Integration with Active Directory and some LDAP directories is completely broken. It's really disapointing that features that worked great in 10.4 are broken in 10.5.
Bruce is full of shit, but you need to consider that he's speaking at the RSA conference, and most of the attendees are corporate security policy wonks, whose jobs are mostly horseshit.
I think people take certain cues and translate them into a "risk level" automatically. Let's look at two examples: fear about flying and computer security.
Many people worry about airplane safety. Let's think about why:
- Few people survive airplane crashes
- Nearly every airline is at or near bankruptcy
- People hear all of the time in the media that airline employees are taking pay reductions.
- Airlines systems are fucked up; planes are late, the airlines act arbitrarily, they don't care about customer satisfaction
So if I'm a little anxious to be strapped into a 22 inch wide seat in an aluminum tube for 5 hours, and I'm stuck in an airport for 8 hours because the flight was overbooked or there was a thunderstorm 2,000 miles away, I'm going to be nervous. Why would I expect maintaining a complex machine is done right when everything else is fucked up?
Computer security ranks low, not necessarily because people are ignorant of the risks, but because they don't perceive any danger from them. If someone steals your credit card info, who cares -- you're not liable! If there's a botnet spewing spam from my PC, who cares... there's minimal impact to you.
People are full of paradox. Everyone knows of devout, moral religious people who have dirty secrets like pedophilia or are stealing from the poorbox.
Ethics and honesty are too different things.
How many people would steal $5 from someone's wallet? And if they did, how likely are they to admit it?
How about complaining about food at a mom & pop restaurant for the sole purpose of avoiding payment? And again, how likely are they to admit it?
And finally, how about realizing that the cashier at Wal-Mart forgot to scan an item? And how likely would someone be to admitting that?
Most people are basically honest because they understand that stealing from someone is wrong. The the lack of ethics today is evidenced in how someone will happily steal from a big corporation. Theft is theft, but many people don't see it as a black and white issue.
I totally disagree. 40 years ago, forgery was outrageously easy because we just extended methods or technologies meant for a much simpler era.
In the early 20th century, few people had access to checks, and few people travelled. When you wrote a check to someone, the person receiving the check could check a city directory and confirm where you lived, what your profession was and whether you had written bad checks in the past. In the 60's and 70's, society became more mobile and more anonymous. More people had checks, but merchants didn't "know the customer" like they had previously. Credit chits maintained by merchants transformed into credit cards, where the risk of non-payment was shifted to some faceless bank.
Today, most people barely know anyone, and getting a fake set of identity documents is trivial.
I recently went on a NY->South Carolina road trip, and used my Treo 700w with Verizon on the way down for getting maps from Google and doing very casual web browsing. Alot of the I-95 corridor is still using 1xRTT, and I was expecting really abysmal performance.
My experience was similar to what is being discussed by others here -- overall response times, especially for applications like Google Maps that are doing alot of small image loads, seemed better than on 1xRTT than EVDO. I didn't notice any difference in battery life -- the Treo just sucks ass.
The IBM/Lenovo deal was just a ploy to offload some debt to another company and get better access to Chinese markets. For the most part, Lenovo bigshots are same IBMers that were there before.
I totally disagree. Novell does some things that I am not happy about, but they have leveraged tools like Yast to make cumbersome configuration activities much easier and more reliable. Working with a Microsoft domain is a great example -- unless you have a heavily customized AD, Yast makes it VERY easy to become a member of the domain and authenticate users. Red Hat has the capability though Kerberos, LDAP and Samba, but it's harder to set it up.
In the long term, Red Hat is going to need a tool like Yast as Linux continues to penetrate into other areas of business networks.
DirectTV has much, much higher quality feeds than my local Time Warner affiliate. Or go to a bar that has a DirecTV setup and compare it to your experience with cable -- in my area, the DirecTV signal is always better.
For data warehousing, a higher or different level of abstraction may be useful and make database design easier, particularly as paralellism becomes more and more common. Storing rich markup language or media in a database might be problematic as well.
But there's no way that RDBMS's are going away -- relational algebra simply solves too many data storage problems.
The other part of it is that the zLinux miracle is mostly bullshit.
zLinux is great if you're consolidating mostly idle, low priority resources. The "magic" that allows you to save money while simultaneously getting raped by IBM Global Services and paying too much for hardware is thin provisioning. You might assign 10 Linux VMs 1GB RAM each, and only have 4GB of actual memory available. Same thing with CPU. This is an efficient use of resources, if your applications don't all require memory at the same time... if you're like me, your employer has lots of memory-hogging J2EE stuff. On the other hand, crypto and networking between VMs is blazing fast.
Another problem is that in a big business that has mainframes, the mainframe folks are very conservative, use much stricter change and other controls than most open systems shops and don't understand the workloads that Unix/Linux systems get. They get prickly when your linux systems start looking for lots of resources. Everything takes about 3x longer.
The other issue is that the VMs are dependent on the Linux installation on the LPAR, and you may not have many LPARs available. If you want to run Red Hat & Suse, or RHEL5 and RHEL4, you need an LPAR for each. Nobody (except for a few showboat customers) is investing in new mainframes, and you may only have a few LPARs available on an existing mainframe available.
So if you have a business model like providing lots of cheap (and mostly idle) virtual servers, and you already have a major Mainframe investment, zLinux is a great solution. Otherwise, you're probably better off looking at the hardware virtualization options that you can get from Sun or even on whatever IBM calls RS/6000's these days for 1/5 of the cost.
Just a note: I'm not a mainframe guru, and my views are slanted based on my experience in working at a particular employer about a year and a half ago. So some of the issues may have changed, or the options available to me may have been limited due to some site-specific restriction that I am not aware of.
No, not wrong. People use word to type shit -- they don't really care about the file format at all. Some lawyers still use Wordperfect because they memorized the keyboard shortcuts -- not because of any special affinity to the wordperfect format.
You're confusing the issue. ODF is great, except Microsoft doesn't support it. StarOffice/OpenOffice sucks, and they chose to adopt ODF as a way to get leverage with governments.
It's a new paradigm, and everybody who doesn't buy, now, will be priced out forever. Anybody who does buy will be rewarded with a lifetime of riches, as their property will continue its 30% yearly price increase.
Renters, and anybody born in a future generation, will not be able to afford a $10,000,000 starter home in 15 years. They will live in tent cities, and Hondas.
This asset bubble is different than all of the others - it will never slow down, or pop. The gains are permanent.
That's what they all said, but in reality the future is bleak.
Without 6% they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver.
You would, except that even minor updates frequently break Java applications.
Because of that, the Sun installers don't remove previous versions of Java -- so the old stuff this still there & still vulnerable, unless you script something to remove it.
That's not really that relevant. By asking IBM to convert the debt into a "gift", they are acknowledging the debt.
It's bullshit that the school district would make a public display that puts IBM in a bad light for gross, possibly criminal mismanagement on their part. In New York, school administrators were caught stealing millions from districts once the State Comptroller was given the authority to audit the books.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
Hubris often leads to poor decisions. An arrogant prick who is always right is a hero -- until he's wrong.
Jobs has done alot of great stuff -- he's a visionary who has beaten cancer and grown an amazing company at the same time. That doesn't mean that he's infallible. The obsession with secrecy costs Apple alot of business -- there are today enterprises that would purchase thousands of Macs, but the needless obsession with secrecy and refusal to listen to some customer desires hurts the company in the long run.
Apple is a premium brand, think of a luxury car brand versus a "regular" car. A luxury car maker could sell more units by lowering the price, but alot of the panache of a luxury brand is exclusivity. If everyone had a Mac, that would alienate or reduce the loyalty of high-end, more profitable customers.
Apple focuses on making only a few models, so they actually get better pricing than their overall sales volume would normally yield. The problem is, large enterprise customers can get quality workstations with 17" LCDs for like $600, smaller ones cost a little more.
When you compare apples to apples (to use a bad pun), their pricing is excellent. The problem is that Apple is very selective about what market segments that they appeal to.
That's really bad for Microsoft, as the whole point of offering like 18 editions of Windows was to confuse and shame you enough to buy Vista Super Ultimate edition with Office Enterprise Ultimate.
I forgot to mention that some states and local governments are inconsistent with how they apply the law. Massachusetts says that for income taxes, I owe taxes when I set foot in the state. Baseball players have to file when they play against the Red Sox at Fenway.
The problem is how to you assess the tax rate? If I ship a computer to somebody's vacation house where there's an 8% tax rate, but his principal residence is in a place with a 9% tax, which rate is correct? The customer's home city might say that you have to pay their tax!
Counties and cities apply sales taxes, so you have thousands of different rates. In New York City, the rate is 8.5%; in other New York City counties, it's 4% for some goods (clothes) up to $110 and 8% or 8.25% or 9% for everything else. There's one county with 5 different tax rates!
Some school districts have excise taxes on things like cell phones, cable TV and other services as well -- and that's just New York!
Also the OpenSolaris page: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
ZFS is a kick-ass filesystem and a volume manager, and a raid controller. It's hard to categorize. You get things like snapshots, thin provisioning, etc without shelling out for a NetApp filer.
To me one of the best things about ZFS is error correction. You can very easily lose data with RAID-5 if you're getting silent block level corruption that the controller doesn't know about. Because it's silent, you end up backing up corrupt data without even knowing about it. I got burned pretty badly by this a few years back when we ordered a batch of disks that turned out to be junk. ZFS would have detected that problem, because it checks checksums on blocks.
Sun is using ZFS to move storage back to the server. You can spend $50k on a 4U Thumper with 24TB of disk on 48 spindles, and use ZFS to move data at Gigabit line speeds with about 10 minutes of work. I think that in the long run as the fault tolerance gets better on the server (there's a single point of failure in the Thumper) they have have viable alternatives to NAS devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Integration with Active Directory and some LDAP directories is completely broken. It's really disapointing that features that worked great in 10.4 are broken in 10.5.
Bruce is full of shit, but you need to consider that he's speaking at the RSA conference, and most of the attendees are corporate security policy wonks, whose jobs are mostly horseshit.
I think people take certain cues and translate them into a "risk level" automatically. Let's look at two examples: fear about flying and computer security.
Many people worry about airplane safety. Let's think about why:
- Few people survive airplane crashes
- Nearly every airline is at or near bankruptcy
- People hear all of the time in the media that airline employees are taking pay reductions.
- Airlines systems are fucked up; planes are late, the airlines act arbitrarily, they don't care about customer satisfaction
So if I'm a little anxious to be strapped into a 22 inch wide seat in an aluminum tube for 5 hours, and I'm stuck in an airport for 8 hours because the flight was overbooked or there was a thunderstorm 2,000 miles away, I'm going to be nervous. Why would I expect maintaining a complex machine is done right when everything else is fucked up?
Computer security ranks low, not necessarily because people are ignorant of the risks, but because they don't perceive any danger from them. If someone steals your credit card info, who cares -- you're not liable! If there's a botnet spewing spam from my PC, who cares... there's minimal impact to you.
People are full of paradox. Everyone knows of devout, moral religious people who have dirty secrets like pedophilia or are stealing from the poorbox.
Ethics and honesty are too different things.
How many people would steal $5 from someone's wallet? And if they did, how likely are they to admit it?
How about complaining about food at a mom & pop restaurant for the sole purpose of avoiding payment? And again, how likely are they to admit it?
And finally, how about realizing that the cashier at Wal-Mart forgot to scan an item? And how likely would someone be to admitting that?
Most people are basically honest because they understand that stealing from someone is wrong. The the lack of ethics today is evidenced in how someone will happily steal from a big corporation. Theft is theft, but many people don't see it as a black and white issue.
I totally disagree. 40 years ago, forgery was outrageously easy because we just extended methods or technologies meant for a much simpler era.
In the early 20th century, few people had access to checks, and few people travelled. When you wrote a check to someone, the person receiving the check could check a city directory and confirm where you lived, what your profession was and whether you had written bad checks in the past. In the 60's and 70's, society became more mobile and more anonymous. More people had checks, but merchants didn't "know the customer" like they had previously. Credit chits maintained by merchants transformed into credit cards, where the risk of non-payment was shifted to some faceless bank.
Today, most people barely know anyone, and getting a fake set of identity documents is trivial.
I recently went on a NY->South Carolina road trip, and used my Treo 700w with Verizon on the way down for getting maps from Google and doing very casual web browsing. Alot of the I-95 corridor is still using 1xRTT, and I was expecting really abysmal performance.
My experience was similar to what is being discussed by others here -- overall response times, especially for applications like Google Maps that are doing alot of small image loads, seemed better than on 1xRTT than EVDO. I didn't notice any difference in battery life -- the Treo just sucks ass.
The IBM/Lenovo deal was just a ploy to offload some debt to another company and get better access to Chinese markets. For the most part, Lenovo bigshots are same IBMers that were there before.
I totally disagree. Novell does some things that I am not happy about, but they have leveraged tools like Yast to make cumbersome configuration activities much easier and more reliable. Working with a Microsoft domain is a great example -- unless you have a heavily customized AD, Yast makes it VERY easy to become a member of the domain and authenticate users. Red Hat has the capability though Kerberos, LDAP and Samba, but it's harder to set it up.
In the long term, Red Hat is going to need a tool like Yast as Linux continues to penetrate into other areas of business networks.
DirectTV has much, much higher quality feeds than my local Time Warner affiliate. Or go to a bar that has a DirecTV setup and compare it to your experience with cable -- in my area, the DirecTV signal is always better.
For data warehousing, a higher or different level of abstraction may be useful and make database design easier, particularly as paralellism becomes more and more common. Storing rich markup language or media in a database might be problematic as well.
But there's no way that RDBMS's are going away -- relational algebra simply solves too many data storage problems.
It sucks, because it looks different depending on your window size, and the 10% of features that you use once in awhile are impossible to find.
Microsoft spent alot of money fixing something that was perfectly fine.
The other part of it is that the zLinux miracle is mostly bullshit.
zLinux is great if you're consolidating mostly idle, low priority resources. The "magic" that allows you to save money while simultaneously getting raped by IBM Global Services and paying too much for hardware is thin provisioning. You might assign 10 Linux VMs 1GB RAM each, and only have 4GB of actual memory available. Same thing with CPU. This is an efficient use of resources, if your applications don't all require memory at the same time... if you're like me, your employer has lots of memory-hogging J2EE stuff. On the other hand, crypto and networking between VMs is blazing fast.
Another problem is that in a big business that has mainframes, the mainframe folks are very conservative, use much stricter change and other controls than most open systems shops and don't understand the workloads that Unix/Linux systems get. They get prickly when your linux systems start looking for lots of resources. Everything takes about 3x longer.
The other issue is that the VMs are dependent on the Linux installation on the LPAR, and you may not have many LPARs available. If you want to run Red Hat & Suse, or RHEL5 and RHEL4, you need an LPAR for each. Nobody (except for a few showboat customers) is investing in new mainframes, and you may only have a few LPARs available on an existing mainframe available.
So if you have a business model like providing lots of cheap (and mostly idle) virtual servers, and you already have a major Mainframe investment, zLinux is a great solution. Otherwise, you're probably better off looking at the hardware virtualization options that you can get from Sun or even on whatever IBM calls RS/6000's these days for 1/5 of the cost.
Just a note: I'm not a mainframe guru, and my views are slanted based on my experience in working at a particular employer about a year and a half ago. So some of the issues may have changed, or the options available to me may have been limited due to some site-specific restriction that I am not aware of.
No, not wrong. People use word to type shit -- they don't really care about the file format at all. Some lawyers still use Wordperfect because they memorized the keyboard shortcuts -- not because of any special affinity to the wordperfect format.
You're confusing the issue. ODF is great, except Microsoft doesn't support it. StarOffice/OpenOffice sucks, and they chose to adopt ODF as a way to get leverage with governments.
File format isn't what people are worried about when purchasing software, it's the software itself!
Office is expensive, but OpenOffice doesn't look as good, doesn't work as well and feels cobbled together.
It's a new paradigm, and everybody who doesn't buy, now, will be priced out forever. Anybody who does buy will be rewarded with a lifetime of riches, as their property will continue its 30% yearly price increase.
Renters, and anybody born in a future generation, will not be able to afford a $10,000,000 starter home in 15 years. They will live in tent cities, and Hondas.
This asset bubble is different than all of the others - it will never slow down, or pop. The gains are permanent.
That's what they all said, but in reality the future is bleak.
Without 6% they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver.
You would, except that even minor updates frequently break Java applications.
Because of that, the Sun installers don't remove previous versions of Java -- so the old stuff this still there & still vulnerable, unless you script something to remove it.
Few people use 64-bit Windows, and lots of stuff doesn't work on it. Most printers, for example, don't have 64-bit drivers.
Plate armor was great until someone came up with the longbow. Large bastions/fortresses ruled warfare until mobile artillery became more practical.
There's a sense that operating systems are getting better with security, so it's no suprise that people are starting to look at hardware.
That's not really that relevant. By asking IBM to convert the debt into a "gift", they are acknowledging the debt.
It's bullshit that the school district would make a public display that puts IBM in a bad light for gross, possibly criminal mismanagement on their part. In New York, school administrators were caught stealing millions from districts once the State Comptroller was given the authority to audit the books.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
Hubris often leads to poor decisions. An arrogant prick who is always right is a hero -- until he's wrong.
Jobs has done alot of great stuff -- he's a visionary who has beaten cancer and grown an amazing company at the same time. That doesn't mean that he's infallible. The obsession with secrecy costs Apple alot of business -- there are today enterprises that would purchase thousands of Macs, but the needless obsession with secrecy and refusal to listen to some customer desires hurts the company in the long run.
Apple is a premium brand, think of a luxury car brand versus a "regular" car. A luxury car maker could sell more units by lowering the price, but alot of the panache of a luxury brand is exclusivity. If everyone had a Mac, that would alienate or reduce the loyalty of high-end, more profitable customers.
Apple focuses on making only a few models, so they actually get better pricing than their overall sales volume would normally yield. The problem is, large enterprise customers can get quality workstations with 17" LCDs for like $600, smaller ones cost a little more.
When you compare apples to apples (to use a bad pun), their pricing is excellent. The problem is that Apple is very selective about what market segments that they appeal to.
That's really bad for Microsoft, as the whole point of offering like 18 editions of Windows was to confuse and shame you enough to buy Vista Super Ultimate edition with Office Enterprise Ultimate.
I forgot to mention that some states and local governments are inconsistent with how they apply the law. Massachusetts says that for income taxes, I owe taxes when I set foot in the state. Baseball players have to file when they play against the Red Sox at Fenway.
The problem is how to you assess the tax rate? If I ship a computer to somebody's vacation house where there's an 8% tax rate, but his principal residence is in a place with a 9% tax, which rate is correct? The customer's home city might say that you have to pay their tax!
The problem is that the US is different.
Counties and cities apply sales taxes, so you have thousands of different rates. In New York City, the rate is 8.5%; in other New York City counties, it's 4% for some goods (clothes) up to $110 and 8% or 8.25% or 9% for everything else. There's one county with 5 different tax rates!
Some school districts have excise taxes on things like cell phones, cable TV and other services as well -- and that's just New York!
Ben Rockwood is THE OpenSolaris/ZFS guy... read his blog to learn more about it:
= 775= 729
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id
Also the OpenSolaris page:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
ZFS is a kick-ass filesystem and a volume manager, and a raid controller. It's hard to categorize. You get things like snapshots, thin provisioning, etc without shelling out for a NetApp filer.
To me one of the best things about ZFS is error correction. You can very easily lose data with RAID-5 if you're getting silent block level corruption that the controller doesn't know about. Because it's silent, you end up backing up corrupt data without even knowing about it. I got burned pretty badly by this a few years back when we ordered a batch of disks that turned out to be junk. ZFS would have detected that problem, because it checks checksums on blocks.
Sun is using ZFS to move storage back to the server. You can spend $50k on a 4U Thumper with 24TB of disk on 48 spindles, and use ZFS to move data at Gigabit line speeds with about 10 minutes of work. I think that in the long run as the fault tolerance gets better on the server (there's a single point of failure in the Thumper) they have have viable alternatives to NAS devices.