"The Red Hat database is not a defunct product. It has been deemphasized..." OK, deemphasized. Fairly well, too, as I see no mention of it at http://www.redhat.com/solutions/. The "Storage Solutions" link, chased out of curiosity (only thing I could find by direct nav), led only to RH GFS. Appropriate from the link text, and a sweet FS. But it wasn't the RH DB, and that's as close as I came to a link.
"RH is profitable, and its revenues are increasing." What's more, it's market cap is still very high. If Oracle wants to pay that sort of money for a Linux distribution then that's good news for folks in the Linux business." Something like a $0.5-1.0^9 got pealed off the market cap to day. Didn't check the closing price. But what's at stake here is the entire premise of those 'increasing revenues', given that RH sells support, and the second largest software company in the world has declared support war on them. I think there's cause for concern about that.
I definitely don't buy into the RH PR line about how this is good for RH (or did they just say Linux?), as stated at http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/ but that same link goes into some detail from RH that's pretty informative, and indicates that not all is doom and gloom for RH. To me, Ellison seemed at least to be just deploying his vaunted mad media skilz.
I guess we'll see. Overall, I'd far rather see RH get through this.
Well, if RH is no longer seen as viable (and major corporations can be very conservative about roadmap credibility) they're less likely to choose, say, JBoss over Oracle's Java platform. If a single vendor is responsible for the entire stack, the customer tends to lose. Which is, of course, something that corporations have been getting more sensitive too, over the past few years. On the major (think Fortune 500) corporation front, there really aren't that many Linuxes to choose from--mainly RH and SuSE, with RH far in the lead.
Part of that problem really does have to be the overall ABI stability issue you alluded to, as well as things as basic as which distros break the FHS in which ways. I agree 100% that this is a sad state of affairs. lastb broken in some distros, differences in how you access the PRNG via the shell, etc., particularly suck for me, as a security guy.
"Its also slightly difficult to understand why the death of commercial server side Linux would be a disaster..." Major corporations get nervous about not being able to write a check, and have someone they can bring suit against. It's a risk mitigation thing, just like insurance. In the case of telecomm and financial systems (RH is a player in both areas) losses can grow large, very quickly.
Without large commercial Linux vendors, many of those corporations are going to migrate to another platform, and they've been at the very least indirectly responsible for many improvements to the software.
Of course, this is all just MHO, and I'm not predicting the demise of commercial Linux distros. I think the market has spoken on that--they're a Good Thing. I would hate to see RH being subsumed by Oracle, and I can definitely see a couple of scenarios where that could happen.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see a third major corporate distro, with more commonality (ABI, etc), competing on quality of support, and non-OS offerings, such as directory services, etc. I see that as the best win for the customer (I'm talking corporate here, not home desktops), as that's what keeps the wolf off my doorstep.
Disclaimer: it would also make my life a lot easier! I've just returned from a bizarre pipe-dream of having to recommend Vendor 3 because, while Vendors 1 & 2 have improved their offerings and quality of support (with at least some sort of announced metrics, such as % calls resolved at first contact) by Leaps & Bounds, Vendor 3 has improved by L&B + 1.
Of course, reality is going to be somewhat different. For sure, this is going to be interesting.
I wouldn't be surprised if RH is going to grow some sort of "RHEL+JBoss+Postgresql combo" *now*, as a response. But the RH database is currently a defunct product. It made better business sense at the time for RH to get Oracle. I think that what's happened is that Oracle has seen an opportunity to seriously damage RH, and at a minimum keep them from moving up the application stack.
They do love to either wack or buy competition. Sound familiar?
RH was already struggling with a 34% drop in profit in their last quarter. This has taken their price down further (-$5 to $14.30 a few moments ago). If there's any stumble in integrating JBoss, they'll be further hurt. Oracle's just done a string of acquisitions, and may be betting on a stumble as the final event which drives the company to a firesale price.
Of course, that could involve a bidding war. The RH brand is still valuable, after all. I wonder if IBM would need regulatory approval to buy RH?
As far as the db corruption issues go, I've seen the same thing with SuSE. Nor could YaST handle it--it required an initialize and rebuild of the db. And I've had that same 'run some tests' experience with HP-UX. From what I've seen, there is no bomb-proof support provider, whether Linux or Unix. Even within a single company, support quality varies over time, so you can't really even listen to much anecdotal evidence, as there's a fair chance that quality will change over the life of a support contract--especially if it's multi-year.
From what I've seen, it's mostly a game of roll the dice, and deal with varying amounts of suckage. Maybe Oracle will be the One True Support Provider who Gets it Right, but my inner cynic is ROFL at the idea. I can only conclude that the MBAs have gamed this, and calculated that the cost of bomb-proof support would make them non-competitive on price. Which means that support suckage is just going to be an ongoing fact of life, which we all end up paying for in time, frustration, increased testbed count, etc.
It might not matter much to private parties, but the number of private parties running RHEL is probably low. This probably *will* matter to corporations, and not just because they can cut their support costs in half. The majors are very likely running Oracle apps and middleware (especially after the PeopleSoft acquisition) as well as their database. Now they get to evaluate the cost:benefit of having a single large (#2 software company in the world) supply support for virtually their entire stack for enterprise apps.
The downside is lock-in, if Oracle manages to eliminate RH as a viable competitor--which I have no doubt is their long-term intention. The upside is whatever terms they can negotiate on the next few years of contracts.
RH-haters are pretty common on Slashdot. Well, there's that old chestnut about being careful what you wish for...
It's not just the Russians. We use Radioisotopic Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) as well. Any mission where you can't get enough energy via solar panels, such as outer soar system missions, are good candidates. I believe the total is in the twenties. Plus we've launched at least one nuclear reactor, a SNAP-10, which is in a parking orbit which is intended to be stable for something like 3K years, so by the time the orbit decays, the nuclear material will have, too.
There is indeed a huge difference between killing and murder. Murdering your wife should indeed be unthinkable for most people. I'll go farther, and call it 'for anyone'. Although I'm not clear about how to arrange that 'undoable' bit, as a practical consideration...
But I would still argue that it is indeed society that has taught you not to kill. I could be wrong (it's not as if that doesn't happen all the time) but if you'd been born into one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, knowing no other way of life, I'm pretty sure that putting meat on the table, as a daily survival thing, would take precedence. And in today's society, you're a killer by proxy if you eat meat. I don't mean to insult--no way am I a vegetarian or vegan. Bring me the barbeque, or the shellfish. So I'm a killer by proxy.
I personally can't hunt. I'll probably never again be able to squeeze a trigger, other than target shooting, which is a very far cry from the real thing. Assuming we don't do some improbable collapse of civilization thing, anyway. I do fish, but even that is pretty much catch and release. But I'm in the possibly odd postion of not being able to shoot an animal for sport, but absolutely still able to shoot a human if the circumstances demanded it. There would still be a huge psychological penalty to pay afterwords, in my case, at least. But I absolutely would do it.
Overall, I sympathize with your viewpoint, and would be the first to agree that a reluctance to kill is definitely a Good Thing. As a species, we are way too good at it. The ultimate irony would be that doing something that ensured the survival of a species at one point, in the form of developing a hunting ability, would be their ultimate downfall, in the form of developing nuclear or biological warfare (chemical warfare is vastly overrated as a viable military tool) technologies. But history is rife with examples of species that got too good at something, and set the stage for their own downfall.
There's an episode of Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_ that had a major impact on me. The title was something like _Who Speaks for Mankind_, or something close to that. It's probably at your local library, and is definitely recommended viewing. If you thought that killing things was a Bad Idea *before* seeing it...
All this from a guy who, in the original post, claimed that he didn't understand the concept of root. And now you're competent to comment on the difficulty of porting or cloning software, and any Linux folk who don't agree with you are assholes, or just don't realize that your conception of a GUI is The One True GUI. OK, I'm now prepared to admit I've been trolled. Nice job, I guess, although I fundamentally don't get the entire concept of purposeful trolling. It seems to me that that there are a lot more useful and/or enjoyable ways to spend time. I suppose that's why I fall for it so many times, even when I see the Great Runes and other obvious signs.
In some sense, you're correct about the asshole comment. I'm a security guy, and a former military NCO. It's widely known that both of these alien life forms are paid to be assholes. I've been called far worse, by far better, so that sort of thing rolls off me like water off a well-oiled duck.
You, on the other hand, probably aren't a professional asshole. Most people aren't, anyway, so it seems a reasonable assumption. How you arrived at the state of unprofessional asshole probably goes back to some sort of deep nature v nurture question, which is well up on my Could Not Care Less list. I'd rather be banging out some code, helping people out on mailing lists, or otherwise spending my spare geek time doing things which might actually be useful to people.
But by all means please get your troll on, for whatever bizarre reasons drive you. Far be it from me to interfere with your fun. While I won't waste any more time responding, it might drive home some lessons in how to spot you people, and actually save me some time down the road. That's the only useful thing that I can imagine coming from this thread.
OK, I can sorta see your point. The way you made it was a bit harsh. Maybe you didn't realize that you were telling a bunch of developers that the uncountable manhours (many contributed for free, as a labor of love) they've put into something were all a waste, and they didn't know what they were doing, because it doesn't work exactly like something that they may very well detest.
As a mechanic, tools are professionally vital to you, right? You need to know how to use them, and take care of them. Realizing that power tools require a bit more knowledge than hand tools is second nature to you. Well, at the end of the day, a computer is just an extremely flexible (and complex) power tool.
Making that power available to a wider audience than the relatively small group of people who were willing to work by typing at a command line drove the creation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), which are actually a large part of the complexity, in terms of the sheer number of lines of code required. That's unavoidable. A Crescent wrench serves only three purposes (adjustable wrench, adjustable hammer, and prybar), only one of which is intended. So the interface is simple: the grip, and a thumbwheel. But even that interface isn't absolutely defined, i.e. grips may or may not be vinyl coated. Vinyl coated grips may or may not be the optimal design for someone who operates their Crescent wrench in prybar mode, as you get less slippage, but more wear.
General purpose computers serve a multitude of purposes, not all of which can be envisioned when the design is created (prybar mode, and Slashdotters may well supply a few more), and creating *any* workable interface which allows for them all is horribly complex. So complex, in fact, that CS, usability, etc., people are still learning how to do it, about thirty years[1] later. Even if we did have The One True GUI design, things would probably still be complicated because:
a) Somebody would immediately patent the thing so no one else could use it. b) The marketting departments of whatever companies didn't hold the patent would still campaign against it. c) There will always be a groups that will want to do things differently, due to either special circumstances (GUIs may be of limited use to the visually challenged without extremely flexible icon sets, fonts, etc., if they're even usable *at all*), or simply because human beings are by nature very contrary beasts. d) Hardware is a moving target.
So far, the result has been several subtly different[2] user interfaces. I obviously don't see those remaining differences dissappearing anytime soon. But you actually have it pretty good. A user of one GUI can sit down in front of a another, mess around for a few minutes, and begin to accomplish things. It might not be perfect for you (and people can obviously be very passionate about this stuff), but you can get things done.
[1] There's a history of the GUI at http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars/1. It's a great read, has screenshots, etc. [2] I say 'subtly different', because, well, they are. When the command line was the only interface, each operating system's UI was wildly different. Differences in GUIs are extremely minor in comparison.
Personally, I've changed my opinion on Microsoft. I was thinking of buying Vista SP1 or 2, just as a testing platform. But I won't be doing that now, as I build my own boxes, and change motherboards now and again.
But that's not really the mind-changing bit. This next bit is.
I think Apple would love to be a hardware company until the heat death of the universe, and would love to be able to go back to charging premiums for the gear. They have a responsibility to their investors to do it, if they can. Which means that if MS were to fold up, innexpensive commodity hardware could evaporate shortly afterward.
So right now, I'm in a sweet spot. I run an OS (Linux) that works extremely well for me (but I'm not a gamer), on several boxes built from very cost effective hardware. Long live Microsoft!
Sorry to hear all the cries of woe from the Microsoft tribe, or those who aren't part of the tribe, but have to use it at work, etc. But for the rest of, having Microsoft around may actually be a Good Thing. I just wish they'd sort out their stand on software patents. Love them in Europe, a slight sign of wavering in the US.
If they'd just decide against supporting software patents, I'd definitely call having them around a Good Thing. As long as I didn't have to actually run their software, anyway.
You want Linux to become a Windows clone for your convenience? To the point that it, "has an identical start menu / quick launch / control panel to vanilla WinXP." Someone who won't make even the trivial effort to understand the concept of the root user (think 'Administrator')? Yet carps about, 'The ludicrous over the top server security built in?"
As for as 'SUCKS FOR EVERYONE'--not really. Works pretty well for me, and a rather large group of others.
You probably don't have enough of a clue to even be embarrassed about your post, do you?
I also keep a paper notebook in every room of my home. I seem to do a lot of problem solving and purely creative things subconsciously, and I don't want to carry a notebook (electronic or paper) around at all times. The top page of the notebook in the kitchen most commonly contains the current grocery list. But the next page(s) might be an idea for a recipe I'm working on, a fragmentary business idea, a couple of lines of code, a couple of bullet points for a paper, etc.
Setting a problem aside for my subconscious to grind on works extremely well for me, but answers pop out at the weirdest times, and I've found it best to capture them ASAP. Nothing beats the convenience of paper for that. It does get you the occasional odd look from guests, though...
We aren't born with morals. See the child soldier discussion above. Morals are instilled by society, for better or for worse. In some societies, cutting off a hand for stealing is moral behavior, for instance.
In every society that I'm aware of, it's not immoral for a member of the military to kill in the line of duty. It's not only the expected norm, but failing to do so can carry serious penalties.
What about law enforcement personnel? Should the cop who kills one to save several be labeled immoral?
Or how about someone who's neither law enforcement nor military, but who's forced into a situation of having to kill to protect loved ones, or even complete strangers? Is this person immoral?
I agree with you about an executioner, because I don't believe in the death penalty. But IMO that's an completely different issue. For one thing, I see it as having failed as a deterrence, so it's vengeance, not defense of the greater good.
Most societies try fairly hard to instill a belief that it's wrong to kill. They do a good enough job that military and police personnel are often wracked by (IMO needless) guilt. I'm thinking they did a pretty good job with you, as well. This is generally a Good Thing, with respect to how 99% of the population leads 99% of their lives.
But 99% of 99% is *not* 100%. That small remainder represents a group of people doing fundamentally hard things on fundamentally bad days. You might want to cut them some slack.
I agree with CharonX on all points. To continue in the same vein, I doubt Fox will sell the rights to Firefly, unless the people who cancelled it are now gone. Risk/reward probably looks something like: They might make a hit of it, and make me look bad/minuscule upside to corporate bottom line. Hmm...set corporate butt-covering shields to eleven!
Also, Whedon seems to have projects enough to keep him busy for another couple of years, and time has to be at least something of a factor. The buzz (and apparently there wasn't enough of *that* to begin with) diminishes, cast members are more likely to be working on other shows, etc. And people change. Would the same chemistry still be there, after some years have passed?
I'd be pleasantly surprised if we saw any more Firefly/Serenity, and yet more surprised if I enjoyed it as much as the original work. OTOH, I was surprised before, as I never expected Whedon to ever produce something I actually liked.
The only exception I'd take lies with Google. IMHO, they're just another corporation (with the *responsibility* to go for your wallet), not some magical Do No Evil exception to the rule.
1) Their track record regarding China isn't anything to brag about. 2) They've been very slow to begin providing services (Google Earth comes immediately to mind) which were accessible to Linux/BSD users, which negates some of their Summer of Code efforts, in my mind. 3) The benefits I can derive from them 'wanting to know all about me' are outweighed by the loss of my privacy. I reject Google cookies--I certainly don't feel as if I can trust them with my email. 4) For the kinds of searches I most commonly do, they're simply not as good as they once were. To me, this at least implies some sort of issue with their search technology R&D efforts. It's probably not a problem, from a board/investor POV, as it's clearly good enough to hold market share and support their bottom line, as an advertising company.
I'm not saying that for-profit corporations are intrinsically evil. Concentrations of capital have made a lot of good things possible, and that probably dates back to the invention of money. There are a few for-profits that I'm fairly supportive of, at the moment. But that can change in an instant, as a response to an entirely reasonable (from their POV, and their investors) decision that they take, which leads them to do something that's counter to my best interests.
Non-profits tend to be more aligned with public interest. Even here, there's still no guaranty. Boards can still make mistakes, etc. But in general I tend to be more supportive of them.
But *loyalty* I reserve for *people*. Not products, not corporations of any stripe (and certainly not Google), but people. Ah, well. Time to chase my disloyal self to work...
Giving a specific date, eight years ago, for something that suspect (systems with that much memory were already widely available), without a citation, has me thinking, "Troll!"
Well, at least some of them don't require real money for testing, but a fake that looks nothing like real currency. Maybe all of them, for all I know. On the other hand, the machines are network-aware, instead of communicating via serial technologies and MUXes. And they're no longer running OS/2 (which I think was the the largest single reason IBM supported it for so long).
On balance, I'd say that overall ATM security is *worse* now than it was twenty years ago.
If a component is going to be shared everywhere, it should be very secure, and I won't trust a new Explorer until it's been in use for a bit, and finally building a reasonable track record. History is against it, and it's sheer size is against it.
"You haven't explained how it's different to its contemporaries on other systems" It allows people to visit a Web site, and have their system immediately subverted, as in the case of the flaw last month, which even DHS thought was bad enough to warn the public about. Surely you'll admit to at least a qualitative difference, as it's had the worst security record of any widely deployed browser, by at least an order of magnitude?
How you connect components is also an issue. Microsoft is fond of RPC--a mechanism which tends to expose a lot of component internals.
Yes, they should. But they didn't, as it would have required them to remove the deep connections between the browser and the OS. That tight coupling has been the major problem, since square one. Not only in the browser, but throughout Microsoft's product line. Protected mode still requires Microsoft staffers to envision what bad guys will do. That's Allow by Default. The same reason that AV engines aren't catching the majority of malware these days. http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/securifythis/soa/Why _popular_antivirus_apps_do_not_work_/0,139033343,1 39264249,00.htm
The far more secure Deny by Default is mandated by many organizations in firewall rules (for obvious reasons), but they then abandon the principal on virus scan hosts, PCs, etc.
Maybe I'm completely out to lunch on the protected mode issue. We'll all know the truth well before the end of Q1 '07, barring any further release delays. Maybe I'll be eating crow. I actually hope so. It's way past time Windows users got a break on the security front, and better Windows security helps non-Windows organizations as well. But I'm not really expecting this to be much of a fix. You don't ignore basic security principles without paying a price.
Currently, there's no way to *accurately* perform a public poll on the Internet. So yes, it would likely have turned out differently. I'd guess that some percentage of the neutrality folk (of which I most definitely am one) would have thoroughly stuffed the ballot box. They'd be the ones most likely to have the motivation and the ability (assuming any controls at all are in place).
But nobody pays any attention to on-line polls, anyway. Their inherent unreliability is too widely known.
What if Windows patches aren't made available in a timely fashion, or at all? Or broken patches are issued? To be fair, it's not *only* Windows. I've also had a couple of encounters with proprietary Unix vendors who denied or downplayed vulnerabilities. But it's *mostly* a Windows problem, and by a very wide margin.
I think you're correct about a cultural divide, but that's certainly not the entire story. And while 'keep your machine(s) updated' is the first line of defense, that's not the entire story, either.
There's already been a response about recompiling the kernel, so I won't go there.
"Vista is supposedly rewritten from scratch. That's fine, because the code now incorporates an awareness of security issues that weren't anticipated when the original codebase was developed...or so they say."
This is the third Microsoft OS that's going to be a huge leap forward in security, so I'm a bit skeptical. I hadn't heard it was rewritten from scratch, but I wouldn't have believed it if I _had_ heard it. The existing code base represents an arbitrary (I doubt even MS could give an accurate figure) but large number of man-centuries. Any company would be hesitant to through that sort of investment away. I can't see Microsoft doing it. Also, the nature of a couple of the already-released exploits seems to indicate a common code base. Though I'm not prepared to swear it wasn't an example of a common design flaw.
Aside from his UI comments (which don't interest me, as my non-MS desktop does everything I ask of it), Thurrott also had a good point with the following:
"Anti-virus and Anti-spam Windows Vista's antivirus and anti-spam features are particularly embarrassing because of Microsoft's stated focus on security in Windows Vista. Oh, and because there aren't any. To get this kind of protection, you'll need to pay Microsoft $50 a year for Windows Live OneCare which, while admittedly an excellent product, should also just come free with the OS that caused the problems in the first place. Obviously."
Essentially, MS doesn't exactly have a sterling track record, and I'd have to see this OS survive in the wild for a few months before I'd have much confidence in it. If I get a Vista box at all, it won't be 'till SP1 or SP2.
"Why are you using Browser stats to sustantiate a point about her work with an operating system wide service pack?" Because pieces of SP2 were related to the browser, and because of a generally flawed OS design (It's simply far too monolithic, which is also what caused most of the application breakage with XPSP2.) which ties the browser far too tightly to the OS. The proof of that is the continual flow of remote ownership of exploits due to browser bugs.
Also, my quote was clipped before the reference to her. My post was in response to the supposition that since XPSP2, Windows security is somehow seen as adequate within the security community, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't know the period in which she was employed at Microsoft, but I can guarantee you there were serious exploits in the wild during that time. I can say that with complete confidence because it's been true since shortly after Windows hosts began to be connected to the Internet. Every new Microsoft OS is supposed to fix everything, and it never does.
The problem is in the design. MS will never throw it all out and start with a clean sheet of paper, due to the enormous expense. I'd offer the stock price slump of a few months ago, after MS announced they'd be spending $2-3^9 on R&D, in support of that statement.
You can't bolt security onto a product. It has to be designed in. That fact has been proven time and again in the security world. No matter how talented the lady is, she was working at an insurmountable task. I'd not be surprised to find that this was one of the reasons she moved on. I know I'd have found it very frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Red Hat database is not a defunct product. It has been deemphasized..." OK, deemphasized. Fairly well, too, as I see no mention of it at http://www.redhat.com/solutions/. The "Storage Solutions" link, chased out of curiosity (only thing I could find by direct nav), led only to RH GFS. Appropriate from the link text, and a sweet FS. But it wasn't the RH DB, and that's as close as I came to a link.
"RH is profitable, and its revenues are increasing." What's more, it's market cap is still very high. If Oracle wants to pay that sort of money for a Linux distribution then that's good news for folks in the Linux business." Something like a $0.5-1.0^9 got pealed off the market cap to day. Didn't check the closing price. But what's at stake here is the entire premise of those 'increasing revenues', given that RH sells support, and the second largest software company in the world has declared support war on them. I think there's cause for concern about that.
I definitely don't buy into the RH PR line about how this is good for RH (or did they just say Linux?), as stated at http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/
but that same link goes into some detail from RH that's pretty informative, and indicates that not all is doom and gloom for RH. To me, Ellison seemed at least to be just deploying his vaunted mad media skilz.
I guess we'll see. Overall, I'd far rather see RH get through this.
Well, if RH is no longer seen as viable (and major corporations can be very conservative about roadmap credibility) they're less likely to choose, say, JBoss over Oracle's Java platform. If a single vendor is responsible for the entire stack, the customer tends to lose. Which is, of course, something that corporations have been getting more sensitive too, over the past few years. On the major (think Fortune 500) corporation front, there really aren't that many Linuxes to choose from--mainly RH and SuSE, with RH far in the lead.
Part of that problem really does have to be the overall ABI stability issue you alluded to, as well as things as basic as which distros break the FHS in which ways. I agree 100% that this is a sad state of affairs. lastb broken in some distros, differences in how you access the PRNG via the shell, etc., particularly suck for me, as a security guy.
"Its also slightly difficult to understand why the death of commercial server side Linux would be a disaster..." Major corporations get nervous about not being able to write a check, and have someone they can bring suit against. It's a risk mitigation thing, just like insurance. In the case of telecomm and financial systems (RH is a player in both areas) losses can grow large, very quickly.
Without large commercial Linux vendors, many of those corporations are going to migrate to another platform, and they've been at the very least indirectly responsible for many improvements to the software.
Of course, this is all just MHO, and I'm not predicting the demise of commercial Linux distros. I think the market has spoken on that--they're a Good Thing. I would hate to see RH being subsumed by Oracle, and I can definitely see a couple of scenarios where that could happen.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see a third major corporate distro, with more commonality (ABI, etc), competing on quality of support, and non-OS offerings, such as directory services, etc. I see that as the best win for the customer (I'm talking corporate here, not home desktops), as that's what keeps the wolf off my doorstep.
Disclaimer: it would also make my life a lot easier! I've just returned from a bizarre pipe-dream of having to recommend Vendor 3 because, while Vendors 1 & 2 have improved their offerings and quality of support (with at least some sort of announced metrics, such as % calls resolved at first contact) by Leaps & Bounds, Vendor 3 has improved by L&B + 1.
Of course, reality is going to be somewhat different. For sure, this is going to be interesting.
I wouldn't be surprised if RH is going to grow some sort of "RHEL+JBoss+Postgresql combo" *now*, as a response. But the RH database is currently a defunct product. It made better business sense at the time for RH to get Oracle. I think that what's happened is that Oracle has seen an opportunity to seriously damage RH, and at a minimum keep them from moving up the application stack.
They do love to either wack or buy competition. Sound familiar?
RH was already struggling with a 34% drop in profit in their last quarter. This has taken their price down further (-$5 to $14.30 a few moments ago). If there's any stumble in integrating JBoss, they'll be further hurt. Oracle's just done a string of acquisitions, and may be betting on a stumble as the final event which drives the company to a firesale price.
Of course, that could involve a bidding war. The RH brand is still valuable, after all. I wonder if IBM would need regulatory approval to buy RH?
As far as the db corruption issues go, I've seen the same thing with SuSE. Nor could YaST handle it--it required an initialize and rebuild of the db. And I've had that same 'run some tests' experience with HP-UX. From what I've seen, there is no bomb-proof support provider, whether Linux or Unix. Even within a single company, support quality varies over time, so you can't really even listen to much anecdotal evidence, as there's a fair chance that quality will change over the life of a support contract--especially if it's multi-year.
From what I've seen, it's mostly a game of roll the dice, and deal with varying amounts of suckage. Maybe Oracle will be the One True Support Provider who Gets it Right, but my inner cynic is ROFL at the idea. I can only conclude that the MBAs have gamed this, and calculated that the cost of bomb-proof support would make them non-competitive on price. Which means that support suckage is just going to be an ongoing fact of life, which we all end up paying for in time, frustration, increased testbed count, etc.
How depressing. Maybe I just need more coffee.
It might not matter much to private parties, but the number of private parties running RHEL is probably low. This probably *will* matter to corporations, and not just because they can cut their support costs in half. The majors are very likely running Oracle apps and middleware (especially after the PeopleSoft acquisition) as well as their database. Now they get to evaluate the cost:benefit of having a single large (#2 software company in the world) supply support for virtually their entire stack for enterprise apps.
The downside is lock-in, if Oracle manages to eliminate RH as a viable competitor--which I have no doubt is their long-term intention. The upside is whatever terms they can negotiate on the next few years of contracts.
RH-haters are pretty common on Slashdot. Well, there's that old chestnut about being careful what you wish for...
I don't think this is good news for Linux.
They're a vanilla IT corporation. Is having the first word of the submission be inaccurate a first?
It's not just the Russians. We use Radioisotopic Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) as well. Any mission where you can't get enough energy via solar panels, such as outer soar system missions, are good candidates. I believe the total is in the twenties. Plus we've launched at least one nuclear reactor, a SNAP-10, which is in a parking orbit which is intended to be stable for something like 3K years, so by the time the orbit decays, the nuclear material will have, too.
There is indeed a huge difference between killing and murder. Murdering your wife should indeed be unthinkable for most people. I'll go farther, and call it 'for anyone'. Although I'm not clear about how to arrange that 'undoable' bit, as a practical consideration...
But I would still argue that it is indeed society that has taught you not to kill. I could be wrong (it's not as if that doesn't happen all the time) but if you'd been born into one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, knowing no other way of life, I'm pretty sure that putting meat on the table, as a daily survival thing, would take precedence. And in today's society, you're a killer by proxy if you eat meat. I don't mean to insult--no way am I a vegetarian or vegan. Bring me the barbeque, or the shellfish. So I'm a killer by proxy.
I personally can't hunt. I'll probably never again be able to squeeze a trigger, other than target shooting, which is a very far cry from the real thing. Assuming we don't do some improbable collapse of civilization thing, anyway. I do fish, but even that is pretty much catch and release. But I'm in the possibly odd postion of not being able to shoot an animal for sport, but absolutely still able to shoot a human if the circumstances demanded it. There would still be a huge psychological penalty to pay afterwords, in my case, at least. But I absolutely would do it.
Overall, I sympathize with your viewpoint, and would be the first to agree that a reluctance to kill is definitely a Good Thing. As a species, we are way too good at it. The ultimate irony would be that doing something that ensured the survival of a species at one point, in the form of developing a hunting ability, would be their ultimate downfall, in the form of developing nuclear or biological warfare (chemical warfare is vastly overrated as a viable military tool) technologies. But history is rife with examples of species that got too good at something, and set the stage for their own downfall.
There's an episode of Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_ that had a major impact on me. The title was something like _Who Speaks for Mankind_, or something close to that. It's probably at your local library, and is definitely recommended viewing. If you thought that killing things was a Bad Idea *before* seeing it...
All this from a guy who, in the original post, claimed that he didn't understand the concept of root. And now you're competent to comment on the difficulty of porting or cloning software, and any Linux folk who don't agree with you are assholes, or just don't realize that your conception of a GUI is The One True GUI. OK, I'm now prepared to admit I've been trolled. Nice job, I guess, although I fundamentally don't get the entire concept of purposeful trolling. It seems to me that that there are a lot more useful and/or enjoyable ways to spend time. I suppose that's why I fall for it so many times, even when I see the Great Runes and other obvious signs.
In some sense, you're correct about the asshole comment. I'm a security guy, and a former military NCO. It's widely known that both of these alien life forms are paid to be assholes. I've been called far worse, by far better, so that sort of thing rolls off me like water off a well-oiled duck.
You, on the other hand, probably aren't a professional asshole. Most people aren't, anyway, so it seems a reasonable assumption. How you arrived at the state of unprofessional asshole probably goes back to some sort of deep nature v nurture question, which is well up on my Could Not Care Less list. I'd rather be banging out some code, helping people out on mailing lists, or otherwise spending my spare geek time doing things which might actually be useful to people.
But by all means please get your troll on, for whatever bizarre reasons drive you. Far be it from me to interfere with your fun. While I won't waste any more time responding, it might drive home some lessons in how to spot you people, and actually save me some time down the road. That's the only useful thing that I can imagine coming from this thread.
OK, I can sorta see your point. The way you made it was a bit harsh. Maybe you didn't realize that you were telling a bunch of developers that the uncountable manhours (many contributed for free, as a labor of love) they've put into something were all a waste, and they didn't know what they were doing, because it doesn't work exactly like something that they may very well detest.
As a mechanic, tools are professionally vital to you, right? You need to know how to use them, and take care of them. Realizing that power tools require a bit more knowledge than hand tools is second nature to you. Well, at the end of the day, a computer is just an extremely flexible (and complex) power tool.
Making that power available to a wider audience than the relatively small group of people who were willing to work by typing at a command line drove the creation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), which are actually a large part of the complexity, in terms of the sheer number of lines of code required. That's unavoidable. A Crescent wrench serves only three purposes (adjustable wrench, adjustable hammer, and prybar), only one of which is intended. So the interface is simple: the grip, and a thumbwheel. But even that interface isn't absolutely defined, i.e. grips may or may not be vinyl coated. Vinyl coated grips may or may not be the optimal design for someone who operates their Crescent wrench in prybar mode, as you get less slippage, but more wear.
General purpose computers serve a multitude of purposes, not all of which can be envisioned when the design is created (prybar mode, and Slashdotters may well supply a few more), and creating *any* workable interface which allows for them all is horribly complex. So complex, in fact, that CS, usability, etc., people are still learning how to do it, about thirty years[1] later. Even if we did have The One True GUI design, things would probably still be complicated because:
a) Somebody would immediately patent the thing so no one else could use it.
b) The marketting departments of whatever companies didn't hold the patent would still campaign against it.
c) There will always be a groups that will want to do things differently, due to either special circumstances (GUIs may be of limited use to the visually challenged without extremely flexible icon sets, fonts, etc., if they're even usable *at all*), or simply because human beings are by nature very contrary beasts.
d) Hardware is a moving target.
So far, the result has been several subtly different[2] user interfaces. I obviously don't see those remaining differences dissappearing anytime soon. But you actually have it pretty good. A user of one GUI can sit down in front of a another, mess around for a few minutes, and begin to accomplish things. It might not be perfect for you (and people can obviously be very passionate about this stuff), but you can get things done.
[1] There's a history of the GUI at http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars/1. It's a great read, has screenshots, etc.
[2] I say 'subtly different', because, well, they are. When the command line was the only interface, each operating system's UI was wildly different. Differences in GUIs are extremely minor in comparison.
Personally, I've changed my opinion on Microsoft. I was thinking of buying Vista SP1 or 2, just as a testing platform. But I won't be doing that now, as I build my own boxes, and change motherboards now and again.
But that's not really the mind-changing bit. This next bit is.
I think Apple would love to be a hardware company until the heat death of the universe, and would love to be able to go back to charging premiums for the gear. They have a responsibility to their investors to do it, if they can. Which means that if MS were to fold up, innexpensive commodity hardware could evaporate shortly afterward.
So right now, I'm in a sweet spot. I run an OS (Linux) that works extremely well for me (but I'm not a gamer), on several boxes built from very cost effective hardware. Long live Microsoft!
Sorry to hear all the cries of woe from the Microsoft tribe, or those who aren't part of the tribe, but have to use it at work, etc. But for the rest of, having Microsoft around may actually be a Good Thing. I just wish they'd sort out their stand on software patents. Love them in Europe, a slight sign of wavering in the US.
If they'd just decide against supporting software patents, I'd definitely call having them around a Good Thing. As long as I didn't have to actually run their software, anyway.
You want Linux to become a Windows clone for your convenience? To the point that it, "has an identical start menu / quick launch / control panel to vanilla WinXP." Someone who won't make even the trivial effort to understand the concept of the root user (think 'Administrator')? Yet carps about, 'The ludicrous over the top server security built in?"
As for as 'SUCKS FOR EVERYONE'--not really. Works pretty well for me, and a rather large group of others.
You probably don't have enough of a clue to even be embarrassed about your post, do you?
I also keep a paper notebook in every room of my home. I seem to do a lot of problem solving and purely creative things subconsciously, and I don't want to carry a notebook (electronic or paper) around at all times. The top page of the notebook in the kitchen most commonly contains the current grocery list. But the next page(s) might be an idea for a recipe I'm working on, a fragmentary business idea, a couple of lines of code, a couple of bullet points for a paper, etc.
Setting a problem aside for my subconscious to grind on works extremely well for me, but answers pop out at the weirdest times, and I've found it best to capture them ASAP. Nothing beats the convenience of paper for that. It does get you the occasional odd look from guests, though...
We aren't born with morals. See the child soldier discussion above. Morals are instilled by society, for better or for worse. In some societies, cutting off a hand for stealing is moral behavior, for instance.
In every society that I'm aware of, it's not immoral for a member of the military to kill in the line of duty. It's not only the expected norm, but failing to do so can carry serious penalties.
What about law enforcement personnel? Should the cop who kills one to save several be labeled immoral?
Or how about someone who's neither law enforcement nor military, but who's forced into a situation of having to kill to protect loved ones, or even complete strangers? Is this person immoral?
I agree with you about an executioner, because I don't believe in the death penalty. But IMO that's an completely different issue. For one thing, I see it as having failed as a deterrence, so it's vengeance, not defense of the greater good.
Most societies try fairly hard to instill a belief that it's wrong to kill. They do a good enough job that military and police personnel are often wracked by (IMO needless) guilt. I'm thinking they did a pretty good job with you, as well. This is generally a Good Thing, with respect to how 99% of the population leads 99% of their lives.
But 99% of 99% is *not* 100%. That small remainder represents a group of people doing fundamentally hard things on fundamentally bad days. You might want to cut them some slack.
I agree with CharonX on all points. To continue in the same vein, I doubt Fox will sell the rights to Firefly, unless the people who cancelled it are now gone. Risk/reward probably looks something like: They might make a hit of it, and make me look bad/minuscule upside to corporate bottom line. Hmm...set corporate butt-covering shields to eleven!
Also, Whedon seems to have projects enough to keep him busy for another couple of years, and time has to be at least something of a factor. The buzz (and apparently there wasn't enough of *that* to begin with) diminishes, cast members are more likely to be working on other shows, etc. And people change. Would the same chemistry still be there, after some years have passed?
I'd be pleasantly surprised if we saw any more Firefly/Serenity, and yet more surprised if I enjoyed it as much as the original work. OTOH, I was surprised before, as I never expected Whedon to ever produce something I actually liked.
Now *that* was funny!
The only exception I'd take lies with Google. IMHO, they're just another corporation (with the *responsibility* to go for your wallet), not some magical Do No Evil exception to the rule.
1) Their track record regarding China isn't anything to brag about.
2) They've been very slow to begin providing services (Google Earth comes immediately to mind) which were accessible to Linux/BSD users, which negates some of their Summer of Code efforts, in my mind.
3) The benefits I can derive from them 'wanting to know all about me' are outweighed by the loss of my privacy. I reject Google cookies--I certainly don't feel as if I can trust them with my email.
4) For the kinds of searches I most commonly do, they're simply not as good as they once were. To me, this at least implies some sort of issue with their search technology R&D efforts. It's probably not a problem, from a board/investor POV, as it's clearly good enough to hold market share and support their bottom line, as an advertising company.
I'm not saying that for-profit corporations are intrinsically evil. Concentrations of capital have made a lot of good things possible, and that probably dates back to the invention of money. There are a few for-profits that I'm fairly supportive of, at the moment. But that can change in an instant, as a response to an entirely reasonable (from their POV, and their investors) decision that they take, which leads them to do something that's counter to my best interests.
Non-profits tend to be more aligned with public interest. Even here, there's still no guaranty. Boards can still make mistakes, etc. But in general I tend to be more supportive of them.
But *loyalty* I reserve for *people*. Not products, not corporations of any stripe (and certainly not Google), but people. Ah, well. Time to chase my disloyal self to work...
Giving a specific date, eight years ago, for something that suspect (systems with that much memory were already widely available), without a citation, has me thinking, "Troll!"
Well, at least some of them don't require real money for testing, but a fake that looks nothing like real currency. Maybe all of them, for all I know. On the other hand, the machines are network-aware, instead of communicating via serial technologies and MUXes. And they're no longer running OS/2 (which I think was the the largest single reason IBM supported it for so long).
On balance, I'd say that overall ATM security is *worse* now than it was twenty years ago.
If a component is going to be shared everywhere, it should be very secure, and I won't trust a new Explorer until it's been in use for a bit, and finally building a reasonable track record. History is against it, and it's sheer size is against it.
"You haven't explained how it's different to its contemporaries on other systems"
It allows people to visit a Web site, and have their system immediately subverted, as in the case of the flaw last month, which even DHS thought was bad enough to warn the public about. Surely you'll admit to at least a qualitative difference, as it's had the worst security record of any widely deployed browser, by at least an order of magnitude?
How you connect components is also an issue. Microsoft is fond of RPC--a mechanism which tends to expose a lot of component internals.
Yes, they should. But they didn't, as it would have required them to remove the deep connections between the browser and the OS. That tight coupling has been the major problem, since square one. Not only in the browser, but throughout Microsoft's product line. Protected mode still requires Microsoft staffers to envision what bad guys will do. That's Allow by Default. The same reason that AV engines aren't catching the majority of malware these days.y _popular_antivirus_apps_do_not_work_/0,139033343,1 39264249,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/securifythis/soa/Wh
The far more secure Deny by Default is mandated by many organizations in firewall rules (for obvious reasons), but they then abandon the principal on virus scan hosts, PCs, etc.
Maybe I'm completely out to lunch on the protected mode issue. We'll all know the truth well before the end of Q1 '07, barring any further release delays. Maybe I'll be eating crow. I actually hope so. It's way past time Windows users got a break on the security front, and better Windows security helps non-Windows organizations as well. But I'm not really expecting this to be much of a fix. You don't ignore basic security principles without paying a price.
Currently, there's no way to *accurately* perform a public poll on the Internet. So yes, it would likely have turned out differently. I'd guess that some percentage of the neutrality folk (of which I most definitely am one) would have thoroughly stuffed the ballot box. They'd be the ones most likely to have the motivation and the ability (assuming any controls at all are in place).
But nobody pays any attention to on-line polls, anyway. Their inherent unreliability is too widely known.
What if Windows patches aren't made available in a timely fashion, or at all? Or broken patches are issued? To be fair, it's not *only* Windows. I've also had a couple of encounters with proprietary Unix vendors who denied or downplayed vulnerabilities. But it's *mostly* a Windows problem, and by a very wide margin.
I think you're correct about a cultural divide, but that's certainly not the entire story. And while 'keep your machine(s) updated' is the first line of defense, that's not the entire story, either.
There's already been a response about recompiling the kernel, so I won't go there.
"Vista is supposedly rewritten from scratch. That's fine, because the code now incorporates an awareness of security issues that weren't anticipated when the original codebase was developed...or so they say."
This is the third Microsoft OS that's going to be a huge leap forward in security, so I'm a bit skeptical. I hadn't heard it was rewritten from scratch, but I wouldn't have believed it if I _had_ heard it. The existing code base represents an arbitrary (I doubt even MS could give an accurate figure) but large number of man-centuries. Any company would be hesitant to through that sort of investment away. I can't see Microsoft doing it. Also, the nature of a couple of the already-released exploits seems to indicate a common code base. Though I'm not prepared to swear it wasn't an example of a common design flaw.
Aside from his UI comments (which don't interest me, as my non-MS desktop does everything I ask of it), Thurrott also had a good point with the following:
"Anti-virus and Anti-spam
Windows Vista's antivirus and anti-spam features are particularly embarrassing because of Microsoft's stated focus on security in Windows Vista. Oh, and because there aren't any. To get this kind of protection, you'll need to pay Microsoft $50 a year for Windows Live OneCare which, while admittedly an excellent product, should also just come free with the OS that caused the problems in the first place. Obviously."
Essentially, MS doesn't exactly have a sterling track record, and I'd have to see this OS survive in the wild for a few months before I'd have much confidence in it. If I get a Vista box at all, it won't be 'till SP1 or SP2.
"Why are you using Browser stats to sustantiate a point about her work with an operating system wide service pack?"
Because pieces of SP2 were related to the browser, and because of a generally flawed OS design (It's simply far too monolithic, which is also what caused most of the application breakage with XPSP2.) which ties the browser far too tightly to the OS. The proof of that is the continual flow of remote ownership of exploits due to browser bugs.
Also, my quote was clipped before the reference to her. My post was in response to the supposition that since XPSP2, Windows security is somehow seen as adequate within the security community, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't know the period in which she was employed at Microsoft, but I can guarantee you there were serious exploits in the wild during that time. I can say that with complete confidence because it's been true since shortly after Windows hosts began to be connected to the Internet. Every new Microsoft OS is supposed to fix everything, and it never does.
The problem is in the design. MS will never throw it all out and start with a clean sheet of paper, due to the enormous expense. I'd offer the stock price slump of a few months ago, after MS announced they'd be spending $2-3^9 on R&D, in support of that statement.
You can't bolt security onto a product. It has to be designed in. That fact has been proven time and again in the security world. No matter how talented the lady is, she was working at an insurmountable task. I'd not be surprised to find that this was one of the reasons she moved on. I know I'd have found it very frustrating.
VENONA