I almost hate to venture an opinion on this as I feel most of the points have been well covered but I think there is a simple one that has been understated.
Lying is bad.
Stealing is bad.
Forgery is lying to steal and.. you guessed it: bad.
Letting people know when they are being lied to or stolen from is good.
There might be exceptions but I don't think that forging art is one of them. All the comments on whether or not art is worth what is paid for it are missing the central point which is that it is something to help people keep a crime from being committed or to let them help prove when one has been.
Of course you may not think art is worth the price or a car is worth the price or a piece of software is worth the price, but it doesn't matter. It matters to the person getting scammed.
Note that I am not disagreeing with the replied to post, mearly simplifying here because I didn't see a better place to put this.
Well, I've never run Linux for "years" but I'll share my experiences.
I just had a server running AIX Unix up for 305 days (rebooted two days ago.)
I had a friend who forgot about a box running FreeBSD that stayed up for over five years. (It was in a closet, had a battery backup and just did its job as a server until people stopped needing it. Eventually it ran out of log space and didn't die but started paging somebody incessently that it needed help.)
I currently have two Linux servers up 248 and 337 days. Desktops with Linux usually run for about six months without a reboot. Most of those reboots aren't really necessary, just easy and to make sure that nothing has been changed that would keep it from coming up with the desired services.
I've never managed to really hose an ext3 filesystem.
I have hosed NTFS, FAT32, and UFS, but none very often and always as a result of doing something I knew was risky. (Reiser is an exception and the only one that has spontaneously fubar'd on me. I don't use it anymore, so couldn't really attest to whether that was a fluke or not.)
To be fair, my Windows servers usually stay up for similar periods.
I think in the end it is about setting up any computer system to do the job it is designed for in a way that will continue until hardware wears out or power dies. Kernel patches and Security Updates are the exceptions. Windows has more critical patches but probably doesn't affect me as much as a lot of people, since I pair down my servers to not run software they don't need. For stability I usually use an enterprise system with security updates enabled which translates to almost never needing to reboot for security updates. Almost every security update is about software, not kernels in Windows, Unix, xBSD and Linux as long as you start out with a stable kernel.
Cliff probably would be well served by whatever OS he chooses as long as it supports the choice of software well. The trick will be finding software that serves the purpose well. My approach is to see first if there is OSS that meets the need well and then to look at commercial options if not or if they offer something that offers enough service or time savers to offset the cost. I think that the question that Cliff needs to be asking isn't about the OS but rather about what OSS software is out there for specific tasks and how it compares to propritary offerings.
I don't know anything about them, but when I get back to work on Monday I'm going to investigate with the hope I can use them to keep my old Windows installs secure. If they're doing patches for Windows 2000 then I practically have to at least look at the option. If Microsoft were reliable and didn't stop releasing security patches for "old" OSs, then I wouldn't need to.
I hope this really irks the people at Microsoft that make the decisions on when to EOL something.
I know, too simplistic, but if it could work, it would work like this:
Debian: How about we call it something people will recognize as associated with your fine work, but not actually the exact same thing?
Mozilla: Um, okay, what?
Debian: Direfox. People will recognize your fine product but our users will appreciate it is patched by us and your users will know it is different somehow from yours. If they're the same user they can have both if they really want.
Mozilla: I guess that protects our name, what about our logo?
Debian: We'll wrap the fox around a geenie bottle.
Nods all around
Everybody shakes hands and signs something to pay the lawyer. Then everybody goes back to doing good/reliable/free/socially responsible/crack software.
A Perl command to instantly rename and re-iconize Firefox gets passed around. This is unofficially supported inside Mozilla and somebody from Debian buys beer for somebody in Mozilla to make sure it stays that way.
Somebody throws a fit about wanting "Firefox" in Debian
Debian puts Firefox in contrib and leaves Direfox in the base
A few really big companies (think of people who process financial transactions) on systems that have been running on SCO since it made sense. They're using software with thousands of tweaks and patches that make it incredibly expensive to port to a different OS.
They'll probably have to pony up the millions of dollars to practically rewrite their central processing software from scratch. (Maybe this time they won't use COBOL.) They won't be happy. It will happen over the course of years, since what they have will continue to work, but when the OS dies you eventually have to bury it.
Nope. I agree with your opinions to a degree, but the bottom line for me is that if I believe the product already installed is good, then I won't bother switching to another. I use Firefox or Opera or elinks on every computer I sit down to now, but if I believed that IE was everything I needed and was unlikely to expose me to unnecessary risks, I would use it.
Microsoft has done good things with 2003 and IIS 6. (I know, I'm almost asking to be flamed by admitting that opinion.) Since they're both pretty reliable and pretty secure, I don't bother trying to push for a different OS where we already have them. Since they're beta testing and since their recent track record for default security has improved, its not unimaginable to me that next year I will sit down at a Windows machine running Internet Explorer and actually just use it.
Given enough time, I might even come to like them again. If Microsoft makes their products secure and adds the features I care about at a reasonable price, then some day, I might want to use them again. I've said the same thing for years but only recently have I actually seen a glimmer of hope that it could happen.
Or you could try my personal favorite, once mounted (and files no longer appear encrypted) then encrypt them on a file level with a daily/weekly job to backup. Personally I favor tape, 40-120GB backups encrypted with gpg, but you can use whatever you find cheapest/handy. No, if you have a serious crash, doing this doesn't keep it from sucking, it just keeps the suckiness to minimum.
That way your backups are mostly secure even if your physical security is second rate or gets beaten, but you still get the security and convenience of an encrypted file system.
I'm with you and even wrote a short note on it for a school project back in the day. (See it here.)
In a nutshell, Apple did a lot of work and only then made money with something Xerox couldn't figure out how to make commercially viable. It would be more reasonable to say Xerox (PARC) inspired Apple.
Gotta say, I can't figure out whether to be ticked that we can't get accurate projections from the engineers or be proud that we get so much more out of our mission than we require to consider it a success.
I always thought Kirk was hard on Scotty when he asked for whatever was needed in half the estimated time. If engineers design things to last so far beyond their requirements, then maybe it is rational after all.
Maybe though, we need someone running around NASA who knows which engineers are lowballing and will have the nads to tell them to do it in a fraction of the time they say they need.
Google gets the muscle to compete with other telco companies, thus paying less for their own services and thereby increasing share value and at the same time freeing up capital for investment in more and better services.
Google, with a successful business model based on competition, drives prices down for everyone.
Google gets to leverage their newly bought rights to land lines, with their plans to provide near free Internet access, driving down Internet access prices.
Google has to play by the same regulatory rules as the telco's do, proving what can be done by a profit through compeitition company, negating many of the arguments telcos have been pushing.
Just put up a paypal link for donations to the cause google, I'll click.
Experiment:
"Say, George, whadda ya think would happen if we tossed this suit out the airlock?"
"Dunno Fred, lets find out." - result: Now we know.
Overheard at NASA by the coffee: ... "Nah, nobody'd care about it." [other voice] "Not if we just tossed it, but turn down the wattage on the transmitters and news reporters will be all over how it is 'failing' and viola, free publicity. Of course we get to say that it seems to be working but was never intended to be a serious scientific effort, we were just trying to do something nice for the kids." [first voice] "I'm with you now. Okay, call George back and tell him we changed our minds, but we have to do some PR before he can toss the thing."
Speaking of connections, lets talk about that loan you got last week. You know we might be able to talk about you doing us a favor, what do you know about viruses and software patents?....
OMGosh. I signed a petition (at an Autozone here in Texas) about three years ago. It was a petition to have made law that car owners should have the right to repair or choose who does repairs on their vehicles. I sincerely hope that was the outcome.
I don't want to carry around another piece of crap.
I don't want to have to pay for it through new or raised fees with my bank either.
Token and smart cards suck because your security is lost if somebody can comprimise them, maybe just by replacing yours with a look alike.
Anything stored on the computer sucks. If I can manage to get control of your computer, I have the ability to access your money and maybe take it.
One solution that seemed obvious to me is using the telephone. I know I've seen some good ideas here but didn't see anyone suggesting this one.
What your bank should do is buy an account with somebody who is offering this service to a bunch of banks and share required (only required) information with that company. That company then sets up an automated phone system (yes we hate them but they're cheap to run compared to actually paying staff) which would use voice recognition and question response to validate your session for one login and give you a required passphrase which is associated with your account for one time access and expires in a pre-determined amount of time.
Why?
It still costs but then it costs mere fractions of a cent per customer since the company selling the service can handle so many accounts at the same time.
Its electronic so there is no additional staff to hire.
It uses bio-metrics which can be improved without selling new hardware or dongles.
It uses existing available technology and any company can do it.
I'm open to other suggestions but I stand by my original statements. Don't charge me or the bank even an extra dollar for my security. (Per account anyway.) Don't make me carry even more crap around.
I explained the problems you're facing to my wife.
She said "How long has he worked for Microsoft?"
After giving it some thought, she suggests "get some balls and ask your boss exactly 'what do you want?' so that you can cover your ass, preferably by email and when the higher smucks express displeasure, hit the print button."
She goes so far to say you should include the higher smucks in that discussion of how it should be done. Carbon copy them in the email if you're emailing.
Disclaimer: I am posting her suggestion because she has been in this type of situation and came out well. Personally, I see a danger of tanking evaluations and having to keep an eye out for the next job.
Never huh? Let me fix that for you. We've been together four years now and I say mine turned out well. (YMMV)
In the pursuit of strictest accuracy though, it should be noted that we met by chatting, not through a dating site. I believe that it gave us a chance to meet we would have otherwise have missed. We were also both honest with each other since each expected to just find someone to talk to rather than a date.
I don't think its quite as simple as a right answer. Sure, openMosix rocks but its only one kind of answer, not the final one. OpenMosix spreads the processes around but can't split a single process up to make it complete faster. It can send processes to the most likely CPU but that still doesn't address the question of speeding up the time that the process will take to complete.
Beowulf clusters typically are designed for specific purposes and software is written to take advantage of the design. You can't have two computers add 2+2 any faster than you can have one computer do it. You can however, have two computers adding 2+2 and 0+1+1 at the same time to get two answers in half the time it would take one computer to do it.
I'm certainly no expert, but I have researched this a bit since I work in a department with a LOT of extra boxes laying around. They're slow individually but together add up to a good bit of processing power and memory. We want to put them to use but the question is "what use?"
That question boils down to programs designed to use multiple threads versus splitting processes. If your needs involve running things that require lots of processes, then openMosix is a good bet, but if you're simply wanting to make your favorite software run faster, the answer might be to rebuild it to take advantage of a Beowulf cluster with more threads rather than trying to divy up the processes. Fortunately, there are compile tools out there to make it a little easier and specifically openMosix has some compile tools to make programs more multi-process friendly.
Despite all the tools though, some programs just don't divide well without significant recoding. If you're faced with that type of problem, its time to call in the coding gurus because openMosix can't help you. Others, like apache and mysql were practically written to be shared.
OpenMosix may be the answer or not, it all depends on the question, which in this case isn't completely clear because the objective and software desired aren't discussed.
As to the why clustering works this way, there are far more technical and probably much more accurate answers but in simple terms, you can't make two computers do one thing faster than one computer can do it unless you can divide the job. Some jobs divide easily, some don't.
I've also grown to love the 2.6 kernels but only after some initial issues. I run two servers on different hardware. The older hardware I keep stable as a backup system until I'm ready to upgrade, at which point I switch IP addresses of the servers to make the backup server the primary and upgrade the new hardware system. If all works well I then eventually switch them back and bring the backup system up to date. (Note that neither system is really new hardware, one is just relatively newer.)
With the 2.6 kernels I consistantly had freezes after hours (occassionally ranging to days) of operations. I tried different kernels, patched and vanilla, but couldn't get a stable system out of it on older or newer hardware. Eventually I stuck with the 2.4 kernel until about a month ago when I tried the newer 2.6 kernel(s). This time I've had no freezes and everything seems to be stable as a rock, which is required for the servers I'm running since they provide my department with the vast majority of documentation.
For me the performance boost has been worth the upgrade this time. I only make a change when there is a compelling reason to do so, and generally that means only upgrading the kernel when there are significant changes. 2.6 has had great reviews but it wasn't dependable enough for me until the last time I tried it. Now it seems to be dependable and significantly faster. I'm still running off of the old hardware for the moment but I've got about 25 days of uptime with no problems on the new hardware and will probably be switching it back to be the primary system in the next couple of weeks.
You hit the nail on the head with the normal people thing. The problem is that we've been thinking in terms of a single time standard when what we really need are multiple standards. Set a scientific standard based on the atomic clocks then everybody has a base time to work with. No leap seconds/hours/days/years to worry about at all with this one. (Which would accomplish what I suspect the politicians are shooting for; They want to abolish the need to worry about it for a long time.)
With one standard in place, we can then create other standards based on it such as an astronomical time which could take into account leap seconds as necessary but without requiring everybody else to conform to it. Your astrological time could be Scientific Time + 3 seconds for example, which would be easy enough for software and people to work around. It would allow those that need it to continue to use the current time scheme without worry of changing standards.
Now for biological clocks we would probably need to sub-divide into sunlight and human centric time standards. We would have a day based on where the sun stands (expressed as Scientific Standard, plus or minus however many seconds (and expressed as a sundial wristwatch.. maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here.) The human centric one would be based on a day of 24 hours and 11 minutes (the biological standard) and that would do away with all the little irritations of daylight saving time or no saving depending on where you are.)
Plus it would mean that there would be a need for new technology which would in turn produce more jobs but the new tech would affect almost solely end consumers which means no necessity to muck about with aging comptuer programs and systems.
The biggest benefit by far would be to me, who would get to sleep in for eleven extra minutes every morning.
Then again, we could just not muck about with the system everybody is used to.
Okay, I can't argue that this wasn't hacking, but having recently been accused of it myself, I'm curious where other people stand.
intentionally vague but true
In my case, I was given a username and password and address of a server for ftp. I wondered what else was out there so I logged in via ssh. No special trick needed, the firewall was open, I had a server account, had a shell and all I did was gather a little basic info on what the server was and what it was running. Apparently nobody realized they had set all that up for me. Some admin panicked, somebody in authority (over me) panicked and next thing I know I'm sitting in an office explaining my actions to somebody that has a LOT more authority.
I certainly wouldn't argue that uploading root kits/security cracking tools, downloading encrypted files to attempt to crack encryption isn't wrong but what exactly is?
My questions (is it legal/is it hacking):
Pings and traceroutes aren't hacking are they?
What about port scans?
Is it hacking and illegal to attempt a connection? Does it matter what port?
When it it okay to try a generic username/password? anonymous:youremai@whatever.com: is generally okay, why not administrator::?
How about viewing what is viewable? Is directory structure okay? What kinds of files?
How far do you have to go before you've committed an actual punishable crime?
How far is it ethical to let your curiousity take you?
This would never have been a problem if the employer hadn't been snooping on it's employees right? Then every card holder could continue in blissful ignorance and the privacy of the employee that exported the data would have been protected.
Seriously though, this just proves the point: If you own a business where your employees have access to sensitive data, you have an obligation to know what they're doing. Basically, if you own the box, then the resposibility for how it gets used or misused is yours regardless of the smuck you hired to sit at it.
I respectfully disagree. I work in a financial related industry and if one of our employees sends out credit card numbers then they should be stopped. There is no way to ensure that they do not, except by monitoring. I therefore assume everything I type and everything I send is subject to screening. I'd be surprised if they don't have a hardware based keylog (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/5a05/ for example) and I'd be surprised if they don't have some sort of content capture installed on every workstation that has access to sensitive information.
Why do I think they have a right to? Simple, I have to trust them with my personal financial information as does practically anyone who uses a credit card, thus I want them to protect it. That protection is an obligation, not an invasion of my own or anyone else's privacy.
Furthermore encrypting doesn't necessarily protect your privacy on a work computer.
Encrypting only stops them from decyphering what was sent, not what was originally created as it was in the process of the creation. With a solid security scheme in place, I expect the system records everything and flags long numbers, curse words and clipboard pastes. I certainly hope it does anyway.
Bottom line. Don't trust anything to be secure unless you own the box and know how to keep it secure yourself. Even then, assume somebody smarter than you might figure out a way past it and try to keep the damage potential to a minimum just in case.
Free software doesn't always mean free support. Is there a place out there somewhere where developers can take posted tech questions and documentation requests? I'd like to see one where the questions get voted on by other people who want to see them answered with a paypal (or other media) contribution. Basically ask your question and pledge a dollar or three and get a refund if the question or documentation request doesn't meet a minumum amount within a period of time. Heh, maybe I should do that with my own website.
Would you or others be interested? Maybe if they were getting paid for their extra work beyond development, we wouldn't lose developers like this.
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There might be exceptions but I don't think that forging art is one of them. All the comments on whether or not art is worth what is paid for it are missing the central point which is that it is something to help people keep a crime from being committed or to let them help prove when one has been.
Of course you may not think art is worth the price or a car is worth the price or a piece of software is worth the price, but it doesn't matter. It matters to the person getting scammed.
Note that I am not disagreeing with the replied to post, mearly simplifying here because I didn't see a better place to put this.
Well, I've never run Linux for "years" but I'll share my experiences.
I think in the end it is about setting up any computer system to do the job it is designed for in a way that will continue until hardware wears out or power dies. Kernel patches and Security Updates are the exceptions. Windows has more critical patches but probably doesn't affect me as much as a lot of people, since I pair down my servers to not run software they don't need. For stability I usually use an enterprise system with security updates enabled which translates to almost never needing to reboot for security updates. Almost every security update is about software, not kernels in Windows, Unix, xBSD and Linux as long as you start out with a stable kernel.
Cliff probably would be well served by whatever OS he chooses as long as it supports the choice of software well. The trick will be finding software that serves the purpose well. My approach is to see first if there is OSS that meets the need well and then to look at commercial options if not or if they offer something that offers enough service or time savers to offset the cost. I think that the question that Cliff needs to be asking isn't about the OS but rather about what OSS software is out there for specific tasks and how it compares to propritary offerings.
I hope this really irks the people at Microsoft that make the decisions on when to EOL something.
I know, too simplistic, but if it could work, it would work like this:
- Debian: How about we call it something people will recognize as associated with your fine work, but not actually the exact same thing?
- Mozilla: Um, okay, what?
- Debian: Direfox. People will recognize your fine product but our users will appreciate it is patched by us and your users will know it is different somehow from yours. If they're the same user they can have both if they really want.
- Mozilla: I guess that protects our name, what about our logo?
- Debian: We'll wrap the fox around a geenie bottle.
Nods all aroundEverybody shakes hands and signs something to pay the lawyer. Then everybody goes back to doing good/reliable/free/socially responsible/crack software.
- A Perl command to instantly rename and re-iconize Firefox gets passed around. This is unofficially supported inside Mozilla and somebody from Debian buys beer for somebody in Mozilla to make sure it stays that way.
- Somebody throws a fit about wanting "Firefox" in Debian
- Debian puts Firefox in contrib and leaves Direfox in the base
---No elk were harmed in the making of this sig.
A few really big companies (think of people who process financial transactions) on systems that have been running on SCO since it made sense. They're using software with thousands of tweaks and patches that make it incredibly expensive to port to a different OS.
They'll probably have to pony up the millions of dollars to practically rewrite their central processing software from scratch. (Maybe this time they won't use COBOL.) They won't be happy. It will happen over the course of years, since what they have will continue to work, but when the OS dies you eventually have to bury it.
Humm... missed this somehow with the American Muslims who've become terrorists and the British and the IRA.
I'd like to say that I agree, but observation tells me otherwise.
Suggested Modified Motto: Feed, clothe, medicate, and educate. When they do something evil, however, smash them like bugs.
Carrot - We will make your life better
Big stick - We will obliterate you and all you hold dear if you try to kill our innocent
Microsoft has done good things with 2003 and IIS 6. (I know, I'm almost asking to be flamed by admitting that opinion.) Since they're both pretty reliable and pretty secure, I don't bother trying to push for a different OS where we already have them. Since they're beta testing and since their recent track record for default security has improved, its not unimaginable to me that next year I will sit down at a Windows machine running Internet Explorer and actually just use it.
Given enough time, I might even come to like them again. If Microsoft makes their products secure and adds the features I care about at a reasonable price, then some day, I might want to use them again. I've said the same thing for years but only recently have I actually seen a glimmer of hope that it could happen.
That way your backups are mostly secure even if your physical security is second rate or gets beaten, but you still get the security and convenience of an encrypted file system.
In a nutshell, Apple did a lot of work and only then made money with something Xerox couldn't figure out how to make commercially viable. It would be more reasonable to say Xerox (PARC) inspired Apple.
Gotta say, I can't figure out whether to be ticked that we can't get accurate projections from the engineers or be proud that we get so much more out of our mission than we require to consider it a success.
I always thought Kirk was hard on Scotty when he asked for whatever was needed in half the estimated time. If engineers design things to last so far beyond their requirements, then maybe it is rational after all.
Maybe though, we need someone running around NASA who knows which engineers are lowballing and will have the nads to tell them to do it in a fraction of the time they say they need.
Just put up a paypal link for donations to the cause google, I'll click.
Experiment: "Say, George, whadda ya think would happen if we tossed this suit out the airlock?"
"Dunno Fred, lets find out."
- result: Now we know.
Overheard at NASA by the coffee:
... "Nah, nobody'd care about it."
[other voice] "Not if we just tossed it, but turn down the wattage on the transmitters and news reporters will be all over how it is 'failing' and viola, free publicity. Of course we get to say that it seems to be working but was never intended to be a serious scientific effort, we were just trying to do something nice for the kids."
[first voice] "I'm with you now. Okay, call George back and tell him we changed our minds, but we have to do some PR before he can toss the thing."
OMGosh. I signed a petition (at an Autozone here in Texas) about three years ago. It was a petition to have made law that car owners should have the right to repair or choose who does repairs on their vehicles. I sincerely hope that was the outcome.
I don't want to have to pay for it through new or raised fees with my bank either.
Token and smart cards suck because your security is lost if somebody can comprimise them, maybe just by replacing yours with a look alike.
Anything stored on the computer sucks. If I can manage to get control of your computer, I have the ability to access your money and maybe take it.
One solution that seemed obvious to me is using the telephone. I know I've seen some good ideas here but didn't see anyone suggesting this one.
What your bank should do is buy an account with somebody who is offering this service to a bunch of banks and share required (only required) information with that company. That company then sets up an automated phone system (yes we hate them but they're cheap to run compared to actually paying staff) which would use voice recognition and question response to validate your session for one login and give you a required passphrase which is associated with your account for one time access and expires in a pre-determined amount of time.
Why?
- It still costs but then it costs mere fractions of a cent per customer since the company selling the service can handle so many accounts at the same time.
- Its electronic so there is no additional staff to hire.
- It uses bio-metrics which can be improved without selling new hardware or dongles.
- It uses existing available technology and any company can do it.
I'm open to other suggestions but I stand by my original statements. Don't charge me or the bank even an extra dollar for my security. (Per account anyway.) Don't make me carry even more crap around.I explained the problems you're facing to my wife.
She said "How long has he worked for Microsoft?"
After giving it some thought, she suggests "get some balls and ask your boss exactly 'what do you want?' so that you can cover your ass, preferably by email and when the higher smucks express displeasure, hit the print button."
She goes so far to say you should include the higher smucks in that discussion of how it should be done. Carbon copy them in the email if you're emailing.
Disclaimer: I am posting her suggestion because she has been in this type of situation and came out well. Personally, I see a danger of tanking evaluations and having to keep an eye out for the next job.
Never huh? Let me fix that for you. We've been together four years now and I say mine turned out well. (YMMV)
In the pursuit of strictest accuracy though, it should be noted that we met by chatting, not through a dating site. I believe that it gave us a chance to meet we would have otherwise have missed. We were also both honest with each other since each expected to just find someone to talk to rather than a date.
Beowulf clusters typically are designed for specific purposes and software is written to take advantage of the design. You can't have two computers add 2+2 any faster than you can have one computer do it. You can however, have two computers adding 2+2 and 0+1+1 at the same time to get two answers in half the time it would take one computer to do it.
I'm certainly no expert, but I have researched this a bit since I work in a department with a LOT of extra boxes laying around. They're slow individually but together add up to a good bit of processing power and memory. We want to put them to use but the question is "what use?"
That question boils down to programs designed to use multiple threads versus splitting processes. If your needs involve running things that require lots of processes, then openMosix is a good bet, but if you're simply wanting to make your favorite software run faster, the answer might be to rebuild it to take advantage of a Beowulf cluster with more threads rather than trying to divy up the processes. Fortunately, there are compile tools out there to make it a little easier and specifically openMosix has some compile tools to make programs more multi-process friendly.
Despite all the tools though, some programs just don't divide well without significant recoding. If you're faced with that type of problem, its time to call in the coding gurus because openMosix can't help you. Others, like apache and mysql were practically written to be shared.
OpenMosix may be the answer or not, it all depends on the question, which in this case isn't completely clear because the objective and software desired aren't discussed.
As to the why clustering works this way, there are far more technical and probably much more accurate answers but in simple terms, you can't make two computers do one thing faster than one computer can do it unless you can divide the job. Some jobs divide easily, some don't.
With the 2.6 kernels I consistantly had freezes after hours (occassionally ranging to days) of operations. I tried different kernels, patched and vanilla, but couldn't get a stable system out of it on older or newer hardware. Eventually I stuck with the 2.4 kernel until about a month ago when I tried the newer 2.6 kernel(s). This time I've had no freezes and everything seems to be stable as a rock, which is required for the servers I'm running since they provide my department with the vast majority of documentation.
For me the performance boost has been worth the upgrade this time. I only make a change when there is a compelling reason to do so, and generally that means only upgrading the kernel when there are significant changes. 2.6 has had great reviews but it wasn't dependable enough for me until the last time I tried it. Now it seems to be dependable and significantly faster. I'm still running off of the old hardware for the moment but I've got about 25 days of uptime with no problems on the new hardware and will probably be switching it back to be the primary system in the next couple of weeks.
You hit the nail on the head with the normal people thing. The problem is that we've been thinking in terms of a single time standard when what we really need are multiple standards. Set a scientific standard based on the atomic clocks then everybody has a base time to work with. No leap seconds/hours/days/years to worry about at all with this one. (Which would accomplish what I suspect the politicians are shooting for; They want to abolish the need to worry about it for a long time.)
With one standard in place, we can then create other standards based on it such as an astronomical time which could take into account leap seconds as necessary but without requiring everybody else to conform to it. Your astrological time could be Scientific Time + 3 seconds for example, which would be easy enough for software and people to work around. It would allow those that need it to continue to use the current time scheme without worry of changing standards.
Now for biological clocks we would probably need to sub-divide into sunlight and human centric time standards. We would have a day based on where the sun stands (expressed as Scientific Standard, plus or minus however many seconds (and expressed as a sundial wristwatch.. maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here.) The human centric one would be based on a day of 24 hours and 11 minutes (the biological standard) and that would do away with all the little irritations of daylight saving time or no saving depending on where you are.)
Plus it would mean that there would be a need for new technology which would in turn produce more jobs but the new tech would affect almost solely end consumers which means no necessity to muck about with aging comptuer programs and systems.
The biggest benefit by far would be to me, who would get to sleep in for eleven extra minutes every morning.
Then again, we could just not muck about with the system everybody is used to.
Okay, I can't argue that this wasn't hacking, but having recently been accused of it myself, I'm curious where other people stand.
intentionally vague but trueIn my case, I was given a username and password and address of a server for ftp. I wondered what else was out there so I logged in via ssh. No special trick needed, the firewall was open, I had a server account, had a shell and all I did was gather a little basic info on what the server was and what it was running. Apparently nobody realized they had set all that up for me. Some admin panicked, somebody in authority (over me) panicked and next thing I know I'm sitting in an office explaining my actions to somebody that has a LOT more authority.
I certainly wouldn't argue that uploading root kits/security cracking tools, downloading encrypted files to attempt to crack encryption isn't wrong but what exactly is?
My questions (is it legal/is it hacking):
This would never have been a problem if the employer hadn't been snooping on it's employees right? Then every card holder could continue in blissful ignorance and the privacy of the employee that exported the data would have been protected.
Seriously though, this just proves the point: If you own a business where your employees have access to sensitive data, you have an obligation to know what they're doing. Basically, if you own the box, then the resposibility for how it gets used or misused is yours regardless of the smuck you hired to sit at it.
Of couse carrying cheetos and being good looking is considered solicitation in my neighborhood
Why do I think they have a right to? Simple, I have to trust them with my personal financial information as does practically anyone who uses a credit card, thus I want them to protect it. That protection is an obligation, not an invasion of my own or anyone else's privacy.
Furthermore encrypting doesn't necessarily protect your privacy on a work computer.
Encrypting only stops them from decyphering what was sent, not what was originally created as it was in the process of the creation. With a solid security scheme in place, I expect the system records everything and flags long numbers, curse words and clipboard pastes. I certainly hope it does anyway.
Bottom line. Don't trust anything to be secure unless you own the box and know how to keep it secure yourself. Even then, assume somebody smarter than you might figure out a way past it and try to keep the damage potential to a minimum just in case.
Would you or others be interested? Maybe if they were getting paid for their extra work beyond development, we wouldn't lose developers like this.