Every poster has ignored the actual question -- the system needs to be scalable (4,000 computers) and backwards compatible (8-letters long).
The 120 or so elements fail both tests (Praseodymium? 50% too big. And typical length.)
For the servers themselves, xxxxxYzz is the best system -- where xxxxx is the name of the company, Y a (capital, to make visual scanning easier) letter indicating the function of the server, and zz a number indicating its position in the group of type Y servers.
However, I don't see why you couldn't run a small internal DNS server (and make it accessible to your clients, if they are so inclined), to implement the other naming schemes.
Etc, etc. I only have experience on a smaller network -- 200 computers or so. 4000 is a *big*, *big* step up and requires a more systematic system to keep things simple.
(web servers, they don't make em like they used to)
My iPod is the second sexiest thing that fits in my palm.
...web content, they don't make that like they used to, either.
From a software/interface designer point of view, I enjoy reading people's experiences with software but for some reason his frequent comparisons of software to girls named Allison and Stacy just didn't do it for me.
Still, Novell and ATI would do well to read his complaints.
I wasn't going to post his here until I discovered the main page for the district was 34k. Call me a whiner, but it wasn't worth the bytes it occupied in the bitstream.
See, Joe Sixpack doesn't buy an IP address. He rents it from his ISP.
The ISP is the organisation that actually owns rights to the addresses. And them rights don't get sold in singles.
Peace Region Internet Society serves a few northern Canadian towns totalling maybe 30,000 people. They own 1,280 IP addresses. (199.60.237.x, 64.114.104.0-64.114.107.255) -- this sort of efficiency is the *rare* case.
The government of British Columbia owns 65,536 IP addresses (142.32.0.0-142.32.255.255). They just fired a few thousand employees -- now we're in the 30,000 range. Overkill, eh?
The University of British Columbia owns 65,536 IPs. They have 40,000 students -- you think they all have computers on the net?
The reason there's an IP address crisis is because organisations are sold IP addresses in groups of 256 (2^8), 65,536 (2^16) or (ack!) 16,777,216 (2^24).
When the net was shiny and new, big corporations were given big IP address blocks rather than a lot of small ones. Hence, inefficient distribution of our resources.
(If you're interested in finding out how many addresses other people have, visit http://www.arin.net/whois/. This is only for North American sites -- you'll need RIPE or ApNIC for other continents.)
how they talk about Mary's computer decoding an mpeg for someone in Helsinki and sending it to her -- and then her telling her to computer to stop (presumably, our Finnish friend just got screwed out of a key part of his movie.)
This is all very cute -- but some of it is laughable. The rest of it, decoding DNA sequences, sharing movies (the binary, not the decompression of) -- it already exists.
Do you care if your JPEGs last for a few hundred years? Are you interested in preserving your data so that generations way down the road from you can understand how to access it?
I wasn't speaking about home-users. I was speaking about massive data farming operations like the Domesday effort.
Digital storage *is* perfectly viable. But digital storage 15 years ago and digital storage today would be like comparing accountancy before Arabic numerals and after.
Today reliability, speed and capacity is what, 1000 times greater? No more need for weird compression techniques -- plain text (or TeX) documents can be stored. Viciously *uncompressed* graphics, too.
With 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, surely we can task a few of 'em with keeping the media current.
(Also, to be pedantic: Optical media are disCs, magnetic media are disKs.)
Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)
Computer courses have the best teachers. I've had three so far.
One was a balding zany character who refused to admit to his receding hairline (It's true Mr. Monks) and pretty much let us do whatever. Another was the most open and flexible teacher I've ever had in any classroom, and the last and current is questionable at best. Let me explain why.
My current teacher doesn't really think out his assignments. I don't want to say that they were oh, pulled out of his ass while laying some cable, but that's what you'd think. They're all the same. "Make a website." "Research this." "Read this and write your thoughts in an essay." He'll use big words and strange grammar structures to make it sound sophisticated, but it's not the computer science that I fell in love with at the age of 10. It's designed so that he has to the minimal amount of work possible, and he gets paid a premium for it. This man honestly doesn't have to work: He has labtechs (they get extra credits) to fix computers for him, so all he has to do is mark essays -- never with any insightful comments or thought provoking messages, just with a "Good" or "Excellent!". We don't learn.
My sister's in the class with me (she's grade 12, I'm grade 10, it's a grade 11 class), and we recently had to make a project without using any website builder tools. She is making a simple web site, using SimpleText (Macs in the school system -- a whole different tirade awaits you there from me.) and recently confided that that project was the most fun for her because she was actually learning and saw how easy it was to pick up HTML and use resources on the web to solve any snags she ran into.
That was the bad teacher. The good teacher, Mr. Readman (who, sadly enough, is now just a substitute teacher because his wife got lured away to a better paying job in a different city where he's only on the sub list) was this man's complete opposite. He actually had criteria, on paper, that he'd give you before he started explaining the project. And he was open to student-led projects. I easily finished the tasks he set out for me, so he let me do whatever I wanted as long as it showed that I was learning something about technology. That year I broke into the school computer system (and didn't get suspended that time:), set up and administered a linux server remotely during my CS class time and played around with DHTML. This is the way teaching, especially in a course like CS, should be. Freeform. The students should find a path and see where it takes them, getting only guidance and a helping nudge from the teacher. People who treat it as a real course with research project and essays are missing the point.
Similar to art, fun, oldschool CS is an expression of your feelings. Take any language, make something you're proud of in it. Make an animation that boosts your self confidence because it uses tricks that you learned yourself.
But God, if I have to write another essay on how Napster is evil, I'm taking a god damned hammer to their G4.:)
Writing tech stories is about the easiest thing to do in the world if you want to be lazy. (Or quite hard to be objective if you're a good reporter.)
Recent example: The National Post ran five pages on the Microsoft breakup. One reporter, looking to get a down-to-life gritty excerpt of reaction from the streets, went to a chat room. A Yahoo! chat room. He combined the comments and rolled it into an article. The comments were worse then those found in yer standard -1/. fare.
"Why are they doing this? If it wasn't for Microsoft we'd still be stuck in DOS." (If you can't figure out why that's a stupid comment, go run along to barney.com.)
"Before Microsoft you practically had to be an engineer to install programs, you had to deal with code... It was confusing."
Umm, sorry? Microsoft came out in '85, right? So Apple / Mac was out then? Yep. And MS has always lagged behind the Mac. Running programs on Apple ][e's was the simplest thing ever: Insert disk. Turn on computer.
Now, the oldest DOS version I've used is 5.0, but I'm guessing 2.0 and it's predecessors were evil.
End rant: Lazy journalists. Clueless morons whose memories of "when Microsoft came on the scene" only date back to when/they/ started computing. Add it up. What do you get? A crappy article.
(Silly/.: Actual article title should be "The Operating System You Ignore")
Am I the only one who thinks that in 10 years time, operating systems/will/ be operating systems, and just that?
Windows, linux and MacOS will all perform the same functions the same way you'd expect them to. Something very similar to an anti-trust case happens, where it is shown that APIs need to be homogenized for all operating systems, so it's relatively easy to port code from one OS to another.
Java dies. Few tears are shed.
Focus goes back to what computing was originally about: Making it easy for us lazy humans.
You are a whiner. RMS did a lot, and now you are just sitting there whining. You didn't have to click on that link, then click on that button, then type in a bigass flamebait post, now did you?
You now have to deal with pissed off moderators, peeved Slashdotters. Of course, you can keep taking shots at RMS, but he can't really take his ball and go home. Why? Because his software is open sourced. That's what it was all about.
This series is very useful for people just starting to work in linux admin environments, even if it's just a personal server.
Lots of varying methods are discussed of how to properly protect or run a server, and now we get a real life scenario of what happens when the shit hits the fan.
Don't just publish the Hellfire series, package up this one too.
Yep, I have to agree: I hate uneducated highly paid writers as much as the rest person.
If you'd care to throw money at me for ranting at the triple initial squad, I'd gladly do it. However, I don't have very many of those offers kicking about so:
Do you truly think it's OSS against closed source? I think it is in the server market, because that's where key developments happen, and happen fast. That's where patches need to be made on the fly. That's the key security and integrity issue coming up.
However, there are some programs that, while they may benefit from being open source, are just fine and dandy as closed source. I could care less if they were free or not. Example: Opera Software's Opera browser. I love that thing, and it's closed source (but being ported to several OSes, so they probably had decent coding techniques when they first started it:).
Open Source has it's places, but as a reason to pay some guy 60K US a year just to rant about it? I don't think so. Do you?
Of course, the halfassed solution for this is for companies to start using Torx screws, like those found on your power supply. You wouldn't believe how many people are too lazy to buy another screwdriver..
On every DIKU mud, it's the standard to have in the policy helpfile that you can not trade real goods for virtual goods.
Why? a) Get a life. Go buy some food (no, not a 'roasted lizard's tongue', something you eat in real life) b) We all need to game to relax. But it's not very relaxing when you spend a long time getting your social status in the game, only to be superseded by someone who has bought his way into the game.
It may not happen very much, but just the thought of it kills the fun of online games.
Would you like to play a game of Quake against someone using all the cheats? Because as any multi player game gamer (w00+, weird sentence) can tell you, that's what this is: Cheating.
Just think: If they succeed, every music company in the world can sue them for stealing their system of letting a user preview music in a brick-and-mortar store.
Yes, they're transferring it to a new technology, but that's like saying "My BookPirater(tm) doesn't provide a digitized text version of a book -- it provides an audio version! Totally different methods of delivery! Not the same at all!"
Let's face it: It's been done before, it should be done the way it is now, but no one person should control it.
Anyone wonder why the Commonwealth nations all use their TLDs a lot?
I mean, *.uk, *.au, *.nz and *.ca get a lot of usage.
It could be because the people governing these TLDs know what they're doing and have rules available to make it work the best for whoever is involved.
i.e. you can get a *.ca if you're running a national event -- but it has a limited lifespan. You can get a *.ca if your company has two major locations in Canada (or more). If your company has only one location, you get a *.provincename.ca. If the name you want is too general you get a *.cityname.provincename.ca.
And it all works. I just registered a name in the.on.ca subnet. There's red tape to go through while they check you out, but for preventing the decadence and mess of *.tv and *.com/net/org, that's a small price to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this news? Of course hackers hang out in IRC. You know what, so do crackers. And so do other people.
NEWSFLASH: The sky is blue.
Every poster has ignored the actual question -- the system needs to be scalable (4,000 computers) and backwards compatible (8-letters long).
The 120 or so elements fail both tests (Praseodymium? 50% too big. And typical length.)
For the servers themselves, xxxxxYzz is the best system -- where xxxxx is the name of the company, Y a (capital, to make visual scanning easier) letter indicating the function of the server, and zz a number indicating its position in the group of type Y servers.
However, I don't see why you couldn't run a small internal DNS server (and make it accessible to your clients, if they are so inclined), to implement the other naming schemes.
sol.company -- jdeliA01.domain.com
terra.company -- jdeliB01.domain.com
Etc, etc. I only have experience on a smaller network -- 200 computers or so. 4000 is a *big*, *big* step up and requires a more systematic system to keep things simple.
...web content, they don't make that like they used to, either.
From a software/interface designer point of view, I enjoy reading people's experiences with software but for some reason his frequent comparisons of software to girls named Allison and Stacy just didn't do it for me.
Still, Novell and ATI would do well to read his complaints.
I wasn't going to post his here until I discovered the main page for the district was 34k. Call me a whiner, but it wasn't worth the bytes it occupied in the bitstream.
u rr'spage.htm is my retaliation.
http://www.rockfordschools.org/erms/kleefij/Mrs.G
(FOR THE SLOW: Click above to view RealPlayer versions of smarttech boards.)
1.6 million available IP addresses? BZZT, wrong.
See, Joe Sixpack doesn't buy an IP address. He rents it from his ISP.
The ISP is the organisation that actually owns rights to the addresses. And them rights don't get sold in singles.
Peace Region Internet Society serves a few northern Canadian towns totalling maybe 30,000 people. They own 1,280 IP addresses. (199.60.237.x, 64.114.104.0-64.114.107.255) -- this sort of efficiency is the *rare* case.
The government of British Columbia owns 65,536 IP addresses (142.32.0.0-142.32.255.255). They just fired a few thousand employees -- now we're in the 30,000 range. Overkill, eh?
The University of British Columbia owns 65,536 IPs. They have 40,000 students -- you think they all have computers on the net?
The reason there's an IP address crisis is because organisations are sold IP addresses in groups of 256 (2^8), 65,536 (2^16) or (ack!) 16,777,216 (2^24).
When the net was shiny and new, big corporations were given big IP address blocks rather than a lot of small ones. Hence, inefficient distribution of our resources.
(If you're interested in finding out how many addresses other people have, visit http://www.arin.net/whois/. This is only for North American sites -- you'll need RIPE or ApNIC for other continents.)
how they talk about Mary's computer decoding an mpeg for someone in Helsinki and sending it to her -- and then her telling her to computer to stop (presumably, our Finnish friend just got screwed out of a key part of his movie.)
This is all very cute -- but some of it is laughable. The rest of it, decoding DNA sequences, sharing movies (the binary, not the decompression of) -- it already exists.
In short: Big deal.
Do you care if your JPEGs last for a few hundred years? Are you interested in preserving your data so that generations way down the road from you can understand how to access it?
I wasn't speaking about home-users. I was speaking about massive data farming operations like the Domesday effort.
... no kidding.
Digital storage *is* perfectly viable. But digital storage 15 years ago and digital storage today would be like comparing accountancy before Arabic numerals and after.
Today reliability, speed and capacity is what, 1000 times greater? No more need for weird compression techniques -- plain text (or TeX) documents can be stored. Viciously *uncompressed* graphics, too.
With 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, surely we can task a few of 'em with keeping the media current.
(Also, to be pedantic: Optical media are disCs, magnetic media are disKs.)
Well, hell, I posted this as an AC, but wtf, a score of 0? Craptacular.
/., as the moron hasn't fixed the size issues.
Dennis Vieren has moved the pictures of the case to: http://case.1be.be/.
Go forth and
For those of you that just want the purdy pictures, have a look at:
http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_20mar01 .html - spaceweather's aurora borealis gallery of photos
Or alternatively just go direct to a few pictures found in the gallery:
Enjoy! These things are really a lot more impressive in person, as they dance around the night sky. Picture those early Windows 3.1 screensavers superimposed into space and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Please, stay seated, Bill Gates doesn't actually rule the universe, that was just a for-instance.)
Computer courses have the best teachers. I've had three so far.
One was a balding zany character who refused to admit to his receding hairline (It's true Mr. Monks) and pretty much let us do whatever. Another was the most open and flexible teacher I've ever had in any classroom, and the last and current is questionable at best. Let me explain why.
My current teacher doesn't really think out his assignments. I don't want to say that they were oh, pulled out of his ass while laying some cable , but that's what you'd think. They're all the same. "Make a website." "Research this." "Read this and write your thoughts in an essay." He'll use big words and strange grammar structures to make it sound sophisticated, but it's not the computer science that I fell in love with at the age of 10. It's designed so that he has to the minimal amount of work possible, and he gets paid a premium for it. This man honestly doesn't have to work: He has labtechs (they get extra credits) to fix computers for him, so all he has to do is mark essays -- never with any insightful comments or thought provoking messages, just with a "Good" or "Excellent!". We don't learn.
My sister's in the class with me (she's grade 12, I'm grade 10, it's a grade 11 class), and we recently had to make a project without using any website builder tools. She is making a simple web site, using SimpleText (Macs in the school system -- a whole different tirade awaits you there from me.) and recently confided that that project was the most fun for her because she was actually learning and saw how easy it was to pick up HTML and use resources on the web to solve any snags she ran into.
That was the bad teacher. The good teacher, Mr. Readman (who, sadly enough, is now just a substitute teacher because his wife got lured away to a better paying job in a different city where he's only on the sub list) was this man's complete opposite. He actually had criteria, on paper, that he'd give you before he started explaining the project. And he was open to student-led projects. I easily finished the tasks he set out for me, so he let me do whatever I wanted as long as it showed that I was learning something about technology. That year I broke into the school computer system (and didn't get suspended that time :), set up and administered a linux server remotely during my CS class time and played around with DHTML. This is the way teaching, especially in a course like CS, should be. Freeform. The students should find a path and see where it takes them, getting only guidance and a helping nudge from the teacher. People who treat it as a real course with research project and essays are missing the point.
Similar to art, fun, oldschool CS is an expression of your feelings. Take any language, make something you're proud of in it. Make an animation that boosts your self confidence because it uses tricks that you learned yourself.
But God, if I have to write another essay on how Napster is evil, I'm taking a god damned hammer to their G4. :)
Methinks you still need source code to port a program from one OS to the other.
Sure, this would simplify writing an emulator for OSX, because it's got some BSD blood in it, but that's not a port, that's just a glorified emulator.
Besides which, what's wrong with the (open, no less) tools provided already?
Very freaking true.
/. fare.
/they/ started computing. Add it up. What do you get? A crappy article.
Writing tech stories is about the easiest thing to do in the world if you want to be lazy. (Or quite hard to be objective if you're a good reporter.)
Recent example: The National Post ran five pages on the Microsoft breakup. One reporter, looking to get a down-to-life gritty excerpt of reaction from the streets, went to a chat room. A Yahoo! chat room. He combined the comments and rolled it into an article. The comments were worse then those found in yer standard -1
"Why are they doing this? If it wasn't for Microsoft we'd still be stuck in DOS." (If you can't figure out why that's a stupid comment, go run along to barney.com.)
"Before Microsoft you practically had to be an engineer to install programs, you had to deal with code... It was confusing."
Umm, sorry? Microsoft came out in '85, right? So Apple / Mac was out then? Yep. And MS has always lagged behind the Mac. Running programs on Apple ][e's was the simplest thing ever: Insert disk. Turn on computer.
Now, the oldest DOS version I've used is 5.0, but I'm guessing 2.0 and it's predecessors were evil.
End rant: Lazy journalists. Clueless morons whose memories of "when Microsoft came on the scene" only date back to when
Blah!
Actually, although he doesn't discuss it in the web article, he does indeed install it.
According to the user who submitted the story, the author installed Corel Linux with ease.
Read more then just the headline next time, eh?
(Silly /.: Actual article title should be "The Operating System You Ignore")
/will/ be operating systems, and just that?
Am I the only one who thinks that in 10 years time, operating systems
Windows, linux and MacOS will all perform the same functions the same way you'd expect them to. Something very similar to an anti-trust case happens, where it is shown that APIs need to be homogenized for all operating systems, so it's relatively easy to port code from one OS to another.
Java dies. Few tears are shed.
Focus goes back to what computing was originally about: Making it easy for us lazy humans.
Life is good.
You are a whiner. RMS did a lot, and now you are just sitting there whining. You didn't have to click on that link, then click on that button, then type in a bigass flamebait post, now did you?
You now have to deal with pissed off moderators, peeved Slashdotters. Of course, you can keep taking shots at RMS, but he can't really take his ball and go home. Why? Because his software is open sourced. That's what it was all about.
Er, I meant to say Hellmouth. Blorf.
This series is very useful for people just starting to work in linux admin environments, even if it's just a personal server.
Lots of varying methods are discussed of how to properly protect or run a server, and now we get a real life scenario of what happens when the shit hits the fan.
Don't just publish the Hellfire series, package up this one too.
Following other standard protocols seems to be how Microsoft manages to be so damned great.
The only difference I get from the linux daemons are stability, configurability and security.
Yep, I have to agree: I hate uneducated highly paid writers as much as the rest person.
:).
If you'd care to throw money at me for ranting at the triple initial squad, I'd gladly do it. However, I don't have very many of those offers kicking about so:
Do you truly think it's OSS against closed source? I think it is in the server market, because that's where key developments happen, and happen fast. That's where patches need to be made on the fly. That's the key security and integrity issue coming up.
However, there are some programs that, while they may benefit from being open source, are just fine and dandy as closed source. I could care less if they were free or not. Example: Opera Software's Opera browser. I love that thing, and it's closed source (but being ported to several OSes, so they probably had decent coding techniques when they first started it
Open Source has it's places, but as a reason to pay some guy 60K US a year just to rant about it? I don't think so. Do you?
Of course, the halfassed solution for this is for companies to start using Torx screws, like those found on your power supply. You wouldn't believe how many people are too lazy to buy another screwdriver..
If they can't keep running laptops at high speeds (required for the new millenniums bloated applications), I see a resurgence of ...
common sense!
Don't buy a new computer! Use your old one! Worried that new document formats will render it useless? Publish for the web only!
At least, that's my take on the whole fruitcake of an issue that this appears to be.
Ah, does no one remember or play MUDs?
On every DIKU mud, it's the standard to have in the policy helpfile that you can not trade real goods for virtual goods.
Why?
a) Get a life. Go buy some food (no, not a 'roasted lizard's tongue', something you eat in real life)
b) We all need to game to relax. But it's not very relaxing when you spend a long time getting your social status in the game, only to be superseded by someone who has bought his way into the game.
It may not happen very much, but just the thought of it kills the fun of online games.
Would you like to play a game of Quake against someone using all the cheats? Because as any multi player game gamer (w00+, weird sentence) can tell you, that's what this is: Cheating.
I'm rooting for Intouch!
Just think: If they succeed, every music company in the world can sue them for stealing their system of letting a user preview music in a brick-and-mortar store.
Yes, they're transferring it to a new technology, but that's like saying "My BookPirater(tm) doesn't provide a digitized text version of a book -- it provides an audio version! Totally different methods of delivery! Not the same at all!"
Let's face it: It's been done before, it should be done the way it is now, but no one person should control it.
(Do it the GNU way!)
Anyone wonder why the Commonwealth nations all use their TLDs a lot?
.on.ca subnet. There's red tape to go through while they check you out, but for preventing the decadence and mess of *.tv and *.com/net/org, that's a small price to pay.
I mean, *.uk, *.au, *.nz and *.ca get a lot of usage.
It could be because the people governing these TLDs know what they're doing and have rules available to make it work the best for whoever is involved.
i.e. you can get a *.ca if you're running a national event -- but it has a limited lifespan. You can get a *.ca if your company has two major locations in Canada (or more). If your company has only one location, you get a *.provincename.ca. If the name you want is too general you get a *.cityname.provincename.ca.
And it all works. I just registered a name in the