This is a weakness of nearly all UNIX, with the possible exception of AIX. You only need to read IBM mainframe propaganda to understand what workload management is all about. It is possible to run an entire enterprise from a single system image. Everything; file servers, enterprise applications, OLAP, OLTP, customer facing apps (web, etc) from a single system image.
It is not possible to do this without strong workload management.
Support for hotswap CPU/RAM etc. This is tough without hardware vendor support. Getting the info to write the driver (under NDA or whatever) is one thing. Proving the OS can actually cope with a CPU hotswap is another. Without high end hardware for testing, this ain't gonna be real. Solution: force the vendors to make Linux a priority on high end hardware.
Mature LVM. Mature enough that you bet your career on it, like HP/Sun/IBM admins do every day while barely understanding what's really involved. Having multiple competing (diluting?) implementations doesn't help.
>8 way scalability. If I had to pick from amongst my wish list, this would be one of the last. However, it does matter. For credibility, if nothing else. Solution? Hmm. Breakthrough in OS engineering, where the big boys get the scalability they want without compromising the low end. Ain't been done yet. But then, that's where the real opportunity is huh?
Compatibility with some significant percentage of the bazaar third party hardware in the world. Like EMC^2 arrays and the wild world of Fiber Channel. On one hand, Linux can/does thrive quite happily in the edge/cluster/small-database/terminal market. On the other, until you can manage a high end drive array from Linux (no, NFS doesn't count) that is where it's gonna stay. Only market share will make this happen.
Diagnostics that don't suck. Again, low level hardware vendor support required. So you paid extra for that nice ECC memory in your self-built machine. Do you know what would actually happen if a bit went bad? What would you get in the way of diag from the machine? Bet most of you don't know... Not good enough. Solution? See "hotswap" above.
Time. Linux is competing with OSes that are 3 times as old in some cases. PHB instinct is going to shy away from something less mature. Truth is those instincts tend to keep planes in the air, whether it fits your agenda or not. Linux isn't exactly new, but it hasn't really met the test of time yet either. Solution? Patience.
Software issues need fixing. GNU compilers suck. The native compiler on a *nix machine needs to not suck. This is basic. Linux has some real POSIX issues too. Threading only being the most obvious. Solution? Someone with the pragmatism and skill of Linus on the compiler/library side.
Mature advocacy. The way to be an effective Linux geek is to not try to sell it. If it's worthy of your advocacy, it doesn't need it. When opportunities appear, out in the "real world", step up. Otherwise, keep your geek mouth shut. Solution? Look within.
But these can easily be solved by a good design of your application.
Yes, good design will solve OODBs problems. Then requirements change and your "good" design needs to be "refactored." Meanwhile, the RDBMS geek slaps an outer join into the system, creates an index and postpones the "refactoring" for another half decade.
There are reasons OODB isn't making much of a dent in RDBMS. Reason #1 being that RDBMS allows you to get away with a certain amount of bad design without a rewrite....and I have yet to see a schema, relational, OO or otherwise, that lacks design errors.
"Sounds like the 'crybabys' are those folks complaining about their lack of broadband Internet access."
If I'm willing to pay for my access with my own money, yet I'm prevented from having that option because the "phone company" is playing political games with the build-out, how do I become a cry baby? I'd be perfectly happy to fork over >$100 a month for broadband but I don't even have the option of doing so. I know it takes capital to build-out and I'm willing to pay well for it. How the hell do you interpret this as crying?
"And for those who are convinced that only the Reps favor corporate America, keep in mind that the Dems are heavily behind the push to maintain Big Media's stranglehold."
The dems soak up most of the Lawyer and Union money. The reps get from anyone capable of producing revenue.
There are no innocents. Only those that know the score, and naive fools that believe their "side" retains some token nobility.
For God sakes! A browser in the firmware? What for?!
Look. DEC did this right years ago. If you don't know, find a crummy AlphaStation on EBay or something. They're next to free.
You can put a serial cable in the back and when the 10+ year old computer notes the lack of a keyboard and/or video subsystem on boot (because its headless, like most significant computers) it will send a frigging prompt out the serial port. From there you can run basic diagnostics, dump a device list, pick a boot device, etc. You can bootstrap the machine from nothing to full installed and running OS without the use of a "local" keyboard or monitor. I don't think you even need to have a processor installed to get, at least, the prompt. It uses a small, inexpensive and independent CPU!
Sun, HP, etc. I'm sure they all have similar.
Over *here* I have a VA Linux A1000. I got this for cheap during VA's fire sale before they spaced the hardware biz. One of the last machines out the door from VA. What is this machine's solution to the bootstrapping puzzle? A proprietary connector on the back (where?!) attaches a proprietary little black box (poorly made and rather difficult to replace, I gather) that provides keyboard/mouse/VGA connectors. IT'S A 1U BOX! I'm supposed to leave this flimsy little device permanently attached to the machine in a rack? What crap!
What I want is someone (say Phoenix, perhaps?) to create a BIOS for Intel/AMD based motherboards that provides all the basic features of traditional PC BIOS (minus that pointless energy saver thing) configuration through a serial port, with the option of allowing the OS to assume control of that same serial port and thus achieving complete, end-to-end, power-up to OS bootstrapping fully headless. I have no doubt that every cotton picking Intel/AMD motherboard with a built-in serial or USB connector is FULLY CAPABLE of doing this today. All it would take is a tiny bit of inspiration. Why on Earth has no commodity motherboard manufacture thought to do me this trivial thing? I'll pay extra. A LOT extra.
Yeah, I know, buy "good" hardware, the Unix folks already do this. Yeah, I know, some weirdo vertical market board maker has just the thing hiding behind some link. My point is this; allowing a serial port, instead of keyboard+VGA, to perform BIOS config and bootstrapping is trivial to implement. There is no technical reason this should not exist on cheap, common peecee hardware.
"In most current persistent world games you don't regress if you haven't been logged on in a while."
This is completely wrong.
Most MM games are constantly evolving. It you don't play regular you do indeed fall behind. Far behind.
The expansion packs for EQ add lots of new goodies and strata to the game. In level based games the maker can increase the maximum possible levels attainable, or create new abilities and rewards that can only be gained by actively playing.
An example; If you had stopped playing DAOC five months after release, logging in today you would find yourself completely outclassed. No "epic" armor, no "Realm Abilities," no "spellcrafted" gear, you would have your original gimp spec that has almost certainly been changed dramatically, etc. A player that hasn't logged in since April or May 2002 is so far behind that any attempt to play as-is would be hopeless.
It's part of the formula. You either put hundreds of hours in or find something better to do with your time.
It could, but it would force everyone to be renumbered, which they will not accept.
As opposed to IPv6, which everyone is clearly so excited about accepting? Which of these three options is more likely to be considered acceptable outside the ivory towers of IETF;
a.) mitigating the size of routing tables by renumbering existing subnets
b.) implementing an entirely new protocol
c.) buying bigger, faster routers
If you know anything of the commercial world, you have absolutely no doubt about the correct answer.
Uh, but there is a desperate shortage and people are using hacks like NAT to patch it up.
Funny how the term "hack" is a pejorative with regard to NAT.
Why doesn't my mobile phone have a real IP address?
Why should it?
Why does a 1 MBit residential ADSL service come with just/one/ IPv4 address.
Because the ISP is being frugal with their netblock. They know, as well as you do, that 1 address is enough. Do you think that IPv6 will suddenly provide the means to operate a vast subnet with that ADSL service? That's naive. Most DSL contracts for home users already prevent this sort of thing.
Do they think the average home with DSL has only one computer?
Nope. They know damn well there's likely to be >1 host behind those endpoints. I bet they're also well aware of the fact the most of those hosts are vulnerable to no end of remote attacks that most of their customers are blissfully unaware of this because they're safely behind NAT.
Current allocation strategies are punitive, and the aggregation problems already have caused some small organizations to "fall off the network" due to routing table overflow.
There are routers available that are capable of keeping up. You get what you pay for in ISPs just like everything else. If an ISP allows this to happen to it's customers, what makes you think they're interested in the investment necessary for IPv6?
Of course this means people like you are going to imagine a conspiracy right up until they notice that now 10 billion hosts are on the Internet...
I agree. This is no corporate conspiracy. This is a conspiracy of the elite. The commercial world solved the IPv4 problem. The academic world doesn't care to hear about it.
As to an "open, free-entry consortium" there are any number of organizations that more or less match that description. Governments and larger ISPs have given a lot of money to these projects so that the transition goes smoothly. Far sighted people (e.g. those who can do a quick head count and see that 6 billion potential users on a network with 4 billion addresses won't work) have been trying to kick start this for ages, and the longer we wait the more painful it will be.
If there were a real problem IPv6 wouldn't need all this nursing.
That wasn't my question. My question was are we not wasting vast address space with/64?
Now you may have implied that I suggest some similarity with IPv4. I do. The IETF and it's believers are always quite proud in pointing out that 128 bits is a vast space. No doubt. However, even vast spaces can be wasted through mismanagement.
If we're already doling out/64s, I suspect we're well on our way to pissing away that vast space. I know that the upper 64 bits of the space is segmented into various parts. How many careless over-allocations of the those segments can IPv6 tolerate? Every mistake made in the 24 bit NLA lops off a huge slice of the space...
I have every faith in the power if ignorance and greed to screw up what appears to be a limitless supply of addresses. The fact that we're already pissing away/64s is only reinforcing this faith. I note that IPv6 defines no segments after the first 64 bits. It may be that IPv6 was designed to work like this. Fine. My point, ultimately, is the belief that 128 bits is so big that it verges on inexhaustible is naive. This is history repeating itself; the 32 bits of IPv4 looked equally inexhaustible to it's creators. The consequence of this belief led to granting huge chunks of this space to institutions that today would be lucky to get a/24 in IPv4.
The folks at the receiving end of customer demands solved the IP shortage issue years ago. They simply subnet the last octet. I personally think the IETF could better serve us all by revising some of the early "over" allocations of netblocks to institutions like MIT, but that runs counter to the IPv6 agenda.
The desire for point-to-point connectivity is nothing more than that; a desire. The real-world Internet doesn't really care all that much if it can't touch millions or billions of anonymous hosts behind NAT. The fact that it can't means, for example, that Slammer was only able to infect the routable hosts. Imagine the effects of something like Slammer if every single MS SQL server was actually routable from the public network. Yes, I know, NAT is not security. Until the IETF invents a way to force network operators to care enough about security to be worthy of allowing all their hosts to be routable, I'll remain pretty appreciative of the benefits of NAT in the real world.
Claims that IPv4 is inherently doomed due to the demands placed on routers I find difficult to believe. The size of the graph that is the Internet will not get smaller with IPv6. If IPv6 provides a more efficient means for "routers" to comprehend that graph, why can't that solution also apply to IPv4? Routers get faster right along side all other computing devices. Routers are also becoming a figment of the IETFs imagination. The old fashioned IP Internet is quickly being supplanted by ATM et al, and most of the "routing" is being done via virtual circuits between IP endpoints. IP "routing" is being relegated to the edges of the core.
The commercial world solved the IPv4 problem. IETF just doesn't care to notice.
Nominet controls the uk. TLD and most of the xxx.uk. SLDs.
Nominet doesn't control parliament.uk. The authoritive name servers for uk. (Nominet's servers) return NS delegation records for parliament.uk., and those servers do not appear to be Nominet servers. Therefore, Parliament controls it's own SLD.
Why this is difficult to deal with I don't know. Nominet should only have to confirm to Thawte that Parliament owns the SLD. Nominet controls uk. and, in turn, the UK government controls parliament.uk., what's the problem here?
"You're probably one of the people that make my job far more difficult than it has to be: instead of saying "Yes, we can do that, here's how much it'll cost and how long it'll take" or "No, that's technically impossible", they say useful things like "NO!", without an explanation (or my favorite excuse, "That's not how we do things")."
My primary failing is underestimating the time/cost of projects. You're off 180 degrees pal. With regard to "That's not how we do things"; usually, the moment I hear that from someone I feel shame. You really don't know who or what you're talking about. Feel free to stop guessing.
"That's daft. The most important communication is what occurs between people face-to-face"
This is naive. I work daily with co-workers in Paris, Hamburg and Lismore (look it up.) I've never met the staff in one of those locations. I've been to Paris twice and Germany once in the past three years. Most of the people in my company, from the president on down, work this way every single day. Since the time difference makes most real-time communication impossible, email is the primary means of communication.
"I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mind set of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users. After all, in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier."
This is dribble. Pure, 100% unadulterated Dilbert. I am thoroughly fed up with this "master, servant" BS.
Why do IT folks worry so much about what their position is relative to non-IT folks? How do we come to the point where IT pin-heads dictate that people who work in the same organization are to be referred to as "customers"?
Lets set the record straight. People who work for your organization and do not happen to be in IT are co-workers and peers, not "customers". They don't pay you, they can't fire you, they can't send you back under warranty and you don't get to refuse to do business with them. When they fuck up systems you have as much right to complain about them as they you. I'll begin to behave as though non-IT folks are "customers" the day I get to install a cash register near the door to my office.
Is it true that some IT "professionals" are elitist? You bet. The fact that they are elitist isn't the problem. There are elitists in every walk of life, from the Vatican to the local Jiffy Lube. The problem is some IT manager hasn't done his job and fired the hell out of the "elite."
IT staff doesn't exist just "to make it easier". Computing long ago transcended the simple role of reducing labor costs. Computing is the single most important method of communication in the business world. Modern business is not possible without modern computing.
Screwed up people (IT and otherwise) using screwed up software for screwed up reasons, all under the auspicious of screwed up management. Some people think all this screwing up can be fixed if we just straighten out the relationship definitions; make sure IT knows that everyone else is the "customer." It cannot. Making systems work well requires talent, hard work and investment. This is required of all parties involved; IT and otherwise.
Here's a bit of common junk science from the article: In a study of 8,000 tech projects in businesses, only 16 percent of the new systems were deemed successes
What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be "deem successes" and by whom? I could pick this apart in my sleep. Suffice it to say, that statement is ambiguous to the point of being worse than meaningless. It is laughable. Anyone naive enough to quote such a thing in their own material is equally laughable.
Whatever the case may be, I'll take it on faith that up to as much as 16% of "tech" projects can, in fact, be "deem successes". What I know for certain is that every one of those successes were created by hard work, talent and mutual respect among IT and non-IT contributors, not because some CTO publishes a memo about how the word "user" is offensive and will no longer be tolerated.
Structures this small have very little mass. While I don't care to attempt to calculate this, I suppose it's possible that a wire only few atoms wide might be capable of sustaining tremendous acceleration. Would something with so little mass survive >100G acceleration? If so, it could withstand more force than the device that encloses it.
The real story, just like the IAB says, is that it's a hack, and it messes with the distinction between application and service.
The academics what to maintain their precious model and the grown-ups need to deal with real world demands. Same old problem, new medium.
When 32 bits was clearly too few to cope with many new Internet hosts the academics began to invent IPV6. Meanwhile, the grown-ups deployed NAT, classless subnets and RFC2317. Despite the extent of hackery, the sky fails to fall.
Attempting to "secure" the Internet (and push a certain agenda) the academics invent IPSec. The grown-ups, wishing to obey and comply, discover that IPSec provides zero support for NAT and must invent NAT-T. NAT-T is also an ugly hack. Yet the sky, somehow, remains aloft.
The academics are perpetually behind the curve and chock full of agenda. The grown-ups operate on short time lines and small profit margins. If academia wishes to retain control of the destiny of the Internet, it must accelerate the process an order of magnitude. Prior to this you are to expect to witness further hackery from the likes of Verisign et al.
The world wants fully internationalized DNS. The world will not wait another 5-10 years for IETF to bless a solution. The world does not care about the "distinction between application and service". Get over yourselves and deal with it.
In the end, the world will get what it wants. The grown-ups will see to it that the sky remains safely above us. The structure of the Internet will be the result of the first solutions that appear (as opposed to the "best",) regardless of whether they come from Verisign, Microsoft or the IETF.
BTW, perpare to start working on your resolvers. The ones you're using are now obsolete.
"This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem."
This vulnerability is worse than just the buffer overflow in the "Monitor port" of SQL-Server. It a fundamental design issue with the product. SQL-Server is using UDP as the protocol for the "Monitor port". The client is supposed to send a tiny query packet, to which the server replies with info on what connection methods the server supports. The vulnerability is that the code which listens to the port allows a buffer to be overflowed.
Why the hell is mickysoft using UDP for this? Due to the use of UDP, no connection handshake occurs. The attacker can spoof the source address and it will still arrive and infect the target most of the time.
Why the hell is mickysoft allowing queries of SQL-Server connection methods from completely unauthenticated clients? Basically, what you have here is an excellent way to "ping" for SQL-Server hosts that are exposed and gather useful information about those servers.
Many commercial software products use very poor username and password combinations for database schema. PROD/PROD for example. Micysofts "Monitor port" service allows an attacker to locate a running server, determine how to attempt to connect and then iterate through a password dictionary hunting for default logins.
The patch only fixes the buffer overflow. The other problems I point out are not addressed. The patch is a crappy Band-Aid for host of fundamental flaws.
Microsoft couldn't even get their patches straight. If you happened to employ an administrator that had the diligence and spare time to keep up with all of mickysofts vulnerabilities, and that admin had followed mickysofts instructions to the letter, it's possible you would still be vulnerable. You see, mickeysoft published more patches after they fixed this vulnerability 7 months ago, and at least one of the newer patches reintroduced the vulnerability!
All of my statements thus far are based on the facts as well as I know them. Now here is some anecdote: Mickysoft itself was wide open to this worm. We know that XP's registration service was ganked. I know from second hand reports that other mickysoft services, such as AC2, were ruined.
Please, avoid your little knee jerk attempt to blame sysadmins by accusing them of negligence. If evidence of negligence is to be found, it is the fact that the infected hosts were not behind firewalls (except in cases where they were infected by internal hosts, such as laptops running SQL-Server,) not that the sysadmins failed to devote 40+ hours a week solely to applying and debugging mickysoft patches, all the while disrupting services on production servers due to flaws in those same patches. From your entirely ignorant statements thus far, I gather you probably don't realize that any RDBMS is usually the focus of great paranoia for sysadmins, and they don't generally plaster patches all over them 30 seconds after the vendor publishes them. You don't just "Windows Update" your databases!
You simp.
(P.S. I have zero faith that mickysoft will improve any of this given more time.)
OpenBSD doesn't have a democracy. It has a benevolent (heh) dictatorship. This is a Good Thing to a certain extent, because it keeps a project on-track. It gives it some level of direction, as opposed to letting things bloat... and bloat... and bloat... You can't compare open source to countries, because it's a lot easier to fork source and make your own branch than it is to revolt and declare independence. That said, sometimes the dictator can be a stubborn little bitch, and there's not much anyone can do. But that's why Linux users have the Alan Cox branches, and OpenBSD users have MicroBSD and other "unofficial" patched versions. It's no big deal.
We already have lots of "democratic" systems. They come from vendors like Microsoft and the voters are paying customers. The result is a mess of screwed up priorities and feature bloat.
According the article, and my own knowledge of the NUMA debate on linux-kernel, Linus objected to the original implementation from IBM because it was too intrusive and caused performance degradation on non-NUMA systems. I, for one, was pleased to see this prevented. I will explain why.
Had this been a commercial operating system the NUMA work would have been incorporated right over the heads of whatever moral equivalent of Linus existed among the engineers within the organization. This would happen because the marketdroids would insist the NUMA feature check box be filled. The bosses would buy the marketdroid line and overrule the engineers. This is how systems like Windows get to be how they are. This is your "democratic" system at work.
Martin Bligh approached this from the perspective that his work was indemnified from critical review due to it's importance. This is typical when an engineer thinks he has the marketdroids on his side. He made unnecessary technical compromises in his implementation and expected it to be overlooked. When you believe you have the blessing of the powers-that-be you will try to get away with murder.
Unfortunately for our Martin, the Linux kernel isn't controlled by sales people. It's controlled by a man who has earned his credibility over a decade of public scrutiny. He has the power to make objective decisions based on technical merit. Linus forced the issue and the engineer was forced to reconsider his approach. The proof that Linus was entirely correct is that when the engineer was forced to reconsider his approach, he not only achieved the desired result, but now appears quite proud that his new implementation compromises nothing.
Linus makes lots of decisions about the work of others. Often, this results in someone's hard work being excluded. This happens so frequently that if the community at large believed he a motive other than technical excellence he would have run out of credibility with all of us long ago. He hasn't, and there is no sign he's about to.
We see these calls for "democracy" of some sort whenever a controversy appears. Perhaps we wonder if they have any merit? I don't, because I understand the motivation and I don't like it. Raw talent is a rare thing. When we witness extraordinary talent at work without a full understanding of the reasons we are often mystified and unsettled. When our own desires and motivations are in conflict with those who possess such talent, we are frustrated. This leads us to couch our desire to confound this mysterious force by suggesting "obviously" superior methods, such as "democracy".
I do not fear the talent of others. I lack the means to make reasoned decisions on these matters and, probably, so do you. The difference is that I accept this and rely on my faith in certain people to do the correct thing. Linus is right far more often that he is wrong. He has my faith. I, too, was annoyed to see the select NUMA audience denied the features they wanted in the mainstream kernel. Clearly this sort of thing impedes World Domination (tm). In the end, however, I took it on faith that Linus had the clues necessary to make the call.
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This is a weakness of nearly all UNIX, with the possible exception of AIX. You only need to read IBM mainframe propaganda to understand what workload management is all about. It is possible to run an entire enterprise from a single system image. Everything; file servers, enterprise applications, OLAP, OLTP, customer facing apps (web, etc) from a single system image.
It is not possible to do this without strong workload management.
Stuff Linux "needs":
Support for hotswap CPU/RAM etc. This is tough without hardware vendor support. Getting the info to write the driver (under NDA or whatever) is one thing. Proving the OS can actually cope with a CPU hotswap is another. Without high end hardware for testing, this ain't gonna be real. Solution: force the vendors to make Linux a priority on high end hardware.
Mature LVM. Mature enough that you bet your career on it, like HP/Sun/IBM admins do every day while barely understanding what's really involved. Having multiple competing (diluting?) implementations doesn't help.
>8 way scalability. If I had to pick from amongst my wish list, this would be one of the last. However, it does matter. For credibility, if nothing else. Solution? Hmm. Breakthrough in OS engineering, where the big boys get the scalability they want without compromising the low end. Ain't been done yet. But then, that's where the real opportunity is huh?
Compatibility with some significant percentage of the bazaar third party hardware in the world. Like EMC^2 arrays and the wild world of Fiber Channel. On one hand, Linux can/does thrive quite happily in the edge/cluster/small-database/terminal market. On the other, until you can manage a high end drive array from Linux (no, NFS doesn't count) that is where it's gonna stay. Only market share will make this happen.
Diagnostics that don't suck. Again, low level hardware vendor support required. So you paid extra for that nice ECC memory in your self-built machine. Do you know what would actually happen if a bit went bad? What would you get in the way of diag from the machine? Bet most of you don't know... Not good enough. Solution? See "hotswap" above.
Time. Linux is competing with OSes that are 3 times as old in some cases. PHB instinct is going to shy away from something less mature. Truth is those instincts tend to keep planes in the air, whether it fits your agenda or not. Linux isn't exactly new, but it hasn't really met the test of time yet either. Solution? Patience.
Software issues need fixing. GNU compilers suck. The native compiler on a *nix machine needs to not suck. This is basic. Linux has some real POSIX issues too. Threading only being the most obvious. Solution? Someone with the pragmatism and skill of Linus on the compiler/library side.
Mature advocacy. The way to be an effective Linux geek is to not try to sell it. If it's worthy of your advocacy, it doesn't need it. When opportunities appear, out in the "real world", step up. Otherwise, keep your geek mouth shut. Solution? Look within.
But these can easily be solved by a good design of your application.
...and I have yet to see a schema, relational, OO or otherwise, that lacks design errors.
Yes, good design will solve OODBs problems. Then requirements change and your "good" design needs to be "refactored." Meanwhile, the RDBMS geek slaps an outer join into the system, creates an index and postpones the "refactoring" for another half decade.
There are reasons OODB isn't making much of a dent in RDBMS. Reason #1 being that RDBMS allows you to get away with a certain amount of bad design without a rewrite.
http://www.waterpik.com/about/Ozone_release.shtml
Ozone explodes cells on contact. When O3 comes in contact with cell membranes it basically rips the cell open with obvious consequences.
This product is meant to be used as a disinfectant. You spray the ozone enriched water on stuff and everything on the surface dies.
Beware that this applies to your own cells too. You breath enough ozone and your lungs melt.
No seriously.
No need to qualify this...
"Sounds like the 'crybabys' are those folks complaining about their lack of broadband Internet access."
If I'm willing to pay for my access with my own money, yet I'm prevented from having that option because the "phone company" is playing political games with the build-out, how do I become a cry baby? I'd be perfectly happy to fork over >$100 a month for broadband but I don't even have the option of doing so. I know it takes capital to build-out and I'm willing to pay well for it. How the hell do you interpret this as crying?
(Hasn't the Itanium architecture been nailed down for almost a decade now? And we're still waiting on better compilers for it?)
That's the key isn't it? Itanium demands breakthroughs in compiler technology. Will this happen?
I dunno.
"And for those who are convinced that only the Reps favor corporate America, keep in mind that the Dems are heavily behind the push to maintain Big Media's stranglehold."
The dems soak up most of the Lawyer and Union money. The reps get from anyone capable of producing revenue.
There are no innocents. Only those that know the score, and naive fools that believe their "side" retains some token nobility.
For God sakes! A browser in the firmware? What for?!
Look. DEC did this right years ago. If you don't know, find a crummy AlphaStation on EBay or something. They're next to free.
You can put a serial cable in the back and when the 10+ year old computer notes the lack of a keyboard and/or video subsystem on boot (because its headless, like most significant computers) it will send a frigging prompt out the serial port. From there you can run basic diagnostics, dump a device list, pick a boot device, etc. You can bootstrap the machine from nothing to full installed and running OS without the use of a "local" keyboard or monitor. I don't think you even need to have a processor installed to get, at least, the prompt. It uses a small, inexpensive and independent CPU!
Sun, HP, etc. I'm sure they all have similar.
Over *here* I have a VA Linux A1000. I got this for cheap during VA's fire sale before they spaced the hardware biz. One of the last machines out the door from VA. What is this machine's solution to the bootstrapping puzzle? A proprietary connector on the back (where?!) attaches a proprietary little black box (poorly made and rather difficult to replace, I gather) that provides keyboard/mouse/VGA connectors. IT'S A 1U BOX! I'm supposed to leave this flimsy little device permanently attached to the machine in a rack? What crap!
What I want is someone (say Phoenix, perhaps?) to create a BIOS for Intel/AMD based motherboards that provides all the basic features of traditional PC BIOS (minus that pointless energy saver thing) configuration through a serial port, with the option of allowing the OS to assume control of that same serial port and thus achieving complete, end-to-end, power-up to OS bootstrapping fully headless. I have no doubt that every cotton picking Intel/AMD motherboard with a built-in serial or USB connector is FULLY CAPABLE of doing this today. All it would take is a tiny bit of inspiration. Why on Earth has no commodity motherboard manufacture thought to do me this trivial thing? I'll pay extra. A LOT extra.
Yeah, I know, buy "good" hardware, the Unix folks already do this. Yeah, I know, some weirdo vertical market board maker has just the thing hiding behind some link. My point is this; allowing a serial port, instead of keyboard+VGA, to perform BIOS config and bootstrapping is trivial to implement. There is no technical reason this should not exist on cheap, common peecee hardware.
Funny thing is UK.CO. is probably the most valuable (in terms of potential registrants) part of the CO. TLD!
"In most current persistent world games you don't regress if you haven't been logged on in a while."
This is completely wrong.
Most MM games are constantly evolving. It you don't play regular you do indeed fall behind. Far behind.
The expansion packs for EQ add lots of new goodies and strata to the game. In level based games the maker can increase the maximum possible levels attainable, or create new abilities and rewards that can only be gained by actively playing.
An example; If you had stopped playing DAOC five months after release, logging in today you would find yourself completely outclassed. No "epic" armor, no "Realm Abilities," no "spellcrafted" gear, you would have your original gimp spec that has almost certainly been changed dramatically, etc. A player that hasn't logged in since April or May 2002 is so far behind that any attempt to play as-is would be hopeless.
It's part of the formula. You either put hundreds of hours in or find something better to do with your time.
It could, but it would force everyone to be renumbered, which they will not accept.
As opposed to IPv6, which everyone is clearly so excited about accepting? Which of these three options is more likely to be considered acceptable outside the ivory towers of IETF;
a.) mitigating the size of routing tables by renumbering existing subnets
b.) implementing an entirely new protocol
c.) buying bigger, faster routers
If you know anything of the commercial world, you have absolutely no doubt about the correct answer.
Uh, but there is a desperate shortage and people are using hacks like NAT to patch it up.
/one/ IPv4 address.
Funny how the term "hack" is a pejorative with regard to NAT.
Why doesn't my mobile phone have a real IP address?
Why should it?
Why does a 1 MBit residential ADSL service come with just
Because the ISP is being frugal with their netblock. They know, as well as you do, that 1 address is enough. Do you think that IPv6 will suddenly provide the means to operate a vast subnet with that ADSL service? That's naive. Most DSL contracts for home users already prevent this sort of thing.
Do they think the average home with DSL has only one computer?
Nope. They know damn well there's likely to be >1 host behind those endpoints. I bet they're also well aware of the fact the most of those hosts are vulnerable to no end of remote attacks that most of their customers are blissfully unaware of this because they're safely behind NAT.
Current allocation strategies are punitive, and the aggregation problems already have caused some small organizations to "fall off the network" due to routing table overflow.
There are routers available that are capable of keeping up. You get what you pay for in ISPs just like everything else. If an ISP allows this to happen to it's customers, what makes you think they're interested in the investment necessary for IPv6?
Of course this means people like you are going to imagine a conspiracy right up until they notice that now 10 billion hosts are on the Internet...
I agree. This is no corporate conspiracy. This is a conspiracy of the elite. The commercial world solved the IPv4 problem. The academic world doesn't care to hear about it.
As to an "open, free-entry consortium" there are any number of organizations that more or less match that description. Governments and larger ISPs have given a lot of money to these projects so that the transition goes smoothly. Far sighted people (e.g. those who can do a quick head count and see that 6 billion potential users on a network with 4 billion addresses won't work) have been trying to kick start this for ages, and the longer we wait the more painful it will be.
If there were a real problem IPv6 wouldn't need all this nursing.
Indeed.
/64?
/64s, I suspect we're well on our way to pissing away that vast space. I know that the upper 64 bits of the space is segmented into various parts. How many careless over-allocations of the those segments can IPv6 tolerate? Every mistake made in the 24 bit NLA lops off a huge slice of the space...
/64s is only reinforcing this faith. I note that IPv6 defines no segments after the first 64 bits. It may be that IPv6 was designed to work like this. Fine. My point, ultimately, is the belief that 128 bits is so big that it verges on inexhaustible is naive. This is history repeating itself; the 32 bits of IPv4 looked equally inexhaustible to it's creators. The consequence of this belief led to granting huge chunks of this space to institutions that today would be lucky to get a /24 in IPv4.
That wasn't my question. My question was are we not wasting vast address space with
Now you may have implied that I suggest some similarity with IPv4. I do. The IETF and it's believers are always quite proud in pointing out that 128 bits is a vast space. No doubt. However, even vast spaces can be wasted through mismanagement.
If we're already doling out
I have every faith in the power if ignorance and greed to screw up what appears to be a limitless supply of addresses. The fact that we're already pissing away
The folks at the receiving end of customer demands solved the IP shortage issue years ago. They simply subnet the last octet. I personally think the IETF could better serve us all by revising some of the early "over" allocations of netblocks to institutions like MIT, but that runs counter to the IPv6 agenda.
The desire for point-to-point connectivity is nothing more than that; a desire. The real-world Internet doesn't really care all that much if it can't touch millions or billions of anonymous hosts behind NAT. The fact that it can't means, for example, that Slammer was only able to infect the routable hosts. Imagine the effects of something like Slammer if every single MS SQL server was actually routable from the public network. Yes, I know, NAT is not security. Until the IETF invents a way to force network operators to care enough about security to be worthy of allowing all their hosts to be routable, I'll remain pretty appreciative of the benefits of NAT in the real world.
Claims that IPv4 is inherently doomed due to the demands placed on routers I find difficult to believe. The size of the graph that is the Internet will not get smaller with IPv6. If IPv6 provides a more efficient means for "routers" to comprehend that graph, why can't that solution also apply to IPv4? Routers get faster right along side all other computing devices. Routers are also becoming a figment of the IETFs imagination. The old fashioned IP Internet is quickly being supplanted by ATM et al, and most of the "routing" is being done via virtual circuits between IP endpoints. IP "routing" is being relegated to the edges of the core.
The commercial world solved the IPv4 problem. IETF just doesn't care to notice.
So, if we go and get /64s, aren't we wasting vast amounts of the address space?
You misunderstand.
Nominet controls the uk. TLD and most of the xxx.uk. SLDs.
Nominet doesn't control parliament.uk. The authoritive name servers for uk. (Nominet's servers) return NS delegation records for parliament.uk., and those servers do not appear to be Nominet servers. Therefore, Parliament controls it's own SLD.
Why this is difficult to deal with I don't know. Nominet should only have to confirm to Thawte that Parliament owns the SLD. Nominet controls uk. and, in turn, the UK government controls parliament.uk., what's the problem here?
"You're probably one of the people that make my job far more difficult than it has to be: instead of saying "Yes, we can do that, here's how much it'll cost and how long it'll take" or "No, that's technically impossible", they say useful things like "NO!", without an explanation (or my favorite excuse, "That's not how we do things")."
My primary failing is underestimating the time/cost of projects. You're off 180 degrees pal. With regard to "That's not how we do things"; usually, the moment I hear that from someone I feel shame. You really don't know who or what you're talking about. Feel free to stop guessing.
"That's daft. The most important communication is what occurs between people face-to-face"
This is naive. I work daily with co-workers in Paris, Hamburg and Lismore (look it up.) I've never met the staff in one of those locations. I've been to Paris twice and Germany once in the past three years. Most of the people in my company, from the president on down, work this way every single day. Since the time difference makes most real-time communication impossible, email is the primary means of communication.
"I think a lot of this has to do with the elitist mind set of a lot IT workers. They see themselves as the masters, the ones who ought to be in charge because so much of the work is done through systems they built. But really, they should think of themselves as servants, trying to build the best system they can to support the end-users. After all, in a business setting, the end users are the ones who produce the true value of that business. IT people are just there to make it easier."
This is dribble. Pure, 100% unadulterated Dilbert. I am thoroughly fed up with this "master, servant" BS.
Why do IT folks worry so much about what their position is relative to non-IT folks? How do we come to the point where IT pin-heads dictate that people who work in the same organization are to be referred to as "customers"?
Lets set the record straight. People who work for your organization and do not happen to be in IT are co-workers and peers, not "customers". They don't pay you, they can't fire you, they can't send you back under warranty and you don't get to refuse to do business with them. When they fuck up systems you have as much right to complain about them as they you. I'll begin to behave as though non-IT folks are "customers" the day I get to install a cash register near the door to my office.
Is it true that some IT "professionals" are elitist? You bet. The fact that they are elitist isn't the problem. There are elitists in every walk of life, from the Vatican to the local Jiffy Lube. The problem is some IT manager hasn't done his job and fired the hell out of the "elite."
IT staff doesn't exist just "to make it easier". Computing long ago transcended the simple role of reducing labor costs. Computing is the single most important method of communication in the business world. Modern business is not possible without modern computing.
Screwed up people (IT and otherwise) using screwed up software for screwed up reasons, all under the auspicious of screwed up management. Some people think all this screwing up can be fixed if we just straighten out the relationship definitions; make sure IT knows that everyone else is the "customer." It cannot. Making systems work well requires talent, hard work and investment. This is required of all parties involved; IT and otherwise.
Here's a bit of common junk science from the article:
In a study of 8,000 tech projects in businesses, only 16 percent of the new systems were deemed successes
What, exactly, is a "tech project"? Define "new systems". What criteria is applied to conclude whether things may be "deem successes" and by whom? I could pick this apart in my sleep. Suffice it to say, that statement is ambiguous to the point of being worse than meaningless. It is laughable. Anyone naive enough to quote such a thing in their own material is equally laughable.
Whatever the case may be, I'll take it on faith that up to as much as 16% of "tech" projects can, in fact, be "deem successes". What I know for certain is that every one of those successes were created by hard work, talent and mutual respect among IT and non-IT contributors, not because some CTO publishes a memo about how the word "user" is offensive and will no longer be tolerated.
The post mentions that. That's what the "Templates" thing was.
Structures this small have very little mass. While I don't care to attempt to calculate this, I suppose it's possible that a wire only few atoms wide might be capable of sustaining tremendous acceleration. Would something with so little mass survive >100G acceleration? If so, it could withstand more force than the device that encloses it.
The real story, just like the IAB says, is that it's a hack, and it messes with the distinction between application and service.
The academics what to maintain their precious model and the grown-ups need to deal with real world demands. Same old problem, new medium.
When 32 bits was clearly too few to cope with many new Internet hosts the academics began to invent IPV6. Meanwhile, the grown-ups deployed NAT, classless subnets and RFC2317. Despite the extent of hackery, the sky fails to fall.
Attempting to "secure" the Internet (and push a certain agenda) the academics invent IPSec. The grown-ups, wishing to obey and comply, discover that IPSec provides zero support for NAT and must invent NAT-T. NAT-T is also an ugly hack. Yet the sky, somehow, remains aloft.
The academics are perpetually behind the curve and chock full of agenda. The grown-ups operate on short time lines and small profit margins. If academia wishes to retain control of the destiny of the Internet, it must accelerate the process an order of magnitude. Prior to this you are to expect to witness further hackery from the likes of Verisign et al.
The world wants fully internationalized DNS. The world will not wait another 5-10 years for IETF to bless a solution. The world does not care about the "distinction between application and service". Get over yourselves and deal with it.
In the end, the world will get what it wants. The grown-ups will see to it that the sky remains safely above us. The structure of the Internet will be the result of the first solutions that appear (as opposed to the "best",) regardless of whether they come from Verisign, Microsoft or the IETF.
BTW, perpare to start working on your resolvers. The ones you're using are now obsolete.
"This is admins not doing a good job of keeping up to date and fixing problem."
This vulnerability is worse than just the buffer overflow in the "Monitor port" of SQL-Server. It a fundamental design issue with the product. SQL-Server is using UDP as the protocol for the "Monitor port". The client is supposed to send a tiny query packet, to which the server replies with info on what connection methods the server supports. The vulnerability is that the code which listens to the port allows a buffer to be overflowed.
Why the hell is mickysoft using UDP for this? Due to the use of UDP, no connection handshake occurs. The attacker can spoof the source address and it will still arrive and infect the target most of the time.
Why the hell is mickysoft allowing queries of SQL-Server connection methods from completely unauthenticated clients? Basically, what you have here is an excellent way to "ping" for SQL-Server hosts that are exposed and gather useful information about those servers.
Many commercial software products use very poor username and password combinations for database schema. PROD/PROD for example. Micysofts "Monitor port" service allows an attacker to locate a running server, determine how to attempt to connect and then iterate through a password dictionary hunting for default logins.
The patch only fixes the buffer overflow. The other problems I point out are not addressed. The patch is a crappy Band-Aid for host of fundamental flaws.
Microsoft couldn't even get their patches straight. If you happened to employ an administrator that had the diligence and spare time to keep up with all of mickysofts vulnerabilities, and that admin had followed mickysofts instructions to the letter, it's possible you would still be vulnerable. You see, mickeysoft published more patches after they fixed this vulnerability 7 months ago, and at least one of the newer patches reintroduced the vulnerability!
All of my statements thus far are based on the facts as well as I know them. Now here is some anecdote: Mickysoft itself was wide open to this worm. We know that XP's registration service was ganked. I know from second hand reports that other mickysoft services, such as AC2, were ruined.
Please, avoid your little knee jerk attempt to blame sysadmins by accusing them of negligence. If evidence of negligence is to be found, it is the fact that the infected hosts were not behind firewalls (except in cases where they were infected by internal hosts, such as laptops running SQL-Server,) not that the sysadmins failed to devote 40+ hours a week solely to applying and debugging mickysoft patches, all the while disrupting services on production servers due to flaws in those same patches. From your entirely ignorant statements thus far, I gather you probably don't realize that any RDBMS is usually the focus of great paranoia for sysadmins, and they don't generally plaster patches all over them 30 seconds after the vendor publishes them. You don't just "Windows Update" your databases!
You simp.
(P.S. I have zero faith that mickysoft will improve any of this given more time.)
OpenBSD doesn't have a democracy. It has a benevolent (heh) dictatorship. This is a Good Thing to a certain extent, because it keeps a project on-track. It gives it some level of direction, as opposed to letting things bloat... and bloat... and bloat... You can't compare open source to countries, because it's a lot easier to fork source and make your own branch than it is to revolt and declare independence. That said, sometimes the dictator can be a stubborn little bitch, and there's not much anyone can do. But that's why Linux users have the Alan Cox branches, and OpenBSD users have MicroBSD and other "unofficial" patched versions. It's no big deal.
We already have lots of "democratic" systems. They come from vendors like Microsoft and the voters are paying customers. The result is a mess of screwed up priorities and feature bloat.
According the article, and my own knowledge of the NUMA debate on linux-kernel, Linus objected to the original implementation from IBM because it was too intrusive and caused performance degradation on non-NUMA systems. I, for one, was pleased to see this prevented. I will explain why.
Had this been a commercial operating system the NUMA work would have been incorporated right over the heads of whatever moral equivalent of Linus existed among the engineers within the organization. This would happen because the marketdroids would insist the NUMA feature check box be filled. The bosses would buy the marketdroid line and overrule the engineers. This is how systems like Windows get to be how they are. This is your "democratic" system at work.
Martin Bligh approached this from the perspective that his work was indemnified from critical review due to it's importance. This is typical when an engineer thinks he has the marketdroids on his side. He made unnecessary technical compromises in his implementation and expected it to be overlooked. When you believe you have the blessing of the powers-that-be you will try to get away with murder.
Unfortunately for our Martin, the Linux kernel isn't controlled by sales people. It's controlled by a man who has earned his credibility over a decade of public scrutiny. He has the power to make objective decisions based on technical merit. Linus forced the issue and the engineer was forced to reconsider his approach. The proof that Linus was entirely correct is that when the engineer was forced to reconsider his approach, he not only achieved the desired result, but now appears quite proud that his new implementation compromises nothing.
Linus makes lots of decisions about the work of others. Often, this results in someone's hard work being excluded. This happens so frequently that if the community at large believed he a motive other than technical excellence he would have run out of credibility with all of us long ago. He hasn't, and there is no sign he's about to.
We see these calls for "democracy" of some sort whenever a controversy appears. Perhaps we wonder if they have any merit? I don't, because I understand the motivation and I don't like it. Raw talent is a rare thing. When we witness extraordinary talent at work without a full understanding of the reasons we are often mystified and unsettled. When our own desires and motivations are in conflict with those who possess such talent, we are frustrated. This leads us to couch our desire to confound this mysterious force by suggesting "obviously" superior methods, such as "democracy".
I do not fear the talent of others. I lack the means to make reasoned decisions on these matters and, probably, so do you. The difference is that I accept this and rely on my faith in certain people to do the correct thing. Linus is right far more often that he is wrong. He has my faith. I, too, was annoyed to see the select NUMA audience denied the features they wanted in the mainstream kernel. Clearly this sort of thing impedes World Domination (tm). In the end, however, I took it on faith that Linus had the clues necessary to make the call.