I guess the thought is that if things go bad, IBM will either settle in some way that allows them to continue doing busines in AIX/P-series, or will pay whatever damages a court actually orders them to. There's no such entity to keep Linux in business.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous; but there you go... corporate America.
At the company I work for, (and I've heard others doing the same), they're easing back on Linux for mission critical applications and instead buying AIX boxes.
There is no rationality to that at all. After all, IBM is the only one who's actually been sued. Perhaps they have more faith in IBM's legal department than they do in their own.
Slightly OT: I just had a couple of P-series boxes get back-ordered for about a month. My rep told me that the Department of Homeland Security ordered a bunch of AIX boxes - so many that it put manufacturing behind. Tom Ridge must not be too worried about all of this.
This is what I find the most irritating aspect of trying to track down spammers.
The people who are running open relays are either not knowledgeable enough, or motivated enough to respond to my requests for log entries or information regarding messages sent through their relay. Most of them even act offended when I try to politely inform them that they're being abused.
You can call their ISP; but if they are of any size, you generally get ignored.
Yeah. I apologize. Later on when I came back to Slashdot, I realized I had sort of gone off on a rant there. It's one of those things where I really wish I had read my post and yours more carefully before spouting off.:-)
I obviously projected something badly onto your post, and I shouldn't have. I apologize.
The software is bad enough; but the patch process is ridiculous.
If you could patch non-kernel portions of the OS without rebooting, it would be a lot easier on the average Windows admin who has to argue for downtime with the internal customers.
And while you're at it, let's not install every application in the OS every time.
Study has no real science in it
on
IT Career Horoscopes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm tempted to go on one of those personal crusades against stuff like this. I can't begin to relate the difficulties my wife and I have had over crap like this type of study.
There is no possible way for you to control a control group well enough to get ANY meaningful data from a study that follows people from birth into adulthood. The variables are nearly infinite.
If the people who wrote the study actually performed the data collection and administered the study, they should be shot for putting forward the idea that you can tell anything specific about adulthood from such specific environmental factors in children.
Most of the time, when you hear something like this, it is an interpretation of data that other people collected and deemed only marginally interesting; but some advocate got a hold of and pawned off as meaningful.
A great book to read for new or expecting parents is "The Myth of the First Three Years" by John Bruer.
Play Mozart to your baby because it's soothing and you wish to foster a familiarity with the music. Don't do it because you think it will increase your child's I.Q. by 5 points; because there is nothing that actually suggests that... nothing.
The guy in charge of security at any institution might as well change his name to Snowden.
If you don't recognize this name, Snowden was a character in the Joseph Heller book "Catch 22" He's a gunner in a B-25 who gets shot. The protagonist, Yossarian, goes back to help him, and tells him he'll be fine. Then he opens the kid's jacket and his guts spill out all over the floor. The kid can't see them, so Yossarian keeps trying to comfort him.
That's your security administrator. He's already dead, it's just that nobody has shown him his guts yet.
I'm not going to become an apologist for people who don't patch their servers; but at the same time, it's not the NY Times' job to keep crackers from being worthless amoral turds.
He didn't break in because he wanted to help the NY Times. At best he broke in for recognition, or a job, or to feel bigger about himself. So in short, he broke in for his own personal gain.
That doesn't exactly endear him to me as the network messiah, come to save me.
Agreed. I opted out and sent an e-mail to the plaintiff's lawyers protesting.
This is the sort of litigious bull**** that we could do without. If the guy didn't know better than to submit his domain without name servers, or didn't know that these things don't get organized immediately, then he should sue whoever told him how to set up a website. Or better yet, he should just chock it up to learning the new forms of business in the internet age.
And class action my butt. It implies that he was doing this for all those people who were wronged by the defendant. If there were serious damages done, we'd have heard more about it from the enraged masses, and the settlement would have been something real or substantial. This was just a way to "lawyer up."
Maybe instead of putting the burden on the customer, waiters should organize and demand a LIVING WAGE from their employers.
If you think service is bad now, just wait until all of the wait staff make the same amount of money.
The tips are an incentive to do good work. If you're nice to people and do a good job, you can make a fair wage waiting tables. If you ignore people or act dismissive, you won't make much.
As an employer, I know that if a waiter of mine isn't making much money, he won't be around long, which is good. If he's not providing good service, I don't really want him around. At the same time, unless I'm getting a lot of complaints from customers, I don't really have any grounds to fire him. In the end, the better wait staff will stick around longer.
If I pay everybody the same wage, there's no incentive for the worst waiter to do any better, and there's no incentive for the best waiter to do any better than the average waiter who is making the same wage.
The market for buying and selling excess power is VERY active and exists primarily on the internet. Multi-million dollar deals are made quickly, and while they can be made in advance, they may also be made at the whim of mother nature (excessive heat causing a company to purchase power, or a drop in temp making excess power available).
Implementing the deal means interacting with control systems. I will admit to ignorance of how this happens exactly; but I suspect that the traders aren't driving to the power plant or transmission control centers and doing it themselves.
For a company that has efficient generation, they can make a great deal of money selling excess power. This means their customers don't have to pay quite as much.
Here is the real issue: Everybody wants better security; but just tell anyone that you're going to have to up their rates to provide it and see what the reaction is.
We're fortunate to have a good solid VM guy, so implementation was no big deal on our dev box. But we've noticed a few things along the way...
VM is expensive. Engines on the mainframe are expensive, and are the weak point in Z/Linux. Mainframes normally run batch types of workloads, and have great big fat I/O. They're not necessarily great processing powerhouses.
You can download Linux and install it on the mainframe; but you get zero support. If you want support, open up that big old budget again. When we looked at it, Suse wanted about $20k per year, and RedHat wanted $24k. We flew solo instead. So far it's been fine; but be prepared to pay if you want support (which, by the way, is something the PHB's and mainframe systems programmers are used to having.)
As for operational considerations, I haven't really had any problems with it at all. There aren't many rpms out there for z/os; but you can compile almost anything and use it.
Installation is kind of cheesy; but not horrible. You basically set up your vm guest, log in to it and ftp the linux kernel, ramdisk and parmfile to the guest dasd, giving it a fixed record length of 80 bytes. You then feed these into a virtual card punch (that's right, a virtual Hollerith Punch Card Reader - 80 columns = 80 bytes), then into a virtual card reader, and ipl the reader.
This gives you a running instance of linux that you can use to do a net install of the full distribution.
In the implementation class I took, I was partnered with a mainframe guy who was complaining about how archaic vi was. It made me laugh.
"Dude. We just chopped my kernel into 80 byte blocks and fed it into a card reader. Don't talk to me about archaic."
Pilots go solo on many fewer hours than drivers go solo...
But a solo pilot must pass a written exam covering such things as their airport environment, airplane procedures and limitations, and emergency procedures. They also must have an endorsement from an instructor attesting to their skills and training. They don't simply fly for a few hours and then get turned loose on the world.
The biggest reason that there aren't that many air accidents is due to the tiny proportion of planes that are ever in the same airspace. While away from airports the chances of seeing another plane, let alone crashing into it are miniscule - and when near airports you are under instructions from the tower, who keep a lookout for any potential problems.
Over my 15 or so years of flying, I've seen the traffic increase quite a bit. I regularly see other airplanes enroute. When I fly IFR, I regularly get traffic alerts from Center. The big sky isn't nearly so big anymore. And as for the traffic only being heavy at an airport, don't forget that the airplane enters an airport environment twice every flight, on takeoff and landing. It's not as if the pilots can avoid it the way a driver can avoid downtown. Also, separation is only provided when operating under IFR, or in certain VFR circumstances, and is only provided by TRACON or ARTCC. The tower does not officially provide separation, though in practice they provide what I'd call "traffic flow assistance." Their only real responsibility is to keep airplanes separated on the ground. Most airports do not have radar controllers. Many airports do not have towers. Most of the separation that occurs happens because skilled people flying the airplanes know and obey the rules and procedures.
I have a great deal more confidence in my fellow pilots than I do in my fellow drivers.
"No, whomever launched MSBlaster.B is not going to become a media darling"
And he shouldn't. At 18 he knows the score for breaking the law. He also knows the damage this virus could cause.
People who say he's just a misunderstood child, or that he didn't really cause any harm are kind of kidding themselves. Millions were spent cleaning up this mess, and at 18 he may be childish; but he's not a child.
By all means, keep going after the bigger fish; but don't give this punk a pass just because he's 18. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the consequences. Now let him face them like a responsible adult.
Bayesian analysis isn't foolproof. To skew the analysis, simply place a large amount of innocuous and seemingly valid text into some embedded html. This causes the filter to analyze that text as well, adding its benign weight to the spam probability.
No solution is the only way to go. We need a combination of many solutions to stand a chance these days.
At the height of our SPAM problems, we were getting 100k e-mails per day, rejecting about 90k using our own 420k line list, checked against 500 exceptions. We were also using about 10 anti-spam lists, doing several header and body checks, and running the whole thing on a pc that averaged about 5% load average.
I'm a big fan of Postfix. Wietse Venema is a smart man.
I wonder about the emotional effects of this "truth". If you remove deaths from things biological, that means every death will be the result of some tragedy. All would know that their death will be violent, or at least sudden (relatively anyhow, rather than expecting it for the ten years leading up to it.)
Also, it's hard enough to lose a loved one after 30/40/50/60 years, what will be the emotional impact of losing your wife of 200 years, or of losing your brother at age 500.
Will we even want to live that long? I'm not sure I would. I'm already dreaming of retirement, and I'm only 34. I'd imagine that I'd get tired of the daily grind at some point and just shoot myself, wrecking my wife of 300 years.
If these changes happened slowly (and I mean at an evolutionary pace) we might be able to deal with it; but I'm not sure we'd find longevity to be all it's cracked up to be if it was just handed to us.
I understand your point; but it doesn't make it any less loathsome.
If we want to remain the good guys, we have to behave and act in a moral fashion. No doubt we will pay a price for doing so. We will likely be less informed than if we removed all inhibitions (though that could be disputed). We may suffer more successful terrorist attacks, or the consequences of successful attacks elsewhere, etc.
But our fight isn't about survival alone. We have to remain decent people: people worthy of survival.
Paying out on bets about who will be killed next, or who will be attacked by terrorists is a good step in the wrong direction. It's not us, or if it is, it shouldn't be.
You're fighting a learned or intuited behavior in that case.
After time, you're first reaction will be to drop the nose, because the instinct at work here is survival, and survival means lowering the angle of attack below critical.
I for one, don't want the computer to override the pilot. After all, the computer is programmed to fly the airplane in its day to day environment. Any well paid airline pilot will tell you that most of the time the flying is routine and even boring. They get paid for those unexpected emergencies, during which time I think the pilots should have the ability to fly the airplane beyond its design limits with the understanding that it only needs to be done once. They can junk the thing when it lands.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.
I guess the thought is that if things go bad, IBM will either settle in some way that allows them to continue doing busines in AIX/P-series, or will pay whatever damages a court actually orders them to. There's no such entity to keep Linux in business.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous; but there you go... corporate America.
You know, I see just the opposite.
At the company I work for, (and I've heard others doing the same), they're easing back on Linux for mission critical applications and instead buying AIX boxes.
There is no rationality to that at all. After all, IBM is the only one who's actually been sued. Perhaps they have more faith in IBM's legal department than they do in their own.
Slightly OT: I just had a couple of P-series boxes get back-ordered for about a month. My rep told me that the Department of Homeland Security ordered a bunch of AIX boxes - so many that it put manufacturing behind. Tom Ridge must not be too worried about all of this.
This is what I find the most irritating aspect of trying to track down spammers.
The people who are running open relays are either not knowledgeable enough, or motivated enough to respond to my requests for log entries or information regarding messages sent through their relay. Most of them even act offended when I try to politely inform them that they're being abused.
You can call their ISP; but if they are of any size, you generally get ignored.
And the sheer number of them is disheartening.
Yeah. I apologize. Later on when I came back to Slashdot, I realized I had sort of gone off on a rant there. It's one of those things where I really wish I had read my post and yours more carefully before spouting off. :-)
I obviously projected something badly onto your post, and I shouldn't have. I apologize.
Congratulations on your new baby!
The software is bad enough; but the patch process is ridiculous.
If you could patch non-kernel portions of the OS without rebooting, it would be a lot easier on the average Windows admin who has to argue for downtime with the internal customers.
And while you're at it, let's not install every application in the OS every time.
I'm tempted to go on one of those personal crusades against stuff like this. I can't begin to relate the difficulties my wife and I have had over crap like this type of study.
There is no possible way for you to control a control group well enough to get ANY meaningful data from a study that follows people from birth into adulthood. The variables are nearly infinite.
If the people who wrote the study actually performed the data collection and administered the study, they should be shot for putting forward the idea that you can tell anything specific about adulthood from such specific environmental factors in children.
Most of the time, when you hear something like this, it is an interpretation of data that other people collected and deemed only marginally interesting; but some advocate got a hold of and pawned off as meaningful.
A great book to read for new or expecting parents is "The Myth of the First Three Years" by John Bruer.
Play Mozart to your baby because it's soothing and you wish to foster a familiarity with the music. Don't do it because you think it will increase your child's I.Q. by 5 points; because there is nothing that actually suggests that... nothing.
The guy in charge of security at any institution might as well change his name to Snowden.
If you don't recognize this name, Snowden was a character in the Joseph Heller book "Catch 22" He's a gunner in a B-25 who gets shot. The protagonist, Yossarian, goes back to help him, and tells him he'll be fine. Then he opens the kid's jacket and his guts spill out all over the floor. The kid can't see them, so Yossarian keeps trying to comfort him.
That's your security administrator. He's already dead, it's just that nobody has shown him his guts yet.
So it's THIER fault the cracker broke in.
I'm not going to become an apologist for people who don't patch their servers; but at the same time, it's not the NY Times' job to keep crackers from being worthless amoral turds.
He didn't break in because he wanted to help the NY Times. At best he broke in for recognition, or a job, or to feel bigger about himself. So in short, he broke in for his own personal gain.
That doesn't exactly endear him to me as the network messiah, come to save me.
Agreed. I opted out and sent an e-mail to the plaintiff's lawyers protesting.
This is the sort of litigious bull**** that we could do without. If the guy didn't know better than to submit his domain without name servers, or didn't know that these things don't get organized immediately, then he should sue whoever told him how to set up a website. Or better yet, he should just chock it up to learning the new forms of business in the internet age.
And class action my butt. It implies that he was doing this for all those people who were wronged by the defendant. If there were serious damages done, we'd have heard more about it from the enraged masses, and the settlement would have been something real or substantial. This was just a way to "lawyer up."
Damned word wrap.
Here go.
Magic
I first heard of this right here on Slashdot. Wish I could remember who posted it that time so that I could give them proper attribution. Oh well.
o ry -about-magic.html
http://jargon.watson-net.com/section.asp?f=a-st
Maybe instead of putting the burden on the customer, waiters should organize and demand a LIVING WAGE from their employers.
If you think service is bad now, just wait until all of the wait staff make the same amount of money.
The tips are an incentive to do good work. If you're nice to people and do a good job, you can make a fair wage waiting tables. If you ignore people or act dismissive, you won't make much.
As an employer, I know that if a waiter of mine isn't making much money, he won't be around long, which is good. If he's not providing good service, I don't really want him around. At the same time, unless I'm getting a lot of complaints from customers, I don't really have any grounds to fire him. In the end, the better wait staff will stick around longer.
If I pay everybody the same wage, there's no incentive for the worst waiter to do any better, and there's no incentive for the best waiter to do any better than the average waiter who is making the same wage.
You might lose power, you might lose running water, you might get hit by a bus.
Indeed. I often find myself reminding people of this.
It's a weird and messy world: water falls from the sky.
Economics come in to play here a bit as well.
The market for buying and selling excess power is VERY active and exists primarily on the internet. Multi-million dollar deals are made quickly, and while they can be made in advance, they may also be made at the whim of mother nature (excessive heat causing a company to purchase power, or a drop in temp making excess power available).
Implementing the deal means interacting with control systems. I will admit to ignorance of how this happens exactly; but I suspect that the traders aren't driving to the power plant or transmission control centers and doing it themselves.
For a company that has efficient generation, they can make a great deal of money selling excess power. This means their customers don't have to pay quite as much.
Here is the real issue: Everybody wants better security; but just tell anyone that you're going to have to up their rates to provide it and see what the reaction is.
We're fortunate to have a good solid VM guy, so implementation was no big deal on our dev box. But we've noticed a few things along the way...
VM is expensive. Engines on the mainframe are expensive, and are the weak point in Z/Linux. Mainframes normally run batch types of workloads, and have great big fat I/O. They're not necessarily great processing powerhouses.
You can download Linux and install it on the mainframe; but you get zero support. If you want support, open up that big old budget again. When we looked at it, Suse wanted about $20k per year, and RedHat wanted $24k. We flew solo instead. So far it's been fine; but be prepared to pay if you want support (which, by the way, is something the PHB's and mainframe systems programmers are used to having.)
As for operational considerations, I haven't really had any problems with it at all. There aren't many rpms out there for z/os; but you can compile almost anything and use it.
Installation is kind of cheesy; but not horrible. You basically set up your vm guest, log in to it and ftp the linux kernel, ramdisk and parmfile to the guest dasd, giving it a fixed record length of 80 bytes. You then feed these into a virtual card punch (that's right, a virtual Hollerith Punch Card Reader - 80 columns = 80 bytes), then into a virtual card reader, and ipl the reader.
This gives you a running instance of linux that you can use to do a net install of the full distribution.
In the implementation class I took, I was partnered with a mainframe guy who was complaining about how archaic vi was. It made me laugh.
"Dude. We just chopped my kernel into 80 byte blocks and fed it into a card reader. Don't talk to me about archaic."
Pilots go solo on many fewer hours than drivers go solo...
But a solo pilot must pass a written exam covering such things as their airport environment, airplane procedures and limitations, and emergency procedures. They also must have an endorsement from an instructor attesting to their skills and training. They don't simply fly for a few hours and then get turned loose on the world.
The biggest reason that there aren't that many air accidents is due to the tiny proportion of planes that are ever in the same airspace. While away from airports the chances of seeing another plane, let alone crashing into it are miniscule - and when near airports you are under instructions from the tower, who keep a lookout for any potential problems.
Over my 15 or so years of flying, I've seen the traffic increase quite a bit. I regularly see other airplanes enroute. When I fly IFR, I regularly get traffic alerts from Center. The big sky isn't nearly so big anymore. And as for the traffic only being heavy at an airport, don't forget that the airplane enters an airport environment twice every flight, on takeoff and landing. It's not as if the pilots can avoid it the way a driver can avoid downtown. Also, separation is only provided when operating under IFR, or in certain VFR circumstances, and is only provided by TRACON or ARTCC. The tower does not officially provide separation, though in practice they provide what I'd call "traffic flow assistance." Their only real responsibility is to keep airplanes separated on the ground. Most airports do not have radar controllers. Many airports do not have towers. Most of the separation that occurs happens because skilled people flying the airplanes know and obey the rules and procedures.
I have a great deal more confidence in my fellow pilots than I do in my fellow drivers.
"No, whomever launched MSBlaster.B is not going to become a media darling"
And he shouldn't. At 18 he knows the score for breaking the law. He also knows the damage this virus could cause.
People who say he's just a misunderstood child, or that he didn't really cause any harm are kind of kidding themselves. Millions were spent cleaning up this mess, and at 18 he may be childish; but he's not a child.
By all means, keep going after the bigger fish; but don't give this punk a pass just because he's 18. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the consequences. Now let him face them like a responsible adult.
My favorite quote from one of the timelines:
"We're fighting for the right in the industry to be able to make a living with software"
They consider profit an entitlement. As far as I know, there is no right to make a living with software, just an opportunity.
Bayesian analysis isn't foolproof. To skew the analysis, simply place a large amount of innocuous and seemingly valid text into some embedded html. This causes the filter to analyze that text as well, adding its benign weight to the spam probability.
No solution is the only way to go. We need a combination of many solutions to stand a chance these days.
I agree.
At the height of our SPAM problems, we were getting 100k e-mails per day, rejecting about 90k using our own 420k line list, checked against 500 exceptions. We were also using about 10 anti-spam lists, doing several header and body checks, and running the whole thing on a pc that averaged about 5% load average.
I'm a big fan of Postfix. Wietse Venema is a smart man.
How much strength does the triggering x-ray need?
What happens when a suicide terrorist carries a piece of this in his pocket through the airline gate?
I have to agree. And I don't see my allegiance to Google as a sell-out. I see it as a reward for good work.
I wonder about the emotional effects of this "truth". If you remove deaths from things biological, that means every death will be the result of some tragedy. All would know that their death will be violent, or at least sudden (relatively anyhow, rather than expecting it for the ten years leading up to it.)
Also, it's hard enough to lose a loved one after 30/40/50/60 years, what will be the emotional impact of losing your wife of 200 years, or of losing your brother at age 500.
Will we even want to live that long? I'm not sure I would. I'm already dreaming of retirement, and I'm only 34. I'd imagine that I'd get tired of the daily grind at some point and just shoot myself, wrecking my wife of 300 years.
If these changes happened slowly (and I mean at an evolutionary pace) we might be able to deal with it; but I'm not sure we'd find longevity to be all it's cracked up to be if it was just handed to us.
I understand your point; but it doesn't make it any less loathsome.
If we want to remain the good guys, we have to behave and act in a moral fashion. No doubt we will pay a price for doing so. We will likely be less informed than if we removed all inhibitions (though that could be disputed). We may suffer more successful terrorist attacks, or the consequences of successful attacks elsewhere, etc.
But our fight isn't about survival alone. We have to remain decent people: people worthy of survival.
Paying out on bets about who will be killed next, or who will be attacked by terrorists is a good step in the wrong direction. It's not us, or if it is, it shouldn't be.
You're fighting a learned or intuited behavior in that case.
After time, you're first reaction will be to drop the nose, because the instinct at work here is survival, and survival means lowering the angle of attack below critical.
I for one, don't want the computer to override the pilot. After all, the computer is programmed to fly the airplane in its day to day environment. Any well paid airline pilot will tell you that most of the time the flying is routine and even boring. They get paid for those unexpected emergencies, during which time I think the pilots should have the ability to fly the airplane beyond its design limits with the understanding that it only needs to be done once. They can junk the thing when it lands.