Very true, but it'll only keep out an absolute moron. Anyone with half a brain will use a distributed mechanism, which means DenyHosts will only see failed password attempts from a given host a few times.
There's plenty more to do:
- Don't allow root logins via SSH, or limit them to key-based logins (trivially easy in/etc/ssh/sshd.conf) - Disable shell accounts unless they're really needed. rssh is useful here - limit what a user with SSH login authority can do. - Lock down other services. What good does DenyHosts do you if SSH and a separate app which can't be locked with DenyHosts both use the same password mechanism? - Lock accounts which have more than N failed logins. (Though if you've centralised logins such as in the above example, it'd probably be better to do this from whatever system deals with the authentication, eg. LDAP).
The real question is: do they even need to in order to maintain their ridiculous profit margins?
The truth is, if you look in the context of most other businesses outside of the computer industry Apple don't have ridiculous profit margins.
The rest of the PC industry is trying to eke out a living on the most absurdly thin margins. There's a reason why the number of PC manufacturers is going down every year - 10 or 15 years ago it was possible for anyone to buy a bunch of component, build PCs and make a fair profit. Today, that's almost impossible.
"PXE was introduced as part of the Wired for Management framework by Intel and is described in the specification (version 2.1) published by Intel and Systemsoft on September 20, 1999." (Wikipedia)
I imagine you're talking about something like booting Unix workstations from an NFS share, right?
It's been possible to boot from Ethernet since long before then. Hell, DHCP is based on BOOTP (which dates from 1985) and most modern DHCP servers can also act as BOOTP servers.
Pick up an old PCI or ISA network card, there's a strong chance you'll find a socket on there for a chip. The idea was you bought the chip and you could then boot directly from the network.
I'm not quite sure what PXE adds, to be perfectly honest. Though I have noticed some applications which add a PXE server to the network without having to reconfigure your existing DHCP server. I'm not quite sure how that works, but I do know that those applications don't work if your existing DHCP server is handing out boot instructions to PXE requests.
Win Mobile was pretty successful in a business setting. Its probably had its day now but think of all the xdas out there before an Iphone was even a twinkle, with screens that you could touch albeit with a stylus and mobile web browsers etc..
And having dealt with a couple of Win Mobile devices, I can honestly say that its continued success is a total mystery to me.
Please read the thread you're posting to. This isn't a thread about how Apple doesn't offer compact or lightweight computers. It's about how Apple doesn't offer any decent cheap computers. Mini is irrelevant, because it doesn't match the requirements of a typical buyer in this market.
And there's a reason they don't.
The profit margins are absolutely miniscule. That PC "you can get from Dell for $500" probably makes Dell about $20-30 gross profit - and if you look at Dell's accounts, you'll see that while they're making a tidy profit it's on the back of a turnover that's absolutely immense. Hell, IBM decided it wasn't worthwhile. Wouldn't surprise me if HP make a similar decision within the next 3 years.
It would be more accurate to say that nobody's yet come up with an even remotely reliable form of rehabilitation. If such a thing can exist, it certainly isn't prison.
Programmers for Microsoft:.... Deliver the products you've come to expect
Do you mean "Years late, then claim that their product displays incredible innovation because it implements features which have been in other systems for years, sometimes decades and even then their implementation of it is seldom any good until at least the second, often third version"?
Those Windows 7 commercials where random people describe how they emailed Microsoft about making Windows 7 better all end with the person saying "... and Windows 7 was my idea!"
It all makes sense now. The people in the commercial weren't protected by the GPL, and MS took their ideas.
I'm not so sure. I swear to God that all those great ideas the voxpops are claiming were theirs have been part of OS X since at least 10.5, frequently longer.
Being as I regularly have to do so, I have reached an inescapable conclusion.
The commercial software industry does not want you to be able to keep track of licenses.
Why on Earth would I say this? Simple:
- You're dealing with a product which by definition can be copied fairly easily. It follows that you need an auditing programme in addition to any asset tracking you apply to software. BUT.... - Packages have wildly varying license terms which can't easily be audited for. It's OK to install most Adobe software on two computers at once provided it's impossible that it will be in use on both computers at once. So a copy on a person's company-provided PC at home and the same copy on their PC at work is fine. How on Earth do you audit for things like that? - No software application I am aware of makes the job of auditing for that particular piece of software easy. Applications frequently change the only registry entry which announces what version is installed when a patch is released, even though the software is only licensed according to major version. Vendors seldom, if ever publish a list of the checksums of all major, minor and patched versions of the.exe which actually starts up the application so you can compare the checksum of what's on your PC with the list to find out which version you have and marry this up with what you're licensed for. - Software auditing packages are (by quite some margin) some of the most odious things I've ever evaluated. They frequently have one or more of the following "features":
+ License terms rather more onerous than the actual packages you're auditing for.
+ A recommended deployment mechanism which is still stuck in the mid 1990's. ("Visit each PC in turn and run the program, save the results to a shared drive or a floppy")
+ Don't actually audit anything reliably. (Checking the registry but not scanning for executables is just not adequate considering the costs involved in doing it wrong).
+ No sensible reporting of any description. (No I do not want to go through a list of applications for every PC and marry it up with my own invoices. Why can't I just tell the application what I've bought and have it alert me to any discrepancies?)
+ Generate enormous quantities of data but provide no way to turn that into information. (Windows itself ships with dozens, if not hundreds of executables and many other commercial packages contain several small executables. I don't need to know the name of every one of these, nor do I care about licenses for Internet Explorer. I understand that you can't be expected to know every nuance of every package out there, but why can't I say "Ignore this from now on" or "File it under the heading of Ships as part of X"?)
+ Conspicuously ignore important things. (Fonts are licensed too, y'know)
- License terms that are so difficult to understand that you come away feeling there's something very important you've missed. Show me a company that runs every software package they want to buy past their lawyers first, I'll show you a liar.
This, actually, is probably the most sensible solution here. It's reasonable, it's not too confrontational, it tries to find a solution without asking the CEO to sign off the equivalent of a person's salary for six months in one big lump.
I would add that if you really do succeed in bringing this up diplomatically (and no, marching into the CEOs office and saying "We owe Microsoft, Adobe et al tens of thousands of dollars, we must pay them now or stop using all of their software immediately" is not diplomatic) and you still get ignored, then you can be fairly certain that the respect the company has for you is approximately zero.
As soon as you go outside the relatively mainstream and/or "sexy" problems, F/OSS ceases to be a panacea. It's often hard to find something appropriate and when you do you'll have to pay someone who really knows what they're doing to get everything working nicely together. And industry-specific software is invariably an arm and a leg to license.
There is a reason that hosted apps are becoming popular. Take a typical costing example, £20/user/month, no need to pay anyone to set anything up, no need to pay expensive licensing fees upfront, no need to buy a server and find somewhere to put it? Money talks, and when it's a choice between that or find the barrier to getting your small business off the ground is unrealistically high it talks pretty damn loudly.
Other Departments are going to have to expense their own software, and you just aid in the installation and support.
In which case your budget is still going to go way up because instead of a volume license for Office (can be installed on a number of machines, installation can be scripted, a master copy can be stored on a server somewhere, can use the same key on all the machines) you'll get a couple of dozen boxed copies (to which none of the above applies).
Sure pulling the plug is easier, but, really, how hard would it have been to just stop routing packets to that MAC address?
Technical issues aside (it's easy enough to fake a MAC but we'll assume that this isn't the issue here) it doesn't take an enormous amount of foresight to see that in so doing you're essentially going to spend the rest of your life playing whack-a-mole at the behest of the MPAA.
If it's being properly cached then it shouldn't ask the server about it AT ALL, assuming of course that proper cacheability directives have been placed on the response.
Go set up a caching proxy sometime, turn the logging up to max and take a look at what you get.
You would be AMAZED how many things these days cross the Internet with Pragma: No-Cache and HTTP/1.1 cache control headers.
Obviously if you're writing the app yourself you can make it cache-friendly and stick a reverse caching proxy in front of it, which helps everyone. But this doesn't help the lone admin trying to stretch available bandwidth as far as is humanly possible within his organisation.
Except that it isn't. No one made me sign a contract when I bought my copy of Leopard, any more than they tacked on after-sale terms when I bought a book and a cup of coffee afterward. Maybe you had to sign a lease agreement or similar, but I don't know of anyone else who did.
You don't need to sign something to enter into an agreement. This is one of the first things law students learn with the Carbolic Smoke Ball case.
That you can take this operating system and run it on other like hardware is not insignificant.
Er.... yes it is.
There's no reason you couldn't have bought a different PPC-based system and tried to persuade it to run OS X back in the Mac-pre-Intel days. Or, going further back, hacked around with System (whatever) to run on an alternate 68000-based system. (Atari, anyone?).
The only real difference is it's a hell of a lot cheaper to do it today.
There are also examples of people taking firmware for one manufacturer's home router and running it on anothers. Not difficult, most of the hardware around seems to be based on one of only a handful of reference designs. But nobody goes complaining how much Linksys sucks because they can't get the latest Linksys firmware to run on their D-Link router.
Maybe if "any other company" had sold the product explicitly with Atom support and then reneged on that promise.
AFAICT the argument from the whiners is "Even though OS X is explicitly sold with strings attached which make it hard for me to legally build a hackintosh, it shouldn't be because I don't like it and any attempt to enforce such strings, no matter how feeble such an attempt may be, is nasty!"
As I understand it, though, the question asked merely wants to have the remote control work in all rooms as he doesn't even want separate speakers in the rooms. Surely that can be achieved using a universal remote with RF and a RF reciever on a PC?
I don't want audio separates - ie. separate speakers, wiring and amp in each room. A portable device containing speaker and amp is fine.
I'm still at a point where I may be moving house every couple of years, so wireless is a big plus point - particularly in the UK where 100+ year houses with brick walls throughout and rooms all odd shapes are by no means unusual.
To be honest, if I'd expected my question to make it to the front page I probably would have worded it a bit more carefully.
The original poster was looking for something low cost.
Not strictly true, though I could perhaps have phrased it better.
I was looking for something at a fair price. By fair, I don't mean expensive, I mean "is reasonable considering what you get for your money". Logitech, for example, charge a lot less for their Squeezebox products - is this because they're terrible? Or because Sonos are aiming at a market with more money than sense?
While you can execute rm -f wife, it can take a very long time to complete and an inevitable side effect of this is that the wife process, prior to termination, will execute mv money wife and this cannot be avoided.
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Very true, but it'll only keep out an absolute moron. Anyone with half a brain will use a distributed mechanism, which means DenyHosts will only see failed password attempts from a given host a few times.
There's plenty more to do:
- Don't allow root logins via SSH, or limit them to key-based logins (trivially easy in /etc/ssh/sshd.conf)
- Disable shell accounts unless they're really needed. rssh is useful here - limit what a user with SSH login authority can do.
- Lock down other services. What good does DenyHosts do you if SSH and a separate app which can't be locked with DenyHosts both use the same password mechanism?
- Lock accounts which have more than N failed logins. (Though if you've centralised logins such as in the above example, it'd probably be better to do this from whatever system deals with the authentication, eg. LDAP).
The real question is: do they even need to in order to maintain their ridiculous profit margins?
The truth is, if you look in the context of most other businesses outside of the computer industry Apple don't have ridiculous profit margins.
The rest of the PC industry is trying to eke out a living on the most absurdly thin margins. There's a reason why the number of PC manufacturers is going down every year - 10 or 15 years ago it was possible for anyone to buy a bunch of component, build PCs and make a fair profit. Today, that's almost impossible.
"PXE was introduced as part of the Wired for Management framework by Intel and is described in the specification (version 2.1) published by Intel and Systemsoft on September 20, 1999." (Wikipedia)
I imagine you're talking about something like booting Unix workstations from an NFS share, right?
It's been possible to boot from Ethernet since long before then. Hell, DHCP is based on BOOTP (which dates from 1985) and most modern DHCP servers can also act as BOOTP servers.
Pick up an old PCI or ISA network card, there's a strong chance you'll find a socket on there for a chip. The idea was you bought the chip and you could then boot directly from the network.
I'm not quite sure what PXE adds, to be perfectly honest. Though I have noticed some applications which add a PXE server to the network without having to reconfigure your existing DHCP server. I'm not quite sure how that works, but I do know that those applications don't work if your existing DHCP server is handing out boot instructions to PXE requests.
Xeros Alto to ?????
Visicalc to ????
Someone actually has to come up with new ideas.
Yep, and those ideas are almost never seen in mainstream PC-based computing first.
Win Mobile was pretty successful in a business setting. Its probably had its day now but think of all the xdas out there before an Iphone was even a twinkle, with screens that you could touch albeit with a stylus and mobile web browsers etc..
And having dealt with a couple of Win Mobile devices, I can honestly say that its continued success is a total mystery to me.
Please read the thread you're posting to. This isn't a thread about how Apple doesn't offer compact or lightweight computers. It's about how Apple doesn't offer any decent cheap computers. Mini is irrelevant, because it doesn't match the requirements of a typical buyer in this market.
And there's a reason they don't.
The profit margins are absolutely miniscule. That PC "you can get from Dell for $500" probably makes Dell about $20-30 gross profit - and if you look at Dell's accounts, you'll see that while they're making a tidy profit it's on the back of a turnover that's absolutely immense. Hell, IBM decided it wasn't worthwhile. Wouldn't surprise me if HP make a similar decision within the next 3 years.
It would be more accurate to say that nobody's yet come up with an even remotely reliable form of rehabilitation. If such a thing can exist, it certainly isn't prison.
Programmers for Microsoft: ....
Deliver the products you've come to expect
Do you mean "Years late, then claim that their product displays incredible innovation because it implements features which have been in other systems for years, sometimes decades and even then their implementation of it is seldom any good until at least the second, often third version"?
Those Windows 7 commercials where random people describe how they emailed Microsoft about making Windows 7 better all end with the person saying " ... and Windows 7 was my idea!"
It all makes sense now. The people in the commercial weren't protected by the GPL, and MS took their ideas.
I'm not so sure. I swear to God that all those great ideas the voxpops are claiming were theirs have been part of OS X since at least 10.5, frequently longer.
I hate keeping track of licenses.
Being as I regularly have to do so, I have reached an inescapable conclusion.
The commercial software industry does not want you to be able to keep track of licenses.
Why on Earth would I say this? Simple:
- You're dealing with a product which by definition can be copied fairly easily. It follows that you need an auditing programme in addition to any asset tracking you apply to software. BUT.... .exe which actually starts up the application so you can compare the checksum of what's on your PC with the list to find out which version you have and marry this up with what you're licensed for.
- Packages have wildly varying license terms which can't easily be audited for. It's OK to install most Adobe software on two computers at once provided it's impossible that it will be in use on both computers at once. So a copy on a person's company-provided PC at home and the same copy on their PC at work is fine. How on Earth do you audit for things like that?
- No software application I am aware of makes the job of auditing for that particular piece of software easy. Applications frequently change the only registry entry which announces what version is installed when a patch is released, even though the software is only licensed according to major version. Vendors seldom, if ever publish a list of the checksums of all major, minor and patched versions of the
- Software auditing packages are (by quite some margin) some of the most odious things I've ever evaluated. They frequently have one or more of the following "features":
+ License terms rather more onerous than the actual packages you're auditing for.
+ A recommended deployment mechanism which is still stuck in the mid 1990's. ("Visit each PC in turn and run the program, save the results to a shared drive or a floppy")
+ Don't actually audit anything reliably. (Checking the registry but not scanning for executables is just not adequate considering the costs involved in doing it wrong).
+ No sensible reporting of any description. (No I do not want to go through a list of applications for every PC and marry it up with my own invoices. Why can't I just tell the application what I've bought and have it alert me to any discrepancies?)
+ Generate enormous quantities of data but provide no way to turn that into information. (Windows itself ships with dozens, if not hundreds of executables and many other commercial packages contain several small executables. I don't need to know the name of every one of these, nor do I care about licenses for Internet Explorer. I understand that you can't be expected to know every nuance of every package out there, but why can't I say "Ignore this from now on" or "File it under the heading of Ships as part of X"?)
+ Conspicuously ignore important things. (Fonts are licensed too, y'know)
- License terms that are so difficult to understand that you come away feeling there's something very important you've missed. Show me a company that runs every software package they want to buy past their lawyers first, I'll show you a liar.
It's been a problem since before people were regularly exchanging documents and data over the Internet.
My own mother bought a PC partly because she thought people were "laughing at her" for using something else, and that was in the mid 1990's.
Would you really want your job back in such circumstances?
This, actually, is probably the most sensible solution here. It's reasonable, it's not too confrontational, it tries to find a solution without asking the CEO to sign off the equivalent of a person's salary for six months in one big lump.
I would add that if you really do succeed in bringing this up diplomatically (and no, marching into the CEOs office and saying "We owe Microsoft, Adobe et al tens of thousands of dollars, we must pay them now or stop using all of their software immediately" is not diplomatic) and you still get ignored, then you can be fairly certain that the respect the company has for you is approximately zero.
I actually don't think it's as simple as that.
As soon as you go outside the relatively mainstream and/or "sexy" problems, F/OSS ceases to be a panacea. It's often hard to find something appropriate and when you do you'll have to pay someone who really knows what they're doing to get everything working nicely together. And industry-specific software is invariably an arm and a leg to license.
There is a reason that hosted apps are becoming popular. Take a typical costing example, £20/user/month, no need to pay anyone to set anything up, no need to pay expensive licensing fees upfront, no need to buy a server and find somewhere to put it? Money talks, and when it's a choice between that or find the barrier to getting your small business off the ground is unrealistically high it talks pretty damn loudly.
Other Departments are going to have to expense their own software, and you just aid in the installation and support.
In which case your budget is still going to go way up because instead of a volume license for Office (can be installed on a number of machines, installation can be scripted, a master copy can be stored on a server somewhere, can use the same key on all the machines) you'll get a couple of dozen boxed copies (to which none of the above applies).
Sure pulling the plug is easier, but, really, how hard would it have been to just stop routing packets to that MAC address?
Technical issues aside (it's easy enough to fake a MAC but we'll assume that this isn't the issue here) it doesn't take an enormous amount of foresight to see that in so doing you're essentially going to spend the rest of your life playing whack-a-mole at the behest of the MPAA.
The words "door", "horse", "stable" and "bolted" spring to mind there.
How is the separate GET slower?
If it's being properly cached then it shouldn't ask the server about it AT ALL, assuming of course that proper cacheability directives have been placed on the response.
Go set up a caching proxy sometime, turn the logging up to max and take a look at what you get.
You would be AMAZED how many things these days cross the Internet with Pragma: No-Cache and HTTP/1.1 cache control headers.
Obviously if you're writing the app yourself you can make it cache-friendly and stick a reverse caching proxy in front of it, which helps everyone. But this doesn't help the lone admin trying to stretch available bandwidth as far as is humanly possible within his organisation.
Except that it isn't. No one made me sign a contract when I bought my copy of Leopard, any more than they tacked on after-sale terms when I bought a book and a cup of coffee afterward. Maybe you had to sign a lease agreement or similar, but I don't know of anyone else who did.
You don't need to sign something to enter into an agreement. This is one of the first things law students learn with the Carbolic Smoke Ball case.
That you can take this operating system and run it on other like hardware is not insignificant.
Er.... yes it is.
There's no reason you couldn't have bought a different PPC-based system and tried to persuade it to run OS X back in the Mac-pre-Intel days. Or, going further back, hacked around with System (whatever) to run on an alternate 68000-based system. (Atari, anyone?).
The only real difference is it's a hell of a lot cheaper to do it today.
There are also examples of people taking firmware for one manufacturer's home router and running it on anothers. Not difficult, most of the hardware around seems to be based on one of only a handful of reference designs. But nobody goes complaining how much Linksys sucks because they can't get the latest Linksys firmware to run on their D-Link router.
More to the point, without the Fair Use exception there would be no such thing as a search engine.
Be careful what you ask for, Mr. Murdoch. You might get it.
Any other company and yes, they would be blamed.
Maybe if "any other company" had sold the product explicitly with Atom support and then reneged on that promise.
AFAICT the argument from the whiners is "Even though OS X is explicitly sold with strings attached which make it hard for me to legally build a hackintosh, it shouldn't be because I don't like it and any attempt to enforce such strings, no matter how feeble such an attempt may be, is nasty!"
As I understand it, though, the question asked merely wants to have the remote control work in all rooms as he doesn't even want separate speakers in the rooms. Surely that can be achieved using a universal remote with RF and a RF reciever on a PC?
I don't want audio separates - ie. separate speakers, wiring and amp in each room. A portable device containing speaker and amp is fine.
I'm still at a point where I may be moving house every couple of years, so wireless is a big plus point - particularly in the UK where 100+ year houses with brick walls throughout and rooms all odd shapes are by no means unusual.
To be honest, if I'd expected my question to make it to the front page I probably would have worded it a bit more carefully.
The original poster was looking for something low cost.
Not strictly true, though I could perhaps have phrased it better.
I was looking for something at a fair price. By fair, I don't mean expensive, I mean "is reasonable considering what you get for your money". Logitech, for example, charge a lot less for their Squeezebox products - is this because they're terrible? Or because Sonos are aiming at a market with more money than sense?
Unfortunately, from man(1) wife:
NOTES:
While you can execute rm -f wife, it can take a very long time to complete and an inevitable side effect of this is that the wife process, prior to termination, will execute mv money wife and this cannot be avoided.