So now we know IBM's answer to SQL Server 2005. Both now have native XML support with XQuery, both do stored procedures although SQL Server has for some time. What's interesting is that db2 can have the Zend core bolted on as the equivalent of.NET and that db2 does very nice document store handling but that's always been a selling point for a while now. I really like the notion of using it for a document store.
I wonder what the price point for Viper is going to be in comparison. I already know what it is for the various versions of SQL Server 2005. Ouch! I'm waiting for my Enterprise and Developer versions to show up now so I can play more (I've been playing with the betas for a long time now as I do DBE work as well).
At least on Amazon.com (I have no idea about the CD case itself) it is advertised as a copy-protected CD and the copy-protection in this case is the DRM Rootkit so that protection is out methinks.
The Copy Protection solution is really simple. Make the works affordable and very easy to obtain for the majority of people and they will buy them.
And that's precisely what it comes down to, the consumer has to perceive value received at the particular price point. As it stands right now, consumers perceive that they are not receiving value for the particular price and turn to alternative methods to circumvent the price system. Here the price is paid in terms of possible financial and legal consequences as a result of their actions. If you lower the price, the consumer will stick with the legal methods. Unfortunately it seems too simple for the business types and apparently they were asleep during their classes in economics. I know that they don't teach this stuff over in business school as I had some serious knockdown dragout fights with their professors over their whenever they wandered over into the economics terrain.
Apple apparently gets it right now as they are doing very nicely indeed although that won't last if they music industry gets their way. They want to squeeze the consumer back out of that market and back into illegal downloads in order to extract as much profit as they can despite the fact that increasing the price-point will decrease overall profits. Their loss as they will find out. Why does this stuff have to be so hard for these id10ts to get? It's real simple.
Which is one argument for having outside testers. I don't know about other testers but my testing platforms here are wired up like pinball machines complete down to system file and registry monitoring so installation of this software would be triggering alarms (and getting bounced when I reject the changes) all over the place and that's assuming that I'm running as the Administrator which is also another of my tests here. So, not only didn't they practice due diligence in the purchasing department, I'd argue that they didn't practice due diligence in their software engineering section either.
I don't call it them my torture chambers for nothing;-).
This is one time it pays to RTFA as Russ provides you with the details you need to kill the sucker dead without killing your system. Also read the comments as there is some advice their about how to take ownership of the keys that are registered to LOCAL SYSTEM.
For reference, Mark posted the full EULA. Yep, it does have the exclusion but what is even more interesting is the line much earlier. "Once installed, the SOFTWARE will reside on YOUR COMPUTER until removed or deleted." Which is interesting since they went out of their way to insure that you can't uninstall or delete it unless you are a fellow practioner in the Mark Russinovich school of black-belt system administration.
Sooo, I'm not the only one clicking on article links to insure that what the article asserts bears at least some resemblence to the original source. If it were only the WWW, I'd rely on print media but it seems print articles also have the same problem especially when it comes to scientific/technological issues which is extremely sad. There's not much either of us can do about it save point out the error when we come across it but so far I've yet to see one of my letters make it into print which is about what I expected. I actually do better on the WWW where it seems that having alternative avenues encourages a certain amount of wary openness. Whatever. That's a debate for another day/article;-).
Re: SQL Server 2005. MS is not withdrawing the CTP versions which will still remain available for download after the Nov. 7th release date according to the most recent MSDN Flash that I received yesterday (actually several times so I guess they wanted to make a point!). That version is good for over a year before it times out and you can go all the way up to the enterprise version which has some adequate built-in tools (they ain't Embarcadero;-). So, if anyone out there is interested, you may want to grab a copy although they are rather hefty in size (Enterprise weighs in at 920 MB). Still, you can use those tools with the Express version or take what you've built and use it as there isn't that much missing between the versions for the personal/workgroup/small-business level which is the level I'm mostly working with when I'm not testing for the big-guys.
I agree completely and have pointed this out elsewhere when the subject has come up. This product is competitively targeted at MS and IBM. I don't think Oracle even thought two seconds about MySQL, postgreSQL, or BDB (which is sad as they are competitive in my book for certain market segments). I'll need to examine it more closely but from first glance I'd say SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is the feature winner here but I'll have to kick the tires, throw some tools at it, and see. It's certainly a huge monster, that's for sure.
The Windows side has the same cutoff, 31 Jan 2006. That's fairly standard for a beta I might add. However, this says nothing about what, if any, they will charge for the Express Edition. Is it just me, or did anyone else actually read all the terms of their license agreement and find them just a bit over the top? Not even MS goes to these extremes and I read all agreements. [The community agreement was even odder but I won't go there.]
I'll be downloading it later after I finish collection SQL Server 2005 Enterprise here;-). It'll be interesting to see how well it works with my Oracle speaking tools here.I do hope they work as I really, really don't want to face yet another tool upgrade cycle. Those are expensive!
Actually my favorite was my Northgate Omnikey Ultra Plus which worked on both mi Amigas and my PC compatible. Unfortunately it gave up the ghost in the late '90's after over ten years of use. I'd like to get the Avant, the one I mentioned in the message, but what with upgrades and building a new machine it's on the backburner for now. My IBM keyboard is okay but nothing beats the touch of the old Selectric style IBM keyboards and the Northgate and Avants have that same touch.
Actually Microsoft has had guides like these for quite a while and I've been using their guides and the ones from the NSA for years now as baselines for the networks and computer systems that I've been locking down for clients. So, I'm a bit puzzled about why you can't go to a website (Microsoft Downloads) and download them. It's not like they are hard to find. There's also a heck of a lot of this information built into the help files that come with XP, for instance, and the other MS operating systems under the best practices entries you'll find all over the place in there. Then again, so far as I can tell, no one except yours truly bothers to read the help files (I do it during betas to catch mistakes). Perhaps it's for the same reason most men seem incapable of asking directions, although one must ask why women are also affected? Whatever.
What really puzzles me is why this article came along. Slow/. news day or something? As I said above I've been using the NSA guides for years now so what changed?
The problem here, familiar to anyone that has dealt with the classified security system regulations, is that as soon as that equipment went in the door it became classified equipment of some certain level. Forever after that equipment, whether it had data on it or not, is set at the level of classification, period. You can never use it with equipment of a lesser classification nor can you declassify it (which in the eyes of the requlations is using it with unclassified equipment). If you can't deal with it, sorry, but that's the way the system works and it isn't going to change as one mistake can cost not just the country but real lives.
For those you need to actually look at the motherboard specs which include the RealTek AC'97 sound system and 10/100 ethernet. I clicked on the mWave link to find those. The sound system won't satisfy the high-end games, probably, but despite being a musically inclined I don't need great sound from my computer, my stereo fulfills that need, thank ye. [And Creative can keep their crap out of my systems!] Actually it's not a bad little board and I'm adding it to my list for building yet another beta-testing machine. I do wonder if it can handle the X2 series of CPU's though. Those weren't mentioned in the specs.
Actually I wouldn't want whatever they recommended as I'm quite happy with my Sony Multiscan G400 (cost 3 times that system cost), IBM keyboard and optical mouse, and my ALPS speakers or for when I feed it through my stereo my Infinity bookshelf speakers. I'm already using a KVM, what's one more system hanging off of it. BTW, you'll pry those out of my cold dead fingers .
Someday I'd like to upgrade the keyboard but the one I have my eye on costs $158 last time I looked. Sweet though!
I beg to differ on your second point. I've moved my Windows Server 2003 Enterprise from one system to another with no problem and it hasn't required anything except that I do one of two things: completely fill out the registration information before I click on Activate or give Microsoft a call. the same is true with Windows XP Pro here as well and yes I have called them when I've been at one of my remote machines or at a clients and are moving things over and it bounced for some strange reason. Actually they are quite nice over the phone when you explain what you are doing.
Oops, I forgot. This is Slashdot. Microsoft is evil, they can't ever be nice. Sheesh!
I've got ten licenses for Windows XP, among all the other licenses from MS, and I'm only using five here of which three are strictly for virtual machines despite the fact they really don't notice that I have all three activated. [To Windows Activation it's the same machine being reinstalled, near as I can tell.] So, that's a bad assumption with our technically inclined audience I'd say and almost certainly with the THW audience judging from the discussions there. If you are serious about playing with Windows or have clients that you must work with that use Windows despite themselves, become a MS partner (free) and get one of their ActionPacks [$299] and you'll have licenses for most everything except Visual Studio of course which requires an MSDN subscription. Those cost an arm and a leg.
That peak 58% is a hard number for pure HTML as I have everything else blocked normally with only a few exceptions. The default for any site blocks everything: advertisements, backgrounds, blinking text, pop-up windows, system information (UserAgent), last page (Referrer), cookies, javascript, and sounds. And that's before Firefox even receives the page. I'm absolutely ruthless about security here;-). As for FF, I have all the usual stuff, images only for the originating site and ditto for cookies, most of javascript disabled even if I do allow it for a site via my proxy settings, flashblock, etc. ad nauseum. Nope, it's just a resource hog. It really doesn't matter much as I'm not usually doing anything else resource intensive at the same time, just an interesting observation and btw not unique to FF as most F/OSS exhibits the same behavior here. I can get nice spikes in memory and cpu utilization in a lot of the F/OSS stuff I use as this system is well blended between both camps. I use whatever tool is best for what I'm doing at the time and the hell with purity. It'd be interesting to grab one of the P4 optimized versions to see what their behavior is like. Probably better would be my guess but with FF in a bit of flux right now, I don't see wasting my time while they shake out the kinks. I have enough beta stuff on my plate right now to keep me busy well into next year.
Among the statistical computing community it is still taught and rather popular or at least that is my experience. I started with SPSS back in the '70's (and used it for my first contract job) and was rather surprised to find it still taught, recommended, and in use by business and government when I went back to the university for another degree in the '90's. SAS is another popular package especially among the life sciences set that I sometimes work with. Still, given the fact that many of the high-end spreadsheet tools (Excel, etc.) and their capabilities, I've seen a reduction in demand for my services and utilization of these packages except for research, high-end enterprise, and government needs. That should be no surprise to anyone given the migration of capabilities down to the user level.
Nicely put. My problem with this model run along the same lines. I can't see either the engineering or economic justification yet although I'm sure there are some if Sun would give us their rationale. If the rationale is simply that IBM is doing it, and doing it rather well from my data, then they have a real problem. If they have identified some niches in the IT economic pie, could they please explain what they are? Pretty please? I have a lot of people around the world that ask me for analyses on issues like these and without data I can't recommend it. However this isn't a problem unique to Sun by a long shot. As Number Five said: "Need Input!"
This makes me think on the software liability issues point, I am sure these companies would demand something very very far from the typical "EULA" or contract to use this service.
With services like this you demand a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which spells out exactly the level and type of services required, penalties for non-performance, and any other requirements (security of data, etc.) and their related penalties. In no way, shape or form do you have something that resembles an EULA where the provider can wave their hands and say "we aren't responsible." I have no idea what Sun is providing for their SLA. It'd be interesting to give it a read. Something else to go looking for if they publish it at all.
Actually that isn't true at all anymore. One of the things I do here is act as that 1/10th of an admin and price accordingly when I bother to charge at all (I don't charge non-profits for instance). That's why I developed my techniques for securing and remotely monitoring systems here. Actually mostly it's just monitoring these days and I'm not the only person/firm doing this in the IT arena. SMB's and consumers can't afford a full-time IT person so the market is out there. Sun's premise is that no one else can provide an equal level of service and support. In that they are sadly mistaken and on the per client basis, with client hardware, I can beat them badly. There is a niche for the Sun product, unfortunately IBM is already playing there and they have clients lined up like crazy.
Actually I would disagree (or I wouldn't be posting this;-). Such a set exists but frankly they have much better things to do with their time for the most part like real work in the real world that affects real people. Look at the grief that the Senate majority leader has taken from the ethics committee over the fact that he continues to deliver babies on his weekends or volunteer his services whenver he travels to foreign countries in, say, Africa. You see those same id10t rules being applied across the whole of government and those of us with the qualifications and the smarts literally run away. I've long thought about getting involved in the political process either on the advisory level or actually running for office. Then I look at reality. No thank you!
Actually a lot of the supposedly imitative stuff that you are attributing to brain-dead following by Microsoft has been years in the making if you track what they are doing behind the scenes. For instance, MS has been trying for almost a decade to deliver software as services mostly, methinks, to insure a steadier revenue stream, or at least that's my read of the various things I've seen leak out over the years. Expect to see this also proposed for the Project Green development effort results. If anything, quite a bit of what Microsoft Research is working on flows the other way out to the rest of industry as they aren't exactly a very secretive bunch unlike some corporate labs. For instance, AJAX wouldn't exist if MS hadn't put XMLHTTPRequest() and XMLHTTPServerRequest() in the browser API. I was wondering for years when someone would pick up on what you could do with it as it was a natural to combine it with the XML capabilities of SQL Server, and no, I wasn't that interested in doing anything with it myself.
Sorry to disillusion you, if I have, and I'm sure this will not be a popular opinion here on Slashdot where everything MS does is evil, monopolistic, and a carbon-copy of what other people have already done with the intent of driving them out of business. Oh well, donning asbestos underwear .
Actually this is nothing new with respect to Sun. They've been stuck in the (dumb-)client/(smart-)server mode ever since I can recall and that's going back quite a ways. They keep hoping that the market will come around to their way of thinking but, frankly, I can't see it. The fundamental problems of information/systems security, compliance, and other issues are pretty much insurmountable in my not so humble opinion. Yes, they can be addressed but are you willing to bet the company on it which is what it comes down to when you get down to brass-tacks. I won't. To put it simply, I'm absolutely ruthless about systems security and info-sec here and I get all the security notices, so they can't tell me that they are "safe". Thankfully I don't have to worry about compliance issues, yet, aside from the usual contractual NDA's.
This doesn't even address the price-point issue. Sun set that at $1 per cpu-hour. Where they pulled this figure from I have no idea but looking at it I can't see it used for anything but trivial usage patterns or by enterprises with large IT budgets. Just on the basis of my relative's usage patterns the cost would dwarf their satellite TV bill completely despite having all the channels and they seem to be fairly typical users. That doesn't even begin to address my usage pattern which would easily finance a new computer a month.
Sorry Sun, back to the drawing board. Better yet, talk to IBM which seems to have a clue in marketing grid super-computing. That's the market you really need to play in, if you can compete. Frankly, I don't think you have a prayer there either which is sad. They actually are coming up with some pretty nicely engineered designs of late at decent price-points.
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I wonder what the price point for Viper is going to be in comparison. I already know what it is for the various versions of SQL Server 2005. Ouch! I'm waiting for my Enterprise and Developer versions to show up now so I can play more (I've been playing with the betas for a long time now as I do DBE work as well).
At least on Amazon.com (I have no idea about the CD case itself) it is advertised as a copy-protected CD and the copy-protection in this case is the DRM Rootkit so that protection is out methinks.
Apple apparently gets it right now as they are doing very nicely indeed although that won't last if they music industry gets their way. They want to squeeze the consumer back out of that market and back into illegal downloads in order to extract as much profit as they can despite the fact that increasing the price-point will decrease overall profits. Their loss as they will find out. Why does this stuff have to be so hard for these id10ts to get? It's real simple.
I don't call it them my torture chambers for nothing ;-).
This is one time it pays to RTFA as Russ provides you with the details you need to kill the sucker dead without killing your system. Also read the comments as there is some advice their about how to take ownership of the keys that are registered to LOCAL SYSTEM.
For reference, Mark posted the full EULA. Yep, it does have the exclusion but what is even more interesting is the line much earlier. "Once installed, the SOFTWARE will reside on YOUR COMPUTER until removed or deleted." Which is interesting since they went out of their way to insure that you can't uninstall or delete it unless you are a fellow practioner in the Mark Russinovich school of black-belt system administration.
Actually such suppliers already exist that provide equipment that is TEMPEST certified. There's a whole GSA catalog section for them.
Re: SQL Server 2005. MS is not withdrawing the CTP versions which will still remain available for download after the Nov. 7th release date according to the most recent MSDN Flash that I received yesterday (actually several times so I guess they wanted to make a point!). That version is good for over a year before it times out and you can go all the way up to the enterprise version which has some adequate built-in tools (they ain't Embarcadero ;-). So, if anyone out there is interested, you may want to grab a copy although they are rather hefty in size (Enterprise weighs in at 920 MB). Still, you can use those tools with the Express version or take what you've built and use it as there isn't that much missing between the versions for the personal/workgroup/small-business level which is the level I'm mostly working with when I'm not testing for the big-guys.
Just my $.02.
I agree completely and have pointed this out elsewhere when the subject has come up. This product is competitively targeted at MS and IBM. I don't think Oracle even thought two seconds about MySQL, postgreSQL, or BDB (which is sad as they are competitive in my book for certain market segments). I'll need to examine it more closely but from first glance I'd say SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is the feature winner here but I'll have to kick the tires, throw some tools at it, and see. It's certainly a huge monster, that's for sure.
I'll be downloading it later after I finish collection SQL Server 2005 Enterprise here ;-). It'll be interesting to see how well it works with my Oracle speaking tools here.I do hope they work as I really, really don't want to face yet another tool upgrade cycle. Those are expensive!
Actually my favorite was my Northgate Omnikey Ultra Plus which worked on both mi Amigas and my PC compatible. Unfortunately it gave up the ghost in the late '90's after over ten years of use. I'd like to get the Avant, the one I mentioned in the message, but what with upgrades and building a new machine it's on the backburner for now. My IBM keyboard is okay but nothing beats the touch of the old Selectric style IBM keyboards and the Northgate and Avants have that same touch.
What really puzzles me is why this article came along. Slow /. news day or something? As I said above I've been using the NSA guides for years now so what changed?
The problem here, familiar to anyone that has dealt with the classified security system regulations, is that as soon as that equipment went in the door it became classified equipment of some certain level. Forever after that equipment, whether it had data on it or not, is set at the level of classification, period. You can never use it with equipment of a lesser classification nor can you declassify it (which in the eyes of the requlations is using it with unclassified equipment). If you can't deal with it, sorry, but that's the way the system works and it isn't going to change as one mistake can cost not just the country but real lives.
For those you need to actually look at the motherboard specs which include the RealTek AC'97 sound system and 10/100 ethernet. I clicked on the mWave link to find those. The sound system won't satisfy the high-end games, probably, but despite being a musically inclined I don't need great sound from my computer, my stereo fulfills that need, thank ye. [And Creative can keep their crap out of my systems!] Actually it's not a bad little board and I'm adding it to my list for building yet another beta-testing machine. I do wonder if it can handle the X2 series of CPU's though. Those weren't mentioned in the specs.
Someday I'd like to upgrade the keyboard but the one I have my eye on costs $158 last time I looked. Sweet though!
Oops, I forgot. This is Slashdot. Microsoft is evil, they can't ever be nice. Sheesh!
I've got ten licenses for Windows XP, among all the other licenses from MS, and I'm only using five here of which three are strictly for virtual machines despite the fact they really don't notice that I have all three activated. [To Windows Activation it's the same machine being reinstalled, near as I can tell.] So, that's a bad assumption with our technically inclined audience I'd say and almost certainly with the THW audience judging from the discussions there. If you are serious about playing with Windows or have clients that you must work with that use Windows despite themselves, become a MS partner (free) and get one of their ActionPacks [$299] and you'll have licenses for most everything except Visual Studio of course which requires an MSDN subscription. Those cost an arm and a leg.
That peak 58% is a hard number for pure HTML as I have everything else blocked normally with only a few exceptions. The default for any site blocks everything: advertisements, backgrounds, blinking text, pop-up windows, system information (UserAgent), last page (Referrer), cookies, javascript, and sounds. And that's before Firefox even receives the page. I'm absolutely ruthless about security here ;-). As for FF, I have all the usual stuff, images only for the originating site and ditto for cookies, most of javascript disabled even if I do allow it for a site via my proxy settings, flashblock, etc. ad nauseum. Nope, it's just a resource hog. It really doesn't matter much as I'm not usually doing anything else resource intensive at the same time, just an interesting observation and btw not unique to FF as most F/OSS exhibits the same behavior here. I can get nice spikes in memory and cpu utilization in a lot of the F/OSS stuff I use as this system is well blended between both camps. I use whatever tool is best for what I'm doing at the time and the hell with purity. It'd be interesting to grab one of the P4 optimized versions to see what their behavior is like. Probably better would be my guess but with FF in a bit of flux right now, I don't see wasting my time while they shake out the kinks. I have enough beta stuff on my plate right now to keep me busy well into next year.
Among the statistical computing community it is still taught and rather popular or at least that is my experience. I started with SPSS back in the '70's (and used it for my first contract job) and was rather surprised to find it still taught, recommended, and in use by business and government when I went back to the university for another degree in the '90's. SAS is another popular package especially among the life sciences set that I sometimes work with. Still, given the fact that many of the high-end spreadsheet tools (Excel, etc.) and their capabilities, I've seen a reduction in demand for my services and utilization of these packages except for research, high-end enterprise, and government needs. That should be no surprise to anyone given the migration of capabilities down to the user level.
Nicely put. My problem with this model run along the same lines. I can't see either the engineering or economic justification yet although I'm sure there are some if Sun would give us their rationale. If the rationale is simply that IBM is doing it, and doing it rather well from my data, then they have a real problem. If they have identified some niches in the IT economic pie, could they please explain what they are? Pretty please? I have a lot of people around the world that ask me for analyses on issues like these and without data I can't recommend it. However this isn't a problem unique to Sun by a long shot. As Number Five said: "Need Input!"
This makes me think on the software liability issues point, I am sure these companies would demand something very very far from the typical "EULA" or contract to use this service. With services like this you demand a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which spells out exactly the level and type of services required, penalties for non-performance, and any other requirements (security of data, etc.) and their related penalties. In no way, shape or form do you have something that resembles an EULA where the provider can wave their hands and say "we aren't responsible." I have no idea what Sun is providing for their SLA. It'd be interesting to give it a read. Something else to go looking for if they publish it at all.
Actually that isn't true at all anymore. One of the things I do here is act as that 1/10th of an admin and price accordingly when I bother to charge at all (I don't charge non-profits for instance). That's why I developed my techniques for securing and remotely monitoring systems here. Actually mostly it's just monitoring these days and I'm not the only person/firm doing this in the IT arena. SMB's and consumers can't afford a full-time IT person so the market is out there. Sun's premise is that no one else can provide an equal level of service and support. In that they are sadly mistaken and on the per client basis, with client hardware, I can beat them badly. There is a niche for the Sun product, unfortunately IBM is already playing there and they have clients lined up like crazy.
Actually I would disagree (or I wouldn't be posting this ;-). Such a set exists but frankly they have much better things to do with their time for the most part like real work in the real world that affects real people. Look at the grief that the Senate majority leader has taken from the ethics committee over the fact that he continues to deliver babies on his weekends or volunteer his services whenver he travels to foreign countries in, say, Africa. You see those same id10t rules being applied across the whole of government and those of us with the qualifications and the smarts literally run away. I've long thought about getting involved in the political process either on the advisory level or actually running for office. Then I look at reality. No thank you!
Sorry to disillusion you, if I have, and I'm sure this will not be a popular opinion here on Slashdot where everything MS does is evil, monopolistic, and a carbon-copy of what other people have already done with the intent of driving them out of business. Oh well, donning asbestos underwear .
This doesn't even address the price-point issue. Sun set that at $1 per cpu-hour. Where they pulled this figure from I have no idea but looking at it I can't see it used for anything but trivial usage patterns or by enterprises with large IT budgets. Just on the basis of my relative's usage patterns the cost would dwarf their satellite TV bill completely despite having all the channels and they seem to be fairly typical users. That doesn't even begin to address my usage pattern which would easily finance a new computer a month.
Sorry Sun, back to the drawing board. Better yet, talk to IBM which seems to have a clue in marketing grid super-computing. That's the market you really need to play in, if you can compete. Frankly, I don't think you have a prayer there either which is sad. They actually are coming up with some pretty nicely engineered designs of late at decent price-points.