I would hug the last paragraph of this comment.
Code written with hate, code printed out on a line printer with hate, code dumped to machine language and then reverse compiled by hand out of the most powerful spite in the universe. crazy bastards.
Greenwich is very cool, the exhibits for kids are very well done. I did four days solo in London at the end of October and spent half a day in Greenwich. Easy to get to from the DLR. If the weather is nice, the views of the City and Canary Wharf are lovely.
The Thames Barrier is something cool to see, too. It's on the DLR at Pontoon Dock station.
The British Museum is awesome, but it's easy to OD and get into info overload. There is sooo much there.
If you like theatre at all, there is a TKTS discount booth in Leicester Square that will have same-night tickets for almost anything playing in the West End, particularly on weeknights. Plus the Southbank Centre has some good concerts.
The "Dressed to Kill" exhibit at the Tower of London is good, if it's not super crowded and you're into history much. Kew Gardens was a nice relaxing afternoon, too.
Get a visitor's Oyster card before you go, and save yourself some hassle. In the US you can get them online from BritRail or VisitBritain. And if you're going to be there for two weeks, get on a train and head out to other places.
And I took my netbook, to save pictures off my camera and do some school work. The Starbucks in London (they're even more numerous than in NYC, I think) have wireless that isn't free, but is at least reasonable and you can buy minutes that can be used over multiple sessions.
I love London. While the Underground is super easy and goes all over the place, just walking is fascinating. There is such a mix of old and new architecture, and cool little things tucked all over the place.
The drive out to the VLA is worth it to see the telescopes, though there's not much in the way of a museum there. http://www.vla.nrao.edu/
I've also heard good things about lanl's Bradbury Museum, but I've never been there. http://www.lanl.gov/museum/
Spaceport America was originally scheduled to have a hangar and terminal in 2010, so there might be something there worth checking out. http://www.spaceportamerica.com/
I am awesome. As an added bonus, I'm always right. And if you don't believe me, i'll show you the metrics on how your bad code affected the production systems.
Because it shouldn't be. Do your thing, be yourself. Computer nerditry is predominantly male, but being a geek is a gender-neutral lifestyle. There will always be some work environments that are better able to handle the "not like us" members of the team, whether gender-wise, or age-wise, or race-wise. What i've seen, though, is that teams that treat women poorly treat almost everyone poorly, and it's usually a sign to get the hell out.
It's not like there is some magic bullet for female geeks. A woman in IT may just as likely be a fish out of water with the Cosmo-reading stereotype that is outlined by our esteemed cohorts here, and totally able to relate to the dorkiness of whatever band of computer misfits might be around. It's not like every woman born onto this planet is replete with all of the social graces just because she's female. So, be a dork. Or dorque.
If you're looking for other women in computer-related fields to chat with, try Systers, Linuxchix, search meetup, whatever. Practice talking to other tech people like colleagues, regardless of gender, and it will become easier to interact with your coworkers. And there are thousands of conversation topics for IT people that have nothing to do with ribaldry or innuendo. Don't become the office cruise director, the instigator of dumb things like "let's celebrate birthdays each month", or crochet cozies for the headsets (unless they're amigurumi). I'm guessing those sorts of things don't come naturally to you anyway. I'd want to punch someone who wanted to make a thing out of celebrating birthdays and it showed up on my calendar. Spontaneous confectionary combustion is another matter.
For the posters here who complain about being afraid of being hauled to HR for naughty jokes, you should be. It's a workplace, not a locker room. Remember the locker room? Where the football player peed on you and laughed? Yeah. Keep your lame jokes for some other time.
So, essentially, meet them halfway. Be friendly, start conversations, don't judge their social shortcomings. Don't act like a victim, and don't take any crap either. It's a big world out there, there are a lot of jobs, there are a lot of assholes, and there are a lot of good people. The good ones will make you want to stay at a job that essentially sucks and the assholes will drive you out of your dream job. The trick is to know which is which, and not lose sight of what got you into IT in the first place. One batch of self-involved coworkers does not a career make.
Good luck
--mandi
my birthday is in october. i put it on your calendar
HHS during the first GWB administration spent a ton of cash and time to pull everyone into the Active Directory structure. As late as 2003, each individual institute or center in NIH was able to run their own email on whatever system they pleased.
Then the AD juggernaut came in, along with other IT mandates such as moving database services to Oracle, regardless of what you were using before (which was one of those "unfunded mandate" type of things).
HHS, and NIH in particular, are caught up in a cost cutting problem. They've been centralizing a lot of the IT functionality, farming more work out to contractors, and in some ways making a lot of really poor decisions.
NIH has scientific work to do. And a lot of it. There is little wiggle room for a lot of the labs to have decent IT budgets when they have science to get done. Science used to happen on big Unix boxes, Suns and SGIs, and the budget for these types of systems has dried up. Many of the programs ended up on Mac. Some of them are more naturally now on Linux.
So some ICs have already moved a lot of processing to Linux. The big challenge for HHS and NIH going forward is to get Linux admins in there that know what the hell they're doing. A year ago you couldn't get a tech at the NIH helpdesk who knew how to get the VPN client installed on a linux box.
So this is a good thing, overall. But NIH in particular, and HHS to a lesser degree, has been a technical rogue in the government for a while. They have work to do, and many of the scientists aren't interested in working with systems that don't do what they need. The migration to Exchange server was painful. The introduction of an AD-linked single signon system for web sites was begun in a total vacuum and made for a lot of headaches for a lot of people because the product they chose was weak.
Scientific directors don't have time or interest in forcing their scientists to use products that don't work just because someone higher up said so. It's one of the best parts of working with and for scientists. Hopefully they'll be able to put this all together in a way that is cost effective and beneficial, and gets a lot of really cool work done using linux.
this might have been the way to go in 1997 when only pansies ran systems with package management and real men built everything from source to run on their slackware boxes.
However, it is reasonable to expect several hundred packages to be in place on a moderately loaded machine. I get paid to admin linux, but even i have better things to do than sit and go over all the packages with even grep. On 9 different distributions. across 30+ machines. And it's not like i have a large installation to deal with.
If you're downloading source, you should be downloading gpg signatures and checking them. I'm downloading binaries, and checking the signatures against those. It comes back to trust, then, in the way pki and pgp meant trust to be: do you trust the source of this tarball? do you trust the person who signed it to not be naughty? If so, go nuts.
If you have the time and patience to go through every piece of software, every perl module, evey little whatever that goes into your machine, more power to you.
But I think your attitude undermines the idea that open source programmers participate in the community for the peer prestige and bragging rights. Where do your bragging rights go if your stuff's been trojaned? if you can't be bothered to gpg your stuff? Someone's going to clamp onto the security idea and say "well, you really can't trust those Open Source guys; they're all just out to trojan your machines and hijack your network, so you should buy windows".
You have to have some kind of package management in a production environment. Being able to tell with one query what version of a package is installed on a machine is very useful (rpm -qi)...knowing what all the files are that the package installed is more than useful (rpm -qf). Having shit all over your machine that you installed by hand, in some random directory scheme that makes sense to you is great. FOR YOUR HOME MACHINE. But if i get your job and find that box, i'm reformatting and badmouthing you to your mom.
With the mass-marketing and ready availability of cheap home computers, we have seen a shift in the way the computer is viewed in the home.
A computer is no longer a tool, or a piece of equipment used to aid learning. A computer is for entertainment. It is for chatting with friends or paedophiles, swapping movies and music, and playing games. Students who come into college thinking they are "good with computers" are able to do email and chat, but often not use a search engine properly (AOL keywords aside).
The uniqueness of the computer in the early 80's meant that fewer people had computers, and those that did had them for a reason. Why did your parents buy you a machine with an amazing price tag that could do LOGO and "Oregon Trail"? Were your parents fascinated by the computer? By what it could do for their lives? Their jobs? Many more of today's parents spend their careers in front of a computer, confounded by the stupidity of poorly designed programs that don't interact the way they should. Are they going to encourage their children to learn how to program computers? I doubt it.
My mom spends all day on the computer at work. We fought when I wanted to change my BS major from chemistry to computer science. It doesn't matter that I would still be in school and possibly $100k in debt had I stayed in chem... The computer is a beast that many people see as robbing them of their lives, their sight, and the use of their hands.
We've had numerous discussions over the past several years about coding becoming a commodity position and much of that work moving overseas. Parents don't want to see that for their kids, do they? Certainly, where I grew up, there isn't much interest in most kids getting an education, and thousands of people will still line up for a handfull of railroad or factory jobs. But for the parents who bought their kids a computer, don't you think they want to see them use it as a tool to get into something more stable? That has an obvious benefit to the layman?
Ask your parents WHY you had a computer. What motivated them to be an early adopter. Why they let you play with programming it. I think you'll find that nuturing curiosity and supporting a kid's interests are more key to having a happy kid than trying to steer them down a particular path just because YOU did it when you were a kid. (change "learning to code" to "being quarterback of the high school football team"...)
No you wouldn't. If you were to replace "Red Hat" with "Microsoft", it would be "You don't like that Dell and Microsoft are partners? Fine, don't buy a computer".
You don't get that choice with Microsoft. You buy Microsoft from HP, Dell, Gateway, whomever, that's all you're going to get, right? You still have to deal with Microsoft no matter who your hardware vendor is. You want Linux? HP is going to offer you a choice of two different distributions. Sun wants to if they can.
How do you compare that to microsoft? Where do you get a non-Microsoft version of Windows? From any vendor?
The difference in the Linux space is that there are dozens of possible distributions. Hardware vendors can pick and choose who they want to partner with; they're not being strong-armed into anything by the software vendor. If they pick Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, even freaking Lindows, it's a decision based on "who can we count on to not let our customers down" not "we have to have Windows products on all our hardware or we can't offer it on any hardware and it'll never sell".
Red Hat isn't out attacking anyone. They don't go around buying every other Linux company just because they can. They're not making extensions to glibc or gcc or apache and refusing to let SuSE or gentoo or StickUpYourButt Linux have access to them.
Hm. Well, Mandrake has a new version of their Corporate server product out.
HP offers SuSE and Red Hat configurations on their servers.
Sun will probably have to go with SuSE, because Red Hat freaking hates them and they recently abandoned their own Linux flavor.
It's not Red Hat's fault if other Linux vendors implode. They're not out there demanding that certain apps only be available on Red Hat. They didn't do that with Oracle, who has worked closely with SuSE as well as Red Hat.
You don't like that Red Hat and Dell are partners? Fine, buy something from HP. No one is demanding you buy anything from Red Hat.
Of course, if you're used to having your decisions made for you by your local Microsoft Sales Rep, maybe having all these choices is just too much overload.
Red Hat isn't forbidding users from getting updates. They are facilitating a simpler way for users of their distro to get updates. You can get updates, for currently supported releases, from the usual mirrors, just like always.
Opening up a support service to P2P could solve the bandwidth problem of downloads directly from Red Hat. It provides no mechanism for the system management capabilities of RHN to be pushed off to another system, though. Or testing and QA of all packages. Why don't Microsoft SysAdmins patch their systems as soon as m$ puts out a patch? because they're afraid of the patches and the repercussions on running systems. That's the real way to guarantee another slammer - take out the QA, bungle a few simple patches, and have no one trust patches for something important.
Honestly, though, if Red Hat loses the 1% or whatever it might be of RHN users who still run 6.2 or lower, what have they lost? they've lost the users who don't appreciate the work Red Hat's employees do on making new versions of gcc, glibc, the kernel, etc. They've lost the "customers" in their system who don't support new development. If they lose the users of supported releases who don't have the time or whatever to type junk into a survey every couple months, they can only provide a better service for paying customers.
There's always Debian. Run ancient software forever. Or hook up with some other 6.2 afficiandos and put up an apt repository for 6.2.
Consider today. If 1 million rhn users wanted the sendmail, sendmail-util, sendmail-cf packages, and sendmail-devel that's 4 million packages they're serving, plus updates on some crazy amount of table rows in their profiles database.
Not to mention the resources and bandwidth it takes to spin out 1 million errata notification emails in a timely fashion for a problem as big as this.
And that's just one day. Let's say, now, that there is a kernel errata. OK. You have 1 million users getting hold of some combination of kernel, kernel-source, kernel-smp/bigmem/whatever they're calling it these days, possibly stuff like kernel-headers and kernel-doc.
Even for smaller packages, the amount of bandwidth is just crazy. sendmail (on 7.3) is 662877 bytes. If 1 million users get just that package, that's 617Gb of data. For one package.
In return for being one of the faceless thousands who use up this service, server space, database resources, and bandwidth, Red Hat is asking that you 1: verify your email address so they know they're not wasting table rows on someone who isn't paying attention; and 2: fill out a survey on the off chance that they might someday stumble upon a service offering, based on your answers, that you might consider paying for.
We can sit here and write wish lists a mile long, prostelytize until we're blue in the face, type comments until our wrists become immobile.
But the real question is, "who's gonna pay for this?"
Sun, HP, IBM have a vested interest in keeping certain features out of Linux so their respective OSs retain their share of the big iron. Unless one of them retires their OS efforts (hint - it won't be Sun), who has enough cash and expertise to put Linux in the running on big systems? SGI? Heehee. Riiiiiiight...
IBM has stepped up, spent some money. Where did they put it? At what level can you get Linux boxes from HP? Where in Sun's product line will Linux be available?
Many of the things we might want need to come from big vendors with big cash. From hardware vendors, from software vendors... But who on the Linux side would be there? Debian? Slackware? UnitedLinux? Gentoo? Do we spend more time creating separate packaging environments and not enough time creating things to put in them?
It won't shake both ways. You can't have cheapass linux on cheapass PCs and have cheapass linux on big machines. where the hell do you get the money for test equipment? for some kind of lab environment to run in? Who's going to be able to persuade their CIO to replace their Sun NFS servers with Linux to help out the testing phase of an nfs rewrite and do load handling benchmarks?
There are lots of good people out there doing good work, and lots of it, to get Linux doing all sorts of things. But they have to eat, too. If Sun calls you up and says "hey, come work on Solaris", are you still going to want to work on Linux in your spare time for free?
Why do i want some weird tool to implement simple documentation? If writing man pages is too hard, write text for pete's sake. who wants another bizarre markup language with tokens like ^_ ?
Good god man! As if your $60/year would compensate for the amount of work that would be required to maintain current patchlevels for 6.2.
There's a reason they've gone to the current configuration, and the future changes in their product line, of requiring more cash and providing longer lifetimes for "professional" releases - maintaining 1200 packages/release is a lot of work. And if you screw something up, or you're late with a package, people bitch.
Red Hat is a company. Before they released their EOL status, they looked at what their customers are running. Hell, they've got a million points of data in the RHN database to look at. If 6.2 made up a significant amount of customers, I would imagine they would have been more lenient.
But when the bulk of your customers are running the latest or one-off release, how can you spend time and money supporting elderly releases? We're not talking about just the kernel; we're talking about ALL THE PACKAGES Red Hat puts in their distro. Someone has to sit down and do that. And that takes time away from the bulk of their business - newer releases.
I certainly hope you find someone who will package patches for you. But if you don't have the time to upgrade, how do you have the time to package everything you're running? I have the same problem with a box i work with. Users don't want downtime, now the box is so far out it needs to be taken off the network.
Can't blame Red Hat for that. It's not like they have the boundless resources of other companies. Having said that, though, there is no reason why the two dozen or so 6.2 users that are still around couldn't clammor with Red Hat to allow them to post a channel on RHN. They may not let you, but at least they'll know you're out there.
3-chord rock came out of jazz in the mid 20th century. It's easy to play, and easy to listen to. There are sounds that are naturally pleasing to the western ear.
120 bpm is a longtime holdover from military marches. A healthy person without ambulatory difficulties can walk comfortably to music set at 120 bpm, just ask any Sousa fanatic. (british marches are slightly faster, at 144bpm. don't know why that is)
Actually, a lot of the structure of modern music is an amalgamation of military march styling and jazz. You can't march to music in 5/4 (or dance - check PDQ Bach for some of that silliness). Most marches also have a similar set up of refrains and bridges in their lyrical makeup.
We've dropped the epic storytelling style of classical composition in favor or more portable, more approachable music, which was where the jazz bits came in. Sadly, the rise of pop music has devalued the art to the point where most of it is complete whiny crap. But that's why it's pop music. The listener really has nothing to lose or gain by having a different level of musical appreciation, since it's not musically complex and can therefore be comodified for john q. consumer.
"I have this product. I am going to tell you what it does in a security-related context. You can take this checklist, test my product, and certify that it does in fact do these things."
There is no security implied by the certification. It is a recommendation from the vendor of what the product is best used for when the customer is shopping for products to do certain security-related tasks. The vendor makes the checklist, a third party says "yay" or "nay", the customer says "i need a product that does X, Y, and Z. Windows does X, HP-UX does X and Y, and this one all three, plus it will help my sex life". Or something similar, anyway.
These things can be as simple as "userA cannot access userB's files" to "enforces complex passwords" to "has the biggest crazy ass firewall known to man". Well, maybe not that last one...
Now y'all can go back to shootin' your mouths off.
Absolutely. They're shooting everyone else in the foot.
By calling for boycotts and threatening lawsuits, they're showing everyone outside of OS/FS that we as a group don't care about the good work being done and excellent projects people are putting together, we only care about personal bickering and the semantics of our chosen mantra.
It's crap. What's important here is the work that's being done and the people who are doing it, not the people who are bitching about it. There is no single one of us who is going to change the world's collective mind about buying Microsoft products. But by demanding that all participants use one phrase over another, or holding extreme points of view, we have lost all room to bargain, compromise, or cooperate.
I think we all can agree that the US government doesn't give a rat's ass about the items brought up by the naysayers in this instance; part of that has been proven in court. But if we can't close ranks and defend our own, we've got nothing. Why should any agency want to use Open Source or Free Software when it's used and supported by a bunch of beligerent people?
Microsoft may take my money and give me crap in return, but it's not personal.
Slashdot Mirror
I would hug the last paragraph of this comment. Code written with hate, code printed out on a line printer with hate, code dumped to machine language and then reverse compiled by hand out of the most powerful spite in the universe. crazy bastards.
The Thames Barrier is something cool to see, too. It's on the DLR at Pontoon Dock station.
The British Museum is awesome, but it's easy to OD and get into info overload. There is sooo much there.
If you like theatre at all, there is a TKTS discount booth in Leicester Square that will have same-night tickets for almost anything playing in the West End, particularly on weeknights. Plus the Southbank Centre has some good concerts.
The "Dressed to Kill" exhibit at the Tower of London is good, if it's not super crowded and you're into history much. Kew Gardens was a nice relaxing afternoon, too.
Get a visitor's Oyster card before you go, and save yourself some hassle. In the US you can get them online from BritRail or VisitBritain. And if you're going to be there for two weeks, get on a train and head out to other places.
And I took my netbook, to save pictures off my camera and do some school work. The Starbucks in London (they're even more numerous than in NYC, I think) have wireless that isn't free, but is at least reasonable and you can buy minutes that can be used over multiple sessions.
I love London. While the Underground is super easy and goes all over the place, just walking is fascinating. There is such a mix of old and new architecture, and cool little things tucked all over the place.
Everyone in Japan has Hello Kitty coke spoons.
Plan your drive around the missile test schedule http://www.wsmr.army.mil/wsmr.asp?pg=y&page=202
The drive out to the VLA is worth it to see the telescopes, though there's not much in the way of a museum there. http://www.vla.nrao.edu/
I've also heard good things about lanl's Bradbury Museum, but I've never been there. http://www.lanl.gov/museum/
Spaceport America was originally scheduled to have a hangar and terminal in 2010, so there might be something there worth checking out. http://www.spaceportamerica.com/
I am awesome. As an added bonus, I'm always right. And if you don't believe me, i'll show you the metrics on how your bad code affected the production systems.
Because it shouldn't be. Do your thing, be yourself. Computer nerditry is predominantly male, but being a geek is a gender-neutral lifestyle. There will always be some work environments that are better able to handle the "not like us" members of the team, whether gender-wise, or age-wise, or race-wise. What i've seen, though, is that teams that treat women poorly treat almost everyone poorly, and it's usually a sign to get the hell out.
It's not like there is some magic bullet for female geeks. A woman in IT may just as likely be a fish out of water with the Cosmo-reading stereotype that is outlined by our esteemed cohorts here, and totally able to relate to the dorkiness of whatever band of computer misfits might be around. It's not like every woman born onto this planet is replete with all of the social graces just because she's female. So, be a dork. Or dorque.
If you're looking for other women in computer-related fields to chat with, try Systers, Linuxchix, search meetup, whatever. Practice talking to other tech people like colleagues, regardless of gender, and it will become easier to interact with your coworkers. And there are thousands of conversation topics for IT people that have nothing to do with ribaldry or innuendo. Don't become the office cruise director, the instigator of dumb things like "let's celebrate birthdays each month", or crochet cozies for the headsets (unless they're amigurumi). I'm guessing those sorts of things don't come naturally to you anyway. I'd want to punch someone who wanted to make a thing out of celebrating birthdays and it showed up on my calendar. Spontaneous confectionary combustion is another matter.
For the posters here who complain about being afraid of being hauled to HR for naughty jokes, you should be. It's a workplace, not a locker room. Remember the locker room? Where the football player peed on you and laughed? Yeah. Keep your lame jokes for some other time.
So, essentially, meet them halfway. Be friendly, start conversations, don't judge their social shortcomings. Don't act like a victim, and don't take any crap either. It's a big world out there, there are a lot of jobs, there are a lot of assholes, and there are a lot of good people. The good ones will make you want to stay at a job that essentially sucks and the assholes will drive you out of your dream job. The trick is to know which is which, and not lose sight of what got you into IT in the first place. One batch of self-involved coworkers does not a career make.
Good luck
--mandi
my birthday is in october. i put it on your calendar
Then the AD juggernaut came in, along with other IT mandates such as moving database services to Oracle, regardless of what you were using before (which was one of those "unfunded mandate" type of things).
HHS, and NIH in particular, are caught up in a cost cutting problem. They've been centralizing a lot of the IT functionality, farming more work out to contractors, and in some ways making a lot of really poor decisions.
NIH has scientific work to do. And a lot of it. There is little wiggle room for a lot of the labs to have decent IT budgets when they have science to get done. Science used to happen on big Unix boxes, Suns and SGIs, and the budget for these types of systems has dried up. Many of the programs ended up on Mac. Some of them are more naturally now on Linux.
So some ICs have already moved a lot of processing to Linux. The big challenge for HHS and NIH going forward is to get Linux admins in there that know what the hell they're doing. A year ago you couldn't get a tech at the NIH helpdesk who knew how to get the VPN client installed on a linux box.
So this is a good thing, overall. But NIH in particular, and HHS to a lesser degree, has been a technical rogue in the government for a while. They have work to do, and many of the scientists aren't interested in working with systems that don't do what they need. The migration to Exchange server was painful. The introduction of an AD-linked single signon system for web sites was begun in a total vacuum and made for a lot of headaches for a lot of people because the product they chose was weak.
Scientific directors don't have time or interest in forcing their scientists to use products that don't work just because someone higher up said so. It's one of the best parts of working with and for scientists. Hopefully they'll be able to put this all together in a way that is cost effective and beneficial, and gets a lot of really cool work done using linux.
--mandi
--mandi
--mandi
Know Thy Enemies
However, it is reasonable to expect several hundred packages to be in place on a moderately loaded machine. I get paid to admin linux, but even i have better things to do than sit and go over all the packages with even grep. On 9 different distributions. across 30+ machines. And it's not like i have a large installation to deal with.
If you're downloading source, you should be downloading gpg signatures and checking them. I'm downloading binaries, and checking the signatures against those. It comes back to trust, then, in the way pki and pgp meant trust to be: do you trust the source of this tarball? do you trust the person who signed it to not be naughty? If so, go nuts.
If you have the time and patience to go through every piece of software, every perl module, evey little whatever that goes into your machine, more power to you.
But I think your attitude undermines the idea that open source programmers participate in the community for the peer prestige and bragging rights. Where do your bragging rights go if your stuff's been trojaned? if you can't be bothered to gpg your stuff? Someone's going to clamp onto the security idea and say "well, you really can't trust those Open Source guys; they're all just out to trojan your machines and hijack your network, so you should buy windows".
You have to have some kind of package management in a production environment. Being able to tell with one query what version of a package is installed on a machine is very useful (rpm -qi)...knowing what all the files are that the package installed is more than useful (rpm -qf). Having shit all over your machine that you installed by hand, in some random directory scheme that makes sense to you is great. FOR YOUR HOME MACHINE. But if i get your job and find that box, i'm reformatting and badmouthing you to your mom.
--mandi
A computer is no longer a tool, or a piece of equipment used to aid learning. A computer is for entertainment. It is for chatting with friends or paedophiles, swapping movies and music, and playing games. Students who come into college thinking they are "good with computers" are able to do email and chat, but often not use a search engine properly (AOL keywords aside).
The uniqueness of the computer in the early 80's meant that fewer people had computers, and those that did had them for a reason. Why did your parents buy you a machine with an amazing price tag that could do LOGO and "Oregon Trail"? Were your parents fascinated by the computer? By what it could do for their lives? Their jobs? Many more of today's parents spend their careers in front of a computer, confounded by the stupidity of poorly designed programs that don't interact the way they should. Are they going to encourage their children to learn how to program computers? I doubt it.
My mom spends all day on the computer at work. We fought when I wanted to change my BS major from chemistry to computer science. It doesn't matter that I would still be in school and possibly $100k in debt had I stayed in chem... The computer is a beast that many people see as robbing them of their lives, their sight, and the use of their hands.
We've had numerous discussions over the past several years about coding becoming a commodity position and much of that work moving overseas. Parents don't want to see that for their kids, do they? Certainly, where I grew up, there isn't much interest in most kids getting an education, and thousands of people will still line up for a handfull of railroad or factory jobs. But for the parents who bought their kids a computer, don't you think they want to see them use it as a tool to get into something more stable? That has an obvious benefit to the layman?
Ask your parents WHY you had a computer. What motivated them to be an early adopter. Why they let you play with programming it. I think you'll find that nuturing curiosity and supporting a kid's interests are more key to having a happy kid than trying to steer them down a particular path just because YOU did it when you were a kid. (change "learning to code" to "being quarterback of the high school football team"...)
But I hate kids, so, grain of salt, k?
--mandi
It's your hell. You go there. I'm going to have an ice cream.
Yay.
ay, 'cause you sold your soul.
You don't get that choice with Microsoft. You buy Microsoft from HP, Dell, Gateway, whomever, that's all you're going to get, right? You still have to deal with Microsoft no matter who your hardware vendor is. You want Linux? HP is going to offer you a choice of two different distributions. Sun wants to if they can.
How do you compare that to microsoft? Where do you get a non-Microsoft version of Windows? From any vendor?
The difference in the Linux space is that there are dozens of possible distributions. Hardware vendors can pick and choose who they want to partner with; they're not being strong-armed into anything by the software vendor. If they pick Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, even freaking Lindows, it's a decision based on "who can we count on to not let our customers down" not "we have to have Windows products on all our hardware or we can't offer it on any hardware and it'll never sell".
Red Hat isn't out attacking anyone. They don't go around buying every other Linux company just because they can. They're not making extensions to glibc or gcc or apache and refusing to let SuSE or gentoo or StickUpYourButt Linux have access to them.
--mandi
HP offers SuSE and Red Hat configurations on their servers.
Sun will probably have to go with SuSE, because Red Hat freaking hates them and they recently abandoned their own Linux flavor.
It's not Red Hat's fault if other Linux vendors implode. They're not out there demanding that certain apps only be available on Red Hat. They didn't do that with Oracle, who has worked closely with SuSE as well as Red Hat.
You don't like that Red Hat and Dell are partners? Fine, buy something from HP. No one is demanding you buy anything from Red Hat.
Of course, if you're used to having your decisions made for you by your local Microsoft Sales Rep, maybe having all these choices is just too much overload.
--mandi
Opening up a support service to P2P could solve the bandwidth problem of downloads directly from Red Hat. It provides no mechanism for the system management capabilities of RHN to be pushed off to another system, though. Or testing and QA of all packages. Why don't Microsoft SysAdmins patch their systems as soon as m$ puts out a patch? because they're afraid of the patches and the repercussions on running systems. That's the real way to guarantee another slammer - take out the QA, bungle a few simple patches, and have no one trust patches for something important.
Honestly, though, if Red Hat loses the 1% or whatever it might be of RHN users who still run 6.2 or lower, what have they lost? they've lost the users who don't appreciate the work Red Hat's employees do on making new versions of gcc, glibc, the kernel, etc. They've lost the "customers" in their system who don't support new development. If they lose the users of supported releases who don't have the time or whatever to type junk into a survey every couple months, they can only provide a better service for paying customers.
There's always Debian. Run ancient software forever. Or hook up with some other 6.2 afficiandos and put up an apt repository for 6.2.
--mandi
That's A LOT of server resources and bandwidth.
Consider today. If 1 million rhn users wanted the sendmail, sendmail-util, sendmail-cf packages, and sendmail-devel that's 4 million packages they're serving, plus updates on some crazy amount of table rows in their profiles database.
Not to mention the resources and bandwidth it takes to spin out 1 million errata notification emails in a timely fashion for a problem as big as this.
And that's just one day. Let's say, now, that there is a kernel errata. OK. You have 1 million users getting hold of some combination of kernel, kernel-source, kernel-smp/bigmem/whatever they're calling it these days, possibly stuff like kernel-headers and kernel-doc.
Even for smaller packages, the amount of bandwidth is just crazy. sendmail (on 7.3) is 662877 bytes. If 1 million users get just that package, that's 617Gb of data. For one package.
In return for being one of the faceless thousands who use up this service, server space, database resources, and bandwidth, Red Hat is asking that you 1: verify your email address so they know they're not wasting table rows on someone who isn't paying attention; and 2: fill out a survey on the off chance that they might someday stumble upon a service offering, based on your answers, that you might consider paying for.
And you can always lie on the survey.
--mandi
But the real question is, "who's gonna pay for this?"
Sun, HP, IBM have a vested interest in keeping certain features out of Linux so their respective OSs retain their share of the big iron. Unless one of them retires their OS efforts (hint - it won't be Sun), who has enough cash and expertise to put Linux in the running on big systems? SGI? Heehee. Riiiiiiight...
IBM has stepped up, spent some money. Where did they put it? At what level can you get Linux boxes from HP? Where in Sun's product line will Linux be available?
Many of the things we might want need to come from big vendors with big cash. From hardware vendors, from software vendors... But who on the Linux side would be there? Debian? Slackware? UnitedLinux? Gentoo? Do we spend more time creating separate packaging environments and not enough time creating things to put in them?
It won't shake both ways. You can't have cheapass linux on cheapass PCs and have cheapass linux on big machines. where the hell do you get the money for test equipment? for some kind of lab environment to run in? Who's going to be able to persuade their CIO to replace their Sun NFS servers with Linux to help out the testing phase of an nfs rewrite and do load handling benchmarks?
There are lots of good people out there doing good work, and lots of it, to get Linux doing all sorts of things. But they have to eat, too. If Sun calls you up and says "hey, come work on Solaris", are you still going to want to work on Linux in your spare time for free?
--mandi
info est crapola
Why do i want some weird tool to implement simple documentation? If writing man pages is too hard, write text for pete's sake. who wants another bizarre markup language with tokens like ^_ ?
Ugh!
--mandi
There's a reason they've gone to the current configuration, and the future changes in their product line, of requiring more cash and providing longer lifetimes for "professional" releases - maintaining 1200 packages/release is a lot of work. And if you screw something up, or you're late with a package, people bitch.
Red Hat is a company. Before they released their EOL status, they looked at what their customers are running. Hell, they've got a million points of data in the RHN database to look at. If 6.2 made up a significant amount of customers, I would imagine they would have been more lenient.
But when the bulk of your customers are running the latest or one-off release, how can you spend time and money supporting elderly releases? We're not talking about just the kernel; we're talking about ALL THE PACKAGES Red Hat puts in their distro. Someone has to sit down and do that. And that takes time away from the bulk of their business - newer releases.
I certainly hope you find someone who will package patches for you. But if you don't have the time to upgrade, how do you have the time to package everything you're running? I have the same problem with a box i work with. Users don't want downtime, now the box is so far out it needs to be taken off the network.
Can't blame Red Hat for that. It's not like they have the boundless resources of other companies. Having said that, though, there is no reason why the two dozen or so 6.2 users that are still around couldn't clammor with Red Hat to allow them to post a channel on RHN. They may not let you, but at least they'll know you're out there.
--mandi
3-chord rock came out of jazz in the mid 20th century. It's easy to play, and easy to listen to. There are sounds that are naturally pleasing to the western ear.
120 bpm is a longtime holdover from military marches. A healthy person without ambulatory difficulties can walk comfortably to music set at 120 bpm, just ask any Sousa fanatic. (british marches are slightly faster, at 144bpm. don't know why that is)
Actually, a lot of the structure of modern music is an amalgamation of military march styling and jazz. You can't march to music in 5/4 (or dance - check PDQ Bach for some of that silliness). Most marches also have a similar set up of refrains and bridges in their lyrical makeup.
We've dropped the epic storytelling style of classical composition in favor or more portable, more approachable music, which was where the jazz bits came in. Sadly, the rise of pop music has devalued the art to the point where most of it is complete whiny crap. But that's why it's pop music. The listener really has nothing to lose or gain by having a different level of musical appreciation, since it's not musically complex and can therefore be comodified for john q. consumer.
so, yeah.
--mandi
Flowers die. Chocolate is just going to end up on my butt. Diamonds can end up in the drain.
A Porsche, now, that's just another story entirely.
The Common Criteria is of the fashion:
"I have this product. I am going to tell you what it does in a security-related context. You can take this checklist, test my product, and certify that it does in fact do these things."
There is no security implied by the certification. It is a recommendation from the vendor of what the product is best used for when the customer is shopping for products to do certain security-related tasks. The vendor makes the checklist, a third party says "yay" or "nay", the customer says "i need a product that does X, Y, and Z. Windows does X, HP-UX does X and Y, and this one all three, plus it will help my sex life". Or something similar, anyway.
These things can be as simple as "userA cannot access userB's files" to "enforces complex passwords" to "has the biggest crazy ass firewall known to man". Well, maybe not that last one...
Now y'all can go back to shootin' your mouths off.
--mandi
By calling for boycotts and threatening lawsuits, they're showing everyone outside of OS/FS that we as a group don't care about the good work being done and excellent projects people are putting together, we only care about personal bickering and the semantics of our chosen mantra.
It's crap. What's important here is the work that's being done and the people who are doing it, not the people who are bitching about it. There is no single one of us who is going to change the world's collective mind about buying Microsoft products. But by demanding that all participants use one phrase over another, or holding extreme points of view, we have lost all room to bargain, compromise, or cooperate.
I think we all can agree that the US government doesn't give a rat's ass about the items brought up by the naysayers in this instance; part of that has been proven in court. But if we can't close ranks and defend our own, we've got nothing. Why should any agency want to use Open Source or Free Software when it's used and supported by a bunch of beligerent people?
Microsoft may take my money and give me crap in return, but it's not personal.
--mandi