Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
Welcome to industrialized society.
Captialism seeks to make production more efficient. A necessary side effect of this is that some jobs will become non-productive and obsolete.
This is absolutely ridiculous on so many levels. The whole point of all of this is that the world needs software development, and that software helps industry and the world run more effectively (so your "more efficient" nonsense is pure bullshit : Yeah sure it's more "efficient" if it's free. I'd like EVERYTHING to be free, thank you). The OSS zealots insist that despite the intrinsic value of that software, it should be free. Sure software developers are responsible for helping grow more crops, build more cars, and mine more metals, but who cares? Software should be free for all and software developers apparently should live off the crumbs of charity thrown their way. This is, and I apologize for sounding a little harsh, FUCKING RETARDED. These assholes and their bizarre take on what "economics" is (see the inane and incredibly unbalanced "money is wasted on software" bullshit in another thread) is so laughable to most people, yet it doesn't fail to line up more and more cult members. Then again the Nazi movement lined up supporters too.
The only people who fail to see the value of software, and the IP protection required to ensure it isn't stolen from them (because most people, when given the choice between doing the right thing and looking out for only themselves, will look out for only themselves), are fanatics who aren't benefitting and they despise those who are benefitting. In a garage band that can't get gigs? GO NAPSTER! DOWN WITH BIG MUSIC! Don't get respect for your 31337 Linux skills? DOWN WITH MCSEs! Work flipping burgers and just can't break into the software development field (despite mastering FORTRAN)? DOWN WITH COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT! DOWN WITH IP!
I think the ultimate irony, which is brought up again and again, is that Linus happily takes paycheques from a company that is developing a chip that would be ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS without IP protection. The silicon is worth about $0.02, but put the design they created on it and suddenly it's worth hundreds. I respect that Linus works for Transmeta, and personally I think he's very respectable (and not nearly the zealot as most of those clowns), but this hypocrisy is just so glaring, and it's amazing how no one bothers following up. Should chip designs be free of IP protection, and should the designs be "open source"? How about drugs? Should all drug compounds be public domain and free for generics from day one? It's questions like these that separates the idealist idiots from the true extreme socialists who don't want to reveal the colours under that OSS banner.
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
Yes, there was a window in history where you could become a zillionaire by starting a software company. That window is rapidly being closed by the same technicological trends that made it possible to begin with. This is hardly the first business or trade that was once lucrative and now isn't (or at least is quickly headed that way).
Being lucrative and being a part of the capitalist world (i.e. a career) are two vastly different things. Software development is a valuable skill, and indeed the vast majority of software development has occurred because of the "carrot at the end of the stick" in terms of monetary reward (though I'm sure the reinvention of UNIX over and over again in various flavours each less capable that the last will be a claimed revolution of the OSS movement). Even in the case of corporate development for internal systems (this is something that so few OSS fanatics fail to see), the impetus for development is the idea that it will make the corporation leaner and meaner than the next guy, allowing them to excel where other corporations fail.
What Mundie and most others don't understand is that open source is going to win no matter what anyone says or does, because its ultimate basis is neither a fad nor a social movement, but the simple march of progress. Microsoft might be able to buy enough legislators to postpone the inevitable, but inevitable it is. Where are the monopolies from the Age of Merchantilism, and what good are their Patents Royal doing them now?
This is absolutely proposterous and is the sense of grandeur that the open source movement applauds itself over. The OSS system is in actuality a front for extreme socialism (though the OSS talking heads will speak out of one side about the compatibility of OSS and capitalism, the reality is that they are paradoxes), and I think history has shown the "benefits" of extreme socialism time and time again.
OSS lives in a vacuum. In that vacuum they believe that the philosophies and fundamentals are something that they invented (guess what: They didn't. See Marx for prior art). In that vacuum they superimpose the benefits of a capitalist society with their unproven claims of OSS superiority. In that vacuum OSS fanatics talk about the great strides that OSS is making, all the while OSS ventures are collapsing at a staggering rate. In that vacuum they can talk about the failure of the commercial software industry at the same time that it keeps exploding (all the while open source sites such as sourceforge are packed to the brim full of dream projects that never made it off the ground because there is no carrot at the end of the stick [and the religion is losing its luster]). Open source is spitting up some blood and it's heading for the grave. Well in reality it's not heading for the grave, but rather it's returning to the normal position it occupies in our society. There will always be college kids willing to do some free development to sharpen their skills, and there'll always be armchair developers who flip burgers in the daytime but at night they're willing to pour over a SCSI driver to be a hero to their Linux friends. No one is saying that will disappear (and it's great that it exists), though it's amazing how once a project becomes "real" (i.e. a software system), like Linux, the progress of development slows to a crawl (or in fact regresses). Yet still most OSS fanatics have the classic fallacy that they can look at the early development and draw a straight line as far as progress goes.
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
Read ESR.
Classic. Yes ESR sure has made a name for himself on the back of the OSS movement. I'm going to bet he has profited quite a lot more than your average Linux hacker busy plugging away at code.
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
The unavoidable conclusion is that we should allow people to stand at streetcorners and charge you a fee before they let you pass. By failing to do so, we have put millions of people out of work and kept trillions of dollars out of the economy. Surely we owe it to ourselves to implement such a system immediately?
This is a gross perversion of the thought process. Software development is a valuable skill, and it's so ironic seeing reams of misled software developers leading the rampage for devaluing what we do. Damn funny.
Sometimes I seriously wonder whether this whole OSS thing isn't a big joke by a couple of guys are Large Corporation Co.: Laughing away while hoardes of prostituting amateur developers slave their "free" time away filling their needs.
Whether this is a bad thing or not is open to debate.
Yes but most OSS fanatics try to pretend it goes both ways (just look at the collective writings of the OS gurus where they again ridiculously claim that there's no reason commercial software and the GPL are incompatible).
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
In other words, if we could replace the commercial software industry with free software, we would save businesses $175 billion annually.
So true! In fact who do those programmers think they are getting paid for their work anyways? They don't deserve anything!
In fact while we're at it I think we should "save" society the cost of teachers, doctors, dentists, plumbers, construction workers, engineers, electricians, etc. Let's "save" then all this money by making it all free! What a great idea! Of course society will collapse, but who cares? Let's "save" them money!
One of the most interesting things about open source is how much of suckers a large percentage of the open source world is. Let me take a little piece of the article as an example:
In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
In a nutshell what this is saying, and yes I'm putting words in their mouth, is that there's too many programmers out there. Let's reduce the cost by putting them out of work. In fact even sweeter lets entice them into a cause so much so that they dedicate thousands of hours of their life so that we as a business can save money on our software (perhaps eliminating a couple of programming positions while we're at it). Open Source=Programmers out of jobs. I find it humorous how much devoted career programmers applaud these fanatics not realizing that it's directly undermining their worth in society.
Excuse me for stating the obvious, but if these open source fanatics truly believe you can charge for software that must be freely available, they must seriously have mental deficiencies. Do they really believe this crap?
The other interesting thing is the name brand recognition all of the signers of this document are making on the backs of all of the open source programmers out there. Have you ever noticed how these guys are constantly bringing out whitepapers basically claiming credit for all of the work that every open source programmer is doing (cough cough...ESR...cough cough)? This gives them money in the bank in that they're so well known they can do speeches, or in the case of ESR they can collect payouts from companies like VA Linux. How ridiculous.
What a pile of utter crap. The video cards aren't "sharing" system resources with Windows : They're self contained computers by themselves (pretty much), and any modern PC can push commands to the video card faster than it can process them.
The point is..MS is just peicing together stuff and not really developing their own HW
This "point" is silly. MS has been the primary driving force behind the rapid acceleration in video technology (it started with 3dfx' Glide actually which pretty much kicked the market into gear). I'm going to presume your post was a troll. Why am I feeding the trolls?
Absolute stock price is (mostly) irrelevant due to stock splitting, etc.
Yup very true. Indeed I gave the wrong impression when I said that they were doing well at $68 (which implied that I meant that value $68 was inherently a good number), which in my mind was in relation to a peek of $120 during the heyday, and a multi-year low of around $50.
Microsoft is too busy trying to keep their stock from collapsing to care much about one single company that employed a handful of hackers.
Keep their stock from collapsing? While Microsoft got pulled into the whirlwind of bizarre valuations of a little over a year ago, their stock has gone through remarkably well. In fact given that this is a company that has a massive federal judgement against them and countless other legal issues on the docket, I'd say their $68+ stock price is remarkably good.
That's exactly what I meant. The longer the economy isn't full of venture capitalists with money to burn the more "professional" distos for open source projects will suffer.
Good point, and if you had said a "recession of VC funds" I would absolutely agree. However the drying up of VC funds is the result of realism setting in rather than any universal economic condition. VCs could dump $ into companies with hypothetical visions of grandeur in the future for only so long before either the pursuit starts paying off, or they pull out. The vast majority of investments didn't pay off (anything but) so the VCs have mostly taken a wait and see attitude (not to mention that lots of them are short many millions of dollars).
Open source and business were never compatible and that was being stated clearly by realists way back in the.COM heyday. It has absolutely nothing to do with a "recession", but rather time ticking by and venture capital funds drying up as people got a little more rational.
All things aside, all questions of Linus, Bill, Mac, etc. aside, the Microsoft backdoor does illustrate a major advantage of Open Source:
Security.
While I can see the theoretical, practically this is not true. In practical terms almost no one actually analyzes the source with any intensity apart from the people who are the primary programmers (hence the ones who would likely be planting the backdoors). I do CVSups on my FreeBSD fairly frequently and I'm basically entrusting that machine absolutely and entirely to the FreeBSD CVS controllers (which of course means if they were compromised I'd be ownzed). I'd wager >99.5% of open source users are exactly the same way: You presume that because the source is available there are tonnes of selfless individuals busily auditing it, but the reality is quite different.
The simple reality is that most current software projects are HUGE and there simply isn't enough time in a lifetime for each of us to analyze all of the code we run with anything more than a cursory glance. And if anyone thinks they'll scan through and see
// Embed backdoor
if (strcmp(password,"REDHAT")==0) {
      iPriority=1000;
}
then they have a enormously naive impression of how a backdoor would be embedded in code subtly. For all you know a number of the software products you are running might be waiting for a magic byte string to come along when it bows to its real master.
This, and many of the other postings regarding this issue, are perhaps a bit misled, and if anything I think your campaign would be taking a bad situation and making it worse.
It's a classic trait of humanity that we try to simplify whatever happens so we can pretend that we can easily "fix" it. Kid opens fire on a local high school: It must be Doom. Ban Doom and therefore we're all safe and can feel safe and sound again because everything is all right. Kid commits suicide after being caught committing illegal acts? Blame the people who caught them. Kid commits suicide after getting D on test? Damn that murderous teacher! Kid commits suicide after getting caught hacking into school computer? If only computers weren't in the classroom this would never have happened! BAN COMPUTERS FROM CLASSROOMS!
The reality is that such simplifications are ridiculous and distract people from actually caring about the wide-ranging and hard to comprehend issues behind something like this. Just as the general readership of Slashdot would laugh when presented with the standard knee-jerk "ban violent video games" after an outburst at a school, they should see the same thing in this. Sure the kid was a "hacker"...whatever. We know nothing of the kids family life, his friend situation, whether he was really depressed about a big zit, whether he was hacking to try to get requitement for his love, etc. Suicide, which is generally an act of incredible cowardice (yes I know this is insensitive, but you know what kids: It's true. There is no honor in suicide. People feel bad for a couple of days and then they move on, but you remain 105% dead. If you wanted to point to something as the cause of teen suicides point to boohoo sessions such as what many of the memorials here on Slashdot are doing). Probably the biggest "fantasy" teens have about suicides is that suddenly everyone will realize how great they were and will talk about how they miss them, blah blah blah (ala a million teeny shows). I think probably the greatest suicide reduction technique that we as a society could introduce is to immediately bury them in unmarked mass graves and immediately ban any mention of them or their name [see 1984]. I would wager suicides would drop through the floor.
If we could only hug and coddle all kids who fuxxor up, it'd be a brave new world of kids who never feel sad or lonely, etc. If we made a world where teens could do whatever they wanted without regard with no ups and no downs, and no responsibility for their actions, it would be a completely lost generation.
This posting I'm writing might cause 10 kids to go slice their wrists. The inevitable goatsex followup might cause 15 more to go jump off cliffs. Yet the only ones we can blame for our actions are ourselves, and as intelligent young adults teens are the same way.
The admin shares are admin only and if you can see them you've authenticated to the ACL and passed (hence you're an admin and you should be able to see it). In any case if you really don't like it shut off the Server service (in reality most people don't need it anyways and it consumes memory).
Had me scared for a second...
on
Bioinformatics
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· Score: 1
I apologize in advance for the second grade level of material, however for a split second when I saw the headline I truly intepreted "biofartmetrics". I instantly had images of large corporations requiring flatulence logins (wouldn't be a problem for some of the people I've worked with...802.11 style wireless logins from remote locations...).
<COMPUTER VOICE>"Authorized....please eat more fibre Mr. Jones..."<COMPUTER VOICE>
I realize that this will be laughed away, and perhaps it should, but recently I took some time to evaluate Microsoft Sharepoint. It's meant specifically for team document management/centralization/version and includes such features as an approval cycle before a document is "published", etc. It integrated extremely well with Windows (i.e. Webfolders), though it does have a basic HTML front end as well.
Personally I wasn't sold on it. Indeed it had a slight feeling of being almost there...but not quite. Previously I believe it was codenamed "Microsoft Tahoe", and the Web Storage System (or Service can't remember), or WSS, is shared with Exchange. I'm personally curious as to whether Exchange 2000 supports the same sort of versioning, etc.
Anyways just something worth looking at if only for ideas.
Actual MSs product is crap. There is an add-on, though, called SourceOffsite, which is much, much better see http://www.sourcegear.com/
While generally I just ignore such claims on Slashdot, this just takes the cake and pushes me to respond. SourceOffsite (I use it every day so I'm pretty aware) is basically SourceSafe Lite : All the same features used in the same way, just less of them. How in the world is that so much better?
The good thing about SourceOffsite is that it does have a server component for low bandwidth connections, but without that requirement it'd be enormously stupid to use it in an office.
I took a look at Jabber after seeing this article as it might fulfill some corporate needs (I've been looking for an intra-company IM for a while: Something that allows us an IM system without needing to use external servers or route data externally) so first I looked for the server, hopefully to run on a Windows 2000 server. "Contact our sales department at...". Any company that isn't willing to display simple prices for software products earns a big fat slimeball marker. "You wanna know how much it costs? I dunno...how much you got?"
Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."
how microsoft blew java out of the water with the confusion they generated by introducing
incompatibilities with their version of java?
Ha! Sun did that themselves by implementating their own special Sun extensions, and in any case the Java platform independence works great...just so long as you're willing to modify your code for each platform. Java is its own worst enemy and Microsoft truly has been a bit player in the drama saga that is Java.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to industrialized society.
Captialism seeks to make production more efficient. A necessary side effect of this is that some jobs will become non-productive and obsolete.
This is absolutely ridiculous on so many levels. The whole point of all of this is that the world needs software development, and that software helps industry and the world run more effectively (so your "more efficient" nonsense is pure bullshit : Yeah sure it's more "efficient" if it's free. I'd like EVERYTHING to be free, thank you). The OSS zealots insist that despite the intrinsic value of that software, it should be free. Sure software developers are responsible for helping grow more crops, build more cars, and mine more metals, but who cares? Software should be free for all and software developers apparently should live off the crumbs of charity thrown their way. This is, and I apologize for sounding a little harsh, FUCKING RETARDED. These assholes and their bizarre take on what "economics" is (see the inane and incredibly unbalanced "money is wasted on software" bullshit in another thread) is so laughable to most people, yet it doesn't fail to line up more and more cult members. Then again the Nazi movement lined up supporters too.
The only people who fail to see the value of software, and the IP protection required to ensure it isn't stolen from them (because most people, when given the choice between doing the right thing and looking out for only themselves, will look out for only themselves), are fanatics who aren't benefitting and they despise those who are benefitting. In a garage band that can't get gigs? GO NAPSTER! DOWN WITH BIG MUSIC! Don't get respect for your 31337 Linux skills? DOWN WITH MCSEs! Work flipping burgers and just can't break into the software development field (despite mastering FORTRAN)? DOWN WITH COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT! DOWN WITH IP!
I think the ultimate irony, which is brought up again and again, is that Linus happily takes paycheques from a company that is developing a chip that would be ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS without IP protection. The silicon is worth about $0.02, but put the design they created on it and suddenly it's worth hundreds. I respect that Linus works for Transmeta, and personally I think he's very respectable (and not nearly the zealot as most of those clowns), but this hypocrisy is just so glaring, and it's amazing how no one bothers following up. Should chip designs be free of IP protection, and should the designs be "open source"? How about drugs? Should all drug compounds be public domain and free for generics from day one? It's questions like these that separates the idealist idiots from the true extreme socialists who don't want to reveal the colours under that OSS banner.
Yes, there was a window in history where you could become a zillionaire by starting a software company. That window is rapidly being closed by the same technicological trends that made it possible to begin with. This is hardly the first business or trade that was once lucrative and now isn't (or at least is quickly headed that way).
Being lucrative and being a part of the capitalist world (i.e. a career) are two vastly different things. Software development is a valuable skill, and indeed the vast majority of software development has occurred because of the "carrot at the end of the stick" in terms of monetary reward (though I'm sure the reinvention of UNIX over and over again in various flavours each less capable that the last will be a claimed revolution of the OSS movement). Even in the case of corporate development for internal systems (this is something that so few OSS fanatics fail to see), the impetus for development is the idea that it will make the corporation leaner and meaner than the next guy, allowing them to excel where other corporations fail.
What Mundie and most others don't understand is that open source is going to win no matter what anyone says or does, because its ultimate basis is neither a fad nor a social movement, but the simple march of progress. Microsoft might be able to buy enough legislators to postpone the inevitable, but inevitable it is. Where are the monopolies from the Age of Merchantilism, and what good are their Patents Royal doing them now?
This is absolutely proposterous and is the sense of grandeur that the open source movement applauds itself over. The OSS system is in actuality a front for extreme socialism (though the OSS talking heads will speak out of one side about the compatibility of OSS and capitalism, the reality is that they are paradoxes), and I think history has shown the "benefits" of extreme socialism time and time again.
OSS lives in a vacuum. In that vacuum they believe that the philosophies and fundamentals are something that they invented (guess what: They didn't. See Marx for prior art). In that vacuum they superimpose the benefits of a capitalist society with their unproven claims of OSS superiority. In that vacuum OSS fanatics talk about the great strides that OSS is making, all the while OSS ventures are collapsing at a staggering rate. In that vacuum they can talk about the failure of the commercial software industry at the same time that it keeps exploding (all the while open source sites such as sourceforge are packed to the brim full of dream projects that never made it off the ground because there is no carrot at the end of the stick [and the religion is losing its luster]). Open source is spitting up some blood and it's heading for the grave. Well in reality it's not heading for the grave, but rather it's returning to the normal position it occupies in our society. There will always be college kids willing to do some free development to sharpen their skills, and there'll always be armchair developers who flip burgers in the daytime but at night they're willing to pour over a SCSI driver to be a hero to their Linux friends. No one is saying that will disappear (and it's great that it exists), though it's amazing how once a project becomes "real" (i.e. a software system), like Linux, the progress of development slows to a crawl (or in fact regresses). Yet still most OSS fanatics have the classic fallacy that they can look at the early development and draw a straight line as far as progress goes.
Read ESR.
Classic. Yes ESR sure has made a name for himself on the back of the OSS movement. I'm going to bet he has profited quite a lot more than your average Linux hacker busy plugging away at code.
The unavoidable conclusion is that we should allow people to stand at streetcorners and charge you a fee before they let you pass. By failing to do so, we have put millions of people out of work and kept trillions of dollars out of the economy. Surely we owe it to ourselves to implement such a system immediately?
This is a gross perversion of the thought process. Software development is a valuable skill, and it's so ironic seeing reams of misled software developers leading the rampage for devaluing what we do. Damn funny.
Sometimes I seriously wonder whether this whole OSS thing isn't a big joke by a couple of guys are Large Corporation Co.: Laughing away while hoardes of prostituting amateur developers slave their "free" time away filling their needs.
GET TO WORK BEEATCHES!
Whether this is a bad thing or not is open to debate.
Yes but most OSS fanatics try to pretend it goes both ways (just look at the collective writings of the OS gurus where they again ridiculously claim that there's no reason commercial software and the GPL are incompatible).
In other words, if we could replace the commercial software industry with free software, we would save businesses $175 billion annually.
So true! In fact who do those programmers think they are getting paid for their work anyways? They don't deserve anything!
In fact while we're at it I think we should "save" society the cost of teachers, doctors, dentists, plumbers, construction workers, engineers, electricians, etc. Let's "save" then all this money by making it all free! What a great idea! Of course society will collapse, but who cares? Let's "save" them money!
One of the most interesting things about open source is how much of suckers a large percentage of the open source world is. Let me take a little piece of the article as an example:
In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
In a nutshell what this is saying, and yes I'm putting words in their mouth, is that there's too many programmers out there. Let's reduce the cost by putting them out of work. In fact even sweeter lets entice them into a cause so much so that they dedicate thousands of hours of their life so that we as a business can save money on our software (perhaps eliminating a couple of programming positions while we're at it). Open Source=Programmers out of jobs. I find it humorous how much devoted career programmers applaud these fanatics not realizing that it's directly undermining their worth in society.
Excuse me for stating the obvious, but if these open source fanatics truly believe you can charge for software that must be freely available, they must seriously have mental deficiencies. Do they really believe this crap?
The other interesting thing is the name brand recognition all of the signers of this document are making on the backs of all of the open source programmers out there. Have you ever noticed how these guys are constantly bringing out whitepapers basically claiming credit for all of the work that every open source programmer is doing (cough cough...ESR...cough cough)? This gives them money in the bank in that they're so well known they can do speeches, or in the case of ESR they can collect payouts from companies like VA Linux. How ridiculous.
What a pile of utter crap. The video cards aren't "sharing" system resources with Windows : They're self contained computers by themselves (pretty much), and any modern PC can push commands to the video card faster than it can process them.
The point is..MS is just peicing together stuff and not really developing their own HW
This "point" is silly. MS has been the primary driving force behind the rapid acceleration in video technology (it started with 3dfx' Glide actually which pretty much kicked the market into gear). I'm going to presume your post was a troll. Why am I feeding the trolls?
Absolute stock price is (mostly) irrelevant due to stock splitting, etc.
Yup very true. Indeed I gave the wrong impression when I said that they were doing well at $68 (which implied that I meant that value $68 was inherently a good number), which in my mind was in relation to a peek of $120 during the heyday, and a multi-year low of around $50.
Microsoft is too busy trying to keep their stock from collapsing to care much about one single company that employed a handful of hackers.
Keep their stock from collapsing? While Microsoft got pulled into the whirlwind of bizarre valuations of a little over a year ago, their stock has gone through remarkably well. In fact given that this is a company that has a massive federal judgement against them and countless other legal issues on the docket, I'd say their $68+ stock price is remarkably good.
That's exactly what I meant. The longer the economy isn't full of venture capitalists with money to burn the more "professional" distos for open source projects will suffer.
Good point, and if you had said a "recession of VC funds" I would absolutely agree. However the drying up of VC funds is the result of realism setting in rather than any universal economic condition. VCs could dump $ into companies with hypothetical visions of grandeur in the future for only so long before either the pursuit starts paying off, or they pull out. The vast majority of investments didn't pay off (anything but) so the VCs have mostly taken a wait and see attitude (not to mention that lots of them are short many millions of dollars).
Open source and business were never compatible and that was being stated clearly by realists way back in the .COM heyday. It has absolutely nothing to do with a "recession", but rather time ticking by and venture capital funds drying up as people got a little more rational.
A link
Actually I use FreeBSD which is from a different (in fact that papa) fork than OpenBSD.
All things aside, all questions of Linus, Bill, Mac, etc. aside, the Microsoft backdoor does illustrate a major advantage of Open Source:
Security.
While I can see the theoretical, practically this is not true. In practical terms almost no one actually analyzes the source with any intensity apart from the people who are the primary programmers (hence the ones who would likely be planting the backdoors). I do CVSups on my FreeBSD fairly frequently and I'm basically entrusting that machine absolutely and entirely to the FreeBSD CVS controllers (which of course means if they were compromised I'd be ownzed). I'd wager >99.5% of open source users are exactly the same way: You presume that because the source is available there are tonnes of selfless individuals busily auditing it, but the reality is quite different.
The simple reality is that most current software projects are HUGE and there simply isn't enough time in a lifetime for each of us to analyze all of the code we run with anything more than a cursory glance. And if anyone thinks they'll scan through and see
// Embed backdoor
if (strcmp(password,"REDHAT")==0) {
      iPriority=1000;
}
then they have a enormously naive impression of how a backdoor would be embedded in code subtly. For all you know a number of the software products you are running might be waiting for a magic byte string to come along when it bows to its real master.
This, and many of the other postings regarding this issue, are perhaps a bit misled, and if anything I think your campaign would be taking a bad situation and making it worse.
It's a classic trait of humanity that we try to simplify whatever happens so we can pretend that we can easily "fix" it. Kid opens fire on a local high school: It must be Doom. Ban Doom and therefore we're all safe and can feel safe and sound again because everything is all right. Kid commits suicide after being caught committing illegal acts? Blame the people who caught them. Kid commits suicide after getting D on test? Damn that murderous teacher! Kid commits suicide after getting caught hacking into school computer? If only computers weren't in the classroom this would never have happened! BAN COMPUTERS FROM CLASSROOMS!
The reality is that such simplifications are ridiculous and distract people from actually caring about the wide-ranging and hard to comprehend issues behind something like this. Just as the general readership of Slashdot would laugh when presented with the standard knee-jerk "ban violent video games" after an outburst at a school, they should see the same thing in this. Sure the kid was a "hacker"...whatever. We know nothing of the kids family life, his friend situation, whether he was really depressed about a big zit, whether he was hacking to try to get requitement for his love, etc. Suicide, which is generally an act of incredible cowardice (yes I know this is insensitive, but you know what kids: It's true. There is no honor in suicide. People feel bad for a couple of days and then they move on, but you remain 105% dead. If you wanted to point to something as the cause of teen suicides point to boohoo sessions such as what many of the memorials here on Slashdot are doing). Probably the biggest "fantasy" teens have about suicides is that suddenly everyone will realize how great they were and will talk about how they miss them, blah blah blah (ala a million teeny shows). I think probably the greatest suicide reduction technique that we as a society could introduce is to immediately bury them in unmarked mass graves and immediately ban any mention of them or their name [see 1984]. I would wager suicides would drop through the floor.
If we could only hug and coddle all kids who fuxxor up, it'd be a brave new world of kids who never feel sad or lonely, etc. If we made a world where teens could do whatever they wanted without regard with no ups and no downs, and no responsibility for their actions, it would be a completely lost generation.
This posting I'm writing might cause 10 kids to go slice their wrists. The inevitable goatsex followup might cause 15 more to go jump off cliffs. Yet the only ones we can blame for our actions are ourselves, and as intelligent young adults teens are the same way.
Cheers!
What absolute FUD. I'm going to guess wildly here and say that you've seen...oh, ZERO Windows machines with a blank admin password.
The admin shares are admin only and if you can see them you've authenticated to the ACL and passed (hence you're an admin and you should be able to see it). In any case if you really don't like it shut off the Server service (in reality most people don't need it anyways and it consumes memory).
I apologize in advance for the second grade level of material, however for a split second when I saw the headline I truly intepreted "biofartmetrics". I instantly had images of large corporations requiring flatulence logins (wouldn't be a problem for some of the people I've worked with...802.11 style wireless logins from remote locations...).
<COMPUTER VOICE>"Authorized....please eat more fibre Mr. Jones..."<COMPUTER VOICE>
I realize that this will be laughed away, and perhaps it should, but recently I took some time to evaluate Microsoft Sharepoint. It's meant specifically for team document management/centralization/version and includes such features as an approval cycle before a document is "published", etc. It integrated extremely well with Windows (i.e. Webfolders), though it does have a basic HTML front end as well.
Personally I wasn't sold on it. Indeed it had a slight feeling of being almost there...but not quite. Previously I believe it was codenamed "Microsoft Tahoe", and the Web Storage System (or Service can't remember), or WSS, is shared with Exchange. I'm personally curious as to whether Exchange 2000 supports the same sort of versioning, etc.
Anyways just something worth looking at if only for ideas.
Actual MSs product is crap. There is an add-on, though, called SourceOffsite, which is much, much better see http://www.sourcegear.com/
While generally I just ignore such claims on Slashdot, this just takes the cake and pushes me to respond. SourceOffsite (I use it every day so I'm pretty aware) is basically SourceSafe Lite : All the same features used in the same way, just less of them. How in the world is that so much better?
The good thing about SourceOffsite is that it does have a server component for low bandwidth connections, but without that requirement it'd be enormously stupid to use it in an office.
I took a look at Jabber after seeing this article as it might fulfill some corporate needs (I've been looking for an intra-company IM for a while: Something that allows us an IM system without needing to use external servers or route data externally) so first I looked for the server, hopefully to run on a Windows 2000 server. "Contact our sales department at...". Any company that isn't willing to display simple prices for software products earns a big fat slimeball marker. "You wanna know how much it costs? I dunno...how much you got?"
Secondly it's always really suspicious anytime a product is opensource/freeware for Linux/BSD/etc., but for the Windows world it's closed source/commercial. It's like "We believe in open source so long as it is only applicable to a tiny minority of the marketplace. Otherwise send your checks."
how microsoft blew java out of the water with the confusion they generated by introducing incompatibilities with their version of java?
Ha! Sun did that themselves by implementating their own special Sun extensions, and in any case the Java platform independence works great...just so long as you're willing to modify your code for each platform. Java is its own worst enemy and Microsoft truly has been a bit player in the drama saga that is Java.
<P>Hehe, this is quite the riot but I just remembered that I had made this account way back when. Whee, I have a low numbered account back.</P>