You missed Sanity's point: They don't care about their moral responsibility.
Besides, "moral responsibility" is a vague and relative term. What you consider immoral, I may consider ingenious. Does that mean I'm wrong? You think so. Does that mean you're wrong? I think so. Where does that get us?
The question is, should businesses use "moral responsibily" or laws as a code of conduct. "moral responsibility" doesn't work since its open to wide interpretation, everyone would have a different set of rules and the game would be unfair. Laws are a lot more concrete and make a better set of rules.
The point is, arguing that businesses should follow a moral code is useless. They don't and can't.
This post freaked me out. Just replace "Sun" with "IBM" and "Java" with "OS/2" and it sounds like something I heard over and over 6 years ago. Damn if it didn't come true.
I love Java, much like I loved OS/2. They are/were great technologies; there just wasn't anything else that kept up. In 1995, Windows 95 was on the horizon... and the end of OS/2 was coming.
So here we are in 2001, talking about how Sun's right hand isn't working with the left hand, much like IBM in 1995... and.NET on the horizon.
On the BIOS topic, do you know where I can find BIOS that talks via ttyS0 instead of the video card?
To me, this is a requirement for servers. It means I can completely administer it remotely via a cheap terminal server. It also means I can dump the video card in my servers. Sure, Linux can use the serial port for its console, but that doesn't help me when Linux isn't booting. I know there are remote KVMs, but they aren't the cheapest thing in the world.
So hold a book to each side of your face and look at your monitor. There. See, Linux has only one GUI. Feel better?
Open Source isn't about standardization, its about choices. If something isn't quite right, you can tweak it until its what you are looking for.
Assume for a minute that the entire Linux population standardized on RedHat's distribution running, say GNOME. This is good. Now when a newbies learns "Linux", s/he will be comfortable sitting down at any "Linux" box. The world will rejoice. All is great.
Now assume for a minute that I, as the Uberhacker that I am, decide I'm not quite happy. GNOME sucks, I want something better. I take "Linux" and change the GUI environment and create... "GarvIX". One of two scenarios may play out:
The RedHat commando squad breaks down my door and drags my ass off to court screaming "Thou shall not hold your own opinions. Thou shall use what we tell you."
I'm happy and the newbies are happy too since they can still sit down at any "Linux" box and know what to do, this "GarvIX" thing though is a whole different matter. Time goes on and I show people "GarvIX" and people like it. Other Uberhackers start using. Next thing you know, we have "GarvIX" conventions. Before long everyone is using it except my grandma.
The point is that with standardization, someone controls the standard. Migrations to something better only happen when the entity deems it was time. Its called a monopoly.
The other point is that "GarvIX" IS different. Just as RedHat/KDE, RedHat/GNOME, Debian/KDE, Debian/GNOME, etc. are also different. If it makes you feel better think of your operating system as Redhat/GNOME/GNU/Linux or ReGNOGL for short. Go forth and make everyone use it.
Funny, I was just thinking how Lucas can do no wrong. He is absolutely masterful at keeping the Star Wars hype going with pre-release rumors. In other words, he gets to keep selling action figures by the ton, with little promotional expense. Hell, he doesn't even have to make a good movie any more and it grosses $430 million, nevermind the action figures.
Come on, why do you think he re-re-released the original trilogy? Just to make the public happy? Do you think it was coincidental that shortly after he re-re-re-released the same triology but now in a gold case with new scenes and animated critters? Why do you really think the DVD isn't coming out yet?
He knows he's got a pile of suckers and is milking us for all we're worth. Personally, as long as he keeps entertaining me (via the movies, the pre-movie hype, or the action figures, I don't care), I'm more than happy to keep playing the sucker.
If an art can't fund itself, then I would argue that there isn't a market for it. If there isn't a market for it, why should it exist?
Because it defines us as a great society? The US is not a great society because of its arts. The US is a great society because of the American Dream. Anyone with ambition can succeed.
Because monarchs of long ago thought it was important? The monarchs were showing off. Vanity, pure and simple. It made them and, by association, their country, look superior. Every dime they spent on the arts should have gone back to the peasant they taxed to pay for it.
If it's important to even a handfull of people, they will pay to see it and it will live. Its called a niche market. They exist everywhere and succeed all the time, without government assistance.
Free-market capitalism could be an excellent system without a pesky thing called greed
Greed is good. Greed drives people to succeed. Without success for your European governments to tax, they wouldn't have their shine health systems, beautiful skylines, flawless transportation, etc. Take away the greed, you lose the success, your tax base and your "progressive" social programs.
A free-market capitalist society isn't the only place you find greed. Unfortunately, greed is human nature (if you believe otherwise, you have been watching too much startrek), as such it exists in any system. In a capitalist system, it begets Dollars, Euros, and Pesos. In a communist system (and to some extent a socialist system), it begets influence. Power. Which is more sinister? Dollars which are obvious and the exchange of which follow a set of rules, or Power which is non-obvious and defines the rules?
Besides, once Libertarians take control of America and fuck it up beyond recognition, we'll need to know where to move to.
mmmm... stop teasing. A world where it wasn't told what proper social behaviour is. Where I get to keep what I earned instead of being penalized for earning more. Where I had a choice in how 30% of my income was spent. Where I could do what I wanted in the privacy of my own home. Sounds like freedom.
One small nit: right-wingers do not have a monopoly on fearing that which they do not understand.
Unfortunately, it's human nature and happens in any country, race, religious group, social group, ethnicity, or caste, you can come up with.
When people don't know how to deal with something, they try not to. They ignore it if they can. If they can't, they try to get rid of it by ridiculing it. If that doesn't work, they attempt to destroy it. Of course, the sensible and responsible thing to do is learn to understand what they fear. Perhaps there is no reason to fear it after all, or perhaps there is a way to fix it without destroying it.
Don't fall into this trap. Before writing your right-wing classmates off as a group about to fuck up the US, try to understand them instead of ridiculing them. As long as you are ridiculing them without understanding them, you are no better than them.
In reading the top-moderated comments, one thought came to mind: Slashdot readers, who are accused of being rabid Linux supporters, are bashing a benchmark that came out pro-Linux.
Kudos to the Slashdot community for being objective, despite your theoretical biases.
I spent a lot of time playing with WAP. My company decided to support WAP mostly just because of all the hype around it, not because it was good technology. WAP sucked for a lot of reasons:
WAP was built to work around phones with low bandwidth, slow CPUs and low memory. The transfer protocol was compact, the markup language got compressed, etc. In the time it was taking for WAP to be accepted, all of these limitations (except bandwidth) have gone away.
Security sucked. The spec. built-in a "man in the middle". WAP is dependent upon a WAP gateway which bridges the mobile network and the Internet. Because of this gateway, secure connections are not end to end. In addition, WML lets you define variables. Catch is that the variables are global to the phone and the spec. does not call for them to be concealed from other sites, so if another site knew the variable name I used for "password", they could steal my users' passwords.
Fragmentation. Practically speaking, if you have one vendor's browser in your phone, your mobile provider must have that vendor's WAP gateway running in their network. On top of that, different browsers rendered things differently, making it a real pain to develop WAP content. Fragmentation is normal with an emerging market, but it never seemed to settle out with WAP.
Phones don't really support packet data yet. Who wants to surf the net at $.10/min?
Hard to use/small display. I think positioning WAP as the "wireless Internet" was foolish. I surf the net with at least a 14" monitor, 1024x768 resolution and a mouse. Anything less sucks.
Given all that, I think the Internet will always be on phones in one form or another. Phones browsers will never be Internet Explorer, but phones now have sufficient CPUs and memory. Coming soon are beautiful color displays and bandwidth. With all of this, good ol' HTTP/TCP/IP will work fine as a protocol (Your mobile provider will pick Layer 2 for you). No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
If all choices are bad, you lose, whether we are talking about governments or businesses. My approach is to try to have as many choices as possible. Government can't offer that. You may have different candidates, but if the system is flawed, there is little they can do about it. Each business is its own system; if that system is flawed, the business goes out of business.
I prefer big business over big government and the reason is simple: You only get one government.
Think about it. If a government is corrupt, the only thing we can do is take arms (assuming we still have them), risk our lives, over-throw it, and put another soon to be government into place. If a business is corrupt, we can boycott them and buy from their competitors.
As for big business not having responsiblity because they can hide behind lawyers, I would say that your government is already corrupt. Part of government's job is to make sure everyone plays nice. If businesses or people are getting away with more than they should, then government is broke. Sure, ethically businesses should play nice without being forced to do so, but this isn't human nature. How many people do you know that follow the rules to the T, regardless of whether or not they agree with them? I speed to work everyday, do you?
A minor issue? The author must be on some super drugs. The reasoning for these new advances in credit card protection schemes is for these minor issues else they wouldn't worry about it altogether.
A nitpick, but I believe the author's point is that consumers don't need to worry about the cost of someone stealing their card. Banks, on the other hand, are worried about it since they pick up the tab. They push for any technology that can cut down on fraud, thereby saving them money.
In my experience iptables with connection tracking enabled eats up a ton more CPU than ipchains. That said, you can always run without connection tracking.
As a data point, we are running a linux firewall/edge router on a K6-2/400 We are pushing around 3-4k packets/second during peak. When running 2.2 and ipchains, this box was 99.99% idle. It was bored! We upgraded to 2.4 and enable connection tracking. While we were at it, we added a good bit of infrastructure to the chains to make administration easier (dedicated chains for accounting, another for the webcache, etc.), thus increasing processing time for filtering. Now, we are only about 94.5% idle. I'm pretty sure that connection tracking accounts for the vast majority of this increase. Nevertheless, this still is not a big deal when the whole system costs $300.
Linux 2.2.x doesn't do many-to-many and many-to-few NAT and as far as I know still doesn't do it in 2.4.0, but I don't think it would be a big stretch to implement it in the new netfilter structure.
Stateful inspection allows connection tracking. I think a lot of hacks were required to give MASQUERADEing enough state to work within ipchains. Life is easier with iptables since the state is maintained by iptables. For example, since iptables can see connection creates and tear-downs, MASQUERADEing knows when to stop connecting a realIP:port to a fakeIP:port.
The RAID drivers are alpha as in misnomer. This is the directory they distributed from and at one point it was a correct label. I believe there are a few features that should still be considered alpha/beta (on-line expansion, for example), but the standard RAID[0|1|5] stuff is great.
Linux 2.4.0 has support for up to 10 (yes ten) IDE channels. How does/dev/hdt sound?
There are drivers in the kernel and userland tools like vgcreate, lvcreate, lvextend, etc.
I'm pretty certain you need to clobber the disks to start using LVM. With disk prices the way they are today, I just bought new disks, rebuilt on them, then imported my old ones when I was finished.
I'm currently running 2.4.0test12 on a system I just built, not just because I wanted to be cool and brag to all of co-workers (who would of course give me a blank stare and go on about the NY Jets, etc.), but because I had use for the features. What I'm actually using in 2.4.0:
iptables. Part of yet another iteration in packet filtering, this one promises to stick around. iptables is stateful, while ipchains was stateless. This means real NAT is possible. I also didn't have to hack and patch to get my IPsec tunnel to work NAT'ed. Finally, iptables is a lot simpler (in my experience) to work with. No more headaches trying to figure out how many of the 3 chains, INPUT, OUTPUT, and FORWARD, the packet will go through. In iptables, packets go through only one: INPUT if it is coming into the machine, OUTPUT if it originated on the machine and is leaving, and FORWARD if it is being routed through. Oh, and I can have chains with returns, so I can bring up my firewall, but leave my webcache down, etc. I can go on, but I think you get the point.
RAID and LVM. The good, so called "alpha", drivers are in this kernel. No more patching, finding a good "ac" patch, etc. Prior to this, I was mostly stuck running 2.2.13ac3 since they had been concentrating (as they should be) on getting the drivers in 2.4.0. LVM is a beautiful thing and gets us closer to the flexibility of Solaris+Veritas. When I built this machine, I RAID5'd 3 40GB drives, put them in a volume group, made logical volumes, copied all of my user data off of my old system drives, then put the old drivers in as another RAID5 array, added them to the volume group, and used the new space to expand any volumes I wanted more space in.
I have 2 Promise ATA100 cards in these beast also, for a total of 6 IDE channels. I had a much easier time getting 2.4.0 to a) see all of the channels; and b) play ATA100 with them. In fact, I didn't have to do anything, plug them in and watch them detect at boot.
It has been promised that reiserfs will show up in 2.4.1. Imagine a journalled filesystem! Currently, filesystem checks on my volumes requires about 45-60 minutes. That sucks. I'm
That said, I agree, don't use them if you don't need the features. I had a lot of problems with test11. I was one of many that saw panics when running RAID5, sometimes within 4 hours after boot. test12 hasn't failed yet, but it has only been 20days.
Better yet: One number, period. When someone calls that number, they are forwarded to a list of other numbers until you are found. You define that list and what time of day to use. You may define a different list for different times of day. This is called Single Number Reach (SNR) and companies are doing. Today.
One step farther: One number for voice and fax. The nature of the call is detected and handled accordingly. Voice is handled like the above. Faxes are received and delivered to you. This is called Single Number Access (SNA). Again, this is happening today.
Usually these features are part of a Unified Messaging/Communications platform. These guys are growing out of the pick_buzzword("Convergent Network", "Next Generation Network", "Unified Communications") revolution. They idea is to bring everything together over IP. What you can do then is only limited by how fast a company can develop new software. In other words, we aren't held back by traditional telcos that move at a snail's pace.
Come on. Think logically, not emotionally. Business works on logic. Emotions never made a business a dime.
To squash the competition, they have to beat them. To beat them, they need to sell more. To sell more, they have to offer something that consumers will like better. Consumers are always the end judges that make or break a new company. They have the right to buy whatever they want. Power to people, man!
There is ALWAYS a financial reason to innovate. Innovation means you can offer more to the customer. See above.
As long as a company stays private (or is majority held by one entity), they can't be bought out. It will be their choice to be bought out. Power to the little guys!
The best part about the wireless revolution is that there will be very little regulation. The prime reason we have telco regulation today is because it is a sanctioned monopoly. Only one telco gets to bring copper to your house, so regulations ensure that competitors can get to that copper and the consumer isn't held hostage. Anyone can bring wireless to your house. No need for regulation!
But outraged consumer advocates and state regulators say adopting 10-digit dialing is unnecessary and would create confusion about the distinction between a local and long-distance call.
I can see a point here, but only kind of. Traditionally, when you dial a number with a "1" at the front, you are going to get charged. Without the "1" it is free. All of that is out the window with this change.
BUT! I'm in Verizon's monopoly and routinely dial a 7 digit number (no "1"'s anywhere) and get charged. Granted, I was pissed the first time, but now I'm used to it. In fact, nowadays, I completely ignore whether it is long distance or not. Partly because the charges are peanuts and I now have an income, but mostly because I now usually use my mobile which doesn't differentiate between a free or toll call.
The reason wireless "last mile" internet will happen is simple: competition.
Nowadays, the only options are DSL, cable, ISDN, or analog dial-up. Most people are lucky to have 2 out of the 4 and they all suck in their own unique ways. Analog dial-up is just slow, ISDN is still too slow and too costly. DSL and cable are the only ones to provide sufficient bandwidth for reasonable $, but they have little legs. Their days are numbered, especially DSL, since they have horrible bandwidth/distance restrictions.
Now imagine that you are a new company that wants to offer service and get a subscriber base. You are really faced with only two choices today: buy a cable company or resell DSL. Buying a cable company is a hell of a proposition and most companies aren't going to be willing to take the plunge. If you resell DSL, someone else is holding your balls (be it Covad, Northpoint, etc). Sure, you could install your own DSL equipment, but when faced with that cost, you might as well buy a cable company. Even if you go this path, you are still subject to the phone company's whims. If your little company doesn't controll its own destiny, how can it be sure to compete?
Competition is severely limited by our current technology. The magic bullet to that is wireless. The technology isn't there yet, but wireless systems are potentially cheaper to implement and faster to deploy. Cheap and fast are the key words. It means a small company could put up a single receiver in a neighborhood, be operational in a matter of weeks, and grow from there. They don't have to bury lines, deal with Telco's that move at a snail's pace, and deal with endless gov't regulations (most are needed for monopoly-busting, but not needed in wireless since there is no monopoly). In other words, they deal directly with their customers, realizing all of the profits and controlling their own quality levels.
As a consumer, I want choices. Right now, my choice is between the cable company that sucks or the DSL reseller that sucks. I would jump at the chance to be able to choose between a few different wireless providers in my neighborhood.
I also feel that the technological hurdles left to jump are nothing compared to the potential market. In other words, there is too much money to be made to let something as simple as "its not technologically possible" to get in our way. We will find a way, we always have in the past.
First, why knock Java because of its IDE? First of all, it doesn't have an IDE. IDEs are value-added products by third parties.
Second, I've never found much use in one. Give me a good text editor (read vim), a build system, CVS, and a command line. An IDE is just something pretty that makes the average programmer feel better about themselves.
In the past, IDEs have been very useful for rapid development. They allowed you to visually represent something and out pops 1000 lines of code to build that pretty window you drew. Because of the structure of Java, really object-oriented not just kind of like C++, rapid development is inherent. You subclass a window type that is pretty close (something for the Java API or your own class), spend a few lines tweaking it, and show it.
The best part is that the developer is left close to the code, not abstracted from it like rapid prototyping IDEs do. The result is fewer bugs.
The Company for response to accusations, seems to preclude the employees the ability to consult with legal counsel, given that clearances take months to be approved
For the job I'm currently working, I had to sign an Employee Dispute Resolution agreement. It basically says that I can't sue them and they can't sue me until we have gone through a resolution process, which involves at some stage an outside mediator. The result is that most disputes are handled internally, without causing harm to the company while still providing a resolution satisfactory to the employee. Signing this made me very nervous, needless to say, but after reviewing the procedure, it seemed reasonable to me.
The point is, if my non-Top Secret company had such an agreement, it wouldn't surprise me if the CIA, a group which would be very concerned about public resolution of disputes, had such an agreement.
What is all this Beowulf crap? For highly-available systems, clustering usually means server fail-over. It means an active-standby configuration with a shared disk. If the active server dies, the standby mounts the disk, starts up the app, and carries on.
A lot of services have to be active-standby; only one server can be doing the job at a time. Any database falls into this category, including SQL-based, LDAP, and mail stores. This is where the above products would get used. For services that can be active-active, like web servers, DNS, mail relays, some form of load balancing is better and cheaper.
There are distributed databases on the horizon, but few of them are ready for primetime. These would feel more like a Beowulf cluster.
I'm not trying to tell you that calling Beowulf a cluster is wrong, but limiting clustering to just Beowulf is.
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You missed Sanity's point: They don't care about their moral responsibility.
Besides, "moral responsibility" is a vague and relative term. What you consider immoral, I may consider ingenious. Does that mean I'm wrong? You think so. Does that mean you're wrong? I think so. Where does that get us?
The question is, should businesses use "moral responsibily" or laws as a code of conduct. "moral responsibility" doesn't work since its open to wide interpretation, everyone would have a different set of rules and the game would be unfair. Laws are a lot more concrete and make a better set of rules.
The point is, arguing that businesses should follow a moral code is useless. They don't and can't.
This post freaked me out. Just replace "Sun" with "IBM" and "Java" with "OS/2" and it sounds like something I heard over and over 6 years ago. Damn if it didn't come true.
I love Java, much like I loved OS/2. They are/were great technologies; there just wasn't anything else that kept up. In 1995, Windows 95 was on the horizon... and the end of OS/2 was coming.
So here we are in 2001, talking about how Sun's right hand isn't working with the left hand, much like IBM in 1995... and .NET on the horizon.
Tell me it'll be all right, mommy.
On the BIOS topic, do you know where I can find BIOS that talks via ttyS0 instead of the video card?
To me, this is a requirement for servers. It means I can completely administer it remotely via a cheap terminal server. It also means I can dump the video card in my servers. Sure, Linux can use the serial port for its console, but that doesn't help me when Linux isn't booting. I know there are remote KVMs, but they aren't the cheapest thing in the world.
Linux needs a single GUI
So hold a book to each side of your face and look at your monitor. There. See, Linux has only one GUI. Feel better?
Open Source isn't about standardization, its about choices. If something isn't quite right, you can tweak it until its what you are looking for.
Assume for a minute that the entire Linux population standardized on RedHat's distribution running, say GNOME. This is good. Now when a newbies learns "Linux", s/he will be comfortable sitting down at any "Linux" box. The world will rejoice. All is great.
Now assume for a minute that I, as the Uberhacker that I am, decide I'm not quite happy. GNOME sucks, I want something better. I take "Linux" and change the GUI environment and create... "GarvIX". One of two scenarios may play out:
The point is that with standardization, someone controls the standard. Migrations to something better only happen when the entity deems it was time. Its called a monopoly.
The other point is that "GarvIX" IS different. Just as RedHat/KDE, RedHat/GNOME, Debian/KDE, Debian/GNOME, etc. are also different. If it makes you feel better think of your operating system as Redhat/GNOME/GNU/Linux or ReGNOGL for short. Go forth and make everyone use it.
I swear, Lucas can do nothing right anymore.
Funny, I was just thinking how Lucas can do no wrong. He is absolutely masterful at keeping the Star Wars hype going with pre-release rumors. In other words, he gets to keep selling action figures by the ton, with little promotional expense. Hell, he doesn't even have to make a good movie any more and it grosses $430 million, nevermind the action figures.
Come on, why do you think he re-re-released the original trilogy? Just to make the public happy? Do you think it was coincidental that shortly after he re-re-re-released the same triology but now in a gold case with new scenes and animated critters? Why do you really think the DVD isn't coming out yet?
He knows he's got a pile of suckers and is milking us for all we're worth. Personally, as long as he keeps entertaining me (via the movies, the pre-movie hype, or the action figures, I don't care), I'm more than happy to keep playing the sucker.
If an art can't fund itself, then I would argue that there isn't a market for it. If there isn't a market for it, why should it exist?
Because it defines us as a great society? The US is not a great society because of its arts. The US is a great society because of the American Dream. Anyone with ambition can succeed.
Because monarchs of long ago thought it was important? The monarchs were showing off. Vanity, pure and simple. It made them and, by association, their country, look superior. Every dime they spent on the arts should have gone back to the peasant they taxed to pay for it.
If it's important to even a handfull of people, they will pay to see it and it will live. Its called a niche market. They exist everywhere and succeed all the time, without government assistance.
Free-market capitalism could be an excellent system without a pesky thing called greed
Greed is good. Greed drives people to succeed. Without success for your European governments to tax, they wouldn't have their shine health systems, beautiful skylines, flawless transportation, etc. Take away the greed, you lose the success, your tax base and your "progressive" social programs.
A free-market capitalist society isn't the only place you find greed. Unfortunately, greed is human nature (if you believe otherwise, you have been watching too much startrek), as such it exists in any system. In a capitalist system, it begets Dollars, Euros, and Pesos. In a communist system (and to some extent a socialist system), it begets influence. Power. Which is more sinister? Dollars which are obvious and the exchange of which follow a set of rules, or Power which is non-obvious and defines the rules?
Besides, once Libertarians take control of America and fuck it up beyond recognition, we'll need to know where to move to.
mmmm... stop teasing. A world where it wasn't told what proper social behaviour is. Where I get to keep what I earned instead of being penalized for earning more. Where I had a choice in how 30% of my income was spent. Where I could do what I wanted in the privacy of my own home. Sounds like freedom.
One small nit: right-wingers do not have a monopoly on fearing that which they do not understand.
Unfortunately, it's human nature and happens in any country, race, religious group, social group, ethnicity, or caste, you can come up with.
When people don't know how to deal with something, they try not to. They ignore it if they can. If they can't, they try to get rid of it by ridiculing it. If that doesn't work, they attempt to destroy it. Of course, the sensible and responsible thing to do is learn to understand what they fear. Perhaps there is no reason to fear it after all, or perhaps there is a way to fix it without destroying it.
Don't fall into this trap. Before writing your right-wing classmates off as a group about to fuck up the US, try to understand them instead of ridiculing them. As long as you are ridiculing them without understanding them, you are no better than them.
In reading the top-moderated comments, one thought came to mind: Slashdot readers, who are accused of being rabid Linux supporters, are bashing a benchmark that came out pro-Linux.
Kudos to the Slashdot community for being objective, despite your theoretical biases.
I spent a lot of time playing with WAP. My company decided to support WAP mostly just because of all the hype around it, not because it was good technology. WAP sucked for a lot of reasons:
Given all that, I think the Internet will always be on phones in one form or another. Phones browsers will never be Internet Explorer, but phones now have sufficient CPUs and memory. Coming soon are beautiful color displays and bandwidth. With all of this, good ol' HTTP/TCP/IP will work fine as a protocol (Your mobile provider will pick Layer 2 for you). No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
What if all of the ballot choices are corrupt?
If all choices are bad, you lose, whether we are talking about governments or businesses. My approach is to try to have as many choices as possible. Government can't offer that. You may have different candidates, but if the system is flawed, there is little they can do about it. Each business is its own system; if that system is flawed, the business goes out of business.
I prefer big business over big government and the reason is simple: You only get one government.
Think about it. If a government is corrupt, the only thing we can do is take arms (assuming we still have them), risk our lives, over-throw it, and put another soon to be government into place. If a business is corrupt, we can boycott them and buy from their competitors.
As for big business not having responsiblity because they can hide behind lawyers, I would say that your government is already corrupt. Part of government's job is to make sure everyone plays nice. If businesses or people are getting away with more than they should, then government is broke. Sure, ethically businesses should play nice without being forced to do so, but this isn't human nature. How many people do you know that follow the rules to the T, regardless of whether or not they agree with them? I speed to work everyday, do you?
A minor issue? The author must be on some super drugs. The reasoning for these new advances in credit card protection schemes is for these minor issues else they wouldn't worry about it altogether.
A nitpick, but I believe the author's point is that consumers don't need to worry about the cost of someone stealing their card. Banks, on the other hand, are worried about it since they pick up the tab. They push for any technology that can cut down on fraud, thereby saving them money.
In my experience iptables with connection tracking enabled eats up a ton more CPU than ipchains. That said, you can always run without connection tracking.
As a data point, we are running a linux firewall/edge router on a K6-2/400 We are pushing around 3-4k packets/second during peak. When running 2.2 and ipchains, this box was 99.99% idle. It was bored! We upgraded to 2.4 and enable connection tracking. While we were at it, we added a good bit of infrastructure to the chains to make administration easier (dedicated chains for accounting, another for the webcache, etc.), thus increasing processing time for filtering. Now, we are only about 94.5% idle. I'm pretty sure that connection tracking accounts for the vast majority of this increase. Nevertheless, this still is not a big deal when the whole system costs $300.
Linux 2.2.x doesn't do many-to-many and many-to-few NAT and as far as I know still doesn't do it in 2.4.0, but I don't think it would be a big stretch to implement it in the new netfilter structure.
Stateful inspection allows connection tracking. I think a lot of hacks were required to give MASQUERADEing enough state to work within ipchains. Life is easier with iptables since the state is maintained by iptables. For example, since iptables can see connection creates and tear-downs, MASQUERADEing knows when to stop connecting a realIP:port to a fakeIP:port.
The RAID drivers are alpha as in misnomer. This is the directory they distributed from and at one point it was a correct label. I believe there are a few features that should still be considered alpha/beta (on-line expansion, for example), but the standard RAID[0|1|5] stuff is great.
Linux 2.4.0 has support for up to 10 (yes ten) IDE channels. How does /dev/hdt sound?
There are drivers in the kernel and userland tools like vgcreate, lvcreate, lvextend, etc.
I'm pretty certain you need to clobber the disks to start using LVM. With disk prices the way they are today, I just bought new disks, rebuilt on them, then imported my old ones when I was finished.
I'm currently running 2.4.0test12 on a system I just built, not just because I wanted to be cool and brag to all of co-workers (who would of course give me a blank stare and go on about the NY Jets, etc.), but because I had use for the features. What I'm actually using in 2.4.0:
It has been promised that reiserfs will show up in 2.4.1. Imagine a journalled filesystem! Currently, filesystem checks on my volumes requires about 45-60 minutes. That sucks. I'm
That said, I agree, don't use them if you don't need the features. I had a lot of problems with test11. I was one of many that saw panics when running RAID5, sometimes within 4 hours after boot. test12 hasn't failed yet, but it has only been 20days.
I guess it's a just a matter of time before everything converges into one data stream.
Aahh... the promised land!
Better yet: One number, period. When someone calls that number, they are forwarded to a list of other numbers until you are found. You define that list and what time of day to use. You may define a different list for different times of day. This is called Single Number Reach (SNR) and companies are doing. Today.
One step farther: One number for voice and fax. The nature of the call is detected and handled accordingly. Voice is handled like the above. Faxes are received and delivered to you. This is called Single Number Access (SNA). Again, this is happening today.
Usually these features are part of a Unified Messaging/Communications platform. These guys are growing out of the pick_buzzword("Convergent Network", "Next Generation Network", "Unified Communications") revolution. They idea is to bring everything together over IP. What you can do then is only limited by how fast a company can develop new software. In other words, we aren't held back by traditional telcos that move at a snail's pace.
Come on. Think logically, not emotionally. Business works on logic. Emotions never made a business a dime.
To squash the competition, they have to beat them. To beat them, they need to sell more. To sell more, they have to offer something that consumers will like better. Consumers are always the end judges that make or break a new company. They have the right to buy whatever they want. Power to people, man!
There is ALWAYS a financial reason to innovate. Innovation means you can offer more to the customer. See above.
As long as a company stays private (or is majority held by one entity), they can't be bought out. It will be their choice to be bought out. Power to the little guys!
The best part about the wireless revolution is that there will be very little regulation. The prime reason we have telco regulation today is because it is a sanctioned monopoly. Only one telco gets to bring copper to your house, so regulations ensure that competitors can get to that copper and the consumer isn't held hostage. Anyone can bring wireless to your house. No need for regulation!
But outraged consumer advocates and state regulators say adopting 10-digit dialing is unnecessary and would create confusion about the distinction between a local and long-distance call.
I can see a point here, but only kind of. Traditionally, when you dial a number with a "1" at the front, you are going to get charged. Without the "1" it is free. All of that is out the window with this change.
BUT! I'm in Verizon's monopoly and routinely dial a 7 digit number (no "1"'s anywhere) and get charged. Granted, I was pissed the first time, but now I'm used to it. In fact, nowadays, I completely ignore whether it is long distance or not. Partly because the charges are peanuts and I now have an income, but mostly because I now usually use my mobile which doesn't differentiate between a free or toll call.
The reason wireless "last mile" internet will happen is simple: competition.
Nowadays, the only options are DSL, cable, ISDN, or analog dial-up. Most people are lucky to have 2 out of the 4 and they all suck in their own unique ways. Analog dial-up is just slow, ISDN is still too slow and too costly. DSL and cable are the only ones to provide sufficient bandwidth for reasonable $, but they have little legs. Their days are numbered, especially DSL, since they have horrible bandwidth/distance restrictions.
Now imagine that you are a new company that wants to offer service and get a subscriber base. You are really faced with only two choices today: buy a cable company or resell DSL. Buying a cable company is a hell of a proposition and most companies aren't going to be willing to take the plunge. If you resell DSL, someone else is holding your balls (be it Covad, Northpoint, etc). Sure, you could install your own DSL equipment, but when faced with that cost, you might as well buy a cable company. Even if you go this path, you are still subject to the phone company's whims. If your little company doesn't controll its own destiny, how can it be sure to compete?
Competition is severely limited by our current technology. The magic bullet to that is wireless. The technology isn't there yet, but wireless systems are potentially cheaper to implement and faster to deploy. Cheap and fast are the key words. It means a small company could put up a single receiver in a neighborhood, be operational in a matter of weeks, and grow from there. They don't have to bury lines, deal with Telco's that move at a snail's pace, and deal with endless gov't regulations (most are needed for monopoly-busting, but not needed in wireless since there is no monopoly). In other words, they deal directly with their customers, realizing all of the profits and controlling their own quality levels.
As a consumer, I want choices. Right now, my choice is between the cable company that sucks or the DSL reseller that sucks. I would jump at the chance to be able to choose between a few different wireless providers in my neighborhood.
I also feel that the technological hurdles left to jump are nothing compared to the potential market. In other words, there is too much money to be made to let something as simple as "its not technologically possible" to get in our way. We will find a way, we always have in the past.
First, why knock Java because of its IDE? First of all, it doesn't have an IDE. IDEs are value-added products by third parties.
Second, I've never found much use in one. Give me a good text editor (read vim), a build system, CVS, and a command line. An IDE is just something pretty that makes the average programmer feel better about themselves.
In the past, IDEs have been very useful for rapid development. They allowed you to visually represent something and out pops 1000 lines of code to build that pretty window you drew. Because of the structure of Java, really object-oriented not just kind of like C++, rapid development is inherent. You subclass a window type that is pretty close (something for the Java API or your own class), spend a few lines tweaking it, and show it.
The best part is that the developer is left close to the code, not abstracted from it like rapid prototyping IDEs do. The result is fewer bugs.
No, I don't agree that IDEs make the difference.
The Company for response to accusations, seems to preclude the employees the ability to consult with legal counsel, given that clearances take months to be approved
For the job I'm currently working, I had to sign an Employee Dispute Resolution agreement. It basically says that I can't sue them and they can't sue me until we have gone through a resolution process, which involves at some stage an outside mediator. The result is that most disputes are handled internally, without causing harm to the company while still providing a resolution satisfactory to the employee. Signing this made me very nervous, needless to say, but after reviewing the procedure, it seemed reasonable to me.
The point is, if my non-Top Secret company had such an agreement, it wouldn't surprise me if the CIA, a group which would be very concerned about public resolution of disputes, had such an agreement.
What is all this Beowulf crap? For highly-available systems, clustering usually means server fail-over. It means an active-standby configuration with a shared disk. If the active server dies, the standby mounts the disk, starts up the app, and carries on.
For examples of shrink-wrapped versions, see Sun Cluster, Veritas Cluster Server, and a Linux based one, Turbo Linux Cluster Server.
A lot of services have to be active-standby; only one server can be doing the job at a time. Any database falls into this category, including SQL-based, LDAP, and mail stores. This is where the above products would get used. For services that can be active-active, like web servers, DNS, mail relays, some form of load balancing is better and cheaper.
There are distributed databases on the horizon, but few of them are ready for primetime. These would feel more like a Beowulf cluster.
I'm not trying to tell you that calling Beowulf a cluster is wrong, but limiting clustering to just Beowulf is.