...and who are you going to believe? A few crackpot 'scientists', or the millions of 5th grade Science Fair projects which have already conclusively shown that the odds are split 50/50, right down the middle? I tell you, ten million grade schoolers can't be wrong!
You might be thinking of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. ABM didn't govern proliferation of nuclear weapons, it was a treaty to prevent the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems. It was signed to prevent either side from making the other's nuclear arsenal irrelevant, which would clear the way for a one-sided nuclear war. As far as I know, ABM was never actually violated by either side, although the SDI (and more recently, THAAD and Brilliant Eyes/Brilliant Pebbles) would have been clear violations.
The problem is, had Bush stuck to what he knew was true, there would never have been popular support for a war against Iraq. He did overinflate the information, but he did it intentionally to stir up support he would have otherwise lacked. Whether or not he did the right thing is up for a considerable amount of debate, but that he did it for the wrong reasons is certainly true, and it has become exceedingly apparent over the last month or two.
Whew.. I was starting to feel the same way judging from the rabid anti-Enterprise comments. I started watching Star Trek (original series) on Nick at Nite when I was about 10, and when The Next Generation started, I had a real problem with that (as much of a real problem as a 12 year old kid could have, anyway). Eventually I got used to Next Generation, and then I started preferring it. So when DS9 came along, I gave that a shot, figuring I'd been wrong before. Still, I just never got interested in it. Voyager was way off the mark, and I couldn't sit through much of that at all.
At the risk of being stoned by the masses, I'd have to say that I think Enterprise is far and away the best they've done since Next Generation. I sit through an episode and it kind of feels like it used to feel when I was watching the old Star Treks. I'll admit that it's a little bit worn, but I'm still entertained for an hour, and although I'm not really a regular viewer (I catch it if it's on and I'm looking for something to watch), it does seem a bit wrong that it'll end up faring so much worse than Voyager and DS9.
So there, I've said it! As a guy who grew up on real, honest-to-goodness corn-fed Star Trek, I actually like Enterprise, and I'm not ashamed to say so! Now I have to consider whether or not I want to post this anonymously... ah, what the hell.
Hey, I remember those (Epix?) games... Summer Games, Winter Games, and Summer Games II! Yeah, my dad taught me how to solder when we used to have to put those joysticks back together.
I guess I understand why RedHat is doing what it's doing, but I think it may be shooting a little too high for much of the market. Linux is just starting to make inroads at my company, but only because of the zero cost right now. When we need to throw something up quickly or host a new project, linux is always the first pick now because it's quick, easy, and free. But if we had to pay $799/yr per linux server... well, I hate to say it, but MS makes more sense. We already have a lot of it, so we already pay for Subscription Services. We're mostly an MS shop anyway still.... so why are we fooling with this linux stuff, again?
And just to ward off the notion that we're complete freeloaders, the success of linux at the small server level has led us to consider RHAS for our oracle environment. We'll probably still consider it, but there's no way we're ever going to see RHEL WS corporate-wide at these prices ($299/yr per workstation?). For free workstations, you might be able to convince the folks in the offices with doors that a migration might be worth the pain. Trying to sell them the pain *and* higher prices... well, the best I could ever hope for would be a good laugh.
I can tell you with certainty that they know which switch port you're on when they nab you. They just shut your port off at the switch, send you a letter, and wait for you to come in.
This honestly isn't anything to get up in arms about. The DHNet people at UF have been shutting ports off for network abusers for a long time. I recall the day a roommate has his port shut off for some excessive bandwidth usage that was drawing complaints from upstream. The fact is, you were always going to get shut off as soon as they found you using kazaa (or napster, it was back then). This just cuts some of the work out of the process for them.
No, you heard him right. You just have to read it very carefully and in context. Every time he ships a copy of his operating system, he pays royalties to Novell. See? It works!
Right on target -- MSSQL isn't cheap, but compared to Oracle, it's looks really good. Lots of companies already have MS infrastructure in place, so slapping SQL Server in there is no problem at all. It's also honestly not that bad of a product for the low to mid range, which is where a lot of the money is nowadays.
In my opinion, Postgres can, to a large degree, fill the same slot that MSSQL is filling now, but that just doesn't appear to be what's happening. Still, MSSQL does cost a pretty penny, especially if you're doing several installations. Perhaps as Postgres gets better, more people will realize that and make a switch.
This is true at the high-end, no doubt. But where I work, we've got oracle and mssql all over the place, and we could easily be doing all of our work on something like postgres. While Oracle certainly has a high-performance reputation, the fact is that more and more people are deploying databases that simply don't need that kind of power. Postgres shines particularly brightly in the low-to-mid range arena with folks like us, and I think that represents a pretty good chunk of the market these days.
I think that for people with the pioneer spirit, like the folks who were building webpages back in 1994, the internet as we knew has been dead for a while. Much of what made it interesting was the fact that it was new and mostly undiscovered, and there was a lot of anticipation and excitement about its potential.
Now that it's gone mainstream and its direction has gone into the hands of large corporations, it just isn't that interesting anymore. It's kind of like the western half of the United States -- now that everybody lives there, it's just another place. Sad to think that the most interesting days are well behind us, but honestly, when was the last time you were really excited about anything internet-related?
Or just let some entreprenuers do it for you. Once people realize that they can make loads of cash by influencing the future, there's no end to who might be killed. And the government doesn't even have to lay a finger on them. All you have to do is control what people are allowed to bet on... er, invest in. Man, if this isn't The American Way in high gear, nothing is.
But my office is in an uproar! This news has our execs discussing our future rollout plans for Microsoft products. In fact, five huge projects are already on hold because the legal department is afraid Windows is stolen technology. None of our business partners are comfortable with the shakey legal ground Microsoft is standing, and they're taking a wait-and-see approach. We've begun evaluating Plan 9 for the desktop.
To their debit, most WinDesktops that I'm aware of end up as glorified single-user machines, and that user is also.... Admin. Finally build a decent security model, and then customers ignore it.
I think the customers only ignore it because they've been bred on Win9x, which sort of casually asked if you felt like typing in a password, but didn't really care one way or the other if you actually did. You can't train people that passwords don't matter for 7 years and then expect them to start caring about security when you finally decide to implement it. So now we have a sea of internet users who don't know or care one whit about security all because they've been taught from the very beginning that all they ever have to do is plug it in, turn it on, and start browsing.
Indeed, there seems to be very little correlation between what's really high quality and what gets bought, at least in my experience. From what I've seen, decisions get made based on:
1. Politics 2. Price 3. Sales pitch
in that order of priority. There's always a grand plan to "evaluate all options", but we always end up buying what's cheapest or what some management fellow thinks will be best (often times it's just whatever the last company they worked for was using). It'd be nice if quality was the #1 deciding factor, but it'd have to be on the list of criteria first.
The fact that the large majority of webservers out there are running Apache (many on linux) and have been for a long time suggests otherwise. Sure bugs exist and there will always be exploits for all platforms, but somehow the Apache team is dodging those problems far better than Microsoft. With even MS themselves admitting that their emphasis was never on security in the past, you're probably one of the few people left in the world trying to defend their record.
So don't complain too much about the zealots around here -- you're just as much one as the rest of them, and one of the more vehement that I've seen.
I was thinking the same thing. I suppose technically you could be driving most of those miles in a different state, but it wouldn't be the first time a tax law hasn't been perfectly fair. How much are they going to spend on managing this nonsense, and how much of the tax money that they ultimately collect will be mitigated by the cost of maintaining the program?
What an awesome way to build up unanimous support for a tax hike, eh? Man, a few more stories about this and everybody'll be begging to pay more gas tax. Reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad would tell me to stop crying unless I wanted something to really cry about.
Not to mention the real damage -- solid evidence that no matter how many assurances Microsoft gives you that your data is safe and they've taken all precautions, you simply cannot trust them with important personal data. How many times does your bank have to 'whoops' a $1500 deposit before you decide that it's just not acceptable to do business with them? Once is usually enough.
Having your website defaced is one thing, and having a day-long network headache because of the most recent worm is one thing, but losing sensitive personal data is quite another. Based on their track record, Microsoft is simply not qualified to step into the role of holding and protecting important personal information, and this exploit makes that abundantly clear.
To be fair, maybe nobody is qualified to step into that role right now, but Microsoft's release-now fix-later approach to software development has no place in an environment where there's so much at stake.
because I'd love to have DSL again instead of cable. Time Warner provides my cable service now, and I have yet to see any of these fabled 3Mb/s downloads, or even anything even close. In fact, 1.5Mb/s is about as good as it ever gets. What I do see a lot of is that brick wall when I'm uploading. I guess I'm a little surprised that Time Warner wasn't included in this study, but I think they might bring those numbers down a little bit.
Speakeasy had a very comfortable TOS and a whole lot fewer customers than Time Warner, which made it pretty easy to get ahold of them on the few occassions that I needed to. When cable went out last month, Time Warner gave me the typical 11am-5pm window to stay at home so the cable guy could come check some things.
I suppose my point is that raw download speed isn't the only thing that matters in an ISP, and even if it was, I personally don't see the speed advantages they're referring to in this article.
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...and who are you going to believe? A few crackpot 'scientists', or the millions of 5th grade Science Fair projects which have already conclusively shown that the odds are split 50/50, right down the middle? I tell you, ten million grade schoolers can't be wrong!
You might be thinking of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. ABM didn't govern proliferation of nuclear weapons, it was a treaty to prevent the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems. It was signed to prevent either side from making the other's nuclear arsenal irrelevant, which would clear the way for a one-sided nuclear war. As far as I know, ABM was never actually violated by either side, although the SDI (and more recently, THAAD and Brilliant Eyes/Brilliant Pebbles) would have been clear violations.
The problem is, had Bush stuck to what he knew was true, there would never have been popular support for a war against Iraq. He did overinflate the information, but he did it intentionally to stir up support he would have otherwise lacked. Whether or not he did the right thing is up for a considerable amount of debate, but that he did it for the wrong reasons is certainly true, and it has become exceedingly apparent over the last month or two.
Whew.. I was starting to feel the same way judging from the rabid anti-Enterprise comments. I started watching Star Trek (original series) on Nick at Nite when I was about 10, and when The Next Generation started, I had a real problem with that (as much of a real problem as a 12 year old kid could have, anyway). Eventually I got used to Next Generation, and then I started preferring it. So when DS9 came along, I gave that a shot, figuring I'd been wrong before. Still, I just never got interested in it. Voyager was way off the mark, and I couldn't sit through much of that at all.
At the risk of being stoned by the masses, I'd have to say that I think Enterprise is far and away the best they've done since Next Generation. I sit through an episode and it kind of feels like it used to feel when I was watching the old Star Treks. I'll admit that it's a little bit worn, but I'm still entertained for an hour, and although I'm not really a regular viewer (I catch it if it's on and I'm looking for something to watch), it does seem a bit wrong that it'll end up faring so much worse than Voyager and DS9.
So there, I've said it! As a guy who grew up on real, honest-to-goodness corn-fed Star Trek, I actually like Enterprise, and I'm not ashamed to say so! Now I have to consider whether or not I want to post this anonymously... ah, what the hell.
Hey, I remember those (Epix?) games... Summer Games, Winter Games, and Summer Games II! Yeah, my dad taught me how to solder when we used to have to put those joysticks back together.
Hell yeah... I'm just glad they're only listing the top 10 professions... I was afraid they might be listing names :-)
I guess I understand why RedHat is doing what it's doing, but I think it may be shooting a little too high for much of the market. Linux is just starting to make inroads at my company, but only because of the zero cost right now. When we need to throw something up quickly or host a new project, linux is always the first pick now because it's quick, easy, and free. But if we had to pay $799/yr per linux server... well, I hate to say it, but MS makes more sense. We already have a lot of it, so we already pay for Subscription Services. We're mostly an MS shop anyway still.... so why are we fooling with this linux stuff, again?
And just to ward off the notion that we're complete freeloaders, the success of linux at the small server level has led us to consider RHAS for our oracle environment. We'll probably still consider it, but there's no way we're ever going to see RHEL WS corporate-wide at these prices ($299/yr per workstation?). For free workstations, you might be able to convince the folks in the offices with doors that a migration might be worth the pain. Trying to sell them the pain *and* higher prices... well, the best I could ever hope for would be a good laugh.
I can tell you with certainty that they know which switch port you're on when they nab you. They just shut your port off at the switch, send you a letter, and wait for you to come in.
This honestly isn't anything to get up in arms about. The DHNet people at UF have been shutting ports off for network abusers for a long time. I recall the day a roommate has his port shut off for some excessive bandwidth usage that was drawing complaints from upstream. The fact is, you were always going to get shut off as soon as they found you using kazaa (or napster, it was back then). This just cuts some of the work out of the process for them.
No, you heard him right. You just have to read it very carefully and in context. Every time he ships a copy of his operating system, he pays royalties to Novell. See? It works!
And don't forget, everybody has a share :)
Right on target -- MSSQL isn't cheap, but compared to Oracle, it's looks really good. Lots of companies already have MS infrastructure in place, so slapping SQL Server in there is no problem at all. It's also honestly not that bad of a product for the low to mid range, which is where a lot of the money is nowadays.
In my opinion, Postgres can, to a large degree, fill the same slot that MSSQL is filling now, but that just doesn't appear to be what's happening. Still, MSSQL does cost a pretty penny, especially if you're doing several installations. Perhaps as Postgres gets better, more people will realize that and make a switch.
This is true at the high-end, no doubt. But where I work, we've got oracle and mssql all over the place, and we could easily be doing all of our work on something like postgres. While Oracle certainly has a high-performance reputation, the fact is that more and more people are deploying databases that simply don't need that kind of power. Postgres shines particularly brightly in the low-to-mid range arena with folks like us, and I think that represents a pretty good chunk of the market these days.
I think that for people with the pioneer spirit, like the folks who were building webpages back in 1994, the internet as we knew has been dead for a while. Much of what made it interesting was the fact that it was new and mostly undiscovered, and there was a lot of anticipation and excitement about its potential.
Now that it's gone mainstream and its direction has gone into the hands of large corporations, it just isn't that interesting anymore. It's kind of like the western half of the United States -- now that everybody lives there, it's just another place. Sad to think that the most interesting days are well behind us, but honestly, when was the last time you were really excited about anything internet-related?
Or just let some entreprenuers do it for you. Once people realize that they can make loads of cash by influencing the future, there's no end to who might be killed. And the government doesn't even have to lay a finger on them. All you have to do is control what people are allowed to bet on... er, invest in. Man, if this isn't The American Way in high gear, nothing is.
Exactly... Notice he didn't say the biggest bet is on 'Longhorn'. It's on 'The Next Version of Windows', whatever that may be at any given time :)
But my office is in an uproar! This news has our execs discussing our future rollout plans for Microsoft products. In fact, five huge projects are already on hold because the legal department is afraid Windows is stolen technology. None of our business partners are comfortable with the shakey legal ground Microsoft is standing, and they're taking a wait-and-see approach. We've begun evaluating Plan 9 for the desktop.
I think the customers only ignore it because they've been bred on Win9x, which sort of casually asked if you felt like typing in a password, but didn't really care one way or the other if you actually did. You can't train people that passwords don't matter for 7 years and then expect them to start caring about security when you finally decide to implement it. So now we have a sea of internet users who don't know or care one whit about security all because they've been taught from the very beginning that all they ever have to do is plug it in, turn it on, and start browsing.
That means they just thought of an even better way to screw us.
Indeed, there seems to be very little correlation between what's really high quality and what gets bought, at least in my experience. From what I've seen, decisions get made based on:
1. Politics
2. Price
3. Sales pitch
in that order of priority. There's always a grand plan to "evaluate all options", but we always end up buying what's cheapest or what some management fellow thinks will be best (often times it's just whatever the last company they worked for was using). It'd be nice if quality was the #1 deciding factor, but it'd have to be on the list of criteria first.
The fact that the large majority of webservers out there are running Apache (many on linux) and have been for a long time suggests otherwise. Sure bugs exist and there will always be exploits for all platforms, but somehow the Apache team is dodging those problems far better than Microsoft. With even MS themselves admitting that their emphasis was never on security in the past, you're probably one of the few people left in the world trying to defend their record.
So don't complain too much about the zealots around here -- you're just as much one as the rest of them, and one of the more vehement that I've seen.
I was thinking the same thing. I suppose technically you could be driving most of those miles in a different state, but it wouldn't be the first time a tax law hasn't been perfectly fair. How much are they going to spend on managing this nonsense, and how much of the tax money that they ultimately collect will be mitigated by the cost of maintaining the program?
What an awesome way to build up unanimous support for a tax hike, eh? Man, a few more stories about this and everybody'll be begging to pay more gas tax. Reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad would tell me to stop crying unless I wanted something to really cry about.
Not to mention the real damage -- solid evidence that no matter how many assurances Microsoft gives you that your data is safe and they've taken all precautions, you simply cannot trust them with important personal data. How many times does your bank have to 'whoops' a $1500 deposit before you decide that it's just not acceptable to do business with them? Once is usually enough.
Having your website defaced is one thing, and having a day-long network headache because of the most recent worm is one thing, but losing sensitive personal data is quite another. Based on their track record, Microsoft is simply not qualified to step into the role of holding and protecting important personal information, and this exploit makes that abundantly clear.
To be fair, maybe nobody is qualified to step into that role right now, but Microsoft's release-now fix-later approach to software development has no place in an environment where there's so much at stake.
because I'd love to have DSL again instead of cable. Time Warner provides my cable service now, and I have yet to see any of these fabled 3Mb/s downloads, or even anything even close. In fact, 1.5Mb/s is about as good as it ever gets. What I do see a lot of is that brick wall when I'm uploading. I guess I'm a little surprised that Time Warner wasn't included in this study, but I think they might bring those numbers down a little bit.
Speakeasy had a very comfortable TOS and a whole lot fewer customers than Time Warner, which made it pretty easy to get ahold of them on the few occassions that I needed to. When cable went out last month, Time Warner gave me the typical 11am-5pm window to stay at home so the cable guy could come check some things.
I suppose my point is that raw download speed isn't the only thing that matters in an ISP, and even if it was, I personally don't see the speed advantages they're referring to in this article.
...there won't be anything left. :)
"Hey, you! When I'm done kickin' these four bouncers' asses, you're next! You and your huge friends, there!"