The law of unintended consequences is waiting for you... First and foremost, define "bad genes". How about the set of brain chemistry differences clustering around autism, Ausperger's disease, &c? They're generally considered as treatment-worthy defects in modern first world society, because a kid with even a touch of this stuff is not going to be a popular team player. For that matter, what about the current fad for ADD, ADHD, Hyperactivity, or whatever else you want to call "not fitting into a regimented classroom environment"?
Richard Stallman, Nikolai Tesla, and Albert Einstein all fit the pattern in my non-medical opinion, not to mention Temple Grandin, who is diagnosed autistic. Would these people be who they are and do what they've done if their genes were tweaked, or their parents disallowed from breeding? Maybe what we call a disease is just a misunderstood variation which is necessary for social progress?
Regardless of whether different is better, maybe there's nothing wrong with it being different. They used to try to "fix" left-handed kids in my parent's generation, and homosexuality would land you in a mental institution a generation before that. Now the former looks like eugenetic insanity and the latter is confined to the radical-right fringes of society.
What does that have to do with anything? The conversation here is about desktops, not cluster farms.
By the way, I don't know them, but I'm guessing that the Virginia Tech folks sure do wish that Apple had sprung for some sort of OOB hardware management on those XServes. IPMI, anyone? Only if you've got the new X86-based hardware, which they didn't buy.
And emusic still has my dollars instead of ITMS because of DRM, to the tune of $250 a year. Apple has been buying access to a large catalog by enforcing DRM, so that they could build a large audience. Now that they have the large audience, they're suddenly finding it interesting and convenient to take a principled stand. Principles are not something that come and go that conveniently though, which is what the article is trying to point out. If they're sleazy enough to fake principle now on this issue, maybe it's not just a convenient moment of sleaze... maybe they're really sleazy.
You can also use external providers for SecureACS to do some very deep scanning and remediation of the system. The stock Cisco NAC solution does rather suck, but as a framework it could work.
Problem one is that unfinished frameworks are a dime a dozen -- figuring out which ones are going to get finished is a job for Nostradamus.
Problem two is that most IT organizations don't have the chutzpah to actually implement trusted access. The coordination requirements between different departments are a killer, and the security trade off is too high.
A nearby hospital called the consulting joint I worked for about 12 years ago because their network was down. I met the new IT guy in the lobby, and as he's walking me back towards the networking room he explains that the old IT guy was an ex-Bellhead. He's going on and on about the old guy's various problems, and I'm like, what's the point here? Then we get to the networking room, which is in a small cinderblock bunker in the parking lot between several of the main buildings. When he opens the door, there's no data networking gear... instead, there's a two wall collection of punchdown blocks, and a drift of red sticky dots all over the floor. Seems that the guy had wired 10Base-T in with his phone system in order to save money, and marked the data ports with a red dot. Worked okay until the A/C failed, and he was promptly fired.
Later on, I was consulting with a company that sold devices which you downloaded content to. Each user would log into the Apache-powered website, where a WebLogic app generated 4 to 10 MB of sorta-custom data and shoved it over the net into the device. Unfortunately, some bright fellow came up with the idea of also sticking this same data into the Oracle database as a BLOB... Site went down Christmas day and didn't come back until January.
Same company had a DS-3 from their corporate offices to their data center, and complained about performance. A little bing testing showed it was pulling 14 mbps rather than 45, so I spent a day with the datacenter and ISP verifying all their stuff. Finally, I ended up standing in their telco closet and tracing the cables... turns out it doesn't go CSU/DSU > Sun firewall > Catalyst 5500, it actually goes CSU/DSU > Sun firewall > dusty 16-port NetGear switch under the rack > Catalyst 5500. Shockingly, removing the NetGear made the problem go away, though I had to argue pretty hard for at least trying it.
Then there was the time that Dell sent some free Ethernet switches for testing. I accidentally knocked the power cord out of one, but when I tried to plug it back in, the power supply's little plastic collar snapped off and the whole thing fell into the switch.
Oddly, that's the line where I unplugged my headphones from the airplane's armrest and restored them to their rightful place in my rockboxed iRiver iHP-120. The movie was crap. I kept an eye on the screen when my work got too dull, but the only thing I thought was cool was the lowest-cost special effect in it... the eyes painted on Johnny Depp's eyelids were pretty damned cool.
Your comment really helps to solidify something that I've felt for all the years I've worked with Apple's OS'es. It's not that I'm annoyed with implementation details, it's that I fundamentally disagree with the philosophy of the design.
The interface was designed and built for people who don't use computers after extensive research into what would make them want to buy a computer. It's a damnable horrorshow for people who use computers every day. I use and have used KDE, XFce, Gnome, FVWM, XP, 2000, WfW3.11, OS 9, OS X, &c, as well as watching other users of these OS'es while helping them with problems. Unix UI's are the most productive as measured by speed of successful input, followed by Windows 2000 and XP. Admins working on Linux or BSD get things done at the speed of their thoughts, and the best Windows people are almost there. Both use keyboard shortcuts extensively. The OS X people, when they aren't explaining why Macs are better and they're being unfairly cheated out of their rightful place at the head of the class, are slow to get things done. Basic operations like copying files, editing files, and restarting applications just take longer. They use mice extensively.
Subjective observation, subjective opinion, and subjective dislike. My Macbook gathers dust while my PC gets used all day every day.
I'm sure there's plenty of egocentrism to go around, but the real reason geeks get upset about internet explorer is because they have to write web pages and applications for the damned thing. It's very frustrating to write HTML, Javascript, and CSS for a site and have it work perfectly in everything but MSIE.
Better yet, MSIE 7 breaks code that worked in MSIE 6, but not by becoming standards compliant, so there's yet another set of work arounds required....
This is common knowledge, and you can change the editor in pine too. I'm a vi guy myself, and that's the way that I had it configured. The thing that mutt sucks at (IMHO) is functionality. It is in my opinion a poor console mailer compared to pine, and changing the editor does not fix that. Not like it matters any more, since everyone has switched to skynet (er, gmail).
You do realize that it's not just Mars that would get rammed... "Hello, India? China? This is the U.S.A. calling. We'd like you to know that your days as rival nuclear powers were really cool and all, but now we've got a nuke you can't match. Maybe you should have invested more in your space programs back in the Naughty Aughties." Bring it in right and the warning threshold will be about 10 seconds.
I've used mutt plenty, but pine remains my favorite console MUA. It's a vi/emacs thing, I guess, what's intuitive and pleasant to some is alien and intrusive to others.
You are so right. This is the stuff, together with lousy power management on laptops, that has driven me away from Linux on the desktop. I still use Linux for servers, but I won't waste my time on the GUI until it's settled.
Unfortunately, I see very little hope of it being settled.... rather, history is going to repeat itself. Those with the time and resources to manage the morass will continue to use Linux despite its continual self-splintering, while the vast majority of the industry moves on with easier alternatives.
and that's good because hundreds and hundreds of people want to go from OAK to SLC every morning between 6 and 9 AM? There's a reason the airlines are all expanding their regional jet fleets. Sure, they're also buying some behemoth machines for transcontinental flights, but their bread-and-butter seems to be the low head count short haul. Exactly the sort of thing that Greyhound does, only at 500 mph instead of 55 mph.
Now let's review the feasibility of building a mag-lev track between OAK and SLC, along Highway 80. Two mountain ranges and a river delta to be crossed, and it wouldn't make sense to do it unless there was a stop in Tahoe and another in Reno, and suddenly the whole thing is taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than a direct plane flight.
One more little wrinkle -- about a year ago, I had to go to Butte, Montana. I was able to hop the same OAK-SLC flight that I already take about once a month, then catch a puddle-jumper from SLC into a rather scary podunk airport in Butte. Would it make sense to run passenger rail into Butte, or would I have been mag-lev'ing to SLC and then renting a car to drive to Butte? Bearing in mind that the SLC-BTM also crosses a lot of mountainous territory, that one-hour plane hop would have taken most of the day to drive, and a decade to build rail through. That decade was already used and there is a freight line, but that line was not built to support high-speed passenger rail.
Adding or subtracting an air route costs diddly; adding a rail route costs years and millions, which must be paid for even if it's later subtracted.
Ask around: frequent travellers do not check luggage, unless there is a truly dire need. For any trip of a week or shorter, all you need is your laptop bag and one rollie full of clothes and toiletries. If the trip is longer, there's always hotel laundry service...
We don't check luggage because checking luggage adds at least an hour to the flying experience, making day trips in the same time zone less feasible, greatly increasing the chance of loss or damage, and generally ruining one's day.
One other thing to consider... what's going to happen to the checked-luggage system when these new TSA rules cause its load to be increased by 50 or 75 percent? Currently, it's only used by the infrequent travellers or the people with truly dire needs (musicians, sports, and others with large equipment). Add in the rollies of all those business travelers and the plane hold fills up faster, and then what's the chance that your bag with clothes and toiletries makes it to the same place you're going at the same time? Some people are expected to show up the next morning in clean clothes, and for those just planning to get some more toothpaste when you land, you're obviously not used to landing late at night after everything is closed. It's not an unusual occurence.
but that out of the way, the scale of the US makes it a bit less than feasible. For instance, here in California we've been arguing on and off for several years about a high-speed rail between SF and LA. It's only 500 miles, and it could follow the course of the old El Camino Real (now Highway 101)... only that's through mountainous territory all the way. Okay, so it could follow Highway 5... but now it's a 600 or 700 mile journey, and it still crosses a mountain range (the Grapevine). Either route is sparsely populated between the suburban outreaches, reducing the pull-through... and before you claim that the new transit corridor will produce new cities, bear in mind that the highways have been there for 40 years (or 300 if you're counting El Camino Real). There also won't be a train stop every where that there's a freeway on ramp.
On the other hand, you can fly down for a day trip for about $100, and on some days it's actually faster than driving to the other side of LA or the Bay Area. The fact is that trains are great for 9-5 commuting where people have 9-5 office jobs, but they kind of suck at flexibility.
Worse, the hub-and-spoke model that gives air travel its flexibility is not replicable with rail because the rail has to be built and maintained, which takes a lot longer than upgrading or building an airport terminal. Even if that problem were overcome, say by a massive government building program that connected all the major and minor cities of the country, it still wouldn't be successful because of the economic requirement to put lots of passengers onto each train and stop relatively infrequently. Greyhound buses on Interstate highways are the proof.
"some people assumed that the sizeOf function just returned a variable as we had been taught it should"
It takes real world experience to disabuse them of the assumption that things work as documented. If you read that it works in fashion A in the manual, the textbook, and on several fora, you think that's what's what. It's not until you use the product/function/tool that you realize fashion A is the designed behavior, but it isn't the only possible behavior. In your special corner case, it's going to be fashion B. Maybe that's a bug, maybe it's a safety valve the developer applied to keep the thing from core dumping, maybe it's just an accident, but it is what it is. If you don't try, you don't know.
Today's example (and yes, most days have one): IIS 6.0 logs and returns error code 404 2 1260 when it doesn't want to deliver a.exe file for permissions reasons. MSIE pops an error message and doesn't give you the file, but Firefox offers to save the file to disk, then does so successfully. Documented, expected, logical behavior is for the server to return an error, but actual behavior is for the server to return an error _and the file_.
I'd say that Nagios' real strength is actually its dirt-simple plugin architecture. Use any language you like to figure out any state that you want, and you can have Nagios monitor, alert, or take corrective action on it. Monitoring a single machine is easy -- using Perl to step through several sections of your entire website, expect to log in to your RADIUS/PPPoE infrastructure, or bash to make sure that Mailman is still receiving and resending emails is a job for Nagios.
because in software-land, "mature" is rapidly followed by "obsolete." I love Nagios, but I'm hesistant to recommend it to anyone who's not comfortable spending a week on building and configuring software.
Packages for it are often broken or from the old 1.3 tree, which makes for confusion when following examples that use 2.0 syntax.
Configuration is extremely challenging to start from scratch with, especially if you want to do anything custom.
There are a number of external dependencies, particularly if you want to compile the plugins.
That said, Nagios still whips the pants off quite a few commercial monitoring products I've evaluated.
a) Draw a connection to their own fields, or else they'll tune out right from the start. If you want to write good code, you should read a lot of good code. If you want to do good accounting, watch a lot of good accounting. If you need to write clearly, then read a lot of clear writing."
b) Provide said writing. Try to avoid fiction and non-contemporary writing, rather stick with clear essayists, satirists, humorists, and engineers. Give them credit for writing book reports on their own fields, many O'Reilly books are written by people who are decent writers as well as brilliant technologists (Jeremy Friedl and Randall Schwartz come to mind).
the vast majority were from email in postfix and spamd/spamc, though some could have theoretically come from squid. The interesting thing to me is that command is unending (IOW it loops), which probably says something deep and intriguing and probably geb0rken about Linux's memory stack.
There are some commercial apps that appear to come close, but it's clearly not a priority for the OSS folks. My guess on this is that few OSS-oriented folks actually work on internal infrastructure or talk to desktop users (unless they're trying to write a replacement desktop and are trying to sell the user on how much more productive they'll be when the krunkulator widget goes swizzle instead of wiggle).
What's the motivation to develop faster?
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
The American stock market rewards growth, and to a lesser degree cost-cutting, not mastery. When a company already owns a market, it's supposed to look for ways to maintain that ownership less expensively. All the real work is then directed to taking over another market.
Applied to Microsoft, that means you can expect Vista and Office to be back-burner projects, while the XBox and Media PC stuff gets lots of love. What are they supposed to compete against, if not Microsoft's own earlier products? I'm well aware of the options and have used them professionally, but I haven't seen anyone big enough to get Microsoft's attention deploy them as an IT-sanctioned desktop solution (OSX excluded).
That being said, Vista does have some aspects designed to take over new markets, such as more onerous DRM. It's also confusing because a back-burner project on Microsoft's scale is still bigger than most projects any of us have ever worked on or near, but I don't think that either project is really a priority item for them.
Slashdot Mirror
The law of unintended consequences is waiting for you... First and foremost, define "bad genes". How about the set of brain chemistry differences clustering around autism, Ausperger's disease, &c? They're generally considered as treatment-worthy defects in modern first world society, because a kid with even a touch of this stuff is not going to be a popular team player. For that matter, what about the current fad for ADD, ADHD, Hyperactivity, or whatever else you want to call "not fitting into a regimented classroom environment"?
Richard Stallman, Nikolai Tesla, and Albert Einstein all fit the pattern in my non-medical opinion, not to mention Temple Grandin, who is diagnosed autistic. Would these people be who they are and do what they've done if their genes were tweaked, or their parents disallowed from breeding? Maybe what we call a disease is just a misunderstood variation which is necessary for social progress?
Regardless of whether different is better, maybe there's nothing wrong with it being different. They used to try to "fix" left-handed kids in my parent's generation, and homosexuality would land you in a mental institution a generation before that. Now the former looks like eugenetic insanity and the latter is confined to the radical-right fringes of society.
What does that have to do with anything? The conversation here is about desktops, not cluster farms.
By the way, I don't know them, but I'm guessing that the Virginia Tech folks sure do wish that Apple had sprung for some sort of OOB hardware management on those XServes. IPMI, anyone? Only if you've got the new X86-based hardware, which they didn't buy.
And emusic still has my dollars instead of ITMS because of DRM, to the tune of $250 a year. Apple has been buying access to a large catalog by enforcing DRM, so that they could build a large audience. Now that they have the large audience, they're suddenly finding it interesting and convenient to take a principled stand. Principles are not something that come and go that conveniently though, which is what the article is trying to point out. If they're sleazy enough to fake principle now on this issue, maybe it's not just a convenient moment of sleaze... maybe they're really sleazy.
You can also use external providers for SecureACS to do some very deep scanning and remediation of the system. The stock Cisco NAC solution does rather suck, but as a framework it could work.
Problem one is that unfinished frameworks are a dime a dozen -- figuring out which ones are going to get finished is a job for Nostradamus.
Problem two is that most IT organizations don't have the chutzpah to actually implement trusted access. The coordination requirements between different departments are a killer, and the security trade off is too high.
A nearby hospital called the consulting joint I worked for about 12 years ago because their network was down. I met the new IT guy in the lobby, and as he's walking me back towards the networking room he explains that the old IT guy was an ex-Bellhead. He's going on and on about the old guy's various problems, and I'm like, what's the point here? Then we get to the networking room, which is in a small cinderblock bunker in the parking lot between several of the main buildings. When he opens the door, there's no data networking gear... instead, there's a two wall collection of punchdown blocks, and a drift of red sticky dots all over the floor. Seems that the guy had wired 10Base-T in with his phone system in order to save money, and marked the data ports with a red dot. Worked okay until the A/C failed, and he was promptly fired.
Later on, I was consulting with a company that sold devices which you downloaded content to. Each user would log into the Apache-powered website, where a WebLogic app generated 4 to 10 MB of sorta-custom data and shoved it over the net into the device. Unfortunately, some bright fellow came up with the idea of also sticking this same data into the Oracle database as a BLOB... Site went down Christmas day and didn't come back until January.
Same company had a DS-3 from their corporate offices to their data center, and complained about performance. A little bing testing showed it was pulling 14 mbps rather than 45, so I spent a day with the datacenter and ISP verifying all their stuff. Finally, I ended up standing in their telco closet and tracing the cables... turns out it doesn't go CSU/DSU > Sun firewall > Catalyst 5500, it actually goes CSU/DSU > Sun firewall > dusty 16-port NetGear switch under the rack > Catalyst 5500. Shockingly, removing the NetGear made the problem go away, though I had to argue pretty hard for at least trying it.
Then there was the time that Dell sent some free Ethernet switches for testing. I accidentally knocked the power cord out of one, but when I tried to plug it back in, the power supply's little plastic collar snapped off and the whole thing fell into the switch.
Oddly, that's the line where I unplugged my headphones from the airplane's armrest and restored them to their rightful place in my rockboxed iRiver iHP-120. The movie was crap. I kept an eye on the screen when my work got too dull, but the only thing I thought was cool was the lowest-cost special effect in it... the eyes painted on Johnny Depp's eyelids were pretty damned cool.
Your comment really helps to solidify something that I've felt for all the years I've worked with Apple's OS'es. It's not that I'm annoyed with implementation details, it's that I fundamentally disagree with the philosophy of the design.
The interface was designed and built for people who don't use computers after extensive research into what would make them want to buy a computer. It's a damnable horrorshow for people who use computers every day. I use and have used KDE, XFce, Gnome, FVWM, XP, 2000, WfW3.11, OS 9, OS X, &c, as well as watching other users of these OS'es while helping them with problems. Unix UI's are the most productive as measured by speed of successful input, followed by Windows 2000 and XP. Admins working on Linux or BSD get things done at the speed of their thoughts, and the best Windows people are almost there. Both use keyboard shortcuts extensively. The OS X people, when they aren't explaining why Macs are better and they're being unfairly cheated out of their rightful place at the head of the class, are slow to get things done. Basic operations like copying files, editing files, and restarting applications just take longer. They use mice extensively.
Subjective observation, subjective opinion, and subjective dislike. My Macbook gathers dust while my PC gets used all day every day.
I'm sure there's plenty of egocentrism to go around, but the real reason geeks get upset about internet explorer is because they have to write web pages and applications for the damned thing. It's very frustrating to write HTML, Javascript, and CSS for a site and have it work perfectly in everything but MSIE.
Better yet, MSIE 7 breaks code that worked in MSIE 6, but not by becoming standards compliant, so there's yet another set of work arounds required....
This is common knowledge, and you can change the editor in pine too. I'm a vi guy myself, and that's the way that I had it configured. The thing that mutt sucks at (IMHO) is functionality. It is in my opinion a poor console mailer compared to pine, and changing the editor does not fix that. Not like it matters any more, since everyone has switched to skynet (er, gmail).
You do realize that it's not just Mars that would get rammed... "Hello, India? China? This is the U.S.A. calling. We'd like you to know that your days as rival nuclear powers were really cool and all, but now we've got a nuke you can't match. Maybe you should have invested more in your space programs back in the Naughty Aughties." Bring it in right and the warning threshold will be about 10 seconds.
I've used mutt plenty, but pine remains my favorite console MUA. It's a vi/emacs thing, I guess, what's intuitive and pleasant to some is alien and intrusive to others.
:x
Oh, and
"If it's not already in your development tree or toolkit, xdg-utils is available for download at http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/. "
The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from...
Sort of the way that Mandriva ships a broken Perl but keeps on calling it Perl...
You are so right. This is the stuff, together with lousy power management on laptops, that has driven me away from Linux on the desktop. I still use Linux for servers, but I won't waste my time on the GUI until it's settled.
Unfortunately, I see very little hope of it being settled.... rather, history is going to repeat itself. Those with the time and resources to manage the morass will continue to use Linux despite its continual self-splintering, while the vast majority of the industry moves on with easier alternatives.
and that's good because hundreds and hundreds of people want to go from OAK to SLC every morning between 6 and 9 AM? There's a reason the airlines are all expanding their regional jet fleets. Sure, they're also buying some behemoth machines for transcontinental flights, but their bread-and-butter seems to be the low head count short haul. Exactly the sort of thing that Greyhound does, only at 500 mph instead of 55 mph.
Now let's review the feasibility of building a mag-lev track between OAK and SLC, along Highway 80. Two mountain ranges and a river delta to be crossed, and it wouldn't make sense to do it unless there was a stop in Tahoe and another in Reno, and suddenly the whole thing is taking a lot longer and costing a lot more than a direct plane flight.
One more little wrinkle -- about a year ago, I had to go to Butte, Montana. I was able to hop the same OAK-SLC flight that I already take about once a month, then catch a puddle-jumper from SLC into a rather scary podunk airport in Butte. Would it make sense to run passenger rail into Butte, or would I have been mag-lev'ing to SLC and then renting a car to drive to Butte? Bearing in mind that the SLC-BTM also crosses a lot of mountainous territory, that one-hour plane hop would have taken most of the day to drive, and a decade to build rail through. That decade was already used and there is a freight line, but that line was not built to support high-speed passenger rail.
Adding or subtracting an air route costs diddly; adding a rail route costs years and millions, which must be paid for even if it's later subtracted.
Ask around: frequent travellers do not check luggage, unless there is a truly dire need. For any trip of a week or shorter, all you need is your laptop bag and one rollie full of clothes and toiletries. If the trip is longer, there's always hotel laundry service...
We don't check luggage because checking luggage adds at least an hour to the flying experience, making day trips in the same time zone less feasible, greatly increasing the chance of loss or damage, and generally ruining one's day.
One other thing to consider... what's going to happen to the checked-luggage system when these new TSA rules cause its load to be increased by 50 or 75 percent? Currently, it's only used by the infrequent travellers or the people with truly dire needs (musicians, sports, and others with large equipment). Add in the rollies of all those business travelers and the plane hold fills up faster, and then what's the chance that your bag with clothes and toiletries makes it to the same place you're going at the same time? Some people are expected to show up the next morning in clean clothes, and for those just planning to get some more toothpaste when you land, you're obviously not used to landing late at night after everything is closed. It's not an unusual occurence.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/20 06/08/08/MNGGTKD03A1.DTL
9 62410-6073658?v=glance&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375725806/002-8
but that out of the way, the scale of the US makes it a bit less than feasible. For instance, here in California we've been arguing on and off for several years about a high-speed rail between SF and LA. It's only 500 miles, and it could follow the course of the old El Camino Real (now Highway 101)... only that's through mountainous territory all the way. Okay, so it could follow Highway 5... but now it's a 600 or 700 mile journey, and it still crosses a mountain range (the Grapevine). Either route is sparsely populated between the suburban outreaches, reducing the pull-through... and before you claim that the new transit corridor will produce new cities, bear in mind that the highways have been there for 40 years (or 300 if you're counting El Camino Real). There also won't be a train stop every where that there's a freeway on ramp.
On the other hand, you can fly down for a day trip for about $100, and on some days it's actually faster than driving to the other side of LA or the Bay Area. The fact is that trains are great for 9-5 commuting where people have 9-5 office jobs, but they kind of suck at flexibility.
Worse, the hub-and-spoke model that gives air travel its flexibility is not replicable with rail because the rail has to be built and maintained, which takes a lot longer than upgrading or building an airport terminal. Even if that problem were overcome, say by a massive government building program that connected all the major and minor cities of the country, it still wouldn't be successful because of the economic requirement to put lots of passengers onto each train and stop relatively infrequently. Greyhound buses on Interstate highways are the proof.
"some people assumed that the sizeOf function just returned a variable as we had been taught it should"
.exe file for permissions reasons. MSIE pops an error message and doesn't give you the file, but Firefox offers to save the file to disk, then does so successfully. Documented, expected, logical behavior is for the server to return an error, but actual behavior is for the server to return an error _and the file_.
It takes real world experience to disabuse them of the assumption that things work as documented. If you read that it works in fashion A in the manual, the textbook, and on several fora, you think that's what's what. It's not until you use the product/function/tool that you realize fashion A is the designed behavior, but it isn't the only possible behavior. In your special corner case, it's going to be fashion B. Maybe that's a bug, maybe it's a safety valve the developer applied to keep the thing from core dumping, maybe it's just an accident, but it is what it is. If you don't try, you don't know.
Today's example (and yes, most days have one): IIS 6.0 logs and returns error code 404 2 1260 when it doesn't want to deliver a
I'd say that Nagios' real strength is actually its dirt-simple plugin architecture. Use any language you like to figure out any state that you want, and you can have Nagios monitor, alert, or take corrective action on it. Monitoring a single machine is easy -- using Perl to step through several sections of your entire website, expect to log in to your RADIUS/PPPoE infrastructure, or bash to make sure that Mailman is still receiving and resending emails is a job for Nagios.
because in software-land, "mature" is rapidly followed by "obsolete." I love Nagios, but I'm hesistant to recommend it to anyone who's not comfortable spending a week on building and configuring software.
Packages for it are often broken or from the old 1.3 tree, which makes for confusion when following examples that use 2.0 syntax.
Configuration is extremely challenging to start from scratch with, especially if you want to do anything custom.
There are a number of external dependencies, particularly if you want to compile the plugins.
That said, Nagios still whips the pants off quite a few commercial monitoring products I've evaluated.
a) Draw a connection to their own fields, or else they'll tune out right from the start. If you want to write good code, you should read a lot of good code. If you want to do good accounting, watch a lot of good accounting. If you need to write clearly, then read a lot of clear writing."
b) Provide said writing. Try to avoid fiction and non-contemporary writing, rather stick with clear essayists, satirists, humorists, and engineers. Give them credit for writing book reports on their own fields, many O'Reilly books are written by people who are decent writers as well as brilliant technologists (Jeremy Friedl and Randall Schwartz come to mind).
the vast majority were from email in postfix and spamd/spamc, though some could have theoretically come from squid. The interesting thing to me is that command is unending (IOW it loops), which probably says something deep and intriguing and probably geb0rken about Linux's memory stack.
it's kind of concerning how well the trick in your signature works :)
There are some commercial apps that appear to come close, but it's clearly not a priority for the OSS folks. My guess on this is that few OSS-oriented folks actually work on internal infrastructure or talk to desktop users (unless they're trying to write a replacement desktop and are trying to sell the user on how much more productive they'll be when the krunkulator widget goes swizzle instead of wiggle).
The American stock market rewards growth, and to a lesser degree cost-cutting, not mastery. When a company already owns a market, it's supposed to look for ways to maintain that ownership less expensively. All the real work is then directed to taking over another market.
Applied to Microsoft, that means you can expect Vista and Office to be back-burner projects, while the XBox and Media PC stuff gets lots of love. What are they supposed to compete against, if not Microsoft's own earlier products? I'm well aware of the options and have used them professionally, but I haven't seen anyone big enough to get Microsoft's attention deploy them as an IT-sanctioned desktop solution (OSX excluded).
That being said, Vista does have some aspects designed to take over new markets, such as more onerous DRM. It's also confusing because a back-burner project on Microsoft's scale is still bigger than most projects any of us have ever worked on or near, but I don't think that either project is really a priority item for them.