I've been trying to buy one of those Wii Fits that are supposedly all over Europe and I can't find any for sale in the UK. Amazon.de has some, that's all I can find. No English versions anywhere. I'm sure some 'leet slashdotter knows where there's a secret stash in the UK, and they may even tell me, but that doesn't change the fact that they're effectively unobtainable in the UK too.
I can only imagine you were using a GSM data call or a GPRS connection. For interactive use, a 3G (UTMS) or EV-DO connection is close to essential. EDGE isn't really enough. The latency on 2G data is too high. If you're stuck in a country or area without modern, standard mobile telecoms services, this is a problem.
That review has no actual disc benchmarks for that disc? Anyone got some? If you have a UNIXlike on one of these boxes, please run "iozone -a" and paste the results into a comment. That'll give us useful info.
The N95 8GB has no lens cover, so that lovely Zeiss lens will soon be scratched and dirty. Better get an N95 not-8-GB and put a 4 or 8GB microSD card in it.
Apple Macbook (black, as it shows dirt and wear less, and not a Macbook pro as the non-pro is more durable) Nokia E90 phone (smartphone, email, quadband GSM, GPS, you can fit maps of the world on an SD card) iPod Classic 160GB (highest battery life of any MP3 player) Canon PowerShot SD950 (metal case)
It should be noticed that the particular groups of people who campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences are terrorists: They use threats of force to induce fear in people at HLS; They have used actual violent force, at the work and at the homes, of people who work at HLS; They threaten anyone involved with HLS, their suppliers, etc, with the same degree of violence; They have placed bombs, which exploded, under the cars of people who work at HLS or are involvd with HLS; They claim their actions are justifiable, that they are engaged in a violent struggle, that their violence is justified because they must achieve their aims by any means possible.
These are not nice people we are talking about. They are not the innocent defenders of the fluffy bunnies. They are aggressive, violent people and they are familiar with the tools and techniques of covert violence. Curiously they fail to mention their devotion to violence in their own article about this case.
RIPA, like any other "anti-terrorism law", will one day be used against people who have nothing to do with terrorism. Today is not that day.
My company, which is not so small (some hundreds employees, some hundreds millions Euro revenue/year, growing fast), uses CentOS (as well as RHEL) because it's cheaper, the cost difference is noticeable. We also use MySQL partly because it's cheaper. But we also like the ability to deploy rapidly, and not have to manage licenses, and so on, and we do pay for MySQL support and RHEL support when we use it. Not all companies consider $10k Oracle licenses to be an inevitable cost of business, nor having to have people to track the licensing to be an inevitable drag.
Indeed! My company will (for the foreseeable future) need some RHEL licenses for the applications which the vendor only supports on RHEL, like SAP. We may run other things on CentOS, but if we didn't run them on CentOS, we'd probably run them on Debian; it's all either common free software or software we wrote ourselves and we don't feel like paying Red Hat for their product. SInce we can, effectively, run one quite similar OS all over without having to pay Red Hat for all of it, we do, and that's why we're not entirely leaving Red Hat. I can't believe we're the only company doing this. If Red Hat demanded that anything we ran that looked even vaguely like their OS had to be paid for, we would run entirely Debian/Ubuntu and start pressing application vendors to support Debian/Ubuntu and we would not be alone, and application vendors would give in, and then Red Hat's market would entirely evaporate. (Red Hat are not endearing themselves to us any by being further behind the feature curve than we would like, and by generally having quite unhelpful support if we have a problem - we perceive their added value to be small)
"... cut off their oxygen like Microsoft did to Netscape.."
That's just not going to happen. MS managed to kill Netscape because the browser they suffocated was most of Netscape's business. Windows Mobile is only a tiny part of MS, and if Google tries to suffocate WM they may well succeed, but MS won't thrash around and die. If you want to kill all of MS, you have to suffocate Microsoft Office (at least, maybe Exchange and SQL Server too). If Google tries to use their piles of cash from other parts of their business (advertising) to suffocate Windows Mobile, Microsoft will simply use piles of cash from other parts of their business (MS Office & friends) to support Windows Mobile. Google could offer an all-encompassing Google-software-pack for Symbian and Windows Mobile to direct a lot of mobile traffic to them in a lot of the world (maybe not the US where handsets are too locked down, but the US is not most of the mobile world) without having to fight WM or have their own hardware.
Buy a better modem. The older (flat, black) USR Courier series are still the best modems made for talking to other modems [1], but you'll have to find one secondhand now.
[1] The Telebit Trailblazer can still do better over a very bad phone line than the Courier but to do so requires you to use the Telebit PEP mode, so there has to be a Trailblazer on the other end.
You can outsource work but you can't outsource responsibility. And if you think the supplier will always be around to sue later, and suing them is your only plan, you're a fool.
If it's a problem that the software doesn't come with a big bill from someone who doesn't help you when the software goes wrong, the problem can easily be removed by signing up to a full-on Red Hat support contract! MySQL support can get pricey enough to be noticed, too (but it's quite useful).
First of all, this is a requirement to satisfy an audit. It would be nice if whatever solution you come up with is actually good, but you only have to satisfy the auditors. Auditors want processes and records to raise the barrier to someone doing something wrong or unrecorded. They know systems aren't perfect. Nerds all go "but someone could just make a change some other way so this system is no use". If it raises the barrier high enough, it is useful. All accounting books can be cooked, the point of auditing is to make it harder (and to make it require more people). Some write-once methods are more accepted by auditors than others, because they have seen them before. Of course you can rewrite a WORM disc's contents onto another disc and edit the contents on the way, but most auditors think that is sufficiently difficult that they think WORM media is OK. And you can write several copies and send them to different places, then the person wanting to edit the log has to get to all the discs. The commercial solutions like those from EMC and Network Appliance aren't foolproof. You could take all the discs and edit the data on the discs if you want. It's harder for you to do that than simply "su root; vi logfile" because you have to work at a lower level. All the EMC or NetApp software is promising the auditors is that it would be hard work to do it undetectably and that is what they are looking for. An Open Source solution which has no API to change data once it is written would work the same as the EMC or NetApp, but if you are the first to use it then you have to persuade your auditors (and possibly a court down the line) that it really doesn't have any such API. Usually Open Source is good for your business because you have control of it, can change it, and can see how it works. Auditable logs are about you not having control of them, not being able to change them. The easiest way to get your auditors to agree your logs meet the audit requirements is to use some solution that they have seen before. Buy a Netapp (I won't, personally, recommend EMC) or buy a WORM drive. DVD-R is WORM, it's cheap.
If your company is publically traded in the US, it needs to comply with the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. One of those provisions [1] is that there is to be an Audit Committee, not reporting to any executive officer (but to the board of directiors, including non-executive directors), and that employees be provided and told about a process to report ethical or illegal issues to the Audit Committee. The process usually requires that the employee tell their supervisor first, but if the supervisor takes no action, the employee can and should contact the Audit Committee.
Professional integrity demands that one do this.
If the audit committee does not act, then the entire edifice is rotten and one should leave before it collapses. Sending a copy of one's complaint to the local police, industry regulators, SEC, etc, will then land the entire audit committee in very deep shit.
[1] Because in WorldCom the CFO was cooking the books and all routes for complaints about cooked books, like the audit committee, went through the CFO. This SPOF has been removed.
If I'm going to run my company's mission-critical code on Solaris, I need to have the developers running Solaris too, which means I have to have a nice desktop environment they will want to use. If Solaris gives me that, my life is much easier. If I have to spend a lot of time making gnome-whatever, all the Java tools they love, etc, run on Solaris, then my life is much harder. If the tools aren't shipped for Solaris, I'm SOL.
Debian isn't the best model for usability
on
Ian Murdock Joins Sun
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Debian isn't the best model for usability for non-technical users; glacial release schedules and lack of desktop environment coherence to offset your stability is, well, what you get with Solaris already. Sun should poach Mark Shuttleworth if they want someone who can make a solid OS into one that you can give to random people to use without it blowing their minds.
Apple do not offer (in the UK, for a several-hundred-person ecommerce company where I work) anything that we consider enterprise-grade service. If one of the desktop Dells breaks down, we call Dell and someone shows up the next day to wherever the machine is and fixes it. If one of our Apple machines breaks down, we send it to Apple or take it to the Apple dealer who sits on it for some days, at least, then fixes it and returns it to us. That's not acceptable for the whole enterprise, especially for people who travel, which all of the upper management. We love using Apple laptops, they are UNIX and they just work, for sysadmin and programmer staff - but we have to take account of the fact that their laptop might break and keep a spare or make sure they have other ways to work. Our web design team of 4 all work on Macs. We have to carry a spare G5 for them because Apple take so long to repair them. We can't roll macs out to everyone without the same level of service that Dell give us at the moment, which Apple Just Doesn't Do.
We had one of those where I worked. The side of a chip was burnt off, like in the pictures in the article referenced, and the drive mounting bay was charred. Nothing else went wrong in the machine. It happened in a Mac G5 tower, and the drive was an 80GB unit and about 18 months old.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to buy one of those Wii Fits that are supposedly all over Europe and I can't find any for sale in the UK.
Amazon.de has some, that's all I can find. No English versions anywhere.
I'm sure some 'leet slashdotter knows where there's a secret stash in the UK, and they may even tell me, but that doesn't change the fact that they're effectively unobtainable in the UK too.
... is that the Police could and should have knocked.
I can only imagine you were using a GSM data call or a GPRS connection.
For interactive use, a 3G (UTMS) or EV-DO connection is close to essential. EDGE isn't really enough.
The latency on 2G data is too high. If you're stuck in a country or area without modern, standard mobile telecoms services, this is a problem.
Whoring out the data of the adults to the commercial partners is just fine!
Posting their private actions to all their facebook mates is just fine!
Facebook are slimy bottomfeeders who don't give a shit about their users.
But then, cui bono ? The users aren't paying Facebook, the advertisers and commercial partners are.
That review has no actual disc benchmarks for that disc? Anyone got some? If you have a UNIXlike on one of these boxes, please run "iozone -a" and paste the results into a comment. That'll give us useful info.
The N95 8GB is not expandable in the memory department. Nokia replaced the microSD slot with a fixed 8GB of flash.
The N95 8GB has no lens cover, so that lovely Zeiss lens will soon be scratched and dirty. Better get an N95 not-8-GB and put a 4 or 8GB microSD card in it.
It's a good idea, and I like my N95 a lot too, but prepaid SIMs are not available to visitors everywhere, for example not in Japan.
The Macbook Air is completely unsuitable for long distance travel because of the poor battery life and non-swappable battery.
Apple Macbook (black, as it shows dirt and wear less, and not a Macbook pro as the non-pro is more durable)
Nokia E90 phone (smartphone, email, quadband GSM, GPS, you can fit maps of the world on an SD card)
iPod Classic 160GB (highest battery life of any MP3 player)
Canon PowerShot SD950 (metal case)
Thank you for your informative and supportive comment.
It should be noticed that the particular groups of people who campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences are terrorists:
They use threats of force to induce fear in people at HLS;
They have used actual violent force, at the work and at the homes, of people who work at HLS;
They threaten anyone involved with HLS, their suppliers, etc, with the same degree of violence;
They have placed bombs, which exploded, under the cars of people who work at HLS or are involvd with HLS;
They claim their actions are justifiable, that they are engaged in a violent struggle, that their violence is justified because they must achieve their aims by any means possible.
These are not nice people we are talking about. They are not the innocent defenders of the fluffy bunnies. They are aggressive, violent people and they are familiar with the tools and techniques of covert violence. Curiously they fail to mention their devotion to violence in their own article about this case.
RIPA, like any other "anti-terrorism law", will one day be used against people who have nothing to do with terrorism.
Today is not that day.
My company, which is not so small (some hundreds employees, some hundreds millions Euro revenue/year, growing fast), uses CentOS (as well as RHEL) because it's cheaper, the cost difference is noticeable. We also use MySQL partly because it's cheaper. But we also like the ability to deploy rapidly, and not have to manage licenses, and so on, and we do pay for MySQL support and RHEL support when we use it.
Not all companies consider $10k Oracle licenses to be an inevitable cost of business, nor having to have people to track the licensing to be an inevitable drag.
Indeed! My company will (for the foreseeable future) need some RHEL licenses for the applications which the vendor only supports on RHEL, like SAP. We may run other things on CentOS, but if we didn't run them on CentOS, we'd probably run them on Debian; it's all either common free software or software we wrote ourselves and we don't feel like paying Red Hat for their product. SInce we can, effectively, run one quite similar OS all over without having to pay Red Hat for all of it, we do, and that's why we're not entirely leaving Red Hat. I can't believe we're the only company doing this. If Red Hat demanded that anything we ran that looked even vaguely like their OS had to be paid for, we would run entirely Debian/Ubuntu and start pressing application vendors to support Debian/Ubuntu and we would not be alone, and application vendors would give in, and then Red Hat's market would entirely evaporate.
(Red Hat are not endearing themselves to us any by being further behind the feature curve than we would like, and by generally having quite unhelpful support if we have a problem - we perceive their added value to be small)
"... cut off their oxygen like Microsoft did to Netscape.."
That's just not going to happen. MS managed to kill Netscape because the browser they suffocated was most of Netscape's business. Windows Mobile is only a tiny part of MS, and if Google tries to suffocate WM they may well succeed, but MS won't thrash around and die. If you want to kill all of MS, you have to suffocate Microsoft Office (at least, maybe Exchange and SQL Server too).
If Google tries to use their piles of cash from other parts of their business (advertising) to suffocate Windows Mobile, Microsoft will simply use piles of cash from other parts of their business (MS Office & friends) to support Windows Mobile.
Google could offer an all-encompassing Google-software-pack for Symbian and Windows Mobile to direct a lot of mobile traffic to them in a lot of the world (maybe not the US where handsets are too locked down, but the US is not most of the mobile world) without having to fight WM or have their own hardware.
[1] The Telebit Trailblazer can still do better over a very bad phone line than the Courier but to do so requires you to use the Telebit PEP mode, so there has to be a Trailblazer on the other end.
You can outsource work but you can't outsource responsibility.
And if you think the supplier will always be around to sue later, and suing them is your only plan, you're a fool.
If it's a problem that the software doesn't come with a big bill from someone who doesn't help you when the software goes wrong, the problem can easily be removed by signing up to a full-on Red Hat support contract!
MySQL support can get pricey enough to be noticed, too (but it's quite useful).
First of all, this is a requirement to satisfy an audit. It would be nice if whatever solution you come up with is actually good, but you only have to satisfy the auditors.
Auditors want processes and records to raise the barrier to someone doing something wrong or unrecorded. They know systems aren't perfect. Nerds all go "but someone could just make a change some other way so this system is no use". If it raises the barrier high enough, it is useful. All accounting books can be cooked, the point of auditing is to make it harder (and to make it require more people).
Some write-once methods are more accepted by auditors than others, because they have seen them before. Of course you can rewrite a WORM disc's contents onto another disc and edit the contents on the way, but most auditors think that is sufficiently difficult that they think WORM media is OK. And you can write several copies and send them to different places, then the person wanting to edit the log has to get to all the discs.
The commercial solutions like those from EMC and Network Appliance aren't foolproof. You could take all the discs and edit the data on the discs if you want. It's harder for you to do that than simply "su root; vi logfile" because you have to work at a lower level. All the EMC or NetApp software is promising the auditors is that it would be hard work to do it undetectably and that is what they are looking for.
An Open Source solution which has no API to change data once it is written would work the same as the EMC or NetApp, but if you are the first to use it then you have to persuade your auditors (and possibly a court down the line) that it really doesn't have any such API.
Usually Open Source is good for your business because you have control of it, can change it, and can see how it works.
Auditable logs are about you not having control of them, not being able to change them.
The easiest way to get your auditors to agree your logs meet the audit requirements is to use some solution that they have seen before. Buy a Netapp (I won't, personally, recommend EMC) or buy a WORM drive. DVD-R is WORM, it's cheap.
If your company is publically traded in the US, it needs to comply with the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. One of those provisions [1] is that there is to be an Audit Committee, not reporting to any executive officer (but to the board of directiors, including non-executive directors), and that employees be provided and told about a process to report ethical or illegal issues to the Audit Committee. The process usually requires that the employee tell their supervisor first, but if the supervisor takes no action, the employee can and should contact the Audit Committee.
Professional integrity demands that one do this.
If the audit committee does not act, then the entire edifice is rotten and one should leave before it collapses. Sending a copy of one's complaint to the local police, industry regulators, SEC, etc, will then land the entire audit committee in very deep shit.
[1] Because in WorldCom the CFO was cooking the books and all routes for complaints about cooked books, like the audit committee, went through the CFO. This SPOF has been removed.
If I'm going to run my company's mission-critical code on Solaris, I need to have the developers running Solaris too, which means I have to have a nice desktop environment they will want to use. If Solaris gives me that, my life is much easier. If I have to spend a lot of time making gnome-whatever, all the Java tools they love, etc, run on Solaris, then my life is much harder. If the tools aren't shipped for Solaris, I'm SOL.
Debian isn't the best model for usability for non-technical users; glacial release schedules and lack of desktop environment coherence to offset your stability is, well, what you get with Solaris already.
Sun should poach Mark Shuttleworth if they want someone who can make a solid OS into one that you can give to random people to use without it blowing their minds.
Apple do not offer (in the UK, for a several-hundred-person ecommerce company where I work) anything that we consider enterprise-grade service. If one of the desktop Dells breaks down, we call Dell and someone shows up the next day to wherever the machine is and fixes it. If one of our Apple machines breaks down, we send it to Apple or take it to the Apple dealer who sits on it for some days, at least, then fixes it and returns it to us. That's not acceptable for the whole enterprise, especially for people who travel, which all of the upper management.
We love using Apple laptops, they are UNIX and they just work, for sysadmin and programmer staff - but we have to take account of the fact that their laptop might break and keep a spare or make sure they have other ways to work. Our web design team of 4 all work on Macs. We have to carry a spare G5 for them because Apple take so long to repair them. We can't roll macs out to everyone without the same level of service that Dell give us at the moment, which Apple Just Doesn't Do.
and it's called CPAN.
We had one of those where I worked. The side of a chip was burnt off, like in the pictures in the article referenced, and the drive mounting bay was charred. Nothing else went wrong in the machine. It happened in a Mac G5 tower, and the drive was an 80GB unit and about 18 months old.