Actually, in this case you're wrong. The CSIRO is essentially a not-for-profit. There are no shares, you can't invest in them, they don't turn a profit.
All the income they make from patents they hold is used to further research, which *does* benefit us. Sure, we're paying for that, but we're not paying to simply generate profit, we're paying for inventions.
In fact, if they recieved no government funding at all, and totally relied on their inventions, patents and licence revenues, market forces would give us a pretty good idea of the actual value of new ideas (and whether it's a sustainable venture).
In addition to there simply being too much to read, in the US, if it can be shown that you knowingly infringed a patent, the amount of damages you can be liable for is trebled (x3).
which outlines some of the properties you want in a version control system. Tools like CVS and VSS don't capture all the information they could, which means you don't actually have an accurate history of what happened.
There are also a few rants by Greg Hudson and Tom Lord about changeset vs tree-history. Search google:)
Actually, one of the great things about Subversion is that it's pretty much just an incremental upgrade from CVS.
For basic, day-to-day tasks, the only thing you need to switch is the word "cvs" with "svn" on your command line (or switch from TortoiseCVS to TortoiseSVN). "svn co/checkout", "svn up/update", "svn ci/commit" all work just fine.
I've switched over several groups (usually 5-20 developers) and the time to get back to work for each was in the order of half an hour or so (a lot less for some developers).
The biggest comment that I've had from those groups is that "Subversion is a relief". All of a sudden, the things you need to be careful with (renaming files, creating/moving directories, etc) with CVS are no longer issues with SVN.
ViewCVS works with Subversion, plugins exist for Eclipse, NetBeans, Forte and.NET. Command line is highly compatible with CVS. All-in-all it's a pretty easy switch, with lots to gain and not much to lose.
That's a very interesting take on some specific issues one often comes across when trying to use UML.
Personal experience has shown that some of the features of UML are useful. We often use class diagrams to help new developers on the project get quickly up to speed. The class relationship information, which is what they need, is more densely represented in UML than as code. That said, we rarely use most of the other artefacts. Pseudocode and flowcharts often seem to work much better.
When it comes down to it, UML is sometimes a useful communication tool, but that's about the extent of it. When you have a bunch of developers who communicate better in some other way, you use that instead.
Don't be silly. From a profit taking point of view, why on earth would they want to fix the problem, when it's the potential source of extra revenue?
From MS's point of view, their large marketshare combined with a demand for security fixes has actually *created* demand for more things they can sell, rather than harming their business. With no real competitors in their space, they have the luxury of taking their time fixing things. There is no percieved alternative so they're not driven to compete with anyone in the security space.
I've done some contract work at some of these in.au, and yes, lots of them are indeed hoping to deploy Linux soon (some have already, but lots (particularly the larger ones) havent). Some might say they're a bit behind the wave, but some of these places are terribly ponderous.
Some big corps are taking a clear "wait-and-see" approach to the SCO litigation, and won't commit themselves until it's all cleared up and won't cause them any trouble.
I agree. XML-FO is supposed to be the W3C's "definitive" answer to an XML, page-oriented formatting language. XML-FO achieves basically exactly what PDF does, but in XML. It's supposed
to be a structured representation of print-formatted data.
I've used it quite a lot and it's great. It's very easy to transform your XML data into the XML-FO schema, from which you can use Apache-FOP (or one of the commercial tools) to turn it into a format other tools can use (PDF, ps, RTF, etc).
Perhaps this would solve the problem once and for all. I see two outcomes:
The patent is accepted and you can invalidate all patents that follow (as they cover ground your patent now owns). No more software patents!
The patent is rejected because of prior art. Subsequently, all software patents that follow that piece of prior art should also be invalidated. No more software patents!
The only thing you have to prove is that your patent for the turing machine describes all other possible software patents....
Here, buy these bits:
Patch panels: Krone Siemon
Small, shallow rack enclosure: here
Connect the leads coming out of the wall to the back of the patch panels and use short cat5 leads to link them together (or into a rack mountable hub/switch, like this one here). If you do buy a rack mountable switch, make sure it's not too deep for your cabinet.
Not sure what to do about the RG6 cables, but I imagine you can get patch panels for them too (although too many joints may kill your signal..)
I've always found that in situations where I need to refer back to things that I've done (i.e. why exactly is my filesystem empty? Oh dear, a space in rm -rf asdf *) a serial, text based interface is the fastest way to work. You can quickly look back over operations you've performed in the recent past. The interface is consistant too, so any number of different operations look the same, no new interface to learn.
GUI's on the other hand are good where you don't need that audit trail, or the information for the audit trail is unlikely to be used and can be condensed into a text-based format of some kind (think saving the undo-log in a wordprocessor to disk).
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head when it comes to correct file permissions and remote access to folders under apache.
The only way to really achieve it is to allow apache to set(e)uid to the user who you want it to be running as. I extended mod_become for our internal use here, and it works ok, but yes, you need to run apache as root to achieve this. I wouldn't want to go exposing it to the world-at-large.
I've spent quite some time researching this issue for here at work. We have two primary offices, separated by a 256k of network topology. Too slow for most users to find acceptable (large files, several 10s of seconds to copy). A bit of a culture problem but oh well.
I looked into a whole pile of options for having a "live" filesystem, a-la NFS, but the bandwidth killed interactivity (this is for users who've never used 100mbit network filesystems before).
I found the following:
1. Windows 2000 Server includes a thing called "File Replication Service". Basically, it's a synchronisation service. You replicate the content to many servers, and the service watches transactions on the filesystem, and replicates them to the rest of the mirrors as soon as it can. You can write to all mirrors, but I never quite worked out how it handled conflict resolution. A chapter from the Windows 2000 Resource kit that describes how it works: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/resk it/samplechapters/dsdh/dsdh_frs_tkae.asp
2. Some people have done similar work for Unix systems, but they mostly involve kernel tweaks to capture filesystem events. Can't remember any URLS, but some Googling should find it.
3. Some people are using Unison to support multi-write file replication. So long as you sync regularly, you shouldn't have too many problems.
4. The multi-write problem is a hard one, so most people tend to say "don't do it, just make the bandwidth enough". This is the way to go if bandwidth isn't an issue.
A guy by the name of Yasushi Saito has done quite a bit of research into data replication. Some papers (search for them on google in quotes). He also put together a project called "Pangaea" which tries to do as described above. It wasn't great last time I looked. Some paper titles:
- Optimistic Replication for Internet Data Services
- Consistency Management in Optimistic Replication Algorithms
- Pangaea: a symbiotic wide-area file system
- Taming aggressive replication in the Pangaea wide-area file system
There is also a bunch of other research work:
- Studying Dynamic Grid Optimisation Algorithms for File Replication
- Challenges Involved in Multimaster Replication (note: this talks about Oracle database replication)
- Chapter 18 of the Windows 2000 Server manual describes the File Replication Service in detail
- How to avoid directory service headaches (talks about not having multi-master-write replication and why)
It's a full text search engine API, so some coding for your specific requirements would be required. However, it's fast, extremely flexible, and has a pluggable interface for documents. It comes with native support for plain text, and for proprietry document types, we've written simple wrappers around tools like "pdf2text" and "catdoc" to index PDF's and Word docs.
I've recently solved a problem possibly similar to this where I work. We have a mixture of Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris, w2k, and win98 machines.
I use OpenLDAP to store all user information. User accounts are of classes posixAccount AND sambaAccount.
I built samba with LDAP support and configured it to store all it's info in our LDAP server. I then combined two PAM modules (pam_smb_auth.so and pam_ldap.so) to let PAM enabled services to authenticate via the Samba server. pam_ldap.so is used for account information, pam_smb_auth.so is used for username/password authentication.
This gives a single username/password that can be used by anything which talks SMB or PAM. The samba server acts as a PDC, so network signons work, users can change their passwords from the built-in windows password change tools, passwd changes their password from the unix command line. It's all good:)
I haven't bothered writing up a FAQ, mail me if you want a more detailed explanation (danpat at au dot adaptiveinternational dot com)
I've recently had to look at the same issue where I work. Management wanted to start sending financial information to each other via email, but didn't want to send it unencrypted (they at least have that many smarts). For management/admin, we're a mostly w2k shop, which means they all use outlook/IE. I found that the easiest way to implement encryption was to use the built in X.509 certificate stuff.
Personally, I prefer mutt with GnuPG, but PGP style encryption isn't the only alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in this case you're wrong. The CSIRO is essentially a not-for-profit. There are no shares, you can't invest in them, they don't turn a profit.
All the income they make from patents they hold is used to further research, which *does* benefit us. Sure, we're paying for that, but we're not paying to simply generate profit, we're paying for inventions.
In fact, if they recieved no government funding at all, and totally relied on their inventions, patents and licence revenues, market forces would give us a pretty good idea of the actual value of new ideas (and whether it's a sustainable venture).
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Kind-of a catch-all government sponsored department for scientific research.
See http://www.csiro.au/
http://www.wikinews.org/
Sits somewhere between NYT and the blogosphere...
http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
Is Google implementing the same algorithm?
In addition to there simply being too much to read, in the US, if it can be shown that you knowingly infringed a patent, the amount of damages you can be liable for is trebled (x3).
You're much safer in your ignorance.
There are also a few rants by Greg Hudson and Tom Lord about changeset vs tree-history. Search google
Actually, one of the great things about Subversion is that it's pretty much just an incremental upgrade from CVS.
For basic, day-to-day tasks, the only thing you need to switch is the word "cvs" with "svn" on your command line (or switch from TortoiseCVS to TortoiseSVN). "svn co/checkout", "svn up/update", "svn ci/commit" all work just fine.
I've switched over several groups (usually 5-20 developers) and the time to get back to work for each was in the order of half an hour or so (a lot less for some developers).
The biggest comment that I've had from those groups is that "Subversion is a relief". All of a sudden, the things you need to be careful with (renaming files, creating/moving directories, etc) with CVS are no longer issues with SVN.
ViewCVS works with Subversion, plugins exist for Eclipse, NetBeans, Forte and .NET. Command line is highly compatible with CVS. All-in-all it's a pretty easy switch, with lots to gain and not much to lose.
That's a very interesting take on some specific issues one often comes across when trying to use UML.
Personal experience has shown that some of the features of UML are useful. We often use class diagrams to help new developers on the project get quickly up to speed. The class relationship information, which is what they need, is more densely represented in UML than as code. That said, we rarely use most of the other artefacts. Pseudocode and flowcharts often seem to work much better.
When it comes down to it, UML is sometimes a useful communication tool, but that's about the extent of it. When you have a bunch of developers who communicate better in some other way, you use that instead.
Don't be silly. From a profit taking point of view, why on earth would they want to fix the problem, when it's the potential source of extra revenue?
From MS's point of view, their large marketshare combined with a demand for security fixes has actually *created* demand for more things they can sell, rather than harming their business. With no real competitors in their space, they have the luxury of taking their time fixing things. There is no percieved alternative so they're not driven to compete with anyone in the security space.
I've done some contract work at some of these in .au, and yes, lots of them are indeed hoping to deploy Linux soon (some have already, but lots (particularly the larger ones) havent). Some might say they're a bit behind the wave, but some of these places are terribly ponderous.
Some big corps are taking a clear "wait-and-see" approach to the SCO litigation, and won't commit themselves until it's all cleared up and won't cause them any trouble.
I agree. XML-FO is supposed to be the W3C's "definitive" answer to an XML, page-oriented formatting language. XML-FO achieves basically exactly what PDF does, but in XML. It's supposed to be a structured representation of print-formatted data.
I've used it quite a lot and it's great. It's very easy to transform your XML data into the XML-FO schema, from which you can use Apache-FOP (or one of the commercial tools) to turn it into a format other tools can use (PDF, ps, RTF, etc).
- The patent is accepted and you can invalidate all patents that follow (as they cover ground your patent now owns). No more software patents!
- The patent is rejected because of prior art. Subsequently, all software patents that follow that piece of prior art should also be invalidated. No more software patents!
The only thing you have to prove is that your patent for the turing machine describes all other possible software patents....Krone
Siemon
Small, shallow rack enclosure:
here Connect the leads coming out of the wall to the back of the patch panels and use short cat5 leads to link them together (or into a rack mountable hub/switch, like this one here). If you do buy a rack mountable switch, make sure it's not too deep for your cabinet.
Not sure what to do about the RG6 cables, but I imagine you can get patch panels for them too (although too many joints may kill your signal..)
Quick quote:
The Australian parliament has to pass five or six pieces of enabling legislation, although the agreement itself will not be voted upon directly.
Mr Vaile said he hoped to have those pieces of legislation passed during the July and August sittings of parliament.
Both countries hope to have the deal operating from January 1 next year.
I've always found that in situations where I need to refer back to things that I've done (i.e. why exactly is my filesystem empty? Oh dear, a space in rm -rf asdf *) a serial, text based interface is the fastest way to work. You can quickly look back over operations you've performed in the recent past. The interface is consistant too, so any number of different operations look the same, no new interface to learn.
GUI's on the other hand are good where you don't need that audit trail, or the information for the audit trail is unlikely to be used and can be condensed into a text-based format of some kind (think saving the undo-log in a wordprocessor to disk).
I stand corrected
You'd be crazy not to re-use all the LDAP protocol work that OpenLDAP does for you. In addition, writing backends is not as hard as you infer.
In your case, you can probably use the Perl backend plugin, and base your custom thingy on:
Run the openldap server on the same machine that's running your database right now and you're done.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head when it comes to correct file permissions and remote access to folders under apache.
The only way to really achieve it is to allow apache to set(e)uid to the user who you want it to be running as. I extended mod_become for our internal use here, and it works ok, but yes, you need to run apache as root to achieve this. I wouldn't want to go exposing it to the world-at-large.
Actually, some appservers (WebSphere?) *do* have "click here to cluster" buttons.
The problem is that they don't work.
Oh, and, of course, GFS, but it's no longer free, so not an option if you don't want to spend any money. It works a treat.
I've spent quite some time researching this issue for here at work. We have two primary offices, separated by a 256k of network topology. Too slow for most users to find acceptable (large files, several 10s of seconds to copy). A bit of a culture problem but oh well.
k it/samplechapters/dsdh/dsdh_frs_tkae.asp
I looked into a whole pile of options for having a "live" filesystem, a-la NFS, but the bandwidth killed interactivity (this is for users who've never used 100mbit network filesystems before).
I found the following:
1. Windows 2000 Server includes a thing called "File Replication Service". Basically, it's a synchronisation service. You replicate the content to many servers, and the service watches transactions on the filesystem, and replicates them to the rest of the mirrors as soon as it can. You can write to all mirrors, but I never quite worked out how it handled conflict resolution.
A chapter from the Windows 2000 Resource kit that describes how it works: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/res
2. Some people have done similar work for Unix systems, but they mostly involve kernel tweaks to capture filesystem events. Can't remember any URLS, but some Googling should find it.
3. Some people are using Unison to support multi-write file replication. So long as you sync regularly, you shouldn't have too many problems.
4. The multi-write problem is a hard one, so most people tend to say "don't do it, just make the bandwidth enough". This is the way to go if bandwidth isn't an issue.
A guy by the name of Yasushi Saito has done quite a bit of research into data replication. Some papers (search for them on google in quotes). He also put together a project called "Pangaea" which tries to do as described above. It wasn't great last time I looked. Some paper titles:
- Optimistic Replication for Internet Data Services
- Consistency Management in Optimistic Replication Algorithms
- Pangaea: a symbiotic wide-area file system
- Taming aggressive replication in the Pangaea wide-area file system
There is also a bunch of other research work:
- Studying Dynamic Grid Optimisation Algorithms for File Replication
- Challenges Involved in Multimaster Replication (note: this talks about Oracle database replication)
- Chapter 18 of the Windows 2000 Server manual describes the File Replication Service in detail
- How to avoid directory service headaches (talks about not having multi-master-write replication and why)
yah, this is a good solution. I've been using it here for quite some time and it works a treat.
I highly recommend taking a look at the Apache Lucene Project, at http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/
It's a full text search engine API, so some coding for your specific requirements would be required. However, it's fast, extremely flexible, and has a pluggable interface for documents. It comes with native support for plain text, and for proprietry document types, we've written simple wrappers around tools like "pdf2text" and "catdoc" to index PDF's and Word docs.
I've recently solved a problem possibly similar to this where I work. We have a mixture of Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris, w2k, and win98 machines.
:)
I use OpenLDAP to store all user information. User accounts are of classes posixAccount AND sambaAccount.
I built samba with LDAP support and configured it to store all it's info in our LDAP server. I then combined two PAM modules (pam_smb_auth.so and pam_ldap.so) to let PAM enabled services to authenticate
via the Samba server. pam_ldap.so is used for
account information, pam_smb_auth.so is used
for username/password authentication.
This gives a single username/password that can be
used by anything which talks SMB or PAM. The samba
server acts as a PDC, so network signons work, users can change their passwords from the built-in windows password change tools, passwd changes
their password from the unix command line. It's
all good
I haven't bothered writing up a FAQ, mail me if
you want a more detailed explanation (danpat at au dot adaptiveinternational dot com)
I've recently had to look at the same issue where I work. Management wanted to start sending financial information to each other via email, but didn't want to send it unencrypted (they at least have that many smarts). For management/admin, we're a mostly w2k shop, which means they all use outlook/IE. I found that the easiest way to implement encryption was to use the built in X.509 certificate stuff.
Personally, I prefer mutt with GnuPG, but PGP style encryption isn't the only alternative.