I do think it will matter. Instead of griping about their actions, make it known to them that you are not happy with them. If Orrin Hatch lost his next election it would send a really powerful message. It would be a message to everybody in Congress, as well as the corporations and their lobbyists.
If you can't vote directly for Hatch or Leahy, send a message to your state's senators, too. Tell them that you are not happy with what Hatch is doing and that you, as a constituent of theirs, do not want them voting for any of this nonsense.
Even though I am extremely happy with one of my senators (Feingold), I am sending them both a message saying that I dislike these bills and I want them to not vote for them. How else will they know what I, as their constituent, wants?
For the record, I do blame the MPAA, RIAA, etc. but I also blame our senators for not representing the people. And I blame the people of the U.S. for allowing this crap to have gone on this long and far.
Well, on one hand they would know what people think if everybody responds.
On the other hand, it should be more of a message when constituents tell them they are unhappy and do not feel they are being represented. If it isn't more of a message then the people of Utah and Vermont should not re-elect them out of principle.
If you like in Utah or Vermont please make sure that you explicitly mention that you are a constituent of theirs.
It just seems ridiculous. But you have a good point about the civil prosecution. Criminal prosecution always seemed way too harsh.
I still mean what I said about constituents telling their senators what they think. They are supposed to represent their constituency, and if I didn't know the system better I'd think that at least Utah is out to get the rest of the U.S.
Please, please, please tell them that, too. It only takes a minute to say what you just posted here.
The only reason these guys care so much about money is to get re-elected. If you tell them that it isn't going to matter how much money their campaign has because you folks aren't going to re-elect them either way, they'll listen.
The way to stop this sort of thing is to be a constituent of Hatch or Leahy. If you are one, make it clear to them that they will not get re-elected with behaviour like this.
And then tell your neighbors, friends, coworkers, etc. what these two guys are up to, and ask them outright to never vote for them again.
The rest of the country cannot get these two corrupt, entertainment industry pawns out of office. Only Vermont and Utah residents can. Do not re-elect these two. While it might seem they are doing good, they are doing long-term damage to the country, including your states.
Please do it now before these two turn the U.S. citizens into entertainment industry criminals and slaves, and infect every other nation with these ideas.
Yes -- actually there are a lot of people that are dissatisfied with this. You just don't hear the outcry because it has been transmuted to a collective "argggh" when people try building software that should be portable and it won't build. The idea that GCC is preventing the growth of open source is something just not propagated, because it's heresy. A lot of what GCC 3.x has done to adhere to the language has been wonderful, but that also means they did not maintain compatibility with GCC 2.95 and before. That's okay -- in my position I'll take the portable code that results from the move to 3.x, especially 3.2.
I love GCC, but it's just not the compiler for these other platforms. If you built all your software with it -- fine. But I find I need the native compilers (Forte or VisualAge) to be installed alongside it (for vendors and such), and what ends up happening eventually is a linker nightmare. Especially if you need to use libraries that were built with the other compiler. For the price of the native compilers, at least for me and my organization, it's not worth messing around with GCC on these systems.
That's funny. Mine doesn't have one of those. My favorite was when I was getting a root canal, and they were debating the type of root canal drill bit thing. "22 or 23?" "Is there a 22.5... no." I asked (well, to the extent I could speak) "Is there a unit attached to those numbers?" and I got the "you don't want to know" look, then "Yeah, millimeters."
Holy christ, that thing is nearly an inch into my jaw! Cool.
The reason that an NMR is called 'MRI' in medicine is the same reason that your dentist has for guarding that information: most people are excitable sheep that cannot handle the word 'nuclear' in a name, and will never understand the science of the thing. To help people with this technology you need to hide what it does from them.
I do the same thing as you: I ask all kinds of questions about the things that get stuck into me, get attached to me, or even the things around me when I tour a place. Why not?
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...unless your doctor is inept, doesn't care, misinformed/has old information, or is just too busy to make a good diagnosis. You are still your own best advocate, especially in matters of health. The point is not that your doctor should be your sole source of medical information, but that you should use him or her as an additional one. It is also common to get a second opinion and/or a referral to a specialist if you didn't like your physician's response, or didn't feel that they were as informed as you'd like.
It's just like security -- security is better when there are humans involved to make rational decisions. It's the same with your health.
Just had a thought: you could just build a series of shelves, too, out of 2x4's and plywood (where the plywood is a standard rackmount case size), so that you could put the rackmount cases on the shelves. Just make a frame out of the 2x4s and set the plywood right on 2x4 crossbars. Actually, you could just set the machines right on the crossbars like that, too. It's not as space efficient as a real rack, but for a few machines it'd be okay.
I have a copy of S&T that came with Works, too (and for the other respondants, sometimes you get Works when you order PCs from Dell).:-) I started using it when MapQuest steered me into the wrong half of a medium-sized city and I had to stop and ask directions. I hate that.
One nice thing about it is that you can take a laptop along and always be able to find your way. On trips if your navigator/passenger isn't totally brain dead you can use it to get around traffic jams, etc. in real time. It's also pretty sweet because you can highlight an area and tell S&T to avoid it when plotting the route. And it will take GPS data -- I love being able to see where I am on the map so I have some idea of where to turn.
I just wish S&T would adjust the route dynamically as you went, if it had GPS data to use. That's one advantage of the Garmin dashboard units. If you overshoot a turn or something it will just guide you back around. It would also be cool if it spoke to you to tell you where to go.
Agreed. Part of my argument, though, is that support for this has to be ubiquitous and built in to the OS, not a separate product like SMS. I don't want to pay more money to have Microsoft, or any vendor, keep me secure when I should have been secure in the first place.
Operating system version control has been a problem for Microsoft Windows for a long time. Especially with runtime software bundled with third-party applications (think DirectX), you need a clear way to identify what is installed on a machine, upgrade it while tracking dependencies, and easily remove it. InstallShield does this sort of thing -- why isn't it built into the operating system?
Furthermore, most package managers provide a facility to verify the files that are running on the machine. While it isn't as conclusive as something like Tripwire, a simple "rpm --verify --all" will give you some insight into whether a system file has been replaced.
Package management on AIX (and probably other UN*Xes, but I haven't used them) gives you the ability to roll back out of a patch that went wrong, too. While that is possible to some extent in Windows, a package management solution could make that very easy.
And while we're at it, why isn't there a framework built into Windows to centralize patching of ALL products, not just Microsoft ones? Certainly the "Microsoft Update" that they are proposing is a good step, but why not build something that can check other vendors' web sites for patches? Couldn't such a framework be built so that when an application is installed it registers with the OS, and tells the OS where to look for updates for that specific product? Then when you run this "update console" or whatever, your local machine goes out to Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, whoever, and checks to see if there are updates for EVERYTHING that is installed?
The system could also be similar to Red Hat's update mirrors/satellite up2date server, where a corporate customer could set up a central update server, tell it where to get updates for all the products in use in their company, and then that server mirrors it. Then updating the client workstations (and servers) is something that happens in-house. Maybe it could even be smart enough to tell if a client machine hasn't been updated yet, and then when that machine is powered on it could update itself and reboot if necessary, all before the user is able to log in.
These two things together could really put a dent in management for Windows machines. Sorry if this is sort of a ramble, I've been thinking about it for a while and it all just spilled out.
People have started becoming more paranoid about antivirus companies' involvement in virus creation. That's good -- if these companies are defrauding the public by creating the viruses they catch then all of them should end up in jail.
Could this be the same with spam? Could anti-spam vendors be sponsoring the spam itself, just to take corporate money in exchange for protection? Sounds like the mafia to me.
I can only think of ways that the US government will use this technology to spy on its citizens. It isn't going to improve the safety of anything, and in fact will probably lead to less safety, at least for our liberties. So I ask, why do we need to say yes to this?
Take the money that would be spent on this and fix our educational system or something. And demand the resignation of the people that even suggested that the U.S. government should spy on its own citizens.
Agreed. Get a very good intellectual property lawyer, or better yet, a lawyer in a firm that deals with business issues and has IP specialists on staff. I was in this very same position with a software application my company had started writing, and a medium-sized business in the Midwest was interested in it. It would have saved them quite a lot of money over commercial applications, plus it would have been fully customized for their business. And on top of it, we could go on to sell the software to other companies for more money. Good for both parties.
The other company was worried about us being able to finish the project to their specifications. We'd develop a contract with them, send it to them, and their lawyers would change it to basically ensure that we would at some time be in breach of contract. If that happened they would get the source code. We were already willing to share the code with them as part of the deal so long as they didn't resell it or market it themselves. No need to get hostile about it. We learned quite rapidly that only lawyers can fight lawyers (without massive time committments on our part), and by spending the extra money on a good set of lawyers, including an IP specialist, we saved ourselves lots of future headaches and problems.
In the end we ended up not doing business with the company, and we lost the sale and opportunity. The other business spent ten times what we would have charged to implement a generic software package for their needs, and to cutomize that package to work with their business. Do I feel bad about it? Yeah -- it sucks to lose business like that, and it was a good opportunity. But I would have felt much worse if I hadn't involved expert lawyers along the way to protect us and explain what the other side was trying to do (the good parts along with the bad things they were doing).
I think it's generally agreed that the course of action you suggest is where to go in the future. And it seems that the Debian folks agree, even if this has all been sort of a rude awakening. However, developing a more intuitive installer takes some time. In the meantime a good explanation/walkthrough of how to install Debian will help some of the people get the distribution installed. In my experience, creating walkthroughs like that also help sort out the rough spots of the process, so people who are going to work on the installation process know right where to start to have the most effect.
Same with my family. It's awesome. Not only do I not have to go shopping for a ring and endure all that, but the ring has some history behind it, and is neat looking. Plus four generations of women liked it, so I don't have to fret over whether it looks good or not.:-) Kid tested, mother approved. But yeah, if we have a son, he has the option of passing it along, and if you ditch me I'm getting it back (and hopefully that's not the case!).
If you don't like this, don't use Hotmail. Microsoft is approximately the worst, most unethical company around (save Kazaa/Sharman) so why did you expect anything different?
If you don't like those types of policies, don't work there. Or get your management to except you. As a sysadmin I use the 'net all the time to find answers to problems, get the latest software for my AIX boxes, etc. If they took that away I would be a lot less productive.
I wonder if anyone has tried negotiating exceptions to these corporate 'net blockages as part of the hiring process...
Older versions of AIX, namely AIX 4.1 and 4.2, weren't very good, standards-wise. A lot of this has been fixed. IBM's latest version of AIX, AIX 5L 5.1, includes a lot of stuff they got through Project Monterey. Project Monterey was the combined effort between SCO, IBM, and Intel. When they joined, IBM had access to the SysV source for the first time, and started making their OSes more SysV-compliant. This was coupled with a general rewriting of all the device drivers in the OS, so that the drivers were more robust and handled errors better. If you watch carefully, you can see the effect these efforts have had on AIX, even in AIX 4.3.3. AIX 4.3.3 has had some interesting, destabilizing bugs in the last year. They were patched rapidly (patched, but IBM Support always had a good workaround if you couldn't just reject the faulty software package and put the machine back the way it was -- AIX has excellent package management!). Looking at the bugs, though, they were very low-level bugs that seemed to get exposed by development work throughout the OS. Given the sorts of things that are changing in AIX, it is actually a good sign that deep-seated problems are boiling to the surface, because that means that the developers are really doing their job.
The other thing that seems to have improved AIX 4.3.3 a lot is the benchmarking. Dueling with Sun isn't a bad thing all the time. AIX 4.3.3, with the latest patches applied, has an excellent, capable, and very tunable TCP stack. It has also had a number of features backported to it from AIX 5.1. AIX 5L 5.1 has a lot more of the cool TCP features in it, and is even with Solaris 8 in those regards.
In the past, compiling has seriously sucked under AIX. However, the IBM VisualAge C++ compilers for AIX are cool. They will compile just about anything, and if you cannot compile it then the programmer should probably go back and adhere to the various C/C++ standards. Generally I have the same trouble compiling certain software under either Solaris or AIX. Sometimes I even break down and install the GNU compiler collection...
Right now, IBM has two machines that support virtual machines, or in mainframe/IBM terminology, logical partitions (LPARS). LPARs are supported in hardware on the pSeries 690 running AIX, and on IBM zSeries running z/OS or z/VM. LPARs are hardware-based, and if a processor, memory chip, or other system component dies it is able to prolong an outage by deallocating it. Currently AIX is not able to dynamically add resources to an LPAR without rebooting the LPAR, but that is coming. Otherwise, LPARs are totally independent instances of the OS. And the reboot to add resources takes an LPAR about thirty seconds (yes, 30). The LPARs do share a few things, like the system clock, and a management workstation for console access, but they are isolated in hardware.
On the pSeries 690, the boundaries of the LPARs are 1 processor/1 GB memory. So you have to allocate whole processors and whole gigabytes of RAM to an LPAR. While this sounds like it's not such a great idea (and it isn't the best), it's okay. Any more granularity can be handled by the built-in AIX Workload Manager, which is able to manage OS-level resources like memory, processor time, disk I/Os, etc. in percentages based on users, groups, and process names. That isn't something Sun has, and often you don't need partitions on a machine, but instead just need to keep two pieces of software from fighting for resources (or need to cap a group of users to low memory or low CPU usage). Workload Manager is very handy in that regard. The IBM mainframes running z/OS or MVS can do timeslicing, where an LPAR can have 10% of all of the CPU time on the box, or 5% of RAM, etc. You can also create situations where you overcommit the resources on the machine but define priorities, to guarantee levels of service. So maybe you have three LPARs, and one can have up to 80% of the CPU if it's busy, and the other two can have up to 30% of the CPU, but LPAR 1 has priority (so it gets its 80% anytime it needs it). This is where the pSeries 690 is going, it just isn't there yet (IBM took all the guys that made MVS capable of this stuff and pointed them at AIX).
I really know nothing about Sun's Dynamic System Domains. I do know it is similar in certain ways to the concept of LPARs, but isn't as flexible as the MVS/mainframe LPAR scheme. The OS instances are still isolated from each other in hardware. The two are probably nearly even when it comes down to it.
If you consider the hardware these things run on you will see that a pSeries 690 with 32 CPUs equals a Sun Starfire with 72 CPUs. What IBM is doing in this regard is cool -- they are actively attempting to put fewer components into a machine. More components == more likelihood of failure, and therefore you need more redundant components. More components == more heat, which leads to more failures. It also means more electricity for more components. You can also cluster the big machines using a derivative of the IBM SP2 technology (you can also cluster smaller ones, like pSeries 660s, which are a hell of a deal, price/performance-wise). So while Sun's machines can go to 72 CPUs, all you get are extra components and extra heat (and extra service calls)
IBM has been working with Red Hat for a while now. In fact, when Linux was ported to the S/390, there were two ports. I forget who the individual was that did one of the ports, but IBM had a team that did the other. There is an S/390 distribution of Red Hat Linux -- check any mirror site that is worthy (many don't carry it). It generally lags behind the i386 distribution, but only by a few weeks. Considering the market, hey, that's not bad at all. And IBM is doing a lot of work on Linux itself, from porting JFS to it, to adding a lot of what makes AIX a very scalable, very stable, very reliable OS. Check the IBM AlphaWorks site for examples. I am not sure what Sun is doing in that regards, or what Solaris can offer Linux as far as technology. That isn't an insult, it is just my unfamiliarity with Solaris.
And finally, every machine is stable & reliable with a good system administration team that is knowledgable. I have been doing AIX admin work for about two years now, and I love it (having come from a Linux admin background). AIX has always had excellent filesystem support (true logical volume management built right in with real journalling filesystems, while you have to buy it from Veritas for Suns), and that, for me, makes it very easy to work with. And if you work with an OS for a while you get to know how it does things. I cannot speak for the admins that deal with Suns. I don't work with Suns, but half of the machines where I work are Sun machines (the other half is AIX, with two mainframes, and a handful of Linux boxes). And those Sun sysadmins can make their machines as stable and reliable as my AIX boxes. So it just depends on what you're trying to do, what you already have, and often, how much it'll cost you, because more often than not the machines can do the exact same thing, except one will be thousands cheaper.
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I do think it will matter. Instead of griping about their actions, make it known to them that you are not happy with them. If Orrin Hatch lost his next election it would send a really powerful message. It would be a message to everybody in Congress, as well as the corporations and their lobbyists.
If you can't vote directly for Hatch or Leahy, send a message to your state's senators, too. Tell them that you are not happy with what Hatch is doing and that you, as a constituent of theirs, do not want them voting for any of this nonsense.
Even though I am extremely happy with one of my senators (Feingold), I am sending them both a message saying that I dislike these bills and I want them to not vote for them. How else will they know what I, as their constituent, wants?
For the record, I do blame the MPAA, RIAA, etc. but I also blame our senators for not representing the people. And I blame the people of the U.S. for allowing this crap to have gone on this long and far.
Well, on one hand they would know what people think if everybody responds.
On the other hand, it should be more of a message when constituents tell them they are unhappy and do not feel they are being represented. If it isn't more of a message then the people of Utah and Vermont should not re-elect them out of principle.
If you like in Utah or Vermont please make sure that you explicitly mention that you are a constituent of theirs.
It just seems ridiculous. But you have a good point about the civil prosecution. Criminal prosecution always seemed way too harsh.
I still mean what I said about constituents telling their senators what they think. They are supposed to represent their constituency, and if I didn't know the system better I'd think that at least Utah is out to get the rest of the U.S.
Please, please, please tell them that, too. It only takes a minute to say what you just posted here.
The only reason these guys care so much about money is to get re-elected. If you tell them that it isn't going to matter how much money their campaign has because you folks aren't going to re-elect them either way, they'll listen.
The rest of the country cannot get these two corrupt, entertainment industry pawns out of office. Only Vermont and Utah residents can. Do not re-elect these two. While it might seem they are doing good, they are doing long-term damage to the country, including your states.
Send a message to Leahy
Send a message to Hatch
Please do it now before these two turn the U.S. citizens into entertainment industry criminals and slaves, and infect every other nation with these ideas.
Yes -- actually there are a lot of people that are dissatisfied with this. You just don't hear the outcry because it has been transmuted to a collective "argggh" when people try building software that should be portable and it won't build. The idea that GCC is preventing the growth of open source is something just not propagated, because it's heresy. A lot of what GCC 3.x has done to adhere to the language has been wonderful, but that also means they did not maintain compatibility with GCC 2.95 and before. That's okay -- in my position I'll take the portable code that results from the move to 3.x, especially 3.2.
I love GCC, but it's just not the compiler for these other platforms. If you built all your software with it -- fine. But I find I need the native compilers (Forte or VisualAge) to be installed alongside it (for vendors and such), and what ends up happening eventually is a linker nightmare. Especially if you need to use libraries that were built with the other compiler. For the price of the native compilers, at least for me and my organization, it's not worth messing around with GCC on these systems.
That's funny. Mine doesn't have one of those. My favorite was when I was getting a root canal, and they were debating the type of root canal drill bit thing. "22 or 23?" "Is there a 22.5... no." I asked (well, to the extent I could speak) "Is there a unit attached to those numbers?" and I got the "you don't want to know" look, then "Yeah, millimeters."
Holy christ, that thing is nearly an inch into my jaw! Cool.
IBM has gone so far as to build a number of GCCisms into their native compilers, just to deal with this sort of thing on AIX. It's actually really nice -- most everything Open Source builds on AIX 5.2 now.
The reason that an NMR is called 'MRI' in medicine is the same reason that your dentist has for guarding that information: most people are excitable sheep that cannot handle the word 'nuclear' in a name, and will never understand the science of the thing. To help people with this technology you need to hide what it does from them.
I do the same thing as you: I ask all kinds of questions about the things that get stuck into me, get attached to me, or even the things around me when I tour a place. Why not?
...unless your doctor is inept, doesn't care, misinformed/has old information, or is just too busy to make a good diagnosis. You are still your own best advocate, especially in matters of health. The point is not that your doctor should be your sole source of medical information, but that you should use him or her as an additional one. It is also common to get a second opinion and/or a referral to a specialist if you didn't like your physician's response, or didn't feel that they were as informed as you'd like.
It's just like security -- security is better when there are humans involved to make rational decisions. It's the same with your health.
Just had a thought: you could just build a series of shelves, too, out of 2x4's and plywood (where the plywood is a standard rackmount case size), so that you could put the rackmount cases on the shelves. Just make a frame out of the 2x4s and set the plywood right on 2x4 crossbars. Actually, you could just set the machines right on the crossbars like that, too. It's not as space efficient as a real rack, but for a few machines it'd be okay.
I have a copy of S&T that came with Works, too (and for the other respondants, sometimes you get Works when you order PCs from Dell). :-) I started using it when MapQuest steered me into the wrong half of a medium-sized city and I had to stop and ask directions. I hate that.
One nice thing about it is that you can take a laptop along and always be able to find your way. On trips if your navigator/passenger isn't totally brain dead you can use it to get around traffic jams, etc. in real time. It's also pretty sweet because you can highlight an area and tell S&T to avoid it when plotting the route. And it will take GPS data -- I love being able to see where I am on the map so I have some idea of where to turn.
I just wish S&T would adjust the route dynamically as you went, if it had GPS data to use. That's one advantage of the Garmin dashboard units. If you overshoot a turn or something it will just guide you back around. It would also be cool if it spoke to you to tell you where to go.
Agreed. Part of my argument, though, is that support for this has to be ubiquitous and built in to the OS, not a separate product like SMS. I don't want to pay more money to have Microsoft, or any vendor, keep me secure when I should have been secure in the first place.
Two thoughts here. First, package management
Operating system version control has been a problem for Microsoft Windows for a long time. Especially with runtime software bundled with third-party applications (think DirectX), you need a clear way to identify what is installed on a machine, upgrade it while tracking dependencies, and easily remove it. InstallShield does this sort of thing -- why isn't it built into the operating system?
Furthermore, most package managers provide a facility to verify the files that are running on the machine. While it isn't as conclusive as something like Tripwire, a simple "rpm --verify --all" will give you some insight into whether a system file has been replaced.
Package management on AIX (and probably other UN*Xes, but I haven't used them) gives you the ability to roll back out of a patch that went wrong, too. While that is possible to some extent in Windows, a package management solution could make that very easy.
And while we're at it, why isn't there a framework built into Windows to centralize patching of ALL products, not just Microsoft ones? Certainly the "Microsoft Update" that they are proposing is a good step, but why not build something that can check other vendors' web sites for patches? Couldn't such a framework be built so that when an application is installed it registers with the OS, and tells the OS where to look for updates for that specific product? Then when you run this "update console" or whatever, your local machine goes out to Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, whoever, and checks to see if there are updates for EVERYTHING that is installed?
The system could also be similar to Red Hat's update mirrors/satellite up2date server, where a corporate customer could set up a central update server, tell it where to get updates for all the products in use in their company, and then that server mirrors it. Then updating the client workstations (and servers) is something that happens in-house. Maybe it could even be smart enough to tell if a client machine hasn't been updated yet, and then when that machine is powered on it could update itself and reboot if necessary, all before the user is able to log in.
These two things together could really put a dent in management for Windows machines. Sorry if this is sort of a ramble, I've been thinking about it for a while and it all just spilled out.
Maybe if Open Source prevails in all of this one of the results will be the end of software patents. Is that not really the problem here, after all?
People have started becoming more paranoid about antivirus companies' involvement in virus creation. That's good -- if these companies are defrauding the public by creating the viruses they catch then all of them should end up in jail.
Could this be the same with spam? Could anti-spam vendors be sponsoring the spam itself, just to take corporate money in exchange for protection? Sounds like the mafia to me.
I can only think of ways that the US government will use this technology to spy on its citizens. It isn't going to improve the safety of anything, and in fact will probably lead to less safety, at least for our liberties. So I ask, why do we need to say yes to this?
Take the money that would be spent on this and fix our educational system or something. And demand the resignation of the people that even suggested that the U.S. government should spy on its own citizens.
"Quit endangering yourself...
Quit endangering yourself...
Quit endangering yourself..."
Seriously, they are using those portable emergency power packs for vehicles, so someone must go out there and retrieve them and charge them again.
Agreed. Get a very good intellectual property lawyer, or better yet, a lawyer in a firm that deals with business issues and has IP specialists on staff. I was in this very same position with a software application my company had started writing, and a medium-sized business in the Midwest was interested in it. It would have saved them quite a lot of money over commercial applications, plus it would have been fully customized for their business. And on top of it, we could go on to sell the software to other companies for more money. Good for both parties.
The other company was worried about us being able to finish the project to their specifications. We'd develop a contract with them, send it to them, and their lawyers would change it to basically ensure that we would at some time be in breach of contract. If that happened they would get the source code. We were already willing to share the code with them as part of the deal so long as they didn't resell it or market it themselves. No need to get hostile about it. We learned quite rapidly that only lawyers can fight lawyers (without massive time committments on our part), and by spending the extra money on a good set of lawyers, including an IP specialist, we saved ourselves lots of future headaches and problems.
In the end we ended up not doing business with the company, and we lost the sale and opportunity. The other business spent ten times what we would have charged to implement a generic software package for their needs, and to cutomize that package to work with their business. Do I feel bad about it? Yeah -- it sucks to lose business like that, and it was a good opportunity. But I would have felt much worse if I hadn't involved expert lawyers along the way to protect us and explain what the other side was trying to do (the good parts along with the bad things they were doing).
I think it's generally agreed that the course of action you suggest is where to go in the future. And it seems that the Debian folks agree, even if this has all been sort of a rude awakening. However, developing a more intuitive installer takes some time. In the meantime a good explanation/walkthrough of how to install Debian will help some of the people get the distribution installed. In my experience, creating walkthroughs like that also help sort out the rough spots of the process, so people who are going to work on the installation process know right where to start to have the most effect.
Or better yet, who will be the other admin that restores that stuff?
Sysadmins will turn into glorified, electronic janitors, but they'll still be needed to do some stuff.
Same with my family. It's awesome. Not only do I not have to go shopping for a ring and endure all that, but the ring has some history behind it, and is neat looking. Plus four generations of women liked it, so I don't have to fret over whether it looks good or not. :-) Kid tested, mother approved. But yeah, if we have a son, he has the option of passing it along, and if you ditch me I'm getting it back (and hopefully that's not the case!).
If you don't like this, don't use Hotmail. Microsoft is approximately the worst, most unethical company around (save Kazaa/Sharman) so why did you expect anything different?
If you don't like those types of policies, don't work there. Or get your management to except you. As a sysadmin I use the 'net all the time to find answers to problems, get the latest software for my AIX boxes, etc. If they took that away I would be a lot less productive.
I wonder if anyone has tried negotiating exceptions to these corporate 'net blockages as part of the hiring process...
Older versions of AIX, namely AIX 4.1 and 4.2, weren't very good, standards-wise. A lot of this has been fixed. IBM's latest version of AIX, AIX 5L 5.1, includes a lot of stuff they got through Project Monterey. Project Monterey was the combined effort between SCO, IBM, and Intel. When they joined, IBM had access to the SysV source for the first time, and started making their OSes more SysV-compliant. This was coupled with a general rewriting of all the device drivers in the OS, so that the drivers were more robust and handled errors better. If you watch carefully, you can see the effect these efforts have had on AIX, even in AIX 4.3.3. AIX 4.3.3 has had some interesting, destabilizing bugs in the last year. They were patched rapidly (patched, but IBM Support always had a good workaround if you couldn't just reject the faulty software package and put the machine back the way it was -- AIX has excellent package management!). Looking at the bugs, though, they were very low-level bugs that seemed to get exposed by development work throughout the OS. Given the sorts of things that are changing in AIX, it is actually a good sign that deep-seated problems are boiling to the surface, because that means that the developers are really doing their job.
The other thing that seems to have improved AIX 4.3.3 a lot is the benchmarking. Dueling with Sun isn't a bad thing all the time. AIX 4.3.3, with the latest patches applied, has an excellent, capable, and very tunable TCP stack. It has also had a number of features backported to it from AIX 5.1. AIX 5L 5.1 has a lot more of the cool TCP features in it, and is even with Solaris 8 in those regards.
In the past, compiling has seriously sucked under AIX. However, the IBM VisualAge C++ compilers for AIX are cool. They will compile just about anything, and if you cannot compile it then the programmer should probably go back and adhere to the various C/C++ standards. Generally I have the same trouble compiling certain software under either Solaris or AIX. Sometimes I even break down and install the GNU compiler collection...
Right now, IBM has two machines that support virtual machines, or in mainframe/IBM terminology, logical partitions (LPARS). LPARs are supported in hardware on the pSeries 690 running AIX, and on IBM zSeries running z/OS or z/VM. LPARs are hardware-based, and if a processor, memory chip, or other system component dies it is able to prolong an outage by deallocating it. Currently AIX is not able to dynamically add resources to an LPAR without rebooting the LPAR, but that is coming. Otherwise, LPARs are totally independent instances of the OS. And the reboot to add resources takes an LPAR about thirty seconds (yes, 30). The LPARs do share a few things, like the system clock, and a management workstation for console access, but they are isolated in hardware.
On the pSeries 690, the boundaries of the LPARs are 1 processor/1 GB memory. So you have to allocate whole processors and whole gigabytes of RAM to an LPAR. While this sounds like it's not such a great idea (and it isn't the best), it's okay. Any more granularity can be handled by the built-in AIX Workload Manager, which is able to manage OS-level resources like memory, processor time, disk I/Os, etc. in percentages based on users, groups, and process names. That isn't something Sun has, and often you don't need partitions on a machine, but instead just need to keep two pieces of software from fighting for resources (or need to cap a group of users to low memory or low CPU usage). Workload Manager is very handy in that regard. The IBM mainframes running z/OS or MVS can do timeslicing, where an LPAR can have 10% of all of the CPU time on the box, or 5% of RAM, etc. You can also create situations where you overcommit the resources on the machine but define priorities, to guarantee levels of service. So maybe you have three LPARs, and one can have up to 80% of the CPU if it's busy, and the other two can have up to 30% of the CPU, but LPAR 1 has priority (so it gets its 80% anytime it needs it). This is where the pSeries 690 is going, it just isn't there yet (IBM took all the guys that made MVS capable of this stuff and pointed them at AIX).
I really know nothing about Sun's Dynamic System Domains. I do know it is similar in certain ways to the concept of LPARs, but isn't as flexible as the MVS/mainframe LPAR scheme. The OS instances are still isolated from each other in hardware. The two are probably nearly even when it comes down to it.
If you consider the hardware these things run on you will see that a pSeries 690 with 32 CPUs equals a Sun Starfire with 72 CPUs. What IBM is doing in this regard is cool -- they are actively attempting to put fewer components into a machine. More components == more likelihood of failure, and therefore you need more redundant components. More components == more heat, which leads to more failures. It also means more electricity for more components. You can also cluster the big machines using a derivative of the IBM SP2 technology (you can also cluster smaller ones, like pSeries 660s, which are a hell of a deal, price/performance-wise). So while Sun's machines can go to 72 CPUs, all you get are extra components and extra heat (and extra service calls)
IBM has been working with Red Hat for a while now. In fact, when Linux was ported to the S/390, there were two ports. I forget who the individual was that did one of the ports, but IBM had a team that did the other. There is an S/390 distribution of Red Hat Linux -- check any mirror site that is worthy (many don't carry it). It generally lags behind the i386 distribution, but only by a few weeks. Considering the market, hey, that's not bad at all. And IBM is doing a lot of work on Linux itself, from porting JFS to it, to adding a lot of what makes AIX a very scalable, very stable, very reliable OS. Check the IBM AlphaWorks site for examples. I am not sure what Sun is doing in that regards, or what Solaris can offer Linux as far as technology. That isn't an insult, it is just my unfamiliarity with Solaris.
And finally, every machine is stable & reliable with a good system administration team that is knowledgable. I have been doing AIX admin work for about two years now, and I love it (having come from a Linux admin background). AIX has always had excellent filesystem support (true logical volume management built right in with real journalling filesystems, while you have to buy it from Veritas for Suns), and that, for me, makes it very easy to work with. And if you work with an OS for a while you get to know how it does things. I cannot speak for the admins that deal with Suns. I don't work with Suns, but half of the machines where I work are Sun machines (the other half is AIX, with two mainframes, and a handful of Linux boxes). And those Sun sysadmins can make their machines as stable and reliable as my AIX boxes. So it just depends on what you're trying to do, what you already have, and often, how much it'll cost you, because more often than not the machines can do the exact same thing, except one will be thousands cheaper.