Guess I should have looked up my MX record before I posted that comment:-)
Fact is, most email that I consider sensitive goes to my own host box, which does have appropriately set MX records. Demon however is going to be part of the BT rollout of ADSL (whenever that happens), I would like to see more technical details of what they are offering, but I have heard tell of a fixed IP (or three). Demon's own internet suite (Turnpike) uses SMTP to receive email, so I would hope that, as part of a stand against this bill, they would be willing to alter the MX records for ADSL users to have email delivered directly. Of course this could be described as a means to a)Lower load on the Demon mail servers and b)Speed email delivery to subscribers.
I have quite a lot of faith in Demon, at least the old pre-Thus Demon, and hope that they will keep making the right technical decisions about service provision. This is one of the reasons that I have stuck with Demon despite "Free" ISP's. I am however disappointed that they are only officially supporting Windows 9x or NT on ADSL trials, they have always been very cross platform in the past. Perhaps this Microsoft partnership they have going is starting to tell, or perhaps this is imposed by BT, in its normal blinkered manner.
Yeah, but that isn't what they are intending to do, or what the bill allows them to do as I understand it (IANAL). All this does is allow them to monitor those too technically innept, unaware of the monitoring, or just plain stupid. Now, if you were a terrorist organisation, child porn ring, etc, how would you have your people configure their systems? Assuming you didn't just set up some BBS or something for them out of the country?
You don't even need to encrypt your email to avoid this detection. They intend to install their black boxes next to the email servers themselves, and monitor all that traffic, so all you need to do is bypass the ISP mail server pools. If you run your own little mail server, and have it config'd to send mail directly to the recipient, which is something I usually do anyway for speed, then it will either go direct to the recipients ISP (possibly in another country, and therefore not monitored by this) or direct into their own server, if they run a similar config. This sort of thing will become very common once BT gets its act together on ADSL and/or cable modems become more common. The only thing you'd need to do is get your own domain, if you are assigned a fixed IP, or a subdomain off of one of the free DNS services that allow you to update whenever your IP changes. My ISP, one of the largest (demon.net), gives me a fixed IP and domain name, which means when I am online emails can come straight into my machine, bypassing their mail server pool, and they have used this config since before the RIP bill was even dreamt of.
What can they do about this? Other than getting all of the ISP's to act against this sort of thing (mandatory firewall on port 25...), they don't have a change, they would have to monitor ALL of the traffic for email, and that would be hugely expensive. With IPv6 coming, with its included packet encryption, this would become completely impossible anyway. I intend to enable IPv6 on my own systems as soon as it starts to be used on the net.
Yeah, but the point I was making is that in most cases only the first eight characters matter. Last thing you want is people to start giving out advice about just typing a sentence in as their password! Take it from a sysadmin who knows! Anyway, I made your point at the end of my original post.
have users choose pass-phrases of at least 25 chracters -- requiring them to use spaces and punctuation. Complete sentences can be easier to remember than "hcv97e#" and just as difficult to "guess" if they're long enough.
I have to disagree with this one. Most systems only hash the first eight characters, so the potential hacker only has to guess the first eight characters not the entire sentence. This is little better than allowing them to use a dictionary word as their pass. Of course, since this guy is writing the entire system from scratch he has the option of storing the entire password not just the first eight characters so my argument may not apply, but in general it holds.
ON a mixed 10/100 network just now we use 3Com hubs and switches. If you attatch a 10Mb card to a port then the card and the port run at 10Mb. If you then attach a 10/100 card to another port then that port will run at 100Mb (assuming things are configured correctly). The two machines can still communicate, the hub does the rate conversion. Obviously the maximum transfer rate between the two machines is governed by the slower NIC, but if you had a second 10/100 on there then the two faster machines will communicate at 100Mbps despite the presence of the 10Mb NIC on the same segment. First time I saw this working was a real "wow" experience Don't ask how it wall works, I have no idea, but it simply does. I would guess 3com must have some bridging logic for each port, after all the 10Mb NIC could never get to see all the traffic between the two 100Mb NICs running at full tilt, but I have never seen any problems caused by this, and our network is 50:50 10:100. Presumably 3Com could manage the same trick with 1000Mb.
3Com is simply a vendor whose equipment I know from personal experience, I'm sure some other vendors equipment can do the same trick.
I use a Jansport laptop bag that I have had for over two and a half years. It still looks almost as new, has bottom and back padding as well as some separating the laptop from the other contents of the bag and adjusts really well to different sizes of laptop. So far it has coped with an AST Ascentia A that was really thick and my current Compaq Armada 3500 that is really thin. It even copes when I put the expansion base on the Compaq. It's best feature however is that the bag doesn't look like a laptop bag. I used this bag on a daily basis for a year at Uni and could comfortably chuck it down wherever I wanted without worrying people would steal it because it obviously contained a laptop. Ideal!
Unfortunately Jansport no longer appears to make this particular bag, but they still do a laptop bag which I found here.
..but the point is at the time we didn't know any better. Nowadays I would put in place a Linux solution for that, but back then my geek credentials were a bit thin on the ground. The point is, I had never used NT before but after a couple of weeks learning it by playing around I managed to put together a, by NT standards, stable server that did what they wanted and continues to do so, and most of those two weeks were spent in me going through the entire system learning how it did what, I could actually have produced a server in a couple of days but not been confident about it. For the small firm ease of use is all important.
Just like governments the world over the US is trying to tackle the symptoms of the problem rather than the causes. It's not just computer crime either, how many governments try to educate drivers rather than impose rediculous blanket speed limits. They are simply doing something for the sake of being seen to do something. This way is cheaper, quicker and easier, but utterly pointless. Think of it as a cold cure remedy, makes you feel better but does nothing to get rid of the cold!
'Eagles may fly but a weasle will never be sucked into a jet engine'
Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft didn't break under DrDos? A good friend of mine back in '92 spent weeks trying to get Win3.x to install on top of DrDos (v7 I think) and didn't succeed. In the end he needed a 'bug fix' from Dr/Novell/Caldera/whoever to make it work. Even then he had serious problems and eventually had to take the inevitable route of using MS-DOS instead. At the time the line was that Dr needed to lie to Windows, essentially telling Windows that it was MS-DOS not Dr. Once that was done misteriously the major bug disappeared.
I'm not saying that Dr didn't have other, genuine bugs, or that Windows didn't make other checks for the 'correct' version of DOS, but if Microsoft were being genuinely competitive they would have tested Windows on top of BOTH of the major DOS's of the time, MS and Dr. The fact of the matter is that they didn't. This means Microsoft either committed a major sin in putting in code to cause problems when Dr was present, or the slightly lesser sin of simply not checking its product on top of Dr. Either way I think they were in the wrong and deserved to pay for it.
Before you think that I am simply another anti-microsoft geek, let me tell you my position.
I admin Win95, NT w/s, NT svr, AIX and Linux. Of those my favourites to work on are AIX and Linux, simply due to the flexibility. Unix's design philosophy is just so much more versatile and stable than MS's. My idea of a perfect OS would probably use a Unix backend with a Microsoft GUI. Typically MS GUI's are very good, if bloated and inflexible. Unfortunately what most people see is the GUI, never what is behind it. Geeks like us spend a good amount of time working 'behind the scenes' so MS really pisses us off. People are also used to the idea that their workstations WILL crash on a daily basis, it's normal, it's what computers _do_, they simply don't know any better. That historic brainwashing and the continual brainwashing from MS's marketing dept (which is where they REALLY excel (no pun intended)) means people continue to go with the MS product, often unaware that there even is any competition. Win95 is ok for games, crap for anything else, NT is fairly stable if resource hungry, some of the Backoffice applications are a nightmare to work with (Systems Manangement Server anybody, Exchange?). Unix on the other hand is resource frugal, flexible and fast.
I have to say that, whilst I use Linux as much as possible, my main job is as an AIX and NT sys admin. My own max uptimes for NT stand at around 90 days (own home server box, tripped over its cable in the end) and 60 days (work servers, continuous use and upgrading). The AIX servers are around the same, about 60 - 90 days norm. My own experiences are : - AIX - restarted when upgraded or power problems - NT - restarted fairly frequently, say once every two months max, avg every 30 days, due to a crash. Most of these reboots are due to a service crashing and refusing to re-start. - Linux - whenever my dodgy hardware fails again! - Windows 9x - rebooted every day whether it needs it or not... and yes, I'm one of those admins who won't even look at a 9x box unless it has been rebooted. In one small firm I used to work for they used 95 as a cheap and cheerful file and print server. We never got over 14 days uptime out of it even tho' it was running on good hardware. We subsequently upgraded it to an NT server and got 60 day uptimes.
Personally all I really want it to do is connect to my LAN. The telphone handset connection is a bonus. Is there a suitably compact handset/cradle to strap to the tablet or even a hands-free option?
USB is a good thing, I did some firmware programming for it back in University. So this means there will be a market for you to produce all sorts of goodies for it (Cameras, etc). Good thinking!
The artists impression of the case looks v.good. Have you got engineering samples of the finished case back yet or just the basic cases we can see on the site?
As for no X, that isn't what I wanted to hear, but I suppose I can use the web browser. Does it support Java, etc?
Ok, we all know that this story was on slashdot not too long ago, but there is a little bit more info on the web site. Well, ok, some more pretty pictures anyway. The real question here is whether the friendly developer who took part in the original discussion is back, and whether he has any more technical info. In particular I would like to know whether his "Geek Version" of the pad, with the OS opened up, is going to be a reality. Just now I believe they are going to lock down the OS to make it "User Friendly". This means I won't be able to "export DISPLAY=" from my Linux servers to it.:-((
Re:Still waiting for BT to sort out ADSL
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Yeah, I have heard the same things and am now laying all my hopes on Cable Modems. I was speaking to a TeleWest customer rep a few weeks back (cus rep so take with a pinch of salt), and he told me that they had all had a briefing about Cable modems and that they were coming out "Q1 2000". He also believed that they were in the 40-60UKP range (60-90USD?).
Unfortunately all this means I will have to abandon my current ISP, Demon Internet, who seems to have fantastic international bandwidth, fixed IPs, SMTP mail delivery, etc. Ideal for a tech like me. Cable will probably put me behind some poxy firewall I don't want to "protect me from hackers" and give me a dynamic IP. In actuality the firewall will be to prevent me from setting up a web server, etc. Anyone here work for Telewest to open up a few holes in the firewall pointing to my fixed IP?
At the risk of loosing my Karma to being marked down as Flamebait....
Every medical advance can be taken as messing with things we shouldn't be, and I don't mean from a religious standpoint.
As any biologist will tell you what medicine essentially does is mess up the evolution of the human species. Every premature baby/cancer victim/whatever we save from death remains in the gene pool, when otherwise they would have been removed by death. If someone, for whatever reason, would have been unable to survive without medical intervention, then they are unfit, in one way or another, and would normally be dealt with by nature. Its how evolution works (assuming you are not reading this from certain middle-American states:-) ). The most fit are those that survive to succesfully breed, the least fit die out.
There is a viewpoint that says be damned with the human rights issues and make people prove their fitness to procreate before they do it. You will see this in one or two Sci-Fi books I have read, where couples have to get permission from "Fitness-Panels" to have a baby. It makes a good deal of sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because only those "fit to breed" get to do so. Think about it, who, typically, has the most children in Western society? The answer tends to be the "lower classes", those who haven't done well in the education system, haven't got any real prospects in life and just stay at home on the dole. Successful people seldom have more than two children and many successful couples have none. Now this is a gross generalisation I know, but shows the right trend AFAIK. So what are we selecting for here? Unsuccessful people.
I would love for somebody to point out a major flaw in my argument because from what I can see the human race is doomed. We will become totally reliant on medical technology, assuming there are enough people left bright enough to understand it, and even that assumes that we haven't blown ourselves up by then.
I don't necessarily believe that we should actually implement such a system, however I think that it should at least be discussed unemotionally as a scientific concept.
Once you install Exchange on a server, don't expect less than 20 minute reboots
Really? We have a PII 350 with 128Mb RAM and 18Gb of (NT Software!) RAID HDD here running Exchange, Proxy, IIS and its a Domain Controller. It reboots in around 7 minutes despite being horrendously overloaded. Am I doing something wrong:-) . Even worse it used to be a Pentium 133 until recently (it blew its mobo one weekend) and still managed reboots under 10 minutes.
Perhaps I should upgrade to a newer version of Exchange so I can get the correct boot times!
Still can't run java applets on Netscape for linux
So it's not just me, one of my Redhat 6.0 systems does the same, even with an updated version of Netscape and every other possibly related package. I've been ripping out and replacing packages to try and sort it and been through every config file but to no avail, every time I go near a Java site Netscape bombs. I'm near to giving up and completely re-installing but it's a production system and frankly I can live with it. The system was a straight 6.0 install with the/home and/etc/password files patched in from an older system it was replacing. How common is this problem?
Hehe - isn't there a version of IE for Linux? giggle, slap. Sorry, the men in white coats are coming for me.
Re:Cheaper by the sixpack?
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$200 Linux PCs
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Yeah, one in each room would be great, but the problem I'd have is space for the monitors, keyboards and mice. I've been toying with the idea of touchscreen LCDs. Here you could do a basic user-interface giving access to the common functions with only the flat panel screen visible. I've seen touchscreen LCDs available but only at horrendous prices, anyone know of a cheap way to get hold of these? Being in the UK it would be useful if the supplier was in Europe.
One other point, every cheap PC I've seen makes a horrendous amount of noise, everyone is talking about continuously on systems, but would you really want that continuous drone in every room of the house? I've a decent high spec PC in my bedroom that is quite quiet but it never stays on overnight. Unless they start supplying devices to alter the speed on the fans, and decent ultraquiet fans at that, and linux starts to power down the hard disks appropriately, I don't think this will change.
Course I could just splash out on a load of laptops....
Re:Surveillance is the key...
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Smart Dust
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As a lapsed Microbiologist, yeah.
These things could potentially spread some fairly nasty stuff, but so can practically anything ( a slight breeze would do!). The problem, as in all germ-warfare stuff is the delivery system. If you can find some method of keying the nanites so that they only release the payload to their intended target(s) then you are onto a winner, but you would have to be pretty certain that they would a)Reach the intended target and either b)Destroy the payload or c)Hold onto the payload indefinately if they don't find their target. Just how you would achieve all this is beyond me.
Off the top of my head I can think of about half a dozen things I'd like to use this for, but most of them rely on the answers to the following questions:
1) Can I attach it to my network without having to hack around its phone support
2) Does it support either X-Windows client/server or VNC
Personally I would find it extremely useful to be able to wonder about with a pad like this for email, documentation access, continuous systems monitoring whilst away from my desk, etc.
I think everyone is missing the point here. What Sun is primarily good at is Hardware. They are a hardware company and are extremely good at it.
Microsoft, despite being primarily a software company, is a direct threat to them, as MS s/w doesn't run on Sun hardware. NcNally et al would probably be better off from a business sense sweet-talking MS into porting NT to Sun hardware. I don't mean that as flame-bait, I wouldn't like to see it happen either, but it would probably allow Sun to make more money. Inspite of this, MS software is probably far too inflexible to run on some of the more interesting Sun hardware (failover servers with everything duplicated in one box, running the same commands simultaneously!). Some of the stuff they do is incredibly difficult even in Unix, never mind NT.
So, to answer the question, what does Sun gain from this, is that Sun moves people away from, for at least applies the breaks to the juggernaught of people moving to MS products and hence away from any services Sun can offer. By promoting anything non-MS they can only be doing themselves a favour.
What we really need to look at is how much Sun makes per-annum on their hardware and support services, I would bet it vastly outweighs whatever they make on software. In this situation you don't really loose anything by giving away your software to promote your hardware and services. Its the traditional loss-leader approach. The typical example of which is, it costs you one pound sterling to make and serve a cup of coffee/tea, yet you sell it for fifty pence. Why? Because it brings people into your establishment and these people invariably buy other items which you are making a profit on. If I were Sun this is precisely what I would be doing. Promote the Linux angle in any way you can, even if the early adopters don't give you any money, once it takes off and really moves into the large corporates they will be clamouring for larger, better, faster, more reliable hardware to run it on, which Sun will be quite happy to provide. When you add to this the fact that Sun is also benefiting from the work of the Linux/GNU community, ie it doesn't have to spend a fortune paying its own developers to debug the software, add new features, etc then its costs come down further. What you do is put a few developers, maybe a few hundred out of your throusands, into developing the software and working with the community to nudge it to go the way you want (remember here that you are a good guy 'cos you are "unselfishly" donating to the common good, so everybody is only too happy to oblige). What you do with the rest of your developers is have them supporting obscure bugs for your paying customers, writing support for your hardware, porting old apps to the new system, etc. If they went fully towards Linux they could drop large numbers of software developers, quietly of course to prevent comment and bad feelings. Sun knows that what it has to do is build up the Linux user base, even if everyone is using x86 or PPC. This built up base will inevitably generate the need for high end systems that the x86 and PPC are unable to provide. Sun can't really loose here, if they do nothing they will loose sales, this can't hurt them significantly but it could potentially do them a lot of good.
Taking the original question and twisting it a bit..
What if you want to move across just the/home and user accounts to a fresh install on a new hard-disk? Obviously you copy/etc/passwd, but what else? (Yeah, I've checked the how-to's first).
I've got to do exactly the same thing to a Server I run for my old University Union in a few weeks time. I found that the Linux Documentation Project has a mini-howto that, at first glance, appears to cover all the steps required. Has anyone actually followed this?
You will find the file in HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html. Remember to use the mirrors folks, hence no direct link.
Backup Exec does support those OS's but there is a problem with some of them. We bought it intending to use it at least partially to backup an AIX system. Unfortunately the client s/w is only supported on version 4.1 of AIX, we can get it to work on 4.2 Ok but it refuses to do so under 4.3.2. There has been a request for an upgrade to this in for about six months! The moral? Check the support documentation for supported OS versions.
Graduate of the Mad Max school of defensive driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess I should have looked up my MX record before I posted that comment :-)
Fact is, most email that I consider sensitive goes to my own host box, which does have appropriately set MX records. Demon however is going to be part of the BT rollout of ADSL (whenever that happens), I would like to see more technical details of what they are offering, but I have heard tell of a fixed IP (or three). Demon's own internet suite (Turnpike) uses SMTP to receive email, so I would hope that, as part of a stand against this bill, they would be willing to alter the MX records for ADSL users to have email delivered directly. Of course this could be described as a means to a)Lower load on the Demon mail servers and b)Speed email delivery to subscribers.
I have quite a lot of faith in Demon, at least the old pre-Thus Demon, and hope that they will keep making the right technical decisions about service provision. This is one of the reasons that I have stuck with Demon despite "Free" ISP's. I am however disappointed that they are only officially supporting Windows 9x or NT on ADSL trials, they have always been very cross platform in the past. Perhaps this Microsoft partnership they have going is starting to tell, or perhaps this is imposed by BT, in its normal blinkered manner.
Yeah, but that isn't what they are intending to do, or what the bill allows them to do as I understand it (IANAL). All this does is allow them to monitor those too technically innept, unaware of the monitoring, or just plain stupid. Now, if you were a terrorist organisation, child porn ring, etc, how would you have your people configure their systems? Assuming you didn't just set up some BBS or something for them out of the country?
You don't even need to encrypt your email to avoid this detection. They intend to install their black boxes next to the email servers themselves, and monitor all that traffic, so all you need to do is bypass the ISP mail server pools. If you run your own little mail server, and have it config'd to send mail directly to the recipient, which is something I usually do anyway for speed, then it will either go direct to the recipients ISP (possibly in another country, and therefore not monitored by this) or direct into their own server, if they run a similar config. This sort of thing will become very common once BT gets its act together on ADSL and/or cable modems become more common. The only thing you'd need to do is get your own domain, if you are assigned a fixed IP, or a subdomain off of one of the free DNS services that allow you to update whenever your IP changes. My ISP, one of the largest (demon.net), gives me a fixed IP and domain name, which means when I am online emails can come straight into my machine, bypassing their mail server pool, and they have used this config since before the RIP bill was even dreamt of.
What can they do about this? Other than getting all of the ISP's to act against this sort of thing (mandatory firewall on port 25...), they don't have a change, they would have to monitor ALL of the traffic for email, and that would be hugely expensive. With IPv6 coming, with its included packet encryption, this would become completely impossible anyway. I intend to enable IPv6 on my own systems as soon as it starts to be used on the net.
Yeah, but the point I was making is that in most cases only the first eight characters matter. Last thing you want is people to start giving out advice about just typing a sentence in as their password! Take it from a sysadmin who knows! Anyway, I made your point at the end of my original post.
I have to disagree with this one. Most systems only hash the first eight characters, so the potential hacker only has to guess the first eight characters not the entire sentence. This is little better than allowing them to use a dictionary word as their pass. Of course, since this guy is writing the entire system from scratch he has the option of storing the entire password not just the first eight characters so my argument may not apply, but in general it holds.
THe answer to that is.. it depends.
ON a mixed 10/100 network just now we use 3Com hubs and switches. If you attatch a 10Mb card to a port then the card and the port run at 10Mb. If you then attach a 10/100 card to another port then that port will run at 100Mb (assuming things are configured correctly). The two machines can still communicate, the hub does the rate conversion. Obviously the maximum transfer rate between the two machines is governed by the slower NIC, but if you had a second 10/100 on there then the two faster machines will communicate at 100Mbps despite the presence of the 10Mb NIC on the same segment. First time I saw this working was a real "wow" experience Don't ask how it wall works, I have no idea, but it simply does. I would guess 3com must have some bridging logic for each port, after all the 10Mb NIC could never get to see all the traffic between the two 100Mb NICs running at full tilt, but I have never seen any problems caused by this, and our network is 50:50 10:100. Presumably 3Com could manage the same trick with 1000Mb.
3Com is simply a vendor whose equipment I know from personal experience, I'm sure some other vendors equipment can do the same trick.
Unfortunately Jansport no longer appears to make this particular bag, but they still do a laptop bag which I found here.
..but the point is at the time we didn't know any better. Nowadays I would put in place a Linux solution for that, but back then my geek credentials were a bit thin on the ground. The point is, I had never used NT before but after a couple of weeks learning it by playing around I managed to put together a, by NT standards, stable server that did what they wanted and continues to do so, and most of those two weeks were spent in me going through the entire system learning how it did what, I could actually have produced a server in a couple of days but not been confident about it. For the small firm ease of use is all important.
Just like governments the world over the US is trying to tackle the symptoms of the problem rather than the causes. It's not just computer crime either, how many governments try to educate drivers rather than impose rediculous blanket speed limits. They are simply doing something for the sake of being seen to do something. This way is cheaper, quicker and easier, but utterly pointless. Think of it as a cold cure remedy, makes you feel better but does nothing to get rid of the cold!
'Eagles may fly but a weasle will never be sucked into a jet engine'
Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft didn't break under DrDos? A good friend of mine back in '92 spent weeks trying to get Win3.x to install on top of DrDos (v7 I think) and didn't succeed. In the end he needed a 'bug fix' from Dr/Novell/Caldera/whoever to make it work. Even then he had serious problems and eventually had to take the inevitable route of using MS-DOS instead. At the time the line was that Dr needed to lie to Windows, essentially telling Windows that it was MS-DOS not Dr. Once that was done misteriously the major bug disappeared.
I'm not saying that Dr didn't have other, genuine bugs, or that Windows didn't make other checks for the 'correct' version of DOS, but if Microsoft were being genuinely competitive they would have tested Windows on top of BOTH of the major DOS's of the time, MS and Dr. The fact of the matter is that they didn't. This means Microsoft either committed a major sin in putting in code to cause problems when Dr was present, or the slightly lesser sin of simply not checking its product on top of Dr. Either way I think they were in the wrong and deserved to pay for it.
Before you think that I am simply another anti-microsoft geek, let me tell you my position.
I admin Win95, NT w/s, NT svr, AIX and Linux. Of those my favourites to work on are AIX and Linux, simply due to the flexibility. Unix's design philosophy is just so much more versatile and stable than MS's. My idea of a perfect OS would probably use a Unix backend with a Microsoft GUI. Typically MS GUI's are very good, if bloated and inflexible. Unfortunately what most people see is the GUI, never what is behind it. Geeks like us spend a good amount of time working 'behind the scenes' so MS really pisses us off. People are also used to the idea that their workstations WILL crash on a daily basis, it's normal, it's what computers _do_, they simply don't know any better. That historic brainwashing and the continual brainwashing from MS's marketing dept (which is where they REALLY excel (no pun intended)) means people continue to go with the MS product, often unaware that there even is any competition. Win95 is ok for games, crap for anything else, NT is fairly stable if resource hungry, some of the Backoffice applications are a nightmare to work with (Systems Manangement Server anybody, Exchange?). Unix on the other hand is resource frugal, flexible and fast.
I have to say that, whilst I use Linux as much as possible, my main job is as an AIX and NT sys admin. My own max uptimes for NT stand at around 90 days (own home server box, tripped over its cable in the end) and 60 days (work servers, continuous use and upgrading). The AIX servers are around the same, about 60 - 90 days norm. My own experiences are :
- AIX - restarted when upgraded or power problems
- NT - restarted fairly frequently, say once every two months max, avg every 30 days, due to a crash. Most of these reboots are due to a service crashing and refusing to re-start.
- Linux - whenever my dodgy hardware fails again!
- Windows 9x - rebooted every day whether it needs it or not... and yes, I'm one of those admins who won't even look at a 9x box unless it has been rebooted. In one small firm I used to work for they used 95 as a cheap and cheerful file and print server. We never got over 14 days uptime out of it even tho' it was running on good hardware. We subsequently upgraded it to an NT server and got 60 day uptimes.
Personally all I really want it to do is connect to my LAN. The telphone handset connection is a bonus. Is there a suitably compact handset/cradle to strap to the tablet or even a hands-free option?
The artists impression of the case looks v.good. Have you got engineering samples of the finished case back yet or just the basic cases we can see on the site?
As for no X, that isn't what I wanted to hear, but I suppose I can use the web browser. Does it support Java, etc?
Ok, we all know that this story was on slashdot not too long ago, but there is a little bit more info on the web site. Well, ok, some more pretty pictures anyway. The real question here is whether the friendly developer who took part in the original discussion is back, and whether he has any more technical info. In particular I would like to know whether his "Geek Version" of the pad, with the OS opened up, is going to be a reality. Just now I believe they are going to lock down the OS to make it "User Friendly". This means I won't be able to "export DISPLAY=" from my Linux servers to it. :-((
Unfortunately all this means I will have to abandon my current ISP, Demon Internet, who seems to have fantastic international bandwidth, fixed IPs, SMTP mail delivery, etc. Ideal for a tech like me. Cable will probably put me behind some poxy firewall I don't want to "protect me from hackers" and give me a dynamic IP. In actuality the firewall will be to prevent me from setting up a web server, etc. Anyone here work for Telewest to open up a few holes in the firewall pointing to my fixed IP?
Every medical advance can be taken as messing with things we shouldn't be, and I don't mean from a religious standpoint.
As any biologist will tell you what medicine essentially does is mess up the evolution of the human species. Every premature baby/cancer victim/whatever we save from death remains in the gene pool, when otherwise they would have been removed by death. If someone, for whatever reason, would have been unable to survive without medical intervention, then they are unfit, in one way or another, and would normally be dealt with by nature. Its how evolution works (assuming you are not reading this from certain middle-American states :-) ). The most fit are those that survive to succesfully breed, the least fit die out.
There is a viewpoint that says be damned with the human rights issues and make people prove their fitness to procreate before they do it. You will see this in one or two Sci-Fi books I have read, where couples have to get permission from "Fitness-Panels" to have a baby. It makes a good deal of sense from an evolutionary standpoint, because only those "fit to breed" get to do so. Think about it, who, typically, has the most children in Western society? The answer tends to be the "lower classes", those who haven't done well in the education system, haven't got any real prospects in life and just stay at home on the dole. Successful people seldom have more than two children and many successful couples have none. Now this is a gross generalisation I know, but shows the right trend AFAIK. So what are we selecting for here? Unsuccessful people.
I would love for somebody to point out a major flaw in my argument because from what I can see the human race is doomed. We will become totally reliant on medical technology, assuming there are enough people left bright enough to understand it, and even that assumes that we haven't blown ourselves up by then.
I don't necessarily believe that we should actually implement such a system, however I think that it should at least be discussed unemotionally as a scientific concept.
Really? We have a PII 350 with 128Mb RAM and 18Gb of (NT Software!) RAID HDD here running Exchange, Proxy, IIS and its a Domain Controller. It reboots in around 7 minutes despite being horrendously overloaded. Am I doing something wrong :-) . Even worse it used to be a Pentium 133 until recently (it blew its mobo one weekend) and still managed reboots under 10 minutes.
Perhaps I should upgrade to a newer version of Exchange so I can get the correct boot times!
So it's not just me, one of my Redhat 6.0 systems does the same, even with an updated version of Netscape and every other possibly related package. I've been ripping out and replacing packages to try and sort it and been through every config file but to no avail, every time I go near a Java site Netscape bombs. I'm near to giving up and completely re-installing but it's a production system and frankly I can live with it. The system was a straight 6.0 install with the /home and /etc/password files patched in from an older system it was replacing. How common is this problem?
Hehe - isn't there a version of IE for Linux? giggle, slap. Sorry, the men in white coats are coming for me.
One other point, every cheap PC I've seen makes a horrendous amount of noise, everyone is talking about continuously on systems, but would you really want that continuous drone in every room of the house? I've a decent high spec PC in my bedroom that is quite quiet but it never stays on overnight. Unless they start supplying devices to alter the speed on the fans, and decent ultraquiet fans at that, and linux starts to power down the hard disks appropriately, I don't think this will change.
Course I could just splash out on a load of laptops....
These things could potentially spread some fairly nasty stuff, but so can practically anything ( a slight breeze would do!). The problem, as in all germ-warfare stuff is the delivery system. If you can find some method of keying the nanites so that they only release the payload to their intended target(s) then you are onto a winner, but you would have to be pretty certain that they would a)Reach the intended target and either b)Destroy the payload or c)Hold onto the payload indefinately if they don't find their target. Just how you would achieve all this is beyond me.
1) Can I attach it to my network without having to hack around its phone support
2) Does it support either X-Windows client/server or VNC
Personally I would find it extremely useful to be able to wonder about with a pad like this for email, documentation access, continuous systems monitoring whilst away from my desk, etc.
Steven
Microsoft, despite being primarily a software company, is a direct threat to them, as MS s/w doesn't run on Sun hardware. NcNally et al would probably be better off from a business sense sweet-talking MS into porting NT to Sun hardware. I don't mean that as flame-bait, I wouldn't like to see it happen either, but it would probably allow Sun to make more money. Inspite of this, MS software is probably far too inflexible to run on some of the more interesting Sun hardware (failover servers with everything duplicated in one box, running the same commands simultaneously!). Some of the stuff they do is incredibly difficult even in Unix, never mind NT.
So, to answer the question, what does Sun gain from this, is that Sun moves people away from, for at least applies the breaks to the juggernaught of people moving to MS products and hence away from any services Sun can offer. By promoting anything non-MS they can only be doing themselves a favour.
What we really need to look at is how much Sun makes per-annum on their hardware and support services, I would bet it vastly outweighs whatever they make on software. In this situation you don't really loose anything by giving away your software to promote your hardware and services. Its the traditional loss-leader approach. The typical example of which is, it costs you one pound sterling to make and serve a cup of coffee/tea, yet you sell it for fifty pence. Why? Because it brings people into your establishment and these people invariably buy other items which you are making a profit on. If I were Sun this is precisely what I would be doing. Promote the Linux angle in any way you can, even if the early adopters don't give you any money, once it takes off and really moves into the large corporates they will be clamouring for larger, better, faster, more reliable hardware to run it on, which Sun will be quite happy to provide. When you add to this the fact that Sun is also benefiting from the work of the Linux/GNU community, ie it doesn't have to spend a fortune paying its own developers to debug the software, add new features, etc then its costs come down further. What you do is put a few developers, maybe a few hundred out of your throusands, into developing the software and working with the community to nudge it to go the way you want (remember here that you are a good guy 'cos you are "unselfishly" donating to the common good, so everybody is only too happy to oblige). What you do with the rest of your developers is have them supporting obscure bugs for your paying customers, writing support for your hardware, porting old apps to the new system, etc. If they went fully towards Linux they could drop large numbers of software developers, quietly of course to prevent comment and bad feelings. Sun knows that what it has to do is build up the Linux user base, even if everyone is using x86 or PPC. This built up base will inevitably generate the need for high end systems that the x86 and PPC are unable to provide. Sun can't really loose here, if they do nothing they will loose sales, this can't hurt them significantly but it could potentially do them a lot of good.
What if you want to move across just the
You will find the file in HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html. Remember to use the mirrors folks, hence no direct link.
Backup Exec does support those OS's but there is a problem with some of them. We bought it intending to use it at least partially to backup an AIX system. Unfortunately the client s/w is only supported on version 4.1 of AIX, we can get it to work on 4.2 Ok but it refuses to do so under 4.3.2. There has been a request for an upgrade to this in for about six months!
The moral? Check the support documentation for supported OS versions.
Graduate of the Mad Max school of defensive driving.