Re. the IBM scsi drives, I dunno if you've been a victim of this, but they had a bad batch produced in Aug. - Oct. 2000. They start with the model number "DDYS" and were made in Hungary. 9, 18, and 36 GB scsis are known to be involved. We had 26 of the buggers in our environment; three of them failed in production before we got them all replaced under warranty. We even had two fail simultaneously in the same RAID; that made for a long night (but thank god for Lotus Domino clustering, the users didn't notice).
Overall you can't generalize much about "IBM" drives since they outsource the production -- the replacements we got for the bad DDYS models were mostly "ST" models (i.e. Seagate) with an IBM label on them.
(To spell it out: You can find brutality and superstition anywhere. Especially in countries that still have the death penalty. Right beside that, you can find freedom, justice, and science. Life is complex; deal with it.)
Re:Too much idealism, too little practicality
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
Questions:
Who pays for the fiber? It's not like laying a couple thousand miles of fiber optics is pocket change.
Israel is a pretty tiny country -- roughly 100 Km east-west and 200 Km north-south. They wouldn't need that many thousands of miles of fiber.
Who administers the network?
That's a better question -- especially if those "free" mailservers are running sendmail.
Stickerboy, I think your most valid concern is around human resources. Indeed, that's the way it is with almost any IT project. Technology won't solve the problem without good analysis, design, project management, and operational frameworks -- all of which are done best by skilled, experienced people. That's not cheap. But if they pulled it off, just think what a treasure they'd have! It's always fun to have a dream....
A comment on the article's Win98 load speed test
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 1
The article says: At home, my wife, whom I adore, runs Windows 98 with WordPerfect 2000. I installed Netscape 6 on her machine to see what the Windows version was like. I started it, and, just like its Linux cousin, it took a while to load. When I was done, I fired up WordPerfect to finish some correspondence. The first thing I noticed was that WordPerfect started more quickly than Netscape 6. I could not believe it. Just to make sure, I closed all the programs that were running, then started Netscape 6 and timed it. It took 23 seconds. It made sense that it would be slower than my test time, because my wife's machine has less RAM and a slower CPU than mine. The shocking thing was that WordPerfect 2000 loaded in 12 seconds. WordPerfect 2000 is a huge program, much larger than Netscape 6.
Remember, though, Win98's "walign.exe" program. Win98 keeps track of your app usage and what sectors are needed in what order when the app is loaded. Walign, run optionally when you do a defrag, moves sectors around on the disk to optimize app loading speed. It works best if you've been running the app on the o/s for several weeks, so it has a good sample to work with. So if your wife has been running WP2000 for a while on her machine, and has done a defrag, then it's going to be optimized for fast loading. If you install Netscape 6 and load it, it will still be unoptimized and won't be able to compete.
Try loading Netscape 6 on her machine once a day for 3 or 4 weeks, then do a defrag, and check the timing again. It might cut the load time in half, as has been the case with some other apps.
If the 4 color vision is a good mutation, it will hopefully propogate into the general population eventually (well, half of it anyway:)
Only if it confers a clear reproductive advantage, so that those with the trait end up having more babies living to reproductive adulthood than those without the trait. I.e., the trait makes them more attractive mates, helps them to hunt for food better, or avoid more fatal risks before reproducing.
Semi-related: Just think how handy it would be to have a tail, when you're trying to solder something. One hand for soldering iron, one hand for solder, one tail to hold it all steady. Youch! But not likely a reproductive advantage. Just because it's handy doesn't make it necessarily a reproductive advantage.
I don't think most of MS's revenue stream for apps comes from home users phoning MS for support. I think this will be a tremendous boon to companies who have their own tech support folks.
Especially if it's a requirment that not only compiled exe's, but also all scripts, be signed. That will be almost the end of Outlook worms. In a totally managed environment, it could in fact mean the absolute end of Outlook worms -- such a thing is possible in Lotus Notes today.
Lotus Notes is aimed at the enterprise, not the SOHO, and it has signing built in. It works great. Every piece of code you write is signed automatically by your ID, transparently to you as a coder. The sig is checked by each server and client that the code is expected to run on. If Microsoft implements it as transparently as Lotus did, then this will be a tremendous boon to the thousand-seat-plus organizations.
The down side is that it will result in less business for the anti-virus people
Or be like Lotus Notes and have everything you do signed by default, with a certificate inherited from your company's head office.
The naysayers are thinking of their individual rights and freedoms, and yes that concerns me too when I'm working at home. At work, however, the company owns my time and my productivity, and if the company wants everything we do signed by its certificate, then that's fine by me. It sure cuts down on the number of worms!!!
Unless you're a charitable organization whose mission statement is to support Microsoft, you had better remind management that they need to come up with a business case before making ANY change. Make sure they investigate return on investment and strategic directions.
Then someone in the organization needs to do a study to compare the competing groupware products -- MS Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell Groupwise are the main ones -- with your existing system, and do a cost/benefit analysis.
I'm a certified Notes/Domino sys admin, and I'm also about to write the MS Exchange 5.5 exam, so I have some credentials to say the following: I'd choose Notes/Domino over Exchange in just about all circumstances, but in either case make the investment only if you have the developers and business needs to make it worth your while. You can do some cool workflow automation with either tool, but if you don't have the developers to do it, it gets expensive; and if you don't have the business need, then save your money.
I prefer Notes/Domino. Admittedly MS has come a long way in competing with Lotus, and has in fact surpassed it with respect to integration with the user's experience (assuming MS Windows on the desktop), but architecturally Exchange still sucks (and not well, at that). And because all items in Notes are digitally signed by default, and the signatures are checked before code is executed, it's tougher to get rampaging worms bringing down your workflow system (all too easy with Exchange/Outlook). Oh, and the other cool thing Notes does is make digital signatures trivial to implement on forms, so you can actually move towards a paperless office and still keep authorizations and approvals official and secure.
And the Domino server will run on Unix, and it can share postings with NNTP servers, so you're not facing a major O/S overhaul.
At any rate, the bottom line is they've gotta make the business case. If they would like some help with that, hey, I'm a consultant, I'd be happy if they'd hire me to assist them with trying to make the business case.;-)
I just helped an acquaintance build one from an old 486 and two new, cheap ISA Ethernet cards using the EigerStein beta2 Linux Router Project-based floppy. Hardware & software took 2 hours, and I was showing him how all the way. Of course, it was the 3rd one I had done, but I'm also no Linux expert so I suspect most of the readership here would have no trouble matching my 2 hours.
The down side is the cost of electricity for keeping this PC running (but no hard drive, so that saves a bit). I think the firewall-on-a-pci card has a decent market niche, for those who don't want to spend the electricity, take up the space, or put up with the noise of a separate firewall box. But if you have a 486 kicking around, the LRP makes a very nice firewall option.
I like it -- comparing humans to an asteroid strike. They seem to be having about the same impact on the environment.
It took an asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs. To wipe out the mammals, however, it will require -- a mammal!
(For the humour-impaired, let it be known that I LIKE the idea of terraforming Mars. I just thought Steven's comparison was humorous.)
p.s. - It's short-sleeve shirt weather here in Saskatchewan, in mid-October. Global Warming is real!
It doesn't surprise me much about The Matrix. I know folks who treat it quasi-religiously, but really The Matrix didn't impress me as much as Thirteeth Floor. Same concept, but more drama and a better plot twist.
Slashdot Mirror
Re. the IBM scsi drives, I dunno if you've been a victim of this, but they had a bad batch produced in Aug. - Oct. 2000. They start with the model number "DDYS" and were made in Hungary. 9, 18, and 36 GB scsis are known to be involved. We had 26 of the buggers in our environment; three of them failed in production before we got them all replaced under warranty. We even had two fail simultaneously in the same RAID; that made for a long night (but thank god for Lotus Domino clustering, the users didn't notice).
Overall you can't generalize much about "IBM" drives since they outsource the production -- the replacements we got for the bad DDYS models were mostly "ST" models (i.e. Seagate) with an IBM label on them.
b) Intel + Alpha > 1 platform
www.quadrantids.com appears not to have been updated for a year. It doesn't give the best viewing time for 2001.
Link seems to be broken. Doesn't look like /. effect.
(To spell it out: You can find brutality and superstition anywhere. Especially in countries that still have the death penalty. Right beside that, you can find freedom, justice, and science. Life is complex; deal with it.)
Who pays for the fiber? It's not like laying a couple thousand miles of fiber optics is pocket change.
Israel is a pretty tiny country -- roughly 100 Km east-west and 200 Km north-south. They wouldn't need that many thousands of miles of fiber.
Who administers the network?
That's a better question -- especially if those "free" mailservers are running sendmail.
Stickerboy, I think your most valid concern is around human resources. Indeed, that's the way it is with almost any IT project. Technology won't solve the problem without good analysis, design, project management, and operational frameworks -- all of which are done best by skilled, experienced people. That's not cheap. But if they pulled it off, just think what a treasure they'd have! It's always fun to have a dream....
Remember, though, Win98's "walign.exe" program. Win98 keeps track of your app usage and what sectors are needed in what order when the app is loaded. Walign, run optionally when you do a defrag, moves sectors around on the disk to optimize app loading speed. It works best if you've been running the app on the o/s for several weeks, so it has a good sample to work with. So if your wife has been running WP2000 for a while on her machine, and has done a defrag, then it's going to be optimized for fast loading. If you install Netscape 6 and load it, it will still be unoptimized and won't be able to compete.
Try loading Netscape 6 on her machine once a day for 3 or 4 weeks, then do a defrag, and check the timing again. It might cut the load time in half, as has been the case with some other apps.
This hardly rates a "Troll". Who in their right mind would waste a moderator point that way?
Only if it confers a clear reproductive advantage, so that those with the trait end up having more babies living to reproductive adulthood than those without the trait. I.e., the trait makes them more attractive mates, helps them to hunt for food better, or avoid more fatal risks before reproducing.
Semi-related: Just think how handy it would be to have a tail, when you're trying to solder something. One hand for soldering iron, one hand for solder, one tail to hold it all steady. Youch! But not likely a reproductive advantage. Just because it's handy doesn't make it necessarily a reproductive advantage.
Especially if it's a requirment that not only compiled exe's, but also all scripts, be signed. That will be almost the end of Outlook worms. In a totally managed environment, it could in fact mean the absolute end of Outlook worms -- such a thing is possible in Lotus Notes today.
The down side is that it will result in less business for the anti-virus people
The naysayers are thinking of their individual rights and freedoms, and yes that concerns me too when I'm working at home. At work, however, the company owns my time and my productivity, and if the company wants everything we do signed by its certificate, then that's fine by me. It sure cuts down on the number of worms!!!
Then someone in the organization needs to do a study to compare the competing groupware products -- MS Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell Groupwise are the main ones -- with your existing system, and do a cost/benefit analysis.
I'm a certified Notes/Domino sys admin, and I'm also about to write the MS Exchange 5.5 exam, so I have some credentials to say the following: I'd choose Notes/Domino over Exchange in just about all circumstances, but in either case make the investment only if you have the developers and business needs to make it worth your while. You can do some cool workflow automation with either tool, but if you don't have the developers to do it, it gets expensive; and if you don't have the business need, then save your money.
I prefer Notes/Domino. Admittedly MS has come a long way in competing with Lotus, and has in fact surpassed it with respect to integration with the user's experience (assuming MS Windows on the desktop), but architecturally Exchange still sucks (and not well, at that). And because all items in Notes are digitally signed by default, and the signatures are checked before code is executed, it's tougher to get rampaging worms bringing down your workflow system (all too easy with Exchange/Outlook). Oh, and the other cool thing Notes does is make digital signatures trivial to implement on forms, so you can actually move towards a paperless office and still keep authorizations and approvals official and secure.
And the Domino server will run on Unix, and it can share postings with NNTP servers, so you're not facing a major O/S overhaul.
At any rate, the bottom line is they've gotta make the business case. If they would like some help with that, hey, I'm a consultant, I'd be happy if they'd hire me to assist them with trying to make the business case. ;-)
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net/DiskImages/Eiger/Eiger Stein2BETA.htm
I just helped an acquaintance build one from an old 486 and two new, cheap ISA Ethernet cards using the EigerStein beta2 Linux Router Project-based floppy. Hardware & software took 2 hours, and I was showing him how all the way. Of course, it was the 3rd one I had done, but I'm also no Linux expert so I suspect most of the readership here would have no trouble matching my 2 hours.
The down side is the cost of electricity for keeping this PC running (but no hard drive, so that saves a bit). I think the firewall-on-a-pci card has a decent market niche, for those who don't want to spend the electricity, take up the space, or put up with the noise of a separate firewall box. But if you have a 486 kicking around, the LRP makes a very nice firewall option.
I like it -- comparing humans to an asteroid strike. They seem to be having about the same impact on the environment. It took an asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs. To wipe out the mammals, however, it will require -- a mammal! (For the humour-impaired, let it be known that I LIKE the idea of terraforming Mars. I just thought Steven's comparison was humorous.) p.s. - It's short-sleeve shirt weather here in Saskatchewan, in mid-October. Global Warming is real!
Definitely worth seeing 13th floor. It's more mature than Matrix, IMHO.
Sterling
It doesn't surprise me much about The Matrix. I know folks who treat it quasi-religiously, but really The Matrix didn't impress me as much as Thirteeth Floor. Same concept, but more drama and a better plot twist.