From the product spec sheet: 256K RAM 512K Flash, 10/100 Ethernet, Web Server (including Java applets, ferchrisake!), email sender, TCP/IP plus Telnet, SNMP, and the usual low-level service protocols. And AES Rijndael encryption as an option. Hot damn!
"It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM.
actually is somewhere near the heart of the complaint, it should be relatively easy to assess the argument. According to the GPL, the code of Linux is readily available for examination, from which it is possible to assess the methods and the concepts as well. Since SCO/ Caldera claim ownership of UNIX(tm) they should be able to point to specific examples of the misappropriations that they have in mind... and be able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of a court of law that the same methods and concepts could not have been independently rediscovered and reimplemented by others, despite the fact that Unix(tm)-like systems have been the academic world's basic teaching-and-basic-research OS of choice for, oh, more years than SCO has held title to the Unix "tm"?
This feels like an ugly hack that's being embarked on because fixing the underlying problem is reckoned to be too difficult. To blockquote from the referenced ZDnet story:
Problems typically occur when an application is installed that uses an updated version
of a Dynamic Link Library--or DLL--that is already used by another application. If the
original application cannot work with the updated DLL...
And there you have it: a system which has been implemented with such a lack of discipline that the concept of upward compatibility in API specifications is either intrinsically impossible or de facto unenforcible because breaking it carries few penalties to the culprits.
To be fair, I can see that some such mechanism as this could be of use as part of a long-term program to clean up the API hell. However, I'm not convinced that the same result could not be better achieved by consciously deciding to build up a parallel set of APIs (Trusted-Win32, perhaps?) where professional design and implementation practices are enforced. It's not as though it's difficult to understand: disciplined design and implementation of APIs with upward compatibility taken for granted have been standard practice for decades in non-Windows enterprise environments (mainframe, VMS, more recently Unix, etc.)
Yeah, I know. But it's the popular misconception that gets misremembered and repeated... (Mind you, anyone who provides the excuse for the "Paddle your own Kanute" line in 1066 And All That couldn't have been all bad (or as that book would have it, a Bad Thing)).
The ASA is a trade association that draws up voluntary guidelines to be followed by companies who care about being seen to be 'responsible'. Enough people are now sufficiently irritated by the floods of unsolicited dreck that it's now in the interests of the major advertisers to scale back their use of the mechanism, so lo and behold the ASA comes up and says 'you shouldn't do that'.
The effects are likely to be marginal at best. Most large companies are smart enough not to irritate potential customers this way. The slimebrains that peddle Big Man and Easy Money snake-oil won't take any notice. Maybe it will have some effect on the armies of small companies that are competing to replace your windows with new! improved! double-glazed! fittings! - we can but hope.
I can't help being reminded that it was an early Anglo-saxon ruler, Kanute, who famously ordered the tide not to come in.
Sounds as though the music biz suits are looking for ways to cut back on the expense of keeping large numbers of A&R people around. If this scheme works out (or perhaps it's better to say if the figures look as though it's working out) then the obvious next step is to turn the technology round and use it to compose the hits in the first place. No need then for any of those freaky unreliable "creative" types....
Of course, there are some of us who suspect that step was already made about 10 years ago, but no matter.
news.bbc.com - UK, World, Business, Science & Technology sections - first stop of the day and start of the afternoon.
The stats and status page for an intranet service I'm involved in running.
www.dilbert.com - 'nuff said
keepersoflists.org - a bit hit and miss, but occasionally +5 coffee-through-nose funny
www.theregister.co.uk - essential
slashdot - 'nuff said
www.telegraph.co.uk - Yes, it's antidiluvian right-wing stuff, but the Alex cartoon strip in the business section is a deadly accurate parody of the financial services biz (currently exploring the world of unemployed investment bankers after Alex has been laid off by MegaBank....)
www.ananova.com/news - headline scan in case they've picked up something the BBC has missed.
Google news - For a more US-centric take on the world
catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ - The Risks list digest - when my automatic checker flags an update
www.economist.com - The Economist newspaper, on Fridays - I get the print edition too but the web site has additional stories.
Various news and info pages on employer's intranet.
Reuters news service via employer's intranet, especially for air transport information
3 airline booking sites every few weeks to track any useful special offers
Total time taken: maybe 15 minutes if there's a lot going on.
Yes, I'm an expat Brit IT-er working in financial services. How could you tell?
Google search for "clear channel" indicates that there's a company of that name that works in the public radio atation market, and another one (sfx.com) that stages concerts. The referenced story is succint to the point of near uselessness, but I imagine this is the concert company, who can doubtless work out deals with the artists (Stones at al) they are promoting.
Is it just me, or is what used to be called the military-industrial complex's lobbeying for funds to persue 'cool' research areas undermining the country's ability to make appropriate military responses to novel threats? Here we are, less than 18 months after the carefully low-tech attacks of 9/11, busy working on all sorts of neat cyberwar and domestic datamining tools that aren't going to matter a toss to a bunch of fanatics holed up in a cave somewhere, or even to an economy like Iraq's that's already been largely put back to early 20th-century levels.
Leaving aside all the points about peak v. RMS power, distortion levels, etc., it sounds as though the bloat phenomenon isn't restricted to software and computing resources. Back when I was a student (admittedly some time ago) 15W per channel with a good set of speakers was adequate, 50W per channel and an average set of speakers satisfyingly 'it goes up to 11' LOUD.
Coming in late on this discussion, but what the hey.
I've earned my living in IT for over 30 years, and I sympathise with much of what the Washington Post's columnist is saying. Putting in time to learn and master complex and powerful tools when these are essential for your work is a part of the job. Being expected to waste time becoming familiar with the idiosyncracies of yet another poorly designed and implemented tool for doing a simple task is another matter entirely. Examples I've encountered in the last year:
New networked printers rolled out, do I want to join a 1-hour course to learn how to use them? Pardon me: these are printers. You hit "print" in a desktop app, point and click to select the printer and what you want it to do. If you go to collect your output and there's a paper jam, you consult the cookbook for which doors to open and which levers to move to free the obstruction. What more is needed? Well, it turned out that the cookbooks were incomplete, so everyone had to waste an hour - charged to their projects, by the way - because the logistics organisation goofed up.
Or, how about a "how to use the in-house phone system" course? Excuse me while I go ballistic for a moment: the system was installed 6 years ago, why the fsck hasn't logistics yet produced a simple summary of which of the functions that the vendor's equipment can provide are actually available here and under which {mis-|un-}labelled function buttons? Jeeze...
Why doesn't the new time-reporting system allow people to book half-days off sick? Or does the company prefer us to lie about illness?
A powerful search engine that indexes documents published on the company intranet is a poor substitute for intelligent structuring, naming, and navigation, even if it's cheaper and easier to provide than making the effort to do the job properly. But if you're going to rely on a search engine, at least try to select and tune it so that it doesn't produce 50 different versions of the same document as its top 50 search responses.
Oh hi, listing the PCs and workstations again, are we? Look, just a suggestion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to try to work out how the records have got so screwed up, again, in less than 6 months? It's not as if we can get new equipment or dispose of old stuff without going through 3 levels of approval and signoff, after all. Or am I some sort of bad team player for suggesting this?
What all these SNAFUs had in common is an inability - or in some cases a simple disinclination - on the part of the "vendor" to attempt to see things from the point of view of the end user. In some cases, like the time reporting system, it was blatantly obvious that the people who produced the new system had made no attempt to check the workings of the one it was replacing to guard against overlooking something. And there's also an evident tendency to regard the deployment phase as the final target, and not to budget for maintainance, corrections, and incremental improvements in the light of experience.
... That's something that the EU countries should copy from the US:)
Yah, I saw the smiley. But the main difference between EU countries that take bad winter weather in their stride and those where transport goes chaotic at the first sign of snow (hello there, England) is that (a) they get it more often, and (b) they reckon it's cost-effective to spend money in advance to minimise the disruption when it happens. (Mind you, where I live in lowland Switzerland the first snowfall of the winter is always "interesting" - there are always a few fools who've delayed switching to winter tyres in the hope that they won't be needed this year.)
...not so good against the USA's actual enemies, i.e. 20 beardy guys with assault rifles in a cave....
Nah, for them all you need to do is just drop a few tons of high explosive from a great height. Works every time. Um, provided the cave isn't really deep. Or, um, not on your target list because it's, um, too well hidden. Or empty because the beardy guys were passing the hookah around one evening, as you tend to do when you're holed up in a cave with no TV to denounce as an instrument of the infidels, and they wondered, hey, what would The Great Satan do, and top of the list was that he'd probably drop a few tons of explosive on them from a great height, so they decided that sitting out the campaign in neighboring Pakistan had a lot to recommend it.
I'm not trawling for +1 funny points here, nor indulging in knee-jerk anti-US sentiment: successfully taking the fight to a group as amorphous as, for example, Al-Qaida which has no intention of cooperating with your preferred choice of battleground is hard. I just wish I could be more confident that the activities and emphasis that have been made public so far aren't the whole of it.
Hmm. Possibly, but... my dictionary gives the origin as being military slang, and although the military are not exactly well-known for being polite in their everyday language, boffin's been around for quite a while; I'm pretty sure I can recall it being used back in the 1950's, at a time when the 'f' word was still very taboo in regular society. I'm not convinced that such a vulgar coinage would have leaked out into general use (the less extreme counter-example of "bumf" notwithstanding).
This applies to all OSes, of course. And find someone familiar with the OS to tell you what's important to read first (particularly important with systems where the documentation extends to several meters of bookshelf in printed form). It's some time since I worked with VMS, but here are a few pointers:
Look in particular at "OpenVMS User's Manual" for starters, then "OpenVMS System Manager's Manual", and "OpenVMS Guide to System Security".
VMS security is fairly fine-grained and the OS is pretty secure by default provided people (and processes, eg backups) are granted privileges on the basis of the minimum needed to perform their work, and passwords for the really dangerous accounts are kept under tight control (place I used to work had the password for the all-powerful "system" account in a sealed envelope in a safe). Oh, and if you have physical access to the system console then there are alternative boot modes which can override all the OS protections. They're well-documented.
System Management:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/system_manag ement.html - though at first glance this looks to be more a "here are some fine extra products you can buy to help you" page than detailed technical information.
Slashdot Mirror
Pity about the white/ grey packaging, though.
- The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
- The Tay Bridge Disaster
- An Address to the New Tay Bridge
Enjoy.[*]Poetry, alas, not being one of them.
[*]Sort of green, similar to envious.
To be fair, I can see that some such mechanism as this could be of use as part of a long-term program to clean up the API hell. However, I'm not convinced that the same result could not be better achieved by consciously deciding to build up a parallel set of APIs (Trusted-Win32, perhaps?) where professional design and implementation practices are enforced. It's not as though it's difficult to understand: disciplined design and implementation of APIs with upward compatibility taken for granted have been standard practice for decades in non-Windows enterprise environments (mainframe, VMS, more recently Unix, etc.)
...when I saw this was to wonder why ESA was sending an automobile to the moon.
Oh thank you, yes that is my hat and yes I was just about to leave anyway....
Yeah, I know. But it's the popular misconception that gets misremembered and repeated... (Mind you, anyone who provides the excuse for the "Paddle your own Kanute" line in 1066 And All That couldn't have been all bad (or as that book would have it, a Bad Thing)).
The effects are likely to be marginal at best. Most large companies are smart enough not to irritate potential customers this way. The slimebrains that peddle Big Man and Easy Money snake-oil won't take any notice. Maybe it will have some effect on the armies of small companies that are competing to replace your windows with new! improved! double-glazed! fittings! - we can but hope.
I can't help being reminded that it was an early Anglo-saxon ruler, Kanute, who famously ordered the tide not to come in.
...these subcommitee members must be getting really worried about losing their re-election campaign contributions from Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley.
Of course, there are some of us who suspect that step was already made about 10 years ago, but no matter.
--
Today, I'm listening mostly to Handel.
The stats and status page for an intranet service I'm involved in running.
www.dilbert.com - 'nuff said
keepersoflists.org - a bit hit and miss, but occasionally +5 coffee-through-nose funny
www.theregister.co.uk - essential
slashdot - 'nuff said
www.telegraph.co.uk - Yes, it's antidiluvian right-wing stuff, but the Alex cartoon strip in the business section is a deadly accurate parody of the financial services biz (currently exploring the world of unemployed investment bankers after Alex has been laid off by MegaBank....)
www.ananova.com/news - headline scan in case they've picked up something the BBC has missed.
Google news - For a more US-centric take on the world
catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ - The Risks list digest - when my automatic checker flags an update
www.economist.com - The Economist newspaper, on Fridays - I get the print edition too but the web site has additional stories.
Various news and info pages on employer's intranet.
Reuters news service via employer's intranet, especially for air transport information
3 airline booking sites every few weeks to track any useful special offers
Total time taken: maybe 15 minutes if there's a lot going on.
Yes, I'm an expat Brit IT-er working in financial services. How could you tell?
Either that, or I've just fallen into a "+1 Funny" troll-trap.
In short, nothing to see here, just move along.
Not trolling, just worried.
Kids these days, mumble mumble mumble.....
I've earned my living in IT for over 30 years, and I sympathise with much of what the Washington Post's columnist is saying. Putting in time to learn and master complex and powerful tools when these are essential for your work is a part of the job. Being expected to waste time becoming familiar with the idiosyncracies of yet another poorly designed and implemented tool for doing a simple task is another matter entirely. Examples I've encountered in the last year:
- New networked printers rolled out, do I want to join a 1-hour course to learn how to use them? Pardon me: these are printers. You hit "print" in a desktop app, point and click to select the printer and what you want it to do. If you go to collect your output and there's a paper jam, you consult the cookbook for which doors to open and which levers to move to free the obstruction. What more is needed? Well, it turned out that the cookbooks were incomplete, so everyone had to waste an hour - charged to their projects, by the way - because the logistics organisation goofed up.
- Or, how about a "how to use the in-house phone system" course? Excuse me while I go ballistic for a moment: the system was installed 6 years ago, why the fsck hasn't logistics yet produced a simple summary of which of the functions that the vendor's equipment can provide are actually available here and under which {mis-|un-}labelled function buttons? Jeeze...
- Why doesn't the new time-reporting system allow people to book half-days off sick? Or does the company prefer us to lie about illness?
- A powerful search engine that indexes documents published on the company intranet is a poor substitute for intelligent structuring, naming, and navigation, even if it's cheaper and easier to provide than making the effort to do the job properly. But if you're going to rely on a search engine, at least try to select and tune it so that it doesn't produce 50 different versions of the same document as its top 50 search responses.
- Oh hi, listing the PCs and workstations again, are we? Look, just a suggestion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to try to work out how the records have got so screwed up, again, in less than 6 months? It's not as if we can get new equipment or dispose of old stuff without going through 3 levels of approval and signoff, after all. Or am I some sort of bad team player for suggesting this?
What all these SNAFUs had in common is an inability - or in some cases a simple disinclination - on the part of the "vendor" to attempt to see things from the point of view of the end user. In some cases, like the time reporting system, it was blatantly obvious that the people who produced the new system had made no attempt to check the workings of the one it was replacing to guard against overlooking something. And there's also an evident tendency to regard the deployment phase as the final target, and not to budget for maintainance, corrections, and incremental improvements in the light of experience.Yeah, it's my lunch hour, how did you guess.
Security by Obfuscation.
Security by Slashdot Effect.
Ah well, I guess it means I won't be using working hours today trying to work out how to use these "insights" in my own code.
--
Film at 11.
I'm not trawling for +1 funny points here, nor indulging in knee-jerk anti-US sentiment: successfully taking the fight to a group as amorphous as, for example, Al-Qaida which has no intention of cooperating with your preferred choice of battleground is hard. I just wish I could be more confident that the activities and emphasis that have been made public so far aren't the whole of it.
--
Yes, we're at a coffee break here. How did you guess?
Doctor Hu (one of several 'old farts' and 'dinosaurs' who are helping to keep our employer's head above water.)
--
Yes, it's lunchtime here. How did you guess?
VMS Documentation:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
VMS OS Documentation:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/os731_index.html
Look in particular at "OpenVMS User's Manual" for starters, then "OpenVMS System Manager's Manual", and "OpenVMS Guide to System Security".
VMS security is fairly fine-grained and the OS is pretty secure by default provided people (and processes, eg backups) are granted privileges on the basis of the minimum needed to perform their work, and passwords for the really dangerous accounts are kept under tight control (place I used to work had the password for the all-powerful "system" account in a sealed envelope in a safe). Oh, and if you have physical access to the system console then there are alternative boot modes which can override all the OS protections. They're well-documented.
System Management:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/system_manag ement.html - though at first glance this looks to be more a "here are some fine extra products you can buy to help you" page than detailed technical information.
More VMS Documentation:
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/openvms_faq.h tml
Yet more VMS Documentation:
Type "HELP" at the command line.
Notwithstanding your clarifications of what you'll be doing, good luck.