Actually, Firebird is quite a bit older than a few years... a few years ago Borland opened the source to Interbase, which spawned the firebird project.
Not to belittle what the Firebird team has done - they have made some excellent improvements in the base code - but it was a robust and very mature product long before it became Firebird. It is a shame that so little attention is given to this project as it is probably one of the most commercially viable open-source database solutions available. It has all of the things that product like MySQL are missing that keep them from being "real" RDBMS... namely transactions, referential integrity, stored procedures, triggers, data dictionaries, etc.
I was writing code to talk to Interbase in 1995 and even then it was at version 4 and had been around for a long time. The core project that makes up Firebird has been in development since 1981!
While it might not be suitable to build the next "terra-server", it has excellent performance, reliability, and a enterprise-class set of features that make it a must-see open source, Free application.
You would actually be suprised how having the same name as an unrelated product will bring bone-heads out of the woodwork. I run a small computer security consulting company call "Vortech Consulting". There also happens to be a company that makes performance auto parts called Vortech (most often heard in GM commercials for their vehicles that contain "Vortech" engines).
In 1997, when I chose the name for my computer company, it was spin on "Vortex" and "Technology" - I poked around until I found a domain name that was available (vortech.net) and settled on the name after checking with the Secretary of State for Ohio (where my business is located) and determining that there were no issues using the name.
However - today I get 2 or 3 emails per week and even the occasional phone call from somebody that managed to navigate a web site about Computer Security, web hosting, and computer network consulting to find my contact page and call me about their Vortech super-charger. (Some of which get very upset when I insist that they have called the wrong company).
While 2 or 3 confusions per week is not worth getting worked up over, I am fairly certain that these two projects will have a much greater level of Internet exposure than either of the "Vortech"s will. I can imagine that a great deal of time will be spent by both project teams to try to explain "you are at the wrong site, go see these guys".
As a previous Windows Delphi developer who as recently replaced ALL of my company's systems with Linux + Kylix for custom business code, this story has put a major pit in my stomach.
While I realize that a lot of open-source purists don't much care for Kylix, as a pervious professional Windows Delphi developer it has been absolutely awesome to have Kylix to port my code to Linux.
Lazarus is coming along, but it has been doing so very slowly for years now. The first time I looked into their IDE was roughly 3 years ago, well before the first mention of Delphi for Linux.
If you need RAD web app or client/server database development capabilities for Linux, Kylix is really hard to beat (and yes, I have tried). In addition, I would venture to guess that better than 90% of my Windows code didn't even require touching to start working in Linux.
I personally don't mind having shelled out the price of Kylix Professional or the price of the boxed set for Red Hat. To implement the dozen or so servers it has cost me FAR less than the price of a single Windows 2000 Server + SQL... which my business simply can not afford.
The loss of Kylix would make running my business on LAMP infinitely less appealing. In addition, several of the existing products that I am developing for Linux that are some of the primary focus points for my business would take a major hit. I don't have the time or resources to develop tools to do my development or to try to port all of my code to a new language.
I am currently in an email conversation with LinkSys over the topic of securing a small WLAN that I set up to link my home network to my office (in a house across the street) and ran into a real problem with their WAP11 v2.2 AP's.
With 2 AP's set up in ethernet bridge mode (Shick as Slit!), if I enable WEP, the AP's encryption will get out of sync in very short order under heavy traffic loads (such as FTP'ing a file across the network at full speed). Once out of sync, I have to reset both AP's. With WEP disabled, the AP's perform OK.
After several tests I was able to reproduce these results each and every time... so I emailed LinkSys about their broken WEP support. Here is the response I got:
---------- Dear Mr. Joshua,
Thank you for contacting Linksys Customer Support.
With regard to the problem, can you provide the complete set up of your network? About WEP, it is advised that you disable WEP keys in your access point to avoid possible degradation of wireless transmission. The encryption causes your network to slow down in terms of wireless transmission because prior to transmission, the data are encrypted and decrypted at the receiving end. Hence, the result is to slow the efficiency of your data transfer. For a small network where there aren't much important files to be transferred, it is advised that WEP keys are disabled.
About the firmware, the access point should have no problem connecting to one another although they have different firmwares.
Have a nice day!
Sincerely,
Glythel Ria M. Penus Product Support Representative Linksys ----------------------- If you are wondering what the firmware issue is about, I noticed that one of the new AP's came with an undocumented revision of the firmware (1.01f), so I attempted to downgrade it the version listed on their web site (1.01c), which also happens to be the version that the other AP is running. It won't do a downgrade.
So, for my solution, I used a firewall product that my company has developed to run IPSEC across an unsecured wireless link. Fortunately, in bridge mode, the Linksys AP's will only to the another WAP11 that has its MAC specified in the allowed list.
Even if this wasn't my business LAN, how many people that need a wireless network never transfer anything "important"? More to the point, how many people don't care if the neighbor leeches Internet service off of the cable modem that they are paying for?
This is not the first time I have seen this idiocy come from a vendor... my brother in law was recently instructed to remove the last several Windows Critical Updates from his Windows 2000 computer by an M$ phone-monkey, telling him that if it wasn't broke in the first place, that he shouldn't have tried to fix it.
Blocking UDP would not be a realistic option as DNS runs on port 53/UDP. Blocking this port/proto combination would effectively bring the Internet connectivity to a stand still.
Even though most resolver clients will attempt to fall back to 53/tcp for DNS, it is usually after a lengthy time-out and not all DNS implementations support the tcp fallback option.
Re:Portion of Internet's data
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 1
If you have ever participated in any of their contests, this wouldn't be so mind blowing for you...
Your computer does not actually transmit a 64bit key for each key that it checks. Instead you would receive a starting key, from which your computer would start running tests on a variable range from 2^28 to 2^36 keys. Once completed, a signal that the block was complete was queued up to be transmitted back to the key servers.
In this fashion, billions of keys could be reported on with just a few bytes of traffic trasmitted.
Anybody that claims commercials don't work doesn't have a 4 year old. (or a 14 year old for that matter).
The point is, commercials largely drive the trends of today's youth. For those of you that aren't still trying to fit-in or be a misfit, the effects of the latest jean, shoe, (or whatever) commercials are pretty obvious.
I can't count the number of times I have heard the phrase "ooh, cool, I want THAT" come out of one of my children (ages 5, 8, and 10) while watching TV.
Isn't the whole point of the hyper-fast GPU's to be able to render 3D, texture-mapped objects with a minimal of communication with the CPU? If a graphics card is going to make full use of the AGP bandwidth, isn't this going to put one hell of a strain on the motherboard processing power itself?
If you look at the pre-hardware accel cards, the CPU was responsible for the calcs needed to render the display and then dump the raw data out to the video card. I would think that the design focus for the GF4 in my system was to render as many 3D objects at as high of a framerate possible WITHOUT the need to send gigs of data streaming into the video card.
While it might not be that big of an engineering modification to up the bandwidth capabilities of a video card's interface with the mobo, I don't think this was part of the initial design goals... in fact, I think the goal was the exact opposite.
If there is one piece of equipment that will never take up space in my house, it is a game console. I have 3 children that I spend enough time struggling with to get them to do their home work or find something a bit more creative to do than veg in front of a television.
I have 5 computers running at home... 1 for myself, 1 for my wife, 1 for my children, 1 that acts as a file/game server and one that runs Linux as a firewall. There are plenty of games available for the PC to provide the occassional gaming entertainment experience... the hell if I am going to spend another $400 plus the cost of games just to have a PC than can do nothing BUT play games. The whole concept seems stupid to me...
Buy a PC and a decent graphics accelerator. That way you can play games and when you aren't, the money you spent can actually be used for something productive.
While some may argue that Freon (probably more like expensive-on) adds additional functionality to the game console, it is not functionality that I want from a single piece of equipment... if I am playing a game and there is something on TV that I want to watch, I personally like the ability to record it at the same time without it causing a reduction in framerate or a sudden system crash.
I wish these idiots would simply focus on making a more stable and secure OS... some of of just simply like our Sony (or Panasonic, etc) entertainment equipment and could give 2 shits about M$'s visions... they belong in my office, not my livingroom!
So will this set back in the expected density for hard drives delay the next release of Windoze? I would expect they are going need at least a 1.2TB/sq inch before they will beable to cram the damn thing into a 3.5" form factor.
Citrix and the underlying Window NT or 2000 need to be properly secured to prevent this sort of thing. The only way that a remote user can shut down the server it to have both local admin privs and access to the shutdown option.
A properly configured Citrix server should only publish the applications that are needed by the clients. As you can publish just an application, there is no excuse for someone being able to shut down the server.
Last but not least, you can set session timeouts to prevent people from leaving idle sessions that tie up user connections.
I personally work for a company that has hundreds of citrix servers (yes, servers, not clients... the clients are upwards of 3000 internal plus many customers) and while there need to be many special considerations made when sharing computing power in this fashion, it is actually a very cost effective and easy to manage.
This is the product that we are currently looking to replace several hundred desktops with. It boots in roughly the amount of time that it takes for the CRT tube to warm up and is pretty well idiot proof.
Personally, I buy a copy of every version of Red Hat that I use. Typically I make the purchase a few weeks after having been one of the initial people clogging the mirror sites to get an ISO "fresh off the press"... this is done to a) support Red Hat because I like their product (and I hope the stock I own in them evertually make some money:) and b) I like the little "Powered By" stickers that I can put all over the place.
This sounds very similiar to what I set up when moving into my new house. My house was freshly built and the basement is below ground in the front of the house and exposed in the back with patio doors that lead outside.
I wired 16 CAT5 outlets into the drywall walls. During contstruction of the walls, a small room was built around the furnace and hot water heater that also houses a 3.3kW (5kva) Powerware UPS and the router equipment for a T1. I have 1 7' rack of equipment and several free-standing servers.
The 1/2 below ground offers some natural cooling... in fact, during the summer and winter months it is not a problem. In the winter, I close all of the furnace vents and the machines keep the basement at around 65-70 degrees F. During the summer the AC vents had to be closed prior to moving in the equipment because it got so cold... but the machine balance it out nicely. The problem is during the periods of the year that the A/C in the house doesn't run and the outside temp is not low enough to keep the room cool. These times can easily be controlled by a window A/C unit.
If you have no windows or more of a problem with cooling/heating, you may want to look at the APC NetworkAIR 1000 unit... it is a spot enviro unit that runs around US$1000.00.
From the stories that I have heard M$ tried to run hotmail on NT when they first acquired it and it failed miserably. NT couldn't even come close to scaling large enough to handle HotMail traffic.
Yeah... hotmail runs on Unix. BUT, this is not the issue. It would not matter if it had been running on Apache, FastTrack, IIS, etc. The security flaw was in the code for site itself.
This in no way puts a bad mark on Unix (namely FreeBSD) or Apache. Instead it makes the guys that are in charge of security for HotMail at M$ look like fools.
Had HotMail been on IIS (NT), this would not be the first major loophole that we would have heard about.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Firebird is quite a bit older than a few years... a few years ago Borland opened the source to Interbase, which spawned the firebird project.
Not to belittle what the Firebird team has done - they have made some excellent improvements in the base code - but it was a robust and very mature product long before it became Firebird. It is a shame that so little attention is given to this project as it is probably one of the most commercially viable open-source database solutions available. It has all of the things that product like MySQL are missing that keep them from being "real" RDBMS... namely transactions, referential integrity, stored procedures, triggers, data dictionaries, etc.
I was writing code to talk to Interbase in 1995 and even then it was at version 4 and had been around for a long time. The core project that makes up Firebird has been in development since 1981!
While it might not be suitable to build the next "terra-server", it has excellent performance, reliability, and a enterprise-class set of features that make it a must-see open source, Free application.
You would actually be suprised how having the same name as an unrelated product will bring bone-heads out of the woodwork. I run a small computer security consulting company call "Vortech Consulting". There also happens to be a company that makes performance auto parts called Vortech (most often heard in GM commercials for their vehicles that contain "Vortech" engines).
In 1997, when I chose the name for my computer company, it was spin on "Vortex" and "Technology" - I poked around until I found a domain name that was available (vortech.net) and settled on the name after checking with the Secretary of State for Ohio (where my business is located) and determining that there were no issues using the name.
However - today I get 2 or 3 emails per week and even the occasional phone call from somebody that managed to navigate a web site about Computer Security, web hosting, and computer network consulting to find my contact page and call me about their Vortech super-charger. (Some of which get very upset when I insist that they have called the wrong company).
While 2 or 3 confusions per week is not worth getting worked up over, I am fairly certain that these two projects will have a much greater level of Internet exposure than either of the "Vortech"s will. I can imagine that a great deal of time will be spent by both project teams to try to explain "you are at the wrong site, go see these guys".
As a previous Windows Delphi developer who as recently replaced ALL of my company's systems with Linux + Kylix for custom business code, this story has put a major pit in my stomach.
While I realize that a lot of open-source purists don't much care for Kylix, as a pervious professional Windows Delphi developer it has been absolutely awesome to have Kylix to port my code to Linux.
Lazarus is coming along, but it has been doing so very slowly for years now. The first time I looked into their IDE was roughly 3 years ago, well before the first mention of Delphi for Linux.
If you need RAD web app or client/server database development capabilities for Linux, Kylix is really hard to beat (and yes, I have tried). In addition, I would venture to guess that better than 90% of my Windows code didn't even require touching to start working in Linux.
I personally don't mind having shelled out the price of Kylix Professional or the price of the boxed set for Red Hat. To implement the dozen or so servers it has cost me FAR less than the price of a single Windows 2000 Server + SQL... which my business simply can not afford.
The loss of Kylix would make running my business on LAMP infinitely less appealing. In addition, several of the existing products that I am developing for Linux that are some of the primary focus points for my business would take a major hit. I don't have the time or resources to develop tools to do my development or to try to port all of my code to a new language.
I am currently in an email conversation with LinkSys over the topic of securing a small WLAN that I set up to link my home network to my office (in a house across the street) and ran into a real problem with their WAP11 v2.2 AP's.
With 2 AP's set up in ethernet bridge mode (Shick as Slit!), if I enable WEP, the AP's encryption will get out of sync in very short order under heavy traffic loads (such as FTP'ing a file across the network at full speed). Once out of sync, I have to reset both AP's. With WEP disabled, the AP's perform OK.
After several tests I was able to reproduce these results each and every time... so I emailed LinkSys about their broken WEP support. Here is the response I got:
----------
Dear Mr. Joshua,
Thank you for contacting Linksys Customer Support.
With regard to the problem, can you provide the complete set up of your
network? About WEP, it is advised that you disable WEP keys in your access
point to avoid possible degradation of wireless transmission. The encryption
causes your network to slow down in terms of wireless transmission because
prior to transmission, the data are encrypted and decrypted at the receiving
end. Hence, the result is to slow the efficiency of your data transfer. For
a small network where there aren't much important files to be transferred,
it is advised that WEP keys are disabled.
About the firmware, the access point should have no problem connecting to
one another although they have different firmwares.
Have a nice day!
Sincerely,
Glythel Ria M. Penus
Product Support Representative
Linksys
-----------------------
If you are wondering what the firmware issue is about, I noticed that one of the new AP's came with an undocumented revision of the firmware (1.01f), so I attempted to downgrade it the version listed on their web site (1.01c), which also happens to be the version that the other AP is running. It won't do a downgrade.
So, for my solution, I used a firewall product that my company has developed to run IPSEC across an unsecured wireless link. Fortunately, in bridge mode, the Linksys AP's will only to the another WAP11 that has its MAC specified in the allowed list.
Even if this wasn't my business LAN, how many people that need a wireless network never transfer anything "important"? More to the point, how many people don't care if the neighbor leeches Internet service off of the cable modem that they are paying for?
This is not the first time I have seen this idiocy come from a vendor... my brother in law was recently instructed to remove the last several Windows Critical Updates from his Windows 2000 computer by an M$ phone-monkey, telling him that if it wasn't broke in the first place, that he shouldn't have tried to fix it.
Blocking UDP would not be a realistic option as DNS runs on port 53/UDP. Blocking this port/proto combination would effectively bring the Internet connectivity to a stand still.
Even though most resolver clients will attempt to fall back to 53/tcp for DNS, it is usually after a lengthy time-out and not all DNS implementations support the tcp fallback option.
If you have ever participated in any of their contests, this wouldn't be so mind blowing for you...
Your computer does not actually transmit a 64bit key for each key that it checks. Instead you would receive a starting key, from which your computer would start running tests on a variable range from 2^28 to 2^36 keys. Once completed, a signal that the block was complete was queued up to be transmitted back to the key servers.
In this fashion, billions of keys could be reported on with just a few bytes of traffic trasmitted.
Anybody that claims commercials don't work doesn't have a 4 year old. (or a 14 year old for that matter).
The point is, commercials largely drive the trends of today's youth. For those of you that aren't still trying to fit-in or be a misfit, the effects of the latest jean, shoe, (or whatever) commercials are pretty obvious.
I can't count the number of times I have heard the phrase "ooh, cool, I want THAT" come out of one of my children (ages 5, 8, and 10) while watching TV.
Isn't the whole point of the hyper-fast GPU's to be able to render 3D, texture-mapped objects with a minimal of communication with the CPU? If a graphics card is going to make full use of the AGP bandwidth, isn't this going to put one hell of a strain on the motherboard processing power itself?
If you look at the pre-hardware accel cards, the CPU was responsible for the calcs needed to render the display and then dump the raw data out to the video card. I would think that the design focus for the GF4 in my system was to render as many 3D objects at as high of a framerate possible WITHOUT the need to send gigs of data streaming into the video card.
While it might not be that big of an engineering modification to up the bandwidth capabilities of a video card's interface with the mobo, I don't think this was part of the initial design goals... in fact, I think the goal was the exact opposite.
< rant >
/rant >
If there is one piece of equipment that will never take up space in my house, it is a game console. I have 3 children that I spend enough time struggling with to get them to do their home work or find something a bit more creative to do than veg in front of a television.
I have 5 computers running at home... 1 for myself, 1 for my wife, 1 for my children, 1 that acts as a file/game server and one that runs Linux as a firewall. There are plenty of games available for the PC to provide the occassional gaming entertainment experience... the hell if I am going to spend another $400 plus the cost of games just to have a PC than can do nothing BUT play games. The whole concept seems stupid to me...
Buy a PC and a decent graphics accelerator. That way you can play games and when you aren't, the money you spent can actually be used for something productive.
While some may argue that Freon (probably more like expensive-on) adds additional functionality to the game console, it is not functionality that I want from a single piece of equipment... if I am playing a game and there is something on TV that I want to watch, I personally like the ability to record it at the same time without it causing a reduction in framerate or a sudden system crash.
I wish these idiots would simply focus on making a more stable and secure OS... some of of just simply like our Sony (or Panasonic, etc) entertainment equipment and could give 2 shits about M$'s visions... they belong in my office, not my livingroom!
<
No, you would be getting printer cartidges that where only 1/2 full.
So will this set back in the expected density for hard drives delay the next release of Windoze? I would expect they are going need at least a 1.2TB/sq inch before they will beable to cram the damn thing into a 3.5" form factor.
Citrix and the underlying Window NT or 2000 need to be properly secured to prevent this sort of thing. The only way that a remote user can shut down the server it to have both local admin privs and access to the shutdown option.
e x. htm
A properly configured Citrix server should only publish the applications that are needed by the clients. As you can publish just an application, there is no excuse for someone being able to shut down the server.
Last but not least, you can set session timeouts to prevent people from leaving idle sessions that tie up user connections.
I personally work for a company that has hundreds of citrix servers (yes, servers, not clients... the clients are upwards of 3000 internal plus many customers) and while there need to be many special considerations made when sharing computing power in this fashion, it is actually a very cost effective and easy to manage.
http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/3200le/ind
This is the product that we are currently looking to replace several hundred desktops with. It boots in roughly the amount of time that it takes for the CRT tube to warm up and is pretty well idiot proof.
ROFLMAO... more truthful words were never spoken (or typed for that matter).
However, I am not sure wether to call this "Funny" or "Informative", both fit quite nicely.
Personally, I buy a copy of every version of Red Hat that I use. Typically I make the purchase a few weeks after having been one of the initial people clogging the mirror sites to get an ISO "fresh off the press"... this is done to a) support Red Hat because I like their product (and I hope the stock I own in them evertually make some money:) and b) I like the little "Powered By" stickers that I can put all over the place.
This sounds very similiar to what I set up when moving into my new house. My house was freshly built and the basement is below ground in the front of the house and exposed in the back with patio doors that lead outside.
d ex .cfm?base_sku=AP7003&language=en&LOCAL.APCCountryC ode=us
I wired 16 CAT5 outlets into the drywall walls. During contstruction of the walls, a small room was built around the furnace and hot water heater that also houses a 3.3kW (5kva) Powerware UPS and the router equipment for a T1. I have 1 7' rack of equipment and several free-standing servers.
The 1/2 below ground offers some natural cooling... in fact, during the summer and winter months it is not a problem. In the winter, I close all of the furnace vents and the machines keep the basement at around 65-70 degrees F. During the summer the AC vents had to be closed prior to moving in the equipment because it got so cold... but the machine balance it out nicely. The problem is during the periods of the year that the A/C in the house doesn't run and the outside temp is not low enough to keep the room cool. These times can easily be controlled by a window A/C unit.
If you have no windows or more of a problem with cooling/heating, you may want to look at the APC NetworkAIR 1000 unit... it is a spot enviro unit that runs around US$1000.00.
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_in
The only DDoS going on right now is people like us using our Mass-Web-Browsers-Of-Destruction (tm).
From the stories that I have heard M$ tried to run hotmail on NT when they first acquired it and it failed miserably. NT couldn't even come close to scaling large enough to handle HotMail traffic.
Yeah... hotmail runs on Unix. BUT, this is not the issue. It would not matter if it had been running on Apache, FastTrack, IIS, etc. The security flaw was in the code for site itself.
This in no way puts a bad mark on Unix (namely FreeBSD) or Apache. Instead it makes the guys that are in charge of security for HotMail at M$ look like fools.
Had HotMail been on IIS (NT), this would not be the first major loophole that we would have heard about.