I've been wondering how long it will be before we give up on gasoline/diesel engines and go with fuel cells. Granted, that may be many years away. Anyway, fuel cells generate a lot of excess heat during operation which could be used for generating steam as the BMW does. I think this is a step in the right direction. Despite advances made in recent years, automobile engines are still very inefficient and the focus should be on improving overall efficiency.
Just like drugs... the first one's free. Oracle makes their money from support contracts, not the products. If you're software is bad enough, everyone needs the support!
Sounds to me like Oracle's market share is dropping and they're doing what they can to hold on. Besides, they make the bulk of their money from support fees, not the database itself. If you do anything serious with their software, you'll NEED that support. It's been my experience that Oracle is so much more difficult to configure and optimize that I'll just stick with MySQL and other database products when needed. I am completely convinced that unless you require a feature only present in Oracle or unless you have software that requires it, you should go with another database.
Is it me or has Microsoft become highly reactionary? Google says they are going to start hosting things like databases and office applications on the web and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says the same thing. Mac OS uses the graphics processor and OpenGL to provide dazzling desktop effects and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says their next version of Windows will have the same thing. I'm sure there are probably many other examples. Can Microsoft not come up with useful new technologies on their own? Are they brain-dead followers blantanly copying everybody else's ideas?
Start using tcpdump along with ethereal. Put the Linux box on different parts of the network to see what is happening. If you're in a switched environment, you will see mostly broadcasts. Some broadcasts are required and good (like the necessary ARP requests and possibly DHCP requests when a computer boots and initializes its network devices). However, unnecessary broadcasts are very bad for network performance and can cause "packet storms" which cause outages.
Start tracking those broadcasts down and find out what's going on in this network, find out what machines are sending the broadcasts and why. Learn why various services broadcast and what services are available to minimize the broadcasting. For example, Windows boxes configured for a workgroup will typically broadcast until you setup a WINS system. Once properly configured, all the Windows boxes talk to the WINS box directly without broadcasting.
The same is true with Windows domains. If all the boxes are joined to an Active Directory domain, the workstations should switch from broadcasting to unicasting (talking directly) to the Active Directory servers.
This is also true of Service Location Protocol. If you've got a bunch of boxes trying to use SLP, they're probably multicasting (or broadcasting if the network switches and routers don't properly support multicast). Once you start an SLP Directory Agent, all the servers register their services with the DA and all the clients ask the DA where to find those services -- all with unicast instead of broadcast.
Certain older protocols are very "chatty" -- AppleTalk, IPX, NetBEUI, and NetBIOS are good examples. Work toward eliminating these protocols. In a properly configured network, you should be able to do everything you need without them.
I find it interesting and somewhat disturbing that the only way to achieve broad acceptance of an operating system is to offer the product with as few options as possible. An gross exaggeration? Yes, but consider this. The article states, "Developing applications for Linux desktops is a complicated endeavor now because of significant differences between two prevailing versions, called GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment)." So what we're saying is that an OS cannot be accepted by the masses if it has a choice of desktop environments, because it's hard to develop for two desktop environments? You know, a window is a window is a window. Is the code needed to create a window not abstracted from the window manager? Is what you display within the window dependent on the window manager? I don't see why this is so hard. Someone explain it to me. I know you will.:-)
You may as well ask why we don't use specialized languages for specific tasks, such as using C for pointers, Java for objects, FORTRAN for mathematics, etc. all within the same project, perhaps even in the same source file. Why should the compiler care what language we use? The computer can handle all those languages just as the computer can handle special symbols. Another similar question would be: Why don't we have specialized processors dedicated to certain tasks, like a speech processor, speech recognition processor, sound generation processor, video coding / decoding processor, I/O processor, and so on? I think the truth lies in the efficiencies of volume production. Specialization just isn't cost effective these days. People who do tend to reach out and try new ideas rarely get far today -- which is a real shame.
Seems to me all such storms, including typhoons and tornados, are the most efficient way to dissipate energy from a given area, or nature wouldn't do it that way. So my thinking leads me to believe that if we stop a lot of these storms then nature will find other ways to dissipate the energy and one of those ways could be that the energy builds up to a point where we cannot prevent it and we get a super-destructive monster storm. That or we have other very significant and destructive release of that energy, like huge waves. I say we focus on reducing the energy available to such storms, i.e. reducing "global warming".
I expect the first significant Mac OS virus to come within six months of the release of Intel-based Macs. I suspect Macs have been largely free of viruses because they run on CPUs with a very different design of which most virus writers have little or no experience. Granted, I think it will always be easier to trick Windows into executing malicious code, but moving Mac OS to Intel hardware will make for a smaller learning curve for those who write viruses.
Why isn't there a product available that allows one to "view" RF like a camcorder.. or at least still photos? Could something like a CCD sensor be built that would be tuned to radio frequencies instead of light frequencies? This sort of device would be extremely useful for locating RF signals, helping to find sources of interference, verifying whether antenae are active or not, looking for someone using a radio while hiding behind a bush with a gun, you know.. things like that.
I'll second that. In Black and White, you train your creature to do battle, and other tasks, for you. While you do have some ability to interact directly with the world, the objective is to show your creature how you want it to behave and ultimately to get your creature to do the job for you.
I personally saw the NLD running at a seminar last week and what I would call an Alpha release of Open Enterprise Server. I'm fairly optimistic about the product. I manage Novell and Linux servers at a north texas university and am greatly looking forward to consolidating the two into OES.
I was really interested to see that Novell has Linux kernel modules (a few of them that work together, actually) to manage their own NSS filesystem -- really an object database. This is very impressive since the NSS filesystem's access is granted to objects in eDirectory (LDAP server) and file permissions are quite different than posix file permissions. Yet, it mounted on Linux and showed posix permissions just as you'd expect.
I've heard the open beta starts in December, with a final release in February.
I agree that Windows 2003 is much better than 2000. I've used both and am about to rename a domain.. something not even supported under 2000... and can recommend 2003 with full confidence.
Also, as a standard practice, I disable DCOM and install a virus scanner and set all machines to auto-update (both virus signatures and windows updates) in the early morning (say around 05:00 local time). The servers will automatically update and reboot and I've personally never had a problem even though the servers are directly on the Internet. Granted, I don't run the web server.
In my opinion, anything that leads to long-term stability of national and world economies is positive. It seems to me that there is a trend in the U.S. with large, quicky growing companies being irresponsible in the way they handle their finances. Because the stock market is speculative and therefore volatile during the fallout of these companies, a single company that folds can have a huge impact. I would like to belive that the market will eventually discourage this, but perhaps the allure of making quick profits and upper management being able to walk away with tens or hundreds of millions is just too powerful a temptation. In that case, I think it would be good for the economy and for the world for us to adjust the rules to moderate this tendency.
The University of North Texas is about 60% through our own migration from mainframe to Oracle/PeopleSoft and I have to say that the transition is going quite well so far. We are already done with financials and inventory and many other parts of the system and are going live with registration this coming fall term. Projects are being completed mostly on-time and with relatively few problems. Now, our team did a tremendous amount of research before getting into this and knew much about the problems at other universities. It seems the problem is not the software, but the tendency of these organizations to continue doing business in their old ways. They try to force the new software to behave much the same way as the legacy systems they are trying to replace. From what I can tell, the problem is not with PeopleSoft or Oracle, but the universities themselves.
I would take a completely different tack. Instead of trying to blindly convince your boss that experience counts, try asking him how he arrived at his conclusion. The answer might surprise you. At the very least, you better understand how he arrived at his conclusions and are better able to counter them.
On a related note... I was shopping for new phones recently and had two sales people tell me that an unlocked phone will lead to more roaming charges since it will auto-switch over to another provider's network if the signal is better. Is there any truth to this?
Don't you hate it when everyone tells you something is impossible? It would be much more useful if they wouldn't, so that people who post solutions are easier to find.
This is absolutely possible and not that hard. It is just that most people don't take the time to learn how. The poster who mentioned Quality of Service (QOS) was correct. You will certainly want to read about traffic control and queueing disciplines.
Under Linux, use the traffic control (tc) command to configure bandwidth limits by adding or chaining queueing disciplines to your network interface. tc may not come pre-installed with your distribution, so you might have to find it.
At the end of this post is a script I wrote to limit bandwidth from my website, which limits anything going out of port 8000 to 2 Mbps, but can "borrow" up to 2 Mbps more when bandwidth is available (almost always on a 100 Mbps connection).
Since you can accidentally limit yourself to near nothing, you'll want a quick way to disable traffic control. The line below removes the "root" queueing disciple from the network interface which removes all the queueing disciplines that are chained from it.
tc qdisc del dev eth0 root
By modifying the u32 queueing discipline parameters, you can quite easily limit based upon IP addresses/networks.
This should get you started, but you really should read the traffic control documentation and understand how to configure this stuff. Don't just think you can tweak a few parameters in the script and get what you want. I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me a few hours to get a beginning grasp on it.
OK, here is the script...
# Add HTB queuing discipline to root of eth0 with handle 1:0
# unclassified traffic goes to class 1:99
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
root \
handle 1: \
htb \
default 99
# Add a single class that will limit all bandwidth on this interface
# This is done so that we can borrow between the classes below
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1: \
classid 1:1 \
htb \
rate 100mbit
# Class 1:10 is limited to 2mbit/s but can borrow up to 2mbit/s more from 1:99
# in practice the other 2mbit/s should almost always be available
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:1 \
classid 1:10 \
htb \
rate 2mbit \
ceil 4mbit
# Class 1:99 is limited to 90mbit/s and can not borrow any more
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:1 \
classid 1:99 \
htb \
rate 90mbit \
ceil 90mbit
# Use SFQ to load balance the connections within class 1:10
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:10 \
handle 10: \
sfq
# Use SFQ to load balance the connections within class 1:99
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:99 \
handle 99: \
sfq
# This filter selects all traffic from port 8000 as belonging to class 1:10
tc filter add \
dev eth0 \
protocol ip \
parent 1: \
prio 1 \
u32 match ip sport 8000 0xffff \
flowid 1:10
I'll recommend the HP LaserJet 1300 which supports PostScript Level 2 for all your Linux printing needs and which you can find for as little as $350 on PriceWatch.
Microsoft is putting this in the mail client? Why not put it in the mail server? Either way, this isn't going to combat spam. Spammers will simply not use Microsoft mail programs.
I have MacOS 10.3.1 and tried cut-and-pasting his command line and got the Segmentation fault, but no root prompt. Perhaps Max is using an older version of the OS?
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I've been wondering how long it will be before we give up on gasoline/diesel engines and go with fuel cells. Granted, that may be many years away. Anyway, fuel cells generate a lot of excess heat during operation which could be used for generating steam as the BMW does. I think this is a step in the right direction. Despite advances made in recent years, automobile engines are still very inefficient and the focus should be on improving overall efficiency.
Just like drugs... the first one's free. Oracle makes their money from support contracts, not the products. If you're software is bad enough, everyone needs the support!
Sounds to me like Oracle's market share is dropping and they're doing what they can to hold on. Besides, they make the bulk of their money from support fees, not the database itself. If you do anything serious with their software, you'll NEED that support. It's been my experience that Oracle is so much more difficult to configure and optimize that I'll just stick with MySQL and other database products when needed. I am completely convinced that unless you require a feature only present in Oracle or unless you have software that requires it, you should go with another database.
Is it me or has Microsoft become highly reactionary? Google says they are going to start hosting things like databases and office applications on the web and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says the same thing. Mac OS uses the graphics processor and OpenGL to provide dazzling desktop effects and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says their next version of Windows will have the same thing. I'm sure there are probably many other examples. Can Microsoft not come up with useful new technologies on their own? Are they brain-dead followers blantanly copying everybody else's ideas?
Start using tcpdump along with ethereal. Put the Linux box on different parts of the network to see what is happening. If you're in a switched environment, you will see mostly broadcasts. Some broadcasts are required and good (like the necessary ARP requests and possibly DHCP requests when a computer boots and initializes its network devices). However, unnecessary broadcasts are very bad for network performance and can cause "packet storms" which cause outages.
Start tracking those broadcasts down and find out what's going on in this network, find out what machines are sending the broadcasts and why. Learn why various services broadcast and what services are available to minimize the broadcasting. For example, Windows boxes configured for a workgroup will typically broadcast until you setup a WINS system. Once properly configured, all the Windows boxes talk to the WINS box directly without broadcasting.
The same is true with Windows domains. If all the boxes are joined to an Active Directory domain, the workstations should switch from broadcasting to unicasting (talking directly) to the Active Directory servers.
This is also true of Service Location Protocol. If you've got a bunch of boxes trying to use SLP, they're probably multicasting (or broadcasting if the network switches and routers don't properly support multicast). Once you start an SLP Directory Agent, all the servers register their services with the DA and all the clients ask the DA where to find those services -- all with unicast instead of broadcast.
Certain older protocols are very "chatty" -- AppleTalk, IPX, NetBEUI, and NetBIOS are good examples. Work toward eliminating these protocols. In a properly configured network, you should be able to do everything you need without them.
I find it interesting and somewhat disturbing that the only way to achieve broad acceptance of an operating system is to offer the product with as few options as possible. An gross exaggeration? Yes, but consider this. The article states, "Developing applications for Linux desktops is a complicated endeavor now because of significant differences between two prevailing versions, called GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment)." So what we're saying is that an OS cannot be accepted by the masses if it has a choice of desktop environments, because it's hard to develop for two desktop environments? You know, a window is a window is a window. Is the code needed to create a window not abstracted from the window manager? Is what you display within the window dependent on the window manager? I don't see why this is so hard. Someone explain it to me. I know you will. :-)
You may as well ask why we don't use specialized languages for specific tasks, such as using C for pointers, Java for objects, FORTRAN for mathematics, etc. all within the same project, perhaps even in the same source file. Why should the compiler care what language we use? The computer can handle all those languages just as the computer can handle special symbols. Another similar question would be: Why don't we have specialized processors dedicated to certain tasks, like a speech processor, speech recognition processor, sound generation processor, video coding / decoding processor, I/O processor, and so on? I think the truth lies in the efficiencies of volume production. Specialization just isn't cost effective these days. People who do tend to reach out and try new ideas rarely get far today -- which is a real shame.
Seems to me all such storms, including typhoons and tornados, are the most efficient way to dissipate energy from a given area, or nature wouldn't do it that way. So my thinking leads me to believe that if we stop a lot of these storms then nature will find other ways to dissipate the energy and one of those ways could be that the energy builds up to a point where we cannot prevent it and we get a super-destructive monster storm. That or we have other very significant and destructive release of that energy, like huge waves. I say we focus on reducing the energy available to such storms, i.e. reducing "global warming".
Why then do Linux vulnerabilities only apply to certain hardware platforms?
I expect the first significant Mac OS virus to come within six months of the release of Intel-based Macs. I suspect Macs have been largely free of viruses because they run on CPUs with a very different design of which most virus writers have little or no experience. Granted, I think it will always be easier to trick Windows into executing malicious code, but moving Mac OS to Intel hardware will make for a smaller learning curve for those who write viruses.
Why isn't there a product available that allows one to "view" RF like a camcorder.. or at least still photos? Could something like a CCD sensor be built that would be tuned to radio frequencies instead of light frequencies? This sort of device would be extremely useful for locating RF signals, helping to find sources of interference, verifying whether antenae are active or not, looking for someone using a radio while hiding behind a bush with a gun, you know.. things like that.
I'll second that. In Black and White, you train your creature to do battle, and other tasks, for you. While you do have some ability to interact directly with the world, the objective is to show your creature how you want it to behave and ultimately to get your creature to do the job for you.
What part of using XML for window layouts was reverse engineered?
Let Microsoft open the source code for their operating system and then let us see who has more reported vulnerabilities!
According to this eWeek article, they will be including Evolution, but Evolution 2 still needs some work to integrate it with GroupWise.
eWeek also has more information and you can look at Novell's Linux Desktop documentation and OSNews had some screen shots.
I personally saw the NLD running at a seminar last week and what I would call an Alpha release of Open Enterprise Server. I'm fairly optimistic about the product. I manage Novell and Linux servers at a north texas university and am greatly looking forward to consolidating the two into OES.
I was really interested to see that Novell has Linux kernel modules (a few of them that work together, actually) to manage their own NSS filesystem -- really an object database. This is very impressive since the NSS filesystem's access is granted to objects in eDirectory (LDAP server) and file permissions are quite different than posix file permissions. Yet, it mounted on Linux and showed posix permissions just as you'd expect. I've heard the open beta starts in December, with a final release in February.
I suggest we all boycott this and support HD-DVD.
I agree that Windows 2003 is much better than 2000. I've used both and am about to rename a domain.. something not even supported under 2000... and can recommend 2003 with full confidence.
Also, as a standard practice, I disable DCOM and install a virus scanner and set all machines to auto-update (both virus signatures and windows updates) in the early morning (say around 05:00 local time). The servers will automatically update and reboot and I've personally never had a problem even though the servers are directly on the Internet. Granted, I don't run the web server.
In my opinion, anything that leads to long-term stability of national and world economies is positive. It seems to me that there is a trend in the U.S. with large, quicky growing companies being irresponsible in the way they handle their finances. Because the stock market is speculative and therefore volatile during the fallout of these companies, a single company that folds can have a huge impact. I would like to belive that the market will eventually discourage this, but perhaps the allure of making quick profits and upper management being able to walk away with tens or hundreds of millions is just too powerful a temptation. In that case, I think it would be good for the economy and for the world for us to adjust the rules to moderate this tendency.
The University of North Texas is about 60% through our own migration from mainframe to Oracle/PeopleSoft and I have to say that the transition is going quite well so far. We are already done with financials and inventory and many other parts of the system and are going live with registration this coming fall term. Projects are being completed mostly on-time and with relatively few problems. Now, our team did a tremendous amount of research before getting into this and knew much about the problems at other universities. It seems the problem is not the software, but the tendency of these organizations to continue doing business in their old ways. They try to force the new software to behave much the same way as the legacy systems they are trying to replace. From what I can tell, the problem is not with PeopleSoft or Oracle, but the universities themselves.
I would take a completely different tack. Instead of trying to blindly convince your boss that experience counts, try asking him how he arrived at his conclusion. The answer might surprise you. At the very least, you better understand how he arrived at his conclusions and are better able to counter them.
On a related note... I was shopping for new phones recently and had two sales people tell me that an unlocked phone will lead to more roaming charges since it will auto-switch over to another provider's network if the signal is better. Is there any truth to this?
Don't you hate it when everyone tells you something is impossible? It would be much more useful if they wouldn't, so that people who post solutions are easier to find.
This is absolutely possible and not that hard. It is just that most people don't take the time to learn how. The poster who mentioned Quality of Service (QOS) was correct. You will certainly want to read about traffic control and queueing disciplines.
Under Linux, use the traffic control (tc) command to configure bandwidth limits by adding or chaining queueing disciplines to your network interface. tc may not come pre-installed with your distribution, so you might have to find it.
At the end of this post is a script I wrote to limit bandwidth from my website, which limits anything going out of port 8000 to 2 Mbps, but can "borrow" up to 2 Mbps more when bandwidth is available (almost always on a 100 Mbps connection).
Since you can accidentally limit yourself to near nothing, you'll want a quick way to disable traffic control. The line below removes the "root" queueing disciple from the network interface which removes all the queueing disciplines that are chained from it.
tc qdisc del dev eth0 root
By modifying the u32 queueing discipline parameters, you can quite easily limit based upon IP addresses/networks.
This should get you started, but you really should read the traffic control documentation and understand how to configure this stuff. Don't just think you can tweak a few parameters in the script and get what you want. I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me a few hours to get a beginning grasp on it.
OK, here is the script...
# Add HTB queuing discipline to root of eth0 with handle 1:0
# unclassified traffic goes to class 1:99
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
root \
handle 1: \
htb \
default 99
# Add a single class that will limit all bandwidth on this interface
# This is done so that we can borrow between the classes below
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1: \
classid 1:1 \
htb \
rate 100mbit
# Class 1:10 is limited to 2mbit/s but can borrow up to 2mbit/s more from 1:99
# in practice the other 2mbit/s should almost always be available
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:1 \
classid 1:10 \
htb \
rate 2mbit \
ceil 4mbit
# Class 1:99 is limited to 90mbit/s and can not borrow any more
tc class add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:1 \
classid 1:99 \
htb \
rate 90mbit \
ceil 90mbit
# Use SFQ to load balance the connections within class 1:10
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:10 \
handle 10: \
sfq
# Use SFQ to load balance the connections within class 1:99
tc qdisc add \
dev eth0 \
parent 1:99 \
handle 99: \
sfq
# This filter selects all traffic from port 8000 as belonging to class 1:10
tc filter add \
dev eth0 \
protocol ip \
parent 1: \
prio 1 \
u32 match ip sport 8000 0xffff \
flowid 1:10
I'll recommend the HP LaserJet 1300 which supports PostScript Level 2 for all your Linux printing needs and which you can find for as little as $350 on PriceWatch.
Microsoft is putting this in the mail client? Why not put it in the mail server? Either way, this isn't going to combat spam. Spammers will simply not use Microsoft mail programs.
I have MacOS 10.3.1 and tried cut-and-pasting his command line and got the Segmentation fault, but no root prompt. Perhaps Max is using an older version of the OS?