Does anybody--that is, does ANYBODY--actually think that all decisions on any technical project anywhere whatsoever are made for purely technical reasons?
I'd like to shake his hand, but he's probably wearing tinfoil gloves to match his hat.
When you work in a large environment, you start to develop a different idea about backups. Strangely enough, most of these ideas work remarkably well on a small scale as well.
tar, gtar, dd, cp, etc. are not backup programs. These are file or filesystem copy programs. Backups are a different kettle of fish entirely.
Amanda is a pretty good option. There are many others. The tool really isn't that important other than that (a) it maintains a catalog, and (b) it provides comprehensive enough scheduling for your needs.
The schedule is key. Deciding what needs to get backed up, when it needs to get backed up, how big of a failure window you can tolerate, and such is the real trick. It can be insanely difficult when you have a hundred machines with different needs, but fundamentally, a few rules apply to backups:
For backups: 1) Back up the OS routinely. 2) Back up the data obsessively. 3) Document your systems carefully. 4) TEST your backups!!!
For restores: 1) Don't restore machines--rebuild. 2) Restore necessary config files. 3) Restore data. 4) TEST your restoration.
All machines should have their basic network and system config documented. If a machine is a web server, that fact should be added to the documentation but the actual web configuration should be restored from OS backups. Build the machine, create the basic configuration, restore the specific configuration, recover the data, verify everything. It's not backups, it's not a tool, it's not just spinning tape; it's the process and the documentation and the testing.
And THAT'S how you save 63 billion dollar companies.
This is the only good news I've heard in the entire computer industry in the last year.
Sun releasing Solaris 10 (and dtrace, ZFS, zones, services) and IE losing market share are the only good things that have happened in the industry that I'm aware of.
I'm quite convinced that Jonathan Schwartz exists to be the counterpart to Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates was an economist and a monopolist standing against Scott McNealy, a technologist. Now we have a Ballmer, the psychotic sociopath, facing down Schwartz, the insane dreamer.
Nothing he says makes much sense. Whether or not it helps Sun, I don't know.
Microsoft has come up with bad user paradigms and then carefully polished them. Over and over, they fail to create a good program, and instead create a marginally usable one after the user has been trained to think like the program.
Then everyone else comes along and tries to write software which allows people to "break free of Microsoft;" but they do it by mimicking the software as closely as possible, because they forget that people are capable of learning something new. Once in a while, they come up with a new and different idea, but it usually sucks, because it's written by geeks for geeks.
You might want to check your legal jurisdiction, before shooting your mouth off.
If the money can be traced back to someone residing in the US, they can be prosecuted. Besides, when has the US government EVER worried about jurisdiction?
"A common theme is that good ideas sell; in reality, what a customer wants sells."
This is true. Good ideas don't necessarily sell. What a consumer wants, sells. An effective company will either find something that the consumer already really REALLY wants, or more likely convince the consumer that they want the company's product.
It's all marketing. You can sell a good idea or a bad one, or you can go bankrupt on a good idea or a bad one. The product is irrelevant.
Well for starters, it's a fictional show, so the creators of the fiction are allowed to declare whatever they want.:-)
Secondly, I believe the regeneration has been shown in every case except for Chris Eccleston. In his case, we'll just have to fall back on rule #1: The writers said so!
I grew up with Tom Baker, and he was THE definitive doctor for me. I remember the first time I tuned in to late-night PBS for a Doctor Who four-parter, and it was...someone else! Some other IDIOT had replaced Tom Baker! I had never been so offended in my life!
That said, I thought that Eccleston was absolutely brilliant. David Tennant was a bit frenetic in comparison, which might be more in line with some of the 'classic' doctor traits, but a little wearying over the space of a season. Mind you, it wasn't his acting that was the source of the disconnect--it was the writing.
The thing about both David and Chris is that they're new Doctors for a new style of TV. Television has changed enormously over the decades that the show has been on, and even vs. Tom Baker's day, the way we write for TV is significantly different. Creating a new Doctor in the exact mould of William Hartnell would be comical and sad, and would probably be laughed out of the studio.
There's an excellent post just below here asking the question, "how black is black?" This is a key point--if the person in question did some things which might be illegal but shouldn't be (i.e. writing code to hack DVD encryption a la "DVD Jon"), then it's not that big of a deal. However, if this person did something that would have, in its day, hurt my company or something like it, then screw 'em. I don't need possibly reformed criminals.
The myth of the black-hat is becoming almost a cult belief. Black hats are amazing hackers, who think differently than the rest of the world, can penetrate incredibly secure systems with ease, and have mad skillz that normal humans can't achieve. On this I call bullshit. Anyone can learn to become a script kiddy, and the few who actually create new hacks don't often do anything extraordinary; they're just vandals who happen to be amateur programmers.
I sat down with a security consultant yesterday. The guy has been doing this for ten years. He gets paid a healthy sum to audit systems and make recommendations, and occasionally will get hired by a company to hack their own systems. He's very good at it. He follows the underground conversations, he keeps up on the latest exploits, and most importantly, he practices. He can think like a hacker, hack like a felon, but only goes after machines with the owners' approval. There are good security consultants, and they don't have to be criminals--in fact, the mindset and skillset of the hacker isn't necessarily the same as that of a security consultant. They're complementary, but not identical.
So no, I won't hire black hats. There are enough skilled and capable people out there to do the job that I'm not reduced to supporting reformed (maybe!) criminals in their former habits.
As others have mentioned, this is an old saw made new.
At one point, it was it was rock 'n' roll, or jazz for the elite rebels. In the '60s it was pot and long hair. Acid (courtesy of the CIA) has been used as a target at times, as has heavy metal, movies, cartoons, video games, and now online chat/blogging communities.
On the one hand, they're all scapegoats. Someone is always looking for a _cause_ for evil or deviant behaviour. Bad messages for the sake of entertainment are meant as entertainment, and will always be there. It's only the broken psyches that believe in the message or take it seriously.
However, that's not the entire story. There's at least a legitimate cause to question the content. On the one hand, all of these things preached rebellion, and thats a disrupting influence on the norm. Destructive rebellion is generally not a good thing. However, one should also look at the specific details. Elvis' gyrations made girls faint in the aisles at concerts. Did they encourage promiscuitity? Perhaps, perhaps not--the message was still fairly implicit. Compare that to these lyrics:
I see you windin n grindin up on that pole, I kno u see me lookin' at you and you already know I wanna fuck you, you already know, i wanna fuck you, you already know
Hard to mistake that for anything innocent.
Likewise with movies. Psycho might have inspired dementia in an already-unbalanced individual. Compare that to something like the remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is more like an instruction manual.
The messages are getting more graphic, and more explicit. It's wrong to point at them as the cause of problems because it still comes down to individual responsibility. However, the medium and the content aren't totally free of blame either. Makers should have some sense of responsibility. However, they don't and they won't--money is money, and the bigger the audience, the more money there is to be made.
"Walmart, as sociopathic as their organisation may or may not be has relatively little to do with the problem, they just take advantage of it."
No argument there. The only thing is that they are such a huge buyer that they can strongly influence the status quo. With their political and economic pressure, they can keep things pretty much the way they are.
You're missing an important point. Walmart is a source and cause of the lower class. When Walmart enters an area--especially a lower-middle class area--they drive wages down. They FORCE people to shop there, because they have no choice after their buying power has been reduced.
Furthermore, they way that they can afford such low prices is by squeezing the suppliers and producers. How's the farming industry in the US right now? Most farmers can barely afford to make ends meet, and it's not because they're buying premium goods at premium stores, it's because they're being told "we'll pay you 70% of fair market value, and you have no choice since we're the biggest buyer in the nation."
On the other hand, Sony is behaving in a classical "company about to self-destruct" fashion.
No, the gamer conventions and the pundits won't bring down Sony. But people are pretty good at subconciously detecting the stench of death on an organisation, and they'll start to avoid Sony, even if they don't know why. If (or when) Sony eventually craters, the same useless pundits will take the credit, but in fact it'll be Sony itself that did the damage.
Dunno about yak--sounds like something that I need to get for our data centre.
However, we tend to use velcro ties wherever there's any chance of impermanency (which is pretty much everwhere). Prettier than zip ties, reusable, and far easier to move around.
I did some coding work for a year. Forced myself to use emacs for all of it, and came to appreciate the power and customisability of it. However, most of that power is only evident if you're doing something like programming or maybe writing a book.
vi has always been a fairly lightweight editor. It functions on a minimal system, and is ubiquitous. Also, it's not written by RMS. These are all good features.:-)
Two editors have two different niches. As you say, they both do their respective jobs fantastically well.
I work on dozens of modern, high-end systems that don't have arrow keys. In fact, the only access to many of them is through an amber-on-black text-only monitor (hey, we've evolved from green on black!:-).
If you don't like vim, fine--there are those other 99% of editors that you can choose from. However, that's not a valid reason to change it from what it was designed for (or at least what vi was designed for) and in the process piss off the people who use it the way it is.
In short, don't try to change MY editor to suit YOUR desires. -g may be an unintuitive way to get to the end, but you can do it without having to move away from the home-row on the keyboard, it works on all terminals, and 1-g to get to the top of the file or 341-g to get to the line that some config file parser told you was the source of your error is a lot more consistent and efficient than having different keystrokes for each function, and having to scroll to a specific arbitrary line.
It's not a friendly editor. It's an efficient and universal editor.
While I have no doubt that vim is a powerful and useful editor, it's increasingly large laundry-list of features is dragging it increasingly farther away from both the functionality and the philosophy behind vi. Keep in mind that vi is a visual superset of ex. As such, it was designed as a visual text editor that works on any cursor-addressable terminal. All functions are accessible from the home-row of keys, with the exception of the esc key. Editing features use regular expressions. In short, it's the ideal editor for the touch-typing administrator who can count on it working under fairly rough circumstances.
As a sysadmin, I have to ask how features like pop-up spellcheck and "omini" completion will help me edit config files on a vt102 terminal, (OK, my hard terminal is actually a vt520). vim is basically becoming a graphically-dependent editor that happens to use a similar editing structure to vi. Yes, I know about vi compatability mode, but that just throws out most of the last 'n' years of development.
My point? Not that development should be stopped, or that these goll-durned newfangled features ain't right, but that I wish it wasn't always trumpeted as "vi--but better." Most of the 'better' part of is are things that point away from vi.
But that's exactly it--once you've released your source under the GPL, YOU are building on GPL code. Your own code becomes a derivative work of the first GPL release, and turning that backwards into non-GPL code would imply reverting to code base from before the first GPL release.
"I love everything being open source, but if people are to cheat using my stuff then that is not acceptable."
First of all, that's the nature of open source. That's similarly the nature of free speech. The primary point to them is that they allow others to use them according to the license, without your approval or consent.
Furthermore, I'm not an expert on the GPL but I don't believe you can 'rescind' the license in September or anything like that. You also presumably can't develop the software under a non-GPL license after you've released it under the GPL.
At any rate, if the students are cheating, it's up to the Universities to deal with them. If they're violating the license, it's up to you to go after them. Pretty simple, really.
So let's see here. Give me a good HD resolution for a TV. Make it 1080p, or something comparable. Then make it semi-transparent, put another one behind it, and generate some true depth. Then crank up the dynamic range to at least ten times what it is now. Now THAT'S where they should be doing some innovation!
Google turned into an evil company roughly three years ago. Now they're just evil and hypocritical, like most big companies. They still have a fairly good search engine, but the veneer has long since worn off.
Slashdot Mirror
Um...
Does anybody--that is, does ANYBODY --actually think that all decisions on any technical project anywhere whatsoever are made for purely technical reasons?
I'd like to shake his hand, but he's probably wearing tinfoil gloves to match his hat.
When you work in a large environment, you start to develop a different idea about backups. Strangely enough, most of these ideas work remarkably well on a small scale as well.
tar, gtar, dd, cp, etc. are not backup programs. These are file or filesystem copy programs. Backups are a different kettle of fish entirely.
Amanda is a pretty good option. There are many others. The tool really isn't that important other than that (a) it maintains a catalog, and (b) it provides comprehensive enough scheduling for your needs.
The schedule is key. Deciding what needs to get backed up, when it needs to get backed up, how big of a failure window you can tolerate, and such is the real trick. It can be insanely difficult when you have a hundred machines with different needs, but fundamentally, a few rules apply to backups:
For backups:
1) Back up the OS routinely.
2) Back up the data obsessively.
3) Document your systems carefully.
4) TEST your backups!!!
For restores:
1) Don't restore machines--rebuild.
2) Restore necessary config files.
3) Restore data.
4) TEST your restoration.
All machines should have their basic network and system config documented. If a machine is a web server, that fact should be added to the documentation but the actual web configuration should be restored from OS backups. Build the machine, create the basic configuration, restore the specific configuration, recover the data, verify everything. It's not backups, it's not a tool, it's not just spinning tape; it's the process and the documentation and the testing.
And THAT'S how you save 63 billion dollar companies.
This is the only good news I've heard in the entire computer industry in the last year.
Sun releasing Solaris 10 (and dtrace, ZFS, zones, services) and IE losing market share are the only good things that have happened in the industry that I'm aware of.
Sad, ain't it?
I'm quite convinced that Jonathan Schwartz exists to be the counterpart to Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates was an economist and a monopolist standing against Scott McNealy, a technologist. Now we have a Ballmer, the psychotic sociopath, facing down Schwartz, the insane dreamer.
Nothing he says makes much sense. Whether or not it helps Sun, I don't know.
1) Microsoft.
2) Anti-Microsoft.
Microsoft has come up with bad user paradigms and then carefully polished them. Over and over, they fail to create a good program, and instead create a marginally usable one after the user has been trained to think like the program.
Then everyone else comes along and tries to write software which allows people to "break free of Microsoft;" but they do it by mimicking the software as closely as possible, because they forget that people are capable of learning something new. Once in a while, they come up with a new and different idea, but it usually sucks, because it's written by geeks for geeks.
You might want to check your legal jurisdiction, before shooting your mouth off.
If the money can be traced back to someone residing in the US, they can be prosecuted.
Besides, when has the US government EVER worried about jurisdiction?
"A common theme is that good ideas sell; in reality, what a customer wants sells."
This is true. Good ideas don't necessarily sell. What a consumer wants, sells. An effective company will either find something that the consumer already really REALLY wants, or more likely convince the consumer that they want the company's product.
It's all marketing. You can sell a good idea or a bad one, or you can go bankrupt on a good idea or a bad one. The product is irrelevant.
Infighting is handing every victory to Microsoft. The best product will eventually win, and there won't be anyone to notice it.
Well for starters, it's a fictional show, so the creators of the fiction are allowed to declare whatever they want. :-)
Secondly, I believe the regeneration has been shown in every case except for Chris Eccleston. In his case, we'll just have to fall back on rule #1: The writers said so!
Interesting, and of course a personal opinion.
I grew up with Tom Baker, and he was THE definitive doctor for me. I remember the first time I tuned in to late-night PBS for a Doctor Who four-parter, and it was...someone else! Some other IDIOT had replaced Tom Baker! I had never been so offended in my life!
That said, I thought that Eccleston was absolutely brilliant. David Tennant was a bit frenetic in comparison, which might be more in line with some of the 'classic' doctor traits, but a little wearying over the space of a season. Mind you, it wasn't his acting that was the source of the disconnect--it was the writing.
The thing about both David and Chris is that they're new Doctors for a new style of TV. Television has changed enormously over the decades that the show has been on, and even vs. Tom Baker's day, the way we write for TV is significantly different. Creating a new Doctor in the exact mould of William Hartnell would be comical and sad, and would probably be laughed out of the studio.
TV has changed. The show has to change as well.
Chris Eccleston was the ninth, and David Tennant is the tenth. The official counting is according to the BBC itself.l
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/guide.shtm
There's an excellent post just below here asking the question, "how black is black?" This is a key point--if the person in question did some things which might be illegal but shouldn't be (i.e. writing code to hack DVD encryption a la "DVD Jon"), then it's not that big of a deal. However, if this person did something that would have, in its day, hurt my company or something like it, then screw 'em. I don't need possibly reformed criminals.
The myth of the black-hat is becoming almost a cult belief. Black hats are amazing hackers, who think differently than the rest of the world, can penetrate incredibly secure systems with ease, and have mad skillz that normal humans can't achieve. On this I call bullshit. Anyone can learn to become a script kiddy, and the few who actually create new hacks don't often do anything extraordinary; they're just vandals who happen to be amateur programmers.
I sat down with a security consultant yesterday. The guy has been doing this for ten years. He gets paid a healthy sum to audit systems and make recommendations, and occasionally will get hired by a company to hack their own systems. He's very good at it. He follows the underground conversations, he keeps up on the latest exploits, and most importantly, he practices. He can think like a hacker, hack like a felon, but only goes after machines with the owners' approval. There are good security consultants, and they don't have to be criminals--in fact, the mindset and skillset of the hacker isn't necessarily the same as that of a security consultant. They're complementary, but not identical.
So no, I won't hire black hats. There are enough skilled and capable people out there to do the job that I'm not reduced to supporting reformed (maybe!) criminals in their former habits.
As others have mentioned, this is an old saw made new.
At one point, it was it was rock 'n' roll, or jazz for the elite rebels. In the '60s it was pot and long hair. Acid (courtesy of the CIA) has been used as a target at times, as has heavy metal, movies, cartoons, video games, and now online chat/blogging communities.
On the one hand, they're all scapegoats. Someone is always looking for a _cause_ for evil or deviant behaviour. Bad messages for the sake of entertainment are meant as entertainment, and will always be there. It's only the broken psyches that believe in the message or take it seriously.
However, that's not the entire story. There's at least a legitimate cause to question the content. On the one hand, all of these things preached rebellion, and thats a disrupting influence on the norm. Destructive rebellion is generally not a good thing. However, one should also look at the specific details. Elvis' gyrations made girls faint in the aisles at concerts. Did they encourage promiscuitity? Perhaps, perhaps not--the message was still fairly implicit. Compare that to these lyrics:
I see you windin n grindin up on that pole,
I kno u see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna fuck you, you already know, i wanna fuck you, you already know
Hard to mistake that for anything innocent.
Likewise with movies. Psycho might have inspired dementia in an already-unbalanced individual. Compare that to something like the remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is more like an instruction manual.
The messages are getting more graphic, and more explicit. It's wrong to point at them as the cause of problems because it still comes down to individual responsibility. However, the medium and the content aren't totally free of blame either. Makers should have some sense of responsibility. However, they don't and they won't--money is money, and the bigger the audience, the more money there is to be made.
Sounds like vi.
"Walmart, as sociopathic as their organisation may or may not be has relatively little to do with the problem, they just take advantage of it."
No argument there. The only thing is that they are such a huge buyer that they can strongly influence the status quo. With their political and economic pressure, they can keep things pretty much the way they are.
You're missing an important point. Walmart is a source and cause of the lower class. When Walmart enters an area--especially a lower-middle class area--they drive wages down. They FORCE people to shop there, because they have no choice after their buying power has been reduced.
Furthermore, they way that they can afford such low prices is by squeezing the suppliers and producers. How's the farming industry in the US right now? Most farmers can barely afford to make ends meet, and it's not because they're buying premium goods at premium stores, it's because they're being told "we'll pay you 70% of fair market value, and you have no choice since we're the biggest buyer in the nation."
Consider how well they've benefited Vlassic, as laid out in this article:
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/77/walmart.html
Walmart isn't about savings--it's about false savings, and short-term cash in pocket driving long-term economic ruin.
On the one hand, what you say is true.
On the other hand, Sony is behaving in a classical "company about to self-destruct" fashion.
No, the gamer conventions and the pundits won't bring down Sony. But people are pretty good at subconciously detecting the stench of death on an organisation, and they'll start to avoid Sony, even if they don't know why. If (or when) Sony eventually craters, the same useless pundits will take the credit, but in fact it'll be Sony itself that did the damage.
Dunno about yak--sounds like something that I need to get for our data centre.
However, we tend to use velcro ties wherever there's any chance of impermanency (which is pretty much everwhere). Prettier than zip ties, reusable, and far easier to move around.
I did some coding work for a year. Forced myself to use emacs for all of it, and came to appreciate the power and customisability of it. However, most of that power is only evident if you're doing something like programming or maybe writing a book.
:-)
vi has always been a fairly lightweight editor. It functions on a minimal system, and is ubiquitous. Also, it's not written by RMS. These are all good features.
Two editors have two different niches. As you say, they both do their respective jobs fantastically well.
Sucks to be you.
:-).
I work on dozens of modern, high-end systems that don't have arrow keys. In fact, the only access to many of them is through an amber-on-black text-only monitor (hey, we've evolved from green on black!
If you don't like vim, fine--there are those other 99% of editors that you can choose from. However, that's not a valid reason to change it from what it was designed for (or at least what vi was designed for) and in the process piss off the people who use it the way it is.
In short, don't try to change MY editor to suit YOUR desires. -g may be an unintuitive way to get to the end, but you can do it without having to move away from the home-row on the keyboard, it works on all terminals, and 1-g to get to the top of the file or 341-g to get to the line that some config file parser told you was the source of your error is a lot more consistent and efficient than having different keystrokes for each function, and having to scroll to a specific arbitrary line.
It's not a friendly editor. It's an efficient and universal editor.
While I have no doubt that vim is a powerful and useful editor, it's increasingly large laundry-list of features is dragging it increasingly farther away from both the functionality and the philosophy behind vi. Keep in mind that vi is a visual superset of ex. As such, it was designed as a visual text editor that works on any cursor-addressable terminal. All functions are accessible from the home-row of keys, with the exception of the esc key. Editing features use regular expressions. In short, it's the ideal editor for the touch-typing administrator who can count on it working under fairly rough circumstances.
As a sysadmin, I have to ask how features like pop-up spellcheck and "omini" completion will help me edit config files on a vt102 terminal, (OK, my hard terminal is actually a vt520). vim is basically becoming a graphically-dependent editor that happens to use a similar editing structure to vi. Yes, I know about vi compatability mode, but that just throws out most of the last 'n' years of development.
My point? Not that development should be stopped, or that these goll-durned newfangled features ain't right, but that I wish it wasn't always trumpeted as "vi--but better." Most of the 'better' part of is are things that point away from vi.
But that's exactly it--once you've released your source under the GPL, YOU are building on GPL code. Your own code becomes a derivative work of the first GPL release, and turning that backwards into non-GPL code would imply reverting to code base from before the first GPL release.
"I love everything being open source, but if people are to cheat using my stuff then that is not acceptable."
First of all, that's the nature of open source. That's similarly the nature of free speech. The primary point to them is that they allow others to use them according to the license, without your approval or consent.
Furthermore, I'm not an expert on the GPL but I don't believe you can 'rescind' the license in September or anything like that. You also presumably can't develop the software under a non-GPL license after you've released it under the GPL.
At any rate, if the students are cheating, it's up to the Universities to deal with them. If they're violating the license, it's up to you to go after them. Pretty simple, really.
So let's see here. Give me a good HD resolution for a TV. Make it 1080p, or something comparable. Then make it semi-transparent, put another one behind it, and generate some true depth. Then crank up the dynamic range to at least ten times what it is now. Now THAT'S where they should be doing some innovation!
Google turned into an evil company roughly three years ago. Now they're just evil and hypocritical, like most big companies. They still have a fairly good search engine, but the veneer has long since worn off.