It is really useful for historical info on almost anything, CPU, memory, network, mail, MySQL, Apache, swapping, you name it.
I've only used it on Linux systems, so don't know much about its Windows features.
Its default page may not be useful as is for a WOW display. But you may be able to write an HTML page with a meta refresh to pull a few interesting graphs and display them in a custom page.
Having lived there for more than a decade, most Saudis I have worked with had secular degrees, mainly in engineering, computer and IT. Some in HR,...etc. Most of them have Masters or Ph.D degrees from US universities, some from Europe. These were all on government grants. After 9/11, they shifted to Canada and Europe because the US would not be the welcoming place it used to be given the climate.
If you are talking of post-graduate degrees in religious studies, then it would be understandable if they are more than secular degrees. The reason is that this type of education cannot be gotten from the USA or Europe. Even not from other universities in the Muslim world, such as Egypt's Al-Azhar, or others in Morocco,...etc. due to ideological differences. They belong to different schools of thought that make it not an option for the Saudi religious establishment to encourage such exchange.
So, yes, Ph.D and Masters in religious studies will be heavily biased towards in-country institutions, but it does not convey the whole picture.
On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 ******* wrote:
"Dude your troll option don't make sense! I know yall think that it means someone bad but trolls used to be good. They'd build stuff if you left them bread or wine and they made the viking gods armor and spears. Don't let a few years of internet people destroy what something means. Be smarter than that! Yall don't have to play follow the leader. learn about trolls. I guess some were bad and you have to trick them into cutting open his belly in an eating contest but that doesn't even matter when it comes to what your saying. Do some research."
This reminds me of the many Slashdotters who will up in arms when the term "hacker" comes in the media with the meaning of "computer criminal".
The meaning of the word has changed in mainstream usage. In the narrow context of free software activism, it stills means solving a challenge in a clever way.
Deal with it, it no longer means what it used to mean, and the sooner you accept it the better.
Both the guy emailing about the meaning of "troll", and Slashdotters who insist on cracker and get upset by the new meaning of hacker have to adjust.
Part of the issue is storing identifying information, the other issue is storing credit card info. There should be no excuse for storing credit card info.
I was at Home Depot (Canada), returning something I bought earlier, and I reached for my wallet to give the guy the credit card to refund the item. He said, "Oh, we don't need that Sir, it is all stored in our system". I said: "You store credit card data on your computer"? He says: "Oh, we don't have access to it".
The point is, not the employees having access to it, but the data getting copied or stolen by criminals, such as the Best Western case.
Some credit card gateways provide a token based approach to recurring charges, such as monthly subscriptions, but it is not a standard that can be used everywhere with any card, and any merchant.
I don't know about uprising against the British, but for sure, Herbert used many Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune. Some of the stuff is obscure historical terms, so he digged deeper than just current colloquial terms in use in the Middle East at the time.
I have seen the same story in an English translation of a Russian book, but about crows.
A farmer had crows ravaging their crops, and he wanted to get in a building so he can shoot the crows. He did the same thing and got someone to go with him in building, then leave.
The crows were able to count up to a certain number (perhaps 4) and lost track of counting from that point on.
The Ashari school of thought came in early, and gained a lot of support perhaps from the 10th century onwards.
At the time, the other schools of thoughts, which are not "sects", within the majority Sunni Islam were as follows:
a) the Mu'tazili, which were supposed to a rationalist theological branch. They had followers among the elite, but very little among the majority. They managed to be the "state religion" under Al-Ma'moun. This caused severe oppression of the traditionalists, going to extremes, such as crucifying leaders of opposing sects, making them more popular among the public at large, and refusing to pay ransom for Muslim prisoners of war of Byzantium who were tested for their creed and did not confirm to Mu'tazilism. They are touted today by some factions in the West as an alternative to the literalist Hanbalis, forgetting that they were so oppressive when in power. Their school of thought lived on among a few scholars and elite, but faded from existence. Some of their thought got absorbed into other schools, for example the Shi'a Twelvers of today.
b) the Hanbalis (traditionalists), which have a literalist legalistic interpretation of theology based mainly on scripture and tradition. Their thought lives on within the contemorary Salafi/Wahhabi, which is not necessarily militant, although Al-Qaeda subscribes to that thought.
c) the Asharis, which sought to merge aspects of the above two in theology, retaining both tradition and reason. This was the majority thought from the 10th century on. One famous Ash'ari scholar was Al Ghazali of Persia in the late 1000s. He sought to refute many of the theology of the philosophers, and was also a Sufi. He is incorrectly blamed for the decline in scientific thought.
d) the Sufis (mystics), with a whole spectrum ranging from just "I am not interested in materialism" to "I get my revelation directly from God". They were mainly interested in ethics, conduct and sometimes esoteric practices (like the Whirling Dervishs), and there were Sufi strains within sects, e.g. Shi'a. It is important to note that Sufis were very prevalent in the 18th to early 20th century. Many anti-colonial leaders of "Jihad" were Sufis, such as Omar Al Mukhtar in Libya, Abdul Qadi in Algeria, the Mad Mullah in Somalia, Al Mahdi in Sudan, and Shamil in the Caucasus. Again, some in the West advocate Sufism as a replacement for the literalist Hanbali, forgetting that Sufis were the main religious opposing force, to the extent that Russia outlawed all the Sufi orders!
e) the philosophers, who were really a few, but had a lot of influence. They went beyond Mu'tazilis and wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Plato's work. The adherents to those were mainly medical doctors who were polymaths, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al Farabi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and others. They were often close to rulers, but did not seek to make their thought a mass thing like the Mu'tazilis did.
f) the Zahiri (literalist jurists), which never gained popularity, apart from the famed debates of Ibn Hazm of Cordova. Although literal in Sharia, they were not so in matters of theology, more of a mix between Mu'tazilis and Ash'aris.
The golden age of science under Muslim rule between 900s and 1200s, and carried over to the 1400s in some areaas. Ash'aris were well established during that time, with most rulers and the public being Ash'aris.
Read the articles of Dr. George Saliba of Columbia University sometime. They detail how scientific thought continued well into the 15th century.
There are some choice quotes on anti-trust, Michael Cowpland (Corel founder and the WordPerfect debacle), recruiting from University of Waterloo, establishing a Richmond, B.C. campus,...etc.
it is not uncommmon and a transfer to be marched off the plane, asked to collect bags, then processed back through 'security checks' along with full documentation checks, records, etc and then held until transfer in a 'secure holding place'.
Actually, it is funnier than that.
Prior to 9/11, Egypt Air's flight from Montreal (or was it Toronto? They don't fly there anymore) stopped in New York's JFK to pick up more passengers, then continued on to Cairo. It just took an hour or so to get the NY passengers on and their luggage, and everything was cool. The Montreal passengers stayed in the plane in the meantime.
After 9/11, the passengers boarding at Montreal have to unboard at JFK, go through passport control, claim their luggage, have it checked by customs, then take it back to luggage checkin, and then both the passengers and the luggage would go back on the SAME PLANE.
I can't speak for the 1970s, but I started developing for mainframes in the 1980s.
The mainframe I first worked on did NOT have a card reader, which was odd at the time for the series (NCR Criterion V-series). It had 1MB of memory per CPU, and the two hosts shared a bank of 6 disks, each 500MB (total of 3 GB).
Now, my laptop has a CPU with dual cores, 1GB of memory, and 160GB of disk. Oh, and my cell phone has a microSD card with 2GB on it that is less than my thumbnail size.
Apache with PHP and few PHP scripts (Drupal modules) start at 17MB, while that mainframe had a maximum of 16MB that could fit in it. One could run Linux with X11 and fvwm in 64MB comfortably. Now with KDE, kubuntu would not boot 128MB (or was it 256MB, can't remember).
15 years down the road we would be talking terabytes of storage in your key ring.
Maher Arar is another case. He was deported from the US to Syria where he was held and tortured for a year. Then suddenly released without charge. The people responsible for his initial detention within CSIS (Canadian counterpart to CIA) and the RCMP (counterpart to FBI) have not yet been identified nor punished for their role. Not only did they cause this to happen, but they kept leaking biased info to the media during the inquiry that cleared his name.
As a side note: the "el-" vs. "al-" is just a dialectical thing in Arabic. The proper classical Arabic is "Al-" meaning "The". El-Masri means "The Egyptian". In all of the Arabic speaking countries, it would be Al-, except for Egypt and Morocco where the local dialect reverts it to "El-".
This is utter horsehit. The oil in Montana and North Dakota is in oil shale, not in liquid form. You would essentially have to strip mine the entire area. Look here for more info. The environmental impact would be huge, and this technique is only economically viable when oil is incredibly expensive.
Actually, Americans are already benefiting from a similar source, but in someone else's backyard: Canada.
The USA imports more oil from Canada than from any Middle East country (yes, this is a little known fact in the USA).
That comes from Alberta (and recently from Saskatchewan too), which have seen an economic boom. Oil comes from the Oil Sands. While not shale, it has a negative environmental impact nonetheless.
I have seen this happen in Egypt. Farmers used to grow cotton and wheat as cash crops.
However, in the 1980s, while visiting my grandfather in a village east of the delta, he pointed out strange looking plants in the fields, inundated with water. It turns out that this reed looking plant is papyrus, grown for the tourist industry: it is made into sheets and then fake hieroglyphs and paintings are put on it.
Of course, this means that Egypt does not grow enough food for itself and relies on subsidized wheat from the USA and elsewhere.
I am not sure if the high price of wheat in the last 8 months or so will change the minds of some farmers to grow it or not.
Here is Southern Ontario, we have two problems: tigers and elephants. The former eat our pets and can be dangerous to children in backyards. The latter wreaks havoc on our lawns.
I sprinkle pepper on the lawn and have some special rocks that I put in front of the house.
Both these procedures keep tigers and elephants away, and so far, they have been 100% effective...
Research on pigs has shown that tasers cause erratic heart rhythms when the barbs form a line that crosses the heart. Little surprise, because the heart's rhythm works on electric pulses.
In Canada we had more than one case of death after tasering, including a polish immigrant.
Slashdot Mirror
This one is easy ...
Ever since the DHS has been setup, there are no terror attacks on the USA. So, obviously what the DHS is doing prevents terrorism.
Is is the same up here in Canada. We sprinkle black pepper on our lawns to prevent elephants from messing then up.
But there are no elephants in Canada you say? See, more proof that the black pepper works ...
Mollom is free for low to medium traffic sites. They have plugins for the major CMSes out there (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and a bunch of others).
It is relatively new, but I use it on several sites and it works well. See the score card for some fun.
The founder of Mollom is Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, the CMS.
One of the effective ways to not worry about these probes, is to run your ssh daemon on a non standard port.
So, instead of it being on port 22, run it on port 1022 or some other port.
You can do that by modifying your /etc/ssh/sshd_config to contain the line: Port 1022.
This means that scp and ssh will have to be told about the port on the command line though.
Here is a second vote for Munin.
It is really useful for historical info on almost anything, CPU, memory, network, mail, MySQL, Apache, swapping, you name it.
I've only used it on Linux systems, so don't know much about its Windows features.
Its default page may not be useful as is for a WOW display. But you may be able to write an HTML page with a meta refresh to pull a few interesting graphs and display them in a custom page.
A high school student in Ontario cannot get their diploma unless they do 40 hours of community service.
It is actually a good idea.
Yes, the Conservatives did promise to reintroduce the copyright "reform" legislation. This will be the third attempt at it by the Conservatives.
As for the elections themselves, there are many interesting observations. Read my thoughts on Canada's federal elections 2008.
I have to dispute the figure of 90%.
Having lived there for more than a decade, most Saudis I have worked with had secular degrees, mainly in engineering, computer and IT. Some in HR, ...etc. Most of them have Masters or Ph.D degrees from US universities, some from Europe. These were all on government grants. After 9/11, they shifted to Canada and Europe because the US would not be the welcoming place it used to be given the climate.
If you are talking of post-graduate degrees in religious studies, then it would be understandable if they are more than secular degrees. The reason is that this type of education cannot be gotten from the USA or Europe. Even not from other universities in the Muslim world, such as Egypt's Al-Azhar, or others in Morocco, ...etc. due to ideological differences. They belong to different schools of thought that make it not an option for the Saudi religious establishment to encourage such exchange.
So, yes, Ph.D and Masters in religious studies will be heavily biased towards in-country institutions, but it does not convey the whole picture.
Would that be NCR Corporation? They make cash registers, and were purchased by AT&T in the early 90s and then spun off with the same name?
This reminds me of the many Slashdotters who will up in arms when the term "hacker" comes in the media with the meaning of "computer criminal".
The meaning of the word has changed in mainstream usage. In the narrow context of free software activism, it stills means solving a challenge in a clever way.
Deal with it, it no longer means what it used to mean, and the sooner you accept it the better.
Both the guy emailing about the meaning of "troll", and Slashdotters who insist on cracker and get upset by the new meaning of hacker have to adjust.
Part of the issue is storing identifying information, the other issue is storing credit card info. There should be no excuse for storing credit card info.
I was at Home Depot (Canada), returning something I bought earlier, and I reached for my wallet to give the guy the credit card to refund the item. He said, "Oh, we don't need that Sir, it is all stored in our system". I said: "You store credit card data on your computer"? He says: "Oh, we don't have access to it".
The point is, not the employees having access to it, but the data getting copied or stolen by criminals, such as the Best Western case.
Some credit card gateways provide a token based approach to recurring charges, such as monthly subscriptions, but it is not a standard that can be used everywhere with any card, and any merchant.
Quite the opposite, it will fuel existing movements, and as well as start new ones, such as: Raelians, Heaven's Gate and many other alien based religions.
I don't know about uprising against the British, but for sure, Herbert used many Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune. Some of the stuff is obscure historical terms, so he digged deeper than just current colloquial terms in use in the Middle East at the time.
I am writing this while traveling in the near North of Ontario.
My connection is via xplornet, a satellite provider while I am on this trip.
Latency really sucks. Everything has a lag to it, but most noticably SSH is unusuable at all.
Bandwidth seems to be OK, but at times, the transfer rate crawls to just BYTES per second.
I am glad this is only temprorary in my case, and I pity those who have to deal with an SSH connection over satellite.
I have seen the same story in an English translation of a Russian book, but about crows.
A farmer had crows ravaging their crops, and he wanted to get in a building so he can shoot the crows. He did the same thing and got someone to go with him in building, then leave.
The crows were able to count up to a certain number (perhaps 4) and lost track of counting from that point on.
This view is overly simplistic.
The Ashari school of thought came in early, and gained a lot of support perhaps from the 10th century onwards.
At the time, the other schools of thoughts, which are not "sects", within the majority Sunni Islam were as follows:
a) the Mu'tazili, which were supposed to a rationalist theological branch. They had followers among the elite, but very little among the majority. They managed to be the "state religion" under Al-Ma'moun. This caused severe oppression of the traditionalists, going to extremes, such as crucifying leaders of opposing sects, making them more popular among the public at large, and refusing to pay ransom for Muslim prisoners of war of Byzantium who were tested for their creed and did not confirm to Mu'tazilism. They are touted today by some factions in the West as an alternative to the literalist Hanbalis, forgetting that they were so oppressive when in power. Their school of thought lived on among a few scholars and elite, but faded from existence. Some of their thought got absorbed into other schools, for example the Shi'a Twelvers of today.
b) the Hanbalis (traditionalists), which have a literalist legalistic interpretation of theology based mainly on scripture and tradition. Their thought lives on within the contemorary Salafi/Wahhabi, which is not necessarily militant, although Al-Qaeda subscribes to that thought.
c) the Asharis, which sought to merge aspects of the above two in theology, retaining both tradition and reason. This was the majority thought from the 10th century on. One famous Ash'ari scholar was Al Ghazali of Persia in the late 1000s. He sought to refute many of the theology of the philosophers, and was also a Sufi. He is incorrectly blamed for the decline in scientific thought.
d) the Sufis (mystics), with a whole spectrum ranging from just "I am not interested in materialism" to "I get my revelation directly from God". They were mainly interested in ethics, conduct and sometimes esoteric practices (like the Whirling Dervishs), and there were Sufi strains within sects, e.g. Shi'a. It is important to note that Sufis were very prevalent in the 18th to early 20th century. Many anti-colonial leaders of "Jihad" were Sufis, such as Omar Al Mukhtar in Libya, Abdul Qadi in Algeria, the Mad Mullah in Somalia, Al Mahdi in Sudan, and Shamil in the Caucasus. Again, some in the West advocate Sufism as a replacement for the literalist Hanbali, forgetting that Sufis were the main religious opposing force, to the extent that Russia outlawed all the Sufi orders!
e) the philosophers, who were really a few, but had a lot of influence. They went beyond Mu'tazilis and wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Plato's work. The adherents to those were mainly medical doctors who were polymaths, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al Farabi, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and others. They were often close to rulers, but did not seek to make their thought a mass thing like the Mu'tazilis did.
f) the Zahiri (literalist jurists), which never gained popularity, apart from the famed debates of Ibn Hazm of Cordova. Although literal in Sharia, they were not so in matters of theology, more of a mix between Mu'tazilis and Ash'aris.
The golden age of science under Muslim rule between 900s and 1200s, and carried over to the 1400s in some areaas. Ash'aris were well established during that time, with most rulers and the public being Ash'aris.
Read the articles of Dr. George Saliba of Columbia University sometime. They detail how scientific thought continued well into the 15th century.
Here is some data, via Google Analytics, from a site that I run:
Jun 13 - 19
IE 62%
FF 30%
Jun 20 - 26
IE 59%
FF 32%
Pretty close as you can see.
However, when you look at the breakdown for Firefox version, you see:
Jun 13 - 19
2.x 72%
3.0 16%
Jun 20 - 26
2.x 57%
3.0 32%
A big jump doubling 3.0's share within Firefox.
The CBC has an article titled Bill Gates in Canada: a checkered legacy.
There are some choice quotes on anti-trust, Michael Cowpland (Corel founder and the WordPerfect debacle), recruiting from University of Waterloo, establishing a Richmond, B.C. campus, ...etc.
Worth a read.
Actually, it is funnier than that.
Prior to 9/11, Egypt Air's flight from Montreal (or was it Toronto? They don't fly there anymore) stopped in New York's JFK to pick up more passengers, then continued on to Cairo. It just took an hour or so to get the NY passengers on and their luggage, and everything was cool. The Montreal passengers stayed in the plane in the meantime.
After 9/11, the passengers boarding at Montreal have to unboard at JFK, go through passport control, claim their luggage, have it checked by customs, then take it back to luggage checkin, and then both the passengers and the luggage would go back on the SAME PLANE.
Really really annoying ...
Submission wrongly spells his name. His name is Khan and not Kahn.
I can't speak for the 1970s, but I started developing for mainframes in the 1980s.
The mainframe I first worked on did NOT have a card reader, which was odd at the time for the series (NCR Criterion V-series). It had 1MB of memory per CPU, and the two hosts shared a bank of 6 disks, each 500MB (total of 3 GB).
Now, my laptop has a CPU with dual cores, 1GB of memory, and 160GB of disk. Oh, and my cell phone has a microSD card with 2GB on it that is less than my thumbnail size.
Apache with PHP and few PHP scripts (Drupal modules) start at 17MB, while that mainframe had a maximum of 16MB that could fit in it. One could run Linux with X11 and fvwm in 64MB comfortably. Now with KDE, kubuntu would not boot 128MB (or was it 256MB, can't remember).
15 years down the road we would be talking terabytes of storage in your key ring.
Maher Arar is another case. He was deported from the US to Syria where he was held and tortured for a year. Then suddenly released without charge. The people responsible for his initial detention within CSIS (Canadian counterpart to CIA) and the RCMP (counterpart to FBI) have not yet been identified nor punished for their role. Not only did they cause this to happen, but they kept leaking biased info to the media during the inquiry that cleared his name.
As a side note: the "el-" vs. "al-" is just a dialectical thing in Arabic. The proper classical Arabic is "Al-" meaning "The". El-Masri means "The Egyptian". In all of the Arabic speaking countries, it would be Al-, except for Egypt and Morocco where the local dialect reverts it to "El-".
Actually, Americans are already benefiting from a similar source, but in someone else's backyard: Canada.
The USA imports more oil from Canada than from any Middle East country (yes, this is a little known fact in the USA).
That comes from Alberta (and recently from Saskatchewan too), which have seen an economic boom. Oil comes from the Oil Sands. While not shale, it has a negative environmental impact nonetheless.
I have seen this happen in Egypt. Farmers used to grow cotton and wheat as cash crops.
However, in the 1980s, while visiting my grandfather in a village east of the delta, he pointed out strange looking plants in the fields, inundated with water. It turns out that this reed looking plant is papyrus, grown for the tourist industry: it is made into sheets and then fake hieroglyphs and paintings are put on it.
Of course, this means that Egypt does not grow enough food for itself and relies on subsidized wheat from the USA and elsewhere.
I am not sure if the high price of wheat in the last 8 months or so will change the minds of some farmers to grow it or not.
Here is Southern Ontario, we have two problems: tigers and elephants. The former eat our pets and can be dangerous to children in backyards. The latter wreaks havoc on our lawns.
...
...
I sprinkle pepper on the lawn and have some special rocks that I put in front of the house.
Both these procedures keep tigers and elephants away, and so far, they have been 100% effective
Yes, security theatre does work
Research on pigs has shown that tasers cause erratic heart rhythms when the barbs form a line that crosses the heart. Little surprise, because the heart's rhythm works on electric pulses.
In Canada we had more than one case of death after tasering, including a polish immigrant.