They say that it is classified, but nevertheless, it is read by around three million people in diplomatic circles. Unfortunately they still don't seem to understand that they can't label anything they choose as 'secret' and try ane enforce it after the fact.
It's amusing that some people believe they can get at an organisation like WikiLeaks by going after one man and putting pressure on every company imaginable not to do business with them. WikiLeaks will get donations regardless and if it's not WikiLeaks it will be something else. It's like no one has learned anything from the past ten or fifteen years.
I have that set up, there really isn't anything special to it, my hair is intact.
I thought I'd made this clear? Do this on a network with hundreds or even thousands of servers, routers and network equipment and then try and maintain a certain amount of forwards and backwards compatibility - with applications that can't afford to be down for any length of time, no less.
People are just not understanding what's required here.
I repeat, you do what is necessary to keep hard infrastructure working. You don't expect people to replace it, and so far that hasn't happened at all. I wonder why.
Computing people have this vision that you can start again with something nice and 'clean' and pink ponies will run free through meadows. In the real world this doesn't happen with infrastructure that you rely on. People pay once for it and expect it to work for at least decades before anything major is done.
Whether I or you like NAT is neither here nor there. When you have a vast amount of infrastructure you keep the thing running in the form that it is in, and the perfect solutions you didn't think of are neither here nor there.
IPv6 has been around since 1998 ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2460 ). That's Windows '98/NT territory. If Windows Server can't handle it, it's not because it hasn't had long enough to be tested in that configuration.
You missed the point and you kind of answered it with that. People don't rip out network infrastructures that will merely make everything work as it did before, at best. It simply doesn't happen. That's why nothing has been done with IPv6 and it should have been a clue to those pushing for its usage that it wasn't going to work.
Auditing by who? The first crisis with IPv4 allocation is the inability to allocate new chunks. Organisations with enough IPv4 addresses already aren't going to be bothered by this for a long time.
Yep, and if you can't demonstrate that you're using them then you'll get them taken off you. I fail to see why organisations that have been efficient with their use of IP addresses should be penalised.
2. So... you're avoiding the cost of configuring networks to be dual protocol, by re-configuring servers... why is that necessarily cheaper?
Application support for IPv6 is as thin on the ground as it is, and for IPv6 it will be a hard prerequisite. That's a lot of rewriting no one is going to do.
3. Reclaiming IP addresses is akin to solving a lack of phone numbers for the NY area by claiming back some from a less populated state.
Hmmm, no. That's silly. It's reclaiming phone numbers from people who already have several and don't use many of them.
4. Again, you're suggesting an alternative way of investing time to solve a problem instead of solving it properly, and I'm not sure why this is inherently faster.
Solving something 'properly' in computing means starting all over again. I repeat, this is not going to happen.
5. Possibly some variation on the SRV records, but... again, why is replacing every OS world-wide (absolutely nothing supports that, so everything will need upgrading) cheaper than enabling IPv6 on systems that are already out there?
Supporting IPv6 is about more than an OS being able to accept a IPv6 address. Application support is required regardless. I know people like to tell us that IPv6 support is widespread, but it really isn't.
Which is why people have been saying for the last several years that you needed to start moving to IPv6. But human nature being what it is, people just wait to the last minute.
You missed the point. No organisation is going to move to another network infrastructure that will make things appear to work the same, at best. No one.
You should refrain from lumping the rest of the world in to your little delusions, the rest of the internet that actually works in networking, do not in fact, share your paranoid view of "OMG PEOPLE SEE MY IPS! THEY CAN HACK ME!" and are actually quite comfortable in the significant distinction between stateful fire-walling and IP masquerading / Network Address Translation.
No, they're not and the fact that you think you can create a nice little safe scenario where the majority will feel comfortable just shows how deluded the "Move everything to IPv6" brigade is.
I keep hearing this "Oh, you must move to IPv6 now!" as if this can be done with a wave of a wand and completely ignoring the current economic realities of the chicken and egg situation we are in. I've also seen some wankers who think that giving lists of network equipment that supports IPv6 and that they've converted their basement office to IPv6 means that we can all magically start using it.
IPv6 is completely incompatible with IPv4. Don't give me any of that tunnel crap because organisations are going to have to maintain two different network systems within their infrastructure, and to be practically usable it has to be largely forwards compatible as well. Just take a look at the hair-pulling in mixed IPv4 and 6 networks with things like Windows Server. The hard requirement should have been a direct addition to IPv4 that would be as backwards compatible as possible, but no, the IPv6 weenies decided that we should be 'saved' from all of the mistakes of IPv4. This is where computer people are derided in other industries because they won't do what is necessary to keep the systems going we have now, warts and all. You don't rip out sewer systems and replace them with something you think is far better.
Solutions? There's a few and they are just unpalatable things we are going to have to swallow:
1. Auditing of all public facing systems and as much IP address sharing as possible.
2. Much IP address usage on the web has been brought about by SSL. SNI virtual hosting will help there.
3. IP addresses will get much more expensive and any unused IP addresses will simply be taken off you.
4. Far, far greater use of NAT and the sharing of external services via as few IP addresses as possible.
5. Beyond that we will probably have some sort of DNS extension where you can find a particular service on a port on an IP address with systems behind NAT.
IPv4 is here and is not going away. IT and computing people need to learn the hard way what is required in building and keeping infrastructure that is heavily relied on going.
You missed the bit where anyone with v4 connectivity can use 6to4 right now. No need for massive router upgrades or ISP cooperation, etc. Just turn it on. If you plan for a 10 minute upgrade, you'll have time to make a coffee as well. Assuming basic sysadmin competence.
You know, I despair at people who say utterly brainless shit like this because they obviously have not a clue about how large some organisations are and how long it's taken to get their existing network infrastructure sorted and working. You cannot do this in ten fucking minutes.
I'm mystified as to why you think switches (which are layer 2) would need upgrading to support IPv6,
A lot of switching equipment can be protocol aware.
Oh God, please don't let sensible practicality get in the way of this. You should know by now that private addressing and NAT is completely evil and there are absolutely no reasons at all why you should be doing this.
You want to learn about security. There is nothing good about IPv6-NAT, and security through obscurity isn't security.
Nobody wants to expose all their internal addresses. Period. Which part of that can you dumb fucks not understand? No organisation is going to want to implement that.
Learn DNS. You should only be looking at a IPv6 address if you are a network engineer.
I'm afraid that IP addresses are a very real part of working on networks today, and making them relatively easy to remember is pretty important. Mixing numbers and letters together in hexadecimal (a numbering system humans don't use) was something cobbled together by some tit who had no idea about the practicalities of maintaining a network.
I see a lot of people roll out the usual Milton Friedman 'Privatise it!' option to everything, but I'm afraid that a lot of private delivery firms just do not see it as cost effective to deliver to a lot of, mainly rural, areas. It's the same thing here in the UK with the Royal Mail. No matter how much anyone talks about privatisation you can always bet that there will be government subsidies needed to fill the gap needed, because you can't have a functioning economy and communities without some kind of postal service unless you tell everyone to move to areas that delivery firms find cost effective. I can't see that being an option.
When you subsidise private firms to provide a service they don't really want to provide then you get something far worse than anything the government could run itself. It simply doesn't work.
I don't waste my time assuming his claim is the truth until I can find proof otherwise, especially when logic dictates it is fucking ludacris.
I believe the word you're looking for is ludicrous - or in this case it means "It's so fucking unbelievable that I don't want to even contemplate it, so I'll defend against it".
I'll throw you a piece of logic. Why would the family of a terrorist responsible for a massive attack and loss of life be allowed to fly out of the country two days (by your admission, anyway) after said attack? I'm sure the efficient intelligence service found out that the Bin Laden family, minus Osama of course, rescues orphaned kittens and so couldn't be a threat but that still doesn't mean that he wouldn't try and contact them or try and obtain money.
The Bin Laden family is actually a very wealthy family of [legitimate] business associates....
Yes, they certainly are.
.....that have disowned their nutjob son.
Have they really? Do we have any evidence for that? I knew there was going to be some kind of great punchline to wave this away, because even the Bin Laden's family status is just far, far too undeniable for anyone. I love the word 'legitimate' by the way, just to give it all some credibility and a nice flourish to try and emphasise a differentiation that you have no idea exists.
The Bin Laden family wasn't allowed to fly until September 13th, when they eased the lockdown and started to allow others to fly.
That's perfectly OK then, if true. It still doesn't answer the question of why, however.
This is the same guy who has insinuated that George W. Bush is pals with Osama Bin Laden
Well, we can only go on what we know and we know that Bush and Bin Laden, certainly through his family, have invested in a lot of companies together. The Bin Ladens are very well known, wealthy and extremely well connected in Saudi Arabia. The notion that Bush knows nothing about him is just plain fishy.
...and specifically sent too few troops into Afghanistan to make sure Bin Laden escaped and wanted to keep his Taliban friends safe.
Well, all we know is that not a trace of Osama Bin Laden has ever been found. Not a single lead. Not a sausage. Nothing. This is from a guy and his supporters who are supposed to be propping up a worldwide terrorism network who are well connected and well funded. Oh, and there's a lot of companies with directors who are friends of George Bush who are making quite a bit of money from the 'rebuilding' of Afghanistan. Basically, it's in their interests to keep the whole thing going.
I think people are more then entitled to ask what the hell is going on. The trouble with this stuff is that you almost get a kind of 'reverse conspiracy theory' effect and governments have learned to use this phenomenon, especially when they do something bare faced and obvious. Basically, it's so unbelievable for most people that no amount of evidence will convince them that there is even the smallest thing wrong. Note, we're not talking about grand conspiracy theories here, we're just talking about admitting that something is wrong. The notion that there is something wrong and the consequences would rock their cosy little world too much, and so, they will go into denial and even defend the status quo in order to protect their own bubble of perceived security.
Fowler's attack on the company's firewall, which had caused a "lockout", took Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) three months to resolve.
What? Seriously. What? What the hell is a lockout and why would it take anyone three months to solve a firewall issue?
No Wonder /. is Running Solaris Migration Ads
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RIP, SunSolve
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· Score: 1
I was intrigued to see those Suse/Novell/IBM sponsored ads at the top of the page when I wasn't logged in. Now I understand why. Whereas Sun have steadily got themselves into trouble over the past ten years Oracle have now really accelerated the process to the point where you can see the end for anything SPARC or Solaris related in the next couple of years. Not even Oracle can absorb the kind of losses Sun must be making now.
Whereas you would have thought that Oracle would want to make existing customers as happy as possible and rebuild the customer base from there, their strategy seems to be to try and screw existing customers as hard as possible to maximise revenue. Whereas this has worked in software and their database business in the past because people have generally got themselves locked into PL/SQL and Oracle's archane infrastructure the fly-in-the-ointment is that people have proved that over the past ten years they have been more than willing to move away from Solaris and SPARC, and it's much easier to switch hardware and then operating systems with the advent of Linux than it is specific applications. Oracle's software runs on more than just Solaris so their customers have a migration path off anyway.
Oracle just don't understand the business, in other words. McNealy should have sold to IBM if he wanted anything at all to remain.
Re:Oracle is pure evil.
on
RIP, SunSolve
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· Score: 1
Wow. Just wow. Given how bad things eventually got for Sun you would have thought that Oracle would want to look after the remaining paying customers, wouldn't you?
Why? You may belive that there is some fundamental difference between humans and other animals, but myself and many others do not. That doesn't make us uncivilised.
This isn't right in humans or in any animals. We don't know what the long-term effect of this would be in mice. The point the OP is making is that humans have differences in genetics that make this process even more fraught with danger than the basic stuff they've managed to accomplish so far. Allowing offspring to go through that is totally uncivilised.
On the other hand, I don't think we as a species need any additional vectors for reproducing -- we seem to do well enough as it is...
Mark my words, crazy fuckers and those promoting 'equality' for same-sex couples will be pushing for this. I have no problems with same-sex relationships but this kind of stuff is where we need to draw a very clear line.
When other people provide evidence you are wrong (I don't recall where it was, but I saw a tv show or webpage in the last few months that demonstrated the death ray does work), you need to examine that evidence, revisit your study, and see if you reach a new conclusion. That's a quality that a lot of people lack these days (they will insist they are correct even when showing them clear and concise evidence they are wrong).
Indeed. This is exactly what is wrong with Mythbusters and the attitude surrounding scientific criticism and debate.
Rather than getting people to think about it and perform things themselves the central premise of that show is that they come up with some contrived situation that is quite often questionable and then tell everyone that the 'myth' is busted. No debate about it. I remember them doing a moon landing one a while back that I don't think actually helped the cause of debunking moon landing accusations. The guy in it had an astronaut figure that he confidently told us was Neil Armstrong because he had the orange flashes on his suit, but that's inaccurate because those only came in in later missions when they realised they had an identification problem. Little things like that tend to propogate from this kind of stuff - "We've proved it, we're right, anything we say goes, no fact checking or revisiting necessary. If you disagree with us it's a conspiracy theory".
Sun needed heavy investment and lots of R&D to continue to compete in the h/w arena. They didn't have it and Fujitsu was no help. IBM, Intel and AMD poured tons of $$$ into chip development while Sun kept missing release dates.
Indeed. It takes a ton of investment to keep a hardware business going, and the more customers Sun lost the less investment they could put in. They've clearly been struggling since the 90s when their workstation business disappeared overnight, and a few years later when those companies who laid out money on Sun to run web systems realised they could get more power for less money when they upgraded. Time was of the essence, and as far as I could see since the early 00s Sun spent their time convinced of their own superiority and that customers would simply come back to them because that's what Sun believed. Wishful thinking, in other words. I've lost count of the number of times a Sun representative tried to tell me that you couldn't run anything 'serious' on a Linux and x86 system, despite what the last decade has taught us.
IBM were largely insulated from that bottom-up squeeze from x86 systems because they had the resources to put the investment into their hardware and their high-end mainframe business is simply in a different arena. That was not the case with Sun. They were trying to get people to move away from mainframes to them for years and yet it is ironic that it is the thing that would have saved them had they got involved much, much sooner.
They were lucky to find a buyer for the company.
You're right there. One wonders why IBM turned tail when they were looking to buying them, because surely they were only going to buy Sun for the customer list? Oracle are going to be pulling their hair out absorbing Sun's current significant losses while trying to turn the ship around. I can't see it being possible because I don't know what Sun's market is now. You wouldn't go to them for a mainframe but the stuff they do sell has long since been outperformed and can be done faster and cheaper elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
They say that it is classified, but nevertheless, it is read by around three million people in diplomatic circles. Unfortunately they still don't seem to understand that they can't label anything they choose as 'secret' and try ane enforce it after the fact.
It's amusing that some people believe they can get at an organisation like WikiLeaks by going after one man and putting pressure on every company imaginable not to do business with them. WikiLeaks will get donations regardless and if it's not WikiLeaks it will be something else. It's like no one has learned anything from the past ten or fifteen years.
I have that set up, there really isn't anything special to it, my hair is intact.
I thought I'd made this clear? Do this on a network with hundreds or even thousands of servers, routers and network equipment and then try and maintain a certain amount of forwards and backwards compatibility - with applications that can't afford to be down for any length of time, no less.
People are just not understanding what's required here.
I repeat, you do what is necessary to keep hard infrastructure working. You don't expect people to replace it, and so far that hasn't happened at all. I wonder why.
Computing people have this vision that you can start again with something nice and 'clean' and pink ponies will run free through meadows. In the real world this doesn't happen with infrastructure that you rely on. People pay once for it and expect it to work for at least decades before anything major is done.
Whether I or you like NAT is neither here nor there. When you have a vast amount of infrastructure you keep the thing running in the form that it is in, and the perfect solutions you didn't think of are neither here nor there.
They don't. Why? Because it's a lot of huge effort for nothing.
IPv6 has been around since 1998 ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2460 ). That's Windows '98/NT territory. If Windows Server can't handle it, it's not because it hasn't had long enough to be tested in that configuration.
You missed the point and you kind of answered it with that. People don't rip out network infrastructures that will merely make everything work as it did before, at best. It simply doesn't happen. That's why nothing has been done with IPv6 and it should have been a clue to those pushing for its usage that it wasn't going to work.
Auditing by who? The first crisis with IPv4 allocation is the inability to allocate new chunks. Organisations with enough IPv4 addresses already aren't going to be bothered by this for a long time.
Yep, and if you can't demonstrate that you're using them then you'll get them taken off you. I fail to see why organisations that have been efficient with their use of IP addresses should be penalised.
2. So... you're avoiding the cost of configuring networks to be dual protocol, by re-configuring servers... why is that necessarily cheaper?
Application support for IPv6 is as thin on the ground as it is, and for IPv6 it will be a hard prerequisite. That's a lot of rewriting no one is going to do.
3. Reclaiming IP addresses is akin to solving a lack of phone numbers for the NY area by claiming back some from a less populated state.
Hmmm, no. That's silly. It's reclaiming phone numbers from people who already have several and don't use many of them.
4. Again, you're suggesting an alternative way of investing time to solve a problem instead of solving it properly, and I'm not sure why this is inherently faster.
Solving something 'properly' in computing means starting all over again. I repeat, this is not going to happen.
5. Possibly some variation on the SRV records, but... again, why is replacing every OS world-wide (absolutely nothing supports that, so everything will need upgrading) cheaper than enabling IPv6 on systems that are already out there?
Supporting IPv6 is about more than an OS being able to accept a IPv6 address. Application support is required regardless. I know people like to tell us that IPv6 support is widespread, but it really isn't.
Which is why people have been saying for the last several years that you needed to start moving to IPv6. But human nature being what it is, people just wait to the last minute.
You missed the point. No organisation is going to move to another network infrastructure that will make things appear to work the same, at best. No one.
1. Deny all default inbound rule on the firewall. Done. Same level of security as NAT.
This has got nothing to do with the security of firewalls. You're misunderstanding this, perhaps deliberately, if you think that it is.
You should refrain from lumping the rest of the world in to your little delusions, the rest of the internet that actually works in networking, do not in fact, share your paranoid view of "OMG PEOPLE SEE MY IPS! THEY CAN HACK ME!" and are actually quite comfortable in the significant distinction between stateful fire-walling and IP masquerading / Network Address Translation.
No, they're not and the fact that you think you can create a nice little safe scenario where the majority will feel comfortable just shows how deluded the "Move everything to IPv6" brigade is.
I keep hearing this "Oh, you must move to IPv6 now!" as if this can be done with a wave of a wand and completely ignoring the current economic realities of the chicken and egg situation we are in. I've also seen some wankers who think that giving lists of network equipment that supports IPv6 and that they've converted their basement office to IPv6 means that we can all magically start using it.
IPv6 is completely incompatible with IPv4. Don't give me any of that tunnel crap because organisations are going to have to maintain two different network systems within their infrastructure, and to be practically usable it has to be largely forwards compatible as well. Just take a look at the hair-pulling in mixed IPv4 and 6 networks with things like Windows Server. The hard requirement should have been a direct addition to IPv4 that would be as backwards compatible as possible, but no, the IPv6 weenies decided that we should be 'saved' from all of the mistakes of IPv4. This is where computer people are derided in other industries because they won't do what is necessary to keep the systems going we have now, warts and all. You don't rip out sewer systems and replace them with something you think is far better.
Solutions? There's a few and they are just unpalatable things we are going to have to swallow:
1. Auditing of all public facing systems and as much IP address sharing as possible.
2. Much IP address usage on the web has been brought about by SSL. SNI virtual hosting will help there.
3. IP addresses will get much more expensive and any unused IP addresses will simply be taken off you.
4. Far, far greater use of NAT and the sharing of external services via as few IP addresses as possible.
5. Beyond that we will probably have some sort of DNS extension where you can find a particular service on a port on an IP address with systems behind NAT.
IPv4 is here and is not going away. IT and computing people need to learn the hard way what is required in building and keeping infrastructure that is heavily relied on going.
You missed the bit where anyone with v4 connectivity can use 6to4 right now. No need for massive router upgrades or ISP cooperation, etc. Just turn it on. If you plan for a 10 minute upgrade, you'll have time to make a coffee as well. Assuming basic sysadmin competence.
You know, I despair at people who say utterly brainless shit like this because they obviously have not a clue about how large some organisations are and how long it's taken to get their existing network infrastructure sorted and working. You cannot do this in ten fucking minutes.
I'm mystified as to why you think switches (which are layer 2) would need upgrading to support IPv6,
A lot of switching equipment can be protocol aware.
Oh God, please don't let sensible practicality get in the way of this. You should know by now that private addressing and NAT is completely evil and there are absolutely no reasons at all why you should be doing this.
You want to learn about security. There is nothing good about IPv6-NAT, and security through obscurity isn't security.
Nobody wants to expose all their internal addresses. Period. Which part of that can you dumb fucks not understand? No organisation is going to want to implement that.
Learn DNS. You should only be looking at a IPv6 address if you are a network engineer.
I'm afraid that IP addresses are a very real part of working on networks today, and making them relatively easy to remember is pretty important. Mixing numbers and letters together in hexadecimal (a numbering system humans don't use) was something cobbled together by some tit who had no idea about the practicalities of maintaining a network.
I see a lot of people roll out the usual Milton Friedman 'Privatise it!' option to everything, but I'm afraid that a lot of private delivery firms just do not see it as cost effective to deliver to a lot of, mainly rural, areas. It's the same thing here in the UK with the Royal Mail. No matter how much anyone talks about privatisation you can always bet that there will be government subsidies needed to fill the gap needed, because you can't have a functioning economy and communities without some kind of postal service unless you tell everyone to move to areas that delivery firms find cost effective. I can't see that being an option.
When you subsidise private firms to provide a service they don't really want to provide then you get something far worse than anything the government could run itself. It simply doesn't work.
Nevertheless, companies where Bush's friends are directors (Halliburton, most notably) have profited handsomely.
I don't waste my time assuming his claim is the truth until I can find proof otherwise, especially when logic dictates it is fucking ludacris.
I believe the word you're looking for is ludicrous - or in this case it means "It's so fucking unbelievable that I don't want to even contemplate it, so I'll defend against it".
I'll throw you a piece of logic. Why would the family of a terrorist responsible for a massive attack and loss of life be allowed to fly out of the country two days (by your admission, anyway) after said attack? I'm sure the efficient intelligence service found out that the Bin Laden family, minus Osama of course, rescues orphaned kittens and so couldn't be a threat but that still doesn't mean that he wouldn't try and contact them or try and obtain money.
The Bin Laden family is actually a very wealthy family of [legitimate] business associates....
Yes, they certainly are.
.....that have disowned their nutjob son.
Have they really? Do we have any evidence for that? I knew there was going to be some kind of great punchline to wave this away, because even the Bin Laden's family status is just far, far too undeniable for anyone. I love the word 'legitimate' by the way, just to give it all some credibility and a nice flourish to try and emphasise a differentiation that you have no idea exists.
The Bin Laden family wasn't allowed to fly until September 13th, when they eased the lockdown and started to allow others to fly.
That's perfectly OK then, if true. It still doesn't answer the question of why, however.
This is the same guy who has insinuated that George W. Bush is pals with Osama Bin Laden
Well, we can only go on what we know and we know that Bush and Bin Laden, certainly through his family, have invested in a lot of companies together. The Bin Ladens are very well known, wealthy and extremely well connected in Saudi Arabia. The notion that Bush knows nothing about him is just plain fishy.
...and specifically sent too few troops into Afghanistan to make sure Bin Laden escaped and wanted to keep his Taliban friends safe.
Well, all we know is that not a trace of Osama Bin Laden has ever been found. Not a single lead. Not a sausage. Nothing. This is from a guy and his supporters who are supposed to be propping up a worldwide terrorism network who are well connected and well funded. Oh, and there's a lot of companies with directors who are friends of George Bush who are making quite a bit of money from the 'rebuilding' of Afghanistan. Basically, it's in their interests to keep the whole thing going.
I think people are more then entitled to ask what the hell is going on. The trouble with this stuff is that you almost get a kind of 'reverse conspiracy theory' effect and governments have learned to use this phenomenon, especially when they do something bare faced and obvious. Basically, it's so unbelievable for most people that no amount of evidence will convince them that there is even the smallest thing wrong. Note, we're not talking about grand conspiracy theories here, we're just talking about admitting that something is wrong. The notion that there is something wrong and the consequences would rock their cosy little world too much, and so, they will go into denial and even defend the status quo in order to protect their own bubble of perceived security.
Fowler's attack on the company's firewall, which had caused a "lockout", took Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) three months to resolve.
What? Seriously. What? What the hell is a lockout and why would it take anyone three months to solve a firewall issue?
I was intrigued to see those Suse/Novell/IBM sponsored ads at the top of the page when I wasn't logged in. Now I understand why. Whereas Sun have steadily got themselves into trouble over the past ten years Oracle have now really accelerated the process to the point where you can see the end for anything SPARC or Solaris related in the next couple of years. Not even Oracle can absorb the kind of losses Sun must be making now.
Whereas you would have thought that Oracle would want to make existing customers as happy as possible and rebuild the customer base from there, their strategy seems to be to try and screw existing customers as hard as possible to maximise revenue. Whereas this has worked in software and their database business in the past because people have generally got themselves locked into PL/SQL and Oracle's archane infrastructure the fly-in-the-ointment is that people have proved that over the past ten years they have been more than willing to move away from Solaris and SPARC, and it's much easier to switch hardware and then operating systems with the advent of Linux than it is specific applications. Oracle's software runs on more than just Solaris so their customers have a migration path off anyway.
Oracle just don't understand the business, in other words. McNealy should have sold to IBM if he wanted anything at all to remain.
Wow. Just wow. Given how bad things eventually got for Sun you would have thought that Oracle would want to look after the remaining paying customers, wouldn't you?
Why? You may belive that there is some fundamental difference between humans and other animals, but myself and many others do not. That doesn't make us uncivilised.
This isn't right in humans or in any animals. We don't know what the long-term effect of this would be in mice. The point the OP is making is that humans have differences in genetics that make this process even more fraught with danger than the basic stuff they've managed to accomplish so far. Allowing offspring to go through that is totally uncivilised.
On the other hand, I don't think we as a species need any additional vectors for reproducing -- we seem to do well enough as it is...
Mark my words, crazy fuckers and those promoting 'equality' for same-sex couples will be pushing for this. I have no problems with same-sex relationships but this kind of stuff is where we need to draw a very clear line.
When other people provide evidence you are wrong (I don't recall where it was, but I saw a tv show or webpage in the last few months that demonstrated the death ray does work), you need to examine that evidence, revisit your study, and see if you reach a new conclusion. That's a quality that a lot of people lack these days (they will insist they are correct even when showing them clear and concise evidence they are wrong).
Indeed. This is exactly what is wrong with Mythbusters and the attitude surrounding scientific criticism and debate.
Rather than getting people to think about it and perform things themselves the central premise of that show is that they come up with some contrived situation that is quite often questionable and then tell everyone that the 'myth' is busted. No debate about it. I remember them doing a moon landing one a while back that I don't think actually helped the cause of debunking moon landing accusations. The guy in it had an astronaut figure that he confidently told us was Neil Armstrong because he had the orange flashes on his suit, but that's inaccurate because those only came in in later missions when they realised they had an identification problem. Little things like that tend to propogate from this kind of stuff - "We've proved it, we're right, anything we say goes, no fact checking or revisiting necessary. If you disagree with us it's a conspiracy theory".
Sun needed heavy investment and lots of R&D to continue to compete in the h/w arena. They didn't have it and Fujitsu was no help. IBM, Intel and AMD poured tons of $$$ into chip development while Sun kept missing release dates.
Indeed. It takes a ton of investment to keep a hardware business going, and the more customers Sun lost the less investment they could put in. They've clearly been struggling since the 90s when their workstation business disappeared overnight, and a few years later when those companies who laid out money on Sun to run web systems realised they could get more power for less money when they upgraded. Time was of the essence, and as far as I could see since the early 00s Sun spent their time convinced of their own superiority and that customers would simply come back to them because that's what Sun believed. Wishful thinking, in other words. I've lost count of the number of times a Sun representative tried to tell me that you couldn't run anything 'serious' on a Linux and x86 system, despite what the last decade has taught us.
IBM were largely insulated from that bottom-up squeeze from x86 systems because they had the resources to put the investment into their hardware and their high-end mainframe business is simply in a different arena. That was not the case with Sun. They were trying to get people to move away from mainframes to them for years and yet it is ironic that it is the thing that would have saved them had they got involved much, much sooner.
They were lucky to find a buyer for the company.
You're right there. One wonders why IBM turned tail when they were looking to buying them, because surely they were only going to buy Sun for the customer list? Oracle are going to be pulling their hair out absorbing Sun's current significant losses while trying to turn the ship around. I can't see it being possible because I don't know what Sun's market is now. You wouldn't go to them for a mainframe but the stuff they do sell has long since been outperformed and can be done faster and cheaper elsewhere.