Yes, I know it is better than gzip, and it is also supported everywhere.
"Supported everywhere" is pretty nice to have. Particularly if you can't guarantee what kind of system you'll be recovering data to in the event of having to go back to old backups.
I've stored things in obscure formats before. It's a PITA if you find your platform changes drastically 1 year later, the software which wrote the files isn't available on the new platform and you need to restore something from a pre-platform-change old backup 2 years later. Basically, it's a variation on the "but all our documents are.DOC!" issue which keeps so many people using Office but substantially worse because at least Office is ubiquitous enough that a lot of the hard work of reverse-engineering the format has been done.
That being said, if all the algorithms used here are free to use, documented and not patented, it's much less of an issue.
Sorry, while this story is upsetting, I'm not really outraged when somebody is falsely arrested, as long as they are not falsely convicted, and as long as the basis for the arrest was honest and without any malice or impropriety. I certainly would like to see the number of innocent people arrested minimized, and in that sense maybe we can learn something about how field testing methods can be less than reliable, and maybe in certain cases their findings should have to be corroborated before they can be used to arrest somebody. I was just kind of annoyed that the detail of "this person's situation has been totally resolved" was not included in the writeup.
Technically, you're correct. But mud sticks.
What if he wasn't a drummer with a band? What if he was an IT geek with a day job in a "respectable" office like a large percentage of/. readership? Would our collective employers be pleased to know that someone they employed had just been arrested on suspicion of carrying a date-rape drug?
In many parts of the world, my guess is you'd come home from your short involuntary stint in prison to find yourself out of work with little hope of a reference or of redress. The police "acted properly" by arresting you when they thought you'd committed a crime, and released you when it became apparent you hadn't. Not their fault your employer dropped you like a hot potato.
What it does do is highlight that some of these tests need to be drastically improved.
IIRC, every single litigant involved in cases with SCO has filed motions for summary judgement.
I think they're filing them more in hope than in expectation - in the hope that it will close the case fast and minimise legal fees. Novell, IBM et al are a lot of things, but I can't imagine they want to hand over any more money than they have to to their lawyers.
In my experience, updating a gentoo box infrequently is a bad idea. You should either update every week/month or not at all. The way I look at it, you either want a system with the latest everything, or you want a system which works. If you want the first, you should expect to spend a bit of time working on it. If you want the second - why on earth are you updating every four months.
Not to sound too much like an AOL weenie, but you're absolutely right.
I inherited a bunch of gentoo boxes, and I've kept everything on gentoo because it seemed easier than changing it and trying to maintain a bunch of different Linux distributions.
On the one hand, it's fantastic. I never have to worry about major OS upgrades which I need to do because otherwise support (and hence security fixes) will cease to exist.
On the other hand, I either update frequently (not ideal on a system which is business-critical) or I accept that a major change or update will cause so much breakage that I may as well rebuild the box from scratch and bring the data back from backup.
In fact, I'm in exactly that position now. I need to migrate a box whcih hasn't had a major update in at least 2 years to newer hardware (the old hardware which I inherited is out of its service contract and doesn't have redundant power supply or disk - it works but I'd be a lot happier with at least two power supplies and RAID1).
All the newer hardware I have available to me requires a newer kernel (this is Gentoo, "building your own kernel" hasn't quite become the archaic "why on Earth would you want to do that?" thing it is with other distributions). But the previous one was built with devfs, which has been dropped from modern kernels in favour of udev.
So now I have to install udev. Which means I have to update the base system. Which means LDAP authentication breaks. Which means I have to rebuild OpenLDAP. Which means I have to restore my LDAP database from backup. Then I find some other obscure thing has broken so LDAP still doesn't work. Oh yes, and nscd is now crashing every 10 minutes for no apparent reason, leaving no logs or other trace. After 6 hours of this with no end in sight, I gave up and reverted back to the old hardware. It may not quite meet my requirements for reliable hardware, but at least the OS installed on it works.
It would probably have been quicker just to install Debian or even Ubuntu Server LTS and migrate just the user data and configuration - which is quite likely what I'll wind up doing in the end.
That is the most nonsensical thing I've heard in my life.
I assure you, the child doing the breastfeeding is substantially younger than 13. That being the case, why is a picture of the human breast "only suitable for over-13s"?
I hope you won't take offence if I say "cobblers".
I've looked after dozens of HP inkjets and fed them nothing but OEM ink. Certainly a couple of years ago (don't know about today, I avoid inkjets as much as possible), the sponge which wipes the ink from the printhead had a tendency to get so clogged in ink that it would literally jam the head in and stop it from moving. The reason? There was a congealed mess of ink about 1/2 an inch thick which had to be removed with copious quantities of industrial tissue paper and alcohol.
"Messy" only begins to describe it. After doing it, I looked like a vet who's just helped a cow through a particularly difficult labour.
Hey! Youi sound like you know what you're talking about, what are you doing on/.?
All joking aside, I was under the impression that viruses tend to mutate, making treatment rather difficult. Is it possible for a virus to mutate such that it uses a different attack vector? Because if it is, this is surely just another in a long line of treatments which will sooner or later become ineffective, and not a "cure for AIDS" at all.
Because that's not how change should happen in large/business critical applications.
What should happen is that the update is thoroughly tested, a change control request is raised and at the next change control meeting the change request is discussed.
The change request should include at the very least a benefit analysis (what's the benefit in making this change), risk analysis (what could happen if it goes wrong) and a rollback plan (what we do if it goes wrong). None of these should necessarily be vastly complicated - but if the risk analysis is "our entire network falls apart horribly" and the rollback plan is "er... we haven't got one. Suppose we'll have to go back to backups. We have tested those, haven't we?" then the change request should be denied.
As much as anything else, this process forces the person who's going to be making the change to think about what they're going to be doing in a clear way and make sure they've got a plan B. It also serves as a means to notify the management that a change is going to be taking place, and that a risk is attached to it.
And if a change is made but hasn't been approved through that process, then it's a disciplinary issue.
Of course, it's entirely possible that such a process was in place and someone did put a change through without approval. In which case, I don't envy their next job interview.... "Why did you leave your last job?"
Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges. With appropriate plugins, Office will interoperate with ODF documents -- just as any number of other applications will.
I think the reason is that this doesn't work both ways - while Office could have a plugin written to support ODF, you can't write an alternative Office suite which supports OOXML. Not because there's anything wrong with OOXML as such, but a few issues surround implementing it:
If China standardises on.DOCX (Office XML) as a file format, Sun haven't got a hope of selling StarOffice there. Similarly, if they standardise on their own format, StarOffice is at a disadvantage because the format isn't native to Star/OpenOffice.
But standardise on ODF, and suddenly Sun are on a reasonably level playing field with Microsoft (and, for that matter, the incumbent company producing office software which writes the native Chinese file format) at selling their office suite. That's assuming Microsoft *do* wind up providing a ODF plugin (I won't believe it until I see a download available from the Microsoft website). If they don't, Sun have a huge advantage.
Which is annoying for those of us who love a good Microsoft bash, it seems they are not the worst offenders in this case.
I'm not sure they need to bribe that much. Given their current market position, all they need to do is spread a few seeds of FUD in the minds of people who are wondering if it's necessary to stick with a Microsoft-based solution and they've got the contract. If that doesn't work, plan B is to publicly agree to a special price "because you're such a large customer/because you're the government/because we think you smell nice".
Publicly agreeing to a special price is slightly different from offering a kickback behind closed doors.
that even being accused of it should ruin one's life. Virginia Tech shooting had a false suspect. The mistake has been revealed and he is fine now.
Absolutely.
Particularly given that had events not played out as they did, the false suspect could be in prison today awaiting trial with the real gunman still walking free.
The defence is always better funded. To see why this is so, consider this: wouldn't you be if your liberty and life was at stake?
Your life and liberty may be at stake, but a lot of damage has already been done as soon as the accusation is first made.
In parts (where clearly "learning English" and "critical thinking" aren't strong points - peadophiles don't tend to arrange for their sexual tendencies to be printed on their business cards) this can even happen before an accusation is made.
If people are going to break the law to get some child porn, don't you think that they might try to hide their actions by breaking the law, too?
I hate to break it to you, but the UK government is only just realising this.
True story: a couple of years ago I wrote to my MP (parliamentary representative) and pointed out that criminals, by definition, do not obey the law.
Several weeks later I received a reply informing me that "the government was aware of this, was trying to think of ways around it and wanted to know if I had any suggestions",
Smart people are willing to pay for quality, someone just needs to offer a quality printer.
On that subject, I think the highest quality printer I ever clapped eyes upon was a Kyocera - and that was only about 2 or 3 years ago.
I only had access to it for a day, so I didn't get much time to test it properly. Shame, because it was built like a brick outhouse and supported every major printer language you could think of and a few you couldn't. You don't see many desktop-size black and white laser printers which require two people to move and come with built-in steel handles these days.
No idea if they're similar today. But price-wise, they occupy a similar corner of the market so they may well be.
One of the advantages owning your own printer has is that its much cheaper to own than any of the "managed services" pay-per-page copiers already in the market.
Quite correct.
Where this business model does shine is in the "company with branches all over the country",
In such a company, there's a strong chance that there's no IT staff anywhere near most of the branches and even a tricky paper jam could stuff that branch up. What the company is paying for is not the printouts at all. They're paying for the peace of mind knowing that if anything goes wrong with a printer - anything at all, anywhere across the entire company - all they have to do is place a call with Lexmark/Xerox/HP who will send a man with a screwdriver out within X working hours to get the printer working again.
with lasers being the price they are now. You can get a fairly inexpensive Samsung or maybe even an HP laser printer for $100 - 150, sometimes on sale for under 100, and with a full toner cartridge get thousands of pages out of it.
Every cheap laser printer like that I have seen shipped with "starter" (ie. half full) cartridges which cost almost the same to replace as the printer itself did to buy in the first place.
They've applied the inkjet model to laser printers.
And if you use Linux and use UUIDs instead of device names in your fstab, then it doesn't much matter what the hardware is; the distribution will reconfigure on boot (unlike Windows, which will give you INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE if you don't have the same kind of host adapter, at the same PCI address) and find the devices by UUID.
Not that most of us work in a Linux-only shop, but it's just one more reason Windows sucks and Linux doesn't.
I had to think for a minute before I figured out what you were talking about. Then I realised you meant deploying the same image to various types of hardware.
This is a field in which Windows has historically sucked a helluva lot. Various tools have been provided to try and work around it (some by Microsoft, some by third-party vendors), but most of the tools I've found have introduced as many problems as they've solved.
I know Symantec Ghost claims to solve it but the trial version doesn't allow you to test any of those features, the only way you find out how well they work is after you've handed the money over. TBH, I haven't dedicated much time to solving the problem in XP and I've never even gone near trying it in Vista so it may be completely solved.
The alternative - and one I have seen done in larger companies - is to have one image per hardware model and standardise desktop hardware to a particular make and model. Of course, when the model is updated you need a new image, which sucks. And this method only really works when you're large enough and have a high enough turnover to buy many PCs at a time every couple of months. If you're only buying a dozen PCs a year it's fairly lousy.
Don't know about the country you're in, but here in the UK we have a law called the Sale of Goods Act.
Briefly, "goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold". You can't sell someone a hammer which is softer than any nail on the market.
I'd say a DVD which may or may not play and it's potluck whether or not it will isn't fit for purpose. And the Sale of Goods act trumps any store policy, I don't care what the spotty teenager thinks.
That's the law. That being said, I've noticed a trend recently to instruct store managers in company policy but not tell them how the sale of goods act works, so you wind up having to argue that you don't give a damn about company policy, you're not returning the goods under company policy, you're returning them because they're unfit for purpose. Such arguments tend to be more effective when carried out slightly louder than normal speaking voice in a crowded store.
Yes, I know it is better than gzip, and it is also supported everywhere.
.DOC!" issue which keeps so many people using Office but substantially worse because at least Office is ubiquitous enough that a lot of the hard work of reverse-engineering the format has been done.
"Supported everywhere" is pretty nice to have. Particularly if you can't guarantee what kind of system you'll be recovering data to in the event of having to go back to old backups.
I've stored things in obscure formats before. It's a PITA if you find your platform changes drastically 1 year later, the software which wrote the files isn't available on the new platform and you need to restore something from a pre-platform-change old backup 2 years later. Basically, it's a variation on the "but all our documents are
That being said, if all the algorithms used here are free to use, documented and not patented, it's much less of an issue.
Only on /. could that comment get modded "insightful".
Sorry, while this story is upsetting, I'm not really outraged when somebody is falsely arrested, as long as they are not falsely convicted, and as long as the basis for the arrest was honest and without any malice or impropriety. I certainly would like to see the number of innocent people arrested minimized, and in that sense maybe we can learn something about how field testing methods can be less than reliable, and maybe in certain cases their findings should have to be corroborated before they can be used to arrest somebody. I was just kind of annoyed that the detail of "this person's situation has been totally resolved" was not included in the writeup.
/. readership? Would our collective employers be pleased to know that someone they employed had just been arrested on suspicion of carrying a date-rape drug?
Technically, you're correct. But mud sticks.
What if he wasn't a drummer with a band? What if he was an IT geek with a day job in a "respectable" office like a large percentage of
In many parts of the world, my guess is you'd come home from your short involuntary stint in prison to find yourself out of work with little hope of a reference or of redress. The police "acted properly" by arresting you when they thought you'd committed a crime, and released you when it became apparent you hadn't. Not their fault your employer dropped you like a hot potato.
What it does do is highlight that some of these tests need to be drastically improved.
IIRC, every single litigant involved in cases with SCO has filed motions for summary judgement.
I think they're filing them more in hope than in expectation - in the hope that it will close the case fast and minimise legal fees. Novell, IBM et al are a lot of things, but I can't imagine they want to hand over any more money than they have to to their lawyers.
In my experience, updating a gentoo box infrequently is a bad idea. You should either update every week/month or not at all. The way I look at it, you either want a system with the latest everything, or you want a system which works. If you want the first, you should expect to spend a bit of time working on it. If you want the second - why on earth are you updating every four months.
Not to sound too much like an AOL weenie, but you're absolutely right.
I inherited a bunch of gentoo boxes, and I've kept everything on gentoo because it seemed easier than changing it and trying to maintain a bunch of different Linux distributions.
On the one hand, it's fantastic. I never have to worry about major OS upgrades which I need to do because otherwise support (and hence security fixes) will cease to exist.
On the other hand, I either update frequently (not ideal on a system which is business-critical) or I accept that a major change or update will cause so much breakage that I may as well rebuild the box from scratch and bring the data back from backup.
In fact, I'm in exactly that position now. I need to migrate a box whcih hasn't had a major update in at least 2 years to newer hardware (the old hardware which I inherited is out of its service contract and doesn't have redundant power supply or disk - it works but I'd be a lot happier with at least two power supplies and RAID1).
All the newer hardware I have available to me requires a newer kernel (this is Gentoo, "building your own kernel" hasn't quite become the archaic "why on Earth would you want to do that?" thing it is with other distributions). But the previous one was built with devfs, which has been dropped from modern kernels in favour of udev.
So now I have to install udev. Which means I have to update the base system. Which means LDAP authentication breaks. Which means I have to rebuild OpenLDAP. Which means I have to restore my LDAP database from backup. Then I find some other obscure thing has broken so LDAP still doesn't work. Oh yes, and nscd is now crashing every 10 minutes for no apparent reason, leaving no logs or other trace. After 6 hours of this with no end in sight, I gave up and reverted back to the old hardware. It may not quite meet my requirements for reliable hardware, but at least the OS installed on it works.
It would probably have been quicker just to install Debian or even Ubuntu Server LTS and migrate just the user data and configuration - which is quite likely what I'll wind up doing in the end.
(PG-13 rated) breastfeeding photos
That is the most nonsensical thing I've heard in my life.
I assure you, the child doing the breastfeeding is substantially younger than 13. That being the case, why is a picture of the human breast "only suitable for over-13s"?
I hope you won't take offence if I say "cobblers".
I've looked after dozens of HP inkjets and fed them nothing but OEM ink. Certainly a couple of years ago (don't know about today, I avoid inkjets as much as possible), the sponge which wipes the ink from the printhead had a tendency to get so clogged in ink that it would literally jam the head in and stop it from moving. The reason? There was a congealed mess of ink about 1/2 an inch thick which had to be removed with copious quantities of industrial tissue paper and alcohol.
"Messy" only begins to describe it. After doing it, I looked like a vet who's just helped a cow through a particularly difficult labour.
Hey! Youi sound like you know what you're talking about, what are you doing on /.?
All joking aside, I was under the impression that viruses tend to mutate, making treatment rather difficult. Is it possible for a virus to mutate such that it uses a different attack vector? Because if it is, this is surely just another in a long line of treatments which will sooner or later become ineffective, and not a "cure for AIDS" at all.
I mean we can try to teach them, but, we can't "behave" for them....
Not very easy to teach them when their own leaders are denying a link between HIV and unprotected sex.
Or accept blood transfusions - particularly in any country where the screening may not be very good.
Or be born to HIV-positive parents.
How about a little blame for the devs?
Because that's not how change should happen in large/business critical applications.
What should happen is that the update is thoroughly tested, a change control request is raised and at the next change control meeting the change request is discussed.
The change request should include at the very least a benefit analysis (what's the benefit in making this change), risk analysis (what could happen if it goes wrong) and a rollback plan (what we do if it goes wrong). None of these should necessarily be vastly complicated - but if the risk analysis is "our entire network falls apart horribly" and the rollback plan is "er... we haven't got one. Suppose we'll have to go back to backups. We have tested those, haven't we?" then the change request should be denied.
As much as anything else, this process forces the person who's going to be making the change to think about what they're going to be doing in a clear way and make sure they've got a plan B. It also serves as a means to notify the management that a change is going to be taking place, and that a risk is attached to it.
And if a change is made but hasn't been approved through that process, then it's a disciplinary issue.
Of course, it's entirely possible that such a process was in place and someone did put a change through without approval. In which case, I don't envy their next job interview.... "Why did you leave your last job?"
Since when was MS Office an alternative to ODF?
4 43 23237&mode=thread&tid=155&tid=99m l?tid=109
.DOCX (Office XML) as a file format, Sun haven't got a hope of selling StarOffice there. Similarly, if they standardise on their own format, StarOffice is at a disadvantage because the format isn't native to Star/OpenOffice.
Office is an application suite. ODF is a document format. They're apples and oranges. With appropriate plugins, Office will interoperate with ODF documents -- just as any number of other applications will.
I think the reason is that this doesn't work both ways - while Office could have a plugin written to support ODF, you can't write an alternative Office suite which supports OOXML. Not because there's anything wrong with OOXML as such, but a few issues surround implementing it:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/13/16112
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/23/2
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/04/13/2031259.sht
If China standardises on
But standardise on ODF, and suddenly Sun are on a reasonably level playing field with Microsoft (and, for that matter, the incumbent company producing office software which writes the native Chinese file format) at selling their office suite. That's assuming Microsoft *do* wind up providing a ODF plugin (I won't believe it until I see a download available from the Microsoft website). If they don't, Sun have a huge advantage.
Which is annoying for those of us who love a good Microsoft bash, it seems they are not the worst offenders in this case.
I'm not sure they need to bribe that much. Given their current market position, all they need to do is spread a few seeds of FUD in the minds of people who are wondering if it's necessary to stick with a Microsoft-based solution and they've got the contract. If that doesn't work, plan B is to publicly agree to a special price "because you're such a large customer/because you're the government/because we think you smell nice".
Publicly agreeing to a special price is slightly different from offering a kickback behind closed doors.
It is a fact that no matter who buys this material, 75 to 90% of it ends up in the hands of our children.
We also know that once a person is perverted, it is practically impossible for that person to adjust to normal attitudes in regard to sex.
(Free clue before you mod me troll: I'm referring to things which have been said in anti-porn propaganda).
I got a minolta on sale 88 bucks brand new.
The 'starter' cartrige got me well over 1000 pages, probablt closer to 2000.
I paid 44.95 for a new cartige and expect to get 10,000 pages out of it.
That's actually not bad. I've noticed Minolta's printers have been getting very interesting in the last 4 years or so.
Mind if I ask which model it is?
that even being accused of it should ruin one's life. Virginia Tech shooting had a false suspect. The mistake has been revealed and he is fine now.
Absolutely.
Particularly given that had events not played out as they did, the false suspect could be in prison today awaiting trial with the real gunman still walking free.
The defence is always better funded. To see why this is so, consider this: wouldn't you be if your liberty and life was at stake?
Your life and liberty may be at stake, but a lot of damage has already been done as soon as the accusation is first made.
In parts (where clearly "learning English" and "critical thinking" aren't strong points - peadophiles don't tend to arrange for their sexual tendencies to be printed on their business cards) this can even happen before an accusation is made.
If people are going to break the law to get some child porn, don't you think that they might try to hide their actions by breaking the law, too?
I hate to break it to you, but the UK government is only just realising this.
True story: a couple of years ago I wrote to my MP (parliamentary representative) and pointed out that criminals, by definition, do not obey the law.
Several weeks later I received a reply informing me that "the government was aware of this, was trying to think of ways around it and wanted to know if I had any suggestions",
You're not just an idiot, you're a fucking idiot. There's a distinction.
Yes, the fucking idiot gets laid.
Smart people are willing to pay for quality, someone just needs to offer a quality printer.
On that subject, I think the highest quality printer I ever clapped eyes upon was a Kyocera - and that was only about 2 or 3 years ago.
I only had access to it for a day, so I didn't get much time to test it properly. Shame, because it was built like a brick outhouse and supported every major printer language you could think of and a few you couldn't. You don't see many desktop-size black and white laser printers which require two people to move and come with built-in steel handles these days.
No idea if they're similar today. But price-wise, they occupy a similar corner of the market so they may well be.
One of the advantages owning your own printer has is that its much cheaper to own than any of the "managed services" pay-per-page copiers already in the market.
Quite correct.
Where this business model does shine is in the "company with branches all over the country",
In such a company, there's a strong chance that there's no IT staff anywhere near most of the branches and even a tricky paper jam could stuff that branch up. What the company is paying for is not the printouts at all. They're paying for the peace of mind knowing that if anything goes wrong with a printer - anything at all, anywhere across the entire company - all they have to do is place a call with Lexmark/Xerox/HP who will send a man with a screwdriver out within X working hours to get the printer working again.
with lasers being the price they are now. You can get a fairly inexpensive Samsung or maybe even an HP laser printer for $100 - 150, sometimes on sale for under 100, and with a full toner cartridge get thousands of pages out of it.
Every cheap laser printer like that I have seen shipped with "starter" (ie. half full) cartridges which cost almost the same to replace as the printer itself did to buy in the first place.
They've applied the inkjet model to laser printers.
And if you use Linux and use UUIDs instead of device names in your fstab, then it doesn't much matter what the hardware is; the distribution will reconfigure on boot (unlike Windows, which will give you INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE if you don't have the same kind of host adapter, at the same PCI address) and find the devices by UUID.
Not that most of us work in a Linux-only shop, but it's just one more reason Windows sucks and Linux doesn't.
I had to think for a minute before I figured out what you were talking about. Then I realised you meant deploying the same image to various types of hardware.
This is a field in which Windows has historically sucked a helluva lot. Various tools have been provided to try and work around it (some by Microsoft, some by third-party vendors), but most of the tools I've found have introduced as many problems as they've solved.
I know Symantec Ghost claims to solve it but the trial version doesn't allow you to test any of those features, the only way you find out how well they work is after you've handed the money over. TBH, I haven't dedicated much time to solving the problem in XP and I've never even gone near trying it in Vista so it may be completely solved.
The alternative - and one I have seen done in larger companies - is to have one image per hardware model and standardise desktop hardware to a particular make and model. Of course, when the model is updated you need a new image, which sucks. And this method only really works when you're large enough and have a high enough turnover to buy many PCs at a time every couple of months. If you're only buying a dozen PCs a year it's fairly lousy.
Don't know about the country you're in, but here in the UK we have a law called the Sale of Goods Act.
Briefly, "goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold". You can't sell someone a hammer which is softer than any nail on the market.
I'd say a DVD which may or may not play and it's potluck whether or not it will isn't fit for purpose. And the Sale of Goods act trumps any store policy, I don't care what the spotty teenager thinks.
That's the law. That being said, I've noticed a trend recently to instruct store managers in company policy but not tell them how the sale of goods act works, so you wind up having to argue that you don't give a damn about company policy, you're not returning the goods under company policy, you're returning them because they're unfit for purpose. Such arguments tend to be more effective when carried out slightly louder than normal speaking voice in a crowded store.