AutoCAD does what you want. It has a good command shell and you only need to use the mouse/digitizer for tasks like selecting an entity.
What the couch-placing dude missed is that most sizing and placement tasks are driven by mathematical/geometric rules. There is very little place in mechanical design for interactively picking a point on the screen. When I worked on CAD drafting, freediging (pronounced "free-didging") was forbidden. That means moving the digitizer until it looks right on the screen and then clicking.
To get back to the couch, I'll bet the designer had a geometric requirement but couldn't think sufficiently formally to express it. Therefore, he thought "I'll just move this couch around until something clicks inside me."
He parodied the idea of geometric placement by citing a 30 degree angle when he obviously doesn't care about the angle. Instead, the constraints on placing the couch are probably based on clearances remaining to walls and other furniture. I've had to engineer the placement of control consoles in crowded control rooms, and it's driven by math.
Extreme Programming, is just the latest buzz word for what was RAD, and before that what was simply good practice/procedures...
Nope. Extreme Programming is a programming ideology with some very specific and unusual features. For example, all production code must be written by a pair of coders sitting in front of the same workstation. This is not as crazy as it sounds - read their books to find out why.
The reason there is so little interest in fundamental change is that we're in the middle of a war. M$ still has an excellent chance of crushing all other OS's. If we can kill m$ and clearly establish that future OS development will be open, we might have an influx of energy into more advanced OS's. Right now, if you question Unix most people assume you are doing so from an M$-advocate standpoint.
Poor Jaron. I don't think his point came across. You can read his essay in Wired Magazine if you want to understand it better. He was not saying, "Unix Bad, m$ Good". Rather, I think he takes it as read that Unix is the current state of the art and asks "how can we evolve past that?"
I read the linked article as well as Lanier's very long essay in Wired.
Lanier proposes that someone who writes software for a pacemaker be prohibited from writing software for music composition. He compares such mixing to a brain surgeon running a tattoo parlor on the side. I disagree with this idea. I think the mixed backgrounds of programmers provide valuable cross-fertilization.
The focus of the Wired essay was Lanier's disagreement with 'futurists' who predict techno-utopias or dystopias. He points out correctly that software is far too primitive to power the dreams or nightmares of these writers.
One thing I found irritating in the Wired article is that Lanier is clearly a Windows user and ascribes many of Microsoft's shortcomings to some deep-rooted problem in software development, when they're actually just caprices of the gnomes in Redmond. If you read the essay, you'll see what I mean.
Also, he calls Unix 'that devilish accumulator of data trash'. Jaron, maybe you need to take a look at the man pages for crontab, find and rm.
Want to see some good Perl? Check out Randall's WTR columns. And his UnixReview columns which are more tutorial.
Of course the biggest collection of Perl is CPAN. I disagree with the previous assertion that modules on CPAN are sloppy. The one's I've bothered reading are really clean and nice.
You cite slashdot as an example of sloppy Perl. Please realize that it tracks a moving target. Code that powers web sites tends to be sloppy because web sites change in unpredictable ways. Want to see clean code? Look at Net::Ping for example.
I guess we live in two different worlds. The kind of projects you work on are the ones I avoid like the plague. I would never work with idiots or work under strict arbitrary rules, not when there are so many great places to work. Maybe your workplace has a vicious cycle - the barriers you've erected to keep the 'sad wankers' at bay scare off the more talented programmers.
Java can stop some idiot coming and screwing up your code by ignoring the APIs...
What if the "idiot" edits the Java class to furnish the API he wants? Since you don't believe in trust, I'd love to see how you've set up your network, office and development hosts. I hope you don't let those "idiots" inside the firewall.
What I think you're really saying is that it's human nature to bypass the API and access a private variable if convenient, but it's also human nature to respect a minimal access barrier.
But Perl already has a minimal access barrier that's understood by Perl programmers - I've read lots of good and horrible Perl, but I've never seen a programmer getting/setting a variable in an object rather than use the API.
In any event, the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. Object-orientation solves a lot of imaginary problems but has little linkage to the real problems programmers encounter.
I agree that the O'Reilly MySQL book sucks. However I found the New Riders book reasonably useful. Like you, I still prefer the official manual.
Despite myself, I have some emotional loyalty to O'Reilly and I really want them to stop printing trash. Or maybe use a different cover theme for books that are garbage. In this case, George Reese's name on the cover was a good indicator of the quality. Remember his anti-perl flames on usenet?
Sorry about the link. I have no idea what happened. It should have been: http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/eeor acle/. Is there any chance that HP would help you out with some of their Unix servers? They make a fairly broad range of really solid (but expensive) servers running HP-UX on their PA-RISC chips. Not as much bang for the buck as Intel, but more peace of mind.
The idea of Microsoft buying RedHat is equally silly. If they did then ALL the key technical RedHat employees would resign. They would take their money and do something else (or maybe the same thing).
Oh really? First of all, it's kind of hard to 'take all your money' when it's in stock options. That's why they're called golden handcuffs. Second, MS has bought some Unix-centric companies like Hotmail and WebTV. Was there a mass exodus? And if so, how did it affect the business? And third, if MS bought red hat, it would not be for the purpose of hiring developers. It would be for the purpose of killing a competitor, acquiring a corporate customer base, and using Red Hat's good name to flog MS garbage for a few months before everyone catches on. In MS's worldview, individual developers are not very important.
1) That MS would give up it's windows source base and move to Linux.
Why should they have to give up anything? They create the WinCE OS without giving up Win95. They created NT without giving up Win95. They can afford to throw some people on a Linux project without hurting their other efforts.
2) That MS Linux would be able to differentiate itself enough in the market as to become more popular than Redhat, Caldera, etc.
They won't have to. They will automatically have much more credibility with PHB's. They will bundle with new PC's if they choose. MS linux will always have better integration with Windows than the competitors - big argument in a mixed-OS site. For some PHB's this will be a no-brainer. They've been subjected to a steady stream of linux hype for several years now. Which distro to choose? Suddenly, their favorite most trusted vendor offers a distro. Problem solved.
I'm depressed at the naivete and lack of imagination in most of the comments here. First let me point out the lame arguments that keep getting repeated:
The GPL prevents it. No - MS would not need to modify GPL'd software, just add their own. And if they did modify GPL software, they'd publish the patches. And we'd face a dilemma - the patches will suck - accepting them will hurt the security, stability and performance of the affected code, but rejecting them will lock us out of the MS-linux universe. We'll end up doing tons of engineering to wrap and encapsulate their lame crap. See FrontPage extensions.
Geeks won't like it.They're not selling to geeks. They're selling to home users, who are jaded and ready for the Next Big Thing (which MS needs to keep selling upgrades) and to PHB's who keep hearing that Linux is great but are afraid to leave the MS camp. This will give them 'the best of both worlds'.
At least parts of the OS won't suck - good filesystem, stability, etc. What makes you think MS will expose the underlying filesystem? They could build a system of virtual objects managed by a complex, buggy daemon. The whole datastore could live in one file or a raw partition. It would be a nightmare to debug and most Unix hackers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Any software they write has to be GPL! This is so stupid I won't even address it.
If they make their own GUI instead of X, they'll lose all the apps! Joe sixpack doesn't want any of the X apps. But what they'd do is make a fast, non-network GUI with slow, buggy X server built in. Now Joe Sixpack can run KOffice and other 'legacy' apps but of course they're not as good as the MS apps. Oh, they'll also crash fairly often, due to bugs in the X emulation.
Any apps written for MS-Linux will run on ordinary Linux. No - they'll require proprietary libraries and middleware. Remember, MS's specialty is needless complexity. Think Registry, think SMB. They'll make this godawful tarbaby of interacting daemons and weird binary data files that no sane person will be willing to sift through.
The bottom line is that they can easily steal the hype from Linux, leaving only the smart people running "real linux". They can't stop the development of "real linux" but they can hope to shift the hardware manufacturers and the IBM's and SGI's into their camp. If they're smart, and they are, they won't tighten all the above-mentioned screws at once. Rather they'll come out with a distro that's barely palatable to geeks, then tighten the thumbscrews over the next several releases and watch users struggle in vain to escape. And we will do nothing to prevent it because we don't have the vision or imagination to see what's possible.
How depressing. I wonder if Red Hat Enterprise Edition for Oracle would be applicable? I think that given the context, you may have little choice. But why was the hardware platform selected before the OS? I'd say the mainstream recommendation is Solaris/SPARC. Windows, like Linux, is a red-headed stepchild to Oracle, though they won't say that. I'm afraid Linux is totally indefensible as an enterprise DB platform for now. It doesn't even show up at tpc. I'm sorry to say I predict a lot of pain with your Win2K servers. Maybe the key to keeping them stable is not running any unnecessary apps or scripts on them - use an external Linux box for all cleanup and monitoring tasks. If you experience the growth you're expecting, you'll wish you'd thrown these machines in the dumpster and bought Suns.
People posting enterprise questions to/. are just curious about their peers' opinions. The poster is probably not in a position to affect these kinds of decisions.
In the ensuing hubbub, a certain portion of 'enterprise mindset' will trickle down to the/. masses. This can only be a good thing. If awareness of high-end requirements spreads, more software might be written that meets the needs of high-end users.
He hits the "Y" key and ten minutes later he can do his accounts.
I still remember how surprised I was when I first encountered RPMs. I skimmed the huge man page, and figured out that I needed to type "rpm -i foo.rpm". I expected this to inititate some huge nerve-wracking process, with questions or dialog boxes or something. Anyhow, I hit 'enter' and half a second later my shell prompt was back. Something must have gone wrong. I typed the first few characters of the program name and hit 'tab' and it completed! Software that hasn't been RPM'd yet is probably too immature for newbies to be messing with.
...defrag once a month, update your virus defs once a week, clean up your filesystem to leave yourself plenty of drivespace.
Sounds like Windows. I don't do any of this stuff on any Unix box. OK, I keep half an eye on disk space, and I do update internet-connected machines for security reasons. At any large site there are machines which have been completely forgotten by the sysadmin staff because they just work. Then one day you get mail from root@neptune - "/tmp is at 80%" - and you wonder "do we really have a host named neptune? And where is it?" I agree with your overall point, though. Windows infantilizes users by promising to take care of everything, a promise that can't really be kept.
The trick is to have the varied PC software base on the 390.
Couldn't you run the PC software under VMWare on Linux on VM on the 390? A scheme like that would have real benefits for big organizations. You could 'reimage' the virtual PC after each user session, so it never has time to get corrupted. You could control and count the number of copies of software to ensure license compliance. You could have a daemon that nukes the virtual PC at the first sign of an email virus. Alternately, you could run the PC software under VMWare on the diskless workstation, and still get the same benefits (with more work).
If having an Open Source OS is important, why would there be a demand for closed source software that you can already obtain for closed source operating systems?
Good question. Let me try to explain. You're thinking of the OS as the 'mothership' and the applications as little plugins. To understand big database planning, turn that around. The first question is, what RDBMS? Oracle/DB2/Sybase/whatever. Unfortunately there are no Free RDBMS's in that league yet. If you pick DB2, the next question is, 'what platform?' Each platform will have a different combination of acquisition cost, cost/transaction, uptime, security, etc. The RDBMS vendor will usually have a bias - Oracle develops on Suns, so Sun is ahead of the pack if you're using Oracle. I don't know much about IBM's offerings, but I think the obvious platform for DB2 is AIX. You would expect that IBM would put more energy into making DB2 work smoothly on AIX than on Sun/Solaris. Now, IBM announces that they're supporting DB2 on some kind of Intel/Linux platform. Yes, they released the software a long time ago. But this might be a move towards seriously promoting and supporting the DB2/Linux/Intel combination. So to answer your question: this is not a case of a software vendor pitching their product at Linux users (who care about open source). This is a case of IBM telling their DB2 customers that they now have the option of using Linux servers.
You make a good point, but you're wrong about QCad. It's a FPOS. It doesn't come near AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is considered low-end in the CAD world. I still get high blood pressure thinking about the five hours I spent trying to get QCad to do something useful. You have to click on some stupid icon for every single action. AutoCAD has an excellent command shell that enables fast, efficient drafting. Also, QCad lacks a lot of the object snap modes that are critical to drafting. Much as I hate Autodesk, if they ever port AutoCAD to linux, and the result is not too Windows-infested, I'll probably buy it. So is this an anomaly? No - the OSS world understands two kinds of apps:
Consumer apps - stuff that runs on a Windows desktop
Enterprise apps - stuff that runs on Unix servers.
It doesn't understand professional workstation apps. Thus we get QCad, which is a caricature of a CAD program. There's a lot of room for commercial software there.
First, using the phrase "security by obscurity" when that's not the issue *is* trolling, whether you realized it or not.
I disagree - trolling is intentionally stating a belief not held by the poster to get a hostile reaction from the audience. There's no such thing as trolling without realizing it. Second, if ktb is wrong to bring up Security Through Obscurity then he's wrong by a narrow margin, not the gross margin characteristic of trolling. STO is relevant because this action is a move towards the restriction of security information and away from full disclosure. Obviously, it won't stop full disclosure. But inside the pointy little heads of M$ execs, something like STO logic must have prompted this move.
Thank God somebody gets it. I read Bugtraq and AFAIR all the ms advisories originate outside m$. (I don't pay much attention because I don't admin any m$). So I'm happy to be spared the m$ advisories, which are really long bloated pieces of crap full of spin control. Just give me the theory, the exploit code, the fix, and the affected systems. So will the outside hackers who currently notify m$ start posting to Bugtraq at the same time m$ publishes their 'advisory'? I wonder if this is a good time to implement the 'time capsure' previously discussed on Bugtraq.
Copyright issues aside, Bugtraq is doing a disservice anyway if they widely distribute word-for-word static advisories soon to be out of date.
Bugtraq is a mailing list. The fact that an archive is available on the web is of secondary importance. Bugtraq gives me my daily digest of holes in one convenient flat-text document. In two minutes I can see if any of my systems are vulnerable. I don't want to chase all over the web for vulnerabilities every day. And exploits never go out of date until you patch/upgrade the affected software.
Personally, I prefer a consistent web page link, not a bunch of secondary source emails that you have to hobble together in order to secure your system.
Microsoft is not the 'primary source' for advisories affecting their products. The only reason they're notified at all is that they've been cooperative with outside researchers and given credit. You'd like all the info on a vendor's website? I guess you don't understand the history of bugtraq and related fora. Without an *independent* focus of security info, the vendors will sweep everything under the carpet.
Your point about large organizations simply downloading the ISO is quite valid. In fact the VBC I'm working for currently is planning to develop its own distro in-house, possibly based on RedHat. There are too many things we want to tweak, and we have lots of history with managing Suns and keeping the support costs reasonable - we'd like to port our tools and techniques to linux. So RH won't make much off of us. However, I don't think RH is doomed - there are companies with less in-house expertise than ours which might like the comfort factor of having a support contract with the same vendor that made the OS. As a point of comparison, HP and Sun employ a lot of sysadmins to handle customer sites. Do they deliver the absolute best quality or the lowest price? Probably not. But customers are fairly confident in using their services because they trust the brand. I'll go out on a limb (knowing nothing of the financial picture) and guess that if RH wanted to turn a profit immediately, they could. They'd cut unprofitable areas, reduce their revenue by 50%, and make a profit on what's left. They'd also be killing their future. Given their cash reserves, they're wise to keep growing tentacles in different directions, because that ubiquity could pay off handsomely.
Don't underestimate it. Bob Young has used that analogy to describe what Red Hat does - they're a marketing company, focused on a brand. RH's stock in trade is credibility. This looks nonsensical to techies, but if you've watched the "suit" reaction to Linux over the last few years, it's evolved quite a bit from "we'll never a use a free OS at this company!" RH gets their logo stuck on as many things as possible, forges alliances with existing players, and generally enters the PHB's field of vision. All but the most myopic PHB's are now aware of them.
The majority of the intrusions have occurred on Microsoft Windows NT systems, although Unix based operating systems have been victimized as well. The hackers are exploiting at least three known system vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access and download
propriety information.
What was the propriety info that was downloaded? Was it info about the propriety of cracking e-commerce sites? Also, the article goes on to cite three old Microsoft exploits. Where's the promised Unix vulnerability? I'm not saying Unix doesn't have exploits, only that this article says "Unix based operating systems have been victimized as well" and fails to explain. Anyhow, I fail to see why this is a "National Infrastructure" issue. Some greedy fools slapped together a website with Microsoft "solutions" and got hacked. If customers care, the market will reward sites with better security. If customers don't care, why should the government? I think this "nipc" is trying to create a pseudo-crisis to make themselves look relevant. Oldest trick in the governmental book.
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AutoCAD does what you want. It has a good command shell and you only need to use the mouse/digitizer for tasks like selecting an entity.
What the couch-placing dude missed is that most sizing and placement tasks are driven by mathematical/geometric rules. There is very little place in mechanical design for interactively picking a point on the screen. When I worked on CAD drafting, freediging (pronounced "free-didging") was forbidden. That means moving the digitizer until it looks right on the screen and then clicking.
To get back to the couch, I'll bet the designer had a geometric requirement but couldn't think sufficiently formally to express it. Therefore, he thought "I'll just move this couch around until something clicks inside me."
He parodied the idea of geometric placement by citing a 30 degree angle when he obviously doesn't care about the angle. Instead, the constraints on placing the couch are probably based on clearances remaining to walls and other furniture. I've had to engineer the placement of control consoles in crowded control rooms, and it's driven by math.
The reason there is so little interest in fundamental change is that we're in the middle of a war. M$ still has an excellent chance of crushing all other OS's. If we can kill m$ and clearly establish that future OS development will be open, we might have an influx of energy into more advanced OS's. Right now, if you question Unix most people assume you are doing so from an M$-advocate standpoint.
Poor Jaron. I don't think his point came across. You can read his essay in Wired Magazine if you want to understand it better. He was not saying, "Unix Bad, m$ Good". Rather, I think he takes it as read that Unix is the current state of the art and asks "how can we evolve past that?"
I read the linked article as well as Lanier's very long essay in Wired.
Lanier proposes that someone who writes software for a pacemaker be prohibited from writing software for music composition. He compares such mixing to a brain surgeon running a tattoo parlor on the side. I disagree with this idea. I think the mixed backgrounds of programmers provide valuable cross-fertilization.
The focus of the Wired essay was Lanier's disagreement with 'futurists' who predict techno-utopias or dystopias. He points out correctly that software is far too primitive to power the dreams or nightmares of these writers.
One thing I found irritating in the Wired article is that Lanier is clearly a Windows user and ascribes many of Microsoft's shortcomings to some deep-rooted problem in software development, when they're actually just caprices of the gnomes in Redmond. If you read the essay, you'll see what I mean.
Also, he calls Unix 'that devilish accumulator of data trash'. Jaron, maybe you need to take a look at the man pages for crontab, find and rm.
Want to see some good Perl? Check out Randall's WTR columns. And his UnixReview columns which are more tutorial.
Of course the biggest collection of Perl is CPAN. I disagree with the previous assertion that modules on CPAN are sloppy. The one's I've bothered reading are really clean and nice.
You cite slashdot as an example of sloppy Perl. Please realize that it tracks a moving target. Code that powers web sites tends to be sloppy because web sites change in unpredictable ways. Want to see clean code? Look at Net::Ping for example.
I guess we live in two different worlds. The kind of projects you work on are the ones I avoid like the plague. I would never work with idiots or work under strict arbitrary rules, not when there are so many great places to work. Maybe your workplace has a vicious cycle - the barriers you've erected to keep the 'sad wankers' at bay scare off the more talented programmers.
What I think you're really saying is that it's human nature to bypass the API and access a private variable if convenient, but it's also human nature to respect a minimal access barrier.
But Perl already has a minimal access barrier that's understood by Perl programmers - I've read lots of good and horrible Perl, but I've never seen a programmer getting/setting a variable in an object rather than use the API.
In any event, the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. Object-orientation solves a lot of imaginary problems but has little linkage to the real problems programmers encounter.
I agree that the O'Reilly MySQL book sucks. However I found the New Riders book reasonably useful. Like you, I still prefer the official manual.
Despite myself, I have some emotional loyalty to O'Reilly and I really want them to stop printing trash. Or maybe use a different cover theme for books that are garbage. In this case, George Reese's name on the cover was a good indicator of the quality. Remember his anti-perl flames on usenet?
Sorry about the link. I have no idea what happened. It should have been:r acle/.
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/linux/eeo
Is there any chance that HP would help you out with some of their Unix servers? They make a fairly broad range of really solid (but expensive) servers running HP-UX on their PA-RISC chips. Not as much bang for the buck as Intel, but more peace of mind.
You have just disproved the existence of MacOS X.
Or could it be that Apple and Microsoft don't want any attention from geeks?
In MS's worldview, individual developers are not very important.
Why should they have to give up anything? They create the WinCE OS without giving up Win95. They created NT without giving up Win95. They can afford to throw some people on a Linux project without hurting their other efforts.
They won't have to. They will automatically have much more credibility with PHB's. They will bundle with new PC's if they choose. MS linux will always have better integration with Windows than the competitors - big argument in a mixed-OS site. For some PHB's this will be a no-brainer. They've been subjected to a steady stream of linux hype for several years now. Which distro to choose? Suddenly, their favorite most trusted vendor offers a distro. Problem solved.
The bottom line is that they can easily steal the hype from Linux, leaving only the smart people running "real linux". They can't stop the development of "real linux" but they can hope to shift the hardware manufacturers and the IBM's and SGI's into their camp. If they're smart, and they are, they won't tighten all the above-mentioned screws at once. Rather they'll come out with a distro that's barely palatable to geeks, then tighten the thumbscrews over the next several releases and watch users struggle in vain to escape.
And we will do nothing to prevent it because we don't have the vision or imagination to see what's possible.
How depressing. I wonder if Red Hat Enterprise Edition for Oracle would be applicable? I think that given the context, you may have little choice.
But why was the hardware platform selected before the OS? I'd say the mainstream recommendation is Solaris/SPARC. Windows, like Linux, is a red-headed stepchild to Oracle, though they won't say that.
I'm afraid Linux is totally indefensible as an enterprise DB platform for now. It doesn't even show up at tpc.
I'm sorry to say I predict a lot of pain with your Win2K servers. Maybe the key to keeping them stable is not running any unnecessary apps or scripts on them - use an external Linux box for all cleanup and monitoring tasks. If you experience the growth you're expecting, you'll wish you'd thrown these machines in the dumpster and bought Suns.
Software that hasn't been RPM'd yet is probably too immature for newbies to be messing with. Sounds like Windows. I don't do any of this stuff on any Unix box. OK, I keep half an eye on disk space, and I do update internet-connected machines for security reasons.
At any large site there are machines which have been completely forgotten by the sysadmin staff because they just work. Then one day you get mail from root@neptune - "/tmp is at 80%" - and you wonder "do we really have a host named neptune? And where is it?"
I agree with your overall point, though. Windows infantilizes users by promising to take care of everything, a promise that can't really be kept.
Couldn't you run the PC software under VMWare on Linux on VM on the 390? A scheme like that would have real benefits for big organizations. You could 'reimage' the virtual PC after each user session, so it never has time to get corrupted. You could control and count the number of copies of software to ensure license compliance. You could have a daemon that nukes the virtual PC at the first sign of an email virus.
Alternately, you could run the PC software under VMWare on the diskless workstation, and still get the same benefits (with more work).
Each platform will have a different combination of acquisition cost, cost/transaction, uptime, security, etc. The RDBMS vendor will usually have a bias - Oracle develops on Suns, so Sun is ahead of the pack if you're using Oracle.
I don't know much about IBM's offerings, but I think the obvious platform for DB2 is AIX. You would expect that IBM would put more energy into making DB2 work smoothly on AIX than on Sun/Solaris.
Now, IBM announces that they're supporting DB2 on some kind of Intel/Linux platform. Yes, they released the software a long time ago. But this might be a move towards seriously promoting and supporting the DB2/Linux/Intel combination.
So to answer your question: this is not a case of a software vendor pitching their product at Linux users (who care about open source). This is a case of IBM telling their DB2 customers that they now have the option of using Linux servers.
So is this an anomaly? No - the OSS world understands two kinds of apps:
It doesn't understand professional workstation apps. Thus we get QCad, which is a caricature of a CAD program. There's a lot of room for commercial software there.
I disagree - trolling is intentionally stating a belief not held by the poster to get a hostile reaction from the audience. There's no such thing as trolling without realizing it.
Second, if ktb is wrong to bring up Security Through Obscurity then he's wrong by a narrow margin, not the gross margin characteristic of trolling. STO is relevant because this action is a move towards the restriction of security information and away from full disclosure. Obviously, it won't stop full disclosure. But inside the pointy little heads of M$ execs, something like STO logic must have prompted this move.
Thank God somebody gets it. I read Bugtraq and AFAIR all the ms advisories originate outside m$. (I don't pay much attention because I don't admin any m$). So I'm happy to be spared the m$ advisories, which are really long bloated pieces of crap full of spin control. Just give me the theory, the exploit code, the fix, and the affected systems.
So will the outside hackers who currently notify m$ start posting to Bugtraq at the same time m$ publishes their 'advisory'?
I wonder if this is a good time to implement the 'time capsure' previously discussed on Bugtraq.
Your point about large organizations simply downloading the ISO is quite valid. In fact the VBC I'm working for currently is planning to develop its own distro in-house, possibly based on RedHat. There are too many things we want to tweak, and we have lots of history with managing Suns and keeping the support costs reasonable - we'd like to port our tools and techniques to linux. So RH won't make much off of us.
However, I don't think RH is doomed - there are companies with less in-house expertise than ours which might like the comfort factor of having a support contract with the same vendor that made the OS.
As a point of comparison, HP and Sun employ a lot of sysadmins to handle customer sites. Do they deliver the absolute best quality or the lowest price? Probably not. But customers are fairly confident in using their services because they trust the brand.
I'll go out on a limb (knowing nothing of the financial picture) and guess that if RH wanted to turn a profit immediately, they could. They'd cut unprofitable areas, reduce their revenue by 50%, and make a profit on what's left. They'd also be killing their future. Given their cash reserves, they're wise to keep growing tentacles in different directions, because that ubiquity could pay off handsomely.
Don't underestimate it. Bob Young has used that analogy to describe what Red Hat does - they're a marketing company, focused on a brand. RH's stock in trade is credibility. This looks nonsensical to techies, but if you've watched the "suit" reaction to Linux over the last few years, it's evolved quite a bit from "we'll never a use a free OS at this company!"
RH gets their logo stuck on as many things as possible, forges alliances with existing players, and generally enters the PHB's field of vision. All but the most myopic PHB's are now aware of them.
What was the propriety info that was downloaded? Was it info about the propriety of cracking e-commerce sites?
Also, the article goes on to cite three old Microsoft exploits. Where's the promised Unix vulnerability? I'm not saying Unix doesn't have exploits, only that this article says "Unix based operating systems have been victimized as well" and fails to explain.
Anyhow, I fail to see why this is a "National Infrastructure" issue. Some greedy fools slapped together a website with Microsoft "solutions" and got hacked. If customers care, the market will reward sites with better security. If customers don't care, why should the government?
I think this "nipc" is trying to create a pseudo-crisis to make themselves look relevant. Oldest trick in the governmental book.