The word "internet" (lower case) is a shortened form of the more formal term "internetwork." An internetwork is an über network of interconnected networks that utilize the same communication protocol. The Internet (upper case) is the worldwide public internet. Many organizations connect their computers to a private internet. Most organizations are connected to each other through the public Internet.
Long ago, in a virtual software galaxy far away, one of the developers involved in the design of the Xerox Star told me, "if you need a manual to figure out how to use a computing environment, it wasn't properly designed."
Actually, recent revs of Solaris install with daemons for remote services (including TELNET) not running unless the individual performing the install explicitly requests the legacy behavior. (Previous versions, as with most *NIX operating systems, enabled most remote services by default.) Typically, therefore, there is nothing to "fix."
I'm fairly certain Sun is still shipping the Solaris 10 06/06 release if you request media. However, the current rev is Solaris 10 11/06, and is downloadable at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp. This is a minor update and, once all the regression testing is completed, there will be patches (for a price, except for security patches and driver updates) to bring an 06/06 release up to 11/06. But if you want the latest version now, download the ISO image(s) for free and burn your own DVD/CDs.
(I'm referring here to the current release of the supported Solaris 10 product. As others have noted, there's also OpenSolaris, which available from http://www.opensolaris.org/os, is well ahead of the mainstream release and provides source code, but is a somewhat less complete product bundle. Also, Solaris Express, which is a snapshot of what will become the Solaris 11 release, which like the supported product can be downloaded from Sun's website.)
The White House directive applies only to laptops (and presumably desktops) that (1) store or process "personally identifiable information" and (2) are used outside an agency's security perimeter. The memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget to all U.S. agencies also outlines additional requirements that are intended to reduce the risk that Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information are compromised by the physical loss of a computer and to better control external access to such information.
I'm writing this from my chateau in France. I flew here earlier today from my horse farm in Virginia in my new Gulfstream. Can't believe my good luck: couple of months ago, I discovered this unsolicited stock tip in my email. The stock was cheap and the tip seemed pretty solid, so I invested my life savings in it. And my grandmother's life savings, too; I have her power-of-attorney. The next day, I got nervous. Remembered the old line about if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. So I decided to unload the stock. Damned if the price hadn't gone up 6000 percent! In one day! Incredible! Anyway, I sold it all... and here I am. Grandma's taking a round-the-world tour in her Gulfstream -- we bought a matched pair.
Well, I certainly don't hate Microsoft and I have invested a ton of money in buying their products. What I hate is NetBSD because it's compact and rock solid and, for crying out loud, you can launch an install from a single floppy. I can't stand Linux because it runs efficiently on anemic old hardware and what do you think that's going to do to my Dell stock? Solaris sucks because it foists DTrace and ZFS on unsuspecting users: I mean, how good can a filesystem be if you don't have to defrag it once in a while? And then there's OpenOffice. Don't even get me started on OpenOffice.
The Xerox Alto never made it past the research project stage, as the Information Week article points out, but the Macintosh OS was a pale imitation of the Xerox Star, which was indeed a commercial product -- albeit for large corporations and the federal government, not individual consumers. I can't imagine that anyone who ever used both Star and MacOS could fail to appreciate the superior functionality, sophistication, and attention to detail of the former. Like the original Mac, the Xerox Star was an integral bundle of hardware and software (see http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retros pect/ for a concise description), but it was a lot more than a detached box: it was part of an integrated pre-IP distributed computing environment that included a collection of network services (directory, mail, filing, printing) as well as a bundle of seamlessly integrated apps, including what arguably was the finest word processor -- Xerox called it a "document editor" -- ever designed. Admittedly, it wasn't sufficiently successful in the market to survive the onslaught of the WIntel PC and the ineptitude of Xerox's general management. More's the pity: we may have cycles to burn these days (although what Intel and AMD giveth, Microsoft inevitably taketh away), but for fit and finish Star has never been surpassed.
Sun has some terrific assets: by far the most innovative and perhaps, overall, the best UNIX product bundle in the market, very high availability multiprocessor big iron, and -- more recently -- a line of fast, energy efficient and aggressively priced X86 machines, as well as a strong suite of mass storage devices and some ouotstanding application software (e.g., Sun's enterprise messaging server). But it was slow to understand the importance of the service business, is only now making a serious effort to regain lost ground in the workstation market, hasn't figured out how to capitalize on Java, and has barely cracked the server appliance market.
Sun has a strong base of loyal customers -- especially telecoms, the federal government, service providers, and very large enterprises. But, with the possible exception of the government, these are cyclical purchasers and when they achieve over-capacity or have to tighten their belts, as they have in the last few years, you have a perfect storm of diminished demand. Moreover, Sun has never achieved credibility in the small business market despite a push in recent years to develop more penetration among retailers and other resellers; the potential Sun customers who graduate from Microsoft wind up on Linux with hardware from Dell or IBM.
Ironically, under Scott McNealy, the volatile non-techie businessman, Sun has made dramatic improvements in the technical quality of its product offerings since the dot-com meltdown but hasn't been able to restore profitability, while under the more methodical Jonathan Schwartz, who has unimpeachable technical credentials, the company may finally be able to capitalize on the techical quality of its products and restore the bottom line.
ISPs should concentrate on trying to interdict outbound spam rather than imposing filters on inbound messages without the customer's consent.
Try explaining to your 91-year-old father -- as I had to do this morning -- that some of his messages are bouncing because they happen to be transmitted through one of AOL's SMTP relays that has been blocklisted by Verizon while others are getting through because they happen to be routed through a different relay. (He sort of understood, and decided the remedy is simply to send everything twice. In other words, now he is spamming me.)
Most organizations should routinely purge back-ups of mailbox (i.e., IMAP, POP) servers precisely to avoid this type of situation.
It's no good to wait until a subpoena is served. At that point, you simply have to wait and allow the legal process to play itself out -- all the way out. Even if you prevail at the trial level, you have to squirrel away your back-ups for years because if you destroy them before the requesting party has exhausted all its opportunities for appeal, the organization and possibly its officers are liable to be held in contempt of court. (This discussion is confined to U.S. law; I don't know about other jurisdictions.)
Even if you don't care about confidentiality, this makes economic sense. Wholly aside from the privacy issue, responding to subpoenas for email back-ups can involve enormous expense in staff and machine time, and while some judges will consider claims by the responding party that the cost of retrieval exceeds the probative value of the backed-up messages in the "offer of proof" by the requesting party (describing what the messages are expected to contain), more often than not that argument doesn't work.
You can waste a lot of money to collect individual messages from back-up media, only to discover they have no effect on the outcome of the legal proceeding. I've seen it happen.
Since mass storage is inexpensive these days, and since the majority of messages have a short shelf-life, the sensible thing to do is to give mail users the ability to store as many messages as they want permenently in server-based mail folders, which means they will be picked up by even a very recent back-up, encourage them to get rid of any messages they don't need (perhaps by purging old messages from their INBOX folder automagically), and eradicate your back-up media on a regular basis -- keeping only what you need to restore the message store on your server(s) in the event of a catastrophic failure.
(By the way, this militates in favor of organizations other, perhaps, than ISPs using IMAP rather that POP. You really don't want to have to go around trying to retrieve messages stored on thousands of desktops and laptops in response to a subpoena.)
Needless to say, deleted messages should either not be backed up at all, or should should only be stored on daily incrementals for at most a few days.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reference implementation is for Linux.
The word "internet" (lower case) is a shortened form of the more formal term "internetwork." An internetwork is an über network of interconnected networks that utilize the same communication protocol. The Internet (upper case) is the worldwide public internet. Many organizations connect their computers to a private internet. Most organizations are connected to each other through the public Internet.
Well, I blame Al Gore ... for inventing the Internet in the first place.
Long ago, in a virtual software galaxy far away, one of the developers involved in the design of the Xerox Star told me, "if you need a manual to figure out how to use a computing environment, it wasn't properly designed."
Actually, recent revs of Solaris install with daemons for remote services (including TELNET) not running unless the individual performing the install explicitly requests the legacy behavior. (Previous versions, as with most *NIX operating systems, enabled most remote services by default.) Typically, therefore, there is nothing to "fix."
(I'm referring here to the current release of the supported Solaris 10 product. As others have noted, there's also OpenSolaris, which available from http://www.opensolaris.org/os, is well ahead of the mainstream release and provides source code, but is a somewhat less complete product bundle. Also, Solaris Express, which is a snapshot of what will become the Solaris 11 release, which like the supported product can be downloaded from Sun's website.)
The White House directive applies only to laptops (and presumably desktops) that (1) store or process "personally identifiable information" and (2) are used outside an agency's security perimeter. The memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget to all U.S. agencies also outlines additional requirements that are intended to reduce the risk that Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information are compromised by the physical loss of a computer and to better control external access to such information.
Great idea! Anything else I can do to slow down my passage through Immigration and Customs after a long flight? I'm always looking for ideas.
http://www.chriskern.net/history/voaFirstOnTheInte rnet.html
I'm writing this from my chateau in France. I flew here earlier today from my horse farm in Virginia in my new Gulfstream. Can't believe my good luck: couple of months ago, I discovered this unsolicited stock tip in my email. The stock was cheap and the tip seemed pretty solid, so I invested my life savings in it. And my grandmother's life savings, too; I have her power-of-attorney. The next day, I got nervous. Remembered the old line about if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. So I decided to unload the stock. Damned if the price hadn't gone up 6000 percent! In one day! Incredible! Anyway, I sold it all ... and here I am. Grandma's taking a round-the-world tour in her Gulfstream -- we bought a matched pair.
Well, I certainly don't hate Microsoft and I have invested a ton of money in buying their products. What I hate is NetBSD because it's compact and rock solid and, for crying out loud, you can launch an install from a single floppy. I can't stand Linux because it runs efficiently on anemic old hardware and what do you think that's going to do to my Dell stock? Solaris sucks because it foists DTrace and ZFS on unsuspecting users: I mean, how good can a filesystem be if you don't have to defrag it once in a while? And then there's OpenOffice. Don't even get me started on OpenOffice.
The Xerox Alto never made it past the research project stage, as the Information Week article points out, but the Macintosh OS was a pale imitation of the Xerox Star, which was indeed a commercial product -- albeit for large corporations and the federal government, not individual consumers. I can't imagine that anyone who ever used both Star and MacOS could fail to appreciate the superior functionality, sophistication, and attention to detail of the former. Like the original Mac, the Xerox Star was an integral bundle of hardware and software (see http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retros pect/ for a concise description), but it was a lot more than a detached box: it was part of an integrated pre-IP distributed computing environment that included a collection of network services (directory, mail, filing, printing) as well as a bundle of seamlessly integrated apps, including what arguably was the finest word processor -- Xerox called it a "document editor" -- ever designed. Admittedly, it wasn't sufficiently successful in the market to survive the onslaught of the WIntel PC and the ineptitude of Xerox's general management. More's the pity: we may have cycles to burn these days (although what Intel and AMD giveth, Microsoft inevitably taketh away), but for fit and finish Star has never been surpassed.
Robots may not be ready to cook breakfast, but they do a decent job vacuuming the house or cleaning the kitchen floor: http://www.irobot.com/.
Sun has a strong base of loyal customers -- especially telecoms, the federal government, service providers, and very large enterprises. But, with the possible exception of the government, these are cyclical purchasers and when they achieve over-capacity or have to tighten their belts, as they have in the last few years, you have a perfect storm of diminished demand. Moreover, Sun has never achieved credibility in the small business market despite a push in recent years to develop more penetration among retailers and other resellers; the potential Sun customers who graduate from Microsoft wind up on Linux with hardware from Dell or IBM.
Ironically, under Scott McNealy, the volatile non-techie businessman, Sun has made dramatic improvements in the technical quality of its product offerings since the dot-com meltdown but hasn't been able to restore profitability, while under the more methodical Jonathan Schwartz, who has unimpeachable technical credentials, the company may finally be able to capitalize on the techical quality of its products and restore the bottom line.
ISPs should concentrate on trying to interdict outbound spam rather than imposing filters on inbound messages without the customer's consent. Try explaining to your 91-year-old father -- as I had to do this morning -- that some of his messages are bouncing because they happen to be transmitted through one of AOL's SMTP relays that has been blocklisted by Verizon while others are getting through because they happen to be routed through a different relay. (He sort of understood, and decided the remedy is simply to send everything twice. In other words, now he is spamming me.)
Microsoft overreaching in order to advance its interests? I'm shocked! And dismayed. That's it, shocked and dismayed.
Most organizations should routinely purge back-ups of mailbox (i.e., IMAP, POP) servers precisely to avoid this type of situation.
It's no good to wait until a subpoena is served. At that point, you simply have to wait and allow the legal process to play itself out -- all the way out. Even if you prevail at the trial level, you have to squirrel away your back-ups for years because if you destroy them before the requesting party has exhausted all its opportunities for appeal, the organization and possibly its officers are liable to be held in contempt of court. (This discussion is confined to U.S. law; I don't know about other jurisdictions.)
Even if you don't care about confidentiality, this makes economic sense. Wholly aside from the privacy issue, responding to subpoenas for email back-ups can involve enormous expense in staff and machine time, and while some judges will consider claims by the responding party that the cost of retrieval exceeds the probative value of the backed-up messages in the "offer of proof" by the requesting party (describing what the messages are expected to contain), more often than not that argument doesn't work.
You can waste a lot of money to collect individual messages from back-up media, only to discover they have no effect on the outcome of the legal proceeding. I've seen it happen.
Since mass storage is inexpensive these days, and since the majority of messages have a short shelf-life, the sensible thing to do is to give mail users the ability to store as many messages as they want permenently in server-based mail folders, which means they will be picked up by even a very recent back-up, encourage them to get rid of any messages they don't need (perhaps by purging old messages from their INBOX folder automagically), and eradicate your back-up media on a regular basis -- keeping only what you need to restore the message store on your server(s) in the event of a catastrophic failure.
(By the way, this militates in favor of organizations other, perhaps, than ISPs using IMAP rather that POP. You really don't want to have to go around trying to retrieve messages stored on thousands of desktops and laptops in response to a subpoena.)
Needless to say, deleted messages should either not be backed up at all, or should should only be stored on daily incrementals for at most a few days.