The fact is true... they simply don't read e-mail. Sad but true.
The problem with e-mail is it is easy, quick, and emotional. In other words, there is a strong tendency for people who fire off e-mail not to not really be very committed to what they are saying (committed in terms of votes, money, time, or other support). It takes at least an hour to get a typed letter signed and out the door, which is a minimum expenditure of effort. So from a realistic point of view it makes a lot of sense for elected politicians to pay more attention to written letters than to e-mail.
Hardly. The Vietnam War was a proxy war between the US and the USSR, an extended campaign in the Cold War. North Vietnam had essentially zero industrial capacity for fighters, bombers, aircraft, firearms, radios, and anti-aircraft missiles. Without vast infusions of Soviet materiel, the US would've promptly conquered North Vietnam. (Of course without the Soviet presence there would have been no need to.)
Well, that's one theory, and well worth considering.
But here's an odd question: why don't the Vietnamese hate the US (in general, on average)? If there is any people on earth who would have a right to take revenge on the US for killing 100k's of their people, bombing their industry, defoliating their land, etc. (not to mention betrying their trust after WWII), it would be the Vietnamese.
And yet we don't seem to see that behaviour, either in international relations or a a personal level. US citizens I know who have gone to Vietnam as tourists are have been treated either on a friendly, or neutral, basis, and I even know a few army-types who have been invited to attend seminars by the Vietnamese army (on topics such as "Beating the crap out of sophisticated helicopters in a jungle envirnment, natch).
Any thoughts on why this is? Because they won, and they know it? Or something else?
An excellent sign that you've never even looked at Multics, and therefore probably have no idea what you're talking about.
I must confess to puzzlement at comments of the nature, particularly when directed as posts which are clearly designed to be food for additional discussion, rather than to be complete in themselves. You have no idea who I am, how long I have been working with system, what I have or haven't worked with in the past, or what my personal opinions are of the systems I mentioned (for good or ill), yet you know I have "no idea what I am talking about".
Perhaps a mirror would be in order?
sPh
How about OS's that should be brought back?
on
Niche Operating Systems
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There's an old adage that every mistake that has ever been made with computers has been made three times. It originally referred to the mainframe, minicomputer, and PC eras. That could probably be extended to at least five times today by adding "client/server" and "web" environments. One of the strange aspects of computing is that everything has to be started from scratch and nobody seems willing to even consider the lessons learned in the past.
Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?
There seem to be two ways of establishing legal traditions. One is to plan things out ahead of time, being aware of the mistakes of the past, and the other is to muddle one's way through, sort of making it up as you go along. Our system, based on English common law (but much changed from it), is definitely in category two.
A little of both, I would say, since those who crafted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had the benefit of 150 years of intense experimentation into the structure of government (particularly in England and France) available to them as they drafted their documents. That was also a time of deep philosophical discussion of those questions at all levels of society (can you imagine Gary Condit at the Constituational Convention? Gag).
Personally, I think the concept of "rights" as something that individuals hold in relation to governments (including their own) is just about over in the United States.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting today the the U.S. Government is currently holding at least 300 people in connection with the 9/11 incident. These 300 are being held in secret, without being allowed to communicate with attorneys, without their attorneys being informed when court proceedings are being held, without family members being informed where the prisoners are being held or even that they _are_ being held, and with all records of the proceedings being kept under "seal" (a concept that I don't believe appears in the Constitution of the United States).
Any objections to that? You will probably be next.
If a mirrored drive dies in a Compaq DL360, the good drive continues the mirroring and dies as well. I know this now.
You know, that's always been my experience with RAID 1 as well. Yet I hear all the time that RAID 1 is the superior choice for mission-critical databases. Oh well.
Unfortunately, because of your manufacturing faults and inability to admit
fault, I have lost a large amount of unique and important data, ranging from
schoolwork to business-related documents.
May I humbly suggest that if these data are indeed of such importance, that 4 mm DAT, CD-RW, Zip disks, or even the lowly 1.44 MB floppy are suitable backup media?
Fulminating about lost data due to the failure of a mechanical storage system, and vague threats of class-action lawsuits, are in my experience goods ways to get large manufacturing organizations to put your letter in the deep freeze for about 10 years.
Think of IIS as a [powerful tool]. When handled improperly, it endangers the internet and its users.
I am not necessarily disagreeing. Indeed, a fairly common occurance is for Joe Homeowner to decide he needs to "upgrade" from a Black & Decker drill to a Milwaukee Hole Hawg (now that such tools are available at homeowner hells). He takes it home, rips into some solid wood, and the drill breaks his wrist when he hits a nail. No question who is at fault there.
But my observation is more along the lines of, why does it have to be so hard? Joe Businessman doesn't need a license or a "security administrator" to print up and distribute some brochures. He may need a license, but doesn't need much help, to put up a small billboard. At least in the US (at least for the moment), he doesn't need a "secure firewall" to publish a small newspaper.
So why should all this rigamarole be necessary for a small busines to publish a small web site? Is there any incentive for the people in the admin and security industries to keep things complex?
Personally, if this stuff keeps up, I expect that within two years either (a) most businesses will abandon the Internet (b) draconian government controls, including licenses and strict liability for Internet pipes.
The biggest selling point for Microsoft crap is in how easy it is. It's also its biggest problem. Sure it's easy to set things up when, at install time, everything (especially the stuff the installer doesn't yet know about) is turned on by default! It is precisely this selling point that has created this problem.
As a once and future system administrator, I have to agree with you.
As a manager, a business person, and a general human being who likes to communicate, I submit this humble question: is there a little bit of medieval guild-ism in statements of this nature? A desire to _keep_ things difficult, keep the cauldrons bubbling, keep the flap of the shamen's tent closed, so that only the guild of "clueful sysadmins" can perform amazing feats such as (gasp!) building a web site
Maybe I have been taking too much acid in the last couple of days (Wow, look! A rainbow Tux!), but I think this is part of Microsoft's plan.
If it takes 2 MS machines to replace every Apache machine MS will be sitting pretty. All they need is a few pointy haired bosses who are naive enough to spend more money for more machines. Then they can say they have the most marketshare
That's not exactly a new idea for Microsoft: it was one of their key tactics in the battle against Novell. Top brass would be sold on how much less expensive NT was than Netware. When all was said and done, 1 Netware sever with two support techs would be replaced by 15 NT servers and 10 support techs. But it happened over a period of time and no one understood what was really going on.
Of course, those 10 new techs then became evangalists for pushing more Microsoft stuff, and the rest is history...
"AT&T, the company that U.S. government broke into pieces due to antitrust, is gaining back gradually its monopoly position"
If the old AT&T monopoly exists in any form today, it is in the shape of Southwestern Bell (SBC). AT&T proper bears no resemblence to its 1970 shape.
With that in mind, AT&T actually had the best strategy of any of the data communication companies: build a full portfolio of services (voice, data, cable, mobile), with as much global component as the hyper-nationalism over telecomm allows (can you say DT?), and offer it to home and business customers in a bundle.
But as soon as the stock price dropped a bit, Armstrong panic'd and started selling pieces. Now there is no player on the field who even comes close to being able to offer that bundle.
"If they're going to block internet access, they must have a firewall anyway... either that or they are just going to change the router/gateway setting on every workstation"
I have talked to quite a few managers and company owners in the last few weeks who are getting ready to just unplug the Internet connection - totally and forever. From a return on investment perspective it is becoming less clear that the Internet is a net gain for the typical business.
"to an economist, "pure greed" is the same motivation behind every wage negotiation, every food purchase, every economic decision. Do you donate to charity? You do it because it makes you feel good, and your pure greed for that feeling makes you turn over a (usually moderate) portion of your wealth."
I was with you up to the second sentence of this paragraph. There is the minor problem that actual human beings are neither utility maximizers nor particularly rational. And even within the classical framework (a) there is no accepted way to measure "utility" so proof/falsification of these theories is essentially impossible (b) information and transactions costs are not zero, are often significant, and are usually not known or understood. With that complication much of what is "proven" in classical micro turns out not to actually apply in practice.
"I don't know if there's any international law/agreement on how high a country's jurisdiction extends"
As Jerry Pournelle has pointed out, there are 5 countries in the world that can put objects INTO orbit, and two who can probably knock objects down FROM orbit (US and Russia; yes, I know, we claim we don't have such a weapon). Everyone else is free to make whatever laws they want; enforcing them would be the hard part.
It is also not necessarly a felony offense because even though the net damage could have been $25k, you would only be able to claim what would have been reasonable damage."
We had private addresses, a proxy server, a firewall, packet filters, a virus scanner, and various other mid-level defenses, plus 99 out of 100 recommended patches (mea culpa). If that counts as "wide open" you live in a different town than I do (and in my town, people do actually leave the front doors of their house open into the evening).
And the "intent" thing will work, up to a point, for someone under the age of 14. I wouldn't bet my bacon on it if I were older than that.
"And if you had your main office door open wide with a $25k piece of equipment sitting there with no apparent security"
We didn't. But even if we had done that, it would still be a felony offense to do 25k of damage to someone else's property. And the person who created Minda was not an innocent kid who didn't know what he was using. "I'm sorry - I didn't realize that a bottle of gasoline was dangerous". Yeah, right.
Good luck finding work in the real world. I am afraid the days of 600-man data processing departments went out with the 1960's. And while we do have security guards around our physical facilities, we don't have detachement of 200 ex-SAS blokes with night vision and sniper rifles, either.
"Gosh! It would be interesting to see if any more servers turns up affected after so much of patching and screaming and thrashing. I would normally expect everyone of those Admins to patch their boxes by now, but at the same time, there would be some more, either ignorant or out on vacation, who is bound to get hit."
You are assuming, of course, that all the vectors of infection are known, all the behaviours of the worm are understood, and that patches exist for all of them.
It's typical terrorist tactics to hit the same target twice 20 minutes apart. That way you get all the rescue workers and gawkers too. The IRA figured that out years ago - the WTC killers just perfected the idea.
So perhaps Nimda was designed to throw a scare into everyone, cause them to run around and download lots of patches, expend lots of effort - and then 10 days later do its real dirty work.
"I bet you have security guards, fences and cameras to protect your buildings from 14 year old kids.
Why don't you have a secure firewall to protect your servers? "
There's something to that argument, and I have already abased myself in front of the owners of the company.
OTOH, we DO (and did) have a firewall and virus scanners of reasonable strength. I also own a house on a fairly heavily travelled street. Should I have to put up 3m walls with razor wire and install bullet-proof glass, as they do in Jo-burg? Is that a pleasant way to live? And what about personal responsibility on the part of the felon who did, in fact, actually cause the damage?
"Not meaning to flame you, I've missed my share of security bulletins too. I'm just honestly interested in where that figure comes from. I understand if you don't want to mention specifics due to corporate interest, but even a rough breakdown would be enlightening."
Well, I'm a bit busy at the moment:-(, but a rough breakdown goes like this:
We are in the middle of an ERP implementation. I (who serve as the IS Director, IT Manager, business analyst, and project manager) am six weeks behind on some critical tasks. Fixing the worm took 5 days of my time (about 100 hours - but I won't charge for the lost sleep). I had to bring in several temps to key data that couldn't be pulled from our reports server, bring in our networking consultant on short notice from out of town, pay overtime to the other members of my staff to assist in the cleanup, buy two additional machines to use as recovery servers. We missed several customer shipments because part of the shipment processing system was down, for which we will probably have to pay penalties. We had to pay our EDI vendor to fax us transactions that should have EDI'd in, and Customer Service and Accounting people overtime to key them in manually. We may be charged penalties for not to the customer for not completing the EDI transactions. And so on.
There are real dollars involved when business processes fail. Normally I am not the most even-tempered person in the world, but this time, every time I started to get angry I thought to myself: "and how do they sysadmins on Wall Street feel?", making my problems not seem as critical. But it was a very ugly week.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with e-mail is it is easy, quick, and emotional. In other words, there is a strong tendency for people who fire off e-mail not to not really be very committed to what they are saying (committed in terms of votes, money, time, or other support). It takes at least an hour to get a typed letter signed and out the door, which is a minimum expenditure of effort. So from a realistic point of view it makes a lot of sense for elected politicians to pay more attention to written letters than to e-mail.
sPh
Well, that's one theory, and well worth considering.
But here's an odd question: why don't the Vietnamese hate the US (in general, on average)? If there is any people on earth who would have a right to take revenge on the US for killing 100k's of their people, bombing their industry, defoliating their land, etc. (not to mention betrying their trust after WWII), it would be the Vietnamese.
And yet we don't seem to see that behaviour, either in international relations or a a personal level. US citizens I know who have gone to Vietnam as tourists are have been treated either on a friendly, or neutral, basis, and I even know a few army-types who have been invited to attend seminars by the Vietnamese army (on topics such as "Beating the crap out of sophisticated helicopters in a jungle envirnment, natch).
Any thoughts on why this is? Because they won, and they know it? Or something else?
sPh
I must confess to puzzlement at comments of the nature, particularly when directed as posts which are clearly designed to be food for additional discussion, rather than to be complete in themselves. You have no idea who I am, how long I have been working with system, what I have or haven't worked with in the past, or what my personal opinions are of the systems I mentioned (for good or ill), yet you know I have "no idea what I am talking about".
Perhaps a mirror would be in order?
sPh
There's an old adage that every mistake that has ever been made with computers has been made three times. It originally referred to the mainframe, minicomputer, and PC eras. That could probably be extended to at least five times today by adding "client/server" and "web" environments. One of the strange aspects of computing is that everything has to be started from scratch and nobody seems willing to even consider the lessons learned in the past.
Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?
sPh
A little of both, I would say, since those who crafted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had the benefit of 150 years of intense experimentation into the structure of government (particularly in England and France) available to them as they drafted their documents. That was also a time of deep philosophical discussion of those questions at all levels of society (can you imagine Gary Condit at the Constituational Convention? Gag).
sPh
Personally, I think the concept of "rights" as something that individuals hold in relation to governments (including their own) is just about over in the United States.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting today the the U.S. Government is currently holding at least 300 people in connection with the 9/11 incident. These 300 are being held in secret, without being allowed to communicate with attorneys, without their attorneys being informed when court proceedings are being held, without family members being informed where the prisoners are being held or even that they _are_ being held, and with all records of the proceedings being kept under "seal" (a concept that I don't believe appears in the Constitution of the United States).
Any objections to that? You will probably be next.
sPh
You know, that's always been my experience with RAID 1 as well. Yet I hear all the time that RAID 1 is the superior choice for mission-critical databases. Oh well.
sPh
May I humbly suggest that if these data are indeed of such importance, that 4 mm DAT, CD-RW, Zip disks, or even the lowly 1.44 MB floppy are suitable backup media?
Fulminating about lost data due to the failure of a mechanical storage system, and vague threats of class-action lawsuits, are in my experience goods ways to get large manufacturing organizations to put your letter in the deep freeze for about 10 years.
sPh
I am not necessarily disagreeing. Indeed, a fairly common occurance is for Joe Homeowner to decide he needs to "upgrade" from a Black & Decker drill to a Milwaukee Hole Hawg (now that such tools are available at homeowner hells). He takes it home, rips into some solid wood, and the drill breaks his wrist when he hits a nail. No question who is at fault there.
But my observation is more along the lines of, why does it have to be so hard? Joe Businessman doesn't need a license or a "security administrator" to print up and distribute some brochures. He may need a license, but doesn't need much help, to put up a small billboard. At least in the US (at least for the moment), he doesn't need a "secure firewall" to publish a small newspaper.
So why should all this rigamarole be necessary for a small busines to publish a small web site? Is there any incentive for the people in the admin and security industries to keep things complex?
Personally, if this stuff keeps up, I expect that within two years either (a) most businesses will abandon the Internet (b) draconian government controls, including licenses and strict liability for Internet pipes.
sPh
Very eloquent response.
sPh
As a once and future system administrator, I have to agree with you.
As a manager, a business person, and a general human being who likes to communicate, I submit this humble question: is there a little bit of medieval guild-ism in statements of this nature? A desire to _keep_ things difficult, keep the cauldrons bubbling, keep the flap of the shamen's tent closed, so that only the guild of "clueful sysadmins" can perform amazing feats such as (gasp!) building a web site
Just asking.
sPh
If M$ is sincere, this is of course welcome news.
The problem is that M$ have a history of promising "initiatives" of this nature, then never following through once the smoke has cleared a bit.
And that's assuming it isn't just pure FUD, as in this lovely example.
sPh
That's not exactly a new idea for Microsoft: it was one of their key tactics in the battle against Novell. Top brass would be sold on how much less expensive NT was than Netware. When all was said and done, 1 Netware sever with two support techs would be replaced by 15 NT servers and 10 support techs. But it happened over a period of time and no one understood what was really going on.
Of course, those 10 new techs then became evangalists for pushing more Microsoft stuff, and the rest is history...
sPh
"AT&T, the company that U.S. government broke into pieces due to antitrust, is gaining back gradually its monopoly position"
If the old AT&T monopoly exists in any form today, it is in the shape of Southwestern Bell (SBC). AT&T proper bears no resemblence to its 1970 shape.
With that in mind, AT&T actually had the best strategy of any of the data communication companies: build a full portfolio of services (voice, data, cable, mobile), with as much global component as the hyper-nationalism over telecomm allows (can you say DT?), and offer it to home and business customers in a bundle.
But as soon as the stock price dropped a bit, Armstrong panic'd and started selling pieces. Now there is no player on the field who even comes close to being able to offer that bundle.
sPh
"If they're going to block internet access, they must have a firewall anyway... either that or they are just going to change the router/gateway setting on every workstation"
I have talked to quite a few managers and company owners in the last few weeks who are getting ready to just unplug the Internet connection - totally and forever. From a return on investment perspective it is becoming less clear that the Internet is a net gain for the typical business.
sPh
I year ago I would have said you were nuts. Today, while I don't necessarily agree with you, I can't dismiss your theory either. Great way to live.
sPh
"to an economist, "pure greed" is the same motivation behind every wage negotiation, every food purchase, every economic decision. Do you donate to charity? You do it because it makes you feel good, and your pure greed for that feeling makes you turn over a (usually moderate) portion of your wealth."
I was with you up to the second sentence of this paragraph. There is the minor problem that actual human beings are neither utility maximizers nor particularly rational. And even within the classical framework (a) there is no accepted way to measure "utility" so proof/falsification of these theories is essentially impossible (b) information and transactions costs are not zero, are often significant, and are usually not known or understood. With that complication much of what is "proven" in classical micro turns out not to actually apply in practice.
sPh
"I don't know if there's any international law/agreement on how high a country's jurisdiction extends"
As Jerry Pournelle has pointed out, there are 5 countries in the world that can put objects INTO orbit, and two who can probably knock objects down FROM orbit (US and Russia; yes, I know, we claim we don't have such a weapon). Everyone else is free to make whatever laws they want; enforcing them would be the hard part.
sPh
"Oh no, you did leave your front door wide open.
It is also not necessarly a felony offense because even though the net damage could have been $25k, you would only be able to claim what would have been reasonable damage."
We had private addresses, a proxy server, a firewall, packet filters, a virus scanner, and various other mid-level defenses, plus 99 out of 100 recommended patches (mea culpa). If that counts as "wide open" you live in a different town than I do (and in my town, people do actually leave the front doors of their house open into the evening).
And the "intent" thing will work, up to a point, for someone under the age of 14. I wouldn't bet my bacon on it if I were older than that.
sPh
"And if you had your main office door open wide with a $25k piece of equipment sitting there with no apparent security"
We didn't. But even if we had done that, it would still be a felony offense to do 25k of damage to someone else's property. And the person who created Minda was not an innocent kid who didn't know what he was using. "I'm sorry - I didn't realize that a bottle of gasoline was dangerous". Yeah, right.
sPh
"Oops indeed! All of Nimda's exploits were old. You had what? Five months?"
You are assuming that you, and the security vendors, fully understand Nimda and all its vectors. I am not quite so sure myself.
sPh
Good luck finding work in the real world. I am afraid the days of 600-man data processing departments went out with the 1960's. And while we do have security guards around our physical facilities, we don't have detachement of 200 ex-SAS blokes with night vision and sniper rifles, either.
sPh
"Gosh! It would be interesting to see if any more servers turns up affected after so much of patching and screaming and thrashing. I would normally expect everyone of those Admins to patch their boxes by now, but at the same time, there would be some more, either ignorant or out on vacation, who is bound to get hit."
You are assuming, of course, that all the vectors of infection are known, all the behaviours of the worm are understood, and that patches exist for all of them.
It's typical terrorist tactics to hit the same target twice 20 minutes apart. That way you get all the rescue workers and gawkers too. The IRA figured that out years ago - the WTC killers just perfected the idea.
So perhaps Nimda was designed to throw a scare into everyone, cause them to run around and download lots of patches, expend lots of effort - and then 10 days later do its real dirty work.
sPh
"I bet you have security guards, fences and cameras to protect your buildings from 14 year old kids.
Why don't you have a secure firewall to protect your servers? "
There's something to that argument, and I have already abased myself in front of the owners of the company.
OTOH, we DO (and did) have a firewall and virus scanners of reasonable strength. I also own a house on a fairly heavily travelled street. Should I have to put up 3m walls with razor wire and install bullet-proof glass, as they do in Jo-burg? Is that a pleasant way to live? And what about personal responsibility on the part of the felon who did, in fact, actually cause the damage?
sPh
"Not meaning to flame you, I've missed my share of security bulletins too. I'm just honestly interested in where that figure comes from. I understand if you don't want to mention specifics due to corporate interest, but even a rough breakdown would be enlightening."
:-(, but a rough breakdown goes like this:
Well, I'm a bit busy at the moment
We are in the middle of an ERP implementation. I (who serve as the IS Director, IT Manager, business analyst, and project manager) am six weeks behind on some critical tasks. Fixing the worm took 5 days of my time (about 100 hours - but I won't charge for the lost sleep). I had to bring in several temps to key data that couldn't be pulled from our reports server, bring in our networking consultant on short notice from out of town, pay overtime to the other members of my staff to assist in the cleanup, buy two additional machines to use as recovery servers. We missed several customer shipments because part of the shipment processing system was down, for which we will probably have to pay penalties. We had to pay our EDI vendor to fax us transactions that should have EDI'd in, and Customer Service and Accounting people overtime to key them in manually. We may be charged penalties for not to the customer for not completing the EDI transactions. And so on.
There are real dollars involved when business processes fail. Normally I am not the most even-tempered person in the world, but this time, every time I started to get angry I thought to myself: "and how do they sysadmins on Wall Street feel?", making my problems not seem as critical. But it was a very ugly week.
sPh