Obvious concerns about only showing while you're away aside, do you want a screensaver to connect to some website somewhere and download new ads?
I don't want my machine compromised by a screensaver. Rooted, scanning, spamming, all while there's an 85% chance I'm away from my desk and not looking. No.
Chief software architect for the biggest software company in the world and his personal page breaks in Mozilla. Go figure. Note the image on the upper left. In Moz. he's no longer the Chief Software Architect, and the navbars all break, hit "About Microsoft" in IE and Moz. for example.
If they want people to SWITCH to their product, they should make their site accessible to all browsers and code to standards. This would make it easier to find out about the plethora of fine offerings available to me from Microsoft.
Forcing Useragent in Konqueror to an IE variant will show that the menus work, but don't line up, at all.
The lack of basic HTML skill present makes me wonder. Not that I'm any better, certainly not, but then again, I'm not the Richest Man, and I don't claim to make the best software in the world either.
Hey, go for it, that's what the web is there for. Might want to link to her site instead, but there's not much interesting in either place:-), and they're on the same server, so it really makes no difference to me.
I'm not characterizing anyone as anything. In fact, I am a Hairy Unix Hippie, but so what? I only dispute that IIS should be looked upon as criminally unadministratable.
Many admins working on IIS Platforms do so simply because they are given no choice in the matter. A company will write its code in VB/ASP, get their proof of concept server running, and then hire people to scale it out for them. I, as an admin, have no/RIGHT/ to tell them to re-write everything in perl, and to be honest, a lot of parts of our site are un-duplicatable (cool, new word) in a Unix environment.
I, and other admins I know, work to become the best server administrators, regardless of platform, that we can be. It makes no difference if you're using Linux as a frontend if you still have a drooling moron running it.
Besides, what looks better to an interviewer for a potential job:
Candidate A:) I have administered NT/IIS, Exchange, Linux, Sendmail, Apache, QMAIL, MSDNS, DJBDNS, MS-SQL, MySQL, Win2k Active Directory, LDAP, NFS/NIS.
Candidate B:) I am a Unix Admin. If you have Microsoft, you are criminally negligent morons. I refuse to touch IIS lest I be prosecutable as an accessory to stupidiy.
I see an Anti-MS admin view as short sighted and trollish. Take the long view of network security and you can make any OS reasonably secure.
I should have been more specific. I wanted to clear the URL field without touching my keyboard I have multiple PCs on my desk, and often I will have my left hand on the keyboard for one of the PCs and my right hand on the mouse for the other.
You're absolutely right, that works, but a "Clear URL Field" button is far more convenient.
I use Opera 90% of the time under Linux, it's great, fast, looks great most of the time. However one major feature that it lacks is a "delete URL" button, like the X> that Konq has. When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste. It's a pain. Much easier to select, hit X>, mid-click.
The 'who cares' factor is decided by the 'how fast can I run this without it melting' factor.
I agree that the MTBF must be the result of more stringent engineering, maybe, who knows. I myself think the guy is full of shit, but what do I know? I was jaded by the fact that logically, of friggin COURSE he's going to say that, he wants to sell more Ultra160 SCSI adaptors, duh. But maybe he wasn't full of shit, I leave that decision as an excersise for the reader.
I remember being at Adaptec Live SPAM Session at MS Technet a few years back. The Adaptec rep told of his many trips to drive manufacturers, particularly Seagate.
He said that SCSI drives come off the same lines as IDEs, if the batch can handle running at 10000 RPM, they're Cheetahs, if they can do 7200, they're Barracuda SCSI's, if they have a lower MTBF, they're IDE 'cudas.
I never really believed him, since the physical drive cases are different, but his contention was that they were all the same drives, with different electronics slapped on depending on MTBF.
But Big Iron no less. I used to work in a distribution center for a fairly large baby product manufacturer. They had a counterbalance or HiLo that the brakes had gone out on. So we called the leasing compnay to come out and get it.
The repair guy showed up with a low boy (flatbed truck) at a receiving bay and proceeded to FLY across the dock at top speed. Everyone yelled at him to slow down, that the brakes were out, but he was 'too experienced'. He knew what he was doing. He'd done this a million times.
Off the dock, onto the lowboy, through the fence on the lowboy, through the air, through the side of a 53' trailer, and there it stuck.
These things weigh ~ 12000 lbs, he jumped it like the General Lee into a tractor trailer, pretty awesome.
We had security video of a receiving guy driving one of these off the dock as well, that video got a LOT of airtime. At least more than the HiLo did.
Working in a warehouse you build up a long list of these stories. The guy who tipped over a HiLo is often a favorite, 13klbs hitting the floor of a warehouse, breaking it, breaking the floor, shaking the building, and walking away.
Adminning might be (slightly) safer, but nowhere near as much fun as driving heavy equipment with little regard for human life.
Slashdot Slashdotted by Slashdot. Since FM sits in the same cage as/., and slashdot slashdotted fresmeat, might the traffic of everyone whacking freshmeat slow slashdot down? A self-slashdotting.
Evidently not yet. If it does, well, see you at Exodus!
I know it won't happen with their feed, but it would be worth seeing. I'm waiting for those guys doing their build out in the adjoining cage to whack something and forever be pariahs for causing the Great Blackout of '02.
If you have 700MB per day per server across 5 servers Excel falls down hard. WebTrends falls down hard. The last two companies I worked for both overcame these difficulties with web-bug pixel gifs in the pages to track user agent, referrers and such to a database where we could analyze it.
The good thing about doing the raw logs is that they give a better idea of how much traffic has passed off the site. This is usually more use to smaller sites that have to pay by bandwidth used, or more specifically, more use to their providers.
If you're just looking at tracking specific data, there's no easier way than to have all that data written to a database, you can have your webbugs tweaked to save off exactly what you want, you get all your data, no extraneous crap, and you can track whatever.
Now that'll I give ya: admins reponsible for bad admin work:)... I have seen alot of that, and ocassionally been party to it:D
Hey, who hasn't been there eh? Sometimes you have to weigh risk against cost-effectiveness and business-value and lots of other 50 cent words I don't understand coming down from management.
And I know that was what the original article is trying to get across. You can treat the GPL'd/BSD'd stuff as some sort of non-profit entity and exempt them from the game. That would be great, but you can bet MS's PAC would bitch up a storm in DC about being singled out, even though they aren't, and try to get it applied to every piece of software there is.
People pay for GPL'd software every time they buy a distro of Linux, the burden in that case would probably fall on RedHat or SuSE or Mandrake, rather than the original authors, but the arguement can be made. And if there's an arguement to make, leave it to some shifty ambulance chaser to make it...
I'm saying that if we, as admins, don't properly secure our networks by using layers of security solutions, email scanners, not allowing certain attachment types, etc, we deserve what happens to us.
I hate saying this, but even Microsoft should not be held liable for the affects of sloppy admin work.
I just see this as an 'out' for admins and companies who didn't want to spend the money up front to invest in their data security. They can put it out there, not fully secure their network, get hacked because of some buffer overflow or IIS directory traversal attack, blame the software and go on with life.
I hate to see that happen. Especially when the victim software becomes ssh
If you read a license, any license, it basically states that you use the enclosed software "at risk", meaning you can't sue if something, anything, goes wrong. Including data corruption, script kiddie 0wn@g3, etc. What he's proposing is getting rid of that. Fine, now Microsoft is liable for NT vulns, but you can't basically throw MS licensing rules out the window and leave BSD and GPL in tact. So then the "As Is" portions of the Open licenses have too.
Why not hold Network Admins responsible for problems on their networks? I am a network admin, and if some kid got in and stole a database from one of my employers, compromising customers, I would expect to take the full heat for it. In the back of my mind I'd be saying "F*** Microsoft and their buggy-ass code", but I would know it was my fault for allowing it to happen.
This is no solution. What's the estimated cause of Nimda so far? Code Red? SadminD? Melissa? I love you? all the other outlook worms?
The cost of lawsuits from just these AUTOMATED attacks would cripple even Microsoft. Not to mention the CDUniverses of the, er, Universe.
Software authors need these clauses for a reason, if they didn't have them there, they might as well go start a farming commune instead because it wouldn't be worth it to code anymore.
Free Software authors would then also have to specify under which conditions they would ALLOW their software to be run. Otherwise some schmuck could install some.01a version of code that some guy wrote on his weekend off as a proof of concept on their primary webserver, immediately get hacked, and sue Joe Programmer into the stonage.
Nice idea, just to tweak MS, but I don't like the way it would play out.
If you vent your nacelles the resultant plasma trail should make any cloaked vessels which may be following you visible to the naked eye long enough to shoot at them.
I never said commercial Unices weren't awesome, I just think RedHat is doing what they need to do to survive. Stealing userbase from AIX is going to be a lot easier than stealing it from NT, mostly for bullshit political reasons.
But does this actually lend some amount of truth to Microsofts stance that Linux is only really gaining the marketshare that is being lost by proprietary Unix systems? If RedHat is concentrating on stealing commercial Unix accounts, rather than getting either new businesses or MS shops, it would appear so.
This isn't bad. Commercial Unix is the easiest target for RedHat, it's far easier to convince someone to drop AIX off their 390 and replace it with RedHat than it would be to convince them to ditch Windows on 5e10 little servers. Especially in a "Microsoft Shop" type culture, which is unfortunately where I spend a lot of my time.
My belief is that RedHat has as much chance of success as the next company, and if they need to steal business from Sun, Compaq, HP, IBM to do it, so much the better. At least the customer can still get their hardware from the hardware co's and get their software from RH, best of both worlds.
Granted, I knew all that before I read this article, but hey, the securityfocus article that was linked had all this information, would have been 4 seconds of Journalistic Research.
I'm too ornery in the morning. In any case, really big mass-defacement, really easily accomplished.
Slashdot Mirror
Obvious concerns about only showing while you're away aside, do you want a screensaver to connect to some website somewhere and download new ads?
I don't want my machine compromised by a screensaver. Rooted, scanning, spamming, all while there's an 85% chance I'm away from my desk and not looking. No.
Chief software architect for the biggest software company in the world and his personal page breaks in Mozilla. Go figure. Note the image on the upper left. In Moz. he's no longer the Chief Software Architect, and the navbars all break, hit "About Microsoft" in IE and Moz. for example.
If they want people to SWITCH to their product, they should make their site accessible to all browsers and code to standards. This would make it easier to find out about the plethora of fine offerings available to me from Microsoft.
Forcing Useragent in Konqueror to an IE variant will show that the menus work, but don't line up, at all.
The lack of basic HTML skill present makes me wonder. Not that I'm any better, certainly not, but then again, I'm not the Richest Man, and I don't claim to make the best software in the world either.
What do you think one does in a carpark? I was parking cars...
Hey, go for it, that's what the web is there for. Might want to link to her site instead, but there's not much interesting in either place :-), and they're on the same server, so it really makes no difference to me.
I checked out DiaryMonster, looks kind of cool.
It's my fiancee, on opening a backpack and finding a banana and a couple oranges from god-knows when among her papers and stuff.
I'm not characterizing anyone as anything. In fact, I am a Hairy Unix Hippie, but so what? I only dispute that IIS should be looked upon as criminally unadministratable.
Many admins working on IIS Platforms do so simply because they are given no choice in the matter. A company will write its code in VB/ASP, get their proof of concept server running, and then hire people to scale it out for them. I, as an admin, have no /RIGHT/ to tell them to re-write everything in perl, and to be honest, a lot of parts of our site are un-duplicatable (cool, new word) in a Unix environment.
I, and other admins I know, work to become the best server administrators, regardless of platform, that we can be. It makes no difference if you're using Linux as a frontend if you still have a drooling moron running it.
Besides, what looks better to an interviewer for a potential job:
Candidate A:) I have administered NT/IIS, Exchange, Linux, Sendmail, Apache, QMAIL, MSDNS, DJBDNS, MS-SQL, MySQL, Win2k Active Directory, LDAP, NFS/NIS.
Candidate B:) I am a Unix Admin. If you have Microsoft, you are criminally negligent morons. I refuse to touch IIS lest I be prosecutable as an accessory to stupidiy.
I see an Anti-MS admin view as short sighted and trollish. Take the long view of network security and you can make any OS reasonably secure.
I should have been more specific. I wanted to clear the URL field without touching my keyboard I have multiple PCs on my desk, and often I will have my left hand on the keyboard for one of the PCs and my right hand on the mouse for the other.
You're absolutely right, that works, but a "Clear URL Field" button is far more convenient.
Awesome. That feature takes care of one of my major gripes. Joy!
Thanks
x
Go to CNN.com with Opera 6/Linux. It's a shame.
I use Opera 90% of the time under Linux, it's great, fast, looks great most of the time. However one major feature that it lacks is a "delete URL" button, like the X> that Konq has. When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste. It's a pain. Much easier to select, hit X>, mid-click.
The 'who cares' factor is decided by the 'how fast can I run this without it melting' factor.
I agree that the MTBF must be the result of more stringent engineering, maybe, who knows. I myself think the guy is full of shit, but what do I know? I was jaded by the fact that logically, of friggin COURSE he's going to say that, he wants to sell more Ultra160 SCSI adaptors, duh. But maybe he wasn't full of shit, I leave that decision as an excersise for the reader.
I remember being at Adaptec Live SPAM Session at MS Technet a few years back. The Adaptec rep told of his many trips to drive manufacturers, particularly Seagate.
He said that SCSI drives come off the same lines as IDEs, if the batch can handle running at 10000 RPM, they're Cheetahs, if they can do 7200, they're Barracuda SCSI's, if they have a lower MTBF, they're IDE 'cudas.
I never really believed him, since the physical drive cases are different, but his contention was that they were all the same drives, with different electronics slapped on depending on MTBF.
Take it for what you will, BIG Grains of Salt...
I'll...I'll put strychnine in the guacamole.
Hope Slashdot didn't ruin anyones day in CA by posting this, since we east coast people will find out so far before them.
But Big Iron no less. I used to work in a distribution center for a fairly large baby product manufacturer. They had a counterbalance or HiLo that the brakes had gone out on. So we called the leasing compnay to come out and get it.
The repair guy showed up with a low boy (flatbed truck) at a receiving bay and proceeded to FLY across the dock at top speed. Everyone yelled at him to slow down, that the brakes were out, but he was 'too experienced'. He knew what he was doing. He'd done this a million times.
Off the dock, onto the lowboy, through the fence on the lowboy, through the air, through the side of a 53' trailer, and there it stuck.
These things weigh ~ 12000 lbs, he jumped it like the General Lee into a tractor trailer, pretty awesome.
We had security video of a receiving guy driving one of these off the dock as well, that video got a LOT of airtime. At least more than the HiLo did.
Working in a warehouse you build up a long list of these stories. The guy who tipped over a HiLo is often a favorite, 13klbs hitting the floor of a warehouse, breaking it, breaking the floor, shaking the building, and walking away.
Adminning might be (slightly) safer, but nowhere near as much fun as driving heavy equipment with little regard for human life.
Does having Jim Norton in the movie count as a 'bug'?
Slashdot Slashdotted by Slashdot. Since FM sits in the same cage as /., and slashdot slashdotted fresmeat, might the traffic of everyone whacking freshmeat slow slashdot down? A self-slashdotting.
Evidently not yet. If it does, well, see you at Exodus!
I know it won't happen with their feed, but it would be worth seeing. I'm waiting for those guys doing their build out in the adjoining cage to whack something and forever be pariahs for causing the Great Blackout of '02.
If you have 700MB per day per server across 5 servers Excel falls down hard. WebTrends falls down hard. The last two companies I worked for both overcame these difficulties with web-bug pixel gifs in the pages to track user agent, referrers and such to a database where we could analyze it.
The good thing about doing the raw logs is that they give a better idea of how much traffic has passed off the site. This is usually more use to smaller sites that have to pay by bandwidth used, or more specifically, more use to their providers.
If you're just looking at tracking specific data, there's no easier way than to have all that data written to a database, you can have your webbugs tweaked to save off exactly what you want, you get all your data, no extraneous crap, and you can track whatever.
And I know that was what the original article is trying to get across. You can treat the GPL'd/BSD'd stuff as some sort of non-profit entity and exempt them from the game. That would be great, but you can bet MS's PAC would bitch up a storm in DC about being singled out, even though they aren't, and try to get it applied to every piece of software there is.
People pay for GPL'd software every time they buy a distro of Linux, the burden in that case would probably fall on RedHat or SuSE or Mandrake, rather than the original authors, but the arguement can be made. And if there's an arguement to make, leave it to some shifty ambulance chaser to make it...
I'm saying that if we, as admins, don't properly secure our networks by using layers of security solutions, email scanners, not allowing certain attachment types, etc, we deserve what happens to us.
I hate saying this, but even Microsoft should not be held liable for the affects of sloppy admin work.
I just see this as an 'out' for admins and companies who didn't want to spend the money up front to invest in their data security. They can put it out there, not fully secure their network, get hacked because of some buffer overflow or IIS directory traversal attack, blame the software and go on with life.
I hate to see that happen. Especially when the victim software becomes ssh
If you read a license, any license, it basically states that you use the enclosed software "at risk", meaning you can't sue if something, anything, goes wrong. Including data corruption, script kiddie 0wn@g3, etc. What he's proposing is getting rid of that. Fine, now Microsoft is liable for NT vulns, but you can't basically throw MS licensing rules out the window and leave BSD and GPL in tact. So then the "As Is" portions of the Open licenses have too.
.01a version of code that some guy wrote on his weekend off as a proof of concept on their primary webserver, immediately get hacked, and sue Joe Programmer into the stonage.
Why not hold Network Admins responsible for problems on their networks? I am a network admin, and if some kid got in and stole a database from one of my employers, compromising customers, I would expect to take the full heat for it. In the back of my mind I'd be saying "F*** Microsoft and their buggy-ass code", but I would know it was my fault for allowing it to happen.
This is no solution. What's the estimated cause of Nimda so far? Code Red? SadminD? Melissa? I love you? all the other outlook worms?
The cost of lawsuits from just these AUTOMATED attacks would cripple even Microsoft. Not to mention the CDUniverses of the, er, Universe.
Software authors need these clauses for a reason, if they didn't have them there, they might as well go start a farming commune instead because it wouldn't be worth it to code anymore.
Free Software authors would then also have to specify under which conditions they would ALLOW their software to be run. Otherwise some schmuck could install some
Nice idea, just to tweak MS, but I don't like the way it would play out.
If you vent your nacelles the resultant plasma trail should make any cloaked vessels which may be following you visible to the naked eye long enough to shoot at them.
I never said commercial Unices weren't awesome, I just think RedHat is doing what they need to do to survive. Stealing userbase from AIX is going to be a lot easier than stealing it from NT, mostly for bullshit political reasons.
But does this actually lend some amount of truth to Microsofts stance that Linux is only really gaining the marketshare that is being lost by proprietary Unix systems? If RedHat is concentrating on stealing commercial Unix accounts, rather than getting either new businesses or MS shops, it would appear so.
This isn't bad. Commercial Unix is the easiest target for RedHat, it's far easier to convince someone to drop AIX off their 390 and replace it with RedHat than it would be to convince them to ditch Windows on 5e10 little servers. Especially in a "Microsoft Shop" type culture, which is unfortunately where I spend a lot of my time.
My belief is that RedHat has as much chance of success as the next company, and if they need to steal business from Sun, Compaq, HP, IBM to do it, so much the better. At least the customer can still get their hardware from the hardware co's and get their software from RH, best of both worlds.
Not Register.com, Verisign/NetSol. The domains were parked at InterLand.
Granted, I knew all that before I read this article, but hey, the securityfocus article that was linked had all this information, would have been 4 seconds of Journalistic Research.
I'm too ornery in the morning. In any case, really big mass-defacement, really easily accomplished.