Posts by b shubin 307 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007
i like the electric car idea, and PH likes the name, because it combines two of her favorite things: dong and energy.
imagine, "Dong", "Energy", and PH. bring a videocamera, and your commercial opportunities are endless...until the energy runs out, the dong is worn to a nub, or Paris gets bored (place your bets).
mine is the rain slicker on the back of the Director's chair...
software is only ever completely perfect, secure and stable in one place: marketing literature.
anything created by humans has flaws, because humans can not imagine every possible use case, over an indefinite period of time (easy example: the creators of SMTP failed to design for spam). if one starts with that assumption, a VM is just another target to compromise. just like antivirus/security apps, a virtualized environment can provide a more effective way to hide malware.
the bullet point was likely (hopefully) produced by the marketing department, because if their engineering team came up with that clanger, they need to hire some less optimistic code jockeys, soonest.
...between "amuse" and "abuse". i suggest thereg writers may want to consult a dictionary...a commercially available, paid-for dictionary, if it so pleases you.
many organizations and individuals who use these free resources, have no ideological agenda regarding commercial goods; in fact, they themselves offer services or products commercially. most of them DO understand the difference between "great" and "good enough", and accept the reduced feature set, to benefit their top line numbers.
for those who do not know the difference between the top line and the bottom line, i recommend a brief overview of financial accounting...also fee-based, if it so pleases you. perhaps then you can stop (ab)using this tiresome term. leave the horse be, it's gone...
it is worth noting that those of us who use FOSS, have been known to contribute money to many of the projects we find useful (of our own "free" will, if you like), sometimes more than once. nothing is free, there are often non-monetary costs (time, effort, inconvenience, headaches, stress, the agony of thinking critically and independently, etc.). of course, many commercial products have those costs, in addition to the purchase price.
all this may be too much for the magnificent mind that came up with "Freetard", but he's called "Fake Steve" for a reason. those who can, do; those who are capable, knowledgeable and experienced, teach; those who can't do or teach, administrate; and those who offer nothing constructive, whine (but often add "oh, i'm just joking..." to avoid responsibility for their whining).
because XSS vulns. repeatedly. in most if not all browsers, at one point or another.
thus, different browsers for secure connections to a bank, to webmail(s), to another bank, to an online tech gear shopping site, to eBay, to Amazon.com, etc., and yet another app for just browsing.
how many things do you have going on at the same time? i have 3 to 4 browsers open at any given time, and IE is not one of them, because i'm busy, not stupid, and after supporting MS products for 20 years, i know those MS code monkeys really ARE monkeys, mostly.
that's what Cisco Call Manager is for. it's also buggy, erratic and mysterious; it is a Windows appliance; and the support sucks out loud...so exactly like a MS product should be.
MS selling its own messaging product is redundant. it's like getting another piece of organic fertilizer, identical to the one you already have.
in a globalized world, there is no need for a Western nation with a technology competence. technology needs facilities, developers, engineers, infrastructure, effective government investment (haha...effective government...i made funny), etc.
it also requires institutional acceptance of periodic failure. not all research projects pan out, it's usually a 30% success rate, on average. out of 7 projects, one will be a complete success with possible blockbuster potential (the Internet), two will be viable and potentially (perhaps modestly) useful (Eye-O-Sauron), and four will be stinkers (failed projects that someone with management authority, foresight and integrity, should kill, with a firm hand and a clear conscience).
innovation merely requires a clever idea that one can outsource to India, China, Thailand, Czech Republic, Russia, the Baltics, or similar, to make it as cheaply and profitably as possible, and to sell it to the sponsoring government at 6 to 12 times the reasonable price (as opposed to 2 to 4 times the reasonable price, if the product was produced domestically).
ideas are portable, facilities are not; that's why it's an innovation center.
"...China's desire to improve its international image."
not shooting monks would probably help...but then, Burma got away with it (no substantially adverse consequences followed), so why wouldn't you?
love the PR, though. it's clumsy in a way that only a large company (Microsoft, ExxonMobil, etc.) or a government can fumble it.
@ Ito
you've answered your own question, with a resounding yes. two very safe, very predictable establishment candidates won. that's the way corporations like it. predictable, status quo, minimal disruption and maximum exposure to lobbyists.
they both fit the bill, and i don't trust either of them.
McCain showed his true colors when he helped Bush sustain the veto on the bill against waterboarding. that's about as blatant a sellout as i've ever seen. plus, he supports the Iraq adventure (stay there for 100 years? what the fsck for?).
Hillary was part of the administration that repealed some very important banking regulations back in 1998; this has led directly to our current banking crisis. she also voted for the war.
most of the candidates that would rock the boat have been eliminated, and Obama is next. then, your choice will be no choice, and corporate America will be happy.
"Democracy" is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US corporate establishment.
or, to put it less delicately, scum like Sequoia will make sure that other scum (like them) get elected. home of the brave, land of the free...no longer.
i'm curious to see whether the public will continue to take this, like the sheep they have been. there's always a chance that one of the domestic militias will wake up and send its small-mouthed, armed anarchists after the people who are really implementing these decisions - people like Sequoia, and behind them, old money and the GOP.
i'm naturalized, and my wife is a resident alien, so i'll probably be leaving in a few years. i've paid my dues, and have no special loyalty to the US. this country is getting dumber and crazier every year. George Carlin is right about this place.
@ Peter and others soon to come (where's Webster?)
"it works for me, therefore it works everywhere, and there are no problems. reports to the contrary must be lies."
love it. well done. dovetails nicely with the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" philosophy of your preferred vendor. please put head back in sand, and return to your slumber. your work is done here.
Warfighter Advanced Network Knowledge-Enhanced Recon.
i have personally seen worse (US Army Reserve 1988-94). also makes for good comms-related chatter: "hey, somebody get that WANKER on the horn! what the hell is he doing up there?"
oddly (snugly?) fitting.
think i'll head out...mine is the black latex one with the red dragon...thanks.
in other surprising news, extensive research has concluded that foxes will eat hens, if allowed to guard the henhouse (voluntary self-regulation does not work, because greed is not self-regulating); and in a related story, regulators easily accessible to, and readily influenced by lobbyists, were found to be ineffective (FCC, i'm looking at you; also EPA, FDA, DOJ, DOD, etc.).
coming up next: water is wet, and digestive waste is malodorous! we'll be right back after a message from our "sponsor", who in no way influences our content <wink> <wink> <nudge> <nudge>...
@ AC and Tim
i lived in PA for 25+ years, worked on contract for the city of Philadelphia, and later a suburban county; also dealt with state (i'm systems support).
don't know which PA these two are talking about, but i can say that the level of waste, corruption and incompetence i witnessed, was worthy of Louisiana (or so its reputation indicates). Philadelphia is, very quietly, one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. it is also one of the oldest, so that fits.
you think this person could notify the local government? are you joking? local government systems support people are mostly overworked, underpaid, disgruntled, burned-out, apathetic and cynical. many are also passive-aggressive, and completely unqualified for their jobs, so this security issue is no surprise at all.
additionally, the contact information for systems support is unavailable to most of the local government workers (they have to go up one or more levels in their chain of command, their boss or boss's boss has to call for them), let alone the public. last, and certainly not least, gov systems workers are highly likely to ignore a problem unless and until it reaches public crisis status.
be serious. this person did the only rationally useful thing, and posted the information where it would humiliate senior officials, which is the ONLY way to get most of them to act quickly (or indeed, at all).
kudos for the bravery. personally, i would have acted through a third party, preferably a security firm by way of thereg, for example. i like to avoid having my identity tied to this sort of thing, for fear of retaliation.
so now Sun is offering features for Windows on Sun virtualization management products, before those features are made available for Solaris or UNIX/Linux?
sweet. when does Sun turn into Dell? can they publish a schedule for that, so i could sell the stock short?
the world needs another me-too MS systems provider (think Unisys) like a fish needs a bicycle. any bets on the name? Sunsys, maybe...
dead bird icon because, well, duh.
@ first AC
that's easy (and ubiquitous).
multi-billion-dollar marketing, complete with bloggers and astroturfing (some to be found on these forums, see Webster Phreaky); coupled with bullying and monopoly tactics (see Groklaw's Jihad documents from MS marketing); topped off with hordes of lobbyists and massive political campaign contributions to buy off governments and standards organizations (OASIS, anyone?).
now, that's what we in the US call REAL INNOVATION (well, some of us call it "lying", and the courts call it "illegal monopoly", but never mind). the academic establishment (MIT, UCBerkeley, etc.), the national labs (Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, etc.), Intel, AMD, Apple, Sun, Xerox, IBM, the open-source movement, etc. - none of them can hold a candle to MS innovation, because they focus on quality, technology and products, which are quite beside the point.
TRUE US INNOVATION is brilliant, aggressive, ethics-free marketing. that's what enables a company to sell buggy, badly designed and executed products, and then sell upgrades to those products, profitably, year after year.
pirate icon perfectly appropriate.
so here's what it looked like in the US:
Verizon: hey, what would happen if we replaced our copper with fiber? it's plastic/glass and lasts practically forever, the bandwidth is ace, and we can deliver as many additional services as we want, starting with IPTV. the maintenance costs would drop too...
Comcast: don't you dare! we'd have to give improvements to our monopoly customers for free, just to keep them! they're already angry about the constant price hikes (also comically bad support, no a-la-carte pricing, low and lossy broadband, shady bandwidth management, the constant endless lying, etc., etc.). our investors would lynch us!
all the other Telcos: YEAH! you tell them, Comcast!
Verizon: oh yeah? i bet your investors are more skittish than ours...
as a former Comcast, then Verizon FIOS customer, i can say that FIOS makes Comcast look like Tiscali in the UK. we have a T1 line (nothing else is available where we live now), and i SO miss FIOS.
whoever blinks first, either wins or goes bankrupt. it's one of those bets where being first could either kill you or put you in the lead, being second could make you irrelevant, and being last is guaranteed obsolescence.
the CDN is a stopgap. until the bandwidth problem is addressed, not much will change, except the volume of available content and services, which will continue to grow. it may or may not be fiber (wireless? powerline broadband? whatever...), but sooner or later, someone will have to take on this infrastructure buildout. Maybe Ofcom could ask the Japanese, they have an island, too...
sooner is better.
erm, he's a database geek. don't flame him, he's asking for something only a developer could love.
if a systems person is asking for this, (s)he is to be considered a rookie, and sent back to Desktop Support for 6 months (used to be a year, but nowadays, the internet is meaner, and the users more ornery). if (s)he asks for it again, (s)he should be shot, and then banned from working in the systems side of the house, FOREVER.
for all the non-IT readers (especially our dearly beloved non-technical managers), THIS IS A REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD IDEA, SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT...shouldn't you be in a meeting, or something?
@ jedd
actually, to be fair to RedHat, they've come a long way in package and process management. there are service scripts and chkconfig for many standard processes, and yum is now the default package manager. it's all quite manageable (for the most part), actually. much like Debian is, eh?
trash not what ye find unfamiliar. there's something about Debian, that Ubuntu has become so popular, mostly at Debian expense. all UNIX/Linux versions have their weaknesses. derivative versions and forks are the result (just ask the DragonflyBSD project).
that being said, SuSE is still crap by comparison, even if they get indemnified access to all the proprietary stuff from their "partner" in Redmond (got to hand it to Ballmer, he'd look right at home in a pimp suit - makes sense, he's from Detroit).
of course Manhunt 2 is available here, it's not like it has boobies, now, is it? if it did have some female anatomy in it (instead of all the vicious, slash-happy, sadistic, Saw-movie-fandom stuff), it would have died a quiet death, because gory, extreme violence is just good clean fun, but boobies would DESTROY THE VERY FABRIC OF DECENT SOCIETY!!1111!
needless to say, the only bush they ever show on TV is our fscktard of a president. classic definition of a shame and a waste.
@ AC and the impossible
it's been 10 years. the NSA has (according to some rumors) more computation capacity than the rest of the world combined. it may take up a good chunk of their resources, but if they want to, they can supposedly decrypt things other organizations can't touch. it may also take a few weeks, but i feel certain they've found a way.
BB may be a highly secure platform (use it myself), but nothing is completely proof against decryption (theoretically). the gov't of India appears to be technologically ignorant, as most governments are.
it can't be that difficult to get cooperation from Canada, they rolled over for GWBush, didn't they? India just needs to try a bit harder, and they can have their intercept. decrypting it is another matter. if they can't be bothered to develop the capacity, they'll have to live with the disadvantage. i am not at all sympathetic, and i used to be MI.
too bad, so sad, guess you'll have to rely on HUMINT. you were trained in intelligence work, first by the British, and later, the Russians; in a nation of almost a billion people, you should be doing a lot of that already.
according to the documents that came out in one of these lawsuits (at&t), the warrantless universal surveillance started in the 1990s, and continued right through 9/11. it didn't prevent 9/11, and is unlikely to prevent anything else, for the same reasons.
the Constitution is being subverted, for no good purpose. if AC#1 doesn't get that, perhaps a few months in Gitmo (or one of the CIA's guest houses in Egypt or SA) would help the AC understand why we need the rule of law, and not the rule of an autocrat (King George, i'm looking at you and your shadowy Veep).
the best part was when some Congresscritter asked Attourney General Mukasey, if waterboarding was used on him, would he consider it torture? Mukasey said that, yes, he probably would. they tried to pass a law against it, and GW vetoed it, with the support of the Congress Republicans. it was used by the Spanish Inquisition, and the German SS in WW2 (movie reference: "Jacob the Liar"), and both parties considered it torture; yet Dubya and the GOP think it's just great.
even the former POW, McCain, sold out and voted with the GOP. so much for his integrity.
which part of "pondscum" did the AC not understand?
@ Daniel B.
for the discerning BB user, i recommend the BB 8800 series, which does indeed do emoticons, fast task switching, Google Sync and Gmail alerts, as well as BB-native email, and much more (also takes SD cards). my wife has one (works fine, even after a dunk in the toilet), as well as the iPod Touch. she's happy with both, for totally different purposes.
the BB 8800 is an excellent device, and (@ Alan Parsons) no one says you have to acknowledge an email, phone call or SMS/MMS/IM as soon as it arrives (i certainly do not). any communication medium can destroy your life (WoW, Facebook, Twitter, IM, IRC, Usenet, email, the old-style wired telephone, etc., etc.) when you let the technology run the show. IT is a tool, so you don't have to be one; therefore, don't be a tool, and follow basic mobile communications protocol (Rule #1: the person you are dealing with in the flesh, is almost always more important than anyone trying you on your phone, with VERY few exceptions).
the Jesus Phone (if you are offended by this usage, you are apparently part of the 50% of the US population that i despise) is not exempt from this protocol, and any tosser that takes a call in the middle of a physical-presence conversation, is even more of a pretentious twit if he does it on his Jesus Phone (do i get to burn in hell now? please?).
it's actually pretty obvious.
erm, none? if the company needs such a thing for collaboration, etc., i can establish the service inside the firewall, using free OSS on a low-end server (or obsolete PC, for that matter). this guarantees AAA and control, and removes the risk of connecting to an immature virus incubator like Facebook.
if people still need to access Facebook, they can do it on their mobile phones, and if it's not important enough to pay for the required phone and data package, then they do not need it badly enough.
Gartner's solution is currently looking for a problem...
and as for giving people what they want, not likely. the people are here to deliver value to their employer, so in return, they can get...um, what's the word i'm thinking of...oh yeah, PAID. this is a capitalist system, and you're entitled to starve in a ditch, and/or die from disease, but that's about it. my job is to make sure the place keeps running, so you'll ONLY EVER MAYBE get Facebook access (and the security, productivity and accountability headaches that come with it) after i'm gone.
wow, something more knee-jerk, stream-of-consciousness, and inane than a blog. probably worth noting that most people's thoughts are not worth sharing after sober reflection, and especially not worth sharing with Twitter immediacy.
the name seems appropriate, reminds me of birds singing in the trees: just as irrelevant, but the birds are more pleasant (unless one is trying to sleep), and potentially just as distracting.
where do i sign up to not have it?
the cost of this corporate ego massage is money that would have been better spent:
[1] debugging a "Big Science" storage product that occasionally exhibits very odd behavior.
[2] padding the top line so that prices for NetApp gear can be made less insane.
this idea, that marketing can gloss over a multitude of operational issues, is not a long-term solution (the saying has "deck chairs" and "Titanic" in it). the storage sector is beginning to exhibit classic signs of low-end disruption. premium vendors usually do badly in this process, if they survive at all. branding exercises do not help this.
odds are, barring a major revision of the business model, in 5 to 8 years, NetApp will be another Unisys (a footnote in IT history), or out of business. and no one will care about their snappy logo.
if memory serves, we had a Ted here in the US, with a similar last name, who also led a rustic existence and publicized his very odd ideas, backed up by mail bombs.
he was the Unabomber, a celebrity of sorts (if terrorists qualify).
any relation?
to be fair, he came from the other side of the political (and education, socio-ecenomic) spectrum, only to arrive at a very similar place (which goes to show, once you go around the bend, it's all pretty much the same).
old IT farts are not always biologically old (the whole industry is still young as such things go), but we are quite useful when five-nines uptime is required. qualify as one myself (will be 40 soon, have 20+ years of experience), and the new kids have no clue.
first thing i do is teach them BSD and the like (penguins also allowed), and they smile as if they got a new toy. routinely running locked-down, low-end machines (p3 and the like) as parts of core infrastructure, for years, without downtime or reboots, always boggles the mind of those used to the desktop life ("have you rebooted today?").
nothing wrong with IBM Big Iron. even their old stuff still does a bang-up job on availability (if it's down, the shiny features don't really matter, do they?), and runs *n*xen perfectly well.
thereg needs a geezer icon, but i'll settle for the Blue Boffin.
so now you know what the priorities really are, for Western governments:
[1] an omniscient and omnipotent police state (a la "V for Vendetta").
[2] fat, easy handouts for friends, relatives and corporate patrons.
...oh, sorry, that's all of it, food doesn't make the list.
King George is still working it out in the US, but the UK seems to be further along in some ways. kudos, vote Labor (why do they call them that, still?), because better the devil you know, even when it really is a devil.
perhaps intelligence is not a survival trait after all. i can see the problem clearly, but the people in charge (US and UK both) are corrupt beyond redemption and dumb as a post, so my intelligence makes no difference.
they spent all the money on DHS (because the Department of Defense is now the Department of War, they apparently can't defend or secure things anymore), and my house has better network security and monitoring (with an open-source ipcop firewall/IDS) than the entire US.gov infrastructure.
ahhahaha...not funny, they have NBC weapons, and all my personal info.
not only did i understand an AMFM post, i agreed with significant parts of it.
the last thing the Chinese public needs is full understanding of exactly how badly the US has been mismanaged.
the last decade has provided abundant proof that the only thing worse than a tax-and-spend Democrat,
is a cut-taxes-but-spend-much-more Republican.
a nation is not a credit card, and spending it into the ground has global consequences.
of course, since the US does not own its own money, but borrows it from
a privately owned entity (the Federal Reserve system is arguably the greatest instance of theft in human history, wars included),
they can't really print their way out of the hole, either.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/tragedy-recession-its-bad-ending/story.aspx?guid=%7B5D72D7E3%2D76BB%2D4CAB%2DB4D0%2D60F87DA734B7%7D&dist=TNMostRead
we can only hope that the rest of the world goes along with the happy talk, until we get our house back into some sort of believable order.
please ignore our financial news. really.
@ Mectron
most Comcast customers are also enthusiastic Vista adopters (with the exception of a few who have a clue but no choice of provider - see monopoly discussions above), eat fast food, and respond extremely well to any and all marketing; so pretty much your average click-and-drool human ballast.
the US is controlled by money, huge amounts of it, used to bribe anyone who holds a position of authority...or to destroy them, if they refuse to cooperate. they call it "capitalism", though it's about as far from an undistorted free market as one can get.
how do you think we got George W. Bush (who managed to graduate from Yale with only the most tenuous grasp of his native language) as President? generally, one has to speak pretty good English before one can get that job...this guy can't get to the end of a sentence without breaking a leg, and he hates to read (by his own admission).
do you really think he got elected twice by accident? 45%+ of the American public voted for this guy (twice) because they think he is one of them (which tells you all you need to know about them), and the rest of us get to go along for the ride. it wasn't a mistake, it was a GRAVE ERROR IN JUDGMENT, so pretty much like any other day for Bush supporters.
if you try to point this out, they will turn on football, baseball, basketball, golf, bowling, NASCAR, the fishing channel, or whatever other sports program that will drown you out. try it. odds are, you'll see a Comcast logo on the screen.
was a customer for a long time (not by choice), must say that this behavior is quite typical. Comcast is completely ethics-free, and they pay many people to astroturf online.
they wouldn't have to, if it wasn't for the constant price increases (with no capability upgrades), and the abysmal customer service.
they fought the a-la-carte channel selection, jacked up fees and invented new ones, and now this. perfectly consistent.
it is interesting to note that, in the US, it is not illegal to be a monopoly; but it is illegal to abuse that position, to distort the market environment to the detriment of competitors and customers. this is what Microsoft was convicted of; Intel is under investigation (though they are too smart to do that on an institutional level); and ARM is never even mentioned in this context, though they are an undisputed monopoly in their market.
Comcast is a geographical monopoly, which is why their prices are lower in markets where customers have alternative providers, and much higher (double, in some places) where there are no options and Comcast is the only available provider. as corporations go, they don't get much dirtier than these guys.
they make Verizon and the Death Star (at&t) look good.
has it come to this? do we all have to start using encrypted anonymizing proxies, to stop our provider from selling all information about us to a third party, without our knowledge or consent? opt-out indeed. what's the benefit for the profiled?
doesn't the UK have a Commissioner to handle this sort of thing?
and i thought the US telcos were slimy.
so that's what it looks like...we don't have any of that here in the US. between the Saudi oil money and corporate cash, they bought all the politicians so thoroughly, we have to read news from overseas to remember how this is supposed to work.
here, they hold Congressional hearings about some baseball players getting steroids, because THAT is what REALLY matters.
a mighty offer was made, and the bottomless wallet opened,
and Hotmail was swallowed up by the Redmond whale,
and the FreeBSD Daemon was banished forthwith,
and Windows 2000 flowered in its place,
and BillG looked upon his work,
and saw that it was good.
...
and so it was,
slower and flakier and less usable,
until the service went down (yet again),
and the sun became as black as sack cloth,
and the moon became as blood,
and the seas boiled,
and the skies fell:
Server 2008 OCP Release Hotmail Migration Pilot Day.
@ AC and ghillie suit
not that homemade ghillie suits are that hard to make, but if you have the stamina to crawl that distance, you can sneak right by these towers anyway, no suit required. the monitoring stations are oriented more towards clumps of walkers or runners; a crawling human could go starkers (nasty nettle damage potential), wear a clown suit, or cowboy boots and a tutu, or even prison orange, and no detector would twitch.
this stuff is usually doppler radar anyway, so one may be able to evade it just by moving parallel to the pulse wavefront, and approaching the desired objective obliquely. perhaps the immigrants will have cheap GPS units, programmed with the tower locations as points of interest, and routes to evade detection (what a business opportunity!...i'm sure the free-market zealots will love this idea).
it's going to make a comeback, as zigzag trenches (dug through the less-driveable stretches of border country - it's too big a place for DHS agents to walk) will allow the intruders to pass literally below the radar, much like the tunnels do now.
i think the Mexicans are familiar with shovel technology, and have no shortage of labor.
oddly enough, the US economy runs on labor arbitrage, so cheap labor is a very necessary component. you would think immigrants are more welcome in a place like this, but Americans are very sentimental people (rational thinking too much like work), and their feelings are very important to them. when someone makes them feel safe and secure, they get all warm-fuzzy.
they could achieve about 80% of the control for about 20% of the expense (as in, "reasonable efforts to secure borders and control immigration"), but it is custom here to buy silver bullets, THE absolutely perfect, infallible solutions (as described by the salespeople, that is). reality and rational thinking have no place here.
Linux is one of many OSS operating systems. i would think NetBSD is at least as portable; OpenBSD is certainly more free in the FSF sense, and likely more secure. some form of open source UNIX (looks like the BSDs or OpenSolaris, at the moment) will find its way onto the exascale platforms, simply because it will be so tweakable that it makes a good testing and development platform. if it isn't Linux, i'll be just fine with that, i like the BSDs even better for some purposes (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly, etc.).
Ballmer will likely be much more annoyed when that happens, and there will once again be some chair-throwing, probably at a former Yahoo! facility this time. if Linus is peeved, that's fine. neither one can supposedly hold a candle to Theo de Raadt (lead of the OpenBSD project), who reputedly eats normal people, and excretes secure, peer reviewed code.
i don't care about personalities, i care about RESULTS.
@ Haywood
funny, the High Church Murphyites say the same thing about the Maxwellians, because the High Church teaches not the existence of the Sky Fairy (God). it kinda makes sense, because if (S)He/(It) existed, one could pray to the omnipotent and omniscient Sky Fairy for more optimal results. this theory is not supported by empirical evidence, and flies in the face of the High Church creed.
i'm with the High Church on this one; personally, i'd have to be much more of an optimist to believe in a Sky Fairy.
@ Adrien
that would be "Murphyite" (anything that can go wrong, will), and for the devout practitioner, "High-Church Murphyite" (most things go wrong, given time - consider a government, any government...).
technologists have a special affinity for the way of Murphy, because we study and maintain arcane, complex systems for a living. engineers used to be the only known practicing Murphyites, but progress and entropy have made the faith much more pervasive.
soon to be followed by a high-energy capacitor dart, as an effective countermeasure. think Taser for robots, shooting longer range and high-precision, with a charged self-contained projectile. pumps enough juice into your flying surveillance drone to transform it into a nice paperweight. can probably get an upgrade to handle land-based sniperbots, too. perhaps we can get a high capacitance from the new metamaterials...
otherwise, i suppose a particle beam would work too.
yeah, so i'm stealing it all from Shadowrun, but they seem to have gotten a few things very right.
@ marc
actually, one quick look at Leopard Server will show you an OS that is by NO means ready for production use, in all but a few corner cases. has far too many bugs, and if you look at Apple's own discussion groups, you'd have the same conclusion jump out and bite you in the face. i got this feedback from someone who took the class, and his opinion was unanimous for all the students in his class, as well as the instructor ("we'll stay with Tiger for at least 2 or 3 more major updates").
about 2 weeks ago, i was taking the RHCE5 exam, for which they use the release version OS, and it ran beautifully (otherwise, there would be no test - like the CCIE, it's a performance-based cert). if i tried to perform the same tasks using the OS X Server 10.5 release disks, the server would fail massively.
in this case, many of the problems seem to be coming from Apple's efforts to rewrite, refactor and rationalize Darwin's UNIX-like subsystem. they have some good ideas, but the release-version result was experimental, to put it politely. they have also put some highly compelling features in (shared CalDAV-based calendars, groupware, easy LDAP admin, lights-out management, excellent remote management and troubleshooting features, most systems integrated with LDAP and kerberized or otherwise secured by standards-based encryption, much of the feature set based on open standards and software, almost all of it transparently interoperable with most other products), but the product is not yet stable, and the response time could use some work.
@ Hewittt
"non-vocal"? "many many"?
hardly.
i have read your postings before, and would not describe you as "non-vocal". "shouty rabid MS partisan fanboi" is more accurate.
furthermore, if the many many ones like you out there were truly non-vocal, there would be much less FUD. unfortunately, all the ones like you tend to loudly go on, and on, and on...
and finally, pronouncements like "i haven't seen the problem on my network, therefore it is inconsequential or fictional", are indicative of solipsism, which is not a very productive attitude for a technologist. good thing you support Windows, then, which makes you easily interchangeable with any other MCSE within earshot (there always seems to be one...).
flame away.
is a big bonus for a marketing executive. here's how this works:
you start with a pure-technology company, then gradually replace everyone who has decision-making authority with someone nontechnical, preferably with a sales, marketing, or "pure management" background; an MBA would be nice. make sure none of them understand technology AT ALL, and all of them are risk-averse.
this is how you turn one of the biggest movers and shakers in the computer field into...well, i'm not sure what they do that is distinctive, and and no one i know has any idea, either.
therefore, it must be a slow news day, as there is a story about Unisys here (a fly in my soup?). kind of like a story about a cat stuck in a tree, in The Economist.
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