Is a CEO qualified to understand any of these statements?
NO
S/He won't understand, it'll come across in the same way as the garage mechanic saying "... ooh, your Big End's gone, that's gonna cost ya". It's some mumble-mumble jargon with no real meaning, just a huge bill.
The CEO doesn't get that kind of stuff from the Wintel team, they just say "It's okay, MS produce patches, we'll check them out an install them".
The CEO, not understanding any of this, will have more faith in the Wintel team than in the *nix team. Because the Wintel answer is more understandable, acknowledges flaws, and has a plan to fix them (yes, I know it's just one sentence, but it does contain all that, if you have no knowledge of the underlying issues).
The CEO is busy doing many deals with customers, suppliers, potential customers and suppliers, internal management, etc. Your post would be chucked straight into the bin. Accurate and detailed as it may be, it's just so much jargon to the CEO. The CEO speaks a different language, and it's actually very easy to learn. There are only two questions to answer:
What does it cost me?
How does it improve my income?
Speak that language, and it's very simple. Speak any other language, and you are seen as just another back-street garage mechanic talking about big-ends.
The business are only concerned about money (it's called Capitalism, it's fairly common in the western world, you might have heard of it - it pays your salary). They don't care about "better", they care about "cost-effective". Show them that, make sure that you can deal with the details (because that's your job, and it's not their job (you know they'd fsck it up!)), and propose the best solution, in simple terms which the CEO will understand. That will improve your credibility, which is a virtuous circle. If you fsck it up, your credibility goes downhill, so be clear up-front about any assumptions, risks, worst-case-scenarios (as well as best-case-scenarios) for all options (your preferred option, as well as the one you are "resisting")
An interesting and useful thing a headhunter told me recently about looking for jobs - don't tell them what you know and what you're good at, tell them how much money you have saved, and how much income you have generated, in your current/previous jobs.
If you can come up with figures, saying that (eg) "We spend $x per annum on Anti-Virus software for Wintel; we could reduce that to $y by moving to Linux", or "We lose x hours per annum with unscheduled downtime on Wintel servers, costing $XX; we could reduce that to y hours with Linux servers, costing only $YY", you are more likely to get the attention of the beancounters.
A Ferrari is faster than a Volkswagen, but it costs more. It's down to the beancounters to sign-off the outlay. If you can show that you need a Ferrari's speed, and the benefits justify the cost, then they'll get the Ferrari. If you can show that the Volkswagen is quick enough, and is cheaper to buy/run, then they'll get the Volkswagen. Note that I've not gone into any details about the technical differences between the two manufacturers, but I've sold them on whichever option best suits the need.
In some cases, the Ferrari is the best buy; in others, the VW is the best buy.
If I'm in the high-end chauffeur business, then a Ferrari could win on the prestige alone; If I'm in the taxi business, the VW will win on TCO.
I know - I'm using the traditional car analogy, and I am failing to specify which option is Wintel and which is Linux; sorry for going against the mould, but it doesn't work that way in the CEO/CTO/CIO mindset. There is no "best"... we all know that a Ferrari is "bettter" than a VW, but is it better in this situation? If the objective is security, *nix is likely to beat Wintel; If the objective is massive user-acceptance and low training costs, Wintel could beat *nix.
Whether the criteria are right or wrong is a different issue; you could say that it doesn't matter that the users don't need retraining to use the *nix solution, because the Wintel solution is riddled with flaws; again, you can put that into CEO language by costing the (Wintel flaws) vs the (*nix (flaws + training)) to show that training on *nix, whilst an extra expense, is overall lower than the Wintel solution.
If you cannot show that, then you are not actually benefitting the company.
As a simple example, if the proposal is a stand-alone workstation with no external I/O devices, does it really matter (for security) if it runs Windows 95? The security argument doesn't hold up as strong in this case, as compared to a publically-accessible web server.
Think about what it costs, and what it delivers. Don't bother telling non-technical people about technical details - they don't understand, and it's not their place to understand (if they did understand, we'd be out of a job!). We have to translate the technical details into costs.
So if replacing a Wintel server with a Linux server is "better", you have to define "better", even (especially!) when it's obvious. If it's better because the Wintel server was a security issue, then work out the total cost for keeping the Wintel server secure, and the cost to the company if it was breached, along with the likelihood of that occuring. Do the same costings for your proposal, along with any additional costs incurred (new hardware, licenses, training, etc). If it turns out that there's a very low risk if the Wintel server is compromised (eg, it's not connected to the internal network, contains no sensitive data, and is blocked by the firewall from doing anything nasty), and there'd be a large cost in migrating to Linux (eg, retraining, HW changes, etc), then Wintel is the right answer, and all the "but Linux is better than Windows" arguments are ignored, and your credibility is reduced. That reduced credibility will carry on to the next time you propose something, like the boy who cried "Wolf!".
Cost. That's all the business people care about. If they can spend $10k on a
GPL2 has been written; I don't need the FSF's approval to use it (unless I'm violating it, of course). Current FSF software is available as "GPL2 or later", so I can continue to ignore any changes in GPL3 and use it under GPLv2.
That is one of the good things about the GPL (and one of the bad things about the boilerplate text) - it's unlikely, but possible, that GPLv4 could something totally unacceptable, like "You also have free use of the author's kitchen". I see including the boilerplate text as providing my software under a license which I have never seen.
As for GPL3 being more restrictive than GPL2, that's a pretty broad statement for a license which hasn't been released yet. Personally I have to admit that I haven't even read the entire draft GPL3 yet (let alone put it by a lawyer)
Fair enough. Sun workstations pretty much don't exist any more. There's SunRay (a terribly undersold technology), but after that, unless you fancy an expensive pizza-box like a V100 on your desk (I've never tried it, but I wouldn't expect it to make a great desktop PC), Sun don't really do desktop any more. It's what they started with, it got them some credibility with a certain crowd, and that credibility got them a lot of sales (and vast over-hype, hence the silly prices) in the 1999.com boom, but Sun have been a datacentre company for a long time now.
True; just like you don't see many projects released as "GPL v1 or any later version" these days... however, you see a lot of projects released as "GPL (with or without the v2, with or without the "or any later version" or BSD", or "GPL (ditto) or MPL", etc, etc.
GPLv2 is one license; GPLv3 is another; BSD is another, yadda yadda. I think that because it's been so long between GPL license changes, some confusion is inevitable. GPLv2 and GPLv3 will have similarities, I am sure. But they will be different licenses.
Personally, the code I've released under the GPL has been explicitly GPLv2. I didn't (and still don't) know what GPLv3 (or v4, v5, etc) may contain. I sympathise with the FSF's thoughts on this boilerplate text, and can see it being consistent for FSF-released code, but for many projects, the exact license terms need to be clear before releasing the code with a license saying "whatever the FSF come up with in future will be fine, too... I'm sure."
Until recently, my daily commute was 25 miles in each direction, which was nice enough. It's great to be just down the road from work (though it gives me less of an excuse to work-from-home when I choose to!).
New company, new rules - I can drive my own car for up to 100 miles (I choose the old Polo for the office, the 2003 Mondeo for longer drags), but use a rental car for trips over 100 miles round-trip (that's pretty much all of them). It's a load of hassle getting a hire car delivered and picked up, but if I do enough miles I'll get a company car (cheaper for me, worse for the environment, as it's bound too be a 1.8l at least!) and I'm already (after 4 months in the new job) stacked up to get a company car at this rate!
Isn't it ironic? Get a new, local job which allows me to get a cheap and efficient car, just for the new employer to replace it with a larger car at their expense (which, given the insurance costs, I'll be inclined to go for!)
No win, no win... er, or something !
The traditional/. counterpoint is that there is a difference between a coder who is paid to work on Closed[X] and a coder who (may be paid to) work on Open[X].
Either may be paid (or simply motivated) to develop [X], but have no interest in maintaining it. Or, they may be paid (or motivated) to develop and maintain it. Still, all scores are equal.
If the closed developer is not paid to maintain Closed[X], and no colleague is paid to maintain it either, then it goes unmaintained. (even if the developer chose to spend their own time on it, being unassigned is likely to get in the way of any internal peer-review processes, and may even introduce legal grey areas, the changes not being directly requested or paid for by the employer)
If the open developer is not interested in maintaining Open[X], there is still the possibility that someone else is interested in maintaining it. There may be a financial benefit here (take existing F/OSS software, improve it, sell it), or other motivations (eg, getting into the project, gaining credibility with the project, getting coding experience without starting from scratch, etc).
It's getting a bit tenuous at that point, but for large projects, the statistical bent slightly favours open development, and for small projects, tends to favour closed source (though the downside to closed-source for small projects is that they tend to remain one-man-teams, and cannot progress to becoming larger projects).
What's going on here? eldavojohn posts what is, with no disrespect, absolute crap with nothing to do with buffer overflows whatsoever, gets flamed, makes a "funny" post, and is suddently exhonerated?
Let's get back to buffer overflows, which olivianewtonjohn or whatever your name is totally glossed over. "You know (after toying around with said web app on your home machine) that certain large chunks of hex in a field will result in a submission that essentially writes your binary to their $HOME directory"
That's the "buffer overflow" part - the rest has already been pulled to pieces, but we're supposed to be talking about buffer overflows, here.
What Olivia is referring to, is that an application (in this eg, a webserver) has a coding flaw, in that it accepts unvalidated input, and treats that input in such a way as to see an "end" to the valid input, but keep processing the rest of it. Today, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow has a reasonable explanation. A quick google offers http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~cspress/HelloWorld/1999 /04-apr/attack_class.html as a less randomly-editable explanation (but that's a different rant).
Readers can spend a few minutes on Google for an accurate description of buffer overflows (in their programming language of choice - some are worse than others (the C family is probably the worst)), and we can all save ourselves the time of reading this thread.
I'm with you on the DNS thing (for NIS/NIS+, I use the installer; I've never installed Solaris as an LDAP client, but for DNS, I go for "files" and then "cp/etc/nsswitch.dns/etc/nsswitch.files" after the install, but that's mainly because I've got an existing/etc/resolv.conf, with various options selected, which has to be installed exactly as-is, and I can't be bothered with typing the stuff in by hand.
DNS is just easier to configure that way with Solaris - in my experience, at least, but maybe that's just because I've tended to do installs for very specific requirements where I want/etc/resolv.conf to look a particular way, and I don't need DNS during the install anyway.
For NIS/NIS+, which is more complicated to configure, I'm happy to leave that to the installer.
I've used the Solaris DNS installer a few times at home, though (very simple setup, and I have occasionally bothered to type the addresses in by hand), and it's worked for me on 7,8,9 and 10.
Hold on, there... 6 G5s?! That's going to scare an E25K away. I think we're looking at different things, here. Sun's expertise is in the datacentre. The desktop is a different question.
How many paths to the SAN does your Mac have? How many connections to the LAN(s)? How many nodes in your cluster?
Not knocking the Mac, or desktops at all - we all need to use a desktop - but that's not been Sun's area since they started 20-odd years ago.
Interesting "bragging-rights": 'I get more than 30MPG'.... Being a Brit, I'd see 30MPG as pretty expensive running costs. Admittedly, not all Brits these days see things the same way, we're following the Americans into this "I need a 3+ litre 4WD monster to get the kids to school" mentality. Personally, I need to get myself to work and back, so I've got a (rather overkill) 1.3 litre VW Polo for my 10 mile daily journey. For historical reasons (I used to pound the country until recently, doing about 20k miles per year) we've also got a 1.8 litre Ford Mondeo, which is handy for getting the kids around, but that is overkill.
We actually looked into this a couple of weeks ago; If it wasn't for depreciation, we'd swap that for a smaller car, except that we could swap the Mondeo for a same-aged smaller equivalent (Focus) for zero cash. That is, the larger car (which we currently own) is worth the same as the smaller car of the same age.
I asked Stallman about this back in 2001; his reply is here:
ME: I modify GPL code - eg a CGI library - to suit my own needs for
use on a publicly-available web server. This code is being run, by the
general public, on my web server. Should I, in this case, make the code
available? Under the GPL, must I?
RMS: The GPL does not require it. But is not very good for the community
when people do this, so I am looking at a way that GPL 3 could
require publication in this case.
Because he only had a license for Windows 98. It would be illegal to "fix" his computer by installing WinXP Pro + SP2.
Reinstalling Win98 would only be inviting further disaster. Installing a similarly aged Linux distro (SuSE8 would be my best bet for the scenario described, but lots of alternatives of course) would be one option; sounds like the GP chose the better option - he could afford to buy his brother a WinXP machine to replace the old one.
No matter how bad the software it isn't going to be able to rewire his hardware. - No, but reinstalling a bad OS is not going to provide a long-term solution.
Using the neighbour's WiFi kit is potentially modifying his property (changes to access logs, traffic counts, etc). That is unauthorised use of a computer system. Whether technically easy or not, it is unauthorised.
By "up to speed", I mean that for me to take the machine as-is, a bunch of CDs and an internet connection, that I do not have sufficient background in Windows to get it installed and doing everything it currently does, exactly as it does it, anywhere near as quickly as the Wintel IT department can (it took them about 2h, it would have taken me over 2h just to install base Windows XP - of course, they use a corporate Gold image). That should be pretty obvious - if I could, then I should be working in Wintel desktop support, and not on high-end *nix servers.
What else did you want to know? Let's see...
I have not complained about the condition of my laptop whatsoever in my original post. That is because of corporate firewalls, a decent (though admittedly not always 100% functional) corporate patching mechanism, and not installing extraneous crap on the system. Why would I? My post should make it fairly clear that I know that installing crap onto Windows gives an already poor OS major headaches. I have installed FireFox and just about nothing else onto the system. Any self-respecting sysadmin would refuse to support a UNIX system where the users go around installing their own crap. I would not expect the Wintel IT dept. to support my laptop if I did such things, either. I've got my area of expertise, they've got theirs.
If you can't figure out what an entry does either by its location in the registry or by a simple web search, you don't know as much about computers as you claim. Where did I claim to be an expert in (or even care about) Windows? If you think that Registry entries == Computers, then there's a great world of computers for you to still learn and experience:)
Well, I suppose that belief is the stronger, but maybe that's a jargon thing. In Christian terms, the words "hope" and "belief" have stronger meanings than they tend to hold in secular contexts. Like any community, jargon is unfortunately inevitable. In "normal" English, "hope" is rather a vague term, but in Christian terms, it refers to a definite expectation. So, in the secular sense, "I hope I win the lottery" is a pretty pathetic thing ("hope" could more accurately be replaced by "wish"), but in the Christian usage of the word, "I hope in Heaven" has a definitive thing upon which to hang that hope (namely, the resurrection of Christ, in this example).
Similarly, "believe" in secular terms often means "currently think that things are like this", whereas in the Christian jargon, it refers to a belief based upon a personal relationship, so for me to say that I believe in Jesus Christ, it is not akin to saying "I believe in Fairies", but is more like saying "I believe in my wife".
Feel free to dislike the reuse of existing words for jargon, but most communities are guilty of it - Cracker/Hacker misunderstandings, the American use of the word "Gas" to describe liquid fuel, etc, etc... that is beside the point. I didn't make the context in which I used the word "believe" terribly clear, but hopefully this is a brief intro to Christian jargon (believe me, it's no easier than a brief intro to IT jargon!)
Why? Because it is the scientific community who are so strongly against it. Just disprove it (you do know it is untrue, don't you? It's not just because it feels uncomfortable to accept the concept of a creator God?) and be done with it.
I agree with just about everything you say, but I note that Further, science is a process and need not be proved. is an interesting statement of faith. If I had said "God is ineffable and need not be proven", you would have ripped me to shreds.
I don't live in the USA, where this debate seems to be raging, so I do not entirely understand what the "ID" camp are putting forward, but it seems a little forward of you to put words in their mouths without quoting sources.
As I read the Bible, evolution does not deny faith, but if it were to be proven, would give us additional detail to explain what the Bible tells us. That's all.
Six days? When was "day" and "night" created? Do you really think this is about 6 x 24h days? There is nothing in the Bible to say that it is 6 x 24h
Nice sidetrack about astrology... let me add belief in the Tooth Fairy for additional straw-man arguments.
The idea that something irrelevant has no objections is totally flawed - Creation is attacked on all sides, and has not met any scientific rebuff yet. If someone were to bother to look into astronomy or the tooth fairy, I admit that it would be difficult to find a definitive "thing" to attack, but disproving it would not be difficult, merely too time-consuming to bother with (track a child's teeth for 7 years? Simply to disprove the tooth fairy? No thanks!) Similarly, track a person's life for 7 years, to see how well it matched their horoscope? Not even necessary - just check their horoscope for one week, in 5 different publications, and see if it's even possible to match them all up to that person's actual week.
Slashdot Mirror
NO
S/He won't understand, it'll come across in the same way as the garage mechanic saying "... ooh, your Big End's gone, that's gonna cost ya". It's some mumble-mumble jargon with no real meaning, just a huge bill.
The CEO doesn't get that kind of stuff from the Wintel team, they just say "It's okay, MS produce patches, we'll check them out an install them".
The CEO, not understanding any of this, will have more faith in the Wintel team than in the *nix team. Because the Wintel answer is more understandable, acknowledges flaws, and has a plan to fix them (yes, I know it's just one sentence, but it does contain all that, if you have no knowledge of the underlying issues).
The CEO is busy doing many deals with customers, suppliers, potential customers and suppliers, internal management, etc. Your post would be chucked straight into the bin. Accurate and detailed as it may be, it's just so much jargon to the CEO. The CEO speaks a different language, and it's actually very easy to learn. There are only two questions to answer:
- What does it cost me?
- How does it improve my income?
Speak that language, and it's very simple. Speak any other language, and you are seen as just another back-street garage mechanic talking about big-ends.The business are only concerned about money (it's called Capitalism, it's fairly common in the western world, you might have heard of it - it pays your salary). They don't care about "better", they care about "cost-effective". Show them that, make sure that you can deal with the details (because that's your job, and it's not their job (you know they'd fsck it up!)), and propose the best solution, in simple terms which the CEO will understand. That will improve your credibility, which is a virtuous circle. If you fsck it up, your credibility goes downhill, so be clear up-front about any assumptions, risks, worst-case-scenarios (as well as best-case-scenarios) for all options (your preferred option, as well as the one you are "resisting")
An interesting and useful thing a headhunter told me recently about looking for jobs - don't tell them what you know and what you're good at, tell them how much money you have saved, and how much income you have generated, in your current/previous jobs.
If you can come up with figures, saying that (eg) "We spend $x per annum on Anti-Virus software for Wintel; we could reduce that to $y by moving to Linux", or "We lose x hours per annum with unscheduled downtime on Wintel servers, costing $XX; we could reduce that to y hours with Linux servers, costing only $YY", you are more likely to get the attention of the beancounters.
A Ferrari is faster than a Volkswagen, but it costs more. It's down to the beancounters to sign-off the outlay. If you can show that you need a Ferrari's speed, and the benefits justify the cost, then they'll get the Ferrari. If you can show that the Volkswagen is quick enough, and is cheaper to buy/run, then they'll get the Volkswagen. Note that I've not gone into any details about the technical differences between the two manufacturers, but I've sold them on whichever option best suits the need.
In some cases, the Ferrari is the best buy; in others, the VW is the best buy.
If I'm in the high-end chauffeur business, then a Ferrari could win on the prestige alone; If I'm in the taxi business, the VW will win on TCO.
I know - I'm using the traditional car analogy, and I am failing to specify which option is Wintel and which is Linux; sorry for going against the mould, but it doesn't work that way in the CEO/CTO/CIO mindset. There is no "best"... we all know that a Ferrari is "bettter" than a VW, but is it better in this situation? If the objective is security, *nix is likely to beat Wintel; If the objective is massive user-acceptance and low training costs, Wintel could beat *nix.
Whether the criteria are right or wrong is a different issue; you could say that it doesn't matter that the users don't need retraining to use the *nix solution, because the Wintel solution is riddled with flaws; again, you can put that into CEO language by costing the (Wintel flaws) vs the (*nix (flaws + training)) to show that training on *nix, whilst an extra expense, is overall lower than the Wintel solution.
If you cannot show that, then you are not actually benefitting the company.
As a simple example, if the proposal is a stand-alone workstation with no external I/O devices, does it really matter (for security) if it runs Windows 95? The security argument doesn't hold up as strong in this case, as compared to a publically-accessible web server.
Think about what it costs, and what it delivers. Don't bother telling non-technical people about technical details - they don't understand, and it's not their place to understand (if they did understand, we'd be out of a job!). We have to translate the technical details into costs.
So if replacing a Wintel server with a Linux server is "better", you have to define "better", even (especially!) when it's obvious. If it's better because the Wintel server was a security issue, then work out the total cost for keeping the Wintel server secure, and the cost to the company if it was breached, along with the likelihood of that occuring. Do the same costings for your proposal, along with any additional costs incurred (new hardware, licenses, training, etc). If it turns out that there's a very low risk if the Wintel server is compromised (eg, it's not connected to the internal network, contains no sensitive data, and is blocked by the firewall from doing anything nasty), and there'd be a large cost in migrating to Linux (eg, retraining, HW changes, etc), then Wintel is the right answer, and all the "but Linux is better than Windows" arguments are ignored, and your credibility is reduced. That reduced credibility will carry on to the next time you propose something, like the boy who cried "Wolf!".
Cost. That's all the business people care about. If they can spend $10k on a
How to maintain your privacy 101:
That is one of the good things about the GPL (and one of the bad things about the boilerplate text) - it's unlikely, but possible, that GPLv4 could something totally unacceptable, like "You also have free use of the author's kitchen". I see including the boilerplate text as providing my software under a license which I have never seen.
As for GPL3 being more restrictive than GPL2, that's a pretty broad statement for a license which hasn't been released yet. Personally I have to admit that I haven't even read the entire draft GPL3 yet (let alone put it by a lawyer)
Apples, Oranges, Horses, Loaves and Shoes ;-)
True; just like you don't see many projects released as "GPL v1 or any later version" these days ... however, you see a lot of projects released as "GPL (with or without the v2, with or without the "or any later version" or BSD", or "GPL (ditto) or MPL", etc, etc.
GPLv2 is one license; GPLv3 is another; BSD is another, yadda yadda. I think that because it's been so long between GPL license changes, some confusion is inevitable. GPLv2 and GPLv3 will have similarities, I am sure. But they will be different licenses.
Personally, the code I've released under the GPL has been explicitly GPLv2. I didn't (and still don't) know what GPLv3 (or v4, v5, etc) may contain. I sympathise with the FSF's thoughts on this boilerplate text, and can see it being consistent for FSF-released code, but for many projects, the exact license terms need to be clear before releasing the code with a license saying "whatever the FSF come up with in future will be fine, too ... I'm sure."
Until recently, my daily commute was 25 miles in each direction, which was nice enough. It's great to be just down the road from work (though it gives me less of an excuse to work-from-home when I choose to!). New company, new rules - I can drive my own car for up to 100 miles (I choose the old Polo for the office, the 2003 Mondeo for longer drags), but use a rental car for trips over 100 miles round-trip (that's pretty much all of them). It's a load of hassle getting a hire car delivered and picked up, but if I do enough miles I'll get a company car (cheaper for me, worse for the environment, as it's bound too be a 1.8l at least!) and I'm already (after 4 months in the new job) stacked up to get a company car at this rate! Isn't it ironic? Get a new, local job which allows me to get a cheap and efficient car, just for the new employer to replace it with a larger car at their expense (which, given the insurance costs, I'll be inclined to go for!) No win, no win ... er, or something !
The traditional /. counterpoint is that there is a difference between a coder who is paid to work on Closed[X] and a coder who (may be paid to) work on Open[X].
Either may be paid (or simply motivated) to develop [X], but have no interest in maintaining it. Or, they may be paid (or motivated) to develop and maintain it. Still, all scores are equal.
If the closed developer is not paid to maintain Closed[X], and no colleague is paid to maintain it either, then it goes unmaintained. (even if the developer chose to spend their own time on it, being unassigned is likely to get in the way of any internal peer-review processes, and may even introduce legal grey areas, the changes not being directly requested or paid for by the employer)
If the open developer is not interested in maintaining Open[X], there is still the possibility that someone else is interested in maintaining it. There may be a financial benefit here (take existing F/OSS software, improve it, sell it), or other motivations (eg, getting into the project, gaining credibility with the project, getting coding experience without starting from scratch, etc).
It's getting a bit tenuous at that point, but for large projects, the statistical bent slightly favours open development, and for small projects, tends to favour closed source (though the downside to closed-source for small projects is that they tend to remain one-man-teams, and cannot progress to becoming larger projects).
Just my 2p,
Let's get back to buffer overflows, which olivianewtonjohn or whatever your name is totally glossed over. "You know (after toying around with said web app on your home machine) that certain large chunks of hex in a field will result in a submission that essentially writes your binary to their $HOME directory"
That's the "buffer overflow" part - the rest has already been pulled to pieces, but we're supposed to be talking about buffer overflows, here.
What Olivia is referring to, is that an application (in this eg, a webserver) has a coding flaw, in that it accepts unvalidated input, and treats that input in such a way as to see an "end" to the valid input, but keep processing the rest of it. Today, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow has a reasonable explanation. A quick google offers http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~cspress/HelloWorld/1999 /04-apr/attack_class.html as a less randomly-editable explanation (but that's a different rant).
Readers can spend a few minutes on Google for an accurate description of buffer overflows (in their programming language of choice - some are worse than others (the C family is probably the worst)), and we can all save ourselves the time of reading this thread.
I'm with you on the DNS thing (for NIS/NIS+, I use the installer; I've never installed Solaris as an LDAP client, but for DNS, I go for "files" and then "cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.files" after the install, but that's mainly because I've got an existing /etc/resolv.conf, with various options selected, which has to be installed exactly as-is, and I can't be bothered with typing the stuff in by hand.
/etc/resolv.conf to look a particular way, and I don't need DNS during the install anyway.
DNS is just easier to configure that way with Solaris - in my experience, at least, but maybe that's just because I've tended to do installs for very specific requirements where I want
For NIS/NIS+, which is more complicated to configure, I'm happy to leave that to the installer.
I've used the Solaris DNS installer a few times at home, though (very simple setup, and I have occasionally bothered to type the addresses in by hand), and it's worked for me on 7,8,9 and 10.
How many paths to the SAN does your Mac have? How many connections to the LAN(s)? How many nodes in your cluster?
Not knocking the Mac, or desktops at all - we all need to use a desktop - but that's not been Sun's area since they started 20-odd years ago.
x86 Solaris is Solaris. It's the same tree.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/opensolaris.js p - "both SPARC and x64/x86 (it's a single source base)"
Granted, an 'interesting' use of the word 'both' when listing 3 platforms, but Solaris is Solaris, regardless of platform.
In what way?
My project is GPL2; yours is GPL2 "or any later version".
My project can still use your code; your project can still use my code (under the terms of GPL2)
We actually looked into this a couple of weeks ago; If it wasn't for depreciation, we'd swap that for a smaller car, except that we could swap the Mondeo for a same-aged smaller equivalent (Focus) for zero cash. That is, the larger car (which we currently own) is worth the same as the smaller car of the same age.
I live in the UK. My question is - has Cambridge moved overseas?
Reinstalling Win98 would only be inviting further disaster. Installing a similarly aged Linux distro (SuSE8 would be my best bet for the scenario described, but lots of alternatives of course) would be one option; sounds like the GP chose the better option - he could afford to buy his brother a WinXP machine to replace the old one.
No matter how bad the software it isn't going to be able to rewire his hardware. - No, but reinstalling a bad OS is not going to provide a long-term solution.
Similarly, we shouldn't teach people to spell correctly :)
Using the neighbour's WiFi kit is potentially modifying his property (changes to access logs, traffic counts, etc). That is unauthorised use of a computer system. Whether technically easy or not, it is unauthorised.
By "up to speed", I mean that for me to take the machine as-is, a bunch of CDs and an internet connection, that I do not have sufficient background in Windows to get it installed and doing everything it currently does, exactly as it does it, anywhere near as quickly as the Wintel IT department can (it took them about 2h, it would have taken me over 2h just to install base Windows XP - of course, they use a corporate Gold image). That should be pretty obvious - if I could, then I should be working in Wintel desktop support, and not on high-end *nix servers.
What else did you want to know? Let's see ...
I have not complained about the condition of my laptop whatsoever in my original post. That is because of corporate firewalls, a decent (though admittedly not always 100% functional) corporate patching mechanism, and not installing extraneous crap on the system. Why would I? My post should make it fairly clear that I know that installing crap onto Windows gives an already poor OS major headaches. I have installed FireFox and just about nothing else onto the system. Any self-respecting sysadmin would refuse to support a UNIX system where the users go around installing their own crap. I would not expect the Wintel IT dept. to support my laptop if I did such things, either. I've got my area of expertise, they've got theirs.
If you can't figure out what an entry does either by its location in the registry or by a simple web search, you don't know as much about computers as you claim. Where did I claim to be an expert in (or even care about) Windows? If you think that Registry entries == Computers, then there's a great world of computers for you to still learn and experience :)
Similarly, "believe" in secular terms often means "currently think that things are like this", whereas in the Christian jargon, it refers to a belief based upon a personal relationship, so for me to say that I believe in Jesus Christ, it is not akin to saying "I believe in Fairies", but is more like saying "I believe in my wife".
Feel free to dislike the reuse of existing words for jargon, but most communities are guilty of it - Cracker/Hacker misunderstandings, the American use of the word "Gas" to describe liquid fuel, etc, etc... that is beside the point. I didn't make the context in which I used the word "believe" terribly clear, but hopefully this is a brief intro to Christian jargon (believe me, it's no easier than a brief intro to IT jargon!)
Why? Because it is the scientific community who are so strongly against it. Just disprove it (you do know it is untrue, don't you? It's not just because it feels uncomfortable to accept the concept of a creator God?) and be done with it.
I agree with just about everything you say, but I note that Further, science is a process and need not be proved. is an interesting statement of faith. If I had said "God is ineffable and need not be proven", you would have ripped me to shreds.
I don't live in the USA, where this debate seems to be raging, so I do not entirely understand what the "ID" camp are putting forward, but it seems a little forward of you to put words in their mouths without quoting sources.
As I read the Bible, evolution does not deny faith, but if it were to be proven, would give us additional detail to explain what the Bible tells us. That's all.
Six days? When was "day" and "night" created? Do you really think this is about 6 x 24h days? There is nothing in the Bible to say that it is 6 x 24h
The idea that something irrelevant has no objections is totally flawed - Creation is attacked on all sides, and has not met any scientific rebuff yet. If someone were to bother to look into astronomy or the tooth fairy, I admit that it would be difficult to find a definitive "thing" to attack, but disproving it would not be difficult, merely too time-consuming to bother with (track a child's teeth for 7 years? Simply to disprove the tooth fairy? No thanks!) Similarly, track a person's life for 7 years, to see how well it matched their horoscope? Not even necessary - just check their horoscope for one week, in 5 different publications, and see if it's even possible to match them all up to that person's actual week.