I wrote a replacement GINA for $BIG_PROJECT that I was on. What a nightmare.
Unfortunately, GINA doesn't do everything, and it is (or at least was when I had the misfortune to write a replacement GINA) very badly documented. We had a $40K support contract with MS to provide us development support for this, but it was a complete waste of money - they couldn't answer our questions. We ended up essentially reverse engineering msgina.dll to find out exactly what needed to be set for everything to work correctly (we were writing a complete replacement, rather than a stub GINA).
"companies like IBM and Sun pay them several orders of magnitude more than 25/k per year"
Really?
They certainly weren't when I was working there. One order of magnitude more than 25K would be in the $100K range. A couple of orders of magnitude would be in the $1MM range. Several orders of magnitude higher would be in the $10MM+ range.
I've never heard of any UNIX admin being paid more than ten million dollars a year!
> Which is precisly why I dumped Linux which stupidily ties in FTP to the OS.
Linux DOES NOT tie FTP into the OS. Where did you get this idea from? I've never found a kernel FTP daemon. Most of my Linux and BSD systems don't even run ftpd at all.
My question is why hospitals are using CONSUMER grade equipment (hardware and operating systems) at all. A surgeon would probably try and choke you to death if you suggested he used consumer grade sterilizing equipment that people use to clean out their home brew beer kits to sterilizing his tools: why is it then acceptable to use consumer grade computers and operating systems?
> I've got to do something to make up for the contaminated well water I drank as a teenager for over 1 year
Maybe not. My grandfather is now 80, and his house still doesn't have mains water. He's been drinking water contaminated by fertilizer, bacteria and god knows what else for five decades.
He doesn't seem to get ill often. Just maybe by not being obsessed by everything being sterile, he has an immune system actually worth something?
SCO *don't* have any of their copyrighted code in Linux. This is SCO's basis for the lawsuit:
IBM added NUMA, JFS et al. to AIX. AIX is a derivative of SysV, and covered by our contract. IBM put NUMA, JFS et al. into Linux 2.4.x Since NUMA, JFS is in AIX, it makes them also derivatives of SysV. We don't have any copyright claim to them, but since they are derivatives of SysV, it's our IP anyway. Therefore, since NUMA, JFS et al. are now in Linux 2.4.x, Linux 2.4.x and newer are SysV derivatives. Therefore we can charge a licensing fee for Linux since it is now a SysV derivative (even though we wrote none of the code, or even hold the copyrights to the alleged infringing components).
My bets are if you sign the NDA with SCO, they'll send you parts of the NUMA or JFS implementation in Linux, and the equivalent parts from AIX. You will be told AIX is a derivative of SysV, so therefore, here's the line-for-line identical infringing code in Linux.
SCO's argument can be summed up as follows:
Our cat has four legs. IBM's dog has four legs. Therefore IBM's dog is a cat.
Now Microsoft go on about the viral nature of the GPL. If they think that's viral, they should take heed of what's now happening to IBM - I think NUMA and JFS was developed for other operating systems first and then added to AIX as it seemed a good idea. Now these pre-existing pieces of IP are tainted by the viral nature of SysV, and become derivatives, even though they previously existed outside of SysV and were never contributed to by SCO.
The damned thing blew up (went bang, magic smoke came out). When I fitted a new PSU, I found that when it went, it had taken out the motherboard, graphics card, both hard drives and CD-RW drive. The only survivors were the network card, DVD-ROM, keyboard and mouse. The fuse in the PSU didn't even blow.
Meanwhile, the adjacent Sun Ultra 5, Dell PC, printer and other kit carried on running as it always has - so I doubt it was a surge in the mains power.
Technology problems like X itself? I keep hearing people beat this dead horse, but no one has actually come up with a _valid_ reason why X is bad.
I strongly disagree that X is bad - in fact it's one of the great strengths of Linux/*BSD/Unix windowed interfaces. It was designed correctly to begin with.
Let's slay the most common myths about X now:
Argument: X is network transparent. All the requests are done over a socket. This means it's slow. Rebuttal: On the local host, the X protocol goes over a Unix domain socket. It's just a form of interprocess communication - it does not use the TCP/IP stack on the local host. Windows also uses IPC. There is direct rendering for games (RTCW:ET and UT runs just as well on Linux/X as it does on Windows).
Argument: Xlib is complicated. Rebuttal: So is Win32. But hardly anyone programs directly in Xlib, and hardly anyone programs Win32 directly either for GUI programs. Windows programmers will use something like the IBM Class Library or MFC. X applications will use Qt or GTK+.
Argument: No one uses the network transparency anyway. Rebuttal: Most UNIX admins I've known who have a network with more than one UNIX/BSD/Linux machine use the network transparency as a matter of course every day. The Secure Shell includes X forwarding to make it even easier. It's convenient and easy.
I think people criticise X because they simply don't understand it, or think that since it's been around since the mid-80s, it ought to be replaced. X has grown with technology, and because it was designed right in the first place, it still makes a great foundation for a GUI today.
If you like War of the Worlds, try Jeff Wayne's musical version. Get the original (when I lived in the US, I had to order it from the UK because I could only find the remix in the US which has had lukewarm reviews at best) Amazon.co.uk has it.
Oops, forgot, you can't do that. Even reputable computer shops now insist that you show them your Windows license before they'll allow you to buy an OS-less computer
That's certainly not the case in Britain - there's several suppliers who will sell you anything from a laptop to a loaded gaming machine with no OS. A bare machine is about 50-60 cheaper than one with XP Home, and about 80-90 cheaper than one XP Pro.
IBM doesn't even employ 3M people - you're not even in the same order of magnitude. If they outsource 3M jobs, they are *employing* an extra 2.75M people. Sounds like it'd be good for the world as a whole.
If people are laughing at the name "MySQL" and telling you to get something more professional, use PostgreSQL. It's a much more feature rich DB too (has many basic things that MySQL still lacks such as enforcement of referential integrity, triggers etc.)
Re: Piled Higher and Deeper?
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You do realise that just like BS stands for 'Bullshit', Ph.D. just stands for Piled higher and Deeper?
The MX license would work a bit like the pilot's license - each country administers their own exams which are compliant with an international standard, just like pilot's licenses are (so international travel can happen).
Nothing MTA specific - just general knowledge like having good knowledge of the RFCs for email, how to check an MTA is not acting as an open relay (it's possible to do this for *all* MTAs by telnet hostname smtp, without any MTA-specific knowledge) etc. plus ancilliary general knowledge (TCP/IP networks etc.). All in all you could probably do an MTA course in a couple of weeks. Of course, the applicant would have to pay for the exam, but there'd be enough that the Govt. could make a tidy profit, so Governments would like it.
A licensed MTA operator will then be able to register their MX on a global listing.
Conditions of the license would say that you must only accept SMTP from registered MXs on the list.
Things such as spam, child porn, being hacked, distributing warez, illegal MP3s etc. will of course lead to a suspension of the MTA license and removal from the list - in some cases, temporary, in others (such as Ralsky cases) permanent. And of course, a background check would be part of the issuance of an MTA license.
It's possible and totally desirable to have the MTA license 'MTA agnostic'. Unfortunately, people have got religious about their MTA, and just like proper religions, no good comes of this. Look at how Christianity has lead to the murder and torture of millions. Religion is bad, period. MTA religion probably hasn't lead to deaths, but I'm sure it's lead to many bad/insecure/misconfigured systems because due to religion, people have chosen inferior MTAs such as sendmail when they really should have used Exim or qmail.
They aren't banning free email (as some kneejerking Slashdotters have implied in this article), they just want it traceable.
Email accounts should all be traceable. It should be legislated that some kind of physical address/person identification is required for any form of email access, free or paid for. It's not stopping you from emailing, or censoring you - it's just making you accountable. It's getting to the stage with spam etc. that really we need a licensing system to be allowed to run a MTA. All ISPs by law should be forced to block SMTP traffic except from their registered MXs, and the administrator of the system should have to be licensed, just like a radio operator. Too much spam coming from your MX? Your license gets revoked. Of course, all the whiners who can't configure sendmail to save their life (but run it anyway, usually as an open relay) would be up in arms about such a scheme, but it's about time it's done.
It seems like so many people are taking principles of anonymity to the levels of zealotry (just look at the responses to this article to see what I mean). When anything ends up getting 'religious' it hurts the cause. What do we want? An accountable email system where the police only have to log/record/watch suspects, or an unaccountable email system where they have to watch much more, with the associated 'collateral damage' of ending up watching some non-suspects because you don't know who they are? You just have to look at the real religions (such as Christian fundamentalists) to realise when anything gets religious, it ends up in destruction. How many people have Christian zealots killed? This can translate to "How many potential Linux users have Linux zealots turned off?" or "How many people who care about privacy have been turned off by the rantings of ACLU zealots?"
Re:Why are they running Windows then?
on
Can .NET Really Scale?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I had a long discussion with a good friend who is not terribly computer literate. Linux drives him _crazy_ because he can't just, "point, click and go" as he said it.
Windows systems need an administrator every bit as clueful as a UNIX sysadmin if they are to have any reliability at all. If the Windows 'sysadmin' has to be able to point-click-go to be able to function, in all probability the Windows system will be unreliable and insecure.
It is a false economy to think that "It's Windows. I can hire a junior reboot monkey to admin the system" - a Windows system really does require a sysadmin every bit as competent, skilled and clueful as a Unix system. A Windows system can be very reliable with a clueful admin - but it *needs* a clueful admin. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they think otherwise.
Hrm. I think it's an opportunity. It is our destiny that our machines replace us; once we have machines that are better at doing the general purpose things we are, why not just become our machines? It's the next logical step in our evolution.
Just imagine what it would be like if we could abandon our fragile, biological bodies for a self-repairing machine body: - Space travel: life support greatly simplified. Just need an energy source and sufficient radiation shielding for the components which will already be a lot more tolerant of radiation than our bodies. - Repairs - break your back, just get a new one. No more being crippled for the rest of your life. - Hostile environments may no longer be hostile. We can live on Mars without the need to terraform. - Interstellar travel possible - just shut down for the duration of the journey, and restart at the destination. - Ability to back up data in the brain, so if the body gets totally trashed, a restore is possible. - Ability to complement the intelligent parts with simple procedurally programmed parts - mental arithmetic suddenly becomes instantaneous. You may have had a problem calculating 3 * 47 / 2 -3 + 4096 / 7 in your head, but now you can comfortably work out the square root of pi without worrying about where the calculator went....and many more other things.
Yes I can. I've been to Indiana. I've even spent a night in Valporizo. I've personally set foot in 26 U.S. states.
Now I don't find it surprising when people in the US don't know where the Isle of Man is (although I wish they wouldn't ask "Is there an Isle of Woman?" - because that little jape is getting a little bit old now! Although that does lead to a discussion of Mannannan and his cloak) To be fair, the Isle of Man is well known in the US by bikers (due to the racing) and cat lovers (due to Manx cats).
However, I was flummoxed when I was asked whether English was spoken in England. (No joke. I was actually asked this question on two separate occasions. OK, so the women in question were blonde, but come on!) It took all my willpower to keep a straight face when explaining English is called English because it comes from England!
4-5 Gs can be tolerated without blacking out by many people. Fighter pilots with G-suits can take much more (around 8-9).
I've done aerobatic training in a Bellanca Super Decathalon (a piston engined single engine light aircraft), and I can pull 4 G without any ill effect (apart from feeling a bit heavy of course!). The most I've ever pulled is 5.5G, and I've not blacked out/greyed out at that. However, it's quite individual. I took a friend for a ride, and he blacked out momentarily during the bottom part of a split-S (roll inverted and pull out) where we got up to 4.5G. Going from negative G to positive G will make me grey out at a much lower level - I greyed out during the recovery from an inverted spin only pulling +4G on the recovery.
A momentary 10G would be very uncomfortable, but it shouldn't be harmful.
It's a nice all-metal Mini-ITX formfactor case with heatsinks instead of PSU fans. I saw one in action at a supplier, and there is remarkably little noise (you can just hear the hard disk). It's also a great looking case.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a replacement GINA for $BIG_PROJECT that I was on. What a nightmare.
Unfortunately, GINA doesn't do everything, and it is (or at least was when I had the misfortune to write a replacement GINA) very badly documented. We had a $40K support contract with MS to provide us development support for this, but it was a complete waste of money - they couldn't answer our questions. We ended up essentially reverse engineering msgina.dll to find out exactly what needed to be set for everything to work correctly (we were writing a complete replacement, rather than a stub GINA).
"companies like IBM and Sun pay them several orders of magnitude more than 25/k per year"
Really?
They certainly weren't when I was working there.
One order of magnitude more than 25K would be in the $100K range. A couple of orders of magnitude would be in the $1MM range. Several orders of magnitude higher would be in the $10MM+ range.
I've never heard of any UNIX admin being paid more than ten million dollars a year!
Gosh. Just like those lazy workers too. I've noticed that since I've been in management, 40% of days taken sick happen on Mondays and Fridays!
Or the "Revenge of Billy The Kid"?
> Which is precisly why I dumped Linux which stupidily ties in FTP to the OS.
Linux DOES NOT tie FTP into the OS. Where did you get this idea from? I've never found a kernel FTP daemon. Most of my Linux and BSD systems don't even run ftpd at all.
My question is why hospitals are using CONSUMER grade equipment (hardware and operating systems) at all. A surgeon would probably try and choke you to death if you suggested he used consumer grade sterilizing equipment that people use to clean out their home brew beer kits to sterilizing his tools: why is it then acceptable to use consumer grade computers and operating systems?
> I've got to do something to make up for the contaminated well water I drank as a teenager for over 1 year
Maybe not. My grandfather is now 80, and his house still doesn't have mains water. He's been drinking water contaminated by fertilizer, bacteria and god knows what else for five decades.
He doesn't seem to get ill often. Just maybe by not being obsessed by everything being sterile, he has an immune system actually worth something?
SCO *don't* have any of their copyrighted code in Linux. This is SCO's basis for the lawsuit:
IBM added NUMA, JFS et al. to AIX.
AIX is a derivative of SysV, and covered by our contract.
IBM put NUMA, JFS et al. into Linux 2.4.x
Since NUMA, JFS is in AIX, it makes them also derivatives of SysV. We don't have any copyright claim to them, but since they are derivatives of SysV, it's our IP anyway.
Therefore, since NUMA, JFS et al. are now in Linux 2.4.x, Linux 2.4.x and newer are SysV derivatives.
Therefore we can charge a licensing fee for Linux since it is now a SysV derivative (even though we wrote none of the code, or even hold the copyrights to the alleged infringing components).
My bets are if you sign the NDA with SCO, they'll send you parts of the NUMA or JFS implementation in Linux, and the equivalent parts from AIX. You will be told AIX is a derivative of SysV, so therefore, here's the line-for-line identical infringing code in Linux.
SCO's argument can be summed up as follows:
Our cat has four legs.
IBM's dog has four legs.
Therefore IBM's dog is a cat.
Now Microsoft go on about the viral nature of the GPL. If they think that's viral, they should take heed of what's now happening to IBM - I think NUMA and JFS was developed for other operating systems first and then added to AIX as it seemed a good idea. Now these pre-existing pieces of IP are tainted by the viral nature of SysV, and become derivatives, even though they previously existed outside of SysV and were never contributed to by SCO.
I paid the price for using a cheap PSU.
The damned thing blew up (went bang, magic smoke came out). When I fitted a new PSU, I found that when it went, it had taken out the motherboard, graphics card, both hard drives and CD-RW drive. The only survivors were the network card, DVD-ROM, keyboard and mouse. The fuse in the PSU didn't even blow.
Meanwhile, the adjacent Sun Ultra 5, Dell PC, printer and other kit carried on running as it always has - so I doubt it was a surge in the mains power.
Technology problems like X itself? I keep hearing people beat this dead horse, but no one has actually come up with a _valid_ reason why X is bad.
I strongly disagree that X is bad - in fact it's one of the great strengths of Linux/*BSD/Unix windowed interfaces. It was designed correctly to begin with.
Let's slay the most common myths about X now:
Argument: X is network transparent. All the requests are done over a socket. This means it's slow.
Rebuttal: On the local host, the X protocol goes over a Unix domain socket. It's just a form of interprocess communication - it does not use the TCP/IP stack on the local host. Windows also uses IPC. There is direct rendering for games (RTCW:ET and UT runs just as well on Linux/X as it does on Windows).
Argument: Xlib is complicated.
Rebuttal: So is Win32. But hardly anyone programs directly in Xlib, and hardly anyone programs Win32 directly either for GUI programs. Windows programmers will use something like the IBM Class Library or MFC. X applications will use Qt or GTK+.
Argument: No one uses the network transparency anyway.
Rebuttal: Most UNIX admins I've known who have a network with more than one UNIX/BSD/Linux machine use the network transparency as a matter of course every day. The Secure Shell includes X forwarding to make it even easier. It's convenient and easy.
I think people criticise X because they simply don't understand it, or think that since it's been around since the mid-80s, it ought to be replaced. X has grown with technology, and because it was designed right in the first place, it still makes a great foundation for a GUI today.
Or try this version which is superb (DON'T get the re-mix version though).
If you like War of the Worlds, try Jeff Wayne's musical version. Get the original (when I lived in the US, I had to order it from the UK because I could only find the remix in the US which has had lukewarm reviews at best)
Amazon.co.uk has it.
Oops, forgot, you can't do that. Even reputable computer shops now insist that you show them your Windows license before they'll allow you to buy an OS-less computer
That's certainly not the case in Britain - there's several suppliers who will sell you anything from a laptop to a loaded gaming machine with no OS. A bare machine is about 50-60 cheaper than one with XP Home, and about 80-90 cheaper than one XP Pro.
> But 3 million outsourced jobs? FUCK YOU IBM.
IBM doesn't even employ 3M people - you're not even in the same order of magnitude. If they outsource 3M jobs, they are *employing* an extra 2.75M people. Sounds like it'd be good for the world as a whole.
Try making a tunnel with SSH, then run your VNC session over the SSH tunnel.
If people are laughing at the name "MySQL" and telling you to get something more professional, use PostgreSQL. It's a much more feature rich DB too (has many basic things that MySQL still lacks such as enforcement of referential integrity, triggers etc.)
You do realise that just like BS stands for 'Bullshit', Ph.D. just stands for Piled higher and Deeper?
The MX license would work a bit like the pilot's license - each country administers their own exams which are compliant with an international standard, just like pilot's licenses are (so international travel can happen).
Nothing MTA specific - just general knowledge like having good knowledge of the RFCs for email, how to check an MTA is not acting as an open relay (it's possible to do this for *all* MTAs by telnet hostname smtp, without any MTA-specific knowledge) etc. plus ancilliary general knowledge (TCP/IP networks etc.). All in all you could probably do an MTA course in a couple of weeks. Of course, the applicant would have to pay for the exam, but there'd be enough that the Govt. could make a tidy profit, so Governments would like it.
A licensed MTA operator will then be able to register their MX on a global listing.
Conditions of the license would say that you must only accept SMTP from registered MXs on the list.
Things such as spam, child porn, being hacked, distributing warez, illegal MP3s etc. will of course lead to a suspension of the MTA license and removal from the list - in some cases, temporary, in others (such as Ralsky cases) permanent. And of course, a background check would be part of the issuance of an MTA license.
It's possible and totally desirable to have the MTA license 'MTA agnostic'. Unfortunately, people have got religious about their MTA, and just like proper religions, no good comes of this. Look at how Christianity has lead to the murder and torture of millions. Religion is bad, period. MTA religion probably hasn't lead to deaths, but I'm sure it's lead to many bad/insecure/misconfigured systems because due to religion, people have chosen inferior MTAs such as sendmail when they really should have used Exim or qmail.
They aren't banning free email (as some kneejerking Slashdotters have implied in this article), they just want it traceable.
Email accounts should all be traceable. It should be legislated that some kind of physical address/person identification is required for any form of email access, free or paid for. It's not stopping you from emailing, or censoring you - it's just making you accountable. It's getting to the stage with spam etc. that really we need a licensing system to be allowed to run a MTA. All ISPs by law should be forced to block SMTP traffic except from their registered MXs, and the administrator of the system should have to be licensed, just like a radio operator. Too much spam coming from your MX? Your license gets revoked. Of course, all the whiners who can't configure sendmail to save their life (but run it anyway, usually as an open relay) would be up in arms about such a scheme, but it's about time it's done.
It seems like so many people are taking principles of anonymity to the levels of zealotry (just look at the responses to this article to see what I mean). When anything ends up getting 'religious' it hurts the cause. What do we want? An accountable email system where the police only have to log/record/watch suspects, or an unaccountable email system where they have to watch much more, with the associated 'collateral damage' of ending up watching some non-suspects because you don't know who they are? You just have to look at the real religions (such as Christian fundamentalists) to realise when anything gets religious, it ends up in destruction. How many people have Christian zealots killed? This can translate to "How many potential Linux users have Linux zealots turned off?" or "How many people who care about privacy have been turned off by the rantings of ACLU zealots?"
I had a long discussion with a good friend who is not terribly computer literate. Linux drives him _crazy_ because he can't just, "point, click and go" as he said it.
Windows systems need an administrator every bit as clueful as a UNIX sysadmin if they are to have any reliability at all. If the Windows 'sysadmin' has to be able to point-click-go to be able to function, in all probability the Windows system will be unreliable and insecure.
It is a false economy to think that "It's Windows. I can hire a junior reboot monkey to admin the system" - a Windows system really does require a sysadmin every bit as competent, skilled and clueful as a Unix system. A Windows system can be very reliable with a clueful admin - but it *needs* a clueful admin. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they think otherwise.
Hrm. I think it's an opportunity. It is our destiny that our machines replace us; once we have machines that are better at doing the general purpose things we are, why not just become our machines? It's the next logical step in our evolution.
...and many more other things.
Just imagine what it would be like if we could abandon our fragile, biological bodies for a self-repairing machine body:
- Space travel: life support greatly simplified. Just need an energy source and sufficient radiation shielding for the components which will already be a lot more tolerant of radiation than our bodies.
- Repairs - break your back, just get a new one. No more being crippled for the rest of your life.
- Hostile environments may no longer be hostile. We can live on Mars without the need to terraform.
- Interstellar travel possible - just shut down for the duration of the journey, and restart at the destination.
- Ability to back up data in the brain, so if the body gets totally trashed, a restore is possible.
- Ability to complement the intelligent parts with simple procedurally programmed parts - mental arithmetic suddenly becomes instantaneous. You may have had a problem calculating 3 * 47 / 2 -3 + 4096 / 7 in your head, but now you can comfortably work out the square root of pi without worrying about where the calculator went.
Yes I can. I've been to Indiana. I've even spent a night in Valporizo. I've personally set foot in 26 U.S. states.
Now I don't find it surprising when people in the US don't know where the Isle of Man is (although I wish they wouldn't ask "Is there an Isle of Woman?" - because that little jape is getting a little bit old now! Although that does lead to a discussion of Mannannan and his cloak) To be fair, the Isle of Man is well known in the US by bikers (due to the racing) and cat lovers (due to Manx cats).
However, I was flummoxed when I was asked whether English was spoken in England. (No joke. I was actually asked this question on two separate occasions. OK, so the women in question were blonde, but come on!) It took all my willpower to keep a straight face when explaining English is called English because it comes from England!
4-5 Gs can be tolerated without blacking out by many people. Fighter pilots with G-suits can take much more (around 8-9).
I've done aerobatic training in a Bellanca Super Decathalon (a piston engined single engine light aircraft), and I can pull 4 G without any ill effect (apart from feeling a bit heavy of course!). The most I've ever pulled is 5.5G, and I've not blacked out/greyed out at that. However, it's quite individual. I took a friend for a ride, and he blacked out momentarily during the bottom part of a split-S (roll inverted and pull out) where we got up to 4.5G. Going from negative G to positive G will make me grey out at a much lower level - I greyed out during the recovery from an inverted spin only pulling +4G on the recovery.
A momentary 10G would be very uncomfortable, but it shouldn't be harmful.
Three words:
User Mode Linux
Why not just use the Hush PC case?
It's a nice all-metal Mini-ITX formfactor case with heatsinks instead of PSU fans. I saw one in action at a supplier, and there is remarkably little noise (you can just hear the hard disk). It's also a great looking case.
http://mini-itx.com has the details.