I believe they OEM from PatchLink. And PatchLink also does Windows software. The Linux version costs more, and I don't know if it's as advanced or as useful - there really isn't a popular "standardized linux desktop", so mostly Linux in big corps are on servers and I dunno if most would want to (or should) automatically roll out patches onto their servers (most sites aren't like google).
I wonder what EDS used to screw up so badly. You'd have to take extra effort to screw up so badly on PatchLink Update for windows. It's possible to screw up and put _compatible_ patches on 60K machines prematurely - e.g. deploy on the wrong group, but EDS seems to have put _incompatible_ patches on 60K machines. Big diff between "oops boss, I updated all the machines too early, but 99% are working fine after the update - the rest have viruses or something interacting with the update" vs "oops boss, I screwed up 60K machines".
Still, if I were doing 60K Linux desktops I'd do things a lot differently - it'd be something like booting off knoppix terminal server from servers at various sites - there will still be different sites (otherwise the network load would be crazy, and each site has different needs).
So update the client image on a site, and the clients will get the new image.
Don't you remember the good old days of "oops forgot to run lilo"?
That's why I switched to grub for Linux systems.
I use FreeBSD at home though, and it sure seems a bit simpler to manage. Maybe I should try Gentoo one of these days, but looks like RedHat and Suse are the ones to use from the "officially supported" by 3rd party software point of view.
XP "features": 1) Stops working if you change your hardware too often unless you "reactivate" it. 2) boots up faster 3) Can switch users without logging off and closing other apps (can be very useful) 4) has option to save credentials with their run as command, so it's much easier to run IE using a user account with less privileges and so help prevent worms etc trashing stuff created by your normal user account which you use for office work etc. 5) Has tons of eye candy stuff which gets in the way of the way I do things, which fortunately can be turned off - so that it looks and works more like win2K. My ex-colleague didn't know you could turn _off_ the group programs on taskbar thing - he was happy when I showed him it was possible.
The personalize menu's thingy on both O/S sucks. Hiding options and making them unpredictable does NOT make things easier IMO. Better if you make them different colours/shades gradually.
If you have admin rights to a Linux/MS PC, you can do almost anything including screw things up totally. Otherwise it'd be hard to replace system files that needed to be replaced don't you think?
I'd like to know what patch distribution and management software they used to screw up so bad.
There are various such patch distribution and management software around. My company used to sell Patchlink - seemed an OK software, with Patchlink I don't think you'd be able to screw up like this, unless you forced a custom update. The various Patchlink supplied patches will only apply if the relevant software is installed. So the way to screw up is you distribute custom software and run it without any checks - e.g. distribute an executable to ALL machines regardless of O/S and software, and ran it.
I doubt this was Microsoft's fault at all. This is either EDS's fault or the patch management software vendor's fault.
Most people can only keep/visualize/instantiate about 7 distinct objects in short term memory at any one time. You might want to stick to a max of 5 to cater the slightly below average. (Maybe someone might want to be a hero and try increase the population average to 10 items or something;) ).
There are workarounds if you can easily get people to group a bunch of items as one object.
If people have to remember 7 or more important things during the learning period where short term memory is used then the thing is hard.
Given the amount of choices and options possible with software, it's going to be hard.
So the workaround is to split the learning phases to small absorbable chunks and give time between these phases for people to commit them to long term memory.
If you use common/defacto UI standards, many of the users would be familiar them and so the effective number of learning phases required drops.
If they really are so powerful why haven't we seen more free/OSS code, modules, programs written in these? If one Lisp programmer = 5 to 50 programmers in other languages[1], we should be seeing more stuff from them eh? If one Lisp programmer is only 2 x other programmers in output, then erm thanks but no thanks...
Look at the "software ecosystems" of Perl (e.g. CPAN), Python, PHP, Java etc.
Compare them with Lisp/Smalltalk. Even Ruby (a newcomer) appears to be doing better.
You have the top perl coders whipping out weird and funny modules/programs (and sometimes even weird AND useful modules/programs) in their _spare/idle_ cycles.
You have the top python coders whipping out free code (for fun?) too. Examples: spambayes, bittorrent, Zope, Plone.
What happened to the Lisp programmers? No spare cycles? Where's all that alleged power I keep hearing about?
Maybe languages like Smalltalk and Lisp aren't that powerful - they just attract/keep a certain group of programmers (more likely to be decent/top programmers).
"Actually in Malaysia only muslims have to follow sharia so if you aren't muslim you can do what you like...although finding alchohol or porn could be tricky.
I wouldn't move to even a relatively moderate muslim country like malayasia though. In a country of hundreds of millions theres bound to be more than a couple islamo-kooks looking to blow up westerners."
I'm in Malaysia. Finding alcohol is definitely not tricky, in fact beer's pretty cheap here considering it is a muslim country. Of course beer might not count as alcohol to some people (concentration is quite low). But you can all sorts of alcoholic drinks at bars, nightclubs, most restaurants, 7/11s, supermarts etc. Plenty of choices. You can get stout for about USD1.50 to USD3.00 depending on where you go.
Finding porn tricky? Erm there's this thing called the Internet and spam sure gets here too. Avoiding porn has got to be trickier than finding porn...
Malaysia only has 20+ million people. IIRC in the US there were more than a couple of "islamo-kooks" who blew up more than a few westerners.
"1) The first lesson is that people lie. Those that tell you that they spend 70+ hours at work are really speaking about 40-50"
That's the thing - you can have people sit at their desks for 70+ hours a week, but I bet most would be just about as effective as if they had only put in 40-50.
Sure but where's the proof that the machines are more accurate than hand counts in real world conditions esp in problematic scenarios? Machines are often very good when everything works fine but not so good when things are fubarred.
As I mentioned sometimes the ballots could be vague and subject to interpretation (to make voting less prone to such situations one has to be careful not to push the problem elsewhere or create a bigger problem (ala Diebold)).
If you have very slim margins deciding whether a voting result is correct/incorrect is not so easy nor simple. Any vague vote records become quite significant. e.g. is a selection considered shaded by a pencil or not etc?
Just assuming the machines are more accurate would do greater disservice to the voters.
Precision is not the same as accuracy. Accuracy is not the same as validity.
With such slim margins it's practically a draw. After all any slight "noise" could flip the result. It's hard to say which is the correct reading.
So I argue if that happens it's much better if you have the parties agreeing on the result even _if_ their mutual count is less accurate than a machine - since the signal is so close to noise level anyway. After all that, if they can't agree the "effectively-drawn" candidates might as well play rock-paper-scissors to decide.
The worst thing they can do is look at porn? Erm, they could be tricked into being the next Paris Hilton or something like that. Worse tricking someone else.
Many people might actually prefer committing suicide than face massive embarassment.
Kids no matter how smart shouldn't be expected to know as much of the far reaching consequences of their actions as their parents.
It's fine for parents to be benevolent dictators over their children. That's their job.
Sure you can argue it's brainwashing, but if you don't influence/domesticate/brainwash your children the way you want, someone else is going to to do it - MTV, some dubious person on online chat, some porn site...
This being slashdot, maybe you should say "The internet has lots of bad stuff, I'm trying to protect you from it". If they don't believe you - show em goatse.cx. Use tubgirl only for tough kids...:)
Yep. IF the machines are more accurate and not just more precise.
EVEN if the machines are more accurate, if they aren't significantly more accurate, a multi-witnessed count result might be treated with more respect.
Note that with some style of votes, the voters may screw up the ballot sheet so that it is may actually be hard to figure out what the voter was voting for, or whether the vote should be regarded as spoilt. So actual accuracy might be almost subjective...
Also given such a scenario IF the party representative agrees that a vote isn't for his/her party then I'd say it's more _valid_ than a machine saying otherwise EVEN if the machine is more "accurate" based on certain standardized tests etc etc etc.
Because the party representative speaks for his/her party, whereas the machine _should_ be disinterested. So a conceded vague vote is more significant than a machine's guess of that vague vote.
The trouble with the IA64 route was, it was (and is) about as painful to switch from x86-32 to IA64 as it was to switch from x86-32 to POWER (or some other RISC).
So the Itanic take up has only been by Intel loyalists or people who got Itaniums very cheap, or people herded by HP consultants...
Whereas switching from x86-32 to x86-64 is going to be a lot less painful.
And it's fun to see pigs fly even if they cheat and use jetpacks.
I'm glad AMD didn't just extend x86 to 64 bit. They added Hypertransport, more registers and a lower latency memory interface for each CPU.
AMD have some smart people too. Looks like they didn't get too crippled by politics in AMD.
It actually seems to me that Intel has great _process_ and Q/A engineers - so far I haven't directly experienced an Intel CPU being DOA/failing (haven't experienced AMD ones failing either, but I only recently went AMD). However I've experienced UltraSPARCs failing...
I haven't seen evidence that Intel's CPU design bunch are really that outstanding. The Itanium 2 doesn't look that impressive architecture-wise. I'd be happy to if someone can provide evidence that they are outstanding.
Yep that's how things should be. There's a big difference between a machine counted result of 77.434% of the votes and a hand counted result of 60.2% of the votes.
Even though a hand recount could have less precision (e.g. 100 times less precise), it may be more accurate esp if representatives from the affected parties and independent(?) observers are there to witness each count (this is how vote counts are done in my country btw). And anyway even if it is all a show, rational and reasonable voters should be more likely to accept such a result counted that way[1].
BUT the widespread lack of commonsense, ignorance and stupidity is quite staggering though. So it seems that the voters don't really care anyway.
Also get the impression that many if not most voters of the winning party stupidly don't and won't care either- as long as their party wins they are happy. The degree of partisanship in the US is gross - "No matter what happens - XXX is right".
If these people like that sort of thing they should not vote - just stay at home and watch "pro wrestling" on TV.
[1] If the electorate are going to be screwed anyway, at least make them take a lot of trouble to do so. Don't make it easy for them by just settling for machine counts.
If a machine is rigged, proper hand recounts could show the problem even if it's not as accurate as a nonrigged machine. It's like the diff between machine recount: Candidate A has 87.4432% of the votes and hand recount: Candidate A has 56% of the votes. Sure the result is the same: Candidate A wins. BUT you learn that something fishy likely happened.
That said I get the impression that the typical US voter of the winning party wouldn't care, especially given sufficient spin - all they want is their party to win[1].
Over here in my country, when they count the votes, the various different party representatives can be (and usually are) there to observe each vote as it is counted (and dispute if necessary).
Sure our system isn't very anonymous, but I'd rather have our system than be Diebolded as in the US.
If all the party representatives are in collusion to create a particular result then the voters are probably screwed anyway.
[1] If they like that sort of stuff, they should stick to watching WWE and not bother voting.
You miss the point. It's about showing respect to the process. Otherwise why bother all the spiel about the USA being a democracy?
The Ceremony is to indicate the importance the public considers the event.
EVEN if it's all a show (and the relevant votes have already been Diebolded), you have to make it seem like a good show. Go through the _proper_ motions.
Just try telling a kid a story, and skipping everything except for "And they all lived happily ever after".
I suppose maybe nowadays they are content with that and they'll go off to watch MTV and stuff themselves.
BTW: Copying copyrighted works without permission isn't copyright infringement everywhere and all the time.
If Valve without warning screws their _paying_ customers for using nocd what do they expect? Rational and mature behaviour by all of them?
I dunno about you, but there'd could be thousands of new users of the warezed version... What else can the "disenfranchised" do?
It's kinda ironic that the ones using the warez version are getting a better experience in some cases:). I suppose this should change for online multiplayer HL2? Does the warez version work in that scenario given the Steam+HL2 architecture/system?
Slashdot Mirror
"The developer provides a full refund. I think you're confused over the word "developer""
"It isn't who wrote the code, it's who certified it as safe for that use."
By whose laws? Or is that just wishful thinking?
If they start making/changing laws dealing with this, someone better go help make sure the law makers do the right thing.
Otherwise people like Linus COULD be made liable. Haven't you noticed the number of stupid and dangerous laws being passed?
I believe they OEM from PatchLink. And PatchLink also does Windows software. The Linux version costs more, and I don't know if it's as advanced or as useful - there really isn't a popular "standardized linux desktop", so mostly Linux in big corps are on servers and I dunno if most would want to (or should) automatically roll out patches onto their servers (most sites aren't like google).
I wonder what EDS used to screw up so badly. You'd have to take extra effort to screw up so badly on PatchLink Update for windows. It's possible to screw up and put _compatible_ patches on 60K machines prematurely - e.g. deploy on the wrong group, but EDS seems to have put _incompatible_ patches on 60K machines. Big diff between "oops boss, I updated all the machines too early, but 99% are working fine after the update - the rest have viruses or something interacting with the update" vs "oops boss, I screwed up 60K machines".
Still, if I were doing 60K Linux desktops I'd do things a lot differently - it'd be something like booting off knoppix terminal server from servers at various sites - there will still be different sites (otherwise the network load would be crazy, and each site has different needs).
So update the client image on a site, and the clients will get the new image.
Well that says a lot about their customers (including the UK Gov) who seem to keep handing them money.
Don't you remember the good old days of "oops forgot to run lilo"?
That's why I switched to grub for Linux systems.
I use FreeBSD at home though, and it sure seems a bit simpler to manage. Maybe I should try Gentoo one of these days, but looks like RedHat and Suse are the ones to use from the "officially supported" by 3rd party software point of view.
XP "features":
1) Stops working if you change your hardware too often unless you "reactivate" it.
2) boots up faster
3) Can switch users without logging off and closing other apps (can be very useful)
4) has option to save credentials with their run as command, so it's much easier to run IE using a user account with less privileges and so help prevent worms etc trashing stuff created by your normal user account which you use for office work etc.
5) Has tons of eye candy stuff which gets in the way of the way I do things, which fortunately can be turned off - so that it looks and works more like win2K. My ex-colleague didn't know you could turn _off_ the group programs on taskbar thing - he was happy when I showed him it was possible.
The personalize menu's thingy on both O/S sucks. Hiding options and making them unpredictable does NOT make things easier IMO. Better if you make them different colours/shades gradually.
If you have admin rights to a Linux/MS PC, you can do almost anything including screw things up totally. Otherwise it'd be hard to replace system files that needed to be replaced don't you think?
I'd like to know what patch distribution and management software they used to screw up so bad.
There are various such patch distribution and management software around. My company used to sell Patchlink - seemed an OK software, with Patchlink I don't think you'd be able to screw up like this, unless you forced a custom update. The various Patchlink supplied patches will only apply if the relevant software is installed. So the way to screw up is you distribute custom software and run it without any checks - e.g. distribute an executable to ALL machines regardless of O/S and software, and ran it.
I doubt this was Microsoft's fault at all. This is either EDS's fault or the patch management software vendor's fault.
Most people can only keep/visualize/instantiate about 7 distinct objects in short term memory at any one time. You might want to stick to a max of 5 to cater the slightly below average. (Maybe someone might want to be a hero and try increase the population average to 10 items or something ;) ).
There are workarounds if you can easily get people to group a bunch of items as one object.
If people have to remember 7 or more important things during the learning period where short term memory is used then the thing is hard.
Given the amount of choices and options possible with software, it's going to be hard.
So the workaround is to split the learning phases to small absorbable chunks and give time between these phases for people to commit them to long term memory.
If you use common/defacto UI standards, many of the users would be familiar them and so the effective number of learning phases required drops.
Isn't Forth about as prone to buffer flows as C is?
Good for firmware/embedded I suppose, but let's not substitute C with something with about as much potential to be just a problematic.
Anecdotal maybe, but I crashed a Forth webserver(zHTTP) on my first try. Typed a single quote into a webserver password prompt and poof.
Zimmerly (the author of the webserver) said the line between CODE and DATA is blurred
by Lisp and obliterated by Forth.
IMO a language prone to such stuff/behaviour isn't that great from the IT Security perspective. It's like "SQL Injection" on steroids.
If they really are so powerful why haven't we seen more free/OSS code, modules, programs written in these? If one Lisp programmer = 5 to 50 programmers in other languages[1], we should be seeing more stuff from them eh? If one Lisp programmer is only 2 x other programmers in output, then erm thanks but no thanks...
Look at the "software ecosystems" of Perl (e.g. CPAN), Python, PHP, Java etc.
Compare them with Lisp/Smalltalk. Even Ruby (a newcomer) appears to be doing better.
You have the top perl coders whipping out weird and funny modules/programs (and sometimes even weird AND useful modules/programs) in their _spare/idle_ cycles.
You have the top python coders whipping out free code (for fun?) too. Examples: spambayes, bittorrent, Zope, Plone.
What happened to the Lisp programmers? No spare cycles? Where's all that alleged power I keep hearing about?
Maybe languages like Smalltalk and Lisp aren't that powerful - they just attract/keep a certain group of programmers (more likely to be decent/top programmers).
What happens if open source developers are held financially responsible for their errors too?
"Actually in Malaysia only muslims have to follow sharia so if you aren't muslim you can do what you like...although finding alchohol or porn could be tricky.
I wouldn't move to even a relatively moderate muslim country like malayasia though. In a country of hundreds of millions theres bound to be more than a couple islamo-kooks looking to blow up westerners."
I'm in Malaysia. Finding alcohol is definitely not tricky, in fact beer's pretty cheap here considering it is a muslim country. Of course beer might not count as alcohol to some people (concentration is quite low). But you can all sorts of alcoholic drinks at bars, nightclubs, most restaurants, 7/11s, supermarts etc. Plenty of choices. You can get stout for about USD1.50 to USD3.00 depending on where you go.
Finding porn tricky? Erm there's this thing called the Internet and spam sure gets here too. Avoiding porn has got to be trickier than finding porn...
Malaysia only has 20+ million people. IIRC in the US there were more than a couple of "islamo-kooks" who blew up more than a few westerners.
Could be that getting a subpoena takes time. So by the time subpoenas are approved and so on, logs could have been purged/deleted/expired.
Should probably do it in parallel then- request for a subpoena and at the same time request for data directly from the sites.
"1) The first lesson is that people lie. Those that tell you that they spend 70+ hours at work are really speaking about 40-50"
That's the thing - you can have people sit at their desks for 70+ hours a week, but I bet most would be just about as effective as if they had only put in 40-50.
Sure but where's the proof that the machines are more accurate than hand counts in real world conditions esp in problematic scenarios? Machines are often very good when everything works fine but not so good when things are fubarred.
As I mentioned sometimes the ballots could be vague and subject to interpretation (to make voting less prone to such situations one has to be careful not to push the problem elsewhere or create a bigger problem (ala Diebold)).
If you have very slim margins deciding whether a voting result is correct/incorrect is not so easy nor simple. Any vague vote records become quite significant. e.g. is a selection considered shaded by a pencil or not etc?
Just assuming the machines are more accurate would do greater disservice to the voters.
Precision is not the same as accuracy. Accuracy is not the same as validity.
With such slim margins it's practically a draw. After all any slight "noise" could flip the result. It's hard to say which is the correct reading.
So I argue if that happens it's much better if you have the parties agreeing on the result even _if_ their mutual count is less accurate than a machine - since the signal is so close to noise level anyway. After all that, if they can't agree the "effectively-drawn" candidates might as well play rock-paper-scissors to decide.
The worst thing they can do is look at porn? Erm, they could be tricked into being the next Paris Hilton or something like that. Worse tricking someone else.
:)
Many people might actually prefer committing suicide than face massive embarassment.
Kids no matter how smart shouldn't be expected to know as much of the far reaching consequences of their actions as their parents.
It's fine for parents to be benevolent dictators over their children. That's their job.
Sure you can argue it's brainwashing, but if you don't influence/domesticate/brainwash your children the way you want, someone else is going to to do it - MTV, some dubious person on online chat, some porn site...
This being slashdot, maybe you should say "The internet has lots of bad stuff, I'm trying to protect you from it". If they don't believe you - show em goatse.cx. Use tubgirl only for tough kids...
Yep. IF the machines are more accurate and not just more precise.
EVEN if the machines are more accurate, if they aren't significantly more accurate, a multi-witnessed count result might be treated with more respect.
Note that with some style of votes, the voters may screw up the ballot sheet so that it is may actually be hard to figure out what the voter was voting for, or whether the vote should be regarded as spoilt. So actual accuracy might be almost subjective...
Also given such a scenario IF the party representative agrees that a vote isn't for his/her party then I'd say it's more _valid_ than a machine saying otherwise EVEN if the machine is more "accurate" based on certain standardized tests etc etc etc.
Because the party representative speaks for his/her party, whereas the machine _should_ be disinterested. So a conceded vague vote is more significant than a machine's guess of that vague vote.
The trouble with the IA64 route was, it was (and is) about as painful to switch from x86-32 to IA64 as it was to switch from x86-32 to POWER (or some other RISC).
So the Itanic take up has only been by Intel loyalists or people who got Itaniums very cheap, or people herded by HP consultants...
Whereas switching from x86-32 to x86-64 is going to be a lot less painful.
And it's fun to see pigs fly even if they cheat and use jetpacks.
Yeah, but it depends on the given task.
:).
;)
A Civic doesn't have as much snob appeal as a Porsche.
Use the right tool for the task
If you want top speed, great 0-100mph figures, for a low vehicle price, you'd get one of those big bikes.
Don't forget though - a bike may still cost you an arm and a leg...
I'm glad AMD didn't just extend x86 to 64 bit. They added Hypertransport, more registers and a lower latency memory interface for each CPU.
AMD have some smart people too. Looks like they didn't get too crippled by politics in AMD.
It actually seems to me that Intel has great _process_ and Q/A engineers - so far I haven't directly experienced an Intel CPU being DOA/failing (haven't experienced AMD ones failing either, but I only recently went AMD). However I've experienced UltraSPARCs failing...
I haven't seen evidence that Intel's CPU design bunch are really that outstanding. The Itanium 2 doesn't look that impressive architecture-wise. I'd be happy to if someone can provide evidence that they are outstanding.
AFAIK Itanium does have a x86 32 bit mode.
It just sucks so bad.
Yep that's how things should be. There's a big difference between a machine counted result of 77.434% of the votes and a hand counted result of 60.2% of the votes.
Even though a hand recount could have less precision (e.g. 100 times less precise), it may be more accurate esp if representatives from the affected parties and independent(?) observers are there to witness each count (this is how vote counts are done in my country btw). And anyway even if it is all a show, rational and reasonable voters should be more likely to accept such a result counted that way[1].
BUT the widespread lack of commonsense, ignorance and stupidity is quite staggering though. So it seems that the voters don't really care anyway.
Also get the impression that many if not most voters of the winning party stupidly don't and won't care either- as long as their party wins they are happy. The degree of partisanship in the US is gross - "No matter what happens - XXX is right".
If these people like that sort of thing they should not vote - just stay at home and watch "pro wrestling" on TV.
[1] If the electorate are going to be screwed anyway, at least make them take a lot of trouble to do so. Don't make it easy for them by just settling for machine counts.
But do you know the state of the machines?
If a machine is rigged, proper hand recounts could show the problem even if it's not as accurate as a nonrigged machine. It's like the diff between machine recount: Candidate A has 87.4432% of the votes and hand recount: Candidate A has 56% of the votes. Sure the result is the same: Candidate A wins. BUT you learn that something fishy likely happened.
That said I get the impression that the typical US voter of the winning party wouldn't care, especially given sufficient spin - all they want is their party to win[1].
Over here in my country, when they count the votes, the various different party representatives can be (and usually are) there to observe each vote as it is counted (and dispute if necessary).
Sure our system isn't very anonymous, but I'd rather have our system than be Diebolded as in the US.
If all the party representatives are in collusion to create a particular result then the voters are probably screwed anyway.
[1] If they like that sort of stuff, they should stick to watching WWE and not bother voting.
You miss the point. It's about showing respect to the process. Otherwise why bother all the spiel about the USA being a democracy?
The Ceremony is to indicate the importance the public considers the event.
EVEN if it's all a show (and the relevant votes have already been Diebolded), you have to make it seem like a good show. Go through the _proper_ motions.
Just try telling a kid a story, and skipping everything except for "And they all lived happily ever after".
I suppose maybe nowadays they are content with that and they'll go off to watch MTV and stuff themselves.
Well, I can do that with one hand tied behind my back. I'd need the other hand free to do the calculation though.
And a PC.
BTW: Copying copyrighted works without permission isn't copyright infringement everywhere and all the time.
:). I suppose this should change for online multiplayer HL2? Does the warez version work in that scenario given the Steam+HL2 architecture/system?
If Valve without warning screws their _paying_ customers for using nocd what do they expect? Rational and mature behaviour by all of them?
I dunno about you, but there'd could be thousands of new users of the warezed version... What else can the "disenfranchised" do?
It's kinda ironic that the ones using the warez version are getting a better experience in some cases