While it certainly true that software was not solely responsible for this tragedy, in the real world it is rarely one single item that causes a system to fail. Typically it is a complex, almost unforseeable combination/chain of small events, each not possible without the one before it.
In this case, software contributed to the problem by not sufficiently differentiating between range and altitude information enough. The interface was designed to be used under combat circumstances, and should be layed out as easily and simply as possible. Non-obvious interfaces and information presentation is a common way that software can induce a human error, and systems designed for mission critical deployment should be carefuly and thoroughly usability tested, in an environment as close as possible to it's deployment environment.
Amen. The term "Bug" is usually meant to mean software errors. Software errors can creep in during requirements gathering (missing or erroneous information about the intended application), specification development (erroneous assumptions), or actual implementation (off-by one errors, buffer overruns, etc. or for that matter any of the above also).
All of the process and infrastructure surrounding software development (ESPECIALLY with mission critical apps) is just as important as the coding itself. Until more colleges and education programs start pounding that into students heads, we are going to continue to have the same problems.
Not like I'd choose anyone for name alone. Given the choice between a company that has people with solid skills with a cute name vs. a company with a "professional" name and staff that has just recently graduated with their history degree and have take 4 microsoft MSCE classes, I'll take the company with talented people anyday.
These guys did an audit of one of my website networks once for a bank, not too bad. Guy mostly knew his stuff and was easy to work with. Cute name too:
http://www.wealsowalkdogs.com/
I don't know if counterpane.com does audits, but you should definitely consider their managed security service if you don't have a dedicated on-staff security person.
Finally beware these types of audits, they often don't look at your procedures and policies, which are the root cause of most problems. It's always good to have external cross checks from a different point of view, but be very careful about assigning too much importantace to them.
The problem is that Solaris actually represents a fairly sizable investment and a competitive advantage for Sun. Lots (not sure of the percentage) of the code is non-platform specific, and Solaris is really well engineered. Giving their competitors in the space (IBM, HP) access to a working, proven, extremely efficient Unix kernel could hurt them.
Solaris is a very very fast, stable, proven OS that I'd love to see stick around on Intel, even if I don't have that much call to use it at the moment. I can certainly see situations where I would use, sometimes even if I had to license it at $300-500 a copy. An IA64 port would be great as well.
Don't think they'll be saving much bandwidth. Those XML/SOAP requests passing back and forth aren't exactly lightweight, probably about the same as the HTML for a page. And the logo of course is cached everywhere.:-)
In fact, probably _especially_ for NT admins. NT admins often seem to lack the exact background, sensitivity, and discipline that this book is talking about. Even though some of things are hard to implment (revision control for configurations, etc), the principles apply to _all_ production systems.
This is the best sysadmin book I've ever read. This plus a practical how-to book like USAH and O'Reilly's Unix Backup and Recovery are the three cornerstones that everyone should start with as a starting sysadmin. This book in particular will save you 2-3 years of frustration unless you work in a very disciplined shop.
We do not want books full of screenshots that duplicate the online (or in rare cases supplied paper) manuals. What we want are books that explain the theory and workings of how to do things, without dating themselves by referring to lots of specifics. Put the real information in the text, and make any specifics side-bars when possible.
Look at some of the "bibles" of the industry. The Art of Computer Programming, TCP/IP Illustrated (Stephens), Advanced programming in the Unix Enviornment (Stephens again), The C++ Programming Language, Code Complete, etc....this list goes on. These books were all published ages ago but are still worth buying and reading. Much better than "Solaris 8 adminstration" or whatever. I never buy those with my own money, but if I have a specific project at work, I'll sometimes have work buy them.
In short, make it relavent for the long term. Books on the hows and whys of image processing (short supply!) are a million times better than "Mastering Photoshop 10" or whatever the version de jour is. If I think it's going to be obsolete or irrelevant in a year, I'm not going to buy it. It's that simple.
Along the same lines, I wonder how feasible it would be to modify a cryptosystem so that when the government used their backdoor, the message decrypted into some aribtrary text chosen by the individual, but when decrypted through the proper channels, the message is the intended one... so when Agency X uses their backdoor key on your message, they see a love letter to your girlfriend, but when the proper recipent uses the right key, the actual message is revealed...
You have a point that we have done some extremely bad things to various people as a matter of national policy, and I realize you're not saying that these responses would be justified.
But please, damnit, please don't spread rumors about the perpetrators of this act. We're going to be exposed to previously unkown levels of paranoia and fear over the cuplrits in the next few week. The news knows nothing right now of the investigation or the culprits I assure you. Palenstinians, other middle Eastern countries, one of our own people, a Canadian....bottom line is:
right now we have no idea who did this in any provable capacity.
Everything else is just paranoid rumor and fear mongering; let's nip these rumors in the bud okay? Worry about people trapped in rubble and anyone potentially still at risk for now.
I too weap for our future as I read public message boards, especially ones that supply anonymity (ahem...Sl*shd*t at -1), but the same holds true for just about every internet message boards. If one was to examine the Windows tech support forums, I bet someone would be mad (and equally childish) over not support NT 4.0. Or not supporting some wacky video card API. Or someone who just plain couldn't make the thing work. The "idiots on messageboard" problem is much larger than just the Linux world, and for a company to not support something just because of a childish, vocal minority is more than a little shortsighted.
Small or not it's quite perceptible. Play on my stereo an MP3 vs. a CD of the same song I will 100% pick out the CD as being better each time based on the sound alone, and I could point out the differences to anyone and make them see it too. Lots of people can; MP3's are simply no good for at home, pure listening purposes. For just about everything else, they're fine (computers, joggers, cars, DJ's, parties, etc...) for the most part.
Errr...that was supposed to be "product", not "produce". They probably couldn't stop you from using that phrase to promote your produce; the products are too different. Unless Microsoft wanted to move into the produce market...
IANAL, but actually, it's quite the contrary. Trademarks explicitly exist for the protection of common words and phrases as they apply to businesses. The phrase "where do you want to go today?" is trademarked. Microsoft can't stop you from saying it, but they can stop you from using it to promote your produce.
Of course the name is slightly differentiated. In a normal case you'd lose by only slightly changing the name, but since this one is so simple and generic, it could go either way in court.
Basically, if it creates confusion, then Adobe can win. Will the courts decide that the average user has any trouble differentiating between KIllustrator and Illustrator? Tough call.
You are totally correct. A little overstated perhaps, but since NT is so easy to admin for basic tasks, most NT admins are LAN administrators turned network engineers. They just don't *typically* have the background to properly handle all of the various issues that arise in running a production website. This is generally speaking of course. It's perfectly possible to build a reliable, secure web application on top of NT systems, it's just that it takes more - not less- discipline and skill on the part of the administrators. Skilled administrators are annoyed with and avoid NT because it is difficult to administer remotely, lowering their quality of life.
It's a card with a full blown (AMD I think) x86 processor, it's own RAM, and it's own video card. You can display the video out it's own card into a seperate monitor, or you can display it via X onto a remote box or the local box. 8 bit color isn't to bad performance wise, but 24 is painful running remote X (part of the install comes with some local video driver extensions I believe that allow direct pass through for the local system).
To run the thing, you just fire up the SUNWpci binary and it boots up the baby x86 system in a window (bios settings available and everthing). Special utilities within the Windows drivers allow for cut and paste. The x86 system gets it's own IP and pretty much acts totally seperate. It's file system is stored in a single ufs file, which is rather nice because you can create a known good installation, then back it up and revert or copy it around if need be. All in all, the whole system was pretty cool, especially for getting your Outlook mail...:-)
My amp is a Nakamichi AV-8 running Dynaudio Audience 40's. Good setup for music and HT. Good dynamics, excellent imaging; very listenable. I'm adding a Dynaudio C120+ in a week or so; excellent speakers. The drivers really make midranges sing. Certainly for HT need a sub, but I'm not there yet. I'm in a apartment, so I'm limited in that respect anyway.
At any rate, don't skimp on the reciever. Get something nice that you can listen to. Don't worry about features; generally manufacturers that are trying to throw in every feature known to man are not too worried about the sound quality. NAD is another excellent manufacturer.
Talk to a local high-end audio shop; they're almost always extremely helpful. Just make sure you listen objectively to what you buy.
Annoying, unfair stuff from the content provider as expected, but it's pretty hard to tell what this system will actually do from this article. My favorite quote:
"If you want to watch a high definition TV program on an analog TV set, the signal will be downgraded so it's not HDTV-quality anymore."
Ohmygod. You mean I can't display 1080 lines of resolution on my old crappy TV set? No real suprise there. To watch high-res signals, you kind of need a high res display device. I don't think it's copy protection that's keeping your 10 year old RCA TV from displaying HDTV...
Of course Novell is irrelevant; they've been that way for a year or two now. The question is, how could they fix themselves? Since "embracing" open source is so trendy these days, that seems like a likely route. They have decent resources and (presumably) developers; why not take a shot at changing NDS into an open standard (perhaps just changing into an LDAP based product), and building adapters for the various OS's? There's probably a lot of other options. Certainly they are no longer the market dictator that they once were (and probably never will be again), but I see no reason that they can't remain in business producing useful products.
In most modern operating systems, using a ram based filesystem will only confuse things. The entire operating system was designed with the thought in mind that disk access was slow; hence the paging, virtual memory, and caching subsystems. Essentially what all of these things do is work together to assume that the right peices of code/data are in memory more often then not. As something is loaded, the OS will defer loading it into memory until it is actually called upon, where it will read it off the disk (generally asynchronously, assuming that it will take a long time). It should remain in memory until physical memory gets tight, and/or that peice of code/data hasn't been used in a while. All of these subsystems working together are generally much better at guessing dynamically what needs to be in RAM, rather then the user taking away 100mb of RAM and forcing all of that into memory. Theoretically, if you had enough RAM, the OS would pretty much load everything it needed into memory and be done with it. So if you want more benfifits of a "ramdrive", then add physical memory to your system.
The only real place I can imagine where this might help is one where there is a lot of disk writing going on on a particular filesystem, and the system is so busy it never has a chance to flush it's cache without causing incoming requests to wait, such as a way overloaded mail server (I've seen this). Of course, the problem there is that it's not a night and day performance difference anyway when you're talking about modern disks with built in caches and OS's with decent lazy write techniques. And of course the little tiny issue that you're completely compromising your data integrity since if the system dies, everything in that file system goes with it. A far better solution, if you feel you must second guess the OS's caching/paging/vm system, is a controller card with on board cache and a battery backup. This maintains your data integrity, and will give you a little performance boost for busy disks with lots of writing. Of course, you'd still probably see just as much performance improvement by adding memory...
1/2 the pixel depth? 16.8million pixels works out to about 3500x4650. You'd be hard pressed to get tons more information out of a 35mm negative then that. Maybe a little bit, but I wouldn't want to spend the money on a scan, not to mention the work you'd have to do taking the picture. I still say the real limitations are recycle time and sensitivity. Especially recylce time. How long would it take your average digital camera to store a 3500x4650 image and be ready for the next shot? 5-6 minutes? Don't miss the shot...that's why film is king for me right now.
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While it certainly true that software was not solely responsible for this tragedy, in the real world it is rarely one single item that causes a system to fail. Typically it is a complex, almost unforseeable combination/chain of small events, each not possible without the one before it.
In this case, software contributed to the problem by not sufficiently differentiating between range and altitude information enough. The interface was designed to be used under combat circumstances, and should be layed out as easily and simply as possible. Non-obvious interfaces and information presentation is a common way that software can induce a human error, and systems designed for mission critical deployment should be carefuly and thoroughly usability tested, in an environment as close as possible to it's deployment environment.
Amen. The term "Bug" is usually meant to mean software errors. Software errors can creep in during requirements gathering (missing or erroneous information about the intended application), specification development (erroneous assumptions), or actual implementation (off-by one errors, buffer overruns, etc. or for that matter any of the above also).
All of the process and infrastructure surrounding software development (ESPECIALLY with mission critical apps) is just as important as the coding itself. Until more colleges and education programs start pounding that into students heads, we are going to continue to have the same problems.
Not like I'd choose anyone for name alone. Given the choice between a company that has people with solid skills with a cute name vs. a company with a "professional" name and staff that has just recently graduated with their history degree and have take 4 microsoft MSCE classes, I'll take the company with talented people anyday.
These guys did an audit of one of my website networks once for a bank, not too bad. Guy mostly knew his stuff and was easy to work with. Cute name too:
http://www.wealsowalkdogs.com/
I don't know if counterpane.com does audits, but you should definitely consider their managed security service if you don't have a dedicated on-staff security person.
Finally beware these types of audits, they often don't look at your procedures and policies, which are the root cause of most problems. It's always good to have external cross checks from a different point of view, but be very careful about assigning too much importantace to them.
The problem is that Solaris actually represents a fairly sizable investment and a competitive advantage for Sun. Lots (not sure of the percentage) of the code is non-platform specific, and Solaris is really well engineered. Giving their competitors in the space (IBM, HP) access to a working, proven, extremely efficient Unix kernel could hurt them.
Solaris is a very very fast, stable, proven OS that I'd love to see stick around on Intel, even if I don't have that much call to use it at the moment. I can certainly see situations where I would use, sometimes even if I had to license it at $300-500 a copy. An IA64 port would be great as well.
Don't think they'll be saving much bandwidth. Those XML/SOAP requests passing back and forth aren't exactly lightweight, probably about the same as the HTML for a page. And the logo of course is cached everywhere. :-)
There's two words I've never heard together before...
In fact, probably _especially_ for NT admins. NT admins often seem to lack the exact background, sensitivity, and discipline that this book is talking about. Even though some of things are hard to implment (revision control for configurations, etc), the principles apply to _all_ production systems.
This is the best sysadmin book I've ever read. This plus a practical how-to book like USAH and O'Reilly's Unix Backup and Recovery are the three cornerstones that everyone should start with as a starting sysadmin. This book in particular will save you 2-3 years of frustration unless you work in a very disciplined shop.
We do not want books full of screenshots that duplicate the online (or in rare cases supplied paper) manuals. What we want are books that explain the theory and workings of how to do things, without dating themselves by referring to lots of specifics. Put the real information in the text, and make any specifics side-bars when possible.
Look at some of the "bibles" of the industry. The Art of Computer Programming, TCP/IP Illustrated (Stephens), Advanced programming in the Unix Enviornment (Stephens again), The C++ Programming Language, Code Complete, etc....this list goes on. These books were all published ages ago but are still worth buying and reading. Much better than "Solaris 8 adminstration" or whatever. I never buy those with my own money, but if I have a specific project at work, I'll sometimes have work buy them.
In short, make it relavent for the long term. Books on the hows and whys of image processing (short supply!) are a million times better than "Mastering Photoshop 10" or whatever the version de jour is. If I think it's going to be obsolete or irrelevant in a year, I'm not going to buy it. It's that simple.
If you have to ask this question on Slashdot, then you shouldn't be doing it. Read "Secrets and Lies," and then think about the question some more.
Along the same lines, I wonder how feasible it would be to modify a cryptosystem so that when the government used their backdoor, the message decrypted into some aribtrary text chosen by the individual, but when decrypted through the proper channels, the message is the intended one... so when Agency X uses their backdoor key on your message, they see a love letter to your girlfriend, but when the proper recipent uses the right key, the actual message is revealed...
You have a point that we have done some extremely bad things to various people as a matter of national policy, and I realize you're not saying that these responses would be justified.
But please, damnit, please don't spread rumors about the perpetrators of this act. We're going to be exposed to previously unkown levels of paranoia and fear over the cuplrits in the next few week. The news knows nothing right now of the investigation or the culprits I assure you. Palenstinians, other middle Eastern countries, one of our own people, a Canadian....bottom line is:
right now we have no idea who did this in any provable capacity.
Everything else is just paranoid rumor and fear mongering; let's nip these rumors in the bud okay? Worry about people trapped in rubble and anyone potentially still at risk for now.
I too weap for our future
:) But anyway...
:-)
I weep for our educational system.
Damnit; I swar it wuz a typeo.
I too weap for our future as I read public message boards, especially ones that supply anonymity (ahem...Sl*shd*t at -1), but the same holds true for just about every internet message boards. If one was to examine the Windows tech support forums, I bet someone would be mad (and equally childish) over not support NT 4.0. Or not supporting some wacky video card API. Or someone who just plain couldn't make the thing work. The "idiots on messageboard" problem is much larger than just the Linux world, and for a company to not support something just because of a childish, vocal minority is more than a little shortsighted.
Small or not it's quite perceptible. Play on my stereo an MP3 vs. a CD of the same song I will 100% pick out the CD as being better each time based on the sound alone, and I could point out the differences to anyone and make them see it too. Lots of people can; MP3's are simply no good for at home, pure listening purposes. For just about everything else, they're fine (computers, joggers, cars, DJ's, parties, etc...) for the most part.
Errr...that was supposed to be "product", not "produce". They probably couldn't stop you from using that phrase to promote your produce; the products are too different. Unless Microsoft wanted to move into the produce market...
IANAL, but actually, it's quite the contrary. Trademarks explicitly exist for the protection of common words and phrases as they apply to businesses. The phrase "where do you want to go today?" is trademarked. Microsoft can't stop you from saying it, but they can stop you from using it to promote your produce.
Of course the name is slightly differentiated. In a normal case you'd lose by only slightly changing the name, but since this one is so simple and generic, it could go either way in court.
Basically, if it creates confusion, then Adobe can win. Will the courts decide that the average user has any trouble differentiating between KIllustrator and Illustrator? Tough call.
This was so close to what happened in some cases, no one could tell that it was a fake story...
You are totally correct. A little overstated perhaps, but since NT is so easy to admin for basic tasks, most NT admins are LAN administrators turned network engineers. They just don't *typically* have the background to properly handle all of the various issues that arise in running a production website. This is generally speaking of course. It's perfectly possible to build a reliable, secure web application on top of NT systems, it's just that it takes more - not less- discipline and skill on the part of the administrators. Skilled administrators are annoyed with and avoid NT because it is difficult to administer remotely, lowering their quality of life.
It's a card with a full blown (AMD I think) x86 processor, it's own RAM, and it's own video card. You can display the video out it's own card into a seperate monitor, or you can display it via X onto a remote box or the local box. 8 bit color isn't to bad performance wise, but 24 is painful running remote X (part of the install comes with some local video driver extensions I believe that allow direct pass through for the local system).
To run the thing, you just fire up the SUNWpci binary and it boots up the baby x86 system in a window (bios settings available and everthing). Special utilities within the Windows drivers allow for cut and paste. The x86 system gets it's own IP and pretty much acts totally seperate. It's file system is stored in a single ufs file, which is rather nice because you can create a known good installation, then back it up and revert or copy it around if need be. All in all, the whole system was pretty cool, especially for getting your Outlook mail...:-)
My amp is a Nakamichi AV-8 running Dynaudio Audience 40's. Good setup for music and HT. Good dynamics, excellent imaging; very listenable. I'm adding a Dynaudio C120+ in a week or so; excellent speakers. The drivers really make midranges sing. Certainly for HT need a sub, but I'm not there yet. I'm in a apartment, so I'm limited in that respect anyway. At any rate, don't skimp on the reciever. Get something nice that you can listen to. Don't worry about features; generally manufacturers that are trying to throw in every feature known to man are not too worried about the sound quality. NAD is another excellent manufacturer. Talk to a local high-end audio shop; they're almost always extremely helpful. Just make sure you listen objectively to what you buy.
Annoying, unfair stuff from the content provider as expected, but it's pretty hard to tell what this system will actually do from this article. My favorite quote:
"If you want to watch a high definition TV program on an analog TV set, the signal will be downgraded so it's not HDTV-quality anymore."
Ohmygod. You mean I can't display 1080 lines of resolution on my old crappy TV set? No real suprise there. To watch high-res signals, you kind of need a high res display device. I don't think it's copy protection that's keeping your 10 year old RCA TV from displaying HDTV...
Of course Novell is irrelevant; they've been that way for a year or two now. The question is, how could they fix themselves? Since "embracing" open source is so trendy these days, that seems like a likely route. They have decent resources and (presumably) developers; why not take a shot at changing NDS into an open standard (perhaps just changing into an LDAP based product), and building adapters for the various OS's? There's probably a lot of other options. Certainly they are no longer the market dictator that they once were (and probably never will be again), but I see no reason that they can't remain in business producing useful products.
The only real place I can imagine where this might help is one where there is a lot of disk writing going on on a particular filesystem, and the system is so busy it never has a chance to flush it's cache without causing incoming requests to wait, such as a way overloaded mail server (I've seen this). Of course, the problem there is that it's not a night and day performance difference anyway when you're talking about modern disks with built in caches and OS's with decent lazy write techniques. And of course the little tiny issue that you're completely compromising your data integrity since if the system dies, everything in that file system goes with it. A far better solution, if you feel you must second guess the OS's caching/paging/vm system, is a controller card with on board cache and a battery backup. This maintains your data integrity, and will give you a little performance boost for busy disks with lots of writing. Of course, you'd still probably see just as much performance improvement by adding memory...
1/2 the pixel depth? 16.8million pixels works out to about 3500x4650. You'd be hard pressed to get tons more information out of a 35mm negative then that. Maybe a little bit, but I wouldn't want to spend the money on a scan, not to mention the work you'd have to do taking the picture. I still say the real limitations are recycle time and sensitivity. Especially recylce time. How long would it take your average digital camera to store a 3500x4650 image and be ready for the next shot? 5-6 minutes? Don't miss the shot...that's why film is king for me right now.