Linux-Advocacy Digest #459
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459, Volume #34 Sat, 12 May 01 20:13:04 EDT Contents: Re: Richard Stallman what a tosser, and lies about free software (Lee Hollaar) Re: How to hack with a crash, another Microsoft feature (Chronos Tachyon) Re: linux too slow to emulate Microsoft (Erik Funkenbusch) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (The Ghost In The Machine) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (JS PL) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (JS PL) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Ayende Rahien) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Ayende Rahien) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Ayende Rahien) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Ayende Rahien) Re: W2K/IIS proves itself over Linux/Tux (Joseph T. Adams) Re: MS should sue the pants off linux-mandrake (was: Re: Winvocates confuse me - d'oh!) (Roy Culley) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Roy Culley) Re: Justice Department LOVES Microsoft! (Roy Culley) Re: Linux is paralyzed before it even starts (Roy Culley) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lee Hollaar) Crossposted-To: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy Subject: Re: Richard Stallman what a tosser, and lies about free software Date: 12 May 2001 22:56:35 GMT In article [EMAIL PROTECTED] Austin Ziegler [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In a strict sense, no, copyright doesn't cover use. I can *use* a book any way I like, as long as I've legally obtained a copy of that book. Not really. Except in certain special circumstances, you can't do a public reading of the book. And you can't create a new work based on the book, which sort of gets us back to the start of this discussion. -- From: Chronos Tachyon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: How to hack with a crash, another Microsoft feature Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 22:56:30 GMT On Sat 12 May 2001 05:30, Erik Funkenbusch wrote: T. Max Devlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message [Snip] You show the same degree of competency in quantum physics as you do cryptography, Erik. What gave you the impression that anyone is 'debating' whether or not nuclear decay is random? It seems to me to be a rather fundamentally secure aspect of physics that this is, in fact, the very definition of 'random', at least as close as we can possibly get in the real world. As far as I know, in fact, it is truly random, and other than Einstein's intuition (long since proven false) that God does not play dice almost a century ago, nobody seriously questions this. What is debated is that we cannot know if it is truly random or not. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle shows that the mere observation of the particle effects its state, and thus its randomness. Even if the decay were completely random, there mere act of measuring it would make it non-random. Einstein tried to prove the HUP wrong with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox, but it's still very hotly debated. Your problem max, is that you are only willing to accept what you believe to be true. The EPR paradox was essentially solved in the 1960's, when Bell's Inequality was hypothesized as a way to prove the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (CI/QM, spooky action at a distance) or Einstein's local hidden variable theory (HV/QM). The results came out strongly in favor of CI/QM, even after much peer review and many attempts to repeat the experiment. There is still some minor debate about methodology, mostly by eccentrics but occasionally by serious phyicists, but the results are widely accepted as canon. Since all post-Bell physics pretty much assumes that CI/QM is true, especially quantum computing, the evidence is in fact very strong that HV/QM is incorrect. Whenever you hear anyone talking about superposition or collapsing quantum eigenstates, they are talking about CI/QM, which would be right out the window with counting the angels dancing on a pinhead if HV/QM were actually correct. The fact that we can discuss such things, propose experiments, then get meaningful and correct results from them is strong evidence indeed that CI/QM is, if not the final truth, then at least a special case. -- Chronos Tachyon Guardian of Eristic Paraphernalia Gatekeeper of the Region of Thud [Reply instructions: My real domain is echo address | cut -d. -f6,7] -- From: Erik Funkenbusch [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: linux too slow to emulate Microsoft Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 18:10:38 -0500 Charles Lyttle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... Erik Funkenbusch wrote: Charles Lyttle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... COM was a great boon for developers, able to share compiled bits of code written in different languages, and allowing apps to communicate with each other easily. On linux, CORBA has barely taken off
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459, Volume #31 Sun, 14 Jan 01 17:13:08 EST
Contents:
Re: Why Linux won't get far in Luxembourg's comapanies. ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux?
Re: Red hat becoming illegal? (Mig)
Re: you dumb. and lazy.
Re: The Server Saga ("Joseph T. Adams")
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux? (Andy Newman)
Re: A salutary lesson about open source (Mig)
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux? ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux? ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: Linux is INFERIOR to Windows (Charlie Ebert)
Re: Linux is INFERIOR to Windows (Charlie Ebert)
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux? ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: OS-X GUI on Linux? ("Erik Funkenbusch")
Re: Linux Mandrake 7.2 and the banana peel (Charlie Ebert)
Re: Linux Mandrake 7.2 and the banana peel (Charlie Ebert)
Re: Linux 2.4 Major Advance ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: Linux is easier to install than windows ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: A salutary lesson about open source ("Bobby D. Bryant")
Re: Didn't the Gartner group say don't move to W2K straight away ("Bobby D. Bryant")
From: "Erik Funkenbusch" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Why Linux won't get far in Luxembourg's comapanies.
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 15:16:48 -0600
"Bartek Kostrzewa" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
news:3a620d03$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
My friend's father has a small company, he asked me to give him a proposal
for a file server (serving 8 computers with 500MB/day/PC), so I built a
server for 1500$ with SCSI, AMD Duron 750, 256 MB of RAM and a 100 Mbit
NIC,
of course, I told him I'd install Linux and set up SAMBA for file serving
(the company is 100% M$ based). When he heard the price he said: "What?
That's far too cheap! I need to spend at least 7500$ on it, so I can
reduce
my tax charges at the end of the year!" Now he bought a Win2k Server based
Compaq Proline server powered by an 933Mhz PIII, 256MB of RDRAM and 60GB
RAID-10 (4 30GB 10K rpm SCSI harddrives in RAID mode, stripped and imaged
together) and that for 8 computer low-profile file-sharing.
This is not all that different from the US, except we have other issues as
well. Many companies strive to have 0 profit, so they pay no (or very
little) corporate tax, since corporate tax in most states is quite high. On
top of that, lots of larger companies give their departments budgets. If
they don't spend all their budget, they reduce their budget next year, which
encourages departments to spend every dime they have whether they need it or
not.
--
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ()
Subject: Re: OS-X GUI on Linux?
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 21:09:25 -
On 14 Jan 2001 21:04:49 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Sat, 13 Jan 2001 20:18:21 -0600, Erik Funkenbusch [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"mlw" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
Here is a question for all us Linux people.
If Apple made the OS-X GUI GPL, and worked with RedHat, S.u.S.E, and
others to get it installable on various linux distributions, would you
consider it?
The problem is that X is so entrenched in Linux that it would be damn near
The bulk of what constitues Apple NeXTstep is already
running on top of X courtesy of GNU and has been for
awhile now.
The bulk of what constituted NeXTStep was display postscript, and is not
running on linux at all.
...DPS has been running under Linux/GNU for at least 2 years.
--
Regarding Copyleft:
There are more of "US" than there are of "YOU", so I don't
really give a damn if you're mad that the L/GPL makes it
harder for you to be a robber baron.
|||
/ | \
--
From: Mig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To:
alt.destroy.microsoft,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Red hat becoming illegal?
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 22:07:59 +0100
Chad Myers wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:3rns39.13o.ln@gd2zzx...
In article usj86.2348$[EMAIL PROTECTED],
"Chad Myers" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
"Chad Myers" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
news:Rrj86.2343$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
We tried it on Linux, but it performed less than half as well as the
Solaris and Windows 2000 implementations.
Why do I feel this is just a downright lie?
Bottom Line:
Linux isn't enterprise ready. It may do static web serving well (not
the best, but well and cheap) but it doesn't cut it for doing big-boy
tasks.
Strewth, are we living on the same planet? Linux has proven that it is
enterpri
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459, Volume #30 Mon, 27 Nov 00 00:13:02 EST
Contents:
Re: Whistler review. ("Aaron R. Kulkis")
Re: Whistler review. ("Aaron R. Kulkis")
Re: Whistler review. ("Aaron R. Kulkis")
Re: Whistler review. ("Bennetts family")
Re: C++ -- Our Industry... ("Aaron R. Kulkis")
From: "Aaron R. Kulkis" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Whistler review.
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 23:35:09 -0500
Ayende Rahien wrote:
I've finally gotten whistler (pro, 2296, beta 1), and I'm *liking* it.
For those of you who doesn't know what this is, whistler is an the new OS
(the one that will inherit both win2k win ME) from Microsoft, destined to
finally eliminated the 9x line.
Here is my biased review.
I'm going to limit myself to comments about the new GUI and features of the
OS, as this a Beta1, it's not yet appropriate to talk about performace and
stability yet.
Starting with the install, you stick the cd in the drive, set the BIOS to
boot from the CD, and you are done.
Strangely enough, I have the system up and running without returning to the
BIOS to change the settings, and it's still working.
The installation itself is pretty similar to Windows 2000, blue screen in
text mode, and afterward the familiar wizard style.
The main difference is that it's now uses the "simpler start menu" as a
background.
Installation took little longer than an hour, most of the time to format a
NTFS HD.
After the text mode, which require some little knowledge in the computer's
HD, the installer required very little input from the user, and did all the
configuration on its on.
The computer is win2k HCLed, btw.
As a note:
For some reason, it thinks that I've multiply monitors, likely because I've
a TV-Out card. This doesn't seem to cause any problems whatsoever, so I
don't think I would bother to fiddle with it in the near future.
The new startup screen is cool, but I like the win2k one better, the win2k
one provide some (limited, but real) information on how much progress the OS
had in loading itself.
Whistler's startup screen provide no such information, in that, it's very
much like the win9x startup screens.
The system finished loading, and you get a pretty wizard like interface
which explained you how to use the computer (can't report much about this, I
quited this part when it started explaining how to you the mouse.), ask you
whatever you want to register at Microsoft.com, and help you setup a dial up
account.
Then you create users, You can create up to six users in this screen.
I don't like this way very much, all the accounts you create this way are
admins, with no passwords set on them, and you get *no* warning about this.
The user interface itself, for that matter, isn't very good comparing to NT
or 2000.
You can enter a user's name, and a picture, if you like, but that is about
it.
Accounts are created without passwords by default, another thing I don't
like.
And when you login, all the accounts on the computer are presented to you,
which is another mistake.
I can see the reasons behind this, of course, as the whistler I'm using is
supposed to go to home users, where you rarely need such security measures,
and there are probably ways to fix those things, which I'm currently
clueless about.
The biggest problem I've with this (all accounts being displayed) can
apperantly turned off quite easily (I've not tested it yet, though)
Strangely enough, by default, the desktop don't display the "My Computer"
and "My Documents" icon folders.
With those icons being probably the most important in handling windows, I'm
quite sure it's a bug.
Another bug I found is in the control panelmousepointer options, where the
"Show location" option doesn't warp, so the "y." (at least I assume that it
what it's supposed to be) cannot be seen.
The icons problem was fixed by right clicking the desktop, active
desktopcustomise my desktop, btw.
I also recommend to use the "Proffessional" image as background to the
desktop, totally cool.
The entire GUI is cool, for that matter.
It feel like a game or a flash applet.
The login screen, for example, is in pastel colors, and you've a list of
users, with pictures near each name, and when your mouse is over a username,
all the other usernames fade out.
If you click a username, and it has no password, it moved to the center of
the upper half of the screen, and it would tell you what it's doing (3 - 4
seconds process) while it loads your settings.
If it has a password, it opens (open like a drawer, really cool) a box that
ask you to enter the password.
On NT 2000, you needed a *long* password to feel the p
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459, Volume #29Wed, 4 Oct 00 22:13:06 EDT
Contents:
Re: Space Shuttle uses Windows software almost exclusively (Charlie Ebert)
Re: The real issue (Steve Mading)
Re: Migration -- NT costing please :-) ("Adam Warner")
Re: Space Shuttle uses Windows software almost exclusively ("Chad Myers")
Re: What kind of WinTroll Idiot are you anyway? ("Chad Myers")
Re: Linux - - Troll (Dave Ratcliffe)
Re: Linux and Free Internet? (Bob Hauck)
Re: Migration -- NT costing please :-) ("Chad Myers")
Re: RAID on Win2k Pro ("Adam Warner")
From: Charlie Ebert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Space Shuttle uses Windows software almost exclusively
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 01:04:47 GMT
Chad Myers wrote:
I said almost because their MIGHT be one or two
pieces of software that weren't for Windows, but
I couldn't find 'em.
http://www.spaceref.com/shuttle/computer/spoc/
(click on a few of the links/screenshots on the left)
They even use Windows (NT apparently) to control
life-support systems including warning and
monitoring systems:
http://www.spaceref.com/shuttle/computer/spoc/cautwarn.html
Here's an example of one of the three network diagrams
they have for the space shuttle and space station:
http://www.spaceref.com/shuttle/computer/106.LAN.nominal.html
At least a few of them are windows, but, judging by the
software it says the no-named-OS computers are running,
it appears they are Windows as well.
No mention of Linux, MacOS, or *laf* OS/2
Guess they actually want some productivity. They also
trust their lives to it because they know that when it's
properly set up, NT can be the most stable OS available
(2nd only to Win2k, of course).
-Chad
That being also the one which went poof.
The ones which went into Mars at 62 degree angles were W2k equipped.
Snikker.
Ah, Story uses Linux on his laptop. He took it with him on every
flight
as they needed to do some work.
Love
Charlie
--
From: Steve Mading [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: The real issue
Date: 5 Oct 2000 01:06:41 GMT
Kolbjørn S. Brønnick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
: Hi all!
: I just wanted to say that I am a bit fed up with some of the advocacy for
: Linux that I have seen here. People who say that Netscape haven't crashed
: at all, people who claim Linux is a good desktop OS, compared to W2K.
This depends largely on how you use Netscape. Netscape on Linux is
very crash-prone when visiting certain sites using Java, but not
at all if you have Java turned off. I used to crash Netscape about
once a day. Then I adopted a policy of leaving Java support turned
off until I hit a site where I knew I needed it, and turning it on
just while visiting that site only. That got rid of a lot of the
silly little "let's use an applet to make a stupid animation" stuff,
and consequently, the crash-prone java code that was behind it all.
I consider this a failing of Netscape's Linux support rather than a
failing of Linux itself, since Linux has several standalone java
implementations that work fine - its only the one built into Netscape
that seems so buggy. Now that I've adopted this policy, I haven't
crashed Netscape once in 6 months. So where am I going with this?
Simple: People who say "Netscape never crashes" might just happen to
be people who don't visit sites with Java applets, and so as far as
they know, it doesn't crash. They might not be liars, like you claim.
(Oh, and incedentally, the crashes from Java sites don't always happen
right away. Sometimes they just start a neverending loop in a thread
hidden away behind the scenes that doesn't go away. This sometimes
doesn't cause a crash until much later in the browsing session, after
the offending site is long forgotten. That's why it took me a very
long time to trace down the cause of it. The cause and the effect
were sometimes separated by more than 10 minutes of realtime.)
: These are not the important issues. It's obvious to me that Windows has the
: best desktop environment, the best applications and so-on.
: The important issues are: do we want to use proprietary office suites with
: proprietary unpublished file-formats? Do we want to use proprietary
: development languages and tools? Or, do we want free exchange of
: information and freedom from the immoral mafia that is Microsoft?
That's only an important issue to some. I'm not in a field where I
ever need to bother with office type applications, so I'm rather
ambivilent on that issue (until some moron sends me something in
Word format even though it's nothing more than dumb text with
paragraphs, and so could have been done in ascii without any loss of
formatting, then it becomes an issue.)
---
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459
Linux-Advocacy Digest #459, Volume #28 Thu, 17 Aug 00 19:13:07 EDT Contents: Re: Windows stability: Alternate shells? (R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard )) Open source: an idea whose time has come (phil hunt) From: R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard ) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Windows stability: Alternate shells? Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 22:23:32 GMT In article XDhl5.5147$[EMAIL PROTECTED], "Erik Funkenbusch" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard )" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:8n2uj7$r4$[EMAIL PROTECTED]... ATT decided to use UNIX to control it's switching systems. Since they made this decision prior to divestiture, all of the Baby Bells were dependent on UNIX too. What would happen if your company's telephone system stopped working for an hour or two? How about if an entire city came "unplugged"? You do realize that ATT and the bells have always used redundancy. switches fail, but they've always had extensive cutovers and the ability to re-route around failures. Yes. I was a developer on one of the first computerized Directory Assistance systems to go nationwide. We had developed the original using PDP-11s and a hacked up version of RT-11, with one of the very first clustered systems. We ran 8 PDP-11/44 processors per cluster, connected to up to 32 group controllers, each group controller supported up to 24 8085/8088 processors and up 20 terminal cluster controllers. Each cluster controller served up to 20 terminals. Each data volume was redundantly stored on 3 drives, more for better performance. Keep in mind that a PDP-11/44 was about as fast and had about as much memory as a PC/XT. With our additional support processors, each SCU (pdp-11 with supporting 8008 group controller and 4004 drive controller (essentially a bridge between ESDI and something like SCSI) we could get almost as much power as a PC/AT. These systems had down-times of 15 minutes/year or 3 parts/million. When we won the 2ADA bid, (just before devistature) we began moving the whole thing to UNIX. Furthermore, we ended up deploying it at British Telecomm. It was amazing. The entire UNIX development took less time than a single upgrade revision (minor structure changes) to the legacy system. What made the job so much easier was that we didn't have to reinvent the wheel to do simple things like queue jobs to the printer (lpr), generate formatted reports (tbl | nroff), route messages (ip), connect to remote computers (tcp), and create databases (awk, sed, grep). We didn't even have to create relational databases (split, join). And when we did have a huge table we didn't have to create an ISAM (dbm). Keep in mind that this in 1983, about 7 years before the first SQL databases appeared for UNIX. The culture of UNIX was "It will fail, what will you do?". As a result, code was much more carefully tested, reliable code was packaged into self-contained units that could be linked together without risk of breaking the components. UNIX developers also came up with things like RAID, Clustering, and hot-standby or active-redundant systems that could cutover in a matter of milliseconds. RAID was developed as a means of producing faster, more inexpensive disk subsystems. One of my supervisors, Anita Freeman, was on the SCSI draft committee when the SASI standard was being formalized to the ANSII SCSI standard. Almost from the very beginning, Anita had the goal of supporting redundancy within SCSI. Anita had worked on the projects decribed above. She knew that we needed the ability to quickly update multiple drives concurrently. The concept of RAID was implemented in ESDI and SASI long before the formal buzzword/acronym evolved for the SCSI version. When they first announced RAID-1 my CCI colegues chuckled and said "Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from" - of course, they were doing "RAID" back in 1978. Of course, back in those days, it was RAED - Redundant Array of Expensive Drives. Redundancy was added because it made sense, but was not the primary motivation. RAID-0 reduced the latency and fetch time for large files. RAID-1 was specifically designed for high performance, high availability databases. RAID-5 became popular because you could get more storage into fewer drives - and this was only practical when you kept the drives pretty much synchronized (since you had to read all stripes each time data was written to create the ECC drive. Eventually, UNIX even found it's way into things like Air Traffic Control, Military tactical systems, and even strategic systems like Norad and SAC. Although these systems were primarily mainframe based until recent years. Mainframe - as in OS/370? Most of the tactical and strategic systems were implemented on supercomputers using either ADA or a combination of ADA
