I just put my boss's Windows 2003 Server CD under a microscope to examine the binaries.. Started zooming in.. and then SNAP. The bitch cracked into 2. I'll put gentoo on the server now and just tell him that a security cracker broke his shit.
For the humor impaired, if you put anything thin and crunchable on an optical microscope's stage, say a CD like in the example above, the viewing objective mount will crush it if you keep zooming. There is usually a buffer spring to allow for a margin of error, but if you keep turning the coarse focus, something will crush...
I'd be interested to hear which people like the best. The Macintosh one is an obvious candidate...
No way to find out. Not only won't BuyMusic.com work with Macintosh or other platforms, it's locked into a browser headed for non-support.
By going with a standards-based service, not only would the service be easier to maintain, but they increase their market share by serving Mac users and every one else.
A sale is a sale, the customer's choice of platform should be irrelevant.
Furthermore, there are still numbers of WinNT and Win98 users out there. Developing for MSIE ony is going to leave them out in the cold when MS drops the standalone version of MSIE.
So it'd be interesting to know if the service is letting the bottom line or their ideology decide? It can't be good for sales to turn away an arbitrary percentage of potential customers.
Yes, the U.S. has been a center for innovation, but that's something that has to be actively maintained and is not guaranteed to continue. To keep the momentum, you need the pick of the world's students and researchers, as well as an enviroment conducive to research.
One of the factors for the U.S. gaining the advantage for a few decades, aside from the havoc in Europe from WWII, has been the ease with which the best students and researchers from the whole world can work onsite with their peers. Visa problems and other undesireable side affects caused by P.A.T.R.I.O.T. and other anti-U.S. legislation makes can help move IT centers out of the U.S. Outsourcing drives this by providing funding and further incentive.
DMCA-like legislation and software patents also stifle innovation. Although there will not necessarily be mass emmigration from those lands, they will over time suffocate innovation, In contrast, lands where development can build on previous develoments and on investigation and publication, can move forward.
So, in short, the U.S. had for wa while a great environment for IT develoment and growth. The U.S. or some other economy which can produce or maintain such an environment is going to get the growth in the future. Whether it's Asia, East Asia, North America, or Europe (or Australio-Pacific) depends largely on which ones take themselves out of competition by enacting weird P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-DMCA-SofwarePatent laws
Oh really? So when did corporations start outsourcing their outrageously-paid executives to India?
Good question. The average executive compensation has been creeping up towards 500 - 600 times the average employee compensation. Saving even half of that would allow 250-300 staff to be retained instead of downsized, or could even be used for staff bonuses, or -- get this -- reinvested back into the company to promote growth.
Along the same lines, now that most of the dot-com era is over, it would be possible to see if there was an inverse correlation between the numebr of MBAs at a firm and its survival.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.
A ring world might be more portable when the sun eventually burns low. Alternately, more fuel could be added to the star with a ring world with a greater level of ease and larger margin for error than a Dyson Sphere.
Presumably the population of either a Dyson Sphere or a Ring World would be so large that emmigration would be a physical imposibility due to lack of materials and energy to build and move whole colonies. So some very, very long term form of regeneration is needed.
Putting a ring world around a "small" Dyson Sphere might capture all of the star's energy. Useful spectra can be re-emitted in the ring's plane of rotation.
Perhaps not an advocate, maybe an employee or contractor?;)
Regarding external communication, I first noticed Exchange's problems when I was constantly getting dropped from professional lists starting around the time I transfered the address. Later two other lists sent requests for confirmations that the MS-Exchange based address was valid. And for the first month, I got phone calls if a mail that I was expected to answer disappeared. So I set up a test.
My methodology was to set up a cron job on a machine in country A to send mails every 10 minutes to two recipients, one to my account on the exchange server one to an account on a unix server on the same subnet, with a datetime stamp in the subject. After two weeks, I did a grep + diff on the Subject and found that about 15% were missing from the exchange account. My colleagues there assured me that this was abnormal as Exchange usually lost only 5% - 10% according to their experience at other sites ( which I have not discussed here.)
Though we agree that it is expensive, I'd add that based on what I've observed at the four sites that MS-Exchange is probably the most expensive way of going about setting up a mail server, even before counting the security and client side problems. Then there is the issue of overtime, which is expensive especially in Europe.
Anyway, I can't call anything an excellent product that give me and my colleagues every appearance of failing to function, being unsecure, locked into a high-TCO platform, and more expensive than any other options.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on performance.
Schools and libraries often have old hardware as a result of low hardware and software budgets. It would be interesting to see how much more kick could be gained from the old hardware by setting up network of QNX machines or other kernel/microkernel with distributed processing capabilities. Many libraries and schools are already familiar with various F/OSS tools like KDE+Mozilla+OpenOffice & co., so swapping out the [micro-]kernel would be unnoticed by the user, except for a possible improved performance.
In general, office parks, libraries, class rooms, and computer labs have a lot of idle time that could be exploited. Generally in cases like these the power is on anyway during certain hours and maintenance is covered anyway, so distributed computing might be used for many things.
The incubation period was so short that they would have been better of calling it a bacteria. If it truly had been a virus the incubation period would have been measured in 2-3 days | weeks | months | years.
However, even with an incubation period of 2-3 days, instead of a few seconds, there would have been no film. Travellers would have spread the plague to most if not all major travel centers before symptoms showed up.
That said, viruses and bacteria do attack different parts of the body, conceivably even different parts of the brain, so having one or more emotional/cognitive functions pegged out is not so unbelievable. The part I thought was lame, was the girl's comments about never again hearing original music. Since when did the RIAA remove the ability to sing or make instruments?
Not to mention that not once have I ever seen any mail server bounce a mail if none of the servers listed in MX were available. Mail is queued for a day, as a general rule.
Yes, but when the MS-Exchange server was available it was still bouncing or altogether losing (external) mail, both incoming and outgoing.
I've connected Exchange sites together using the internet and SMTP, as well as X.400 connectors.
Sounds like it's still part of an intranet. In a Windows-only shop that's not online and never intends to be, I can see MS-Exchange competing with Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. In the context of external mail, I cannot see that it can compete with Exim, Postfix, or qmail on ease of installation, ease of maintenance, stability, load, or security, especially when the latter are on proven platforms like *BSD or Linux. On all four sites, I observed MS-Exchange to be the functional death of external communication.
Otherwise, I agree with your preference to keep things in house, when practical.
Sorry, but the problems have been at multiple sites. The "NT Admin syndrome" aka MSCE syndrome was not applicable in any of the cases. One site even tried two different support / service contract.
If you're running mail for less than a few hundred, it would take some real magic to bring the cost of even just the server side down from 9 per user per month (for MS-Exchange) to 3.5 per user per month.
An additional reason to have IMAP/POP offsite is that if your local Internet connection goes down, mail from your customers and clients still gets queued and not bounced or lost.
MS-Exchange might be good on an isolated Intranet, but connected to the Internet, it's death, especially for departments doing international work.
Actually, they're all potentially incompatible so I'd recommend rejecting all attachments.
I've set up mailing lists which contain large numbers of non-expert users so I set an automated rejection + message of anything with incoming attachments. This not only stops the MSTDs dead, but also makes the size of the archive smaller, and allows the archive to be fully searchable. From the user side, it eliminates crowded inboxes (many web-mail clients have small limits) and, for the novices, it eliminates the problem of incompatible file formats, i.e. which program and which version of that program.
If a binary file does need to be transfered, then that's what HTTP, WebDAV, and other services excel at.
MS-Exchange's weak points are cost of maintenance (from both client and server) and poor interoperability with external mail.
Regarding cost, a colleague outsourced her county's mail server to the regional telco altogether thus decreasing costs, increasing availability/reliability, and dratically decreasing client-side maintenance/support. Her previous situation was the the MS-Outlook + MS-Exchange problem you describe. Those were side benefits, the main reason to drop MS-Exchange was to get acceptible uptime and reduce the number of lost messages. The upfront costs of the outsourcing went from 7 to 3.5 per user per month. I've seen analyses showing $2 USD per user per month for FOSS solutions when serving 5000+ users, so 3.5 has to include a nice profit.
The client side benefited, too. Since end users were no longer locked into MS-Outlook, the support time for clients went down from several hours per week to less than an hour. That and outgoing/incoming external mail stopped disappearing.
Using Postfix, Exim or qmail seems to be best practice. In addition, these can be run on any platform, whereas MS-Exchange has the added drawback of being locked into a single platform.
From my observations at 4 sites, pretty much any MTA is worlds more stable and reliable than MS-Exchange. My previous employer tried to put the whole institution on MS-Exchange which was a nightmare. Among the main problems, I found that 15% of the incoming mails (to a legitimate address) during a two week test either just disappeared or bounced with a 'user does not exist'
Lost mail == delayed projects or lost bids.
I have not found a mail system as stable as Outlook with an Exchange server.
That's an interesting way to phrase it, misleading yet technically correct. Perhaps a quote from the sales team? Based on what I've seen for the last 3 years, I would put a different emphasis:
I have not found a mail system as unsecure, unstable and incompatible with external users as Outlook with an Exchange server.
Yes there are idelogical reasons to go with alternatives like MS-Outlook and co, but no technical or economic ones. When performance and cost matter, it's the traditional, mainstream choices like Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail that are relevant and can run on any platform.
The mouse gestures found in Mozilla and Opera probably won't make it into MSIE. Stand alone MSIE is being dropped. If MS is not taken out first, then MSIE will still exist as a part of the new (supported) Windows, but that looks to me like no new versions for Macintosh or older versions of Windows. No new versions looks like no new functions to me.
So, either way, users wishing to have tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, and improved security will find it in the cross-platform browsers Mozilla and Opera.
MS just hikacked tens of thousands of computers to be sold by the Thai government with Linux pre-installed by offering Windows to purchasers for 250 Baht (about US$6). There were supposed to be a hundred thousand Linux computers by December, and now there will be, like zero. Check my journal for the details.
I found the article which you linked to, but it is in Thai. Can you point to a published English version?
ATMs and kiosks (especially bus / train / boat / airplane schedules) really need uptime at least when there are people around.
Here, the automated bus schedules were down for a week with a Windows NT error message. Also, the other week at an airport some of the terminals above the check-in were offline and showed some Windows based error message instead of the departures and gate numbers. In one lobby I used to pass on the way to work was visible from the street a machine which showed the BSOD most days.
It's kind of sad when religion / ideology dictate choice of technology instead of criteria like performance. Kiosks and other public relations devices ought to be using proven stable systems like BSD, Linux, QNX or Novell. Perhaps a PR campaign is needed to remind people that software shouldn't crash and that it's not normal for it to do so, except if you stay with MS.
Postgresql and MySQL have had a reasonably good track record for security as far as software goes. And from what I've seen, it seems to be improving over time.
This is in strong contrast to the dbms-which-ought-not-be-named which provided hours of entertainment and overtime with its special features, the latest being the special slammer/sapphire feature.
Japan has given a deadline of 2005 for IPv6 adoption. After that Europe and then, later, the U.S. will also start to adopt. There's a fresher article from this week, but I can't find it again.
The large install base for various flavors of Windows is only one reason for the frequency. The other, perhaps larger, reason is the overwhelming number of fundamental design flaws in MS products like MS-Outlook, MS-Exchange, MS-SQLserver, MS-Windows and even MS-Word and other components of MS-Office.
Simply put, it's easier to write worms and viruses for MS products.
The problem is that these software packages that we intentionally disable keep mysteriously reenabling themselves. Oddly enough this seems to happen after I install a product created by MS or an update created by MS or
There's more where that came from. The leadership of Microsoft has on repeated occasions, clearly and unambiguously stated that MS will continue to do so even if it breaks third party apps. Think about it. In practice this strategy goes back years -- every time "support" tells you to wipe the hard disk and do a fresh install, not only are you resetting the defaults, you are also purging the disk of any third party apps, plug-ins or drivers. This can keep going until you get tired of or have no time to keep re-installing thrid party application or re-configuring MS-Windows the way you like it.
DRM would die on it's own in a free market, but as it is now it is an inactive part of WinXP and an active part of subsequent versions. Sure some individuals can keep trying to turn it off, but Windows XP SP1 gives Redmond root privileges on your computer and they can keep turning back on. A perfect method for locking out competitors and locking customers in.
There are just too many good, cost-effective, secure, time saving alternatives, even on the desktop, to spend time/money on MS-Windows. Even government agencies, traditionally slow-moving beasts, are starting to see that this just another dot-com -- full of false claims. Even the management can see it's a dead company and have been bailing under the smoke screen of a multi-hundred million dollar marketing campaign.
IIRC with WinXP you are only purchasing a subscription for a year or so. So, assuming that and no price hikes, if the effective life of your system is 3 years, then $50 / year is still $150 and for 5 years it's $250.
At least with Lindows, its yours, you own your copy. Not only that with, with Lindows you retain the right to continue to access your data
IIRC with WinXP you are only purchasing a subscription for a year or so. So, assuming that and no price hikes, if the effective life of your system is 3 years, then $50 / year is still $150 and for 5 years it's $250.
At least with Lindows, its yours, you own your copy. Not only that with, with Lindows you retain the right to continue to access your data.
Another nice thing about Debian, besides being stable and very, very easy to maintain, is that it's ported to 10 different architectures. So if you have Alphas, Intels, or Macintoshes, you can install Debian and only the sysadmin will occasionally notice that it's a different architecture.
Debian is also available for several BSDs and for Hurd, should you wish some other than Linux kernel.
Debian's the obvious choice for the server room. RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSe are good for the desktop.
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I'd guess a Macintosh, they're stable, easy to use and have a low TCO. These days the purchase price is even competitive.
I'd be interested to hear which people like the best. The Macintosh one is an obvious candidate...
No way to find out. Not only won't BuyMusic.com work with Macintosh or other platforms, it's locked into a browser headed for non-support.By going with a standards-based service, not only would the service be easier to maintain, but they increase their market share by serving Mac users and every one else. A sale is a sale, the customer's choice of platform should be irrelevant.
Furthermore, there are still numbers of WinNT and Win98 users out there. Developing for MSIE ony is going to leave them out in the cold when MS drops the standalone version of MSIE.
So it'd be interesting to know if the service is letting the bottom line or their ideology decide? It can't be good for sales to turn away an arbitrary percentage of potential customers.
---
pump and dump
One of the factors for the U.S. gaining the advantage for a few decades, aside from the havoc in Europe from WWII, has been the ease with which the best students and researchers from the whole world can work onsite with their peers. Visa problems and other undesireable side affects caused by P.A.T.R.I.O.T. and other anti-U.S. legislation makes can help move IT centers out of the U.S. Outsourcing drives this by providing funding and further incentive.
DMCA-like legislation and software patents also stifle innovation. Although there will not necessarily be mass emmigration from those lands, they will over time suffocate innovation, In contrast, lands where development can build on previous develoments and on investigation and publication, can move forward.
So, in short, the U.S. had for wa while a great environment for IT develoment and growth. The U.S. or some other economy which can produce or maintain such an environment is going to get the growth in the future. Whether it's Asia, East Asia, North America, or Europe (or Australio-Pacific) depends largely on which ones take themselves out of competition by enacting weird P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-DMCA-SofwarePatent laws
Along the same lines, now that most of the dot-com era is over, it would be possible to see if there was an inverse correlation between the numebr of MBAs at a firm and its survival.
Presumably the population of either a Dyson Sphere or a Ring World would be so large that emmigration would be a physical imposibility due to lack of materials and energy to build and move whole colonies. So some very, very long term form of regeneration is needed.
Putting a ring world around a "small" Dyson Sphere might capture all of the star's energy. Useful spectra can be re-emitted in the ring's plane of rotation.
Regarding external communication, I first noticed Exchange's problems when I was constantly getting dropped from professional lists starting around the time I transfered the address. Later two other lists sent requests for confirmations that the MS-Exchange based address was valid. And for the first month, I got phone calls if a mail that I was expected to answer disappeared. So I set up a test.
My methodology was to set up a cron job on a machine in country A to send mails every 10 minutes to two recipients, one to my account on the exchange server one to an account on a unix server on the same subnet, with a datetime stamp in the subject. After two weeks, I did a grep + diff on the Subject and found that about 15% were missing from the exchange account. My colleagues there assured me that this was abnormal as Exchange usually lost only 5% - 10% according to their experience at other sites ( which I have not discussed here.)
Though we agree that it is expensive, I'd add that based on what I've observed at the four sites that MS-Exchange is probably the most expensive way of going about setting up a mail server, even before counting the security and client side problems. Then there is the issue of overtime, which is expensive especially in Europe.
Anyway, I can't call anything an excellent product that give me and my colleagues every appearance of failing to function, being unsecure, locked into a high-TCO platform, and more expensive than any other options.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on performance.
In general, office parks, libraries, class rooms, and computer labs have a lot of idle time that could be exploited. Generally in cases like these the power is on anyway during certain hours and maintenance is covered anyway, so distributed computing might be used for many things.
However, even with an incubation period of 2-3 days, instead of a few seconds, there would have been no film. Travellers would have spread the plague to most if not all major travel centers before symptoms showed up.
That said, viruses and bacteria do attack different parts of the body, conceivably even different parts of the brain, so having one or more emotional/cognitive functions pegged out is not so unbelievable. The part I thought was lame, was the girl's comments about never again hearing original music. Since when did the RIAA remove the ability to sing or make instruments?
Yes, but when the MS-Exchange server was available it was still bouncing or altogether losing (external) mail, both incoming and outgoing.
I've connected Exchange sites together using the internet and SMTP, as well as X.400 connectors.
Sounds like it's still part of an intranet. In a Windows-only shop that's not online and never intends to be, I can see MS-Exchange competing with Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. In the context of external mail, I cannot see that it can compete with Exim, Postfix, or qmail on ease of installation, ease of maintenance, stability, load, or security, especially when the latter are on proven platforms like *BSD or Linux. On all four sites, I observed MS-Exchange to be the functional death of external communication.
Otherwise, I agree with your preference to keep things in house, when practical.
If you're running mail for less than a few hundred, it would take some real magic to bring the cost of even just the server side down from 9 per user per month (for MS-Exchange) to 3.5 per user per month.
An additional reason to have IMAP/POP offsite is that if your local Internet connection goes down, mail from your customers and clients still gets queued and not bounced or lost.
MS-Exchange might be good on an isolated Intranet, but connected to the Internet, it's death, especially for departments doing international work.
I've set up mailing lists which contain large numbers of non-expert users so I set an automated rejection + message of anything with incoming attachments. This not only stops the MSTDs dead, but also makes the size of the archive smaller, and allows the archive to be fully searchable. From the user side, it eliminates crowded inboxes (many web-mail clients have small limits) and, for the novices, it eliminates the problem of incompatible file formats, i.e. which program and which version of that program.
If a binary file does need to be transfered, then that's what HTTP, WebDAV, and other services excel at.
Plain text - it was good enough for Shakespeare
Regarding cost, a colleague outsourced her county's mail server to the regional telco altogether thus decreasing costs, increasing availability/reliability, and dratically decreasing client-side maintenance/support. Her previous situation was the the MS-Outlook + MS-Exchange problem you describe. Those were side benefits, the main reason to drop MS-Exchange was to get acceptible uptime and reduce the number of lost messages. The upfront costs of the outsourcing went from 7 to 3.5 per user per month. I've seen analyses showing $2 USD per user per month for FOSS solutions when serving 5000+ users, so 3.5 has to include a nice profit.
The client side benefited, too. Since end users were no longer locked into MS-Outlook, the support time for clients went down from several hours per week to less than an hour. That and outgoing/incoming external mail stopped disappearing.
Using Postfix, Exim or qmail seems to be best practice. In addition, these can be run on any platform, whereas MS-Exchange has the added drawback of being locked into a single platform.
From my observations at 4 sites, pretty much any MTA is worlds more stable and reliable than MS-Exchange. My previous employer tried to put the whole institution on MS-Exchange which was a nightmare. Among the main problems, I found that 15% of the incoming mails (to a legitimate address) during a two week test either just disappeared or bounced with a 'user does not exist'
Lost mail == delayed projects or lost bids.
That's an interesting way to phrase it, misleading yet technically correct. Perhaps a quote from the sales team? Based on what I've seen for the last 3 years, I would put a different emphasis: Yes there are idelogical reasons to go with alternatives like MS-Outlook and co, but no technical or economic ones. When performance and cost matter, it's the traditional, mainstream choices like Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail that are relevant and can run on any platform.So, either way, users wishing to have tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, and improved security will find it in the cross-platform browsers Mozilla and Opera.
Here, the automated bus schedules were down for a week with a Windows NT error message. Also, the other week at an airport some of the terminals above the check-in were offline and showed some Windows based error message instead of the departures and gate numbers. In one lobby I used to pass on the way to work was visible from the street a machine which showed the BSOD most days.
It's kind of sad when religion / ideology dictate choice of technology instead of criteria like performance. Kiosks and other public relations devices ought to be using proven stable systems like BSD, Linux, QNX or Novell. Perhaps a PR campaign is needed to remind people that software shouldn't crash and that it's not normal for it to do so, except if you stay with MS.
This is in strong contrast to the dbms-which-ought-not-be-named which provided hours of entertainment and overtime with its special features, the latest being the special slammer/sapphire feature.
Japan has given a deadline of 2005 for IPv6 adoption. After that Europe and then, later, the U.S. will also start to adopt. There's a fresher article from this week, but I can't find it again.
Simply put, it's easier to write worms and viruses for MS products.
At least there are benchmarks and enough of a description to allow discussion. It would be much worse if benchmarks were prohibited from publication.
DRM would die on it's own in a free market, but as it is now it is an inactive part of WinXP and an active part of subsequent versions. Sure some individuals can keep trying to turn it off, but Windows XP SP1 gives Redmond root privileges on your computer and they can keep turning back on. A perfect method for locking out competitors and locking customers in.
There are just too many good, cost-effective, secure, time saving alternatives, even on the desktop, to spend time/money on MS-Windows. Even government agencies, traditionally slow-moving beasts, are starting to see that this just another dot-com -- full of false claims. Even the management can see it's a dead company and have been bailing under the smoke screen of a multi-hundred million dollar marketing campaign.
IIRC with WinXP you are only purchasing a subscription for a year or so. So, assuming that and no price hikes, if the effective life of your system is 3 years, then $50 / year is still $150 and for 5 years it's $250.
At least with Lindows, its yours, you own your copy. Not only that with, with Lindows you retain the right to continue to access your data
At least with Lindows, its yours, you own your copy. Not only that with, with Lindows you retain the right to continue to access your data.
Debian is also available for several BSDs and for Hurd, should you wish some other than Linux kernel.
Debian's the obvious choice for the server room. RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSe are good for the desktop.