Linux-Advocacy Digest #195, Volume #26 Thu, 20 Apr 00 10:13:05 EDT
Contents:
Re: Unix is dead? (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: Windows2000 sale success.. (The Ghost In The Machine)
Re: Unix is dead? (LFessen106)
Re: Unix is dead? (mlw)
Re: LILO saves the day (Streamer)
Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000 or server software? ("Davorin Mestric")
Re: Guess How Many Windows Crashes.... (mlw)
Re: Elian (mlw)
Re: Standard desktop... (mlw)
Re: Standard desktop... ("LGFR")
Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000? ("Mr. Rupert")
Re: Unix is dead? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Subject: Re: Unix is dead?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 11:26:42 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Chris Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote on Thu, 20 Apr 2000 03:54:48 -0400 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>I keep hearing "Unix is dead or will die soon."
>What can replace it?
>Linux?
>Linux is Unix.
I think many of the personages using that phrase are of the opinion
that Windows NT or Windows 2000 can kill Unix. I'm speaking very
generally here, of course. (Win2K is an improvement, I've heard,
but it's more of the same.)
However, it would also appear that Unix is about to reinvent itself,
if it hasn't already (Solaris, for example, can run on some very
impressive hardware -- 64 hot-swappable CPUs? Wow!), and Linux of
course is applying the squeeze at the low end (hard to beat free!).
I'm not sure I've seen a single "killer app" yet, but Linux is
apparently employing guerrilla tactics, in a manner of speaking
(sneaking? :-) ) -- that file server just might be running RedHat
or Debian.
There are also other alternatives. Tandem, as I understand it, has
a very interesting architecture, which basically has multiple
daemons running that can independently service a request; the
sender throws out a message and someone catches it, then tosses
a reply when finished. It's vaguely reminiscent of the Amiga
(which worked very well after some initial bugs), except for the
difference that nothing's shared -- which is actually an advantage
(nothing to fight over).
QNX is still out there.
Mach is out there, somewhere.
MacOS is out there.
>
>Chris Williams
>
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- still wondering what OS was running on the mothership
in "Independence Day" that could be infected with
an Earth computer virus :-)
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Ghost In The Machine)
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Windows2000 sale success..
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 11:29:46 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote on Thu, 20 Apr 2000 02:33:35 GMT <8dlq9v$3qo$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>In article <mh8L4.59287$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> "Otto" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> "J@M" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> > "Indeed, on Tuesday, Microsoft said it had sold 1.5 million
>> >copies of Windows 2000 in the two months since its launch,
>> >a pace four times that of its predecessor, Windows NT 4.0."
>>
>> Any data on how many servers out of the 1.5 million copies?
>>
>> >
>> > 0.5 million copies for the second month compared to 1 million
>> > in the first month...
>>
>> And the projected sale for this month is.......
>>
>> Otto
>>
>
>These are really abysmal sales figures if you consider the market
>presence of the predecessor operating system. For two whole months,
>you're looking at single digit growth, i.e. at this rate it will be more
>than ten years before the existing NT base finishes upgrading to W2K.
>
>Looks like there's a lot of cautious consumers out there. Gotta ask,
>how come they're being so cautious this time around?
My guess would be that things will pick up once Service Pack 1
is released. Hopefully, Linux can take advantage of the lull
between Win2k's initial release and SP1 to catch some more market
share before the Mighty Microsoft Marketing Machine (Behemoth
Version) gets into gear. :-)
>
>
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
>Before you buy.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- insert random misquote here
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (LFessen106)
Subject: Re: Unix is dead?
Date: 20 Apr 2000 11:45:07 GMT
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- still wondering what OS was running on the mothership
> in "Independence Day" that could be infected with
> an Earth computer virus :-)
Good movie, but didn't you catch the little Windows logo that came up before
the skull and crossbones? :-)
------------------------------
From: mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Unix is dead?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 07:59:45 -0400
Chris Williams wrote:
>
> I keep hearing "Unix is dead or will die soon."
> What can replace it?
> Linux?
> Linux is Unix.
>
> Chris Williams
Linux is not UNIX. One could say there is no such thing as UNIX anymore.
We do, however, have a good number of UNIX-like operating systems that
meet or come very close to the posix standard. *BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
FreeBSD are most likely the closest things to a real UNIX left.
However, semantics aside, the UNIX market, made up of many UNIX-like
operating systems, has undergone a rebirth or sorts. Many companies
tried switching from UNIX to NT, and found that NT was more expensive
and harder to administrate in large numbers, and are now switching back
to UNIX. Many more are waking up and realizing that the IT solution,
based on NT, is either not scaling well or not reliable enough. In these
companies, people are looking alternatives that are probably UNIX-like.
The Linux market has shed new light on UNIX, as people become more
accustom to the UNIX paradigms and as more applications are developed
for UNIX-like operating systems, the "but Windows runs everything"
argument will evaporate. Leaving the OS choice based on the technical
merits of the OS not marketing propaganda.
If one were to take a very honest look at all the real technical merits
of an OS, stability, scalability, source code longevity, performance,
administration tools, etc. A good UNIX-like operating systems will
always beat out NT or Win2K. Besides, NT and Win2K only run on one
platform, yes, Microsoft claims it is portable, but they have a proven
track record of pulling support if they find it is "unpopular." This
means if you decide on using NT or Win2K on anything but an Intel
system, you best hope others do as well or in a few years you will find
it is time to reimplement your whole architecture on new hardware, or
switch to a UNIX-like OS that will run on what you already have. Your
best bet is to use a UNIX. It was here before Windows, and it will be
here after Windows, and you won't have to re-write everything on the
next version.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 9x, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit http://www.mohawksoft.com
"We've got a blind date with destiny, and it looks like she ordered the
lobster"
------------------------------
From: Streamer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: LILO saves the day
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 07:06:24 -0500
Clockmeister wrote:
> <snip> In any case, Win95 couldn't possibly trash a drive to the point
> where it
> required a LLF, unless the drive itself had a problem to begin with.
Yes, Win 95 can, and did trash my Hard Disks on me twice at the LLF level.
None of the scandisks, Western Digital LLF formatting program, DOS fdisk, and
format/format /mbr available saved my Win95 from committing suicide by
trashing the drive. This was the main reason I went to Linux exclusively.
Two years later, The same machine with the same disk drives still work
flawlessly under Linux (even through 3 or 4 Linux distro upgrades....which
really weren't mandatory), and I have found that I didn't even miss the MS
products.
------------------------------
From: "Davorin Mestric" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000 or server software?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 14:08:14 +0200
it looks like you are the one living in a dream world. you are making a
classic error, assuming something is true just because you want it to be
true.
"Rob S. Wolfram" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Christopher Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >My lack of time and expertise in the relevant area, however, does. I
> >sincerely doubt I am alone in that.
>
> No, you're not alone. Personally I think that more than half the Linux
> users never look at the source code (see below).
>
> >> My common sense tells me it is impossible for all the thousands of
> >> independent reviewers worldwide to conspire together just to slip a
> >> backdoor in.
> >
> >Thousands ? I'd be surprised if the number of competent and
knowledgable
> >people "reviewing" the major open source applications numbered very
far into
> >the hundreds.
>
> Man, you're living in a dream world. Let's do some calculations, shall
> we? Let's estimate the number of current Linux users worldwide at
around
> 10 million (which is a pessimistic estimate). Let's estimate the
number
> of "competent knowledgeable reviewing" users at 0.1% (which is a
*very*
> pessimistic estimate),
>you would still have 10000 reviewers.
if you consider that each reviewer is looking at 0.01% of the code?
>If I look
> at all the people I know who use Linux, I think more than 3 out of 4
at
> least occasionally look at the source code.
is that what you consider reviewing code for security holes?
occasionally looking at the source code? looking for security holes
requires more than that.
> But maybe I know the wrong
> people. Maybe it is only one out of 10 Linux users that at least
> occasionally looks at the source, than that would constitute at least
1
> million people worlwide who do so.
so, people take a look at the source code, just to see how it looks.
they don't search for security problems.
there could be a really small number of people looking at the source,
seaching for security holes. first, this is a boring work, without a
guaranteed result at the end. even if somebody looks, there is no
guarantee that you really did not miss something. people don't like
that kind of work. second, everybody assumes that everyone else is
'reviewing' the code, so there is no need for him to do it. this leads
to the fact that nobody reviews anything!
davorin
------------------------------
From: mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Guess How Many Windows Crashes....
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 08:20:33 -0400
"Dan J. Smeski" wrote:
> Your hardware is shit, that's why it crashed. I bet Linux would crash the
> same way.
Actually, some hardware can crash Linux, yes. A bad IDE port will crash
Linux, same as SCSI, etc. Bad video hardware can because sometimes it
can lock up the I/O bus or confuse the Xserver (in which case you can
telnet into the machine and kill the Xserver). A printer, you are out
of your mind. A bad printer will simply not print in Linux. The whole
printing system is in user space running as a user level process. The
kernel portion simply does I/O to the printer I/O ports.
The printer subsystem in Windows (and NT/W2K) is a kernel level behemoth
that is just plain poorly designed. In earlier versions of NT, MS tried
to keep this code separate from the kernel, but couldn't. So in NT 4.0
they moved all the GUI code into kernel space, and left interfaces up in
user space. So if you have no problems running things like bitblt,
Linedda, etc. in kernel space, have fun with Windows. Printers crashing
the OS, could very well be one of the perks.
> CG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > We installed a new network printer yesterday. Guess how many times my
> > "user friendly" windows 98 machine crashed in the process of
> > installing the new printer driver.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 9x, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit http://www.mohawksoft.com
"We've got a blind date with destiny, and it looks like she ordered the
lobster"
------------------------------
From: mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
alt.activism,alt.politics.communism,rec.games.video.misc,alt.destroy.microsoft,alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk,alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
Subject: Re: Elian
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 08:32:21 -0400
Michiel Buddingh' wrote:
>
> Donovan Rebbechi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schreef in berichtnieuws
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 14:32:46 -0400, DGITC wrote:
> >
> > >That's not much of a problem, since the majority of Linux users are
> > >already Communist.
> >
> > Bullshit. Go back under your bridge, troll.
>
> Bullshit? Linux is one of the best examples of
> anarcho-communism the world has ever seen.
Except that we like to make money. Actually, I think it is interesting.
Linux is sort of a farm cooperative, or native american sort of thing.
We build stuff in cooperative groups as a community, but use the stuff
that we build for a capitalistic endeavor.
If you think about, look at the Amish, a group of Women together share
materials and help each other create quilts. The quilts can be given
away as gifts, or most likely sold for profit. The people share work for
their own common good. The whole community will build houses for each
other for free, but will charge each other for other services. It is not
purely communism, it is not purely capitalism either. It is a balance of
community good and personal prosperity. It is how mankind has been
successful for millions of years. Just because the last 25 years have
been the worst example of wide spread greed the race has ever known,
does not mean the rules of survival and long term prosperity have
changed completely.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 9x, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit http://www.mohawksoft.com
"We've got a blind date with destiny, and it looks like she ordered the
lobster"
------------------------------
From: mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Standard desktop...
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 09:03:54 -0400
Davorin Mestric wrote:
>
> no, you said your KDE settings could be used on other OS because it was
> open source. this has nothing to do with being open sourced or not.
>
> you can run Internet Explorer on other OSes, but it is not open source.
> what is your point again?
The point is that open source allows one to move tools and applications
to platforms which the copyright owners may not have the resources /
desire to to do. Then because the GNU license says you should be a nice
camper, and share, what ever changes were needed to move this
application or tool to the new platform become available for others.
You can run IE on three platforms. Windows, Macintosh, and SUN because
that is all MS will support. Putting IE aside, you can only run the
official Windows desktop on an official Windows machine. The KDE Desktop
has been ported to many platforms by many people.
Being able to run software on many platforms is not the purpose of open
source, no. Portability is, however, more often than not, one of the end
results.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 9x, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit http://www.mohawksoft.com
"We've got a blind date with destiny, and it looks like she ordered the
lobster"
------------------------------
From: "LGFR" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Standard desktop...
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 12:28:41 +0100
I think he meant that he could go from an Intel Linux box
to a Sun Solaris box (different hardware, different OS's)
and have _exactly_ the same desktop & apps available.
To put it another way, at my work I use a Solaris box
with my desktop set up to fit the way I work, but if I
need to use a PC (for Word or Excel docs given to me)
I have to undergo a "paradigm shift" in the operation of
the user interface. What is impled here is that it would
be nice to have a KDE-style UI running on Windows
with the ability to read settings from an NFS/Samba
drive. But that still leaves out lots of nice Open Source
apps which cannot be compiled to run under the
Windows OS, as it uses a NON-OPEN SOURCE API
(i.e. not X).
For what it's worth, I believe it's "horses for courses" in
the OS arena, if you've got money to burn & time to
waste and hair to lose then buy M$, otherwise you could
do worse than try Linux.
LGFR
Davorin Mestric <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:8dmbhk$175$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> no, you said your KDE settings could be used on other OS because it was
> open source. this has nothing to do with being open sourced or not.
>
> you can run Internet Explorer on other OSes, but it is not open source.
> what is your point again?
>
>
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Get real, I was talking about the KDE *USER INTERFACE* being able to
> run
> > on different *OPERATING SYSTEMS*. The Windows98 *USER INTERFACE* can
> > only run on the WINDOWS98 *OPERATING SYSTEM*. In fact the *NONE* of
> MS's
> > *USER INTERFACES* can run on ANY MS *OPERATING SYSTEM* other than the
> > SINGLE *OPERATING SYSTEM* it was designed for.
>
> not really true. internet explorer is turning into a full user
> interface.
>
>
> > KDE is a *USER INTERFACE* that CAN run on different *OPERATING
> SYSTEMS*
> > (I have it running on Linux and Solaris) from DIFFERENT COMPANIES (MS
> > can not even do this with it's own *OPERATING SYSTEMS*) making it
> > possible to give the SAME *USER INTERFACE* across DIFFERENT *OPERATING
> > SYSTEMS*.
>
> but this has nothing to do with it being open sourced. those things are
> orthogonal to each other.
>
>
>
>
>
>
------------------------------
From: "Mr. Rupert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Backdoors in Windows 2000?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 08:33:03 -0500
sandrews wrote:
>
> Gary Connors wrote:
> >
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rob S. Wolfram) writes:
> > > Thank you very much for this post, Drestin. Although your little game of
> > > reverse psychology is funny at best, it clearly shows the value of open
> > > source software. See, it is possible for Microsoft or another closed
> > > source vendor to place a backdoor into their program and there would be
> > > no way of knowing that until it is far too late. It would also be
> > > possible for Linux or another open source system to be backdoored, but
> > > this would be noticed *very* soon. As a matter of fact, this happened in
> > > real life. Someone cracked the win.tue.nl ftp site and replaced the tcp
> > > wrapper tarballs with trojaned versions that would send a mail with
> > > sensitive information to some hotmail account when used. Within hours
> > > this was all over Bugtraq and for all we know, nobody used the trojaned
> > > version unintentionally.
> >
> > Hypothetically speaking, when was the last time you or anyone you
> > personally know looded at the Linux Source?
>
> 5 minutes ago, I intend to have a look at the entire kernel code
>
> --
> TurboLinux Beta Tester
The WINTrolls just don't get it. The Linux source is of interest to others
besides 16 year old kids who dream of being the next super hacker. IBM, Corel,
the company I work for, and many other companies have reviewed and modified
the Linux source for their particular needs. The Linux source has many many
eyes upon it.
--
Mr Rupert
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Unix is dead?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 13:57:34 GMT
mlw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Chris Williams wrote:
> >
> > I keep hearing "Unix is dead or will die soon."
> > What can replace it?
> > Linux?
> > Linux is Unix.
> >
> > Chris Williams
>
> Linux is not UNIX. One could say there is no such thing as UNIX anymore.
> We do, however, have a good number of UNIX-like operating systems that
> meet or come very close to the posix standard. *BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
> FreeBSD are most likely the closest things to a real UNIX left.
>
Gee, you think Solaris, makes of Solaris Unix know that?
--
Da Katt
[This space for rent]
------------------------------
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