California had a decent (first pass) bill with some guts to it. It was to go into effect Jan 1.
This bill, as federal, superceded it. Lamely.
Which is pathetic and sad./me wants to see a spammer get REAL jail time for
stealing computer resources on high-jacked machine
pushing scams that are ALREADY illegal
Real jail time in a real jail with real property seizure. Loudly.
Well, no. I don't own or use Windows (ok, work makes me, but only VNCed from a FreeBSD box). I have used Unix for 20 years. I played with X the first time in '88 when a friend was working at MIT on project Athena. Large DEC boxes.
I believe the biggest failing of the XWindow System derives from its birth in the Apple/Lotus LookNFeel error^Wera.
I also used SGIs a lot. GL made it VERY programmable when a "Hello world" X program was 4 pages of setting pointers. More, my SGI could render a 3D "hello world" and spin it on a couple axes without much effort, using the boxes ($20k) accelerated Video card. The CPU would be mainly idle with the graphics hauled.
In short, yes, I've written for X environments, Mac (since Finder 1), GL and OpenGL. A little little bit for windows. And X Windows environments - what the user ends up with - is aged, is not meeting the needs of users or developers. The unovation speaks for itself.
Once upon a, competing widgets were OpenLook and Motif. Nice choice. Sucks and Sucks More (you choose order). The vendors came up with Committee Designed Environment (CDE) - the Camel of desktop environments. Open Source (again) wins out as Sun starts to offer GNOME. To be fair, I've used lots of SunOSs and other OSs on Sparcs and run open source window managers, X11 and tools. (It's irksome when I'm told that GNOME or KDE is a Linux tool).
The replies to my original post are filled with [TOOL] is going to have [FEATURE HERE].
That's sad. X was a leading edge once. Now it's going to, forever.
I do expect more from an open source windowing project like X11 and its addons.
So again, what UI advances have there been?
The core toolkit needs to support acceleration (perhaps through abstraction and "handles" of routines that can be intercepted by a smarter driver), but it also needs to break free of the way it puts pixels. Square windows everywhere, (decorated by the WM, yes, but X owns the window), lots and lots of basic functionality being provided by another layer of tool kits - it's time for core menus, pull downs, dialog boxes, etc. Snapshotting apps and other BASIC functionality needs to be awefully close to core. Core at least has to be able to query an app to find out what it needs to restart it using the file(s) its in and location(s) in said files.
Nobody sane would put X on a handheld; nobody sane would run it remote over a modem speed connection (that will be solved in 1995, promise - it will be here real soon now); nobody sane would run it on a device with smallish memory. X11R4 ran ok on a 16MB SPARCStation 1. Just ok. Add the 17 layers atop X11 that you need to make it functionally, and you need TONS more RAM. My car's LCD should be running X. And it should be easy to program, robust and tiny (for 2 "uh oh" 4 - 16MB)
I'm truly sorry that cutting edge and advanced UI design are not and will not happen when you are using X11. The XConsortium set the stage on a platform of fear and left us tools that are difficult to use; since then it just hasn't been addressed and fixing it appears unlikely.
Pleading that X11R# is simply there to light up pixels in a Window still leaves us with Suck. It's Suck Rationalization. It was more convincing in 1994 or so when advances were expected from vendors and open source. Nobody has delivered.
When I logged into Irix 3.x, I got pretty shaded buttons that spun off to oblivion when selected. That's still a bear to do on a Unix box running X.
-- multihead
I can stick 2 different video cards in a Mac and it shows up as one contiguous desktop. I can tell the system where those monitors are relative to each other. First did this in 1985 - when half of you all were born
I can stick 2 different video cards in a Sparc 10 (or 2 or 5/10, etc) and it will run 2 different windows setups, it two different desktops.
When I stick a PCI S3 video card in a machine with
It's an apple phrase that they came up with to push that OS X was aware of BSD. Too vague to really nail down, it works for apple because they're kernel is not BSD. Their utilities are.
Calling Mac OS X a BSD is like saying that Linux is a GNU OS. It's just utilities.
Now, would someone port BSD's userland over to a linux kernel and get RMS to STFU?
--
There are 10 kinds of people
Those that understand binary
and those that don't
ok, the marketoids created the "Solaris (1|2).x" stuff.
Then then didn't like that "2." part, so they gave it up. "Solaris 8" preceded "Solaris 9"
What comes after 9? A
Pretty clear. Of course if Sun weren't a company driven by technology and were driven by marketing fluff (and 1.2GHz Ultra 3's delivered a year + late
wouldn't indicate that so much, esp when 3+Ghz intel boxes are CPU faster for 1/8th the cost:), then perhaps they'd use a decimal system.
Grrrr. I've used X for 12 years now, regularly. It was *ok* on a Sun 3, if you opened a window and waited a while. It's gotten better.
But in the last several years it really just hasn't moved.
18 years ago the Mac// came out. We stole a vid card from one and put it in another. 4 seconds later, we had 2 screens showing one continuous desktop. Windows and X Windows finally now can do that if you kill a chicken at the full moon.
The X Consortium kept X down for critical years - backing off from coming close to dictating look at feel. As a result, doing things like Exiting an App was a Tower of Babel proposition (frame != lotus != xv != wordperfect != anything else).
Gnome and KDE was developed by folks used to Windows and Mac as kids who demanded a style guide. Too late?
X11R6/Broadway was released and, as far as I can discern, mostly development has stopped. Sure we have drivers to take advantage of cards and 3D engines and such, but it's pretty well unchanged from 1994.
Where is my easy Log Back in and have it give me my desktop I left back (start up the apps I had with cursors in the places I had them)?
Where is my ability to snapshot and env, give up the machine, move to another and restart it?
What's moved FORWARD except drivers in the last couple years?
Why do we care about.. releases.
License?
I have faith that it will be worked out with everyone happy. This reminds me too much of the IPF flameup over a license in a beta of darren's code. It caused PF to be written, but that was mostly schoolyard maturity at work on that one.
Um, perhaps you'd think about that second letter of
ASCII for a second?
For all I care, IBM can HAVE EBCDIC. When a-z are non contiguous... shudder./me misses it not.
Dunno if you could do a vid conference at "low res" like they're used to seeing, then smack your head and say, "Oh, I forgot THIS switch" and pop into a High Def mode with a full size window (or from a small window to spread across 4 screens).
A slightly larger view point (a second camera that shows more) would subtly show them "more" as well.
So pop from a web cam/small window to a high def cam/4 screen video.
similiarly, go from phone quality 11kb/s audio to full CD quality. A little sound processing and subs and speakers in the back will give them an audio immersion experience.
THis way they move from "watching at a distance" to "being in the environment" with a flick of a switch.
I have to concur. I've used pkgsrc (netbsd's
word for "ports" cause "port" to netbsd means netbsd on a new hardware platform - so same as "port" for free/open users)... where was I? Ah: I've used pkgsrc on NetBSD for years. I'm now using it on Solaris, MacOS X and Linux.
*WHY* would I want yet another port project?
What advantage does this one give us? Less filling? Tastes great? better ego fullfillment?
I'm a long time BSD user (used it on vaxen in the 80s) and as much as I enjoy a rift for the sake of a rift... can't we stop wasting time doing the same work over and over and perhaps get ONE ports/pkgsrc project going and working well?
Is there a complelling reason for opendarwin over, say, pkgsrc (which is much more established as a cross platform tool with over 4300 packages done).
I have a psion 3, a 3c and a 5. Nice little thing for its time. STILLL nice, almost.
I carry a Zaurus 5500 (which needs to be charged every 5 minutes). It runs linux. That was part of why I liked it. But more, Mom would never KNOW it runs linux. And that's good. Especially on
handhelds, its about the apps. Whether it's on Palm or Psion or the Z, bad apps make the thing useless.
So how did Psion blow it?
Well, if you wanted to develop (beyond the scripting language), you had to give Psion lots of money for the devel package. It was defended on the boards: "They have a right to make money" blah blah blah.
The PALM came out and dev tools were RIGHT THERE. For free. Sure if you wanted an IDE, you'd blow <US$70 on the stuff to plug into your dev env.
But you could right binaries for it without that, you could EMULATE the psion on Mac, PC and several *nix's.
That, combined with no brainer syncing helped the Palm take off. First, hundreds of useful utilities appeared for free. Harmful to 3com? Well... no. They sell hardware. Hardware is more useful when more people have them and develop for them. Fancy apps don't generally come out of OpenSource, so there was a market. But handy util's (mileage trackers, shopping lists, etc) appeared instantly.
Contrast with Psion
Sure, I can sync it: how many extra software packages and cables (different for each Psion) do I own to backup the bastard? How many variations on small proprietary storage devices?
Sure I can get programs for it.
On cards (only 2 in the machine at a time). Which were often ok, not great. But they were too often islands. I know 3 people who ever had Psions. And I'm a geek. I know about 100 people with Palms these days.
What do I miss in the Zaurus?
I loved that I could press the PHONE button on the psion and it would emit touch tone. I made a call when visiting mom. Looked up the number, held it to the phone and pressed DIAL. Mom looked up at the sound and, after a couple seconds realized what I'd done. "God, that's so lazy..." Sure,,but I never misdialed numbers and it worked for my answering machine when NYNEX was disabling touch tones after the call went through on their payphones.
I miss the battery life.
I don't miss that the free software was mediocre and that the pay software was also not stellar (for lots of money).
I don't miss buying cards for that one model.
CF's boot a couple computers, feed the zaurus and work the camera.
BSD? Linux? who cares?
You don't buy it for the OS (though ssh'ing to it is killer). OPEN SOURCE is good. It means that people can use and extend it. Try that with VxWorks or Wince.
For flamebait, I find that most BSD developed software runs on any unix, but not so with too much software developed on Linux. That's not a reflection on the kernel/OS, but more a reflection on the professional maturity of the developers. There aren't that many fresh faced newbies that find BSD first. (but it's dead anyway and has been for 15 years:)
ummm, Apple and, er, Oranges (or is Sun Yellow:)
36 2x machines is not gonna do what 1 64 CPU machine will do.
with Solaris 9's containers, I can partition up a lot of that big machine into controllable sub machines. SGI does this the best, but Solaris A (5.A?? 10 for marketing weenies) takes it steps further - mostly to match some of the LPAR stuff that IBM offers).
SATA is simply serial ATA. It's not SCSI. On that note, you can drop cost and boost performance buy using a nice Baydel RAID array rather than anything from Sun (I don't buy Kawasaki brand tires; I don't buy Sun brand RAID)
Ever run a large Oracle|Sybase database (the main purpose for most monster Sun boxes) across 36 machines? Me neither. I *do* have it on V1280s, however.
Sun's also good for many many PCI busses. Not slots but independant busses.
We can also mention the switched backplanes that expedite processors reaching RAM banks directly - not a shared bus and other things that make this a different class of computer.
Now I'll concur that at the <= 4CPU end, Sun doesn't really offer much. And if SGI weren't tanking for the previous 5 and next 10 years, they'd likely be doing it better (MIPS is whithering, but pluging 6 4x machines together the its craylink to make it into 1 single 24x machine is cost effective scaling.
With Sun, you start with a 32 way machine populated with 4 CPUs and by the time you grow, oh! those 900MHz ultra 3's aren't going to work with our newer 1200MHz chips.
As much as I hate AIX, the Power5 machines are SWEET at the high end.
But this crowd is about 1-4 way machines. Sun offers no reasonable 1Us (V120: 700Mhz Ultra 2 CPUs? with no cache to speak of? Cmon. My abay
Wait, looking at Sun they have a 2*1GHz V240 Ultra3 box for "only" $6k. Add a RAID box and you can compete with the $4 DL380g3 (at 3GHz, but only 32bit:).
But Sun ships with apache 1.3.12 and other never updated Open Source Tools...
FreeBSD does rock. MacOS X doesn't really have much FreeBSD in it. The kernel is the core of the OS and that's NOT FreeBSD, for better or for worse.
NeXTStep: Mach 2.x kernel with BSD 4.3 userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using DisplayPS.
Mac OS X: Mach 3.x kernel with BSD 4.4+ (mostly from FreeBSD) userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using Display PDF
Note a similarity?
10.3 (finally) updated a lot of userland from FreeBSD 3.x stuff so we have decent IPv6 support and several other improvments, major and minor.
Mach, from CMU, threads nicely and did well for NeXT. HFS+ is all but proprietary (it would be neat if the OS X UFS implementation wasn't quite so old).
We'll skip over the whole Jobs'ism of DisplayPS and Objective C and creating NI when my other 12 *nix architectures spoke NIS (only). LDAP is a fine replacement for NI/NIS/NIS+. If only I could run a window from another machine without VNC. It's just like SunView:)
The big big win is pulling over NetBSD's pkgsrc (free and openbsd call it "ports") and use it on OS X (or solaris, or linux or irix).
Building your tools from source means no "find the RPM and trust the guy who built it" and no issues with library versions (linux's version of DLL hell) plus you get NetBSD's pkg_* system and a good ftp client:).
Oh, and the fact that I can BUY it and get buy it and get contractually obligated support means less of a hard sell into the OpenSource Phobic corporate world....
if they'd get over that "but it's apple" thing. (yes, it's apple. the vendor that ships more Unix that any other company).
One could also ask why run IPv4 on a small home network?
Hell, why have a network at home. One machine with IP is enough. I can run NetBeui on the others, right?
(ok, I'm MS free here with a dozen machines, so beui's out)
Effort to setup IPv6? Not really more than it took you to learn IPv4. You figured out what a netmask is right?
It means my machines speak IPv6 to other machines that speak IPv6 and are reachable by IPv6. Otherwise, all apps back down to IPv4 and use that.
transition to IPv6? More effort has gone into that than anything else. There is no IPv4 "flag day" where all the ARPA-Net machines were brought down, NCP removed and TCP put in.
Backbones and cores of networks can move to IPv6 with the outlying parts speakign IPv4. Home users can use IPv4 fairly perpetually while their ISP uses IPv6. If their ISP speaks to another ISP with IPv6, no matter.
The biggest bar has been Cisco and other routers. Some services too - NFS/AFS would be nice to have run well between vendors over 6.
The benefits include easier crypto, QOS, address space limits removed.
Weaknesses being worked out involve how to scalably handle sites with multiple backbone connections (eg. you have 2 T1s to different providers). Who "owns" the prefix? How will routing be handled right, etc. (Basically the same issues plaguing IPv4 now).
"Anycast" is pretty neat. Here's an address, find me the nearest way to it. So I can have mail servers on an anycast address. Perhaps 1 in the US and on in France. If you send me mail, it finds THE NEAREST gateway. Right now, my preferred MX is in the US, so if you send to a french employee from france, it crosses the ocean twice.
Apply this to web servers now - find me the nearest www.slashdot.org.
Useless?
Re:ipv6 network stacks for other o/s-es ?
on
IPv6 Success Stories?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"HI I'm going to insist on running old software and want support for it retroactively."
You can get support for older computers. You may have issues with older software. Just like getting TCP/IPv4 support was a PITA before 1990.
Dude, try to get IPv4 onto Mac's System 4. Oh that's right, it was kind of a big PITA. TCP/IP(4) in Windows 3.0? You *could* go buy it, I guess.
- 68030 MacCI running OpenBSD (with IPv6)
- 486/133 running FreeBSD (With IPv6)
- SPARC 2 running NetBSD or OpenBSD (with IPv6)
- Sun 3... Well its off.
- Kaypro "luggable"? No networking in CP/M. Sorry. but it runs.
- Apple//s? See above.
- Athlon running Linux (with IPv6)
- 586 Soekris box running FreeBSD 5.2 (with IPv6, wireless, IPSec and IP6-4 gateway)
- Festival of Apple and Sun and SGI and DEC hardware - all running IPv6
IPv4 only: An annex terminal server and an HP LaserJet.
Oh, they all work SEAMLESSLY. If a box needs to print to the printer (called "HP") is looks for an AAAA record, fails to find it, looks for an A record, and sends the code.
Friends visiting generally never notice the IPv6
Cost? $0
Effort? Pretty close to nil
Skills gained by using it for years and not even pausing in knowing about how to set it up and what it's capable of now? Priceless
Um, in 1984 Mr Reagan was president, telling us that we had plenty of money and the economy was great - mostly because he was deficit spending TRILLIONS and pumping it into his buddies' defense companies.
Nicaraguan terrorists were our friends as were El Salvadorian dictators. We had yet to begin, fully, the "War On Drugs" (sent up as a distraction to "Oh, Ollie North *did* siphon drugs to pay to fund the Contras explicitly against Congressional Mandate" and "you have no hard proof that as a candidate that my campaign negotiated with Iran to hold Americans until the election") - the war on drugs which has taken property and put american's who have never sold or seen or touched drugs into prisons ("conspiracy to ponder thinking about forming a committee to sell drugs" - whatta system). And since most prisoners on drugs are there because they didn't know enough to turn over on other folks, most of them are just low level petty criminals - the bottom of the drug selling food chain. But that's why america is free of drugs today, right?
Good Ford, man! Remember, Winston Smith was (it appeared) alone in his recognition of the wrongness of the system - it wasn't a book about the masses recognizing something wrong, it was a book about one guy who noticed among all the others.
The online stuff is fine REFERENCE material.
It answers questions from the "what are the arguments that THIS FUNCTION takes?"
There are also, like any real world programming language, many ways to approach the same problem.
Sometimes there are BAD ways (a function might exist to do something simple and quickly and shouldn't be used as part of a more complex solution)
The online docs don't answer the questions like:
What's the best way to read in an apps config file and perhaps even write it back out?
How can I write a random cookie to someone and use that value as a lookup into a database of current state and other information (and expire said info for out-of-date sessions)?
Can I easily use XML for configs rather than.ini files?
Books can show best practices, hazards in using certain functions, how some suites of functions best interact with other uses, etc. A book may also elide certain functions that are older and perhaps better replicated in newer functions - code waiting to die (once that PHP2 stuff gets redone).
This sort of thing has no place in documentation for a list of functions.
We could call is "user manual" vs. "reference manual". Online docs for PHP are a great reference manual.
well, the buzz is the goal, so I could handle that. But it *was* amusing watching our visiting french guys try to deal with the watery americano in our office.
I work anti-spam at a large corp. 70% is about right.
I've done a lot of email work with companies.
It's damaging email. It's hurting business. It costs BILLIONS a year to slow down spam to make mailboxes not entirely useless.
A manager: "I can't see how someone serious about doing business could keep relying on email."
Mail is being discarded (no bounce backs, no trail) all over the place.
Now, when the US House stops blocking spam to their own mailboxes, maybe we'll get some laws with some balls and maybe the FTC, FBI and similar agencies might get the budget and motivation to track down the HUGE amount of spam that is illegal in that it's perpetrating scams or illegal medicines.
We convict the minor players and offer them real prison or they get to appear on the new Fox show: "Cane the Spammer".
20 whacks. Each whack given by a system admin selected by lottery.
Do it public and demotivate the kiddies willing to blast out some mail for some guy for $500.
When I worked in NY in film and later on Wall St, we drank lots and lots of coffees. And to make us happy, clients and people who needed us would bring us espresso. Life was good.
Then I worked from home one day and was out of both sugar and milk (yes, I'm a wuss). Meant to go out. 1.5 blocks to my coffee shop, back when they were manned by cool people with good music who made a decent wage. Never got there.
Spent from 4:30 on in bed with the shades drawn and a headache and "extreme stomach discomfort". (this is a family site.) Decided enough was enough. Got some mountain dew to at least ween off it. (I was drinking 4-5 espresso's/day).
I now generally stop drinkiing it in July. I get righteous and mock my friends who need coffee. But then, Aug 1, I make a tripple dose latte and enjoy that rush that's been missing for a year. Woo Hoo! That's the payoff
So:
Reduce intake - duh. Unlike cigarettes, you don't have CRAVINGS for coffee. You have a headache and feel like crap - for a day.
Drink water (not soda, not beer, just plain water). it's good for you in general. I keep a nalgene bottle by my desk. It hydrates you.
Caffeine opens blood vessels. Drink water, pop a couple asprins.
When you really cut off, do it on a wasted saturday (rainy, useless, no thinking needs).
A Week!? I suppose if you drink 8-10 cups a day. On the other hand, cut back first. My boss switched to decaf in the afternoon. Then started cutting his post-10 AM coffees with half decaf. Ended up with 2 cups of caffeinated per day.
A day is quite reasonable cause you'll be fuzzy and might feel like crap.
And suck it up, this ain't morphine or nicotine. It's freaking coffee. If you're addiction is soda, then it's about sugar.
Oh, if you're in Europe (france, italy), the above applies less. My french friends mock american coffee. They make me coffee and pass me a glass of water to dilute it to "american strength". (I just dump 2-3 sugars in instead).
I swear french coffee is:
Make 2 espressos.
change the grounds
dump the 2 espresso's back into the machine through the fresh grounds.
Houston, the center of oil and oil energy, has a paper decrying the dangers of WIND enery? To the environment?
I laugh.
But first, more useful stats are gleaned not from "in 20 years of operations" but in "birds per year." Is it static or have lots of work in the last few years to reduce bird death paid off? Using a broad statistic like that reeks of lazy journalism or trying to push aside that bird deaths/year have plunged since Altamont first opened.
I'm not far from the wind farm right now (just over a rise I can see), and I know that lots of birds got whacked with the original windmills.
I also know that new windmills were put in, along with other measures, to DEAL with this problem.
I've heard (on radio, in paper) that the number of birds/year killed is down VASTLY.
Ok, that out of the way: Damage to wild life isincluding hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors - but I imagine that the VAST MAJORITY of bird deaths are to sparrows and other common birds.
How much damage is done compared to if they were pumping oil from those fields? Or if it has a coal power plant there?
I find it a little disigenuous that it comes from Houston; from the home of the Resident of the US; on the same day the radio covers stories of Wyoming's [home of Big Dick Cheney] massive budget SURPLUS.
Did you know that a fair amount of energy is required to MAKE solar panels? Ban them!
The best way to save animals and such is to:
Reduce energy use (do you NEED an electric razor when a manual one works fine? Toothbrush? Does that tivo REALLY need to be on 24/7 with disks spinning?
Have you noticed that plasma screens just SUCK power?
It's not like the environmentalists don't have other things they could do. Every MW not needed is a win for the environment.
Generate power locally. And make is EASY for Joe Sixpack to join in.
If every new electrical meter put it were REQUIRED to run both directions, then it would be a simple matter to run 2, 4 solar panels and just push it back on the grid.
If every new house was REQUIRED to have at least the infrastructure
for roof panels - a PVC from roof to power area to run cables, perhaps
footings for mounting panels - cost < $100 when putting up a roof and hundreds or thousands when putting onto an existing roof.
If they ALSO measured accoring to TIME of use (peak/non-peak), we might have a slight cash motivation to do power consumptive things during the off peak. Right now the only motivation is the somewhat lame: "because it's good". Most people will respond better, I'm sorry to say, to "because it's good and you'll save 20%/month"
If every new WATER meter in Calif were required to measure usage based on TIME, then people might be a bit motivated to run dishs and laundry at night.
So, now that computers are about as fast as they need for the software we're currently running, where are the "new P4/1.2GHz that uses 50% the power of the same machine using der biggen chip?"
I know my LCD's suck a lot less power than CRTs, that my ARM computer uses a gazillionth the power of the dual 1GHz 1U. AT this point, with intel pushing 4GHz, I'd be more attracted to a machine advertised as saving me 20%/month on my power bills. (and yes, I mostly use a 266MHz laptop or a 400MHz apple laptop).
Encourage less power use and you support the country and reduce our need to support nations breeding terrorists.
With Enron/worldcom, you can say: "Yeah, the management really fucked up. I got screwed too - no retirement benefits, worthless stock and no job. Now lets talk about my qualifications."
With SCO, the problem is the qualifications. SCO's market mainly comes from people who have been locked into it forever. I know I moved several hundred of my customers machines off of it. Early on, Sun cost more to acquire, but it became clear to customers who'd insisted on cheaping out with SCO that the support, quality of software and features were bigger issues. In the late Xenix/UnixWare time (93-94), features like "NIS support" were added that required/.rhost access so the box could rcp the "Servers" files and join them with the system ones. No RPC, just a sad little hack.
When Sun/AOL bought the wreckage of Netscape, the Netscapees were, widely, admired as qualified and innovative.
No, were I dealing with SCO refugees, I'd be letting them defend excessively mediocre software. But I'd not hold them too responsible for the FiaSCOs of DARL and all unless they WERE closely connected.
Then "for home use, no encryption is good enough".
There IS no security in WEP.
Presume it.
It's as secure as leaving your key under the mat and hoping your neighbor doesn't notice (ok break onto my LAN and you don't get much (vs. the house)). But telling people that WEP is "ok" is just irresponsible.
That said, I generally use SSH and the only cleartext on my wireless net is webbrowsing.
OS X, Unix and even that other OS all support IPSec. PPTP is even better.
I went through, they asked for the usual "please turn it on" and I kicked it out of sleep.
Unfortunately, the last thing on the screen was a terminal window filled with stuff, but the bottom lines saying beastie 51% ps ax| grep something
beastie 52% sudo kill 1514
Pause "What's that KILL thing there mean?"
I was stopping a program. Do you really want me to explain BSD in detail?
PauseUm, I guess you can go.
I bump my WM (fvwm) over to an innocuous desktop when I go through now.
Hot Chick: Wow, you're really cute. I'd love to go on a picnic.
Before:
You would have to say, "sorry, I have no picnic implements." whereupon she would say, "Oh well, I guess I and my hot twin sister will have to give up our virginity to someone else."
Now:
well, I have a picnic basket in my room.
HC: "That's great. Can I see your room? I'd like to go there because this new bra is really too tight on my breasts and they ache. Would you rub them for me?"
Which situation would you rather be in? Now you're prepared (well, add a 12 pack of condoms and a bottle of gatorade to replace lost fluids and you're set).
Slashdot Mirror
This bill, as federal, superceded it. Lamely.
Which is pathetic and sad. /me wants to see a spammer get REAL jail time for
stealing computer resources on high-jacked machine
pushing scams that are ALREADY illegal
Real jail time in a real jail with real property seizure. Loudly.
I believe the biggest failing of the XWindow System derives from its birth in the Apple/Lotus LookNFeel error^Wera.
I also used SGIs a lot. GL made it VERY programmable when a "Hello world" X program was 4 pages of setting pointers. More, my SGI could render a 3D "hello world" and spin it on a couple axes without much effort, using the boxes ($20k) accelerated Video card. The CPU would be mainly idle with the graphics hauled.
In short, yes, I've written for X environments, Mac (since Finder 1), GL and OpenGL. A little little bit for windows. And X Windows environments - what the user ends up with - is aged, is not meeting the needs of users or developers. The unovation speaks for itself.
Once upon a, competing widgets were OpenLook and Motif. Nice choice. Sucks and Sucks More (you choose order). The vendors came up with Committee Designed Environment (CDE) - the Camel of desktop environments. Open Source (again) wins out as Sun starts to offer GNOME. To be fair, I've used lots of SunOSs and other OSs on Sparcs and run open source window managers, X11 and tools. (It's irksome when I'm told that GNOME or KDE is a Linux tool).
The replies to my original post are filled with [TOOL] is going to have [FEATURE HERE].
That's sad. X was a leading edge once. Now it's going to, forever.
I do expect more from an open source windowing project like X11 and its addons.
So again, what UI advances have there been?
The core toolkit needs to support acceleration (perhaps through abstraction and "handles" of routines that can be intercepted by a smarter driver), but it also needs to break free of the way it puts pixels. Square windows everywhere, (decorated by the WM, yes, but X owns the window), lots and lots of basic functionality being provided by another layer of tool kits - it's time for core menus, pull downs, dialog boxes, etc. Snapshotting apps and other BASIC functionality needs to be awefully close to core. Core at least has to be able to query an app to find out what it needs to restart it using the file(s) its in and location(s) in said files.
Nobody sane would put X on a handheld; nobody sane would run it remote over a modem speed connection (that will be solved in 1995, promise - it will be here real soon now); nobody sane would run it on a device with smallish memory. X11R4 ran ok on a 16MB SPARCStation 1. Just ok. Add the 17 layers atop X11 that you need to make it functionally, and you need TONS more RAM. My car's LCD should be running X. And it should be easy to program, robust and tiny (for 2 "uh oh" 4 - 16MB)
I'm truly sorry that cutting edge and advanced UI design are not and will not happen when you are using X11. The XConsortium set the stage on a platform of fear and left us tools that are difficult to use; since then it just hasn't been addressed and fixing it appears unlikely.
Pleading that X11R# is simply there to light up pixels in a Window still leaves us with Suck. It's Suck Rationalization. It was more convincing in 1994 or so when advances were expected from vendors and open source. Nobody has delivered. When I logged into Irix 3.x, I got pretty shaded buttons that spun off to oblivion when selected. That's still a bear to do on a Unix box running X.
--
multihead
I can stick 2 different video cards in a Mac and it shows up as one contiguous desktop. I can tell the system where those monitors are relative to each other. First did this in 1985 - when half of you all were born
I can stick 2 different video cards in a Sparc 10 (or 2 or 5/10, etc) and it will run 2 different windows setups, it two different desktops.
When I stick a PCI S3 video card in a machine with
It's an apple phrase that they came up with to push that OS X was aware of BSD. Too vague to really nail down, it works for apple because they're kernel is not BSD. Their utilities are.
Calling Mac OS X a BSD is like saying that Linux is a GNU OS. It's just utilities.
Now, would someone port BSD's userland over to a linux kernel and get RMS to STFU?
--
There are 10 kinds of people
Those that understand binary
and those that don't
Then then didn't like that "2." part, so they gave it up. "Solaris 8" preceded "Solaris 9"
What comes after 9?
A
Pretty clear. Of course if Sun weren't a company driven by technology and were driven by marketing fluff (and 1.2GHz Ultra 3's delivered a year + late wouldn't indicate that so much, esp when 3+Ghz intel boxes are CPU faster for 1/8th the cost :), then perhaps they'd use a decimal system.
But in the last several years it really just hasn't moved.
18 years ago the Mac // came out. We stole a vid card from one and put it in another. 4 seconds later, we had 2 screens showing one continuous desktop. Windows and X Windows finally now can do that if you kill a chicken at the full moon.
The X Consortium kept X down for critical years - backing off from coming close to dictating look at feel. As a result, doing things like Exiting an App was a Tower of Babel proposition (frame != lotus != xv != wordperfect != anything else).
Gnome and KDE was developed by folks used to Windows and Mac as kids who demanded a style guide. Too late?
X11R6/Broadway was released and, as far as I can discern, mostly development has stopped. Sure we have drivers to take advantage of cards and 3D engines and such, but it's pretty well unchanged from 1994.
Where is my easy Log Back in and have it give me my desktop I left back (start up the apps I had with cursors in the places I had them)?
Where is my ability to snapshot and env, give up the machine, move to another and restart it?
What's moved FORWARD except drivers in the last couple years?
Why do we care about .. releases.
License?
I have faith that it will be worked out with everyone happy. This reminds me too much of the IPF flameup over a license in a beta of darren's code. It caused PF to be written, but that was mostly schoolyard maturity at work on that one.
Um, perhaps you'd think about that second letter of ASCII for a second? /me misses it not.
For all I care, IBM can HAVE EBCDIC. When a-z are non contiguous... shudder.
When I was cursing it (Xenix) my friend at MS says "Well of course it sucks. It's MS's way of demoing to our customers why they want Microsoft OS/2"
Dunno if you could do a vid conference at "low res" like they're used to seeing, then smack your head and say, "Oh, I forgot THIS switch" and pop into a High Def mode with a full size window (or from a small window to spread across 4 screens).
A slightly larger view point (a second camera that shows more) would subtly show them "more" as well.
So pop from a web cam/small window to a high def cam/4 screen video.
similiarly, go from phone quality 11kb/s audio to full CD quality. A little sound processing and subs and speakers in the back will give them an audio immersion experience.
THis way they move from "watching at a distance" to "being in the environment" with a flick of a switch.
*WHY* would I want yet another port project?
What advantage does this one give us? Less filling? Tastes great? better ego fullfillment?
I'm a long time BSD user (used it on vaxen in the 80s) and as much as I enjoy a rift for the sake of a rift ... can't we stop wasting time doing the same work over and over and perhaps get ONE ports/pkgsrc project going and working well?
Is there a complelling reason for opendarwin over, say, pkgsrc (which is much more established as a cross platform tool with over 4300 packages done).
I carry a Zaurus 5500 (which needs to be charged every 5 minutes). It runs linux. That was part of why I liked it. But more, Mom would never KNOW it runs linux. And that's good. Especially on handhelds, its about the apps. Whether it's on Palm or Psion or the Z, bad apps make the thing useless.
So how did Psion blow it?
Well, if you wanted to develop (beyond the scripting language), you had to give Psion lots of money for the devel package. It was defended on the boards: "They have a right to make money" blah blah blah.
The PALM came out and dev tools were RIGHT THERE. For free. Sure if you wanted an IDE, you'd blow <US$70 on the stuff to plug into your dev env. But you could right binaries for it without that, you could EMULATE the psion on Mac, PC and several *nix's.
That, combined with no brainer syncing helped the Palm take off. First, hundreds of useful utilities appeared for free. Harmful to 3com? Well ... no. They sell hardware. Hardware is more useful when more people have them and develop for them. Fancy apps don't generally come out of OpenSource, so there was a market. But handy util's (mileage trackers, shopping lists, etc) appeared instantly.
Contrast with Psion
Sure, I can sync it: how many extra software packages and cables (different for each Psion) do I own to backup the bastard? How many variations on small proprietary storage devices?
Sure I can get programs for it.
On cards (only 2 in the machine at a time). Which were often ok, not great. But they were too often islands. I know 3 people who ever had Psions. And I'm a geek. I know about 100 people with Palms these days.
What do I miss in the Zaurus?
I loved that I could press the PHONE button on the psion and it would emit touch tone. I made a call when visiting mom. Looked up the number, held it to the phone and pressed DIAL. Mom looked up at the sound and, after a couple seconds realized what I'd done. "God, that's so lazy..." Sure,,but I never misdialed numbers and it worked for my answering machine when NYNEX was disabling touch tones after the call went through on their payphones.
I miss the battery life.
I don't miss that the free software was mediocre and that the pay software was also not stellar (for lots of money).
I don't miss buying cards for that one model.
CF's boot a couple computers, feed the zaurus and work the camera.
BSD? Linux? who cares? :)
You don't buy it for the OS (though ssh'ing to it is killer). OPEN SOURCE is good. It means that people can use and extend it. Try that with VxWorks or Wince.
For flamebait, I find that most BSD developed software runs on any unix, but not so with too much software developed on Linux. That's not a reflection on the kernel/OS, but more a reflection on the professional maturity of the developers. There aren't that many fresh faced newbies that find BSD first. (but it's dead anyway and has been for 15 years
36 2x machines is not gonna do what 1 64 CPU machine will do.
- with Solaris 9's containers, I can partition up a lot of that big machine into controllable sub machines. SGI does this the best, but Solaris A (5.A?? 10 for marketing weenies) takes it steps further - mostly to match some of the LPAR stuff that IBM offers).
- SATA is simply serial ATA. It's not SCSI.
- Ever run a large Oracle|Sybase database (the main purpose for most monster Sun boxes) across 36 machines? Me neither. I *do* have it on V1280s, however.
-
Sun's also good for many many PCI busses. Not slots but independant busses.
Now I'll concur that at the <= 4CPU end, Sun doesn't really offer much. And if SGI weren't tanking for the previous 5 and next 10 years, they'd likely be doing it better (MIPS is whithering, but pluging 6 4x machines together the its craylink to make it into 1 single 24x machine is cost effective scaling.On that note, you can drop cost and boost performance buy using a nice Baydel RAID array rather than anything from Sun (I don't buy Kawasaki brand tires; I don't buy Sun brand RAID)
We can also mention the switched backplanes that expedite processors reaching RAM banks directly - not a shared bus and other things that make this a different class of computer.
With Sun, you start with a 32 way machine populated with 4 CPUs and by the time you grow, oh! those 900MHz ultra 3's aren't going to work with our newer 1200MHz chips.
As much as I hate AIX, the Power5 machines are SWEET at the high end.
But this crowd is about 1-4 way machines. Sun offers no reasonable 1Us (V120: 700Mhz Ultra 2 CPUs? with no cache to speak of? Cmon. My abay Wait, looking at Sun they have a 2*1GHz V240 Ultra3 box for "only" $6k. Add a RAID box and you can compete with the $4 DL380g3 (at 3GHz, but only 32bit :).
But Sun ships with apache 1.3.12 and other never updated Open Source Tools...
NeXTStep: Mach 2.x kernel with BSD 4.3 userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using DisplayPS.
Mac OS X: Mach 3.x kernel with BSD 4.4+ (mostly from FreeBSD) userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using Display PDF
Note a similarity?
10.3 (finally) updated a lot of userland from FreeBSD 3.x stuff so we have decent IPv6 support and several other improvments, major and minor.
Mach, from CMU, threads nicely and did well for NeXT. HFS+ is all but proprietary (it would be neat if the OS X UFS implementation wasn't quite so old).
We'll skip over the whole Jobs'ism of DisplayPS and Objective C and creating NI when my other 12 *nix architectures spoke NIS (only). LDAP is a fine replacement for NI/NIS/NIS+. If only I could run a window from another machine without VNC. It's just like SunView :)
The big big win is pulling over NetBSD's pkgsrc (free and openbsd call it "ports") and use it on OS X (or solaris, or linux or irix).
Building your tools from source means no "find the RPM and trust the guy who built it" and no issues with library versions (linux's version of DLL hell) plus you get NetBSD's pkg_* system and a good ftp client :).
Oh, and the fact that I can BUY it and get buy it and get contractually obligated support means less of a hard sell into the OpenSource Phobic corporate world....
if they'd get over that "but it's apple" thing. (yes, it's apple. the vendor that ships more Unix that any other company).
Hell, why have a network at home. One machine with IP is enough. I can run NetBeui on the others, right?
(ok, I'm MS free here with a dozen machines, so beui's out)
Effort to setup IPv6? Not really more than it took you to learn IPv4. You figured out what a netmask is right?
It means my machines speak IPv6 to other machines that speak IPv6 and are reachable by IPv6. Otherwise, all apps back down to IPv4 and use that.
transition to IPv6? More effort has gone into that than anything else. There is no IPv4 "flag day" where all the ARPA-Net machines were brought down, NCP removed and TCP put in.
Backbones and cores of networks can move to IPv6 with the outlying parts speakign IPv4. Home users can use IPv4 fairly perpetually while their ISP uses IPv6. If their ISP speaks to another ISP with IPv6, no matter.
The biggest bar has been Cisco and other routers. Some services too - NFS/AFS would be nice to have run well between vendors over 6.
The benefits include easier crypto, QOS, address space limits removed.
Weaknesses being worked out involve how to scalably handle sites with multiple backbone connections (eg. you have 2 T1s to different providers). Who "owns" the prefix? How will routing be handled right, etc. (Basically the same issues plaguing IPv4 now).
"Anycast" is pretty neat. Here's an address, find me the nearest way to it. So I can have mail servers on an anycast address. Perhaps 1 in the US and on in France. If you send me mail, it finds THE NEAREST gateway. Right now, my preferred MX is in the US, so if you send to a french employee from france, it crosses the ocean twice.
Apply this to web servers now - find me the nearest www.slashdot.org.
Useless?
You can get support for older computers. You may have issues with older software. Just like getting TCP/IPv4 support was a PITA before 1990.
Dude, try to get IPv4 onto Mac's System 4. Oh that's right, it was kind of a big PITA. TCP/IP(4) in Windows 3.0? You *could* go buy it, I guess.
- 68030 MacCI running OpenBSD (with IPv6) //s? See above.
- 486/133 running FreeBSD (With IPv6)
- SPARC 2 running NetBSD or OpenBSD (with IPv6)
- Sun 3... Well its off.
- Kaypro "luggable"? No networking in CP/M. Sorry. but it runs.
- Apple
- Athlon running Linux (with IPv6)
- 586 Soekris box running FreeBSD 5.2 (with IPv6, wireless, IPSec and IP6-4 gateway)
- Festival of Apple and Sun and SGI and DEC hardware - all running IPv6
IPv4 only: An annex terminal server and an HP LaserJet.
Oh, they all work SEAMLESSLY. If a box needs to print to the printer (called "HP") is looks for an AAAA record, fails to find it, looks for an A record, and sends the code.
Friends visiting generally never notice the IPv6
Cost? $0
Effort? Pretty close to nil
Skills gained by using it for years and not even pausing in knowing about how to set it up and what it's capable of now? Priceless
Nicaraguan terrorists were our friends as were El Salvadorian dictators. We had yet to begin, fully, the "War On Drugs" (sent up as a distraction to "Oh, Ollie North *did* siphon drugs to pay to fund the Contras explicitly against Congressional Mandate" and "you have no hard proof that as a candidate that my campaign negotiated with Iran to hold Americans until the election") - the war on drugs which has taken property and put american's who have never sold or seen or touched drugs into prisons ("conspiracy to ponder thinking about forming a committee to sell drugs" - whatta system). And since most prisoners on drugs are there because they didn't know enough to turn over on other folks, most of them are just low level petty criminals - the bottom of the drug selling food chain. But that's why america is free of drugs today, right?
Good Ford, man! Remember, Winston Smith was (it appeared) alone in his recognition of the wrongness of the system - it wasn't a book about the masses recognizing something wrong, it was a book about one guy who noticed among all the others.
--
Buy a Hummer (12 mpg?) and support terrorism.
There are also, like any real world programming language, many ways to approach the same problem.
Sometimes there are BAD ways (a function might exist to do something simple and quickly and shouldn't be used as part of a more complex solution)
The online docs don't answer the questions like: .ini files?
What's the best way to read in an apps config file and perhaps even write it back out?
How can I write a random cookie to someone and use that value as a lookup into a database of current state and other information (and expire said info for out-of-date sessions)?
Can I easily use XML for configs rather than
Books can show best practices, hazards in using certain functions, how some suites of functions best interact with other uses, etc. A book may also elide certain functions that are older and perhaps better replicated in newer functions - code waiting to die (once that PHP2 stuff gets redone).
This sort of thing has no place in documentation for a list of functions.
We could call is "user manual" vs. "reference manual". Online docs for PHP are a great reference manual.
well, the buzz is the goal, so I could handle that. But it *was* amusing watching our visiting french guys try to deal with the watery americano in our office.
I've done a lot of email work with companies.
It's damaging email. It's hurting business. It costs BILLIONS a year to slow down spam to make mailboxes not entirely useless.
A manager: "I can't see how someone serious about doing business could keep relying on email."
Mail is being discarded (no bounce backs, no trail) all over the place.
Now, when the US House stops blocking spam to their own mailboxes, maybe we'll get some laws with some balls and maybe the FTC, FBI and similar agencies might get the budget and motivation to track down the HUGE amount of spam that is illegal in that it's perpetrating scams or illegal medicines.
We convict the minor players and offer them real prison or they get to appear on the new Fox show:
"Cane the Spammer".
20 whacks. Each whack given by a system admin selected by lottery.
Do it public and demotivate the kiddies willing to blast out some mail for some guy for $500.
Then I worked from home one day and was out of both sugar and milk (yes, I'm a wuss). Meant to go out. 1.5 blocks to my coffee shop, back when they were manned by cool people with good music who made a decent wage. Never got there.
Spent from 4:30 on in bed with the shades drawn and a headache and "extreme stomach discomfort". (this is a family site.) Decided enough was enough. Got some mountain dew to at least ween off it. (I was drinking 4-5 espresso's/day).
I now generally stop drinkiing it in July. I get righteous and mock my friends who need coffee. But then, Aug 1, I make a tripple dose latte and enjoy that rush that's been missing for a year. Woo Hoo! That's the payoff
So:
Reduce intake - duh. Unlike cigarettes, you don't have CRAVINGS for coffee. You have a headache and feel like crap - for a day.
Drink water (not soda, not beer, just plain water). it's good for you in general. I keep a nalgene bottle by my desk. It hydrates you.
Caffeine opens blood vessels. Drink water, pop a couple asprins.
When you really cut off, do it on a wasted saturday (rainy, useless, no thinking needs).
A Week!? I suppose if you drink 8-10 cups a day. On the other hand, cut back first. My boss switched to decaf in the afternoon. Then started cutting his post-10 AM coffees with half decaf. Ended up with 2 cups of caffeinated per day.
A day is quite reasonable cause you'll be fuzzy and might feel like crap. And suck it up, this ain't morphine or nicotine. It's freaking coffee. If you're addiction is soda, then it's about sugar.
Oh, if you're in Europe (france, italy), the above applies less. My french friends mock american coffee. They make me coffee and pass me a glass of water to dilute it to "american strength". (I just dump 2-3 sugars in instead).
I swear french coffee is:
- Make 2 espressos.
- change the grounds
- dump the 2 espresso's back into the machine through the fresh grounds.
No needle? Use a cup to injest it.Drink less of it
Drink more water.
Repeat until no caf.
I laugh.
But first, more useful stats are gleaned not from "in 20 years of operations" but in "birds per year." Is it static or have lots of work in the last few years to reduce bird death paid off? Using a broad statistic like that reeks of lazy journalism or trying to push aside that bird deaths/year have plunged since Altamont first opened.
I'm not far from the wind farm right now (just over a rise I can see), and I know that lots of birds got whacked with the original windmills.
I also know that new windmills were put in, along with other measures, to DEAL with this problem.
I've heard (on radio, in paper) that the number of birds/year killed is down VASTLY.
Ok, that out of the way: Damage to wild life isincluding hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors - but I imagine that the VAST MAJORITY of bird deaths are to sparrows and other common birds. How much damage is done compared to if they were pumping oil from those fields? Or if it has a coal power plant there?
I find it a little disigenuous that it comes from Houston; from the home of the Resident of the US; on the same day the radio covers stories of Wyoming's [home of Big Dick Cheney] massive budget SURPLUS.
Did you know that a fair amount of energy is required to MAKE solar panels? Ban them!
The best way to save animals and such is to:
Reduce energy use (do you NEED an electric razor when a manual one works fine? Toothbrush? Does that tivo REALLY need to be on 24/7 with disks spinning?
Have you noticed that plasma screens just SUCK power?
It's not like the environmentalists don't have other things they could do. Every MW not needed is a win for the environment.
Generate power locally. And make is EASY for Joe Sixpack to join in.
If every new electrical meter put it were REQUIRED to run both directions, then it would be a simple matter to run 2, 4 solar panels and just push it back on the grid.
If every new house was REQUIRED to have at least the infrastructure for roof panels - a PVC from roof to power area to run cables, perhaps footings for mounting panels - cost < $100 when putting up a roof and hundreds or thousands when putting onto an existing roof.
If they ALSO measured accoring to TIME of use (peak/non-peak), we might have a slight cash motivation to do power consumptive things during the off peak. Right now the only motivation is the somewhat lame: "because it's good". Most people will respond better, I'm sorry to say, to "because it's good and you'll save 20%/month"
If every new WATER meter in Calif were required to measure usage based on TIME, then people might be a bit motivated to run dishs and laundry at night.
So, now that computers are about as fast as they need for the software we're currently running, where are the "new P4/1.2GHz that uses 50% the power of the same machine using der biggen chip?"
I know my LCD's suck a lot less power than CRTs, that my ARM computer uses a gazillionth the power of the dual 1GHz 1U. AT this point, with intel pushing 4GHz, I'd be more attracted to a machine advertised as saving me 20%/month on my power bills. (and yes, I mostly use a 266MHz laptop or a 400MHz apple laptop).
Encourage less power use and you support the country and reduce our need to support nations breeding terrorists.
With SCO, the problem is the qualifications. SCO's market mainly comes from people who have been locked into it forever. I know I moved several hundred of my customers machines off of it. Early on, Sun cost more to acquire, but it became clear to customers who'd insisted on cheaping out with SCO that the support, quality of software and features were bigger issues. In the late Xenix/UnixWare time (93-94), features like "NIS support" were added that required /.rhost access so the box could rcp the "Servers" files and join them with the system ones. No RPC, just a sad little hack.
When Sun/AOL bought the wreckage of Netscape, the Netscapees were, widely, admired as qualified and innovative.
No, were I dealing with SCO refugees, I'd be letting them defend excessively mediocre software. But I'd not hold them too responsible for the FiaSCOs of DARL and all unless they WERE closely connected.
It just sucks when someone with not tons of effort can send a billion spams out your box one afternoon.
Then "for home use, no encryption is good enough".
There IS no security in WEP.
Presume it.
It's as secure as leaving your key under the mat and hoping your neighbor doesn't notice (ok break onto my LAN and you don't get much (vs. the house)). But telling people that WEP is "ok" is just irresponsible.
That said, I generally use SSH and the only cleartext on my wireless net is webbrowsing.
OS X, Unix and even that other OS all support IPSec. PPTP is even better.
Bad dot'er. No food pellets.
Unfortunately, the last thing on the screen was a terminal window filled with stuff, but the bottom lines saying
beastie 51% ps ax| grep something
beastie 52% sudo kill 1514
Pause "What's that KILL thing there mean?"
I was stopping a program. Do you really want me to explain BSD in detail?
PauseUm, I guess you can go.
I bump my WM (fvwm) over to an innocuous desktop when I go through now.
Before:
You would have to say, "sorry, I have no picnic implements." whereupon she would say, "Oh well, I guess I and my hot twin sister will have to give up our virginity to someone else."
Now:
well, I have a picnic basket in my room.
HC: "That's great. Can I see your room? I'd like to go there because this new bra is really too tight on my breasts and they ache. Would you rub them for me?"
Which situation would you rather be in? Now you're prepared (well, add a 12 pack of condoms and a bottle of gatorade to replace lost fluids and you're set).