>>It took 3 minutes to get an apache 3.x series server with mod_perl up.
See, even an idiot can get Debian to work.:P
But seriously, with articles like The Perfect Setup and tons of community support, Debian is really coming into its own. I run it on my own site and have suggested and helped several people work it into their own operations.
BTW, an old laptop with Debian and wikimedia makes an awesome shared documentation server for a small office.
>>Vista will make billions for Microsoft - driven by the warm embrace of those who hated the MacOS X interface when Microsoft didn't sell it;
It isn't about the interface; it's the apps. And it'll make billions because of OEMs. Likely MS will report every sale to an OEM as a full-price sale.
>>Itanium will continue on life support while Compaq, operating as HP, negotiates a way out with Intel;
Itanium will go on as long as corporate HQs demand Intel procs for their servers.
>>By the end of the year, the super computer listings will be entirely dominated by products built using IBM's cell processor -and the business applications performance benchmarks will be equally dominated by Sun's second generation CMT/SMP technologies.
I don't know enough about Cell to make a comment here. However, X86 has lost the MIPS war many times. It always remains dominant. Until someone comes up with a CPU virtualization system (Transmeta, where are you?), X86 will remain king.
>>By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Again, Sun is a name corporate trusts. If they have a virtualization layer for Office and a really good management system, they'll be welcomed with open arms. But I doubt it'll happen soon.
I'm kinda in the same position. 12 years of experience working mostly on WAN and LAN/MAN backbone links. My vision is very skewed. On the backbone, things "just work". If they don't, KDDI, ATT, Cisco, Juniper, and other companies send a *very* skilled tech to look at our problems. 24*7*365 I can get a tech on-site in under an hour.
When I went over to the dark side (doing server to switch to user support), I was shocked. Everything sucked so bad. I had 300 users with different installs, different software, and different problems.
My first step was to install SNMP and set up traps for disk full, memory full, CPU utilization, things like that.
The "Why" of linux came down to this: the ability to easily standardize desktops and easily back-up and restore a user's PC. In Linux, I know all the users' files are in/home I can easily set up scripts on a server to back up those files nightly. If a user's PC breaks, I can easily copy his profile to a laptop and have him back up within an hour.
VMware with a NLITE cut-down version of WinXP allows us to access crap web apps that demand IE.
We had a few people who complained about the lack of Access in Linux. I set aside some money to train them on MySQL and PHP. Within a week, they were building the same Access apps in a browser-compatible interface.
We had a few people complain about OO scripting support. They wanted things like spreadsheets that automatically turn past-due dates red and such. A few hours on IRC and that was solved.
Corporate recently began touting SharePoint. We've been using Wikimedia for shared document access for over a year.
The one "why" for linux for me is the fact that I can easily back up and restore a desktop PC in a short time. The "how" is that you look for alternatives where you can, and use VMWare where you can't.
I picture this attack being used as part of an ongoing investigation. They have a target and they just need some pattern analysis to secure the warrant. Over a month-long investigation, they could glean a lot of info by throwing up very specific requests and seeing if your hard drive springs to life or your CPU spikes.
In most cases, the wouldn't even need to be near your house. A well-positioned amp-meter with remote sensing could tell you if the CPU suddenly needed more power.
>>#5a; If you work in the USA you pay the same taxes regardless of being a citizen, H1-B, or green card holder. Yea, in some cases crooked firms who knowingly hire illegals as employees or contractors (Wal-Mart) don't withhold taxes. I would say no taxes paid no access to health care or the legal system.
That was actually intended to address US companies firing US employees and outsourcing projects. If you hire and Indonesian in Indonesia to do a job that a USian could do in the US, you still have to pay US taxes on the foreign worker.
However, the vast majority of health problems in the US are caused by lifestyle. Not everyone who has lung cancer smokes. However, most of them do. No everyone with heart disease eats fatty food. Most of them do.
Not all diabetes can be cured with exercise and diet. However, if you are overweight and have a bad diet, then that should be addressed before a doc whips out his prescription pad.
>>I love to walk and often walk several miles a day
You could walk all day long and still be out of shape. Every adult needs 45+ minutes of 80% max heart rate exercise 5+ days a week. Walking will rarely get you above 60% MHR. That's fine for losing weight, but no good for overall fitness.
Look at the recommendations for body composition. A 6' male should weigh no more than 170lbs. At 190lbs he would be obese. At what, 210, he'd be morbidly obese. How many 6' males do you know who weigh 170? 190? 210? I'm willing to bet that number ramps up exponentially. Where do you think you fit in?
Once weight and diet are analyzed and fixed, then, and only then, should a doctor prescribe a drug. Too many people take the drug and never fix the problem.
I've seen a lot of social health care systems. Canada, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria. All of them are broken in some fashion.
Profit means better service for the customer. Social HC means no chance of profit. That means the customer gets shitty service and the hospitals have no incentive to change.
>>'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.'
Apparently he was also a Girl Scout at some point...
The entire medical industry is broken. Probably to the point where it cannot be fixed. Government regulation could go a long way, but who really wants a bigger government?
1. Stop advertising drugs on TV and in magazines. You are not a doctor. You shouldn't be "asking your doc" if zotramiphil is right for your itchy ass.
2. Stop developing drugs for stupid shit. Yes, lots of people have Type2 diabetes. We already have a cure for that; a treadmill. Stop wasting money to develop a drug *just* to make money off a stupid disease.
2a. Why can an old guy take a drug to make his dick hard when I can't smoke a joint?
3. If a company develops a truly amazing cure/drug, the government should step in and buy it for the cost of development. The drug should them be distributed for the cost of production inside the US and for twice the cost of production outside the US. Once the costs are recouped, it should be just the cost of production inside and outside the US.
4. Get rid of medical lawsuits. A judge and jury have no idea if what a doc did was right or wrong. Appoint a commission of well-respected docs and have all medical complaints go through that office. If the commission decides the doc was wrong, then the doc should be fired and the patient recouped in a fair way.
4a. Make hospitals stop charging so much. Why does it cost $200 for an x-ray and $10 for a tylenol? Because of lawsuits.
5. Make US employers provide health insurance. Yes, all of them. Call it the cost of doing business in the USA.
5a. For every non-US employee a company contracts or subcontracts, make them pay money directly to the federal government's unemployment fund. In other words, a non-US employee working for a US company still gets taxed at the same rate as a US employee would.
6. Identify the hypochondriacs and truly sick people. Fix them. I go to the doc, on average, once a year for a checkup. Maybe once every 3 years for an illness. My kids get checkups and rarely go to the ER for being sick or hurt. If you or your family member is going to the hospital every week, something (lifestyle or mental) needs to be fixed.
7. Pay for any improvements by taking money out of the DoD. Stipulate that the DoD has to maintain current manning levels and quality of life. All money taken from their budget should be from cruft (how much does DoD spend on office supplies) or from special projects (Do we really need the JSF right after the F-22).
7a. Reduce the funding to every government agency by 2% per year until the customers start complaining. Then, analyze the complaints to see if better customer service could fix the problem. Fire assholes and slashdoters. We pay for 8 hours, fucking work them.
8. Threaten corporate shareholders with jail for withholding good drugs at low cost.
9. Mandate one special project for major companies. Wanna do business? Then you have to work on a cure for AIDS.
NMCI is an admin's dream. CAC authentication means no more password issues. Locked-down desktops means no more shareware crap. Remote desktop and remote program installs means reduced admin visits.
Of course, paying $5000 for a shitty computer sucks ass. Plus what, $500 per user? On top of that, you have to pay retail for every app you want.
I have a CD-Burner in my NMCI machine. If I want NERO installed, I have to pay $300 for a cd-burner (because my build does not show a burner even though any idiot can look at the face-plate and see it's a CD/RW) and $100 for Nero.
NMCI is making out like bandits on this thing.
If you want to see the next step, look at the USAF's SDC program. They are using WinXP with some sort of Trusted Computing module. Unless an executable is digitally signed by the USAF, it will not run. Plus, the firewalls are on by default and highly locked. In a lot of cases, people going to SDC could no longer do their jobs. Even programs that were developed by USAF programmers in-house would no longer function.
On SDC, you can't even change your desktop background, color scheme, file view settings (I like a detailed list vice stupid thumbnails), or sound scheme. Most USB thumb drives fail to work, but you can still burn a CD.
On a clean SDC install, my computer shows 350MB of memory in-use on a machine that only has 512MB installed.
The US military has been doing this for years. Sign up and kill people for 4 years and we pay for your degree. The GI Bill is quite nice. Also, while you are still in, the Veterans' Administration pays for 100% of your tuition and 50% of your wife's tuition.
Flickr and MySpace are opening new avenues to business. Those ways of getting customers were not there before. It's like mana from heaven.
However, for a company to place an OS on the desktop of every individual, they need to ensure the new system is better than the last.
The first company to lose a day of work because of deactivation will be the nail in WGAs coffin. Either MS will release an anti-WGA patch, or everyone will go back to Win2k.
Speaking of "first things first", why not focus on, oh, I don't know, AIDS. Or maybe homelessness in America. Or shitty public schools. Or a better trained (i.e. not shooting a drunk, black guy 50 times) police force. Or clean water. Or more energy efficient cars.
Why spend billions on a trip to the moon *before* we solve the real crises that threaten our everyday life?
Yes, I know the space program brought about better $material for $application and all that crap. But a billion bucks could seriously make life better back on Earth.
I think it will be cracked. Various mafia-like entities make too much money from selling street-corner software. There is a lot of money to be had for the people that crack Vista.
I have gmail auto-forward to my work account due to stupid webmail blocking policies. If I click "reply" in Outlook, the "To" address is not my gmail account; it is the person who sent the mail originally.
Oh, and the "From" field in my Outlook inbox shows the correct sender.
I could give two shits about lawn signs and commercials. What bothers me is the fact that once elected, the official is obligated to return the favors. If you give $20 to the GOP, you get shit for it. If Bill Gates gives $20,000,000, he gets a night in the whitehouse and a private sit-down with the man.
That needs to stop.
Special interests and corporate shills are buying votes from people who are all to willing to let them.
I lived in Italy for a while. I saw the perversion of the system when the public funds candidates. It does happen and it will happen if there is enough money involved.
>>The candidates are NOT allowed to accept outside donations or to use their own personal money if they receive this public funding.
Still does not stop them from spending a weekend at $big_corp hunting lodge or getting a ride on $special_interest private jet.
Slashdot Mirror
Glow engines use nitromethane, not petrol.
>>It took 3 minutes to get an apache 3.x series server with mod_perl up.
:P
See, even an idiot can get Debian to work.
But seriously, with articles like The Perfect Setup and tons of community support, Debian is really coming into its own. I run it on my own site and have suggested and helped several people work it into their own operations.
BTW, an old laptop with Debian and wikimedia makes an awesome shared documentation server for a small office.
DRM does not really matter to corporate. You shouldn't be watching movies or listening to music at work anyway. It's probably a selling point.
>>Vista will make billions for Microsoft - driven by the warm embrace of those who hated the MacOS X interface when Microsoft didn't sell it;
It isn't about the interface; it's the apps. And it'll make billions because of OEMs. Likely MS will report every sale to an OEM as a full-price sale.
>>Itanium will continue on life support while Compaq, operating as HP, negotiates a way out with Intel;
Itanium will go on as long as corporate HQs demand Intel procs for their servers.
>>By the end of the year, the super computer listings will be entirely dominated by products built using IBM's cell processor -and the business applications performance benchmarks will be equally dominated by Sun's second generation CMT/SMP technologies.
I don't know enough about Cell to make a comment here. However, X86 has lost the MIPS war many times. It always remains dominant. Until someone comes up with a CPU virtualization system (Transmeta, where are you?), X86 will remain king.
>>By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Again, Sun is a name corporate trusts. If they have a virtualization layer for Office and a really good management system, they'll be welcomed with open arms. But I doubt it'll happen soon.
I'm kinda in the same position. 12 years of experience working mostly on WAN and LAN/MAN backbone links. My vision is very skewed. On the backbone, things "just work". If they don't, KDDI, ATT, Cisco, Juniper, and other companies send a *very* skilled tech to look at our problems. 24*7*365 I can get a tech on-site in under an hour.
/home I can easily set up scripts on a server to back up those files nightly. If a user's PC breaks, I can easily copy his profile to a laptop and have him back up within an hour.
When I went over to the dark side (doing server to switch to user support), I was shocked. Everything sucked so bad. I had 300 users with different installs, different software, and different problems.
My first step was to install SNMP and set up traps for disk full, memory full, CPU utilization, things like that.
The "Why" of linux came down to this: the ability to easily standardize desktops and easily back-up and restore a user's PC. In Linux, I know all the users' files are in
VMware with a NLITE cut-down version of WinXP allows us to access crap web apps that demand IE.
We had a few people who complained about the lack of Access in Linux. I set aside some money to train them on MySQL and PHP. Within a week, they were building the same Access apps in a browser-compatible interface.
We had a few people complain about OO scripting support. They wanted things like spreadsheets that automatically turn past-due dates red and such. A few hours on IRC and that was solved.
Corporate recently began touting SharePoint. We've been using Wikimedia for shared document access for over a year.
The one "why" for linux for me is the fact that I can easily back up and restore a desktop PC in a short time. The "how" is that you look for alternatives where you can, and use VMWare where you can't.
I picture this attack being used as part of an ongoing investigation. They have a target and they just need some pattern analysis to secure the warrant. Over a month-long investigation, they could glean a lot of info by throwing up very specific requests and seeing if your hard drive springs to life or your CPU spikes.
In most cases, the wouldn't even need to be near your house. A well-positioned amp-meter with remote sensing could tell you if the CPU suddenly needed more power.
If you run TOR, run Folding@Home also. F@H will slack off a bit while TOR does its thing. After TOR finishes, F@H picks back up.
There will be a small delay in there. Maybe big enough to pick up. But I doubt it.
Of course, you could combine this with EM spectrum sniffing and easily pinpoint a particular PC.
It's pretty early in the rollout. The execs will kill off the format and release a new system within a year. HD-DVD-2 or something like that.
Then, they'll just not give the keys to PowerDVD.
Note to all future hackers. Wait till you have critical mass before you release a crack.
>>#5a; If you work in the USA you pay the same taxes regardless of being a citizen, H1-B, or green card holder. Yea, in some cases crooked firms who knowingly hire illegals as employees or contractors (Wal-Mart) don't withhold taxes. I would say no taxes paid no access to health care or the legal system.
That was actually intended to address US companies firing US employees and outsourcing projects. If you hire and Indonesian in Indonesia to do a job that a USian could do in the US, you still have to pay US taxes on the foreign worker.
Exceptions to every rule...
However, the vast majority of health problems in the US are caused by lifestyle. Not everyone who has lung cancer smokes. However, most of them do. No everyone with heart disease eats fatty food. Most of them do.
Not all diabetes can be cured with exercise and diet. However, if you are overweight and have a bad diet, then that should be addressed before a doc whips out his prescription pad.
>>I love to walk and often walk several miles a day
You could walk all day long and still be out of shape. Every adult needs 45+ minutes of 80% max heart rate exercise 5+ days a week. Walking will rarely get you above 60% MHR. That's fine for losing weight, but no good for overall fitness.
Look at the recommendations for body composition. A 6' male should weigh no more than 170lbs. At 190lbs he would be obese. At what, 210, he'd be morbidly obese. How many 6' males do you know who weigh 170? 190? 210? I'm willing to bet that number ramps up exponentially. Where do you think you fit in?
Once weight and diet are analyzed and fixed, then, and only then, should a doctor prescribe a drug. Too many people take the drug and never fix the problem.
I've seen a lot of social health care systems. Canada, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria. All of them are broken in some fashion.
Profit means better service for the customer. Social HC means no chance of profit. That means the customer gets shitty service and the hospitals have no incentive to change.
>>'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.'
Apparently he was also a Girl Scout at some point...
The entire medical industry is broken. Probably to the point where it cannot be fixed. Government regulation could go a long way, but who really wants a bigger government?
1. Stop advertising drugs on TV and in magazines. You are not a doctor. You shouldn't be "asking your doc" if zotramiphil is right for your itchy ass.
2. Stop developing drugs for stupid shit. Yes, lots of people have Type2 diabetes. We already have a cure for that; a treadmill. Stop wasting money to develop a drug *just* to make money off a stupid disease.
2a. Why can an old guy take a drug to make his dick hard when I can't smoke a joint?
3. If a company develops a truly amazing cure/drug, the government should step in and buy it for the cost of development. The drug should them be distributed for the cost of production inside the US and for twice the cost of production outside the US. Once the costs are recouped, it should be just the cost of production inside and outside the US.
4. Get rid of medical lawsuits. A judge and jury have no idea if what a doc did was right or wrong. Appoint a commission of well-respected docs and have all medical complaints go through that office. If the commission decides the doc was wrong, then the doc should be fired and the patient recouped in a fair way.
4a. Make hospitals stop charging so much. Why does it cost $200 for an x-ray and $10 for a tylenol? Because of lawsuits.
5. Make US employers provide health insurance. Yes, all of them. Call it the cost of doing business in the USA.
5a. For every non-US employee a company contracts or subcontracts, make them pay money directly to the federal government's unemployment fund. In other words, a non-US employee working for a US company still gets taxed at the same rate as a US employee would.
6. Identify the hypochondriacs and truly sick people. Fix them. I go to the doc, on average, once a year for a checkup. Maybe once every 3 years for an illness. My kids get checkups and rarely go to the ER for being sick or hurt. If you or your family member is going to the hospital every week, something (lifestyle or mental) needs to be fixed.
7. Pay for any improvements by taking money out of the DoD. Stipulate that the DoD has to maintain current manning levels and quality of life. All money taken from their budget should be from cruft (how much does DoD spend on office supplies) or from special projects (Do we really need the JSF right after the F-22).
7a. Reduce the funding to every government agency by 2% per year until the customers start complaining. Then, analyze the complaints to see if better customer service could fix the problem. Fire assholes and slashdoters. We pay for 8 hours, fucking work them.
8. Threaten corporate shareholders with jail for withholding good drugs at low cost.
9. Mandate one special project for major companies. Wanna do business? Then you have to work on a cure for AIDS.
NMCI is an admin's dream. CAC authentication means no more password issues. Locked-down desktops means no more shareware crap. Remote desktop and remote program installs means reduced admin visits.
Of course, paying $5000 for a shitty computer sucks ass. Plus what, $500 per user? On top of that, you have to pay retail for every app you want.
I have a CD-Burner in my NMCI machine. If I want NERO installed, I have to pay $300 for a cd-burner (because my build does not show a burner even though any idiot can look at the face-plate and see it's a CD/RW) and $100 for Nero.
NMCI is making out like bandits on this thing.
If you want to see the next step, look at the USAF's SDC program. They are using WinXP with some sort of Trusted Computing module. Unless an executable is digitally signed by the USAF, it will not run. Plus, the firewalls are on by default and highly locked. In a lot of cases, people going to SDC could no longer do their jobs. Even programs that were developed by USAF programmers in-house would no longer function.
On SDC, you can't even change your desktop background, color scheme, file view settings (I like a detailed list vice stupid thumbnails), or sound scheme. Most USB thumb drives fail to work, but you can still burn a CD.
On a clean SDC install, my computer shows 350MB of memory in-use on a machine that only has 512MB installed.
The US military has been doing this for years. Sign up and kill people for 4 years and we pay for your degree. The GI Bill is quite nice. Also, while you are still in, the Veterans' Administration pays for 100% of your tuition and 50% of your wife's tuition.
Flickr and MySpace are opening new avenues to business. Those ways of getting customers were not there before. It's like mana from heaven.
However, for a company to place an OS on the desktop of every individual, they need to ensure the new system is better than the last.
The first company to lose a day of work because of deactivation will be the nail in WGAs coffin. Either MS will release an anti-WGA patch, or everyone will go back to Win2k.
And promptly got nailed to a tree for saying so.
Speaking of "first things first", why not focus on, oh, I don't know, AIDS. Or maybe homelessness in America. Or shitty public schools. Or a better trained (i.e. not shooting a drunk, black guy 50 times) police force. Or clean water. Or more energy efficient cars.
Why spend billions on a trip to the moon *before* we solve the real crises that threaten our everyday life?
Yes, I know the space program brought about better $material for $application and all that crap. But a billion bucks could seriously make life better back on Earth.
How can MRE get best writing? It's literally a word-for-word copy of a flash thingy that has been on the Internet for years.
I think it will be cracked. Various mafia-like entities make too much money from selling street-corner software. There is a lot of money to be had for the people that crack Vista.
Context is your friend...
I have gmail auto-forward to my work account due to stupid webmail blocking policies. If I click "reply" in Outlook, the "To" address is not my gmail account; it is the person who sent the mail originally.
Oh, and the "From" field in my Outlook inbox shows the correct sender.
I could give two shits about lawn signs and commercials. What bothers me is the fact that once elected, the official is obligated to return the favors. If you give $20 to the GOP, you get shit for it. If Bill Gates gives $20,000,000, he gets a night in the whitehouse and a private sit-down with the man.
That needs to stop.
Special interests and corporate shills are buying votes from people who are all to willing to let them.
I lived in Italy for a while. I saw the perversion of the system when the public funds candidates. It does happen and it will happen if there is enough money involved.
>>The candidates are NOT allowed to accept outside donations or to use their own personal money if they receive this public funding.
Still does not stop them from spending a weekend at $big_corp hunting lodge or getting a ride on $special_interest private jet.
>>voters really are the term limits
Do you think the President should be allowed to run for 3+ terms?
If not, then why should you (or Hatch) be any different?
If you forced people to make a decision, than maybe some of them would put more thought into it.