If I ignore (for the moment) an interruption, then it has less of an impact on my productivity.
Plus it usually irritates everyone around you that they don't want to communicate with you at all. I t took months, but after ignoring my boss for five minutes every time he showed up at my desk he stopped bothering me.
Access to private information of innocent Americans should be justified and there needs to be procedures in place to prevent abuse. If it cannot be justified, then the citizen should be notified so that they can take appropriate legal action against any abuse or misuse of their private information.
Absolutely. Recently signed up to pay my electric bill online and they wanted my SSN. Why do they need my SSN, no one else that I sign up for online bill paying needs it? Appearantly it's a security issue intended to establish my identity. I wasn't sure I wanted to give my SSN to the electric company where any employee could potentially steal it. I ended up giving it to them for the convenience, but where do the 'additional security precautions' start creating more security risks than they solve?
Exactly. There is always a cost involved. Nothing is free and the number of machines you can maintain is limited by the amount of work. Sure there are downloadable scripts and tools to help with configuration and update woes, but the rate of change for Linux distributions can be very high. Keeping everything up to date can definitely be a challenge.
When distributing functions over servers, the compromise will be limited to the one server running a vulnerable service.
It's much easier to compromise additional servers once you are on the inside of the system and can see what distribution, kernel, etc... is being run.
Also, when you have seperate machines for different functions, failure will be far less catastrophic because it means only one service is affected.
Generally, in my experience, any service failure is very serious. Networks don't exist in a vacuum, services depend on each other to work. If your ldap server goes down no one can log in anywhere on the network. If your dns server goes down everyone has to connect via IP address. If your firewall goes down all of your online services, email, etc.. no longer work.
I have heard many people following your reasoning, probably because it makes sense at first glance. I have seen very few keeping to this opinion AND being seriously interested in securing their network, after having had a decade or so experience with it.
I've had a decade or so of experience running my network, which is relatively large and I still have that opinion. The network I adminstrate has never been hacked by an intruder, the only time we have been compromised is when some of our users infected their workstation with an email virus and that has only happened twice. Don't get me wrong, there are still circumstances where a dedicated machine is best. I fully believe in dedicated firewall machines and of course distributed webservers and DNS servers are a necessity if you want to keep a site up continually. I just don't ascribe to the philosophy of distributing out components across multiple servers more than required for reliability or performance issues and even then I prefer redundancy to separation.
Eventually these squatters are going to move out to "deeper territory,"
True enough, it's possible that squatters will eventually cause this problem, but I don't see it any time soon.
Just for fun I went out and checked widgetshop.com, which isn't available, but the following names are:
WIDGETSHOPONLINE.COM
WIDGETSHOPHOME.COM
WIDGETSHOPSITE.COM
WIDGETSHOPNET.COM
FIRSTWIDGETSHOP.COM
BESTWIDGETSHOP.COM
NEWWIDGETSHOP.COM
MYWIDGETSHOP.COM
THEWIDGET-SHOP.COM
Sure, they aren't ideal names, but a business should be able to build some name recognition on one of these or a variation. My point was more that there are many many pronouncable domain names out there. Personally I abhor squatters. There are some domains that I would like to use that are just taken up by cheesey link farm/ad pages. A good example is http://www.redlineperformance.com/
My friend has a business with that name and I'd like to set up a site for him, but some jerk has it registered for a link page. Wish there was a way to put a stop to that and still remain a capitalist society, but I don't know how.
Actually, MS Fud did its worse to VisiOn, GEM and DR-Dos COncurrent DOS, WordPerfect and Novell.
The problem is that MS isnt very good at FUD anymore. Now they use the bs-smokescreen method.
The problem isn't that they aren't good at it, the problem is they don't have a competitive product. With the companies you mentioned (at least the ones I'm familiar with) MS had a product that was nearly as good or better than their competitors. Word was a valid competitor to WordPerfect who mostly missed the boat on the wysiwyg editors the market demanded. Novell's networks were good, but a pain to administer and not intuitive at all. Windows networking, IMHO, is easier to deal with than Novell and cheaper. Going back to the GP's example Dos and Windows were competitive with OS/2. I remember the OS/2 Warp/Win 95 days. Win 95 wasn't great, but Warp was ridiculous. I never saw anyone keep it running for more than 20 minutes or so.
My point, after all this rambling, is that Microsoft's OS is not competitive with Linux, so they can't throw out good FUD. It has some advantages in being somewhat more intuitive in certain areas, but in terms of stability and robustness Linux is many orders of magnitude better. The only areas MS has an edge is in GUI (somewhat, personally I think KDE is as good as the Windows XP GUI), peripherals (which changes all the time as Linux gets more market share) and pre-built applications. Most Linux distros have more apps that come with the installation, but there are many popular applications that are only available for Windows or Mac(Quickbooks, Photoshop, MS Office, most commercial games). They can't directly attack these weakneses without drawing attention to them and increasing the amount of work being done to solve the issues, or goading hardware vendors and software manufacturers into providing Linux support. So, now they use the bs-smokescreen method. Get up and make a lot of noise just to confuse the issue. So far it's been working for them, at least to a degree, but the only way they are going to have continued long term success is if their next OS release is competitive with a current Linux distribution.
1. This has been a recommended strategy for building servers, one that MS finally adapted itself (tho possibly for the wrong reasons).
It is a very good idea because it ensures physical seperation between the different services and greatly reduces the potential of compromise of one service spreading to other services.
Maybe, but there are disadvantages. If you run everything on one machine you have a single point of failure. The more machines you have the more failure points, the more complexity, more nodes available to attack and more maintenance. As a Sys Admin I'm in favor of running as many things as possible on one box for all of the above reasons. If I can't resonably protect a single machine how can I be expected to reasonably protect six, or ten, or a hundred?
how much more time is left before anything even remotely pronouncable is already registered?
Have you registered a domain lately. It can be difficult to find a domain that fits your site, but I have never found any problems registering a domain that's 'remotely pronouncable'. Of course, the availability of domains with fewer characters is less. If you want a relatively short name that's pronouncable that may be a problem. Domains can (by RFC) be up to 255 characters. Not sure how many combinations that gives us, but I have never had any trouble registering a domain if it's over 6-8 characters.
If I were really in an emergency, I wouldn't hesitate to use any of the three and would only resort to one farther away if my first choice didn't work
Exactly. My cell phone is almost always with me. If it's an emergency I'm going to use it because it's closest. If it doesn't work I'm going to try to find something else. If I'm so incoherent I can't communicate my location to emergency personnel I'm probably not going to have the presence of mind to decide which phone would be best to use.
Those potential sacrifices, waking up an hour later or going to bed an hour earlier are more than made up by the availability of sun later in the day to allow traditional summertime activities.
Thing is, where I live the days get significantly longer in the summer anyway, so we naturally get more daylight. The time when I really want afternoon daylight is during the winter when the days are short. I'm for setting the time to DST and leaving it there. If some of the kids are going to school in the dark the schools can change their hours of operation. Around here most people just drive their kids to school anyway, so who cares if they go in the dark?
Something catchy like, "Don't burn your house down" day to help people remember to change their batteries
Good idea, except we will need two holidays, one for spring and one for fall. We should name them something similar so people will never remember which is which (like memorial day and labor day). Maybe "Don't burn your house down" day in the spring and "Save your life" day in the fall.
He would if he offered shipping. I can't imagine competition for this in Reading will net him much. OTOH, somebody on slashdot might be geeky enough to fly over there and get it.
I agree, my point is that the 'medical community' at least as it is percieved by the average person is focused on BMI, not body fat content. There is no easy way to measure body fat content on a nationwide basis, so the media and government resorts to things like BMI to establish these obesity numbers.
As I understand it, extra weight isn't unhealthy (and may actually be healthier on average than "proper" weight), but true obesity (defined as 25% to 30% body fat content, depending on what sources you use)...
The most common indication of obesity I see sited is BMI. Every BMI calculator I have found takes into account no more than three variables: gender, height and weight. (the cdc calculator in the link doesn't even factor gender in). BMI does not measure body fat and, as a result, is very misleading.
yep, if everybody, be it user or crawler, can point their browser to copyrighted material, than copyright loses it's purpose.
Not always. Disney vehemently defends the Micky Mouse copyright, but I can point a browser to www.mickeymouse.com and look at his image or name. Simpsons are the same way. Used to be, and I imagine it still is, if you put up a website with Simpsons characters likeness Matt Groening and Co will send you nast cease and desist letters.
Copyright holder should be able to use that copyrighted material to drive traffic to their website and get indexed in search engines if they want to.
Funny, Netflix seems to doing just fine with the "be happy waiting a few days" business model. Why do you think a few hours is a worse one?
I use Netflix, and the thing is they send you more than one movie at a time (depending on your subscription). I can set up the list of movies I want to watch, and I almost always have one on hand when I want to watch something. The other great thing is no more wandering around a movie store looking for something to catch my eye. Currently I've got over 100 movies in my queue - I'll probably never see them all.
I imagine any kind of download service will be the same way - I can download multiple movies, so I always have something available. After I delete the last movie I watched the next one in my queue will be downloaded. Probably a lot like their current service, just faster.
I mean, what type of computer costs 3000? You can get a good rackmount for $1200. Usually, all it takes to host a website is a high end desktop at up to $950.
Many computers cost $3000 and up. I've seen rackmount machines from HP, Dell and Sun all cost way more than $3000.
Mostly it depends on what their uses are. If they are just using it to host their website they probably don't need much of a server, if they are using that server as a development/test platform as well I'm sure it would be helpful to have a somewhat bigger machine. Actually, from their site:
Currently, drupal.org runs on a shared server paid for and maintained by Kjartan. The server is a single Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. There are about 20 sites running on the server, including some of our sites like http://drupal.org/, http://drupaldocs.org/ and http://cvs.drupal.org/. In addition to the websites, the server hosts our mailing lists, mailing list archives and CVS repositories. Last month, drupal.org alone served more than 3 million pages for 100 Gb of traffic (this does not include any of the other sites or services; non Drupal websites, Drupal mailing list traffic, etc).
Where I work we run HP DL380 machines, which is not really a high end server. Base price on those is $2899. In a perfect world, that would be about the class of server I would want to run a site like Drupal has.
But it's interesting that Bill Gates recognised publicly that if the current patent regime had been in place when Microsoft was young, they never would have made it!
Only because Mr. Gates isn't always the most forthcoming person. His statement is obviously true, many of Microsoft's successes have been from ideas they 'borrowed' from other companies (dos, Windows, IE). Now their offerings are so broad, and software patents are being issued on the most mundane, rudimentary processes that they can't possibly keep up with ever patent out there. Microsoft is in a situation where it has to either patent EVERYTHING it can possibly think of, no matter how basic (an expensive prospect), or spend all of it's time in court fighting these patents. I'm sure Gates has better things to do with his money.
Slashdot Mirror
If I ignore (for the moment) an interruption, then it has less of an impact on my productivity.
Plus it usually irritates everyone around you that they don't want to communicate with you at all. I t took months, but after ignoring my boss for five minutes every time he showed up at my desk he stopped bothering me.
Due to all of the quality children's programming watched while I was a child, I have the attention span of a gnat anyway.
Access to private information of innocent Americans should be justified and there needs to be procedures in place to prevent abuse. If it cannot be justified, then the citizen should be notified so that they can take appropriate legal action against any abuse or misuse of their private information.
Absolutely. Recently signed up to pay my electric bill online and they wanted my SSN. Why do they need my SSN, no one else that I sign up for online bill paying needs it? Appearantly it's a security issue intended to establish my identity. I wasn't sure I wanted to give my SSN to the electric company where any employee could potentially steal it. I ended up giving it to them for the convenience, but where do the 'additional security precautions' start creating more security risks than they solve?
In other words, more work is more work.
Exactly. There is always a cost involved. Nothing is free and the number of machines you can maintain is limited by the amount of work. Sure there are downloadable scripts and tools to help with configuration and update woes, but the rate of change for Linux distributions can be very high. Keeping everything up to date can definitely be a challenge.
When distributing functions over servers, the compromise will be limited to the one server running a vulnerable service.
It's much easier to compromise additional servers once you are on the inside of the system and can see what distribution, kernel, etc... is being run.
Also, when you have seperate machines for different functions, failure will be far less catastrophic because it means only one service is affected.
Generally, in my experience, any service failure is very serious. Networks don't exist in a vacuum, services depend on each other to work. If your ldap server goes down no one can log in anywhere on the network. If your dns server goes down everyone has to connect via IP address. If your firewall goes down all of your online services, email, etc.. no longer work.
I have heard many people following your reasoning, probably because it makes sense at first glance. I have seen very few keeping to this opinion AND being seriously interested in securing their network, after having had a decade or so experience with it.
I've had a decade or so of experience running my network, which is relatively large and I still have that opinion. The network I adminstrate has never been hacked by an intruder, the only time we have been compromised is when some of our users infected their workstation with an email virus and that has only happened twice. Don't get me wrong, there are still circumstances where a dedicated machine is best. I fully believe in dedicated firewall machines and of course distributed webservers and DNS servers are a necessity if you want to keep a site up continually. I just don't ascribe to the philosophy of distributing out components across multiple servers more than required for reliability or performance issues and even then I prefer redundancy to separation.
True enough, it's possible that squatters will eventually cause this problem, but I don't see it any time soon.
Just for fun I went out and checked widgetshop.com, which isn't available, but the following names are:
- WIDGETSHOPONLINE.COM
- WIDGETSHOPHOME.COM
- WIDGETSHOPSITE.COM
- WIDGETSHOPNET.COM
- FIRSTWIDGETSHOP.COM
- BESTWIDGETSHOP.COM
- NEWWIDGETSHOP.COM
- MYWIDGETSHOP.COM
- THEWIDGET-SHOP.COM
Sure, they aren't ideal names, but a business should be able to build some name recognition on one of these or a variation. My point was more that there are many many pronouncable domain names out there. Personally I abhor squatters. There are some domains that I would like to use that are just taken up by cheesey link farm/ad pages. A good example is http://www.redlineperformance.com/ My friend has a business with that name and I'd like to set up a site for him, but some jerk has it registered for a link page. Wish there was a way to put a stop to that and still remain a capitalist society, but I don't know how.Actually, MS Fud did its worse to VisiOn, GEM and DR-Dos COncurrent DOS, WordPerfect and Novell.
The problem is that MS isnt very good at FUD anymore. Now they use the bs-smokescreen method.
The problem isn't that they aren't good at it, the problem is they don't have a competitive product. With the companies you mentioned (at least the ones I'm familiar with) MS had a product that was nearly as good or better than their competitors. Word was a valid competitor to WordPerfect who mostly missed the boat on the wysiwyg editors the market demanded. Novell's networks were good, but a pain to administer and not intuitive at all. Windows networking, IMHO, is easier to deal with than Novell and cheaper. Going back to the GP's example Dos and Windows were competitive with OS/2. I remember the OS/2 Warp/Win 95 days. Win 95 wasn't great, but Warp was ridiculous. I never saw anyone keep it running for more than 20 minutes or so.
My point, after all this rambling, is that Microsoft's OS is not competitive with Linux, so they can't throw out good FUD. It has some advantages in being somewhat more intuitive in certain areas, but in terms of stability and robustness Linux is many orders of magnitude better. The only areas MS has an edge is in GUI (somewhat, personally I think KDE is as good as the Windows XP GUI), peripherals (which changes all the time as Linux gets more market share) and pre-built applications. Most Linux distros have more apps that come with the installation, but there are many popular applications that are only available for Windows or Mac(Quickbooks, Photoshop, MS Office, most commercial games). They can't directly attack these weakneses without drawing attention to them and increasing the amount of work being done to solve the issues, or goading hardware vendors and software manufacturers into providing Linux support. So, now they use the bs-smokescreen method. Get up and make a lot of noise just to confuse the issue. So far it's been working for them, at least to a degree, but the only way they are going to have continued long term success is if their next OS release is competitive with a current Linux distribution.
1. This has been a recommended strategy for building servers, one that MS finally adapted itself (tho possibly for the wrong reasons).
It is a very good idea because it ensures physical seperation between the different services and greatly reduces the potential of compromise of one service spreading to other services.
Maybe, but there are disadvantages. If you run everything on one machine you have a single point of failure. The more machines you have the more failure points, the more complexity, more nodes available to attack and more maintenance. As a Sys Admin I'm in favor of running as many things as possible on one box for all of the above reasons. If I can't resonably protect a single machine how can I be expected to reasonably protect six, or ten, or a hundred?
how much more time is left before anything even remotely pronouncable is already registered?
Have you registered a domain lately. It can be difficult to find a domain that fits your site, but I have never found any problems registering a domain that's 'remotely pronouncable'. Of course, the availability of domains with fewer characters is less. If you want a relatively short name that's pronouncable that may be a problem. Domains can (by RFC) be up to 255 characters. Not sure how many combinations that gives us, but I have never had any trouble registering a domain if it's over 6-8 characters.
If I were really in an emergency, I wouldn't hesitate to use any of the three and would only resort to one farther away if my first choice didn't work
Exactly. My cell phone is almost always with me. If it's an emergency I'm going to use it because it's closest. If it doesn't work I'm going to try to find something else. If I'm so incoherent I can't communicate my location to emergency personnel I'm probably not going to have the presence of mind to decide which phone would be best to use.
That's a good one. Maybe we could just use the summer and winter solstices - incorporate some ancient druid festival as a battery changing ceremony.
Those potential sacrifices, waking up an hour later or going to bed an hour earlier are more than made up by the availability of sun later in the day to allow traditional summertime activities.
Thing is, where I live the days get significantly longer in the summer anyway, so we naturally get more daylight. The time when I really want afternoon daylight is during the winter when the days are short. I'm for setting the time to DST and leaving it there. If some of the kids are going to school in the dark the schools can change their hours of operation. Around here most people just drive their kids to school anyway, so who cares if they go in the dark?
Why not just pass a law that makes a standard work day for salaried employees from 10:00 am to 2:00pm (with the standard hour for lunch).
Something catchy like, "Don't burn your house down" day to help people remember to change their batteries
Good idea, except we will need two holidays, one for spring and one for fall. We should name them something similar so people will never remember which is which (like memorial day and labor day). Maybe "Don't burn your house down" day in the spring and "Save your life" day in the fall.
He'll be having a very nice christmas I'll bet...
He would if he offered shipping. I can't imagine competition for this in Reading will net him much. OTOH, somebody on slashdot might be geeky enough to fly over there and get it.
I agree, my point is that the 'medical community' at least as it is percieved by the average person is focused on BMI, not body fat content. There is no easy way to measure body fat content on a nationwide basis, so the media and government resorts to things like BMI to establish these obesity numbers.
As I understand it, extra weight isn't unhealthy (and may actually be healthier on average than "proper" weight), but true obesity (defined as 25% to 30% body fat content, depending on what sources you use)...
The most common indication of obesity I see sited is BMI. Every BMI calculator I have found takes into account no more than three variables: gender, height and weight. (the cdc calculator in the link doesn't even factor gender in). BMI does not measure body fat and, as a result, is very misleading.
yep, if everybody, be it user or crawler, can point their browser to copyrighted material, than copyright loses it's purpose.
Not always. Disney vehemently defends the Micky Mouse copyright, but I can point a browser to www.mickeymouse.com and look at his image or name. Simpsons are the same way. Used to be, and I imagine it still is, if you put up a website with Simpsons characters likeness Matt Groening and Co will send you nast cease and desist letters.
Copyright holder should be able to use that copyrighted material to drive traffic to their website and get indexed in search engines if they want to.
Funny, Netflix seems to doing just fine with the "be happy waiting a few days" business model. Why do you think a few hours is a worse one?
I use Netflix, and the thing is they send you more than one movie at a time (depending on your subscription). I can set up the list of movies I want to watch, and I almost always have one on hand when I want to watch something. The other great thing is no more wandering around a movie store looking for something to catch my eye. Currently I've got over 100 movies in my queue - I'll probably never see them all.
I imagine any kind of download service will be the same way - I can download multiple movies, so I always have something available. After I delete the last movie I watched the next one in my queue will be downloaded. Probably a lot like their current service, just faster.
I mean, what type of computer costs 3000? You can get a good rackmount for $1200. Usually, all it takes to host a website is a high end desktop at up to $950.
Many computers cost $3000 and up. I've seen rackmount machines from HP, Dell and Sun all cost way more than $3000.
Mostly it depends on what their uses are. If they are just using it to host their website they probably don't need much of a server, if they are using that server as a development/test platform as well I'm sure it would be helpful to have a somewhat bigger machine. Actually, from their site:
Currently, drupal.org runs on a shared server paid for and maintained by Kjartan. The server is a single Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. There are about 20 sites running on the server, including some of our sites like http://drupal.org/, http://drupaldocs.org/ and http://cvs.drupal.org/. In addition to the websites, the server hosts our mailing lists, mailing list archives and CVS repositories. Last month, drupal.org alone served more than 3 million pages for 100 Gb of traffic (this does not include any of the other sites or services; non Drupal websites, Drupal mailing list traffic, etc).
Where I work we run HP DL380 machines, which is not really a high end server. Base price on those is $2899. In a perfect world, that would be about the class of server I would want to run a site like Drupal has.
Exactly what I was thinking. Might have to use that one.
(Hint: four letters, starts with 'm')
mba? That only has three letters.
You should have your girlfriend read the article to you.
Fair enough. Didn't mean any disrespect to Natalie herself. I also think she is an excellent actress.
Her performance was much more and indication of writing and directing than any failing on her part.
But it's interesting that Bill Gates recognised publicly that if the current patent regime had been in place when Microsoft was young, they never would have made it!
Only because Mr. Gates isn't always the most forthcoming person. His statement is obviously true, many of Microsoft's successes have been from ideas they 'borrowed' from other companies (dos, Windows, IE). Now their offerings are so broad, and software patents are being issued on the most mundane, rudimentary processes that they can't possibly keep up with ever patent out there. Microsoft is in a situation where it has to either patent EVERYTHING it can possibly think of, no matter how basic (an expensive prospect), or spend all of it's time in court fighting these patents. I'm sure Gates has better things to do with his money.