Oh please, you just bash Sun because it's the fashionable thing to do on Slashdot these days.
As other posters pointed out, what about the usability engineers Sun put on Gnome? Or the work they did on Apache/TomCat, or OpenOffice?
btw if you don't think OpenOffice is free, why don't you fork it?
Also Sun is a company and it's in business to make money, not to please OSS developers. Yes, it has taken from the OSS world but who can blame them? If you didn't want ppl taking advantage of the OSS code written , under whatever License (be it BSD or GPL) then perhaps you just should have released it under another license...
You can't stop someone from using software released under $FREE_LICENSE just because you don't like them.
Actually it wasn't KSR who introduced the space elevator. Arthur C. Clarke had popularized it before in his novel Fountains of Paradise. In his foreword he credits Yuri Artsutanov who wrote about Space Elevators in Pravda in the 1960s.
As Netcom UK we are now in control of large parts of the UK network and we fully intend to keep it running for as long as possible. However our main concern are the transmission links as they're all managed from Brussels.
As the Netcom entity we're pretty secure although we anticipate a mad scrambling to reconfigure part of our network, we will also try to keep the majority of the UK Ebone customers online, but all of that depends on the extend of the backbone shutdown, so Irish customers might be not as "lucky". But AS5571 should be largely okay.
Let's not forget that whilst the guys are fighting to save the main NOC and keeping it running, other temporary NOCs have sprung up and the old KQ NOC in The Hague has also been resurrected.
We're all working very hard to make sure that disruption to our customers stays limited to the absolute minimum and all techies in this company have now shown to management that they can make their stand in the darkest hour of this company.
Needless to say I'm proud to work with these guys.
A lot of us local entities are preparing to leave the mothership. Netcom UK is about to go solo again after 2 years under the GTS/Ebone/KQ banner.
KQ portugal and italy are going standalone as well I believe. We're now all waiting to see who will pick up the network so we can buy cheap transit from our former parent;)
Seriously though, even though we're going our separate ways, right now we're still one company (apart from KQ NO that got sold already) and we're still running the network, even if we have to do it without the assurance of being paid.
The actions of the guys in Brussels have been an inspiration for the rest of us in the company (those that are left).
I can pretty much assure that the UK network will keep running, definitely one of the main AS numbers of the UK (5571) has alternate transit so do most in-country networks. If anything it's the Eurorings that are at risks but even they are supported right now from Brussels AND The Hague (both IP NOCs are operational right now).
The actions of the last few days make me proud to be part of KQ, Ebone and Netcom and I really hope that we can all survive this crisis, and if we don't, it won't be from the lack of trying or courage.
Well I can only speak for my corner of KQ really and to be honest nan-a.* is a bit too much of a bitchfest to me with too many people eager to block and not enough common sense.
I do not deny that Qwest (and to some extent uunets) abuse email seemed to be piped straight into/dev/null but to say that Qwest loves spammers is a bit of an overstatement. Fact is that it's a paying customer and looking at the state of Qwest's balance sheet they can use any customers they can get. It's surprising how few morals people have when money's involved.
You could always use the argument that they would lose more money by losing customers by being a spam haven but I doubt it bothers a lot of people to be honest and Qwest is a big enough behemoth to draw business from bigger corps anyway (the miracles of being a baby-Bell).
Anyway I don't particularly want to justify Qwest's behaviour when it comes to spam but I can assure you that abuse policies for most of KQ's network is decided locally (XLink, EU.net and Netcom) and some of it centrally (Ebone &KQ central) but none of it is dictated by Qwest.
PS: give Zeus my regards ( drop me a line if you don't know who I am:))
it is *NOT* down. Believe me I work for them bastards.
The fact that your host was forced to move their servers is due to the fact that we cannot guarantee uptime or any SLA on our core. We're still carrying IP over AS286 and having just spoken to the NOC there aren't any major outages right now (apart from a fibre cut in Stockholm).
Unless you're dealing with KQ Sweden which was insolvent earlier than the rest and forced to file last week. But that's the in-country network which is on a different AS than the core. Like I said the core is still carrying traffic.
And of course qwest has one of the biggest networks in the world, so they will probably percentage wise have more spammers on their network.
And you also seem to confuse KPNQwest and Qwest, KQ is a joint-venture and whilst it does (I should say did) take some policy guidelines, I am sure that none of them accepted spammailers as a viable customer.
Most of the spam will have been generated from Qwest's DSL network anyway, not necessarily from their hosting customers (@home used to be the biggest problem before it went under), KQ does/did not have a european wide DSL network, apart from relying on it's string of European ISPs (EUnet and Netcom UK) to provide local end-user access, and their spam policy was locally dictated, not from above.
indeed. This filing means that it's basically every subsidiary for itself. KQ Italy and Portugal are definitely not filing as their selfsufficient.
KQ UK and Ebone UK are being wrapped up as we speak (liquidation). Netcom in the UK is most likely to survive (either as a customer base sale or as an entity sale). Netcom has connected their network to another backbone tonight in case the core goes dark.
We're not going dark, we're pretty much guaranteeing the core will stay lit till monday morning when the administrator will start in Brussels, even then we're not saying it will go dark. What will happen on monday depends on the administrator.
KPN is picking up bills for running the network left,right and center as it is quite badly exposed to KPNQwest for IP transit. (and open to legal action from it's customers).
An asset sale is indeed on the cards however you have to remember that the most valuable asset (the customerbase) is mostly going to be gone (or in the proces of migrating away). Also an asset sale is most likely to be an auction so they're not even sure they'll be able to pick up the assets.
No, it doesn't. We're guaranteeing the core will stay up till monday morning when the administrator in Brussels will turn up and then decide what to do.
Shutting down the core is the stupidest thing they could as that would mean the network becomes worthless. (after all selling part of the business as a going concern brings in more cash than an asset sale).
However you need to be responsible and be honest, and it's now that we can't offer any guarantees about the core. SLAs are out of the window, which is what a lot of the guarantees are about.
Even the subsidiaries (those that are self-funded or still have money (like the one I work for)) were told to put contingency plans in place in case the core goes dark.
I don't think he should be nice and warm and fuzzy with everyone, but the public spats first with Darren Reed and then with Dan Bernstein could have been avoided (well I hope so).I fear these things hurt OpenBSD than it benefits it.
Being a system engineer I know I would have great difficulty convincing my boss to bring in OpenBSD on a big scale if he knew the arguments that have come to pass. FreeBSD and NetBSD are havens of peace compared to OpenBSD.:)
You could of course say that my boss is an idiot then, and I wouldn't argue that with you. But it's his decision and it isn't solely based on technical merit.
Perhaps.
The frustration of the OpenBSD team at Darren backporting patches from other people into his codebase is well documented. Whether it would warrant a fork or not is debatable, either way if the license would have allowed it, it would have been a codefork rather than a rewrite. The clarification determined it to be a rewrite rather than a fork.
Also I fail to see why the fact that IPFilter was first written for Solaris would make me a retard.
The version where Darren changed his license was announced with "I've put the changes, to date, against 3.4.17 into a "beta release" (if
you like) which I'd like people who've had problems in the past to report
back about whether or not it makes things better or worse (especially for
Solaris).
".
Where did you get that from? Theo got his knickers in a twist about a test release of IPF (aimed at Solaris of all OSes!) and challenged Darren. Funnily enough, (after being threatened (although some debate can be had about what constituted a threat)) Darren then decided to clarify his IPF license (which for release versions hadn't changed for yonks) so it was not quite compatible with the goals of OpenBSD. Hence the split. Darren has cordial relationships with FreeBSD and NetBSD core and as such things never get as out of hand as with Theo.
With the regards to the "design problems" someone else posted about earlier, IPF is designed to be a crossplatform package (we use it exclusively on Solaris here) and as such it will never be as taylored for OpenBSD as pf is.
I think that Theo, as good as he is for OpenBSD, would be even better if he now and then counted to ten before saying something. Having a clear vision and unwavering ideals is a good thing to have but a foul temper will only harm the cause.
"It was her idea to title the book The Dying Earth (a records search showed a novel by that name five hundred years earlier, but the copyright had lapsed and the book was out of print)." --
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Uhm. What Abovenet do on their own network is their own business. If their customers don't like it they will have to go somewhere else.
If ORBS's provider can't properly configure their own BGP feed then that's not Abovenet's problem.
Maybe you ought to check your facts before you open your mouth.
I'm sorry but I have no sympathy for all you people crying wolf, as far as I can see, Vixie is not making Bind closed source, CERT advisories are still going to be issued. Whether it will work out I don't know though... --
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
I'm sure the better way is to invest those $100K to improve NetFoo v.0.1. You gather vendor independence and freedom for the same price. There are lots of programmers, that can suit the open-source software for your needs. And you can sell it then as a solution (while still being open-source), because your programmers know it and you'll get something from the $100K back. That's what I call buisness
My company (large business ISP in the UK) took that road when they decided that the legacy billing software we got from our parent company in the US wouldnt be Y2K compliant and needed replacing. We hired several programmers and started to design a SQL database driven ISP solution. 2 years we had spend more than 2 million dollars and the project had been canned during final beta stages.
My point is that if you think that with just hiring a few programmers to tailor OSS for your needs will do it, then you're very much mistaken.
A project like this needs to properly managed, you need a large userbase for beta testing (believe me that costs handsful of money).
In hindsight we could have bought a software packet that did all we wanted for $100K, with support and all...
I think that the post above only makes sense in an ideal world (what sane ISP jumps at the chance to run the latest Apache? (I know of none that runs 2.0ax), but this is the real world, where things always cost far more than people think,
and with OSS I feel the costs are more hidden than with off-the-shelf packages, making it an unfair comparison.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
This reminds me of a french saying I once heard "reculer pour mieux sauter"... take a step back to make a better jump.
That might be the phenomenon that the author is trying to describe? A seemingly slowdown of emergence of new technologies or the halt of the maturing of existing technologies.
There is one given though, Time will tell us what
is happening now.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
But that's besides the point. Personally, having been forced to make the output of CGIs pixelperfect I believe that everyone who uses HTML for formatting and pixelperfect layout should be shot on sight.
As a pragmatist I believe in using the right tools for a job, and as much as Microsoft and Netscape have bastardised HTML it's still not the right tool for pixelperfect layout.
The main idea is that HTML code is renderable in any HTML compliant browser, abusing HTML code like you suggest is shortsighted and really plain stupid. After all, not everyone is using NetexplorerScape version 10.7 release 3beta7.
I must say I did find immense pleasure this year in having my team learn LaTeX for all technical documents they wrote. (all converted to html with LaTeX2html of course!).
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
If anything this move will give the Cobalt more credibility in the marketplace as Solaris is highly regarded. Another benefit is that it's rocksolid and geared very much so towards the server market.
All due respect for Linux but I feel it has been evolving more towards a desktop market and left the server end hanging a bit. The main impetus that has been driving Linux development has seemed to shift the focus to add layer upon layer of complexity to the kernel,which I do admit has resulted in a better kernel, but also had the side effect that due to the massive array of hardware supported the source has been quite convoluted.
An OS such as Solaris, which has inherently less hardware support than Linux, might be the answer here, provided Sun can keep the hardware spec fairly standardised.
And BTW Cobalt is/was moving away from MIPS towards the IA platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, you just bash Sun because it's the fashionable thing to do on Slashdot these days.
As other posters pointed out, what about the usability engineers Sun put on Gnome? Or the work they did on Apache/TomCat, or OpenOffice?
btw if you don't think OpenOffice is free, why don't you fork it?
Also Sun is a company and it's in business to make money, not to please OSS developers. Yes, it has taken from the OSS world but who can blame them? If you didn't want ppl taking advantage of the OSS code written , under whatever License (be it BSD or GPL) then perhaps you just should have released it under another license...
You can't stop someone from using software released under $FREE_LICENSE just because you don't like them.
Actually it wasn't KSR who introduced the space elevator. Arthur C. Clarke had popularized it before in his novel Fountains of Paradise. In his foreword he credits Yuri Artsutanov who wrote about Space Elevators in Pravda in the 1960s.
As Netcom UK we are now in control of large parts of the UK network and we fully intend to keep it running for as long as possible. However our main concern are the transmission links as they're all managed from Brussels.
As the Netcom entity we're pretty secure although we anticipate a mad scrambling to reconfigure part of our network, we will also try to keep the majority of the UK Ebone customers online, but all of that depends on the extend of the backbone shutdown, so Irish customers might be not as "lucky". But AS5571 should be largely okay.
Let's not forget that whilst the guys are fighting to save the main NOC and keeping it running, other temporary NOCs have sprung up and the old KQ NOC in The Hague has also been resurrected.
We're all working very hard to make sure that disruption to our customers stays limited to the absolute minimum and all techies in this company have now shown to management that they can make their stand in the darkest hour of this company.
Needless to say I'm proud to work with these guys.
A lot of us local entities are preparing to leave the mothership. Netcom UK is about to go solo again after 2 years under the GTS/Ebone/KQ banner.
;)
KQ portugal and italy are going standalone as well I believe.
We're now all waiting to see who will pick up the network so we can buy cheap transit from our former parent
Seriously though, even though we're going our separate ways, right now we're still one company (apart from KQ NO that got sold already) and we're still running the network, even if we have to do it without the assurance of being paid.
The actions of the guys in Brussels have been an inspiration for the rest of us in the company (those that are left).
I can pretty much assure that the UK network will keep running, definitely one of the main AS numbers of the UK (5571) has alternate transit so do most in-country networks. If anything it's the Eurorings that are at risks but even they are supported right now from Brussels AND The Hague (both IP NOCs are operational right now).
The actions of the last few days make me proud to be part of KQ, Ebone and Netcom and I really hope that we can all survive this crisis, and if we don't, it won't be from the lack of trying or courage.
just another Netcom/Ebone/KQ techie
Well I can only speak for my corner of KQ really and to be honest nan-a.* is a bit too much of a bitchfest to me with too many people eager to block and not enough common sense.
/dev/null but to say that Qwest loves spammers is a bit of an overstatement. Fact is that it's a paying customer and looking at the state of Qwest's balance sheet they can use any customers they can get. It's surprising how few morals people have when money's involved.
:))
I do not deny that Qwest (and to some extent uunets) abuse email seemed to be piped straight into
You could always use the argument that they would lose more money by losing customers by being a spam haven but I doubt it bothers a lot of people to be honest and Qwest is a big enough behemoth to draw business from bigger corps anyway (the miracles of being a baby-Bell).
Anyway I don't particularly want to justify Qwest's behaviour when it comes to spam but I can assure you that abuse policies for most of KQ's network is decided locally (XLink, EU.net and Netcom) and some of it centrally (Ebone &KQ central) but none of it is dictated by Qwest.
PS: give Zeus my regards ( drop me a line if you don't know who I am
it is *NOT* down. Believe me I work for them bastards.
The fact that your host was forced to move their servers is due to the fact that we cannot guarantee uptime or any SLA on our core. We're still carrying IP over AS286 and having just spoken to the NOC there aren't any major outages right now (apart from a fibre cut in Stockholm).
Unless you're dealing with KQ Sweden which was insolvent earlier than the rest and forced to file last week. But that's the in-country network which is on a different AS than the core. Like I said the core is still carrying traffic.
KPNQwest != Qwest.
And of course qwest has one of the biggest networks in the world, so they will probably percentage wise have more spammers on their network.
And you also seem to confuse KPNQwest and Qwest, KQ is a joint-venture and whilst it does (I should say did) take some policy guidelines, I am sure that none of them accepted spammailers as a viable customer.
Most of the spam will have been generated from Qwest's DSL network anyway, not necessarily from their hosting customers (@home used to be the biggest problem before it went under), KQ does/did not have a european wide DSL network, apart from relying on it's string of European ISPs (EUnet and Netcom UK) to provide local end-user access, and their spam policy was locally dictated, not from above.
PS: how's Zeus WPI?
indeed. This filing means that it's basically every subsidiary for itself. KQ Italy and Portugal are definitely not filing as their selfsufficient.
KQ UK and Ebone UK are being wrapped up as we speak (liquidation). Netcom in the UK is most likely to survive (either as a customer base sale or as an entity sale). Netcom has connected their network to another backbone tonight in case the core goes dark.
bollocks.
We're not going dark, we're pretty much guaranteeing the core will stay lit till monday morning when the administrator will start in Brussels, even then we're not saying it will go dark. What will happen on monday depends on the administrator.
KPN is picking up bills for running the network left,right and center as it is quite badly exposed to KPNQwest for IP transit. (and open to legal action from it's customers).
An asset sale is indeed on the cards however you have to remember that the most valuable asset (the customerbase) is mostly going to be gone (or in the proces of migrating away). Also an asset sale is most likely to be an auction so they're not even sure they'll be able to pick up the assets.
No, it doesn't. We're guaranteeing the core will stay up till monday morning when the administrator in Brussels will turn up and then decide what to do.
Shutting down the core is the stupidest thing they could as that would mean the network becomes worthless. (after all selling part of the business as a going concern brings in more cash than an asset sale).
However you need to be responsible and be honest, and it's now that we can't offer any guarantees about the core. SLAs are out of the window, which is what a lot of the guarantees are about.
Even the subsidiaries (those that are self-funded or still have money (like the one I work for)) were told to put contingency plans in place in case the core goes dark.
We got that base covered. After scenes in one of our offices after the initial announcement on wednesday security on the Core got increased manifold.
well if you put it that way ;)
I have to say DJB would try my patience as well. But credit where credit is due, some of his software is pretty impressive.
Well, I only have Darren's word for it of course (his postings on deadly.org), which is why I said it's debatable what constitutes a threat ;)
I don't think he should be nice and warm and fuzzy with everyone, but the public spats first with Darren Reed and then with Dan Bernstein could have been avoided (well I hope so).I fear these things hurt OpenBSD than it benefits it. :)
Being a system engineer I know I would have great difficulty convincing my boss to bring in OpenBSD on a big scale if he knew the arguments that have come to pass. FreeBSD and NetBSD are havens of peace compared to OpenBSD.
You could of course say that my boss is an idiot then, and I wouldn't argue that with you. But it's his decision and it isn't solely based on technical merit.
Perhaps. The frustration of the OpenBSD team at Darren backporting patches from other people into his codebase is well documented. Whether it would warrant a fork or not is debatable, either way if the license would have allowed it, it would have been a codefork rather than a rewrite. The clarification determined it to be a rewrite rather than a fork. Also I fail to see why the fact that IPFilter was first written for Solaris would make me a retard. The version where Darren changed his license was announced with "I've put the changes, to date, against 3.4.17 into a "beta release" (if you like) which I'd like people who've had problems in the past to report back about whether or not it makes things better or worse (especially for Solaris). ".
Where did you get that from? Theo got his knickers in a twist about a test release of IPF (aimed at Solaris of all OSes!) and challenged Darren. Funnily enough, (after being threatened (although some debate can be had about what constituted a threat)) Darren then decided to clarify his IPF license (which for release versions hadn't changed for yonks) so it was not quite compatible with the goals of OpenBSD. Hence the split. Darren has cordial relationships with FreeBSD and NetBSD core and as such things never get as out of hand as with Theo.
With the regards to the "design problems" someone else posted about earlier, IPF is designed to be a crossplatform package (we use it exclusively on Solaris here) and as such it will never be as taylored for OpenBSD as pf is.
I think that Theo, as good as he is for OpenBSD, would be even better if he now and then counted to ten before saying something. Having a clear vision and unwavering ideals is a good thing to have but a foul temper will only harm the cause.
Simmons acknowledges Vance in Hyperion :)
"It was her idea to title the book The Dying Earth (a records search showed a novel by that name five hundred years earlier, but the copyright had lapsed and the book was out of print)."
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Uhm. What Abovenet do on their own network is their own business. If their customers don't like it they will have to go somewhere else.
If ORBS's provider can't properly configure their own BGP feed then that's not Abovenet's problem.
Maybe you ought to check your facts before you open your mouth.
I'm sorry but I have no sympathy for all you people crying wolf, as far as I can see, Vixie is not making Bind closed source, CERT advisories are still going to be issued. Whether it will work out I don't know though...
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
My company (large business ISP in the UK) took that road when they decided that the legacy billing software we got from our parent company in the US wouldnt be Y2K compliant and needed replacing. We hired several programmers and started to design a SQL database driven ISP solution. 2 years we had spend more than 2 million dollars and the project had been canned during final beta stages.
My point is that if you think that with just hiring a few programmers to tailor OSS for your needs will do it, then you're very much mistaken. A project like this needs to properly managed, you need a large userbase for beta testing (believe me that costs handsful of money). ...
In hindsight we could have bought a software packet that did all we wanted for $100K, with support and all
I think that the post above only makes sense in an ideal world (what sane ISP jumps at the chance to run the latest Apache? (I know of none that runs 2.0ax), but this is the real world, where things always cost far more than people think, and with OSS I feel the costs are more hidden than with off-the-shelf packages, making it an unfair comparison.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
This reminds me of a french saying I once heard "reculer pour mieux sauter" ... take a step back to make a better jump.
That might be the phenomenon that the author is trying to describe? A seemingly slowdown of emergence of new technologies or the halt of the maturing of existing technologies.
There is one given though, Time will tell us what is happening now.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
As a pragmatist I believe in using the right tools for a job, and as much as Microsoft and Netscape have bastardised HTML it's still not the right tool for pixelperfect layout.
The main idea is that HTML code is renderable in any HTML compliant browser, abusing HTML code like you suggest is shortsighted and really plain stupid. After all, not everyone is using NetexplorerScape version 10.7 release 3beta7.
I must say I did find immense pleasure this year in having my team learn LaTeX for all technical documents they wrote. (all converted to html with LaTeX2html of course!).
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
All due respect for Linux but I feel it has been evolving more towards a desktop market and left the server end hanging a bit.
The main impetus that has been driving Linux development has seemed to shift the focus to add layer upon layer of complexity to the kernel,which I do admit has resulted in a better kernel, but also had the side effect that due to the massive array of hardware supported the source has been quite convoluted.
An OS such as Solaris, which has inherently less hardware support than Linux, might be the answer here, provided Sun can keep the hardware spec fairly standardised.
And BTW Cobalt is/was moving away from MIPS towards the IA platform.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod