Also, spammers steal addressbooks or buy them from unethical employees, others make partnership contracts where you've submitted a contact address and use those contacts to get spam addresses, some spammers use alphabetical or name-guess spam, and any unethical sysadmin with a clue can use the mail logs of his servers to generate a list of valid email addresses from other sites for sale.
Let's not get silly. RFID tags are still far too expensive to use at the small scales of individual food containers, although I have seen one demonstration at a trade show of putting them on individual Cocoa Krispies boxes.
They're basically barcodes that can be read from across a room, nothing more complex or powerful than that. They're potentially very useful for tagging expensive containers to be able to track where the box came from: or to track shipping of food where adulteration is a big deal, such as coffee due to its high expense/pound, or drugs due to the concern of poisoning or fake goods. In that way they're more useful than bar codes, because you can put them inside the box and because simply taping another one on top doesn't obscure the other tag. But whoever puts the tag on in the first place can simply lie and mis-enter the data to the database.
But the last estimate I heard for installing RFID tags was an OEM price of $1/tag: I'm surprised if it's gotten much cheaper than that, and that makes it useless for a lot of things.
And also read this, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html. It's Eric Raymond's fairly famous rant on the poor design of open source interfaces, with suggested rules on how to avoid or fix some of the issues.
Also, this is marketing from one of the most successful distributions. They're happy to have competitors stay fragmented: it lets RedHat continue to be one of the larger and more integrated environments, and have less effective competition in the server market, where they consider the real business market to be.
Try again, and please learn to count. The Windows releases are more like:
DOS [ multiple versions, mostly discarded but some still active ] Windows for Workgroups [ multiple versions, but some still active ] Win95 [ multiple versions, by language and features ] Win98 [ multiple versions, by language and features ] WinME [ multiple versions, by language and features ]
Then there are the NT based versions.
NT [3.51, 4.0, etc., multiple versions by language and features] WinXP [which is really NT 5.0 and should have been labeled such, multiple versions by language and features] Windows 2003 [Which is really WinXP with delusions of serverhood, but if they want to relabel it again, who are we to argue?] Longwood [In beta]
So after totalling up all the different actual OS releases, even if you skip the alternative hardware and language versions that make much more of a difference to Windows than to Linux, you're still talking about at least a dozen different active and supported OS's.
What Microsoft knows that no one else does is their future development plans. They can pre-develop security software to cope with the latest MS Office or.NET security stupidity, such as the way both of them auto-execute things now, and stop wasting time on developing utilities for features they are about to discard.
Neither is stealing or copying the technology, breaking it deliberately, and lauding it as new and improved. The NT kernel and much of that OS was stolen by David Cutler, using his work developing VMS at DEC. The Microsoft Mouse was stolen. Kerberos was copied and broken. Java was copied and broken. Their TCP stack was copied many years ago and left badly broken until, perhaps, Longhorn comes out.
Perhaps the refusal to do more than 60-hour workweeks did mark him as disloyal, although the other departments did want to hire him. But I think it was a penny-wise, pound-foolish management choice by a VP who wasn't actually doing any of the real work anymore and believed that firm layoffs would make the stockholders happy, and that people once laid off might be too suspicious of management to deal with.
Suspicion seems to have been well-founded: my friend found out a year later that the software-implemented computer audit he helped start, and was actually written up for spending time doing it, showed that the shipping manager was stealing computers and that at least 20 other computers had slipped through the cracks of accounting and disappeared.
My source was Peter LaMacchia, who explained that we could trust Microsoft to handle the security ramifications of Palladium (now called Trusted Computing) because the engineers who were involved in it would resign if Microsoft screwed it up, just as he had resigned from the.NET project.
Of course, his resignation stopped none of the changes:.NET changed various security defaults that were previously wise (requiring user approval to install additional software and utilities) into typical Microsoft demoware, where it magically does all these cool things in a demo but doesn't mention the risks of it. Microsoft is famous for these sorts of auto-execution security flaws, and they forced it into the.NET computing architecture over the direct objections of at least one of its core developers. This is why Peter is now working elsewhere.
Agreed. I watched a good colleague, with a new wife and new son, gently refuse to do more than 60 hours/week at his start-up. The baby actually affected the quality of his work by improving it: he planned more, completed projects more thoroughly, documented his work, put in safety features, and made his code more reliable.
The result is that when layoffs happened, his core projects had just been completed and other departments were clamoring for his help and trying to get him to transfer, but since his development work had been well done it could be shoveled onto another over-worked person and his rather high medical expenses for the baby, who'd been ill, avoided by laying him off.
Several old department heads told me privately that they'd tried to rehire him for their departments but had been blocked by a vice president from doing any re-hiring of laid-off personnel.
They shouldn't use it for anything else involving nuclear power, either. Scheduling, getting parts, monitoring security cams, even just turning the lights on in the parking lot can be a problem for security reasons..NET has been a minefield since Peter LaMacchia at Microsoft, who wrote the first good book on it, resigned from the project over the security changes management was making to it in the next release over his direct objections.
Agreed. They'd have to distribute a different compiler than gcc, a different libc package than glibc, a different gzip and tar and make and/bin/sh than the GNU packages.
Once you've swapped out all these components, you're simply not running Linux anymore.
Agreed. The GPL impedes Linux the same way that having seatbelts, brakes, and a muffler impedes the speed of a car. The destructive capability of runaway development without any safety gear to protect the developers and their clients is, in the long run, much faster than watching companies and developers crash and burn as they develop tools that can never be used again by anyone because of closed source.
If you rip out the X display system, you still have an OS. If you rip out glibc, bash, vim and EMACS, the GNU compiler, and all the other GNU tools, you have scattered bytes of programs left that you can't even compile with.
The GNU tools really are the guts of the operating system itself: Linus's kernel provided that last missing piece, the beachhead to unload the rest of the troops onto for the free source invasion.
Serial console is a good approach, but may not be used here. They may be using a Linux based BIOS, which works rather well if you pay the upfront cost of mastering it and buying an appropriate chip programmer to reprogram the BIOS's you mess up in the testing process. One variant is at http://www.linuxbios.org/ and the idea is really quite good: use a micro-Linux to actually replace the BIOS and provide BIOS read/write access to the operating system itself.
It's hard work, because a lot of the current BIOS madness is workarounds of various bugs and limitations of specific hardware, so it requires a lot of testing to be able to use. But it's a very exciting approach for institutional or cluster computing where you have thousands of identical machines.
It's a gaming server: you need to make the IP addresses public, or at least make a tunnelable port on your external facing NAT address, to publish the server for others.
Such servers, even if allowed on a corporate network, should be in a locked down DMZ area of their network, and any such machines should not have the same logins or passwords as other machines. Public SSH key access is preferred if the machine has to have user accounts.
The ones who want Word format are headhunters, so they can add their own letterhead or tweak the resume to send to different clients. I've caught them at it, sometimes with the applicants permission and sometimes without.
What you want is called gsview, and it uses ghostscript for doing the image processing. (Notice the lack of Adobe and Postscript anywhere in the process?)It's available at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/, and it works quite well. It's much lighter weight and faster than the Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it even prints better.
It's not integrated into Internet Explorer or other web browsers the way Acrobat Reader, but it's awfully good.
They were running RedHat Enterprise 3.0. That's a 2.4 kernel, and doesn't even beging to approach leading edge hardware support. The latest published kernel you get from RedHat for that is 2.4.21. You can install a 2.6 kernel by hand, and the ones published by some folks at RedHat are pretty good, but you're really on your own for keeping that up and running for unusual or poorly supported hardware, such as Promise RAID controllers or NVidia devices.
The problem probably isn't the hardware, or Linux. It's SAP. Closed source, extremely feature-driven to sell the latest/hottest/greatest widgets to the VP's who approve its purchase, and extremely reluctant to discuss their system internals with anyone, even when they require very specific kernel and software configurations. That's begging for trouble when you actually use it in the field, but since their main customers are using Windows, you benefit from their support staff and early bug reports being focused on that arena.
They tried to run heavily loaded, production services on a 2.4 kernel. They got what they deserved: RedHat Enterprise 4.0 has been out since January with a robust 2.6 kernel, and they themselves chose to stay with RedHat Enterprise 3.0, which was definitely due for update when 4.0 came out.
I don't blame Crest for that: I blame SAP, who definitely should have been more aggressive about updating their certified software capabilities to match the latest hardware available.
You cannot use vendor provided kernel modules, such as those from NVidia or for various USB license dongles, without loadable kernel modules. You could theoretically integrate their kernel modules into your own kernel source tree, and load them statically, but that's a lot of work and not a good idea for a typical home user of a Linux desktop.
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Also, spammers steal addressbooks or buy them from unethical employees, others make partnership contracts where you've submitted a contact address and use those contacts to get spam addresses, some spammers use alphabetical or name-guess spam, and any unethical sysadmin with a clue can use the mail logs of his servers to generate a list of valid email addresses from other sites for sale.
You apparently missed Iglassware, Bill's contribution to measured drinking, and his role in the JunkYard Wars, at http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0310/Byko/Byk o-0310.html
Let's not get silly. RFID tags are still far too expensive to use at the small scales of individual food containers, although I have seen one demonstration at a trade show of putting them on individual Cocoa Krispies boxes.
They're basically barcodes that can be read from across a room, nothing more complex or powerful than that. They're potentially very useful for tagging expensive containers to be able to track where the box came from: or to track shipping of food where adulteration is a big deal, such as coffee due to its high expense/pound, or drugs due to the concern of poisoning or fake goods. In that way they're more useful than bar codes, because you can put them inside the box and because simply taping another one on top doesn't obscure the other tag. But whoever puts the tag on in the first place can simply lie and mis-enter the data to the database.
But the last estimate I heard for installing RFID tags was an OEM price of $1/tag: I'm surprised if it's gotten much cheaper than that, and that makes it useless for a lot of things.
And also read this, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . It's Eric Raymond's fairly famous rant on the poor design of open source interfaces, with suggested rules on how to avoid or fix some of the issues.
Also, this is marketing from one of the most successful distributions. They're happy to have competitors stay fragmented: it lets RedHat continue to be one of the larger and more integrated environments, and have less effective competition in the server market, where they consider the real business market to be.
Try again, and please learn to count. The Windows releases are more like:
DOS [ multiple versions, mostly discarded but some still active ]
Windows for Workgroups [ multiple versions, but some still active ]
Win95 [ multiple versions, by language and features ]
Win98 [ multiple versions, by language and features ]
WinME [ multiple versions, by language and features ]
Then there are the NT based versions.
NT [3.51, 4.0, etc., multiple versions by language and features]
WinXP [which is really NT 5.0 and should have been labeled such, multiple versions by language and features]
Windows 2003 [Which is really WinXP with delusions of serverhood, but if they want to relabel it again, who are we to argue?]
Longwood [In beta]
So after totalling up all the different actual OS releases, even if you skip the alternative hardware and language versions that make much more of a difference to Windows than to Linux, you're still talking about at least a dozen different active and supported OS's.
No. It's called "mating".
What Microsoft knows that no one else does is their future development plans. They can pre-develop security software to cope with the latest MS Office or .NET security stupidity, such as the way both of them auto-execute things now, and stop wasting time on developing utilities for features they are about to discard.
Neither is stealing or copying the technology, breaking it deliberately, and lauding it as new and improved. The NT kernel and much of that OS was stolen by David Cutler, using his work developing VMS at DEC. The Microsoft Mouse was stolen. Kerberos was copied and broken. Java was copied and broken. Their TCP stack was copied many years ago and left badly broken until, perhaps, Longhorn comes out.
The list goes on, but you get the idea.
Perhaps the refusal to do more than 60-hour workweeks did mark him as disloyal, although the other departments did want to hire him. But I think it was a penny-wise, pound-foolish management choice by a VP who wasn't actually doing any of the real work anymore and believed that firm layoffs would make the stockholders happy, and that people once laid off might be too suspicious of management to deal with.
Suspicion seems to have been well-founded: my friend found out a year later that the software-implemented computer audit he helped start, and was actually written up for spending time doing it, showed that the shipping manager was stealing computers and that at least 20 other computers had slipped through the cracks of accounting and disappeared.
My source was Peter LaMacchia, who explained that we could trust Microsoft to handle the security ramifications of Palladium (now called Trusted Computing) because the engineers who were involved in it would resign if Microsoft screwed it up, just as he had resigned from the .NET project.
.NET changed various security defaults that were previously wise (requiring user approval to install additional software and utilities) into typical Microsoft demoware, where it magically does all these cool things in a demo but doesn't mention the risks of it. Microsoft is famous for these sorts of auto-execution security flaws, and they forced it into the .NET computing architecture over the direct objections of at least one of its core developers. This is why Peter is now working elsewhere.
Of course, his resignation stopped none of the changes:
Agreed. I watched a good colleague, with a new wife and new son, gently refuse to do more than 60 hours/week at his start-up. The baby actually affected the quality of his work by improving it: he planned more, completed projects more thoroughly, documented his work, put in safety features, and made his code more reliable.
The result is that when layoffs happened, his core projects had just been completed and other departments were clamoring for his help and trying to get him to transfer, but since his development work had been well done it could be shoveled onto another over-worked person and his rather high medical expenses for the baby, who'd been ill, avoided by laying him off.
Several old department heads told me privately that they'd tried to rehire him for their departments but had been blocked by a vice president from doing any re-hiring of laid-off personnel.
They shouldn't use it for anything else involving nuclear power, either. Scheduling, getting parts, monitoring security cams, even just turning the lights on in the parking lot can be a problem for security reasons. .NET has been a minefield since Peter LaMacchia at Microsoft, who wrote the first good book on it, resigned from the project over the security changes management was making to it in the next release over his direct objections.
Agreed. They'd have to distribute a different compiler than gcc, a different libc package than glibc, a different gzip and tar and make and /bin/sh than the GNU packages.
Once you've swapped out all these components, you're simply not running Linux anymore.
Agreed. The GPL impedes Linux the same way that having seatbelts, brakes, and a muffler impedes the speed of a car. The destructive capability of runaway development without any safety gear to protect the developers and their clients is, in the long run, much faster than watching companies and developers crash and burn as they develop tools that can never be used again by anyone because of closed source.
If you rip out the X display system, you still have an OS. If you rip out glibc, bash, vim and EMACS, the GNU compiler, and all the other GNU tools, you have scattered bytes of programs left that you can't even compile with.
The GNU tools really are the guts of the operating system itself: Linus's kernel provided that last missing piece, the beachhead to unload the rest of the troops onto for the free source invasion.
Serial console is a good approach, but may not be used here. They may be using a Linux based BIOS, which works rather well if you pay the upfront cost of mastering it and buying an appropriate chip programmer to reprogram the BIOS's you mess up in the testing process. One variant is at http://www.linuxbios.org/ and the idea is really quite good: use a micro-Linux to actually replace the BIOS and provide BIOS read/write access to the operating system itself.
It's hard work, because a lot of the current BIOS madness is workarounds of various bugs and limitations of specific hardware, so it requires a lot of testing to be able to use. But it's a very exciting approach for institutional or cluster computing where you have thousands of identical machines.
It's a gaming server: you need to make the IP addresses public, or at least make a tunnelable port on your external facing NAT address, to publish the server for others.
Such servers, even if allowed on a corporate network, should be in a locked down DMZ area of their network, and any such machines should not have the same logins or passwords as other machines. Public SSH key access is preferred if the machine has to have user accounts.
The ones who want Word format are headhunters, so they can add their own letterhead or tweak the resume to send to different clients. I've caught them at it, sometimes with the applicants permission and sometimes without.
What you want is called gsview, and it uses ghostscript for doing the image processing. (Notice the lack of Adobe and Postscript anywhere in the process?)It's available at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/, and it works quite well. It's much lighter weight and faster than the Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it even prints better.
It's not integrated into Internet Explorer or other web browsers the way Acrobat Reader, but it's awfully good.
To make Windows disk imaging even faster and more reliable, you can use ntfsclone at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html#ntfs tools.
They were running RedHat Enterprise 3.0. That's a 2.4 kernel, and doesn't even beging to approach leading edge hardware support. The latest published kernel you get from RedHat for that is 2.4.21. You can install a 2.6 kernel by hand, and the ones published by some folks at RedHat are pretty good, but you're really on your own for keeping that up and running for unusual or poorly supported hardware, such as Promise RAID controllers or NVidia devices.
The problem probably isn't the hardware, or Linux. It's SAP. Closed source, extremely feature-driven to sell the latest/hottest/greatest widgets to the VP's who approve its purchase, and extremely reluctant to discuss their system internals with anyone, even when they require very specific kernel and software configurations. That's begging for trouble when you actually use it in the field, but since their main customers are using Windows, you benefit from their support staff and early bug reports being focused on that arena.
They tried to run heavily loaded, production services on a 2.4 kernel. They got what they deserved: RedHat Enterprise 4.0 has been out since January with a robust 2.6 kernel, and they themselves chose to stay with RedHat Enterprise 3.0, which was definitely due for update when 4.0 came out.
I don't blame Crest for that: I blame SAP, who definitely should have been more aggressive about updating their certified software capabilities to match the latest hardware available.
You cannot use vendor provided kernel modules, such as those from NVidia or for various USB license dongles, without loadable kernel modules. You could theoretically integrate their kernel modules into your own kernel source tree, and load them statically, but that's a lot of work and not a good idea for a typical home user of a Linux desktop.