More to the point, the Mono project started using WineLib (not all of wine as some posts have suggested) to make sure that the System.Windows.Forms is completly compatable with the standard interface. Imagine, distributing a single binary on both Windows and Linux. That can only help linux. I am waiting for a System.Linux namespace to become available.
There are a lot of statements here that need correction. First of all, cOM is on it's way out. It is being replaced by the new remoting and web services architecture. The new component arch works much better and is far easier to understand then the iUnknown interface in COM. COM+ services (most notable, transactions) are still being supported, and I have no doubt that Mono will do a great job implementing these.
Sadly, *NIX has never really implimented anything like COM.
Not true. In fact, there is a COM implemented for UNIX called XPCOM. It's the foundation of Mozilla. In addition, COM itself is a copy of CORBA/IDL (the tools for Corba/IDL are fairly poor tho). Gnome uses CORBA, and KDE also uses a distributed object protocol. In additional, almost every language supports SOAP (including.NET) and Perl's.NET support is awesome. So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port, because it is heavily dependent on the COM/ActiveX objects to get the real work done. Unless the.GNU project aims to bring ActiveX functionality over to *NIX, and port all of the cool ActiveX objects like ADO (Database), DOM (XML), System.DirectoryServices (LDAP), FSO (Files), etc.
It's a really good thing that.NET rewreites all of these, and MONO is writing all of them. ADO is replacd with the much more usefull ADO.net, DOM is boosted with XSL, XSD, X** (many other XML standards), System.Directory is also bein gimplemented. FSO is replaced by the much cleaner streaming interface. Mono is implementing all of these
There is a difference. Compare the vast amount of space with people living on average further from major metropolitian areas with england. Quite frankly, England was crowded in the 1700's to say nothing of today. OTOH, if Colorado were to put in a fast track system, it would cost us millions of dollars, but there are only 5/10 million people in colorado. The land that we would have to cover just for this one rather small state to provide the same amount of train coverage per person would be prohibitivly expensive.
Someone would prefer to use a model that does not require me to think beyond simple business rules in the first place. Thinking about the difference in "beans" in kinda absurd.
Oh, and that model is faster, semantically cleaner and more interopable? I can't understand why more people don't use it (yet)....
Just like Carbon, C++, this stuff will take a bit to catch on, but catch on it will.
It's their business ethic I can't stand..NET is the most exciting thing in distributed component programming since Objective-C and NeXT. Unlike, Microsoft has enough influnce to acutally make a new programming language part of the vernacular that programmers use.
I have deployed two different production systems off of.NET, and have been utterly amazed at the API. While C++ has about 50/50 curve (50% of the things are really easy to do, the other 50% suck) and Java raises that to about 70/30, C# and more importantly the.NET framework allow programmers to naturally write good n-tier applications. (In fact, my biggest critique on.NET is that it tends to force people to n-tier when that is not completly appropriate).
J2EE is a horrific mess in many ways. The abstractions don't map well to real world concerns (for example, a bean represents a row, not a business object, unless your business object is a row, in which case you are probably over exposed to changes in the database), and the API's for SOAP et all are poor (unless you use Glue which rocks beyond anything else I have seen in Java).
Java's basic trade offs are part of the problem. Remember that Java was created for the purpose of running on embeded systems. This makes very simple tradeoffs (for example, optimizing for size in the bytecode instead of performance) that are not real good for large applications.
Finally, Java is object oriented..NET is component oriented. Refliction, delegates, events, emission, cross domain calls and third party language itneroperability are all first class in.NET...
Now, if Microsoft's business guys would just follow suit.
By the Taleban, who wants the world to return the late 14th century. Wants Christians, Homosexuals, Hindu's, moderate Islamics, and anyone who disagrees with sharia to be put to death?
What were the predictions of death before the US went in there due to starvation in Afganistan (irregardless of US bombs?) 7,500,000. People forget that we immediatly started food shipments as well into afganistan (and had already been providing more then a 3 million in aid even with Bin Ladin in sactuary in Afganistan).
Will we save them all? Probably not. Did we save most of them? Yes. That alone is a major step up.
We have invested 689 Million dollors just into relief efforts.
In general, if there is one criticism to be made in general from the Afgani war is that we did not take a active enough approach to it, and accidently killed people that the warlords "mis-identified".
http://www.usaid.gov/hum_response/ofda/centralas ia _sr42_fy02.html
Many millions more are going to the governments directly as well. Imagine how much worse it could have been if we had not gotten involved when we did.
By Al-Qeda Al-Qeda has called for the re-establishment of a Celiphate as their main rallying call. In addition, Bin Ladin wants the relativly (anything is relative compared to Iran/Iraq/Syria) moderate government blodily overthrown. Al-Qeda contains many other organizations. On top of this list is the Lashkar Jihad which has been attempting to "purify" Indonesia by exterminating the Christians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/77 02 63.stm 3000 or more have died.
Aceh Merdeka is responsible for more then 2000 deaths in Indonesia
Want more? Go Here: http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/
These groups will kill simply on the basis of ethnic, religous or political differences.
Today they are being challanged.
Hussain stands with Hitler as the only dictator to use WMDs against his own population (gassing). He has killed hudreds of thousands of political dissidents, and invaded two nearby countries in the last twenty years. He is activly persuing biological, nukes, and chemical weapons. Deployed WMD's for strike against Isreal in the Desert War in the early 90's but was dissuaded when the US government informed him that the response would be of "biblical proportions" should any WMD be used. Known to believe that Isreal's annilihation would be the key to unifying the Middle east.
How many will die? Depends on weither we stop him before he nukes someone.
I don't doubt that there are Islamic fundamentalists who do want this, but it is inaccurate to consider all of them to be part of a homogenous group. All al-Queda want is isolation of the Middle East from Western influence.
Bi Ladin himself has says otherwise. The phrase take back the lands that are muslim, includes France and Spain as well Moslems want to restart the crusades? I suggest you go back and reread your mediaeval history.
Mine's up to date, yours? Remember, they sacked Isreal first. That's hardly a trait of al-Queda, or Islam in general.
Really? Take a look at Lashkar Jihaad, or the groups in Kashmir, or Bin Ladin's repeated accounts that Allah has given him the deaths of 2 million americans. 2,000,000 - 3,000 = big number. perhaps you ought to study what the CIA started on September 11th, 1973 in Chile. I'll get you started
That was the British more then the Americans, and there was a different threat present. Does that justify it? Nope. Pinochet turned out to be (arguably) a bad dude. Does that change anything? Nope. Not a whit. Your argument is a straw man, and it has nothing to do with the larger elements.
The guys want to kill Americans. Pure and simple. Because we support Isreal and deny them all sorts of things that went out of fashion in Europe 1000 years ago.
Another Simple Statistical fact. Lets assume that there are ~1000truly radical we want to bring back sharia, women must never be seen in public again death to infidel type radicals in america. Let's assume that there are ~100 terrorists in the nation. Since ETA, Basque/Irish/Itallian/zimbabwian (etc) terrorists are pretty much not likely to hit in America (where they do most of the fund raising, but that's another story), lets assume that the 100 are of the Arab persuasion. Let's further assume that 25 members of Indymedia have lost what further sanity they have left, and now decided to avenge Palestine using C4.
Percentage of people who might have radical beliefs and use C4 100/1000
percentege of people who might use C4 125/270,000,000
Percentege of Americans who might use C4 25/270,000,000
Which number might you go after first? Even if it is by screening middle easter foreigners, assuming that 400,000 come thru a year: 100/400,0000
Do you honestly believe that? Perhaps Hitler only wanted Alsance-Lorraine back. Reality check, the US Millitary wants nothing more then to be rid of the Prince-Sultan base. They don't need it, causes too many clueless twits like Bin Ladin to use excuses to rally his troops.
So, let's go to their sites. a) Worldwide Sharia... That's right Christians, Lesbians, Gays, Jews, Moderate Islamics, Hindu's now you too can live in a world where You can be beheaded for any variety of personal belief.
b) Establishment of a Celiphate. Basically these guys want to restart the crusades.
c) Death to anyone who may stop them. Yep, that's you... If you post to Slashdot, chances are you fall into category A above, and therefore is someone who would resist Sharia. Don't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
First of all, The "west" created Iraq? Umm try again. The UK and France created the unholy mess that is the middle east with constant back stabbing, broken treaties and leaving the Jews to fend for themselves. We have kept the west out of the Middle East as much as possible (go lookup the Suez Debacle with UK/France) as well as forcing them to give up thoose regions of the world after WWII.
We gave the Middle East self-determination. They have squandered in to a pit of religious extremism.
Second of all, fact checks: The gov't of Saudi Arabai has been around almost as long as the US. We did not create Iraq, we gave them weapons because they were by far the lesser of two evils during the 80's (imagine how bad the Islamists would be if Iran had conquered Iraq.).
That being said, while I reject the porely written arguments which do not have factual basis above, I agree with the fact that Saudi Arabia is scum, and had you looked at some of my other posts, you would have noticed.
BTW, they will hate America just as long as the Germans, Japanese, S. Koreans, and Afgani's did.
I am proud, and continue to be proud of the role the US has played in the world . Have we screwed up alot yes? Right now we are being punished because the french and the british had no clue that drawing lines w.r.t ethnic minorities might have been a good idea. We are being punished because A Celiphate 1200 years ago decided that Isreal would make a nice addition to Islamic vacation stops, and a pope decided that a new way to unify europe in the form of the crusades would be nice. The US is targeted because the British backed the Syrians rather then the Isreali's in 1947 and because the French and the British tried to re-take the Suez.
I for one will root for the day that we can simply build a wall around the only functional democracy in the region, and tell the Saudi's and egyptions to go play by themselves in a corner.
As for your last argument, It is my deepest wish that we never unleash nukes ever again (I have a history degree with a focus on WWII), that being said if Iraq ever uses a WMD against us or ours (US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Latin America), Hussain will be glassed.
Iraq hates is because we won't let them take over nations next to them, poison their kurdish minority, use biological weapons on Isreal, Kill random guests at parties and do all sorts of other anti-social behavoirs.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose the embargo on Iraq. I opposed it when the Libarals first suggested it in the early 90's.
That being said, I agree with Condi Rice. "We must take steps to make sure that the next smoking gun is not a mushroom cloud".
I am reminded of the Communist Trials, the stupidity of which we look back upon now and laugh at. In one airport run, I had to stand and watch both a girl who could barely see over the table on which her items were being rifled through get wanded, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother get "randomly searched" while sitting in her wheelchair. Upon seeing such unwarrented hysteria, I realized the terrorists had won.
Yes, but on the other hand, whenever anyone suggests that searching granny who was born in the US in 1932 might not reveal a terrorists, and instead suggests that it might be a good idea to make sure Sulyiman does not have a 10-pack of razors in his bag is immedatly called a racists.
The problem with Americans is that we assume that absolutly everyone is like us, there are people out there (Aidid, Hussain, et all) who have serious kill the big devil (the united states) and little devil (Isreal) reflexes, and don't mind turning WMD's on their own citizines to make the world a safer place for them.
Everyone held inside of the US on immigration charges or in X-ray have had forms and options given to them to reveal to media whom they are. Several have feared for the safety of their famalies in Afganistan if they are revealed (Northern Allience is not all that hot), so they have chosen not to.
Almost all >95% of the people held in immigration charges have been deported at this point. The remaining 5% are people that we really might not want Al-Qeda to know we have (the downside of a cell structure is that while your enemy can not easily get to your membership, neither can you, esp if they are "sleeper cells" like say, the 9/11 crowd was.).
There have been no changes that signficantly impact anyone one slashdot, unless one has serious ties to Islamists.
GASP! What is that? How can it be?
Outside of one alarmist Retuers article, the reality is that for 99.999% of people out there (which leaves approxamitly 2500 people left in america) there has been absolutly zilch change, with the exception of the fact that our airports are not the second most secure (we have a long way to go before we hit the level that is El-Al) and border crossings take longer.
(And don't give me the argument that Europe's are better. No they are not. I was there, I was scared at how easy it was, and this was a week after Reid decided to prove how lax security was).
Reality Check... 99.99% of slashdot probably constists of white males/females who are athiest/christian/jewish/hindu/moderate islam, which are viewed to be infidels by certain people. Reminder. THESE GUYS WANT TO KILL US. Plain and Simple. Ignoring the rhetoric, it comes down to that. Frankly, if they catch a guy who has been spending time in Afganistan in the company of the Taliban or Al-Qeda Lock him up for a VLT (Very Long Time).
If you find someone who is of obvious leanings, has home videos of other peoples kids and Disneyland and plans of the local radation generation, make friggen sure that said individual is not going to cry "Allahu Ackbar" and take a plan into either a) the sea, b) A building, c) a nuclear reactor...
Yoko Kanno (think Anime's John Williams) is doing the music for Stand Alone Complex. This is a huge surprise, because AFAIK, this is the first music she has done for a studio that is owned by someone other then Bandai.
(Some of her music includes Bebop, Escaflowne, Macross Plus, Arjuna, etc). This is a great thing, as she has been sorely underused as of late.
Good to see that KDE and GNOME have user's in mind
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 2
NOT.
First of all, this is actually some developers over on the KDE side of the house complaining. I just wish the KDE/GNOME guys would get over the NIH concerns.
Already they are doing a couple of stupid things that will ensure the dominance of Windows for another 5 years.
QT# does not implement the standards form interface making it incompatable with a large number of Windows and Mono applications.
A common Linux API's in C# would be a nice start. Some simple SOAP bingings that are platform independent would make the Linux experience much nicer.
Think about how to play together rather then "my program is better then yours"
We don't like it, so we are taking our ball and going home.
Seriously folks, There are massive issues with the jurasdiction purpose, but lets look at some of the judgements that Europeans are forcing on american people and companies:
- Yahoo/eBay crud.
Can you imagine the outcry if an american court forced a european court not to sell something completly in line with european law (never mind the horrible precident to forbid works of history).
- American's paying VAT taxes
Americans end up paying taxes on goods in Europe, even when we don't put taxes on their goods.
The author also labours under the fallacy of a single american culture. I, as an american, take that as a insult. I despise hollywood, am anti-death penalty, but anti-abortion.
In closing I have no worry about them taking their ball and going home. The Internet works beause it is a global best behavoir net. The side effect of a closed net is to shut themselves off too.
This is backup. CPU speed is neglagable here. RAIDed disk array is suggested, but not mandatory. A XP1800 is amazingly relable.
(BTW, As long as you get something KT333ish, you will have shutdown on CPU). I suspect that this is a rant from a magazine article, not real life, since fan failure on the CPU is far less likely then disk or case overheating.
Your backup system itself shoudl be backed up. The critical thing is just to not use the backup system for anything else. You would be _amazed_ at how long NT boxes can run under thoose circumstances.
Remember that the systems that you put in now have a tremendous effect on the organization of the company in the future. Likewise the policies you put in now, as long as they are reasonable, not to draconian, and CYA and CYCA (Cover your companies A$$) are important.
As time goes on, System Admining becomes a lot less about turning kernals, and a lot more about engineering data flow around the company. Realize that as a system admin, you now have a _lot_ of legal responsibility in the company. Among other things, you have to arbitrate between User privacy, and company security. In addition, you have root access to business documents that can and often must be considered confidential.
I recently asked a officer onboard a navy ship what was the most restricted position for people to be in. Turns out it is IT. They have access to just about anything, and so security must be tight.
Therefore, with System's Engineering perhaps more then any other computer job, you must not comprimise on principle and design if at all possible (which is not always true).
This is highly highly un-ethical IMHO, unless you take proper steps to inform all people that their systems could be monitored. In addition, the way you suggest using it (to impose fear) strikes me as a particullarly blase approach.
First of all, this could be used for "spying" by either yourself, or other IT staff, and yes, the temptation is there to do this. Second, you leave your network open to attack (this is a MD hash, and _CLEARTEXT_ passwords to log in). You should only ever do this with the users consent, or a direct order from a officer of the company (CEO/CTO/CIO: Anyone who can be held liable for actions of the company).
In general, I recommend the USAH/LSAH's ethics chapters. I think that all systems admins should read that before given root password.
Ruling thru fear is effective only when you are a small company (from personal experience). Once the company gets larger then say 20 people, you just can't inflict fear in the same way.
People do stupid things. Period. If you can cover for their mistakes, do so, because it means that you will look like a Miracle Worker rather then a evil tyrant.
One of the products that I do like is agent based backup. These software let end users "request" backups of critical data. This is a really good idea for laptops, which have problems with not always being able to access the H:\ drives. This is also a problem because clueless execs also tend to have laptops.
In general tho, leave a policy there that is draconian, but go above and beyond the call of doctrine and duty, and it will serve you well.
The problem with OFO's, is that they tend to require a lot of up front setup, and people just "assume" that it works cleanly with Oracle and what not.
Any application which has a propetary store (read Exchange/Oracle/SQL/etc) really should have a specific backup agent which is capable of talking store-ese. The OFO options allow you to copy, but they do not make sure that the store is in a recoverable state when you copy the backup. In addition, you really cannot mix OFO's with clustering without bad things happening (a particular problem I hit recently).
Worst comes to worse, schedule yourself a hour every few weeks to do cold backups. Then a) You know that your data is consistant b) You have a excuse to bring the network down. c) You teach the executives that you can not maintain a 24x7 service without pretty expensive hardware and software services.
After many years of painfull experience, I have only one suggestion:
**** NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BACKUP WORKSTATIONS ****
Got my point?
Instead, go out and buy a cheap server. You can get a AtlonXP 1800 w/ 512MB of RAM and 100 GB of disk for around 200-400 dollors if you put it together yourself. From there map all drives. If you ever get stuck in a situation where you back up the PC's A) It will get difficult to wean users off of later. B) Builds bad saving practice. To comply with document policies, you really must centralize where your documents are. C) Backup software tends to fail/hide/be to verbose when too many boxes are used.
If you absolutly have to backup workstations, look at network backup products like Veritas or Seagate software (err. they may have sent the product to some other company). Ask a user explicitly for a single directory to backup.
For servers, a image level backup is always a good idea. It tends to be the different between 3-4 hours recovery time and 12-24 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Per fox's PR7
http://www.fireflyfans.net/news.asp?newsid=32
They are going to trade it. BTW, Zap2it has been ragging on firefly since day one. Take anything they say with a grain of salt.
More to the point, the Mono project started using WineLib (not all of wine as some posts have suggested) to make sure that the System.Windows.Forms is completly compatable with the standard interface. Imagine, distributing a single binary on both Windows and Linux. That can only help linux. I am waiting for a System.Linux namespace to become available.
There are a lot of statements here that need correction.
.NET) and Perl's .NET support is awesome.
.GNU project aims to bring ActiveX functionality over to *NIX, and port all of the cool ActiveX objects like ADO (Database), DOM (XML), System.DirectoryServices (LDAP), FSO (Files), etc.
.NET rewreites all of these, and MONO is writing all of them. ADO is replacd with the much more usefull ADO.net, DOM is boosted with XSL, XSD, X** (many other XML standards), System.Directory is also bein gimplemented. FSO is replaced by the much cleaner streaming interface. Mono is implementing all of these
First of all, cOM is on it's way out. It is being replaced by the new remoting and web services architecture. The new component arch works much better and is far easier to understand then the iUnknown interface in COM. COM+ services (most notable, transactions) are still being supported, and I have no doubt that Mono will do a great job implementing these.
Sadly, *NIX has never really implimented anything like COM.
Not true. In fact, there is a COM implemented for UNIX called XPCOM. It's the foundation of Mozilla. In addition, COM itself is a copy of CORBA/IDL (the tools for Corba/IDL are fairly poor tho). Gnome uses CORBA, and KDE also uses a distributed object protocol. In additional, almost every language supports SOAP (including
So, really: what is the need for C# on *NIX? None of my c# code that I am writing will port, because it is heavily dependent on the COM/ActiveX objects to get the real work done. Unless the
It's a really good thing that
There is a difference. Compare the vast amount of space with people living on average further from major metropolitian areas with england. Quite frankly, England was crowded in the 1700's to say nothing of today. OTOH, if Colorado were to put in a fast track system, it would cost us millions of dollars, but there are only 5/10 million people in colorado. The land that we would have to cover just for this one rather small state to provide the same amount of train coverage per person would be prohibitivly expensive.
Someone would prefer to use a model that does not require me to think beyond simple business rules in the first place. Thinking about the difference in "beans" in kinda absurd.
Oh, and that model is faster, semantically cleaner and more interopable? I can't understand why more people don't use it (yet)....
Just like Carbon, C++, this stuff will take a bit to catch on, but catch on it will.
It's their business ethic I can't stand. .NET is the most exciting thing in distributed component programming since Objective-C and NeXT. Unlike, Microsoft has enough influnce to acutally make a new programming language part of the vernacular that programmers use.
.NET, and have been utterly amazed at the API. While C++ has about 50/50 curve (50% of the things are really easy to do, the other 50% suck) and Java raises that to about 70/30, C# and more importantly the .NET framework allow programmers to naturally write good n-tier applications. (In fact, my biggest critique on .NET is that it tends to force people to n-tier when that is not completly appropriate).
.NET is component oriented. Refliction, delegates, events, emission, cross domain calls and third party language itneroperability are all first class in .NET...
I have deployed two different production systems off of
J2EE is a horrific mess in many ways. The abstractions don't map well to real world concerns (for example, a bean represents a row, not a business object, unless your business object is a row, in which case you are probably over exposed to changes in the database), and the API's for SOAP et all are poor (unless you use Glue which rocks beyond anything else I have seen in Java).
Java's basic trade offs are part of the problem. Remember that Java was created for the purpose of running on embeded systems. This makes very simple tradeoffs (for example, optimizing for size in the bytecode instead of performance) that are not real good for large applications.
Finally, Java is object oriented.
Now, if Microsoft's business guys would just follow suit.
How many more people are going to die.
. htm
s ia _sr42_fy02.html
7 02 63.stm
By the Taleban, who wants the world to return the late 14th century. Wants Christians, Homosexuals, Hindu's, moderate Islamics, and anyone who disagrees with sharia to be put to death?
What were the predictions of death before the US went in there due to starvation in Afganistan (irregardless of US bombs?) 7,500,000. People forget that we immediatly started food shipments as well into afganistan (and had already been providing more then a 3 million in aid even with Bin Ladin in sactuary in Afganistan).
source: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/afg159.doc
Will we save them all? Probably not. Did we save most of them? Yes. That alone is a major step up.
We have invested 689 Million dollors just into relief efforts.
In general, if there is one criticism to be made in general from the Afgani war is that we did not take a active enough approach to it, and accidently killed people that the warlords "mis-identified".
http://www.usaid.gov/hum_response/ofda/centrala
Many millions more are going to the governments directly as well. Imagine how much worse it could have been if we had not gotten involved when we did.
By Al-Qeda
Al-Qeda has called for the re-establishment of a Celiphate as their main rallying call. In addition, Bin Ladin wants the relativly (anything is relative compared to Iran/Iraq/Syria) moderate government blodily overthrown.
Al-Qeda contains many other organizations. On top of this list is the Lashkar Jihad which has been attempting to "purify" Indonesia by exterminating the Christians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7
3000 or more have died.
Aceh Merdeka is responsible for more then 2000 deaths in Indonesia
Want more? Go Here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/
These groups will kill simply on the basis of ethnic, religous or political differences.
Today they are being challanged.
Hussain stands with Hitler as the only dictator to use WMDs against his own population (gassing). He has killed hudreds of thousands of political dissidents, and invaded two nearby countries in the last twenty years. He is activly persuing biological, nukes, and chemical weapons. Deployed WMD's for strike against Isreal in the Desert War in the early 90's but was dissuaded when the US government informed him that the response would be of "biblical proportions" should any WMD be used. Known to believe that Isreal's annilihation would be the key to unifying the Middle east.
How many will die? Depends on weither we stop him before he nukes someone.
Nope. They were not fabricated. The PA then forbit any journalists to record pictures of it, and confiscated more cameras.
I don't doubt that there are Islamic fundamentalists who do want this, but it is inaccurate to consider all of them to be part of a homogenous group. All al-Queda want is isolation of the Middle East from Western influence.
Bi Ladin himself has says otherwise. The phrase take back the lands that are muslim, includes France and Spain as well
Moslems want to restart the crusades? I suggest you go back and reread your mediaeval history.
Mine's up to date, yours? Remember, they sacked Isreal first.
That's hardly a trait of al-Queda, or Islam in general.
Really? Take a look at Lashkar Jihaad, or the groups in Kashmir, or Bin Ladin's repeated accounts that Allah has given him the deaths of 2 million americans. 2,000,000 - 3,000 = big number.
perhaps you ought to study what the CIA started on September 11th, 1973 in Chile. I'll get you started
That was the British more then the Americans, and there was a different threat present. Does that justify it? Nope. Pinochet turned out to be (arguably) a bad dude. Does that change anything? Nope. Not a whit. Your argument is a straw man, and it has nothing to do with the larger elements.
The guys want to kill Americans. Pure and simple. Because we support Isreal and deny them all sorts of things that went out of fashion in Europe 1000 years ago.
Another Simple Statistical fact. Lets assume that there are ~1000truly radical we want to bring back sharia, women must never be seen in public again death to infidel type radicals in america. Let's assume that there are ~100 terrorists in the nation. Since ETA, Basque/Irish/Itallian/zimbabwian (etc) terrorists are pretty much not likely to hit in America (where they do most of the fund raising, but that's another story), lets assume that the 100 are of the Arab persuasion. Let's further assume that 25 members of Indymedia have lost what further sanity they have left, and now decided to avenge Palestine using C4.
Percentage of people who might have radical beliefs and use C4
100/1000
percentege of people who might use C4
125/270,000,000
Percentege of Americans who might use C4
25/270,000,000
Which number might you go after first? Even if it is by screening middle easter foreigners, assuming that 400,000 come thru a year:
100/400,0000
Do you honestly believe that? Perhaps Hitler only wanted Alsance-Lorraine back. Reality check, the US Millitary wants nothing more then to be rid of the Prince-Sultan base. They don't need it, causes too many clueless twits like Bin Ladin to use excuses to rally his troops.
So, let's go to their sites.
a) Worldwide Sharia... That's right Christians, Lesbians, Gays, Jews, Moderate Islamics, Hindu's now you too can live in a world where You can be beheaded for any variety of personal belief.
b) Establishment of a Celiphate. Basically these guys want to restart the crusades.
c) Death to anyone who may stop them. Yep, that's you... If you post to Slashdot, chances are you fall into category A above, and therefore is someone who would resist Sharia. Don't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
First of all, The "west" created Iraq? Umm try again. The UK and France created the unholy mess that is the middle east with constant back stabbing, broken treaties and leaving the Jews to fend for themselves. We have kept the west out of the Middle East as much as possible (go lookup the Suez Debacle with UK/France) as well as forcing them to give up thoose regions of the world after WWII.
We gave the Middle East self-determination. They have squandered in to a pit of religious extremism.
Second of all, fact checks:
The gov't of Saudi Arabai has been around almost as long as the US. We did not create Iraq, we gave them weapons because they were by far the lesser of two evils during the 80's (imagine how bad the Islamists would be if Iran had conquered Iraq.).
That being said, while I reject the porely written arguments which do not have factual basis above, I agree with the fact that Saudi Arabia is scum, and had you looked at some of my other posts, you would have noticed.
BTW, they will hate America just as long as the Germans, Japanese, S. Koreans, and Afgani's did.
I am proud, and continue to be proud of the role the US has played in the world . Have we screwed up alot yes? Right now we are being punished because the french and the british had no clue that drawing lines w.r.t ethnic minorities might have been a good idea. We are being punished because A Celiphate 1200 years ago decided that Isreal would make a nice addition to Islamic vacation stops, and a pope decided that a new way to unify europe in the form of the crusades would be nice. The US is targeted because the British backed the Syrians rather then the Isreali's in 1947 and because the French and the British tried to re-take the Suez.
I for one will root for the day that we can simply build a wall around the only functional democracy in the region, and tell the Saudi's and egyptions to go play by themselves in a corner.
As for your last argument, It is my deepest wish that we never unleash nukes ever again (I have a history degree with a focus on WWII), that being said if Iraq ever uses a WMD against us or ours (US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Latin America), Hussain will be glassed.
Iraq hates is because we won't let them take over nations next to them, poison their kurdish minority, use biological weapons on Isreal, Kill random guests at parties and do all sorts of other anti-social behavoirs.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose the embargo on Iraq. I opposed it when the Libarals first suggested it in the early 90's.
That being said, I agree with Condi Rice. "We must take steps to make sure that the next smoking gun is not a mushroom cloud".
I am reminded of the Communist Trials, the stupidity of which we look back upon now and laugh at. In one airport run, I had to stand and watch both a girl who could barely see over the table on which her items were being rifled through get wanded, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother get "randomly searched" while sitting in her wheelchair. Upon seeing such unwarrented hysteria, I realized the terrorists had won.
Yes, but on the other hand, whenever anyone suggests that searching granny who was born in the US in 1932 might not reveal a terrorists, and instead suggests that it might be a good idea to make sure Sulyiman does not have a 10-pack of razors in his bag is immedatly called a racists.
The problem with Americans is that we assume that absolutly everyone is like us, there are people out there (Aidid, Hussain, et all) who have serious kill the big devil (the united states) and little devil (Isreal) reflexes, and don't mind turning WMD's on their own citizines to make the world a safer place for them.
Everyone held inside of the US on immigration charges or in X-ray have had forms and options given to them to reveal to media whom they are. Several have feared for the safety of their famalies in Afganistan if they are revealed (Northern Allience is not all that hot), so they have chosen not to.
Almost all >95% of the people held in immigration charges have been deported at this point. The remaining 5% are people that we really might not want Al-Qeda to know we have (the downside of a cell structure is that while your enemy can not easily get to your membership, neither can you, esp if they are "sleeper cells" like say, the 9/11 crowd was.).
There have been no changes that signficantly impact anyone one slashdot, unless one has serious ties to Islamists.
GASP! What is that? How can it be?
Outside of one alarmist Retuers article, the reality is that for 99.999% of people out there (which leaves approxamitly 2500 people left in america) there has been absolutly zilch change, with the exception of the fact that our airports are not the second most secure (we have a long way to go before we hit the level that is El-Al) and border crossings take longer.
(And don't give me the argument that Europe's are better. No they are not. I was there, I was scared at how easy it was, and this was a week after Reid decided to prove how lax security was).
Reality Check... 99.99% of slashdot probably constists of white males/females who are athiest/christian/jewish/hindu/moderate islam, which are viewed to be infidels by certain people. Reminder. THESE GUYS WANT TO KILL US. Plain and Simple. Ignoring the rhetoric, it comes down to that. Frankly, if they catch a guy who has been spending time in Afganistan in the company of the Taliban or Al-Qeda Lock him up for a VLT (Very Long Time).
If you find someone who is of obvious leanings, has home videos of other peoples kids and Disneyland and plans of the local radation generation, make friggen sure that said individual is not going to cry "Allahu Ackbar" and take a plan into either a) the sea, b) A building, c) a nuclear reactor...
Yoko Kanno (think Anime's John Williams) is doing the music for Stand Alone Complex. This is a huge surprise, because AFAIK, this is the first music she has done for a studio that is owned by someone other then Bandai.
(Some of her music includes Bebop, Escaflowne, Macross Plus, Arjuna, etc).
This is a great thing, as she has been sorely underused as of late.
NOT.
First of all, this is actually some developers over on the KDE side of the house complaining. I just wish the KDE/GNOME guys would get over the NIH concerns.
Already they are doing a couple of stupid things that will ensure the dominance of Windows for another 5 years.
QT# does not implement the standards form interface making it incompatable with a large number of Windows and Mono applications.
A common Linux API's in C# would be a nice start. Some simple SOAP bingings that are platform independent would make the Linux experience much nicer.
Think about how to play together rather then "my program is better then yours"
We don't like it, so we are taking our ball and going home.
Seriously folks, There are massive issues with the jurasdiction purpose, but lets look at some of the judgements that Europeans are forcing on american people and companies:
- Yahoo/eBay crud.
Can you imagine the outcry if an american court forced a european court not to sell something completly in line with european law (never mind the horrible precident to forbid works of history).
- American's paying VAT taxes
Americans end up paying taxes on goods in Europe, even when we don't put taxes on their goods.
The author also labours under the fallacy of a single american culture. I, as an american, take that as a insult. I despise hollywood, am anti-death penalty, but anti-abortion.
In closing I have no worry about them taking their ball and going home. The Internet works beause it is a global best behavoir net. The side effect of a closed net is to shut themselves off too.
This is backup. CPU speed is neglagable here. RAIDed disk array is suggested, but not mandatory. A XP1800 is amazingly relable.
(BTW, As long as you get something KT333ish, you will have shutdown on CPU). I suspect that this is a rant from a magazine article, not real life, since fan failure on the CPU is far less likely then disk or case overheating.
Your backup system itself shoudl be backed up. The critical thing is just to not use the backup system for anything else. You would be _amazed_ at how long NT boxes can run under thoose circumstances.
Remember that the systems that you put in now have a tremendous effect on the organization of the company in the future. Likewise the policies you put in now, as long as they are reasonable, not to draconian, and CYA and CYCA (Cover your companies A$$) are important.
As time goes on, System Admining becomes a lot less about turning kernals, and a lot more about engineering data flow around the company. Realize that as a system admin, you now have a _lot_ of legal responsibility in the company. Among other things, you have to arbitrate between User privacy, and company security. In addition, you have root access to business documents that can and often must be considered confidential.
I recently asked a officer onboard a navy ship what was the most restricted position for people to be in. Turns out it is IT. They have access to just about anything, and so security must be tight.
Therefore, with System's Engineering perhaps more then any other computer job, you must not comprimise on principle and design if at all possible (which is not always true).
This is highly highly un-ethical IMHO, unless you take proper steps to inform all people that their systems could be monitored. In addition, the way you suggest using it (to impose fear) strikes me as a particullarly blase approach.
First of all, this could be used for "spying" by either yourself, or other IT staff, and yes, the temptation is there to do this. Second, you leave your network open to attack (this is a MD hash, and _CLEARTEXT_ passwords to log in). You should only ever do this with the users consent, or a direct order from a officer of the company (CEO/CTO/CIO: Anyone who can be held liable for actions of the company).
In general, I recommend the USAH/LSAH's ethics chapters. I think that all systems admins should read that before given root password.
Ruling thru fear is effective only when you are a small company (from personal experience). Once the company gets larger then say 20 people, you just can't inflict fear in the same way.
People do stupid things. Period. If you can cover for their mistakes, do so, because it means that you will look like a Miracle Worker rather then a evil tyrant.
One of the products that I do like is agent based backup. These software let end users "request" backups of critical data. This is a really good idea for laptops, which have problems with not always being able to access the H:\ drives. This is also a problem because clueless execs also tend to have laptops.
In general tho, leave a policy there that is draconian, but go above and beyond the call of doctrine and duty, and it will serve you well.
The problem with OFO's, is that they tend to require a lot of up front setup, and people just "assume" that it works cleanly with Oracle and what not.
Any application which has a propetary store (read Exchange/Oracle/SQL/etc) really should have a specific backup agent which is capable of talking store-ese. The OFO options allow you to copy, but they do not make sure that the store is in a recoverable state when you copy the backup. In addition, you really cannot mix OFO's with clustering without bad things happening (a particular problem I hit recently).
Worst comes to worse, schedule yourself a hour every few weeks to do cold backups. Then
a) You know that your data is consistant
b) You have a excuse to bring the network down.
c) You teach the executives that you can not maintain a 24x7 service without pretty expensive hardware and software services.
After many years of painfull experience, I have only one suggestion:
**** NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BACKUP WORKSTATIONS ****
Got my point?
Instead, go out and buy a cheap server. You can get a AtlonXP 1800 w/ 512MB of RAM and 100 GB of disk for around 200-400 dollors if you put it together yourself. From there map all drives. If you ever get stuck in a situation where you back up the PC's
A) It will get difficult to wean users off of later.
B) Builds bad saving practice. To comply with document policies, you really must centralize where your documents are.
C) Backup software tends to fail/hide/be to verbose when too many boxes are used.
If you absolutly have to backup workstations, look at network backup products like Veritas or Seagate software (err. they may have sent the product to some other company). Ask a user explicitly for a single directory to backup.
For servers, a image level backup is always a good idea. It tends to be the different between 3-4 hours recovery time and 12-24 hours.
Anyways, that's my advice.