Hello Charles, Sunday, September 21, 2003, 7:15:36 PM, you wrote:
CA> This has been said about opensource very frequently. The implications are CA> that Microsoft hires people who are not "very sharp". I tend to doubt this. CA> The fact that the source code is available for these 'very sharp' people to CA> develop the software also means the source code is available to be CA> examined for flaws by the malicious programmers who need that info CA> to violate the software. Oops... I did not explain myself well enough. The operative word was supposed to be 'a lot'... not 'sharp'. Microsoft indeed does hire sharp people, but they cannot possibly hire as many people for a project that is going to run within a specified period of time, as the Open Source community can get involved in a venture independently, over an open-ended period of time. Also, in spite of MS hiring sharp people, they are all hired by people with the same general ethic, and method of deciding who will make a good employee, with 'team player' being high on the list. ( I know more than a few people who have both worked for and been rejected by MS, over the years, and have been privy to numerous renditions what of the interview process is like) I think that the 'like-mindedness' which the company's hiring practices wind up with, in their employees, might be detrimental to the code development and debugging process, because it would wind up with a more 'single-perspective work pool, than might otherwise be the case. Also, in any large corporation like MS, there is a tendency for upper echelon decision makers not to want to hear 'bad new'... especially as a release deadline nears, and for lower echelon drones, operating in 'survival mode', not to want to buck the system, by going public with 'bad news', if they see that the honchos are going to bury it. I think that Microsoft's past behaviour where security flaws... especially with their IIS and SQL Data Base are concerned, are good examples of this. CA> BSD does have a reputation for being 'secure' but as John has said CA> that might be only because BSD is used even less than Linux is used CA> making it less attractive to those who wish to draw attention to their CA> ability to do harm. FreeBSD Server 4.8 Stable is very widely used... I do not have figures, but it has been a mainstay for website hosting, and large ISP-type operations, and other Internet appliances, for a long time, as were its predecessors... the line is about 10 years old, and the code it is bases on, is about 30 years old. I am pretty sure that eBay uses FreeBsd 4.8 stable. It's not a desktop appliance, and I doubt if it ever will be... Linux, which is already much more user friendly, is much more focused on that niche... but FreeBSD... especially the secure version... is the kind of app that banks and power supply stations choose. CA> This is one solution that seems obvious but isn't. According to recent CA> reports even Microsoft 'hid' behind some rented Linux servers for awhile CA> to stop MSBLAST from bringing down their servers not using Linux. Well... I'm just learning about setting up a 'gateway'... which is what I want the 'firewall box' to be... with two completely discrete networks running on it. One network... a LAN, will be the gateway box, and all computers inside my home environment, and the other network... a WAN, will be the gateway box, my web server, and the Internet itself. Heh. If this doesn't make complete sense... that is because I am not yet completely up to speed on what I am talking about.<g> CA> I really don't think any recent version of Linux would be easy to get CA> working on an i386 and by the time you get around to this it will be CA> difficult to find an i386 the capacitors haven't dried out on. A 'lesser' CA> machine of whatever that would be at the time (early Pentium?) is CA> certainly a possibility but "386" is becoming only a memory in the CA> real world. I just tossed out '386'... however, there are plenty of Linuxes, both older and newer versions, that would run on a 386 processor. Peanut Linux would be a good choice. Here is the URL to a fellow name Doyle McClennan's website page, listing all the the various versions of Linux that he sells, with links to informational pages for each distro. FreeBSD will run on a 386 processor, too. I have about a dozen 286 and 8086/8087 boxes that are still running fine, and get occasional light use, as word processors, or for playing with early versions of software, that cannot run correctly on later processors. Heh! You should see early versions of Leisuresuit Larry, when they run on a 486 box.....zzzzoooooooommmmmmm! -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ -weblog http://radio.weblogs.com/0128450/ A business is as honest as its advertising. . To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
