I love linux, but alot of this stuff pretty much pertains to anything on the internet. Do you have a linux box on the public net with SSH open? I gaurantee you are getting more than 1000 attempted logins per day. This article talks about alot of "attempted" attacks, well my linux machines on the net get port scanned at least 10 times a day, any box that has ssh running on the default port is being dictionary attacked pretty much 24/7. Sure the linux boxes aren't being turned into zombies, and I'm not sending out boatloads of spam, but my apache servers get hit with IIS attacks regularly. Putting a box with open ports on the net gaurantees you will be attacked. It doesn't matter if its linux or windows.
The difference is with windows you will probably get hacked, with linux you at least have a fighting chance.
Ok, not entirely, but Vonage is a completely unencrypted service. It is the same as sending a standard email. If you are ordering things over a Vonage phone line and saying or dialing your credit card number, it is just like emailing it. Grabbing these packets off the internet and replaying them is exceedingly simple. As your voice travels across the internet, any router along that path could be used to dump those packets and a malicious tech or hacker who has gained access to that router can very easily steal your information.
Comcast probably suffers from the exact same problem, although the traffic is probably not traversing multiple provider's networks the way Vonage is and therefore the danger should in theory be less.
It states in the press release that they are anticipating winning their lawsuits so they are releasing this version of Linux because as soon as they win they will be the only legal provider of Linux solutions.
Obviously as others have already stated, if they are using linux 2.5 codebase, don't they have to GPL everything they added? If not, can't Linus et al sue the pants off of them?
Talk about backfiring, here's a scenario for you.. MS gives SCO a chunk of cash to go fight linux, SCO illegally uses Linux code, Linus Torvalds sues them and gets all of MSs money to further linux development...
I'm sure it is... it was a joke, it seems a little silly to me... I was just thinking of like car ads and such "Buy the new 2003 Chevy Tahoe! All new for 2007!"...
If you're gonna use years to version your products at least use the right year.
Ok, MS just released Cluster Server 2003... Um is my clock set right? It is 2006 right?
What now in 3 years they are going to release Cluster Server 2005....
And we're supposed to be worried about it? Their software is admittedly at least 3 years behind the times right there in the title of the software it says so.
His main argument is that smart is always better than stupid, and that allowing the internet to become more "intelligent" in the way it handles traffic is a good thing. Unfortunately, The whole reason that the internet worked in the first place, and the reason its so huge is that the network is dumb, and all the intelligence is at the edges.
The whole thing was designed that way.
His other argument that the government should be in the business of preserving business models is of course obvious hypocrisy. It's not about whether or not the government is going to preserve a business model, its who's business model they are preserving. Either they help out Ebay, Google, et al, or they preserver the business models of Verizon, Qwest, AT&T et al...
He would have you believe it is either protect Google and Ebay or keep the world free of protection. In reality the choice is protect innovative companies or protect old dinosaur companies that haven't invented anything in the last 40 years.
That may be true, and I agree that DSL does depend heavily on distances etc. However, in my experience, if a line qualifies for a speed (say 3mbps) the DSL will train up at that speed, and the DSL itself will pass data at that speed. The only limitation then and the reason people aren't getting the speeds they are "paying" for is because the ISP doesn't actually have the bandwidth they are selling. You mention not having much choice, as I said previously I don't know about verizon, but with Qwest you can choose from a list of about 40 ISPs in Utah. These ISPs have peering connections with Qwest (usually at least 1 DS3, but Xmission the one I mentioned has at least 6 DS3s). The data comes off the DSL line (generally at whatever speed you're paying for because the modem trains up at that speed), heads through the CO, Qwest then routes the traffic straight to Xmission and from there out to the internet. Xmission has multiple DS3s, and I think now an OC3. They have traffic and usage graphs of all of their connections up on their website, you can see that they aren't using all of their available bandwidth, and they I have never had DSL anywhere in Utah that I didn't get the speeds I was paying for through them.
Everything comes down to the ISP. I generally favor DSL over cable simply because it offers much higher upload speeds, and being a geek I've always got a couple servers running in my house. Also with DSL I do get a choice of ISP, and I can get static IPs extremely cheap because of that (Xmission sells class C blocks for less than Comcast charges for 3 addresses). Comcast only offers 256kbps upload no matter what. I'd be willing to pay an extra $50/mo just to get 1mbps uploads, but they can't do 1mbps uploads. With DSL I get 1.5 down 1mbps up and all the static IPs I need.
If you sign up for Qwest's DSL service and use them for everything, you end up routing through their network, and they use all sorts of bandwidth limiting to prioritize their backbone and peering trunks for business connections. I'm sure that Comcast uses similar methodologies to limit the actual amount of bandwidth that is available to customers at their backbone/border. In short, the bandwidth crunch isn't at the edge, its at the core of these provider's networks where they have 2 or 3 peering connections that actually get you onto the internet, and if those are saturated, then it doesn't matter if you are 5 feet from the CO and your VDSL trains up at 45Mbps or if you are the only person in your entire city that has Cable internet and you've got the "10mbps" service, you're only going to get 1mbps.
I have had DSL on and off for the last 6 years, and I've always had test speeds within 10% of the advertised speed (IE 1300-1400 on a 1.5mb service, 700kbps on a 768 service). I don't know about verizon, where I am (Utah) its all Qwest, and I use xmission as an ISP. That to me is the difference, my parents in Nevada have DSL and ISP service both through the phone company, and it is crap their 3mbps line only gets about 1mbps. At my dad's office however, he has a different ISP and his 1mbps lines always get ~950kbps.
I have this same problem with my comcast service in Utah, supposed to have 6mbps, only ever really see about 2mbps. This has nothing to do with the differences between DSL and Cable, it has to do with providers heavily oversubscribing their bandwidth. Smaller local ISPs I've found are much better in this area. The ones I've used in 2 states have much more reasonable oversubscription rates, and generally provide the level of service they advertise. The huge carriers (Qwest, Comcast, Verizon, etc) seem to be much worse at this and probably are selling 1mb of bandwidth over 1000 times. IE Comcast sells 100,000 homes a 6mbps service, but their uplink for those 100,000 people (600,000mbps) is only a 100mbps connection. What's that? a 6000/1 oversubscription ratio... I wouldn't be suprised if that is where the telcos/cable providers are in large metro areas.
I worked for a time for a small ISP and we had an oversubscription ratio of about 75/1 on a bandwidth basis, we were using about 75% of our available bandwidth at peek usage times. In short all of our customers always got advertised speeds. If our peek usage ever got above 85% for more than a week, we would order more bandwidth.
I'm sure the telco's are squeezing as much profit as they can out of residential broadband by never upgrading their backbone links. I know for a fact that Sprint has a single OC3 servicing all of the DSL customers in the entire Las Vegas valley. I was told that by a level 3 engineer when I was trying to diagnose the slow speeds at my parents house.
This is only a new process for Novell to deal with vendors to make kernel upgrades more seamless to customers. I don't think this is going to cause all the vendors to release binary only drivers, but for the ones who do, SUSE will now work better with kernel updates. Personally, every system I use has an nvidia card in it and a marvell sata controller which only has a binary driver, about 75 systems btw... So, what kernel am I running? Oh, the stock one that came with red hat el 4, have there been security updates? YES, have I updated NO! because that is 75 systems I have to boot into text mode, rebuild the Nvidia drivers, rebuild the sata drivers, and reboot back to X windows... and that's if everything just works... I've had it not work before. Then of course you have to wait at least 2-3 weeks after red hat releases a new kernel before nvidia publishes the new version of the driver, and all in all its just a huge headache.
Binary only drivers are here to stay folks, we aren't going to abolish them, and as long as Linus is in charge of the kernel we aren't going to get a stable ABI, so, kernel update means recompile all your drivers... Any way to ease this burden is a GOOD THING because it encourages people to update their kernels. upgrading a kernel right now on any somewhat complex system, or anything that might not be 100% supported (IE wifi, some network cards, some storage devices and video cards) means a huge headache every single time a new kernel is released (by the major vendors at least 6 times a year). I estimate that if I were to keep my system updated it would take an additional 6-700 man hours per year, that is 30,000-35,000 dollars at $50/hour (which is low), you have to figure 1+ hour per system 75 systems, 6 times a year...
I attempt to follow standards as much as possible, however because IE is so hideously broken, it almost doesn't matter. I recently developed a site, ran the validator on it, it passes fine, it all works in firefox and opera, displays how its supposed to, everything's great right? Open it in IE, totally broken, things don't line up, the spacing is wrong, everything looks like crap... go through everything to fix it, get it so it displays "right" in IE, run the validator again.... oops errors all over the place...
In short I don't think its possible to write a standards compliant page and have it display in IE properly, as long as this situation persists, it will be impossible to push "standards" on the internet. If the standards don't display correctly on 90% of the computers, what are you supposed to do?
Ok, so in the end this guy left a dead end support job for a start up that could presumably create something cool and new and really change things.
This is exactly why outsourcing is a good thing. Cisco purged a bunch of people form call centers near where I live, sent all the jobs to India... Everyone was up in arms, the tech community was angry, no one could "find a job" cause suddenly there were 800+ certified, experienced techs in the job market.
Fast forward 2 years... All of the ex-cisco employees have jobs now, and alot of them have started new companies that are doing some pretty cool stuff, they are hiring people, creating more jobs, and being more innovative.
If Cisco hadn't sent all the dead end jobs to India, there would be ~50 less tech companies in the area, and about 2k less jobs. Anyway, I have seen first hand that sending these types of dead end jobs overseas is not a bad thing, even if they are "white collar", "good paying" jobs.
You're missing the point of course... There are alot of small businesses that do business in multiple states. I own a small IT consulting/software business (3 people right now, hoping to be 5 if we get a countract we are bidding on). We already do business regularly in Utah and Nevada, we have pretty much a 50-50 split between the 2 states, however if we weren't allowed to work in Utah cause we are a Nevada business, I'd have to fire my 2 employees because our Nevada revenue/business is only enough to support me alone. My father is an attorney, he works in 6 states right now, he employees about 20 people, if he were forced to be a "Nevada Only" company, he'd have to lay off more than half his workforce.
Small companies cross state borders all the time, and the Internet and telecommuting only make it easier and more economical for a small business to do this. If we get the contract I mentioned, it is also in Utah, but we would hire 2 people locally in Utah to handle it. The Internet makes this feasible. Previously only a company with resources like MS, Oracle, etc would be able to bid on this project because it requires a local presence, now with the technology that is cheaply available, I can compete locally in many markets even though I am small.
In short, requiring a corporation to not cross state lines is patently absurd.
I agree with the fact that the tax structures and such should be changed to penalize companies for sending work overseas to a certain extent, however I can't say that offshoring of level 1 tech support has hurt much..
Personally, I have seen the positive effects of this. I work regularly with a group of people who used to work in Cisco TAC, their jobs got sent to India so.... Well, now one of them is the local manager over a team of Indians, he got a 75% pay increase, and works less hours. Another pair of these guys helped found a FTTH company that now has more than 500 homes running in their first master planned community. Another one got a job with a Cisco reseller and now is in a management position making quite a bit more money, and he has more time off... If cisco hadn't sent their jobs overseas they'd probably all be sitting there working 60+ hours a week and making 50k/yr. That's just the way it is for most people, if they aren't forced to change they don't, but there is plenty of opportunity in IT if you are good and are willing to take a bit of a risk.
I personally love tmobile. Unlike all the other US carriers they actually let you get stuff done with your phone. I have their unlimited data plan, and while its not high speed, tmobile lets me hook it up to my computer as a modem, and it works fine for ssh sessions and limited browsing when I'm on the road or not in a hot spot. It's only $20/mo for unlimited data, Verizon charges $60/mo for unlimited data, and then to use the phone as a modem they charge another $30.
I don't know how good actual "3G" is, is it better than verizon's evdo network? Is Verizon's evdo considered 3g or is it 2.5g?
My point is, VoIP doesn't work over the evdo network, latencies are just too high, and call quality is horrible, also, you can't do any QoS over the link.. basically unless actual 3G is a whole lot better than evdo, VoIP wouldn't work anyway, so the fact that they are "disallowing" it is like someone saying "Don't jump a car off a cliff" its just not a good idea.
Now, IM being outlawed is another story, but I use IM on my phone all the time in the US across their low speed plan... I think UK customers should get angry, but T-Mobile US seems much nicer, and is the best wireless carrier in the US as far as I'm concerned (been with Verizon, ATT, Cingular, Qwest, and Tmobile).
Ok, so why don't you report these problems to the Distro then? Redhat has a bugzilla, you can pop on there any time and report bugs against their kernel. I don't know about Suse, but I'd imagine they have some sort of bug reporting feature. And, if they fix it, then it is in the code... The way it is supposed to work is that you report bugs to Redhat/Suse, they look at them, and either fix them and pass the patch up to Linus et al, or they just talk to the kernel folks directly and say "Here's a bug we're getting reports of" and work with them to fix it. Not saying anything is the worst thing to do.
Many of you guys are bashing this guys "technical" skills, or his statements of how the hacking sessions occurred... I think there is a deeper flaw in his argument. Namely this: He is trying to hack into US Gov't computers because they have ALL the Alien secrets....
Now, why would you hack only US computers, and if the US is the only country that knows the secrets, how have we been able to convince the aliens not to crash land any ships any where else in the world where someone else could find them? Are we really to believe that out of some crazy chance the aliens only speak American English? That we are the only ones "smart" enough to figure out alien technology and reverse engineer it?
If there are aliens, and alien technology that is known and understood I see it as a huge statistical improbability that the US would have a monopoly on such. Many other countries have much larger land masses, so a chance "crash landing" (IE Roswell) if such a thing has happened, would probably occur in other nations besides the US as well.
In short for this "conspiracy" to be true, it would have to be a worldwide conspiracy involving at least the US, UK, Japan, Russia, China, the entire EU, basically the entire industrialized world with advanced science programs. Unless just by chance the Roswell incident was the *ONLY* time an alien craft has crashed, and the US just happened to get lucky.
But, even given that, with all the talk in this article of UFOs in satelite photos and such... The US isn't the only country with satelites with cameras on them, we aren't the only country with a space program. Someone else would have pictures. This guy should be bugging the UK to release their satelite photos, and the EU should have to release information from their space program too... It is bizarre to think that the US is the only country that has "happened" upon proof of aliens. Basically the whole UFO/Alien thing is a crap shoot, point a bunch of cameras, radio transmitters, etc at the sky and hope you get something. It is silly to think we are the only ones that have any successful throws in the game.
Once you've laid out a few kilobucks on your BC system and been frustrated a few times with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? Jobs's bet: You'll start spending more and more time in OS X.... It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings
So, if you get fed up with Windows hickups, and change to a different system that works better, you are a lemming and a moron? It's better to just sit there and suffer through windows many shortcomings, viruses, and spyware?
After you've already been overcharged for a Mac, you need to spend another hundred dollars or so buying Windows, just for the privilege of tainting the Apple core with Microsoft's OS. You'll probably need more memory, too. Is it really worth all that extra money?
Again, this argument is idiotic.. You pay a little more for a Mac, which works better, and is easier to use, and doesn't break, and you don't have to spend an extra $100/yr on anti-virus/anti-spyware, and you don't have to call tech support every couple weeks because its "slow again". The extra cost for a mac is 100% worth it because it is a better system. So in the end, his argument is "Windows isn't worth $100 and the extra RAM you need to run it". BC is a dual boot environment, if you need "more memory" as he states, it is solely because windows is a memory hog compared to OS X.
The article is full of comments like this that are completely moronic. Here's my favorite:
The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems.
Ok, so to be a "creative computer user" I have to spend hours making my case look different from anyone else's? How exactly does that pay the bills? I think we should ask Linus, Larry Page, and the Yahoo founders how many cases they've modded... Or maybe Bill Gates and Ballmer I bet they've modded alot of cases. Seemingly since MS is the champion of case modders everywhere, Bill and Steve must be the kings of case modding, that's the whole reason they let you install their OS on commodity hardware.
In the end, the most important thing to this guy is how your computer case looks, not the work you get done with your PC, and its better to spend hours beating your head against MS security holes, viruses, and spyware than to get work done.
You are obviously an idiot. SBC/ATT, Verizon, and Qwest control the internet pipes.. I don't care if you use MaPa DSL, or have a Covad T1, try doing a traceroute to some sites sometime (ibm.com, microsoft.com, google.com, yahoo.com, myspace.com, vonage.com) I have comcast cable (only because its the only high speed option I have), from home accessing any one of those sites crosses one of those ILEC networks somewhere. If they are allowed to do "whatever" they want, each of those sites will have to go negotiate independent contracts with each of the telco providers just so that you can access them. At my office I have a local DSL ISP. Same thing, you cannot access sites on the internet without crossing the ILEC networks. It is not possible. Therefore anything that allows them to do anything like what they are proposing breaks the entire internet.
Ok, so I'm a programmer, I write code in at least 10 different languages and often times I'll forget "How do you do X in Y?"... Well I just ran through my last 10 such searches on google... ran the exact same searches on a9, and directly at live.com.... Yeah so "determine distance between zip codes", Google results: first 5 hits open source, freely available code to perform that calculation in PHP, python, perl, and C. Windows Live: 1 hit on the first page that was PHP related however, its a $200 closed source script, all others pay for web sites that offer a form to type in 2 zips and get the distance, but nothing that would allow me to understand how to do it.
The other 9 searches were similar. On google, I never go past the first 10 results to find the answer I'm looking for, regardless of language, technology, whatever Google always has the answer. On windows live, the first page is stuff with people who are paying for their links, or just by MS's bias they list "commercial" sites first in an effort to hold open source down. I never have used A9 but I never will now.
Ok, this was an engineering firm, and unfortunately, because of some of the software that was REQUIRED for a customer contract, this lady had to have admin rights on her machine. Yeah, that's windows for you. Further, it didn't take me 2 months to diagnose the problem, it took about 30 minutes, but it had been happening for 2 months every year for the last 5 (since they hired her).
Also, she was about 3rd in command at the company, way above me, or even the IT manager... One word from her and we'd both be fired.. So yeah we pretty much had to do what she said.
As far as the SBA audit, I was hired about 1 month before it happened, and was in the process of gathering all the licensing info, and doing an audit of all of the IT assets (they had about 30 computers whose leases had expired, and they hadn't returned, it was a complete mess). In short, it wasn't my fault, and my bosses recognized that, and I actually got a raise and a promotion after the SBA mess because of the job I did cleaning it all up.
Lord knows, I'm not a techie, but it *increases* "reliliency" by having the applications located at the data center and not my PC??? And if I can't access the Data Center? Or if the application there becomes corrupt, virus infected, etc.?
Ok, so you trust your desktop machine with a 40GB IDE disk drive, that you admit you install applications and such onto (probably from the internet), so you've got at least 1 virus, and probably 300-400 hits on a random run of spybot... and that power supply in your system isn't redundant, and if you have a UPS it maybe lasts for 5 minutes... but you trust that more than the 2 redundant servers in the data center, with triple redundant power supplies, a RAID5 SAN, and redundant NICs, and a 6 hour UPS sitting underneath it....
See, with this system, you can get full redundancy for the whole enterprise by simply building a 2-3 machine cluster... Everything is redundant, and I guarantee you I can build a system that will smoke your little Dell as far as reliability is concerned, and I can do it for the cost of maybe 10 standard PCs...
Oh yeah, and now you can access your applications from any internet connected computer, not just your Dell that sits in your cube. Also, now your computer at your cube can be replaced by a completely silent, fanless, no moving parts thin client...
If you believe part of your compensation package is being able to make system admins life hell... well I'm glad I don't work at the same place you do. Besides the license violations your machine probably presents (I know I worked at a firm that got audited by the SBA, and you wonderful users with your "Oh, I think I'll just install this app even though the IT guys told me I couldn't" cost that company more than 750k in fines). 99% of all "computer" problems are problems with some crap software the users have installed... "But I have to have this new nifty 3d Screensaver with weather reports"... Oh it logs all my keystrokes and sends them to a server in the Ukraine, and it also attempts to automatically install this software on random PCs across the internet and that's why the network has been slow for the last week? I don't care I've gotta see this cool 3d butterfly! Or my favorite was the lady who kept installing real networks player (even though we uninstalled it almost every night from her machine) to watch real time video of birds hatching... on a 128k ISDN line that fed 100+ employees... and everyone wondered why for 2 months in the spring the internet was mysteriously slow...
Part of your compensation package is not to use the computer systems however you feel... They are provided to do a job, not watch movies or play MP3s, and they are certainly not provided to allow you to run up expenses in the IT dept. If you want that go purchase your own PC, but leave the company systems to their proper function.
We currently use openvpn for a remote management service that my company offers have been using it for over a year now, more than 50 customers up, works from behind nat, with dynamic IPs, through all sorts of nasty things, and as long as the internet is up, the VPN is up and we have connectivity. Ive used alot of different VPNs (openswan, cisco, PPTP) nothing comes close to the stability of openvpn tunnels, especially when dealing with adverse network conditions (NAT of any sort, multiple NATs, poor link quality, etc) even if the internet link is pretty spotty, openvpn does a very good job of automatically renegotiating the tunnels as soon as it has connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
I love linux, but alot of this stuff pretty much pertains to anything on the internet. Do you have a linux box on the public net with SSH open? I gaurantee you are getting more than 1000 attempted logins per day. This article talks about alot of "attempted" attacks, well my linux machines on the net get port scanned at least 10 times a day, any box that has ssh running on the default port is being dictionary attacked pretty much 24/7. Sure the linux boxes aren't being turned into zombies, and I'm not sending out boatloads of spam, but my apache servers get hit with IIS attacks regularly. Putting a box with open ports on the net gaurantees you will be attacked. It doesn't matter if its linux or windows.
The difference is with windows you will probably get hacked, with linux you at least have a fighting chance.
Ok, not entirely, but Vonage is a completely unencrypted service. It is the same as sending a standard email. If you are ordering things over a Vonage phone line and saying or dialing your credit card number, it is just like emailing it. Grabbing these packets off the internet and replaying them is exceedingly simple. As your voice travels across the internet, any router along that path could be used to dump those packets and a malicious tech or hacker who has gained access to that router can very easily steal your information.
Comcast probably suffers from the exact same problem, although the traffic is probably not traversing multiple provider's networks the way Vonage is and therefore the danger should in theory be less.
winning is strongly implied by the statement in the release that they will be the only legal linux distributor once the lawsuits are over...
Or do you think that IBM will win, but SCO will be granted ownership of linux by the court just because they felt like it?
It states in the press release that they are anticipating winning their lawsuits so they are releasing this version of Linux because as soon as they win they will be the only legal provider of Linux solutions.
Obviously as others have already stated, if they are using linux 2.5 codebase, don't they have to GPL everything they added? If not, can't Linus et al sue the pants off of them?
Talk about backfiring, here's a scenario for you.. MS gives SCO a chunk of cash to go fight linux, SCO illegally uses Linux code, Linus Torvalds sues them and gets all of MSs money to further linux development...
I'm sure it is... it was a joke, it seems a little silly to me...
I was just thinking of like car ads and such "Buy the new 2003 Chevy Tahoe! All new for 2007!"...
If you're gonna use years to version your products at least use the right year.
Ok, MS just released Cluster Server 2003... Um is my clock set right? It is 2006 right?
What now in 3 years they are going to release Cluster Server 2005....
And we're supposed to be worried about it? Their software is admittedly at least 3 years behind the times right there in the title of the software it says so.
His main argument is that smart is always better than stupid, and that allowing the internet to become more "intelligent" in the way it handles traffic is a good thing. Unfortunately, The whole reason that the internet worked in the first place, and the reason its so huge is that the network is dumb, and all the intelligence is at the edges.
The whole thing was designed that way.
His other argument that the government should be in the business of preserving business models is of course obvious hypocrisy. It's not about whether or not the government is going to preserve a business model, its who's business model they are preserving. Either they help out Ebay, Google, et al, or they preserver the business models of Verizon, Qwest, AT&T et al...
He would have you believe it is either protect Google and Ebay or keep the world free of protection. In reality the choice is protect innovative companies or protect old dinosaur companies that haven't invented anything in the last 40 years.
That may be true, and I agree that DSL does depend heavily on distances etc. However, in my experience, if a line qualifies for a speed (say 3mbps) the DSL will train up at that speed, and the DSL itself will pass data at that speed. The only limitation then and the reason people aren't getting the speeds they are "paying" for is because the ISP doesn't actually have the bandwidth they are selling. You mention not having much choice, as I said previously I don't know about verizon, but with Qwest you can choose from a list of about 40 ISPs in Utah. These ISPs have peering connections with Qwest (usually at least 1 DS3, but Xmission the one I mentioned has at least 6 DS3s). The data comes off the DSL line (generally at whatever speed you're paying for because the modem trains up at that speed), heads through the CO, Qwest then routes the traffic straight to Xmission and from there out to the internet. Xmission has multiple DS3s, and I think now an OC3. They have traffic and usage graphs of all of their connections up on their website, you can see that they aren't using all of their available bandwidth, and they I have never had DSL anywhere in Utah that I didn't get the speeds I was paying for through them.
Everything comes down to the ISP. I generally favor DSL over cable simply because it offers much higher upload speeds, and being a geek I've always got a couple servers running in my house. Also with DSL I do get a choice of ISP, and I can get static IPs extremely cheap because of that (Xmission sells class C blocks for less than Comcast charges for 3 addresses). Comcast only offers 256kbps upload no matter what. I'd be willing to pay an extra $50/mo just to get 1mbps uploads, but they can't do 1mbps uploads. With DSL I get 1.5 down 1mbps up and all the static IPs I need.
If you sign up for Qwest's DSL service and use them for everything, you end up routing through their network, and they use all sorts of bandwidth limiting to prioritize their backbone and peering trunks for business connections. I'm sure that Comcast uses similar methodologies to limit the actual amount of bandwidth that is available to customers at their backbone/border. In short, the bandwidth crunch isn't at the edge, its at the core of these provider's networks where they have 2 or 3 peering connections that actually get you onto the internet, and if those are saturated, then it doesn't matter if you are 5 feet from the CO and your VDSL trains up at 45Mbps or if you are the only person in your entire city that has Cable internet and you've got the "10mbps" service, you're only going to get 1mbps.
I have had DSL on and off for the last 6 years, and I've always had test speeds within 10% of the advertised speed (IE 1300-1400 on a 1.5mb service, 700kbps on a 768 service). I don't know about verizon, where I am (Utah) its all Qwest, and I use xmission as an ISP. That to me is the difference, my parents in Nevada have DSL and ISP service both through the phone company, and it is crap their 3mbps line only gets about 1mbps. At my dad's office however, he has a different ISP and his 1mbps lines always get ~950kbps.
I have this same problem with my comcast service in Utah, supposed to have 6mbps, only ever really see about 2mbps. This has nothing to do with the differences between DSL and Cable, it has to do with providers heavily oversubscribing their bandwidth. Smaller local ISPs I've found are much better in this area. The ones I've used in 2 states have much more reasonable oversubscription rates, and generally provide the level of service they advertise. The huge carriers (Qwest, Comcast, Verizon, etc) seem to be much worse at this and probably are selling 1mb of bandwidth over 1000 times. IE Comcast sells 100,000 homes a 6mbps service, but their uplink for those 100,000 people (600,000mbps) is only a 100mbps connection. What's that? a 6000/1 oversubscription ratio... I wouldn't be suprised if that is where the telcos/cable providers are in large metro areas.
I worked for a time for a small ISP and we had an oversubscription ratio of about 75/1 on a bandwidth basis, we were using about 75% of our available bandwidth at peek usage times. In short all of our customers always got advertised speeds. If our peek usage ever got above 85% for more than a week, we would order more bandwidth.
I'm sure the telco's are squeezing as much profit as they can out of residential broadband by never upgrading their backbone links. I know for a fact that Sprint has a single OC3 servicing all of the DSL customers in the entire Las Vegas valley. I was told that by a level 3 engineer when I was trying to diagnose the slow speeds at my parents house.
I don't know what it is good for, but I'd have to say its not good for:
Sites that you might want to withstand a slashdotting.
Seriously never seen a site down so fast, the first comment was about how it was slashdotted.
This is only a new process for Novell to deal with vendors to make kernel upgrades more seamless to customers. I don't think this is going to cause all the vendors to release binary only drivers, but for the ones who do, SUSE will now work better with kernel updates. Personally, every system I use has an nvidia card in it and a marvell sata controller which only has a binary driver, about 75 systems btw... So, what kernel am I running? Oh, the stock one that came with red hat el 4, have there been security updates? YES, have I updated NO! because that is 75 systems I have to boot into text mode, rebuild the Nvidia drivers, rebuild the sata drivers, and reboot back to X windows... and that's if everything just works... I've had it not work before. Then of course you have to wait at least 2-3 weeks after red hat releases a new kernel before nvidia publishes the new version of the driver, and all in all its just a huge headache.
Binary only drivers are here to stay folks, we aren't going to abolish them, and as long as Linus is in charge of the kernel we aren't going to get a stable ABI, so, kernel update means recompile all your drivers... Any way to ease this burden is a GOOD THING because it encourages people to update their kernels. upgrading a kernel right now on any somewhat complex system, or anything that might not be 100% supported (IE wifi, some network cards, some storage devices and video cards) means a huge headache every single time a new kernel is released (by the major vendors at least 6 times a year). I estimate that if I were to keep my system updated it would take an additional 6-700 man hours per year, that is 30,000-35,000 dollars at $50/hour (which is low), you have to figure 1+ hour per system 75 systems, 6 times a year...
I attempt to follow standards as much as possible, however because IE is so hideously broken, it almost doesn't matter. I recently developed a site, ran the validator on it, it passes fine, it all works in firefox and opera, displays how its supposed to, everything's great right? Open it in IE, totally broken, things don't line up, the spacing is wrong, everything looks like crap... go through everything to fix it, get it so it displays "right" in IE, run the validator again.... oops errors all over the place...
In short I don't think its possible to write a standards compliant page and have it display in IE properly, as long as this situation persists, it will be impossible to push "standards" on the internet. If the standards don't display correctly on 90% of the computers, what are you supposed to do?
Ok, so in the end this guy left a dead end support job for a start up that could presumably create something cool and new and really change things.
This is exactly why outsourcing is a good thing. Cisco purged a bunch of people form call centers near where I live, sent all the jobs to India... Everyone was up in arms, the tech community was angry, no one could "find a job" cause suddenly there were 800+ certified, experienced techs in the job market.
Fast forward 2 years... All of the ex-cisco employees have jobs now, and alot of them have started new companies that are doing some pretty cool stuff, they are hiring people, creating more jobs, and being more innovative.
If Cisco hadn't sent all the dead end jobs to India, there would be ~50 less tech companies in the area, and about 2k less jobs. Anyway, I have seen first hand that sending these types of dead end jobs overseas is not a bad thing, even if they are "white collar", "good paying" jobs.
You're missing the point of course...
There are alot of small businesses that do business in multiple states. I own a small IT consulting/software business (3 people right now, hoping to be 5 if we get a countract we are bidding on). We already do business regularly in Utah and Nevada, we have pretty much a 50-50 split between the 2 states, however if we weren't allowed to work in Utah cause we are a Nevada business, I'd have to fire my 2 employees because our Nevada revenue/business is only enough to support me alone. My father is an attorney, he works in 6 states right now, he employees about 20 people, if he were forced to be a "Nevada Only" company, he'd have to lay off more than half his workforce.
Small companies cross state borders all the time, and the Internet and telecommuting only make it easier and more economical for a small business to do this. If we get the contract I mentioned, it is also in Utah, but we would hire 2 people locally in Utah to handle it. The Internet makes this feasible. Previously only a company with resources like MS, Oracle, etc would be able to bid on this project because it requires a local presence, now with the technology that is cheaply available, I can compete locally in many markets even though I am small.
In short, requiring a corporation to not cross state lines is patently absurd.
I agree with the fact that the tax structures and such should be changed to penalize companies for sending work overseas to a certain extent, however I can't say that offshoring of level 1 tech support has hurt much..
Personally, I have seen the positive effects of this. I work regularly with a group of people who used to work in Cisco TAC, their jobs got sent to India so.... Well, now one of them is the local manager over a team of Indians, he got a 75% pay increase, and works less hours. Another pair of these guys helped found a FTTH company that now has more than 500 homes running in their first master planned community. Another one got a job with a Cisco reseller and now is in a management position making quite a bit more money, and he has more time off... If cisco hadn't sent their jobs overseas they'd probably all be sitting there working 60+ hours a week and making 50k/yr. That's just the way it is for most people, if they aren't forced to change they don't, but there is plenty of opportunity in IT if you are good and are willing to take a bit of a risk.
I personally love tmobile. Unlike all the other US carriers they actually let you get stuff done with your phone. I have their unlimited data plan, and while its not high speed, tmobile lets me hook it up to my computer as a modem, and it works fine for ssh sessions and limited browsing when I'm on the road or not in a hot spot. It's only $20/mo for unlimited data, Verizon charges $60/mo for unlimited data, and then to use the phone as a modem they charge another $30.
I don't know how good actual "3G" is, is it better than verizon's evdo network? Is Verizon's evdo considered 3g or is it 2.5g?
My point is, VoIP doesn't work over the evdo network, latencies are just too high, and call quality is horrible, also, you can't do any QoS over the link.. basically unless actual 3G is a whole lot better than evdo, VoIP wouldn't work anyway, so the fact that they are "disallowing" it is like someone saying "Don't jump a car off a cliff" its just not a good idea.
Now, IM being outlawed is another story, but I use IM on my phone all the time in the US across their low speed plan... I think UK customers should get angry, but T-Mobile US seems much nicer, and is the best wireless carrier in the US as far as I'm concerned (been with Verizon, ATT, Cingular, Qwest, and Tmobile).
Ok, so why don't you report these problems to the Distro then?
Redhat has a bugzilla, you can pop on there any time and report bugs against their kernel.
I don't know about Suse, but I'd imagine they have some sort of bug reporting feature. And, if they fix it, then it is in the code... The way it is supposed to work is that you report bugs to Redhat/Suse, they look at them, and either fix them and pass the patch up to Linus et al, or they just talk to the kernel folks directly and say "Here's a bug we're getting reports of" and work with them to fix it. Not saying anything is the worst thing to do.
Many of you guys are bashing this guys "technical" skills, or his statements of how the hacking sessions occurred... I think there is a deeper flaw in his argument. Namely this: He is trying to hack into US Gov't computers because they have ALL the Alien secrets....
Now, why would you hack only US computers, and if the US is the only country that knows the secrets, how have we been able to convince the aliens not to crash land any ships any where else in the world where someone else could find them? Are we really to believe that out of some crazy chance the aliens only speak American English? That we are the only ones "smart" enough to figure out alien technology and reverse engineer it?
If there are aliens, and alien technology that is known and understood I see it as a huge statistical improbability that the US would have a monopoly on such. Many other countries have much larger land masses, so a chance "crash landing" (IE Roswell) if such a thing has happened, would probably occur in other nations besides the US as well.
In short for this "conspiracy" to be true, it would have to be a worldwide conspiracy involving at least the US, UK, Japan, Russia, China, the entire EU, basically the entire industrialized world with advanced science programs. Unless just by chance the Roswell incident was the *ONLY* time an alien craft has crashed, and the US just happened to get lucky.
But, even given that, with all the talk in this article of UFOs in satelite photos and such... The US isn't the only country with satelites with cameras on them, we aren't the only country with a space program. Someone else would have pictures. This guy should be bugging the UK to release their satelite photos, and the EU should have to release information from their space program too... It is bizarre to think that the US is the only country that has "happened" upon proof of aliens. Basically the whole UFO/Alien thing is a crap shoot, point a bunch of cameras, radio transmitters, etc at the sky and hope you get something. It is silly to think we are the only ones that have any successful throws in the game.
Also he mentions later in the article that he was using a dial up connection...
so yeah.. his stats are a little out of whack.
Once you've laid out a few kilobucks on your BC system and been frustrated a few times with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? Jobs's bet: You'll start spending more and more time in OS X.... It's sad to see so many of my compatriots being turned into lemmings
So, if you get fed up with Windows hickups, and change to a different system that works better, you are a lemming and a moron? It's better to just sit there and suffer through windows many shortcomings, viruses, and spyware?
After you've already been overcharged for a Mac, you need to spend another hundred dollars or so buying Windows, just for the privilege of tainting the Apple core with Microsoft's OS. You'll probably need more memory, too. Is it really worth all that extra money?
Again, this argument is idiotic.. You pay a little more for a Mac, which works better, and is easier to use, and doesn't break, and you don't have to spend an extra $100/yr on anti-virus/anti-spyware, and you don't have to call tech support every couple weeks because its "slow again". The extra cost for a mac is 100% worth it because it is a better system. So in the end, his argument is "Windows isn't worth $100 and the extra RAM you need to run it". BC is a dual boot environment, if you need "more memory" as he states, it is solely because windows is a memory hog compared to OS X.
The article is full of comments like this that are completely moronic. Here's my favorite:
The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems.
Ok, so to be a "creative computer user" I have to spend hours making my case look different from anyone else's? How exactly does that pay the bills? I think we should ask Linus, Larry Page, and the Yahoo founders how many cases they've modded... Or maybe Bill Gates and Ballmer I bet they've modded alot of cases. Seemingly since MS is the champion of case modders everywhere, Bill and Steve must be the kings of case modding, that's the whole reason they let you install their OS on commodity hardware.
In the end, the most important thing to this guy is how your computer case looks, not the work you get done with your PC, and its better to spend hours beating your head against MS security holes, viruses, and spyware than to get work done.
Um, well if your local loop is on the ILEC network, then everything you access can be messed with by them.
You are obviously an idiot. SBC/ATT, Verizon, and Qwest control the internet pipes.. I don't care if you use MaPa DSL, or have a Covad T1, try doing a traceroute to some sites sometime (ibm.com, microsoft.com, google.com, yahoo.com, myspace.com, vonage.com) I have comcast cable (only because its the only high speed option I have), from home accessing any one of those sites crosses one of those ILEC networks somewhere. If they are allowed to do "whatever" they want, each of those sites will have to go negotiate independent contracts with each of the telco providers just so that you can access them. At my office I have a local DSL ISP. Same thing, you cannot access sites on the internet without crossing the ILEC networks. It is not possible. Therefore anything that allows them to do anything like what they are proposing breaks the entire internet.
Ok, so I'm a programmer, I write code in at least 10 different languages and often times I'll forget "How do you do X in Y?"... Well I just ran through my last 10 such searches on google... ran the exact same searches on a9, and directly at live.com.... Yeah so "determine distance between zip codes", Google results: first 5 hits open source, freely available code to perform that calculation in PHP, python, perl, and C. Windows Live: 1 hit on the first page that was PHP related however, its a $200 closed source script, all others pay for web sites that offer a form to type in 2 zips and get the distance, but nothing that would allow me to understand how to do it.
The other 9 searches were similar. On google, I never go past the first 10 results to find the answer I'm looking for, regardless of language, technology, whatever Google always has the answer. On windows live, the first page is stuff with people who are paying for their links, or just by MS's bias they list "commercial" sites first in an effort to hold open source down. I never have used A9 but I never will now.
Ok, this was an engineering firm, and unfortunately, because of some of the software that was REQUIRED for a customer contract, this lady had to have admin rights on her machine. Yeah, that's windows for you. Further, it didn't take me 2 months to diagnose the problem, it took about 30 minutes, but it had been happening for 2 months every year for the last 5 (since they hired her).
Also, she was about 3rd in command at the company, way above me, or even the IT manager... One word from her and we'd both be fired.. So yeah we pretty much had to do what she said.
As far as the SBA audit, I was hired about 1 month before it happened, and was in the process of gathering all the licensing info, and doing an audit of all of the IT assets (they had about 30 computers whose leases had expired, and they hadn't returned, it was a complete mess). In short, it wasn't my fault, and my bosses recognized that, and I actually got a raise and a promotion after the SBA mess because of the job I did cleaning it all up.
Lord knows, I'm not a techie, but it *increases* "reliliency" by having the applications located at the data center and not my PC??? And if I can't access the Data Center? Or if the application there becomes corrupt, virus infected, etc.?
Ok, so you trust your desktop machine with a 40GB IDE disk drive, that you admit you install applications and such onto (probably from the internet), so you've got at least 1 virus, and probably 300-400 hits on a random run of spybot... and that power supply in your system isn't redundant, and if you have a UPS it maybe lasts for 5 minutes... but you trust that more than the 2 redundant servers in the data center, with triple redundant power supplies, a RAID5 SAN, and redundant NICs, and a 6 hour UPS sitting underneath it....
See, with this system, you can get full redundancy for the whole enterprise by simply building a 2-3 machine cluster... Everything is redundant, and I guarantee you I can build a system that will smoke your little Dell as far as reliability is concerned, and I can do it for the cost of maybe 10 standard PCs...
Oh yeah, and now you can access your applications from any internet connected computer, not just your Dell that sits in your cube. Also, now your computer at your cube can be replaced by a completely silent, fanless, no moving parts thin client...
If you believe part of your compensation package is being able to make system admins life hell... well I'm glad I don't work at the same place you do. Besides the license violations your machine probably presents (I know I worked at a firm that got audited by the SBA, and you wonderful users with your "Oh, I think I'll just install this app even though the IT guys told me I couldn't" cost that company more than 750k in fines). 99% of all "computer" problems are problems with some crap software the users have installed... "But I have to have this new nifty 3d Screensaver with weather reports"... Oh it logs all my keystrokes and sends them to a server in the Ukraine, and it also attempts to automatically install this software on random PCs across the internet and that's why the network has been slow for the last week? I don't care I've gotta see this cool 3d butterfly! Or my favorite was the lady who kept installing real networks player (even though we uninstalled it almost every night from her machine) to watch real time video of birds hatching... on a 128k ISDN line that fed 100+ employees... and everyone wondered why for 2 months in the spring the internet was mysteriously slow...
Part of your compensation package is not to use the computer systems however you feel... They are provided to do a job, not watch movies or play MP3s, and they are certainly not provided to allow you to run up expenses in the IT dept. If you want that go purchase your own PC, but leave the company systems to their proper function.
We currently use openvpn for a remote management service that my company offers have been using it for over a year now, more than 50 customers up, works from behind nat, with dynamic IPs, through all sorts of nasty things, and as long as the internet is up, the VPN is up and we have connectivity. Ive used alot of different VPNs (openswan, cisco, PPTP) nothing comes close to the stability of openvpn tunnels, especially when dealing with adverse network conditions (NAT of any sort, multiple NATs, poor link quality, etc) even if the internet link is pretty spotty, openvpn does a very good job of automatically renegotiating the tunnels as soon as it has connectivity.