"Taiwan is a separate country at this time from mainland China"
Sure it is. Go tell that to the Chinese Government and see what they think about it.
Taiwan WANTS to be a separate country, but they have the little problem that Beijing doesn't want to let them. Every time someone in the Taiwanese govenment makes waves about declaring independence, Mainland China "coincidentally" schedules war games just off Taiwan's northern coast, and strongly hints that if Taiwan ever dared to secede, by noon the next day the Red Guard would be all over Taipei. The US wants Taiwan to secede and pretends they'd help militarily if China invades, but all three know that if push comes to shove, the US will not intervene. They wouldn't want to start WWIII over "just" Taiwan.
Actually, the best thing to see happen would be for IBM to take advantage of SCO's 24% drop in price today to buy up 5-10% of the SCO stock, and then sue the directors (who, being company directors, are PERSONALLY liable for damages) as major shareholders for corporate malfeasance in destroying SCO's good name with their actions designed to artifically inflate the stock's price and perceived value at the cost of long-term customers. Bankrupting a few of these weasels as an object lesson would be far better than throwing them in a 6'x9' as someone else suggested.
By definition, the moment Microsoft posts a *PATCH* to fix a hole, it's *BROKEN*.
Perhaps the SQL worm rings a bell? The discussion about that on Slashdot was full of guys like you saying "Geez, anyone who didn't patch right away and got hit by the worm deserves to be fired!"
Patch when it's going well in case of the next wild exploit, or don't. Can't have it both ways.
Personally, I'll go with the lesser evil and patch. Better that than be part of the mess when the shit hits the fan. Unless of course you like the idea of your boxes being part of a half million zombie machines that attack the DoD or something...
"As for your excuse for not testing in a lab; You will have the same problem whether you are open source or not open source."
True, but in the above hypothetical situation, a fifth option would have arisen in an open source world. That of:
e) Give the progamming team 2 hours to see if they can figure out why it broke and if we can fix either our stuff, or the affected Apache module without rolling back. If not, then choose another option
And actually, now that I think about it, even the rollback would be a lot easier than Windows. If you want/need to go to a previous version of Apache, I can do it in about 10 minutes. Good luck with doing that with IIS....
Plus, things aren't nearly so interdependant on Linux boxes. Witness the fun with anything that uses MSHTML.DLL on a windows box, for example...
" So wait, microsoft is releasing more updates, this is bad? So maybe some of their updates have bugs, at least we get the fixes rapidly."
Are you drunk?
Picture this: You are the sysadmin at a company that runs its business all online, doing thousands of dollars of business per hour. You have a farm of 2000 servers running a custom back end for all your web services. The weekly patch comes down from Microsoft, it's time to update it. Again. Just like last week and the week before. You go down to the colocation facility late that evening, and apply the patches because that's the corporate policy. A few minutes after applying the patches you notice that your company's custom apps are acting.... odd. You call one of the programmers who works on the app, and he sees the same thing. Soon the whole team is conferenced in, and the consensus is that the patch screwed up the company's app. Rollback! goes the cry and hue! You attempt to rollback. It doesn't work.
Fuck.
Your options at this moment in time are:
a) Try to patch your internal app to work around what Microsoft's wonderous patch has broken b) Spend the next 3 hours (per machine) reinstalling and restoring from the tape backups to be ready for the opening rush of business by the next morning. No, you are not getting paid extra for this. c) Clench your collective buttocks and see how badly this fault affects normal business, all the while praying the Overlords at Microsoft release a patch for this patch real soon. d) Pick up one of your servers, hurl it through the window in the colocation facility (on the 21st floor) and jump after it to the blissful eternal night where there is no Microsoft (that we know of).
Answers to a couple of questions that might come up:
Q: Why aren't you testing all of these in a test lab before going live? A: I don't know. Probably because we spent all our damn money we would normally use to hire a regression testing QA team on server licenses instead. Call me naive, but when we're paying multiple thousands of dollars per server on software licensing, is it too much to ask that the shit doesn't require us to hire a QA team to constantly regression test the effects of Microsoft's bug fixes? Since this is something we're trying to find the budget for, apparently it is too much to ask.
Q: Why are you using Windows 2000? A: That's what our app is developed on. And continues to be. You don't throw out 15 man-years of coding on a whim to switch to Linux just because this year it's "finally" being seen as ready for the enterprise by enough people in our company. We have Linux boxes a go-go here. Just not doing this.
Sony Store in Langley (Suburb of Vancouver) They were having a sale to clear the older Clie's out just before the release of the newer SJ-22 and SJ-33's. I bought the SJ-20 for $199 plus tax.
You want flashy, check out the Zire 71 (their new color one with a camera built in). I played with one at Staples for about 20 minutes and almost bought it on the spot, even though I only replaced my Visor with the Clie 3 months ago. They are cool. And fast. Very fast. It's got an audio player, can play video decently enough that people have been recording half-hour TV shows to watch on the subway, and built-in camera works well. And it can play Sega master system games too..
Actually, I think for anyone it makes sense to get either the Neo, or the m105. Why would someone deliberately choose to limit themselves based on their current behavior? If people normally bought things based on their current needs, there wouldn't be the monsterous SUV market that we have today. Instead everyone buys an SUV promising to go drive up to the cabin they don't have yet with it. So why not get a PDA that does all the scheduling stuff, and has the capability of doing all the other stuff even if you don't need it yet? And besides, they cut off 2 buttons on the Zire. WTF was what I thought when I saw that...
Flashy isn't necessarily better than functional. What *do* you look for in a PDA's OS? Personally I look for small footprint and low power consumption. My Sony Clie SJ-20 fits that bill perfectly. I only need to recharge it once every couple of weeks, and it does everything I want a PDA to do, and it only cost me $200 CDN. And it has a 320x320 display...
Retina is good, but even the free version of LANGuard is great for the point-and-click crowd. Windows is not my preferred platform of choice, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised the first time I took a look at LANGuard. But I wonder if it's not a bad thing that these tools are starting to auto-fix so many items, like the aforementioned Retina and the registry issues. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my people to fix the problems on a box by actually getting onto the box and doing it from there. That way you can also tell if anything... funky... is going on. NT/2000 will do that to you sometimes. Responds to remote requests OK, but there's something going hogwild that you don't really notice until you get onto the console. Plus, of course, the more people just click a button for scan, and another for fix, the less they'll know what to do if the "fix" button doesn't work in a certain case.
Let's see... Do I make groundless threats against my competitors in the dubious hope that one of them might buy me out, and in the process destroy all existing and future customer goodwill? Including the Slashdot weenies who will now be advising the purchasers in their companies not to buy SCO at any cost?
Or do I suck it up, and try to sell things people (especially existing clientele) want to buy?
Yeah, I noticed that as well. I pay extra for my static IP as well. It was a one-off thing with a friend of mine who has an account on my server sending a message to another guy he knows who just got an Earthlink account. I got into a discussion through email with someone over at Earthlink. They wanted me to get my cable company's provisioning department to contact them to verify that I do in fact have a static address, even though their list says it's dynamic. Considering it takes my cable company upwards of three weeks to do anything (including provide services I want to give them more money for, like static IPs) the chances of that happening were slim and none. So I told the Earthlink guy never mind, my friend would just get in touch with the guy once Earthlink went bankrupt and he had to get an account elsewhere. I didn't hear back from him after that. Was it something I said?
So why not question the source of a gift? In this case why bother? I presume Mr. DeRaadt was going to continue to work on OpenBSD anyway, so whether or not he gets money from DARPA is entirely irrelevant to his continuance of work. DARPA would have the same OpenBSD to use regardless of if Mr. DeRaadt's group got money from DARPA, a research grant from the Canadian government, or the Tooth Fairy. Or probably even if he got no money at all. It might just take him a bit longer then. He's not doing it for the Benjamins, you know...
No. Her real problem is the fact that she's using "just fell off the junk truck on the way to the landfill" class hardware. I mean come on, a frickin' Verite card? Go out and get dirt cheap GeForce MX for like $40 at some places. One crystal clear indicator that her hardware is flaky as hell is the fact that she got "different" results between boots on Knoppix. It's burned in stone on a CD for Christ's sake! *IT* certainly isn't a variable from boot to boot... As an aside, I've used Redhat for a while as a desktop at the office, works fine for me. I even installed Redhat 8 on a 3 year old laptop and it worked just fine. I've had complete Windows newbies absolutely astonished by Knoppix. After I gave one to the HR manager, she wanted to lead a crusade to move everyone in the office to it posthaste, and she's a person who can't find the start bar if it autohides itself. Bottom line: I think almost any disto in the last year is fine for the average end user who wants to read mail, surf the web, type documents (Openoffice), do finances (Gnucash), maybe play some games, etc. If they're looking for more than that, perhaps Linux isn't yet their choice. But it sounds like this person regrettably stacked the deck against herself with her choice of hardware and had a bad experience as a result. I couldn't possibly imagine her having this many problems even on a new Dell or some damn thing like that.
I agree, but for different reasons. Generally speaking a "war" is when two powers of moderately similar strength have protracted military engagements. Needless to say the US outweighs Iraq in strength by a factor of hundreds to one. Calling this a "war" is like calling someone gunning down an opponent only armed with a machete at 200' a "fair fight".
Re:Nice Duplicate of Last Weeks Story
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: 1
Funny. That story had no book review in it. How is it a duplicate?
All my family live in other cities from me, and they all have Knoppix CDs I burned them "just in case" anything goes horribly wrong. To get back on the Net where most of the stuff they do with computers is anyway, they just stick the CD in the drive and reboot. They get a GUI, browsers, OpenOffice, and a way for me to come in remotely and fix anything with the file system they might have screwed up by mistake. If Windows doesn't completely hose itself, I also have installed VNC server on their machines, so all they have to do is start the server by clicking on the icon, and I can just fix it myself..
But the Knoppix thing is great, since even if their hard drive dies (like it did once) it still works.
And the same thing can happen (a jam, anyway) if you don't maintain your regular firearm as well. Bottom line, if you have a gun for self defence, you have to take care of it. Just like you have to change the batteries in your smoke alarms, the oil in your car, etc. Nothing's perfect... But on the plus side, with barrels like this thing uses, you won't need to clean it.
Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Microsoft won't kill it off. They'll just fire all their Mac Office developers and tell everyone who wants to run future versions of Office on a Mac that all they need to do is buy the Virtual PC, a copy of Windows, and Office for Windows, and then they can have Office on their Mac. After all, why sell only one product to fill someone's need when you can force three down their throat instead?
Must be nice to have a company that has the available money around to have both machines for simulating your live environment, the staff to run it every time Microsoft releases a security update, and simulate the real-world traffic your site gets. You guys all have Aeron chairs and beer on tap too?
Oh, and don't even bring up SMS. That thing is the biggest steaming pile of crap I've ever seen.
I think part of the reason is because, as he points out above, the *gross* miscarriage of justice in his case. As Mitnick himself states he was held in solitary confinement for 8 months because the prosecution was able to convince a technologically uneducated judge that if Mitnick gained access to a payphone he could launch nuclear missiles. He was held without a bail hearing for 4 1/2 years. Up in Vancouver here, some street racers just got sentenced the other day to 2 years house arrest for mowing down and killing a pedestrian, yet he spends 8 years + in the clink for essentially copying software?
And of course the reason it resonates with a lot of the Slashdot crowd is that some of their activities when they were younger might not have been so different. And if that happened to Mitnick, who is to say it wouldn't happen to them?
Slashdot Mirror
"Taiwan is a separate country at this time from mainland China"
Sure it is. Go tell that to the Chinese Government and see what they think about it.
Taiwan WANTS to be a separate country, but they have the little problem that Beijing doesn't want to let them. Every time someone in the Taiwanese govenment makes waves about declaring independence, Mainland China "coincidentally" schedules war games just off Taiwan's northern coast, and strongly hints that if Taiwan ever dared to secede, by noon the next day the Red Guard would be all over Taipei.
The US wants Taiwan to secede and pretends they'd help militarily if China invades, but all three know that if push comes to shove, the US will not intervene. They wouldn't want to start WWIII over "just" Taiwan.
No, it's hypocritical to trash them when a particular law works against you, and then cheer when the SAME law works for you. Not similar laws.
Actually, the best thing to see happen would be for IBM to take advantage of SCO's 24% drop in price today to buy up 5-10% of the SCO stock, and then sue the directors (who, being company directors, are PERSONALLY liable for damages) as major shareholders for corporate malfeasance in destroying SCO's good name with their actions designed to artifically inflate the stock's price and perceived value at the cost of long-term customers. Bankrupting a few of these weasels as an object lesson would be far better than throwing them in a 6'x9' as someone else suggested.
By definition, the moment Microsoft posts a *PATCH* to fix a hole, it's *BROKEN*.
Perhaps the SQL worm rings a bell? The discussion about that on Slashdot was full of guys like you saying "Geez, anyone who didn't patch right away and got hit by the worm deserves to be fired!"
Patch when it's going well in case of the next wild exploit, or don't. Can't have it both ways.
Personally, I'll go with the lesser evil and patch. Better that than be part of the mess when the shit hits the fan. Unless of course you like the idea of your boxes being part of a half million zombie machines that attack the DoD or something...
"As for your excuse for not testing in a lab; You will have the same problem whether you are open source or not open source."
True, but in the above hypothetical situation, a fifth option would have arisen in an open source world. That of:
e) Give the progamming team 2 hours to see if they can figure out why it broke and if we can fix either our stuff, or the affected Apache module without rolling back. If not, then choose another option
And actually, now that I think about it, even the rollback would be a lot easier than Windows. If you want/need to go to a previous version of Apache, I can do it in about 10 minutes. Good luck with doing that with IIS....
Plus, things aren't nearly so interdependant on Linux boxes. Witness the fun with anything that uses MSHTML.DLL on a windows box, for example...
" So wait, microsoft is releasing more updates, this is bad? So maybe some of their updates have bugs, at least we get the fixes rapidly."
Are you drunk?
Picture this: You are the sysadmin at a company that runs its business all online, doing thousands of dollars of business per hour. You have a farm of 2000 servers running a custom back end for all your web services. The weekly patch comes down from Microsoft, it's time to update it. Again. Just like last week and the week before. You go down to the colocation facility late that evening, and apply the patches because that's the corporate policy. A few minutes after applying the patches you notice that your company's custom apps are acting.... odd. You call one of the programmers who works on the app, and he sees the same thing. Soon the whole team is conferenced in, and the consensus is that the patch screwed up the company's app. Rollback! goes the cry and hue!
You attempt to rollback. It doesn't work.
Fuck.
Your options at this moment in time are:
a) Try to patch your internal app to work around what Microsoft's wonderous patch has broken
b) Spend the next 3 hours (per machine) reinstalling and restoring from the tape backups to be ready for the opening rush of business by the next morning. No, you are not getting paid extra for this.
c) Clench your collective buttocks and see how badly this fault affects normal business, all the while praying the Overlords at Microsoft release a patch for this patch real soon.
d) Pick up one of your servers, hurl it through the window in the colocation facility (on the 21st floor) and jump after it to the blissful eternal night where there is no Microsoft (that we know of).
Answers to a couple of questions that might come up:
Q: Why aren't you testing all of these in a test lab before going live?
A: I don't know. Probably because we spent all our damn money we would normally use to hire a regression testing QA team on server licenses instead. Call me naive, but when we're paying multiple thousands of dollars per server on software licensing, is it too much to ask that the shit doesn't require us to hire a QA team to constantly regression test the effects of Microsoft's bug fixes? Since this is something we're trying to find the budget for, apparently it is too much to ask.
Q: Why are you using Windows 2000?
A: That's what our app is developed on. And continues to be. You don't throw out 15 man-years of coding on a whim to switch to Linux just because this year it's "finally" being seen as ready for the enterprise by enough people in our company. We have Linux boxes a go-go here. Just not doing this.
Sony Store in Langley (Suburb of Vancouver)
They were having a sale to clear the older Clie's out just before the release of the newer SJ-22 and SJ-33's. I bought the SJ-20 for $199 plus tax.
You want flashy, check out the Zire 71 (their new color one with a camera built in). I played with one at Staples for about 20 minutes and almost bought it on the spot, even though I only replaced my Visor with the Clie 3 months ago. They are cool. And fast. Very fast. It's got an audio player, can play video decently enough that people have been recording half-hour TV shows to watch on the subway, and built-in camera works well. And it can play Sega master system games too..
Actually, I think for anyone it makes sense to get either the Neo, or the m105. Why would someone deliberately choose to limit themselves based on their current behavior? If people normally bought things based on their current needs, there wouldn't be the monsterous SUV market that we have today. Instead everyone buys an SUV promising to go drive up to the cabin they don't have yet with it. So why not get a PDA that does all the scheduling stuff, and has the capability of doing all the other stuff even if you don't need it yet?
And besides, they cut off 2 buttons on the Zire. WTF was what I thought when I saw that...
Flashy isn't necessarily better than functional.
What *do* you look for in a PDA's OS? Personally I look for small footprint and low power consumption. My Sony Clie SJ-20 fits that bill perfectly. I only need to recharge it once every couple of weeks, and it does everything I want a PDA to do, and it only cost me $200 CDN.
And it has a 320x320 display...
Sorry to nitpick, but your math is incorrect.
By your 9 month doubling:
0 months - 5GB
9 months - 5GB x 2 = 10GB
18 months - 10GB x 2 = 20GB
27 months - 20GB x 2 = 40GB
So to make that true, the iPod would have to be shipping with a 40GB drive right now..
Retina is good, but even the free version of LANGuard is great for the point-and-click crowd. Windows is not my preferred platform of choice, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised the first time I took a look at LANGuard.
But I wonder if it's not a bad thing that these tools are starting to auto-fix so many items, like the aforementioned Retina and the registry issues. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my people to fix the problems on a box by actually getting onto the box and doing it from there. That way you can also tell if anything... funky... is going on. NT/2000 will do that to you sometimes. Responds to remote requests OK, but there's something going hogwild that you don't really notice until you get onto the console.
Plus, of course, the more people just click a button for scan, and another for fix, the less they'll know what to do if the "fix" button doesn't work in a certain case.
Ever thought that maybe the problem is Abit couldn't find their ass with both hands in the dark?
I've used Abit boards. They suck. Take the same Athlon chip to a non-toy motherboard and your problems go away.
Stick to Asus, or MSI. ECS can be OK on a budget too, and Tyan has nice dual processor boards for Athlons.
Let's see...
Do I make groundless threats against my competitors in the dubious hope that one of them might buy me out, and in the process destroy all existing and future customer goodwill? Including the Slashdot weenies who will now be advising the purchasers in their companies not to buy SCO at any cost?
Or do I suck it up, and try to sell things people (especially existing clientele) want to buy?
Decisions, decisions...
Yeah, I noticed that as well. I pay extra for my static IP as well. It was a one-off thing with a friend of mine who has an account on my server sending a message to another guy he knows who just got an Earthlink account. I got into a discussion through email with someone over at Earthlink. They wanted me to get my cable company's provisioning department to contact them to verify that I do in fact have a static address, even though their list says it's dynamic. Considering it takes my cable company upwards of three weeks to do anything (including provide services I want to give them more money for, like static IPs) the chances of that happening were slim and none. So I told the Earthlink guy never mind, my friend would just get in touch with the guy once Earthlink went bankrupt and he had to get an account elsewhere. I didn't hear back from him after that. Was it something I said?
So why not question the source of a gift?
In this case why bother? I presume Mr. DeRaadt was going to continue to work on OpenBSD anyway, so whether or not he gets money from DARPA is entirely irrelevant to his continuance of work. DARPA would have the same OpenBSD to use regardless of if Mr. DeRaadt's group got money from DARPA, a research grant from the Canadian government, or the Tooth Fairy. Or probably even if he got no money at all. It might just take him a bit longer then. He's not doing it for the Benjamins, you know...
No. Her real problem is the fact that she's using "just fell off the junk truck on the way to the landfill" class hardware. I mean come on, a frickin' Verite card? Go out and get dirt cheap GeForce MX for like $40 at some places. One crystal clear indicator that her hardware is flaky as hell is the fact that she got "different" results between boots on Knoppix. It's burned in stone on a CD for Christ's sake! *IT* certainly isn't a variable from boot to boot...
As an aside, I've used Redhat for a while as a desktop at the office, works fine for me. I even installed Redhat 8 on a 3 year old laptop and it worked just fine. I've had complete Windows newbies absolutely astonished by Knoppix. After I gave one to the HR manager, she wanted to lead a crusade to move everyone in the office to it posthaste, and she's a person who can't find the start bar if it autohides itself.
Bottom line: I think almost any disto in the last year is fine for the average end user who wants to read mail, surf the web, type documents (Openoffice), do finances (Gnucash), maybe play some games, etc. If they're looking for more than that, perhaps Linux isn't yet their choice. But it sounds like this person regrettably stacked the deck against herself with her choice of hardware and had a bad experience as a result. I couldn't possibly imagine her having this many problems even on a new Dell or some damn thing like that.
I agree, but for different reasons. Generally speaking a "war" is when two powers of moderately similar strength have protracted military engagements. Needless to say the US outweighs Iraq in strength by a factor of hundreds to one. Calling this a "war" is like calling someone gunning down an opponent only armed with a machete at 200' a "fair fight".
Funny. That story had no book review in it. How is it a duplicate?
All my family live in other cities from me, and they all have Knoppix CDs I burned them "just in case" anything goes horribly wrong. To get back on the Net where most of the stuff they do with computers is anyway, they just stick the CD in the drive and reboot. They get a GUI, browsers, OpenOffice, and a way for me to come in remotely and fix anything with the file system they might have screwed up by mistake. If Windows doesn't completely hose itself, I also have installed VNC server on their machines, so all they have to do is start the server by clicking on the icon, and I can just fix it myself..
But the Knoppix thing is great, since even if their hard drive dies (like it did once) it still works.
And the same thing can happen (a jam, anyway) if you don't maintain your regular firearm as well. Bottom line, if you have a gun for self defence, you have to take care of it. Just like you have to change the batteries in your smoke alarms, the oil in your car, etc. Nothing's perfect... But on the plus side, with barrels like this thing uses, you won't need to clean it.
Microsoft won't kill it off. They'll just fire all their Mac Office developers and tell everyone who wants to run future versions of Office on a Mac that all they need to do is buy the Virtual PC, a copy of Windows, and Office for Windows, and then they can have Office on their Mac. After all, why sell only one product to fill someone's need when you can force three down their throat instead?
Save every damn dime I get until the age of 25, and then put it all into Starnet stock when it's at $.60. Then sell when it hits $25 8 months later.
Then take all of that, and throw it into Nvidia's stock and sell off all that when that quintuples.
Then get completely out of the stock market, and instead buy a bunch of income properties, and do that as my "job".
And also, I'd tell me before I found out the hard way that I am allergic to car body filler.
Must be nice to have a company that has the available money around to have both machines for simulating your live environment, the staff to run it every time Microsoft releases a security update, and simulate the real-world traffic your site gets. You guys all have Aeron chairs and beer on tap too?
Oh, and don't even bring up SMS. That thing is the biggest steaming pile of crap I've ever seen.
I think part of the reason is because, as he points out above, the *gross* miscarriage of justice in his case. As Mitnick himself states he was held in solitary confinement for 8 months because the prosecution was able to convince a technologically uneducated judge that if Mitnick gained access to a payphone he could launch nuclear missiles. He was held without a bail hearing for 4 1/2 years. Up in Vancouver here, some street racers just got sentenced the other day to 2 years house arrest for mowing down and killing a pedestrian, yet he spends 8 years + in the clink for essentially copying software?
And of course the reason it resonates with a lot of the Slashdot crowd is that some of their activities when they were younger might not have been so different. And if that happened to Mitnick, who is to say it wouldn't happen to them?