By Scott McNealy
CEO and President,
The Sun Corperation.
December 2 2005
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of Unix servers in this country. SUN was the server to own. Then the other guy came out with a open source Linux based servers. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called Solaris. That's three layered enterprise system and J2EE application server. For portability. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to GCJ and JONAS. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three layered enterprise system and J2EE strip. portability or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going "open source".
Sure, we could go open source next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker Java layer and call it the Solaris enterprise environment. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the open source game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Solaris is the best OS a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If the BSD license is good, and the GPL license is better, obviously Sun's even more restrictive open source lisence would make us the best fucking system that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the Unix game by clinging to the posix industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, open sourcing theo whole Solaris entrprise system is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more abstraction layers in there. I don't care how. Make the JVM so thin it's invisible. Put some on the management interface. I don't care if they have to cram the new enterprise layer in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "Operating" part of "Operating System" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make platform history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when Solaris becomes the development tool for the U.S. of "this is how we program now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to develop, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Microsoft, working on fucking VISTA. Secure platform, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Microsoft's wake and make game consoles. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Microsoft is the day I leave the operating system game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, developing with anything less than J2EE is like hacking lines of VB off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off your firewall." Try "Your source is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief around it."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which SUN is, always
From the "Transcript of Internet Caucus Panel Discussion.
Re: Administration's new encryption policy.
Date: September 28, 1999.
Source: Tech Law Journal recorded the event, transcribed the audio recording, and then converted it into HTML. Weldon statement:
Schwartz: Congressman Weldon, thank you very much for being here. Do you have any questions.
Rep. Curt Weldon: Thank you. Let me see if I can liven things up here in the last couple of minutes of the luncheon. First of all, I apologize for being late. And I thank Bob and the members of the caucus for inviting me here.
Pardon me if I seem a little bit confused to our panel, but, I am, and have been, with the change in direction which has occurred. But before I begin, let me say at the outset one of my biggest projects for the past four years has been to build what is becoming the first smart region in America, linking up all of the institutions within a four state region -- Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland -- _____. In fact, over the weekend, I hosted the Minister _____, who is the Minister of Information Technology for Malaysia. As we signed an ____ with them for uplink downlink ties between our hub initiative in the four states, and the new Malaysian super-computing corridor project that they are building in Malaysia. So, I am a strong advocate for the use of information technology.
But my other hat is to chair the Research Committee for National Security. And when Bob introduced his bill three years ago, my door was pounded incessantly by the Defense Secretary and his staff, by the Director of the CIA, and by the head of the NSA, and I would note for the record neither the CIA nor the NSA is here today.
Who is actually speaking for them today, I might add? OK.
NSA and CIA came in, and in a very intense way, lobbied me personally, and I am not a computer expert, nor am I a lawyer, and they asked me to give access to my subcommittee and the full Armed Services Committee to look at the security implications of the change in Bob's legislation. I respect Bob. I think that he is an outstanding member. But I felt that I owed it to my committee, and my responsibility to Congress to listen to what the administration was going to tell me.
We arranged a series of classified hearings and briefings. And, as with any Member of Congress expressing concern about the ability for our forces involved in a hostile environment to be able to respond quickly, ____ back to 1991 in Desert Storm where my understanding is that our commanders in the field had Saddam Hussein's commands before his own command officers had them, because of our ability to intercept and break the codes of Saddam's military. I want to make sure that we have that capability in the future. I responded in a very positive way to the argument that was being made by the CIA, by the NSA, and by DOD. And we took some very tough positions.
In fact, Ron Dellums and I offered the amendment last year that had only one dissenting vote in the House, and this year passed by a vote of 48 to 6.
In the past year none of those briefings have changed. And the people who have come to me as a Member of the National Security Committee, there has been no lessening of their impression of the threat. Yet all of a sudden I am told, and John Hamre, I think, he made the courtesy of calling me in advance, that there was a change.
Now, I agree with the gentleman from the White House, for the administration, that it was coincidence that this happened the day before Vice President Gore went to Silicon Valley. I agree that that was just a coincidence.
But the point is that when John Hamre briefed me, and gave me the three key points of this change, there are a lot of unanswered questions. He assured me that in discussions that he had had with people like Bill G
4) Install a DHCP demon on the local
server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the
desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network.
If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware,
the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into
Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the
ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop
partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working
with full access to files while the the remote administrator
fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone
who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for
your setup ) 5) Partition the desktops with as small as required C:
partition ( or in the case of Linux the root partition ) for software.
When software is install, use dd and netcat
via live Knoppix to copy/clone a snapshot of the partition to the
server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistent
partition where documents are stored. 6) Install and enable remote VNC service on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
Lower end desktop PCs can be setup boot as thin-clients, as we used to do, and use LTSP with local ssh login and HD access to do the same job as the thick-client Knoppix.
Serously, someone whould consider hacking a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu live to work with WINE as a bootable CD for a remote repair service business.
For large establishments such as Coal or Gas power-plants, would it not be better to "scrub" the emissions close to the source and feed the "cleaner" CO2 and Nitrogen byproducts into sealed greenhouses to force feed specially genetically engineered bacteria and flora.
The resulting biomass could even be feed back into the energy cycle.
By the way, it was John Wyndham who first popularised this concept.
Anyhow, Szulik tends to hang around many of the more larger conservative kids, I mean companies, and even then in the backrooms a lot of it is going on that the CEOs and CIOs would like to admit ( I'm talking about messing around with Linux desktops, geez you guys have dirty minds ).
If Szulik were to hang around with more of the leaner mid sized less well off young companies he would find a lot more physical experimenting going on, especially with thin client Linux ( what else would they be doing ).
And as for local, state and federal governmental bodies around the world, they are begging for it, which at least is better than them always doing it to the tax payers.
I have set up and supported remote sites and home based telecommuters. Listen to my advice, listen very carefully and save your sanity and driving : Find an older PC, at least PII 300 with 256 MB memory, to set-up as a headless ( no display or keyboard ) server and firewall. A simple web based interface can be used to Start/stop the modem and server, all other maintenance should be handled remotely via ssh, webmin and vnc.
1) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be though the server and connection to the Office should be though a VPN on the server.
2) Install a new IDE Hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the HD during the day to resync and repair.
3) Install DHCP demon to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot KNOPPIX via PXE. IF the desktop OS is constantly crashing, the user can select PXE boot, network KNOPPIX. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable ssh server to allow remote repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions from copies on the local server.
4) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: ( or in the case of Linux the root ) partition for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live KNOPPIX to copy a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistant partition where documents are stored. ( Consider hireing someone who knows how to customise Knoppix for your setup.)
5) Install/Enable VNC on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
6) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessable by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundantcy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
7) If the network load to the Office is takeing up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server and consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best ).
8) If phone charges are eating into the budget, and the internet connection is good enough, then install Asterisk on the local server ( upgrade the server to a Celron 800Mhz or better ) and a card with enough FXS ports for each local user. Don't bother with software based phones/headsets. The phone will work when the desktop does not.
9) Set up a Linux server at the Office that operates as a thin client application server. Allow remote access though both FreeNX and VNC. Create login accounts and logins that operate as virtual meeting rooms, with multiple users logging in via VNC. Use VNCserver with a screen size of around 1000x600, that will operate via a VNC viewer on any 1024x768 desktop. Use phone based conference calling for voice -- it's a lot less hassle for the users
10) Add the ususal list of cross platform applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, OpenOffice etc.
Do the open ten step and save yourself and your santity from all those hours driving from site to site.
As I said before
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing and service industry be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works and despair.
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing and service industry be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works and despair.
However relatively bad the security of Microsoft's products are in
comparison to what the free licensed and open source communities (
as well as practically every other vendor on the planet ) provide,
Microsoft is not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is
a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as ever other OS and
vendor.
Samuel Plimsoll brought about one of the greatest shipping revolutions ever known by shocking the British nation into making reforms which have saved the lives of countless seamen. By the mid-1800's, the overloading of English ships had become a national problem. Plimsoll took up as a crusade the plan of James Hall to require that vessels bear a load line marking indicating when they were overloaded, hence ensuring the safety of crew and cargo. His violent speeches aroused the House of Commons; his book, Our Seamen, shocked the people at large into clamorous indignation. His book also earned him the hatred of many ship owners who set in train a series of legal battles against Plimsoll. Through this adversity and personal loss, Plimsoll clung doggedly to his facts. He fought to the point of utter exhaustion until finally, in 1876, Parliament was forced to pass the Unseaworthy Ships Bill into law, requiring that vessels bear the load line freeboard marking. It was soon known as the "Plimsoll Mark" and was eventually adopted by all maritime nations of the world.
The risks,issues and solutions for providing a more secure
operating and application enviroment have been known for decades.
Those who do not already comprehend the issues and are willing to
learn, should take some time out to listen to some of the speeches
at Dr. Dobbs Journal's Technetcast security archives, starting with Meeting Future Security Challenges by Dr. Blaine Burnham, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security
Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency
(NSA)
The design and implementation of some applications and servers are
just too unsafe to use in the "open ocean" of the internet.
Numerous security experts have railed against Microsoft's lack of
security, best summed up by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO
Counterpane Internet Security, Inc who rightly said:
Honestly, security experts don't pick on Microsoft because we
have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft's
poor products are one of the reasons we're in business. We pick on
them because they've done more to harm Internet security than
anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their
products' security, and because they do everything they can to
convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside
Microsoft. Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public
relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind
of nonsense from Microsoft and its products. (Note to Gartner: The
vulnerabilities will come, a couple of them a week, for years and
years...until people stop looking for them. Waiting six months
isn't going to make this OS safer.)
However Microsoft's products are not alone in the presence of
vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and
Unix as well as any other OS and vendor.
In a recent speech "Fixing Network Security by Hacking the
Business Climate", also now on Technetcast, Bruce Schneier claimed that for change to occur the software
industry must become libel for damages from "unsecure" software
A company that migrated from Microsoft Windows to Linux on the desktop has praised the open source operating system's stability.
Günter Stoverock, the data processing manager at German import company Heinz Tröber, said on Thursday his firm had decided against running its ERP software on Windows as it considered it less stable than the open source alternative.
North America, and the USA in particular, will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Europe's parliaments will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The problem with high end all-in-one media center PCs is that despite the claims of the vendors, they are either unable to scale to do all the high definition media encoding/decoding/storage tasks you need at once or are very noisy due to the cooling requirements of the high end processor.
A solution is to use a rack of dedicated relatively low cost embedded systems that connect via ethernet to each other. You could purchase the components separately over time to meet your needs within your budget.
1) Network switch : Either standalone or built into the Media storage device.
2) Media storage : Either a dedicated file server appliance or an ethernet connection to your PC.
3) Digital receiver : A dedicated component that pulls content out of the airwaves and encodes it on the fly to an acceptable format. You can have multiple receivers putting content on demand into the Media storage component.
4) Digital players : Either a dedicated component or a networkable games console that pulls the content from the media storage, decodes it then puts it out to the displays.
5) Digital processors : Either a dedicated component or a networkable games console that translates content from one media format to another and possibly mixes it with other digital content.
The point is that the above system using freely deployable Linux and commonly used network standards such as http,NFS and SAMBA could scale to meet your desires. You want to record multiple channels of content at the same time? Just add another digital receiver. You want to expand your storage capacity? Just upgrade the hard drives or just purchase another fileserver.
The market potential is larger for rackable systems than it is for standalone media PCs.
Microsoft released MS-DOS 4.0 in June, 1988. 4.0 had several improvements, such as XMS support, larger hard disk partition support (up to 2 GB) and a mouse-driven graphical interface called the DOS SHELL. MS-DOS 4.0 had an abnormally large number of bugs, many of which were fixed in version 4.01 that was released a few months later.
MS DOS 4.01, released in November 1998, corrected many of the bugs seen in version 4.0, but many users simply switched back to version 3.3 and waited for a properly re-written and fully tested version - which did not come until version 5 in June 1991.
The "it ain't done until Lotus won't run" comment by an unnamed Microsoft executive was reportedly made during the development of MS-DOS 4, not the 3.x or the later version 5.
The truth is that when released onto the market MS-DOS 4 with Microsoft's first attempt at a Character based User Interface (CUI) Shell and switching task manager was *NOT* backwardly compatible with a *LOT* of third party software. This included problems with Lotus 1.2.3 and many Turbo Pascal v3 and v4 programs that used third party CUIs libraries. The MS/IBM-DOS 3.x behaviors used were well document and widely used and their change in MS-DOS 4 were restored back to MS-DOS 3.x usage when Microsoft released MS-DOS 5.
The result was that MS-DOS 4 was an abysmal failure in the market which led a lot of technically minded people to replace it with the older MS-DOS 3.3 or DR-DOS when it became available. MS-DOS 4, like Microsoft BOB, is rarely mentioned by Microsoft because of their utter failure in the market.
However, the choice to release MS-DOS 4 onto the market with the changes in behavior which were incompatable with many DOS 3 applications had to be a conscious decision made by MS-DOS executives.
You've obviously forgotten (or more likely, never heard of) David Mohring.He was the guy that put forward the solution of using many third party C compilers and environments for the
original bootstrap compiler build and compare the resulting code after
the resulting compiler has rebuild itself for the third time. If the
result greatly differs then manual inspect the generated code where
it differs.
He did it to show that even theoretical attacks, which have never been seen in the wild, can be effectively mitigated out of existence.
Never forget that the Open Source development community have been working towards providing more secure environments, whether you make use what is available is up to you.
When I purchase a car, I own that car. I have the right to that particular instance of that car to use,modify ( pimp my ride ),combine, dispose or resell without having to seek permission from the car builders, vendors etc.
It's called the doctrine of first sale and it has been recognized time and again by the US and other courts that it also applies to instances of copyrighted works. It's fair use.
Therefore is the following is self evident that copyright legislation should grant the following rights under the concept of fair use:
1. Acknowledge the supremacy of the doctrine of first sale : When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work, your rights to view,use,modify,combine,inter-operate with, dispose or resell that one instance should not be impeded by either legislation or technology. This fact has been recognized time and again by the US courts.
2. The doctrine of first sale applies to both physical media and digital content where the receiver pays a transaction for particular instances of a copyrighted works: When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work that involves the buyer making a choice for that instance of copyrighted work and entering into a transaction with the seller, then the buyer has the rights to that instance under the doctrine of first sale. Sellers of instances of copyrighted work cannot hide behind "provision as a service": when you pay for an instance, you own that instance.
3. You do not have the right to record content without permission of the copyright holders of a live performance ( play, concert etc ) or private performance ( film theater ) held on private property or performance venue. You pay to attend a performance at a physical venue, not for a copy of an instance of that performance.
4. Instances of copyrighted works broadcast ( as apposed to downloaded ) and received by a device held by individual person or on that person's property, may not be redistributed outside of that person's household to anyone who does not receive the content though the same service. You may record an instance of copyrighted work for later viewing ( timeshifting ) and distribute a copy along to any person whos household also receives that same broadcast service ( samaritan clause ). You many not redistribute or resell content recorded from a broadcast service to anyone not receiving that same broadcast service content.
5. Although you may not redistribute recorded copies of broadcast copyrighted content outside of the terms of (4), there should be no limit to what you may do with instances of those works within your household. You should have the right to modify the works, combine with other works and inter-operate with other works. You should also have the right to transform the instances of the copyrighted work so that it operates or can be viewed on other devices (mediashifting).
6. Copyright protection extends only to the particular work copyrighted. The copyright holder's exclusive rights should not extend to the right to deny others combining a legally acquired instance of a copyrighted work with other works. You should have the right to distribute and/or sell, patches, recipes and add-on components that refer and link to the content of the copyrighted work, as long as the distributed items do not contain content from the original copyrighted work. The resulting combined and/or transformed work that contains content from the copyrighted work sources can not be legally redistributed without the permission of all the copyright holders.
We have to ensure that file formats and protocols adopted should not limit the ability to sample mix and match. To do otherwise would limit peoples creativity.
New Zealand Prime Minister Muldoon on the migration of New Zealanders to Australia in 1978 : "Trans-Tasman migration is great. It raises the IQ on both sides of the Tasman."
I'm a New Zealander, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about us from Australians.
* yes, we are the country with the kiwis * no, we are not a state of Australia, so we definitely do not have a convict government. * we invented the pavlova desert, and our pies don't contain marsupials * our kids don't go to school by riding flightless birds. * we don't have sex with sheep. Neither do we have a song where the lyrics say "Tie my kangaroo down sport". * never confuse us with Australians. It's bad enough that the Australians keep claiming out entertainers, born or raised in New Zealand as their own. * We don't all have cool tattoos. * Yes, we thrashed the Lions, a rugby team consisting of the best from England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
The folks at Redhat have really been pushing the envelope with core components of the Linux system. GCC4, GCJ, Xen, SELinux, X.org, DBus and HAL are all going to be adopted by the rest of the Linux distributions and venders in the near future.
Note: "in the near future". Just like when Redhat pushed the envelope by adopting GCC3 and ELF at an early stage,in comparison to Redhat's x.2 and x.3 releases, the x.0 and x.1 result has been slightly flaky at the edges.
I think that Fedora Core 4 was released two months too early. Another couple of months in rawhide development would have ironed out a few more of the kinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Date: September 28, 1999.
Source: Tech Law Journal recorded the event, transcribed the audio recording, and then converted it into HTML.
Weldon statement:
Serously, someone whould consider hacking a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu live to work with WINE as a bootable CD for a remote repair service business.
The resulting biomass could even be feed back into the energy cycle.
By the way, it was John Wyndham who first popularised this concept.
Anyhow, Szulik tends to hang around many of the more larger conservative kids, I mean companies, and even then in the backrooms a lot of it is going on that the CEOs and CIOs would like to admit ( I'm talking about messing around with Linux desktops, geez you guys have dirty minds ).
If Szulik were to hang around with more of the leaner mid sized less well off young companies he would find a lot more physical experimenting going on, especially with thin client Linux ( what else would they be doing ).
And as for local, state and federal governmental bodies around the world, they are begging for it, which at least is better than them always doing it to the tax payers.
1) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be though the server and connection to the Office should be though a VPN on the server. .
2) Install a new IDE Hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the HD during the day to resync and repair.
3) Install DHCP demon to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot KNOPPIX via PXE. IF the desktop OS is constantly crashing, the user can select PXE boot, network KNOPPIX. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable ssh server to allow remote repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions from copies on the local server.
4) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: ( or in the case of Linux the root ) partition for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live KNOPPIX to copy a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistant partition where documents are stored. ( Consider hireing someone who knows how to customise Knoppix for your setup.)
5) Install/Enable VNC on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
6) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessable by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundantcy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
7) If the network load to the Office is takeing up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server and consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best )
8) If phone charges are eating into the budget, and the internet connection is good enough, then install Asterisk on the local server ( upgrade the server to a Celron 800Mhz or better ) and a card with enough FXS ports for each local user. Don't bother with software based phones/headsets. The phone will work when the desktop does not.
9) Set up a Linux server at the Office that operates as a thin client application server. Allow remote access though both FreeNX and VNC. Create login accounts and logins that operate as virtual meeting rooms, with multiple users logging in via VNC. Use VNCserver with a screen size of around 1000x600, that will operate via a VNC viewer on any 1024x768 desktop. Use phone based conference calling for voice -- it's a lot less hassle for the users
10) Add the ususal list of cross platform applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, OpenOffice etc.
Do the open ten step and save yourself and your santity from all those hours driving from site to site.
Listen to Greg Glaros US Navy Commander of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. The USA is being outmaneuvered in business.
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing and service industry be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works and despair.
Opps, I forgot "ye Mighty" in the last linked google search.
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing and service industry be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works and despair.
However relatively bad the security of Microsoft's products are in comparison to what the free licensed and open source communities ( as well as practically every other vendor on the planet ) provide, Microsoft is not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as ever other OS and vendor.
From the Plimsoll Club history
The risks,issues and solutions for providing a more secure operating and application enviroment have been known for decades.
Those who do not already comprehend the issues and are willing to learn, should take some time out to listen to some of the speeches at Dr. Dobbs Journal's Technetcast security archives, starting with Meeting Future Security Challenges by Dr. Blaine Burnham, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA)
The design and implementation of some applications and servers are just too unsafe to use in the "open ocean" of the internet.
Numerous security experts have railed against Microsoft's lack of security, best summed up by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security, Inc who rightly said:
However Microsoft's products are not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as any other OS and vendor.
In a recent speech "Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate", also now on Technetcast, Bruce Schneier claimed that for change to occur the software industry must become libel for damages from "unsecure" software
Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro-fighter and even the latest Airbus built.
Europe's parliaments will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
A solution is to use a rack of dedicated relatively low cost embedded systems that connect via ethernet to each other. You could purchase the components separately over time to meet your needs within your budget.
1) Network switch : Either standalone or built into the Media storage device.
2) Media storage : Either a dedicated file server appliance or an ethernet connection to your PC.
3) Digital receiver : A dedicated component that pulls content out of the airwaves and encodes it on the fly to an acceptable format. You can have multiple receivers putting content on demand into the Media storage component.
4) Digital players : Either a dedicated component or a networkable games console that pulls the content from the media storage, decodes it then puts it out to the displays.
5) Digital processors : Either a dedicated component or a networkable games console that translates content from one media format to another and possibly mixes it with other digital content.
The point is that the above system using freely deployable Linux and commonly used network standards such as http,NFS and SAMBA could scale to meet your desires. You want to record multiple channels of content at the same time? Just add another digital receiver. You want to expand your storage capacity? Just upgrade the hard drives or just purchase another fileserver.
The market potential is larger for rackable systems than it is for standalone media PCs.
The truth is that when released onto the market MS-DOS 4 with Microsoft's first attempt at a Character based User Interface (CUI) Shell and switching task manager was *NOT* backwardly compatible with a *LOT* of third party software. This included problems with Lotus 1.2.3 and many Turbo Pascal v3 and v4 programs that used third party CUIs libraries. The MS/IBM-DOS 3.x behaviors used were well document and widely used and their change in MS-DOS 4 were restored back to MS-DOS 3.x usage when Microsoft released MS-DOS 5.
The result was that MS-DOS 4 was an abysmal failure in the market which led a lot of technically minded people to replace it with the older MS-DOS 3.3 or DR-DOS when it became available. MS-DOS 4, like Microsoft BOB, is rarely mentioned by Microsoft because of their utter failure in the market.
However, the choice to release MS-DOS 4 onto the market with the changes in behavior which were incompatable with many DOS 3 applications had to be a conscious decision made by MS-DOS executives.
Download the three episodes from the Internet Archive.org and SEE THEM.
Even if you do not agree with his conclusion, the historical background will give you a far clearer picture of the reality of the situation.
He did it to show that even theoretical attacks, which have never been seen in the wild, can be effectively mitigated out of existence.
Never forget that the Open Source development community have been working towards providing more secure environments, whether you make use what is available is up to you.
maow.
NeoOffice/J is the port of OpenOffice.org to MacOSX. It does make full use of the Java Cocoa interface.
It might be that Apple on Intel is a little to close to the Sun on Opteron workstation market for Sun's liking.
Anyone can copy and redistribute the content of this slashdot post.
It's called the doctrine of first sale and it has been recognized time and again by the US and other courts that it also applies to instances of copyrighted works. It's fair use.
The doctrine of first sale has even been used to challenge End User License Agreements
Therefore is the following is self evident that copyright legislation should grant the following rights under the concept of fair use:
1. Acknowledge the supremacy of the doctrine of first sale : When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work, your rights to view,use,modify,combine,inter-operate with, dispose or resell that one instance should not be impeded by either legislation or technology. This fact has been recognized time and again by the US courts.
2. The doctrine of first sale applies to both physical media and digital content where the receiver pays a transaction for particular instances of a copyrighted works: When you purchase an instance of a copy of copyrighted work that involves the buyer making a choice for that instance of copyrighted work and entering into a transaction with the seller, then the buyer has the rights to that instance under the doctrine of first sale. Sellers of instances of copyrighted work cannot hide behind "provision as a service": when you pay for an instance, you own that instance.
3. You do not have the right to record content without permission of the copyright holders of a live performance ( play, concert etc ) or private performance ( film theater ) held on private property or performance venue. You pay to attend a performance at a physical venue, not for a copy of an instance of that performance.
4. Instances of copyrighted works broadcast ( as apposed to downloaded ) and received by a device held by individual person or on that person's property, may not be redistributed outside of that person's household to anyone who does not receive the content though the same service. You may record an instance of copyrighted work for later viewing ( timeshifting ) and distribute a copy along to any person whos household also receives that same broadcast service ( samaritan clause ). You many not redistribute or resell content recorded from a broadcast service to anyone not receiving that same broadcast service content.
5. Although you may not redistribute recorded copies of broadcast copyrighted content outside of the terms of (4), there should be no limit to what you may do with instances of those works within your household. You should have the right to modify the works, combine with other works and inter-operate with other works. You should also have the right to transform the instances of the copyrighted work so that it operates or can be viewed on other devices (mediashifting).
6. Copyright protection extends only to the particular work copyrighted. The copyright holder's exclusive rights should not extend to the right to deny others combining a legally acquired instance of a copyrighted work with other works. You should have the right to distribute and/or sell, patches, recipes and add-on components that refer and link to the content of the copyrighted work, as long as the distributed items do not contain content from the original copyrighted work. The resulting combined and/or transformed work that contains content from the copyrighted work sources can not be legally redistributed without the permission of all the copyright holders.
We have to ensure that file formats and protocols adopted should not limit the ability to sample mix and match. To do otherwise would limit peoples creativity.
If I purchase an instan
New Zealand Prime Minister Muldoon on the migration of New Zealanders to Australia in 1978 : "Trans-Tasman migration is great. It raises the IQ on both sides of the Tasman."
I'm a New Zealander, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about us from Australians.
* yes, we are the country with the kiwis
* no, we are not a state of Australia, so we definitely do not have a convict government.
* we invented the pavlova desert, and our pies don't contain marsupials
* our kids don't go to school by riding flightless birds.
* we don't have sex with sheep. Neither do we have a song where the lyrics say "Tie my kangaroo down sport".
* never confuse us with Australians. It's bad enough that the Australians keep claiming out entertainers, born or raised in New Zealand as their own.
* We don't all have cool tattoos.
* Yes, we thrashed the Lions, a rugby team consisting of the best from England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
Note: "in the near future". Just like when Redhat pushed the envelope by adopting GCC3 and ELF at an early stage,in comparison to Redhat's x.2 and x.3 releases, the x.0 and x.1 result has been slightly flaky at the edges.
I think that Fedora Core 4 was released two months too early. Another couple of months in rawhide development would have ironed out a few more of the kinks.