By leadership, I don't making a stove-pipe product line that works fine in homogenous networks and ignores the realities in heterogenous enterprise networks. Sun used to drive these technologies into the whole market like Linux and other Open Source software are driving things today. It's always been a mix of attitude, smart decisions and and technical chops that drives the market and Sun just does not have it anymore.
For example, I was recently hired to try to get LDAP-based single-sign-on to work across Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM and Linux. All the vendors are using variants of the RFC2307 schema, but they are not generally interoperable. You want to share automount maps via LDAP? Nope. You want to have a nice consistant format for SSL certs? Nope. Sun used to LEAD these kind of issues by pushing the industry standards processes to address enterprise compatibility issues that their customers faced. Based on the quagmire I found trying to get cross-platform directory services working, Sun was just another vendor pointing fingers at everyone else for the failures we saw. They are clearly not leading LDAP-based directory services anymore, despite how many records their implementation can store. Frankly, no one else is either because getting interoperable directory services sucks. We actually had to leave some services running on NIS as a least common denominator solution because it was the only thing that worked.
Back in the day, Sun actually licensed its NSS/NIS/NFS technology to its competitors to assist with cross-vendor interoperability for its customers. Having nice technologies to differentiate a platform, like the examples you mentioned like dtrace and the management tools are fine, but Sun got my trust back in the 1990's because I saw that they were committed to pushing the whole market along and making things work. I wanted Sun equipment because they had the momentum, the best ideas and had so little fear they even dragged their competitors along to keep it interesting.
So rather than waiting for a consensus solution to congeal from the Free / Open Source community, I'd love to see a company like Sun re-engaged and driving enterprise standards and interoperability like they did in days gone by.
I remember cutting my teeth on SunOS and Solaris starting back in 93/94. They were amazing innovators and almost single-handedly brought Unix into the enterprise. Here is a short list of technologies that were developed largely by Sun:
o The name service switch (nsswitch)
o Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+)
o Network File System (NFS)
o Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)
I know we make fun of NIS and NFS today as being old and insecure, but in 1993 it was the only way to provide single-sign-on and meet other enterprise requirements for scalability.
I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.
If Sun wants to drive, it needs to stop complaining from the back seat. It needs to start acting like it did back in the 1990's by developing solutions to enterprise problems and then showing the rest of the market how its done. Leaders lead and right now Sun is like some crotchity old man complaining about "the damn kids". Well, "the damn kids" are too busy driving right now to care about your CDDL and Solaris 10.
So... if they polute MD5. then use SHA. Or any other hashing mechanism. This is not a slam dunk by any means.
Hey RIAA, the cat is out of the bag, down the road, in a pub, laughing at your attempts to find him and stuff him back in the bag. Just suck it up and deal with the market reality and stop wishing you'd actually offered a real solution back in 1997. Bygones!
...then stay outa the kitchen. The market has changed and people will no longer stand by when pundits / reporters / analysts start talking smack without proper, logical, untainted research to back them up. Didiot was one of the people who signed the SCO NDA to 'see the code' back when the FiaSCO started and toed Darl McBride's corporate line. She gets no sympathy from me...
Please allow me to introduce myself, I am an analyst of wealth and taste...
...with fetchmail / procmail / cyrdeliver for sorting and storing from other sources. How can 5GB of mail can't be wrong?! I can slice and dice my all my email (including about a gig of spam...) for choice bits of information.
We have had a government contract that required Oracle 8i for odd reasons. Debian still has available the older libc versions needed for Oracle 8i. I don't if any current versions of RHEL or SLES support 8i, but I know Debian + the older 1.1.8 JDK allowed the Oracle installer to run and work with minimal shoe-horning.
The other Debian box we built for this application was for running Tomcat with the Sun JDK pushing a web-based reporting tool. We were able to demonstrate how Debian supported removing all unrelated packages (including compilers) and lowered the security profile lower than their Solaris boxes. (They still used telnet, God help them) The demonstration worked and the server is running Debian in production on the [redacted] government network.
Don't push it. We recommend Debian because of access to the build/distribution system and the ability to craft custom loads for specific purposes (point-of-sale, thin client, rich client, etc.). Controlling the build/distribution environment is a bigger issue than many people realize. But we really support anything because after a certain point, Linux is just Linux.
The Kernel Instrumentation Process has already started creating the foundation for a kind of dtrace functionality. The profiling mechanisms appear to echo some of what Sun has done to Solaris to enable this kind of process-less profiling. Hope someone is still pushing this along...
I jumped in to the "Desktop Linux Consortium" back in the Feb 2003 to offer some thoughts about direction for the forming DLC and the linux desktop in general. If you have any interest in what I said back then:
I think that the crucial missing application and management pieces are staring us all right in the face. It is not enough to have an easy install. It's not enough to have a slick desktop and functional apps. Those are important, certainly, but if we are really doing well at them, why hasn't the momentum shifted?
I've worked IT for fifteen years and the number of systems I've imaged with their OS and software loads dwarfs by 100 to 1 the number of times I've used any OS installer, even if you count the last five years of Install Parties at the Melbourne Florida LUG! The things most developers and non-corporate users think are important don't apply to corporate IT like people outside of IT would think.
The typical larger IT department has to deal with things like corporate software policies, locking user account profiles, automated application and operating system patches/updates and remote helpdesk. How can I enforce the corporate software policy against instant messengers when every distro except debian bundles all the stock KDE applications (including instant messenger apps) in a few giant RPMs? KDE 3.2 will be doing more profile locking features, but what about applications that don't use the KDE libs? What about Gnome?
I know people point to things like Red Carpet and the Red Hat Network for updates (still not 100% in my opinion), but I think corporations will need to be able to build or rebuild apps with different attributes or patches for distribution to corporate clients. SUSE is using 'autobuild' internally and Red Hat wants you to buy a Red Hat Network Proxy, but again, no-one other than Debian provides access to the build architecture to be able to modify certain stock bundled apps like removing parts from larger RPM's like KDE.
Remote helpdesk and other IT-friendly features are available in most distributions at this point, but they aren't really bundled and configured for that role in the context of the distribution. This needs work and attention. VNC is great, but a distro focusing on corporate desktops needs to have that puppy configured for easy remote desktop support by default.
I've spoken at LinuxWorld and other conferences, but every time I try to submit a topic that addresses some of these kinds of issues, I hear crickets and we get 10 more 'How to install Samba' sessions. We need a focus on what all the "Ticket System Cowboys" know about desktop deployments before some of the spectacular Linux desktop announcements turn into craptastic failures.
My company was collateral damage on SPEWS last month and I kicked the *^&^#$* out of our ISP for hosting Global Travel on our netblock. They got booted and we got cleaned off the list. Bada-bing bada boom.
RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease. Get your ISP to whack the spammer or change ISP's.
If you claim you are operating an incorporated business in Florida and are not registered, you just got a ticket to jail. Sounds like someone is lying about something...
Highlights include "20. Although it completed an initial public offering, SCO has failed to establish a successful business around Linux. SCO's Linux business has never generated a profit. In fact, the company as a whole did not experience a profitable quarter until after it abandoned its Linux business and undertook its present scheme to extract windfall profits from UNIX technology that SCO played no part in developing."
My company was collateral damage on SPEWS last month and I kicked the *^&^#$* out of our ISP for hosting Global Travel on our netblock. They got booted and we got cleaned off the list. Bada-bing bada boom.
RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease. Get your ISP to whack the spammer or change ISP's.
There is some evidence that this kind of report is crap. I found real numbers from IBM, Dell and "the new HP", and wrote an article on Linux and Main describing them. From my article:
"Sales of general purpose servers running Linux grew in 2001, to 486,000 units worldwide, while sales of Windows NT and Unix servers declined in the same time period. In 2002, while most parts of the server market shrank, Linux server sales grew 78.9 percent, Gartner said. In March 2002, Linux surpassed NetWare to become the second largest operating system used for new Intel-based server deployments according to IDC.
"Dell reported that in 2001, Linux servers represented 8% to 10% of all servers sold. Randy Groves, vice-president for enterprise computing at Dell said in a recent interview that number should climb to 10% to 12% in 2002. Peter Blackmore, executive vice-president of HP's enterprise systems group and former executive vice-president of sales at Compaq, said in a recent interview that 12% of customers are purchasing Compaq Proliant servers preloaded with Linux. He further indicated the number will move into the high teens through 2002 and 2003. In Linux servers, IBM moved up to the No. 1 spot, improving its sales 19 percent to hold 34.4 percent of the $236 million Linux server market."
I wonder where these numbers indiocating down sales are from, because everything I found indicated that 2001 sales numbers were up and sales of Linux preinstalled on servers is going up further yet.
The argument I see on the news stories is that Microsoft is whacking Opera and Mozilla because they don't fully support the W3C standards. AMAYA is available at www.w3.org and is the W3's benchmark standards compliant browser. It doesn't work either...
That Microsoft lies probably surprises no one. However, judging from these compliance tables, they are lying in a fairly major way:
Slashdot Mirror
...but Firefox keeps suggesting I run it with Wine. I don't get it, I'm not thirsty. I'd rather run it with a nice plate of steak and eggs.
By leadership, I don't making a stove-pipe product line that works fine in homogenous networks and ignores the realities in heterogenous enterprise networks. Sun used to drive these technologies into the whole market like Linux and other Open Source software are driving things today. It's always been a mix of attitude, smart decisions and and technical chops that drives the market and Sun just does not have it anymore.
For example, I was recently hired to try to get LDAP-based single-sign-on to work across Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM and Linux. All the vendors are using variants of the RFC2307 schema, but they are not generally interoperable. You want to share automount maps via LDAP? Nope. You want to have a nice consistant format for SSL certs? Nope. Sun used to LEAD these kind of issues by pushing the industry standards processes to address enterprise compatibility issues that their customers faced. Based on the quagmire I found trying to get cross-platform directory services working, Sun was just another vendor pointing fingers at everyone else for the failures we saw. They are clearly not leading LDAP-based directory services anymore, despite how many records their implementation can store. Frankly, no one else is either because getting interoperable directory services sucks. We actually had to leave some services running on NIS as a least common denominator solution because it was the only thing that worked.
Back in the day, Sun actually licensed its NSS/NIS/NFS technology to its competitors to assist with cross-vendor interoperability for its customers. Having nice technologies to differentiate a platform, like the examples you mentioned like dtrace and the management tools are fine, but Sun got my trust back in the 1990's because I saw that they were committed to pushing the whole market along and making things work. I wanted Sun equipment because they had the momentum, the best ideas and had so little fear they even dragged their competitors along to keep it interesting.
So rather than waiting for a consensus solution to congeal from the Free / Open Source community, I'd love to see a company like Sun re-engaged and driving enterprise standards and interoperability like they did in days gone by.
DaGoodBoy
I remember cutting my teeth on SunOS and Solaris starting back in 93/94. They were amazing innovators and almost single-handedly brought Unix into the enterprise. Here is a short list of technologies that were developed largely by Sun:
o The name service switch (nsswitch)
o Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+)
o Network File System (NFS)
o Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)
I know we make fun of NIS and NFS today as being old and insecure, but in 1993 it was the only way to provide single-sign-on and meet other enterprise requirements for scalability.
I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.
If Sun wants to drive, it needs to stop complaining from the back seat. It needs to start acting like it did back in the 1990's by developing solutions to enterprise problems and then showing the rest of the market how its done. Leaders lead and right now Sun is like some crotchity old man complaining about "the damn kids". Well, "the damn kids" are too busy driving right now to care about your CDDL and Solaris 10.
DaGoodBoy
...by putting the engineering plans and documentation on the Internet! Then we can build some and make a Beowulf cluster... oh wait.
DaGoodBoy
So... if they polute MD5. then use SHA. Or any other hashing mechanism. This is not a slam dunk by any means.
Hey RIAA, the cat is out of the bag, down the road, in a pub, laughing at your attempts to find him and stuff him back in the bag. Just suck it up and deal with the market reality and stop wishing you'd actually offered a real solution back in 1997. Bygones!
DaGoodBoy
...then stay outa the kitchen. The market has changed and people will no longer stand by when pundits / reporters / analysts start talking smack without proper, logical, untainted research to back them up. Didiot was one of the people who signed the SCO NDA to 'see the code' back when the FiaSCO started and toed Darl McBride's corporate line. She gets no sympathy from me...
Please allow me to introduce myself,
I am an analyst of wealth and taste...
DaGoodBoy
...with fetchmail / procmail / cyrdeliver for sorting and storing from other sources. How can 5GB of mail can't be wrong?! I can slice and dice my all my email (including about a gig of spam...) for choice bits of information.
not stenography... Stenography is 'short hand'.
We have had a government contract that required Oracle 8i for odd reasons. Debian still has available the older libc versions needed for Oracle 8i. I don't if any current versions of RHEL or SLES support 8i, but I know Debian + the older 1.1.8 JDK allowed the Oracle installer to run and work with minimal shoe-horning.
The other Debian box we built for this application was for running Tomcat with the Sun JDK pushing a web-based reporting tool. We were able to demonstrate how Debian supported removing all unrelated packages (including compilers) and lowered the security profile lower than their Solaris boxes. (They still used telnet, God help them) The demonstration worked and the server is running Debian in production on the [redacted] government network.
Don't push it. We recommend Debian because of access to the build/distribution system and the ability to craft custom loads for specific purposes (point-of-sale, thin client, rich client, etc.). Controlling the build/distribution environment is a bigger issue than many people realize. But we really support anything because after a certain point, Linux is just Linux.
Comment on DebianPlanet about how we do it
We use it in our business and support it for our customers. No problems here! Go Debian!
Good IDE hardware RAID controllers with Open Source drivers. Appears as a single SCSI drive to Linux. We swear by them.
The Kernel Instrumentation Process has already started creating the foundation for a kind of dtrace functionality. The profiling mechanisms appear to echo some of what Sun has done to Solaris to enable this kind of process-less profiling. Hope someone is still pushing this along...
DaGoodBoy
I jumped in to the "Desktop Linux Consortium" back in the Feb 2003 to offer some thoughts about direction for the forming DLC and the linux desktop in general. If you have any interest in what I said back then:
l c-discuss/2003-February/000002.html
http://www.desktoplinuxconsortium.org/pipermail/d
I think that the crucial missing application and management pieces are staring us all right in the face. It is not enough to have an easy install. It's not enough to have a slick desktop and functional apps. Those are important, certainly, but if we are really doing well at them, why hasn't the momentum shifted?
I've worked IT for fifteen years and the number of systems I've imaged with their OS and software loads dwarfs by 100 to 1 the number of times I've used any OS installer, even if you count the last five years of Install Parties at the Melbourne Florida LUG! The things most developers and non-corporate users think are important don't apply to corporate IT like people outside of IT would think.
The typical larger IT department has to deal with things like corporate software policies, locking user account profiles, automated application and operating system patches/updates and remote helpdesk. How can I enforce the corporate software policy against instant messengers when every distro except debian bundles all the stock KDE applications (including instant messenger apps) in a few giant RPMs? KDE 3.2 will be doing more profile locking features, but what about applications that don't use the KDE libs? What about Gnome?
I know people point to things like Red Carpet and the Red Hat Network for updates (still not 100% in my opinion), but I think corporations will need to be able to build or rebuild apps with different attributes or patches for distribution to corporate clients. SUSE is using 'autobuild' internally and Red Hat wants you to buy a Red Hat Network Proxy, but again, no-one other than Debian provides access to the build architecture to be able to modify certain stock bundled apps like removing parts from larger RPM's like KDE.
Remote helpdesk and other IT-friendly features are available in most distributions at this point, but they aren't really bundled and configured for that role in the context of the distribution. This needs work and attention. VNC is great, but a distro focusing on corporate desktops needs to have that puppy configured for easy remote desktop support by default.
I've spoken at LinuxWorld and other conferences, but every time I try to submit a topic that addresses some of these kinds of issues, I hear crickets and we get 10 more 'How to install Samba' sessions. We need a focus on what all the "Ticket System Cowboys" know about desktop deployments before some of the spectacular Linux desktop announcements turn into craptastic failures.
Just my $0.02.
DaGoodBoy
Tell your friends that you won't support net.terrorists. Find new hosting. Basically, two words: Pair Networks
Best web services company ever.
No, really!
"Maybe if I keep raising the damage award, no one will notice I have no evidence!"
http://www.awtrey.com/darlmcevil/
I was quoted in an article in Florida Today about bad recruiters. Typical "Recruiter Hell" story.
My company was collateral damage on SPEWS last month and I kicked the *^&^#$* out of our ISP for hosting Global Travel on our netblock. They got booted and we got cleaned off the list. Bada-bing bada boom.
RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease. Get your ISP to whack the spammer or change ISP's.
Google Thread
...because then I could charge them for criminal mail fraud.
DIE SCO, DIE!
No Moore Computer Consultants or MCCI in Florida:
l
l
http://www.sunbiz.org/corpweb/inquiry/corinam.htm
Search for "MCCI" or "Moore Computer". Also no "John Moore" as a corporate officer in a computer business:
http://www.sunbiz.org/corpweb/inquiry/corioff.htm
If you claim you are operating an incorporated business in Florida and are not registered, you just got a ticket to jail. Sounds like someone is lying about something...
DIE SCO, DIE!!!
The 46 page response is now available as a multipage TIFF and converted to a PDF file.
Highlights include "20. Although it completed an initial public offering, SCO has failed to establish a successful business around Linux. SCO's Linux business has never generated a profit. In fact, the company as a whole did not experience a profitable quarter until after it abandoned its Linux business and undertook its present scheme to extract windfall profits from UNIX technology that SCO played no part in developing."
My company was collateral damage on SPEWS last month and I kicked the *^&^#$* out of our ISP for hosting Global Travel on our netblock. They got booted and we got cleaned off the list. Bada-bing bada boom.
5 2%24Db4.726975%40twister.tampabay.rr.com
RBL's are like a fever. They tell you when something it wrong and only a dork blames the fever when the problem is the disease. Get your ISP to whack the spammer or change ISP's.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Fc6K9.262
There is some evidence that this kind of report is crap. I found real numbers from IBM, Dell and "the new HP", and wrote an article on Linux and Main describing them. From my article:
"Sales of general purpose servers running Linux grew in 2001, to 486,000 units worldwide, while sales of Windows NT and Unix servers declined in the same time period. In 2002, while most parts of the server market shrank, Linux server sales grew 78.9 percent, Gartner said. In March 2002, Linux surpassed NetWare to become the second largest operating system used for new Intel-based server deployments according to IDC.
"Dell reported that in 2001, Linux servers represented 8% to 10% of all servers sold. Randy Groves, vice-president for enterprise computing at Dell said in a recent interview that number should climb to 10% to 12% in 2002. Peter Blackmore, executive vice-president of HP's enterprise systems group and former executive vice-president of sales at Compaq, said in a recent interview that 12% of customers are purchasing Compaq Proliant servers preloaded with Linux. He further indicated the number will move into the high teens through 2002 and 2003. In Linux servers, IBM moved up to the No. 1 spot, improving its sales 19 percent to hold 34.4 percent of the $236 million Linux server market."
I wonder where these numbers indiocating down sales are from, because everything I found indicated that 2001 sales numbers were up and sales of Linux preinstalled on servers is going up further yet.
The argument I see on the news stories is that Microsoft is whacking Opera and Mozilla because they don't fully support the W3C standards. AMAYA is available at www.w3.org and is the W3's benchmark standards compliant browser. It doesn't work either...
That Microsoft lies probably surprises no one. However, judging from these compliance tables, they are lying in a fairly major way:
Unix/Linux Chart
Windows Chart
Macintosh Chart
If they are letting Netscape 4.7 in, the Opera browser and Mozilla are more standards compatible and should have no problems at all!
The opinion is mirrored here:
http://www.mlinux.org/00-5212a.pdf