You know, in Matrix: Reloaded, Trinity breaks into a power station, somehow runs nmap on a terminal there, then sshnuke, and finally runs some console program which has a "Do you want to shut down power to everything (Y/N)" type prompt...
So, anyhow, I went with a bunch of people. The geeks in the group (including me) giggled and poked each other. Afterwards we talked about it for hours, initially about how cool it was, but then, the "yeah buts" started... The "yeah but how did she get nmap and sshnuke on the machine in the first place." The "yeah but why would she have to do that crap if she was already IN the facility." The "yeah but why would there be such a stupidly simple console program to turn off the power with just a "Y/N"? Knocking out the power HAS to be harder than that!" (This being before the NE blackout, of course.)...
The moral of the story is that it hardly matters if you try to fill a story with "plausibility" since the geeks will STILL tear it apart afterwards.
Incidentally, a girl that went with us to the showing later told me that all the geek-bitching was the "cutest thing she'd ever seen." That was suitably emasculating, to be sure.
This made it somewhat difficult to enforce, I'm sure you'll understand.
I suspect something like McCain's plan for guest workers combined with a path to citizenship for said workers is probably the best bet, but that HAS to be coupled with an enforced border. You're definitely right that California RELIES on the migrant workers to get work done, but the way they get here is (pardon the pun) positively criminal, for both sides. The amount of risk to them (you should hear some of the tales friends of mine on the border tell about how people are getting across) combined with the risk that we face of not knowing just who is getting up here, make the case that the current system isn't working, but also that yet another amnesty isn't going to help either.
Sure, there's 6 to 4, so the people on IPv6 networks will see everything on the IPv4 network, so they can web browse, etc etc...
But there is no 4to6, for obvious reasons, so noone on the IPv4 network will be able to directly address all the systems on the ISPs IPv6 network. In other words, to everyone still one the IPv4 network, the ISP's IPv6 network will appear to them no functionally different than a NATted network (which, in fact, it is, really) with all the problems inherent to that.
Say I stick with Verizon, but you go to the cool new UberNet with IPv6 (tm), and one day you want me to check out this nifty new XML app you've wrote and deployed on your Web server. Too bad, because I can't get to it. So, do I go switch to UberNet or one of its (hypothetically, if not realistically) many competitors, or do I stick with Verizon? The answer depends on how badly I want to see your content...
OK, from the other angle. I'm running FunnyComic.com which is an incredibly popular (and since this is a fantasy scenario, incredibly lucrative) web comic. I'm currently hosting with ServerBeach or somebody on an IPv4 network. Now, along comes UberHosting.com, and offers to put me on a brand spanking new IPv6 net, and I even get to have 1000000 IPs, so that if I go insane and want to have a custom server per VIEWER, I probably could... Do I switch to them? When in all likelihood most of my customers will continue to use AOL on IPv4 and thus not be able to see me on IPv6? Is my comic SOOOO popular that people will switch to IPv6 ISPs in droves, and the remaining IPv4 ISPs will be forced to convert? Ah, but you say: "You can be on IPv4 AND IPv6 at the same time!" True, but then what is the motivation to be on IPv6 at all?
The problem is that its very hard to have IPv6 spring whole from the head of Zeus like Athena did in a commercial environment. Probably the only thing that will cause it to happen is sheer absolute necessity (a REAL, tangible IP shortage, in which you try to sign onto the internet and the DHCP server cannot lease you an IP) or some unbelievable killer app on IPv6 that is not on IPv4 (and for most people IPSec and "everything has an IP" isn't quite that, it's going to have to be an end user content protocol, and then its going to be difficult to say why it would not be ported back to IPv4... My personal best guess as to what would make this work? Multicast multimedia, like a DirecTV over IP that is on a show by show basis or something, and this presupposes BROAD-broadband to millions of homes.)
Yeah, they didn't spring for the GPS* option in their cyborg conversions. It was just too expensive, and they just figured they'd get more use out of the detachable MP3 player, which was half the price.
In any case, I'll state it again: Over the long term, of course, IPv6 will work out better, but over the short term, any ONE ISP that goes to IPv6 will be stuck with a lot of customers that can't be addressed by the rest of the IPv4 world. Sure, if multiple ISPs converted simulataneously, this wouldn't be a problem, but I like to stay strictly grounded in reality.
Fundamentally, any ISP conversion to IPv6 now will appear (in terms of functionality gained/lost) almost exactly the same as if they had NATed... This being over the short term of course. Yes, in the long run, its adding functionality for their customers, but right now, it leads to the same "my friend joe can't see my computer on the internet anymore" problem.
On a side note: I personally don't believe there is any music that defines "us" as a generation, or a nation, if "us" is an all-inclusive "us" for generation or nation.
Re:The Superiority of PHP over Perl
on
Perl 6 Essentials
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
While I tend to prefer Perl as well, many of your reasons for prefering it are not entirely informed...
"* Perl is more standardized, due to it's greater history."
Not really sure of the point you're trying to make here. Niether project really has a standards body behind it. Perhaps you mean Perl is more accepted. "* Perl has better DB support..."
Granted, although PHP provides a DB abstraction layer in Pear now, which all good PHP coders should be using... "* Perl has structures..."
Some would say this is a bit ad-hominem, with the "not so in other (which?) languages part, but others would say the OO part is Perl's weakness. Either way, both languages (Perl in 5, PHP in 5) are working to improve their OO models. "* Perl has better string manipulation"
True. Probably why PHP apes it in some respects. "* PHP used Perl as part of it's basis"
This isn't really a good reason, since the obvious rejoinder is "ah, so PHP is an improvement on Perl then?". At any rate, its a bit silly to pick on another language for appropriating the good parts of other languages when you like Perl. Pot, this is Kettle, over, you are BLACK!
"PHP embeds..."
You mean, kind of like Mason with Perl? Really "violations of the OSI model" aside, this tends to be WHY PHP is so popular, because its very easy to use to do the odd simple thing because of this. Yes, you run into the problems with it when you start to do a larger project (which is why there are all those PHP template systems, I suppose.) but why deride something that works very well for the 80% of cases that are out there. It's also entirely possible to use PHP as a non-HTML-embedded language, of course.
That being said, I'd choose Perl in a heartbeat over PHP for a large project, particular one not Web related, for a number of reasons.
* Far better support for modules, and a much larger library of solutions already available. * Some speed related issues out of the box. * The afore mentioned string manipulation issues. * Better ability to do things like signal handlers, and other "Unixy" things. * What IMHO, I consider better language/character set support.
Probably all the more reason for Harvard to do it...
Professor at Harvard: "What, John Smith is representing the RIAA? He failed my basic corporate law class the first 2 times he took it! AND he toilet papered my house and threw up on my front lawn! I'm going to burn the little moron!"
I've thought about this, and the realization I came to is that somebody just needs to invent a plug-in system for NAT firewalls. Something that uses signed processor independant byte-code or the like.
The system I see is that you buy your NATing router from LinkSys with the "GameServer Inside" logo, or download and install gameservd from Freshmeat. This is a little daemon running on the router which can be connected to from a trusted host inside the NAT region, and have a game server byte code downloaded to it. It automatically sets up the ports, does the proxying, etc etc, and walla, you've got mini server running on a real IP that you connect to from inside the wire, and which others can connect to (include other game servers out there) from the outside.
But if they are, yes, we'll lose a bit of functionality for a few months. The Linux hobbyist market will adjust. However, it'll kill the enterprise, because no Linux copyright holder is going to want to have square one to do with SCO whether or NOT they are right, so they'll retract their copyrights, and you won't have a valid OS, and companies that are currently using 2.4 based stuff will have to move to something else or be at risk of lawsuits for years, and no doubt SCO hopes that'll be UnixWare or the like. The truth is, they'll probably move to that OTHER Intel OS, who will accept them with open arms.
I hate to say it, but those Microsoft conspiracy theories are starting to look kind of valid.
That's the whole point of voting with your wallet. You get your one vote, and everybody else gets there's. You don't like it? You don't buy it, and if there's enough people like you, then the statement is made, and if it there's not, then it obviously isn't the will of the people. It isn't about you trying to propigate your "vote" by getting other people to think like you. Hmm, actually, in a lot of ways, this is what's wrong with current political thought in America.
You can talk about an "educated electorate" and I agree that people need to have the facts about what DRM really means for them (as in what it prevents them from doing, and what it requires of them to do.) but I also think its essential that it doesn't get presented in a "they're trying to control your thoughts, man" kind of way. Present the facts, the actual consequences, and let opinions fall where they may.
One problem, and maybe its been mentioned already, but its pretty darn easy for flesh to make contact with the copper on an RJ-45... I know that I'd have a great deal more respect for the patch panel if I thought I could get 120V AC at multiple amps just by being careless with the Cat5.
Well, only if you read them, but no, I'm talking about the 2 minute or longer previews, such as those shown before a movie starts.
I figured somebody would bring up the books, so I probably should have picked a better example. But I can always count on Slashdot to bring out the smart asses before the smart people.
Secure Attention Sequence. A requirement of the at-the-time lauded C2 security standard... It's still not a bad idea. A trained user can feel reasonably secure that the login prompt they are getting is the OS's and not somebodies nifty little bit of engineering.
I used to have to bust students in the PC lab ALL the time for thinking that a "really cool program" would be something that faked looking like a Linux log-on screen, and just pretended to not "work" when the user tried to log on, storing the password away for its own use. It was at times like that I wished Linux had a similar attention sequence.
I suspect it will be less hard to justify next time though.
This is hardly unique to Windows. Just got done doing a rollout of a new production server for an existing application set. Going from Solaris 2.6 to 8, upgrading Oracle, upgrading the application, upgrading Perl (which a lot of the 'glue' was based on) from 5.6.1 to 5.8, upgrading Perl module versions, upgrading LPRng from a 2.x version to 3.8.10, upgrading the CASS system software, etc etc. You can bet that every single application and business process on that system had to be completely re-verified on the new system, even though in almost all cases it meant NO changes to the code. Took up better than 2-3 months of the developers time, and some of them definitely complained that they could be working on new projects instead.
But the point was that they DID catch a number of "gotchas" that would have seized up production if the upgrade had been done blind, and everyone from management on down was reassured that nothing bottom-line threatening was going to happen on the day of cutover.
Frankly, I can't see how a USEFUL signed bootloader WOULDN'T allow pirated games... Even with a "you can only run this kernel" limitation, couldn't the root user just do something like "load DVD-rom code, and start executing in protected mode"?
Maybe TiVo just needs to allow Thumbing Up and Down individual commercials. That would be some real feedback.
Of course, if you're sitting there rating every commercial that goes by, I seriously hope someone comes in the room, grabs you bodily, and throws your butt outside every once in a while.
This is, in many ways, a good thing. I've found extended previews usually give too MUCH away in recent years. The Harry Potter extended previews in particular have been guilty of this.
Oh, and as for the last question of where the "big companies" would be coming from, do you imagine the government would hire 100,000 people and develop the IT infrastructure to run this, or would they bid it out?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, in Matrix: Reloaded, Trinity breaks into a power station, somehow runs nmap on a terminal there, then sshnuke, and finally runs some console program which has a "Do you want to shut down power to everything (Y/N)" type prompt...
So, anyhow, I went with a bunch of people. The geeks in the group (including me) giggled and poked each other. Afterwards we talked about it for hours, initially about how cool it was, but then, the "yeah buts" started... The "yeah but how did she get nmap and sshnuke on the machine in the first place." The "yeah but why would she have to do that crap if she was already IN the facility." The "yeah but why would there be such a stupidly simple console program to turn off the power with just a "Y/N"? Knocking out the power HAS to be harder than that!" (This being before the NE blackout, of course.)...
The moral of the story is that it hardly matters if you try to fill a story with "plausibility" since the geeks will STILL tear it apart afterwards.
Incidentally, a girl that went with us to the showing later told me that all the geek-bitching was the "cutest thing she'd ever seen." That was suitably emasculating, to be sure.
Actually "alternatives" from RedHat is a reimplementation of Debian's "alternatives"...
Chickens.
I'd let the chickens say whatever they want, as long as they promised we could fry and eat them afterwards.
Well, 187 WAS declared unconstitutional, after all.
1 99 7-04mn.html
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/archive_mn/dec_
This made it somewhat difficult to enforce, I'm sure you'll understand.
I suspect something like McCain's plan for guest workers combined with a path to citizenship for said workers is probably the best bet, but that HAS to be coupled with an enforced border. You're definitely right that California RELIES on the migrant workers to get work done, but the way they get here is (pardon the pun) positively criminal, for both sides. The amount of risk to them (you should hear some of the tales friends of mine on the border tell about how people are getting across) combined with the risk that we face of not knowing just who is getting up here, make the case that the current system isn't working, but also that yet another amnesty isn't going to help either.
Sure, there's 6 to 4, so the people on IPv6 networks will see everything on the IPv4 network, so they can web browse, etc etc...
But there is no 4to6, for obvious reasons, so noone on the IPv4 network will be able to directly address all the systems on the ISPs IPv6 network. In other words, to everyone still one the IPv4 network, the ISP's IPv6 network will appear to them no functionally different than a NATted network (which, in fact, it is, really) with all the problems inherent to that.
Say I stick with Verizon, but you go to the cool new UberNet with IPv6 (tm), and one day you want me to check out this nifty new XML app you've wrote and deployed on your Web server. Too bad, because I can't get to it. So, do I go switch to UberNet or one of its (hypothetically, if not realistically) many competitors, or do I stick with Verizon? The answer depends on how badly I want to see your content...
OK, from the other angle. I'm running FunnyComic.com which is an incredibly popular (and since this is a fantasy scenario, incredibly lucrative) web comic. I'm currently hosting with ServerBeach or somebody on an IPv4 network. Now, along comes UberHosting.com, and offers to put me on a brand spanking new IPv6 net, and I even get to have 1000000 IPs, so that if I go insane and want to have a custom server per VIEWER, I probably could... Do I switch to them? When in all likelihood most of my customers will continue to use AOL on IPv4 and thus not be able to see me on IPv6? Is my comic SOOOO popular that people will switch to IPv6 ISPs in droves, and the remaining IPv4 ISPs will be forced to convert? Ah, but you say: "You can be on IPv4 AND IPv6 at the same time!" True, but then what is the motivation to be on IPv6 at all?
The problem is that its very hard to have IPv6 spring whole from the head of Zeus like Athena did in a commercial environment. Probably the only thing that will cause it to happen is sheer absolute necessity (a REAL, tangible IP shortage, in which you try to sign onto the internet and the DHCP server cannot lease you an IP) or some unbelievable killer app on IPv6 that is not on IPv4 (and for most people IPSec and "everything has an IP" isn't quite that, it's going to have to be an end user content protocol, and then its going to be difficult to say why it would not be ported back to IPv4... My personal best guess as to what would make this work? Multicast multimedia, like a DirecTV over IP that is on a show by show basis or something, and this presupposes BROAD-broadband to millions of homes.)
Yeah, they didn't spring for the GPS* option in their cyborg conversions. It was just too expensive, and they just figured they'd get more use out of the detachable MP3 player, which was half the price.
* That's "Galactic Positioning System"
So are you agreeing or disageeing?
In any case, I'll state it again: Over the long term, of course, IPv6 will work out better, but over the short term, any ONE ISP that goes to IPv6 will be stuck with a lot of customers that can't be addressed by the rest of the IPv4 world. Sure, if multiple ISPs converted simulataneously, this wouldn't be a problem, but I like to stay strictly grounded in reality.
Fundamentally, any ISP conversion to IPv6 now will appear (in terms of functionality gained/lost) almost exactly the same as if they had NATed... This being over the short term of course. Yes, in the long run, its adding functionality for their customers, but right now, it leads to the same "my friend joe can't see my computer on the internet anymore" problem.
Yeah, if this was back in the days of me grading undergrad lab reports, there'd be some points taken off for lack of clarity on that page.
On a side note: I personally don't believe there is any music that defines "us" as a generation, or a nation, if "us" is an all-inclusive "us" for generation or nation.
While I tend to prefer Perl as well, many of your reasons for prefering it are not entirely informed...
"* Perl is more standardized, due to it's greater history."
Not really sure of the point you're trying to make here. Niether project really has a standards body behind it. Perhaps you mean Perl is more accepted.
"* Perl has better DB support..."
Granted, although PHP provides a DB abstraction layer in Pear now, which all good PHP coders should be using...
"* Perl has structures..."
Some would say this is a bit ad-hominem, with the "not so in other (which?) languages part, but others would say the OO part is Perl's weakness. Either way, both languages (Perl in 5, PHP in 5) are working to improve their OO models.
"* Perl has better string manipulation"
True. Probably why PHP apes it in some respects.
"* PHP used Perl as part of it's basis"
This isn't really a good reason, since the obvious rejoinder is "ah, so PHP is an improvement on Perl then?". At any rate, its a bit silly to pick on another language for appropriating the good parts of other languages when you like Perl. Pot, this is Kettle, over, you are BLACK!
"PHP embeds..."
You mean, kind of like Mason with Perl? Really "violations of the OSI model" aside, this tends to be WHY PHP is so popular, because its very easy to use to do the odd simple thing because of this. Yes, you run into the problems with it when you start to do a larger project (which is why there are all those PHP template systems, I suppose.) but why deride something that works very well for the 80% of cases that are out there. It's also entirely possible to use PHP as a non-HTML-embedded language, of course.
That being said, I'd choose Perl in a heartbeat over PHP for a large project, particular one not Web related, for a number of reasons.
* Far better support for modules, and a much larger library of solutions already available.
* Some speed related issues out of the box.
* The afore mentioned string manipulation issues.
* Better ability to do things like signal handlers, and other "Unixy" things.
* What IMHO, I consider better language/character set support.
Probably all the more reason for Harvard to do it...
Professor at Harvard: "What, John Smith is representing the RIAA? He failed my basic corporate law class the first 2 times he took it! AND he toilet papered my house and threw up on my front lawn! I'm going to burn the little moron!"
I've thought about this, and the realization I came to is that somebody just needs to invent a plug-in system for NAT firewalls. Something that uses signed processor independant byte-code or the like.
The system I see is that you buy your NATing router from LinkSys with the "GameServer Inside" logo, or download and install gameservd from Freshmeat. This is a little daemon running on the router which can be connected to from a trusted host inside the NAT region, and have a game server byte code downloaded to it. It automatically sets up the ports, does the proxying, etc etc, and walla, you've got mini server running on a real IP that you connect to from inside the wire, and which others can connect to (include other game servers out there) from the outside.
Just a thought.
Assuming that the claims are valid.
But if they are, yes, we'll lose a bit of functionality for a few months. The Linux hobbyist market will adjust. However, it'll kill the enterprise, because no Linux copyright holder is going to want to have square one to do with SCO whether or NOT they are right, so they'll retract their copyrights, and you won't have a valid OS, and companies that are currently using 2.4 based stuff will have to move to something else or be at risk of lawsuits for years, and no doubt SCO hopes that'll be UnixWare or the like. The truth is, they'll probably move to that OTHER Intel OS, who will accept them with open arms.
I hate to say it, but those Microsoft conspiracy theories are starting to look kind of valid.
Actually, it's #2 in the US and Europe. #3 (by a loooong shot) in Japan. Overall, they aren't doing so bad.
That's the whole point of voting with your wallet. You get your one vote, and everybody else gets there's. You don't like it? You don't buy it, and if there's enough people like you, then the statement is made, and if it there's not, then it obviously isn't the will of the people. It isn't about you trying to propigate your "vote" by getting other people to think like you. Hmm, actually, in a lot of ways, this is what's wrong with current political thought in America.
You can talk about an "educated electorate" and I agree that people need to have the facts about what DRM really means for them (as in what it prevents them from doing, and what it requires of them to do.) but I also think its essential that it doesn't get presented in a "they're trying to control your thoughts, man" kind of way. Present the facts, the actual consequences, and let opinions fall where they may.
One problem, and maybe its been mentioned already, but its pretty darn easy for flesh to make contact with the copper on an RJ-45... I know that I'd have a great deal more respect for the patch panel if I thought I could get 120V AC at multiple amps just by being careless with the Cat5.
I can't really imagine that this would be a hard or interesting question for most people...
It's roughly equivalent to asking whether a bottle of wine tastes better before or after fermentation.
Well, only if you read them, but no, I'm talking about the 2 minute or longer previews, such as those shown before a movie starts.
I figured somebody would bring up the books, so I probably should have picked a better example. But I can always count on Slashdot to bring out the smart asses before the smart people.
Secure Attention Sequence. A requirement of the at-the-time lauded C2 security standard... It's still not a bad idea. A trained user can feel reasonably secure that the login prompt they are getting is the OS's and not somebodies nifty little bit of engineering.
I used to have to bust students in the PC lab ALL the time for thinking that a "really cool program" would be something that faked looking like a Linux log-on screen, and just pretended to not "work" when the user tried to log on, storing the password away for its own use. It was at times like that I wished Linux had a similar attention sequence.
I suspect it will be less hard to justify next time though.
This is hardly unique to Windows. Just got done doing a rollout of a new production server for an existing application set. Going from Solaris 2.6 to 8, upgrading Oracle, upgrading the application, upgrading Perl (which a lot of the 'glue' was based on) from 5.6.1 to 5.8, upgrading Perl module versions, upgrading LPRng from a 2.x version to 3.8.10, upgrading the CASS system software, etc etc. You can bet that every single application and business process on that system had to be completely re-verified on the new system, even though in almost all cases it meant NO changes to the code. Took up better than 2-3 months of the developers time, and some of them definitely complained that they could be working on new projects instead.
But the point was that they DID catch a number of "gotchas" that would have seized up production if the upgrade had been done blind, and everyone from management on down was reassured that nothing bottom-line threatening was going to happen on the day of cutover.
Moral of the story: Always validate. Always.
Frankly, I can't see how a USEFUL signed bootloader WOULDN'T allow pirated games... Even with a "you can only run this kernel" limitation, couldn't the root user just do something like "load DVD-rom code, and start executing in protected mode"?
Maybe TiVo just needs to allow Thumbing Up and Down individual commercials. That would be some real feedback.
Of course, if you're sitting there rating every commercial that goes by, I seriously hope someone comes in the room, grabs you bodily, and throws your butt outside every once in a while.
This is, in many ways, a good thing. I've found extended previews usually give too MUCH away in recent years. The Harry Potter extended previews in particular have been guilty of this.
Oh, and as for the last question of where the "big companies" would be coming from, do you imagine the government would hire 100,000 people and develop the IT infrastructure to run this, or would they bid it out?