I've been very impressed with yum. We used it to upgrade a 7.1 box to 7.3 + Fedora Legacy. You instatall a new redhat-release package for your target version, install yum, check your kernel is recent enough, type yum upgrade, and all the rpms are installed over the network. Reboot, and Bob's your uncle. No messing about with install CDs, and minimal downtime. You can't do that with RHEL yet.
That said, Fedora Legacy is behind on rpm updates. The last one is March 2004. We run pretty locked down systems, so many of the errata aren't critical for us, because we don't have X or any of that stuff. But it is worrying. We'll probably go to Fedora Core sometime next year, or when one of our boxes is cracked, whichever is sooner.
I'm sure a corrupt Republican senator from a southern state named Alex Shrub in GTA-VC has no resemblence to any living persons. The fact that his wife is called Laura is also coincidental. From the game:
I've ensured important tax breaks for gun retailers, real estate developers, and I've cut the cost of policing, saving the city 2%, or 25 cents per household, over a six year period.
It's more than is needed. For example, we get bags of spam from the USA, mostly selling viagra or mortgage refinancing by US companies for US $. We have no US customers. Do we block the whole country? Unilaterally? Don't think so. Our blocklists look kind of like this:
We recject about 60% of incoming mail (part of that is virus stuff which we refuse). We could crack down more, start filtering by content, but once you do that you start down that road email stops being worthwhile. Discussion of viagra is legitmate, but selling it isn't?
I have no problem people implementing their own solutions client side, but doing it server side for all our customers is too much. One size does not fit all.
The idea of email is that if someone sees something interesting on a website somewhere, they can email the site's owner, no matter who or where they are. We're not giving up on that ideal yet.
I belong to the National Union of Journalists in the UK. They issue press cards, but also do uniony things, like get discounts for buying Macs, insurance deals, bitching about certain companies. If you think programmers are a diverse and egocentric bunch, you should really spend some time with journalists. The union here covers editors, TV folks, photographers, staffers, freelancers, and reporters from tech to gardening to celebrities to war.
I said I liked the linux way of doing things, not that OSX didn't have them. I stand corrected about installing OSX server without Quartz, I didn't know you could do that.
I'm very impressesed by OSX, and I use it on my laptop, but I wouldn't want it on our servers. Partitioning disks, software RAID, tpmfs, RPM/yum, kickstart, logrotation, disk quotas, cron - these are all things that I prefer the linux way of working. And then there's all the shell scripts that we already use with linux that need to be tweaked for Apple's unix. I like the way you can install linux without a gui. If we were looking for a 64 bit 1U server, we'd choose the xServe over Sun's comparable hardware.
The Enron sale had way too much media/gravedigger attention. When their assets were sold off here in the UK, you had to slap down a fifty just to get in the door (refundable after purchase).
I did buy a couple of HP boxes at another dotcom sale, for not too much, PIII, 1G RAM, 2 SCSI HD's. They're still in use now.
Where I come from (UK), the police can ask to see your driving licence if you are in charge of a car. As his daughter was driving, I can't see why he should have to have ID. However, it sounds odd (to European ears) that people are freaked out that they need to show ID to police. In France it is illegal not to have ID with you, anywhere. Period.
The US Postal Service? You can be sure the French will kill that idea. And the Russians, and the North Koreans, and the Chinese, and the English, and the Germans, and the Vietnamese, and the Australians, and..........
O'Reilly ran an article on it. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4370
JPEG2000 can compress lossless bitmap images more than zip/lzw tiffs, by a factor of 2 or more. It's great for archiving, but slow to create files. Quicktime has decent support for both lossless and lossy compression. I'm running out of disk space fast, and am looking into any archiving solution I can.
Why do people read Forbes? There are good financial publications out there who actually have a clue - the Financial Times, The Ecomomist, Janes Defense Weekly, all tell it like it really is. Any business who takes what Forbes writes seriously is going to find itself in the position of Boeing. As the FT said last week:
Boeing's 737, with almost 4,000 planes in the air, is the most successful commercial airliner in history. But the company's largest and riskiest project was the development of the 747 jumbo jet. When a non-executive director asked about the expected return on investment, he was brushed off: there had been some studies, he was told, but the manager concerned couldn't remember the results.
It took only 10 years for Boeing to prove me wrong in asserting that its market position in civil aviation was impregnable. The decisive shift in corporate culture followed the acquisition of its principal US rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The transformation was exemplified by the CEO, Phil Condit. The company's previous preoccupation with meeting "technological challenges of supreme magnitude" would, he told Business Week, now have to change. "We are going into a value-based environment where unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged. That's a big shift."
The company's senior executives agreed to move from Seattle, where the main production facilities were located, to Chicago. More importantly, the more focused business reviewed risky investments in new civil projects with much greater scepticism. The strategic decision was to redirect resources towards projects for the US military that involved low financial risk. Chicago had the advantage of being nearer to Washington, where government funds were dispensed.
So Boeing's civil orderbook today lags that of Airbus, the European consortium whose aims were not initially commercial but which has, almost by chance, become a profitable business. And the strategy of getting close to the Pentagon proved counter- productive: the company got too close to the Pentagon, and faced allegations of corruption. And what was the market's verdict on the company's performance in terms of unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return? Boeing stock, $48 when Condit took over, rose to $70 as he affirmed the commitment to shareholder value; by the time of his enforced resignation in December 2003 it had fallen to $38.
As Redhat have EOL'd support for their boxed sets at the end of December, they could have had a lot of converts. Now most of those people will have gone for RHAS or Fedora.
In the 1930s, most magazine photography was work for hire. In 1947 a bunch of talented guys got together to form Magnum, one of the first photographer-owned agencies. Under their terms of business, the photographers owned the copyright to their own pictures. They were good, and Life, Picture Post, National Geographic, Paris Match etc had no objections. Up until the 1970s, things were good for photographers and agancies.
Then budget-cutting media owners realised that someone was making money when pictures were resold, and it wasn't them. Today, editorial rates of pay for photographers are around what they were in the mid 1980s. If you can get expenses out of anyone, you're doing well. Contracts are becoming more favourable to publishers, effectively taking copyright from photographers without either granting them better rates of pay, or better working conditions, insurance etc.
I got back from the Middle East last month, at times it was hairy, had 5 pages in a magazine, just recovered my costs. I can resell these pics overseas, as I'd done the story freelance rather than on comission (I took all the financial risk), but what's really paying my way now is corporate work. The deal is that some corporation pays top dollar for all rights. So if you see those pics in magazines, that's the corporation that's paying for the photography, not the magazine. I could say a few things here for editorial independence, but I won't. Bottom line is, the market is taking control out of the hands of photographers, in a few years time, the only people still working magazines will be those best adapted to say "yes sir!" to their bosses - either in the media or industry, there isn't that much difference. When was the last time you saw pictures coming out of Chechnya or Sierra Leone? In the 70s you could make a career out of being an honest reporter. Now the cash comes from people with their eye on the next great cost-cutting measure. Magnum are still going, mixing in hard news with corporate work like the rest of us.
As for this National Geographic case, while NG are one of the best bosses in the business, it's sad to see bean-counters taking steps against their own photographers. Without the bean-counters, there's chaos. But without the photographers there's no magazine. And like the website is making money. Photographers won this round, but I doubt they'll win the war.
If next week 50% of the people driving started to bike, then there would be a bike jam on the roads and bikeways.
Actually, in the space of 1 car, you can fit 9 bicycles. So the roads would appear to be 9 times emptier (unless your average car has 8 passengers) if people gave up their cars for bikes. In cities which were built around the concept of people walking, I'm thinking Europe here, cycling is widespread and practical, even as people have started working some distance from home. If you build cities around what you can do with a car, there is no practical alternative as all shopping is out of town, you work 40 miles from home, and the gym is 10 miles the other way. Me, I like living without a car, but them I'm lucky enough to be someplace where I don't need one.
If you read the RFC, the point is that anonymity is still possible as far as usesnames go, the authentication is aimed at servers, not users. So as an ISP you could have a setup allowing anonymous usernames, just not anonymous domain names. It's a compromise, but given the scale of the problem these days, it makes some sense.
It's not just Pine. All University of Washinton stuff is on the way out. Pico (basic text editor) is replaced by GNU Nano. UW-IMAP will be replaced by dovecot, but not till next release (already happened in RH10 beta, but not AS), WU-FTP will be replaced by vsftpd (happened as of v9 AFAIK). Means I'll need to learn some new config tricks/have to rewrite cron jobs/work out new chroot setup. Hopefully it will be painless, but you never know. I'm looking at the glacial pace of change of Solaris, and almost feeling envious.
Have to post a link to this famous example, the dodgy dossier. There was a writeup here. If you're thinking of making the case for war, don't release Word documents to the press - unless they're very very docile.
Laptops still have a way to go. There's stuff that's being researched now, but isn't in production yet for economic reasons. I'd like to see:
1) Solid sate storage. For speed and battery-life, this will be a real breakthrough. Currently, $ for MB it's not practical.
2) Decent battery life, in the order of 24 hours minimum. Maybe polymer technologies will help here.
3) High res screens, at least 300 dpi. Goodbye LCD, hello something else?
4) Large rewritable optical storage. We have 4GB now with DVD-RW. It will get bigger.
5) Fast wireless access from anywhere. Either hotspots will become ubiquitous, or a new GSM based tech will become standard.
6) Touch sensitive screens. These will be so cheap, that it will seem dumb not to have them with all monitors.
I'm prabably wrong on 5 of these 6 counts, but I don't know which ones. Whatever happens, these hardware developments will require a lot of new software to keep up.
To "talk" with windows PCs? Huh? You mean SMB? ODBC? DCOM? Oh wait, those are all known.
Perhaps they had the intergration of Exchange (server) and Outlook (client) in mind. It's a killer groupware app, and there is no obvious alternative out there like Samba or Apache. Unlike www, where MS was a late entry to the games, and the standards were already set, MS has managed to make and hold onto the standard.
I'm pretty tired of so-called Systems Administrators who can't seem to actually do anything on their own.
I'm not a sysadmin. I know how to compile apache and related modules and distribute custom rpms to production servers using rsync, but I also know that my time is better spent doing other things.
With this release, the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project -- an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.
Looks like the old setup of 2 boxed sets (personal and professional) is going, as is the x.0, x.1, x.2 release cycle. This means they can break binary compatibility with each release. Also means that despite the fact that RH officially stops supporting this relase afer 1 year, package maintainers will be responsible for their own bug-fixes, not RH. Check out the article on The Register for more info. Looking at the package list, it looks too bleeding edge (Apache 2.045, PHP 4.32) for server use. If you want to keep with Apache 1.3x, then your only choice is RHES. Goodbye RedHat, it was good while it lasted.
Well, if you think telemarketing calls are bad now, wait until every business on the planet can afford to call you.
It's already happening. In Canada prisoners are phoning the US for market research, because calls are cheap, prisoners are cheap, and you don't have huge staff turnover in medium security jails. In India staff are madly cheap, well educated, and calls are cheap too. There are specialised traing programs to get sales agents used to the country with which they are dealing - which sport teams are cool, how the weather is etc. But in both these cases, calls are only made between 5-9 pm (US time) as people get even more pissed off with calls outside those hours.
SCO have been bleating elsewhere about how IBM hasn't filed for summary dissmissal. And it's odd. I am seriously underwhelmed by the IBM response. If SCO are so in the wrong, IBM could have come out more aggressivly on this, or even counter-sued by now. That they haven't is a bad sign.
Photoshop test are nice, but who uses Photoshop the way Jobs did? 360M files, batch processed? Not me. Most of my work uses 23M greyscale files,editied individually, maybe adjustment layered, in which case you can double that. I'd guess with the (relativelty) small files I use, the PC would have kept up with the G5. The G5 has a big advantage with large files in memory bandwdith and 64 bit addressing. It would have been cool to see how the G5 did on smaller workloads.
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I've been very impressed with yum. We used it to upgrade a 7.1 box to 7.3 + Fedora Legacy. You instatall a new redhat-release package for your target version, install yum, check your kernel is recent enough, type yum upgrade, and all the rpms are installed over the network. Reboot, and Bob's your uncle. No messing about with install CDs, and minimal downtime. You can't do that with RHEL yet.
That said, Fedora Legacy is behind on rpm updates. The last one is March 2004. We run pretty locked down systems, so many of the errata aren't critical for us, because we don't have X or any of that stuff. But it is worrying. We'll probably go to Fedora Core sometime next year, or when one of our boxes is cracked, whichever is sooner.
I'm sure a corrupt Republican senator from a southern state named Alex Shrub in GTA-VC has no resemblence to any living persons. The fact that his wife is called Laura is also coincidental. From the game:
I've ensured important tax breaks for gun retailers, real estate developers, and I've cut the cost of policing, saving the city 2%, or 25 cents per household, over a six year period.
It's more than is needed. For example, we get bags of spam from the USA, mostly selling viagra or mortgage refinancing by US companies for US $. We have no US customers. Do we block the whole country? Unilaterally? Don't think so. Our blocklists look kind of like this:
si.rr.com. comcast.net
client.attbi.com
client2.attbi.com
nj.rr.com
tx.charter.com
fl.comcast.net
client
dorm.utexas.edu
adsl.proxad.net
We recject about 60% of incoming mail (part of that is virus stuff which we refuse). We could crack down more, start filtering by content, but once you do that you start down that road email stops being worthwhile. Discussion of viagra is legitmate, but selling it isn't?
I have no problem people implementing their own solutions client side, but doing it server side for all our customers is too much. One size does not fit all.
The idea of email is that if someone sees something interesting on a website somewhere, they can email the site's owner, no matter who or where they are. We're not giving up on that ideal yet.
I belong to the National Union of Journalists in the UK. They issue press cards, but also do uniony things, like get discounts for buying Macs, insurance deals, bitching about certain companies. If you think programmers are a diverse and egocentric bunch, you should really spend some time with journalists. The union here covers editors, TV folks, photographers, staffers, freelancers, and reporters from tech to gardening to celebrities to war.
I said I liked the linux way of doing things, not that OSX didn't have them. I stand corrected about installing OSX server without Quartz, I didn't know you could do that.
I'm very impressesed by OSX, and I use it on my laptop, but I wouldn't want it on our servers. Partitioning disks, software RAID, tpmfs, RPM/yum, kickstart, logrotation, disk quotas, cron - these are all things that I prefer the linux way of working. And then there's all the shell scripts that we already use with linux that need to be tweaked for Apple's unix. I like the way you can install linux without a gui. If we were looking for a 64 bit 1U server, we'd choose the xServe over Sun's comparable hardware.
The Enron sale had way too much media/gravedigger attention. When their assets were sold off here in the UK, you had to slap down a fifty just to get in the door (refundable after purchase).
I did buy a couple of HP boxes at another dotcom sale, for not too much, PIII, 1G RAM, 2 SCSI HD's. They're still in use now.
Where I come from (UK), the police can ask to see your driving licence if you are in charge of a car. As his daughter was driving, I can't see why he should have to have ID. However, it sounds odd (to European ears) that people are freaked out that they need to show ID to police. In France it is illegal not to have ID with you, anywhere. Period.
The US Postal Service? You can be sure the French will kill that idea. And the Russians, and the North Koreans, and the Chinese, and the English, and the Germans, and the Vietnamese, and the Australians, and..........
O'Reilly ran an article on it.
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4370
JPEG2000 can compress lossless bitmap images more than zip/lzw tiffs, by a factor of 2 or more. It's great for archiving, but slow to create files. Quicktime has decent support for both lossless and lossy compression. I'm running out of disk space fast, and am looking into any archiving solution I can.
Why do people read Forbes? There are good financial publications out there who actually have a clue - the Financial Times, The Ecomomist, Janes Defense Weekly, all tell it like it really is. Any business who takes what Forbes writes seriously is going to find itself in the position of Boeing. As the FT said last week:
Boeing's 737, with almost 4,000 planes in the air, is the most successful commercial airliner in history. But the company's largest and riskiest project was the development of the 747 jumbo jet. When a non-executive director asked about the expected return on investment, he was brushed off: there had been some studies, he was told, but the manager concerned couldn't remember the results.
It took only 10 years for Boeing to prove me wrong in asserting that its market position in civil aviation was impregnable. The decisive shift in corporate culture followed the acquisition of its principal US rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The transformation was exemplified by the CEO, Phil Condit. The company's previous preoccupation with meeting "technological challenges of supreme magnitude" would, he told Business Week, now have to change. "We are going into a value-based environment where unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged. That's a big shift."
The company's senior executives agreed to move from Seattle, where the main production facilities were located, to Chicago. More importantly, the more focused business reviewed risky investments in new civil projects with much greater scepticism. The strategic decision was to redirect resources towards projects for the US military that involved low financial risk. Chicago had the advantage of being nearer to Washington, where government funds were dispensed.
So Boeing's civil orderbook today lags that of Airbus, the European consortium whose aims were not initially commercial but which has, almost by chance, become a profitable business. And the strategy of getting close to the Pentagon proved counter- productive: the company got too close to the Pentagon, and faced allegations of corruption. And what was the market's verdict on the company's performance in terms of unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return? Boeing stock, $48 when Condit took over, rose to $70 as he affirmed the commitment to shareholder value; by the time of his enforced resignation in December 2003 it had fallen to $38.
As Redhat have EOL'd support for their boxed sets at the end of December, they could have had a lot of converts. Now most of those people will have gone for RHAS or Fedora.
In the 1930s, most magazine photography was work for hire. In 1947 a bunch of talented guys got together to form Magnum, one of the first photographer-owned agencies. Under their terms of business, the photographers owned the copyright to their own pictures. They were good, and Life, Picture Post, National Geographic, Paris Match etc had no objections. Up until the 1970s, things were good for photographers and agancies.
Then budget-cutting media owners realised that someone was making money when pictures were resold, and it wasn't them. Today, editorial rates of pay for photographers are around what they were in the mid 1980s. If you can get expenses out of anyone, you're doing well. Contracts are becoming more favourable to publishers, effectively taking copyright from photographers without either granting them better rates of pay, or better working conditions, insurance etc.
I got back from the Middle East last month, at times it was hairy, had 5 pages in a magazine, just recovered my costs. I can resell these pics overseas, as I'd done the story freelance rather than on comission (I took all the financial risk), but what's really paying my way now is corporate work. The deal is that some corporation pays top dollar for all rights. So if you see those pics in magazines, that's the corporation that's paying for the photography, not the magazine. I could say a few things here for editorial independence, but I won't. Bottom line is, the market is taking control out of the hands of photographers, in a few years time, the only people still working magazines will be those best adapted to say "yes sir!" to their bosses - either in the media or industry, there isn't that much difference. When was the last time you saw pictures coming out of Chechnya or Sierra Leone? In the 70s you could make a career out of being an honest reporter. Now the cash comes from people with their eye on the next great cost-cutting measure. Magnum are still going, mixing in hard news with corporate work like the rest of us.
As for this National Geographic case, while NG are one of the best bosses in the business, it's sad to see bean-counters taking steps against their own photographers. Without the bean-counters, there's chaos. But without the photographers there's no magazine. And like the website is making money. Photographers won this round, but I doubt they'll win the war.
you have to realize that Apple has no experience when it comes to the world of Unix security.
They weren't great, but then who was back in the day.
Next were developing their unix since 1988, and Apple merged with them in 1998. Apple's current CTO is formerly of Next
A/UX, Apple's unix, ran on M68030 Macs in 1989
AIX, IBM's unix, ran on the PPC604 Newtork Servers in 1996
MK/Linux, Apple's Mach/Linux hybrid, ran on PPC Macs in 1996
MacOSX server has been going since 1999.
If next week 50% of the people driving started to bike, then there would be a bike jam on the roads and bikeways.
Actually, in the space of 1 car, you can fit 9 bicycles. So the roads would appear to be 9 times emptier (unless your average car has 8 passengers) if people gave up their cars for bikes. In cities which were built around the concept of people walking, I'm thinking Europe here, cycling is widespread and practical, even as people have started working some distance from home. If you build cities around what you can do with a car, there is no practical alternative as all shopping is out of town, you work 40 miles from home, and the gym is 10 miles the other way. Me, I like living without a car, but them I'm lucky enough to be someplace where I don't need one.
If you read the RFC, the point is that anonymity is still possible as far as usesnames go, the authentication is aimed at servers, not users. So as an ISP you could have a setup allowing anonymous usernames, just not anonymous domain names. It's a compromise, but given the scale of the problem these days, it makes some sense.
It's not just Pine. All University of Washinton stuff is on the way out. Pico (basic text editor) is replaced by GNU Nano. UW-IMAP will be replaced by dovecot, but not till next release (already happened in RH10 beta, but not AS), WU-FTP will be replaced by vsftpd (happened as of v9 AFAIK). Means I'll need to learn some new config tricks/have to rewrite cron jobs/work out new chroot setup. Hopefully it will be painless, but you never know. I'm looking at the glacial pace of change of Solaris, and almost feeling envious.
Have to post a link to this famous example, the dodgy dossier. There was a writeup here. If you're thinking of making the case for war, don't release Word documents to the press - unless they're very very docile.
Laptops still have a way to go. There's stuff that's being researched now, but isn't in production yet for economic reasons. I'd like to see:
1) Solid sate storage. For speed and battery-life, this will be a real breakthrough. Currently, $ for MB it's not practical.
2) Decent battery life, in the order of 24 hours minimum. Maybe polymer technologies will help here.
3) High res screens, at least 300 dpi. Goodbye LCD, hello something else?
4) Large rewritable optical storage. We have 4GB now with DVD-RW. It will get bigger.
5) Fast wireless access from anywhere. Either hotspots will become ubiquitous, or a new GSM based tech will become standard.
6) Touch sensitive screens. These will be so cheap, that it will seem dumb not to have them with all monitors.
I'm prabably wrong on 5 of these 6 counts, but I don't know which ones. Whatever happens, these hardware developments will require a lot of new software to keep up.
To "talk" with windows PCs? Huh? You mean SMB? ODBC? DCOM? Oh wait, those are all known.
Perhaps they had the intergration of Exchange (server) and Outlook (client) in mind. It's a killer groupware app, and there is no obvious alternative out there like Samba or Apache. Unlike www, where MS was a late entry to the games, and the standards were already set, MS has managed to make and hold onto the standard.
I'm pretty tired of so-called Systems Administrators who can't seem to actually do anything on their own.
I'm not a sysadmin. I know how to compile apache and related modules and distribute custom rpms to production servers using rsync, but I also know that my time is better spent doing other things.
From the changelog:
With this release, the Red Hat Linux product is becoming the Red Hat Linux Project -- an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.
Looks like the old setup of 2 boxed sets (personal and professional) is going, as is the x.0, x.1, x.2 release cycle. This means they can break binary compatibility with each release. Also means that despite the fact that RH officially stops supporting this relase afer 1 year, package maintainers will be responsible for their own bug-fixes, not RH. Check out the article on The Register for more info. Looking at the package list, it looks too bleeding edge (Apache 2.045, PHP 4.32) for server use. If you want to keep with Apache 1.3x, then your only choice is RHES. Goodbye RedHat, it was good while it lasted.
Well, if you think telemarketing calls are bad now, wait until every business on the planet can afford to call you.
It's already happening. In Canada prisoners are phoning the US for market research, because calls are cheap, prisoners are cheap, and you don't have huge staff turnover in medium security jails. In India staff are madly cheap, well educated, and calls are cheap too. There are specialised traing programs to get sales agents used to the country with which they are dealing - which sport teams are cool, how the weather is etc. But in both these cases, calls are only made between 5-9 pm (US time) as people get even more pissed off with calls outside those hours.
SCO have been bleating elsewhere about how IBM hasn't filed for summary dissmissal. And it's odd. I am seriously underwhelmed by the IBM response. If SCO are so in the wrong, IBM could have come out more aggressivly on this, or even counter-sued by now. That they haven't is a bad sign.
Photoshop test are nice, but who uses Photoshop the way Jobs did? 360M files, batch processed? Not me. Most of my work uses 23M greyscale files,editied individually, maybe adjustment layered, in which case you can double that. I'd guess with the (relativelty) small files I use, the PC would have kept up with the G5. The G5 has a big advantage with large files in memory bandwdith and 64 bit addressing. It would have been cool to see how the G5 did on smaller workloads.