I subscribed to TPJ back when it was TPJ. It used to be a nice journal until Sysadmin took over. They had clever/funny covers, good articles, and all was nice. Then it became pretty corporate feeling when Sysadmin was publishing it, with more advertisements than articles. The number of pages dropped, and the cool covers disappeared. It basically turned to shit, minus the occasional article from the oldtimers. That's why I don't care now. I *did* care that it was going under way back when, before Sysadmin started publishing it.
Yeah I don't think it's a troll as it seems to be coming from reliable sources. Apparently his family sent an email to the faculty at cs.utexas.edu which has been forwarded around. I would imagine it would show up in the news within a day. Here's a link to the email, on the perl5-porters list.
"FORTRAN: "The infantile disorder", by now nearly twenty years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use." (1982).
"In the good old days physicists repeated each others experiments, just to be sure. Today, they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each others programs. And bugs."
--Edsger Dijkstra (Interestingly enough, Dijkstra died today.)
I once heard it suggested that on any project of 10 or more people, you can sack one person and the code will be better quality and delivered faster. The longer I work, the more I believe it is true. And replacing that person with someone good is always a win.
Because you repeatedly sack another guy on the team and hire someone better?
it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
I disagree. Neural networks are fine and dandy, but they aren't applicable to every problem...or even most problems. Any AI that could possibly approach general levels of intelligence will probably need to use neural networks for some things, logic for others, analogies for others, and it would definitely need a LOT of common sense. That would tend to require multiple representations of the same thing.
You should read some of Marvin Minsky's papers too.
Uh, I downloaded their annual report, but the closest thing I see to numbers are some bar charts showing sourceforge user and project growth over time. I'll admit that their stock photography is very snazzy looking, but that's hardly what I'm talking about. Therefore, they still get nothing from me. But thanks for posting.
Sigh. You're a fucking nimrod. Free software and the buzzword marketing term "Open Source" refer to a philosophy, not a business model. It's obvious that OSDN is not really in it for the philosophical ideals. M'kay. What could possibly make me think that? Hmmmm. In fact, to expand on your cheesy metaphor of the soup kitchen, I see these guys as the types of "homeless" folks who come up to you wearing $200 shoes, Tommy jackets, and try to scoach spare change. You give them a quarter and they look back at you and say, "Dontcha gotst a fiver or sumthin'. Shiiiit, you cheap assed mothafuckin biotch."
Businesses are ok, making money is ok, but when I see a marketing company--and if you don't think OSDN is a marketing company, you're either stupid or you havent' been to their site recently--begging for handouts I question it. I say cover your costs doing that marketing crap that you do, and leave me the fuck alone. If you're going to beg, you better tell me why because I refuse to line your pockets until you do.
What's wrong with paying for the services that/. provides?
I just don't like the idea of paying money to OSDN when they are primarily focused on making money. It's just a fucking contradiction. "We're the Open Source Development Network, line our pockets, suckers!" Yeah. That's the spirit of free software! Woohooo!
Now, if they were to have open accounting, where we could see what their costs are, where their income originates, what they use it for, etc. I'd be glad to contribute. Until then, they can run their advertisements, and die for all I care. Fuck 'em.
Ugh. We're using cisco's unity voip stuff at my job. It's constantly going down, and I personally hate getting wav files dumped into my inbox, especially when I'm picking up emails from home. Even with dsl it's fucking ridiculous to be downloading several megs of "uhhh yes, this is Steve Jones with foo incorporated and uhhhhhhhhh......I'm calling to reach uhhhhh ummmmmm uhhhhhhhhhh the uhhhhhhhh" messages. I completely loathe it, almost as much as this PHB who mails everyone these massive 15mb+ excel attachments of fucking statistics about some damn web server. Then he and his brown nosing wanker buddies send replies back and forth (to everyone) with the attachment included and little comments like "This is cool, Jim." or "Oooh. Didja see we got a 3.2% increase in traffic on page x? Yes, yes!"
Basically what we do is use a data warehouse that contains faculty & staff data from human resources plucked from peoplesoft, and from CICS for students. We treat that as the definitive list of who should have accounts (at least on the high volume everyone-has-an-account machines). The vast majority of our machines rely on LDAP, Kerberos, Active Directory, and NIS. So on the relevant boxes we have some perl scripts that run daily and pull a list of users from the database that should have accounts, as well as a list of users using that particular authentication scheme. From those two sets we can trivially create and delete the various accounts that should be created/deleted.
Changing passwords on all these systems is pretty simple too. The users hit an ssl webpage which authenticates through kerberos and then goes out and hits various machines using whatever hook is appropriate (some use Net::SSH::Perl and login to a box and call some sudoed program, some use Radius, some dump an md5 digest into a table, etc.).
Admittedly, if a user changes their password on one machine e.g. via passwd it's not going to propagate out to every other machine, but we also don't want to *force* users to use a single sign on either.
I don't think this is the *best* scheme out there, but it works a lot better than I would have ever imagined when I wrote it. The big pluses as I see them: it's easy to integrate new software into the scheme that doesn't use ldap, kerberos, active directory, etc. (stuff I've done recently: imp/horde web based student mail, blackboard courseinfo), if a domain controller or kdc or whatever goes down your whole authentication scheme doesn't go down the tubes until it's fixed, and last but not least just about everything uses ldap, kerberos, active directory and nis. Take your pick.:)
I see many folks saying to stick with just kerberos, or just LDAP or even Active Directory. I work at a largish university and had to come up with a roll your own solution a while back mainly due to political reasons (the NT group would only use Active Directory, the UNIX guys wanted Kerberos, the dialup used Cisco Secure, other systems stored digested passwords in an oracle table, some things required LDAP, etc., etc.) What we decided on, and what I wound up writing was a bunch of perl code to synchronize ALL of these different schemes. We have upwards of 50k users, and we've been using this for 3 years now with no problems.
Then again, this is a university where we basically provide services that faculty request and we don't have the luxury of not using software x because it uses authentication scheme y and we only support authentication scheme z. If you have a situation like this, it isn't that difficult to come up with the glue you need.
Nah. They should just keep running those Jon Katz ads.
"If you're looking for an integrated advertising solution that reaches a highly influential Community of IT professionals, systems administrators and Open Source/Linux developers, you've found it at OSDN."
Slashdot Mirror
I subscribed to TPJ back when it was TPJ. It used to be a nice journal until Sysadmin took over. They had clever/funny covers, good articles, and all was nice. Then it became pretty corporate feeling when Sysadmin was publishing it, with more advertisements than articles. The number of pages dropped, and the cool covers disappeared. It basically turned to shit, minus the occasional article from the oldtimers. That's why I don't care now. I *did* care that it was going under way back when, before Sysadmin started publishing it.
Yeah I don't think it's a troll as it seems to be coming from reliable sources. Apparently his family sent an email to the faculty at cs.utexas.edu which has been forwarded around. I would imagine it would show up in the news within a day. Here's a link to the email, on the perl5-porters list.
"FORTRAN: "The infantile disorder", by now nearly twenty years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use." (1982).
"In the good old days physicists repeated each others experiments, just to be sure. Today, they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each others programs. And bugs."
--Edsger Dijkstra
(Interestingly enough, Dijkstra died today.)
Apple? Are you serious? As in... Apple, the company that makes mice designed to be used while you wear mittens?
Or... *gasp*... goatse
I once heard it suggested that on any project of 10 or more people, you can sack one person and the code will be better quality and delivered faster. The longer I work, the more I believe it is true. And replacing that person with someone good is always a win.
;)
Because you repeatedly sack another guy on the team and hire someone better?
Well, duh.
Jay Rubin translates most of his books. I think Alfred Birnbaum did a few. Rubin does a better job in my opinion.
it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
I disagree. Neural networks are fine and dandy, but they aren't applicable to every problem...or even most problems. Any AI that could possibly approach general levels of intelligence will probably need to use neural networks for some things, logic for others, analogies for others, and it would definitely need a LOT of common sense. That would tend to require multiple representations of the same thing.
You should read some of Marvin Minsky's papers too.
Nahhhh. thegovernment.kids.us
You can find this information in Peru's world factbook entry.
Uh, I downloaded their annual report, but the closest thing I see to numbers are some bar charts showing sourceforge user and project growth over time. I'll admit that their stock photography is very snazzy looking, but that's hardly what I'm talking about. Therefore, they still get nothing from me. But thanks for posting.
s/beg+/ask/g if $youprefer
Sigh. You're a fucking nimrod. Free software and the buzzword marketing term "Open Source" refer to a philosophy, not a business model. It's obvious that OSDN is not really in it for the philosophical ideals. M'kay. What could possibly make me think that? Hmmmm. In fact, to expand on your cheesy metaphor of the soup kitchen, I see these guys as the types of "homeless" folks who come up to you wearing $200 shoes, Tommy jackets, and try to scoach spare change. You give them a quarter and they look back at you and say, "Dontcha gotst a fiver or sumthin'. Shiiiit, you cheap assed mothafuckin biotch."
Businesses are ok, making money is ok, but when I see a marketing company--and if you don't think OSDN is a marketing company, you're either stupid or you havent' been to their site recently--begging for handouts I question it. I say cover your costs doing that marketing crap that you do, and leave me the fuck alone. If you're going to beg, you better tell me why because I refuse to line your pockets until you do.
Nyaaaaah!
What's wrong with paying for the services that /. provides?
I just don't like the idea of paying money to OSDN when they are primarily focused on making money. It's just a fucking contradiction. "We're the Open Source Development Network, line our pockets, suckers!" Yeah. That's the spirit of free software! Woohooo!
Now, if they were to have open accounting, where we could see what their costs are, where their income originates, what they use it for, etc. I'd be glad to contribute. Until then, they can run their advertisements, and die for all I care. Fuck 'em.
Yeah. They really should dump tkinter and make wx the default.
Ha ha. I don't know about running coredumps, but you can compile perl. Check out perlcc.
Ugh. We're using cisco's unity voip stuff at my job. It's constantly going down, and I personally hate getting wav files dumped into my inbox, especially when I'm picking up emails from home. Even with dsl it's fucking ridiculous to be downloading several megs of "uhhh yes, this is Steve Jones with foo incorporated and uhhhhhhhhh......I'm calling to reach uhhhhh ummmmmm uhhhhhhhhhh the uhhhhhhhh" messages. I completely loathe it, almost as much as this PHB who mails everyone these massive 15mb+ excel attachments of fucking statistics about some damn web server. Then he and his brown nosing wanker buddies send replies back and forth (to everyone) with the attachment included and little comments like "This is cool, Jim." or "Oooh. Didja see we got a 3.2% increase in traffic on page x? Yes, yes!"
Fuck. I'm about to lose it.
Hmmm. Thanks, but I'll leave that to whoever comes in to take my place. I hate my job and am currently looking for something else.
:-D
Fucking economy.
Anyone hiring?
Well that's definitely an issue. :)
:)
Basically what we do is use a data warehouse that contains faculty & staff data from human resources plucked from peoplesoft, and from CICS for students. We treat that as the definitive list of who should have accounts (at least on the high volume everyone-has-an-account machines). The vast majority of our machines rely on LDAP, Kerberos, Active Directory, and NIS. So on the relevant boxes we have some perl scripts that run daily and pull a list of users from the database that should have accounts, as well as a list of users using that particular authentication scheme. From those two sets we can trivially create and delete the various accounts that should be created/deleted.
Changing passwords on all these systems is pretty simple too. The users hit an ssl webpage which authenticates through kerberos and then goes out and hits various machines using whatever hook is appropriate (some use Net::SSH::Perl and login to a box and call some sudoed program, some use Radius, some dump an md5 digest into a table, etc.).
Admittedly, if a user changes their password on one machine e.g. via passwd it's not going to propagate out to every other machine, but we also don't want to *force* users to use a single sign on either.
I don't think this is the *best* scheme out there, but it works a lot better than I would have ever imagined when I wrote it. The big pluses as I see them: it's easy to integrate new software into the scheme that doesn't use ldap, kerberos, active directory, etc. (stuff I've done recently: imp/horde web based student mail, blackboard courseinfo), if a domain controller or kdc or whatever goes down your whole authentication scheme doesn't go down the tubes until it's fixed, and last but not least just about everything uses ldap, kerberos, active directory and nis. Take your pick.
I see many folks saying to stick with just kerberos, or just LDAP or even Active Directory. I work at a largish university and had to come up with a roll your own solution a while back mainly due to political reasons (the NT group would only use Active Directory, the UNIX guys wanted Kerberos, the dialup used Cisco Secure, other systems stored digested passwords in an oracle table, some things required LDAP, etc., etc.) What we decided on, and what I wound up writing was a bunch of perl code to synchronize ALL of these different schemes. We have upwards of 50k users, and we've been using this for 3 years now with no problems.
Then again, this is a university where we basically provide services that faculty request and we don't have the luxury of not using software x because it uses authentication scheme y and we only support authentication scheme z. If you have a situation like this, it isn't that difficult to come up with the glue you need.
Nah. They should just keep running those Jon Katz ads.
"If you're looking for an integrated advertising solution that reaches a highly influential Community of IT professionals, systems administrators and Open Source/Linux developers, you've found it at OSDN."
Yeah, we just LOVE Katz. Thanks OSDN!
Our stuff is just as good, and cheaper to boot, and will server your needs as well.
Shouldn't that be sever?
Blah. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Emacs is a programmable editor for programmers. It's programmer friendly.
troll, troll, troll your goat
Hence the "Enterprise" bit. Yes folks, it's Wil Wheaton Enterprise Edition (for the multi-tiered enterprise)!