'Checkpoint buys Snort' - 10/10 for an arresting headline, minus several billion for good thinking. Checkpoint has bought Sourcefire, not *Snort*. That's like saying OSDN have "bought Linux" because they happen to pay Linus.
Honestly, the "slashdot's going down hill" trolls have been making me roll my eyes pretty much as soon as I became a regular, but things like this really make me wonder:(
The rest of your post is coherent, clear, informed, draws together several things that were floating around within my head as a diffuse cloud of handwaving and enumerated them in a clear logical sequence.
Hey... didn't you use to be a Slashdot editor? Pffft, no wonder you were sacked. Making sense? deflating hype and nonsense with the clear light of reason? Better get your coat, son. You're on the wrong damn site!
(Of course, I personally only come here to read the "...oh, wait, this is Slashdot" posts:)
...you won't get far in the world of corporate development with your book-learnin' and fancy college talk. Abstract an API and document it to enable code reuse? W're a Microsoft shop, goddammit!
Disclaimer: I must admit that I have had to maintain some of the most god-awful Perl ever imagined... suffice to say the author's previous experience was 40 line NT batch files and some crippled home-computer BASIC that made a lot of use of GOTO. *shudders at the memory*...
I wonder if that code's still being used to test and release that mega-corp software vendor's anti-virus product signature updates...
sometime over the next year or two, at 2 am, someone is going to be looking at that software with a plant manager screaming like a drill sergeant in their ear while they try to figure out what the heck it does and why one of the stations doesn't seem to be working, and if all they see is some multi-dimensional indexing nightmare, then I'll be the first one they call at 2 am.
Hate to sound like a wizened old veteran, but I am, so that's how it comes out[1]. Son, if you're giving out your home number to anyone at work apart from HR (or a possible date, if you're prepared to take that mad risk) then I'm afraid you had it coming... It's like the old army saying: Never volunteer. Never give anyone the ability to call you out of work hours, let alone 2am!, unless you're being paid a fat on-call bonus. (This should be structured such that you only get paid if they call you: if you have a flat-rate bonus for being prepared not to hang up when you realise who it is, plus some for each call-out, they'll feel entitled to call you at 2am, and that they're just getting their money's-worth. )
Whether you feel it's worth the money is your call; if it stops people from asking me whether I'd be prepared to do it, I'm all in favour.
> What's that thing in the top left hand corner of the second image? It
>doesn't fit with the rest of the landscape...
You mean the words that say, "DB_Session allocated the following problem: DB Error: connect failed"? Something tells me it is an earthy artifact.
Whoops, did I do that? (I'm the submitter. Yes, I screwed up and got an image of the wrong moon, but, y'know, after all... look at the pretty picture!:) Sorry, CICLOPS admins, didn't mean to DDoS ya! still,
Interesting. I've been playing with OpenBSD at home for a few years, long enough to encounter the well-known 'challenging' areas (upgrades. And coping with two separate toolchains is fun:) Meanwhile I've been given some Fedora Core 4 machines to admin at work. I knew RH had the SELinux extensions but never used them. Where to start? I ended up with the FC3 SELinux FAQ at redhat.com, which makes it clear that it needs a fair amount of care and attention, especially during the time I call "the coming of the great admin learning curve" - well, this admin anyway:) A thought has struck me: has anyone got past the initial setup, false-positive squishing and crossing off log entries as you fix or reconfig stuff, to a stable machine, then either (a) first discovered attacks (successful or not) via SELinux alerting mechanisms, or (b) got useful, or even just interesting, evidence of naughty activity via SEL logs, etc?
Knowing my machines are bulletproof is great, and all, but if one of my users is deliberately doing something s/he shouldn't, I want to know about it!
I used to work at Andersen consulting back in 92 and JBoss played a big part in our enterprise deployments
But Java wasn't first released until - what, 1996? 97? No idea when JBoss came along, but pretty recently - post 2000 at a guess?
Did you mean you worked at Anderson back in 2002?
I was just watching this, and it seems strangely relevant in some way I can't quite put my finger on...
Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!
the highest altitude reached by the balloon/ribbon/robot combination was 1,000 feet (305 meters). 'It gives us complete confidence that the mile goal is well within reach,' Laine said.
Hmmm....
~/Desktop/ $ units
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 1000 feet
You want: miles
* 0.18939394
/ 5.28
You have:
cally@inego(23:24:09)
This will probably be modded flamebait, and it will probably deserve
it here - which is unfortunate, because it's intended seriously.
This is addressed to those Americans who defend the right to bear
arms partly on the grounds that it gives the people the right
to rise up and overthrow the government if it becomes oppressive or
undemocratic. (I recognise there are other arguments, but I'm thinking
specifically of this one.) Now it seems to be (a self-confessed
liberal - capital L - Brit) that for many of those people who defend
guns with the "ultimate governmental veto" point, a government DNA
database would seem to be an almost biblically prophetic sign (or do I
mean 'Sign'?) that the time to rise up has come, because (as you said) most people who have thought "surely it could never happen here!" is asked - yet here you are... (I can only imagine
what NRA types would have said if this had happened under Clinton!)
So, which is it? A harmless but essential means to defend America
against the terrorist hordes, or the beginning of the black helicopter
putsch to introduce a Liberal secret police rounding up meat eaters
and shooting in the streets anyone who goes to church?
They might say "Ah, but we still have a democratic means to express
our opposition to this measure", but (a) anyone can see there's no
such thing, and (b) Bush IS a Republican, ferchrisakes!
Well, I wasn't posting to slag him off, per se - hence "dammit!" - TBH, as the humblest MITcundergrad is probably several tens of IQ points above me, I was jsut acknowledging that he's much cleverer and more accomplished than I am - yet even so, he made this call about AOLServer/Tcl/HPUX/Oracle which seemed absurd even when I read it in the late 90s (IIRC.) And, despite that comment (and other evidence of his being a bit obsessed with the idea that he's always infallibly correct) , he's still much cleverer and more accomplished than I am. I'm right that for my (and most other typical) uses, including high traffic database intensive sites, Linux or BSD, Apache and mod_perl (I don't buy PHP; perhaps the language isn't inherently insecure, perhaps it suffers from the market-share visibility problem, but I still won't touch PHP until the CVE stats look a bit less scary. (Blimey, I just ran the searches and got 545 hits in CVE for 'PHP', and... 65 for 'Perl'. Lordy!)
Super brainy? check. Major contributor of code to the community? Check. Absurdly over-inflated sense of own intellectual superiority only offset partly by the fact that he's a professor at MIT? check... (dammit!) But let us not forget that this is the man who asserted that only fools would use a differnt technology stack than tcl (for programming) on AOLserver (for HTTP serving) and Oracle, all running on HP/UX (server O/S) for building database-driven websites. A shame, cos the book on the topic he wrote (and gave away for free) was very insightful, funny, and informative whilst being one of the first books to draw obvious-in-retrospect conclusions about the whole domain of rich applications running over HTTP. I certainly learnt a lot from it without ever using tcl, AOLserver or HP/UX. And I had enough exposure to Oracle to realise that life's too short for that, for at least 99% of users.
You don't get it. You're right about needing a reliable network connection, but service outages (for successful applications) should be as rare as outages of, say, yahoo.com or news.bbc.co.uk . Platform issues go away, that the whole point of HTTP and HTML; a standards-compliant client nowadays can support enough functionality for rich applications, and it i>doesn't matter whether the UI is displayed on Apple, GNU/Linux, Windows, Ericsson or Motorola platform, any more than you care about the chipset or processor in your mobile. The choice about platform happens at the backend, and is up to the application developers. eg., if they want to use Slash, they'll have to run mod_perl on Apache with MySQL (I believe - I could be wrong about MySQL.) But (AFAIK) it's not that hard to run Apache and mod_perl on Windows, GNU/Linux or BSD. Likewise, those three OSes support a wide range of CPUs.
Likewise your scenario of "wanting to stay on SP1 because SP2 breaks your slides". Your slides live on the server and if they're broken because of an OS upgrade, so are everyone else's. I suspect the application providers will try to avoid this happening. You can see this with webmail; Hotmail or Gmail don't suddenly lose or corrupt your data, because if they do, they're dead. Licenses? *shrug* that's for the market to sort out. I doubt the Gmail or Flikr models will work for everyone, but it's a big internet out there and there's room for a lot of trial and error in the next couple of decades.
BTW you sound like you haven't seen maps.google.com... the first time you drag the map around inside the window in Firefox, the real power of DHTML should become obvious. TBH I don't even see why apps like photoediting couldn't be done serverside, on LANs at least. The other day I was looking at a graphic (a map of NOLA with satellite pics and overlaid labels); I realised (by chance!) that the "pseudo window" design of the legend, complete with a little titlebar and [X], wasn't just for sure. You could drag it around the window to see bits of map it covered, turn the labels on or off, and (this is what got me!) *windowshade* the whole legend dialog (roll it up into just the titlebar) with one click, just like X. I had to sit and think about the implications of that for a bit, popping it up, popping it down, dragging it around the display,... I suggest you do the same:)
I didn't know then what exactly it was, but as management consultants they put a lot of emphasis on 'data' and 'crunching the numbers'. So typically hat would be reams of sales figures, accounting info and the like. The clients were often huge megacorps and would often supply tons of raw unprocessed figures. The "backups" of these were, simply, ctrl+C / ctrl+V copies of copies of copies of Access.mdb files.
I guess you mean as an AC you won't see a message saying I've replied so you won't see this... ah well, no great loss I think! umyeah the way you describe it sounds very familiar. (Actually you've also reminded me that I got roped in to do a small edit using ProTools cos the real engineer/producer had gone home "...and you know about computers, right?" They had a lovely new desk put into their demo studio, 72 track Amek Einstein semi-automated IIRC, one night I was left to play with this stuff and a bunch of outboard gear, with very little clue what the hell any of it did... the only sound source I had was mostly classical CDs... Beethoven does sound strange through big studio monitors with the lights down. With a fat spliff;)
After I left it took me several years to be able to listen to any new music. I had "A&R ears", couldn't help breaking it all down & analysing & wondering how big they could be & all that crap. I did get into a lot of good other music instead, though, classical, jazz and flamenco (which is much, much better than you think it is!)
safe...
Damn, closed the wrong tab and nuked an unfinished comment. Um, I reckon 140 would still be less than 200 quid today.. inflation's been well under 4% the whole time, remember.
I shouldn't name the company really;... well, the logo was (is?) a butterfly. And not everyone there was a tosser, of course; just now I can think of three really, *really* nice people. But the unpleasant people more than made up for that.
I take a small satisfaction from noticing that certain A&R people's pet bands & projects have sunk without trace since then. Also, something I'd brought in got SotW in NME a couple of months after they fired me... (BTW I'm not bothered about having been sacked, though I was gutted at the time; in retrospect I'm glad, cos I'd installed a DOS-based Demon Internet account to demo the web etc to them, and been ignored; I managed to turn that into a more enjoyable career instead. Which was nice.
Ah yes, I well remember the management consultants where I worked in the late 90s, where official policy was to make "backups" of Access databases which were basically flat lists, but which were 100Mb or so and grew ten meg every time they were 'backed up' by the management consultants. Naturally, all these copies lived on our then-enormous 240Gb RAID equipped file servers - which, of course, were backed up every night, with the whole off-site, firesafes, random files verified and everything. We realised what was going on when we worked out this one project team had consumed something like 20% of the other 250 users' total space, within a month.
No, seriously, I mean it. Fuck them and their stinking business model that's based around parasiting off talent and screwing the pressure down on young artists to be as commercially successful as possible. BTW I speak as someone who worked at a music publisher for a couple of years. I thought I was pretty cynical when I started there, by the time I left I was a physical and emotional wreck (this was partly caused by my trying to live on 140 quid a week in Notting Hill Gate [expensive & flash area of West London] and partly by trying to reconcile their world view with my own and manage to build myself a career in the industry that didn't involve fucking artists over, lying, cheating, and generally behaving like a dick. (This was over ten years ago, by the way. )
How long do you normally keep a computer before you get a new one?
What OS do you think will be on a computer that you buy two years from now?
This comment is powered by the first computer I ever owned myself. It's a Dell P2/233 from late 1997, now with 256Mb RAM (I originally paid extra to double up the RAM to 64MB.) It arrived with Windows 95 pre-installed; it's now running GNU/Linux 2.6, the Mandrake 10.1 distro. It's much, much happier with the new-style Slashdot:)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, the "slashdot's going down hill" trolls have been making me roll my eyes pretty much as soon as I became a regular, but things like this really make me wonder :(
The rest of your post is coherent, clear, informed, draws together several things that were floating around within my head as a diffuse cloud of handwaving and enumerated them in a clear logical sequence.
Hey... didn't you use to be a Slashdot editor? Pffft, no wonder you were sacked. Making sense? deflating hype and nonsense with the clear light of reason? Better get your coat, son. You're on the wrong damn site!
(Of course, I personally only come here to read the "...oh, wait, this is Slashdot" posts:)
Disclaimer: I must admit that I have had to maintain some of the most god-awful Perl ever imagined... suffice to say the author's previous experience was 40 line NT batch files and some crippled home-computer BASIC that made a lot of use of GOTO. *shudders at the memory*...
I wonder if that code's still being used to test and release that mega-corp software vendor's anti-virus product signature updates...
Hate to sound like a wizened old veteran, but I am, so that's how it comes out[1]. Son, if you're giving out your home number to anyone at work apart from HR (or a possible date, if you're prepared to take that mad risk) then I'm afraid you had it coming... It's like the old army saying: Never volunteer. Never give anyone the ability to call you out of work hours, let alone 2am!, unless you're being paid a fat on-call bonus. (This should be structured such that you only get paid if they call you: if you have a flat-rate bonus for being prepared not to hang up when you realise who it is, plus some for each call-out, they'll feel entitled to call you at 2am, and that they're just getting their money's-worth. )
Whether you feel it's worth the money is your call; if it stops people from asking me whether I'd be prepared to do it, I'm all in favour.
References:
[1] Bill Hicks (misquoted)
Knowing my machines are bulletproof is great, and all, but if one of my users is deliberately doing something s/he shouldn't, I want to know about it!
.../me finishes reading the comment replied to and realises what a mistake that was. D'oh!
Surely the appropriate response is to start checking your back for any unexpected protrusions.
Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!
LOL! :)
The problem, I'm afraid, is physics (or more precisely, materials science.)
~/Desktop/ $ units
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 1000 feet
You want: miles
* 0.18939394
/ 5.28
You have:
cally@inego(23:24:09)
This is addressed to those Americans who defend the right to bear arms partly on the grounds that it gives the people the right to rise up and overthrow the government if it becomes oppressive or undemocratic. (I recognise there are other arguments, but I'm thinking specifically of this one.) Now it seems to be (a self-confessed liberal - capital L - Brit) that for many of those people who defend guns with the "ultimate governmental veto" point, a government DNA database would seem to be an almost biblically prophetic sign (or do I mean 'Sign'?) that the time to rise up has come, because (as you said) most people who have thought "surely it could never happen here!" is asked - yet here you are... (I can only imagine what NRA types would have said if this had happened under Clinton!)
So, which is it? A harmless but essential means to defend America against the terrorist hordes, or the beginning of the black helicopter putsch to introduce a Liberal secret police rounding up meat eaters and shooting in the streets anyone who goes to church?
They might say "Ah, but we still have a democratic means to express our opposition to this measure", but (a) anyone can see there's no such thing, and (b) Bush IS a Republican, ferchrisakes!
Just curious...
Well, I wasn't posting to slag him off, per se - hence "dammit!" - TBH, as the humblest MITcundergrad is probably several tens of IQ points above me, I was jsut acknowledging that he's much cleverer and more accomplished than I am - yet even so, he made this call about AOLServer/Tcl/HPUX/Oracle which seemed absurd even when I read it in the late 90s (IIRC.) And, despite that comment (and other evidence of his being a bit obsessed with the idea that he's always infallibly correct) , he's still much cleverer and more accomplished than I am. I'm right that for my (and most other typical) uses, including high traffic database intensive sites, Linux or BSD, Apache and mod_perl (I don't buy PHP; perhaps the language isn't inherently insecure, perhaps it suffers from the market-share visibility problem, but I still won't touch PHP until the CVE stats look a bit less scary. (Blimey, I just ran the searches and got 545 hits in CVE for 'PHP', and ... 65 for 'Perl'. Lordy!)
Super brainy? check. Major contributor of code to the community? Check. Absurdly over-inflated sense of own intellectual superiority only offset partly by the fact that he's a professor at MIT? check... (dammit!) But let us not forget that this is the man who asserted that only fools would use a differnt technology stack than tcl (for programming) on AOLserver (for HTTP serving) and Oracle, all running on HP/UX (server O/S) for building database-driven websites. A shame, cos the book on the topic he wrote (and gave away for free) was very insightful, funny, and informative whilst being one of the first books to draw obvious-in-retrospect conclusions about the whole domain of rich applications running over HTTP. I certainly learnt a lot from it without ever using tcl, AOLserver or HP/UX. And I had enough exposure to Oracle to realise that life's too short for that, for at least 99% of users.
Why not have a seance?
Why not go mad?
Actually, it doesn't. Other countries exporting significant quantities of cocaine include Peru and Bolivia.
BTW you sound like you haven't seen maps.google.com... the first time you drag the map around inside the window in Firefox, the real power of DHTML should become obvious. TBH I don't even see why apps like photoediting couldn't be done serverside, on LANs at least. The other day I was looking at a graphic (a map of NOLA with satellite pics and overlaid labels); I realised (by chance!) that the "pseudo window" design of the legend, complete with a little titlebar and [X], wasn't just for sure. You could drag it around the window to see bits of map it covered, turn the labels on or off, and (this is what got me!) *windowshade* the whole legend dialog (roll it up into just the titlebar) with one click, just like X. I had to sit and think about the implications of that for a bit, popping it up, popping it down, dragging it around the display,... I suggest you do the same :)
True story.
After I left it took me several years to be able to listen to any new music. I had "A&R ears", couldn't help breaking it all down & analysing & wondering how big they could be & all that crap. I did get into a lot of good other music instead, though, classical, jazz and flamenco (which is much, much better than you think it is!) safe...
I shouldn't name the company really;... well, the logo was (is?) a butterfly. And not everyone there was a tosser, of course; just now I can think of three really, *really* nice people. But the unpleasant people more than made up for that. I take a small satisfaction from noticing that certain A&R people's pet bands & projects have sunk without trace since then. Also, something I'd brought in got SotW in NME a couple of months after they fired me... (BTW I'm not bothered about having been sacked, though I was gutted at the time; in retrospect I'm glad, cos I'd installed a DOS-based Demon Internet account to demo the web etc to them, and been ignored; I managed to turn that into a more enjoyable career instead. Which was nice.
PS What's KR?
Ah yes, I well remember the management consultants where I worked in the late 90s, where official policy was to make "backups" of Access databases which were basically flat lists, but which were 100Mb or so and grew ten meg every time they were 'backed up' by the management consultants. Naturally, all these copies lived on our then-enormous 240Gb RAID equipped file servers - which, of course, were backed up every night, with the whole off-site, firesafes, random files verified and everything. We realised what was going on when we worked out this one project team had consumed something like 20% of the other 250 users' total space, within a month.
No, seriously, I mean it. Fuck them and their stinking business model that's based around parasiting off talent and screwing the pressure down on young artists to be as commercially successful as possible. BTW I speak as someone who worked at a music publisher for a couple of years. I thought I was pretty cynical when I started there, by the time I left I was a physical and emotional wreck (this was partly caused by my trying to live on 140 quid a week in Notting Hill Gate [expensive & flash area of West London] and partly by trying to reconcile their world view with my own and manage to build myself a career in the industry that didn't involve fucking artists over, lying, cheating, and generally behaving like a dick. (This was over ten years ago, by the way. )