It takes some effort, sure, but you don't have to give out the root password with sudo. In fact, you can disable root logins with sudo.
Sure, it's a bit of a pain to be typing your admin user password every five minutes or whatever you set that to, and the real superusers are going to tend to "sudo sh" or such. But you can set up non-superusers with permission to do things like backups and, gasp, rebooting. And you can set them up so they can't easily type "sudo sh" and get root.
I suppose I get too excited about things like webmin, and i haven't worked with it in something like eight years, but I'm going to warn you anyway.
Tools like webmin are just wrong in principle.
First, they expose way too much of the administration interface to the vagueries of ssl. (Thankfully, they usually at least give you that these days). You did notice the flap about the BEAST attack on chained block ciphers recently? (MSWindows tools also vulnerable, to the extent it's an issue.)
Don't confuse SSL with SSH, by the way.
Second, they hide the real tools from you. If you want to learn Linux/Unix tools, you don't want tools like webmin hiding the tools you want to learn from you.
Third, as many have said already, don't fear the command line. It really is your friend. Sure, the GUI tools show you the most used commands and options with a lot less excess information than the man pages. But you really want to learn to use the man pages, because sometimes the options you need aren't in the GUI interface. Searching the web is also necessary in many cases, whether you use the GUI stuff or not.
Well, I suppose I won't convince you.
Whether you use webmin and its ilk^H^H^H like or not, you really want at least one other machine for this project, for practice and backup.
If you do use the same machine for practice and backup, you probably want a detachable drive to keep the backup on. USB is okay, but don't try to just copy stuff onto VFAT or NTFS formatted USB drives. If you don't use a *nix format like ext3, you must at least pack up your archives with tar, so that permissions and stuff can be retained. ("man tar". And check the options for the ACLs if you use those.)
Practicing/designing on a machine that is not the live server is a good idea whatever OS you use, of course, but especially when you are learning a new OS/environment.
Which kind of brings me back to the command line. You are going to be doing remote work. You are going to be using ssh. You can tunnel an X session over ssh, but there's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem there, since you end up using command-line tools to set the tunnel up.
Don't fear the command line. Just get a practice server and make lots of mistakes on it. Problems solve themselves that way.
Sure linear algebra will give you an indication of how fast you can expect certain games (synthesized graphics) to run, but it doesn't say much about what on ordinary non-gamer can expect.
Two cores are going to be more responsive for interactive systems than a single core. You have to go way more than double the effective core speed to get single core CPUs to respond as quickly to user input as you can get dual core CPUs to respond. Linpack has nothing to do with that.
On the other hand, two cores do not double CPU bound compute in general. With a properly compiled linpack on a well-designed CPU, you can saturate the compute on each CPU, and thus pretty much scale the speed with the number of CPUs, which, as another poster points out, causes one to question your choice of numbers to compare.
Ergo, your expectation that you can just compare linpack to linpack is misguided at best. To analyze the results properly, the compiles have to be co-ordinated. The compiler switches for the one have to be matched by the compiler switches for the other, and have to be selected for the expected problem set to be meaningful. And then they are meaningful for the selected problem set and may not be meaningful for other problem sets.
Sure, we can say that the K is significantly faster than the Tianhe, but we can't say it's 4 times as fast in any particular real application. We expect, in fact, that there will be some applications where the Tianhe is faster.
Linpack is not what the average user is running. Shoot. I have an old clamshell PowerPC G3 ibook that takes a long time to start Firefox, but once it's running, it's reasonably responsive. Bound more by my ancient ADSL connection than by the 300 MHz CPU and 67 MHz RAM. (The thing is slow installing Linux, however.)
Or a lunch-box or double-lunchbox tower case with slots for five or ten CPUs, and I can put my firewall/modem/bridge on one CPU, my outward facing httpd server on another, my inward facing DNS server on another, my local file server on another (takes extra room for a terabyte 2 1/3" drive), local timestamp server on another, and one more for a watchdog to watch them all. Optional filter/proxy server. Maybe even put the family mail-homework-corkboard server (with video output for a digital frame screensaver, etc.) in the same box.
How many people have made that "walk to the corner drugstore"?
You're assuming we have a lot more experience in space than we have. Meaningful human activity on Mars is just not going to happen until we have a lot more experience in space.
Seriously. The icon changes when you push the mouse button to start a drag on any ejectable volume.
Sure, it requires you to have faith that there might be someplace useful to drag it to. Or to be observant when you accicentally hold a click on an ejectable volume.
I suppose you're too much of a purist to ever try dragging a volume. But if you had tried right-clicking on the volume, well, there you have another way.
What you're really complaining about is the lack of that tiny, tiny, "Why should I do anything with that?" triangle about the some place in the MSWindows task bar where the trash icon in the stock dock on the Mac would be, the one you can click on to see and manipulate the status (I guess?) of certain attachable devices. Talk about having to have someone point that one out to me.
But, then, right clicking worked well enough for me.
(And many of my co-workers just pull the USB Flash drive and don't worry about it. Buy a new flash unit when it dies. It's gonna die anyway, as they perceive.)
I'm not really sure how serious I am, but the primary reason my project which I think might replace javascript (and many other things) is sitting on sourceforge without updates for a long time is my lack of resources.
People with the resources to do the job have mostly forgotten why.
People (crackpots, like me) who can remember why we want something else are likely to have been shunted aside by people with less patience. (And cut off from the jobs that would get us access to the resources.)
(Oh. The current shards of my project, if you're curious, are here. Not very self-explanatory, and I can't even scrape up the time to chart the course from that to a proper scripting language, but you might find it amusing.)
I hate to be a pessimist. Except I am not. You'll probably call me an unreasoning optimist.
When I was young, I dreamed of being a space cowboy with my own rocket to ply the routes between earth and wherever. I wanted to see the stars in my lifetime. Asimov and Heinlein clued me in as to how hard that was going to be, and some pseudo-psychiatry stuff clued me in as to how my personal desire to go there was as much as an expression of my desire to escape from the public school system as it was a real desire to actually go places and do useful things there. Maybe more escapism than goals.
Disillusionment with science turned me to religion. Religion turned me to my fellow man. For the last six years or so, I've been (barely) making my living in the public school system that I used to hate. I find that I no longer need to escape.
But I can recognize the long-term need for space as one of the frontiers we need to keep challenging, to keep our technology advancing in ways other than designing cheaper, faster gaming consoles and entertainment systems.
Figuring out how to get into orbit without doing semi-permanent harm to the environment is one good project that could help us learn how to get around on the ground without doing so much damage.
We still don't have enough experience getting people through space in healthy condition. That's why we work on getting back to the moon.
That and all the science that remains to be done on the moon.
Also, while the environment-related tech for the moon and for Mars will be drastically different, learning how to deal with the moon's environment will only help learning how to deal with the environment on Mars. Seeing any of these options as mutually exclusive is missing the entire point of space exploration.
Panic programs to get us (back or otherwise) to X in Y time are not a particularly good idea, however.
While I agree with you that Battlestar Galactica (sp?), Star Wars, et. al. are just cowboy movies shifted to space, and not realistic goals for our future as a race, I disagree with your assessment of the space program. As someone else pointed out already, the space program is a good place to sharpen the tools we call our technology.
Tools are usefull things, and keeping them in good working condition is important.
Promoting the worship of technology is bad, whether through space fantasy or game machines, but until we can teach the majority of people what true religion is, we can of have to let them get by on what they can believe in.
And, either way, space exploration is (or can be) a valid way to refine and add to our technological toolset.
Sustaining the long haul with the Apollo was seen as too expensive.
It hasn't gotten less expensive, we have just become more willing to spend money. (Setting aside the question of whether we have the money to spend. Except, if we were willing to spend money on those big toys, why weren't we spending money fighting poverty? and there were too many people who couldn't see that space exploration was one essential part of the overall approach to fighting poverty.)
The Russians have as many problems with the heavy lift as the Americans do. (Check the news recently?) They just have less problems with insurance companies.
Not sure why the Canadians should be seen as better than the Japanese at robotics. But robotics has a significantly wider field of application than heavy lift. (Not disjoint, even?) And even if the Japanese are better at some kinds of robotics and the Canadians are better at some kinds of robotics, cooperation does not mean just turning all of job X over to some other guy.
We're all in this mess together. The only good reason for space exploration is to give us more areas to keep pioneering in, to keep us from turning all of our technology over to making the next bigger and faster game console.
And then they say that's what makes them different from everyone else.
What this guy is saying is just that he's betting that the tech is finally getting there for some profitable applications. (Nothing new on that bet, really.)
And that he is terribly impatient with all the physicists who are taking way too long to turn this magic technology into money.
Depends on how tightly you can roll it without disrupting it.
Tearing is not supposed to be a problem? Stretching?
Well, sticking will be a problem.
You have to have some space between layers or the layers will stick together, whether bonding together or simple exerting static cling that makes it hard to unroll. And even problems with air pressure, if the roll is wider than 10-20 cm.
It's not quite going to be like spidey's web stuff.
God is real. No mortal is going to get his or her mind around God, but God is real. That's one of the problems with commercial programs that attempt to use AA principles, is that they are trying to "harness faith" to make themselves money. (There may be exceptions, but it would be a difficult tightwire to walk.)
The best way for an atheist or agnostic to understand God is to consider that acceptance of God is equivalent to the acceptance that there is something that matters outside of oneself.
Unfortunately, those who use faith to make themselves money (power, influence, agenda, etc.) are working directly against the thing outside themselves that matters. Which causes no small confusion.
What this has to do with drug cartels and bloggers, well,...
We all make mistakes. Trying to punish the other guy for his minor mistakes is a bad idea, but trying to encourage him to make more is not a good idea either. And the definition of "minor" is always going to be a problem.
Okay. I'll break that up into bite-sized pieces for you.
Business schools teach such insanities as the concept that a business's primary reason for existence is to make money.
That's kind of like saying that the primary reason for human existence is for everyone to be someone else's slave. But that's beside the point.
You go to business school and the teachers are going to try to indoctrinate you with that kind of philosophical waste product.
But, if you already know where Marx really went wrong, you may also want to go learn how the business schools are trying to train the enemy, so that you can help counter their plans.
Now, where do you see a reason for the business schools to teach Marx in that? Unless you want the business schools to be trying to misdirect the students, poison the well with red herring ideas like communal living sapping people's will to work with guaranteed wages,...
Slashdot Mirror
That, and being able to set it up so ordinary users can do small maintenance-type tasks, but can't (easily) do things like "sudo sh".
It takes some effort, sure, but you don't have to give out the root password with sudo. In fact, you can disable root logins with sudo.
Sure, it's a bit of a pain to be typing your admin user password every five minutes or whatever you set that to, and the real superusers are going to tend to "sudo sh" or such. But you can set up non-superusers with permission to do things like backups and, gasp, rebooting. And you can set them up so they can't easily type "sudo sh" and get root.
I suppose I get too excited about things like webmin, and i haven't worked with it in something like eight years, but I'm going to warn you anyway.
Tools like webmin are just wrong in principle.
First, they expose way too much of the administration interface to the vagueries of ssl. (Thankfully, they usually at least give you that these days). You did notice the flap about the BEAST attack on chained block ciphers recently? (MSWindows tools also vulnerable, to the extent it's an issue.)
Don't confuse SSL with SSH, by the way.
Second, they hide the real tools from you. If you want to learn Linux/Unix tools, you don't want tools like webmin hiding the tools you want to learn from you.
Third, as many have said already, don't fear the command line. It really is your friend. Sure, the GUI tools show you the most used commands and options with a lot less excess information than the man pages. But you really want to learn to use the man pages, because sometimes the options you need aren't in the GUI interface. Searching the web is also necessary in many cases, whether you use the GUI stuff or not.
Well, I suppose I won't convince you.
Whether you use webmin and its ilk^H^H^H like or not, you really want at least one other machine for this project, for practice and backup.
If you do use the same machine for practice and backup, you probably want a detachable drive to keep the backup on. USB is okay, but don't try to just copy stuff onto VFAT or NTFS formatted USB drives. If you don't use a *nix format like ext3, you must at least pack up your archives with tar, so that permissions and stuff can be retained. ("man tar". And check the options for the ACLs if you use those.)
Practicing/designing on a machine that is not the live server is a good idea whatever OS you use, of course, but especially when you are learning a new OS/environment.
Which kind of brings me back to the command line. You are going to be doing remote work. You are going to be using ssh. You can tunnel an X session over ssh, but there's a kind of chicken-and-egg problem there, since you end up using command-line tools to set the tunnel up.
Don't fear the command line. Just get a practice server and make lots of mistakes on it. Problems solve themselves that way.
Wanted to do that in caps, but shouting is considered gauche here even when appropriate.
Please, no encouraging webmin.
I mean, I suppose they may have completely re-written it in the last eight years since I last had to work with it, but I don't think so.
Learn how to read and use benchmarks.
Sure linear algebra will give you an indication of how fast you can expect certain games (synthesized graphics) to run, but it doesn't say much about what on ordinary non-gamer can expect.
Two cores are going to be more responsive for interactive systems than a single core. You have to go way more than double the effective core speed to get single core CPUs to respond as quickly to user input as you can get dual core CPUs to respond. Linpack has nothing to do with that.
On the other hand, two cores do not double CPU bound compute in general. With a properly compiled linpack on a well-designed CPU, you can saturate the compute on each CPU, and thus pretty much scale the speed with the number of CPUs, which, as another poster points out, causes one to question your choice of numbers to compare.
Ergo, your expectation that you can just compare linpack to linpack is misguided at best. To analyze the results properly, the compiles have to be co-ordinated. The compiler switches for the one have to be matched by the compiler switches for the other, and have to be selected for the expected problem set to be meaningful. And then they are meaningful for the selected problem set and may not be meaningful for other problem sets.
Sure, we can say that the K is significantly faster than the Tianhe, but we can't say it's 4 times as fast in any particular real application. We expect, in fact, that there will be some applications where the Tianhe is faster.
Linpack is not what the average user is running. Shoot. I have an old clamshell PowerPC G3 ibook that takes a long time to start Firefox, but once it's running, it's reasonably responsive. Bound more by my ancient ADSL connection than by the 300 MHz CPU and 67 MHz RAM. (The thing is slow installing Linux, however.)
This is what I was going to say.
Tower case with slots for lots of CPUs.
Or a lunch-box or double-lunchbox tower case with slots for five or ten CPUs, and I can put my firewall/modem/bridge on one CPU, my outward facing httpd server on another, my inward facing DNS server on another, my local file server on another (takes extra room for a terabyte 2 1/3" drive), local timestamp server on another, and one more for a watchdog to watch them all. Optional filter/proxy server. Maybe even put the family mail-homework-corkboard server (with video output for a digital frame screensaver, etc.) in the same box.
How many people have made that "walk to the corner drugstore"?
You're assuming we have a lot more experience in space than we have. Meaningful human activity on Mars is just not going to happen until we have a lot more experience in space.
Seriously. The icon changes when you push the mouse button to start a drag on any ejectable volume.
Sure, it requires you to have faith that there might be someplace useful to drag it to. Or to be observant when you accicentally hold a click on an ejectable volume.
I suppose you're too much of a purist to ever try dragging a volume. But if you had tried right-clicking on the volume, well, there you have another way.
What you're really complaining about is the lack of that tiny, tiny, "Why should I do anything with that?" triangle about the some place in the MSWindows task bar where the trash icon in the stock dock on the Mac would be, the one you can click on to see and manipulate the status (I guess?) of certain attachable devices. Talk about having to have someone point that one out to me.
But, then, right clicking worked well enough for me.
(And many of my co-workers just pull the USB Flash drive and don't worry about it. Buy a new flash unit when it dies. It's gonna die anyway, as they perceive.)
So, what's your complaint again?
I've also wanted to do that for a long time.
Been working on an engine for it, but I can't seem to break out the time to push it beyond a poor implementation of FORTH.
Probably should spend less time on slashdot and groklaw.
I'm not really sure how serious I am, but the primary reason my project which I think might replace javascript (and many other things) is sitting on sourceforge without updates for a long time is my lack of resources.
People with the resources to do the job have mostly forgotten why.
People (crackpots, like me) who can remember why we want something else are likely to have been shunted aside by people with less patience. (And cut off from the jobs that would get us access to the resources.)
(Oh. The current shards of my project, if you're curious, are here. Not very self-explanatory, and I can't even scrape up the time to chart the course from that to a proper scripting language, but you might find it amusing.)
I find myself agreeing with both the parent and grandparent.
WHAT DO I DOoooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh????????????????
(Sorry for the shouting. I'll go find a corner by myself where I can breath deeply for a few minutes.)
I hate to be a pessimist. Except I am not. You'll probably call me an unreasoning optimist.
When I was young, I dreamed of being a space cowboy with my own rocket to ply the routes between earth and wherever. I wanted to see the stars in my lifetime. Asimov and Heinlein clued me in as to how hard that was going to be, and some pseudo-psychiatry stuff clued me in as to how my personal desire to go there was as much as an expression of my desire to escape from the public school system as it was a real desire to actually go places and do useful things there. Maybe more escapism than goals.
Disillusionment with science turned me to religion. Religion turned me to my fellow man. For the last six years or so, I've been (barely) making my living in the public school system that I used to hate. I find that I no longer need to escape.
But I can recognize the long-term need for space as one of the frontiers we need to keep challenging, to keep our technology advancing in ways other than designing cheaper, faster gaming consoles and entertainment systems.
Figuring out how to get into orbit without doing semi-permanent harm to the environment is one good project that could help us learn how to get around on the ground without doing so much damage.
We still don't have enough experience getting people through space in healthy condition. That's why we work on getting back to the moon.
That and all the science that remains to be done on the moon.
Also, while the environment-related tech for the moon and for Mars will be drastically different, learning how to deal with the moon's environment will only help learning how to deal with the environment on Mars. Seeing any of these options as mutually exclusive is missing the entire point of space exploration.
Panic programs to get us (back or otherwise) to X in Y time are not a particularly good idea, however.
While I agree with you that Battlestar Galactica (sp?), Star Wars, et. al. are just cowboy movies shifted to space, and not realistic goals for our future as a race, I disagree with your assessment of the space program. As someone else pointed out already, the space program is a good place to sharpen the tools we call our technology.
Tools are usefull things, and keeping them in good working condition is important.
Promoting the worship of technology is bad, whether through space fantasy or game machines, but until we can teach the majority of people what true religion is, we can of have to let them get by on what they can believe in.
And, either way, space exploration is (or can be) a valid way to refine and add to our technological toolset.
You can go first.
The president is not supposed to be anybody's boss.
Well, except for the executive branch of the government, subject to restrictions set by the Constitution and Congress.
About the only group he is the boss of is his cabinet, and not really even that.
Sustaining the long haul with the Apollo was seen as too expensive.
It hasn't gotten less expensive, we have just become more willing to spend money. (Setting aside the question of whether we have the money to spend. Except, if we were willing to spend money on those big toys, why weren't we spending money fighting poverty? and there were too many people who couldn't see that space exploration was one essential part of the overall approach to fighting poverty.)
The Russians have as many problems with the heavy lift as the Americans do. (Check the news recently?) They just have less problems with insurance companies.
Not sure why the Canadians should be seen as better than the Japanese at robotics. But robotics has a significantly wider field of application than heavy lift. (Not disjoint, even?) And even if the Japanese are better at some kinds of robotics and the Canadians are better at some kinds of robotics, cooperation does not mean just turning all of job X over to some other guy.
We're all in this mess together. The only good reason for space exploration is to give us more areas to keep pioneering in, to keep us from turning all of our technology over to making the next bigger and faster game console.
When you go to the government for funding, you don't want to admit you have options.
That is, unless you really don't need the funding.
... you're on the road to becoming part of the problem in your country.
The "American" problems which you so accurately point to are in no small part due to idealists turning into lobbyists.
Anybody can lobby, and, unfortunately, it's addictive.
Everybody wants the sweet jobs.
But nobody wants to do the work.
And then they say that's what makes them different from everyone else.
What this guy is saying is just that he's betting that the tech is finally getting there for some profitable applications. (Nothing new on that bet, really.)
And that he is terribly impatient with all the physicists who are taking way too long to turn this magic technology into money.
Depends on how tightly you can roll it without disrupting it.
Tearing is not supposed to be a problem? Stretching?
Well, sticking will be a problem.
You have to have some space between layers or the layers will stick together, whether bonding together or simple exerting static cling that makes it hard to unroll. And even problems with air pressure, if the roll is wider than 10-20 cm.
It's not quite going to be like spidey's web stuff.
Ten years ago, "Trusted Computing", or whatever it was, was sort of news. And it was not unexpected back then either.
But PKI isn't going to be enough, really. They're going to have to find some people to make examples of and sic the lawyers on 'em.
Of course, real security, in the form of a physical switch, is too simple, and too easy for the owner to, well, switch.
Wow the masses, cow the masses.
... and posting a response.
Except I'm not sure how to respond.
God is real. No mortal is going to get his or her mind around God, but God is real. That's one of the problems with commercial programs that attempt to use AA principles, is that they are trying to "harness faith" to make themselves money. (There may be exceptions, but it would be a difficult tightwire to walk.)
The best way for an atheist or agnostic to understand God is to consider that acceptance of God is equivalent to the acceptance that there is something that matters outside of oneself.
Unfortunately, those who use faith to make themselves money (power, influence, agenda, etc.) are working directly against the thing outside themselves that matters. Which causes no small confusion.
What this has to do with drug cartels and bloggers, well, ...
We all make mistakes. Trying to punish the other guy for his minor mistakes is a bad idea, but trying to encourage him to make more is not a good idea either. And the definition of "minor" is always going to be a problem.
Okay. I'll break that up into bite-sized pieces for you.
Business schools teach such insanities as the concept that a business's primary reason for existence is to make money.
That's kind of like saying that the primary reason for human existence is for everyone to be someone else's slave. But that's beside the point.
You go to business school and the teachers are going to try to indoctrinate you with that kind of philosophical waste product.
But, if you already know where Marx really went wrong, you may also want to go learn how the business schools are trying to train the enemy, so that you can help counter their plans.
Now, where do you see a reason for the business schools to teach Marx in that? Unless you want the business schools to be trying to misdirect the students, poison the well with red herring ideas like communal living sapping people's will to work with guaranteed wages, ...