Software: how did they come to the conclusion that Linux softwares are more expensive? I can't find the list of comparable softwares they used in their study.
I looked at one study and they used proprietary databases and application servers/middleware. You could easily run such infrastructure on top of a proprietary UNIX or Windows operating system. It doesn't matter much from a TCO or political point of view. On the server, these components contribute strongly to the lock-in effect, and not the underlying operating system. A comparison to a LAMP solution would be far more interesting, but it's also extremely difficult to do in a meaningful way.
Microsoft is quite clever in this regard: they compare traditional, proprietary environments on Linux and Windows in such studies (which certainly the right thing to do because to most business people, "Linux" just means "not Microsoft", and not "freedom"), and at the same time help prospective customers to move their Apache/PHP/MySQL applications to Windows (running on Apache/PHP/MySQL, of course).
You know, this reminds me of one time when an apartment building in our neighborhood was burning. Sure, you felt sorry to see it burn, and you felt sorry to see the people who lived there get hurt, but man, it's really fun to watch a building burn!
By the way, Stockhausen was slammed for a similar comment on 9/11.
Don't be so certain, JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork, which links together UK universities) has a 10 Gbit/s backbone. That's a pretty fat pipe...
Of course, the backbone is mostly 2.4 Gbit/s right now. Nominal bandwidth hardly matters anyway as long as the peak usage percentage is at 30% or so. 8-) (It is rumored that a lot of NRNs are operated at even less utilization, at the tax-payers' expense.)
This looks to me like a typical government-level game. Somebody, high up there in the Chinese Communist Party, had a vested interest for this project to fail. And as soon as a proof of concept was put into operation (and proved that the concept works, duh!) proceeded to axe it.
Similar projects have failed in other countries or have not even been begun for the sheer economic madness of it. Maybe the Chinese promised to build it to get better terms from the Germans on other projects, so it's not necessary just the pet project of some party leader. Actually, it's pretty clever. Some of German's economic and political leaders would have done almost anything to acquire a maglev contract for Siemens and it partners.
When German chancellor Gerhard Schroder visitied China last year, he and his delegation deliberately excluded topics such as human rights violations from the agenda, in order not to endanger the maglev train project. Apparently, this strategy has failed once again.
No, the great selling point is that you don't have a hardware failure every 6 months like with Dell hardware.
I've seen half of a Sun cluster down for "recertification tests" (because Sun engineers were unable to track down the cause of some instability). And low-end, entry-level workstations are just cheap PC hardware, often even in plastic cases, with a different CPU architecture.
Sun's economic difficulties show that the marketplace no longer believes in the added value of Sun components, at least at that stark price. Nowadays, the most important task for Sun servers is running legacy applications. You can't run a successful business based on that. Applications can and will be ported.
Security is a job for all of us, not just Microsoft.
Yes, that's a nice spin -- it's your own fault when your computer has been successfully attacked, even if the vendor has known about the vulnerability for months.
The most important part about patching is that you have to do it. If something goes wrong, the vendor can blame you. You don't pay your virus scanner tax? Your fault. You don't pay for personal firewalling software? Again your fault. You don't apply that multi-megabyte security upgrade? Of course, it's your fault.
As long as hackers out there have the tuits to break into systems, security is everyone's business.
But if your basic infrastructure is broken, you can't fix it on your own. There's no workaround for gaping security holes in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver a patch to fix these.I nstead, they more and more "security researchers" end up on Microsoft's payroll and suddenly claim on public mailing lists that using Internet Explorer is safe as long as you use the right security settings.
By the way, Mozilla isn't better either (a number of unspecified security fixes in 1.6), and it looks as if the security audit has been stopped. But in contrast to Microsoft, they don't have to pay for the "this browser is safe to use" bullshit.
Increasing maintainability can actually require a rewrite at a certain point. Other good reasons are:
licensing issues (Netscape 4.x)
badly needed architectural changes (threading support for Apache)
However, business logic often cannot be rewritten from scratch because it must be consistent with older versions. At some point, it's necessary to live with all those warts and bugs because too much stuff relies on them.
The devils are in a pose that mimics one that is usually associated with valour and the giving of ones life for "liberty" (whether or not you agree that this particular pose does or not is for another discussion).
I'm struggling to find the correct reference for the logo. Is that Delacroix painting? Or is it something else?
Cisco has the same problem as Microsoft: The infrastructure that is supposed to protect vulnerable systems is itself vulnerable. Routers running IOS sofware which have some kind of H.323 support are affected, and this includes the IOS firewalling code (for CBAC, content-based access control).
This time, the PIX code base is unaffected, but Cisco claims that they incorporate legacy IOS code into the PIX software: "Provides comprehensive OSPF dynamic routing services on Cisco PIX Security Appliances using technology based on world-renowned Cisco IOS Software". This is, of course, the same mistake Microsoft made with ISA; they also reused broken code from their client and server products in it.
This was speculated on in an article [groklaw.net] at Groklaw [groklaw.net], that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. They have been distributing a UNIX userland for quite some time now, and surely they had proper licensing for that all the time.
Services for Unix comes with a lot GNU software. It will help users to use free software even in proprietary Windows environments, and it's a clear statement from Microsoft that distributing GPLed software is consistent even if you want to closely guard your IP rights.
Keep in mind that SFU is a two-edged sword. It can encourage UNIX-to-Windows migration, but it also can prepare future migration in the opposite direction: You can run major UNIX-only free software applications, without having to switch the operating system at once or administrate two servers instead of one. And switching the application is the hard part, the underlying operating system is unimportant as long as it does its job and can support the applications.
This is probably more important for the free software community than some random vendor announcing a "Linux" port of a product that is still proprietary software. After all, it's not a huge difference if you run the proprietary Windows kernel or a Linux kernel enhanced with proprietary drivers.
The URL to add to your apt.sources file is aptsource.spirit.downloads.nasa.gov. To grab the latest image updates, just issue this at the command line: apt-get update nasa-spirit-images
This is a complete fake. Neither host nor domain exist, nor is the information sufficient to populate a sources.list (the file isn't even called apt.sources), and the apt-get update command doesn't accept a package name, either.
Why are the Microsoft languages so fast with the Trig functions?
Last time I did similar benchmark on Windows, the MSVC runtime library set the FPU control word to limit precision to 64 bits. Other environments on x86 used 80 bits precision by default, increasing computation time for some operations.
It doesn't seem to be using any particular vulnerabilities in MSN. It depends on users to click on a URL they receive in a message.
But if you are an IE user and you don't check carefully the URLs you click, you might be in trouble anyway (because these days the download of the trojan horse starts immediately, and it's silently executed).
On the other hand, I've been seeing such "worms" on IRCnet for months, and I'm sure they must have hit MSN messenger before.
Mr Wobber and his group calculated that if there are 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational "price" of a 10-second levy would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000 messages a day, at most.
That's nice to hear, but will it work on Earth, too? Are they going to increase the rotational speed of our planet?
Or broken software. Quite a lot of distributed systems (including DNS servers) already failed because something or someone decided to replicate an empty database to all nodes.
(Seriously though, I hope they offer some kind of time warp feature for their file storage, so you should be able to get a previous version of your file.)
I was in a similar situation (although I was more concerned by the noise than the power consumption). I ended up with a ThinkPad T40p, for various reasons: very robust, 6 hours on a single battery (with a dimmed display and reduced CPU clock rate), pretty good GNU/Linux support (even if you run free software only), and the academic discount almost makes it affordable.
Please tell me how I can get one of these images from Microsoft?
Maybe you should ask them and not me. Or OEMs should ask such questions. 8-)
What's a Windows supporter to do?
Buy at a quality retail store, from an OEM that sets different, reasonable defaults? Usually, you get what you pay for.
For example, IBM ships their ThinkPads with Windows XP and an enabled Internet Connection Firewall. OEMs can easily change such settings (which makes writing advisories for Windows issues pretty hard, just remember that UPnP bug!), and some of them do.
2 weeks ago I reinstalled XP for a friend and she got W32.Blaster during the installation.
Not very surprising, unfortunately. At the university, we have custom-built RIS images that incorporate the necessary patches before the network services are enabled. 8-/
However, keep in mind that the current Windows XP service pack level is the last one that has these problems. After all, such problems are relatively easy to fix (just don't have anything listening on network interfaces by default), and Microsoft got the message.
Now we let's look at the mainstream GNU/Linux distributions. Is any of them planning to to bind all network services to localhost by default (even if you explicitly install them)? I don't think so. (Hey, even OpenBSD doesn't do it.)
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Software: how did they come to the conclusion that Linux softwares are more expensive? I can't find the list of comparable softwares they used in their study.
I looked at one study and they used proprietary databases and application servers/middleware. You could easily run such infrastructure on top of a proprietary UNIX or Windows operating system. It doesn't matter much from a TCO or political point of view. On the server, these components contribute strongly to the lock-in effect, and not the underlying operating system. A comparison to a LAMP solution would be far more interesting, but it's also extremely difficult to do in a meaningful way.
Microsoft is quite clever in this regard: they compare traditional, proprietary environments on Linux and Windows in such studies (which certainly the right thing to do because to most business people, "Linux" just means "not Microsoft", and not "freedom"), and at the same time help prospective customers to move their Apache/PHP/MySQL applications to Windows (running on Apache/PHP/MySQL, of course).
You know, this reminds me of one time when an apartment building in our neighborhood was burning. Sure, you felt sorry to see it burn, and you felt sorry to see the people who lived there get hurt, but man, it's really fun to watch a building burn!
By the way, Stockhausen was slammed for a similar comment on 9/11.
Don't be so certain, JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork, which links together UK universities) has a 10 Gbit/s backbone. That's a pretty fat pipe...
Of course, the backbone is mostly 2.4 Gbit/s right now. Nominal bandwidth hardly matters anyway as long as the peak usage percentage is at 30% or so. 8-) (It is rumored that a lot of NRNs are operated at even less utilization, at the tax-payers' expense.)
This looks to me like a typical government-level game. Somebody, high up there in the Chinese Communist Party, had a vested interest for this project to fail. And as soon as a proof of concept was put into operation (and proved that the concept works, duh!) proceeded to axe it.
Similar projects have failed in other countries or have not even been begun for the sheer economic madness of it. Maybe the Chinese promised to build it to get better terms from the Germans on other projects, so it's not necessary just the pet project of some party leader. Actually, it's pretty clever. Some of German's economic and political leaders would have done almost anything to acquire a maglev contract for Siemens and it partners.
When German chancellor Gerhard Schroder visitied China last year, he and his delegation deliberately excluded topics such as human rights violations from the agenda, in order not to endanger the maglev train project. Apparently, this strategy has failed once again.
No, the great selling point is that you don't have a hardware failure every 6 months like with Dell hardware.
I've seen half of a Sun cluster down for "recertification tests" (because Sun engineers were unable to track down the cause of some instability). And low-end, entry-level workstations are just cheap PC hardware, often even in plastic cases, with a different CPU architecture.
Sun's economic difficulties show that the marketplace no longer believes in the added value of Sun components, at least at that stark price. Nowadays, the most important task for Sun servers is running legacy applications. You can't run a successful business based on that. Applications can and will be ported.
Who the heck is eating any fish that glows? So, what does "food safety" have to do with anything?
I bet it will be fed to cows, like anything which is of remote organic origin.
Security is a job for all of us, not just Microsoft.
Yes, that's a nice spin -- it's your own fault when your computer has been successfully attacked, even if the vendor has known about the vulnerability for months.
The most important part about patching is that you have to do it. If something goes wrong, the vendor can blame you. You don't pay your virus scanner tax? Your fault. You don't pay for personal firewalling software? Again your fault. You don't apply that multi-megabyte security upgrade? Of course, it's your fault.
As long as hackers out there have the tuits to break into systems, security is everyone's business.
But if your basic infrastructure is broken, you can't fix it on your own. There's no workaround for gaping security holes in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver a patch to fix these.I nstead, they more and more "security researchers" end up on Microsoft's payroll and suddenly claim on public mailing lists that using Internet Explorer is safe as long as you use the right security settings.
By the way, Mozilla isn't better either (a number of unspecified security fixes in 1.6), and it looks as if the security audit has been stopped. But in contrast to Microsoft, they don't have to pay for the "this browser is safe to use" bullshit.
- licensing issues (Netscape 4.x)
- badly needed architectural changes (threading support for Apache)
However, business logic often cannot be rewritten from scratch because it must be consistent with older versions. At some point, it's necessary to live with all those warts and bugs because too much stuff relies on them.nope. this one [netbsd.org] looks like this [tamu.edu].
Oops, cultural references are always a problem if you don't share the culture.
Actually, it's modelled quite literally after this photo. I think I've seen that photo before (of course), but I didn't associate it with WWII at all.
The devils are in a pose that mimics one that is usually associated with valour and the giving of ones life for "liberty" (whether or not you agree that this particular pose does or not is for another discussion).
I'm struggling to find the correct reference for the logo. Is that Delacroix painting? Or is it something else?
Cisco has the same problem as Microsoft: The infrastructure that is supposed to protect vulnerable systems is itself vulnerable. Routers running IOS sofware which have some kind of H.323 support are affected, and this includes the IOS firewalling code (for CBAC, content-based access control).
This time, the PIX code base is unaffected, but Cisco claims that they incorporate legacy IOS code into the PIX software: "Provides comprehensive OSPF dynamic routing services on Cisco PIX Security Appliances using technology based on world-renowned Cisco IOS Software". This is, of course, the same mistake Microsoft made with ISA; they also reused broken code from their client and server products in it.
This was speculated on in an article [groklaw.net] at Groklaw [groklaw.net], that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. They have been distributing a UNIX userland for quite some time now, and surely they had proper licensing for that all the time.
Services for Unix comes with a lot GNU software. It will help users to use free software even in proprietary Windows environments, and it's a clear statement from Microsoft that distributing GPLed software is consistent even if you want to closely guard your IP rights.
Keep in mind that SFU is a two-edged sword. It can encourage UNIX-to-Windows migration, but it also can prepare future migration in the opposite direction: You can run major UNIX-only free software applications, without having to switch the operating system at once or administrate two servers instead of one. And switching the application is the hard part, the underlying operating system is unimportant as long as it does its job and can support the applications.
This is probably more important for the free software community than some random vendor announcing a "Linux" port of a product that is still proprietary software. After all, it's not a huge difference if you run the proprietary Windows kernel or a Linux kernel enhanced with proprietary drivers.
The URL to add to your apt.sources file is aptsource.spirit.downloads.nasa.gov. To grab the latest image updates, just issue this at the command line: apt-get update nasa-spirit-images
This is a complete fake. Neither host nor domain exist, nor is the information sufficient to populate a sources.list (the file isn't even called apt.sources), and the apt-get update command doesn't accept a package name, either.
sigh
Why are the Microsoft languages so fast with the Trig functions?
Last time I did similar benchmark on Windows, the MSVC runtime library set the FPU control word to limit precision to 64 bits. Other environments on x86 used 80 bits precision by default, increasing computation time for some operations.
WTF?! Have they never heard of Perl??
I guess many people put personal information into the message body (maybe even obfuscated email addresses). Perl isn't sufficiently advanced for that.
Win98 was the last MS operating system that allowed direct access to the I/O ports and memory.
What about Windows Me?
It doesn't seem to be using any particular vulnerabilities in MSN. It depends on users to click on a URL they receive in a message.
But if you are an IE user and you don't check carefully the URLs you click, you might be in trouble anyway (because these days the download of the trojan horse starts immediately, and it's silently executed).
On the other hand, I've been seeing such "worms" on IRCnet for months, and I'm sure they must have hit MSN messenger before.
This software will reduce the number of copy writers needed, not reporters.
Just license your content from The New York Times, and you can lay off both copy writers and reports.
(You can use Google to watch how many online news sites republish this story.)
For your convenience, here's the link to the original article that requires registration.
Mr Wobber and his group calculated that if there are 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational "price" of a 10-second levy would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000 messages a day, at most.
That's nice to hear, but will it work on Earth, too? Are they going to increase the rotational speed of our planet?
But not including company employees.
Or broken software. Quite a lot of distributed systems (including DNS servers) already failed because something or someone decided to replicate an empty database to all nodes.
(Seriously though, I hope they offer some kind of time warp feature for their file storage, so you should be able to get a previous version of your file.)
But none of the desktop replacement units.
I was in a similar situation (although I was more concerned by the noise than the power consumption). I ended up with a ThinkPad T40p, for various reasons: very robust, 6 hours on a single battery (with a dimmed display and reduced CPU clock rate), pretty good GNU/Linux support (even if you run free software only), and the academic discount almost makes it affordable.
Please tell me how I can get one of these images from Microsoft?
Maybe you should ask them and not me. Or OEMs should ask such questions. 8-)
What's a Windows supporter to do?
Buy at a quality retail store, from an OEM that sets different, reasonable defaults? Usually, you get what you pay for.
For example, IBM ships their ThinkPads with Windows XP and an enabled Internet Connection Firewall. OEMs can easily change such settings (which makes writing advisories for Windows issues pretty hard, just remember that UPnP bug!), and some of them do.
2 weeks ago I reinstalled XP for a friend and she got W32.Blaster during the installation.
Not very surprising, unfortunately. At the university, we have custom-built RIS images that incorporate the necessary patches before the network services are enabled. 8-/
However, keep in mind that the current Windows XP service pack level is the last one that has these problems. After all, such problems are relatively easy to fix (just don't have anything listening on network interfaces by default), and Microsoft got the message.
Now we let's look at the mainstream GNU/Linux distributions. Is any of them planning to to bind all network services to localhost by default (even if you explicitly install them)? I don't think so. (Hey, even OpenBSD doesn't do it.)