Wow, I really picked a bad analogy, didn't I? You really seem to hate cars...
Not really, it's just that they are so BORING. Car designers are like PC designers and mobile phone designers. They all make a big fuss about lways coming up with essentially the same design as everyone else. Look at a car from 50 years ago and one from this year, the designs are only trivially different, still a box with a wheel near each corner. Of course it is really the consumers who drive the conformity.
My point wasn't that it doesn't make sense to make things look better, but that cutting a hole in a beige box and panting it blue doesn't cut it. As I said, putting a plant in front of it would ave more positive effect for less effort.
if we were to trigger a catastrophic irreversible runaway climate change process that destroyed the atmosphere?
How are we going to destroy 5*10^18Kg of atmosphere? That would be SOME climatic change.
If you just mean change the composition, it is unlikely we will ever manage anything a fraction as dramatic as was done by whatever lifeform it was which first developed photosynthesys. Life survived that.
Remember that to eliminate life we would have to turn all of the earth into an environment worse than, for example, the cooling water of an operating nuclear reactor (since we know life can survive in such conditions).
[fluffy dice] don't improve how the car runs, but (when properly done) can sure make it look better.
Cars are just metal boxes with a wheel at each corner, the only way to make them look better ir to put them throug a scrap yard and recycle the metal into something interesting.
Same goes for beige box computers. Putting a hole in the side just gives you and ugly box with an ugly hole. What's the point? Stick it under the desk or put a plant in front of it and use the effort/cash to do something which has some chance of atually improving something.
People should auction off the right to the name for plants and animamls[...]want to spend money to protect it.
Tie IPR to endangered species. You get to keep your patent/trademark/copyright as long as a totem species survives. The more valuable the IPR, the more species an/or the harder to keep alive the species.
Sorry Bill, the lesser fringed marshmallow newt is extinct, looks like the NT kernel is now public domain.
The Hurd has concepts that are actually innovative.
Actually, now I come to think of it, thinking of the Hurd as a piece of conceptual art rather than an operating system does improve my feelings about it. Over her a pcikled shark, over there a toy operating system.
There are already programs that support undo past save. If we do something intelligent like get rid of the save command, we should also do something intelligent like undo past save
The correct solution is version control built in at the OS level. This would mean all file types would have to have a useful diff defined.
That would also allow multiple people to work on the smae document with control over how their changes are merged and so on. After all, all these tools were developed for source control not because they are related to programming, but because they are related to editing; any appliction which can be sen as an editing operation could benefit.
nearly all technology requires admins not to
be lazy, that's why sysadmin is such a complex job.
Er, no. Mature and well designed technology works to a reasonable standard out of the box. Yes, there are things to think about, but you're starting from somewhere sane.
`Wi-Fi' as one might assume from something they had to think of a silly name for, comes out of the box useless, leaving the admin to do everything the designers and manufacturer should have done.
Linux still suffers from the "let's throw files in places that only a seasoned unix user will think to look for them" mentality
Er, no. Linux distributions suffer from the ``let's throw files in weird places no one will look for them, then throw together some god awful configuraton tool to try to hide the fact we haven't thought any of this through'' mentality.
The traditional unix places generally made sense, Nothing like a couple of decades of slow development to get things right.
Or take a `pirate' copy, and send the full cover price of the CD to the artist, with a coverring letter asking them to forward whatever amount they feel is apropriate to their production people, cover artists etc.
What use is it to have a connection "anywhere", when most conference rooms and what have you have a cord connection nearby
When you get out of school you will find that those cables don't lay themselves. They are expensive and sometimes hard work (try working when somoene is trying to drill cable runs through stone walls someday).
Even for a simple home nettwork, I would have gone the wireless route if the technology was mature last year when I was laying a cable the length of my (then-) new flat. The difference between plugging in one wireless hub and putting in a couple of sockets in each room with all the structured wiring and hole drilling would easily pay for the extra cost.
[OpenBSD is] the world's most secure operating system
It's well known that MSDOS is the world's most secure operating system.
No network access and so completely secure from remote break in, and if anyone breaks in from the console there is bugger all they can break and no one cases what they do anyway.
Security by obsolescence.
Re:All involved US corporate leaders arrested!
on
Saddam's Inbox Hacked
·
· Score: 2
If there is truth to U.S. business attempting to solicit business with Saddam Hussein, then I expect to see reports of arrests
After all, deals with dictators are the US government's job.
Here (in the US) the networks coincide in a lot of places, but they (at least used to) run a seperate cable to the house for the cable modem.
Not here, but then I can't say it would make a difference. I've never had a problem with the line to my home (even when, at my previous flat, the installers complained that the box they had to connect me to was flooded and he was working up to his elbow in water).
OTOH, just after I got cable They (another They, not the cable people) started all of the water mains in this part of the city, and water company machinery seems to be magnetically attracted to cable company cable runs... so maybe I have over-experienced network breakdowns.
(and needless to say, they resurfaced the main road into town a week or two before they dug it all up for the water mains... not that this is/. material, but sometimes you just have to winge... must shut up, starting to treat/. as usenet...)
Then again, most of the places I've been have the TV installed on a completely seperate line. There's got to be a really big problem for both to go down.
Maybe it's different in other places but here (UK) the reason the cable companies can provide broadband and telephones is that they already have the network in place. So most failures turn out to be network related and affect TV too. In fact my TV box is more sensitive to noise than the cable modem, so a coupe of times I have had TV jitters etc. but the internet was fine.
AIUI the other main UK cable company (NTL) doesn't provide a separate cable modem at all, just uses an outlet on the TV box.
Of all the nerve, to expect computer guys to communicate with other people in the business, to work with them, to adopt the same dress code,
If you think dressing like someone is a prerequisite for communicating with them then I can only hope you never have kids. You'd either end up one of those embarssing people who dress as if they are 14 at age 40, or not communicating with them.
I should be able to not be a team player, to dress slovenly[...]
`Team player' is management speak for `sucker', and anyone whose only options are being told what to wear or dressing slovenly needs to go back to mummy.
My policy is that if they worry more about the clothes than the work, then I'll subcontract to a showroom dummy and stay home collecting the money.
They certainly don't require that you leave it installed, except for Tech Support. Which so far has been easy, because if it's a problem with the line, you simply call and report that cable TV is out.
I'd like to underline this. For anyone who hasn't learned by painful experience yet, never report anything to the interent suport people if you have TV from the same source.
Anything which goes wrong is in one of two classes, things shared with the TV operation and things their tech support stands no chance of fixing. The TV operation will be far better resourced, and the support staff know that you may have 5 children demanding cartoon network at your end and so not fixing things may result in you being driven insane and turning up at their call center with a chainsaw. Nerds just don't carry that fear factor:-)
Certainly when I had a problem which seemed to be at my end, my cable suppler (Telewest) quoted a couple of weeks for an engineer from the internet side and day and a half for a TV bod.
I wonder if you could take them to small claims court to compensate you for the time you spent uninstalling the program?
More significantly, isn't him clicking through the end user agreements a forgery of your agreement?
On a practical level, I agree with someone above: have a sacrificial machine. I built a machine from my parts boxes for them to mess up. After all, all they want is a windows control panel to poke at, that it is on a P100 with almost no disk space and a slightly dodgy power supply doesn't matter.
What's wrong with usenet for anonymous publication? Posting is over SMTP,
No, usually NNTP.
so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want.
Which will (potentially) log where you came in from. Spooks get NNTP server people to hand over logs (or, if they have any sense, they are running most of the public posting enabled NNTP servers), talk to your ISP to see who was dialed in on that line and come pay you a visit.
Yes, you can be more indirect etc. but so can they, will you bet your lievelihood (or in some countries your life) on your ability to be better than their staff?
The penet vs scientology case is an example of what even a private organisation can do in one of the more free states of the world.
If i remember correct the UK does not ban crypto but does requires you decrypt it on demand or be assumed guilty
I believe the current position is that no one knows what the UK situation is. The government put through some legislation which was messed about and fuzzed and so on until no one is sure what it means, and nothing has been tried in court, which is the only way to know what it really means.
Probably not anti-crypto, at least not in the US; that fight has already been had, and the government lost.
Governments never lose permanantly, sooner or later they will decide things have quetened down and try again. A concrete example of encryption and related things being used to do Evil Things would be just what they need.
I'm having a very hard time imagining any nontrivial legitimate use for this technology.
The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.
OTOH, I think the most likely impact on freedom of speech is
A resonable number of people start using it
It becomes flooded with stolen goods and kiddie porn
The powers that be make a fuss.
They use it as an excuse to pass sweeping anti-encrypton (etc) laws.
We have all taken a big step backwards.
On the whole, I think in resonably open societies, suc a the US and Uk still are, the only sane option is `publish and be damned'. That way they at least have to be somewhat public in acting against you. If you hide, they can attack you in hiding, perhaps by attacking everyone who looks a little like you.
Well, personally I'd like `shut the hell up abpout this one'. My Win98 machine has been bugging me to update IE6 to patch some of it's mny security holes every day for weeks.
I don't have IE6. I don't want IE6. So far as I can see there is no way to tell M$ this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, it's just that they are so BORING. Car designers are like PC designers and mobile phone designers. They all make a big fuss about lways coming up with essentially the same design as everyone else. Look at a car from 50 years ago and one from this year, the designs are only trivially different, still a box with a wheel near each corner. Of course it is really the consumers who drive the conformity.
My point wasn't that it doesn't make sense to make things look better, but that cutting a hole in a beige box and panting it blue doesn't cut it. As I said, putting a plant in front of it would ave more positive effect for less effort.
How are we going to destroy 5*10^18Kg of atmosphere? That would be SOME climatic change.
If you just mean change the composition, it is unlikely we will ever manage anything a fraction as dramatic as was done by whatever lifeform it was which first developed photosynthesys. Life survived that.
Remember that to eliminate life we would have to turn all of the earth into an environment worse than, for example, the cooling water of an operating nuclear reactor (since we know life can survive in such conditions).
Cars are just metal boxes with a wheel at each corner, the only way to make them look better ir to put them throug a scrap yard and recycle the metal into something interesting.
Same goes for beige box computers. Putting a hole in the side just gives you and ugly box with an ugly hole. What's the point? Stick it under the desk or put a plant in front of it and use the effort/cash to do something which has some chance of atually improving something.
Tie IPR to endangered species. You get to keep your patent/trademark/copyright as long as a totem species survives. The more valuable the IPR, the more species an/or the harder to keep alive the species.
Actually, now I come to think of it, thinking of the Hurd as a piece of conceptual art rather than an operating system does improve my feelings about it. Over her a pcikled shark, over there a toy operating system.
Concepts butter no parsnips.
The correct solution is version control built in at the OS level. This would mean all file types would have to have a useful diff defined.
That would also allow multiple people to work on the smae document with control over how their changes are merged and so on. After all, all these tools were developed for source control not because they are related to programming, but because they are related to editing; any appliction which can be sen as an editing operation could benefit.
Er, no. Mature and well designed technology works to a reasonable standard out of the box. Yes, there are things to think about, but you're starting from somewhere sane.
`Wi-Fi' as one might assume from something they had to think of a silly name for, comes out of the box useless, leaving the admin to do everything the designers and manufacturer should have done.
Er, no. Linux distributions suffer from the ``let's throw files in weird places no one will look for them, then throw together some god awful configuraton tool to try to hide the fact we haven't thought any of this through'' mentality.
The traditional unix places generally made sense, Nothing like a couple of decades of slow development to get things right.
Or take a `pirate' copy, and send the full cover price of the CD to the artist, with a coverring letter asking them to forward whatever amount they feel is apropriate to their production people, cover artists etc.
OTOH, any technology which requires admins to not be `lazy' needs more work before it is ready for the real world.
Most admins are `lazy' becase they already have enough on their plates.
When you get out of school you will find that those cables don't lay themselves. They are expensive and sometimes hard work (try working when somoene is trying to drill cable runs through stone walls someday).
Even for a simple home nettwork, I would have gone the wireless route if the technology was mature last year when I was laying a cable the length of my (then-) new flat. The difference between plugging in one wireless hub and putting in a couple of sockets in each room with all the structured wiring and hole drilling would easily pay for the extra cost.
s/You/Only idiots/
s/\.\.\./ except conincidentally./
what about:
C:\>format c:
That would be an upgrade.
It's well known that MSDOS is the world's most secure operating system.
No network access and so completely secure from remote break in, and if anyone breaks in from the console there is bugger all they can break and no one cases what they do anyway.
Security by obsolescence.
After all, deals with dictators are the US government's job.
Not here, but then I can't say it would make a difference. I've never had a problem with the line to my home (even when, at my previous flat, the installers complained that the box they had to connect me to was flooded and he was working up to his elbow in water).
OTOH, just after I got cable They (another They, not the cable people) started all of the water mains in this part of the city, and water company machinery seems to be magnetically attracted to cable company cable runs... so maybe I have over-experienced network breakdowns.
(and needless to say, they resurfaced the main road into town a week or two before they dug it all up for the water mains... not that this is /. material, but sometimes you just have to winge... must shut up, starting to treat /. as usenet...)
Maybe it's different in other places but here (UK) the reason the cable companies can provide broadband and telephones is that they already have the network in place. So most failures turn out to be network related and affect TV too. In fact my TV box is more sensitive to noise than the cable modem, so a coupe of times I have had TV jitters etc. but the internet was fine.
AIUI the other main UK cable company (NTL) doesn't provide a separate cable modem at all, just uses an outlet on the TV box.
If you think dressing like someone is a prerequisite for communicating with them then I can only hope you never have kids. You'd either end up one of those embarssing people who dress as if they are 14 at age 40, or not communicating with them.
I should be able to not be a team player, to dress slovenly[...]
`Team player' is management speak for `sucker', and anyone whose only options are being told what to wear or dressing slovenly needs to go back to mummy.
My policy is that if they worry more about the clothes than the work, then I'll subcontract to a showroom dummy and stay home collecting the money.
I'd like to underline this. For anyone who hasn't learned by painful experience yet, never report anything to the interent suport people if you have TV from the same source.
Anything which goes wrong is in one of two classes, things shared with the TV operation and things their tech support stands no chance of fixing. The TV operation will be far better resourced, and the support staff know that you may have 5 children demanding cartoon network at your end and so not fixing things may result in you being driven insane and turning up at their call center with a chainsaw. Nerds just don't carry that fear factor:-)
Certainly when I had a problem which seemed to be at my end, my cable suppler (Telewest) quoted a couple of weeks for an engineer from the internet side and day and a half for a TV bod.
More significantly, isn't him clicking through the end user agreements a forgery of your agreement?
On a practical level, I agree with someone above: have a sacrificial machine. I built a machine from my parts boxes for them to mess up. After all, all they want is a windows control panel to poke at, that it is on a P100 with almost no disk space and a slightly dodgy power supply doesn't matter.
No, usually NNTP.
so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want.
Which will (potentially) log where you came in from. Spooks get NNTP server people to hand over logs (or, if they have any sense, they are running most of the public posting enabled NNTP servers), talk to your ISP to see who was dialed in on that line and come pay you a visit.
Yes, you can be more indirect etc. but so can they, will you bet your lievelihood (or in some countries your life) on your ability to be better than their staff?
The penet vs scientology case is an example of what even a private organisation can do in one of the more free states of the world.
I believe the current position is that no one knows what the UK situation is. The government put through some legislation which was messed about and fuzzed and so on until no one is sure what it means, and nothing has been tried in court, which is the only way to know what it really means.
Governments never lose permanantly, sooner or later they will decide things have quetened down and try again. A concrete example of encryption and related things being used to do Evil Things would be just what they need.
The first which comes to mind is whistle blowing.
OTOH, I think the most likely impact on freedom of speech is
On the whole, I think in resonably open societies, suc a the US and Uk still are, the only sane option is `publish and be damned'. That way they at least have to be somewhat public in acting against you. If you hide, they can attack you in hiding, perhaps by attacking everyone who looks a little like you.
Well, personally I'd like `shut the hell up abpout this one'. My Win98 machine has been bugging me to update IE6 to patch some of it's mny security holes every day for weeks.
I don't have IE6. I don't want IE6. So far as I can see there is no way to tell M$ this.