I've just had to spend money on closed-source mail and NAT software on NT. (straps on asbestos : I haad to do it, you see, I had no choice !! arghhh ! etc). I subdued my conscience slightly by mailing a everyone on the shortlist of contenders for my dosh explaining that if/one/ of them were open/free, they'd get my custom ahead of any closed competition.
I've pursued a similar tactic in hardware sales. When buying my first PC, Mesh [check the link, they're as good at server admin as at marketing:) ] were on my shortlist, but had bikini-clad women draped over all their press ads... I called the marketing dept. & told them they'd lost a sale on the basis of their terrible advertising. Flame me as PC if you want, but I did what I thought was right.
Perhaps this approach could/should be taken with games ads -- insofar as any gamers in/.land care about such things...
Indeed, my first reaction is "hoax !" just like the "crackers hijack spy satellite" story from '99...
search the archives of Need To Know for more details (see also Sunday Times)
Also interesting that none of the mainstream media have picked up this enormous scoop...
OTOH !!! there are attributed quotes in there -- so if theyr'e wrong, they'll get the arse sued off 'em. And then it really will be the end for the editor, can't remember his name now...
Actually, ANY day is a good day to quit smoking... in theory. Which is where I'll retire, I think : the Land of Theory...
Why climate change ? Woo, big question; there's lots of evidence, and various contrarian theories (eg: observed temperature change is due to solar oputput variations) have been knocked down one by ne. Latest doom-watch for us Euro-weenies : tghe Gulf Stream (well the upstream end of it, off Greenland) is being severely disrupted. Shut down the gulf stream and suddenly central/southern Europe regains the climate of other areas on our latitude: Siberia, northern Canada....
There's too much to give precise URLs, but for starters search these for 'climate change' :
This may be the way it is in the US (though with so many of you going to church, it's hard to believe it.) In the UK, IMHO, it's very different. Personally, I get more and more pissed off every day with the anti-science techno-phobe hysteria that has infected otherwise intelligent people. People `believe` in the most absurd nonsense (alien abductions, ESP, astrology... oh & feng shui was the craze last year). Apparently intelligent, well-informed people have recently informed me that (a) AIDS and hepatitus may be warded off by positive thinking (b) most disease is 'all in the mind', anyway (c) electricity cables give you cancer (this was really bothering a friend who smokes 20 a day and lives next to dbusy main road... sheesh)
Apart from that, which has always been with us, something new that's happened in the last ten years is that the Mad Scientist cliche has become a firm staple of public villainy. After BSE, mobile phones, thalidomide, PCBS etc etc (name your poison) people now seem to assume/by default/ that anyone involved in science of any sort is a malicious, evil capitalist plotting to enslave humanity & give us all cancer.
Environmental movements are the worst of the lot. We are about to see the biggest and quickest phase-change in the global climate for millenia, it's human-caused, and we can still stop or mitigate it's worst effects. ANd what do Greenpeace get upset about ? Sinking oilrigs in the Atlantic, event though (a) they are virtually free of pollution and (b) far from disrupting the local ecosystems, they actuall y benefit it enormously.
The idea of rational debate is a complete non-starter for these people.
GMO crops is another excellent example. There are legitimate things to debate about them, and further research is needed, but simply connecting the word 'genetic' with food is enough to make most of the drooling middle-classes freak out. And organic farming !! Do any of the morons who happily pay 20% more for their "organic" food in my local supermarket KNOW that it poisons land far faster than normal chemical-enhanced practices ? No of course not. They make me sick.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit smoking;)
The UK Minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury (yes, Lords are still allowed in the government without being elected) was interviewed about this on BBC Radio 4's morning current affairs show 'Today'. There was a clip from Mark Bailey (describing the threat and potential solutions with admirable clairy), then the Lord Sainsbury interview.
Real Audio link to the whole (3 hour) program. The interview occurs at elapsed time 2:19:00, about 80% through the program. (I can't stand McGregor so can't bear to listen through it again...)
It was rather embarrassing, as I recall; he was interviewed by (IMHO) the most irritatingly fluff-headed presenter on the show, Sue McGregor, who asked stupid questions, didn't listen to the answers, then asked further stupid questions which had already been dealt with ("How do you tell meteors and comets and so on to buzz off ?") The morning I hear her interviewing an Open Source personality is the morning my head explodes. (No change there, then.)
The gist of what he was saying was that the reports are way ahead of themselves; he has asked Mark Bailey et al for a list of recommended experts in the field, with the intention of investigating the actual threat and then recommending appropriate action, if any. The establishment of a permanent study group is one possibility that may come out of this process.
Could someone with the time & qualifications to actually understand the paper briefly say what's different between this and 'traditional' string theory / M space etc etc ?
Encore. I'm in exactly this position at work. We've just had three horrible Microsoft-related crashes -> network downtime -> very unhappy management consultants (especially when we lost four days' work and a whole day of backups) (not my fault !!). I'm hoping to sneak a couple of stealth-mode Linux boxes onto our network & not revealing their existence tp the PHBs until they've been running smoothly and transparently for a few months.
> People's main argument about why > Windoze is insecure is because a user, > or user process, has access to the > entire file-system
Not true for NT (despite the flamebait earlier on this thread about an 'inherently weak security model', the/model/ is actually pretty damn good (where are the Access Control Lists in Linux ?) Mind you, the actual implementation of the model has been repeatedly demonstrated to be weak. That's where the open Source 'engineering' argument kicks in.
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M E T E O R O R G A N I Z A T I O N
1999 Leonids: Rapid Information Dissemination =============================================
Dear meteor observer,
>From earlier communications, you have learned that the IMO is setting up a communication network to obtain reliable information as soon as possible after the event in the morning of November 18. We invite you to contribute to this effort.
First of all, we want to point out you must DISTINGUISH between the USUAL OBSERVATIONAL REPORTS, such as collected by the IMO's Visual Commission, and which may be used for detailed, global analyses, and the "EXPRESS REPORT" described below which serves as sole purpose the compilation of a rough but reliable picture of the activity within hours after the event.
The EXPRESS REPORT should have the following format:
Meteo R. Observer Fireball City (45N 10E)
Time Interval (UT) Lim. Magn. Nr. of Leonids Remarks (if any) ------------------------------------------------ ----------------------- 01:15-01:30 5.8 27 None 01:30-01:45 5.9 56 None 01:45-02:00 6.1 156 None . . .
To the extent possible, bin your observations for this "express report" in time interval of 15 MINUTES.
(Again, the full report of your observations will be different from this express report, as shorter intervals are required as well as magnitude distributions and some additional data - see the earlier posted article with visual observing hints - but the above data suffice for the purpose indicated.)
If you wish to collaborate with the IMO in this respect, please send your express report for the night of November 17/18 ONLY (or, of course, for any unexpected activity you might happen to witness) *** IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE OBSERVATION *** to the following email addresses:
wgn@imo.net gyssens@hcoss.uia.ac.be
The latter is a back-up address in case Web-site access to www.imo.net would prove to slow down our computer too much. This back-up address will be active only on November 17 and 18!
Thank you in advance for any collaboration we may receive!
Times for astronomical events are given in UTC which is the same as GMT. The expected peak Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of 15,000 has been predicted for 2am GMT.;
Note that the ZHR is a/theoretical/ maximum that would be seen by an observer if the radiant (the line of comet's orbit, ie the place in the sky where the meteors appear to radiate away from) were directly overhead. Actual observed rates are always lower.
Hints and tips for observing :
No smoking ! It ruins night vision.
Get as far away from light pollution as possible.
The radiant rises at about midnight local time in the northern hemisphere, in the east (of course;) )
Use a deckchair or lawn chair to prevent a permanent crick in the neck.
wrap up WARMLY -- good skies == clear skies == very cold !
Hot drinks (counter-intuitively) do NOT warm you up if you're outdoors.
If your location is clouded in, set an alarm clock for 60-90 mins and check again. If they storm, and you miss them, you'll kick yourself !
Finally, don't be too disappointed if you "only" get a ZHR of a few hundred. Last year's observations allowed significantly better understanding of the separate streams of debris coming off the parent comet. Predictions are for a relatively quiet year next year, but much higher ZHRs in 2001 and 2002.
I find it profoundly depressing that there are so many closed minded, bigoted zealots on Slashdot. Folks, believe it or not, Windows NT is not a complete dead loss. It works, it's reasonably security, it's reasonably reliable. It's about as good a desktop OS as Linux is a workstation / ser ver OS. The only reason I'm trying to work away from it is that it's not Free/open. Linux is exellent for many things, but has faults of it's own. Please, keep your knee jerk rantings to yourself. You just bore those of us surfing at 0 or 1.
Alas, despite the initial burst of enthusiasm with which a bunch of crazy Ozzies threw strong crypto back into the original codebase (the Cryptzilla project IIRC, moz as he is spoke does not include strong crypto. What's needed is an enterprising ex-US team to incorporate, say, GPG or some other public domain code.
% date
Sat Nov 6 00:00:51 1999 % ping usvms.gpo.gov -w 9000
Pinging usvms.gpo.gov [162.140.64.115] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 4.1.1.214: Destination net unreachable. Reply from 4.1.1.210: Destination net unreachable. Reply from 4.1.1.222: Destination net unreachable. Reply from 4.1.1.210: Destination net unreachable. %
Mmmm yes, makes perfect sense to me. Next week : how we'll all be living on Mars in five years time, the moon is made of blue cheese and Bill Gates is a visionary leader...
However, to say that America is not 'free' because of the strong reactions of opinionated people to other people's opinions is IMHO misunderstanding an important thing about 'freedom' in the political context. The freedom whose absence Katz laments is an illusion . We have no 'freedom' in this sense, and never can have. The freedoms which are important, and worth struggling for, are specific, carefully defined 'human rights' -- being 'free to act' in a particular manner (freedom of speech, movement, freedom from repression, violence etc.)
Check out Beyond Freedom and Dignity" for a rather mind-bending book on the subject. Mind-bending for those without a background in psychology or some of the more entertaining philosophies.
Anyone interested in helping to compile a fact - based "Windows NT Myths" page, please drop me a line : andrew at zpok dot demon.co.uk (include subject line 'NT myths' or similar -- ta !:) )
... is/really/ good. Can't recommend it strongly enough. Medical student, gay, alcoholic, wrote most of those jokes. Can you believe that when he says "... it says 'Romans go home !'" he's drunk a bottle and a half of gin ?
It's also funny, surreal, touching, historically interesting an d contains entertaining caricatures of Messers. Cleese, Idle, Jones et al c. 1965 : truly has to be seen to be believed.
Any Kiwi readers may also find the description of an early tour of NZ stirs some fond recollections...
I've just rebuilt my NT Workstation, this time I decided to get really anal about security -- auditing everything, applying all available patches, hotfixes etc. Microsoft release 'Service Packs' that aggregate all the available fixes and patches; NT 4.0 is now on SP5. However after installing that there are merely the... twenty ? thirty ? other patches and fixes to apply to NT alone. There are multiple patches for Office and Internet Explorer, too, and the holes they're patching are mostly things that could leave root (Adminmistrator) access vulnerable. There were 13 NT security alerts & patches in September/alone/.
So "most large companies would prefer the one large, sweeping-in-scope, fix" huh ? Quite right. Our corporate MIS has banned the application of hot fixes, patches or service packs beyond SP3 because... wait for it... it makes NT too unstable .
Slashdot Mirror
lemuria.org
OpenDVD.org
--
I've pursued a similar tactic in hardware sales. When buying my first PC, Mesh [check the link, they're as good at server admin as at marketing :) ] were on my shortlist, but had bikini-clad women draped over all their press ads ... I called the marketing dept. & told them they'd lost a sale on the basis of their terrible advertising. Flame me as PC if you want, but I did what I thought was right.
Perhaps this approach could/should be taken with games ads -- insofar as any gamers in /.land care about such things ...
--
search the archives of Need To Know for more details (see also Sunday Times)
Also interesting that none of the mainstream media have picked up this enormous scoop ...
OTOH !!! there are attributed quotes in there -- so if theyr'e wrong, they'll get the arse sued off 'em. And then it really will be the end for the editor, can't remember his name now ...
--
Why climate change ? Woo, big question; there's lots of evidence, and various contrarian theories (eg: observed temperature change is due to solar oputput variations) have been knocked down one by ne. Latest doom-watch for us Euro-weenies : tghe Gulf Stream (well the upstream end of it, off Greenland) is being severely disrupted. Shut down the gulf stream and suddenly central/southern Europe regains the climate of other areas on our latitude: Siberia, northern Canada ....
There's too much to give precise URLs, but for starters search these for 'climate change' :
--
Apart from that, which has always been with us, something new that's happened in the last ten years is that the Mad Scientist cliche has become a firm staple of public villainy. After BSE, mobile phones, thalidomide, PCBS etc etc (name your poison) people now seem to assume /by default/ that anyone involved in science of any sort is a malicious, evil capitalist plotting to enslave humanity & give us all cancer.
Environmental movements are the worst of the lot. We are about to see the biggest and quickest phase-change in the global climate for millenia, it's human-caused, and we can still stop or mitigate it's worst effects. ANd what do Greenpeace get upset about ? Sinking oilrigs in the Atlantic, event though (a) they are virtually free of pollution and (b) far from disrupting the local ecosystems, they actuall y benefit it enormously.
The idea of rational debate is a complete non-starter for these people.
GMO crops is another excellent example. There are legitimate things to debate about them, and further research is needed, but simply connecting the word 'genetic' with food is enough to make most of the drooling middle-classes freak out. And organic farming !! Do any of the morons who happily pay 20% more for their "organic" food in my local supermarket KNOW that it poisons land far faster than normal chemical-enhanced practices ? No of course not. They make me sick.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit smoking ;)
--
Real Audio link to the whole (3 hour) program. The interview occurs at elapsed time 2:19:00, about 80% through the program. (I can't stand McGregor so can't bear to listen through it again ...)
It was rather embarrassing, as I recall; he was interviewed by (IMHO) the most irritatingly fluff-headed presenter on the show, Sue McGregor, who asked stupid questions, didn't listen to the answers, then asked further stupid questions which had already been dealt with ("How do you tell meteors and comets and so on to buzz off ?") The morning I hear her interviewing an Open Source personality is the morning my head explodes. (No change there, then.)
The gist of what he was saying was that the reports are way ahead of themselves; he has asked Mark Bailey et al for a list of recommended experts in the field, with the intention of investigating the actual threat and then recommending appropriate action, if any. The establishment of a permanent study group is one possibility that may come out of this process.
--
Could someone with the time & qualifications to actually understand the paper briefly say what's different between this and 'traditional' string theory / M space etc etc ?
--
Are you listening, O'Reilly ? :-)
--
> Windoze is insecure is because a user,
> or user process, has access to the
> entire file-system
Not true for NT (despite the flamebait earlier on this thread about an 'inherently weak security model', the /model/ is actually pretty damn good (where are the Access Control Lists in Linux ?) Mind you, the actual implementation of the model has been repeatedly demonstrated to be weak. That's where the open Source 'engineering' argument kicks in.
I agree with everything else you say :)
--
Noticable shortage of webcams compared to last year. Heh.
--
> UFO is because they have an offical report
--
See also :
- -----------------------
Leoniods 99 updates.
American Meteor Society
This is X/posted w/out permission (sorry Marc! )
\a
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M E T E O R O R G A N I Z A T I O N
1999 Leonids: Rapid Information Dissemination
=============================================
Dear meteor observer,
>From earlier communications, you have learned that the IMO is setting
up a communication network to obtain reliable information as soon as
possible after the event in the morning of November 18. We invite you
to contribute to this effort.
First of all, we want to point out you must DISTINGUISH between the
USUAL OBSERVATIONAL REPORTS, such as collected by the IMO's Visual
Commission, and which may be used for detailed, global analyses, and
the "EXPRESS REPORT" described below which serves as sole purpose the
compilation of a rough but reliable picture of the activity within
hours after the event.
The EXPRESS REPORT should have the following format:
Meteo R. Observer
Fireball City (45N 10E)
Time Interval (UT) Lim. Magn. Nr. of Leonids Remarks (if any)
-----------------------------------------------
01:15-01:30 5.8 27 None
01:30-01:45 5.9 56 None
01:45-02:00 6.1 156 None
.
.
.
To the extent possible, bin your observations for this "express report"
in time interval of 15 MINUTES.
(Again, the full report of your observations will be different from
this express report, as shorter intervals are required as well as
magnitude distributions and some additional data - see the earlier
posted article with visual observing hints - but the above data
suffice for the purpose indicated.)
If you wish to collaborate with the IMO in this respect, please send
your express report for the night of November 17/18 ONLY (or, of course,
for any unexpected activity you might happen to witness)
*** IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE OBSERVATION *** to the following email
addresses:
wgn@imo.net
gyssens@hcoss.uia.ac.be
The latter is a back-up address in case Web-site access to www.imo.net
would prove to slow down our computer too much. This back-up address
will be active only on November 17 and 18!
Thank you in advance for any collaboration we may receive!
Marc Gyssens
International Meteor Organization
--
Note that the ZHR is a /theoretical/ maximum that would be seen by an observer if the radiant (the line of comet's orbit, ie the place in the sky where the meteors appear to radiate away from) were directly overhead. Actual observed rates are always lower.
Hints and tips for observing :
Finally, don't be too disappointed if you "only" get a ZHR of a few hundred. Last year's observations allowed significantly better understanding of the separate streams of debris coming off the parent comet. Predictions are for a relatively quiet year next year, but much higher ZHRs in 2001 and 2002.
Clear skies, all !
North American Meteor Network /VERY/ high traffic at the moment !
Meteorobs mailing list -- NB
--
I find it profoundly depressing that there are so many closed minded, bigoted zealots on Slashdot. Folks, believe it or not, Windows NT is not a complete dead loss. It works, it's reasonably security, it's reasonably reliable. It's about as good a desktop OS as Linux is a workstation / ser ver OS. The only reason I'm trying to work away from it is that it's not Free/open. Linux is exellent for many things, but has faults of it's own. Please, keep your knee jerk rantings to yourself. You just bore those of us surfing at 0 or 1.
--
Alas, despite the initial burst of enthusiasm with which a bunch of crazy Ozzies threw strong crypto back into the original codebase (the Cryptzilla project IIRC, moz as he is spoke does not include strong crypto. What's needed is an enterprising ex-US team to incorporate, say, GPG or some other public domain code.
\a
--
--
screenshot of how it looks from London (121K)
--
screenshot of how it looks from London (121K)
shameless plug for vanity URL
--
... and my only defence is that it's gone midnight here in the UK ...
--
The witch is dead ! The wicked witch is dead ! this is a very silly link to follow... and it was very juvenile of me to think of it.
(this is what I see from London) :
--
Mmmm yes, makes perfect sense to me. Next week : how we'll all be living on Mars in five years time, the moon is made of blue cheese and Bill Gates is a visionary leader ...
However, to say that America is not 'free' because of the strong reactions of opinionated people to other people's opinions is IMHO misunderstanding an important thing about 'freedom' in the political context. The freedom whose absence Katz laments is an illusion . We have no 'freedom' in this sense, and never can have. The freedoms which are important, and worth struggling for, are specific, carefully defined 'human rights' -- being 'free to act' in a particular manner (freedom of speech, movement, freedom from repression, violence etc.)
Check out Beyond Freedom and Dignity" for a rather mind-bending book on the subject. Mind-bending for those without a background in psychology or some of the more entertaining philosophies.
cheers !
It's also funny, surreal, touching, historically interesting an d contains entertaining caricatures of Messers. Cleese, Idle, Jones et al c. 1965 : truly has to be seen to be believed.
Any Kiwi readers may also find the description of an early tour of NZ stirs some fond recollections ...
So "most large companies would prefer the one large, sweeping-in-scope, fix" huh ? Quite right. Our corporate MIS has banned the application of hot fixes, patches or service packs beyond SP3 because ... wait for it ... it makes NT too unstable .