I have used Linux since 1992. I only use computers at work. This means that I have never paid a single cent for any of the software I use anyway, nor for the computers. I can basically have any workstation I want. I chose Linux then. I still choose Linux. The only other Unix I can work with without excessive pain is Irix. I can work as much as I want with Solaris, AIX etc. but it's such a pain. It hurts to use those crappy systems. I use Linux because Linux is good to work with! I don't pay anyway, I wouldn't have used Solaris if I was paid a dollar an hour to use it. TA
Background: I have worked as a maintainer and developer for more than fifteen years. We work with projects, i.e. we work for customers with products that should be finished in from three to twelve months, with from two-three to many more developers. It could well be that contractors are among the "best" people, and we do occasionaly hire some when we're short of people. The big problem with contractors is that they always come in on projects unprepared, because they haven't been there that long.. which means that the project is hit hard with Brook's law: Adding people to a project that is late makes the project even later. It doesn't matter how good they are. We can hire super-contractors but they're not much more useful than fresh students, because they don't know the background for the project (they are often expansions or new features in old projects), they don't know the customers and their site and other projects etc. We can make them useful if we have a long-term project with good experienced employees leading the project where it makes sense to hire the contractors, and only if they can join from the very beginning. But we definitely prefer to populate the project with the old hardliners (our own employees). Conclusion: Contractors can be useful for completely self-contained, rather simple and short projects and jobs. TA
I don't know how things are in the U.S., but what your bosses are suggesting is absolutely illegal in many countries including my own. As it's illegal it can't be "overruled" by company "rules" either -- I remember a case where a managing director was charged and convicted for reading employees' email. In general email should work exactly like snail mail, and it should go like this: - If the snail mail is addressed to company name person's name address then the secretary or whoever opens it and registers it and everything. However, if the employee's name is at the top and only then followed by the company's name then it's personal and the secretary or anyone is absolutely forbidden to open it. A company can't just decide on it's own that any envelope coming in their door can be opened, whoever it's addressed to. The bank, the authorities, whoever, is allowed to send private post to any address, even if that just happens to be a company's address. They can refuse to receive it, but they cannot receive it and then open it. With email it should work like so: - any personal email address is personal, and it's up to the employee to decide that this is company mail (if so) and forward it for archiving (if that's the practice). - non-personal email should always have a non-personal address, e.g. project-X@company.com, support@company.com, internal-jokes@company.com etc. These addresses can work like internal mailing lists and can be automatically archived. Thus no need for intercepting and storing everybody's email either (another very bad and, in this country, illegal practice). If the company don't want the employees to have truly private emails then the only thing they can do is to refuse the employees to have personal email addresses. Fair and simple as that. TA
The main reason you could actually use it for something with less than a kilobyte of RAM was that at that time computers didn't necessarily have an operating system. The Altair and the Imsai came with just some switches at the front, what you did was basically that you just set the byte value (one switch per bit, 1 or 0), then you set the address with another set of switches (or sometimes it could be automatically counting and you first had to specify a start address, this depends on the computer. I don't remember exactly what the Altair did put I think I still have the '75 magazine with the details) and then you pressed a key to enter that value into RAM at the right position. After having entered a bunch of byte values starting from, say, address zero, you just set the program counter to zero and pressed the 'run' key (setting the program counter means to put the value into the PC register). That's it. You could get a lot done that way, I never did it on an Altair (it was just a dream for me at the time), but as late as 1982 I did essentially the same thing on a 16-bit minicomputer, it had those switches despite actually having a real solid operating system. For debugging some programs it was actually easier to enter a little test loop from the front switches and watch the blinkenlights to see what happened (the 'blinkenlights' would show the value of the current memory address, one light per bit). You could single step the computer that way. However, the Altair could be extended with both more RAM and also with the, at the time, great operating system CP/M. CP/M was a hacker's dream operating system, you could quite easily port it yourself to a new computer. You would just write your own BIOS, the functions needed were very clearly described in the documentation, then you loaded BDOS which would run using the BIOS entry points. A lot of this software came with full commented source. TA
NO you couldn't get 256KB at the time, whatever way you tried! Not only would it be super-extremely expensive, nobody had ever even heard about any microcomputer with such an amount of memory. Even the Alpha LSI minicomputer we used when I was studying at the time only had 16KB (not RAM, it was actually real core memory.. non-volatile, bonus points for those who can explain what core memory is). It came with 256 bytes (static) RAM alright, however he certainly got himself a little more memory after a while. TA
They obviously meant 256 bytes, although that wasn't much even for the time. But you certainly couldn't get 256 KB RAM in any small computer in 1976. My own had 2KB and I wished I had enough money to buy the 16KB RAM kit. Remember that the first IBM PC that came in 1981 (five years later is a long time in the computer age!) only had 16KB RAM. Sixteen kilobytes. TA
You can't run Wordstar on one of those! Have you ever seen an Altair 8800b? If it's anything more primitive out there it would have to be an Imsai (used in War Games if I'm not mistaken). My old Nascom-II from about the same time was almost advanced compared to it (2KB RAM, yay!). Running Wordstar on it would be like running Word on your pocket calculator. TA
This technology was quite well described in New Scientist several years ago. It did not come from any military division or anything. It's simply an ordinary product that took its ordinary invention-to-finished-product time. TA
"UFO bufs who have read too much SF" is an oxymoron. SF people have no interest in UFOs and little green men. And the SETI project has nothing to do with UFOs either, quite the opposite in fact. TA
True, as far as it goes. But the really dangerous thing is when cells start to divide before the DNA damage hasn't been fixed up. That's why it's very important to not get any cuts or damages if you have radiation damages (never do surgery until the patient has recovered). It can mean the difference between "you die" and "you're doing pretty good". TA
There may be things to worry about, but modified brain cell DNA isn't one of them. Brain cells don't divide, and then it doesn't matter much.. the problem is with organs that divide all the time, or if you force them to divide by damaging them. The liver is particularly eager to let its cells start dividing, and if their DNA has been damaged you get cancer. TA
Loans? Most of the time you get them in the bank where your wages end up (I don't know about all countries on this side but it's pretty common that the employer will only pay you through a bank). So the bank knows all ins and outs already:-) TA
>Also think about how many times you have handed over income info >voluntarily to commercial entities already. Whatwhatwhatwhat?? Is this a common thing to do in the U.S.? On this other side of the pond it's *not* common. If some "commercial entity" had asked me to tell them my income I would have told them to go **** themselves, as would 99% of the people I know. TA
I think my road analogy was better (a provider (e.g. a road owner), comes up with a transport medium (e.g. a road), and whoever transports slogans or lies/pornography or whatever on that [road] isn't anything you want to blame the [road] owners for). Your analogy was particularly bad because you used toxic chemicals as example (something that does hard,physical damage and isn't open for discussion), I believe the right analogy is public speech on the road/public place v.s. public speech on a web site/newsgroup/whatever. TA
There's something completely wrong with the law interpreters here. If I walk around on a street or road with a big sign with "defamatory material" or whatever, should the street/road owner be liable? Of course not. Nobody would even think of calling up the owner (which could be private, local authorities or maybe national) demanding them to get me off that road. The police would come directly after me instead, they wouldn't fine the street owner! Why isn't the law the same for ISPs? TA
It helps to complain. Only yesterday I saw the national version of "Reuters" use the words "cracker" and "cracked" completely correctly when they described the FBI break-ins or whatever it was. It thus got correctly printed in all the newspapers too. TA
If you break in where you're not supposed to break in you're a "cracker", simple as that. Hackers are bored to death with the thought of it and won't do it unless somebody asks/pays them to break into the (payer's) system as part of a security audit. And then the hacker may not really be particularly good at it but could probably find out how. Eric Raymond actually got this one right: "Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. " TA
You're the one making the mistakes here. You seem to think that "crackers" are just the same as evil hackers (like "white" and "black" witches, eh?). That braindead thinking is part of the problem here. Hackers and crackers don't have much in common, except for both working with computers these days. TA
"..because it is only a theory!!" Why don't you first learn what the word "theory" means when a scientist uses it? It's not the same as what a layman means with "theory". What people in general call a "theory" wouldn't even be considered a hypothesis in scientific terminology. A scientific theory must be consistent with itself, it must be able to come up with testable predictions etc. All in all a scientific "theory" is far closer to what most people would call "a fact" than what they mean by "theory" themselves. TA
"Electrons can tunnel through insulators at speeds faster than the speed of light." Not really. First, electrons themselves travel nowhere near the speed of light (when talking about electronic equipment at least), and secondly, even if the "center" of the wave function of the tunelling electron went faster than light the "tip" of the wave function would not. This has been explained in many papers, including in popular form in Scientific American (with a nice cartoon drawing). TA
You got it backwards: information is what can't travel faster than light, everything else can, in principle. That's what's make any faster-than-light system you can come up with quite useless. TA
It certainly doesn't multithread in the Unix version.. Maybe it's the graphical part that is able to multithread (or maybe NT multithreads the graphical part for you), try to turn off the graphics (by setting the screensaver to blank the screen, in the control box). Others report that this cuts the processing time to half, if it doesn't for you but merely unloads a CPU you know what's going on.. TA
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I have used Linux since 1992. I only use computers at work. This means that I have never paid a single cent for any of the software I use anyway, nor for the computers. I can basically have any workstation I want. I chose Linux then. I still choose Linux. The only other Unix I can work with without excessive pain is Irix. I can work as much as I want with Solaris, AIX etc. but it's such a pain. It hurts to use those crappy systems.
I use Linux because Linux is good to work with! I don't pay anyway, I wouldn't have used Solaris if I was paid a dollar an hour to use it.
TA
Background: I have worked as a maintainer and developer for more than fifteen years. We work with projects, i.e. we work for customers with products that should be finished in from three to twelve months, with from two-three to many more developers.
It could well be that contractors are among the "best" people, and we do occasionaly hire some when we're short of people. The big problem with contractors is that they always come in on projects unprepared, because they haven't been there that long.. which means that the project is hit hard with Brook's law: Adding people to a project that is late makes the project even later. It doesn't matter how good they are. We can hire super-contractors but they're not much more useful than fresh students, because they don't know the background for the project (they are often expansions or new features in old projects), they don't know the customers and their site and other projects etc. We can make them useful if we have a long-term project
with good experienced employees leading the project where it makes sense to hire the contractors, and only if they can join from the very beginning. But we definitely prefer to populate the project with the old hardliners (our own employees). Conclusion: Contractors can be useful for completely self-contained, rather simple and short projects and jobs.
TA
I don't know how things are in the U.S., but what your bosses are suggesting is absolutely illegal in many countries including my own. As it's illegal it can't be "overruled" by company "rules" either -- I remember a case where a managing director was charged and convicted for reading employees' email.
In general email should work exactly like snail mail, and it should go like this:
- If the snail mail is addressed to
company name
person's name
address
then the secretary or whoever opens it and registers it and everything. However, if the employee's name is at the top and only then followed by the company's name then it's personal and the secretary or anyone is absolutely forbidden to open it. A company can't just decide on it's own that any envelope coming in their door can be opened, whoever it's addressed to. The bank, the authorities, whoever, is allowed to send private post to any address, even if that just happens to be a company's address. They can refuse to receive it, but they cannot receive it and then open it. With email it should work like so:
- any personal email address is personal, and it's up to the employee to decide that this is company mail (if so) and forward it for archiving (if that's the practice).
- non-personal email should always have a non-personal address, e.g. project-X@company.com, support@company.com, internal-jokes@company.com etc. These addresses can work like internal mailing lists and can be automatically archived. Thus no need for intercepting and storing everybody's email either (another very bad and, in this country, illegal practice). If the company don't want the employees to have truly private emails then the only thing they can do is to refuse the employees to have personal email addresses. Fair and simple as that.
TA
The main reason you could actually use it for something with less than a kilobyte of RAM was that at that time computers didn't necessarily have an operating system. The Altair and the Imsai came with just some switches at the front, what you did was basically that you just set the byte value (one switch per bit, 1 or 0), then you set the address with another set of switches (or sometimes it could be automatically counting and you first had to specify a start address, this depends on the computer. I don't remember exactly what the Altair did put I think I still have the '75 magazine with the details) and then you pressed a key to enter that value into RAM at the right position. After having entered a bunch of byte values starting from, say, address zero, you just set the program counter to zero and pressed the 'run' key (setting the program counter means to put the value into the PC register). That's it. You could get a lot done that way, I never did it on an Altair (it was just a dream for me at the time), but as late as 1982 I did essentially the same thing on a 16-bit minicomputer, it had those switches despite actually having a real solid operating system. For debugging some programs it was actually easier to enter a little test loop from the front switches and watch the blinkenlights to see what happened (the 'blinkenlights' would show the value of the current memory address, one light per bit). You could single step the computer that way.
However, the Altair could be extended with both more RAM and also with the, at the time, great operating system CP/M. CP/M was a hacker's dream operating system, you could quite easily port it yourself to a new computer. You would just write your own BIOS, the functions needed were very clearly described in the documentation, then you loaded BDOS which would run using the BIOS entry points. A lot of this software came with full commented source.
TA
Great story, but you forgot to tell how it ended.. did you find what caused the BDOS error on A:?
TA
NO you couldn't get 256KB at the time, whatever way you tried! Not only would it be super-extremely expensive, nobody had ever even heard about any microcomputer with such an amount of memory. Even the Alpha LSI minicomputer we used when I was studying at the time only had 16KB (not RAM, it was actually real core memory.. non-volatile, bonus points for those who can explain what core memory is).
It came with 256 bytes (static) RAM alright, however he certainly got himself a little more memory after a while.
TA
They obviously meant 256 bytes, although that wasn't much even for the time. But you certainly couldn't get 256 KB RAM in any small computer in 1976. My own had 2KB and I wished I had enough money to buy the 16KB RAM kit. Remember that the first IBM PC that came in 1981 (five years later is a long time in the computer age!) only had 16KB RAM. Sixteen kilobytes.
TA
You can't run Wordstar on one of those! Have you ever seen an Altair 8800b? If it's anything more primitive out there it would have to be an Imsai (used in War Games if I'm not mistaken). My old Nascom-II from about the same time was almost advanced compared to it (2KB RAM, yay!). Running Wordstar on it would be like running Word on your pocket calculator. TA
The radar variant should be a great supplement to the existing infrared devices you already have. The radion waves won't be affected by heat. TA
This technology was quite well described in New Scientist several years ago. It did not come from any military division or anything. It's simply an ordinary product that took its ordinary invention-to-finished-product time. TA
"UFO bufs who have read too much SF" is an oxymoron. SF people have no interest in UFOs and little green men. And the SETI project has nothing to do with UFOs either, quite the opposite in fact.
TA
True, as far as it goes. But the really dangerous thing is when cells start to divide before the DNA damage hasn't been fixed up. That's why it's very important to not get any cuts or damages if you have radiation damages (never do surgery until the patient has recovered). It can mean the difference between "you die" and "you're doing pretty good".
TA
There may be things to worry about, but modified brain cell DNA isn't one of them. Brain cells don't divide, and then it doesn't matter much.. the problem is with organs that divide all the time, or if you force them to divide by damaging them. The liver is particularly eager to let its cells start dividing, and if their DNA has been damaged you get cancer.
TA
Loans? Most of the time you get them in the bank where your wages end up (I don't know about all countries on this side but it's pretty common that the employer will only pay you through a bank). :-)
So the bank knows all ins and outs already
TA
>Also think about how many times you have handed over income info
>voluntarily to commercial entities already.
Whatwhatwhatwhat?? Is this a common thing to do in the U.S.? On this other side of the pond it's *not* common. If some "commercial entity" had asked me to tell them my income I would have told them to go **** themselves, as would 99% of the people I know.
TA
I think my road analogy was better (a provider (e.g. a road owner), comes up with a transport medium (e.g. a road), and whoever transports slogans or lies/pornography or whatever on that [road] isn't anything you want to blame the [road] owners for).
Your analogy was particularly bad because you used toxic chemicals as example (something that does hard,physical damage and isn't open for discussion), I believe the right analogy is public speech on the road/public place v.s. public speech on a web site/newsgroup/whatever.
TA
There's something completely wrong with the law interpreters here.
If I walk around on a street or road with a big sign with "defamatory material" or whatever, should the street/road owner be liable? Of course not. Nobody would even think of calling up the owner (which could be private, local authorities or maybe national) demanding them to get me off that road. The police would come directly after me instead, they wouldn't fine the street owner! Why isn't the law the same for ISPs?
TA
It helps to complain. Only yesterday I saw the national version of "Reuters" use the words "cracker" and "cracked" completely correctly when they described the FBI break-ins or whatever it was. It thus got correctly printed in all the newspapers too.
TA
If you break in where you're not supposed to break in you're a "cracker", simple as that. Hackers are bored to death with the thought of it and won't do it unless somebody asks/pays them to break into the (payer's) system as part of a security audit. And then the hacker may not really be particularly good at it but could probably find out how. Eric Raymond actually got this one right: "Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. "
TA
You're the one making the mistakes here. You seem to think that "crackers" are just the same as evil hackers (like "white" and "black" witches, eh?). That braindead thinking is part of the problem here. Hackers and crackers don't have much in common, except for both working with computers these days.
TA
"..because it is only a theory!!"
Why don't you first learn what the word "theory" means when a scientist uses it? It's not the same as what a layman means with "theory". What people in general call a "theory" wouldn't even be considered a hypothesis in scientific terminology.
A scientific theory must be consistent with itself, it must be able to come up with testable predictions etc.
All in all a scientific "theory" is far closer to what most people would call "a fact" than what they mean by "theory" themselves.
TA
"Electrons can tunnel through insulators at speeds faster than the
speed of light."
Not really. First, electrons themselves travel nowhere near the speed of light (when talking about electronic equipment at least), and secondly, even if the "center" of the wave function of the tunelling electron went faster than light the "tip" of the wave function would not. This has been explained in many papers, including in popular form in Scientific American (with a nice cartoon drawing).
TA
You got it backwards: information is what can't travel faster than light, everything else can, in principle. That's what's make any faster-than-light system you can come up with quite useless.
TA
It certainly doesn't multithread in the Unix version..
Maybe it's the graphical part that is able to multithread (or maybe NT multithreads the graphical part for you), try to turn off the graphics (by setting the screensaver to blank the screen, in the control box). Others report that this cuts the processing time to half, if it doesn't for you but merely unloads a CPU you know what's going on..
TA
To avoid the Vogon effect you're describing they should send each work unit out for processing twice, and compare the results.
TA