"Today, ninety-two percent of desktops and now seventy percent of servers run the completely proprietary and non-standardized Microsoft Windows operating system."
70% of servers are running Windows? What year is this? Have I been in some kind of coma?
A teenager needs access to two things: A friend and OpenSSH. The former is something most teens have, and the latter is something that all teens can download. I used SSH to bypass filters in high school (not to get porn, but to go to innocent websites like Slashdot or Wired News where the mention of sex used to tip off the filters), and if my mother had tried to block my access to porn at home, I could have easily used the same trick. What my mom did instead (knowing that I could have defeated any filter she put in place) was to just talk to me about such things, so that I would understand why she objected to (certain forms of) porn and that was that. There is no need to have your kids grow up with the same restrictions that children in China grow up with.
Careful! The last time I even suggested that Apple was not an open source friendly company here on Slashdot, I was modded down as "flamebait." Of course, I also reminded everyone that Apple's developers did not invent the mouse, object oriented programming, the GUI, and that those developers were also not capable of producing a preemptive scheduler, and the presence of those features in OS X represents Apple's team simply borrowing ideas from other people without contributing anything back.
Yeah? Because there are still plenty of landlines in use, and there are places where cell connections make no sense at all. Cell phones are very popular, but they don't quite beat landlines all the time. Landlines are more reliable, especially during an emergency (911 operators can more easily find your location if you call from a land line than from a cell). I still see credit card machines using X.25 land line connections in a lot of small stores, where a telephone connection is a hell of a lot cheaper than a dedicated internet connection.
Yes, WiFi networking has gained a lot of ground and has a lot of uses, but there are things that wired connections are just better for. Wireless devices are more expensive to produce than wired, and for some embedded devices that can be a problem ($5 for cabling vs. $20 for a wireless adapter is a no-brainer, especially if you are trying to deploy 50 security cameras). For the same reason that you still see X.25 connections in wide use, you will continue to see wired LAN connections in wide use, but not necessarily for PCs. Really, embedded devices shouldn't be discounted when discussing computing, especially infrastructure.
" under a new hybrid software licensing arrangement. "
And:
" Access to QNX source code is free, but commercial deployments of QNX Neutrino runtime components still require royalties, and commercial developers will continue to pay for QNX Momentics® development seats. "
Wireless will never beat Ethernet, if for no other reason, simple reliability. I have seen odd things happen with radio waves, like have a very good signal in one spot, and almost no signal just a few feet away. Or getting the signal strength affect by where some random person is standing. Or signals not passing through walls (getting a cable through a wall requires no more than a drill). Or microwave ovens killing the signal.
The strangest was a friend who used a linksys router with the SSID "linksys" and WEP encryption, who lived next door to someone using the same SSID but no encryption. Oh yeah, the wireless network managers on various OS's had a field day with that one. Ethernet just doesn't have those problems, so it will always been needed when mobility is less important than reliability.
Yes, Fedora does outlast Vista by 3 hours. If you are talking about older versions of the linux kernel and related software, then yes, Windows wins; but the new Linux kernel is much more power efficient (tickless), and fixes to apps like Pidgin and libraries like GTK mean longer battery life. She is using a 9 cell battery, and gets roughly 6 hours out of it. Also bear in mind that Vista is a bit more CPU intensive than most other OS's, which takes its toll, especially on Centrino chipsets that save power when they are not in use.
The next release of Fedora looks even more promising on battery life, because it will load most services on demand, and therefore significantly reduce the amount of CPU cycles that must be consumed. I would recommend that you at least look into what's been happening with Linux power management over the past few months; even if it is on a desktop, you will notice lower core temperatures (among other things), but you will definitely want to look into it for a laptop.
I used the same trick in high school to get around a really annoying filter. This filter would sometimes block slashdot because there were too many curses, "sexual references," or just because the random block feature was active. A quick SSH to a box outside of the school, run w3m (our connection was pretty bad, so I needed to save some bandwidth), and I have the unfiltered web.
I used to think the "Year of Linux" would be when the following people were using a Linux system:
My Grandmother
My Girlfriend
My Mother
But they are all Linux users now, and amazingly it was out of need. The family wanted a way to see me live when I was in far away places (which is most of the time now) and to defeat the shitty Verizon DSL firewall, I used a Linux solution. The girlfriend needed her laptop's battery life to be very long, and Fedora outlasts Vista by almost 3 hours.
...of a guy in a class I took who had packet sniffed our network, then reported my university e-mail password to me. Why? Because the university refused to enable SSL-secured POP3. A quick email reveals that, in fact, they were never planning to, and that I am just SOL.
OK, maybe it doesn't automatically detect your hardware, but that is more of a legal problem. Red Hat (and companies that follow similar policies) doesn't want the risk of a lawsuit over intellectual property, so they don't ship things like MP3 support or ndiswrapper (or certain binary firmware drivers). So what we need now is open hardware with open source drivers...
That said, hardware support is getting a lot better. A new Dell Inspiron will run Fedora 8 right out of the box, with the network card working. Except that it is being released in October, so just give it a month or so.
"(On a more serious note, doesn't the term "reduced functionality" imply that something is still functional? The description makes it sound like it disables the system entirely.)"
Yes, it does. My guess is that M$ turns your computer into a node for some sort of grid computer they are running, which will run DDOS attacks on mirrors.kernel.org.
Well, maybe, but I view it like this: bandwidth doesn't just cost the site operators money. I should be able to view a website on a 9.6K connection without waiting half an hour for each page load. Why should I pay for a broadband connection, which is significantly more expensive than dialup, just because a website operator decided to contract with Flash, Java applet, or XYZJax advertisers?
Why should I foot a higher electricity bill? These ads are now so CPU intensive that my power consumption nearly doubles. I shouldn't have to upgrade my processor to read an article just so that I can render the ads without crawling along. Advertising is fine, but I shouldn't have to pay just to view it.
Actually, the NSA was wiretapping domestic communications, including domestic communications that never crossed international borders, and they wiretapped domestic Internet communications. The government has flagged American citizens for criticizing the government, including a professor who was on the "do not fly" list after giving a series of lectures about the September 11th attacks. How are either of these helping in the fight against terrorism?
You tell me how installing packet sniffing equipment on AT&T's backbone connections (within US borders) was not wiretapping domestic Internet connections, or how that was helpful in discovering a terrorist plot, and then we'll talk.
Terrorists want to establish a repressive state in America, that would arrest people who speak out against the government by eavesdropping on communications.
America, trying to defeat terrorism, starts eavesdropping on communications, looking for people speaking out against America.
Really, what is the point of defeating terrorism if we destroy ourselves in the process? If America is destroyed by terrorists, fine, we lost the fight, and the world is a darker place. But if we corrupt our own nation, if we start to abandon our freedoms in the name of protecting our freedoms, then we don't just lose the fight, we do the terrorists' work for them.
If we allow the government to wiretap us without a warrant, will we also allow the government to enter our homes for "random checks?" Randomly invading homes to check for terrorism would also help catch plots, but you wouldn't be so quick to support that idea. Why not, though, if you have nothing to hide?
Well, that is the argument for free (as in freedom) software. You shouldn't use software that you cannot examine, but people do that all the time, and they don't care about the philosophical argument. Convenience comes first, then aesthetics, but freedom and privacy aren't even on the table.
It is a "big deal" because software as a service is a "big deal." People are starting to rely on web apps; imagine if I could stop you from using a desktop app at a moment's notice because of a privacy policy change.
Yeah, I've noticed that. For example, Acrobat is installed on all the Linux machines, even though GNOME and KDE are also installed and each come with their own PDF functionality. Still, the problem as I see it is a lack of exposure to open source software -- the Linux computers are in a basement, and most people don't know they exist, and the Windows computers are conveniently located in the main library building, and I have seen other universities do the same thing.
It is a start, but it hardly makes a dent in the proprietary software world. I am at a university right now, and here is an abbreviated list of free vs. proprietary software in use:
Free: Linux, Solaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, VNC, OpenSSH, GNU, GIMP
Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE
This list is a bit misleading, because it doesn't count the number of installations. Counting that, the figures are closer to 95% proprietary for desktops, and 70% proprietary for servers.
And my university isn't even the worst. I know of another where free software support is a few pages on printing using command line LPR, and a recommendation to use Firefox. If the managers, accountants, and programmers and engineers who graduate from these schools have never heard of free software, then they are less likely to order it or recommend it at work (which is why Microsoft has been paying my school so much to teach freshman engineers about MS Office and Visual Studio). Sun going open source? Hardly a dent in the problem.
Too late for me. I used Mandrake for years, then the shift to Mandriva occurred, and then the problems started. The repositories got screwed up (I know, they were required to change the name, but they could have done it more smoothly), then packages became even more out of date (it was still running a 2.6.12 kernel for MDV2006 last time I checked), and finally I just got too fed up and switched to Fedora Core 5, and have been running Fedora ever since. I will probably upgrade an old file server that is still running Mandrake, just so I can get updates (right now, updates are not even possible).
And how far are you willing to take that philosophy? Maybe I don't like property laws, because it benefits property owners more than college students like me -- so should I go around breaking into people's homes? Or building random structures on their property (I could certainly use a few high-power antennas in some choice places that happen to be owned by someone else).
I agree, laws like the DMCA are misguided and benefit the wrong people. But they have been voted into law, and the best way to fight them is to try and get them either voted back out of law, or ruled by the court to be invalid (but that seems unlikely). Alternatively, you could go and find people who aren't abusing these laws; some familiar ones are garageband.com and magnatune.com in the music world, and Red Hat, Mandriva, Canonical, etc. in the software world. In the coming years, you will probably see like-minded companies and organizations in the video world, and they will probably produce better content than NBC anyway (big companies these days seem to produce shallow, unimaginative content; this trend is apparent across industries, from television to beer).
Oh yeah, because it is going to be so much better when it is using some M$-DRM'ed format, or something even worse, where you can only use it on certain versions of Windows with certain versions of the software. Not to even mention the millions of people who don't use Windows. The problem here isn't Apple or Apple's programmers (who couldn't even figure out how to write a preemptive scheduler), it is NBC's demands for more restrictive DRM, or more generally, the notion that every single person will definitely pirate material unless it is locked down to the point where it is barely usable at all.
For a small system, sure -- I am sure that Microsoft's printf implementation performs about the same as GNU's. But for a large system, this way of checking signatures is effective simply because different teams will wind up doing different things to accomplish the same result. Think about WINE -- some games actually run faster under WINE than under Windows, even on the same machine, because of differences in the implementation of the WINE and MS system libraries.
If your mission critical software is run by someone else, then you made a mistake in planning. If you are small, this is especially true -- you don't have the resources to recovery from a failure, the way that a big enterprise does. If you cannot afford an IT guy, you can get an IT contract from a company like Red Hat -- your car analogy fits in more naturally with that scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
"Today, ninety-two percent of desktops and now seventy percent of servers run the completely proprietary and non-standardized Microsoft Windows operating system." 70% of servers are running Windows? What year is this? Have I been in some kind of coma?
A teenager needs access to two things: A friend and OpenSSH. The former is something most teens have, and the latter is something that all teens can download. I used SSH to bypass filters in high school (not to get porn, but to go to innocent websites like Slashdot or Wired News where the mention of sex used to tip off the filters), and if my mother had tried to block my access to porn at home, I could have easily used the same trick. What my mom did instead (knowing that I could have defeated any filter she put in place) was to just talk to me about such things, so that I would understand why she objected to (certain forms of) porn and that was that. There is no need to have your kids grow up with the same restrictions that children in China grow up with.
Careful! The last time I even suggested that Apple was not an open source friendly company here on Slashdot, I was modded down as "flamebait." Of course, I also reminded everyone that Apple's developers did not invent the mouse, object oriented programming, the GUI, and that those developers were also not capable of producing a preemptive scheduler, and the presence of those features in OS X represents Apple's team simply borrowing ideas from other people without contributing anything back.
Yes, WiFi networking has gained a lot of ground and has a lot of uses, but there are things that wired connections are just better for. Wireless devices are more expensive to produce than wired, and for some embedded devices that can be a problem ($5 for cabling vs. $20 for a wireless adapter is a no-brainer, especially if you are trying to deploy 50 security cameras). For the same reason that you still see X.25 connections in wide use, you will continue to see wired LAN connections in wide use, but not necessarily for PCs. Really, embedded devices shouldn't be discounted when discussing computing, especially infrastructure.
" under a new hybrid software licensing arrangement. "
And:
" Access to QNX source code is free, but commercial deployments of QNX Neutrino runtime components still require royalties, and commercial developers will continue to pay for QNX Momentics® development seats. "
(Hint: It's definitely not GPL)
The strangest was a friend who used a linksys router with the SSID "linksys" and WEP encryption, who lived next door to someone using the same SSID but no encryption. Oh yeah, the wireless network managers on various OS's had a field day with that one. Ethernet just doesn't have those problems, so it will always been needed when mobility is less important than reliability.
The next release of Fedora looks even more promising on battery life, because it will load most services on demand, and therefore significantly reduce the amount of CPU cycles that must be consumed. I would recommend that you at least look into what's been happening with Linux power management over the past few months; even if it is on a desktop, you will notice lower core temperatures (among other things), but you will definitely want to look into it for a laptop.
I used the same trick in high school to get around a really annoying filter. This filter would sometimes block slashdot because there were too many curses, "sexual references," or just because the random block feature was active. A quick SSH to a box outside of the school, run w3m (our connection was pretty bad, so I needed to save some bandwidth), and I have the unfiltered web.
- My Grandmother
- My Girlfriend
- My Mother
But they are all Linux users now, and amazingly it was out of need. The family wanted a way to see me live when I was in far away places (which is most of the time now) and to defeat the shitty Verizon DSL firewall, I used a Linux solution. The girlfriend needed her laptop's battery life to be very long, and Fedora outlasts Vista by almost 3 hours.So here is the revised list:
...of a guy in a class I took who had packet sniffed our network, then reported my university e-mail password to me. Why? Because the university refused to enable SSL-secured POP3. A quick email reveals that, in fact, they were never planning to, and that I am just SOL.
OK, maybe it doesn't automatically detect your hardware, but that is more of a legal problem. Red Hat (and companies that follow similar policies) doesn't want the risk of a lawsuit over intellectual property, so they don't ship things like MP3 support or ndiswrapper (or certain binary firmware drivers). So what we need now is open hardware with open source drivers...
That said, hardware support is getting a lot better. A new Dell Inspiron will run Fedora 8 right out of the box, with the network card working. Except that it is being released in October, so just give it a month or so.
Yes, it does. My guess is that M$ turns your computer into a node for some sort of grid computer they are running, which will run DDOS attacks on mirrors.kernel.org.
Why should I foot a higher electricity bill? These ads are now so CPU intensive that my power consumption nearly doubles. I shouldn't have to upgrade my processor to read an article just so that I can render the ads without crawling along. Advertising is fine, but I shouldn't have to pay just to view it.
You tell me how installing packet sniffing equipment on AT&T's backbone connections (within US borders) was not wiretapping domestic Internet connections, or how that was helpful in discovering a terrorist plot, and then we'll talk.
Really, what is the point of defeating terrorism if we destroy ourselves in the process? If America is destroyed by terrorists, fine, we lost the fight, and the world is a darker place. But if we corrupt our own nation, if we start to abandon our freedoms in the name of protecting our freedoms, then we don't just lose the fight, we do the terrorists' work for them.
If we allow the government to wiretap us without a warrant, will we also allow the government to enter our homes for "random checks?" Randomly invading homes to check for terrorism would also help catch plots, but you wouldn't be so quick to support that idea. Why not, though, if you have nothing to hide?
Well, that is the argument for free (as in freedom) software. You shouldn't use software that you cannot examine, but people do that all the time, and they don't care about the philosophical argument. Convenience comes first, then aesthetics, but freedom and privacy aren't even on the table.
It is a "big deal" because software as a service is a "big deal." People are starting to rely on web apps; imagine if I could stop you from using a desktop app at a moment's notice because of a privacy policy change.
Yeah, I've noticed that. For example, Acrobat is installed on all the Linux machines, even though GNOME and KDE are also installed and each come with their own PDF functionality. Still, the problem as I see it is a lack of exposure to open source software -- the Linux computers are in a basement, and most people don't know they exist, and the Windows computers are conveniently located in the main library building, and I have seen other universities do the same thing.
It is a start, but it hardly makes a dent in the proprietary software world. I am at a university right now, and here is an abbreviated list of free vs. proprietary software in use: Free: Linux, Solaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, VNC, OpenSSH, GNU, GIMP Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE This list is a bit misleading, because it doesn't count the number of installations. Counting that, the figures are closer to 95% proprietary for desktops, and 70% proprietary for servers. And my university isn't even the worst. I know of another where free software support is a few pages on printing using command line LPR, and a recommendation to use Firefox. If the managers, accountants, and programmers and engineers who graduate from these schools have never heard of free software, then they are less likely to order it or recommend it at work (which is why Microsoft has been paying my school so much to teach freshman engineers about MS Office and Visual Studio). Sun going open source? Hardly a dent in the problem.
Welcome to UbuntuDot/SlashHat.
Too late for me. I used Mandrake for years, then the shift to Mandriva occurred, and then the problems started. The repositories got screwed up (I know, they were required to change the name, but they could have done it more smoothly), then packages became even more out of date (it was still running a 2.6.12 kernel for MDV2006 last time I checked), and finally I just got too fed up and switched to Fedora Core 5, and have been running Fedora ever since. I will probably upgrade an old file server that is still running Mandrake, just so I can get updates (right now, updates are not even possible).
I agree, laws like the DMCA are misguided and benefit the wrong people. But they have been voted into law, and the best way to fight them is to try and get them either voted back out of law, or ruled by the court to be invalid (but that seems unlikely). Alternatively, you could go and find people who aren't abusing these laws; some familiar ones are garageband.com and magnatune.com in the music world, and Red Hat, Mandriva, Canonical, etc. in the software world. In the coming years, you will probably see like-minded companies and organizations in the video world, and they will probably produce better content than NBC anyway (big companies these days seem to produce shallow, unimaginative content; this trend is apparent across industries, from television to beer).
Oh yeah, because it is going to be so much better when it is using some M$-DRM'ed format, or something even worse, where you can only use it on certain versions of Windows with certain versions of the software. Not to even mention the millions of people who don't use Windows. The problem here isn't Apple or Apple's programmers (who couldn't even figure out how to write a preemptive scheduler), it is NBC's demands for more restrictive DRM, or more generally, the notion that every single person will definitely pirate material unless it is locked down to the point where it is barely usable at all.
For a small system, sure -- I am sure that Microsoft's printf implementation performs about the same as GNU's. But for a large system, this way of checking signatures is effective simply because different teams will wind up doing different things to accomplish the same result. Think about WINE -- some games actually run faster under WINE than under Windows, even on the same machine, because of differences in the implementation of the WINE and MS system libraries.
If your mission critical software is run by someone else, then you made a mistake in planning. If you are small, this is especially true -- you don't have the resources to recovery from a failure, the way that a big enterprise does. If you cannot afford an IT guy, you can get an IT contract from a company like Red Hat -- your car analogy fits in more naturally with that scenario.