Isn't Windows Terminal Services a "widget-level" communications system? For some reason I'm thinking that it's higher-level than X, although I could be mistaken.
It sounds pretty much like common HPUX/Sun office setups using NIS/NFS auto home directories. Every machine has the same software, and everybody can access their files from any machine. The one question might be the WAN aspect - I don't know how well NFS would work in that situation.
Although I somewhat fault our sysadmins (because some of them are Microsoft monkeys and deserve it:) in fact the week-long outage was due to a Global Address List replication bug within Exchange. Perhaps Exchange is as reliable; but the user-perceived reliability of it is that it is a significant downgrade from sendmail (really, I'd like to see a user base which doesn't feel this way after getting stuck with Exchange). It also requires more hardware to service an equivalent user base, leading to higher support costs, etc. and exacerbating the reliability problems.
So? Everything in a corporation is driven top-down. The guys at the top tell you what the goals of
the company are and they set the direction and tone. They give you the tools and the resources
and it is your job to do it. If you don't understand that you don't have a place in an enterprise
environment.
See, that's the problem - the guys at the top shouldn't be specifying tools at all. They should specify what they want and what they're willing to provide in order to get that done, and let the people that know what they're doing pick the tools that work properly. If people who don't know what they're doing pick the tools, then sometimes it becomes impossible for those with the know-how to get the job done with the tools they're given. And unfortunately blame usually rolls downhill, which is another truism of how large corporations work.
Top-down works great for setting goals and expectations. It does not work great for creating excellent technical solutions. Especially if there's a lot of micro-management and politics concerning those technical solutions.
The reality is that employees at a large company are the customers of IT, just the same way that an ISP or a web site might have external customers. But since the inside of the company is a feudal estate, employees get the shaft on the IT front with disturbing regularity. Employees put up with internal IT failures that would drive actual paying customers away in droves. But when you're top-down, you don't have to worry about annoying metrics like "user-perceived reliability", I guess.
Same thing happened to me. I don't know why they can't just keep the old domain name too, point it at their new mail server, and avoid screwing over customers, but what do I know.
I agree with the other poster - get your own domain and mail.
"Standardization is the last refuge of an incompetent CIO"
This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time. All so that we could standardize on Microsoft.
Hmmm, maybe it's the "Microsoft" part that really makes the CIO "incompetent"?
I'll grant that there are benefits to standardization, but it seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down; nobody asks the users what they want or even what they need to get their jobs done. So the results satisfy some sort of CIO goals checklist, but the real result is that lots of time at the ground level is wasted. It's like top executives are allergic to feedback that doesn't come from Wall Street sycophants or something.
Actually, the quality of the information does seem inversely proportional to the cross-section of the corporation that it's distributed to. This was a big problem where I work too. Eventually we switched to a system where a weekly mail is sent out that summarizes all the various memos, with links to the full story for each, so we can avoid reading about reorganizations that we don't care about. It's not perfect, since some brass still abuse the system, but it's better than it was. Efforts to get management to understand that announcements work best via internal newsgroups rather than by email have so far been unsuccessful.
Remember: "...They've struggled long and hard to be able to turn on and turn off Windows and MacOS machines."
They're just doing their part to support Free Software. Heck, by that count, Microsoft is the biggest Free Software supporter around. Code Red and Nimda probably did more for Linux/sendmail or qmail than Red Hat ever has:)
Meanwhile, if you would spend less time
criticizing honest hard working people and more time helping put a stop to
this sort of thing, we'd all be better off.
That sounds like carte blanche to Code Red their server, and helpfully either patch their server config, or just remove the whole smtp service. The man wants your help, and he doesn't have time to do it himself, does he?
Alternate fun idea: convince local spammers to use this server as their spamhaus, with Jeff Darga's email address as the reply-to. Bonus points if they happen to be pornographic spams. I bet that will get the problem fixed real fast:)
Y'know, the DMCA contains sections that supposedly protect fair use (reverse engineering for interoperability, etc.), but we know how well that worked out in practice.
Somehow I don't imagine that "based on" here necessarily means that you can get the exact source of the standards-implementing code. Although that really would be a bright spot, if true. It would spell the end of software players for anything, though, at least until the inevitable court battle over whether firmware is really software or not.
I don't think this is correct. With music CDs, at least, you aren't buying a license to anything. You just buy a medium with information on it. Your reproduction and dissemination of the information is constrained by copyright law, but is not constrained by a license.
For software there may be a license involved as well, which supposedly grants you the right to do things like install the software on your hard drive, use the software, etc. But just playing the disc like some sort of wacked-out audio CD doesn't require a license, for example.
I agree with you that the content industry wants to have it both ways; I just disagree with you on how far from reality they really are:)
Send it care of that kid watching movies on his C64. But you'll have to wait a bit; it takes him forever to download the movies on his 300 baud modem and he's still in the middle of The Matrix:)
Wow, I'm glad to hear that I'm immune from service if I use a non-relevant OS, like GNU HURD (no, I wouldn't, but just fr'instance). Although I suppose you could compile xpdf from source on almost any platform and use it. Hopefully "relevant platform" doesn't become the legal standard that's used in these situations, or else we'll be seing a lot more Plan 9 users:)
Surely "dedicated public safety frequency" is the important detail here, not digital.
Actually, digital is important, because digitally vocoded voice requires a lot less bandwidth than analog voice. Essentially compression is built in already. So digital systems are more spectrum-efficient. And with the digital radios you can quit thinking about a dedicated frequency, and think about a dedicated band of frequencies that the various agencies can split up amongst themselves and then rearrange quickly at disaster time.
In any case, the
nature of cell phones is that a cell has a certain amount of capacity. When people move into the
area or whatever the phone network company
has to put in more hardware, splitting up the cell and increasing capacity. It would seem a very
sudden increase in calls would always overload the hardware, and possibly the underlying local &
long distance networks (which did happen to some degree on Sept. 11).
So presumably you would need not just dedicated frequency, but dedicated hardware and
network for emergency use. For NYC it makes sense but not for Littleton CO. The costs are too
great.
One advantage of public safety systems is that they have much larger cells, so you don't have the same hardware scalability problems. Also, these systems already include the sorts of priority mechanisms that the government is requesting for cellular systems and the 'net, so that more important calls (the police chief) go through first.
Dedicated hardware is a cost, I agree. The push at the moment is to sell state-wide systems (see other comment) and then sell local communities access to the system, using their own talkgroups, etc. That way, when there's a disaster in Littleton, you can quickly patch the local police, fire, etc. in with the state police, state disaster teams, etc.
I may have worked on those radios - are you in Michigan, I assume?
It is pretty expensive hardware, but on the other hand the signalling protocols that the radios use are standardized (APCO), so hopefully a market will arise there that will mitigate some of the costs. IMHO the hardware does a lot to justify it's cost, but then I'm a little biased:)
I think there was a/. story a while back about an insurance company offering breaks for various secure computing activities - if you had a firewall, etc.
The problem with computing is that a 99% secure system is still wide open to 1% of the attacks, and that's all that you need. Guaranteed computer security is all or nothing, which is a little harder to insure I would think.
I think that the sniffer came first, actually. I just liked the name for a UID, since it was fairly anonymous and sounded neat, and I didn't check whether it was already in use for something else. Somehow when you think of something cool, you don't consider that you might not be the first person to think of it:) The UID dates from summer/fall '98 IIRC; too bad/. hasn't kept all 2600+ of my posts or I could tell you exactly when.
I'm definitely not associated with the ethereal packet sniffer project, although I hear they do great things. I haven't actually used it; tcpdump satisfies my needs thus far.
The difference is that they take you off the road for driving on the wrong side, but usually the worst thing that happens when you violate an RFC is that your connectivity is degraded or lost. A better analogy would be "you don't HAVE to wear pants while driving", but if you get caught then you can't expect your drive to complete successfully:)
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No, what it does is present your mail and calendar as a web-based interface. So, like hotmail, but also with a calendar app too.
Your local web browser actually does the downloading and parsing of web pages.
qmail rocks - I use it at home and found it very easy to set up and configure. How well does it do in enterprise situations?
Isn't Windows Terminal Services a "widget-level" communications system? For some reason I'm thinking that it's higher-level than X, although I could be mistaken.
It sounds pretty much like common HPUX/Sun office setups using NIS/NFS auto home directories. Every machine has the same software, and everybody can access their files from any machine. The one question might be the WAN aspect - I don't know how well NFS would work in that situation.
Although I somewhat fault our sysadmins (because some of them are Microsoft monkeys and deserve it :) in fact the week-long outage was due to a Global Address List replication bug within Exchange. Perhaps Exchange is as reliable; but the user-perceived reliability of it is that it is a significant downgrade from sendmail (really, I'd like to see a user base which doesn't feel this way after getting stuck with Exchange). It also requires more hardware to service an equivalent user base, leading to higher support costs, etc. and exacerbating the reliability problems.
See, that's the problem - the guys at the top shouldn't be specifying tools at all. They should specify what they want and what they're willing to provide in order to get that done, and let the people that know what they're doing pick the tools that work properly. If people who don't know what they're doing pick the tools, then sometimes it becomes impossible for those with the know-how to get the job done with the tools they're given. And unfortunately blame usually rolls downhill, which is another truism of how large corporations work.
Top-down works great for setting goals and expectations. It does not work great for creating excellent technical solutions. Especially if there's a lot of micro-management and politics concerning those technical solutions.
The reality is that employees at a large company are the customers of IT, just the same way that an ISP or a web site might have external customers. But since the inside of the company is a feudal estate, employees get the shaft on the IT front with disturbing regularity. Employees put up with internal IT failures that would drive actual paying customers away in droves. But when you're top-down, you don't have to worry about annoying metrics like "user-perceived reliability", I guess.
Same thing happened to me. I don't know why they can't just keep the old domain name too, point it at their new mail server, and avoid screwing over customers, but what do I know.
I agree with the other poster - get your own domain and mail.
I'm going to coin a phrase:
This is from a company where the ultra-reliable sendmail servers were replaced with Exchange, which has been down corporate wide for up to a week at a time. All so that we could standardize on Microsoft.
Hmmm, maybe it's the "Microsoft" part that really makes the CIO "incompetent"?
I'll grant that there are benefits to standardization, but it seems like large corporate standardization efforts are driven top-down; nobody asks the users what they want or even what they need to get their jobs done. So the results satisfy some sort of CIO goals checklist, but the real result is that lots of time at the ground level is wasted. It's like top executives are allergic to feedback that doesn't come from Wall Street sycophants or something.
Actually, the quality of the information does seem inversely proportional to the cross-section of the corporation that it's distributed to. This was a big problem where I work too. Eventually we switched to a system where a weekly mail is sent out that summarizes all the various memos, with links to the full story for each, so we can avoid reading about reorganizations that we don't care about. It's not perfect, since some brass still abuse the system, but it's better than it was. Efforts to get management to understand that announcements work best via internal newsgroups rather than by email have so far been unsuccessful.
Remember: "...They've struggled long and hard to be able to turn on and turn off Windows and MacOS machines."
They're just doing their part to support Free Software. Heck, by that count, Microsoft is the biggest Free Software supporter around. Code Red and Nimda probably did more for Linux/sendmail or qmail than Red Hat ever has :)
That sounds like carte blanche to Code Red their server, and helpfully either patch their server config, or just remove the whole smtp service. The man wants your help, and he doesn't have time to do it himself, does he?
Alternate fun idea: convince local spammers to use this server as their spamhaus, with Jeff Darga's email address as the reply-to. Bonus points if they happen to be pornographic spams. I bet that will get the problem fixed real fast :)
The City of Townsville?
Y'know, the DMCA contains sections that supposedly protect fair use (reverse engineering for interoperability, etc.), but we know how well that worked out in practice.
Somehow I don't imagine that "based on" here necessarily means that you can get the exact source of the standards-implementing code. Although that really would be a bright spot, if true. It would spell the end of software players for anything, though, at least until the inevitable court battle over whether firmware is really software or not.
I don't think this is correct. With music CDs, at least, you aren't buying a license to anything. You just buy a medium with information on it. Your reproduction and dissemination of the information is constrained by copyright law, but is not constrained by a license.
For software there may be a license involved as well, which supposedly grants you the right to do things like install the software on your hard drive, use the software, etc. But just playing the disc like some sort of wacked-out audio CD doesn't require a license, for example.
I agree with you that the content industry wants to have it both ways; I just disagree with you on how far from reality they really are :)
Send it care of that kid watching movies on his C64. But you'll have to wait a bit; it takes him forever to download the movies on his 300 baud modem and he's still in the middle of The Matrix :)
Not even if you alter lynx to provide the correct browser detection string?
Wow, I'm glad to hear that I'm immune from service if I use a non-relevant OS, like GNU HURD (no, I wouldn't, but just fr'instance). Although I suppose you could compile xpdf from source on almost any platform and use it. Hopefully "relevant platform" doesn't become the legal standard that's used in these situations, or else we'll be seing a lot more Plan 9 users :)
Obligatory semi-ontopic The Register link: MS judge in shock MSWord to WordPerfect defection
Yeah, but really only one guy in the dorm has to own one...
Mmmmm... Barely Legal Cake.
Actually, digital is important, because digitally vocoded voice requires a lot less bandwidth than analog voice. Essentially compression is built in already. So digital systems are more spectrum-efficient. And with the digital radios you can quit thinking about a dedicated frequency, and think about a dedicated band of frequencies that the various agencies can split up amongst themselves and then rearrange quickly at disaster time.
One advantage of public safety systems is that they have much larger cells, so you don't have the same hardware scalability problems. Also, these systems already include the sorts of priority mechanisms that the government is requesting for cellular systems and the 'net, so that more important calls (the police chief) go through first.
Dedicated hardware is a cost, I agree. The push at the moment is to sell state-wide systems (see other comment) and then sell local communities access to the system, using their own talkgroups, etc. That way, when there's a disaster in Littleton, you can quickly patch the local police, fire, etc. in with the state police, state disaster teams, etc.
I may have worked on those radios - are you in Michigan, I assume?
It is pretty expensive hardware, but on the other hand the signalling protocols that the radios use are standardized (APCO), so hopefully a market will arise there that will mitigate some of the costs. IMHO the hardware does a lot to justify it's cost, but then I'm a little biased :)
I think there was a /. story a while back about an insurance company offering breaks for various secure computing activities - if you had a firewall, etc.
The problem with computing is that a 99% secure system is still wide open to 1% of the attacks, and that's all that you need. Guaranteed computer security is all or nothing, which is a little harder to insure I would think.
I think that the sniffer came first, actually. I just liked the name for a UID, since it was fairly anonymous and sounded neat, and I didn't check whether it was already in use for something else. Somehow when you think of something cool, you don't consider that you might not be the first person to think of it :) The UID dates from summer/fall '98 IIRC; too bad /. hasn't kept all 2600+ of my posts or I could tell you exactly when.
I'm definitely not associated with the ethereal packet sniffer project, although I hear they do great things. I haven't actually used it; tcpdump satisfies my needs thus far.
The difference is that they take you off the road for driving on the wrong side, but usually the worst thing that happens when you violate an RFC is that your connectivity is degraded or lost. A better analogy would be "you don't HAVE to wear pants while driving", but if you get caught then you can't expect your drive to complete successfully :)
LOL - sounds like something that happened here at work recently :) Thanks for brightening my day.