I unplug the connecting wire and let it go. A split second later there's this big *FLASH* and the power goes out in the workroom as the wire touches the side of the grounded case.
Somehow nothing was damaged in that computer...except for the giant burn mark on the insides of the case. And SOMEHOW, even though he was just in the next room over, my boss never said anything to me about it. I still doubt that he didn't hear it...maybe he was just laughing too hard to say anything.
This happened to a coworker. He was diddling around inside his workstation, and jostled something which ripped the cable right off of the switch. The exposed wires swung down against the bottom of the case, leaving a thick black burn scar as it went. Luckily he figured out that he should unplug the sucker from the wall.
It's always so hillarious when someone comes inches from death and escapes with only a fucked up computer.
Well, we all know how Network Solutions makes it next to impossible to actually access a human being in the company when their seamless process doesn't go quite as smoothly as it should have (back in the day when you had to authenticate email addresses, fax over letterhead, etc for a simple DNS change).
On September 11th, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon with jets. The entire world was awestruck, watching the flaming wreckage on TV, shocked, paralyzed. No one knew what the hell to do that day.
Me? I knew exactly what I could do. I called Network Solutions!
I was talking to a human being in 60 seconds and asked the poor sod who was still at work to change my nameserver IP addresses.
He did.
I'd never been able to get someone at Network Solutions on the line before that day to make such a change, and never been able to since.
Use emacs to edit your zone files (as long as they are named with a.zone extention). The default zone mode auto-updates the serial number using the date/version convention.
BIND should let you replace the serial number with a $TIME variable, which would evaluate to the last modified timestamp on the zone file (or any of its dependent includes).
If you have to understand one point about Linux, it is this:
Linux is not special because it is (or isn't) technically superior, it is not special because of how many systems it does or does not run on, it is not special because it is easier or harder to use than another system.
Linux is special because every user is in effect a developer.
The code itself is not special. It is almost meaningless. When detractors like Ken Brown argue that there's no way that Linux could be as powerful as commercial UNIX today without having stolen code, he is entirely missing the point.
Good writers are called good writers because they have a brilliant idea, viewpoint, or wit, and express it in writing. Anyone who knows how to write can take a dictation, but not everyone who can take great dictation is a great writer. Great artists are great artists because they have a unique vision of the world and can express it. A great artist is not someone who can just photorealistically render a bowl of fruit to canvas.
Software development, while more utilitarian than art, is no different. The development of the idea itself is what all of the labors of the software development process go towards--the representation of an idea as code is the easy part. This is why so many Operating Systems resemble UNIX--lots of people spent lots of time thinking about the best set of primitives to make available to the programmer and system operator. Coming up with UNIX from scratch is hard, that requires thinking. Making a system that looks like UNIX is relatively easy in comparisen.
The Linux project (and its ilk) develop so well because an entire marketplace (like a bazaar?) of ideas push and pull it, guide it in the direction that makes it most usable. The good ideas continue to live, the less good ideas disappear.
The marketplace mostly decides where Linux goes.
The process that develops Linux is what is so valuable.
Windows entirely lacks this process because of one simple fact: Microsoft does not give a fuck about what I want out of Windows. I'm just one person out of a million. However, with Linux, I have the freedom to make my system do whatever I want, and if I can present a good enough reason (ie, the idea stands on its merits) for what I want out of it, it'll be introduced into the mainstream. If not, oh well, at least my little corner of the universe is to my liking.
The hardest and most annoying part about parallel parking for me is constantly checking all of my blind spots to make sure that I'm not about to mangle a pedestrian/stick my car out into oncoming traffic.
How does the parking system handle that, I wonder.
Set your DNS TTL low and make the switch. Within 15 minutes all traffic should go to the new IPs. It's not like someone you knew ten years ago is going to try to contact you on that IP...
Pffftt.
Every time I've changed the A record which have always had a TTL of 2 hours, I've seen a small trickle of traffic hit the old IP addresses for, I shit you not, at least two-three weeks afterward.
Some providers completely ignore your TTL entries when they cache them.
We kept the old IP addresses active for about a month (and had them do HTTP redirects to the new location, by an alternate name).
Much different from cell phone number portability. When you want to call mom you key in a 7-10 digit address to ring mom's phone. Most users won't key in "mom". If mom changes her phone number she has to tell everyone her new number, so even if you set up a voice dialing entry, you're not isolated from having to know her number at least once so you can update your phone book entry.
However, when you want to do a keyword search do you type in 216.239.57.99 or do you type in google.com?
When you check your email do you type in 64.4.32.7 or do you type in hotmail.com?
When you want to look at porn do you type in 64.71.165.211 or do you type in thehun.com?
Have you *ever* seen those IP addresses before today? Probably not. You don't need to know them to reach them.
Do you have any idea that when you type in thehun.com, sometimes you see 216.218.206.40 and sometimes you see 64.71.165.211 and sometimes it's 216.218.255.232? Would you know if they changed? Would you know if there were a hundred of them? This stuff is kept hidden from you by DNS for a reason.
If a user ever needs to see an IP address, someone has done something wrong. The purpose of DNS is to make physical IP address assignments irrelevant.
And not only is it dumb, but it's extremely hard to do. IP address networks are segmented, and routers need to be able to rely on cases where it can say "Well, I don't know what's on the other end of this network, BUT I DO KNOW FOR A FACT THAT *THIS* END *ALWAYS* HAS ADDRESSES IN THE 216.139.128.x RANGE!"
Some idiot probably hired a bunch of idiots to migrate their web site to a new provider, they probably fucked DNS to hell, the idiot probably demanded that the ISP just allow them to take the IP address and be done with it. In the meantime, the idiot went out of business because his site was down, and the ISP that said "you're crazy we can't do any of this!!" gets blamed.
Software development is the communication of an idea from the buyer to the seller, and from the seller to a computer. This kind of communication is best facilitated in part by conference rooms where everyone can participate with their laptops.
Unfortunately, every single conference room I've been in where all of the participants bring laptops involves a deadly tripwire field of power cords and ethernet cable. The power/rj45 jacks should be underneath the table, not against the walls.
While I don't know much about sales and marketing, I bet each of those groups benefits in part from conferencing also, and could use conference rooms that were modern information worker friendly.
IMO, the ideal office allocations, going around the edges, is: engineers, support, marketers, kitchen, equipment. In the middle goes clerical and management, and only from there can you reach accounting (which is against a barracaded edge). Why is management in the middle? So they can have a better chance in hell of understanding what's going on in the rest of the company through osmosis. Upper managers? They're located off-premesis so the rest of the company can get actual work done.
When ever you are driving a vehicle the authorities have the right to demand papers (licence registration) at any time for any reason. And since Americans spend a significant amounts of time driving isn't this equivilent to identification on demand?
Of course not, you have plenty of anonymity.
For example, assume you're not in your vehicle at the moment: "I don't have my wallet on me, it's in my car" is good enough to avoid identification. Well... wait...
Searching a car that you're currently not inside of requires permission (which you don't have to give), a warrant (which the officer can summon by chanting the magic words "I smell marijuana") or probable cause (which, if the officer performed an illegal search that turned up something useful, is easy enough to lie about "the unregistered firearm was in clear view on the passenger seat, not inside a locked box underneath the spare tire in his trunk with the groceries on top of as he claims").
So, on second thought, I guess you really don't have anonymity after all.
The worst case scenario would be that the judge rules in favor of the ripped off CD customer every time, but each ripped off CD customer has to go through the hassle of small claims court.
DNS is so core to a company that outsourcing it is absolutely ludicrous, IMO. Even third party "secondaries" can be disasterous.
Considering that DNS is one of the easier things to replicate internally (djbdns can do it securely, quickly, automatically and atomically with cdb/ssh/rsync/cron), it makes little sense to hand it off to a third party. On the flip side, this ease-of-replication is probably why DNS outsourcing is so common (despite being a bad idea).
I'm a supporter of open source, but "forced open source" by cracking developers' computers and making their data public is just unethical. These people were real black hats; IIRC, they wrote cracking programs for their private use, specifically to crack Valve --- every sysadmin's worst nightmare. I hope crackdowns like this will get more prominent media attention in the future.
Don't be ridiculous. The typical open source advocate does not support compromising networks to copy private information. Almost everyone can agree that it's "wrong".
What you will not find a concensus on is how to punish the perpetrator of this crime because there is such a variance of opinion on two basic questions: 1) how has the 'victim' been injured by this? 2) what was the perpetrator's intent?
It's a huge can of worms to argue injury, because, well, the code wasn't destroyed or altered, it was just copied. You'll have a difficult time arguing that the trade secrets that have been exposed through this are so valuable that they constitute real damage.
There's also a debate as to the perpetrator's intent. None of us really know. If the perpetrator was a competitor who was trying to gain inside information, that's an entirely different case than if it was a bored teenager who wanted to have some fun.
My belief is that Valve hasn't suffered at all besides maybe having to have a serious evaluation of their network security, and that the perpetrator didn't intend for any serious harm. If anything they gained value from this--an excuse to miss their deadline.
If you ask me, the punk should pay restitution in the form of whatever it cost Valve (within reason) to perform a security audit, a suspended 1 month jail sentence, and that's the end of it.
They probably just rounded up people who happened to have the source code on their machines (ratted out by friends/enemies, etc.) and asked them where they got it. If they couldn't name names, they were further scrutinized. If they can't name names (practical joke gone awry?) have the "capacity to commit the crime" (ie, they're techies) they get charged. Follow the names that were named. Repeat until the number of people you've arrested sounds impressive.
This makes great headlines and eases the PHB's nerves, but doesn't really solve anything. The original perpetrator may get away with it scott free, even.
Out of habit I seem to run WindowMaker on every system I have access to. I'm familar with it, it has a limited, understood set of functionality, pretty small memory footprint, and it reacts in mostly expected ways. It does very little, but does it well. IMO, Steve Jobs struck a very good balance between end-user simplicity and power with this design, and it's a shame that they threw it all away with MacOS X (which I find frustratingly unusable).
The command line is where most of my action is at, but when I do need applications that don't make sense in a terminal, such as GIMP, Mozilla, xfig, etc. WindowMaker manages them very well but also stays the hell out of my way.
It's such a shame how the command line interface has been demonized. For many applications, they're the most efficient and least stressful way to operate, and they simply don't exist anymore because everyone believes that the GUI is the unquestioned, best interface available for every task.
Things I find easier with a command line interface than their conventional GUI counterparts:
Reading/writing email with mutt/vi vs. Outlook, etc.
Writing a letter, report, proposal with vi/pdflatex vs. OpenOffice, MS Office, etc.
Programming with vi vs. Visual Studio
Burning CDs with mkisofs/cdrecord vs. Easy CD Creator, nero, etc.
Most image manipulation tasks are better suited with ImageMagick's command line tools (such as convert) vs. GIMP, Photoshop.
Some things that I find easier with a GUI interface vs a command line:
"Reading" usenet, I much prefer the graphical pan to slrn and its ilk.
Web browsing with mozilla. I lose my patience with lynx/links very quickly.
Image touchups require GIMP (or Photoshop).
Technical drawings with xfig, versus, uh, I have no idea how else I could do them.
GUIs are great, but in my world it should never be the only interface available because I'd suffer. Why not the best interface for the job?
$ ps ax PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 1 ? S 0:04 init [2] 2 ? SWN 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0] 3 ? SW< 0:00 [events/0] 4 ? SW< 0:00 [kblockd/0] 5 ? SW< 0:00 [khelper] 6 ? SW 0:00 [pdflush] 7 ? SW 0:00 [pdflush] 9 ? SW< 0:00 [aio/0] 8 ? SW 0:00 [kswapd0] 112 ? SW 0:00 [kseriod] 116 ? SW< 0:00 [reiserfs/0] 593 ? SW 0:00 [khubd] 1266 ? S 0:00 dhclient -pf/var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid eth0 1488 ? S 0:00/sbin/syslogd 1491 ? S 0:00/sbin/klogd 1522 ? S 0:00/usr/sbin/cupsd 1543 ? S 0:08/usr/sbin/gpm -m/dev/input/mice -t autops2 -Rms3 -s 1636 ? S 0:00/usr/lib/postfix/master 1639 ? S 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u -c 1652 ? S 0:00/usr/sbin/sshd 1663 ? S 0:01/usr/bin/X11/xfs -daemon 1667 ? S 0:00/usr/bin/X11/xfs-xtt -daemon -user xfntserv -port 711 1758 ? S 0:00/bin/bash/etc/rc2.d/S20xprint posix_sh_forced start 1763 ? S 0:00/bin/bash/etc/rc2.d/S20xprint posix_sh_forced start 1764 ? S 0:02/usr/X11R6/bin/Xprt -ac -pn -nolisten tcp -audit 4 -f 1767 ? S 0:00 tee -a/dev/null 1768 ? S 0:00 logger -p lpr.notice -t Xprt_64 1779 ? S 0:00/usr/sbin/atd 1782 ? S 0:00/usr/sbin/cron 1789 ? S 0:00/usr/bin/X11/xdm 1817 ? S< 2:05/usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp -auth/va 1848 ? S 0:00 -:0 1868 ? S 0:03/usr/bin/WindowMaker 1909 ? S 0:00/usr/bin/ssh-agent x-window-manager 2449 ? S 0:02 xterm +sb -bg black -fg gray -e ssh foo.bar. 2450 pts/9 S 0:01 ssh foo.bar.com 2613 ? S 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u -c 2627 ? S 0:21/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 2655 ? S 0:00 xterm +sb -bg black -fg gray 2656 pts/17 S 0:00 bash 2659 pts/17 R 0:00 ps ax
Lets pick one of those processes at random, oh, gpm! Now what the hell does that do?
man gpm gives me some information. Oh, it's not enough? No problem!
apt-get source gpm and I've got the source in 30 seconds, beckoning me to change it. Why change it? Well, call me crazy, but I think it'd be neat for gpm to kill every process straight up to init on a given terminal if I hold mouse-1 and mouse-2 for 5 seconds -- this way I can be sure that a trojan isn't capturing my login information next time I type it in*.
Total elapsed time: 10 minutes?
I could not do this on Windows, certainly not in under 10 minutes. I don't mean the end result, I mean the process. Microsoft thought of this problem and Windows NT makes you ALT-CTRL-DEL to login (which can be compromised just like my gpm security feature can be compromised). But the point is that I added this feature to my system in 10 minutes.
I could just as easily be annoyed at, oh, every time I try to su to root and mistype my password, su sleeps for 3 seconds and catches CTRL-C so I have to sit and wait (or ^Z and kill -9 $1 which isn't as convenient as ^C or just having it reprompt me). I can change that in the time it took me to write this. Under Windows, I just can't manage this level of control.
* Yes Linux provides this feature via SYSRQ but I don't like all of the other side-effects of enabling SYSRQ. OH WAIT, I CAN CHANGE THAT TOO!
Politicians dictate policy and enforce it with guns.
Businesses develop policy and sustain it with dollars.
Sometimes politicians covet businesses, sometimes businesses covet politicians. Regardless, this pairing is a powerful force that upsets the balances of our democracy.
Destroy these alliances by taking the guns out of the hands of politicians.
The USA started with a few basic ideas: prosecute criminals (where crime equals victim and malicious intent), keep people to their word if they swear to (enforce contracts), promote standards (money, units of measure), protect people from religion, people protect their communities and enforce their laws.
Today it resembles a much different beast. One that imprisons people who have harmed no one, one that codifies religious dogma as law, one where armed men roam communities looking for "criminals", where our soldiers invade countries that have never harmed us, and one where businesses are more valuable constituents than civilians.
Lets abolish the FCC. Afterwards, we can hit the FDA, FTC, DOJ, DOD, DHS, and so on.
It may also stop some teenagers from printing up obvious fakes and landing themselves years in prison. Of course, this wouldn't be so huge an issue if ambitious politicians didn't insist on throwing the book at them.
Criminals will go "oh, that's cute" and switch to something else, implement a workaround, or whatever it takes to keep business running.
The rest of us will have to deal with software self-destructing, hardware seizing up, open source projects becoming illegal, etc. More hassle in our lives just so politicians can make headlines.
Furthermore in almost every interview with experienced computer science professionals, almost all said that they personally had a copy of the Lions notes, an illegal distribution of Unix source code.
Either Brown is an idiot or a liar, since he left some interesting information out of his report. This once illegal distribution was eventually published as a book, which I'm holding my lap right now. Here's an excerpt from the preface:
Thanks to the efforts of Dennis Ritchie, AT&T's lawyers stated that they had "no objection" to publication [of the Lions notes as a book]. Negotiations with Novell, purchasers of the UNIX system from AT&T, were sluggish. Then, late in 1995, came the announcement that
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (SCO) had purchased UNIX from Novell. Dennis and I wrote to Mike Tilson and Doug Michels, executives at SCO we knew personally. Mike actually owned a copy of John Lions' work, treasured it, and within a short period of time had arranged with SCO's lawyers for permission.
It's truly amazing how far the name SCO has fallen since then, and how this shill can make such a blatant misrepresentation, and how much money he probably made doing it.
I wish someone would pay me to tell outrageous lies.
Most programmers don't even figure this out, so non-programmers are a lost cause, but I'll keep patiently repeating this:
The makeup of the Software Industry is that 95% (or more) of the software developed in the world today is sold to single buyers. The remaining 5%, which most analysts mistakenly characterize as the ENTIRE software industry, is shrinkwrap software like Windows or Adobe Photoshop.
While open source directly threatens the shrinkwrap (5%) software industry, it has enormous positive impact on the custom software (95%) sector. Remember, since it's sold to single buyers (developed in-house by the company or under contract) so if it incorporates GPL or BSD licensed code, IT IS IRRELEVANT! Custom systems are almost never resold because a) the client is usually not in the software business, and b) the software is usually useful only in the original buyer's environment, and is custom tailored for their individual needs.
GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS, OPEN SOURCE IS ONLY A REMOTE THREAT, AND ONLY TO SHRINKWRAP SOFTWARE VENDORS! Microsoft is worried, Oracle is concerned, Siemens, IBM, and consultants like me who write and sell code every day sure aren't.
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I unplug the connecting wire and let it go. A split second later there's this big *FLASH* and the power goes out in the workroom as the wire touches the side of the grounded case.
Somehow nothing was damaged in that computer...except for the giant burn mark on the insides of the case. And SOMEHOW, even though he was just in the next room over, my boss never said anything to me about it. I still doubt that he didn't hear it...maybe he was just laughing too hard to say anything.
This happened to a coworker. He was diddling around inside his workstation, and jostled something which ripped the cable right off of the switch. The exposed wires swung down against the bottom of the case, leaving a thick black burn scar as it went. Luckily he figured out that he should unplug the sucker from the wall.
It's always so hillarious when someone comes inches from death and escapes with only a fucked up computer.
Interpretting Python with Java?
Wait for it...
Wait for it......
Now!
WON'T THAT BE SLOW!?!?!!
Well, we all know how Network Solutions makes it next to impossible to actually access a human being in the company when their seamless process doesn't go quite as smoothly as it should have (back in the day when you had to authenticate email addresses, fax over letterhead, etc for a simple DNS change).
On September 11th, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon with jets. The entire world was awestruck, watching the flaming wreckage on TV, shocked, paralyzed. No one knew what the hell to do that day.
Me? I knew exactly what I could do. I called Network Solutions!
I was talking to a human being in 60 seconds and asked the poor sod who was still at work to change my nameserver IP addresses.
He did.
I'd never been able to get someone at Network Solutions on the line before that day to make such a change, and never been able to since.
Use emacs to edit your zone files (as long as they are named with a .zone extention). The default zone mode auto-updates the serial number using the date/version convention.
BIND should let you replace the serial number with a $TIME variable, which would evaluate to the last modified timestamp on the zone file (or any of its dependent includes).
If you have to understand one point about Linux, it is this:
The code itself is not special. It is almost meaningless. When detractors like Ken Brown argue that there's no way that Linux could be as powerful as commercial UNIX today without having stolen code, he is entirely missing the point.
Good writers are called good writers because they have a brilliant idea, viewpoint, or wit, and express it in writing. Anyone who knows how to write can take a dictation, but not everyone who can take great dictation is a great writer. Great artists are great artists because they have a unique vision of the world and can express it. A great artist is not someone who can just photorealistically render a bowl of fruit to canvas.
Software development, while more utilitarian than art, is no different. The development of the idea itself is what all of the labors of the software development process go towards--the representation of an idea as code is the easy part. This is why so many Operating Systems resemble UNIX--lots of people spent lots of time thinking about the best set of primitives to make available to the programmer and system operator. Coming up with UNIX from scratch is hard, that requires thinking. Making a system that looks like UNIX is relatively easy in comparisen.
The Linux project (and its ilk) develop so well because an entire marketplace (like a bazaar?) of ideas push and pull it, guide it in the direction that makes it most usable. The good ideas continue to live, the less good ideas disappear. The marketplace mostly decides where Linux goes.
The process that develops Linux is what is so valuable.
Windows entirely lacks this process because of one simple fact: Microsoft does not give a fuck about what I want out of Windows. I'm just one person out of a million. However, with Linux, I have the freedom to make my system do whatever I want, and if I can present a good enough reason (ie, the idea stands on its merits) for what I want out of it, it'll be introduced into the mainstream. If not, oh well, at least my little corner of the universe is to my liking.
The hardest and most annoying part about parallel parking for me is constantly checking all of my blind spots to make sure that I'm not about to mangle a pedestrian/stick my car out into oncoming traffic.
How does the parking system handle that, I wonder.
The DOJ's response would be grounds for filing a motion for contempt of court.
"We're in the middle of a system upgrade, wait until December -- the election should be over by then."
Set your DNS TTL low and make the switch. Within 15 minutes all traffic should go to the new IPs. It's not like someone you knew ten years ago is going to try to contact you on that IP...
Pffftt.
Every time I've changed the A record which have always had a TTL of 2 hours, I've seen a small trickle of traffic hit the old IP addresses for, I shit you not, at least two-three weeks afterward.
Some providers completely ignore your TTL entries when they cache them.
We kept the old IP addresses active for about a month (and had them do HTTP redirects to the new location, by an alternate name).
Much different from cell phone number portability. When you want to call mom you key in a 7-10 digit address to ring mom's phone. Most users won't key in "mom". If mom changes her phone number she has to tell everyone her new number, so even if you set up a voice dialing entry, you're not isolated from having to know her number at least once so you can update your phone book entry.
However, when you want to do a keyword search do you type in 216.239.57.99 or do you type in google.com?
When you check your email do you type in 64.4.32.7 or do you type in hotmail.com?
When you want to look at porn do you type in 64.71.165.211 or do you type in thehun.com?
Have you *ever* seen those IP addresses before today? Probably not. You don't need to know them to reach them.
Do you have any idea that when you type in thehun.com, sometimes you see 216.218.206.40 and sometimes you see 64.71.165.211 and sometimes it's 216.218.255.232? Would you know if they changed? Would you know if there were a hundred of them? This stuff is kept hidden from you by DNS for a reason.
If a user ever needs to see an IP address, someone has done something wrong. The purpose of DNS is to make physical IP address assignments irrelevant.
And not only is it dumb, but it's extremely hard to do. IP address networks are segmented, and routers need to be able to rely on cases where it can say "Well, I don't know what's on the other end of this network, BUT I DO KNOW FOR A FACT THAT *THIS* END *ALWAYS* HAS ADDRESSES IN THE 216.139.128.x RANGE!"
Some idiot probably hired a bunch of idiots to migrate their web site to a new provider, they probably fucked DNS to hell, the idiot probably demanded that the ISP just allow them to take the IP address and be done with it. In the meantime, the idiot went out of business because his site was down, and the ISP that said "you're crazy we can't do any of this!!" gets blamed.
Software development is the communication of an idea from the buyer to the seller, and from the seller to a computer. This kind of communication is best facilitated in part by conference rooms where everyone can participate with their laptops.
Unfortunately, every single conference room I've been in where all of the participants bring laptops involves a deadly tripwire field of power cords and ethernet cable. The power/rj45 jacks should be underneath the table, not against the walls.
While I don't know much about sales and marketing, I bet each of those groups benefits in part from conferencing also, and could use conference rooms that were modern information worker friendly.
IMO, the ideal office allocations, going around the edges, is: engineers, support, marketers, kitchen, equipment. In the middle goes clerical and management, and only from there can you reach accounting (which is against a barracaded edge). Why is management in the middle? So they can have a better chance in hell of understanding what's going on in the rest of the company through osmosis. Upper managers? They're located off-premesis so the rest of the company can get actual work done.
When ever you are driving a vehicle the authorities have the right to demand papers (licence registration) at any time for any reason. And since Americans spend a significant amounts of time driving isn't this equivilent to identification on demand?
Of course not, you have plenty of anonymity.
For example, assume you're not in your vehicle at the moment: "I don't have my wallet on me, it's in my car" is good enough to avoid identification. Well... wait...
Searching a car that you're currently not inside of requires permission (which you don't have to give), a warrant (which the officer can summon by chanting the magic words "I smell marijuana") or probable cause (which, if the officer performed an illegal search that turned up something useful, is easy enough to lie about "the unregistered firearm was in clear view on the passenger seat, not inside a locked box underneath the spare tire in his trunk with the groceries on top of as he claims").
So, on second thought, I guess you really don't have anonymity after all.
Small claims courts do not set legal precedent.
The worst case scenario would be that the judge rules in favor of the ripped off CD customer every time, but each ripped off CD customer has to go through the hassle of small claims court.
DNS is so core to a company that outsourcing it is absolutely ludicrous, IMO. Even third party "secondaries" can be disasterous.
Considering that DNS is one of the easier things to replicate internally (djbdns can do it securely, quickly, automatically and atomically with cdb/ssh/rsync/cron), it makes little sense to hand it off to a third party. On the flip side, this ease-of-replication is probably why DNS outsourcing is so common (despite being a bad idea).
I'm a supporter of open source, but "forced open source" by cracking developers' computers and making their data public is just unethical. These people were real black hats; IIRC, they wrote cracking programs for their private use, specifically to crack Valve --- every sysadmin's worst nightmare. I hope crackdowns like this will get more prominent media attention in the future.
Don't be ridiculous. The typical open source advocate does not support compromising networks to copy private information. Almost everyone can agree that it's "wrong".
What you will not find a concensus on is how to punish the perpetrator of this crime because there is such a variance of opinion on two basic questions: 1) how has the 'victim' been injured by this? 2) what was the perpetrator's intent?
It's a huge can of worms to argue injury, because, well, the code wasn't destroyed or altered, it was just copied. You'll have a difficult time arguing that the trade secrets that have been exposed through this are so valuable that they constitute real damage.
There's also a debate as to the perpetrator's intent. None of us really know. If the perpetrator was a competitor who was trying to gain inside information, that's an entirely different case than if it was a bored teenager who wanted to have some fun.
My belief is that Valve hasn't suffered at all besides maybe having to have a serious evaluation of their network security, and that the perpetrator didn't intend for any serious harm. If anything they gained value from this--an excuse to miss their deadline.
If you ask me, the punk should pay restitution in the form of whatever it cost Valve (within reason) to perform a security audit, a suspended 1 month jail sentence, and that's the end of it.
They probably just rounded up people who happened to have the source code on their machines (ratted out by friends/enemies, etc.) and asked them where they got it. If they couldn't name names, they were further scrutinized. If they can't name names (practical joke gone awry?) have the "capacity to commit the crime" (ie, they're techies) they get charged. Follow the names that were named. Repeat until the number of people you've arrested sounds impressive.
This makes great headlines and eases the PHB's nerves, but doesn't really solve anything. The original perpetrator may get away with it scott free, even.
Just inventing details...
Out of habit I seem to run WindowMaker on every system I have access to. I'm familar with it, it has a limited, understood set of functionality, pretty small memory footprint, and it reacts in mostly expected ways. It does very little, but does it well. IMO, Steve Jobs struck a very good balance between end-user simplicity and power with this design, and it's a shame that they threw it all away with MacOS X (which I find frustratingly unusable).
The command line is where most of my action is at, but when I do need applications that don't make sense in a terminal, such as GIMP, Mozilla, xfig, etc. WindowMaker manages them very well but also stays the hell out of my way.
It's such a shame how the command line interface has been demonized. For many applications, they're the most efficient and least stressful way to operate, and they simply don't exist anymore because everyone believes that the GUI is the unquestioned, best interface available for every task.
Things I find easier with a command line interface than their conventional GUI counterparts:
Some things that I find easier with a GUI interface vs a command line:
GUIs are great, but in my world it should never be the only interface available because I'd suffer. Why not the best interface for the job?
Here's something I can never do on Windows:
Lets pick one of those processes at random, oh, gpm! Now what the hell does that do? man gpm gives me some information. Oh, it's not enough? No problem!
apt-get source gpm and I've got the source in 30 seconds, beckoning me to change it. Why change it? Well, call me crazy, but I think it'd be neat for gpm to kill every process straight up to init on a given terminal if I hold mouse-1 and mouse-2 for 5 seconds -- this way I can be sure that a trojan isn't capturing my login information next time I type it in*.
Total elapsed time: 10 minutes?
I could not do this on Windows, certainly not in under 10 minutes. I don't mean the end result, I mean the process. Microsoft thought of this problem and Windows NT makes you ALT-CTRL-DEL to login (which can be compromised just like my gpm security feature can be compromised). But the point is that I added this feature to my system in 10 minutes.
I could just as easily be annoyed at, oh, every time I try to su to root and mistype my password, su sleeps for 3 seconds and catches CTRL-C so I have to sit and wait (or ^Z and kill -9 $1 which isn't as convenient as ^C or just having it reprompt me). I can change that in the time it took me to write this. Under Windows, I just can't manage this level of control.
* Yes Linux provides this feature via SYSRQ but I don't like all of the other side-effects of enabling SYSRQ. OH WAIT, I CAN CHANGE THAT TOO!
Politicians dictate policy and enforce it with guns.
Businesses develop policy and sustain it with dollars.
Sometimes politicians covet businesses, sometimes businesses covet politicians. Regardless, this pairing is a powerful force that upsets the balances of our democracy.
Destroy these alliances by taking the guns out of the hands of politicians.
The USA started with a few basic ideas: prosecute criminals (where crime equals victim and malicious intent), keep people to their word if they swear to (enforce contracts), promote standards (money, units of measure), protect people from religion, people protect their communities and enforce their laws.
Today it resembles a much different beast. One that imprisons people who have harmed no one, one that codifies religious dogma as law, one where armed men roam communities looking for "criminals", where our soldiers invade countries that have never harmed us, and one where businesses are more valuable constituents than civilians.
Lets abolish the FCC. Afterwards, we can hit the FDA, FTC, DOJ, DOD, DHS, and so on.
...will only inconvenience legitimate users.
It may also stop some teenagers from printing up obvious fakes and landing themselves years in prison. Of course, this wouldn't be so huge an issue if ambitious politicians didn't insist on throwing the book at them.
Criminals will go "oh, that's cute" and switch to something else, implement a workaround, or whatever it takes to keep business running.
The rest of us will have to deal with software self-destructing, hardware seizing up, open source projects becoming illegal, etc. More hassle in our lives just so politicians can make headlines.
Fuck it.
Furthermore in almost every interview with experienced computer science professionals, almost all said that they personally had a copy of the Lions notes, an illegal distribution of Unix source code.
Either Brown is an idiot or a liar, since he left some interesting information out of his report. This once illegal distribution was eventually published as a book, which I'm holding my lap right now. Here's an excerpt from the preface:
It's truly amazing how far the name SCO has fallen since then, and how this shill can make such a blatant misrepresentation, and how much money he probably made doing it.
I wish someone would pay me to tell outrageous lies.
Most programmers don't even figure this out, so non-programmers are a lost cause, but I'll keep patiently repeating this:
The makeup of the Software Industry is that 95% (or more) of the software developed in the world today is sold to single buyers. The remaining 5%, which most analysts mistakenly characterize as the ENTIRE software industry, is shrinkwrap software like Windows or Adobe Photoshop.
While open source directly threatens the shrinkwrap (5%) software industry, it has enormous positive impact on the custom software (95%) sector. Remember, since it's sold to single buyers (developed in-house by the company or under contract) so if it incorporates GPL or BSD licensed code, IT IS IRRELEVANT! Custom systems are almost never resold because a) the client is usually not in the software business, and b) the software is usually useful only in the original buyer's environment, and is custom tailored for their individual needs.
GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS, OPEN SOURCE IS ONLY A REMOTE THREAT, AND ONLY TO SHRINKWRAP SOFTWARE VENDORS! Microsoft is worried, Oracle is concerned, Siemens, IBM, and consultants like me who write and sell code every day sure aren't.
Oh, right, citizens don't have that right anymore.
I opened a terminal:
*sigh* Can Sun do anything right?
Might a judge rule that a professional cannot escape their professional obligations under any circumstances, including writing free software?
Architects can be held personally liable if the structures that they design ever collapse. EVER.
Maybe we should do the same to programmers. Of course, how do you define "collapse" where software is concerned?