Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?
While the rest of those shows are utter dreck, Seinfeld is probably the only sitcom on television to have truly intelligent jokes and actually remain entertaining to watch. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld are comedic geniuses. I'm sorry you don't appreciate their humor.
So very obvious. You call the operator. Now, the operator will do whatever is necessary to put you through, and at the same time, you've notified the local phone company that 911 service isn't working.
I don't suppose you've tried to call the operator any time in the last 10 years or so... because if you had you would have realized that dialing 0 doesn't get you a person... It usually gets you a pre-recorded message that basically says "bugger off"... I suppose all of the operators were downsized years ago.
The FreeBSD operating system provides the jail(2) system call and the jail(1) command for imprisoning a process and its future decendants.
This, and other type of chroot environments work great for certain applications, but there is the problem with low-numbered ports in that nobody other than root can create a listener on a port numbered lower than 1024. Many programs that require low level ports (like BIND) don't run as well in a chroot environment because of this. Then the developer has to write what is known as an egg or a function that executes with SUID privileges and "hatches" in order to allow access to the lower numbered port. This opens up another security hole because now the SUID function or egg can be exploited to allow a remote attacker to gain root or elevate privileges.
So I will agree with you that good system administration practice requires that you run a lot of processes in a chroot jail, however there are a lot of cases where this isn't possible, especially with closed-source commercial applications.
Frequently vendors can't restrict their applications to run on a limited set of ports. Most of the time they stare blankly when we want their application to run as something less than superuser.
Simple answer: Don't let them. This is standard operating procedure in the financial services industry. Do you think that a bank would EVER let a non-employee or non-contractor access any bank system whatsoever? Especially remotely? If these companies want to do business with you, they WILL play by your rules or you'll pick one of their competitors products. In my experience, the only companies that required remote access to their systems were ones that A. Didn't have a fully working product, and B. Had to have the developer log in constantly to patch binaries with the latest bug fixes just to get a semi-working product. These are not the type of companies you want to do business with in the first place.
Speaking as a sysadmin for a smallish financial services company that processes around 1.2 million transactions a month, I would NEVER allow any vendor remote access to our network. It just wouldn't happen. Even if I did want to give them access, there are rules and regulations that strictly forbid my giving them access. If they give you a hard time, make something up about a security audit or something.
Seriously, you are asking for trouble if you let them have access. Who's going to take the blame when one of their developers logs in and wipes out all of your company's data? Chances are they'll blame it on you and you'll be in trouble for their mistake.
What? It's the 21st century. The Universal Service fee is bullshit. What part of the country is without telephone lines?
The Universal Service fee is a subsidy for the well to do. Developers subdivide former farmland and put nice big houses on them. The phone companies need to build phone lines out to them, putting up poles, stringing cable and what not. The Universal Service Fee is a way for them to recoup that loss.
It isn't about providing phones to poor underpriveledges children in Arkansas.
Actually, the USF was originally created to do just that, help provide phone services to rural areas, like Arkansas, that aren't profitable enough for the phone companies to run lines with their own money to. It has morphed into corporate charity . Believe me, I used to work on a contract at Alltel in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I saw exactly that. Every business unit in the company lost money hand over fist. They couldn't make money if their lives depended on it, yet every quarter, their federal bailout through the Universal Service Fee kept them operating in the black. It's a real racket providing phone service that is terrible to rural areas. Not only that, they provide the bare minimum service required by law... simply dial-tone and E911 service, and they're lucky if they get that. Have your line go down? Expect to wait two to three weeks or whenever they feel like it to get it back up. They will never offer any enhanced services like caller ID or call waiting. And they charge the customers an arm and a leg for service, plus, they get the federal bailout money from the USF to boot.
The sooner we can get rid of the USF, the sooner we will be free from the tyranny of the baby bells. Don't buy this lobbyist bullshit of "they will kill 911 service." VoIP will save the world from the tyranny of monopolistic RLECs (baby bells), but don't expect them to go out without a fight. If they could prove that VoIP users were breaking some laws, they would be suing them just like the RIAA and MPAA are suing file-swappers.
VoIP truly is a disruptive technology, and it's time for it to go into mainstream.
Also, don't believe the bullshit about VoIP calls being lower quality than regular voice calls. ALL voice calls are packetized into data anyway, whether it travels over digital PRI (primary rate interface) 64k channels on the baby bells equipment, or over a digital 64k voice channel on a VoIP modem. The quality is the same. Thanks to VoIP, I get $29 unlimited long distance and voice, plus, for another $29 I get 10 megabits down/1 megabit up cable modem service (all from Cablevision). I can max out my cable internet connection and still make voice calls with crystal clarity because Cablevision uses a separate data channel for internet and voice. The service is delivered through a single VoIP cable modem with an ethernet jack and a POTS jack on the back of it.
VoIP is the future and the baby bells are shitting their pants right now trying to keep it from happening.
It's got an 80 pin cable, but perhaps you're right, I need to replace it...
FYI, you can run out... I had a pro-level sound card that took two DMA channels (1 for transmit, 1 for receive), out of three available. But just using internal IDE channels shouldn't be an issue on most modern systems.
Damn! That's a a sweet system... If HL2 is crapping out on that system then Valve is doomed (no pun intended...:-)... I'm sorry, but this game really does seem to be still in beta... The skipping problems should not be happening, even if your hard drive is running in PIO mode...
I had this problem too when I first installed HalfLife 2 and it was frustrating as hell... Just a little background on my system:
Intel 875 chipset (800 mhz. FSB) P4 2.6C (hyperthreaded) 1GB PC3200 memory (dual channel, 800 mhz.) ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB graphics Windows XP Pro SP2
In other words, this is not a bottom of the line system, and runs Doom 3 perfectly...
Now, when I first installed the game, I installed it to my D: drive, which happened to be an older 30GB drive that came from my previous computer. I just stuck it in there as a slave drive for extra storage space, having filled up the 120GB primary IDE hard drive a while ago...
Anyway, I noticed the stuttering always seemed to happen when the system was accessing data from the hard drive.
I finally went into the Device Mangler (haha... that's what I call it anyways, you might know it as the Device Manager), and checked the DMA settings on my secondary hard drive... Sure enough, it was only using PIO Mode!!! I always wondered why that second hard drive was slow. I tried to enable DMA mode, but was out of DMA channels, so I couldn't.
Anyway, I freed up some space on my hard drive and moved it to the primary hard drive... voila, problem solved! Now the game plays smoothly and the immersion experience is what it should be...
This problem seems to be linked to either inadequate DMA support for your hard drive (which can spike the CPU during disk access and loading times), or a hard drive that just isn't fast enough to keep up. Also, because all of the sound in the game is MP3 files that are streamed off of the hard drive, hard drive bandwidth seems to be very important for this game, in addition, I'm sure all of the MP3 decompression makes you take a big CPU hit, especially when they're mixing multiple channels of MP3 audio together at once and outputting it to 5.1 surround.
This is just a theory of mine, but it worked for me... Put the game on your fastest hard drive, and defragment it... Make sure DMA is enabled for that hard drive, and you should (hopefully) be set.
+5 Funny... OMG, I just read his comment and about spewed my beer all over the keyboard...
It's a tough day swatting all of the Linux slashbot flies today... That article was so biased against Sun it was palpable, but reading all of your comments made it worthwile. (I browse at +5 friends).
The ignorance of some of the Slashbots is impressive, isn't it?
What I don't get is if Red Hat acquired Netscape Directory Service why are they still claiming to be focusing on the "desktop" when Novell's NDS is Linux-friendly. Is it mostly because of the proprietary nature of NDS? I just hope there isn't too much duplication of effort with the directory services biz.
The reason why is because a strong LDAP directory server is essential for a Samba PDC/BDC rollout if you're going to replace a Windows NT domain in the enterprise. This is a much needed piece to the enterprise desktop/server puzzle. I guess it's a little misleading to call it a "desktop focus" when what they really mean is that it's an enterprise Windows replacement focus.
Believe me, I've been going through the hell that is replacing a Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux and it is just not easy. OpenLDAP is not scalable or reliable enough to be considered enterprise-ready yet, and Samba doesn't have enough support for 3rd-party LDAP servers (like iPlanet (Sun/Netscape) or IBM yet). Who wants to roll out Samba in the enterprise when you still need a Windows 2000 active directory DC or Windows NT 4 PDC to authenticate against? The whole point of Samba is to eliminate Microsoft's stranglehold on the marketplace, not to add to it.
I've heard from a friend of mine at Redhat that the Samba team is so frustrated with OpenLDAP that they're thinking of writing their own LDAP backend to store all of the account information in.
But trust me, once it's all working (it might be Samba 4 before then), single sign on using an LDAP server for the backend, and Samba PDC on the front-end will be the holy grail for end-users. Having the same password to authenticate against Windows, Linux/Unix, plus any web apps you might have is a good thing. Having a single place to manage your user identities is also a good thing.
It amazes me to think of how many great technologies came out of Netscape and how quickly that company died... I mean think about it, they practically invented (I know they didn't really invent it, but they perfected it) the web browser, web server, directory server, certificate server, SSL, name switch service... You name it... Almost every core technlogy that the internet uses was built or perfected there. How much better off would the world be if Netscape had won the browser war?
Would the SPARC version be free? I need an update fo ra old Ultra 80 we're going to use.
If you have a Sparc system you already got a license to run any version of Solaris on it. It came when you bought your computer. Sun doesn't charge OS upgrade fees.
I think once Solaris 10 is ported to x86_64 platform, which I read somewhere once that it will get ported, it will only be a matter of time before the software vendors that these companies use start to validate the OS.
RTFA.... The x86-64 version is released today. That's why it's such big news.
(three weeks later) back from Cancun Patch almost complete, clean gutters, mow lawn, wash car. Ahhhh, now we're ready to rock and roll...
I just thought I'd mention that on a new Solaris installation, where you don't need to save rollback information for your patches (it's a new install anyway, so who cares if it blows up), you can use the "install_cluster -nosave" option which will dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to install the recommended patch clusters.
I put this in the finish scripts on my jumpstart server and it saves at least half an hour of patching on most of my boxen.
Maybe QA and development were overwhelmed by Microsoft perfidity, I dunno. I do know that company dumped WordPerfect (and Lotus 1-2-3, which performed similarly) for Microsoft Word and Excel as soon as it could. And most of us who had backed the choice of WordPerfect lost our jobs when the Microsoft-lovers took control.
I think there is something to be said about the fact that both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 couldn't compete with Microsoft Word. This sort of reinforces the whole "undocumented APIs" thing.
Interesting post, but I don't agree that IPX was the cause of Novells loss of market share.
Believe me if you want, I don't really care. I've been using this userid for years now (notice the 200,000 userid).
I think they were more concerned with them getting architectural diagrams and things like that off of whiteboards. I agree with you, code snippets wouldn't really help that much.
What I do know is that while I worked there, there was a strict policy that all developers had to erase their whiteboards after using them. If you were caught leaving anything written on a whiteboard for longer than an hour or so, you would be chastised.
Interesting post, but I don't agree that IPX was the cause of Novells loss of market share.
I somewhat agree with you. The IPX vs. TCP/IP issue wasn't the real reason. I believe the real reason was that CIOs and other executive types weren't marketed too well enough (like you said). I think a lot of them weren't made aware that Novell supported TCP/IP. They should have done a much better job of making sure people knew that TCP/IP could be added easily, and they should have gone native TCP/IP before version 5...
Netware was still a great product, and I remember the days when I used to be a Netware admin and had 400+ day uptime on my boxen...:-)
Doesn't that make it a monopoly? That's the percent Windows had at the time it was considered a monopoly.
Yes, but as others have already pointed out, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It's what you do with that monopoly that matters. WordPerfect was an ethical company. They treated their employees and customers well, and gave FREE technical support to all of their customers. I'll leave it for you to decide who you would rather have as your corporate master.
I don't know if Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior but I do know that Novell probably nailed the coffin shut themselves with Word Perfect for Windows. That early implementation was so horrible switching to Word was an act of self-preservation.
I worked for WordPerfect as a Software Tester (Software Quality Engineer) between 1992 and 1994 so I have first-hand knowledge of how slimy Microsoft's competitive tactics were. When I started working at WP, they owned over 90% of the PC Word Processing market. MS set their sights on them and stooped to all kinds of levels to rub them out of the market. As a matter of fact, on the WP campus in Orem, UT, we had an entire building called building S that was dedicated to Security. Rows and rows of black and white TVs connected up to closed circuit cameras planted all over the campus. There were hundreds of them. You see, MS had a habit of hiring corporate spies to sit in the parking lot with binoculars and write down code snippets they saw on white-boards in the developers offices. Dumpster diving, you name it, all sorts of corporate espionage went on. They had more security there than most defense contractors. They had to. Microsoft has always played a dirty game.
The first few versions of WordPerfect for Windows were by default crippled because Microsoft kept the (important) Windows APIs undocumented. Any new features that WordPerfect was working on behind closed doors were somehow stolen and announced in a press release by MS the day before WP had scheduled a press release to announce them. There were half a dozen employees in the marketing department and even development that were found to be on MS payroll and ended up getting fired.
Microsoft is one of the most unethical companies I know of. Their tactics should land them in the corporate malfeasance hall of fame along with the likes of Enron, but instead, they are worshipped as the darling of Wall Street.
As one of many former WordPerfect engineers who was sad to see such a great company get rubbed out of the market, I can tell you first hand that MS Word would be a much better program right now if it had any legitimate competitors.
Windows Server would also be a much better server product if they hadn't used their dominance on the Windows desktop to rub Novell out of the server market as well, although, in that case, Novell hastened their own doom by refusing to acknowledge that IPX was doomed and TCP/IP was the wave of the future.
It's good to see Novell finally doing what they should have done 10 years ago... stick it to those anti-competitive mo-fos.
Supposedly it was fixed... fixed by what? using an ABS function to strip the sign from the number??
If any precincts reported a negative number, it would be trivial to fix the discrepancy by:
$vote_tally = 32767 + (32768 - abs($vote_tally));
The real problem might occur if you got more than 65535 votes in a precinct and it wrapped around to a positive value. Then you would have no way of knowing if a candidate got only 200 votes, or 65735 votes.
Still, this is major sloppy coding. Does anyone else think it's absolutely insane that these programmers can't even pick the right variable type for their code? Where are they hiring these guys from, Visual Basic University or something?;-) ---
Why would anyone pay $265 for Halo 2? 1. It's on the Internet if you want it now.
Where? Seriously, is there a torrent somewhere? I can't seem to find one at Suprnova or anywhere; only that PAL version, which I definitely don't want to play because it's in French.
I would love to have the chance to play the single player version over the weekend, before I buy the full version and play it online next Tuesday.
McAfee has a product for Exchange servers that is based on Spam Assassin called Spam Killer. I found out about it from the Spam Assassin site when I was looking for a windows version. Spam Killer isnt free yet its not as expensive as some of the other solutions out there.
The major problem I've been having with it is it creating zero byte emails which cannot be downloaded via pop3. When a user gets 30 messages, and message 10 is a zero byte email the client will constantly download the first 10 over and over, creating duplicates, until the user logs into outlook web access (webmail) and deletes the zero byte message. This doesnt happen to the MAPI users but we have quite a few POP3 users.
The support people are useless, I'm about to try out Microsoft Intelligent Message Filter for exchange, and hopefully with some good RBLs it should be ok.
It sounds like you should really consider making your external SMTP relay a Linux box. You throw a cheapo Linux box with Postfix, Spamassasin, and ClamAV in your DMZ, make it the primary MX (mail exchanger) for your internet domain name. Then, it will scan all incoming mail and forward only the non-spam, non-virus containing messages inside to the exchange server, which sits inside your firewall. This is much more secure as well, because everybody knows you should never expose anything running Windows to the internet, especially port 25. I'd much rather have the Linux box be sitting in the DMZ with port 25 open, than the alternative: forwarding port 25 through my external firewall past the DMZ, through my internal firewall, and right into my Exchange server. Yeowch!
Schweet!!! I always wanted to write my own CounterStrike-like 3D FPS as a shell script! Now my uber-leet shell hacking skills can make me rock-star dollars as a video game developer!
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?
While the rest of those shows are utter dreck, Seinfeld is probably the only sitcom on television to have truly intelligent jokes and actually remain entertaining to watch. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld are comedic geniuses. I'm sorry you don't appreciate their humor.
So very obvious. You call the operator. Now, the operator will do whatever is necessary to put you through, and at the same time, you've notified the local phone company that 911 service isn't working.
I don't suppose you've tried to call the operator any time in the last 10 years or so... because if you had you would have realized that dialing 0 doesn't get you a person... It usually gets you a pre-recorded message that basically says "bugger off"... I suppose all of the operators were downsized years ago.
Also I may point out if this vendor uses a Solaris that Solaris zones is supported in Solaris10.
You can still access ports lower than 1024 without an egg SUID function in a seperate zone running a partitioned instance of Solaris.
Quite nice.
Definitely. I'm looking forward to trying that out. It's about time I upgraded my Ultra 5 from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10.
The FreeBSD operating system provides the jail(2) system call and the jail(1) command for imprisoning a process and its future decendants.
This, and other type of chroot environments work great for certain applications, but there is the problem with low-numbered ports in that nobody other than root can create a listener on a port numbered lower than 1024. Many programs that require low level ports (like BIND) don't run as well in a chroot environment because of this. Then the developer has to write what is known as an egg or a function that executes with SUID privileges and "hatches" in order to allow access to the lower numbered port. This opens up another security hole because now the SUID function or egg can be exploited to allow a remote attacker to gain root or elevate privileges.
So I will agree with you that good system administration practice requires that you run a lot of processes in a chroot jail, however there are a lot of cases where this isn't possible, especially with closed-source commercial applications.
Frequently vendors can't restrict their applications to run on a limited set of ports. Most of the time they stare blankly when we want their application to run as something less than superuser.
Simple answer: Don't let them. This is standard operating procedure in the financial services industry. Do you think that a bank would EVER let a non-employee or non-contractor access any bank system whatsoever? Especially remotely? If these companies want to do business with you, they WILL play by your rules or you'll pick one of their competitors products. In my experience, the only companies that required remote access to their systems were ones that A. Didn't have a fully working product, and B. Had to have the developer log in constantly to patch binaries with the latest bug fixes just to get a semi-working product. These are not the type of companies you want to do business with in the first place.
Speaking as a sysadmin for a smallish financial services company that processes around 1.2 million transactions a month, I would NEVER allow any vendor remote access to our network. It just wouldn't happen. Even if I did want to give them access, there are rules and regulations that strictly forbid my giving them access. If they give you a hard time, make something up about a security audit or something.
Seriously, you are asking for trouble if you let them have access. Who's going to take the blame when one of their developers logs in and wipes out all of your company's data? Chances are they'll blame it on you and you'll be in trouble for their mistake.
What? It's the 21st century. The Universal Service fee is bullshit. What part of the country is without telephone lines?
The Universal Service fee is a subsidy for the well to do. Developers subdivide former farmland and put nice big houses on them. The phone companies need to build phone lines out to them, putting up poles, stringing cable and what not. The Universal Service Fee is a way for them to recoup that loss.
It isn't about providing phones to poor underpriveledges children in Arkansas.
Actually, the USF was originally created to do just that, help provide phone services to rural areas, like Arkansas, that aren't profitable enough for the phone companies to run lines with their own money to. It has morphed into corporate charity . Believe me, I used to work on a contract at Alltel in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I saw exactly that. Every business unit in the company lost money hand over fist. They couldn't make money if their lives depended on it, yet every quarter, their federal bailout through the Universal Service Fee kept them operating in the black. It's a real racket providing phone service that is terrible to rural areas. Not only that, they provide the bare minimum service required by law... simply dial-tone and E911 service, and they're lucky if they get that. Have your line go down? Expect to wait two to three weeks or whenever they feel like it to get it back up. They will never offer any enhanced services like caller ID or call waiting. And they charge the customers an arm and a leg for service, plus, they get the federal bailout money from the USF to boot.
The sooner we can get rid of the USF, the sooner we will be free from the tyranny of the baby bells. Don't buy this lobbyist bullshit of "they will kill 911 service." VoIP will save the world from the tyranny of monopolistic RLECs (baby bells), but don't expect them to go out without a fight. If they could prove that VoIP users were breaking some laws, they would be suing them just like the RIAA and MPAA are suing file-swappers.
VoIP truly is a disruptive technology, and it's time for it to go into mainstream.
Also, don't believe the bullshit about VoIP calls being lower quality than regular voice calls. ALL voice calls are packetized into data anyway, whether it travels over digital PRI (primary rate interface) 64k channels on the baby bells equipment, or over a digital 64k voice channel on a VoIP modem. The quality is the same. Thanks to VoIP, I get $29 unlimited long distance and voice, plus, for another $29 I get 10 megabits down/1 megabit up cable modem service (all from Cablevision). I can max out my cable internet connection and still make voice calls with crystal clarity because Cablevision uses a separate data channel for internet and voice. The service is delivered through a single VoIP cable modem with an ethernet jack and a POTS jack on the back of it.
VoIP is the future and the baby bells are shitting their pants right now trying to keep it from happening.
It's got an 80 pin cable, but perhaps you're right, I need to replace it...
FYI, you can run out... I had a pro-level sound card that took two DMA channels (1 for transmit, 1 for receive), out of three available. But just using internal IDE channels shouldn't be an issue on most modern systems.
Damn! That's a a sweet system... If HL2 is crapping out on that system then Valve is doomed (no pun intended... :-)... I'm sorry, but this game really does seem to be still in beta... The skipping problems should not be happening, even if your hard drive is running in PIO mode...
I dunno how, but I can't seem to set that hard drive to DMA mode... Frustrating... I only use it for BitTorrent though, so no big...
I had this problem too when I first installed HalfLife 2 and it was frustrating as hell... Just a little background on my system:
Intel 875 chipset (800 mhz. FSB)
P4 2.6C (hyperthreaded)
1GB PC3200 memory (dual channel, 800 mhz.)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB graphics
Windows XP Pro SP2
In other words, this is not a bottom of the line system, and runs Doom 3 perfectly...
Now, when I first installed the game, I installed it to my D: drive, which happened to be an older 30GB drive that came from my previous computer. I just stuck it in there as a slave drive for extra storage space, having filled up the 120GB primary IDE hard drive a while ago...
Anyway, I noticed the stuttering always seemed to happen when the system was accessing data from the hard drive.
I finally went into the Device Mangler (haha... that's what I call it anyways, you might know it as the Device Manager), and checked the DMA settings on my secondary hard drive... Sure enough, it was only using PIO Mode!!! I always wondered why that second hard drive was slow. I tried to enable DMA mode, but was out of DMA channels, so I couldn't.
Anyway, I freed up some space on my hard drive and moved it to the primary hard drive... voila, problem solved! Now the game plays smoothly and the immersion experience is what it should be...
This problem seems to be linked to either inadequate DMA support for your hard drive (which can spike the CPU during disk access and loading times), or a hard drive that just isn't fast enough to keep up. Also, because all of the sound in the game is MP3 files that are streamed off of the hard drive, hard drive bandwidth seems to be very important for this game, in addition, I'm sure all of the MP3 decompression makes you take a big CPU hit, especially when they're mixing multiple channels of MP3 audio together at once and outputting it to 5.1 surround.
This is just a theory of mine, but it worked for me... Put the game on your fastest hard drive, and defragment it... Make sure DMA is enabled for that hard drive, and you should (hopefully) be set.
+5 Funny... OMG, I just read his comment and about spewed my beer all over the keyboard...
It's a tough day swatting all of the Linux slashbot flies today... That article was so biased against Sun it was palpable, but reading all of your comments made it worthwile. (I browse at +5 friends).
The ignorance of some of the Slashbots is impressive, isn't it?
What I don't get is if Red Hat acquired Netscape Directory Service why are they still claiming to be focusing on the "desktop" when Novell's NDS is Linux-friendly. Is it mostly because of the proprietary nature of NDS? I just hope there isn't too much duplication of effort with the directory services biz.
The reason why is because a strong LDAP directory server is essential for a Samba PDC/BDC rollout if you're going to replace a Windows NT domain in the enterprise. This is a much needed piece to the enterprise desktop/server puzzle. I guess it's a little misleading to call it a "desktop focus" when what they really mean is that it's an enterprise Windows replacement focus.
Believe me, I've been going through the hell that is replacing a Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux and it is just not easy. OpenLDAP is not scalable or reliable enough to be considered enterprise-ready yet, and Samba doesn't have enough support for 3rd-party LDAP servers (like iPlanet (Sun/Netscape) or IBM yet). Who wants to roll out Samba in the enterprise when you still need a Windows 2000 active directory DC or Windows NT 4 PDC to authenticate against? The whole point of Samba is to eliminate Microsoft's stranglehold on the marketplace, not to add to it.
I've heard from a friend of mine at Redhat that the Samba team is so frustrated with OpenLDAP that they're thinking of writing their own LDAP backend to store all of the account information in.
But trust me, once it's all working (it might be Samba 4 before then), single sign on using an LDAP server for the backend, and Samba PDC on the front-end will be the holy grail for end-users. Having the same password to authenticate against Windows, Linux/Unix, plus any web apps you might have is a good thing. Having a single place to manage your user identities is also a good thing.
It amazes me to think of how many great technologies came out of Netscape and how quickly that company died... I mean think about it, they practically invented (I know they didn't really invent it, but they perfected it) the web browser, web server, directory server, certificate server, SSL, name switch service... You name it... Almost every core technlogy that the internet uses was built or perfected there. How much better off would the world be if Netscape had won the browser war?
Would the SPARC version be free? I need an update fo ra old Ultra 80 we're going to use.
If you have a Sparc system you already got a license to run any version of Solaris on it. It came when you bought your computer. Sun doesn't charge OS upgrade fees.
I think once Solaris 10 is ported to x86_64 platform, which I read somewhere once that it will get ported, it will only be a matter of time before the software vendors that these companies use start to validate the OS.
RTFA.... The x86-64 version is released today. That's why it's such big news.
(three weeks later) back from Cancun
Patch almost complete, clean gutters, mow lawn, wash car.
Ahhhh, now we're ready to rock and roll...
I just thought I'd mention that on a new Solaris installation, where you don't need to save rollback information for your patches (it's a new install anyway, so who cares if it blows up), you can use the "install_cluster -nosave" option which will dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to install the recommended patch clusters.
I put this in the finish scripts on my jumpstart server and it saves at least half an hour of patching on most of my boxen.
Maybe QA and development were overwhelmed by Microsoft perfidity, I dunno. I do know that company dumped WordPerfect (and Lotus 1-2-3, which performed similarly) for Microsoft Word and Excel as soon as it could. And most of us who had backed the choice of WordPerfect lost our jobs when the Microsoft-lovers took control.
I think there is something to be said about the fact that both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 couldn't compete with Microsoft Word. This sort of reinforces the whole "undocumented APIs" thing.
Interesting post, but I don't agree that IPX was the cause of Novells loss of market share.
Believe me if you want, I don't really care. I've been using this userid for years now (notice the 200,000 userid).
I think they were more concerned with them getting architectural diagrams and things like that off of whiteboards. I agree with you, code snippets wouldn't really help that much.
What I do know is that while I worked there, there was a strict policy that all developers had to erase their whiteboards after using them. If you were caught leaving anything written on a whiteboard for longer than an hour or so, you would be chastised.
Interesting post, but I don't agree that IPX was the cause of Novells loss of market share.
:-)
I somewhat agree with you. The IPX vs. TCP/IP issue wasn't the real reason. I believe the real reason was that CIOs and other executive types weren't marketed too well enough (like you said). I think a lot of them weren't made aware that Novell supported TCP/IP. They should have done a much better job of making sure people knew that TCP/IP could be added easily, and they should have gone native TCP/IP before version 5...
Netware was still a great product, and I remember the days when I used to be a Netware admin and had 400+ day uptime on my boxen...
Doesn't that make it a monopoly? That's the percent Windows had at the time it was considered a monopoly.
Yes, but as others have already pointed out, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It's what you do with that monopoly that matters. WordPerfect was an ethical company. They treated their employees and customers well, and gave FREE technical support to all of their customers. I'll leave it for you to decide who you would rather have as your corporate master.
I don't know if Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior but I do know that Novell probably nailed the coffin shut themselves with Word Perfect for Windows. That early implementation was so horrible switching to Word was an act of self-preservation.
I worked for WordPerfect as a Software Tester (Software Quality Engineer) between 1992 and 1994 so I have first-hand knowledge of how slimy Microsoft's competitive tactics were. When I started working at WP, they owned over 90% of the PC Word Processing market. MS set their sights on them and stooped to all kinds of levels to rub them out of the market. As a matter of fact, on the WP campus in Orem, UT, we had an entire building called building S that was dedicated to Security. Rows and rows of black and white TVs connected up to closed circuit cameras planted all over the campus. There were hundreds of them. You see, MS had a habit of hiring corporate spies to sit in the parking lot with binoculars and write down code snippets they saw on white-boards in the developers offices. Dumpster diving, you name it, all sorts of corporate espionage went on. They had more security there than most defense contractors. They had to. Microsoft has always played a dirty game.
The first few versions of WordPerfect for Windows were by default crippled because Microsoft kept the (important) Windows APIs undocumented. Any new features that WordPerfect was working on behind closed doors were somehow stolen and announced in a press release by MS the day before WP had scheduled a press release to announce them. There were half a dozen employees in the marketing department and even development that were found to be on MS payroll and ended up getting fired.
Microsoft is one of the most unethical companies I know of. Their tactics should land them in the corporate malfeasance hall of fame along with the likes of Enron, but instead, they are worshipped as the darling of Wall Street.
As one of many former WordPerfect engineers who was sad to see such a great company get rubbed out of the market, I can tell you first hand that MS Word would be a much better program right now if it had any legitimate competitors.
Windows Server would also be a much better server product if they hadn't used their dominance on the Windows desktop to rub Novell out of the server market as well, although, in that case, Novell hastened their own doom by refusing to acknowledge that IPX was doomed and TCP/IP was the wave of the future.
It's good to see Novell finally doing what they should have done 10 years ago... stick it to those anti-competitive mo-fos.
Supposedly it was fixed... fixed by what? using an ABS function to strip the sign from the number??
;-)
If any precincts reported a negative number, it would be trivial to fix the discrepancy by:
$vote_tally = 32767 + (32768 - abs($vote_tally));
The real problem might occur if you got more than 65535 votes in a precinct and it wrapped around to a positive value. Then you would have no way of knowing if a candidate got only 200 votes, or 65735 votes.
Still, this is major sloppy coding. Does anyone else think it's absolutely insane that these programmers can't even pick the right variable type for their code? Where are they hiring these guys from, Visual Basic University or something?
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OMG, this is the funniest one:
Some nigerian 419 scammers with bags over their head and a sign that says "Baba Booey Howard Stern's Penis"...
Priceless...
Why would anyone pay $265 for Halo 2? 1. It's on the Internet if you want it now.
Where? Seriously, is there a torrent somewhere? I can't seem to find one at Suprnova or anywhere; only that PAL version, which I definitely don't want to play because it's in French.
I would love to have the chance to play the single player version over the weekend, before I buy the full version and play it online next Tuesday.
McAfee has a product for Exchange servers that is based on Spam Assassin called Spam Killer. I found out about it from the Spam Assassin site when I was looking for a windows version. Spam Killer isnt free yet its not as expensive as some of the other solutions out there.
The major problem I've been having with it is it creating zero byte emails which cannot be downloaded via pop3. When a user gets 30 messages, and message 10 is a zero byte email the client will constantly download the first 10 over and over, creating duplicates, until the user logs into outlook web access (webmail) and deletes the zero byte message. This doesnt happen to the MAPI users but we have quite a few POP3 users.
The support people are useless, I'm about to try out Microsoft Intelligent Message Filter for exchange, and hopefully with some good RBLs it should be ok.
It sounds like you should really consider making your external SMTP relay a Linux box. You throw a cheapo Linux box with Postfix, Spamassasin, and ClamAV in your DMZ, make it the primary MX (mail exchanger) for your internet domain name. Then, it will scan all incoming mail and forward only the non-spam, non-virus containing messages inside to the exchange server, which sits inside your firewall. This is much more secure as well, because everybody knows you should never expose anything running Windows to the internet, especially port 25. I'd much rather have the Linux box be sitting in the DMZ with port 25 open, than the alternative: forwarding port 25 through my external firewall past the DMZ, through my internal firewall, and right into my Exchange server. Yeowch!
Schweet!!! I always wanted to write my own CounterStrike-like 3D FPS as a shell script! Now my uber-leet shell hacking skills can make me rock-star dollars as a video game developer!