What I do not understand is why there aren't any similar groups for the OpenSource / non-Darkside [ advocacy ]
I certainly hope there aren't any self-proclaimed Open Source/Free Software groups that pump out such logically-challenged, clue-free blather. I'd frankly be ashamed to see something on the same order, clue-wise, being used to promote the Open Source/Free Software philosophy.
Maildir : Do you really want to clutter your system with millions of small files? That's waste of inodes, space (unless perhaps you use Linux/ReiserFS or SGi)...
In case you haven't noticed, the default settings for the Linux ext[23] filesystems is to allocate one inode per 4096 or 8192 bytes of disk space. Which happens to be pretty much the size of an average E-mail message. So, in other words, you are unlikely to run out of inodes before you run out of disk space, since both are going to be used up pretty much at the same clip.
It may come as a shocking surprise to some, but the average large filesystem is just littered with small files here, and small files there, all over the place. Here's my workstation -- a fairly large box with all sorts of crap loaded:
Filesystem 1k-blocks... /dev/sdb5 8159388...
Filesystem Inodes... /dev/sdb5 1036288...
I'm using up almost exactly 8192 bytes per inode.
and just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it takes your favorite Mailprogram to only display the subjects.
How about instantly? Most GUI E-mail clients cache mail headers, so they don't have to go and wait for the server to reply each time you click on the folder index window to re-sort, or scroll the folder index.
...
Some ideas about the ideal mail-storage: * One file per Mailbox-folder, allowing multiple folders per user.
Using one file per folder essentially forces you to use some form of locking each time folder access is necessary. Locking of any sort has been problematic for years whenever NFS (or pretty much any other network filesystem) is involved. A single circuit will now take out your entire network spool, as all clients are now spinning on lock requests out on the unreachable server.
Compression: Should messages be broken into pieces and the MIME-attachments stored separately (thus searching of the text parts would still be possible without decompressing the whole file)?
I thought you wanted to save everything in a single file per folder, and using multiple files for messages is supposed to waste inodes, remember?
File format: gdbm, Sleepycat db? Something new?
Ask an Exchange admin about joys of a corrupted Exchange database. If mail are stored in simple, plain, files, a single instance of corruption will affect at most one mailbox, instead of taking out the entire monolithic database.
Unicode support in folder names? Imap message-IDs, flags, useragent specific state-information?
IMAP already uses Unicode to encode folder names. Not sure what "useragent specific state-information" means...
Congress is spending more and more of its time considering legislation that requires technological enforcement of copyright laws... Why is it than we've not seen a legislative mandate that requires car manufacutrers to prevent drunk driving?
Little news tidbits like these ones actually explain why there's been a steady trickle of those bizarre, off the wall, statements and comments, from Ballmer, Gates, and other senior Microsoft officers. You know -- the comments like open source being some demonic spawn of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin; or Richard Stallman invading your corporate vaults and stealing your company secrets, etc... etc... etc...
I do believe that Open Source software, and Linux specifically, are taking a bigger, and bigger chunk out of Microsoft's revenues. Not much, in fact it's rather piddly; but it's still noticeable. And it's growing. Although few people on/. can actually put a monetary amount on how much it actually is, if there's anybody in the world who has a pretty good idea how much revenue Microsoft is losing because of Linux, it must be Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft's upper echelon.
And I think they're getting scared.
That may be a bit self-serving or presumptious, and with 40 billion in the bank they clearly don't have much to worry about. Still, I think they have to have at least a mild case of indigestion.
There's nothing in this story that really should surprise anyway. So the feds, and the spooks, are using Linux, sometimes in a quite visible, and mission-critical way. So? That's nothing earth-shattering. And that's precisely what's giving Ballmer and Co the problem. Linux has traction. Not just the feds. Linux has traction in big corporate America. SIAC - the folks who run the networks for the stock exchanges, have cut over some mission-critical functionality over to Linux. Look at the classifieds ads in New York City, from big financial firms. There's a small trickle of open job reqs for hackers with Linux experience.
Gates, Ballmer, and Co, are seeing this as well as the next guy, and they just don't know what to do about it. That's what's scaring them. It's one thing when you have a well-defined opponent to do battle with. But how do you define the opponent here? Microsoft can't clearly define who their opponent here is. There's no single company to purchase, spread FUD about, or drag into court over some frivolous intellectual issue, in order to bleed them with legal fees.
So, all you can do is to try to FUD your way against Linux in general. But each time you'll try to go with a generic FUD campaign, your arguments can be easily shut down with a single, specific, counterexample of Linux's success in a mission-critical role. There's enough case history out there now to be able to point to, as a counterargument to FUD.
Microsoft is clearly struggling, trying to figure out a focused, targeted, anti-Linux campaign, and failing each time. Notice how they no longer claim that Linux isn't ready for mission-critical roles. That didn't work. Now they're claiming that using Linux puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. That can't last much longer. They still can't come up with a specific example, and only talk about in generalities; furthermore with Sun and HP putting Linux APIs into their respectives *nixes, the notion that Sun and HP have intentionally put their intellectual property in jeopardy is a bit difficult to swallow.
So, I don't think the intellectual property FUD has much more left in it, and it will slowly disappear over time. So, what's the next FUD attack? I don't know. Neither does Ballmer, or Gates. And that's what's scaring them.
They already paid tax on it. In the US of A, tax is levied on income, not assets. That's why it's called "Income Tax". Now, unless there was some funny monkey business going on with their profit/loss, and they didn't report all of their revenue to the IRS gestapo, that's 40 bil after tax.
As a side note, if that pile of cash gets distributed as dividends, the recipients will end up paying income tax on them, 'cause its income to them. So corporate profits are, essentially, double-taxes, but that's a different topic. In any case, MS does not owe any tax on their cash pile (except, perhaps, on the interest, since interest is considered to be income).
I've seen the first trilogy. In theaters, and on video. I've suffered through Episode I. I actually saw it twice since I was interested in looking at the movie with a fresh viewpoint two months later, mostly to see for myself if Jar Jar was indeed as obnoxious as everyone was whining about. I didn't actually pay much attention to Jar Jar the first time around, and was caught off-guard when the hollering started, so I wanted to see the movie again.
Anyway, I haven't skipped out to see the flick, and I haven't even seen it. I'll go and see it in a few weeks, when all the crowds leave. I hate crowded theaters. I'm going to see Spider-Man later tonight, since I'm now guessing all the hoardes will be stuffing themselves into Episode II's screenings.
Off-topic: I heard that AMC Empire 25 in NYC's Times Square has a digital projector. Anyone know if it's running Episode II in digital?
I've heard commercials on TV lately advertising products that you can put between the jack and the phone that actually block telemarketers. Does anyone have any experience with these devices? DO they work? Which is the best one to get?
There are several brand names these gizmos are sold under, the most common one is called a "Telezapper". The way they work is that every time you pick up the phone the device sends out that three-note high-pitched tone you sometimes hear when you misdial and reach an invalid number, or you get an "all circuits are busy" recording.
It's called a SIT tone - "Special Information Tone" - and is used by the phone company to indicate that the dialed number cannot be reached for some reason. It's actually not used in most places since that kind of information is now transmitted out-of-band with the voice call, but is used for compatibility reasons in case the call originates from some ancient phone switch in Antarctica which does not receive out-of-band signalling, and listens to the voice path to figure out what happened to the phone call.
The idea behind the telezapper is that many telemarketing calls are robo-dialed, and the telemarketer is put on the line only after you pick up the phone and answer (which is why many times you get a short delay after you say hello, before some sleazebag starts yammering into your ear trying to peddle some junk). If the telemarketers' dialer detects that the call didn't go through, it never even goes to a human. The idea is that if the robodialer hears a SIT it will assume that the phone number is invalid, and the phone number will be automatically removed from the telemarketer's phone list.
In any case, that's how it's supposed to work in theory. I wouldn't know, since I'm in NY and I don't get phonespam no mo'.:-) However I do know this: if you use that device you may experience occasional problems receiving calls from pay-phones. Many privately-owned payphones (you know, mostly the weird looking ones owned by some private phone operator that charges $5 per minute) are not properly provisioned to process out-of-band call signaling, and the circuitry in the payphone listens to the voice line in order to figure out what happened to the dialed call (busy, ringing, no answer, human speech, etc...) If the payphone hears a SIT it will disconnect the line even though the call will actually go through.
The problem with the whole Monsterhut situation was that they basically had a completely free hand at spamming the shit out of everyone's mailboxes, while this whole thing slowly made its way through courts. Monsterhut obtained a TRO against being shut down by Paetec for any reason, while this whole thing was playing out.
Nice, eh? A license to spam.
Well, it's all water under the bridge now. The consensus in various forums where this whole issue was discussed to death was that Paetec was making a good-faith effort to get the whole mess resolved and Monsterhut shut down. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I always had the impression that Paetec was always too eager to trot out the excuse that they are prohibited by court order from shutting down this spamming parasite, in response to every spam complaint (with a generous side-order of crocodile tears).
Anyway, I firmly believe that Monsterhut had a pink contract here, but when the complaints began to roll in, and Paetec's IP address space began to get blocklisted, Paetec began backtracking, trying to invoke their standard AUP close, and Monsterhut responded by taking them to court.
And if you think that's convenient, try an HTTP install next time. You don't need to mess around setting up NFS, and you do not need a special boot disk. Only you need is a garden-variety apache install, and an HTTP install option is included in the bootnet image.
Simply copy everything off Disk 1 somewhere in your DocumentRoot, then take RedHat/RPMS from the remaining install disks, and add all the binary RPMs to the RedHat/RPMS directory that was copied off disk 1. Now, use the bootnet image to boot the installer, and select HTTP install.
* But MSDN showed us a VB IE startup fix that does the same thing [microsoft.com].
Do you really expect Joe Sixpack to write a VB script to do that, when it only takes two mouse clicks in Mozilla?
* But I can do the same thing with Windows telnet, or better, Windows terminal services since I can actually see what I am doing.
How much does the Windows Terminal Server cost, and are there any CAL fees?
* But I can get that many themes for XP, and plus I actually know how to change the backgrounds and icons in Windows myself. YOu haven't shown me how to do that yet with Linux. This frickin' sucks.
Programs -> Settings -> Desktop -> Background. That's it. It's not rocket science.
Install a distribution in server mode (no X11). Demonstrate the extreme modularization of Linux, such as you can complete get rid of all GUI support, and use only the disk/network services to turn a box into a network appliance.
* Uh, yeah, we use the Services admin panel and Add/Remove programs for that.
How many times do you have to reboot? What happens if the install get screwed up, and you're left with a corrupted registry?
* But if I only want Windows on my system, why do I care? If I could access the Linux partitions it would be like having FAT32 partitions on an NT machine... pretty pointless.
True - NT doesn't really support things like soft and hard links...
* Yeah, when services go down in Windows, it still starts up fine and you just look in the system log. If a driver goes down, I just restart in safe mode, removed the device, and everything is fine. No big deal. Who needs a scanner on a server anyway? It looks like if I do this Linux thing I have to go through all these damned scripts to figure out what went wrong... and where's the safe mode?
It's there. It's called "Run level 1", but you rarely have a need to use it, since as I said a broken daemon is not going to take down the rest of the system.
* Yeah... uh, we do that. Where's the network neighborhood icon?
It's right there, on the screen. Looks like I forget to mention Nautilus, in my original comment.
* We do that with Windows terminal services like we said.
And how much does Windows Terminal Services cost?
You really should conserve some network bandwidth and just go sit down at the machine though.
It's going to be a long walk. Remember, that server's on the other side of the world?
* If we want to install a new version of msvcxxrt.dll without restarting the box, I just close all the apps that are using it and then copy the new DLL into place.
Sounds clumsy and awkwards. There's no need to do that in Linux.
It's not that difficult. It breaks a bunch of stuff though, but I bet this glibc messes things up too.
Nope. I upgraded glibc on my firewall box about three weeks ago. I still haven't rebooted the box:
[root@brimstone httpd]# w 4:32pm up 42 days, 2:19, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
What are you doing monkeying with the kernel?
glibc isn't the kernel.
That doesn't need updating, it's the frickin' kernel. If it's broken, we get a reinstall going while we go to lunch. Huh... fat pipes are cool.
I tend to upgrade my Red Hat servers twice a year. Insert a kickstart floppy, reboot each server, have a cup of coffee while the server upgrades itself, back in production 35 minutes later...
Here are a few random suggestions, in no particular order.
* Open a relatively complicated page in MSIE, the same page in Mozilla-win32, and the same page agin in Mozilla-linux. Go to a bunch of annoying web sites, with Mozilla's pop-up/pop-down filters enabled.
* Use ssh to log in to a box halfway across the world. Demonstrate some simple system administration tasks, and the fact that anything you can do at the console you can also do remotely, via ssh.
* Run either Gnome or KDE. Change the themes, a couple of times, demonstrate the customizable UI. Switching between one of the mac Aqua-like themes, some star trek theme, and one of the Winxx-lookalike themes should be very effective.
* Install a distribution in server mode (no X11). Demonstrate the extreme modularization of Linux, such as you can complete get rid of all GUI support, and use only the disk/network services to turn a box into a network appliance.
* Install Windows and Linux on the same box. Boot into Linux; then mount and browse Windows partitions. Make a casual remark that Windows cannot browse Linux partitions in the same way.
* When the Linux box boots up, and is busy going through the initscripts, starting all the services, explain that if one service fails to start for some reason the boot process will continue and the machine should still be mostly usable. Ask if anyone experienced a situation where a Windows driver kept croaking during the boot process, and what happened alter.
I recall an incident about three years ago when UMAX shipped a buggy driver for their scanners. The driver was faulting on machines with USB ports, and CPU speeds over 400 Mhz (something about some timing loop), forcing a complete crash during the Windows boot cycle, with the subsequent reboot falling back into safe mode.
The Linux equivalent for this would be something like SANE, which runs completely in user mode, and therefore cannot crash the entire OS.
* Use samba to browse the local windows network neighborhood.
* If you have a fat pipe, forward X11 over ssh, and run remote X applications on the local terminal.
* Install a base distribution package right out of the box. I'll use Red Hat 7.2 as an example. Apply all the errata to bring the box up to date, except for the kernel, without rebooting. Even install a new version of glibc (the equivalent of msvcxxrt.dll) without rebooting the box. Install a new kernel on the remote machine, make sure that LILO or GRUB is all set up, then remotely reboot the box into the new kernel.
At my day job (a huge corporate behemoth), they decided to use WIPRO to build a business-critical application. Well, they've been regretting this decision for two years now.
Everyone had dollar signs in their eyes at first: using cheap overseas labor, how much money they'll save, yadda yadda yadda...
Well, the PHBs discovered that if they wanted cheap overseas labor, that's exactly what they got with WIPRO: cheap, shoddy labor. Spaghetti, unmaintainable code all around.
I really hope that WIPRO's "contributions" to the GNOME project would undergo the same scrutiny and vetting as anyone else's submitted patches and contributed code.
Re:Ultra-condensed review of "Collateral Damage".
on
Collateral Damage
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· Score: 1
What does disturb me are the slack-ass self-proclaimed nerds and geeks who have nothing better to say than that "with [their] expectations already lowered, the movie didn't really turn out to be that bad."
And there's a reason why I have nothing better to say: the movie sucks. Why is it my fault that the story blows chunks, and I can't find anything better to say about it? Go bitch to whoever wrote this joke of a screenplay. And take your self-righteous and sanctimonious attitude with you.
Ultra-condensed review of "Collateral Damage".
on
Collateral Damage
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In the spirit of Book-A-Minute Classics, here's an alternative review of Collateral Damage. There's no need to plow through another Katz-ian monologue, when an ultra-condensed review will suffice. Here we go:
Yes, this movie sucks. It's mostly predictable, there's nothing new here. If you came to the theater expecting something on the order of "Die Hard", or "Indiana Jones", you'd be disappointed.
However it doesn't suck that much. It could've sucked much, much worse than it did. It was clear to me, when I sat down, that the flick is going to blow. With my expectations already lowered, the movie didn't really turn out to be that bad.
Yes, it's the typical output of the paint-by-numbers Hollywood screenplay mill. Still, I think the movie did make a couple of valiant attempts at being original. Ahnold's, uhhh.... impression of Mike Tyson was completely unexpected. And it was funny. And it did seem, at first, that Ahnold was going to end up bedding down whatsherface. The way that character actually turned out to be was also unexpected.
So, go and see the movie on a bargain matinee, and check your brain at the door. Or wait for it to come up on video. You could do worse. There's plenty of crap out there that's even worse than "Collateral Damage".
I wouldn't be surprised if a few other brokerages will get nailed pretty soon, for similar kinds of shennanigans. Disclaimer: I have no direct knowledge of any regulatory investigation of ETrade, but we all know that they pretty much played the same games with RHAT.
At least with CSFB did in fact give a handful of shares to everyone who applied for the friends-in-family deal - AFAIK - while ETrade tried to come up with every excuse in the book to kick out as many people as they could in their friends-and-family program. Although some of us did eventually get our pound of flesh (see my website: E*Trouble to revisit those exciting times) it would be icing on the cake to see EGRP whacked on the balls, again.
I think these anti-spam zealots teamed up on this poor spammer, and the only reason it went as far as it did (and as hilariously as it did) was because Shifman has a large amount of juvenile pride.
A couple of things:
1. I am the spambag.net guy.
2. In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).
3. The reason Shifman was piled on was because he deserved it. Nobody cared about him much until he began calling people up on the phone, yelling at them, or leaving crank messages on the answering machine. The initial version of spambag.net was only a few short paragraphs. Then Shifman began calling my voice mail and screaming into my answering machine.
Here's a free clue to wanna-be grubors and speedbumps. Be very careful before you decide to waive your dick around. Someone might just have a bigger one themselves.
Cancer is, basically, uncontrolled growth of cell tissue. And aging is the natural death of cell tissue. So if you somehow halt the natural cell death process, there would be nothing that could stop a runaway cancer growth.
It's time for my Saturday morning rant. I'm really getting sick tired of hearing people whine about MS Office. Whine, whine, whine. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Moan, moan, moan. After, oh, at least three years of nagging I think I've reached my limit.
I don't want and don't care about Microsoft's crapware any more. StarOffice 5.2 works great for me. Even though it's a bit long in the tooth, by now, it does everything that I could possibly need an office suite to do. Three months ago I completely wiped MS Office off my Windows partition (because I needed the disk space) and I haven't missed it since. SO 5.2 does everything I want - letters, mailing labels, and spreadsheets.
Yes, 5.2 is a bit bloated, but if you have a problem with that, do you think that MS Office would turn out any slimmer? Are you really naive enough to think that its WIN32 API emulation layer is going to turn out any better. Don't forget that the Solaris' version of MS Internet Explorer actually went ahead and created a fscking registry when you ran it. You really want to deal with this kind of crap?
Well, I don't. I'm looking forward to SO 6.0, which promises to be a significant improvement over 5.2, it's going to be a native Linux application, and not some overbloated, macro virus-injecting monstrosity that comes complete with its own mini-operating system.
Plus there's also KOffice, which is moving along rather nicely. In short, I really don't see what's so special about MS Office that people are always drooling about.
Over here, on my plain old analog TV, I receive UPN's "Enterprise" in a slightly letter-boxed format. Not a full 16:9 letterbox, but more like 5:3. The black bars just barely clear the UPN logo in the lower-right corner.
When the show begun airing, I thought that it was done purely for artistic reasons (and I actually liked it, it gave the show a more "mature' look) but it just occured to me that the show might be filmed in wide-screen HD, and its letterboxed for analog. Anyone know for sure what's up with that?
Hi. The first four years after college I worked as an employee, and for the last 7 years as an independent, C corp consultant.
If you have some basic accounting background, incorporate as a C corp, and get yourself contracted out through a consulting agency, and expect that they'll get about a 10% cut. A 14% cut (in your example) seems a bit high, but not too unreasonable. I personally find the 10% cut quite acceptable, given the fact that the consulting agency has much better contacts and jobs available through them, and will fill your invoices on a regular schedule (instead of you having to wait god knows when for the company to cut you a check, each time). If you don't mind hassling your client each time they're late on an invoince, then go the full distance, and try getting the gigs all by yourself. Personally, I think that setting up a relationship with a reputable consulting agency that has plenty of contacts in the 'biz', and will try not to keep you 'on the beach' for too long, is worth the small cut that they get.
In my opinion, W2 consulting is the worst option. The cut is too much, and you really don't get anything in return. If you were to set yourself up as a C corp consultant, then you'd be able to write off reasonable expenses with pre-tax money, and set up reasonable benefits that can match anything you can possibly get as an employee. As a W2 consultant you end up giving up a much larger cut, without getting anything in return. Some consulting companies will actually provide their W2 consultant with reasonable benefits, but that's a rare exception.
If you have some accounting knowledge yourself, you should be able to handle being an independent consultant without really needing an accountant. I am not an accountant, but my gigs tend to be in the financial industry, and what I know seems to be enough for me to handle this. With over-the-counter small business acccounting software, such as QuickBooks, or Peachtree Accounting, you'll be able to calculate your own paychecks, and keep track of your tax liabilities by yourself. I've been doing that for the last seven years, and I've never had any problems. Yes, you will have to fill out some additional paperwork. You'll need to fill out some paperwork each time you make a tax deposit (or once a month as long as your annual lialibilities are below a certain amount, I think $50K, or for each actual tax deposit if you're over that), plus fill out a couple of forms each quarter, and additional corporate returns at the end of the year. I don't find that to be too difficult - Quickbooks will even print out the quarterly 941s and annual 940s for you, and TurboTax for Business will take care of your annual 1120 filings (plus your equivalent state filings).
Depending on the laws in your state, you may also have to arrange for liability insurance, workers' comp, disability, and unemployment insurance. This does sound like a hassle, but it's really not. There's a little bit of a hassle to set everything up, and after that it's just a matter of cutting a couple of checks, each year. Expect all of this overhead to run you about 2K-3K a year. Not bad when you're pulling in 200K.
If this bookkeeping deal is not your cup of tea, then just get an accountant.
As long as people are complacent and accept these kinds of bully tactics from their providers, they really have no standing to complain about it later. Don't like the fact that your cable company wants to be your net.babysitter, and tell you what you can or can't do on the Internet?
Well, rewarding this kind of arrogant big-brother attitude by giving them even MORE money for business-class service is certainly going to encourage a change for the better, wouldn't it? Or, perhaps, you should tell them to shove their port filters, and their DHCP garbage, up their network interface, and switch to someone else who does indeed provides real internet connectivity.
People really need to vote with their feet, and stop agreeing to put on their Internet provider's straightjackets. There are ISPs who will sell you a residential class DSL service, with a static IP address, and let you run servers. That's real Internet connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
"Harry Potter, and the Wrath Of The Troll", wherein Harry Potter is turned into a slashdot editor that can't spell.
F. CowboyNeal
What I do not understand is why there aren't any similar groups for the OpenSource / non-Darkside [ advocacy ]
I certainly hope there aren't any self-proclaimed Open Source/Free Software groups that pump out such logically-challenged, clue-free blather. I'd frankly be ashamed to see something on the same order, clue-wise, being used to promote the Open Source/Free Software philosophy.
Is Linux kosher?
Maildir : Do you really want to clutter your system with millions of small files? That's waste of inodes, space (unless perhaps you use Linux/ReiserFS or SGi) ...
... ...
... ...
In case you haven't noticed, the default settings for the Linux ext[23] filesystems is to allocate one inode per 4096 or 8192 bytes of disk space. Which happens to be pretty much the size of an average E-mail message. So, in other words, you are unlikely to run out of inodes before you run out of disk space, since both are going to be used up pretty much at the same clip.
It may come as a shocking surprise to some, but the average large filesystem is just littered with small files here, and small files there, all over the place. Here's my workstation -- a fairly large box with all sorts of crap loaded:
Filesystem 1k-blocks
/dev/sdb5 8159388
Filesystem Inodes
/dev/sdb5 1036288
I'm using up almost exactly 8192 bytes per inode.
and just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it takes your favorite Mailprogram to only display the subjects.
How about instantly? Most GUI E-mail clients cache mail headers, so they don't have to go and wait for the server to reply each time you click on the folder index window to re-sort, or scroll the folder index.
...
Some ideas about the ideal mail-storage:
* One file per Mailbox-folder, allowing multiple folders per user.
Using one file per folder essentially forces you to use some form of locking each time folder access is necessary. Locking of any sort has been problematic for years whenever NFS (or pretty much any other network filesystem) is involved. A single circuit will now take out your entire network spool, as all clients are now spinning on lock requests out on the unreachable server.
Compression: Should messages be broken into pieces and the MIME-attachments stored separately (thus searching of the text parts would still be possible without decompressing the whole file)?
I thought you wanted to save everything in a single file per folder, and using multiple files for messages is supposed to waste inodes, remember?
File format: gdbm, Sleepycat db? Something new?
Ask an Exchange admin about joys of a corrupted Exchange database. If mail are stored in simple, plain, files, a single instance of corruption will affect at most one mailbox, instead of taking out the entire monolithic database.
Unicode support in folder names? Imap message-IDs, flags, useragent specific state-information?
IMAP already uses Unicode to encode folder names. Not sure what "useragent specific state-information" means...
Congress is spending more and more of its time considering legislation that requires technological enforcement of copyright laws ... Why is it than we've not seen a legislative mandate that requires car manufacutrers to prevent drunk driving?
Three words:
Ted Kennedy. Chappaquiddick.
Little news tidbits like these ones actually explain why there's been a steady trickle of those bizarre, off the wall, statements and comments, from Ballmer, Gates, and other senior Microsoft officers. You know -- the comments like open source being some demonic spawn of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin; or Richard Stallman invading your corporate vaults and stealing your company secrets, etc... etc... etc...
/. can actually put a monetary amount on how much it actually is, if there's anybody in the world who has a pretty good idea how much revenue Microsoft is losing because of Linux, it must be Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft's upper echelon.
I do believe that Open Source software, and Linux specifically, are taking a bigger, and bigger chunk out of Microsoft's revenues. Not much, in fact it's rather piddly; but it's still noticeable. And it's growing. Although few people on
And I think they're getting scared.
That may be a bit self-serving or presumptious, and with 40 billion in the bank they clearly don't have much to worry about. Still, I think they have to have at least a mild case of indigestion.
There's nothing in this story that really should surprise anyway. So the feds, and the spooks, are using Linux, sometimes in a quite visible, and mission-critical way. So? That's nothing earth-shattering. And that's precisely what's giving Ballmer and Co the problem. Linux has traction. Not just the feds. Linux has traction in big corporate America. SIAC - the folks who run the networks for the stock exchanges, have cut over some mission-critical functionality over to Linux. Look at the classifieds ads in New York City, from big financial firms. There's a small trickle of open job reqs for hackers with Linux experience.
Gates, Ballmer, and Co, are seeing this as well as the next guy, and they just don't know what to do about it. That's what's scaring them. It's one thing when you have a well-defined opponent to do battle with. But how do you define the opponent here? Microsoft can't clearly define who their opponent here is. There's no single company to purchase, spread FUD about, or drag into court over some frivolous intellectual issue, in order to bleed them with legal fees.
So, all you can do is to try to FUD your way against Linux in general. But each time you'll try to go with a generic FUD campaign, your arguments can be easily shut down with a single, specific, counterexample of Linux's success in a mission-critical role. There's enough case history out there now to be able to point to, as a counterargument to FUD.
Microsoft is clearly struggling, trying to figure out a focused, targeted, anti-Linux campaign, and failing each time. Notice how they no longer claim that Linux isn't ready for mission-critical roles. That didn't work. Now they're claiming that using Linux puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. That can't last much longer. They still can't come up with a specific example, and only talk about in generalities; furthermore with Sun and HP putting Linux APIs into their respectives *nixes, the notion that Sun and HP have intentionally put their intellectual property in jeopardy is a bit difficult to swallow.
So, I don't think the intellectual property FUD has much more left in it, and it will slowly disappear over time. So, what's the next FUD attack? I don't know. Neither does Ballmer, or Gates. And that's what's scaring them.
They already paid tax on it. In the US of A, tax is levied on income, not assets. That's why it's called "Income Tax". Now, unless there was some funny monkey business going on with their profit/loss, and they didn't report all of their revenue to the IRS gestapo, that's 40 bil after tax.
As a side note, if that pile of cash gets distributed as dividends, the recipients will end up paying income tax on them, 'cause its income to them. So corporate profits are, essentially, double-taxes, but that's a different topic. In any case, MS does not owe any tax on their cash pile (except, perhaps, on the interest, since interest is considered to be income).
I've seen the first trilogy. In theaters, and on video. I've suffered through Episode I. I actually saw it twice since I was interested in looking at the movie with a fresh viewpoint two months later, mostly to see for myself if Jar Jar was indeed as obnoxious as everyone was whining about. I didn't actually pay much attention to Jar Jar the first time around, and was caught off-guard when the hollering started, so I wanted to see the movie again.
Anyway, I haven't skipped out to see the flick, and I haven't even seen it. I'll go and see it in a few weeks, when all the crowds leave. I hate crowded theaters. I'm going to see Spider-Man later tonight, since I'm now guessing all the hoardes will be stuffing themselves into Episode II's screenings.
Off-topic: I heard that AMC Empire 25 in NYC's Times Square has a digital projector. Anyone know if it's running Episode II in digital?
I've heard commercials on TV lately advertising products that you can put between the jack and the phone that actually block telemarketers. Does anyone have any experience with these devices? DO they work? Which is the best one to get?
:-) However I do know this: if you use that device you may experience occasional problems receiving calls from pay-phones. Many privately-owned payphones (you know, mostly the weird looking ones owned by some private phone operator that charges $5 per minute) are not properly provisioned to process out-of-band call signaling, and the circuitry in the payphone listens to the voice line in order to figure out what happened to the dialed call (busy, ringing, no answer, human speech, etc...) If the payphone hears a SIT it will disconnect the line even though the call will actually go through.
There are several brand names these gizmos are sold under, the most common one is called a "Telezapper". The way they work is that every time you pick up the phone the device sends out that three-note high-pitched tone you sometimes hear when you misdial and reach an invalid number, or you get an "all circuits are busy" recording.
It's called a SIT tone - "Special Information Tone" - and is used by the phone company to indicate that the dialed number cannot be reached for some reason. It's actually not used in most places since that kind of information is now transmitted out-of-band with the voice call, but is used for compatibility reasons in case the call originates from some ancient phone switch in Antarctica which does not receive out-of-band signalling, and listens to the voice path to figure out what happened to the phone call.
The idea behind the telezapper is that many telemarketing calls are robo-dialed, and the telemarketer is put on the line only after you pick up the phone and answer (which is why many times you get a short delay after you say hello, before some sleazebag starts yammering into your ear trying to peddle some junk). If the telemarketers' dialer detects that the call didn't go through, it never even goes to a human. The idea is that if the robodialer hears a SIT it will assume that the phone number is invalid, and the phone number will be automatically removed from the telemarketer's phone list.
In any case, that's how it's supposed to work in theory. I wouldn't know, since I'm in NY and I don't get phonespam no mo'.
The problem with the whole Monsterhut situation was that they basically had a completely free hand at spamming the shit out of everyone's mailboxes, while this whole thing slowly made its way through courts. Monsterhut obtained a TRO against being shut down by Paetec for any reason, while this whole thing was playing out.
Nice, eh? A license to spam.
Well, it's all water under the bridge now. The consensus in various forums where this whole issue was discussed to death was that Paetec was making a good-faith effort to get the whole mess resolved and Monsterhut shut down. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I always had the impression that Paetec was always too eager to trot out the excuse that they are prohibited by court order from shutting down this spamming parasite, in response to every spam complaint (with a generous side-order of crocodile tears).
Anyway, I firmly believe that Monsterhut had a pink contract here, but when the complaints began to roll in, and Paetec's IP address space began to get blocklisted, Paetec began backtracking, trying to invoke their standard AUP close, and Monsterhut responded by taking them to court.
And if you think that's convenient, try an HTTP install next time. You don't need to mess around setting up NFS, and you do not need a special boot disk. Only you need is a garden-variety apache install, and an HTTP install option is included in the bootnet image.
Simply copy everything off Disk 1 somewhere in your DocumentRoot, then take RedHat/RPMS from the remaining install disks, and add all the binary RPMs to the RedHat/RPMS directory that was copied off disk 1. Now, use the bootnet image to boot the installer, and select HTTP install.
Do you really expect Joe Sixpack to write a VB script to do that, when it only takes two mouse clicks in Mozilla?
* But I can do the same thing with Windows telnet, or better, Windows terminal services since I can actually see what I am doing.
How much does the Windows Terminal Server cost, and are there any CAL fees?
* But I can get that many themes for XP, and plus I actually know how to change the backgrounds and icons in Windows myself. YOu haven't shown me how to do that yet with Linux. This frickin' sucks.
Programs -> Settings -> Desktop -> Background. That's it. It's not rocket science.
Install a distribution in server mode (no X11). Demonstrate the extreme modularization of Linux, such as you can complete get rid of all GUI support, and use only the disk/network services to turn a box into a network appliance.
* Uh, yeah, we use the Services admin panel and Add/Remove programs for that.
How many times do you have to reboot? What happens if the install get screwed up, and you're left with a corrupted registry?
* But if I only want Windows on my system, why do I care? If I could access the Linux partitions it would be like having FAT32 partitions on an NT machine... pretty pointless.
True - NT doesn't really support things like soft and hard links...
* Yeah, when services go down in Windows, it still starts up fine and you just look in the system log. If a driver goes down, I just restart in safe mode, removed the device, and everything is fine. No big deal. Who needs a scanner on a server anyway? It looks like if I do this Linux thing I have to go through all these damned scripts to figure out what went wrong... and where's the safe mode?
It's there. It's called "Run level 1", but you rarely have a need to use it, since as I said a broken daemon is not going to take down the rest of the system.
* Yeah... uh, we do that. Where's the network neighborhood icon?
It's right there, on the screen. Looks like I forget to mention Nautilus, in my original comment.
* We do that with Windows terminal services like we said.
And how much does Windows Terminal Services cost?
You really should conserve some network bandwidth and just go sit down at the machine though.
It's going to be a long walk. Remember, that server's on the other side of the world?
* If we want to install a new version of msvcxxrt.dll without restarting the box, I just close all the apps that are using it and then copy the new DLL into place.
Sounds clumsy and awkwards. There's no need to do that in Linux.
It's not that difficult. It breaks a bunch of stuff though, but I bet this glibc messes things up too.
Nope. I upgraded glibc on my firewall box about three weeks ago. I still haven't rebooted the box:
What are you doing monkeying with the kernel?glibc isn't the kernel.
That doesn't need updating, it's the frickin' kernel. If it's broken, we get a reinstall going while we go to lunch. Huh... fat pipes are cool.
I tend to upgrade my Red Hat servers twice a year. Insert a kickstart floppy, reboot each server, have a cup of coffee while the server upgrades itself, back in production 35 minutes later...
Here are a few random suggestions, in no particular order.
* Open a relatively complicated page in MSIE, the same page in Mozilla-win32, and the same page agin in Mozilla-linux. Go to a bunch of annoying web sites, with Mozilla's pop-up/pop-down filters enabled.
* Use ssh to log in to a box halfway across the world. Demonstrate some simple system administration tasks, and the fact that anything you can do at the console you can also do remotely, via ssh.
* Run either Gnome or KDE. Change the themes, a couple of times, demonstrate the customizable UI. Switching between one of the mac Aqua-like themes, some star trek theme, and one of the Winxx-lookalike themes should be very effective.
* Install a distribution in server mode (no X11). Demonstrate the extreme modularization of Linux, such as you can complete get rid of all GUI support, and use only the disk/network services to turn a box into a network appliance.
* Install Windows and Linux on the same box. Boot into Linux; then mount and browse Windows partitions. Make a casual remark that Windows cannot browse Linux partitions in the same way.
* When the Linux box boots up, and is busy going through the initscripts, starting all the services, explain that if one service fails to start for some reason the boot process will continue and the machine should still be mostly usable. Ask if anyone experienced a situation where a Windows driver kept croaking during the boot process, and what happened alter.
I recall an incident about three years ago when UMAX shipped a buggy driver for their scanners. The driver was faulting on machines with USB ports, and CPU speeds over 400 Mhz (something about some timing loop), forcing a complete crash during the Windows boot cycle, with the subsequent reboot falling back into safe mode.
The Linux equivalent for this would be something like SANE, which runs completely in user mode, and therefore cannot crash the entire OS.
* Use samba to browse the local windows network neighborhood.
* If you have a fat pipe, forward X11 over ssh, and run remote X applications on the local terminal.
* Install a base distribution package right out of the box. I'll use Red Hat 7.2 as an example. Apply all the errata to bring the box up to date, except for the kernel, without rebooting. Even install a new version of glibc (the equivalent of msvcxxrt.dll) without rebooting the box. Install a new kernel on the remote machine, make sure that LILO or GRUB is all set up, then remotely reboot the box into the new kernel.
At my day job (a huge corporate behemoth), they decided to use WIPRO to build a business-critical application. Well, they've been regretting this decision for two years now.
Everyone had dollar signs in their eyes at first: using cheap overseas labor, how much money they'll save, yadda yadda yadda...
Well, the PHBs discovered that if they wanted cheap overseas labor, that's exactly what they got with WIPRO: cheap, shoddy labor. Spaghetti, unmaintainable code all around.
I really hope that WIPRO's "contributions" to the GNOME project would undergo the same scrutiny and vetting as anyone else's submitted patches and contributed code.
79 episodes, and into history.
... plus a pilot episode.
What does disturb me are the slack-ass self-proclaimed nerds and geeks who have nothing better to say than that "with [their] expectations already lowered, the movie didn't really turn out to be that bad."
And there's a reason why I have nothing better to say: the movie sucks. Why is it my fault that the story blows chunks, and I can't find anything better to say about it? Go bitch to whoever wrote this joke of a screenplay. And take your self-righteous and sanctimonious attitude with you.
I wouldn't be surprised if a few other brokerages will get nailed pretty soon, for similar kinds of shennanigans. Disclaimer: I have no direct knowledge of any regulatory investigation of ETrade, but we all know that they pretty much played the same games with RHAT.
At least with CSFB did in fact give a handful of shares to everyone who applied for the friends-in-family deal - AFAIK - while ETrade tried to come up with every excuse in the book to kick out as many people as they could in their friends-and-family program. Although some of us did eventually get our pound of flesh (see my website: E*Trouble to revisit those exciting times) it would be icing on the cake to see EGRP whacked on the balls, again.
I think these anti-spam zealots teamed up on this poor spammer, and the only reason it went as far as it did (and as hilariously as it did) was because Shifman has a large amount of juvenile pride.
A couple of things:
1. I am the spambag.net guy.
2. In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).
3. The reason Shifman was piled on was because he deserved it. Nobody cared about him much until he began calling people up on the phone, yelling at them, or leaving crank messages on the answering machine. The initial version of spambag.net was only a few short paragraphs. Then Shifman began calling my voice mail and screaming into my answering machine.
Here's a free clue to wanna-be grubors and speedbumps. Be very careful before you decide to waive your dick around. Someone might just have a bigger one themselves.
Cancer is, basically, uncontrolled growth of cell tissue. And aging is the natural death of cell tissue. So if you somehow halt the natural cell death process, there would be nothing that could stop a runaway cancer growth.
It's time for my Saturday morning rant. I'm really getting sick tired of hearing people whine about MS Office. Whine, whine, whine. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Moan, moan, moan. After, oh, at least three years of nagging I think I've reached my limit.
I don't want and don't care about Microsoft's crapware any more. StarOffice 5.2 works great for me. Even though it's a bit long in the tooth, by now, it does everything that I could possibly need an office suite to do. Three months ago I completely wiped MS Office off my Windows partition (because I needed the disk space) and I haven't missed it since. SO 5.2 does everything I want - letters, mailing labels, and spreadsheets.
Yes, 5.2 is a bit bloated, but if you have a problem with that, do you think that MS Office would turn out any slimmer? Are you really naive enough to think that its WIN32 API emulation layer is going to turn out any better. Don't forget that the Solaris' version of MS Internet Explorer actually went ahead and created a fscking registry when you ran it. You really want to deal with this kind of crap?
Well, I don't. I'm looking forward to SO 6.0, which promises to be a significant improvement over 5.2, it's going to be a native Linux application, and not some overbloated, macro virus-injecting monstrosity that comes complete with its own mini-operating system.
Plus there's also KOffice, which is moving along rather nicely. In short, I really don't see what's so special about MS Office that people are always drooling about.
Over here, on my plain old analog TV, I receive UPN's "Enterprise" in a slightly letter-boxed format. Not a full 16:9 letterbox, but more like 5:3. The black bars just barely clear the UPN logo in the lower-right corner.
When the show begun airing, I thought that it was done purely for artistic reasons (and I actually liked it, it gave the show a more "mature' look) but it just occured to me that the show might be filmed in wide-screen HD, and its letterboxed for analog. Anyone know for sure what's up with that?
Hi. The first four years after college I worked as an employee, and for the last 7 years as an independent, C corp consultant.
If you have some basic accounting background, incorporate as a C corp, and get yourself contracted out through a consulting agency, and expect that they'll get about a 10% cut. A 14% cut (in your example) seems a bit high, but not too unreasonable. I personally find the 10% cut quite acceptable, given the fact that the consulting agency has much better contacts and jobs available through them, and will fill your invoices on a regular schedule (instead of you having to wait god knows when for the company to cut you a check, each time). If you don't mind hassling your client each time they're late on an invoince, then go the full distance, and try getting the gigs all by yourself. Personally, I think that setting up a relationship with a reputable consulting agency that has plenty of contacts in the 'biz', and will try not to keep you 'on the beach' for too long, is worth the small cut that they get.
In my opinion, W2 consulting is the worst option. The cut is too much, and you really don't get anything in return. If you were to set yourself up as a C corp consultant, then you'd be able to write off reasonable expenses with pre-tax money, and set up reasonable benefits that can match anything you can possibly get as an employee. As a W2 consultant you end up giving up a much larger cut, without getting anything in return. Some consulting companies will actually provide their W2 consultant with reasonable benefits, but that's a rare exception.
If you have some accounting knowledge yourself, you should be able to handle being an independent consultant without really needing an accountant. I am not an accountant, but my gigs tend to be in the financial industry, and what I know seems to be enough for me to handle this. With over-the-counter small business acccounting software, such as QuickBooks, or Peachtree Accounting, you'll be able to calculate your own paychecks, and keep track of your tax liabilities by yourself. I've been doing that for the last seven years, and I've never had any problems. Yes, you will have to fill out some additional paperwork. You'll need to fill out some paperwork each time you make a tax deposit (or once a month as long as your annual lialibilities are below a certain amount, I think $50K, or for each actual tax deposit if you're over that), plus fill out a couple of forms each quarter, and additional corporate returns at the end of the year. I don't find that to be too difficult - Quickbooks will even print out the quarterly 941s and annual 940s for you, and TurboTax for Business will take care of your annual 1120 filings (plus your equivalent state filings).
Depending on the laws in your state, you may also have to arrange for liability insurance, workers' comp, disability, and unemployment insurance. This does sound like a hassle, but it's really not. There's a little bit of a hassle to set everything up, and after that it's just a matter of cutting a couple of checks, each year. Expect all of this overhead to run you about 2K-3K a year. Not bad when you're pulling in 200K.
If this bookkeeping deal is not your cup of tea, then just get an accountant.
Good luck.
As long as people are complacent and accept these kinds of bully tactics from their providers, they really have no standing to complain about it later. Don't like the fact that your cable company wants to be your net.babysitter, and tell you what you can or can't do on the Internet?
Well, rewarding this kind of arrogant big-brother attitude by giving them even MORE money for business-class service is certainly going to encourage a change for the better, wouldn't it? Or, perhaps, you should tell them to shove their port filters, and their DHCP garbage, up their network interface, and switch to someone else who does indeed provides real internet connectivity.
People really need to vote with their feet, and stop agreeing to put on their Internet provider's straightjackets. There are ISPs who will sell you a residential class DSL service, with a static IP address, and let you run servers. That's real Internet connectivity.