And ya know.. I have to say I'm impressed with the fact that Mr. Valentine is clairvoyant and knows ahead of time what DH Brown is going to find when they do their "study" on TCO and how MS is going to come out favorable in that report when compared to Linux.
At $5,000, I'd imagine just building a second one makes the most sense. Unless you want to drop $80,000 for the hardware and software to put all that data on tape.:-)
The journaling capability isn't just about improving fsck times. Check out Intermezzo. The company that's working on Intermezzo (Mountainview Data) has some other cool sounding products that take advantage of some tricks only possible with journals (ie, taking snapshots of filesystems).... looks like mostly vaporware right now, though. I'm sure there are some other applications, but I'm not imaginative enough to see 'em.:-)
You have to understand that this was a 13 year old kid and that he's going to take this kind of shit seriously because you can't possibly expect a child to have the perspective on this at all. Especially if he had never been in trouble (trouble being defined as having been sent to the principal's office and suspended) before.
When you talk to a 13 year old child, you are not dealing with an adult. Yes, they need to learn that what they did was wrong, but you don't throw something like fscking JAIL TIME in their face. That's just as tasteless as telling a 4-year old that if he doesn't behave you'll lock him in the closet with the boogie man. If you can't find a better way to reinforce the severity of the offense than to draw on the fear of an adult punishment, then chances are high that you don't understand kids... let alone have even a pale image of a clue as to what kind of damage you might be doing.
Is the principal directly to blame for the kid killing himself? No. But he certainly helped set up the stage.
I just hope this dork feels as sick now as he felt self-righteous when he watched the terror creep across the kid's face when he told him he "could" be going jail. Although the principal didn't kill him, he's got bad kharma like Shawn Kemp's got child support payments. When he lies awake at night at 3am staring at the ceiling, I hope he begins to just get an inkling of what his role was.
And I hope it's enough to convince to get the hell out of middle school education and into a situation where he can ego trip on pushing around people his own size.
Your prediction might have been a little more earth shattering if it had been made back in like '97 or '98. That's kind of like waiting till the fourth quarter to make a prediction on who's going to win.
Disclaimer: I'm on Rackspace's payroll, I'm a Linux developer, and I really like it. I'm not speaking as a representative of Rackspace in anyway, shape, or form... just an employee who takes pride in his company.
Rackspace may be fine today, I don't know. But it wasn't that long ago that almost all of their servers were vulnerable to Bind NXT attacks.
I guess it's all relative, but I believe that was back in late January... and the bind NXT hole was eventually plugged up on every server where the customer allowed us to do the upgrade for him/her.
Since this was a major remote exploit, we ended up with a bunch of folks working overtime to perform the upgrades. Any server you see vulnerable now (at least on the Linux side) has a customer that has been informed of the risks but chosen not to upgrade or let us upgrade for whatever reason.
I sent them email on it and got no response at all.
Where'd you send it? I'd be highly interested in finding out where the break down was... I certainly don't want us to get a rep for ignoring folks who are trying to be helpful.
I was in the exact same situation a couple of years ago with, of all things, a company that made a Linux distribution. I, too, checked out the CLC since the IP agreement said that that article gave the only grounds for exemption. I, too, thought that was pretty clear text and couldn't think of anything that might cause hassles later on.
Unfortunately, I got to see where I'd been outsmarted by the legal gibbons a couple of months later. There was a question about a very small, simple perl script an intern had written and wanted to take with him back to school by GPL'ing it. The CEO said, "No. That's 'software', we are a 'software company', and therefore it relates to our business and isn't exempt... hand it over."
After some discussions, I found out that the company would lay claim to _any_ software you wrote (even if it was for BSD, Windows, or whatever) because they wanted to increase the amount of IP the company held. They'd found a loophole in the "on your own dime, on your own time" clause in the CLC and made it clear that they were going to exploit it in even trivial cases. And since you weren't covered by the CLC exemption, you had to hand over the copyright to the company.. which meant that even if you did GPL it, they could close it back up.
Although I could understand this as a normal corporate policy, I couldn't reconcile it with the fact we were essentially a company making money off of free software and had an obligation to the community to contribute back. This seemed more like the actions of group of folks interested more in "snatch'n'grab" rather than helping advance the ideals of Linux and free software in general.
Any rate, I decided to walk out, find a new job, and made sure that the next time I assigned an IP agreement (which I have found kind of hard to avoid in this biddness) I listed everything (even if they were just ideas) that had popped into my head during my time between jobs and that I could remember from my college years.
Almost all of the compiler "bugs" reported in the last couple of months were actually buggy code that older gccs accepted because they are not standards compliant.
You guys have been shipping the patches you've been making to correct the code and get stuff to compile with 2.96 back to the original authors of the software, correct? If so, have the developers started merging the patches back into their source trees?
Unfortunately, most people don't know/care about the source they've downloaded being compliant with ISOs or any other standard... they just want to snag a tarball or CVS snapshot, run make, and get down to business. When the compiler starts failing to build stuff that worked just fine with egcs, no matter what the reason, they just assume that there's a problem with the compiler and not the source they're trying to compile.
So it would seem that if RH helps the community fix the source so that RH users will have less of a hassle using 2.96 a lot of the resistance will probably go away, and public opinion will once again be in harmony with The Right Technical Decision(tm).
The more people who are involved in making a decision, the longer it takes to make that decision. Designing/coding/maintaining by committee just simply doesn't work... what you need instead is a team of people with similar goals/motivations who have different but overlapping skill sets making a concerted effort to reach those goals and managed by someone with a bird's eye view of where the whole thing is going.
It's also worth mentioning that if Linus stands in the way of something, people have a tendency to route around him. It's his kernel, so he gets final say on what goes into it before it gets put up on ftp.kernel.org, but if you bother to take a look the source for the kernels shipped by various Linux distributions you'll notice that they have added in a lot of stuff that Linus rejected. A prime example would be SuSE's inclusion of reiserfs into their kernel. Or Debian including pcmcia-cs into theirs. Or RedHat using the software RAID patches. And so on....
I'd say amen to the big iron stuff. I'd also throw in "how about some help with the LVM and LFS projects?". Not that the folks currently working
on them aren't doing a good job, but IBM's been doing this for a while now... they've got to have some valuable advice that only years of experience can yield.
And assuming we aren't just talking about kernel stuff, but user space as well, I'd like to see tools for the above fleshed out. Performance tools for hardware diagnostics and benchmarking would rock, too.
In short, there's lots of areas where IBM could contribute it's experience (if not code) to the free software community.
Linux has something equivalent to this in LIDS. True, it does involve a kernel patch, but you can set up fine grained ACLs for files and directories. You can set files to be completely immutable (even root is denied) and only allow users/processes to read or append to the file. No, this isn't in any mainstream Linux distribution yet, but there are a few of us looking at making add in packages to get it working.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the FreeBSD security feature, though. This is the first I've heard about it and I thank everyone for the pointers thus far. This has been a really interesting discussion.
Background: I worked for TL when it was still PHT and took the US office from being a 1 man developer/distro engineer/support staff/IT department company right up to Thanksgiving of last year when they were starting to ink the deals for the $57 mill VC round. I watched the company grow, and I wasn't particularly happy with where I felt it was heading.
So, if they can let people go & still make their earnings & growth goals, why spend the extra cash?
In the interview, Lonn was bitching about not being profitable and just not having the revenue to maintain the current employee level. My response to that is, Maybe the whole "let's get TL into the market by giving it away FREE!" move wasn't such a hot idea. For every copy of TL that was sold at CompUSA (or wherever) for $20 that had a $20 rebate on it, TL took a bath. Instead of making money for each sale, they were spending money to cover the cost of the CD's, books, and boxes. Apparently, TLS and TCLS sales didn't quite pull in enough to make up that deficit, did they? Maybe whoever came up with that idea should have been laid off a few months ago.
Secondly... the idea that they're looking for more funding is laughable. TL has managed to pimp itself out to just about everybody, and they've got more than enough cash to keep running for a while now... they need revenue now more than they need money. Although I guess an "investment" in the form of a $10 mill purchase of product would be extremely helpful... maybe it's time to talk to Oracle and see if they'd be willing to change the terms of their buy-in.
The bottom line is that management dropped the ball when it made its marketing decisions, totally failed to provide the leadership needed to unify three different code bases (English, Japanese, and Chinese), and couldn't figure out exactly what company goals should be (other than "let's go make some money!")... so now other people are paying for it.
It does no good to forge ahead if you don't know where you're going.
rsync does indeed have a configuration file, and it's pretty easy to set up an rsync server. The rsyncd.conf file looks a lot like an smb.conf file (probably because Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras wrote the sucker) and by jamming a simple shell script into the crontab on different machines you can mirror data pretty easily.
Consider the whole Mindcraft deal. Now consider that, according to ESR's CandB paper that part of the motivation for creating open source software is satisfaction of ego. Now imagine you're kernel hacker and MS has, either by design or accident, thrown down the gauntlet. Note to large, Redmond based software companies: Mindcraft is a loss even if it's a win. Let it lay....all you're going to do is make it worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on.
And ya know.. I have to say I'm impressed with the fact that Mr. Valentine is clairvoyant and knows ahead of time what DH Brown is going to find when they do their "study" on TCO and how MS is going to come out favorable in that report when compared to Linux.
At $5,000, I'd imagine just building a second one makes the most sense. Unless you want to drop $80,000 for the hardware and software to put all that data on tape. :-)
The journaling capability isn't just about improving fsck times. Check out Intermezzo. The company that's working on Intermezzo (Mountainview Data) has some other cool sounding products that take advantage of some tricks only possible with journals (ie, taking snapshots of filesystems).... looks like mostly vaporware right now, though. I'm sure there are some other applications, but I'm not imaginative enough to see 'em. :-)
You have to understand that this was a 13 year old kid and that he's going to take this kind of shit seriously because you can't possibly expect a child to have the perspective on this at all. Especially if he had never been in trouble (trouble being defined as having been sent to the principal's office and suspended) before.
When you talk to a 13 year old child, you are not dealing with an adult. Yes, they need to learn that what they did was wrong, but you don't throw something like fscking JAIL TIME in their face. That's just as tasteless as telling a 4-year old that if he doesn't behave you'll lock him in the closet with the boogie man. If you can't find a better way to reinforce the severity of the offense than to draw on the fear of an adult punishment, then chances are high that you don't understand kids... let alone have even a pale image of a clue as to what kind of damage you might be doing.
Is the principal directly to blame for the kid killing himself? No. But he certainly helped set up the stage.
I just hope this dork feels as sick now as he felt self-righteous when he watched the terror creep across the kid's face when he told him he "could" be going jail. Although the principal didn't kill him, he's got bad kharma like Shawn Kemp's got child support payments. When he lies awake at night at 3am staring at the ceiling, I hope he begins to just get an inkling of what his role was.
And I hope it's enough to convince to get the hell out of middle school education and into a situation where he can ego trip on pushing around people his own size.
http://www.bynari.net/Products/products.html
What other flavors ya got?
Yeah... I got a question. Actually two.
"So what do you want? A cookie?"
Your prediction might have been a little more earth shattering if it had been made back in like '97 or '98. That's kind of like waiting till the fourth quarter to make a prediction on who's going to win.
Disclaimer: I'm on Rackspace's payroll, I'm a Linux developer, and I really like it. I'm not speaking as a representative of Rackspace in anyway, shape, or form... just an employee who takes pride in his company.
Rackspace may be fine today, I don't know. But it wasn't that long ago that almost all of their servers were vulnerable to Bind NXT attacks.
I guess it's all relative, but I believe that was back in late January... and the bind NXT hole was eventually plugged up on every server where the customer allowed us to do the upgrade for him/her. Since this was a major remote exploit, we ended up with a bunch of folks working overtime to perform the upgrades. Any server you see vulnerable now (at least on the Linux side) has a customer that has been informed of the risks but chosen not to upgrade or let us upgrade for whatever reason.
I sent them email on it and got no response at all.
Where'd you send it? I'd be highly interested in finding out where the break down was... I certainly don't want us to get a rep for ignoring folks who are trying to be helpful.
Thanks for trying to give us a heads up, though.
I was in the exact same situation a couple of years ago with, of all things, a company that made a Linux distribution. I, too, checked out the CLC since the IP agreement said that that article gave the only grounds for exemption. I, too, thought that was pretty clear text and couldn't think of anything that might cause hassles later on.
Unfortunately, I got to see where I'd been outsmarted by the legal gibbons a couple of months later. There was a question about a very small, simple perl script an intern had written and wanted to take with him back to school by GPL'ing it. The CEO said, "No. That's 'software', we are a 'software company', and therefore it relates to our business and isn't exempt... hand it over."
After some discussions, I found out that the company would lay claim to _any_ software you wrote (even if it was for BSD, Windows, or whatever) because they wanted to increase the amount of IP the company held. They'd found a loophole in the "on your own dime, on your own time" clause in the CLC and made it clear that they were going to exploit it in even trivial cases. And since you weren't covered by the CLC exemption, you had to hand over the copyright to the company.. which meant that even if you did GPL it, they could close it back up.
Although I could understand this as a normal corporate policy, I couldn't reconcile it with the fact we were essentially a company making money off of free software and had an obligation to the community to contribute back. This seemed more like the actions of group of folks interested more in "snatch'n'grab" rather than helping advance the ideals of Linux and free software in general.
Any rate, I decided to walk out, find a new job, and made sure that the next time I assigned an IP agreement (which I have found kind of hard to avoid in this biddness) I listed everything (even if they were just ideas) that had popped into my head during my time between jobs and that I could remember from my college years.
Zack Brown was laid off from Linuxcare :-( and
as such the kernel cousin lists have moved to
kt.zork.net
You guys have been shipping the patches you've been making to correct the code and get stuff to compile with 2.96 back to the original authors of the software, correct? If so, have the developers started merging the patches back into their source trees?
Unfortunately, most people don't know/care about the source they've downloaded being compliant with ISOs or any other standard... they just want to snag a tarball or CVS snapshot, run make, and get down to business. When the compiler starts failing to build stuff that worked just fine with egcs, no matter what the reason, they just assume that there's a problem with the compiler and not the source they're trying to compile.
So it would seem that if RH helps the community fix the source so that RH users will have less of a hassle using 2.96 a lot of the resistance will probably go away, and public opinion will once again be in harmony with The Right Technical Decision(tm).
The more people who are involved in making a decision, the longer it takes to make that decision. Designing/coding/maintaining by committee just simply doesn't work... what you need instead is a team of people with similar goals/motivations who have different but overlapping skill sets making a concerted effort to reach those goals and managed by someone with a bird's eye view of where the whole thing is going.
It's also worth mentioning that if Linus stands in the way of something, people have a tendency to route around him. It's his kernel, so he gets final say on what goes into it before it gets put up on ftp.kernel.org, but if you bother to take a look the source for the kernels shipped by various Linux distributions you'll notice that they have added in a lot of stuff that Linus rejected. A prime example would be SuSE's inclusion of reiserfs into their kernel. Or Debian including pcmcia-cs into theirs. Or RedHat using the software RAID patches. And so on....
And there's the power of free software for ya.
And assuming we aren't just talking about kernel stuff, but user space as well, I'd like to see tools for the above fleshed out. Performance tools for hardware diagnostics and benchmarking would rock, too.
In short, there's lots of areas where IBM could contribute it's experience (if not code) to the free software community.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the FreeBSD security feature, though. This is the first I've heard about it and I thank everyone for the pointers thus far. This has been a really interesting discussion.
So, if they can let people go & still make their earnings & growth goals, why spend the extra cash?
In the interview, Lonn was bitching about not being profitable and just not having the revenue to maintain the current employee level. My response to that is, Maybe the whole "let's get TL into the market by giving it away FREE!" move wasn't such a hot idea. For every copy of TL that was sold at CompUSA (or wherever) for $20 that had a $20 rebate on it, TL took a bath. Instead of making money for each sale, they were spending money to cover the cost of the CD's, books, and boxes. Apparently, TLS and TCLS sales didn't quite pull in enough to make up that deficit, did they? Maybe whoever came up with that idea should have been laid off a few months ago.
Secondly... the idea that they're looking for more funding is laughable. TL has managed to pimp itself out to just about everybody, and they've got more than enough cash to keep running for a while now... they need revenue now more than they need money. Although I guess an "investment" in the form of a $10 mill purchase of product would be extremely helpful... maybe it's time to talk to Oracle and see if they'd be willing to change the terms of their buy-in.
The bottom line is that management dropped the ball when it made its marketing decisions, totally failed to provide the leadership needed to unify three different code bases (English, Japanese, and Chinese), and couldn't figure out exactly what company goals should be (other than "let's go make some money!")... so now other people are paying for it.
It does no good to forge ahead if you don't know where you're going.
rsync does indeed have a configuration file, and it's pretty easy to set up an rsync server. The rsyncd.conf file looks a lot like an smb.conf file (probably because Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras wrote the sucker) and by jamming a simple shell script into the crontab on different machines you can mirror data pretty easily.
600 mph is better than many of those popular SUVs can hope for, as well. ;-)
Consider the whole Mindcraft deal. Now consider that, according to ESR's CandB paper that part of the motivation for creating open source software is satisfaction of ego. Now imagine you're kernel hacker and MS has, either by design or accident, thrown down the gauntlet. Note to large, Redmond based software companies: Mindcraft is a loss even if it's a win. Let it lay....all you're going to do is make it worse.