They all do it. When I domain I own is up for renewal I get "DON'T LET IT SLIP!!!!!" renewal messages from tons of registrars (and sometimes none from VeriSign/NetSol).
I'm starting to think that the only businesses left in this world are the sleazy ones.
The link on the front page so no presntations, which presumably means no sales shit, either.
Obviously Microsoft employees (not "gold partners" or any of that crap) did not actually come to your office and say that shit to your face, so it doesn't count.
We have a squid cache and during peak browsing, er, working times we see 40-50% cache hit rate.
I think the byte savings isn't quite as good as that, but I don't have any solid data to back that up.
The best I can say is that we had to shut the cache off for a day or so to do some maintenance and the help desk got a lot of calls about how "slow" the web was, in spite of the fact that not more than a few days prior we had *doubled* our internet bandwidth (single 1.5Mbit frame to MPP bonded dual pointtopoint).
I think that overall it provides much better bandwidth utilization (ie, fewer packets on the ISP link, even if the byte savings is only 10-20%) and the client browsing experience is a lot snappier.
Our ISP used to have a whole statewide squid cache hierarchy which you could tune your local squid cache into if you wanted to -- I wish they still did, the aggregated caching would have been very nice.
What would aliens want with earth? Theres life on earth, perhaps they are curious and want to study us. Why on earth would humans go in the deep ocean and study microscopic lifeforms?
The cost of traveling to the bottom of the ocean is trivial relative to the cost of crossing the galaxy.
Oh and I'm sure if Aliens do see us, and how brutal we are, Aliens would treat us like wild animals, tag us, and keep their distance. I dont see you going to shake hands with a wild lion or ape in the jungle.
If lions and apes wrote books, built machines and transformed their environment in an apparently intelligent way, I would try to shake their hands.
Most of these speed records are about as applicable to everyday communications problems as the Thrust SSC's land speed record is to the problems of everyday ground transportaton.
Eventually the technological advances will influence everyday communications technology, but for now they're a gee-whiz thing that's of little direct value.
Not to troll, but a lot of Microsoft's innovations are actually recycled ideas that've been around for years. No, really, not to troll - I'm glad they've taken certain ideas from Unix. It wouldn't make sense for them to have not done so. There's a lot of good stuff in the various Unices out there.
All of the features you've mentioned were not invented by UNIX operating system, they're features of many operating systems (multitasking) or filesystems (symlinks) that have been implemented within the UNIX environment. (I may be wrong about symlinks -- I don't remember them as a feature in my Cyber or limited VMS experience, although the idea I'm sure was thought of in those days).
Kerberos is an application that was implemented on UNIX -- it doesn't have anything to do with the UNIX operating system.
A better question may be asking why new features are so often implemented on UNIX instead of other operating systems.
I used to think that some small percentage of UFO reports *had* to represent entities from outer space -- there were too reports of them, and too many of them came from people who had a lot of credibility (Air Force/NASA people, law enforcement, etc).
I doubt that any of them represent space travelers anymore.
SETI hasn't found squat -- you would think that if there was anyone "close", say within 20-30 light years would have been observable by SETI.
The distances space travellers would need to cross strain at the laws of physics as we know them. The technology needed to travel extra-solar distances are staggering. Leads me to believe that its not possible or practical for anything smaller than an aircraft-carrier sized starship to travel such distances and at least tens of years of travel.
Even if you assume that these space travellers are further evolved from a technology and physics perspective and can cross great distances in something much less than a human lifetime, what could they *possibly* want with earth? Its small, primitive population can't teach them very much, and our meager resources can't be of any use to them.
And of course the most damning evidence is that entities from outer space haven't made themselves known in any kind of a verifiable way (ie, appearing on Larry King Live).
I'd like to believe that there are advanced civiliations with cool technology that can travel the galaxy, but it seems kind of unlikely.
If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files.
You've now just defined a web site, not an FTP site. Enough suits know WTF a web site is and will make the project into a huge extranet, full of Flash, animated GIFs, javascript and weeks of approval processes for the tiniest change.
It will also be hosted off-site at some hosting place the CIO gets free golf and booze from, requiring everyone to FTP their files off of it...
I work at a top 10 US agency and ad people are about as technically incompetant as you can get and still be employed as more than frycook at McDonalads.
To their credit, our prepress people have figured out FTP with the aid of Fetch and other GUI tools. But there are a number of people who still don't get it.
Raj was brought over on a H1B visa by Bob, who knew that he could buy a better BMW if he helped keep wages down. This also enabled Bob to drive out the now unemployed families living in the apartments he wanted to convert into his 4000 sq ft luxury city apartment.
Are they related to those dumbass, cargo-pants weaing, PDA using, Slashdot-reading, Honda-driving, 30-something, "Hey, Raj, look at us! We're geeks!" weenies who can't be bothered to turn off their cell phones, pagers, PDAs and notebooks in the movies?
I think SPAM could be limited if our government dedicated more resources to white collar crime and fraud than to other pursuits like the war on drugs.
Most of what passes for SPAM in my mailbox is either prima facie fraudulent products (penis enlargers) and offers (stock "tips") or setups to fraudulent web sites for porn or related items.
If people who did these scams were actually investigated and ultimately jailed with great frequency we would have fewer SPAM messages. They have to be invetigatable because there has to be a way for them to get money from your pocket to theirs.
Also, I think that there'd have to be few convictions. Merely having the FBI/SEC/ATF show up and start doing a serious investigation is enough to scare a lot of people into other lines of fraud.
This wouldn't do anything for offshore scammers, but I have a feeling that the offshore places are going to have to get their shit together or they will start finding lots of the 1st world net blackholed to all of their data.
You would think there would be some, fairly HIGH safe wattage.
When I've been to the doctor to get my eyes checked he takes a freakin BRIGHT light and shines it around the inside of my eyes. I feel like I'm going to go blind for the rest of my life.
I've asked the doctor why it isn't dangerous when it seems so bright and he says it takes a lot more power to hurt your eyes. Maybe a discrete source like a laser would require the same power as this penlight, but man that thing is bright.
First you asked: Why shouldn't shareware authors expect to make a profit?
And then you answer your own question: Sure, most people will take advantage of the situation and never register software that they decide to use beyond the trial period, but some people are more honest and will happily pony up [...]
That's exactly why they shouldn't expect to make a "profit", because most people aren't going to pay for something if they get it up front without having to pay for it.
I'd agree that there are some people who seem to have a natural inclination for IT work but relying on them alone to do IT doesn't produce enough people to get the work done.
It's also a really tough metric by which to judge people, and its an impossible management philosophy by which to actually get work done by people who have never done it, whether the task is new to them or a new kind of task -- who was a "natural" at IP networking when it had never been done before?
I also don't think it precludes the idea of an apprenticeship model, either -- people who are naturally good at it but due to boredom or whatever don't excel at the traditional credentialling institutions (colleges, tech schools, cert mills) might get an opportunity to do what they're good at, and it also gives them an opportunity to learn in a structured way.
People who are naturally good at things also tend to screw up monumentally because they ignore structured learning and they make all the classic mistakes over and over again. Having a journeyman to learn from would help tremendously.
And just exactly where are people going to attain work experience if everyone does as you, and sends them all to the help desk?
On the help desk? Seriously. I think the IT trade needs to be treated more like many other sophisticated trades, like electricians, where you go to trade school, work as an apprentice, journeyman, foreman rankings through proven experience.
This of course highlights my other peeve, the way most help desks are organized -- they're a call center dumping ground full of retards that acts largely as a wall built around the more senior people to protect them from end users. The help desk should be totally split from the phone answering/training function (ie, people that just answer the phone). They should be treated and paid like they have a future in IT and expected to act, work and learn like they have one.
Treating sysadmin/network management like a trade with a natural progression of skills advancement makes so much sense because it involves everyone. Experienced people get to share their experience and knowledge with less experienced people, and less experienced people get real valuable experience and a better career path.
I used to use Zip disks back in the day when you could reasonably do viable a viable installation (one with development tools, editors, networking, etc etc) on 100MB. The "rescue" disk and the drive wsas portable to whatever machine it was needed on, reasonably fast and was a writable medium for saving configs or other data if it was determined that the original disk was dead (yes, there was actually 10-20 MB of FREE disk space).
It seems like the last time I tried to make a boot disk this way I couldn't get a basic install to fit on 100MB.
Removable IDE sleds sound the ideal solution, but so many boxes don't have room for them. A bootable CD seems like the most portable, although it lacks a writable filesystem.
Systinstall works pretty well for installation, especially if you do a complete non-X installation. It gets weird if you try to do anything out of the ordinary, tho.
I've actually roached a disk or two trying to do post-installation partitioning of a disk with sysinstall. To do this day I'm not sure what went wrong. Heh, nor do I remember how to make FBSD partitions and slices using fdisk and disklabel..
I think the biggest obstacles to improvement is probably the urge to fit the whole thing on two floppies. I'm sure no one will agree with me, but it'd be nice to see some modularization that would create multiple disk 2s depending on what kind of install you were doing -- CD, FTP, NFS. Putting those methods and their supporting code on seperate disk 2s might leave enough room to clean up and strengthen sysinstall.
One thing I don't think it needs is a GUI installer, or lots of flash. I'm not sure why people like GUI installs so much, but a clean, text-based installer seems so much easier to work with than a bad UNIX GUI.
How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada
Too bad for Canadians. Price you pay for universal health care, I guess...
I can't see the RIAA managing to do this in the US without some serious concessions to consumer media rights. I think they're getting close to the point of stepping over the line with copy-protection and general fear-mongering now. Trying to accomplish a RIAA tax on one of the few aspects of the computer industry that hasn't been crushed by the tech industry downturn will be pretty unpopular with a rather large and influential lobby.
The last batch I bought was a spindlepack of 100 for $17 at Microcenter. Even Office Despot sells 100 packs for $34.
Before you complain about the quality of cheap CDRs, I have been using these mostly in my car for the past year and I'm brutal with them. They get flung around the interior, sat on in the passenger seat, broiled in the summer sun, frozen in the winter, jammed 3-4 at a time into a single visor slot and I have yet to have one go bad.
I'm sure they're not national archive quality, but for $0.17/ea who cares.
I wonder how the small v. large debate is influenced by management philosophies and organization.
In the limited experience I've had with software development one of the biggest limitations on software development was that merely adequate developers slowed down the really good developers. Projects couldn't continue forward until certain development milestones were met, so good people just kind of shut down.
This effect was magnified by well-intentioned managers. They wouldn't do anything to try to improve the laggards development skills or pacing because they were otherwise meeting the basic goals, were likeable people, and so on. The lack of vulnerability of the laggards also prevented the better developers from taking over the laggards projects or assisting their speedy completion, since the laggards had a sense of ownership and management "backing" which enabled them to maintain control of their segments in spite of the overall degredation of the project.
It leads me to wonder if development groups have ever applied a 6-Sigma style management process where the laggards were cut and new people brought in. I understand there's some risk -- new people slow everything down getting up to speed, but it has the potential advantage that it eliminates *known* hindrances, and its not an attempt to increase team sizes. In other words, you're trying to fix the team not make it bigger, hopefully avoiding some of the Man-Month style diminishing returns.
Slashdot Mirror
They all do it. When I domain I own is up for renewal I get "DON'T LET IT SLIP!!!!!" renewal messages from tons of registrars (and sometimes none from VeriSign/NetSol).
I'm starting to think that the only businesses left in this world are the sleazy ones.
The link on the front page so no presntations, which presumably means no sales shit, either.
Obviously Microsoft employees (not "gold partners" or any of that crap) did not actually come to your office and say that shit to your face, so it doesn't count.
We have a squid cache and during peak browsing, er, working times we see 40-50% cache hit rate.
I think the byte savings isn't quite as good as that, but I don't have any solid data to back that up.
The best I can say is that we had to shut the cache off for a day or so to do some maintenance and the help desk got a lot of calls about how "slow" the web was, in spite of the fact that not more than a few days prior we had *doubled* our internet bandwidth (single 1.5Mbit frame to MPP bonded dual pointtopoint).
I think that overall it provides much better bandwidth utilization (ie, fewer packets on the ISP link, even if the byte savings is only 10-20%) and the client browsing experience is a lot snappier.
Our ISP used to have a whole statewide squid cache hierarchy which you could tune your local squid cache into if you wanted to -- I wish they still did, the aggregated caching would have been very nice.
What would aliens want with earth? Theres life on earth, perhaps they are curious and want to study us. Why on earth would humans go in the deep ocean and study microscopic lifeforms?
The cost of traveling to the bottom of the ocean is trivial relative to the cost of crossing the galaxy.
Oh and I'm sure if Aliens do see us, and how brutal we are, Aliens would treat us like wild animals, tag us, and keep their distance. I dont see you going to shake hands with a wild lion or ape in the jungle.
If lions and apes wrote books, built machines and transformed their environment in an apparently intelligent way, I would try to shake their hands.
Most of these speed records are about as applicable to everyday communications problems as the Thrust SSC's land speed record is to the problems of everyday ground transportaton.
Eventually the technological advances will influence everyday communications technology, but for now they're a gee-whiz thing that's of little direct value.
Not to troll, but a lot of Microsoft's innovations are actually recycled ideas that've been around for years. No, really, not to troll - I'm glad they've taken certain ideas from Unix. It wouldn't make sense for them to have not done so. There's a lot of good stuff in the various Unices out there.
All of the features you've mentioned were not invented by UNIX operating system, they're features of many operating systems (multitasking) or filesystems (symlinks) that have been implemented within the UNIX environment. (I may be wrong about symlinks -- I don't remember them as a feature in my Cyber or limited VMS experience, although the idea I'm sure was thought of in those days).
Kerberos is an application that was implemented on UNIX -- it doesn't have anything to do with the UNIX operating system.
A better question may be asking why new features are so often implemented on UNIX instead of other operating systems.
I used to think that some small percentage of UFO reports *had* to represent entities from outer space -- there were too reports of them, and too many of them came from people who had a lot of credibility (Air Force/NASA people, law enforcement, etc).
I doubt that any of them represent space travelers anymore.
SETI hasn't found squat -- you would think that if there was anyone "close", say within 20-30 light years would have been observable by SETI.
The distances space travellers would need to cross strain at the laws of physics as we know them. The technology needed to travel extra-solar distances are staggering. Leads me to believe that its not possible or practical for anything smaller than an aircraft-carrier sized starship to travel such distances and at least tens of years of travel.
Even if you assume that these space travellers are further evolved from a technology and physics perspective and can cross great distances in something much less than a human lifetime, what could they *possibly* want with earth? Its small, primitive population can't teach them very much, and our meager resources can't be of any use to them.
And of course the most damning evidence is that entities from outer space haven't made themselves known in any kind of a verifiable way (ie, appearing on Larry King Live).
I'd like to believe that there are advanced civiliations with cool technology that can travel the galaxy, but it seems kind of unlikely.
If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files.
You've now just defined a web site, not an FTP site. Enough suits know WTF a web site is and will make the project into a huge extranet, full of Flash, animated GIFs, javascript and weeks of approval processes for the tiniest change.
It will also be hosted off-site at some hosting place the CIO gets free golf and booze from, requiring everyone to FTP their files off of it...
I work at a top 10 US agency and ad people are about as technically incompetant as you can get and still be employed as more than frycook at McDonalads.
To their credit, our prepress people have figured out FTP with the aid of Fetch and other GUI tools. But there are a number of people who still don't get it.
Raj was brought over on a H1B visa by Bob, who knew that he could buy a better BMW if he helped keep wages down. This also enabled Bob to drive out the now unemployed families living in the apartments he wanted to convert into his 4000 sq ft luxury city apartment.
Are they related to those dumbass, cargo-pants weaing, PDA using, Slashdot-reading, Honda-driving, 30-something, "Hey, Raj, look at us! We're geeks!" weenies who can't be bothered to turn off their cell phones, pagers, PDAs and notebooks in the movies?
I think SPAM could be limited if our government dedicated more resources to white collar crime and fraud than to other pursuits like the war on drugs.
Most of what passes for SPAM in my mailbox is either prima facie fraudulent products (penis enlargers) and offers (stock "tips") or setups to fraudulent web sites for porn or related items.
If people who did these scams were actually investigated and ultimately jailed with great frequency we would have fewer SPAM messages. They have to be invetigatable because there has to be a way for them to get money from your pocket to theirs.
Also, I think that there'd have to be few convictions. Merely having the FBI/SEC/ATF show up and start doing a serious investigation is enough to scare a lot of people into other lines of fraud.
This wouldn't do anything for offshore scammers, but I have a feeling that the offshore places are going to have to get their shit together or they will start finding lots of the 1st world net blackholed to all of their data.
The last thing I need is Mr. "Noisy Typist" and Ms. "I Refuse to Mute My Laptop" sitting next to me.
They're usually pretty cooperative when they find out that Mr. "Gonna Break Your Laptop" is sitting next to them.
Future Headlines:
Overdue Library Books: Terrorism in the heart of our community
Right Turn On Red: Legitimate Liberty or Terrorist Vulnerabilty? Congress contemplates cracking down
I'm sure the list goes on.
You would think there would be some, fairly HIGH safe wattage.
When I've been to the doctor to get my eyes checked he takes a freakin BRIGHT light and shines it around the inside of my eyes. I feel like I'm going to go blind for the rest of my life.
I've asked the doctor why it isn't dangerous when it seems so bright and he says it takes a lot more power to hurt your eyes. Maybe a discrete source like a laser would require the same power as this penlight, but man that thing is bright.
First you asked:
Why shouldn't shareware authors expect to make a profit?
And then you answer your own question:
Sure, most people will take advantage of the situation and never register software that they decide to use beyond the trial period, but some people are more honest and will happily pony up [...]
That's exactly why they shouldn't expect to make a "profit", because most people aren't going to pay for something if they get it up front without having to pay for it.
You either have it or you don't.
I'd agree that there are some people who seem to have a natural inclination for IT work but relying on them alone to do IT doesn't produce enough people to get the work done.
It's also a really tough metric by which to judge people, and its an impossible management philosophy by which to actually get work done by people who have never done it, whether the task is new to them or a new kind of task -- who was a "natural" at IP networking when it had never been done before?
I also don't think it precludes the idea of an apprenticeship model, either -- people who are naturally good at it but due to boredom or whatever don't excel at the traditional credentialling institutions (colleges, tech schools, cert mills) might get an opportunity to do what they're good at, and it also gives them an opportunity to learn in a structured way.
People who are naturally good at things also tend to screw up monumentally because they ignore structured learning and they make all the classic mistakes over and over again. Having a journeyman to learn from would help tremendously.
And just exactly where are people going to attain work experience if everyone does as you, and sends them all to the help desk?
On the help desk? Seriously. I think the IT trade needs to be treated more like many other sophisticated trades, like electricians, where you go to trade school, work as an apprentice, journeyman, foreman rankings through proven experience.
This of course highlights my other peeve, the way most help desks are organized -- they're a call center dumping ground full of retards that acts largely as a wall built around the more senior people to protect them from end users. The help desk should be totally split from the phone answering/training function (ie, people that just answer the phone). They should be treated and paid like they have a future in IT and expected to act, work and learn like they have one.
Treating sysadmin/network management like a trade with a natural progression of skills advancement makes so much sense because it involves everyone. Experienced people get to share their experience and knowledge with less experienced people, and less experienced people get real valuable experience and a better career path.
I used to use Zip disks back in the day when you could reasonably do viable a viable installation (one with development tools, editors, networking, etc etc) on 100MB. The "rescue" disk and the drive wsas portable to whatever machine it was needed on, reasonably fast and was a writable medium for saving configs or other data if it was determined that the original disk was dead (yes, there was actually 10-20 MB of FREE disk space).
It seems like the last time I tried to make a boot disk this way I couldn't get a basic install to fit on 100MB.
Removable IDE sleds sound the ideal solution, but so many boxes don't have room for them. A bootable CD seems like the most portable, although it lacks a writable filesystem.
Systinstall works pretty well for installation, especially if you do a complete non-X installation. It gets weird if you try to do anything out of the ordinary, tho.
I've actually roached a disk or two trying to do post-installation partitioning of a disk with sysinstall. To do this day I'm not sure what went wrong. Heh, nor do I remember how to make FBSD partitions and slices using fdisk and disklabel..
I think the biggest obstacles to improvement is probably the urge to fit the whole thing on two floppies. I'm sure no one will agree with me, but it'd be nice to see some modularization that would create multiple disk 2s depending on what kind of install you were doing -- CD, FTP, NFS. Putting those methods and their supporting code on seperate disk 2s might leave enough room to clean up and strengthen sysinstall.
One thing I don't think it needs is a GUI installer, or lots of flash. I'm not sure why people like GUI installs so much, but a clean, text-based installer seems so much easier to work with than a bad UNIX GUI.
How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada
Too bad for Canadians. Price you pay for universal health care, I guess...
I can't see the RIAA managing to do this in the US without some serious concessions to consumer media rights. I think they're getting close to the point of stepping over the line with copy-protection and general fear-mongering now. Trying to accomplish a RIAA tax on one of the few aspects of the computer industry that hasn't been crushed by the tech industry downturn will be pretty unpopular with a rather large and influential lobby.
A buck each for CDR media? What?
The last batch I bought was a spindlepack of 100 for $17 at Microcenter. Even Office Despot sells 100 packs for $34.
Before you complain about the quality of cheap CDRs, I have been using these mostly in my car for the past year and I'm brutal with them. They get flung around the interior, sat on in the passenger seat, broiled in the summer sun, frozen in the winter, jammed 3-4 at a time into a single visor slot and I have yet to have one go bad.
I'm sure they're not national archive quality, but for $0.17/ea who cares.
I wonder how the small v. large debate is influenced by management philosophies and organization.
In the limited experience I've had with software development one of the biggest limitations on software development was that merely adequate developers slowed down the really good developers. Projects couldn't continue forward until certain development milestones were met, so good people just kind of shut down.
This effect was magnified by well-intentioned managers. They wouldn't do anything to try to improve the laggards development skills or pacing because they were otherwise meeting the basic goals, were likeable people, and so on. The lack of vulnerability of the laggards also prevented the better developers from taking over the laggards projects or assisting their speedy completion, since the laggards had a sense of ownership and management "backing" which enabled them to maintain control of their segments in spite of the overall degredation of the project.
It leads me to wonder if development groups have ever applied a 6-Sigma style management process where the laggards were cut and new people brought in. I understand there's some risk -- new people slow everything down getting up to speed, but it has the potential advantage that it eliminates *known* hindrances, and its not an attempt to increase team sizes. In other words, you're trying to fix the team not make it bigger, hopefully avoiding some of the Man-Month style diminishing returns.
There is no smbclient or smbmount, so you can't even think of doing that.
$ uname -sr
FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE
$ man mount_smbfs
MOUNT_SMBFS(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual MOUNT_SMBFS(8)
NAME
mount_smbfs - mounts a shared resource from an SMB file server
It was added to the system in the past year.
a real...armed-revolution-really-might-happen depression...
I want to have one of those. Burning, looting, anarachy. It'd be good for us all, kind of like Outward Bound, but for the country's social fabric.