IBM has already developed porting libraries to allow Linux software to be recompiled on AIX. Looks like we're at the beginning of a trend by the major UNIX players to offer "easy migration paths" to their commercial products.
I have to admit, this is not the method of the IT industry's acceptance of Linux I had in mind. -- Steve Jackson
I know I'm leaving driblets of my personal life all over the net, but I sign up for weekly emails detailing new listings that fit my needs, and monthly bank loan information. I also frequently check the sale prices of homes in my neighborhood. The last time I was looking (late '98), I ended up buying from a family-referred real estate agent anyway. I always seem to find myself going back to ReMAX or Prudential's websites. They seem to do a good job with their website. Sometimes Realtor.com.
What kills me is the fact that this is a niche industry that **BEGS** for ebusiness transformation through XML. I know that an MLS in Michigan is 1 of less than 5 in the nation that use what appears to be the premiere XML-based MLS, I believe it's called OpenMLS. I recall seeing a website for a california realtor that puts their database up on WAP, so you can enter an MLS# in your WAP phone, and see all the details on the place, or schedule an appointment.
Only slightly cooler than the 1mw AM radio stations they put in some houses.
And Vivendi has been getting coverage lately as a good stock to get into if you've suffered through the tech wreck. It'll be interesting to see what will happen if they can become a successful early adopter of legal digital music distribution. Maybe they'll use IBM's solution.. if it still exists, that is. --
I'm about to pilot test 10 Linux-based webpads running 802.11b in April, another 500 or so in September, with the hopes of blowing it wide open to a few thousand next summer. The deployments will typically have 3 access points per 30 units. Seamless roaming will not be supported.
I want to propose a monster box to run the apps, and many smaller boxes managing the displays of the 30 or so portable units per group. With each unit getting up to 1Mbit/s of bandwidth, then low-bandwidth X on an otherwise embeedded-class handheld sounds like it will be an excellent solution to my problem.
I work for IBM e-business, and I'm currently learning XML for a project. I ordered the requisite round of books, and I'm starting with SAMS'Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days. So far it's ok. I had been playing with Xeena from IBM Alphaworks over the last month or two, so I had some idea of what I was getting into.
The book is a bit too aggressive with the introduction for true beginners, but I hope that once I get through it, the rest of the books will make the introduction clearer. It's a big undertaking. --
I'm 30 years old, and I remember Manhunter from my teens. I didn't make the connection to SOTL when it came out, but I learned about it a number of years ago. My wife read the first 2 books, and we both absolutely loved SOTL. She didn't know about Manhunter.
Two weeks ago, we went to a video store, and I requested Manhunter. The pimply, Simpsonsesque 16 year old kid said it was in, and that he was impressed as I was the only one to ask for it. Everyone had been clamoring over SOTL.
I don't read movie novels too often.. last ones were The Shining, Intensity, and Demon Seed. I haven't read any of the Harris books. Having watched the first 2 parts a number of times, I really feel that if you're a fan of this series, you're probably going to like it. I can see how it's been getting bad reviews on its own, but I'm definitely glad I saw it.
It was thoroughly gory, and it did go long. Even if I did know what was going to happen, its not like I didn't want to let the movie take me there. I definitely enjoyed the ride. Perhaps if I drop my 10 XML books and find time to read the Harris books, I might find that I was annoyed, but I doubt it. --
Anyone working on a Motorola Pagewriter?
on
Cheap Linux PDAs
·
· Score: 1
With all the ports going on, and the new embedded push at LWCE, I'm dyin' here, waiting for a port to the Motorola Pagewriter 2000 to come out. It's running a Dragonball with 4 or 5MB of RAM. I wrote to Motorola, asking if they're cooperating with the ucLinux.org people, but they sent a reply pointing me to the list of prepackaged offerings they give away or sell.
I really just want to do IRDA, GPG email, and do keyword searching on my newsfeeds. Seeing PocketLinux getting underway is getting me antsy. --
Went home early that day..
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 2
I was 16, in 11th grade. I usually got out of school at around 1 that year. They made an announcement over the PA system and urged us to watch when we got home.
I got home and watched the replays for hours. I remember being pissed off when they finally returned to regular programming. See, I was totally fascinated with the shuttle program when I was a kid. Columbia first went up when I was 10. I was the geeky kid who grabbed the National Geographics to read up on the shuttle program instead of looking for the naked ladies in the jungle. In fact, I swiped the Columia issue from my stepfather's collection just last year. I couldn't believe what I was watching that day, as most of us here.
In December of last year, I spent Christmas vacation in Orlando, and spent 6 hours touring Kennedy Space Center with my family. What an amazing place. We sat in third row center of the shuttle IMAX movie, featuring the Challenger, and some crew members who lost their lives in the explosion. And then MSNBC ran the Challenger special for a couple weeks earlier this month. It was all too soon for me, right after the Florida vacation.
I still get very upset when I see the explosion. I often have to close my eyes or turn away. And being a ham radio operator, knowing hams who have spoken directly to astronauts and cosmonauts using 14-foot steerable antennas on the roofs of their homes.. it all just strikes me very hard.
Being a sysadmin now, I now regularly use a phrase that I learned directly from the loss of the challenger.. "catastrophic failure". --
Mr. Lucas. I had been tinkering/programming for 5 years by then, and it was 1986. Mr. Lucas gave me the single most important epiphany I've ever had with respect to computers and programming.
"Every single thing you do in life is a sequence of steps, and each step can be broken down into its own sequence of steps." He gave an example of going to school: I went to school. I drove to school. I got ready, drove across town, and went in the school. I woke up, I got dressed, I scraped ice off the windows, I warmed up the car, I drove down my street, got on the highway, got off at the school's exit, parked in the parking lot, turned off the car, locked the door, grabbed my books, shut the door, walked up to the building, pulled the door open, and walked inside. And so on, and so on.
The same holds true for computer programming. You take a concept, a goal, and break it down into steps. Then you attack each step and break that down. It makes any programming project seem approachable. It makes any programming language learnable. Eventually you can say, "I know all the 'whats', it's just a matter of learning the 'hows'." --
I just left a tiny company after 3 years of service. The owners were great, but had a very short list of clients. In the end, they couldn't pay for any classes or exams for me. With 4 years of experience, I was only making $66k in NYC, and they were even losing money on me! My 30th birthday was approaching, and I just couldn't take the grind anymore.
I had a close friend in the IBM e-business group, and she got me in. In six months, I've already architected a 64-node Linux cluster, and I'm about to architect a 200-server Linux network with wireless Linux webpads as clients. Sure I'm still doing MS network design and implementation, but my horizons are much wider now. Can you imagine architecting a solution for a tier-3 ISP wanting to run thousands of virtual Linux hosts on a mainframe? Now I can. Hell, I may have to one day.
Was this the single best decision of my life? Hell yeah. --
Am I the only one sick and tired of seeing, "if this ever gets deployed", or "this will be thrown out if it's evidence ever shows up in court"?
This has been out there for years, people. It's been used in hundreds of cases already. This is version 2.0 they're reviewing. It ran on Solaris for a couple years, and was recently rebuilt to run on NT. Congress and the public are just learning about it now. Search Slashdot for "Carnivore" and review the previous postings and released documentation.
And no, script kiddies won't have a field day with this thing. The released documentation showed a one-way bridge in promiscuous mode at the ISP with all data being copied off to another dedicated LAN segment on which the carnivore box does its thing. It won't be accessible from the Internet side. It's designed to receive a continuous, read-only stream of *all* data IN and OUT of an ISP, live. The question is whether or not they're only keeping data relevant to an ongoing investigation.
I'm just amazed that someone was able to build an NT box that could conceivably sniff and parse data at gigabit speeds, let alone 100Mbit/s. I imagine a fibre connection right at their core routers going to a fibre card in the carnivore box, or a fibre connection to a 100Mbit switch running full-tilt 24x7.
To cover all possibilities, it's safe to assume that every unencrypted web page view, email, ftp, AOL, AOL-IM, IRC and NNTP session *ever* has been sniffed and possibly archived or indexed somewhere. The Internet was built BY the government FOR the government, and anyone who thinks it was just "handed over" to the public in '92 probably also thinks AOL bought the Internet from the NSF.
SSL * SSH * GnuPG/PGP - these things exist for a reason. With the expiration of the RSA patents in September went all excuses for not using encryption. --
First Union bought my bank, and they supplemented their Quicken/MS Money support with web support.
I've been studying Java servlets and how they tend to be "best viewed with any browser". FU has done a terrific job at maintaining cross platform compatibility as long as I've been a customer. And they required 128-bit SSL. Another plus. --
I've often felt that NAT proxies can be detected if people abuse them enough. AFAIK, NAT proxies use the socket serial number to maintain a "proxy session" of sorts so that it can properly redirect incoming reply packets from the 'Net. If the ISP routers flag IP's with unusually high numbers of open sockets, then perhaps that could trip a "we think you're using a NAT proxy" letter. One machine with 5, 10 or 15 unrelated web sites coming up *simultaneously* is probably not just one machine. Think small office or frat house.
Sure I've had machines with 5 web browsers up, but I never surfed so much as to wait for all 5 to load their pages at once, I would rotate among them. Certainly never 10 browsers loading at once. But when I violate my AUP and use NAT proxy, I've had 10ish browsers running between five clients.
In the old days, I used to run over 30 simultaneous FTP's to bring down the latest Slackware from Walnut Creek. All the same site, however.
I think it can be done. Doesn't mean I think it's happening, tho. --
I admin about 60 boxes, and someone who claims to be a network architect brought with him a brutally logical naming convention.
2 letter site code by city 1 digit o/s code (1=nw 2=nt) 2 letter purpose code 2 digit server number "p"/"d" for production or development
The purpose codes are AS for application server, FS for file server, NF for network fax, NS for Notes server, PS for proxy server, and others are written as needed.
The server number is supposed to be incremented only by O/S code since that allows changing purpose, location and production/development status with few implications. We started resetting server numbers at each location, though, much to his chagrin.
99% of the admins hate it, but I think it grows on you. I never thought that I would memorize the departments served by a server named pp1fs03p but it works. It may also help to remember the boxes if I actually built them! I can't tell you what runs on some of them.
Also, in this new world of frequent mergers and acquisitions, these server names are resistant to company name changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Compaq is indeed following IBM's lead.
IBM has already developed porting libraries to allow Linux software to be recompiled on AIX. Looks like we're at the beginning of a trend by the major UNIX players to offer "easy migration paths" to their commercial products.
I have to admit, this is not the method of the IT industry's acceptance of Linux I had in mind.
--
Steve Jackson
I know I'm leaving driblets of my personal life all over the net, but I sign up for weekly emails detailing new listings that fit my needs, and monthly bank loan information. I also frequently check the sale prices of homes in my neighborhood. The last time I was looking (late '98), I ended up buying from a family-referred real estate agent anyway. I always seem to find myself going back to ReMAX or Prudential's websites. They seem to do a good job with their website. Sometimes Realtor.com.
What kills me is the fact that this is a niche industry that **BEGS** for ebusiness transformation through XML. I know that an MLS in Michigan is 1 of less than 5 in the nation that use what appears to be the premiere XML-based MLS, I believe it's called OpenMLS. I recall seeing a website for a california realtor that puts their database up on WAP, so you can enter an MLS# in your WAP phone, and see all the details on the place, or schedule an appointment.
Only slightly cooler than the 1mw AM radio stations they put in some houses.
--
Steve Jackson
And Vivendi has been getting coverage lately as a good stock to get into if you've suffered through the tech wreck. It'll be interesting to see what will happen if they can become a successful early adopter of legal digital music distribution. Maybe they'll use IBM's solution.. if it still exists, that is.
--
I'm about to pilot test 10 Linux-based webpads running 802.11b in April, another 500 or so in September, with the hopes of blowing it wide open to a few thousand next summer. The deployments will typically have 3 access points per 30 units. Seamless roaming will not be supported.
I want to propose a monster box to run the apps, and many smaller boxes managing the displays of the 30 or so portable units per group. With each unit getting up to 1Mbit/s of bandwidth, then low-bandwidth X on an otherwise embeedded-class handheld sounds like it will be an excellent solution to my problem.
Steve
--
I work for IBM e-business, and I'm currently learning XML for a project. I ordered the requisite round of books, and I'm starting with SAMS' Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days. So far it's ok. I had been playing with Xeena from IBM Alphaworks over the last month or two, so I had some idea of what I was getting into.
The book is a bit too aggressive with the introduction for true beginners, but I hope that once I get through it, the rest of the books will make the introduction clearer. It's a big undertaking.
--
I'm 30 years old, and I remember Manhunter from my teens. I didn't make the connection to SOTL when it came out, but I learned about it a number of years ago. My wife read the first 2 books, and we both absolutely loved SOTL. She didn't know about Manhunter.
Two weeks ago, we went to a video store, and I requested Manhunter. The pimply, Simpsonsesque 16 year old kid said it was in, and that he was impressed as I was the only one to ask for it. Everyone had been clamoring over SOTL.
I don't read movie novels too often.. last ones were The Shining, Intensity, and Demon Seed. I haven't read any of the Harris books. Having watched the first 2 parts a number of times, I really feel that if you're a fan of this series, you're probably going to like it. I can see how it's been getting bad reviews on its own, but I'm definitely glad I saw it.
It was thoroughly gory, and it did go long. Even if I did know what was going to happen, its not like I didn't want to let the movie take me there. I definitely enjoyed the ride. Perhaps if I drop my 10 XML books and find time to read the Harris books, I might find that I was annoyed, but I doubt it.
--
With all the ports going on, and the new embedded push at LWCE, I'm dyin' here, waiting for a port to the Motorola Pagewriter 2000 to come out. It's running a Dragonball with 4 or 5MB of RAM. I wrote to Motorola, asking if they're cooperating with the ucLinux.org people, but they sent a reply pointing me to the list of prepackaged offerings they give away or sell.
I really just want to do IRDA, GPG email, and do keyword searching on my newsfeeds. Seeing PocketLinux getting underway is getting me antsy.
--
I was 16, in 11th grade. I usually got out of school at around 1 that year. They made an announcement over the PA system and urged us to watch when we got home.
I got home and watched the replays for hours. I remember being pissed off when they finally returned to regular programming. See, I was totally fascinated with the shuttle program when I was a kid. Columbia first went up when I was 10. I was the geeky kid who grabbed the National Geographics to read up on the shuttle program instead of looking for the naked ladies in the jungle. In fact, I swiped the Columia issue from my stepfather's collection just last year. I couldn't believe what I was watching that day, as most of us here.
In December of last year, I spent Christmas vacation in Orlando, and spent 6 hours touring Kennedy Space Center with my family. What an amazing place. We sat in third row center of the shuttle IMAX movie, featuring the Challenger, and some crew members who lost their lives in the explosion. And then MSNBC ran the Challenger special for a couple weeks earlier this month. It was all too soon for me, right after the Florida vacation.
I still get very upset when I see the explosion. I often have to close my eyes or turn away. And being a ham radio operator, knowing hams who have spoken directly to astronauts and cosmonauts using 14-foot steerable antennas on the roofs of their homes.. it all just strikes me very hard.
Being a sysadmin now, I now regularly use a phrase that I learned directly from the loss of the challenger.. "catastrophic failure".
--
Mr. Lucas. I had been tinkering/programming for 5 years by then, and it was 1986. Mr. Lucas gave me the single most important epiphany I've ever had with respect to computers and programming.
"Every single thing you do in life is a sequence of steps, and each step can be broken down into its own sequence of steps." He gave an example of going to school: I went to school. I drove to school. I got ready, drove across town, and went in the school. I woke up, I got dressed, I scraped ice off the windows, I warmed up the car, I drove down my street, got on the highway, got off at the school's exit, parked in the parking lot, turned off the car, locked the door, grabbed my books, shut the door, walked up to the building, pulled the door open, and walked inside. And so on, and so on.
The same holds true for computer programming. You take a concept, a goal, and break it down into steps. Then you attack each step and break that down. It makes any programming project seem approachable. It makes any programming language learnable. Eventually you can say, "I know all the 'whats', it's just a matter of learning the 'hows'."
--
I just left a tiny company after 3 years of service. The owners were great, but had a very short list of clients. In the end, they couldn't pay for any classes or exams for me. With 4 years of experience, I was only making $66k in NYC, and they were even losing money on me! My 30th birthday was approaching, and I just couldn't take the grind anymore.
I had a close friend in the IBM e-business group, and she got me in. In six months, I've already architected a 64-node Linux cluster, and I'm about to architect a 200-server Linux network with wireless Linux webpads as clients. Sure I'm still doing MS network design and implementation, but my horizons are much wider now. Can you imagine architecting a solution for a tier-3 ISP wanting to run thousands of virtual Linux hosts on a mainframe? Now I can. Hell, I may have to one day.
Was this the single best decision of my life? Hell yeah.
--
Am I the only one sick and tired of seeing, "if this ever gets deployed", or "this will be thrown out if it's evidence ever shows up in court"?
This has been out there for years, people. It's been used in hundreds of cases already. This is version 2.0 they're reviewing. It ran on Solaris for a couple years, and was recently rebuilt to run on NT. Congress and the public are just learning about it now. Search Slashdot for "Carnivore" and review the previous postings and released documentation.
And no, script kiddies won't have a field day with this thing. The released documentation showed a one-way bridge in promiscuous mode at the ISP with all data being copied off to another dedicated LAN segment on which the carnivore box does its thing. It won't be accessible from the Internet side. It's designed to receive a continuous, read-only stream of *all* data IN and OUT of an ISP, live. The question is whether or not they're only keeping data relevant to an ongoing investigation.
I'm just amazed that someone was able to build an NT box that could conceivably sniff and parse data at gigabit speeds, let alone 100Mbit/s. I imagine a fibre connection right at their core routers going to a fibre card in the carnivore box, or a fibre connection to a 100Mbit switch running full-tilt 24x7.
To cover all possibilities, it's safe to assume that every unencrypted web page view, email, ftp, AOL, AOL-IM, IRC and NNTP session *ever* has been sniffed and possibly archived or indexed somewhere. The Internet was built BY the government FOR the government, and anyone who thinks it was just "handed over" to the public in '92 probably also thinks AOL bought the Internet from the NSF.
SSL * SSH * GnuPG/PGP - these things exist for a reason. With the expiration of the RSA patents in September went all excuses for not using encryption.
--
First Union bought my bank, and they supplemented their Quicken/MS Money support with web support.
I've been studying Java servlets and how they tend to be "best viewed with any browser". FU has done a terrific job at maintaining cross platform compatibility as long as I've been a customer. And they required 128-bit SSL. Another plus.
--
I've often felt that NAT proxies can be detected if people abuse them enough. AFAIK, NAT proxies use the socket serial number to maintain a "proxy session" of sorts so that it can properly redirect incoming reply packets from the 'Net. If the ISP routers flag IP's with unusually high numbers of open sockets, then perhaps that could trip a "we think you're using a NAT proxy" letter. One machine with 5, 10 or 15 unrelated web sites coming up *simultaneously* is probably not just one machine. Think small office or frat house.
Sure I've had machines with 5 web browsers up, but I never surfed so much as to wait for all 5 to load their pages at once, I would rotate among them. Certainly never 10 browsers loading at once. But when I violate my AUP and use NAT proxy, I've had 10ish browsers running between five clients.
In the old days, I used to run over 30 simultaneous FTP's to bring down the latest Slackware from Walnut Creek. All the same site, however.
I think it can be done. Doesn't mean I think it's happening, tho.
--
I admin about 60 boxes, and someone who claims to be a network architect brought with him a brutally logical naming convention.
2 letter site code by city
1 digit o/s code (1=nw 2=nt)
2 letter purpose code
2 digit server number
"p"/"d" for production or development
The purpose codes are AS for application server, FS for file server, NF for network fax, NS for Notes server, PS for proxy server, and others are written as needed.
The server number is supposed to be incremented only by O/S code since that allows changing purpose, location and production/development status with few implications. We started resetting server numbers at each location, though, much to his chagrin.
99% of the admins hate it, but I think it grows on you. I never thought that I would memorize the departments served by a server named pp1fs03p but it works. It may also help to remember the boxes if I actually built them! I can't tell you what runs on some of them.
Also, in this new world of frequent mergers and acquisitions, these server names are resistant to company name changes.