Could this be the begining of the end? First it was a special dividend, now executives are jumping ship in droves. (so two is not a drove but it is still early, there may be more shortly)
How much stock are these guys selling off? It may be another indication that there is serious doubt and trouble inside Microsoft. They can ride Windows and Office only so far. The competitors out there are getting better and people are starting to realize there is an option. The next few years will see Microsofts dominance start to fade. Adoption of Vista will be slow and limited. Instead of paying for upgrading to Vista many companines will seriously consider one of the open source alternatives that are now available. Microsoft knows this. They have to find another revenue stream before their Windows and Office based empire suffers major losses.
What is all this discussion about karma and talking about Microsoft's demise?
Did anyone read the head lines? "Micorsoft lost two executives"! Where is the amber alert when you need one?
Let's start a search party and go help find them. They may be lost and hurt somewhere in Redmond. They need to be found quickly before they wander away and are lost forever.
I mean there is no telling if they might wander into another company and start making trouble all over again. We must collect them and return them, then we know where they all are. We must keep them isolated to the Microsoft campus. That is the only way to keep this from becoming a major outbreak.
Good for them! It can be done, just not that many companies out there willing to backup such a plan. Would be better if it was a fortune 500 company here in the states but this is a good start. I hope they publish the results including any problems encountered and how they solved them. That would be interesting reading. Unlike stories like this one where someone put a BSD system in front of a checkpoint firewall.
If the case had included a few more details it might have been interesting. As written there is not much there IMHO.
Throwing a BSD server in front of your windows checkpoint systems to "protect" them is humorous but is not that big a deal. Having been down the checkpoint route once (on nokia platforms not windows platforms) I would opt for a different solution. Primarly due to the cost of checkpoint licensing and maintance contracts. Don't get me wrong, checkpoint is a fine firewall package, it just costs to much.
As to the published story I suspect similar things happen every day in many different companies. But I don't think it is really news worthy that someone setup a few DNS servers on cheap hardware running linux to replace a windows dns server. That is not news. If that was news then/. would be streaming stories past at a huge rate. Save it for something really news worthy.
Canara Bank in Bangalore is implementing RHEL over 1000 servers and 10,000 desktops, as part of its total branch computerization project.
Now that is more like a story that should be on/.
Do they still use Windows for some applications or are they trying to go 100% linux?
Hopefully the editors will notice this and monitor the developments on such a deployment. What am I thinking? Of course they won't do that. They will run the PWC story again in a few days as if it is new again. DoH!
So they replaced some (not all) of their backend systems with OpenBSD systems. Primarly security systems (firewalls) because Checkpoint on the windows systems was not working real well.
There is a significant DUH factor there.
Now it would have been real news if they had replaced all their backend systems as well as their desktop systems with open source alternatives. That is serious news. But no, like most companies out there they just have a mix of unix like systems along with their Windows based servers. It would be interesting to know if there is any company at all that runs purely Windows systems (or for that matter purely unix like systems). I doubt there are any. So running a mix of systems is pretty much standard. Sure the percentages will vary. As such this is not really big news.
Wake me up again when they have switched all their clients or even a significant portion of their clients to open source alternatives. That will be real news.
OK, who was the joker that kept hitting all the buttons in the elevator? No wonder it was so slow, it kept having to stop at all the floors.:)
Re:Puppeteers were unavailable for comment
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
Beware neutron stars. Even GP hulls can not protect against gravitational effects.
Re:3 year old news, 3 year old video
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
Take a look at the original press release, dated 16 October 2002.
The article was published in Nature at the same time, and the video isn't new either.
Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?
This is one of the rare cases when the dupe took 3 year to show up instead of 3 hours. There is some suspicion that this story passed very close to a black hole and suffered time dilation effects and it finally popped out today. You can almost see it in the video, that small grey spot that makes a close pass at the black hole.......
Anybody else get a plain black screen for the video?
Dude! It's a black hole you are looking at. That is the neat thing about being an astronomer studying black holes, you can look at a black screen and make stuff up. It is really cool, you can even get paid for doing this stuff!
Can we volunteer upper management for a brain cell injection? I think there are plenty of people in the office willing to chip in to cover the costs. Even if this does not fix them it would keep them from making stupid decisions for a short period of time while they are in the hospital.
.. from the other two raptors you didnt even know were there. And they DO have disembowling claws, unlike this obvious decoy.
Actually the other two carried AK-47s. At least until the anti-gun lobby got laws passed to ban those weapons. That was shortly before they all went extinct. No way to protect themselves from the mammals who still carried automatic weapons.
Doesn't this again bring up the question which was discussed a while ago. 'Why should Operating systems have a policy of default accept? Run programs only which you trust.'
This is what selinux brings to the table. It allows you to specify a policy for your system that will block programs from doing things that they should not do. Of course if most windows systems operated with the least privilege rule most of the viruses out there would be unable to work as they do now. Instead of an arms race between virus writers and virus detectors (I'm still no convinced these are not one and the same) applying a few best practices to existing systems would go a long way toward solving this problem. But Microsoft refuses to do this.
As far as commercially available rootkits and this company claiming they have detetected the first one out there, how do they know it is the first one? Any really good rootkit should go undetected by definition. If they can detect it then there is a bug in the code.:)
Oh great! Now half the parking lot will be marked off for nano-car parking. Had enough trouble parking the hummer in the compact car spots now I have to jocky it into half a billion nano-car spots.:)
No solution for that problem that I know of. Was hit by that the other night, a football game ran long and pushed the schedule out.
I started running a mythfilldatabase --refresh-today in the early morning hours to try an pickup on schedule changes but it does not work when they run sports events late. It might have picked up the debate you mentioned. It did for a presidential address once.
Which PVR do you use? I setup a mythtv system back in February of this year and it has changed they way I watch TV. I rarely watch live TV anymore. I do hate it when they have a sports show that runs late. That still messes up the schedule so some or all of following shows are missed. But then I can set it so that show will be recorded the next time it airs so no big loss.
The factory fire you mentioned is a good case in point, if you did not live in that particular neighborhood (in which case you would probably be outside watching it first person) it is not going to directly affect you unless you owned the building or worked there. A very small number of people. But fires are good entertainment for everyone else. And you can bet the station still gets it ads inserted while they are showing such events. Would not surprise me if they had special deals where companies pay a special rate to have their ads shown during such emergencies.
Has the TV or radio reported on such events with enough detail for you to make a correct choice in the scenerios you have described? The reports I see on TV are mostly at the county level at best. And until things have gone really bad they rarely report on specific streets or neighborhoods. If your local stations do a better job than that I am impressed.
As to your specific scenerio "Its storming outside. Thunder. Heavy rain. Do I head for high ground, go to the basement or not worry at all?" I would hope you know your particular neighborhood enough to know if you are prone to flooding or not. And if tornados are common in your area your either going to see it coming or it won't matter one way or the other.
A few years ago there was a good storm that spawned a number of tornados north of where I am. Spent some time up there helping clean things up. Some houses were completly wiped out, not just trailers, houses. ONe of the worst tornado hits in the area in many many years. In this case there was no where to run, they don't build storm cellars down here. All you can do is hang on and hope for the best. By the time any warnings came on the TV or radio the tornados had done their damage and moved on.
Have you been in a court room lately? The courts and our legal system are not there to determine what the facts are or to dispense justice. The courts are a place where two opposing lawyers tell stories that may or may not be loosely related to any purported facts in the case in an attempt to convince a jury to vote for them. That is assuming it even gets to a jury. Most of the time the lawyers get together and make a deal out side of the court room and settle the case. The lawyers end up the only winners in the deal since they get paid regardless of the out come. And those with deep pockets make sure most cases never get to a jury so they can buy a single judge. Much more efficient use of money that way.
The analogy of land compared to spectrum is not really that good. Its kind of like saying I own the air over that piece of property there. If you breath it you owe me money. If you want to use that analogy the why not say I own the air and the spectrum over my property. You are broadcasting through my property there for either stop it or pay me.
So it should have been left to the courts to decide who got to use which frequencies? Would have made a lot of lawyers happy since they would be the ones to win in such a case. The little broadcaster that did not have deep pockets would be displaced by the big broadcaster that had more money and better lawyers. And if in the early days I wanted to stake a claim to a particular sprectrum would it have been enough to put up a beacon to demonstrate that I owned it? And If I wanted to put someone out of business so I could claim jump their sprectrum would it have been sufficient to jam them and drag out the court case so to exhaust their money while denying them use of the spectrum to make money? Letting a lot of lawyers get rich making deals on the side to decide who gets to use the spectrum is IMHO a bad way to go.
You can add some types of news into that list of yours. If there is a tornado, blizzard, flash flood warning or a few other things headed my way I want to know NOW. TV via the Emergency Broadcasting Service and Emergency Interuptions helps people find out what they need to know quickly. Additionaly, the Amber Alert notifications use this kind of system as well. Those kinds of emergencies work well for TV and Radio broadcasts. Not so well with websites. Especially when during a "Severe winter storm" most likely my internet connection has gone out due to power loss. A radio will work, mainly due to batteries and that broadcasters keep large generators on hand. I can't see that working in the model Daniel Fisher proposes.
I hesitated to add news to the list since most of the news out there is old to start with and rife with errors. As to blizzards I expect you know those are happening and I never did see much use in tornado warnings. No one can really tell where they will hit and by the time they do annouce it they have come and gone along with your house. I have never seen the Emergency Broadcasting Service used for anything but to interrupt a show. I suspect that is mostly because when they activate such a system power is usually already gone and everyone is busy getting ready for the event or in the midst of it. As such I don't think TV is really a good method to spread such useful information. Last year we were hit with three hurricanes. Cable service including ISPs were out for about a week along with power the first time around. I did use a radio to get some information but what they provided was not really that useful. We were very lucky in all three hurricanes. And I already had a generator to keep the fridge going. Was able to get one station over the air on the TV but again the info they provided was pretty much useless. What was really surprising is that cell phone service went out immediately and the land lines went out in the first day as the batteries died at the telco. So for awhile there was no way to communicate in or out of the area.
As such the use of TV for emergency information is IMHO a fallacy. It does provide great entertainment value to those not directly affected by the emergency but it does nothing to help those in the middle of the mess. So I don't see why anyone would think that cable, TV, or ISPs would be a good source of info during an emergency. At least not for storm type emergencies that affect large areas of a state or the country.
As for the news industry I will wait for another thread to write my opinion about them being nothing more than another entertainment industry out to make money with nothing really do with news reporting.:)
I never said there was a shortage, I said that there is a finite set of bandwidth available. You can slice the bandwidth only so thin. True, technology advancements will allow you to slice it ever thinner but there is only so much available. It is similar to the microprocessor industry. They have been able to reduce the size of their processors significantly. However there are limits to how far they can go. The limit in that case is down at the atomic level. It will be virtually impossible to go beyond that point. Same with frequency bandwidth. There are lots of technical tricks to get more data pushed over a specified set of frequencies, but eventually a limit will be reached where all the little tricks have been used and there is just no way to get any more data pushed over that set of frequencies with degrading the existing transmissions. What those ultimate limits are I don't think have been defined. But there is a limit. And if you are saturating the spectrum with that much data it won't take much interference to degrade the overall throughput. Think of one noisy microwave oven splattering the 802.11 spectrum.
Same arguments for IP address space. There is only so much. Several years ago many people thought we would be out of address space by now. But use of RFC1918 addressing and inexpensive NAT routers has allowed things to grow signficantly. Eventually there will be shortage and IPv6 will actually start being used on a wide scale. But that is going to be many years from now. It will only happen when all the little tricks have been used up and there is no more address space to be reclaimed.
Slashdot Mirror
Could this be the begining of the end? First it was a special dividend, now executives are jumping ship in droves. (so two is not a drove but it is still early, there may be more shortly)
How much stock are these guys selling off? It may be another indication that there is serious doubt and trouble inside Microsoft. They can ride Windows and Office only so far. The competitors out there are getting better and people are starting to realize there is an option. The next few years will see Microsofts dominance start to fade. Adoption of Vista will be slow and limited. Instead of paying for upgrading to Vista many companines will seriously consider one of the open source alternatives that are now available. Microsoft knows this. They have to find another revenue stream before their Windows and Office based empire suffers major losses.
I'm actually confused as to why this ended up getting approved for the front page.
So they will have something to dupe next week.
What is all this discussion about karma and talking about Microsoft's demise?
Did anyone read the head lines? "Micorsoft lost two executives"! Where is the amber alert when you need one?
Let's start a search party and go help find them. They may be lost and hurt somewhere in Redmond. They need to be found quickly before they wander away and are lost forever.
I mean there is no telling if they might wander into another company and start making trouble all over again. We must collect them and return them, then we know where they all are. We must keep them isolated to the Microsoft campus. That is the only way to keep this from becoming a major outbreak.
Good for them! It can be done, just not that many companies out there willing to backup such a plan. Would be better if it was a fortune 500 company here in the states but this is a good start. I hope they publish the results including any problems encountered and how they solved them. That would be interesting reading. Unlike stories like this one where someone put a BSD system in front of a checkpoint firewall.
If the case had included a few more details it might have been interesting. As written there is not much there IMHO.
/. would be streaming stories past at a huge rate. Save it for something really news worthy.
Throwing a BSD server in front of your windows checkpoint systems to "protect" them is humorous but is not that big a deal. Having been down the checkpoint route once (on nokia platforms not windows platforms) I would opt for a different solution. Primarly due to the cost of checkpoint licensing and maintance contracts. Don't get me wrong, checkpoint is a fine firewall package, it just costs to much.
As to the published story I suspect similar things happen every day in many different companies. But I don't think it is really news worthy that someone setup a few DNS servers on cheap hardware running linux to replace a windows dns server. That is not news. If that was news then
Canara Bank in Bangalore is implementing RHEL over 1000 servers and 10,000 desktops, as part of its total branch computerization project. Now that is more like a story that should be on /.
Do they still use Windows for some applications or are they trying to go 100% linux?
Hopefully the editors will notice this and monitor the developments on such a deployment. What am I thinking? Of course they won't do that. They will run the PWC story again in a few days as if it is new again. DoH!
So they replaced some (not all) of their backend systems with OpenBSD systems. Primarly security systems (firewalls) because Checkpoint on the windows systems was not working real well.
There is a significant DUH factor there.
Now it would have been real news if they had replaced all their backend systems as well as their desktop systems with open source alternatives. That is serious news. But no, like most companies out there they just have a mix of unix like systems along with their Windows based servers. It would be interesting to know if there is any company at all that runs purely Windows systems (or for that matter purely unix like systems). I doubt there are any. So running a mix of systems is pretty much standard. Sure the percentages will vary. As such this is not really big news.
Wake me up again when they have switched all their clients or even a significant portion of their clients to open source alternatives. That will be real news.
OK, who was the joker that kept hitting all the buttons in the elevator? No wonder it was so slow, it kept having to stop at all the floors. :)
Beware neutron stars. Even GP hulls can not protect against gravitational effects.
Take a look at the original press release, dated 16 October 2002.
The article was published in Nature at the same time, and the video isn't new either.
Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?
This is one of the rare cases when the dupe took 3 year to show up instead of 3 hours. There is some suspicion that this story passed very close to a black hole and suffered time dilation effects and it finally popped out today. You can almost see it in the video, that small grey spot that makes a close pass at the black hole.......
Anybody else get a plain black screen for the video?
Dude! It's a black hole you are looking at. That is the neat thing about being an astronomer studying black holes, you can look at a black screen and make stuff up. It is really cool, you can even get paid for doing this stuff!
Can we volunteer upper management for a brain cell injection? I think there are plenty of people in the office willing to chip in to cover the costs. Even if this does not fix them it would keep them from making stupid decisions for a short period of time while they are in the hospital.
;)
.. from the other two raptors you didnt even know were there. And they DO have disembowling claws, unlike this obvious decoy.
Actually the other two carried AK-47s. At least until the anti-gun lobby got laws passed to ban those weapons. That was shortly before they all went extinct. No way to protect themselves from the mammals who still carried automatic weapons.
Doesn't this again bring up the question which was discussed a while ago. 'Why should Operating systems have a policy of default accept? Run programs only which you trust.'
:)
This is what selinux brings to the table. It allows you to specify a policy for your system that will block programs from doing things that they should not do. Of course if most windows systems operated with the least privilege rule most of the viruses out there would be unable to work as they do now. Instead of an arms race between virus writers and virus detectors (I'm still no convinced these are not one and the same) applying a few best practices to existing systems would go a long way toward solving this problem. But Microsoft refuses to do this.
As far as commercially available rootkits and this company claiming they have detetected the first one out there, how do they know it is the first one? Any really good rootkit should go undetected by definition. If they can detect it then there is a bug in the code.
What's next nano-deabolt locks from Yale?
Nah, little tiny bumper stickers that say "save the whales!".
why an unpowered car?
Because that darn intern lost the pistons and camshaft for the motor. He's still looking for them.
Oh great! Now half the parking lot will be marked off for nano-car parking. Had enough trouble parking the hummer in the compact car spots now I have to jocky it into half a billion nano-car spots. :)
What are you going to complain about when W is not longer in the whitehouse?
They will complain about all the radioactive debri left around where Los Angles used to be and how that is all W's fault too.
No solution for that problem that I know of. Was hit by that the other night, a football game ran long and pushed the schedule out.
I started running a mythfilldatabase --refresh-today in the early morning hours to try an pickup on schedule changes but it does not work when they run sports events late. It might have picked up the debate you mentioned. It did for a presidential address once.
Which PVR do you use? I setup a mythtv system back in February of this year and it has changed they way I watch TV. I rarely watch live TV anymore. I do hate it when they have a sports show that runs late. That still messes up the schedule so some or all of following shows are missed. But then I can set it so that show will be recorded the next time it airs so no big loss.
The factory fire you mentioned is a good case in point, if you did not live in that particular neighborhood (in which case you would probably be outside watching it first person) it is not going to directly affect you unless you owned the building or worked there. A very small number of people. But fires are good entertainment for everyone else. And you can bet the station still gets it ads inserted while they are showing such events. Would not surprise me if they had special deals where companies pay a special rate to have their ads shown during such emergencies.
Has the TV or radio reported on such events with enough detail for you to make a correct choice in the scenerios you have described? The reports I see on TV are mostly at the county level at best. And until things have gone really bad they rarely report on specific streets or neighborhoods. If your local stations do a better job than that I am impressed.
As to your specific scenerio "Its storming outside. Thunder. Heavy rain. Do I head for high ground, go to the basement or not worry at all?" I would hope you know your particular neighborhood enough to know if you are prone to flooding or not. And if tornados are common in your area your either going to see it coming or it won't matter one way or the other.
A few years ago there was a good storm that spawned a number of tornados north of where I am. Spent some time up there helping clean things up. Some houses were completly wiped out, not just trailers, houses. ONe of the worst tornado hits in the area in many many years. In this case there was no where to run, they don't build storm cellars down here. All you can do is hang on and hope for the best. By the time any warnings came on the TV or radio the tornados had done their damage and moved on.
Have you been in a court room lately? The courts and our legal system are not there to determine what the facts are or to dispense justice. The courts are a place where two opposing lawyers tell stories that may or may not be loosely related to any purported facts in the case in an attempt to convince a jury to vote for them. That is assuming it even gets to a jury. Most of the time the lawyers get together and make a deal out side of the court room and settle the case. The lawyers end up the only winners in the deal since they get paid regardless of the out come. And those with deep pockets make sure most cases never get to a jury so they can buy a single judge. Much more efficient use of money that way.
The analogy of land compared to spectrum is not really that good. Its kind of like saying I own the air over that piece of property there. If you breath it you owe me money. If you want to use that analogy the why not say I own the air and the spectrum over my property. You are broadcasting through my property there for either stop it or pay me.
So it should have been left to the courts to decide who got to use which frequencies? Would have made a lot of lawyers happy since they would be the ones to win in such a case. The little broadcaster that did not have deep pockets would be displaced by the big broadcaster that had more money and better lawyers. And if in the early days I wanted to stake a claim to a particular sprectrum would it have been enough to put up a beacon to demonstrate that I owned it? And If I wanted to put someone out of business so I could claim jump their sprectrum would it have been sufficient to jam them and drag out the court case so to exhaust their money while denying them use of the spectrum to make money? Letting a lot of lawyers get rich making deals on the side to decide who gets to use the spectrum is IMHO a bad way to go.
You can add some types of news into that list of yours. If there is a tornado, blizzard, flash flood warning or a few other things headed my way I want to know NOW. TV via the Emergency Broadcasting Service and Emergency Interuptions helps people find out what they need to know quickly. Additionaly, the Amber Alert notifications use this kind of system as well. Those kinds of emergencies work well for TV and Radio broadcasts. Not so well with websites. Especially when during a "Severe winter storm" most likely my internet connection has gone out due to power loss. A radio will work, mainly due to batteries and that broadcasters keep large generators on hand. I can't see that working in the model Daniel Fisher proposes.
:)
I hesitated to add news to the list since most of the news out there is old to start with and rife with errors. As to blizzards I expect you know those are happening and I never did see much use in tornado warnings. No one can really tell where they will hit and by the time they do annouce it they have come and gone along with your house. I have never seen the Emergency Broadcasting Service used for anything but to interrupt a show. I suspect that is mostly because when they activate such a system power is usually already gone and everyone is busy getting ready for the event or in the midst of it. As such I don't think TV is really a good method to spread such useful information. Last year we were hit with three hurricanes. Cable service including ISPs were out for about a week along with power the first time around. I did use a radio to get some information but what they provided was not really that useful. We were very lucky in all three hurricanes. And I already had a generator to keep the fridge going. Was able to get one station over the air on the TV but again the info they provided was pretty much useless. What was really surprising is that cell phone service went out immediately and the land lines went out in the first day as the batteries died at the telco. So for awhile there was no way to communicate in or out of the area.
As such the use of TV for emergency information is IMHO a fallacy. It does provide great entertainment value to those not directly affected by the emergency but it does nothing to help those in the middle of the mess. So I don't see why anyone would think that cable, TV, or ISPs would be a good source of info during an emergency. At least not for storm type emergencies that affect large areas of a state or the country.
As for the news industry I will wait for another thread to write my opinion about them being nothing more than another entertainment industry out to make money with nothing really do with news reporting.
I never said there was a shortage, I said that there is a finite set of bandwidth available. You can slice the bandwidth only so thin. True, technology advancements will allow you to slice it ever thinner but there is only so much available. It is similar to the microprocessor industry. They have been able to reduce the size of their processors significantly. However there are limits to how far they can go. The limit in that case is down at the atomic level. It will be virtually impossible to go beyond that point. Same with frequency bandwidth. There are lots of technical tricks to get more data pushed over a specified set of frequencies, but eventually a limit will be reached where all the little tricks have been used and there is just no way to get any more data pushed over that set of frequencies with degrading the existing transmissions. What those ultimate limits are I don't think have been defined. But there is a limit. And if you are saturating the spectrum with that much data it won't take much interference to degrade the overall throughput. Think of one noisy microwave oven splattering the 802.11 spectrum.
Same arguments for IP address space. There is only so much. Several years ago many people thought we would be out of address space by now. But use of RFC1918 addressing and inexpensive NAT routers has allowed things to grow signficantly. Eventually there will be shortage and IPv6 will actually start being used on a wide scale. But that is going to be many years from now. It will only happen when all the little tricks have been used up and there is no more address space to be reclaimed.