The "we can't upgrade because stuff will break" crowd really gets on my nerves sometimes.
You must be a Solaris sysadmin. Let me give you a Solaris developer perspective:-)
I have complicated package install scripts that rely on many of the old Solaris SysV stuff to be there. If it isn't, things will almost certainly break.
The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in/usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing. After some period of time, announce that you are deprecating the SysV coammands. Some period of time later (several releases) consider reversing the situation - make the GNU stuff the default, leave the old commands somewhere else.
We still have plenty of customers running Solaris 7. When you have high availablility high transaction systems, you make upgrade moves slowly and carefully. I know this isn't the way Linux works, but Sun plays in somewhat of a different market.
We both sell widgets for $10, but mine only cost me $5 to manufacture, while yours cost you $9. I drop my price to $7. What do you do?
If you are Microsoft and you have $billions in the bank, you eat the loss and drop your price to try and compete. But don't come crying to me that you are losing money hand over fist every time you sell a widget.
Sorry, I don't have any sympathy for Micorosft here. Somebody might have "forced" them to drop their price, but nobody forced them to be stupid enough to manufacture a console more expensively than everyone else and then sell it with a game lineup that makes me yearn for my Atari 2600.
The window manager is 4DWm. I have an (old...) screenshot of it running here. I also have a crappy screenshot of IRIX running Enlightenment here.
A lot of people don't like 4DWm, put compared to other desktops that *NIX vendors were/are shipping (CDE!) 4DWm rocks. I think that Gnome/KDE have surpassed it in some areas, but the IRIX system admin tools in the toolchest are still better than what Gnome or KDE ship. Of course, IRIX only has to run on SGI hardware:-)
Indeed. When I got my current UID it was during a big upswing of account creation (just around the time Netscape was going to be open sourced). I remember feeling like such a n00b when they introduced moderation and my UID was too high to qualify at first.
I too don't feel so bad now, but I still feel humbled by the 1 and 2 digit UID people;-)
I'd like to second this opinion. When I worked as a co-op student at a semiconductor manufacturing facility, I wrote computer-based-training software to educate employees about ESD. I got to work with the engineers who were ESD specialists.
One of the major points that the training we developed emphasized is latent failures. Sure, sometimes you had a major discharge that fried something on the spot. However, the much more serious problem was that a smaller discharge would damage and weaken a part of a circuit. The chip would pass probe and final test, but fail later in the field. Of course, this cost the company much more than a failure caught before the chip shipped.
The bottom line is that the cost of employee education, grounded workstations, heel/toe straps, wrist straps and proper handling equipment was much less than replacing failing parts in the field.
His point is that our poulation is centered around several cities, which is true. You don't have to cover much of our landmass to get most of the population.
I'll admit that our situation here in Canada might be better than the US, but it is far from perfect. While CableModem/DSL is starting to come to smaller towns, people in rural areas like myself (just outside Ottawa) are out in the cold for broadband, and likely will be for the foreeable future.
I live in rural Canada and I *am* watching and praying.
I live in a rural subdivision just outside Ottawa, and I am praying too.
You can get 2-way satellite here now, but it is really expensive ($150/mo. plus thousands to set it up) and the latency is bad. I had hope for the spead-spectrum wirless that is being offered here (http://www.storm.ca for example) but it is line of sight and I am at the extreme range of one of their transmitters and I can't get LoS.
We can only hope this works out. I don't need 2Mb ADSL, but something in the order of a couple of hundred Kpbs would sure be nice.
Re:They're running out of book topics
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I still get a kick out of the "source code" for true on a Solaris box:
% cat/usr/bin/true #!/usr/bin/sh # Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T # All Rights Reserved
# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T # The copyright notice above does not evidence any # actual or intended publication of such source code.
Yeah, this manages to get posted to the front page when submitted by someone who attends said institution. Then, reading the comments one notices numerous posts from people with > 500,000 UIDs saying that they attend Olin, defending it, and basically astroturfing the hell out of this story.
I'm not saying that Olin isn't a good school, or even that the story isn't interesting, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
I took a computer Engineering degree in school, and I would have to agree with this sentiment. We learned the whole gambit: transististors -> digital logic -> computer architecture -> operating systems -> assembly progarmming -> C programming -> C++ programming.
That kind of knowledge isn't in all of the "Learn [Foo] in 21 Days" books combined, and I really do think it makes you a better programmer.
All the engineers in our orientation group... were gathered in an auditorium to listen to the dean speak. One of the first things he said was "Take a look around...3 of the 5 people sitting near you won't be here when you graduate"
Heh. I have an Engineering degree from a university in Canada, and they did the exact same thing. I wonder if it is a universal Engineering thing?
I got the impression that they were trying to make a point - don't assume that becuase you got good grades in high school that you can graduate from Engineering.
And you know what - I was proud when I graduated too, knowing that I had made it through those odds.
I thought this guy was supposed to be halfway intelligent, but he can't even figure out how to get XP working after even a couple installs?
Well, installed XP for my dad over top of 98 (I told him not to bother with XP, but anyways...) and it was unstable as hell, MOHAA would crash constantly, etc. This is on a 2 year old stock Dell system.
So, I backed up his data and reformatted the drive, and tried again. Same results.
Finally, I start pulling components out of the system. After numerous tries, I finally figure out that XP doesn't like one of his DIMMs. No problems under 98, but somehow XP was crapping out.
Trust me, you don't laugh at other people having problems with their PC, you feel sorry for them.
there is a myth around waterloo students, but not entirely unwarrented
I think it is pretty unwarrented. Maybe I am biased because I turned down Waterloo for another University, but I know friends who went there, and I have met plenty of people in the workplace who did too.
From what I see, Waterloo runs a CS/Comp Eng. school like everyone else. Sure, back in the day when they were the only ones doing co-op it might have been different, but now everyone does that.
IMHO, what school you go to doesn't have that much of an impact. Your natural ability, personality and willingness to learn aren't going to be changed by a post-secondary institution, and those are the things that really count.
Re:Time to move to Savannah
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 2
It becomes less open when you _have_ to use the proprietary tools.
I'll give you that, but sf.net isn't forcing you to run anything - they'll just be running some closed source stuff behind the scene.
I could see how some people might have a problem with that, but I am a bit more pragmatic. For example, would you refuse to visit Slashdot if it was hosted on a Solaris box running Oracle? I wouldn't!
Re:Time to move to Savannah
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 2
But it is your project, so if you prefer to wait until trouble actually arises, that is your perogative, and in the end, your fault.
His fault for what? If for some reason VA could not longer afford to run sf.net and nobody else wanted to step up and pay for it, then it would shut down. Ok, it might be somewhat of an inconvenience, but you would still have the important part - the source code - to continue and host the project somewhere else.
I don't get the bitching about sf.net. Ok, so some people don't like the fact that VA is selling a closed-source fork, but does that really impact the service? And there are a lot of stupid stage 1 projects in there that are going nowhere, but again, does that really impact the service?
People amaze me with the ability to complain about something that has been such a tremendous help to the open source community. Look at the number of important high-profile projects hosted there. Alternatives like GNU Savannah are good, but they don't have the server capacity (or features, yet) to measure up to sf.net.
It would be a huge loss to the community if sf.net shut down, and maybe that was your point. However, I prefer to look at the glass half full and hope that either VA will pull through or someone else will step up to pay for sf.net. Either way, sticking with them to host your project in the meantime is hardly stupid or short-sighted.
Heh, who ever thought I would be explaining old-school/. trolls to someone?
What's she got to do with hot grits?
One of the older slashdot trolls/jokes was Natalie Portman (considered to be good looking by many) naked and petrified, or having hot grits poured down her pants. It is sorta part of slashdot folklore, like first post and goatse.cx.
Is it me, or do people miss MEEPT, OOG, Steven Woston, Jon Eriksson and the rest of the old school jokers and trolls? I still get a laugh out of BREAKING OPEN SOURCE CD OVER HEAD!!!:)
Re:Is this really a security risk?
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've got news for you: local priviledge escalation exploits are still exploits.
Sure, it isn't as serious as a remote exploit. However, if you take the stance that once a user logs on to your system then you are 0wned, you don't have a real multi-user O/S. What is the point of having multiple user accounts with priviledge separation if you don't fix local exploits? Would you give every user on a system you admin root (Adminstrator) privs?
The fact that Microsoft is dismissing a local priviledge escalation as "not a problem" just tells me they still don't understand how to make a real multi-user enterprise O/S.
The only O'Reilly book I own that I can say sucks is the old MySQL one. I own dozens of O'Reilly titles and that is the only one I ever regretted purchasing.
The only publishers I trust are O'Reilly, Addison Wesley and the in-house publishers (Oracle Press, Sun Press, Microsoft Press). Anything else I typically wait for someone to really reccomend the book before I'll buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be a Solaris sysadmin. Let me give you a Solaris developer perspective :-)
I have complicated package install scripts that rely on many of the old Solaris SysV stuff to be there. If it isn't, things will almost certainly break.
The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in /usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing. After some period of time, announce that you are deprecating the SysV coammands. Some period of time later (several releases) consider reversing the situation - make the GNU stuff the default, leave the old commands somewhere else.
We still have plenty of customers running Solaris 7. When you have high availablility high transaction systems, you make upgrade moves slowly and carefully. I know this isn't the way Linux works, but Sun plays in somewhat of a different market.
Here's an economics lesson for you:
We both sell widgets for $10, but mine only cost me $5 to manufacture, while yours cost you $9. I drop my price to $7. What do you do?
If you are Microsoft and you have $billions in the bank, you eat the loss and drop your price to try and compete. But don't come crying to me that you are losing money hand over fist every time you sell a widget.
Sorry, I don't have any sympathy for Micorosft here. Somebody might have "forced" them to drop their price, but nobody forced them to be stupid enough to manufacture a console more expensively than everyone else and then sell it with a game lineup that makes me yearn for my Atari 2600.
The window manager is 4DWm. I have an (old...) screenshot of it running here. I also have a crappy screenshot of IRIX running Enlightenment here.
A lot of people don't like 4DWm, put compared to other desktops that *NIX vendors were/are shipping (CDE!) 4DWm rocks. I think that Gnome/KDE have surpassed it in some areas, but the IRIX system admin tools in the toolchest are still better than what Gnome or KDE ship. Of course, IRIX only has to run on SGI hardware :-)
As you can tell from my nick, some of were unfact *NIX users long before we were Linux users ;-)
Indeed. When I got my current UID it was during a big upswing of account creation (just around the time Netscape was going to be open sourced). I remember feeling like such a n00b when they introduced moderation and my UID was too high to qualify at first.
I too don't feel so bad now, but I still feel humbled by the 1 and 2 digit UID people ;-)
Edlin! :)
I'd like to second this opinion. When I worked as a co-op student at a semiconductor manufacturing facility, I wrote computer-based-training software to educate employees about ESD. I got to work with the engineers who were ESD specialists.
One of the major points that the training we developed emphasized is latent failures. Sure, sometimes you had a major discharge that fried something on the spot. However, the much more serious problem was that a smaller discharge would damage and weaken a part of a circuit. The chip would pass probe and final test, but fail later in the field. Of course, this cost the company much more than a failure caught before the chip shipped.
The bottom line is that the cost of employee education, grounded workstations, heel/toe straps, wrist straps and proper handling equipment was much less than replacing failing parts in the field.
Man, that site is hilarious! You can't make stuff like this up :-)
he govt. regulators did a good job in forcing the monopoly telcos to offer up the last mile at (almost) reasonable wholesale rates.
Probably not for long.
His point is that our poulation is centered around several cities, which is true. You don't have to cover much of our landmass to get most of the population.
I'll admit that our situation here in Canada might be better than the US, but it is far from perfect. While CableModem/DSL is starting to come to smaller towns, people in rural areas like myself (just outside Ottawa) are out in the cold for broadband, and likely will be for the foreeable future.
I live in rural Canada and I *am* watching and praying.
I live in a rural subdivision just outside Ottawa, and I am praying too.
You can get 2-way satellite here now, but it is really expensive ($150/mo. plus thousands to set it up) and the latency is bad. I had hope for the spead-spectrum wirless that is being offered here (http://www.storm.ca for example) but it is line of sight and I am at the extreme range of one of their transmitters and I can't get LoS.
We can only hope this works out. I don't need 2Mb ADSL, but something in the order of a couple of hundred Kpbs would sure be nice.
I still get a kick out of the "source code" for true on a Solaris box:
:)
Yeah, this manages to get posted to the front page when submitted by someone who attends said institution. Then, reading the comments one notices numerous posts from people with > 500,000 UIDs saying that they attend Olin, defending it, and basically astroturfing the hell out of this story.
I'm not saying that Olin isn't a good school, or even that the story isn't interesting, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
I took a computer Engineering degree in school, and I would have to agree with this sentiment. We learned the whole gambit: transististors -> digital logic -> computer architecture -> operating systems -> assembly progarmming -> C programming -> C++ programming.
That kind of knowledge isn't in all of the "Learn [Foo] in 21 Days" books combined, and I really do think it makes you a better programmer.
All the engineers in our orientation group ... were gathered in an auditorium to listen to the dean speak. One of the first things he said was "Take a look around...3 of the 5 people sitting near you won't be here when you graduate"
Heh. I have an Engineering degree from a university in Canada, and they did the exact same thing. I wonder if it is a universal Engineering thing?
I got the impression that they were trying to make a point - don't assume that becuase you got good grades in high school that you can graduate from Engineering.
And you know what - I was proud when I graduated too, knowing that I had made it through those odds.
Go ahead, point out a case where a corporation has successfully sued Microsoft over a bug in their software.
I'm waiting............
I thought this guy was supposed to be halfway intelligent, but he can't even figure out how to get XP working after even a couple installs?
Well, installed XP for my dad over top of 98 (I told him not to bother with XP, but anyways...) and it was unstable as hell, MOHAA would crash constantly, etc. This is on a 2 year old stock Dell system.
So, I backed up his data and reformatted the drive, and tried again. Same results.
Finally, I start pulling components out of the system. After numerous tries, I finally figure out that XP doesn't like one of his DIMMs. No problems under 98, but somehow XP was crapping out.
Trust me, you don't laugh at other people having problems with their PC, you feel sorry for them.
I think it depends on what kind of pilot you are, and where you are flying.
For example, when my dad was flying tacitcal helicopters for the military, he carried his sidearm when he flew on any sort of operational mission.
there is a myth around waterloo students, but not entirely unwarrented
I think it is pretty unwarrented. Maybe I am biased because I turned down Waterloo for another University, but I know friends who went there, and I have met plenty of people in the workplace who did too.
From what I see, Waterloo runs a CS/Comp Eng. school like everyone else. Sure, back in the day when they were the only ones doing co-op it might have been different, but now everyone does that.
IMHO, what school you go to doesn't have that much of an impact. Your natural ability, personality and willingness to learn aren't going to be changed by a post-secondary institution, and those are the things that really count.
It becomes less open when you _have_ to use the proprietary tools.
I'll give you that, but sf.net isn't forcing you to run anything - they'll just be running some closed source stuff behind the scene.
I could see how some people might have a problem with that, but I am a bit more pragmatic. For example, would you refuse to visit Slashdot if it was hosted on a Solaris box running Oracle? I wouldn't!
But it is your project, so if you prefer to wait until trouble actually arises, that is your perogative, and in the end, your fault.
His fault for what? If for some reason VA could not longer afford to run sf.net and nobody else wanted to step up and pay for it, then it would shut down. Ok, it might be somewhat of an inconvenience, but you would still have the important part - the source code - to continue and host the project somewhere else.
I don't get the bitching about sf.net. Ok, so some people don't like the fact that VA is selling a closed-source fork, but does that really impact the service? And there are a lot of stupid stage 1 projects in there that are going nowhere, but again, does that really impact the service?
People amaze me with the ability to complain about something that has been such a tremendous help to the open source community. Look at the number of important high-profile projects hosted there. Alternatives like GNU Savannah are good, but they don't have the server capacity (or features, yet) to measure up to sf.net.
It would be a huge loss to the community if sf.net shut down, and maybe that was your point. However, I prefer to look at the glass half full and hope that either VA will pull through or someone else will step up to pay for sf.net. Either way, sticking with them to host your project in the meantime is hardly stupid or short-sighted.
Heh, who ever thought I would be explaining old-school /. trolls to someone?
What's she got to do with hot grits?One of the older slashdot trolls/jokes was Natalie Portman (considered to be good looking by many) naked and petrified, or having hot grits poured down her pants. It is sorta part of slashdot folklore, like first post and goatse.cx.
Is it me, or do people miss MEEPT, OOG, Steven Woston, Jon Eriksson and the rest of the old school jokers and trolls? I still get a laugh out of BREAKING OPEN SOURCE CD OVER HEAD!!! :)
I've got news for you: local priviledge escalation exploits are still exploits.
Sure, it isn't as serious as a remote exploit. However, if you take the stance that once a user logs on to your system then you are 0wned, you don't have a real multi-user O/S. What is the point of having multiple user accounts with priviledge separation if you don't fix local exploits? Would you give every user on a system you admin root (Adminstrator) privs?
The fact that Microsoft is dismissing a local priviledge escalation as "not a problem" just tells me they still don't understand how to make a real multi-user enterprise O/S.
Guys,
Please stop slashdotting my C64. I am trying to watch some streaming video and play Counterstrike.
Sincerely,
Junis in Afghanistan
The only O'Reilly book I own that I can say sucks is the old MySQL one. I own dozens of O'Reilly titles and that is the only one I ever regretted purchasing.
The only publishers I trust are O'Reilly, Addison Wesley and the in-house publishers (Oracle Press, Sun Press, Microsoft Press). Anything else I typically wait for someone to really reccomend the book before I'll buy it.