Why not just install Windows XP then? I believe there is a rule that says you can always downgrade your Windows version without additional cost? I believe this was the case with Windows XP -> Windows 98
Also, it's a known fact by now that you shouldn't run Windows vista with less than 2GB of memory.
Quote: "You see the bolded text up there? That would be why it's not exactly Microsoft's fault."
Just because the people selling the MS products are bad too, doesn't make MS any better. Unfair business practices are the main reason of MS' dominance on the desktop market.
Besides, if everyone would be -REALLY- fair here: Why would you even suggest/sell Windows Vista to an end-user at this point? Every well informed person knows that the people buying Vista now will be going through a giant heap of untested crap. Vista won't improve your PC experience for at least the next 1.5 years, unless you find a hobby in fixing Windows.
That's actually the reason why the Netherlands "legalized" weed, too many people were using it and they couldn't stop them. But then again, the legal system here seems to have use lot more common sense than it does in America.
Quote: "But I would like to see what would happen if Microsoft just said "We're not changing our practices, so we won't sell our products in Europe." Would computer users revolt against the EU? Would they be angry at MS instead?"
What would happen is that MS copyrights would be invalidated, life would just continue and everyone would start porting their apps to another operating system. You'd be surprised how fast drop-in solutions would drop from the sky in notime. Two years later, most of the migration would have been completed. It's just like when MS revoked support for Windows NT, which didn't mean people would stop using it immediately but the transition progressed over time. The only loser in the picture would be MS themselves.
BTW, it's a known fact that the European legal system is slow but accurate, I even believe they are acting pretty fast in this case. Believe me that MS won't be getting away with this easily, fines will get higher and higher. Also, ignoring the rulings will upset the commission and will make them much harsher.
It works like that with everything here: First time you break the law, punishment will be quite soft. Next time on the other hand it will be a lot harder. And eventually they'll lock you up for life.
They fact that Neelie actually uses the term 'unacceptable' says a lot, she wouldn't have said that if she didn't have a VERY hard case. To me it looks like MS is using their American tactics at the wrong continent: This will get very sour for them.
As someone who has lived both extremes, I wish to share my experiences as a system/network admin.
For years I have worked with a cluttered desk and big piles of documents, until the director of the company got quite upset about it. I then started to "organize" everything, it took me at least two weeks to do that. Then I started to use the bestpractical.com ticketing system and I numbered all documents and put them in ordners. I had everyone to e-mail their requests to the ticketing system. After about half a year I realized I spend so much time documenting and organizing that I didn't even have time to actually talk to my colleagues about things, I became a giant bureaucracy and a gigantic amount of time went into organizing.
Then I decided to stop with the ticketing system and I went back to clutter, which made me much more productive again, but complaints about the clutter reappeared again after a while. I got so angry about it that I just took my entire pile of stuff and just threw it away (I only keep the -really- important stuff), what I have noticed is that all the lost information didn't cause any problems.
The thing I've learned is that the best way to stay organized without spending too much time organizing is to just throw things away if it isn't an absolutely certain fact I will need it again in the near future. It appears to be the best solution between clutter and organization.
Quote: "Also, testing just what could obviously break is a terrible way to test. A read a story about someone, who after upgrading to Linux kernel 2.6 started having random lockups in PHP/Apache."
I have had the same issue, the apache SSL module needs the random stuff from/dev/random. You need to run 'rngd' in order to fix this (it fills the entropy pool with random data generated). No "long and extensive testing" needed to figure that out.
And, as other people have mentioned, upgrading 2.4 -> 2.6 is like upgrading from Windows 2000 -> 2003.
But the point I want to make is the following: Look how precisely it is possible to pinpoint the -exact- problem.
Whereas I see most MS people fiddling around like it's a big magic box where just about anything can happen (this includes myself when administering a MS box). And actually, compared to the openness of Linux updates, a MS SP really -IS- a black box.
Quote: "If Google were ever dumb enough (they aren't) to start self-censoring to penalize foes in other areas of their business, people wouldn't use Google."
They don't have to actually sensor it, leave it up to the sysop from hell to make something "accidentally go wrong" with the Viacom keywords.
Why is this modded +5 interesting? The comment is either based on a very old version of OO.o or the author is just plain wrong. Also, I don't see him mentioning any concrete example.
I've been using OO.o for years, even while exchanging quite large and more complex documents with MS Office users, I've had only very minor issues. Now with OO.o 2.1 document exchange with Word, Excel and Powerpoint is almost flawless.
We're even had a pilot with OO.o at work, we have found much less issues than I imagined. Now we're rolling it out. Even while some MS office minded people are showing some resistance, we still haven't run into any real issue.
I don't know what kind of manager everyone has, but I can't think of any manager having the time to read such crap like Rob Enderle has produced. In my experience managers can actually be educated quite fast/well on open source if you know how to sell it to them. The main keywords are 'cost savings', 'reliability', 'significantly less downtime', 'scalability', 'flexibility', 'performance'. And big company's like Novell, IBM and RedHat selling opensource/linux make a very strong case.
Actually, in my experience management doesn't care what is running on the servers as long as it -just works 24/7 and saves them money-. It's not like they will actually have to fix it should any problem arise. Please note that you will have to take full responsibility for the product your are recommending, anyone will back out immediately when you have any doubt. In contrast to commercial software, 'finger pointing' games cannot be played with open source, so if anything goes wrong you'll be shot on the spot. But in my experience everything will go just fine and expectations will often be exceeded.
If you take the time to make an alternative cost calculation for the next project and invite a company that can sell it to you, chances are good a manager will change his mind. Also, make it very clear that it's the manager's budget and you are just trying to make their life easier. In the long run, your manager will become your friend.
The main problem are engineers without any Linux/Unix experience fearing for their jobs, they will do anything to sabotage the whole thing and start shouting like the world is coming to an end.
Quote: "I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point."
Now you can actually run a webserver on this device.
Granted, you can create a discussion about the commercial value of it all, but it certainly has a very high educational value. Also, this code (with some modifications) could be used on other/similar devices as well.
The way I see it, this is a big win. Instead of reinventing the wheel people can now start off with the already existing code. And I bet Linksys is actually selling more devices because of openwrt instead of less, so Linksys has won too.
Ever managed to solve a capacity problem without purchasing additional hardware?
I never did.. At least virtualization will save you the effort of actually having to take down the server, copy it to the new machine, reconfigure it for the new hardware and then boot it. Also, you could always do this from the comfort of your own home when nobody is at the office. Instead of actually having to be present at the time of migration.
While I completely agree with you on this at many other areas, I don't in this case. The reason for this is that virtualization -simplifies- tech support in every way (except for real-time applications).
Load problems, especially in a virtualized environment are extremely easy to manage technically. You can just add additional servers and move the virtual machine to the new machine while it's running.
It's the management who will be having a budget problem when this happens, while tech support is not having a technical problem.
Quote: "Now, IMHO, the REAL trouble with Linux in the eyes of his sponsors (yes, I think he is shilling) is that nasty old GPL."
I don't believe he is being sponsored. If I were to sponsor someone to write bad stuff about something, I'd definitely demand more than this. I'd tell him on the spot a whole list of things about why his article is not even worth half reading it (I stopped at line 4).
Quote from the article: "In short, if anyone bothers to look at the sequence of events, they will see that the Linux community pushed me down this path." These are the signs of a frustrated and nonobjective person seeking for attention. He even tells the reader in advance, clear in the open, that the following is the result of pure frustration and perhaps even hatred.
In short, how could this article (if it's even worth that name) even be considered to be posted on slashdot?
Nah, this is the exact thought people had who were thinking Linux was going to rule the desktop just because it's better technology.
Even if there would be a better OS/kernel in the future, it would take -many years- before a significant portion would adopt it the way Linux has now been adopted.
You see this kind of lag everywhere in IT: Windows -> Linux IPv4 -> IPv6 PSTN -> VOIP Spamfilters -> SPF (or any other solid long term solution)
It even takes a long time for everyone has migrated to a new major kernel release, so don't even think the world would be flexible enough to make a kernel switch in a reasonable time.
Quote: "Because there is no compatibility between IPv4 and IPv6, there is no migration path."
There is a complete migration path available! Here at home, at the office and at my co-located server I'm running both IPv6 as well as IPv4. If a remote computer supports IPv6 it will be automatically used, otherwise IPv4 will be used. I can just connect to any IPv6 enabled computer, without having to do any port forwarding etc. at all, it's great.
To make things even better, it's even possible to do transparent IPv6 IPv4 translation. In short this means you can even keep using your IPv4 appliances over IPv6 indefinitely!
But I guess IPv4 addresses will have to completely run out before people are -willing- to make a change.
The "problem" with free distro mainly is that they're a moving target. If you look at Novell SLES 9 and RHEL 4 you will see that they're still running on (a heavily patched up) 2.6.7 and 2.6.9 version of the kernel. Free distro's usually update their packages very frequently which is a good thing, except in an enterprise environment. Also, 2 years later there will be absolutely no support for anymore for those verions. SLES and RHEL versions on the other hand are supported for at least 5 years.
The point is that they only patch (security) bugs and nothing else, so the entire system is essentially frozen for years, hardly any new features are added. Also, there is absolutely no point in checking out Oracle's Linux until they've been around for a couple of years and have a proven track record. Who says they won't change their mind in 2 year about the entire thing and all effort will be lost.
Also, while CentOS practically is basically just RHEL, it can certainly cause support issues. I've installed arcserve backup on CentOS and it didn't recognize the distro because of the name change and I had to manually alter the install script. I can very well imagine a lot of companies don't want to gamble on this possibility.
Always remember that a good ICT operation shouldn't always run entirely smoothly. There have to be some bumps to remind them why you're still there. Nothing beats the time when a server crashes, nobody can do any work anymore, and you're there to save the day.
If you're doing your job too well they start to believe they don't need you anymore and that everything would run just as smoothly if you wouldn't be there. It's sad but true...
I clearly see your point, but wouldn't any code that Novell adds to a GPL product be covered under the patent agreement even if it violates a MS patent? Since only Novell is responsible for distributing it under the GPL, and they in fact can't be sued.
I don't see how end-users can be sued for the code as long as they keep pointing at Novell. SCO appears to have a hard time pulling it off. Or am I thinking wrongly here?
Isn't it possible to pull a trick on MS? Say someone willingly writes code to violate a MS patent. The coder then transfers the copyright to Novell.
Novell then contributes the code under their copyright to an OSS project.
Isn't Novell then entirely responsible for the offending code? And since MS can't sue Novell, users of the OSS software are safe a long as Novell denies it violates MS patents. Since MS can't sue Novell, they can't prove it in court.
This is the most sensible thing I've heard about the entire issue. Novell has a lot of proprietary software, Zenworks and Groupwise for example, which are direct Microsoft competitors. Having a patent agreement on these products seems like a very helpful thing.
The following seems to be the case: - Novell is just trying to do business. - Microsoft is still after discrediting Linux. - FSF is trying to push GPLv3 at all costs.
Quote: "Therefore, the entire kernel is a mess of copyrights all over. And some of the things in there were written by people who have sinced passed away, other bits were written by people who definitely don't want to go GPL3 etc etc etc....."
I believe we can be very happy about that, it prevents the kernel from being sold out. History has learned us that, given enough time, such a thing is eventually bound to happen.
Quote: "Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office."
Hold it, it depends on what you're familiar with. I for one get the strong urge to smack my head against the monitor every time I work (about two hours per year) with MS Office. However, I'm very comfortable working with OpenOffice. And having to click the arrow in MS Office everytime I want to access a menu item I haven't used in the last 2 minutes is the worst invention -ever-.
Installing a wireless network correctly is always pure hell, also under Windows. It still costs me about 2 hours to configure an AP and a Windows client (with encryption, MAC filtering etc.) (I've configured about 6 wireless networks). It's just a big mess between the vendor and windows configuration GUI, it's different between every vendor (Which is not the case in Linux btw). And even when it works, the connection sometimes drops and Windows terminates all of your connections instantly.
And indeed, wireless configuration also sucks under Linux. At this point it is critical that you buy a -well supported- network card. The point Linux could score points with is to choose ONE FULLY SUPPORTED device per category and make damn sure it just works. That way it would be obvious which device to purchase.
But hey, on the other hand, if every vendor would spend at much time on Linux support as they did on Windows support, then Linux wireless networking would work -flawlessly-.
The amount of spam is so large these days that sacrifices will have to be made, it's that simple. Also, with blacklists, the sender will get a 'message undeliverable' message back, informing him about the issue. In the error message there will be an URL with more information about -why- the message has been blocked. The sender should then fix the issue and resend the message or use another e-mail account/server which is not located on a spam infested network.
This is in fact better than the spam filter approach of throwing 400 spam messages per day into a separate mail folder so the user can check this list periodicly. I for one couldn't manage to really check all of those 400 messages -EVERY DAY- and threw them all away without really looking at them. If there was a non-spam mail (which there inevitably was) in the folder which is deleted, the sender will -never- be notified, which is much worse than the blacklist approach. Also, most users -never- empty their spam mailfolder and don't bother looking at it.
With the current blacklist solution, if a non-spam message gets blocked and the sender gets an error report with the explaination, should you really care about it? If you have to choose between two evils, I believe blacklists work better.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just install Windows XP then?
I believe there is a rule that says you can always downgrade your Windows version without additional cost?
I believe this was the case with Windows XP -> Windows 98
Also, it's a known fact by now that you shouldn't run Windows vista with less than 2GB of memory.
Quote: "You see the bolded text up there? That would be why it's not exactly Microsoft's fault."
Just because the people selling the MS products are bad too, doesn't make MS any better.
Unfair business practices are the main reason of MS' dominance on the desktop market.
Besides, if everyone would be -REALLY- fair here: Why would you even suggest/sell Windows Vista to an end-user at this point? Every well informed person knows that the people buying Vista now will be going through a giant heap of untested crap. Vista won't improve your PC experience for at least the next 1.5 years, unless you find a hobby in fixing Windows.
That's actually the reason why the Netherlands "legalized" weed, too many people were using it and they couldn't stop them.
But then again, the legal system here seems to have use lot more common sense than it does in America.
Quote: "But I would like to see what would happen if Microsoft just said "We're not changing our practices, so we won't sell our products in Europe." Would computer users revolt against the EU? Would they be angry at MS instead?"
What would happen is that MS copyrights would be invalidated, life would just continue and everyone would start porting their apps to another operating system. You'd be surprised how fast drop-in solutions would drop from the sky in notime. Two years later, most of the migration would have been completed. It's just like when MS revoked support for Windows NT, which didn't mean people would stop using it immediately but the transition progressed over time. The only loser in the picture would be MS themselves.
BTW, it's a known fact that the European legal system is slow but accurate, I even believe they are acting pretty fast in this case. Believe me that MS won't be getting away with this easily, fines will get higher and higher. Also, ignoring the rulings will upset the commission and will make them much harsher.
It works like that with everything here: First time you break the law, punishment will be quite soft. Next time on the other hand it will be a lot harder. And eventually they'll lock you up for life.
They fact that Neelie actually uses the term 'unacceptable' says a lot, she wouldn't have said that if she didn't have a VERY hard case.
To me it looks like MS is using their American tactics at the wrong continent: This will get very sour for them.
As someone who has lived both extremes, I wish to share my experiences as a system/network admin.
For years I have worked with a cluttered desk and big piles of documents, until the director of the company got quite upset about it.
I then started to "organize" everything, it took me at least two weeks to do that. Then I started to use the bestpractical.com ticketing system and I numbered all documents and put them in ordners. I had everyone to e-mail their requests to the ticketing system. After about half a year I realized I spend so much time documenting and organizing that I didn't even have time to actually talk to my colleagues about things, I became a giant bureaucracy and a gigantic amount of time went into organizing.
Then I decided to stop with the ticketing system and I went back to clutter, which made me much more productive again, but complaints about the clutter reappeared again after a while. I got so angry about it that I just took my entire pile of stuff and just threw it away (I only keep the -really- important stuff), what I have noticed is that all the lost information didn't cause any problems.
The thing I've learned is that the best way to stay organized without spending too much time organizing is to just throw things away if it isn't an absolutely certain fact I will need it again in the near future. It appears to be the best solution between clutter and organization.
Quote: "Also, testing just what could obviously break is a terrible way to test. A read a story about someone, who after upgrading to Linux kernel 2.6 started having random lockups in PHP/Apache."
/dev/random. You need to run 'rngd' in order to fix this (it fills the entropy pool with random data generated).
I have had the same issue, the apache SSL module needs the random stuff from
No "long and extensive testing" needed to figure that out.
And, as other people have mentioned, upgrading 2.4 -> 2.6 is like upgrading from Windows 2000 -> 2003.
But the point I want to make is the following:
Look how precisely it is possible to pinpoint the -exact- problem.
Whereas I see most MS people fiddling around like it's a big magic box where just about anything can happen (this includes myself when administering a MS box).
And actually, compared to the openness of Linux updates, a MS SP really -IS- a black box.
Quote: "If Google were ever dumb enough (they aren't) to start self-censoring to penalize foes in other areas of their business, people wouldn't use Google."
They don't have to actually sensor it, leave it up to the sysop from hell to make something "accidentally go wrong" with the Viacom keywords.
Why is this modded +5 interesting? The comment is either based on a very old version of OO.o or the author is just plain wrong.
Also, I don't see him mentioning any concrete example.
I've been using OO.o for years, even while exchanging quite large and more complex documents with MS Office users, I've had only very minor issues. Now with OO.o 2.1 document exchange with Word, Excel and Powerpoint is almost flawless.
We're even had a pilot with OO.o at work, we have found much less issues than I imagined. Now we're rolling it out.
Even while some MS office minded people are showing some resistance, we still haven't run into any real issue.
I don't know what kind of manager everyone has, but I can't think of any manager having the time to read such crap like Rob Enderle has produced.
In my experience managers can actually be educated quite fast/well on open source if you know how to sell it to them. The main keywords are 'cost savings', 'reliability', 'significantly less downtime', 'scalability', 'flexibility', 'performance'.
And big company's like Novell, IBM and RedHat selling opensource/linux make a very strong case.
Actually, in my experience management doesn't care what is running on the servers as long as it -just works 24/7 and saves them money-. It's not like they will actually have to fix it should any problem arise. Please note that you will have to take full responsibility for the product your are recommending, anyone will back out immediately when you have any doubt. In contrast to commercial software, 'finger pointing' games cannot be played with open source, so if anything goes wrong you'll be shot on the spot. But in my experience everything will go just fine and expectations will often be exceeded.
If you take the time to make an alternative cost calculation for the next project and invite a company that can sell it to you, chances are good a manager will change his mind.
Also, make it very clear that it's the manager's budget and you are just trying to make their life easier. In the long run, your manager will become your friend.
The main problem are engineers without any Linux/Unix experience fearing for their jobs, they will do anything to sabotage the whole thing and start shouting like the world is coming to an end.
Quote: "I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point."
There are a lot of people benefiting from this actually.
Ever heard of http://www.hyperwrt.org/ and http://openwrt.org/ ?
Now you can actually run a webserver on this device.
Granted, you can create a discussion about the commercial value of it all, but it certainly has a very high educational value. Also, this code (with some modifications) could be used on other/similar devices as well.
The way I see it, this is a big win. Instead of reinventing the wheel people can now start off with the already existing code. And I bet Linksys is actually selling more devices because of openwrt instead of less, so Linksys has won too.
Ever managed to solve a capacity problem without purchasing additional hardware?
I never did.. At least virtualization will save you the effort of actually having to take down the server, copy it to the new machine, reconfigure it for the new hardware and then boot it. Also, you could always do this from the comfort of your own home when nobody is at the office. Instead of actually having to be present at the time of migration.
While I completely agree with you on this at many other areas, I don't in this case.
The reason for this is that virtualization -simplifies- tech support in every way (except for real-time applications).
Load problems, especially in a virtualized environment are extremely easy to manage technically.
You can just add additional servers and move the virtual machine to the new machine while it's running.
It's the management who will be having a budget problem when this happens, while tech support is not having a technical problem.
For a second there I was under the impression this was going to be a suicide note..
Quote: "Now, IMHO, the REAL trouble with Linux in the eyes of his sponsors (yes, I think he is shilling) is that nasty old GPL."
I don't believe he is being sponsored. If I were to sponsor someone to write bad stuff about something, I'd definitely demand more than this. I'd tell him on the spot a whole list of things about why his article is not even worth half reading it (I stopped at line 4).
Quote from the article: "In short, if anyone bothers to look at the sequence of events, they will see that the Linux community pushed me down this path."
These are the signs of a frustrated and nonobjective person seeking for attention. He even tells the reader in advance, clear in the open, that the following is the result of pure frustration and perhaps even hatred.
In short, how could this article (if it's even worth that name) even be considered to be posted on slashdot?
Nah, this is the exact thought people had who were thinking Linux was going to rule the desktop just because it's better technology.
Even if there would be a better OS/kernel in the future, it would take -many years- before a significant portion would adopt it the way Linux has now been adopted.
You see this kind of lag everywhere in IT:
Windows -> Linux
IPv4 -> IPv6
PSTN -> VOIP
Spamfilters -> SPF (or any other solid long term solution)
It even takes a long time for everyone has migrated to a new major kernel release, so don't even think the world would be flexible enough to make a kernel switch in a reasonable time.
Quote: "Because there is no compatibility between IPv4 and IPv6, there is no migration path."
There is a complete migration path available!
Here at home, at the office and at my co-located server I'm running both IPv6 as well as IPv4.
If a remote computer supports IPv6 it will be automatically used, otherwise IPv4 will be used.
I can just connect to any IPv6 enabled computer, without having to do any port forwarding etc. at all, it's great.
To make things even better, it's even possible to do transparent IPv6 IPv4 translation. In short this means you can even keep using your IPv4 appliances over IPv6 indefinitely!
But I guess IPv4 addresses will have to completely run out before people are -willing- to make a change.
The "problem" with free distro mainly is that they're a moving target.
If you look at Novell SLES 9 and RHEL 4 you will see that they're still running on (a heavily patched up) 2.6.7 and 2.6.9 version of the kernel.
Free distro's usually update their packages very frequently which is a good thing, except in an enterprise environment. Also, 2 years later there will be absolutely no support for anymore for those verions. SLES and RHEL versions on the other hand are supported for at least 5 years.
The point is that they only patch (security) bugs and nothing else, so the entire system is essentially frozen for years, hardly any new features are added.
Also, there is absolutely no point in checking out Oracle's Linux until they've been around for a couple of years and have a proven track record. Who says they won't change their mind in 2 year about the entire thing and all effort will be lost.
Also, while CentOS practically is basically just RHEL, it can certainly cause support issues. I've installed arcserve backup on CentOS and it didn't recognize the distro because of the name change and I had to manually alter the install script. I can very well imagine a lot of companies don't want to gamble on this possibility.
Always remember that a good ICT operation shouldn't always run entirely smoothly. There have to be some bumps to remind them why you're still there.
Nothing beats the time when a server crashes, nobody can do any work anymore, and you're there to save the day.
If you're doing your job too well they start to believe they don't need you anymore and that everything would run just as smoothly if you wouldn't be there.
It's sad but true...
I clearly see your point, but wouldn't any code that Novell adds to a GPL product be covered under the patent agreement even if it violates a MS patent?
Since only Novell is responsible for distributing it under the GPL, and they in fact can't be sued.
I don't see how end-users can be sued for the code as long as they keep pointing at Novell. SCO appears to have a hard time pulling it off.
Or am I thinking wrongly here?
Isn't it possible to pull a trick on MS?
Say someone willingly writes code to violate a MS patent.
The coder then transfers the copyright to Novell.
Novell then contributes the code under their copyright to an OSS project.
Isn't Novell then entirely responsible for the offending code?
And since MS can't sue Novell, users of the OSS software are safe a long as Novell denies it violates MS patents.
Since MS can't sue Novell, they can't prove it in court.
Anyone who can shed a legal light on this?
This is the most sensible thing I've heard about the entire issue. Novell has a lot of proprietary software, Zenworks and Groupwise for example, which are direct Microsoft competitors. Having a patent agreement on these products seems like a very helpful thing.
The following seems to be the case:
- Novell is just trying to do business.
- Microsoft is still after discrediting Linux.
- FSF is trying to push GPLv3 at all costs.
Quote: "Therefore, the entire kernel is a mess of copyrights all over. And some of the things in there were written by people who have sinced passed away, other bits were written by people who definitely don't want to go GPL3 etc etc etc....."
I believe we can be very happy about that, it prevents the kernel from being sold out. History has learned us that, given enough time, such a thing is eventually bound to happen.
Quote: "Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office."
Hold it, it depends on what you're familiar with. I for one get the strong urge to smack my head against the monitor every time I work (about two hours per year) with MS Office. However, I'm very comfortable working with OpenOffice. And having to click the arrow in MS Office everytime I want to access a menu item I haven't used in the last 2 minutes is the worst invention -ever-.
Installing a wireless network correctly is always pure hell, also under Windows. It still costs me about 2 hours to configure an AP and a Windows client (with encryption, MAC filtering etc.) (I've configured about 6 wireless networks). It's just a big mess between the vendor and windows configuration GUI, it's different between every vendor (Which is not the case in Linux btw).
And even when it works, the connection sometimes drops and Windows terminates all of your connections instantly.
And indeed, wireless configuration also sucks under Linux. At this point it is critical that you buy a -well supported- network card.
The point Linux could score points with is to choose ONE FULLY SUPPORTED device per category and make damn sure it just works.
That way it would be obvious which device to purchase.
But hey, on the other hand, if every vendor would spend at much time on Linux support as they did on Windows support, then Linux wireless networking would work -flawlessly-.
The amount of spam is so large these days that sacrifices will have to be made, it's that simple. Also, with blacklists, the sender will get a 'message undeliverable' message back, informing him about the issue.
In the error message there will be an URL with more information about -why- the message has been blocked.
The sender should then fix the issue and resend the message or use another e-mail account/server which is not located on a spam infested network.
This is in fact better than the spam filter approach of throwing 400 spam messages per day into a separate mail folder so the user can check this list periodicly. I for one couldn't manage to really check all of those 400 messages -EVERY DAY- and threw them all away without really looking at them. If there was a non-spam mail (which there inevitably was) in the folder which is deleted, the sender will -never- be notified, which is much worse than the blacklist approach.
Also, most users -never- empty their spam mailfolder and don't bother looking at it.
With the current blacklist solution, if a non-spam message gets blocked and the sender gets an error report with the explaination, should you really care about it?
If you have to choose between two evils, I believe blacklists work better.