Even contemplating a way to 'live forever' is hersay.
Did you mean heresy or hearsay? The first is, of course subjective. Cast ye the first stone? Incidentally, you sure make G-d sound like a big bully.
It's almost like flying. It reminds me of the story of Icarus. Trapped on a lonely island with only his mother and father, Icarus developed a way to fly by encasing feathers in wax, and attaching them to his arms.
Real religion majors also usually have a basic grasp of classical mythology. You do have the fundamental concept of hubris, here, but Icarus didn't develop anything, his father Daedelus built the wings... and used them successfully without suffering divine retribution.
Here's a question for you, Mr. Metatron (and if you don't get that reference you should give up now) Why do English-language translations of the Bible translate the word "SHEOL" as "HELL" when it literally means "place of death", as in a graveyard or tomb? And why do the same bowlderized Torahs translate a word meaning "an indefinite period of time" to specific, and inconsistent, periods of time ranging from "a moment" to "eternity"?
If you really are a religion major, I suggest you change seminaries immediately. You do not seem to be learning religion, but rather basting in your own ignorant zealotry. Seek enlightenment elsewhere, and if you want to grok the Bible don't use the politically-influenced English translations.
--Charlie
...edison, tesla and einstein were great scientists who, through a thorough and accurate understanding of the best scientific learning of their day, applied existing principles in groundbreaking and unexpected ways to advance contemporary physics.
and again
...it might be prudent to base your fantastic new theories on intelligent observation and existing science (as edison, tesla and einstein all did), rather than just gazing into space and pulling things out of your eternally-young ass.
Edison, OK. However, both Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein did "gaze into space and pull things out of their asses".
Einstein, in his own works, specifically disclaims "thorough and accurate understanding of the best scientific learning" and all his work is based on "thought experiments" that he performed while basically sitting on his butt.
Tesla, on the other hand, was pretty clearly a deeply disturbed man (worse than Edison on that account - descriptions of Tesla's obsessive/compulsive eating habits are pretty entertaining) who made dozens of wild claims and predictions that are quite well documented. Many of his claims have turned out to be true - but they were not based on the "best scientific learning of their day" unless you consider Tesla's childhood hallucinations (look up how he claimed to have hit on the idea of the brushless universal AC motor) to be "scientific learning".
Sometimes nuts are also visionary. But neither condition proves or disproves the other.
--Charlie
Re:Does ICANN hate hospitals?
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I know that's the official rationale, but I don't buy it. I mean, how is it a valid experiment to offer lengthy, unpopular, undesireable, cumbersome, language-specific names?
You can't validly extend the response to a.museum TLD to predict what the response to a.sex or.xxx TLD would be. Is everyone at ICANN an idiot, or are they assuming we are all idiots?
And there are no real technical issues here that ICANN has any control over. The people with the ability to influence the technology work for Vixie Labs.
--Charlie
Re:Does ICANN hate hospitals?
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Sorry, though it was obvious. Sometimes we lose prespective over time.
Before NSI let the/org/com/net TLD fall into chaos, by letting anyone take any or all of the above regardless of function, it was easier to find stuff. You didn't have to use slow-loading, information-broadcasting search engines if you were familiar with the basic system.
If you don't remember those days (and I'm not trying to pretend it worked perfectly, BTW, just that it was better organized than purposely disorganized) think of this - when you see a DNS name that has a.mil or.gov on it, you KNOW what that means. It's not a random or purposely deceptive tag, it carries meaning to the user.
A.med TLD would indicate the owner provided some function associated with medicine. It's more important to the function of these institutions than their profit/non-profit status, after all... the.com and.org carry zero meaning other than differentation.
If differentiation is all that is required, we don't need names, we can just use IP addresses. Names (rather than addresses) are designed to be humanly memorable, and humans are better at remembering things that carry meaning - for example, I can't remember in my head which of the 30 hospitals I deal with on a daily basis are.edus, and which are.coms or.nets. The TLDs for these are essentially random and not memorable. The individual names, on the other claw, are easy - for example, NMMC is North Memorial Medical Center, but is it a.com or.org? I honestly don't remember right now.
And before anyone mentions it, bookmarks are a sub-optimal solution, because I don't use the same machines every day, or even the same operating system, and the existence of a kludge does not make a proper solution undesirable.
--Charlie
Re:.md domain exists already
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The.md domain serves admirably as an expensive "vanity tag" for physicians, and I hope Moldava continues to prosper from it.
It has not (perhaps fortunately? Is a goverment less politically driven than a corporation? Is there any difference between the two anymore?) evolved into a TLD for medical establishments at this point.
--Charlie
PD axed: Anyone here actually jam an ATX board into an AT box like this guy is doing? What problems did you have?
Yup. Fairly frequently. My main box is a K6-2 these days and it's in an original IBM PC case. Well, OK, the bottom half is from an XT, because I needed the 8 slots at some point (this thing has held at least half a dozen different motherboards at this point, because I prefer metalworking to shopping) but the top half is from an original 5-slot Type A. Still looks like new, nice RF shielding, holds a fairly burly monitor on top.
I have several ATX-modified AT-type systems also, and the worst problem so far was a gashed finger from a raw metal edge I forgot to file off.
I find that you need a goodly supply of standoffs (I use the little brass kind) to adapt pre-AT cases to post-AT boards. And after you chop the case up three or four times with the sawzall, it starts to get, well, sort of floppy. With the top half off, my case has very little structural integrity, because I've had to chop out most of the strengthening members over time to fit variously sized boards, power supplies, and drives. I have pieces of hollow threaded rod from an old lamp mounted across each top corner edge, though, and they hold it together enough to slide the top half on. Once I get the two remaining case screws in it's quite sturdy.
And if anyone looks in my window, they see a total piece of crap computer not worth breaking in to steal. Unfortunately my spouse bought a fancy keyboard, mouse, and monitor, so the camoflage is no longer viable at this point .
--Charlie
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I don't know why someone modded you to "funny" - I think the idea is eminently practical.
We could check with Paul Vixie to be sure (keeping in mind he is, um, "a man of strong opinions":)) but I don't think it would be too tough to scale BIND up to 17576 TLDs. Theoretically, the number of actual domain names would remain nearly constant anyway, since the companies with multiple names could drop down to one truly descriptive one.
As for the.tld domain, that's the perfect place to keep the index of what the other TLDs mean! In trademark law names are distinct within a sphere of influence or "class" - since Acme Machine Tools and Acme Supermarkets exist in different classes, there is no valid trademark infringement. The address www.sex.tld would be a page defining the business ventures allowed to own unique names in the.sex TLD, for example.
I think you are on to a good idea, and one that might eventually come to pass simply because of the strong evolutionary forces affecting the DNS. ICANN can't keep their stranglehold forever.
--Charlie
Does ICANN hate hospitals?
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Disclaimer: I'm one of the people that've been petitioning for a.med TLD for years... so those readers who keep up on DNS issues have already heard this rant.
Currently, the hospitals of the world are randomly scattered across the DNS. For example, Fox Chase Cancer Center is fccc.edu, and Holy Spirit Hospital is HolySpiritHospital.Com, and the American Hospital Directory is AHD.Org. All these are non-profits except possibly the last.
The need for a.med domain is so strong that one of the alternative registries has already created the TLD. Unfortunately, ICANN's stranglehold on the industry prevents this alternative registry from seeing wide use (although adoption by hospitals through inclusion of alternative roots in the bind cache is ramping up).
ICANN has refused to discuss the issue except to say that people who supply a solution to the problem (i.e. alternative registries) are the bad guys, destablizing the Internet (ha! I've been using all the major DNS roots simultaneously for years; just add the additional root entries in BIND).
I expect that when the.med finally comes about, the people currently trying to serve the public good by providing the TLD will be marginalized if not driven out of business.
[snip]
Of course many scientists agree this is pure politics given that over a ton of Martian material enters our atmosphere every year, spit up from meteor impacts on Mars. [snip]
To state that someone is a "scientist" implies that the person referenced practices science, or to be more precise applies the scientific method.
To state a disputed theory as a "given", and then to base policy recommendations on it, is not science - it's either politics or religion.
And further, in the unlikely event that it turns out to be true that Martian material is being blasted out of the Martian gravitational well, and being recaptured by Terrestrial gravity, the method of entry into Earth's biosphere is fundamentally different than any that does not involve pulverization and irradiation on a fairly titanic scale.
Quarantine may be unnecessary, but it's certainly warranted. Science requires skepticism; and that often means disbelieving people who say "Oh, why bother with all those uneeded precautions, everything will be fine!". Let's leave objectively baseless faith in providence to the priests.
What is neolithic about the current file attribute system?
Neolithic = "New Stone Age", incidentally. In the beginning, all users could access all files. That would be the "Old Stone Age", or Paleolithic, thus extending my metaphor into a conceit.
Unix access control depends on the idea of three access levels, and one user who transcends access restrictions altogether. The three levels are "user, group, other" as you probably are aware. Compare this to DEC VMS, with "system, owner, group, world" and you see it's nearly the same idea, just expressed a little more coherently, and with the addition of "system" (which is primarily used by the backup process; you can lock the system admin out of your files, but then you don't get backed up - a nice trade-off, IMHO).
But then Unix goes on to implement the concept of a root superuser. Fundamentally stupid to lock everything and then mass-produce skeleton keys, I think... Suffice it to say that many OSes do not use this concept, and are thus radically more difficult to crack yet easier for the administrator to secure.
Anyway, Unix then goes on to posit three types of access to a file - the simplistic rwx or "read, write, execute". Note that execute access is really just read access - you can cat a file to a shell without using execute, or you can copy a file you don't have the ability to change and then chmod +x your copy. So really, there's only two types of access - read and write - in Unix. (The x bit is just to keep you from stepping on your own privates by accident, which is easy to do in Unix since there is no "run" command.)
Compare Unix's rwx to MVS, the ancient IBM behemoth OS, which implements "read, write, update" (but which unfortunately assumes that you have all lower privs if you have a higher one - so, under MVS RACF, if you can update a file you can read it. This is sufficient for most but not all situations.) The IBM system does not restrict files to a single group - one file can have separate read/write/update values for ten or twelve distinct groups of users (or more).
Compare Unix's rwx with DEC's VMS - which implements "control, read, write, execute, delete". The "execute" is not quite as meaningless as it is under Unix, but nearly so; it doesn't take long to figure out how to subvert it. More importantly, the "delete" access is parsed out from "write", and "control" determines who can modify the protection values on the file.
DEC has ACLs, too, probably the nicest implementation available and it doesn't store them off in some separate data structure, but rather keeps them with the file headers where they belong. But this diatribe is way too long already without going into ACLs.
Novell has the most highly evolved system, which actually separates out create access from write access (which is amazingly useful) among other things. The Timpanogas guys (your google search should have turned them up, if not try searching on MANOS or FENRIS LINUX) are working to integrate the GPL'd linux code base with a Novell directory system, based at least partially on the ncpfs and ncpmount work that is included in most distros. The Timpanogas guys apparently have no social skills whatsoever (and seem to have squabbled with Linus) but they are reputedly crackerjack coders.
Better yet do you have some links to papers or books that address these issues?
I like @stake and counterpane.com for security stuff. Bruce Schneier of counterpane has addressed the lunacy of root superuser on occasion, I think. There is boodles of analysis on that available from the government, too.
I am right now doing a google on timpanogas and will go back and look at the reiser stuff, but, your comment was very interesting and I was hoping you could elaborate.
I wish I could spend more time writing this, but my 4-year old and I are supposed to be building a lego aircraft carrier at the moment. I don't think you'll have any trouble finding info on these subjects, though. Most linux people agree that the Unix access controls are horribly weak, and there are many discussions going on about how to fix the problem in linux while maintaining Unix compatibility (which is still desirable at the moment).
I mostly use Linux BSD etc. but was recently forced to work on WIN2K and find it impossible to reconcile file permissions and licensing issues with the software I have to install.
I have great sympathy. Since both systems essentially suck, it is difficult if not impossible to reconcile them. I would recommend the use of samba and serious perusal of the docs that come with it... FreeBSD already has ACL abilities at the kernel (of course, FreeBSD is also, well, BSD, so I will wait for linux to get a similar capability) which samba can use.
So I don't see it as superior. Of course I still have much to investigate with regards to M$. I point this out because of recent articles touting M$ as the only "inovator".
Oh, gods, don't get me started. Unix has an excuse, it is ancient and was not originally designed to survive in the current totally networked world. M$ has no such excuse for their crapola security and access control systems! In fact, considering how much of WinNT was ripped off wholesale from VMS when Dave Cutler left DEC to work at M$, the situation is appalling!
All right, on to the legos. Just remember there are many more OSes than just Unix and MicroSquat, and many of them (probably most of them) have way better access control than either.
--Charlie
Mac OSX is BSD-based. I stopped using Unix twenty years ago because of the attitude of the people at Berkeley - it was obvious that they were not interested in improving Unix, in fact the basis of their activities was the assumption that Unix was the apotheosis of computer operating system design.
Unix has simply horrible access control - the ridiculous and unnecessary concept of the root superuser, for example, or the neolithic rwxrwxrwx file attribute system.
Linux represents not just a free unix, but a unix-derived OS that is evolving toward something vastly better. Look at what Timpanogas is doing to try to bring real file access controls (and please, don't even bring up the various pathetic and incompatible implementations of POSIX ACLs that currently exist) or what Reiser is doing to co-evolve the file and name spaces.
I use linux primarily because it is free and NOT UNIX. Just like a human is not an australopithecus. Interestingly enough, though, the advent of linux seems to have shaken the BSD world up to the point that Unix has started evolving again, too... or maybe that's just synchronicity. Apes aren't australopithecines either.
Yeah, I'm not an anthropologist, my spelling is probably wrong.
--Charlie
Could the lack of a COM / OLE / ActiveX architecture be hurting the desktop environment?
Possibly. We'll see soon, since ORBit, Mesa, and Bonobo are available and many applications are being written to use them. But I don't think this is really an issue, since ASCII paste between Xwindows actually fills most users' real needs. (If I'm wrong, though, bonobo should reach maturity in the near future).
but the interoperability between Office products is really helpful and useful and, in my mind, is the main advantage to a Windows-based system.
While individual releases of Office do have excellent compatibility within components, this is a feature also available in StarOffice and whatever the heck WordPerfect eventually evolved into (I forget the name, ask Corel).
Compatibility between versions of MSOffice is less graceful, and compatibility across the Microsoft product line is basically non-existent. For one example, MS Word and MS Works are not crosscompatible; most versions will not read each other's files. Other examples abound.
(On the other hand, this model is responsible for many of the security holes in both MS's OS and desktop app programs.)
I would say "Microsoft's implementation of this model" rather. On the other claw, there may be similar concerns with bonobo, but the open-source nature of GNOME apps makes such problems more fixable than MS's "black box".
For instance, from MS Access (or any other Office product) one can "drive" Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint not to mention other automation-compatible software put out by third parties. This includes exchanging information between applications, creating new instances of an application and creating new documents, all from the VBA IDE.
StarOffice has similar capabilities, but like MSOffice requires aclimatization. You can't learn to do all that stuff overnight, although you may think you did. Try training a person who has never, ever, ever used a computer before to use these features, and you'll see what I mean.
Corel's Office product (still can't remember the name) does all this component integration stuff dramatically better than MSOffice.
A typical Linux user might call this "bloatware," but if you know what you're doing, tasks that are difficult and time consuming in a Linux desktop environment (Netscape/Staroffice, etc.) are trivial using Office 2000 on Windows.
I find everything you've mentioned trivial on StarOffice. The first three weeks nearly drove me insane because of the different interface, though. I wouldn't consider MSOffice more bloated than StarOffice if there weren't a flight simulator hidden in my copy of Excel as an easter egg (no, I'm not kidding, really. Found it reading 2600 magazine in a letter to the editor, and tested it personally).
Visual Basic was created to fulfill all the needs of the desktop workers and works with ALL Microsoft products.
If that was the goal, it hadn't reached it the last time I tried to use it. I am comfortable in at least a dozen programming languages, including most flavors of BASIC, but I see VB as a poorly designed and structured kludge. Perhaps it has matured in the last few years.
Any competing desktop has to deal with a guzillion man-years put in usability and interoperability by the MS juggernaut.
Agreed. That's why StarOffice has gone Open Source, incidentally, to reverse that equation. The OSS movement has more programming resources than Microsoft can afford (more coders, more testers, etc.) so they are beginning to force Microsoft to adopt our standards, such as TCP/IP, DHCP, Kerberos, DNS, etc. MS can try to subvert all these with "embrace and extend", but they simply don't have the resources to win the battle.
On my last job, I did a breakdown on an 86 million dollar budget in one week using Access and Excel. Off the top of my head (please remember I'm not Linux-savy and I'm not flaming here!), I can't think of a similar DB/spreadsheet combo on Linux that would have done the job in that short an amount of time.
StarOffice can do it if the user has experience equivalent to your MSOffice experience. My spouse, for example, (who is an entemologist and plant pathologist working with limnological microbiology:translation: studies bugs in your water supply) can do more involved work than that, with bigger numbers by far.
The Corel product, which I saw demonstrated at LWE in NYC and which a couple of my buddies use, is also quite capable of that sort of thing, and it can generate your powerpoint-equivalent slide show automatically when you are done, or set up a dynamic web site based on your work. And the interface is easier than MSOffice (in my estimation).
So, yes, the linux destop is immature. But it's getting better all the time, and once Mahogany gets off the ground, we'll have everything we need with a modest retraining effort.
--Charlie
Re:A lack of Carefull Thought (sic)
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I shall dismember your post. Observe:
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get.
Which government? Just the Third Reich, or any old collection of yahoos that believes they can morally perform acts immoral for individuals to perform? Bush's government? Andy Jackson's?
It seems to me you have already given up your individuality, and spit upon the Declaration of Independence, in your first sentence.
Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible.
Pedophilia will never go away, but I don't wish to become efficient at it. Evil religions will probably never go away either, unfortunately.
(Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing).
It goes well with the troling rig.
If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it.
Yay! And since nobody's going to come invade us, we can go to their countries and play! US homeowners have enough munitions to repel any foreign invader, even if we don't count ESR, so we'll have to send our bugs abroad.
The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
Hmm, nothing to criticize here but the grammar. Oh, wait, I guess I can point out that enemy civilians and third parties just got ignored.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it.
Did anyone else hear a volunteer step forward?
I'd like to see incontrovertable proof that incontrovertable proof can exist. Kurt Godel might've liked to see it too. (Look it up.)
We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
I pick Canadians, they always get a bum rap. Of course we may have to write off those dirty immigrants (you know, those supposed "freedom seeking refugees" from non-allied countries) trying to sneak through the war zones.
A lot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man.
Not to mention people who think carefully.
but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
OK, you got me on that one. The movie really was pitiful. The Dean was rolling over in his grave.
But I can argue that war is a good, effective, desirable means of population control when fought strictly with knives, spears, swords, and axes. The problem with warfare is the environmental damage of modern weapons... still, people will create immoral weapons, and people will use them. Do you still think I believe in the inherent goodness of man, that goodness you seem ready to assign to the government?
I'm not a Luddite by any means, but c'mon, don't kid yourself that all progress is inherently good.
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It was bad enough when the "Drug Czar" was an acknowledged nicotine addict and alleged alcohol abuser. Now we're going to make the commissar of the nation's electronic information an appointed official?
Ooh, like that won't be abused for short-term political goals.
We should get to elect the poor sucker who gets this job. National elections every four years just like the vice president.
And y'know, it'd probably be the only fedgov election that'd make me consider voting for Al Gore.
--Charlie
Let me say that I purchase and have enjoyed using Red Hat products - although I have stopped at 6.2 for the moment.
Red Hat Linux at one time had a refreshingly clean approach to system startup; based on System V, but with all the links neatly arranged in/etc/rcx.d. The only real problem was the default inclusion of the rc.local script (which rewrites issue.net at bootup, and still prevents the adoption of Red Hat in some corporate circles - it is believed that this represents an insufficiently serious attitude about system security).
Recent versions of Red Hat move vital configuration information out of/etc/rc.d/init.d into a completely distinct/etc/sysconfig hierarchy, forming the sort of baroque, convoluted and counterintuitive structure that traditional unices like HPsUX have made famous.
Do you see Red Hat continuing this trend, perhaps even including unneccessary and redundant hierarchies such as/opt and/contrib? If so, what will differentiate your version of linux from "conceit" operating systems like NetBSD and OpenBSD? If not, will linuxconf be discarded since that is clearly the direction it is taking?
How exactly did this troll get marked "Insightful"?
Gas-electric hybrid cars surpassed pure IC cars for mpg efficiency about ten years ago. At this point, the ratio is probably around 5:1 in favor of g/e hybrids, even in the overweight commerical vehicles (the best are home built).
Head on over to Unique Mobility and look at the 4-wheel drive gas-electric Humvee they built for the military (not the consumer model, look at the pricy custom military job - tres cool!). You'll need a pdf reader.
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First off, it hasn't "always" been "innocent until proven guilty" even in your country. Did you sleep through history class?
Second, this is not the norm today throughout the world (although it is now commonplace). For instance, I am told that France still requires all accused criminals to prove their innocence.
Slashdot once again proven to be overrun by technologically talented know-nothings; frog-bashing at 11.
./
Also, English or Amish hard cider (not that crappy stuff with the rhino on it) German dark beer, Engish ale & bitters, smoking & non-smoking areas with separate air handlers, NO MUSIC THAT MUST BE SHOUTED OVER (except in the dance room, which should also be equipped with first aid equipment) and maybe that "cone of silence" thing from Get Smart. It'd be cool even if it didn't work any better than it did for Max.
--Charlie
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The inestimable Donald Becker & droogies have formed a company called SCYLD (if you don't get it, all I can say is "we whupped Grendel, we whupped Grendel's mom, how big a deal can one dragon be?") to produce just what you are asking for.
Use any search engine to find SCYLD BEOWULF, or just click on over to Scyld.Com... I bought six CDs for 3 bucks apiece.
It's nice to see an Open Source company that sells software for fair value (as opposed to overpricing OSS CDs in an attempt to recover development costs overnight, which generally results in piss-poor sales, right Red Hat?) so I bought more than I needed. I haven't regretted it.
--Charlie
naah... HP-UX still has that dreaded 128Gb size limit on a filesystem...
Er, no, HP's native file system is limited to 2GB. However, HP-UX now ships with Veritas' excellent journaled file system, which is what you are referring to. Note, vxfs is fast and sweet, but it is also expensive, and drives up the already ludicrous software cost of HP-UX. And I don't believe you can boot from it, so you need a separate hfs boot partition (called "stand" as part of HP's quest to incorporate all the stupidest parts of every unix every forked).
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I once found complete blueprints for a US nuclear weapons storage/containment facility; with details of the thickness and construction of walls, doors, etc. and locations of pretty much everything - including wiring diagrams for security systems.
I found 'em in a tube laying in the hallway of a building where several small companies (none of which had any obvious connection to the US fedgov) had just moved out (I was scavenging telco equipment if you must know).
Since I have a few aquaintances in low places, I arranged for the prints to be "discovered" outside the doorway of a naval installation with a neatly laser-printed note detailing where they'd been found originally.
I'm a little too paranoid to turn something like that in personally... might get Waco'ed or Rosenberged by the fedthugs.
--Charlie
My right hand is currently sporting four thin slashes, two of them deep, one to the bone, and my left hand has a little one too.
Last night I took apart a commercial-grade convection oven to fix the door latch. The inside of the multiply layered case was liberally supplied with razor-sharp metal edges.
I am not amused.
--Charlie
"It's only funny till somebody gets hurt." --James
"Yeah, then it's hilarious!" --Eric
Slashdot Mirror
Did you mean heresy or hearsay? The first is, of course subjective. Cast ye the first stone? Incidentally, you sure make G-d sound like a big bully.
Real religion majors also usually have a basic grasp of classical mythology. You do have the fundamental concept of hubris, here, but Icarus didn't develop anything, his father Daedelus built the wings... and used them successfully without suffering divine retribution.
Here's a question for you, Mr. Metatron (and if you don't get that reference you should give up now) Why do English-language translations of the Bible translate the word "SHEOL" as "HELL" when it literally means "place of death", as in a graveyard or tomb? And why do the same bowlderized Torahs translate a word meaning "an indefinite period of time" to specific, and inconsistent, periods of time ranging from "a moment" to "eternity"?
If you really are a religion major, I suggest you change seminaries immediately. You do not seem to be learning religion, but rather basting in your own ignorant zealotry. Seek enlightenment elsewhere, and if you want to grok the Bible don't use the politically-influenced English translations.
--Charlie
Edison, OK. However, both Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein did "gaze into space and pull things out of their asses".
Einstein, in his own works, specifically disclaims "thorough and accurate understanding of the best scientific learning" and all his work is based on "thought experiments" that he performed while basically sitting on his butt.
Tesla, on the other hand, was pretty clearly a deeply disturbed man (worse than Edison on that account - descriptions of Tesla's obsessive/compulsive eating habits are pretty entertaining) who made dozens of wild claims and predictions that are quite well documented. Many of his claims have turned out to be true - but they were not based on the "best scientific learning of their day" unless you consider Tesla's childhood hallucinations (look up how he claimed to have hit on the idea of the brushless universal AC motor) to be "scientific learning".
Sometimes nuts are also visionary. But neither condition proves or disproves the other.
--Charlie
/. .museum TLD to predict what the response to a .sex or .xxx TLD would be. Is everyone at ICANN an idiot, or are they assuming we are all idiots?
I know that's the official rationale, but I don't buy it. I mean, how is it a valid experiment to offer lengthy, unpopular, undesireable, cumbersome, language-specific names?
You can't validly extend the response to a
And there are no real technical issues here that ICANN has any control over. The people with the ability to influence the technology work for Vixie Labs.
--Charlie
/. /org/com/net TLD fall into chaos, by letting anyone take any or all of the above regardless of function, it was easier to find stuff. You didn't have to use slow-loading, information-broadcasting search engines if you were familiar with the basic system.
.mil or .gov on it, you KNOW what that means. It's not a random or purposely deceptive tag, it carries meaning to the user.
.med TLD would indicate the owner provided some function associated with medicine. It's more important to the function of these institutions than their profit/non-profit status, after all... the .com and .org carry zero meaning other than differentation.
.edus, and which are .coms or .nets. The TLDs for these are essentially random and not memorable. The individual names, on the other claw, are easy - for example, NMMC is North Memorial Medical Center, but is it a .com or .org? I honestly don't remember right now.
Sorry, though it was obvious. Sometimes we lose prespective over time.
Before NSI let the
If you don't remember those days (and I'm not trying to pretend it worked perfectly, BTW, just that it was better organized than purposely disorganized) think of this - when you see a DNS name that has a
A
If differentiation is all that is required, we don't need names, we can just use IP addresses. Names (rather than addresses) are designed to be humanly memorable, and humans are better at remembering things that carry meaning - for example, I can't remember in my head which of the 30 hospitals I deal with on a daily basis are
And before anyone mentions it, bookmarks are a sub-optimal solution, because I don't use the same machines every day, or even the same operating system, and the existence of a kludge does not make a proper solution undesirable.
--Charlie
/. .md domain serves admirably as an expensive "vanity tag" for physicians, and I hope Moldava continues to prosper from it.
The
It has not (perhaps fortunately? Is a goverment less politically driven than a corporation? Is there any difference between the two anymore?) evolved into a TLD for medical establishments at this point.
--Charlie
PD axed:
Anyone here actually jam an ATX board into an AT box like this guy is doing? What problems did you have?
Yup. Fairly frequently. My main box is a K6-2 these days and it's in an original IBM PC case. Well, OK, the bottom half is from an XT, because I needed the 8 slots at some point (this thing has held at least half a dozen different motherboards at this point, because I prefer metalworking to shopping) but the top half is from an original 5-slot Type A. Still looks like new, nice RF shielding, holds a fairly burly monitor on top.
I have several ATX-modified AT-type systems also, and the worst problem so far was a gashed finger from a raw metal edge I forgot to file off.
I find that you need a goodly supply of standoffs (I use the little brass kind) to adapt pre-AT cases to post-AT boards. And after you chop the case up three or four times with the sawzall, it starts to get, well, sort of floppy. With the top half off, my case has very little structural integrity, because I've had to chop out most of the strengthening members over time to fit variously sized boards, power supplies, and drives. I have pieces of hollow threaded rod from an old lamp mounted across each top corner edge, though, and they hold it together enough to slide the top half on. Once I get the two remaining case screws in it's quite sturdy.
And if anyone looks in my window, they see a total piece of crap computer not worth breaking in to steal. Unfortunately my spouse bought a fancy keyboard, mouse, and monitor, so the camoflage is no longer viable at this point .
--Charlie
/. :)) but I don't think it would be too tough to scale BIND up to 17576 TLDs. Theoretically, the number of actual domain names would remain nearly constant anyway, since the companies with multiple names could drop down to one truly descriptive one.
.tld domain, that's the perfect place to keep the index of what the other TLDs mean! In trademark law names are distinct within a sphere of influence or "class" - since Acme Machine Tools and Acme Supermarkets exist in different classes, there is no valid trademark infringement. The address www.sex.tld would be a page defining the business ventures allowed to own unique names in the .sex TLD, for example.
I don't know why someone modded you to "funny" - I think the idea is eminently practical.
We could check with Paul Vixie to be sure (keeping in mind he is, um, "a man of strong opinions"
As for the
I think you are on to a good idea, and one that might eventually come to pass simply because of the strong evolutionary forces affecting the DNS. ICANN can't keep their stranglehold forever.
--Charlie
/. .med TLD for years... so those readers who keep up on DNS issues have already heard this rant.
.med domain is so strong that one of the alternative registries has already created the TLD. Unfortunately, ICANN's stranglehold on the industry prevents this alternative registry from seeing wide use (although adoption by hospitals through inclusion of alternative roots in the bind cache is ramping up).
.med finally comes about, the people currently trying to serve the public good by providing the TLD will be marginalized if not driven out of business.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the people that've been petitioning for a
Currently, the hospitals of the world are randomly scattered across the DNS. For example, Fox Chase Cancer Center is fccc.edu, and Holy Spirit Hospital is HolySpiritHospital.Com, and the American Hospital Directory is AHD.Org. All these are non-profits except possibly the last.
The need for a
ICANN has refused to discuss the issue except to say that people who supply a solution to the problem (i.e. alternative registries) are the bad guys, destablizing the Internet (ha! I've been using all the major DNS roots simultaneously for years; just add the additional root entries in BIND).
I expect that when the
--Charlie
Inquiring minds want to know.
--Charlie
To state that someone is a "scientist" implies that the person referenced practices science, or to be more precise applies the scientific method.
To state a disputed theory as a "given", and then to base policy recommendations on it, is not science - it's either politics or religion.
And further, in the unlikely event that it turns out to be true that Martian material is being blasted out of the Martian gravitational well, and being recaptured by Terrestrial gravity, the method of entry into Earth's biosphere is fundamentally different than any that does not involve pulverization and irradiation on a fairly titanic scale.
Quarantine may be unnecessary, but it's certainly warranted. Science requires skepticism; and that often means disbelieving people who say "Oh, why bother with all those uneeded precautions, everything will be fine!". Let's leave objectively baseless faith in providence to the priests.
--CharlieUnix access control depends on the idea of three access levels, and one user who transcends access restrictions altogether. The three levels are "user, group, other" as you probably are aware. Compare this to DEC VMS, with "system, owner, group, world" and you see it's nearly the same idea, just expressed a little more coherently, and with the addition of "system" (which is primarily used by the backup process; you can lock the system admin out of your files, but then you don't get backed up - a nice trade-off, IMHO).
But then Unix goes on to implement the concept of a root superuser. Fundamentally stupid to lock everything and then mass-produce skeleton keys, I think... Suffice it to say that many OSes do not use this concept, and are thus radically more difficult to crack yet easier for the administrator to secure.
Anyway, Unix then goes on to posit three types of access to a file - the simplistic rwx or "read, write, execute". Note that execute access is really just read access - you can cat a file to a shell without using execute, or you can copy a file you don't have the ability to change and then chmod +x your copy. So really, there's only two types of access - read and write - in Unix. (The x bit is just to keep you from stepping on your own privates by accident, which is easy to do in Unix since there is no "run" command.)
Compare Unix's rwx to MVS, the ancient IBM behemoth OS, which implements "read, write, update" (but which unfortunately assumes that you have all lower privs if you have a higher one - so, under MVS RACF, if you can update a file you can read it. This is sufficient for most but not all situations.) The IBM system does not restrict files to a single group - one file can have separate read/write/update values for ten or twelve distinct groups of users (or more).
Compare Unix's rwx with DEC's VMS - which implements "control, read, write, execute, delete". The "execute" is not quite as meaningless as it is under Unix, but nearly so; it doesn't take long to figure out how to subvert it. More importantly, the "delete" access is parsed out from "write", and "control" determines who can modify the protection values on the file.
DEC has ACLs, too, probably the nicest implementation available and it doesn't store them off in some separate data structure, but rather keeps them with the file headers where they belong. But this diatribe is way too long already without going into ACLs.
Novell has the most highly evolved system, which actually separates out create access from write access (which is amazingly useful) among other things. The Timpanogas guys (your google search should have turned them up, if not try searching on MANOS or FENRIS LINUX) are working to integrate the GPL'd linux code base with a Novell directory system, based at least partially on the ncpfs and ncpmount work that is included in most distros. The Timpanogas guys apparently have no social skills whatsoever (and seem to have squabbled with Linus) but they are reputedly crackerjack coders.
I like @stake and counterpane.com for security stuff. Bruce Schneier of counterpane has addressed the lunacy of root superuser on occasion, I think. There is boodles of analysis on that available from the government, too.
I wish I could spend more time writing this, but my 4-year old and I are supposed to be building a lego aircraft carrier at the moment. I don't think you'll have any trouble finding info on these subjects, though. Most linux people agree that the Unix access controls are horribly weak, and there are many discussions going on about how to fix the problem in linux while maintaining Unix compatibility (which is still desirable at the moment).
I have great sympathy. Since both systems essentially suck, it is difficult if not impossible to reconcile them. I would recommend the use of samba and serious perusal of the docs that come with it... FreeBSD already has ACL abilities at the kernel (of course, FreeBSD is also, well, BSD, so I will wait for linux to get a similar capability) which samba can use.
Oh, gods, don't get me started. Unix has an excuse, it is ancient and was not originally designed to survive in the current totally networked world. M$ has no such excuse for their crapola security and access control systems! In fact, considering how much of WinNT was ripped off wholesale from VMS when Dave Cutler left DEC to work at M$, the situation is appalling!
All right, on to the legos. Just remember there are many more OSes than just Unix and MicroSquat, and many of them (probably most of them) have way better access control than either.
--Charlie
Mac OSX is BSD-based. I stopped using Unix twenty years ago because of the attitude of the people at Berkeley - it was obvious that they were not interested in improving Unix, in fact the basis of their activities was the assumption that Unix was the apotheosis of computer operating system design.
Unix has simply horrible access control - the ridiculous and unnecessary concept of the root superuser, for example, or the neolithic rwxrwxrwx file attribute system.
Linux represents not just a free unix, but a unix-derived OS that is evolving toward something vastly better. Look at what Timpanogas is doing to try to bring real file access controls (and please, don't even bring up the various pathetic and incompatible implementations of POSIX ACLs that currently exist) or what Reiser is doing to co-evolve the file and name spaces.
I use linux primarily because it is free and NOT UNIX. Just like a human is not an australopithecus. Interestingly enough, though, the advent of linux seems to have shaken the BSD world up to the point that Unix has started evolving again, too... or maybe that's just synchronicity. Apes aren't australopithecines either.
Yeah, I'm not an anthropologist, my spelling is probably wrong.
--Charlie
Could the lack of a COM / OLE / ActiveX architecture be hurting the desktop environment?
:translation: studies bugs in your water supply) can do more involved work than that, with bigger numbers by far.
Possibly. We'll see soon, since ORBit, Mesa, and Bonobo are available and many applications are being written to use them. But I don't think this is really an issue, since ASCII paste between Xwindows actually fills most users' real needs. (If I'm wrong, though, bonobo should reach maturity in the near future).
but the interoperability between Office products is really helpful and useful and, in my mind, is the main advantage to a Windows-based system.
While individual releases of Office do have excellent compatibility within components, this is a feature also available in StarOffice and whatever the heck WordPerfect eventually evolved into (I forget the name, ask Corel).
Compatibility between versions of MSOffice is less graceful, and compatibility across the Microsoft product line is basically non-existent. For one example, MS Word and MS Works are not crosscompatible; most versions will not read each other's files. Other examples abound.
(On the other hand, this model is responsible for many of the security holes in both MS's OS and desktop app programs.)
I would say "Microsoft's implementation of this model" rather. On the other claw, there may be similar concerns with bonobo, but the open-source nature of GNOME apps makes such problems more fixable than MS's "black box".
For instance, from MS Access (or any other Office product) one can "drive" Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint not to mention other automation-compatible software put out by third parties. This includes exchanging information between applications, creating new instances of an application and creating new documents, all from the VBA IDE.
StarOffice has similar capabilities, but like MSOffice requires aclimatization. You can't learn to do all that stuff overnight, although you may think you did. Try training a person who has never, ever, ever used a computer before to use these features, and you'll see what I mean.
Corel's Office product (still can't remember the name) does all this component integration stuff dramatically better than MSOffice.
A typical Linux user might call this "bloatware," but if you know what you're doing, tasks that are difficult and time consuming in a Linux desktop environment (Netscape/Staroffice, etc.) are trivial using Office 2000 on Windows.
I find everything you've mentioned trivial on StarOffice. The first three weeks nearly drove me insane because of the different interface, though. I wouldn't consider MSOffice more bloated than StarOffice if there weren't a flight simulator hidden in my copy of Excel as an easter egg (no, I'm not kidding, really. Found it reading 2600 magazine in a letter to the editor, and tested it personally).
Visual Basic was created to fulfill all the needs of the desktop workers and works with ALL Microsoft products.
If that was the goal, it hadn't reached it the last time I tried to use it. I am comfortable in at least a dozen programming languages, including most flavors of BASIC, but I see VB as a poorly designed and structured kludge. Perhaps it has matured in the last few years.
Any competing desktop has to deal with a guzillion man-years put in usability and interoperability by the MS juggernaut.
Agreed. That's why StarOffice has gone Open Source, incidentally, to reverse that equation. The OSS movement has more programming resources than Microsoft can afford (more coders, more testers, etc.) so they are beginning to force Microsoft to adopt our standards, such as TCP/IP, DHCP, Kerberos, DNS, etc. MS can try to subvert all these with "embrace and extend", but they simply don't have the resources to win the battle.
On my last job, I did a breakdown on an 86 million dollar budget in one week using Access and Excel. Off the top of my head (please remember I'm not Linux-savy and I'm not flaming here!), I can't think of a similar DB/spreadsheet combo on Linux that would have done the job in that short an amount of time.
StarOffice can do it if the user has experience equivalent to your MSOffice experience. My spouse, for example, (who is an entemologist and plant pathologist working with limnological microbiology
The Corel product, which I saw demonstrated at LWE in NYC and which a couple of my buddies use, is also quite capable of that sort of thing, and it can generate your powerpoint-equivalent slide show automatically when you are done, or set up a dynamic web site based on your work. And the interface is easier than MSOffice (in my estimation).
So, yes, the linux destop is immature. But it's getting better all the time, and once Mahogany gets off the ground, we'll have everything we need with a modest retraining effort.
--Charlie
/.
I shall dismember your post. Observe:
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get.
Which government? Just the Third Reich, or any old collection of yahoos that believes they can morally perform acts immoral for individuals to perform? Bush's government? Andy Jackson's?
It seems to me you have already given up your individuality, and spit upon the Declaration of Independence, in your first sentence.
Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible.
Pedophilia will never go away, but I don't wish to become efficient at it. Evil religions will probably never go away either, unfortunately.
(Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing).
It goes well with the troling rig.
If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it.
Yay! And since nobody's going to come invade us, we can go to their countries and play! US homeowners have enough munitions to repel any foreign invader, even if we don't count ESR, so we'll have to send our bugs abroad.
The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
Hmm, nothing to criticize here but the grammar. Oh, wait, I guess I can point out that enemy civilians and third parties just got ignored.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it.
Did anyone else hear a volunteer step forward?
I'd like to see incontrovertable proof that incontrovertable proof can exist. Kurt Godel might've liked to see it too. (Look it up.)
We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
I pick Canadians, they always get a bum rap. Of course we may have to write off those dirty immigrants (you know, those supposed "freedom seeking refugees" from non-allied countries) trying to sneak through the war zones.
A lot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man.
Not to mention people who think carefully.
but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
OK, you got me on that one. The movie really was pitiful. The Dean was rolling over in his grave.
But I can argue that war is a good, effective, desirable means of population control when fought strictly with knives, spears, swords, and axes. The problem with warfare is the environmental damage of modern weapons... still, people will create immoral weapons, and people will use them. Do you still think I believe in the inherent goodness of man, that goodness you seem ready to assign to the government?
I'm not a Luddite by any means, but c'mon, don't kid yourself that all progress is inherently good.
--Charlie
/.
My natural history consultant sez the small bone in a bat's penis is called a "bakula".
I can't make this stuff up, you know.
--Charlie
/.
It was bad enough when the "Drug Czar" was an acknowledged nicotine addict and alleged alcohol abuser. Now we're going to make the commissar of the nation's electronic information an appointed official?
Ooh, like that won't be abused for short-term political goals.
We should get to elect the poor sucker who gets this job. National elections every four years just like the vice president.
And y'know, it'd probably be the only fedgov election that'd make me consider voting for Al Gore.
--Charlie
Let me say that I purchase and have enjoyed using Red Hat products - although I have stopped at 6.2 for the moment.
/etc/rcx.d. The only real problem was the default inclusion of the rc.local script (which rewrites issue.net at bootup, and still prevents the adoption of Red Hat in some corporate circles - it is believed that this represents an insufficiently serious attitude about system security).
/etc/rc.d/init.d into a completely distinct /etc/sysconfig hierarchy, forming the sort of baroque, convoluted and counterintuitive structure that traditional unices like HPsUX have made famous.
/opt and /contrib? If so, what will differentiate your version of linux from "conceit" operating systems like NetBSD and OpenBSD? If not, will linuxconf be discarded since that is clearly the direction it is taking?
Red Hat Linux at one time had a refreshingly clean approach to system startup; based on System V, but with all the links neatly arranged in
Recent versions of Red Hat move vital configuration information out of
Do you see Red Hat continuing this trend, perhaps even including unneccessary and redundant hierarchies such as
--Charlie
Still plugging that KISS principle....
How exactly did this troll get marked "Insightful"?
Gas-electric hybrid cars surpassed pure IC cars for mpg efficiency about ten years ago. At this point, the ratio is probably around 5:1 in favor of g/e hybrids, even in the overweight commerical vehicles (the best are home built).
Head on over to Unique Mobility and look at the 4-wheel drive gas-electric Humvee they built for the military (not the consumer model, look at the pricy custom military job - tres cool!). You'll need a pdf reader.
It took 25 seconds to find these links:
Alternative Energy Engineering
Electro Automotive
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Home Power Magazine
innEVations
Jerry Halstead's Car
Low Rolling Resistance Tires
Phoenix EAA
Unique Mobility
Wilde EVolutions catalog
/.
First off, it hasn't "always" been "innocent until proven guilty" even in your country. Did you sleep through history class?
Second, this is not the norm today throughout the world (although it is now commonplace). For instance, I am told that France still requires all accused criminals to prove their innocence.
Slashdot once again proven to be overrun by technologically talented know-nothings; frog-bashing at 11.
--Charlie
./
Also, English or Amish hard cider (not that crappy stuff with the rhino on it) German dark beer, Engish ale & bitters, smoking & non-smoking areas with separate air handlers, NO MUSIC THAT MUST BE SHOUTED OVER (except in the dance room, which should also be equipped with first aid equipment) and maybe that "cone of silence" thing from Get Smart. It'd be cool even if it didn't work any better than it did for Max.
--Charlie
/.
The inestimable Donald Becker & droogies have formed a company called SCYLD (if you don't get it, all I can say is "we whupped Grendel, we whupped Grendel's mom, how big a deal can one dragon be?") to produce just what you are asking for.
Use any search engine to find SCYLD BEOWULF, or just click on over to Scyld.Com... I bought six CDs for 3 bucks apiece.
It's nice to see an Open Source company that sells software for fair value (as opposed to overpricing OSS CDs in an attempt to recover development costs overnight, which generally results in piss-poor sales, right Red Hat?) so I bought more than I needed. I haven't regretted it.
--Charlie
--Charlie
.
/etc/opt/subdirectory!)
I mean seriously, HP-UX is just a train-wreck of a proprietary unix variant.
-- Doesn't come with a useable C compiler
(ANSI C costs $$$$$$$ extra, K&R compiler is purposely crippled, GCC port is very ugly)
-- Still running CURSES (the AUTHORS of curses recommend that everyone use ncurses!)
-- Ships with outdated versions of GZIP and PERL
-- Doesn't follow its own directory hierarchy guidelines (ems logs to
-- Uses the worst package management system ever written (the "depot" system)
-- Embodies the worst features of both BSD and System V without the best of either
-- Poor support of non-HP peripherals (try running an LSI disk array on a PA-RISC machine - your HP service reps will blame everthing on it)
I could go on, but I'm nauseated. Anyone else?
--Charlie
.
I once found complete blueprints for a US nuclear weapons storage/containment facility; with details of the thickness and construction of walls, doors, etc. and locations of pretty much everything - including wiring diagrams for security systems.
I found 'em in a tube laying in the hallway of a building where several small companies (none of which had any obvious connection to the US fedgov) had just moved out (I was scavenging telco equipment if you must know).
Since I have a few aquaintances in low places, I arranged for the prints to be "discovered" outside the doorway of a naval installation with a neatly laser-printed note detailing where they'd been found originally.
I'm a little too paranoid to turn something like that in personally... might get Waco'ed or Rosenberged by the fedthugs.
--Charlie
My right hand is currently sporting four thin slashes, two of them deep, one to the bone, and my left hand has a little one too.
Last night I took apart a commercial-grade convection oven to fix the door latch. The inside of the multiply layered case was liberally supplied with razor-sharp metal edges.
I am not amused.
--Charlie
"It's only funny till somebody gets hurt." --James
"Yeah, then it's hilarious!" --Eric