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Right, I browse the WWW from my router all the time. Sun has a MAC range, but the addresses are easily changeable. Whether Apple has one or uses it I do not know, but plug any random PCI ethernet NIC into it, and suddenly your Mac becomes a PC.

It hands out the MAC to anyone on the Internet, which can be nice for MAC-related attacks if a hacker can compromise a nearby system...

If the hacker can compromise a nearby system, he can just hang around on it until he sees an arp request fly by. Or, with IPv4, simply scan whatever pitiful subnet the two machines are on.

As a non-privacy-related but nasty issue, my IP changes if my Ethernet card breaks and I get a new one. People running a server will love that (and "IP numbers unassociated with MACs" become a premium item to sell to business accounts).

Finally, I can *get* a new IP number if I want one today. If my ISP has a policy (and has routers that depend on) my IP ending in my MAC, I'm stuck with it.

You seem to be holding on to this notion of "my IP". "My IP" only applies to end user devices, like when you bring your laptop to work and it gets an IPv6 address. Whenever you are actually connecting to an ISP and not just borrowing someones network, you get your very own /48. If you prefer to allocate addresses the RFC 2322 way, feel free.

You can't do that on any card that I'm familiar with, though I'm sure there are some that you can finagle into pulling that off on. The Linux approach of "changing the MAC" just kicks the card into promisc mode and then does software filtering when listening for frames with the right MAC. It wastes CPU time.

I have no idea what makes you think that Linux cannot do hardware filtering of MACs for software assigned addresses. A reference for that claim would be nice. Not that hardware filtering makes any sense these days - when did your NIC last receive a packet that was not addressed to you or a broadcast packet?

Anyway, many drivers for Windows allow you to change the MAC address. If yours does not, try this

refer to RFC 2471, which established the current address allocation: "These addresses are temporary and will be reclaimed in the future."

And why are they closing the 6bone? "As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone."

They're just cleaning up from the testing phase so they can move into official use. It's only a step backwards if you consider the end of a beta test a step backwards.

While surfing the web for FAQs on UNIX shells, I came across this popular FAQ on the differences between shells and how to choose.

There's a great table in there that lists the features of each.

I would vote for zsh, personally.

I've actually had bash segfault on me a few times, which zsh has never done. and zsh uses less memory unless you do abusive things via scripting or the command line editor. zsh scripting is a superset of sh, so the things I try generally work; csh users can have a similar experience after setting a few options. (But remember, csh programming Considered Harmful.) I've become accustomed to spiffy zsh features like reporting when other users log in and out (before the prompt, just like new mail), extended globbing, very customizable completion behavior, being able to tab-expand history references (makes trying "!rm" much less dangerous), and so forth.

It's even the little things. Like, zsh expands commands when it prints a job completion report, but bash doesn't; so if you have a loop which does something on a bunch of items, each of which can complete in the background, under bash you get a report where each item looks like "[%] Done wget $i" or something equally useless, but under zsh you can see the actual text of the command that finished.

I have 100+ lines invested in the four rc files for zsh by now, so something new might not be immediately superior for me. I have been meaning to seriously try out es and rc for years.

I recently started to use NetBSD, the first thing I noticed was that it didn't have a command-line history.

It? Command-line history isn't a feature of an operating system, it's a feature of a shell.

my first instinct was to change to tcsh, but many people told me it wasn't any good.

Read csh programming considered harmful. It's not really sensible to write shell scripts using one shell and use another, so steer clear of csh.

Many people like zsh for it's completion routines, but I believe bash has similar facilities by now.

Too bad whoever wrote that was completely full of it. Fibre Channel does not exist over coax or twisted pair.

Too bad you're full of shit and your little outburst will make you look like a moron.

Here's one example, here's another and here is yet another.

According to Google, there are about 5,500 pages that disagree with you.

>No, the space station was placed in that orbit as a compromise
>so that both the American (Shuttle) and the Russian (Soyuz)
>vehicles could get to it. Baikonur [astronautix.com] and Cape
>Canaveral [nasa.gov] are at quite different lattitudes. ISS is
>half way in between.

Yes, true to a point - and it was a stupid compromise. Had we relied on the cheaper, more reliable Russian boosters and scrapped utilizing the Shuttles for ISS construction, crew delivery and resupply, the ISS could have been placed into a substantially higher orbit, requiring fewer reboost missions and therefore becoming inherently cheaper to operate.

Compare the cost of launching unmanned payloads (say, ISS components) on a Russian Proton rocket to the cost of launching them on the Shuttle. It costs around $4,729 a pound to put a payload into low earth orbit with the Shuttle, as opposed to $1,953 a pound with the Proton. Proton can't launch payloads that are quite as large as the Shuttle's (19,760 kg for the Proton vs. 28,803 kg for the Shuttle), but the cost per pound for the Russian vehicle is vastly lower. As opposed to the $300 million plus launch cost of a Shuttle, a Proton costs a comparatively paltry $85 million to build and launch.

And you don't need a rocket as big as a Proton to launch men into space - the Russians routinely send people to the ISS aboard the relatively tiny Soyuz rocket, which only has a capacity of 7,000 kg and costs just $37 million to build and launch (the per-pound cost is also cheaper than the shuttle - $2,432). Compare this to the Shuttles, which cost at least $2 billion to build each (probably more, if you factor in R&D), and well in excess of $300 million each launch (some accounting puts Shuttle launches at an incredible $500 million each).

There also hasn't been a fatal accident involving Soyuz since the 1970's, when an air seal failed during reentry and the crew suffocated. There was a serious accident during the '80s when the booster failed, but the cosmonauts were able to successfully escape the destruction of the vehicle and came away with only minor injuries. That's simply not possible with the Shuttle, since the astronauts are strapped right next to huge tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (an insanely stupid design - there's no way to be safely blown clear).

There have been something like 1,600 launches of Soyuz-family rockets, as opposed to a little more than 100 Shuttle launches, so clearly most of the bugs have been worked out of the Soyuz system by now. The fact it's a far smaller rocket means less energy is required to launch it into orbit, reducing the stress and strain on the system and making it inherently safer than the Shuttles, with all that fuel and weight they have to contend with. There's also no reason to couple human payloads with equipment and supplies bound for orbit. In fact, it's downright senseless.

Here are some reliability figures for boosters in common use. With the exception of Soyuz, these are all unmanned boosters. Note that many of these unmanned boosters are as reliable (or even more reliable) than the Shuttle, which becomes a 2 billion dollar supersonic crematorium for all 7 astronauts aboard roughly 1 mission in 50:

Atlas 1&2 - 49 launch attempts, 95.9% reliability
Delta 2 - 73, 98.6%
Ariane 4 - 81, 96.3%
Proton - 254, 89.4%
Soyuz - 958, 99.3%
Long March - 54, 90.7%

Quite frankly, the Shuttle is nothing but a jobs program. Everything that's being done with the ISS could be done - cheaper and safer - using Russian launchers. For some interesting stats regarding launchers and costs, see this PDF file (sorry for the format, but it's informative), this NASA FAQ on launchers (it's from the mid-'90s, but still mostly accurate), and

PC prices are so cheap nowdays, that I'm wondering how come no company has come up with a "PC on a PCI card" which you can drop into a mac, and use as a normal PC instead of emulating it...

Like this (search for Houdini)? There were also (as you mention) the various Janus Bridgeboards for the Amigas. The fastest was a '486dx66, I think. There was even a A500 '286 card that connected to the memory expansion slot (!) at the bottom of the computer. With glorious Herkules graphics.

In other words, it has been tried. These card all had some things in common:

• Being at least one processor generation behind the PC.
• Costing about the same as an equivalent PC, despite being only glorified motherboards.

This concept could work, but only when there is a high volume PC motherboard form factor that's smaller than a PCI (or whatever we're using then) card. Then you can make a PCI-shaped 'glue' kit that plugs into the motherboards various connectors and fits into a PCI slot in another system.

Marketing shmarketing. Yes, you have a point that KDE "friendly names" are probably the only thing a user sees, but THEY follow that silly K-naming abhorration too! Aargh!

In short, the K naming scheme must die. Maybe the KDE project needs something like RFC 2100 but then regarding application names.

Looks like we have come a long way since this and this.

without a mouse attached, there appears to be no way to move it or get rid of it.

You can move the cursor by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Num Lock and then using the numpad. You move the cursor with the keys around 5, click with 5, etc. A quick googling brought up this webpage.

I hope you're compliant with RFC1149 (Standard for IP transmitted by carrier pigeon).

Yes, it's genuine.

No, it isn't serious.

I think..... ;)

I totally agree, but do find it sad that Apple spent all the time and effort only to find that creating an OS was beyond them, so they chucked it all out and went for Unix. And Unix had been there for them all along.

C'mon, try grounding your trolling in reality next time. Scheduling on OSX is handled by Mach, which was developed at CMU by Avi Tevanian, developed at NeXT and brought up to 3.0 at Apple.

Apple uses BSD for its UNIX compatibilty layer, but that doesn't handle scheduling, which is what this article is about.

Now, if you want to say Apple was dumb for chucking A/UX in the early nineties, then that'd make a much better troll.

The patent was filed on 3 Feb 1999. Depending on how you read the legalese of the claims, use of CVS (for web development) may or may not be covered by this patent.

Prior art with regard to CVS is easy to prove. Back in 1997 cyclic.com already had a CVS and the Web page. That page references amongst others L.D.Stein's book How to set up and maintain a web site, that makes mention of the use of CVS for version control.

By 1998 the same page on cyclic included a link to Sean Dreilinger's CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects (link to current version). archive.org does not appear to have the original document, but the link is on cyclic.com circa Dec 1998, and Sean's Copyright is dated back to 1997.

Cyclic.com also had a page listing sites using CVS (for web development, 1998).

And just in case anyone didn't get the message, WebDAV (RFC) has a history (and more) going back to 1996. The RFC was published in (surprise surprise) Feb 1999.

>Personally, I am for some kind of IP

So am I.

2) The $450 million/ flight cost includes initial development, a cost which cannot be recovered at this point. The actual marginal cost of one shuttle flight is something like $50 million. If the USA had built as many as originally envisioned, the cost/ flight would have likewise been a lot lower.

From the Space FAQ:

People arguing over shuttle costs on the net are usually arguing from
different assumptions and do not describe their assumptions clearly,
making it impossible to reach agreement. To demonstrate the difficulty,
here are a range of flight cost figures differing by a factor of 35 and
some of the assumptions behind them (all use 1992 constant dollars).

$45 million - marginal cost of adding or removing one flight from
the manifest in a given year.

$414 million - NASA's average cost/flight, assuming planned flight
rates are met and using current fiscal year data only.

$1 billion - operational costs since 1983 spread over the actual
number of flights.

$900 million - $1.35 billion - total (including development) costs
since the inception of the shuttle program, assuming 4 or 8
flights/year and operations ending in 2005 or 2010.

$1.6 billion - total costs through 1992 spread over the actual
number of flights through 1992.

I know man! These moderators are clueless, maybe I should have thrown a link in to Godwin's Law...

Well, obviously not. Satellites are way up in the air, and hamsters can't fly. Duh.

I'm guessing they are using IP over avian carriers to get around the altitude issue.

An SMTP replacement that verified - at least - that the domain of the sender was correct - would cut down on spam tremendously. Virually all spam I get has forged headers and invalid reply addresses.

It's already been done: RFC 3207. It's an extentsion to SMTP: STARTTLS allows the use of SSL certificates to encrypt email and authenticate SMTP servers/clients.

It's backwards compatible, and many sites already use it (my company).

Sendmail supports it, as do many other SMTP servers with a simple compile-time option. Highly recommended.

"Hemos mentioned Nazis in the subject line. Therefore, by the Godwin's Law rule, the discussion is over almost before it's started."

Think again. The Godwin's Law FAQ, section II.2, discusses this.

Click here for the RFC (2916)

OK, here's a little secret for all of you: Fast seduction. It works, and it completely changed my life: From being a geek to being a little sexgod.

Start here. Have fun.

Don't forget FSP, the file service protocol. While rsync has its uses for many admins and SAFT is actually used by some people I know, I've yet to meet a person that has ever used fsp. Quite odd if there ever was a time that they frequently had to answer questions about it on usenet :)

Looks like it's mostly dead: last update to the FAQ comes from 1996. I have found a reference in freshmeat from 2001, though.

It is called the internet stream protocol (SP) apparently (see RFC 1819).

...may be both short and stout. This should be funny:5. That's my favorite rfc. Maybe a link to rfc 2324, the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, would be nice....

ISPs and mail providers following these recommendations can prevent most illegitimate spam(forged headers, open relays), and completely prevent what happened here. Unfortunately, large providers cannot follow these recommendations, due to the large volume of legitimate mail that gets blocked from systems with ignorant admins. The former ISP I worked for decided to implement some of the measures in RFC 2505 and began verifying PTR records (reverse DNS)....I never had to take so many calls from pissed customers not recieving their mail. I was threatened by an admin US Department of Education, who, in a most impolite fashion told me to fix our problem(we don't need no stinkin PTR records).....not to mention the University of Texas, Texaco, and so on. Soon the ISP relented, the spam came flooding back in and we were back where we started. I don't see the need for a new system.....just better admins.

So by using this app to trade some music with 10 people you can go straight to jail. Wow, that really is one-click convenience.

Xix.

IP over Avian Carriers now supports Quality of Service. Just FYI.

If you wanted to impress me, you would have used pigeon carcasses and shoestrings.
Yeah, MPEG-4 over CP/IP (RFC1149 would be much more impressive. Not sure how they'd get around the latency and out-of-order delivery issues though...

Please help us understand as well as you.

At least the DOD has been kind enough to post best practices for registering your new .mil domain name through the use of a standard format...

For more info, help yourself to RFC 1956

n2q

This depends on whether they follow the .mil registration RFC (1956) - if not, then that's what you get for violating RFCs! Just having access to an admin interface does not imply it's automatic. All registrations should still have to be accepted by the hostmaster first. As the RFC says, security implications are not discussed :)

No, we aren't confused about MD5. You're confused about MD5. MD5 is a hash algorithm such that you cannot obtain the original file from the hash. There's details on how it works here.Simply speaking, it's almost impossible to get two files with the same MD5sum, as the algorithm goes through the entire file and applies mathematical transformations so the resulting sum is unique to the file. Getting a file with the same checksum is nearly impossible in the 128 bit keyspace.

In general, there's a lot of confusion about Public Key Infrastructures, partly because of the big gap in the middle of "1. Write Marketing Hype!! 2. ???? 3. ???? 6. PROFIT!!" chain, but mainly because there are different ways to answer questions about "Who's certifying whom or what to do what or be who or what?" which lead to different applications and solve (or fail to solve) different business problems. One major effort to address this systematically is the IETF SPKI Simple Public Key Infrastructure group, much of which is based on the work of Carl Ellison and Ron Rivest (RFC2692, Requirements, RFC2693, Theory.) It turns out that, while the "Some Authority Certifies that You have Documents with your True Name" model that's popularly used is often useful, it's often not the right model, and there are often more useful relationships, such as the DNSSEC authentication used for web sites and email.

ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA may also eat carrots from your garden. Do not place ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA near iron i-beams. ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA has been found to cause cancer in ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA. And like coffee, ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA is good for the heart, bad for the heart, stimulating, depressing, addicting, and tastes terrible on Mondays.

Do not taunt ASBESTOS-EATING-BACTERIA.

i'll repeat myself on this topic:
One of the artifacts of lower frame rates is ghosting, a form of temporal aliasing.

From sgi
Ghosting. A true FAQ is why multiple images of objects like trees, house edges, the horizon, etc. are seen as the viewer turns. This is a form of "temporal aliasing" and is an attribute of having a frame rate which is less than the video refresh rate.

The problem is that a single image is scanned out onto the monitor several times before being changed. The repetition of a frame means that the image is temporally inaccurate for motion. Real moving objects do not stay in one place for a couple frame times and then move.

What's actually happening is that your eye is following an object, moving with the same angular velocity, which keeps the image stationary on the retina. Between two video refreshes of the same frame, your eye has moved, but the image on the screen has not. Consequently the image of the second frame appears at a different location on the retina, and you see a "ghost" image.

So a simulation running at 20Hz update on a display refreshing at 60Hz, the object will appear tripled. On large objects such as horizon silhouette, the effect manifests itself as multiple edges.

The original post looks at the new solid fuel more from an environmental standpoint. In that respect, reusable boosters with an environmentally friendly fuel are good because you're not throwing away all that shell material on each launch. Also, my point was that solid rockets are easier to operate and maintain than liquid-fuelled ones, and making them less environmentally noxious is a Good Thing. They have different applications, and I imagine that both technologies will have a place as long as we're putting stuff is space by pushing reaction mass around. Lastly, I certainly don't dispute that the Shuttle is costly to operate.

At the begining of the Shuttle program Nasa did everything that they could do make sure that the Saturn V's would never be built again, they destroyed all of the blueprints and attempted to destroy all of the equipment used to make them.

This is a popular urban legend. The Saturn V blueprints still exist stored on microfilm at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Rocketdyne still has significant documentation describing the F-1 (first stage) and J-2 (second and third stage) engines. The national archives also contain significant documentation on almost all NASA projects--including Saturn V. Although much of the equipment used to build Saturn has been lost or dismantled, it's not really surprising--the last Saturn V flight was what, nearly thirty years ago? Do we expect IBM to still have the hardware on hand to build an S/370 machine whenever we want one? Yes, the launch facilities for the Saturn V were dismantled or repurposed. NASA had to launch the Shuttle from somewhere, and the Saturn V program was coming to a close.

For what it's worth, I agree with you on the ISS. It would make more sense to update the Saturn V design--use modern materials where appropriate, and certainly new avionics--to do heavy lifting for the ISS. Unfortunately, such an option seems politically untenable at the moment, and there really aren't any other major projects happening right now that demand such lift capacity. (A Mars mission would be neat--but who's going to fund it?)

The only way to achieve this kind of speed gain would be a new and radical form of compression.

Of course they spring up on a regular basis...

correct. One of the artifacts is ghosting, a form of temporal aliasing.

From sgi:
Ghosting. A true FAQ is why multiple images of objects like trees, house edges, the horizon, etc. are seen as the viewer turns. This is a form of "temporal aliasing" and is an attribute of having a frame rate which is less than the video refresh rate.

The problem is that a single image is scanned out onto the monitor several times before being changed. The repetition of a frame means that the image is temporally inaccurate for motion. Real moving objects do not stay in one place for a couple frame times and then move.

What's actually happening is that your eye is following an object, moving with the same angular velocity, which keeps the image stationary on the retina. Between two video refreshes of the same frame, your eye has moved, but the image on the screen has not. Consequently the image of the second frame appears at a different location on the retina, and you see a "ghost" image.

So a simulation running at 20Hz update on a display refreshing at 60Hz, the object will appear tripled. On large objects such as horizon silhouette, the effect manifests itself as multiple edges.

Which is a standard What is everyone complaining about?

i.e. If there are aliens, why the heck haven't they colonized the earth by now?

Here's a link.

But do fleas wonder if there is life on other dogs?

A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

To quote a long url in an email is extremely simple - just write it <URL:http://verylongaddress......> as per RFC1738 or even more simply <http://verylongaddress.....> as per RFC2396 Appendix E.

You may need to switch to a standards compliant mail client (read - one which does not say Microsoft in the About box).

Still may have problems via the phone though...

To quote a long url in an email is extremely simple - just write it <URL:http://verylongaddress......> as per RFC1738 or even more simply <http://verylongaddress.....> as per RFC2396 Appendix E.

You may need to switch to a standards compliant mail client (read - one which does not say Microsoft in the About box).

Still may have problems via the phone though...

Read the RFC and they have one with QoS as well

Read the RFC and they have one with QoS as well

...use that freedom we have to "bare arms"...

Without making any comment on (or passing any judgment about) your desire to take up arms against the U. S. government, the purist in me must point out that your proposal is bad from both a tactical and a legalistic assessment. Do not battle an opponent of the terms he chooses, but rather you should play to your own strengths.

If you read, study, and understand the RFC's you'll begin to understand that The Internet does not exist as a thing; but rather it is a concept for organizing the interconnection of computers in such a way as to (as much as possible) guarantee the maintenance of communications.

Each time I hear a new proposal to "block" or "monitor" or "centralize" or "control" those communications, I'm not thinking about how this damages The Internet, but rather how the implementation of such a proposal would leave what we currently, popularly, refer to as The Internet in a state which leaves it less able to achieve the ideals laid out in the RFCs.

Yes, we love our broadband, and our Google, and our MP3's, and our Slashdot, and our weblogs, and our mailing lists (I could go on...) but we need to keep focused on those parts of internetworking which allow these, the parts which are, in the final analysis, most critical to the culture which produced the things we love.

Think for a moment; if there were but one Internet provider (think AOL, for example, or perhaps MSN) any you refused to use it (because of "centralized control", or "official monitoring", or "institutionalized censorship", or "philosophical differences", or "lameness" or whatever), would you still be able to have all the things you love about the Internet? If not, which of those would you be willing to give up?

I submit that we will lose (or have already lost) The Internet. I submit that we are seeing today, in the bursting of the Internet Bubble, the first whiffs of the stench of gangrene the above proposals will create. I submit that proposals like this (and others) will eventually create an internet, The Internet, which is at once more completely controlling, more completely profitable, more completely monitorable and blockable and censorable, and at the same time more completely useless.

But take heart, because the slow destruction of The Internet will allow the creation of a new way of internetworking which will still provide much of what you loved about The Internet (and many new things which are not possible now in the shadow of The Internet) but, true to the RFCs, still provides the core functionality of end-to-end, stupid network, guaranteed (as much as possible) communications.

But this new internetworking will not be built by those who have control (or centralization or monitoring or blocking or profit) as their goal, but rather by those who remain true to the cause.

But it can be built, and it will be built. And building it will be legal and challenging and fun, and no one will have to get shot doing it.

You're welcome to make your stand here, and try to defend The Internet from the onslaught. If you choose to employ violence in making your stand, please try to avoid harming the innocents or (heaven forbid) your allies. (That would be another tactical mistake). Your determination, bravery, and sacrifices (is it okay to use those terms to describe someone who posts anonymously?) are honorable, but in the end I fear they will be fruitless.

As an alternative, you can do what geeks are best at, play to your strengths, and help to build the internetworking to preserve those elements without which Freedom and Democracy itself are threatened.

Or, as another poster put it so succinctly: "Go Freenet!"