I've been saying this for years. It's good to see comcast moving in the right direction. You can run and move faster on offense than you can on defense,
CDs should come with better artwork and possibly ticket promotions and stuff like that in them (Camel cash anyone?) it helps defuse the piracy issue.
PPV is easy, it's actually fairly cheap, especially compared to going to the movies. Making it more worth while seems like a great move. Movie theaters should follow suit, the MPAA is up in arms over the minicam piracted copies so they should just make it worth you while to buy an actual ticket for the $9 and see the movie. With 2 tickets stubs, send me the DVD for free when it's ready or something.
Asteroids should be grouped together. If there is only one or 2 entities in an orbital slot, it doens't create its own heat. It's visibly noticable from other "planets" in the system then it's planet.
If there are cluster of entities in the same slot, asteroids.
Totally because the FBI is really only capable of focusing on one problem at a time. I mean if any kidnappers get away or terrorists attack or any interstate commerce violations happen it'll be because they misappropriated resources to stopping copyright violations.
Come on! That's the first impression? I'm sold, where can I get this software? Of all the positive things to spin his favorite OS up, he leads with boot time. DOS boots pretty fast...
I suggest that we boycott any "reviews" that include boot time in a major way. The only time I'd like to see boot time mentioned is if it is in some way painfully long or if there is a ration boot time / up time that is too far from zero.
5 years ago all the apple articles were talking about how they were dead and didn't know it, on their way to dead, getting ready to be bought by ____, etc...
Now it's all "the real reason they dumped IBM."
It's simple. There isn't anything they want built that IBM can't build. They might not like the cost, they might not want to pay for the rapid revs that Intel does, but it's all possible. THis is simply a case of Apple expecting to get their ass kissed by IBM and treated like the only thing in the world and IBM expecting to get a hand job from Apple for doing what they are paid to do and they finally realized it. Guess what, very few asses get kissed by IBM and it's not a regular thing when it happens. The same is true about apple, they don't really need much of anyone's help. Spew all the theories you want, this is probably more like J-Lo and Ben Affleck; they just got tired of pretending that they liked each other.
You give them all way too much credit to say that they are planning some DRM coup several chips out in the future. Believe me, Apple and MS and Intel aren't playing together, I think that they can just barely tolerate each other.
I think the only thing that really mattered was/is cost. Until you're making IA-64 desktop workstations for $700, it's just not that interesting to the masses. Compilers aren't as strong as they could be because compiler writers aren't working on IA-64 compilers because they aren't selling because of cost. 32bit IA-32 support is nice, but when it's all said and done, you want IA64 code. Because it's expensive and nobody buys them, MS doesn't spend the several hundred million dollars to keep Windows running well on it and get the Office Apps ported.
It's kind of interesting, Intel timed it really well to kill off sparc, alpha, PA-RISC, Mips and potentially even POWER. They essentially did kill off most of them, Sparc is kind of limping along for now and IBM's still in the ring. On the other hand, they also made kind of a big blunder and they hurt themselves by hurting a lot of that competition. Why would I spend $100k on an IA64 solution that hasn't be proven in the field rather than a Sparc or POWER solution? Or even better, spend $30 on Xeons and Linux.
Really to make it happen, HP is going to have to move a lot and start to hurt IBM with them and the cost will have to drop substantially. As is the x86-64 market is building up, being 64bit alone isn't a selling feature, people don't care about RISC vs. CISC vs EPIC and there is simply no way that small and midsized companies are going to pay for the relatively small performance improvement.
If it's x86, I don't understand how it wouldn't be hurting Intel and their 64bit efforts. Intel still hasn't given up on Itanium and they are billions down on it.
x86-64 sounds and look sexy but Intel needs shit or get off the pot with ia64. If they plan to keep kicking it, bringing a customer like Apple in to the fold on anything less than ia64 seems counter productive unless they some how magically think they will turn x86-64 into ia64.
I know that they offered Pavel Machek a job, who knows what that means. The transition seems like a big deal though. All things being equal, Intel has never looked more exposed and with IBM owning the console market and has a strong handle on the 64bit space, there will definitely be some economies of scale.
What does make sense is if they were to move the x-serve to x86-64. I could see something like that happening. I can see that with the PowerBook line that Apple may be feeling vulnerable but they are still very competitive machines.
It's about time. Linux needs something similar
on
Does launchd Beat cron?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Cron and init and rc.X work fine, I'm not a hater. However I do think it's time to move forward. I like what Sun is doing with SMF and this is Apple's cut at it.
Basically, cron needs higher resolution, that's my only beef with it. It also seems like to do anything facny with cron you end up writing a program to do it and it's not that uncommon to do that.
The startup scripts need an all together different kind of overhaul. I've been working on Linux appliances for over 6 years now, without exception, it seems like someone ends up writing some kind of "health script" that is kicked off by cron every minute or a few or is a daemon in it's own right that watches for things to crash or not be running and then it restarts them. I've seen it in a production set-top box based on Linux where we essentially wrote our own init and had it treat some processes special and 5 different software appliances. Fact of life is software crashes from time to time. These scripts then do something else, like ping the gateway or something stupid to check if the network went down before they do what it is that they do. To make matters worse, they are always written in Perl by some guy who doesn't know Bourne shell to write a good startup script in the first place; that's the part that chaps me. Rather than contaminate the system with all this extra shit we should just have an easily extensible and configurable system process starter and monitor and it shouldn't require scripting to do anything advanced.
Use XML for configuration, it's easy to parse, it's here to stay and I think it's a little bit better than the columns of a crontab because it's more verbose.
Have variable restart behavior, restart, restart and restart dependancies, reboot, just let processes die, etc..
Have dependancies (start the database before the shit that inserts data in to it, even though it shouldn't matter, it does) and start them in the right order.
Kill dependencies when I kill a process
Smart killing, if something doesn't gracefully go down, 9 it down.
Have some kind of health monitoring call back, at a time I specify, execute a program that will check to see if a process is okay.
Once all this is done, maybe support something like soft cycling, kill everything down to single user mode and then bring it all back.
Variable dependency notification, if I restart my database allow me to do nothing to dependant processes, restart them, or HUP them, or something I define.
Full featured logging.
At some configurable interval, sniff out all of the XML configs in this "next gen startup proc" config directory, like every 5 minutes just check for changes and if needed, start something new up.
Allow for user to be specified in the config
Allow for end users to have thier own daemons defined by files in their home directories.
Then finally, allow for cron like behavior and run tranient tasks with all the flexibility of cron.
Proc specific ulimits would be nice also...
And some form of runlevel logic still.
And startup and kill in parallel if allowed by the depends...
And it should have a template for common daemon type things I should just provide a startup command, arguments, a user to run it as, and a run level.
There are probably some things I forgot, it's really not that much, I could see bangin' this out in Python or java in not that much code. My thinking is that instead of checking for a PID file or grepping through ps outout to provide "status" you query a running process and it tells you your proc is up and running. Yeah yeah, I know, shit shouldn't crash and whatever. I've just seen such a shitty job of this stuff being done over and over and even on fairly stock installs of major linux distributions I've seen service
There are many variations on this idea that don't fundmentally involve that many changes to SMTP. I think we're at a crossroads here. What are the "best practices" for spam? Filters with their obvious problems, Black lists which have worse problems, the sender auth where the smtp server logs in to your server during the message transit to check that your server is valid (you know how screwed up that is?) or my favorite dump HTML email because just text is the way to go anyways.. Maybe we should stop using GUIs too because then there won't be any popup ads...
We're trying to fix a broken protocol with terrible band-aids.
Add layering to SMIME or OpenPGP. All server to server communication is signed and optionally encrypted (there are clear benefits besides that like compression also and a degree of security from snooping) There are already well established trust mechanisms, you want to run an SMTP server, you pay a CA to have your cert signed.
People are already spending money on implementing shit to fix spam, the cost of a cert is next to nothing. You can phase it in, put non-signed email in the "questionable" folder until it all but goes away. No changes to client software and best of all, email will get through, you'll never miss an email because some POS filter thought it might be a spam. If you do get spammed, report it and there is an easy way to track it back to its source and have the problem corrected. Also, and this is indirect, the cost of sending email goes up, you'll have to perform some costly calculations to sign and or encrypt them; that's part of the security, it's like rate limiting.
Further, if you deploy SMIME or OpenPGP, this could be pushed to the endusers. There are tons of ways to evolve this.
They want to think that they are big so they won't take certain risks and they don't want to admit that they are small. My personal opinion is that that's where the BS kind of lives. Take indemnification, it's bullshit. What is covered? There are parts of the industry where it matters for some reason but at the end of the day, Microsoft won't indemnify you against anything that matters, read their policy they are going to stand up for you, if someone sues you for their violation. Can anyone post numbers for this kind of lawsuit? I mean, I don't know that I remember hearing anything about it until SCO tried to sue Diamler and Autozone for using Linux and those are stalled out. Really, MS doesn't protect you anymore than they would protect themselves and that's it; moreover should you request indemnification you open yourself up to be responsible for their fees if it's not valid. According to DiDio of the Yankee group, that is "best of breed" indemnification. It's all FUD, we know that, but people are clearly listening to it, it's like spam, they wouldn't keep doing if it wasn't working. I mean, when I first think about indemnification, I think about SLAs and software working as it's expected to and the types of shit you can get from IBM and the big boys; if I was to be sued for using MS's products, worst case is I lose and then sue MS..
If you're a big company, you take your IT seriously, you know have too much to lose so you employ a staff and implementing something like Linux is just a decision based on costs and features. If you're a small company, you do what you can and what you can afford; I love Linux and run it everywhere but I also have to admit for a lot of smaller shops MacOSX or Windows provides a lot more function for less IT investment. They're more enduser friendly. Or small companies have a UNIX dork and employ Linux for some critical functions. That really leaves "midsized" where they may wish to outsource, they aren't comfortable analyzing risks because they can't determine how big or small they really are in the world, they want to be big bug can't afford it and they need to take risks more seriously than small sized organizations. Sign up for MS's all encompassing license for the mill and a half or whatever it is for your group and you sleep well at night.. It's all emotion and insecurity (psychosis) they're scared, they hear the FUD, they believe it.
Really if you look at it, this is something I'd expect distributions to solve to a large degree. I also see Apple potentially making this space really painful for MS if they keep doing what they are, there are already small companies that can do most or all of their IT with MacOS. I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a directory distribution that installs and sets up up LDAP right out of the box and has some managment tools. Same thing could be done with databases. A linux based backup server distribution would be cake. It needs to come out of the box and pop, you know? So of like smoothwall does for firewalls. It seems like a market where you really could add some value, that's what midsized are looking for.
I think that the other area where we can enhance what Linux is offering is by some of the main distribution vendors stop leading with support but start up programs where they suggest third party consultants to do support. That potentially hurts them but Redhat and Suse have the appearance of being large platform vendors. No MS roll out is done with MS support, midsized companies always have some third party consulting group involved.
I think that the database connectivity could be standardized a little more, perhaps with an ORM. It's not bad now but as a postgresql user, I'm not really happy, the "best" connector needs some janked up mx library, there are a few dead connectors. It seems like python.org could take this over or some kind of packager could.
Then the newer pythons allow you to import from a zip. That needs polish, there should be a standard way to package a whole app in a zip (just to make it harder to screw up the file distribution. Having a single unit that contains all the needed code is a huge positive; it's just that much harder to screw stuff up.
Then there are people working on compiler speed, really it isn't as bad as you might think from some of the benchmarks. It can use some improvment though and people are working on it.
They would have to do more than store your public key, they'd have to replace it with their own and then decipher every message you send and recipher it to you.
At the end of the day, that's the difference between Linux and the BSDs. Alan, Andrew and numerous others are content to just publish a patch set for their stuff if it's not accepted in to the mainline, Linus is fairly consistent, you want a debugger, for example, then make it work on all of the supported platforms because that's what he wants, it's nothing personal and it's usually a fairly technical decision when you get to the end of it... (It chaps me that so many people point out areas where patches aren't being accepted without understanding that.) So then you maintain it outside the main kernel tree or you finish the job.
In BSD land, it seems like it quickly becomes a matter of personal pride and other things so you take the whole tree and start your own distribution..
I like the BSDs, I think they are doing great things and bringing good things to the world, same for Linux. I think that there may be a certain psychology at work though. I'm just throwing an idea out there. As Linux has become larger and more accepted and successful, certain types of geeks felt the need to switch to something else, like it was too mainstream for them. Some of them chalk it up to a "corporateness" of Linux, whatever that means, some chalk it up to whatever the masses are using must suck, some say that with the bigger companies and larger user base they don't like the directions that Linux is moving in (I'm not entirely sure I know that that means but I've heard it) and I think some people just like to be different, it makes them feel better for whatever reasons. Linux went through this phase a few years back when there was seemingly a different distribution every week, there are still a huge number of them but for a while you could go to different LUG meetings and such and there would be some new fangled linux dist every week, most have died LSB has come to be accepted and nobody really cares that much any more, Linux is Linux in many ways. BSD has been stuck in this mode a while; to be honest, I expect it to become much worse before it starts to get better, if it ever does. The difference was that the linux distribution frenzy was largely made up of single people or smaller groups trying to brand something, trying to come up with a name for themselves and some small piece of vision that wasn't being satisfied by Redhat or the other big boys. In BSD it's the actual kernel and distribution maintainers that have become angry with each other and taken their toys to a new snadbox to play in. It's an advantage (not that there aren't costs for it) for splitting the kernel from the distribution, now if there were a set of rifts within the linux development community and then a set of rifts within the binutils team and then a set of rifts within the glibc team and then a set of rifts within the compiler team then you could see some real fractures to the Linux process.
They aren't going through your belongings in your house. They are sniffing. I know of 3 major ISPs that have simply handed over everything they had when the FBI came and asked about certain porn businesses that they were helping host. No warning, no nothing, charges didn't even always get filed, the FBI simply asked if they could monitor the traffic and they handed over the keys to the kingdom. In fact that's how they catch kiddy porn peddlers, they watch them for a while before the close them down so that they can watch the clients..
Now if you had some sort of privacy agreement I could see being upset about that. It's a civil thing though, it's not that the government is taking your rights. You don't have to route your packets out to the internet. And the internet is mostly a privately funded and maintained entity. There isn't any regulation, internet isn't a utility. It's not like your history of borrowing from the public library or something. That's easy, "hey uunet, how'd you like to have your taxes reduced by 30%? let us install some hardware in your datacenters and as long as it is there you get a 30% discount" No messy warrants, nothing like that.
Now if they were forcing ISPs to comply then that would be a different matter but that's the problem anyways, you think mom and pop ISP is going to fight The Man when he asks to see you emails? You think comcast or earthlink so much as gives a shit about the millions upon millions of their customers individual privacy? If the FBI doesn't publicize it then why should they give a damn?
If you're really worried about your privacy and the government looking at your packets, then I'd see to it that they don't leave your home lan.
Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 1
Isn't conspiracy to steal copyrighted materials also a crime?
He knowingly broke the law. If they make the punishment a $2500 fine and a slap on the wrist, is that more or less likely to curb this type of crime? That is nearly a hobby for some people; I could fork out $2500 a year and still come out way ahead of the game if I pirate millions of dollars in media. It's like taxes, I don't have to pay them, why should I be put in a federal pen. when I get caught? (Like Al Capone?) it's not like it hurts anybody, right? Not the troops in Iraq, not the Iraqis, not the many nations we give aid to. Just like stealing software or media doesn't hurt anyone, I mean who cares if they outsource your job to India? Or what of the nations that can't afford MS's software so they copy it and then the US beats up on them and their trade laws to curb it? What do you think the Chinese did to their wholesale software pirates and their factories?
What is the fitting punishment? Should the punishment be a force to stop the crime? 15 years seems kind of harsh in one sense, and in another, it makes me a lot less likely to wholesale pirate tons and tons of media. I'll be completely honest, I'm a legal user, I don't have any movies, music, or software that I haven't bought legally. I'm an advocate of the FSF, I use a lot of GNU software and GNU/Linux, I've contributed. I also own some high dollar software, Maple and Mathematica, Office on Mac OSX, several other pieces of software. When I see kids getting busted for piracy and people being sued for pirating music, it makes me think twice every time someone asks me for a copy of something. It justifies the FSF and their mission; if you think the laws are wrong, then support them. It is agaist the law to just steal media. To me, 15 years scares the hell out of me and encourages me to check the my wife's computers and any others in the house to make sure we're legal, I'll gladly go without or pay for the data rather than risk 15years; that seems like an effective deterant for me. We're not talking about some 12 year old kid who didn't know better, he knew exactly what he was doing, should that affect the crime? That's just wanton disrespect for our laws and society. Don't confuse this with civil disobedience, he wasn't actively trying to change the laws, just ignoring them.
They used the very same example to demo searchmanager/2 about 10 years ago (maybe more?)
Phenominal technology, IBM built the desktop search that everybody is pushing now, way back when. Cutting edge search and indexing capabilities, fully extendable, you could write your own plugins to deal with your data (use JPEG meta tags to label pictures from your digicam? Write a little plug in so you can search through your photos) and it had semantic and linguisitic searching.
For a long time SM/2 was kind of the poster child for IBM's inability to take remarkably cool technology to the consumer. Everyone that used it thought it was cool, nobody ever knew about it. They had trouble getting the word out within the company about it. Last I heard anything about it, they were turing the technology into some kind of intranet spider. It was the shit, it might have even had primitive cross referencing, like you could search for president and it would find references to Clinton because a third article may have referred to him as the president. They seemed to have some foresight into this area, web searching has to cut out some much bullshit, you wouldn't want to contaminate your semantic searches with all of it, keeping it in intranet space might be a good idea. Local search is hot right now too though so maybe it'll come back.
I'm not anti-gentoo or linux from scratch. I get a huge kick out of the kiddies though. I'm particularly fond of the type that bounce from distribution to distribution until they find one that configures some application for them.
What's even funnier, rather than let the humor be (and unless you're one of the people mocked, you have to admit and know that there are those users in the Gentoo community, albeit they are not exclusive members of the gentoo world..) what really cracks me up are the rebuttals. They know it's not "faster" (start listing off some examples if you have them, I'd like to measure the performance increase of a running application) It's easy to talk but I'd like to see some real world numbers on a running application.
It's just funny. Let it be that. Even if that percieved 0.01% humor improvement is imagined, I still think it's funny.
I'm not sure how many itaniums have shipped. According the theregister.co.uk, there have been quarters where Dell and IBM shipped 2 and 3 digit quantities of Itanium and Itanium 2 systems. This kind of talks about it.
Now I was bidding on a dual itanium on ebay a while back, it seemed like a cool piece of exotic hardware with decent performance (my alpha is nearing EOL..;) 40GB of SCSI drive, 2 800Mhz IA64s, 2GB of RAM. I bailed at $800 and it went for $975; original price of the hardware was $12k to $14k. The alarming thing was when I was searching IBM's site for information, it was practically non-existant. I asked some employees to look around inside, it's a real machine the specs are correct, no info because they literally sold under 500 of them.
There used to be all sorts of Linux on IA64 sites, they've been drying up. People are still doing stuff but it looks like some well backed projects have just dried up. Like the trillian project. Also, it doesn't seem like anybody is making an IA64 linux distribution anymore, there are some projects but all the big boys look like they have one they made back a couple years and never sold it and never updated it, SuSE has an 8. Redhat has a 7 (?!? RH 7? How old is that? Is that even a 21st century release?) and it looks like a RHEL 2.1 which is more reasonable, Mandrake has never been terribly strong off of IA32 but they have an 8.1 which is ancient and, Debian and Gentoo look like that have projects but they are kind of fossilized. I imagine that once the installer is done for most distros, it's mostly just a job of recompiling packages and then some kind of QA effort or a "beta" labeling goes on everything, not to make it sound easy or anything but once it's built it shouldn't require a huge team to maintain. Maybe Intel would kick in a few dollars too, they need Linux for IA64 internally and if they really want to sell the hardware they need some OS for it.
So Intel has pumped a trmendous amount of money in to IA64, a huge amount of time and they have all but decaired it their future architecture so presumably that leaves them at a bit of a disadvantage should they abandon it. SGI has bet on it. HP has bet on it. It's really down to POWER/PowerPC, x86 and x86-64, and then sort of Sparc. Does Intel keep kicking this dead horse? When does it turn the corner? and how? The next gen chips are all supposed to be socket compatible between the EM64 and IA64, if Intel starts shipping $400 Itaniums then maybe it will start to get some traction but why would you buy one when you can buy an em64 that will run Windows and tons of other software? I don't see how they back out, and I don't see how they can make it win, it looks like AMD has forced their hand and what that really does is make IBM the only contender in enterprise 64bit heavy duty computing right now.
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It's a nice list. Seems really lacking without the Pentium-M line though. THat's where intel is going.
Use an actual release of the compiler and report this regression to the gcc mailing list. It's an error.
CDs should come with better artwork and possibly ticket promotions and stuff like that in them (Camel cash anyone?) it helps defuse the piracy issue.
PPV is easy, it's actually fairly cheap, especially compared to going to the movies. Making it more worth while seems like a great move. Movie theaters should follow suit, the MPAA is up in arms over the minicam piracted copies so they should just make it worth you while to buy an actual ticket for the $9 and see the movie. With 2 tickets stubs, send me the DVD for free when it's ready or something.
If there are cluster of entities in the same slot, asteroids.
Totally because the FBI is really only capable of focusing on one problem at a time. I mean if any kidnappers get away or terrorists attack or any interstate commerce violations happen it'll be because they misappropriated resources to stopping copyright violations.
I suggest that we boycott any "reviews" that include boot time in a major way. The only time I'd like to see boot time mentioned is if it is in some way painfully long or if there is a ration boot time / up time that is too far from zero.
Now it's all "the real reason they dumped IBM."
It's simple. There isn't anything they want built that IBM can't build. They might not like the cost, they might not want to pay for the rapid revs that Intel does, but it's all possible. THis is simply a case of Apple expecting to get their ass kissed by IBM and treated like the only thing in the world and IBM expecting to get a hand job from Apple for doing what they are paid to do and they finally realized it. Guess what, very few asses get kissed by IBM and it's not a regular thing when it happens. The same is true about apple, they don't really need much of anyone's help. Spew all the theories you want, this is probably more like J-Lo and Ben Affleck; they just got tired of pretending that they liked each other.
You give them all way too much credit to say that they are planning some DRM coup several chips out in the future. Believe me, Apple and MS and Intel aren't playing together, I think that they can just barely tolerate each other.
I think the only thing that really mattered was/is cost. Until you're making IA-64 desktop workstations for $700, it's just not that interesting to the masses. Compilers aren't as strong as they could be because compiler writers aren't working on IA-64 compilers because they aren't selling because of cost. 32bit IA-32 support is nice, but when it's all said and done, you want IA64 code. Because it's expensive and nobody buys them, MS doesn't spend the several hundred million dollars to keep Windows running well on it and get the Office Apps ported.
It's kind of interesting, Intel timed it really well to kill off sparc, alpha, PA-RISC, Mips and potentially even POWER. They essentially did kill off most of them, Sparc is kind of limping along for now and IBM's still in the ring. On the other hand, they also made kind of a big blunder and they hurt themselves by hurting a lot of that competition. Why would I spend $100k on an IA64 solution that hasn't be proven in the field rather than a Sparc or POWER solution? Or even better, spend $30 on Xeons and Linux.
Really to make it happen, HP is going to have to move a lot and start to hurt IBM with them and the cost will have to drop substantially. As is the x86-64 market is building up, being 64bit alone isn't a selling feature, people don't care about RISC vs. CISC vs EPIC and there is simply no way that small and midsized companies are going to pay for the relatively small performance improvement.
x86-64 sounds and look sexy but Intel needs shit or get off the pot with ia64. If they plan to keep kicking it, bringing a customer like Apple in to the fold on anything less than ia64 seems counter productive unless they some how magically think they will turn x86-64 into ia64.
What does make sense is if they were to move the x-serve to x86-64. I could see something like that happening. I can see that with the PowerBook line that Apple may be feeling vulnerable but they are still very competitive machines.
Basically, cron needs higher resolution, that's my only beef with it. It also seems like to do anything facny with cron you end up writing a program to do it and it's not that uncommon to do that.
The startup scripts need an all together different kind of overhaul. I've been working on Linux appliances for over 6 years now, without exception, it seems like someone ends up writing some kind of "health script" that is kicked off by cron every minute or a few or is a daemon in it's own right that watches for things to crash or not be running and then it restarts them. I've seen it in a production set-top box based on Linux where we essentially wrote our own init and had it treat some processes special and 5 different software appliances. Fact of life is software crashes from time to time. These scripts then do something else, like ping the gateway or something stupid to check if the network went down before they do what it is that they do. To make matters worse, they are always written in Perl by some guy who doesn't know Bourne shell to write a good startup script in the first place; that's the part that chaps me. Rather than contaminate the system with all this extra shit we should just have an easily extensible and configurable system process starter and monitor and it shouldn't require scripting to do anything advanced.
There are probably some things I forgot, it's really not that much, I could see bangin' this out in Python or java in not that much code. My thinking is that instead of checking for a PID file or grepping through ps outout to provide "status" you query a running process and it tells you your proc is up and running. Yeah yeah, I know, shit shouldn't crash and whatever. I've just seen such a shitty job of this stuff being done over and over and even on fairly stock installs of major linux distributions I've seen service
We're trying to fix a broken protocol with terrible band-aids.
Add layering to SMIME or OpenPGP. All server to server communication is signed and optionally encrypted (there are clear benefits besides that like compression also and a degree of security from snooping) There are already well established trust mechanisms, you want to run an SMTP server, you pay a CA to have your cert signed.
People are already spending money on implementing shit to fix spam, the cost of a cert is next to nothing. You can phase it in, put non-signed email in the "questionable" folder until it all but goes away. No changes to client software and best of all, email will get through, you'll never miss an email because some POS filter thought it might be a spam. If you do get spammed, report it and there is an easy way to track it back to its source and have the problem corrected. Also, and this is indirect, the cost of sending email goes up, you'll have to perform some costly calculations to sign and or encrypt them; that's part of the security, it's like rate limiting.
Further, if you deploy SMIME or OpenPGP, this could be pushed to the endusers. There are tons of ways to evolve this.
they are going to stand up for you, if someone sues you for their violation. Can anyone post numbers for this kind of lawsuit? I mean, I don't know that I remember hearing anything about it until SCO tried to sue Diamler and Autozone for using Linux and those are stalled out. Really, MS doesn't protect you anymore than they would protect themselves and that's it; moreover should you request indemnification you open yourself up to be responsible for their fees if it's not valid. According to DiDio of the Yankee group, that is "best of breed" indemnification. It's all FUD, we know that, but people are clearly listening to it, it's like spam, they wouldn't keep doing if it wasn't working. I mean, when I first think about indemnification, I think about SLAs and software working as it's expected to and the types of shit you can get from IBM and the big boys; if I was to be sued for using MS's products, worst case is I lose and then sue MS..
If you're a big company, you take your IT seriously, you know have too much to lose so you employ a staff and implementing something like Linux is just a decision based on costs and features. If you're a small company, you do what you can and what you can afford; I love Linux and run it everywhere but I also have to admit for a lot of smaller shops MacOSX or Windows provides a lot more function for less IT investment. They're more enduser friendly. Or small companies have a UNIX dork and employ Linux for some critical functions. That really leaves "midsized" where they may wish to outsource, they aren't comfortable analyzing risks because they can't determine how big or small they really are in the world, they want to be big bug can't afford it and they need to take risks more seriously than small sized organizations. Sign up for MS's all encompassing license for the mill and a half or whatever it is for your group and you sleep well at night.. It's all emotion and insecurity (psychosis) they're scared, they hear the FUD, they believe it.
Really if you look at it, this is something I'd expect distributions to solve to a large degree. I also see Apple potentially making this space really painful for MS if they keep doing what they are, there are already small companies that can do most or all of their IT with MacOS. I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a directory distribution that installs and sets up up LDAP right out of the box and has some managment tools. Same thing could be done with databases. A linux based backup server distribution would be cake. It needs to come out of the box and pop, you know? So of like smoothwall does for firewalls. It seems like a market where you really could add some value, that's what midsized are looking for.
I think that the other area where we can enhance what Linux is offering is by some of the main distribution vendors stop leading with support but start up programs where they suggest third party consultants to do support. That potentially hurts them but Redhat and Suse have the appearance of being large platform vendors. No MS roll out is done with MS support, midsized companies always have some third party consulting group involved.
Psycopg. Nothing is really wrong with it, I'm just not fond of the mxtimedate dependency.
Then the newer pythons allow you to import from a zip. That needs polish, there should be a standard way to package a whole app in a zip (just to make it harder to screw up the file distribution. Having a single unit that contains all the needed code is a huge positive; it's just that much harder to screw stuff up.
Then there are people working on compiler speed, really it isn't as bad as you might think from some of the benchmarks. It can use some improvment though and people are working on it.
They would have to do more than store your public key, they'd have to replace it with their own and then decipher every message you send and recipher it to you.
Sci-fi fans? Surely these are manziers or bros that are being mailed in.
Sorry I hurt your feelings; what was the troll? Any chance you were a BeOS user or an Amiga user?
In BSD land, it seems like it quickly becomes a matter of personal pride and other things so you take the whole tree and start your own distribution..
I like the BSDs, I think they are doing great things and bringing good things to the world, same for Linux. I think that there may be a certain psychology at work though. I'm just throwing an idea out there. As Linux has become larger and more accepted and successful, certain types of geeks felt the need to switch to something else, like it was too mainstream for them. Some of them chalk it up to a "corporateness" of Linux, whatever that means, some chalk it up to whatever the masses are using must suck, some say that with the bigger companies and larger user base they don't like the directions that Linux is moving in (I'm not entirely sure I know that that means but I've heard it) and I think some people just like to be different, it makes them feel better for whatever reasons. Linux went through this phase a few years back when there was seemingly a different distribution every week, there are still a huge number of them but for a while you could go to different LUG meetings and such and there would be some new fangled linux dist every week, most have died LSB has come to be accepted and nobody really cares that much any more, Linux is Linux in many ways. BSD has been stuck in this mode a while; to be honest, I expect it to become much worse before it starts to get better, if it ever does. The difference was that the linux distribution frenzy was largely made up of single people or smaller groups trying to brand something, trying to come up with a name for themselves and some small piece of vision that wasn't being satisfied by Redhat or the other big boys. In BSD it's the actual kernel and distribution maintainers that have become angry with each other and taken their toys to a new snadbox to play in. It's an advantage (not that there aren't costs for it) for splitting the kernel from the distribution, now if there were a set of rifts within the linux development community and then a set of rifts within the binutils team and then a set of rifts within the glibc team and then a set of rifts within the compiler team then you could see some real fractures to the Linux process.
Now if you had some sort of privacy agreement I could see being upset about that. It's a civil thing though, it's not that the government is taking your rights. You don't have to route your packets out to the internet. And the internet is mostly a privately funded and maintained entity. There isn't any regulation, internet isn't a utility. It's not like your history of borrowing from the public library or something. That's easy, "hey uunet, how'd you like to have your taxes reduced by 30%? let us install some hardware in your datacenters and as long as it is there you get a 30% discount" No messy warrants, nothing like that.
Now if they were forcing ISPs to comply then that would be a different matter but that's the problem anyways, you think mom and pop ISP is going to fight The Man when he asks to see you emails? You think comcast or earthlink so much as gives a shit about the millions upon millions of their customers individual privacy? If the FBI doesn't publicize it then why should they give a damn?
If you're really worried about your privacy and the government looking at your packets, then I'd see to it that they don't leave your home lan.
Isn't conspiracy to steal copyrighted materials also a crime?
What is the fitting punishment? Should the punishment be a force to stop the crime? 15 years seems kind of harsh in one sense, and in another, it makes me a lot less likely to wholesale pirate tons and tons of media. I'll be completely honest, I'm a legal user, I don't have any movies, music, or software that I haven't bought legally. I'm an advocate of the FSF, I use a lot of GNU software and GNU/Linux, I've contributed. I also own some high dollar software, Maple and Mathematica, Office on Mac OSX, several other pieces of software. When I see kids getting busted for piracy and people being sued for pirating music, it makes me think twice every time someone asks me for a copy of something. It justifies the FSF and their mission; if you think the laws are wrong, then support them. It is agaist the law to just steal media. To me, 15 years scares the hell out of me and encourages me to check the my wife's computers and any others in the house to make sure we're legal, I'll gladly go without or pay for the data rather than risk 15years; that seems like an effective deterant for me. We're not talking about some 12 year old kid who didn't know better, he knew exactly what he was doing, should that affect the crime? That's just wanton disrespect for our laws and society. Don't confuse this with civil disobedience, he wasn't actively trying to change the laws, just ignoring them.
Phenominal technology, IBM built the desktop search that everybody is pushing now, way back when. Cutting edge search and indexing capabilities, fully extendable, you could write your own plugins to deal with your data (use JPEG meta tags to label pictures from your digicam? Write a little plug in so you can search through your photos) and it had semantic and linguisitic searching.
For a long time SM/2 was kind of the poster child for IBM's inability to take remarkably cool technology to the consumer. Everyone that used it thought it was cool, nobody ever knew about it. They had trouble getting the word out within the company about it. Last I heard anything about it, they were turing the technology into some kind of intranet spider. It was the shit, it might have even had primitive cross referencing, like you could search for president and it would find references to Clinton because a third article may have referred to him as the president. They seemed to have some foresight into this area, web searching has to cut out some much bullshit, you wouldn't want to contaminate your semantic searches with all of it, keeping it in intranet space might be a good idea. Local search is hot right now too though so maybe it'll come back.
What's even funnier, rather than let the humor be (and unless you're one of the people mocked, you have to admit and know that there are those users in the Gentoo community, albeit they are not exclusive members of the gentoo world..) what really cracks me up are the rebuttals. They know it's not "faster" (start listing off some examples if you have them, I'd like to measure the performance increase of a running application) It's easy to talk but I'd like to see some real world numbers on a running application.
It's just funny. Let it be that. Even if that percieved 0.01% humor improvement is imagined, I still think it's funny.
Now I was bidding on a dual itanium on ebay a while back, it seemed like a cool piece of exotic hardware with decent performance (my alpha is nearing EOL..;) 40GB of SCSI drive, 2 800Mhz IA64s, 2GB of RAM. I bailed at $800 and it went for $975; original price of the hardware was $12k to $14k. The alarming thing was when I was searching IBM's site for information, it was practically non-existant. I asked some employees to look around inside, it's a real machine the specs are correct, no info because they literally sold under 500 of them.
There used to be all sorts of Linux on IA64 sites, they've been drying up. People are still doing stuff but it looks like some well backed projects have just dried up. Like the trillian project. Also, it doesn't seem like anybody is making an IA64 linux distribution anymore, there are some projects but all the big boys look like they have one they made back a couple years and never sold it and never updated it, SuSE has an 8. Redhat has a 7 (?!? RH 7? How old is that? Is that even a 21st century release?) and it looks like a RHEL 2.1 which is more reasonable, Mandrake has never been terribly strong off of IA32 but they have an 8.1 which is ancient and, Debian and Gentoo look like that have projects but they are kind of fossilized. I imagine that once the installer is done for most distros, it's mostly just a job of recompiling packages and then some kind of QA effort or a "beta" labeling goes on everything, not to make it sound easy or anything but once it's built it shouldn't require a huge team to maintain. Maybe Intel would kick in a few dollars too, they need Linux for IA64 internally and if they really want to sell the hardware they need some OS for it.
So Intel has pumped a trmendous amount of money in to IA64, a huge amount of time and they have all but decaired it their future architecture so presumably that leaves them at a bit of a disadvantage should they abandon it. SGI has bet on it. HP has bet on it. It's really down to POWER/PowerPC, x86 and x86-64, and then sort of Sparc. Does Intel keep kicking this dead horse? When does it turn the corner? and how? The next gen chips are all supposed to be socket compatible between the EM64 and IA64, if Intel starts shipping $400 Itaniums then maybe it will start to get some traction but why would you buy one when you can buy an em64 that will run Windows and tons of other software? I don't see how they back out, and I don't see how they can make it win, it looks like AMD has forced their hand and what that really does is make IBM the only contender in enterprise 64bit heavy duty computing right now.