I really disagree with this article. There's very few real world cases where a problem lands on a dev team's plate that could otherwise easily be solved by throwing hardware at it. In cases where it is possible, it's usually an exotic hardware change. For example, moving from local disks to a SAN or SSDs, which is not to be taken as a hardware swap. If you have an app that's CPU bound and you go from a single core 3gz to a quad core, any dev will tell you that it won't ever get close to 4x faster unless it was very carefully developed for multiple cores in the first place.
Consider one of the most common cases. A web application that starts to bog down quickly when it reaches a certain threshold. Let's assume it's not as simple as the network bandwidth (I *wish* my customer's bandwidth doubled every year for the same price!). You've got 200 visitors and they're all responsive, but when you get 300 it's twice as slow, and when you get 350 it's 3 times as slow. Go ahead and replace the servers with double the CPU & RAM, and the next step up of disk tech (raid 5 SCSI to RAID 10 SAS for example) and see if you can suddenly support 400 users.
Part of the developer's skill set, and the reason they are expensive, is engineering and architecture. Consider the mechanical engineering world. Humans have been doing that for a lot longer than programming, so we have a better understanding of a solution that is plain stupid. If a device is underperforming, can you skip talking to an engineer and solve it by swapping out the engine for one twice as big? Have you ever talked to an engineer who said, "yeah, just double the power and that won't affect anything else!" Maybe you've got a steel rod that keeps breaking, and the actual solution is to make a slightly bigger rod out of titanium. But if that actually works, it just means the engineering wasn't done right in the first place. This is how engineering disasters happen.
And finally, good programmers are not dumb. If a problem lands on their desk that can be fixed with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware, they're going to consider it after they've billed that much time. Chances are they've got better things to do because their skills can be better used elsewhere.
Let's have the company name and a copy of the response from that higher up who said it was perfectly OK. I think you'd see some backpedaling. I would hope the terms of service don't say anything about you needing to refrain from criticizing their service.
Some of the core reasons the IL state laws define so strictly what needs to happen to dispose of capital equipment is that this has historically been a wonderful way to conduct illicit transfers. Illinois is obviously the last place you'd expect corruption of this kind to take place, but that's probably because of these great laws and regs. For example, a political figure arranges to have 500 old computers disposed of by some waste management outfit for a fee WAY under cost. (Those very nice waste management firms, who are never involved in any schemes, do a school a big favor and get rid of all that old junk for a just a few grand plus expenses. Big thanks to the politician who saved the school big bucks and pushed so hard to get that old equipment replaced! Fortunately his brother-in-law owns a little company who's an authorized Sony dealer, and that company came in with the low bid on the new equipment! We gotta reelect that guy! He saved the school big money with those two deals!)
Bottom line, the rules are supposed to stop the possibility of equipment purchased with state funds getting into the hands of the private or for-profit sectors. The current system doesn't really stop this. It just makes it so it's really really hard to get away with it, should the DA or curious investigative reporter who puts in the time to make FOIA/Public Info requests starts digging. So sending the equipment to a state licensed facility (hey, the school board chairman's uncle happens to be licensed!) means that there's a paper trail. But really, anything that won't get you in the newspaper works. Donating the equipment to a non-profit or another state funded entity, or an auction that's carefully documented and where the winning criteria are totally objective is not going to run afoul of the state laws, but many school administrators don't even want to do anything other than send the old stuff to a licensed recycle facility. Often for a low low disposal fee.
One of the problems with this argument is that the seeds are organisms that naturally strive to reproduce. If I develop a gene therapy that cures a man's sickle cell disease, can I sue his children & grandchildren for licensing fees? They are reaping the benefits of my genetic research. This is an exact analogy to what Monsanto is doing to many farmers. It's not really a case of famers intentionally stealing the GM seed and using it without a license. In my example, at least humans who have my IP could decide not to procreate to incur the licensing fees, but how do you tell a plant not to reproduce?
Throw in the old fashioned monopoly building of a megacorp, and you have viral licensing of life.
Step 1. Develop Roundup weed killer.
Step 2. Develop a seed that is resistant to roundup.
Step 3,4,5,6. Buy over 80% of seed companies so customers have almost no choice.
Step 7. Partner with large agri-businesses who buy up farms so they earn record profits while family farms can't stay profitable...
... I could keep going. Anyone who reads up on it, even if they're not at all into conspiracies, realizes this is wrong and leads to tight control of the world's food suply.
I agree with your assessment, and also suspect that a lot of those policies are probably in place at the White House too. The data is likely somewhere. I worked for a state govt institution with a lot of PCs. Individuals want to save everything, even if central IT doesn't. And even a prolific e-mailer will only build up 4gig of mail in a year. That's plenty small enough to be stored on C:. This is exactly what the White House is claiming. That they turned on Outlook's autoarchive, and let Outlook suck the mail down to c:\documents and settings\user\blah\blah.pst
Guess how many PC techs get flamed to death for forgetting to copy those PSTs from the old PC to the new? Trust me. Everyone gets their files like this copied over. Where I worked, techs would make ghost images of the old PC on the giant new C: drives of the new PCs, because drives are generally much more than 2x the size after 3 years. They did this BECAUSE it came up 3 out of 5 times that the user would call back to ask for something they forgot to copy off the old PC.
So my point is, if the PSTs were on C: drives, and the PCs were replaced, the vast majority of the users would demand that those PSTs be copied. The techs that couldn't do that would be in deep trouble. So I believe the files are there. The judge should order some spot checks. They'll find it's easy to do the checks, and they'll find the files in most cases.
I'm very curious about the effect of legally violating the copyright on a normally licensed work.
Just to start off the idea: As some of us are aware, Office 2007 prohibits reverse engineering of the product in it's EULA. So for example, I can't buy a copy of Office 2007, install it, and run a disassembler against it to... let's say... figure out the Word2007 save file format. It's prohibited. If I did this and published my findings, Microsoft would say, "You violated your license agreement, and you're liable for the damages caused by ruining our control of the format, we get all the fruits of your labor, plus fines, oh, and to top it all off, the moment you broke the EULA, you broke copyright because you no longer had a right to have that copy of the software, so we'll see you in federal court too." So nobody reverse engineers this way. But it's the most effective way.
With me so far? Ok, so now we've got this Antigua WTO decision and someone outside the US can buy a copy of Antigua Productivity Suite 2007 which happens to be a legal copy of Microsoft Office 2007 with the EULA stripped off. Instead of licensing it, they are purchasing a copy. Just like purchasing a book. They could cut it up, post details about how it works internally, and lots of other interesting stuff.
Am I on to something, or missing something?
Of course this could also be used against a GPL work, like Linux. Since the teeth of the GPL lies in the idea, "your copyright license depends on these terms, and if you don't agree, you have no license to copy." Well, Antigua could make a copy now. I could buy it, get no source, and have no right to the source. Maybe I could buy a copy of Linux with source, but not be bound by the GPL in things I do with it?
I have doubts that they actually reverse engineered the driver from this company.
Meta, Func, Shift, Alt, type combinations are fully supported in the X11 layouts already, and their use (you can create your own layout and match it up to scancodes to do whatever you want, then paint the tops of the keys accordingly.:)
There's very little reason to take this company's binary driver and reverse engineer it. Hardware is sold outright, not licensed (leased). OLPC is clearly not stealing the company's hardware design with 4 shift keys. There's 1 meta key on the OLPC which has a very strong prior art case for not being infringing, (I'm looking at my C64 here) so it looks like they are talking about the software that came with the keyboards that the OLPC Project bought)
Consider: You're OLPC, and you want to make Meta-E print out a certain character. You've licensed a motherboard with some keyboard serial UART on it, and that UART has a scan code for the meta-key. Do you throw out X11's keyboard drivers and layout files, reverse engineer this company's driver for their hardware alone, and put that in it's place? Or do you take the existing X11 layout files and put in the scancodes you want for meta-E and not do any special coding?
But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code, this penalty seems zealous. I live in California, and it's painful to see bureaucratic zealots nominally on my side, but being far from reasonable. This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
This might not be the only issue; just the only clear cut legal issue that the state can latch on to. If you're having trouble with a vendor, and you have a contract clause that's stated so clearly and then absolutely violated, you go to this point and kill them. We can't assume the whole story is here. FTA: California Secretary of State Debra Bowen says, "ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught." Hmm... This implies the model change may not be the only thing the state is upset about.
I'm upset about the cost of the devices. Doing the math on the reimbursement only, (not the penalties) CA paid nearly $5 million for 972 non-compliant devices = $5000+ per voting device. I bet the engineer who shaved $5 off the manufacturing process by changing the mounting brackets was really proud of himself.
These ideas are still a hardware based solutions, but cheap and easy. Once every X seconds, write a checksum to a CD-R or DVD+R media. If the logs on your traditional magnetic disk are altered, you'll know. Depending on how much you can afford to lose, make X smaller. (I haven't read the new requirements, but I assume there's a tolerance of some kind) Another very certain method would be to write to a 1-way firewalled magnetic disk. e.g. copies of the magnetically stored logs are shipped (or just checksum packets) to a firewalled server with a hard disk. They're saved, but no traffic whatsoever is allowed out from that log box. Reading the logs requires physical access, and some kind of human oversight. (like launch codes that need 2 or more keys to access).
Your day to day log checks, like "any errors in last night's backup?" could be done live against the non-firewalled copies. When lawsuits, audits, or questions hit (and at some frequent interval), compare the live logs to the 1-way physically secured ones to make sure your live logs aren't being altered.
I agree 100% with your opinion of doing it modularly. For example, the StorPort driver that recently replaced the ScsiPort driver. I'm not sure how parallelized it is, but I know that it easily gives a 15% boost in disk operations. It's a perfect example of how replacing an outdated module (in the most significant bottleneck of any modern computer) can reap huge rewards. Everything in ScsiPort was double checked, done linearly and logically, and queues were long, and RAM use was high. All this was great for performance and reliability when you had a magnetic disk with a single spindle. If they're smart enough to stick to things like this for a while, they'll make the OS better.
Another possible use of all the extra cores would be internal compression of data. Disk, Ram, Net packets... I know on-the-fly compression is evil many geeks. Disk space is cheap, and compression causes more problems than it solves in a lot of cases. But if you have extra cores laying around idle, and you know that there's a 50% chance you'll be able to compress two 64k packets into a single 64k packet or page in 2 milliseconds, why not? You just have to manage it correctly, and do it at such a low level that there's no extra risks. And give us the knobs and levers to control it if we have to! That's another thing that MS is pretty bad at. For example, if I have a WAN compressed link to another site, I don't want it's performance to drop 80% as it tries in futility to compress the already compressed stream.
There's also a lot of optimization work like this to be done in the linux kernel for anyone who's got the urge and skill. In fact, I bet Linux will be able to keep in step with MS's very difficult task quite easily. MS will develop something after 10 teams work for 12 months, then they'll spend a while trying to figure out which tier of product this awesome feature belongs in, and tons of time trying to convince hardware vendors to support it and release drivers, while someone in the linux world will see it and put it right into everyone's kernel or driver.
In 1998, Janet Reno warned, "There are now new criminals out there that don't have guns. They have computers and many have other weapons of mass destruction."
I analyzed the script and extracted the list of possible hotfix regressions. None of them appear to be standard hotfixes. None are installed as part of a WindowsUpdate or SP1. If you have these on your system, you probably installed them after searching the KB to solve a specific problem. Many of the updates do not have public KB articles or descriptions, so you'd have to have gotten the patch after being sent the patch from MSPSS. Here are the public hotfixes that are regressed:
Agreed! Although Light Blue Optics Ltd's devices aren't available on the market yet, and they claim to have no mirrors, prisms, or moving parts. I poked around in Feb when LBO announced their laser projector tech. I couldn't believe no one had tried to make a cheap laser/mirror scanning projector. I found some patents on the technology from the 70's that appear to be used by companies doing the "Pink Floyd laser light show" type devices. They just don't understand what they have could be used to kill off the multi-million dollar LCD projector market, home theater, and even win the LCD/Plasma/OLED/etc TV wars.
Compiling a linux kernel is a bad choice of benchmark. It happens to be heavily slanted towards VMware... It doesn't use any of the high-cost software emulated parts of vmware except the virtual disk drive. And they've invested a ton of effort into optimizing their virtual disk driver. A tiny improvement in the virtual disk is actually a visible speedup to an end user, especially across a bunch of VMs.
Can we see some benchmarks that mirror what people are really using virtualization for? The most popular thing to virtualize is web servers, client-server app servers that hit a database, file servers. This means a LOT of traffic through VMware's software virtual network switch, the software virtual NICs, and likely lots of interrupts being generated by the app software! Compiling a kernel doesn't touch the nic, the switch, and makes almost no interrupts.
These projects aren't really shooting for the virtualization pie. As far as I know, OpenVZ, qemu, bochs aren't interested in moving to hypervisors. It's a new way of thinking about virtualization. In fact, VMware is is having to re-do a lot of stuff they've already got solved in their software emulation layers in the hypervisor way, because it's really worth it! You know how the VMWareTools installed inside the hosted OS speeds things up and allows you to see disks and other (limited) parts of the host's hardware? Hypervisors solve those problems more elegantly, and make the core parts of virtualization cleaner and faster. If VMware doesn't retool as a hypervisor VM provider instead of software emulated VMs then they're going to be killed off by Xen. Microsoft is too slow and keeps looking for a way to tie their VM solutions to their existing customer base through marketing. If they take too long to get there, Xen VMs will be performing 10-20% faster. If XenSource doesn't make their setup and management tools tools better, customers won't care about a little more performance.
The "big thing" is running 10+ servers on 1 physical box in the datacenter. You become incredibly nimble in terms of improving your traditional backup/restore processes; upgrades and provisioning and test environments are a snap. It's the same types of benefits that people saw in SANs vs. RAID arrays for storage. But VMs virtualize the whole server, not just the data disk. You get to a point where it's just silly not to do it because of the benefits.
Also, you might see 20 centralized WinXP desktops for end users. But that's not as simple as servers. You'll be doing virtual desktops after you've plucked the fruit of server virtualization.
it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware.
Nobody is really going to use this. When people talk about this, it's like saying, "if it's the 3rd Tuesday of a month that ends in 'ber', I'm in an important meeting, sitting in my assigned seat, and I spill coffee on my shirt but not my tie, I can totally switch my shirt without taking off my tie with only a small hiccup in the meeting agenda that we can train the attendees to work around as long as they're sitting in their assigned seats! Isn't that great?! Let's set up our systems to support this and assign the seats now! Move all critical meetings to the 3rd Tuesday of the month!" You'll pick your favorite VM engine and hypervisor and run all your VMs in it. You might have individual users like developers running groups of VMs under a different hypervisor, but you'll be hard pressed to find an excuse to transfer a running VM versus rebooting it. And you almost never "pre-detect" failing hardware and transfer a running machine. I'm constantly reminding people that vmotion and transfering running machines has everything to do with scheduled maintenance, and nothing to do with disaster response. You can't currently (and don't want to) transfer a VM off a local disk over the network, to another disk. Transfering depends on a SAN and fast uncongested network. If your disk controller is failing, you're not going to transfer. If your nic is failing you're not going to transfer. If your CPU or RAM starts glitching you'll be very lucky to successfully transfer a blue-screened OS. If your power drops and you're running on battery and want to transfer somewhere else, you need so many prereqs like a bridged network to somewhere where there's still power, and a mechanism to seamlessly switch your users over... Maybe? If you're this size and budget you probably have the same brand of hypervisor as a hot spare in the remote bridged, SAN replicated, alternatively powered site.
The really important news here is that they're not going to be forking the kernel. Xen and VMware were submitting patches that weren't compatible. If Morton and Torvalds went with Xen's patches, then they wouldn't consider similar but different VMware patches. It'd be redundant. So VMware would need a forked kernel to put their patches in.
Microsoft will never jump in and run a hypervisor on Linux, and if they wanted to they had wanted to last week, they'd need to submit patches to Linux to compete effectively. Extremely unlikely. With this news, MS could write a VM engine or hypervisor to run under Linux. The earlier announced partnership between MS and Xen is simply getting Xen to help make sure Linux VMs work in MS Virtual Server. (In other words, the patches Xen is submitting to the Linux kernel will help make sure that Microsoft can get a few snippits of info from a Linux VM running under MS Virtual Server. It's not really important.) I *WISH* MS would tweak Windows to run more smoothly on hypervisors. But I predict that they'll only be tweaking it to run better under Virtual Server.
That's what I thought. I wrote the first reponse this morning and I admit I didn't go read your previous AskSlashdot about VMware in general. I see what kind of environment you're running now. You're dealing with the typical "legacy can't be touched" problem. If you're still on older Netware (please tell me it's not IPX based too) you're going to keep hitting problems.
You might attack the problem on two fronts. Virtualize your Netware servers on VMware & Virtualize the client access to the finance app through Citrix. Forget the logistics and hardware layout for a moment. All I'm proposing is that when you control the backend Netware unbundled from the existing hardware, and you control the client access to the applications via citris, you can stop dealing with distributed Windows desktop configs. Q:"My Desktop can't access the finance app!" A:"Log on to citrix. It works there!" When you wall off the legacy apps and control access to them on both sides, you have the power to do something like slice off one of those netware volumes, move it to a Windows share, and repoint your citrix servers to it.
I hope it's that simple, but it's probably not. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of desktop Win32's out there accessing the Novell servers as well, and you'll have to figure out how to deal with those when you move the data somewhere, and your various apps might have internal pointers to particular shares with Novell UNCs or whatever they call those vol:folder\ things.
I was thinking of running 2 Citrix Servers within VMWare to handle maybe 8GB, effectively making 4 public Citrix servers, but I'm not sure what the best solution would be."
There's a lot of overlap between VMware and Citrix to be honest. People usually have multiple citrix servers in a farm for 2 reasons. First is to handle large loads. Second is to have a testbed and make it easier for your admins. (I'm assuming you're not virtualizing to do something specialized like training classes or simulate geographically separate sites...)
In your case, based on what you've told us, the only reason I can see VMize your citrix servers is making your testbed alongside production. (The MAIN reason people do Citrix in VMware is because their citrix system is already established, and the large citrix farms can be reduced and virtualized on more powerful modern hardware to further reduce maintenance. But you've got a new install here, and all options are open.)
Spend a little time asking yourself what those novell desktop apps do. Can they be delivered without client32? Novell is constantly pushing to pull off the desktop and into server stacks, but keeps faltering. There's enough tools to do it if you want to, but they're harder to use than the deskside tools that integrate with windows... And everyone constantly sees issues like you are where Novell lags behind Microsoft's changes to windows. (In the past I do think Microsoft did this intentionally) It sounds like you were surprised or maybe hit politically with a "we don't do it any other way!"
Your premise that RFID tags are just stored data with no logic is incorrect. They have shared key encryption, have a handshake mechanism, and the pieces of data are encrypted when transfered. I don't know the specifics, but the info is out there and I've read it when I was curious before. The tag and the reader must both have the same shared key to communicate. So an RFID reader in Walmart supposedly can't read any data off your Mobil Speedpass, because Mobil doesn't give Walmart it's big database of shared keys. But, Walmart might be able to use your Mobil Speedpass to ID you. (Their RFID reader might say "I have no way to communicate with RFID tag 24352340981435, but I see it is in the store at these times, and oh gee, that tag was at cash register #2 at the same time a certain John Davis made a credit card transaction.) It's speculated that this type of thing, or worse might be cracked after RFID tags are in widespread use, or that manufacturers of systems (embedded ones where it's designed once, as small and simple as possible) might screw up when designing systems around the tags. (and then not pay attention when the devices are exploited)
There are already proof of concept hardware devices that can do relay attacks. (Attacker brings a briefcase near Victim's wallet, and his buddy at the Mobil gas station outside is relayed the signals. The relay doesn't know what data is passing through it, but the Mobil RFID base thinks it's talking directly to victim's tag.) So you better have some security based on more than just an RFID exchange.
Re:Did some looking up on our fragile teeth
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Stone Age Dentists
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As I had a spate of dental problems the last year and because I was wondering why we evolves such apparently wretchedly fragile teeth (sharks have it nice, three rows of ever-emerging teeth keep popping up and the old ones pop out), and read up on dentistry in general to take better care of my teeth.
I wondered the same thing. Animals have very few problems with their teeth, especially crooked, impacted, etc... You will never run across an animal with teeth as crooked as a human who has never had access to dental care. I came to the conclusion that human teeth are an evolutionary failing. Basically, I believe brain size increased, which caused jaws to shrink, crowding of teeth, and problems in childbirth. However, congnitive powers and the use of hands and tools instead of teeth, overwhelmingly made up for the problems. It was better to have crappy teeth and a big brain and tools. Especially when you consider that evolution would not have been affected greatly by older humans who had already procreated. It's the same reason heart disease isn't being affected by evolution. By the time it kills you, you've already had kids. I think this also happens with teeth. In prehistoric times, if your teeth had problems at 25, it was too late to affect your reproductive success.
I bet there's a market for a little windows program that sits in the system tray and monitors the revenues and accounting trends of a particular company. It could match the trends and heuristics of the financials against known trouble patterns. When something suspicous is detected it could pop up a warning, or ask the user what they want to do.
Tin is an aluminium/lead alloy. I have been wondering if a quick 5 second POP in the microwave wouldn't be the best strategy to thwart RFID tags in badges and documents? I once took revenge on my brother by throwing his laser tag gun into the microwave. Of course instantly one of the metal traces on the circuit board popped and the gun was toast.
Imagine the upgrade to Ex12 for the big distributed Exchange systems out there. Places where branch offices are responsible for their own server hardware will be slow to upgrade, but even centrally funded mail systems will need to coordinate more downtime to upgrade the hardware and software together. (and how often will this also be the admin's first exposure to win64??)
I hope MS has beefed up their migration tools AND simplified them.
I also remember a free IA-64 emulator from Intel. I wonder if that could be used to run these 64 bit apps on i386?
I'm sure MS would rather use the palms they've already greased in Washington than try to steer state level politicians who might have preconceived "common sense barriers" that need to be broken down.
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Consider one of the most common cases. A web application that starts to bog down quickly when it reaches a certain threshold. Let's assume it's not as simple as the network bandwidth (I *wish* my customer's bandwidth doubled every year for the same price!). You've got 200 visitors and they're all responsive, but when you get 300 it's twice as slow, and when you get 350 it's 3 times as slow. Go ahead and replace the servers with double the CPU & RAM, and the next step up of disk tech (raid 5 SCSI to RAID 10 SAS for example) and see if you can suddenly support 400 users.
Part of the developer's skill set, and the reason they are expensive, is engineering and architecture. Consider the mechanical engineering world. Humans have been doing that for a lot longer than programming, so we have a better understanding of a solution that is plain stupid. If a device is underperforming, can you skip talking to an engineer and solve it by swapping out the engine for one twice as big? Have you ever talked to an engineer who said, "yeah, just double the power and that won't affect anything else!" Maybe you've got a steel rod that keeps breaking, and the actual solution is to make a slightly bigger rod out of titanium. But if that actually works, it just means the engineering wasn't done right in the first place. This is how engineering disasters happen.
And finally, good programmers are not dumb. If a problem lands on their desk that can be fixed with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware, they're going to consider it after they've billed that much time. Chances are they've got better things to do because their skills can be better used elsewhere.
Let's have the company name and a copy of the response from that higher up who said it was perfectly OK. I think you'd see some backpedaling. I would hope the terms of service don't say anything about you needing to refrain from criticizing their service.
Bottom line, the rules are supposed to stop the possibility of equipment purchased with state funds getting into the hands of the private or for-profit sectors. The current system doesn't really stop this. It just makes it so it's really really hard to get away with it, should the DA or curious investigative reporter who puts in the time to make FOIA/Public Info requests starts digging. So sending the equipment to a state licensed facility (hey, the school board chairman's uncle happens to be licensed!) means that there's a paper trail. But really, anything that won't get you in the newspaper works. Donating the equipment to a non-profit or another state funded entity, or an auction that's carefully documented and where the winning criteria are totally objective is not going to run afoul of the state laws, but many school administrators don't even want to do anything other than send the old stuff to a licensed recycle facility. Often for a low low disposal fee.
Throw in the old fashioned monopoly building of a megacorp, and you have viral licensing of life.
Step 1. Develop Roundup weed killer.
Step 2. Develop a seed that is resistant to roundup.
Step 3,4,5,6. Buy over 80% of seed companies so customers have almost no choice.
Step 7. Partner with large agri-businesses who buy up farms so they earn record profits while family farms can't stay profitable...
... I could keep going. Anyone who reads up on it, even if they're not at all into conspiracies, realizes this is wrong and leads to tight control of the world's food suply.
Guess how many PC techs get flamed to death for forgetting to copy those PSTs from the old PC to the new? Trust me. Everyone gets their files like this copied over. Where I worked, techs would make ghost images of the old PC on the giant new C: drives of the new PCs, because drives are generally much more than 2x the size after 3 years. They did this BECAUSE it came up 3 out of 5 times that the user would call back to ask for something they forgot to copy off the old PC.
So my point is, if the PSTs were on C: drives, and the PCs were replaced, the vast majority of the users would demand that those PSTs be copied. The techs that couldn't do that would be in deep trouble. So I believe the files are there. The judge should order some spot checks. They'll find it's easy to do the checks, and they'll find the files in most cases.
Just to start off the idea: As some of us are aware, Office 2007 prohibits reverse engineering of the product in it's EULA. So for example, I can't buy a copy of Office 2007, install it, and run a disassembler against it to ... let's say ... figure out the Word2007 save file format. It's prohibited. If I did this and published my findings, Microsoft would say, "You violated your license agreement, and you're liable for the damages caused by ruining our control of the format, we get all the fruits of your labor, plus fines, oh, and to top it all off, the moment you broke the EULA, you broke copyright because you no longer had a right to have that copy of the software, so we'll see you in federal court too." So nobody reverse engineers this way. But it's the most effective way.
With me so far? Ok, so now we've got this Antigua WTO decision and someone outside the US can buy a copy of Antigua Productivity Suite 2007 which happens to be a legal copy of Microsoft Office 2007 with the EULA stripped off. Instead of licensing it, they are purchasing a copy. Just like purchasing a book. They could cut it up, post details about how it works internally, and lots of other interesting stuff.
Am I on to something, or missing something?
Of course this could also be used against a GPL work, like Linux. Since the teeth of the GPL lies in the idea, "your copyright license depends on these terms, and if you don't agree, you have no license to copy." Well, Antigua could make a copy now. I could buy it, get no source, and have no right to the source. Maybe I could buy a copy of Linux with source, but not be bound by the GPL in things I do with it?
Meta, Func, Shift, Alt, type combinations are fully supported in the X11 layouts already, and their use (you can create your own layout and match it up to scancodes to do whatever you want, then paint the tops of the keys accordingly. :)
There's very little reason to take this company's binary driver and reverse engineer it. Hardware is sold outright, not licensed (leased). OLPC is clearly not stealing the company's hardware design with 4 shift keys. There's 1 meta key on the OLPC which has a very strong prior art case for not being infringing, (I'm looking at my C64 here) so it looks like they are talking about the software that came with the keyboards that the OLPC Project bought)
Consider: You're OLPC, and you want to make Meta-E print out a certain character. You've licensed a motherboard with some keyboard serial UART on it, and that UART has a scan code for the meta-key. Do you throw out X11's keyboard drivers and layout files, reverse engineer this company's driver for their hardware alone, and put that in it's place? Or do you take the existing X11 layout files and put in the scancodes you want for meta-E and not do any special coding?
This might not be the only issue; just the only clear cut legal issue that the state can latch on to. If you're having trouble with a vendor, and you have a contract clause that's stated so clearly and then absolutely violated, you go to this point and kill them. We can't assume the whole story is here. FTA: California Secretary of State Debra Bowen says, "ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught." Hmm... This implies the model change may not be the only thing the state is upset about.
I'm upset about the cost of the devices. Doing the math on the reimbursement only, (not the penalties) CA paid nearly $5 million for 972 non-compliant devices = $5000+ per voting device. I bet the engineer who shaved $5 off the manufacturing process by changing the mounting brackets was really proud of himself.
Your day to day log checks, like "any errors in last night's backup?" could be done live against the non-firewalled copies. When lawsuits, audits, or questions hit (and at some frequent interval), compare the live logs to the 1-way physically secured ones to make sure your live logs aren't being altered.
Another possible use of all the extra cores would be internal compression of data. Disk, Ram, Net packets... I know on-the-fly compression is evil many geeks. Disk space is cheap, and compression causes more problems than it solves in a lot of cases. But if you have extra cores laying around idle, and you know that there's a 50% chance you'll be able to compress two 64k packets into a single 64k packet or page in 2 milliseconds, why not? You just have to manage it correctly, and do it at such a low level that there's no extra risks. And give us the knobs and levers to control it if we have to! That's another thing that MS is pretty bad at. For example, if I have a WAN compressed link to another site, I don't want it's performance to drop 80% as it tries in futility to compress the already compressed stream.
There's also a lot of optimization work like this to be done in the linux kernel for anyone who's got the urge and skill. In fact, I bet Linux will be able to keep in step with MS's very difficult task quite easily. MS will develop something after 10 teams work for 12 months, then they'll spend a while trying to figure out which tier of product this awesome feature belongs in, and tons of time trying to convince hardware vendors to support it and release drivers, while someone in the linux world will see it and put it right into everyone's kernel or driver.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-208562.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898073 = [IE6 crashes on] digest proxy authentication [to https sites] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918005 = Battery power may drain more quickly [after unplugging or undocking] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918837 = power management is turned off [after disabling WakeOnWirelessLAN] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924078 = [error opening] Properties [...] for a network printer on [WinXP] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924301 = AutoComplete feature [broken after following javascript link in IE6] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925020 = [Lockup when using] USB device on a multiprocessor computer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925240 = warning message [...] new password that does not meet the requirements http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925513 = Error code Winsock [...] "WSAECONNABORTED (10053)" http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926047 = [Misplaced] AutoComplete box [...] in Internet Explorer 6 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926132 = ...WMI does not clear event registrations when the corresponding sink...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926754 = STOP: 0x000000D1 (parameter1 , 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xf27b4e8e)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926940 = SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 stops responding
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927291 = Dfsutil /import" command takes a long time to finish
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927493 = Winsock programs may exhaust the system's non-paged pool
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929620 = increased paging to the hard disk when you run an SAP R/3
These fixes are regressed, but they're not published on the public Knowledge Base:
"919757" "925290" "926305" "926513" "926583" "927197" "927436" "927893" "928194" "929066" "929759" "930620" "933452"
Agreed! Although Light Blue Optics Ltd's devices aren't available on the market yet, and they claim to have no mirrors, prisms, or moving parts. I poked around in Feb when LBO announced their laser projector tech. I couldn't believe no one had tried to make a cheap laser/mirror scanning projector. I found some patents on the technology from the 70's that appear to be used by companies doing the "Pink Floyd laser light show" type devices. They just don't understand what they have could be used to kill off the multi-million dollar LCD projector market, home theater, and even win the LCD/Plasma/OLED/etc TV wars.
Can we see some benchmarks that mirror what people are really using virtualization for? The most popular thing to virtualize is web servers, client-server app servers that hit a database, file servers. This means a LOT of traffic through VMware's software virtual network switch, the software virtual NICs, and likely lots of interrupts being generated by the app software! Compiling a kernel doesn't touch the nic, the switch, and makes almost no interrupts.
The "big thing" is running 10+ servers on 1 physical box in the datacenter. You become incredibly nimble in terms of improving your traditional backup/restore processes; upgrades and provisioning and test environments are a snap. It's the same types of benefits that people saw in SANs vs. RAID arrays for storage. But VMs virtualize the whole server, not just the data disk. You get to a point where it's just silly not to do it because of the benefits.
Also, you might see 20 centralized WinXP desktops for end users. But that's not as simple as servers. You'll be doing virtual desktops after you've plucked the fruit of server virtualization.
Nobody is really going to use this. When people talk about this, it's like saying, "if it's the 3rd Tuesday of a month that ends in 'ber', I'm in an important meeting, sitting in my assigned seat, and I spill coffee on my shirt but not my tie, I can totally switch my shirt without taking off my tie with only a small hiccup in the meeting agenda that we can train the attendees to work around as long as they're sitting in their assigned seats! Isn't that great?! Let's set up our systems to support this and assign the seats now! Move all critical meetings to the 3rd Tuesday of the month!" You'll pick your favorite VM engine and hypervisor and run all your VMs in it. You might have individual users like developers running groups of VMs under a different hypervisor, but you'll be hard pressed to find an excuse to transfer a running VM versus rebooting it. And you almost never "pre-detect" failing hardware and transfer a running machine. I'm constantly reminding people that vmotion and transfering running machines has everything to do with scheduled maintenance, and nothing to do with disaster response. You can't currently (and don't want to) transfer a VM off a local disk over the network, to another disk. Transfering depends on a SAN and fast uncongested network. If your disk controller is failing, you're not going to transfer. If your nic is failing you're not going to transfer. If your CPU or RAM starts glitching you'll be very lucky to successfully transfer a blue-screened OS. If your power drops and you're running on battery and want to transfer somewhere else, you need so many prereqs like a bridged network to somewhere where there's still power, and a mechanism to seamlessly switch your users over... Maybe? If you're this size and budget you probably have the same brand of hypervisor as a hot spare in the remote bridged, SAN replicated, alternatively powered site.
The really important news here is that they're not going to be forking the kernel. Xen and VMware were submitting patches that weren't compatible. If Morton and Torvalds went with Xen's patches, then they wouldn't consider similar but different VMware patches. It'd be redundant. So VMware would need a forked kernel to put their patches in.
Microsoft will never jump in and run a hypervisor on Linux, and if they wanted to they had wanted to last week, they'd need to submit patches to Linux to compete effectively. Extremely unlikely. With this news, MS could write a VM engine or hypervisor to run under Linux. The earlier announced partnership between MS and Xen is simply getting Xen to help make sure Linux VMs work in MS Virtual Server. (In other words, the patches Xen is submitting to the Linux kernel will help make sure that Microsoft can get a few snippits of info from a Linux VM running under MS Virtual Server. It's not really important.) I *WISH* MS would tweak Windows to run more smoothly on hypervisors. But I predict that they'll only be tweaking it to run better under Virtual Server.
You might attack the problem on two fronts. Virtualize your Netware servers on VMware & Virtualize the client access to the finance app through Citrix. Forget the logistics and hardware layout for a moment. All I'm proposing is that when you control the backend Netware unbundled from the existing hardware, and you control the client access to the applications via citris, you can stop dealing with distributed Windows desktop configs. Q:"My Desktop can't access the finance app!" A:"Log on to citrix. It works there!" When you wall off the legacy apps and control access to them on both sides, you have the power to do something like slice off one of those netware volumes, move it to a Windows share, and repoint your citrix servers to it.
I hope it's that simple, but it's probably not. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of desktop Win32's out there accessing the Novell servers as well, and you'll have to figure out how to deal with those when you move the data somewhere, and your various apps might have internal pointers to particular shares with Novell UNCs or whatever they call those vol:folder\ things.
There's a lot of overlap between VMware and Citrix to be honest. People usually have multiple citrix servers in a farm for 2 reasons. First is to handle large loads. Second is to have a testbed and make it easier for your admins. (I'm assuming you're not virtualizing to do something specialized like training classes or simulate geographically separate sites...)
In your case, based on what you've told us, the only reason I can see VMize your citrix servers is making your testbed alongside production. (The MAIN reason people do Citrix in VMware is because their citrix system is already established, and the large citrix farms can be reduced and virtualized on more powerful modern hardware to further reduce maintenance. But you've got a new install here, and all options are open.)
Spend a little time asking yourself what those novell desktop apps do. Can they be delivered without client32? Novell is constantly pushing to pull off the desktop and into server stacks, but keeps faltering. There's enough tools to do it if you want to, but they're harder to use than the deskside tools that integrate with windows... And everyone constantly sees issues like you are where Novell lags behind Microsoft's changes to windows. (In the past I do think Microsoft did this intentionally) It sounds like you were surprised or maybe hit politically with a "we don't do it any other way!"
There are already proof of concept hardware devices that can do relay attacks. (Attacker brings a briefcase near Victim's wallet, and his buddy at the Mobil gas station outside is relayed the signals. The relay doesn't know what data is passing through it, but the Mobil RFID base thinks it's talking directly to victim's tag.) So you better have some security based on more than just an RFID exchange.
I wondered the same thing. Animals have very few problems with their teeth, especially crooked, impacted, etc... You will never run across an animal with teeth as crooked as a human who has never had access to dental care. I came to the conclusion that human teeth are an evolutionary failing. Basically, I believe brain size increased, which caused jaws to shrink, crowding of teeth, and problems in childbirth. However, congnitive powers and the use of hands and tools instead of teeth, overwhelmingly made up for the problems. It was better to have crappy teeth and a big brain and tools. Especially when you consider that evolution would not have been affected greatly by older humans who had already procreated. It's the same reason heart disease isn't being affected by evolution. By the time it kills you, you've already had kids. I think this also happens with teeth. In prehistoric times, if your teeth had problems at 25, it was too late to affect your reproductive success.
If you never get calls from users upset about network printing then your users must be scientists, or they're not network printing at all.
LPR must go, (for the transmission of critical data) the same way telnet and FTP did. And at least THEY had authentication...
I bet there's a market for a little windows program that sits in the system tray and monitors the revenues and accounting trends of a particular company. It could match the trends and heuristics of the financials against known trouble patterns. When something suspicous is detected it could pop up a warning, or ask the user what they want to do.
Tin is an aluminium/lead alloy. I have been wondering if a quick 5 second POP in the microwave wouldn't be the best strategy to thwart RFID tags in badges and documents? I once took revenge on my brother by throwing his laser tag gun into the microwave. Of course instantly one of the metal traces on the circuit board popped and the gun was toast.
I hope MS has beefed up their migration tools AND simplified them.
I also remember a free IA-64 emulator from Intel. I wonder if that could be used to run these 64 bit apps on i386?
I'm sure MS would rather use the palms they've already greased in Washington than try to steer state level politicians who might have preconceived "common sense barriers" that need to be broken down.