All the more reason to opt for a Linux-house or BSD-house. Everything's made with open technology, so when you don't like something you just have to poke around at it until it changes. You have your choice of how you want your house to look, and you can tweak it quite a bit. Just grind your own.
And your house will arrive in the form of piles of bricks and sacks of cement, with a single photocopied sheet of paper titled "HOWTO: Build a house"!
I want to be able to say, "Send all my media to $DISPLAY, both visual and audio" and then be able to have all X programs pick up on that.
I know what you mean. It's kinda weird to be running X apps displaying on a PC over one side of the room and hearing the bells coming out of a workstation on the other side.
No it isn't, it's just financial boilerplate text that the lawyers bolted on. It's to cover their asses in case anyone tries to file a class-action suit against them if their profits fall. I used to work for a NASDAQ-traded company, and we had this crap in our quarterlies all the time. You have to enumerate every possible risk to your business, even stuff like we operate in country X and there is a risk of an earthquake, which may materially affect our revenue in that market, blah blah.
Doesn't need to run vi. An experienced Unix user (with a malicious streak) could easily come up with some sed and awk to muck around with just about anything... keep in mind, if a file can be read by "anybody" (/etc/passwd is one of these), it can be read (via/bin/cat) by "nobody". No they can't get passwords, but it allows them to get the list of users on the box and quickly reduce the # of options when it comes to running passwd dictionary scripts for login attempts.
Oh yeah. You can upload a CGI script to start an xterm running on the web server displaying on your own workstation. Most people don't block outbound connections on their firewall, and the X11 connection is initiated from within. Nothing's tcp_wrapper'd from localhost, so now you can r00t fingerd, or one of the CDE daemons. You got 5 minutes to do as you please before the CGI times out and the httpd kills you.
This is a cracking tool, plain and simple. I don't understand why Slashdot is promoting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Sun aren't doing that badly, all things considered, given the current state of the economy. We'll see how things pan out over the next few years, but it's too early to say Sun/SPARC is dying.
One of Sun's key assets is its developer mindshare. It seems everyone I come across whose experience includes development or sysadmin on more than one Unix has Solaris as the common overlap. If you need to hire on Unix, Solaris people are easy to find. This creates a virtuous circle: lots of developers means lots of apps which means lots of hardware sales which in turn attracts developers.
In the workstation market, it's apps that count. First you decide what apps you want to run, then you buy the hardware to run them. If platform X runs rings around platform Y on a benchmark, but your app is available and rock-solid on platform Y now, and will take 2 years to port and certify on X, then you buy Y, end of story. That even removes the incentive to port to X.
Alpha tried to emulate the x86 earlier and failed. Sadly.
Well, commercially it failed, because DEC were utterly useless at marketing anything, but technically there was nothing wrong with FX!32, performance was impressive, and it was smart enough to profile code at runtime and devote more resource to on-the-fly optimizing of frequently used code, while emulating code that was so infrequently used as to be not worth the effort of translating. If Microsoft were to market an FX!32-like product for Itanic, or even bundle it with their OS, the outcome would likely be radically different.
Exactly my point: going out all over the world, destroying one civilization after another, subjugating the native populations, and plundering its natural resources.
But the option not to conquer the Empire did not exist. If Britain had not done so, one of the other European powers (France, Spain, Portugal, Holland) would have done and used the resources to conquer Britain. It was not so much a matter of becoming stronger as it was one of not becoming weaker. And of all the empire that have existed throughout history, the British was one of the more benign. Just one example: Indian culture was left more or less intact, and the Indian people are thriving today. The Spanish didn't permit a significant indiginous population to survive in South America.
Itanium/2 is a 64 bit processor. So it needs 64 bit software, including the OS.
Umm, no. For example I am running 32-bit Solaris on a 64-bit UltraSPARC. And applications compiled 32-bit.
Whereas in the case of Windoze, the 32 bit stuff (and even some 16 bit stuff) is built right in to the API.
Yes, that's why it's called the Win32 API. Work is well under way on Win64, but in Microsoft's ideal world, almost no-one will write to the Win64 API - they'll target the CLR, which itself will be 64-bit native.
Then the millions of apps that people use, right now an excellent way to lock customers in, are going to turn into a lodestone around their necks.
Yes, just like when Apple moved from 68k to PPC? Nope, wasn't a problem.
I'm sure Micro$oft is pissed as hell, but Linux is going to take a huge upswing when Itaniums start flying off the shelves.
That doesn't necessarily follow either. After all, Win 3.11 didn't fully exploit the 80386 either, and it wasn't 'til the first NT that Microsoft did.
The British Empire was one of the most evil institutions in human history.
Yes, damn those evil Brits, rampaging all over the world building roads, schools, hospitals, dams, playing cricket, freeing slaves, creating legal systems and drinking tea! If only Stalin had conquered the world instead!
Rights can be forfeited. That's one thing you're free to do with liberty- you can squander it, and give it away. Once you've done that, it's gone, and it's difficult to say why you still deserve it. Which is sort of the point- its an unwise trade.
That is sort of the point of the US Constitution: even if the people vote for it, you theoretically can't get rid of basic rights like the right to free speech, to not incriminate yourself, to keep and arm bears, etc.
Of course it doesn't quite work like that in practice; witness prohibition.
The only thing that the author fails to note is HP's responsibility for the wretched Itanium 1.
As far as I know, Itanic 1 was always expected to suck: they only made them so people could start writing compilers and optimizing handwritten code for the Itanic platform. Itanic 2 is supposed to be what you'd go into production with.
Not as simple as that. A games card will trade precision for speed, because precision is less important if you are updating the scene dozens of times a second anyway. If two walls don't meet perfectly for 1/60th of a second, who will even notice? A workstation card will trade speed for precision - you cannot risk a mechanical engineer missing an improperly aligned assembly because of an artifact created by the graphics card, or worse, breaking an existing design because an artifact shows a problem that doesn't exist in the underlying model.
This is from a country who already rigorously monitors its citizens with CCTV everywhere they go. Perhaps the UK could be considered a testbed for how people react when their basic rights are subtlely chipped away. It's all in the name of safety and convenience.
I think people in the UK are well aware of the problems of ID cards. The only problem is that we are also well aware that our traditional respect for individual freedoms is being abused wholesale - the French, for example, are ignoring international law and dumping their illegal immigrant problem on us. Short of withdrawing from the Schengen treaty altogether (personally I don't believe that would be a bad thing) the only solution is ID cards - so long as the penalties for not having one are properly enforced (i.e. a genuine Citizen without one gets a slap on the wrist, a non Citizen is immediately deported).
I am not saying that this protocol is bogus, but it will probably be useful for apps that don't exist yet, at least on the Internet.
And when they do exist, they'll use XA, a (relatively) open protocol developed by IBM, which has been proven over decades of distributed, heterogenous transaction processing (banks, airlines, telcos, etc). You can already mix CICS, Tuxedo, Oracle and DB/2 transactions with XA. (Note to Slashbots: it's OK if you haven't heard of CICS and Tuxedo). What do we need some newfangled nonsense for?
The Indian had immigrated to the US. Otherwise you'd have to say there were no Americans on board and quote everyone as being the nationality their families were from.
Don't worry about being unpatriotic. This is the problem with America hit right on the nose. Profit rather than success and a sense of history is the motive for our endeavors. Rather, we equate profit with success.
Exactly how is NASA about profit? It is, and always was, a black hole for money. Their cost overruns are the stuff of legend, not just the ISS and the STS, but even their day to day operations.
It is hard to say that a totalitarian regime like the one in China could be more prescient than the US and realize that space is part of humanity's destiny.
In the USA, you have to build a fairly broad consensus if you want to do anything at all. If you're a politician, you need votes. If you're a businessman, you need customers. In a totalitarian regime like China, you only need one highly-placed official to make a decision, and no-one else gets any say in the matter. But remember what a disaster the Great Leap Forward was.
the Government will give NASA the money to build a new earth to orbit reusable spacecraft.
Actually, it would probably be far better to disband NASA altogether and transfer responsibility for space (back) to USAF. They have execution capabilities that NASA can only dream of.
I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?
You do know that Unix hails from 1970 and VMS from 1978 don't you? It always amazes me when Unix kiddies don't seem to realize that VMS is actually more modern.
People use VMS when scalability and reliability matter. It's perhaps 15 years ahead of Unix for that (i.e. VMS clusters 15 years ago are where Unix clusters are now). You can do useful stuff like add a node to a cluster, migrate the applications onto it, shut down the original node, and the users won't even notice a gap in application availability. Add to that real ACLs and a versionning, journalled filesystem (things that modern Unix has only gotten in the last few years), and very fine-grained tunability, for example you can set the working set size per process and configure the system to assign different priorities to programs or users at different times. And DECnet is smart enough to authenticate user at the packet level, inherently more secure than TCP/IP.
Essentially, VMS died because DEC was run by engineers who thought that a good product would sell itself, whereas Sun et al were smart enough to hire marketers by the boatload.
Do I think this was an act of terrorist? No F-ing Way!. My reason is the only thing that could reach that high is an Intercontinental Ballistic Missle (ICBM). And even if it is likely that someone could get ahold of an ICBM, it would be damn difficult to be able to hit a target moving faster than 12,000mph. If a terrorist could get an ICBM, he wouldn't get something nice like the US has with GPS computers to get accuracy of within 100 feet of the target
The only possible way this could have been a terrorist act is if al-Queda had a sleeper amongst the shuttle technicians. I don't doubt that the FBI are investigating them as we speak.
All of the tens of thousands of tiles on the surface of the shuttle are unique. Each one has different dimensions, and fits in only one place. Obviously, it would be impossible to carry a replacement for every one.
Whose bright idea was that? No-one the shuttles are so expensive to run. All the tiles apart from the ones around the edges should be identical, and the other ones should be smaller than the regular ones so one can be cut to fit.
Things that last for 20 years or more. As software developers we are more like artists. We design the tools that suite the latest fashion. Most software is trash in less that 3 years.
Engineering artifacts last for decades, but works of art last centuries or more! Have you ever even been to a museum? If you want an analogy for computer programming think more along the line of flipping burgers.
Slashdot Mirror
All the more reason to opt for a Linux-house or BSD-house. Everything's made with open technology, so when you don't like something you just have to poke around at it until it changes. You have your choice of how you want your house to look, and you can tweak it quite a bit. Just grind your own.
And your house will arrive in the form of piles of bricks and sacks of cement, with a single photocopied sheet of paper titled "HOWTO: Build a house"!
With thousands of Wi Fi transmitters around, couldn't the military use passive radar technology?
Yes, because at no point in the Iraqi desert or the mountains of Afghanistan are you more than a few hundred feet from a wireless access point.
I want to be able to say, "Send all my media to $DISPLAY, both visual and audio" and then be able to have all X programs pick up on that.
I know what you mean. It's kinda weird to be running X apps displaying on a PC over one side of the room and hearing the bells coming out of a workstation on the other side.
This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft
No it isn't, it's just financial boilerplate text that the lawyers bolted on. It's to cover their asses in case anyone tries to file a class-action suit against them if their profits fall. I used to work for a NASDAQ-traded company, and we had this crap in our quarterlies all the time. You have to enumerate every possible risk to your business, even stuff like we operate in country X and there is a risk of an earthquake, which may materially affect our revenue in that market, blah blah.
Nothing to see here, move along...
Doesn't need to run vi. An experienced Unix user (with a malicious streak) could easily come up with some sed and awk to muck around with just about anything... keep in mind, if a file can be read by "anybody" (/etc/passwd is one of these), it can be read (via /bin/cat) by "nobody". No they can't get passwords, but it allows them to get the list of users on the box and quickly reduce the # of options when it comes to running passwd dictionary scripts for login attempts.
Oh yeah. You can upload a CGI script to start an xterm running on the web server displaying on your own workstation. Most people don't block outbound connections on their firewall, and the X11 connection is initiated from within. Nothing's tcp_wrapper'd from localhost, so now you can r00t fingerd, or one of the CDE daemons. You got 5 minutes to do as you please before the CGI times out and the httpd kills you.
This is a cracking tool, plain and simple. I don't understand why Slashdot is promoting it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Sun aren't doing that badly, all things considered, given the current state of the economy. We'll see how things pan out over the next few years, but it's too early to say Sun/SPARC is dying.
One of Sun's key assets is its developer mindshare. It seems everyone I come across whose experience includes development or sysadmin on more than one Unix has Solaris as the common overlap. If you need to hire on Unix, Solaris people are easy to find. This creates a virtuous circle: lots of developers means lots of apps which means lots of hardware sales which in turn attracts developers.
In the workstation market, it's apps that count. First you decide what apps you want to run, then you buy the hardware to run them. If platform X runs rings around platform Y on a benchmark, but your app is available and rock-solid on platform Y now, and will take 2 years to port and certify on X, then you buy Y, end of story. That even removes the incentive to port to X.
On the one hand, Microsoft are losing money, yay! But on the other hand, if they're losing money they must be selling more and more units, boo!
Help, tell me what to think!!!
Alpha tried to emulate the x86 earlier and failed. Sadly.
Well, commercially it failed, because DEC were utterly useless at marketing anything, but technically there was nothing wrong with FX!32, performance was impressive, and it was smart enough to profile code at runtime and devote more resource to on-the-fly optimizing of frequently used code, while emulating code that was so infrequently used as to be not worth the effort of translating. If Microsoft were to market an FX!32-like product for Itanic, or even bundle it with their OS, the outcome would likely be radically different.
Exactly my point: going out all over the world, destroying one civilization after another, subjugating the native populations, and plundering its natural resources.
But the option not to conquer the Empire did not exist. If Britain had not done so, one of the other European powers (France, Spain, Portugal, Holland) would have done and used the resources to conquer Britain. It was not so much a matter of becoming stronger as it was one of not becoming weaker. And of all the empire that have existed throughout history, the British was one of the more benign. Just one example: Indian culture was left more or less intact, and the Indian people are thriving today. The Spanish didn't permit a significant indiginous population to survive in South America.
Itanium/2 is a 64 bit processor. So it needs 64 bit software, including the OS.
Umm, no. For example I am running 32-bit Solaris on a 64-bit UltraSPARC. And applications compiled 32-bit.
Whereas in the case of Windoze, the 32 bit stuff (and even some 16 bit stuff) is built right in to the API.
Yes, that's why it's called the Win32 API. Work is well under way on Win64, but in Microsoft's ideal world, almost no-one will write to the Win64 API - they'll target the CLR, which itself will be 64-bit native.
Then the millions of apps that people use, right now an excellent way to lock customers in, are going to turn into a lodestone around their necks.
Yes, just like when Apple moved from 68k to PPC? Nope, wasn't a problem.
I'm sure Micro$oft is pissed as hell, but Linux is going to take a huge upswing when Itaniums start flying off the shelves.
That doesn't necessarily follow either. After all, Win 3.11 didn't fully exploit the 80386 either, and it wasn't 'til the first NT that Microsoft did.
The British Empire was one of the most evil institutions in human history.
Yes, damn those evil Brits, rampaging all over the world building roads, schools, hospitals, dams, playing cricket, freeing slaves, creating legal systems and drinking tea! If only Stalin had conquered the world instead!
Rights can be forfeited. That's one thing you're free to do with liberty- you can squander it, and give it away. Once you've done that, it's gone, and it's difficult to say why you still deserve it. Which is sort of the point- its an unwise trade.
That is sort of the point of the US Constitution: even if the people vote for it, you theoretically can't get rid of basic rights like the right to free speech, to not incriminate yourself, to keep and arm bears, etc.
Of course it doesn't quite work like that in practice; witness prohibition.
The only thing that the author fails to note is HP's responsibility for the wretched Itanium 1.
As far as I know, Itanic 1 was always expected to suck: they only made them so people could start writing compilers and optimizing handwritten code for the Itanic platform. Itanic 2 is supposed to be what you'd go into production with.
1. workstation == better processors
2. gaming system == better graphic cards
Not as simple as that. A games card will trade precision for speed, because precision is less important if you are updating the scene dozens of times a second anyway. If two walls don't meet perfectly for 1/60th of a second, who will even notice? A workstation card will trade speed for precision - you cannot risk a mechanical engineer missing an improperly aligned assembly because of an artifact created by the graphics card, or worse, breaking an existing design because an artifact shows a problem that doesn't exist in the underlying model.
This is from a country who already rigorously monitors its citizens with CCTV everywhere they go. Perhaps the UK could be considered a testbed for how people react when their basic rights are subtlely chipped away. It's all in the name of safety and convenience.
I think people in the UK are well aware of the problems of ID cards. The only problem is that we are also well aware that our traditional respect for individual freedoms is being abused wholesale - the French, for example, are ignoring international law and dumping their illegal immigrant problem on us. Short of withdrawing from the Schengen treaty altogether (personally I don't believe that would be a bad thing) the only solution is ID cards - so long as the penalties for not having one are properly enforced (i.e. a genuine Citizen without one gets a slap on the wrist, a non Citizen is immediately deported).
I am not saying that this protocol is bogus, but it will probably be useful for apps that don't exist yet, at least on the Internet.
And when they do exist, they'll use XA, a (relatively) open protocol developed by IBM, which has been proven over decades of distributed, heterogenous transaction processing (banks, airlines, telcos, etc). You can already mix CICS, Tuxedo, Oracle and DB/2 transactions with XA. (Note to Slashbots: it's OK if you haven't heard of CICS and Tuxedo). What do we need some newfangled nonsense for?
"ding-dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch! the witch is dead!"
I don't want Connie to be dead, I want her to be fired by AOL and go work in the pr0n industry!
I like my coffee like I like my women...bitter.
I like mine tied up in a sack and carried over the Andes to market on a donkey.
The Indian had immigrated to the US. Otherwise you'd have to say there were no Americans on board and quote everyone as being the nationality their families were from.
Don't worry about being unpatriotic. This is the problem with America hit right on the nose. Profit rather than success and a sense of history is the motive for our endeavors. Rather, we equate profit with success.
Exactly how is NASA about profit? It is, and always was, a black hole for money. Their cost overruns are the stuff of legend, not just the ISS and the STS, but even their day to day operations.
It is hard to say that a totalitarian regime like the one in China could be more prescient than the US and realize that space is part of humanity's destiny.
In the USA, you have to build a fairly broad consensus if you want to do anything at all. If you're a politician, you need votes. If you're a businessman, you need customers. In a totalitarian regime like China, you only need one highly-placed official to make a decision, and no-one else gets any say in the matter. But remember what a disaster the Great Leap Forward was.
the Government will give NASA the money to build a new earth to orbit reusable spacecraft.
Actually, it would probably be far better to disband NASA altogether and transfer responsibility for space (back) to USAF. They have execution capabilities that NASA can only dream of.
I know it's present in some legacy systems, and supported by Compaq for that reason. But why would we want VMS on new hardware? What new stuff runs on VMS these days?
You do know that Unix hails from 1970 and VMS from 1978 don't you? It always amazes me when Unix kiddies don't seem to realize that VMS is actually more modern.
People use VMS when scalability and reliability matter. It's perhaps 15 years ahead of Unix for that (i.e. VMS clusters 15 years ago are where Unix clusters are now). You can do useful stuff like add a node to a cluster, migrate the applications onto it, shut down the original node, and the users won't even notice a gap in application availability. Add to that real ACLs and a versionning, journalled filesystem (things that modern Unix has only gotten in the last few years), and very fine-grained tunability, for example you can set the working set size per process and configure the system to assign different priorities to programs or users at different times. And DECnet is smart enough to authenticate user at the packet level, inherently more secure than TCP/IP.
Essentially, VMS died because DEC was run by engineers who thought that a good product would sell itself, whereas Sun et al were smart enough to hire marketers by the boatload.
Do I think this was an act of terrorist? No F-ing Way!. My reason is the only thing that could reach that high is an Intercontinental Ballistic Missle (ICBM). And even if it is likely that someone could get ahold of an ICBM, it would be damn difficult to be able to hit a target moving faster than 12,000mph. If a terrorist could get an ICBM, he wouldn't get something nice like the US has with GPS computers to get accuracy of within 100 feet of the target
The only possible way this could have been a terrorist act is if al-Queda had a sleeper amongst the shuttle technicians. I don't doubt that the FBI are investigating them as we speak.
All of the tens of thousands of tiles on the surface of the shuttle are unique. Each one has different dimensions, and fits in only one place. Obviously, it would be impossible to carry a replacement for every one.
Whose bright idea was that? No-one the shuttles are so expensive to run. All the tiles apart from the ones around the edges should be identical, and the other ones should be smaller than the regular ones so one can be cut to fit.
Things that last for 20 years or more. As software developers we are more like artists. We design the tools that suite the latest fashion. Most software is trash in less that 3 years.
Engineering artifacts last for decades, but works of art last centuries or more! Have you ever even been to a museum? If you want an analogy for computer programming think more along the line of flipping burgers.