But you know what I'd like to see more of? Quieter PC's. Everything seems to be getting faster and/or smaller, but quieter would be nice.
I didn't notice how much of a difference noise makes until I got a laptop. After a year of working out of the laptop instead of my once-mighty desktop tower (with several big, noisy fans) I've seen the light.
My laptop is basically silent - I hear nothing when it's running. Now, fan noise drives me just nuts!
Everybody knows that the best way to be secure is to be obscure. And, everybody knows that the best way to back up data is to put a copy of it out on the Internets...
DATE=date +%Y%m%d tar -zcf/mnt/p2p/shared_files/paris_hilton_gets_laid.$DATE.mpg/home
Run this script as a cron job, and leave your favorite P2P app running.
The best part? You can check the integrity of your backups just by doing a search in the p2p app, from anywhere in the world!
I have a full, working copy of Windows 1.0 on 5.25" floppies, complete with manuals. Unfortunately, the package has been opended, and I no longer have the original box. =(
I've worked as an outsourced programmer for years. I've also worked with outsourced programmers with reasonably good results.
I see lots of recommendations to "get it in writing" and "make sure they finish BEFORE you pay them..."
I've never, ever, not even ONCE seen things work that way! Trying to adhere to fiction will get you fictitious (and painful) results.
1) Write your contract so that venue is the location of the outsourcer, and all legal hassles happen there.
2) Demand ownership of all sources. It's OK to cross-license rights to use sources in other non-competetive ventures - nobody wants to think you own their thoughts!
3) Demand a reasonable NDA - don't try for everything under the sun and moon. If your NDA is too severe, you generate ill-will without much benefit, and that never helps.
4) Provide a development server, and require them to work on it remotely via SSH or VPN. That leaves you with all the cards, but still prevents the IRS from considering them as "employees" since they have to provide the keyboard and monitor. It also lets you see what they do and how often, and in real time. Perform backups of this work on a regular basis, and keep backups going back in time that they cannot access.
5) Pay promptly and frequently, maybe even weekly. It's easy to cancel a contract that's not going well when there's not $60,000 on the line. That also keeps both sides a little on edge as there's no big, fat lever to screw each other with.
6) It's a relationship. Be friendly! It never works well if somebody resents your contact. If it gets cold and uncomfortable, say so, and demand immediate correction or leave. You don't have to like each other personally to work well professionally. If you leave, do so quickly and without delay.
7) Forget extensive spec development before beginning. Scope creep always arrives at the party, and software is *NEVER* "done" - it's always a work in progress. Spec development, and change the spec as anticipated needs change. It's OK to pay by the hour since you have the source anyway - You can leave and go somewhere else if you don't like things.
In short, arrange the contract so that if your contractor decides to flake, you have options.
At this point, you've pretty well shot yourself in the foot, since you don't have sources. Big mistake! Your only options are:
1) Cajole them into doing the fix (which hasn't worked so far)
2) Have the work redeveloped, or
3) Sue for a fix in a guaranteed timeframe and or access to source code, and financial losses.
Sorry you're in this situation, but never EVER outsource software development without sources. Never. Just don't do it. Can you imagine a tractor company investing in huge, million-dollar tractors, and not ensuring that there's a backup copy of the key?
When looking at retirees, there are basically three classes of people:
1) Those who prepared carefully with their own private investments. They bought real estate, they invested in the Stock Market, what have you. They drive BMWs and nice Cadillacs, wear nice clothes, and have a golf course as their back yard.
2) Those who are comfortable with Social Security and (union) retirement. These are the types who worked at Ford Motor Co. for 30 years. Neither feast nor famine - they drive a 6-year-old Ford Taurus or Chevy Citation. They complain about utility bills, and have a monthly disposable income after base expenses of a few hundred.
3) Those who had no planning at all. These guys work at McDonald's when they can, eat dog food when they can't work, and live their golden years in desperation.
If people lived forever, the wealth equalizer of death would no longer work, and those who knew how to invest wisely would continue to get wealthier. We'd see a disparity of wealth that would make todays "shrinking middle class" look like a walk in the park.
Once you reach a particular level of wealth, you no longer need to work to increase your wealth! If you know what to do with wealth, the wealth itself can earn you profits from investments!
So I imagine, in this life of eternities, a quickly separating class of super-mega wealthy that live very long lives of ecstacy, devoid of necessary work, while the poor continue to breed and die since they cannot afford the eternity treatments, and live with more daily risks.
When I switched from my desktop system (2 Ghz Athlon XP) a year ago, to a laptop system, I made certain that the laptop was generally equivalent, and would do everything that the desktop system did.
I bought the smallest, lightest, "full-power" Centrino laptop I could find - the Dell Inspiron 600m, running at 1.7 Ghz. It wasn't cheap. (All told, $2,600 USD)
The only area that I had to compromise was in disk space, and I've mitigated that by moving my media collection (MP3s and various video files) to a network drive on my home network.
And... I LOVE IT! I have this svelte, light, comfortable system with massive connection options, (802.11g, Gb ethernet, 56k Modem, Cellular modem, etc) plenty of horsepower to run several VMWare instances at once, 1.5 GB of Ram, etc, running Fedora Core 3. It goes with me easily and lightly, and with little more than a power plug and a hotspot, with my cell phone at my hip, I have my office, all ready to go.
Now that I've gotten used to it, there's NO WAY I'm going back to a desktop system for my primary system! And the Athlon sits on a desk in my enclosed porch, mainly used for network games.
As of June, 2004, SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessor) support has been merged into the main OpenBSD development branch. At this time, the i386 and amd64 platforms supports SMP, but hopefully others, including macppc, sparc, and sparc64 will ultimately support SMP.
Did you read the link you posted? It's "in development"...
Looking at http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
Starting with OpenBSD 3.6, OpenBSD/amd64 supports most SMP (Symmetrical MultiProcessor) systems. To support SMP operation, a separate SMP kernel (bsd.mp) is included with the installation file sets.
As this is a new feature, developers will want to see what hardware does and doesn't work when running SMP, so it is even more important to send a dmesg after install.
It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.
And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?
First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway.
I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP. I don't have SMP on my desktop, but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.
Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows?
Because the smaller mindshare of Linux (And I'm not so sure it really is much smaller) is worth it to avoid the worm-of-the-week (tm) syndrome so common with Windows. I didn't say mindshare was all-encompassing.
I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!
It is definitely NOT a stupid argument. I have people in line to get XYZ done. I can either do XYZ and make paying customers happy, or take a performance hit while I get used to a new environment. Which do you prefer? Money to pay for kid's college tuition, or time spent learning new stuff so that you can do what you were doing before?
Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh....apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.
And to many of us, "damned fine and strutting like she knows it" IS "good enough". I'm not sure what you are saying here; it seems self-contradictory. Linux does the job competently, and to me, that's "good enough". Who mentioned telnet?
If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows.
Refer to the previous point, about "good enough". In my experience, Linux has excellent hardware compatability, and BSD is so-so.
Grandparent was/NOT/ intended to be a troll, but rather an honest indication of my perception of BSD (specifically, OpenBSD) when I evaluated it for the next round of upgrades.
My conclusion was that Whitebox Linux would be the best solution for my specific needs.
I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD? I've considered it heavily, and revisit my decision from time to time:
1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.
2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.
3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux - most interesting packages are developed on Linux, and "maintained" elsewhere.
4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.
5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast. Keep the patches up to date, (it's easy with yum - as a policy, I patch monthly or when "critical" issues are found) apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.
6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.
All the above said, I might still move to BSD. Later. When I have time to. When I get a chance to play with it more. When I decide I'm ready to make the switch.
any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose. if you set your entire filesystem to 777 then you're completely vulnerable on any unix-based os too.
Really? So, if I chmod 777 my, uh,/tmp or/mnt/deleteme directory, you can make a web page that will delete it all from within my Firefox browser? On my Fedora Core 3 laptop?
Are you sure?
See, to do this, you have to get a script or something to run on my system to delete these locations. Show me where even lowly jscript allows for this...
Now, I'm no jscript guru, so I did a google search for jscript delete files and, on at least the first page or two, only came up with stuff having to do with the ".NET framework" or involving ActiveX!
And the point isn't that files can be deleted, the point is that the API for ActiveX allows somebody to do this remotely.
Microsoft is not out to make you, the consumer happy. No, their customers really are the system builders and integrators. They're the ones who hawk their software, they're the ones who take the !@# phone calls, they're the ones who preload the Windows software.
By making the new software with stiff software requirements, they all but force consumers (that's you and me, folks) to upgrade hardware too. That makes system integrators and builders happy, and the mild collusion continues.
Microsoft did this with Windows 3.x, 95, and NT. Recent talk is of a very stagnant industry. Why wouldn't they do it again?
I knew this little old lady who didn't lock one of her windows, so I snuck in and changed all her locks and added a vulgar greeting to her answering machine! Boy was that funny!
Yeah, but you have to look at intent. Really. If I go to some stranger's car at a parking lock, open it, and sit down inside it, I'm clearly commiting a crime. But, if I turn off the headlights that were left on, write a message on my business card, and then leave, it'd be hard to argue that I'd actually commited a crime.
Technically, I did - breaking an entering. But, at least in California, INTENT is part of the definition of what a crime actually is. You run a risk, as there's a line you're clearly skirting.
But, in the case of your little old lady, you didn't take her life savings did you? And, by changing her answering machine, you did something to prevent her from losing her life savings a-la identify theft, didn't you?
You run the risk of pissing her off, going to court, and potentially being found. But, if you don't do anything, SHE runs the riks of losing her life savings.
What if you put "Hi there! This is -Address- and I left my window open. Somebody else is leaving this message so that I know to lock my window next time" as the message on the answering machine instead? Then, lock the window on the way out? She'd get a good warning, and it'd be hard to argue that you did anything but the equivalent of turning the headlights off...
I feel like broadcasting my SSID and changing it to 'I'm at number 35, for god's sake please come over and speek to me about wireless network security!'
Using the admin passwords, set up a default route so that 0.0.0.0/0 routes to goatse or a porn site.
A number of people have mentioned H&R block finding additional deductions they wouldn't have thought of on their own. Anyone care to be specific?
The first year we started using an accountant, we had prepared our own taxes. On the emphatic recommendation of a business associate, we went to a very conservative tax accountant.
His charge was $750, and for that, he cut our taxes by a a few thousand. I've never looked back, and I'm well aware of the fact that our accuntant tends to be rather conservative. I know a guy who spends more on repairs for his several Mercedes cars than he legally makes in income!
Really, and truly - especially if you run your own business - a good accountant and a good attorney are some of your very best friends! If they are any good, they'll save you thousands - (or, if you read my earlier post, qualify you for things you otherwise would completely miss!)
If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
Which is true until you have to do a total site redesign. It *WILL* happen. Then, you have the choice of running an error-prone, REGEX based perl script to reprocess all those HTML files, or re-generating all X,000 pages manually. Either way, it's going to suck, and then you find out what the $300 in savings by going with a slower CPU really cost you.
However, a decent template engine, written in C, as an extension for a language such as PHP or perl will provide excellent performance while still allowing you a total site redesign by editing a single file. I use php-templates as an extension to PHP. It actually performs 5-10% faster than native PHP echo statements!
I serve millions of hits per month with this tool, and I love it. Yes, you *CAN* have your cake and eat it, too!
If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
Which is true until you have to do a total site redesign. It *WILL* happen. Then, you have the choice of running an error-prone, REGEX based perl script to reprocess all those HTML files, or re-generating all X,000 pages manually. Either way, it's going to suck, and then you find out what the $300 in savings by going with a slower CPU really cost you.
However, a decent template engine, written in C, as an extension for a language such as PHP or perl will provide excellent performance while still allowing you a total site redesign by editing a single file. I use php-templates as an extension to PHP. It actually performs 5-10% faster than native PHP echo statements!
I serve millions of hits per month with this tool, and I love it. Yes, you *CAN* have your cake and eat it, too!
As a young IT professional in a new business, I had lots of time and very little money. Thus, getting a used P2 on E-bay and coaxing it into a reliable system (this is a few years ago) was worth it. Any problems would affect only the few clients I had, and I had plenty of time to look for problems.
However, things change. Now, with a quite successful business, I don't have time to spend coaxing the last bit of performance out of an old AMD K6-2 system. Now, I'm looking for something to work quickly, and well. If I have to come back to it very often, it gets replaced. Quickly.
Now that hundreds of users' time is on the line, paying a bit extra is money well spent.
So, don't ask about the hardware, ask about your actual needs? If you are small/new, get cheap equipment and get valuable experience keeping it running. If you are successful/established, get the more expensive, high-quality stuff that will preserve the good name you've worked hard to earn.
Personally, I refuse to work without an N*2 arrangement, with a redundant network. In other words, if *EVERYTHING* were to fail, I could STILL restore full service in a few hours. That includes the city of San Francisco being leveled by a thermonuclar device, which would shut me down for about 4-6 hours. In most cases, I have THREE degrees of "fallback" before things are truly "dead".
What's cheaper? Downtime for your clients, or server equipment? It's a simple value equation.
If you are a employee I guess what you say applies quite well here in the U.S. But, for me, as a self-employed businessman with my fingers in numerous pies, my taxes are anything but.
Being in business for myself means there's a qualitative judgement for every expense: is it a "business expense"? I have numerous computers, one of which I spent 4 hours in the past year checking my email. Is the purchase of that computer a business expense?
I travelled to the Bay this year, with my kids, to visit the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. During this trip, I met with a potential client. Is this a business trip?
I have many, many times in the past not deducted legitimate business expenses, and purposely paid additional taxes, to "raise" my income in order to qualify for loans when buying property. It's often advantageous to pay a few hundred or thousand to get a property, or qualify for funding for XYZ business loan.
It's a routine - my accountant calls me as soon as he receives our tax stuff for the year and asks me: "More income, or lower taxes?".
Heck, when times were hard, I've even counted borrowed money as income!
I usually have about 100% flexibility - I usually have a 100% range (EG: $75,000 - $150,000 per year) in income I can claim depending on what I decide to call a "business expense".
This year, I'm going for low taxes - my actual income has raised nicely this last year, and I have no particular ambitions to buy real estate. Thus, I want to deduct everything I can think of. I'd write off my kids' allowance this year if my accountant can cook up a justifiable way to do so. Given a simple, written agreement that they sign to "clean Dad's office weekly", I can do so.
If preparing your taxes takes less than a week (by yourself or your book-keeper) you are a wage-slave, and I genuinely feel for you. There's a clear sense of purpose and control when you run your own business - it'd be damn hard to convince me I want a "boss"....
Slashdot Mirror
But you know what I'd like to see more of? Quieter PC's. Everything seems to be getting faster and/or smaller, but quieter would be nice.
I didn't notice how much of a difference noise makes until I got a laptop. After a year of working out of the laptop instead of my once-mighty desktop tower (with several big, noisy fans) I've seen the light.
My laptop is basically silent - I hear nothing when it's running. Now, fan noise drives me just nuts!
Or for something equally cryptic and at least somewhat intelligible, try running "top"...
Then, when they ask, you can talk load averages, memory swap, cpu utilization, blah blah blah.
30 seconds of that will put many people right to sleep...
The best part? You can check the integrity of your backups just by doing a search in the p2p app, from anywhere in the world!
Should Taxpayers Pay Twice For Weather Data?
Uhm.... yeah? (ducks)
I have a full, working copy of Windows 1.0 on 5.25" floppies, complete with manuals. Unfortunately, the package has been opended, and I no longer have the original box. =(
Wonder what it's worth today?
According to Alexa, ebaumsworld has a higher traffic ranking than Slashdot, at ~500 as opposed to ~1000.
What are you talking about? Where would I go to get this kind of information?
TINFOILHAT>
/TINFOILHAT>
VOIP is digital, and quite searchable with a text-to-speech converter. What if google wants to make your conversations searchable?
What if you make defamatory comments about GW? (or whoever is the power-that-be of the day)
What if they made it searchable, but didn't tell anybody?
I've worked as an outsourced programmer for years. I've also worked with outsourced programmers with reasonably good results.
I see lots of recommendations to "get it in writing" and "make sure they finish BEFORE you pay them..."
I've never, ever, not even ONCE seen things work that way! Trying to adhere to fiction will get you fictitious (and painful) results.
1) Write your contract so that venue is the location of the outsourcer, and all legal hassles happen there.
2) Demand ownership of all sources. It's OK to cross-license rights to use sources in other non-competetive ventures - nobody wants to think you own their thoughts!
3) Demand a reasonable NDA - don't try for everything under the sun and moon. If your NDA is too severe, you generate ill-will without much benefit, and that never helps.
4) Provide a development server, and require them to work on it remotely via SSH or VPN. That leaves you with all the cards, but still prevents the IRS from considering them as "employees" since they have to provide the keyboard and monitor. It also lets you see what they do and how often, and in real time. Perform backups of this work on a regular basis, and keep backups going back in time that they cannot access.
5) Pay promptly and frequently, maybe even weekly. It's easy to cancel a contract that's not going well when there's not $60,000 on the line. That also keeps both sides a little on edge as there's no big, fat lever to screw each other with.
6) It's a relationship. Be friendly! It never works well if somebody resents your contact. If it gets cold and uncomfortable, say so, and demand immediate correction or leave. You don't have to like each other personally to work well professionally. If you leave, do so quickly and without delay.
7) Forget extensive spec development before beginning. Scope creep always arrives at the party, and software is *NEVER* "done" - it's always a work in progress. Spec development, and change the spec as anticipated needs change. It's OK to pay by the hour since you have the source anyway - You can leave and go somewhere else if you don't like things.
In short, arrange the contract so that if your contractor decides to flake, you have options.
At this point, you've pretty well shot yourself in the foot, since you don't have sources. Big mistake! Your only options are:
1) Cajole them into doing the fix (which hasn't worked so far)
2) Have the work redeveloped, or
3) Sue for a fix in a guaranteed timeframe and or access to source code, and financial losses.
Sorry you're in this situation, but never EVER outsource software development without sources. Never. Just don't do it. Can you imagine a tractor company investing in huge, million-dollar tractors, and not ensuring that there's a backup copy of the key?
Neither can I.
When looking at retirees, there are basically three classes of people:
1) Those who prepared carefully with their own private investments. They bought real estate, they invested in the Stock Market, what have you. They drive BMWs and nice Cadillacs, wear nice clothes, and have a golf course as their back yard.
2) Those who are comfortable with Social Security and (union) retirement. These are the types who worked at Ford Motor Co. for 30 years. Neither feast nor famine - they drive a 6-year-old Ford Taurus or Chevy Citation. They complain about utility bills, and have a monthly disposable income after base expenses of a few hundred.
3) Those who had no planning at all. These guys work at McDonald's when they can, eat dog food when they can't work, and live their golden years in desperation.
If people lived forever, the wealth equalizer of death would no longer work, and those who knew how to invest wisely would continue to get wealthier. We'd see a disparity of wealth that would make todays "shrinking middle class" look like a walk in the park.
Once you reach a particular level of wealth, you no longer need to work to increase your wealth! If you know what to do with wealth, the wealth itself can earn you profits from investments!
So I imagine, in this life of eternities, a quickly separating class of super-mega wealthy that live very long lives of ecstacy, devoid of necessary work, while the poor continue to breed and die since they cannot afford the eternity treatments, and live with more daily risks.
When I switched from my desktop system (2 Ghz Athlon XP) a year ago, to a laptop system, I made certain that the laptop was generally equivalent, and would do everything that the desktop system did.
I bought the smallest, lightest, "full-power" Centrino laptop I could find - the Dell Inspiron 600m, running at 1.7 Ghz. It wasn't cheap. (All told, $2,600 USD)
The only area that I had to compromise was in disk space, and I've mitigated that by moving my media collection (MP3s and various video files) to a network drive on my home network.
And... I LOVE IT! I have this svelte, light, comfortable system with massive connection options, (802.11g, Gb ethernet, 56k Modem, Cellular modem, etc) plenty of horsepower to run several VMWare instances at once, 1.5 GB of Ram, etc, running Fedora Core 3. It goes with me easily and lightly, and with little more than a power plug and a hotspot, with my cell phone at my hip, I have my office, all ready to go.
Now that I've gotten used to it, there's NO WAY I'm going back to a desktop system for my primary system! And the Athlon sits on a desk in my enclosed porch, mainly used for network games.
As of June, 2004, SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessor) support has been merged into the main OpenBSD development branch. At this time, the i386 and amd64 platforms supports SMP, but hopefully others, including macppc, sparc, and sparc64 will ultimately support SMP.
Did you read the link you posted? It's "in development"...
Looking at http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
Starting with OpenBSD 3.6, OpenBSD/amd64 supports most SMP (Symmetrical MultiProcessor) systems. To support SMP operation, a separate SMP kernel (bsd.mp) is included with the installation file sets.
As this is a new feature, developers will want to see what hardware does and doesn't work when running SMP, so it is even more important to send a dmesg after install.
Sounds nice and stable, doesn't it?
It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.
...apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.
/NOT/ intended to be a troll, but rather an honest indication of my perception of BSD (specifically, OpenBSD) when I evaluated it for the next round of upgrades.
And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?
First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway.
I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP. I don't have SMP on my desktop, but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.
Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows?
Because the smaller mindshare of Linux (And I'm not so sure it really is much smaller) is worth it to avoid the worm-of-the-week (tm) syndrome so common with Windows. I didn't say mindshare was all-encompassing.
I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!
It is definitely NOT a stupid argument. I have people in line to get XYZ done. I can either do XYZ and make paying customers happy, or take a performance hit while I get used to a new environment. Which do you prefer? Money to pay for kid's college tuition, or time spent learning new stuff so that you can do what you were doing before?
Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh.
And to many of us, "damned fine and strutting like she knows it" IS "good enough". I'm not sure what you are saying here; it seems self-contradictory. Linux does the job competently, and to me, that's "good enough". Who mentioned telnet?
If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows.
Refer to the previous point, about "good enough". In my experience, Linux has excellent hardware compatability, and BSD is so-so.
Grandparent was
My conclusion was that Whitebox Linux would be the best solution for my specific needs.
I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD? I've considered it heavily, and revisit my decision from time to time:
1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.
2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.
3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux - most interesting packages are developed on Linux, and "maintained" elsewhere.
4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.
5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast. Keep the patches up to date, (it's easy with yum - as a policy, I patch monthly or when "critical" issues are found) apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.
6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.
All the above said, I might still move to BSD. Later. When I have time to. When I get a chance to play with it more. When I decide I'm ready to make the switch.
But, for now, it's RedHat/Whitebox Linux for me!
any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose. if you set your entire filesystem to 777 then you're completely vulnerable on any unix-based os too.
/tmp or /mnt/deleteme directory, you can make a web page that will delete it all from within my Firefox browser? On my Fedora Core 3 laptop?
Really? So, if I chmod 777 my, uh,
Are you sure?
See, to do this, you have to get a script or something to run on my system to delete these locations. Show me where even lowly jscript allows for this...
Now, I'm no jscript guru, so I did a google search for jscript delete files and, on at least the first page or two, only came up with stuff having to do with the ".NET framework" or involving ActiveX!
And the point isn't that files can be deleted, the point is that the API for ActiveX allows somebody to do this remotely.
W.I.N.D.O.W.S:
Windows Is Not a Disk Operating Windowing System
Given this thread, shouldn't that read:
Windows Is Not a Dependable Online Windowing System?
Microsoft is not out to make you, the consumer happy. No, their customers really are the system builders and integrators. They're the ones who hawk their software, they're the ones who take the !@# phone calls, they're the ones who preload the Windows software.
By making the new software with stiff software requirements, they all but force consumers (that's you and me, folks) to upgrade hardware too. That makes system integrators and builders happy, and the mild collusion continues.
Microsoft did this with Windows 3.x, 95, and NT. Recent talk is of a very stagnant industry. Why wouldn't they do it again?
I knew this little old lady who didn't lock one of her windows, so I snuck in and changed all her locks and added a vulgar greeting to her answering machine! Boy was that funny!
Yeah, but you have to look at intent. Really. If I go to some stranger's car at a parking lock, open it, and sit down inside it, I'm clearly commiting a crime. But, if I turn off the headlights that were left on, write a message on my business card, and then leave, it'd be hard to argue that I'd actually commited a crime.
Technically, I did - breaking an entering. But, at least in California, INTENT is part of the definition of what a crime actually is. You run a risk, as there's a line you're clearly skirting.
But, in the case of your little old lady, you didn't take her life savings did you? And, by changing her answering machine, you did something to prevent her from losing her life savings a-la identify theft, didn't you?
You run the risk of pissing her off, going to court, and potentially being found. But, if you don't do anything, SHE runs the riks of losing her life savings.
What if you put "Hi there! This is -Address- and I left my window open. Somebody else is leaving this message so that I know to lock my window next time" as the message on the answering machine instead? Then, lock the window on the way out? She'd get a good warning, and it'd be hard to argue that you did anything but the equivalent of turning the headlights off...
I feel like broadcasting my SSID and changing it to 'I'm at number 35, for god's sake please come over and speek to me about wireless network security!'
Using the admin passwords, set up a default route so that 0.0.0.0/0 routes to goatse or a porn site.
They'll get the idea REAL QUICK that way....
from what I've seen, the exploit has only been demonstrated on uniprocessor 2.4 kernels.
I've tried several times to get the 'sploit to do something meaningful on an old RedHat 7.2 system updated with Progeny updates.
The closest I ever came to an exploit was the system becoming unresponsive, and having to reboot the machine. (Run as a local user via SSH)
I've also seen *NO* activity from the various yum repositories - for Fedora Legacy (Core1), Core3, Progeny, or RHEL.
WTF?
A number of people have mentioned H&R block finding additional deductions they wouldn't have thought of on their own. Anyone care to be specific?
The first year we started using an accountant, we had prepared our own taxes. On the emphatic recommendation of a business associate, we went to a very conservative tax accountant.
His charge was $750, and for that, he cut our taxes by a a few thousand. I've never looked back, and I'm well aware of the fact that our accuntant tends to be rather conservative. I know a guy who spends more on repairs for his several Mercedes cars than he legally makes in income!
Really, and truly - especially if you run your own business - a good accountant and a good attorney are some of your very best friends! If they are any good, they'll save you thousands - (or, if you read my earlier post, qualify you for things you otherwise would completely miss!)
If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
Which is true until you have to do a total site redesign. It *WILL* happen. Then, you have the choice of running an error-prone, REGEX based perl script to reprocess all those HTML files, or re-generating all X,000 pages manually. Either way, it's going to suck, and then you find out what the $300 in savings by going with a slower CPU really cost you.
However, a decent template engine, written in C, as an extension for a language such as PHP or perl will provide excellent performance while still allowing you a total site redesign by editing a single file. I use php-templates as an extension to PHP. It actually performs 5-10% faster than native PHP echo statements!
I serve millions of hits per month with this tool, and I love it. Yes, you *CAN* have your cake and eat it, too!
If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
Which is true until you have to do a total site redesign. It *WILL* happen. Then, you have the choice of running an error-prone, REGEX based perl script to reprocess all those HTML files, or re-generating all X,000 pages manually. Either way, it's going to suck, and then you find out what the $300 in savings by going with a slower CPU really cost you.
However, a decent template engine, written in C, as an extension for a language such as PHP or perl will provide excellent performance while still allowing you a total site redesign by editing a single file. I use php-templates as an extension to PHP. It actually performs 5-10% faster than native PHP echo statements!
I serve millions of hits per month with this tool, and I love it. Yes, you *CAN* have your cake and eat it, too!
As a young IT professional in a new business, I had lots of time and very little money. Thus, getting a used P2 on E-bay and coaxing it into a reliable system (this is a few years ago) was worth it. Any problems would affect only the few clients I had, and I had plenty of time to look for problems.
However, things change. Now, with a quite successful business, I don't have time to spend coaxing the last bit of performance out of an old AMD K6-2 system. Now, I'm looking for something to work quickly, and well. If I have to come back to it very often, it gets replaced. Quickly.
Now that hundreds of users' time is on the line, paying a bit extra is money well spent.
So, don't ask about the hardware, ask about your actual needs? If you are small/new, get cheap equipment and get valuable experience keeping it running. If you are successful/established, get the more expensive, high-quality stuff that will preserve the good name you've worked hard to earn.
Personally, I refuse to work without an N*2 arrangement, with a redundant network. In other words, if *EVERYTHING* were to fail, I could STILL restore full service in a few hours. That includes the city of San Francisco being leveled by a thermonuclar device, which would shut me down for about 4-6 hours. In most cases, I have THREE degrees of "fallback" before things are truly "dead".
What's cheaper? Downtime for your clients, or server equipment? It's a simple value equation.
If you are a employee I guess what you say applies quite well here in the U.S. But, for me, as a self-employed businessman with my fingers in numerous pies, my taxes are anything but.
Being in business for myself means there's a qualitative judgement for every expense: is it a "business expense"? I have numerous computers, one of which I spent 4 hours in the past year checking my email. Is the purchase of that computer a business expense?
I travelled to the Bay this year, with my kids, to visit the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. During this trip, I met with a potential client. Is this a business trip?
I have many, many times in the past not deducted legitimate business expenses, and purposely paid additional taxes, to "raise" my income in order to qualify for loans when buying property. It's often advantageous to pay a few hundred or thousand to get a property, or qualify for funding for XYZ business loan.
It's a routine - my accountant calls me as soon as he receives our tax stuff for the year and asks me: "More income, or lower taxes?".
Heck, when times were hard, I've even counted borrowed money as income!
I usually have about 100% flexibility - I usually have a 100% range (EG: $75,000 - $150,000 per year) in income I can claim depending on what I decide to call a "business expense".
This year, I'm going for low taxes - my actual income has raised nicely this last year, and I have no particular ambitions to buy real estate. Thus, I want to deduct everything I can think of. I'd write off my kids' allowance this year if my accountant can cook up a justifiable way to do so. Given a simple, written agreement that they sign to "clean Dad's office weekly", I can do so.
If preparing your taxes takes less than a week (by yourself or your book-keeper) you are a wage-slave, and I genuinely feel for you. There's a clear sense of purpose and control when you run your own business - it'd be damn hard to convince me I want a "boss"....
As a software vendor myself, I'm curious - what do you sell? What's your company? Estimated install base?