How could a milk 'monopoly' keep me out of the business and/or tell me what rates I will charge when I get into business?
They could prohibit any stores from carrying your milk. If any stores disobey, they can stop selling to them. No store will want to lose the main milk provider, with a proven track record and probably a broad product line, in exchange for some start-up.
This is how monopolies usually work. They leverage their market power to exclude competitors.
Both the article and the writeup wonder how "tiny macedonia" could be a big enough problem to blacklist. Surely Russia and Israel have more scams?
What they're missing is that it's probably the ratio of fraudulent order volume to total order volume. It seems that the blacklisters are accusing Macedonia of too high a ratio of fraud.
These complainers are failing to see the merchant's viewpoint. Fraud can really bite into profits. If I were starting an e-commerce business, I wouldn't ship to any questionable countries. Sorry to hurt anyone's feelings, but it doesn't make business sense.
Sound like Macedonia needs to start catching and prosecuting the fraudsters, then publicize this fact to the e-commerce merchants.
Sorry, I can't remember. It took me a weekend to figure it out, and it may have changed since then.
I think you modprobe the framebuffer module, then use fbset(8) to go into framebuffer mode. I think you need an/etc/fb.modes that's right for your video card.
Interesting stuff. Have you read Bamford's Body of Secrets? He devotes many pages to the destruction of the Liberty by Israeli jets, and tries to connect this with the overall Israeli strategy.
Re:Why not?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think I'm in general agreement with you, but there's one problem.
...encouraging US style policies and government... will lead to increased prosperity...
I'm not sure there is such a thing as US style policies. The phrase seems to imply that the US wants to (and can) create the same kind of government abroad that we have at home. It may have been true around WWII. I think that today the US leaders are keenly aware that the most advantageous thing for the US is to disrupt a country's economy so it becomes deeply dependent on the US. Create poverty, because that creates cheap workers. We send subsidized agricultural products to the third world, which kills the rural economy, which sends economic refugees to work in factories, which gives us cheap imports.
A democratic, strong country that accumulates capital and crafts its own trade policies is a threat to the US. A helpless, chaotic country that sells all its resources to multinationals at cheap prices and lets multinationals drain off all its hard currency with tricks like foreign-owned utilities is an asset to the US.
I'm afraid the US track record shows a desire to prevent any new US-like countries from emerging. There are other, more worthy desires there - but don't ignore this one.
First, most GUI apps annoy me visually. They bring their own ideas of colors and fonts, usually white background and Microsoft-like look, and if I want to change them I have to figure out how they're configured. I've already wrestled xterm and rxvt into submission, so everything else should run inside those, where the colors and fonts will be harmonious. For what it's worth, during the day I use light colored, randomly selected background and black text, with Jim Knoble's neep-14 font. In the evening I sometimes use black-background terminals with a different color mapping via XResources.
Gaim doesn't support the readline keystrokes, which I'm very accustomed to using. Especially ^u to kill the line I started typing. Almost everything else I use does.
Gaim has lots of cute icons, menus and other space-wasters which I don't use and don't have time to learn how to shut off. Icons irritate me. Pixels are precious.
GUI apps seem to always have something broken in the interface. I'm looking at Gaim right now and there's overlapping text in the lower right corner - it's some kind of button, illegible.
I use Gaim despite all this because it works, and last time I investigated console-mode AIM clients I ran out of time before finding one as reliable as Gaim.
Have you tried framebuffer mode? Loading different fonts (like the Sun console font) can make the console a pretty cool, unique experience. Lots of rows and columns there. Some cards support it better than others. Console mode doesn't have to be ugly.
You can deploy thousands of workstations and give the users great freedom to customize their environment, while keeping stability, security, and fast, controlled rollouts of new software. I've seen it done with Suns, and there's no reason it can't be done with Linux. If your vision of Unix is DEC terminals connected to a VAX, things have changed a bit since then.
But you know what? You can actually have diskless PCs acting as X terminals and still deliver most of the freedom users expect from a modern PC. The physical architecture and the administrative policies are not necessarily linked.
By choosing a generic word as the OS name, they've made it harder to search for info about the OS. Try searching for "linux word processor" vs. "haiku word processor."
Actually, it wasn't management. It was a "Senior Technical Architect" type who has been carefully flattered and cultivated by Microsoft. He was apparently responsible for the worst decisions on that project, and has now moved on to blight some future project while others pick up the pieces on the last one.
I'm not sure why I said the programmers "chose" the mess - assigning collective responsibility, I guess, unfairly.
Management seems to be pretty agnostic about platforms, although some products have to run on Windows so they can be sold as packaged software. I'm not sure if the Disastrous Server Product had to be Windows for market reasons (which does not imply using Microsoft's latest shiny toys) or if that choice came from the "Architect".
I agree that there is no silver bullet. Given the right tools, these people may well have screwed up anyway. But over the last several years I have helped develop some big systems that are very comparable to this payment system. The preferred platform narrows down to Perl, Oracle, and Linux/FreeBSD. And yes, trendy though it may be, XML for data transport, because it is unambiguous and human readable, which greatly facilitates testing and troubleshooting. There are similar technologies that are 95% as good, but those are the sweet spot. If I were forced to use Windows for these applications, I might well be in as much trouble as these power utility employees, because Windows brings in too much complexity to understand, in my opinion.
Like you, I am opposed to shiny new unproven technologies. Another group in my company recently built a similar system (embedded clients talking to a central server.) They used some new, unproven Microsoft technologies on the server. The server is now buggy and unreliable, and the programmers are at a loss. The toolkit they chose to use does not appear to have enough diagnostic and logging capabilities to isolate the problems. You can blame the programmers, but I consider them fairly capable. I think they were doomed to a bad result by the bad platform that was forced upon them.
To me, the most fundamental issue is that in order to take responsibility for delivering a good product on time, you must control all the factors and not abdicate control. Each pre-written piece of software brings additional risks - the risks are amplified if the piece is closed-source, and amplified again if the piece is unproven. These risks have to balanced against potential reward - usually the reward of adopting the library/toolkit/whatever is smaller than it appears.
Yes, he means something like that, but not in an article about a worm; rather in a "TCO Study". When the context is TCO comparison, the study never seems to mention Microsoft's burden of malware. In case you're not familiar with these "studies", Microsoft periodically pays outside consultants to write these papers "proving" that Linux has much higher TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership.
Did anyone else read to the end where the employees discuss "lessons learned"? Really encapsulates whats wrong with IT. First, nobody says the obvious, that they shouldn't have used Windows for a dedicated, distriubted application. I guess at least someone must have thought that, and was afraid to speak up. There are hints in the article of an upper manager beating his chest and making the peons shake.
Second, they vow to not let contractor notebooks on their network without a thorough security vetting. Great, more IT-fascism, and totally impractical. IT needs to support the organization's business objectives, not obstruct them. If you have an attorney who bills $400/hour coming in to meet with the Chief Counsel, and he's got one hour before he has to drive to the airport, who is going to hold him up and scan his notebook? What if you screw it up in the process? There are lots of more practical solutions to this problem, once you accept the basic fact that IT is not an end in itself but just a business enabler.
Also, did you notice how Windows' overly complicated permission system caused a disaster? The machines were locked down to prevent tampering, which prevented the patch scripts from running. In the end, they had to send people out to each location to fix the machines. I've never had this problem with Unix, because Unix permissions are simple and logical; therefore a sysadmin can easily understand the implications of any permission setting.
I particularly liked the phrase (quoting from memory) "one of the policy admins". One? Not only do they seem to have a full time employee maintaining these tragic "policies", but they have a team? And still caused a train wreck? Windows is close to being a job-creation program for mediocre technical types.
I'm not sure why people think "hardware firewalls" are better. Experience shows that they are often shipped with huge gaping holes. One of them had a root password of "uclinux". Most of them probably have a static root password that's the same on every unit.
If you want a cheap, trustworthy firewall put a free Unix on a cheap PC and configure it per the community's advice.
I disagree that this problem is an inevitable result of growth by accretion. AutoCAD grew the same way and didn't have the problem. The difference is that AutoCAD allows the user better visibility and control of the internal entities (lines, arcs, etc..) than Word does of its entities(presumably paragraphs, keeps, figures...).
Building a very opaque app that manipulates a complex database may be "user friendly" but it's a recipe for disaster. When you look at a word document on the screen it's hard to know what the underlying representation is.
That's cool - I've thought a lot about doing that. How will you build the body? It's tough to design something that will resist pressure but can be opened up completely for access. I had some ideas of using PVC pipe for the pressure hull and building a much lighter hydrodynamic envelope around it. The ballast tanks would live in the annular space between.
Possibly the whole inside can be a chassis that slides out one end - but that makes it hard to connect sensor and actuators.
That's really perceptive. But I wonder if the bull's blindness is partly intentional. Our leaders like to have an insidious, terrible threat that justifies national paranoia. Actually, I guess all leaders like that. It seems like Osama and Bush are partners in a way - they both want Osama to be famous, they both want everyone to live in fear of terrorist attacks. They feed off each other.
SCO's been saying that Linux is so powerful and advanced that it destroyed the market for Unix. Those who understand the situation realize that when SCO says "Unix" they mean their own pathetic products - most IT professionals would think of Solaris, HPUX and AIX. And Linux is not really ready to displace those at the high end.
But to the general public/financial community SCO has sent a loud and clear message that Linux has crushed Unix. It almost makes me wonder if IBM arranged the whole thing.
Too bad they screwed it up. The Titan missiles (you can visit one in Green Valley AZ) had a combination that was evaluated by the launch valve inside the missile. The airman would enter the code with thumbwheel switches on a rack-mount box in the underground control room. That box had cables running through a tunnel to the silo, where they connected to the missile and ultimately the valve assembly.
If the wrong code was entered three times, the valve assembly would mechanically destroy itself so the missile could never be launched. At least, it would need major repairs.
He's a repeat offender who has probably caused harm to millions of people with his spamming. He has probably committed hundreds of crimes for which he'll never be caught. He should be in prison for life. As it is, we get a few years before he starts victimizing us again.
It takes work to catch these guys. Why would law enforcement agencies work hard to catch these people if the end result is community service?
Because spammers are causing a serious worldwide problem, and because they are hard to catch, they should receive exemplary sentences that make headlines around the world. If you have to let someone out of prison due to overcrowding, let out pot smokers or pot dealers. Or just move some parole eligibility dates forward. It would be more just to release people who have already served most of their sentence than to give this guy a free ride.
And forget about him undoing harm. As a professional fraudster, he is not trustworthy. I don't think his victims want him anywhere near their credit card info or accounts, even if he's claiming to help.
I hope that's true. It may well be, however, that the FBI will go after the spammers with the most criminality rather than the most spam. The guy stealing credit card numbers, shipping phony medicines, etc. I hope you're right.
Could you write a "microkernel" that becomes a macrokernel if compiled with certain parameters? Message passing would be done via a macro which can become simply a function call.
Then kernel developers can run the "micro" version and have the freedom to easily hack parts while the system is running. But production machines could run the "macro" version.
If you haven't, I recommend reading Our Guys a book about a similar situation. Rape, I mean, not unauthorized notebook borrowing.
The author makes a good case for the complicity of the school authorities in the rape by their prior encouragement of bad behavior in the ruling clique of athletes.
Hmm, yes. The really bright programmers are living in their parents'basement and working for IBM for free. The dumb ones are getting paid a pile of money to code up forms and reports in fancy code-generation tools, then clocking off at 5 and enjoying themselves.
There are some bright programmers working for free. But I'd say that bright programmers are generally working on device drivers, embedded systems, game engines, file systems, search engines, compilers, and similar things. Stuff that pushes the envelope.
The comment about "a pile of money" is sad. People who think they're making a pile of money generally aren't. At any rate, the ability to live well, manage one's time and enjoy oneself is not positively correlated with intelligence. In fact, it may be negatively correlated. In other words, knowing how to get off work at 5 may not help you to write a fast, scalable, fault-resilient distributed datastore.
Once you've been around the block a few times, you'll drop your tech-snobbery and just choose the right tool for the job.
This isn't snobbery; quite the reverse. I'm quite happy with Oracle/Sun/EMC if someone else is paying. I spend a lot of time working with Oracle.
But would you dig into your savings and buy that stuff if you were starting an internet company? If you want to choose the right tool for the job, you should start by knowing the tradeoffs of the various tools available.
As I understand, there is no console management. And broken machines are never fixed or replaced - the system re-replicates the data that was (redundantly) stored on that node.
Of course I could be wrong - I'm basing this on the few glimpses Google has allowed of their operation in the past.
I don't think these PC's cost $3159. More like $500. They are just cheap PC's with two disks, either in a 1RU case or naked on a plate - Google has used both packaging techniques.
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They could prohibit any stores from carrying your milk. If any stores disobey, they can stop selling to them. No store will want to lose the main milk provider, with a proven track record and probably a broad product line, in exchange for some start-up.
This is how monopolies usually work. They leverage their market power to exclude competitors.
Both the article and the writeup wonder how "tiny macedonia" could be a big enough problem to blacklist. Surely Russia and Israel have more scams?
What they're missing is that it's probably the ratio of fraudulent order volume to total order volume. It seems that the blacklisters are accusing Macedonia of too high a ratio of fraud.
These complainers are failing to see the merchant's viewpoint. Fraud can really bite into profits. If I were starting an e-commerce business, I wouldn't ship to any questionable countries. Sorry to hurt anyone's feelings, but it doesn't make business sense.
Sound like Macedonia needs to start catching and prosecuting the fraudsters, then publicize this fact to the e-commerce merchants.
Sorry, I can't remember. It took me a weekend to figure it out, and it may have changed since then.
/etc/fb.modes that's right for your video card.
I think you modprobe the framebuffer module, then use fbset(8) to go into framebuffer mode. I think you need an
Interesting stuff. Have you read Bamford's Body of Secrets? He devotes many pages to the destruction of the Liberty by Israeli jets, and tries to connect this with the overall Israeli strategy.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as US style policies. The phrase seems to imply that the US wants to (and can) create the same kind of government abroad that we have at home. It may have been true around WWII. I think that today the US leaders are keenly aware that the most advantageous thing for the US is to disrupt a country's economy so it becomes deeply dependent on the US. Create poverty, because that creates cheap workers. We send subsidized agricultural products to the third world, which kills the rural economy, which sends economic refugees to work in factories, which gives us cheap imports.
A democratic, strong country that accumulates capital and crafts its own trade policies is a threat to the US. A helpless, chaotic country that sells all its resources to multinationals at cheap prices and lets multinationals drain off all its hard currency with tricks like foreign-owned utilities is an asset to the US.
I'm afraid the US track record shows a desire to prevent any new US-like countries from emerging. There are other, more worthy desires there - but don't ignore this one.
First, most GUI apps annoy me visually. They bring their own ideas of colors and fonts, usually white background and Microsoft-like look, and if I want to change them I have to figure out how they're configured. I've already wrestled xterm and rxvt into submission, so everything else should run inside those, where the colors and fonts will be harmonious. For what it's worth, during the day I use light colored, randomly selected background and black text, with Jim Knoble's neep-14 font. In the evening I sometimes use black-background terminals with a different color mapping via XResources.
Gaim doesn't support the readline keystrokes, which I'm very accustomed to using. Especially ^u to kill the line I started typing. Almost everything else I use does.
Gaim has lots of cute icons, menus and other space-wasters which I don't use and don't have time to learn how to shut off. Icons irritate me. Pixels are precious.
GUI apps seem to always have something broken in the interface. I'm looking at Gaim right now and there's overlapping text in the lower right corner - it's some kind of button, illegible.
I use Gaim despite all this because it works, and last time I investigated console-mode AIM clients I ran out of time before finding one as reliable as Gaim.
Have you tried framebuffer mode? Loading different fonts (like the Sun console font) can make the console a pretty cool, unique experience. Lots of rows and columns there. Some cards support it better than others. Console mode doesn't have to be ugly.
You can deploy thousands of workstations and give the users great freedom to customize their environment, while keeping stability, security, and fast, controlled rollouts of new software. I've seen it done with Suns, and there's no reason it can't be done with Linux. If your vision of Unix is DEC terminals connected to a VAX, things have changed a bit since then.
But you know what? You can actually have diskless PCs acting as X terminals and still deliver most of the freedom users expect from a modern PC. The physical architecture and the administrative policies are not necessarily linked.
By choosing a generic word as the OS name, they've made it harder to search for info about the OS. Try searching for "linux word processor" vs. "haiku word processor."
Actually, it wasn't management. It was a "Senior Technical Architect" type who has been carefully flattered and cultivated by Microsoft. He was apparently responsible for the worst decisions on that project, and has now moved on to blight some future project while others pick up the pieces on the last one.
I'm not sure why I said the programmers "chose" the mess - assigning collective responsibility, I guess, unfairly.
Management seems to be pretty agnostic about platforms, although some products have to run on Windows so they can be sold as packaged software. I'm not sure if the Disastrous Server Product had to be Windows for market reasons (which does not imply using Microsoft's latest shiny toys) or if that choice came from the "Architect".
I agree that there is no silver bullet. Given the right tools, these people may well have screwed up anyway. But over the last several years I have helped develop some big systems that are very comparable to this payment system. The preferred platform narrows down to Perl, Oracle, and Linux/FreeBSD. And yes, trendy though it may be, XML for data transport, because it is unambiguous and human readable, which greatly facilitates testing and troubleshooting. There are similar technologies that are 95% as good, but those are the sweet spot. If I were forced to use Windows for these applications, I might well be in as much trouble as these power utility employees, because Windows brings in too much complexity to understand, in my opinion.
Like you, I am opposed to shiny new unproven technologies. Another group in my company recently built a similar system (embedded clients talking to a central server.) They used some new, unproven Microsoft technologies on the server. The server is now buggy and unreliable, and the programmers are at a loss. The toolkit they chose to use does not appear to have enough diagnostic and logging capabilities to isolate the problems. You can blame the programmers, but I consider them fairly capable. I think they were doomed to a bad result by the bad platform that was forced upon them.
To me, the most fundamental issue is that in order to take responsibility for delivering a good product on time, you must control all the factors and not abdicate control. Each pre-written piece of software brings additional risks - the risks are amplified if the piece is closed-source, and amplified again if the piece is unproven. These risks have to balanced against potential reward - usually the reward of adopting the library/toolkit/whatever is smaller than it appears.
Yes, he means something like that, but not in an article about a worm; rather in a "TCO Study". When the context is TCO comparison, the study never seems to mention Microsoft's burden of malware. In case you're not familiar with these "studies", Microsoft periodically pays outside consultants to write these papers "proving" that Linux has much higher TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership.
Did anyone else read to the end where the employees discuss "lessons learned"? Really encapsulates whats wrong with IT. First, nobody says the obvious, that they shouldn't have used Windows for a dedicated, distriubted application. I guess at least someone must have thought that, and was afraid to speak up. There are hints in the article of an upper manager beating his chest and making the peons shake.
Second, they vow to not let contractor notebooks on their network without a thorough security vetting. Great, more IT-fascism, and totally impractical. IT needs to support the organization's business objectives, not obstruct them. If you have an attorney who bills $400/hour coming in to meet with the Chief Counsel, and he's got one hour before he has to drive to the airport, who is going to hold him up and scan his notebook? What if you screw it up in the process? There are lots of more practical solutions to this problem, once you accept the basic fact that IT is not an end in itself but just a business enabler.
Also, did you notice how Windows' overly complicated permission system caused a disaster? The machines were locked down to prevent tampering, which prevented the patch scripts from running. In the end, they had to send people out to each location to fix the machines. I've never had this problem with Unix, because Unix permissions are simple and logical; therefore a sysadmin can easily understand the implications of any permission setting.
I particularly liked the phrase (quoting from memory) "one of the policy admins". One? Not only do they seem to have a full time employee maintaining these tragic "policies", but they have a team? And still caused a train wreck? Windows is close to being a job-creation program for mediocre technical types.
I'm not sure why people think "hardware firewalls" are better. Experience shows that they are often shipped with huge gaping holes. One of them had a root password of "uclinux". Most of them probably have a static root password that's the same on every unit.
If you want a cheap, trustworthy firewall put a free Unix on a cheap PC and configure it per the community's advice.
I disagree that this problem is an inevitable result of growth by accretion. AutoCAD grew the same way and didn't have the problem. The difference is that AutoCAD allows the user better visibility and control of the internal entities (lines, arcs, etc..) than Word does of its entities(presumably paragraphs, keeps, figures ...).
Building a very opaque app that manipulates a complex database may be "user friendly" but it's a recipe for disaster. When you look at a word document on the screen it's hard to know what the underlying representation is.
That's cool - I've thought a lot about doing that. How will you build the body? It's tough to design something that will resist pressure but can be opened up completely for access. I had some ideas of using PVC pipe for the pressure hull and building a much lighter hydrodynamic envelope around it. The ballast tanks would live in the annular space between.
Possibly the whole inside can be a chassis that slides out one end - but that makes it hard to connect sensor and actuators.
That's really perceptive. But I wonder if the bull's blindness is partly intentional. Our leaders like to have an insidious, terrible threat that justifies national paranoia. Actually, I guess all leaders like that. It seems like Osama and Bush are partners in a way - they both want Osama to be famous, they both want everyone to live in fear of terrorist attacks. They feed off each other.
SCO's been saying that Linux is so powerful and advanced that it destroyed the market for Unix. Those who understand the situation realize that when SCO says "Unix" they mean their own pathetic products - most IT professionals would think of Solaris, HPUX and AIX. And Linux is not really ready to displace those at the high end.
But to the general public/financial community SCO has sent a loud and clear message that Linux has crushed Unix. It almost makes me wonder if IBM arranged the whole thing.
Too bad they screwed it up. The Titan missiles (you can visit one in Green Valley AZ) had a combination that was evaluated by the launch valve inside the missile. The airman would enter the code with thumbwheel switches on a rack-mount box in the underground control room. That box had cables running through a tunnel to the silo, where they connected to the missile and ultimately the valve assembly.
If the wrong code was entered three times, the valve assembly would mechanically destroy itself so the missile could never be launched. At least, it would need major repairs.
I wonder if the Titan codes were also all 0s.
He's a repeat offender who has probably caused harm to millions of people with his spamming. He has probably committed hundreds of crimes for which he'll never be caught. He should be in prison for life. As it is, we get a few years before he starts victimizing us again.
It takes work to catch these guys. Why would law enforcement agencies work hard to catch these people if the end result is community service?
Because spammers are causing a serious worldwide problem, and because they are hard to catch, they should receive exemplary sentences that make headlines around the world. If you have to let someone out of prison due to overcrowding, let out pot smokers or pot dealers. Or just move some parole eligibility dates forward. It would be more just to release people who have already served most of their sentence than to give this guy a free ride.
And forget about him undoing harm. As a professional fraudster, he is not trustworthy. I don't think his victims want him anywhere near their credit card info or accounts, even if he's claiming to help.
I hope that's true. It may well be, however, that the FBI will go after the spammers with the most criminality rather than the most spam. The guy stealing credit card numbers, shipping phony medicines, etc. I hope you're right.
Could you write a "microkernel" that becomes a macrokernel if compiled with certain parameters? Message passing would be done via a macro which can become simply a function call.
Then kernel developers can run the "micro" version and have the freedom to easily hack parts while the system is running. But production machines could run the "macro" version.
If you haven't, I recommend reading Our Guys a book about a similar situation. Rape, I mean, not unauthorized notebook borrowing.
The author makes a good case for the complicity of the school authorities in the rape by their prior encouragement of bad behavior in the ruling clique of athletes.
There are some bright programmers working for free. But I'd say that bright programmers are generally working on device drivers, embedded systems, game engines, file systems, search engines, compilers, and similar things. Stuff that pushes the envelope.
The comment about "a pile of money" is sad. People who think they're making a pile of money generally aren't. At any rate, the ability to live well, manage one's time and enjoy oneself is not positively correlated with intelligence. In fact, it may be negatively correlated. In other words, knowing how to get off work at 5 may not help you to write a fast, scalable, fault-resilient distributed datastore.
This isn't snobbery; quite the reverse. I'm quite happy with Oracle/Sun/EMC if someone else is paying. I spend a lot of time working with Oracle.
But would you dig into your savings and buy that stuff if you were starting an internet company? If you want to choose the right tool for the job, you should start by knowing the tradeoffs of the various tools available.
As I understand, there is no console management. And broken machines are never fixed or replaced - the system re-replicates the data that was (redundantly) stored on that node.
Of course I could be wrong - I'm basing this on the few glimpses Google has allowed of their operation in the past.
I don't think these PC's cost $3159. More like $500. They are just cheap PC's with two disks, either in a 1RU case or naked on a plate - Google has used both packaging techniques.