The idea of OODBMS sounds great - on paper. I have experience managing two large-scale systems that used OODB's over the past 3 years.
The issues I ran into were lack maintainability and flexability. Geeze, aren't those the things you really WANT in a database?
While an overpriced "explorer" type tool was available for browsing the database, there are no ad-hoc query tools. An application has to be written to work with the data. This also eliminates the ability of DBA's to manually look into the system, and optionally massage the data.
You also have to keep in mind that the corporate world is very row / column oriented, and random blobs of data are useless. While some OODMS's have ODBC interfaces, they are difficult to work with and generally provide for an incomplete mapping (unless you design your objects as row / column like, and then why use an OODBMS?)
The other big issue with OODBMS's in general is that they push processing off to the client. The server basically delievers "memory pages", and the client does all the processing. This causes increased network utilization, and requires that the clients have massive horsepower (this is the opposite of the popular thin-client approach.)
Other random comments:
The inability to make schema changes without rebuilding applications is a BIG DEAL and is one of the KEY reasons that OODB's suck. Now you are talking about major deployment issues, increased downtime, etc.
Doing simple SQL queries can be a TON of code on an OODBMS. With SQL, you spend time coding getting data to and from the DB, and with OODB you spend time coding what the (well-tested and robust) RDBMS was doing on the server. It's quite obvious which one has a higher chance of having bugs.
As for "who is using OODB", how about the Massive list of those that are NOT? Ah. Not enough paper in the printer for that list...
So in my own conclusion, I'll conceed that there are gains in "developing" with an OODB in an OO language, but in the "real" world, we don't just develop. We USE. It's the "using" part that fails with an OODB. The inability to interact without a specialized app for each and every little thing you may want to do is a showstopper. You end up having to recreate your toolset for each project, and can't leverage generalized commercial tools. You also limit yourself to not being able to integrate with other applications that do use RDBMS's in your enterprise (and there are LOTS of those...) This gets WAY expensive folks...
I thought it was funny too. And you are right, they don't come off easy. It's raining again this morning and I rubbed on them with my shoe and nothing happened.
This city needs a sense of humor, but it should be a slap on the wrist with a warning to others that it's funny once, but it won't be tolerated again.
I Don't think it would be funny to start seeing real advertisements sprayed on all over the place...
FYI, many "check cards" have daily limits... I found this out with my BOA card. Had over $30,000 in the bank but spent over $700 in one day - the next $15 transaction was denied - I did have a credit card to fall back on, but that really pissed me off... Check with your bank to see if they are as incredibly stupid as Bank of America...
BTW, they do have "premier" accounts that have higher limits, but they still have limits. Bunch of crap IMHO.
Also, check cards do NOT share the same fraud protection as credit cards. That cash is GONE NOW, unless you can get a refund - way different than denying charges and refusing to pay the bill.
Bottom line is that check cards != credit cards in many ways. Check with your individual bank for more info as P&P is different for each bank.
I can only get IDSL, so I got sprintBB as an additional service to my IDSL circuit.
Until sprint pulls it's head out of its ass, avoid this service. I have MASSIVE problems with outages that have not been resolved in 4 months so far. Upload speed can be WORSE than a modem, best case about IDSL speeds (144kb) and is usually on the slow end.
The thing craps out about every ten minutes for about a minute at a time. WORTHLESS.
In San Jose this past weekend, service was totally out from Friday to Monday.
Their AUP also really sucks...
Buyer beware... It it is your only connection, you are better off with a modem.
Even large drive arrays can't keep up with a SSD.
Don't think "Large files, continuous write", think
opening and closing 100,000 small files and needing to write to all of them. Think directory updates and searches. There are lots of variables.
I tried the drive arrays (much larger than your setup, with E4000's, fiberchannel hardware raid, etc.) and the SSD still kicks ass. There are also MANY cases where you don't need 1/2 Terabyte of storage, yet still need speed. Why should I use a $60,000 drive array when a $20,000 SSD works FASTER?
Bottom line is that you need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's a SSD, sometimes its real disk.
Don't forget that ram disks generate less heat and use less power and have no moving parts compared to a drive array.
Ram drives are NOT fault tolerant. They also nuke themselves when the power goes out, or the OS dies for some reason. SS drives are needed when you need the funtionlaity of non-volitile storage yet much higher speeds than tradional disk. So No, a PC with a ramdisk and UPS does NOT equal a SSD.
Generally they don't use high-density dimms. They use low density, and LOTS of them. But the boards they plug them into are all proprietary. The real answer is more of the fact that it's a nitch market so drives arn't manufacturered in large quantities. The common person doesn't have a need for a big ram drive.
This may change however, as the speed of processors keeps going up, yet drive speed really hasn't (not to the same degree anyway.) If applications are written specifically for SSD's, things may change. Oracle for example is now supporting the use of SSD's to hold transaction logs.... Speeds up the database a LOT.
... But did you ever try and BUY one of those quantum drives? Fat chance. I gave up after being told lead times were over 2 months, and no guarentees. I went to soliddata.com. It's a neat box that has "bigass" ram cards, an internal UPS, and a harddrive to store the contents of RAM.
Standard really-fast SCSI interface (availble in a variety of speeds.) Totally plug and play, looks like a normal harddrive. Quantum may talk, but they can't deliver.
An hour wait isn't all that common, but it does happen. You can't tell a patient "Sorry, I know your sick but I have to go see someone else so I don't have time to talk about your simptoms and write a prescription. Next!!" Patients are individuals. They have individual problems that take variable lengths of time. They DO schedule based on average time, but not all patients are average!! Sometimes they get nailed with a particularly bad problem or emergency, or several emergencies in a row. I don't know about you, but I don't get sick only on my regularly scheduled appointment!
Bottom line is: Pull your self-important head out of your self-important ass and realize that you are not alone in this world. People don't exist to serve you. I can just see you getting out of your car in a traffic jam screaming at everyone "Get the hell out of my way! I make more money than you and you are costing me profits!"
You obviously don't know squat about the medical field...
Most doctors make less than high tech workers. They don't get to charge whatever they want. The insurance companies are the only ones getting rich here...
How things REALLY work is that insurance companies set the rates that they are willing to pay for different services. They also limit a doctors ability to prescribe certain drugs, offer certain kinds of treatments, etc. Some insurance companies that do HMO plans tell the doctors that they will pay them X dollars for every patient whether or not the patients use services - so you make money on the healthy patients, and lose out the ass on the sick ones and in the end, you hope you did a little better than breaking even. If you are a doctor and want any patients, you WILL bow down to the insurance compnaies and accept what they offer. Here in the valley, Sutter (which manages dozens of clinics including Palo Alto Medical foundation) won't accept Blue Cross anymore because they were losing money for every patient since BC was only willing to pay 1950's rates... This REALLY sucks if your employer only offers Blue Cross and your doctor
is in Sutter...
Now if you want to make money in the medical field, go into cosmetic surgery or something where the insurance companies don't have any control.
You probably don't want doctors and patients communicating with each other via email. This is almost as bad as not having any security on patient records. Email should not be used for ANY confidential communications of any kind.
Instead, you may want a web form on a secure https
web server where patients sign in and communicate over a private webmail type system.
In general, security security security. That should be the first thing you think about. VPN's for doctors at home, SecureID tokens, etc. Don't leave terminals logged in that patients can screw with. Disable booting from floppy / CD in BIOS and enable BIOS passwords (better yet, use diskless or hard disk only workstations.) Use screensaver passwords, and short timeouts. Don't allow ANY non-authorized software to be installed. Isolate your web systems from internal systems and make sure passwords are not shared between the two. Consult a security expert from a reputable firm (I think Price Waterhouse Coopers does this...)
Drill into ALL employees how important security is - many people can get frustrated when you have lots of security, but with proper training they may understand it and accept it.
You've got it close here, but it's actually MUCH easier than that.
"bulk" boxes don't work because you are still paying to get the spam, and it saps your connection. You have to think from a corporate viewpoint. I don't want the spam on my network AT ALL. I also don't want my ISP's lines clogged with spam either as it degrades my ability to surf / use the net.
ISP's need to filter outgoing SMTP to all servers except their own mail servers. Their servers need rate limiting code in them to disable any account that smells like it is trying to send spam. Nobody regularly sends out emails to their 1000 closest buddies. If someone has a true need, the ISP can put a "special" flag on the account to open up SMTP / disable rate limiters - but require the user to sign a contract forbidding spam, and charge them a Very large penalty if they do. The ISP should also require that the users system does not relay spam from unauthorized sites (easy to do with modern servers.) This allows "power users" to run their own mail systems.
ISP's can also look for massive SMTP Syn packets
from direct line / business customers and make sure that the customer is not spamming. This isn't that hard to do either - just dump a few boxes on your backbone with gig-e cards, and monitor. Look for spam patterns (type of connections - not content monitoring - only check content when it looks like a spam run.)
Most spammers use throwaway accounts. They sign up for "free trials" and such. They use debit cards that have $50 on them to sign up for service, so the ISP can't bill them. Even though spam costs ISP's millions, they are unwilling to stop it. It will take congress to fix it. We also need to put pressure on people to close open relays (see maps.abuse.net)
The only way for email to survive is to eliminate spam. If we don't stop it, it will continue to ramp to thousands of messages a day.
OK, then how about when EMAIL marketing REALLY takes off and %30 of all national and %30 of local businesses start sending out spam. Oh, and they think you need to be reminded once a month of their woderful products and services. The net result is that you will have 1000 times more spam than real email.
How's that for "getting real?" I live in the bay area - the number of companies that have national scope that could spam me and all the local companies that could spam me would number in the millions. If only 500,000 sent spam once a month,
that would be over 16,000 emails a day. If they only sent it once a year, that's still over 1300 a day. You want that?????? Is spam still free and doesn't cost you much now? Can you effectivly just hit delete anymore?
Let's go further and say that you have to use a modem due to the fact that DSL / cablemodems / etc are not available to you. Let's say that you are lucky and get about a 4K per second download rate.
Just downloading SPAM would take 1.1 HOURS a day! Is spam still "just a little anoying" anymore?
Unless we as a society really start getting aggressive about spam, this will be a reality. Penalties NEED to include jail time. That's the ONLY thing that will stop spam.
120 users with 180M boxes? You must have one hell of a drive array and FAST machine...
What happens on the server is that every time a user "checks mail" (and many do this as often as once a minute), the server must scan through the
entire mailbox - finding all the headers.
If you have 120 users with only 20M mail boxes, and they scan once every 2 minutes, your server must parse 20M / second on average!!! The real world scenario is that it takes a while for each mailbox to be read, and you end up having MANY mailboxes being read simultainiously. The server gets massivly I/O bound and performance goes to shit. The server slows to the point where people start getting timeout errors in their clients.
mbox sucks BIG time with lots of users and large mail boxes.
I'd like to see a system based on a true database.
This is FUD. Both IMAP and POP have alternatives to cleartext passwords. Pop has APOP. IMAP has several alternatives. Most modern clients support these alternatives.
Please don't spew misinformation - read up before posting...
"What I can never figure out is why no one uses a.us domain."
The.us domain is geography based. I'm suposed to register my domain in sanjose.ca.us for example. What happens if I move? If I'm a business and have stores in new york, san francisco, and chicago, which location do I register in? all of them? Just one?
There are only a few entities that make sense to use the.us domain. Local governments, schools, etc.
The.us domain is also NOT well managed. The registrar for san jose is actually in santa cruz. Some cities registrars in different states. Some charge (!) but most don't. It's anarchy.
Remember that names and numbers are NOT a one to one relationship. idiotsRus.com and moronhouse.com
could point to the SAME IP address, but totally different web sites. This is one of the things HTTP 1.1 did for us. It helps conserve IP addresses that are in short supply. www.butthead.com can also map to many different IP addresses too.
Of course some of the REASONS that IP addresses are in short supply are stupid - large corps hogging class A's & B's that don't need them... But I digress.
But don't worry Simon, soon you will have lots of IPv6 numbers to remember!!!
You must have missed the slashdot about the ham radio operator you was issued a ceas and desist from QVC networks because his web site (call sign) had the letters QVC in them. You must also have missed the etoy / etoys article.
Large corporations will abuse trademarks to all extents possible. Individuals and smaller entities need protection from that. The ICANN domain name dispute policy is anti individual and pro corporate. It is really a violation of our free speach rights AND our right to use common english words / names in domain names.
ICANN has also artificially limited new TLD's to only a few mega corporations - Why? There is NO techincal reason why we can't have thousands / millions of TLD's. There is nothing special about Top level versus second level.
I'm the Director of Operations for a mid-sized company managing ~80 servers, ~500 workstations...
If I want to install a service on all servers that are web servers (20 out of 80) for example, I can run a script that adds the service to all those machines by adding a file to it's/etc/init.d and a link in the appropriate rc?.d directory. It would be a royal pain to try and use sed or some other method to edit each independant bsd style rc file since each machine can have different requirements.
By automating the administration of all these machines with a series of scripts and cronjobs, I can manage this large number of machines with only 2 sysadmins.
If you think about larger groups of machines where each machine can have one / several roles, it makes more sense. I used to prefer the BSD style rc system until I had to start dealing with large numbers of machines.
If you are only managing one machine however, I still find the BSD style easier - but once you get used to sysv style, you will probably want to stick with it for consistencies sake even with one machine.
And you have proof of this? Fraud costs us BILLIONS. Does anyone remember the S&L bailouts that we taxpayers had to deal with? And anyone remember WHY the S&L's failed? The fraud that happens everyday by corporations and government harms ALL of us. Murderers, rapists, and kidnappers only harm individuals.
Slashdot Mirror
It may not have been "none", but it must have been a VERY small number. -- A former customer
Versant / ODI are not that cheap. You get less too. If you are going broke on Oracle, you don't have a good negotiater.
The idea of OODBMS sounds great - on paper. I have experience managing two large-scale systems that used OODB's over the past 3 years.
The issues I ran into were lack maintainability and flexability. Geeze, aren't those the things you really WANT in a database?
While an overpriced "explorer" type tool was available for browsing the database, there are no ad-hoc query tools. An application has to be written to work with the data. This also eliminates the ability of DBA's to manually look into the system, and optionally massage the data.
You also have to keep in mind that the corporate world is very row / column oriented, and random blobs of data are useless. While some OODMS's have ODBC interfaces, they are difficult to work with and generally provide for an incomplete mapping (unless you design your objects as row / column like, and then why use an OODBMS?)
The other big issue with OODBMS's in general is that they push processing off to the client. The server basically delievers "memory pages", and the client does all the processing. This causes increased network utilization, and requires that the clients have massive horsepower (this is the opposite of the popular thin-client approach.)
Other random comments:
The inability to make schema changes without rebuilding applications is a BIG DEAL and is one of the KEY reasons that OODB's suck. Now you are talking about major deployment issues, increased downtime, etc.
Doing simple SQL queries can be a TON of code on an OODBMS. With SQL, you spend time coding getting data to and from the DB, and with OODB you spend time coding what the (well-tested and robust) RDBMS was doing on the server. It's quite obvious which one has a higher chance of having bugs.
As for "who is using OODB", how about the Massive list of those that are NOT? Ah. Not enough paper in the printer for that list...
So in my own conclusion, I'll conceed that there are gains in "developing" with an OODB in an OO language, but in the "real" world, we don't just develop. We USE. It's the "using" part that fails with an OODB. The inability to interact without a specialized app for each and every little thing you may want to do is a showstopper. You end up having to recreate your toolset for each project, and can't leverage generalized commercial tools. You also limit yourself to not being able to integrate with other applications that do use RDBMS's in your enterprise (and there are LOTS of those...) This gets WAY expensive folks...
Actually, it's Peace, Love, Linux. Not the other way around...
I thought it was funny too. And you are right, they don't come off easy. It's raining again this morning and I rubbed on them with my shoe and nothing happened.
This city needs a sense of humor, but it should be a slap on the wrist with a warning to others that it's funny once, but it won't be tolerated again.
I Don't think it would be funny to start seeing real advertisements sprayed on all over the place...
FYI, many "check cards" have daily limits... I found this out with my BOA card. Had over $30,000 in the bank but spent over $700 in one day - the next $15 transaction was denied - I did have a credit card to fall back on, but that really pissed me off... Check with your bank to see if they are as incredibly stupid as Bank of America...
BTW, they do have "premier" accounts that have higher limits, but they still have limits. Bunch of crap IMHO.
Also, check cards do NOT share the same fraud protection as credit cards. That cash is GONE NOW, unless you can get a refund - way different than denying charges and refusing to pay the bill.
Bottom line is that check cards != credit cards in many ways. Check with your individual bank for more info as P&P is different for each bank.
I can only get IDSL, so I got sprintBB as an additional service to my IDSL circuit.
Until sprint pulls it's head out of its ass, avoid this service. I have MASSIVE problems with outages that have not been resolved in 4 months so far. Upload speed can be WORSE than a modem, best case about IDSL speeds (144kb) and is usually on the slow end.
The thing craps out about every ten minutes for about a minute at a time. WORTHLESS.
In San Jose this past weekend, service was totally out from Friday to Monday.
Their AUP also really sucks...
Buyer beware... It it is your only connection, you are better off with a modem.
Bottom line is that you need to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's a SSD, sometimes its real disk.
Don't forget that ram disks generate less heat and use less power and have no moving parts compared to a drive array.
Bill Gates: 640K should be enough for anyone.
(Old IBM founder quote): The world will never need more than 4 computers.
Haven't we leared ANYTHING???
Ram drives are NOT fault tolerant. They also nuke themselves when the power goes out, or the OS dies for some reason. SS drives are needed when you need the funtionlaity of non-volitile storage yet much higher speeds than tradional disk. So No, a PC with a ramdisk and UPS does NOT equal a SSD.
This may change however, as the speed of processors keeps going up, yet drive speed really hasn't (not to the same degree anyway.) If applications are written specifically for SSD's, things may change. Oracle for example is now supporting the use of SSD's to hold transaction logs.... Speeds up the database a LOT.
... But did you ever try and BUY one of those quantum drives? Fat chance. I gave up after being told lead times were over 2 months, and no guarentees. I went to soliddata.com. It's a neat box that has "bigass" ram cards, an internal UPS, and a harddrive to store the contents of RAM. Standard really-fast SCSI interface (availble in a variety of speeds.) Totally plug and play, looks like a normal harddrive. Quantum may talk, but they can't deliver.
Bottom line is: Pull your self-important head out of your self-important ass and realize that you are not alone in this world. People don't exist to serve you. I can just see you getting out of your car in a traffic jam screaming at everyone "Get the hell out of my way! I make more money than you and you are costing me profits!"
Most doctors make less than high tech workers. They don't get to charge whatever they want. The insurance companies are the only ones getting rich here...
How things REALLY work is that insurance companies set the rates that they are willing to pay for different services. They also limit a doctors ability to prescribe certain drugs, offer certain kinds of treatments, etc. Some insurance companies that do HMO plans tell the doctors that they will pay them X dollars for every patient whether or not the patients use services - so you make money on the healthy patients, and lose out the ass on the sick ones and in the end, you hope you did a little better than breaking even. If you are a doctor and want any patients, you WILL bow down to the insurance compnaies and accept what they offer. Here in the valley, Sutter (which manages dozens of clinics including Palo Alto Medical foundation) won't accept Blue Cross anymore because they were losing money for every patient since BC was only willing to pay 1950's rates... This REALLY sucks if your employer only offers Blue Cross and your doctor is in Sutter...
Now if you want to make money in the medical field, go into cosmetic surgery or something where the insurance companies don't have any control.
Instead, you may want a web form on a secure https web server where patients sign in and communicate over a private webmail type system.
In general, security security security. That should be the first thing you think about. VPN's for doctors at home, SecureID tokens, etc. Don't leave terminals logged in that patients can screw with. Disable booting from floppy / CD in BIOS and enable BIOS passwords (better yet, use diskless or hard disk only workstations.) Use screensaver passwords, and short timeouts. Don't allow ANY non-authorized software to be installed. Isolate your web systems from internal systems and make sure passwords are not shared between the two. Consult a security expert from a reputable firm (I think Price Waterhouse Coopers does this...)
Drill into ALL employees how important security is - many people can get frustrated when you have lots of security, but with proper training they may understand it and accept it.
You've got it close here, but it's actually MUCH easier than that.
"bulk" boxes don't work because you are still paying to get the spam, and it saps your connection. You have to think from a corporate viewpoint. I don't want the spam on my network AT ALL. I also don't want my ISP's lines clogged with spam either as it degrades my ability to surf / use the net.
ISP's need to filter outgoing SMTP to all servers except their own mail servers. Their servers need rate limiting code in them to disable any account that smells like it is trying to send spam. Nobody regularly sends out emails to their 1000 closest buddies. If someone has a true need, the ISP can put a "special" flag on the account to open up SMTP / disable rate limiters - but require the user to sign a contract forbidding spam, and charge them a Very large penalty if they do. The ISP should also require that the users system does not relay spam from unauthorized sites (easy to do with modern servers.) This allows "power users" to run their own mail systems.
ISP's can also look for massive SMTP Syn packets
from direct line / business customers and make sure that the customer is not spamming. This isn't that hard to do either - just dump a few boxes on your backbone with gig-e cards, and monitor. Look for spam patterns (type of connections - not content monitoring - only check content when it looks like a spam run.)
Most spammers use throwaway accounts. They sign up for "free trials" and such. They use debit cards that have $50 on them to sign up for service, so the ISP can't bill them. Even though spam costs ISP's millions, they are unwilling to stop it. It will take congress to fix it. We also need to put pressure on people to close open relays (see maps.abuse.net)
The only way for email to survive is to eliminate spam. If we don't stop it, it will continue to ramp to thousands of messages a day.
OK, then how about when EMAIL marketing REALLY takes off and %30 of all national and %30 of local businesses start sending out spam. Oh, and they think you need to be reminded once a month of their woderful products and services. The net result is that you will have 1000 times more spam than real email.
How's that for "getting real?" I live in the bay area - the number of companies that have national scope that could spam me and all the local companies that could spam me would number in the millions. If only 500,000 sent spam once a month,
that would be over 16,000 emails a day. If they only sent it once a year, that's still over 1300 a day. You want that?????? Is spam still free and doesn't cost you much now? Can you effectivly just hit delete anymore?
Let's go further and say that you have to use a modem due to the fact that DSL / cablemodems / etc are not available to you. Let's say that you are lucky and get about a 4K per second download rate.
Just downloading SPAM would take 1.1 HOURS a day! Is spam still "just a little anoying" anymore?
Unless we as a society really start getting aggressive about spam, this will be a reality. Penalties NEED to include jail time. That's the ONLY thing that will stop spam.
120 users with 180M boxes? You must have one hell of a drive array and FAST machine... What happens on the server is that every time a user "checks mail" (and many do this as often as once a minute), the server must scan through the entire mailbox - finding all the headers. If you have 120 users with only 20M mail boxes, and they scan once every 2 minutes, your server must parse 20M / second on average!!! The real world scenario is that it takes a while for each mailbox to be read, and you end up having MANY mailboxes being read simultainiously. The server gets massivly I/O bound and performance goes to shit. The server slows to the point where people start getting timeout errors in their clients. mbox sucks BIG time with lots of users and large mail boxes. I'd like to see a system based on a true database.
This is FUD. Both IMAP and POP have alternatives to cleartext passwords. Pop has APOP. IMAP has several alternatives. Most modern clients support these alternatives.
Please don't spew misinformation - read up before posting...
The .us domain is geography based. I'm suposed to register my domain in sanjose.ca.us for example. What happens if I move? If I'm a business and have stores in new york, san francisco, and chicago, which location do I register in? all of them? Just one?
There are only a few entities that make sense to use the .us domain. Local governments, schools, etc.
The .us domain is also NOT well managed. The registrar for san jose is actually in santa cruz. Some cities registrars in different states. Some charge (!) but most don't. It's anarchy.
Remember that names and numbers are NOT a one to one relationship. idiotsRus.com and moronhouse.com
could point to the SAME IP address, but totally different web sites. This is one of the things HTTP 1.1 did for us. It helps conserve IP addresses that are in short supply. www.butthead.com can also map to many different IP addresses too.
Of course some of the REASONS that IP addresses are in short supply are stupid - large corps hogging class A's & B's that don't need them... But I digress.
But don't worry Simon, soon you will have lots of IPv6 numbers to remember!!!
You must have missed the slashdot about the ham radio operator you was issued a ceas and desist from QVC networks because his web site (call sign) had the letters QVC in them. You must also have missed the etoy / etoys article.
Large corporations will abuse trademarks to all extents possible. Individuals and smaller entities need protection from that. The ICANN domain name dispute policy is anti individual and pro corporate. It is really a violation of our free speach rights AND our right to use common english words / names in domain names.
ICANN has also artificially limited new TLD's to only a few mega corporations - Why? There is NO techincal reason why we can't have thousands / millions of TLD's. There is nothing special about Top level versus second level.
I'm the Director of Operations for a mid-sized company managing ~80 servers, ~500 workstations...
/etc/init.d and a link in the appropriate rc?.d directory. It would be a royal pain to try and use sed or some other method to edit each independant bsd style rc file since each machine can have different requirements.
If I want to install a service on all servers that are web servers (20 out of 80) for example, I can run a script that adds the service to all those machines by adding a file to it's
By automating the administration of all these machines with a series of scripts and cronjobs, I can manage this large number of machines with only 2 sysadmins.
If you think about larger groups of machines where each machine can have one / several roles, it makes more sense. I used to prefer the BSD style rc system until I had to start dealing with large numbers of machines.
If you are only managing one machine however, I still find the BSD style easier - but once you get used to sysv style, you will probably want to stick with it for consistencies sake even with one machine.
Hollywood is heavily democratic. He may oppose this for that reason...
And you have proof of this? Fraud costs us BILLIONS. Does anyone remember the S&L bailouts that we taxpayers had to deal with? And anyone remember WHY the S&L's failed? The fraud that happens everyday by corporations and government harms ALL of us. Murderers, rapists, and kidnappers only harm individuals.