Yeah, it's kind of funky. One site I was doing some work for was using a well known chat server. Some kids would find out what the new exploit was whenever a new version came out, and take over admin within a few days. We finally started talking with him and he told us he just wanted to prove that he was good enough to be the chat admin for us!
The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.
This is simply no longer the case. It was true of the NSA and other intel agencies during the cold war, especially during the Reagan years. However, with Congressional interest in a balanced budget, these agencies have been scrutinized fairly intensely and now have to operate their programs within budgets.
That is actually one reason that they are 'behind' in some ways. They used to have all the money they wanted to build anything they needed from the ground up. Now they are shifting from that model to needing to use prebuilt components ('COTS' - Consumer Off The Shelf). There is not as much expertise with using these types of components, and in many cases they engineer systems in sort of strange ways because the COTS products are treated as if they were developed internally in regard to testing and design.
COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is
companies. This domain has grown very large and there is
concern about the administrative load and system performance if
the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is
being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future
commercial registrations in the subdomains.
ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for
organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-
government organizations may fit here.
I recall some earlier RFC saying that ORG was for nonprofits and individuals, but I can't quite recall which one that was.
In Europe, where numerous bills and resolutions have been introduced, local, state and federal governments spent $7.8 billion on software in 2000. In Brazil, governments spent a mere $200 million the same year, an indication of how little the country has to spend on software and why free or low-priced software holds such powerful appeal.
This may look impressive, but one should also consider exactly what goes into the estimated costs on software purchases. If these estimates include the cost of man-hours for producing custom software, this is not going to be a fair comparison because it will have more to do with how much money European countries are putting into, say, development of custom military software than it will have to do with what OS the foreign ministry is using for their desktops. I browsed the net a bit but was unable to find out what the size of the budgets of all of the European countries was in comparison with the size of Brazil's budget. It would be much more compelling to see what percent of Brazil's budget was spent on software in comparison with the percent of the countries in Europe.
As a side note, I know for a fact that the US military uses free operating systems and free build tools for some of their software, but they are still pouring a ton of money into the man-hours to create that custom software.
While I advocate the use of free software, and agree that it will help save some money, the comparison between Brazil and Europe in this article is fairly ridiculous because of the likely nature of their software expenditures. This may be a little off the subject, but a pet peeve of mine is when articles throw out fairly meaningless numbers to attempt to support their point.
Does anyone know why Sun is stopping this program? I don't see any rationale given anywhere.
I think it's very useful for certain types of users to have access to the Solaris source -- not because they want to compile it, but because they want to be able to see how certain things work. When I was doing much more in-depth work with the TCP/IP stack (including TCP parameter tuning) and ATM on Solaris, it would have saved me trouble to be able to get a look at some of the source to better understand how certain things were behaving rather than having to tweak parameters semi-blindly and see what ended up working best. If had still been doing that work when Sun released the source code I would have been all over it. I'm sure I can't be alone, there must be other Solaris users out there with similar needs. These types of users also tend to be very proactive about helping Sun resolve bugs, and I would not be surprised if the speed of implementation of bug fixes has been improved with their help.
As a side note, I also know that Sun had distributed source to certain (usually educational) institutions over the years prior to this program, including UCLA.
Having decent amount of work for a couple groups in the DoD in the past, two things:
* There are a lot of Sun workstations floating around various organizations. That is probably the main thing they want to use StarOffice for. I saw little in the way of Linux use in the DoD, but there was a decent amount of *BSD use in certain niches.
* There are at least a couple major organizations that have moved from alternatives to Windows NT for standard desktops. I would bet that the adoption of StarOffice is partly because there is more cross-OS compatibility with the hordes of NT boxes.
homestore.com is another place you can look for buy/rent listings. They've bought up several companies, including move.com, which was itself a conglomeration. I only happen to know about this because I did some brief work for move.com.
I'm not quite sure why something easily found on yahoo is an 'ask slashdot'.
Gartner reported that they asked end users what OS they were using on their new servers. They did not ask what came preinstalled (despite what all the/. posters who had not read the actual article were claiming during the 8/24 debate).
To me this seems like a decent way of determining market share. It would be interesting to hear more about the characteristics of the end users that Gartner polled. The specific industry and size of a company often dictates technical choices of that nature, and if Gartner did not have a broad cross-section then their results could be questioned.
> Gartner said that they asked end users what OS they had installed on their new servers
Even you are claiming that the survey is talking about preloaded OSes. Who installed the OS if they "had" an OS installed?
The word 'they' in my sentence refers to the END USERS. Good morning. The END USERS reported what OS they ran on their new servers AFTER they set them up.
* As someone else mentioned, Gartner said that they asked end users what OS they had installed on their new servers, the survey had NOTHING to do with what came pre-installed. RTFA.
* I find the Gartner numbers much easier to believe than the claim that GNU/Linux holds 25% of the server market. Gartner is well-known as an excellent objective research firm. Also, from my personal experience as a former client-facing employee of a large internet consulting firm, I know that there are a lot of companies out there still nervous about using GNU/Linux for their servers. The internet consulting firms themselves also have excellent relationships with Microsoft, Sun, and Application Server providers, so are incented financially and with training to recommend more commercial products to their clients. For smaller inexpensive sites, clients tended to lean towards Windows, and for the larger ones they tended to lean towards Solaris, at least in my experience. The one place I saw GNU/Linux getting used was at the web layer, with the RedHat/Apache combo. I never saw Linux used for an application or database server on any site my company built, and I know that it was suggested by some technical leads then turned down.
My mother has been part of a pilot program put together by Microsoft and Toshiba. She teaches a fourth/fifth grade split class. The long term aim of the program is to get laptops into the school for each child (Toshiba laptops running Windows, of course).
It is interesting to see how what they do in her class deviates from what I learned about computers in elementary (I am 26 now). I learned LOGO and BASIC on an Apple ][. In my mother's class, they are learning how to use a computer as a tool for their other work. They use Powerpoint to do presentations for their science project, and Word to write their paragraphs. IMO, the kids in my mother's class are probably getting a better taste of getting comfortable using a computer for tasks they can apply to any path they choose to take than the kids in my class 'back in the day'. *insert creaking rocking chair*
Tangent -- I will agree that it is good to teach some programming skills early on to kids who might be interested in it, but in general I feel it is probably best to hold off on that until they are a little older and can get more out of it. I know that I didn't get much out of BASIC and LOGO and only started really getting into programming when I learned Pascal later on. That may of course be because I had a Commodore 64 and the games were all so cool I didn't want to waste my time trying to write some little dinky BASIC program.
My utopian/dystopian personal vision of the not-so-distant future is of two kids on the playground at recess, MP3 players built into wristwatches, trading the latest cool songs via geosynchronous satellite. There are a thousand reasons that might never happen... [snip]
I feel obliged to snark at this with my networking hat on - the biggest reason that this wouldn't ever happen is that it would be remarkably stupid to impose the 600+ ms delay of a geosynchronous satellite link for a data transfer between devices a foot apart from each other.:P Networking over satellite is great for remote locations, but to the playground you'd want to be on a wireless LAN or maybe MAN in the future.
Why the heck did this get modded as troll? It is one of the best comments anyone made. The GPL *is* a restrictive license because it forces any extensions of GPLed code to be also GPLed. I wish my moderator hat was on right now to correct the points on this one.
Just raise the numbers of his example and you are back to being wrong that the solution is just more bandwidth. An ATM implementation can offer delay variation (jitter) guarantees whereas alternatives will not. This is not only because of the fixed packet size but because it is a connection-based technology, so it will never make a guarantee that it can't support.
The downside is of course that ATM lives at both layer 2 and 3. Mechanisms to get IP (also 3) working nicely with ATM such as LANE, MPOA, etc, will break its great QoS features. That means with ATM you end up buying an expensive pipe that you can't use the features of instead of a cheap pipe without the same features. (It's also an expensive pipe with a lot of overhead given the ridiculously small size of ATM cells.)
here are several other relevant past/. articles for the interested, including a couple on the exact same technology from different companies. all are cmdrtaco posts too!
My uncle in LA had a neighbor that did that with a bunch of stuff he didn't need anymore. Nobody took anything. Then he put a sign out that said $10. All the stuff was stolen overnight.
You are completely wrong. uname on Solaris 2.6 shows it as being SunOS 5.6, not as SunOS 5.2.6. You are also wrong about SunOS having always been 5.x -- 4.x releases existed. I am not sure how Solaris 1 releases synch up with SunOS numbering because I am too young (I started out with Solaris 2.5.1).
Here is how the numbering of Solaris 2.x - 8 works:
if ((SunOS < 5.7) && (SunOS >= 5.0))
Solaris = SunOS - 3;
else if (SunOS >= 5.7)// new marketing!
Solaris = (SunOS - 5) * 10;
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's kind of funky. One site I was doing some work for was using a well known chat server. Some kids would find out what the new exploit was whenever a new version came out, and take over admin within a few days. We finally started talking with him and he told us he just wanted to prove that he was good enough to be the chat admin for us!
The NSA has an essentially unlimited amount of money. Citizens of the U.S. are not allowed to know the amount.
This is simply no longer the case. It was true of the NSA and other intel agencies during the cold war, especially during the Reagan years. However, with Congressional interest in a balanced budget, these agencies have been scrutinized fairly intensely and now have to operate their programs within budgets.
That is actually one reason that they are 'behind' in some ways. They used to have all the money they wanted to build anything they needed from the ground up. Now they are shifting from that model to needing to use prebuilt components ('COTS' - Consumer Off The Shelf). There is not as much expertise with using these types of components, and in many cases they engineer systems in sort of strange ways because the COTS products are treated as if they were developed internally in regard to testing and design.
From RFC 1591:
COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is
companies. This domain has grown very large and there is
concern about the administrative load and system performance if
the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is
being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future
commercial registrations in the subdomains.
ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for
organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-
government organizations may fit here.
I recall some earlier RFC saying that ORG was for nonprofits and individuals, but I can't quite recall which one that was.
In Europe, where numerous bills and resolutions have been introduced, local, state and federal governments spent $7.8 billion on software in 2000. In Brazil, governments spent a mere $200 million the same year, an indication of how little the country has to spend on software and why free or low-priced software holds such powerful appeal.
This may look impressive, but one should also consider exactly what goes into the estimated costs on software purchases. If these estimates include the cost of man-hours for producing custom software, this is not going to be a fair comparison because it will have more to do with how much money European countries are putting into, say, development of custom military software than it will have to do with what OS the foreign ministry is using for their desktops. I browsed the net a bit but was unable to find out what the size of the budgets of all of the European countries was in comparison with the size of Brazil's budget. It would be much more compelling to see what percent of Brazil's budget was spent on software in comparison with the percent of the countries in Europe.
As a side note, I know for a fact that the US military uses free operating systems and free build tools for some of their software, but they are still pouring a ton of money into the man-hours to create that custom software.
While I advocate the use of free software, and agree that it will help save some money, the comparison between Brazil and Europe in this article is fairly ridiculous because of the likely nature of their software expenditures. This may be a little off the subject, but a pet peeve of mine is when articles throw out fairly meaningless numbers to attempt to support their point.
This is /., not America.
I think it's very useful for certain types of users to have access to the Solaris source -- not because they want to compile it, but because they want to be able to see how certain things work. When I was doing much more in-depth work with the TCP/IP stack (including TCP parameter tuning) and ATM on Solaris, it would have saved me trouble to be able to get a look at some of the source to better understand how certain things were behaving rather than having to tweak parameters semi-blindly and see what ended up working best. If had still been doing that work when Sun released the source code I would have been all over it. I'm sure I can't be alone, there must be other Solaris users out there with similar needs. These types of users also tend to be very proactive about helping Sun resolve bugs, and I would not be surprised if the speed of implementation of bug fixes has been improved with their help.
As a side note, I also know that Sun had distributed source to certain (usually educational) institutions over the years prior to this program, including UCLA.
* There are a lot of Sun workstations floating around various organizations. That is probably the main thing they want to use StarOffice for. I saw little in the way of Linux use in the DoD, but there was a decent amount of *BSD use in certain niches.
* There are at least a couple major organizations that have moved from alternatives to Windows NT for standard desktops. I would bet that the adoption of StarOffice is partly because there is more cross-OS compatibility with the hordes of NT boxes.
well now i feel silly, looks like homestore redirects to relator. damn all these mergers. ;)
I'm not quite sure why something easily found on yahoo is an 'ask slashdot'.
Gartner reported that they asked end users what OS they were using on their new servers. They did not ask what came preinstalled (despite what all the /. posters who had not read the actual article were claiming during the 8/24 debate).
To me this seems like a decent way of determining market share. It would be interesting to hear more about the characteristics of the end users that Gartner polled. The specific industry and size of a company often dictates technical choices of that nature, and if Gartner did not have a broad cross-section then their results could be questioned.
Even you are claiming that the survey is talking about preloaded OSes. Who installed the OS if they "had" an OS installed?
The word 'they' in my sentence refers to the END USERS. Good morning. The END USERS reported what OS they ran on their new servers AFTER they set them up.
* I find the Gartner numbers much easier to believe than the claim that GNU/Linux holds 25% of the server market. Gartner is well-known as an excellent objective research firm. Also, from my personal experience as a former client-facing employee of a large internet consulting firm, I know that there are a lot of companies out there still nervous about using GNU/Linux for their servers. The internet consulting firms themselves also have excellent relationships with Microsoft, Sun, and Application Server providers, so are incented financially and with training to recommend more commercial products to their clients. For smaller inexpensive sites, clients tended to lean towards Windows, and for the larger ones they tended to lean towards Solaris, at least in my experience. The one place I saw GNU/Linux getting used was at the web layer, with the RedHat/Apache combo. I never saw Linux used for an application or database server on any site my company built, and I know that it was suggested by some technical leads then turned down.
It is interesting to see how what they do in her class deviates from what I learned about computers in elementary (I am 26 now). I learned LOGO and BASIC on an Apple ][. In my mother's class, they are learning how to use a computer as a tool for their other work. They use Powerpoint to do presentations for their science project, and Word to write their paragraphs. IMO, the kids in my mother's class are probably getting a better taste of getting comfortable using a computer for tasks they can apply to any path they choose to take than the kids in my class 'back in the day'. *insert creaking rocking chair*
Tangent -- I will agree that it is good to teach some programming skills early on to kids who might be interested in it, but in general I feel it is probably best to hold off on that until they are a little older and can get more out of it. I know that I didn't get much out of BASIC and LOGO and only started really getting into programming when I learned Pascal later on. That may of course be because I had a Commodore 64 and the games were all so cool I didn't want to waste my time trying to write some little dinky BASIC program.
I feel obliged to snark at this with my networking hat on - the biggest reason that this wouldn't ever happen is that it would be remarkably stupid to impose the 600+ ms delay of a geosynchronous satellite link for a data transfer between devices a foot apart from each other. :P Networking over satellite is great for remote locations, but to the playground you'd want to be on a wireless LAN or maybe MAN in the future.
Why the heck did this get modded as troll? It is one of the best comments anyone made. The GPL *is* a restrictive license because it forces any extensions of GPLed code to be also GPLed. I wish my moderator hat was on right now to correct the points on this one.
Why must Darren make it so hard for people to use his software. It's easy to use his software. It is just harder to modify it for redistribution.
and it is the ONLY free NAT package for solaris, as far as I am aware
I'll put 777 away again.
I'd better go auction off my mod points on ebay right away!!
The downside is of course that ATM lives at both layer 2 and 3. Mechanisms to get IP (also 3) working nicely with ATM such as LANE, MPOA, etc, will break its great QoS features. That means with ATM you end up buying an expensive pipe that you can't use the features of instead of a cheap pipe without the same features. (It's also an expensive pipe with a lot of overhead given the ridiculously small size of ATM cells.)
no you don't. that's why people keep tossing the idea of a privacy amendment around on and off.
here are several other relevant past /. articles for the interested, including a couple on the exact same technology from different companies. all are cmdrtaco posts too!
one
two
three
four
My uncle in LA had a neighbor that did that with a bunch of stuff he didn't need anymore. Nobody took anything. Then he put a sign out that said $10. All the stuff was stolen overnight.
You are completely wrong. uname on Solaris 2.6 shows it as being SunOS 5.6, not as SunOS 5.2.6. You are also wrong about SunOS having always been 5.x -- 4.x releases existed. I am not sure how Solaris 1 releases synch up with SunOS numbering because I am too young (I started out with Solaris 2.5.1).
// new marketing!
Here is how the numbering of Solaris 2.x - 8 works:
if ((SunOS < 5.7) && (SunOS >= 5.0))
Solaris = SunOS - 3;
else if (SunOS >= 5.7)
Solaris = (SunOS - 5) * 10;
this isn't another one of those penis extension spam email things i keep getting, is it?