People are getting annoyed at MS for something that many applications have done for YEARS. How many people have installed apps that then go off and search for you web browser and "add functionality". Wow, MS did it, big f'n deal! I don't see this as a huge problem myself. So it installs it quitely, so it's hard to remove (perhaps my next few paragraphs might frame a "why"), so what? its not impossible.
If you want a reason to be peaved about this, here is a better one. Having worked for some big companies that do web development (from the perspective of creating websites that add functionality to their own business, not 3rd party developers writing apps for other business') most that I have dealt with have a list of "broswers we must support" which usually includes firefox, IE, safari as a minimum (not platforms, browsers). So now said businesses can say "ahh, we can write.net client side applications and it'll work and support all our browser support requirements". There in lies the problem, suddenly if your running firefox on linux, your screwed because mono and the associated chunks that would fulfil the req's under linux just aren't going to cut it.
As far as im concerned thats the real reason to be very angry. Suddenly people can look at.net as a replacement for java (webstart/applets) and flash. This is NOT a good scenario given that at least adobe and sun do put some effort into making flash and java work with some consistency across platforms. Its not a stab at ruining firefox, its a stab at linux, bsd, solaris, etc. That is a much greater concern.
I couldn't care less about glider, I play maybe a couple hours a week on a good week because I work and have other things to do. But it also means that it takes 4 times as long as alot of players in the game to get anywhere and I also don't grind anything that I don't get a decent benefit out of.
I can understand the appeal of glider, but I don't use it. Consider fishing in WoW for example, its an utterly tedious thing to level up, entirely dependant on your time to do so and can be moderately useful when it's maxed out, as such my char has a total of about 30 skill points in fishing (of about 450 i think is the max). If people use glider to level fishing for them, they may see some benefit for it and using glider to do so would not harm anyone else in the game (one person's fishing doesn't bother another persons).
People may say "oh but someone using glider to run around killing mob's just makes it so much harder for "normal" players to kill those mobs. This is utter fallacy. The reality is that if you can use glider to run around killing mobs, the user of the account is capable of exactly the same thing. In truth glider just gives them the ability to do what they can do naturally when they are not at the computer, and to be fair it would seem fair to use it to level the playing field (i.e. someone who can only manage 4 hours a week gets to keep up with someone playing 20 hours a week).
Now, if your level 80 right now, your probably running around stuggling in some area's because there are 50 other people also trying to grind in the same area. Some of these (such as mages and hunters) are capable of dealing with 3-5 mobs at once. What annoys me is that they do just that (bot or no bot), they tap 3-5 mobs and sit there with crowd-control so they get the kill. This (imho) should also be banned if they are going to go after glider.
The reality is though, that even with something like glider you wont level the playing field. The things that make some players better then others are mostly in instances and raid dungeons that glider is never going to be able to help you with and getting from level 1 to 80 with glider makes playing the game pointless because theres alot of things you learn by actually grinding your char up those levels.
The even sadder part though is that the people using bots to farm gold and spam you trying to sell it may stop using glider and move to something else equally good and so its a no-win situation because glider was "available to anyone" and easy to go after. But this is typical of Blizzard tactics (see bnetd), with the money they spent on the case they could hire people to actively go after gold spamming accounts, they make alot of money of WoW and so they go after glider as a PR exercise rather then going after the real problem. To me, the real problem is the people who sit there spamming me trying to sell me gold and power-leveling services. The rest I don't care about (if you want to farm gold and sell it online, be my guest but dont bother me with it). I also think that the whole practice of stopping people from selling what they get/own/farm online is quite wrong. After all, if you play WoW, get to level 80 and decide "i've had enough", why shouldn't you be able to sell your account? you paid for it and you probably put alot of work into it.
I personally don't think glider ever will (or would) make the game unplayable for human users, but as I mentioned, I don't care about glider.
What I do care about is the ramifications of the judgement (IANAL), but it would seem that anyone who writes software (especially in the online space - think software as a service) could stop you for automating the use of it. So if for example I choose to use google docs as my software provider they could have a terms of service forbidding me from using some macro-driven software to auto-fill bits in tables for me (they aren't about to do that). That is seriously scarey stuff. If MS come out with Office online (or is it already out?) what would happen if they choose to have a "Certification" criteria for client side macro programs - well hello monopoly abuse.
I think alot of people have missed the point as to what seed is trying to achieve.
Consider firefox addon's as a good example of what seed is trying to accomplish.
Having done "addon" functionality in a number of places its actually quite a limiting experience, people mention perl, php, c++ and c while talking about bindings... sorry, your missing the purpose. Perl is very bad as an language devoted to creating addon's as is php, while c++ and c are completely out (unless you want to write a c++ or c runtime interpreter... no? well, it has been done, but thats beside the point).
One of the tricky things with righting "addon" features is passing data to and from while retaining control in the original program. Now, you can write something in C and execute perl from there, but you cant easily pass between the two as you would with addon's. C++ and C (compiled to a shared object) it is highly possible, but obviously very limiting. Same with php, you can execute php from within an application (as apache does), but not pass data between the two in a meaningful way. The point is, dont confuse language bindings (i.e. the ability to "create" a gtk gui from perl, pyhthon, php, and the rest) with the ability to embed the language.
The second thing is, people talk about "well, if its JS, it'll have to be opensource!". Again wrong, there are quite a number of things out there (though crackable) that allow you to protect php, perl, python, etc from being "read" (be they byte-code compilers or whatever). I cant see that being such a big problem for JS either.
Personally, I would love to see a more generic approach in the form of "extend mysql functionality with JS plugins" and so forth (insert any application - server or gui or whatever), which i dont see seed being capable of providing.
Dont get too angry at the patent examiner, back in 2000 there weren't alot of the tools available to "find" some things as prior art.
But, Given they were doing this some time before 2000 and keep in mind there wasn't much before 2000 aside from EQ. At least not in the commercial MMO sense. So to say they were the first to do it holds some water in some specific scenarios.
However, there is alot of prior art in the persistent world, personallized avatar scene. In 1998 I was even working in the 3d gaming industry, though not in this particular area.
I do remember as early as '96/'95 playing the first quake "beta", and prior to that doom (Though doom was only partly 3d - many sprites and didnt actually deal with verticals at all). But both engines were made public and there was alot of custom games written from both. There was one I used to play at lan parties based off quake that allowed people to customize avatars. Sure, we didnt have the detail algorithms that they do today back then, but we did have mip-mapping, and sure, we had max 16 players (depending on the game itself and its server) and the game was non-persistant.
But, when you read the the patent claim the various quake mods do actually qualify. They didn't keep objects in an RDBMS, but they did have their own database - though it was quite simple. What also qualifies are things like battle net (im not sure if that was pre-2000 or not) and so forth.
Also keep in mind, while worlds.com may be suing a game company there are more then just games at stake.
There were several experiments I played with based on the persistent-world idea using the quake client (or at least, its ideas). They weren't much, and they weren't commercial, but EQ was an evolution of many ideas that came before it (including the various experiments based on the quake client and various extensions to the MUD concept).
I even remember a very simple java-based persistent world that didn't live very long (while I was back at uni) where people would interact with those around them (in a non-i-want-to-shoot-you sense).
But when you read the patent, its hard to see it surviving simply because of the prior art. If you only took EQ into account (and that would be a ridiculous notion).
You might have to go back to places like the funet and (i cant remember the others, but there was a few great places to get shareware/FOSS/software legally back prior to things like sourceforge, google code, and the various download archives like tucows), i think one was called simtel as well, but there were many more. I even have pressed CD's from '94 (still on my desk) that contain archives of them (infomagic cd's if anyone remembers them, the best way of getting your hands on linux at the time because downloading it onto floppies was pure pain and there was no such thing as "burning" a cd or usb hard drives).
However, I digress. I remember one of those little java (or something) based multi-user (kind of like a 3d muck that was like an irc client with a physical dimension) programs floating around one of those mirrors.
But at the crux of the matter what I believe is that software patents should bite the bullet and be gotten rid of. Its a ridiculous notion. I also believe patent examiners should be gotten rid of. They do nothing except hold up the patent process, they rarely get it right and in reality someone who just checks the format of the patent would be good enough. Then have a penalty system that punishes people for publishing patents where prior art existed so long as you can prove the information for the prior art was public prior to the patent (and lets face it, patent cases go on for years already, this wouldn't make it any worse). Just leave it up to the public to do the due diligence. Make it so expensive to get it wrong that people who submit patents are going to pay a big price for getting it wrong.
Since vista came out I've been pretty much linux-only at the desktop (prior to that it was probably 50/50 and i've been at it alot longer then probably 99.9% of people using linux today) and for the most part I like it. However, there are some things I find hard to tolerate.
First, people say linux is snappy. well, thats very subjective (i've seen "snappy vista") and the applications that run on top of it are often the pain. So my start menu comes up nice and quick? Wow, well firefox 3 on linux still isnt anywhere near as snappy and responsive as firefox 2 on XP. Anyone seen chrome on XP/Vista lately by the way, im praying to god chrome will be the answer to my web browsing pain under linux. But thats just me.
Second thing, about eye candy. I (off and on) run compiz for 1 really simple thing, the window shading - practically every OS does it but its quite useful to be able to look at a screen cluttered with windows and know where one begins and the next ends... More on that, I also appreciate a "small" window manager. I.e. one with very very little wasted screen space (Another reason i love chrome) and KDE 3.x used to be able to provide that. Then kde 4 (and yes i've tried the 4.x releases too) came out - a bloated WM that suddenly needed twice the screen real estate just for the window borders!?!?!?!. That was frustrating. I've tried fvwm (what i used to use ages and ages ago), and many others. But at the end of the day I bring up firefox or evolution or thunderbird or whatever and i'm forced to look at this massive amount of whitespace between buttons and menus.
I think, if you asked alot of desktop users, they'd want a "nice" desktop that utilised screen real estate while being able to be "pretty", I think compiz delivers on part of that in the prettiness sense (though could leave some desires for a bit more user friendliness on the finger-yoga key bindings), but its hard to find something that works well without looking like a desktop white-space hog. As an example, look at nautilus, look at the whitespace between the text in a button and the edge of the button (or just the location bar and the main tool bar, then compare it at the same resolution to explorer side-by-side - im not talking about the actual file list by the way, just the bars at the top)... what a waste of space. For a while I thought xfce might have been a valid choice, but im still searching!
As for MACOS X, i dont know how people stand that interface, but thats me!
As for W7 beta 1, well, the screen shots dont really tell you much when it comes down to it and i'm unlikely to listen to vague "its so much snappier" remarks with nothing backing it up... its quite bizare anyone would make a post about how its "so much snappier" and then give you static screen shots... They certainly don't answer any questions along the lines of "here's all the things you hate about vista removed!". After all, when it comes to "snappy", windows XP (and even vista) are snappy when first installed (on current hardware)... go figure, show me something that makes sence. I.e. show me a machine where vista will suck and windows 7 will not, then i'll be impressed. After all, the hardware has gone a long way to catching up when it comes to vista-pain.
While i am adamantly apposed to the whole govt filtering thing. The reasons I hate it is because its going to waste alot of tax payer money and achieve nothing but make my game playing in MMO land alot less enjoyable... Yet the govt is too stupid (and too ham-strung by the family first minister who is truly the most god-forsaken idiot on the planet) to be able to see it.
But, how do you stop bit torrent? dont you just cut off the trackers? (im no bittorrent expert). In which case its just going to be like the rest of the internet filtering rubbish. Now, my assumption is its going to be partly automated and partly player-controlled in that there will be family first fanatics sitting in a room looking for sites of evil (funded by the tax payers) and adding them to a list of "banned" sites. And of course, you'll have users at the other end going "this site isnt evil, please unblock it".
But, getting from the list of evil onto the filtering list (or off again) will probably require some political process - i.e. time. So "generic porn site" will get blocked, but by the time it does, 15 other sites will have risen in its place. So you achieve nothing, and in the interim, joe user is banging his head against the wall going "i really wanted to get to a site" that had nothing to do with porn.
Now, for example, a little while ago I went and got a vps provider and it just so happened that the person who had used that particular IP address prior to me was an adult website (the reverse address lookup gave it away). Now assuming they've blocked access to that IP address, can you imagine how p*ssed off I would be not to be able to access my shiny new vps?
But, this isn't about protecting children and never has been, its not about blocking porn sites or anything like that, its about a small-minded minister with no brains trying to persuade another even stupider minister to vote the way his govt does.
The thing most people dont seem to get though is that its going to be about killing "crime" much the same way as it is in real life - find out who the criminal is and block them. This is not a black-and-white kull p2p (i dont think). But the government is too slow to really achieve that on the "Real" internet, by the time they're able to add a block list for some p2p tracker it's probably already distributed its load and when some more legit site takes its place they'll be the ones to suffer. So right along side them the other people who'll suffer are the users, copping a huge boost in latency and making the traffic to the US (when MMO land lives) even slower.
But as the old saying goes "make something idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot" (applies to our ministers in AU quite well), but in this case I simply mean that if you make things inaccessible, people will find other ways to access them and eventually it'll be so hard to differentiate between good and evil you cant achieve a goal. In that sense it'll probably be good for the internet in some way, it'll spawn innovation. Need is the mother of invention after all right?
A penguin running onto the set of the mac "im a mac" commercials, knocking the pc guy over, stealing his shoes, throwing them at the MAC guy, flipping them both the bird and running away shouting "heh, too easy".
It's a rediculous notion, and almost certain to become law if Australia (where I live) is anything to go by. We're filtering the content of the internet based on the stupidity of a minor party who is somehow in control of the internet, or at least in control of the minister in control of the internet. Essentially this means we're going to slow down the internet in this country to make it ever-so-slightly harder for someone to look at rude pictures in the hope that kids (and lets face it, they're usually the ones who figure out how to get around such measures anyway) wont see said rude pictures.
But what our govt is doing makes (if only barely) more sence what the Canadians are doing, or there's a massive back-story we're not exposed to. So lets try and put it in perspective in a way that makes sence. Lets say the local school gets broken into by vandals and they do alot of damage, who pays for it? the tax payers inevitably. Even if the vandals are caught, they are unlikely to have the money to fund the repairs (nor the skills to help fix the damage). In fact, the only option is incarceration or some form of penalty which ultimately leads to more public money being eaten. But theres more, because its become quite common (im talking hypothetically here), the tax payer ends up footing the bill for a 10ft high fence right around the school and a security patrol (subsitute school with trains, busses, govt buildings as you like, it still goes the same way).
So how does that little example relate to a 3% tax on isp's? It shouldn't, and it represents a huge amount of ignorance from the group itself and from anyone who supports it. SOCAN itself MAY not be evil as people have been saying (and reading this I find that very hard to believe, maybe they're becoming evil, maybe they've been watching the RIAA/MPAA/etc?), but in the very least (much like our Australian minister of fruity firewalls), they're completely ignorant. In reality, it shouldn't be ISP's that are footing the bill if your going to go down this path, it should be everyone, thats what TAX is for if you can equate fixing a school with fixing a copyright. After all, does illegal copying only occur over the internet? (sure it makes it easier, but im equally sure that like most countries there are plenty of flee markets going on where people are selling bootleg cd's, but wait, thats what the CD tax was for!!). The reality is is that there is no way to do it fairly, but more importantly "with even a hint of fairness"
Where it becomes ridiculous is that you have no way of apportioning out this "tax" to the people who are being pirated in the first place. Do you assume that the general lay of the land on pirated content follows the popular media? And why just music? More importantly though (probably the most important point) is that music, unlike the public school, is a luxury and never dies. You create it once and its around forever. You can copy it to infinity and it cost no one anything at all and its absurd notion to assume that just because people are pirating your music that they would have bought it and hence your loosing money.
On the flip side, if the govt were to tax the ISP's by 10%, then make it perfectly legal to "pirate" music, then you would have no argument from me even though I barely bother to listen to music anymore - the whole copyright thing in the US just makes it an unpleasurable thing to do these days. But, what would thoroughly p*ss me off as a tax payer in the upper bands is that I'm forced to foot the bill for what is a luxury crime, this is not a crime that makes my local school unusable, I cant howl for the vandals to be strung up by the codlies, they're not endangering lives and they're not stopping my kids (if i had any) from getting an education, stopping food from getting to my local retailer, etc. The reality is that the people who will get the money are likely to be the musicians who are already earning magnitudes of cash more then I am, so is it fair that I should have to pay a tax so they can get 1 more extra m
I was a fan of IPV6 when it first was proposed (back in '93 i think and it was a battle betwen ip128, ipng and something else), it looked like a good solution to what would evidently be a problem at some point.
But these days its seems like no one actually learned from the mistakes of the past. All the things that were done wrong with ipv4 and now being done again with ipv6 (classes for eg)... "I can only have a/64 or/48 network?" are you for real?.
I guess the point im trying to make is that/64 is a HUGE number, but back in my day when they were handing out class A subnets like candy, 32 sounded pretty big too. Given the love we have for gadetry, that address space will be consumed mighty fast and so we'll go through a very painful migration for something that may put us back where we were with people calling out the "doom of the ipv4 address space".
On top of that we have idiots running around saying things like "NAT is evil! IPV6 will be the end of NAT" and in other areas the same thing except "we wont implement NAT for ipv6 in the linux kernel". Without even understanding the reasons NAT came to be in the first place. NAT was absolutely not developed as a solution to the ipv4 address space running out. In reality it gave people a way of "getting" an address space without having to be assigned one, not because it was hard to get one but because it was a temporary space. Later on this became very important because the internet suddenly became popular outside the academic space. When internet first came to Australia at the consumer level it was AGAINST THE TERMS OF USE to have more then one machine on the other end of the link, but thankfully by then we had linux with its natting kernel. Later home consumer routers became ubiquitous and the problem mostly solved itself. NAT also has its uses in the corporate world, which I wont bother going into.
On top of that you have people who scream things like "NAT isnt scalable". Well, yes, If i try and push 1000 people through a single NAT thats going to be an issue. But its such a rediculous argument anyone who makes it should be shot anyway, I mean how dumb do you have to be to say something like that? have you never dealt with large networks?. That was never and will never be an issue regardless.
But, for me the most important part of NAT is simple the ability to own my own address space - something that no one can decide for me, and if you think thats a bad thing then you really have lost the plot.
As for NAT breaking protocols, well, IMHO people should be designing protocols to work through a NAT. In most cases it forces people to do things the right way (look at h323 as a good example, a very poor protocol that just doesn't work very well with or without NAT, and later SIP - personally, im not a big fan of SIP, but at least its better then h323) at the network layer. There are obviously places where NAT is definitely not feasible (incoming services for the most part). But every incoming service has an initiator, which should work behind NAT with few exceptions.
I personally use cacti.. which is capable of importing stats on just about anything and converting them into graphs. But supports just about anything that can publish data through snmp also (great for routers and stuff). Has quite a nice interface too (http://www.cacti.net/).
Otherwise, hobbit with rrd (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) is pretty decent and can track most things. Generally speaking, i've used many MANY commercial products and I've not seen anything that really works as well (and as simply) as hobbit does.
However, i've come to realise that the reason's i have this perception is simply the applications.
Firefox is probably the biggest and baddest example - its so pathetic under linux. The mozilla guys dont give a dam about linux and blame everything else for its various slowdowns. Opera is quicker (though not markedly so), but still how much of your time do you spend in your web browser? If your like me its quite alot (and yes i work in IT). Its the sadest part of the linux desktop and very detrimental to the overall look and feel of linux.
Now, if you switch to ie4linux (ie6) you'll feel a vast improvement. How sad is that? a browser, running under a compatibility layer managers a better general responsiveness that one thats supposed to be completely native.
Of course, if you then compare things with other applications you start to notice an interesting reality - Open office is very responsive, next to no interface lag. Even eclipse (java) is snappier than firefox.
There are of course other applications that have terrible responsiveness (fedora's python configuration gui's for example), but none of them are anywhere near as important as the web browser.
actually just impi by itself is fine... there is even (somewhere, i cant find it but i've seen it used) a serial access console for ipmi on windows (2003, 2008) that can reboot/crashdump and give you a cmd prompt....
The ipmi interface (existts on almost every current server hardware, though few people are aware of the fact) allows both soft and hard power on/off, reset and access to a serial console...
Typically this is good enough for most things, and rdp for the rest.
The problem is (typically) diagnostics... like a machine going down and no one knowing why...
From the OS side, im not sure about vxworks, but there are snmp adaptors for windows that could help you start/stop programs or web based admin things.
I dont know what its like in other countries, but in Australia trying to find the eeepc in a linux version is near impossible.
As I work for a VAR/SI company we have logins to many importers and wholesalers. One of the biggest in Australia has 3 versions of the linux-based eeepc. Two of them are 701's. The third is one version of 901, and it comes in at $120 more expensive then the XP version with a 2gb ram upgrade.
Thats right, more than 20% extra for the 1gb 901 with linux versus a 2gb 901 with windows. If you went into a retail store you might find an acer aspire one running linux, but theres no way in hell you'll find a eeepc running it anymore. So is it a surprise XP is outselling linux? Hell no.
Personally, this is the reason why I hate MS, they couldn't compete fairly so they found another way around the problem - force the OEM's to make linux so expensive and unavailable no one would ever use it.
ok, this is going to be a rant, so hold on to your seats. But having dealt with this bug for so long has gotten me near the edge when it comes to mozilla
---rant begin---
It still has the same linux bug people have been complaining about for I have no idea how long and effects quite a number of users...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970 - and this wasnt the first time it was logged either. Check out the last link in that bug report and feel the pain if the bug affects you...
Then again, I keep making the assumption mozilla give a flying.... about linux, which means im the one in the wrong, right? Its really the only piece of the linux puzzle i've yet to be able to find an adequate answer to and I've tried them all. The sad part is that mozilla is the best answer in most situations (though between IEs4linux and opera theres a possible answer there).
yes i've tried ever fix ever mentioned for it... So far the only real method that "works" is to use something like the adblock plugin to kill off the performance destroying aspects of a website.
While its true that linux has never been the subject of a concentrated effort on the virus front, there are many reasons for it. Some of it revolves around the user, some of it around the penetration and some of it is because of the variety out there.
Consider Windows XP for example, its been around for a long time, and while holes get patches you can reliably (if you were a virus maker) guess that everyone running windows XP has a certain patch level and software level. While its true there is some variety, its not like on linux where the kernel alone can be anything from 2.4.x to 2.6.26 and writing a virus to aim for that kind of range of software is hard enough without taking into account the software that might be running (and their version level also) on the box. So even a "broad spectrum" virus may only be able to hit 10-20% of linux desktops/servers and likely wont get 50% of that.
The second thing is the obvious, market penetration, theres just not enough "ordinary" people out there running linux. Lets say all the "ordinary" people ran ubuntu 8.10, even the "ordinary" people are mostly smart enough to know they've been infected - if it were happening. where as the "ordinary" people on windows are very ordinary. The general computing intelligence level of the windows desktop user vs the linux desktop level (on average) is very very much different. There are many people out there who dont even know what a windows share is, and haven't heard of linux - to them windows is a web browser, an email client and an instant message platform.
It's also worth pointing out that while linux isn't the subject of desktop virus, it's certainly the subject of server/script kiddie hacking - DDos botnets, spam relays, and the like. So dont think linux is not prone to problems, it sure is but desktop machines just dont make for reliable platforms for such things.
Another thing to consider is how virus' have evolved over time, back in the dos/wfw 3.11 days virus simply erased your hard disk (or floppy) and printed a message telling you your an idiot. These days they catch back account info and are a hell of a lot more clandestine.
But at the end of the day, windows is a big (huge user base) simple target with often-uncaring users. Mac is catching up, but a long way to go yet. Why write a virus that hits 5% of the population when you can write one thats hitting 90%...
As for virus scanners, i've only seen (or ever found) clam, spybot search and destroy, and avira. I dont think they're any better or worse then the comercial competitors, but i dont really use windows much either!.
Howard's minister was sensible, and the people voted to chuck Howard out, which was probably fair, but it definitely was a case of "throwing out the baby with the bath water". Which is a shame.
To be honest, what i think is more worrying is that Conroy is so obsessed with child pornography to the point that when so many people in the technical adept community are telling him "this wont work" he wont listen. Which either means someone (think family first retards) has his genitalia in a vice, he's acting on the recommendations of a software company willing to throw alot of money in his personal pocket, or he's doing it simply because its not what the Howard govt did. All of those ideas are highly disturbing.
At the end of the day Australia ends up with a firewall thats going to kill our internet speeds and achieve nothing - factor in the fact we have some of the slowest speeds (and the highest costs) in the world and you've got to wonder why we're wasting this huge amount of money on a pointless notion.
As for Howard and the war, while he was very Pro-US, im not sure any other prime minister would have done differently, they all seem to think tieing us tightly to the US (at least in the military sense) is a requirement. Im not sure thats something i really care about so long as they dont start drafting civilians!
So does that mean, everyone in the USA voted to have people tortured at Guantanamo?
Now, thats probably unfair - but so is the OP. Not only that we're forced to vote and we dont have a "I vote for none of you" option. You can try and blame the people of Australia by saying we've brought this on ourselves, but that's kind of like saying to someone who died in the towers on 9/11 "well, you voted for the US govt who didn't see this coming so its your fault you died...."
The point of that article was how to present poor statistical analysis (being someone who hated statistics at uni, I can see my own half-arsed attempts in the article).
Or perhaps its fairer to say "poor statistical analysis accompanies by real-world lack of knowledge".
Now, if you work with SAN's and storage, you probably already see the faults that I really cant be bothered pointing out... we can just sit here and laugh together at yet another ill-conceived zdnet article shall we?
I can only assume there was a point behind the repost of the same cx1 article (some time ago as well), but i fail to see it.
However, back then I had a good long look at it, and I fail to really see the benefit over any other blade system really, be it a dell, hp, IBM or the absolutely spanking egenera.
That point aside, anyone who's worked in the industry with infiniband knows why alot of the silicon makers aligned with it have abandoned it. It really is a painful tech, that works in some very very select corner cases (tds ramsan for example uses it to good advantage). Infiniband really is one of the big un-kept promises in the IT realm.
What I personally use is all linux so it may not be much use to you however, i've gone thru several iterations of a simple script for my machines.
Originally it was just a usb connected drive at home and work that got rsynced to (it would look for an lvm volume with specific name and if it existed, kick it off). The first iteration of the script basically just rsynced the data across and once a week did a dump. The second iteration took lvm snapshots on top of that (with some minor automated management) and added rsync -d to the mix (deletes files on the target that dont exist on the source).
The next iteration was a much bigger change (and probably the smarter one) so basically it would rsync and snapshot files that didnt come from (or had changed from) packages that existed on the machine. i.e. it would go thru all the files on my harddrive, if it was from a package it would leave it alone (getting the OS back is simple then just overlay the backup stuff on top). a little while ago i switch to zfs for the external drive (my only real regret is zfs will probably never be a part of the linux kernel) and thats been pretty good cause zfs is a brilliant filesystem.
In the OSS space i've played with things like afs, coda, drbd and things that wrap around svn and cvs (how I wish lvm had replication in built).
But, having worked in the big-boy space for a long time i've seen alot of commercially available implementations most of which are available cross platform. Some are based on backup solutions (netbackup, backupexec, backbone, etc) and some work at the storage level.
One implementation I was mostly impressed with though was using falconstor. Its basically a block-level replication software that connects to iscsi volumes and is really quite impressive in the way it manages backing up data. The company itself had mostly rover types who were in the office maybe once a week, the rest of the time their volumes would sync across links of varying speed (even over vpn) and was able to be configured not to chew up the entire link space. It all spoke back to an iscsi storage device (equalogic or emc with its iscsi head, i cant remember) and was also snapshotted occasionally. The best part about it was they never really had to deal with it, it just seemed to work 99.99% of the time.
So far i've found the OSS side a little friendlier to those who know how to use them (mostly because they're just so much easier to modify), while the commercial side do everything you expect them to with varying degrees of success without being flexible enough.
Of course, the one definitive thing i've found with people is that you'll always find someone who'll end up saving data in odd locations then get cranky when you cant restore it because you just weren't backing up c:\windows\temp;). The whole "you can please some of the people some of the time" holds true 99% of the time.
twice-memory came from the old (old) unix days (and is still applicable by the way) because a crash wrote memory to swap. the machine would restart, look for a crash signature in swap and if it existed, suck it back out onto disk for analysis.
Again, all still very applicable today (for unix).
having said that, so long as you dont need to analyse your crash dumps, your choice of swap size can be more flexible!
I did buy a set of glasses for the whole nvidia deal and they didnt suck terribly (edimensional 3d, and they were quite cheap) - in fact i was mostly quite impressed really. It did have its draw backs, (i remember playing eve online once with them, and the way eve draws it universe meant they didn't work, but for alot of games they were quite sufficient). They also worked as a pass-thru which i didnt really like (and really wasnt needed if the card had just had a little plug on it instead of having to use the passthru)
But, where I really did quite like them was for 3d modelling. very handy to be able to see 3d models in 3d even if only for flying around the model every now and then. It gives a kind of perspective that was hard to easily gain on a monitor.
The other feature I tried to get going (and failed terribly) was for security - sure its easily undone, but if you could have the eye shutters opening and closing (ok, their LCD so they dont actually move, but you know what i mean) together you could show the "real screen" when the shutters are open and garbage the other times. Assuming you had a fast enough monitor you could make it fairly random (open and close) for some added security. Ultimately the system is flawed for real security, but for a bit of privacy in the cubicle it would have been a nice idea.
Theres alot of arguments in the replies about things unrelated (like the symantics of raid levels.
My personal option at home was (for some time) a very cheap amd mb with a gig connection and 6 sata disks 3 medium sized fast canavores striped and 3 larger (slower) disks (used as raw volumes for backup with bacula. Some of this storage was on shares, others were used as iscsi volumes and after trying a few of the bits of software out there (freenas/openfiler) i finally decided just putting fedora (any linux based os will do, ubuntu, suse, whatever floats your boat) and webwin was perfectly satisfactory (later it all got replaced with a very speedy xeon machine work gave me and so now i have no real nas as such.
There are a number of devices that i have used (the linksys nslu2 for example) which are perfectly good (only 100mb ethernet though). And i've heard good things about the d-link dns-323, both exceptionally low power devices.
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A great example of making a proprietary method of syncing mobile devices even more important when there are open standards already available...
nice one google, lets add to your monopolistic competitor's ability to make the market even less free then it should be.
There are many things that should be forced open and active sync is a good example. Im sure people could list a tonne of others.
People are getting annoyed at MS for something that many applications have done for YEARS. How many people have installed apps that then go off and search for you web browser and "add functionality". Wow, MS did it, big f'n deal! I don't see this as a huge problem myself. So it installs it quitely, so it's hard to remove (perhaps my next few paragraphs might frame a "why"), so what? its not impossible.
If you want a reason to be peaved about this, here is a better one. Having worked for some big companies that do web development (from the perspective of creating websites that add functionality to their own business, not 3rd party developers writing apps for other business') most that I have dealt with have a list of "broswers we must support" which usually includes firefox, IE, safari as a minimum (not platforms, browsers). So now said businesses can say "ahh, we can write .net client side applications and it'll work and support all our browser support requirements". There in lies the problem, suddenly if your running firefox on linux, your screwed because mono and the associated chunks that would fulfil the req's under linux just aren't going to cut it.
As far as im concerned thats the real reason to be very angry. Suddenly people can look at .net as a replacement for java (webstart/applets) and flash. This is NOT a good scenario given that at least adobe and sun do put some effort into making flash and java work with some consistency across platforms. Its not a stab at ruining firefox, its a stab at linux, bsd, solaris, etc. That is a much greater concern.
I couldn't care less about glider, I play maybe a couple hours a week on a good week because I work and have other things to do. But it also means that it takes 4 times as long as alot of players in the game to get anywhere and I also don't grind anything that I don't get a decent benefit out of.
I can understand the appeal of glider, but I don't use it. Consider fishing in WoW for example, its an utterly tedious thing to level up, entirely dependant on your time to do so and can be moderately useful when it's maxed out, as such my char has a total of about 30 skill points in fishing (of about 450 i think is the max). If people use glider to level fishing for them, they may see some benefit for it and using glider to do so would not harm anyone else in the game (one person's fishing doesn't bother another persons).
People may say "oh but someone using glider to run around killing mob's just makes it so much harder for "normal" players to kill those mobs. This is utter fallacy. The reality is that if you can use glider to run around killing mobs, the user of the account is capable of exactly the same thing. In truth glider just gives them the ability to do what they can do naturally when they are not at the computer, and to be fair it would seem fair to use it to level the playing field (i.e. someone who can only manage 4 hours a week gets to keep up with someone playing 20 hours a week).
Now, if your level 80 right now, your probably running around stuggling in some area's because there are 50 other people also trying to grind in the same area. Some of these (such as mages and hunters) are capable of dealing with 3-5 mobs at once. What annoys me is that they do just that (bot or no bot), they tap 3-5 mobs and sit there with crowd-control so they get the kill. This (imho) should also be banned if they are going to go after glider.
The reality is though, that even with something like glider you wont level the playing field. The things that make some players better then others are mostly in instances and raid dungeons that glider is never going to be able to help you with and getting from level 1 to 80 with glider makes playing the game pointless because theres alot of things you learn by actually grinding your char up those levels.
The even sadder part though is that the people using bots to farm gold and spam you trying to sell it may stop using glider and move to something else equally good and so its a no-win situation because glider was "available to anyone" and easy to go after. But this is typical of Blizzard tactics (see bnetd), with the money they spent on the case they could hire people to actively go after gold spamming accounts, they make alot of money of WoW and so they go after glider as a PR exercise rather then going after the real problem. To me, the real problem is the people who sit there spamming me trying to sell me gold and power-leveling services. The rest I don't care about (if you want to farm gold and sell it online, be my guest but dont bother me with it). I also think that the whole practice of stopping people from selling what they get/own/farm online is quite wrong. After all, if you play WoW, get to level 80 and decide "i've had enough", why shouldn't you be able to sell your account? you paid for it and you probably put alot of work into it.
I personally don't think glider ever will (or would) make the game unplayable for human users, but as I mentioned, I don't care about glider.
What I do care about is the ramifications of the judgement (IANAL), but it would seem that anyone who writes software (especially in the online space - think software as a service) could stop you for automating the use of it. So if for example I choose to use google docs as my software provider they could have a terms of service forbidding me from using some macro-driven software to auto-fill bits in tables for me (they aren't about to do that). That is seriously scarey stuff. If MS come out with Office online (or is it already out?) what would happen if they choose to have a "Certification" criteria for client side macro programs - well hello monopoly abuse.
The judge has obviously lost his marbles.
I think alot of people have missed the point as to what seed is trying to achieve.
Consider firefox addon's as a good example of what seed is trying to accomplish.
Having done "addon" functionality in a number of places its actually quite a limiting experience, people mention perl, php, c++ and c while talking about bindings... sorry, your missing the purpose. Perl is very bad as an language devoted to creating addon's as is php, while c++ and c are completely out (unless you want to write a c++ or c runtime interpreter... no? well, it has been done, but thats beside the point).
One of the tricky things with righting "addon" features is passing data to and from while retaining control in the original program. Now, you can write something in C and execute perl from there, but you cant easily pass between the two as you would with addon's. C++ and C (compiled to a shared object) it is highly possible, but obviously very limiting. Same with php, you can execute php from within an application (as apache does), but not pass data between the two in a meaningful way. The point is, dont confuse language bindings (i.e. the ability to "create" a gtk gui from perl, pyhthon, php, and the rest) with the ability to embed the language.
The second thing is, people talk about "well, if its JS, it'll have to be opensource!". Again wrong, there are quite a number of things out there (though crackable) that allow you to protect php, perl, python, etc from being "read" (be they byte-code compilers or whatever). I cant see that being such a big problem for JS either.
Personally, I would love to see a more generic approach in the form of "extend mysql functionality with JS plugins" and so forth (insert any application - server or gui or whatever), which i dont see seed being capable of providing.
Dont get too angry at the patent examiner, back in 2000 there weren't alot of the tools available to "find" some things as prior art.
But, Given they were doing this some time before 2000 and keep in mind there wasn't much before 2000 aside from EQ. At least not in the commercial MMO sense. So to say they were the first to do it holds some water in some specific scenarios.
However, there is alot of prior art in the persistent world, personallized avatar scene. In 1998 I was even working in the 3d gaming industry, though not in this particular area.
I do remember as early as '96/'95 playing the first quake "beta", and prior to that doom (Though doom was only partly 3d - many sprites and didnt actually deal with verticals at all). But both engines were made public and there was alot of custom games written from both. There was one I used to play at lan parties based off quake that allowed people to customize avatars. Sure, we didnt have the detail algorithms that they do today back then, but we did have mip-mapping, and sure, we had max 16 players (depending on the game itself and its server) and the game was non-persistant.
But, when you read the the patent claim the various quake mods do actually qualify. They didn't keep objects in an RDBMS, but they did have their own database - though it was quite simple. What also qualifies are things like battle net (im not sure if that was pre-2000 or not) and so forth.
Also keep in mind, while worlds.com may be suing a game company there are more then just games at stake.
There were several experiments I played with based on the persistent-world idea using the quake client (or at least, its ideas). They weren't much, and they weren't commercial, but EQ was an evolution of many ideas that came before it (including the various experiments based on the quake client and various extensions to the MUD concept).
I even remember a very simple java-based persistent world that didn't live very long (while I was back at uni) where people would interact with those around them (in a non-i-want-to-shoot-you sense).
But when you read the patent, its hard to see it surviving simply because of the prior art. If you only took EQ into account (and that would be a ridiculous notion).
You might have to go back to places like the funet and (i cant remember the others, but there was a few great places to get shareware/FOSS/software legally back prior to things like sourceforge, google code, and the various download archives like tucows), i think one was called simtel as well, but there were many more. I even have pressed CD's from '94 (still on my desk) that contain archives of them (infomagic cd's if anyone remembers them, the best way of getting your hands on linux at the time because downloading it onto floppies was pure pain and there was no such thing as "burning" a cd or usb hard drives).
However, I digress. I remember one of those little java (or something) based multi-user (kind of like a 3d muck that was like an irc client with a physical dimension) programs floating around one of those mirrors.
But at the crux of the matter what I believe is that software patents should bite the bullet and be gotten rid of. Its a ridiculous notion. I also believe patent examiners should be gotten rid of. They do nothing except hold up the patent process, they rarely get it right and in reality someone who just checks the format of the patent would be good enough. Then have a penalty system that punishes people for publishing patents where prior art existed so long as you can prove the information for the prior art was public prior to the patent (and lets face it, patent cases go on for years already, this wouldn't make it any worse). Just leave it up to the public to do the due diligence. Make it so expensive to get it wrong that people who submit patents are going to pay a big price for getting it wrong.
Since vista came out I've been pretty much linux-only at the desktop (prior to that it was probably 50/50 and i've been at it alot longer then probably 99.9% of people using linux today) and for the most part I like it. However, there are some things I find hard to tolerate.
First, people say linux is snappy. well, thats very subjective (i've seen "snappy vista") and the applications that run on top of it are often the pain. So my start menu comes up nice and quick? Wow, well firefox 3 on linux still isnt anywhere near as snappy and responsive as firefox 2 on XP. Anyone seen chrome on XP/Vista lately by the way, im praying to god chrome will be the answer to my web browsing pain under linux. But thats just me.
Second thing, about eye candy. I (off and on) run compiz for 1 really simple thing, the window shading - practically every OS does it but its quite useful to be able to look at a screen cluttered with windows and know where one begins and the next ends... More on that, I also appreciate a "small" window manager. I.e. one with very very little wasted screen space (Another reason i love chrome) and KDE 3.x used to be able to provide that. Then kde 4 (and yes i've tried the 4.x releases too) came out - a bloated WM that suddenly needed twice the screen real estate just for the window borders!?!?!?!. That was frustrating. I've tried fvwm (what i used to use ages and ages ago), and many others. But at the end of the day I bring up firefox or evolution or thunderbird or whatever and i'm forced to look at this massive amount of whitespace between buttons and menus.
I think, if you asked alot of desktop users, they'd want a "nice" desktop that utilised screen real estate while being able to be "pretty", I think compiz delivers on part of that in the prettiness sense (though could leave some desires for a bit more user friendliness on the finger-yoga key bindings), but its hard to find something that works well without looking like a desktop white-space hog. As an example, look at nautilus, look at the whitespace between the text in a button and the edge of the button (or just the location bar and the main tool bar, then compare it at the same resolution to explorer side-by-side - im not talking about the actual file list by the way, just the bars at the top)... what a waste of space. For a while I thought xfce might have been a valid choice, but im still searching!
As for MACOS X, i dont know how people stand that interface, but thats me!
As for W7 beta 1, well, the screen shots dont really tell you much when it comes down to it and i'm unlikely to listen to vague "its so much snappier" remarks with nothing backing it up... its quite bizare anyone would make a post about how its "so much snappier" and then give you static screen shots... They certainly don't answer any questions along the lines of "here's all the things you hate about vista removed!". After all, when it comes to "snappy", windows XP (and even vista) are snappy when first installed (on current hardware)... go figure, show me something that makes sence. I.e. show me a machine where vista will suck and windows 7 will not, then i'll be impressed. After all, the hardware has gone a long way to catching up when it comes to vista-pain.
While i am adamantly apposed to the whole govt filtering thing. The reasons I hate it is because its going to waste alot of tax payer money and achieve nothing but make my game playing in MMO land alot less enjoyable... Yet the govt is too stupid (and too ham-strung by the family first minister who is truly the most god-forsaken idiot on the planet) to be able to see it.
But, how do you stop bit torrent? dont you just cut off the trackers? (im no bittorrent expert). In which case its just going to be like the rest of the internet filtering rubbish. Now, my assumption is its going to be partly automated and partly player-controlled in that there will be family first fanatics sitting in a room looking for sites of evil (funded by the tax payers) and adding them to a list of "banned" sites. And of course, you'll have users at the other end going "this site isnt evil, please unblock it".
But, getting from the list of evil onto the filtering list (or off again) will probably require some political process - i.e. time. So "generic porn site" will get blocked, but by the time it does, 15 other sites will have risen in its place. So you achieve nothing, and in the interim, joe user is banging his head against the wall going "i really wanted to get to a site" that had nothing to do with porn.
Now, for example, a little while ago I went and got a vps provider and it just so happened that the person who had used that particular IP address prior to me was an adult website (the reverse address lookup gave it away). Now assuming they've blocked access to that IP address, can you imagine how p*ssed off I would be not to be able to access my shiny new vps?
But, this isn't about protecting children and never has been, its not about blocking porn sites or anything like that, its about a small-minded minister with no brains trying to persuade another even stupider minister to vote the way his govt does.
The thing most people dont seem to get though is that its going to be about killing "crime" much the same way as it is in real life - find out who the criminal is and block them. This is not a black-and-white kull p2p (i dont think). But the government is too slow to really achieve that on the "Real" internet, by the time they're able to add a block list for some p2p tracker it's probably already distributed its load and when some more legit site takes its place they'll be the ones to suffer. So right along side them the other people who'll suffer are the users, copping a huge boost in latency and making the traffic to the US (when MMO land lives) even slower.
But as the old saying goes "make something idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot" (applies to our ministers in AU quite well), but in this case I simply mean that if you make things inaccessible, people will find other ways to access them and eventually it'll be so hard to differentiate between good and evil you cant achieve a goal. In that sense it'll probably be good for the internet in some way, it'll spawn innovation. Need is the mother of invention after all right?
A penguin running onto the set of the mac "im a mac" commercials, knocking the pc guy over, stealing his shoes, throwing them at the MAC guy, flipping them both the bird and running away shouting "heh, too easy".
It's a rediculous notion, and almost certain to become law if Australia (where I live) is anything to go by. We're filtering the content of the internet based on the stupidity of a minor party who is somehow in control of the internet, or at least in control of the minister in control of the internet. Essentially this means we're going to slow down the internet in this country to make it ever-so-slightly harder for someone to look at rude pictures in the hope that kids (and lets face it, they're usually the ones who figure out how to get around such measures anyway) wont see said rude pictures.
But what our govt is doing makes (if only barely) more sence what the Canadians are doing, or there's a massive back-story we're not exposed to. So lets try and put it in perspective in a way that makes sence. Lets say the local school gets broken into by vandals and they do alot of damage, who pays for it? the tax payers inevitably. Even if the vandals are caught, they are unlikely to have the money to fund the repairs (nor the skills to help fix the damage). In fact, the only option is incarceration or some form of penalty which ultimately leads to more public money being eaten. But theres more, because its become quite common (im talking hypothetically here), the tax payer ends up footing the bill for a 10ft high fence right around the school and a security patrol (subsitute school with trains, busses, govt buildings as you like, it still goes the same way).
So how does that little example relate to a 3% tax on isp's? It shouldn't, and it represents a huge amount of ignorance from the group itself and from anyone who supports it. SOCAN itself MAY not be evil as people have been saying (and reading this I find that very hard to believe, maybe they're becoming evil, maybe they've been watching the RIAA/MPAA/etc?), but in the very least (much like our Australian minister of fruity firewalls), they're completely ignorant. In reality, it shouldn't be ISP's that are footing the bill if your going to go down this path, it should be everyone, thats what TAX is for if you can equate fixing a school with fixing a copyright. After all, does illegal copying only occur over the internet? (sure it makes it easier, but im equally sure that like most countries there are plenty of flee markets going on where people are selling bootleg cd's, but wait, thats what the CD tax was for!!). The reality is is that there is no way to do it fairly, but more importantly "with even a hint of fairness"
Where it becomes ridiculous is that you have no way of apportioning out this "tax" to the people who are being pirated in the first place. Do you assume that the general lay of the land on pirated content follows the popular media? And why just music? More importantly though (probably the most important point) is that music, unlike the public school, is a luxury and never dies. You create it once and its around forever. You can copy it to infinity and it cost no one anything at all and its absurd notion to assume that just because people are pirating your music that they would have bought it and hence your loosing money.
On the flip side, if the govt were to tax the ISP's by 10%, then make it perfectly legal to "pirate" music, then you would have no argument from me even though I barely bother to listen to music anymore - the whole copyright thing in the US just makes it an unpleasurable thing to do these days. But, what would thoroughly p*ss me off as a tax payer in the upper bands is that I'm forced to foot the bill for what is a luxury crime, this is not a crime that makes my local school unusable, I cant howl for the vandals to be strung up by the codlies, they're not endangering lives and they're not stopping my kids (if i had any) from getting an education, stopping food from getting to my local retailer, etc. The reality is that the people who will get the money are likely to be the musicians who are already earning magnitudes of cash more then I am, so is it fair that I should have to pay a tax so they can get 1 more extra m
I was a fan of IPV6 when it first was proposed (back in '93 i think and it was a battle betwen ip128, ipng and something else), it looked like a good solution to what would evidently be a problem at some point.
But these days its seems like no one actually learned from the mistakes of the past. All the things that were done wrong with ipv4 and now being done again with ipv6 (classes for eg)... "I can only have a /64 or /48 network?" are you for real?.
I guess the point im trying to make is that /64 is a HUGE number, but back in my day when they were handing out class A subnets like candy, 32 sounded pretty big too. Given the love we have for gadetry, that address space will be consumed mighty fast and so we'll go through a very painful migration for something that may put us back where we were with people calling out the "doom of the ipv4 address space".
On top of that we have idiots running around saying things like "NAT is evil! IPV6 will be the end of NAT" and in other areas the same thing except "we wont implement NAT for ipv6 in the linux kernel". Without even understanding the reasons NAT came to be in the first place. NAT was absolutely not developed as a solution to the ipv4 address space running out. In reality it gave people a way of "getting" an address space without having to be assigned one, not because it was hard to get one but because it was a temporary space. Later on this became very important because the internet suddenly became popular outside the academic space. When internet first came to Australia at the consumer level it was AGAINST THE TERMS OF USE to have more then one machine on the other end of the link, but thankfully by then we had linux with its natting kernel. Later home consumer routers became ubiquitous and the problem mostly solved itself. NAT also has its uses in the corporate world, which I wont bother going into.
On top of that you have people who scream things like "NAT isnt scalable". Well, yes, If i try and push 1000 people through a single NAT thats going to be an issue. But its such a rediculous argument anyone who makes it should be shot anyway, I mean how dumb do you have to be to say something like that? have you never dealt with large networks?. That was never and will never be an issue regardless.
But, for me the most important part of NAT is simple the ability to own my own address space - something that no one can decide for me, and if you think thats a bad thing then you really have lost the plot.
As for NAT breaking protocols, well, IMHO people should be designing protocols to work through a NAT. In most cases it forces people to do things the right way (look at h323 as a good example, a very poor protocol that just doesn't work very well with or without NAT, and later SIP - personally, im not a big fan of SIP, but at least its better then h323) at the network layer. There are obviously places where NAT is definitely not feasible (incoming services for the most part). But every incoming service has an initiator, which should work behind NAT with few exceptions.
But, anyway, i've had enough of a rant.
I personally use cacti.. which is capable of importing stats on just about anything and converting them into graphs. But supports just about anything that can publish data through snmp also (great for routers and stuff). Has quite a nice interface too (http://www.cacti.net/).
Otherwise, hobbit with rrd (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) is pretty decent and can track most things. Generally speaking, i've used many MANY commercial products and I've not seen anything that really works as well (and as simply) as hobbit does.
Best of all, both are free.
For a while i felt the same thing.
However, i've come to realise that the reason's i have this perception is simply the applications.
Firefox is probably the biggest and baddest example - its so pathetic under linux. The mozilla guys dont give a dam about linux and blame everything else for its various slowdowns. Opera is quicker (though not markedly so), but still how much of your time do you spend in your web browser? If your like me its quite alot (and yes i work in IT). Its the sadest part of the linux desktop and very detrimental to the overall look and feel of linux.
Now, if you switch to ie4linux (ie6) you'll feel a vast improvement. How sad is that? a browser, running under a compatibility layer managers a better general responsiveness that one thats supposed to be completely native.
Of course, if you then compare things with other applications you start to notice an interesting reality - Open office is very responsive, next to no interface lag. Even eclipse (java) is snappier than firefox.
There are of course other applications that have terrible responsiveness (fedora's python configuration gui's for example), but none of them are anywhere near as important as the web browser.
actually just impi by itself is fine... there is even (somewhere, i cant find it but i've seen it used) a serial access console for ipmi on windows (2003, 2008) that can reboot/crashdump and give you a cmd prompt....
The ipmi interface (existts on almost every current server hardware, though few people are aware of the fact) allows both soft and hard power on/off, reset and access to a serial console...
Typically this is good enough for most things, and rdp for the rest.
The problem is (typically) diagnostics... like a machine going down and no one knowing why...
From the OS side, im not sure about vxworks, but there are snmp adaptors for windows that could help you start/stop programs or web based admin things.
I dont know what its like in other countries, but in Australia trying to find the eeepc in a linux version is near impossible.
As I work for a VAR/SI company we have logins to many importers and wholesalers. One of the biggest in Australia has 3 versions of the linux-based eeepc. Two of them are 701's. The third is one version of 901, and it comes in at $120 more expensive then the XP version with a 2gb ram upgrade.
Thats right, more than 20% extra for the 1gb 901 with linux versus a 2gb 901 with windows. If you went into a retail store you might find an acer aspire one running linux, but theres no way in hell you'll find a eeepc running it anymore. So is it a surprise XP is outselling linux? Hell no.
Personally, this is the reason why I hate MS, they couldn't compete fairly so they found another way around the problem - force the OEM's to make linux so expensive and unavailable no one would ever use it.
Nice work microsoft.
ok, this is going to be a rant, so hold on to your seats. But having dealt with this bug for so long has gotten me near the edge when it comes to mozilla
---rant begin---
It still has the same linux bug people have been complaining about for I have no idea how long and effects quite a number of users...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/125970 - and this wasnt the first time it was logged either. Check out the last link in that bug report and feel the pain if the bug affects you...
Then again, I keep making the assumption mozilla give a flying .... about linux, which means im the one in the wrong, right? Its really the only piece of the linux puzzle i've yet to be able to find an adequate answer to and I've tried them all. The sad part is that mozilla is the best answer in most situations (though between IEs4linux and opera theres a possible answer there).
yes i've tried ever fix ever mentioned for it... So far the only real method that "works" is to use something like the adblock plugin to kill off the performance destroying aspects of a website.
----rant end----
ok, im done... apologies in advance and so forth.
This is somewhat OT... But,
While its true that linux has never been the subject of a concentrated effort on the virus front, there are many reasons for it. Some of it revolves around the user, some of it around the penetration and some of it is because of the variety out there.
Consider Windows XP for example, its been around for a long time, and while holes get patches you can reliably (if you were a virus maker) guess that everyone running windows XP has a certain patch level and software level. While its true there is some variety, its not like on linux where the kernel alone can be anything from 2.4.x to 2.6.26 and writing a virus to aim for that kind of range of software is hard enough without taking into account the software that might be running (and their version level also) on the box. So even a "broad spectrum" virus may only be able to hit 10-20% of linux desktops/servers and likely wont get 50% of that.
The second thing is the obvious, market penetration, theres just not enough "ordinary" people out there running linux. Lets say all the "ordinary" people ran ubuntu 8.10, even the "ordinary" people are mostly smart enough to know they've been infected - if it were happening. where as the "ordinary" people on windows are very ordinary. The general computing intelligence level of the windows desktop user vs the linux desktop level (on average) is very very much different. There are many people out there who dont even know what a windows share is, and haven't heard of linux - to them windows is a web browser, an email client and an instant message platform.
It's also worth pointing out that while linux isn't the subject of desktop virus, it's certainly the subject of server/script kiddie hacking - DDos botnets, spam relays, and the like. So dont think linux is not prone to problems, it sure is but desktop machines just dont make for reliable platforms for such things.
Another thing to consider is how virus' have evolved over time, back in the dos/wfw 3.11 days virus simply erased your hard disk (or floppy) and printed a message telling you your an idiot. These days they catch back account info and are a hell of a lot more clandestine.
But at the end of the day, windows is a big (huge user base) simple target with often-uncaring users. Mac is catching up, but a long way to go yet. Why write a virus that hits 5% of the population when you can write one thats hitting 90%...
As for virus scanners, i've only seen (or ever found) clam, spybot search and destroy, and avira. I dont think they're any better or worse then the comercial competitors, but i dont really use windows much either!.
im 100% on your side ;)
Howard's minister was sensible, and the people voted to chuck Howard out, which was probably fair, but it definitely was a case of "throwing out the baby with the bath water". Which is a shame.
To be honest, what i think is more worrying is that Conroy is so obsessed with child pornography to the point that when so many people in the technical adept community are telling him "this wont work" he wont listen. Which either means someone (think family first retards) has his genitalia in a vice, he's acting on the recommendations of a software company willing to throw alot of money in his personal pocket, or he's doing it simply because its not what the Howard govt did. All of those ideas are highly disturbing.
At the end of the day Australia ends up with a firewall thats going to kill our internet speeds and achieve nothing - factor in the fact we have some of the slowest speeds (and the highest costs) in the world and you've got to wonder why we're wasting this huge amount of money on a pointless notion.
As for Howard and the war, while he was very Pro-US, im not sure any other prime minister would have done differently, they all seem to think tieing us tightly to the US (at least in the military sense) is a requirement. Im not sure thats something i really care about so long as they dont start drafting civilians!
note entirely true... the previous government looked into implemented it and abandoned it for reasons of cost and unreliability...
So does that mean, everyone in the USA voted to have people tortured at Guantanamo?
Now, thats probably unfair - but so is the OP. Not only that we're forced to vote and we dont have a "I vote for none of you" option. You can try and blame the people of Australia by saying we've brought this on ourselves, but that's kind of like saying to someone who died in the towers on 9/11 "well, you voted for the US govt who didn't see this coming so its your fault you died...."
The point of that article was how to present poor statistical analysis (being someone who hated statistics at uni, I can see my own half-arsed attempts in the article).
Or perhaps its fairer to say "poor statistical analysis accompanies by real-world lack of knowledge".
Now, if you work with SAN's and storage, you probably already see the faults that I really cant be bothered pointing out... we can just sit here and laugh together at yet another ill-conceived zdnet article shall we?
I can only assume there was a point behind the repost of the same cx1 article (some time ago as well), but i fail to see it.
However, back then I had a good long look at it, and I fail to really see the benefit over any other blade system really, be it a dell, hp, IBM or the absolutely spanking egenera.
That point aside, anyone who's worked in the industry with infiniband knows why alot of the silicon makers aligned with it have abandoned it. It really is a painful tech, that works in some very very select corner cases (tds ramsan for example uses it to good advantage). Infiniband really is one of the big un-kept promises in the IT realm.
What I personally use is all linux so it may not be much use to you however, i've gone thru several iterations of a simple script for my machines.
Originally it was just a usb connected drive at home and work that got rsynced to (it would look for an lvm volume with specific name and if it existed, kick it off). The first iteration of the script basically just rsynced the data across and once a week did a dump. The second iteration took lvm snapshots on top of that (with some minor automated management) and added rsync -d to the mix (deletes files on the target that dont exist on the source).
The next iteration was a much bigger change (and probably the smarter one) so basically it would rsync and snapshot files that didnt come from (or had changed from) packages that existed on the machine. i.e. it would go thru all the files on my harddrive, if it was from a package it would leave it alone (getting the OS back is simple then just overlay the backup stuff on top). a little while ago i switch to zfs for the external drive (my only real regret is zfs will probably never be a part of the linux kernel) and thats been pretty good cause zfs is a brilliant filesystem.
In the OSS space i've played with things like afs, coda, drbd and things that wrap around svn and cvs (how I wish lvm had replication in built).
But, having worked in the big-boy space for a long time i've seen alot of commercially available implementations most of which are available cross platform. Some are based on backup solutions (netbackup, backupexec, backbone, etc) and some work at the storage level.
One implementation I was mostly impressed with though was using falconstor. Its basically a block-level replication software that connects to iscsi volumes and is really quite impressive in the way it manages backing up data. The company itself had mostly rover types who were in the office maybe once a week, the rest of the time their volumes would sync across links of varying speed (even over vpn) and was able to be configured not to chew up the entire link space. It all spoke back to an iscsi storage device (equalogic or emc with its iscsi head, i cant remember) and was also snapshotted occasionally. The best part about it was they never really had to deal with it, it just seemed to work 99.99% of the time.
So far i've found the OSS side a little friendlier to those who know how to use them (mostly because they're just so much easier to modify), while the commercial side do everything you expect them to with varying degrees of success without being flexible enough.
Of course, the one definitive thing i've found with people is that you'll always find someone who'll end up saving data in odd locations then get cranky when you cant restore it because you just weren't backing up c:\windows\temp ;).
The whole "you can please some of the people some of the time" holds true 99% of the time.
twice-memory came from the old (old) unix days (and is still applicable by the way) because a crash wrote memory to swap. the machine would restart, look for a crash signature in swap and if it existed, suck it back out onto disk for analysis.
Again, all still very applicable today (for unix).
having said that, so long as you dont need to analyse your crash dumps, your choice of swap size can be more flexible!
I did buy a set of glasses for the whole nvidia deal and they didnt suck terribly (edimensional 3d, and they were quite cheap) - in fact i was mostly quite impressed really. It did have its draw backs, (i remember playing eve online once with them, and the way eve draws it universe meant they didn't work, but for alot of games they were quite sufficient). They also worked as a pass-thru which i didnt really like (and really wasnt needed if the card had just had a little plug on it instead of having to use the passthru)
But, where I really did quite like them was for 3d modelling. very handy to be able to see 3d models in 3d even if only for flying around the model every now and then. It gives a kind of perspective that was hard to easily gain on a monitor.
The other feature I tried to get going (and failed terribly) was for security - sure its easily undone, but if you could have the eye shutters opening and closing (ok, their LCD so they dont actually move, but you know what i mean) together you could show the "real screen" when the shutters are open and garbage the other times. Assuming you had a fast enough monitor you could make it fairly random (open and close) for some added security. Ultimately the system is flawed for real security, but for a bit of privacy in the cubicle it would have been a nice idea.
Theres alot of arguments in the replies about things unrelated (like the symantics of raid levels.
My personal option at home was (for some time) a very cheap amd mb with a gig connection and 6 sata disks 3 medium sized fast canavores striped and 3 larger (slower) disks (used as raw volumes for backup with bacula. Some of this storage was on shares, others were used as iscsi volumes and after trying a few of the bits of software out there (freenas/openfiler) i finally decided just putting fedora (any linux based os will do, ubuntu, suse, whatever floats your boat) and webwin was perfectly satisfactory (later it all got replaced with a very speedy xeon machine work gave me and so now i have no real nas as such.
There are a number of devices that i have used (the linksys nslu2 for example) which are perfectly good (only 100mb ethernet though). And i've heard good things about the d-link dns-323, both exceptionally low power devices.
But also the other day i saw these:
http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d945gclf/ and http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/dg45fc/ which both look like fantastic little products to build off. Ultimately, there are quite a number of good products out there that do it "out of the box" like the thecus things, but I personally prefer something a little more flexible then they prefer.