I think the error here is in trying to develop and deploy a grand, unified graphics environment. This is extremely labor-intensive, and Apple/MS will always outgun us.
Perhaps we should be working on little graphic systems that address specific markets and do so concisely. Was abandoning the old Xt/Xaw/Motif such a good idea?
Maybe even X is too heavyweight for what needs to happen with desktop Unix. The ideas behind it are also pretty old.
What about combining the Gecko rendering code with something along the lines of svgalib or the direct console rendering of mplayer? What about an entire desktop based on XUL?
IMHO, desktop Linux/BSD is being crushed under the weight of legacy code.
...when the label peels off. I don't know who the OEM was. I usually buy Sony CD-Rs now (and avoid Imation).
I have also previously read that DVD-R was slightly more compatible with most readers, but the error correction discussion below makes me want to switch.
The DVD-R specification states that for every 192 bits, 48 of them are not protected under any scheme, 24 of them are protected by 24 bits of parity, and the last 56 bits are protected by another 24 bits of parity. This weird (to put it mildly) scheme allows you to easily scramble or lose 25% of the data that is required to read your disk!... The DVD+R specification, however, states that for every 204 bits of information, it is split into four blocks of 52 bits containing 1 (shared among all blocks) sync bit to prevent misreading because of phase changes, 31 bits of data, and a 20 bit parity (that protects all 32 bits).
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Evidence that is obtained by any party that does not follow this rule should be inadmissible!
In addition to the points above, do not browse the internet with the Administrator, root, or admin accounts. Do not use these accounts for day-to-day work.
Under OSX, the admin account(s) have the privilege of writing to the root directory (which is unusual, even though sticky-bit protected). With the growing number of UNIX-functions assimilated into non-standard Apple software (/etc/passwd,/etc/inetd.conf [launchd], etc.), the security of the admin user should not be trusted or used unwisely.
Under Windows, create restricted users that do not have the power to install software and use those for day-to-day work (even a "power" user is too much). Use "Run-As" to elevate privilege when necessary. If you have a piece of suspected malware, run it as a restricted user or on a throwaway machine.
Windows (and I mean the VMS-derrived NT family) actually has the more flexible and powerful security environment, and it is quite good when used properly. It is a shame that the OS is shipped with all security disabled.
...then it stands to reason that you will have a ton of additional bugs.
This argument in no way excuses Oracle for their timely patch cycle (or lack thereof), but may explain the higher number of patches.
I haven't looked at the Sybase/SQL Server family for awhile, but I assume that it still doesn't offer anything like Flashback, LogMiner, richer indexing, direct LGWR connection to DataGuard, resumable transactions, or even basic multiversioning.
The final CPU for the 8.1.7.4 database release comes out in January. It's highly unlikely that anything revealed in this effort will be fixed for 8.1.7.4.
That's an important release... it's the last one (that's supported) that will talk to Oracle 7 or early v8 databases (as a client). My company has thousands of win32 clients rolled out, and a fair number of servers supporting some critical apps (think Peoplesoft).
8.1.7.4 was a great release. Small, not a lot of cruft. I wish it (and we) weren't hanging in the breeze. DB2 customers are lucky for their long support.
Say Ubuntu, Mandriva, or Linspire comes out with a "Winix Edition" distribution - integrated WINE, NTFS support, runs most or all of your current Win32 apps without Microsoft. Set this up as a sacrificial lamb.
Say this is positioned against Vista at half the price (or even free), and the world decides that a Vista upgrade isn't such a good idea.
Microsoft will win a pyrrhic victory destroying this decoy. They might as well fire their PR department if they try it. Their revenues would probably take a nose-dive.
The Discrete Cosine Transform would be a fantastic goal. DCT is used in MP3, JPEG, and MPEG compression (amongst others). The practical applications for lossy encoding are hardly difficult to see.
Such a discussion should probably replace vector calculus. I only used Groves/Stokes/Divergence/Gradients in a single course (EM Theory), and I've never had a practical application in my career. My Digital Image Processing class spent too much time on the Discrete Fourier Transform and dismissed the DCT with some hand-waving (and this after two years of pointless control and communication theory - when was the last time you used Vestigal Sideband Modulation?).
The math that should be taught in computer science should reflect the math used in computer science. DCT certainly qualifies, and a lot of the current curriculum(s) do not.
Maybe talking to the guy who maintains the PAQ compressor might also be good. That is interesting software.
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.
Is the new manufacturer using the Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) process that is common in semiconductor manufacturing?
Is the new process able to make material that is appropriate for use as a carbon semiconductor substrate? They probably aren't making 12" wafers of diamond, but could a few small MIPS or ARM CPUs be implemented on a diamond substrate? Is enhanced heat tolerance the only benefit of a diamond substrate? How much faster could such a device be run than if it were on silicon? Are any fabs capable of this now?
What are the "irradiation" techniques that change a diamond to pink? What type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, or something more exotic)? Does this irradiation produce unstable isotopes? Will an irradiated diamond or other gem exhibit greater than background radiation after treatment?
I'd rather not live in Dublin or Belfast. After I saw children singing and begging on Grafton Street, I was rather turned off. The hostel that my tour group rented also was a surprise - the front desk clerks were high on hasish constantly. I also flew into Belfast in marching season, and that was interesting, to say the least.
After traveling Donnegal, your roads are terrible.
I don't think there is any natural gas anywhere in Donnegal, although I don't know for other counties. Homes are heated with "turf" - chopped up bog grasses that are burned in miniature fireplaces. Quaint, but I'll take my Trane furnace.
No natural gas makes hot water interesting. Don't simply assume that you will have hot water whenever you want it if you are visiting.
I do regret skipping the daytrip to Derry, but on the whole I like Iowa.
They've already dabbled with NetBSD...
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
And Larry mentioned NetBSD for an Oracle database appliance a long time ago.
But, with their recent Linux focus, any NetBSD bias probably evaporated long ago. Linux is flashy, and because of this it is easier to find admins and apps.
You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to allow your attorney to examine your "interpretation" and present it as best as (s)he can to a jury. What point is there in helping build a charge against yourself?
Someone within HP is acting against Mark Hurd, otherwise documents demonstrating his direct culpability would not have surfaced. It appears to me that this information seals Hurd's fate... he will probably lose his job, face criminal charges, and be the target of a class action lawsuit from the reporters from whom he fraudulently obtained phone records.
The question is who is leaking and why.
HP is now the synthesis of Compaq and DEC, and there probably isn't an HP employee who doesn't know of a terminated coworker. Perhaps it is possible that someone with a grudge over a past termination decided to eliminate Hurd.
But then again, the terminations aren't over. Perhaps someone in the crosshairs decided to halt the process by taking out the CEO.
Or perhaps the leaker is directly involved in this chain of activity and is covering themselves by sacrificing the superior.
In any case, HP has not done well with executives from Lucent and NCR/Terradata. Perhaps it is time to consider promoting from within? Where can HP find someone to restore the HP way? Certainly not from outside.
There are publicly-available tools to prevent weak passwords from being used in the first place. OpenBSD has something, and I've compiled the library below and used it to protect ancient Oracle 7 accounts on HP-UX 10.20.
$ rpm -qi cracklib Name : cracklib Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 2.7 Vendor: CentOS Release : 29 Build Date: Mon 21 Feb 2005 01:54:42 PM CST Install Date: Mon 12 Dec 2005 06:18:57 PM CST Build Host: build2.hughesjr.centos.org Group : System Environment/Libraries Source RPM: cracklib-2.7-29.src.rpmSize : 46398 License: Artistic Signature : DSA/SHA1, Sat 26 Feb 2005 02:32:53 PM CST, Key ID a53d0bab443e1821Packager : Johnny Hughes <johnny@centos.org> URL : http://www.crypticide.org/users/alecm/ Summary : A password-checking library. Description: CrackLib tests passwords to determine whether they match certain security-oriented characteristics, with the purpose of stopping users from choosing passwords that are easy to guess. CrackLib performs several tests on passwords: it tries to generate words from a username and gecos entry and checks those words against the password; it checks for simplistic patterns in passwords; and it checks for the password in a dictionary.
CrackLib is actually a library containing a particular C function which is used to check the password, as well as other C functions. CrackLib is not a replacement for a passwd program; it must be used in conjunction with an existing passwd program.
Install the cracklib package if you need a program to check users' passwords to see if they are at least minimally secure. If you install CrackLib, you will also want to install the cracklib-dicts package.
I recently discovered that my DLT backups of a 100GB database could not be read consistently, so I decided to write them to DVD.
I am lucky enough that 7-Zip is able to compress the entire database down to under 8GB, which fits on a dual-layer disc.
If I had not been so lucky, what I was planning to do was a Bourne-shell FOR loop that moved over all files in a directory tree, calling ln to make a hard link in a backup tree, while constantly testing the output of du in the backup tree (backing off the last file when the threshold was exceeded). Then simply burn the backup tree, erase it, then continue. The backup tree would consume no extra disk space in this scenario.
All of these tools are available on NT. I've downloaded growisofs, and a real ln for ntfs is in the unxutils.sourceforge.net collection, which also includes a zshell.
You may be unaware that Sybase and M$ SQL Server were the same program until release 4.8. If I use the Sybase dialect of Transact SQL, am I still riding a bicycle?
M$ has higher TPC scores than Sybase, but is Sybase still a car?
Sybase has always been strong in the financial sector because of its rich types (MONEY, for example). Oracle is somewhat anemic in this regard, without even so much as a BOOLEAN. Is richness of data types akin to riding a bicycle? Is it amateurish of me to remember them fondly?
There are some great critiques for most database vendors. Where are the UNIX clients for M$ SQL server? Why hasn't Sybase maintained DB & CTlib compatibility with MS no matter the cost? Why hasn't Sybase benchmarked on the POWER5 systems that have clobbered Oracle to prove themselves more scalable than M$ once and for all?
If you are really interested in intelligent Sybase criticism, you might read some Tom Kyte. He started out as a Sybase guy, but is now an Oracle VP.
Don't browse the internet as Administrator on Windows, ever. Don't even browse as a "power user" - create a restricted user (no install or registry change privileges).
If you are going to browse while logged in as Administrator, right-click on your browser, select "Run as" and run it as a less-privileged user.
In general, always run as a restricted user, and use "Run as" to elevate privilege of software that requires it (cd burning, etc.). Leave Administrator alone.
If you have no firewall, examine the services that you have running (right-click My Computer, manage, services). Look up every running service (on google or whatnot) and make a decision to shut it down or leave it operating.
Also, ensure that your SYSTEMROOT resides on an NTFS filesystem. If it's on FAT, none of the above will help you.
The E6700 we tested here, that bests the FX-62 that is currently selling for over $1000, has a predicted price of $530; nearly half the price!! If Intel sticks with that price, and AMD doesn't drastically lower theirs, the Core 2 Duo line up is going to tear AMD apart.
There can be no argument that, if AMD were back on the K5 and Intel's lead were comfortable, these chips would never be priced so aggressively. This is designed to erase AMD's market share.
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
Get the IE team to implement privilege separation for the IE rendering engine and all plugins - these would run as the GUEST user. Granted, if NT is installed on FAT this isn't going to help much.
Seriously consider replacing the rendering engine with Gecko or KHTML. Vista is demonstrating an obvious manpower shortage, and those IE developers could be better tasked. The stock price would also probably jump if such an overt move was made to embrace open source.
OpenBSD has implemented W^X on i386 regardless of the presence of an NX-capable CPU. I would move heaven and earth to do the same on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista (and unify the kernels of these releases to minimize support complexity).
OpenBSD code is distributed by Microsoft in the SFU package. Microsoft should aggressively back OpenBSD (funding hackathons, etc.) for the following reasons:
OpenBSD actively removes GPL-code from the base whenever possible. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - endorsing BSD is better than campaigning against GPL.
OpenBSD is slower on any given platform than most other free kernels (because of extensive security and no fine-grain SMP locking), allowing the NT kernel to be promoted for performance.
The OpenBSD installer is concise yet complex, as is much of the OS. It is unlikely that it would ever be repackaged in a form that will compete with NT.
If Microsoft goodwill and contributions obtains some influence over OpenSSH, an opportunity is presented to obtain some control over AIX, RedHat, and others. Subtle manipulations of these platforms might benefit NT.
OpenBSD, if expanded properly, will produce more secure coders which might be of use within Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the error here is in trying to develop and deploy a grand, unified graphics environment. This is extremely labor-intensive, and Apple/MS will always outgun us.
Perhaps we should be working on little graphic systems that address specific markets and do so concisely. Was abandoning the old Xt/Xaw/Motif such a good idea?
Maybe even X is too heavyweight for what needs to happen with desktop Unix. The ideas behind it are also pretty old.
What about combining the Gecko rendering code with something along the lines of svgalib or the direct console rendering of mplayer? What about an entire desktop based on XUL?
IMHO, desktop Linux/BSD is being crushed under the weight of legacy code.
...when the label peels off. I don't know who the OEM was. I usually buy Sony CD-Rs now (and avoid Imation).
I have also previously read that DVD-R was slightly more compatible with most readers, but the error correction discussion below makes me want to switch.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Evidence that is obtained by any party that does not follow this rule should be inadmissible!
In addition to the points above, do not browse the internet with the Administrator, root, or admin accounts. Do not use these accounts for day-to-day work.
Under OSX, the admin account(s) have the privilege of writing to the root directory (which is unusual, even though sticky-bit protected). With the growing number of UNIX-functions assimilated into non-standard Apple software (/etc/passwd, /etc/inetd.conf [launchd], etc.), the security of the admin user should not be trusted or used unwisely.
Under Windows, create restricted users that do not have the power to install software and use those for day-to-day work (even a "power" user is too much). Use "Run-As" to elevate privilege when necessary. If you have a piece of suspected malware, run it as a restricted user or on a throwaway machine.
Windows (and I mean the VMS-derrived NT family) actually has the more flexible and powerful security environment, and it is quite good when used properly. It is a shame that the OS is shipped with all security disabled.
...then it stands to reason that you will have a ton of additional bugs.
This argument in no way excuses Oracle for their timely patch cycle (or lack thereof), but may explain the higher number of patches.
I haven't looked at the Sybase/SQL Server family for awhile, but I assume that it still doesn't offer anything like Flashback, LogMiner, richer indexing, direct LGWR connection to DataGuard, resumable transactions, or even basic multiversioning.
The final CPU for the 8.1.7.4 database release comes out in January. It's highly unlikely that anything revealed in this effort will be fixed for 8.1.7.4.
That's an important release... it's the last one (that's supported) that will talk to Oracle 7 or early v8 databases (as a client). My company has thousands of win32 clients rolled out, and a fair number of servers supporting some critical apps (think Peoplesoft).
8.1.7.4 was a great release. Small, not a lot of cruft. I wish it (and we) weren't hanging in the breeze. DB2 customers are lucky for their long support.
Say Ubuntu, Mandriva, or Linspire comes out with a "Winix Edition" distribution - integrated WINE, NTFS support, runs most or all of your current Win32 apps without Microsoft. Set this up as a sacrificial lamb.
Say this is positioned against Vista at half the price (or even free), and the world decides that a Vista upgrade isn't such a good idea.
Microsoft will win a pyrrhic victory destroying this decoy. They might as well fire their PR department if they try it. Their revenues would probably take a nose-dive.
The Justice Department defeated Microsoft. Boies was the prosecutor.
Boies firm has gone on to lose some high-profile cases, Al Gore's supreme court appeal being the most prominent.
...and IBM attorneys are affectionately known within the organization as the "Nazgul."
The track record for Microsoft's legal department is really not that good. IBM will probably tear them apart if they really go at eachother.
The Discrete Cosine Transform would be a fantastic goal. DCT is used in MP3, JPEG, and MPEG compression (amongst others). The practical applications for lossy encoding are hardly difficult to see.
Such a discussion should probably replace vector calculus. I only used Groves/Stokes/Divergence/Gradients in a single course (EM Theory), and I've never had a practical application in my career. My Digital Image Processing class spent too much time on the Discrete Fourier Transform and dismissed the DCT with some hand-waving (and this after two years of pointless control and communication theory - when was the last time you used Vestigal Sideband Modulation?).
The math that should be taught in computer science should reflect the math used in computer science. DCT certainly qualifies, and a lot of the current curriculum(s) do not.
Maybe talking to the guy who maintains the PAQ compressor might also be good. That is interesting software.
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.
I do regret skipping the daytrip to Derry, but on the whole I like Iowa.
... for their network appliance systems.
And Larry mentioned NetBSD for an Oracle database appliance a long time ago.
But, with their recent Linux focus, any NetBSD bias probably evaporated long ago. Linux is flashy, and because of this it is easier to find admins and apps.
You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to allow your attorney to examine your "interpretation" and present it as best as (s)he can to a jury. What point is there in helping build a charge against yourself?
So this thing has both an ARM and a souped-up 486 (aka Cyrix 5x86 aka National Semiconductor Geode aka AMD Geode)?
Why not just ditch x86 and go ARM exclusively? Is x86 binary compatibility that important?
You could even label it a "BBC Micro" or an "Acorn" for old time's sake.
My Athlon 650 is still partying like it's 1999.
There are only a few things that I really need a faster processor for, and I do them elsewhere.
Someone within HP is acting against Mark Hurd, otherwise documents demonstrating his direct culpability would not have surfaced. It appears to me that this information seals Hurd's fate... he will probably lose his job, face criminal charges, and be the target of a class action lawsuit from the reporters from whom he fraudulently obtained phone records.
The question is who is leaking and why.
HP is now the synthesis of Compaq and DEC, and there probably isn't an HP employee who doesn't know of a terminated coworker. Perhaps it is possible that someone with a grudge over a past termination decided to eliminate Hurd.
But then again, the terminations aren't over. Perhaps someone in the crosshairs decided to halt the process by taking out the CEO.
Or perhaps the leaker is directly involved in this chain of activity and is covering themselves by sacrificing the superior.
In any case, HP has not done well with executives from Lucent and NCR/Terradata. Perhaps it is time to consider promoting from within? Where can HP find someone to restore the HP way? Certainly not from outside.
There are publicly-available tools to prevent weak passwords from being used in the first place. OpenBSD has something, and I've compiled the library below and used it to protect ancient Oracle 7 accounts on HP-UX 10.20.
I recently discovered that my DLT backups of a 100GB database could not be read consistently, so I decided to write them to DVD.
I am lucky enough that 7-Zip is able to compress the entire database down to under 8GB, which fits on a dual-layer disc.
If I had not been so lucky, what I was planning to do was a Bourne-shell FOR loop that moved over all files in a directory tree, calling ln to make a hard link in a backup tree, while constantly testing the output of du in the backup tree (backing off the last file when the threshold was exceeded). Then simply burn the backup tree, erase it, then continue. The backup tree would consume no extra disk space in this scenario.
All of these tools are available on NT. I've downloaded growisofs, and a real ln for ntfs is in the unxutils.sourceforge.net collection, which also includes a zshell.
It seems like he had a lot of emacs responsibility at one time. Wouldn't that have to be earned?
JWZ mentions him here.
Linuxgazette mentions his work on HTML extensions for emacs here.
There are some great critiques for most database vendors. Where are the UNIX clients for M$ SQL server? Why hasn't Sybase maintained DB & CTlib compatibility with MS no matter the cost? Why hasn't Sybase benchmarked on the POWER5 systems that have clobbered Oracle to prove themselves more scalable than M$ once and for all?
If you are really interested in intelligent Sybase criticism, you might read some Tom Kyte. He started out as a Sybase guy, but is now an Oracle VP.
Don't browse the internet as Administrator on Windows, ever. Don't even browse as a "power user" - create a restricted user (no install or registry change privileges).
If you are going to browse while logged in as Administrator, right-click on your browser, select "Run as" and run it as a less-privileged user.
In general, always run as a restricted user, and use "Run as" to elevate privilege of software that requires it (cd burning, etc.). Leave Administrator alone.
If you have no firewall, examine the services that you have running (right-click My Computer, manage, services). Look up every running service (on google or whatnot) and make a decision to shut it down or leave it operating.
Also, ensure that your SYSTEMROOT resides on an NTFS filesystem. If it's on FAT, none of the above will help you.
Firefox helps, but this works better.
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
I would...