Actually SuSe was slackware based originally. I believe SuSe started as a german translation of Slackware and has since grown from there. There is more information on any of the History of SuSe web pages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suse
Although Intel is not alone on this front it has been shown many times in the past that Intel will announce a technology or chip or both and yet it takes 6+ months for those to actually hit the market. We really should just wait until we actually HAVE the products from Intel (and other people) before raving about how fantatic they are.
Its not just Linux that runs well on older hardware. I am currently running many Digital Alpha servers and workstations all on systems ranging upto 500Mhz. It works beautifully on FreeBSD, NetBSD Linux and Tru64. That is with and without GUIs configured.
Solar power is not a good investment in the UK, There simply is not enough sunlight to really make it a viable solution. If you run solar in places that the sun shines more and your power company allows you to return excess power to the grid the return on investment can be greatly increased. It will still take several years but you dont have to worry about the energy bills going up as they will continue to go up as the Coal and Gas prices increase as local supply in the UK starts to dry up. Its not always about an investment in todays money it can also be about saving money in the long term. The laptops and lower power PCs are only part of the solution as stated several times. Working in a home office and having 1 or 2 monitors on each pc most of the day with the high performance graphics and pcs that went along with it did make a noticable increase in the power bills in the UK. Since replacing all of the units over a 1.5 year period the power bills are significantly lower however that is not the entire solution. We also changed all the old style bulbs with energy efficient replacement units, replaced older less efficient refridgerators etc over time its made a big difference and the savings will be paid off well within 2-3 years.
From my experience many programming languages have different pros and cons, choosing the best language for each task is generally the best idea. However standardisation can save money but in time it may cost more as you may have to write more code to do simple tasks rather than use built in modules etc in other languages.
It all adds up. We had several 21inch CRT monitors running, we then replaced them with 20inch LCDs If I recall correctly it was from 150watt down to ~50watt so around 1/3rd of the Wattage. When you have them on for around 12hours a day with all of the computers every penny saved makes a big difference, Plus the cost of power in the UK is fairly expensive so the savings are realised much more quickly than in many other areas of the world.
Recently I have begun to invest heavily into the use of power saving sytems. I have recently replaced all of my older generation computers with Turion based PCs and new laptops. Using LCD screens. in total I am now saving some serious money off my electricity bill. Minimising your use of gas heating will result in big savings. There have been reports on Television in the UK stating that by cutting the temperature by a few degrees in your house can save well over a £100 for an average family home. Its all the small things that add up to big savings in the long run though.
After the experiences that I have had with EMC gear in several different companies around the world I am suprised that anyone would still use EMC junk. Ohhh. but I guess EMC would support someone who is paying $4million for their storage gear rather than someone that only paid $0.5million... Since the company has started to use alternative vendors for storage we have had fewer problems, with higher performance and better support at a much cheaper price. And what is more interesting is that the EMC story I am talking about is a very common story from what I have seen. I would be interested to hear other peoples storage issues with EMC if they are not a Top100/500 company?
Many corporate companies that I have had dealings with have already made these sorts of issues clear in the employment contracts. Most internal systems have USB ports that are disabled and the operating systems are locked down so that files must be stored on a central file server rather than on the local hard drives making it more difficult for the average person to steal the data. However if any employee REALLY wants to get their hands on data they can in most cases with relative ease.
Reductions in Spam
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been system administrating several large scale email servers with around 50,000 users or so in total. During the "spam peak" we would have over 400 spam emails a minute being marked which was around 60% of the total email volume through that period. Now we are seeing around 60 emails a minute with more users and domain names on the system than before. However statistics are not everything. If we look more closely at the stats we see that while we would have an average of 400 emails per minute as spam it would peak up to several thousand a minute at times and sometimes it would be less than 20-30 spam emails a minute. While now we are almost flat lining at around 55-65 spam messages which means its not as big a drop as would have originally expected but it is still a drop. One of the issues we also note is that many of the cable providers are now blocking port 25 which was traditionally a large percentage of the traffic spam on our service.
That is true to an extent, however as north sea reserves start running out the switch over to other sources becomes more critical as having all of your energy supply governed by another nations politics cant be a good thing as getting gas delivered by other methods can become very costly at short notice.
Another issue that has re-sparked the debate, Many European countries rely on gas supplies for their energy requirements. Its not a massive % however with the recent russian/ukranian issues with gas supply it has highlighed the direct requirements for countries to have their supplies of energy.
There are several other issues here that are important to note, How many of the vulnerabilities can be remotely exploited, taking that on board how many of them have exploits in the wild, and then how many of those vulnerabilities are Operating system specific,. When I read down the list i See several web applications that are reported as vulnerable. But they are not platform specific. for example I can install phpBB on a windows or linux system with little to no difference.
The problem is with open source from the management view of things. It may not be something that you agree with but when you take a very simplistic view of things.. "it works with Solaris, It works with HPUX, it works with windows.. Linux must be the problem".
Unfortunatly its all about comparisons of products that people are familure with and know work. Once there are working products in those segments enterprise will have very little to moan about.
Its a pain that I cannot recommend Linux as an operating system into many of our customers corporate environments simply because the vendor support is still not there. Here is a classic example of issues that I have faced with Linux over the last year. Recommending a customer to go with Linux would have required them to use GFS to keep it supported by Redhat, however there is no Veritas or Legato backup agent for GFS at this point in time which means they would have had issues backing up the file systems or having a system that would have been completely un supported. So we ended up recommending Solaris 10 with Veritas Cluster Server which we knew we could backup using the Legato or Veritas backup software and remain fully supported. The real issue is not that we cant support the product in house but its who does management call when things break which from my experience does not happen too often in a well designed and implemented solution. For linux to really be accepted on a broad scale enterprise offering it must have
- Fully supported file systems with fully supported backup agents for each system. - Vender interoperability. Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 and Enterprise Linux 4. Some commercial applications will not work properly on 4 but will on 3 because of the compiler/libraries they had used to build the code.
As an open source advocate and someone who believes in the principals of open source things have come a very long way over the last year, but the real linch pins still remain and will remain for some time.
They have speed cameras that record the time between cameras and book you accordingly in many places in the world. It wouldnt be so difficult to implement on a broader scale. After all it would pay for itself in a matter of months/years.
The system is currently in use in certain areas of what people in the UK call "the city". It has been in place for several years after the IRA bomb attacks and other issues. They are now rolling out that number plate recognition system across many other areas. It does not require them to have any device on your car except that you have to have a number plate. However the system for number plate issuing in the UK is heavily floored. There are so many cars that are driving around uninsured, un taxed and without an MOT (road worthy certificate) that it will really only be an issue for the people that are law abiding as the people with out their car registered and on the road legally can still get away with whatever they want. Moving forward they need to really start working hard at defeating the uninsured, untaxed cars from the roads. Its not that hard to do have several big crack downs. At the end of the day it will reduce the overall cost of motoring in the UK as there will be less risk of being hit by an uninsured/untaxed motorist which costs everyone more. Some of the implications of the system they are implementing is that they will be able to calculate distances between cameras and KNOW if people are speeding, They will also be able to proove that particular cars/trucks/bikes are in certain areas at certain times. That in itself is a great benefit for tracing criminal activity.
In many places in the UK they already have the CCTV cameras in action and they do record the cars going along the roads. However they are just adding the ability to track the number plates.
You made some good points. From a linux perspective I dont use the onboard RAID because its normally a software emulation layer or something thats not REAL raid. Having had a problem once in the past where the RAID was reporting as fine in windows but the disks where screwed. Even with SMART it did not detect anything. After some Time for a home system a very economical and good controller is the New MegaRAID 4-150 (or 150-4) cards. SATA 4 port 64bit SATA.. nice card. Its much cheaper than the 3ware stuff and for home use its great.. In fact I use em now in servers too.
Havnt the last 40 years been all about getting rid of segregation and trying to create equals. As far as I can see the internet will be for the wealthy and the poor will just have to suck it in. The more that corporations try and enforce things like that the more disjointed they will become. There is nothing wrong with having their own content delivery mechanisms in place, However when it becomes expensive and the poorest people loose out does that make more people want to pirate content ? Simply putting it out of reach financially makes people want it more.
What the music industry wont tell you is that people are getting sick of the same old manufactured artists, boy bands, girl bands and pop groups that really have no tallent and a good PR and marketing campaign. Today the kids are exposed to so many bands / groups and artists that really dont care about the music they just wanted to be famous. Where is the tallent. I know that there are some really great artists emerging but how much air time do they get? And if they do get air time how can the 14 year old girls and boys afford the CDs when the latest Xbox or game has come out. People get sick of having no tallent crap bands and artists. Most of the music when I turn on the radio is just all sooo similar it almost all turns into one big blab blab blab of noise. Its got to the point where I dont listen to the radio any more. I can listen to the music I want online and download the music that I want so that I dont have to listen to the Dj talking garbage about stuff they often know nothing about. The record industry is its own worst enemy. They want the money, they want the PR, but they dont want to premote the artists with the tallent... its all about the beautiful face on the CD cover, and the music clips that have lots of half naked girls dancing sh*t moves. Wake up Record companies are killing themselves. Anyway thats my bitch for the day.. time to move on..
What most of these reviews dont really get is the reason why a great portion of the people use linux, It offers choice, you have the freedom to choose your desktop environment, you have the freedom to choose what you want to do today under the front screen. Its not about whats better and whats not its about providing me with a freedom that I never had with windows or MAC OS. When will a study really focus in on what its really about rather than what its not about ?..
I have to agree with you. We have several tens of sun servers ranging from the baby all the way up to 880s and beyond. We have very good uptime even with very high load. However many of the applications that we use are all web based these days so that we can be platform independant.
The camera batteries that I had with the F505V previously where rechargeable and still can hold a charge even if its for only half an hour or so. The issue was that the batteries are very bespoke which resulted in high cost accessories and they went end of life a long time ago. Plus that camera is not really in the same league as the cameras Ive been looking at/talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually SuSe was slackware based originally. I believe SuSe started as a german translation of Slackware and has since grown from there. There is more information on any of the History of SuSe web pages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suse
Although Intel is not alone on this front it has been shown many times in the past that Intel will announce a technology or chip or both and yet it takes 6+ months for those to actually hit the market. We really should just wait until we actually HAVE the products from Intel (and other people) before raving about how fantatic they are.
Its not just Linux that runs well on older hardware. I am currently running many Digital Alpha servers and workstations all on systems ranging upto 500Mhz. It works beautifully on FreeBSD, NetBSD Linux and Tru64. That is with and without GUIs configured.
Solar power is not a good investment in the UK, There simply is not enough sunlight to really make it a viable solution. If you run solar in places that the sun shines more and your power company allows you to return excess power to the grid the return on investment can be greatly increased. It will still take several years but you dont have to worry about the energy bills going up as they will continue to go up as the Coal and Gas prices increase as local supply in the UK starts to dry up. Its not always about an investment in todays money it can also be about saving money in the long term.
The laptops and lower power PCs are only part of the solution as stated several times. Working in a home office and having 1 or 2 monitors on each pc most of the day with the high performance graphics and pcs that went along with it did make a noticable increase in the power bills in the UK. Since replacing all of the units over a 1.5 year period the power bills are significantly lower however that is not the entire solution. We also changed all the old style bulbs with energy efficient replacement units, replaced older less efficient refridgerators etc over time its made a big difference and the savings will be paid off well within 2-3 years.
From my experience many programming languages have different pros and cons, choosing the best language for each task is generally the best idea. However standardisation can save money but in time it may cost more as you may have to write more code to do simple tasks rather than use built in modules etc in other languages.
It all adds up. We had several 21inch CRT monitors running, we then replaced them with 20inch LCDs If I recall correctly it was from 150watt down to ~50watt so around 1/3rd of the Wattage. When you have them on for around 12hours a day with all of the computers every penny saved makes a big difference, Plus the cost of power in the UK is fairly expensive so the savings are realised much more quickly than in many other areas of the world.
Recently I have begun to invest heavily into the use of power saving sytems. I have recently replaced all of my older generation computers with Turion based PCs and new laptops. Using LCD screens. in total I am now saving some serious money off my electricity bill. Minimising your use of gas heating will result in big savings. There have been reports on Television in the UK stating that by cutting the temperature by a few degrees in your house can save well over a £100 for an average family home. Its all the small things that add up to big savings in the long run though.
After the experiences that I have had with EMC gear in several different companies around the world I am suprised that anyone would still use EMC junk. Ohhh. but I guess EMC would support someone who is paying $4million for their storage gear rather than someone that only paid $0.5million... Since the company has started to use alternative vendors for storage we have had fewer problems, with higher performance and better support at a much cheaper price. And what is more interesting is that the EMC story I am talking about is a very common story from what I have seen. I would be interested to hear other peoples storage issues with EMC if they are not a Top100/500 company?
Many corporate companies that I have had dealings with have already made these sorts of issues clear in the employment contracts. Most internal systems have USB ports that are disabled and the operating systems are locked down so that files must be stored on a central file server rather than on the local hard drives making it more difficult for the average person to steal the data. However if any employee REALLY wants to get their hands on data they can in most cases with relative ease.
I have been system administrating several large scale email servers with around 50,000 users or so in total. During the "spam peak" we would have over 400 spam emails a minute being marked which was around 60% of the total email volume through that period. Now we are seeing around 60 emails a minute with more users and domain names on the system than before. However statistics are not everything. If we look more closely at the stats we see that while we would have an average of 400 emails per minute as spam it would peak up to several thousand a minute at times and sometimes it would be less than 20-30 spam emails a minute. While now we are almost flat lining at around 55-65 spam messages which means its not as big a drop as would have originally expected but it is still a drop. One of the issues we also note is that many of the cable providers are now blocking port 25 which was traditionally a large percentage of the traffic spam on our service.
That is true to an extent, however as north sea reserves start running out the switch over to other sources becomes more critical as having all of your energy supply governed by another nations politics cant be a good thing as getting gas delivered by other methods can become very costly at short notice.
Another issue that has re-sparked the debate, Many European countries rely on gas supplies for their energy requirements. Its not a massive % however with the recent russian/ukranian issues with gas supply it has highlighed the direct requirements for countries to have their supplies of energy.
There are several other issues here that are important to note, How many of the vulnerabilities can be remotely exploited, taking that on board how many of them have exploits in the wild, and then how many of those vulnerabilities are Operating system specific,. When I read down the list i See several web applications that are reported as vulnerable. But they are not platform specific. for example I can install phpBB on a windows or linux system with little to no difference.
The problem is with open source from the management view of things. It may not be something that you agree with but when you take a very simplistic view of things.. "it works with Solaris, It works with HPUX, it works with windows.. Linux must be the problem".
Unfortunatly its all about comparisons of products that people are familure with and know work. Once there are working products in those segments enterprise will have very little to moan about.
Its a pain that I cannot recommend Linux as an operating system into many of our customers corporate environments simply because the vendor support is still not there. Here is a classic example of issues that I have faced with Linux over the last year. Recommending a customer to go with Linux would have required them to use GFS to keep it supported by Redhat, however there is no Veritas or Legato backup agent for GFS at this point in time which means they would have had issues backing up the file systems or having a system that would have been completely un supported. So we ended up recommending Solaris 10 with Veritas Cluster Server which we knew we could backup using the Legato or Veritas backup software and remain fully supported. The real issue is not that we cant support the product in house but its who does management call when things break which from my experience does not happen too often in a well designed and implemented solution. For linux to really be accepted on a broad scale enterprise offering it must have
- Fully supported file systems with fully supported backup agents for each system.
- Vender interoperability. Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 and Enterprise Linux 4. Some commercial applications will not work properly on 4 but will on 3 because of the compiler/libraries they had used to build the code.
As an open source advocate and someone who believes in the principals of open source things have come a very long way over the last year, but the real linch pins still remain and will remain for some time.
They have speed cameras that record the time between cameras and book you accordingly in many places in the world. It wouldnt be so difficult to implement on a broader scale. After all it would pay for itself in a matter of months/years.
The system is currently in use in certain areas of what people in the UK call "the city". It has been in place for several years after the IRA bomb attacks and other issues. They are now rolling out that number plate recognition system across many other areas. It does not require them to have any device on your car except that you have to have a number plate. However the system for number plate issuing in the UK is heavily floored. There are so many cars that are driving around uninsured, un taxed and without an MOT (road worthy certificate) that it will really only be an issue for the people that are law abiding as the people with out their car registered and on the road legally can still get away with whatever they want.
Moving forward they need to really start working hard at defeating the uninsured, untaxed cars from the roads. Its not that hard to do have several big crack downs. At the end of the day it will reduce the overall cost of motoring in the UK as there will be less risk of being hit by an uninsured/untaxed motorist which costs everyone more.
Some of the implications of the system they are implementing is that they will be able to calculate distances between cameras and KNOW if people are speeding, They will also be able to proove that particular cars/trucks/bikes are in certain areas at certain times. That in itself is a great benefit for tracing criminal activity.
In many places in the UK they already have the CCTV cameras in action and they do record the cars going along the roads. However they are just adding the ability to track the number plates.
You made some good points. From a linux perspective I dont use the onboard RAID because its normally a software emulation layer or something thats not REAL raid. Having had a problem once in the past where the RAID was reporting as fine in windows but the disks where screwed. Even with SMART it did not detect anything. After some Time for a home system a very economical and good controller is the New MegaRAID 4-150 (or 150-4) cards. SATA 4 port 64bit SATA.. nice card. Its much cheaper than the 3ware stuff and for home use its great.. In fact I use em now in servers too.
Havnt the last 40 years been all about getting rid of segregation and trying to create equals. As far as I can see the internet will be for the wealthy and the poor will just have to suck it in. The more that corporations try and enforce things like that the more disjointed they will become. There is nothing wrong with having their own content delivery mechanisms in place, However when it becomes expensive and the poorest people loose out does that make more people want to pirate content ? Simply putting it out of reach financially makes people want it more.
The real question is the dell still tacky in its feeling? are the keys very cheap feeling, does the overall feel of the build quality improve?
What the music industry wont tell you is that people are getting sick of the same old manufactured artists, boy bands, girl bands and pop groups that really have no tallent and a good PR and marketing campaign. Today the kids are exposed to so many bands / groups and artists that really dont care about the music they just wanted to be famous. Where is the tallent. I know that there are some really great artists emerging but how much air time do they get? And if they do get air time how can the 14 year old girls and boys afford the CDs when the latest Xbox or game has come out. People get sick of having no tallent crap bands and artists. Most of the music when I turn on the radio is just all sooo similar it almost all turns into one big blab blab blab of noise. Its got to the point where I dont listen to the radio any more. I can listen to the music I want online and download the music that I want so that I dont have to listen to the Dj talking garbage about stuff they often know nothing about. The record industry is its own worst enemy. They want the money, they want the PR, but they dont want to premote the artists with the tallent... its all about the beautiful face on the CD cover, and the music clips that have lots of half naked girls dancing sh*t moves. Wake up Record companies are killing themselves. Anyway thats my bitch for the day.. time to move on..
What most of these reviews dont really get is the reason why a great portion of the people use linux, It offers choice, you have the freedom to choose your desktop environment, you have the freedom to choose what you want to do today under the front screen. Its not about whats better and whats not its about providing me with a freedom that I never had with windows or MAC OS. When will a study really focus in on what its really about rather than what its not about ?..
I have to agree with you. We have several tens of sun servers ranging from the baby all the way up to 880s and beyond. We have very good uptime even with very high load. However many of the applications that we use are all web based these days so that we can be platform independant.
The camera batteries that I had with the F505V previously where rechargeable and still can hold a charge even if its for only half an hour or so. The issue was that the batteries are very bespoke which resulted in high cost accessories and they went end of life a long time ago. Plus that camera is not really in the same league as the cameras Ive been looking at/talking about.
Redhat as a distro is terrible the upgrade path and support cycles for non-enterprise versions is horrible. RIP $100 laptop.