------- Additional Comment #1 From CS 2002-11-14 17:32 ------- This 'bug' can't be confirmed on any version of 2.5. Possible problem: submitter is a troll and/or moron.
suggested course of action: delete (bug report and troll account).
This was a hi-tech sort of drum, that I've not seen referenced anywhere before or since. It was supposedly very high-speed -- with a large number of heads reading in parallel -- but low capacity. But in addition to the 360/91 there was a 360/75, so I suppose that it could have been hooked up there. Or perhaps my memory is just succumbing to the passage of time.
The edit/compile/run cycle could take
hours. I worked as a contractor at NASA
Goddard in the early 1980s and we still had
couriers that would run around from building
to building, picking up card decks to run and
dropping off the run card decks with their
printouts. You actually spent hours sometimes
pouring over hex core dumps because that was
faster and less expensive than just trying
things on a hunch to see if they worked.
Proper procedure was that you wrote your
program out, by hand, on 80-column "coding
forms", which were 8.5"x11" paper tablets
with green lines and shading and numbers and
stuff. There were
little boxes where you would print each
character to be punched. Theoretically, these
were designed so that you could hand them to
a keypunch operator, but I never had a job
where we could afford this -- you just
punched them yourself. You still used the
forms, however, because in some cases you'd
have to wait in line for a turn at a
keypunch. They made cabinets with special
drawers to hold punch cards. When someone
left a job, the remaining people would bicker
over who got his drawers.
Since persistent, cataloged disk space was
so scarce, the more important measure of your
space allocation was the number of hanger
slots you had in the tape library. You'd get
strips with number codes that you would
insert in the plastic band around the 9-track
reel, and then go hang them in the library
(other sites I worked at made you hand them
to the tape librarian). You might put a dozen
or more files on a tape and then you'd have
to remember how many tape marks to skip to
get to the one you wanted. Standard labeled
tapes were evil.
Anyway, You'd code the slot number on in the
JCL DD statement and when your job was run,
the operator would have to scurry over to
tape library to pull it off the rack, mount
it on the drive, and push the acknowledge
button on the console. Before they needed the
tape drive again they'd pull your tape and
hang it on the "ready rack"; if that tape was
called up again they'd have it right there.
But if you went over to pick up your tape
shortly after your job ran, you'd often have
to ask them to "check the ready rack", or, in
the case of NASA Goddard, you could often
walk over to the console and yank your tape
off the ready rack yourself.
I had one long-running linear least squares
job that we could only run on standby. This
meant that you'd submit a card deck to a
special bin that could take days to empty.
Late at night, after all the paying jobs were
run, if there was time left in the operator's
shift they'd load one of these jobs and let
it run, for free, until the morning shift if
necessary. This one particular job would
crash in random places, and I was weeks
pouring over crash dumps, even resorting to
my own special little bit map that I'd use to
indicate program status and progress at the
point it crashed. Nothing did any good,
crashes were completely random. A co-worker,
more experienced than I, took a look at it,
saw that it was mounting a tape and the tape
always got put on the same drive. He told me
to rubber-band a note on the deck to the
operator, telling him to take that tape drive
offline before running the job. It ran to
completion that night for the first time.
At a later job, the company I worked for
used a timesharing service. We rented a whole
disk pack, which seemed kind of extravagant
but was in fact cost-effective given their
pricing structure. This was a removable pack
and it was kept offline most of the time, and
was mounted when needed by a job. There were
two ways to manage that space. You could
simply code the pack's ID into the JCL and
then access files through the on-pack
catalog, or you could enter the files into
the mainframe's master catalog. Generally, I
preferred doing the latter, but I think I was
about the only customer they had that did,
because as I recall it caused all manner of
problems for the operators.
BTW, I believe it was NASA's IBM 360/91 that
I remember having
drum storage for virtual memory storage. A
drum was sort of like a disk drive except it
was a cylinder with the magnetic material on
the outside surface. Some drums, I think, had
heads that moved up and down to read separate
tracks, but this one had a long row of heads
from top to bottom, reading the tracks in
parallel. But I could be remembering it
wrong. Anyone else remember these?
4. You may not rely on oral or written information or advice given by STARPOWER's officers, directors, employees, agents, authorized representatives, subcontractors or affiliates and/or their officers, directors, employees, agents, authorized representatives, or subcontractors or affiliates to create a warranty or increase the scope of warranty already established in these terms and conditions. Your rights and STARPOWER's responsibilities are limited to the warranties that are expressed in these written terms and conditions that have been established by STARPOWER to govern the use of the Access Service.
IOW, you agree that our sales droids, our sales droids managers -- anyone all the way up to the head of the company, really -- can feed you any line of bullshit they care to in order to get you to sign up with us, and absolutely none of it commits us to anything.
"Sure you can run servers off your cable modem."
"Of course you can have static IPs. How many would you like?"
"With our latest improvements, we're able to offer you 10Mbps unrestricted bandwidth with no upstream bottlenecks."
It gets a tiny bit harder if bar is in the current directory, of course, but you didn't list it so I assume it isn't. Sure it gets harder if you've got a few hundred randomly-named files to pick through, but often it can be done incrementally, and you'd probably do it bit by bit in the GUI as well.
Somehow/. is breaking that link, putting a space before the five at the end; it happens in this post too (at least, when I preview), but the quoted URL in the href attribute seems to work.
One's right here, mostly being quiet. BTW, to get this number I was reading/. the day Rob turned on the user account system; it was a weekend day, as I recall, maybe Saturday or Sunday morning, and things were relatively slow. I reloaded the home page and there was a post from Rob about the userid system. So I hit the link and grabbed myself an account; I doubt the system had been operational more than a few minutes.
The one "nice" thing about having the nick "bob" is all the PNRs(*) who appear to wish they had the same nick, or anyway cluelessly try to get it. For a while I was getting my password emailed to me maybe once or twice per month, so I always had a current copy in my mail if I happened to forget it:-) That's what gave me the idea of putting it up for sale on eBay, but twenty bucks didn't seem enough.
What do you believe is going to happen to all the dark fiber that has been installed by Worldcom and others? It seems clear at this point that fiber networks have been grossly overbuilt, and demand for much, if not most, of this fiber is not about to materialize, at least within the context of current applications and cost structure. In your opinion, does this situation represent a massive loss of investment, or a tremendous opportunity to sell innovative new services, e.g. intercity video teleconferencing links which are cost-competitive with voice-only conferences?
Are innovations that could take advantage of this fiber likely to be stifled as a result of the current dependence of the telecom industry on high bandwidth charges? If this were a pure supply-and-demand situation, one might expect the cost to access dark fiber to sink like a rock until people were willing to pay for it, allowing small, entrepreneurial companies to begin to offer speculative new services. Does all that fiber remain dark only because the small number of fiber owners are unwilling to allow such price declines to happen?
Of course, only time will tell in this case, but it it would not be unusal for a judge to be extra-deferential to the party that he or she is about to squash like a bug. Doing the opposite is exactly the mistake that Jackson made on the last go-round.
I think the thing that most struck me about it was the major changes to the init system. No longer do they have this big, monolithic/etc/rc.config. After getting it installed, one of the first things I wanted to do was to get it to add a default route -- I was using a static IP and for some reason that didn't get done correctly during the install. No problem, just vi/etc/rc.config... oops, where'd everything go!?!? Well,/etc/sysconfig as a matter of fact, with all the RedHattish ifup scripts and all. Gonna take some getting used to for this long-time SuSE user.
The license did allow free downloads for academic use (students, faculty, etc.), but you were supposed to buy it from them otherwise.
Actually, the license also allowed you to evaluate the software for an amount of time
that was just a bit longer than the approximate average time between releases. About the only case in which you really had to pay for it was if
you were a corporation and had decided to deploy it to all your desktop computers or something like that.
As I'm sure most/. readers know, the webserver core of GNN is now known as AOLserver.
It's open sourced under the MPL and it's actually a pretty darned interesting hunk of Unix application code.
Personally, I do not care for the way that AOL tries to make their dial-up customers dependant on them. The browser brokenness that their customers and many webmasters have to endure ("AOL customers click here...") would probably not persist if AOL didn't lock less-savy users in the way that they do.
But they have dumped a bunch of money into some very cool stuff and have set it free with an astonishingly small number of strings attached, and I for one have trouble not being thankful for that much.
Re:Subscriptions should add value
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
I think a pretty good example of this is Silicon Investor. Anyone can browse around, but only
paid members get to post. Also, paid members can pass notes to each other in private. You can set your own bookmarks for other subscribers so that you can check what so-and-so posted today. Also, on SI,
threads last forever. You can choose to show only threads with recent activity or you can dig around in -- and post to -- antique threads that haven't seen activity for years. You also can in effect set up a kill file -- every post has a little hyperlink "Ingore this person".
@siliconinvestor.com email is available. They have deals set up with brokerage houses and various other information sources. For example, you can get a free premium membership sponsered by National Discount Brokers if you want to set up an account there. Premium members also get access to an advanced search engine.
It seems to me that/. could create such premium content and services to justify a subscription fee. I should think that the private message passing would be quite popular -- you can contact a poster in private without knowing thier real email. The "Ignore this person" links would be quite useful. There could be premium slashboxen with various functions; e.g. stock tickers, auto-refresh (or perhaps streaming video) Jennicam:-),/. member-only "blue light specials" at Computer Geeks, registration-free links to the New York Times, better searching and filtering, member-only ftp sites for the latest distribution ISOs, mozilla builds, etc.
But I really don't think that I'd pay just to get rid of ads. Also, I serioiusly think that there should be free lifetime memberships for charter subscribers -- say, anyone with a UID lower than maybe 100 or so;-)
"I prefer not to," he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did.
"You are decided, then, not to comply with my request? a request made according to common usage and common sense?"
He briefly gave me to understand that on that point my judgment was sound. Yes: his decision was irreversible.
It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.
"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this? Am I not right?"
"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."
"Nippers," said I, "what do you think of it?"
"I think I should kick him out of the office."
(The reader of nice perceptions will here perceive that, it being morning, Turkey's answer is couched in polite and tranquil terms, but Nippers replies in ill-tempered ones. Or, to repeat a previous sentence, Nippers's ugly mood was on duty, and Turkey's off.)
"Ginger Nut," said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, "what do you think of it?"
"I think, sir, he's a little luny," replied Ginger Nut, with a grin.
"You hear what they say," said I, turning towards the screen, "come forth and do your duty."
I agree with this post on two points: (a) Paul's website is an excellent resource -- I've used his 8051 ROM monitor in the past and learned some stuff from his PCB design (thanks, Paul!) -- and (b) The Index's attitude toward what is useful about the web is rather inexplicable. Google, for example, indexes tons of sites that contain mailing list archives, and I often find the answers I need there. Often Deja is better, but Google finds stuff that never makes it to Deja. I participate in a number of mailing lists, and Google usually finds a lot of my posts. Just now I did a search on my name, and came up with about 300 hits (*) of various sorts on Google -- The Index comes up totally empty. A search on "sparclinux" on The Index returns a single, dead link, while Google returns over 400 references. I just don't see how this search engine could be useful -- if you're just looking for a company selling something -- well, even Internet Keywords will do a decent (although highly skewed) job of that.
I also have a stupid little personal website, but as lame as it might be, I regularly get email from people thanking me for some of the stuff I put up there. If even a handful of people find it useful, I think it's worth the effort. I don't particularly care if The Index indexes my site, but I really think that without this kind of stuff, the web is really, really boring and serverely degraded.
(*) with my surname (Drzyzgula) being virtually unique on the web, hits on my name run about 99% my fault. If anyone ever finds web references to other people named Drzyzgula, please let me know. There's my brother and sister-in-law (virtually invisible in web searches) and there's a violinist in Poland, but that's about it.
First, off topic: put your money where your sig is:-) (see sig below)
To the point, the following entry, stolen from Merriam-Webster, shows that the usage of the word "book" is nowhere near as limited as you suggest -- very many of the definitions have nothing to do with paper. Expanding usage to include something like an "online book" hardly seems a stretch.
That being said, I hate reading books online. Can't do it on the can, can't do it on the train, can't do it walking down the street, can't hold one finger in the index while you quick check to see if you got the right reference, can't flip through 100 pages to find the page on the left side that looked like what you remembered... I could go on, but the point is that it will be a long, long time before the user interface of an online book will compare favorably to that of a print book. IMHO, the only thing an online book has going for it is a text search feature.
Main Entry: 1 book
Pronunciation: 'buk
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English bOc; akin to Old High German buoh book, Gothic boka letter
Date: before 12th century 1 a: a set of written sheets of skin or
paper or tablets of wood or ivory b: a
set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together
into a volume c: a long written or printed
literary composition d: a major division of
a treatise or literary work e: a record
of a business's financial transactions or financial
condition -- often used in plural <the books
show a profit> 2capitalized:
BIBLE 1 3:
something that yields knowledge or understanding <the
great book of nature> <her face was an
open book> 4 a: the total
available knowledge and experience that can be brought to
bear on a task or problem <tried every trick in the
book> <the book on him is that he
can't hit a curveball> b: the standards
or authority relevant in a situation <run by the
book> 5 a: all the charges
that can be made against an accused person <threw
the book at him> b: a position
from which one must answer for certain acts : ACCOUNT <bring
criminals to book> 6 a: LIBRETTOb: the
script of a play c: a book of arrangements
for a musician or dance orchestra: musical
repertory 7: a packet of items bound
together like a book <a book of stamps>
<a book of matches> 8 a: BOOKMAKERb:
the bets registered by a bookmaker; also: the business or activity of giving odds and
taking bets 9: the number of tricks
a cardplayer or side must win before any trick can have
scoring value - bookful/'buk-"ful/
noun - in one's book: in one's
own opinion - in one's good books:
in favor with one - one for the book:
an act or occurrence worth noting - on the books: on the records
It seems to me that you'd want to start from the
RDBMS itself -- what was available in that timeframe,
and who was using it? I kinda remember Unify,
Oracle and Ingres... what others were there?
So troll around in user groups and mailing lists
and such for these products, and see if you can
find people who were using those back then and
did they ever have an X-based application for it.
One possible thing to do is to search through some
antique collections of open-source software. For
example, I have Walnut Creek's three volumes of
Usenet source newsgroup archives (comp.sources.unix, comp.sources.x, etc). I took
a quick look through the 1985-1990 and 1991-1992
volumes, and nothing jumped out at me. Still, you
might be able to use these somewhat indirectly --
for example, by recursively grepping through the
comp.sources.x stuff, I noted that a fellow by
the name of Gibson, working at Unify, made some
contributions to olvwm3 in the early 1990s.
If you can track him down, he might remember if
they ever did any X-based apps or if they just
used X for developing non-X code like everyone
else.
I will say, though, digging through those CDs was
quite a trip down memory lane.
Well, we're doing what we can in this regard, but it is always a balancing act. The most important thing is to make sure that one has facts to present -- suspicions and FUD won't do it.
Nah, you don't really have to. Of course we're in the middle of doing this (setting up a test environment, that is:-). But I figured, and this is certainly proving to be the case, that y'all would do a great job in helping us figure out how to set up the tests and what to look for. The comments here are extremely useful, thanks everyone.
"In native mode it will of course deny anything that is not active directory compatible. In mixed mode it's supposed to let you work with older NT stations and servers/domain controllers. (Of course there are some features that require native mode to help force you a bit more towards it and once you're in native mode you can't go back to mixed either;)"
Thanks, this is where I keep getting crossed signals. I am assuming some sort of native-mode
roll-out, largely because many of the arguments I hear in favor of a W2K/AD implementation are things that only work in native mode. So if it turns out that we
do face a native-mode implementation, what does this say about the ability for having workstations mount both W2K and Samba shares?
I work for a US governement agency, and we use Samba extensively in our mixed Solaris/NT (soon to be Solaris, NT & Linux) network. In fact, partly because we are able to provide better support for our Solaris servers and partly because a lot of analytical processing is done under Solaris and Solaris can't straightforwardly mount NT filesystems, most of our users store most of their data -- even their NT-native data -- on the Samba servers, not the NT servers. We don't see a liklihood of this preferance going away anytime soon, and we would seriously like to do away with our NT servers if at all possible, and replace them with servers running either Solaris and/or Linux.
We are now in the process of redesigning our authtentication and name services schemes, and at least in my division -- what with the extensive use of Unix -- Active Directory is not a leading contender to provide any of these services. What we need is good support for NT desktop workstations (MS Word being a business requirement and all) and Unix file, print and computational servers. Preferably Unix and NT systems would obtain authentication from the same source, e.g. a Kerberos or LDAP server. Note that, as contrasted to some "appliance-like" implementations of Samba servers, we need to support login authentication to the Unix machines (both through telnet and xdm -- most users use eXceed on their NT workstations) as well as mapping SMB shares, so having Sabma be able to use an authentication service is not sufficient; xdm, telnetd and login must also be able to use the service. (We currently use Samba in security=server mode -- both the NIS master and the NT PDC are controled by the same adminstrative team and a single person will add userids to both -- so most authentication is handled by the PDC, except for Unix login and xdm which are handled by NIS.)
In addition to login authentication, we do of course need file services for the NT workstations. But full control of file ACLs from the NT client side is an absolute long-term requriement. Today, our users control file security by creating files first in Unix and setting the permissions, or by logging into a Unix server and doing a chmod/chgrp on the file after it gets created by Samba on behalf of the NT workstation. By setting restrictive default permissions in the Samba configuration, this is relatively safe, but it is a huge pain. Thus, in some cases where file sharing among several NT users must be supported and complex security requirements exist, users will typically create the files on the NT servers. On the Unix side, we have maybe 100 groups for a few hundred users, and have had problems with users being in more groups than are supported by the OS. Also, many groups completely change membership from month to month depending on project staffing. Thus, whatever our solution is must support very fine-grained and dynamic control over access control lists, and it must be straightforwardly controllable from the NT client side, preferably though Windows Explorer.
One other thing we make use of in NT is NT Server's ability to transparantly download printer drivers to NT workstations. Since our users don't have administrative access to their workstations, they are not able to install their own printer drivers. NT deals with this configuration by storing the appropriate driver as part of the printer share on the NT side. When a user maps an NT server-based printer to their workstation, the driver is automagically installed on the workstation. If Samba can't do something like this, it could cause a pretty big headache for us. (Samba may do this today, I'm not sure).
Finally, one major issue is how one goes about distributing software and patches to NT workstations, and also how they may be remotely controlled by help desk and/or administrative staff. Currently we us Microsoft's System Management Server for this, which kind of sucks in a lot of ways. Still, it would be utterly fabulous if it worked the way it seems to have been designed to, and it really does provide some essential services today. This is kind of pie-in-the-sky, but a solution that didn't address some of the function lost if SMS were shut down could easily result in whole lot of lost shoe leather.
There's probably some other things, but I've listed what I think are the big ones. If authentication and name services can be integrated for NT, Samba and Unix, if users can have fine-grained control over file ACLs, if printers can be transparently mapped without having to install drivers by hand, and if an alternative solution can be found for software distribution, remote control and other services provided by SMS, then I think we stand a chance of shutting our NT servers down completely. Partial solutions, such as addressing only the file ACLs and integrated authentication, are likely to help to get rid of a large number of the NT servers, but are not likely to eliminate our dependance on NT Server altogether.
Jeremy, any light you can shed on these issues would be greatly appreciated.
CA is the most egregiously arrogant company I have dealt with in over 15 years of doing computer support. Besides the support issues that have already been mentioned, just trying to *buy* their products can be a nightmare. Several years ago they tried to sell me Unicenter. The salesman and I went round and round for months over one central issue: Pricing.
It wasn't that the pricing was too much, it was that they couldn't tell me what it was. I insisted that I wasn't going to invest any time in evaluating Unicenter until I was convinced that it would fit in my budget. I wanted a price schedule -- you know, like a price per server of various sizes, and a price per client, a price per management station, etc. They wouldn't give me any prices until I'd given them a complete inventory of all the hardware on our network, identifying which machines were servers, which workstations, etc., etc., etc. I tried to explain that this was a Sun environment and, what with NFS and all, just about *all* the machines could be considered servers, and that for the purposes of determining affordability, he could just assume that all of our approximately 150 Sun machines were servers. I explained that doing the kind of documentation he wanted, in the form he wanted, was exactly the kind of thing I didn't have time for until I knew that I could afford the product. After a long time of this, I finally told him to just stop calling me.
We went through the same thing again a few months ago with ARCserve. We'd been using ARCserve for NT since the Cheyenne days -- Cheyenne was actually a pretty good company before CA slaughtered it -- and we wanted to (a) upgrade it to the latest version and (b) buy copies for our Unix machines. It boggles the mind, but we never, ever did get a price for it. There appeared to be no one in CA who was authorized to give us a price, and we tried, repeatedly, for months to get this information out of them. At one point they sent us a single license for evaluation, but by that time we were pretty far along evaluating an alternative, Backup Express from SyncSort. Backup Express works great, and SyncSort's service is excellent.
Really, CA offering products for Linux is a very mixed blessing.
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------- Additional Comment #1 From CS 2002-11-14 17:32 -------
This 'bug' can't be confirmed on any version of 2.5.
Possible problem: submitter is a troll and/or moron.
suggested course of action: delete (bug report and troll account).
This was a hi-tech sort of drum, that I've not seen referenced anywhere before or since. It was supposedly very high-speed -- with a large number of heads reading in parallel -- but low capacity. But in addition to the 360/91 there was a 360/75, so I suppose that it could have been hooked up there. Or perhaps my memory is just succumbing to the passage of time.
They were a pain in the ass. Consider:
Anyway, You'd code the slot number on in the JCL DD statement and when your job was run, the operator would have to scurry over to tape library to pull it off the rack, mount it on the drive, and push the acknowledge button on the console. Before they needed the tape drive again they'd pull your tape and hang it on the "ready rack"; if that tape was called up again they'd have it right there. But if you went over to pick up your tape shortly after your job ran, you'd often have to ask them to "check the ready rack", or, in the case of NASA Goddard, you could often walk over to the console and yank your tape off the ready rack yourself.
BTW, I believe it was NASA's IBM 360/91 that I remember having drum storage for virtual memory storage. A drum was sort of like a disk drive except it was a cylinder with the magnetic material on the outside surface. Some drums, I think, had heads that moved up and down to read separate tracks, but this one had a long row of heads from top to bottom, reading the tracks in parallel. But I could be remembering it wrong. Anyone else remember these?
One of my favorite examples of this is Starpower's Internet access agreement, in section "VII. No Warranties". Quoting,
IOW, you agree that our sales droids, our sales droids managers -- anyone all the way up to the head of the company, really -- can feed you any line of bullshit they care to in order to get you to sign up with us, and absolutely none of it commits us to anything.
"Sure you can run servers off your cable modem."
"Of course you can have static IPs. How many would you like?"
"With our latest improvements, we're able to offer you 10Mbps unrestricted bandwidth with no upstream bottlenecks."
It gets a tiny bit harder if bar is in the current directory, of course, but you didn't list it so I assume it isn't. Sure it gets harder if you've got a few hundred randomly-named files to pick through, but often it can be done incrementally, and you'd probably do it bit by bit in the GUI as well.
Somehow /. is breaking that link, putting a space before the five at the end; it happens in this post too (at least, when I preview), but the quoted URL in the href attribute seems to work.
I'm here.
One's right here, mostly being quiet. BTW, to get this number I was reading /. the day Rob turned on the user account system; it was a weekend day, as I recall, maybe Saturday or Sunday morning, and things were relatively slow. I reloaded the home page and there was a post from Rob about the userid system. So I hit the link and grabbed myself an account; I doubt the system had been operational more than a few minutes.
:-) That's what gave me the idea of putting it up for sale on eBay, but twenty bucks didn't seem enough.
The one "nice" thing about having the nick "bob" is all the PNRs(*) who appear to wish they had the same nick, or anyway cluelessly try to get it. For a while I was getting my password emailed to me maybe once or twice per month, so I always had a current copy in my mail if I happened to forget it
(*) Persons Named Robert
What do you believe is going to happen to all the dark fiber that has been installed by Worldcom and others? It seems clear at this point that fiber networks have been grossly overbuilt, and demand for much, if not most, of this fiber is not about to materialize, at least within the context of current applications and cost structure. In your opinion, does this situation represent a massive loss of investment, or a tremendous opportunity to sell innovative new services, e.g. intercity video teleconferencing links which are cost-competitive with voice-only conferences?
Are innovations that could take advantage of this fiber likely to be stifled as a result of the current dependence of the telecom industry on high bandwidth charges? If this were a pure supply-and-demand situation, one might expect the cost to access dark fiber to sink like a rock until people were willing to pay for it, allowing small, entrepreneurial companies to begin to offer speculative new services. Does all that fiber remain dark only because the small number of fiber owners are unwilling to allow such price declines to happen?
Of course, only time will tell in this case, but it it would not be unusal for a judge to be extra-deferential to the party that he or she is about to squash like a bug. Doing the opposite is exactly the mistake that Jackson made on the last go-round.
I think the thing that most struck me about it was the major changes to the init system. No longer do they have this big, monolithic /etc/rc.config. After getting it installed, one of the first things I wanted to do was to get it to add a default route -- I was using a static IP and for some reason that didn't get done correctly during the install. No problem, just vi /etc/rc.config... oops, where'd everything go!?!? Well, /etc/sysconfig as a matter of fact, with all the RedHattish ifup scripts and all. Gonna take some getting used to for this long-time SuSE user.
As I'm sure most /. readers know, the webserver core of GNN is now known as AOLserver.
It's open sourced under the MPL and it's actually a pretty darned interesting hunk of Unix application code.
Personally, I do not care for the way that AOL tries to make their dial-up customers dependant on them. The browser brokenness that their customers and many webmasters have to endure ("AOL customers click here...") would probably not persist if AOL didn't lock less-savy users in the way that they do.
But they have dumped a bunch of money into some very cool stuff and have set it free with an astonishingly small number of strings attached, and I for one have trouble not being thankful for that much.
I think a pretty good example of this is Silicon Investor. Anyone can browse around, but only paid members get to post. Also, paid members can pass notes to each other in private. You can set your own bookmarks for other subscribers so that you can check what so-and-so posted today. Also, on SI, threads last forever. You can choose to show only threads with recent activity or you can dig around in -- and post to -- antique threads that haven't seen activity for years. You also can in effect set up a kill file -- every post has a little hyperlink "Ingore this person". @siliconinvestor.com email is available. They have deals set up with brokerage houses and various other information sources. For example, you can get a free premium membership sponsered by National Discount Brokers if you want to set up an account there. Premium members also get access to an advanced search engine.
It seems to me that /. could create such premium content and services to justify a subscription fee. I should think that the private message passing would be quite popular -- you can contact a poster in private without knowing thier real email. The "Ignore this person" links would be quite useful. There could be premium slashboxen with various functions; e.g. stock tickers, auto-refresh (or perhaps streaming video) Jennicam :-), /. member-only "blue light specials" at Computer Geeks, registration-free links to the New York Times, better searching and filtering, member-only ftp sites for the latest distribution ISOs, mozilla builds, etc.
But I really don't think that I'd pay just to get rid of ads. Also, I serioiusly think that there should be free lifetime memberships for charter subscribers -- say, anyone with a UID lower than maybe 100 or so ;-)
cf. "a little luny" in Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street written by Herman Melville in 1853:
I agree with this post on two points: (a) Paul's website is an excellent resource -- I've used his 8051 ROM monitor in the past and learned some stuff from his PCB design (thanks, Paul!) -- and (b) The Index's attitude toward what is useful about the web is rather inexplicable. Google, for example, indexes tons of sites that contain mailing list archives, and I often find the answers I need there. Often Deja is better, but Google finds stuff that never makes it to Deja. I participate in a number of mailing lists, and Google usually finds a lot of my posts. Just now I did a search on my name, and came up with about 300 hits (*) of various sorts on Google -- The Index comes up totally empty. A search on "sparclinux" on The Index returns a single, dead link, while Google returns over 400 references. I just don't see how this search engine could be useful -- if you're just looking for a company selling something -- well, even Internet Keywords will do a decent (although highly skewed) job of that.
I also have a stupid little personal website, but as lame as it might be, I regularly get email from people thanking me for some of the stuff I put up there. If even a handful of people find it useful, I think it's worth the effort. I don't particularly care if The Index indexes my site, but I really think that without this kind of stuff, the web is really, really boring and serverely degraded.
(*) with my surname (Drzyzgula) being virtually unique on the web, hits on my name run about 99% my fault. If anyone ever finds web references to other people named Drzyzgula, please let me know. There's my brother and sister-in-law (virtually invisible in web searches) and there's a violinist in Poland, but that's about it.
First, off topic: put your money where your sig is :-) (see sig below)
To the point, the following entry, stolen from Merriam-Webster, shows that the usage of the word "book" is nowhere near as limited as you suggest -- very many of the definitions have nothing to do with paper. Expanding usage to include something like an "online book" hardly seems a stretch.
That being said, I hate reading books online. Can't do it on the can, can't do it on the train, can't do it walking down the street, can't hold one finger in the index while you quick check to see if you got the right reference, can't flip through 100 pages to find the page on the left side that looked like what you remembered... I could go on, but the point is that it will be a long, long time before the user interface of an online book will compare favorably to that of a print book. IMHO, the only thing an online book has going for it is a text search feature.
Main Entry: 1 book : a set of written sheets of skin or
paper or tablets of wood or ivory b : a
set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together
into a volume c : a long written or printed
literary composition d : a major division of
a treatise or literary work e : a record
of a business's financial transactions or financial
condition -- often used in plural <the book s
show a profit> :
something that yields knowledge or understanding <the
great book of nature> <her face was an
open book> : the total
available knowledge and experience that can be brought to
bear on a task or problem <tried every trick in the
book> <the book on him is that he
can't hit a curveball> b : the standards
or authority relevant in a situation <run by the
book> : all the charges
that can be made against an accused person <threw
the book at him> b : a position
from which one must answer for certain acts : ACCOUNT <bring
criminals to book> : the
script of a play c : a book of arrangements
for a musician or dance orchestra : musical
repertory : a packet of items bound
together like a book <a book of stamps>
<a book of matches> :
the bets registered by a bookmaker; also : the business or activity of giving odds and
taking bets : the number of tricks
a cardplayer or side must win before any trick can have
scoring value /'buk-"ful/
noun : in one's
own opinion :
in favor with one :
an act or occurrence worth noting : on the records
Pronunciation: 'buk
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English bOc; akin to Old High German buoh book, Gothic boka letter
Date: before 12th century
1 a
2 capitalized : BIBLE 1
3
4 a
5 a
6 a : LIBRETTO b
7
8 a : BOOKMAKER b
9
- bookful
- in one's book
- in one's good books
- one for the book
- on the books
My Slashdot ID is lower than yours
No, it isn't :->
It seems to me that you'd want to start from the RDBMS itself -- what was available in that timeframe, and who was using it? I kinda remember Unify, Oracle and Ingres... what others were there?
So troll around in user groups and mailing lists and such for these products, and see if you can find people who were using those back then and did they ever have an X-based application for it.
One possible thing to do is to search through some antique collections of open-source software. For example, I have Walnut Creek's three volumes of Usenet source newsgroup archives (comp.sources.unix, comp.sources.x, etc). I took a quick look through the 1985-1990 and 1991-1992 volumes, and nothing jumped out at me. Still, you might be able to use these somewhat indirectly -- for example, by recursively grepping through the comp.sources.x stuff, I noted that a fellow by the name of Gibson, working at Unify, made some contributions to olvwm3 in the early 1990s. If you can track him down, he might remember if they ever did any X-based apps or if they just used X for developing non-X code like everyone else.
I will say, though, digging through those CDs was quite a trip down memory lane.
Well, we're doing what we can in this regard, but it is always a balancing act. The most important thing is to make sure that one has facts to present -- suspicions and FUD won't do it.
Thanks. BTW, since posting the initial question above, I found another interesting item at the Computer & Communications Industry Association: Microsoft Windows 2000: Blueprint for Domination.
"In native mode it will of course deny anything that is not active directory compatible. In mixed mode it's supposed to let you work with older NT stations and servers/domain controllers. (Of course there are some features that require native mode to help force you a bit more towards it and once you're in native mode you can't go back to mixed either ;)"
Thanks, this is where I keep getting crossed signals. I am assuming some sort of native-mode roll-out, largely because many of the arguments I hear in favor of a W2K/AD implementation are things that only work in native mode. So if it turns out that we do face a native-mode implementation, what does this say about the ability for having workstations mount both W2K and Samba shares?
I work for a US governement agency, and we use Samba extensively in our mixed Solaris/NT (soon to be Solaris, NT & Linux) network. In fact, partly because we are able to provide better support for our Solaris servers and partly because a lot of analytical processing is done under Solaris and Solaris can't straightforwardly mount NT filesystems, most of our users store most of their data -- even their NT-native data -- on the Samba servers, not the NT servers. We don't see a liklihood of this preferance going away anytime soon, and we would seriously like to do away with our NT servers if at all possible, and replace them with servers running either Solaris and/or Linux.
We are now in the process of redesigning our authtentication and name services schemes, and at least in my division -- what with the extensive use of Unix -- Active Directory is not a leading contender to provide any of these services. What we need is good support for NT desktop workstations (MS Word being a business requirement and all) and Unix file, print and computational servers. Preferably Unix and NT systems would obtain authentication from the same source, e.g. a Kerberos or LDAP server. Note that, as contrasted to some "appliance-like" implementations of Samba servers, we need to support login authentication to the Unix machines (both through telnet and xdm -- most users use eXceed on their NT workstations) as well as mapping SMB shares, so having Sabma be able to use an authentication service is not sufficient; xdm, telnetd and login must also be able to use the service. (We currently use Samba in security=server mode -- both the NIS master and the NT PDC are controled by the same adminstrative team and a single person will add userids to both -- so most authentication is handled by the PDC, except for Unix login and xdm which are handled by NIS.)
In addition to login authentication, we do of course need file services for the NT workstations. But full control of file ACLs from the NT client side is an absolute long-term requriement. Today, our users control file security by creating files first in Unix and setting the permissions, or by logging into a Unix server and doing a chmod/chgrp on the file after it gets created by Samba on behalf of the NT workstation. By setting restrictive default permissions in the Samba configuration, this is relatively safe, but it is a huge pain. Thus, in some cases where file sharing among several NT users must be supported and complex security requirements exist, users will typically create the files on the NT servers. On the Unix side, we have maybe 100 groups for a few hundred users, and have had problems with users being in more groups than are supported by the OS. Also, many groups completely change membership from month to month depending on project staffing. Thus, whatever our solution is must support very fine-grained and dynamic control over access control lists, and it must be straightforwardly controllable from the NT client side, preferably though Windows Explorer.
One other thing we make use of in NT is NT Server's ability to transparantly download printer drivers to NT workstations. Since our users don't have administrative access to their workstations, they are not able to install their own printer drivers. NT deals with this configuration by storing the appropriate driver as part of the printer share on the NT side. When a user maps an NT server-based printer to their workstation, the driver is automagically installed on the workstation. If Samba can't do something like this, it could cause a pretty big headache for us. (Samba may do this today, I'm not sure).
Finally, one major issue is how one goes about distributing software and patches to NT workstations, and also how they may be remotely controlled by help desk and/or administrative staff. Currently we us Microsoft's System Management Server for this, which kind of sucks in a lot of ways. Still, it would be utterly fabulous if it worked the way it seems to have been designed to, and it really does provide some essential services today. This is kind of pie-in-the-sky, but a solution that didn't address some of the function lost if SMS were shut down could easily result in whole lot of lost shoe leather.
There's probably some other things, but I've listed what I think are the big ones. If authentication and name services can be integrated for NT, Samba and Unix, if users can have fine-grained control over file ACLs, if printers can be transparently mapped without having to install drivers by hand, and if an alternative solution can be found for software distribution, remote control and other services provided by SMS, then I think we stand a chance of shutting our NT servers down completely. Partial solutions, such as addressing only the file ACLs and integrated authentication, are likely to help to get rid of a large number of the NT servers, but are not likely to eliminate our dependance on NT Server altogether.
Jeremy, any light you can shed on these issues would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
CA is the most egregiously arrogant company I have dealt with in over 15 years of doing computer support. Besides the support issues that have already been mentioned, just trying to *buy* their products can be a nightmare. Several years ago they tried to sell me Unicenter. The salesman and I went round and round for months over one central issue: Pricing.
It wasn't that the pricing was too much, it was that they couldn't tell me what it was. I insisted that I wasn't going to invest any time in evaluating Unicenter until I was convinced that it would fit in my budget. I wanted a price schedule -- you know, like a price per server of various sizes, and a price per client, a price per management station, etc. They wouldn't give me any prices until I'd given them a complete inventory of all the hardware on our network, identifying which machines were servers, which workstations, etc., etc., etc. I tried to explain that this was a Sun environment and, what with NFS and all, just about *all* the machines could be considered servers, and that for the purposes of determining affordability, he could just assume that all of our approximately 150 Sun machines were servers. I explained that doing the kind of documentation he wanted, in the form he wanted, was exactly the kind of thing I didn't have time for until I knew that I could afford the product. After a long time of this, I finally told him to just stop calling me.
We went through the same thing again a few months ago with ARCserve. We'd been using ARCserve for NT since the Cheyenne days -- Cheyenne was actually a pretty good company before CA slaughtered it -- and we wanted to (a) upgrade it to the latest version and (b) buy copies for our Unix machines. It boggles the mind, but we never, ever did get a price for it. There appeared to be no one in CA who was authorized to give us a price, and we tried, repeatedly, for months to get this information out of them. At one point they sent us a single license for evaluation, but by that time we were pretty far along evaluating an alternative, Backup Express from SyncSort. Backup Express works great, and SyncSort's service is excellent.
Really, CA offering products for Linux is a very mixed blessing.