IIRC, Commodore ultimately collapsed due to Enron-style accounting fraud and outright looting by the CEO & CFO. Even with the horrible mis-management going on, C= could have probably survived if the executives had syphoned off a little less money for their corporate jets and yachts.
If it can run a terminal emulator and connect to another computer, it's internet capable. I was using my Apple IIc to read newsgroups and mail via UMBC's Unix server in 1988.
For example, a hard-working sysadmin will manually check the error logs every day for problems. A lazy sysadmin will write a script to check the error logs for him and mail him the results. A hard-working sysadmin will scurry around all day fighting fires.
"I am the laziest man in the world. I invented all those things to save myself from toil." - Benjamin Franklin
"All Progress is made by lazy men, looking for easier ways to do things." - Robert Heinlein
It could have been something as simple as an interlock being left on accidentally, or the auto-start switch being turned off, or some equivilent bit of user error / ignorance.
The building in which I used to work was attached to two seperate power grids -- if one grid went down, it was supposed to switch over automatically to the other grid within 10 seconds. Well, one day the the active grid went down and it didn't switch over. The reason? User error. I don't know the details but apparantly the building engineer didn't reset everything correctly after the last scheduled test.
Remember Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
While sabotage is indeed a possibility, I find it far more likely that the scabs hired to replace the striking engineers never bothered to RTFM, never ran an equipment test, and never had a drill or simulated outage.
In that kind of facility, they should have been running a monthly, if not weekly, test of the backup systems. The most likely explanation to me is that there was a breakdown in operational procedure, possibly because the procedures weren't documented. If the policy is that you run a periodic systems test, then you need to document the fact that you need to run a test along with the instructions needed to carry out the test.
"Fred runs the test every Tuesday; get him to show you how to do it" doesn't cut it, particuarly if Fred goes on strike or gets run over by a bus. It's management's responsibility to make sure that all the critical operational procedures are documented and that they are being followed on an ongoing basis. This obviously did not happen in this case -- even if the generators were sabotaged, the damage should have been detected at the next test.
Everything transmitted over any public network (be it the telephone system or the internet) is insecure. This is not news. Let big brother monitor the internet and the phone system to his heart's content; anyone who cares about security already uses encryption.
I'm all for *more* monitoring -- I want it so widespread that everyone knows that every phone call they make and every email they send *will* be monitored by big brother at some point. The more awareness people have about how easily the government can listen in on their private conversations, the more they will demand that transparent encryption be built in to their phones and email programs. Wholesale wiretapping will make encryption mainstream.
I searched for a hardware store close to my Manhattan zip code [and didn't find any nearby]
Consider where you live: if you searched for overpriced pretentious yuppie coffee bars, you would have probably gotten 100 hits in a 5 block radius:-) If you did the same two searches for East Bumfuck, Indiana, you'd get very different results. The HardwareStore:CoffeeBar ratio in a rural farming community is going to be a lot higher than it is in a trendy urban neighborhood or in the 'burbs.
It may be beta, but by the standards set by Google's past betas, it's pretty buggy. Froogle and News are both beta, and neither one of those ever gave fatal error messages on every other hit.
I wish both parties would stop spending the money and start paying off the debt.
It's never going to happen, at least not until the system implodes. Politicians have learned that they can run the debt up as high as they want and keep getting re-elected as long as they keep telling people what they want to hear.
Eventually the ponzi scheme they're running is going to collapse, and when it does we're going to have an economic crisis which will make the Great Depression look mild by comparison. Given a few years of hyperinflation, paying back a trillion dollar debt would be trivial, because all you could buy with that trillion dollars would be a Big Mac & Fries.
Re:I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Year
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Amiga Sells AmigaOS
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· Score: 1
AGA was superior to (base) VGA (8-bit color 640x480 60Hz noninterlaced). IIRC, the AGA chipset could run in VGA mode; it wasn't used much because most Amigas used NTSC-based monitors which couldn't handle the signal. Somewhere in my crawlspace I have a dongle I built which allowed you to hook up a standard VGA monitor to the Amiga's video port.
Don't forget the aluminum and/or magnesium powder in your recipe. Without that addition, your sticky gas/styrofoam mixture isn't particuarly effective.
If you put a a file up on a publicly-accessable URL, you are implicitly granting the public licence to download and view that file. If you imbed image I in page P, and both files are accessable via a standard URL, I don't see how you can dictate that somone can only view P in the context of I without some technical means of restricting access (EG, only serve up I if referrer = P). If you put a keg of beer out on the street in front of your house with a sign that says "help yourself", you can't complain if someone says "hey, go to 123 Maple street, he's giving away free beer".
If someone copies I and serves it off their own machine, then you might have a case for copyright infringment. If they're telling someone to download it off of your server, where you put it, the only "copyright" possibly being infringed is the URL of the image itself. Since an URL is a fact, it should be no more copyrightable than a street address or a phone number. Any other argument is a perversion of common sense and of the law. Of course, perverting the law is what lawyers get paid for.
If the government has evidence that they are indeed terrorists, then they should be charged in open court, given a fair trial by an impartial jury of their peers, and then duly sentenced to death or life without parole if/when convicted.
Holding people indefinately, without trial or even formal charges, runs completely counter to every priciple of modern jurisprudince and spits in the face of the ideals on which the US was founded. What the fuck happened to the idea of "innocent until proven guilty by a court of law"?
Labelling someone a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" is not a justifiable excuse for the US Government to ignore the Constitution or to flaunt International treaties it has signed.
Someone needs to print out the Bill of Rights on 60-grit sandpaper and forcably insert it into the rectums of Bush, Ashcroft, and company (assuming you can get their heads out of the way first). Come to think of it, maybe someone already has -- they treat it like it's a pain in their asses and shit all over it whenever they can.
But by keeping all this stuff secret, they create a monopoly on service and their dealerships can charge $200 for something that Joe Smith at your local garage would charge $120 for.
Or even more to the point, they can charge you $200 for something that you could do yourself in your driveway for $60.
The "war" on terror, (like the "war" on drugs) is primarily a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The military's principal role in the war on terror is to discourage soverign countries from harboring and supporting terrorist groups.
It's a shame that people waste years learning an inferior tool like MySQL and then refuse to take that knowledge and apply it to a real database. Not only that, because MySQL lacks essential features like triggers and stored procedures, people who use MySQL never learn *why* you need them. MySQL teaches people bad habits that they then refuse to unlearn; all too often, they cop an attitude rather than face the reality that they're wrong.
As relational databases go, MySQL is utter crap. Even in the realm of open-source databases, there are better choices. Just because it's *possible* to do some jobs with MySQL, doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Anything that can be done with MySQL could be done as well or better with MS-Access. No one in their right mind would consider building a serious web application around Access, but people think using MySQL is ok for some bizarre reason.
All the Feds have to do to get the states to play ball is threaten to withhold those precious Federal highway funds. This is exactly how the Feds forced all the states to adopt the 55 MPH speed limit and the 21 y/o drinking age.
While killing spammers and pedophiles may be a good idea, that isn't the military's mission. That is the job for law enforcement. Even though both wear uniforms, carry guns, and have similar organizational structures, the military is VERY different than law enforcement in what it needs to do it's job, and who it's going up against.
The military wants secure and reliable communications, period. From a military standpoint, it might be nice to monitor your adversaries, but not if it means that your adversaries can monitor you. Any intentional weakness in a communications protocol could be exploited by an enemy, making it unsuitable for military purposes. Since the military's opponents are other militaries, they have to assume that the enemy has the resources of an entire country behind it, and plan accordingly. Insecure comms makes the military's job harder. For the military, keeping YOUR comms secure is the first priority; monitoring or disrupting the other side's comms is a bonus.
Law enforcement, on the other hand, is going up against individuals or small groups. The stakes are lower and the adversary has far fewer resources. Insecure comms makes their jobs easier, because they need to monitor the other side a whole lot more than they need to worry about having their communications monitored. Hell, virtually all police departments still use unencrypted radios, despite the fact that scanners have been available to the general public for 30+ years.
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IIRC, Commodore ultimately collapsed due to Enron-style accounting fraud and outright looting by the CEO & CFO. Even with the horrible mis-management going on, C= could have probably survived if the executives had syphoned off a little less money for their corporate jets and yachts.
If it can run a terminal emulator and connect to another computer, it's internet capable. I was using my Apple IIc to read newsgroups and mail via UMBC's Unix server in 1988.
For example, a hard-working sysadmin will manually check the error logs every day for problems. A lazy sysadmin will write a script to check the error logs for him and mail him the results. A hard-working sysadmin will scurry around all day fighting fires.
"I am the laziest man in the world. I invented all those things to save myself from toil." - Benjamin Franklin
"All Progress is made by lazy men, looking for easier ways to do things." - Robert Heinlein
Actually, having kids is worse. I'm amazed anyone is ever able to have more than one :-)
The building in which I used to work was attached to two seperate power grids -- if one grid went down, it was supposed to switch over automatically to the other grid within 10 seconds. Well, one day the the active grid went down and it didn't switch over. The reason? User error. I don't know the details but apparantly the building engineer didn't reset everything correctly after the last scheduled test.
Being an early adopter of a Slot-A Athlon, I've often regretted not having waited the extra 9 months for the Socket-A to have come out.
While sabotage is indeed a possibility, I find it far more likely that the scabs hired to replace the striking engineers never bothered to RTFM, never ran an equipment test, and never had a drill or simulated outage.
In that kind of facility, they should have been running a monthly, if not weekly, test of the backup systems. The most likely explanation to me is that there was a breakdown in operational procedure, possibly because the procedures weren't documented. If the policy is that you run a periodic systems test, then you need to document the fact that you need to run a test along with the instructions needed to carry out the test.
"Fred runs the test every Tuesday; get him to show you how to do it" doesn't cut it, particuarly if Fred goes on strike or gets run over by a bus. It's management's responsibility to make sure that all the critical operational procedures are documented and that they are being followed on an ongoing basis. This obviously did not happen in this case -- even if the generators were sabotaged, the damage should have been detected at the next test.
I'm all for *more* monitoring -- I want it so widespread that everyone knows that every phone call they make and every email they send *will* be monitored by big brother at some point. The more awareness people have about how easily the government can listen in on their private conversations, the more they will demand that transparent encryption be built in to their phones and email programs. Wholesale wiretapping will make encryption mainstream.
It may be beta, but by the standards set by Google's past betas, it's pretty buggy. Froogle and News are both beta, and neither one of those ever gave fatal error messages on every other hit.
Eventually the ponzi scheme they're running is going to collapse, and when it does we're going to have an economic crisis which will make the Great Depression look mild by comparison. Given a few years of hyperinflation, paying back a trillion dollar debt would be trivial, because all you could buy with that trillion dollars would be a Big Mac & Fries.
AGA was superior to (base) VGA (8-bit color 640x480 60Hz noninterlaced). IIRC, the AGA chipset could run in VGA mode; it wasn't used much because most Amigas used NTSC-based monitors which couldn't handle the signal. Somewhere in my crawlspace I have a dongle I built which allowed you to hook up a standard VGA monitor to the Amiga's video port.
You can get legal copies of the Kickstart ROM images as part of the Amiga Forever package.
Don't forget the aluminum and/or magnesium powder in your recipe. Without that addition, your sticky gas/styrofoam mixture isn't particuarly effective.
Congradulations on being such a good little consumer. I see that you, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.
Sounds like it's time to move out of the People's Republic of California and back into the USA.
If someone copies I and serves it off their own machine, then you might have a case for copyright infringment. If they're telling someone to download it off of your server, where you put it, the only "copyright" possibly being infringed is the URL of the image itself. Since an URL is a fact, it should be no more copyrightable than a street address or a phone number. Any other argument is a perversion of common sense and of the law. Of course, perverting the law is what lawyers get paid for.
Holding people indefinately, without trial or even formal charges, runs completely counter to every priciple of modern jurisprudince and spits in the face of the ideals on which the US was founded. What the fuck happened to the idea of "innocent until proven guilty by a court of law"?
Labelling someone a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant" is not a justifiable excuse for the US Government to ignore the Constitution or to flaunt International treaties it has signed.
Someone needs to print out the Bill of Rights on 60-grit sandpaper and forcably insert it into the rectums of Bush, Ashcroft, and company (assuming you can get their heads out of the way first). Come to think of it, maybe someone already has -- they treat it like it's a pain in their asses and shit all over it whenever they can.
The "war" on terror, (like the "war" on drugs) is primarily a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The military's principal role in the war on terror is to discourage soverign countries from harboring and supporting terrorist groups.
As relational databases go, MySQL is utter crap. Even in the realm of open-source databases, there are better choices. Just because it's *possible* to do some jobs with MySQL, doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Anything that can be done with MySQL could be done as well or better with MS-Access. No one in their right mind would consider building a serious web application around Access, but people think using MySQL is ok for some bizarre reason.
That is exactly the point: no matter how desperate you are, there's always going to be someone out there who's just a little bit more desperate.
All the Feds have to do to get the states to play ball is threaten to withhold those precious Federal highway funds. This is exactly how the Feds forced all the states to adopt the 55 MPH speed limit and the 21 y/o drinking age.
The military wants secure and reliable communications, period. From a military standpoint, it might be nice to monitor your adversaries, but not if it means that your adversaries can monitor you. Any intentional weakness in a communications protocol could be exploited by an enemy, making it unsuitable for military purposes. Since the military's opponents are other militaries, they have to assume that the enemy has the resources of an entire country behind it, and plan accordingly. Insecure comms makes the military's job harder. For the military, keeping YOUR comms secure is the first priority; monitoring or disrupting the other side's comms is a bonus.
Law enforcement, on the other hand, is going up against individuals or small groups. The stakes are lower and the adversary has far fewer resources. Insecure comms makes their jobs easier, because they need to monitor the other side a whole lot more than they need to worry about having their communications monitored. Hell, virtually all police departments still use unencrypted radios, despite the fact that scanners have been available to the general public for 30+ years.