As someone who's job it is to work on things like this, there's a few things that must be pointed out.
- SPDY runs over SSL. There isn't an unencrypted version -- note that SPDY was in fact faster than HTTPS.
- Many of the tricks used today to speed up page delivery, such as domain sharding, actually hurt SPDY's performance. SPDY's main benefit is that it opens up a single TCP connection and channelizes requests for assets inside that connection. Forcing the browser to establish a lot of TCP connections defeats this entirely, and the overhead of spinning up an SSL connection is very high. (And again, it should be noted that SPDY *WAS* faster, even if just a little bit, than standard HTTPS.)
There are other features in SPDY that today remain largely untapped, such as a server hinting to a client that it knows it'll need some content ahead of time -- giving the client something to do while it'd normally be idle waiting for the server to respond while it's generating the HTML it requested. (Large DB query, or whatever.)
Web engineers are clever and a smart bunch. While it looks like there's not a lot of gain to rethinking HTTP 1.1 today, given the years of organic growth we've had and time spent optimizing an older protocol, as new technology comes along that take advantage of the new foundation, things this will change. Give it time.
To the folks complaining that this guy doesn't know what he's doing, uh, he's a Chief Product Architect at Akamai. Yes he does. The folks at Akamai know more about web delivery than just about anyone.
Novell added support to run the GroupWise backend on Linux recently (late last year or early this year, I can't remember). In fact, most of the GroupWise servers this year at Brainshare were running Linux instead of NetWare!
Take a tip from an administrator in a public school system:
Pick up a copy a copy of DriveShield for the Mac, and allow the students to do whatever they wish to it.
DriveShield is a driver that sits between the hard drive and the OS. Any writes made to the hard drive are redirected into a sratch area of the hard drive, and thus don't stick around for the next reboot. The machine will be back in the state it was in when it was locked on every reboot.
I've tested it by even booting off a System CD and reformatting the drive... on the next reboot it comes right back to how you expect!
The philosophy used to be to lock the machine down as tight as possible to prevent the users from making any changes to it. (Restricted Finder, Windows Policies, etc.) Products like DriveShield (DeepFreeze is another one) work differently -- they don't lock down the machine to the user at all, they just prevent any changes from sticking across a reboot.
Protect the machine with DriveShield (or something similar), and have all the kids log in as the admin. Quick and easy to do, and the kids don't have to be restricted to a limited set of options on the computer!
We've been using this technique in several of our schools now (only in the open labs, mind you -- not the staff computers!), and the only support calls we now recieve in those labs is for hardware problems, not software.
One feature that Linux lacks in the datacenter is a directory. eDirectory is what used to be known as NDS. Novell ported it to Linux a few years ago...
I am the sysadmin for a NetWare shop. Having a replicated, partitioned directory tree is wonderful. It's one of those things that "just works".
Apache's mod_speling module will correct small typeos in URLs that are requested, and if it finds more than one possible match it returns an error 300 with the possible choices.
I think the word "subscription" is the wrong word to use for Slashdot's new pay-per-view system.
A "subscription" implies that you're receiving something you otherwise wouldn't have received. For example, if I have a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens, I'm getting the magazine at all. If I don't subscribe, I don't get a "free" copy of it in the mail, but with ads.
The same happens with a newspaper. I don't have the time to read the newspaper every morning, so I don't have a subscription to it. I wish that the Dayton Daily News would given me a "free" copy full of ads in case I wanted to read it, but that's not the case.
Calling the new Slashdot system a "subscription" implies that you have to pay for it if you want to read it, which isn't the case. If you don't mind the ads, and even think that some of the ads on Slashdot are worthwhile (like I do), then you're free to not pay. That's not the case with every other subscription-based service out there.
I think Slashdot should rephrase the system as the Slashdot "Tip Jar". If you want to pay $5 into the Tip Jar, Slashdot will "thank you" by giving you 1,000 pages without ads. If you don't want to leave $5 in the Tip Jar, that's fine too.
Calling the current subscription system a "Tip Jar" makes it sound more like what it is - a way to pay for the content on Slashdot if you desire. It's not a requirement to receive content at all.
I'll bet those sysadmins would be very surprised to discover that the 802.1b access points were even on their networks. This stuff is too cheap and bone-head easy to install. Apparently a lot of consultants of various types like to pack them around with their laptops so they don't have to futz with network cables whereever they happen to be working that day.
Exactly.
What we're seeing is only the dawn of what most likely will become a very large problem... the cost of wireless Ethernet is around a few hundered bucks, and is affordable by the clueless.
I run a 1,200 node network, and never thought about this until today. This is an issue we're going to have to address in the future...
If an employee wants to run a wireless LAN, that might be okay, but they really should check with us first to make sure they "do it right"...
You can go on and on. The only reasons schools use anything but open source software is marketing.
That's not true.
I am the network administrator for Mad River Local Schools in Riverside, Ohio. We use MacOS in grades K-8, and Windows in grades 9-12.
We buy software based on the educational value of it. Linux lacks the support of most educational software vendors. Here's a quick list of the basic software packages we have on our network at the K-4 level:
I could go on... those are just the titles that I can think of off the top of my head. (Thank you, Google!) In the older grades we have software like Microsoft Office 97/98, and HyperStudio.
None of these pieces of software have a Linux version. We would love to start adopting Linux in the classroom, but until it has the application support that MacOS and Windows has, it's not going to happen.
But, but, I can hear you say "WHAT ABOUT STAR OFFICE?!" StarOffice may work in the younger grades, but not in the High School. We teach with the same tools that the business world uses. We don't have a "Microsoft Office" class, but we do teach our Business Administration classes using Office. Why? It's the same thing that businesses use. There's also a training issue - we offer training to teachers and employees on the tools we use. It wouldn't make sense for us to have to teach two classes, one for Star Office and one for Microsoft Office.
I have been a long time MacOS supporter and user, but my roots are in x86 hardware.
Why do cluessless MacOS adovcates (zealots?) always toss the words "IRQ Conflicts" around?
I can honestly say that I haven't had to deal with an "IRQ Conflict" in years on x86 hardware. PCI man, PCI! It deals with the "IRQ Conflicts" for you.
In the days of ISA this mattered. But now?
Seesh people. Wake up and realize that the "dark side" has evolved.
I wrote a web-based helpdesk for my employer, Mad River Local Schools. It works really well, and we enjoy it a lot.
However, we don't allow staff members to post to it.
Why? We don't want it to be flooded with comments like "I can't print" and "The server isn't working". Somehow, non-techies don't have a clue how to correctly report problems, and can make MORE work for the support staff. (By having to figure out what they meant to say.)
I've even gone so far as to write a "knowledgebase" front end to the helpdesk, which allows people to search for a solution to the problem on their own based on closed incidents.
You can see the "public" front-end here to allow staff members to check on the incident status, and the knowledgebase here. And yes, you can see a demo of it here, and download the code here if you want to hack it up.
I'll second that. I am just finishing up my CS degree.
The vast majority of the "real" CS classes are theory. We write very little code. A lot of it is math and optimization techniques.
Most of what is taught transcends any operating system, or even a programming language. I've had a few classes where we can turn in our homework/projects in any language we'd like, just as long as the professor can check it on a computer on the network in the college. (Which includes C/C++, Java, Pascal, FORTRAN, ADA, even MATHLAB.)
In my college the 20x level "CS" classes are things like Microsoft Office and really basic programming. My guess is the initial poster has these classes confused with "real" Computer Science.
Computer Science is the science of solving problems using computers. It is not the science of how to use an operating system.
I'll second that. I've had ORBS hit both of my mail servers in the last few months.
We use a Novell GroupWise system, which is immune to their attacks, but I didn't enjoying having my mail servers attacked 15+ times IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY. I have GWIA set to forward all undeliverable messages back to my account... That's quite annoying having to wade though all of the bounced messages looking for "legit" messages that I might need to deal with.
I feel "lucky" our mail system can handle their attacks (GroupWise is set to never relay anything, anytime... the joys of having a LAN mail system!), but I feel for people who's software simply cannot be secured against all the attacks they perform.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who's job it is to work on things like this, there's a few things that must be pointed out.
- SPDY runs over SSL. There isn't an unencrypted version -- note that SPDY was in fact faster than HTTPS.
- Many of the tricks used today to speed up page delivery, such as domain sharding, actually hurt SPDY's performance. SPDY's main benefit is that it opens up a single TCP connection and channelizes requests for assets inside that connection. Forcing the browser to establish a lot of TCP connections defeats this entirely, and the overhead of spinning up an SSL connection is very high. (And again, it should be noted that SPDY *WAS* faster, even if just a little bit, than standard HTTPS.)
There are other features in SPDY that today remain largely untapped, such as a server hinting to a client that it knows it'll need some content ahead of time -- giving the client something to do while it'd normally be idle waiting for the server to respond while it's generating the HTML it requested. (Large DB query, or whatever.)
Web engineers are clever and a smart bunch. While it looks like there's not a lot of gain to rethinking HTTP 1.1 today, given the years of organic growth we've had and time spent optimizing an older protocol, as new technology comes along that take advantage of the new foundation, things this will change. Give it time.
To the folks complaining that this guy doesn't know what he's doing, uh, he's a Chief Product Architect at Akamai. Yes he does. The folks at Akamai know more about web delivery than just about anyone.
- Bunny
It appears that Evolution 2.0 adds some aupport for Novell's mail system, GroupWise.
There's an article in this month's Novell Connection Magazine on how to set it up, complete with a bunch of screen shots.
Novell added support to run the GroupWise backend on Linux recently (late last year or early this year, I can't remember). In fact, most of the GroupWise servers this year at Brainshare were running Linux instead of NetWare!
- Bunny
Take a tip from an administrator in a public school system:
Pick up a copy a copy of DriveShield for the Mac, and allow the students to do whatever they wish to it.
DriveShield is a driver that sits between the hard drive and the OS. Any writes made to the hard drive are redirected into a sratch area of the hard drive, and thus don't stick around for the next reboot. The machine will be back in the state it was in when it was locked on every reboot.
I've tested it by even booting off a System CD and reformatting the drive... on the next reboot it comes right back to how you expect!
The philosophy used to be to lock the machine down as tight as possible to prevent the users from making any changes to it. (Restricted Finder, Windows Policies, etc.) Products like DriveShield (DeepFreeze is another one) work differently -- they don't lock down the machine to the user at all, they just prevent any changes from sticking across a reboot.
Protect the machine with DriveShield (or something similar), and have all the kids log in as the admin. Quick and easy to do, and the kids don't have to be restricted to a limited set of options on the computer!
We've been using this technique in several of our schools now (only in the open labs, mind you -- not the staff computers!), and the only support calls we now recieve in those labs is for hardware problems, not software.
- Bunny
One word: eDirectory
One feature that Linux lacks in the datacenter is a directory. eDirectory is what used to be known as NDS. Novell ported it to Linux a few years ago...
I am the sysadmin for a NetWare shop. Having a replicated, partitioned directory tree is wonderful. It's one of those things that "just works".
- Bunny
I've noticed there's been a lot of tainting of the Google results lately as well.
For example, if you search for "GroupWise cbt" (Novell GroupWise Computer Based Training), a lot of really interesting results come up.
This has been happening with enough frequency lately that I've been pondering switching search engines...
- Bunny
Error 300 isn't as unusual as you might think.
s 1
Apache's mod_speling module will correct small typeos in URLs that are requested, and if it finds more than one possible match it returns an error 300 with the possible choices.
For example:
http://www.madriver.k12.oh.us/network/netware/wef
- Bunny
I think the word "subscription" is the wrong word to use for Slashdot's new pay-per-view system.
A "subscription" implies that you're receiving something you otherwise wouldn't have received. For example, if I have a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens, I'm getting the magazine at all. If I don't subscribe, I don't get a "free" copy of it in the mail, but with ads.
The same happens with a newspaper. I don't have the time to read the newspaper every morning, so I don't have a subscription to it. I wish that the Dayton Daily News would given me a "free" copy full of ads in case I wanted to read it, but that's not the case.
Calling the new Slashdot system a "subscription" implies that you have to pay for it if you want to read it, which isn't the case. If you don't mind the ads, and even think that some of the ads on Slashdot are worthwhile (like I do), then you're free to not pay. That's not the case with every other subscription-based service out there.
I think Slashdot should rephrase the system as the Slashdot "Tip Jar". If you want to pay $5 into the Tip Jar, Slashdot will "thank you" by giving you 1,000 pages without ads. If you don't want to leave $5 in the Tip Jar, that's fine too.
Calling the current subscription system a "Tip Jar" makes it sound more like what it is - a way to pay for the content on Slashdot if you desire. It's not a requirement to receive content at all.
Just my two cents.
"...From The Roots Up"?
C'mon Timothy, everyone knows that in computer science trees grow from the root DOWN.
Seesh.
(Yes, this is a lame attempt at humor...)
It appears that this new worm is appending the following JavaScript snippet to all pages that the server sends:
Not sure what this JavaScript is suppose to do, but it's there none the less.
- Matt
NASA has put some photos of the smoke plume on their website.
They can be seen at http://www.nasa.gov/newsinfo/WTCplume.html. Very interesting!
Easy.
SGI knows their days are limited.
They would rather dump their technology into the Linux and the GPL than allow Sun Microsystems to buy them and have access to it.
Once their technologies are in Linux, and under the GPL the world can use them, and Sun can't touch them.
Exactly.
What we're seeing is only the dawn of what most likely will become a very large problem... the cost of wireless Ethernet is around a few hundered bucks, and is affordable by the clueless.
I run a 1,200 node network, and never thought about this until today. This is an issue we're going to have to address in the future...
If an employee wants to run a wireless LAN, that might be okay, but they really should check with us first to make sure they "do it right"...
That's not true.
I am the network administrator for Mad River Local Schools in Riverside, Ohio. We use MacOS in grades K-8, and Windows in grades 9-12.
We buy software based on the educational value of it. Linux lacks the support of most educational software vendors. Here's a quick list of the basic software packages we have on our network at the K-4 level:
- Bailey's Book House
- Millie's Math House
- Sammy's Science House
- Trudy's Time & Place House
- Accelerated Reader (This is a major one)
- STAR Reading
- Math Blaster
- The Graph Club
- Thinkin' Things
- Kid Pix
- Storybook Weaver
I could go on... those are just the titles that I can think of off the top of my head. (Thank you, Google!) In the older grades we have software like Microsoft Office 97/98, and HyperStudio.None of these pieces of software have a Linux version. We would love to start adopting Linux in the classroom, but until it has the application support that MacOS and Windows has, it's not going to happen.
But, but, I can hear you say "WHAT ABOUT STAR OFFICE?!" StarOffice may work in the younger grades, but not in the High School. We teach with the same tools that the business world uses. We don't have a "Microsoft Office" class, but we do teach our Business Administration classes using Office. Why? It's the same thing that businesses use. There's also a training issue - we offer training to teachers and employees on the tools we use. It wouldn't make sense for us to have to teach two classes, one for Star Office and one for Microsoft Office.
Sometime the cost of "free" is too high...
I have been a long time MacOS supporter and user, but my roots are in x86 hardware.
Why do cluessless MacOS adovcates (zealots?) always toss the words "IRQ Conflicts" around?
I can honestly say that I haven't had to deal with an "IRQ Conflict" in years on x86 hardware. PCI man, PCI! It deals with the "IRQ Conflicts" for you.
In the days of ISA this mattered. But now?
Seesh people. Wake up and realize that the "dark side" has evolved.
I wrote a web-based helpdesk for my employer, Mad River Local Schools. It works really well, and we enjoy it a lot.
However, we don't allow staff members to post to it.
Why? We don't want it to be flooded with comments like "I can't print" and "The server isn't working". Somehow, non-techies don't have a clue how to correctly report problems, and can make MORE work for the support staff. (By having to figure out what they meant to say.)
I've even gone so far as to write a "knowledgebase" front end to the helpdesk, which allows people to search for a solution to the problem on their own based on closed incidents.
You can see the "public" front-end here to allow staff members to check on the incident status, and the knowledgebase here. And yes, you can see a demo of it here, and download the code here if you want to hack it up.
As far as I know, Intel's x86 chips use APIC, and Athlons use OpenPIC.
OpenPIC is by no means "new". It's been around for a while. Alphas have been using OpenPIC for quite some time.
Bringing SMP Athlon support to OSes shouldn't be that difficult, it just needs to be done.
It's about the concepts and the theory behind it.
I'll second that. I am just finishing up my CS degree.
The vast majority of the "real" CS classes are theory. We write very little code. A lot of it is math and optimization techniques.
Most of what is taught transcends any operating system, or even a programming language. I've had a few classes where we can turn in our homework/projects in any language we'd like, just as long as the professor can check it on a computer on the network in the college. (Which includes C/C++, Java, Pascal, FORTRAN, ADA, even MATHLAB.)
In my college the 20x level "CS" classes are things like Microsoft Office and really basic programming. My guess is the initial poster has these classes confused with "real" Computer Science.
Computer Science is the science of solving problems using computers. It is not the science of how to use an operating system.
- Bunny
I'll second that. I've had ORBS hit both of my mail servers in the last few months.
We use a Novell GroupWise system, which is immune to their attacks, but I didn't enjoying having my mail servers attacked 15+ times IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY. I have GWIA set to forward all undeliverable messages back to my account... That's quite annoying having to wade though all of the bounced messages looking for "legit" messages that I might need to deal with.
I feel "lucky" our mail system can handle their attacks (GroupWise is set to never relay anything, anytime... the joys of having a LAN mail system!), but I feel for people who's software simply cannot be secured against all the attacks they perform.
- Bunny
That commerical by EDS has to be one of my all-time favorites.
As anyone in network management will tell you, it truely is like "herding cats".
You can view the commerical online, in MPEG format.
A $300 dollar piece of hardware is not a good way for students to collect data in the field.
A $1 yellow legal pad and a $0.20 cent pencil is.
Technology cannot make a bad teacher good, technology makes great teachers even better.