Another factor is that you are ignoring delivery methods. Most organizations use email constantly throughout the day - so the notification that "You've got spam!" gets very annoying very quickly when you hear it every eight minutes all day long, every day of the week. (Yes, I had one user who was receiving 200+ spam messages per day). Contrast this with snail mail: you only deal with it once a day, and even that is (probably) at your leisure. Even if it is full of junk, it's still a one-time confrontation per day.
Seriously, how annoyed would you get if the mailman rang the doorbell with every delivery, and delivered 75 times a day?
If the person who was stopped wants the D.A. to file charges, then yes, Brian Kelly is up the creek. But that doesn't seem to be the case - from what I can tell, it was the officer who detained* Brian's friend who decided Brian should be arrested (and subsequently charged with a crime).
Police said the officer saw Kelly had a camera in his lap, aimed at him and was concealing it with his hands.
Kelly said his friend was cited.... He said he held the camera in plain view and turned it on when the officer yelled at his pal."
A District Attorney is going to have a hard time of getting a conviction unless someone is willing to press charges, accusing someone else (in this case, Brian Kelly) of a crime. What would happen to the D.A.'s case, if Brian Kelly asked his pal to be a witness, and his pal said "Heck, I wanted Brian to record the cop that was yelling at me!"
Kind of makes the "non-consensual recording" charge go out the window, don't you think?
*technically, detention == arrested, if only long enough to issue a citation.
I mostly agree with you, but I do disagree on one point. Yes, Novell has been screwed by Microsoft a lot. As a Novell server administrator, I can recall five different instances where Microsoft deliberately shipped code (or worked with developers to ship code) with features to sabotage Novell customers. In essence, since 1990, Novell has been the biggest target of Microsoft's plan to crush it's competition.
Has Microsoft been successful? Like you say, Novell used to dominate their sector, and now.... But: it's been more than sixteen years, and they are still here. Most of Microsoft's other specific targets didn't make it: OS/2, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect. Some, like Oracle, Adobe, and Nintendo are still here, but one could argue that Microsoft hasn't been as devoted to crushing them as they have been toward the other targets.
Anyway, my point is that if you are the elephants in Bill Gates sixteen year safari, that you are not yet extinct does indicate some level of shrewdness.
Doesn't mean they are out of danger though. It's hard to see how asking for an invite into camp is supposed to work out well for the remaining elephant. Unless it's planning to stomp on all the ammo, once inside.
Number (1) is funny because Ted Stevens is thought to be stupid about the internet, and this article is (paraphrased): "Which person should I vote for, on the basis that they 'get' technology?" Of course, Ted Stevens is thought to be stupid about the internet, because: a) he sided with the major telecoms on how to strangle the internet (net neutrality), b) he has a reputation for being corrupt (the bridge to nowhere), c) he doesn't understand the internet and just parroted what the the telecomm lobbyist told him (the internet is like a series of tubes). So "Vote For Ted Stevens!" is a joke ("you'd have to be the biggest chump ever to vote for Ted Stevens").
Number (2) is funny because moving data and moving stuff is an analogy that comes easily, yet is fundamentally flawed. Every time someone uses a transportation of goods analogy for the internet, Vint Cerf kills a kitten.
Seriously, the pain here is that people are smart enough to understand that transportation analogies are bad - and Ted Stevens has demonstrated that knows he should not use a transportation analogy when describing the internet. So if he is smart enough to know that, he's a good candidate, right? (No - see funny (1) above).
You owe me a dollar too. We have a property tax system running on a mixture of COBOL and CICS that keeps on humming. Some of that code was written in the 1960's.... Thing is, property tax law doesn't change all that often, nor does the structure of the data. The programmers that we have love their job because it's easy as heck: write a new report every once in a while, twiddle with things a little here and there, generally work on things that are more interesting; but always be available to work on the property tax system, because that is how we all get PAID.
They did look at replacing it a few years ago, because it seemed the trendy thing to do. As it turns out, every county does their property tax a little different than the next. This means that there is no off-the-shelf / canned solution available. It was going to have be a whole 100% custom system that cost more that $1 million to implement.
And for what? So that we can say that we got rid of COBOL? Our taxpayers deserve better treatment than that....
At some point, the mainframe will become a virtual machine inside a big beefy PC. But I'll bet that COBOL code will still be reading records and printing bills five - ten years from now.
I'm kind of surprised that people place SPF records out there as Neutral. Mine says Fail if the sending MTA is not in my specific IP address range. Period.
Now admittedly, I don't have users that want to be outside our network and send mail as if they are inside our network. This is a problem I expect a huge corporation (or like you say in another post: an ISP) might have. But for every small business (or even medium sized business or agency), I'd think it would be SOP.
I guess I don't see the downside to publishing the information to hard fail any impersonating spam engines.
The problem I see with DKIM is that I'm going to burn a huge number of CPU cycles to receive "signed" spam. I can get 90% of the forgery problem solved with SPF and reverse DNS lookups with far far fewer cpu cycles burned. Since the spam problem isn't solved, why not go for the trivial forgery solution?
I suppose my attitude is a little less aggressive than it used to be, because I'm in the deployment phase of an anti-spam solution that has so far worked great: quarantine them all, and let the users sort them out.;-)
Sure, reverse engineering MS object code is harder than cut/copy/paste source code made available direct from Microsoft. I don't think Novell would do that, but obviously some people think they might.
But it doesn't change the ability of anyone inserting patented code into stuff they shouldn't. And thus, Microsoft is a threat everyone. Novell offering to support the EFF isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Similarly, It isn't in Blizzard's best interest if you come to the table with a decent (but not great) machine and get so badly beat that you become bitter and tell your friends. Faster hardware should make the game more fun for you, and could even give you a slight advantage - but if the advantage is too great, then one guy gets to have fun, and three others get bummed. A better business model is to make all four people happy.
You make a decent point. I'm now an email administrator mostly - which means reading and writing a lot of email, or reading and writing documentation. Thus, the flow of text in sentences and paragraphs is my practice; the short declaratory nature of code isn't something I'm used to (any more).
Somehow, I think that even if I had an automated reformatter presenting the material to me, I'd get frustrated. I suppose if there were a smooth-scrolling feature that could keep up with my reading speed, I would give it another shot. But rather like the Dvorak keyboard, I think this is a large solution to a minor problem.
Perhaps I am one of those aural thinkers - but the GP top paragraph just flowed for me, and the reformatted one was awful. FWIW, I was a bookworm as a kid, and read pretty quickly (depending on the material).
It might be a different case if I learned the vertical stuff first - but I didn't. So reading the vertical stuff just caused me exceptional frustration as the next thing I wanted to read wasn't there, and I had to look to the next line down.
That was one of my all-time favorite SNL skits ever. I remember Ernestine (Lilly Tomlin) hitting as many buttons as she could with her elbows, ("There goes Peoria") and I (literally) fell out of my chair laughing.
And then they delivered the punchline.
If Saturday Night Live were that funny now, I'd watch every new episode.
I remember, immediately post breakup, of offers of seven cents a minute, and five cents a minute for long distance service (in 1980 dollars). I know that my phone calls to my girlfriend went from $150 a month to $40 a month. Although it isn't surprising that former AT&T engineers may lament the passing of their monopoly, I was, and still am, all for it.
I'd be happier if the FCC would free up the markets, instead of allowing each monopoly to protect its turf. Yes, I think the phone companies should be allowed to broadcast TV. And the TV companies should be allowed to sell phone service. Ditto Clearwire. Heck, I'd like to allow the electric power companies to become fiber-to-the-home ISP's. Now if only I could figure out "incentives" to get them to bury the cables underground.
Similarly, see if your help desk ticketing system can be connected to a survey system. In our organization, every time a help desk ticket is closed, an email goes out to the end user ("please click this link to take the survey").
The survey includes questions about responsiveness, courtesy, time-to-resolution, number of interactions required, technical proficiency of the service person. It's important to know where you are great, and where you are less-than-great. Over time, you can show how the organization improved it's services. The survey results go to management and the department heads, not the technicians.
It doesn't really help you compare your organization to another, but the improvements that come from it will make your organization better. With that, worries about "how you compare" lessen - prove yourself good, and you'll get budget dollars for more improvements.
Another option is Novell ZENworks. They've been doing this since 1998, so it's not like they are new at it. Novell is working reasonably hard to make ZENworks "directory independent" - in other words, run on either eDirectory or Active Directory. Unfortunately, I don't believe the Windows 98 machines will work with the upcoming ZENworks 7 - but I think they do work with ZENworks 6.5. At BrainShare, one of the cool demos was that they pointed ZENworks discovery manager at a subnet, and it found the machines without an agent, and auto-installed the agent without touching the machine. (The ZENworks administrator did have to supply a username and password to get the program installed - but there was no remote-control required, no user intervention, nothing. The demo was run against a Windows Vista machine).
The other benefit to using ZENworks is that they are adding Linux to their base of managed systems. If your environment will expand in that direction, the one tool manages both.
We've been down this road before. First, the GIM 1.0 standard is announced. Then, Google makes a superior robotic product and Intel and Microsoft make some money selling more stuff. Microsoft wants it all though, so they add a clunky slow new interface (perhaps voice-control) that is obviously a burden now but will eventually dominate all robotic interfaces (given time). Microsoft doesn't want to wait though, in case Google pushes the current technology to make the Microsoft tech look silly. So Microsoft finds a subtle part of GIM 1.0 that isn't nailed down, and changes it (moving from byte boundaries to word boundaries for memory access, or word boundaries to block boundaries or some such). They re-write all the supporting code in their own robot to deal with the change. Then Microsoft issues a Critical Update on www.gimrobotsupdate.com - overnight every Google robot answers each command to power up with violent spasmodic flailing against the floor.
You hear a little voice come out of the Googlerobot: "This robot has violated the First Law, you should ask Google why they put out such a crappy product."
Thanks for the link to that article - that was great.
As far as I/O prioritization goes, one of the things old mainframes have that we still don't have in the microcomputer world is high-throughput I/O channels. 64 CPU cores is nice, but getting them to chew through 60 TB of data quickly really requires some planning to open up the I/O channels and keep those channels full.
Obviously, I expect that the slowest part of the system will be the I/O channel - not the process scheduler. With that new I/O block scheduler you mentioned, I could be wrong.
As the field expands, we interpret it as time - but the actual drag on the field is seen as gravity. This makes the four directions left-right, up-down, forward-backward, (and in a twisty spiral that looks like a logarithmic curve, but is really just yet-another-right-angle in the fourth dimension) inward-outward (collapsing-expanding).
OK - I'm just messing with you. I have no idea - but I looked through a textbook at a UC Berkeley bookstore years ago with that title, with the picture of the logarithmic spiral, and liked the idea.
"But I hear the Linux business is up for sale, anyway, and that they will eventually break the company into several pieces."
Is the definition of irony a mover and shaker in the FSF spreading FUD to help Microsoft? Or was the comment about Novell supposed to be a back-handed endorsement of some kind? Because I'm pretty sure I read earlier someone saying we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.
Oooof - I don't remember. I went to Xiotech training last summer, and I remember hearing "90% full is a problem" several times. 90% full on allocated LUN's makes the most sense, because the Xiotech needs to deal with striping and parity data behind the scenes. To the server, it's just a hard disk with an (initial) long spinup delay. I don't see the Xiotech caring if the blocks being requested by the OS are near the front of the (virtual) disk or the end of the virtual disk. So I'm going with option C - call Xiotech, and ask them to run their performance diagnostics on your SAN. They can take a snapshot of the current performance statistics, and tell you if you need to buy more disk. They'll love to remote in and check out whether they should tell you to buy more disk.;-)
The Xiotech machinery tends to run along fine... right up until you cross the 90% full threshold. Then performance goes in the toilet, fast. Which is probably better than getting to 100% full and crashing hard....
Seconded on the suggestion to call Xiotech. They know their stuff and should be able to help you out.
It's kind of funny - I'm at Novell BrainShare, and my fourth session of the day was how to diagnose poor server performance due to SAN congestion. In NetWare we have always had tools to measure how well the disk subsystem is handling - but I have no idea if Windows/Citrix can provide the same. I would think so, using the WMI interfaces, but I don't know. We were talking about disk subsystem statistics, and a Mainframe guy asked about stuff. As it turns out, they have way more detailed information about the disk subsystems than we do in the Intel world. The mainframe keeps track of how many nanoseconds it takes for the disk heads to position themselves, how many nanoseconds the File Open takes, how many milliseconds the Read takes, how many nanoseconds the File Close takes. In the NetWare world, we can (easily) tell how many disk writes are pending, how many disk reads are pending, how long ago did a file read not come out of cache - but not a whole lot at such a really low level. I have no idea where we would get those kinds of statistics in Linux.
I think we can agree. I see your point about distinguishing features: people don't try something new if it is the same old boring thing. And I agree that the Gnome people should focus on innovation - not just copying the Microsoft interface. That being said, it doesn't help to scare off newbies. Maybe the Mandriva people should be the ones to work on an uber-friendly interface.
I'm just thinking that my mom has this group of laidies that play Majhong. If my mom started using Linux, and it worked for her, there would be at least a couple of the Majhong ladies that would be willing to try it. Honestly, all my mom does with her computer is email (which is really just a web app), photos, and surfing the web. Once a year, she needs to run a tax program.
There really ins't anything here that Linux couldn't do - so long as my mom and friends don't get into a situation where they have to open up a new terminal and type grep 'error'/var/log/message or something.
You've obviously never met my mom. Does she pay the Microsoft tax? Yes. Would I rather she didn't? Sure.
But trying to be different for the sake of difference isn't that great an idea. Unless that Dvorak keyboard is working out well for you... (and I can promise you, it wouldn't work out well for my mom). In my ideal world, some distribution of Linux would come with the "Redmond" window manager, that I could plop in front of my mom, and her 65+ year old brain would deal with just fine.
I don't want Novell to change Gnome to mimic Windows; but I wouldn't mind if they wrote an optional skin to ease the transition for people who would otherwise see the foreigness as a reason to tell their friends to stay away.
So what if they bought into open source? They are still responsible for the technical and market state of Suse - because they are responsible to their customers. Some companies buy other companies and fire all the programmers; think Computer Associates or SCO or Corel. I don't see that is the case with Novell. If Novell was nothing but a bunch of freeloaders, then your bias might be fair. But they do fund people to write and continue to maintain open source projects. I see 43 projects listed at the Open Source & Novell page.
As a paying customer, do I benefit from Novell working on the OpenSLP project? Of course I do. You do to. Or you will, once your network gets large enough that TCP/IP based services ought to be auto-discoverable instead of hand-worked.
My point is that yes, Novell is a commercial venture, and I'm one of those customers. If Novell can issue a press release that tells my CIO that the path he allowed us to travel (we have implemented 25+ Suse servers in a year and a quarter) is a good path, then I win. Obviously, the Ziff-Davis reporter is pandering to the "lets hate Linux and affirm our love of Microsoft crowd". But in the real world, if my CIO hears that the vendor he already is working with is gaining market share, that makes my position more solid.
I'm not a Novell shareholder, but I do have a lot of Novell product knowledge that I don't want it trivialized. If Novell improves the code you and I use, that's good for me. If Novell tells people they are winning customers, that's good for me.
You just don't want to hear that, because it doesn't fit your bias.
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Seriously, how annoyed would you get if the mailman rang the doorbell with every delivery, and delivered 75 times a day?
A District Attorney is going to have a hard time of getting a conviction unless someone is willing to press charges, accusing someone else (in this case, Brian Kelly) of a crime. What would happen to the D.A.'s case, if Brian Kelly asked his pal to be a witness, and his pal said "Heck, I wanted Brian to record the cop that was yelling at me!"
Kind of makes the "non-consensual recording" charge go out the window, don't you think?
*technically, detention == arrested, if only long enough to issue a citation.
Has Microsoft been successful? Like you say, Novell used to dominate their sector, and now.... But: it's been more than sixteen years, and they are still here. Most of Microsoft's other specific targets didn't make it: OS/2, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect. Some, like Oracle, Adobe, and Nintendo are still here, but one could argue that Microsoft hasn't been as devoted to crushing them as they have been toward the other targets.
Anyway, my point is that if you are the elephants in Bill Gates sixteen year safari, that you are not yet extinct does indicate some level of shrewdness.
Doesn't mean they are out of danger though. It's hard to see how asking for an invite into camp is supposed to work out well for the remaining elephant. Unless it's planning to stomp on all the ammo, once inside.
1) Vote for Ted Stevens.
2) The Internet is like a big truck.
Number (1) is funny because Ted Stevens is thought to be stupid about the internet, and this article is (paraphrased): "Which person should I vote for, on the basis that they 'get' technology?" Of course, Ted Stevens is thought to be stupid about the internet, because: a) he sided with the major telecoms on how to strangle the internet (net neutrality), b) he has a reputation for being corrupt (the bridge to nowhere), c) he doesn't understand the internet and just parroted what the the telecomm lobbyist told him (the internet is like a series of tubes). So "Vote For Ted Stevens!" is a joke ("you'd have to be the biggest chump ever to vote for Ted Stevens").
Number (2) is funny because moving data and moving stuff is an analogy that comes easily, yet is fundamentally flawed. Every time someone uses a transportation of goods analogy for the internet, Vint Cerf kills a kitten.
Seriously, the pain here is that people are smart enough to understand that transportation analogies are bad - and Ted Stevens has demonstrated that knows he should not use a transportation analogy when describing the internet. So if he is smart enough to know that, he's a good candidate, right? (No - see funny (1) above).
They did look at replacing it a few years ago, because it seemed the trendy thing to do. As it turns out, every county does their property tax a little different than the next. This means that there is no off-the-shelf / canned solution available. It was going to have be a whole 100% custom system that cost more that $1 million to implement.
And for what? So that we can say that we got rid of COBOL? Our taxpayers deserve better treatment than that....
At some point, the mainframe will become a virtual machine inside a big beefy PC. But I'll bet that COBOL code will still be reading records and printing bills five - ten years from now.
Now admittedly, I don't have users that want to be outside our network and send mail as if they are inside our network. This is a problem I expect a huge corporation (or like you say in another post: an ISP) might have. But for every small business (or even medium sized business or agency), I'd think it would be SOP.
I guess I don't see the downside to publishing the information to hard fail any impersonating spam engines.
The problem I see with DKIM is that I'm going to burn a huge number of CPU cycles to receive "signed" spam. I can get 90% of the forgery problem solved with SPF and reverse DNS lookups with far far fewer cpu cycles burned. Since the spam problem isn't solved, why not go for the trivial forgery solution?
I suppose my attitude is a little less aggressive than it used to be, because I'm in the deployment phase of an anti-spam solution that has so far worked great: quarantine them all, and let the users sort them out. ;-)
Sure, reverse engineering MS object code is harder than cut/copy/paste source code made available direct from Microsoft. I don't think Novell would do that, but obviously some people think they might.
But it doesn't change the ability of anyone inserting patented code into stuff they shouldn't. And thus, Microsoft is a threat everyone. Novell offering to support the EFF isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Similarly, It isn't in Blizzard's best interest if you come to the table with a decent (but not great) machine and get so badly beat that you become bitter and tell your friends. Faster hardware should make the game more fun for you, and could even give you a slight advantage - but if the advantage is too great, then one guy gets to have fun, and three others get bummed. A better business model is to make all four people happy.
Somehow, I think that even if I had an automated reformatter presenting the material to me, I'd get frustrated. I suppose if there were a smooth-scrolling feature that could keep up with my reading speed, I would give it another shot. But rather like the Dvorak keyboard, I think this is a large solution to a minor problem.
It might be a different case if I learned the vertical stuff first - but I didn't. So reading the vertical stuff just caused me exceptional frustration as the next thing I wanted to read wasn't there, and I had to look to the next line down.
And then they delivered the punchline.
If Saturday Night Live were that funny now, I'd watch every new episode.
Seems like the punchline is still true, too.
I'd be happier if the FCC would free up the markets, instead of allowing each monopoly to protect its turf. Yes, I think the phone companies should be allowed to broadcast TV. And the TV companies should be allowed to sell phone service. Ditto Clearwire. Heck, I'd like to allow the electric power companies to become fiber-to-the-home ISP's. Now if only I could figure out "incentives" to get them to bury the cables underground.
Anyway, I have never thought very much of AT&T.
The survey includes questions about responsiveness, courtesy, time-to-resolution, number of interactions required, technical proficiency of the service person. It's important to know where you are great, and where you are less-than-great. Over time, you can show how the organization improved it's services. The survey results go to management and the department heads, not the technicians.
It doesn't really help you compare your organization to another, but the improvements that come from it will make your organization better. With that, worries about "how you compare" lessen - prove yourself good, and you'll get budget dollars for more improvements.
The other benefit to using ZENworks is that they are adding Linux to their base of managed systems. If your environment will expand in that direction, the one tool manages both.
You hear a little voice come out of the Googlerobot: "This robot has violated the First Law, you should ask Google why they put out such a crappy product."
And the rest is (future) history.
As far as I/O prioritization goes, one of the things old mainframes have that we still don't have in the microcomputer world is high-throughput I/O channels. 64 CPU cores is nice, but getting them to chew through 60 TB of data quickly really requires some planning to open up the I/O channels and keep those channels full.
Obviously, I expect that the slowest part of the system will be the I/O channel - not the process scheduler. With that new I/O block scheduler you mentioned, I could be wrong.
OK - I'm just messing with you. I have no idea - but I looked through a textbook at a UC Berkeley bookstore years ago with that title, with the picture of the logarithmic spiral, and liked the idea.
And thanks for reminding me that it is 80% full, not 90%.
Seconded on the suggestion to call Xiotech. They know their stuff and should be able to help you out.
It's kind of funny - I'm at Novell BrainShare, and my fourth session of the day was how to diagnose poor server performance due to SAN congestion. In NetWare we have always had tools to measure how well the disk subsystem is handling - but I have no idea if Windows/Citrix can provide the same. I would think so, using the WMI interfaces, but I don't know. We were talking about disk subsystem statistics, and a Mainframe guy asked about stuff. As it turns out, they have way more detailed information about the disk subsystems than we do in the Intel world. The mainframe keeps track of how many nanoseconds it takes for the disk heads to position themselves, how many nanoseconds the File Open takes, how many milliseconds the Read takes, how many nanoseconds the File Close takes. In the NetWare world, we can (easily) tell how many disk writes are pending, how many disk reads are pending, how long ago did a file read not come out of cache - but not a whole lot at such a really low level. I have no idea where we would get those kinds of statistics in Linux.
I'm just thinking that my mom has this group of laidies that play Majhong. If my mom started using Linux, and it worked for her, there would be at least a couple of the Majhong ladies that would be willing to try it. Honestly, all my mom does with her computer is email (which is really just a web app), photos, and surfing the web. Once a year, she needs to run a tax program.
There really ins't anything here that Linux couldn't do - so long as my mom and friends don't get into a situation where they have to open up a new terminal and type grep 'error' /var/log/message or something.
But trying to be different for the sake of difference isn't that great an idea. Unless that Dvorak keyboard is working out well for you... (and I can promise you, it wouldn't work out well for my mom). In my ideal world, some distribution of Linux would come with the "Redmond" window manager, that I could plop in front of my mom, and her 65+ year old brain would deal with just fine.
I don't want Novell to change Gnome to mimic Windows; but I wouldn't mind if they wrote an optional skin to ease the transition for people who would otherwise see the foreigness as a reason to tell their friends to stay away.
As a paying customer, do I benefit from Novell working on the OpenSLP project? Of course I do. You do to. Or you will, once your network gets large enough that TCP/IP based services ought to be auto-discoverable instead of hand-worked.
My point is that yes, Novell is a commercial venture, and I'm one of those customers. If Novell can issue a press release that tells my CIO that the path he allowed us to travel (we have implemented 25+ Suse servers in a year and a quarter) is a good path, then I win. Obviously, the Ziff-Davis reporter is pandering to the "lets hate Linux and affirm our love of Microsoft crowd". But in the real world, if my CIO hears that the vendor he already is working with is gaining market share, that makes my position more solid.
I'm not a Novell shareholder, but I do have a lot of Novell product knowledge that I don't want it trivialized. If Novell improves the code you and I use, that's good for me. If Novell tells people they are winning customers, that's good for me.
You just don't want to hear that, because it doesn't fit your bias.