I agree... to a point... but I'm wondering where the limit is. You mentioned four possible applications. Let's be generous and say we broke that off to four threads for each tasks... sixteen threads. Lets be even more generous and say there were four more tasks you didn't consider. All told that's thirty-two threads... a tenth of the power were talking about here. And... I'll go back to my second point. Currently, there are no memory or storage systems that are capable of feeding this. If it really is a 300x increase in processing power then moore's law predicts it will be almost a decade before current approaches can actually support this.
I'm going to make an assumption and say that you don't do a lot of system programming. Threaded applications depend... heavily... on synchronizing data access. You simply can't take a single threaded application and break it out across threads without having some context of how it's accessing it's data and why. Imagine landing planes at an airport. It's a serial process... you just can't arbitrarily run it in parallel... "bad things" (tm) happen. The "algorithms" Mr. Vishkin is speaking of have no way of determining the context of code being executed and trying to break it out is a disaster waiting to happen.
There are applications where massive parallelism like this is fantastic... using my initial example... encoding video. Throw each frame off to one of the processors and you're processing 300 at a time (even there there are limitations because each frame requires information from the previous).
But I stand my statement.. anyone who says they can take a serial application and run it in parallel is full of sh*t and they know it. In certain, limited circumstances, yes... but in general. NO.
Assuming this actually works as detailed and the fine print on the claim isn't too onerous, there's three practical problems:
1. Many applications are limited by the speed of the user, not the computer. You can only type or click so fast.
2. Hardware would have to catch up to drive this beast. This would max out all known memory and storage systems. Not to mention your internet connection.
3. As has been mentioned time and again, until developers actually embrace multi-threading this will be relatively useless. Tests from various hardware sites have shown that going from the Core 2 Duo to the Core 2 Quad offers very little benefit except for a very small subset of users... who should probably be running workstations anyway (Video editing, 3D rendering, etc.)
However, I have a ton of HD content on my MythTV box that I would like to turn this processor and h264 loose on:) Maybe by the time this is a viable commercial product it will have more practical uses. (Remembering LOGO on my TI-94/A... we've come a long way baby)
Lets be more specific... ZFS (as a whole) is not GPLv2'd.
From the TFP : Now about that headline, yes I really did say that ZFS code is already available under the GPLv2. I will be completely honest though and make it clear that it isn't all of the ZFS source.
Well that's fantastic... which parts do we get? The ones that make ZFS revolutionary or the ones that make it a rehashed XFS, JFS, Rieser, etc? I don't see how this is any different than any of the bait-n-switch scams that people post to/., digg or other sites. Yes... you can use "part" of the FS but if you want the whole thing you'll have to use Solaris or FUSE (or BSD as others have pointed out).
FUSE defeats the entire purpose. ZFS is meant to run and support a large/huge file store. What admin in their right mind would do that through userspace unless it's solely for backup?
The point is, ZFS is not functionally viable for Linux on the environments for which it was intended.
It really depends on the person. Yes there is a "math" to war... I take out the guy with the red cross on his helmet and I really kill twenty people. But there is an undeniable humanity in most of us. And while we know, by the numbers, that we should pull the trigger... we don't... because ultimately we know that our life is no better or no more important than anyone else's. It is a human instinct that is deeper than any training. You DO NOT KILL unless you absolutely have to. Yes... a lot of people will do what their told but just as many will not be able to.... regardless of their race, religion or creed. They just understand that any life is valuable. War and battle is an unfortunate reality... but most don't kill because they can but because they have to. And a medic is the hand of God... no matter which God you believe in. If you shoot at them, you're just an animal... and you will go to your grave knowing that.
I'm not pulling this out my ass... my grandfather was a bombardier and killed, by his own admission, thousands of people. He pushed a button and hundreds of people died. He lived with that ever day of his life... and took every chance he had to tell me to avoid that at all cost but do it if I must.
So drop the bullshit... Life is precious and most everyone... anyone... when faced with a choice... will want to let it continue. It's what makes us human.
I worked as a life guard for almost eight years. Most of the injuries were thankfully mundane but there were a few horrific ones that I was witness to.
You can be as cool or as macho as you want but when you're bleeding out and close to death... all that swagger goes away and you will most likely do anything you can to get away from the pain and your own mortality. This doesn't mean that you'd be sobbing or hysterical but *any* comfort you can find you will cling onto.
It's also been proven, time and again, that a patients survival rate is influenced by their state of mind.
So... a "teddy bear" head may seem stupid or silly but it is actually a very well conceived and valid idea. Beyond the patient's needs, there is the very real likely possibility that a "friendly" looking robot is less likely to be attacked by the enemy.
This what I'm beginning to despise about Slashdot, Digg, etc... the mob mentality... no one thinks for themselves or evaluates data by themselves anymore. Most everything boils down to "me too".
There have been countless articles on Slashdot about the need to secure access points out of the box (I've contributed to them)... there have been articles on the need to shield children from certain materials until they are old enough to comprehend/digest/etc them. Yet we throw someone "unholy" into the mix and all of a sudden it "a bad thing" with no regard to to what's being said or why.
For example... I'm from Texas and I consider myself a true republican. But that doesn't mean that I accept everything the Bush administration does. They've done a handful of good things... but for the most part they're flaming idiots. The same is true of the Clinton administration... while I've been thought to consider them fools... I had enough common sense to look at them and see that they did a few things right.
So. Let's regroup and ignore the word "SCO" and look at this a common point of view.
Children should not view adult subjects because they do not have the education or emotional background to handle it. It's that simple... a 12 year old can not possibly understand what is going through the mind of two 30 year old adults when one says "spank me harder" to the other. The idea that it's a role-playing game and that one is not really dominating the other doesn't click. I know that's a bit graphic but that's what it boils down to. There are games that adults play that children do not understand... think about when you were a teenager and how you saw sex and relationships and think how you see it now... there is most like a *drastic* difference.
My Godson can't climb the rungs at the playground right now... we're going to have to step him through it. In a few months he will be able to do it by himself. This is the same idea. Sex is something that I and his parents will have to step him through... in a controlled manner... one rung at a time so we're there to catch him if he has any questions when he falls... and he will fall. We all had *that* boyfriend or girlfriend in high school that ended life as we know it. Hopefully your parents or a sibling was there to pick up the pieces.
The majority of this responsibility is on his parents... control what he does, what he's exposed to and when... but for G*d's sake... they need all they help they can get. By the time he's 12 (in ten years) he'll be able to go to Best Buy and get a device to surf the web for > $100 that fits in his pocket.
Free speech is a good thing but controlling who has access to it is just as good. It's sounds Orwellian but there is a fine line... that's actually hard to draw (and it should be... which is why more than one person needs to draw it)... but there are easy extremes... a ten year old does not need access to political diatribes or porn... in almost all cases they don't have the background required to process either. I will argue that a 20 year old needs access to both... but that is because they have the emotional and psychological background to comprehend it. In some ways it's their responsibility to understand how they fit into society. But, again, it's a fine line.
I think most reasonable people on Slashdot can agree that there is a healthy median where we agree with the great satan's of the world... despite who they are and what they think.
But we need to defend the opposing points just as vigorously.
Anyway... do not rate the message solely on the messenger.
I was the IT administrator at my old company of about 500 consultants. After many discussions with the upper management I successfully argued for an open webmail policy because we had employees who regularly worked long and odd hours to accomplish our projects and it seemed only fair that we give them a method of private communications during their _overtime_. Quid Pro Quo.
We were especially lenient with consultants who traveled all the time... except for a few areas those laptops were considered their property and as long as they didn't jack with the security settings we didn't call them on anything.
With that said:
1. We were running squid and clam on any any incoming data (yes this is intensive but $8-10k of equipment will garner you many times that in employee good will).
2. We had a very aggressive AV policy.
3. We had consultants that were governed by stricter SEC and DoD rules that were kept on a separate subnet and different AD that was more restrictive... because laws required it.
Seriously though... Unless you tell your salaried employees to work no more than 40-45 hours a week (and give them comp time to balance that out) it is asinine not to let them use the company system for personal activities when the company itself is encroaching into their personal time.
Seriously the "if it ain't broke don't fix mentality" is what pays my bills.
There are two kinds of "broke", there are gaps in functionality... e.g. migrating from Apache 1.x to 2.x... and then there are bugs that haven't affected you yet but are still in the code base. Just because you haven't experienced any problems yet does not mean there aren't any underlying problems in the packages you're using.
Case in point. The company I work for is in a mad dash to upgrade for the DST time change. And for those of you thinking "duh, you just upgrade your timezone files"... no it's not that easy. Some Sun systems require firmware upgrades, almost all of the systems prior to 2005 require binary updates because they can't handle a timezone that has two rulesets (e.g. they would apply the new 2007 rules to timestamps from 2005), most JVM's have to be patched or upgraded and some applications inexplicably do their own calculations and have to be update as well.
The majority of the company has the "if it ain't broke" mentality and were running everything from NT 4.0 on DEC Alpha's and Sun 2.4 to Windows 2003 64-bit and Solaris 10. Upgrading the older machines is an absolute nightmare because the vendor patches are built one, two even three years worth of patches that we haven't applied. What should be a relatively simple upgrade task has broken applications all over the place and has our QA and Engineering staff bleary eyed and ready for it all to just end.
The answer is controlled refresh. Twice a year you sync up your servers with a certain patchset. You don't go crazy... you just get vendor required patches and include them in your dev and qa cycles. And you DO NOT USE EOL OS' in an enterprise environment. Ever. This includes commercial and FOSS packages.
Full Disclosure : I run two gentoo boxes at my house my workstation and my mythtv box. I patch them about once a week because I like to tinker. My web/file/mysql server is running on a stripped down Debian system that only gets patched every few months or if there is an advisory that comes out.
I had to go through this routine with the toys I bought for my new XBox 360 last week. I can honestly say the most traumatic experience of the whole ordeal was asking my mom for "utility" scissors (I was at home seeing my family when I bought it).
Somehow I suspect that the same p*ssies (sorry, the only appropriate word I could come up with) who are complaining about this packaging are the same nerds who cut themselves on their sheet metal cases that their modding in their parents basement over the weekend and then try to wear that as a badge of pride over the next week.
It's a piece of plastic for sake. If it gets the better of you please report to your nearest suicide booth and get it over with.
One of the most difficult phases of my career was coming to the understanding that I, as a manager, was not responsible for determining how something was done or the technical purity/perfection of my subordinates work. I am a manager... I am not a implementer or designer. My job is to:
1) Determine the competence of those that I manage. 2) Rely on their judgment and expertise to solve the problem. 3) Assess the value of their solution against the needs of the customer and the company. 4) Provide them the resources and staff required to accomplish this solution. 5) Judge their performance based on the constraints that I have provided them.
Sadly enough... that's it. For my power I pay the price of letting younger, brighter staff tell me how my projects should be done. If you spend too much time second guessing your staff and telling them how you thing thinks should be done then you've failed. You *should* be paying attention to financial, competitive and political forces and dealing with them so your staff doesn't have to and can focus on doing their job.
I give a clear and accomplishable objective... you get it done.
I think comment is insightful in that it only reinforces flawed approaches that this book is trying to discuss and resolve. The review itself states that sections of the book are likely to give/.'ers fits because it tries to dispel common viewpoints in the IT industry of Microsoft being an underhanded company with a grossly inferior product.
I worked on games published for Microsoft ("Close Combat") and the level of effort that Microsoft put into the polishing and marketing of that game was astounding... especially when compared to work that the prior publishers of the V for Victory series had done.
Microsoft is underhanded at times and their products are technically inferior to other solutions. But the reason that Microsoft is successful is because they understand their customers very, very well. I am not their customer... my parents are. The unwashed masses of/. are not their customers... corporations are. They're not going to make much money off us so they don't care about us... their focus and their concern is on those customers. Which is exactly what a business *should do* and how businesses succeed.
The point of this book is that other companies did not do this and that is why they failed. It may be 20/20 hindsight but the message is a core fundamental of even basic business classes and the failures documented in this book just prove that the lessons were not always learned.
(And I'm tied to the book in anyway and haven't worked for Microsoft in any manner for a loong time.)
These type of polls really amaze me. Oh noz!!!... we're falling behind on a medium primarily used for entertainment (or worse). Seriously, who the hell cares? The information is still accessible, just not as quickly and the quality and veracity of the information (which in many cases is questionable to begin with) does not change because of the download speed.
Let's worry about more important things like streamlining healthcare, reducing pollution, whirled peas, etc. and leave these types of comparisons to middle-aged under-endowed guys and their sports cars... k?
Wow... vodka does horrible, horrible things to the grammatical functions of the brain. People under the age of 21 take note... 60% of the time, vodka screws you up all of the time. I felt I had to comment though. Please excuse me.
I've worked as a contractor for the Federal Government and the City of New York (which considers themselves a Federal Government). Most of the agencies I worked at had security that was an absolute joke. I'll give the guys at the DoE/Forrestal Building some credit as well as the Department of Juvenile Justice in NYC , they actually asked questions and took their jobs seriously. (The DoJJ guys in New York are the only ones who have flat-out denied me entry... no matter how much smooth talking I did. For whatever reason, the guards I came across took protecting the identities and lives of the children in overseen by the agency very, very seriously and I have the utmost respect for them because of it.) Most of the other security guards were too concerned about talking about the caboose of the last woman to walk through the metal detector.
The point is, no amount of technological or physical security is going to do any good if the people entrusted with its implementation are not trained to do their job properly or take it seriously. The only "serious" contracts I worked were at DoE but at the rest of the agencies I had access to enough information to financially ruin a good number of the people in the United States. Thankfully I worked with people who took that responsibility as seriously as I did but I can't help but feel that was through luck of the draw and not the success of the system.
Smartcards/RFID make sense if they going to be used and implemented properly (e.g. you picture is on the card and encrypted with a public key system so that the agency can verify that it's authentic and not a clever forgery... and the people at the desk care enough to actually check)... otherwise it's just another way for contractors/etc to make money and a waste of everyone else's time./looking for the black helicopters
I use Debian at home for a general purpose router and firewall and it is very flexible. There have been times when I've been tempted to deploy it as a small/medium business router in lieu of cisco but it's not just about the software, it's about the hardware as well. For a reliable system you need reliable parts... which are more expensive... preferable a cpu with a low thermal dissipation but still fast enough to handle the load, which is going to cost you money and either a RAID system or (ideally) a flash based storage system, which is going to cost money. You can build a system that will beat Cisco's cost/feature set easily. Building a system that can compete on cost/mtbf... not so easy... and generally just not worth the effort.
The article referenced a "still servicable pc"... which roughly translate into "a machine that we picked up from behind the receptionists desk and cleaned all the dust bunnies out of.... *shudders*
Telling people how to do it is not going to solve the problem. When I headed up the IT department for my old company I established a program where people could fedex in their routers and we would secure them and fedex them back... at no cost to them (I successfully argued that the cost of next day air was less than the cost of a potential breach). One person out of a company of 300 took advantage of it.
As much as I hate big government/big brother there are times when you have to overcome apathy but legislation. It sucks but it's true... and there is a simple solution to this problem. Almost every piece of commercial software you buy today includes a key that is, for practical purposes, unique. The technology to create, assign and distribute these keys exists and can be done at a price point low enough to pass on to the consumer without them caring (e.g. $5 a router, most of which pays for support and not the actual technology to do it).
The legislation should not mandate that users are told *how* to secure the router. It should mandate that the routers are *shipped* secured, with a pseudo-random key pre-program and stuck on the outside of the router with a label. Just like the keys you get if you buy Windows.
The problem is the support costs... but good documentation can take care of must of that, along with a little $ tacked onto the cost of the router.
I'm the author and I appreciate you taking the time to point this application out.
Thankfully I have access to 48x60 plotters and I know I'll be using them:)
Re:Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technolo
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High Tech Tour de France
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· Score: 4, Informative
There are several reasons for the technical limitations:
1. Safety reasons... it just recently became possible to build a _safe_ bike under UCI weight limits. Prior to that people were using bikes of questionable structural integrity and even drilling holes in important components to shave weight (e.g. stems, cranks, etc.) Very, very nasty wrecks ensue when your bike fails on you.
2. To level the playing field a bit. There are mega teams like Discovery, T-Mobile, etc. that can afford to throw money at a problem. There are smaller teams that can't. By imposing some limits on the technology it allows these smaller teams to compete.
3. In Europe, cycling is very much a blue collar sport of the people and UCI felt it was important to get the teams riding bikes people can actually buy. Over the past decade most of the teams have gone from custom bikes to off the shelf bikes with the really hi-tech bits reserved for time trials and mountain stages. You can go buy the Trek that most of the Discovery riders use at your local Trek dealer.
Drugs aside, I can throw on my old school Postal kit, jump on my Trek OCLV and pretend for a moment that I'm chasing down Floyd and that is part of the allure of the sport for most fans. You just don't get that with Football, NASCAR, etc. (Although I think it does translate well to baseball and soccer, which probably explains the popularity of the sports).
Finally, for the post underneath this complaining about the quality of the coverage... stadiums are built with TV coverage in mind, they have broadcast booths and hardpoints for the cameras with all the wiring already run. Cycling coverage is done over a 150+ course, at 25+ mph and they can't prep the city because they move to different citites each day. The technology behind it is pretty cool and covering stadium sports is childs play compared to what they're doing.
I'm the original anonymous coward... wish it hadn't posted as such.
Windows support for IPC is actually very robust, shared memory and semaphores is about as fast as you can get and it exists on both Windows and *nix just under different names.
A lot of people either don't know or forget that the NT->XP->2k3 kernel owes a lot to the Vax/VMS group from Digital who were snatched away to build the NT kernel. There seems to be this illusion that XP is the bastard step child of Windows 1.x and that is not the case, a lot of thought was put into the system from a multi-process/user stand point. The current problem is that thought didn't extend that far into today's current security evironment (although Dave Cutler and crew did try... I remeber the fight to move the video card drivers out of ring zero... Cutler argued that they were ancillary to the system, which is true from a server standpoint, but he lost).
Apple's decision to use OWA/DAV probably has more to do with the fact that Microsoft is encouraging developers to do that. OWA makes heavy use of DAV and allows you to access messages, contacts, etc. directly as a HTTP/DAV resource. This was done because of the problems with running MAPI over the Internet (won't work over any properly setup firewall) and to support mobile devices which often go through a proxy.
Despite the fact that Microsoft is a lumbering giant they do have some fairly sharp people working for them and they have picked up that MAPI is a dead horse. Exchange now uses SMTP for transport between exchange servers and OWA/DAV is being pushed. MAPI is still used extensively and is supported over the Internet by RPC over HTTP (a godsend for consultants at customer sites) but casting Apple's decision to use OWA as a screen-scraping hack to get around the big evil is wholy inaccurate. The Mail.app guys are good developers who read their Microsoft Tech Notes.
And... btw... I used to reverse engineer the Mac Toolbox so we could port Mac games to DOS and Windows, so I have a little bit of experience with this whole thing. (Yes, yes... someone was that foolish, look up "V for Victory" and "Close Combat" by Atomic Games... both series were written on the Mac and ported over.) Any time the Mac lead and I got into the whole fanboy thing the owner of Atomic would ask us if we hung our toliet paper with the loose end in front of the roll or behind the roll.
Because this is not the US with vast tracts of land and three SUV's in every driveway blocking RF output. This is Europe where population densities are much higher in urban areas and the cafe *is* right outside your house.
I grew up in Texas (with a large family home and three SUV's outside:p) and live in New York City (in a studio with no car). This wouldn't work in suburban Texas, it would work in New York... or San Francisco... etc.
"Agentless" monitoring is a misnomer dreamt up by marketing and sales types to differentiate their product as "better". All monitoring is agent based, the only difference is if the agent you are using is bundled with the system or a 3rd party agent. Most "agentless" monitoring systems acquire their data through SNMP, sar, netstat, iostat, WMI, etc. All these providers will consume system resources in some manner or another so the argument that agents incur more overheard is usually nonsense (unless the agent is very poorly written). In most cases the monitoring packages bundled with the system can be disabled so the new agents will consume resources that would have been used by the system utilities. And poorly conceived/written monitoring schemes will be a drag on any system. The only real differentiation is:
a) specific metrics gathered
b) frequency of update
c) "agent" based required distribution and control of a 3rd-party piece of software
Performance and resource utilization are a red herring.
Would you rather typing or talking?
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JetBlue to Offer WiFi
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· Score: 2, Informative
Unfortunately I serve as "IT super-guru" to my consulting group and get upwards of 50-100+ emails a day asking for advice on one question or another. I say "unfortunately" because a) I'd rather they get competent staff for their projects and b) some of the questions are OMG!?!?! answer now or we lose the contract.
For all the disparaging remarks:
a) Yes, there really are emails/phone calls that are worth $5+/minute. This sounds stupid but when you can answer a question in $10 worth of time that saves a $500k contract then yes, all of a sudden $50/flight seems reasonable (and unfortunately this happens more often than sane/rational people would like to imagine) b) I would much rather get an email and reply (quietly) in kind then spend 30 minutes going "could you repeat that, you broke up" until the person next to me bludgeon me over the head with nearest available blunt object.
Finally, if you're a control freak who's never been on a 10+ hour flight to (insert deity(s) of choice) knows where... STFU. You have no idea what it's like to be stuffed in a aluminum cigar tube with no contact to the outside world and minion's doing who knows what to your servers while you're out of touch (yes, yes... in a perfect world I'd subjugate minions who were better than I but in my company the checkbook rules all)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree... to a point... but I'm wondering where the limit is. You mentioned four possible applications. Let's be generous and say we broke that off to four threads for each tasks... sixteen threads. Lets be even more generous and say there were four more tasks you didn't consider. All told that's thirty-two threads... a tenth of the power were talking about here. And... I'll go back to my second point. Currently, there are no memory or storage systems that are capable of feeding this. If it really is a 300x increase in processing power then moore's law predicts it will be almost a decade before current approaches can actually support this.
I'm going to make an assumption and say that you don't do a lot of system programming. Threaded applications depend... heavily... on synchronizing data access. You simply can't take a single threaded application and break it out across threads without having some context of how it's accessing it's data and why. Imagine landing planes at an airport. It's a serial process... you just can't arbitrarily run it in parallel... "bad things" (tm) happen. The "algorithms" Mr. Vishkin is speaking of have no way of determining the context of code being executed and trying to break it out is a disaster waiting to happen.
There are applications where massive parallelism like this is fantastic... using my initial example... encoding video. Throw each frame off to one of the processors and you're processing 300 at a time (even there there are limitations because each frame requires information from the previous).
But I stand my statement.. anyone who says they can take a serial application and run it in parallel is full of sh*t and they know it. In certain, limited circumstances, yes... but in general. NO.
Assuming this actually works as detailed and the fine print on the claim isn't too onerous, there's three practical problems:
:) Maybe by the time this is a viable commercial product it will have more practical uses. (Remembering LOGO on my TI-94/A... we've come a long way baby)
1. Many applications are limited by the speed of the user, not the computer. You can only type or click so fast.
2. Hardware would have to catch up to drive this beast. This would max out all known memory and storage systems. Not to mention your internet connection.
3. As has been mentioned time and again, until developers actually embrace multi-threading this will be relatively useless. Tests from various hardware sites have shown that going from the Core 2 Duo to the Core 2 Quad offers very little benefit except for a very small subset of users... who should probably be running workstations anyway (Video editing, 3D rendering, etc.)
However, I have a ton of HD content on my MythTV box that I would like to turn this processor and h264 loose on
Lets be more specific... ZFS (as a whole) is not GPLv2'd.
/., digg or other sites. Yes... you can use "part" of the FS but if you want the whole thing you'll have to use Solaris or FUSE (or BSD as others have pointed out).
From the TFP : Now about that headline, yes I really did say that ZFS code is already available under the GPLv2. I will be completely honest though and make it clear that it isn't all of the ZFS source.
Well that's fantastic... which parts do we get? The ones that make ZFS revolutionary or the ones that make it a rehashed XFS, JFS, Rieser, etc? I don't see how this is any different than any of the bait-n-switch scams that people post to
FUSE defeats the entire purpose. ZFS is meant to run and support a large/huge file store. What admin in their right mind would do that through userspace unless it's solely for backup?
The point is, ZFS is not functionally viable for Linux on the environments for which it was intended.
It really depends on the person. Yes there is a "math" to war... I take out the guy with the red cross on his helmet and I really kill twenty people. But there is an undeniable humanity in most of us. And while we know, by the numbers, that we should pull the trigger... we don't... because ultimately we know that our life is no better or no more important than anyone else's. It is a human instinct that is deeper than any training. You DO NOT KILL unless you absolutely have to. Yes... a lot of people will do what their told but just as many will not be able to.... regardless of their race, religion or creed. They just understand that any life is valuable. War and battle is an unfortunate reality... but most don't kill because they can but because they have to. And a medic is the hand of God... no matter which God you believe in. If you shoot at them, you're just an animal... and you will go to your grave knowing that.
I'm not pulling this out my ass... my grandfather was a bombardier and killed, by his own admission, thousands of people. He pushed a button and hundreds of people died. He lived with that ever day of his life... and took every chance he had to tell me to avoid that at all cost but do it if I must.
So drop the bullshit... Life is precious and most everyone... anyone... when faced with a choice... will want to let it continue. It's what makes us human.
I worked as a life guard for almost eight years. Most of the injuries were thankfully mundane but there were a few horrific ones that I was witness to.
You can be as cool or as macho as you want but when you're bleeding out and close to death... all that swagger goes away and you will most likely do anything you can to get away from the pain and your own mortality. This doesn't mean that you'd be sobbing or hysterical but *any* comfort you can find you will cling onto.
It's also been proven, time and again, that a patients survival rate is influenced by their state of mind.
So... a "teddy bear" head may seem stupid or silly but it is actually a very well conceived and valid idea. Beyond the patient's needs, there is the very real likely possibility that a "friendly" looking robot is less likely to be attacked by the enemy.
This what I'm beginning to despise about Slashdot, Digg, etc... the mob mentality... no one thinks for themselves or evaluates data by themselves anymore. Most everything boils down to "me too". There have been countless articles on Slashdot about the need to secure access points out of the box (I've contributed to them)... there have been articles on the need to shield children from certain materials until they are old enough to comprehend/digest/etc them. Yet we throw someone "unholy" into the mix and all of a sudden it "a bad thing" with no regard to to what's being said or why. For example... I'm from Texas and I consider myself a true republican. But that doesn't mean that I accept everything the Bush administration does. They've done a handful of good things... but for the most part they're flaming idiots. The same is true of the Clinton administration ... while I've been thought to consider them fools... I had enough common sense to look at them and see that they did a few things right.
So. Let's regroup and ignore the word "SCO" and look at this a common point of view.
Children should not view adult subjects because they do not have the education or emotional background to handle it. It's that simple... a 12 year old can not possibly understand what is going through the mind of two 30 year old adults when one says "spank me harder" to the other. The idea that it's a role-playing game and that one is not really dominating the other doesn't click. I know that's a bit graphic but that's what it boils down to. There are games that adults play that children do not understand... think about when you were a teenager and how you saw sex and relationships and think how you see it now... there is most like a *drastic* difference.
My Godson can't climb the rungs at the playground right now... we're going to have to step him through it. In a few months he will be able to do it by himself. This is the same idea. Sex is something that I and his parents will have to step him through... in a controlled manner... one rung at a time so we're there to catch him if he has any questions when he falls... and he will fall. We all had *that* boyfriend or girlfriend in high school that ended life as we know it. Hopefully your parents or a sibling was there to pick up the pieces.
The majority of this responsibility is on his parents... control what he does, what he's exposed to and when... but for G*d's sake... they need all they help they can get. By the time he's 12 (in ten years) he'll be able to go to Best Buy and get a device to surf the web for > $100 that fits in his pocket.
Free speech is a good thing but controlling who has access to it is just as good. It's sounds Orwellian but there is a fine line... that's actually hard to draw (and it should be... which is why more than one person needs to draw it)... but there are easy extremes... a ten year old does not need access to political diatribes or porn... in almost all cases they don't have the background required to process either. I will argue that a 20 year old needs access to both... but that is because they have the emotional and psychological background to comprehend it. In some ways it's their responsibility to understand how they fit into society. But, again, it's a fine line.
I think most reasonable people on Slashdot can agree that there is a healthy median where we agree with the great satan's of the world... despite who they are and what they think.
But we need to defend the opposing points just as vigorously.
Anyway... do not rate the message solely on the messenger.
I was the IT administrator at my old company of about 500 consultants. After many discussions with the upper management I successfully argued for an open webmail policy because we had employees who regularly worked long and odd hours to accomplish our projects and it seemed only fair that we give them a method of private communications during their _overtime_. Quid Pro Quo. We were especially lenient with consultants who traveled all the time... except for a few areas those laptops were considered their property and as long as they didn't jack with the security settings we didn't call them on anything. With that said: 1. We were running squid and clam on any any incoming data (yes this is intensive but $8-10k of equipment will garner you many times that in employee good will). 2. We had a very aggressive AV policy. 3. We had consultants that were governed by stricter SEC and DoD rules that were kept on a separate subnet and different AD that was more restrictive... because laws required it. Seriously though... Unless you tell your salaried employees to work no more than 40-45 hours a week (and give them comp time to balance that out) it is asinine not to let them use the company system for personal activities when the company itself is encroaching into their personal time.
Seriously the "if it ain't broke don't fix mentality" is what pays my bills.
... e.g. migrating from Apache 1.x to 2.x... and then there are bugs that haven't affected you yet but are still in the code base. Just because you haven't experienced any problems yet does not mean there aren't any underlying problems in the packages you're using.
There are two kinds of "broke", there are gaps in functionality
Case in point. The company I work for is in a mad dash to upgrade for the DST time change. And for those of you thinking "duh, you just upgrade your timezone files"... no it's not that easy. Some Sun systems require firmware upgrades, almost all of the systems prior to 2005 require binary updates because they can't handle a timezone that has two rulesets (e.g. they would apply the new 2007 rules to timestamps from 2005), most JVM's have to be patched or upgraded and some applications inexplicably do their own calculations and have to be update as well.
The majority of the company has the "if it ain't broke" mentality and were running everything from NT 4.0 on DEC Alpha's and Sun 2.4 to Windows 2003 64-bit and Solaris 10. Upgrading the older machines is an absolute nightmare because the vendor patches are built one, two even three years worth of patches that we haven't applied. What should be a relatively simple upgrade task has broken applications all over the place and has our QA and Engineering staff bleary eyed and ready for it all to just end.
The answer is controlled refresh. Twice a year you sync up your servers with a certain patchset. You don't go crazy... you just get vendor required patches and include them in your dev and qa cycles. And you DO NOT USE EOL OS' in an enterprise environment. Ever. This includes commercial and FOSS packages.
Full Disclosure : I run two gentoo boxes at my house my workstation and my mythtv box. I patch them about once a week because I like to tinker. My web/file/mysql server is running on a stripped down Debian system that only gets patched every few months or if there is an advisory that comes out.
I had to go through this routine with the toys I bought for my new XBox 360 last week. I can honestly say the most traumatic experience of the whole ordeal was asking my mom for "utility" scissors (I was at home seeing my family when I bought it).
Somehow I suspect that the same p*ssies (sorry, the only appropriate word I could come up with) who are complaining about this packaging are the same nerds who cut themselves on their sheet metal cases that their modding in their parents basement over the weekend and then try to wear that as a badge of pride over the next week.
It's a piece of plastic for sake. If it gets the better of you please report to your nearest suicide booth and get it over with.
Uh oh... I think I might have offended someone.
The dude.
One of the most difficult phases of my career was coming to the understanding that I, as a manager, was not responsible for determining how something was done or the technical purity/perfection of my subordinates work. I am a manager... I am not a implementer or designer. My job is to:
1) Determine the competence of those that I manage.
2) Rely on their judgment and expertise to solve the problem.
3) Assess the value of their solution against the needs of the customer and the company.
4) Provide them the resources and staff required to accomplish this solution.
5) Judge their performance based on the constraints that I have provided them.
Sadly enough... that's it. For my power I pay the price of letting younger, brighter staff tell me how my projects should be done. If you spend too much time second guessing your staff and telling them how you thing thinks should be done then you've failed. You *should* be paying attention to financial, competitive and political forces and dealing with them so your staff doesn't have to and can focus on doing their job.
I give a clear and accomplishable objective... you get it done.
That's how it should work.
I think comment is insightful in that it only reinforces flawed approaches that this book is trying to discuss and resolve. The review itself states that sections of the book are likely to give /.'ers fits because it tries to dispel common viewpoints in the IT industry of Microsoft being an underhanded company with a grossly inferior product.
/. are not their customers... corporations are. They're not going to make much money off us so they don't care about us... their focus and their concern is on those customers. Which is exactly what a business *should do* and how businesses succeed.
I worked on games published for Microsoft ("Close Combat") and the level of effort that Microsoft put into the polishing and marketing of that game was astounding... especially when compared to work that the prior publishers of the V for Victory series had done.
Microsoft is underhanded at times and their products are technically inferior to other solutions. But the reason that Microsoft is successful is because they understand their customers very, very well. I am not their customer... my parents are. The unwashed masses of
The point of this book is that other companies did not do this and that is why they failed. It may be 20/20 hindsight but the message is a core fundamental of even basic business classes and the failures documented in this book just prove that the lessons were not always learned.
(And I'm tied to the book in anyway and haven't worked for Microsoft in any manner for a loong time.)
These type of polls really amaze me. Oh noz!!!... we're falling behind on a medium primarily used for entertainment (or worse). Seriously, who the hell cares? The information is still accessible, just not as quickly and the quality and veracity of the information (which in many cases is questionable to begin with) does not change because of the download speed. Let's worry about more important things like streamlining healthcare, reducing pollution, whirled peas, etc. and leave these types of comparisons to middle-aged under-endowed guys and their sports cars... k?
If I remember correctly, moon quakes are the result of tidal forces between the earth and the moon... not geologic activity.
Wow... vodka does horrible, horrible things to the grammatical functions of the brain. People under the age of 21 take note... 60% of the time, vodka screws you up all of the time. I felt I had to comment though. Please excuse me.
I've worked as a contractor for the Federal Government and the City of New York (which considers themselves a Federal Government). Most of the agencies I worked at had security that was an absolute joke. I'll give the guys at the DoE/Forrestal Building some credit as well as the Department of Juvenile Justice in NYC , they actually asked questions and took their jobs seriously. (The DoJJ guys in New York are the only ones who have flat-out denied me entry... no matter how much smooth talking I did. For whatever reason, the guards I came across took protecting the identities and lives of the children in overseen by the agency very, very seriously and I have the utmost respect for them because of it.) Most of the other security guards were too concerned about talking about the caboose of the last woman to walk through the metal detector.
/looking for the black helicopters
The point is, no amount of technological or physical security is going to do any good if the people entrusted with its implementation are not trained to do their job properly or take it seriously. The only "serious" contracts I worked were at DoE but at the rest of the agencies I had access to enough information to financially ruin a good number of the people in the United States. Thankfully I worked with people who took that responsibility as seriously as I did but I can't help but feel that was through luck of the draw and not the success of the system.
Smartcards/RFID make sense if they going to be used and implemented properly (e.g. you picture is on the card and encrypted with a public key system so that the agency can verify that it's authentic and not a clever forgery... and the people at the desk care enough to actually check)... otherwise it's just another way for contractors/etc to make money and a waste of everyone else's time.
I use Debian at home for a general purpose router and firewall and it is very flexible. There have been times when I've been tempted to deploy it as a small/medium business router in lieu of cisco but it's not just about the software, it's about the hardware as well. For a reliable system you need reliable parts... which are more expensive... preferable a cpu with a low thermal dissipation but still fast enough to handle the load, which is going to cost you money and either a RAID system or (ideally) a flash based storage system, which is going to cost money. You can build a system that will beat Cisco's cost/feature set easily. Building a system that can compete on cost/mtbf ... not so easy... and generally just not worth the effort.
The article referenced a "still servicable pc" ... which roughly translate into "a machine that we picked up from behind the receptionists desk and cleaned all the dust bunnies out of.... *shudders*
Telling people how to do it is not going to solve the problem. When I headed up the IT department for my old company I established a program where people could fedex in their routers and we would secure them and fedex them back... at no cost to them (I successfully argued that the cost of next day air was less than the cost of a potential breach). One person out of a company of 300 took advantage of it. As much as I hate big government/big brother there are times when you have to overcome apathy but legislation. It sucks but it's true... and there is a simple solution to this problem. Almost every piece of commercial software you buy today includes a key that is, for practical purposes, unique. The technology to create, assign and distribute these keys exists and can be done at a price point low enough to pass on to the consumer without them caring (e.g. $5 a router, most of which pays for support and not the actual technology to do it). The legislation should not mandate that users are told *how* to secure the router. It should mandate that the routers are *shipped* secured, with a pseudo-random key pre-program and stuck on the outside of the router with a label. Just like the keys you get if you buy Windows. The problem is the support costs... but good documentation can take care of must of that, along with a little $ tacked onto the cost of the router.
I'm the author and I appreciate you taking the time to point this application out.
:)
Thankfully I have access to 48x60 plotters and I know I'll be using them
There are several reasons for the technical limitations:
1. Safety reasons... it just recently became possible to build a _safe_ bike under UCI weight limits. Prior to that people were using bikes of questionable structural integrity and even drilling holes in important components to shave weight (e.g. stems, cranks, etc.) Very, very nasty wrecks ensue when your bike fails on you.
2. To level the playing field a bit. There are mega teams like Discovery, T-Mobile, etc. that can afford to throw money at a problem. There are smaller teams that can't. By imposing some limits on the technology it allows these smaller teams to compete.
3. In Europe, cycling is very much a blue collar sport of the people and UCI felt it was important to get the teams riding bikes people can actually buy. Over the past decade most of the teams have gone from custom bikes to off the shelf bikes with the really hi-tech bits reserved for time trials and mountain stages. You can go buy the Trek that most of the Discovery riders use at your local Trek dealer.
Drugs aside, I can throw on my old school Postal kit, jump on my Trek OCLV and pretend for a moment that I'm chasing down Floyd and that is part of the allure of the sport for most fans. You just don't get that with Football, NASCAR, etc. (Although I think it does translate well to baseball and soccer, which probably explains the popularity of the sports).
Finally, for the post underneath this complaining about the quality of the coverage... stadiums are built with TV coverage in mind, they have broadcast booths and hardpoints for the cameras with all the wiring already run. Cycling coverage is done over a 150+ course, at 25+ mph and they can't prep the city because they move to different citites each day. The technology behind it is pretty cool and covering stadium sports is childs play compared to what they're doing.
I'm the original anonymous coward... wish it hadn't posted as such.
Windows support for IPC is actually very robust, shared memory and semaphores is about as fast as you can get and it exists on both Windows and *nix just under different names.
A lot of people either don't know or forget that the NT->XP->2k3 kernel owes a lot to the Vax/VMS group from Digital who were snatched away to build the NT kernel. There seems to be this illusion that XP is the bastard step child of Windows 1.x and that is not the case, a lot of thought was put into the system from a multi-process/user stand point. The current problem is that thought didn't extend that far into today's current security evironment (although Dave Cutler and crew did try... I remeber the fight to move the video card drivers out of ring zero... Cutler argued that they were ancillary to the system, which is true from a server standpoint, but he lost).
Apple's decision to use OWA/DAV probably has more to do with the fact that Microsoft is encouraging developers to do that. OWA makes heavy use of DAV and allows you to access messages, contacts, etc. directly as a HTTP/DAV resource. This was done because of the problems with running MAPI over the Internet (won't work over any properly setup firewall) and to support mobile devices which often go through a proxy.
t rans/exchange/exc0428.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/
Despite the fact that Microsoft is a lumbering giant they do have some fairly sharp people working for them and they have picked up that MAPI is a dead horse. Exchange now uses SMTP for transport between exchange servers and OWA/DAV is being pushed. MAPI is still used extensively and is supported over the Internet by RPC over HTTP (a godsend for consultants at customer sites) but casting Apple's decision to use OWA as a screen-scraping hack to get around the big evil is wholy inaccurate. The Mail.app guys are good developers who read their Microsoft Tech Notes.
And... btw... I used to reverse engineer the Mac Toolbox so we could port Mac games to DOS and Windows, so I have a little bit of experience with this whole thing. (Yes, yes... someone was that foolish, look up "V for Victory" and "Close Combat" by Atomic Games... both series were written on the Mac and ported over.) Any time the Mac lead and I got into the whole fanboy thing the owner of Atomic would ask us if we hung our toliet paper with the loose end in front of the roll or behind the roll.
Invariably we were told our answer was wrong.
Because this is not the US with vast tracts of land and three SUV's in every driveway blocking RF output. This is Europe where population densities are much higher in urban areas and the cafe *is* right outside your house.
:p) and live in New York City (in a studio with no car). This wouldn't work in suburban Texas, it would work in New York... or San Francisco... etc.
I grew up in Texas (with a large family home and three SUV's outside
"Agentless" monitoring is a misnomer dreamt up by marketing and sales types to differentiate their product as "better". All monitoring is agent based, the only difference is if the agent you are using is bundled with the system or a 3rd party agent. Most "agentless" monitoring systems acquire their data through SNMP, sar, netstat, iostat, WMI, etc. All these providers will consume system resources in some manner or another so the argument that agents incur more overheard is usually nonsense (unless the agent is very poorly written). In most cases the monitoring packages bundled with the system can be disabled so the new agents will consume resources that would have been used by the system utilities. And poorly conceived/written monitoring schemes will be a drag on any system. The only real differentiation is:
a) specific metrics gathered
b) frequency of update
c) "agent" based required distribution and control of a 3rd-party piece of software
Performance and resource utilization are a red herring.
Unfortunately I serve as "IT super-guru" to my consulting group and get upwards of 50-100+ emails a day asking for advice on one question or another. I say "unfortunately" because a) I'd rather they get competent staff for their projects and b) some of the questions are OMG!?!?! answer now or we lose the contract.
For all the disparaging remarks:
a) Yes, there really are emails/phone calls that are worth $5+/minute. This sounds stupid but when you can answer a question in $10 worth of time that saves a $500k contract then yes, all of a sudden $50/flight seems reasonable (and unfortunately this happens more often than sane/rational people would like to imagine)
b) I would much rather get an email and reply (quietly) in kind then spend 30 minutes going "could you repeat that, you broke up" until the person next to me bludgeon me over the head with nearest available blunt object.
Finally, if you're a control freak who's never been on a 10+ hour flight to (insert deity(s) of choice) knows where... STFU. You have no idea what it's like to be stuffed in a aluminum cigar tube with no contact to the outside world and minion's doing who knows what to your servers while you're out of touch (yes, yes... in a perfect world I'd subjugate minions who were better than I but in my company the checkbook rules all)
Regards,
A very, very bitter techie.