I've got three cooker (well, 9.2 as of today) desktop/server systems, a 9.0 server, and a 9.1 desktop/server. All are generally rock-solid, with the exception of the 9.1 system (naturally the most important). Of course, that system has been severely overheated to the point of panic shutdown quite a few times, so I tend to chalk up flakiness to its abused little chip. Importance being relative of course:-)
Why spend a little money when you could spend a lot?
1) make the PC quieter -- replace it with a tiny Shuttle, go nuts with the mods at http://www.quietpcusa.com, store it behind baffles under your desk. 2) Get a Slimp3 hooked up to your existing bookshelf or to one of those super-tiny amplifiers. Some people even skip the external amplifier entirely and hook their Slimp3 up directly to powered speakers. 3) Rip and sell your CDs. 4).... 5) In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman gets all your profit -- but trust me, there will be enough of it to buy hot grits by the dumptruck load, and I think we can all guess where those grits are going to go.
"So tell me, how's anybody even supposed to know it exists?"
That thought has occurred to me and others on some of the mailing lists I frequent. Some are using redirects, but I find this in my Zope's standard_html_footer to be sufficient:
I concur. Lost an hour on Monday by discovering a Javascript bug/implementation problem(*) in IE and Opera. I was coding to Mozilla, tried it in IE before releasing it to the customer, and shock of shocks, it broke. Back to the drawing board for that feature... and the redesigned code runs like a pig in a tarpit on IE. Nice and snappy on Mozilla or Opera, but IE takes THIRTEEN SECONDS to construct the page. I'll be damned if I'm going to track down why either.
(*) The problem is with toggling the.selected property of dynamically generated dropdown menus. Basically, if you're generating the list of options in a dropdown forminput based on previous user choices, IE and Opera have no way to access that list; Mozilla-based browsers will simply let you set document.myform.mydropdown[i].selected = true, but IE and Opera force you to build a new array, toggle selected within the array, then write the array into document.myform.mydropdown. Sick and wrong.
Old bug? Which one? Do a little research and you'll find that SSH bugs are also a lot less frequent than Outlook bugs. I don't know about Slashdot, but I'd be just as smug. Getting in via email and getting in via ssh are two different classes of attack.
The first requires one step: the attacker to send a crafted email to an unpatched mail client. The defense modes against that (defanging mail, &c.) are unpopular because of collateral damage and required maintenance. Once the attack is launched, all other activity is passive (keystroke logging) until the shipment of captured data back to th cracker. The cracker then logs in as a regular user and looks like regular traffic, no need to worry about an IDS.
the second requires: 1) opening SSH to the Internet on an unpatched box. 2) a local root exploit on that box (just because you got in as the sshd user doesn't mean you have the privileges required to scan and attack other boxes on the LAN). 3) active attacks that don't trip any IDS systems in operation, or the ability to passively sniff user data (very difficult in switched environments, unless of course your evil sniffer is sitting on the general manager's desktop!).
I think we can all agree that Valve's sloppy IT practices are to blame here; I'm just saying that Outlook on the desktops is one of the sloppy practices.
See the story at The Register. They link to Valve's forum, where the general manager details how the code was leaked: in short, his own account information was stolen via Outlook, then several other employees were hit with a Outlook preview-pane virus that installed a keylogger.
Of course, this is no reason to think that Outlook isn't a perfectly good solution for email. Outlook is great. There's no reason to consider any alternatives. No matter how much money you lose to Outlook virii, simply look at the silly dancing monkey!
I have one of those in my wrist from a kindergarten pencil fight. It was a real wood pencil, makes a good war story. Yessiree, it's been twenty-seven years and the dot is still black!
I type whenever possible; if I can't type the message, I'll probably leave it in voicemail. Handwriting more than a post-it or two hurts my wrist, is illegible for the average human, takes way too freaking long, and goes on a piece of paper that usually gets lost anyway. Besides, with half the pens out there and all the pencils the writing gets smudged all over by my left pinky anyway.
which is why it had a mail-sink on it for a few hours this afternoon... Unfortunately said mail-sink seems to have dissolved under the load. It was probably catching half the spam on the Internet. Wish I could remember the name, something like Snuffle.
I was wondering how far I was going to have to scroll down before someone mentioned Evolution vfolders:-) They're quite a good solution to this problem.
Mentioning Outlook's Journal feature is probably de rigeur.
The problem with all the heap and chain systems that I've seen is that they aren't any more intuitive than the existing nested file cabinet metaphor. I suspect that most of them are designed by people who have grad students to file and find things for them:-)
The real solution isn't a different system, it's a smarter and faster search. Changing the file system would help for browsing activity, I suppose, but how much? And why browse unless you don't know what's there or can't articulate what you want to find?
CodeWeavers: nice folks with a strong customer service orientation. They produce a product that is generally quite reliable, they'll give your money back if it won't do what it's supposed to, and they have a decent support system.
Transgaming: MIA, zero customer service orientation. The product worked for one of the fifteen games I tried with it, the support forum is very difficult to use, and the emails I sent trying to find a human went unanswered.
I'm sure that some people have had opposite experiences, but after my attempts to deal with these two companies I have no interest in giving money to Transgaming. I'd buy a Crossover Games though.
yet another one of these... multitasking performance problems? Look to the OS. My P3/850 laptop burns CDs, rips MP3s, plays DVDs, plays Quake2 and runs the full set of office apps without batting an eyelid. Installing Linux took more effort on the front end than accepting the XP license, but the value I receive is worth every minute of time spent figuring out how to do things.
Presumably you've got good reasons for running XP, but complaining about its well-known problems is sort of pointless. "I have to use this manure to fertilize my garden, but I wish it didn't smell like manure!"
Re:Work with the OpenOffice team?
on
Gnumeric Turns 5
·
· Score: 1
Could just as well turn the argument on its head though. OOo is good, but its spreadsheet component isn't as good as Gnumeric.
That isn't going to replace free/busy lookups, unless I'm being particularly dense this morning. Granted, this should in theory be a relatively simple little network daemon, but I can't help thinking that if it's so simple, it would exist by now:-)
Agreed that the GAL lookup is pretty lame, and no matter what MUA I'm on, I end up copying important addresses into my local address book. However, I've never seen Outlook's attempt to lookup something in GAL bring the whole MUA to a grinding halt or crash it, common occurences with Evo's LDAP lookup.
This is actually an area where XML might make some sense, though the best use of it would still be a router between native formats.
You're missing the value-add of Exchange (and therefore the hard part of replacing it) entirely.
The complete integration of calendar, contacts, public folders, and email in Outlook (well copied in Evolution) is not client-side only -- it extends into the server. The two most useful and hard to replace parts are:
free/busy scheduler. Calendar, new appointment, select a few co-workers, pick a time. You can see if they're busy at that time or not. Timezone synchronization is automatic. Select some resources as well, like a conference bridge or a video projector -- you can see if it's in use at that time. This is the killer app of Exchange.
global address book. LDAP is great, but few Unixy solutions let you use it from the email composer address field, the calendar address field, and the contact editor. Evolution is pretty close, Mozilla does better but lacks the calendar part.
Public folders which include non-file content. Shared filesystem is okay if I want to share a spreadsheet, but a public folder can include an addressbook of people that you don't need in your everyday book, a calendar showing training schedules and the resources committed, all sorts of goodies like that. VB macros too -- workflow and virii to your heart's content:-)
bingo... I know of more than one company that is operating with a new IT staff trying to support some wacked-out app written by the old IT staff. This app will invariably be:
a) utterly mission critical. b) far too complex to recreate in less than the six months spent by the original IT staff. c) completely non-fault tolerant. d) pretty stable as long as you provide lots of RAM and reboot the server every eight and a half hours. e) written in a compiled language, the source of which has gone mysteriously missing. f) using some clever hacks that cause mysterious breakage when OS patches are applied.
If your boss has ever had proximity to such a project or can use their imagination, your project will be shot down unless you can provide business reasons for going your way and an escape strategy. Having an active open source community working with the same codebase is a good escape strategy. Having YAISFP (yet another inactive source forge project) is not.
1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.
wow, it goes that far now? Last time I bought it, it didn't include anything past a login prompt in init 3. You want X Windows? Best of luck, kiddo!
The hilarious thing to me is that Mandrake does exactly what he asks and what you describe. It does show you a list of what it wants to install, and I wouldn't have that any other way, but you just check the little checkboxes and say okay and off it goes. It's called urpmi, but you can access the same power through the rpmdrake or MandrakeUpdate interfaces.
Two differences: you do have to select a mirror, which might be overloaded, because MandrakeSoft isn't made of cash; and you don't have to reboot at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got three cooker (well, 9.2 as of today) desktop/server systems, a 9.0 server, and a 9.1 desktop/server. All are generally rock-solid, with the exception of the 9.1 system (naturally the most important). Of course, that system has been severely overheated to the point of panic shutdown quite a few times, so I tend to chalk up flakiness to its abused little chip. Importance being relative of course :-)
Why spend a little money when you could spend a lot?
....
1) make the PC quieter -- replace it with a tiny Shuttle, go nuts with the mods at http://www.quietpcusa.com, store it behind baffles under your desk.
2) Get a Slimp3 hooked up to your existing bookshelf or to one of those super-tiny amplifiers. Some people even skip the external amplifier entirely and hook their Slimp3 up directly to powered speakers.
3) Rip and sell your CDs.
4)
5) In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman gets all your profit -- but trust me, there will be enough of it to buy hot grits by the dumptruck load, and I think we can all guess where those grits are going to go.
that really was posted in plain text... oh well. Figure out your own "detect IE and display a Mozilla nag" footer, it's not like it's hard :-)
"So tell me, how's anybody even supposed to know it exists?"
That thought has occurred to me and others on some of the mailing lists I frequent. Some are using redirects, but I find this in my Zope's standard_html_footer to be sufficient:
0">
USE MOZILLA
I concur. Lost an hour on Monday by discovering a Javascript bug/implementation problem(*) in IE and Opera. I was coding to Mozilla, tried it in IE before releasing it to the customer, and shock of shocks, it broke. Back to the drawing board for that feature... and the redesigned code runs like a pig in a tarpit on IE. Nice and snappy on Mozilla or Opera, but IE takes THIRTEEN SECONDS to construct the page. I'll be damned if I'm going to track down why either.
.selected property of dynamically generated dropdown menus. Basically, if you're generating the list of options in a dropdown forminput based on previous user choices, IE and Opera have no way to access that list; Mozilla-based browsers will simply let you set document.myform.mydropdown[i].selected = true, but IE and Opera force you to build a new array, toggle selected within the array, then write the array into document.myform.mydropdown. Sick and wrong.
(*) The problem is with toggling the
Old bug? Which one? Do a little research and you'll find that SSH bugs are also a lot less frequent than Outlook bugs. I don't know about Slashdot, but I'd be just as smug. Getting in via email and getting in via ssh are two different classes of attack. The first requires one step: the attacker to send a crafted email to an unpatched mail client. The defense modes against that (defanging mail, &c.) are unpopular because of collateral damage and required maintenance. Once the attack is launched, all other activity is passive (keystroke logging) until the shipment of captured data back to th cracker. The cracker then logs in as a regular user and looks like regular traffic, no need to worry about an IDS. the second requires: 1) opening SSH to the Internet on an unpatched box. 2) a local root exploit on that box (just because you got in as the sshd user doesn't mean you have the privileges required to scan and attack other boxes on the LAN). 3) active attacks that don't trip any IDS systems in operation, or the ability to passively sniff user data (very difficult in switched environments, unless of course your evil sniffer is sitting on the general manager's desktop!). I think we can all agree that Valve's sloppy IT practices are to blame here; I'm just saying that Outlook on the desktops is one of the sloppy practices.
All the functions that were in that code have to be redesigned and rewritten to work differently in order to prevent cheats.
The point of the theft wasn't to get HL2 early and play it; the point of the theft was to write and sell cheater bots and mods.
See the story at The Register. They link to Valve's forum, where the general manager details how the code was leaked: in short, his own account information was stolen via Outlook, then several other employees were hit with a Outlook preview-pane virus that installed a keylogger.
Of course, this is no reason to think that Outlook isn't a perfectly good solution for email. Outlook is great. There's no reason to consider any alternatives. No matter how much money you lose to Outlook virii, simply look at the silly dancing monkey!
I have one of those in my wrist from a kindergarten pencil fight. It was a real wood pencil, makes a good war story. Yessiree, it's been twenty-seven years and the dot is still black!
I type whenever possible; if I can't type the message, I'll probably leave it in voicemail. Handwriting more than a post-it or two hurts my wrist, is illegible for the average human, takes way too freaking long, and goes on a piece of paper that usually gets lost anyway. Besides, with half the pens out there and all the pencils the writing gets smudged all over by my left pinky anyway.
He's like a machine, been at it for hours.
Are you okay?
I know kung fu!
I tried that at my last job and the bastards laid me off anyway! Said I wasn't a team player...
which is why it had a mail-sink on it for a few hours this afternoon... Unfortunately said mail-sink seems to have dissolved under the load. It was probably catching half the spam on the Internet. Wish I could remember the name, something like Snuffle.
I was wondering how far I was going to have to scroll down before someone mentioned Evolution vfolders :-) They're quite a good solution to this problem.
:-)
Mentioning Outlook's Journal feature is probably de rigeur.
The problem with all the heap and chain systems that I've seen is that they aren't any more intuitive than the existing nested file cabinet metaphor. I suspect that most of them are designed by people who have grad students to file and find things for them
The real solution isn't a different system, it's a smarter and faster search. Changing the file system would help for browsing activity, I suppose, but how much? And why browse unless you don't know what's there or can't articulate what you want to find?
CodeWeavers: nice folks with a strong customer service orientation. They produce a product that is generally quite reliable, they'll give your money back if it won't do what it's supposed to, and they have a decent support system.
Transgaming: MIA, zero customer service orientation. The product worked for one of the fifteen games I tried with it, the support forum is very difficult to use, and the emails I sent trying to find a human went unanswered.
I'm sure that some people have had opposite experiences, but after my attempts to deal with these two companies I have no interest in giving money to Transgaming. I'd buy a Crossover Games though.
yet another one of these... multitasking performance problems? Look to the OS. My P3/850 laptop burns CDs, rips MP3s, plays DVDs, plays Quake2 and runs the full set of office apps without batting an eyelid. Installing Linux took more effort on the front end than accepting the XP license, but the value I receive is worth every minute of time spent figuring out how to do things.
Presumably you've got good reasons for running XP, but complaining about its well-known problems is sort of pointless. "I have to use this manure to fertilize my garden, but I wish it didn't smell like manure!"
Could just as well turn the argument on its head though. OOo is good, but its spreadsheet component isn't as good as Gnumeric.
That isn't going to replace free/busy lookups, unless I'm being particularly dense this morning. Granted, this should in theory be a relatively simple little network daemon, but I can't help thinking that if it's so simple, it would exist by now :-)
Agreed that the GAL lookup is pretty lame, and no matter what MUA I'm on, I end up copying important addresses into my local address book. However, I've never seen Outlook's attempt to lookup something in GAL bring the whole MUA to a grinding halt or crash it, common occurences with Evo's LDAP lookup.
This is actually an area where XML might make some sense, though the best use of it would still be a router between native formats.
You're missing the value-add of Exchange (and therefore the hard part of replacing it) entirely.
:-)
The complete integration of calendar, contacts, public folders, and email in Outlook (well copied in Evolution) is not client-side only -- it extends into the server. The two most useful and hard to replace parts are:
free/busy scheduler. Calendar, new appointment, select a few co-workers, pick a time. You can see if they're busy at that time or not. Timezone synchronization is automatic. Select some resources as well, like a conference bridge or a video projector -- you can see if it's in use at that time. This is the killer app of Exchange.
global address book. LDAP is great, but few Unixy solutions let you use it from the email composer address field, the calendar address field, and the contact editor. Evolution is pretty close, Mozilla does better but lacks the calendar part.
Public folders which include non-file content. Shared filesystem is okay if I want to share a spreadsheet, but a public folder can include an addressbook of people that you don't need in your everyday book, a calendar showing training schedules and the resources committed, all sorts of goodies like that. VB macros too -- workflow and virii to your heart's content
bingo... I know of more than one company that is operating with a new IT staff trying to support some wacked-out app written by the old IT staff. This app will invariably be:
a) utterly mission critical.
b) far too complex to recreate in less than the six months spent by the original IT staff.
c) completely non-fault tolerant.
d) pretty stable as long as you provide lots of RAM and reboot the server every eight and a half hours.
e) written in a compiled language, the source of which has gone mysteriously missing.
f) using some clever hacks that cause mysterious breakage when OS patches are applied.
If your boss has ever had proximity to such a project or can use their imagination, your project will be shot down unless you can provide business reasons for going your way and an escape strategy. Having an active open source community working with the same codebase is a good escape strategy. Having YAISFP (yet another inactive source forge project) is not.
1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.
wow, it goes that far now? Last time I bought it, it didn't include anything past a login prompt in init 3. You want X Windows? Best of luck, kiddo!
The hilarious thing to me is that Mandrake does exactly what he asks and what you describe. It does show you a list of what it wants to install, and I wouldn't have that any other way, but you just check the little checkboxes and say okay and off it goes. It's called urpmi, but you can access the same power through the rpmdrake or MandrakeUpdate interfaces.
Two differences: you do have to select a mirror, which might be overloaded, because MandrakeSoft isn't made of cash; and you don't have to reboot at the end.
Cool, so your system can figure out who sent forged mail? Love it!
Betcha that if you were using a TDMA and I sent you a dictionary attack with [ ]@clubi.ie, one or two would get through to you.
I can agree with that; though I'm still not interested in higher math or programming :-) I've developed a love affair with Perl though.