Matt: I’d just love to be making cartoons with these characters again. If it looks like there’s a possibility of doing this full time again, that’s amazing I don’t want to set expectations too high, but needless to say, we’re jonesing to do this again.
If the Brothers Chaps really wanted to do web cartoons for a living, I bet a Homestar Runner Kickstarter would easily bring in a million or two to get them (re)started.
Crack mods, please mod the parent troll up, he's got a good point.
I'm so fucking tired of slashdot, I need to quit before I short out my keyboard with drool. And I think tonight the time has finally come. Browsing the comments on the Super-K followup, every single fucking comment at +3 or above has been "Funny" -- can you tell anything wrong with this picture?
Slashdot has degraded to the level of an irc channel. I'm off. Be good, all, and don't get horribly mauled by the schoolbus tomorrow morning.
So what is the range of acceptable? Well, for
a single user workstation a load average of 1
(one thing waiting) probably means the user is waiting, and you may want more CPU or disk
bandwidth.
Actually, on a single user workstation a load average of 1 means either that the user is running seti@home or there's a nautilus thread stuck in a busy loop again.
You can already do this pretty reliably. Just go to your favorite search engine and search for "joe's bakery yourtown yourstate" and make a bookmark when you find the right one. Post your bookmarks on the LAN if you need to share with other people around the office.
This is what search engines are for, and as TLD's proliferate, I expect more and more people will be doing this rather than sifting desperately through the squatters' pop-up ads at joesbakery.com, joes-bakery.biz, joes.bakery, joe.baker, etc..
[I tried submitting the following article to Ask Slashdot but it got rejected today after sitting in the queue for a few days -- it's somewhat on topic.]
I got to thinking once again about how fragile my current backup
scheme is.
I have three machines -- one laptop for MS Office, games, and browsing
the rare website I can't use with Opera on Linux, one ancient Linux
box doing NAT and email, and one modern Linux workstation that I use
for my daily work. My backup sets from these machines total about 15
gigabytes compressed. About five gigabytes are irreplaceable data,
and replacing the rest would be several days' work.
I take backups every night. The two linux boxes cpio, gzip, and cp
new and changed files off their relevant filesystems to a separate
backup drive on the workstation, while the built-in backup applet on
the Win2k box takes a full backup onto the same drive via SMB. An
additional cron job on the workstation renames the windows backup file
each night so the new one doesn't.
This scheme protects me from any single drive failure, as well as
accidental deletion of any file or directory except the root directory
on the Linux workstation. Which means that if, for example, if I were
to install a poorly constructed RPM that did rm -rf $DIRECTORY/ in a
script while $DIRECTORY was unset, I would lose all my data. While I
do have the most critical stuff on CD's, those are usually weeks out
of date. And even those would be susceptible to a housefire or a
burglary (well, I don't know if burglars typically bother to steal
stacks of CD-R's -- anyone with experience in this regard?).
In any case, offsite backups would be the way to go. CDR's are a pain
to automate when your backup set is large, and a pain to drag off
site, and they can get quite expensive in the long run, so I've looked
into various online backup services. Unfortunately, at the volumes
I'm looking at, the commercial services will typically charge you
several times the one-time cost of the hard drive space each month,
which seems somewhat excessive.
In fact, if I could just find two or three random guys with DSL or
cable, each with a server that's always on and has 20GB to spare, I'd
be quite happy to give them each 20 gigs on my box in return. A
15-minute search on Google didn't turn up any backup exchange rings on
the web -- is someone doing this kind of thing, either privately with
friends or through a more open group? What kind of software do you
use? While I would be perfectly happy with cpio | gzip | gpg | ssh
cat to stash my own stuff, I would be hesitant to give random
strangers full shell accounts on my box. And I would prefer not to
let them turn my workstation into a warez server, either, although I
suppose IP address restrictions and monitoring would pretty much take
care of that. Something that runs on windows would also increase the
user base nicely.
Has anyone been thinking carefully about a peer-to-peer online backup
system, or should I?
You're unlikely to get any calls from most innocent senders whose emails end up as collateral damage because the average person is unable to parse a bounce message and extract the useful information. Most can't even tell between a delivery delay and a fatal error -- if they get a scary looking message full of words like "warning" or "error" or "delivery failure", they'll just assume that the recipient's email is broken.
I've been victimized by the RBL once that I know of (I had my outgoing email rejected by the recipient's ISP because my ISP had some clients who with open relays and MAPS had their entire address space blocked on the RBL), and I suspect it may have happened at other times, as mail to my account at my current ISP who also uses the RBL has been mysteriously disappearing, and I've had complaints from people that my email is "broken". In fact, I'm considering switching to a yahoo address as my primary email account.
I've recently played around with both PGP and S/MIME with Outlook
Express. The integration really is much better than with PGP -- where
the built-in S/MIME has a clear advantage is when you have to
regularly send file attachments, which is frequently the case if you
need encrypted email in the first place. With PGP, you have to
separately encrypt each file and perhaps rename them, or zip them up
and encrypt the archive. It's also a minor pain having to keep
picking out recipients from a long PGP keyring, since the plugin can't
look up your recipients and doesn't even let you create recipient
groups to duplicate the ones in your address book.
PGP's key distribution mechanism is better -- you can (in theory)
communicate with someone you don't know by just retrieving the key
from the server and checking the chain of trust. In practice,
however, you often don't actually have a chain of trust to the person,
since only a couple of his friends have signed his key. With the
built-in S/MIME, if you don't have someone's certificate in your
address book, you need to get it from them directly.
Getting a S/MIME cert signed by one of the CA's preinstalled in
Windows does involve some security. It need not be much --
e.g. thawte.com offers free certificates that are valid for one year
and identify nothing more than your email address. For a modest fee
and some bureaucracy, your name can be slapped on to your cert.
The built-in S/MIME's big failing is the terrible documentation and
the highly complex security model -- the user will have to expend much
more effort to actually use it securely. For example, very little
guidance is given when you're creating your keys with the wizard.
You're asked to pick from three security levels which. If you pick
the lowest level, your keys are available for programs to perform
signing and decrypting operations automatically, without your
intervention. If you pick the intermediate level, you are asked to
confirm operations (a dialog box pops up saying "An application is
requesting access to a Protected item."; in the Details you can see
the name of the executable but no more information is offered). Only
if you pick the highest level do you get to enter a pass phrase to
protect the key. Backing up your keys is not clearly explained, and
understanding the escrow features seems to require a good
understanding of the Win2k security model, and I never bothered.
And of course the built-in S/MIME encryption is a Microsoft security
product built on top of Microsoft's security services in a Microsoft
Windows environment, so you're always one Nimda away from sending out
your client's business requirements to all your other clients anyway.
What would be really great would be S/MIME support in one of the
better Unix MUA's, with a freely available key certification authority
(verifying the email address only would be sufficient) and keyserver
network.
Re:Bad News: your joke turned out partly true
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 1
Comparing the CNN and BBC versions, it does look like the BBC's translator simply did a much better job than CNN's. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, though -- perhaps CNN's usual Arabic translator has simply been detained by the INS.
The Predator's watch probably didn't include a tactical nuke. If you look at the video evidence of the detonation of his device, you can clearly see a distortion across the field of view, very much like a gravitational lensing effect. It is more likely that the Predator's self-defense device was based on a technology able to create and manipulate extreme gravitational fields, in effect creating a tiny, temporary neutron star that sucked in surrounding matter, thus releasing a vast amount energy from the implosion. This was also a very efficient way of disposing of all physical evidence of his visit, and if it weren't for the incredibly brave camera crew that happened to be present and whom the Predator fortunately failed to notice, the very fact he was here would still be unknown to us to this date.
To get back to the topic: while putting a tactical nuke inside a Linux-powered wristwatch is beyond IBM's current technical capability, it will certainly be possible in the hopefully not too distant future. One can only hope that the unfortunate events of 9/11 will not cause unconstitutional legislation to be passed that would keep these devices away from the reach of the common man, making it impossible for him to protect his home and family.
Remember, when tactical nukes in wristwatches are outlawed, only Predator will have a tactical nuke in his wristwatch!
Incidentally, why is being able to "suspend to RAM" dependent on having lots of memory? Isn't what you're storing basically just the contents of your RAM, all of which is already there anyway? What constitutes the overhead?
Midichlorians, thetans, karma, nirvana, souls, angels, djinn, omniscient and omnipotent One True Deities waging the war of Good vs. Evil, squabbling mountain-dwelling pantheons,...
I'm having a hard time keeping a religion, sometimes it seems as though they all started out with somebody spinning a good scifi yarn around the campfire when suddenly some of the guys started going "Hey, man, that actually makes sense!"
He just means that all the other SI base units are defined in such a manner that you could email the definition off to your alien and it could then construct an experiment to figure out the exact value to any precision it's capable of measuring. The kilogram is still defined as "the mass of this one chunk of metal we got here", so the alien would have to drop by to see just how much mass that is.
Now of course we could explain a kilogram to the alien in terms of something else it's probably got lying around, such as carbon atoms or electrons, but then the precision would be limited by our own measurements, and we wouldn't be conveying "the standard".
Go here to check it out.
Incidentally, can someone explain to me why the mole is a base unit?
I have a linux box which I use for most of my stuff. I have all my files on ext3fs partitions because it's faster and more reliable than vfat, and more importantly because it has proper Unix semantics. I also have lots of things in crontab because I'm a lazy bum and don't want to do anything manually that I can possibly automate.
Now, I also like to play Civilization II of which I own a windows copy; I don't know if it's available for Linux and in any case I've already paid for the Windows version. I could reboot into Windows and play my game, but that would mean that I wouldn't have any of my applications available, none of my files would be accessible, and none of my cron jobs would get run.
Running CivII in a VMWare box is the best of both worlds. Sure, the graphics are a little sluggish, and the sound is choppy (bug in VMWare for Linux), but it's quite playable and quite stable, and it looks like any old window on my desktop, and I can put it away for a minute and the come back to it if I need to do something else.
And of course VMware offers some cool extras, such as the ability to roll back changes to a virtual hard drive -- this is wonderful for checking out Windows software, as you are guaranteed a quick and easy (1 second, 2 clicks) return path from any installation or upgrade, no matter what it did to your registry and "system" dll's..
It exists and it's called socks. The trouble is, it usually requires application level support as many braindead protocols make unwarranted assumptions.
Durr there is a network interface on this machine with an ip address of 192.168.1.7, that must be my ip address, HELLO SERVER i am a client, please send the file BRITNEYSPEARS.MP3 to 192.168.1.7 port 5432 i have opened it for you!
And don't get me started on peer-to-peer voice-over-ip..
In related news today, Linus Torvalds stated that he doesn't believe
in the viability of the open software development model, and RMS announced the FSF will be releasing a shareware Java bytecode obfuscator for Windows 98/ME/2000 in Q2/2002.
But if Real, Apple or other companies don't provide anything new or better to bring to the table, then yes, Media Player will win out. Now, is this a bad thing, or a good thing?
In this particular case it would indeed be a bad thing, since it would mean that the vast majority of media out there would be viewable on Windows machines only. The other formats would not be dying because they are inferior but because Media Player has achieved market share due to its vendor's clever leveraging of its an existing monopoly.
Of course there will always alternatives -- I could even roll my own. But who would publish content in it if everything else is in Microsoft format?
The issue is not what the end user pays for the browser, it's whether there in the future there will remain any significant competition to the Microsoft-approved content formats that generate revenue for Microsoft. If you're a content provider wishing to publish streaming video, for example, here's how your reasoning will go when you're selecting the format: "Do we use Real Player which requires all users to download a 5-megabyte plugin, or QuickTime which doesn't currently with new browsers, or Windows Media which every new (Windows) PC supports out of the box?" Windows Media is such an obvious choice that it might as well be the only one. The side effects are that:
The other formats will die, slowing down innovation despite what Microsoft may claim and giving Microsoft a monopoly in yet another field, and
You'll only be able to view the content on a Windows box.
This is already a problem with many an excellent net radio station, and the reason I have to keep a VMWare box chewing through inordinate amounts of CPU time as the audio is squeezed through virtual hardware. And of course I get to pay for a Windows license for the privilege of using their "free" media player.
Why stop at "display paint"? Imagine a solution that you could inject directly into your eyeballs to provide three-dimensional displays or overlays at arbitrary resolutions.
Better yet, could these nanocrystals be fashioned into a powder that you could snort up your nose? This could even let you experience colors outside the normal human visual spectrum!
Well, Active Worlds is certainly goal-less -- when I tried it out a year ago or so, there was absolutely nothing to do but wander around and watch the blocky software textures slowly creeping down your modem to materialize into abunch of kids cursing and making passes at each other.
But then Active Worlds is not a game, it's a "social environment", and while it's prettier or at least more colorful than IRC, it doesn't actually offer any improved functionality over it. In fact, I imagine trying to hold a conference would be much easier on IRC than in one of the "virtual conference centers", where everyone's avatar must fit in the constraints of a "room" and offer a line of sight to whoever they're trying to "listen" or "talk" to. And when you're the speaker and want to take questions from the audience, they all spew overlapping text on the screen at once.
Yes, you can also communicate directly with particular users on Active Worlds with a simple text-based interface component which defeats the purpose of having a 3D environment at all and is also far inferior to any IRC client.
What I'd really like to see is a good captivating 3D first-person adventure game, such as Ultima Underworld was (and Ultima IX wasn't). But I'd be just as happy with a good captivating 2D adventure or role playing game, such as the Curse of Monkey Island or Ultima IV.
It was a common complaint in reviews in computer game magazines some fifteen years ago how games now had beautiful graphics and amazing sound, and absolutely no depth or interest. Plus ca change..
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous reader linked a mashable.com article about Facebook? FRONT PAGE
wow, these Big Kuiper Belt bosses just do whatever they please
at this rate, I predict half the planets and several Middle Eastern nations will be designated KBOs by the year 2025
Thanks captain! This is real insightful! Also women should not wear dresses, and people should not buy consumer goods.
If the Brothers Chaps really wanted to do web cartoons for a living, I bet a Homestar Runner Kickstarter would easily bring in a million or two to get them (re)started.
I'm so fucking tired of slashdot, I need to quit before I short out my keyboard with drool. And I think tonight the time has finally come. Browsing the comments on the Super-K followup, every single fucking comment at +3 or above has been "Funny" -- can you tell anything wrong with this picture?
Slashdot has degraded to the level of an irc channel. I'm off. Be good, all, and don't get horribly mauled by the schoolbus tomorrow morning.
Actually, on a single user workstation a load average of 1 means either that the user is running seti@home or there's a nautilus thread stuck in a busy loop again.
This is what search engines are for, and as TLD's proliferate, I expect more and more people will be doing this rather than sifting desperately through the squatters' pop-up ads at joesbakery.com, joes-bakery.biz, joes.bakery, joe.baker, etc..
How do real men follow hyperlinks?
I got to thinking once again about how fragile my current backup scheme is.
I have three machines -- one laptop for MS Office, games, and browsing the rare website I can't use with Opera on Linux, one ancient Linux box doing NAT and email, and one modern Linux workstation that I use for my daily work. My backup sets from these machines total about 15 gigabytes compressed. About five gigabytes are irreplaceable data, and replacing the rest would be several days' work.
I take backups every night. The two linux boxes cpio, gzip, and cp new and changed files off their relevant filesystems to a separate backup drive on the workstation, while the built-in backup applet on the Win2k box takes a full backup onto the same drive via SMB. An additional cron job on the workstation renames the windows backup file each night so the new one doesn't.
This scheme protects me from any single drive failure, as well as accidental deletion of any file or directory except the root directory on the Linux workstation. Which means that if, for example, if I were to install a poorly constructed RPM that did rm -rf $DIRECTORY/ in a script while $DIRECTORY was unset, I would lose all my data. While I do have the most critical stuff on CD's, those are usually weeks out of date. And even those would be susceptible to a housefire or a burglary (well, I don't know if burglars typically bother to steal stacks of CD-R's -- anyone with experience in this regard?).
In any case, offsite backups would be the way to go. CDR's are a pain to automate when your backup set is large, and a pain to drag off site, and they can get quite expensive in the long run, so I've looked into various online backup services. Unfortunately, at the volumes I'm looking at, the commercial services will typically charge you several times the one-time cost of the hard drive space each month, which seems somewhat excessive.
In fact, if I could just find two or three random guys with DSL or cable, each with a server that's always on and has 20GB to spare, I'd be quite happy to give them each 20 gigs on my box in return. A 15-minute search on Google didn't turn up any backup exchange rings on the web -- is someone doing this kind of thing, either privately with friends or through a more open group? What kind of software do you use? While I would be perfectly happy with cpio | gzip | gpg | ssh cat to stash my own stuff, I would be hesitant to give random strangers full shell accounts on my box. And I would prefer not to let them turn my workstation into a warez server, either, although I suppose IP address restrictions and monitoring would pretty much take care of that. Something that runs on windows would also increase the user base nicely.
Has anyone been thinking carefully about a peer-to-peer online backup system, or should I?
I won't touch your political analysis, but how is your proposed bug going to "destroy" the oil? Would it burn it up, or what?
I've been victimized by the RBL once that I know of (I had my outgoing email rejected by the recipient's ISP because my ISP had some clients who with open relays and MAPS had their entire address space blocked on the RBL), and I suspect it may have happened at other times, as mail to my account at my current ISP who also uses the RBL has been mysteriously disappearing, and I've had complaints from people that my email is "broken". In fact, I'm considering switching to a yahoo address as my primary email account.
PGP's key distribution mechanism is better -- you can (in theory) communicate with someone you don't know by just retrieving the key from the server and checking the chain of trust. In practice, however, you often don't actually have a chain of trust to the person, since only a couple of his friends have signed his key. With the built-in S/MIME, if you don't have someone's certificate in your address book, you need to get it from them directly.
Getting a S/MIME cert signed by one of the CA's preinstalled in Windows does involve some security. It need not be much -- e.g. thawte.com offers free certificates that are valid for one year and identify nothing more than your email address. For a modest fee and some bureaucracy, your name can be slapped on to your cert.
The built-in S/MIME's big failing is the terrible documentation and the highly complex security model -- the user will have to expend much more effort to actually use it securely. For example, very little guidance is given when you're creating your keys with the wizard. You're asked to pick from three security levels which. If you pick the lowest level, your keys are available for programs to perform signing and decrypting operations automatically, without your intervention. If you pick the intermediate level, you are asked to confirm operations (a dialog box pops up saying "An application is requesting access to a Protected item."; in the Details you can see the name of the executable but no more information is offered). Only if you pick the highest level do you get to enter a pass phrase to protect the key. Backing up your keys is not clearly explained, and understanding the escrow features seems to require a good understanding of the Win2k security model, and I never bothered.
And of course the built-in S/MIME encryption is a Microsoft security product built on top of Microsoft's security services in a Microsoft Windows environment, so you're always one Nimda away from sending out your client's business requirements to all your other clients anyway. What would be really great would be S/MIME support in one of the better Unix MUA's, with a freely available key certification authority (verifying the email address only would be sufficient) and keyserver network.
Comparing the CNN and BBC versions, it does look like the BBC's translator simply did a much better job than CNN's. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, though -- perhaps CNN's usual Arabic translator has simply been detained by the INS.
To get back to the topic: while putting a tactical nuke inside a Linux-powered wristwatch is beyond IBM's current technical capability, it will certainly be possible in the hopefully not too distant future. One can only hope that the unfortunate events of 9/11 will not cause unconstitutional legislation to be passed that would keep these devices away from the reach of the common man, making it impossible for him to protect his home and family.
Remember, when tactical nukes in wristwatches are outlawed, only Predator will have a tactical nuke in his wristwatch!
Incidentally, why is being able to "suspend to RAM" dependent on having lots of memory? Isn't what you're storing basically just the contents of your RAM, all of which is already there anyway? What constitutes the overhead?
I'm having a hard time keeping a religion, sometimes it seems as though they all started out with somebody spinning a good scifi yarn around the campfire when suddenly some of the guys started going "Hey, man, that actually makes sense!"
Now of course we could explain a kilogram to the alien in terms of something else it's probably got lying around, such as carbon atoms or electrons, but then the precision would be limited by our own measurements, and we wouldn't be conveying "the standard".
Go here to check it out. Incidentally, can someone explain to me why the mole is a base unit?
Now, I also like to play Civilization II of which I own a windows copy; I don't know if it's available for Linux and in any case I've already paid for the Windows version. I could reboot into Windows and play my game, but that would mean that I wouldn't have any of my applications available, none of my files would be accessible, and none of my cron jobs would get run.
Running CivII in a VMWare box is the best of both worlds. Sure, the graphics are a little sluggish, and the sound is choppy (bug in VMWare for Linux), but it's quite playable and quite stable, and it looks like any old window on my desktop, and I can put it away for a minute and the come back to it if I need to do something else.
And of course VMware offers some cool extras, such as the ability to roll back changes to a virtual hard drive -- this is wonderful for checking out Windows software, as you are guaranteed a quick and easy (1 second, 2 clicks) return path from any installation or upgrade, no matter what it did to your registry and "system" dll's..
Durr there is a network interface on this machine with an ip address of 192.168.1.7, that must be my ip address, HELLO SERVER i am a client, please send the file BRITNEYSPEARS.MP3 to 192.168.1.7 port 5432 i have opened it for you!
And don't get me started on peer-to-peer voice-over-ip ..
(apologies to drew)
In related news today, Linus Torvalds stated that he doesn't believe
in the viability of the open software development model, and RMS announced the FSF will be releasing a shareware Java bytecode obfuscator for Windows 98/ME/2000 in Q2/2002.
Of course there will always alternatives -- I could even roll my own. But who would publish content in it if everything else is in Microsoft format?
- The other formats will die, slowing down innovation despite what Microsoft may claim and giving Microsoft a monopoly in yet another field, and
- You'll only be able to view the content on a Windows box.
This is already a problem with many an excellent net radio station, and the reason I have to keep a VMWare box chewing through inordinate amounts of CPU time as the audio is squeezed through virtual hardware. And of course I get to pay for a Windows license for the privilege of using their "free" media player.Better yet, could these nanocrystals be fashioned into a powder that you could snort up your nose? This could even let you experience colors outside the normal human visual spectrum!
But then Active Worlds is not a game, it's a "social environment", and while it's prettier or at least more colorful than IRC, it doesn't actually offer any improved functionality over it. In fact, I imagine trying to hold a conference would be much easier on IRC than in one of the "virtual conference centers", where everyone's avatar must fit in the constraints of a "room" and offer a line of sight to whoever they're trying to "listen" or "talk" to. And when you're the speaker and want to take questions from the audience, they all spew overlapping text on the screen at once. Yes, you can also communicate directly with particular users on Active Worlds with a simple text-based interface component which defeats the purpose of having a 3D environment at all and is also far inferior to any IRC client.
What I'd really like to see is a good captivating 3D first-person adventure game, such as Ultima Underworld was (and Ultima IX wasn't). But I'd be just as happy with a good captivating 2D adventure or role playing game, such as the Curse of Monkey Island or Ultima IV.
It was a common complaint in reviews in computer game magazines some fifteen years ago how games now had beautiful graphics and amazing sound, and absolutely no depth or interest. Plus ca change..