If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks. You have a few options 1: pay someone to fix it 2: fix it yourself 3: try the development version of the code 4: ask the developers nicely, they are usually quite friendly especially on smaller projects. 5: ask other users (who unlike with propietry software have all the options I listed above availible to them.
With closed source software from big vendors most of theese options are usually out of the question, your only options are to either pay the vendor a lot of money for a high level support contract or talk to a support droid who won't be able to get code changes performed.
If you do need bugs fixed ASAP and can't handle them in house you will need a support contract regardless of whether the software is open or closed source but you may well be able to find more than one supplier of said support contracts.
Re:The power you speak of is the power of the GNU
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NYSE Moves to Linux
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I would bet that most people when given the words "free software" would think gratis not libre. Also freeware (which is an obvious contraction of the words free and software) has always meant gratis software that is usually written by one or two people. "Open source" isn't a perfect term either but IMO it is far less likely to give the wrong impression than "free software".
As for why the name linux was picked up I'm not sure but I have several ideas. Firstly it is a far nicer name than GNU, secondly afaict linus was the one took gnu, built the crucial missing component (which had been missing for some time due to GNUs dicking arround with microkernels) and put together a system that could actually run on it's own.
I suspect you are misinterpreting what the original poster meant by install script.
On debian the upstreams installation script/target is typically only used to copy the files to a staging area during package build (though if you are lazy and build packages as root it can still do damage if it is buggy). But there are scripts that are part of the package which are run when the package is installed or removed to allow the package to update configuration and so on. If those scripts are buggy then they can definately trash systems.
From a quick look it appears the situation on gentoo is similar but i'm no expert there.
Afaict the vista loader simply chainloads to NTLDR for XP and before.
What those users with XP/Vista dual boots were probablly seeing is the same fallback that protected people with just a single XP install on the first partition.
This means that to modify the file you need to remove these attributes in a specific order first before you can modify or delete it, According to the windows API docs you only have to remove the "read only" attribute (which you end up with among other things for files copied direct from CD so it is not unreasonable for an install scripting tool to be pretty agressive about removing it) to use deletefile
This is a remnant of the (internet) explorer for everything game played by Microsoft. Someone needs a history lesson.
The windows "explorer" process has managed the taskbar since windows 95. Explorer and internet explorer were not integrated until the "windows desktop update" released with IE 4.
I doubt at least for those in IT getting a legit XP vlk was hard and as long as you didn't leak it on the open internet the chances of it ending up in the wga shitlist were quite low.
For vista you either have to use MAK keys and when nessacery beg for more activations like retail users do or set up a KMS server which requires at least 25 machines and requires the machines to check back with the KMS every so often.
This I keep seeing, but keep wondering, didn't the 32 bit windows offer PAE? Windows did support PAE with physical address space over 4GB but there were driver issues and the feature was disabled in the desktop editions.
vista and XP are pretty similar in a sense, both were releases with a few new features many of which were half baked (for example fast user switching that only works if you don't use any centralised authentication system for client logins), better support for newer hardware a few compatibility problems (though vista had more than XP mostly due to UAC) and of course more bloat.
Firewire was meant to be complementry to USB. USB for relatively slow stuff firewire for fast stuff and stuff that needed to communicate directly with each other without the help of a host PC. Firewire also carried more power allowing bigger devices to be bus powered.
Then intel released USB 2 which had a higher headline speed than firewire and was cheaper but ended up slower in practice. It also was a simple master-slave system unlike firewire.
Then firewire got an upgrade to double it's speed.
I would compare it to IDE vs SCSI, USB like IDE is cheap and basic. Firewire like SCSI is faster and more flexible but at a price.
I don't support Gasoline taxes precisely because they harm the poor. Gasoline is highly price inelastic, and so prices have to be hiked enormously in order to decrease demand. This takes away money that consumers could have spent on other things. As I see is the big problem is the US has always had (relatively) cheap gasoline due to a combination of domestic production and low taxes. This means they are getting hit way harder than most by the rises.
In the medium term gasoline is indeed highly price inelastic, the sprawling and highly car orientated american cities have already been built and can't be changed overnight. The gas guzzling SUVs have alreayd been built and can't be replaced overnight (and afaict it is also pretty unplesent driving small cars in areas where SUVs dominate).
And to preempt a flood of angry responses, I believe in Global Warming and Emissions control. But MPG and carbon tailpipe emissions are only weakly correlated. Instead of wasting large amounts of money on improving MPG, we could focus these resources on CO2 control. The ammount of carbon in the fuel is pretty much fixed. And what goes into the engine must come out.
Some comes out as CO2, for the most part this is the preffered outcome, it causes global warming but thats about it. It also represents a complete burn (which means the maximum energy was extracted from the fuel. Some comes out as CO, this is posious so we really want to keep it to a minimum. It could come out as partiuclates or unburnt hydrocarbons, theese tend to also cause major problems and represent severe wastage of fuel.
So if we want to reduce CO2 emmisions (which are belived to be the main cause of global warming) we either need to reduce fuel consumption, increase emmisions of things that are even worse or somehow put the CO2 into permanent storage (which is not going to be practical for road vehircles).
Data stored without backups is vulnerable to many things. Buggy software, viruses, hardware failure and so on. If you lose data as valuable as a phd thesis due to such a failure then IMO you who have been negligent.
We don't expect hardware vendors to provide anything more than a replacement when thier products fail and I don't see why software should be any different.
I agree the computing environment now is much more hostile towards beginning programmers than in the days of the 8 bit machines. Those machines booted in a BASIC interpreter, they often had manuals that described at least the basics of thier variant of BASIC.
Nowadays people use game consoles and windows PCs. Neither comes with a usable programming environment in an obvious place. Also many kids have thier exposure to PCs limited by parents who are (justifiablly) worried about the kids breaking stuff.
Hmm, last I heared it was pay for two get one. Maybe they have got a bit greedier;)
Still if they have any sense there will be a clear visible difference (main case plastics a different color would be the obvious one) between XOs for the open market and XOs for the bulk education customers.
Afaict none have been shipped through that program yet though. I suspect this author got given the machine because he was working with kids who used them and needed to know his way arround them.
how many companies are really on three year replacement cycles nowadays? I know that was the norm back in the dotcom boom but i'm pretty sure it's not anymore.
or just get it from MSDN if you have access to it.. if you work in software you probably do Last I checked it didn't seem to be availible on MSDN subscriber downloads.
Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010 It is in extended support, they are pretty clear about stating that means that you get security updates for free and have to pay for any other updates.
They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. The patch is availible you just have to pay for it as for any other new non security win2K hotfix.
Basically everyone is staying with XP. Still most people are running XP on OEM licenses that are tied to the machine. So mostly people who want to stick with XP but get a new machine will either buy it with XP while they still can or buy it with vista buisness and use the downgrade rights.
and some buisnesses and many educational institutions went for subscription based licencing so they have to keep paying.
Afaict microsofts big problem atm is selling upgrades (I count software assurance as essentially an upgrade though there are some other benifits too). While I doubt home users have ever bought many upgrades most buisnesses when they finally migrate will want to upgrade everything at once and since some machines won't have vista licenses they will need to buy upgrades for them.
More buy another Mac than buy another PC, At the moment at least. There are plenty of reasons to buy a Mac, even for a PC user. The hardware is equivalent to server level hardware on a PC. The pro is certainly built out of server parts but it has a pretty high price tag. Still given an unlimited budget the mac pro would probablly be my PC of choice (apple knows how to deal with the heat problems of FBDIMMS and XEONS in a way that doesn't make a load of noise).
The mini is a laptop with no battery and monitor.
Afaict the macbooks and macbook pros are similar in price and quality to other brands higher grade laptop ranges.
Not sure about the imac but it certainly isn't built out of server parts
P.S. I got a macbook but decided I didn't particularlly like OS-X. It now mainly runs linux (though it also has XP and OS-X on in case I need them)
Microsoft bit themselves in the ass by pretty much forcing the habit of always running as admin when using windows. What really happened is that most users used 3.x then 9x. NT was used only for high end workstations and servers. On 3.x there was no concept of user accounts at all afaict and on 9x there was no concept of privilages to anything local.
By the time significant people started moving over to the NT line the idea of all users running without restrictions was too ingrained to go away.
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If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.
You have a few options
1: pay someone to fix it
2: fix it yourself
3: try the development version of the code
4: ask the developers nicely, they are usually quite friendly especially on smaller projects.
5: ask other users (who unlike with propietry software have all the options I listed above availible to them.
With closed source software from big vendors most of theese options are usually out of the question, your only options are to either pay the vendor a lot of money for a high level support contract or talk to a support droid who won't be able to get code changes performed.
If you do need bugs fixed ASAP and can't handle them in house you will need a support contract regardless of whether the software is open or closed source but you may well be able to find more than one supplier of said support contracts.
I would bet that most people when given the words "free software" would think gratis not libre. Also freeware (which is an obvious contraction of the words free and software) has always meant gratis software that is usually written by one or two people. "Open source" isn't a perfect term either but IMO it is far less likely to give the wrong impression than "free software".
As for why the name linux was picked up I'm not sure but I have several ideas. Firstly it is a far nicer name than GNU, secondly afaict linus was the one took gnu, built the crucial missing component (which had been missing for some time due to GNUs dicking arround with microkernels) and put together a system that could actually run on it's own.
I suspect you are misinterpreting what the original poster meant by install script.
On debian the upstreams installation script/target is typically only used to copy the files to a staging area during package build (though if you are lazy and build packages as root it can still do damage if it is buggy). But there are scripts that are part of the package which are run when the package is installed or removed to allow the package to update configuration and so on. If those scripts are buggy then they can definately trash systems.
From a quick look it appears the situation on gentoo is similar but i'm no expert there.
Afaict the vista loader simply chainloads to NTLDR for XP and before.
What those users with XP/Vista dual boots were probablly seeing is the same fallback that protected people with just a single XP install on the first partition.
This means that to modify the file you need to remove these attributes in a specific order first before you can modify or delete it,
According to the windows API docs you only have to remove the "read only" attribute (which you end up with among other things for files copied direct from CD so it is not unreasonable for an install scripting tool to be pretty agressive about removing it) to use deletefile
This is a remnant of the (internet) explorer for everything game played by Microsoft.
Someone needs a history lesson.
The windows "explorer" process has managed the taskbar since windows 95. Explorer and internet explorer were not integrated until the "windows desktop update" released with IE 4.
When I ordered it, I had to pay £50 to 'upgrade' from Vista home to XP pro.
What supplier was it?
Did they not offer an XP home option?
I doubt at least for those in IT getting a legit XP vlk was hard and as long as you didn't leak it on the open internet the chances of it ending up in the wga shitlist were quite low.
For vista you either have to use MAK keys and when nessacery beg for more activations like retail users do or set up a KMS server which requires at least 25 machines and requires the machines to check back with the KMS every so often.
This I keep seeing, but keep wondering, didn't the 32 bit windows offer PAE?
Windows did support PAE with physical address space over 4GB but there were driver issues and the feature was disabled in the desktop editions.
vista and XP are pretty similar in a sense, both were releases with a few new features many of which were half baked (for example fast user switching that only works if you don't use any centralised authentication system for client logins), better support for newer hardware a few compatibility problems (though vista had more than XP mostly due to UAC) and of course more bloat.
Firewire was meant to be complementry to USB. USB for relatively slow stuff firewire for fast stuff and stuff that needed to communicate directly with each other without the help of a host PC. Firewire also carried more power allowing bigger devices to be bus powered.
Then intel released USB 2 which had a higher headline speed than firewire and was cheaper but ended up slower in practice. It also was a simple master-slave system unlike firewire.
Then firewire got an upgrade to double it's speed.
I would compare it to IDE vs SCSI, USB like IDE is cheap and basic. Firewire like SCSI is faster and more flexible but at a price.
I don't support Gasoline taxes precisely because they harm the poor. Gasoline is highly price inelastic, and so prices have to be hiked enormously in order to decrease demand. This takes away money that consumers could have spent on other things.
As I see is the big problem is the US has always had (relatively) cheap gasoline due to a combination of domestic production and low taxes. This means they are getting hit way harder than most by the rises.
In the medium term gasoline is indeed highly price inelastic, the sprawling and highly car orientated american cities have already been built and can't be changed overnight. The gas guzzling SUVs have alreayd been built and can't be replaced overnight (and afaict it is also pretty unplesent driving small cars in areas where SUVs dominate).
And to preempt a flood of angry responses, I believe in Global Warming and Emissions control. But MPG and carbon tailpipe emissions are only weakly correlated. Instead of wasting large amounts of money on improving MPG, we could focus these resources on CO2 control.
The ammount of carbon in the fuel is pretty much fixed. And what goes into the engine must come out.
Some comes out as CO2, for the most part this is the preffered outcome, it causes global warming but thats about it. It also represents a complete burn (which means the maximum energy was extracted from the fuel.
Some comes out as CO, this is posious so we really want to keep it to a minimum.
It could come out as partiuclates or unburnt hydrocarbons, theese tend to also cause major problems and represent severe wastage of fuel.
So if we want to reduce CO2 emmisions (which are belived to be the main cause of global warming) we either need to reduce fuel consumption, increase emmisions of things that are even worse or somehow put the CO2 into permanent storage (which is not going to be practical for road vehircles).
Data stored without backups is vulnerable to many things. Buggy software, viruses, hardware failure and so on. If you lose data as valuable as a phd thesis due to such a failure then IMO you who have been negligent.
We don't expect hardware vendors to provide anything more than a replacement when thier products fail and I don't see why software should be any different.
I expect once theese actually ship (afaict they haven't yet) then they will start to turn up on the likes of ebay pretty quickly.
I agree the computing environment now is much more hostile towards beginning programmers than in the days of the 8 bit machines. Those machines booted in a BASIC interpreter, they often had manuals that described at least the basics of thier variant of BASIC.
Nowadays people use game consoles and windows PCs. Neither comes with a usable programming environment in an obvious place. Also many kids have thier exposure to PCs limited by parents who are (justifiablly) worried about the kids breaking stuff.
Anyone can buy one right now
They can order one but I don't think any have been shipped to private customers yet.
Hmm, last I heared it was pay for two get one. Maybe they have got a bit greedier ;)
Still if they have any sense there will be a clear visible difference (main case plastics a different color would be the obvious one) between XOs for the open market and XOs for the bulk education customers.
Afaict none have been shipped through that program yet though. I suspect this author got given the machine because he was working with kids who used them and needed to know his way arround them.
or they store the devkey (and the passphrase for it if there is one) in a place on the machine where the thief can find it.
but I suspect this will be a minor issue as few will request the devkey in the first place.
how many companies are really on three year replacement cycles nowadays? I know that was the norm back in the dotcom boom but i'm pretty sure it's not anymore.
or just get it from MSDN if you have access to it.. if you work in software you probably do
Last I checked it didn't seem to be availible on MSDN subscriber downloads.
Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010
It is in extended support, they are pretty clear about stating that means that you get security updates for free and have to pay for any other updates.
They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules.
The patch is availible you just have to pay for it as for any other new non security win2K hotfix.
Basically everyone is staying with XP.
Still most people are running XP on OEM licenses that are tied to the machine. So mostly people who want to stick with XP but get a new machine will either buy it with XP while they still can or buy it with vista buisness and use the downgrade rights.
and some buisnesses and many educational institutions went for subscription based licencing so they have to keep paying.
Afaict microsofts big problem atm is selling upgrades (I count software assurance as essentially an upgrade though there are some other benifits too). While I doubt home users have ever bought many upgrades most buisnesses when they finally migrate will want to upgrade everything at once and since some machines won't have vista licenses they will need to buy upgrades for them.
More buy another Mac than buy another PC, At the moment at least. There are plenty of reasons to buy a Mac, even for a PC user. The hardware is equivalent to server level hardware on a PC.
The pro is certainly built out of server parts but it has a pretty high price tag. Still given an unlimited budget the mac pro would probablly be my PC of choice (apple knows how to deal with the heat problems of FBDIMMS and XEONS in a way that doesn't make a load of noise).
The mini is a laptop with no battery and monitor.
Afaict the macbooks and macbook pros are similar in price and quality to other brands higher grade laptop ranges.
Not sure about the imac but it certainly isn't built out of server parts
P.S. I got a macbook but decided I didn't particularlly like OS-X. It now mainly runs linux (though it also has XP and OS-X on in case I need them)
Microsoft bit themselves in the ass by pretty much forcing the habit of always running as admin when using windows.
What really happened is that most users used 3.x then 9x. NT was used only for high end workstations and servers. On 3.x there was no concept of user accounts at all afaict and on 9x there was no concept of privilages to anything local.
By the time significant people started moving over to the NT line the idea of all users running without restrictions was too ingrained to go away.