If I had any mod points left, I would mod you informative. However, since I don't, let me play the devils advocate for a while:
Are there superior products from windows in the market today?
If the answer is yes, could you tell me why don't they sell as much?
To put it simply, why is it always the company's sole responsibility if it has a superior product but still people don't buy it? I mean OK, it may have to do with incompetence from the company's part for one thing, but isn't it our responsibility as the market to make a right choice?
What I believe is that the people are as responsible for that kinds of phenomena as the companys you are refering to. So please, instead of bashing everyone else let's all consider what WE have done besides choosing one product from the other on the ground that it is a few dollars cheaper.
I don't know what you mean by "damage," but if you think this you probably don't have kids. My son has already put my cable box into some crazy administrative mode that I had to call the cable company to get instructions how to fix.
Hahaha, point taken! But you would agree that this a case of accident, not stupidity!..
You are of course right. But allow me a few remarks: 1)If power goes down while you are listening to your music there is a chance that you may loose some data or even have a damaged HD. 2)Especially if you're running Windows, your system can be rendered unusable by a number of reasons. How long would it take you to rebuild the entire system installing the OS and all the software that you are using. 3)How long does it take to boot your system? A minute, half a minute perhaps?
I could go on, but you get the point. You see all the commodity devices in our houses cannot be damaged by power outages, nor can be damaged by stupid users whatever buttons they push (contrary to computers). In addition, you don't have to install anything to make them work and finally, when I press the power button the machine is ready within 1 or 2 seconds.
And that is (IMHO of course) why today's computers are inappropriate as normal everyday media centers. I can put up with having to reinstall windows or linux or FreeBSD to my machine at work, but I don't want to do that same when I get home. I just need a machine that just works and not another PC to administer.
No no, instead of writing a ports collection from scratch they could as well make a head start by contributing to pkgsrc. I am also not certain that pkg_install (netbsd) and pkginstall (solaris) use the same database (probably not). So they could modify it to use the regular pkgsrc.
This puppy is actually (IMHO) a good deal for its money. I particularly liked the fact that it is quiet, which is a fact that has become very important in these days. If I am not wrong it will be able to run 3 operating systems (windows,linux,solaris) so there is a lot of choice without even counting FreeBSD. Speaking of which, I would like to make a plead to the Sun guys:
PLEASE give us a port collection similar to FreeBSD's on Solaris.
While compiling things still has meaning in a lot of situations where precompiled packages just don't fit, doing it on manual nowadays is a pain in the butt because of the complex interdependencies between various open source packages. If you don't want to take my word for it,the NetBSD ports collection can be installed on solaris as well, so Sun would only have to assist in this effort without trying to reinvent the world from square one.
Yucca Mountain has changed little over the last several million years. Extensive scientific studies of potential natural hazards at the site show it is highly unlikely that volcanoes, erosion, or other geologic processes and events would disrupt a repository at Yucca Mountain. In addition, by locating the repository in solid rock about 1,000 feet under the surface and on average 1,000 feet above the water table, the waste would be protected from the impacts of earthquakes. Damaging ground movement is the most intense at the earth's surface and decreases with the depth underground.
Yesterday I was reading an interview from Joel Spolsky (You probably know him from Joel on software) and I found the following quote interesting:
In my ("How Microsoft Lost the API War") essay, I quoted a Microsoft guy (and Longhorn Avalon team member) named Joe Beda. I quoted him saying "Microsoft is making a big bet on the rich client." And now he works at Google with Adam Bosworth. I'm sure what they're doing is a new browser. It's the IE (Internet Explorer) team reconstructed inside Google.
Ok, lets try to summarize why we like SNMP: -Implementations can fit in a few kb memory footprint. I don't see web services beating that any time soon. (Oh, and not all the devices on the planet are 4Ghz P4's with a gigabyte of ram so it is still important not to be a memory hog on many areas). -For relatively simple purposes, S(imple)NMP is almost as simple as it gets. Like say, for the monitoring of the temperature of a router, using something like web services would surely be overkill. -There are many implementations for your favorite unix flavor. Probably best is the excelent net-snmp package. The 5.x version has many new methods of extending the main agent instrumentation through compiled in modules, dynamicaly loadable modules, external (pass) scripts, even embedded perl. Solaris 10 will be using the net-snmp package as part of the standard installation. -The protocol is extremely efficient so there is little presure on the underlying medium. The PDU's are encoded in BER, so the implementations are abundant and quite standard. And yes, this is very very important because practicaly all versions of agents and toolkits are 100% compatible between them. -Because the SMI is defined in ASN.1, there is no ambiguity in the structure of the management information. See previous bullet why this is important. -There are excellent tools like HP OpenView NNM which can really simplify monitoring of even extremely large networks.
Now let's see some of its disadvantages: -Poor security, corrected in version 3 (somewhat complex) but still most people use version 1 or 2c. -Setable objects are IMHO a nightmare to use. For those of you who are reloading their router by setting sysUpTime to 0, I may seem dead wrong, but it appears that most people's safe bet would be just to log in to the machine and do the job they want. To generalize that idea, SNMP is unbeatable when it comes to monitoring things, but when it comes to actualy controlling things from away, it loses. Perhaps that is exactly the niche that those web services will complement (not replace!) SNMP. -Extremely difficult to describe complex data structures using SMI. But then again I may be too impatient.
Lastly, though it will sound bitter, there is no clear evidence that web services or WBEM or whatever will be able to actualy help network administrators do their job better than they do it today.
And remember everyone, there is no big company that can necessarily know your job and your needs better than you, as much as they profess to. So on this matter we must not take the word of those who are trying to sell us the New Management Ubertool but on the contrary try to evaluate it in the real world and figure out if it actualy is usefull or not.
Would it not be possible to record the actual broadcast signal at the time of transmision, and then replay it in front of the HDTV equipement when you want? Would the DRM-enabled equipement have a way to know?
I realize that to sample the raw HDTV signal at double its frequency would require enormous amounts of storage available, but storage always becomes cheaper and bigger.
I may be completely wrong here, but I think if DRM enabled equipement becomes too ubiquitus (I am not talking only HDTV here) analog methods of aquiring the information could become rather usefull. The information could then be stored in non-DRM formats. How big would be the loss if I capture a song from a decent sound card using the built-in A-D converter? And if the degradation using a sound card is not acceptable, there must be better equipement available for a reasonal price.
Proper switches cannot always defeat a sniffer
on
New Worm Installs Sniffer
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here in Greece we have shorts of stuff named Olympi-something all over the place. Mount Olympus, Olympic hotel, Olympic airways and so on. At least here, it would appear utterly insane to try to force someone not use that name. Hell, I personally know of many girls named "Olympia".
What sort of stupidity is this? Surely they can't own the damn name since they haven't invented it in the first place.
Re:Other IT Myths
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Quite correct. Would you also agree that one of the root causes of all these is that the profession is quite young. And because IMHO the situation is and will be relatively volatile in the following years, we have phenomena like these. In my country, a civil engineer cannot undertake major projects (like say a bridge) unless he/she has reached a certain "level" which is determined by his past projects and experience. So there is a natural flow that requires that younger engineers must start from the low and climb their way up. The real difference is that this mechanism is in place to prevent companies from hiring younger inexperienced engineers just to cut costs. And that's because there must be assurance that the bridge must be built correctly, or peoples lifes will be in danger. As time passes and our profession becomes equally crucial in many cases, I believe that the same problem will make its appearance. What we need to do is to get organized and support independent regulation authorities which will prevent companies from doing anything they think its cheaper.
Of cource, before anything else, we ourselves must take our profession seriously because it is no longer a game.
From what I've gathered, the looking glass project will probably be not able to function under the "normal" xserver which was until recently xfree86 and now is x.org. I think that the engineers at Sun are utilising the damage and the composite extensions which are available in the new xserver which by the way is based on kdrive which was primarily developed by Keith Packard. It is possible though that eventualy these extensions will be reimplemented for the x.org server.
Where are all the useful tools? There is a reason for which everything is in its place in solaris. Ever wondered why/usr/ucb/ps is different from the/usr/bin/ps ??? Its because if it changed place it would break those applications that expect it there.
No command-line editing anywhere in sight Yeah I know many many people aren't using solaris because of that
The pkg format sucks You do understand that pkg does a different job than apt_get, right?
The installer is slow and horribly interactive Cough*jumpstart*cough.
It's sllloooowwwwww too. Could you please find out from which version did solaris have preemption? What about kernel threads?
Sorry, you are terribly biased. Plus, you fail to understand that it for our common good to have as many alternatives as possible. If some of these are proprietary unices, it does not mean that it is bad by definition. I use linux, freebsd and solaris everyday and they all have their pros and cons. Do I have to get fanatical about it?
An attacker would still have to guess the tcp source port to reset the connection on the other bgp peer. Furthermore, it is clearly stated that the seq number in the rst packet would still have to be also guessed, although this is more easy than anticipated.
Reading the/. headline, I almost believed the internet is falling apart. Sorry but there are much more serious threats which can be utilized by attackers without the need to read serious scientific papers on the subject.
Bottomline, the headline title is at the very least unfortunate.
Incidentaly they've been on and on about "commodities" and all that for years. What about their Niagara chip? I 've read the article and it hints that the chip will be fitted not only with processor cores but also with a tcp offload engine and crypto accell circuits. Plus the chip will be substantialy more energy efficient than its x86 counterparts. So you have a chip that does more things on its own, and consumes less energy. More integration could possibly mean commodisation. If these things require less electricity they could even produce laptops and tablets which could have their desktop products integrated.
I think that they no longer consider selling their hardware at high prices a valid option, they would rather go for mass markets like their desktop linux offering etc.
And one thing more, in my experience Sun's products were always high quality both in terms of engineering and in terms of craftsmanship. Unfortunately, we are living at an age where it is preferable to outsource your needs in the other side of the world just to shave off a few dollars/euros, no matter what happens to the quality of the product you deliver. It is not strange that Sun has these difficulties today, because they've always went for unmatched quality instead of sheer numbers. Now they are forced to change and move all the way around. Hope they make it, to me they are yet another choice and having many choices is good!..
Is it really necessary to have sufficient firepower to independantly forcibly take over any other country/contitent on the planet?
Very interesting hypothesis.
I 've once read that England, at its zenith of power (around 1870 if I remember correctly) not only aimed at havind the most powerfull naval fleet in the world, but something even more: The goal was that the British navy should be able at any time to defeat the combined force of the two next most powerfull navies in the world. If you are interested in the book here is a link
First, go get antiword and elinks To read HTML under mutt put something like text/html; elinks -dump-charset 8859-1 -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
inside your.mailcap file and put auto_view text/html
inside your.muttrc file.
To read word attachments from inside mutt put application/msword; antiword -m 8859-1.txt '%s'; copiousoutput; description=3D"Microsoft Word Text"; nametemplate=3D%s.doc
and auto_view application/msword
respectively. Note that you can even change the default charset in the commands and it works perfectly!!!
they are replacing the Imake buildsystem with GNU autoconf/automake - a good thing I think
If you are saying that autoconf/automake are better because they are being used by almost everyone, I would like to express my disagreement. Goodness should not be decided on a basis of majority consensus rather on proven technical merit.
But if you were not reffering to the popularity of gnu autoconf/automake, please, tell us why they are superior to imake.
There is a very comprehensive reference of currently used time standards over at wolfram research site. It came up yesterday while I was trying to figure out the difference between Universal Time (UT) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In the last link I believe you will find that "Earth's rotation is irregular at the 0.1 second level" along with a diagram of the errors so far.
I was under the impression that there are so many probes this time because Earth and Mars came very very close last summer. Their relative position was probably favorable for plotting an easy trajectory to mars.
I could be wrong though. Could someone plz verufy this?
Slashdot Mirror
If I had any mod points left, I would mod you informative. However, since I don't, let me play the devils advocate for a while:
Are there superior products from windows in the market today?
If the answer is yes, could you tell me why don't they sell as much?
To put it simply, why is it always the company's sole responsibility if it has a superior product but still people don't buy it? I mean OK, it may have to do with incompetence from the company's part for one thing, but isn't it our responsibility as the market to make a right choice?
What I believe is that the people are as responsible for that kinds of phenomena as the companys you are refering to. So please, instead of bashing everyone else let's all consider what WE have done besides choosing one product from the other on the ground that it is a few dollars cheaper.
I don't know what you mean by "damage," but if you think this you probably don't have kids. My son has already put my cable box into some crazy administrative mode that I had to call the cable company to get instructions how to fix.
Hahaha, point taken! But you would agree that this a case of accident, not stupidity!..
You are of course right.
But allow me a few remarks:
1)If power goes down while you are listening to your music there is a chance that you may loose some data or even have a damaged HD.
2)Especially if you're running Windows, your system can be rendered unusable by a number of reasons. How long would it take you to rebuild the entire system installing the OS and all the software that you are using.
3)How long does it take to boot your system? A minute, half a minute perhaps?
I could go on, but you get the point. You see all the commodity devices in our houses cannot be damaged by power outages, nor can be damaged by stupid users whatever buttons they push (contrary to computers). In addition, you don't have to install anything to make them work and finally, when I press the power button the machine is ready within 1 or 2 seconds.
And that is (IMHO of course) why today's computers are inappropriate as normal everyday media centers. I can put up with having to reinstall windows or linux or FreeBSD to my machine at work, but I don't want to do that same when I get home. I just need a machine that just works and not another PC to administer.
Just my 5 cents.
No no, instead of writing a ports collection from scratch they could as well make a head start by contributing to pkgsrc. I am also not certain that pkg_install (netbsd) and pkginstall (solaris) use the same database (probably not). So they could modify it to use the regular pkgsrc.
This puppy is actually (IMHO) a good deal for its money. I particularly liked the fact that it is quiet, which is a fact that has become very important in these days. If I am not wrong it will be able to run 3 operating systems (windows,linux,solaris) so there is a lot of choice without even counting FreeBSD. Speaking of which, I would like to make a plead to the Sun guys:
PLEASE give us a port collection similar to FreeBSD's on Solaris.
While compiling things still has meaning in a lot of situations where precompiled packages just don't fit, doing it on manual nowadays is a pain in the butt because of the complex interdependencies between various open source packages.
If you don't want to take my word for it,the NetBSD ports collection can be installed on solaris as well, so Sun would only have to assist in this effort without trying to reinvent the world from square one.
Am I getting through - or am I asking too much?
I googled for Yucca mountain and it says:
Yucca Mountain has changed little over the last several million years. Extensive scientific studies of potential natural hazards at the site show it is highly unlikely that volcanoes, erosion, or other geologic processes and events would disrupt a repository at Yucca Mountain. In addition, by locating the repository in solid rock about 1,000 feet under the surface and on average 1,000 feet above the water table, the waste would be protected from the impacts of earthquakes. Damaging ground movement is the most intense at the earth's surface and decreases with the depth underground.
So, normaly there shouldn't be a problem, right?
Yesterday I was reading an interview from Joel Spolsky (You probably know him from Joel on software) and I found the following quote interesting:
In my ("How Microsoft Lost the API War") essay, I quoted a Microsoft guy (and Longhorn Avalon team member) named Joe Beda. I quoted him saying "Microsoft is making a big bet on the rich client." And now he works at Google with Adam Bosworth. I'm sure what they're doing is a new browser. It's the IE (Internet Explorer) team reconstructed inside Google.
the RIAA will just get Congress to pass laws that make us all retain ALL logs for all time...
Doing so would require massive resources (archiving,backup,storage etc) especially if you're a big ISP, right? And resources cost money, right?
Wouldn't it be fair that they pick up the tab too? Or should I squander MY money so they can continue THEIR business?
Ok, lets try to summarize why we like SNMP:
-Implementations can fit in a few kb memory footprint. I don't see web services beating that any time soon. (Oh, and not all the devices on the planet are 4Ghz P4's with a gigabyte of ram so it is still important not to be a memory hog on many areas).
-For relatively simple purposes, S(imple)NMP is almost as simple as it gets. Like say, for the monitoring of the temperature of a router, using something like web services would surely be overkill.
-There are many implementations for your favorite unix flavor. Probably best is the excelent net-snmp package. The 5.x version has many new methods of extending the main agent instrumentation through compiled in modules, dynamicaly loadable modules, external (pass) scripts, even embedded perl. Solaris 10 will be using the net-snmp package as part of the standard installation.
-The protocol is extremely efficient so there is little presure on the underlying medium. The PDU's are encoded in BER, so the implementations are abundant and quite standard. And yes, this is very very important because practicaly all versions of agents and toolkits are 100% compatible between them.
-Because the SMI is defined in ASN.1, there is no ambiguity in the structure of the management information. See previous bullet why this is important.
-There are excellent tools like HP OpenView NNM which can really simplify monitoring of even extremely large networks.
Now let's see some of its disadvantages:
-Poor security, corrected in version 3 (somewhat complex) but still most people use version 1 or 2c.
-Setable objects are IMHO a nightmare to use. For those of you who are reloading their router by setting sysUpTime to 0, I may seem dead wrong, but it appears that most people's safe bet would be just to log in to the machine and do the job they want. To generalize that idea, SNMP is unbeatable when it comes to monitoring things, but when it comes to actualy controlling things from away, it loses. Perhaps that is exactly the niche that those web services will complement (not replace!) SNMP.
-Extremely difficult to describe complex data structures using SMI. But then again I may be too impatient.
Lastly, though it will sound bitter, there is no clear evidence that web services or WBEM or whatever will be able to actualy help network administrators do their job better than they do it today.
And remember everyone, there is no big company that can necessarily know your job and your needs better than you, as much as they profess to. So on this matter we must not take the word of those who are trying to sell us the New Management Ubertool but on the contrary try to evaluate it in the real world and figure out if it actualy is usefull or not.
And that's my five cents for tonight.
Would it not be possible to record the actual broadcast signal at the time of transmision, and then replay it in front of the HDTV equipement when you want? Would the DRM-enabled equipement have a way to know?
I realize that to sample the raw HDTV signal at double its frequency would require enormous amounts of storage available, but storage always becomes cheaper and bigger.
I may be completely wrong here, but I think if DRM enabled equipement becomes too ubiquitus (I am not talking only HDTV here) analog methods of aquiring the information could become rather usefull. The information could then be stored in non-DRM formats. How big would be the loss if I capture a song from a decent sound card using the built-in A-D converter? And if the degradation using a sound card is not acceptable, there must be better equipement available for a reasonal price.
Why your switched network isn't secure.
Here in Greece we have shorts of stuff named Olympi-something all over the place. Mount Olympus, Olympic hotel, Olympic airways and so on. At least here, it would appear utterly insane to try to force someone not use that name. Hell, I personally know of many girls named "Olympia".
What sort of stupidity is this? Surely they can't own the damn name since they haven't invented it in the first place.
Quite correct. Would you also agree that one of the root causes of all these is that the profession is quite young. And because IMHO the situation is and will be relatively volatile in the following years, we have phenomena like these.
In my country, a civil engineer cannot undertake major projects (like say a bridge) unless he/she has reached a certain "level" which is determined by his past projects and experience. So there is a natural flow that requires that younger engineers must start from the low and climb their way up. The real difference is that this mechanism is in place to prevent companies from hiring younger inexperienced engineers just to cut costs. And that's because there must be assurance that the bridge must be built correctly, or peoples lifes will be in danger.
As time passes and our profession becomes equally crucial in many cases, I believe that the same problem will make its appearance. What we need to do is to get organized and support independent regulation authorities which will prevent companies from doing anything they think its cheaper.
Of cource, before anything else, we ourselves must take our profession seriously because it is no longer a game.
From what I've gathered, the looking glass project will probably be not able to function under the "normal" xserver which was until recently xfree86 and now is x.org. I think that the engineers at Sun are utilising the damage and the composite extensions which are available in the new xserver which by the way is based on kdrive which was primarily developed by Keith Packard. It is possible though that eventualy these extensions will be reimplemented for the x.org server.
Yes: ipv6 ports for freebsd
Where are all the useful tools? /usr/ucb/ps is different from the /usr/bin/ps ??? Its because if it changed place it would break those applications that expect it there.
There is a reason for which everything is in its place in solaris. Ever wondered why
No command-line editing anywhere in sight
Yeah I know many many people aren't using solaris because of that
The pkg format sucks
You do understand that pkg does a different job than apt_get, right?
The installer is slow and horribly interactive
Cough*jumpstart*cough.
It's sllloooowwwwww too.
Could you please find out from which version did solaris have preemption? What about kernel threads?
Sorry, you are terribly biased. Plus, you fail to understand that it for our common good to have as many alternatives as possible. If some of these are proprietary unices, it does not mean that it is bad by definition. I use linux, freebsd and solaris everyday and they all have their pros and cons. Do I have to get fanatical about it?
Theora doesn't have a working windows codec.
Sorry, I maybe wrong, but what about this?
The nullsoft video format which by the way is embedded in winamp uses it...
An attacker would still have to guess the tcp source port to reset the connection on the other bgp peer.
/. headline, I almost believed the internet is falling apart. Sorry but there are much more serious threats which can be utilized by attackers without the need to read serious scientific papers on the subject.
Furthermore, it is clearly stated that the seq number in the rst packet would still have to be also guessed, although this is more easy than anticipated.
Reading the
Bottomline, the headline title is at the very least unfortunate.
Incidentaly they've been on and on about "commodities" and all that for years. What about their Niagara chip? I 've read the article and it hints that the chip will be fitted not only with processor cores but also with a tcp offload engine and crypto accell circuits. Plus the chip will be substantialy more energy efficient than its x86 counterparts. So you have a chip that does more things on its own, and consumes less energy. More integration could possibly mean commodisation. If these things require less electricity they could even produce laptops and tablets which could have their desktop products integrated.
I think that they no longer consider selling their hardware at high prices a valid option, they would rather go for mass markets like their desktop linux offering etc.
And one thing more, in my experience Sun's products were always high quality both in terms of engineering and in terms of craftsmanship. Unfortunately, we are living at an age where it is preferable to outsource your needs in the other side of the world just to shave off a few dollars/euros, no matter what happens to the quality of the product you deliver. It is not strange that Sun has these difficulties today, because they've always went for unmatched quality instead of sheer numbers. Now they are forced to change and move all the way around. Hope they make it, to me they are yet another choice and having many choices is good!..
Is it really necessary to have sufficient firepower to independantly forcibly take over any other country/contitent on the planet?
Very interesting hypothesis.
I 've once read that England, at its zenith of power (around 1870 if I remember correctly) not only aimed at havind the most powerfull naval fleet in the world, but something even more: The goal was that the British navy should be able at any time to defeat the combined force of the two next most powerfull navies in the world. If you are interested in the book here is a link
There is one button on it
Yeah, and it says: "I feel lucky"
First, go get antiword and elinks .mailcap file and put .muttrc file.
To read HTML under mutt put something like
text/html; elinks -dump-charset 8859-1 -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
inside your
auto_view text/html
inside your
To read word attachments from inside mutt put
application/msword; antiword -m 8859-1.txt '%s'; copiousoutput; description=3D"Microsoft Word Text"; nametemplate=3D%s.doc
and
auto_view application/msword
respectively.
Note that you can even change the default charset in the commands and it works perfectly!!!
they are replacing the Imake buildsystem with GNU autoconf/automake - a good thing I think
If you are saying that autoconf/automake are better because they are being used by almost everyone, I would like to express my disagreement. Goodness should not be decided on a basis of majority consensus rather on proven technical merit.
But if you were not reffering to the popularity of gnu autoconf/automake, please, tell us why they are superior to imake.
There is a very comprehensive reference of currently used time standards over at wolfram research site. It came up yesterday while I was trying to figure out the difference between Universal Time (UT) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In the last link I believe you will find that "Earth's rotation is irregular at the 0.1 second level" along with a diagram of the errors so far.
I was under the impression that there are so many probes this time because Earth and Mars came very very close last summer. Their relative position was probably favorable for plotting an easy trajectory to mars.
I could be wrong though. Could someone plz verufy this?