If linux is kicking Sun's ass, why are people moving from Linux to Solaris and BSD on their servers?
At work we only run one linux server now and it will be reloaded next week and most likly with freebsd. Since its an intel box, it won't be running Solaris.
We bought three new Sun boxes in the last year. Out of our operational machines, one of them is more than a decade old and I think our sparc station 1000's are over 8 years old. Thats why we are a sun shop. I don't have to replace gear every few years and I don't have to budget for it.
A recent flame fest in the gps news group is because I told a major contributor of the group that his ads aren't welcome and I told that to his ISP to get the point driven home.
Now it seems that there are many supporters of this guys ads but none of these people see where its going if one person is allowed to put up and ad, how about 10 or 100 or 1000 every day?
A month ago I go down the the local pub to find out a guy there just paid $2000 for an opt-in mailing list that is telling him stories. The guys out the money and thinks they may be legit.
Meanwhile I've got a joker still tring to nail my NT honeypot to relay spam to all ends of the earth.
Maybe its time to just agree with the spamers and hand them the net on a silver plater:-(
I think you need to go read a bit of the DMCA. I believe that if you agree to a EULA that claims you won't reverse engineer a program, even if its covered under the GPL, you are not allowed to reverse engineer it because of the DMCA because it a copy protection measure.
What happens if someone gives you a license for a program and then you happen to find out its a GNU program? Then what? Do you have the ability to reverse engineer it? The answer is not explicitly. What if they hide the GNU stuff behind an "access control device"? It gets very tricky from a legal point of view.
You might live in a world where people won't try to sell you emacs as their own, but I have a few devices that contain open source code that has very specifc licenses.
As far as the FSF and patches goes, they are very good about getting rights for extensive patches but not simple patches. That still leaves the thousands of other programs released under GPL that aren't owned by the FSF where the primary author don't bother with the paperwork at all.
Core copyright law hasn't changed in a very long time but that only deals with the copying. What has changed is the leagal codification of many things that we used to take for granted that are no longer true.
At least thats my take on it from talking to a lawyer about a situation I was involved with where a vendor was selling me code that I had submitted patches for. The advice I was given was to ask for explicit premission to reverse engineer a GNU program to keep me out of hot water.
The GPL doesn't give you lots of rights you may think you have. It does give you lots of rights to be able to recreate the program and fix bugs in it and then distribute thouse changes but thats where it ends.
For example, DMCA may restrict your ability to reverse engineer a GPLed program. Its an odd situation since you have source but if the license says you can't reverse engineer it, then you can't and you can get fined (via being sued DMCA style) if you do.
There are other rights as well that may or may not exist. For example, if you send in a patch to a common program. Do you own the copyright on that or does someone else? If you find your code got used illegally, can you do anything about it or must you go back to the main copyright holder to file an action?
GPL gives you additional rights but only in the context of copyright law as it was a decade ago. The license does have conflicts with the DMCA and other newer laws that have not been tested in a court.
GNU is working on a new version of the license but the work will take a long time and be quite expensive.
Australia and New Zealand both have overpriced internet access however its not due to small pipes out to the the major exchanges, its due to greed of the local phone compaines.
The pipes are the 1st excuse. Boy is it a lame one too. It turns out that AT&T recently decided it was too expensive to maintain repeaters every 20km and repalced them with ones that have a greater distance and now they have something like a 1000x the bandwidth they had before. Soutern Cross just upgraded its repeaters and now has more bandwidth than the can sell plus most of the speculators are tring to offlaod their unused bandwith as well. Plus Tyco may be running a new fiber which will keep the stock holders happy about keeping orders up for undersea fiber and the laying ships busy even though the bandwidth side of the businesse may not be looking so hot. Why have 3 bad divisions when you can have one?
The second excuse is that Australia is a big place and Telstra has to provide coverage everywhere. Thats kind of ture but there are parts of Australia the size of many US states that has zero population and no one asking for a phone. Throw in the fact that two cities have a larger population than Chicago now. With the other cities 96% of the population lives within 25,000 meters (or yards) of an exchange (but not by ADSL distance) or cell tower. Telstra does have to spend a bit on rural areas but its no different than the western part of the US midwest and they don't have to worry about ice.
The only real excuse is Telstra is a luxury tax which helps the goverment and what a lovely tax it is. Outside of the 3rd world, Telstra is the most expensive phone company in the world for people who use the phone.
The interconnect fees are out of line. Its cheaper for me to call the US or UK on some cell phones than it is to call the other side of town. with Orange, its cost twice as much to call a land line in Australia than it does to call a landline in the US. Phone rates in New Zeland are equally out of line. With some plans its the same price if you call a phone in NZ, Aus, US or the UK.
Right now I've got a few Canopy access points. I also have access to a roof on one of the tallest building in town and 10mb ISP uplink. I've got racks of isp gear and everything I need to sell ISP service execpt for one small thing, a Telecomunications License. Thats $10,000 up front and more every year. You also have to be the right kind of company to get the license but the license lets you do things like run wire in the ground and resell inetnet access.
So if anyone near Melbourne wants to buy an unlimited 2mb pipe, I can set you up. The gear is only about $1500 and it takes about 2 hrs to set up so the setup fee would be about $11,800:-)
I also have an AP on a very tall hill just outside of the outer burbs and I can't sell bandwidth from there either.
And for those that say Telstra won't sell unlimited business broadband, they will but only in New Zealand and a 1.5mb adsl link is NZ$500/mo +gst. The same thing in Australia would cost you something like $38,556 in over use charges if you could keep the pipe full for a full month.
People in both countries need to pull their heads out and figure out they need a Public Utilities Commission but everyone seems to be so happy with the TIO and ACCC and the other groups that aren't looking out for anyone.
Excuse me while I hop on over to the Information Super Outback! Thanks Telstra!
IPv6 is going to be great. Our spam black lists will be competely useless. Tracking spam will be much more difficult. Effecent routers will need 4x as much memory as they do now to hold the same routes other routers will take far more memory. You can now memory map the world as a/24. Can't do that with IPv6.
The tables aren't too full. When there are 2^32 entires in the routing tables, then they will be full but not a day before then.
The problem with routing tables is the way they work. For a small outfit, the world appears as inside and maybe two outbound links. You can precalculate where a packet for each address would go and build a huge bit table so you can make that decisions quickly. That table doesn't even need to be built on the router.
The problem is we are using routers that have a long history and we are paying for it. If AIAN simply said they are going to be handing out/24 with no consolidation then everyone would have to make sure their routers could cope with 16 million entries. If a router has 11 interfaces to the outside world (which is quite a few), then it needs nearly 8 megabytes of memory to hold the table to figure out where the packets are suppoed to go. So why can't my cisco with 64 meg deal with the current route tables? The answer is that its being very stupid about how it manages route data. Add in the fact that IANA is full of a bunch of morons that think Cisco can do no wrong and you end up with the current situation.
AT&T had a router that did this very thing 1/2 a decade ago. It could pick the interface that a packet was suppoed to go to in under 3 nanoseconds which was faster than anything Cisco could do. Of course if they used cache tag ram, it could have done it in a fraction of that time.
Cursive was intended to make sure the pen was heading the correct direction so it would keep writing. Pens before the ball point had these kinds of problems.
Many of the serifs in caligraphy were done so the pen would be writing smothly before you got to the importaint parts of the letter. Some early styles where based on how the pens failed.
Most airlines in the US use the saber system that lets them do the price changes up till the time the door closes. Soutwest (and a few others like them) in the US are doing much better than the rest.
In Europe the same thing is true. The compaines using Saber aren't getting the business and the lowcost (who seem to keep their prices consistant for days or months at a time) are doing much better and most of them have positive profits while the older airlines have had major porblems to the point of cliaming they would go under without tax money keeping them alive.
A punishment is covered under DMCA. Any copyright holder can shutdown their web site till they get their act together. What will their stock price do when their site is down. The court order to shut the site down, could also redirect it to another site that says "This site has been taken down due to a court order under the DMCA". Such a thing would cause many investors to look at pulling out.
So? I don't contribute to open source programs so they can have the #1 market share or other people can rip me off. I contribute so that the programs work for me and others that are willing to share.
If linksys isn't hit hard, others will follow and the GPL will be worthless.
3com does the same thing. If you run strings on the core NBX 100 program, you get "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License" but they won't give me that or the source either. I've reported it to GNU, Univ of Wash (someone else they lifted code from) and so far have heard nothing about what they are doing about it. I need source so I can fix some of their bugs in the junk they sold me.
The fine today is now $250,000 for the 1st violation if there is any way to hide it behind the DMCA (like an EULA preventing reverse engineering) and the copyright holder can turn off the compaines web site. I wonder what a court order turning off a website of an IT company does to its stock price, maybe I should find out.
Remember that if you reverse engineer a product and find GNU code, you may be in violation of the DMCA. You must get permission to reverse engineer the code from the copyright holder before you start. In the case of Linux, this means you have to have that permission direct from Linus since the GPL does not give you that right.
If your in the US and you want to take on these guys, talk to a lawyer 1st. The fines are big and the jail time is long and their lawyers are better paid than yours:-(
If its so well honed, why is it that the airlines that use it are going broke and need tax money to keep going while airlines that aren't using it are showing a profit?
Bush promised bin Laden's head on a plater and hasn't seemed fit to deliver it. He also promised Saddam's head and didn't deliver that either. Both of these guys were good buddies of the CIA when his father was in charge of it. Also who ever head of a war where the former leaders just sort of walked away and now every war Bush (I or 2) have won, the leaders are no where to be found.
I still like asking Texans how come they voted for a male chearleader when they say they voted for Bush. It has resulted in some interesting confused looks.
I figure Bush is running again for pres starting real soon now. I think he's waiting to deliver the heads then.
Looking at the Dem canidates, there is no hope that anyone but Bush is going to win next time and there isn't enough strife to start an effective third party. We it be 4 more years of the same?
Has anyone else noticed that the airlines that play stupid ticket price games are not doing so well but the ones with consistant fairs are doing well? Almost all the airlines are using Sabre to do price fixing (but their procedures are too complex to prove it) and can adjust their prices several times a day for all tickets. They figure if you have to fly to do a business deal, then you'll pay $2000 to get 1/2 accross the US. It turns out that 9/11 taught many businesses that you don't have to have a face to face meeting to close the deal and now the airlines are hurting. Ever plan a meeting and then call up the other side and say, "can we postpone this a week? the airlines want $2000 extra." They all understand that they will be paying for that and will arrnage the deal via fax machine or wait a week. There is also a massive increase in people chartering their own jets. At prices of $1000/hr for flight time, its cheaper to do that than fly two people on two days notice. The airlines the follow Howard Hughes business model will all go the way of its early adopters, TWA, Pan Am, Eastern...
Did Knuth find the 1st software patent that shouldn't have been issued based on prior art? Page 394 of the Art volume 3, He claims US patents 1261167 (in 1918) and 1435663 (1922) were issued and that was quite some time after Soundex was used by the US Census office in 1880. Even back they there were complaints that it didn't work well for Indian and immigrants names.
I still think I should be able to sack a programmer for saying "Who's Knuth?"
Linux is made in most parts of the world. Many local goverments must consider locally made products before buying from outside of the county, state, country etc.
Anyone one want to dig up a list of countries where work on linux has been done and then find out how many of them have offical logos (like this or this) and then find out what rules apply and come up with a nice mixed image?
The subsidizing is over. I can buy a phone for AU$100 (US$65) with no contract. The replacement batteries are still over au$75.
We gave up with the "free phone" contracts since its cheaper to keep the old contracts and buy replacement phones with no contracts. A full featured phone with all the features are not over au$300 with out a contract. Of course with a contract you get these $750 phones for "free"
I've got two legit email messages that include "wtih DAV". I just checked because it looked like a good thing to include in my inbound filters. I don't have any recent spam with it but much of that just got deleted.
I was at Boni Beach last week. Nice beach out side the sliding glass door but one problem...the rain wasn't falling, it was more of a horizontal thing.
Um no. There is no charged coil when its unplugged. Coils can only be charged when they have current flowing through them.
What will nail you is the charge on the tube which can last days. Its a effectivly a large leyden jar (read that as capacitor).
Once the grounding grid on a color crt is removed, the outside of a tube can build up quite a charge.
The coil used for the HV is good for many tens of thousnads of volts when its on. Typically the better quality on the tube, the higher the voltage. It must have a source of power to generate the high voltage.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know how good Ultrix is till you try EUNICE :-)
If linux is kicking Sun's ass, why are people moving from Linux to Solaris and BSD on their servers?
At work we only run one linux server now and it will be reloaded next week and most likly with freebsd. Since its an intel box, it won't be running Solaris.
We bought three new Sun boxes in the last year. Out of our operational machines, one of them is more than a decade old and I think our sparc station 1000's are over 8 years old. Thats why we are a sun shop. I don't have to replace gear every few years and I don't have to budget for it.
But will it run under linux?
It does run under os-x....
I would love to buy x-plane. Its a very nice program but I don't run windows.
A recent flame fest in the gps news group is because I told a major contributor of the group that his ads aren't welcome and I told that to his ISP to get the point driven home.
:-(
Now it seems that there are many supporters of this guys ads but none of these people see where its going if one person is allowed to put up and ad, how about 10 or 100 or 1000 every day?
A month ago I go down the the local pub to find out a guy there just paid $2000 for an opt-in mailing list that is telling him stories. The guys out the money and thinks they may be legit.
Meanwhile I've got a joker still tring to nail my NT honeypot to relay spam to all ends of the earth.
Maybe its time to just agree with the spamers and hand them the net on a silver plater
I think you need to go read a bit of the DMCA. I believe that if you agree to a EULA that claims you won't reverse engineer a program, even if its covered under the GPL, you are not allowed to reverse engineer it because of the DMCA because it a copy protection measure.
What happens if someone gives you a license for a program and then you happen to find out its a GNU program? Then what? Do you have the ability to reverse engineer it? The answer is not explicitly. What if they hide the GNU stuff behind an "access control device"? It gets very tricky from a legal point of view.
You might live in a world where people won't try to sell you emacs as their own, but I have a few devices that contain open source code that has very specifc licenses.
As far as the FSF and patches goes, they are very good about getting rights for extensive patches but not simple patches. That still leaves the thousands of other programs released under GPL that aren't owned by the FSF where the primary author don't bother with the paperwork at all.
Core copyright law hasn't changed in a very long time but that only deals with the copying. What has changed is the leagal codification of many things that we used to take for granted that are no longer true.
At least thats my take on it from talking to a lawyer about a situation I was involved with where a vendor was selling me code that I had submitted patches for. The advice I was given was to ask for explicit premission to reverse engineer a GNU program to keep me out of hot water.
The GPL doesn't give you lots of rights you may think you have. It does give you lots of rights to be able to recreate the program and fix bugs in it and then distribute thouse changes but thats where it ends.
For example, DMCA may restrict your ability to reverse engineer a GPLed program. Its an odd situation since you have source but if the license says you can't reverse engineer it, then you can't and you can get fined (via being sued DMCA style) if you do.
There are other rights as well that may or may not exist. For example, if you send in a patch to a common program. Do you own the copyright on that or does someone else? If you find your code got used illegally, can you do anything about it or must you go back to the main copyright holder to file an action?
GPL gives you additional rights but only in the context of copyright law as it was a decade ago. The license does have conflicts with the DMCA and other newer laws that have not been tested in a court.
GNU is working on a new version of the license but the work will take a long time and be quite expensive.
Australia and New Zealand both have overpriced internet access however its not due to small pipes out to the the major exchanges, its due to greed of the local phone compaines.
:-)
The pipes are the 1st excuse. Boy is it a lame one too. It turns out that AT&T recently decided it was too expensive to maintain repeaters every 20km and repalced them with ones that have a greater distance and now they have something like a 1000x the bandwidth they had before. Soutern Cross just upgraded its repeaters and now has more bandwidth than the can sell plus most of the speculators are tring to offlaod their unused bandwith as well. Plus Tyco may be running a new fiber which will keep the stock holders happy about keeping orders up for undersea fiber and the laying ships busy even though the bandwidth side of the businesse may not be looking so hot. Why have 3 bad divisions when you can have one?
The second excuse is that Australia is a big place and Telstra has to provide coverage everywhere. Thats kind of ture but there are parts of Australia the size of many US states that has zero population and no one asking for a phone. Throw in the fact that two cities have a larger population than Chicago now. With the other cities 96% of the population lives within 25,000 meters (or yards) of an exchange (but not by ADSL distance) or cell tower. Telstra does have to spend a bit on rural areas but its no different than the western part of the US midwest and they don't have to worry about ice.
The only real excuse is Telstra is a luxury tax which helps the goverment and what a lovely tax it is. Outside of the 3rd world, Telstra is the most expensive phone company in the world for people who use the phone.
The interconnect fees are out of line. Its cheaper for me to call the US or UK on some cell phones than it is to call the other side of town. with Orange, its cost twice as much to call a land line in Australia than it does to call a landline in the US. Phone rates in New Zeland are equally out of line. With some plans its the same price if you call a phone in NZ, Aus, US or the UK.
Right now I've got a few Canopy access points. I also have access to a roof on one of the tallest building in town and 10mb ISP uplink. I've got racks of isp gear and everything I need to sell ISP service execpt for one small thing, a Telecomunications License. Thats $10,000 up front and more every year. You also have to be the right kind of company to get the license but the license lets you do things like run wire in the ground and resell inetnet access.
So if anyone near Melbourne wants to buy an unlimited 2mb pipe, I can set you up. The gear is only about $1500 and it takes about 2 hrs to set up so the setup fee would be about $11,800
I also have an AP on a very tall hill just outside of the outer burbs and I can't sell bandwidth from there either.
And for those that say Telstra won't sell unlimited business broadband, they will but only in New Zealand and a 1.5mb adsl link is NZ$500/mo +gst. The same thing in Australia would cost you something like $38,556 in over use charges if you could keep the pipe full for a full month.
People in both countries need to pull their heads out and figure out they need a Public Utilities Commission but everyone seems to be so happy with the TIO and ACCC and the other groups that aren't looking out for anyone.
Excuse me while I hop on over to the Information Super Outback! Thanks Telstra!
IPv6 is going to be great. /24. Can't do that with IPv6.
Our spam black lists will be competely useless.
Tracking spam will be much more difficult.
Effecent routers will need 4x as much memory as they do now to hold the same routes other routers will take far more memory.
You can now memory map the world as a
The tables aren't too full. When there are 2^32 entires in the routing tables, then they will be full but not a day before then.
/24 with no consolidation then everyone would have to make sure their routers could cope with 16 million entries. If a router has 11 interfaces to the outside world (which is quite a few), then it needs nearly 8 megabytes of memory to hold the table to figure out where the packets are suppoed to go. So why can't my cisco with 64 meg deal with the current route tables? The answer is that its being very stupid about how it manages route data. Add in the fact that IANA is full of a bunch of morons that think Cisco can do no wrong and you end up with the current situation.
The problem with routing tables is the way they work. For a small outfit, the world appears as inside and maybe two outbound links. You can precalculate where a packet for each address would go and build a huge bit table so you can make that decisions quickly. That table doesn't even need to be built on the router.
The problem is we are using routers that have a long history and we are paying for it. If AIAN simply said they are going to be handing out
AT&T had a router that did this very thing 1/2 a decade ago. It could pick the interface that a packet was suppoed to go to in under 3 nanoseconds which was faster than anything Cisco could do. Of course if they used cache tag ram, it could have done it in a fraction of that time.
Cursive was intended to make sure the pen was heading the correct direction so it would keep writing. Pens before the ball point had these kinds of problems.
Many of the serifs in caligraphy were done so the pen would be writing smothly before you got to the importaint parts of the letter. Some early styles where based on how the pens failed.
The loops are to keep the pen in the correct direction so it keeps writing. Remember this was before the invention of the ball point pen.
Most airlines in the US use the saber system that lets them do the price changes up till the time the door closes. Soutwest (and a few others like them) in the US are doing much better than the rest.
In Europe the same thing is true. The compaines using Saber aren't getting the business and the lowcost (who seem to keep their prices consistant for days or months at a time) are doing much better and most of them have positive profits while the older airlines have had major porblems to the point of cliaming they would go under without tax money keeping them alive.
A punishment is covered under DMCA. Any copyright holder can shutdown their web site till they get their act together. What will their stock price do when their site is down. The court order to shut the site down, could also redirect it to another site that says "This site has been taken down due to a court order under the DMCA". Such a thing would cause many investors to look at pulling out.
So? I don't contribute to open source programs so they can have the #1 market share or other people can rip me off. I contribute so that the programs work for me and others that are willing to share.
:-(
If linksys isn't hit hard, others will follow and the GPL will be worthless.
3com does the same thing. If you run strings on the core NBX 100 program, you get "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License" but they won't give me that or the source either.
I've reported it to GNU, Univ of Wash (someone else they lifted code from) and so far have heard nothing about what they are doing about it. I need source so I can fix some of their bugs in the junk they sold me.
The fine today is now $250,000 for the 1st violation if there is any way to hide it behind the DMCA (like an EULA preventing reverse engineering) and the copyright holder can turn off the compaines web site. I wonder what a court order turning off a website of an IT company does to its stock price, maybe I should find out.
Remember that if you reverse engineer a product and find GNU code, you may be in violation of the DMCA. You must get permission to reverse engineer the code from the copyright holder before you start. In the case of Linux, this means you have to have that permission direct from Linus since the GPL does not give you that right.
If your in the US and you want to take on these guys, talk to a lawyer 1st. The fines are big and the jail time is long and their lawyers are better paid than yours
If its so well honed, why is it that the airlines that use it are going broke and need tax money to keep going while airlines that aren't using it are showing a profit?
Bush promised bin Laden's head on a plater and hasn't seemed fit to deliver it. He also promised Saddam's head and didn't deliver that either. Both of these guys were good buddies of the CIA when his father was in charge of it. Also who ever head of a war where the former leaders just sort of walked away and now every war Bush (I or 2) have won, the leaders are no where to be found.
I still like asking Texans how come they voted for a male chearleader when they say they voted for Bush. It has resulted in some interesting confused looks.
I figure Bush is running again for pres starting real soon now. I think he's waiting to deliver the heads then.
Looking at the Dem canidates, there is no hope that anyone but Bush is going to win next time and there isn't enough strife to start an effective third party. We it be 4 more years of the same?
Has anyone else noticed that the airlines that play stupid ticket price games are not doing so well but the ones with consistant fairs are doing well? Almost all the airlines are using Sabre to do price fixing (but their procedures are too complex to prove it) and can adjust their prices several times a day for all tickets. They figure if you have to fly to do a business deal, then you'll pay $2000 to get 1/2 accross the US. It turns out that 9/11 taught many businesses that you don't have to have a face to face meeting to close the deal and now the airlines are hurting. Ever plan a meeting and then call up the other side and say, "can we postpone this a week? the airlines want $2000 extra." They all understand that they will be paying for that and will arrnage the deal via fax machine or wait a week. There is also a massive increase in people chartering their own jets. At prices of $1000/hr for flight time, its cheaper to do that than fly two people on two days notice. The airlines the follow Howard Hughes business model will all go the way of its early adopters, TWA, Pan Am, Eastern...
In your course, did they tell you that Soundex came from the late 1800's? It was used by tabulating and sorting machines using Hollerith like cards.
Did Knuth find the 1st software patent that shouldn't have been issued based on prior art? Page 394 of the Art volume 3, He claims US patents 1261167 (in 1918) and 1435663 (1922) were issued and that was quite some time after Soundex was used by the US Census office in 1880. Even back they there were complaints that it didn't work well for Indian and immigrants names.
I still think I should be able to sack a programmer for saying "Who's Knuth?"
Linux is made in most parts of the world. Many local goverments must consider locally made products before buying from outside of the county, state, country etc.
Anyone one want to dig up a list of countries where work on linux has been done and then find out how many of them have offical logos (like this or this) and then find out what rules apply and come up with a nice mixed image?
The subsidizing is over. I can buy a phone for AU$100 (US$65) with no contract. The replacement batteries are still over au$75.
We gave up with the "free phone" contracts since its cheaper to keep the old contracts and buy replacement phones with no contracts. A full featured phone with all the features are not over au$300 with out a contract. Of course with a contract you get these $750 phones for "free"
I've got two legit email messages that include "wtih DAV". I just checked because it looked like a good thing to include in my inbound filters. I don't have any recent spam with it but much of that just got deleted.
Why would a nerd ever use hotmail? Don't they all have their own domains?
I was at Boni Beach last week. Nice beach out side the sliding glass door but one problem...the rain wasn't falling, it was more of a horizontal thing.
Um no. There is no charged coil when its unplugged. Coils can only be charged when they have current flowing through them.
What will nail you is the charge on the tube which can last days. Its a effectivly a large leyden jar (read that as capacitor).
Once the grounding grid on a color crt is removed, the outside of a tube can build up quite a charge.
The coil used for the HV is good for many tens of thousnads of volts when its on. Typically the better quality on the tube, the higher the voltage. It must have a source of power to generate the high voltage.
Note that LCD backlights also use high voltage.