The difference is that the results are being used for their corporate benefit and no one else's. They patch their system, you better believe they're not going to give me the sources for that patch.
They're just grandstanding and posturing, trying to prove that Windows 2000 is secure. Its win-win for them -- free high-level security testing (which unlike Beta testing, is something that is generally VERY expensive to contract out for), if it gets cracked, then they get an early warning and time to fix the problem, and if they don't their marketroids will have that nugged to get their paid-off "independant" columnists to write about.
All while people are wasting time to save Microsoft money developing a product that they're going to charge exorbanant licensing fees for.
Seems kind of stupid for anyone to waste their time on it. Get your own copy of Windows 2000, crack THAT, and post THAT exploit all over the net. That puts Microsoft in their place, and doesn't help them screw people over even more.
After I made a nice comment about how SGI does a good job supporting linux the other day on some random/. posting of whose subject I can no longer recall, this pops up.
I find myself wondering if I spoke too soon.
Has anyone seen anything on the Kernel development lists about these NFS patches or the new TCP/IP stack? Or are they keeping them closed-source?
God knows a TCP/IP stack that doesn't get bogged down on multiproc servers would be nice.
Just like not all multia's have the extrenal SCSI port, not all Multia's have the full meg of flash RAM, and as such only have SRM or ARC, not both. You're pretty much hosed in that case. Some DEC systems can boot Linux from SRM, but I never got it working on my Multia's. Both AlphaStations I've got DO boot from SRM though.
You might want to check if you actually even have ARC, and if not, you may be able to flash the linux kernel into the flashram if its small enough. I've heard of it happening, but YMMV and you could probably turn it into a doorstop if it doesn't work.
The sound hardware in the Multia is *noisy*. And its just barely fast enough for MP3 playback.
Don't waste the money on one of these for that. You can buy a new Pentium barebones system that'll work better, and run cooler and more reliably for less money. Even if you get no drive, you should figure on spending $100 more on RAM and a floppy drive for one of these.
I figured I should mention, that MOST of the surplus Multia's I've seen in the last six months or so DO NOT have the external SCSI port. Most of the ones DEC made didn't have them.
I mentioned this last time Multia's showed up on Slashdot, and figured it was worth mentioning again. I have a couple of them. At $30 bare, they're not necessarily a good deal. They take true-parity RAM. Its not that easy to find, most parity RAM today is not true-parity. Trust me, they won't work without it. I've tried.
Obviously you can't do much without the floppy drive. Figure $30 to get one from a place like Starship Computers. Most Multia's I've seen recently being sold do not have an external SCSI port, so you'll have to figure out a way to jam a harddrive in the case. Don't put anything too expensive, Multia's are space heaters, it won't last very long. You might be able to put a IDE notebook drive, but you'll need to find a cable that works with the smaller IDE connector.
Have I mentioned that they're SLOW? A 166 mhz Multia is a LOT slower than a 166 Pentium. *MUCH* slower. Can't say that too many times. *MUCH* *MUCH* slower. Most of the 166's were not socketed, so you can't even upgrade them to the older 233 processor (which again some places like Starship Computers sometimes are selling on onsale.com)
They're interesting to have to be able to play with an Alpha, and you'll have the honor of telling people you've got the slowest Alpha on the block! FIgure on spending another $300 or so to get anything useful out of it, and useful is a relative term. I run secondary DNS and DHCP on one. I ran a print server for a while using Ghostscript, but it took the poor guy five minutes to rasterize a page.
I wonder if they really thought anyone would give a flying fsck about some non-existant risk of Amazon suing them. If I was Amazon.com, and my ONLY billing invoice was set to be e-mail, and I lost my domain, there's three things I'd do:
1) Sue Network Solutions for removing my domain because of a lack of a response on a non legally-binding communcation medium.
2) Fire the admin who set up the domain not to have postal billing notification
3) Contact anyone I could to have said admin "disappeared";)
Personally, I don't understand why someone would set up e-mail notification in the first place. I mean, come on! Sure, most clients are that stupid, but most ISP's should have the brains to point out to the clients the problems inherant in doing that.
Blacklist them. Serves them right. As has been said many times before, Network Solutions do not own the Internet, they're just unfairly utilizing an inappropriate monopoly situation created by a US Government that repeatly shows itself to be the premier organization of cluelessness and idiocity in the world.
Maybe the Government should be blacklisted to, just on general principle.:)
This whole RedHat IPO crap is really irratating me. I've seen a half dozen different explanations of how RedHat choose the special 1000 who got the infamous e-mail. Most of them tell a different story, and RedHat hasn't been saying officially how they picked it.
My guess is the explanation that they sent the letter to the lead coder on each of their various packages seems the most reasonable to me.
That's quite a kick in the balls though to the various people (including myeslf, this whole post is very selfishly motivated) who have contributed innumerable patches, bug fixes, suggestions, and new features to many of those various packages. Pushing RedHat at various corporations, submiting bugs to them on their RPMS, etc...
RedHat could've done a better job of the process I think. I'm kind of irratated that I didn't end up on the list simply because none of the software I've written has ended up in their distribution, or the code has since been removed. (Used to have a few patches in the kernel five or six years ago, but its long since gone...)
They also should've thought of this issue of investment experience before they filed for the IPO. They could've done a private placement to the invitees, and then files for the IPO.
Cyrus is probably the way to go. CMU uses it, and it seems to handle their needs. I've used it at three different companies, and particularly liked the fact that it doesn't rely at all on system users, except for password authentication. Its trivial to patch the system to authenticate passwords against a DBM file or MySQL.
Its also trivial to write scripts to automate the management of the server, so you can create a new user quickly and easily.
Two years ago I installed Cyrus at a company that was using NT domain servers for their logins on all the client machines. Quick patch to Cyrus to work with PAM, and a SMB PAM module, and people were able to check their mail using their NT passwords without having any security issues of having all those users on the mail server.
I also hacked something together that automagically created the mailbox when an IMAP connection was attempted with a username/password on the NT domain that a mailbox didn't already exist for, so the NT-centric admins didn't need to ever touch the mailserver.
The number of users are much smaller, but other installations have shown that Cyrus will scale, so the ability to extend it like this is also important.
Every day my system pulls the tree and builds it for me. I've seen Mozilla progress so much in the last six months, and particularly in the last month.
Used it for several hours today for general browsing, without any crashes. I haven't had that happen in several months, and this was after the Necko code landing (the new fancy-pants networking code... noticably faster, IMHO).
There are still significant bugs, and its important if you're going to pull the CVS tree you know what to expect, because what works and doesn't work depends on the time of day. If it builds and the tests run, then tinderbox will be green even if some glaring feature is missing. (Like menus in the mailreader under Linux on the tree I pulled at 2pm EST today...)
There are people talking on here about how its not beta quality, hardly works, etc. The fact of the matter is ITS NOT beta softare. No one claimed it was. The milestones seem to work relatively well, although I thouht M6 and M7 weren't too good under Linux -- half the systems I tried on wouldn't build them. M8 was great. M9 (real soon now, I think they were mostly waiting on the Necko code becoming the default and stabilizing the problems from that...) should be even better. its definately a useable browser right now for most things, even if some stuff is flaky. (I can't log in on Slashdot for example)
I've said this a few times before on here, but its really worth saying over and over. Mozilla is really coming along. Its running suprisingly well, rendered pages with proper HTML look great on it. It certainly separates the good HTML coders from the bad in that regard. Its *fast*. I noticed that today's build is much faster -- both networking and rendering -- than the last one I actually tried which was on Monday or so.
The better rendering engine, and GTK widgets/menus make it MUCH nicer to look at than Communicator.
I'd suggest the complainers stop complaining and start submitting bug reports if they're having such problems, but people like that aren't likely to give useful bug reports anyway.
I had one of those battery-powered 9mm water guns probably ten or twelve years ago. I loved that thing, before the days of super soakers, that bad boy was da bomb!:)
The newer supersoakers can't easily be hidden either. In hind sight, that old one looked an awful lot like a real gun. I'm probably lucky I didn't get shot by a cop.
Burned the thing out when I added a strap on battery pack that doubled the speed it shot at. Didn't make it through the summer, I seem to recall.
I still think they need to make one you can snap CO2 cartridges into. Too inefficient to have to stop and pump it up in the heat of a battle.
Laser sights are nice. For a couple years I've had a 5mw laser module thats migrated around my various weapons of choice. Useful on the waterguns when you can't hit someone directly, but want to splatter the stream off something over their head.
Also very useful on the suction-cup dart guns they used to make. (The ones that would leave welts, not the new toned down ones) With a laser site on my circa 1994 six-shot SuperSoaker dart gun, and specially reinforced darts (the new darts aren't strong enough for the old guns), I can raise a welt from fifty feet away with dead-on accuracy!
Ah yes, but if your speakers are vifa components driven by very expensive LEAP designed crossovers using frequency response charts produced from the specific drivers you're using in custom built 1" thick MDF enclosures that together produce the auditory quality of $20,000 home speakers, you can shut them up pretty quick.:) My only complaint is I'm running a MT configuration and the tweeter is a bit too off-axis for my taste, and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.
When car audio is good, its *good*. But most people who think they've got something good have never heard a $20k set of speakers, much less a $250k set of speakers.:)
I think you're 100% right. MP3's are good when you've got mediocre equipment. If you've got good ears and high end equipment, they'll drive you nuts. I listen to them all the time at work on my crappy Polk speakers that came with this PC.
At home? They're tolerable, but no comparison really to the quality from a CD played in my DVD player (which outputs digitally to the receiver).
In my car? Not a chance. If I'm driving on the highway or something, I won't notice the quality as much, but on side streets there's not enough road noise to mask it. Drives me crazy.
Try saying that on rec.audio.car though and see how quickly you get flamed.:) Lot of people don't understand that LOTS of people CAN hear the difference even at 256k.
Re:Hot swap != big deal, multiproc & linux
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SGI's Linux Server
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Thought I'd mention, with SCSI drives its also very easy to get Linux to rescan the bus. I have a shell script on my system at home that does that, because I'm a knob and forget to turn on my CDR drive more often than not. Flip it on, run the script and voila! No reboot.
Of course, kiddies, don't try this at home. SCSI isn't really supposed to support powering on a device after the system is powered up, unless it specifically says it can. YMMV.
I'm interested in seeing where FireWire goes from that standpoint. I like the fact that you can disconnect them at will. (Well assuming your OS isn't going to complain!)
The SGI machines offering hot swap isn't that big of a deal. Any many linux systems can support it and any that support a RAID controller that supports it, will support it. (Wow, that was a lousy grammatical construction!)
I meant that there are a bunch of RAID controllers that handle the hot-swapping themselves, including the automagic rebuilding of failed drives in a RAID-5 configuration, for example. I think the Mylex controllers are an example of that.
Two years ago I managed to get Linux running on one of HP's high end (at the time) multiproc machines (it had two Pentium 200's I think). For the life of me I can't remember what drive controller was in it -- it was a repurposed NT server, not something purchased new -- but you could pull drives out just fine...
I'd guess SGI's just using a hardware RAID solution, not a software one, which is the only thing that would need real Linux support.
Wonder what they're doing to make 4-proc efficient? 8-proc?
I have one that seems to not block most ads, but does nuke the ones on slashdot. (Which is good most of the time, because that silly adfu.blockstackers.com is what keeps slashdot from working half the time)
I have a proxy that runs on the fast side of my frame line and gzips everything before sending it to my browser, makes my 56k work like a T1... Somehow it breaks the ad stuff on here though.
I've seen commercial programs that specifically block domains that ads are served from, though.
Instead of suing them, its not that freakin' difficult to write an Apache module (and presumably a module under any other server) that checks the referrer and not serve the requested file if the referrer isn't on the local site.
Keeps people from using your images and crap like that.
The copyright infringement thing is just silly, but I can understand why they don't want people doing that. Its easy enough to fix technically...
This isn't that big a deal. NAS is a very expensive product, and I doubt many places would spend that kind of money on the product and not run it on a Sun system, with a big ol' company behind it that you can sue when it doesn't work.
I'd be a lot more watchful about Sun's involvement in Jakarta, and what support they've had for the Java ports for Linux, than this. The issue is, was this a true demand based decision, or a political decision masked with a demand-based excuse? If its the latter, projects like the Java port for Linux, and Jakarta are probably on pretty tenuous ground.
Wouldn't suprise me in that case if we stop seeing "official" status for Communicator ports for Linux. Thank god Mozilla's coming along quickly -- they can't do squat about that.
Sun is a company that loves Linux because it helps them kick Microsoft around, but may be wising up to the fact that it'll probably turn around and kick them around too. They need to ensure that Linux dominates the low end server area that Microsoft represents a threat to them in, without becoming so capable that it takes over the high-end server area.
Need I say, much kudos to SGI for being much cooler about their Linux support?
Even on a small network not using DHCP is just dumb. It takes, what, two minutes to set it up? Saves a lot of time on each client (although Winblows doesn't seem to pay attention to router or DNS addresses it gets via DHCP... who's the bonehead at Microsoft who did that???)
First thing I do at a companies I go into that don't have it, is set it up, so at the very least I don't have to keep reconfiguring my laptop... DHCP at home, and at work means no tweaking the configuration!
The other problems you're commenting on are related to fundamental flaws in the whole client/server idea -- which is why the industry is moving back towards big-iron for corporate applications. The whole intranet movement in applications is driven in a lot of places not by the idea that its standards based, but because the powers that be know how stupid the shift to client/server really was.
You're absolutely right. Said that in my other post, but I figure its worth saying it again. The issue with his job was because he won't stand up for himself, and the issue with the switchover is that he or whoever above him makes the techical decisions simply don't know what they're doing.
DHCP, simple server scripts, a good hosting architecture for websites and DNS, and a bit of planning ahead keeps that problem from happening. IP Masquerading or NAT on either the firewall or a Linux server takes care of the rest.
Now if you were in a corporation where all the desktop machines need to be restarted, then you've got a bit of a pain -- you could use BO2K!;) Seriously though, if you've got world-routable IP's on the desktops, than its pretty clear that the technical staff is clueless, so that's a non-issue.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but this is the same as every other labor-related story thats cropped up in the last few weeks on here. I bet we see the same B.S. about unions and the same arguments for and against that.
In the end though, it boils down to one thing. If you don't like it, quit. As you said, you're making multiples of the national average income for someone your age. You could always go sell clothes at The Gap or something. Or take one of those several hundred thousand other open IT jobs at companies that have sufficient technical resources and skills in house not to end up in that sort of a situation. (And a properly designed network architecture shouldn't have nearly the issues in that sort of a switch over... but I'll get to that)
There is a tendancy for people in the industry -- particularly people who are in positions significantly beyond their realistic abilities (I'm not saying this is your case, but A case) -- for people not to stick up for themselves. If you don't like working late hours, don't. Half the time people think they have to, their management really isn't saying that, they're just assuming it. If management IS saying it, then say no. If they fire you, they fire you. If you really have any skills, you'll get another job without any problems, and if you don't, maybe thats what you should concern yourself with.
On the area of mass IP migration, I hope this story serves as a warning to anyone else working in those situations. Its not difficult to engineer your network systems to handle this cleanly. Generate your DNS entries out of a database. Generate a DHCPD configuration file that assigns internal-only IP's for each server, Also out of the database, do the same thing with your server configuration, and IP configuration. Simple scripts to do that. (And you're not using NT for real work are you? You probably could do it with NT anyway, just takes a bit more hacking)
A few days before the switchover, change your SOA's for a near-immediate changeover. Run a query against the database to regenerate your various configuration files, and bring down and back up the networks on the servers. On most systems you won't even need a reboot, and you'll have a few seconds downtime.
I've done provider switchovers at companies with dozens of servers and hundreds of clients no-sweat with less than an hour downtime. If you don't have any other downtimes, you're still doing better than EBay;) If you've got high profile clients, you could always use a NAT solution to handle the switchover period. I think Linux could probably even do it for you.
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The difference is that the results are being used for their corporate benefit and no one else's. They patch their system, you better believe they're not going to give me the sources for that patch.
They're just grandstanding and posturing, trying to prove that Windows 2000 is secure. Its win-win for them -- free high-level security testing (which unlike Beta testing, is something that is generally VERY expensive to contract out for), if it gets cracked, then they get an early warning and time to fix the problem, and if they don't their marketroids will have that nugged to get their paid-off "independant" columnists to write about.
All while people are wasting time to save Microsoft money developing a product that they're going to charge exorbanant licensing fees for.
Seems kind of stupid for anyone to waste their time on it. Get your own copy of Windows 2000, crack THAT, and post THAT exploit all over the net. That puts Microsoft in their place, and doesn't help them screw people over even more.
After I made a nice comment about how SGI does a good job supporting linux the other day on some random /. posting of whose subject I can no longer recall, this pops up.
I find myself wondering if I spoke too soon.
Has anyone seen anything on the Kernel development lists about these NFS patches or the new TCP/IP stack? Or are they keeping them closed-source?
God knows a TCP/IP stack that doesn't get bogged down on multiproc servers would be nice.
Anyone got any details?
Just like not all multia's have the extrenal SCSI port, not all Multia's have the full meg of flash RAM, and as such only have SRM or ARC, not both. You're pretty much hosed in that case. Some DEC systems can boot Linux from SRM, but I never got it working on my Multia's. Both AlphaStations I've got DO boot from SRM though.
You might want to check if you actually even have ARC, and if not, you may be able to flash the linux kernel into the flashram if its small enough. I've heard of it happening, but YMMV and you could probably turn it into a doorstop if it doesn't work.
The sound hardware in the Multia is *noisy*. And its just barely fast enough for MP3 playback.
Don't waste the money on one of these for that. You can buy a new Pentium barebones system that'll work better, and run cooler and more reliably for less money. Even if you get no drive, you should figure on spending $100 more on RAM and a floppy drive for one of these.
I figured I should mention, that MOST of the surplus Multia's I've seen in the last six months or so DO NOT have the external SCSI port. Most of the ones DEC made didn't have them.
I mentioned this last time Multia's showed up on Slashdot, and figured it was worth mentioning again. I have a couple of them. At $30 bare, they're not necessarily a good deal. They take true-parity RAM. Its not that easy to find, most parity RAM today is not true-parity. Trust me, they won't work without it. I've tried.
Obviously you can't do much without the floppy drive. Figure $30 to get one from a place like Starship Computers. Most Multia's I've seen recently being sold do not have an external SCSI port, so you'll have to figure out a way to jam a harddrive in the case. Don't put anything too expensive, Multia's are space heaters, it won't last very long. You might be able to put a IDE notebook drive, but you'll need to find a cable that works with the smaller IDE connector.
Have I mentioned that they're SLOW? A 166 mhz Multia is a LOT slower than a 166 Pentium. *MUCH* slower. Can't say that too many times. *MUCH* *MUCH* slower. Most of the 166's were not socketed, so you can't even upgrade them to the older 233 processor (which again some places like Starship Computers sometimes are selling on onsale.com)
They're interesting to have to be able to play with an Alpha, and you'll have the honor of telling people you've got the slowest Alpha on the block! FIgure on spending another $300 or so to get anything useful out of it, and useful is a relative term. I run secondary DNS and DHCP on one. I ran a print server for a while using Ghostscript, but it took the poor guy five minutes to rasterize a page.
That was FUNNY.
;)
:)
I wonder if they really thought anyone would give a flying fsck about some non-existant risk of Amazon suing them. If I was Amazon.com, and my ONLY billing invoice was set to be e-mail, and I lost my domain, there's three things I'd do:
1) Sue Network Solutions for removing my domain because of a lack of a response on a non legally-binding communcation medium.
2) Fire the admin who set up the domain not to have postal billing notification
3) Contact anyone I could to have said admin "disappeared"
Personally, I don't understand why someone would set up e-mail notification in the first place. I mean, come on! Sure, most clients are that stupid, but most ISP's should have the brains to point out to the clients the problems inherant in doing that.
Blacklist them. Serves them right. As has been said many times before, Network Solutions do not own the Internet, they're just unfairly utilizing an inappropriate monopoly situation created by a US Government that repeatly shows itself to be the premier organization of cluelessness and idiocity in the world.
Maybe the Government should be blacklisted to, just on general principle.
This whole RedHat IPO crap is really irratating me. I've seen a half dozen different explanations of how RedHat choose the special 1000 who got the infamous e-mail. Most of them tell a different story, and RedHat hasn't been saying officially how they picked it.
My guess is the explanation that they sent the letter to the lead coder on each of their various packages seems the most reasonable to me.
That's quite a kick in the balls though to the various people (including myeslf, this whole post is very selfishly motivated) who have contributed innumerable patches, bug fixes, suggestions, and new features to many of those various packages. Pushing RedHat at various corporations, submiting bugs to them on their RPMS, etc...
RedHat could've done a better job of the process I think. I'm kind of irratated that I didn't end up on the list simply because none of the software I've written has ended up in their distribution, or the code has since been removed. (Used to have a few patches in the kernel five or six years ago, but its long since gone...)
They also should've thought of this issue of investment experience before they filed for the IPO. They could've done a private placement to the invitees, and then files for the IPO.
Cyrus is probably the way to go. CMU uses it, and it seems to handle their needs. I've used it at three different companies, and particularly liked the fact that it doesn't rely at all on system users, except for password authentication. Its trivial to patch the system to authenticate passwords against a DBM file or MySQL.
Its also trivial to write scripts to automate the management of the server, so you can create a new user quickly and easily.
Two years ago I installed Cyrus at a company that was using NT domain servers for their logins on all the client machines. Quick patch to Cyrus to work with PAM, and a SMB PAM module, and people were able to check their mail using their NT passwords without having any security issues of having all those users on the mail server.
I also hacked something together that automagically created the mailbox when an IMAP connection was attempted with a username/password on the NT domain that a mailbox didn't already exist for, so the NT-centric admins didn't need to ever touch the mailserver.
The number of users are much smaller, but other installations have shown that Cyrus will scale, so the ability to extend it like this is also important.
Every day my system pulls the tree and builds it for me. I've seen Mozilla progress so much in the last six months, and particularly in the last month.
Used it for several hours today for general browsing, without any crashes. I haven't had that happen in several months, and this was after the Necko code landing (the new fancy-pants networking code... noticably faster, IMHO).
There are still significant bugs, and its important if you're going to pull the CVS tree you know what to expect, because what works and doesn't work depends on the time of day. If it builds and the tests run, then tinderbox will be green even if some glaring feature is missing. (Like menus in the mailreader under Linux on the tree I pulled at 2pm EST today...)
There are people talking on here about how its not beta quality, hardly works, etc. The fact of the matter is ITS NOT beta softare. No one claimed it was. The milestones seem to work relatively well, although I thouht M6 and M7 weren't too good under Linux -- half the systems I tried on wouldn't build them. M8 was great. M9 (real soon now, I think they were mostly waiting on the Necko code becoming the default and stabilizing the problems from that...) should be even better. its definately a useable browser right now for most things, even if some stuff is flaky. (I can't log in on Slashdot for example)
I've said this a few times before on here, but its really worth saying over and over. Mozilla is really coming along. Its running suprisingly well, rendered pages with proper HTML look great on it. It certainly separates the good HTML coders from the bad in that regard. Its *fast*. I noticed that today's build is much faster -- both networking and rendering -- than the last one I actually tried which was on Monday or so.
The better rendering engine, and GTK widgets/menus make it MUCH nicer to look at than Communicator.
I'd suggest the complainers stop complaining and start submitting bug reports if they're having such problems, but people like that aren't likely to give useful bug reports anyway.
I had one of those battery-powered 9mm water guns probably ten or twelve years ago. I loved that thing, before the days of super soakers, that bad boy was da bomb! :)
The newer supersoakers can't easily be hidden either. In hind sight, that old one looked an awful lot like a real gun. I'm probably lucky I didn't get shot by a cop.
Burned the thing out when I added a strap on battery pack that doubled the speed it shot at. Didn't make it through the summer, I seem to recall.
Ah yeah, the joys of super soakers.
I still think they need to make one you can snap CO2 cartridges into. Too inefficient to have to stop and pump it up in the heat of a battle.
Laser sights are nice. For a couple years I've had a 5mw laser module thats migrated around my various weapons of choice. Useful on the waterguns when you can't hit someone directly, but want to splatter the stream off something over their head.
Also very useful on the suction-cup dart guns they used to make. (The ones that would leave welts, not the new toned down ones) With a laser site on my circa 1994 six-shot SuperSoaker dart gun, and specially reinforced darts (the new darts aren't strong enough for the old guns), I can raise a welt from fifty feet away with dead-on accuracy!
Ah yes, but if your speakers are vifa components driven by very expensive LEAP designed crossovers using frequency response charts produced from the specific drivers you're using in custom built 1" thick MDF enclosures that together produce the auditory quality of $20,000 home speakers, you can shut them up pretty quick. :) My only complaint is I'm running a MT configuration and the tweeter is a bit too off-axis for my taste, and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.
:)
When car audio is good, its *good*. But most people who think they've got something good have never heard a $20k set of speakers, much less a $250k set of speakers.
I think you're 100% right. MP3's are good when you've got mediocre equipment. If you've got good ears and high end equipment, they'll drive you nuts. I listen to them all the time at work on my crappy Polk speakers that came with this PC.
:) Lot of people don't understand that LOTS of people CAN hear the difference even at 256k.
At home? They're tolerable, but no comparison really to the quality from a CD played in my DVD player (which outputs digitally to the receiver).
In my car? Not a chance. If I'm driving on the highway or something, I won't notice the quality as much, but on side streets there's not enough road noise to mask it. Drives me crazy.
Try saying that on rec.audio.car though and see how quickly you get flamed.
Thought I'd mention, with SCSI drives its also very easy to get Linux to rescan the bus. I have a shell script on my system at home that does that, because I'm a knob and forget to turn on my CDR drive more often than not. Flip it on, run the script and voila! No reboot.
Of course, kiddies, don't try this at home. SCSI isn't really supposed to support powering on a device after the system is powered up, unless it specifically says it can. YMMV.
I'm interested in seeing where FireWire goes from that standpoint. I like the fact that you can disconnect them at will. (Well assuming your OS isn't going to complain!)
The SGI machines offering hot swap isn't that big of a deal. Any many linux systems can support it and any that support a RAID controller that supports it, will support it. (Wow, that was a lousy grammatical construction!)
I meant that there are a bunch of RAID controllers that handle the hot-swapping themselves, including the automagic rebuilding of failed drives in a RAID-5 configuration, for example. I think the Mylex controllers are an example of that.
Two years ago I managed to get Linux running on one of HP's high end (at the time) multiproc machines (it had two Pentium 200's I think). For the life of me I can't remember what drive controller was in it -- it was a repurposed NT server, not something purchased new -- but you could pull drives out just fine...
I'd guess SGI's just using a hardware RAID solution, not a software one, which is the only thing that would need real Linux support.
Wonder what they're doing to make 4-proc efficient? 8-proc?
You could always detect that case too, and let them through. Media Player probably passes a different user agent string to the server.
:)
Or you could detect IE5 and just transparently redirect them to Netscape's download page.
I have one that seems to not block most ads, but does nuke the ones on slashdot. (Which is good most of the time, because that silly adfu.blockstackers.com is what keeps slashdot from working half the time)
I have a proxy that runs on the fast side of my frame line and gzips everything before sending it to my browser, makes my 56k work like a T1... Somehow it breaks the ad stuff on here though.
I've seen commercial programs that specifically block domains that ads are served from, though.
Wouldn't be hard to write one.
Instead of suing them, its not that freakin' difficult to write an Apache module (and presumably a module under any other server) that checks the referrer and not serve the requested file if the referrer isn't on the local site.
Keeps people from using your images and crap like that.
The copyright infringement thing is just silly, but I can understand why they don't want people doing that. Its easy enough to fix technically...
This isn't that big a deal. NAS is a very expensive product, and I doubt many places would spend that kind of money on the product and not run it on a Sun system, with a big ol' company behind it that you can sue when it doesn't work.
I'd be a lot more watchful about Sun's involvement in Jakarta, and what support they've had for the Java ports for Linux, than this. The issue is, was this a true demand based decision, or a political decision masked with a demand-based excuse? If its the latter, projects like the Java port for Linux, and Jakarta are probably on pretty tenuous ground.
Wouldn't suprise me in that case if we stop seeing "official" status for Communicator ports for Linux. Thank god Mozilla's coming along quickly -- they can't do squat about that.
Sun is a company that loves Linux because it helps them kick Microsoft around, but may be wising up to the fact that it'll probably turn around and kick them around too. They need to ensure that Linux dominates the low end server area that Microsoft represents a threat to them in, without becoming so capable that it takes over the high-end server area.
Need I say, much kudos to SGI for being much cooler about their Linux support?
That's a fanstastic idea! Felt covered foam computer cases! You can knock 'em over, kick them, poke at them, and stick velcro to them!
The RF emmissions must be huge, but man, what a great idea!
Bet they soak up coffee (beer, tequilla, etc) pretty well though. Oops. That'd suck.
I'm going to go buy some carpet padding and felt and make my computer cases look just like those!
Eh, you could use SNMP on some routers to do it. He might've meant using NAT on the router to "reconfigure" the servers rather than the router itself.
:)
I'd guess he probably meant SNMP though.
Its a perfect case when network engineers or sys admins should know Perl.
Even on a small network not using DHCP is just dumb. It takes, what, two minutes to set it up? Saves a lot of time on each client (although Winblows doesn't seem to pay attention to router or DNS addresses it gets via DHCP... who's the bonehead at Microsoft who did that???)
First thing I do at a companies I go into that don't have it, is set it up, so at the very least I don't have to keep reconfiguring my laptop... DHCP at home, and at work means no tweaking the configuration!
The other problems you're commenting on are related to fundamental flaws in the whole client/server idea -- which is why the industry is moving back towards big-iron for corporate applications. The whole intranet movement in applications is driven in a lot of places not by the idea that its standards based, but because the powers that be know how stupid the shift to client/server really was.
You're absolutely right. Said that in my other post, but I figure its worth saying it again. The issue with his job was because he won't stand up for himself, and the issue with the switchover is that he or whoever above him makes the techical decisions simply don't know what they're doing.
;) Seriously though, if you've got world-routable IP's on the desktops, than its pretty clear that the technical staff is clueless, so that's a non-issue.
DHCP, simple server scripts, a good hosting architecture for websites and DNS, and a bit of planning ahead keeps that problem from happening. IP Masquerading or NAT on either the firewall or a Linux server takes care of the rest.
Now if you were in a corporation where all the desktop machines need to be restarted, then you've got a bit of a pain -- you could use BO2K!
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but this is the same as every other labor-related story thats cropped up in the last few weeks on here. I bet we see the same B.S. about unions and the same arguments for and against that.
;) If you've got high profile clients, you could always use a NAT solution to handle the switchover period. I think Linux could probably even do it for you.
In the end though, it boils down to one thing. If you don't like it, quit. As you said, you're making multiples of the national average income for someone your age. You could always go sell clothes at The Gap or something. Or take one of those several hundred thousand other open IT jobs at companies that have sufficient technical resources and skills in house not to end up in that sort of a situation. (And a properly designed network architecture shouldn't have nearly the issues in that sort of a switch over... but I'll get to that)
There is a tendancy for people in the industry -- particularly people who are in positions significantly beyond their realistic abilities (I'm not saying this is your case, but A case) -- for people not to stick up for themselves. If you don't like working late hours, don't. Half the time people think they have to, their management really isn't saying that, they're just assuming it. If management IS saying it, then say no. If they fire you, they fire you. If you really have any skills, you'll get another job without any problems, and if you don't, maybe thats what you should concern yourself with.
On the area of mass IP migration, I hope this story serves as a warning to anyone else working in those situations. Its not difficult to engineer your network systems to handle this cleanly. Generate your DNS entries out of a database. Generate a DHCPD configuration file that assigns internal-only IP's for each server, Also out of the database, do the same thing with your server configuration, and IP configuration. Simple scripts to do that. (And you're not using NT for real work are you? You probably could do it with NT anyway, just takes a bit more hacking)
A few days before the switchover, change your SOA's for a near-immediate changeover. Run a query against the database to regenerate your various configuration files, and bring down and back up the networks on the servers. On most systems you won't even need a reboot, and you'll have a few seconds downtime.
I've done provider switchovers at companies with dozens of servers and hundreds of clients no-sweat with less than an hour downtime. If you don't have any other downtimes, you're still doing better than EBay