"Of all the misdeeds the British Empire is responsible for history will look upon the removal of arms as the blackest" - Ghandi...Or something along those lines. I'm not much for memorizing prose verbatim.
You're right, there's aboslutely no way that the general population can stand up to an Army. That's why Russia controls Afghanistan (ok, we helped them with that one). That's why Vietnam was one by the US too. They weren't as well equipped as us, but boy, we won that one! That's why the USA is a British colony (ok, France helped out)...
Sorry, but sometimes it does help to have an armed population. Resitance operations are just that though: reistance. You don't have to actually win, just hold out long enough that the other guy gives up and you're still alive.
Democracy? In the United States of America? THIS IS A LIE!
This is a lie. Period. The United States of America is not a democracy. It never was, it never shall be, it never SHOULD be! Democracy is a failure. We know that, it doesn't work. A true democracy will always be in turmoil and I wish that people proclaiming that we are a democracy would wake up.
We are a Constitutional Republic. We are Republican in nature, not the party, but the system. We elect representatives that vote on issues for us... on our behalf.
Further, were are Constitutional in nature. Unless the Constitution is ammended you cannot pass a law that breaks it. Well, that's the theory. Any slashdotter that keeps up with US politics knows darned good and well the Constitution has been shit on over and over again, but that's the general idea.
A true democracy will never have free speech, fair trial, freedom of religion, free arms, etc, etc.
If you don't like the country you're living in then get the fuck out. Nobody is forcing you to live in America. I guarantee that you'll find America to be a much better place to live in than pretty much any other country.
Is it the best we have? Probably. I love this country; though I feel the sentiments of the parent poster very strongly.
I've got a 4'x6' American flag hunt on the wall of my apartment. It's absurdly large given the size of this place. I love this country. I research my politicians to no end. I scour through laws that would make a police officer's head spin. I am not a normal citizen.
However, The USA is _not_ what it was meant to be. It was meant for so much more than this. We've pissed away a huge amount of our liberties and yet we STILL remain a fairly free country.
I want a return to the basics. When things like Patriot act can't happen. I want a country where the sheer THOUGHT of voting for such a thing sends shivers down a congressional member's spine.
I'm not going to run away. I'm going to fight, politically, for this freedom. It's our God Given Right. Don't accept any less.
This country sucks, but it sucks less than any other I know out there. Now, excuse me while I try and fix this shit up. I will not leave.
I have a feeling you think along the same lines at me. Please do not consider my reply to be personal in nature. Profanity my spew forth from my fingers, but I assure you it's only in digust of the situation at hand, and not at your personal thoughts.
When our forefathers fought their war of independence, they had nearly the same equipment (technologically speaking) as the British they were fighting. Now the populace is so far behind. The military would win. That's why we must act now from keeping things from becoming another civil war.
I'm going to bounce all over the wall on this one. The above is the thing that gets my goat though. Not because it was said but because it's the truth.
FACT: The 2nd Ammendment of the United States Constitution exists for the SOLE reason that the general population needs to have the arms to overthrow the government if need be. If you don't beleive that's why it was written, go read up on your history. It's the truth.
However, is it reasonable? In principle yes, but the US Citizen has been so hampered by firearms laws since 1934 and on that it's just not possible for us to arm ourselves properly. We have a few points of strength though.
True, the US Military is 500,000 strong. I would expect a 40% AWOL though if troops were ever force to fight against our own citizens. That's hopeful thinking though.
There are en estimated 80,000,000 firearms owners in the United States however. A highly trained, well equiped force of.5 million against 80 million is actually possible. However, that's assuming one thing:
All of the.5 million US troops actually know how to handle small arms weapons in close quarters, urban environments, and rural settings. They do not. I guarantee you this. Very few troops actually know how to fondle an M16 or M4 rifle. I know, I have buddies in the Army that had me teach them how to field-strip the AR-15 variety of weapons and fire them so they'd have a leg up on the other recruits.
None of the 3 (out of 4) have actually been trained, beyond moderate skills, on how to handle small arms. Two are tankers, one is an Air Force bomb loader, and the 4th actually is a special-op in training guy that DOES know how to handle a rifle. I know 2 more military fellows (one Air Force, one Navy) that wouldn't know how to work an AR style rifle if their life depended on it.
Our military, by and large, excepting the Marines, are not riflemen. They are manning tanks, computers, air craft carries, and aircraft.
You launch tank, artilerary, and bombers against the population and you have just lost the compassion of the American people. The civilian hunters and patriots are very capable of a guerilla attack against the politicians that vote such things into being. The day that happens I predict 435 dead members of congress, 100 senators, 1 vice president and 1 president. They'll never launch large arms against our people for this reason.
Well, at least not now. We have some semblance of firearms ownership left in this country.
It's fun to wax nostalgically about how "back in the day" arms were simple and the common people had the proper arms to form a rebellion. You'd think that this is no longer true because arms have advanced so quickly that we cannot keep up with the government. Oh, how I wish that were true.
FACT: The very arms that the original patriots armed themselves with ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO THE COMMON MAN! That's right, folks, we can't even own a black powder cannon anymore. The original partiots had them. We don't. How's that for a kick in the ass?
As a further kick in the ass, some asshat in New Jersey actually proposed a bill that would have made 50 caliber muzzle loaders illegal. Nope, nobody wants to disarm the hunters.... keep looking the other way.
Lets's look at this. The average American soldier does not have the skills necessary for urban fighti
If I was a US citizen, I would be furious about this failure to invest my tax dollars in my own country's infrastructure.
I'm just pissed that they're taking it. You know what my medical bills total up to in the past 5 years for visiting a doctor?
$0 USD. That's $0 CDN for those of you that can't do conversions in your head. I forget how to convert to British Pounds.
Where the snot do they get authorization to tax ME for MEDICAL expenses for SOMEBODY OUTSIDE MY COUNTRY?!
Gah.
Re:XML - FO - PDF
on
PDF Writers?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I second the parent's suggestion. Been there, done that, and it rocked, even when FOP was at the 0.17 release. It worked pretty darned well, and you just had to make another XSLT sheet to turn the document into HTML.
Yes, it's a big task and not the "quick and dirty" method but it works really well and gives you exactly the results that you want if you want to put the time into it. The XML+XSLTT -> processor model is definately the way to for things that you expect to last a while into the future.
That's true. Unstable drivers and faulty hardware. People always complain about BSOD under Windows, but since Win2k you should never get a BSOD anymore unless your hardware is broken somehow. For example, I kept getting lockups and blue screens but I traced it down to faulty memory. Another time it was an overheating video card because the fan on it died. Win2k is actually one of the most stable operating systems I've ever run.
Never? Really....
Run 'RhymBox' on your system for a while... then start up NetMeeting under a pre sp4 Win2k install. Crashed on me, my manager's machine, and numerous other people. Once sp4 came out that seemed to fix the problem though.
And drop the ``A'' from the ATF while at it (as the first step in dismantling that agency)?
Drop the ATF entirely if you ask me. Have you -ever- seen a citizen praise the ATF for anything?
For crying out loud... ther's a single government agency dedicated to my leisure activities! I like to drink beers, I like to chew tobacco, and I freaking love firearms.
Their purpose? To keep me from making more than 100 gallons of untaxed beer for me and friends, to keep me from putting something "evil" on my AK like a fucking KNIFE, and to make sure my non-violent self can't possibly get a friggen $80 dollar WWII gun shipped to my residence.
Thanks guys.... you've made this world a hell of a lot safer.
The ATF can go piss into the wind if you ask me. It seems that the parent poster agrees. They represent the antithesis of everything this country was founded on and it's high time we got rid of them.
I did something similiar in the 2000 to 2001ish era. I forget exactly when, but it was basically a "public terminal" in my apartment. Anybody that was hanging out and wanted to use a computer to do something, which was more often than I thought it would be, was directed to the handy little box in the living room. Nobody really did word processing on it though.
At any rate, the bare minimum stuff for a box that I sit down on had to have (at the time):
A good browser. A good MP3 player. A decent MP3 pirating tool. An AOL IM program.
Everybody that dropped in and hung out with us would make use of such things. Now, if this is a family PC that doesn't do gaming I see no reason why you'd actually need Windows on it. I'm a Linux Zealout but even I'll admit when Windows has it's place and in a general purpose "just do stuff" box Windows isn't it... unless you need games or Office specifically. Once you need Office though it becaomes a "compatibile with work thing".
Now, a good browser: Firebird. It just plain rocks. I like it. Runs great on Linux.
MP3 player: XMMS... acts just like Winamp, the kiddies won't have any real problem learning how to use it.
MP3 pirating tool: gtk-gnutella. You might not want this on a family box though. In the heyday of Napster I had gnapster installed on this public box though for friends that wanted to nab a song real quick as we hung out and make their own playlist. Purists may argue that I'm a damned criminal for this but to be honest when there's 10 people hanging out at your place and somebdoy wants one of the latest top-40 hits what's the harm? We used it as a tool for us to grab our favorite hang-out tunes. Odds are somebody had the damned CD in their car but it was way easier in that day to just download it than rip and encode it. After Napster I found myself ripping and encoding CD's and tossing them into the party playlist.
AOL IM was "the thing" that everybody I knew used in that era. MSN caught on a little after that but the solution is still the same: gaim. I've had no-nothing-about-tech friends stop by and use gaim without a problem. I just show them the icon, where to setup the account and they're off. Kids will understand it easily.
Mail client? That's what the browser is for IMHO. Children and non techs are happy with web email so just leave it that way if you can. I don't think I've ever seen a casuasl computer user say,"But I need POP3 access to my email account." If they care that much about email they'll tell you what they need for an email client. Kmail or Balse would suffice for most. For me? It's mutt.
Now, since it's for home use, you need a word processor for the kiddies to type up homework with. If you're going to use Xp Wordpad is prefectly fine here. Seriously. Failing that install OpenOffice regardless of your OS. Go with Abiword or Kword if you want something less "bloated" though. I use all three depending on my mood.
So, that's a rather lengthy explanation of my thoughts. Personally when I sit down at a new Debian install I make sure I have the following which are not part of general use:
vim, lynx, mozilla or firebird, wget, nmap, traceroute, gnome, aterm, gaim, xmms, grip, ogg vorbis utils, abiword, ps2pdf and related utils, mutt, xpdf, maybe ghostview/ghostscript, gcc, make, perl, maybe python, openssh server/client.
Most of us have big pipes for bandwidth so pulling a 22MB kernel archive isn't that big of a deal. Sure, it takes some time but we can do it and live with a 5-10 minute delay.
This idea is just waaaay geeky though, and cool. It would have to be a distribution specific type thing though. There's no way I'd expect the kernel maintainers to take on this task -- it's just not their style.
Debian could, with some work, create a 'kernel-source-2.6.0-skeleton' package though with modified Makefiles that would wget the source files if needed at compile time. That could be friggen awesome. You'd just nab a 200k skeleton package and as it compiles it'll start snatching files. With a little script-fu pulling header files from neccessary.c files should be a piece of cake.
I'm tempted to say that this might cut total bandwidth down by half, maybe a quarter... which after the efficienty of a.tar.gz of the whole thing might not net you much in saved bandwidth. However, it would just be plain -neat- to have only the.c and.h files absolutely neccessary for your particular build. No matter what file you open from your kernel source tree you know for sure that it has an impact on the actual build of your kernel. If you modify something from such a system you know your binary output is going to be different. That is, barring GCC optimizations and such. If you turn the line 'c++' into 'c = c + 1' you won't net a binary change.. hopefully.
Super cool idea... what else could this do?
Well, instead of having/usr/src/linux-2.6.0 you could just have/usr/src/linux (not just a symlink mind you)... and the scripts within there would have enough know how to automatically pull the most up to date code and such. Lets say 2.6.1 comes out:
cd/usr/src/linux make oldconfig && make
Sha-zam! You're pulling 2.6.1 code (what has changed at least)_and rebuilding.
The whole reasoning behind doing this is quite understandable. There has been several fatal gang shootings in bars in Vancouver recently. This is one way to keep them from killing innocent bystanders.
Thankfully we can count on these criminals using their real ID over and over again. Owning an illegal firearm and shooting people is one thing but very very few people in this world are so disgusting that they would use a FAKE ID!
For the Love of God people. Do you really think these people are going to just waltz in packing heat with their real ID? They're already breaking the law. Moderately law abiding adults (or kids) use fake IDs all the time to get into bars. If some 17 year old goodie-goodie boy can get a fake ID what the hell is going to stop a hardened criminal from doing it?
Here's an idea. Lets make everybody in Canada register their firearms. That will stop the shootings as there won't be any way to obtain an untraceable gun. Oh wait, you did that -- lo and behold the Canadian crminals aren't honoring the law! Whatever shall we do?
THE SKY IS FALLING! HELP US! CRIMINALS HAVE STOPPED OBEYING THE LAW!
You want to stop bar violence? Put a 1911 on the hip of the tender behind the counter and a friggen shotgun under the bar. Let the waitresses keep a.38 on their inner thigh or whevever they can fit one. Give the friggen bouncers an M1 so they can either use it to butt-smack somebody or drop them dead when they yank out their firearm.
Scanning criminal's fake IDs won't do anything here. It's good that they're at least thinking about possible solutions but it's just misguided as all hell. It makes them feel better about what they're doing though... but that's like putting a gold star on some retard's head when they managed to piss their pants while in the bathroom instead of in the hallway. It looks like an improvement, and it shows some effort: But you're still just pissing all over yourself.
Wet pants while in the bathroom: Still a retard. Dead customers while you use your scanning system: Still a retard.
That pretty much just leaves the Leatherman, which honestly, you don't need with you at all times McGuyver. If you really must have it handy, then consider a swiss knife.
You, my fellow Slashdottter, are apparently not the type that would carry such a device. To each his own, but trust me -- carrying such utilities is not only useful to yourself but useful to others.
I have a Swiss Army Knife, but it's -really- large. My mother got it for me and I tell you this thing is great. I think thinkgeek.com features it even. It's the uber knife. I usually don't carry it. I do however carry a 3" folding belt knife all the time.
Once you're accustomed to such things you cannot do without. I'll provide some examples.
One day I'm going home for lunch (I live really close to work) and I pull into my apartment complex. I see a stranded couple there with their hood open. I'm a nice guy so I pull over to see if I can help. they've got a transmission problem. That much they know. They don't konw what's wrong though. I look under the car and see a big puddle of oil, I dip my finger in it and sure enough -- it's red. So, they've got an automatic tranny leaking fluid or something. I gander under the hood and spot a rubber hose that's just plain disconnected. That's where their leak's coming from. I'm wearing a knee length wool coat, shirt, tie, slacks, basic business attire. I toss the coat into the snow, tuck my tie into my shirt, and hunker down underneath the car. Inspect hose, determine that it's an easy clamp to refix and:
Yank my handy-dandy Swiss Army knife out of my pocket yank out the flat-blade screw driver and reattach the hose snuggly for them. I'm the friggen hero of the day for understanding basic (very basic) mechanics, having a tool to fix the problem, and I'm willing to get down and dirty to fix it. I snug the hose into place and let them know that they should probably drop a quart or maybe two into their tranny before driving it off. The funny part is the guy asked if I'd drive them to an auto parts store to buy tranny fluid. He didn't notice he was "stranded" 200 yards from an auto parts store. They were happpy and when I finished lunch the car was gone. Mission completed.
Carrying "crap" like this isn't always useful to the person holding onto it. However today when buying a battery for an older car of mien the salesman couldn't yank the silly stick-on security sticker so I yanked out my 3" blade (shirt, slacks, dress shoes again) and pryed it off for them.
You may think the "MacGuyver" mentality is silly, until you're broken down on the side of the road and some tech geek pulls up with a Leatherman on his belt, a set of socket wrenches in his trucnk, and jumper cables to boot.
Consider it a challenge. Most of us here can walk into any IT department and help them out. But, can you pull up to the car of a stranded individual and get them back on the road? If you have the mental capacity to swap hard drives you can fix most road-side problems. Be prepared, help your fellow man out, and carry the "burden" of being prepared for little things. It just might be your own arse.
Yeah, this doesn't help the original poster at all I guess. Except I would say don't give up any -useful- device you carry. Drop the GBA if anything.
You have a J2EE (or something like it) based application that is non-portable in both it's host OS and host application server and on top of that doesn't scale too well because of memory/CPU requirements?
Hmmm... somebody should be loosing their job. Either the consultants who built it or the person that approved such a thing.
If you had a true J2EE app that wasn't coded by a team of monkeys on a wild rampage this shouldn't a problem. The "porting" to a new app server should be trivial, if anything has to be done at all. You'd be able to keep the Sun hardware and whatever app server you use on it, while chucking in Linux machines with Bea, WebSphere or maybe JBoss on them. Slap a hardware based load balancer in front of it and viola, horizontal scalability.
I didn't see anybody else take offense to this, but 100k+ per user login memory usage? I might be showing my age, or rather my roots, but that seems excessive. My guess is your app's written like the app I now support. User logs in and everything about them is swallowed up into session (or application) wide collections immediately. The "lazy caching" thing just didn't cross these guy's minds. Of course, in my case neither did the "mark data dirty" thing but that's another matter.
Please, somebody show me 100k worth of data that you would really want on-demand from-memory on a user at any given instant. Just a C struct or something would suffice.
J2EE apps can be bleeding fast ultra lean sons of bitches if you do it up right. It can also be a dog-ass slow memory-hogging bastard. It just depends on who you had at the business end of the whiteboard I guess.
Going the PHP/static generation/caching route isn't neccessarily a bad idea either... but I don't think you should have to do this. I'm seeing the maintence of such a system as a big onus on the system administrators to make sure everything is up all the time... I know of no PHP frameworks out there that would let you drop sessions from one system to another. I've never tried pushing PHP that far though.
If your a system admin such a system might seem ideal... because while the systems and network might be a little "wonky" that's your domain and you feel comfortable supporting such a thing. I can't fault you for that; however I do think the onus is on the application development team. It is their job to make something scalable and construct it in a manner that it should fail over, recover, etc. from anything weird that may go on.
This isn't realistic, but you probably purchased a scalable application toted as portable because it's Java and you didn't get that. Demand that. If they can't deliver boot them out the door and take it inhouse if you must but I see many obstacles in your path on the system admin side alone... and certainly the re-development of it won't be cake walk.
Scalability problems are largely the development team's responsbilities, so long as such a requirement was put forth in the original development. Good system administration can help to reduce their errors along with a good helping of hardware but that's just a bandaid to the real solution.
OK, give me a break. How hard is it, really, to enforce this? How many freaking people does it really take to:
- receive a complaint - Verify the call with the telco - write them up and get it in front of a judge.
It's a pretty cut and dry matter if you ask me. It won't take long for the agencies to get hit so bad that they'll just plain quit.
Hey, I'm all for privacy and such, but commercial places -can- be monitored. Why not just round up all the outgoing calls made from the commercial call center and cross check that against the DNC list? No fuss, no muss. People don't even have to bother reporting it then.
If you want a cheap solution, gimmie a bottle of booze and a trusty AK-47. That'll teach 'em.
We could get rid of all all this tax bickering with a taxation plan that's been discussed for years but never taken seriously. Outlaw all taxes except sales tax. The federal government would impose a national sales tax on consumer purchases only, and would disburse an annual refund equal to the tax rate times whatever they say is the poverty level. ALL OTHER TAXES would be eliminated.
Are you nuts? Do you know what this would do to our economy? There's a myriad of people out there that depend on tax laws to keep their jobs. If we got rid of all of our tax laws and only taxed purchases then the people that used to handle our income taxes would be out of a job. If they're out of a job then there's less income to tax.
Look. Right now if I earn 50,000 a year and I have to file taxes I end up paying somebody else that makes 50,000 a year USD to file them for me properly. My 50,000 was taxed and that person's 50,000 was taxed. That 50,000 that the tax person made was already taxed once by people that are paying this person to handle their money. If we dont' artificially create income to people that provide no real benefit to society than how can our government survive?
Look, I, like most tech workers, pay about 28% of my income straight to the federal government's income tax. For that I get military protection. I also get a social security fund. Err, wait, that's not part of the 28%, that's part of the 7.5% that I pay and 7.5% my employer pays. So now I'm paying 43% of my money straight to the feds. But I get military protection and I get social security. I'm also provided highways to drive on. Wait, shit, that's my state's job. But they get moeny from the federal government from that. I'm not sure where that money comes from; but at least they're getting it. Shit, that's only if they abide by the federal government rules. I'm glad the feds like to tell my state what to make me do so that the state can give them money that I gave them. The feds tax my gas too, which is probabaly where this highway funding comes from. I forget the exact amount but I don't drive too much so maybe it's only 45% of my money going to the federal government.
Income tax funds things like the FDA, and if we didn't have the FDA we'd have to actually think about putting stuff into our body. Thankfully the federal governmetn provides a medical force to do that for us. Shit! They don't provide doctors for us, they just make rules for the doctors. I'm really glad they do that too, because after only 8 years of schooling I'm sure this community is entirely capable of making decisions on their own. I'm glad the FDA makes comanies jump through hoops to get prescription drugs into the hands of doctors. That helps, uhm.... trained professionals from selling me stuff at a reasonable price. I think that's good. Somebody told me that was good.
They money I send the federal government helps the CIA though. They let me know of all the things going on in the world and keep me protected with an easy color coded diagram. Shit, if I knew what the CIA knew I might... think for myself. Thankfully they give me colors like yellow, orange, and red. From that I'm told how much plastic and duct tape to put on my windows. I won't use that to buy a gun though, guns are bad.
Some of the money I send the feds is used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to make sure that I don't own any firearms that might be bad. I"m happy to pay money to be told that I cannot buy a gun that might do harm. When the terrorists come I'm comfortable in knowning that I've got plastic, duct tape, and firearms suited for hunting deer and squirrel. I wouldn't want to hurt any terrorist too bad. That the government's job, not mine.
The BATF also gets my money to let me know how much of my own beer I can make. Thankfully if I make too much beer and give it out to my friends the'll bust down my door, take away my guns, and put me in jail. I feel much safer now. H
What standing does the RIAA have to bring copyright claims? Does it own any? Did it's members ASSIGN all copyrights they own to them? If so, how are they a legal nonprofit?
This is interesting. I hadn't really thought about it either. Could I create a piece of software called "MILF Hunter" that would interpret a JPEG to let you know if it contains a MILF? Can I copyright this and put it out for sale at $200 a pop and then start subponeaing people that have files matching "MILF Hunter" in their Kazaa search results?
That's a silly scenario; as nobody would really benefit from it. However, here's another one:
Lets say the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security Dept, or whoever hires an outsider to create a copyrighted pro-revolution/2nd ammendment video. Lets say this gets "leaked" to the P2P networks and people start downloading it that agree with such views. What's to stop this outsider from subponeaing ISPs for personal information about people that have this song in their shared directories and fining them back to the stoneage with trumped up charges? Once they're fined and convicted there's a handy little public record for the federal government to use in tracking down and keeping tabs on people that they don't neccessarily like.
Far fetched? Yes. But there's a darned good reason that the US government was setup in a manner that seperated powers of government into three seperate branches. The judges do not create laws (well, they do now), the executive branch does not sentence people (they do now -- think military courts over "national threat" issues), and the legislature is bound by the US Constituion from enacting laws that would violate our God Given Rights. I remember something nestled into the constituion about congress being told that they "shall not infringe" on our right to keep and bear arms. Why the hell aren't people supporting HR 2038 being brought to treason?
Let's face it. The average American with their 2.5 kids and a steady job are letting their government walk right over them and they never bat an eye. The average citizen couldn't tell you who wrote the Declartion of Independence or what the first 3 words of the Constitution are. The 10th ammendment has probably never ever entered into their thought process when mulling over political decisions.
If people don't start standing up for their God Given Rights that are protected by the highest law of the land we're headed for trouble. The govermnet does not grant you "permission" to Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness. They are inalienable rights that cannot be taken from you protected by law.
Due process and trial by jury are NOT privledges. They are your rights. They are being stomped on and it's time to get pissed off about it and let your fellow man hear your words and take heed before things get any worse. Get the word out, get the people to start thinking for themselves again, and get our government out of our day to day lives and back into the little box of control we call the Constituion. Do that and this DMCA nonsense will disappear.
While we're at it, lets try and squash this bipartisan bullcrap too? If you feel the need to have to pick between two parties lets just make it Libertarian and Strong Libertarian, OK?
Sign up for an account there, forward the spam to your new mailbox and start following links to advertisements and such. If they ask for your email address, give it to them. Won't take long.
So given that you want to be secure, you *really* have to rule out speach.
So try IM.
IM would be great for this situation, but when if you want a "peer to peer" solution it just doesn't hold up. Assume there are two road warriors out there that need to communicate securely. Their best option really is the phone system. You could do an old-school modem to modem link that used encryption to filter the communications but the problem with this is that it's hard to verify that the person on the other end really is the proper person. Keys can be stolen and "secret words" can be prompted from people.
What's really needed, or desired by me I guess, would be a portal device that's fairly low cost that enables encrypted voice transmissions. You dial up in "plain text" mode, verify that the person on the other end is who you think it is by voice patterns then you jack in the secure devices. Once identification has been verified quality of transmission isn't -as- import as it was during the plantext situation but it provides a randomness to the transmission that makes it harder to brute force. When sending ASCII over an encrypted link you pretty much know that the data will fit into some numerical scheme eventually. Voice data is much harder to create patterns from that are repeatable. A digitized version of me saying "the fox flys at midnight" will fluxuate every time I say it. When I type it however it comes across the same every time.
The kicker for such a device would be:
- Battery operated
- SSH type encryption
- Portable
- Under $300
MAYBE a mini-itx system using only flash RAM for OS and program code could be run from a 12V DC outlet as you would get from a car. A pack of D-cell batteries would be optimal however. I don't know enough about EE or ITX to say if this is possible though. I'm interested however.
I'm a mish-mash person. I know a fair amount about networking, a fair amount about operating systems, and a good deal about programming. Getting a certification in another displine related to your main discipline can't hurt. Never will.
Do you have any idea how many programmers don't know jack about the network that they program on? It's absurd really -- but they can STIll do a good job! I have seen damn good rock solid programmers (well -- good enough for the job at hand) that didn't know you could open an FTP client to an address that started with "www.".
Some don't know that latency is a problem when doing network programming. The idea of removing client/server communication chatter is just plain odd to them. It doesn't cost CPU, in fact it's sometimes faster, so why would you NOT want to chatter back and forth?
And these people can be darned good programmers in corporate environments. They sometimes need guidance though.
Get the CCNA, it shows that you kinda like networking. If you're going for a software engineering job lay it on there down at the bottom of your pile of other tech skills. If it comes up just play it off at interview time, "Yep.. I got that. I've fiddled with networks so much in the past that I figured I should just get it. It was a breeze and I already knew it anyway. It's not my primary focus, but I realized long ago it's something I should have knowledge of so I got the certification for the heck of it."
If they want to you to take up a networking job that you don't want you can play that off too. "Yeah, I have a CCNA and I dig networking and such, but I consider myself more valuable as a programmer. It's my main discpline and I work far harder on that than I do networking." Well, shit, if you got a CCNA on a whim you must be a good programmer!
Walking in there with a resume that will "rock their knob" in every discipline can't hurt. Toss shit in that doesn't apply but make sure it's not considered your main discipline, unless you want them to. "Yeah, I've worked on projects that emphasised parallel processing batch systems to get the most out of our hardware but what I really dig is high-repsonse clustered environments that scale up horizontally. They're much more fun for me and I feel far more comfrotable working with them." Shit like that -- but it has to be true. Flip it around the other way if you have to take a 2nd interview.
Every interview I walked into wanting that job I got. I've had some where I was less enthusiatic about the position that I didn't get and I walked away knowing I didn't want the job. If I wanted it, I got it. Know your shit, be honest, and don't be afraid to talk down some of your skills that aren't important to the job. If they think it's impressive that you have X cert when the job really requires cert Y just talk down cert X. It's a toy thing to you. What you really dig is discipline Y.... and that's where you rock.
If they have "router monkeys" at the place without at a CCNA and you play that down because you're a far better programmer than a network guy you just plain look better. You don't have to be king shit at everything, but if you have enough in your bag to impress them in one area you give yourself the power to talk yourself up in another area while maintaining that "I'm a better coder than networking guy" air.
I don't have to work with OPC but I started up a venture of sorts once with a guy that knew the horrors of it and let me tell you I hated trying to design our idea in Windows. It just didn't fly. I got sick of COM objects talking to COM objects talking to COM objects. It just got really really bad. This was three years ago, so maybe now it wouldn't be such a problem for me but I just hated the code we had to write.
I'd just love to see a portable, open-sourced SOAP OPC bridge of sorts. Is this an in-house closed up development thing or are you free to speak about it? Can some of the source be released under an OSI friendly license? I'd love to get my fingers back into that pie, develop the snot out of a cool assed open-architecture system and then set to work consulting on implementing the thing.
This supersedes kb823980 which was the rpc patch from a few weeks ago. Basically a roll up. So if you haven't ran kb823980, you can run this and kill 2 birds with one stone.
I spent a good 30 minutes today trying to figure this one out. We run two different production servers, one in North America and one for Europe that are supposed to be identical to one another. Due to the EU portion being over worked their server sometimes falls behind in patches both to our own software and to MS related things.
The EU admins were complaining that their server was acting whacky, so I set in to investigate. Sure enough, it's FUBAR so I hit a reboot (just to get IE to work) after hours and discover that it's got Welchia on it. I update IE (don't know why this was necessary but they wanted it) and I look at the Windowsupdate.com page to see that the 'new' (824146?) patch was supposed to fix Blaster type infections. I figure they never patched this thing... because 824146 was still in my "need to download list" along with 23 other things. Yes it's horribly out of date. No this is not my fault.
So I install the patch and shortly realize that this hasn't hit our QA systems yet after more looking. I look back through my notes and see that 823980 patches the Blaster and family hole. SHIT! Took a while to realize after scanning the KB to figure out that this was a roll-up patch... all because MS didn't want to publish this on their windowsupdate.com page. That and I'm not a Windows admin, I just occasionally play one at work when need be.
It takes a person a day to run through a full sweep of our application stack to validate a patch. We do not have time to do this 2-3 times a week for core OS patches. This is getting insane. Roll them up in a patch-a-week fashion. Distribute them one by one if you want but make it an option to download the patch of the week and make this the common practice. Too many patches are coming out for the CORE OS! It's nuts... just plain nuts. This would be like Debian reasing a new kernel and a new glibc two or three times a week. Something is wrong with this picture.
Come up with a better patching naming scheme too. Ever been to Windows Update? From the summary you see on there you never know what the patch really fixes -- you have to hunt it down via links that distract you from your core job. All the critical OS patches say the same thing: Critical... could allow attacker remote code execution, blah blah blah... etc. List the known in-the-wild worms in the freaking patch names!
Yeah, I'm a little pissed today. I would never ever sign up to be a Windows admin but the days that I have do it it really really hurts.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of all the misdeeds the British Empire is responsible for history will look upon the removal of arms as the blackest" ...Or something along those lines. I'm not much for memorizing prose verbatim.
- Ghandi
You're right, there's aboslutely no way that the general population can stand up to an Army. That's why Russia controls Afghanistan (ok, we helped them with that one). That's why Vietnam was one by the US too. They weren't as well equipped as us, but boy, we won that one! That's why the USA is a British colony (ok, France helped out)...
Sorry, but sometimes it does help to have an armed population. Resitance operations are just that though: reistance. You don't have to actually win, just hold out long enough that the other guy gives up and you're still alive.
Democracy? In the United States of America? THIS IS A LIE!
This is a lie. Period. The United States of America is not a democracy. It never was, it never shall be, it never SHOULD be! Democracy is a failure. We know that, it doesn't work. A true democracy will always be in turmoil and I wish that people proclaiming that we are a democracy would wake up.
We are a Constitutional Republic. We are Republican in nature, not the party, but the system. We elect representatives that vote on issues for us... on our behalf.
Further, were are Constitutional in nature. Unless the Constitution is ammended you cannot pass a law that breaks it. Well, that's the theory. Any slashdotter that keeps up with US politics knows darned good and well the Constitution has been shit on over and over again, but that's the general idea.
A true democracy will never have free speech, fair trial, freedom of religion, free arms, etc, etc.
A republic, if adhered to, does have a chance.
Is it the best we have? Probably. I love this country; though I feel the sentiments of the parent poster very strongly.
I've got a 4'x6' American flag hunt on the wall of my apartment. It's absurdly large given the size of this place. I love this country. I research my politicians to no end. I scour through laws that would make a police officer's head spin. I am not a normal citizen.
However, The USA is _not_ what it was meant to be. It was meant for so much more than this. We've pissed away a huge amount of our liberties and yet we STILL remain a fairly free country.
I want a return to the basics. When things like Patriot act can't happen. I want a country where the sheer THOUGHT of voting for such a thing sends shivers down a congressional member's spine.
I'm not going to run away. I'm going to fight, politically, for this freedom. It's our God Given Right. Don't accept any less.
This country sucks, but it sucks less than any other I know out there. Now, excuse me while I try and fix this shit up. I will not leave.
I'm going to bounce all over the wall on this one. The above is the thing that gets my goat though. Not because it was said but because it's the truth.
.5 million against 80 million is actually possible. However, that's assuming one thing:
.5 million US troops actually know how to handle small arms weapons in close quarters, urban environments, and rural settings. They do not. I guarantee you this. Very few troops actually know how to fondle an M16 or M4 rifle. I know, I have buddies in the Army that had me teach them how to field-strip the AR-15 variety of weapons and fire them so they'd have a leg up on the other recruits.
FACT: The 2nd Ammendment of the United States Constitution exists for the SOLE reason that the general population needs to have the arms to overthrow the government if need be. If you don't beleive that's why it was written, go read up on your history. It's the truth.
However, is it reasonable? In principle yes, but the US Citizen has been so hampered by firearms laws since 1934 and on that it's just not possible for us to arm ourselves properly. We have a few points of strength though.
True, the US Military is 500,000 strong. I would expect a 40% AWOL though if troops were ever force to fight against our own citizens. That's hopeful thinking though.
There are en estimated 80,000,000 firearms owners in the United States however. A highly trained, well equiped force of
All of the
None of the 3 (out of 4) have actually been trained, beyond moderate skills, on how to handle small arms. Two are tankers, one is an Air Force bomb loader, and the 4th actually is a special-op in training guy that DOES know how to handle a rifle. I know 2 more military fellows (one Air Force, one Navy) that wouldn't know how to work an AR style rifle if their life depended on it.
Our military, by and large, excepting the Marines, are not riflemen. They are manning tanks, computers, air craft carries, and aircraft.
You launch tank, artilerary, and bombers against the population and you have just lost the compassion of the American people. The civilian hunters and patriots are very capable of a guerilla attack against the politicians that vote such things into being. The day that happens I predict 435 dead members of congress, 100 senators, 1 vice president and 1 president. They'll never launch large arms against our people for this reason.
Well, at least not now. We have some semblance of firearms ownership left in this country.
It's fun to wax nostalgically about how "back in the day" arms were simple and the common people had the proper arms to form a rebellion. You'd think that this is no longer true because arms have advanced so quickly that we cannot keep up with the government. Oh, how I wish that were true.
FACT: The very arms that the original patriots armed themselves with ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE TO THE COMMON MAN! That's right, folks, we can't even own a black powder cannon anymore. The original partiots had them. We don't. How's that for a kick in the ass?
As a further kick in the ass, some asshat in New Jersey actually proposed a bill that would have made 50 caliber muzzle loaders illegal. Nope, nobody wants to disarm the hunters.... keep looking the other way.
Lets's look at this. The average American soldier does not have the skills necessary for urban fighti
+5? That's +5? Holy crap, the mod points rode in with the shortbus today.
Why wasn't this modded "funny". They've been at it for a LOOONG time!
For starters, 1934's National Firearms Act (NFA).
I'm sure there were some before that... but it's one that irks me plenty.
I'm just pissed that they're taking it. You know what my medical bills total up to in the past 5 years for visiting a doctor?
$0 USD. That's $0 CDN for those of you that can't do conversions in your head. I forget how to convert to British Pounds.
Where the snot do they get authorization to tax ME for MEDICAL expenses for SOMEBODY OUTSIDE MY COUNTRY?!
Gah.
I second the parent's suggestion. Been there, done that, and it rocked, even when FOP was at the 0.17 release. It worked pretty darned well, and you just had to make another XSLT sheet to turn the document into HTML.
Yes, it's a big task and not the "quick and dirty" method but it works really well and gives you exactly the results that you want if you want to put the time into it. The XML+XSLTT -> processor model is definately the way to for things that you expect to last a while into the future.
Never? Really....
Run 'RhymBox' on your system for a while... then start up NetMeeting under a pre sp4 Win2k install. Crashed on me, my manager's machine, and numerous other people. Once sp4 came out that seemed to fix the problem though.
You could call it by it's "true" name if you don't like GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Drop the ATF entirely if you ask me. Have you -ever- seen a citizen praise the ATF for anything?
For crying out loud... ther's a single government agency dedicated to my leisure activities! I like to drink beers, I like to chew tobacco, and I freaking love firearms.
Their purpose? To keep me from making more than 100 gallons of untaxed beer for me and friends, to keep me from putting something "evil" on my AK like a fucking KNIFE, and to make sure my non-violent self can't possibly get a friggen $80 dollar WWII gun shipped to my residence.
Thanks guys.... you've made this world a hell of a lot safer.
The ATF can go piss into the wind if you ask me. It seems that the parent poster agrees. They represent the antithesis of everything this country was founded on and it's high time we got rid of them.
I did something similiar in the 2000 to 2001ish era. I forget exactly when, but it was basically a "public terminal" in my apartment. Anybody that was hanging out and wanted to use a computer to do something, which was more often than I thought it would be, was directed to the handy little box in the living room. Nobody really did word processing on it though.
At any rate, the bare minimum stuff for a box that I sit down on had to have (at the time):
A good browser.
A good MP3 player.
A decent MP3 pirating tool.
An AOL IM program.
Everybody that dropped in and hung out with us would make use of such things. Now, if this is a family PC that doesn't do gaming I see no reason why you'd actually need Windows on it. I'm a Linux Zealout but even I'll admit when Windows has it's place and in a general purpose "just do stuff" box Windows isn't it... unless you need games or Office specifically. Once you need Office though it becaomes a "compatibile with work thing".
Now, a good browser: Firebird. It just plain rocks. I like it. Runs great on Linux.
MP3 player: XMMS... acts just like Winamp, the kiddies won't have any real problem learning how to use it.
MP3 pirating tool: gtk-gnutella. You might not want this on a family box though. In the heyday of Napster I had gnapster installed on this public box though for friends that wanted to nab a song real quick as we hung out and make their own playlist. Purists may argue that I'm a damned criminal for this but to be honest when there's 10 people hanging out at your place and somebdoy wants one of the latest top-40 hits what's the harm? We used it as a tool for us to grab our favorite hang-out tunes. Odds are somebody had the damned CD in their car but it was way easier in that day to just download it than rip and encode it. After Napster I found myself ripping and encoding CD's and tossing them into the party playlist.
AOL IM was "the thing" that everybody I knew used in that era. MSN caught on a little after that but the solution is still the same: gaim. I've had no-nothing-about-tech friends stop by and use gaim without a problem. I just show them the icon, where to setup the account and they're off. Kids will understand it easily.
Mail client? That's what the browser is for IMHO. Children and non techs are happy with web email so just leave it that way if you can. I don't think I've ever seen a casuasl computer user say,"But I need POP3 access to my email account." If they care that much about email they'll tell you what they need for an email client. Kmail or Balse would suffice for most. For me? It's mutt.
Now, since it's for home use, you need a word processor for the kiddies to type up homework with. If you're going to use Xp Wordpad is prefectly fine here. Seriously. Failing that install OpenOffice regardless of your OS. Go with Abiword or Kword if you want something less "bloated" though. I use all three depending on my mood.
So, that's a rather lengthy explanation of my thoughts. Personally when I sit down at a new Debian install I make sure I have the following which are not part of general use:
vim, lynx, mozilla or firebird, wget, nmap, traceroute, gnome, aterm, gaim, xmms, grip, ogg vorbis utils, abiword, ps2pdf and related utils, mutt, xpdf, maybe ghostview/ghostscript, gcc, make, perl, maybe python, openssh server/client.
Just my 2 cents.
Whoa.... that's friggen cool. Seriously.
.c files should be a piece of cake.
.tar.gz of the whole thing might not net you much in saved bandwidth. However, it would just be plain -neat- to have only the .c and .h files absolutely neccessary for your particular build. No matter what file you open from your kernel source tree you know for sure that it has an impact on the actual build of your kernel. If you modify something from such a system you know your binary output is going to be different. That is, barring GCC optimizations and such. If you turn the line 'c++' into 'c = c + 1' you won't net a binary change.. hopefully.
/usr/src/linux-2.6.0 you could just have /usr/src/linux (not just a symlink mind you)... and the scripts within there would have enough know how to automatically pull the most up to date code and such. Lets say 2.6.1 comes out:
/usr/src/linux
:)
Most of us have big pipes for bandwidth so pulling a 22MB kernel archive isn't that big of a deal. Sure, it takes some time but we can do it and live with a 5-10 minute delay.
This idea is just waaaay geeky though, and cool. It would have to be a distribution specific type thing though. There's no way I'd expect the kernel maintainers to take on this task -- it's just not their style.
Debian could, with some work, create a 'kernel-source-2.6.0-skeleton' package though with modified Makefiles that would wget the source files if needed at compile time. That could be friggen awesome. You'd just nab a 200k skeleton package and as it compiles it'll start snatching files. With a little script-fu pulling header files from neccessary
I'm tempted to say that this might cut total bandwidth down by half, maybe a quarter... which after the efficienty of a
Super cool idea... what else could this do?
Well, instead of having
cd
make oldconfig && make
Sha-zam! You're pulling 2.6.1 code (what has changed at least)_and rebuilding.
I like the idea. Go code it dude.
Thankfully we can count on these criminals using their real ID over and over again. Owning an illegal firearm and shooting people is one thing but very very few people in this world are so disgusting that they would use a FAKE ID!
For the Love of God people. Do you really think these people are going to just waltz in packing heat with their real ID? They're already breaking the law. Moderately law abiding adults (or kids) use fake IDs all the time to get into bars. If some 17 year old goodie-goodie boy can get a fake ID what the hell is going to stop a hardened criminal from doing it?
Here's an idea. Lets make everybody in Canada register their firearms. That will stop the shootings as there won't be any way to obtain an untraceable gun. Oh wait, you did that -- lo and behold the Canadian crminals aren't honoring the law! Whatever shall we do?
THE SKY IS FALLING! HELP US! CRIMINALS HAVE STOPPED OBEYING THE LAW!
You want to stop bar violence? Put a 1911 on the hip of the tender behind the counter and a friggen shotgun under the bar. Let the waitresses keep a
Scanning criminal's fake IDs won't do anything here. It's good that they're at least thinking about possible solutions but it's just misguided as all hell. It makes them feel better about what they're doing though... but that's like putting a gold star on some retard's head when they managed to piss their pants while in the bathroom instead of in the hallway. It looks like an improvement, and it shows some effort: But you're still just pissing all over yourself.
Wet pants while in the bathroom: Still a retard.
Dead customers while you use your scanning system: Still a retard.
No, but standing next to him in the shower does.
'Cmon, he named his company MICRO-SOFT!
You, my fellow Slashdottter, are apparently not the type that would carry such a device. To each his own, but trust me -- carrying such utilities is not only useful to yourself but useful to others.
I have a Swiss Army Knife, but it's -really- large. My mother got it for me and I tell you this thing is great. I think thinkgeek.com features it even. It's the uber knife. I usually don't carry it. I do however carry a 3" folding belt knife all the time.
Once you're accustomed to such things you cannot do without. I'll provide some examples.
One day I'm going home for lunch (I live really close to work) and I pull into my apartment complex. I see a stranded couple there with their hood open. I'm a nice guy so I pull over to see if I can help. they've got a transmission problem. That much they know. They don't konw what's wrong though. I look under the car and see a big puddle of oil, I dip my finger in it and sure enough -- it's red. So, they've got an automatic tranny leaking fluid or something. I gander under the hood and spot a rubber hose that's just plain disconnected. That's where their leak's coming from. I'm wearing a knee length wool coat, shirt, tie, slacks, basic business attire. I toss the coat into the snow, tuck my tie into my shirt, and hunker down underneath the car. Inspect hose, determine that it's an easy clamp to refix and:
Yank my handy-dandy Swiss Army knife out of my pocket yank out the flat-blade screw driver and reattach the hose snuggly for them. I'm the friggen hero of the day for understanding basic (very basic) mechanics, having a tool to fix the problem, and I'm willing to get down and dirty to fix it. I snug the hose into place and let them know that they should probably drop a quart or maybe two into their tranny before driving it off. The funny part is the guy asked if I'd drive them to an auto parts store to buy tranny fluid. He didn't notice he was "stranded" 200 yards from an auto parts store. They were happpy and when I finished lunch the car was gone. Mission completed.
Carrying "crap" like this isn't always useful to the person holding onto it. However today when buying a battery for an older car of mien the salesman couldn't yank the silly stick-on security sticker so I yanked out my 3" blade (shirt, slacks, dress shoes again) and pryed it off for them.
You may think the "MacGuyver" mentality is silly, until you're broken down on the side of the road and some tech geek pulls up with a Leatherman on his belt, a set of socket wrenches in his trucnk, and jumper cables to boot.
Consider it a challenge. Most of us here can walk into any IT department and help them out. But, can you pull up to the car of a stranded individual and get them back on the road? If you have the mental capacity to swap hard drives you can fix most road-side problems. Be prepared, help your fellow man out, and carry the "burden" of being prepared for little things. It just might be your own arse.
Yeah, this doesn't help the original poster at all I guess. Except I would say don't give up any -useful- device you carry. Drop the GBA if anything.
You have a J2EE (or something like it) based application that is non-portable in both it's host OS and host application server and on top of that doesn't scale too well because of memory/CPU requirements?
Hmmm... somebody should be loosing their job. Either the consultants who built it or the person that approved such a thing.
If you had a true J2EE app that wasn't coded by a team of monkeys on a wild rampage this shouldn't a problem. The "porting" to a new app server should be trivial, if anything has to be done at all. You'd be able to keep the Sun hardware and whatever app server you use on it, while chucking in Linux machines with Bea, WebSphere or maybe JBoss on them. Slap a hardware based load balancer in front of it and viola, horizontal scalability.
I didn't see anybody else take offense to this, but 100k+ per user login memory usage? I might be showing my age, or rather my roots, but that seems excessive. My guess is your app's written like the app I now support. User logs in and everything about them is swallowed up into session (or application) wide collections immediately. The "lazy caching" thing just didn't cross these guy's minds. Of course, in my case neither did the "mark data dirty" thing but that's another matter.
Please, somebody show me 100k worth of data that you would really want on-demand from-memory on a user at any given instant. Just a C struct or something would suffice.
J2EE apps can be bleeding fast ultra lean sons of bitches if you do it up right. It can also be a dog-ass slow memory-hogging bastard. It just depends on who you had at the business end of the whiteboard I guess.
Going the PHP/static generation/caching route isn't neccessarily a bad idea either... but I don't think you should have to do this. I'm seeing the maintence of such a system as a big onus on the system administrators to make sure everything is up all the time... I know of no PHP frameworks out there that would let you drop sessions from one system to another. I've never tried pushing PHP that far though.
If your a system admin such a system might seem ideal... because while the systems and network might be a little "wonky" that's your domain and you feel comfortable supporting such a thing. I can't fault you for that; however I do think the onus is on the application development team. It is their job to make something scalable and construct it in a manner that it should fail over, recover, etc. from anything weird that may go on.
This isn't realistic, but you probably purchased a scalable application toted as portable because it's Java and you didn't get that. Demand that. If they can't deliver boot them out the door and take it inhouse if you must but I see many obstacles in your path on the system admin side alone... and certainly the re-development of it won't be cake walk.
Scalability problems are largely the development team's responsbilities, so long as such a requirement was put forth in the original development. Good system administration can help to reduce their errors along with a good helping of hardware but that's just a bandaid to the real solution.
Just my two cents.
OK, give me a break. How hard is it, really, to enforce this? How many freaking people does it really take to:
- receive a complaint
- Verify the call with the telco
- write them up and get it in front of a judge.
It's a pretty cut and dry matter if you ask me. It won't take long for the agencies to get hit so bad that they'll just plain quit.
Hey, I'm all for privacy and such, but commercial places -can- be monitored. Why not just round up all the outgoing calls made from the commercial call center and cross check that against the DNC list? No fuss, no muss. People don't even have to bother reporting it then.
If you want a cheap solution, gimmie a bottle of booze and a trusty AK-47. That'll teach 'em.
Are you nuts? Do you know what this would do to our economy? There's a myriad of people out there that depend on tax laws to keep their jobs. If we got rid of all of our tax laws and only taxed purchases then the people that used to handle our income taxes would be out of a job. If they're out of a job then there's less income to tax.
Look. Right now if I earn 50,000 a year and I have to file taxes I end up paying somebody else that makes 50,000 a year USD to file them for me properly. My 50,000 was taxed and that person's 50,000 was taxed. That 50,000 that the tax person made was already taxed once by people that are paying this person to handle their money. If we dont' artificially create income to people that provide no real benefit to society than how can our government survive?
Look, I, like most tech workers, pay about 28% of my income straight to the federal government's income tax. For that I get military protection. I also get a social security fund. Err, wait, that's not part of the 28%, that's part of the 7.5% that I pay and 7.5% my employer pays. So now I'm paying 43% of my money straight to the feds. But I get military protection and I get social security. I'm also provided highways to drive on. Wait, shit, that's my state's job. But they get moeny from the federal government from that. I'm not sure where that money comes from; but at least they're getting it. Shit, that's only if they abide by the federal government rules. I'm glad the feds like to tell my state what to make me do so that the state can give them money that I gave them. The feds tax my gas too, which is probabaly where this highway funding comes from. I forget the exact amount but I don't drive too much so maybe it's only 45% of my money going to the federal government.
Income tax funds things like the FDA, and if we didn't have the FDA we'd have to actually think about putting stuff into our body. Thankfully the federal governmetn provides a medical force to do that for us. Shit! They don't provide doctors for us, they just make rules for the doctors. I'm really glad they do that too, because after only 8 years of schooling I'm sure this community is entirely capable of making decisions on their own. I'm glad the FDA makes comanies jump through hoops to get prescription drugs into the hands of doctors. That helps, uhm.... trained professionals from selling me stuff at a reasonable price. I think that's good. Somebody told me that was good.
They money I send the federal government helps the CIA though. They let me know of all the things going on in the world and keep me protected with an easy color coded diagram. Shit, if I knew what the CIA knew I might... think for myself. Thankfully they give me colors like yellow, orange, and red. From that I'm told how much plastic and duct tape to put on my windows. I won't use that to buy a gun though, guns are bad.
Some of the money I send the feds is used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to make sure that I don't own any firearms that might be bad. I"m happy to pay money to be told that I cannot buy a gun that might do harm. When the terrorists come I'm comfortable in knowning that I've got plastic, duct tape, and firearms suited for hunting deer and squirrel. I wouldn't want to hurt any terrorist too bad. That the government's job, not mine.
The BATF also gets my money to let me know how much of my own beer I can make. Thankfully if I make too much beer and give it out to my friends the'll bust down my door, take away my guns, and put me in jail. I feel much safer now. H
This is interesting. I hadn't really thought about it either. Could I create a piece of software called "MILF Hunter" that would interpret a JPEG to let you know if it contains a MILF? Can I copyright this and put it out for sale at $200 a pop and then start subponeaing people that have files matching "MILF Hunter" in their Kazaa search results?
That's a silly scenario; as nobody would really benefit from it. However, here's another one:
Lets say the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security Dept, or whoever hires an outsider to create a copyrighted pro-revolution/2nd ammendment video. Lets say this gets "leaked" to the P2P networks and people start downloading it that agree with such views. What's to stop this outsider from subponeaing ISPs for personal information about people that have this song in their shared directories and fining them back to the stoneage with trumped up charges? Once they're fined and convicted there's a handy little public record for the federal government to use in tracking down and keeping tabs on people that they don't neccessarily like.
Far fetched? Yes. But there's a darned good reason that the US government was setup in a manner that seperated powers of government into three seperate branches. The judges do not create laws (well, they do now), the executive branch does not sentence people (they do now -- think military courts over "national threat" issues), and the legislature is bound by the US Constituion from enacting laws that would violate our God Given Rights. I remember something nestled into the constituion about congress being told that they "shall not infringe" on our right to keep and bear arms. Why the hell aren't people supporting HR 2038 being brought to treason?
Let's face it. The average American with their 2.5 kids and a steady job are letting their government walk right over them and they never bat an eye. The average citizen couldn't tell you who wrote the Declartion of Independence or what the first 3 words of the Constitution are. The 10th ammendment has probably never ever entered into their thought process when mulling over political decisions.
If people don't start standing up for their God Given Rights that are protected by the highest law of the land we're headed for trouble. The govermnet does not grant you "permission" to Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness. They are inalienable rights that cannot be taken from you protected by law.
Due process and trial by jury are NOT privledges. They are your rights. They are being stomped on and it's time to get pissed off about it and let your fellow man hear your words and take heed before things get any worse. Get the word out, get the people to start thinking for themselves again, and get our government out of our day to day lives and back into the little box of control we call the Constituion. Do that and this DMCA nonsense will disappear.
While we're at it, lets try and squash this bipartisan bullcrap too? If you feel the need to have to pick between two parties lets just make it Libertarian and Strong Libertarian, OK?
Sign up for an account there, forward the spam to your new mailbox and start following links to advertisements and such. If they ask for your email address, give it to them. Won't take long.
IM would be great for this situation, but when if you want a "peer to peer" solution it just doesn't hold up. Assume there are two road warriors out there that need to communicate securely. Their best option really is the phone system. You could do an old-school modem to modem link that used encryption to filter the communications but the problem with this is that it's hard to verify that the person on the other end really is the proper person. Keys can be stolen and "secret words" can be prompted from people.
What's really needed, or desired by me I guess, would be a portal device that's fairly low cost that enables encrypted voice transmissions. You dial up in "plain text" mode, verify that the person on the other end is who you think it is by voice patterns then you jack in the secure devices. Once identification has been verified quality of transmission isn't -as- import as it was during the plantext situation but it provides a randomness to the transmission that makes it harder to brute force. When sending ASCII over an encrypted link you pretty much know that the data will fit into some numerical scheme eventually. Voice data is much harder to create patterns from that are repeatable. A digitized version of me saying "the fox flys at midnight" will fluxuate every time I say it. When I type it however it comes across the same every time.
The kicker for such a device would be:
- Battery operated
- SSH type encryption
- Portable
- Under $300
MAYBE a mini-itx system using only flash RAM for OS and program code could be run from a 12V DC outlet as you would get from a car. A pack of D-cell batteries would be optimal however. I don't know enough about EE or ITX to say if this is possible though. I'm interested however.
I'm a mish-mash person. I know a fair amount about networking, a fair amount about operating systems, and a good deal about programming. Getting a certification in another displine related to your main discipline can't hurt. Never will.
Do you have any idea how many programmers don't know jack about the network that they program on? It's absurd really -- but they can STIll do a good job! I have seen damn good rock solid programmers (well -- good enough for the job at hand) that didn't know you could open an FTP client to an address that started with "www.".
Some don't know that latency is a problem when doing network programming. The idea of removing client/server communication chatter is just plain odd to them. It doesn't cost CPU, in fact it's sometimes faster, so why would you NOT want to chatter back and forth?
And these people can be darned good programmers in corporate environments. They sometimes need guidance though.
Get the CCNA, it shows that you kinda like networking. If you're going for a software engineering job lay it on there down at the bottom of your pile of other tech skills. If it comes up just play it off at interview time, "Yep.. I got that. I've fiddled with networks so much in the past that I figured I should just get it. It was a breeze and I already knew it anyway. It's not my primary focus, but I realized long ago it's something I should have knowledge of so I got the certification for the heck of it."
If they want to you to take up a networking job that you don't want you can play that off too. "Yeah, I have a CCNA and I dig networking and such, but I consider myself more valuable as a programmer. It's my main discpline and I work far harder on that than I do networking." Well, shit, if you got a CCNA on a whim you must be a good programmer!
Walking in there with a resume that will "rock their knob" in every discipline can't hurt. Toss shit in that doesn't apply but make sure it's not considered your main discipline, unless you want them to. "Yeah, I've worked on projects that emphasised parallel processing batch systems to get the most out of our hardware but what I really dig is high-repsonse clustered environments that scale up horizontally. They're much more fun for me and I feel far more comfrotable working with them." Shit like that -- but it has to be true. Flip it around the other way if you have to take a 2nd interview.
Every interview I walked into wanting that job I got. I've had some where I was less enthusiatic about the position that I didn't get and I walked away knowing I didn't want the job. If I wanted it, I got it. Know your shit, be honest, and don't be afraid to talk down some of your skills that aren't important to the job. If they think it's impressive that you have X cert when the job really requires cert Y just talk down cert X. It's a toy thing to you. What you really dig is discipline Y.... and that's where you rock.
If they have "router monkeys" at the place without at a CCNA and you play that down because you're a far better programmer than a network guy you just plain look better. You don't have to be king shit at everything, but if you have enough in your bag to impress them in one area you give yourself the power to talk yourself up in another area while maintaining that "I'm a better coder than networking guy" air.
OPC? On Linux? Will you share?
I don't have to work with OPC but I started up a venture of sorts once with a guy that knew the horrors of it and let me tell you I hated trying to design our idea in Windows. It just didn't fly. I got sick of COM objects talking to COM objects talking to COM objects. It just got really really bad. This was three years ago, so maybe now it wouldn't be such a problem for me but I just hated the code we had to write.
I'd just love to see a portable, open-sourced SOAP OPC bridge of sorts. Is this an in-house closed up development thing or are you free to speak about it? Can some of the source be released under an OSI friendly license? I'd love to get my fingers back into that pie, develop the snot out of a cool assed open-architecture system and then set to work consulting on implementing the thing.
I spent a good 30 minutes today trying to figure this one out. We run two different production servers, one in North America and one for Europe that are supposed to be identical to one another. Due to the EU portion being over worked their server sometimes falls behind in patches both to our own software and to MS related things.
The EU admins were complaining that their server was acting whacky, so I set in to investigate. Sure enough, it's FUBAR so I hit a reboot (just to get IE to work) after hours and discover that it's got Welchia on it. I update IE (don't know why this was necessary but they wanted it) and I look at the Windowsupdate.com page to see that the 'new' (824146?) patch was supposed to fix Blaster type infections. I figure they never patched this thing... because 824146 was still in my "need to download list" along with 23 other things. Yes it's horribly out of date. No this is not my fault.
So I install the patch and shortly realize that this hasn't hit our QA systems yet after more looking. I look back through my notes and see that 823980 patches the Blaster and family hole. SHIT! Took a while to realize after scanning the KB to figure out that this was a roll-up patch... all because MS didn't want to publish this on their windowsupdate.com page. That and I'm not a Windows admin, I just occasionally play one at work when need be.
It takes a person a day to run through a full sweep of our application stack to validate a patch. We do not have time to do this 2-3 times a week for core OS patches. This is getting insane. Roll them up in a patch-a-week fashion. Distribute them one by one if you want but make it an option to download the patch of the week and make this the common practice. Too many patches are coming out for the CORE OS! It's nuts... just plain nuts. This would be like Debian reasing a new kernel and a new glibc two or three times a week. Something is wrong with this picture.
Come up with a better patching naming scheme too. Ever been to Windows Update? From the summary you see on there you never know what the patch really fixes -- you have to hunt it down via links that distract you from your core job. All the critical OS patches say the same thing: Critical... could allow attacker remote code execution, blah blah blah... etc. List the known in-the-wild worms in the freaking patch names!
Yeah, I'm a little pissed today. I would never ever sign up to be a Windows admin but the days that I have do it it really really hurts.