The biggest lie of this decade is that the media is liberal.
Yep, as soon as Rush Limbaugh told me all about the liberal media I knew instantly the only consistent action was to turn off his program immediately so I wouldn't be subject to any further of his leftist harangues.
1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.
Don't make the same kind of mistake as MS.
That is an indicator of the popularity of browsers hitting Google that provide a UserAgent string that identifies the system as Linux.
A lot of Linux systems are running servers. Desktop clients are much fewer in proportion.
A number of Linux desktop users munge their User Agent strings to avoid complications of brain dead web pages using sloppy JavaScript to weed out "incompatible" browsers.
On topic, though, I think there have been (cheese, lion) worms that have exploited applications typically run on Linux.
Public marketing security comparions are always suspicious, though: Linux the OS has been much less vulnerable than applications overlying, such as PHP on top of Apache, or sendmail, etc.
Likewise, Windows security looks worse because of overlying misconfigured misdesigned applications such as IIS, Outlook. Since Win2K, the OS per se has been much less vulnerable than in the Win 9x days.
The problem is figuring out whether a system based on survival and greed can be sustained without wreaking havoc around the world.
The way this can succeed is if the system is constructed so that individuals feel the pleasure and the pain of other individuals instead of just themselves.
Currently, I do things in the free market system where I trade distributed pain on the part of others for my own pleasure.
We don't have a Borg collective yet, where we all feel the pain of one another, but such a system would really help reduce a lot of violence and callousness.
Many of the world's religious systems have tried to instill beliefs that would have this effect, but they're not totally effective and are subject to programming errors: eg,
"You're not in my religious group - your pain is of no consequence to me."
[Plenty of historical and current day examples, pain vectors going every which way.]
A working collective conscience would make the question of capitalism or communism moot; either could work.
Windows is the right tool for the job? For any job?
Qualifications: I'm enthusiastic about Linux, have run it for years, and I'm disgusted by Microsoft's tactics of locking in users to expensive tangleware and steamrolling their business rivals.
But when the job calls for dealing with Microsoft's proprietary file formats, particularly Powerpoint, I use the right tool for that job.
[Digression 1: Win2K, updated and patched, is a perfectly adequate desktop OS for most corporate folks. There is little need for them to upgrade to either Windows XP or to Linux.]
[Digression 2: If I had US$10M I'd fund someone to create SVG authoring tools, presentation tools and nice font sets so I could be free of Powerpoint.]
CVS is a version control system, which allows you to keep old versions of files (usually source code), keep a log of who, when, and why changes occurred, etc., like RCS or SCCS. Unlike the simpler systems, CVS does not just operate on one file at a time or one directory at a time, but
operates on hierarchical collections of directories consisting of version controlled files. CVS helps to manage releases and to control the concurrent editing of source files among multiple authors. CVS allows triggers to enable/log/control various operations and works well over a wide area network.
cvs keeps a single copy of the master sources. This copy is called the source ``repository''; it contains all the information to permit extracting previous software releases at any time based on either a symbolic revision tag, or a date in the past.
Works great for text files (such as programming language source code, and even for documents in formats like LaTeX, XML. A lifesaver if you have to develop with other people.
Sharing common resources is great, and NFS performance is increased if they're all mounted read-only on the clients.
Keeping some protection and partition of/home/me over iSCSI to a single workstation seems like a good idea to me. Given all the concerns of classified processing, it's not like you and some other workstation are going to be routinely part of a parallel cluster where multiple clients need write access to the same filesystem.
Then, each client would only need a writable/etc for system configuration and/var for log files over iSCSI.
I'm not familiar enough to know, but if the traffic is read only, can't the same/usr/bin be exported to multiple clients via iSCSI?
I fail to see how RFID tags affect this purchase of services on your part.
Cash 2.0 will include a unique RFID tag as a "counterfeit protection mechanism" but will have "useful" side-effects in curtailing "illegal" commerce.
I suppose you can always claim that the fifty used by Sally Slut at the grocery store was one of those that you "lost" along with the other fifty that Carl Cokedealer turned up with.
Since we really don't know for sure, lets spend $50 million to find out.
It could well be worth that much of an investment to marketing specialists.
If the mechanism is determined, then you can bet that the next time you walk into a department store or a casino you'll be feeling extra sexy for a reason.
subpeoning investors could be construed as "intimidating people"
Perhaps.
Maybe it's subjective, but some of the civil suits and public statements made by SCO have come across as a hell of lot more intimidating than a legally-empowered request for information.
Besides, anyone that's invested in serious money in something like SCO has got to have a thick hide and willingness to assume a lot of risk. For them, receiving a subpoena is only a mild rush.
Isn't that an artifact of their overall high-level design?
Some of Microsoft's programmers may be the world's brightest, but if their managers praise and reward those who "leverage Windows, Office,.NET, buzzword de jour, etc." in their applications, even if it's not a nice clean partition or the interaction is not needed, then what can you hope for but what we have?
Yeah, I wish people would get a clue about costs. Artificially externalized costs really cause some imbalances.
No one teaches them about the consequences and trade-offs of deficit spending, be it on a personal level or on a collective level by government.
People ought to be shown curves with health care costs vs age, what proportion goes to lawyers, prescription drugs, HMO's, vendors to hospital buying groups, etc.
People need to know exactly what they're paying for.
Including, of course, government expenditures. This much goes to interest on the debt, this much to transfer payments to Aunt Tillie, this much to discretionary pots for defense, education, to science, etc.
Most people have no clue just how much money goes to debt interest and transfer payments.
Nor do they have much concept of where revenue comes from, has come from in the past, and where it's not coming from in the future.
All they see is "I want my taxes lower and my government benefits higher."
Not to mention, it's far easier to say "cut wasteful bloated government bureaucracies" and to ignore the later problems as no bureaucrats are available to prevent fraud and abuse of government programs.
Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will?
Absolutely.
The later retraction of an earlier published work is just the tip of the iceberg. More relevant is deciding what is news, what is not news, and how news should be reported.
Those decisions are being made by a private sector that is aligning itself closely with its business objectives (as it should) to achieve the most growth in revenue, and not necessarily some ideal of providing complete, accurate and unbiased news.
One problem is that greater growth in revenue can be gained not only by reporting sensational but inconsequential "news" (Rosie rants in court), or by culling pieces that advertisers might find offensive,but also by claiming to be an complete accurate and unbiased source of information, even if the claim is supported only by the purveyor of news. I mean, how do we expect them to portray themselves?
Read from multiple sources, including those you would normally not want to read, sources you think are off-base, weird and misguided and tell you things that you'd rather not hear.
Otherwise, we're in danger of living in a fantasy world.
What I think is most important is that standards apply, so that users can mix n match between distributions more easily as new applications are developed.
It's a tough battle, though, because the commercial landscape for Linux is being advanced by companies that are trying to differentiate their particular distribution from the rest of the heard.
The best we can hope for there is that their new systems and add-ons are free.
If questioned, SCO execs will simply plead that they were misled through some mixup by some underlings (who won't have a clue what they're talking about, of course). Or that the code sure did look similar to them at the time, as far as they could tell, to the best of their recollection.
To any SEC investigation, the whole thing will look like a big mess, a morass of incompetency, triple compounded idiocy. "I thought that's what I heard him say and I took it to mean the moon was ours!"
But you can't be legally prosecuted just for being stupid. (The stockholders are the ones that will hold management's feet to the fire for incompetence.)
There would need to be some evidence of prior planning for the scheme or evidence that they knew exactly what they were doing, i.e., that they knew the claims were baseless and they knew they were deceiving people and they expected to profit from the deception.
The ironic thing is this: They do know exactly what they're doing, but there won't be any evidence (witnesses, paper trails, emails) to that effect. Planning will be verbal and the facade language will be used constantly while the participants know what is going on.
What will look like ineptitude and incompetence to the court will actually have been very carefully orchestrated, requiring vigilance and discipline throughout to avoid spilling the beans.
Pay for pilots is one of those distorted marketplaces, because qualifications cannot be obtained for low cost by anyone that wants to learn. AFAICT, unless you're wealthy enough to rent big jets to accumulate enough hours of flying time, the only way to obtain credentials is through military experience.
The labor market for medical doctors and lawyers is also distorted some by the stiff tuition required at a limited number of schools accreditted by, guess who, doctors and lawyers.
Although in the case of lawyers, I think the bottleneck is passing the bar exam for individual states.
Personally, they ought to have some kind of qualifying exam that lets anyone who wants credentials to test for them.
And, there ought to be gradations in quality and competence with prices that can match for
Medical Practioner Level 1 through Medical Practioner Level 9.
The boolean system of approved and unapproved is too coarse grain.
And the gatekeepers have a conflict of interest that prevents the marketplace from becoming more efficient. Nominally doctors are the best judge of other doctors, but, like with cops and teachers, there's a lack of willingness sometimes to discipline one's own.
MS has paid millions of dollars to a company that has NOTHING to offer them except FUD against Linux.
They wouldn't have paid the money unless they thought they were getting good value for it.
I would like to see how it plays out a couple of years from now, though, after SCO goes down in flames, discredited, and their executives are scrutinized by the SEC.
The people [fools, money, parted] who have bought SCO stock at high prices through 2003 will be mad as hornets and want blood, which will motivate the SEC inquiry.
During that investigation, there will surely be some glimpses of a cat with a mouse tail hanging out of its mouth, strangely quiet and uncomplaining of its millions of investment disappearing.
Few companies in the world would consider Microsoft' bottom line to be problematic.
Microsoft's revenue stream from Windows and Office continue to be cash cows envied and feared worldwide.
Microsoft's "problems" are very clear:
keep a grip on a current dominant market position for computer desktops
enter new markets since there's no growth left for them in the desktop
They've been doing the first thing tolerably well and with the bountiful cash they can afford the kinds of mis-steps that have been plagued their address of the second problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest lie of this decade is that the media is liberal.
Yep, as soon as Rush Limbaugh told me all about the liberal media I knew instantly the only consistent action was to turn off his program immediately so I wouldn't be subject to any further of his leftist harangues.
Ja, und wie sagt man "spam" auf Deutsch?
Talk about going off half-cocked...
I'll bet Richard Stalman gives them all a pedantic lecture they won't soon forget...
"I don't know what you mean by "Linux". Many people mistakenly call GNU/Linux simply Linux + [many hours]
And, maybe for good measure,
"I don't know what this means - "Intellectual Property" + [insert lengthy manifesto]
1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.
Don't make the same kind of mistake as MS.
That is an indicator of the popularity of browsers hitting Google that provide a UserAgent string that identifies the system as Linux.
On topic, though, I think there have been (cheese, lion) worms that have exploited applications typically run on Linux.
Public marketing security comparions are always suspicious, though: Linux the OS has been much less vulnerable than applications overlying, such as PHP on top of Apache, or sendmail, etc.
Likewise, Windows security looks worse because of overlying misconfigured misdesigned applications such as IIS, Outlook. Since Win2K, the OS per se has been much less vulnerable than in the Win 9x days.
The problem is figuring out whether a system based on survival and greed can be sustained without wreaking havoc around the world.
The way this can succeed is if the system is constructed so that individuals feel the pleasure and the pain of other individuals instead of just themselves.
Currently, I do things in the free market system where I trade distributed pain on the part of others for my own pleasure.
We don't have a Borg collective yet, where we all feel the pain of one another, but such a system would really help reduce a lot of violence and callousness.
Many of the world's religious systems have tried to instill beliefs that would have this effect, but they're not totally effective and are subject to programming errors: eg,
[Plenty of historical and current day examples, pain vectors going every which way.]A working collective conscience would make the question of capitalism or communism moot; either could work.
Windows is the right tool for the job? For any job?
Qualifications: I'm enthusiastic about Linux, have run it for years, and I'm disgusted by Microsoft's tactics of locking in users to expensive tangleware and steamrolling their business rivals.
But when the job calls for dealing with Microsoft's proprietary file formats, particularly Powerpoint, I use the right tool for that job.
[Digression 1: Win2K, updated and patched, is a perfectly adequate desktop OS for most corporate folks. There is little need for them to upgrade to either Windows XP or to Linux.]
[Digression 2: If I had US$10M I'd fund someone to create SVG authoring tools, presentation tools and nice font sets so I could be free of Powerpoint.]
[man page]
cvs - Concurrent Version System
CVS is a version control system, which allows you to keep old versions of files (usually source code), keep a log of who, when, and why changes occurred, etc., like RCS or SCCS. Unlike the simpler systems, CVS does not just operate on one file at a time or one directory at a time, but operates on hierarchical collections of directories consisting of version controlled files. CVS helps to manage releases and to control the concurrent editing of source files among multiple authors. CVS allows triggers to enable/log/control various operations and works well over a wide area network.
cvs keeps a single copy of the master sources. This copy is called the source ``repository''; it contains all the information to permit extracting previous software releases at any time based on either a symbolic revision tag, or a date in the past.
Works great for text files (such as programming language source code, and even for documents in formats like LaTeX, XML. A lifesaver if you have to develop with other people.
Sharing common resources is great, and NFS performance is increased if they're all mounted read-only on the clients.
Keeping some protection and partition of /home/me over iSCSI to a single workstation seems like a good idea to me. Given all the concerns of classified processing, it's not like you and some other workstation are going to be routinely part of a parallel cluster where multiple clients need write access to the same filesystem.
Then, each client would only need a writable /etc for system configuration and /var for log files over iSCSI.
I'm not familiar enough to know, but if the traffic is read only, can't the same /usr/bin be exported to multiple clients via iSCSI?
I fail to see how RFID tags affect this purchase of services on your part.
Cash 2.0 will include a unique RFID tag as a "counterfeit protection mechanism" but will have "useful" side-effects in curtailing "illegal" commerce.
I suppose you can always claim that the fifty used by Sally Slut at the grocery store was one of those that you "lost" along with the other fifty that Carl Cokedealer turned up with.
Since we really don't know for sure, lets spend $50 million to find out.
It could well be worth that much of an investment to marketing specialists.
If the mechanism is determined, then you can bet that the next time you walk into a department store or a casino you'll be feeling extra sexy for a reason.
Another thing is that medium amounts of physical trauma to such capacitors can cause plasma arcs (i.e., fire.)
Sounds like good after-school fun.
I would assert that if no part of your application uses templates (STL or otherwise), you should be using C instead.
Uhhh, why? As punishment for not learning how to use all the features of C++?
Even without templates, C++ can save you some code bloat and exhaustive logic processing over plain C.
subpeoning investors could be construed as "intimidating people"
Perhaps.
Maybe it's subjective, but some of the civil suits and public statements made by SCO have come across as a hell of lot more intimidating than a legally-empowered request for information.
Besides, anyone that's invested in serious money in something like SCO has got to have a thick hide and willingness to assume a lot of risk. For them, receiving a subpoena is only a mild rush.
Thanks for the link. I work in a similar environment where security requirements are more easily met by diskless workstations.
This project started a few years ago and there have been some interesting new developments since.
Given the current situation, would you consider using iSCSI in your environment?
lack of partitioning of functionality
Isn't that an artifact of their overall high-level design?
Some of Microsoft's programmers may be the world's brightest, but if their managers praise and reward those who "leverage Windows, Office, .NET, buzzword de jour, etc." in their applications, even if it's not a nice clean partition or the interaction is not needed, then what can you hope for but what we have?
They've succeeded in their objectives.
Yeah, I wish people would get a clue about costs. Artificially externalized costs really cause some imbalances.
No one teaches them about the consequences and trade-offs of deficit spending, be it on a personal level or on a collective level by government.
People ought to be shown curves with health care costs vs age, what proportion goes to lawyers, prescription drugs, HMO's, vendors to hospital buying groups, etc.
People need to know exactly what they're paying for.
Including, of course, government expenditures. This much goes to interest on the debt, this much to transfer payments to Aunt Tillie, this much to discretionary pots for defense, education, to science, etc.
Most people have no clue just how much money goes to debt interest and transfer payments.
Nor do they have much concept of where revenue comes from, has come from in the past, and where it's not coming from in the future.
All they see is "I want my taxes lower and my government benefits higher."
Not to mention, it's far easier to say "cut wasteful bloated government bureaucracies" and to ignore the later problems as no bureaucrats are available to prevent fraud and abuse of government programs.
Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will?
Absolutely.
The later retraction of an earlier published work is just the tip of the iceberg. More relevant is deciding what is news, what is not news, and how news should be reported.
Those decisions are being made by a private sector that is aligning itself closely with its business objectives (as it should) to achieve the most growth in revenue, and not necessarily some ideal of providing complete, accurate and unbiased news.
One problem is that greater growth in revenue can be gained not only by reporting sensational but inconsequential "news" (Rosie rants in court), or by culling pieces that advertisers might find offensive,but also by claiming to be an complete accurate and unbiased source of information, even if the claim is supported only by the purveyor of news. I mean, how do we expect them to portray themselves?
Read from multiple sources, including those you would normally not want to read, sources you think are off-base, weird and misguided and tell you things that you'd rather not hear.
Otherwise, we're in danger of living in a fantasy world.
Why Debian, instead of, say Gentoo?
What I think is most important is that standards apply, so that users can mix n match between distributions more easily as new applications are developed.
It's a tough battle, though, because the commercial landscape for Linux is being advanced by companies that are trying to differentiate their particular distribution from the rest of the heard.
The best we can hope for there is that their new systems and add-ons are free.
Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam.
This is news?
Doesn't everyone know that Americans enjoy the ultimate in the free market economy, including the best media and government that money can buy?
I'm voting for either Britney Spears or Lara Croft in the next election. They're a lot more uplifting than these old guys that keep running.
However, they claim to have researched it
Aye, there's the rub.
If questioned, SCO execs will simply plead that they were misled through some mixup by some underlings (who won't have a clue what they're talking about, of course). Or that the code sure did look similar to them at the time, as far as they could tell, to the best of their recollection.
To any SEC investigation, the whole thing will look like a big mess, a morass of incompetency, triple compounded idiocy. "I thought that's what I heard him say and I took it to mean the moon was ours!"
But you can't be legally prosecuted just for being stupid. (The stockholders are the ones that will hold management's feet to the fire for incompetence.)
There would need to be some evidence of prior planning for the scheme or evidence that they knew exactly what they were doing, i.e., that they knew the claims were baseless and they knew they were deceiving people and they expected to profit from the deception.
The ironic thing is this: They do know exactly what they're doing, but there won't be any evidence (witnesses, paper trails, emails) to that effect. Planning will be verbal and the facade language will be used constantly while the participants know what is going on.
What will look like ineptitude and incompetence to the court will actually have been very carefully orchestrated, requiring vigilance and discipline throughout to avoid spilling the beans.
Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy.
It's part of a future marketing campaign.
[Although, I thought TCPA would be sold as a solution for hackersterroristspedophiles, which are feared more than "music pirates".]
Pay for pilots is one of those distorted marketplaces, because qualifications cannot be obtained for low cost by anyone that wants to learn. AFAICT, unless you're wealthy enough to rent big jets to accumulate enough hours of flying time, the only way to obtain credentials is through military experience.
The labor market for medical doctors and lawyers is also distorted some by the stiff tuition required at a limited number of schools accreditted by, guess who, doctors and lawyers.
Although in the case of lawyers, I think the bottleneck is passing the bar exam for individual states.
Personally, they ought to have some kind of qualifying exam that lets anyone who wants credentials to test for them.
And, there ought to be gradations in quality and competence with prices that can match for Medical Practioner Level 1 through Medical Practioner Level 9.
The boolean system of approved and unapproved is too coarse grain.
And the gatekeepers have a conflict of interest that prevents the marketplace from becoming more efficient. Nominally doctors are the best judge of other doctors, but, like with cops and teachers, there's a lack of willingness sometimes to discipline one's own.
MS has paid millions of dollars to a company that has NOTHING to offer them except FUD against Linux.
They wouldn't have paid the money unless they thought they were getting good value for it.
I would like to see how it plays out a couple of years from now, though, after SCO goes down in flames, discredited, and their executives are scrutinized by the SEC.
The people [fools, money, parted] who have bought SCO stock at high prices through 2003 will be mad as hornets and want blood, which will motivate the SEC inquiry.
During that investigation, there will surely be some glimpses of a cat with a mouse tail hanging out of its mouth, strangely quiet and uncomplaining of its millions of investment disappearing.
Stick around a while and discover that the processor industry has a lot of competitive leapfrogging
Alas, if only it were still that way.
Few can afford to play leapfrog with Intel anymore.
You could see this coming a few years back when the UltraSPARC III was delayed for so long.
Sun's making the right move getting out of the expense of trying to compete with Intel.
a threat to Microsoft's bottom line
Few companies in the world would consider Microsoft' bottom line to be problematic.
Microsoft's revenue stream from Windows and Office continue to be cash cows envied and feared worldwide.
Microsoft's "problems" are very clear:
- keep a grip on a current dominant market position for computer desktops
- enter new markets since there's no growth left for them in the desktop
They've been doing the first thing tolerably well and with the bountiful cash they can afford the kinds of mis-steps that have been plagued their address of the second problem.