OK, the submission is a pile of BS, but it's a good place to discuss UVB-76. So...
I have been wondering if anyone has looked at the frequency of the beeps themselves. They're about a second or two apart, but do they vary at all? It occurs to me that the average beat timing could be a carrier, and a (very slow) frequency modulation on top of it would be a subtle way to inject other messages.
Bipolar thinking is a major problem with the world. "You're either with us or your with the terrorists" and such pointless horseshit.
It's possible that he's an evil seditious person who didn't rape anyone. It's possible that he's a forward-thinking iconoclast that _did_ rape someone. It's possible that he's a misguided idealist, and anarchist, a patriot, a nutjob, or any combination thereof.
I'm not going to stand 'for or against' him, I'm going to judge each of his actions on their own.
I work for an ISP. We're busy pushing HARD to get IPv6 out into the wild. Our first set will be the cable set-top-boxes, then internet cable modems. Internally, we're moving some of our systems to IPv6.
We don't make money off of selling you IPs, we make money by selling you bandwidth. We limit IPs because we have to (with IPv4). Moving to IPv6 is going to be a royal pain in the ass for us, but we NEED to do it. You "forcing" us is laughable - we'd love to be there already, and we're only not because it's a huge undertaking in addition to our normal day-to-day operations.
Funny how you read all that stuff, and never got the point of much of it:
DON'T KEEP PRIVATE STUFF ON YOUR WORK COMPUTER!!!
You say that you don't know many people who don't have personal stuff on their work computer. REALLY? This leaves me speechless. In an era when a functional computer can be had for the price of a few dozen fast-food lunches, flashdrives are promotional toys, smartphones are ubiquitous, etc. etc., why would ANYONE keep personal stuff on a work computer? Ten years ago, I could see it. Five years ago, _maybe_, but mostly because work computers were faster and better connected than the average home PC. Nowadays, I could get my own laptop that outpaced my work machine by a huge amount for under $400.
Seriously, why would you risk (a) your job, (b) your privacy, (c) your credibility, (d) your hiring potential (after getting fired for misuse of company resources), and (e) your family by putting stuff on a WORK computer? For gods' sake, use Gmail for email if you must.
When I hear arcade, my mind scrolls waaaay back to my youth, and the arcade down the street from my grandma's house. It had pinball, trampolines, a shooting gallery, mini-bowling, and bumper cars, for a start. I remember when they brought in the brand new video game! (Space Invaders, of course.) My older brother spent endless hours at it, but I was still content with my relatively new Triple Action pinball game.
That arcade is now a parking lot for oversized trailers. Sigh.
Back in the early '80s, Volvos were tanks. They protected their occupants with all of the usual methods (crumple zones, etc.) as well as sheer mass and robustness.
Unfortunately, this made them (a) appealing to people who were scared of driving, and (b) terrible-handling behemoths that would crush all who opposed them.
The result: Badly-handling cars cruising down the highway at either 75km/h (in a 110 zone) or at 150km/h. The followup result: lots of accidents, with the Volvo barely scratched, but the other cars crushed into twisted ruins.
Oracle is taking the utterly destroyed guts of a once great company and trying to decide what the hell to do with it.
Sun was dying. Jonathan Schwartz, may Satan piss on his corpse when he dies, spent his entire tenure trying to gut the company of technological value and sell it off at a profit. I guess he should be happy that he succeeded, but I hope he lies awake at night (on his bed of money!), haunted by the fact that he killed the last pure Unix company in existence. His greed heralded the end of Unix.
Yes, they own it. That's fine. What they're trying to do now, though, is say that they _always_ owned it.
You can now get information on "Oracle Solaris 9 and earlier", and that is utterly disingenuous. Solaris 8 was not, and will never be an Oracle product.
A comparison of Orwell's 1984 vs. Huxley's Brave New World made the following comment:
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
It appears that the western world is gradually tightening the reins on the populace by giving them (us) more and more banal pleasure, so that we don't object to the loss of freedom. Alternately, it seems that China is reducing dissension and unhappiness by giving the populace more and more banal pleasure, without actually increasing their useful freedom.
Curious how we're gradually moving to the same point from both sides.
Laptops are invariably used in areas with bad lighting, glare, etc. Glossy screens are less than ideal in those situations.
My TV or desktop computers, on the other hand, are in controlled environments. I can eliminate glare, so I'll take the better apparent saturation that glossy gives me in those cases. (If I have a choice, that is)
Sun didn't turn from a bright shiny wonderful company to a sacrificial lamb at the helm of an evil empire in a single day with a single set of signatures on a sales contract. Not all of "Sun's" problems stemmed from Larry, or the sale.
Let's not forget a few years ago, when mentioning Sun on/. would get you spit on. Let's not forget that Jonathan Schwartz spent his entire tenure at the helm cutting, cutting, and cutting again, to make Sun an unstable empty shell of its former self - but very appealing as a buyout target.
Oracle wants to make money. If they're not going to be helping with OpenSolaris, then it'll go off on its own way. This might be the best thing for it. In the meantime, think about who else could have bought Sun and done differently (better) with it. All contenders - IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Dell, would have either fumbled as badly, or shuttered it more aggressively. And thanks to Schwartz's manipulations, they couldn't have survived this long without being bought.
Don't get me wrong--I don't like Oracle, I REALLY don't like what support from them is like (on our $~0.6bn worth of Sun gear), but it bugs me to see the former Sun executive--ESPECIALLY Schwartz--avoid their share of the blame.
When I first got into enterprise computing 15 years ago, HSM (Hierarchal Storage Management) was making a comeback. At that time, the vendors were promoting it as something new in their promo cruft, but if you read the technical manuals, they claimed that it was an old idea that wasn't effective before but was now.
Here it is again, and I'm sure it had a resurgence in the middle as well, with NetApp and others coming online. HSM waxes and wanes every handful of years, but it ultimately only makes sense in very rigidly structured realms. It rarely works well for average users in an average mixed-use environment, and any attempt I've seen to implement it in a case like that has failed.
Now in the mainframe world, it used to work brilliantly. I used to work for a telco that had an IBM S/390 with HSM managing the storage. Data would be written to fast directly accessible disk, then gradually automatically migrated off to slower secondary disk, then to tape, and then booted out of the tape library. If you tried to access any file that had been ignored for 'x' and was moved to tape, you would get a pop-up message letting you know that it was being retrieved, and would be available in a few minutes. The tape would be mounted, the file retrieved to fast 1st tier storage, and you were in business. If you were looking at a file older than that, then you'd get a service call ticket number, the ops guys would get a 'mount this tape' request, and you'd get a notification when it was available.
Part of the problem though, is trying to keep track of filesystem sizes. With tape on the back-end, you can have effectively infinite filesystems, parts of which are slower than others. The OS has to understand it at a fairly low level to make it work. And the users need to understand it as well.
This has got me all nostalgic for the days that I was an Atari junkie - the 2600 first, then the 400, where I first learned to program.
However...
After running through a big pile of Atari joysticks, I decided I needed something better. One company that was better known for arcade sticks made a standard handheld one for the Atari. I spent a fortune on them, but they were great. Problem is, I can't remember what they were!
They had a steel stick, a black knob, a pale blue 'top cover', and a black base/housing. The buttons (two of 'em, although I can't remember if they were different triggers) were on the front of the stick, rather than on the top. Oh yeah, and the mechanism used leaf-spring contacts.
While I don't deny that manufacturers should have some responsibility, how is it fair that they're held responsible for the actions of consumers? For small items (candy wrappers), pushing littering laws from the user to the manufacturer may very well encourage MORE people to chuck their garbage around without care. Yeah, the manufacturers will try to limit it for their own financial reasons, but failing to hold consumers responsible for their actions will only make consumers less responsible.
Unfortunately, this is true. You can't say "don't double-dip" to a company. If it's profitable, they'll double-dip, triple-dip, and then sell you an expansion pack every six months. This isn't gaming though, this is life. Companies will do whatever they can get away with to bump up their profits.
I disagree with the statement that 'gamers have a high tolerance for this sort of thing', though. People in general have a fairly short "outrage window." Kick them in the groin, they complain bitterly and swear they won't do business with you. Then you can apologise and kick them in the shins, and they'll be grateful (or at least tolerant) because you're not kicking them in the groin anymore. Of course a year later you can start kicking them in the head, and when they complain bitterly, go back to "only" kicking them in the groin.
This is all very true, but there's some question still about how much of a hit the infrastructure could take. How gracefully would BGP et al deal with a failure of this magnitude? How much useful connectivity would there be between Canada (likely the most directly affected country) and say Spain? What sort of bandwidth would there be, and how long would it take for the routes to build.
It would absolutely not be a simple 'turn off the internet (in the US) for half a day' effect. More like electric carpetbombing--with as much damage and shrapnel as you'd expect from the real thing.
Actually, one quarter (49/200) of the root DNS servers are in the US. I checked last Friday, after this discussion came up elsewhere. The remainder would be congested, but probably able to stay upright.
Regardless. shutting down "access at the ISP level" is pretty much a meaningless statement. Specifically, it says, "private companies -- such as "broadband providers, search engines, and software firms -- immediately comply with any emergency measure or action"
Search engines. That means that google and yahoo will shut down--worldwide. Broadband providers. ISPs. Companies that aren't ISPs buy their access _from_ ISPs. This isn't just Joe down the street and Susie's Bead Shoppe, it's major oil companies and banks.
What about international shipping companies that coordinate through the internet? Trains? Airlines? Stock markets? All of it will grind to a screeching halt, with massive economic damage over the next weeks or months or years. The rest of the world _will_ survive a 'loss of the US' on the internet, although not without collateral damage.
As for DARPA's invention giving them the authority to do this, it's no different that Canada saying that because of Bell inventing the telephone, they have the right to shut down the worldwide POTS network. It's silly - the genie left the bottle decades ago, and the US is now a player, not the owner. Besides, any organization that has that degree of power or authority also has a responsibility to others it would harm.
Twitter is, at its most basic level, anti-internet.
The internet is fundamentally about communication. Every forum that has arisen has been a combination of technical limitations and social constraints, applied differently in each case. The technical limitations have disappeared as technology has evolved, to the point that live audio and video can be used as a means of communication.
Twitter, on the other hand, imposes a completely arbitrary technical constraint for no purpose other than to limit communication. It's not clever, it doesn't force people to be concise, it doesn't create wit, it just annoys and restricts.
Yeah, there are some useful tweets. It doesn't mean that the idea isn't fatally flawed and arbitrarily stupid. Twitter deserves to die a horrible death.
Well then, I stand corrected. (It ALWAYS hurts to say that, but...)
I didn't realise that a universal Turing machine had been implemented in Life. That is utterly cool, and in this context, the self-replicating pattern becomes a demonstration of the proof you point out.
I'd still say that the self-constructing pattern is in the top five, but maybe not #1 anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, the submission is a pile of BS, but it's a good place to discuss UVB-76. So...
I have been wondering if anyone has looked at the frequency of the beeps themselves. They're about a second or two apart, but do they vary at all? It occurs to me that the average beat timing could be a carrier, and a (very slow) frequency modulation on top of it would be a subtle way to inject other messages.
Anyone?
Bollocks and then some.
Bipolar thinking is a major problem with the world. "You're either with us or your with the terrorists" and such pointless horseshit.
It's possible that he's an evil seditious person who didn't rape anyone. It's possible that he's a forward-thinking iconoclast that _did_ rape someone. It's possible that he's a misguided idealist, and anarchist, a patriot, a nutjob, or any combination thereof.
I'm not going to stand 'for or against' him, I'm going to judge each of his actions on their own.
Don't know where in the world you are, but...
I work for an ISP. We're busy pushing HARD to get IPv6 out into the wild. Our first set will be the cable set-top-boxes, then internet cable modems. Internally, we're moving some of our systems to IPv6.
We don't make money off of selling you IPs, we make money by selling you bandwidth. We limit IPs because we have to (with IPv4). Moving to IPv6 is going to be a royal pain in the ass for us, but we NEED to do it. You "forcing" us is laughable - we'd love to be there already, and we're only not because it's a huge undertaking in addition to our normal day-to-day operations.
It's only a scam if you believe there's a benefit.
"...that is what causes people to lose control, and spin out, unless you're a formula 1 driver and you know WTF you're doing..."
Or someone who learned to drive in a cold climate on an old car.
Fishtailing in a light, wide-tired RWD car on warm ice can make anyone learn to handle a car properly in oversteer.
Funny how you read all that stuff, and never got the point of much of it:
DON'T KEEP PRIVATE STUFF ON YOUR WORK COMPUTER!!!
You say that you don't know many people who don't have personal stuff on their work computer. REALLY? This leaves me speechless. In an era when a functional computer can be had for the price of a few dozen fast-food lunches, flashdrives are promotional toys, smartphones are ubiquitous, etc. etc., why would ANYONE keep personal stuff on a work computer? Ten years ago, I could see it. Five years ago, _maybe_, but mostly because work computers were faster and better connected than the average home PC. Nowadays, I could get my own laptop that outpaced my work machine by a huge amount for under $400.
Seriously, why would you risk (a) your job, (b) your privacy, (c) your credibility, (d) your hiring potential (after getting fired for misuse of company resources), and (e) your family by putting stuff on a WORK computer? For gods' sake, use Gmail for email if you must.
When I hear arcade, my mind scrolls waaaay back to my youth, and the arcade down the street from my grandma's house. It had pinball, trampolines, a shooting gallery, mini-bowling, and bumper cars, for a start. I remember when they brought in the brand new video game! (Space Invaders, of course.) My older brother spent endless hours at it, but I was still content with my relatively new Triple Action pinball game.
That arcade is now a parking lot for oversized trailers. Sigh.
Back in the early '80s, Volvos were tanks. They protected their occupants with all of the usual methods (crumple zones, etc.) as well as sheer mass and robustness.
Unfortunately, this made them (a) appealing to people who were scared of driving, and (b) terrible-handling behemoths that would crush all who opposed them.
The result: Badly-handling cars cruising down the highway at either 75km/h (in a 110 zone) or at 150km/h. The followup result: lots of accidents, with the Volvo barely scratched, but the other cars crushed into twisted ruins.
Heh.
Mentioning troff to non-technical readers is really jarring no matter how you slice it.
No. No no no.
Oracle is taking the utterly destroyed guts of a once great company and trying to decide what the hell to do with it.
Sun was dying. Jonathan Schwartz, may Satan piss on his corpse when he dies, spent his entire tenure trying to gut the company of technological value and sell it off at a profit. I guess he should be happy that he succeeded, but I hope he lies awake at night (on his bed of money!), haunted by the fact that he killed the last pure Unix company in existence. His greed heralded the end of Unix.
It's still an incorrect hack.
Go read this article: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1735848&cid=33066158
There is an approved interface to figure this out, it's staying constant, and Eclipse didn't use it.
Yes, they own it. That's fine. What they're trying to do now, though, is say that they _always_ owned it.
You can now get information on "Oracle Solaris 9 and earlier", and that is utterly disingenuous. Solaris 8 was not, and will never be an Oracle product.
A comparison of Orwell's 1984 vs. Huxley's Brave New World made the following comment:
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
It appears that the western world is gradually tightening the reins on the populace by giving them (us) more and more banal pleasure, so that we don't object to the loss of freedom. Alternately, it seems that China is reducing dissension and unhappiness by giving the populace more and more banal pleasure, without actually increasing their useful freedom.
Curious how we're gradually moving to the same point from both sides.
Laptops are invariably used in areas with bad lighting, glare, etc. Glossy screens are less than ideal in those situations.
My TV or desktop computers, on the other hand, are in controlled environments. I can eliminate glare, so I'll take the better apparent saturation that glossy gives me in those cases. (If I have a choice, that is)
Sun didn't turn from a bright shiny wonderful company to a sacrificial lamb at the helm of an evil empire in a single day with a single set of signatures on a sales contract. Not all of "Sun's" problems stemmed from Larry, or the sale.
Let's not forget a few years ago, when mentioning Sun on /. would get you spit on. Let's not forget that Jonathan Schwartz spent his entire tenure at the helm cutting, cutting, and cutting again, to make Sun an unstable empty shell of its former self - but very appealing as a buyout target.
Oracle wants to make money. If they're not going to be helping with OpenSolaris, then it'll go off on its own way. This might be the best thing for it. In the meantime, think about who else could have bought Sun and done differently (better) with it. All contenders - IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Dell, would have either fumbled as badly, or shuttered it more aggressively. And thanks to Schwartz's manipulations, they couldn't have survived this long without being bought.
Don't get me wrong--I don't like Oracle, I REALLY don't like what support from them is like (on our $~0.6bn worth of Sun gear), but it bugs me to see the former Sun executive--ESPECIALLY Schwartz--avoid their share of the blame.
When I first got into enterprise computing 15 years ago, HSM (Hierarchal Storage Management) was making a comeback. At that time, the vendors were promoting it as something new in their promo cruft, but if you read the technical manuals, they claimed that it was an old idea that wasn't effective before but was now.
Here it is again, and I'm sure it had a resurgence in the middle as well, with NetApp and others coming online. HSM waxes and wanes every handful of years, but it ultimately only makes sense in very rigidly structured realms. It rarely works well for average users in an average mixed-use environment, and any attempt I've seen to implement it in a case like that has failed.
Now in the mainframe world, it used to work brilliantly. I used to work for a telco that had an IBM S/390 with HSM managing the storage. Data would be written to fast directly accessible disk, then gradually automatically migrated off to slower secondary disk, then to tape, and then booted out of the tape library. If you tried to access any file that had been ignored for 'x' and was moved to tape, you would get a pop-up message letting you know that it was being retrieved, and would be available in a few minutes. The tape would be mounted, the file retrieved to fast 1st tier storage, and you were in business. If you were looking at a file older than that, then you'd get a service call ticket number, the ops guys would get a 'mount this tape' request, and you'd get a notification when it was available.
Part of the problem though, is trying to keep track of filesystem sizes. With tape on the back-end, you can have effectively infinite filesystems, parts of which are slower than others. The OS has to understand it at a fairly low level to make it work. And the users need to understand it as well.
This has got me all nostalgic for the days that I was an Atari junkie - the 2600 first, then the 400, where I first learned to program.
However...
After running through a big pile of Atari joysticks, I decided I needed something better. One company that was better known for arcade sticks made a standard handheld one for the Atari. I spent a fortune on them, but they were great. Problem is, I can't remember what they were!
They had a steel stick, a black knob, a pale blue 'top cover', and a black base/housing. The buttons (two of 'em, although I can't remember if they were different triggers) were on the front of the stick, rather than on the top. Oh yeah, and the mechanism used leaf-spring contacts.
Any guesses folks?
If your premise was right, your conclusion would be too.
However, according to court findings, ZFS does not infringe on any of NetApp's patents. Unless an appeal succeeds, THAT is the end of the story.
The issue is that as of this moment, they are threating lawsuits against small developers over non-infringing use of a different technology.
NetApp used to be a fairly decent company, but they're slipping very fast in my books.
While I don't deny that manufacturers should have some responsibility, how is it fair that they're held responsible for the actions of consumers? For small items (candy wrappers), pushing littering laws from the user to the manufacturer may very well encourage MORE people to chuck their garbage around without care. Yeah, the manufacturers will try to limit it for their own financial reasons, but failing to hold consumers responsible for their actions will only make consumers less responsible.
Well, that's nice and balanced, isn't it? If China makes it, China should be responsible for it when it's dead.
Here's a thought: Why isn't the consumer responsible for the consequences of their purchases? What you describe is rampant, irresponsible consumerism.
Unfortunately, this is true. You can't say "don't double-dip" to a company. If it's profitable, they'll double-dip, triple-dip, and then sell you an expansion pack every six months. This isn't gaming though, this is life. Companies will do whatever they can get away with to bump up their profits.
I disagree with the statement that 'gamers have a high tolerance for this sort of thing', though. People in general have a fairly short "outrage window." Kick them in the groin, they complain bitterly and swear they won't do business with you. Then you can apologise and kick them in the shins, and they'll be grateful (or at least tolerant) because you're not kicking them in the groin anymore. Of course a year later you can start kicking them in the head, and when they complain bitterly, go back to "only" kicking them in the groin.
This is all very true, but there's some question still about how much of a hit the infrastructure could take. How gracefully would BGP et al deal with a failure of this magnitude? How much useful connectivity would there be between Canada (likely the most directly affected country) and say Spain? What sort of bandwidth would there be, and how long would it take for the routes to build.
It would absolutely not be a simple 'turn off the internet (in the US) for half a day' effect. More like electric carpetbombing--with as much damage and shrapnel as you'd expect from the real thing.
Actually, one quarter (49/200) of the root DNS servers are in the US. I checked last Friday, after this discussion came up elsewhere. The remainder would be congested, but probably able to stay upright.
Regardless. shutting down "access at the ISP level" is pretty much a meaningless statement. Specifically, it says, "private companies -- such as "broadband providers, search engines, and software firms -- immediately comply with any emergency measure or action"
Search engines. That means that google and yahoo will shut down--worldwide.
Broadband providers. ISPs. Companies that aren't ISPs buy their access _from_ ISPs. This isn't just Joe down the street and Susie's Bead Shoppe, it's major oil companies and banks.
What about international shipping companies that coordinate through the internet? Trains? Airlines? Stock markets? All of it will grind to a screeching halt, with massive economic damage over the next weeks or months or years. The rest of the world _will_ survive a 'loss of the US' on the internet, although not without collateral damage.
As for DARPA's invention giving them the authority to do this, it's no different that Canada saying that because of Bell inventing the telephone, they have the right to shut down the worldwide POTS network. It's silly - the genie left the bottle decades ago, and the US is now a player, not the owner. Besides, any organization that has that degree of power or authority also has a responsibility to others it would harm.
Twitter is, at its most basic level, anti-internet.
The internet is fundamentally about communication. Every forum that has arisen has been a combination of technical limitations and social constraints, applied differently in each case. The technical limitations have disappeared as technology has evolved, to the point that live audio and video can be used as a means of communication.
Twitter, on the other hand, imposes a completely arbitrary technical constraint for no purpose other than to limit communication. It's not clever, it doesn't force people to be concise, it doesn't create wit, it just annoys and restricts.
Yeah, there are some useful tweets. It doesn't mean that the idea isn't fatally flawed and arbitrarily stupid. Twitter deserves to die a horrible death.
Well then, I stand corrected. (It ALWAYS hurts to say that, but...)
I didn't realise that a universal Turing machine had been implemented in Life. That is utterly cool, and in this context, the self-replicating pattern becomes a demonstration of the proof you point out.
I'd still say that the self-constructing pattern is in the top five, but maybe not #1 anymore.
Thanks for the education!