I contend that existing legislation is draconian because the vast majority of representatives know good and well that their constiuency by and large would not be negatively impacted by the most severe anti-hacking legislation immaginable. In fact they probably couldn't avoid political suicide by countering such measures. Its not a matter of whether the law is strict or too strict and thereby we have to take blame for using weak tools & code its what popular public opinion will swallow given special interest group involvments. We have something of a police state going on right now as a behind the scenes infrastructure protection mechanism in this time of perpetual conflict. To most people this simply could not possibly matter. To the people who's job it is to care about such things, well, you have a state or federal job. Congratulations.
To most of our citizenry Its like being an 85 year old in Singapore, sure the kids and foreigners may gripe about the strictness of the laws a bit but you personally are rather comforted by the fact that they would be taking their life in their hands if they were hanging out in your front lawn drinking beer. All that said however I'm tired of seeing leglislation implemented on the sly allowing law enforcement such access into my personal life that I think my proctologist would have take a number.
he laws & their enforcemnet do get annoying but really, the responsibility is on the individual and anyone truly concerned about this already knows fine and well that their concerns are rooted in the liklihood that they're breaking at least the spirit of existing laws and damn them for making things worse for the rest of us. I'm not down for giving them a cookie for making my life more difficult, I don't care what form it comes in.
Again, I have no pity for the law enforcement in this matter either, they've got broader sweeping powers and bigger budgets than ever because of global affairs and at a time when state budgets have clearly chosen to fund them over our teachers. You're the guys with the training budgets not the kids of tommorrow, cry me a freaking river. Its incumbent on law enforcement to know the laws we're being arm-twisted into funding so fine. Since I've picked up the check you can go do your damn job and go after real criminals I'll just work on finding the cash to afford home schooling. Clemency contingencies surrounding coding choices that involve notoriously weak tools hardly seem relevant to American citizenry when we're playing fast and loose with our literacy rating. We paid for the law enforcment, let them go after the non-americans who still have a clue on cracking a crappy program. We're just a bunch of old folks who want those damn kids off our lawn.
It generally means a good time smashing the thing to bits since the repair vs. replacement costs favor a mass produced replacement. Seriously, what DO large system builder do with those broken system boards anyway?
I'm sitting here looking at a perfectly good alphaserver vintage 1994 that no one at work had any use for and hence I've inherited.
We use some BSD to squeeze a little more life out of a few aging x86 boxes for mail, etc. but to the best of my knowledge, nothing really touches linux when it comes to a.) hardware compatibility coupled with b.) application support and c.) a snowball's chance in hell of getting a support contract that will keep your TCO south of the prison rape that is MS licensing. But then, I'm the small fish...
In any event, if you have a mixed platform environment and a few older systems the capacity to leverage that hardware's remaining capabilities given a homogenous OS environemnt, open standards and fine-grained configurability creates the potential (in my mind) for a very excellent short term return on investment.
Furthermore, its a relatively low risk scenario for you and other management members to get good, hard fact data about what the realities of the differences in TCO is using linux in _Your Environment_ .
And with the addition of DRM in the intel lines we can know exactly how quickly we won't be able to install the patch for the broken / insecure bit of GNU code.
Wake me up when its about AMD.
VMS does seem to be a well thought out OS that was once popular due to the donations of vaxen to colleges. When that stopped it hurt the future of the OS. Nowadays considering VMS as a well engineered application serving tool or UNI* as a massively popular programming tool that has evolved tons of capability is irrelevant.
Technical superiority is dependant on what you need to get done and the largest measure of what is accomplished isn't necessarily the OS but rather the OS user.
My company has dozens of both OpenVMS and Unix systems. If VMS is technically superior it is completely irrelevant because of its diminished popularity the number of choices for applications to run on it is so limited that the ones we have are TERRIBLE and no alternatives exist in the market. I work with _extremely_ smart and talented career VMS system managers but barely a week goes by without some sort of outage occurring thanks to poorly written vendor applications. By far the bulk of skill in my company is on VMS support over Unix support. Everyone says VMS is technically superior becuase of the organizational approach it was created under. I'm saying it doesn't make a damn bit of difference now because its not popular and therefore has crap applications.
People seem to typically bond with and prefer one OS over others and that probably has a hell of alot more to do with what they have in common personality wise with the creators of that OS than anything else. If a command "made sense" to the creator you'll expect to find it and will get great use from it, etc.
I wonder if I'll be the old-timer in a future post like this tenaciously clinging to my legacy red hat systems while they gripe and moan so confident that we should be moving servers to OpenBeOS. The thing is they may have a point. If you're toying with the idea of moving work off your present platform you may as well attempt to find one using modern industry standars and avoiding pointless legacy code.
Has anyone addressed the fact that the alpha processor line is being discontinued in like five years or so? Without a port to the IA-64 that issue alone seems to make this idea suspect.
With one exception the persons with degrees in my shop from the VP of operations down do not have CS degrees however they do have degrees so the major doesn't necessarily matter although CS can do nothing but help. Having a degree gets you 10-20% more pay on average and demonstrates to an employer that you are able to thrive in a beauracracy (read: succeed in this corporate environment). That alone makes you more attractive to employers. There is also some age discrimination you may run into which is easily avoided while improving yourself by aging while getting a degree (our security admin is 20-ish and some career operators bristle at how much more he is likely paid than they are). You can also gain valuable skills and contacts by working help desk or computer operations jobs while going to school. If you pick the right shift it's like getting paid to study. Finally, I was promoted out of operations and haven't finished my degree yet. While I'm making it as a junior admin and this career wasn't always my goal, I don't think I would've gained this position much earlier in life than I did (age 30) unless I had posessed a degree. There are always exceptions and more development oriented shops simply want ability in any shape or form alot of companies nowadays are probably using the economic downturn and the glut of applicants to pick and choose people based on factors other than skill set. That means a degreed, regular bather who owns at least one tie and can pass a drug test once a year I'd bet. Good luck.
If you install linux which you acquired from a linux solutions provider & also purchase support, installing on hardware you already own, do you really save alot of money? What are the support & liscensing costs for Tru64 or AIX vs the same service costs for linux acquired from Compaq or IBM? I have a feeling that the difference isn't great however, the difference in liscensing any *nix vs. liscensing any M$ product is like night and day. Why isn't M$ the easier target?
I suspect you've already got soem sort of RAID in place. Redundant boxes are nice but server class processors and memory are mindblowingly expensive.
Implementing an object oriented "filesystem" is something that is still being toyed with at MIT and who knows where else. There are supposed to be benefits to it but you would be insane to trust this much data to a bought and paid for solution that comes with certain guarantees.
Drop this idea. Drop it now. Maybe someday Oracle or someone will have a solution based around this, maybe someone already does but for the love of the great pumpkin don't home brew something this big. Have you considered clustering, do you have fibre to disk already, can your boxes do load balancing, does all that data have to be live or can you lighten the load by archiving some data? So many questions but most importantly: Have you exhausted every/Vendor Supported Solution/ to address the availability and performance considerations you have? I strongly suggest buying some solution over creating your own and risking the farm.
All the same here's some linkage related:
http://org.lcs.mit.edu/SOW/proceedings/2001/xyz. pd f Good luck.
I use Tivoli at work to backup our unix boxes but there are lots of gpl'd backup software solutions out there. At home I put a controller card and a 80GB HDD in a POS 233. Works fine and although it looks terrible sitting on top of the AT case at least it makes it easily removable;) Provided the rebate ever gets here total backup cost to me will be a one time $150 including the controller. Everyone has to learn their own data requirements though. If you need more data integrity than availability then a stack of CD-RW's kept in your desk at work may be an even cheaper and more appropriate solution. My only real contribution then I suppose is: decide on what you're looking for in a backup and find a gpl'd backup app that fills the bill. The right app can GREATLY decrease the amount of time your backups run and maybe also decrease the footprint of the data itself.
I was (and am) 30 years old when I was promoted from computer operations (where I only worked for a year, my first IT type job) to become a junior systems analyst/programmer aka AIX sysadmin.
I guess just having a foot in the door via working in operations is what helped me most. All I would have ever had to do was pick an OS or application, database, etc that the company used and dedicated myself to learning more about it for a year and the company notices and put you on the project.
I guess I'm just one of very few people in my company who are in any way connected to the *nix online subculture.
Slashdot Mirror
mmm new diet
to Howard Carmack? Privately organized space travel funded by spam revenue...too...conflicted...must...speak...with.. .dramatic...laboured..words
I contend that existing legislation is draconian because the vast majority of representatives know good and well that their constiuency by and large would not be negatively impacted by the most severe anti-hacking legislation immaginable. In fact they probably couldn't avoid political suicide by countering such measures. Its not a matter of whether the law is strict or too strict and thereby we have to take blame for using weak tools & code its what popular public opinion will swallow given special interest group involvments. We have something of a police state going on right now as a behind the scenes infrastructure protection mechanism in this time of perpetual conflict. To most people this simply could not possibly matter. To the people who's job it is to care about such things, well, you have a state or federal job. Congratulations.
To most of our citizenry Its like being an 85 year old in Singapore, sure the kids and foreigners may gripe about the strictness of the laws a bit but you personally are rather comforted by the fact that they would be taking their life in their hands if they were hanging out in your front lawn drinking beer. All that said however I'm tired of seeing leglislation implemented on the sly allowing law enforcement such access into my personal life that I think my proctologist would have take a number.
he laws & their enforcemnet do get annoying but really, the responsibility is on the individual and anyone truly concerned about this already knows fine and well that their concerns are rooted in the liklihood that they're breaking at least the spirit of existing laws and damn them for making things worse for the rest of us. I'm not down for giving them a cookie for making my life more difficult, I don't care what form it comes in.
Again, I have no pity for the law enforcement in this matter either, they've got broader sweeping powers and bigger budgets than ever because of global affairs and at a time when state budgets have clearly chosen to fund them over our teachers. You're the guys with the training budgets not the kids of tommorrow, cry me a freaking river. Its incumbent on law enforcement to know the laws we're being arm-twisted into funding so fine. Since I've picked up the check you can go do your damn job and go after real criminals I'll just work on finding the cash to afford home schooling. Clemency contingencies surrounding coding choices that involve notoriously weak tools hardly seem relevant to American citizenry when we're playing fast and loose with our literacy rating. We paid for the law enforcment, let them go after the non-americans who still have a clue on cracking a crappy program.
We're just a bunch of old folks who want those damn kids off our lawn.
It generally means a good time smashing the thing to bits since the repair vs. replacement costs favor a mass produced replacement. Seriously, what DO large system builder do with those broken system boards anyway?
I'm sitting here looking at a perfectly good alphaserver vintage 1994 that no one at work had any use for and hence I've inherited.
We use some BSD to squeeze a little more life out of a few aging x86 boxes for mail, etc. but to the best of my knowledge, nothing really touches linux when it comes to a.) hardware compatibility coupled with b.) application support and c.) a snowball's chance in hell of getting a support contract that will keep your TCO south of the prison rape that is MS licensing. But then, I'm the small fish...
In any event, if you have a mixed platform environment and a few older systems the capacity to leverage that hardware's remaining capabilities given a homogenous OS environemnt, open standards and fine-grained configurability creates the potential (in my mind) for a very excellent short term return on investment.
Furthermore, its a relatively low risk scenario for you and other management members to get good, hard fact data about what the realities of the differences in TCO is using linux in _Your Environment_ .
And with the addition of DRM in the intel lines we can know exactly how quickly we won't be able to install the patch for the broken / insecure bit of GNU code.
Wake me up when its about AMD.
VMS does seem to be a well thought out OS that was once popular due to the donations of vaxen to colleges. When that stopped it hurt the future of the OS. Nowadays considering VMS as a well engineered application serving tool or UNI* as a massively popular programming tool that has evolved tons of capability is irrelevant.
Technical superiority is dependant on what you need to get done and the largest measure of what is accomplished isn't necessarily the OS but rather the OS user.
My company has dozens of both OpenVMS and Unix systems. If VMS is technically superior it is completely irrelevant because of its diminished popularity the number of choices for applications to run on it is so limited that the ones we have are TERRIBLE and no alternatives exist in the market. I work with _extremely_ smart and talented career VMS system managers but barely a week goes by without some sort of outage occurring thanks to poorly written vendor applications. By far the bulk of skill in my company is on VMS support over Unix support. Everyone says VMS is technically superior becuase of the organizational approach it was created under. I'm saying it doesn't make a damn bit of difference now because its not popular and therefore has crap applications.
People seem to typically bond with and prefer one OS over others and that probably has a hell of alot more to do with what they have in common personality wise with the creators of that OS than anything else. If a command "made sense" to the creator you'll expect to find it and will get great use from it, etc.
I wonder if I'll be the old-timer in a future post like this tenaciously clinging to my legacy red hat systems while they gripe and moan so confident that we should be moving servers to OpenBeOS. The thing is they may have a point. If you're toying with the idea of moving work off your present platform you may as well attempt to find one using modern industry standars and avoiding pointless legacy code.
Has anyone addressed the fact that the alpha processor line is being discontinued in like five years or so? Without a port to the IA-64 that issue alone seems to make this idea suspect.
With one exception the persons with degrees in my shop from the VP of operations down do not have CS degrees however they do have degrees so the major doesn't necessarily matter although CS can do nothing but help. Having a degree gets you 10-20% more pay on average and demonstrates to an employer that you are able to thrive in a beauracracy (read: succeed in this corporate environment). That alone makes you more attractive to employers. There is also some age discrimination you may run into which is easily avoided while improving yourself by aging while getting a degree (our security admin is 20-ish and some career operators bristle at how much more he is likely paid than they are). You can also gain valuable skills and contacts by working help desk or computer operations jobs while going to school. If you pick the right shift it's like getting paid to study. Finally, I was promoted out of operations and haven't finished my degree yet. While I'm making it as a junior admin and this career wasn't always my goal, I don't think I would've gained this position much earlier in life than I did (age 30) unless I had posessed a degree. There are always exceptions and more development oriented shops simply want ability in any shape or form alot of companies nowadays are probably using the economic downturn and the glut of applicants to pick and choose people based on factors other than skill set. That means a degreed, regular bather who owns at least one tie and can pass a drug test once a year I'd bet. Good luck.
If you install linux which you acquired from a linux solutions provider & also purchase support, installing on hardware you already own, do you really save alot of money? What are the support & liscensing costs for Tru64 or AIX vs the same service costs for linux acquired from Compaq or IBM? I have a feeling that the difference isn't great however, the difference in liscensing any *nix vs. liscensing any M$ product is like night and day. Why isn't M$ the easier target?
I suspect you've already got soem sort of RAID in place. Redundant boxes are nice but server class processors and memory are mindblowingly expensive. /Vendor Supported Solution/ to address the availability and performance considerations you have? I strongly suggest buying some solution over creating your own and risking the farm.
. pd f Good luck.
Implementing an object oriented "filesystem" is something that is still being toyed with at MIT and who knows where else. There are supposed to be benefits to it but you would be insane to trust this much data to a bought and paid for solution that comes with certain guarantees.
Drop this idea. Drop it now. Maybe someday Oracle or someone will have a solution based around this, maybe someone already does but for the love of the great pumpkin don't home brew something this big. Have you considered clustering, do you have fibre to disk already, can your boxes do load balancing, does all that data have to be live or can you lighten the load by archiving some data? So many questions but most importantly: Have you exhausted every
All the same here's some linkage related:
http://org.lcs.mit.edu/SOW/proceedings/2001/xyz
I use Tivoli at work to backup our unix boxes but there are lots of gpl'd backup software solutions out there. At home I put a controller card and a 80GB HDD in a POS 233. Works fine and although it looks terrible sitting on top of the AT case at least it makes it easily removable ;) Provided the rebate ever gets here total backup cost to me will be a one time $150 including the controller. Everyone has to learn their own data requirements though. If you need more data integrity than availability then a stack of CD-RW's kept in your desk at work may be an even cheaper and more appropriate solution. My only real contribution then I suppose is: decide on what you're looking for in a backup and find a gpl'd backup app that fills the bill. The right app can GREATLY decrease the amount of time your backups run and maybe also decrease the footprint of the data itself.
I was (and am) 30 years old when I was promoted from computer operations (where I only worked for a year, my first IT type job) to become a junior systems analyst/programmer aka AIX sysadmin.
I guess just having a foot in the door via working in operations is what helped me most. All I would have ever had to do was pick an OS or application, database, etc that the company used and dedicated myself to learning more about it for a year and the company notices and put you on the project.
I guess I'm just one of very few people in my company who are in any way connected to the *nix online subculture.