Yeah, Fry's is definitely worth a check out. If you're around San Jose, there's the Museum of Technology which is definitely a must see. I tried to tour Xerox PARC, but their web-site says they don't offer tours. Apparently they learned something from giving Steve Jobs a tour...
The garage that Hewlett Packard started in is a national landmark and I think they now have an HP museum around there. You could probably get someone at Above.net to give you a tour of their facility, as well. Isn't that where google is?
Also worth checking out is Weird Stuff Warehouse -- a surplus dealer. Lots of great equipment there.
In Colorado, there are a few things that I can think of right off the top of my head. Just north of Fort Collins is the WWIV radio towers -- you know, "At the tone the time will be". You can't tour the site, but it might be a nice place to stop and get a picture of yourself.
In Boulder there's the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which you probably can get a tour of. They have the atomic clock there. There's also the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which apparently gives a pretty good tour.
Note that southern Colorado has Cheyenne Mountain, the military complex built into the mountain that was in War Games, the movie? They apparently don't do tours any more, however (at least not when I checked 3 or 4 years ago).
Colorado also has the Rocky Mountains, which has some really good backpacking.
Finally, in Colorado we have quite a lot of Linux activity. The http://lug.boulder.co.us/ http://nclug.org/ http://clue.denver.co.us/ to name a few. Those are monthly meetings. There are also Hacking Society meetings http://hackingsociety.org/ a couple of times a week -- Tuesdays in Fort Collins and Thursdays in Boulder. If you're here for the better part of any week, we can probably hook you up with at least two groups of geeks.
If you find yourself in Millwauke, Wisconsin, make sure you visit The Safe House. It's a bar/restaurant with a heavily spy-oriented theme. Not directly geek stuff, but geeks seem to like spy stuff. The food is not so great, but you should definitely order a "Martini, shaken, not stirred".
In Washington, D.C., there's (of course) tons of stuff. The Air and Space museum is pretty sweet, and many of the museums there are free. The Spy Museum is also fun, but very hard to get into. IIRC, it costs $16.
Back in mid to late 1997, Java performance was horrible, particularly on Linux. I remember being very happy with the performance of my development box (dual PPro 200, 200MB of RAM) at the time, except when I was running Java apps. It also used tons of RAM just to start an application, and then it leaked...
I'm sure that all of this has gotten better in the 5 years since then. It doesn't really matter to me though... After 6 months of trying to be happy with Java, I switched to Python. It's working fantasticly for me.
I'm thinking that it'll really start to get to the point where I will start using it in 2008. This is me speaking about my small hosting business as well as a member of the local Internet Cooperative. I'm sure I'll be playing with IPV6 in the next year or two to get up to speed on it.
At the moment you can't get IPV6 service from any of the large providers. And really only people on ipv6 can take advantage of it, so... Until a significant portion of the end-users have IPV6, I can't see that we'll have any real need to start using it in any real way...
It's, obviously, a chicken-and-egg thing. It was really pushed because of the "sky is falling" shouts about running out of IP space. Todays world seems like there's plenty of IP space, if you're not super wastful with it, and we have other problems to face like router table space and ASNs.
The other problem I don't think we really have ironed out right now is that the routers are really underpowered and optimized for ipv4 routing. I expect that having significant traffic on IPV6 is going to stress many of the bigger routers on the net to the point that they can no longer function. Lots of "big router" admins are already working hard getting the routers to handle current traffic.
I don't get it... I have an HP inkjet printer which has sat in the garage for over 2 years, and I'd be suprised if it would perform well on the cartridges in it. It seems totally reasonable to enforce the expiration date, because otherwise you have people bitching about the quality of the prints, or that their cartridges just don't work.
Printers are hardly the only place that this happens. Take, for example, the O2 sensor in your car. Most cars these days have the computer turn on the "sensor" or "check engine" light after the O2 sensor is around 50k to 60k miles old... Even if it's still working.
This has been going on for well over a decade -- my '87 VW and '86 Nissans both worked like this -- strictly on mileage.
At some point it's just reasonable to say "You need to replace this".
If you aren't going to use a full printer cartridge after 2.5 years, you really need to evaluate wether a printer that uses a perishable ink is a good deal. This happens with all perishable things... If you buy a gross of condoms to save 30%, you'd better make sure that you aren't going to lose half of them due to "spoilage".
I don't think a reasonable person would find this opressive.
"We're going to switch to Lexmark printers because of this. It sounds like they have the same problem, though."
Ahh, it all becomes clear. This article was inspired by unreasonable people.;-)
I'll admit that you have a point, once I can actually find *ANY* place selling Super-AIT drives on the net. I see press releases from December, but none of the places I would expect to see them have anything about them.
As far as a price/performance comparison, that'll have to wait until I can get a price on these drives and media.;-/
I don't buy that the tape is going to have a sustained rate better than the IDE hard drives. You're claiming 30GB/sec sustained with Super-AIT, but Sony's announcement of Super-AIT only claims 78Mbps (around 10MB/sec).
In my testing of IDE drives, I've been getting around 30MB/sec per drive. My backup server with 6 drives in a RAID-5 array (IBM 120GBs) was saturating the 32-bit PCI bus at over 120MB/sec reading and 33MB/sec writing.
Of course, for my setup this server is running on a 100mbps network, so I never get anywhere near those speeds.
For those talking about off-site storage... Don't forget that it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a VW bus filled with IDE hard drives...:-P
The unfortunate thing is that tape technology just hasn't kept pace with disc technology. Back in my first job, we were backing up $1,000 20MB drives onto $40 200MB tapes. If that held true, today we would have $4 tapes that would hold around a terrabyte of data...
But, we now have $100 tapes that hold as much data as a $100 hard drive.
We switched over to hard drives for our backups at our (modest) server facility. Late last year we spent $2000 on a system with 600GB of RAID-5 protected storage. That holds current and historic backups, for around 6 months with our current load. We then weekly dump the current data-set off to a removable 120GB hard drive, which we take off-site.
I would argue that being a newbie puts you in exactly the right place to contribute some examples. Because you know what the newbie wants to do better than the author may...
It's a two-edged sword... With Open Source, you don't really get to complain about, for example, missing example sections. Because you only have yourself to blame if you aren't contributing example sections to the man-pages. You *CAN* put examples in the man entries, it's just that YOU haven't.;-)
As an ISP, I'm not as worried about my BGP boxen being compromised and sending out bad routes. The thing that is much more likely is that somebody running one of the BGP routers we talk to makes a mistake, or that we make a mistake ourselves... That happens much more frequently.
This is why people so heavily filter what announcements they will take. This filtering is why there haven't been more problems with bad routes being advertised by the malicious.
So, forget trying to get the whole net to switch over to BGPsec... Let's just put pressure on the people who still aren't doing appropriate filtering of routes they receive.
If you can get ahold of the algorithms that are used to rate the music, you can then compose music that will make the record execs pee their pants with excitement. "Whoa, your song went up to eleven!"
We've already seen this happen -- build a spam filter and the spammers will then engineer their spam to get around it...
If I were a record exec, I'd be particularly dubious of this.
The "enterprise class" drives have "SCSI-like performance"... That's a good one...
According to the benchmarks I've run, 7200RPM IBM IDE drives have similar or better performance than 10K RPM SCSI drives. For example, it took over a week of tuning including vendor interaction to get a 6-drive 10K RPM U160 SCSI system on a $750 Mylex RAID controller performing up to what a 6-drive 7200RPM IDE setup with 3ware controller.
The SCSI controller cost fully HALF what the full 720GB IDE array cost, and the SCSI array only had around 200GB of storage...
I know people like to think that SCSI is faster and uses less CPU time. I'd love to see someone prove it though. Based on my benchmarks, that just isn't true any more.
Anyone who says that HTTP is slower and less reliable than FTP probably hasn't done any benchmarking. Based on my experience, HTTP is definitely more reliable if only because it tends to go through firewalls easier then the two-connection FTP protocol.
Both FTP and HTTP stream data across a TCP socket -- I can't see that streaming it over port 20 versus 80 is going to make any difference.
FTP was designed to be able to do all these neat things back when the internet didn't have so many security issues. Most of these features are either not used or explicitly disabled these days... The fact that the FTP server uses a different port means that firewall have to understand and properly be configured for this. HTTP sends the data back in response to the initial connection, so it tends to be easier to get through firewalls.
If you're concerned about looking like a "wimp", then you should offer both and let people pick what they prefer. Or... Stop worrying about what people these people think and figure out what YOU think is best.
The people who would call you a "wimp" probably aren't worth worrying about.
You know, between 1986 and 1992, when I was in High School and going into my "entry level" computer job, I purchased nearly 400 CDs.
I kind of got fed up with the music industry's attitude, even back then. Did you know that CDs say that "unauthorized *LENDING*" is prohibited? I hated feeling like I was an evil person because I was making compilation tapes *FOR MY OWN USE*. I hated their attitude that they had to milk us for all that they could.
So, I did something about it. I boycotted them. In the last decade I have hardly gotten 100 CDs. Despite the fact that during this time I was making 10x more money than when I was buying more CDs. Probably half of the CDs I've bought since 1992 have been independants or smaller labels or the artists themselves.
A full 10% of CDs I purchsed just to give away (a small band a friend was involved in, I purchased a whole box to give to friends).
Back in the '80s, I'd buy anything that caught my ear. Now I'll only buy something if I've heard several songs from the disc and still like them after a year of listening to them.
How long does the entertainment industry think they can treat their customers like dirt, and expect them to still keep coming back?
I'm sure that internally the RIAA realizes that some of the spending is down because of the economy. If they don't, they're bigger fools than I expected. But their public face keeps making me feel worse and worse that I don't want DRM, I want my music in MP3 format, and I want to keep multiple copies (laptop, player, server), even though I don't use *ANY* of the file-sharing systems.
So, my boycott stays.
At least with 500-ish CDs, it's hard to get bored listening to the same stuff over and over.
What makes somone the target of compromise attemts? These days, it seems that simply having a publicly-routable IP address is enough. Attackers don't say "I wonder if I can break into this site", they instead tend to just search as large an address space as they can looking for a machine that meets a profile.
"Is there a machine in this range of a million addresses that is running an older version of wu-ftpd?"
As a single user, it's hard to tell if a handful of packets constitute an attack attempt. Maybe somone just typed a name or address wrong. I've periodically been suprised that my attempts to SSH to the wrong address haven't been responded to.
It's easier to see an attack if you have a group of IPs. It's pretty obvious when you look at your collected logs across a bunch of machines and see that one site hit every IP on your networks, usually in a fraction of a second.
There are two things that can help smaller systems though. If they're hitting a bunch of common ports (21, 53, 111, 515), you've probably got an attack. The only other thing is if you can consolidate these packets. Say, a service which would allow users to submit packet denies and then when you see a few thousand hits (or whatever) you raise the red flag. I seem to recall there's something like this, but I don't know where. Anyone?
I'd probably be analyzing my firewall logs more if my attempts in the past hadn't been met with such a bad response. I've rarely had an e-mail replied to as the result of such a report. People just don't seem to care.
I wish more people did... I'd sure like to know if one of my machines is being used as a jumping-off point for an attack.
It sounds like they're asking for the existing allocations to simply be made permanent. If the un-named economists in the story really believe that making it commercial property is the way to go, they should be asking to *BUY* it.
"Want to keep those cell phones that you service operating? Better buy up that spectrum before somone else does. Oh, sorry... Somone else outbid you."
The problem is, a lot of commercial ventures have asked for and received huge pieces of the spectrum. UPS has a large chunk of the spectrum that they don't seem to use (the home office uses regular pagers and waits for drivers to call them back).
It also leads to situations like the TV broadcasters saying "Hey, we need X of the spectrum because we're going to be broadcasting HDTV at max resolution." Then once they realize that they can commercialize that spectrum they suddenly start talking about broadcasting in half that resolution and selling the remaining 75% of the spectrum to others.
Yeah, if they want to own the spectrum, they can buy it from we the people -- it's rightful owners.
Oh, and we realize they're valuable now. Be sure to bring your Master Card.
Shortly after the release of 2.2, Linus was saying that the development cycle for 2.3 WOULD be very short, and we should be looking for it to be released in around 8 months.
So I placed a vote for around then. My ranking when all was said and done was around 1,100 out of 1,400.
It'd be nice if it were shorter this time, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Early on in the 2.4 kernel pool, I got e-mail from somone who insisted that the next version would be a new *.0, and cited the 1.2 to 2.0. Of course, now it's easy to criticize.;-)
If the next release is 69.0, the entries in the kernel pool will be applied to it -- the exact version of the next stable kernel isn't important.
What's with the gun thing is that a number of Linux users like guns. It's not that Linux has anything to do with it, it's that some Linux community members enjoy getting together and firing them. At a Linux conference is the logical time for these folks to get together and drink beer, shoot the bull, and just plain shoot.
It doesn't mean that any of these things are related to Linux.
However, upon closer inspection, I don't find it suprising that people who are into freedom of software are also into other forms of freedom, and guns are a freedom issue.
How could it possibly help promote Linux? Handling of firearms requires responsibility in the user like few other things. With all the This versus That wars that go on, one could argue that the Linux community could stand to learn some responsibility.
Why doesn't anyone complain about how Linux is linked with Beer?
The article in question really left a bad taste in my mouth. On the one hand Open Source is dinked because it doesn't meet the author's idea of "innovative" and simply copies other software. On the other hand OSS is dinked because it doesn't work the way the masses expect it to. On your alien third hand he doesn't seem to appreciate that in most cases the author *IS* the user.
When I think of an "innovative" user interface, I think of Kai's Power *. After hearing the reports of how innovative they were, I decided to try some of them to see what I could learn. I literally had to read the manual to figure them out, they were definitely not intuitive.
Imagine if every Linux app had an "innovative" GUI. Everyone trying to out innovate everyone else. I think it would be a mess. Users don't want innovation, they want consistancy.
Consistency means that a class of applications all work alike. However, it seems the author thinks that's unc00l. However, until Open Source software projects start getting the resources to run Human Factors testing on their interfaces, the best we can do is model them after other popular interfaces. What's wrong with doing that?
Unlike most large software companies that employ developers, most developers on free OSS projects are there because they *USE* the results. Why is so much importance placed on the users who don't contribute anything to the projects, instead of the ones who do?
Note that I'm not saying that Aunt Mildred needs to get in and do some coding. That's the last thing the package needs. These users *CAN* contribute by doing usability surveys of their peers and coming up with a user interface that will actually be useful and usable.
I find it hard to blame the developers that these users aren't willing to contribute to the project. I'm not talking about spending 10 minutes whining about the problems a particular user has with an interface the developer took hours to create. A real contribution that *NON-TECHNICAL* users can provide is to spend some hours contacting other users and getting a concensus for an interface design. We're still talking probably a fraction of the hours a developer has put into the project.
So, why aren't users doing this? From a purely selfish standpoint, it directly benefits them. Until users are willing to stop bitching about how developers don't recognise them, and take the future in their own hands by doing something worthy of recognition, they will be left out of this world. And rightly so.
If you're not going to pedal, either stop complaining or get off the bike.
2+2=anything, if you redefine 2...
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I remember a few years ago I just happened to catch Clifford Stoll (? -- I think that's right) on TV. He was talking about how he was against e-mail because it separated them. "I get so much more by just walking down the street and interacting with the people there."
Perhaps that's true, but not everybody can live in BERKELEY, now can they?
To me, socilization has never been about QUANTITY of contact but QUALITY. Come on, defining work as a social experience? I'd rather save an hour or more a day working at home and be able to spend that time with people I *CHOOSE* to be with. The alternative of socializing with whoever happens to be handy is not appealing.
If you live in Bumfuck Iowa, it may be hard to socialize with people who share your interest in computers. Interacting with random people is like watching TV -- it may be entertaining, but it's not particular fulfilling.
The Internet allows me to keep in close contact with RL friends around the country, and virtual peers. My monthly RL geek parties allow us to get together and do even more geeking. I've been blessed with the ability to be able to travel around and meet many of the folks I origially met virtually.
In fact, I can think of few people that I truely value being with that I have NOT met through the net.
Research can show anything if you base it on the right assumptions. Imagine a research project on slavery which was based on an assumption that the slave population is inherently worthless.
I guess it's time to get rid of the telephone and postal e-mail...
I've been traveling around the US for about a month in a VW camper van. It's been a great time, but I *AM* supposed to be working while on this trip, so I've had to have regular net access... Below is my list ways to get access and my experiences with them.
First a note on assumptions... I have a laptop, which is my primary machine for the trip. As I have a camper-van, I want to minimize stays at hotels just for net access. In most cases, I have things organized on my laptop so I can do things off-line, then connect up and dump my e-mail, pick up a new batch, etc...
I have a digital camera and DO want to upload the images from it. Spooling these is no real problem either.
TECHNOLOGY
I am, of course, using Linux. I have set up UUCP over an OpenSSH forwarded socket for doing e-mail. Further, I have prioritized my incoming e-mail and use UUCP grades so that "interesting" e-mail comes across before other. I ended up writing my own simple MTA to process the incoming and outgoing mail (my past attempts using sendmail/qmail left me wanting a SIMPLE leaf-node system).
UUCP can also be used for batching and transferring the pictures and other things. If you have control of the remote system (which I do), doing this is no problem. TaylorUUCP does things like sending and receiving at the same time (to minimize call duration), and continuation of partial transmissions (great for cell phones if you get dropped during a large message).
Your life may change some if you really want to do web browsing, in particular if your accessing a web-based e-mail system. I simply need a couple of minutes and can be on the road again ready to rock. I often *DO* spend more time than that, talking via IRC with folks back at the office, looking at web pages, etc...
For dial-up access I have been using Earthlink. So far, only one city in rural Illinois didn't have access. They have good coverage, and I've not had any problems with getting bumped off. Performance hasn't been stellar, it seems like I get at best around 3.5KB/sec. I'm a DSL slut.:-)
CONNECTIVITY
FRIENDS: On most of my trip I've been visiting various folks I know. This has really made the trip -- visiting other geeks and folks I haven't seen in a long time has really made the trip. On top of that, they will usually have a POTS line, or some sort of ethernet you can jack into.
Not to mention that one of the friends I stopped by had 802.11 wireless networking. I arrived at 2am and they were asleep. I simply fired up my laptop from the van and was on the net through his DSL connection. That wins the award for "Most gratifying net access". As I'm also traveling with two laptops, I've done things like hook one laptop up to the phone line in a friends house and use it as a gateway to talk wireless from the van.
This has been hands down the most reliable way to get net access from dial-up to multi-T1 speed.
KINKOS: (A chain of copy stores, and more) In December when I was buying the van, I found out by accident that some Kinkos have ethernet connections to their "laptop stations", and that they don't charge you if you use your own computer. They will charge you computer time if you use their machines. Also, the ability to do faxes, printing, copying, etc is all really nice. Also, as a small business owner, we do tend to use Kinkos a lot, so I didn't feel overly bad about sucking down some net time from them.
I picked up a guide to their locations before starting the trip. I've since found that only a few locations actually have the ethernet setup (just run DHCP and you're in). For example, the mega Kinkos in Lincoln only had POTS access, and the ones in Uptown Minneapolis, Chicago, and others didn't even have POTS access.
Not very reliable, but when it was available it worked great.
CDPD: This seems to work great when you're in a coverage area. For $55/month I got unlimited access in primary coverage locations. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use it since leaving Colorado. It was *SO* sweet to have net access while driving through Colorado though. The answer to the question "How do you type and drive at the same time" is "Do both badly".:-)
It looks like the east coast had a TON of coverage, but my plans changed and I didn't make it out there. I ended up sending the modem back to Colorado so that other tummy.staff folks could make use of it.
CELLULAR: I've found this to be VERY picky. I don't even TRY to do it unless I have a full-strength signal. I wouldn't want to be uploading pictures (normal pictures on my camera are nearly 500KB), in fact I had a flood of e-mail when a file-system filled up and even that was more than I wanted to do. However, there wasn't much other choice for getting access at a rest-stop in Minnesota...
Slow, and often doesn't work, but when it does it's nice. I mostly get 4800bps connections.
HOTELS: I stayed in hotels for about a week while trying to get the fill valve on my propane system replaced. This was a slam-dunk. In the past I've had problems with some hotels, but not this trip. Problems include: Hotels that won't let you dial 800 numbers, operator intervention, hotels with the phone or jack hard-wired into the wall/phone. On a previous trip a client was having serious problems and I had to take the phone apart with my swiss army knife and hard-wire a cable in to get my RJ11.
No problems with this this trip. Works well, but at $40/day is a little pricy when I don't otherwise need to stay at a hotel.
CYBER CAFES: Found a nice one in Uptown Minneapolis -- CyberX on Lake a few blocks east of Hennepin. They had a single ethernet connection which I could use for my laptop (and I was JUST able to read the label with IP information, it had seen better days:-). This worked really well as the Kinkos there was laptop unfriendly as far as net access goes.
TRUCK STOPS: Many truckstops have phones in their drivers lounge and/or restraints. Often you can jack in using these. Figuring out a local number for dial-in may be a challenge though. I haven't really been frequenting them though because I find the food questionable. Kind of the worst attributes of small local places and big chains. I prefer when I eat out to eat at a nice little local place (hint: Look for the place with all the cars parked at it:-)
RV PARKS: A number of RV parks have telephone lines you can use for net access as well. Most don't however. Wal-Mart allows RVers to park overnight in their parking lots. As someone else mentioned, what we need is for Wal-Marts to set up 802.11 wireless access points and charge a service for IP access. That would give me a hard-on.:-)
TWO-WAY PAGER: The Motorola Creat-a-link pagers have pretty good coverage -- far better than CDPD. They work for e-mail only, but with a 500-byte limit on message size it hasn't proven overly useful for anything but the most rudimentary contact. Messages also seem to get lost (pager card says the message was sent, but it's not received on the other end). SkyTel says they can raise the message size limit to multiple kilobytes, but they don't seem overly motivated to do so. Saying "Yeah, we CAN do that" is MUCH different than saying "Yes, we are GOING to do that on <date>".
MOBITEX: This is Ericson's wireless data protocol. I've got a pair of modems that I just haven't tried out yet, but it sounds like it has pretty good coverage. As I have a pair of them, I should be able to control both ends and do whatever I want over them. They aren't IP-based though, so you'll have to have an arrangement to get data routed to the Internet. Much better coverage than CDPD though from what I've heard (closer to the two-way pagers).
SATELLITE: The current two-way satellite systems require (as far as I know) a fairly large dish (3 foot). They also have pretty bad latency -- around half a second, and are not cheap. I would SERIOUSLY consider a 19" dish system if they were available.
CONCLUSION
For my trip, what I *REALLY* want is some sort of satellite system. I'd like to be able to camp out in the wilderness for several days and still be able to check my mail. All I really need is to be able to send and receive e-mail 1 to 12 times a day. Interactive access would be nice, but not strictly necessary.
So far, visiting friends has been the most reliable way to get net access, and has been the most rewarding. I feel silly carrying around all the crap I do just to stay connected (one small bag with 2 laptops, all sorts of wireless stuff, modem, ethernet, cables). However, sometimes you just have to trust your technolust.
After speaking with my e-trade broker, you can *ONLY* get in if you got an indication in before the deadline. I tried quite a while and read the quote to the broker, but was unable to get in because I hadn't made the indication before the deadline.
So, if you didn't fill out the form with your trading history on it before the normal deadline (several days ago), you can't get in.
It's probably worth calling them and bugging them just in case you are on their magic affinity list (affinity members who "indicated before the deadline").
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Fry's is definitely worth a check out. If you're around San Jose, there's the Museum of Technology which is definitely a must see. I tried to tour Xerox PARC, but their web-site says they don't offer tours. Apparently they learned something from giving Steve Jobs a tour...
The garage that Hewlett Packard started in is a national landmark and I think they now have an HP museum around there. You could probably get someone at Above.net to give you a tour of their facility, as well. Isn't that where google is?
Also worth checking out is Weird Stuff Warehouse -- a surplus dealer. Lots of great equipment there.
Sean
In Colorado, there are a few things that I can think of right off the top of my head. Just north of Fort Collins is the WWIV radio towers -- you know, "At the tone the time will be". You can't tour the site, but it might be a nice place to stop and get a picture of yourself.
In Boulder there's the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which you probably can get a tour of. They have the atomic clock there. There's also the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which apparently gives a pretty good tour.
Note that southern Colorado has Cheyenne Mountain, the military complex built into the mountain that was in War Games, the movie? They apparently don't do tours any more, however (at least not when I checked 3 or 4 years ago).
Colorado also has the Rocky Mountains, which has some really good backpacking.
Finally, in Colorado we have quite a lot of Linux activity. The http://lug.boulder.co.us/ http://nclug.org/ http://clue.denver.co.us/ to name a few. Those are monthly meetings. There are also Hacking Society meetings http://hackingsociety.org/ a couple of times a week -- Tuesdays in Fort Collins and Thursdays in Boulder. If you're here for the better part of any week, we can probably hook you up with at least two groups of geeks.
If you find yourself in Millwauke, Wisconsin, make sure you visit The Safe House. It's a bar/restaurant with a heavily spy-oriented theme. Not directly geek stuff, but geeks seem to like spy stuff. The food is not so great, but you should definitely order a "Martini, shaken, not stirred".
In Washington, D.C., there's (of course) tons of stuff. The Air and Space museum is pretty sweet, and many of the museums there are free. The Spy Museum is also fun, but very hard to get into. IIRC, it costs $16.
Sean
Back in mid to late 1997, Java performance was horrible, particularly on Linux. I remember being very happy with the performance of my development box (dual PPro 200, 200MB of RAM) at the time, except when I was running Java apps. It also used tons of RAM just to start an application, and then it leaked...
I'm sure that all of this has gotten better in the 5 years since then. It doesn't really matter to me though... After 6 months of trying to be happy with Java, I switched to Python. It's working fantasticly for me.
Sean
I'm thinking that it'll really start to get to the point where I will start using it in 2008. This is me speaking about my small hosting business as well as a member of the local Internet Cooperative. I'm sure I'll be playing with IPV6 in the next year or two to get up to speed on it.
At the moment you can't get IPV6 service from any of the large providers. And really only people on ipv6 can take advantage of it, so... Until a significant portion of the end-users have IPV6, I can't see that we'll have any real need to start using it in any real way...
It's, obviously, a chicken-and-egg thing. It was really pushed because of the "sky is falling" shouts about running out of IP space. Todays world seems like there's plenty of IP space, if you're not super wastful with it, and we have other problems to face like router table space and ASNs.
The other problem I don't think we really have ironed out right now is that the routers are really underpowered and optimized for ipv4 routing. I expect that having significant traffic on IPV6 is going to stress many of the bigger routers on the net to the point that they can no longer function. Lots of "big router" admins are already working hard getting the routers to handle current traffic.
Sean
I don't get it... I have an HP inkjet printer which has sat in the garage for over 2 years, and I'd be suprised if it would perform well on the cartridges in it. It seems totally reasonable to enforce the expiration date, because otherwise you have people bitching about the quality of the prints, or that their cartridges just don't work.
;-)
Printers are hardly the only place that this happens. Take, for example, the O2 sensor in your car. Most cars these days have the computer turn on the "sensor" or "check engine" light after the O2 sensor is around 50k to 60k miles old... Even if it's still working.
This has been going on for well over a decade -- my '87 VW and '86 Nissans both worked like this -- strictly on mileage.
At some point it's just reasonable to say "You need to replace this".
If you aren't going to use a full printer cartridge after 2.5 years, you really need to evaluate wether a printer that uses a perishable ink is a good deal. This happens with all perishable things... If you buy a gross of condoms to save 30%, you'd better make sure that you aren't going to lose half of them due to "spoilage".
I don't think a reasonable person would find this opressive.
"We're going to switch to Lexmark printers because of this. It sounds like they have the same problem, though."
Ahh, it all becomes clear. This article was inspired by unreasonable people.
Sean
I'll admit that you have a point, once I can actually find *ANY* place selling Super-AIT drives on the net. I see press releases from December, but none of the places I would expect to see them have anything about them.
;-/
As far as a price/performance comparison, that'll have to wait until I can get a price on these drives and media.
Sean
I don't buy that the tape is going to have a sustained rate better than the IDE hard drives. You're claiming 30GB/sec sustained with Super-AIT, but Sony's announcement of Super-AIT only claims 78Mbps (around 10MB/sec).
:-P
In my testing of IDE drives, I've been getting around 30MB/sec per drive. My backup server with 6 drives in a RAID-5 array (IBM 120GBs) was saturating the 32-bit PCI bus at over 120MB/sec reading and 33MB/sec writing.
Of course, for my setup this server is running on a 100mbps network, so I never get anywhere near those speeds.
For those talking about off-site storage... Don't forget that it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a VW bus filled with IDE hard drives...
Sean
The unfortunate thing is that tape technology just hasn't kept pace with disc technology. Back in my first job, we were backing up $1,000 20MB drives onto $40 200MB tapes. If that held true, today we would have $4 tapes that would hold around a terrabyte of data...
But, we now have $100 tapes that hold as much data as a $100 hard drive.
We switched over to hard drives for our backups at our (modest) server facility. Late last year we spent $2000 on a system with 600GB of RAID-5 protected storage. That holds current and historic backups, for around 6 months with our current load. We then weekly dump the current data-set off to a removable 120GB hard drive, which we take off-site.
Tapes are SO dead...
It works great.
Sean
I would argue that being a newbie puts you in exactly the right place to contribute some examples. Because you know what the newbie wants to do better than the author may...
Sean
With their wide-open spaces and long, cold winters, it makes me wonder when Canadians will perform their first teledildonic extramarital love affair.
Sean
It's a two-edged sword... With Open Source, you don't really get to complain about, for example, missing example sections. Because you only have yourself to blame if you aren't contributing example sections to the man-pages. You *CAN* put examples in the man entries, it's just that YOU haven't. ;-)
Contribute an example today...
Sean
As an ISP, I'm not as worried about my BGP boxen being compromised and sending out bad routes. The thing that is much more likely is that somebody running one of the BGP routers we talk to makes a mistake, or that we make a mistake ourselves... That happens much more frequently.
This is why people so heavily filter what announcements they will take. This filtering is why there haven't been more problems with bad routes being advertised by the malicious.
So, forget trying to get the whole net to switch over to BGPsec... Let's just put pressure on the people who still aren't doing appropriate filtering of routes they receive.
Sean
If you can get ahold of the algorithms that are used to rate the music, you can then compose music that will make the record execs pee their pants with excitement. "Whoa, your song went up to eleven!"
We've already seen this happen -- build a spam filter and the spammers will then engineer their spam to get around it...
If I were a record exec, I'd be particularly dubious of this.
Sean
The "enterprise class" drives have "SCSI-like performance"... That's a good one...
According to the benchmarks I've run, 7200RPM IBM IDE drives have similar or better performance than 10K RPM SCSI drives. For example, it took over a week of tuning including vendor interaction to get a 6-drive 10K RPM U160 SCSI system on a $750 Mylex RAID controller performing up to what a 6-drive 7200RPM IDE setup with 3ware controller.
The SCSI controller cost fully HALF what the full 720GB IDE array cost, and the SCSI array only had around 200GB of storage...
I know people like to think that SCSI is faster and uses less CPU time. I'd love to see someone prove it though. Based on my benchmarks, that just isn't true any more.
Sean
Anyone who says that HTTP is slower and less reliable than FTP probably hasn't done any benchmarking. Based on my experience, HTTP is definitely more reliable if only because it tends to go through firewalls easier then the two-connection FTP protocol.
Both FTP and HTTP stream data across a TCP socket -- I can't see that streaming it over port 20 versus 80 is going to make any difference.
FTP was designed to be able to do all these neat things back when the internet didn't have so many security issues. Most of these features are either not used or explicitly disabled these days... The fact that the FTP server uses a different port means that firewall have to understand and properly be configured for this. HTTP sends the data back in response to the initial connection, so it tends to be easier to get through firewalls.
If you're concerned about looking like a "wimp", then you should offer both and let people pick what they prefer. Or... Stop worrying about what people these people think and figure out what YOU think is best.
The people who would call you a "wimp" probably aren't worth worrying about.
Sean
You know, between 1986 and 1992, when I was in High School and going into my "entry level" computer job, I purchased nearly 400 CDs.
I kind of got fed up with the music industry's attitude, even back then. Did you know that CDs say that "unauthorized *LENDING*" is prohibited? I hated feeling like I was an evil person because I was making compilation tapes *FOR MY OWN USE*. I hated their attitude that they had to milk us for all that they could.
So, I did something about it. I boycotted them. In the last decade I have hardly gotten 100 CDs. Despite the fact that during this time I was making 10x more money than when I was buying more CDs. Probably half of the CDs I've bought since 1992 have been independants or smaller labels or the artists themselves.
A full 10% of CDs I purchsed just to give away (a small band a friend was involved in, I purchased a whole box to give to friends).
Back in the '80s, I'd buy anything that caught my ear. Now I'll only buy something if I've heard several songs from the disc and still like them after a year of listening to them.
How long does the entertainment industry think they can treat their customers like dirt, and expect them to still keep coming back?
I'm sure that internally the RIAA realizes that some of the spending is down because of the economy. If they don't, they're bigger fools than I expected. But their public face keeps making me feel worse and worse that I don't want DRM, I want my music in MP3 format, and I want to keep multiple copies (laptop, player, server), even though I don't use *ANY* of the file-sharing systems.
So, my boycott stays.
At least with 500-ish CDs, it's hard to get bored listening to the same stuff over and over.
Sean
What makes somone the target of compromise attemts? These days, it seems that simply having a publicly-routable IP address is enough. Attackers don't say "I wonder if I can break into this site", they instead tend to just search as large an address space as they can looking for a machine that meets a profile.
"Is there a machine in this range of a million addresses that is running an older version of wu-ftpd?"
As a single user, it's hard to tell if a handful of packets constitute an attack attempt. Maybe somone just typed a name or address wrong. I've periodically been suprised that my attempts to SSH to the wrong address haven't been responded to.
It's easier to see an attack if you have a group of IPs. It's pretty obvious when you look at your collected logs across a bunch of machines and see that one site hit every IP on your networks, usually in a fraction of a second.
There are two things that can help smaller systems though. If they're hitting a bunch of common ports (21, 53, 111, 515), you've probably got an attack. The only other thing is if you can consolidate these packets. Say, a service which would allow users to submit packet denies and then when you see a few thousand hits (or whatever) you raise the red flag. I seem to recall there's something like this, but I don't know where. Anyone?
I'd probably be analyzing my firewall logs more if my attempts in the past hadn't been met with such a bad response. I've rarely had an e-mail replied to as the result of such a report. People just don't seem to care.
I wish more people did... I'd sure like to know if one of my machines is being used as a jumping-off point for an attack.
Sean
It sounds like they're asking for the existing allocations to simply be made permanent. If the un-named economists in the story really believe that making it commercial property is the way to go, they should be asking to *BUY* it.
"Want to keep those cell phones that you service operating? Better buy up that spectrum before somone else does. Oh, sorry... Somone else outbid you."
The problem is, a lot of commercial ventures have asked for and received huge pieces of the spectrum. UPS has a large chunk of the spectrum that they don't seem to use (the home office uses regular pagers and waits for drivers to call them back).
It also leads to situations like the TV broadcasters saying "Hey, we need X of the spectrum because we're going to be broadcasting HDTV at max resolution." Then once they realize that they can commercialize that spectrum they suddenly start talking about broadcasting in half that resolution and selling the remaining 75% of the spectrum to others.
Yeah, if they want to own the spectrum, they can buy it from we the people -- it's rightful owners.
Oh, and we realize they're valuable now. Be sure to bring your Master Card.
Shortly after the release of 2.2, Linus was saying that the development cycle for 2.3 WOULD be very short, and we should be looking for it to be released in around 8 months.
So I placed a vote for around then. My ranking when all was said and done was around 1,100 out of 1,400.
It'd be nice if it were shorter this time, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Sean
Early on in the 2.4 kernel pool, I got e-mail from somone who insisted that the next version would be a new *.0, and cited the 1.2 to 2.0. Of course, now it's easy to criticize. ;-)
If the next release is 69.0, the entries in the kernel pool will be applied to it -- the exact version of the next stable kernel isn't important.
Sean
What's with the gun thing is that a number of Linux users like guns. It's not that Linux has anything to do with it, it's that some Linux community members enjoy getting together and firing them. At a Linux conference is the logical time for these folks to get together and drink beer, shoot the bull, and just plain shoot.
It doesn't mean that any of these things are related to Linux.
However, upon closer inspection, I don't find it suprising that people who are into freedom of software are also into other forms of freedom, and guns are a freedom issue.
How could it possibly help promote Linux? Handling of firearms requires responsibility in the user like few other things. With all the This versus That wars that go on, one could argue that the Linux community could stand to learn some responsibility.
Why doesn't anyone complain about how Linux is linked with Beer?
The article in question really left a bad taste in my mouth. On the one hand Open Source is dinked because it doesn't meet the author's idea of "innovative" and simply copies other software. On the other hand OSS is dinked because it doesn't work the way the masses expect it to. On your alien third hand he doesn't seem to appreciate that in most cases the author *IS* the user.
When I think of an "innovative" user interface, I think of Kai's Power *. After hearing the reports of how innovative they were, I decided to try some of them to see what I could learn. I literally had to read the manual to figure them out, they were definitely not intuitive.
Imagine if every Linux app had an "innovative" GUI. Everyone trying to out innovate everyone else. I think it would be a mess. Users don't want innovation, they want consistancy.
Consistency means that a class of applications all work alike. However, it seems the author thinks that's unc00l. However, until Open Source software projects start getting the resources to run Human Factors testing on their interfaces, the best we can do is model them after other popular interfaces. What's wrong with doing that?
Unlike most large software companies that employ developers, most developers on free OSS projects are there because they *USE* the results. Why is so much importance placed on the users who don't contribute anything to the projects, instead of the ones who do?
Note that I'm not saying that Aunt Mildred needs to get in and do some coding. That's the last thing the package needs. These users *CAN* contribute by doing usability surveys of their peers and coming up with a user interface that will actually be useful and usable.
I find it hard to blame the developers that these users aren't willing to contribute to the project. I'm not talking about spending 10 minutes whining about the problems a particular user has with an interface the developer took hours to create. A real contribution that *NON-TECHNICAL* users can provide is to spend some hours contacting other users and getting a concensus for an interface design. We're still talking probably a fraction of the hours a developer has put into the project.
So, why aren't users doing this? From a purely selfish standpoint, it directly benefits them. Until users are willing to stop bitching about how developers don't recognise them, and take the future in their own hands by doing something worthy of recognition, they will be left out of this world. And rightly so.
If you're not going to pedal, either stop complaining or get off the bike.
I remember a few years ago I just happened to catch Clifford Stoll (? -- I think that's right) on TV. He was talking about how he was against e-mail because it separated them. "I get so much more by just walking down the street and interacting with the people there."
Perhaps that's true, but not everybody can live in BERKELEY, now can they?
To me, socilization has never been about QUANTITY of contact but QUALITY. Come on, defining work as a social experience? I'd rather save an hour or more a day working at home and be able to spend that time with people I *CHOOSE* to be with. The alternative of socializing with whoever happens to be handy is not appealing.
If you live in Bumfuck Iowa, it may be hard to socialize with people who share your interest in computers. Interacting with random people is like watching TV -- it may be entertaining, but it's not particular fulfilling.
The Internet allows me to keep in close contact with RL friends around the country, and virtual peers. My monthly RL geek parties allow us to get together and do even more geeking. I've been blessed with the ability to be able to travel around and meet many of the folks I origially met virtually.
In fact, I can think of few people that I truely value being with that I have NOT met through the net.
Research can show anything if you base it on the right assumptions. Imagine a research project on slavery which was based on an assumption that the slave population is inherently worthless.
I guess it's time to get rid of the telephone and postal e-mail...
I've been traveling around the US for about a month in a VW camper van. It's been a great time, but I *AM* supposed to be working while on this trip, so I've had to have regular net access... Below is my list ways to get access and my experiences with them.
:-)
:-)
:-). This worked really well as the Kinkos there was laptop unfriendly as far as net access goes.
:-)
:-)
First a note on assumptions... I have a laptop, which is my primary machine for the trip. As I have a camper-van, I want to minimize stays at hotels just for net access. In most cases, I have things organized on my laptop so I can do things off-line, then connect up and dump my e-mail, pick up a new batch, etc...
I have a digital camera and DO want to upload the images from it. Spooling these is no real problem either.
TECHNOLOGY
I am, of course, using Linux. I have set up UUCP over an OpenSSH forwarded socket for doing e-mail. Further, I have prioritized my incoming e-mail and use UUCP grades so that "interesting" e-mail comes across before other. I ended up writing my own simple MTA to process the incoming and outgoing mail (my past attempts using sendmail/qmail left me wanting a SIMPLE leaf-node system).
UUCP can also be used for batching and transferring the pictures and other things. If you have control of the remote system (which I do), doing this is no problem. TaylorUUCP does things like sending and receiving at the same time (to minimize call duration), and continuation of partial transmissions (great for cell phones if you get dropped during a large message).
Your life may change some if you really want to do web browsing, in particular if your accessing a web-based e-mail system. I simply need a couple of minutes and can be on the road again ready to rock. I often *DO* spend more time than that, talking via IRC with folks back at the office, looking at web pages, etc...
For dial-up access I have been using Earthlink. So far, only one city in rural Illinois didn't have access. They have good coverage, and I've not had any problems with getting bumped off. Performance hasn't been stellar, it seems like I get at best around 3.5KB/sec. I'm a DSL slut.
CONNECTIVITY
FRIENDS: On most of my trip I've been visiting various folks I know. This has really made the trip -- visiting other geeks and folks I haven't seen in a long time has really made the trip. On top of that, they will usually have a POTS line, or some sort of ethernet you can jack into.
Not to mention that one of the friends I stopped by had 802.11 wireless networking. I arrived at 2am and they were asleep. I simply fired up my laptop from the van and was on the net through his DSL connection. That wins the award for "Most gratifying net access". As I'm also traveling with two laptops, I've done things like hook one laptop up to the phone line in a friends house and use it as a gateway to talk wireless from the van.
This has been hands down the most reliable way to get net access from dial-up to multi-T1 speed.
KINKOS: (A chain of copy stores, and more) In December when I was buying the van, I found out by accident that some Kinkos have ethernet connections to their "laptop stations", and that they don't charge you if you use your own computer. They will charge you computer time if you use their machines. Also, the ability to do faxes, printing, copying, etc is all really nice. Also, as a small business owner, we do tend to use Kinkos a lot, so I didn't feel overly bad about sucking down some net time from them.
I picked up a guide to their locations before starting the trip. I've since found that only a few locations actually have the ethernet setup (just run DHCP and you're in). For example, the mega Kinkos in Lincoln only had POTS access, and the ones in Uptown Minneapolis, Chicago, and others didn't even have POTS access.
Not very reliable, but when it was available it worked great.
CDPD: This seems to work great when you're in a coverage area. For $55/month I got unlimited access in primary coverage locations. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use it since leaving Colorado. It was *SO* sweet to have net access while driving through Colorado though. The answer to the question "How do you type and drive at the same time" is "Do both badly".
It looks like the east coast had a TON of coverage, but my plans changed and I didn't make it out there. I ended up sending the modem back to Colorado so that other tummy.staff folks could make use of it.
CELLULAR: I've found this to be VERY picky. I don't even TRY to do it unless I have a full-strength signal. I wouldn't want to be uploading pictures (normal pictures on my camera are nearly 500KB), in fact I had a flood of e-mail when a file-system filled up and even that was more than I wanted to do. However, there wasn't much other choice for getting access at a rest-stop in Minnesota...
Slow, and often doesn't work, but when it does it's nice. I mostly get 4800bps connections.
HOTELS: I stayed in hotels for about a week while trying to get the fill valve on my propane system replaced. This was a slam-dunk. In the past I've had problems with some hotels, but not this trip. Problems include: Hotels that won't let you dial 800 numbers, operator intervention, hotels with the phone or jack hard-wired into the wall/phone. On a previous trip a client was having serious problems and I had to take the phone apart with my swiss army knife and hard-wire a cable in to get my RJ11.
No problems with this this trip. Works well, but at $40/day is a little pricy when I don't otherwise need to stay at a hotel.
CYBER CAFES: Found a nice one in Uptown Minneapolis -- CyberX on Lake a few blocks east of Hennepin. They had a single ethernet connection which I could use for my laptop (and I was JUST able to read the label with IP information, it had seen better days
TRUCK STOPS: Many truckstops have phones in their drivers lounge and/or restraints. Often you can jack in using these. Figuring out a local number for dial-in may be a challenge though. I haven't really been frequenting them though because I find the food questionable. Kind of the worst attributes of small local places and big chains. I prefer when I eat out to eat at a nice little local place (hint: Look for the place with all the cars parked at it
RV PARKS: A number of RV parks have telephone lines you can use for net access as well. Most don't however. Wal-Mart allows RVers to park overnight in their parking lots. As someone else mentioned, what we need is for Wal-Marts to set up 802.11 wireless access points and charge a service for IP access. That would give me a hard-on.
TWO-WAY PAGER: The Motorola Creat-a-link pagers have pretty good coverage -- far better than CDPD. They work for e-mail only, but with a 500-byte limit on message size it hasn't proven overly useful for anything but the most rudimentary contact. Messages also seem to get lost (pager card says the message was sent, but it's not received on the other end). SkyTel says they can raise the message size limit to multiple kilobytes, but they don't seem overly motivated to do so. Saying "Yeah, we CAN do that" is MUCH different than saying "Yes, we are GOING to do that on <date>".
MOBITEX: This is Ericson's wireless data protocol. I've got a pair of modems that I just haven't tried out yet, but it sounds like it has pretty good coverage. As I have a pair of them, I should be able to control both ends and do whatever I want over them. They aren't IP-based though, so you'll have to have an arrangement to get data routed to the Internet. Much better coverage than CDPD though from what I've heard (closer to the two-way pagers).
SATELLITE: The current two-way satellite systems require (as far as I know) a fairly large dish (3 foot). They also have pretty bad latency -- around half a second, and are not cheap. I would SERIOUSLY consider a 19" dish system if they were available.
CONCLUSION
For my trip, what I *REALLY* want is some sort of satellite system. I'd like to be able to camp out in the wilderness for several days and still be able to check my mail. All I really need is to be able to send and receive e-mail 1 to 12 times a day. Interactive access would be nice, but not strictly necessary.
So far, visiting friends has been the most reliable way to get net access, and has been the most rewarding. I feel silly carrying around all the crap I do just to stay connected (one small bag with 2 laptops, all sorts of wireless stuff, modem, ethernet, cables). However, sometimes you just have to trust your technolust.
So, if you didn't fill out the form with your trading history on it before the normal deadline (several days ago), you can't get in.
It's probably worth calling them and bugging them just in case you are on their magic affinity list (affinity members who "indicated before the deadline").
Sean