Comment Re:Sooo hang on... (Score 1) 594
OK, so buy a domain name for a few bucks a year, and point its MX records at an email provider of your choosing in your own country.
It's worse than that, actually: not only does OpenDNS also fail to return a proper NXDOMAIN response to queries for invalid domain names, but it is often significantly slower than your ISP's own DNS servers.
I second your recommendation of the Level3 DNS servers (4.2.2.X), if you don't want to run your own DNS server and if your ISP's servers are breaking DNS. There's no point whatsoever to using OpenDNS.
Typical commuter here. My bicycle computer will gladly show you that I average between 17-18 mph to and from work, and I know plenty stronger riders than myself.
Sorry, looks like you're the one full of shit.
Despite their claims to the contrary, OpenDNS's servers are likely farther away from you than your local ISP's.
Absolutely right. Out of curiosity, I recently tested DNS performance as experienced from my home network, using Steve Gibson's excellent DNS benchmark tool. The test was between:
OpenDNS was the clear loser in this test. (Sorry for the lack of numeric labels on this screenshot, but the graph is to scale.) Querying the local DNS server was of course faster than anything that had to go across the DSL modem, but OpenDNS was also significantly slower than the other remote servers tested.
By getting the professional opinion of a doctor or registered dietitian.
Everyday I have to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to keep my system secure. Not everyday it is a possible remote exploit, but there is always some security related bug to fix. Linux may have a better implementation to keep those risks from escalating quickly compared to windows, but I would not run nation-critical apps on it. Not at this point in time.
I think you're making the classic mistake of equating the number of patches seen with the actual number, and severity, of vulnerabilities. Of course Debian gets more patches more often than Windows: the Debian security team sends out fixes for security vulnerabilities as soon as they're discovered, rather than leaving users exposed by waiting up to a month and fixing (some, but often not all) of the most critical known vulnerabilities in monthly roll-ups. And of course Debian sees more patches, when nearly all of the desktop applications on a Debian system are handled by apt; Windows Update only takes care of patching the operating system itself.
So when it comes to a question of which operating system to run sensitive government services on, patch counting is worse than useless. Things that are worth considering are the tractibility of the system's security model, and exploit mitigation techniques or fine-grained mechanisms for least-privilege, such as SELinux.
There's a huge advantage cars have in this area. In the US the highway system is paid for entirely by gas taxes
The most I was hoping for was lefties having to admit that their guy wasn't any better.
The problem, precisely, is that we liberals don't have "a guy". He may be a bit more sane than the last guy on social issues such as stem cell research and abortion rights, but in practice Obama represents a wholly inadequate shift to the left from the previous administration.
Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook, but cannot play youtube videos (on either version) without lurching video.
That has everything to do with Adobe's poor implementation of Flash Player on Linux, and little or nothing to do with the underlying operating system. You're drawing conclusions where none can reasonably be drawn.
No it couldn't be ext2/3/4 because of the GPL. It just couldn't so give that idea up.
Absolutely wrong. It couldn't be the *Linux implementation* of ext2/3/4, because of the GPL. But there's nothing to stop someone else from creating a new extN implementation under an arbitrary, non-GPL license: in fact, it's already been done.
Then the FOSS people come along and say you should get a car based solely on the brand of transmission (kernel) inside.
More like the engine than the transmission--but even then it's a horrible analogy.
[...] Imagine if Apple constantly went on and on about OpenDarwin / XNU in their mass-market advertising. Or if Mozilla waged a "Get Gecko" campaign to end-users... They would be in the 1-2% penetration bracket nowadays with a nonsensical message like that.
Nope. The term "Linux" has come to encompass the common set of GNU and other userland tools and applications and desktop environments generally distributed with a Linux kernel--the entire "operating system", in the common meaning of the term. When IBM, Novell, the Linux Foundation, and others say "get Linux", they don't mean just the Linux kernel; they're clearly talking about the whole package. And nobody seems to have much trouble understanding this message.
Then there is the 'Get Ubuntu' crowd, which I admire (and I followed their advice). BUT Ubuntu is not a PC platform: It doesn't have a set UI to make life manageable for users and tech support alike, nor an SDK for app developers, nor a program for certifying hardware for the OS, nor a way to independently distribute application packages that will still work 6 months (nevermind 2-6 years) down the road.
Of course Ubuntu is a PC platform. The Ubuntu project itself is all about providing that set UI you desire. And clearly it has an SDK, it's just that the SDK is most properly referred to as "GNOME" or whatnot rather than "Ubuntu". Standardization is there, too; again, it's just that the standards aren't called "Ubuntu", but rather POSIX, LSB, or freedesktop.org, for instance, depending on what aspect of standardization you're interested in.
Applications cannot be independently distributed and still work down the road? My copies of VMware Workstation and Google Earth might have a thing or two to say about that. In fact Ubuntu provides dpkg, which means that it is much better off in terms of actual software installation and uninstallation than Windows is. (On the other hand, Windows remains the undisputed king of backwards compatibility, over OS X and Linux. However, time has shown that this can have significant long-term consequences for the overall quality of the operating system and its APIs.)
Many of your concerns here boil down to the fact that the actual standardization and unification efforts in the Linux world, to which developers can easily turn for instruction and assurance, don't all have the label "Ubuntu" slapped on them. My point is that, sure, you can consider Ubuntu as a platform unto itself if you'd like--but most aspects of GNU/Linux are now well-standardized enough that there's little need to narrow down to a single distribution for most purposes.
In fact, Firefox looks more like a PC platform in some important areas than any Linux distro.
Now that's just plain silly.
Not only that, it completely ignores the probable rise of inexpensive and energy-efficient ARM-based netbooks. Windows 7 won't be running on those *at all*.
Yes, I do work in IT. And no, it isn't too much to ask of any competent admin, to have some basic awareness of the popular alternatives to expensive Microsoft solutions. Especially when those alternatives have generated as much press coverage as Likewise has.
I'm a busy admin too. Fortunately it doesn't take long at all to install Ubuntu Server, apt-get install likewise-open, and then type "domainjoin-cli join my.domain my-username" in the command line.
When you use being "busy" as an excuse for being ignorant of your options, you do your employer a disservice. That page you linked to hasn't had a major edit in two years or so, and it does not reflect the current best practices for setting up a simple Linux/Samba file server with AD integration. And no, no extra $$ is required for Ubuntu Server.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"
