My father immigrated to the United States in the early 70s. He had the equivalent of perhaps a 5th grade education. He learned to speak English by watching the Flintstones in his tiny flat while working construction for some company. He eventually saved up enough money to move his family here too.
In the late 70s he was laid off. Since then, he has run a fruit store, partially owned a Pizza place, and today he runs a construction company. In my opinion, he provided very adequete shelter, food, and clothing for his 4 kids and wife remarkably well under the cirmcumstances, and is now financially well off that he owns and rents 3 houses, and has a sound retirement plan, and can still give his kids a boost if they need it ("Dad, can I borrow $85,000 to buy a house?").
My dad also helped my eldest sister go to college. She trained to be an architect, worked for someone else for about 10 years, and very recently started her own firm. She also agrees that school is meaningless bullshit, but regrets that it was required for her choice of career.
My second eldest sister received a GED after dropping out of High School. Since then she has been a hair stylist, a pastry chef at some top rated restaurants, a stock broker assistant, a mother of two, and is currently pursuing a successful graphics design business which services the culinary industry.
My older brother dropped out of High School when he was 16, and worked construction with my father until about 28. After that he went to work for a construction supplier, grew his department by perhaps 500%, and eventually started his own construction equipment sales business which seems to be doing him well.
Myself? I graduated High School, skipped college, studied computers, worked MCS at Dean Witter, then worked at an ISP for 3 years, and now I run my own computer consulting practice which I think has remarkable potential.
When you're in High School it's easy for those sadists to make you think you're going to be a fucking loser for not obeying their rules. Sadly, it can really get to some of the students. While the white kids who shoot up their schools make the news, there are thousands of others who take their own lives every year who you never hear about.
But the truly disturbed people are the ones who believe the mantra, and devote their entire lives to fanatic pursuit of the straight A's, who craft every action in their life so that it appeases the all powerful college admissions, and then the big corporation which will employ them. These are the people who I feel for now. They believed that the formula for success was to follow the rules, take no risks, do as you're told, think inside the boundaries. They are wrong, this is the formula for mediocrity.
It's not until maybe a year or two after you're out of school that it occurs to you that you've spent years of your life putting up with bullshit, that everything that your teachers swore would happen has in fact been a lie, and that your life isn't really over. In fact, more the opposite, you find that your life is now beginning.
If you're in that situation now, please don't let it get you down. Everyone is shouting at you about how important it is, but if you have any intelligence at all, it's really not. Once you exit the hell that is education, a sudden sensation of freedom will wash over you. For awhile you will be terrified, afraid, but soon you realize that what you mistook for fear is in fact something you've simply never experienced until now: Unlimited potential.
The piece of paper? It is an inferior substitute for experience, intelligence, and creativity. If you already possess one of these essential traits, you don't need to waste your time trying to obtain a superficial surrogate.
Do something worthwhile with your time. Anything you do is the right decision--the only truly wrong decision you can make is deciding to do nothing.
I thought that was an insightful article. System administration is the process of keeping together an organization's information infrastructure. People often find this job to be non-human oriented, but it is in fact completely human oriented. The good sys admin is constantly thinking of, and even torturing themselves over how the users will be affected by anything he/she ever does and how it can make their lives easier.
The really good sys admins will unfortunately be perceived as adversaries because they would rather disagree and cause a political stir than develop a system that they believe is going to harm the users more in a long run.
Most intelligent people can figure this out, and will respect their sys admin's position in the company. The sys admins who stay quiet during meetings when they see the company making a wrong move are the ones who don't care, and IMO better fit the profile of BOfH.
At the heart of the matter, our profession is to increase the quality of life through information technology. Anyone who doesn't see their IT profession this way is in the wrong career.
Alternative: Burn the OS, boot loader, to CD-ROM. Configure BIOS to only boot the CD. Password protect the BIOS. Guard the computer with savage dogs with laser beams.
Read-write store such as/var,/tmp, and/home should use the hard disk, mounted noexec, nosuid, nodev. Now raise the security level (set capabilities, whatever) so that raw I/O access, mounts, and process attaching (debugging) is disabled.
I didn't cover all of the bases, but I think that's a good number of them.
So explain what was so frustrating about Windows. Clicking the timezone was too complicated?
She kept reaching dead-ends which required a reboot to start over, had to partition the disk, needed to resort to third party driver disks, couldn't figure out what exactly Windows was looking for on those disks, etc.
Sure, this is easy stuff if you're already familar with Windows, but if you're completely computer illiterate it's a major timesink.
Red Hat happened to support our hardware configuration right out of the box and didn't ask her to do much of anything (pick keymap, timezone, autopartition, "workstation", and watch the install). Whenever something odd came up she read the instructions sidebar and picked the best option she could think of. I guess she was lucky that I shopped for sensible hardware.
Now before you fly off your troll-handle, I will reiterate that this was a completely unscientific experiment that can't conclusively prove anything, but remains an amusing anecdote.
Most people switch to Linux because they're fed up with dealing with Windows. Some people switch because they want to see what all of the noise is about.
*I* switched because I found Windows to be an awful development environment and was welcomed with open arms by Linux. Today I find it extremely difficult to use Windows in any context other than to play an occasional game (and even that is pretty frustrating).
But you sound pretty happy with your setup. IMO, you have no reason to switch. Are people really demanding that you stop using Windows?
You did however make a good point in that you already know Windows and can use it to get your work done, and thusly don't need to learn Linux. What I find interesting about it is that people will try Linux, remark about how hard it is to use, and then go back to Windows. In my experience, they are not really complaining that Linux is hard to use, rather they are complaining that Linux is nothing like Windows which they have taken the time to learn (and logged the requisite thousands of hours fucking with it to become familiar with it and get it to work right)
Four cases in point, one of which may interest you professionally:
A good colleague of mine used nothing but Linux for like 10 years. Never touched anything else. One day we sat him in front of a Windows box and he was completely helpless. He's been exposed to it regularly now but he still finds it alien and unworkable.
My wife didn't use computers much at all before she met/married me. Of course my household predominantly runs Linux, but has the occasional Windows machine which she sometimes finds herself in front of. She always whines when she has to use the Windows machine because, well, she's not at all computer literate, so it's hard for her to explain, but here's what she said: "It sucks -- it just, it's hard to explain it. Let me find the words. OK, it's like, if Windows were a circle, Linux would be a sphere. If Windows and Linux were chefs, Windows would be an average chef at an average restaurant. Not good, not bad, just go to any diner and order a burger. Ho hum. A Linux chef could be anybody, any top restaurant, any dive, it's whatever the user makes of it. Which for me isn't much, but I can use it under any circumstance that my husband puts it through". A very unscientific explanation, but I thought it was interesting, as it really shocked me one day to hear her say that she preferred Linux when I had made it a point to install Windows on a machine just for her.
This same wife and I tried an unscientific experiment. I'd wipe a computer, hand her Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Windows ME. It was her job to install one as far as possible, I'd wipe the machine, and then she'd try again with the other. No help from me. The results were again shocking. She finished the Red Hat installation with no sweat, but got stuck with Windows ME (it took her about 5 times as long and she eventually pleaded with me if she could stop now since she was getting frustrated). I will repeat again that my wife is as computer illiterate as they come. The most advanced topic she understands I think is that computers store things in files and folders, and that she can navigate this as a tree.
At a Linux user group meet I recently met a user who was in the market you claim Linux is totally unable to address, an artist. I spoke with him for awhile about why he used Linux (he actually gave a presentation on the topic). Originally he had been using Macs for years to create his work, and as such, over time (about 8 years or so), he built up a large library of material. One day he decided to go through it all and found that the software which he used to create all of this work didn't exist anymore, and that they were in file formats that nothing on Macs today could understand. The vendors were dead, the software didn't run on current hardware/OS, and there were no business interests in providing compatibility today. This terrified him, as he was in danger of losing some of his greatest pieces. It was then that he understood what all of those open source zealots were screaming about. He decided to switch to Linux, and is comfortable knowing that open source software never dies, and that all of his work now will last indefinitely (or at least much longer). Once he got past the initial culture shock, he said it's been a better platform for him overall and regrets not switching sooner.
A point made in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (by Marilyn Manson no less) is that while everyone pointed the finger of blame at video games, rock music, violent movies, etc. Not a single person noted that on the exact same day the Columbine massacre happened, the President was busy bombing the shit out of a foreign country.
What I want is better, more innovative software. Yapping about licensing schemes doesn't get me better software, proprietary or free. These developers should stop pretending to be lawyers and start developing.
Your concern for the principles we software developers hold dear is just so moving. I can't wait to spend 10,000 man hours developing innovative software for appreciative people like you. Why can't every user be this compassionate?
Sound design wins again..
on
The New IT Crisis
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"...and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business..."
No sweat.
# for i in `cat servers`; do scp *.rpm $i:~/; done # for i in `cat servers`; do ssh $i rpm -Uvh ~/*.rpm; done
Without reading the article..
on
The New IT Crisis
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· Score: 3, Informative
Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next.
I'm going to hazard a guess that this will forecast the overworked, underpaid endgame of IT gruntwork and usher in a new era where companies with CUSTOMIZED SERVICES and NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY come in and automate IT and drastically reduce every admin's workload. He happens to run just a company that provides these services.
I will now read the article and be amazed if that isn't exactly what he says.
Working with ISPs. Most of the time any outages are explained to us as a router misconfigurations or some weird event happening that caused some weird problem. At this level the ISP peers with a lot of other third party ISPs so there's naturally a smaller degree of coordination. I couldn't speak for large internal organizational networks.
Who knows, maybe the ISPs have dozens of hardware failures that they recover from without missing a beat.
That's one example, but his are better documented than mine which is why I didn't share mine.
Informally, I've run OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux on the same exact machine and had OpenBSD crash for no reason whereas FreeBSD and Linux run fine. *shrug*
I understand OpenBSD may have less eyeballs but that still doesn't make it acceptable to me. Especially not so when I consider all of the other reasons plus the alternative systems which are just as good if not better in terms of stability, support, etc.
he wasn't interested in loaner or donated hardware to do the work on
Hmm. now why didn't he say "Because SMP is insanely hard to do right and I'm not motivated enough or smart enough to get it done without making the system even more unstable. And besides we get more publicity if we encrypt swap"?
The OpenBSD project seems filled with people who need to prove their masculinity and grab attention rather than people who want to make sound design decisions. And in addition to making technical decisions, they also follow suit politically. For example, oh, such as holding an OpenSSH vulnerability hostage to promote adoption of their privilege separation patch.
OpenBSD has plenty of stability problems. See Dan Bernstein's downtime reports. And Bernstein is someone who wants to believe in OpenBSD but is losing patience.
OpenBSD receives plenty of attention thanks to its loudmouthed egomaniacs. Fortunately, FreeBSD is a better, more rationally designed system. Of course the FreeBSD developers are a little resentful of Linux's attention and the GPL and have made system changes out of spite, but it's nothing as bad as what OpenBSD does on a regular basis.
I really did want to like OpenBSD. Don't believe the hype.
In my experience, downtime is caused more by router misconfigurations and not physical problems: peer router broadcasts bad information and takes down a network, admin discovers that the backup route wasn't configured properly at all, admin reboots a set of routers only to find that the TFTP server hosting the OS hasn't been running for 3 months, etc.:)
The protocol seems like it will do nothing to address this. However, physical outages do tend to last longer than misconfiguration outages, so this protocol may help yet.
For an x86 server running Linux from Rackspace. Full control. You can dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda and they won't care. Survived a slashdotting with no trouble at all.
There are places that are cheaper of course, but I have full confidence in Rackspace, and I believe if I'm satisfied, there's no reason I should abandon my business with them.
Several problems with syslogd.
on
SDSC Secure Syslog
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Standard syslog has several problems which I think are quite serious.
Remote logging is a joke. There is no authentication, and no notification whatsoever that the event was received by the remote syslog daemon. An attacker can fill the remote syslog with garbage data if they so choose.
The records are entirely unstructured and not validated. The timestamp, hostname, and process id are all volunteered by the application, not something that's noted by syslogd.
There is no guarantee whatsoever that an application that has called syslog() will have its messages safely recorded when the function returns. I'm not talking safely tucked away on disk if the system crashes, but even written into the buffer cache by syslogd when syslog(3) returns. See end of post for details.
If syslog's receive buffer is full, syslog(3) will block. This means that if syslogd cannot keep up with the rate of messages, which is a really easy condition to find yourself in given that by default syslogd calls fsync() after every log file update, your system will slow to a crawl. You cannot even login(1) since most systems record this activity to security logs.
P.S. syslog() returns as quickly as possible. Try an experiment. Generate a random number, call syslog() with this number as a string, and then open()/var/log/messages, seek to the end minus 4096 bytes. Try to find the random number. I have tried it 20 times and never has the number been there by the time read() was called. It takes longer than an application doing syslog()/open()/lseek()/read() for syslogd to record it into to the buffer-cache, let alone fsync() it to disk.
That while the price of product A may be cheaper than product B, they both come with their own set of costs.
Lets use an extreme example to illustrate this point.
When you build a bridge, you hire the best talent and use the highest quality resources money can buy. Because no matter how much these things cost up front, they're nothing compared to what it will cost if your bridge collapses.
You make similar tradeoffs every day when choosing between two products.
You may be able to save by economizing on employees or software, but if it results in a huge security compromise where all of your systems are trashed, confidential data is leaked to the world, and it takes you a month to recover from the damage, you'll probably wish you hadn't been so frugal.
Or maybe not. You have to decide which is more important, and if you're not qualified to make the decision, ask someone who is.
Apple Computer, Inc. is a business. Furthermore, Apple Computer, Inc. is a typical business. They hire employees, develop and sell products, and satisfy their shareholders.
Apple Computer, Inc. is not dissimilar to Microsoft Corporation. They both control their markets very tightly, will kill off companies that stand in their way, and even risk angering their loyal customers in an attempt to achieve "the big picture".
Apple Computer, Inc. wields lawyers when they think their brand is threatened, to a positively ridiculous level at times. e.g. The Graphical User Interface, The Aqua Theme, Apple Communications, etc. Even Microsoft Corporation doesn't sue as liberally as Apple Computer, Inc. does.
The signficant difference that I see, however, is that Apple Computer, Inc. has stuck to the same marketing theme for more than two decades: Apple Computer, Inc. is for the free thinkers, the rebels, the nonconformists, the people who need to be different. Microsoft Corporation has not.
Apple Computer, Inc's original Macintosh commercial may have been inspired by George Orwell's 1984, but it is from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that they learned that it takes 64,000 repetitions to make one truth.
Your site seems like it would be useful to people in the industry, like sports journalists. Since they're making money with your site. Isn't it fair for you to get a cut of this action? Only the truly heartless would say you weren't entitled.
Require an account to view the data. The accounts are free to set up, but there's an upper limit on how much data you can view every month. Most casual users will never hit it, but professionals should hit it immediately. Charge a $15/mo fee or whatever to give them unlimited access.
Regular sports fans get a great free site, sports journalists and other people in the industry get a great resource, and you get to eat dinner. By going pay you also gain some credibility. Other businesses will want to make deals with you. Other businesses (such as ESPN) may even want to buy you, which makes for a nice exit strategy if your priorities change.
Asking people to set up accounts has other benefits as well. Just asking your users to fill out a survey would make them more valuable to advertisers. Making the questions somewhat amusing means that most people will be glad to answer them. Have some attitude.:)
Sure you'll have people that will try to cheat, but these people are often the minority--most people have better things to do with their time than to keep opening new accounts. Most professionals would probably pay because they recognize the value, want your site to stay, and believe in paying for services they use.
Casual users may pay anyway just so they get the warm fuzzies from supporting a grassroots site, plus they're probably tired of seeing the same "YOUR CONNECTION IS NOT OPTIMIZED AD!" for the 10,000th time.
You've got plenty of potential. I know because I used to work on a site similar to yours. Shoot me off an email if you'd like to chat about it.
You can play the tracks as much as you like on your PC, burn to CD as many tracks as you want, copy the burned CDs, and use the CD to make MP3s. Keep in mind there is supposed to be some form of digital watermarking on the tracks though. So if you give the music to anyone else, they (UMG) are supposed to be able to know it was you who violated their copyright.
From my understanding, a "watermarked" audio stream is one where identifying information is included in an imperceivable portion of the audio stream.
Given that lossy encoders (MP3, OGG) use psychoacoustic-models to reduce data in the audio stream that it considers outside of the human audible range, wouldn't encoding to MP3 or OGG damage or destroy the watermarking?
But after reading this article, I really want one. I can't wait to see what it thinks we should watch if it combined my wife's heavy TV watching with my fairly minimal TV watching.
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
I've been trying to rent Scarface from Netflix for months (they keep saying "very long wait") and this asshole not only got it before me but is now whining because Netflix thinks he wants to watch gangster rappers?
From your review it sounds like great theory
on
Internet Site Security
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Windows NT and 2000 - authentication, access tokens, security identifiers, object access control lists, tightening Windows users rights, etc.
Ok, I could have ignored this review until I got to that part.
Windows 2000 sounds like a complete, powerful system in theory. To salespeople and even project managers, Windows 2000 is packed with all of the buzzwords they want to hear. "Security Reference Monitor", "Policies", etc.
Of course, anyone with practical, in-the-trenches experience knows that it's an impossible system to keep secure. It is big, it is bloated, it is closed source. It discourages deep understanding and is too complicated and restrictive to allow you to strip down to the parts you only need.
The best reference manual you can find on Windows 2000 internals is "Inside Windows 2000", which is at best a pedestrian overview of the system. This is not the fault of the authors, it is the fault of the system.
It is simply pathetic compared to The Design & Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, or Linux Kernel Source Commentary, or UNIX System Internals, et al. You cannot download the source to Windows 2000 and evaluate it for yourself. You cannot compile out support for everything but the core essentials. You cannot identify and understand every process running on the system. You do not have the option of replacing them with specialized alternatives.
Do not confuse this with Linux being unbreakable. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that in the hands of a competent person, one can achieve a far greater degree of security with Linux than they ever can with Windows. To some admins, this is not a big deal. To me, Windows is simply unacceptable.
The authors appear to be blinded to technical realities by buzzword compliance. Not too suprising given their background.
Many professionals are content with Windows, but anyone who is passionate about technology finds it reprehensible. It comes down to who you'd rather deal with. Would you rather hire a brain surgeon who was passionate about his craft or just one who simply treated it as a job?
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My father immigrated to the United States in the early 70s. He had the equivalent of perhaps a 5th grade education. He learned to speak English by watching the Flintstones in his tiny flat while working construction for some company. He eventually saved up enough money to move his family here too.
In the late 70s he was laid off. Since then, he has run a fruit store, partially owned a Pizza place, and today he runs a construction company. In my opinion, he provided very adequete shelter, food, and clothing for his 4 kids and wife remarkably well under the cirmcumstances, and is now financially well off that he owns and rents 3 houses, and has a sound retirement plan, and can still give his kids a boost if they need it ("Dad, can I borrow $85,000 to buy a house?").
My dad also helped my eldest sister go to college. She trained to be an architect, worked for someone else for about 10 years, and very recently started her own firm. She also agrees that school is meaningless bullshit, but regrets that it was required for her choice of career.
My second eldest sister received a GED after dropping out of High School. Since then she has been a hair stylist, a pastry chef at some top rated restaurants, a stock broker assistant, a mother of two, and is currently pursuing a successful graphics design business which services the culinary industry.
My older brother dropped out of High School when he was 16, and worked construction with my father until about 28. After that he went to work for a construction supplier, grew his department by perhaps 500%, and eventually started his own construction equipment sales business which seems to be doing him well.
Myself? I graduated High School, skipped college, studied computers, worked MCS at Dean Witter, then worked at an ISP for 3 years, and now I run my own computer consulting practice which I think has remarkable potential.
When you're in High School it's easy for those sadists to make you think you're going to be a fucking loser for not obeying their rules. Sadly, it can really get to some of the students. While the white kids who shoot up their schools make the news, there are thousands of others who take their own lives every year who you never hear about.
But the truly disturbed people are the ones who believe the mantra, and devote their entire lives to fanatic pursuit of the straight A's, who craft every action in their life so that it appeases the all powerful college admissions, and then the big corporation which will employ them. These are the people who I feel for now. They believed that the formula for success was to follow the rules, take no risks, do as you're told, think inside the boundaries. They are wrong, this is the formula for mediocrity.
It's not until maybe a year or two after you're out of school that it occurs to you that you've spent years of your life putting up with bullshit, that everything that your teachers swore would happen has in fact been a lie, and that your life isn't really over. In fact, more the opposite, you find that your life is now beginning.
If you're in that situation now, please don't let it get you down. Everyone is shouting at you about how important it is, but if you have any intelligence at all, it's really not. Once you exit the hell that is education, a sudden sensation of freedom will wash over you. For awhile you will be terrified, afraid, but soon you realize that what you mistook for fear is in fact something you've simply never experienced until now: Unlimited potential.
The piece of paper? It is an inferior substitute for experience, intelligence, and creativity. If you already possess one of these essential traits, you don't need to waste your time trying to obtain a superficial surrogate.
Do something worthwhile with your time. Anything you do is the right decision--the only truly wrong decision you can make is deciding to do nothing.
Here's a positive comment.
I thought that was an insightful article. System administration is the process of keeping together an organization's information infrastructure. People often find this job to be non-human oriented, but it is in fact completely human oriented. The good sys admin is constantly thinking of, and even torturing themselves over how the users will be affected by anything he/she ever does and how it can make their lives easier.
The really good sys admins will unfortunately be perceived as adversaries because they would rather disagree and cause a political stir than develop a system that they believe is going to harm the users more in a long run.
Most intelligent people can figure this out, and will respect their sys admin's position in the company. The sys admins who stay quiet during meetings when they see the company making a wrong move are the ones who don't care, and IMO better fit the profile of BOfH.
At the heart of the matter, our profession is to increase the quality of life through information technology. Anyone who doesn't see their IT profession this way is in the wrong career.
Alternative: Burn the OS, boot loader, to CD-ROM. Configure BIOS to only boot the CD. Password protect the BIOS. Guard the computer with savage dogs with laser beams.
Read-write store such as /var, /tmp, and /home should use the hard disk, mounted noexec, nosuid, nodev. Now raise the security level (set capabilities, whatever) so that raw I/O access, mounts, and process attaching (debugging) is disabled.
I didn't cover all of the bases, but I think that's a good number of them.
So explain what was so frustrating about Windows. Clicking the timezone was too complicated?
She kept reaching dead-ends which required a reboot to start over, had to partition the disk, needed to resort to third party driver disks, couldn't figure out what exactly Windows was looking for on those disks, etc.
Sure, this is easy stuff if you're already familar with Windows, but if you're completely computer illiterate it's a major timesink.
Red Hat happened to support our hardware configuration right out of the box and didn't ask her to do much of anything (pick keymap, timezone, autopartition, "workstation", and watch the install). Whenever something odd came up she read the instructions sidebar and picked the best option she could think of. I guess she was lucky that I shopped for sensible hardware.
Now before you fly off your troll-handle, I will reiterate that this was a completely unscientific experiment that can't conclusively prove anything, but remains an amusing anecdote.
Now please stick to sucking dicks.
Most people switch to Linux because they're fed up with dealing with Windows. Some people switch because they want to see what all of the noise is about.
*I* switched because I found Windows to be an awful development environment and was welcomed with open arms by Linux. Today I find it extremely difficult to use Windows in any context other than to play an occasional game (and even that is pretty frustrating).
But you sound pretty happy with your setup. IMO, you have no reason to switch. Are people really demanding that you stop using Windows?
You did however make a good point in that you already know Windows and can use it to get your work done, and thusly don't need to learn Linux. What I find interesting about it is that people will try Linux, remark about how hard it is to use, and then go back to Windows. In my experience, they are not really complaining that Linux is hard to use, rather they are complaining that Linux is nothing like Windows which they have taken the time to learn (and logged the requisite thousands of hours fucking with it to become familiar with it and get it to work right)
Four cases in point, one of which may interest you professionally:
A good colleague of mine used nothing but Linux for like 10 years. Never touched anything else. One day we sat him in front of a Windows box and he was completely helpless. He's been exposed to it regularly now but he still finds it alien and unworkable.
My wife didn't use computers much at all before she met/married me. Of course my household predominantly runs Linux, but has the occasional Windows machine which she sometimes finds herself in front of. She always whines when she has to use the Windows machine because, well, she's not at all computer literate, so it's hard for her to explain, but here's what she said: "It sucks -- it just, it's hard to explain it. Let me find the words. OK, it's like, if Windows were a circle, Linux would be a sphere. If Windows and Linux were chefs, Windows would be an average chef at an average restaurant. Not good, not bad, just go to any diner and order a burger. Ho hum. A Linux chef could be anybody, any top restaurant, any dive, it's whatever the user makes of it. Which for me isn't much, but I can use it under any circumstance that my husband puts it through". A very unscientific explanation, but I thought it was interesting, as it really shocked me one day to hear her say that she preferred Linux when I had made it a point to install Windows on a machine just for her.
This same wife and I tried an unscientific experiment. I'd wipe a computer, hand her Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Windows ME. It was her job to install one as far as possible, I'd wipe the machine, and then she'd try again with the other. No help from me. The results were again shocking. She finished the Red Hat installation with no sweat, but got stuck with Windows ME (it took her about 5 times as long and she eventually pleaded with me if she could stop now since she was getting frustrated). I will repeat again that my wife is as computer illiterate as they come. The most advanced topic she understands I think is that computers store things in files and folders, and that she can navigate this as a tree.
At a Linux user group meet I recently met a user who was in the market you claim Linux is totally unable to address, an artist. I spoke with him for awhile about why he used Linux (he actually gave a presentation on the topic). Originally he had been using Macs for years to create his work, and as such, over time (about 8 years or so), he built up a large library of material. One day he decided to go through it all and found that the software which he used to create all of this work didn't exist anymore, and that they were in file formats that nothing on Macs today could understand. The vendors were dead, the software didn't run on current hardware/OS, and there were no business interests in providing compatibility today. This terrified him, as he was in danger of losing some of his greatest pieces. It was then that he understood what all of those open source zealots were screaming about. He decided to switch to Linux, and is comfortable knowing that open source software never dies, and that all of his work now will last indefinitely (or at least much longer). Once he got past the initial culture shock, he said it's been a better platform for him overall and regrets not switching sooner.
A point made in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (by Marilyn Manson no less) is that while everyone pointed the finger of blame at video games, rock music, violent movies, etc. Not a single person noted that on the exact same day the Columbine massacre happened, the President was busy bombing the shit out of a foreign country.
What I want is better, more innovative software. Yapping about licensing schemes doesn't get me better software, proprietary or free. These developers should stop pretending to be lawyers and start developing.
Your concern for the principles we software developers hold dear is just so moving. I can't wait to spend 10,000 man hours developing innovative software for appreciative people like you. Why can't every user be this compassionate?
Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next.
I'm going to hazard a guess that this will forecast the overworked, underpaid endgame of IT gruntwork and usher in a new era where companies with CUSTOMIZED SERVICES and NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY come in and automate IT and drastically reduce every admin's workload. He happens to run just a company that provides these services.
I will now read the article and be amazed if that isn't exactly what he says.
What is your experience based on?
Working with ISPs. Most of the time any outages are explained to us as a router misconfigurations or some weird event happening that caused some weird problem. At this level the ISP peers with a lot of other third party ISPs so there's naturally a smaller degree of coordination. I couldn't speak for large internal organizational networks.
Who knows, maybe the ISPs have dozens of hardware failures that they recover from without missing a beat.
That's one example, but his are better documented than mine which is why I didn't share mine.
Informally, I've run OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux on the same exact machine and had OpenBSD crash for no reason whereas FreeBSD and Linux run fine. *shrug*
I understand OpenBSD may have less eyeballs but that still doesn't make it acceptable to me. Especially not so when I consider all of the other reasons plus the alternative systems which are just as good if not better in terms of stability, support, etc.
he wasn't interested in loaner or donated hardware to do the work on
Hmm. now why didn't he say "Because SMP is insanely hard to do right and I'm not motivated enough or smart enough to get it done without making the system even more unstable. And besides we get more publicity if we encrypt swap"?
The OpenBSD project seems filled with people who need to prove their masculinity and grab attention rather than people who want to make sound design decisions. And in addition to making technical decisions, they also follow suit politically. For example, oh, such as holding an OpenSSH vulnerability hostage to promote adoption of their privilege separation patch.
OpenBSD has plenty of stability problems. See Dan Bernstein's downtime reports. And Bernstein is someone who wants to believe in OpenBSD but is losing patience.
OpenBSD receives plenty of attention thanks to its loudmouthed egomaniacs. Fortunately, FreeBSD is a better, more rationally designed system. Of course the FreeBSD developers are a little resentful of Linux's attention and the GPL and have made system changes out of spite, but it's nothing as bad as what OpenBSD does on a regular basis.
I really did want to like OpenBSD. Don't believe the hype.
In my experience, downtime is caused more by router misconfigurations and not physical problems: peer router broadcasts bad information and takes down a network, admin discovers that the backup route wasn't configured properly at all, admin reboots a set of routers only to find that the TFTP server hosting the OS hasn't been running for 3 months, etc. :)
The protocol seems like it will do nothing to address this. However, physical outages do tend to last longer than misconfiguration outages, so this protocol may help yet.
Now I can add a compromised md5sum to my rootkit which uses values from this site.
Go team!
For an x86 server running Linux from Rackspace. Full control. You can dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda and they won't care. Survived a slashdotting with no trouble at all.
There are places that are cheaper of course, but I have full confidence in Rackspace, and I believe if I'm satisfied, there's no reason I should abandon my business with them.
Standard syslog has several problems which I think are quite serious.
Remote logging is a joke. There is no authentication, and no notification whatsoever that the event was received by the remote syslog daemon. An attacker can fill the remote syslog with garbage data if they so choose.
The records are entirely unstructured and not validated. The timestamp, hostname, and process id are all volunteered by the application, not something that's noted by syslogd.
There is no guarantee whatsoever that an application that has called syslog() will have its messages safely recorded when the function returns. I'm not talking safely tucked away on disk if the system crashes, but even written into the buffer cache by syslogd when syslog(3) returns. See end of post for details.
If syslog's receive buffer is full, syslog(3) will block. This means that if syslogd cannot keep up with the rate of messages, which is a really easy condition to find yourself in given that by default syslogd calls fsync() after every log file update, your system will slow to a crawl. You cannot even login(1) since most systems record this activity to security logs.
P.S. syslog() returns as quickly as possible. Try an experiment. Generate a random number, call syslog() with this number as a string, and then open() /var/log/messages, seek to the end minus 4096 bytes. Try to find the random number. I have tried it 20 times and never has the number been there by the time read() was called. It takes longer than an application doing syslog()/open()/lseek()/read() for syslogd to record it into to the buffer-cache, let alone fsync() it to disk.
That while the price of product A may be cheaper than product B, they both come with their own set of costs.
Lets use an extreme example to illustrate this point.
When you build a bridge, you hire the best talent and use the highest quality resources money can buy. Because no matter how much these things cost up front, they're nothing compared to what it will cost if your bridge collapses.
You make similar tradeoffs every day when choosing between two products.
You may be able to save by economizing on employees or software, but if it results in a huge security compromise where all of your systems are trashed, confidential data is leaked to the world, and it takes you a month to recover from the damage, you'll probably wish you hadn't been so frugal.
Or maybe not. You have to decide which is more important, and if you're not qualified to make the decision, ask someone who is.
Apple Computer, Inc. is a business. Furthermore, Apple Computer, Inc. is a typical business. They hire employees, develop and sell products, and satisfy their shareholders.
Apple Computer, Inc. is not dissimilar to Microsoft Corporation. They both control their markets very tightly, will kill off companies that stand in their way, and even risk angering their loyal customers in an attempt to achieve "the big picture".
Apple Computer, Inc. wields lawyers when they think their brand is threatened, to a positively ridiculous level at times. e.g. The Graphical User Interface, The Aqua Theme, Apple Communications, etc. Even Microsoft Corporation doesn't sue as liberally as Apple Computer, Inc. does.
The signficant difference that I see, however, is that Apple Computer, Inc. has stuck to the same marketing theme for more than two decades: Apple Computer, Inc. is for the free thinkers, the rebels, the nonconformists, the people who need to be different. Microsoft Corporation has not.
Apple Computer, Inc's original Macintosh commercial may have been inspired by George Orwell's 1984, but it is from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that they learned that it takes 64,000 repetitions to make one truth.
Not "Shenannigans", but "Shenanigans"
If only there were people who specialized in understanding business law that you could hire to help you write such an agreement.
Your site seems like it would be useful to people in the industry, like sports journalists. Since they're making money with your site. Isn't it fair for you to get a cut of this action? Only the truly heartless would say you weren't entitled.
Require an account to view the data. The accounts are free to set up, but there's an upper limit on how much data you can view every month. Most casual users will never hit it, but professionals should hit it immediately. Charge a $15/mo fee or whatever to give them unlimited access.
Regular sports fans get a great free site, sports journalists and other people in the industry get a great resource, and you get to eat dinner. By going pay you also gain some credibility. Other businesses will want to make deals with you. Other businesses (such as ESPN) may even want to buy you, which makes for a nice exit strategy if your priorities change.
Asking people to set up accounts has other benefits as well. Just asking your users to fill out a survey would make them more valuable to advertisers. Making the questions somewhat amusing means that most people will be glad to answer them. Have some attitude. :)
Sure you'll have people that will try to cheat, but these people are often the minority--most people have better things to do with their time than to keep opening new accounts. Most professionals would probably pay because they recognize the value, want your site to stay, and believe in paying for services they use.
Casual users may pay anyway just so they get the warm fuzzies from supporting a grassroots site, plus they're probably tired of seeing the same "YOUR CONNECTION IS NOT OPTIMIZED AD!" for the 10,000th time.
You've got plenty of potential. I know because I used to work on a site similar to yours. Shoot me off an email if you'd like to chat about it.
You can play the tracks as much as you like on your PC, burn to CD as many tracks as you want, copy the burned CDs, and use the CD to make MP3s. Keep in mind there is supposed to be some form of digital watermarking on the tracks though. So if you give the music to anyone else, they (UMG) are supposed to be able to know it was you who violated their copyright.
From my understanding, a "watermarked" audio stream is one where identifying information is included in an imperceivable portion of the audio stream.
Given that lossy encoders (MP3, OGG) use psychoacoustic-models to reduce data in the audio stream that it considers outside of the human audible range, wouldn't encoding to MP3 or OGG damage or destroy the watermarking?
But after reading this article, I really want one. I can't wait to see what it thinks we should watch if it combined my wife's heavy TV watching with my fairly minimal TV watching.
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
I've been trying to rent Scarface from Netflix for months (they keep saying "very long wait") and this asshole not only got it before me but is now whining because Netflix thinks he wants to watch gangster rappers?
Windows NT and 2000 - authentication, access tokens, security identifiers, object access control lists, tightening Windows users rights, etc.
Ok, I could have ignored this review until I got to that part.
Windows 2000 sounds like a complete, powerful system in theory. To salespeople and even project managers, Windows 2000 is packed with all of the buzzwords they want to hear. "Security Reference Monitor", "Policies", etc.
Of course, anyone with practical, in-the-trenches experience knows that it's an impossible system to keep secure. It is big, it is bloated, it is closed source. It discourages deep understanding and is too complicated and restrictive to allow you to strip down to the parts you only need.
The best reference manual you can find on Windows 2000 internals is "Inside Windows 2000", which is at best a pedestrian overview of the system. This is not the fault of the authors, it is the fault of the system.
It is simply pathetic compared to The Design & Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, or Linux Kernel Source Commentary, or UNIX System Internals, et al. You cannot download the source to Windows 2000 and evaluate it for yourself. You cannot compile out support for everything but the core essentials. You cannot identify and understand every process running on the system. You do not have the option of replacing them with specialized alternatives.
Do not confuse this with Linux being unbreakable. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that in the hands of a competent person, one can achieve a far greater degree of security with Linux than they ever can with Windows. To some admins, this is not a big deal. To me, Windows is simply unacceptable.
The authors appear to be blinded to technical realities by buzzword compliance. Not too suprising given their background.
Many professionals are content with Windows, but anyone who is passionate about technology finds it reprehensible. It comes down to who you'd rather deal with. Would you rather hire a brain surgeon who was passionate about his craft or just one who simply treated it as a job?