Whilst I don't disagree with you, I wonder if this is still the case:
the positive PR accruing to Big Blue for defending Linux far outweighs the cost of the legal team
It seems like initially the case was being faught in public with many public statements from SCO.
Nowadays except for rare pieces like this, and the constant coverage on groklaw the case has fallen beneath the public radar.
It is rare to see new coverage of the case - and recently I remember talking to a friend in the pub and they said something to the effect of "Oh, is the SCO case still happening?". Seems like many people assume it is over, since the "popular press" went silent as soon as Darl stopped opening his mouth in public.
I'm sure IBM have done a lot to discourage frivelous cases against them by people paying attention, and they got a lot of credit in geek circles for not rolling over and buying SCO. But otherwise I'm sure they've got all the kudos they can right now. (Though I'm sure there will be a lot of coverage when the decision(s) are finally made on the various cases..)
It looks like I made the CERT list a couple of times, e.g. uw-imapproxy.
But these bugs are trivial things in applications which are either "extra", or not typically installed.
Fixing bugs in programs is important, but having a list of 500 simple buffer overflows in rarely used games (for example) on Linux says nothing about the relative security of Linux vs. Windows.
The worlds are too different, comparing every application included in Debian, say, against Windows would only make sense if you installed every single shareware/freeware/optional piece of software on the windows machine - and that clearly isn't a real world scenario.
I have previously paid the 50 quid extra (or so) to have a Dell Server shipped with RedHat. Even though I ultimately wipe the server and install Debian upon it.
Why?
Partly because I get install media and drivers etc so I know that the hardware will work with Linux (even if I have to use a strange RedHat kernel).
But mostly to send the message that Linux on servers is a good thing.
Sure it is pretty much money wasted, but if my company is paying for it and I'm in charge of the IT department that isn't a major concern...
I can't see your diagram, but I'd certainly echo the use of Danga's memcached. I use it upon my site, and found that I save a lot of database access via the caching.
There's a brief introduction to memcached with perl I wrote to explain it for newcomers, but bindings are available for PHP, and many many other languages.
Secondly I'd look at cheap clustering with pound this is much better than using Round Robin DNS as another poster mentioned; since it avoids clients getting sent to "dead" hosts. It also allows you to redirect visitors to specific backends for particular requests.
Using dedicated machines for serving static content and images may be useful since it frees your primary server(s) to concentrate on the heavyweight CGI stuff.
But to get the point: try to install it into a few randomly chosen new laptops so that everything works out of the box.
True for new hardware I guess. But the converse would be true for a Windows NT kernel. From memory NT4 didn't have any USB support. (I think it was only added in Windows 2000, but I could be mistaken). Even if USB drivers were available there is a lot more new hardware out there than there was in the days of NT.
Actually I always make a point to NEVER use a wildcard when RMing
I frequently use wildcards for deletion, even large constructs like "rm vm[1-4]/*.bak" - the trick I use is to make sure that I always run "ls vm[1-4]/*.bak" first, to make sure I know exactly what is and isn't going to get matched.
Its a fairly simple thing to remember, and it does prevent me being suprised by unexpected glob matches.
2. Your system has been on so long that you want to reboot it to see what whent down without it telling you
So true.
When I started work at $firm there was a sun machine with 500ish days of uptime, it was quite a suprise when it was rebooted to learn exactly what services had been added over that time - but not included in the init.d scripts.
I have heard the rebooting puts strain on system components, but I do admit to rebooting large Unix machines every few months just to make sure they boot as expected. For Linux machines that is usually taken care of by Kernel upgrades, but if no new security fixes are out I'll schedule a reboot just to be safe.
Very often, people asking me for technical help have problems that refuse to manifest themselves when I am present.
So true. Frequently in an office environment somebody will come to me and say "I tried to do foo and it didn't work". My previous starting point was always "what happened?", now I usually say "Show me.".
Nine times out of ten they'll attempt to do whatever it was they were doing and it will work perfectly. I assume they did something wrong the first time.
That ordering works because the "Magicians Nephew" is the one where Narnia is created, and "The Last Battle" is the book in which it is destroyed/ascended. The original ordering has "The Lion.." coming first, and the "Magician Nephew" being a followup after the initial success.
Personally I read them in the published order, and the small paperback set I have has them numbered in the "old" order - not a big deal to be honest.
Pretty much agreed. My site comes 7th on a search for "Debian", and top for "Debian Administrator", "Debian Administration" and other related terms.
None of that was deliberate and none of it was an effort. I just write about Debian sysadmin topics and the inbound links push me to the top. If I could get paid for SEO I'd be laughing.
Mind you I'm still bitter that I only come top on a search for "Steve" if you limit your search to 'Sites from the UK'. Although my full name links me to the top, against a couple of baseball players who have the same name whom I've never heard of!
I've had similar things happen to me in the past, more than once.
The most common experience I've had is working with a small company with approximately 50 staff on site, and a few remote. The backend is entirely Linux based, Exim for Email, Apache for the webserver, Samba for roaming home directories, etc. (Each desktop user will typically have an Windows 2000/XP installation, some brave types [like myself] might run Linux, and no Microsoft servers at all.)
Fast forward a year or two and the company gets bought out.
The next thing you know the entirely open, working, stable, and proven backend is replaced en masse by a Microsoft solution - to make it identical to the software that the parent company has been using.
Having recently been through this for the third time I'm quite cynical. It is almost painful to see a company suddenly lock themselves into paying for upgrades and still losing services which were available previously.
Not to mention switching from nice open POP3+Imap to "improved" installations such as Exchange, or Lotus Notes is enough to make grown men weep.
Re:well, you missed out the ubuntu sites
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Sure not everybody can code and suggestions / requests for enhancements are a good thing.
But posting them here on an devoted to a different project will have no effect, your comments are unlikely to be seen by people working on the project and that means they will most likely be ignored.
Mail the fine MPlayer people and submit your request directly; that would be a good way to support the open source community - and not look like a jackass...
I wouldn't worry about it. Over the years I've heard hundreds of Americans threaten to leave over govenment policies, or other issues.
To the best of my knowlege none of them ever have, it certainly isn't the case that many people are leaving as a result of Mr. Bushs fine policies, just like they didn't when Clinton was doing crazy things. I'd love to see real figures of ex-pat numbers over the past few years, but I'm not sure where to find them.
Whilst I can't really blame them (because I fully appreciate how hard it is to move city, let alone emmigrate) I'm cynical enough now not to expect the public to make any effort at all.
I've only seen a few shows, but I like the way they look like they're always having fun and getting paid to goof off.
By far the best episode I ever saw was the one where they showed a wine glass being shattered by the sound of somebodies voice; allegedly this was the first confirmed case of this being captured on camera, rather than being repeated as hearsay.
Ignoring the issue Google injecting content into the pages via the Javascript.. The fact that it relies upon the visitors having JavaScript installed makes this an unworkable solution for me.
Sure many, many (most?) visitor have it on. But if you're wanting complete records the only way to do it is with your own server logs.
99% of the time I use Debian's excellent package repository, but for the remaining 1% checkinstall is the way to go, as it lets you deal with your package in the normal manner.
Turns out these number anomalies only happen with base-10 numbers. When you have base-16 numbers, these mysterious relationships of the last digits disappear.
If only there were some magical way of turning numbers from base-16 into base-10. Then those tricks would suddenly be useful again...
And yet despite the fact that there are lots of existing bootloaders out there (lilo, grub, chos, etc) and writing a new one is fairly simple nearly every week there will be a new post asking for help in writing a bootloader on alt.os.development.
I can only assume it is because people first start writing an operating system by coding the bootloader. Still given the number of people who have problems with that it is no wonder that few actually write something functional.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst I don't disagree with you, I wonder if this is still the case:
the positive PR accruing to Big Blue for defending Linux far outweighs the cost of the legal team
It seems like initially the case was being faught in public with many public statements from SCO.
Nowadays except for rare pieces like this, and the constant coverage on groklaw the case has fallen beneath the public radar.
It is rare to see new coverage of the case - and recently I remember talking to a friend in the pub and they said something to the effect of "Oh, is the SCO case still happening?". Seems like many people assume it is over, since the "popular press" went silent as soon as Darl stopped opening his mouth in public.
I'm sure IBM have done a lot to discourage frivelous cases against them by people paying attention, and they got a lot of credit in geek circles for not rolling over and buying SCO. But otherwise I'm sure they've got all the kudos they can right now. (Though I'm sure there will be a lot of coverage when the decision(s) are finally made on the various cases..)
Some are, e.g. 'abuse'.
All the bugs I find and report which result in Advisories are as a result of source code auditing.
It looks like I made the CERT list a couple of times, e.g. uw-imapproxy.
But these bugs are trivial things in applications which are either "extra", or not typically installed.
Fixing bugs in programs is important, but having a list of 500 simple buffer overflows in rarely used games (for example) on Linux says nothing about the relative security of Linux vs. Windows.
The worlds are too different, comparing every application included in Debian, say, against Windows would only make sense if you installed every single shareware/freeware/optional piece of software on the windows machine - and that clearly isn't a real world scenario.
I have previously paid the 50 quid extra (or so) to have a Dell Server shipped with RedHat. Even though I ultimately wipe the server and install Debian upon it.
Why?
Partly because I get install media and drivers etc so I know that the hardware will work with Linux (even if I have to use a strange RedHat kernel).
But mostly to send the message that Linux on servers is a good thing.
Sure it is pretty much money wasted, but if my company is paying for it and I'm in charge of the IT department that isn't a major concern...
I use mutt and it is simple to read HTML mails in mutt if you need to.
(Sadly I do.)
Some good comments there :)
I can't see your diagram, but I'd certainly echo the use of Danga's memcached. I use it upon my site, and found that I save a lot of database access via the caching.
There's a brief introduction to memcached with perl I wrote to explain it for newcomers, but bindings are available for PHP, and many many other languages.
Secondly I'd look at cheap clustering with pound this is much better than using Round Robin DNS as another poster mentioned; since it avoids clients getting sent to "dead" hosts. It also allows you to redirect visitors to specific backends for particular requests.
Using dedicated machines for serving static content and images may be useful since it frees your primary server(s) to concentrate on the heavyweight CGI stuff.
True for new hardware I guess. But the converse would be true for a Windows NT kernel. From memory NT4 didn't have any USB support. (I think it was only added in Windows 2000, but I could be mistaken). Even if USB drivers were available there is a lot more new hardware out there than there was in the days of NT.
For example Serial ATA drives.
I frequently use wildcards for deletion, even large constructs like "rm vm[1-4]/*.bak" - the trick I use is to make sure that I always run "ls vm[1-4]/*.bak" first, to make sure I know exactly what is and isn't going to get matched.
Its a fairly simple thing to remember, and it does prevent me being suprised by unexpected glob matches.
I'm going to pretend that I didn't ever rm -f /bin/* . Still the recovery wasn't too painful, and I managed to fix things without having to reboot :)
So true.
When I started work at $firm there was a sun machine with 500ish days of uptime, it was quite a suprise when it was rebooted to learn exactly what services had been added over that time - but not included in the init.d scripts.
I have heard the rebooting puts strain on system components, but I do admit to rebooting large Unix machines every few months just to make sure they boot as expected. For Linux machines that is usually taken care of by Kernel upgrades, but if no new security fixes are out I'll schedule a reboot just to be safe.
So true. Frequently in an office environment somebody will come to me and say "I tried to do foo and it didn't work". My previous starting point was always "what happened?", now I usually say "Show me.".
Nine times out of ten they'll attempt to do whatever it was they were doing and it will work perfectly. I assume they did something wrong the first time.
The "new" ordering of the books is:
That ordering works because the "Magicians Nephew" is the one where Narnia is created, and "The Last Battle" is the book in which it is destroyed/ascended. The original ordering has "The Lion .." coming first, and the "Magician Nephew" being a followup after the initial success.
Personally I read them in the published order, and the small paperback set I have has them numbered in the "old" order - not a big deal to be honest.
Read a this page for more details on suggested reading order.
Pretty much agreed. My site comes 7th on a search for "Debian", and top for "Debian Administrator", "Debian Administration" and other related terms.
None of that was deliberate and none of it was an effort. I just write about Debian sysadmin topics and the inbound links push me to the top. If I could get paid for SEO I'd be laughing.
Mind you I'm still bitter that I only come top on a search for "Steve" if you limit your search to 'Sites from the UK'. Although my full name links me to the top, against a couple of baseball players who have the same name whom I've never heard of!
I've had similar things happen to me in the past, more than once.
The most common experience I've had is working with a small company with approximately 50 staff on site, and a few remote. The backend is entirely Linux based, Exim for Email, Apache for the webserver, Samba for roaming home directories, etc. (Each desktop user will typically have an Windows 2000/XP installation, some brave types [like myself] might run Linux, and no Microsoft servers at all.)
Fast forward a year or two and the company gets bought out.
The next thing you know the entirely open, working, stable, and proven backend is replaced en masse by a Microsoft solution - to make it identical to the software that the parent company has been using.
Having recently been through this for the third time I'm quite cynical. It is almost painful to see a company suddenly lock themselves into paying for upgrades and still losing services which were available previously.
Not to mention switching from nice open POP3+Imap to "improved" installations such as Exchange, or Lotus Notes is enough to make grown men weep.
<plug> http://www.debian-administration.org </plug>
Sure not everybody can code and suggestions / requests for enhancements are a good thing.
But posting them here on an devoted to a different project will have no effect, your comments are unlikely to be seen by people working on the project and that means they will most likely be ignored.
Mail the fine MPlayer people and submit your request directly; that would be a good way to support the open source community - and not look like a jackass ...
I wouldn't worry about it. Over the years I've heard hundreds of Americans threaten to leave over govenment policies, or other issues.
To the best of my knowlege none of them ever have, it certainly isn't the case that many people are leaving as a result of Mr. Bushs fine policies, just like they didn't when Clinton was doing crazy things. I'd love to see real figures of ex-pat numbers over the past few years, but I'm not sure where to find them.
Whilst I can't really blame them (because I fully appreciate how hard it is to move city, let alone emmigrate) I'm cynical enough now not to expect the public to make any effort at all.
Cool, thanks for correcting me.
Using no amplifier makes it much more impressive, I guess that is why I (half) remembered it in the first place!
I've only seen a few shows, but I like the way they look like they're always having fun and getting paid to goof off.
By far the best episode I ever saw was the one where they showed a wine glass being shattered by the sound of somebodies voice; allegedly this was the first confirmed case of this being captured on camera, rather than being repeated as hearsay.
(From memory they had to use an amplifier)
Nicely sampled and used in one of Iron Maidens tracks, IIRC.
Ignoring the issue Google injecting content into the pages via the Javascript .. The fact that it relies upon the visitors having JavaScript installed makes this an unworkable solution for me.
Sure many, many (most?) visitor have it on. But if you're wanting complete records the only way to do it is with your own server logs.
There are people selling such things for Perl, the first to spring to mind is perl-obfus carried upon Freshmeat.
That is slated pretty thoroughly over at Perl Monks.
I wonder how many people have paid for this .. umm .. fine product?
Definitely seconded. I wrote a tutorial on using checkinstall for Debian which explains how it works with a small example.
99% of the time I use Debian's excellent package repository, but for the remaining 1% checkinstall is the way to go, as it lets you deal with your package in the normal manner.
If only there were some magical way of turning numbers from base-16 into base-10. Then those tricks would suddenly be useful again...
And yet despite the fact that there are lots of existing bootloaders out there (lilo, grub, chos, etc) and writing a new one is fairly simple nearly every week there will be a new post asking for help in writing a bootloader on alt.os.development.
I can only assume it is because people first start writing an operating system by coding the bootloader. Still given the number of people who have problems with that it is no wonder that few actually write something functional.