I take your point but it's natural in the course of things for routers to be replaced with newer ones and/or the firmware to be upgraded.
The problem with any 'education based' approach is that there are always newbies coming along that need to be taught. Barring some scheme which encourages them to learn fast (like, say those for mail relays and broadcast amplifiers) such efforts are usually doomed to failure. Evolution just doesn't work that fast;)
A system that needs no configuring, and can be turned on by default in new boxes, is a winner in the long run. Also as IPv6 appraches, we can be sure a lot of router upgrades are on the way.
Not that this applies to everyone but I hope this has made some folk around here realise that admin types generally have ten other things to do better than spending all their life fighting DOS attacks and suchlike.
I have sympathy for k5 but as someone once said, defending the rights of people you agree with is easy. So next time someone launches attacks on Amazon, or some other geek-unfriendly site let's hear no more - "they're paid to handle this sort of thing" crap.
After a somewhat dodgy report of the case earlier in the week, the Guardian had a fairly clueful article . Shame about the title but that's editors for you.
What does this tell you (aside from netscape having WAY too many versions of their browser out)?
That M$ are incapable of understanding the major.minor version number concept? They have roughly fortnightly bug fixes, and a major update (5.5) and they all show up the same. Why is this an advantage?
Not that I don't agree with you: IE is a better browser than NN4 (on the limited number of platforms it runs on).
Now if 4.1 has SDI (which it might), that could go a long way in solving that problem.
I thought SDI was the Strategic Defence Initiative (aka Star Wars). I know web browsers are pretty bloated these days but including a ballistic missile defence system on the desktop is going too far.
It's the point of using stylesheets that you can take all of the explicit fontsize and suchlike crap out of the HTML. The HTML describes the structure, the CSS what the author intended it to look like, your browser preferences what it looks like to you.
The old rule about open source: if you don't like how things are progressing, stop whining and start coding.
That's what you tell your boss when your project is late is it? We'll open source it, and it won't matter how late or buggy it is.
Netscape is hardly a typical OS project; it's owned by a huge company. The letter was addressed to Netscape the company, not the Mozilla hackers.
Standards cops are good things, like any sort of QA. They're a pain but they help keep you honest. If you want it done properly, you don't make them part of the development team. It would really well next time they slammed Microsoft if they were all Mozilla developers wouldn't it?
And, outside the medical world, muons are used for used in studying the magnetic properties of materials. So, some of our understanding of superconductors comes from muons.
I think you're right not to expect too much direct benefit from looking for neutrinos. It's kind of like putting a man on the moon: the benefits arise much more from solving the engineering problems than, say, bringing back a few rocks.
The folks at these places are pushing the limits of electronics and high performance computing and data storage. One of the spinoffs from particle physics research is the World Wide Web. Nuff said.
Or even a real country in a different jurisdiction. Sealand's a bit of a joke: when the RIP bill is passed, and they're faced with providing interception facilities or a jail sentence how long do you think they are going to hold out?
Basically, the impression i got from from this article is that ol' Monty wants to run Windows 95 on Unix! he wants a standard DE and i have to stand up and disagree.
I think you've missed the point almost entirely. The GNOME and KDE folk are busy trying to gain some ground back from Windows on the usability front. This is a laudable effort to be sure but leaves all the original problems of X intact.
These aren't merely the things that it (perhaps rightly) doesn't address, like consistency of GUI. Authentication is still a prize pain. There is no mechanism for adding extensions dynamically making use of them in practice almost impossible.
Papering over a dubious API with n layers of toolkits and RAD tools is something that should be left to M$. Every time I hear yet another/. reader say something like: "that's the Unix way, it can't be improved upon - innovation, no thanks", I despair.
If a piece of software has had no real improvements in 5 years, then it's a sign that it needs a serious redesign. X is moribund: let it die in peace.
Unix print spooling has worked fine until now - why change it?
There are several things it doesn't address very well. The main one is that it is a hack on direct network connected printers: you can print to them but then the printer has no way of communicating status back.
Compare with say, how printing on Appletalk works, where you open a bidirectional channel to the printer, and it tells you on the channel if it's out of paper or whatever.
Furthermore, lpd includes no way of managing networked printers remotely. How do you set up access lists, or retrieve accounting information?
lpr is a 'just good enough' protocol. Don't believe that it can't be improved on.
So the majority are right when it comes to language? Usage defines the word?
Of course. They have the Académie Française in France, to make it illegal to call a computer computeur. However, the English speaking world generally doesn't go in for such authoritarianism.
So if everyone started calling gay men 'fags' tomorrow, they'd be right?
In the end, you have to decide who owns the right to define language. The only sensible answer is those who speak it.
I always think its funny when some loser admin sends us an email saying a host on our network "Attacked" his box and to prove it shows a log saying he was port scanned.
That's what loser net admins always think, until they start getting their network blocked everywhere.
A lot of the questions and comments on this topic are answered on the Long Now web site.
The whole point of the Foundation is to get people thinking about what the world will be like beyond the next couple of cycles of Moore's law. We suffer from too much short term thinking as a society. The actual construction of the clock/library etc. is secondary to opening up people's horizons.
Interesting things happen in the Long Now. You can store any book you want - you just need to wait a few hundred years until the copyright expires. Patented technology - no problem!
Go to the root www.longnow.org and browse around a bit. I recommend 'The Clock of the Long Now' as an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
Yes, it would, and if the story is true, then I'm absolutely stunned. When I worked for the MoD, we had one machine connected to the Internet, and it was in it's own room, required clearance to even use it, and it wasn't connected to any other machines.
It must have been a bloody big room if you could have got spacecraft into orbit in it!
Suddenly, everyone's a critic but doesn't seem to have thought about the basics of the situation. You're going to need to feed the telemetry from several base stations around the world in different countries. Like hell you're going to run a completely isolated network, unless its absolutely required, which in this case it appears not to have been.
It seems that the campaign against the Bill and other folks haven't updated their web pages for some time, nor do they appear to follow the progress of the Bill in parliament.
The Bill has been amended in the house of Lords, and some of the worst features have been eliminated. For example, clause 51(3) now allows 'forgetten it' as a reasonable defence.
Note for non-UK readers: the House of Lords functions primarily as a revisionary chamber, where the details of Bills can be examined outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Commons. It allows the government of the day to back down on contentious issues without suffering the indignity of losing a Commons vote.
Do encourage system administrators and users to never, ever log in and send their password from remotely over telnet. Inside the college network is a different idea.
The problem with campus style networks is that it's hard to enforce people to take even minimal precautions. All it takes is one open box not secured properly and a password sniffer installed.
If you think a college networks is some sort of cracker-free backwater, where the locals can all be trusted to act grown up, then you obviously went to a university a lot different from mine!
For example, a webpage may contain 4k of text, and say, 20 2k images. Why make 21 TCP connections, when you can make one, and send the whole page in one XML stream?
Yes, but this was fixed in HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections. The RFCs have recommended it for three years. That's a lifetime on the web.
They are not going to utilize this 'weakness' unless there are apps written to do it for them.
Like Netscape or IE then? It was the whole point of persistent connections in HTTP/1.1 to avoid having to open a new connection for every image (frame or whatever) on a page.
With HTTP/1.0 you had to open separate connections, and of course, the browser writers opened them concurrently because it was faster to the end user.
Compressed data structures in RAM will now bloat...so you will be penalized for using them. That is why I hate forced compression.
You always turn it off on your modem then? I'm no hardware guru but the obvious implementation to me would be to tag the pages like a cache. You only need to add 1 'uncompressed' bit per page, and you can keep that separately from the bulk memory. And a lot of the time, unless you are just moving the bits around, you will have the data uncompressed in memory anyway.
I think a lot of people here are getting hangups over various nontransparent software compression schemes they have used in the past on DOS.
I'm waiting for the next post: data caches are an awful idea. Cache thrashing means that worst case, they work worse than plain old memory. Let's keep our machines simple and build them all with flat, fast memory like a Cray.
Look at current trends in computing: hardware RAID use is growing, graphics cards are getting more complex, Gigabit NICs often implement IP checksumming in hardware. The future's here, and it's in custom silicon!
Seifert's law of networking also applies here: 'design for the typical case, not the worst case.'
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The problem with any 'education based' approach is that there are always newbies coming along that need to be taught. Barring some scheme which encourages them to learn fast (like, say those for mail relays and broadcast amplifiers) such efforts are usually doomed to failure. Evolution just doesn't work that fast ;)
A system that needs no configuring, and can be turned on by default in new boxes, is a winner in the long run. Also as IPv6 appraches, we can be sure a lot of router upgrades are on the way.
I have sympathy for k5 but as someone once said, defending the rights of people you agree with is easy. So next time someone launches attacks on Amazon, or some other geek-unfriendly site let's hear no more - "they're paid to handle this sort of thing" crap.
After a somewhat dodgy report of the case earlier in the week, the Guardian had a fairly clueful article . Shame about the title but that's editors for you.
That M$ are incapable of understanding the major.minor version number concept? They have roughly fortnightly bug fixes, and a major update (5.5) and they all show up the same. Why is this an advantage?
Not that I don't agree with you: IE is a better browser than NN4 (on the limited number of platforms it runs on).
I thought SDI was the Strategic Defence Initiative (aka Star Wars). I know web browsers are pretty bloated these days but including a ballistic missile defence system on the desktop is going too far.
Sheesh.
That's what you tell your boss when your project is late is it? We'll open source it, and it won't matter how late or buggy it is.
Netscape is hardly a typical OS project; it's owned by a huge company. The letter was addressed to Netscape the company, not the Mozilla hackers.
Standards cops are good things, like any sort of QA. They're a pain but they help keep you honest. If you want it done properly, you don't make them part of the development team. It would really well next time they slammed Microsoft if they were all Mozilla developers wouldn't it?
And, outside the medical world, muons are used for used in studying the magnetic properties of materials. So, some of our understanding of superconductors comes from muons.
The folks at these places are pushing the limits of electronics and high performance computing and data storage. One of the spinoffs from particle physics research is the World Wide Web. Nuff said.
I see that it appears to be unrelated to the other VisualPython under development by Activestate. Looks like the lawyers will have fun on this one.
Whatever next indeed; they'll be developing GUIs for other scripting languages like Tk soon!
That's what they claim. I'll be in the public gallery laughing when they try that one in court.
Or even a real country in a different jurisdiction. Sealand's a bit of a joke: when the RIP bill is passed, and they're faced with providing interception facilities or a jail sentence how long do you think they are going to hold out?
I think you've missed the point almost entirely. The GNOME and KDE folk are busy trying to gain some ground back from Windows on the usability front. This is a laudable effort to be sure but leaves all the original problems of X intact.
These aren't merely the things that it (perhaps rightly) doesn't address, like consistency of GUI. Authentication is still a prize pain. There is no mechanism for adding extensions dynamically making use of them in practice almost impossible.
Papering over a dubious API with n layers of toolkits and RAD tools is something that should be left to M$. Every time I hear yet another /. reader say something like: "that's the Unix way, it can't be improved upon - innovation, no thanks", I despair.
If a piece of software has had no real improvements in 5 years, then it's a sign that it needs a serious redesign. X is moribund: let it die in peace.
We had some discussion about the Long Now library on Slashdot a while back. Much of it is relevant to your question.
There are several things it doesn't address very well. The main one is that it is a hack on direct network connected printers: you can print to them but then the printer has no way of communicating status back.
Compare with say, how printing on Appletalk works, where you open a bidirectional channel to the printer, and it tells you on the channel if it's out of paper or whatever.
Furthermore, lpd includes no way of managing networked printers remotely. How do you set up access lists, or retrieve accounting information?
lpr is a 'just good enough' protocol. Don't believe that it can't be improved on.
Of course. They have the Académie Française in France, to make it illegal to call a computer computeur. However, the English speaking world generally doesn't go in for such authoritarianism.
So if everyone started calling gay men 'fags' tomorrow, they'd be right?
In the end, you have to decide who owns the right to define language. The only sensible answer is those who speak it.
That's what loser net admins always think, until they start getting their network blocked everywhere.
The whole point of the Foundation is to get people thinking about what the world will be like beyond the next couple of cycles of Moore's law. We suffer from too much short term thinking as a society. The actual construction of the clock/library etc. is secondary to opening up people's horizons.
Interesting things happen in the Long Now. You can store any book you want - you just need to wait a few hundred years until the copyright expires. Patented technology - no problem!
Go to the root www.longnow.org and browse around a bit. I recommend 'The Clock of the Long Now' as an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
It must have been a bloody big room if you could have got spacecraft into orbit in it!
Suddenly, everyone's a critic but doesn't seem to have thought about the basics of the situation. You're going to need to feed the telemetry from several base stations around the world in different countries. Like hell you're going to run a completely isolated network, unless its absolutely required, which in this case it appears not to have been.
The Bill has been amended in the house of Lords, and some of the worst features have been eliminated. For example, clause 51(3) now allows 'forgetten it' as a reasonable defence.
Note for non-UK readers: the House of Lords functions primarily as a revisionary chamber, where the details of Bills can be examined outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Commons. It allows the government of the day to back down on contentious issues without suffering the indignity of losing a Commons vote.
The problem with campus style networks is that it's hard to enforce people to take even minimal precautions. All it takes is one open box not secured properly and a password sniffer installed.
If you think a college networks is some sort of cracker-free backwater, where the locals can all be trusted to act grown up, then you obviously went to a university a lot different from mine!
Yes, but this was fixed in HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections. The RFCs have recommended it for three years. That's a lifetime on the web.
Like Netscape or IE then? It was the whole point of persistent connections in HTTP/1.1 to avoid having to open a new connection for every image (frame or whatever) on a page.
With HTTP/1.0 you had to open separate connections, and of course, the browser writers opened them concurrently because it was faster to the end user.
You always turn it off on your modem then? I'm no hardware guru but the obvious implementation to me would be to tag the pages like a cache. You only need to add 1 'uncompressed' bit per page, and you can keep that separately from the bulk memory. And a lot of the time, unless you are just moving the bits around, you will have the data uncompressed in memory anyway.
I think a lot of people here are getting hangups over various nontransparent software compression schemes they have used in the past on DOS.
I'm waiting for the next post: data caches are an awful idea. Cache thrashing means that worst case, they work worse than plain old memory. Let's keep our machines simple and build them all with flat, fast memory like a Cray.
Look at current trends in computing: hardware RAID use is growing, graphics cards are getting more complex, Gigabit NICs often implement IP checksumming in hardware. The future's here, and it's in custom silicon!
Seifert's law of networking also applies here: 'design for the typical case, not the worst case.'