I'd say that the best and least expensive option is doing nothing.
Seriously, unless your line of business requires you to run heavy duty applications, there's no good reason that your 400 MHz machines won't do just fine.
Are you sure that "showing their age" is not merely a symptom that could easily be cured by either upgrading your network or adding some memory to those old systems?
On a personal basis, I've been seduced by the low costs and good performance of the recent hardware, but like many others, I found out that implementing a solution like that chews up far too much of my time. [I can't tell you how I hate to have learned that reseating memory modules sometimes makes a difference!] In the future, I'd rather go with an almost turnkey system made by a manufacturer with a reputation for reliability. My time is too expensive to do anything else.
Now you may have enough systems that you can recover your time investment: eg, you find out that the power supplies on those cheap cases go out and give weird symptoms that you learn to recognize. Time to fix problem first time: 2 days. Time to fix problem second time: 2 hours. Time to fix problem third and nth times: 20 minutes.
Shoot, if the systems you have are old and common, you might be able to pickup some backup reserves for parts or hot replacement systems for next to nothing.
It's too easy to err on the side of laissez faire on an issue that impacts the broader public like this.
The Dept of Commerce should have set down a few more guidelines to head off some of the criticism.
I think letting first claimants have priority, letting holders of related names have priority and people who pay money have priority are fine things, but not the only things.
Having a probationary period where potential names are publicly posted before they become more permanent would be helpful.
A Neustar website saying, for example, that an application for xenu.us was made tCoS on such and such a date for the amount of so many dollars and does anyone have a public comment on it would be helpful.
Of course, this is a bit exaggerated. If your using STL frequently, then you can just use a:
using namespace std;
I used to do that nice trick of cleaning up horrible punctuation until higher C++ gurus told me that using all of the std namespace would bloat my code unnecessarily.
Should I have argued with "Only import what you really need to use."?
About the only downside I've seen are old compilers bloating up the executable sizes if you use it a lot. I believe that's largely becoming an issue of the past, though.
There are really three kinds of internal vulnerabilities from employees.
First, the headline grabbing disgruntled hacker. Very dangerous, but they comprise only a very small part of many companies. I mean really, how many people in Big Co. really know what a DNS server is?
Second, and sometimes noted in the press, are the hordes of ingenues that Point `n Click their way past security policies in ways that would make your blood curdle. There are lots of such people in any organization, running Outlook, clicking on attachments, downloading something cool, etc.
Third, there are CIOs without Clues. They're making big decisions about deployments based on heat they get from upper management, who, frankly , are more likely to belong to the second class of vulnerabilities than to the first class of vulnerabilities. If their decisions are a little bit misguided (let's run IIS as a web server on our externally exposed machine!), then it can cause a fair amount of grief.
Unfortunately, all you're likely to hear about on the news is the first group.
I hope you understand that by "standard" I meant "most widely used and accepted format." I guess you can say that Pepsi or Coke are the "standard" by the same logic
Good analogy.
Reminds me of the good old days when Coca Cola had cocaine as one of it's ingredients, as if the sugar and caffeine were insufficiently addictive.
Heroin-ware is just painful to stop using, even if you curse it, pay a lot of money for it and all your friends are doing it.
I think OpenOffice could supplant Microsoft Office if it develops adequate import filters for all versions of MS Word and simultaneously develops a powerful, robust and flexible XML for its native format.
It would help, of course, if it were distributed for free on 30 million CDs...
The removable memory cards inside the devices could be used to bring in software that looks for vulnerabilities on a company's internal network. The innocent-looking devices could also be used to smuggle out confidential or sensitive information.
Which is why such personally owned recording devices of any kind are verboten on the LAN at many.gov sites.
It's a RPITA sometimes and sometime in the future I expect there will have to be some relenting as the price and ubiquity of personal recording (and communicating) devices continues to plunge.
That backhanded clarification is just what I needed!
"There is no truth to the rumours that Slashdot editors were denying that they were visited by authorities during a recent crackdown on child pornography on the internet."
Probably we can expect further helpful educational tidbits that properly conform to Political Advertisement 101 Guidelines for drive by association with bad company.
[Watch me go!]
"The misguided expenditure of taxpayer money to persecute an American success story has nothing whatsoever to do with the purchasing power of special interests such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle and AOL/TW that are envious of Microsoft's leadership position."
I think I left out Terrorism® and Working Families®, but otherwise it's pretty easy to write crap like this.
Carbohydrates are already rapidly gaining a bad reputation.
If you've read any of the low carb diet books (eg, Protein Power, Dr Atkins Diet) they can tell you all kinds of tales of hyperinsulinemia and many related ills coming from a high carb diet. Type II, adult onset diabetes is just the beginning.
Things like how archeologists can tell from excavated human bones if a society has made the transition from hunter/gatherer to agricultural based food sources by the fact that earlier bones are stronger (albeit fewer of them).
Also, that the early Egyptians, one of the first cultures to rely heavily upon bread, had many of the same problems of modern society with obesity, cardiovascular disease, tooth decay, etc.
How the problems of fat (particularly saturated fat) in the diet are exacerbated by a high carb diet and lessened in a low carb diet.
Not to mention that many traditional hunter/gatherer ethnic groups (such as Native Americans) are being decimated by diabetes. Where 150 years ago they ate buffalo meat, nuts and berries, now they eat a complete 7-11 based diet of spam, potato chips and soft drinks.
I tried the low carb diet ( about 50 grams/ day) for a while. It was quite effective in reducing body fat, but it was much harder to adhere to, much more than a traditional low fat diet, which allows you to find comfort in sugars and starches.
While I'm no longer on the stringent low carb diet, I still try to avoid the most egregious, high glycemic index carbs like sugar and starches, such as those in potatoes.
Dynamic folders or views of your email would be a Wonderful Thing.
I can't say how constraining it is to have statically defined folders which I have to move mail into based on my selection.
Procmail helps to do this dynamically based on simple criteria, but when you want to have a particular piece of email show up in multiple views without having multiple copies, it really calls for associating named "views" of the whole mess with specific search and sorting criteria.
That way, one view is "Latest Unread Messages" which has a particular message in it that might also show up in "Most Recent Messages about Project X" and in "Most Recent Messages from Boss".
I'd love to have my email client show multiple views this way.
Well, Code Red like exploits are still floating around looking for hosts.
They ought to be considered more like parasites than viruses. But I guess the analogies to biological organisms make for more sensational news.
If you were warned of the Ebola virus on one hand and the dangers of ghiardia in drinking water on the other hand, which would you get more excited about?
I can see the headlines now:
Experts Warn of Internet Parasites Sapping Hosts of Strength"
Well, unfortunately, some of the most visible charities spend a great fraction of received donations on administrative overhead, bulk mail solicitations, telemarketing, etc. News articles several years back had tales of some outfits spending as much as 90% of proceeds that way. The United Way suffered a black eye several years ago when its then-head William(?> Arimony was found to be giving himself a $400k annum salary for his efforts.
Those "charities" would probably not balk at ponying up $35K if they thought they could recoup the investment due to a nicer sounding web presence.
Related issue, though - whatever happened to alternative root DNS servers?
Is there anyway for them to become more influential, by way of more client PCs or ISPs allowing lookups from unofficial but hopefully somewhat reputable servers?
Can I have the keys to your house, car and your bank account numbers?
Don't assume that I give zero value to property rights just because in some cases I think other people overvalue them.
It would be just as wrong for me to assume that because you value property rights more than other poeple in some circumstances that therefore you give zero value to human rights.
If you really did give zero value to human rights, then I would gladly give you all those things on condition that you promised to become my slave and obey my every command.
It's nice, but maybe it could be extended even further.
I mean, I'm usually stuck with
XDISPLAY=myhost:0.0
and get the keyboard and mouse lumped together with the screen as local devices connected to one X server.
Perhaps there's something I'm missing about the flexibility of X, but in this day and age it seems like everything should be capable of being a networked device.
Can I, with X, set my keyboard to be one networked device, my mouse to be another networked device and the screen be another?
(As wireless networking takes off, this seems like it could be more useful than it sounds. A keyboard with its own IP address and port sounds a little bit silly.)
X windows - where your ideas of client and server get reversed.
In the old days we made a foray into the leading edge of technology - we bought X terminals, mostly from NCD, some from Tektronix.
They worked pretty good because the network worked well. It was generally pretty fast and reliable.
But not fast enough sometimes to get rid of latency from mouseclicks and keyboard events going to X applications running on the application server down the hall.
So we found that running the X server on the X terminal was made a better environment by also running the window manager on the X terminal. From there, it's only a small step to consider running a few more X applications on the X terminal. Basically, run everything locally where interactive response is of paramount importance, then those applications requiring huge resources like disk access, fast CPU's with lots of memory, down the hall.
Back in those days our application servers were equipped with less memory and less CPU than my current desktop PC. These days there hardly seems to be any excuse for not running X applications locally. For day-to-day graphics, a PC makes a killer good X terminal, plus a whole lot more.
I will admit that system administration for the diskless X terminals was easier than for fat client machines, in that all user profiles, applications, data, etc. sat on the big application servers.
I don't mean to digress too much from your initial question, but do suggest that you look carefully into improving interactive response and decreasing the network load by running as many applications as possible on the local desktops.
The court's verdict sounds as if it's too logical, properly considering the long term benefits and drawbacks to society from copyright.
I doubt we could expect anything so enlightened in the United States.
The "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clause in our Declaration of Independence was almost "life, liberty and property". Sentiment for the importance of "property" rights is strong. Probably slavery in the U.S. would have been abolished a lot sooner had abolition not directly confronted "property" rights of slaveowners.
That VoIP/POTS gateway seems to be what you're paying for, when you really get down to brass tacks.
I kind of wonder what the economics and politics are of getting such gateways in different localities. How much do they charge, and is it in line with real cost of the service?
In one way, providing the IP->POTS service could be new business line for many of the little mom n pop Internet Service Providers. All they'd have to do is to change some modems to call out instead of just waiting for incoming calls. The incoming calls could be destined for long distance service for voice input instead of just computers talking to computers.
So that begs the question: apart from issues of reliability, stability, do the Intel compilers make a Linux system perform better or worse than one built with gcc?
So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people.
Um, so Hilary, exactly what kind of personal investment was it that you were making in these CDs?
If you were talking about personal investment in music, I would have guessed it to be the artist.
AFAICT, the recording companies are middlemen, profiting handsomely for their efforts, which are pretty strongly targeted towards making money, one of the more impersonal activities I can imagine.
Label the large area outside the circle as "Microsoft". After all, most software Innovation® occurs in this area.
Then, label the inside of the circle "Everybody Else Developing Software".
If you look at the GPL from the standpoint of an individual user/developer in the world at large, ready to share and share alike, the GPL is more a "forced open" community.
If you're Craig Mundie, sitting inside Microsoft, looking for ways of developing products to increase the profits of Microsoft in the same way that's worked for almost 20 years for them, then the inside of the circle is "closed" to you by the GPL.
Of course, IMHO Craig has mislabeled the regions on the inside and outside of the circle...
That sounds like an outdated currency to me, kind of like shillings, farthings, and halfpennies!
Living in the US, saddled as we are with the onerous legacy of what used to be the British system of measurements (miles, feet, gallons, pints, pounds, furlongs per fortnight, other nondecimal abominations), I think it is only fitting and fair that the UK be dragged kicking and screaming into using the new &euro and giving up the dear £.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that the best and least expensive option is doing nothing.
Seriously, unless your line of business requires you to run heavy duty applications, there's no good reason that your 400 MHz machines won't do just fine.
Are you sure that "showing their age" is not merely a symptom that could easily be cured by either upgrading your network or adding some memory to those old systems?
On a personal basis, I've been seduced by the low costs and good performance of the recent hardware, but like many others, I found out that implementing a solution like that chews up far too much of my time. [I can't tell you how I hate to have learned that reseating memory modules sometimes makes a difference!] In the future, I'd rather go with an almost turnkey system made by a manufacturer with a reputation for reliability. My time is too expensive to do anything else.
Now you may have enough systems that you can recover your time investment: eg, you find out that the power supplies on those cheap cases go out and give weird symptoms that you learn to recognize. Time to fix problem first time: 2 days. Time to fix problem second time: 2 hours. Time to fix problem third and nth times: 20 minutes.
Shoot, if the systems you have are old and common, you might be able to pickup some backup reserves for parts or hot replacement systems for next to nothing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It's too easy to err on the side of laissez faire on an issue that impacts the broader public like this.
The Dept of Commerce should have set down a few more guidelines to head off some of the criticism.
I think letting first claimants have priority, letting holders of related names have priority and people who pay money have priority are fine things, but not the only things.
Having a probationary period where potential names are publicly posted before they become more permanent would be helpful.
A Neustar website saying, for example, that an application for xenu.us was made tCoS on such and such a date for the amount of so many dollars and does anyone have a public comment on it would be helpful.
Thereafter, forever hold thy peace.
Of course, this is a bit exaggerated. If your using STL frequently, then you can just use a:
using namespace std;
I used to do that nice trick of cleaning up horrible punctuation until higher C++ gurus told me that using all of the std namespace would bloat my code unnecessarily.
Should I have argued with "Only import what you really need to use."?
I think STL is great.
About the only downside I've seen are old compilers bloating up the executable sizes if you use it a lot. I believe that's largely becoming an issue of the past, though.
There are really three kinds of internal vulnerabilities from employees.
First, the headline grabbing disgruntled hacker. Very dangerous, but they comprise only a very small part of many companies. I mean really, how many people in Big Co. really know what a DNS server is?
Second, and sometimes noted in the press, are the hordes of ingenues that Point `n Click their way past security policies in ways that would make your blood curdle. There are lots of such people in any organization, running Outlook, clicking on attachments, downloading something cool, etc.
Third, there are CIOs without Clues. They're making big decisions about deployments based on heat they get from upper management, who, frankly , are more likely to belong to the second class of vulnerabilities than to the first class of vulnerabilities. If their decisions are a little bit misguided (let's run IIS as a web server on our externally exposed machine!), then it can cause a fair amount of grief.
Unfortunately, all you're likely to hear about on the news is the first group.
I hope you understand that by "standard" I meant "most widely used and accepted format." I guess you can say that Pepsi or Coke are the "standard" by the same logic
Good analogy.
Reminds me of the good old days when Coca Cola had cocaine as one of it's ingredients, as if the sugar and caffeine were insufficiently addictive.
Heroin-ware is just painful to stop using, even if you curse it, pay a lot of money for it and all your friends are doing it.
I think OpenOffice could supplant Microsoft Office if it develops adequate import filters for all versions of MS Word and simultaneously develops a powerful, robust and flexible XML for its native format.
It would help, of course, if it were distributed for free on 30 million CDs...
The removable memory cards inside the devices could be used to bring in software that looks for vulnerabilities on a company's internal network. The innocent-looking devices could also be used to smuggle out confidential or sensitive information.
Which is why such personally owned recording devices of any kind are verboten on the LAN at many .gov sites.
It's a RPITA sometimes and sometime in the future I expect there will have to be some relenting as the price and ubiquity of personal recording (and communicating) devices continues to plunge.
That backhanded clarification is just what I needed!
"There is no truth to the rumours that Slashdot editors were denying that they were visited by authorities during a recent crackdown on child pornography on the internet."
Probably we can expect further helpful educational tidbits that properly conform to Political Advertisement 101 Guidelines for drive by association with bad company.
[Watch me go!]
I think I left out Terrorism® and Working Families®, but otherwise it's pretty easy to write crap like this.Given how well AMD designed and executed the K7 (Athlon) my expectations are to see some seriously good performance for their follow-on chip.
But, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Intel's IA-64 is evidence of that.
Does anyone have any idea how fast the K8 will be in real life?
Everywhere I've looked I haven't seen any performance numbers for the Hammer. How does it compare to say, the Power4?
Carbohydrates are already rapidly gaining a bad reputation.
If you've read any of the low carb diet books (eg, Protein Power, Dr Atkins Diet) they can tell you all kinds of tales of hyperinsulinemia and many related ills coming from a high carb diet. Type II, adult onset diabetes is just the beginning.
Things like how archeologists can tell from excavated human bones if a society has made the transition from hunter/gatherer to agricultural based food sources by the fact that earlier bones are stronger (albeit fewer of them).
Also, that the early Egyptians, one of the first cultures to rely heavily upon bread, had many of the same problems of modern society with obesity, cardiovascular disease, tooth decay, etc.
How the problems of fat (particularly saturated fat) in the diet are exacerbated by a high carb diet and lessened in a low carb diet.
Not to mention that many traditional hunter/gatherer ethnic groups (such as Native Americans) are being decimated by diabetes. Where 150 years ago they ate buffalo meat, nuts and berries, now they eat a complete 7-11 based diet of spam, potato chips and soft drinks.
I tried the low carb diet ( about 50 grams/ day) for a while. It was quite effective in reducing body fat, but it was much harder to adhere to, much more than a traditional low fat diet, which allows you to find comfort in sugars and starches.
While I'm no longer on the stringent low carb diet, I still try to avoid the most egregious, high glycemic index carbs like sugar and starches, such as those in potatoes.
Dynamic folders or views of your email would be a Wonderful Thing.
I can't say how constraining it is to have statically defined folders which I have to move mail into based on my selection.
Procmail helps to do this dynamically based on simple criteria, but when you want to have a particular piece of email show up in multiple views without having multiple copies, it really calls for associating named "views" of the whole mess with specific search and sorting criteria.
That way, one view is "Latest Unread Messages" which has a particular message in it that might also show up in "Most Recent Messages about Project X" and in "Most Recent Messages from Boss".
I'd love to have my email client show multiple views this way.
Well, Code Red like exploits are still floating around looking for hosts.
They ought to be considered more like parasites than viruses. But I guess the analogies to biological organisms make for more sensational news.
If you were warned of the Ebola virus on one hand and the dangers of ghiardia in drinking water on the other hand, which would you get more excited about?
I can see the headlines now:
Well, unfortunately, some of the most visible charities spend a great fraction of received donations on administrative overhead, bulk mail solicitations, telemarketing, etc. News articles several years back had tales of some outfits spending as much as 90% of proceeds that way. The United Way suffered a black eye several years ago when its then-head William(?> Arimony was found to be giving himself a $400k annum salary for his efforts.
Those "charities" would probably not balk at ponying up $35K if they thought they could recoup the investment due to a nicer sounding web presence.
Related issue, though - whatever happened to alternative root DNS servers?
Is there anyway for them to become more influential, by way of more client PCs or ISPs allowing lookups from unofficial but hopefully somewhat reputable servers?
but then you're assuming that he values honesty and trustworthiness
Gosh, you're right.
I better given someone else's car keys and bank account numbers, just in case:)
Sounds like a really good idea.
But there are two sides to an interface: the driver and the OS.
How well can UDI cope with the ferment that is the Linux kernel: things changing to make them faster, cleaner, etc.
Can I have the keys to your house, car and your bank account numbers?
Don't assume that I give zero value to property rights just because in some cases I think other people overvalue them.
It would be just as wrong for me to assume that because you value property rights more than other poeple in some circumstances that therefore you give zero value to human rights.
If you really did give zero value to human rights, then I would gladly give you all those things on condition that you promised to become my slave and obey my every command.
network transparency
It's nice, but maybe it could be extended even further.
I mean, I'm usually stuck with
and get the keyboard and mouse lumped together with the screen as local devices connected to one X server.Perhaps there's something I'm missing about the flexibility of X, but in this day and age it seems like everything should be capable of being a networked device.
Can I, with X, set my keyboard to be one networked device, my mouse to be another networked device and the screen be another?
(As wireless networking takes off, this seems like it could be more useful than it sounds. A keyboard with its own IP address and port sounds a little bit silly.)
X windows - where your ideas of client and server get reversed.
In the old days we made a foray into the leading edge of technology - we bought X terminals, mostly from NCD, some from Tektronix.
They worked pretty good because the network worked well. It was generally pretty fast and reliable.
But not fast enough sometimes to get rid of latency from mouseclicks and keyboard events going to X applications running on the application server down the hall.
So we found that running the X server on the X terminal was made a better environment by also running the window manager on the X terminal. From there, it's only a small step to consider running a few more X applications on the X terminal. Basically, run everything locally where interactive response is of paramount importance, then those applications requiring huge resources like disk access, fast CPU's with lots of memory, down the hall.
Back in those days our application servers were equipped with less memory and less CPU than my current desktop PC. These days there hardly seems to be any excuse for not running X applications locally. For day-to-day graphics, a PC makes a killer good X terminal, plus a whole lot more.
I will admit that system administration for the diskless X terminals was easier than for fat client machines, in that all user profiles, applications, data, etc. sat on the big application servers.
I don't mean to digress too much from your initial question, but do suggest that you look carefully into improving interactive response and decreasing the network load by running as many applications as possible on the local desktops.
The court's verdict sounds as if it's too logical, properly considering the long term benefits and drawbacks to society from copyright.
I doubt we could expect anything so enlightened in the United States.
The "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" clause in our Declaration of Independence was almost "life, liberty and property". Sentiment for the importance of "property" rights is strong. Probably slavery in the U.S. would have been abolished a lot sooner had abolition not directly confronted "property" rights of slaveowners.
That VoIP/POTS gateway seems to be what you're paying for, when you really get down to brass tacks.
I kind of wonder what the economics and politics are of getting such gateways in different localities. How much do they charge, and is it in line with real cost of the service?
In one way, providing the IP->POTS service could be new business line for many of the little mom n pop Internet Service Providers. All they'd have to do is to change some modems to call out instead of just waiting for incoming calls. The incoming calls could be destined for long distance service for voice input instead of just computers talking to computers.
So that begs the question: apart from issues of reliability, stability, do the Intel compilers make a Linux system perform better or worse than one built with gcc?
I'd like to help out so that they continue to have a chance to make some better Episodes.
Maybe they could unload some of the many Jar Jar dolls in sporting goods stores interested in diversifying their range of marksmanship targets?
So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people.
Um, so Hilary, exactly what kind of personal investment was it that you were making in these CDs?
If you were talking about personal investment in music, I would have guessed it to be the artist.
AFAICT, the recording companies are middlemen, profiting handsomely for their efforts, which are pretty strongly targeted towards making money, one of the more impersonal activities I can imagine.
Draw a circle on the white board.
Label the large area outside the circle as "Microsoft". After all, most software Innovation® occurs in this area.
Then, label the inside of the circle "Everybody Else Developing Software".
If you look at the GPL from the standpoint of an individual user/developer in the world at large, ready to share and share alike, the GPL is more a "forced open" community.
If you're Craig Mundie, sitting inside Microsoft, looking for ways of developing products to increase the profits of Microsoft in the same way that's worked for almost 20 years for them, then the inside of the circle is "closed" to you by the GPL.
Of course, IMHO Craig has mislabeled the regions on the inside and outside of the circle...
That sounds like an outdated currency to me, kind of like shillings, farthings, and halfpennies!
Living in the US, saddled as we are with the onerous legacy of what used to be the British system of measurements (miles, feet, gallons, pints, pounds, furlongs per fortnight, other nondecimal abominations), I think it is only fitting and fair that the UK be dragged kicking and screaming into using the new &euro and giving up the dear £.