skills are not tech but other things which merely require using a PC as a tool and not configuring it as a co-administrator, Windows will continue to be what mommy and daddy buy for home; I'm ignoring as well that the installed base has already convinced them Windows is easier, if not yet, let them try installing Knoppix to a hard drive without a techie holding their hand and they will be.
Novell used to have a very large corporate presence but their intransigence for so long on adopting TCP/IP, their Apple-like arrogance of thinking themselves great because they were Novell and not because Novell was doing anything great, etc., has squandered that away and those shops which spent so much migrating away from Netware aren't going to be forgetting the reasons that Novell made it necessary so soon. So while they are big and semi-imposing as names go, they have a long way to go to make Suse a common sight.
Red Hat is very nice and growing larger. I use Fedora and Red Hat and like them a lot. I especially like Raleigh, NC. That doesn't make me delusionally think that is enough. The Fedora crowd's legion of faithful packagers and repo maintainers however are a big plus. Not everyone wants or needs to go through Dependency Hell and the torture of make and these people deserve great applause from FC and RH users. Still not enough though.
IBM? OS/2. Need I say more?
HP? Carly Fiorina. Need I say more?
There are no perfect white knights ready to rescue Linux on the corporate end-user desktop.
What is needed is at long last recognition by the Linux vendors and community of what businesses do need. Not "free, free, free" which shows the infantile level of knowledge about business held by so many in the F/OSS world. No, their basic needs must be explored and catered to.
Load-balancing Linux clusters putting all the processing hardware in one room and putting thin clients on the desktop is one good way to begin. But useability, reliability, and compatibility must be there. If businesses cannot leverage existing Windows skills (such as they miserably are) of their workers, it's a no-go because no business is sitting on endless cash to hire trainers to repair the broken mental transmissions resulting from another paradigm shifting without the clutch (with apologies to Scott Adams).
I've seen businesses shock-switch from NT to OS/2 to NT to Win95 to NT in the space of one year as if their CIO was Racter. It's not pretty. No one in business needs the headache. So unless it looks like Windows, feels like Windows, is more stable than Windows, and costs less than Windows, and does more than Windows, easier than Windows, it won't fly.
We aren't there yet. We won't be as long as the zealots and masochists are in control or even very visible. We need to start with ourselves and use Linux because we like it, and NOT because we hate Microsoft/Windows. When we are honest with ourselves, our actions will follow, and all will improve starting from there.
What are they going to do, forbid the use of encryption? If every file is encrypted using public key crptography before it starts to download, and transmits the packets over an encrypted channel, what are they going to be logging? Random bits they can't make sense of?
Yes, you can go tinfoil hat about their secret decryption capabilities, but given that all the computing power on Earth of today would be needed until the death of the sun to crack many commonly availible encryption techniques, they'd not be able to go after serious criminals never mind this trolling and sifting for activity they don't like.
And is this for ISPs ONLY? Then the person hosting a website with pr0n files can set up a server-side encryption system to automatically encrypt to a user's public key whatever they wish to download and need not keep logs of who downloaded what. Are they going to require every farking computer connected to the public Internet to log its own activities?! "You will report on yourselves!"
Yeah, right. PGP/GPG, OpenSSH, proxies, and encrypting drive controllers standard on every PC would make their job a living farking nightmare. Even expreienced organized criminals aren't that good and their police state tactics are only driving that level of security to become the every day norm.
Good going, feds. You're single handedly making your job impossible. Did you idiots never once get the idea that you're driving your targets to put up their defenses against you full tilt? Never mind Al-Queda and the Mafia, your own teenagers' PCs will be unbreakable without dedicating ten years of your department's budget to find out if your daughter is still a virgin or if your son is doing gay cyber sex. Way to go! I'd be surprised the Soviets or Nazis didn't think of this sort of thing first if I wasn't fully aware that they didn't have the Internet back then. Evidently, our politicians and civil servants of today aren't as smart.
Let's see what percentage of illicit file sharers end up getting arrested on anonymous complaints that are later found to hail from Redmond, WA, USA.
While the parity system is nice, we need distributed parity systems with encryption and without connection logging. Microsoft not log, not trace, not interfere?
Which only means we need Paul Kersey (Chuck Bronson) to go out and deal with the spammers. For the squeamish, our vigilante can use humiliation instead, like tranquilizing them, stripping them down and painting them pink and blue and putting them on a 3am bus to Grand Rapids. I'd of course prefer something stronger like repeated tasering...
Who still uses the library? Full of twenty year out of date science books (at best), full of pointless romance novels that most of the readership already get by subscription, full of political fiction conspiracy idiocy, full of art books that have been doodled in by kids...
The Interent is at least up to date, people who have something interesting to say can put up a website... I don't use any of the libraries in my state anymore. Even the university libraries are way out of date, with DOS and Unix System V books more common than anything on Linux, BSD, or even Windows 2000 architecture.
the ease of use of Unix with the security of Internet Explorer.
If this thing will work on an Amiga, the masochists will be truly happy.
Seems another case of retro-mania
on
Makers of MAKE
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sort of. And probably a good one.
I grew up reading do-it-yourself books, encyclopedias, magazines (especially Popular Science and Popular Mechanics of the 50s, 60s, and 70s saved by family). Casting aluminum myself was childs play given I went to school with kids who built calculators out of discrete components in elementary school. Do-it-yourself was just what we did. It wasn't different than catching carp yourself instead of pestering mom and dad to buy them for the tank, or sometimes pond you made with a shovel and hose.
Looking this over, I'll probably eventually get around to subscribing. If only American schools of today put more emphasis on the basics that allow us to build more complicated technology. Wood shop, metal shop, auto, electronics, so many are now cut to nothing no matter the administration being right (the basics are reading, writing, math, history) or left (the basics are sociopolitics, emotions, and safety which precludes hands-on anything). People should know how to build the machines they use in case they ever do need to make them.
Maybe I'll buy a couple subscriptions for my local schools.
...there's always the problem of an innocent or mere idiot getting nailed. If we had layers of defense mechanisms making warnings loud and clear and finally struck back, maybe. But if a fourteen year old script kiddie in Des Moines gets his machine crashed for fooling around, that's a little bit much especially if it is mom and dad's financial info going on the family PC.
We could publish IPs of scorn but we already have such lists on the net of known scum monkeys and the result is basically like that of pro-am net trolls. They got the attention they wanted. And we could blacklist/graylist/scarlet letter the wrong people very easily.
Over time, we may very well have something approaching the world of Ghost in the Shell but right now, we don't need a cyber crime and terrorism unit to go out and whack miscreants down with theatrics and glitz. We need ISPs who give a damn about what their customers are doing and we need to tar and feather THEM. Of course, this hasn't worked for UUNet so YMMV.
I do wish there was some sort of ping-of-death-ability to at least disrupt the connections of people who won't stop knocking on my router or some facility for authorizing specific logging by my ISP. Wouldn't that be something? The ability to sign on to your account and not only manage e-mail but to be able to choose to log specific traffic by port and IP on YOUR connection so you can then cut and paste it in a complaint to the offender's ISP? Probably won't happen, but having the layer 2 as well as layer 3 information in hand would help knock down the "I'm innocent, I was spoofed" defense where you are now put on the spot of having to prove otherwise.
Let's take on some competitors, shall we?
Real Player: latest incarnation will not uninstall from Windows, will not install correctly, will not run correctly. Will not work on Fedora Core 3 either. On BOTH machines is dies as soon as it attempts to run a REAL MEDIA file. If a media player cannot play its own proprietary format never mind work at all, how is it being hurt by another player that works being installed? This is like saying that kids who drop out of high school are injured by those who stayed and graduated because they look bad by comparison.
WinAmp: It (blanks) the llama's (blank). The last incarnations, everything after 2.something, were wonky, played video with a weird tinge no matter what, tended to kill themselves spontaneously, unless you looked at the process list where you'd see them running in circles eating resources. Similar note to above. Yes, they were once hotness. They didn't bother trying to maintain that. Of course the RIAA assault on Internet radio didn't help them any. But Microsoft's bundling did not impact them. There was a time when WinAmp was mandatory among the Internet public. Sort of the way Real Player was pretty much openly hyped by Netscape while WMP was still an ineffective afterthought widget. Oh how the mighty have shot themselves in the foot.
VLC: absolutely necessary if you want to preview incomplete files on eMule (or aMule on Linux) and works very well. However, that being said, it is very poorly documented for something so powerful. How many users even know it streams video and audio? For free? And tends to actually (heavens) work right? Nevertheless, you can't hurt a free open source app by bundling a closed source app if the open source app fulfills many functions the closed source app cannot and will not ever (most likely). It is hardly Microsoft's fault that the VLC developers and users don't boost this thing more. (oddly, it runs better on Windows than on Linux where Xine kicks the arse of everything and should be bundled with all Linux installs of whatever flavor; it just needs its seeming inability to see hidden folders fixed)
Quicktime: Another player with its own proprietary formats but since it comes from Apple and really cool movie trailers are published with it, we let that go. Well, we shouldn't. Not when up until the iteration before last it had a very high incidence of installation failure and if the installation was successful, usage failure on Windows. I didn't hear the same thing from Mac desktop supporters. Nor did I hear tinfoil hat paranoia that Apple did this on purpose. I still found it unacceptable that Apple didn't do a better job of preventing it from crashing. They're Apple. They have money to pay the programmers to code correctly or withhold pay until they do. If not, they should shut up about Redmond's coding practices. In any case, they aren't hurt. You don't see the vast majority of movie trailers on WMV despite the MPAA being so DRM gung-ho. Getting a copy of a Quicktime clip to save to your machine is very easy to do without needing to hunt down StreamboxVCR (as you would with WMV or Real Media).
Yes, you're absolutely right that "They just know that when they double-click something, they expect it to play.". So shouldn't Real Media actually play at least its own format and not force someone to hunt down a copy of Media Player Classic? Shouldn't Quicktime be capable of reading all the formats that WMP can even if you have to add codecs specifically to it? Shouldn't someone be screaming the virtues of VLC from the rooftops? Shouldn't we just put WinAmp in the Internet's past where it belongs like Napster and portal mania?
If alternatives to WMP are so great and so deserving of usage, let their users speak out. I don't see that except maybe with Apple people who use Adobe Premiere and Quicktime but they are hardly evangelists or even boosters. If WMP is missing and replaced with things that don't work right and they eventually come around to WMP, does that not aid Microsoft's rep? Will they not think, "you know, that Microsoft may be a big monopoly they say but that Media Player actually plays my porn right"?
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
This is true. As good as RPM is, I have two words that have not and show no signs of going away: DEPENDENCY HELL.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
Also true./etc/what?/usr/bin/what? A simple easy to follow standard for placement of apps and all associated code is badly needed. Anyone remember pre-Win95 when apps went wherever the developer felt like putting them? I don't accept it when someone ignores standards on Windows and puts their stuff right off of C:\(whatever) and I shouldn't with Linux. We have standards for apps you say? Fine, MENTION them and RUTHELESSLY ENCOURAGE them.
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
Unfortunately also true. And one important thing is overlooked. WinXP handles spaces in file and folder names. Having to type/home/jcurtis/my\ stuff/my\ pictures/my\ vacation/ may seem elementary to Unix geeks, but the casual user wants to type the way he does every day. So Gnome and KDE have file managers which don't show the \ take-the-space-as-literal underpinnings but when they get brave enough to go to the prompt... Oops./home/jcurtis/my stuff/my pictures/my vacation/ returns no such. Linux has inherited most of the idiotic defects noted decades earlier in Unix and this is one.
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
Again true. Windows MFCs,.DLLs, etc., etc., ad nauseam, give much in the way of standardization to Windows and its third part apps. This gives a regular and reassuring environment. If cars were designed as Linux apps, then every one would have the steering device be put in a different place and require that some other third party part be installed at the same time. I like my steering wheels to always be mounted from the dashboard so I can face forward. I don't need a steering joystick mounted in the trunk with a dependency on a gas button mounted under the car and an 8-track stereo in the back seat.
In short, Linux still suffers from useability issues. Why? Because the people driving the forces behind it overall believe that complicated is better than easy? Yes, but that goes with the whole geek-nerd psyche-defect thing of always trying to show off their smarts. I got tired of that in junior high.
The real reason is that the platform isn't being pushed as much for its own survival and its own greatness as hatred for the other guy. Microsoft, IOW. And where is Microsoft leading everywhere? The consumer desktop. And has the hatred blinded people to sober honest analysis of why it still leads? You bet. Even veteran support techs still forget that Windows is being used in huge numbers by people who want easy, sensible, etc. and not hard, incorrect, scattershot.
Mandriva, Mancos, Lydriva, you can call it whatever you want. We could merge Fedora and Suse and get Fuse. What we need is to head towards the ease and sensibility that Windows has given the end users. THAT more than anything is what will begin to compete with Windows and inspire true competition. Ask yourself, is Firefox as hard to install and use as so many other Linux apps? No. It works exactly as it does with Windows minus minutae. And the extensions install with a click and a click without rpm -i this.rpm or emerge that or, shudder, make theotherthing.
Firefox is a perfect example of what Linux should be: easy, consistant, workable. Anyone manages a distro like that, especially during a dangerous market lull for Microsoft like right now pending Longhorn, they'd have something to really challenge Windows. Now that I could get behind.
Earth sheltered, steel reinforced concrete dome homes would be probably a better choice. Equip them with hatches like those on naval vessels and emergency steel shutter systems over the windows and they'd ride it out till the water receeded.
Except in a Deep Impact scenario in which case the land underneath them itself might be washed away and the debris deposited somewhere in the Rockies. In that case lightweight superstrong composites used to make water tight buildings on stilt piers with break-away connections would just bounce like beach balls.
Such things might actually be a good idea for tsunamis like that in Asia. Make them spherical, seat four to twelve like an amusement park ride, water tight, seatbelts and pads, with a GPS and radio transponders to locate them afterwards in case they end up out to sea. They could be put all over the coastal areas.
Of course, they'd need sufficient warning to get to them.
Let's hope that we keep up this war on terror and don't end up with some Bond film level bad guys getting it in their head to depth charge an area with weak undersea cliffs to create a massive landslide triggering tsunamis. Such acts of nature in the past have devestated areas around the North Sea and other places.
This is all partly as a result of the way the PC platform itself works, it's merely that Windows has got so much compound crap in its code that these things are bound to happen. As Linux distros continue to grow and mutate and people ignore the old idea of the smallest kernel possible, we're going to see more buffer overflow errors on Linux. If BSD had the same kind of useage rates as Linux, we'd see a similar trend there. Mac OSX is taking off, we're going to see evolutionary crap in its genetic structure as it were.
Tearing Windows present design platform down to the smallest parts and scrubbing and rebuilding would probably put back the release of XP's successor to 2016. Let's hope some people are listening on the Linux and OSX sides and get it in their heads to keep their code lean and healthy and well tested.
IBM has already proven that corporate financial amd intellectual muscle is for naught if the premise ultimately being worked is bad, so Linux and other OSS boosters should not think IBM's support is any kind of vindication. They should be very afraid.
Why don't the OSS throngs comprehend that the same baseline common end-user base that has been known to disconnect LAN cables by RIPPING them out of the socket, shoving coffee cups into CD trays, call their company help desk to install codecs to watch porn on their company PCs, disables their AV software to speed up their machines, and so forth are not destined to adopt Linux? OS/2 Warp 4 was forty million times easier to work with and it still sucked like a 5,000 horsepower Electrolux. And it was IBM's.
As a Linux user, I'd be happier if those Inadvertant Grim Reapers at IBM stayed as far away as possible. What's next? What other loser to Redmond shall the OSS movement hang their hopes on?
Let's stop with the concept that "Free Software" is a solution. Software written by people whose food-on-their-table doesn't ride on doing it right, and not supported at all or by a cadre of geeks with a "RTFM, F off, TYVM, HTH, HAND" attitude, has to be configured ridiculously before use usually on an OS that also is ridiculously hard to configure for the average user, and bears no relationship with and probably is altogether on a totally different platform than all the rest of their stuff... well, that's NOT a solution.
I like Sun and Red Hat. Fine, use it for free, but don'te expect support. Pay us and we'll ship you shiny media in shiny cases with nice manuals in nice boxes and fess up when we fark up something. But the majority of "Free Software" clearly expresses the old adage that you get what you pay for.
Since Windows apps can be buggy at times because of coder idiocy and management demands for the impossible, immoral, unethical, or demented, usually all at once, but it is EASIER to use and integrate into the existing structure, well piracy will do nicely and if it farks up something, we'll merely go complain about Microsoft on Slashdot and act coy like we don't pirate and curse Adobe under our breath for what Acrobat 3 did to our Win95 machine eight years ago, despite the fact that we stole a copy from work.
This is something I don't really see happening as it steals the thunder from the mobo and chipset manufacturers. Intel, AMD, nVidia, Tyan, etc. do not want to see their boards' creative direction completely usurped by Microsoft, but at the same time are under the gun to support DRM by Microsoft which they for whatever delusional reasons they have believe might somehow screw them in spite if they don't.
What is MS going to do? Buy a processor maker, motherboard company, and so on and be like Apple? Microsoft is a software company, not hardware. The TCP/A Palladium crap should be dumped and the manufacturers should tell Microsoft to kiss their arses.
If the boards are restricted to Windows only, they shut out any future port of OSX should Jobs ever suffer a brain injury that miraculously cures him of his megalomaniacal idiocy, yes. And they kill Linux on all new hardware. But they also kill BSD which is used in sizeable amounts in corporate America in the server farm, they kill x86 Solaris, they kill a lot more than just Linux.
We don't need a PC tech forking to end all forkings. We don't need Microsoft gone over all Apple. We don't need the PC hardware being dictated from Redmond. We don't need to stifle the creativity in hardware we've had for these many years.
Of course there will be PC hardware and Windows-specific PC hardware. So the real threat to Linux is still the people who promote and move it and their lack of understanding as to why people choose Windows over Linux so overwhelmingly. Hints: EASE OF USE, EASE OF INSTALLATION, EASE OF CONFIGURATION, EASE OF ADAPTATION. Did I say that too loud?
Apple has been first and foremost a hardware company since the first Apple rolled out. They have never been anything but. Their OS versions and software architecture were a joke and their ease of access to third party developers and hackers was a travesty compared to Microsoft Windows. Apple thought that only those they knighted from on high should be party to the inner secrets of how their hardware was talked to by software and woe betide anyone who defied their NDAs
The Apple II platform would have spread much farther much faster if Apple allowed their platform to be spread the way IBM allowed theirs by virtue of incompetence at stopping it. Instead the maliciously went after anyone who imagined cloning the platform. If they had instead gone over to being a software company, a lot of the hardware drawbacks of the II platform would have been mitigated by innovation among cloners, the processor manufacturers would have had more say much as Intel and AMD do, and we would have seen evolution.
Software? Please. People bought Beagle Bros. Pronto DOS in the numbers they did precisely because Apple was a weak software vendor and didn't put into their software the functions people wanted. They didn't innovate great stuff and tried to lock people whenever possible into theirs and whined and sniffed (especially Jobs) when third party software was chosen over theirs.
The Macintosh years only solidified that, as they wholeheartedly embraced their growing cult of feel first and think last zealots whose software choices were inherently limited by Apple's hardware design prediliction. Their platform has always been sterile and hostile to advancement and instead relies on Apple to come up with the innovations.
Compare it to the PC platform which has been blessed by its openness to various vendors seizing the reigns at various times.
Let's say another porn site opens and you have to block it avoid getting a felony rap. Oops, sorry, two hundred and fifty thousand opened at the same time and you missed most of them. Do I hear sirens? Better answer that knock on the ISP office door.
Slashdot Mirror
...and likely because their wares are useless until activated by an idiot enduser but mostly because government neither is competent enough to go after this or should be trusted enough, then I don't see why extending antibodies to the malware problem doesn't deserve a shot.
With honeypots and careful use of infectable machines, the code that makes up these beasts can be examined and anti-malware can be released into the wild to destroy the infections whereever the anti-malware gets installed by an end-user.
"Wow, I just cleaned spyware off my machine by looking for pr0n." Sort of like accidentally giving yourself life-saving medication because someone knew you were a pill popping idiot and they put the right stuff where you'd find it.
The question is, how would the corporate antimalware forces of right now react? "Symantec finds the W32.SpamZapFly2 to be a highly dangerous worm capable of closing far too many open smtp relays (which is eating into our business) and recommends using our new tool to remove it as well as purchasing our latest antivirus software (which will be as ineffective as the last one) instead of relying on accidental infection with this so-called anti-bodyware (because while it has equal chance of happening, we'd prefer to be paid).
See how many anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-malware apps there are on sale there, with names you've likely never ever heard of. People who cannot even write semi-reliable shareware are now writing these things, and people like gullible fools are buying them.
On the other side, you have companies like Symantec and McAfee whose best written and supported products have been known to totally hose business PCs at the drop of a hat. Secure? I don't trust them to run correctly, never mind actually do what they were installed for.
None of this is very new, most of it seems obvious, and it is truly sad that it so many will read this and think it a groundbreaking notice instead of an afterthought by the IT world which it is. The horses are out of the barn, and now people are realizing that they got out because the tried using screen doors to hold them in, and they will predictably go look for spline and a tool to put more screening in.
Just wondering is all...
They just don't get it, do they? Any more than spammers get it. Or spyware writers and purveyors. They act as though any personal computer hooked up to the public Internet for any reason is fair game and should be wide open to them. The user's identities, their viewing habits, they personal lives and personal information. Just like hackers who won't stay out of computers they have no right to access.
I note that Slashdot has cookies in my cache. I think if cookie users are above-board, they will make a point of showing in the browser window in a frame the exact content of the cookies they are putting on and the format and an explanation. Anything that doesn't hold water should be tossed and the site not visited and listed as untrustworthy.
Another poster in a previous article referred to this trend as 'the balkanization of Linux', and I believe that that is a very apt description. If Linux really wants to become a player in the regular user market, one distro (or a few, at the most) must claim ascendancy.
Just one question...which one will it be?
Okay, so would that make the paring-down phase "the Higlanderization of Linux" and who would you put money on? My take is that Torvalds might survive the first few rounds but DeRaadt would probably take his head from behind and we'd end up with BSD.
Joking aside, it is very true. And is Linspire the bunch to do it? Or Red Hat? Or Novell? Well since people want what they find at work to work with what they find at home, and not what their kids find as school no matter what Apple zealots think, it would depend on the corporate market.
Therein lies the rub. Unless and until a distribution comes out that is easy to use for all those idiot end users whose skills are not tech but other things which merely require using a PC as a tool and not configuring it as a co-administrator, Windows will continue to be what mommy and daddy buy for home; I'm ignoring as well that the installed base has already convinced them Windows is easier, if not yet, let them try installing Knoppix to a hard drive without a techie holding their hand and they will be.
Novell used to have a very large corporate presence but their intransigence for so long on adopting TCP/IP, their Apple-like arrogance of thinking themselves great because they were Novell and not because Novell was doing anything great, etc., has squandered that away and those shops which spent so much migrating away from Netware aren't going to be forgetting the reasons that Novell made it necessary so soon. So while they are big and semi-imposing as names go, they have a long way to go to make Suse a common sight.
Red Hat is very nice and growing larger. I use Fedora and Red Hat and like them a lot. I especially like Raleigh, NC. That doesn't make me delusionally think that is enough. The Fedora crowd's legion of faithful packagers and repo maintainers however are a big plus. Not everyone wants or needs to go through Dependency Hell and the torture of make and these people deserve great applause from FC and RH users. Still not enough though.
IBM? OS/2. Need I say more?
HP? Carly Fiorina. Need I say more?
There are no perfect white knights ready to rescue Linux on the corporate end-user desktop.
What is needed is at long last recognition by the Linux vendors and community of what businesses do need. Not "free, free, free" which shows the infantile level of knowledge about business held by so many in the F/OSS world. No, their basic needs must be explored and catered to.
Load-balancing Linux clusters putting all the processing hardware in one room and putting thin clients on the desktop is one good way to begin. But useability, reliability, and compatibility must be there. If businesses cannot leverage existing Windows skills (such as they miserably are) of their workers, it's a no-go because no business is sitting on endless cash to hire trainers to repair the broken mental transmissions resulting from another paradigm shifting without the clutch (with apologies to Scott Adams).
I've seen businesses shock-switch from NT to OS/2 to NT to Win95 to NT in the space of one year as if their CIO was Racter. It's not pretty. No one in business needs the headache. So unless it looks like Windows, feels like Windows, is more stable than Windows, and costs less than Windows, and does more than Windows, easier than Windows, it won't fly.
We aren't there yet. We won't be as long as the zealots and masochists are in control or even very visible. We need to start with ourselves and use Linux because we like it, and NOT because we hate Microsoft/Windows. When we are honest with ourselves, our actions will follow, and all will improve starting from there.
What are they going to do, forbid the use of encryption? If every file is encrypted using public key crptography before it starts to download, and transmits the packets over an encrypted channel, what are they going to be logging? Random bits they can't make sense of?
Yes, you can go tinfoil hat about their secret decryption capabilities, but given that all the computing power on Earth of today would be needed until the death of the sun to crack many commonly availible encryption techniques, they'd not be able to go after serious criminals never mind this trolling and sifting for activity they don't like.
And is this for ISPs ONLY? Then the person hosting a website with pr0n files can set up a server-side encryption system to automatically encrypt to a user's public key whatever they wish to download and need not keep logs of who downloaded what. Are they going to require every farking computer connected to the public Internet to log its own activities?! "You will report on yourselves!"
Yeah, right. PGP/GPG, OpenSSH, proxies, and encrypting drive controllers standard on every PC would make their job a living farking nightmare. Even expreienced organized criminals aren't that good and their police state tactics are only driving that level of security to become the every day norm.
Good going, feds. You're single handedly making your job impossible. Did you idiots never once get the idea that you're driving your targets to put up their defenses against you full tilt? Never mind Al-Queda and the Mafia, your own teenagers' PCs will be unbreakable without dedicating ten years of your department's budget to find out if your daughter is still a virgin or if your son is doing gay cyber sex. Way to go! I'd be surprised the Soviets or Nazis didn't think of this sort of thing first if I wasn't fully aware that they didn't have the Internet back then. Evidently, our politicians and civil servants of today aren't as smart.
Let's see what percentage of illicit file sharers end up getting arrested on anonymous complaints that are later found to hail from Redmond, WA, USA.
While the parity system is nice, we need distributed parity systems with encryption and without connection logging. Microsoft not log, not trace, not interfere?
I can't laugh hard enough at that concept.
Which only means we need Paul Kersey (Chuck Bronson) to go out and deal with the spammers. For the squeamish, our vigilante can use humiliation instead, like tranquilizing them, stripping them down and painting them pink and blue and putting them on a 3am bus to Grand Rapids. I'd of course prefer something stronger like repeated tasering...
Who still uses the library? Full of twenty year out of date science books (at best), full of pointless romance novels that most of the readership already get by subscription, full of political fiction conspiracy idiocy, full of art books that have been doodled in by kids...
The Interent is at least up to date, people who have something interesting to say can put up a website... I don't use any of the libraries in my state anymore. Even the university libraries are way out of date, with DOS and Unix System V books more common than anything on Linux, BSD, or even Windows 2000 architecture.
...and this is how it ends up.
Although, there are some AOL users I wouldn't mind being gobbled up, I hardly need to sit on my roof with a minigun and grenade launcher.
For the love of G-d, we must do something now!
the ease of use of Unix with the security of Internet Explorer.
If this thing will work on an Amiga, the masochists will be truly happy.
Sort of. And probably a good one.
I grew up reading do-it-yourself books, encyclopedias, magazines (especially Popular Science and Popular Mechanics of the 50s, 60s, and 70s saved by family). Casting aluminum myself was childs play given I went to school with kids who built calculators out of discrete components in elementary school. Do-it-yourself was just what we did. It wasn't different than catching carp yourself instead of pestering mom and dad to buy them for the tank, or sometimes pond you made with a shovel and hose.
Looking this over, I'll probably eventually get around to subscribing. If only American schools of today put more emphasis on the basics that allow us to build more complicated technology. Wood shop, metal shop, auto, electronics, so many are now cut to nothing no matter the administration being right (the basics are reading, writing, math, history) or left (the basics are sociopolitics, emotions, and safety which precludes hands-on anything). People should know how to build the machines they use in case they ever do need to make them.
Maybe I'll buy a couple subscriptions for my local schools.
...there's always the problem of an innocent or mere idiot getting nailed. If we had layers of defense mechanisms making warnings loud and clear and finally struck back, maybe. But if a fourteen year old script kiddie in Des Moines gets his machine crashed for fooling around, that's a little bit much especially if it is mom and dad's financial info going on the family PC.
We could publish IPs of scorn but we already have such lists on the net of known scum monkeys and the result is basically like that of pro-am net trolls. They got the attention they wanted. And we could blacklist/graylist/scarlet letter the wrong people very easily.
Over time, we may very well have something approaching the world of Ghost in the Shell but right now, we don't need a cyber crime and terrorism unit to go out and whack miscreants down with theatrics and glitz. We need ISPs who give a damn about what their customers are doing and we need to tar and feather THEM. Of course, this hasn't worked for UUNet so YMMV.
I do wish there was some sort of ping-of-death-ability to at least disrupt the connections of people who won't stop knocking on my router or some facility for authorizing specific logging by my ISP. Wouldn't that be something? The ability to sign on to your account and not only manage e-mail but to be able to choose to log specific traffic by port and IP on YOUR connection so you can then cut and paste it in a complaint to the offender's ISP? Probably won't happen, but having the layer 2 as well as layer 3 information in hand would help knock down the "I'm innocent, I was spoofed" defense where you are now put on the spot of having to prove otherwise.
Let's take on some competitors, shall we?
Real Player: latest incarnation will not uninstall from Windows, will not install correctly, will not run correctly. Will not work on Fedora Core 3 either. On BOTH machines is dies as soon as it attempts to run a REAL MEDIA file. If a media player cannot play its own proprietary format never mind work at all, how is it being hurt by another player that works being installed? This is like saying that kids who drop out of high school are injured by those who stayed and graduated because they look bad by comparison.
WinAmp: It (blanks) the llama's (blank). The last incarnations, everything after 2.something, were wonky, played video with a weird tinge no matter what, tended to kill themselves spontaneously, unless you looked at the process list where you'd see them running in circles eating resources. Similar note to above. Yes, they were once hotness. They didn't bother trying to maintain that. Of course the RIAA assault on Internet radio didn't help them any. But Microsoft's bundling did not impact them. There was a time when WinAmp was mandatory among the Internet public. Sort of the way Real Player was pretty much openly hyped by Netscape while WMP was still an ineffective afterthought widget. Oh how the mighty have shot themselves in the foot.
VLC: absolutely necessary if you want to preview incomplete files on eMule (or aMule on Linux) and works very well. However, that being said, it is very poorly documented for something so powerful. How many users even know it streams video and audio? For free? And tends to actually (heavens) work right? Nevertheless, you can't hurt a free open source app by bundling a closed source app if the open source app fulfills many functions the closed source app cannot and will not ever (most likely). It is hardly Microsoft's fault that the VLC developers and users don't boost this thing more. (oddly, it runs better on Windows than on Linux where Xine kicks the arse of everything and should be bundled with all Linux installs of whatever flavor; it just needs its seeming inability to see hidden folders fixed)
Quicktime: Another player with its own proprietary formats but since it comes from Apple and really cool movie trailers are published with it, we let that go. Well, we shouldn't. Not when up until the iteration before last it had a very high incidence of installation failure and if the installation was successful, usage failure on Windows. I didn't hear the same thing from Mac desktop supporters. Nor did I hear tinfoil hat paranoia that Apple did this on purpose. I still found it unacceptable that Apple didn't do a better job of preventing it from crashing. They're Apple. They have money to pay the programmers to code correctly or withhold pay until they do. If not, they should shut up about Redmond's coding practices. In any case, they aren't hurt. You don't see the vast majority of movie trailers on WMV despite the MPAA being so DRM gung-ho. Getting a copy of a Quicktime clip to save to your machine is very easy to do without needing to hunt down StreamboxVCR (as you would with WMV or Real Media).
Yes, you're absolutely right that "They just know that when they double-click something, they expect it to play.". So shouldn't Real Media actually play at least its own format and not force someone to hunt down a copy of Media Player Classic? Shouldn't Quicktime be capable of reading all the formats that WMP can even if you have to add codecs specifically to it? Shouldn't someone be screaming the virtues of VLC from the rooftops? Shouldn't we just put WinAmp in the Internet's past where it belongs like Napster and portal mania?
If alternatives to WMP are so great and so deserving of usage, let their users speak out. I don't see that except maybe with Apple people who use Adobe Premiere and Quicktime but they are hardly evangelists or even boosters. If WMP is missing and replaced with things that don't work right and they eventually come around to WMP, does that not aid Microsoft's rep? Will they not think, "you know, that Microsoft may be a big monopoly they say but that Media Player actually plays my porn right"?
Why am I hearing Clint Eastwood and seeing Steve Ballmer in my head?
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
/etc/what? /usr/bin/what? A simple easy to follow standard for placement of apps and all associated code is badly needed. Anyone remember pre-Win95 when apps went wherever the developer felt like putting them? I don't accept it when someone ignores standards on Windows and puts their stuff right off of C:\(whatever) and I shouldn't with Linux. We have standards for apps you say? Fine, MENTION them and RUTHELESSLY ENCOURAGE them.
/home/jcurtis/my\ stuff/my\ pictures/my\ vacation/ may seem elementary to Unix geeks, but the casual user wants to type the way he does every day. So Gnome and KDE have file managers which don't show the \ take-the-space-as-literal underpinnings but when they get brave enough to go to the prompt... Oops. /home/jcurtis/my stuff/my pictures/my vacation/ returns no such. Linux has inherited most of the idiotic defects noted decades earlier in Unix and this is one.
.DLLs, etc., etc., ad nauseam, give much in the way of standardization to Windows and its third part apps. This gives a regular and reassuring environment. If cars were designed as Linux apps, then every one would have the steering device be put in a different place and require that some other third party part be installed at the same time. I like my steering wheels to always be mounted from the dashboard so I can face forward. I don't need a steering joystick mounted in the trunk with a dependency on a gas button mounted under the car and an 8-track stereo in the back seat.
This is true. As good as RPM is, I have two words that have not and show no signs of going away: DEPENDENCY HELL.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
Also true.
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
Unfortunately also true. And one important thing is overlooked. WinXP handles spaces in file and folder names. Having to type
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
Again true. Windows MFCs,
In short, Linux still suffers from useability issues. Why? Because the people driving the forces behind it overall believe that complicated is better than easy? Yes, but that goes with the whole geek-nerd psyche-defect thing of always trying to show off their smarts. I got tired of that in junior high.
The real reason is that the platform isn't being pushed as much for its own survival and its own greatness as hatred for the other guy. Microsoft, IOW. And where is Microsoft leading everywhere? The consumer desktop. And has the hatred blinded people to sober honest analysis of why it still leads? You bet. Even veteran support techs still forget that Windows is being used in huge numbers by people who want easy, sensible, etc. and not hard, incorrect, scattershot.
Mandriva, Mancos, Lydriva, you can call it whatever you want. We could merge Fedora and Suse and get Fuse. What we need is to head towards the ease and sensibility that Windows has given the end users. THAT more than anything is what will begin to compete with Windows and inspire true competition. Ask yourself, is Firefox as hard to install and use as so many other Linux apps? No. It works exactly as it does with Windows minus minutae. And the extensions install with a click and a click without rpm -i this.rpm or emerge that or, shudder, make theotherthing.
Firefox is a perfect example of what Linux should be: easy, consistant, workable. Anyone manages a distro like that, especially during a dangerous market lull for Microsoft like right now pending Longhorn, they'd have something to really challenge Windows. Now that I could get behind.
Earth sheltered, steel reinforced concrete dome homes would be probably a better choice. Equip them with hatches like those on naval vessels and emergency steel shutter systems over the windows and they'd ride it out till the water receeded.
Except in a Deep Impact scenario in which case the land underneath them itself might be washed away and the debris deposited somewhere in the Rockies. In that case lightweight superstrong composites used to make water tight buildings on stilt piers with break-away connections would just bounce like beach balls.
Such things might actually be a good idea for tsunamis like that in Asia. Make them spherical, seat four to twelve like an amusement park ride, water tight, seatbelts and pads, with a GPS and radio transponders to locate them afterwards in case they end up out to sea. They could be put all over the coastal areas.
Of course, they'd need sufficient warning to get to them.
Let's hope that we keep up this war on terror and don't end up with some Bond film level bad guys getting it in their head to depth charge an area with weak undersea cliffs to create a massive landslide triggering tsunamis. Such acts of nature in the past have devestated areas around the North Sea and other places.
This is all partly as a result of the way the PC platform itself works, it's merely that Windows has got so much compound crap in its code that these things are bound to happen. As Linux distros continue to grow and mutate and people ignore the old idea of the smallest kernel possible, we're going to see more buffer overflow errors on Linux. If BSD had the same kind of useage rates as Linux, we'd see a similar trend there. Mac OSX is taking off, we're going to see evolutionary crap in its genetic structure as it were.
Tearing Windows present design platform down to the smallest parts and scrubbing and rebuilding would probably put back the release of XP's successor to 2016. Let's hope some people are listening on the Linux and OSX sides and get it in their heads to keep their code lean and healthy and well tested.
IBM has already proven that corporate financial amd intellectual muscle is for naught if the premise ultimately being worked is bad, so Linux and other OSS boosters should not think IBM's support is any kind of vindication. They should be very afraid.
Why don't the OSS throngs comprehend that the same baseline common end-user base that has been known to disconnect LAN cables by RIPPING them out of the socket, shoving coffee cups into CD trays, call their company help desk to install codecs to watch porn on their company PCs, disables their AV software to speed up their machines, and so forth are not destined to adopt Linux? OS/2 Warp 4 was forty million times easier to work with and it still sucked like a 5,000 horsepower Electrolux. And it was IBM's.
As a Linux user, I'd be happier if those Inadvertant Grim Reapers at IBM stayed as far away as possible. What's next? What other loser to Redmond shall the OSS movement hang their hopes on?
Let's stop with the concept that "Free Software" is a solution. Software written by people whose food-on-their-table doesn't ride on doing it right, and not supported at all or by a cadre of geeks with a "RTFM, F off, TYVM, HTH, HAND" attitude, has to be configured ridiculously before use usually on an OS that also is ridiculously hard to configure for the average user, and bears no relationship with and probably is altogether on a totally different platform than all the rest of their stuff... well, that's NOT a solution.
I like Sun and Red Hat. Fine, use it for free, but don'te expect support. Pay us and we'll ship you shiny media in shiny cases with nice manuals in nice boxes and fess up when we fark up something. But the majority of "Free Software" clearly expresses the old adage that you get what you pay for.
Since Windows apps can be buggy at times because of coder idiocy and management demands for the impossible, immoral, unethical, or demented, usually all at once, but it is EASIER to use and integrate into the existing structure, well piracy will do nicely and if it farks up something, we'll merely go complain about Microsoft on Slashdot and act coy like we don't pirate and curse Adobe under our breath for what Acrobat 3 did to our Win95 machine eight years ago, despite the fact that we stole a copy from work.
They should convince hot naked chicks to wear BSD demon temporary tattoos and then sell the pics. Instant hit with geeks. Money comes in.
This is something I don't really see happening as it steals the thunder from the mobo and chipset manufacturers. Intel, AMD, nVidia, Tyan, etc. do not want to see their boards' creative direction completely usurped by Microsoft, but at the same time are under the gun to support DRM by Microsoft which they for whatever delusional reasons they have believe might somehow screw them in spite if they don't.
What is MS going to do? Buy a processor maker, motherboard company, and so on and be like Apple? Microsoft is a software company, not hardware. The TCP/A Palladium crap should be dumped and the manufacturers should tell Microsoft to kiss their arses.
If the boards are restricted to Windows only, they shut out any future port of OSX should Jobs ever suffer a brain injury that miraculously cures him of his megalomaniacal idiocy, yes. And they kill Linux on all new hardware. But they also kill BSD which is used in sizeable amounts in corporate America in the server farm, they kill x86 Solaris, they kill a lot more than just Linux.
We don't need a PC tech forking to end all forkings. We don't need Microsoft gone over all Apple. We don't need the PC hardware being dictated from Redmond. We don't need to stifle the creativity in hardware we've had for these many years.
Of course there will be PC hardware and Windows-specific PC hardware. So the real threat to Linux is still the people who promote and move it and their lack of understanding as to why people choose Windows over Linux so overwhelmingly. Hints: EASE OF USE, EASE OF INSTALLATION, EASE OF CONFIGURATION, EASE OF ADAPTATION. Did I say that too loud?
Apple has been first and foremost a hardware company since the first Apple rolled out. They have never been anything but. Their OS versions and software architecture were a joke and their ease of access to third party developers and hackers was a travesty compared to Microsoft Windows. Apple thought that only those they knighted from on high should be party to the inner secrets of how their hardware was talked to by software and woe betide anyone who defied their NDAs
The Apple II platform would have spread much farther much faster if Apple allowed their platform to be spread the way IBM allowed theirs by virtue of incompetence at stopping it. Instead the maliciously went after anyone who imagined cloning the platform. If they had instead gone over to being a software company, a lot of the hardware drawbacks of the II platform would have been mitigated by innovation among cloners, the processor manufacturers would have had more say much as Intel and AMD do, and we would have seen evolution.
Software? Please. People bought Beagle Bros. Pronto DOS in the numbers they did precisely because Apple was a weak software vendor and didn't put into their software the functions people wanted. They didn't innovate great stuff and tried to lock people whenever possible into theirs and whined and sniffed (especially Jobs) when third party software was chosen over theirs.
The Macintosh years only solidified that, as they wholeheartedly embraced their growing cult of feel first and think last zealots whose software choices were inherently limited by Apple's hardware design prediliction. Their platform has always been sterile and hostile to advancement and instead relies on Apple to come up with the innovations.
Compare it to the PC platform which has been blessed by its openness to various vendors seizing the reigns at various times.
Let's say another porn site opens and you have to block it avoid getting a felony rap. Oops, sorry, two hundred and fifty thousand opened at the same time and you missed most of them. Do I hear sirens? Better answer that knock on the ISP office door.
All of these tools are available to some degree but most are very expensive and all are quite complicated to use
Compared to getting Nagios up and running, fabricating the milling machine BY HAND from scrap aluminum is frigging child's play.
Come to think of it, you can go look up a book series on exactly that and find out for yourself.