Well, that was another beef I had, the President of the company fought all my attempts at trying to enhance security. His belief was that it just 'got in the way', and that 'he trusts the employees, it's a small company'. Any suggestion that incompetence was a large concern, well, that also got met with 'well, we'd just fire anyone who made a significant mistake. The contractor was sent packing in a few weeks after this incident.
The guy refused to even let me enable WEP on their access point, saying 'that would be too hard to deal with'. All this accountability without power to do anything about it makes me glad I'm at a new job, where pointing out problems that others want to gloss over and fighting over it as needed is encouraged and rewarded;)
After I had been working there a while and mentioned time and time again their infrastructure *needed* a more controlled storage strategy (as it was, critical data was spread across many non-redundant systems (whichever happened to have free space at the time), and added drives ad-hoc to whatever was there. When time was up on the current storage and they were just about to order an extra 40 GB disk to slap in an Ultra 10 to bolster things, one drive crashed hard and took out critically important data. So I'm finally asked to, on a shoestring budget, give them a decent file server with some redundancy. I price out a PC system to put linux on and 6 cheap IDE disks and three IDE controllers, all new, warrantied parts that would interoperate in a standard way such that any one component failure would leave an easily recoverable situation, even if not necessarily highly available (even if totally destroyed, a tape unit would at least finally be effective being attached to more than 1% of the companies date).
After viewing this, the guy actually making the purchase says 'IDE is not enterprise quality! You can get SCSI storage on a shoestring budget!' and proceeds to acquire a rack-mountable, 14-or-so hotswap SCSI enclosure with 18 GB discs...from some random eBayer, no warranty, no service, no promises, and blows more than the entire budget I was told to go with on *just* a hardware RAID controller. After a week of them using it strongly against my warnings, the whole thing goes down unrecoverably bad... turns out the SCSI enclosure had a malfunctioning backplane and had been corrupting data all the while....
It turned out that before I was around they had a Maxtor IDE-based NAS with two drives per chain and running Windows 2000. One drive went bad and the system went down hard as the other drive on the chain was unreachable. Though all data was recovered when Maxtor sent a drive 2 days later (they didn't want to run non-redundant or with unsupported IDE disks for fear of losing something without recourse.. understandable at least) and so the business guy had learned IDE==bad, lose data. I told him that in this case, it would be one drive per channel, and in the event of failure any ol drive from the local Best Buy would do and he wouldn't have to wait days for a replacement, but that whole job was an exercise of great accountibilty with zero authority to do anything about anything...
Almost every job before and the job I have held since has been infinitely better.
My favorite conversation I had as a sysadmin highly frustrated years ago. We had some old SunOS systems and newer, but still old HP-UX systems that came in and was trying to get things to work at least relatively seamlessly, and for some reason or another something wasn't working right (was many years ago, have no idea, probably an nfs issue/nis configuration). Anyway, so one non-technical user was there as I was trying to get some basic, critical functionality restored. She was curious and asked: 'What's wrong with it, what are you trying to fix?' My response: 'You see, our old network smokes crack, and these new systems.... well they smoke crack too, but it's different crack and they don't seem to be capatible crack' She gota tad angry and obviously felt insulted by my talking down (probably thought I was talking that way because she was a girl) and said 'I can handle a more technical explanation than that!' My honest response: "Well *I* can't" At which point she understood and laughed rather than be angry.
Another one of my past stories, I was working with this contractor once and he was charged with the task of configuring a new HP-UX server that had been ordered. He hooks it up to the network alongside the main nfs/nis HP-UX server of the company, and strolls back to his desk and telnets into the IP he thought he was assigning. Suddenly he thinks 'hmmm.... the hostname of this new box happens to be the same as our main server... better change that.... wow, the IP it will enact in a minute too, that is *really* weird, well, better change, reboot and.....' Suddenly, across the company systems hung as the NIS/NFS server moved. The contractor had no idea what was happening until someone else took a look...
RIAA would love this... MP3 is deeply entrenched, if they feel they can pull something off where at first glance on an online file, users won't know if it is DRM-enabled or not and confusion reigns, they will acheive greater market penetration for DRM-enabled files. Once user goes through effort to get mp3 only to end up with a DRM-crippled MP3, the industry expects the user will be too lazy/apathetic to 'rectify' the situation so long as user can listen to music him/herself. If a user has a DRM-enabled MP3, the prospect of getting a traditional MP3 no longer means user gets to listen, plus share, it means the user would have to go through the trouble of getting the MP3 *just* so he can share what he already has. For most common users, selfishness/apathy reigns high enough it might just work...
Exactly why companies would be very interested in having something that 'makes sense' to call.mp3. They want the market to be confused in the hopes that DRM becomes more ubiquitous, as it has failed to thus far. People are not crazy about.aac and.wma precisely because the names are closesly tied to the DRM concept in people's minds. True, neither require DRM, but that feature weighs so heavily on the mind of the consumer, the (.wma/.aac)==DRM perception is pretty well entrenched..mp3==good/free beer is very entrenched and thus people wouldn't have the same issue with DRM-enabled mp3, and the best DRM (in the minds of the RIAA, etc) is where the user doesn't know his file is afflicted until it is too late. If someone wants to retrieve a file, that person has thus far been frequently willing to go a little out of the way to get the 'safe' mp3 format version rather than risk.wma/.aac files even if they are easier to get. If user ends up with crippled mp3 and is a common person, I would give >90% probablity they won't bother to do anything about it so long as they have already went through the trouble and can hear it themselves. Sharing with his buddies is a nice plus, but he won't give a rat's ass if it involves a sufficient amount of work when he has already gone through enough to get what he has for himself.
Re:Two concerns: Resale and housing code
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From looking at their site, I would say if it subtracts value or decreases resale value, you can likely undo all your hardware changes in a couple of hours at no cost (servos on the actual vents, wiring in the duct system, no extra cutting, drilling, or equipment in inconvenient places.) While the solution is suboptimal (as they say, vent-placed equipment is not perfect), it is cheap and easily reversible in case you worry about that.
Now as to the usability, it appears there is a current problem there with respect to the common user. However, once invested in the hardware and if you have a decent head for development, the system seems that it has a great potential for being amazingly simple (I have not looked at the code myself) to tack on a custom designed GUI with your touchscreen in mind. Of course, embedding a significant flat panel in the wall is not so reversible as the cheap approach;)
Not quite so feasible... When it comes to mass-production of decoding chips, very low power (in both the wattage and processing power area), highly customized decoders are far far more economical than general purpose processors. Even the Crusoe is high power by the standards of these processors. Additionally, it is hard to predict the processing capacity of the player unless you enforce a standard hardware set anyway. You say today a Crusoe can handle any codec, but what if some break through occurs that can be implemented handily in a specialized hardware, but no software implementation can work with the Crusoe used in the mass market at the time? Additionally, the extra few megs of storage required to be that flexible is a lot more expensive than the current requirements.
Just take some time to think about the cheapest general processor based system you have ever seen that is capable of decoding MPEG-2 without dropping frames, and then compare it to the sub-50 dollar DVD players out there. It is a nice dream, but the price is a lot higher overall, and customers would be resistant to such a market change.
Actually, OpenBSD is the extremely secure environment, FreeBSD's main focus is not security like OpenBSD. Perhaps more focused on security than most platforms, they still aren't super obsessed with it like OpenBSD is.
Could it be that there are more Windows systems out there (as opposed to BSD or Linux)?
<just pointing out that perhaps Linux is starting to see *exactly* why Windows has been plagued with security problems, and I fear Linux may fear no better given equal marketshare...>
Ok, that was by far the most stretch of a paranoia theory I have ever seen.
Let me first say that when I say 'Linux', I refer to the concept of the Linux platform. That generally means Linux kernel, GNU tools (gcc, fileutils, tar, etc etc etc), XFree, apache, KDE, Gnome. I know, all of those things but the kernel run on BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Windows, OSX, etc etc. I know Linux could have all of those replaced easy (GNU tools with BSD tools, with effort, apache with iPlanet, XFree with any number of alternatives, and KDE/Gnome with something barebones), but ultimately Linux means to 99% of the userbase is whatever their distro makes convenient and recommends.
MS is bed with Apple? Not quite, MS has provided a lot af financial/application support as a token gesture of not being a monopoly, but it is not a willful situation. If you wanted to say it was MS FUD, the study would have had to find Windows above Mac and maybe BSD.
No, this article is not MS-funded FUD. It may be flawed (not saying it is, but it can at least be accused of *that* within reason), but just because Linux loses in some study does not automatically mean MS has a hand in it.
As to my thoughts on platform inherent security, there are things to consider.
Trying to cop out saying Linux is just a kernel, and in and of itself hasn't had *remote* exploits for a long while is just ridiculous. Automaticaly assuming remote exploits triggered in Apache on a Linux box means the exploit is merely an Apache problem and likely occurs on other Apache platforms can be frequently wrong. There are many defects that result in interactions with particular platforms in any multi-platform application. Though the strength of Linux is choice and diversity in the apps/environment you can run (same is true of BSD of course), the disadvantage is that to compare MS platforms fairly, you have to include all this extra stuff as potential combinations users would use to acheive Windows functionality, and all their problems count against the Linux platform (and to an equal extent, BSD). Any mozilla, Gnome, KDE, XFree86, or Apache problems count against Linux in the same way IE, Explorer, and IIS problems count against Windows.
Additionally, the security mechanisms provided by out-of-the box vanilla linux kernel (or even most distro-patched kernels) are admittedly weak compared, say, to some OpenBSD paranoia-sating features. GRSecurity/SELinux is an improvement on that, but it isn't fair to call that mainstream Linux just yet. Even the Windows platform has managed to support more low-level security features before linux (ACLs are an example, I know in my kernels as of late I have EA/ACL support on filesystems, but XFS was the first implementation available, and the NT platform support for ACL preceded it). Now as to whether other platforms make effective use out of the features out of the box/make it easy to use them effectively, I would say Windows *really* fails, but on a case-by-case basis, these are features in the past that a Windows administrator that a) is actually competent and b) that actually cares enough to put forth the effort historically could make use of to configure a system that, from some aspects, are more secure. On the other hand, my experience has been that getting from the state of the extremely poor, out-of-the-box security of Windows to any respectably secure configuration is a tiresome and daunting task that requires high competentence and a lot of dedication to care. If trying to secure common user's workstations, it also requires education and changing the way they are used to using Windows.
For another, worms/viruses thrive in a homogeneous platform environment, which is Microsoft currently due to market dominance, so naturally you can expect a lot more effort put into exploiting Windows as it 'pays off' so much more. Assuming Linux systems in general were succeptible to a number of virus-capable exploits, the world would never know until it gets popular enough for the script kiddies
I've run the X Window System, but never heard of this X Windows thing.
Seriously though, X Windows is by no means the right name for X, it is either simply X, or, if you must, X Window System, not plural.
Besides, MS would be crazy to chase that, as X existed before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gates' eyes, and serves as irrefutable evidence that in the context of computer GUI, that Windows is a generic term and therefore cannot be trademarked.
I hate to say it, but under the circumstances, more than one short stint of unemployment isn't necessarily the mark of an unqualified candidate.
If I hadn't been so low on savings and unemployment, I would have had a three month stint a couple of years ago (instead I took the equivalent of a minimum wage job, but still technical to a degree), and then another a couple of years ago, and in both cases I really had no control.
At worst you could say my job search and marketing skills were poor. In fact that may be true, to end the stint I had a year ago I had to go through a contract company that gave my resume the marketing touch, and ultimately I performed so well the contracting company's client went to a good deal of trouble to hire me directly (thankfully) with a significant raise after about half a year. So the beginning of my stints were unfortunate, but not my fault, and the duration of the stints reflects mostly the labor market, and worst case my job-seeking/marketing skills more than technical.
Of course, despite my good standing currently, I always fear that a shutdown will happen yet again. I'm somewhat reassured because I know exactly where to go (contracting, hate it, but at the same time their marketing skills are better than mine), and were it not for this lucky coincidence past, I would guarantee it would take several months to find a new job were I to lose my current one.
Actually, SCO was talking about the likes of Google, Governments, essentially a large corporate entity user of linux, not a common user.
But now that you mention it, we should bring this up to Fox, yet *another* reality show. It could be like the apprentice, but replace Trump with Darl McBride and replace 'you're fired' with 'you're being sued'. Excellent.
It will probably be x86_64+extra instructions, akin to the MMX, SSE*, and 3dnow instructions have been unique things in the x86 world...
I think AMD has managed to set a standard here. Perhaps AMD's choice to name the instruction set x86_64 rather than pushing AMD64 as a name was to encourage Intel to produce something compatible without Intel prominently having to show that it wasn't their idea...
I know from all of the Cingular commercials I hear that Cingular is a small little company against the big behemoths, right? They aren't some big, huge wireless provider, the commercials say they are like a little adept startup. Commercials wouldn't lie would they?
I think the parent post is referring to IBM desktops/laptops rather than servers. It is clear as day servers have top-notch linux support from IBM, but I'm not sure on the Thinkpad/Desktop systems that is the case.
I'm more doubtful of your outcome. For one, IBM experts will likely be at least as committed and passionate about their points as SCO experts. Though IBM is a huge corporation, individual experts in Linux are really passionate about not letting this go through.
Secondly, a settlement right now makes no PR sense. A settlement would have come earlier to cut down on potential bad press. Settling now makes it look like they were in the wrong, or else just caved in, neither of which would look good to the linux customer base, which is *very* important to IBM. More likely, if IBM thought they would lose, they would keep their lawyer army going long enough to exhaust SCO resources. However, in this case so far, IBM has been pushing for more quick progression while SCO has been dragging their feet. This tells me that SCO's position is probably weak and that IBM is extremely confident they can win this case legitimately.
Regardless of outcome, IBM will probably not drop out of linux development, it is far too important. They would buy out SCO before they did that. They have high regard for linux, it is becoming a core part of their strategy. You remember the 50 million put into Novell as the SuSE purchase was going on, they have a lot on the line to just throw it away now.
Isn't the XBox2 also a PPC box? Isn't that a rather *significant* obstacle even if video chipset problems are resolved? I have never seen a 700 PIII emulated in software at a gaming-acceptable rate anywhere. Anyone more informed about this?
Actually, I can't think of a single good reason for anyone to have a fully open relay on a mail server. I can see relays for IP networks, I can understand authenticated relay, but what possible justification is there for a fully open relay these days? Even ISPs restrict SMTP servers for their IP subnets. If you need to support road warrior configurations, give those users a username and password and tell them how to configure SMTP with TLS and authentication. The most flexible mail server I have right now is a relay for two internal networks, and external users only after authenticating (and authentication only allowed after STARTTLS).
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Well, that was another beef I had, the President of the company fought all my attempts at trying to enhance security. His belief was that it just 'got in the way', and that 'he trusts the employees, it's a small company'. Any suggestion that incompetence was a large concern, well, that also got met with 'well, we'd just fire anyone who made a significant mistake. The contractor was sent packing in a few weeks after this incident.
;)
The guy refused to even let me enable WEP on their access point, saying 'that would be too hard to deal with'. All this accountability without power to do anything about it makes me glad I'm at a new job, where pointing out problems that others want to gloss over and fighting over it as needed is encouraged and rewarded
Story from my previous doomed job:
After I had been working there a while and mentioned time and time again their infrastructure *needed* a more controlled storage strategy (as it was, critical data was spread across many non-redundant systems (whichever happened to have free space at the time), and added drives ad-hoc to whatever was there. When time was up on the current storage and they were just about to order an extra 40 GB disk to slap in an Ultra 10 to bolster things, one drive crashed hard and took out critically important data. So I'm finally asked to, on a shoestring budget, give them a decent file server with some redundancy. I price out a PC system to put linux on and 6 cheap IDE disks and three IDE controllers, all new, warrantied parts that would interoperate in a standard way such that any one component failure would leave an easily recoverable situation, even if not necessarily highly available (even if totally destroyed, a tape unit would at least finally be effective being attached to more than 1% of the companies date).
After viewing this, the guy actually making the purchase says 'IDE is not enterprise quality! You can get SCSI storage on a shoestring budget!' and proceeds to acquire a rack-mountable, 14-or-so hotswap SCSI enclosure with 18 GB discs...from some random eBayer, no warranty, no service, no promises, and blows more than the entire budget I was told to go with on *just* a hardware RAID controller. After a week of them using it strongly against my warnings, the whole thing goes down unrecoverably bad... turns out the SCSI enclosure had a malfunctioning backplane and had been corrupting data all the while....
It turned out that before I was around they had a Maxtor IDE-based NAS with two drives per chain and running Windows 2000. One drive went bad and the system went down hard as the other drive on the chain was unreachable. Though all data was recovered when Maxtor sent a drive 2 days later (they didn't want to run non-redundant or with unsupported IDE disks for fear of losing something without recourse.. understandable at least) and so the business guy had learned IDE==bad, lose data.
I told him that in this case, it would be one drive per channel, and in the event of failure any ol drive from the local Best Buy would do and he wouldn't have to wait days for a replacement, but that whole job was an exercise of great accountibilty with zero authority to do anything about anything...
Almost every job before and the job I have held since has been infinitely better.
My favorite conversation I had as a sysadmin highly frustrated years ago. We had some old SunOS systems and newer, but still old HP-UX systems that came in and was trying to get things to work at least relatively seamlessly, and for some reason or another something wasn't working right (was many years ago, have no idea, probably an nfs issue/nis configuration). Anyway, so one non-technical user was there as I was trying to get some basic, critical functionality restored. She was curious and asked:
'What's wrong with it, what are you trying to fix?'
My response: 'You see, our old network smokes crack, and these new systems.... well they smoke crack too, but it's different crack and they don't seem to be capatible crack'
She gota tad angry and obviously felt insulted by my talking down (probably thought I was talking that way because she was a girl) and said 'I can handle a more technical explanation than that!'
My honest response: "Well *I* can't"
At which point she understood and laughed rather than be angry.
Another one of my past stories, I was working with this contractor once and he was charged with the task of configuring a new HP-UX server that had been ordered. He hooks it up to the network alongside the main nfs/nis HP-UX server of the company, and strolls back to his desk and telnets into the IP he thought he was assigning. Suddenly he thinks 'hmmm.... the hostname of this new box happens to be the same as our main server... better change that.... wow, the IP it will enact in a minute too, that is *really* weird, well, better change, reboot and.....' Suddenly, across the company systems hung as the NIS/NFS server moved. The contractor had no idea what was happening until someone else took a look...
Hmm... moderated yourself nicely.
IBM supports native x86_64 distros (SLES8/AMD64 now, and looks like RHEL3/AMD64). So IBM supports you running 64-bit today.
Windows is working towards 64-bit for Opteron, so yes, MS is recompiling their crap for Opteron.
Simply because there is a logical reason for images being flash makes it no less annoying as hell.
Opteron is a fascinating platform, and very cool, *especially* with respect to 64 bit computing.
RIAA would love this... MP3 is deeply entrenched, if they feel they can pull something off where at first glance on an online file, users won't know if it is DRM-enabled or not and confusion reigns, they will acheive greater market penetration for DRM-enabled files. Once user goes through effort to get mp3 only to end up with a DRM-crippled MP3, the industry expects the user will be too lazy/apathetic to 'rectify' the situation so long as user can listen to music him/herself. If a user has a DRM-enabled MP3, the prospect of getting a traditional MP3 no longer means user gets to listen, plus share, it means the user would have to go through the trouble of getting the MP3 *just* so he can share what he already has. For most common users, selfishness/apathy reigns high enough it might just work...
Exactly why companies would be very interested in having something that 'makes sense' to call .mp3. They want the market to be confused in the hopes that DRM becomes more ubiquitous, as it has failed to thus far. People are not crazy about .aac and .wma precisely because the names are closesly tied to the DRM concept in people's minds. True, neither require DRM, but that feature weighs so heavily on the mind of the consumer, the (.wma/.aac)==DRM perception is pretty well entrenched. .mp3==good/free beer is very entrenched and thus people wouldn't have the same issue with DRM-enabled mp3, and the best DRM (in the minds of the RIAA, etc) is where the user doesn't know his file is afflicted until it is too late. If someone wants to retrieve a file, that person has thus far been frequently willing to go a little out of the way to get the 'safe' mp3 format version rather than risk .wma/.aac files even if they are easier to get. If user ends up with crippled mp3 and is a common person, I would give >90% probablity they won't bother to do anything about it so long as they have already went through the trouble and can hear it themselves. Sharing with his buddies is a nice plus, but he won't give a rat's ass if it involves a sufficient amount of work when he has already gone through enough to get what he has for himself.
From looking at their site, I would say if it subtracts value or decreases resale value, you can likely undo all your hardware changes in a couple of hours at no cost (servos on the actual vents, wiring in the duct system, no extra cutting, drilling, or equipment in inconvenient places.) While the solution is suboptimal (as they say, vent-placed equipment is not perfect), it is cheap and easily reversible in case you worry about that.
;)
Now as to the usability, it appears there is a current problem there with respect to the common user. However, once invested in the hardware and if you have a decent head for development, the system seems that it has a great potential for being amazingly simple (I have not looked at the code myself) to tack on a custom designed GUI with your touchscreen in mind. Of course, embedding a significant flat panel in the wall is not so reversible as the cheap approach
Not quite so feasible... When it comes to mass-production of decoding chips, very low power (in both the wattage and processing power area), highly customized decoders are far far more economical than general purpose processors. Even the Crusoe is high power by the standards of these processors. Additionally, it is hard to predict the processing capacity of the player unless you enforce a standard hardware set anyway. You say today a Crusoe can handle any codec, but what if some break through occurs that can be implemented handily in a specialized hardware, but no software implementation can work with the Crusoe used in the mass market at the time? Additionally, the extra few megs of storage required to be that flexible is a lot more expensive than the current requirements.
Just take some time to think about the cheapest general processor based system you have ever seen that is capable of decoding MPEG-2 without dropping frames, and then compare it to the sub-50 dollar DVD players out there. It is a nice dream, but the price is a lot higher overall, and customers would be resistant to such a market change.
I use gentoo-dev-sources myself.
Actually, OpenBSD is the extremely secure environment, FreeBSD's main focus is not security like OpenBSD. Perhaps more focused on security than most platforms, they still aren't super obsessed with it like OpenBSD is.
<just pointing out that perhaps Linux is starting to see *exactly* why Windows has been plagued with security problems, and I fear Linux may fear no better given equal marketshare...>
Ok, that was by far the most stretch of a paranoia theory I have ever seen.
Let me first say that when I say 'Linux', I refer to the concept of the Linux platform. That generally means Linux kernel, GNU tools (gcc, fileutils, tar, etc etc etc), XFree, apache, KDE, Gnome. I know, all of those things but the kernel run on BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Windows, OSX, etc etc. I know Linux could have all of those replaced easy (GNU tools with BSD tools, with effort, apache with iPlanet, XFree with any number of alternatives, and KDE/Gnome with something barebones), but ultimately Linux means to 99% of the userbase is whatever their distro makes convenient and recommends.
MS is bed with Apple? Not quite, MS has provided a lot af financial/application support as a token gesture of not being a monopoly, but it is not a willful situation. If you wanted to say it was MS FUD, the study would have had to find Windows above Mac and maybe BSD.
No, this article is not MS-funded FUD. It may be flawed (not saying it is, but it can at least be accused of *that* within reason), but just because Linux loses in some study does not automatically mean MS has a hand in it.
As to my thoughts on platform inherent security, there are things to consider.
Trying to cop out saying Linux is just a kernel, and in and of itself hasn't had *remote* exploits for a long while is just ridiculous. Automaticaly assuming remote exploits triggered in Apache on a Linux box means the exploit is merely an Apache problem and likely occurs on other Apache platforms can be frequently wrong. There are many defects that result in interactions with particular platforms in any multi-platform application. Though the strength of Linux is choice and diversity in the apps/environment you can run (same is true of BSD of course), the disadvantage is that to compare MS platforms fairly, you have to include all this extra stuff as potential combinations users would use to acheive Windows functionality, and all their problems count against the Linux platform (and to an equal extent, BSD). Any mozilla, Gnome, KDE, XFree86, or Apache problems count against Linux in the same way IE, Explorer, and IIS problems count against Windows.
Additionally, the security mechanisms provided by out-of-the box vanilla linux kernel (or even most distro-patched kernels) are admittedly weak compared, say, to some OpenBSD paranoia-sating features. GRSecurity/SELinux is an improvement on that, but it isn't fair to call that mainstream Linux just yet. Even the Windows platform has managed to support more low-level security features before linux (ACLs are an example, I know in my kernels as of late I have EA/ACL support on filesystems, but XFS was the first implementation available, and the NT platform support for ACL preceded it). Now as to whether other platforms make effective use out of the features out of the box/make it easy to use them effectively, I would say Windows *really* fails, but on a case-by-case basis, these are features in the past that a Windows administrator that a) is actually competent and b) that actually cares enough to put forth the effort historically could make use of to configure a system that, from some aspects, are more secure. On the other hand, my experience has been that getting from the state of the extremely poor, out-of-the-box security of Windows to any respectably secure configuration is a tiresome and daunting task that requires high competentence and a lot of dedication to care. If trying to secure common user's workstations, it also requires education and changing the way they are used to using Windows.
For another, worms/viruses thrive in a homogeneous platform environment, which is Microsoft currently due to market dominance, so naturally you can expect a lot more effort put into exploiting Windows as it 'pays off' so much more. Assuming Linux systems in general were succeptible to a number of virus-capable exploits, the world would never know until it gets popular enough for the script kiddies
What is X Windows?
I've run the X Window System, but never heard of this X Windows thing.
Seriously though, X Windows is by no means the right name for X, it is either simply X, or, if you must, X Window System, not plural.
Besides, MS would be crazy to chase that, as X existed before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gates' eyes, and serves as irrefutable evidence that in the context of computer GUI, that Windows is a generic term and therefore cannot be trademarked.
I hate to say it, but under the circumstances, more than one short stint of unemployment isn't necessarily the mark of an unqualified candidate.
If I hadn't been so low on savings and unemployment, I would have had a three month stint a couple of years ago (instead I took the equivalent of a minimum wage job, but still technical to a degree), and then another a couple of years ago, and in both cases I really had no control.
At worst you could say my job search and marketing skills were poor. In fact that may be true, to end the stint I had a year ago I had to go through a contract company that gave my resume the marketing touch, and ultimately I performed so well the contracting company's client went to a good deal of trouble to hire me directly (thankfully) with a significant raise after about half a year. So the beginning of my stints were unfortunate, but not my fault, and the duration of the stints reflects mostly the labor market, and worst case my job-seeking/marketing skills more than technical.
Of course, despite my good standing currently, I always fear that a shutdown will happen yet again. I'm somewhat reassured because I know exactly where to go (contracting, hate it, but at the same time their marketing skills are better than mine), and were it not for this lucky coincidence past, I would guarantee it would take several months to find a new job were I to lose my current one.
Actually, SCO was talking about the likes of Google, Governments, essentially a large corporate entity user of linux, not a common user.
But now that you mention it, we should bring this up to Fox, yet *another* reality show. It could be like the apprentice, but replace Trump with Darl McBride and replace 'you're fired' with 'you're being sued'. Excellent.
It will probably be x86_64+extra instructions, akin to the MMX, SSE*, and 3dnow instructions have been unique things in the x86 world...
I think AMD has managed to set a standard here. Perhaps AMD's choice to name the instruction set x86_64 rather than pushing AMD64 as a name was to encourage Intel to produce something compatible without Intel prominently having to show that it wasn't their idea...
I know from all of the Cingular commercials I hear that Cingular is a small little company against the big behemoths, right? They aren't some big, huge wireless provider, the commercials say they are like a little adept startup. Commercials wouldn't lie would they?
I think my system can beat the FC2 lag to build gnome.... now if we were talking about a KDE release..... That is an entirely different story....
I'll wager Gentoo will have it first ;)
IBM offers e325 Opteron servers at least....
I think the parent post is referring to IBM desktops/laptops rather than servers. It is clear as day servers have top-notch linux support from IBM, but I'm not sure on the Thinkpad/Desktop systems that is the case.
I'm more doubtful of your outcome. For one, IBM experts will likely be at least as committed and passionate about their points as SCO experts. Though IBM is a huge corporation, individual experts in Linux are really passionate about not letting this go through.
Secondly, a settlement right now makes no PR sense. A settlement would have come earlier to cut down on potential bad press. Settling now makes it look like they were in the wrong, or else just caved in, neither of which would look good to the linux customer base, which is *very* important to IBM. More likely, if IBM thought they would lose, they would keep their lawyer army going long enough to exhaust SCO resources. However, in this case so far, IBM has been pushing for more quick progression while SCO has been dragging their feet. This tells me that SCO's position is probably weak and that IBM is extremely confident they can win this case legitimately.
Regardless of outcome, IBM will probably not drop out of linux development, it is far too important. They would buy out SCO before they did that. They have high regard for linux, it is becoming a core part of their strategy. You remember the 50 million put into Novell as the SuSE purchase was going on, they have a lot on the line to just throw it away now.
Isn't the XBox2 also a PPC box? Isn't that a rather *significant* obstacle even if video chipset problems are resolved? I have never seen a 700 PIII emulated in software at a gaming-acceptable rate anywhere. Anyone more informed about this?
From what I have heard, you will not be impressed..... Same hardware essentially, just some microcode trickery to offer a richer instruction set...
Actually, I can't think of a single good reason for anyone to have a fully open relay on a mail server. I can see relays for IP networks, I can understand authenticated relay, but what possible justification is there for a fully open relay these days? Even ISPs restrict SMTP servers for their IP subnets. If you need to support road warrior configurations, give those users a username and password and tell them how to configure SMTP with TLS and authentication. The most flexible mail server I have right now is a relay for two internal networks, and external users only after authenticating (and authentication only allowed after STARTTLS).