Yah, I am spectacularly unimpressed by the American hybrid, and some of the Japanese ones aren't much better.
The Prius is a SULEV or super-ultra-low-emissions-vehicle (its' actually better than the SULEV rating requires, but the naming convention is already ridiculous - what's next, super-duper-wooga-wooga-ultra--schmultra-low-emiss ions? Oh, that's right, I forgot - Detroit said it's physically impossible to get anthing better than Ultra-Low!) so it pretty much leads the pack (Honda on the way up because their ICE technology is more efficient).
As long as people continue to buy utter crap, the "invisible hand" the libertarians are always going on about doesn't really exist. As long as the consumers are prevented from understanding what their options really are, they will continue to buy crap. Thus, marketing and propaganda can be the greatest forces for evil in a capitalist system (greed is generally the greatest force for evil in a non-capitalist system, but capitalism actually deals pretty well with that!).
Obviously, given the many specific replies to your ill-informed claims, you are wrong.
But here's a more important point: In a capitalist society it is necessary for citizens to "vote with their wallets". Don't like the RIAA's policies? It won't suffice to just stop buying their products (although that's important too) you have to buy the products sold by those who reject those policies.
If you don't like advertising-supported magazines, you don't need to just stop reading them (that won't directly affect their income stream, after all) you have to pay for magazines supported by subscriptions.
If you don't like the way Detroit makes cars, you have to buy a car that you like. If you don't like the way Nike treats their employees, you have to buy from their competitors.
I don't like air pollution, or government-sponsored terrorism, so I bought a Toyota Prius. Yes, it cost more, yes, I could have used that money for beer, but I did it anyway. At some point you have to put your money where your ideals are, or you may as well be seaweed.
I have no idea what you are talking about. RPMs allow dependency tracking as well as pre- and post-installation scripting - you can install a new kernel with a single command, for example, or update only the stuff that's already installed on a particular machine.
Are you complaining that managing RPMs is difficult? Perhaps so, but if you've got enough servers (remember Red Hat is targeting the so-called "enterprise" customer, with thousands of servers) it's a hell of a lot easier than managing source.
I deal with 50+ hospitals on a regular basis, all of them have spent unbelievable amounts of money on HIPAA compliance, and all of the data they transfer into my systems is as secure as possible given the current state of encryption technology.
It has generally been my experience that the people who argue "BSD versus linux" fall into one of two categories.
1) BSD people who have no in-depth knowledge of linux, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
2) Linux people who know very little about any particular BSD, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
The people with truly deep knowledge of both systems always say "use the right tool for the right task" and typically have no time for OS religious wars.
Word, brother. Testify. I think Microsoft scooped up all the DEC geniuses that haven't already retired.
I belive the Cost for access to the Codebase has gone from reasonable to 6 figure or so... not entirely sure... they dont exactly make it public the price figure, so thats an estimation peiced together from various sources.
That sucks, but at least there is a FOSS VMS project running. Still seems to be in its infancy unfortunately.
im hoping to break out of the MS/Linux admin BA COmp Sec gets me desk job managing 50 computers kinda job and get myself a place in that 20 thousand new mainframe techs IBM want. I love the big iron.:-)
Don't get sucked into the horrible old IBM mainframe OS390/MVS mindset, though - linux on mainframes is the cutting edge of computer science, if you ask me.
Alphaservers and VMS are like little slices of the big iron cake that i can enjoy in my spare time. Soon as i get a spot for my Alphaserver 2100 Ill be popping 8.2 on it and firing it up.
The Alpha architecture is getting a little long in the tooth, but it's still a great design; IMO better than anything IBM ships. On the other hand, IBM rules when it comes to solidly built chassis... they just pay more attention to the physical characteristics of their machines, using thicker metal, stronger materials, etc.
When was the last time you used VMS?
I stopped adminning VMS machines in 1994, after more than a decade of concentration on DEC hardware and OSes. I still occasionally use them because I mostly do systems integration work these days, making dissimilar machines interoperate transparently to end-users. I think the last time I hacked on a VAX/VMS box was about two years ago (I have one in my basement, but I haven't fired it up in at least that long).
Well, based on the registered republicans I know, only 1 out of 5 voted for GWB, and a total of ZERO voted for him in the primary. Obviously my aquaintances do not really reflect any nation-wide groupthink, but you see my point - saying "the registered republicans... voted for him" is a huge overstatement. If I accept that logic, all voting americans have GWB's values, regardless of party!
First you said that "Registered Republicans chose a punishment-oriented authoritarian to be their party leader" then you said that "They picked someone who they thought best represented their values" and finally "If most Republicans were goal-oriented libertarians they would have chosen one". You've got some implicit logical fallacies there.
First of all, most Republicans != Registered Republicans. The first group is obviously a majority subset of the second.
Second, are you sure the majority of Republicans chose GWB to be their party leader? Here in my home state we sure didn't - he solidly lost in the primary. And in the larger states they used voting machines that do not support a verifiable audit - so maybe nobody voted for him there, we really don't know!
Finally, you might consider that GWB was chosen because he was the least antithetical to the values of registered republicans, of those choices available. Libertarian-leaning Republicans would obviously be horrified by the prospect of a Kerry presidency, and those that considered a vote for Badnarik to be a wasted vote would therefore vote for Bush.
Thus, while your last comment is sadly correct ("The leader of the party generally can set the tone" (unless he's Al Gore)) your other observations ignore the realities of our pseudo-democratic, wealth-dominated system.
What is cool about it, for auditors obsessed with SOX, GLB & HIPAA compliance, is that it maintains a near-perfect audit trail at the cost of disk space (which is cheap compared the other costs of regulatory compliance).
You can mount the disk at any checkpoint, essentially providing a snapshot of each of the filesystem's unique states - unlike conventional backup (the usual 24-hour backup cycle gets a very coarse picture of the changes, obviously).
Other than that, it's yawn-yawn SSDD. The whole "lossy/lossless" thing is overblown hype, because all disk hardware fails to complete a write operation if you remove power before the operation is complete. They are trying to make their system seem better than it really is by making others seem worse than they really are. The fact is, plenty of people have run totally lossless data storage systems using ext2/ext3 and ISO9660, and no filesystem (including NILFS) can prevent your data from being butchered if your power supply is crap.
Is this lossless as in "my gmail emails are lossless" or is this lossless as in "my Escalade is lossless (because when it gets stolen or lost I call onstar and they find it for me)"
Your Escalade is lossless because nobody would steal that pig with gas at $3 a gallon!
If you have a licensed copy of the OS you can get source. Or at least, you used to be able to - many years ago when I was considered a VMS expert (something I certainly am not now) I used to look stuff up in the fiche; most of the stuff I was referencing was written in BLISS, I think.
As I recall, RMS is an indexed file management system. I wrote a molluscan taxonomy database system that used it in the 80s... but I usually encapsulate all OS-specific stuff in subroutines, so somebody has probably ported it to a cheaper database by now.
Once appointed, Supreme Court Justices are pretty much free to rise above the (nearly invisible) Republican/Democrat split if they so choose.
Individual Justices do tend to be either authoritarian or libertarian, and either punishment-oriented or goal-oriented, though; some people incorrectly assign these values to the parties (just because GWB is a punishment-oriented authoritarian doesn't mean those are the values of the people who are registered republicans).
If it makes you feel better, Harriet Miers has been reported to be a Gore supporter by the mainstream media.
You could also build a system where critical data is distributed to where it needs to be used, then updated dynamically.
Examples of such systems would be BIND for DNS or OpenLDAP for LDAP. You can have hordes of cheap servers running BIND or OpenLDAP that build from a kickstart or mondo CD, and get really amazing reliability overall. And no backup tape system required - the systems themselves can be your backup store.
It's not a solution for every problem, but neither are fault-tolerance or clustering. You need to have more than one tool in your toolkit.
When I read your comment, the slashdot quote at the bottom of the page read
"Cynic, n.: Experienced."
During the Y2K leadup, a consultant was ranting about how scared we should be of the total meltdown that was certain to occur, and I got up and started to walk out of the room. He buttonholed me as I tried to pass him, and after I told him I was leaving because the meeting was a waste of time, we had this conversation:
Fearmongering Consultant: "Are you prepared for Y2K?" Me: "Yes. I started testing my hardware in 1997, and I've never in my life written code that couldn't handle an obviously forseeable date change. My most recent test was two weeks ago when I advanced the clocks on all the WAN tackle." FC: "Are you prepared to bet your job on that?" Me (looking across room at CEO and CIO): "I think I just did!" CEO: Buwhahahahahaha! CIO: (sigh) (FC gapes like a spotlighted deer as I exit, stage right)
Real smart, huh? Wrong. Around September of 1999 I was suddenly put in charge of fixing the Y2K issues on our gigantic mainframe, because the CEO remembered the guy who had his Y2k act together. The mainframe had ten years worth of COBOL on it written by people who couldn't comprehend that yes, Virginia, the century will come to an end! and an OS that was years behind in patches. Since I'd spent most of my career at that point avoiding mainframes and mainframers, you can imagine my joy.
I'm not using any binary-only software on any of my boxes. I have raid card management that works just fine (granted, I do have an LSI chipset); so your initial post still makes no sense to me.
I just used google for a couple of seconds and found that Adaptec and 3ware both are freely providing management software for their RAID cards under linux. So perhaps the BSD website is not the best place to find information about what linux does or doesn't do?
OpenBSD is great, because it has incredibly strong code auditing. Not because something else sucks.
OpenBSD sucks, because it conforms to traditional (some would say obsolete) unix paradigms. Not because something else is great.
All nine of my LAN nodes, all four of my laptops (one for each family member), and all the white boxes I used to build the late unlamented big-slow-beowulf cost me nothing but some of my time. And perhaps a little extra laundry detergent. As long as you are willing to settle for Windows-level performance while running linux, you can get all the hardware you need dumpster-diving. At least here on the suburban east coast of the USA, anyway; or maybe the previous poster received the computer as a gift, or stole it, or something.
Used 1GB hard drives are cheaper than CD-Rs. At one point I had a cardboard box with 50 of them in it, but I managed to give them all away eventually.
When the Beowulf stack fell over and nearly killed me (the ceiling wedges held, but one of the casters broke off the plywood sheet on the bottom) I realized there is such a thing as being too cheap. I had a bruise shaped like the mounting flange of a 3com 100bt hub on my back for weeks!
You flamed the other guy for being "not particularly informed" and then you post "I don't want to be hold hostage to some binary-only shoddy RAID managment software running on Linux"?
I've been running completely open-source soft RAID for years on Red Hat linux. My backup server, which uses the same basic idea as dirvish, uses a couple of terabytes of RAID10. There are even multiple RAID implementations freely available, although you are typically restricted by your choice of kernels.
You zealots never seem to realize your conception of the system you disdain is necessarily going to be incorrect, because you aren't going to spend the time required to really understand it. Concentrate on cheerleading you chosen religion's good points and stop trying to point out the other guy's bad points, that way you can show some real insight.
I couldn't come up on my own policy rules for SELinux to make Samba run in a more secure manner.
You'll never come up with a policy that makes samba significantly more secure, unless Microsoft provides clients that can use a secure implementation of the NetBIOS/NetBEUI/SMB/CIFS/whatever-they-call-it-thi s-week protocol.
That's not a failing of SELinux, nor of OpenBSD, or even of Samba itself. Samba's a tool for communicating with systems through an insecure protocol.
You can't lose your finger NEARLY as easily as you can lose your physical token or forget your password.
And, the friendly staff at Abu Ghraib can cut your finger off easier than they can torture a password out of you, so it might just save time for everyone!
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Yah, I am spectacularly unimpressed by the American hybrid, and some of the Japanese ones aren't much better.
s ions? Oh, that's right, I forgot - Detroit said it's physically impossible to get anthing better than Ultra-Low!) so it pretty much leads the pack (Honda on the way up because their ICE technology is more efficient).
The Prius is a SULEV or super-ultra-low-emissions-vehicle (its' actually better than the SULEV rating requires, but the naming convention is already ridiculous - what's next, super-duper-wooga-wooga-ultra--schmultra-low-emis
As long as people continue to buy utter crap, the "invisible hand" the libertarians are always going on about doesn't really exist. As long as the consumers are prevented from understanding what their options really are, they will continue to buy crap. Thus, marketing and propaganda can be the greatest forces for evil in a capitalist system (greed is generally the greatest force for evil in a non-capitalist system, but capitalism actually deals pretty well with that!).
Obviously, given the many specific replies to your ill-informed claims, you are wrong.
But here's a more important point: In a capitalist society it is necessary for citizens to "vote with their wallets". Don't like the RIAA's policies? It won't suffice to just stop buying their products (although that's important too) you have to buy the products sold by those who reject those policies.
If you don't like advertising-supported magazines, you don't need to just stop reading them (that won't directly affect their income stream, after all) you have to pay for magazines supported by subscriptions.
If you don't like the way Detroit makes cars, you have to buy a car that you like. If you don't like the way Nike treats their employees, you have to buy from their competitors.
I don't like air pollution, or government-sponsored terrorism, so I bought a Toyota Prius. Yes, it cost more, yes, I could have used that money for beer, but I did it anyway. At some point you have to put your money where your ideals are, or you may as well be seaweed.
I have no idea what you are talking about. RPMs allow dependency tracking as well as pre- and post-installation scripting - you can install a new kernel with a single command, for example, or update only the stuff that's already installed on a particular machine.
Are you complaining that managing RPMs is difficult? Perhaps so, but if you've got enough servers (remember Red Hat is targeting the so-called "enterprise" customer, with thousands of servers) it's a hell of a lot easier than managing source.
I deal with 50+ hospitals on a regular basis, all of them have spent unbelievable amounts of money on HIPAA compliance, and all of the data they transfer into my systems is as secure as possible given the current state of encryption technology.
Surely you've heard of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 which mandates privacy and security of healthcare information, and provides punitive measures, including fines and prison terms?
It has generally been my experience that the people who argue "BSD versus linux" fall into one of two categories.
1) BSD people who have no in-depth knowledge of linux, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
2) Linux people who know very little about any particular BSD, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
The people with truly deep knowledge of both systems always say "use the right tool for the right task" and typically have no time for OS religious wars.
Well, based on the registered republicans I know, only 1 out of 5 voted for GWB, and a total of ZERO voted for him in the primary. Obviously my aquaintances do not really reflect any nation-wide groupthink, but you see my point - saying "the registered republicans ... voted for him" is a huge overstatement. If I accept that logic, all voting americans have GWB's values, regardless of party!
See this post for a more complete answer.
First you said that "Registered Republicans chose a punishment-oriented authoritarian to be their party leader" then you said that "They picked someone who they thought best represented their values" and finally "If most Republicans were goal-oriented libertarians they would have chosen one". You've got some implicit logical fallacies there.
First of all, most Republicans != Registered Republicans. The first group is obviously a majority subset of the second.
Second, are you sure the majority of Republicans chose GWB to be their party leader? Here in my home state we sure didn't - he solidly lost in the primary. And in the larger states they used voting machines that do not support a verifiable audit - so maybe nobody voted for him there, we really don't know!
Finally, you might consider that GWB was chosen because he was the least antithetical to the values of registered republicans, of those choices available. Libertarian-leaning Republicans would obviously be horrified by the prospect of a Kerry presidency, and those that considered a vote for Badnarik to be a wasted vote would therefore vote for Bush.
Thus, while your last comment is sadly correct ("The leader of the party generally can set the tone" (unless he's Al Gore)) your other observations ignore the realities of our pseudo-democratic, wealth-dominated system.
What is cool about it, for auditors obsessed with SOX, GLB & HIPAA compliance, is that it maintains a near-perfect audit trail at the cost of disk space (which is cheap compared the other costs of regulatory compliance).
You can mount the disk at any checkpoint, essentially providing a snapshot of each of the filesystem's unique states - unlike conventional backup (the usual 24-hour backup cycle gets a very coarse picture of the changes, obviously).
Other than that, it's yawn-yawn SSDD. The whole "lossy/lossless" thing is overblown hype, because all disk hardware fails to complete a write operation if you remove power before the operation is complete. They are trying to make their system seem better than it really is by making others seem worse than they really are. The fact is, plenty of people have run totally lossless data storage systems using ext2/ext3 and ISO9660, and no filesystem (including NILFS) can prevent your data from being butchered if your power supply is crap.
I don't get it - you are bragging that Sun has a filesystem that is too broken for release?
If you have a licensed copy of the OS you can get source. Or at least, you used to be able to - many years ago when I was considered a VMS expert (something I certainly am not now) I used to look stuff up in the fiche; most of the stuff I was referencing was written in BLISS, I think.
As I recall, RMS is an indexed file management system. I wrote a molluscan taxonomy database system that used it in the 80s... but I usually encapsulate all OS-specific stuff in subroutines, so somebody has probably ported it to a cheaper database by now.
Once appointed, Supreme Court Justices are pretty much free to rise above the (nearly invisible) Republican/Democrat split if they so choose.
Individual Justices do tend to be either authoritarian or libertarian, and either punishment-oriented or goal-oriented, though; some people incorrectly assign these values to the parties (just because GWB is a punishment-oriented authoritarian doesn't mean those are the values of the people who are registered republicans).
If it makes you feel better, Harriet Miers has been reported to be a Gore supporter by the mainstream media.
You could also build a system where critical data is distributed to where it needs to be used, then updated dynamically.
Examples of such systems would be BIND for DNS or OpenLDAP for LDAP. You can have hordes of cheap servers running BIND or OpenLDAP that build from a kickstart or mondo CD, and get really amazing reliability overall. And no backup tape system required - the systems themselves can be your backup store.
It's not a solution for every problem, but neither are fault-tolerance or clustering. You need to have more than one tool in your toolkit.
Hey, you asked what I'd bring.
I'd be the most popular guy in camp, I bet.
When I read your comment, the slashdot quote at the bottom of the page read
"Cynic, n.: Experienced."
During the Y2K leadup, a consultant was ranting about how scared we should be of the total meltdown that was certain to occur, and I got up and started to walk out of the room. He buttonholed me as I tried to pass him, and after I told him I was leaving because the meeting was a waste of time, we had this conversation:
Fearmongering Consultant: "Are you prepared for Y2K?"
Me: "Yes. I started testing my hardware in 1997, and I've never in my life written code that couldn't handle an obviously forseeable date change. My most recent test was two weeks ago when I advanced the clocks on all the WAN tackle."
FC: "Are you prepared to bet your job on that?"
Me (looking across room at CEO and CIO): "I think I just did!"
CEO: Buwhahahahahaha!
CIO: (sigh)
(FC gapes like a spotlighted deer as I exit, stage right)
Real smart, huh? Wrong. Around September of 1999 I was suddenly put in charge of fixing the Y2K issues on our gigantic mainframe, because the CEO remembered the guy who had his Y2k act together. The mainframe had ten years worth of COBOL on it written by people who couldn't comprehend that yes, Virginia, the century will come to an end! and an OS that was years behind in patches. Since I'd spent most of my career at that point avoiding mainframes and mainframers, you can imagine my joy.
I don't know about irrelevant, but the "Jack-of-all-Trades" is certainly a lot harder to find lately.That's because WE'RE HIDING.
Or are you actually suggesting that a family cannot be allowed to decide what is the best use of resources they have been given?
I've always found those "don't give the bums money they'll just spend it on booze" people terrifying.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 49 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I'm not using any binary-only software on any of my boxes. I have raid card management that works just fine (granted, I do have an LSI chipset); so your initial post still makes no sense to me.
;)
I just used google for a couple of seconds and found that Adaptec and 3ware both are freely providing management software for their RAID cards under linux. So perhaps the BSD website is not the best place to find information about what linux does or doesn't do?
OpenBSD is great, because it has incredibly strong code auditing. Not because something else sucks.
OpenBSD sucks, because it conforms to traditional (some would say obsolete) unix paradigms. Not because something else is great.
OpenSSH doesn't even suck
Then mod the grandparent "clueless!"
All nine of my LAN nodes, all four of my laptops (one for each family member), and all the white boxes I used to build the late unlamented big-slow-beowulf cost me nothing but some of my time. And perhaps a little extra laundry detergent. As long as you are willing to settle for Windows-level performance while running linux, you can get all the hardware you need dumpster-diving. At least here on the suburban east coast of the USA, anyway; or maybe the previous poster received the computer as a gift, or stole it, or something.
Used 1GB hard drives are cheaper than CD-Rs. At one point I had a cardboard box with 50 of them in it, but I managed to give them all away eventually.
When the Beowulf stack fell over and nearly killed me (the ceiling wedges held, but one of the casters broke off the plywood sheet on the bottom) I realized there is such a thing as being too cheap. I had a bruise shaped like the mounting flange of a 3com 100bt hub on my back for weeks!
You flamed the other guy for being "not particularly informed" and then you post "I don't want to be hold hostage to some binary-only shoddy RAID managment software running on Linux"?
I've been running completely open-source soft RAID for years on Red Hat linux. My backup server, which uses the same basic idea as dirvish, uses a couple of terabytes of RAID10. There are even multiple RAID implementations freely available, although you are typically restricted by your choice of kernels.
You zealots never seem to realize your conception of the system you disdain is necessarily going to be incorrect, because you aren't going to spend the time required to really understand it. Concentrate on cheerleading you chosen religion's good points and stop trying to point out the other guy's bad points, that way you can show some real insight.
That's not a failing of SELinux, nor of OpenBSD, or even of Samba itself. Samba's a tool for communicating with systems through an insecure protocol.