I'm thinking of the Dell laptop I'm typing this on, that I got for 300 euros from a reseller on eBay. It's about the same weight, has a larger screen and keyboard, the same speed processor, more RAM, a hard disc and, when you plug it into the docking station (included) it also has a floppy drive and a combo CDR/DVD drive. With the largest of the three included batteries it has over three hours' autonomy. Ok, there's no wifi, but next years' recycled corporate laptops will have wifi too.
If you want a cheap laptop, you can do a lot worse than recon'd s/h hardware.
4: Loud explosions that make bright flashes and make their sister scream
5: Hot Wheels
6: Very loud explosions
It's all about motivation. Sell your kids on the possibility of making stuff happen, and when they grow up they'll do whatever it takes to understand how to make stuff happen. The trouble with most science teaching is that it's just too abstract. 4 year-olds are not good at abstract, and, actually, much the same is true of the rest of us.
Why do you think people run out and buy a $40,000 SUV while gas prices are nearing $4 a gallon and the only use is to get groceries and haul around their 1.5 kids?
Because the less you drive, the less difference the gas prices make. If they stopped using their car to get groceries and haul around their 1.5 kids too, it wouldn't matter if gas prices neared $400 a gallon, because $400 x 0 miles per week is not a very large number. The lower the mileage, the more viable gas-hungry vehicles become. And if the idea of the SUV is to impress the neighbours by parking it on your drive, it doesn't even need to have an engine.
The UNIX and Linux variants present a much more robust exterior to the outside
might be true until you install most PHP apps in non-CGI mode, whereupon in most cases you've set up a race condition as to who runs admin.php first, and that's if your end user remembers to turn off execution permissions after running the script, and, if (s)he doesn't, your entire machine is compromised because every single PHP app is running under the same users...
From the little experience I've had with the media, any statement about trust that includes all journalists or all bloggers is likely to be meaningless. People trust people, not a job description. I'm sure that being a journalist is a plus, but individual outfits tend to build relationships with individual commentators, ie not everyone will speak to the same journalists.
So I'd expect part of the equation for bloggers to be the extent to which they form a relationship with people in whatever company (or whatever) they want to cover. And, if the blogger has an "all companies are evil and only progress by being slammed on my blog" mentality, or a "I tell you everything the company doesn't want you to know" mentality, that won't be a plus in terms of trust. More generally, while companies know that journalists are in business to sell their media, they at least think they have a handle on the motivation of journalists, whereas the motivation of many bloggers must seem pretty mysterious.
If bloggers want to maintain strict neutrality and be unaccountable for what they write, they should expect to be treated as outsiders. If they want to be treated as insiders, rules apply.
True, but the main reason for someone being a menace to any codebase is surely an ego that is far bigger than their competence, so the chances are that any attempt to provide useful feedback is going to be turned against you too.
It makes commercial sense in the same way that unplugging all your customers to slash bandwidth use makes sense. Reducing your spam overheads is good, but not as good as keeping your customers.
As a small ISP running out of a bigger ISP's server park, that's our entire problem (or it would be if any large ISP used SPEWS, which doesn't seem to be the case from our experience). The logic by which widening IP blocks put pressure on the ISP fails as soon as the CEO fails to receive an important mail. The CEO screams at their mail admin, who either turns off whichever list is causing the blocking or finds a new job. Lecturing the CEO about how losing lucrative contracts thanks to SPEWS makes good commercial sense is another way of starting a job search.
I have been asked a few times by customers why their mail doesn't arrive (which has nothing to do with our servers since they send mail using their local ISPs). The problems IME are always with small companies, not telecom-scale ISPs. My response is always to tell them to tell the person they are trying to email to beat up the local mail admin, and this seems to work. I've honestly never heard of a company changing their hosting arrangements because of a "collateral damage" spam block. The pressure results in reduced influence of collateral damage spam lists, not in commercial pressure on spam-friendly ISPs. And that's because non-techies in business would rather receive all their mail and lots of spam rather than half their mail and less spam.
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I'm relatively sympathetic to the French:) But the multipolar thing only makes sense if the alternative actually works.
The Minitel was long promoted by the French as an alternative to the Internet, and, at times, it offered a superior user experience to the Internet, but failure at a national level to understand where the Internet was going has resulted in France falling years behind the US, Germany and the UK, for example, in terms of Internet literacy, especially among business leaders. The same happened with microcomputers, where the promotion of assorted French hardware long after it made sense resulted in a situation today where Microsoft has an even stronger grip than in other countries. And I could write books about how France Télécom's sort-of state monopoly has crippled telecoms in France, and, to some extent, continues to do so.
If there had ever been any hope of the search engine project producing a useful alternative to Google, it would have been interesting, but that was never going to happen because the French elite doesn't "get" the concept of democratisation of knowledge (as the choice of a latin name for the project illustrates).
Because France is in the dying days of "Everything American private industry can do, Europe can do better by lots of public expenditure". This search engine was announced just before or just after Chirac announced that he was going to take on CNN and the BBC by setting up a public sector competitor. Expect that idea to be quietly downscaled too (if only because last I heard the plan was to do most of the broadcasts in French, which does restrict the international market somewhat).
Personally, I think throwing lots of money into high-tech projects potentially makes more sense in job-creation terms than most of the French attempts to create jobs in the recent past (eg paying young people to carry people's suitcases to trains). Except that there is little social mobility and not much more career mobility in France, so you just know that virtually all those involved in the search engine project will be recruited from the French grandes écoles whose graduates don't have an employment problem anyway. It's virtually impossible to end up working in cutting-edge IT in France unless you start working towards that end from the age of 14.
Most of this stuff is now about Chirac trying to build a legacy. He should be history in a few months' time, and I can't see either of his likely successors continuing to behave as if the président is Louis XIV. It's not inconceivable that Sarkozy could even try building bridges towards the US.
It is not SPEWS that blocks you, it's the networks who use SPEWS that do.
I didn't miss that point, I'm just so tired of it that I declared up front my intention not to play word games around it one more time.
And no amount of bitching is going to solve your problem,
What problem? My servers are primarily web servers, so they don't send a lot of mail. The mail servers I use are not in the same continent, let alone the same server park. The one problem we had concerned one address on one mailing list app on one of a large number of domains we host. If anyone any of our customers wanted to talk to used SPEWS, we would have forked out $15 a year for a clean SMTP server, but they didn't, so we didn't.
which is that you are supporting a spam-friendly ISP.
No, we were (past tense) bound into a contract with an ISP that SPEWS claimed were spam-friendly. Since there's no appeal process, I struggle to treat that claim as having Voice of God authority.
And for this, you deserve to be listed.
Which totally ignores questions like
How long it takes an ISP to investigate a claim and terminate a hosting contract in such a way as to avoid being sued by their former customer. (If my ISP terminated my hosting contract in error, I would certainly sue for punitive damages.)
How hard it is to get out of a dedicated hosting contract (when we did leave that ISP for other reasons, I received threatening letters for a year afterwards, and they only stopped when I offered to send the entire file to the press)
How long it takes to move from one server to another, when you have dozens of customers with their own login details and domain names pointing at the old server that are administrated by your customers
How you can guarantee that the server you move to won't suddenly turn up on the SPEWS blacklist the week after you sign a 2-year contract because someone in their park of 3,000 servers sent some spam, or maybe because the Redsocks are top of the league.
But something tells me that none of this is of any interest to you, because you sound like the sort of spamlist groupie who would happily nuke every major city in the world to reduce his own received spam by 30%. Thankfully, you are in a tiny tiny minority, which is presumably why SPEWS has folded in all but name (YYYEEESSS!!!)
It would be nice to punish brain-dead ISPs, but in the business world you'd just be punishing yourself.
That's the bottom line for me. People who bang on about how they spend half their waking hours tweaking the mail server in their dorm room to reject everybody's mail Because They Have Root are essentially harmless and just need to get a life, but transferring that approach to business is like hacking your own limbs off in a sword fight to stop your opponent injuring you.
Anyway, the news that SPEWS may well have gone belly up, and that no-one with a user base in binary double figures uses it anymore anyway, has really made my week.
The error in your reasoning starts when you assume that self-appointed do-gooders have the right to infringe the rights of third parties. (I'm not going to answer any posts about how actually it's just a list and no-one has to use it bla bla - save it for the bar-room barristers.) Vigilantes are always a menace, especially when they have a policy of hurting the innocent.
I think there's a pretty fundamental difference between a quasi-domestic ISP and a server park running dedicated servers which are the legal responsibility of completely independent companies. The only reason my machines share an IP range with spammers is because (like almost everyone), I'm not rich enough to buy my own pipe and deal directly with IANA.
And SPEWS' policy didn't make me put pressure on my ISP, it just made me vow never ever to use SPEWS on any server I have anything to do with, and to bitch about SPEWS on every possible occasion until the end of time. Part of fighting spam is getting the masses on the side of fighting spam, and I'm afraid that my starting position with anyone fighting spam now is "Is this just a cover for inflicting pain on the innocent?"
If the SPEWS ban had become a real problem I would rather have paid for a separate clean SMTP server than cave into the spam mafia. It's not that I like spam, I just hate bullies more. (We have since changed server parks, but this had nothing to do with SPEWS or spam.)
The good news is that, from my experience, almost no-one I ever wanted to send mail to uses SPEWS. That's the flip-side of blocking huge IP ranges in order to feel important: people with a life realise that being able to email more than 5% of the IP range is A Good Thing and simply sideline you.
But avoid SPEWS like the plague. They have a wonderful policy of blacklisting entire 16-bit IP ranges because one machine in an enormous server park has been used to send spam.
They know this causes massive collateral damage to machines administrated by totally independent companies, many of them small and liable to suffer severe hardship because of this arbitrary action. That's precisely the idea: they keep hurting non-spammers to make them lobby the server parks to deal with the spammers.
Unless you think that kidnapping children and refusing to return them unless their parents fight the mafia for you is an ethical law-enforcement policy, SPEWS is obviously far far worse than the problem they are allegedly attempting to solve.
Minitel was slow and basic, but, in terms of domestic market penetration, it achieved in the 80s what the Internet didn't achieve for another 20 years. By giving out the terminals for free (initially, and then asking a peppercorn rent), and by convincing customers it was a telephone, not a computer, France Telecom got the entire nation using text-based comms, for everything from directory enquiries through weather forecasts and company reports to porn (I never did work out how that worked on a teletext screen, but there you are...) There are still plenty of Minitel users who have never taken to any of the PC or set-tpo box alternatives because they seem more complicated.
If people want to throw away TCO, security, easy of administration, power, and all the free enterprise proven software available
Um, Sharepoint is aimed at business users, and most of them don't have a linux-aware workforce, so it's hardly a case of throwing away Linux benefits, more not throwing away Windows-based skills.
for a glorified calendar and wiki program from Microsoft
I take it you haven't used Sharepoint? I'm an all-Linux web app designer, but, having done some consultancy work on Sharepoint, I have to say that duplicating Sharepoint's functionality from scratch wouldn't be a lot of fun. It's not so much what it does as the way it integrates with desktop apps. You edit your remote Sharepoint templates directly with FrontPage. You can synch Outlook address books. You can delegate responsibility for different parts of your intranet in a very flexible way. And, if you want something exotic, you can write it in XSLT and/or assorted MS programming languages.
Sure, you can achieve a similar goal using wikis, and I've written a few bespoke systems to do this stuff too. But the big hurdle is always separating Windows power users from their Windows apps. Either you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make your web app look like Word, or you never get most of your staff on board. Normal people look at mark-up languages and say "Oh, yes, that's what I/my parents used to do in Wordstar in the 1980s".
By using Sharepoint you have a much better chance to get everyone to use the intranet, and that, more than enabling technology, is what makes intranets useful. Don't get me wrong, I think mark-up is wonderful, but it's naïve to assume that non-specialists can be bothered to learn it if there's a point and click alternative that does what they want.
The quote from Bristol uni is sensible and even mildly interesting. After that, it's just another tired rant about blogs (some someone who appears to be using forum software to run his own blog, which doesn't help to convince that he "gets" blogs at all) and various other sites he clearly doesn't like.
Obviously it's a dumb idea to post information you don't want published in public. Sites like MySpace have introduced a lot of newbies to social networking, and they'll take a while to get the hang of it, but it doesn't follow that social networking sites are inherently about loss of privacy.
And chat rooms are dead because of sexual predators?! I still see a lot of chat rooms, and surely a lot of that traffic has moved onto virtual worlds. Do we have a story about why Second Life has been shut down because of sexual predators? Thought not. A lot depends on much the site creators think about security, privacy and so on, preferably before going live rather than after the first six crises are reported in the international press. From the little I've seen of MySpace, it looks like a "bolt on safeguards in response to crisis" sort of outfit.
My main experience was with CF-booting wireless routers, with a linux setup that did no logging and had no swap. Total lack of local logging is not great for a router IMHO. The main thing that we wrote to the CF was a single config file, and we also used to remote upgrade the build from time to time. Out of 15 or so routers, at least 2 CFs died over an 18-month period. That hardly qualifies as robust in my view - I'd expect a lower failure rate with hard discs doing far more writing.
We also used IPCop, looked at running it off CF, but decided not to because of mailing list concerns about CF failure when using swap. The recommended fix was heaps of RAM so you never needed to swap, but, at the time, this made a big difference to the unit cost of our firewalls.
Yesterday I bought a replacement hard disc for a client in a high street store for under 50 EUR. Last time I looked the CF adaptor cost almost that much before you add the CF. Obviously the economics work a bit differently if your name is Intel and you build CF-enabled motherboards on a huge scale, but then the same economies of scale apply to a disc interface. I can't see that CF gives you huge savings on component cost, although I can see benefits in terms of footprint, power consumption (and therefore heat) and so on.
In my experience of an embedded linux application using CF for storage, the CF wasn't especially durable if you thrash it like a hard disc. Surely the main point of using this form of storage is to reduce power consumption, which either means much longer battery life or (probably in this case) much cheaper batteries. It also helps to get to a point where you don't need a fan, which in turn means less moving parts and less holes in the case for the monsoon to pour through.
From TFA, it appears that the halo effect (sales of Macs because of iPod fans) is supported by this survey. So, to get this straight, we are postulating huge numbers of geriatric iPod users too? Methinks that the survey, at least as presented in TFA, is even less useful than your average market research survey.
Surely the basic fallacy here is that "techie" is a unidimensional attribute that you either have or you don't. In reality, no-one these days has up to date technical knowledge of every aspect of IT. Even if you take, say, web-based solutions, anyone who claims to be up to speed on all the relevant technology is lying or stupid. And if "manager" means more than "lead programmer", the chances are that the project as a whole involves more skills than any one member of the team - techie or not - has mastered.
It's obviously helpful if management know enough about the general area in which they are working to ask intelligent questions, but you really don't want the management arguing with the programmers over how to write the tightest loop.
Can you blame people for their paranoia? Microsoft habitually tries to destroy anything that they get involved with -- Apple, Javascript, IBM, etc.
Is that Apple which now has a bigger turnover than Dell, Javascript that seems to be more popular than ever thanks to AJAX and IBM that has been doing ok recently too? And you didn't mention Netscape that eventually became Firefox. Given your examples, it seems to me that the Linux community should complain that Microsoft is not being mean enough to make Linux a rip-roaring success!
A lot of the cost of the American space program was developing technology that is now commonplace. The Indian IT team will have better equipment on day one than the US had on the day of the lunar landing, for example. India is no slouch in telecoms terms either.
Also, there was a lot of experimentation involved in the first space exploration that doesn't need to be done again. We know how to make space suits, and, thanks mainly to the Russians, we know a lot about the effects of long-term zero-gravity trips on the human body.
And even if America and Europe don't play ball (which is depressingly likely on past form), I'm sure the Russians will be willing to hand over as much technology as the Indians don't feel like reinventing.
So it won't be cheap, but I'd expect it to be cheaper in real terms than the first race to the moon.
And I'm taking as read that the Indian space program really has the same motivation as European and American space exploration, ie it's an excuse to pour lots of state funding into your high-tech industries, which gives you more competitive terrestial technology as a spin-off. In other words, this is probably more about kick-starting the Asian airliner industry than about photos of Indians eating poppadums in a crater.
Re:What backwards compatibility has it broken?
on
PHP 5.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Anybody who isn't coding with safe mode on and register_globals off in this day and age should be taken out and shot
Yes, but
A lot of webmasters using PHP grab the nearest free PHP library that claims to do what they want, and then shop around for someone mad enough to host it. The worst one we've seen was a "manage your mailing list via your webserver" system (why?!) which, by default, tried to open 65k local SMTP connections at once. I was quite impressed that our server didn't just roll over and die at this point...
The whole reason you need safe mode in the first place is because the first design constraint of PHP (originally called Personal Home Page) was to neuter the user/permissions-based Unix security model, so that users could do superuser-type things without talking to their sys admin (this from Rasmus Lerdorf's first Usenet announcement, as reported on p2 of his O'Reilly book on PHP). Having got every web script on a shared server running as the same user with the same privileges, you have effectively imposed a W98 security model on Apache, where every script can write any file that can be written by any other script, which is why Lerdorf says in the aforementioned book that there is no safe way to use files with PHP. Yes, that's right, it's a programming language that can't use files! And then you need safe mode to try (only partially successfully) to reinvent another security model, having neutered the one that works perfectly well for CGI/suEXEC. Of course you can avoid these problems by running PHP as CGI, but that means learning to program, rather than pasting other people's code into HTML, so it's completely uninteresting for most PHP users
Safe mode does nothing to avoid the other problem we keep hitting, ie that nobody involved in PHP at any level seems to have heard of parameter checking. We are forever shutting down PHP mailer scripts that happily pass data straight from the POST request to MySQL and/or sendmail. Most of this could be avoided if the webmasters did some basic checking (how hard is it to count the number of @ in what is supposed to be an email address, for example), but, also, some of the PHP mailer functions seem to grab whatever email addresses they find wherever they appear in the function arguments and send a copy of the mail just in case.
I know people who write very neat code in PHP, but I can't help thinking that it's in spite of, rather than because of, the language. The basic problem is that "You can become a web programmer without knowing anything about programming or security" is always going to be an accident waiting to happen. Web applications are the most exposed programs around. That's why the "PHP is the new BASIC" thing doesn't hold: I learned to program in BBC BASIC, but I didn't let the entire world look for flaws in my BASIC programs...
What backwards compatibility has it broken?
on
PHP 5.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Our company does web hosting, and every single time we get an enquiry involving PHP it comes with a caveat along the lines of "but I need version 4.x.y with version z of the q module and safe mode turned off". The best one yet was someone who wanted us to promise never to upgrade PHP because his XSLT module needs pre-version 4.4 - a bit of googling revealed that there's a whole section of the PHP community hunting for servers that will never upgrade for that reason. We never ever get this with perl, because backwards compatibility works over decades.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking of the Dell laptop I'm typing this on, that I got for 300 euros from a reseller on eBay. It's about the same weight, has a larger screen and keyboard, the same speed processor, more RAM, a hard disc and, when you plug it into the docking station (included) it also has a floppy drive and a combo CDR/DVD drive. With the largest of the three included batteries it has over three hours' autonomy. Ok, there's no wifi, but next years' recycled corporate laptops will have wifi too.
If you want a cheap laptop, you can do a lot worse than recon'd s/h hardware.
1: Explosions
2: Loud explosions
3: Loud explosions that make bright flashes
4: Loud explosions that make bright flashes and make their sister scream
5: Hot Wheels
6: Very loud explosions
It's all about motivation. Sell your kids on the possibility of making stuff happen, and when they grow up they'll do whatever it takes to understand how to make stuff happen. The trouble with most science teaching is that it's just too abstract. 4 year-olds are not good at abstract, and, actually, much the same is true of the rest of us.
Why do you think people run out and buy a $40,000 SUV while gas prices are nearing $4 a gallon and the only use is to get groceries and haul around their 1.5 kids?
Because the less you drive, the less difference the gas prices make. If they stopped using their car to get groceries and haul around their 1.5 kids too, it wouldn't matter if gas prices neared $400 a gallon, because $400 x 0 miles per week is not a very large number. The lower the mileage, the more viable gas-hungry vehicles become. And if the idea of the SUV is to impress the neighbours by parking it on your drive, it doesn't even need to have an engine.
Also,
The UNIX and Linux variants present a much more robust exterior to the outside
might be true until you install most PHP apps in non-CGI mode, whereupon in most cases you've set up a race condition as to who runs admin.php first, and that's if your end user remembers to turn off execution permissions after running the script, and, if (s)he doesn't, your entire machine is compromised because every single PHP app is running under the same users...
From the little experience I've had with the media, any statement about trust that includes all journalists or all bloggers is likely to be meaningless. People trust people, not a job description. I'm sure that being a journalist is a plus, but individual outfits tend to build relationships with individual commentators, ie not everyone will speak to the same journalists.
So I'd expect part of the equation for bloggers to be the extent to which they form a relationship with people in whatever company (or whatever) they want to cover. And, if the blogger has an "all companies are evil and only progress by being slammed on my blog" mentality, or a "I tell you everything the company doesn't want you to know" mentality, that won't be a plus in terms of trust. More generally, while companies know that journalists are in business to sell their media, they at least think they have a handle on the motivation of journalists, whereas the motivation of many bloggers must seem pretty mysterious.
If bloggers want to maintain strict neutrality and be unaccountable for what they write, they should expect to be treated as outsiders. If they want to be treated as insiders, rules apply.
True, but the main reason for someone being a menace to any codebase is surely an ego that is far bigger than their competence, so the chances are that any attempt to provide useful feedback is going to be turned against you too.
It makes commercial sense in the same way that unplugging all your customers to slash bandwidth use makes sense. Reducing your spam overheads is good, but not as good as keeping your customers.
As a small ISP running out of a bigger ISP's server park, that's our entire problem (or it would be if any large ISP used SPEWS, which doesn't seem to be the case from our experience). The logic by which widening IP blocks put pressure on the ISP fails as soon as the CEO fails to receive an important mail. The CEO screams at their mail admin, who either turns off whichever list is causing the blocking or finds a new job. Lecturing the CEO about how losing lucrative contracts thanks to SPEWS makes good commercial sense is another way of starting a job search.
I have been asked a few times by customers why their mail doesn't arrive (which has nothing to do with our servers since they send mail using their local ISPs). The problems IME are always with small companies, not telecom-scale ISPs. My response is always to tell them to tell the person they are trying to email to beat up the local mail admin, and this seems to work. I've honestly never heard of a company changing their hosting arrangements because of a "collateral damage" spam block. The pressure results in reduced influence of collateral damage spam lists, not in commercial pressure on spam-friendly ISPs. And that's because non-techies in business would rather receive all their mail and lots of spam rather than half their mail and less spam.
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I'm relatively sympathetic to the French :) But the multipolar thing only makes sense if the alternative actually works.
The Minitel was long promoted by the French as an alternative to the Internet, and, at times, it offered a superior user experience to the Internet, but failure at a national level to understand where the Internet was going has resulted in France falling years behind the US, Germany and the UK, for example, in terms of Internet literacy, especially among business leaders. The same happened with microcomputers, where the promotion of assorted French hardware long after it made sense resulted in a situation today where Microsoft has an even stronger grip than in other countries. And I could write books about how France Télécom's sort-of state monopoly has crippled telecoms in France, and, to some extent, continues to do so.
If there had ever been any hope of the search engine project producing a useful alternative to Google, it would have been interesting, but that was never going to happen because the French elite doesn't "get" the concept of democratisation of knowledge (as the choice of a latin name for the project illustrates).
Because France is in the dying days of "Everything American private industry can do, Europe can do better by lots of public expenditure". This search engine was announced just before or just after Chirac announced that he was going to take on CNN and the BBC by setting up a public sector competitor. Expect that idea to be quietly downscaled too (if only because last I heard the plan was to do most of the broadcasts in French, which does restrict the international market somewhat).
Personally, I think throwing lots of money into high-tech projects potentially makes more sense in job-creation terms than most of the French attempts to create jobs in the recent past (eg paying young people to carry people's suitcases to trains). Except that there is little social mobility and not much more career mobility in France, so you just know that virtually all those involved in the search engine project will be recruited from the French grandes écoles whose graduates don't have an employment problem anyway. It's virtually impossible to end up working in cutting-edge IT in France unless you start working towards that end from the age of 14.
Most of this stuff is now about Chirac trying to build a legacy. He should be history in a few months' time, and I can't see either of his likely successors continuing to behave as if the président is Louis XIV. It's not inconceivable that Sarkozy could even try building bridges towards the US.
It is not SPEWS that blocks you, it's the networks who use SPEWS that do.
I didn't miss that point, I'm just so tired of it that I declared up front my intention not to play word games around it one more time.
And no amount of bitching is going to solve your problem,
What problem? My servers are primarily web servers, so they don't send a lot of mail. The mail servers I use are not in the same continent, let alone the same server park. The one problem we had concerned one address on one mailing list app on one of a large number of domains we host. If anyone any of our customers wanted to talk to used SPEWS, we would have forked out $15 a year for a clean SMTP server, but they didn't, so we didn't.
which is that you are supporting a spam-friendly ISP.
No, we were (past tense) bound into a contract with an ISP that SPEWS claimed were spam-friendly. Since there's no appeal process, I struggle to treat that claim as having Voice of God authority.
And for this, you deserve to be listed.
Which totally ignores questions like
But something tells me that none of this is of any interest to you, because you sound like the sort of spamlist groupie who would happily nuke every major city in the world to reduce his own received spam by 30%. Thankfully, you are in a tiny tiny minority, which is presumably why SPEWS has folded in all but name (YYYEEESSS!!!)
It would be nice to punish brain-dead ISPs, but in the business world you'd just be punishing yourself.
That's the bottom line for me. People who bang on about how they spend half their waking hours tweaking the mail server in their dorm room to reject everybody's mail Because They Have Root are essentially harmless and just need to get a life, but transferring that approach to business is like hacking your own limbs off in a sword fight to stop your opponent injuring you.
Anyway, the news that SPEWS may well have gone belly up, and that no-one with a user base in binary double figures uses it anymore anyway, has really made my week.
The error in your reasoning starts when you assume that self-appointed do-gooders have the right to infringe the rights of third parties. (I'm not going to answer any posts about how actually it's just a list and no-one has to use it bla bla - save it for the bar-room barristers.) Vigilantes are always a menace, especially when they have a policy of hurting the innocent.
I think there's a pretty fundamental difference between a quasi-domestic ISP and a server park running dedicated servers which are the legal responsibility of completely independent companies. The only reason my machines share an IP range with spammers is because (like almost everyone), I'm not rich enough to buy my own pipe and deal directly with IANA.
And SPEWS' policy didn't make me put pressure on my ISP, it just made me vow never ever to use SPEWS on any server I have anything to do with, and to bitch about SPEWS on every possible occasion until the end of time. Part of fighting spam is getting the masses on the side of fighting spam, and I'm afraid that my starting position with anyone fighting spam now is "Is this just a cover for inflicting pain on the innocent?"
If the SPEWS ban had become a real problem I would rather have paid for a separate clean SMTP server than cave into the spam mafia. It's not that I like spam, I just hate bullies more. (We have since changed server parks, but this had nothing to do with SPEWS or spam.)
The good news is that, from my experience, almost no-one I ever wanted to send mail to uses SPEWS. That's the flip-side of blocking huge IP ranges in order to feel important: people with a life realise that being able to email more than 5% of the IP range is A Good Thing and simply sideline you.
But avoid SPEWS like the plague. They have a wonderful policy of blacklisting entire 16-bit IP ranges because one machine in an enormous server park has been used to send spam.
They know this causes massive collateral damage to machines administrated by totally independent companies, many of them small and liable to suffer severe hardship because of this arbitrary action. That's precisely the idea: they keep hurting non-spammers to make them lobby the server parks to deal with the spammers.
Unless you think that kidnapping children and refusing to return them unless their parents fight the mafia for you is an ethical law-enforcement policy, SPEWS is obviously far far worse than the problem they are allegedly attempting to solve.
40% of bosses always lie about everything and 60% of bosses never lie about anything? This seems to indicate a market for a third type of boss.
Minitel was slow and basic, but, in terms of domestic market penetration, it achieved in the 80s what the Internet didn't achieve for another 20 years. By giving out the terminals for free (initially, and then asking a peppercorn rent), and by convincing customers it was a telephone, not a computer, France Telecom got the entire nation using text-based comms, for everything from directory enquiries through weather forecasts and company reports to porn (I never did work out how that worked on a teletext screen, but there you are...) There are still plenty of Minitel users who have never taken to any of the PC or set-tpo box alternatives because they seem more complicated.
If people want to throw away TCO, security, easy of administration, power, and all the free enterprise proven software available
Um, Sharepoint is aimed at business users, and most of them don't have a linux-aware workforce, so it's hardly a case of throwing away Linux benefits, more not throwing away Windows-based skills.
for a glorified calendar and wiki program from Microsoft
I take it you haven't used Sharepoint? I'm an all-Linux web app designer, but, having done some consultancy work on Sharepoint, I have to say that duplicating Sharepoint's functionality from scratch wouldn't be a lot of fun. It's not so much what it does as the way it integrates with desktop apps. You edit your remote Sharepoint templates directly with FrontPage. You can synch Outlook address books. You can delegate responsibility for different parts of your intranet in a very flexible way. And, if you want something exotic, you can write it in XSLT and/or assorted MS programming languages.
Sure, you can achieve a similar goal using wikis, and I've written a few bespoke systems to do this stuff too. But the big hurdle is always separating Windows power users from their Windows apps. Either you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to make your web app look like Word, or you never get most of your staff on board. Normal people look at mark-up languages and say "Oh, yes, that's what I/my parents used to do in Wordstar in the 1980s".
By using Sharepoint you have a much better chance to get everyone to use the intranet, and that, more than enabling technology, is what makes intranets useful. Don't get me wrong, I think mark-up is wonderful, but it's naïve to assume that non-specialists can be bothered to learn it if there's a point and click alternative that does what they want.
The quote from Bristol uni is sensible and even mildly interesting. After that, it's just another tired rant about blogs (some someone who appears to be using forum software to run his own blog, which doesn't help to convince that he "gets" blogs at all) and various other sites he clearly doesn't like.
Obviously it's a dumb idea to post information you don't want published in public. Sites like MySpace have introduced a lot of newbies to social networking, and they'll take a while to get the hang of it, but it doesn't follow that social networking sites are inherently about loss of privacy.
And chat rooms are dead because of sexual predators?! I still see a lot of chat rooms, and surely a lot of that traffic has moved onto virtual worlds. Do we have a story about why Second Life has been shut down because of sexual predators? Thought not. A lot depends on much the site creators think about security, privacy and so on, preferably before going live rather than after the first six crises are reported in the international press. From the little I've seen of MySpace, it looks like a "bolt on safeguards in response to crisis" sort of outfit.
My main experience was with CF-booting wireless routers, with a linux setup that did no logging and had no swap. Total lack of local logging is not great for a router IMHO. The main thing that we wrote to the CF was a single config file, and we also used to remote upgrade the build from time to time. Out of 15 or so routers, at least 2 CFs died over an 18-month period. That hardly qualifies as robust in my view - I'd expect a lower failure rate with hard discs doing far more writing.
We also used IPCop, looked at running it off CF, but decided not to because of mailing list concerns about CF failure when using swap. The recommended fix was heaps of RAM so you never needed to swap, but, at the time, this made a big difference to the unit cost of our firewalls.
Yesterday I bought a replacement hard disc for a client in a high street store for under 50 EUR. Last time I looked the CF adaptor cost almost that much before you add the CF. Obviously the economics work a bit differently if your name is Intel and you build CF-enabled motherboards on a huge scale, but then the same economies of scale apply to a disc interface. I can't see that CF gives you huge savings on component cost, although I can see benefits in terms of footprint, power consumption (and therefore heat) and so on.
In my experience of an embedded linux application using CF for storage, the CF wasn't especially durable if you thrash it like a hard disc. Surely the main point of using this form of storage is to reduce power consumption, which either means much longer battery life or (probably in this case) much cheaper batteries. It also helps to get to a point where you don't need a fan, which in turn means less moving parts and less holes in the case for the monsoon to pour through.
From TFA, it appears that the halo effect (sales of Macs because of iPod fans) is supported by this survey. So, to get this straight, we are postulating huge numbers of geriatric iPod users too? Methinks that the survey, at least as presented in TFA, is even less useful than your average market research survey.
Surely the basic fallacy here is that "techie" is a unidimensional attribute that you either have or you don't. In reality, no-one these days has up to date technical knowledge of every aspect of IT. Even if you take, say, web-based solutions, anyone who claims to be up to speed on all the relevant technology is lying or stupid. And if "manager" means more than "lead programmer", the chances are that the project as a whole involves more skills than any one member of the team - techie or not - has mastered.
It's obviously helpful if management know enough about the general area in which they are working to ask intelligent questions, but you really don't want the management arguing with the programmers over how to write the tightest loop.
Can you blame people for their paranoia? Microsoft habitually tries to destroy anything that they get involved with -- Apple, Javascript, IBM, etc.
Is that Apple which now has a bigger turnover than Dell, Javascript that seems to be more popular than ever thanks to AJAX and IBM that has been doing ok recently too? And you didn't mention Netscape that eventually became Firefox. Given your examples, it seems to me that the Linux community should complain that Microsoft is not being mean enough to make Linux a rip-roaring success!
A lot of the cost of the American space program was developing technology that is now commonplace. The Indian IT team will have better equipment on day one than the US had on the day of the lunar landing, for example. India is no slouch in telecoms terms either.
Also, there was a lot of experimentation involved in the first space exploration that doesn't need to be done again. We know how to make space suits, and, thanks mainly to the Russians, we know a lot about the effects of long-term zero-gravity trips on the human body.
And even if America and Europe don't play ball (which is depressingly likely on past form), I'm sure the Russians will be willing to hand over as much technology as the Indians don't feel like reinventing.
So it won't be cheap, but I'd expect it to be cheaper in real terms than the first race to the moon.
And I'm taking as read that the Indian space program really has the same motivation as European and American space exploration, ie it's an excuse to pour lots of state funding into your high-tech industries, which gives you more competitive terrestial technology as a spin-off. In other words, this is probably more about kick-starting the Asian airliner industry than about photos of Indians eating poppadums in a crater.
Anybody who isn't coding with safe mode on and register_globals off in this day and age should be taken out and shot
Yes, but
I know people who write very neat code in PHP, but I can't help thinking that it's in spite of, rather than because of, the language. The basic problem is that "You can become a web programmer without knowing anything about programming or security" is always going to be an accident waiting to happen. Web applications are the most exposed programs around. That's why the "PHP is the new BASIC" thing doesn't hold: I learned to program in BBC BASIC, but I didn't let the entire world look for flaws in my BASIC programs...
Our company does web hosting, and every single time we get an enquiry involving PHP it comes with a caveat along the lines of "but I need version 4.x.y with version z of the q module and safe mode turned off". The best one yet was someone who wanted us to promise never to upgrade PHP because his XSLT module needs pre-version 4.4 - a bit of googling revealed that there's a whole section of the PHP community hunting for servers that will never upgrade for that reason. We never ever get this with perl, because backwards compatibility works over decades.