...people contribute to Open Source because it typically costs little more than time.
Time is te most precious commodity of all. Most of us don't realize this until we notice how little we have left (terminal illness diagnosis, old age, a loved one dying, in the middle of a motorcycle wreck, etc).
All of life is a barter system. Most people in "modern", "civilized" societies simply fail to recognize this, and think of money as the only medium that matters in trade.
This isn't in any way dissing people who put time into FOSS (I do). It's just a reality check against the concept that it's free if you "only" put time into it. Rather, it is more dearly bought.
I second this recommendation. In fact, I thought I had submitted a similar post, but apparently I had a brain fart or something.
Not only is SL maintained by people from several of the USA national labs, but their mailing lists are excellent for support.
They track pretty quickly on RH's heels, and try to be 100% compatible with RHEL. They've complied with RH's terms (replaced copyrighted images and trademarked logos), and don't even mention RH on their site.
We expect to have a mix of RHEL and SL. That way we pay RedHat, who after all has done most of the work here, but at the same time we won't go broke as we would if we were a shop running an OS where we had no choice but to pay high per seat licenses.
SuSE Pro is inexpensive, and the odds are that your CAD vendor supports it.
Where do you get your odds?
We've been asking all our CAD tool vendors, and every last one of them either supports running on RHEL or will within a very short time. No other Linux distribution even comes close. Probably the most supported OS after RHEL3 among these vendors is Soalris, not another Linux (or Windows).
As others have noted, Fedora is not the answer for RHEL compatibility, and a tool vendor supporting RHEL will almost certainly not cut you any slack with Fedora, just as they won't cut us any with RH8. Even though the tools run just fine on RH8 for us.
Maintained by one or more of the US National Labs, they track RHEL and build new distros and bugfix packages as quickly as possible. So far we've moved several production compute servers to this with excellent results. We originally picked them for their 64 bit Opteron support; SL3 runs as well there as it does on 32 bit systems.
And yes, our requirement for RHEL3 or equivalent is also driven by CAD tool vendors. The CAD tools we buy licenses for are happy on SL3, and so are our own tools.
I recall seeing examples of just this during the 80s at the X Conferences MIT held. But it either never got out of the labs (Xerox, I suspect), or the people doing it got reassigned.
I really wish I knew why it never got fed back into the core libraries.
There are plenty of ways to build a joystick that lets you easily navigate in three dimensions.
And in fact, it *can* be a useful paradigm, if it's done right. But I'm not sure how useful it is without a VR helmet, or some other 3D visual implementation.
Would that be better than 2D? It deneds on the individual and the application.
On the other hand, there may be something that fits your bill. But if you don't see it yet, just wait, get to know the business better, and keep your eye on all requirements documents, purchase requests, and so forth. Listen in on gripe and bluesky sessions. If it's coming, and you're plugged in and paying attention, you'll recognize the opportunity when it arrives.
While a typical home user probably does have other, larger energy hogs, we have almost 300 systems between desktops and the compute farm. This would be a huge savings for us, both on the front end (direct power to run computers) and on the backend (air conditioning).
For someone with a huge sim farm (ATI, Nvidia) or other giant compute farm (google, MS), it's a phenomenal win.
I agree. My first thought on reading the intro was not about security, but "What's the reson for this?" I can't think of any legitimate reason for such a request.
How long until stores want you to give a urine sample before using the bathroom?
Not necessarily. The company gets to decide what constitutes legitimate use of its respurces. The company can require, for example, that you use company DNS servers. (For that matter, many corporate firewalls force you to.) Many companies also force the use fo a proxy server; everything you browse is in the logs. Depending on the company'ss policies, what laws it falls under, past history at the company, and advice from the company's lawyers, a reasonable policy may be one that checks the logs only when advised of a problem (worker was observed surfing porn), random checks of the logs, or anything up to real-time log monitoring.
If the company says "no personal use of computers, period", and you in any way violate that (such as sending encrypted mail to an email address you can't prove a work relationship with), you are subject to legal, disciplinary action for your illegal theft of services. If you can't live with that, you should work for change within the company or leave. (I've done both.)
We work hard along the lines of Google's policy of "Don't be evil". But there's plenty of evil around, and sometimes it forces IT people to take actions others will see as invasions of privacy ("oh, no, that's evil!"), when in reality there is no privacy protection under the law, and in fact the company must be protected to protect the jobs of all the workers.
I guess it depends on how narrowly you define "traditional servers". Maybe you meant file servers. But plenty of database servers, and most compute servers, are reasonable candiates for this.
And there are plenty of those around.
We use lots of compute servers. After reliabaility, we care most about TCO per CPU/RAM set. A dual Opteron with 16GB is cheaper than two Opterons with 8GB each. But even if it was slightly more to buy, we'd take two in 1U over 2 in 2U. This scales forever, or until we hit some practical limit.
We've always run our db servers on dual processor systems; I suspect we'll welcome the quads at some point in the next year or two.
It must have been a *really* slow news day, or someone at the BBC is rather slow. Techies have been doing this since the 1st email message was received, and everyone else has been doing it since they discovered email.
I know a small handful of people who tend to keep their email cleaned out and very small. For everyone else, it's a huge. mostly convenient database.
This "story" is only about 1% less sill than reporting that "recent study shows people prefer to breathe than to stop".
The web face is aceptable. Neither perfect nor unusable.
But I spent a half hour today trying to get it to let me access it from another computer with no joy.
So I gave up and ran redhat-config-printer-gui since it's trivial to make it display on a remote X11 server. And, lo and behold, it was simple enough. I have a couple of nitpicks, but that's all. Use the wizard to add printers, then use the edit feature to tweak the details. All I missed was a way to assign multiple names to one printer, a la BSD's lp daemon.
If the ppd you need isn't in this release, select the closest thing you can find, go grab the right one off the cups site or vendor site, and replace the printer's ppd file in/etc/cups/ppd/ .
At least, their web site is useless. It looks like a placeholder for a startup that has yet to actually produce anything. No idea who they really are, but that's what their website looks like.
I don't recall which mobos by themselves hadnle 8 sticks, but for a complete system, Penguin does. Of course, that's a 2 way, and it's 4 sticks per CPU so far...
This is a build of RedHat's EL by a public library system in Louisiana. They run servers and at least 50 workstations off this. I don't know if their LMS is ISS or not, but it's worth asking.
The library's site is:
http://library.beau.org/
anbd includes link to online research and an online catalog. (The online catalog is unavailable as I type this).
No, we're back to the ground issue. Almost everything musicians use up to the mixing board is Hi-Z, unbalanced, which means (among other things) common ground. There's no guarantee you can have common ground with the computer setup described.
Frankly I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this issue for themselves.
I'm not sure what the OP meant, but my take on this is that it's stunningly stupid. Wait, this inportant feature of *nix could be misused, so even though many sysadmins count on such things, let's throw it away.
That's obviously true, too, but it isn't what I meant. I meant what I said. If your pae is publicly viewable, without my agreeing to do anything for it, I have no obligation to allow advertisers to annoy me, any more than I have an obligation to send you $1 per word that downloaded onto my computer. And yes, I get to define what annoys me, just as you get to define what annoys you.
For the record, you're not obligate dto provide me any content. Feel free not to.
Now stop and think a moment. If someone's popup ad is just going to piss me off, so that I wouldn't buy from them, anyway, what's the point in trying to force me to see it? Do you just want me pissed off at you, too?
Real world analogy. A restaurant rents rooftop space to Spammers, Inc, to put up a billboard. This allows the restaurant to charge slightly lower prices. I get that benefit every time I eat there. Am I under some obligation to read the billboard? Of course not!
But that's just your average banner ad, which (unless it takes up a lot of space, doesn't bother me, unless it's offensive in general, illegal, etc.
Now suppose this billboard has cameras that monitor its environment, matches faces to an image database, determines who it thinks I am, and starts sending little, flying robots out to wave their little, metal arms in my face, squeaking that my favorite brand of blue jeans "is available for only $3/pair, NOW, NOW, NOW! Hurry up, come buy some!" Do I have an obligation to pay attention to that billboard? No. I also have no obligation to let them see my face to determine who I am. I have no obligation to walk down that sidewalk. I have no obligation to put up with the robots if they get in my face. If they block my vision or impede my movement, they will be dealt with.
Or do you think you should come force me to listen to their spiel? You're welcome to try. I don't think you'd be very succesful...
I blame all the people who think they should get everything for free. I blame the goobers who think they should let everyone publish everything for free. I blame the morons who think anything someone else says is as trustworthy, informed, clever, sensible or whatever as anything someone else says.
I also blame hidebound management at companies who refuse to accept the reality that things are changing, and insist on trying to map their old business model directly onto the network media. I know that change isn't always easy. But if you wear blinders, you deserve what you get. Sadly, all your customers get punished, too.
Good point. And even if you never see the menu, we all know that's how the system works; it developed over time and became a part of everyday life. The closest I can see with the web is a server. If I go park a server in your rack and start using your space, electricity, bandwidth, A/C and so on, I can jolly well expect to pay for it. Random, public content off the web is hardly the same thing.
There are also laws regarding restaurants, precisely because people came up with reasons they didn't think they should have to pay. In at least some states in the USA, these are a subset of "defrauding an innkeeper" laws which go well back into English history, and tend to still be very harsh. There are no such laws governing the reading of public content on the net. There are laws to deal with content that requires payment or contract to pay.
The only extant contract here is between whoever is providing the content and whoever is storing and/or serving it. It's up to the content provider to come up with a viable system that gets their content viewing paid for. It's one thing if you can convince me to agree to watch the ads on your site; if I agree to that, I should be bound to do it. But my entering a URL and hitting return, or clicking on a URL someone sent me, of I found on google, or whatever, doesn't obligate me to anything.
Some sites (please note correct spelling 8^) have a reminder like "If you found this site useful, please support my sponsors". In such cases I'm fairly likely to at least look around and see if their sponsors hold any interest at all. In fact, I tend to do that anyway, if I find the site useful. If not, I'm unlikely to pay attention to their sponsors unless the sponsor has done something worthy of my attention.
Barracuda's ads on/. are a great example. (It helps that I sometimes find/. useful. 8^) The first time I saw a Barracuda ad, I checked out their site. Within a couple of days, I had contacted them. Within a week, my free demo unit was on the way, and within a month we had bought that unit. We love it; it works as promised, they have great support, it makes our sysadmin lives easier, and our users are despammed, devirused, d dewormed, etc.
HOW did this happen?
1)/. has real value, so I come here every day. 2) Barracuda had a good ad, which wasn't intrusive (I will no more buy from annoying advertisres than from spammers). 3) Barracuda followed up. 4) Barracuda provides something I needed at a price I was willing to pay.
If all advertisers followed this model, which has worked very well for Barracuda, I suspect we wouldn't be having this discussion!
The only problem is, as Spurgeon noted, that 90% of everything is crap. This includes web content, products being marketed, and the advertisements themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
...people contribute to Open Source because it typically costs little more than time.
Time is te most precious commodity of all. Most of us don't realize this until we notice how little we have left (terminal illness diagnosis, old age, a loved one dying, in the middle of a motorcycle wreck, etc).
All of life is a barter system. Most people in "modern", "civilized" societies simply fail to recognize this, and think of money as the only medium that matters in trade.
This isn't in any way dissing people who put time into FOSS (I do). It's just a reality check against the concept that it's free if you "only" put time into it. Rather, it is more dearly bought.
I second this recommendation. In fact, I thought I had submitted a similar post, but apparently I had a brain fart or something.
Not only is SL maintained by people from several of the USA national labs, but their mailing lists are excellent for support.
They track pretty quickly on RH's heels, and try to be 100% compatible with RHEL. They've complied with RH's terms (replaced copyrighted images and trademarked logos), and don't even mention RH on their site.
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
We expect to have a mix of RHEL and SL. That way we pay RedHat, who after all has done most of the work here, but at the same time we won't go broke as we would if we were a shop running an OS where we had no choice but to pay high per seat licenses.
SuSE Pro is inexpensive, and the odds are that your CAD vendor supports it.
Where do you get your odds?
We've been asking all our CAD tool vendors, and every last one of them either supports running on RHEL or will within a very short time. No other Linux distribution even comes close. Probably the most supported OS after RHEL3 among these vendors is Soalris, not another Linux (or Windows).
As others have noted, Fedora is not the answer for RHEL compatibility, and a tool vendor supporting RHEL will almost certainly not cut you any slack with Fedora, just as they won't cut us any with RH8. Even though the tools run just fine on RH8 for us.
Try Scientific Linux:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/
Maintained by one or more of the US National Labs, they track RHEL and build new distros and bugfix packages as quickly as possible. So far we've moved several production compute servers to this with excellent results. We originally picked them for their 64 bit Opteron support; SL3 runs as well there as it does on 32 bit systems.
And yes, our requirement for RHEL3 or equivalent is also driven by CAD tool vendors. The CAD tools we buy licenses for are happy on SL3, and so are our own tools.
I recall seeing examples of just this during the 80s at the X Conferences MIT held. But it either never got out of the labs (Xerox, I suspect), or the people doing it got reassigned.
I really wish I knew why it never got fed back into the core libraries.
There are plenty of ways to build a joystick that lets you easily navigate in three dimensions.
And in fact, it *can* be a useful paradigm, if it's done right. But I'm not sure how useful it is without a VR helmet, or some other 3D visual implementation.
Would that be better than 2D? It deneds on the individual and the application.
...everyone.
This is the scariest thing I have ever seen.
Perhaps the Dept of Homeland Security should notify the president that Microsoft and Ford are working on WMDs!
On the 1 hand I agree with the above poster.
On the other hand, there may be something that fits your bill. But if you don't see it yet, just wait, get to know the business better, and keep your eye on all requirements documents, purchase requests, and so forth. Listen in on gripe and bluesky sessions. If it's coming, and you're plugged in and paying attention, you'll recognize the opportunity when it arrives.
While a typical home user probably does have other, larger energy hogs, we have almost 300 systems between desktops and the compute farm. This would be a huge savings for us, both on the front end (direct power to run computers) and on the backend (air conditioning).
For someone with a huge sim farm (ATI, Nvidia) or other giant compute farm (google, MS), it's a phenomenal win.
I agree. My first thought on reading the intro was not about security, but "What's the reson for this?" I can't think of any legitimate reason for such a request.
How long until stores want you to give a urine sample before using the bathroom?
I'm kind of torn between spamming Microsoft's internal network and the historically accurate, Texan outlaw approach (download or say yer prayers!)
Unethical? Yeah. Legal? Definitely.
Not necessarily. The company gets to decide what constitutes legitimate use of its respurces. The company can require, for example, that you use company DNS servers. (For that matter, many corporate firewalls force you to.) Many companies also force the use fo a proxy server; everything you browse is in the logs. Depending on the company'ss policies, what laws it falls under, past history at the company, and advice from the company's lawyers, a reasonable policy may be one that checks the logs only when advised of a problem (worker was observed surfing porn), random checks of the logs, or anything up to real-time log monitoring.
If the company says "no personal use of computers, period", and you in any way violate that (such as sending encrypted mail to an email address you can't prove a work relationship with), you are subject to legal, disciplinary action for your illegal theft of services. If you can't live with that, you should work for change within the company or leave. (I've done both.)
We work hard along the lines of Google's policy of "Don't be evil". But there's plenty of evil around, and sometimes it forces IT people to take actions others will see as invasions of privacy ("oh, no, that's evil!"), when in reality there is no privacy protection under the law, and in fact the company must be protected to protect the jobs of all the workers.
Moving it to apache is only natural if you're dealing with rational beings.
Driving on public roads and spending much time on the net both suggest there's a severe shortage of those.
I guess it depends on how narrowly you define "traditional servers". Maybe you meant file servers. But plenty of database servers, and most compute servers, are reasonable candiates for this.
And there are plenty of those around.
We use lots of compute servers. After reliabaility, we care most about TCO per CPU/RAM set. A dual Opteron with 16GB is cheaper than two Opterons with 8GB each. But even if it was slightly more to buy, we'd take two in 1U over 2 in 2U. This scales forever, or until we hit some practical limit.
We've always run our db servers on dual processor systems; I suspect we'll welcome the quads at some point in the next year or two.
It must have been a *really* slow news day, or someone at the BBC is rather slow. Techies have been doing this since the 1st email message was received, and everyone else has been doing it since they discovered email.
I know a small handful of people who tend to keep their email cleaned out and very small. For everyone else, it's a huge. mostly convenient database.
This "story" is only about 1% less sill than reporting that "recent study shows people prefer to breathe than to stop".
The web face is aceptable. Neither perfect nor unusable.
/etc/cups/ppd/ .
But I spent a half hour today trying to get it to let me access it from another computer with no joy.
So I gave up and ran redhat-config-printer-gui since it's trivial to make it display on a remote X11 server. And, lo and behold, it was simple enough. I have a couple of nitpicks, but that's all. Use the wizard to add printers, then use the edit feature to tweak the details. All I missed was a way to assign multiple names to one printer, a la BSD's lp daemon.
If the ppd you need isn't in this release, select the closest thing you can find, go grab the right one off the cups site or vendor site, and replace the printer's ppd file in
At least, their web site is useless. It looks like a placeholder for a startup that has yet to actually produce anything. No idea who they really are, but that's what their website looks like.
I don't recall which mobos by themselves hadnle 8 sticks, but for a complete system, Penguin does. Of course, that's a 2 way, and it's 4 sticks per CPU so far...
Start here:
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
This is a build of RedHat's EL by a public library system in Louisiana. They run servers and at least 50 workstations off this. I don't know if their LMS is ISS or not, but it's worth asking.
The library's site is:
http://library.beau.org/
anbd includes link to online research and an online catalog. (The online catalog is unavailable as I type this).
No, we're back to the ground issue. Almost everything musicians use up to the mixing board is Hi-Z, unbalanced, which means (among other things) common ground. There's no guarantee you can have common ground with the computer setup described.
Frankly I'm surprised Apple hasn't solved this issue for themselves.
I'm not sure what the OP meant, but my take on this is that it's stunningly stupid. Wait, this inportant feature of *nix could be misused, so even though many sysadmins count on such things, let's throw it away.
MS demon in possession of Steve Jobs, film at 11.
That's obviously true, too, but it isn't what I meant. I meant what I said. If your pae is publicly viewable, without my agreeing to do anything for it, I have no obligation to allow advertisers to annoy me, any more than I have an obligation to send you $1 per word that downloaded onto my computer. And yes, I get to define what annoys me, just as you get to define what annoys you.
For the record, you're not obligate dto provide me any content. Feel free not to.
Now stop and think a moment. If someone's popup ad is just going to piss me off, so that I wouldn't buy from them, anyway, what's the point in trying to force me to see it? Do you just want me pissed off at you, too?
Real world analogy. A restaurant rents rooftop space to Spammers, Inc, to put up a billboard. This allows the restaurant to charge slightly lower prices. I get that benefit every time I eat there. Am I under some obligation to read the billboard? Of course not!
But that's just your average banner ad, which (unless it takes up a lot of space, doesn't bother me, unless it's offensive in general, illegal, etc.
Now suppose this billboard has cameras that monitor its environment, matches faces to an image database, determines who it thinks I am, and starts sending little, flying robots out to wave their little, metal arms in my face, squeaking that my favorite brand of blue jeans "is available for only $3/pair, NOW, NOW, NOW! Hurry up, come buy some!" Do I have an obligation to pay attention to that billboard? No. I also have no obligation to let them see my face to determine who I am. I have no obligation to walk down that sidewalk. I have no obligation to put up with the robots if they get in my face. If they block my vision or impede my movement, they will be dealt with.
Or do you think you should come force me to listen to their spiel? You're welcome to try. I don't think you'd be very succesful...
And if you go back and read it, I never said online advertising was bad. I have since posted other comments that should adequately address this issue.
I blame all the people who think they should get everything for free. I blame the goobers who think they should let everyone publish everything for free. I blame the morons who think anything someone else says is as trustworthy, informed, clever, sensible or whatever as anything someone else says.
I also blame hidebound management at companies who refuse to accept the reality that things are changing, and insist on trying to map their old business model directly onto the network media. I know that change isn't always easy. But if you wear blinders, you deserve what you get. Sadly, all your customers get punished, too.
Good point. And even if you never see the menu, we all know that's how the system works; it developed over time and became a part of everyday life. The closest I can see with the web is a server. If I go park a server in your rack and start using your space, electricity, bandwidth, A/C and so on, I can jolly well expect to pay for it. Random, public content off the web is hardly the same thing.
/. are a great example. (It helps that I sometimes find /. useful. 8^) The first time I saw a Barracuda ad, I checked out their site. Within a couple of days, I had contacted them. Within a week, my free demo unit was on the way, and within a month we had bought that unit. We love it; it works as promised, they have great support, it makes our sysadmin lives easier, and our users are despammed, devirused, d dewormed, etc.
/. has real value, so I come here every day.
There are also laws regarding restaurants, precisely because people came up with reasons they didn't think they should have to pay. In at least some states in the USA, these are a subset of "defrauding an innkeeper" laws which go well back into English history, and tend to still be very harsh. There are no such laws governing the reading of public content on the net. There are laws to deal with content that requires payment or contract to pay.
The only extant contract here is between whoever is providing the content and whoever is storing and/or serving it. It's up to the content provider to come up with a viable system that gets their content viewing paid for. It's one thing if you can convince me to agree to watch the ads on your site; if I agree to that, I should be bound to do it. But my entering a URL and hitting return, or clicking on a URL someone sent me, of I found on google, or whatever, doesn't obligate me to anything.
Some sites (please note correct spelling 8^) have a reminder like "If you found this site useful, please support my sponsors". In such cases I'm fairly likely to at least look around and see if their sponsors hold any interest at all. In fact, I tend to do that anyway, if I find the site useful. If not, I'm unlikely to pay attention to their sponsors unless the sponsor has done something worthy of my attention.
Barracuda's ads on
HOW did this happen?
1)
2) Barracuda had a good ad, which wasn't intrusive (I will no more buy from annoying advertisres than from spammers).
3) Barracuda followed up.
4) Barracuda provides something I needed at a price I was willing to pay.
If all advertisers followed this model, which has worked very well for Barracuda, I suspect we wouldn't be having this discussion!
The only problem is, as Spurgeon noted, that 90% of everything is crap. This includes web content, products being marketed, and the advertisements themselves.