Just so I've got this straight, you're complaining one of the largest holdouts (computer games) against mainstream Linux desktop adoption is about to be supported by one of the most successful, popular and consumer-friendly game developer/publishers in the business?
You could say similar things about other IT behemoths, like, I don't know, IBM maybe? As you've surely noticed, they've been systematically replacing chunks of the kernel with patented binary blobs. Now we all see an IBM logo when we boot and have to pay a 'blue tax', or nothing will work. They also refused to back legal challenges to their Linux business which could have benefitted the community as a whole.
The vast majority of ISPs in Australia work on the VISP model, reselling various components of other ISPs' infrastructure. I work for one myself - we offer cloud, rackspace and WAN products tying in well with our traditional integration and support services.
The margins are very good as long as you know who to talk to. Buying transit or backhaul capacity off one supplier may mean you can get local tails at far below base cost, if they're willing to take the hit for the volume of services you can push through. One particular supplier we deal with will quote a lower price for DSL or EoC tails every time we ring and gripe about the price. End result is pretty consistent griping with every new proposed solution.
It is very, very easy to get enough capital together, some rack space in PoPs in capital cities and major population centres and drop in some redundantly configured layer 3 switches and routers. All you have to do then is purchase tails, interconnects and transit capacity/backhaul from whatever carriers you're best mates with at the time, plug some cables into switches and you're an ISP. Simplifying further, there used to be a couple of fully managed Virtual ISP providers that handled everything and you got a branded portal for customers to check usage and billing plus a number for technical support escalation.
There's been a major explosion in wholesale bandwidth capacity and a lot of new players in wholesale network services over the past decade which has made scenarios like this possible. There's was aggressive competition and consolidation through the "credit crunch" but many pulled through and are primed to take on the NBN/FTTN however that pans out.
Some are striving to overcome our violent with faiths such as christianity. Humanity cannot achieve a Utopian society through humanism. Star Trek was a lie and were are more like the "mirror" universe than you would care to admit.
I see your problem right there. Arguably, more wars have been declared for a religion, either directly (eg: Crusades) or indirectly as a justification (many colonial wars) than wars that have been stopped due to religion. Even the distinction between those 2 examples is hazy. Organised religion is just another method our societies group ourselves into "us" and "them".
Looking at the past couple of hundred years of our history, it's been a general social trend to avoid the upheaval and horror of war - access to information and an increased voice of the people in government has helped, not to mention the general populous being far better educated and having much more free time to consider the results of their actions than a few hundred years ago. Additionally, society is shedding the crutches of religion as we better understand ourselves and the world around us - just look how much the old faiths are thrashing around, making noise, trying to save themselves. Humanity is still far from peaceful, and we're still a warlike bunch, but there is far more social pressure for nations to not slap each other in the face over a minor tiff. It's social and memetic evolution.
Seems like every intranet admin component I've come across won't work with 1.7 unless it was written a month ago
Older IBM RSA cards and a few early revisions of IMM
DS Manager was unstable on some early revisions of JRE7
Minecraft was very unstable on 7, haven't tried recently.
Aptana didn't like it much either
It's annoying, I'd prefer to have the latest everywhere, but I've had to rollback to 1.6.33 in a recent customer upgrade due to pieces of their intranet admin interface not liking it and their lack of a relationship with the original developers.
Our politics are a bit more modest than the media gala that goes on in the US. There's no parades or huge rallies, just old dudes talking and occasionally going on a shopping centre tour kissing babies and shaking hands.
What I find interesting is how our mandatory voting affects the polls. We have a lot more swinging voters than hardline idealists and since they're forced to vote, the attitude is they might as well make (at least) a semi-informed decision. I just wish election campaigns weren't epic sledging matches and our politicians would stop throwing their rattles out of the pram.
I'd be all for electronic voting so I could spend more time at the sausage sizzle on election weekends and less in a queue. It would be great if it increased public participation in policy as well as elections, and if politicians weren't as tightly bound by the parties as they are now and could properly work with their electorate.
It's still best practice to pull systems from production for updates and restart after patching to test for issues.
Rebooting makes sure everything is using the new version, making it quite obvious if there's any big problems with the updates.
Having the updates process force-kill dependant applications on a multi-user or server system isn't going to make the sysadmin any friends unless they are taking it out of production first. Enforcing this for Fedora makes sense (it's upstream of RHEL), and it reduces the support problems of users complaining about weird issues after updating a month ago.
There's still the genetic, physical and mental wear-and-tear of an extended lifespan to deal with. There's no cure for entropy. People will still have varying levels of skill and experience, and most likely will become more cautious and set in their ways as they age.
Anything from a Cisco ASA 5505 (limited UTM), through the redesigned NetGear UTM range, WatchGuards, up to the (sadly long defunct) SnapGear/Cyberguard/Trend UTM range.
SonicWall seem to have a great business model of extravagant licensing, ridiculous restrictions and very poor performance.
Much of my opinion of them does come from customers who've been sold poorly designed solutions that I've had to resolve. In one case, a customer had a device with 10 endpoint licenses, up to a maximum of 30 supported by the device, and over 50 endpoints across 2 sites including a public access Internet kiosk. They had also been encouraged to buy based on a lot of other features not even available in that product line, like categorized URL filters. We threw the device in the bin and replaced it with Cisco routers and a transparent proxy solution.
Looking at the devices, they were spec'd similarily to a SnapGear of half the price which has no such arbitary connection limits and worked great with a cheap subscription to a category feed service. The syslog, SNMP and management capabilities I would've expected from a $700 device were completely non-existent.
Realistically, there's no UTM device that I actually like. It's better to push a decent server or virtual appliance solution. Most UTM vendors release a great product once in a while then 6 months later a new line emerges that never should see the light of day. But SonicWALL are the bottom of the barrel, just under Forti and NetBoxBlue.
You're forgetting the universal service obligation provisions for any ACMA licensed common carrier.
Under the USO all premises must have access to a 'broadband' service with a minimum usable data rate of 64Kbit/s. If noone else can provide it, the carrier of last resort is required to (either Telstra or NBNCo).
What benefit would VMware gain from open sourcing the hypervisor?
Feature wise they're well ahead of the pack, especially when you add in the full vSphere environment. If they did open source it, they would just be donating all those nifty features to the OSS hypervisors. There's already ample competition to keep them on their toes.
Xen and KVM don't really play in the same space as VMware, they seem to be pointed more at high end environments, like VPS hosting or "clouds", where licensing costs hit hard, you've got a large staff and there is ample scope for automation and customisation. VMware aims for simple, scalable and easy to manage.
Their only income from their inventions comes from suing other people or licensing fees extorted by threatening to sue.
No, they aren't trolls. I'll concur that what you've described is one of the characteristics. Another is that patent trolling companies don't do much, if any, research of their own: they buy patents from other companies, and use them to extort payments.
The CSIRO is a research organisation. They've done some incredibly valuable work in a great many fields; their attitude is one of licensing their R&D to commercial companies for commercialisation, rather than doing it themselves. It's a system that has worked very well for over eighty years. The fact that they don't manufacture things themselves does not, in and of itself, make them a patent troll.
In addition, it is worth noting (from the Annual Report) that only ~2% of CSIRO funding comes from intellectual property licensing. Roughly 60% is from the Federal Government and 34% from public, private and foreign co-investments and joint research projects.
It is satisfying to see this finally come to an end; I was recently trying to find what had come of this court case without much luck. I was still a teenager back in the early 2000s when I heard of the CSIRO starting to seek licensing of their radio patents.
Well, it explains why the netblock I'm on (which is used for all of TPG's Queensland POPs) decides my static IP is in a different city each time I look (and correct it again):).
I'm sorry, I just don't follow that rule. If I can use something that "belongs" to someone else, and they aren't going to be harmed by my use of it, then I'm going to. If you need a pen, and you see one lying in front of you, do you go around looking for the owner of the pen, or do you just use it?
You do not set the rules for other people's property. You can subscribe to this idea all you like, but if others do not, then you have no right to use their property in such a manner.
And, the only case I would use a pen "just lying there" would be in the situation where I was pretty sure it belonged there (eg: a library with a little bucket of pens, or pens chained to the desk in a bank, so on), and I would make sure I put it back. In such cases, the pen was placed there for the purpose of being used by the public. Unintentionally leaving a wifi node open is not anywhere near the same thing.
Your idea has a lot of merit, in fact, I've got a small IPv4 (192.168.x.x) VPN up between myself and a few friends, allowing us all full access to each other's networks and various non-public services on them.
I would really like to use IPv6, I was using freenet6 for a short while. My Linux machines have the USAGI IPv6-enabled kernel and everything, but...
1) There is very very very limited ip6tables support. Did I mention it's very limited? There is no way I'm going to run any protocol that leaves my machines open. 2) Squid doesn't support IPv6 at all. There's a years-old patch for it, but it's non-operational, as far as I know.
I'm on dialup, so I need to use squid for adzapping and caching. Even if I was on fast internet, I'd still want it. As soon as I can get DSL or similar, I'll be giving OpenBSD w/IPv6 a go for the firewall/router. But I'll still be annoyed at the lack of squid IPv6 support:).
And the freenet6 2 second round trip times are annoying, too.
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To put that in context, Australia is roughly as big (slightly smaller) as the 48 contiguous US states.
Just so I've got this straight, you're complaining one of the largest holdouts (computer games) against mainstream Linux desktop adoption is about to be supported by one of the most successful, popular and consumer-friendly game developer/publishers in the business?
You could say similar things about other IT behemoths, like, I don't know, IBM maybe? As you've surely noticed, they've been systematically replacing chunks of the kernel with patented binary blobs. Now we all see an IBM logo when we boot and have to pay a 'blue tax', or nothing will work. They also refused to back legal challenges to their Linux business which could have benefitted the community as a whole.
I'd be gritting my teeth if this was EA.
The vast majority of ISPs in Australia work on the VISP model, reselling various components of other ISPs' infrastructure. I work for one myself - we offer cloud, rackspace and WAN products tying in well with our traditional integration and support services.
The margins are very good as long as you know who to talk to. Buying transit or backhaul capacity off one supplier may mean you can get local tails at far below base cost, if they're willing to take the hit for the volume of services you can push through. One particular supplier we deal with will quote a lower price for DSL or EoC tails every time we ring and gripe about the price. End result is pretty consistent griping with every new proposed solution.
It is very, very easy to get enough capital together, some rack space in PoPs in capital cities and major population centres and drop in some redundantly configured layer 3 switches and routers. All you have to do then is purchase tails, interconnects and transit capacity/backhaul from whatever carriers you're best mates with at the time, plug some cables into switches and you're an ISP. Simplifying further, there used to be a couple of fully managed Virtual ISP providers that handled everything and you got a branded portal for customers to check usage and billing plus a number for technical support escalation.
There's been a major explosion in wholesale bandwidth capacity and a lot of new players in wholesale network services over the past decade which has made scenarios like this possible. There's was aggressive competition and consolidation through the "credit crunch" but many pulled through and are primed to take on the NBN/FTTN however that pans out.
Some are striving to overcome our violent with faiths such as christianity. Humanity cannot achieve a Utopian society through humanism. Star Trek was a lie and were are more like the "mirror" universe than you would care to admit.
I see your problem right there. Arguably, more wars have been declared for a religion, either directly (eg: Crusades) or indirectly as a justification (many colonial wars) than wars that have been stopped due to religion. Even the distinction between those 2 examples is hazy. Organised religion is just another method our societies group ourselves into "us" and "them".
Looking at the past couple of hundred years of our history, it's been a general social trend to avoid the upheaval and horror of war - access to information and an increased voice of the people in government has helped, not to mention the general populous being far better educated and having much more free time to consider the results of their actions than a few hundred years ago. Additionally, society is shedding the crutches of religion as we better understand ourselves and the world around us - just look how much the old faiths are thrashing around, making noise, trying to save themselves. Humanity is still far from peaceful, and we're still a warlike bunch, but there is far more social pressure for nations to not slap each other in the face over a minor tiff. It's social and memetic evolution.
Here's a couple:
It's annoying, I'd prefer to have the latest everywhere, but I've had to rollback to 1.6.33 in a recent customer upgrade due to pieces of their intranet admin interface not liking it and their lack of a relationship with the original developers.
Our politics are a bit more modest than the media gala that goes on in the US. There's no parades or huge rallies, just old dudes talking and occasionally going on a shopping centre tour kissing babies and shaking hands.
What I find interesting is how our mandatory voting affects the polls. We have a lot more swinging voters than hardline idealists and since they're forced to vote, the attitude is they might as well make (at least) a semi-informed decision. I just wish election campaigns weren't epic sledging matches and our politicians would stop throwing their rattles out of the pram.
I'd be all for electronic voting so I could spend more time at the sausage sizzle on election weekends and less in a queue. It would be great if it increased public participation in policy as well as elections, and if politicians weren't as tightly bound by the parties as they are now and could properly work with their electorate.
It's still best practice to pull systems from production for updates and restart after patching to test for issues.
Rebooting makes sure everything is using the new version, making it quite obvious if there's any big problems with the updates.
Having the updates process force-kill dependant applications on a multi-user or server system isn't going to make the sysadmin any friends unless they are taking it out of production first. Enforcing this for Fedora makes sense (it's upstream of RHEL), and it reduces the support problems of users complaining about weird issues after updating a month ago.
There's still the genetic, physical and mental wear-and-tear of an extended lifespan to deal with. There's no cure for entropy. People will still have varying levels of skill and experience, and most likely will become more cautious and set in their ways as they age.
Anything from a Cisco ASA 5505 (limited UTM), through the redesigned NetGear UTM range, WatchGuards, up to the (sadly long defunct) SnapGear/Cyberguard/Trend UTM range.
SonicWall seem to have a great business model of extravagant licensing, ridiculous restrictions and very poor performance.
Much of my opinion of them does come from customers who've been sold poorly designed solutions that I've had to resolve. In one case, a customer had a device with 10 endpoint licenses, up to a maximum of 30 supported by the device, and over 50 endpoints across 2 sites including a public access Internet kiosk. They had also been encouraged to buy based on a lot of other features not even available in that product line, like categorized URL filters. We threw the device in the bin and replaced it with Cisco routers and a transparent proxy solution.
Looking at the devices, they were spec'd similarily to a SnapGear of half the price which has no such arbitary connection limits and worked great with a cheap subscription to a category feed service. The syslog, SNMP and management capabilities I would've expected from a $700 device were completely non-existent.
Realistically, there's no UTM device that I actually like. It's better to push a decent server or virtual appliance solution. Most UTM vendors release a great product once in a while then 6 months later a new line emerges that never should see the light of day. But SonicWALL are the bottom of the barrel, just under Forti and NetBoxBlue.
You're forgetting the universal service obligation provisions for any ACMA licensed common carrier.
Under the USO all premises must have access to a 'broadband' service with a minimum usable data rate of 64Kbit/s. If noone else can provide it, the carrier of last resort is required to (either Telstra or NBNCo).
What benefit would VMware gain from open sourcing the hypervisor?
Feature wise they're well ahead of the pack, especially when you add in the full vSphere environment. If they did open source it, they would just be donating all those nifty features to the OSS hypervisors. There's already ample competition to keep them on their toes.
Xen and KVM don't really play in the same space as VMware, they seem to be pointed more at high end environments, like VPS hosting or "clouds", where licensing costs hit hard, you've got a large staff and there is ample scope for automation and customisation. VMware aims for simple, scalable and easy to manage.
OpenWatcom has OS/2 16/32-bit targets: http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Detailed_Contents#A_Wide_Range_of_Host_and_Target_Platforms
Libraries and tools are probably a bit thin on the ground.
Their only income from their inventions comes from suing other people or licensing fees extorted by threatening to sue.
No, they aren't trolls. I'll concur that what you've described is one of the characteristics. Another is that patent trolling companies don't do much, if any, research of their own: they buy patents from other companies, and use them to extort payments.
The CSIRO is a research organisation. They've done some incredibly valuable work in a great many fields; their attitude is one of licensing their R&D to commercial companies for commercialisation, rather than doing it themselves. It's a system that has worked very well for over eighty years. The fact that they don't manufacture things themselves does not, in and of itself, make them a patent troll.
In addition, it is worth noting (from the Annual Report) that only ~2% of CSIRO funding comes from intellectual property licensing. Roughly 60% is from the Federal Government and 34% from public, private and foreign co-investments and joint research projects.
It is satisfying to see this finally come to an end; I was recently trying to find what had come of this court case without much luck. I was still a teenager back in the early 2000s when I heard of the CSIRO starting to seek licensing of their radio patents.
In which case, won't all these optimizations and tips come in handy, or we'll have another inefficient, slow FS ?
Btw, there are a fair few database systems that do read and write raw partitions.
Well, it explains why the netblock I'm on (which is used for all of TPG's Queensland POPs) decides my static IP is in a different city each time I look (and correct it again) :).
I'm sorry, I just don't follow that rule. If I can use something that "belongs" to someone else, and they aren't going to be harmed by my use of it, then I'm going to. If you need a pen, and you see one lying in front of you, do you go around looking for the owner of the pen, or do you just use it?
You do not set the rules for other people's property. You can subscribe to this idea all you like, but if others do not, then you have no right to use their property in such a manner.
And, the only case I would use a pen "just lying there" would be in the situation where I was pretty sure it belonged there (eg: a library with a little bucket of pens, or pens chained to the desk in a bank, so on), and I would make sure I put it back. In such cases, the pen was placed there for the purpose of being used by the public. Unintentionally leaving a wifi node open is not anywhere near the same thing.
Your idea has a lot of merit, in fact, I've got a small IPv4 (192.168.x.x) VPN up between myself and a few friends, allowing us all full access to each other's networks and various non-public services on them.
:).
I would really like to use IPv6, I was using freenet6 for a short while. My Linux machines have the USAGI IPv6-enabled kernel and everything, but...
1) There is very very very limited ip6tables support. Did I mention it's very limited? There is no way I'm going to run any protocol that leaves my machines open.
2) Squid doesn't support IPv6 at all. There's a years-old patch for it, but it's non-operational, as far as I know.
I'm on dialup, so I need to use squid for adzapping and caching. Even if I was on fast internet, I'd still want it. As soon as I can get DSL or similar, I'll be giving OpenBSD w/IPv6 a go for the firewall/router. But I'll still be annoyed at the lack of squid IPv6 support
And the freenet6 2 second round trip times are annoying, too.
You forgot to mention one of the largest/most popular OSS 3D SDKs, Crystal Space.