its really easy. What's difficult is to get "real" work done on a locked down system.
Security hardening is all about removing unnecessary facilities. So obviously whatever is left is necessary for you to do your job, if not then the security guys/procedures didn't do their analysis well enough.
Of course, what they think is necessary and what you think is "necessary" may not be quite the same thing....
the difference is this - do you remember anything the audiobook tells you?
No, of course not. If it did, it'd be because you were concentrating on the words and not on driving, but because the book is providing enough 'background' distraction, you end up shutting it out and find that you stop distracting yourself.
An example: a student once walked into a professor's office and was made to wait, and he started fidgiting and fidgiting, barely unasble to stand still. The professor told him to count the books on the wall behind him, and the student calmed down completely.
The reason: left to yourself with (apparently) nothing to do, your mind wanders all over the shop. Give it a little task to do and it remains settled. A lot of people find music to be better as words tend to make people listen too hard to them - ie, if you want to concentrate on something, wordless music is better than the radio that interrupts every so often to speak to you. You will always change focus when that happens.
So yeah, your audiobook isn't surprising to help you drive better.
but who cares, they turned me off it when I kept getting popups asking if I wanted to install it, am I sure I don't, no really we think you should. oh ok, I'll ask again next time you visit any page in case you've changed your mind.
I installed it in the end just to shut the damn thing up, and even then it refused to install. I almost cried with the frustration! The CIA could use this technique to get their terrorist suspects to talk.
MS doesn't often plan their takeover of markets, someone someehere in the depths of MS's vast ranks of development makes something cool, others within MS get to hear of it, its attracts some takeup,, and then everone in MS thinks that becuase they like it, you will too. And if you don't like it - tough, as they want you to have it so it becomes ubiqutous enough that they can use it everywhere without worrying about it. Hence the push to have silverlight installed everywhere.
Of course, that's the old way of MS planning. Now, someone at MS decides they can make money from it/increase market share/dominate a market, and so they tell everyone at MS to push it everywhere. It often doesn't work - look at.net and how much takeup they have there from the Office, Windows and now the Visual Studio teams. But you, as a MS consumer, still get the marketing message pushed down your throat like it or not.
BTW, they cannot 'flip the switch' and have you have it, they'd get sued. Again. That's why you have to opt-in to silverlight. Whether you want it or not.
They'll provide you with cheap (ish) broadband access - subject to Sprint's usual terms - and you'll also get the added value of Google ads emailed directly to you, keywords pulled from the data you access over their network.
Advertising pays for everything at Google, don't think they'll change that.
Microsoft has MSN which they like to try to push Dude, where have you been, MSN was like soooo last year. Its Windows Live now. Of course, by the time you read this post, it'll have been rebranded to something else again.
from MS.com Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription $5,469 $2,299
Don't forget that's $5k for the fist year, and then $2k per year renewal. It would be cheaper just to buy it, but then you'd not get the dev licences for the OS and other tools. shame really, MS used to be really good with these things but they've become too big, difficult to install, difficult to use and really expensive.
One of the best things is you can checkin changes, roll back to previous versions, branch, merge, etc... all on your local repository while you're on the plane or beach where there is no network access
no, that's the WORST thing about it in a corporate environment. See, if I've paid you $5000 a month to write software, I don't mind it written on a laptop on the beach as long as you check it into the central repository. I seriously do mind if you write it on your laptop on the beach, check it in to your local repository and then get your laptop stolen (or covered in margeritas). This is such a deal-breaker that I would say 'no beach coding' to all developers and make them sit in cubicles instead. Now if they could check code into the central, secure, backed-up repository then I'm fine with whereever they want to code.
Now branching... that's another story and is possibly why this article should be talking about the differences between MS Team Foundation System and Clearcase.
other features for bare-metal backup/restore involves:
Systemimager (dead good, and also good to restoring an image to other machines too). Restores from a cd (or PXE) boot and pulls the necessary data from the server with minimal intervention.
Any virtualisation technology - depends on your definition of 'bare metal', but if you think of it as an easy-to-restore server, then I guess it counts.
r1soft's (paid-for) continuous backup solution. Not tried this, but many webhost type companies have said its the dogs danglies.
so lets get this straight, just for the record. You installed LVM and added additional drives to a single volume (in much the same way as you'd do with a RAID0 setup) and when 1 drive failed you were surprised that you lost all your data?
Its not magic, you need RAID1 or RAID5 to get protection from drive failure, or good backups. LVM has some features that make this a good choice (eg snapshots) but it is not a RAID solution. Stick it on a redundant array and you'll be fine.
"You can not hang up on the customer. They must hang up." really? h boy are they going to have a large bill next time they call me. I only use my landline for broadband so I don't care if I put it on the side without disconnecting. joy.
"You must try to make an appointment for a salesman to call, even if you know it will mean no sale." really? well, I'd like the salesman to call on tuesday morning. What time tuesday morning? Yep 'morning'. And then I'll make sure to be out and only get back at 11:59.
Works for them, why can't it work for me?
On the other hand, life is far too short to do anything more than just hangup on them immediately.
It is my experience that the practical usefulness of features like manual memory management and multiple inheritence are frequntly over-stated I used to think this (about MI), who uses it.... but then I joined a larege company that wrote pretty big enterprise software, who used Analysts who really did a lot of design work (in UML, rather them than me), and they used MI *all* the time. Its pretty obvious when you come to think of it (ie when you've sat down and designed a big system from a logical point of view).
That most people do not use it only shows the 'simple' nature of most applications they write, in languages that do not support it. I know it can be abused, but if you're a professional who knows what you're doing, then its pretty damn powerful. Seriously so.
As for automatic memory management, this is a big failing of GC languages where objects contain anything other than memory. eg. GC is fabulous for string classes, but for a DB class or a file class, or network class they are next to useless. Any 'elegant and beautifully designed' language that has GC fails in these cases - where's the 'elegance' of a OO language where you have to manually close (or 'dispose') of the object by hand or the resource remains in use until the object eventually gets freed. That's not Object Orientation in my opinion, its Structured Programming with classes.
If you're interested in knowing how 'interesting' the underlying.NET code is, you need to read Chris Brumme's weblog. He was part of the team that designed the CLR, and he tells all about it - both good and bad. Unfortunately, some of the bad really doesn't fit with the 'best practices' other parts of the MS marketing machine instructs you to use. eg. exceptions - I was told that exceptions are totally free in.NET, the language took care of them, there was no overhead whatsoever. Turns out that's not quite true. eg: Consider some of the things that happen when you throw an exception:
* Grab a stack trace by interpreting metadata emitted by the compiler to guide our stack unwind.
* Run through a chain of handlers up the stack, calling each handler twice.
* Compensate for mismatches between SEH, C++ and managed exceptions.
* Allocate a managed Exception instance and run its constructor. Most likely, this involves looking up resources for the various error messages.
* Probably take a trip through the OS kernel. Often take a hardware exception.
* Notify any attached debuggers, profilers, vectored exception handlers and other interested parties.
The stuff he wrote is pretty old now, but I can't see much of it changing in the CLR. Like COM before it, I can see.NET becoming full of cruft (check out his posts on Application Hosting in IIS and SQL Server).
interesting.. now, how do I do that in Thunderbird?
It may be slightly redundant though, all those emails bounced back at me are ones that are obviously spam - otherwise the recipient's spam filter wouldn't be bouncing them to me, and so you'd expect my spam filters to detect and delete them without any intervention on my part.
As my 16 year old son said of the jello-wobble screens: Cute, but what's the point! and to think people said the same of Vista! Look how wrong they tur... oh yeah.
Seriously, Microsoft's main marketing effort in flogging copies of Vista, and persuading the world that Vista was the thing to have was entirely down to the UI. The fact that Vista hasn't had the expected take-up is partly down to it being a unhelpful resource hog and that too many bloggers said so. If Vista's UAC, Aero etc worked as we expected and there was just 2 editions, I think MS's recent results would have shown an increase in profits, not a drop. Most of those sales would have practically been down to the fancy UI.
but if it fails to do that, we will end up going with Outlook as we can't afford to buy high end computers for every seat just because of the requirements of one of our core programs.
just don't run it on Vista!!!!!!
(ok, seriously, if all you're doing is email, then why aren't you just running an IMAP server and thunderbird, or any of the other alternatives?).
Supreme Commander is the game that requires 2 cores (well, ok you can drop the frame rate, polygon levels and other fidelity settings of course. Nobody would ever release a game that couldn't be played on a single core machine)(not yet at least).
I think, considering the diminishing returns from adding cores, that adding specialised units on die would make sense. Look at how good a GPU version of folding@home is, and think how that kind of specialised processign could be farmed off to a specialised core. Not necessarily for graphics as I think Nvidia will continue to sell better and better graphics cards.
If the die had the co-processor on it, and CPU extensions to support it, then compiler writers would use it and some processing tasks could fly along.
And the reason why wouldn't they put these things into the existing CPU cores is probably complexity. A dedicated core must be easier to design and develop that bloating existing ones with added features and extensions.
True. In the Linux world the answer to any problem is "big deal".
For ReiserFs going away.. big deal. Work on a better replacement has been going on for a while now. eg:
Q: In a comment about your podcast a reader asked why not everyone would help ReiserFS. What is the difference between ReiserFS and Btrfs?
I worked on ReiserFS v3 for a number of years, and so I have a lot of respect for the Namesys developers. Adding the snapshotting, checksumming and other reliability features to ReiserFS v4 would have basically meant changing the disk format and rewriting big portions of the code. I would have also needed to fork the project into a GPL-only variant. Now he just needs to get his finger out and get a initial release.
You have a very specific need that this particular filesystem solves for you. That doesn't mean any other filesystme is somehow inferior, they solve other issues (go on, tell us what tasks ReiserFS is rubbish ats).
NTFS is a good filesystem. After all, its probably the most common FS in the world, and nobody complains about either its general performance or reliability. It loses out in some cases, but then so does every other filesystem. There isn't a 'perfect' FS that does everything in every case.
Now if you still need a filesystem that is more reliable that Reiser (it has some well documented risks - read the rest of this/. story for some), but still has good performance reading (and deleting) small files, try HFS or keep an eye on BTRFS.
BTW, comments from Hans are practically worthless, everyone and his dog knows the guy is an arrogant ass who would criticise everything but his stuff.
I remember 5.25" drives, lol. That's an interesting unit - send a link if you have one. RAID5 performance over 4 'slow' drives would not be the best, but then a 4-drive RAID5 array can be damn slow anyway. If you used it for backups... you'd still want the capacity of larger drives, but it still seems a cool little unit.
a datacentre with a 5400rpm HDD would be a bad thing, but.. a 20-drive RAID5 array would not be so bad.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I know more spindles = better performance, and you could fit a lot more little drives into an enclosure than the relatively large 3.5" drives, so perhaps the overall performance would be better.
I guess, in the end, you don't get 2.5" drives in SCSI flavour so its a bit pointless. the only good thing about 2.5" drives is that you can put them in an USB caddy without needing a power brick.
perhaps this is why we're seeing so many sites putting all their 'useful' interactivity in flash. (or silverlight). MS's "security" has broken everything so much even they have started to work around it.
not really. Once the AV company has enough viruses in the wild to persuade you to buy their product, all the viruses past that point is just a costly nuisance to them.
not so. If the attack targeted.php pages, you'd be safe. Partly because every PHP programmer is told to use 'gpg magic quotes', but also because the PHP mysql driver doesn't support multiple queries.
Slashdot Mirror
its really easy. What's difficult is to get "real" work done on a locked down system.
Security hardening is all about removing unnecessary facilities. So obviously whatever is left is necessary for you to do your job, if not then the security guys/procedures didn't do their analysis well enough.
Of course, what they think is necessary and what you think is "necessary" may not be quite the same thing....
You have 4 windows updates to install:
Security hotfix for XML services KB0453456
Security hotfix for Windows
Microsoft Silverlight
US DoD anti-terrorist cyberwarfare battle attack bot v3.1
Do you think they really wouldn't do it?
The one I remember most was the MSDN site. I surf using firefox/IETab and always get a large 'get silverlight' javascript 'popup'.
the difference is this - do you remember anything the audiobook tells you?
No, of course not. If it did, it'd be because you were concentrating on the words and not on driving, but because the book is providing enough 'background' distraction, you end up shutting it out and find that you stop distracting yourself.
An example: a student once walked into a professor's office and was made to wait, and he started fidgiting and fidgiting, barely unasble to stand still. The professor told him to count the books on the wall behind him, and the student calmed down completely.
The reason: left to yourself with (apparently) nothing to do, your mind wanders all over the shop. Give it a little task to do and it remains settled. A lot of people find music to be better as words tend to make people listen too hard to them - ie, if you want to concentrate on something, wordless music is better than the radio that interrupts every so often to speak to you. You will always change focus when that happens.
So yeah, your audiobook isn't surprising to help you drive better.
I'm sure silverlight is quite a good technology.
.net and how much takeup they have there from the Office, Windows and now the Visual Studio teams. But you, as a MS consumer, still get the marketing message pushed down your throat like it or not.
but who cares, they turned me off it when I kept getting popups asking if I wanted to install it, am I sure I don't, no really we think you should. oh ok, I'll ask again next time you visit any page in case you've changed your mind.
I installed it in the end just to shut the damn thing up, and even then it refused to install. I almost cried with the frustration! The CIA could use this technique to get their terrorist suspects to talk.
MS doesn't often plan their takeover of markets, someone someehere in the depths of MS's vast ranks of development makes something cool, others within MS get to hear of it, its attracts some takeup,, and then everone in MS thinks that becuase they like it, you will too. And if you don't like it - tough, as they want you to have it so it becomes ubiqutous enough that they can use it everywhere without worrying about it. Hence the push to have silverlight installed everywhere.
Of course, that's the old way of MS planning. Now, someone at MS decides they can make money from it/increase market share/dominate a market, and so they tell everyone at MS to push it everywhere. It often doesn't work - look at
BTW, they cannot 'flip the switch' and have you have it, they'd get sued. Again. That's why you have to opt-in to silverlight. Whether you want it or not.
They'll provide you with cheap (ish) broadband access - subject to Sprint's usual terms - and you'll also get the added value of Google ads emailed directly to you, keywords pulled from the data you access over their network.
Advertising pays for everything at Google, don't think they'll change that.
It isn't even near free.
from MS.com
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
with MSDN Premium Subscription $5,469 $2,299
Don't forget that's $5k for the fist year, and then $2k per year renewal. It would be cheaper just to buy it, but then you'd not get the dev licences for the OS and other tools. shame really, MS used to be really good with these things but they've become too big, difficult to install, difficult to use and really expensive.
One of the best things is you can checkin changes, roll back to previous versions, branch, merge, etc... all on your local repository while you're on the plane or beach where there is no network access
no, that's the WORST thing about it in a corporate environment. See, if I've paid you $5000 a month to write software, I don't mind it written on a laptop on the beach as long as you check it into the central repository. I seriously do mind if you write it on your laptop on the beach, check it in to your local repository and then get your laptop stolen (or covered in margeritas). This is such a deal-breaker that I would say 'no beach coding' to all developers and make them sit in cubicles instead. Now if they could check code into the central, secure, backed-up repository then I'm fine with whereever they want to code.
Now branching... that's another story and is possibly why this article should be talking about the differences between MS Team Foundation System and Clearcase.
other features for bare-metal backup/restore involves:
Systemimager (dead good, and also good to restoring an image to other machines too). Restores from a cd (or PXE) boot and pulls the necessary data from the server with minimal intervention.
Any virtualisation technology - depends on your definition of 'bare metal', but if you think of it as an easy-to-restore server, then I guess it counts.
r1soft's (paid-for) continuous backup solution. Not tried this, but many webhost type companies have said its the dogs danglies.
so lets get this straight, just for the record. You installed LVM and added additional drives to a single volume (in much the same way as you'd do with a RAID0 setup) and when 1 drive failed you were surprised that you lost all your data?
Its not magic, you need RAID1 or RAID5 to get protection from drive failure, or good backups. LVM has some features that make this a good choice (eg snapshots) but it is not a RAID solution. Stick it on a redundant array and you'll be fine.
Works for them, why can't it work for me?
On the other hand, life is far too short to do anything more than just hangup on them immediately.
That most people do not use it only shows the 'simple' nature of most applications they write, in languages that do not support it. I know it can be abused, but if you're a professional who knows what you're doing, then its pretty damn powerful. Seriously so.
As for automatic memory management, this is a big failing of GC languages where objects contain anything other than memory. eg. GC is fabulous for string classes, but for a DB class or a file class, or network class they are next to useless. Any 'elegant and beautifully designed' language that has GC fails in these cases - where's the 'elegance' of a OO language where you have to manually close (or 'dispose') of the object by hand or the resource remains in use until the object eventually gets freed. That's not Object Orientation in my opinion, its Structured Programming with classes.
If you're interested in knowing how 'interesting' the underlying
* Grab a stack trace by interpreting metadata emitted by the compiler to guide our stack unwind.
* Run through a chain of handlers up the stack, calling each handler twice.
* Compensate for mismatches between SEH, C++ and managed exceptions.
* Allocate a managed Exception instance and run its constructor. Most likely, this involves looking up resources for the various error messages.
* Probably take a trip through the OS kernel. Often take a hardware exception.
* Notify any attached debuggers, profilers, vectored exception handlers and other interested parties.
The stuff he wrote is pretty old now, but I can't see much of it changing in the CLR. Like COM before it, I can see
ok. translation for the modern generation:
"you know dude, you been naughty. like stop it, k"
will that do ya?
interesting.. now, how do I do that in Thunderbird?
It may be slightly redundant though, all those emails bounced back at me are ones that are obviously spam - otherwise the recipient's spam filter wouldn't be bouncing them to me, and so you'd expect my spam filters to detect and delete them without any intervention on my part.
Seriously, Microsoft's main marketing effort in flogging copies of Vista, and persuading the world that Vista was the thing to have was entirely down to the UI. The fact that Vista hasn't had the expected take-up is partly down to it being a unhelpful resource hog and that too many bloggers said so. If Vista's UAC, Aero etc worked as we expected and there was just 2 editions, I think MS's recent results would have shown an increase in profits, not a drop. Most of those sales would have practically been down to the fancy UI.
KDE could well be getting it right instead.
but if it fails to do that, we will end up going with Outlook as we can't afford to buy high end computers for every seat just because of the requirements of one of our core programs.
just don't run it on Vista!!!!!!
(ok, seriously, if all you're doing is email, then why aren't you just running an IMAP server and thunderbird, or any of the other alternatives?).
Supreme Commander is the game that requires 2 cores (well, ok you can drop the frame rate, polygon levels and other fidelity settings of course. Nobody would ever release a game that couldn't be played on a single core machine)(not yet at least).
I think, considering the diminishing returns from adding cores, that adding specialised units on die would make sense. Look at how good a GPU version of folding@home is, and think how that kind of specialised processign could be farmed off to a specialised core. Not necessarily for graphics as I think Nvidia will continue to sell better and better graphics cards.
If the die had the co-processor on it, and CPU extensions to support it, then compiler writers would use it and some processing tasks could fly along.
And the reason why wouldn't they put these things into the existing CPU cores is probably complexity. A dedicated core must be easier to design and develop that bloating existing ones with added features and extensions.
For ReiserFs going away.. big deal. Work on a better replacement has been going on for a while now. eg: Q: In a comment about your podcast a reader asked why not everyone would help ReiserFS. What is the difference between ReiserFS and Btrfs?
I worked on ReiserFS v3 for a number of years, and so I have a lot of respect for the Namesys developers. Adding the snapshotting, checksumming and other reliability features to ReiserFS v4 would have basically meant changing the disk format and rewriting big portions of the code. I would have also needed to fork the project into a GPL-only variant. Now he just needs to get his finger out and get a initial release.
In a way, I fail to see your problem.
/. story for some), but still has good performance reading (and deleting) small files, try HFS or keep an eye on BTRFS.
You have a very specific need that this particular filesystem solves for you. That doesn't mean any other filesystme is somehow inferior, they solve other issues (go on, tell us what tasks ReiserFS is rubbish ats).
NTFS is a good filesystem. After all, its probably the most common FS in the world, and nobody complains about either its general performance or reliability. It loses out in some cases, but then so does every other filesystem. There isn't a 'perfect' FS that does everything in every case.
Now if you still need a filesystem that is more reliable that Reiser (it has some well documented risks - read the rest of this
BTW, comments from Hans are practically worthless, everyone and his dog knows the guy is an arrogant ass who would criticise everything but his stuff.
I remember 5.25" drives, lol. That's an interesting unit - send a link if you have one. RAID5 performance over 4 'slow' drives would not be the best, but then a 4-drive RAID5 array can be damn slow anyway. If you used it for backups... you'd still want the capacity of larger drives, but it still seems a cool little unit.
a datacentre with a 5400rpm HDD would be a bad thing, but .. a 20-drive RAID5 array would not be so bad.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I know more spindles = better performance, and you could fit a lot more little drives into an enclosure than the relatively large 3.5" drives, so perhaps the overall performance would be better.
I guess, in the end, you don't get 2.5" drives in SCSI flavour so its a bit pointless. the only good thing about 2.5" drives is that you can put them in an USB caddy without needing a power brick.
perhaps this is why we're seeing so many sites putting all their 'useful' interactivity in flash. (or silverlight). MS's "security" has broken everything so much even they have started to work around it.
not really. Once the AV company has enough viruses in the wild to persuade you to buy their product, all the viruses past that point is just a costly nuisance to them.
not so. If the attack targeted .php pages, you'd be safe. Partly because every PHP programmer is told to use 'gpg magic quotes', but also because the PHP mysql driver doesn't support multiple queries.