I bought my first iBook in the fall of '01, and am now on my second. OS X + iBook = bliss. Occasionally I'll look at Sony's newest bit of eye candy and start to drool, then I tell myself that my os choises are Linux or XP and I get over it. Seriously Linux is good, but OS X is just better. I haven't had to hand edit a system file since 10.2, I'm hardly ever in Terminal anymore. Now if they could just put vi command mode in Hydra I'd be a happy camper.
What's next your current squeeze throwing a pencil through the area of effect, throwing off the station while you try to listen to the news of your theft of the new wonder car? Sheesh!
In a word. Yes. I work in a city that has done just that. Cedar Falls I live in the city next door, Waterloo, that has MediaCom as their cable internet provider. It hasn't given me problems yet, but their support sucks compared to CFU (Hi Joe!). There's really something about getting support for a service from people that actually live in the community....
Of course now the Bells and Cable providers are trying to legislate muninet providers out of existance.
The certificate/key really needs to be stored on a USB key or other removable media, so it can be kept separate from the system.
To Quote Dr. Evil: Riiiiiiight. Who do we know that schleps a laptop around and has to pop in a floppy or USB keyfobb in to access their files who isn't going to leave that device with their laptop? I'll grant you that keeping your security keys on your 'real' keychain with a USB keyfobb is moving in the right direction, but the people that get those nice expensive laptops many times can't even be bothered to enter their password when the machine boots up / wakes up. You show me a CEO that could be persuaded to do what you're asking and I'll eat my socks.
I look at it this way. Scripters of the world are kit bashers, they take all kinds of bit and pieces and assemble something to do a job quickly. Programers are more engineers, creating a solution to fit the design goals. Both solutions have their place. Just as it's costly to build a bridge everytime you want to get your tank company across a river it's also kind of short sighted to demand that the pontoon bridge you put in place goes on to serve as a permenant bridge.
Personally I've never seen much friction, usually because the scripters are also the SysAdmins and lord knows we don't want to have to actually support our own code, unless it makes us look more productive.
Broadband should be rolled out by local cooperatives, not big corporations. You can't trust a baby bell to deliver service. Maybe then we'll get metered broadbad, rather than gouging us all for a few industrial users.
IBM will kill Sun
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I read through this thread and the thing that I kept thinking was: "These kids haven't worked on an RS/6000 recently have they?" Now I will admit that I was indoctrinated into AIX goodness over a year ago, but with Linux/Mac/Windows eating into the workstation market (which is taking market from ALL the players in that space) With the rise of linux/gnu stealing profit from the OS and developer tools business, and now IBM mounting a full frontal assault on the high-end.
To the poster upthread, Sun hasn't captured the hearts and minds of CIO's, Oracle and SAP have. When/If Oracle ever migrates to a different platform for their primary development that will be the nail in Sun's coffin. That's really what is keeping Sun in business these days. The question for the next 5 years is if Sun can transition it's business model from providing expensive big-iron as their primary money maker, to competing with IBM in the high-end and Linux in the low end. They're in somewhat of Apple's problem. Their processor has lagged against the POWER series at the high end, and the PIII/IV at the low end. The Mid-sized market is such a cut-throat environment that Sun can compete there, but it's a hard sell for everyone. As much as we hate monopoloies, Sun needs to find a niche that it can dominate (like SGI) to have a rudder to give it stability.
Umm sorry, but what does drive speed have to do with it? I mean there's 512MB of cache sitting in front of those drives. It doesn't much matter how fast the drives are as long as you're hitting the cache and not the actual spindles. Yeah I can imagine a performance hit with the slower disks, but I don't think that it would be as bad as you think.
Ummmm last I checked ASE Certification wasn't mandated for wrenches. OSHA and all that rot, yes, but that's not really a Certification on par with MCSE, ASE is. And in the end ASE is usually worth about as much as MCSE. My father has been a mechanic for almost 30 years now, and only in the last 3 years has been an ASE Certified tech. And some of the test he took sounded like the MCSE tests, counter to common sense/experience, and in some cases just dumb easy.
Personally I think that the whole industry should be regulated like Engineers, of course then you have the issue with state certification, sitting for certs in different states and such.
Read Manifold: Space by Baxter. There's some very good theory in there that basically states that "life will find a way" It's like a cancer, if there's any concievable way for it to flourish it will.
The other big idea is that in order for intelligent life to exist for more than an intergalactic blink of an eye it has to expand to other star systems, eventually it needs to expand at a rate faster then the speed of light or it dies, basically making the foot print of intelligent life look like a circle. The outer fringes are where life it, the center is where intelligent life can't exist for lack of natural resources.
Anyway, it's a good read with some interesting ideas.
Oh give me a break! The post's 'registration' is fairly inocuous (you don't even have to have a username/password). Besides as far as they know I'm a 100 year old woman from Colorado.
Boris: Burning coppies of that Capitalist pig Elvis' first album. Ve vill sell them by bajillions and buy a nuke from Korea for Fearless Leader's Birthday.
Rocky: Stop right there Badinov! Jack Valenti sent us to put the kibosh on your illegal operation.
Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky, watch me pull a customs agent out of my hat!
Boris: Foiled again!
Natasha: Don't worry poopsie, I hear Saddam Husein has some Anthrax he vill sell cheap. That vill make good gift for Fearless Leader's birthday.
Bullwinkle: Kinda makes you wonder if we're going after the wrong people for the wrong reasons don't it?
Customs Agent: (Snapping on latex glove) I'm affraid we're going to have to search you two to make sure there isn't any contraband coming into the country.
If we look at our life, very simply, in a straightforward way, we see that it is marked with frustration and pain. This is because we attempt to secure our relationship with the "world out there", by solidifying our experiences in some concrete way. For example, we might have dinner with someone we admire very much, everything goes just right, and when we get home later we begin to fantasise about all the things we can do with our new-found friend, places we can go etc. We are going through the process of trying to cement our relationship. Perhaps, the next time we see our friend, she/he has a headache and is curt with us; we feel snubbed, hurt, all our plans go out the window. The problem is that the "world out there" is constantly changing, everything is impermanent and it is impossible to make a permanent relationship with anything, at all.
-- from buddhanet.net
If you accept life as it comes, in due process, you will be eliminated as you violate the basic principle of evolution.
hmmmm what you propose sounds like Nirvana to me. If only more of us could just take life as it comes.
I mean really, what are you going to be doing? Ripping log files appart on a MASSIVE scale, and Generating reports. Maybe they'll give Schwartz clemensy if he writes the system...
But name one other company that has attempted to embrace the GPL with their own code that wasn't already under the GPL.
Here's two. IBM, SGI.
IBM has released it's JFS under the GPL, SGI has released XFS. I'm sure that there are other libraries/programs that these companies have made GPL. I don't fault Apple for not doing so, but there are companies out there at do release code into the GPL.
Re:Take it from a Navy Radar Operator...
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 2
So what you're saying is that you fried your CO's cool new iBook with the SPY-1D 'eh? Serves him right for leaving the damned AirPort card on in his cabin.
That's really what it's all about. Building systems and procedures to watch your business critical systems and respond as best they can without human intervention. It's not hard, really, it just takes a few iterations to get to where you need to be.
The two most important things I took away from my time in the dot com boom are these. If you're not monitoring from the customer's perspective your monitoring is worthless. Significant digits determine uptime measurements.
That is to say, if the web is how your customers place orders they don't care if the database took a lunch break. If you're the web admin, the DBAs make you look bad. Being the admin that takes care of the public face of the business sucks. You depend on everyone behind you. How many of your customers care if you can execute a query in under a second if they have to navigate 13 screens to place an order? Who cares if your Apache server is up 100% of the time if the database behind it that takes orders was down for hours at a time over the month?
THe significant digits thing is an excellent way to throw the 5 9's back in the face of management. If you measure your systems for availability less than once/minute you can never compute uptime to 99.999. It just won't come out. You can get to 100%, or something in the high 90's but to achive comutationa accuracy in the ten thousandths you either need to compute for the year, or increase your polling frequency. While increasing polling frequency may sound good, it increases system load, and requires a more robust monitoring architecture. It's not something that most CIO's, let alone other executives give a second thought (unless say you work for GE, or any other 6 sigma company they know the signifigance of that last 9.)
Getting to a point where monitoring and responce systems are automated is a noble goal. We're a long ways off from that. I've worked with CA:Unicenter, and other automation/monitoring tools and even interviewed with Freshwater Software during the boom (makers of SiteScope). No one has a good paradigm for monitoring and automation. They just don't. The only people that have worried about these issues to date have been System Administrators and Engineers. We're good tool builders, but you need a real wrench, not something that is welded together from bits of scrap metal. That's what the monitoring and automation industry is today, a wrench created by some welder with bits of scrap they found lying around. Granted perl is a pretty damned good welding tool, but we need to cast these systems and standardize on how to actually do these things.
Until everyone's monitoring/automation system speaks the same language and can work interchangably, we're stuck in the pre-browser internet.
So..... what's to stop young Aheeb from taking his iBook (because only pinko commu^?^?^?^?^? terrorists use Macs) to Starbucks, or any of the handful of airports that are offering 802.11 service to patrons? DEAR GOD WE'RE HELPING THEM AT THE AIRPORTS NOW! BRING THAT TRAVEL NETWORK TO A STOP!
This is utterly fscking re-goddamned-diculus. The next thing you know we'll have the great firewall of America. But remember, if you can't watch the superbowl comercials then the terrorists have already won. There's noting quite like the momentum generated by a buearuacrcy motivated to look good to keep it's money.
Ummm, you don't. You put a Firewire/IP card in your router and then route between the networks. Kinda like you do now with Tokin Ring. You remember Tokin Ring don't you? FDDI? StarNet? er...
Slashdot Mirror
I bought my first iBook in the fall of '01, and am now on my second. OS X + iBook = bliss. Occasionally I'll look at Sony's newest bit of eye candy and start to drool, then I tell myself that my os choises are Linux or XP and I get over it. Seriously Linux is good, but OS X is just better. I haven't had to hand edit a system file since 10.2, I'm hardly ever in Terminal anymore. Now if they could just put vi command mode in Hydra I'd be a happy camper.
What's next your current squeeze throwing a pencil through the area of effect, throwing off the station while you try to listen to the news of your theft of the new wonder car? Sheesh!
In a word. Yes. I work in a city that has done just that. Cedar Falls I live in the city next door, Waterloo, that has MediaCom as their cable internet provider. It hasn't given me problems yet, but their support sucks compared to CFU (Hi Joe!). There's really something about getting support for a service from people that actually live in the community....
Of course now the Bells and Cable providers are trying to legislate muninet providers out of existance.
The certificate/key really needs to be stored on a USB key or other removable media, so it can be kept separate from the system.
To Quote Dr. Evil: Riiiiiiight. Who do we know that schleps a laptop around and has to pop in a floppy or USB keyfobb in to access their files who isn't going to leave that device with their laptop? I'll grant you that keeping your security keys on your 'real' keychain with a USB keyfobb is moving in the right direction, but the people that get those nice expensive laptops many times can't even be bothered to enter their password when the machine boots up / wakes up. You show me a CEO that could be persuaded to do what you're asking and I'll eat my socks.
I look at it this way. Scripters of the world are kit bashers, they take all kinds of bit and pieces and assemble something to do a job quickly. Programers are more engineers, creating a solution to fit the design goals. Both solutions have their place. Just as it's costly to build a bridge everytime you want to get your tank company across a river it's also kind of short sighted to demand that the pontoon bridge you put in place goes on to serve as a permenant bridge.
Personally I've never seen much friction, usually because the scripters are also the SysAdmins and lord knows we don't want to have to actually support our own code, unless it makes us look more productive.
Broadband should be rolled out by local cooperatives, not big corporations. You can't trust a baby bell to deliver service. Maybe then we'll get metered broadbad, rather than gouging us all for a few industrial users.
I read through this thread and the thing that I kept thinking was: "These kids haven't worked on an RS/6000 recently have they?" Now I will admit that I was indoctrinated into AIX goodness over a year ago, but with Linux/Mac/Windows eating into the workstation market (which is taking market from ALL the players in that space) With the rise of linux/gnu stealing profit from the OS and developer tools business, and now IBM mounting a full frontal assault on the high-end.
To the poster upthread, Sun hasn't captured the hearts and minds of CIO's, Oracle and SAP have. When/If Oracle ever migrates to a different platform for their primary development that will be the nail in Sun's coffin. That's really what is keeping Sun in business these days. The question for the next 5 years is if Sun can transition it's business model from providing expensive big-iron as their primary money maker, to competing with IBM in the high-end and Linux in the low end. They're in somewhat of Apple's problem. Their processor has lagged against the POWER series at the high end, and the PIII/IV at the low end. The Mid-sized market is such a cut-throat environment that Sun can compete there, but it's a hard sell for everyone. As much as we hate monopoloies, Sun needs to find a niche that it can dominate (like SGI) to have a rudder to give it stability.
With dual active RAID controllers, 512 MB of cache each, and battery backed up? How big will this monstrosity that you put together be?
That's a JBOD box, Xserve RAID is a RAID controller coupled to a JBOD. Not the same.
Umm sorry, but what does drive speed have to do with it? I mean there's 512MB of cache sitting in front of those drives. It doesn't much matter how fast the drives are as long as you're hitting the cache and not the actual spindles. Yeah I can imagine a performance hit with the slower disks, but I don't think that it would be as bad as you think.
Ummmm last I checked ASE Certification wasn't mandated for wrenches. OSHA and all that rot, yes, but that's not really a Certification on par with MCSE, ASE is. And in the end ASE is usually worth about as much as MCSE. My father has been a mechanic for almost 30 years now, and only in the last 3 years has been an ASE Certified tech. And some of the test he took sounded like the MCSE tests, counter to common sense/experience, and in some cases just dumb easy.
Personally I think that the whole industry should be regulated like Engineers, of course then you have the issue with state certification, sitting for certs in different states and such.
Read Manifold: Space by Baxter. There's some very good theory in there that basically states that "life will find a way" It's like a cancer, if there's any concievable way for it to flourish it will.
The other big idea is that in order for intelligent life to exist for more than an intergalactic blink of an eye it has to expand to other star systems, eventually it needs to expand at a rate faster then the speed of light or it dies, basically making the foot print of intelligent life look like a circle. The outer fringes are where life it, the center is where intelligent life can't exist for lack of natural resources.
Anyway, it's a good read with some interesting ideas.
Oh give me a break! The post's 'registration' is fairly inocuous (you don't even have to have a username/password). Besides as far as they know I'm a 100 year old woman from Colorado.
Natasha: Vhat Are you doink Dahling?
Boris: Burning coppies of that Capitalist pig Elvis' first album. Ve vill sell them by bajillions and buy a nuke from Korea for Fearless Leader's Birthday.
Rocky: Stop right there Badinov! Jack Valenti sent us to put the kibosh on your illegal operation.
Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky, watch me pull a customs agent out of my hat!
Boris: Foiled again!
Natasha: Don't worry poopsie, I hear Saddam Husein has some Anthrax he vill sell cheap. That vill make good gift for Fearless Leader's birthday.
Bullwinkle: Kinda makes you wonder if we're going after the wrong people for the wrong reasons don't it?
Customs Agent: (Snapping on latex glove) I'm affraid we're going to have to search you two to make sure there isn't any contraband coming into the country.
Rocky: Not again!
If we look at our life, very simply, in a straightforward way, we see that it is marked with frustration and pain. This is because we attempt to secure our relationship with the "world out there", by solidifying our experiences in some concrete way. For example, we might have dinner with someone we admire very much, everything goes just right, and when we get home later we begin to fantasise about all the things we can do with our new-found friend, places we can go etc. We are going through the process of trying to cement our relationship. Perhaps, the next time we see our friend, she/he has a headache and is curt with us; we feel snubbed, hurt, all our plans go out the window. The problem is that the "world out there" is constantly changing, everything is impermanent and it is impossible to make a permanent relationship with anything, at all.
-- from buddhanet.net
If you accept life as it comes, in due process, you will be eliminated as you violate the basic principle of evolution.
hmmmm what you propose sounds like Nirvana to me. If only more of us could just take life as it comes.
I mean really, what are you going to be doing? Ripping log files appart on a MASSIVE scale, and Generating reports. Maybe they'll give Schwartz clemensy if he writes the system...
But name one other company that has attempted to embrace the GPL with their own code that wasn't already under the GPL.
Here's two. IBM, SGI.
IBM has released it's JFS under the GPL, SGI has released XFS. I'm sure that there are other libraries/programs that these companies have made GPL. I don't fault Apple for not doing so, but there are companies out there at do release code into the GPL.
I mean really, what Soviet sun skipper could resist hanging out on the bottom next to a wreck?
It actually said: "What do you want Poindexter?"
So what you're saying is that you fried your CO's cool new iBook with the SPY-1D 'eh? Serves him right for leaving the damned AirPort card on in his cabin.
That's really what it's all about. Building systems and procedures to watch your business critical systems and respond as best they can without human intervention. It's not hard, really, it just takes a few iterations to get to where you need to be.
The two most important things I took away from my time in the dot com boom are these. If you're not monitoring from the customer's perspective your monitoring is worthless. Significant digits determine uptime measurements.
That is to say, if the web is how your customers place orders they don't care if the database took a lunch break. If you're the web admin, the DBAs make you look bad. Being the admin that takes care of the public face of the business sucks. You depend on everyone behind you. How many of your customers care if you can execute a query in under a second if they have to navigate 13 screens to place an order? Who cares if your Apache server is up 100% of the time if the database behind it that takes orders was down for hours at a time over the month?
THe significant digits thing is an excellent way to throw the 5 9's back in the face of management. If you measure your systems for availability less than once/minute you can never compute uptime to 99.999. It just won't come out. You can get to 100%, or something in the high 90's but to achive comutationa accuracy in the ten thousandths you either need to compute for the year, or increase your polling frequency. While increasing polling frequency may sound good, it increases system load, and requires a more robust monitoring architecture. It's not something that most CIO's, let alone other executives give a second thought (unless say you work for GE, or any other 6 sigma company they know the signifigance of that last 9.)
Getting to a point where monitoring and responce systems are automated is a noble goal. We're a long ways off from that. I've worked with CA:Unicenter, and other automation/monitoring tools and even interviewed with Freshwater Software during the boom (makers of SiteScope). No one has a good paradigm for monitoring and automation. They just don't. The only people that have worried about these issues to date have been System Administrators and Engineers. We're good tool builders, but you need a real wrench, not something that is welded together from bits of scrap metal. That's what the monitoring and automation industry is today, a wrench created by some welder with bits of scrap they found lying around. Granted perl is a pretty damned good welding tool, but we need to cast these systems and standardize on how to actually do these things.
Until everyone's monitoring/automation system speaks the same language and can work interchangably, we're stuck in the pre-browser internet.
Just enclose the processor in a static warp field and adjust the speed of light in your new proto-universe. Sheesh, come on people.
It's worse than that Jim...
So..... what's to stop young Aheeb from taking his iBook (because only pinko commu^?^?^?^?^? terrorists use Macs) to Starbucks, or any of the handful of airports that are offering 802.11 service to patrons? DEAR GOD WE'RE HELPING THEM AT THE AIRPORTS NOW! BRING THAT TRAVEL NETWORK TO A STOP!
This is utterly fscking re-goddamned-diculus. The next thing you know we'll have the great firewall of America. But remember, if you can't watch the superbowl comercials then the terrorists have already won. There's noting quite like the momentum generated by a buearuacrcy motivated to look good to keep it's money.
Ummm, you don't. You put a Firewire/IP card in your router and then route between the networks. Kinda like you do now with Tokin Ring. You remember Tokin Ring don't you? FDDI? StarNet? er...
Why do you need 6pin - 6pin firewire cables. You just need a converter to run firewire over Cat5.