You're basing your claim that "Linux is ready for the desktop!" on the experience of one person?..... Why not see if the average person can get past a Linux
installation?
A short while ago I upgraded my dual-boot box from an old Cyrix 166 to a P3/450. After swapping boards, I booted both OSes.
The Linux side (RH6.1) took a couple of minutes and noted that the mouse had moved, and a couple of other things. After that, everything was fine.
Windows, on the other hand, took over half an hour and a handfull of reboots, after which it was STILL having trouble. It was a couple of days later that I had all the pieces of the windows side patched back together.
My first foray into Linux occurred because I was handed a Windows laptop that ate DAYS of my time trying to get it to work with a simple PCMCIA ether/modem card. I got to the point where an elaborate ritual was needed every time I put the box to sleep. After installing a few patches, I could put the machine to sleep, but it crashed every time I tried to shut it down(!).
I installed RH5.1 on the laptop and spent the evening hunting down appropriate drivers. This process was FAR easier than reloading Windows. Once installed, Linux was FAR more stable than Windows. I later upgraded to 5.2
My roommate at that time was a Windows geek. He loved windows. He thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
He spent 6 months as a MS-windows install expert. Every once in a while, he'd come home with frustration all over his face over an install that was simply NOT working. As someone who was specializing in MS-Windows installs he would sometimes spend a whole day trying to beat a machine's install into submission.
When a new roommate moved in (a complete non-technofile), we started on Windows, and I weaned him over to Linux. This was mostly for my own sanity, since it was far easier to give him his own login than to f*ck around with the Win95 users kludge. It wasn't long before he was glorying in how usable and stable Linux is.
I think that he almost forgot that the computer even runs windows. (I created a 'win95' command that allowed him to automagically flip over to windows. Beyond when I showed it to him, I don't think that he ever used it).
My newest roommates are also relative computer neophytes. I gave them logins, installed the RealAudio extensions and let them loose. The hardest part was getting them started over the phone (I gave them nasty passwords) I got one running with a text editor over the phone. Since then, I haven't gotten any complaints.
In a recent job, we installed dozens of Linux boxes of various configurations. Other than driver hunts for esotheric hardware, installation either went like a breeze, or the problem was traced to bad hardware. (firewalls and VPNs were a different story). A recent addition to our group was such an MS groupie that he helped write a bood about Win-2000. He actually complained when it looked like we were going to force him to keep Windows on his desktop. He solved the problem by installing VMware.
A different group in the same compamy was responsible for NT/95 installations. When their chief installer wanted to install Linux, we gave him a spare install CD and didn't worry about it. It was actually that easy. He still complains about NT/95 installations.
SUMMARY
Windows installs are a pain, Linux installs are a breeze, Linux stability makes for user happiness. The only way that MS can get away with even claiming that Windows installs are easy is that they have people like my first roommate who pulled his hair out so that customers could be handed a nice, clean, working machine. As long as I know that I've got the apps available I'd rather hand someone a Linux box than a Windows box -- especially if I'm going to have to support it later.
"El niño" and "La niña." used to be rare occurrences. A century or two ago, they occurred a decade or two apart. Now they're taking place almost yearly. Also, the loss of the polar ice cap is worse than it may seem at the surface:
Consider it like an ice cube in a massive glass. You may notice a few things:
It acts as a temprature moderator
As it gets smaller, it shrinks faster.
Once it's gone, the temperature change gets REAL noticable.
The loss of the icecap is a visual indicator of the trouble we're in. It's also a problem in, and of itself.
By the way, a 2 Degree change can make a big difference. It doesn't occur in a uniform manner. Near the equator, it doesn't currently do much. In the North, it can make for a 5 degree change in some areas. That can do things like shift frost times which will confuse life cycles of both plants and animals. It also results in weather pattern changes -- Dry areas can get monsoons and wet areas will dry off. Biosystems not designed for the new weather will result in floods or forest fires (respectively). Farming methods which had worked for generations may prove fruitless.
Crops will start to fail until we start growing new crops (which may take years to figure out, and/or years more for the new weather patterns to settle down enough to predict what is now growable in an area).
In the meantime, pests will probably eat away at harvests and forests weakened by the weather pattern changes.
Put more succinctly, the problem with Global Warming is not the personal effect that it's going to have on us high-tech humans in our air-conditioned ecological bomb-shelter equivalents. We're looking at a systematic problem.
It's like running your freezer 5 degrees too warm (because your furnace exaust is being run past the refrigerator coils) -- You may not care that the ice cubes are melting, but you probably won't be as blase a bit later when you find your roast melted and spoiled.
Back about 1991, the Computer Science department used 386-25s and 386-33s for routers. They were dedicated units (ethernet interfaces, one floppy disk, no keyboard, no monitor). As I remember, the Networking geeks figured that the '33s were overkill, but cheap enough that it wasn't worth worrying about.
This was for 10MB ethernet (thicknet mostly but some thinnet). Being a computer science department with everything on NFS, you can bet that we were willing and able to push these ethernets to their 10Mb limit sometimes.
This being before Linux was ready for prime time, I figured that it was one of the few good uses for an Intel box.
The first place that this tech is probably going to go into is likely to be high-end tech. That's the kind of stuff where-- if you don't get it right when you sell it to them, they're going to have {m,b}illions of dollars worth of consequential costs to sue your ass off over.
There's also a marketing issue -- As a company, you want to keep one step ahead of the competition. You also want to get the biggest bang for your research buck. If you get too far ahead of the competition, you won't be able to use, and make money off of, some of your other research. It's also nice to have an 'ace in the hole' for when they threaten to overtake you in another area.
Finally there's the simple lead time for going from producing a.01Micron straight line to producing a 100-million transister CPU from said technology -- and doing it in good quantity with high reliability.
-----
That having been said, I remember a story from a Nortern Telecom tech about the (relatively) early days of optical fiber. One of the labs claimed to have produced a really high-caliber optical repeater laser (about the size of a large grain of sugar). The production of the units was fobbed off on a Japanese company because the company big-wigs didn't believe lab staff that it could be done well using local resources.
Well the Japanese company messed up the order, (they weren't sensitive enough -- a prime specification) and the Exec turned to the lab and essentially said 'we need that order NOW -- Please do it with the lab equipment (no time to build a fab facility at
this point).
Well, the lab made such high quality units that they were TOO sensitive. They were reacting to noise from the other electronics (which wasn't expecting such high quality in the repeater laser). Rather than re-design the electronics they went back to the lab and asked them to purposefully crank down the sensitivity of the lasRs.
Moral of the story: If IBM really HAD to get that stuff out the door in 18 months they could proabably do so. Chances are, however, that they can't see the long-term financial benefit of doing so.
It's also used in CO2 fire extinguishers. My first use of it was as a long-term coolant for family camping trips (works wonderfully). We used it (among other things) to freeze ice packs that were used in the non-freezer cooler.
The one way in which it might be dangerous would be if you had enough of it evaporate fast enough to displace a lot of oxygen in the room. In such a situation, it's actually much safer than Nitrogen because it's a build-up of CO2 which generates the asphyxiation response in the body (if CO2 builds up too much, you'll feel like you're suffocating -- even if you're getting
enough oxygen!)
With a Nitrogen overdose, on the other hand, you can suffocate without feeling weird because the Carbon Dioxide will be able to get out of your bloodstream even though there is no oxygen to take in.
That having been said, I was in a basement room when a 200LB Carbon Dioxide cannister (used for POP) popped a valve. Even with such a rapid infusion of CO2 normal (commercial) ventilation appears to have been enough to prevent my suffocation. From that experience, I would expect that it would take some real work to evaporate enough CO2 to suffocate someone in a resonably ventilated space.
Cable is out of the question because the cable company would
make me pay to run the line half a mile over the highway and after I
paid this inital cost, they'd proceed to let my neighbors steal my bandwidth without
having to pay the same gigantic fees.
In this case, I'd say that -- If they're charging you to install the cable, you should claim ownership, and be able to collect charges from anybody else in the neighborhood who latches on. Either that, or pre-emptively request a share of the charges from your neighbors for the cost.
A second possibility might be to get permission to put 'your' cable modem right on the existing line, and get something like an air-port to beam the link across the road (personal wireless).
Just when are we gonna wake up and smell the &bullet?
(Damn, they did it again!).
Blatent Editorial: As an area where North Americans are so completely
blasé about censorship that we've stopped recognizing
it as such, sex and sex education censorship is our
elephant in the living room. Teachers are supposed to be
preparing our kids for life in the real world. According to
The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 80%
of teens have
sex and 90% of those who do so without protection become
pregnant within a year. Add to this the fact
that Pregnancy can have a massive effect on both
mother
and child.
What we end up with is teachers who are hog-tied when it comes to teaching kids about something that is going to have a massive effect on the rest of their fucking lives (please excuse the pun).
----------------
My suggestion is that you NOT censor access to the net. Despite all the blab in big media (who have a vested interest in limiting public acceptance of the net), people don't access the net porn by accident -- in the same way that kids don't 'accidently' show all their friends the Playboy that they found under their dad's bed.
For people who don't like porn, show them how to use the 'back' button.
For structural design, make sure that all child-accessible sites are in open view. If you want to allow questionable content, create 'unobtrusive' booths with their backs to the walls and separators between stations so that one person's content can't be accidently viewed by other users.
As far as being sued because somebody accessed a porn site on the internet, Libraries have been (sucessfully) sued for putting filters on their stations. I don't think that you could be seriously sued for giving (paying?) customers the same kinds of rights that libraries are being forced to allow the public. In fact, I'd guess that you're more likely to be sucessfully sued for NOT allowing open access to the net. (IANAL)
(sigh.) I should be too young to anticipate feeling that old. No matter how old you get, there's always an older to get to (unless you're dead). The time to start worrying is when there's no older to anticipate feeling.
also: What do you have for software/hardware? Macs? PCs? Do some of them have Linux loaded?
Blatent linux plug:
the source code from Linux can make for some good examples to work from.
Source codes from shell commands varies in size from tiny to huge.
Linux is also better designed (imho) for collaborative work
the development environment is free.
As to what to do: I'd agree with the suggestion to ask them. Give them some ideas. Look for some simple (or not-so-simple) projects that the school could use. It could really turn some kids on if they could end the school year having created something that the school is actually using.
If it turns out to be so big that it becomes a team project -- all the better. Like was said elsewhere: Most real work these days is team oriented.
Above all: Don't underestimate the kids' abilities. Listen for their power. Even if they reach too far, they can learn from the failed attempt. Chances are that they'll do far more than most people would expect.
Early last year, I saw what appeared to be a picture of a PO for ~6million dollars worth of SUN equipment. I was told (this part clearly rumor) that SUN charged Micro$oft full list price for everything in the PO.
Something about having the bastards by the balls, and not expecting much repeat business.
Q: So what's the basis of this case? A: Your honor, he tried to kill me with that T-shirt. Q: And how did he try to kill you with it A: He rolled it up in a ball and threw it at me! Q: And what's so dangerous about throwing a T-shirt at someone? A: It's a munition your honor.
1) I could print copyrighted works on a t-shirt. It's "free speech" but it's still not legal without the copyright holder's permission
Not an issue here, because this work is owned by somebody who has copylefted it.
2) If someone were to break an NDA and, say, print Intel's trace diagram for their super-secret next gen processor, I don't think "it's free speech -- see it's on a T-shirt" would fly.
The speech is free. It's signing the NDA that's gonna cost you. Again: Here, it's breaching a legally binding NDA that was willfully entered into that's illegal. Publishing the T-shirt is simply an aspect of the breach. The people who broke the code weren't bound by the click-through license.
3) Indecency laws (as others have pointed out) Just because it's "free speech" doesn't make it legal.
As shown by the COPA/CDA fight, indecency laws are on the bleeding edge of the boundary between free speech and justifiable infringement. What the pro-DeCSS lawyers were trying to do is show just how badly a finding for the MPAA would go into the realm of restricting free speech. Their intent is to push the case far into the 'free speech' realm, and away from "It's just a case of commercial piracy."
The thing about classic games is that they're good. My equivalent to Warsaw's closing comment is: They're not good because they're old, they're old because they're good.
I.E. for the oldies, we remember things like 'American Pie' (the original, not the Madonna cover). We forget about things like 'tourist leggo short shirt' [just pulled that on off the back of an old album].
When you compare the classics against the currents, it's like comparing 'american pie' to the current Brittany Spears hit. We haven't had a chance to filter for the best of the decade yet. Probability favor the classics in that context.
The multi-million dollar burnt-McLap case wasn't about the lady's medical bill. It was about the fact that McDonalds putting profits before safety.
Apparently McDonalds marketing and legal had determined that people preferred their coffee as hot as possible. Unfortunately, the 'optimal' temperature for serving the coffee so that it stayed a nice temperature was so hot that it would scald people (a difference of a couple of degrees from the 'standard' temperature).
They did the number crunching and figured that they'd get enough extra business to cover the legal expenses for injured customers. The little old lady sued McDonalds for their wilfull risking of her safety. Most of the 7-digit award went to 'punitive' damages -- intended to throw a wrench in their legal number crunching and make it not worthwhile to serve the coffee hot enough to scald customers.
Because the little old lady was willing to take on the big mean corporation, she got what is essentially a 7-digit court bounty.
Some languages have the length of a buffer coded into the buffer and simply won't allow you to put more into a buffer than it has available (either that or they'll re-allocate for more space). With languages like that -- unless the implementation code is buggy, or you do direct system-call hacks that overwrite the internal structures -- it isn't possible to overrun buffers.
When intel came out with the 808[68], they wanted to make it as compatible with the 8085 as possible. It really was 16-bit. The data code and stack segments were 64K wide. Segment registers that gave you overlapping segments with a 16 byte granularity.
If you used the segment registers, the result was basically a highly non-linear address space. In a lot of ways, it was an 8 bit processor with 16 bit registers and hardware bank switching (for those of you that remember bank switching).
as a result, there were a few 'standard' memory models that programmers used:
Small address space: All segment registers the same. don't touch them. This gave you a flat 16bit (64k)address space, turning the machine into a glorified 8085/Z80 -- almost completely source code (assembler!) compatible. It also gave a slight speed advantage, since all pointers and integers were 16 bits wide.
Intermediate address space: segment registers point to disjoint spaces. not too much difference but you get some breathing space since the code and data don't share the same (tiny!) 64K address space.. pointers are still 16 bits, but you now have to remember which segment you're talking to.
'large' address space: all pointers are 32 bits wide. (include both segment registers and then pointers within the segments). This gives you access to the full 1M address space. (the 640K limit was because 380K was reserved for I/O space).
SERIOUS performance hit. If you allow arrays >64K then just about every array access requires you to calculate and load the segment register. address math sucks because if you have two 32 bit addresses A and B, A != B does not necessarily mean that they don't point to the same memory, and *X++ can require some serious work to do the exepected thing.
The 80286 allowed people to break the 1M barrier without doing bank switching (EMS?), but it turned the segment register/pointer problem into a serious horror story. Unless you were seriously masochistic (or just plain desperate) you just made it look like an 8086 that ran a bit faster.
When they came out with the '386 you now had segments of 4GB each. This was at a time when a 2GB ram module could have been camouflaged as a desk and would have required a 15KW watt power supply.
Most programmers and OS designers just set all the segment registers the same (the '386 equivalent of the 'small memory model', and forget about them (I called this traumatic amnesia).
So, yes: Intel has a Segment model that could be used to provide security, but few people are brave/stupid enough to risk the horror stories/ flashbacks that enabling it might entail.
Sure, you can blindly turn off the executable bit on stack pages. It simply requires that the program turn it off if they're doing on the fly code or self-modifying code.
It could also be done as a compile-time switch. This would prevent breaking random code that doesn't know that the rules have changed.
A 'dumb' question -- given that I've never bothered to program Intel assembler (I looked at the 8086 model and got sick to my stomach!). The stack, data and code segments are logically separate, aren't they? wouldn't it be possible to make them disjoint spaces so that you simply couldn't jump to the stack? -- kinda like security by obscurity. Stack and Data may want to share code space, but why share the spaces for data and code, unless you're doing self modifying code. If you need modifiable code space you would do a call to tell malloc to give you some dual-mapped memory. Once you were done modifying it you could unmap it from the data space
The backwards-compatible model would be: Any segment address would map to the same real address if it maps. It would not, however, necessarily map to all (or any) memory spaces.
Hey: a cubic computer is a pretty default shape. it's just a wierdly proportioned rectangular box. and it's a shape that apple - nee NeXT - has used before.
On the other hand, you just try and convince me that you came up with an iMac shaped computer by accident. . . and translucent blue just happens to be the cheapest plastic we could find on the market (but we're planning 5 other translucent colors)..
As Jenkins points out in his article, if Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and the authors of the Bible were covered by the DMCA, none of their works would have received a fraction of the attention or influence they've generated
I'm going to print almost a whole paragraph from an Encyclopedia Britannica article on the history of publishing. (and hope I don't get sued)-:. The point of this (near the end) is that Shakespeare himself is available, in part, because of 'a notorious pirate'.
Publication of drama was left, along with much of the poetry and the popular literature, to publishers who were not members of the Stationers' Company and to the outright pirates, who scrambled for what they could get and but for whom much would never have been printed. To join this fringe, the would-be publisher had only to get hold of a manuscript, by fair means or foul, enter it as his copy (or dispense with the formality), and have it printed. Just such a man was Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609); the mysterious "Mr. W.H." in the dedication is thought by some to be the person who procured him his copy.
The first Shakespeare play to be published (Titus Andronicus, 1594) was printed by a notorious pirate, John Danter, who also brought out, anonymously, a defective Romeo and Juliet (1597), largely from shorthand notes made during performance.....
The rest of the article gives some insight to the history of commercial censorship and -- indirectly a possible origin of the name 'copyright' -- ('copy' was the right to print specific works or classes of works). (but I digress)
This history also points out that what are now known as copyrights were used long ago to limit who could and could not print almost anything. Once again the privilege (and money) generally went to the rich and well-connected.
Perhaps the Napster issue will really galvanize some organized political pressure around the IP issue.
It's a political year. If 10 million Napster users got seriously active and organized, there's actually a real possibility of pressuring congress into 'clarifying' the current Copyright rules to make it clear that things like napster are OK.
Push for an amendment to the copyright rules. Keep track of which reps are for it and which ones try and sabotage it. Make it real public. Be blunt.
Take back congress.
If properly managed, this could be a watershed moment for geekdom.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding was that Piranha was NOT enabled by default (It may have ben installed, but default configs did not run it.)
The Linux side (RH6.1) took a couple of minutes and noted that the mouse had moved, and a couple of other things. After that, everything was fine.
Windows, on the other hand, took over half an hour and a handfull of reboots, after which it was STILL having trouble. It was a couple of days later that I had all the pieces of the windows side patched back together.
My first foray into Linux occurred because I was handed a Windows laptop that ate DAYS of my time trying to get it to work with a simple PCMCIA ether/modem card. I got to the point where an elaborate ritual was needed every time I put the box to sleep. After installing a few patches, I could put the machine to sleep, but it crashed every time I tried to shut it down(!).
I installed RH5.1 on the laptop and spent the evening hunting down appropriate drivers. This process was FAR easier than reloading Windows. Once installed, Linux was FAR more stable than Windows. I later upgraded to 5.2
My roommate at that time was a Windows geek. He loved windows. He thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
He spent 6 months as a MS-windows install expert. Every once in a while, he'd come home with frustration all over his face over an install that was simply NOT working. As someone who was specializing in MS-Windows installs he would sometimes spend a whole day trying to beat a machine's install into submission.
When a new roommate moved in (a complete non-technofile), we started on Windows, and I weaned him over to Linux. This was mostly for my own sanity, since it was far easier to give him his own login than to f*ck around with the Win95 users kludge. It wasn't long before he was glorying in how usable and stable Linux is. I think that he almost forgot that the computer even runs windows. (I created a 'win95' command that allowed him to automagically flip over to windows. Beyond when I showed it to him, I don't think that he ever used it).
My newest roommates are also relative computer neophytes. I gave them logins, installed the RealAudio extensions and let them loose. The hardest part was getting them started over the phone (I gave them nasty passwords) I got one running with a text editor over the phone. Since then, I haven't gotten any complaints.
In a recent job, we installed dozens of Linux boxes of various configurations. Other than driver hunts for esotheric hardware, installation either went like a breeze, or the problem was traced to bad hardware. (firewalls and VPNs were a different story). A recent addition to our group was such an MS groupie that he helped write a bood about Win-2000. He actually complained when it looked like we were going to force him to keep Windows on his desktop. He solved the problem by installing VMware.
A different group in the same compamy was responsible for NT/95 installations. When their chief installer wanted to install Linux, we gave him a spare install CD and didn't worry about it. It was actually that easy. He still complains about NT/95 installations.
SUMMARY
Windows installs are a pain, Linux installs are a breeze, Linux stability makes for user happiness. The only way that MS can get away with even claiming that Windows installs are easy is that they have people like my first roommate who pulled his hair out so that customers could be handed a nice, clean, working machine. As long as I know that I've got the apps available I'd rather hand someone a Linux box than a Windows box -- especially if I'm going to have to support it later.
Consider it like an ice cube in a massive glass. You may notice a few things:
-
It acts as a temprature moderator
-
As it gets smaller, it shrinks faster.
-
Once it's gone, the temperature change gets REAL noticable.
The loss of the icecap is a visual indicator of the trouble we're in. It's also a problem in, and of itself.By the way, a 2 Degree change can make a big difference. It doesn't occur in a uniform manner. Near the equator, it doesn't currently do much. In the North, it can make for a 5 degree change in some areas. That can do things like shift frost times which will confuse life cycles of both plants and animals. It also results in weather pattern changes -- Dry areas can get monsoons and wet areas will dry off. Biosystems not designed for the new weather will result in floods or forest fires (respectively). Farming methods which had worked for generations may prove fruitless.
Crops will start to fail until we start growing new crops (which may take years to figure out, and/or years more for the new weather patterns to settle down enough to predict what is now growable in an area). In the meantime, pests will probably eat away at harvests and forests weakened by the weather pattern changes.
Put more succinctly, the problem with Global Warming is not the personal effect that it's going to have on us high-tech humans in our air-conditioned ecological bomb-shelter equivalents. We're looking at a systematic problem.
It's like running your freezer 5 degrees too warm (because your furnace exaust is being run past the refrigerator coils) -- You may not care that the ice cubes are melting, but you probably won't be as blase a bit later when you find your roast melted and spoiled.
pour chaque feuille dans cahier "Untitled"
ouvrir avec "SimpleText"
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You know you've got a nice, tight joke when you get moderation like this:
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=1, Flamebait=1, Funny=5, Overrated=2, Total=9
This was for 10MB ethernet (thicknet mostly but some thinnet). Being a computer science department with everything on NFS, you can bet that we were willing and able to push these ethernets to their 10Mb limit sometimes.
This being before Linux was ready for prime time, I figured that it was one of the few good uses for an Intel box.
There's also a marketing issue -- As a company, you want to keep one step ahead of the competition. You also want to get the biggest bang for your research buck. If you get too far ahead of the competition, you won't be able to use, and make money off of, some of your other research. It's also nice to have an 'ace in the hole' for when they threaten to overtake you in another area.
Finally there's the simple lead time for going from producing a .01Micron straight line to producing a 100-million transister CPU from said technology -- and doing it in good quantity with high reliability.
-----
That having been said, I remember a story from a Nortern Telecom tech about the (relatively) early days of optical fiber. One of the labs claimed to have produced a really high-caliber optical repeater laser (about the size of a large grain of sugar). The production of the units was fobbed off on a Japanese company because the company big-wigs didn't believe lab staff that it could be done well using local resources.
Well the Japanese company messed up the order, (they weren't sensitive enough -- a prime specification) and the Exec turned to the lab and essentially said 'we need that order NOW -- Please do it with the lab equipment (no time to build a fab facility at this point).
Well, the lab made such high quality units that they were TOO sensitive. They were reacting to noise from the other electronics (which wasn't expecting such high quality in the repeater laser). Rather than re-design the electronics they went back to the lab and asked them to purposefully crank down the sensitivity of the lasRs.
Moral of the story: If IBM really HAD to get that stuff out the door in 18 months they could proabably do so. Chances are, however, that they can't see the long-term financial benefit of doing so.
The one way in which it might be dangerous would be if you had enough of it evaporate fast enough to displace a lot of oxygen in the room. In such a situation, it's actually much safer than Nitrogen because it's a build-up of CO2 which generates the asphyxiation response in the body (if CO2 builds up too much, you'll feel like you're suffocating -- even if you're getting enough oxygen!)
With a Nitrogen overdose, on the other hand, you can suffocate without feeling weird because the Carbon Dioxide will be able to get out of your bloodstream even though there is no oxygen to take in.
That having been said, I was in a basement room when a 200LB Carbon Dioxide cannister (used for POP) popped a valve. Even with such a rapid infusion of CO2 normal (commercial) ventilation appears to have been enough to prevent my suffocation. From that experience, I would expect that it would take some real work to evaporate enough CO2 to suffocate someone in a resonably ventilated space.
A second possibility might be to get permission to put 'your' cable modem right on the existing line, and get something like an air-port to beam the link across the road (personal wireless).
well the endian-ness would be the biggest problem. The rest would probably be resolvable with a meta- VM-WAREish approach
Just when are we gonna wake up and smell the &bullet?
(Damn, they did it again!).
Blatent Editorial: As an area where North Americans are so completely blasé about censorship that we've stopped recognizing it as such, sex and sex education censorship is our elephant in the living room. Teachers are supposed to be preparing our kids for life in the real world. According to The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 80% of teens have sex and 90% of those who do so without protection become pregnant within a year. Add to this the fact that Pregnancy can have a massive effect on both mother and child.
What we end up with is teachers who are hog-tied when it comes to teaching kids about something that is going to have a massive effect on the rest of their fucking lives (please excuse the pun).
----------------
My suggestion is that you NOT censor access to the net. Despite all the blab in big media (who have a vested interest in limiting public acceptance of the net), people don't access the net porn by accident -- in the same way that kids don't 'accidently' show all their friends the Playboy that they found under their dad's bed.
For people who don't like porn, show them how to use the 'back' button.
For structural design, make sure that all child-accessible sites are in open view. If you want to allow questionable content, create 'unobtrusive' booths with their backs to the walls and separators between stations so that one person's content can't be accidently viewed by other users.
As far as being sued because somebody accessed a porn site on the internet, Libraries have been (sucessfully) sued for putting filters on their stations. I don't think that you could be seriously sued for giving (paying?) customers the same kinds of rights that libraries are being forced to allow the public. In fact, I'd guess that you're more likely to be sucessfully sued for NOT allowing open access to the net. (IANAL)
(sigh.) I should be too young to anticipate feeling that old.
No matter how old you get, there's always an older to get to (unless you're dead).
The time to start worrying is when there's no older to anticipate feeling.
Macs? PCs? Do some of them have Linux loaded?
- Blatent linux plug:
- the source code from Linux can make for some good examples to work from.
- Source codes from shell commands varies in size from tiny to huge.
- Linux is also better designed (imho) for collaborative work
- the development environment is free.
As to what to do: I'd agree with the suggestion to ask them. Give them some ideas. Look for some simple (or not-so-simple) projects that the school could use. It could really turn some kids on if they could end the school year having created something that the school is actually using.If it turns out to be so big that it becomes a team project -- all the better. Like was said elsewhere: Most real work these days is team oriented.
Above all: Don't underestimate the kids' abilities. Listen for their power. Even if they reach too far, they can learn from the failed attempt. Chances are that they'll do far more than most people would expect.
Something about having the bastards by the balls, and not expecting much repeat business.
Q: So what's the basis of this case?
A: Your honor, he tried to kill me with that T-shirt.
Q: And how did he try to kill you with it
A: He rolled it up in a ball and threw it at me!
Q: And what's so dangerous about throwing a T-shirt at someone?
A: It's a munition your honor.
Again: Here, it's breaching a legally binding NDA that was willfully entered into that's illegal. Publishing the T-shirt is simply an aspect of the breach. The people who broke the code weren't bound by the click-through license. As shown by the COPA/CDA fight, indecency laws are on the bleeding edge of the boundary between free speech and justifiable infringement. What the pro-DeCSS lawyers were trying to do is show just how badly a finding for the MPAA would go into the realm of restricting free speech. Their intent is to push the case far into the 'free speech' realm, and away from "It's just a case of commercial piracy."
I.E. for the oldies, we remember things like 'American Pie' (the original, not the Madonna cover). We forget about things like 'tourist leggo short shirt' [just pulled that on off the back of an old album].
When you compare the classics against the currents, it's like comparing 'american pie' to the current Brittany Spears hit. We haven't had a chance to filter for the best of the decade yet. Probability favor the classics in that context.
Apparently McDonalds marketing and legal had determined that people preferred their coffee as hot as possible. Unfortunately, the 'optimal' temperature for serving the coffee so that it stayed a nice temperature was so hot that it would scald people (a difference of a couple of degrees from the 'standard' temperature).
They did the number crunching and figured that they'd get enough extra business to cover the legal expenses for injured customers. The little old lady sued McDonalds for their wilfull risking of her safety. Most of the 7-digit award went to 'punitive' damages -- intended to throw a wrench in their legal number crunching and make it not worthwhile to serve the coffee hot enough to scald customers.
Because the little old lady was willing to take on the big mean corporation, she got what is essentially a 7-digit court bounty.
Some languages have the length of a buffer coded into the buffer and simply won't allow you to put more into a buffer than it has available (either that or they'll re-allocate for more space). With languages like that -- unless the implementation code is buggy, or you do direct system-call hacks that overwrite the internal structures -- it isn't possible to overrun buffers.
OK. Next year, we're gonna have the Ottawa Linux Symposium in Vancouver! Great, I'll get VanLUG onto it at the next meeting.
If you used the segment registers, the result was basically a highly non-linear address space. In a lot of ways, it was an 8 bit processor with 16 bit registers and hardware bank switching (for those of you that remember bank switching).
as a result, there were a few 'standard' memory models that programmers used:
- Small address space: All segment registers the same. don't touch them. This gave you a flat 16bit (64k)address space, turning the machine into a glorified 8085/Z80 -- almost completely source code (assembler!) compatible. It also gave a slight speed advantage, since all pointers and integers were 16 bits wide.
- Intermediate address space: segment registers point to disjoint spaces. not too much difference but you get some breathing space since the code and data don't share the same (tiny!) 64K address space.. pointers are still 16 bits, but you now have to remember which segment you're talking to.
- 'large' address space: all pointers are 32 bits wide. (include both segment registers and then pointers within the segments). This gives you access to the full 1M address space. (the 640K limit was because 380K was reserved for I/O space).
The 80286 allowed people to break the 1M barrier without doing bank switching (EMS?), but it turned the segment register/pointer problem into a serious horror story. Unless you were seriously masochistic (or just plain desperate) you just made it look like an 8086 that ran a bit faster.SERIOUS performance hit. If you allow arrays >64K then just about every array access requires you to calculate and load the segment register. address math sucks because if you have two 32 bit addresses A and B, A != B does not necessarily mean that they don't point to the same memory, and *X++ can require some serious work to do the exepected thing.
When they came out with the '386 you now had segments of 4GB each. This was at a time when a 2GB ram module could have been camouflaged as a desk and would have required a 15KW watt power supply.
Most programmers and OS designers just set all the segment registers the same (the '386 equivalent of the 'small memory model', and forget about them (I called this traumatic amnesia).
So, yes: Intel has a Segment model that could be used to provide security, but few people are brave/stupid enough to risk the horror stories/ flashbacks that enabling it might entail.
Intel: Just short of intelligent.
It could also be done as a compile-time switch. This would prevent breaking random code that doesn't know that the rules have changed.
A 'dumb' question -- given that I've never bothered to program Intel assembler (I looked at the 8086 model and got sick to my stomach!).
The stack, data and code segments are logically separate, aren't they? wouldn't it be possible to make them disjoint spaces so that you simply couldn't jump to the stack? -- kinda like security by obscurity.
Stack and Data may want to share code space, but why share the spaces for data and code, unless you're doing self modifying code. If you need modifiable code space you would do a call to tell malloc to give you some dual-mapped memory. Once you were done modifying it you could unmap it from the data space
The backwards-compatible model would be: Any segment address would map to the same real address if it maps. It would not, however, necessarily map to all (or any) memory spaces.
On the other hand, you just try and convince me that you came up with an iMac shaped computer by accident. . . and translucent blue just happens to be the cheapest plastic we could find on the market (but we're planning 5 other translucent colors)..
  No I don't buy bridges from strangers.
This history also points out that what are now known as copyrights were used long ago to limit who could and could not print almost anything. Once again the privilege (and money) generally went to the rich and well-connected.
It's a political year. If 10 million Napster users got seriously active and organized, there's actually a real possibility of pressuring congress into 'clarifying' the current Copyright rules to make it clear that things like napster are OK.
Push for an amendment to the copyright rules. Keep track of which reps are for it and which ones try and sabotage it. Make it real public. Be blunt.
Take back congress.
If properly managed, this could be a watershed moment for geekdom.