Domain: employees.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to employees.org.
Comments · 20
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Re:IPv6
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Re:screen
ssh-agent is run on your local machine, not the server. Additionally, the server only stores the public key, the private key is also stored on your local machine. So unless they're ssh-ing FROM your system to another system, you can't "borrow" their key. And if they ARE doing that, then they were fucked to begin with and this discussion is so pointless I question why you even brought it up.
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Re:MMMm... Placebo
Not sure what you mean by 'resistive', but any geek worthy of the name should know that silver has a higher conductivity than copper. This difference has some practical applications for use in heatsinks and water blocks for CPU/GPU cooling.
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Re:French search results?
Perhaps Google refused it because it has been done before.
5 minutes of research with their search engine might sometimes save a few weeks of development. If you are still keen to do your own engine (good on you!) then at least go the referenced site, where they explain that pitch is not necessary, only the sequence of whether the music goes up or down in frequency. You can whistle very imprecisely and it still works.
To find the pitch of what people are whistling, you can use the code from gstring, a simple guitar tuner, for example. The software is old, but that's because it has been working really well.
Good luck. -
Linux-friendly heart rate monitorsPolar's heart rate monitors are nice and the protocol for their IR upload has been, errr, community-documented thanks to some open-source programming efforts. I keep my triathlon training log based on the software:
http://www.employees.org/~bozceri/training
and the link to the Polar heart rate monitor data download project:
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Yet another option
This seems to be beta quality code. Thus you might want to try Secure NFS via SSH Tunnel, which provides, accoding to the author Secure NFS (SNFS) via SSH2 tunneling of UDP datagrams, as suggested in the SSH FAQ.
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Re:Scorched Earth myself
Dude... its time to upgrade! Scorched 3D complete with an OpenGL renderer!
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Internet Building Blocks? or House of Cards?
For years internet architects have built a house of cards that is not nearly as robust as it's outer appearance. In fact, there are some aspects that point to a fragile infrastructure just waiting for the final earthquake. The ATM backbone that Tom's previous company helped produce, is largely responsible for creating the packet lost instabilities in the network over the last 5 years. Under Vint Cerf's leadership at MCI/WorldCom/UUNet (Will WorldCom's Woes Engulf UUNet?) switched ATM networks created several years of heavy packetloss at key peering points, that can only cascade into total collapse if UUNet goes dark. This fragility might be the only thing that actually saves WorldCom/UUNet - the fear of what can happen without it.
With UUNet dark, the remaining network lacks the switching capacity to handle all of today's traffic (it barely can handle today's traffic without packet loss monitored here), much less short term growth as the world economy recovers from the dire recession. The resulting high packet loss would take us back 5 years where many DNS lookups timed out and simply failed due to high packet loss, and the network loading is dominated by 100% to 300% retries cascading into congestive failure (RFC896 Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks. J. Nagle. January 1984).
There have been many people explore this issue, some very excellent papers (Quality of Service in the Internet: Fact, Fiction, or Compromise? by Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston) - but largely missed are very basic architectural issues like NTP time syncronization network wide for packet loss retransmission that CREATES well synchronized additional packet loss. This happens because the retranmissions are all timed to arrive at the same time in overloaded switches just to be dropped again due to servers having their scheduling clocks syncronized at a very low rate of 50/60/100/1K Hertz.
A study I did in 1997 of peering point packet loss showed that 90% of packet loss observed correlated to retransmit clock boundries. Changes in traffic flow from primarily mail and ftp in the early 90's, to web traffic where browsers launch 4-20 concurrent small file lookups changed the nature and ability for Slow Start to be effective in throttling loads causing packet loss (web browser designers flood requests to mask packet loss timeouts) and the short files which are often only a couple packets in length do not throttle with TCP window size controls.
Nothing in the next generation design of the internet (IPv6, VoIP, Streaming UDP MP3's, FPS games which flood packets, or any other new protocol) addresses these critical failings ... in fact there is a huge head in the sand approach to just continue providing excess bandwidth and applications to saturate it even more quickly.
Tom's suggestions largely miss the boat, for all the wrong reasons - but the end conclusion is correct - the biggest problems tomarrow are not going to be solved by the solutions being offered. -
A shameless, offtopic plugOK, the question you're asking is "How do I avoid using ActiveX?" But it suits my purposes to pretend that you're asking, "How can I live with with ActiveX." And who knows, maybe that's the real question.
My motivation is that I work for Borland. ActiveX isn't my area, but there's a certain feeling (not only by people who work here!) that our support for ActiveX is better than MS's.
A lot of people prefer Delphi (which uses an OO variant of Pascal in place of VB's pseudo-OO BASIC) because Delphi produces smaller, faster, and more reliable object files. The differences in syntax take some getting use to, but people who have used both much prefer Delphi for creating ActiveX components. It probably makes a big difference that component architecture is an afterthought in MS's toolset, but a basic part of the Delphi design.
Then for C++ diehards, there's C++Builder, which co-exists with Delphi a lot better than Visual C++ co-exists with VB. And there are those who think it supports ActiveX, MFC, and ATL better than VC does. Most of all, C++Builder treats ActiveX components as components, not some weird entity you have to kludge into your app.
Perhaps I can make up for such shameless spamming by suggesting that your real problem is a resistence to component-based programming. This is a powerful programming model, and VB's success is based on its semi-support for it. Perhaps converting your existing code base to this model would improve productivity enough to pay for the conversion.
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Cisco's corporate culture
They sure have an interesting corporate culture. Check out Employees.org, a sort of "freenet" for Cisco employees, consisting of an old sun with a probably unauthorised connection in the DMZ of Cisco's data center.
And lets not forget Cisco employees on IRC with hostnames like "ph33r.cisco.com"
Looks like a fairly interesting place to work :) -
Re:David Ahl's BASIC games
Oh, this is cool... here's a page with a lot of those classic games, and they're already typed in! Has some other cool classic computing stuff also:
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Path characterization
This general issue goes under the name of (network) path characterization, and is a reasonably active research area. Usefully you can get several programs that will do their best to characterize the bandwidth and other attributes of each step in your routing. Nothing runs as fast as traceroute, but the numbers are likely to be interesting.
The best starting point for available programs that I have available offhand is the home page for pchar, one of the programs that does this. As well as pchar, the page has a fairly large collection of links to other similar and related programs. (Various programs use somewhat different approachs and math, and operate somewhat differently, so you may want to use several to cross check the results.)
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Well.. we still have employees.org
At least we still have the resources of employees.org -- The Cisco employees web page.
-davidu
It's interesting to note that Cisco has said they are willing to work with other companies to make employees.org a _central_ employee web space but that has never happened.
Here's an example of a great Employees.org web page: The CIDR Report by Tony Bates. -
Well.. we still have employees.org
At least we still have the resources of employees.org -- The Cisco employees web page.
-davidu
It's interesting to note that Cisco has said they are willing to work with other companies to make employees.org a _central_ employee web space but that has never happened.
Here's an example of a great Employees.org web page: The CIDR Report by Tony Bates. -
Lazarus, Blackadder, RowanDisclaimer: I work for Borland, and play a very minor role in Kylix/Delphi development.
Metadisclaimer: My personal POV (not necessarily that of my employer) is that projects like Free Pascal and Lazarus are Good Things. They create awareness of the kind of technology we sell, which far outweighs any dent they make in our marketplace. In short, I'm claiming to have no axes to grind. Make what you will of it.
Post proper: Nobody can even consider using Lazarus for production work until the RAD features are shown to be available and reliable. The Lazarus web site does not project any date for this crucial step. And this is after 18 months of development! I'm sure they put a lot of hard work into it, but why should a developer consider Lazarus until he knows when it might be available?
Berkus quotes $999 for D6. I assume that's because he considers the Professional SKU to be the minimum that meets his needs. Which implies that he has some fairly complex work planned! All I can say is TANSTAAFL. Software development is expensive. Is doesn't get less expensive because you skimp on tools.
Some notes on Black Adder. (Does the name imply an endorsement by Rowan Atkinson?) First, this is a Python IDE. Which means interpreted code. Not all applications need native code, but it's worth bearing in mind. Also, Black Adder may be more expensive than Berkus assumes. The price he quotes is for the Beta version, and goes up drastically if you wait until the final version ships. (Again, no dates!) Plus the fees they charge for maintenance releases strike me as rather stiff. Finally, there's no indication as whether Black Adder includes a Windows version of Qt. And if it does, does that include a license for deploying Windows Qt with your app? If the answer to either question is "no" Black Adder is a lot more expensive than you think.
If I had time, I'd download the demo version of Black Adder and run it side by side with D6 (which also has a free downloadable Demo). I'd encourage anybody comparing the two products to do this.
One last quibble. Object Pascal as a proprietary language. Depends on what you mean. It's certainly less so than Visual Basic. It's just an OO version of the venerable Pascal programming language, which once in the running to be the standard procedural language. And it's a particulary easy language to compile, which it why is works so well as a RAD language.
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Re:Free^H^H^H^HSpeed NetI hate to rain your parade, but Freenet will not help this at all. Even if you're using Freenet, you still have to have your packets *routed*. That's the problem here: the routing tables are growing very quickly.
If you're curious, have a look at this. It's a summary of the size of the Internet routing tables over the last few years. See a pattern?
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Re:Some quick thinking....1.BGP isn't working. Well, fortunately, there are a lot of other protocols out there to choose from.
Really, pray tell what these are? Apart from draft proposals, please tell me what these other protocols are? BGP does work. No, it is not perfect, but it works and it's failure modes are pretty well defined. The fact of no legitimate alternatives also poses a problem.
:\2.Routers will need "gigabits" of memory within two years.
Assuming cisco, which is pretty much the standard, you are going to have trouble fitting a full BGP table into less than 128 MB today. So what? That doesn't mean the sky is falling.
3.In 6 years we went from 10,000 to 100,000 entries.
Yes, for a good statistical analysis of this growth please see:
- http://www.telstra.net/ops/bgptable.html
- http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.hist.plot
. html
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... Part of the reason the routing tables are growing so much is because IPv4 does not make routing tables very efficient.Not the case at all. IPv6 is going to save nothing. Greater than 1/2 of the current routing table is announced as
/24 or longer prefixes. Aggregation can cut the routing table size. Please see the CIDR report for the worst abusers of de-aggregation. The worst offender is announcing ~430 blocks when they could aggregate those into ~150 blocks, without losing any routing stability. The CIDR report is available at:IPv4 has a long way to go still before we are in dire straights. Let's not forget what 2^32 gives us, and what we are using now out of that.
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Re:Routing and securityI really don't know how you could be so wrong.
With a major provider, your hardware is going to be big enough (BFR, GRF, etc) to handle 60,000+ routes AND do adequate security filtering. Don't accept the RFC'd routes in, and don't propogate them. Period. Don't accept internal routes from external sources. These are simple rules any major provider *can* handle if they can handle a full routing table. We're talking edge routers.
First, there are 82,000+ routes in the table currently. Circuits bounce, route are withdrawn, routers have to keep up with the changes. There are very few routers that will handle an ACL and high use (75% of BackPlane capacity). The major ISP I work for will not put more then a standard ACL (martian filters mostly) on the backbone as many of the Cisco GSRs will promptly crash, and Cisco doesn't make them any bigger. Juniper has no filtering ability at all, atleast with JUNos 4.0. Filtering is promised RSN. Second, if you do not accept internal routes from external sources then any of your customers that are multihomed will be unreachable from your network if their link to is goes down. -
Heathkit 'Bots
Personally, what _I_ want to get, is one of those Heathkit things from years ago. The ones with the arm on them. Forget the name
now, but they were SO cool. (and a HELL of a lot less expensive).
I think that would be the Hero series...There's a FAQ here.
--Kevin
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Look at the current high bidder
Here is the homepage of the current high bidder. It is sad really. Hope the idiot does get the high bid, then they will see how people on ebay don't take kindly to fake bidders.