I'm not the parent, but MPEG4, from what I've seen. I don't really have any experience with divx, though. Am I missing something great? I definitely don't want to mess around with Flash. I'm tired of being bugged about needing the latest player, I don't see what problem it solves that's worth more bloat, etc.
Bummer. That means I would have to hit it with a script instead of a mouse to cause them any pain. That would be really hard to do.
I'd have to wget or curl http://www.stockmarketenews.com/s/PHYA.html?gclid= CMeN9bSEpYkCFQdZYQodZiTxOA. I'd have to sleep for a few, possibly random, seconds. Then I'd have to rinse and repeat. Until I walked into the office tomorrow morning, and hit CRTL-C. If a few (hundred) people were to do that, for a few days, it might cost them some serious money.
Article was about using the command line, not scripting. Calling an interpreter, and supply more complex statements, etc., may be something you want to do, but not me. For instance, sorting your environment in Perl:
You'll have to call Perl alone, then issue the statements line by line, or convert this into a one-liner. Which I leave as an exercise for the reader, as I wouldn't do that because in a shell it's just:
env | sort
Plus, portability can suck, if you need to call libraries which may or not be present on a given system. And by then, your command may be getting obnoxiously long, anyway. Granted that there are some powerful Perl and Python one-liners, but I just don't see that as a reason to write 'Don't use shell'. Use what's appropriate. Often, that's shell. That's why it's *there*.
Of course, you have to put in the effort to *learn* what's appropriate, which is a gradual process. Some reasons for putting out the effort:
a) You'll want to learn the basics anyway, just because of the power and convenience you gain in customizing your environment via tweaking resource files. b) It teaches you fundamental things about Unix-y operating systems. c) Trying doing any sort of serious system administration without being able to understand (and modify, if necessary) init scripts. d) Easy script creation via 'script' command. e) It's fun.
Well, let's just hope that a) the code isn't contributed by SuSE, and b) it doesn't autoexec. Personally, I'd rather see a conversion tool than native support.
A lot of people here don't really follow Microsoft operating systems. A 90% desktop share doesn't make you relevant to all people--just 90%. There are a lot of 10% types here, as you might expect from a service running Free software. The burden is on Microsoft marketing people to have sufficiently gotten the word out, not on all Slashdot users to be fully cognizant of all features of an OS that may not be relevant to them. Particularly as traffic shaping has been available in the Unix-y community since, well, forever.
I freely admit that Microsoft was an excellent marketing company. But lots of people have mostly heard about delays, features that have been pulled (in the case of a filesystem, pulled continually from each new release, for over a decade), etc. I say 'was' an excellent marketing company, because they seem to have fallen over. Vista has been released to corporate clients with little fanfare, and even Ballmer seemed more relieved than anything else.
It will get a ton of market share, but that's as much, or more, a function of the difficulty *average* consumers will face in buying a consumer PC without Vista installed, once it's released in that arena. Most consumers don't even know that there *are* other OSs, save perhaps Apple, and they probably still think of that as expensive (you still hear that, even on Slashdot) gear. But that's the result of *previous* Microsoft marketing success, and the resultant monopoly. I deal with several shops that are (very) predominantly Microsoft. None of them are all, "OMG, we must have teh Vista."
From my perspective, they see Vista as long-delayed, expensive to adopt, and very much an only incremental improvement. So, is the Microsoft marketing machine resting on its laurels, knowing a monopoly doesn't really *have* to do much? Or is there really just nothing compelling about this release? Or could all these clients (mom and pop to Fortune 500) simply not be getting teh wunder that be Vista? Which, in itself, would be a marketing failure, as the opinion is unanimous.
Not so. Consider the common scenario of a firewall w/ 3 NICs.
- One is relatively low bandwidth, to the cloud. - One is relatively high bandwidth, to the protected LAN. - One is relatively high bandwidth, to the DMZ.
This really is common, for reasons as silly as failure to do split/split DNS when you should, to entirely valid reasons such as network backup speeds, working with CPU-limited apps on the DMZ, or just the high cost of cloud feeds and speeds.
kill -9 is a last-ditch effort. If it succeeds, it prevents the process from trying to clean up after itself--deleting a PID file, for example. That may bite you if you try to restart an app or daemon that looks for a PID file in, far instance,/var/run to determine if it's already running. It sees the file, and won't start. There can be other issues, as well. Most of them would qualify as Bad Things.
Always attempt 'kill PROCNUMBER' before 'kill -9 PROCNUMBER'.
You're right, and I was thinking of Safari, as that old debate on devs contributing back went through my mind as I was typing. That *definitely* was Apple, not Moz. But I also _thought_ I recalled seeing a setting to change the rendering agent--KHTML or Gecko. Can't find it now, though. It may have been on a different version of KDE and/or Konqueror.
"It should have the look and feel of his native GUI." What if your GUI is themed? My KDE looks nothing like an out of the box KDE. I have no problem with expecting people to be willing and able to download a frapping theme. If we dumb things down to the point where *that* is regarded as too much of a burden, we have gone *way* too far.
>>I have some news for you: it's supposed to be a basic [RSS] implementation that gives you the bare essentials. If you want >>one with bells and whistles, go get an extension that suits your needs better. >IE7 has raised the bar a little higher than this.
One persons feature is another person's bloat. Danga, in a post above, didn't like having to download extensions when loading a new system--nor does he like bloat. Well, building everything in obviously increases bloat, and I personally like the flexibility of the extension model, as you seem to. Not that I'm saying that FF has no bloat without extensions...
But I'll go further--leave out RSS as well. There's no particular reason for it to be in the Web browser. To me, that's an artifact of primitive desktops--where you have only one desktop. If you can have several, it's often more convenient to keep mail, calendar, Usenet, RSS, etc., (basically, all of the communications and news stuff) on one desktop while reserving another for the Web browser. Notifications via the panel work fine, and this keeps all of that stuff out of my way when I'm trying to work.
Granted, when I click an item in my standalone RSS app, another instance of my browser (Konqueror) is created to view it. But that only takes (literally) a second, under normal system loads.
Maybe that's just me, and my work habits. But maybe it's also a decent argument for carrying the Unix philosophy of small, sharp tools onto the desktop, insofar as such a thing is possible.
"mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko" sort of implies that Gecko was their work, while it actually came from KDE's Konqueror. Credit where credit is due. I recommend Konqueror as the more secure browser. There are a few sites which it doesn't deal with very well, and I keep Firefox around for those. But 99% of the time, Konqueror is my browser.
Thanks very much for the URL. Perens is articulate, as usual. I've never had a high opinion of open letters, but Perens brings another quanta of gravitas to the issue. I'll be signing it. I'm afraid I'll be needing a half dozen or so references of like quality. Articles from the trade press probably will not qualify.
My current plan is to give Novell a couple of months to find a way out of this agreement, while saving a bit of corporate face. If they don't manage it, I'll have to EOL SuSE as a supported OS. As it's impossible to EOL OS support without causing problems for *someone*, I'll need a comprehensive statement of my reasons, with a good list of references.
A couple of days work to write the document, after several weeks work planning the migration, writing supporting code and docs, etc. This will probably absorb two hundred manhours, quite easily. And I do work for a very limited number of clients with very specialized needs.
Thanks are owed Novell, for the good work they've done in the past. But if I should have to add a migration load because of this, I'm very unlikely to ever re-add Novell to the supported list. Once burned, twice wary.
OK, how about vets from WW2, Korea, Vietnam? How about the horrendous crap that blacks over 45 had to deal with (and I imagine they still deal with today, in many areas of the country)? How about Japanese being rounded up and sent to internment camps? I could go on and on. The human condition has always included a fair amount of misery, but day to day life is a hell of a lot better than it's been for most of human history, what with a notable lack of Black death, being pretty much owned by a feudal lord, executed by hanging for petty theft when you're starving, etc.
I am a bit curious about how the word 'reality' came to be defined as Bad Things in your lexicon. You must be pretty depressed. Take a day. Don't listen to the news, or read any angst-ridden Web sites like Slashdot. The world will still be here when you get back. Go have some fun. Recharge.
The current crop of politicians seems pretty thoroughly corrupt, or entirely clueless, or both. Guess what? That's nothing even remotely new. It's been the case since there have *been* politicians. Actually, I'd be amazed if this sort of thing didn't predate politicians, in some scenario where the kid brother of the village elder did a bit of influence peddling, and got caught taking copper beads.
The sort of vile crap being visited upon your generation isn't unique to your generation. You pick your fights, you win what you can, you try to do the right thing, and you wait for the cycle to turn. It will, you know.
"...exposing flaws like this does nobody any good."
Well, that's one side of the full disclosure debate. The other side, of course, is that some vendors once had even worse reputations for fixing security vulnerabilities than they currently do. Full disclosure evolved in part as a means of holding their feet to the fire. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on exactly how effective full disclosure is. It's certain that vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited can still remain unpatched for an obscene length of time.
I think full disclosure can be done in what I regard as a responsible manner. You might want to have a look at Rain Forest Puppy's policy at http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/policy.html as a starting point. To me, acting in a professional manner means exercising some judgment. You can't demand the impossible, but neither you can allow a vendor to stonewall indefinitely. Much will depend upon severity, whether you know the vulnerability is currently being exploited, whether you have a sense that the issue is being actively worked, etc.
Personally, I draw the line at publicly releasing exploits. I can see how some people might do it, if they've been dealing with some of the very obvious stonewalling tactics that I've encountered. As in, "OK, after three months you still claim it's not an issue? I just released malware 1.0. I'm sure it won't cause you any PR or support problems. Have a nice day." To me, that's at best allowing frustration to overcome professionalism (defined as acting in the best interests of your profession). At worst, professionalism was never a factor, and it's done for notoriety or some other steaming pile of stupid.
But responsible full disclosure most definitely does have its place. If you've never had a problem with Oracle, congratulations. But other people have. And I know of a plethora of problems with other vendors.
"If you are a programmer, and are in it to make money..."
Both of these conditions are not always satisfied. The rest of this reply relates to those cases where they are.
A lot of people are financially compensated for writing free software. Or to admin infrastructure systems (build, download, mailing list hosts, etc.). The people picking up the tab obviously realize a bottom line benefit, so this will likely increase.
And even financial compensation comes in other forms than a direct revenue stream. For instance, I'm close to releasing two pieces of software. Originally, they were both written to scratch local itches, and they get the job done. They could be better, but once they were good enough, progress on them slowed. If either piece attracts any developer interest, I'll end up with better software, for what I think will be a minimal investment of my time. Giving it away is simply the most sensible approach, from a ROI viewpoint. Even though I'm unlikely to see a revenue stream from either project, any success for either project will, on balance, save me time and effort. Lower overhead is a Good Thing.
Another win from the same example is that both of these pieces of software are something solid to point to, which is directly related to my field, most of which is NDA'ed to death. That's probably a Good Thing as well.
"Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?"
No.
Zonk either knows zero about the histories of the Internet or DNS, or is so enamored of finishing stories with questions that he'll tack on the truly ridiculous.
"Do they honestly think people are going to tolerate it?" Yes, they do. And they are very probably correct.
To the vast majority of home users, MS == computing. Or they've maybe heard of Apple, but haven't used it. Perhaps because they still remember it as being an expensive alternative. Linux they've probably never heard of.
I've never admin'ed a large MS shop, but I'd image that large corporate clients will have made a separate peace with MS. That's assuming that this is even a factor for them, as their upgrade cycles are already typically slow, and asymptotically slowing to EOL of support. I suspect that, as one transfer allows for two hardware upgrade cycles, even MS will have the OS beyond Vista out before it's much of a factor for them.
Small business may be hurt by this, as they're not as likely to have staff who're aware of alternatives. MS wants to keep that market segment, though, so we'll see how that plays out.
One thing is for certain--MS (while, IMHO they're not much of a technology company) is an excellent *marketing* company. They've reams of historic data, the resources to hire an arbitrary number of the best business school grads available, and have undoubtedly run the numbers very thoroughly.
While this sort of things whips the Slashdot community into a frenzy, _we don't matter_. The Slashdot-like population is microscopically small. DRM? Same deal. Remember the Sony 'rootkit' that had everyone here so fired up, a year ago? It wasn't even a blip on Sony's bottom line. It took exploding batteries to crush their profits.
Personally, I don't care[1]. The GNU/Linux OS, the KDE desktop and *some* KDE apps, the Open Office application suite (and it's ability to read and write MS file formats), a dozen or so other apps that are personally vital, the PostgreSQL database, and a small selection of FOSS server software, have already made licensing MS software a complete non-starter for me. Uptake of FOSS for desktops has been slow but steady, and it's been rapid on servers. That's been enough to quiet my inner zealot. Particularly as, for what I do, the software listed above gives me a competitive advantage over MS shops.;)
[1] I still care very much about software patents. That whole concept is broken and evil. As are current implementations of DRM--those just don't affect me much.
I'm wishing that everyone would vote every incumbent out of office. We'd lose a couple of good people, but many more bad ones. And it would send a huge dissatisfaction message. The largest in history. Maybe that would shake things up, and convince the next crop that they have exactly *one* term to prove themselves. Not special interest money, nor our own brand of religious fundamentalist fruitcakes.
There are no good choices. If The Shrub is a good example of the Republicans, it's fairly plain that they're evil, lying, lawbreaking, Constitution-destroying idiots. But then we have a sole surviving Kennedy as a powerful Democrat. A man that would have been locked up years ago, over the Chappaquiddick affair. And would have been, if he weren't a Kennedy. And is now busy trundling illegal aliens over the border as fast as he can, in hopes of votes, and the wellfare of the country be damned.
There's nothing good to be said for either party. Throw all of the incumbents out. We'll end up with a bunch of innexperienced people in office, but how can they *possibly* do worse than the current crop? Right now, there's some debate about whether Iraq should divide along ethic and religious boundaries. This country is now so divided that we may not have too many election cycles before we're thinking about whether we should do the same thing.
I'd vote in favor, on the theory that being associated with Kansans who seem to still have a problem with evolution, and believe in a 'born-again' *anything*, much less President, can't lead to anything good. Separation of church and state was built into our constitution for a *reason*. History has clearly shown that religious groups *will* legislate their beliefs into law, given half a chance, and you will be *screwed* if you don't subscribed to their beliefs. These fruitcakes now constitute a voting block so powerful that it has to be overcome, pretty much immediately, or it's time for people to choose up sides and get ultimately nasty.
I know that the next evangelist (Jehovah's Witness, S. Baptist, etc.) that knocks on my door is going to be seriously insulted. I'd as soon punch their lights out, to tell you the truth, but I suspect they come in pairs because they know they're an annoyance at best, hated in many places, and need a witness.
Fundies mean nothing good for our way of life, if you believe in the sparation of church and state. Next time you wonder how Muslim sects can kill each other with such joyous abandon, you might want to remember that our home-grown fundies have murdered doctors who performed legal abortions. If you have religion you don't need rationality, respect for secular law, or anything else. You're guided by your Higher Power, or Invisible Friend.
Organized religion is one of the last great evils. It's probably the single greatest cause of warfare in our shiny new 21st century, and has killed tens or hundreds of millions down through history. At what point do we decide that there's been enough of this religion weirdness, and at least recognize it as seriously delusional?
OK, I'm a Bush hater. On the other hand, the likely Democrat front runners for our next presidential election suck, too. H. Clinton already saying things she clearly doesn't believe in, just to appease the religious fruitcakes, and get into office. Even McCain (I'm a vet too, same timeframe, and somewhat prejudiced in his favor) has sold us down the river.
It's the system that's at risk, and a damned noble experiment it has been. If you value Thomas Jefferson's thoughts, anyway. Some (not most, but an important fraction) of it probably has to do with everyone knowing that our congressional reps are mostly criminals. If we could ever get our power back, drag the sons of bitches into court, and try them...
We are nowhere, until we limit the power of lobbyists. They've been around since this country was founded, but lately, their power is unbounded--on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, I don't see any limit on their influence happening. Where's the bill? When is it going to be voted on? Who's taking what position? Those are the important questions, and they aren't being asked, by either party.
There's nothing going on, and the populace is numb. Extremely busy watching Survivor, no doubt. We get the government we deserve. Does anyone really believe the government has our best interests at heart? With resistance to things as basic as food labelling laws (other examples abound)? Does the image of a BK Whopper in your last commercial look *anything* like your last *actual* BK Whopper? Why do we allow corporations this huge latitude of obviously false advertising, and just accept it as business as usuall? You've accepted the fact that corporations can lie to you, and manipulate you, with *complete* impunity. No penalty whatsoever, for something we all know is a marketing hallucination.
Does anyone see this as a fundamental flaw? Vote your conscience, for once in your lives. Take a fucking stand. If you don't, well, content youself with knowing that you get the government you deserve.
But I don't see the business world abandoning MS Office anytime soon, either. If nothing else, inertia is a powerful force. On the other hand, if I can read and write MS Office formats (and I've had no troubles with the sort of documents, spreadsheets, etc., that I use) I'm fine, and don't really care what the rest of the world is doing. It's none of my business, now that I have an interoperable choice.
I've heard that there are compatability issues (or were with 1.0, at any rate) in doing regression analysis with Calc/Excel, but I haven't had to share that sort of thing, and I suspect very few people do.
Great. A link to a site that takes forever to load, just for very minimal (maybe 1K of essentially nothing) content, and a link to RH's Unfakeable page, which is http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/, and loads fast. Other RH content worth looking at is http://www.redhat.com/truthhappens/. Links off that last page include a breakdown of cost 'savings' by Dave Dargo, who developed Oracles licensing strategy, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the parent, but MPEG4, from what I've seen. I don't really have any experience with divx, though. Am I missing something great? I definitely don't want to mess around with Flash. I'm tired of being bugged about needing the latest player, I don't see what problem it solves that's worth more bloat, etc.
Bummer. That means I would have to hit it with a script instead of a mouse to cause them any pain. That would be really hard to do.
= CMeN9bSEpYkCFQdZYQodZiTxOA. I'd have to sleep for a few, possibly random, seconds. Then I'd have to rinse and repeat. Until I walked into the office tomorrow morning, and hit CRTL-C. If a few (hundred) people were to do that, for a few days, it might cost them some serious money.
I'd have to wget or curl http://www.stockmarketenews.com/s/PHYA.html?gclid
But that would be evil. I'd better not do that.
Article was about using the command line, not scripting. Calling an interpreter, and supply more complex statements, etc., may be something you want to do, but not me. For instance, sorting your environment in Perl:
foreach my $key (sort keys %ENV) {
print "$key => $ENV{$key}\n";
}
You'll have to call Perl alone, then issue the statements line by line, or convert this into a one-liner. Which I leave as an exercise for the reader, as I wouldn't do that because in a shell it's just:
env | sort
Plus, portability can suck, if you need to call libraries which may or not be present on a given system. And by then, your command may be getting obnoxiously long, anyway. Granted that there are some powerful Perl and Python one-liners, but I just don't see that as a reason to write 'Don't use shell'. Use what's appropriate. Often, that's shell. That's why it's *there*.
Of course, you have to put in the effort to *learn* what's appropriate, which is a gradual process. Some reasons for putting out the effort:
a) You'll want to learn the basics anyway, just because of the power and convenience you gain in customizing your environment via tweaking resource files.
b) It teaches you fundamental things about Unix-y operating systems.
c) Trying doing any sort of serious system administration without being able to understand (and modify, if necessary) init scripts.
d) Easy script creation via 'script' command.
e) It's fun.
But at least some of the cool stuff is available in the archives. I still have a bookmark to Neil Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr .html
I'm wondering if he's making money from distros paying him *not* to promote them.
Well, let's just hope that a) the code isn't contributed by SuSE, and b) it doesn't autoexec. Personally, I'd rather see a conversion tool than native support.
A lot of people here don't really follow Microsoft operating systems. A 90% desktop share doesn't make you relevant to all people--just 90%. There are a lot of 10% types here, as you might expect from a service running Free software. The burden is on Microsoft marketing people to have sufficiently gotten the word out, not on all Slashdot users to be fully cognizant of all features of an OS that may not be relevant to them. Particularly as traffic shaping has been available in the Unix-y community since, well, forever.
I freely admit that Microsoft was an excellent marketing company. But lots of people have mostly heard about delays, features that have been pulled (in the case of a filesystem, pulled continually from each new release, for over a decade), etc. I say 'was' an excellent marketing company, because they seem to have fallen over. Vista has been released to corporate clients with little fanfare, and even Ballmer seemed more relieved than anything else.
It will get a ton of market share, but that's as much, or more, a function of the difficulty *average* consumers will face in buying a consumer PC without Vista installed, once it's released in that arena. Most consumers don't even know that there *are* other OSs, save perhaps Apple, and they probably still think of that as expensive (you still hear that, even on Slashdot) gear. But that's the result of *previous* Microsoft marketing success, and the resultant monopoly. I deal with several shops that are (very) predominantly Microsoft. None of them are all, "OMG, we must have teh Vista."
From my perspective, they see Vista as long-delayed, expensive to adopt, and very much an only incremental improvement. So, is the Microsoft marketing machine resting on its laurels, knowing a monopoly doesn't really *have* to do much? Or is there really just nothing compelling about this release? Or could all these clients (mom and pop to Fortune 500) simply not be getting teh wunder that be Vista? Which, in itself, would be a marketing failure, as the opinion is unanimous.
YMMV, but that's what I'm seeing.
Not so. Consider the common scenario of a firewall w/ 3 NICs.
- One is relatively low bandwidth, to the cloud.
- One is relatively high bandwidth, to the protected LAN.
- One is relatively high bandwidth, to the DMZ.
This really is common, for reasons as silly as failure to do split/split DNS when you should, to entirely valid reasons such as network backup speeds, working with CPU-limited apps on the DMZ, or just the high cost of cloud feeds and speeds.
kill -9 is a last-ditch effort. If it succeeds, it prevents the process from trying to clean up after itself--deleting a PID file, for example. That may bite you if you try to restart an app or daemon that looks for a PID file in, far instance, /var/run to determine if it's already running. It sees the file, and won't start. There can be other issues, as well. Most of them would qualify as Bad Things.
Always attempt 'kill PROCNUMBER' before 'kill -9 PROCNUMBER'.
You are correct. My bad.
You're right, and I was thinking of Safari, as that old debate on devs contributing back went through my mind as I was typing. That *definitely* was Apple, not Moz. But I also _thought_ I recalled seeing a setting to change the rendering agent--KHTML or Gecko. Can't find it now, though. It may have been on a different version of KDE and/or Konqueror.
"It should have the look and feel of his native GUI." What if your GUI is themed? My KDE looks nothing like an out of the box KDE. I have no problem with expecting people to be willing and able to download a frapping theme. If we dumb things down to the point where *that* is regarded as too much of a burden, we have gone *way* too far.
>>I have some news for you: it's supposed to be a basic [RSS] implementation that gives you the bare essentials. If you want >>one with bells and whistles, go get an extension that suits your needs better.
>IE7 has raised the bar a little higher than this.
One persons feature is another person's bloat. Danga, in a post above, didn't like having to download extensions when loading a new system--nor does he like bloat. Well, building everything in obviously increases bloat, and I personally like the flexibility of the extension model, as you seem to. Not that I'm saying that FF has no bloat without extensions...
But I'll go further--leave out RSS as well. There's no particular reason for it to be in the Web browser. To me, that's an artifact of primitive desktops--where you have only one desktop. If you can have several, it's often more convenient to keep mail, calendar, Usenet, RSS, etc., (basically, all of the communications and news stuff) on one desktop while reserving another for the Web browser. Notifications via the panel work fine, and this keeps all of that stuff out of my way when I'm trying to work.
Granted, when I click an item in my standalone RSS app, another instance of my browser (Konqueror) is created to view it. But that only takes (literally) a second, under normal system loads.
Maybe that's just me, and my work habits. But maybe it's also a decent argument for carrying the Unix philosophy of small, sharp tools onto the desktop, insofar as such a thing is possible.
"mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko" sort of implies that Gecko was their work, while it actually came from KDE's Konqueror. Credit where credit is due. I recommend Konqueror as the more secure browser. There are a few sites which it doesn't deal with very well, and I keep Firefox around for those. But 99% of the time, Konqueror is my browser.
Thanks very much for the URL. Perens is articulate, as usual. I've never had a high opinion of open letters, but Perens brings another quanta of gravitas to the issue. I'll be signing it. I'm afraid I'll be needing a half dozen or so references of like quality. Articles from the trade press probably will not qualify.
My current plan is to give Novell a couple of months to find a way out of this agreement, while saving a bit of corporate face. If they don't manage it, I'll have to EOL SuSE as a supported OS. As it's impossible to EOL OS support without causing problems for *someone*, I'll need a comprehensive statement of my reasons, with a good list of references.
A couple of days work to write the document, after several weeks work planning the migration, writing supporting code and docs, etc. This will probably absorb two hundred manhours, quite easily. And I do work for a very limited number of clients with very specialized needs.
Thanks are owed Novell, for the good work they've done in the past. But if I should have to add a migration load because of this, I'm very unlikely to ever re-add Novell to the supported list. Once burned, twice wary.
"Spies are killed left and right and you never get to know about it."
If you never know about it, how can you claim it? And I can make no sense of the last four sentences (from the IE7 reference on) whatsover.
OK, how about vets from WW2, Korea, Vietnam? How about the horrendous crap that blacks over 45 had to deal with (and I imagine they still deal with today, in many areas of the country)? How about Japanese being rounded up and sent to internment camps? I could go on and on. The human condition has always included a fair amount of misery, but day to day life is a hell of a lot better than it's been for most of human history, what with a notable lack of Black death, being pretty much owned by a feudal lord, executed by hanging for petty theft when you're starving, etc.
I am a bit curious about how the word 'reality' came to be defined as Bad Things in your lexicon. You must be pretty depressed. Take a day. Don't listen to the news, or read any angst-ridden Web sites like Slashdot. The world will still be here when you get back. Go have some fun. Recharge.
The current crop of politicians seems pretty thoroughly corrupt, or entirely clueless, or both. Guess what? That's nothing even remotely new. It's been the case since there have *been* politicians. Actually, I'd be amazed if this sort of thing didn't predate politicians, in some scenario where the kid brother of the village elder did a bit of influence peddling, and got caught taking copper beads.
The sort of vile crap being visited upon your generation isn't unique to your generation. You pick your fights, you win what you can, you try to do the right thing, and you wait for the cycle to turn. It will, you know.
"...exposing flaws like this does nobody any good."
Well, that's one side of the full disclosure debate. The other side, of course, is that some vendors once had even worse reputations for fixing security vulnerabilities than they currently do. Full disclosure evolved in part as a means of holding their feet to the fire. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on exactly how effective full disclosure is. It's certain that vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited can still remain unpatched for an obscene length of time.
I think full disclosure can be done in what I regard as a responsible manner. You might want to have a look at Rain Forest Puppy's policy at http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/policy.html as a starting point. To me, acting in a professional manner means exercising some judgment. You can't demand the impossible, but neither you can allow a vendor to stonewall indefinitely. Much will depend upon severity, whether you know the vulnerability is currently being exploited, whether you have a sense that the issue is being actively worked, etc.
Personally, I draw the line at publicly releasing exploits. I can see how some people might do it, if they've been dealing with some of the very obvious stonewalling tactics that I've encountered. As in, "OK, after three months you still claim it's not an issue? I just released malware 1.0. I'm sure it won't cause you any PR or support problems. Have a nice day." To me, that's at best allowing frustration to overcome professionalism (defined as acting in the best interests of your profession). At worst, professionalism was never a factor, and it's done for notoriety or some other steaming pile of stupid.
But responsible full disclosure most definitely does have its place. If you've never had a problem with Oracle, congratulations. But other people have. And I know of a plethora of problems with other vendors.
"If you are a programmer, and are in it to make money..."
Both of these conditions are not always satisfied. The rest of this reply relates to those cases where they are.
A lot of people are financially compensated for writing free software. Or to admin infrastructure systems (build, download, mailing list hosts, etc.). The people picking up the tab obviously realize a bottom line benefit, so this will likely increase.
And even financial compensation comes in other forms than a direct revenue stream. For instance, I'm close to releasing two pieces of software. Originally, they were both written to scratch local itches, and they get the job done. They could be better, but once they were good enough, progress on them slowed. If either piece attracts any developer interest, I'll end up with better software, for what I think will be a minimal investment of my time. Giving it away is simply the most sensible approach, from a ROI viewpoint. Even though I'm unlikely to see a revenue stream from either project, any success for either project will, on balance, save me time and effort. Lower overhead is a Good Thing.
Another win from the same example is that both of these pieces of software are something solid to point to, which is directly related to my field, most of which is NDA'ed to death. That's probably a Good Thing as well.
"Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?"
No.
Zonk either knows zero about the histories of the Internet or DNS, or is so enamored of finishing stories with questions that he'll tack on the truly ridiculous.
Somehow, I see shades of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_ Moon
"Do they honestly think people are going to tolerate it?" Yes, they do. And they are very probably correct.
;)
To the vast majority of home users, MS == computing. Or they've maybe heard of Apple, but haven't used it. Perhaps because they still remember it as being an expensive alternative. Linux they've probably never heard of.
I've never admin'ed a large MS shop, but I'd image that large corporate clients will have made a separate peace with MS. That's assuming that this is even a factor for them, as their upgrade cycles are already typically slow, and asymptotically slowing to EOL of support. I suspect that, as one transfer allows for two hardware upgrade cycles, even MS will have the OS beyond Vista out before it's much of a factor for them.
Small business may be hurt by this, as they're not as likely to have staff who're aware of alternatives. MS wants to keep that market segment, though, so we'll see how that plays out.
One thing is for certain--MS (while, IMHO they're not much of a technology company) is an excellent *marketing* company. They've reams of historic data, the resources to hire an arbitrary number of the best business school grads available, and have undoubtedly run the numbers very thoroughly.
While this sort of things whips the Slashdot community into a frenzy, _we don't matter_. The Slashdot-like population is microscopically small. DRM? Same deal. Remember the Sony 'rootkit' that had everyone here so fired up, a year ago? It wasn't even a blip on Sony's bottom line. It took exploding batteries to crush their profits.
Personally, I don't care[1]. The GNU/Linux OS, the KDE desktop and *some* KDE apps, the Open Office application suite (and it's ability to read and write MS file formats), a dozen or so other apps that are personally vital, the PostgreSQL database, and a small selection of FOSS server software, have already made licensing MS software a complete non-starter for me. Uptake of FOSS for desktops has been slow but steady, and it's been rapid on servers. That's been enough to quiet my inner zealot. Particularly as, for what I do, the software listed above gives me a competitive advantage over MS shops.
[1] I still care very much about software patents. That whole concept is broken and evil. As are current implementations of DRM--those just don't affect me much.
I'm wishing that everyone would vote every incumbent out of office. We'd lose a couple of good people, but many more bad ones. And it would send a huge dissatisfaction message. The largest in history. Maybe that would shake things up, and convince the next crop that they have exactly *one* term to prove themselves. Not special interest money, nor our own brand of religious fundamentalist fruitcakes.
There are no good choices. If The Shrub is a good example of the Republicans, it's fairly plain that they're evil, lying, lawbreaking, Constitution-destroying idiots. But then we have a sole surviving Kennedy as a powerful Democrat. A man that would have been locked up years ago, over the Chappaquiddick affair. And would have been, if he weren't a Kennedy. And is now busy trundling illegal aliens over the border as fast as he can, in hopes of votes, and the wellfare of the country be damned.
There's nothing good to be said for either party. Throw all of the incumbents out. We'll end up with a bunch of innexperienced people in office, but how can they *possibly* do worse than the current crop? Right now, there's some debate about whether Iraq should divide along ethic and religious boundaries. This country is now so divided that we may not have too many election cycles before we're thinking about whether we should do the same thing.
I'd vote in favor, on the theory that being associated with Kansans who seem to still have a problem with evolution, and believe in a 'born-again' *anything*, much less President, can't lead to anything good. Separation of church and state was built into our constitution for a *reason*. History has clearly shown that religious groups *will* legislate their beliefs into law, given half a chance, and you will be *screwed* if you don't subscribed to their beliefs. These fruitcakes now constitute a voting block so powerful that it has to be overcome, pretty much immediately, or it's time for people to choose up sides and get ultimately nasty.
I know that the next evangelist (Jehovah's Witness, S. Baptist, etc.) that knocks on my door is going to be seriously insulted. I'd as soon punch their lights out, to tell you the truth, but I suspect they come in pairs because they know they're an annoyance at best, hated in many places, and need a witness.
Fundies mean nothing good for our way of life, if you believe in the sparation of church and state. Next time you wonder how Muslim sects can kill each other with such joyous abandon, you might want to remember that our home-grown fundies have murdered doctors who performed legal abortions. If you have religion you don't need rationality, respect for secular law, or anything else. You're guided by your Higher Power, or Invisible Friend.
Organized religion is one of the last great evils. It's probably the single greatest cause of warfare in our shiny new 21st century, and has killed tens or hundreds of millions down through history. At what point do we decide that there's been enough of this religion weirdness, and at least recognize it as seriously delusional?
OK, I'm a Bush hater. On the other hand, the likely Democrat front runners for our next presidential election suck, too. H. Clinton already saying things she clearly doesn't believe in, just to appease the religious fruitcakes, and get into office. Even McCain (I'm a vet too, same timeframe, and somewhat prejudiced in his favor) has sold us down the river.
It's the system that's at risk, and a damned noble experiment it has been. If you value Thomas Jefferson's thoughts, anyway. Some (not most, but an important fraction) of it probably has to do with everyone knowing that our congressional reps are mostly criminals. If we could ever get our power back, drag the sons of bitches into court, and try them...
We are nowhere, until we limit the power of lobbyists. They've been around since this country was founded, but lately, their power is unbounded--on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, I don't see any limit on their influence happening. Where's the bill? When is it going to be voted on? Who's taking what position? Those are the important questions, and they aren't being asked, by either party.
There's nothing going on, and the populace is numb. Extremely busy watching Survivor, no doubt. We get the government we deserve. Does anyone really believe the government has our best interests at heart? With resistance to things as basic as food labelling laws (other examples abound)? Does the image of a BK Whopper in your last commercial look *anything* like your last *actual* BK Whopper? Why do we allow corporations this huge latitude of obviously false advertising, and just accept it as business as usuall? You've accepted the fact that corporations can lie to you, and manipulate you, with *complete* impunity. No penalty whatsoever, for something we all know is a marketing hallucination.
Does anyone see this as a fundamental flaw? Vote your conscience, for once in your lives. Take a fucking stand. If you don't, well, content youself with knowing that you get the government you deserve.
Sun for sure. I believe IBM uses it extensively. http://www.oasis-open.org/events/adoption_forum_20 05/slides/tenhumberg.pdf is a pretty extensive adoption in the public sector document. I've seen surveys that talk about 'fifty large [some European country name] companies' and such.
But I don't see the business world abandoning MS Office anytime soon, either. If nothing else, inertia is a powerful force. On the other hand, if I can read and write MS Office formats (and I've had no troubles with the sort of documents, spreadsheets, etc., that I use) I'm fine, and don't really care what the rest of the world is doing. It's none of my business, now that I have an interoperable choice.
I've heard that there are compatability issues (or were with 1.0, at any rate) in doing regression analysis with Calc/Excel, but I haven't had to share that sort of thing, and I suspect very few people do.
Great. A link to a site that takes forever to load, just for very minimal (maybe 1K of essentially nothing) content, and a link to RH's Unfakeable page, which is http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/, and loads fast. Other RH content worth looking at is http://www.redhat.com/truthhappens/. Links off that last page include a breakdown of cost 'savings' by Dave Dargo, who developed Oracles licensing strategy, etc.
Poster must be pimping for osdir or something.