Actually I wonder whether there can really be a past to travel back to. Why should there be one? Something moves from A to B.
There's a very question as to whether saying something moves from A to B through time makes any sense. The question of the fundamental nature of time, and why there's an arrow of time (past to future) is unanswered but what we know or strongly suspect is highly counter-intuitive.
There's a good layman's discussion of the issues in the September 2002 edition of Scientific American.
Actually, I think you'd get called an idiot if you went on any site and pontificated about a subject as if you knew a great deal about it but in reality were absolutely clueless.
Wait, I think I just described 95% of the posts on the 'net.
I think there are much bigger weaknesses than that only the winner of the election changes. The changes that occur come about because Eckel steps off the path and kills a butterfly. However, if changes that small affect things, then the entire safari would change things. An animal sees the metal path they errected and changes its course to get around it. It escapes death (or alternately, find it) because it's in a different location when a predator comes by. The T. rex sees the hunters and charges toward them. It altered its path and steps on a butterfly or mouse that it otherwise would not have. When the shoot the T. rex, it falls in a slightly different location and takes out a tree branch that it otherwise would not have struck. There's a birds nest full of eggs on that branch that tumble to the ground and never hatch.
In short, the idea that staying on a path and killing an animal that's about to die would change nothing but simply stepping off the path would alter things doesn't hold water. Any intrusion into the environment is almost guaranteed to change things.
While it's extremely doubtful that this technology will ever be able to produce a significant amount of oil in terms of our daily appetite, it IS actually an approach to the CO2 increase.
Oil buried in the ground contains CO2. We extract the oil, burn it (in the form of gasoline via an internal combustion engine), and release the CO2 into the atmosphere. This results in a net increase in the atmospheric CO2. In effect, nature has stored CO2 in the ground and we're pumping it from the ground back into the air.
This technology takes organic compounds and converts it to oil. Organic CO2 comes from the atmoshere - various orgainic reactions, primarily occurring in plant life, extract CO2 from the air and bind it into new compounds. When we convert these compounds to oil and burn them, we release the CO2 back into the air. However, this CO2 does not increase the net atmospheric CO2 content because it originally came from the air in the first place. It's a cycle, not a one way pump. If we could produce enough oil via this method to meet all of our needs (impossible but IF), we could use oil forever and never contribute to CO2 pollution.
(For the pedantic, the same cycle actually exists in using oil from the ground. However, it takes nature millions of years to convert the organic matter to oil. It's a sort of cycle but one side - our putting CO2 back into the atmosphere - operates a few orders of magnitude faster than the other side. It's obviously not sustainable.)
I read the article from the Groklaw link before it showed up on/. Tanenbaum says that at least five different people single handedly wrote a UNIX-like kernel and that Linus clearly wrote Linux. He also says that Brown, the person who interviewed him, was completely clueless and obviously pushing an agenda.
The bitter part comes in the last couple of paragraphs, where he takes the opportunity to say that Linus was a misguided kid who should have paid more attention in class such that he would have seen the obvious superiority of a microkernel over a macrokernel. But he's quick to point out that he and Linus are not enemies.
What support does Apple provide? (Legitimate question. I have no idea.) Linux, of course, is available free if you're willing to forgo support. The subscription fee is essentially a support contract.
Yes, he indicates he is using a pricey commercial distribution. However, throughtout the article he makes statements like this one, at the end of the article:
"I truly wanted to use Linux on my best, fastest, newest PC. But I cannot--yet. It's not for any lack of diligence on my part, but because of a limitation in Linux."
Linux did not fail him; his one distribution did. If he wanted to use Linux, I guarantee you that some version of it will work on his hardware.
Additionally, you need a CAL (client access license) for, at a minumum, each machine that is concurrently connected to the Windows server. I think those run around $50 each.
On the flip side, you need to compare apples to apples. Here's Red Hat Enterprise costs. A one year subscription to RHE AS Standard on the X86 is $1499.
You're falling prey to the same error as the article writer - viewing Linux as a single operating system.
Commercial distributions are intended to be polished, consumer-oriented OS's. The writer is correct that they aren't there yet. However, Mandarake, SuSE, Red Hat, etc., are not "Linux." They're a Linux, or a Linux based OS, but not Linux.
Debian, for one example, is still around and still focused on security and reliability rather than consumer use. Gentoo is another. Linux will not lose its focus. Various distributions will have their own focus, but the focus of that distribution does not affect the focus of "Linux" over all.
Certainly it can. I specifically said that the military has contingency plans. Loss of the Internet would affect routine, day-to-day operations. It wouldn't affect our fighting ability. "Military intelligence" is indeed an oxymoron at times but we aren't that stupid.
I used the example of switching from teletypes to packet networks as an example of changing infrastructure because I helped implement the change (when I joined the Navy in 1985, we still had teletypes.) and it sprang immediately to mind. I didn't mean to imply that loss of the Internet would bring the military to its knees.
There is usually an air gap between SIPR and NIPR, and SIPR is much more important to tactical operations than NIPR. However, there are points where NIPR and SIPR touch. And of course there's the human element. We've been bitten by worms and viruses on SIPR before. There's a real possibility that a rapidly spreading worm preying on an unknown Cisco vulnerability would take down both the public Internet, the military's NIPRnet and manage to jump to SIPRnet.
(For lurkers, SIPR is either Secret or Secure Internet Protocol Routed, while NIPR is Non-secure... SIPR is a classified, world-wide intranet. NIPR is a non-classified intranet that connects with the public Internet. The term NIPR is often used to include the Internet as well as the military's private backbone.)
Are you referring to EDS and the NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Internet)? What do you suppose those backbones are made up of? Don't you suppose that a worm feeding off a new Cisco exploit that is capable of taking down the Internet would be capable of taking down that network too? Certainly, it's firewalled off from the main Internet backbone but how many of those firewalls are Cisco do you suppose?
This doesn't take into account the number of trolls who'll enter bogus info just to screw up the survey. I suspect a link from/. may very well significantly increase the number of invalid responses and thus affect the accuracy of the survey.
While not immune, it would seem to me that the sysadmin community is much less susceptible to outsourcing than other IT job fields, ie programming. Unless you include telephone support as part of the sysadmin field, it's difficult to do a sysadmin's job remotely. Certainly, you can telnet in or conect remotely and do some routine tasks, but that's slightly more difficult if the network goes down.
Sure there would be problems, but I think most people would opt for watching TV or going outside.
It isn't the Internet as an entertainment tool that's the issue. It's the Internet as a business tool. In some situations, there are alternatives - a phone call instead of an email, a printed report instead of one transmitted electronically. But there are a great many systems which have been converted to the Internet for which the old infrastructure either no longer exists or would be extremely difficult to reactivate. Inventory systems, ordering systems, tracking systems, etc.
I'm in the US Military. Message traffic used to be transmitted via radio to teletypes. Now, it all rides on the Internet. The teletypes are long gone. Lack of an Internet wouldn't bring us to our knees - we have contingency plans. But it would seriously impact our operations.
Just because you rely on the internet, doesn't mean the entire world does too.
The world DOES rely on the Internet, whether you're aware of it or not. We would survive, just as we survive hurricanes and black outs and other disasters. But any significant disruption of the Internet certainly would be classified as a disaster and have significant impact.
So why stop at helmets? Why not just ban motorcycles? They're much more dangerous than cars. If we'd banned motorcycles, you wouldn't have had that sore neck to deal with.
And the amount of tax-paid health care consumed by non-helmet wearing motorcycle riders is only a fraction of the amount consumed by people with health problems caused by inactivity. So I'm sure you'll welcome a mandatory exercise program enforced on all citizens. After all, its for their own good.
You do not have to expose IIS to the Internet unless users are accessing their Exchange account from the Internet. If they're accessing from your intranet, you only have to enable IIS access over your internal network. If you have users who do need to access their email from outside the network, configure a VPN secured by IPSec.
Not necessarily true. You might need a client access license but you don't need to purchase a copy of Windows. Additionally, depending on how you have your server configured, multiple people can share a CAL, just not at the same time (per server vice per seat licensing.) MS is still getting a slice of the pie, but their slice is a whole lot smaller.
The biggest thing that MS won't like about this, however, isn't the loss of a few seat licenses but that it opens up an avenue for migrating to Linux. You can convert piecemeal rather than having to switch everything at once.
That might be an appropriate analogy in the case of the RIAA, but in this case, the red neck isn't shooting you. He's just yelling "Hey, you. You're on private property."
I'll repeat myself. If this isn't the way to do it, exactly how should it be handled?
I don't remember anything about being guilty until proven innocent.
Who says they're guilty? This appears to be a case of "Hey, what you're doing here looks suspiciously like breaking the law and violating my copyrights. If that's true, how about you knock it off so I don't have to take you to court and prove that you're guilty. If it isn't true, or if someone else is doing it and you weren't aware of it, how about letting me know what's going on so I don't sue you and you have to hire a lawyer and all of that icky, expensive stuff? [1]"
If you object to this method, exactly how should the situation be handled?
[1] The cynic in me suggests that this is an attempt to scare people away without the bad publicity the RIAA got for suing 14 year olds. However, what's wrong with that? They DO have a right to protect their copyrighted material.
It isn't that they're extremes. It's that they're not very good analogies. A more appropriate analogy would be something like:
"...the newly wed couple who both get killed in a car crash because the tires on their car are bald and blow out at high speed and they aren't wearing any seatbelts..."
The precautions mentioned aren't extraordianry, beyond the pale measures. They're basic precautions that everyone should use, like making sure your tires have tread and wearing the factory installed seatbelt. If you don't do that, I might feel sorry for you but I'll also realize that you have to shoulder a large share of the blame.
Defining "spy on the user." That's the problem. If you think it's easy, then post a response with a definition. Explicitly describe what's allowed and what isn't. I'm waiting to read it.
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Actually I wonder whether there can really be a past to travel back to. Why should there be one? Something moves from A to B.
There's a very question as to whether saying something moves from A to B through time makes any sense. The question of the fundamental nature of time, and why there's an arrow of time (past to future) is unanswered but what we know or strongly suspect is highly counter-intuitive.
There's a good layman's discussion of the issues in the September 2002 edition of Scientific American.
Actually, I think you'd get called an idiot if you went on any site and pontificated about a subject as if you knew a great deal about it but in reality were absolutely clueless.
Wait, I think I just described 95% of the posts on the 'net.
I think there are much bigger weaknesses than that only the winner of the election changes. The changes that occur come about because Eckel steps off the path and kills a butterfly. However, if changes that small affect things, then the entire safari would change things. An animal sees the metal path they errected and changes its course to get around it. It escapes death (or alternately, find it) because it's in a different location when a predator comes by. The T. rex sees the hunters and charges toward them. It altered its path and steps on a butterfly or mouse that it otherwise would not have. When the shoot the T. rex, it falls in a slightly different location and takes out a tree branch that it otherwise would not have struck. There's a birds nest full of eggs on that branch that tumble to the ground and never hatch.
In short, the idea that staying on a path and killing an animal that's about to die would change nothing but simply stepping off the path would alter things doesn't hold water. Any intrusion into the environment is almost guaranteed to change things.
That being said, it's still a great story.
While it's extremely doubtful that this technology will ever be able to produce a significant amount of oil in terms of our daily appetite, it IS actually an approach to the CO2 increase.
Oil buried in the ground contains CO2. We extract the oil, burn it (in the form of gasoline via an internal combustion engine), and release the CO2 into the atmosphere. This results in a net increase in the atmospheric CO2. In effect, nature has stored CO2 in the ground and we're pumping it from the ground back into the air.
This technology takes organic compounds and converts it to oil. Organic CO2 comes from the atmoshere - various orgainic reactions, primarily occurring in plant life, extract CO2 from the air and bind it into new compounds. When we convert these compounds to oil and burn them, we release the CO2 back into the air. However, this CO2 does not increase the net atmospheric CO2 content because it originally came from the air in the first place. It's a cycle, not a one way pump. If we could produce enough oil via this method to meet all of our needs (impossible but IF), we could use oil forever and never contribute to CO2 pollution.
(For the pedantic, the same cycle actually exists in using oil from the ground. However, it takes nature millions of years to convert the organic matter to oil. It's a sort of cycle but one side - our putting CO2 back into the atmosphere - operates a few orders of magnitude faster than the other side. It's obviously not sustainable.)
I read the article from the Groklaw link before it showed up on /. Tanenbaum says that at least five different people single handedly wrote a UNIX-like kernel and that Linus clearly wrote Linux. He also says that Brown, the person who interviewed him, was completely clueless and obviously pushing an agenda.
The bitter part comes in the last couple of paragraphs, where he takes the opportunity to say that Linus was a misguided kid who should have paid more attention in class such that he would have seen the obvious superiority of a microkernel over a macrokernel. But he's quick to point out that he and Linus are not enemies.
What support does Apple provide? (Legitimate question. I have no idea.) Linux, of course, is available free if you're willing to forgo support. The subscription fee is essentially a support contract.
Yes, he indicates he is using a pricey commercial distribution. However, throughtout the article he makes statements like this one, at the end of the article:
"I truly wanted to use Linux on my best, fastest, newest PC. But I cannot--yet. It's not for any lack of diligence on my part, but because of a limitation in Linux."
Linux did not fail him; his one distribution did. If he wanted to use Linux, I guarantee you that some version of it will work on his hardware.
Replying to myself. A more accurate comparison for Windows 2000 server is probably RHE ES Standard, which goes for $799 for an anual subscription.
Additionally, you need a CAL (client access license) for, at a minumum, each machine that is concurrently connected to the Windows server. I think those run around $50 each.
On the flip side, you need to compare apples to apples. Here's Red Hat Enterprise costs. A one year subscription to RHE AS Standard on the X86 is $1499.
You're falling prey to the same error as the article writer - viewing Linux as a single operating system.
Commercial distributions are intended to be polished, consumer-oriented OS's. The writer is correct that they aren't there yet. However, Mandarake, SuSE, Red Hat, etc., are not "Linux." They're a Linux, or a Linux based OS, but not Linux.
Debian, for one example, is still around and still focused on security and reliability rather than consumer use. Gentoo is another. Linux will not lose its focus. Various distributions will have their own focus, but the focus of that distribution does not affect the focus of "Linux" over all.
Uh, the same can be said for the term "google."
No one is denying the source of the word. However, coining a word does not mean that you control it, particularly absent a trademark.
Certainly it can. I specifically said that the military has contingency plans. Loss of the Internet would affect routine, day-to-day operations. It wouldn't affect our fighting ability. "Military intelligence" is indeed an oxymoron at times but we aren't that stupid.
I used the example of switching from teletypes to packet networks as an example of changing infrastructure because I helped implement the change (when I joined the Navy in 1985, we still had teletypes.) and it sprang immediately to mind. I didn't mean to imply that loss of the Internet would bring the military to its knees.
There is usually an air gap between SIPR and NIPR, and SIPR is much more important to tactical operations than NIPR. However, there are points where NIPR and SIPR touch. And of course there's the human element. We've been bitten by worms and viruses on SIPR before. There's a real possibility that a rapidly spreading worm preying on an unknown Cisco vulnerability would take down both the public Internet, the military's NIPRnet and manage to jump to SIPRnet.
(For lurkers, SIPR is either Secret or Secure Internet Protocol Routed, while NIPR is Non-secure... SIPR is a classified, world-wide intranet. NIPR is a non-classified intranet that connects with the public Internet. The term NIPR is often used to include the Internet as well as the military's private backbone.)
On a ship at sea, NIPR rides as a VPN on SIPR. How does the NIPR traffic get to the Internet if there's absolutely no connection?
Are you referring to EDS and the NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Internet)? What do you suppose those backbones are made up of? Don't you suppose that a worm feeding off a new Cisco exploit that is capable of taking down the Internet would be capable of taking down that network too? Certainly, it's firewalled off from the main Internet backbone but how many of those firewalls are Cisco do you suppose?
This doesn't take into account the number of trolls who'll enter bogus info just to screw up the survey. I suspect a link from /. may very well significantly increase the number of invalid responses and thus affect the accuracy of the survey.
While not immune, it would seem to me that the sysadmin community is much less susceptible to outsourcing than other IT job fields, ie programming. Unless you include telephone support as part of the sysadmin field, it's difficult to do a sysadmin's job remotely. Certainly, you can telnet in or conect remotely and do some routine tasks, but that's slightly more difficult if the network goes down.
Sure there would be problems, but I think most people would opt for watching TV or going outside.
It isn't the Internet as an entertainment tool that's the issue. It's the Internet as a business tool. In some situations, there are alternatives - a phone call instead of an email, a printed report instead of one transmitted electronically. But there are a great many systems which have been converted to the Internet for which the old infrastructure either no longer exists or would be extremely difficult to reactivate. Inventory systems, ordering systems, tracking systems, etc.
I'm in the US Military. Message traffic used to be transmitted via radio to teletypes. Now, it all rides on the Internet. The teletypes are long gone. Lack of an Internet wouldn't bring us to our knees - we have contingency plans. But it would seriously impact our operations.
Just because you rely on the internet, doesn't mean the entire world does too.
The world DOES rely on the Internet, whether you're aware of it or not. We would survive, just as we survive hurricanes and black outs and other disasters. But any significant disruption of the Internet certainly would be classified as a disaster and have significant impact.
So why stop at helmets? Why not just ban motorcycles? They're much more dangerous than cars. If we'd banned motorcycles, you wouldn't have had that sore neck to deal with.
And the amount of tax-paid health care consumed by non-helmet wearing motorcycle riders is only a fraction of the amount consumed by people with health problems caused by inactivity. So I'm sure you'll welcome a mandatory exercise program enforced on all citizens. After all, its for their own good.
You do not have to expose IIS to the Internet unless users are accessing their Exchange account from the Internet. If they're accessing from your intranet, you only have to enable IIS access over your internal network. If you have users who do need to access their email from outside the network, configure a VPN secured by IPSec.
Not necessarily true. You might need a client access license but you don't need to purchase a copy of Windows. Additionally, depending on how you have your server configured, multiple people can share a CAL, just not at the same time (per server vice per seat licensing.) MS is still getting a slice of the pie, but their slice is a whole lot smaller.
The biggest thing that MS won't like about this, however, isn't the loss of a few seat licenses but that it opens up an avenue for migrating to Linux. You can convert piecemeal rather than having to switch everything at once.
That might be an appropriate analogy in the case of the RIAA, but in this case, the red neck isn't shooting you. He's just yelling "Hey, you. You're on private property."
I'll repeat myself. If this isn't the way to do it, exactly how should it be handled?
I don't remember anything about being guilty until proven innocent.
Who says they're guilty? This appears to be a case of "Hey, what you're doing here looks suspiciously like breaking the law and violating my copyrights. If that's true, how about you knock it off so I don't have to take you to court and prove that you're guilty. If it isn't true, or if someone else is doing it and you weren't aware of it, how about letting me know what's going on so I don't sue you and you have to hire a lawyer and all of that icky, expensive stuff? [1]"
If you object to this method, exactly how should the situation be handled?
[1] The cynic in me suggests that this is an attempt to scare people away without the bad publicity the RIAA got for suing 14 year olds. However, what's wrong with that? They DO have a right to protect their copyrighted material.
It isn't that they're extremes. It's that they're not very good analogies. A more appropriate analogy would be something like:
"...the newly wed couple who both get killed in a car crash because the tires on their car are bald and blow out at high speed and they aren't wearing any seatbelts..."
The precautions mentioned aren't extraordianry, beyond the pale measures. They're basic precautions that everyone should use, like making sure your tires have tread and wearing the factory installed seatbelt. If you don't do that, I might feel sorry for you but I'll also realize that you have to shoulder a large share of the blame.
Defining "spy on the user." That's the problem. If you think it's easy, then post a response with a definition. Explicitly describe what's allowed and what isn't. I'm waiting to read it.