As I walked through the instructions, at some step or other it became apparent that the LIDS build process was wanting to modify the machine it was currently running on, or at least it sure looked that way. Since the build machine wasn't the target machine, I immediately stopped, and haven't ever had time to fiddle with it, again.
I just looked at my old source (LIDS 1.1.0) and you're absolutely right; the default instructions modify the box you're on. The easiest way to get it to work easily would have been to to all building on one box and then NFS-mount the stuff to the router so you could do a "make install". Or you could just copy the new kernel, tools, and configuration files over by hand.
Still, hopefully this will all be moot soon; hopefully the LSM version should be much less of a pain.
Generally, the guy your beating on needs to be whacked. But this makes sense:
C, a language that provides no security features such as garbage collection
In what sense is garbage collection a security feature? That makes no sense.
It's not garbage collection as much as direct memory access and management. In C, it's very easy to accidentally write something that allows for the execution of arbitrary code. In Java, it's very hard.
This is similar to the way one should write banking code. For most of the programmers, there should be no way to add money to an account or remove money from an account. Instead, you just give them an API that allows transfers. That way you eliminate a whole class of possible errors.
The OP's confusion probably comes from the fact, that once you remove free(), garbage collection is the common solution.
Except that LIDS seems to want to be built on the machine where it's going to be run.
What sort of problem were you having?
But trying to evaluate and use any of these packages for a home system turns into a massive time-sink to do properly.
I'd agree. I devoted perhaps three days to installing and trying the major ones last year, and it was a pain.
Personally, I settled on LIDS, which, although it is a little squirrely, has worked happily for me. But for casual users these are not ready for prime time; every time I install a new daemon I need to set up a set of matching LIDS entries so that things work properly. This isn't much of a pain for me, but for novices it would probably make their eyeballs bleed.
Also they are trying to pin the blame on Worldcom (kick them while they are down). If the AT&T executives failed to listen to their foremost expert why is that Worldcom's problem? The data Odlyzko quotes from MAE and other NAPs is publicly available. It was very easy for anybody to check and see if data was doubling or not...
So pretend you're the CEO of AT&T, a company that is the epitome of old-school telcom companies, one that in the early days of the internet just laughed it off. The bulk of your compensation and all of your reputation depends on making it look like your company is able to keep up with rapidly growing competitors. Keep in mind that this is during a bubble; facts are as nothing to investors, and appearance is everything. WorldCom, the biggest data carrier and a darling of the markets, sez their traffic is doubling every hundred days. And because they've been saying it for so long, everybody takes it as fact.
One researcher comes to you and says that although he doesn't have any real numbers on Worldcom's network, he has a pretty good idea growth rates are lower. A lot lower. Even if you believe him utterly (and you probably won't), so what?
To discredit this "fact" would take more than just the CEO of AT&T mentioning it; many industry CEOs would have to come clean at the same time to have a chance of discrediting Worldcom. And if the "fact" weren't true, then investors might notice and start wondering why they were holding exactly so much AT&T stock; if growth is slower than they expected, then it must be worth less, right?
Suddenly the AT&T stock would be in the toilet, and you'd out on your ear. Since the new info is too scary, you send it out for further study, and never think about it again.
So yeah, I'd say that the other companies were certainly at fault as well, but Worldcom was pumping air into the bubble for all they were worth. If they had been honest and said "network growth is slowing" then everybody else would have owned up, too. But then, god forbid, they would have missed a quarterly earnings report.
so basically, you need to invest in this infrastructure regardless -- because let's face it, you need them damn fibre runs even for today's economy. the choice boils down to 1) you spend 85 billion for 2 fibres today, and another 80 3 years later when you need to double the capacity 2) you spend 100 billion for 32 fibres today, and be home free for 12 years or so.
If that were the whole picture, that'd be right. but it's more complicated. Those stats work for just the raw fiber, but a ton of money went in to things other than long-haul fiber runs: fiber termination, routing gear, data centers, advertising, and so on. Those expenses could have been deferred, but as the article points out, everybody was chasing a mirage.
Note that the hidden expenses that brought WorldCom down weren't for installing fiber; they were leases for operating bandwidth.
i like to point out that the interstate highway system is pretty much the same
The two main differences being that a) a dozen different companies weren't all trying to build complete national highways at once, and b) our local roads are not controlled by monopolistic entities with a strong interest in keeping you the hell away from the highway unless you go through them at their prices.
I think there's a dynamic at work that forces a lot of those professions to be, on average, less than humble, too.
On one end, basic monkey wiring dictates that we prefer following people who appear confident. (Check Chimpanzee Politics or any popular book on leadership.) This is doubly true in an emergency or in a high-stakes situation where the right path isn't obvious to all. So any politicians, doctors, or CEOs who are honestly willing to admit that they are muddling along like the rest of us are unlikely to rise (or perhaps even stay) in those professions.
On the other end, it takes quite a bit of self-confidence to say, "Out of a quarter-billion citizens, I am the best choice to lead the free world." It is hard to imagine that, say, George Bush, is a naturally modest man who came to that realization through careful introspection and honest-self assessment.
And in the middle, training often doesn't help. Business school, politico schoool, and to a certain extent medical school seem to make ego inflation part of the curriculum. I've had friends go through all three, and they can be insufferable until they resume contact with the real world. If they ever do, that is. High corporate managers and politicians are so isolated from the effects of their actions, that they may never know whether or not they are doing anything useful. And my doctor sees me about four minutes a year, so I can't imagine he gets much useful feedback either.
Heh. Probably. That day I'd spent two hours composing a carefully constructed, "Guys, your software is great, but I'm stuck," message with plenty of detail, making sure I'd left no obvious stone unturned. And no sooner than I'd sent it off, on three different mailing lists I got "please do my homework for me" posts barely disguised as questions. So I was certainly, uh, aware of leeches.
As they say in California, somebody then demanding that I port shell code to his Windows box, like, totally harshed my mellow, dude.
Maybe I can be excused as part of the long Usenet tradition of reaming somebody to make an example out of him? Probably not; although fun for everybody but the example himself, I'm not sure it's such a good tradition in the long run.
Ouch! Whoever modded your reply to me was more than a bit harsh... '-1 Troll'?! No way!
Heh. Funny, that. My posts on a couple of threads got modded down at about the same time. Ah well; I can live with a 47 karma.
I dunno what exactly I'd do if someone DID start leaching, since I have no real contract, but then again, I have the switch in my condo, so all I need to do is pull the plug.
The Linux traffic control stuff is amazing! See Advanced Routing and Traffic Control HOWTO for details on how to make a router that is good about prioritizing traffic. If you have a leech, you could just put his traffic as lowest priority; he could suck all the bits he wants with minimal problems for others.
Also, the social solution can work pretty well. put together some MRTGgraphs of who's using what; then when people gripe, show them where to check who's using what. That way, you aren't the bad cop.
No, he didn't. He sassed the poster (who had even offered a helpful explantion of those scary 76 characters of code), played dumb (I say "played" because in the same breath he claimed to be a coder), and then demanded help.
If he were asking for help, he might have said, "I don't get it! Please tell me more about what 'tr' does!" But he wasn't asking for help, he was throwing a tantrum.
There are plenty of folks too busy working at their own specialties to learn ours, from farmers to firefighters. The "but it is so simple for ME" attitude is one more reason why Linux is having such a hard slog at displacing Windows.
I neither said nor implied that it was easy for anybody. All specialties require time and effort; otherwise they wouldn't be specialties. I've helped lots of specialists, from artists to writers to anthropologists to philosophers to grandmothers, gain some geeky knowledge. They were all looking to get something done, and were glad to spend some time learning whatever was necessary to help them get there. Symmetrically, I've been glad to put in some time and elbow grease to learn things in other realms when I've needed it.
But for the times when I'm not willing to learn how to do it myself, I expect to pay up to have somebody do it for me, and I try to do it with appropriate humility. This guy is saying, "Gosh, I want to do something with my computer, I don't know how, and I'm not willing to learn a thing. So somebody do it for me right now!" This attitude might work if you are Veruca Salt. But although I've helped hundreds of strangers gratis, he won't get anything from me without cash up front.
Windows is an OS for people who are builders, creators and makers of things IN FIELDS OTHER THAN PROGRAMMING!
Close. If you change it to "...for people with a credit card who are...", then you've got it. Windows is, by design, a consumer product, and billg likes it just fine that way. Unix systems provide you with tools; Windows provides you with sealed "solutions". If your problem matches one of their solutions, you're happy. If not, you generally need to whip out that credit card.
I have bought prebuilt Linux systems from Penguin Computing and ASL with success.
If the people don't know how to run a server, I'd go with Red Hat and subscribe to Red Hat's automatic security update program. Make sure they use one of the user-friendly tools to turn off all the stuff they don't need, though.
If that's not enough, they should probably just hire somebody to help them. A custom off-the-shelf system is a contradiction in terms; if you want something a little different than everybody else, then you can't just open the box and plug it in: cash or elbow grease is required.
I'd really like to know why private business has so much sway over government in these sorts of things.
See, there's this thing called "bribery". It'a a major factor in this other thing called "corruption".
You're forgetting Hanlon's Razor. Having done some contracts for government, the truth is often simpler.
Consider the typical bureaucrat, a lifer whose main skills are political. You've got a person who is risk-averse, ignorant of the outside world, and in charge of something important. They write up a nice request for proposal (RFP), and three months later they get back a bunch of proposals. They immediately throw out all the ones from small or new outfits, because even if they are innovative, they might not be around long enough. Then they pick the safest, shiniest one and send them a big ol' check.
If the bureaucrat is smart, dedicated, and careful, this system works pretty well. And honestly, a surprising fraction of them are. But generally a good marketroid can run rings around the bureaucrats.
To my mind the main problem is that bureaucrats say, "Gosh, I am a smart and broadly educated person; I can understand all this." But they don't, and so they get suckered.
Note that geeks are not immune to this. During the 2000 Election foofaraw, I can't count the number of people who said, "Gosh, I could hack together something much better than this paper ballot thingy." But electronic voting has a metric shitload of subtle, unresolved issues; some prettysmartpeople say it's either impossible or just very, very hard to do right.
So look it as a combination of naive geeks and naive bureaucrats, with some pretty ordinary businesspeople in between. The result is the same, with no bribery needed.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
The Economist had an article this week saying that Worldcom was the source of a much more sinister problem, too.
During the boom, Worldcom repeated suggested their traffic was doubling roughly every 100 days, or circa 1000% annual growth. (Since 1996 or so, it was apparently more like 70% to 150%.) This puffery became industry "fact", so much so that when other companies discovered that their traffic wasn't growing like that, they concluded must be a sales problem.
So to keep up with Worldcom's fictional growth, everybody built out their networks at fantastic rates. Thus, the problem wasn't the public's appetite for bandwidth; it was again Worldcom's (and others') appetite for apparent growth to prop up stock prices.
We, the fellow users of the Internet, are not here as your employees, your slaves, or your parents.
We, like you, have full and rich lives to lead; we have a lot to do before we kick off. To earn our daily bread, many of us are technology professionals, making our living through solving problems like this. Despite that, we are glad to help out fellow seekers of knowledge, fellow strugglers in this hard, cruel world. We do it gratis, recognizing the debt that we owe to those who have helped us.
But then some yutz comes along and, like a fresh-hatched cuckoo, opens his mouth wide and peeps, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" Thanks, but I have no particular interest in feeding leeches.
If you want to understand the preceding command, RTFM. And if you want to accomplish this task on Windows 2000, pay somebody. Linux is an OS for builders, for creators, for makers of things. Windows is an OS for consumers. If you want to act like a consumer, then get out that credit card.
I thought the idea was to do your BL in Stored Proceedures so that you don't need to implement it in client, and thusly allow any interface; web page, windows app, unix app, and so on, to access.
For small apps in a two-tier setup, this is a plausible way to go, especially if you are writing the rest of your code in a procedural language. But it ties you to a single vendor and a single database server. Migrating or scaling is a sharp-taloned bitch.
Personally, after a decade of OO design and development, I hate most uses of stored procedures. I also am deeply suspicious of complicated queries. It's my general belief that a database is not a processsing engine; it's where good objects go to rest. Keeping your business logic on a separate server increases flexibility, eases development, and reduces DBA pain. The initial development cost can be a little higher, but I think the long-term costs are a lot lower.
Then go to Target or Walmart or K-mart (Big-K?) and buy a $90 boombox, put it on the counter, insert CD, press play, and enjoy your tunes while the cappucino machine.
Yeah, a sap who probably nets $5/hour after taxes should spend half a work week so that they and their coworkers can listen to music that they like during setup and teardown when there's a better stereo just sitting there. Swell idea.
I suggest, however, that the poster wants to be able to play the tunes while the customers are in the house. I say: they need to be fired, because they expose their corporation to lawsuit and potentially embarrassing headlines.
Yeah, I can see it in the NYT already: Minimum-Wage Workers Discovered To Not Always Follow Rules.
Let's be real here. From the way you're talking, I imagine that you've never worked a low-end job for a major chain. On average, the managers are robots and the employees are animals. This is understood and expected on all sides. If a couple of minimum-wage teenagers are playing unlicensed music, ASCAP will probably never notice, especially given that Starbucks is already paying every month for music, the only question being who gets the credit. If they do, the most they'll do is send a slightly mean letter to Starbucks.
Thirty seconds later, Starbucks will write back saying that the rogue employees have been terminated and that their vendor has been notified to beef up security on the jukeboxes. ASCAP, noting that Starbucks currently pays 3.2 zillion dollars annually in royalties, will waive the misplaced 30 cents, and everybody will be happy, especially the cd-burning chumps who will never have to use the word "Venti" again and will be working at some other low-rent job a week later.
If Starbucks Corporate HQ would sweat over anything, it would be the potential image problem if customers walk in and the stereo is blaring "You've Got Fetus On Your Breath". But if the guys behind the counter are even vaguely savvy about their music choices, even that won't be a problem.
So please muzzle your moralizing. The poster did not ask for advice from his mommy; he asked about an interesting geek problem. Hopefully they will post more details so we can get on with figuring out how things work.
But if you can't get up (and sometimes when I'm programming I hate to break my concentration), the solution I like is to use an exercise ball as a chair.
The one I use is the Thera-Band, which I like fine, but I haven't tried other brands. Note that they you what size you should get based on your height, but that's for use as an exercise ball, not as a chair; I ended up buying a bigger one because the recommended one was a little too low.
Why is this better than a chair? The main difference is that you are always moving a little. On a chair, you can slump like an overcooked noodle. On a ball, you have to keep balanced, so your muscles are more active. There are also more possible positions with the ball, and I often find myself switching among them.
Don't throw away your old chair, though; I tend to switch every couple of days between the ball and the regular chair.
Between this and regular yoga, my back has improved a lot.
This is true if you play it for the customers, and I could see that ASCAP might come after Starbucks for that. In practice, though, if they discover that it's just a couple of employees who have hot-wired the jukebox, they're not gonna sue; it's too small potatoes.
But if employees play music they own when the store isn't open, I'd bet that's legal; the public can't get in. Personally, that's when I'd really want it. I can stand the 'music' while the place is open, but I'd love to listen to something I like while opening or closing.
Spam is bad. It doesn't work. I can't figure out why people keep dping it. Is the word not getting out there? IT DOESN"T WORK.
Alas, I think the problem is that there are a lot of idiots out there. Note that people are still joining things like Herbalife, even though it appears to be a scam. Ditto for all the other MLMs. For some people, it seems to take a really long time to get TANSTAAFL.
There's and idea I've had about this; maybe y'all can help me work out the kinks. The basic theory is that the Internet allows you to aggregate a lotta little bits of effort or money and come up with an impressive whole, right?
So we open a web site in Tonga or Kazakhstan. Say spam-killer.to or kill-spammers.kz. Anybody can come and contribute money via credit card towards the offing of known spammers. The big spammers would quickly attract large bounties, which would attract high-quality heavies. Whoever gets the spammer gets the bounty. The main problem: when a spammer gets offed, what do we do if there are multiple claimants? You sure don't want to pay the wrong guy; you'd have a skilled murder mad at you.
Or maybe it would be cheaper to just club together and buy some congressmen; thanks to the crash, congressmen should be even cheaper than Nasdaq index funds.
(For the record: Yes, this is a joke; I don't think spammers should get more than 3-5 in a federal pen for the first offense. The bit about bribing congressmen is also a joke. As are, now that I think about it, said congressmen.)
I tested a program called Spam Assassin that does this sort of analysis. It was so beautiful, so magical, so goddamn hilarious that people came in from other rooms to see what the hell I was laughing at.
It has a zillion clever tests, all weighted by spam-predicting ability. You can used these to calculate a final score for a message and then handle the message differently depending on how spammy it looks. The standard approach is to junk the really spammy stuff, put the clearly good stuff in your inbox, and put the semi-spammy messages in a special forlder that you can dig through later.
I haven't installed it for production yet, but I ran it on a few thousand old emails and it did a very good job.
If you really, really can't find a vendor other than one who has junk-marketed you, then at least you should try to hide that.
If a junk call gives you the idea to get a service, then spend a week or two calling around to make sure you've found the best deal. Then call them and order. This bends their stats to make junk marketing look less effective.
And to get them to stop bothering you, consider signing up with Private Citizen and something like Privacy Manager. Between the two of them, I get one junk call about every three months now.
Slashdot Mirror
As I walked through the instructions, at some step or other it became apparent that the LIDS build process was wanting to modify the machine it was currently running on, or at least it sure looked that way. Since the build machine wasn't the target machine, I immediately stopped, and haven't ever had time to fiddle with it, again.
I just looked at my old source (LIDS 1.1.0) and you're absolutely right; the default instructions modify the box you're on. The easiest way to get it to work easily would have been to to all building on one box and then NFS-mount the stuff to the router so you could do a "make install". Or you could just copy the new kernel, tools, and configuration files over by hand.
Still, hopefully this will all be moot soon; hopefully the LSM version should be much less of a pain.
In what sense is garbage collection a security feature? That makes no sense.
It's not garbage collection as much as direct memory access and management. In C, it's very easy to accidentally write something that allows for the execution of arbitrary code. In Java, it's very hard.
This is similar to the way one should write banking code. For most of the programmers, there should be no way to add money to an account or remove money from an account. Instead, you just give them an API that allows transfers. That way you eliminate a whole class of possible errors.
The OP's confusion probably comes from the fact, that once you remove free(), garbage collection is the common solution.
Except that LIDS seems to want to be built on the machine where it's going to be run.
What sort of problem were you having?
But trying to evaluate and use any of these packages for a home system turns into a massive time-sink to do properly.
I'd agree. I devoted perhaps three days to installing and trying the major ones last year, and it was a pain.
Personally, I settled on LIDS, which, although it is a little squirrely, has worked happily for me. But for casual users these are not ready for prime time; every time I install a new daemon I need to set up a set of matching LIDS entries so that things work properly. This isn't much of a pain for me, but for novices it would probably make their eyeballs bleed.
Also they are trying to pin the blame on Worldcom (kick them while they are down). If the AT&T executives failed to listen to their foremost expert why is that Worldcom's problem? The data Odlyzko quotes from MAE and other NAPs is publicly available. It was very easy for anybody to check and see if data was doubling or not...
So pretend you're the CEO of AT&T, a company that is the epitome of old-school telcom companies, one that in the early days of the internet just laughed it off. The bulk of your compensation and all of your reputation depends on making it look like your company is able to keep up with rapidly growing competitors. Keep in mind that this is during a bubble; facts are as nothing to investors, and appearance is everything. WorldCom, the biggest data carrier and a darling of the markets, sez their traffic is doubling every hundred days. And because they've been saying it for so long, everybody takes it as fact.
One researcher comes to you and says that although he doesn't have any real numbers on Worldcom's network, he has a pretty good idea growth rates are lower. A lot lower. Even if you believe him utterly (and you probably won't), so what?
To discredit this "fact" would take more than just the CEO of AT&T mentioning it; many industry CEOs would have to come clean at the same time to have a chance of discrediting Worldcom. And if the "fact" weren't true, then investors might notice and start wondering why they were holding exactly so much AT&T stock; if growth is slower than they expected, then it must be worth less, right?
Suddenly the AT&T stock would be in the toilet, and you'd out on your ear. Since the new info is too scary, you send it out for further study, and never think about it again.
So yeah, I'd say that the other companies were certainly at fault as well, but Worldcom was pumping air into the bubble for all they were worth. If they had been honest and said "network growth is slowing" then everybody else would have owned up, too. But then, god forbid, they would have missed a quarterly earnings report.
so basically, you need to invest in this infrastructure regardless -- because let's face it, you need them damn fibre runs even for today's economy. the choice boils down to
1) you spend 85 billion for 2 fibres today, and another 80 3 years later when you need to double the capacity
2) you spend 100 billion for 32 fibres today, and be home free for 12 years or so.
If that were the whole picture, that'd be right. but it's more complicated. Those stats work for just the raw fiber, but a ton of money went in to things other than long-haul fiber runs: fiber termination, routing gear, data centers, advertising, and so on. Those expenses could have been deferred, but as the article points out, everybody was chasing a mirage.
Note that the hidden expenses that brought WorldCom down weren't for installing fiber; they were leases for operating bandwidth.
i like to point out that the interstate highway system is pretty much the same
The two main differences being that a) a dozen different companies weren't all trying to build complete national highways at once, and b) our local roads are not controlled by monopolistic entities with a strong interest in keeping you the hell away from the highway unless you go through them at their prices.
I think there's a dynamic at work that forces a lot of those professions to be, on average, less than humble, too.
On one end, basic monkey wiring dictates that we prefer following people who appear confident. (Check Chimpanzee Politics or any popular book on leadership.) This is doubly true in an emergency or in a high-stakes situation where the right path isn't obvious to all. So any politicians, doctors, or CEOs who are honestly willing to admit that they are muddling along like the rest of us are unlikely to rise (or perhaps even stay) in those professions.
On the other end, it takes quite a bit of self-confidence to say, "Out of a quarter-billion citizens, I am the best choice to lead the free world." It is hard to imagine that, say, George Bush, is a naturally modest man who came to that realization through careful introspection and honest-self assessment.
And in the middle, training often doesn't help. Business school, politico schoool, and to a certain extent medical school seem to make ego inflation part of the curriculum. I've had friends go through all three, and they can be insufferable until they resume contact with the real world. If they ever do, that is. High corporate managers and politicians are so isolated from the effects of their actions, that they may never know whether or not they are doing anything useful. And my doctor sees me about four minutes a year, so I can't imagine he gets much useful feedback either.
though I still think you over-reacted
Heh. Probably. That day I'd spent two hours composing a carefully constructed, "Guys, your software is great, but I'm stuck," message with plenty of detail, making sure I'd left no obvious stone unturned. And no sooner than I'd sent it off, on three different mailing lists I got "please do my homework for me" posts barely disguised as questions. So I was certainly, uh, aware of leeches.
As they say in California, somebody then demanding that I port shell code to his Windows box, like, totally harshed my mellow, dude.
Maybe I can be excused as part of the long Usenet tradition of reaming somebody to make an example out of him? Probably not; although fun for everybody but the example himself, I'm not sure it's such a good tradition in the long run.
Ouch! Whoever modded your reply to me was more than a bit harsh... '-1 Troll'?! No way!
Heh. Funny, that. My posts on a couple of threads got modded down at about the same time. Ah well; I can live with a 47 karma.
The swell ISP Speakeasy Networks is on record saying customers are allowed to share in an article about community wireless networks.
I dunno what exactly I'd do if someone DID start leaching, since I have no real contract, but then again, I have the switch in my condo, so all I need to do is pull the plug.
The Linux traffic control stuff is amazing! See Advanced Routing and Traffic Control HOWTO for details on how to make a router that is good about prioritizing traffic. If you have a leech, you could just put his traffic as lowest priority; he could suck all the bits he wants with minimal problems for others.
Also, the social solution can work pretty well. put together some MRTGgraphs of who's using what; then when people gripe, show them where to check who's using what. That way, you aren't the bad cop.
The dude asked for help.
No, he didn't. He sassed the poster (who had even offered a helpful explantion of those scary 76 characters of code), played dumb (I say "played" because in the same breath he claimed to be a coder), and then demanded help.
If he were asking for help, he might have said, "I don't get it! Please tell me more about what 'tr' does!" But he wasn't asking for help, he was throwing a tantrum.
There are plenty of folks too busy working at their own specialties to learn ours, from farmers to firefighters. The "but it is so simple for ME" attitude is one more reason why Linux is having such a hard slog at displacing Windows.
I neither said nor implied that it was easy for anybody. All specialties require time and effort; otherwise they wouldn't be specialties. I've helped lots of specialists, from artists to writers to anthropologists to philosophers to grandmothers, gain some geeky knowledge. They were all looking to get something done, and were glad to spend some time learning whatever was necessary to help them get there. Symmetrically, I've been glad to put in some time and elbow grease to learn things in other realms when I've needed it.
But for the times when I'm not willing to learn how to do it myself, I expect to pay up to have somebody do it for me, and I try to do it with appropriate humility. This guy is saying, "Gosh, I want to do something with my computer, I don't know how, and I'm not willing to learn a thing. So somebody do it for me right now!" This attitude might work if you are Veruca Salt. But although I've helped hundreds of strangers gratis, he won't get anything from me without cash up front.
Windows is an OS for people who are builders, creators and makers of things IN FIELDS OTHER THAN PROGRAMMING!
Close. If you change it to "...for people with a credit card who are...", then you've got it. Windows is, by design, a consumer product, and billg likes it just fine that way. Unix systems provide you with tools; Windows provides you with sealed "solutions". If your problem matches one of their solutions, you're happy. If not, you generally need to whip out that credit card.
I have bought prebuilt Linux systems from Penguin Computing and ASL with success.
If the people don't know how to run a server, I'd go with Red Hat and subscribe to Red Hat's automatic security update program. Make sure they use one of the user-friendly tools to turn off all the stuff they don't need, though.
If that's not enough, they should probably just hire somebody to help them. A custom off-the-shelf system is a contradiction in terms; if you want something a little different than everybody else, then you can't just open the box and plug it in: cash or elbow grease is required.
You're forgetting Hanlon's Razor. Having done some contracts for government, the truth is often simpler.
Consider the typical bureaucrat, a lifer whose main skills are political. You've got a person who is risk-averse, ignorant of the outside world, and in charge of something important. They write up a nice request for proposal (RFP), and three months later they get back a bunch of proposals. They immediately throw out all the ones from small or new outfits, because even if they are innovative, they might not be around long enough. Then they pick the safest, shiniest one and send them a big ol' check.
If the bureaucrat is smart, dedicated, and careful, this system works pretty well. And honestly, a surprising fraction of them are. But generally a good marketroid can run rings around the bureaucrats.
To my mind the main problem is that bureaucrats say, "Gosh, I am a smart and broadly educated person; I can understand all this." But they don't, and so they get suckered.
Note that geeks are not immune to this. During the 2000 Election foofaraw, I can't count the number of people who said, "Gosh, I could hack together something much better than this paper ballot thingy." But electronic voting has a metric shitload of subtle, unresolved issues; some pretty smart people say it's either impossible or just very, very hard to do right.
So look it as a combination of naive geeks and naive bureaucrats, with some pretty ordinary businesspeople in between. The result is the same, with no bribery needed.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
The Economist had an article this week saying that Worldcom was the source of a much more sinister problem, too.
During the boom, Worldcom repeated suggested their traffic was doubling roughly every 100 days, or circa 1000% annual growth. (Since 1996 or so, it was apparently more like 70% to 150%.) This puffery became industry "fact", so much so that when other companies discovered that their traffic wasn't growing like that, they concluded must be a sales problem.
So to keep up with Worldcom's fictional growth, everybody built out their networks at fantastic rates. Thus, the problem wasn't the public's appetite for bandwidth; it was again Worldcom's (and others') appetite for apparent growth to prop up stock prices.
You seem to have been misinformed.
We, the fellow users of the Internet, are not here as your employees, your slaves, or your parents.
We, like you, have full and rich lives to lead; we have a lot to do before we kick off. To earn our daily bread, many of us are technology professionals, making our living through solving problems like this. Despite that, we are glad to help out fellow seekers of knowledge, fellow strugglers in this hard, cruel world. We do it gratis, recognizing the debt that we owe to those who have helped us.
But then some yutz comes along and, like a fresh-hatched cuckoo, opens his mouth wide and peeps, "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" Thanks, but I have no particular interest in feeding leeches.
If you want to understand the preceding command, RTFM. And if you want to accomplish this task on Windows 2000, pay somebody. Linux is an OS for builders, for creators, for makers of things. Windows is an OS for consumers. If you want to act like a consumer, then get out that credit card.
Yep! Had I known up front I was giving a marketable asset to MBA-wielding jerkos for free, that would have been swell.
As it is, I now just use freedb. They continue to be what I thought cddb was all along.
I thought the idea was to do your BL in Stored Proceedures so that you don't need to implement it in client, and thusly allow any interface; web page, windows app, unix app, and so on, to access.
For small apps in a two-tier setup, this is a plausible way to go, especially if you are writing the rest of your code in a procedural language. But it ties you to a single vendor and a single database server. Migrating or scaling is a sharp-taloned bitch.
Personally, after a decade of OO design and development, I hate most uses of stored procedures. I also am deeply suspicious of complicated queries. It's my general belief that a database is not a processsing engine; it's where good objects go to rest. Keeping your business logic on a separate server increases flexibility, eases development, and reduces DBA pain. The initial development cost can be a little higher, but I think the long-term costs are a lot lower.
Then go to Target or Walmart or K-mart (Big-K?) and buy a $90 boombox, put it on the counter, insert CD, press play, and enjoy your tunes while the cappucino machine.
Yeah, a sap who probably nets $5/hour after taxes should spend half a work week so that they and their coworkers can listen to music that they like during setup and teardown when there's a better stereo just sitting there. Swell idea.
I suggest, however, that the poster wants to be able to play the tunes while the customers are in the house. I say: they need to be fired, because they expose their corporation to lawsuit and potentially embarrassing headlines.
Yeah, I can see it in the NYT already: Minimum-Wage Workers Discovered To Not Always Follow Rules.
Let's be real here. From the way you're talking, I imagine that you've never worked a low-end job for a major chain. On average, the managers are robots and the employees are animals. This is understood and expected on all sides. If a couple of minimum-wage teenagers are playing unlicensed music, ASCAP will probably never notice, especially given that Starbucks is already paying every month for music, the only question being who gets the credit. If they do, the most they'll do is send a slightly mean letter to Starbucks.
Thirty seconds later, Starbucks will write back saying that the rogue employees have been terminated and that their vendor has been notified to beef up security on the jukeboxes. ASCAP, noting that Starbucks currently pays 3.2 zillion dollars annually in royalties, will waive the misplaced 30 cents, and everybody will be happy, especially the cd-burning chumps who will never have to use the word "Venti" again and will be working at some other low-rent job a week later.
If Starbucks Corporate HQ would sweat over anything, it would be the potential image problem if customers walk in and the stereo is blaring "You've Got Fetus On Your Breath". But if the guys behind the counter are even vaguely savvy about their music choices, even that won't be a problem.
So please muzzle your moralizing. The poster did not ask for advice from his mommy; he asked about an interesting geek problem. Hopefully they will post more details so we can get on with figuring out how things work.
I agree!
But if you can't get up (and sometimes when I'm programming I hate to break my concentration), the solution I like is to use an exercise ball as a chair.
The one I use is the Thera-Band, which I like fine, but I haven't tried other brands. Note that they you what size you should get based on your height, but that's for use as an exercise ball, not as a chair; I ended up buying a bigger one because the recommended one was a little too low.
Why is this better than a chair? The main difference is that you are always moving a little. On a chair, you can slump like an overcooked noodle. On a ball, you have to keep balanced, so your muscles are more active. There are also more possible positions with the ball, and I often find myself switching among them.
Don't throw away your old chair, though; I tend to switch every couple of days between the ball and the regular chair.
Between this and regular yoga, my back has improved a lot.
Yep! And if you can get your hands on the disc, upload if for us. "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." And this sounds like an annoying bug.
This is true if you play it for the customers, and I could see that ASCAP might come after Starbucks for that. In practice, though, if they discover that it's just a couple of employees who have hot-wired the jukebox, they're not gonna sue; it's too small potatoes.
But if employees play music they own when the store isn't open, I'd bet that's legal; the public can't get in. Personally, that's when I'd really want it. I can stand the 'music' while the place is open, but I'd love to listen to something I like while opening or closing.
Spam is bad. It doesn't work. I can't figure out why people keep dping it. Is the word not getting out there? IT DOESN"T WORK.
Alas, I think the problem is that there are a lot of idiots out there. Note that people are still joining things like Herbalife, even though it appears to be a scam. Ditto for all the other MLMs. For some people, it seems to take a really long time to get TANSTAAFL.
Then we can rest easy; it's been a long time since Congress has had an honest member.
There's and idea I've had about this; maybe y'all can help me work out the kinks. The basic theory is that the Internet allows you to aggregate a lotta little bits of effort or money and come up with an impressive whole, right?
So we open a web site in Tonga or Kazakhstan. Say spam-killer.to or kill-spammers.kz. Anybody can come and contribute money via credit card towards the offing of known spammers. The big spammers would quickly attract large bounties, which would attract high-quality heavies. Whoever gets the spammer gets the bounty. The main problem: when a spammer gets offed, what do we do if there are multiple claimants? You sure don't want to pay the wrong guy; you'd have a skilled murder mad at you.
Or maybe it would be cheaper to just club together and buy some congressmen; thanks to the crash, congressmen should be even cheaper than Nasdaq index funds.
(For the record: Yes, this is a joke; I don't think spammers should get more than 3-5 in a federal pen for the first offense. The bit about bribing congressmen is also a joke. As are, now that I think about it, said congressmen.)
I tested a program called Spam Assassin that does this sort of analysis. It was so beautiful, so magical, so goddamn hilarious that people came in from other rooms to see what the hell I was laughing at.
It has a zillion clever tests, all weighted by spam-predicting ability. You can used these to calculate a final score for a message and then handle the message differently depending on how spammy it looks. The standard approach is to junk the really spammy stuff, put the clearly good stuff in your inbox, and put the semi-spammy messages in a special forlder that you can dig through later.
I haven't installed it for production yet, but I ran it on a few thousand old emails and it did a very good job.
If you really, really can't find a vendor other than one who has junk-marketed you, then at least you should try to hide that.
If a junk call gives you the idea to get a service, then spend a week or two calling around to make sure you've found the best deal. Then call them and order. This bends their stats to make junk marketing look less effective.
And to get them to stop bothering you, consider signing up with Private Citizen and something like Privacy Manager. Between the two of them, I get one junk call about every three months now.