Most software companies have a whole collection of partnerships and certification programs. Some of them are godd and some not so good.
At first glance the JBoss one looks good, you're not just handing over the 5k and getting a logo sheet to add to your business cards. You are buying training and certification as well. My first reaction to this idea is a good one, it is a revenue stream for the JBoss guys and helps them build a developer community of good people. Not really just a brand.
The only thing I hope Jboss does is keep the bar for admitance to the program resonably high. There is no point in having a certification if your average 7 year old can pass the exams after a week of study. *cough*MCSE*cough*
I just bought a P133 and put 16mb RAM and an HD in it for $70
Works really well with OpenBSD, if you want to try use Linux (or at least one of the piggy distros) you probably want something a little newer. Try your_city.forsale on usenet.
If I were you I'd try this CD on a different machine. It could be you have some funky RAM or a problem with something else. Could also be that however the XP activation thing pulles a fingerprint of you hardware is being meesed up by one of the components or combination of components.
That's why they won't brand them as Dell. They will probably be your standard little white box deal.
I think one thing that will help them here is inventory management. If they have a bunch of X model mobos they can't use in custom boxes they can push them through this channel.
Interesting.
Why do you have to sign up for the NDA request on the Microsoft stuff as a company? They even want the Dunn & Bradstreet number!
I can't, as a nice person looking to learn about whatever protocol, go and get a copy of the source. Why the hell not? Probably never occured to the bastards that a student or hobby programmer would be interested.
How am I going to become a good coder if I don't have any good code to learn from!
I plan to call you tomorrow and follow this up with an email but I imagine both your inbox and telephone line are going to be jammed tomorrow so I will post as well. These are my comments on the situation and my reaction as a customer.
I have been working with Compaq and HP systems my entire career, Intel based servers, UNIX servers and workstations, printer and software. Working as a retail reseller, VAR and customer I have recommended the purchase of HP and Compaq systems many times in the past and am now in a position to have final authority on what systems are purchased for my company. Our entire infrastructure is based on HP and Compaq products.
As a customer I must trust my vendors to act quickly and responsibly to give me the tools and information I need to keep my systems secure. Timely, complete vulnerability information and patches are critical to my success here. There is no framework, process or authority that provides for the responsible publication of this information, given the nature of many of the parties involved I doubt there can ever be a comprehensive solution. When a third party (outside of vendor and customer) finds a problem with a piece of software and decides to act irresponsibly the situation gets complicated, the Apache Foundation's problems last month are an example of this. From the news reports on news.com today I believe HP currently finds itself in a similar situation. The information I have been able to find does not paint SnoSoft or their member "Phased" in a good light, I suspect that the group has acted in bad faith or at least "Phased" has acted irresponsibly in the matter. I do not pass judgment on HP's actions in producing a solution for this problem.
However the comments of Kent Ferson as reported on news.com concern me greatly. By threatening the use of the DMCA or any other criminal statute in this matter, Mr. Ferson has turned the security community on it's head. HP's position as a market leader could go a long way to setting this as a precedent in the industry and law, the results of which could be devastating. While I recognize the importance of a group like SnoSoft working with a vendor to coordinate their disclosure with a vendor's fix, this also has to happen in an efficient manner. The chances are good that SnoSoft has discovered a problem that others know about or are explioting can not be ignored. The potential harm that can come from using criminal charges to frustrate or slow this process is hard to express. The responsibility for ensuring my company's systems are secure is mine, I must have the information I need to make responsible decisions on security. If this means removing systems from service until I can secure them then that is what I will do.
Regardless of the events leading to Mr. Ferson's letter to SnoSoft HP must clarify their position on this situation. I would hope that you are willing to state that provided no illegal methods were used to discover the vulnerability HP will not pursue criminal prosecution of researchers. If SnoSoft or Phased has acted in bad faith or breech of contract it is a matter for civil courts.
Aaron Schneider Manager, Information Technology Fabutan Sun Tan Studios Schneider@fabutan.com
I have this big time beef with Real One Player (free version). I make a point of cleaning my startup items out whenever some stupid thing like Real's Start Center gets in there. That is anoying enough but Real has taken it to a new level.
On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).
This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!
This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.
Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.
So there I was in Blockbuster Friday, preordering a copy of the August release. I was a happy guy, I even got a cool poster with it.
Now I see this! Damn you evil movie studio! You were watching weren't you? You know I just spent $28 on the first release and you are also probably just as secure in the knowledge that I will spend the money again on the SE. BASTARDS!
So I go and connect to a nice mirror and get ready do d/l myself some ISOs. There are five of them. FIVE!
I imagine some of them are SRPMs or something but they aren't labeled as such. They have open office and a bunch of stuff on there though, maybe not. I am afraid that if I don't d/l and burn all five I'm going to get half way through an install and need disc 5 for some silly package. The last time I installed 7.3 on a server I needed all three, the install size was only 400 MB too.
Why can't Red Hat build thier disc images with Disc 1 being the base, disc 2 being X and Gnome, 3 being Open Office, etc. I can't imagine any benefit to spreading things out so much.
Then there's the issue of the people that call my fax number.... over and over and over. You'd think the telemarketers and people calling the number would realize after several weeks that it was a fax machine, but no dice.
I had the exact oposite problem. My old phone number used to be a fax machine somewhere. Not only did it get calls from a bunch of companies, it was also on onw of those fax spam lists. I got at least 6 a day, at every time of day.
I think educators are basically being tapped out for their budget, so they are being marketed (or "marked") by poeple who have computers and want to sell it.
For the most part I agree with you. I have yet to see a "Computers" class that was even remotely useful. I didn't take any of the available classes in high school, I knew BASIC pretty well as it was. It seems to me that as soon as the Apple ][s were replaced everything went to crap, there was nothing interesting left to do. A few of my friends went ahead a took the high school "Computers" class, IIRC they spent a month on Word Perfect in addition to the comprehensive overview of QBASIC. Sure worth the 3k per XT I'm sure the school doled out.
God even 5 or 6 years ago I remember helping my friend study for her college "Intro to Computers" course, it was worse. I learned a lot of stuff from helping her with that, did you know that Hypercard was the precursor to the WWW? Funny I thought SGML would have fit in there somewhere.
I can see places in schools where you can put PCs to good use, web access in the library for example. I just don't see any point at all to buying labs full of PCs and teaching nothing with them.
Now, if I'm not mistaken the O2 is a pretty old SGI machine, so I would be surprised if the new computers were many times faster. It probably had nothing to do with Linux, other than it being a free unix that runs on fast commodity x86 hardware.
I think you probably already understand this but in may ways that is the point. If they had $X to buy new workstations they probably could buy 5 P4s for the price of each SGI workstation.
For me the article is interesting not because they started using Linux but becuase they are using Open Source tools and libraries. 2 or 3 years ago they would have had to build apps, libraries, evertyhing from scratch. Now they bascially use Red Hat.
Their second mistake was calling the cable company and complaining when their modified box stopped working. They should have been FAR more cautious than that.
I've almost done something similar. A couple months ago my cable went out for 3 days, I got pissed and called the cable company as there was something I wanted to watch that night. Thank god I was stuck on hold for a few minutes, it gave me time to realize that I hadn't ever had my cable service setup. The previous occupant of my apartment had it and while he cancled his account (no bill in the mail) they never deactivated the cable. I hung up before someone picked up the call, thank god.
Honesly, when I went from my el cheapo Samsung to my Toshiba SD800 (not exactly expensive either) I noticed an imediate imporovement with this problem. I also found that the Toshiba's Ehanced Black Level feature almost completely resolved it. I won't go as far as to say that the murky, strange tone shifts are gone but I don't see them without looking for them anymore.
But Mr. Valenti did bring up that there is a high risk factor in the fact that 8 out of 10 films might not make their money back and get out of the red in the first period of release, which is the theatrical division.
Really, I wonder how many movies have since been able to make that money back thought video releases? I wonder just how many copies of Harry Poter have been sold in the last three days?
Another absolutely great quetion from one of the panel members:
Mr. RAILSBACK. I recognize that audio may, by reason of the very large number of sets, have less of a problem as far as proving prospective damage. But I am aware, again, that the district court really made a point that your industry had not been able to show any damage at all at that time. I think there were something like 3 million at that time.
Hmmm, that sounds strangely familiar. I guess those who don't study history are doomed to be asaulted with the same bullshit. Thanks Cryptome.
I can't show you a cite for the $7 figure but based on my experience in the industry it sounds about right or maybe a touch low. The Syncrude FAQ cites $18 as the production cost for a barrel of SSB (Syncrude Sweet Blend). A "Sweet" crude is fairly pure, light and easy to transport. What comes right out of the oil sands is a heavy crude, full of crud, heavy (much higher SG) and needs to be put through a massive machine called an upgrader to turn it into sweet crude. Depending what the end use for the oil is going to be it may or may not be required to do that. So my somewhat educated guess would be that $7(US) is about right for production of a barrel of heavy crude and $12 (US, 18 CDN) is for the upgraded sweet crude
I've worked in oil transportation as opposed production but you can get a broader view from there anyway. Enbridge and a few other largish companies (Petro Canada I think) recently completed a new pipeline that connects up the new oil sands projects with the rest of the North American pipeline network, the Athabasca Pipeline. The line itself is huge, 36" IIRC. Part of that is to allow heavy crude to move well but there is still a big capacity there, an average line is 20 or 24 inches.
The Alberta oil and gas industry is already massive and feeds the much of the US natural gas market, I think with the new oil sands projects we will become a much larger oil supplier as well. Maybe we're gonna get invaded too. (joke)
This is not entirely true. My family had a potrait done this christmas and the photographer used some sort of didgital camera hooked directly to a G4 tower via firewire. I can't remember the brand of the cammera, I didn't recognize it but the pictures it produced were amazing. They don't look quite as good printed as they did on his 21' monitor but even 8X10s and larger look great. IIRC the images took about 45 secs each to get to the G4 from the cammera via firewire so they must have been friggin huge
I didn't really say he was a bad actor, I said every scene he was in was horrible. Maybe he didn't work well with Lucas, maybe he was badly cast, I don't know. I can't remember seeing him in anything else so maybe he's good but in this movie, he sucked.
Slashdot Mirror
Most software companies have a whole collection of partnerships and certification programs. Some of them are godd and some not so good.
At first glance the JBoss one looks good, you're not just handing over the 5k and getting a logo sheet to add to your business cards. You are buying training and certification as well. My first reaction to this idea is a good one, it is a revenue stream for the JBoss guys and helps them build a developer community of good people. Not really just a brand.
The only thing I hope Jboss does is keep the bar for admitance to the program resonably high. There is no point in having a certification if your average 7 year old can pass the exams after a week of study. *cough*MCSE*cough*
I just bought a P133 and put 16mb RAM and an HD in it for $70
Works really well with OpenBSD, if you want to try use Linux (or at least one of the piggy distros) you probably want something a little newer. Try your_city.forsale on usenet.
How much do you trust this hardware?
If I were you I'd try this CD on a different machine. It could be you have some funky RAM or a problem with something else. Could also be that however the XP activation thing pulles a fingerprint of you hardware is being meesed up by one of the components or combination of components.
Still wierd though.
That's why they won't brand them as Dell. They will probably be your standard little white box deal. I think one thing that will help them here is inventory management. If they have a bunch of X model mobos they can't use in custom boxes they can push them through this channel. Interesting.
I can't, as a nice person looking to learn about whatever protocol, go and get a copy of the source. Why the hell not? Probably never occured to the bastards that a student or hobby programmer would be interested.
How am I going to become a good coder if I don't have any good code to learn from!
Bruce,
I plan to call you tomorrow and follow this up with an email but I imagine both your inbox and telephone line are going to be jammed tomorrow so I will post as well. These are my comments on the situation and my reaction as a customer.
I have been working with Compaq and HP systems my entire career, Intel based servers, UNIX servers and workstations, printer and software. Working as a retail reseller, VAR and customer I have recommended the purchase of HP and Compaq systems many times in the past and am now in a position to have final authority on what systems are purchased for my company. Our entire infrastructure is based on HP and Compaq products.
As a customer I must trust my vendors to act quickly and responsibly to give me the tools and information I need to keep my systems secure. Timely, complete vulnerability information and patches are critical to my success here. There is no framework, process or authority that provides for the responsible publication of this information, given the nature of many of the parties involved I doubt there can ever be a comprehensive solution. When a third party (outside of vendor and customer) finds a problem with a piece of software and decides to act irresponsibly the situation gets complicated, the Apache Foundation's problems last month are an example of this. From the news reports on news.com today I believe HP currently finds itself in a similar situation. The information I have been able to find does not paint SnoSoft or their member "Phased" in a good light, I suspect that the group has acted in bad faith or at least "Phased" has acted irresponsibly in the matter. I do not pass judgment on HP's actions in producing a solution for this problem.
However the comments of Kent Ferson as reported on news.com concern me greatly. By threatening the use of the DMCA or any other criminal statute in this matter, Mr. Ferson has turned the security community on it's head. HP's position as a market leader could go a long way to setting this as a precedent in the industry and law, the results of which could be devastating. While I recognize the importance of a group like SnoSoft working with a vendor to coordinate their disclosure with a vendor's fix, this also has to happen in an efficient manner. The chances are good that SnoSoft has discovered a problem that others know about or are explioting can not be ignored. The potential harm that can come from using criminal charges to frustrate or slow this process is hard to express. The responsibility for ensuring my company's systems are secure is mine, I must have the information I need to make responsible decisions on security. If this means removing systems from service until I can secure them then that is what I will do.
Regardless of the events leading to Mr. Ferson's letter to SnoSoft HP must clarify their position on this situation. I would hope that you are willing to state that provided no illegal methods were used to discover the vulnerability HP will not pursue criminal prosecution of researchers. If SnoSoft or Phased has acted in bad faith or breech of contract it is a matter for civil courts.
Aaron Schneider
Manager, Information Technology
Fabutan Sun Tan Studios
Schneider@fabutan.com
I get the same impression.
That would seem to support the linked idea. Don't bet on it though.
On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).
This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!
This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.
Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.
You mean aside from the fact that 1394 is a really bad way to connect drives right?
Error correction is your friend, 1394 doesn't have any.
I'm in Canada, probably a different set of promotions. I've never seen anything like a 10-week rental card there
So there I was in Blockbuster Friday, preordering a copy of the August release. I was a happy guy, I even got a cool poster with it.
Now I see this! Damn you evil movie studio! You were watching weren't you? You know I just spent $28 on the first release and you are also probably just as secure in the knowledge that I will spend the money again on the SE. BASTARDS!
I imagine some of them are SRPMs or something but they aren't labeled as such. They have open office and a bunch of stuff on there though, maybe not. I am afraid that if I don't d/l and burn all five I'm going to get half way through an install and need disc 5 for some silly package. The last time I installed 7.3 on a server I needed all three, the install size was only 400 MB too.
Why can't Red Hat build thier disc images with Disc 1 being the base, disc 2 being X and Gnome, 3 being Open Office, etc. I can't imagine any benefit to spreading things out so much.
I had the exact oposite problem. My old phone number used to be a fax machine somewhere. Not only did it get calls from a bunch of companies, it was also on onw of those fax spam lists. I got at least 6 a day, at every time of day.
For the most part I agree with you. I have yet to see a "Computers" class that was even remotely useful. I didn't take any of the available classes in high school, I knew BASIC pretty well as it was. It seems to me that as soon as the Apple ][s were replaced everything went to crap, there was nothing interesting left to do. A few of my friends went ahead a took the high school "Computers" class, IIRC they spent a month on Word Perfect in addition to the comprehensive overview of QBASIC. Sure worth the 3k per XT I'm sure the school doled out.
God even 5 or 6 years ago I remember helping my friend study for her college "Intro to Computers" course, it was worse. I learned a lot of stuff from helping her with that, did you know that Hypercard was the precursor to the WWW? Funny I thought SGML would have fit in there somewhere.
I can see places in schools where you can put PCs to good use, web access in the library for example. I just don't see any point at all to buying labs full of PCs and teaching nothing with them.
No they don't but IIRC they tried
I think you probably already understand this but in may ways that is the point. If they had $X to buy new workstations they probably could buy 5 P4s for the price of each SGI workstation.
For me the article is interesting not because they started using Linux but becuase they are using Open Source tools and libraries. 2 or 3 years ago they would have had to build apps, libraries, evertyhing from scratch. Now they bascially use Red Hat.
That is news.
http://www.cabletheft.com/
God damn that's funny. I wonder if that actually works, I suppose you'd get some info from pissed off romantic partners or something.
Anybody know if we can get the addresses of AT&T's board members from the SEC or something?
I've almost done something similar. A couple months ago my cable went out for 3 days, I got pissed and called the cable company as there was something I wanted to watch that night. Thank god I was stuck on hold for a few minutes, it gave me time to realize that I hadn't ever had my cable service setup. The previous occupant of my apartment had it and while he cancled his account (no bill in the mail) they never deactivated the cable. I hung up before someone picked up the call, thank god.
Try a better DVD player.
Honesly, when I went from my el cheapo Samsung to my Toshiba SD800 (not exactly expensive either) I noticed an imediate imporovement with this problem. I also found that the Toshiba's Ehanced Black Level feature almost completely resolved it. I won't go as far as to say that the murky, strange tone shifts are gone but I don't see them without looking for them anymore.
I'm not bitching or anything but wow.
But Mr. Valenti did bring up that there is a high risk factor in the fact that 8 out of 10 films might not make their money back and get out of the red in the first period of release, which is the theatrical division.
Really, I wonder how many movies have since been able to make that money back thought video releases? I wonder just how many copies of Harry Poter have been sold in the last three days?
Another absolutely great quetion from one of the panel members:
Mr. RAILSBACK. I recognize that audio may, by reason of the very large number of sets, have less of a problem as far as proving prospective damage. But I am aware, again, that the district court really made a point that your industry had not been able to show any damage at all at that time. I think there were something like 3 million at that time.
Hmmm, that sounds strangely familiar. I guess those who don't study history are doomed to be asaulted with the same bullshit. Thanks Cryptome.
I've worked in oil transportation as opposed production but you can get a broader view from there anyway. Enbridge and a few other largish companies (Petro Canada I think) recently completed a new pipeline that connects up the new oil sands projects with the rest of the North American pipeline network, the Athabasca Pipeline. The line itself is huge, 36" IIRC. Part of that is to allow heavy crude to move well but there is still a big capacity there, an average line is 20 or 24 inches.
The Alberta oil and gas industry is already massive and feeds the much of the US natural gas market, I think with the new oil sands projects we will become a much larger oil supplier as well. Maybe we're gonna get invaded too. (joke)
This is not entirely true. My family had a potrait done this christmas and the photographer used some sort of didgital camera hooked directly to a G4 tower via firewire. I can't remember the brand of the cammera, I didn't recognize it but the pictures it produced were amazing. They don't look quite as good printed as they did on his 21' monitor but even 8X10s and larger look great. IIRC the images took about 45 secs each to get to the G4 from the cammera via firewire so they must have been friggin huge
I didn't really say he was a bad actor, I said every scene he was in was horrible. Maybe he didn't work well with Lucas, maybe he was badly cast, I don't know. I can't remember seeing him in anything else so maybe he's good but in this movie, he sucked.