Who would trust a new DNS server for production use until it has been around for some years.
I made the mistake of trusting djbdns for an important deployment until I started to realize limitation after limitation caused by djb's mental illness. (similar to the qmail story, I guess).
Microsoft DNS was pretty scary - although now I see real networks built around it. They convinced people to switch because of the vague threat that they might break other DNS server's ability to co-exist with Active Directory. But it worked and an alternative DNS server managed to take over significant market share very quickly.
To defeat BIND, Microsoft also provided both a GUI and a command-line interface to alter records.
What about the sensitive data saved in my email? Or the fact that access to my email account gives access to a lot of more sensitive services because they are willing to email me passwords?
Vulnerability to random hackers is one thing (My individual odds of becoming a victim are very small). Microsoft having access to this data is pretty dangerous. They could determine that I use Linux from the email, gain access to online banking, and transfer themselves the money as payment for their unspecified intellectual property. If I am victimized by Microsoft, will I have the same recourse as if it was eastern European hackers?
Microsoft has shown, with the SCOX evilness, that it will do anything to scare people from using Linux - without regards to what is legal. Someone who is willing to do this, and with these kinds of resources, is quite dangerous.
This is a wake-up-call for me. I am going to stop using Yahoo mail, and make sure that all online banking and other sensitive services do not allow elevation of email acccess to the ability to transfer money.
I spend a lot of time writing a PHP script for myself and decided to release it to the public. I think I threw a GPL notice on it but the source was included either way due to it being PHP. Well I put it up on my website and a few months later go back to update it. I search online and find someone selling it for $50. He refused to take it down when I asked him to which really added insult to injury.
I see the insult, but not the injury. He obeyed your license!
Selling someone else's GPL'd software is standard practice and a multi-billion dollar industry.
Security. We had a problem with a salesperson that sent a contract to a client. the client sent it back and accepted it. The salesperson used the file sent back by the customer as the legal document and did not check it for changes. we got SCREWED because the asshole client changed several things silently in their favor.
If we sent them a PDF, they cant play that game as all contracts have to be sent to legal for acceptance as the oridional document format. this solved this problem.
All computers can store data. Data is information, like the words in a book. Numbers are data too. Most humans count with numbers from 0 to 9, and string them together to make bigger numbers. Computers count with numbers from 0 to 1.
On modern computers, data is often arranged into "files". A file is just a collection of data. It can be given a name, and there will be facilities for organizing files.
Networks such as the internet are often used to transfer files. A computer can write any data into a file, and send any file over a network it is connected to. Your computer may have security settings for files or users that affects your ability to access data or networks. Who controls this security? Not the government, and not large corporations, although this will probably change soon. The owner of the computer ultimately controls what software they run on it, and therefore has the ability to control who has access to read and write what files, and connect to networks.
Files have different formats. For example, there are "text files". These contain letters, which have been converted into numbers. There are various methods of converting letters to numbers - all involving a pre-defined table of what letter corresponds to what number. There is a huge variety of software that can modify text files. But it can sometimes be difficult due to differences in which "character set" - the method of converting a number to a letter - has been used. Also, different computers can have different methods of signifying the end of a line. A text file is the simplest form of computer data, but it can still be difficult to deal with.
Images are more complicated. They come in a large variety of formats, each with their own design goals. Some are intended to be widely used, and the designer of the file format clearly documents how to read and write the files. Some are meant for narrow goals, and the knowledge of how to handle the format is not widely disseminated.
Some data can be very hard to manipulate. A video game might have data files describing the virtual world in which the game exists. The ability to read and write these files is only useful to the game designers, and they won't tell anyone else.
Since data is information, and computers primarily just process information, they are very good at doing it. Even if you have data you do not understand, you can manipulate it in any manner that you wish - it just may not have meaningful results.
If you give someone a computer file - for example by sending it to their computer over a network - they can modify it. If they understand the format of the file (or have software that does), they can modify it in a sensible manner.
Computers are also good at comparing data. You can look at a file that you created, and compare it to one that you had originally created but suspect it has been altered. You can not only determine that it has been altered, but what the alterations are.
But it is even more exciting! A computer can turn a data file - which is just a big number - into a smaller number. A number small enough that you could write it down, if not remember it. There are various techniques to turn a large number into a small number, but most have the goal of making it very difficult to find two large numbers that when fed in produce the same small number as output. You can compare two files by comparing the small numbers generated from them. Depending on the technique used to generate the small number, and the size of it in comparison to the size of the large number, you can determine how likely it is that the two file are indeed identical if the resultant small number matches.
Refusing to implement integrity checks at every level is data mismanagement.
The filesystem should provide this.
Linux people have been denying for years that hardware will cause data corruption. Therefore they can deny their own responsibility in detecting and correcting it.
It is everyone's responsibility to make OS people aware of how often hardware causes data corruption.
You pay the people who run the electricity company $100,000 (which is more than they would see from profit in their bonus/dividend/paypacket from you spending $1million on the electricity). You can now magically buy the electricity for $500,000. Total cost: $600,000; Total saving: $400,000.
Kickbacks are post-tax cash. The $100,000 kickback costs $200,000. Total cost is $700,000, savings is $300,000.
Maybe you should read transcripts of Milosevic's trial? Have you ever wondered why such prominent trial was not widely published? My brother did a research for his term paper and found that the court found sufficient evidence for exactly ONE case of war crimes.
That trial was the biggest injustice I've ever seen, after reading a lot of the transcripts. For example, a witness would testify against him for more than a day, and he would be "allowed" to cross examine, but given no time to do so - after one or two questions, he's told his time is up.
And guess what? It was wrong then, and such things are still wrong now.
You really wish for a United States where we didn't wipe out the natives? We would now be in a position similar to Israel. We are lucky we took our chance when such things were considered acceptable, because we would never get away with it now. It would be constant and perpetual civil war. We wouldn't have had the strength to win World War II. Germany, the USSR, and Japan would have divided up the world. We would be living as subjects of one of those empires.
I have about 500 HP servers running Linux, and this averages to about daily warranty returns. They have never once said that they would not support the system. In fact they have sometimes asked for syslog data, or the output of software that HP provided, for Linux.
This just sounds like some anomaly from call-center people sticking to the script.
Instead of a government mandate to change the clocks, why not use the same mandate to make it so that the 8-5 be changed to 7-4? I don't really see the difference
It has been accepted that the US federal government has the legitimate power to set the time. This seems reasonable to me, even as someone with pretty libertarian views.
I don't know if anyone has accepted that the federal government has a legitimate power to mandate when private businesses open and close. That would be a shocking increase in powers. Even for regulated industries, this would be an expansion of powers. I'm not even sure how such a law would be worded. What would the penalties be?
So the business I work in, creating and supporting credit union software for smaller credit unions in Ohio, is now going to have to adjust our hours to be available 24/7 for international clients that don't exist? Not every business works globally nor wants to work globally.
Don't you see a systematic problem if credit union management is this state-specific? Or your software works in Idaho but you just don't want their money?
I'm surprised we don't have a stock market yet that runs without stopping.
It's the people. An 8-hour working day becomes 3 8-hour shifts. How many firms could withstand a tripling of their labor costs? And that's just the beginning.
Unofficial estimates claim that costs due to the DST change well exceed a billion dollars TODAY which is more than the theoretical energy savings added up over 10 years.
Where I work, we have a reasonably fresh environment. Better than any other significantly sized business that I am familiar with, mostly due to several rounds of cleanups. Everyone aware of the costs below was LAUGHING about how we are so much better off than a few bigger businesses in the industry who's stories we heard. Let's consider the cost associated with the DST switch:
Sysadmin time patching supported Solaris machines - the patch requires a reboot (yes, really), and it breaks the system until the reboot so you must reboot right away. Sometimes you have to install the recommended patch set, which could break something. I estimate about an average of 10 minutes each for the sysadmin, plus an average of 3 minutes for application guys to check the system out. 13 minutes * 500 machines = 6500 man-minutes.
Sysadmin time dealing with unsupported Solaris machines - Sun charges $400 per machine for the patch for Solaris 7 and older. We had 50 such machines. We decommissioned 40 and paid for 10. It took probably 1 man-hour per machine decommissioned, not counting hardware and networking effort. Some were replaced with new hardware, but I won't count that cost. 40 man-hours plus $4000.
Sysadmin time patching unsupported Linux machines - pretty simple actually, 1 man-hour for every machine.
Sysadmin time patching supported Linux machines - seemed simple at first, updating the tzdata package (1 man-hour for every machine, includes phased rollout and communication with app teams). Turns out that there was a bug in Redhat Enterprise 3, updaing the package does not update/etc/localtime. Another bug we noticed -today-, cron does not reload/etc/localtime like every other application. Add 5 man-hours debugging the latter two problems and cleaning up the repercussions of the cron problem. Add $10,000 in lost profit because of customer issues caused by cron failing to start applications at the right time this morning.
Sysadmin and app developer time in upgrading every Java instance everywhere, verifying that no one is still using an old one - 40 hours for sysadmins, 200 hours for app guys. We use a lot of Java.
We were hit by the Java bug before Sun announced it Thursday (http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetk ey=1-26-102836-1&searchclause=). They were aware of it back in September, but only made the announcement at the last minute after it started causing the widespread problems that they were warned about in September. Time spent debugging and cleaning up the mess, probably 12 man-hours. Cost due to messed up transactions is a low estimate of $50,000.
Another 40 man-hours spent by everyone re-testing and re-checking their applications for the newly discovered bug. Sun's fix was so insane sounding and was so last-minute that we could not just deploy it.
Linux isn't really for the faint hearted, and is an absolute nightmare to maintain if the user is used to MS bloatware.
Come on. It's a nightmare to maintain AT ALL. I've been maintaining Linux systems for a living for as long as anyone. It is still a nightmare. Let's think about some examples.
Setting up a wireless card can be an all day event if you have driver problems. For even a well-supported card, you are not likely to be able to make it work as well as Windows. For example, set the user up so that they can pick from an open network, an encrypted network and then specify a key, ethernet, or a modem via bluetooth. You will find that is basically impossible to set up a Linux laptop so that you can have someone walk away with it and get reasonable networking behavior. Pathetic!
Setting up multihead requires expert knowledge of X, and only then so that you can properly phrase your question on the right mailing list and hope for a helpful response. Linux had multihead before Windows, but on a modern Linux system it still takes days to make it work. It works out of the box in Windows.
, yet I personally know an admin who had a second drive fail while replacing a bad drive, losing the whole array.
Wow. And I personally AM an admin who this has happened to on at least TEN occasions. It is not rare. If you do the math out using the drive manufacturer's own error rates, you will find that it is actually likely to happen.
That's why REAL plant gene banks work by growing the plants with heavy water.
Awesome. I see heavy water for sale on the internet. I always wanted a reason to buy some. Is it safe stuff? Obviously I won't drink it. What if my cats nibble on a leaf?
At first I suspected it was because I've been doing searches since the days of archie. But more and more I've come to realize that some people just have no skill when it comes to doing a web search. I think it's primarily due to poor reading comprehension and poor reading speed.
These people who can't do searches, they click on results where the summary clearly shows that it is not the desired material. If they had read every word, it would have been clear.
It's a basic literacy problem. Americans have really poor literacy. The destruction of the concept that parents should educate their children, combined with an increasingly poor public education system, has left us with a generation too illiterate to do a web search.
You're the only one who hasn't mentioned xargs -0. I think it's important to elaborate on this. You should never do "find | xargs" or "find | cpio", you should always do "find -print0 | xargs -0" and find -print0 | cpio -0". The former will break if filenames have spaces or newlines in them. You break xargs if filenames have quotes, backslashes, or spaces in them. I never come across a large data set where you can do find | xargs without the -0 options.
If you are encountering data created by untrusted users, don't forget the strange consequences of filenames that contain newlines.
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Who would trust a new DNS server for production use until it has been around for some years.
I made the mistake of trusting djbdns for an important deployment until I started to realize limitation after limitation caused by djb's mental illness. (similar to the qmail story, I guess).
Microsoft DNS was pretty scary - although now I see real networks built around it. They convinced people to switch because of the vague threat that they might break other DNS server's ability to co-exist with Active Directory. But it worked and an alternative DNS server managed to take over significant market share very quickly.
To defeat BIND, Microsoft also provided both a GUI and a command-line interface to alter records.
Sorry, but the NSA is known to have tapped undersea cables.
They have the resources for custom made equipment, you know.
I don't think the NSA is too worried about their spying being discovered, as long as the media does not widely publicize it.
Although I can determine what some of it says, I should not have to suffer permanent damage to my eyes discerning "nylon yarn".
In the US, you are sentenced to years of anal rape, resulting in AIDS, and then death.
Much more civilized here since we don't directly execute anyone.
Oh, and the more you protect yourself from anal rape, the more violent you must be in your defense, creating years more of anal rape.
The text is completely illegible.
What about the sensitive data saved in my email? Or the fact that access to my email account gives access to a lot of more sensitive services because they are willing to email me passwords?
Vulnerability to random hackers is one thing (My individual odds of becoming a victim are very small). Microsoft having access to this data is pretty dangerous. They could determine that I use Linux from the email, gain access to online banking, and transfer themselves the money as payment for their unspecified intellectual property. If I am victimized by Microsoft, will I have the same recourse as if it was eastern European hackers?
Microsoft has shown, with the SCOX evilness, that it will do anything to scare people from using Linux - without regards to what is legal. Someone who is willing to do this, and with these kinds of resources, is quite dangerous.
This is a wake-up-call for me. I am going to stop using Yahoo mail, and make sure that all online banking and other sensitive services do not allow elevation of email acccess to the ability to transfer money.
I see the insult, but not the injury. He obeyed your license!
Selling someone else's GPL'd software is standard practice and a multi-billion dollar industry.
I assume he kept your copyright notice of course.
Security. We had a problem with a salesperson that sent a contract to a client. the client sent it back and accepted it. The salesperson used the file sent back by the customer as the legal document and did not check it for changes. we got SCREWED because the asshole client changed several things silently in their favor.
If we sent them a PDF, they cant play that game as all contracts have to be sent to legal for acceptance as the oridional document format. this solved this problem.
All computers can store data. Data is information, like the words in a book. Numbers are data too. Most humans count with numbers from 0 to 9, and string them together to make bigger numbers. Computers count with numbers from 0 to 1.
On modern computers, data is often arranged into "files". A file is just a collection of data. It can be given a name, and there will be facilities for organizing files.
Networks such as the internet are often used to transfer files. A computer can write any data into a file, and send any file over a network it is connected to. Your computer may have security settings for files or users that affects your ability to access data or networks. Who controls this security? Not the government, and not large corporations, although this will probably change soon. The owner of the computer ultimately controls what software they run on it, and therefore has the ability to control who has access to read and write what files, and connect to networks.
Files have different formats. For example, there are "text files". These contain letters, which have been converted into numbers. There are various methods of converting letters to numbers - all involving a pre-defined table of what letter corresponds to what number. There is a huge variety of software that can modify text files. But it can sometimes be difficult due to differences in which "character set" - the method of converting a number to a letter - has been used. Also, different computers can have different methods of signifying the end of a line. A text file is the simplest form of computer data, but it can still be difficult to deal with.
Images are more complicated. They come in a large variety of formats, each with their own design goals. Some are intended to be widely used, and the designer of the file format clearly documents how to read and write the files. Some are meant for narrow goals, and the knowledge of how to handle the format is not widely disseminated.
Some data can be very hard to manipulate. A video game might have data files describing the virtual world in which the game exists. The ability to read and write these files is only useful to the game designers, and they won't tell anyone else.
Since data is information, and computers primarily just process information, they are very good at doing it. Even if you have data you do not understand, you can manipulate it in any manner that you wish - it just may not have meaningful results.
If you give someone a computer file - for example by sending it to their computer over a network - they can modify it. If they understand the format of the file (or have software that does), they can modify it in a sensible manner.
Computers are also good at comparing data. You can look at a file that you created, and compare it to one that you had originally created but suspect it has been altered. You can not only determine that it has been altered, but what the alterations are.
But it is even more exciting! A computer can turn a data file - which is just a big number - into a smaller number. A number small enough that you could write it down, if not remember it. There are various techniques to turn a large number into a small number, but most have the goal of making it very difficult to find two large numbers that when fed in produce the same small number as output. You can compare two files by comparing the small numbers generated from them. Depending on the technique used to generate the small number, and the size of it in comparison to the size of the large number, you can determine how likely it is that the two file are indeed identical if the resultant small number matches.
Actually, you will soon learn that no one asks what your grades were in college.
Refusing to implement integrity checks at every level is data mismanagement.
The filesystem should provide this.
Linux people have been denying for years that hardware will cause data corruption. Therefore they can deny their own responsibility in detecting and correcting it.
It is everyone's responsibility to make OS people aware of how often hardware causes data corruption.
http://www.storagetruth.org/index.php/2006/data-corruption-happens-easily/
Kickbacks are post-tax cash. The $100,000 kickback costs $200,000. Total cost is $700,000, savings is $300,000.
That trial was the biggest injustice I've ever seen, after reading a lot of the transcripts. For example, a witness would testify against him for more than a day, and he would be "allowed" to cross examine, but given no time to do so - after one or two questions, he's told his time is up.
You really wish for a United States where we didn't wipe out the natives? We would now be in a position similar to Israel. We are lucky we took our chance when such things were considered acceptable, because we would never get away with it now. It would be constant and perpetual civil war. We wouldn't have had the strength to win World War II. Germany, the USSR, and Japan would have divided up the world. We would be living as subjects of one of those empires.
Great plan guy. Real humanitarian you are.
I have about 500 HP servers running Linux, and this averages to about daily warranty returns. They have never once said that they would not support the system. In fact they have sometimes asked for syslog data, or the output of software that HP provided, for Linux.
This just sounds like some anomaly from call-center people sticking to the script.
It has been accepted that the US federal government has the legitimate power to set the time. This seems reasonable to me, even as someone with pretty libertarian views.
I don't know if anyone has accepted that the federal government has a legitimate power to mandate when private businesses open and close. That would be a shocking increase in powers. Even for regulated industries, this would be an expansion of powers. I'm not even sure how such a law would be worded. What would the penalties be?
Don't you see a systematic problem if credit union management is this state-specific? Or your software works in Idaho but you just don't want their money?
It's the people. An 8-hour working day becomes 3 8-hour shifts. How many firms could withstand a tripling of their labor costs? And that's just the beginning.
Where I work, we have a reasonably fresh environment. Better than any other significantly sized business that I am familiar with, mostly due to several rounds of cleanups. Everyone aware of the costs below was LAUGHING about how we are so much better off than a few bigger businesses in the industry who's stories we heard. Let's consider the cost associated with the DST switch:
I count 487 man-hours plus $64000 in direct costs and lost profit. Figure an average employee cost of $100/hr. $112,700 in total costs. Wow!
I'm still really, really confident that we had it better than most.
Come on. It's a nightmare to maintain AT ALL. I've been maintaining Linux systems for a living for as long as anyone. It is still a nightmare. Let's think about some examples.
Setting up a wireless card can be an all day event if you have driver problems. For even a well-supported card, you are not likely to be able to make it work as well as Windows. For example, set the user up so that they can pick from an open network, an encrypted network and then specify a key, ethernet, or a modem via bluetooth. You will find that is basically impossible to set up a Linux laptop so that you can have someone walk away with it and get reasonable networking behavior. Pathetic!
Setting up multihead requires expert knowledge of X, and only then so that you can properly phrase your question on the right mailing list and hope for a helpful response. Linux had multihead before Windows, but on a modern Linux system it still takes days to make it work. It works out of the box in Windows.
The stock they owe comes from actual borrowed shares. That's the number counted in the 34%.
That is, at clearing, the short sell results in "delivery" of stock to the buyer that is borrowed on the short-seller's behalf.
Wow. And I personally AM an admin who this has happened to on at least TEN occasions. It is not rare. If you do the math out using the drive manufacturer's own error rates, you will find that it is actually likely to happen.
Awesome. I see heavy water for sale on the internet. I always wanted a reason to buy some. Is it safe stuff? Obviously I won't drink it. What if my cats nibble on a leaf?
At first I suspected it was because I've been doing searches since the days of archie. But more and more I've come to realize that some people just have no skill when it comes to doing a web search. I think it's primarily due to poor reading comprehension and poor reading speed.
These people who can't do searches, they click on results where the summary clearly shows that it is not the desired material. If they had read every word, it would have been clear.
It's a basic literacy problem. Americans have really poor literacy. The destruction of the concept that parents should educate their children, combined with an increasingly poor public education system, has left us with a generation too illiterate to do a web search.
You're the only one who hasn't mentioned xargs -0. I think it's important to elaborate on this. You should never do "find | xargs" or "find | cpio", you should always do "find -print0 | xargs -0" and find -print0 | cpio -0". The former will break if filenames have spaces or newlines in them. You break xargs if filenames have quotes, backslashes, or spaces in them. I never come across a large data set where you can do find | xargs without the -0 options.
If you are encountering data created by untrusted users, don't forget the strange consequences of filenames that contain newlines.
Failing to use -0 is dangerous malpractice.