All joking aside, now I'm managing the email system. 30-odd people, 59GB growing at a rate of about 30GB/year. It's compounded by people who see email as essentially a glorified filesystem with the added bonus that it's easy to see who each file relates to because it's self-organising in that regard.
I'm in two minds: either I stop adding disk and start enforcing policies like "no email over 6 months old" (some people keep everything for years, however tiny or irrelevant it may be) - this would prove immensely unpopular but nice and cheap - or I keep adding disk at extortionate rates.
Disk is cheap, that's true. But it's nowhere near as cheap when you're using SCSI and you've realistically got to buy at least two of any given disk for redundancy purposes, and there's only so many disks you can fit in a server. I shall look long and hard at SATA for the next server purchase.
Anything that actually helps the meme 'most php flaws are caused by poor programmers' actually become a reality
Most flaws in any code are caused by poor programmers. It's possible to write clearly structured, well laid out code in BASIC (no, not visual BASIC, the real thing), as most implementations support things like local variables and procedures. It's just exceptionally rare.
This is why so many computer science degrees (at least until recently in the UK) used Modula-2 or Pascal as their primary teaching language. Don't for one moment imagine the lecturers thought that these languages would be useful in the real world - the idea was to teach good practise.
Any by requiring precisely nothing specific of the user, the net result is that almost every Linux distribution sooner rather than later requires a degree of knowledge because you've been given the hammer, nails, screwdriver, power drill, jigsaw, timber and plans and it's now your problem to build the house.
But at least you're free to build the house however you like, using whatever materials you want, unlike with an Apple!
I'm pretty certain CUPS "normally" defaults to sensible behaviour which wouldn't have caused those issues.
Wouldn't surprise me if RedHat, deciding that perhaps it would be nice to minimise the likelihood of a system being hacked, set the defaults on their packaging of CUPS to essentially disable network printing as ESR described. Myself, I'd have defaulted to leaving it on and instead firewalling off connections from anywhere outside the current subnet (as Windows does), but hey, each to their own.
Microsoft's biggest "competitor", if you can call it that, is Windows 2000/Office 2000.
In a few years it'll be Windows XP/Office 2003.
90% of Microsoft's money comes from business purchases. What's the business benefit in paying for upgrades when you'll either have to rewrite/repurchase all your software or run the whole lot in an emulated environment to essentially replicate what you already have?
Essentially, Microsoft are being hamstrung because of a proprietary operating system. The irony is it's their own OS.
Regular user has to sudo. How's this different from Vista where essentially the sudo bit is automated, so all you see is "Are you sure? Enter your password"?
I hate to sound so negative, but don't expect a vast range to be Free (either beer or speech). The problem of accounting is fantastically boring to most computer people, the code is 90% boiler-plate stuff and if you're going to generate tax paperwork for directly from the package it will require extensive localisation.
Bottom line, it's the kind of thing which is very difficult to persuade people to code without paying them. And the itch-scratching crowd which starts a lot of Free projects doesn't tend to work on such projects.
Which is not to say there aren't commercial solutions to the problem.... but don't expect a lot of choice in the way of community-driven solutions.
The FA is an FAQ, FFS! Almost every question which has been brought up in the discussion is already in the FAQ because it's an FAQ, that's what it's for.
Re:As a longtime(past tense) PHP developer I can s
on
PHP 5 in Practice
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd go on and say that IMO (which genuinely is humble, as I'm a sysadmin who's prepared to look at and tweak code if necessary, rather than a fulltime dev), PHP has promulgated an entire mass of badly written, badly commented, ill conceived code.
Sure, it's possible to write bad code in any language. But PHP is like the BASIC of the web. Popular, (yes, there was a time BASIC was popular) yet treated with contempt because it's just so easy to shoot yourself hard in the foot. At least with C, you usually know pretty early on if your code is really badly thought up. With PHP, however, it seems that nobody quite realises what a festering mess they've produced until someone else points it out, by which time it's taken as a personal attack.
There are definite "must haves" in terms of software that a solution like this will never be able to account for. You have web applications that rely on IE in order to work.
That's OK. You also have the resources of an absolutely massive IT consulting firm, who can make that problem disappear.
You have local executable applications that people need to get their work done on a day-to-day basis.
Nobody said it was going to be the whole business. For those parts of the business where it makes sense, you have the resources of an absolutely massive IT consulting firm, who can make any remaining problems disappear.
If these applications rely on a specific platform, (Windows, Mac or Linux) you will not be able to solve that. Those are two really big issues that IBM will never solve with this solution.
Except that virtualisation, Wine and Citrix can go a long way towards solving that for the applications which are stuck in Windows - perhaps because the source code is unavailable or the app is heavily dependent on a specific Windows API. For those applications which aren't stuck in Windows, you have the resources of.... you get the idea.
IBM have noticed all these European organisations, both public and private sector, announcing massive Linux switches. Think City of Munich, or Peugeot/Citroen. Organisations that size are IBM's bread and butter, and if IBM aren't ready to supply consulting, the organisation will simply go elsewhere - that's part of the beauty of open source.
How better to demonstrate that you have that expertise than by announcing a similar migration within your own company?
I'd be interested to see if this might result in things like zfs being ported natively to the Linux kernel (rather than the current FUSE-based solution).
But then... if Sun go for GPLv3, I'm not certain that can coexist within the same kernel as a bunch of GPLv2 code.
I mean come on, doesn't everyone know that the internet is run on Windows software and IE is the only REAL web browser! Anyone who uses anything else MUST be a hacker trying to break their site.
It's the same in the UK - and I suspect the democratic world over. They say a political party does not "win power" - what happens is that their opponents piss off their supporters so much that they lose.
I don't know, they are a multi-million corporation, they sure have resources ($$$) to find a nice solution.
It would be quite easy. IIRC, the UK website allowed you to just enter the service tag of your laptop - they could tell from that what serial number battery it had been shipped with, and whether or not it was affected.
They also know who was shipped what laptops, as if you check the invoice for any recent Dell purchase you'll see it lists the service tags of the items you bought.
It therefore follows that Dell could quite easily figure out the addresses of everyone who was shipped faulty batteries and write to them. Yet they didn't.
Because anyone who sees a WW1 biplane in a combat situation today would assume they must be losing their mind. Therefore, rather than engage in combat, they'll fly home and report sick.
Read the spec sheet of the $300 PC versus the Mac Mini. While the PC may be fine for most users, I bet you anything you like the mac has higher specs. Once you start speccing up a PC with the same processor, with bluetooth, with the same capacity disk etc etc, those savings soon disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you like to work at my place? ;)
All joking aside, now I'm managing the email system. 30-odd people, 59GB growing at a rate of about 30GB/year. It's compounded by people who see email as essentially a glorified filesystem with the added bonus that it's easy to see who each file relates to because it's self-organising in that regard.
I'm in two minds: either I stop adding disk and start enforcing policies like "no email over 6 months old" (some people keep everything for years, however tiny or irrelevant it may be) - this would prove immensely unpopular but nice and cheap - or I keep adding disk at extortionate rates.
Disk is cheap, that's true. But it's nowhere near as cheap when you're using SCSI and you've realistically got to buy at least two of any given disk for redundancy purposes, and there's only so many disks you can fit in a server. I shall look long and hard at SATA for the next server purchase.
We had a clear desk policy which was extended to email - not by force, but I was asked to get my inbox down to nothing.
Solution: Set up a folder called "Not Inbox" and a rule to automatically push all incoming email to that.
I was able to honestly say that my inbox was completely empty.
Imagine if MSFT made automobiles (but with the a yolk instead of a wheel/pedals....)
But wouldn't you get covered in bits of egg?
Who don't mention if the bulbs are 110 or 240v (I'd imagine 110v seeing as it's a US site), or indeed if they're bayonet cap or edison screw.
Both fairly crucial as almost all domestic light fittings in the UK are bayonet-style but I'm not sure that's the case in the US.
Anything that actually helps the meme 'most php flaws are caused by poor programmers' actually become a reality
Most flaws in any code are caused by poor programmers. It's possible to write clearly structured, well laid out code in BASIC (no, not visual BASIC, the real thing), as most implementations support things like local variables and procedures. It's just exceptionally rare.
This is why so many computer science degrees (at least until recently in the UK) used Modula-2 or Pascal as their primary teaching language. Don't for one moment imagine the lecturers thought that these languages would be useful in the real world - the idea was to teach good practise.
Any by requiring precisely nothing specific of the user, the net result is that almost every Linux distribution sooner rather than later requires a degree of knowledge because you've been given the hammer, nails, screwdriver, power drill, jigsaw, timber and plans and it's now your problem to build the house.
But at least you're free to build the house however you like, using whatever materials you want, unlike with an Apple!
I'm pretty certain CUPS "normally" defaults to sensible behaviour which wouldn't have caused those issues.
Wouldn't surprise me if RedHat, deciding that perhaps it would be nice to minimise the likelihood of a system being hacked, set the defaults on their packaging of CUPS to essentially disable network printing as ESR described. Myself, I'd have defaulted to leaving it on and instead firewalling off connections from anywhere outside the current subnet (as Windows does), but hey, each to their own.
Sorry, I'm a bit used to /. people expecting Linux software to be free.
Microsoft's biggest "competitor", if you can call it that, is Windows 2000/Office 2000.
In a few years it'll be Windows XP/Office 2003.
90% of Microsoft's money comes from business purchases. What's the business benefit in paying for upgrades when you'll either have to rewrite/repurchase all your software or run the whole lot in an emulated environment to essentially replicate what you already have?
Essentially, Microsoft are being hamstrung because of a proprietary operating system. The irony is it's their own OS.
Regular user has to sudo. How's this different from Vista where essentially the sudo bit is automated, so all you see is "Are you sure? Enter your password"?
I hate to sound so negative, but don't expect a vast range to be Free (either beer or speech). The problem of accounting is fantastically boring to most computer people, the code is 90% boiler-plate stuff and if you're going to generate tax paperwork for directly from the package it will require extensive localisation.
Bottom line, it's the kind of thing which is very difficult to persuade people to code without paying them. And the itch-scratching crowd which starts a lot of Free projects doesn't tend to work on such projects.
Which is not to say there aren't commercial solutions to the problem.... but don't expect a lot of choice in the way of community-driven solutions.
The FA is an FAQ, FFS! Almost every question which has been brought up in the discussion is already in the FAQ because it's an FAQ, that's what it's for.
I'd go on and say that IMO (which genuinely is humble, as I'm a sysadmin who's prepared to look at and tweak code if necessary, rather than a fulltime dev), PHP has promulgated an entire mass of badly written, badly commented, ill conceived code.
Sure, it's possible to write bad code in any language. But PHP is like the BASIC of the web. Popular, (yes, there was a time BASIC was popular) yet treated with contempt because it's just so easy to shoot yourself hard in the foot. At least with C, you usually know pretty early on if your code is really badly thought up. With PHP, however, it seems that nobody quite realises what a festering mess they've produced until someone else points it out, by which time it's taken as a personal attack.
There are definite "must haves" in terms of software that a solution like this will never be able to account for. You have web applications that rely on IE in order to work.
That's OK. You also have the resources of an absolutely massive IT consulting firm, who can make that problem disappear.
You have local executable applications that people need to get their work done on a day-to-day basis.
Nobody said it was going to be the whole business. For those parts of the business where it makes sense, you have the resources of an absolutely massive IT consulting firm, who can make any remaining problems disappear.
If these applications rely on a specific platform, (Windows, Mac or Linux) you will not be able to solve that. Those are two really big issues that IBM will never solve with this solution.
Except that virtualisation, Wine and Citrix can go a long way towards solving that for the applications which are stuck in Windows - perhaps because the source code is unavailable or the app is heavily dependent on a specific Windows API. For those applications which aren't stuck in Windows, you have the resources of.... you get the idea.
IBM have noticed all these European organisations, both public and private sector, announcing massive Linux switches. Think City of Munich, or Peugeot/Citroen. Organisations that size are IBM's bread and butter, and if IBM aren't ready to supply consulting, the organisation will simply go elsewhere - that's part of the beauty of open source.
How better to demonstrate that you have that expertise than by announcing a similar migration within your own company?
I'd be interested to see if this might result in things like zfs being ported natively to the Linux kernel (rather than the current FUSE-based solution).
But then... if Sun go for GPLv3, I'm not certain that can coexist within the same kernel as a bunch of GPLv2 code.
If you only knew just just how insightful that comment was.
It's the same in the UK - and I suspect the democratic world over. They say a political party does not "win power" - what happens is that their opponents piss off their supporters so much that they lose.
It would be quite easy. IIRC, the UK website allowed you to just enter the service tag of your laptop - they could tell from that what serial number battery it had been shipped with, and whether or not it was affected.
They also know who was shipped what laptops, as if you check the invoice for any recent Dell purchase you'll see it lists the service tags of the items you bought.
It therefore follows that Dell could quite easily figure out the addresses of everyone who was shipped faulty batteries and write to them. Yet they didn't.
the walls cant start on fire
No, but your sofa, bedding, curtains, carpets, tables, chairs, computer, television and stereo all can.
So before everyone starts ragging on Dell, remember there are at least a couple of good apples there.
Whose attention you can only get by posting about your problems on Slashdot.
Even today, I don't think you could describe IBM as "lean and quick".
Though they have reasonably nice hardware and their software is generally fairly solid.
Don't know if you realise this, but a very similar solution to a very different problem was proposed a few centuries ago:
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
(Read it through. It's worth it)
Might take a while with the Airbus A380, then.
Because anyone who sees a WW1 biplane in a combat situation today would assume they must be losing their mind. Therefore, rather than engage in combat, they'll fly home and report sick.
More than that.
Read the spec sheet of the $300 PC versus the Mac Mini. While the PC may be fine for most users, I bet you anything you like the mac has higher specs. Once you start speccing up a PC with the same processor, with bluetooth, with the same capacity disk etc etc, those savings soon disappear.