/.
A fatal flaw of this simulation (as a model of real society, that is) is that it includes the "Cincinatus" characters - the incorruptible agents - but does not include the "Dillingers" - agents who are not deterred by punishment, of themselves or of others.
I have found over the years that people who are not influenced by "common sense" (or even an informed sense of self-preservation) are much more common than incorruptible people. Luckily (perhaps) these people more commonly are obsessed with greed than killing, or we'd have a lot more mayhem and a few less rich people.
Thus, the simultation should include agents that are not influenced by the arrest rate, and the model will probably become cyclic instead of trending to a fixed equilibrium.
Your statement that "the simulation is accurate" is unfounded, as any serious study of real behaviour in a police state will show. The Chinese shoot homosexuals and drug addicts; yet they still occur just as frequently as in other nations with less draconian laws. The US is "soft on crime" according to the Immoral Minority, yet our crime rates continue to drop.
But of course, anyone who thinks humans are simple agents with simple motivations is very unobservant.
/.
Well, I don't really care about karma. But it's sad that some moderator out there can't take the time to distinguish legitimate criticism that deserves promotion from "flamebait".
Overall, I like Red Hat. But they used to be a lot better about handling feedback - perhaps their truckload of patches has reached some kind of critical mass?
/.
Is it too hard for you to go to Red Hat's Bugzilla and click on the pretty form?
Try something along the lines of "linux os" "version 7.2" "utility" "pppd" and go look at the dates on the reports. Nalin is the maintainer.
Now, that was flamebait. My previous post was merely statement of facts that somebody wanted to suppress.
As for pppd.tar.gz, it's a little more difficult than that because Red Hat has patched their system so heavily. In their defense, I think they had to given the state the 2.4 kernel was released in. I personally like the Red Hat kernel (still using 6.2 in fact).
/.
The problem I've found with the Adaptec driver (specifically the aic7xxx driver) is that your card and motherboard must be well-matched in speed. You can manipulate the error conditions by modifying anything related to bus speed in the PC bios.
If the card is faster than the motherboard, or vice versa, the results are as you described. I tried about a dozen different versions of the driver at one point.
I had these problems with 6.x also - basically anything past a 2.0.x kernel. I've found that matching the SCSI card and motherboard is a purely empirical process, unfortunately - some combinations work (currently I am using a dual P3-500 ASUS intel-based board with an AHA2940u2w card and RH 6.2, no problems) and others don't.
Adaptec is now actively assisting driver development, rather than making Doug Ledford reverse-engineer everything, so perhaps the situation will improve soon. Even more encouragingly, Alan Cox is rumored to be looking at the linux SCSI layer, and that's bound to help.
- because it's still not ready for production use.
The pppd has been *known* to be broken since October 2001, but no errata has been pushed out yet, despite a chorus of complaints, emails, slashdot discussions, etc. You can't dial in with a mac or a win9x box - that's a *major* bug! The wtmp functionality is broken too - you can't see PPP users with a "w" command.
I paid for 5.0, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 - and I convinced others to pay also - but I'm not going to pay for 7.2 until the pppd gets fixed. What other leverage do I have, but my dollars, since complaining has done no good?
Quality product sells. Broken product gets downloaded for testing and then chucked out.
Alan Cox should be doing whatever he feels like doing (as long as it's linux). Hopefully Red Hat management has the Tao, in which case he'll want to do things that will profit them.
>>Face it, processors are faster than telecommunications.
>The architects of IPv6 disagree. They did away with fragmentation inside routers and made the header size constant to shave a few milliseconds off every packet. With the advent of Tbps optical links and optical routing, processors are about to bite the dust.
I was speaking of current reality, not hypothetical future conditions. Failure of network architects to implement the Best Current Practices (rfc2827/BCP38 and rfc3013/BCP46) can't be excused in the name of future implementations of backbone protocols running on purely hypothetical hardware.
Certainly long-haul communications protocols should be designed without unneccessary overhead - and what is "unneccessary" as opposed to "reserved for future enhancements" is another argument - but all that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about.
/.
Best Current Practice recommends egress filtering for all networks. Are yours in place?
The big problem with DOS and DDOS is the untraceability provided by networks who do not prevent address spoofing with egress filters. If traffic is traceable, criminals get caught.
Before anyone's knee jerks, let me point out:
1) this is not a performance issue. Routing hardware and software (LRP for example) is widely and cheaply (compared to line costs) available that can implement egress filtering without any noticeable effect on line speed. Face it, processors are faster than telecommunications.
2) Egress filters do not improve a repressive regime's ability to finger political dissidents.
3) Egress filters are unlikely to impact privacy - unless what you are trying to keep private is destructive activity. Post a real example if you disagree.
4) I know it's not a cure-all. It's a necessary first step, though.
While Congress milks the entertainment industry for campaign funds in exchange for "digital rights management" facism, they ought to be mandating specific monetary penalties for businesses that do not implement egress filters, and for ISPs that do nothing about hundreds of Code-Red infected nodes on their cable farms. I shouldn't have to pay Comcast if my bandwidth is being principally used by criminals to fill my firewall logs.
I post this every time the subject comes up; next time I'll just make a flippin' link to the BCP RFCs. I'm sure you'll all be relieved.
/.
The resemblance between jellyfish and the Portugese man-o-war is mostly a matter of appearance, although there are some functional similarities too (both have stinging cells and drift freely, for instance).
Man-o-war are siphonophores, and the biologists say they are communal organisms. The transparent blue bladder that floats on the sea surface is one animal; each stinging tentacle that hangs from this float is another, each leech-like feeding polyp still another, and the community is further enlarged by separate male and female reproductive polyps. None of these animals can reproduce or even exist apart from the colony, but they have distinct separate genetic material.
The whole thing plays hell with traditional definitions of what individuality is, and what exactly comprises a single organism.
So, let me get this straight - you won't buy cars from the Japanese?
Sounds like racism to me, Mr. Coward.
Or perhaps you'd care to supply another explanation?
Does oil burned by American cars somehow *not* profit a bunch of war-mongers in the middle east?
Do autos made of parts outside this country (and in some cases, such as Ford's made-in-Mexico-from-Japanese-plans models, the whole car's made abroad) somehow become "American" as soon as a robot glues on that Detroit hood badge?
Does buying a lousy car from an multi-national corporation that mistreats American workers (think Flint, Michigan) somehow seem like a patriotic act to you?
I bought my car from an American who owns a Toyota dealership. He makes good money doing good work.
You, Mr. Coward, need to come to terms with reality. And get a real car.
/.
Clearly, you have never encountered a Mercedes UniMog, which can dominate a tractor pull with its 75hp engine. Mogs can pull a 16-ton trailer... it's all about the gearing you know (and German metallurgy - you can keep your crappy Detroit steel).
Oh, and I'm talking about the REAL UniMog, not the fake mog-inspired SUV that just went on the market under the same name.
/.
I have a car with at least 40 separate processors connected to an internal network, that is currently getting 43 miles to the gallon (I expect to hit 50 mpg in warmer weather), seats five, accelerates briskly from a light, and has not only digital readouts but also a centrally mounted touch screen that I can run diagnostics from.
OK, I admit it... IT CAME THAT WAY FROM THE FACTORY! Go buy a Toyota Prius today, it's a three month waiting list and $20,000 US but the price is going to go way, way up as soon as Detroit gets their hybrid on the road (due to George Bush the Elder barfing on the Japanese prime minister, or something like that).
If your car gets less than 33 mpg, you are not a hacker, you're an end-user (unless you get less than 15 mpg, in which case you're at best a script kiddie). And let's face it, driving a gas-guzzler is unpatriotic - American soldiers don't need to die just so you can impress girls with your supercharged V8.
There's a guy on the priusmods list who has a Russian surplus light-gathering snooperscope wired into his LCD, and he can drive almost silently with the lights out at night, only tire noise and the quiet singing of the inverters can be heard. THAT'S *real* *hacking*.
And yes, there is an active prius hacker community that has already cracked part of the communication protocol - despite Toyota's inability to help us (Toyota bought the AVC LAN technology from Hitachi, unfortunately under a non-disclosure agreement they now regret).
Why should they bother testing non-Windows platforms?
Well, to get closer to an objective performance comparison. However, I take your point; given the target audience they are unlikely to want to spend the resources required for a non-windows-centric (my grade school English teacher is now spinning in her grave) test.
Since they only tested with a single OS, and that OS was Windows XP(a fairly new release of a historically unstable operating system, probably rife with performance bottlenecks that are more apparent on some types of hardware than others) these benchmarks are principally useful to Microsoft Windows users.
It'd be nice to see similar tests with a couple of linux kernel variants (1.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.5.x) and some BSDs, Solaris, whatever. Just get some heterogenity in there and see what difference OSes make, hardware vendors are famous for tuning their systems to meet benchmarks after all. --Charlie
The Prius gets more mpg per unit payload, because the Insight is a sporty little two-seater and the Prius is a five-seater family sedan.
Fuel cells are a great idea to power the home, and I intend to install one eventually, but they are (using current technology) impractical for my driving needs. Membrane contamination is the major issue, and a lack of infrastructure to deal with failures on the road. Toyota has addressed repair problems nicely with a combination of highly reliable systems, broad distribution of repair facilities, and use of standard parts for the non-hybrid portions of the vehicle.
I saw an Insight the other day with a bumper sticker reading "Driving a Gas Guzzler is Unpatriotic". --Charlie
Well, if a Portugese Man-o-War float-jelly is a single lifeform, then the boundaries are pretty blurred already.
There are single fungi that are extremely large, much larger than the Titanic, so the question becomes one of how "largest" is determined - by mass, by volume, by compression, what? Do we have to remove the support media of iron or soil before measurement?
The Irish started it? Jeez, you need to read up on your history and archeology. Ever heard of Ashurnasipal, Sargon the Great, Ghengis Khan, or for that matter the American Revolution? Remember Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys? How about Sherman's "march to the sea" in the US Civil War?
Terrorism is as old as humanity, and trying to eradicate it by force is like trying to eradicate pedophilia by censoring the Internet. Futile. --Charlie
Regardless of what various militias, racists and dissident groups might say, the individual US states are not *sovereign* in any globally accepted (or proper English) sense.
AFGHANISTAN is a sovereign state.
PANAMA is a sovereign state.
The USA is a sovereign state. The individual "states" that make up the USA are not sovereign, because they do not have independent right to make war. This was settled by force around 1865 or so.
The main thrust of your argument (the states have considerable ability to prosecute Microsoft without Federal interference) is correct.
/.
Given the history of inept system administration in the US Armed Services, I have to laugh.
If M$oft actually delivers a secure system, it will immediately be compromised by some knucklehead who wants to play Everquest without his superior officer finding out. --Charlie
I pay for my linux CDs, and I don't download music without the performer's permission. I don't consider it a waste of money, because my dollars keep the goods I want available.
Eventually, you will be doomed to listen to my favorite music, and load my preferred distribution, because you are too shortsighted to keep your favorites in the market. They'll all end up flipping burgers!
"It's hard to see how you could avoid having some antihydrogen in there," says Gabrielse. He can't be sure how many atoms they trapped, but says you would get only a tiny amount of energy by combining the antimatter with matter--not even enough to warm a small cup of coffee.
From Sir Ernest Rutherford's speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1933:
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
Do they have an UPS on that particle trap? --Charlie
Slashdot Mirror
/.
A fatal flaw of this simulation (as a model of real society, that is) is that it includes the "Cincinatus" characters - the incorruptible agents - but does not include the "Dillingers" - agents who are not deterred by punishment, of themselves or of others.
I have found over the years that people who are not influenced by "common sense" (or even an informed sense of self-preservation) are much more common than incorruptible people. Luckily (perhaps) these people more commonly are obsessed with greed than killing, or we'd have a lot more mayhem and a few less rich people.
Thus, the simultation should include agents that are not influenced by the arrest rate, and the model will probably become cyclic instead of trending to a fixed equilibrium.
Your statement that "the simulation is accurate" is unfounded, as any serious study of real behaviour in a police state will show. The Chinese shoot homosexuals and drug addicts; yet they still occur just as frequently as in other nations with less draconian laws. The US is "soft on crime" according to the Immoral Minority, yet our crime rates continue to drop.
But of course, anyone who thinks humans are simple agents with simple motivations is very unobservant.
--Charlie
/.
Well, I don't really care about karma. But it's sad that some moderator out there can't take the time to distinguish legitimate criticism that deserves promotion from "flamebait".
Overall, I like Red Hat. But they used to be a lot better about handling feedback - perhaps their truckload of patches has reached some kind of critical mass?
--Charlie
/.
Is it too hard for you to go to Red Hat's Bugzilla and click on the pretty form?
Try something along the lines of "linux os" "version 7.2" "utility" "pppd" and go look at the dates on the reports. Nalin is the maintainer.
Now, that was flamebait. My previous post was merely statement of facts that somebody wanted to suppress.
As for pppd.tar.gz, it's a little more difficult than that because Red Hat has patched their system so heavily. In their defense, I think they had to given the state the 2.4 kernel was released in. I personally like the Red Hat kernel (still using 6.2 in fact).
--Charlie
/.
The problem I've found with the Adaptec driver (specifically the aic7xxx driver) is that your card and motherboard must be well-matched in speed. You can manipulate the error conditions by modifying anything related to bus speed in the PC bios.
If the card is faster than the motherboard, or vice versa, the results are as you described. I tried about a dozen different versions of the driver at one point.
I had these problems with 6.x also - basically anything past a 2.0.x kernel. I've found that matching the SCSI card and motherboard is a purely empirical process, unfortunately - some combinations work (currently I am using a dual P3-500 ASUS intel-based board with an AHA2940u2w card and RH 6.2, no problems) and others don't.
Adaptec is now actively assisting driver development, rather than making Doug Ledford reverse-engineer everything, so perhaps the situation will improve soon. Even more encouragingly, Alan Cox is rumored to be looking at the linux SCSI layer, and that's bound to help.
--Charlie
- because it's still not ready for production use.
The pppd has been *known* to be broken since October 2001, but no errata has been pushed out yet, despite a chorus of complaints, emails, slashdot discussions, etc. You can't dial in with a mac or a win9x box - that's a *major* bug! The wtmp functionality is broken too - you can't see PPP users with a "w" command.
I paid for 5.0, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 - and I convinced others to pay also - but I'm not going to pay for 7.2 until the pppd gets fixed. What other leverage do I have, but my dollars, since complaining has done no good?
Quality product sells. Broken product gets downloaded for testing and then chucked out.
--Charlie
Alan Cox should be doing whatever he feels like doing (as long as it's linux). Hopefully Red Hat management has the Tao, in which case he'll want to do things that will profit them.
--Charlie
Certainly long-haul communications protocols should be designed without unneccessary overhead - and what is "unneccessary" as opposed to "reserved for future enhancements" is another argument - but all that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about.
--Charlie
/.
Best Current Practice recommends egress filtering for all networks. Are yours in place?
The big problem with DOS and DDOS is the untraceability provided by networks who do not prevent address spoofing with egress filters. If traffic is traceable, criminals get caught.
Before anyone's knee jerks, let me point out:
1) this is not a performance issue. Routing hardware and software (LRP for example) is widely and cheaply (compared to line costs) available that can implement egress filtering without any noticeable effect on line speed. Face it, processors are faster than telecommunications.
2) Egress filters do not improve a repressive regime's ability to finger political dissidents.
3) Egress filters are unlikely to impact privacy - unless what you are trying to keep private is destructive activity. Post a real example if you disagree.
4) I know it's not a cure-all. It's a necessary first step, though.
While Congress milks the entertainment industry for campaign funds in exchange for "digital rights management" facism, they ought to be mandating specific monetary penalties for businesses that do not implement egress filters, and for ISPs that do nothing about hundreds of Code-Red infected nodes on their cable farms. I shouldn't have to pay Comcast if my bandwidth is being principally used by criminals to fill my firewall logs.
I post this every time the subject comes up; next time I'll just make a flippin' link to the BCP RFCs. I'm sure you'll all be relieved.
--Charlie
/.
The resemblance between jellyfish and the Portugese man-o-war is mostly a matter of appearance, although there are some functional similarities too (both have stinging cells and drift freely, for instance).
Man-o-war are siphonophores, and the biologists say they are communal organisms. The transparent blue bladder that floats on the sea surface is one animal; each stinging tentacle that hangs from this float is another, each leech-like feeding polyp still another, and the community is further enlarged by separate male and female reproductive polyps. None of these animals can reproduce or even exist apart from the colony, but they have distinct separate genetic material.
The whole thing plays hell with traditional definitions of what individuality is, and what exactly comprises a single organism.
--Charlie
So, let me get this straight - you won't buy cars from the Japanese?
Sounds like racism to me, Mr. Coward.
Or perhaps you'd care to supply another explanation?
Does oil burned by American cars somehow *not* profit a bunch of war-mongers in the middle east?
Do autos made of parts outside this country (and in some cases, such as Ford's made-in-Mexico-from-Japanese-plans models, the whole car's made abroad) somehow become "American" as soon as a robot glues on that Detroit hood badge?
Does buying a lousy car from an multi-national corporation that mistreats American workers (think Flint, Michigan) somehow seem like a patriotic act to you?
I bought my car from an American who owns a Toyota dealership. He makes good money doing good work.
You, Mr. Coward, need to come to terms with reality. And get a real car.
Driving a gas-guzzler is unpatriotic.
--Charlie
/.
Clearly, you have never encountered a Mercedes UniMog, which can dominate a tractor pull with its 75hp engine. Mogs can pull a 16-ton trailer... it's all about the gearing you know (and German metallurgy - you can keep your crappy Detroit steel).
Oh, and I'm talking about the REAL UniMog, not the fake mog-inspired SUV that just went on the market under the same name.
--Charlie
/.
I have a car with at least 40 separate processors connected to an internal network, that is currently getting 43 miles to the gallon (I expect to hit 50 mpg in warmer weather), seats five, accelerates briskly from a light, and has not only digital readouts but also a centrally mounted touch screen that I can run diagnostics from.
OK, I admit it... IT CAME THAT WAY FROM THE FACTORY! Go buy a Toyota Prius today, it's a three month waiting list and $20,000 US but the price is going to go way, way up as soon as Detroit gets their hybrid on the road (due to George Bush the Elder barfing on the Japanese prime minister, or something like that).
If your car gets less than 33 mpg, you are not a hacker, you're an end-user (unless you get less than 15 mpg, in which case you're at best a script kiddie). And let's face it, driving a gas-guzzler is unpatriotic - American soldiers don't need to die just so you can impress girls with your supercharged V8.
There's a guy on the priusmods list who has a Russian surplus light-gathering snooperscope wired into his LCD, and he can drive almost silently with the lights out at night, only tire noise and the quiet singing of the inverters can be heard. THAT'S *real* *hacking*.
And yes, there is an active prius hacker community that has already cracked part of the communication protocol - despite Toyota's inability to help us (Toyota bought the AVC LAN technology from Hitachi, unfortunately under a non-disclosure agreement they now regret).
--Charlie
Interesting link. Thanks.
--Charlie
--Charlie
Since they only tested with a single OS, and that OS was Windows XP(a fairly new release of a historically unstable operating system, probably rife with performance bottlenecks that are more apparent on some types of hardware than others) these benchmarks are principally useful to Microsoft Windows users.
It'd be nice to see similar tests with a couple of linux kernel variants (1.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.5.x) and some BSDs, Solaris, whatever. Just get some heterogenity in there and see what difference OSes make, hardware vendors are famous for tuning their systems to meet benchmarks after all.
--Charlie
Well, I wasn't kidding.
The Prius gets more mpg per unit payload, because the Insight is a sporty little two-seater and the Prius is a five-seater family sedan.
Fuel cells are a great idea to power the home, and I intend to install one eventually, but they are (using current technology) impractical for my driving needs. Membrane contamination is the major issue, and a lack of infrastructure to deal with failures on the road. Toyota has addressed repair problems nicely with a combination of highly reliable systems, broad distribution of repair facilities, and use of standard parts for the non-hybrid portions of the vehicle.
I saw an Insight the other day with a bumper sticker reading "Driving a Gas Guzzler is Unpatriotic".
--Charlie
Well, if a Portugese Man-o-War float-jelly is a single lifeform, then the boundaries are pretty blurred already.
There are single fungi that are extremely large, much larger than the Titanic, so the question becomes one of how "largest" is determined - by mass, by volume, by compression, what? Do we have to remove the support media of iron or soil before measurement?
--Charlie
... I'd mod you up!
I bought a Toyota Prius for world peace.
42 mpg this winter, should be better come summer.
--Charlie
The Irish started it? Jeez, you need to read up on your history and archeology. Ever heard of Ashurnasipal, Sargon the Great, Ghengis Khan, or for that matter the American Revolution? Remember Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys? How about Sherman's "march to the sea" in the US Civil War?
Terrorism is as old as humanity, and trying to eradicate it by force is like trying to eradicate pedophilia by censoring the Internet. Futile.
--Charlie
mpe writes: " IN at least one place the US Constitution does explicitally say that unconstitutional laws should be ignored."
I can't find this in my copy of the Constitution. Care to post a reference?
--Charlie
Regardless of what various militias, racists and dissident groups might say, the individual US states are not *sovereign* in any globally accepted (or proper English) sense.
AFGHANISTAN is a sovereign state.
PANAMA is a sovereign state.
The USA is a sovereign state.
The individual "states" that make up the USA are not sovereign, because they do not have independent right to make war.
This was settled by force around 1865 or so.
The main thrust of your argument (the states have considerable ability to prosecute Microsoft without Federal interference) is correct.
--Charlie
If it hits you, that'll be 100% of your sample data.
/.
Given the history of inept system administration in the US Armed Services, I have to laugh.
If M$oft actually delivers a secure system, it will immediately be compromised by some knucklehead who wants to play Everquest without his superior officer finding out.
--Charlie
I pay for my linux CDs, and I don't download music without the performer's permission.
I don't consider it a waste of money, because my dollars keep the goods I want available.
Eventually, you will be doomed to listen to my favorite music, and load my preferred distribution, because you are too shortsighted to keep your favorites in the market. They'll all end up flipping burgers!
I confess that this amuses me.
--Charlie
From Sir Ernest Rutherford's speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1933:
Do they have an UPS on that particle trap?
--Charlie