MAC addresses are configurable, for a number of legitimate reasons I won't go into.
Anyway, if you and I have the same MAC address there will not necessarily be any confusion that's visible to the end user.
Each of our machines will discard the packets that do not fit into the conversations we are having, based on other values than the MAC. For example, stuff like sequence numbers, higher-level addressing details (ports & IPs), etc.
So, this will just make stuff run slow, due to all the packet discards. It'll still mostly work.
Now, if you are on a switched network (NOT wireless) and two machines have the same MAC, it will confuse the bejeezus out of the switch and cause much more havoc. Higher level protocols that can ask for retransmits might still muddle through if the the switch is fast enough and you luck out on on the timing, but the switch should throw up all kinds of alarms to the net admins.
1) You assumed you understood what "Intelligent Design" means, but you don't. You admit you have not examined any evidence, yet you believe you know. Your own definition of "faith" fits here nicely. 2) You assumed I am a proponent of ID, but I am not. You leaped to that conclusion without evidence, after I pointed out that the Kansas scientists who refused to defend their views ended up looking weak and cowardly. 3) You assumed that I am well-versed in math and physics - but I am not, really. I fought my way through the higher levels of calculus with a great deal of difficulty, and I have never taken a physics course in my life. Oddly enough, neither is actually necessary for a career in science or rocketry.
Well, I've gotten tired of being called a swine, so I shall move on to more productive efforts. Have a nice life.
Um, pardon me, but YOU are the one with the "Invisible Bubble of Faith".
I'm a proponent of evolution, myself (and I was one even before I spent five years at the Academy of Natural Sciences writing code for taxonomic classification of collection specimens). I'm a former rocket scientist, too - but I guess that's an extraordinary claim, so you can discount it since I cannot present you with any extraordinary evidence (unless you are in the business yourself - can you define a Yardley?).
I'm sorry that your version of science does not jibe with mine, but mine tries to avoid jumping to conclusions. Clearly yours does not.
I myself am not a proponent of ID, so you can't take my word as gospel. My religion is perfectly willing to accept evolution and I don't believe in supernatural beings.
But, with that caveat, here's my take on the "purpose of ID" - and I actually have read their materials, incidentally, and talked personally with people who are pushing the theory.
1) Take the focus off a specific religious subgroup (fundamentalist hillbillies) and the "it isn't true because it's not in the Bible" argument which clearly has not been successful.
2) Bring in fellow travelers - for example, non-christians and mainstream christian groups who are not widely considered to be fundamentalist know-nothings, and the MUFON people who substitute aliens for gods. There's room for theosophists and all kinds of other fringe cults in the ID tent - see Proverbs 16:4, or read the account by Jerry Falwell's biographer in this month's Intelligence Report.
3) Present the argument against evolution not in terms of disproving scientific data, but in terms of presenting alternative, equally logical propositions that cannot be easily disproved.
They've definitely achieved #2, and they are getting closer on #3, but they are still kind of stuck on #1 at this point.
I understand your point, but remember I used the word "appears".
By refusing to accept a challenge, they appear weak and gormless.
I have attended local civic meetings where I knew I would be shouted down (and I was). I knew the debate was rigged, and that I would lose. But, losing a rigged contest can be a strategic win... appearances can be very important, especially when you are trying to influence public policy.
Still, better not to attend than to attend and do a bad job of it, I guess.
Before posting, did you take the time to read and understand their argument (gee, how scientific!) or did you just assume on a basis of faith (like, well, a religious fanatic) that you already knew what they are proposing? Did you even consider discussing ID with a proponent of the theory before you dismissed it? I thought not!
You're classifying people and arguments based on your own ignorance, and not theirs.
Using the scare-word "supernatural" displays the same kind of ignorance that the ID people themselves are directing towards evolutionary science.
Many of the ID group do not believe in any sort of "supernatural" beings.
Proponents of evolution science are hurting their own cause by boycotting these hearings and by falsely insisting that ID is synonymous with biblical fundamentalism.
It appears that the evolutionists in Kansas are either incapable of defending their beliefs, or unwilling to try.
I've got a brand-new mac mini here, and it already does great web browsing.
Now if only it would play a CD without forcing me to enter a contractual relationship with iTunes (which I am not interested in doing) I'd be less disappointed in it.
I spent hours loading X11, fink, and xmms and regular CDs still sound just as skippy and garbled as they did with whamb.
Why do people use Firefox again? Oh yeah, security.
Wrong. For tabbed browsing, javascript control, intelligent cookie management, and popup blocking.
That being said, you'll note that Firefox/Mozilla patches are available immediately when vulnerabilities are discovered, instead of 10 months after an exploit hits the street.
If MS could provide patches in a timely fashion, they would have far fewer problems.
If they weren't shopping their OS to a demographic that is too clueless to install the patches when they are available, they would have no problem at all!
But let's face it, somebody will always try to provide an OS for uneducated, incompetent and mentally defective computer users - since there are so many of them, eager to spend their hard-earned cash of a device they don't need or understand.
Damn, somebody must have hit my "cynicism" button today.
Tridge flat out admits that he telnetted to a live server on the bitkeeper port and interacted with the daemon that monitors that port.
So, what you are saying is that every time I connect to an open port I am bound by any contract that exists between a service provider and the vendor of the software that the provider uses?
By your reasoning, if I send an email to a site that uses MS-Exchange and has a "shared source" agreement with Microsoft, it is illegal for me to contribute code to the samba project.
Or are you saying that telnet is somehow enshrined in law as a special case? How would using telnet be legally different from using sendmail as long as I conform to the SMTP protocol? Quote the law please!
It's been a few years since I've had to endure RACF, but the last time I used it, it had a horrific inheritance model where "update" access automatically granted "Read" access. If RACF is indeed better than *nix, I'f say the difference is infinitesimal!
You wrote:
However, the large organizations I've seen never took a unified approach towards user access management and mostly ran many small clusters of *nix, Win* or MacOS* systems.
Sarbannes-Oxley and HIPAA regulated organizations are not supposed to tolerate such sloppiness; Kerberos and/or LDAP will usually be required if there is a modern heterogenous computing environment... which is why Microsoft co-opted both for their AD product, incidentally.
Maybe (very likely) outfits like FBI, NSA or the army need more sophistication in access control and I dare say that there ACLs are probably overshadowed by encryption based access schemes.
As previously mentioned, banks and hospitals need secure enterprise authentication and access control due to federal law. Having such controls be easily maintained by junior sysadmins and readily comprehended by end-users would be nice.
Now you tell us, who really needs ACLs on micro to mini systems? Have you ever needed ACLs?
Used 'em a lot, in the 1990s, on 64-bit DEC mini-computers. They fit the problems I was solving at the time, which were mostly engineering and scientific stuff.
But ACLs are not a "fits all" solution either, any more than u-g-o is. My point being, just because ACLs suck does not mean traditional unix privilege and access controls are good.
*nix access controls and privilege structures are in the "stone knives and bearskins" stage. In the linux world, however, there is some evolution going on - because some of the kernel people have rejected the philosophy embodied in the title of this thread.
You, and the others you mention, are absolutely correct. MS still doesn't understand privilege separation, and most windows software developers are still unable to comprehend the idea of a multi-user system at all.
Similarly, *nix is still stuck with the inane concept of the "root superuser" - a notable exception being linux, which can be patched (the SElinux patches for example) to restrict root's abilities.
People that spout crap like "But I'd like to exclude one specific user" or "more than one group is allowed to access this file" just don't get the point of grouping.
Are you unemployed, working only in academia, or just trolling?
*nix access rights and user privilege schemes are inutterably primitive and lame (unless you include the many haphazard and incompatible implementations of Posix ACLs, in which case they are cumbersome and non-portable) and do not fit any complex business model.
Linus Torvalds and Ted T'so (yay capabilities! Go Ted, go Ted) are aware of this, and are working towards a better system. Novell's Netware and DEC's VMS had better solutions decades ago. Apple has created a halfway solution with the "resource fork" support in their file systems - but I don't know where they are going with it under OS/X.
Computers are supposed to be programmable to suit the way people think. It appears that you have achieved the opposite.
Since there's not much free oxygen on the moon, the dust is likely to contain any number of compounds that will rapidly oxidize on contact with a human-breathable atmosphere.
So all the comments about moon dust smelling "burnt" sound pretty likely. Fire can be seen as an example of a rapid oxidation effect, after all.
I've been driving a 2002 Prius daily for three years. I don't know why your numbers don't work, but the Real World (tm) says your math is bogus.
I ran my Prius dry one time, just as an experiment. My spouse was quite horrified, but no damage seems to have resulted.
After several abortive attempts to start the engine with no fuel, it stopped trying. I had to turn the key completely off and back on again before it would make another attempt.
I was able to accelerate to 50 mph from a dead stop and travel about a mile to a gas station with no problems. Obviously, handling was not quite as peppy on the electric engine alone as it usually is (the gas engine is supposed to kick in extra horsepower as needed) but I'd say it was better than a Chevette or a Dodge Colt.
The NiMH batteries regained their normal state of charge within 20 minutes of driving, once I had refilled the gas tank and restarted.
And no, the engine did not run "all out" as some other poster suggested, when it was replenishing the batteries. It just ran at a reasonably normal idle rate regardless of whether I was stopped or not - it normally shuts off when I'm stopped ("normal" in this context meaning fully warmed up and batteries reasonably well charged).
Lots of theory, and some ludicrous stereotyping of "those people" (do those people have browner skin than you by any chance? It seems a safe bet, "strictly speaking").
Go buy some cables, a stereo, and an o-scope. Then do the experiment. Then I might respect you as a physicist - but until that day, I'm going to assume you are just another posturing ivory tower snob.
Most zip cord allows air (and therefore oxygen) to penetrate the cable between the surface of the metal and the plastic insulation. Some insulation actually outgasses oxygenated compounds, which is even worse.
Have you ever stripped a wire and found the surface of the conductors, just beneath the plastic, to be black? That's air infiltrating between the copper and the insulation causing that corrosion.
How about those clear-insulated cables that start out shiny coppery colored but turn bright green in a year or two? There, you've actually got the plastic weeping or outgassing corrosive compounds internally (extremely common, incidentally, despite the claims of insulation makers).
Cables that prevent any oxygen from touching the surfaces of the conductors are called "oxygen-free", get it? They are usually clear silicon jacketed so you can see with your own eyes that the copper is still bright after years of use.
I have personally examined a stereo wire (about 16 guage stranded pair, clear jacket) that had turned completely into oxides, without one single strand of copper remaining continuous. Cutting the insulation released noxious green dust, no metal at all!
Unfortunately, I had stored that wire in a damp basement for 20 years before I noticed it had completely rotted away, so I don't know how long the process really took.
... and since "ask slashdot" seems to prefer "how do I get a girlfriend" type questions, I'll post it here.
What's the best non-DRM, free or cheap music player for a mac mini?
The sound hardware isn't exactly great (though better than the average corporate desktop PC). Whamb sounds pretty horrible when playing CDs on it.
Every time I insert a CD, OSX brings up a license agreement for some useless POS called "i-Tunes" (I don't have an Ipod or a Shuffle, I don't want to buy music on-line, and I already own hundreds of CDs that I bought directly from musicians).
I don't want to enter into a legal arrangement with Apple just so I can play a frickin' CD. Even if I did, there is a firewall between me and the Internet that I do not wish to puncture.
If you would like to do me the kindness of replying, please keep in mind that I do not want or need iTunes (and you are unlikely to convince me that I do) and I prefer to operate within the law.
Slashdot Mirror
MAC addresses are configurable, for a number of legitimate reasons I won't go into.
Anyway, if you and I have the same MAC address there will not necessarily be any confusion that's visible to the end user.
Each of our machines will discard the packets that do not fit into the conversations we are having, based on other values than the MAC. For example, stuff like sequence numbers, higher-level addressing details (ports & IPs), etc.
So, this will just make stuff run slow, due to all the packet discards. It'll still mostly work.
Now, if you are on a switched network (NOT wireless) and two machines have the same MAC, it will confuse the bejeezus out of the switch and cause much more havoc. Higher level protocols that can ask for retransmits might still muddle through if the the switch is fast enough and you luck out on on the timing, but the switch should throw up all kinds of alarms to the net admins.
TheyPaidUsToTrustThemSoWeDid.Com
1) You assumed you understood what "Intelligent Design" means, but you don't. You admit you have not examined any evidence, yet you believe you know. Your own definition of "faith" fits here nicely.
2) You assumed I am a proponent of ID, but I am not. You leaped to that conclusion without evidence, after I pointed out that the Kansas scientists who refused to defend their views ended up looking weak and cowardly.
3) You assumed that I am well-versed in math and physics - but I am not, really. I fought my way through the higher levels of calculus with a great deal of difficulty, and I have never taken a physics course in my life. Oddly enough, neither is actually necessary for a career in science or rocketry.
Well, I've gotten tired of being called a swine, so I shall move on to more productive efforts. Have a nice life.
PS: I don't believe in any "invisible man in the sky" - I'm a pantheist, as were Baruch Spinoza, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Albert Einstein. But obviously, none of those losers were scientists, since they all believed in God!
PPS: Einstein might better be described as a panentheist, despite his explicit endorsement of Spinoza; some find the difference to be subtle.
Um, pardon me, but YOU are the one with the "Invisible Bubble of Faith".
I'm a proponent of evolution, myself (and I was one even before I spent five years at the Academy of Natural Sciences writing code for taxonomic classification of collection specimens). I'm a former rocket scientist, too - but I guess that's an extraordinary claim, so you can discount it since I cannot present you with any extraordinary evidence (unless you are in the business yourself - can you define a Yardley?).
I'm sorry that your version of science does not jibe with mine, but mine tries to avoid jumping to conclusions. Clearly yours does not.
I myself am not a proponent of ID, so you can't take my word as gospel. My religion is perfectly willing to accept evolution and I don't believe in supernatural beings.
But, with that caveat, here's my take on the "purpose of ID" - and I actually have read their materials, incidentally, and talked personally with people who are pushing the theory.
1) Take the focus off a specific religious subgroup (fundamentalist hillbillies) and the "it isn't true because it's not in the Bible" argument which clearly has not been successful.
2) Bring in fellow travelers - for example, non-christians and mainstream christian groups who are not widely considered to be fundamentalist know-nothings, and the MUFON people who substitute aliens for gods. There's room for theosophists and all kinds of other fringe cults in the ID tent - see Proverbs 16:4, or read the account by Jerry Falwell's biographer in this month's Intelligence Report.
3) Present the argument against evolution not in terms of disproving scientific data, but in terms of presenting alternative, equally logical propositions that cannot be easily disproved.
They've definitely achieved #2, and they are getting closer on #3, but they are still kind of stuck on #1 at this point.
I understand your point, but remember I used the word "appears".
By refusing to accept a challenge, they appear weak and gormless.
I have attended local civic meetings where I knew I would be shouted down (and I was). I knew the debate was rigged, and that I would lose. But, losing a rigged contest can be a strategic win... appearances can be very important, especially when you are trying to influence public policy.
Still, better not to attend than to attend and do a bad job of it, I guess.
Aliens are occasionally mentioned.
Before posting, did you take the time to read and understand their argument (gee, how scientific!) or did you just assume on a basis of faith (like, well, a religious fanatic) that you already knew what they are proposing? Did you even consider discussing ID with a proponent of the theory before you dismissed it? I thought not!
You're classifying people and arguments based on your own ignorance, and not theirs.
Using the scare-word "supernatural" displays the same kind of ignorance that the ID people themselves are directing towards evolutionary science.
Many of the ID group do not believe in any sort of "supernatural" beings.
Proponents of evolution science are hurting their own cause by boycotting these hearings and by falsely insisting that ID is synonymous with biblical fundamentalism.
It appears that the evolutionists in Kansas are either incapable of defending their beliefs, or unwilling to try.
It seems to hang at 58% every time, regardless of what system I use to try to download it.
I thought I got it at one point, but it failed the MD5 compare (and was about 4MB smaller than the original).
I've got the source, so I'll try rolling my own...
How could I have been so blind! Everything is clear to me now, solely due to your incisive and cogent post.
Do you always assume somebody's lying if their experience doesn't match your expectations?
I've got a brand-new mac mini here, and it already does great web browsing.
Now if only it would play a CD without forcing me to enter a contractual relationship with iTunes (which I am not interested in doing) I'd be less disappointed in it.
I spent hours loading X11, fink, and xmms and regular CDs still sound just as skippy and garbled as they did with whamb.
Wrong. For tabbed browsing, javascript control, intelligent cookie management, and popup blocking.
That being said, you'll note that Firefox/Mozilla patches are available immediately when vulnerabilities are discovered, instead of 10 months after an exploit hits the street.
If MS could provide patches in a timely fashion, they would have far fewer problems.
If they weren't shopping their OS to a demographic that is too clueless to install the patches when they are available, they would have no problem at all!
But let's face it, somebody will always try to provide an OS for uneducated, incompetent and mentally defective computer users - since there are so many of them, eager to spend their hard-earned cash of a device they don't need or understand.
Damn, somebody must have hit my "cynicism" button today.
So, what you are saying is that every time I connect to an open port I am bound by any contract that exists between a service provider and the vendor of the software that the provider uses?
By your reasoning, if I send an email to a site that uses MS-Exchange and has a "shared source" agreement with Microsoft, it is illegal for me to contribute code to the samba project.
Or are you saying that telnet is somehow enshrined in law as a special case? How would using telnet be legally different from using sendmail as long as I conform to the SMTP protocol? Quote the law please!
Perhaps they were chosen to step on Matthew Grant's linux-based single-floppy distros "Eiger" and "Matterhorn".
Those were from the LRP, which is no more (LRP is dead, long live LEAF!)
Or maybe it's like Dilbert says, all the good code names have already been used (I myself am working on "project phlegm").
It's been a few years since I've had to endure RACF, but the last time I used it, it had a horrific inheritance model where "update" access automatically granted "Read" access. If RACF is indeed better than *nix, I'f say the difference is infinitesimal!
You wrote: Sarbannes-Oxley and HIPAA regulated organizations are not supposed to tolerate such sloppiness; Kerberos and/or LDAP will usually be required if there is a modern heterogenous computing environment... which is why Microsoft co-opted both for their AD product, incidentally. As previously mentioned, banks and hospitals need secure enterprise authentication and access control due to federal law. Having such controls be easily maintained by junior sysadmins and readily comprehended by end-users would be nice. Used 'em a lot, in the 1990s, on 64-bit DEC mini-computers. They fit the problems I was solving at the time, which were mostly engineering and scientific stuff.
But ACLs are not a "fits all" solution either, any more than u-g-o is. My point being, just because ACLs suck does not mean traditional unix privilege and access controls are good.
*nix access controls and privilege structures are in the "stone knives and bearskins" stage. In the linux world, however, there is some evolution going on - because some of the kernel people have rejected the philosophy embodied in the title of this thread.
You, and the others you mention, are absolutely correct. MS still doesn't understand privilege separation, and most windows software developers are still unable to comprehend the idea of a multi-user system at all.
Similarly, *nix is still stuck with the inane concept of the "root superuser" - a notable exception being linux, which can be patched (the SElinux patches for example) to restrict root's abilities.
Are you unemployed, working only in academia, or just trolling?
*nix access rights and user privilege schemes are inutterably primitive and lame (unless you include the many haphazard and incompatible implementations of Posix ACLs, in which case they are cumbersome and non-portable) and do not fit any complex business model.
Linus Torvalds and Ted T'so (yay capabilities! Go Ted, go Ted) are aware of this, and are working towards a better system. Novell's Netware and DEC's VMS had better solutions decades ago. Apple has created a halfway solution with the "resource fork" support in their file systems - but I don't know where they are going with it under OS/X.
Computers are supposed to be programmable to suit the way people think. It appears that you have achieved the opposite.
Since there's not much free oxygen on the moon, the dust is likely to contain any number of compounds that will rapidly oxidize on contact with a human-breathable atmosphere.
So all the comments about moon dust smelling "burnt" sound pretty likely. Fire can be seen as an example of a rapid oxidation effect, after all.
I've been driving a 2002 Prius daily for three years. I don't know why your numbers don't work, but the Real World (tm) says your math is bogus.
I ran my Prius dry one time, just as an experiment. My spouse was quite horrified, but no damage seems to have resulted.
After several abortive attempts to start the engine with no fuel, it stopped trying. I had to turn the key completely off and back on again before it would make another attempt.
I was able to accelerate to 50 mph from a dead stop and travel about a mile to a gas station with no problems. Obviously, handling was not quite as peppy on the electric engine alone as it usually is (the gas engine is supposed to kick in extra horsepower as needed) but I'd say it was better than a Chevette or a Dodge Colt.
The NiMH batteries regained their normal state of charge within 20 minutes of driving, once I had refilled the gas tank and restarted.
And no, the engine did not run "all out" as some other poster suggested, when it was replenishing the batteries. It just ran at a reasonably normal idle rate regardless of whether I was stopped or not - it normally shuts off when I'm stopped ("normal" in this context meaning fully warmed up and batteries reasonably well charged).
Lots of theory, and some ludicrous stereotyping of "those people" (do those people have browner skin than you by any chance? It seems a safe bet, "strictly speaking").
Go buy some cables, a stereo, and an o-scope. Then do the experiment. Then I might respect you as a physicist - but until that day, I'm going to assume you are just another posturing ivory tower snob.
Most zip cord allows air (and therefore oxygen) to penetrate the cable between the surface of the metal and the plastic insulation. Some insulation actually outgasses oxygenated compounds, which is even worse.
Have you ever stripped a wire and found the surface of the conductors, just beneath the plastic, to be black? That's air infiltrating between the copper and the insulation causing that corrosion.
How about those clear-insulated cables that start out shiny coppery colored but turn bright green in a year or two? There, you've actually got the plastic weeping or outgassing corrosive compounds internally (extremely common, incidentally, despite the claims of insulation makers).
Cables that prevent any oxygen from touching the surfaces of the conductors are called "oxygen-free", get it? They are usually clear silicon jacketed so you can see with your own eyes that the copper is still bright after years of use.
I have personally examined a stereo wire (about 16 guage stranded pair, clear jacket) that had turned completely into oxides, without one single strand of copper remaining continuous. Cutting the insulation released noxious green dust, no metal at all!
Unfortunately, I had stored that wire in a damp basement for 20 years before I noticed it had completely rotted away, so I don't know how long the process really took.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence"
... and since "ask slashdot" seems to prefer "how do I get a girlfriend" type questions, I'll post it here.
What's the best non-DRM, free or cheap music player for a mac mini?
The sound hardware isn't exactly great (though better than the average corporate desktop PC). Whamb sounds pretty horrible when playing CDs on it.
Every time I insert a CD, OSX brings up a license agreement for some useless POS called "i-Tunes" (I don't have an Ipod or a Shuffle, I don't want to buy music on-line, and I already own hundreds of CDs that I bought directly from musicians).
I don't want to enter into a legal arrangement with Apple just so I can play a frickin' CD. Even if I did, there is a firewall between me and the Internet that I do not wish to puncture.
If you would like to do me the kindness of replying, please keep in mind that I do not want or need iTunes (and you are unlikely to convince me that I do) and I prefer to operate within the law.