“Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic” – Clarke’s Third Law
One of the magical things I love about thin client/server setups is that the IT people can watch fewer systems to judge the health of the whole system, preventing information overload. Dave Richards, head guy at Largo, FL, IT system notes that:
“The end user experience is improving too because now we know about issues before they are even noticed.”
I saw that on systems with just a few servers and more than 100 clients. His system is many times more expensive with several times more clients than mine had but the result is the same. One guy using the tools of GNU/Linux can manage a whole system better than with that other OS.
Further, the efficiency of the whole system is amazing. Expand the image in the article and you will see load averages greater than 1.0. Still users get improved performance on his $40K servers compared to thick clients not sharing resources. Essentially Dave can make the servers run under a heavy load instead of having the whole system idling to try to be responsive to users. That comes from using a true multi-user OS designed for the purpose. That other OS is descended from a single-user cripple-ware and is further burdened by the megalomaniacs at M$ trying to control the world instead of empowering users to control their hardware.
see Dave Richards – City of Largo Work Blog: Thin Clients Updated, Support Portal New Features.
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I’ve been following Dave for years; putting 200 some users on one server, an expensive server at that, is very compelling to say the least. He even wrote a small book http://davelargo.blogspot.com/2010/07/word-about-my-book.html
I walked into a SMB few months ago, and they had four terminal servers running Win2008, with 10 people logged on one server it was “OK”, anymore then that and it slowed wayyyyy down.
I wrote the owner a cordial business letter, listing links to a few items, Daves blog being one and mentioned to call me if there was interest. They were skeptical about Linux, but I setup a trial machine at no cost for one-year and they were blown away on how much faster it was then Windows.
What people do not understand Linux basically runs the entire Internet, runs all of the biggest stock exchanges, most of the biggest bank back ends, most of the largest insurance companies back ends. That’s a multi-trillion dollar target. Yet, Linux keeps on moving data non-stop.
Once you expand to computer systems beyond the Desktop, Windows fades rapidly into the background or just plain disappears. Scale up or down, and you leave the Windows world. Linux though is always there.
Windows is now, always has been, and always will be insecure.
Amen, dougman. I reviewed that book for Free Software Magazine. While the software and hardware has evolved since then, the book still is valuable for the organization of a complete system, how to deal with resistance to change and some observations about how that other OS crimps style.
There’s nothing like side-by-side comparisons to open peoples eyes and minds. I have been blessed to work in schools where there were stacks of PCs sitting idle because they were “too slow” with that other OS but rocked as thin clients of a decent GNU/Linux terminal server.
I walked into a SMB few months ago, and they had four terminal servers running Win2008, with 10 people logged on one server it was “OK”, anymore then that and it slowed wayyyyy down.
Let me get this straight: a SMB XXXXs up its Windows servers. And you make a case of “Windows sucks, Linux rocks” out of it. I’ve been to many SMB, and one defining characteristic for many of these was that they either had no dedicated system administrator at all, with a “normal” employee taking over this role, or they had a system administrator that wasn’t very competent. Kind of like you, dougman.
Chris Weig wrote, “I’ve been to many SMB, and one defining characteristic for many of these was that they either had no dedicated system administrator at all, with a “normal” employee taking over this role, or they had a system administrator that wasn’t very competent.”, blaming the users again… Frequently a competent individual will set up a system and leave it running. That other OS always slows down with usage in my experience unless it’s off the network or not getting updates.
I’ve seen many examples where a system struggling to please a single user with XP could please a dozen users with the same machine running GNU/Linux. It’s a simple exercise for students. Take two identical systems running XP and verify they operate. Install GNU/Linux on one and compare performance: boot-time, time to a usable desktop (that’s a laugh, eh?), time to open a window to a big application like FireFox or LibreOffice. GNU/Linux wins most times. Sometimes I see an XP machine get to the login screen about the same time as GNU/Linux but everything else is a factor of two or three slower with XP than GNU/Linux. In my first experience with LTSP, 30 students logged into a machine with 1.5gB RAM running GNU/Linux and had superior performance to their current machines running that other OS. That was about 50MB RAM per student and they could browse and word-process. LibreOffice and FireFox are more bloated now but so is that other OS. While a normal human like my wife can be quite happy with GNU/Linux in 512 MB that other OS needs much more to be happy. That means way more seeks to make things happen.
blaming the users again…
You blame the users every day on your blog, Mr. Pogson, you blame them for not seeing the light and switching to Linux. Whereas I didn’t blame the users. Because system administrators aren’t users in your sense of the word.
My assertion stands: many “system administrators” at SMB are not competent enough to call themselves that. I’ve seen many a mess at SMB, where sometimes you could only ask yourself where they got these “administrators” from.
Chris Weig wrote:
“My assertion stands: many “system administrators” at SMB are not competent enough to call themselves that.”
Yet you never stop to ask yourself why it is that so many times it’s the Windows administrator that is found to be less than adequate and not the Linux one.
Yet you never stop to ask yourself why it is that so many times it’s the Windows administrator that is found to be less than adequate and not the Linux one.
That’s because you assume that I’m only speaking about Windows administrators. With Linux it’s just as bad or worse, as I’ve found many Linux administrators who have no real skills but were simply hired because they “knew” Linux — in a rather hobbyist way.
But that was actually totally besides the point, Mr. kozmcrae, wasn’t it? Nothing has changed. If your solution to an obviously badly configured Windows is putting Linux on it like Mr. dougman… go figure.
Well, at least Mr. dougman has spared them selling antivirus snake oil.
“I’ve been to many SMB, and one defining characteristic for many of these was that they either had no dedicated system administrator at all, with a “normal” employee taking over this role, or they had a system administrator that wasn’t very competent.”
For most businesses its the first….and when there is the inevitable problems then some Windows know it all ahole….like you…..comes along and sneers at what the employee has managed to do all on their own trying to keep a flaky Windows based network afloat. Then some Windows know it all ahole…..like you uses the issues to sell yet more expensive Windows based crap to the business that will supposedly cure all the problems, sets it up, and then leaves….until the next cycle starts.
Windows requires far too much babysitting. Since few small businesses can afford some know it all ahole to hang around 24/7 its inevitable an employee gets designated to try and cope with it. While it would help to have some know it all Windows sysadmin ahole to hang around 24/7 the real point is most small businesses can’t afford that and Linux requires less babysitting in the first place.
Windows requires far too much babysitting…..Agreed.
lpbbear, describes the IT situation perfectly. Owners get mad, when they cannot conduct business, their wives/husbands get upset when they do not come home at a normal hour, spending extra money for employee overtime, and wasting money on “worthless” M$ support, business owners words NOT mine.
A long time ago, I was making decent money on the weekends installing Compaq Proliant servers using Redhat Linux for file servers. Once the Samba shares were created, and the clients logged onto the shares, they was nothing more for me to do, 99.9% of the machines ran for 3-5 years 24/7 without a single hiccup.
Chris Weig wrote:
“With Linux it’s just as bad or worse, as I’ve found many Linux administrators who have no real skills but were simply hired because they “knew” Linux — in a rather hobbyist way.”
Oh really? Seems rather convenient how you’ve “found many Linux administrators”.
Once the Samba shares were created, and the clients logged onto the shares, they was nothing more for me to do
Oh, wow… Watch out – Colombus of IT has discovered Samba! Sooner he’ll move on to discovering setting up NT4 domains with it. There is simply no stopping of this maverick, is it?
Look – a few months ago I set up a printer share at my old man’s place on his Windows 7 HP install so I could print stuff from my laptop when staying there. Did it work? Of course it did! In fact, I was the one who set up his machine in the first place. Babysit? Slowing down? What the eff are you talking about?
If you don’t know how to handle something properly, give it to someone else. Don’t try and pretend to be an expert and blame your lack of competence on things you are not familiar with (like Sharepoint, to name an example). In fact, I would be furious if someone gave me a proposal involving a couple of freebies duct-taped together as a corporate solution. No one cares if you are running OpenLDAP or MySQL for your little amateur projects (which I have a couple running at home), but when you are dealing with someone paying for your work, there is simply no excuse to give them the Scotch-tape-and-spit solution you have proudly presented in your other comment. Do you honestly expect a company can stay with the same moldy servers with the same unscalable freebies when it grows from 25 employees to 100? Sure, you have already walked away to sunset with the money in your pocket, but what about the ones having to pick up the pieces for you? Have you thought about that?
Re: Look – a few months ago…
LOL, I was installing Compaqs in the late 90′s
Regarding, pretending to be an ‘expert’, I recommend you read Malcolm Gladwel’s book, “Outliers” as he boils it down for one to achieve the mark of expert, one needs to reach 10-years or 10,000 hours of continual effort, I have surpassed both.
Your silly, you would be furious, by wanting to spend MORE money? Obviously you do not work in the business realm or have no conception how a business operates. If the CEO/CFO is presented with proposal at half-cost, against the other vendors and one that comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which one would do you think they would bite at?
The aforementioned Compaq servers scaled nicely, I even taught a few people how to log in remotely using SSH and add new accounts. Simple enough, now that I think about it, I seem to recall one site adding 185 usernames, AFTER I deployed the servers.
Re: moldy servers. Yeck, yes servers that have been running 24/7 for years get dusty, I totally hate that and offer a yearly or monthly maintenance service fee for such things.
Who picks up pieces after me? Uhhh.. no one, as there is none to be picked up. Once I obtain a customer they are mine for life, as I stand-by my work and truth be told, Linux scales better then Windows any day.
Question: Where is your website? Do you even work in the IT field? Do you maintain a blog? I do, and maintain a small IT service hobby business that pays me VERY well. My only competitors are small shops and the GEEK squad, that push M$ exclusively.
I do not hide behind an anonymous name and post rants on how this or that cannot be done, or disagree with an article with no factual information. Its always funny how the zealots love to hide behind the keyboard.
Brillo that is the thing the right selections of FOSS do scale and are well tested scaled.
Mysql itself has some scaling limitations this is not a problem. MariaDB scale very well syntax and network compatible with Mysql. So you code base does not need to be altered.
Mysql trouble detectable around 300-400 staff size can become problem around a 1000 to 2000 in fact. 100 you not going to notice the difference. Too small to cause any form of problem. Express edition of SQL Server yes 100 you will see a problem.
Samba does not always mean NT 4 domains. Samba file servers sitting on cluster file-system can cut vpn traffic way down. Reason each samba file server in the cluster to the clients appears to be the same machine. Result is only traffic to sync file-systems and locks between sites travel over the vpn. This also provides multi site data redundancy.
Brillo samba used correctly is nothing to joke about. As a bridge from a cluster file system to windows. A cluster file system that can even be recording file changes to allow rollback. Other usage is a vpn traffic reduction.
Of course you normally combined on that box openchange to reduce the amount of noise Outlook makes talking to Exchange over vpn links. (even funnier locally this can speed up Exchange and make users happier since openchange takes care of all the stupid requests outlook does making outlook be more responsive)
Interesting enough the cluster file-systems scale side ways is supported by mysql and MariaDB. So for web-services you can join the Apache httpd servers into a cluster as well.
All this clustering has one major universal thing. All clients at each location only talk to there local server/servers. After that servers talk to servers. So keeping traffic that has to go between locations by vpn and other means to a min.
Of course this does not mean you are blocked from having ADS servers. Sharepoint does not scale sideways very well at all and is expensive to take sideways.
Alfresco, Mediawiki and many other open source solutions scale sideways very well and very cost effectively. http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Cluster_Configuration_V2.1.3_and_Later
Brillo when you are dealing with multi site setups FOSS can be impressively good particularly if you remember the fact a cluster does not have to be in the same building. This provides the system with massive tolerance to damage.
I would class a lot of Windows solutions are duct tape solutions since they have done stupid things like deploying solo servers with no redundancy. There are a lot of Linux solutions I call a joke of the same reason. You have so many perfect tools in Linux for going cluster then you don’t use them so why did you use Linux in the first place? Really clustering is what Linux is good at play to the strength of the OS you are using.
Brillo in my mediawiki or alfresco deployments you can take a complete site out without any lose in data. Because the data is replicated to other sites.
Same with any data that is on the samba exposed file-shares since that backs onto a cluster file system. A complete server failure is nothing to worry about. This is why people like me can run servers to failure. Since failure is not a problem.
I want samba 4 so I can use what openchange can fully do so I can start using Cyrus IMAP as my primary email server storage. Again cluster replication multi site. Lets not have single points of failure.
This is also why I see Exchange as expensive. I always want to deploy a min of 2.
Good part is the servers can be fully interchangeable if you do it right.
I recommend you read Malcolm Gladwel’s book, “Outliers” as he boils it down for one to achieve the mark of expert, one needs to reach 10-years or 10,000 hours of continual effort, I have surpassed both.
Here’s a reality check – a baboon playing with its own feces all day doesn’t make it a sculptor. It’s just means it’s a baboon who likes playing with its own filth. Quote all the self-help books all you want but one thing that won’t make you is an expert. If you want to be one, get educated on the subject matter. No “buts” – education is the only proper way to go about this. There is no alternative.
Your silly, you would be furious, by wanting to spend MORE money?
Let’s do the math here.
1) No online backup means you have to take your server offline every time for a routine backup. A disaster does not occur on schedule and this means you will need have to take the risk with less frequent backups. What do you think is likely going to lose when disasters strike?
2) No instant failover means downtime when something happens to your server. A cold backup server is not always reliable (since it’s usually put aside unused) so how much productivity do you think people are going to lose as a result?
3) No support service means when something’s not working right with the software there is no one familiar with the design of it to assist in any way during the situation.
4) No scalabiliy means you can’t trivially expand on your existing infrastructures. What do you think that will translate to in return?
Do you seriously think your client is going to save anything at the end of the day here? Or revel in the mushy, warm feeling that they are going all FOSS? You are out of your depth and your mind here, I am afraid.
If the CEO/CFO is presented with proposal at half-cost, against the other vendors and one that comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which one would do you think they would bite at?
Again, you admit that your client backtracked. That to me is a good enough indication that they have a second thought about your proposal.
As ch plainly puts it, it’s dirt cheap to replace everything with a matchbox and a paperclip, but will that benefit the client at the end of day? A hardware problem is not going to gurantee to pop up in 90 days, and your client is not going to quadriply expand their business within that time frame, either. After-midnight infomercials guarantee 30-day refund policies for their useless bits of gym equipment as well, but are you going to think that you will absolutely to lose any significant weight in just 30 days? Of course not.
All that initial saving means nothing. All that XYZ-day refund promise means nothing. If you don’t have your plan aligned with business growth and disaster management strategies, everything is bunk.
You might as well just get yourself a baboon and watch as it plays with its own feces.
Where is your website?
Excuse me? Website? Blog? What does that have to do with anything, sweetie?
“Hey, I am running a business here because I sit on my backside and blog all day!” Is that what you are trying to tell me?
Unlike you, I have education, I know people in the industry, and it’s pretty easy for me to dig up things that I am not familiar with. 10k hours of excrement-playing be damned.
What have you got on your side, eh?
Oh really? Seems rather convenient how you’ve “found many Linux administrators”.
ROFL. Taken seriously, that statement would basically deny that Linux has arrived in SMB — as you always claim it has. Chuckle.
Really, don’t shoot the messenger. It’s hardly my fault that the Linux system administrators at many SMB I (note: I) have worked with over the years are incompetent. For what it’s worth, the exact type of person I mean is this one: “Have set up LAMP, am Linux administrator”. You wouldn’t believe how many of those are out there. It takes a fool like you, kozmcrae, to believe that the average Linux administrator is somehow better because it’s about Linux.
Chris Weig wrote that he does not believe “the average Linux administrator is somehow better because it’s about Linux”.
Given equal competency, an administrator can definitely do more with GNU/Linux than with that other OS because the source code is open and because of package managers and huge software repositories. To argue otherwise is silly. A system administrator of that other OS cannot just set up a database in minutes because he has to consider funding, budgets and restrictions in the EULA.
e.g. I once worked in a place that had no installation media for that other OS and I had no evidence of proper licensing except the “certificate of authenticity”. On top of that I had a mix of “pro” and “home” OEM licences. That was a paralysing burden. I switched to GNU/Linux and I was legally and technically able to do anything within the capability of Debian GNU/Linux because the licence was supplied with the software and it was clear I could run, copy, modify and examine the software as needed, not as allowed. Further, a single disc image covered all four types of machine in the building whereas XP needed four images.
oiaohm wrote, “samba used correctly is nothing to joke about. As a bridge from a cluster file system to windows. A cluster file system that can even be recording file changes to allow rollback. Other usage is a vpn traffic reduction.”
In my experience, Samba is burdened by combining unnecessarily the disparate concepts of file and print sharing. I find it much more efficient to let CUPS do what it does best and NFS or SSHFS do what they do best. I believe modular technology makes sense. Samba does not. As soon as you get that other OS out of the picture the complexity of IT drops a lot and performance and reliability increase. Mix in inActive Directory stuff and different standards per release of that other OS and spaces in user/file names and Samba is nightmarish just like that other OS.
We have seen many large roll-outs of GNU/Linux do 80-90% of tasks with no involvement of that other OS. 100% is possible with some surgery. It’s worth it to do the surgery.
Brillo wrote, of the scalability of GNU/Linux, “Do you honestly expect a company can stay with the same moldy servers with the same unscalable freebies when it grows from 25 employees to 100?”
Of course, the answer is a resounding, “YES!”. I have seen GNU/Linux scale better than that other OS several times in organizations evolving in size. Largo, FL, has a system much larger than 100 and GNU/Linux flies there. The only servers I have ever seen maxed out in GNU/Linux in a desktop system was a six-year old terminal server with marginal RAM. A $100-upgrade would have made it fly. I have deliberately maxed-out GNU/Linux servers under load and the users did not even notice. The terminal server under load usually had a few K context switches per second. I ramped that up to 64K with only a barely noticeable lag for users. That was a $2K dual-core server.
Compare that with M$-certified people telling me that no more clients could be added to a network with XP because of the “network chatter”. Compare that with Dave Richards’ observation that it takes three servers running that other OS to do the job of one GNU/Linux server hardware being equal. I saw that one place, a school with 7 servers running that other OS. I added a virtual machine with GNU/Linux doing more with a single virtual server. The reason they added so many servers? They were afraid to change anything on their servers and just kept adding more to handle more services… They had servers for the 2K clients, servers for the XP clients, and a server for each database… With GNU/Linux fear is not an option. You just add more services and it keeps working. Only when the hardware is maxed-out do you have to add more servers.
Robert Pogson
“Samba does not. As soon as you get that other OS out of the picture the complexity of IT drops a lot and performance and reliability increase. We have seen many large roll-outs of GNU/Linux do 80-90% of tasks with no involvement of that other OS. 100% is possible with some surgery. It’s worth it to do the surgery.”
I do have mixed systems. Party due to the fact I am stuck in a county lacking decent cross platform accountancy packages that support our tax system.
Compared to the way windows servers can miss behave. Without spending massive amounts out of entry level hardware with Linux you can build something highly decent.
Robert Pogson basically soon I am able to delete windows from the server room the better. Less paperwork.
“I believe modular technology makes sense.”
Same Cluster systems are high modular. Just I am stuck we a few windows problems. Either to be provided by virtualisation that still need decent storage. Or full windows clients again still needs decent storage.
Robert Pogson
“With GNU/Linux fear is not an option.”
Really you can get people with that same fear with Linux. But at least it does not hurt the budget as much.
Samba vs Windows server for storage. Reality the Samba does work out better even with the performance overhead of a cluster file-system. Really that is down right sad. First time I set up samba on a cluster file-system I was expecting windows servers to be able to beat it. Cluster file-systems do slow file access down a minor bit.
oiaohm wrote, “due to the fact I am stuck in a county lacking decent cross platform accountancy packages that support our tax system.”
Well, how many accountants does any organization need? How many need to have PCs in the house? Many accountants digest a single spreadsheet each quarter to spit out all they produce. No need to share files and printers and operating systems with everyone in a business. In education, the accountants are always at HQ and never in schools. I have only seen one application that required that other OS and it was a Java application with a MySQL core. It had “C:\” spread through the code. That was the only thing that made it not run on GNU/Linux. I could and did implement the database on a GNU/Linux system.
Given equal competency, an administrator can definitely do more with GNU/Linux than with that other OS because the source code is open and because of package managers and huge software repositories
LOL.
1) What does a system administrator need or want a piece of source code for? Do you honestly believe that hacking that stuff is a trivial matter? (Note for the slow: writing bash script != hacking source code)
2) A large repository of what? Besides, what is in a Debian repo that cannot be downloaded elsewhere for free otherwise? Thunderbird? Apache? Clue me in, by all means.
3) Package manager? You mean that one-way street that pulls in various dependencies as it goes and is no way comparable to System Restore? Sign me the eff up!
Did I also mention that there is nothing even remotely like System Restore in Debian?
(Cue Oiaohm’s “but there is” made-up crap in 3… 2… 1…)
Largo, FL, has a system much larger than 100 and GNU/Linux flies there.
I didn’t take me one minute to find out what you actually mean by that.
http://davelargo.blogspot.ca/2012/03/offloading-to-thin-clients.html
Do we seriously want to compare some system run by someone else to Pogson-”managed” Windows systems? I think not.
Also, you did know that project you have mentioned there have RDP clients running there, right?
(Cue Pogson’s “but they run Linux” irrelevant distraction in 3… 2… 1…)
A $100-upgrade would have made it fly. I have deliberately maxed-out GNU/Linux servers under load and the users did not even notice.
Again, you are comparing Linux to your misconfigured/abused Windows installs. It’s a “fair” comparison for you, maybe. But for anyone else to make a proper judgment, something more than your mere sketchy desciption is need.
Compare that with M$-certified people telling me that no more clients could be added to a network with XP because of the “network chatter”.
This makes me wonder what they mean by “chatter”. Do they mean packet collision, interference in the physical network or something else? And if you think Linux fixes the first two, you are a dolt.
In any case, I think the people were just trying to explain things to you in as much a layman way as possible.
I added a virtual machine with GNU/Linux doing more with a single virtual server. The reason they added so many servers? They were afraid to change anything on their servers and just kept adding more to handle more services
Again, I can’t examine the actual case aside by your extremely sketchy and biased recount. All I can tell you is that by summarily ignoring the warning from those “M$-certified people”, you have potentially created a problem that you immediately won’t see but will become more and more evident as time goes by. Again, by the time the problem is uncovered, you have already walked away to the sunset and other people will just have to pick up the pieces for you. I don’t think that’s anything to boast about.
Chris Weig wrote:
“It’s hardly my fault that the Linux system administrators at many SMB I (note: I) have worked with over the years are incompetent.”
So why have you left out your criticism of Windows administrators? Let me help you be honest. They outnumber the incompetent (in your opinion) Linux administrators. And you left out which one you encountered more of or spent more time with. Your statement left out more information than it provided. You’re hiding something.
So why have you left out your criticism of Windows administrators? Let me help you be honest. They outnumber the incompetent (in your opinion) Linux administrators.
Discounting Pogson, Dougman and other similar “backyard handyman” types, maybe you are right. But then I wonder how many of them have not been pushed out of the market already (and for good reasons).
“So why have you left out your criticism of Windows administrators?”
Because he already put it in his first and second postings in this thread?
“Let me help you be honest.”
It’s you who is dishonest here.
“They outnumber the incompetent (in your opinion) Linux administrators.”
Since – apart form internet service providers and the like – Windows servers and accordingly Windows admins far outnumber Linux servers and admins in businesses, it would indeed be surprising if incompetent Windows admins didn’t outnumber incompetent Linux admins in businesses.
ch wrote, “apart form internet service providers and the like”.
You mean servers not running that other OS are excluded from discussion. I don’t think so. GNU/Linux runs on a Hell of a lot of servers and the number keeps growing. I think that other OS running on any OS is a huge waste of resources. In many cases, the licence is half the capital cost of the server for no benefit whatsoever. I question the competence of any system administrator installing one that way.
Brillo wrote:
“No “buts” – education is the only proper way to go about this. There is no alternative.”
Another Cult of Microsoft member speaks from On High. You can’t imagine how silly you look when you write like that. You are so full of yourself. You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just making this crap up.
ch wrote:
“Because he already put it in his first and second postings in this thread?”
Thanks for pointing that out.
He added:
“It’s you who is dishonest here.”
I’m pushing your buttons ch. You Microsoft guys are pitiful.
“I’m pushing your buttons ch.”
Nope, you’re just mildly annoying.
Nope, you’re just mildly annoying.
I’ve just discovered that it’s pretty funny if you do a Tommy Wiseau accent when reading his comments.
For those who don’t know who Tommy Wiseau is, here’s a clip of him, eh… “Acting”:
“Nope, you’re just mildly annoying.”
“I’m pushing your buttons ch. You Microsoft guys are pitiful.”
Yep and you are real good at it. Even the most stone faced of us will eventually break down and try to put you down.
But you being the IMHO mindless little roach that you are will just scurry out and continue un-phased by any of us.
The interesting thing here is that for from helping the owner of this site, all you succeed in doing IMHO is damaging his credibility and the credibility of linux even further by proving that Linux true believers are nothing but mindless nasty idiots..
Have a nice day and keep up the good work !
@ldman wrote:
“The interesting thing here is that for from helping the owner of this site, all you succeed in doing IMHO is damaging his credibility and the credibility of linux even further by proving that Linux true believers are nothing but mindless nasty idiots..”
You belong with the Cult of Microsoft. You have aligned yourself with them. To me that makes any other achievements or your station in life basically worthless. So what does that make your statement worth to me? Not a damn thing @ldman.
You are holding me up to some kind of standard but it’s you holding me up to it. You don’t count @ldman. You don’t get to determine who plays fair or not when it comes to FLOSS. Your treatment of FLOSS put you in that category.
Your “humble opinion” is not so humble. It’s bombastic and self aggrandizing. And sometimes painfully so. Read this carefully: A person who writes as I have just described will not be aware of it. You will never see it @ldman. Someone you respect (a lot) who is highly educated will have to tell you so. Even then it would be hard for you to see. I know you will never believe me but you are, in colloquial terms, a blowhard. At least you are on this blog.
What I’ve just given you is the best thing someone could ever say to you. That is the truth. The fact that I’m an adversary just means that I can say it without concern for damaging our relationship. No one you care about would ever tell you what I just did. Good luck with it.
Robert Pogson
“Well, how many accountants does any organization need? How many need to have PCs in the house? Many accountants digest a single spreadsheet each quarter to spit out all they produce.”
Its a case of how important the data is. You don’t have that many people doing finance. Less than 20 percent of staff have any contact with it. 80 percent Linux 20 windows works.
Brillo
“1) What does a system administrator need or want a piece of source code for? Do you honestly believe that hacking that stuff is a trivial matter? (Note for the slow: writing bash script != hacking source code)”
To be correct its not the source code that I find the most valuable. Like debian and other distribution you have the option to install debugging data that enabled you to see exactly what operations the programs were performing when things go bad. Microsoft due to being closed don’t give you full detail debugging data. Being FOSS you are more likely to have complete debugging files or be able to rebuild with complete debugging files.
What makes solaris historically so good as a closed source OS was the include of full debugging details and darn good debugger called dtrace. Linux is the next best thing. Its debugger is not as good but it has broader hardware support.
When you get to windows you get these cryptic messages that it failed at X location. That is not that helpful. To work out this random crashes is happening because these two programs are cross interacting with each other in the kernel due to a slightly suspect driver.(windows/linux/solaris hell cause at times)
“3) Package manager? You mean that one-way street that pulls in various dependencies as it goes and is no way comparable to System Restore? Sign me the eff up!”
100 percent correct Brillo. What is System Restore in XP don’t use it scarily bad it will destroy you system. Vista and later its system restore is volume snapshotting that works.
Linux does have volume snapshotting options. Just to show how big of idiot Brillo is volume snapshotting can be integrated with package management. Redhat and SUSE when running on btrfs do use its copy on write snapshotting. You can enable LVM snapshotting as well to replicate system restore on Linux.
Yes snapshotting has the same problem no matter what its eats hard-drive space like its going out of style. Most of the vista and 7 disc size requirement expand over XP is to support snapshotting.
Brillo this is one area I think should be default out box yet is not on Linux yet that causes a lot of new users pain. This pain could have been avoided for the last 15 years. The tech to snapshot integrated with package management has existed for that long on Linux. The tech on windows only starts in Vista on desktop in Windows.
Brillo reality you don’t know the topic so you put an apple against an orange.
System restore apple vs apple. The Linux one is the snapshotting systems. Yes feel free to complain that Linux snapshotting need better GUI. I completely agree.
Also some linux people use horrid snapshoting like rsync. Again integrable into package manager. rsync is more in your XP class solution you hope your recovery boot mode comes up so you can rsync back.
Linux has everything from decent replacements to system restore in the same class as Vista on to XP style system restore. With 1 major problem lack of good GUI.
“Windows requires far too much babysitting”…I 3rd that.
“Given equal competency, an administrator can definitely do more with GNU/Linux than with that other OS because the source code is open and because of package managers and huge software repositories”
Spoken from the perspective of an employee pressed into IT LAN manager as an adjunct duty time and time again Linux saved my bacon for file and printer services, NAT duty, file backup, and other server-side duties. The wonderful HOWTO files and commented configuration codes made setting up bulletproof systems an achievable task. That other OS had you feel like a drugged out click-monkey trying to get a simple 30-client LAN running and still everything seemed finicky. Linux was truly MUCH closer to the “set and forget” idea even in the mid-to-late 90′s.
You belong with the Cult of Microsoft. You have aligned yourself with them.
“The Cult of Microsoft”? What’s that supposed to be then? Microsoft is not surrounded by religious overtones and religious zealots. FLOSS is. This blog, too, is proof of that. You can see it time and time again in the postings of one Mr. Robert Pogson, who vehemently likes to deny any superiority of any software in any area, especially non-Linux software, if it’s not FLOSS. FLOSS is the holy grail of Mr. Pogson, and he drinks from it and drinks from it and drinks from it. This blind faith seems very much like a cult to me.
There is, of course, a difference between blind followers like Uncle Koz et al. and professionals who use Linux to get something done. Take for example this professional’s acknowledgment of Linux’s shortcomings:
- Maintenance and troubleshooting are beyond the abilities of the average user. Want to install Maya on Fedora? Get your trenchcoat on, because first you’re going to hack your X-Windows conf to blacklist the default nouveau driver, then once you’ve killed the Xserver and installed the Nvidia driver, you need to log in as root to enable dual screen spanning (yes, really). Then you get to hunt down dependencies for your desired app. If you want to dabble in bash or shell scripting, there’s not much reason to pick Linux over OS X unless you really want to become a sysadmin.
- Brutal lack of professional imaging software and official drivers. Unless you’re fine using Photoshop in a virtual machine with no tablet support, The GIMP is your only option. While Linux is the best-supported OS for very high-end apps like Houdini and Mari, it is missing a lot of creative software like ZBrush and modo, which have Mac versions. Ditto for Wacom drivers, which are only available through community-supported drivers that lack support for newer tablet features, and they are a complete pain in the ass to configure via command line. After two hours of fruitless attempts to limit the Wacom to one screen with an AMD card, I just unplugged my other screen and did some 3D texturing work. I still can’t use all the buttons of my mouse—there’s no Steermouse or USB Overdrive for Linux.
- Too many things that should be easy are difficult or impossible on Linux. I wanted to take a screenshot while a right-click menu was open, but between the built-in screenshot utility in Gnome and ImageMagick’s, it wasn’t possible. I could only capture the window behind it.
- Fragmentation. Ubuntu is the friendliest of the Linux distros, but you can’t run most professional apps on Ubuntu without some serious work. Applications like Maya, Nuke, etc. are invariably made for Redhat Enterprise-compatible distros like RHEL 6, Fedora and CentOS. You can run these applications on Ubuntu but it adds a lot of steps.
- Lack of a shareware ecosystem. I have opened the gates to Troll Hell with this one, but there are so many promising-but-dead projects for Linux that I’m convinced that “free” is a double-edged sword. On OS X, low-priced and awesome programs like Default Folder X, TextExpander, 1Password, Dragthing, CodeBox, BBEdit, and Things exist because users are willing to pay for them. If it’s not a $5,000 graphics app, it’s probably free on Linux—that’s great for HFS+ drivers and drive-ghosting software, but you can’t depend that a smaller project will be around later. In the short time I’ve used Linux, I’ve seen a bunch of great apps turned abandonware because the developer figured out that rent is paid with money, not love.
But you people wouldn’t know anything about that, as you’re amateurs.
Chris Weig
“The GIMP is your only option”
This is a common error people get to Linux and all they have heard is gimp. They miss the other native options that are more powerful.
“Lack of a shareware ecosystem.” Answer here in the future is say Steam or Android markets.
Fragmentation go “bedrock Linux” style in near future. Done bedrock linux style for ages using cgroups and chroot.
Chris Weig
“I wanted to take a screenshot while a right-click menu was open, but between the built-in screenshot utility in Gnome and ImageMagick’s, it wasn’t possible. I could only capture the window behind it.”
Don’t use gnome screenshot tool is the answer to that one. KDE and Xfce screen shot works. Its one of the reason why I don’t pick main line Ubuntu.
Sometimes things.
“Maintenance and troubleshooting are beyond the abilities of the average user. Want to install Maya on Fedora?”
Are you mad???? Crosses mind. Fedora is not a enterprise distribution or a stable distribution.
Scientific Linux is what you use if you wish to run that enterprise stuff cheap.
Chris Weig
“But you people wouldn’t know anything about that, as you’re amateurs.”
Wrong call. I am pro I do know about those problems. I am also wise enough not to attempt particular things.
I have no issues using the virtualisation solutions inside Linux. Without them I would have to deal with a lot more head aches.
My base system is debian but I do have chroot with scientific linux in it. Guess why anything like Maya goes in there and it updates and other wise be happy. Those hacks to work on the wrong distribution tree avoiding a chroot is stupidity it only gives you pain. Maya updates and so on will fail and kick you back in the teeth over and over again until you learn not to be stupid.
This is why I see bedrock linux as the solution. Don’t go one distribution go about 4 installed on 1 kernel. 1 from debian tree. 1 stable from the redhat tree(ie not fedora) 1 from the slackware tree and one from the build from source tree. With that you can run basically everything.
As soon as you see someone bending a package from the wrong tree of distributions you know they are in trouble or will be as soon as they need to apply updates. Its the wrong way that simple.
oiaohm wrote, “This is why I see bedrock linux as the solution. Don’t go one distribution go about 4 installed on 1 kernel. 1 from debian tree. 1 stable from the redhat tree(ie not fedora) 1 from the slackware tree and one from the build from source tree. With that you can run basically everything.”
Thank goodness GNU/Linux makes such complexity transparent. It does seem like overkill. I find Debian GNU/Linux will do everything for me without that complexity. I guess it’s a trend to squander RAM by using multiple OS simultaneously now that RAM is plentiful and cheap. I prefer to let Linux manage the RAM and hold lots of data rather than lots of OS. For testing I can see it but for production on a desktop? Nope.
Chris Weig goes on about nothing, “Too many things that should be easy are difficult or impossible on Linux. I wanted to take a screenshot while a right-click menu was open, but between the built-in screenshot utility in Gnome and ImageMagick’s, it wasn’t possible. I could only capture the window behind it.”
Possibilities are only limited by imagination in GNU/Linux, not the EULA, not the price, not the complexity…
What can I say. With GNU/Linux, the difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a couple of clicks.
“As soon as you see someone bending a package from the wrong tree of distributions you know they are in trouble or will be as soon as they need to apply updates. Its the wrong way that simple.”
Something rare just happened: I totally agree with you on this point. But why is that so? Or more to the point (of course I know the first why), I’m still perplexed by the second why: Why is it that the Linux fanboys are so content with this crazy situation where just installing an application on basically the same building blocks becomes an issue if you don’t have the exact install package for your version of this OS?
Mr K:
You are clearly in need of help. As christian I will pray for you that you receive it.
Pog: You have in the form of Mr. K someone who if they were directing this level of vitriol at you, you would have banned.
Is this behavior something you you wish to be associated with as the owner of this blog?
Chris Weig wrote:
“Microsoft is not surrounded by religious overtones and religious zealots. FLOSS is.”
That is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. Power and money are Microsoft’s God, Steve Ballmer their Messiah. Microsoft is highly organized and directed from on high. All those who believe in Microsoft pay tribute to Microsoft. That’s a religion.
FLOSS is just the opposite. It’s a free-for-all. That is often pointed out by the Cult of Microsoft in one way or another. There’s Richard Stallman. But he’s more of a point man, a true north on the compass. He doesn’t direct people or order them around. Same with Eric Raymond. And you can keep going down the list. What you get is a loose organization of people and ideas.
You are losing in the news stories that come up on this blog every day. Your defense against them increasingly unrealistic. You don’t even post on half of them unless you’re goaded into it. You look more foolish as the months wear on.
There is no religion in FLOSS, just common sense. It’s a much better system for producing software. The biggest mark against it is Microsoft. They are doing their very best to hurt the open source system of software development and they are doing a pretty good job of it. But not good enough to kill it. Open source is winning and will win.
The World is waking up to the fact that it wants open source and not Microsoft. The World is bigger than Microsoft and it will have its way.
Making statements like “FLOSS is a religion.” is just more promotion of uncertainty about FLOSS. You are not fooling anyone Chris. With the Cult of Microsoft it’s rinse and repeat, over and over again with the same old crap. Nothing new, no creativity. Those are the tactics of a loser. You are a loser Chris and you are advocating for a loser.
Have a nice day.
kozmcrae wrote, “Making statements like “FLOSS is a religion.” is just more promotion of uncertainty about FLOSS.”
That’s probably the intent. It’s strange that in IT religion is somehow equated with irrationality/incorrectness while in society religion is seen as a means of respecting goodness. Regardless, one can have faith in good IT like GNU/Linux just as one can have faith that planes will arrive at their destination often enough to take the risk. One can either calculate the odds and decide whether or not to get on the plane or judge from the popularity of the process, smartness of the uniforms and the elegance of the fleet. It’s all part of making a decision based on incomplete information. I have seen FLOSS work well in many situations in which that other OS flounders and I am convinced it’s the right way to do IT. Most of the negatives I have heard are just the tenets of that other religion.
“That’s probably the intent.”
Nope. The intent at lease on my part has always been to dispute your contention that it is the ONLY way to do it. That contention as is as far as we are concerned a demonstrable fact not in evidence.
But try as we might, our setting out of the realities of our working conditions are simply dismissed out of hand, and we are regularly excoriated, called sheeple, told to our face that our experiences don’t count and all we have to do is get the FOSS religion (i.e. use FOSS) and all will be well.
BTW I asked you a question Pog, do you intend to answer it?
ROFL.
You people — Ohio Ham featuring prominently, as was to be expected; he’s that dumb — haven’t even understood that the statements after “Take for example this professional’s acknowledgment of Linux’s shortcomings:” weren’t mine, but that they came from the author of the Ars Technica article.
Of course, it’s also Mr. Pogson’s fault, as he couldn’t be bothered to setup WordPress correctly — yes, when I use I somehow expect it to work. Or is this perhaps indicative of the quality of FLOSS? Chuckle.
Anyway, Uncle Koz has it all figured out. Except for the part where his cognitive dissonance kicks in, as it was very aptly described by Leon Festinger in 1956. For you, Uncle Koz, I will paraphrase again what I wrote:
FLOSS cultists believe in a natural superiority of FLOSS against any better judgment, even if something non-FLOSS is actually better. They precisely lack what’s called “common sense”. And just as religious people can’t really justify why they belief in their religion (if asked, many will reply: “Because that’s what you do!”), FLOSS cultists can’t really justify why they believe in the absolute superiority of FLOSS.
Perhaps inferiority complexes?
Ah, I’m sorry, the comment regarding WordPress should read:
“[Y]es, when I use ‘cite’ I somehow expect it to work. Or is this perhaps indicative of the quality of FLOSS? Chuckle.”
This WordPress installation is really crappy.
By the way, nobody here claimed that F(L)OSS is religion. That wouldn’t be possible as a religion offers something very specific: transcendence. It’s rather that F(L)OSS is like a religion. Big difference. But Uncle Koz and Old Man Pogson would know nothing about that. Their education has ended with: “All hail F(L)OSS!”
By the way, nobody here claimed that F(L)OSS is religion. That wouldn’t be possible as a religion offers something very specific: transcendence. It’s rather that F(L)OSS is like a religion. Big difference. But Uncle Koz and Old Man Pogson would know nothing about that. Their education has ended with: “All hail F(L)OSS!”
Okay, seriously, Mr. Pogson, what’s up with your WordPress installation? Can’t you install something decent or fix this crap?
Okay, seriously, Mr. Pogson, what’s up with your WordPress installation? Can’t you install something decent or fix this crap?
Are you insinuating that RP might have installed something incorrectly? How dare you!
On WordPress:
Despite the assurance that
I have in fact been able to track down Oldman to his place of work or else his alma mater, I am not sure which. I have also been able to determine that, should I need slightly wonky IT advice in XXXXXXXX, then Doug is the man for me.
I haven’t managed to track down Mr McCrae yet, but that’s no great loss. I work just down the road from Hyde Park Corner. Should I need to listen to a self-promoting creepy little shouter with nothing to say, I can do it live in my lunch break whilst throwing peanuts at the pathetic little sod.
Anyway, just thought you’d like to know. Bug reports and all that.
Chris Weig wrote, “This WordPress installation is really crappy.”
Feel free to go elsewhere. I don’t owe you anything.
Chris Weig wrote, “FLOSS cultists believe in a natural superiority of FLOSS against any better judgment, even if something non-FLOSS is actually better.”
That’s almost meaningless considering each of us has our own definition of “better”. There is very little I like about M$ except that it stimulates industry to produce hardware sufficient to bear the burden making tons of great GNU/Linux terminal servers.
That’s almost meaningless considering each of us has our own definition of “better”.
That’s evading the subject. And you betray yourself, as you always make very general claims on this blog, which greatly overstep the subjective bounds. Let me just remind you how you recently insisted that LibreOffice (OpenOffice) Calc was good enough for everyone, based on nothing but your experience with spreadsheets.
Yes, it’s subjectivity you want. Because then you can claim anything.
DrLoser, having proven himself anti-social and no asset to this blog is now banned. He was banned before, but this time it’s for good.
Good-bye, Loser.
Chris Weig is frothing. You are not making much sense Chris. And you are repeating yourself (even without the help of WordPress if that was even the cause). You are acting like someone who is on his way out. Like you’ve used up all your evangelic one-liners. Calm down, Microsoft will still be there in the morning. The big bad FLOSSies wont make it go away… just yet anyway.
DrLoser, having proven himself anti-social and no asset to this blog is now banned
In case you are that hopeless:
1) oldman often posts here with a link to http://www.nyu.edu. That’s basically what Dr. Loser means by “his place of work or else his alma mater”.
2) Needless to say, Dougman always posts here along with a link to his website.
The word “track” is just nothing more than a distraction meant to scare people who don’t know the basics of how the Internet works. There is essentially no effort required (other than a single click) to gather all the information he has mentioned in the post.
The reference “Hyde Park Corner” is very obviously a bit of British humor and it’s very unlikely that kozmcrae actually lives or works there (unless he’s a homeless Londoner).
Well, anyway, it’s absolutely hilarious to watch you throw yourself under the bus just for the sake of finding an excuse to get rid of a detractor.
Uncle Koz, don’t forget to attend FLOSS worship on Sunday. You have to renew your faith.
Well, there’s no denying that the FSF is a cult:
http://penguinday.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/brainwashing-at-the-fsf/
Nice quote (on cult characteristics):
“The world is depicted as black and white, with little room for making personal decisions based on a trained conscience. One’s conduct is modeled after the ideology of the group, as taught in its literature. People and organizations are pictured as either good or evil, depending on their relationship to the cult.”
Brillo wrote, “just nothing more than a distraction meant to scare people who don’t know the basics of how the Internet works.”
That’s not what this site is about. If you want to scare people go elsewhere. This is not a place of psychos and terrorists.
Well, there’s no denying Wintel is a cult:
“Working behind the scenes to orchestrate “independent” praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy’s, is a key evangelism function during the Slog. “Independent” analyst’s report should be issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring them). “Independent” consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting them up as experts in the new technology, available for just $200/hour). “Independent” academic sources should be cultivated and quoted (and research money granted). “Independent” courseware providers should start profiting from their early involvement in our technology. Every possible source of leverage should be sought and turned to our advantage.
…
Evangelism’s goal is to put the final nail into the competing technology’s coffin, and bury it in the burning depths of the earth. Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors’ technologies, to make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over time.”
That’s from an internal training manual at M$ revealed in court. It’s all about good and evil to M$-cultists, only they count themselves as “good”.
Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.”
Actually, this is correct. I used to be an avid, close to fanatic fan of OS/2. However, my strong rational senses cured me of this, when I started using OS/2 for production purposes (v 2.1, then 3). Lack of apps was evident, development was expensive and hard at the same time. When I discovered I couldn’t get my work done without going back to Windows (95), I simply quit. I tried back v4, with no luck again.
Btw, I had the same experience with Linux, starting with RH 5. I gave up with Kylix couldn’t compile and run even “Hello world!” without major tweaks.
Phenom wrote, “When I discovered I couldn’t get my work done without going back to Windows (95)”…
When I discovered I couldn’t get my work done with Lose ’95, I switched to GNU/Linux and never looked back.
I kinda liked OS/2 1.x and used it some in the Office. But thanks to its very limited DOS compatibility, there were almost no applications for it except for some server stuff and the Oracle tools we were evaluating.
When OS/2 2.0 came out, I gave it a try. At least it could run Win16 and DOS apps, but I never got used to its Workplace UI. And with Win95 and NT 4.0 it was dead.
In hindsight, it is strange how much effort MS invested in the “OS war” when it was completely unnecessary. I think that Bill G. was a bit paranoid those days: “Surely someone is coming after us! It simply can’t be that all our competition do themselves in!” And by rights, someone should have, but nobody ever did it seriously.
DR botched one opportunity after another, and their only modest successes (TOS and DR-DOS) were history come ’95.
IBM was so bad at selling OS/2 that a joke at the time was: “How do you solve the drug problem? Easy: Legalize everything – and leave the marketing to IBM.”
And after releasing the Mac, Apple was always content with its – admittedly lucrative – niche.
So MS broke a lot of china completely unnecessarily.
For anyone interested in all the details, I recommend “In search of stupidity” by Merrill Chapman.
“When I discovered I couldn’t get my work done with Lose ’95, I switched to GNU/Linux and never looked back.”
You’re awfully petulant with the “lose 95″ and “M$” barbs. I’m keen to know what work you couldn’t get done that forced you to uproot and switch operating systems. My guess is nothing since you’re just another evangelist who’s all talk and no walk.
It’s clear you’re not looking for the best solution, you just hate a company that you somehow feel has wronged you despite them never even knowing you exist. More likely, someone you know has wronged you and their affiliation with Windows was an ideal target for you to latch on to and rail against. The same way some people rail against macs, not because they can’t use them to get things done, but because they can’t stand the fanatical culture that often goes along with them.
You’re just like the (thankfully waning) mac fanatics who turned so many people off macs with their abject love for a company that owed them nothing. Now that macs are becoming more mainstream again, that crowd is dying off since it’s no longer a club for elitists. In a similar fashion, people like you would slowly disappear if Linux desktop gained any significant market share.
TM Repository wrote:
“It’s clear you’re not looking for the best solution, you just hate a company that you somehow feel has wronged you despite them never even knowing you exist.”
This is what you get from a psychology degree on the back of a match book cover.
Thanks for the insight TM. I switched to GNU/Linux when I got tired of the malware infecting my computers. Do you think there’s some deep-rooted hatred there and is there any significance to using GNU with Linux?
One thing first. How the heck do you make your ass talk like that?
I never understood the malware argument, since anyone skilled enough to configure and maintain a linux distro should have no trouble avoiding malware. The truth is, any platform that can claim “no malware” has such a tiny footprint it isn’t worth the time to write a virus for it.
If it really WAS “GNU/Linux” protecting you, then why isn’t it protecting Android from malware? Why are there hundreds of android viruses? Dozens of android virus scanners? And why have several botnets been discovered on the platform? Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Android has something like 60% of the smartphone market in North America; It’s a big target, unlike desktop Linux.
I’m not saying a platform having malware is a good thing, but, as the old adage goes, you tend to attract more flies with honey than vinegar.
Further, none of my Windows machines or Macs have ever had a virus, nor have any that belonged to my parents. My dad is the type of guy who has to look at the keyboard as he types and would certainly not be able to switch operating systems. Yet somehow he’s been able to avoid getting any malware on any of his computers.
Food for thought.
TM wrote, “Why are there hundreds of android viruses? “
Why are there millions of viruses aimed at that other OS? Because it’s an easy target. The popularity of Android/Linux does make it interesting but millions of PCs and servers run GNU/Linux with very few infections.
TM wrote, “I’m keen to know what work you couldn’t get done that forced you to uproot and switch operating systems.”
I had 5 PCs in my classroom as an activity centre in a multi-grade/multi-level classroom. I needed a variety of activity centres so that I could keep students busy and not making me a bottleneck in the classroom. Of the 5 PCs, we rarely finished a class without one of them crashing. That was completely unacceptable because a student’s lesson was off the rails. Sometimes they lost work as well. I switched to Caldera GNU/Linux and never had a crash for months. I was convinced. The PCs in question were HP commercial machines with a build of Lose ’95 licensed by M$ for use on recycled PCs in schools. I was in the Arctic and I was the only IT for 50 miles.
You were still using Win95 in 2002? When XP – which wouldn’t have crashed on you – was available? So as I said before, the constraint was budget, not technology. Did you ever think of asking MS for academic conditions? AFAIK, they do offer deep discounts for schools and universities.
ch wrote, “the constraint was budget, not technology.”
Nope. The constraint was M$’s miserly nature. They donate obsolete versions of their OS to schools. The PCs I had in my classroom in 2001 were Computers for Schools refurbished machines using a donated version of that other OS. M$’s latest OS often does not run on the older machines available to schools. That’s not about budgets but about M$’s desire that older machines not run their latest stuff so people will be pressured to buy new PCs. Schools need for IT is modest since there are alternative ways of teaching/learning but IT is valuable to schools because IT is the best way to do lots of fairly routine tasks in education. However teachers and other staff are the main expenditures in education. Spending on IT is definitely second-tier. In some businesses, 3% of cash-flow is spent on IT. In education it is closer to 0.3%. I have been in some schools where it was 0.1%. Still schools can get PCs for $0 so budget is not the key factor. Ability to keep them running is. A school can keep more GNU/Linux machines running cheaply than they can with that other OS, software donated or not. I have often been in schools where the entire IT budget was toner for printing. All else was donated/granted and did not appear in the budget. At my last school we were donated a case of SATA drives but we had no SATA cables to connect them to newer PCs and our older PCs had no SATA interfaces. Plenty of money was spent on IT but there was very little local control of it. That’s just stupid when many teachers these days are graduating with excellent skills in use of IT. Older teachers who have seen nothing but XP in schools often have no clue about what is possible with FLOSS. That’s probably the second or third issue however. The big one is M$’s interference through EULA and monopoly.
TM Repository wrote:
“If it really WAS “GNU/Linux” protecting you, then why isn’t it protecting Android from malware?”
Before you can infer that Linux was letting Android down in security you have to admit that Linux is the foundation of Android. Do you? Most mouth frothing, Cult of Microsoft zealots like yourself vehemently deny that Linux has anything to do with Android. Have you ever made statements to the effect that Android is disassociated from Linux? If so you cannot infer that Linux let Android down since, as you put it, Linux isn’t part of Android.
I suspect that you will worm and squirm but will not directly answer that question because you are, at the core, a flaccid, shallow person who will take on whatever attributes you need for the moment to come out on top of the discussion.
As a point of fact. All Android malware to date is of the social engineering type and is platform independent. It has to be chosen, downloaded, and executed by the user to infect unlike the malware for your beloved Windows which only needs to visit a rogue website to be brought to its knees.
You are pathetic TM Repository and your mission is pathetic. Try harder, it makes us look better.
“anti-social and no asset to this blog is now banned”
And you continue to permit the craven Mr. K to post?
Shame.
“Before you can infer that Linux was letting Android down in security you have to admit that Linux is the foundation of Android. Do you?”
Of course I do. Android leverages Linux, though most of it isn’t open source anymore, none of the Google apps are open source (maps, earth, gmail, etc.) and they don’t (and in many cases can’t) contribute to upstream because messaging systems have been replaced.
“You are pathetic TM Repository and your mission is pathetic. Try harder, it makes us look better.”
My mission? What do you believe my mission is? To destroy Linux? To cull open source? No, I want to calm a community of rabbit defenders who are unable to admit flaws in the thing they love so much. There are holes in the boat and every moment you ignore them, the boat sinks a little further. Then, when your precious love interest isn’t doing so well in the market, you blame everyone else but yourselves.
The part I have a problem with is the spreading of misinformation; Propagating myths and fallacies as though they were fact. Believe whatever you want in private, but don’t go around like a religious martyr spreading the “good word”.
THAT is why I created the TM Repository; Not to destroy anything, but to document what the zealots say and catch them in their own lies. Silence them, and maybe Linux might have a chance at success on the desktop. It’s already working on smartphones. Why? Because people who own android phones have no problem complaining about them and pointing out flaws in them! Get it? Admitting flaws actually gets them fixed!
TM Repository wrote totally about himself and his mission and negated to mention the central question about Android security. You and your mission are still pathetic TM.
“You and your mission are still pathetic TM.”
And you are still a jerk.
“TM Repository wrote totally about himself and his mission and negated to mention the central question about Android security.”
I did, but I guess I’ll repeat myself; Yes, Android is most certainly Linux. Probably one of the most popular distros in the world, in fact. So why, with all the Linux components, does it need virus scanners and have plenty of public issues with malware?
It’s because Linux, and subsequently Android, aren’t “Inherently secure” (one of the oldest TM’s on the site by the way). It’s facing the same issues any popular platform does; It has a large enough surface area that it’s worth it for malware authors to target it. Denying this is willful ignorance and only harms your beloved platform.
“You and your mission are still pathetic TM.”
Mind explaining why silencing the vocal minority that ruins it for the rest of us is pathetic? What IS pathetic is how frustrated you must be; So dedicated to something but responsible for it doing poorly. Then again, I doubt you have the moral fortitude to accept that fact.
Also, it’s “neglected to mention” not “negated to mention”. If you’re going to use a phrase, at least understand what it means before using it.
TM Repository wrote:
“Denying this is willful ignorance and only harms your beloved platform.” Nice prose, where ‘d you get it?
I did not deny Android’s security problems. You side stepped the fact that all the malware effecting Android is of the social engineering type and as such is totally platform independent. It needs to be executed by the user. Android would be just as vexed with malware if it’s OS base were Joe Blow’s operating system. It has nothing to do with Linux itself.
TM Repository wrote some more:
“No, I want to calm a community of rabbit defenders who are unable to admit flaws in the thing they love so much.” (I think you meant “rabid” defenders. Just FYI.)
Did you ask anyone if they wanted your help or did you just anoint yourself as the new point man for FLOSS advocacy? I’m not sure if the World is big enough to hold an ego that large. You are a piece of work TM. I would encourage you to carry on, full bore, as you are. Be yourself, no, be more of yourself. Because, after all, you really do know what’s best. You know better than all of us FLOSS advocates. You know how to do it better. So do it TM. Do it like you know how. Show us all who TM Repository is and what he stands for. Don’t hold anything back.
Except that there are actual viruses, this isn’t just spyware.
“Did you ask anyone if they wanted your help or did you just anoint yourself as the new point man for FLOSS advocacy?”
This isn’t about providing help, this is about documenting misinformation so that it can be refuted later. Usually you don’t have to ask to do those sorts of things. Ego has nothing to do with it; I just don’t like misinformation so I’ll do what I think is necessary to confront it. It’s up to others to freely use it or not.
You don’t even understand what my site is about, so sarcastically encouraging me to “carry on, full bore” is a bit ironic. You’re trying to goad me and it isn’t going to work. I’ll argue facts, but you’re only interested in character attacks. Presumably, in a weak defense against my claims that you were part of your own problem.
I’d like to see Linux succeed like the rest of the software out there, you on the other hand, only want it to “win”, no matter what cost. You may think being a martyr is noble and that you’re righteous, but you’re not. You’re doing the bidding of your “community” without question which doesn’t seem very free to me.
TM wrote, “Linux, and subsequently Android, aren’t “Inherently secure” (one of the oldest TM’s on the site by the way). It’s facing the same issues any popular platform does; It has a large enough surface area that it’s worth it for malware authors to target it. Denying this is willful ignorance and only harms your beloved platform.”
When you can measure what you are talking about in numbers and do so, such a comment might be meaningful. Why not describe the surface area of */Linux as a bunch of interfaces necessary to do the job versus an unknown but huge number of interfaces many for backwards compatibility and feature-bloat/sales-ramp, i.e. not technically required to get the job done. Then you can see that the surface area of */Linux is tiny in comparison to that other OS. */Linux is inherently secure in comparison.
For example, one should see a number of infections like (number of clients)X(number of vulnerabilities per client)X(number of bad guyes). However, instead of dozens of GNU/Linux infections compared to thousands of infections of that other OS, I have seen only infections of that other OS. One can argue that the small number of clients for */Linux drops */Linux below the horizon but that is weak considering the network effect/multiplier that malware writers see. There are millions of GNU/Linux PCs out there and infecting even a million PCs is worthwhile so someone would do it if it were easy. It’s not. A malware that might work for Android/Linux might not work for Debian GNU/Linux and vice-versa. That diversity is a layer of security whether or not you choose to ignore it. I have accidentally exposed naked GNU/Linux PCs to the web for months with no adverse consequences yet that other OS falls in minutes in that case.
My own server which is exposed to the web with ports open has only had a few self-inflicted DOS problems in years of operation. XP with no ports open to the web falls sooner or later within months by one of a million ways. There’s just no comparison to the vulnerability/risk of running GNU/Linux and that other OS. With all the millions of Android/Linux machines running these days, it would be a disaster if it did not have inherent security.
TM Repository made a statement about Android/Linux security and still has not addressed it. You are defending yourself and your site instead. Thinking of yourself again.
There is nothing special about Android/Linux and malware except that it is the most popular mobile phone OS. The malware is socially engineered and is platform independent. And, as Robert pointed out, the malware written for Android/Linux may not work on Debian/Linux or Ubuntu/Linux or PCLinuxOS/Linux and on and on.
Your statements on Android/Linux and malware were incomplete and inferred that malware that attacks Android is as virulent as that which attacks Windows and because Android is built on top of Linux that all of Linux is affected. That is typical Cult of Microsoft behavior; infer and let the reader assume the worst.
You are the one with the misinformation TM. There is nothing new or innovative in your approach to spreading Microsoft lies.
Now, how about addressing the fact that the malware affecting Android is platform independent, is socially engineered and as such will effect Windows, iOS, Linux and Joe Blow’s operating systems equally.
I doubt if you will. I think at this point you’ll get all huffy on me and claim that you’ve already addressed everything. You haven’t. Underneath your veneer as the crusader of calm benevolence you are just a Microsoft evangelist. You are fooling no one.
I addressed it in the first paragraph both times. Android has viruses, worms and trojans that are not all spread via social engineering.
Why does it have them? Because the platform is popular. Why doesn’t desktop Linux? Because it is most certainly NOT popular. Android is a good example of what will happen to Linux if the desktop ever gained any significant marketshare. It’ll become a honeypot for malware authors, the same way OSX has begun to be targeted now that their marketshare numbers are climbing out of the single digits.
I love the “spreading microsoft lies”. I’m not spreading any microsoft information whatsoever. The site is a record of things the Linux/FOSS community says. WorksForMe(TM), YouDontNeedThat(TM), TryAnotherDistro(TM), etc. these are all things the community says.
You’ve stumbled upon a good one LinuxHateIsMicrosoftLove(TM) as though me pointing out flaws in the community somehow makes me a fan of Microsoft?
Why not describe the surface area of */Linux as a bunch of interfaces necessary to do the job versus an unknown but huge number of interfaces many for backwards compatibility and feature-bloat/sales-ramp, i.e. not technically required to get the job done.
The things you call “feature-bloats” are necessary to keep development costs low for ISVs. Again, rather than come up with something to back up your argument for once, you just keep regurgitating the same stupid sound bites over and over. Even if you don’t understand just how embarrassing you look, at least do you not get tired doing this?
XP with no ports open to the web falls sooner or later within months by one of a million ways.
I don’t think your blatant mismanagement of the machines under your charge is a good example of the software not working. Again, I have heard your story, and there is no nothing in it expect the shameless display of your own lack of knowledge in the subject matter.
“Network chatter”? Is that a Windows thing? Debian will make it go away for sure!
Printers? Let’s buy 20 of them home/small-office ones and if one of them inevitably breaks, it’s your problem to buy a new printer and figure out why it’s not working with Linux.
Why isn’t my Windows 98 working like Windows 2000 with AD?
Seriously, RP. Seriously.
TM Repository wrote:
“Why does it have them? Because the platform is popular. Why doesn’t desktop Linux? Because it is most certainly NOT popular.”
Not popular like the Linux servers? Where are the waves of Trojans, worms and viruses for them? Those are the kind of lies and misinformation I’m talking about.
Actually, ther’s a reason why Linux has less virusses – but it’s not a good one:
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.de/2008/06/at-least-we-dont-have-any-viruses.html
(Sorry for the language, but it makes the point real clear.)
However, oodles of Linux servers have simply been hacked, including that of the kernel devs. Could it be that some admins thought “We are using Linux so we’re InherentlySecure[TM]” ?
Besides, what do you even mean by “inherently secure”? Early versions of Unix didn’t include any real security at all – and given the non-existing threat environment at the time, that was the right decision, BTW. Later security was bolted on, but even in 1986 Unix was still wide-open to such a simple attack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
OTOH, Windows NT was designed to be secure from day one – and we are all aware how well that turned out once NT met the Internet. So the unixoid systems can at best claim that they were exposed and therefore hardened some years earlier – hardly the same thing as “inherently secure”.
“But Unix was always multi-user!”
And so was/is NT: Only the GUI of earlier versions was single-user, the core was always multi-user (that’s what you need for a Server, you know?). So what?
ch wrote, “oodles of Linux servers have simply been hacked, including that of the kernel devs.”
Uhh… The report on that one still has not been made almost a year later. I was told that the intrusion is under investigation. The best information is that passwords were compromised, nothing to do with inherent security if weak/stolen passwords were involved.
ch lied when he wrote, “Early versions of Unix didn’t include any real security at all – and given the non-existing threat environment at the time, that was the right decision, BTW”
By the time UNIX OS was used commercially it was multi-user/multi-tasking (1972). UNIX was inspired by MULTICS which was multi-user/multi-tasking/multi-processor.
Brillo wrote, “Seriously, RP. Seriously.”
Brillo is not serious if he denies reality as he does. I have encountered many systems running that other OS set up by pros with M$’s certifications that were riddled with malware and barely usable. I have only once or twice ever installed that other OS on an employer’s computer because I never needed to . GNU/Linux has served me and my employers very well. That’s a fact.
The XP honeypot is a well-known tool of investigators of malware.
“Within four minutes, the unprotected SP1 box was hacked via a buffer overrun in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (the same flaw used by the Sasser worm). Shortly thereafter, it was hit with the MS Blast exploit, as well as continued attempts using the Sasser flaw. Ten hours after the experiment began, the machine was screwed”
Perhaps Brillo is too young to remember the days when organizations felt best practice was to disconnect from the Internet to continue internal operations with IT. see Ars Technica – From honeypot to bot in minutes for a refresher.
Brillo acknowledged the inherent insecurity of that other OS when he wrote, “The things you call “feature-bloats” are necessary to keep development costs low for ISVs. “
That’s as good an admission as I have seen that the first priority of that other OS is not price/performance/security. The first priority is lock-in and to Hell with security. Oh, that did change a bit after the world awakened to GNU/Linux. M$ slapped on more layers to hide the insecurity but it is still there.
TM Repository wrote, “as though me pointing out flaws in the community”…
Ah, our own Angel of Death, saving us all from ourselves. He invents problems where none exist and offers no real solution just death.
Brillo is not serious if he denies reality as he does.
The only reality I see here is someone with an obvious inability to distinguish the difference between problems with cabling and problems with software, and that someone is Robert Pogson.
I have encountered many systems running that other OS set up by pros with M$’s certifications that were riddled with malware and barely usable.
Can you actually confirm that that these machines have not been tinkered with by other people with after such “pros” have resigned from their position? Besides, I have been in a workplace where the person in charge of simply didn’t care, so I doubt you are actually telling the whole of the story rather than the parts that don’t contradict or raise questions on your interpretation.
You can’t expect someone to believe in your story with just you telling it.
Within four minutes, the unprotected SP1 box was hacked via a buffer overrun in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (the same flaw used by the Sasser worm).
Before SP2, I used Comodo Firwall (which was freeware) and it worked like charm. Again, it’s a matter of knowing what you are doing, which, again, you seem to lack the ability of.
Perhaps Brillo is too young to remember the days when organizations felt best practice was to disconnect from the Internet to continue internal operations with IT.
I am old enough to remember ICQ, k56flex, Geocities and most of the 90s, and I don’t recall a single business with an up-to-scratch IT department feeling the need to “disconnect from the Internet” for the fear of worm infections. In fact, it would be ridiculous for a sizable business with high-speed Internet connection to do this kind of OCD rituals all the time.
I don’t know – maybe it’s a Manitoban thing?
That’s as good an admission as I have seen that the first priority of that other OS is not price/performance/security.
You just won’t quit, do ya?
1) On price:
You know what’s cheap? A PC without an OS. Just ignore the whole OS business and write your apps on bare metal. According to your logic, why the heck not?
2) On performance:
Sure. Instead of a common API for hardware acceleration, just use your own hacky stuff to work your way out. DOS games used to do that a lot – and crash a lot.
3) On security:
Just unplug your PC, seal it in concrete and dump it 50 ft. underground. Now that’s secure.
“Ah, our own Angel of Death, saving us all from ourselves. He invents problems where none exist and offers no real solution just death.”
I’m not an angel of anything. I’m simply providing a mirror for a community which seems incapable of self-reflection. You’d rather drown than admit your boat is full of holes, and so over-confident that you’re right to do so because you’re surrounded by nothing by the yes men of your ilk.
You guys keep thinking my site is meant to squash Linux. It isn’t! I’m not a “microsoft fan”, and I don’t want any particular piece of software to “win”. The problem is, you think we’re at war, but I guess every fundamentalist needs to invent a demon to slay.
Robert, your (and your resident trolls’) logic seems to follow this pattern:
“I like Linux and hate Microsoft, therefore, anyone who’s opinion differs from my must hate Linux and love Microsoft”.
You guys seem incapable of understand that just because you’ve turned a company/entity into a devil, doesn’t mean the rest of us have. Get it? Not everyone who contradicts you is doing so to harm your precious piece of software.
Ironically, you’re cult-like insistence that everyone tow the company line is incredibly corporate.
By the time UNIX OS was used commercially it was multi-user/multi-tasking (1972).
Which basically meant mult-user capability on Unix was an after-thought.
This is in stark contrast to the baseless accusation that NT was designed to be single-user.
UNIX was inspired by Multics which was multi-user/multi-tasking/multi-processor.
1) On “multi-user”:
Multi-user capabilities in Unix were completely absent during the first few years of its existence and the system opted for a superuser/user DAC design in latter time instead of the multi-level MAC design unique to Multics.
2) On “multi-tasking”:
It was true that Unix had pre-emptive mult-tasking capabilities even in its early days, but so was VMS and later NT.
3) On “multi-processor”:
On a PDP-7?
TM Repository is having difficulty penetrating our logic so he falls back on a trusted Cult of Microsoft tactic. If we don’t write something that he can point out as a fallacy, then he’ll write one for us.
Putting words in our mouthes is an old trick TM but we are wise to it. No, you can’t put words in our mouthes and then point out the fallacy in them. Those are your words, not ours.
“TM Repository is having difficulty penetrating our logic so he falls back on a trusted Cult of Microsoft tactic.
“Putting words in our mouthes is an old trick TM but we are wise to it.”
So, TR is putting words in your mouth in regards to you calling him something to the effect of “microsoft fan”. That’s some astoundingly impenetrable “logic” you have got there, don’t you think?
ch lied when he wrote, “Early versions of Unix didn’t include any real security at all – and given the non-existing threat environment at the time, that was the right decision, BTW”
By the time UNIX OS was used commercially it was multi-user/multi-tasking (1972).
Just because it was (eventually) a multi-user System doesn’t mean it had security:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_password
Quote: “Password shadowing first appeared in UNIX systems with the development of System V Release 3.2 in 1988 and BSD4.3 Reno in 1990.”
Before this, security on Unix was a joke.
Mr Pogson, I demand an apology for baselessly calling me a liar.
ch wrote, “Before this, security on Unix was a joke.”
Wrong again. File permissions prevented access to the passwords even before shadowing. File permissions are basic security that worked from the beginning.
Wrong again. File permissions prevented access to the passwords even before shadowing.
No, it didn’t. Because before shadowing was implemented, the login process – since at that time the user loging in didn’t have a confirmed user id – was running essentially as “everybody”, and therefore /etc/password was accessible by “everybody”. Why didn’t you read the article I linked to and which explains such basics?
Of course, in the very early days of Unix it’s users were typically Close colleagues if not outright friends, and therefore a “security” that was akin to a “Please don’t disturb”-sign instead of a lock on your door was acceptable. Only later did it really become an issue.
ch wrote, “therefore /etc/password was accessible by “everybody”. “
Correct. My mistake. But the passwords were hashed so it is incorrect to state that no security existed. With the computing power of the time that hashing was significant security. Before about 1990, CPU clocks were just a few MHz…
Quoting Peter H. Salus, “MULTICS had passwords as well as security levels; UNIX had no passwords, and little else. Why should it? Certainly, on the PDP-7 Ken wasn’t concerned with what Dennis might do. Even when the PDP-11/20 arrived in the summer of 1970 no one worried. The machine (and its various upgrades to other PDP-11s) was used for two purposes: development and text processing.
First Edition UNIX is dated November 3, 1971; Second Edition, June 12, 1972. Only in February 1973, with the advent of Third Edition, did passwd find its place among “user maintained commands.” Fourth Edition (November 1973) was Third, rewritten in C; more importantly, it made its way out of the Labs in central New Jersey and the Bell System in Manhattan.”
It depends on what you mean by “early”. Clearly, not making it out of the lab was “early” for me.
But the passwords were hashed so it is incorrect to state that no security existed. With the computing power of the time that hashing was significant security. Before about 1990, CPU clocks were just a few MHz…
Try again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1
(1982, 10 MHz)
“UNIX had no passwords, and little else. Why should it?”
My point exactly: Because of the friendly environment, security was not an issue in designing Unix – making it run and do useful stuff on the limited HW of the time was much more important. And the later /etc/passwd “security” was a breech waiting to happen, likewise the whole suid stuff (see my other link re. “Cuckoo’s Egg”).
To give you a more general idea:
Between 1983/85 and 2005, this was the meterstick for OS security:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria
In the C2 group you found most of the usual suspects: Various commercial Unixes, Netware and Windows NT. (NT was designed to be later enhanced to B3, but AFAIK that never happened). In B3 there were some “hardened” versions of Unix like Trusted Solaris. (Few businesses bothered to use them.) And in the A1 group? Those were the most secure OSes, so they must be quite popular, right? Actually, no: Those systems were military-only, and I don’t think that anybody else would have wanted to run them because a real secure system is just too cumbersome to use.
Oh, and Linux? Well, those evaluations cost serious money, so Linux was never tested. (Let’s be generous and assume that a standard Linux would have been another C2, and SELinux maybe B3.)
Of course, the best designed security doesn’t mean a thing if the administrator/user doesn’t use it. Set your admin password to “123456″ and you’re toast, no matter what great security could theoretically be had.
Correct. My mistake. But the passwords were hashed so it is incorrect to state that no security existed. With the computing power of the time that hashing was significant security.
Not when you combine the exposed hash with a dictionary attack. Also, by the mid-80s, the clock speed of microprocessors had already exceeded 10MHz and the common scheme used to “hash” the passwords was becoming increasingly dubious for the purpose.
This is also not to mention that /etc/shadow was still an after-thought however you spin it.
“TM Repository is having difficulty penetrating our logic so he falls back on a trusted Cult of Microsoft tactic. If we don’t write something that he can point out as a fallacy, then he’ll write one for us.”
I’m really curious where this “cult of Microsoft” exists. Can you point me to any Microsoft fan sites that claim Linux sucks? What about blogs or forums overrun by Microsoft fanboys trying to convince me that Windows is the One True OS? Oh wait, only the Linux faithful, on their Holy Crusade, do that.
Just like http://clientsfromhell.net/ it isn’t the users that that create the content, it’s the people they deal with. Congratulations, you’re a resident troll and a content creator. (Though Pogson will never admit that; He’s desperate to fill the ranks in his army of righteousness)
“It depends on what you mean by “early”. Clearly, not making it out of the lab was “early” for me.”
Thanks for digging up an old TM:
http://tmrepository.com/trademarks/movethegoalposts/
My first work with unix was in 1978 where I had the privilege of running it on a dual floppy lsi-11/03 based system. It was cutting edge for the time, but it was single user and had zero security.
oldman wrote, “My first work with unix was in 1978 where I had the privilege of running it on a dual floppy lsi-11/03 based system. It was cutting edge for the time, but it was single user and had zero security.”
“UNIX” is an adjective, not a noun. Do you remember the source, version, etc? Was it direct from Bell Labs or some other source? There were many UNIX operating sytems in 1978. I was using DEC’s RT-11 on an LSI-11 at the time for robotic data-collection and later on another LSI-11 for a control system. When I did look for a UNIX OS for a computer that I built from LSI years later I found a price tag of $1K and dropped that idea.
TM Repository wrote:
“I’m really curious where this “cult of Microsoft” exists.”
Oh really? I think you would rather discuss anything other than Microsoft’s atrocious security. Remember that? Then you tried writing our statements for us so you could point out the fallacies in them. Fallacies you put there because they were your own words.
Of course you want the discussion to go somewhere else from where it started. You failed to address those points. Now you want the discussion to go elsewhere, anywhere.
““UNIX” is an adjective, not a noun.”
UNIX is first and foremost a noun, Mr Pogson.
UNIX is only an adjective now, in the way that Google is now also a verb. The name came first, additional meanings came into use later.
Ted wrote, “UNIX is first and foremost a noun, Mr Pogson.”
Nonsense. This is what the owner of the trademark says:
“The Trademark should always be followed by the common generic (the dictionary name) of the product:
Correct: A UNIX system is a …….
Incorrect: UNIX is a …….
Trademarks should be used as adjectives, not as nouns:
Correct: ABC Company’s UNIX system
Incorrect: ABC Company’s UNIX
Correct: The TOGAF framework is….
Incorrect: TOGAF is recognized”
see http://www.opengroup.org/content/legal-trademark-guidelines
This is what the owner of the trademark says
The “owner” didn’t own the trademark or even exist prior to Unix wars. What’s more – there wasn’t even a Research Unix (which you refer to as the “original” Unix) version on a non-PDP system until the mid-70s. It was only in late 70s that we saw the advent of MINI-UNIX – a stripped-down version of Research Unix with no memory protection whatsoever – for some variants in the PDP-11 series. Meanwhile, BSD was still nothing more than Bill Joy’s little project at UC Berkeley. All that beef over XPGx, SysV and BSDs was just a product of the 80s when AT&T began to license the Unix brand left and right to other companies.
“Oh really? I think you would rather discuss anything other than Microsoft’s atrocious security. Remember that? Then you tried writing our statements for us so you could point out the fallacies in them. Fallacies you put there because they were your own words.”
I have no problem discussing it, their track record is far from perfect. The point I was making is there’s no silver bullet; If your OS becomes popular it will be targeted by malware. It’s happening on OSX as it becomes more mainstream, and it _would_ happen on desktop Linux if it could gain any significant marketshare. Like OSX, Android is an example of how ill prepared the Linux ecosystem is for malware threats. They’ve long been able to enjoy “security through obscurity”.
To plug your ears and ignore this threat means you’re just as bad as Microsoft.
“Nonsense. This is what the owner of the trademark says:
“The Trademark should always be followed by the common generic (the dictionary name) of the product:
Correct: A UNIX system is a …….
Incorrect: UNIX is a …….”
Red herring alert! Stay on topic. Don’t try to throw up a distraction when you get uncomfortable with your Unix security knowledge is tested.
“Android is an example of how ill prepared the Linux ecosystem is for malware threats.”
Why isn’t your “ill prepared Linux” affecting Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora or Red Hat? They are part of the “Linux ecosystem”. How about because it’s not Linux that’s ill prepared.
You continue to wilfully ignore the fact that Android/Linux is not being attacked by drive-by or backdoor infections like the kind affecting Microsoft’s Windows. Android suffers from social engineered malware which is platform independent. Android security and Microsoft Windows security are on different planets. They are not equal and any attempt to equate them is disingenuous.
The Android platform is ill prepared but it’s how it is ill prepared that’s important. Like I said, the malware attacking Android is socially engineered. It has to be selected, downloaded and executed by the user. Some of these rogue applications come directly from Google’s App store. Google has to do a better job of screening the apps that come into their store. The Linux repository system is as good an example as you can get. There is no reason why Google can’t do the same.
“Why isn’t your “ill prepared Linux” affecting Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora or Red Hat? They are part of the “Linux ecosystem”. How about because it’s not Linux that’s ill prepared.”
Because they don’t have any significant marketshare! I already explained this fact or did you already forget? Android has a majority share of the smartphone market in North America, it’s a big fat target to attack. Desktop Linux occupies less than 1% of the desktop marketshare; Only the most dedicated of malware developers would waste any time on such a tiny target.
Security through obscurity! Get it? Desktop linux is so tiny and insignificant that even malware developers won’t touch it. If desktop marketshare achieved Android numbers, you can bet it would be getting pummeled by malware just like Android is.
“Like I said, the malware attacking Android is socially engineered.”
And you would be wrong. There are several worms and viruses for Android that don’t rely on social engineering. Every time you defend a negative, you’re taking your precious OS one step FURTHER from a solution.
“Google has to do a better job of screening the apps that come into their store.”
You mean, like Apple and Microsoft do on their stores? Are you sure you can handle such an “unfree” walled garden?
“The Linux repository system is as good an example as you can get.”
You mean you install something from the app store and it requires that 500 dependencies be downloaded with it? Oh wait, no, it’s a binary. Stallman hates those, so I suppose you should as well, right?
TM wrote, “they don’t have any significant marketshare!”
Repeating a lie does not make it so. Web stats published by M$’s partners are unreliable. Other sources are 5-10 times larger share for GNU/Linux. It’s definitely a large enough market share that all major OEMs ship PCs running GNU/Linux. Retailers in some parts of the world have no problem selling millions of GNU/Linux PCs. e.g. Walmart in Brazil. A million PCs of any kind is a worthy target and a malware writer is attacking apps these days. There are many apps that run on that other OS as well as GNU/Linux so why aren’t they targeting GNU/Linux? Very few do.
“Was it direct from Bell Labs or some other source? ”
It was Direct from Bell Labs and we were entitled to it for free being an educational institution.
TM Repository wrote:
“Because they don’t have any significant marketshare!”
They don’t need any market share according to your twisted logic (Linux has all the market share you need in servers, where’s the malware there?). They should be getting infected no matter how many there are because they run Linux. But none of the Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or PCLinuxOS flavors of */Linux are getting infected because the malware is Android malware not Linux malware you dolt!
Does malware written for Windows Phone 7 infect the Windows desktop? Does malware written for mobile phones infect desktops in general? You are making quite a technological leap in that malware that infects Android infects Linux across all the platforms it’s used on.
That’s what we call promoting uncertainty through ignorance. It sounds plausible to someone who doesn’t understand how operating systems work.
“There are several worms and viruses for Android that don’t rely on social engineering.”
There are lists of Android malware, give us a link to the one/s that don’t require user intervention. And how does an Android virus affect, say, Ubuntu Linux?
Last I checked they still need a manual download and execution. Maybe you’re confused by the fact that once they are running they can download and execute other malware without user intervention.
“You mean you install something from the app store and it requires that 500 dependencies be downloaded with it?”
No, I mean it’s malware free. No application has 500 dependencies. If you have to stretch the truth then you’re not comfortable with it. If you didn’t have dependencies you’d have bunch of code instead. Reinvented code that didn’t have the luxury of being reexamined many times.
“Repeating a lie does not make it so. Web stats published by M$’s partners are unreliable. Other sources are 5-10 times larger share for GNU/Linux.”
Sure, claim all the numbers are tainted. Please show me some numbers from a source you consider reputable and impartial. Back up your wishful thinking with some real data.
Remember, we’re talking desktop Linux numbers, so that doesn’t include Android, the same way I wouldn’t include iOS numbers in OSX stats.
In the mean time, here’s Wikipedia’s OS stats for their visitors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
So are they a Microsoft partner or are you going to claim that desktop Linux users don’t visit wikipedia?
TM wrote, “Please show me some numbers from a source you consider reputable and impartial.”
I consider Walmart in Brazil impartial. Check out their best-sellers for desktops. 6 GNU/Linux desktops are better selling than the first desktop with that other OS. Neat, eh? Note Brazil does not make its own notebooks, just desktops. They produce millions of GNU/Linux desktops consumed in South America.
Look at the prices of those best-selling desktops:
GNU/Linux $498, $598, $998, $599, $798, $698, That Other OS $1498
What do you know? Brazil has an import tariff on stuff and that other OS cannot be manufactured locally, so too bad, so sad, and it’s such a hot market for PCs in Brazil.
“What do you know? Brazil has an import tariff on stuff and that other OS cannot be manufactured locally, so too bad, so sad, and it’s such a hot market for PCs in Brazil”
So they’re all pirating windows….So sad!
oldman, thinking Brazilians are computer-geeks, wrote, “they’re all pirating windows….So sad!”
“oldman, thinking Brazilians are computer-geeks, wrote, “they’re all pirating windows….So sad!””
SO they take it to their friendly neighborhood computer store and have windows installed.
So Sad!
When asked to supply some numbers he relies on regarding usage shares for Linux in Brazil, Mr. Pogson waves his hands with “I consider Walmart in Brazil impartial.” That leaves the question unanswered, of course, although it does raise some additional questions.
For one, if you refine the search to what are presumed to be imported brands such as HP, Dell, or Sony, there are no Linux machines offered even though these manufacturers offer such machines elsewhere, even in the USA. So why would HP, for examply, supply only Windows machines to Brazil even though they know the ins and outs of doing so? Suggesting that Linux is so much more popular in Brazil cannot be a logical answer.
In any case, there are no numbers at all here and it is well known that the high percentage of pirated Windows here argues for buying a non-Windows computer and installing a pirated copy being a common occurrence.
In a written statement, Microsoft’s Brazil office told the BBC:
“We strongly believe that governments and computer users should be free to choose whichever software and other technology best meets their needs. But when all the costs and benefits are taken together, we think Microsoft offers the best value.”
LOL, of course M$ thinks they are offer the best value. On the same token, they also offer the best in malware that your Brazilian Real’s can buy.
One day the world will wake up, look towards Redmond and say “No!”
No, as M$ wants to control the world instead of empowering users to control their hardware. We see this with the M$ and Sinofsky with their throw-away tablets.
Linux Mint has a Brazilian representation: http://www.linuxmint.com.br/
Clarence Moon wrote, “high percentage of pirated Windows here”.
Of course that’s easier to write if Clarence publishes no numbers for the “percentage”. It could be 1%, for instance, not high at all.
In fact, this list shows Brazil as about average, not high at all, so illegal copying of that other OS does not explain the great popularity of FLOSS PCs. In fact, the level of illegal copying in the link is 3X the level in USA. By Clarence’s logic, Brazil should be selling 3X as many GNU/Linux PCs as Walmart in USA but Walmart in USA sells only two GNU/Linux PCs so the ratio is 10X or more. Therefor Clarence is wrong again.
In 2008, HP was building PCs in Brazil and getting a tax-break. I don’t know why they are not selling GNU/Linux PCs in Walmart but I do know they had a disastrous quarter. Perhaps not selling what the customers want is part of their problem.
“In fact, this list shows Brazil as about average, not high at all, so illegal copying of that other OS does not explain the great popularity of FLOSS PCs”
Fine, then Show us the real numbers Pog, not your wishful thinking of incomplete facts.
What did I learn today? That a piracy rate of ~59% is “not high at all”.
+5 – informative!
“In fact, this list shows Brazil as about average, not high at all, so illegal copying of that other OS does not explain the great popularity of FLOSS PCs.”
A 59% piracy rate is average? Do you actually read what you write Pog?
Therefor Clarence is wrong again.
Certainly the piracy rate for Windows is not as high as piracy in general. Some years ago, Ballmer made a claim that it was 25% or so and steps have been taken to reduce that figure. Thgat is less than half of the worldwide rate claimed for all software. Also, so very many new computers are sold with Windows pre-installed that there is not very much of a need to pirate the OS anymore. So where does the piracy occur?
The only sensible answer is that it occurs where the opportunity lies and that is anywhere that non-Windows computers are sold in any quantity.
Perhaps not selling what the customers want is part of their problem
When you bet on a dog or a horse in a race, Mr. Pogson, you have to take some advice from somewhere unless you are a dog or horse breeder. If you want to know what customers want in the IT industry, you have to look to what the people who supply products to that industry seem to think is wanted, not what your individual biases are. If HP thought that many people would want or even accept Linux on their PC, they would provide it and promote it. As it stands, they almost totally ignore it.
That is the handwriting on the wall that you seem to always ignore.
M$ could care less about piracy, as the first dose is always free and the user is hooked for life. M$’s anti-piracy policy is analogous to street-corner marketing of illicit drugs.
Those of us that sober up, take rehabilitation by way of the command line, improved GUI and learn about the superiority of Linux and it’s many offerings.
Once you start using a product, you keep using it.”Is widespread piracy simply foregone revenue, a business model by accident or a business model by design?….Maybe all three.”
Of course, M$ executives prefer that people buy, but theft can build market share more quickly, as company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates acknowledged in an unguarded moment.
“Although about 3+ million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though,” Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
The company sues online auctioneers and computer makers that supply pirated products, including Windows, the operating system for more than 90% of the world’s personal computers. It cooperates with law enforcement agencies to seize pirated discs and warns users around the globe that counterfeit programs may destabilize their systems, but they never sue the individual users.
China, for instance, promotes Red Flag Linux — a local, open-source competitor to Windows. As Gates conclude , piracy may be the only way M$ can stay in that market, embracing the opportunity to gradually convert pirates to payers. If M$ launched a draconian crackdown, UC Berkeley’s Varian said, it would provoke the obvious reaction: “People would just switch to open source.”
“Those of us that sober up, take rehabilitation by way of the command line, improved GUI and learn about the superiority of Linux and it’s many offerings.”
Only a complete idiot would laud the command line as something that a desktop user should spend time in.
Are you for real?
VERY real.
You clearly underestimate the power of the command line. The command line is far easier to master then some point-click GUI.
For example, with a single command, I can connect to an online database, search by name for the source code of an application, download that source code, find and download all of its required support files, compile the application into a binary file made specifically to run on my computer, and install the application.
Desktop users should learn basic command line phraseology, such as:
- sfc /scannow
- sigverif
- driverquery
- nslookup
- ping
- pathping
- ipconfig
- repair-bde
- systeminfo
- tasklist
- taskkill
- tracert
- type
- netstat
- net “command”
- nslookup
- netsh
Even M$ has a use for the command line: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2632
The major drawback to Windows servers, by the way, is their requirement to use the GUI for so many things. In some cases, generating the visuals for a GUI can use up to 80% of the machine’s processing capacity, so using a GUI on a server is counterproductive. Linux allows you to run the system with just a CLI, but Windows forces use of a GUI.
CLIs are also useful for operating computers remotely, because they use practically no bandwidth, whereas GUIs gobble bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow. You can manage a dozen machines with as many CLI windows from one PC even on very slow connections, but trying to maintain a dozen GUI windows can easily choke a slow net connection.
“The command line is far easier to master then some point-click GUI.”
There are plenty who will disagree with that. GUIs are far easier for those who can’t read, or can’t read the language the CLI is in. Pictures and symbols on the other hand…
“For example, with a single command, I can connect to an online database, search by name for the source code of an application, download that source code, find and download all of its required support files, compile the application into a binary file made specifically to run on my computer, and install the application.”
It isn’t a single command then, is it? It’s a program or script that does lots of other things, one after the other.
“Desktop users should learn basic command line phraseology, such as:”
Basic? None of those would be used in everyday use of a Windows computer. They’re almost all diagnostics tools.
How about the actual everyday command line stuff like CD, MD, RD, REN, DEL, COPY, MOVE, and DIR?
“The major drawback to Windows servers, by the way, is their requirement to use the GUI for so many things.”
Server Core and Hyper-V Server show this as the nonsense it is.
Nearly all recent MS server products can be *completely* controlled from a CLI. In the case of Exchange, most wizards just generate and run a PowerShell script. Some things in Exchange cannot be done by the GUI, they are CLI ONLY.
“In some cases, generating the visuals for a GUI can use up to 80% of the machine’s processing capacity, ”
I’d REALLY like to see some evidence backing this up, but I expect I’ll just get a dubious anecdote. What were you doing? Rendering a new background wallpaper, raytracing with caustics and global illumination every five seconds?
“so using a GUI on a server is counterproductive. Linux allows you to run the system with just a CLI, but Windows forces use of a GUI.”
Server Core again, I’m afraid. And you do know that Explorer.exe isn’t running when no one is logged on to the server, right? It’s a user process, so no users, no process.
And what’s wrong with a GUI on a server anyway? Don’t Linux terminal servers run the GUI for you and ship it to your X server over the network? No complaints about GUIs on servers there, is there?
“CLIs are also useful for operating computers remotely, because they use practically no bandwidth, whereas GUIs gobble bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow.”
PSEXEC or Remote PowerShell. I’ll bet X over SSH doesn’t guzzle bandwidth though, does it?
“You can manage a dozen machines with as many CLI windows from one PC even on very slow connections, but trying to maintain a dozen GUI windows can easily choke a slow net connection.”
Try looking up RDP, DRAC, or iLO some time.
Managing Windows servers is ideally done with admin tools on the client (Look up RSAT too), which keeps bandwidth use to a minimum over WAN links.
oldman wrote, “Only a complete idiot would laud the command line as something that a desktop user should spend time in.”
There are some things that ordinary users do that is best done CLI. eg. converting every .JPG file in some directory to 500×300 .jpegs. There may be some application that does that easily in a GUI but it is trivial from CLI with imagemagick etc. It’s a lot of work to create a GUI application that anticipates every possible operation of a user and getting an easily accessible UI for it. OTOH, a command script can provably do anything its operators can string together. Suppose some application can do the above example. What application will allow chaingin that operation with some other random demand of the user? GUIs are too rigid for that. e.g. Suppose the user wants to burn the bulk-processed files to a CD. Very few applications will enclose that possibility even if they allow fairly complex operations on the set of files. That requires the user to do the one process, wait until it completes and start another process for burning. With CLI, you can set it up and go to lunch. The more steps, the more options, the bigger the advantage of CLI. CLI scales better for larger operations and is more flexible.
An example from where I last worked. At that school, each student-report was a spreadsheet edited asynchronously by teachers. When editing was complete someone (me, being nearest the fast colour printer), had to print all those files. Now, there is “drag and drop” printing in that other OS, but in this case, selecting the set of files to print was not easy as not every report had to be printed. You could not just “select all”… You would either have to drag the chosen files to some directory or copy them and then “select all”, two steps. With CLI, I could process any list, do a mail-merge, and generate the PDF or PS files and route them to the printer without any other interaction. With CLI, I also generated the templates for each student as a single command merging my attendance data, student information, so I had much less work to do.
There are things the GUI does better, like selecting items from a short list (say, one screen), but, as soon as the size of the job increases the thing becomes unwieldly (say, a directory of 987 files), whereas CLI is about the same effort with 5 or 5K items if the lists are known. For instance, I can create directories with files named after PCs in certain classes. I can send CLI stuff to each PC in a class or all PCs with exactly the same effort whether the number of PCs is 10 or 10K. With a GUI such things become unwieldy as soon as the list does not fit on a screen. CLI is a general purpose programming system capable of doing anything. GUI hides details which may be crucial and limits choices to what is visible.
Kinds of things ordinary users of PCs may do these days, with digital cameras generating thousand of images annually, better with CLI include finding, renaming, converting, sorting, merging large numbers of files. There may be GUI applications with all kinds of bells and whistles but as soon as the software is released some user will make a demand that the application cannot do. With CLI there is always a way to do anything. It may take a bit of effort to learn the process, but once learned it can be recorded as a list of commands somewhere and used as is for years.
There are some things that ordinary users do that is best done CLI. eg. converting every .JPG file in some directory to 500×300 .jpegs.
Every tried IrfanView? It’s a freeware thumbnail viewer with batch conversion features (format, size, etc.) and no CLI involved. Oh, hang on – you don’t use Windows, so how would you have even seen it before? My bad!
It’s a lot of work to create a GUI application that anticipates every possible operation of a user and getting an easily accessible UI for it.
On one hand, we have PR hand-waving about UI designs. On the other hand, there are tons on GUI-based batch utilities floating around on CNET for almost every task you can think of in home computing. One must wonder if he/she should take the guy’s opinion seriously.
Earn some stripes in software development first, PR, and then we shall discuss all this CLI vs. GUI guff in grand details.
“Rendering a new background wallpaper, raytracing with caustics and global illumination every five seconds?”
Wahaha, you just made my day. I doubt he even knows what you’re talking about. Let me confound by asking how many samples you think this 80% CPU usage is using? Do you think the GI image is true HDRI, or does it need to be interpolated? Do you think they’re using too many area lights? Perhaps if they cached the radiance map to disk it might be reduced to 35%?
Comedy gold!
“There are some things that ordinary users do that is best done CLI. eg. converting every .JPG file in some directory to 500×300 .jpegs.”
Are you serious? Because I think the rest of the world might disagree with you (some of the solutions are even Linux-based):
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/02/15-useful-batch-image-processors/
Batch image processors are common, simple, accessible, easy to install and easy to use. Some require no more work than to drag an drop the folder you want to convert onto them. No matter how you slice it, that’s fewer keys pressed to achieve the same result. Especially when said software remembers your defaults between sessions, something the command line doesn’t do.
““There are some things that ordinary users do that is best done CLI. eg. converting every .JPG file in some directory to 500×300 .jpegs.”
Actually it goes like this.
Do a windows search across a folder tree for the files that need processing.
Open your GUI based batch conversion program.
Make sure the option to save the results back into the folder that the original came from is selected.
Select all from the search results window drag and drop into batch window of your GUI tool.
Press start and walk away.
I do this all the time Pog in windows, Why dont you?
oldman wrote, “Do a windows search across a folder tree for the files that need processing.
Open your GUI based batch conversion program.
Make sure the option to save the results back into the folder that the original came from is selected.
Select all from the search results window drag and drop into batch window of your GUI tool.”
Hmmm…
for f in somedir/*.JPG; do convert $f -resize 500×300 $f;done
Notice there are a lot fewer operations by the human for the CLI version. If there were 1K JPGs in that directory mixed with .jpegs and other stuff you would have to change view-mode and scroll. Fun, that scrolling. Same for selecting images made on a certain date or of a certain size. Heaven forbid you had a list of 624 particular images in the bunch that you wanted to convert.
Granted, there is an issue if you count key-presses as clicks but for people like me who can type, the words just seem to flow from the finger-tips. I certainly don’t need to scroll or deal with selections spread over more than one screen. That is truly difficult.
These days, ordinary folks do have thousands of images and the best they can do is drop different photo-shoots into different directories. Still there could be hundreds of images taken at a wedding or other target-rich environment. My little woman has more than 12K. She’s had a digital camera for a few years and now a smart phone that takes pictures anywhere she goes. No kidding. She will be driving somewhere, screech to a stop and take a few pictures of some random neighbourhood/architecture that catches her eye. Her “rate of production” is several K images per annum. Images are her top usage of disk-space. Eventually she will slow down and reflect on her situation and start using a local database, renaming the images at least to something other than IMG12345.JPG or adding comments. A good image-database with a GUI could be advantageous but I doubt it will have all the options available with CLI. Is she going to go through 12K images to click on some options for each one? I doubt it. Could she ask her resident CLI expert to process things? You can bet on that. Everyone should know a CLI guru if they cannot be one.
TM wrote, “Especially when said software remembers your defaults between sessions, something the command line doesn’t do.”
Never seen echo “for f in fruitloops/*;do convert $f -resize 80×80 $f;done” > fl.sh? That’s persistence.
“Never seen echo “for f in fruitloops/*;do convert $f -resize 80×80 $f;done” > fl.sh? That’s persistence.”
No it’s not. That’s called “writing a shell script”.
“These days, ordinary folks do have thousands of images and the best they can do is drop different photo-shoots into different directories. ”
So things like ACDSee, LightRoom, Aperture, Picasa or even just iPhoto or Windows Live Photo Gallery have stopped existing?
Hah, RE: “These days, ordinary folks do have thousands of images and the best they can do is drop different photo-shoots into different directories. ” Sooo..true, the majority of people have no clue and revert to M$ miss-offerings, that are crappy to begin with or just go about and spend money for no reason, when they can obtain the same image effects for $0.00.
Here are some image programs that I use, some of these ARE available for Windows. Picasa is used from a web browser which is nice.
Picasa, Xnview, Minus, Shotwell, Imgur, digiKam, gThumb, F-Spot, ImageMagick, XnViewMP, Gwenview, Geeqie, Jalbum, Openphoto, Fotowall, ITmages, Imageshack Uploader, Picapy, Sharpshot, Galapix, Dropico, Phatch Image Inspector & bATCH Processor
I use Inkscape, GIMP, Blender and LibreDraw for more serious work.
for f in somedir/*.JPG; do
convert $f -resize 500×300 $f;
done
Alternatively, you can simply do the following in cmd.exe:
@echo off
for %%f in (somedir\*.JPG) do convert %%f -resize 500x300 %%f
I recommed cmd.exe/Windows or IrfanView/Windows. It just works.
“Sooo..true, the majority of people have no clue and revert to M$ miss-offerings, that are crappy to begin with or just go about and spend money for no reason, when they can obtain the same image effects for $0.00.”
Way to ignore the fact that many of the solutions available on Windows are also free. Including all the open source ones.
And this may come as a surprise to you, but some people consider their time valuable. Even if the only solutions cost money, they’d rather pay for something they can intuitively use right out of the box than spend their weekend slogging through outdated documentation on the arcane command line switches.
The command line converters don’t allow selective dragging (if I want the first 10 and last 2 images in a folder, I’d have to type out the names of all 12), they don’t have any image previewing to see what that jpeg compression is going to do, they don’t have any way to interactively crop images (you have to guess), they don’t remember your defaults between sessions, etc.
It really is wishful thinking to believe that the command line is anything but a last resort for image conversion. That, or a tool for martyrs on a Linux crusade.
“I use Inkscape, GIMP, Blender and LibreDraw for more serious work.”
I would really REALLY like to see what you consider to be “serious work”.
I just uploaded my Master’s Thesis. That’s serious work and those tools would have done all the graphics beautifully. I might have used LyX instead of LibreOffice for the writing, though. If I get really bored this winter after hunting season and clearing the driveway of snow, I might attempt creating a second edition with modern tools. I no longer have some of the raw data however but curve-fitting parameters are embedded in the text. My daughters explored my stash of stuff that’s been in storage for a decade and we found the thesis and some notes. I bet it would only take a few days to do the whole thing with modern tools found in Debian GNU/Linux.
I might have used LyX instead of LibreOffice for the writing, though.
You mean the piece of software that is also available for Windows?
Don’t you find it sad that your favorite almost for every app you can find in the Debian repo, there is a version for Windows plus more?
What’s the point of this exercise of yours anyway? To prove that you can play endless catching-up with the rest of the world on Linux?
“What’s the point of this exercise of yours anyway? To prove that you can play endless catching-up with the rest of the world on Linux?”
Bingo. Anything worth running on Linux also runs on Windows or OSX. But it doesn’t stop there; You can use all the other software that exists for either OS that simply doesn’t have an equivalent on Linux.
Where’s a Flash IDE (bitch all you want about it dying on the web, it has the biggest install base of any piece of software and it’s used to produce most 2D animation for television)?
What about music creation software like Reason or Ableton Live (no, Audacity doesn’t count, that’s just audio recording)?
Where are the ASIO drivers for my M-Audio hardware interfaces (I thought this stuff being built into the kernel was supposed to “just work”)?
What about a video editor that can handle modern formats (even iOS editors have better features than the paltry Linux offerings)?
What about games that aren’t 5-15 years old?
Hell, what about an image editor that supports CMYK colour profiles?
Guess what operating systems DO have all those things? That’s right, Windows and OSX. Right alongside OpenOffice, GIMP, InkScape, Blender, Audacity, Firefox, Apache, etc.
Settling for Linux is settling for less.
TM wrote, “Settling for Linux is settling for less.”
No, it’s not. Settling for GNU/Linux is getting what you want on good terms. All the things TM mentioned not available in GNU/Linux are various niches not of any interest to many millions of ordinary people who want to be connected, informed and mobile without the burden of a licence designed to enslave them. Really. Most people need transportation not a luxury vehicle with built-in bar. Given a choice most people buy a decent used vehicle or a compact car with four wheels and an engine.
Brillo wrote, “Don’t you find it sad that your favorite almost for every app you can find in the Debian repo, there is a version for Windows plus more?”
Nope. That other OS still has its intrinsic problems of a restrictive EULA, malware, re-re-reboots, phoning home, BSA witch-hunts etc. That good software is cross-platform is an indication of its desirability. It is easier for some to install a single application on that other OS instead of migrating everything to GNU/Linux. That’s the wrong choice in the long run but it is someone’s choice, not something to be sad about. Audacity, for instance, was the second FLOSS application I observed being used in schools before I arrived. The first was OpenOffice.org. The more FLOSS used the easier it is to migrate to GNU/Linux. When I migrated the school at Easterville to GNU/Linux there was very little opposition because most users were very familiar with the browser and there was not much difference between the office suite for their usage. It just worked. I mostly had to show how the file-system was laid out and the users could use it.
Brillo wrote, “What’s the point of this exercise of yours anyway?”
The point of this exercise is to rid the world of that other OS, one computer at a time. It’s fun watching the monopoly crumble.
Given a choice most people buy a decent used vehicle or a compact car with four wheels and an engine.
But the manufacturers do not care, Mr. Pogson. They only care about those who buy new cars, just as the computer OEMs only care about those who buy new computers. Once it is sold, it is water over the dam or under the bridge as you wish.
To influence what is manufactured, you have to influence new equipment buyers. So far, Linux has failed to do that as a PC OS delivered on a new system.
TM Repository wrote:
“Where are the ASIO drivers for my M-Audio hardware…”
Here you big baby: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-MAudio
Can’t you do anything for yourself?
TM Repository, I would love to post them. However, I have NDA’s that I must abide by with my employer and besides that Adobe’s products are ridiculously expensive.
The bean counter’s were looking to cut costs and when I showed them what I could do, the marketing staff was let for being incompetent and spending over budget.
Now I get to do marketing work as a side task and received a 200% raise from my knowledge.
Inkscape is used for layered drawings.
Gimp is for image manipulation and touch-up of original images.
LibreDraw, I create diagrams and work-flows, typically that derive and originate from Freemind.
“LibreDraw, I create diagrams and work-flows, typically that derive and originate from Freemind.”
Okay, so at best you’re putting together slides for some local business. That’s not “serious design work”, it’s so basic you could be doing this in Google Docs.
“However, I have NDA’s that I must abide by with my employer…”
Convenient. Why are you allowing employers to make you sign NDAs? You realize that you should be stipulating in your contract that you’re allowed to show all your work as part of a portfolio, right? That’s the lifeblood of any designer.
“and besides that Adobe’s products are ridiculously expensive.”
You realize that the cost of the Adobe software is a drop in the bucket to how much you should be making with the tools, right? If you’re not then your business model is seriously flawed. Hell, I’ve bought several 3D packages over the years just so I could open files from clients. Even though each was between $1000-2000 it was worth it because the jobs were worth at least 10 times that!
Besides, you can rent adobe software on a monthly, or annual, basis now and it costs a fraction of outright purchasing it.
Its a small price to pay for industry standard software. What if someone requests an editable PSD? Are you going to give them a GIMP file and wish them good luck? What if you need to do CMYK colour work? Oh, GIMP doesn’t support that, hmm? What if you need to do large format printing? Oh, GIMP crashes if images get too big?
Nope. That other OS still has its intrinsic problems of a restrictive EULA, malware, re-re-reboots, phoning home, BSA witch-hunts etc.
- Restrictive EULA
That depends on what you see as “restrictive”. To me, the GPL is restrictive in every sense of the word (to the extent that products such as Astaro Security Gateway have to give you a pointless option to install GPL’d components only).
- Malware
Again, what did I say about optometrists? See one.
Or maybe it’s time to switch to Haiku? I don’t know.
- re-re-reboots
A problem that has more to do with the supposed “expert” on the other side of the keyboard not knowing what he is doing or even just what’s happening than anything else.
- phoning home
I am pretty confident that the majority of security experts would disgree with you on this one.
- BSA witch-hunts etc
I have been using a binary hack that enables concurrent RDP access on XP/7 for non-production purposes and it’s strictly EULA non-compliant. Yet I haven’t seen any law enforcement agent busting down my door. Maybe whoever running the Spanish Inquisition is taking a nap?
That good software is cross-platform is an indication of its desirability.
Again, knowing how to push raw signals through a piece of metal does not give you credibility in software development.
Making a piece of software compilable across heterogeneous platforms implies fitting your code into fundamentally incompatible APIs, and that effort costs money from a comercial point of view. For a small-scale, volunteer effort, the opportunity cost of that investment is simply moot. However, when you are in to sell a product to pay your bills, everything you do becomes a factor in the profitability of your venture. Heck, even GIMP can’t be easily ported without someone familiar with Windows doing the work (as acknowledged by its current 2 1/2 developers), so what makes you think Adobe is going to spend money on an exercise that obviously will not give them much in return?
“restrictive EULA”
You mean more restrictive than the GPL that says what I do for a living is immoral?
“phoning home”
Can you please provide some sort of data that indicates this is happening? Networks can be monitored.
If you don’t trust Windows Update or OSX Update then turn them off. All patches they deploy can be downloaded and manually triaged, then streamlined via Active Directory or some other single point network delivery method.
What do you think network admins do? Run around to every workstation and click “update”?
“re-re-rebooting”
Funny because neither Vista, Windows 7 nor Windows 8 require rebooting even when installing new video or audio drivers. Linux, on the other hand, can’t even recover from a video driver crash without a full reboot. These days, a system reboot is done as a “just in case” measure for 3rd party software that might need it (Adobe Acrobat, for example).
Yet I haven’t seen any law enforcement agent busting down my door
Generally speaking, copyright violation has been a civil matter despite there being some criminal penalties associated with the laws.
If an author detects unauthorized copying by someone deriving economic benefit from the copying, it is more useful to simply grab the money involved than to see the perpetrator incarcerated. The BSA works on a sort of “finder’s fee” basis and gets its leads from employees of violators who are often otherwise disgruntled with their jobs and uses the BSA money as a way to finance a job exit as well as getting even for real or imagined abuse from an employer.
If you use Windows without paying or use some other proprietary application without proper licensing, the BSA may be on your tail sooner or later. That seems fair to me, i.e. if you are getting some money either through sales or cost avoidance, it is a fair go to be found out and penalized for such an action. On the other hand, there are a lot of prosecution of GPL software users by the Software Freedom Law Center who are going after companies that embed open source code in their products. The software is free (as in beer) but these companies are prosecuted in any case, simply to get the recognition they want. The BSA makes more sense.
“The point of this exercise is to rid the world of that other OS, one computer at a time.”
And this is why you’ll never achieve your goal. You’ve set up a “war on terror” scenario for yourself. Like all fanatics and fundamentalists, you’ve demonized something to give yourself a target to blindly vent your rage at being so impotent.
Why is it so hard for you to be pragmatic? Why do you let fanaticism rule your life? You’ve clearly picked a team and want them to “win” very badly. In the process, you see people like me as your enemies, when I’m actually one of the people furthering open source. I use it, contribute to it, and complain about it when it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
You, on the other hand, use it, contribute nothing, and defend the defects like some corporate manager. You’re not an advocate, your just another dumb user with delusions of grandeur.
“It’s fun watching the monopoly crumble.”
Microsoft isn’t a monopoly. The very existence of OSX and Linux proves that it isn’t.
TM wrote, “Why is it so hard for you to be pragmatic?”
I am very pragmatic. I use what works and it’s GNU/Linux. I prefer the Debian GNU/Linux because it suits my style and has a great repository and package manager. It works really well. I don’t see anything practical at all about that other OS or M$. They make IT difficult. The EULA. The re-re-reboots. The phoning home. The authentication. The necessity to prove one has a licence. Any of these are sufficient practical reasons to use GNU/Linux and FLOSS. That’s pragmatism, looking at the possibilities and making informed choices. Pragmatism is not accepting slavery.
Pragmatic:“Philosophical; dealing with causes, reasons, and effects, rather than with details and circumstances; — said of literature. “Pragmatic history.” –Sir W. Hamilton. “Pragmatic poetry.” –M. Arnold.
[1913 Webster]“
TM wrote, of phoning home, “Can you please provide some sort of data that indicates this is happening? Networks can be monitored.”
Worst case I ever encountered. Folks from the bush with no phone and no Internet connection bought a PC as a glorified CD player. After 30 days Vista would not play with them because they had not allowed it to phone home. I installed Debian GNU/Linux and they lived happily every after.
Brillo wrote, “Making a piece of software compilable across heterogeneous platforms implies fitting your code into fundamentally incompatible APIs, and that effort costs money from a comercial point of view.”
A lot of the applications I write are intended to work from CLI, not a GUI and that is all fixed by the “target” option during the build. I can write a programme in PASCAL and FreePascal will generate ELF or .exe without any concern by me for the OS the application runs on. I have programmes that I wrote when I was using DOS that still work as written in GNU/Linux.
It’s the GUI that traps applications. M$ made all kinds of libraries and DEs available that only produce code for M$’s OS so the world would be locked in. At one point a very high percentage of applications would only run on that other OS. Android/Linux has changed all that. iOS, too. There are now hundreds of thousands of applications that will run just fine without that other OS. Perhaps not the standard productivity applications, but that will happen soon. Now there are millions who rarely if ever use that other OS for anything.
“Worst case I ever encountered. Folks from the bush with no phone and no Internet connection bought a PC as a glorified CD player. After 30 days Vista would not play with them because they had not allowed it to phone home. I installed Debian GNU/Linux and they lived happily every after.”
So they bought a PC that didn’t have a valid license then? Because under normal circumstances, an OS registration is something that’s done at the factory and not something the user needs to do unless they do a reinstall.
Sounds like they got duped by the store/dealer, but you wouldn’t want to admit that. Better to claim it was Microsoft’s fault.
This begs the question, why didn’t they just buy a CD player if that’s all they wanted? If they have no internet connection, why did you let them spend all that money on a computer when a return for a $50 player would have sufficed? Hell, they’d have gotten better speakers out of the deal too.
Oh, right, it’s because you were too busy being “computer guru” to solve their actual problem instead of trying to impress your militant views on technology on them.
“A lot of the applications I write are intended to work from CLI, not a GUI and that is all fixed by the “target” option during the build.”
So you mean writing bash scripts might be a bad idea after all? What with the specific bash syntax targeting? Hmm, it’s almost as if writing programs instead of shell scripts produce more portable results. Interesting.
“I can write a programme in PASCAL and FreePascal will generate ELF or .exe without any concern by me for the OS the application runs on.”
Bahaha, oh man, pascal? You realize that one of the godfathers of Pascal/TurboPascal invented C#, right? You’re one of those shmucks who learned a language in school (QBASIC, Pascal, Turing, etc.) and hasn’t been able to let go. No wonder you’re so angry, you’re impotent on so many levels it would drive any man to the brink.
“I have programmes that I wrote when I was using DOS that still work as written in GNU/Linux.”
Interesting. I guess you’re not targeting the Linux API then, because it doesn’t matter what language you’re using, that thing breaks from point release to point release. Meanwhile, many BINARIES from the Windows 95 era can still be run on Windows 8, while open source tools from the same era can’t be run at all, regardless of the arcane compiler flags you invoke.
A lot of the applications I write are intended to work from CLI, not a GUI and that is all fixed by the “target” option during the build.
Oh, why didn’t that surprise me at all? No, actually, I’ll tell you how shocked I am once I have taken off my large-framed glasses and finished riding my antique one-gear bicycle.
I can write a programme in PASCAL and FreePascal will generate ELF or .exe without any concern by me for the OS the application runs on.
LOL. There is no native API in Linux or Windows for Pascal. This is like saying you can just ignore compatibility issues by writing everything in Perl or Python. Cute, but I don’t think people are ready to embrace your very forward-thinking vision of forgoing the performance they get with direct access to native APIs in C or C++ just yet.
It’s the GUI that traps applications. M$ made all kinds of libraries and DEs available that only produce code for M$’s OS so the world would be locked in.
No, they should stick to DOS API and make every single developer come up with mountains of abstraction layers and libraries to deal with the limitations of so. That will make the development costs dirt cheap no doubt.
“It’s the GUI that traps applications. M$ made all kinds of libraries and DEs available that only produce code for M$’s OS so the world would be locked in.”
Don’t try to pull that crap, Robert. There are plenty of cross platform libraries that can produce fine looking GUIs on every platform. There’s no lock in because every OS looks identical; Same windows, same buttons, same lists, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Debian_Screenshot_KDE.png
You’re precious Debian looks an awful lot like Windows with the same min/max/close buttons, the same title bar, the same Start Menu-like launcher, hell, the clock is in the same damn place; Even OSX can’t claim to be THAT DERIVATIVE!
Making a GUI app compatible with Debian and Windows is easier than making one compatible between Windows and OSX. Debian is such a facsimile, practically no work has to be done.
Perhaps if you actually created a GUI app you might actually realize that the work involved isn’t about talking to the libraries, it’s about making a GUI that people can actually use intuitively. Get your head out of your ass and actually develop something in the domain you’re talking about BEFORE you make an argument.
“It’s the GUI that traps applications.”
It’s the API that traps applications, idiot. Win32 API is far from perfect, but it’s OLDER than the Linux API yet still a hell of a lot more stable. A binary that targeted Win32 from 1995 can still run, without emulation, on Windows 8.
Even crazier, many binaries that run on Windows 7 can be installed and run on Windows 95. Did you know that Firefox can be installed on 95, even though it says it isn’t supported? Please, try and install Firefox on 95 era Linux.
“Now I get to do marketing work as a side task and received a 200% raise from my knowledge.”
Bwahahaha. So if you got such a raise for your non-existing “knowledge”, I have to assume that your former pay was close enough to $0 as doesn’t matter.
Careful, he’s under a strict NDA! I’m sure he finds Microsoft EULAs far too restrictive, but when it comes to hundred dollar clients, he’s willing to sign anything they put in front of him.
As I said before, any designer worth their salt would never sign an agreement that didn’t allow them to tout their trade. Either he’s an idiot, or he’s lying about the NDAs.
Dougmann promotes snake oil on his website. According to him,
- he, like, totally replaced Sharepoint with Mediawiki
- he got a big payrise for suggesting to replace PS with GIMP because “Adobe’s products are ridiculously expensive” for businesses
- he then did “marketing work” with Freemind
Oh, and he doesn’t know the difference between revenues and stock prices. So why should I buy his NDA story?
ch expressed skepticism of Dougman, writing, “Oh, and he doesn’t know the difference between revenues and stock prices. So why should I buy his NDA story?”
Because, like the other items, you have no reason to doubt his story.
e.g. Mediawiki does have features a group can use for collaboration. I have used it in schools to combine outsider knowledge from Wikipedia with home-grown knowledge of the members of the group. It builds the team to have local information searchable from the same database as Wikipedia but without the editorial censorship of Wikipedia. It is fine for text and multimedia. The only negative I see is the strangeness of the syntax for input which takes some learning. Mediawiki is adding more normal input now.
Because, like the other items, you have no reason to doubt his story.
No reason for you, maybe, but I am not surprised given your overt lack of skepticism to even the likes of oiaohm whose alleged knowledge in the many subject matters discussed here has been repeatedly found to be pure fabrication.
TM wrote, “Please, try and install Firefox on 95 era Linux.”
Why on Earth would I do that? Quit trying to waste our time. Netscape was available at the time and trashed IE in the market based on performance so M$ had to make exclusive deals to squeeze Netscape out. Linux is the kernel of the OS. Because people have the source code they could upgrade the OS so that FF would run but that’s pointless. People have better things to do with their time like running a more recent distro.
“you have no reason to doubt his story.”
After all his bogus claims? Sure I do – and it’s a shame that you want to believe him because you think he’s on your side.
“Mediawiki does have features”
Yes, and SharePoint has much more, the Wiki functionality is just a byproduct. Either that customer was using only a ridiculously narrow subset of SharePoint’s functionality, or that story is a hoax. BTW, I pointed out before that for Wikis on SP you only need to know one bit of syntax – but Dougmann didn’t want to answer my question which bit that would be.
Why on Earth would I do that? Quit trying to waste our time. Netscape was available at the time and trashed IE in the market based on performance so M$ had to make exclusive deals to squeeze Netscape out.
Someone obviously missed the news on IE 4 download records back in the 90s. Even I myself had a part in contributing to those statistics with a slow-as-molasses 36.6kb dial-up connection.
“Netscape was available at the time and trashed IE in the market based on performance so M$ had to make exclusive deals to squeeze Netscape out.”
No, those “exclusive deals” didn’t accomplish much: As long as Netscape was actually better than IE, just about everybody used it. But then MS released IE4, which was better than Netscape, and guess what happened?
http://penguinday.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/the-ancient-past/
Then Netscape decided to rewrite everything from scratch, while MS released IE5, 5.5 and 6. That’s what did Netscape in.
ch wrote some nonsense, “those “exclusive deals” didn’t accomplish much”.
Uhh… they excluded Netscape. ISPs, OEMs not distributing Netscape was a pretty high hurdle, making Netscape a bottle-neck and requiring consumers to install. OEMs were installing Netscape on PCs in the factory and M$ made them stop…
Here’s M$ paying ISPs not to distribute Netscape.
Here’s HP agreeing to ship IE on 75% of their machines.
They would not have done those things for not accomplishing much.
ch wrote of functionality, “Yes, and SharePoint has much more”.
Some things are just too expensive to acquire for just one more feature. You don’t change your car or your girl-friend annually just because something better comes along. Features you don’t use are useless waste.
“Uhh… they excluded Netscape.”
Yes – so what? As long as Netscape was better than IE, everybody knew how to get it and used it. That’s why I said that those exclusive deals didn’t accomplish much. It was only when IE became better than NS that people used the pre-installed IE – or, rather, got the newest and best version and installed it, even if that involved a download.
“Some things are just too expensive to acquire for just one more feature.”
Fortunately for MS, SP offers a lot of easy-to-use functionality for an affordable price to businesses – that’s why it currently sells like hotcakes. Oh, and SP Foundation is even a free add-on to Windows Server.
However, Dougmann told us that the client had already installed (and thus probably paid for) SP, so where is the saving? Don’t start with updates: They could easily use the existing version for years to come.
ch wrote, “Fortunately for MS, SP offers a lot of easy-to-use functionality for an affordable price to businesses – that’s why it currently sells like hotcakes. Oh, and SP Foundation is even a free add-on to Windows Server.”
Everything is a FREE add-on for GNU/Linux. M$’s sells cripple-ware and then charges a premium to make it less crippled.
All too often the FLOSS offerings are even more functionally “crippled” than the “evil commercial crippleware” – and without the option to upgrade. So what do I gain?