Sysadmin for an SMB here. We develop our own browser-based app in Flash/Flex that we use for a big part of our work. It's also computationally intensive, and I was often being asked how we could improve the performance of the application on the client-platform side. Sure, we have decent hardware, but we were developing for the standard Firefox build, and that meant 32-bit and the restrictions that go with it.
Eventually I convinced the development team that since they had moved the backend to 64-bit code, that the client runtime environment should be there too, and so we optimized the frontend for Chrome (which obviously, is 64-bit, with Flash built in). The speed increase wasn't phenomenal, but it WAS noticeable. Now I'm even more glad we made this change.
Yeah, I must admit to being a bit perturbed by the "definite" language used by that statement. Theories involving geophysical fission at the core of the Earth are intriguing, but they're just theories, and kind of on the fringes of the discipline. Saying "there exists" is scientifically kind of insulting.
I've never had any problem getting ISPs to set up PTR records for our static IP addresses on their networks. Checking for a PTR is definitely an essential part of my spam-fighting configuration.
Those interested in the particulars might also want to check out a recent Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi. Basically, the SEC feels that until an actual case is opened, it is not required to store files for "matters under investigation". Definitely worth a read.
Yeah, no doubt. For Intel to lecture about "open" technology is the pot calling the kettle black. They way they aggressively hold the x86 platform to their chest, a lawsuit always waiting to drop on AMD or NVidia if either company does something they don't like.
Open up the x86 platform to a few other chip makers, then we can talk about "open systems".
Hey now... I was in high school in the late 90s and our computer science class was centred around Turbo Pascal. I learned a lot writing Pascal programs, and for my final project my lab partner and I wrote a graphical RPG including an on-screen scrolling-text display we wrote from scratch. The year after I left, they switched to C++.
I know Javascript, BASIC, Pascal, a bit of Perl, but not any C. And while I feel that every CS student should come away knowing it, I'm also thankful to these other languages for teaching me the fundamentals of program logic.
Sorry to be the stickler, but someone needs to look at their dictionary. "Bionic" (a portmanteau of "bio" and "electronic") is a pretty much a synonym for cybernetic. This story is about biomimicry, not bionics.
Where did this allegation come from, really? Sweden's justice system ought to come clean and let us know what source precipated these charges. The timing is so incredibly suspicious, if government authorities really are using such incredibly dirty tricks to silence a whistleblower, then they need to be exposed. That's what Wikileaks is all about.
Parent is exactly right. The author's argument is based on the fallacy that "the free market will sort things out". In fact we all know that even competing corporations will refuse to do battle on certain turf, thus resulting in maladies such as price-fixing and/or a lack of competitive choice.
De-facto net neutrality has worked well enough for everyone up until now. Let's legislate and make sure it stays that way.
Pretty much. Nobody is forcing you people to use a Mac. If you don't like Apple products, don't use them. There's no need for OS crusades and spreading FUD.
Something that needs to be considered is the existence of so called "Filing Agents". I work for such a business.
Right now, the SEC requires companies to file documents in a specific subset of HTML, as well as (in some cases) XBRL, which is an XML-based reporting language. In some rare cases, documents are another type of XML, or even specially formatted ASCII documents (ugh).
Securities lawyers and company administrators don't want to understand the highly technical processes involved, so they outsource their technical reporting requirements to filing agents. We take care of all the nitpicky details that they don't want to consider. Looks like we'll have to learn Python as well. We've been meaning to graduate from Perl anyway, so no big deal.:-)
Let me say one last thing to those of you telling the rest of us what lousy sysadmins we are.
This is no different than responding to some poor schmuck who had his system broken into and ransacked by mafia hackers by shaking your head and saying: "Well, it's his fault for not being proactive enough about security."
Maintaining systems is not an easy task, it's a multi-level approach combining security, usability, upgrades, and your budget. The question with security is always, "How paranoid am I going to be?" And you then have to balance usability, your time and the budget against how unlikely it will be that someone can figure out how (and be bothered) to crack your RSA certificate.
Likewise, I have to balance my time and budget against how important I feel certain components are. For an organization that has workstation AV and a lot of technology expansion demands this year, monitoring ClamAV was not at the top of my priority list.
So yeah, you can tell me this is my fault, but I doubt very much the last time someone told you that their car got stolen you simply turned up your nose at them and said it was their own fault and that they were an idiot for not buying a better alarm system.
I would have been happy as a... clam... if the way this went down was for me to simply find my log files full of warnings this morning.
Instead, SourceFire chose to willfully break people's mail configurations, causing a huge amount of stress for those of us who are mail system maintainers.
There's a fine line between stuff not working WELL because of negligence on my part, and a software provider deliberately breaking software, and my entire mail system, to punish me for not having the latest version.
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Sysadmin for an SMB here. We develop our own browser-based app in Flash/Flex that we use for a big part of our work. It's also computationally intensive, and I was often being asked how we could improve the performance of the application on the client-platform side. Sure, we have decent hardware, but we were developing for the standard Firefox build, and that meant 32-bit and the restrictions that go with it.
Eventually I convinced the development team that since they had moved the backend to 64-bit code, that the client runtime environment should be there too, and so we optimized the frontend for Chrome (which obviously, is 64-bit, with Flash built in). The speed increase wasn't phenomenal, but it WAS noticeable. Now I'm even more glad we made this change.
Yeah, I must admit to being a bit perturbed by the "definite" language used by that statement. Theories involving geophysical fission at the core of the Earth are intriguing, but they're just theories, and kind of on the fringes of the discipline. Saying "there exists" is scientifically kind of insulting.
I've never had any problem getting ISPs to set up PTR records for our static IP addresses on their networks. Checking for a PTR is definitely an essential part of my spam-fighting configuration.
Those interested in the particulars might also want to check out a recent Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi. Basically, the SEC feels that until an actual case is opened, it is not required to store files for "matters under investigation". Definitely worth a read.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817
Yeah, no doubt. For Intel to lecture about "open" technology is the pot calling the kettle black. They way they aggressively hold the x86 platform to their chest, a lawsuit always waiting to drop on AMD or NVidia if either company does something they don't like.
Open up the x86 platform to a few other chip makers, then we can talk about "open systems".
High-bandwidth users to throttle Verizon.
Hey now... I was in high school in the late 90s and our computer science class was centred around Turbo Pascal. I learned a lot writing Pascal programs, and for my final project my lab partner and I wrote a graphical RPG including an on-screen scrolling-text display we wrote from scratch. The year after I left, they switched to C++.
I know Javascript, BASIC, Pascal, a bit of Perl, but not any C. And while I feel that every CS student should come away knowing it, I'm also thankful to these other languages for teaching me the fundamentals of program logic.
Actually, a rail link between Asia and North America under the Bering Strait doesn't seem so inefficient anymore, does it?
Sorry crowdsource, but I am more inclined to trust the American Oxford Dictionary than the Wikipedia entry.
"bionic |biänik|
adjective
having artificial body parts, esp. electromechanical ones."
... and before stickler #2 gets to me, allow me to correct myself: "cybernetic organism", not "cybernetic".
Sorry to be the stickler, but someone needs to look at their dictionary. "Bionic" (a portmanteau of "bio" and "electronic") is a pretty much a synonym for cybernetic. This story is about biomimicry, not bionics.
Carry on. :-)
The workers' paradise!
So we can see the thought process here:
Developing Linux Kernel = Valuable
Getting Linux into users hands with convenient, easy-to-use installers, providing support, etc. = Not Valuable
To borrow one of Shuttleworth's analogies, a brain can't function without a body to house it.
Looks like "deploying the slide" will be a thing after all. Employers everywhere, beware!
Where did this allegation come from, really? Sweden's justice system ought to come clean and let us know what source precipated these charges. The timing is so incredibly suspicious, if government authorities really are using such incredibly dirty tricks to silence a whistleblower, then they need to be exposed. That's what Wikileaks is all about.
Parent is exactly right. The author's argument is based on the fallacy that "the free market will sort things out". In fact we all know that even competing corporations will refuse to do battle on certain turf, thus resulting in maladies such as price-fixing and/or a lack of competitive choice.
De-facto net neutrality has worked well enough for everyone up until now. Let's legislate and make sure it stays that way.
Pretty much. Nobody is forcing you people to use a Mac. If you don't like Apple products, don't use them. There's no need for OS crusades and spreading FUD.
So much for our magical universal file system.
Another case of cross-platform standards being ruined by a whiny patent abuser.
...and we all know how long it took the floppy drive to die, right?
A lot of differing opinions being tossed around here.
But, Slashdot, can we please stop accepting "fuck off" as acceptable debate discourse? And then cheerfully modding it up?
We're adults here, I think we can debate the pros and cons of this situation intellectually without resorting to hurling epithets at eachother.
Thank you in advance for not modding me "Troll" and "Offtopic".
Something that needs to be considered is the existence of so called "Filing Agents". I work for such a business.
Right now, the SEC requires companies to file documents in a specific subset of HTML, as well as (in some cases) XBRL, which is an XML-based reporting language. In some rare cases, documents are another type of XML, or even specially formatted ASCII documents (ugh).
Securities lawyers and company administrators don't want to understand the highly technical processes involved, so they outsource their technical reporting requirements to filing agents. We take care of all the nitpicky details that they don't want to consider. Looks like we'll have to learn Python as well. We've been meaning to graduate from Perl anyway, so no big deal. :-)
I accept e-mail, phonecalls, text messages, and Facebook.
Updating your support site does not count as "let me know".
Let me say one last thing to those of you telling the rest of us what lousy sysadmins we are.
This is no different than responding to some poor schmuck who had his system broken into and ransacked by mafia hackers by shaking your head and saying: "Well, it's his fault for not being proactive enough about security."
Maintaining systems is not an easy task, it's a multi-level approach combining security, usability, upgrades, and your budget. The question with security is always, "How paranoid am I going to be?" And you then have to balance usability, your time and the budget against how unlikely it will be that someone can figure out how (and be bothered) to crack your RSA certificate.
Likewise, I have to balance my time and budget against how important I feel certain components are. For an organization that has workstation AV and a lot of technology expansion demands this year, monitoring ClamAV was not at the top of my priority list.
So yeah, you can tell me this is my fault, but I doubt very much the last time someone told you that their car got stolen you simply turned up your nose at them and said it was their own fault and that they were an idiot for not buying a better alarm system.
Thank you.
I would have been happy as a ... clam... if the way this went down was for me to simply find my log files full of warnings this morning.
Instead, SourceFire chose to willfully break people's mail configurations, causing a huge amount of stress for those of us who are mail system maintainers.
There's a fine line between stuff not working WELL because of negligence on my part, and a software provider deliberately breaking software, and my entire mail system, to punish me for not having the latest version.