... and Microsoft is patenting the idea of rolling it... sigh! What is this with comp sci? Whatever naive, obvious and trivial mental association made in this field is considered insightful discovery! I'm a cheap ass sysadmin and everyone I know (except the real compsci dudes) venerates me for my quality expertise! WTF? Side note... this news can't be true; and if it were, it would violate the very principle of the Antitrust Lawsuit. How can something (XML) designed to enfranchise the IT world from proprietary undocumented formats be limited in it's applicability so that it can't be used for the very specific application it was developed for? Sigh...
I've tried eZ publish which is a PHP based CMS. Does anyone know both systems enough to point out the differences in performance, setup, maintenance? Thanks.
... then you must be sick. Now, come on! Isn't this like a Brave New World? Taking drugs to coerce your brain into a social standard; this is sick. Thinking about it I might have an attention deficit syndrome; actually I'm pretty shure I DO have it. Does it interfere with my karma? When I was a kid I could read Homer all day long, or loop some symphony the whole damn day. Nobody ever diagnosed me some mental condition because I couldn't suffer stiffingly boring tripe for 45 mins. I AM myself, I'm not nuts, I'm sometimes surprised and cherish the mental associations that emerge from my stream. It's my beautiful brain working hard to factor, correlate and structure the stuff I throw at it. I've fallen in love with signal theory but with little reward because the prof. couln't really care less and just expected the students to memorize and cheat at the exam. My mind isn't passive but preempts (how many times have we undersood the point the lecturer was pointing at long before he made it?); I really hate people that can't follow (or even get once explained) my exuberancy and label me a 'nutty nerd'. Am I incapable of accomplishments? No. I did really cool stuff, sweated really hard and hit the bull's eye, often by challenging the trodden path, contemplation and final solution. That are my little neourons let loose, hounding elegance, simplicity, poetry... I'm proud of my bloody attention deficit, it's my intellect crying for more, more, MORE! If people can't keep up with me, it's their problem... not mine...
Yeah. I have this dead rat old box I'd like to upgrade but there aren't any compatible components for it any more. I've been told AGP isn't electrically compatible with the AGP I have on my box and the RAM wouldn't work either (a 66 MHz SDR DIMM system). Can I find a slot1 cpu to max out my mobo today? Nah... upgradability is a false icon... it's just componentization useful for VARs; the end user (old term... correct is 'consumer') will go for the various USB/FW devices...
Have a nice day, Paul! Buahahaha, he's the most AMUSING Microsoft fanboy I've ever seen... even better that the PH(not my)B I've met. He's what you wish all MS campers were like...
Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent. Some new research threatens boatloads of papers, ok... mop it under the rug. Average, uninitiated scientists can't make heads or tails of the nasty slew of hypotherical particles and their family relations (that HAS to be true because it fits the model!)... oh, they're just ignorant. Hmm, I've grocked EM and some quantum physics (the basics: Schroedinger, Fermi and the avg undergraduate stuff in a Solid State Phy course) and never got the Alice in Wonderland feeling. If anything, I cound whip up some experimental paper and read the numbers. All this cosmology doesn't fit my vision of experimental science. You might argue that modern cosmology can account for all the data (or just give it enough time and it will) but anyone can shoehorn a dataset in a model... just add some epicycles, a nudge here, a constant there... it'll all fit. Well, if you're a cosmologist I have no chance holding up my opinion, these guys really know serious math, much more than I do. I've also moved along, I've dedicated myself to other fields but when I had my jab at the subject I had this uneasy feeling of numerical philosophy. So, I just wished these guys proposed something that didn't postulate unreproducible conditions (like +1 us in time since BB) or misterious events (inflation?) Why is there only G in the cosmos? Where has EM gone? Why does it look like The First Seven Days writ in scientific notation? Is H concentration and Hubble shift such a damning evidence? BTW, I'm biased... I'm italian (roman actually) and I've seen too many priests 'reconciling faith & science' under the BB theory;-)
Noone will ever read this but here it is for the books... all my friends that have graduated (sigh, I'll be the last) have repeatedly told me (a notourious linux geek... and Apple customer BTW) that they see Linux just about anywhere. Servers, IDS (even SUN stuff... paid thrugh the nose... just tailored HW & custom.pl scripts), Firewalls, database backends, and web caches... here in Italy every PHB is an M$ zealot, but when engineers close the doors and get the job dune it's Linux... and I'm not talking about small "Cobalt rack" LAMP arrays... govermental...) actually I'm damn happy about my Linux expertise... it'll be a very good checkmark on my resume... thank you.
It's just yet-another-inconsistency in the n-th hack to the BB theory introduced to clean up previous gripes. Undoubtedly some smart uberphysicist armed with pencil & paper (no lab mind you...) will find some toruous equation and shut up those not smart enough; it's been going on for decades. But, after all... do I care? Well, as long as they don't waste too much money chasing their glory I don't mind; I'm just worried that their sacerdotal attitude and pretence to know "God's mind" might dilute the distinction between Science and Faith.
... and they were even denied the 'scope to perform the observations!? (yeah, like the "Kid, don't bother us with that Lun'ux on our NT Backoffice" crap I was given 3 years ago...) Ah, like all other human things, politics, jealousy and orthodoxy are science's greatest pain in the ass. It's a real shame that you have to wait for the white beards to retire or die before scrapping their pet theories or get out of the basement and have a real lab... Now, I wonder what kind of superforce, string, lace, lasso, wimp, buga-uaba will jump out of the hat to save the BB this time... hmm... stars just minutes after the blast?... He, he...
If IBM wants to get this trough it needs to do a couple of things: 1. Take X11 and throw it out of the window. Build a FB acceled interface and make Qt/GTK use it. There already are some viable projects like DirectFB so IBM can simply inject some cash into it and strongarm the HW makers into more collaborative driver efforts. 2. Offer X11 as an add on like Apple; it's too useful for interoperability and compat but keeping it as a modified & bloated primary interface would make it too complicated for developers. Building a least-resistance clear cut route for them... they're lazy! 3. Buy Qt... LGPL it or offer it at dirt cheap prices... all specialist SW I've seen on WIN/UNIX is linked against Qt, wouldn't that be a better solution to wine (still interop but no OS/2 "might as well jmust go Windows right?") 4. Wait... 5. Give the finger to M$... >-]
He shure looks like one! Jokes apart, Gerstner put this guy on top and it's the one that managed the first sniffing ceremonies towards Linux. Do I see a pattern? Companies on the point of extinction like Apple and IBM (big companies... as far as mindshare and cultural relevance) literally resurrected the moment they embraced OSS and played by it's rules. Other companies like sun are fading away and nasty M$ (Yah, troll me... I'm spelling is M$... yes, I'm biased) is yapping in fear. Folks, it's our time. Old PHBs are retiring to Florida's golf resorts, the evangelized decision makers are making space for the new illuminati... I hate to say it, actually I'm not pleased by the "feast or fast" attitude of this industry, but the cosmological pendulum is swinging our way (I just hope I won't be put aside as these fools are today).
Bella frate... ma le tesine scopiazzate dall'enciclopedia dove le metti? A me che non lo facevo mettevano votacci... chi copiava invece... le lodi! Ah, secondo me il liceo e stato il peggior periodo (culturalmente parlando) della mia vita; ci ho messo anni a scrollarmi di dosso le pessime abitudini acquisite...
but how is your program registering itself to tmdns? Does it edit the config file and send a HUP or does it talk with the directly? In the latter case... it's just a wrapper around a lib, in the former... well, you're right but still it looks like a cludge.
What? Please tell me where am I rooting for the little red book. Nowhere am I condemning capitalism, actually I'm complaining that our lousy condition was caused by the lack of a strong middle class! Italian capitalism is limp, that's a fact and any economic commentator worth it's salt will agree with this statement. It doesn't depend on capitalism per se but it just happened because we never had a true, solid and modern market economy (neither for goods, nor stock) but rather a familistic, credit driven and state investment supported caste system. That our industrial powerhorses have been slaughtered in the past 20 years is another fact; Gardini for Chem, De Benedetti for Electronics and Computer are two easy picks (FIAT...). Cuccia's Mediobanca kept a stranglehold on business for 40 years while Milan's stock exchange is still the "Parco Buoi" that it was 20 years ago. Huge wallops of money were wasted in politically manoevered investments doping whole parts of our national industrial growth. That Italy rapidly grew into consumerism without restraint is another fact and today we don't have a culturally strong middle class but a large social segment with lots of money to spend and no clue. Yes I do lean on the leftish side but I'm NOT a red, I just happen to hate Berlusconi:-) but who wouldn't... he's a bad joke come true.
but being limited to the local. link the mitm has to plug into your property; it is a problem but it doesn't expose you to across-the-globe script kiddies (and on the local link arp poisoning already does the trick even with traditional DNS) Being limited to your private network I think mDNS can easily integrate DNSSEC (whoever needs this level of security can fully deploy it independently)
you need repeates sitting on top of multihomed segment junctions (just like samba). As for the xcsreensaver comment... it already happens, on the Mac at least. There's a screensaver called fluid that shares configs across local. machines. Also Roxio Toast 6 allows to seamlessly share your CD/DVD-RW on local. and although I haven't checked I'm pretty shure it runs off rendezvous. I don't think it'll scale anywhere close to the global DNS range and actually I don't think it should; service autodiscovery is cool but it's a security concern too, so it's better to put tight limits to it.
You need to put this on the rc.d script right? Well, although this strategy is much more suited to a linux distro where choice is a totem (not necessarily a bad thing) it does have it's drawbacks. Keeping processes and portnum in sync becomes troublesome and isn't really optimal when the mDNS is part of the core system. In this case it's much more obvious to use programmatic interfaces rather than scripting cobwebs. I'm all for lightweight design but adding a 57 K lib isn't what I call "bloat";-) Just my 0.02
Ehm... a dual decker VCR? A looping tape? Sorry man, these are trivial ideas that were never implemented before purely for a cost reason, that's it. Noone would ever buy an analog tivo in the '80 because of it's expense or poor visual quality but now that HD storage is dirt cheap it's economically viable to do so. Tivo hasn't done anything new, they just put an old idea to practice because the tech that made it viable arrived.
It's more than that. I haven't yet seen the potential of mDNS revealed anywhay but take this example: postgres is compiled with mDNS support, when the daemon starts it registers onto the server's mDNSResponder. You launch your data analisys app that broadcasts the query:_pgsql._tcp.local. and your server responds with netaddr/port. The app establishes the connection, you move on. This stuff IS cool. Linux efforts today are limited to tmdns that requires the server admin to manually edit a config file... shure, init scripts can do this but the idea is that you link to a lib that registers the app to the responder autonomously... howl does that. It's soo cool that I break up in tears thinking back at the time I've wasted on this stuff. If only iptables had a programmatic interface to open ports rather than handcrafting config scripts your little daemon config file would be the central repository for all relevant service information... hmm, a datacenter admin's wet dream
Historical perspective... yeah, bah... I'm not that shure about our historical perspective. Between the collapse of the roman empire and Italy's unification under the Savoia throne in the late '800 Italy has been the playground of local lords, foreign rulers and bickering nobility. No, against all efforts of our postfascist educational system to convice us of the contrary, Italy has stagnated for centuries. Even the industrial revolution took off late because of our campanilistic fragmentation. We never had a strong middle class and fascism came just in time to trounce any chance to develop one. After the war we sort of dedicated ourselves to survival and had some decent growth but the diffused cultural attitude shifted from "Reds Vs. Blue" class conflict to "Screw and when you're caught or screwed, whine" individualism. Only until recently nationalistic pride was deemed fascist (but we do have racist/secessionist party leaders in the government) but anyone save the most rabid reactionary is deemed a commie (can anyone beleive that over here government officials claim "The Economist" is sold out to the commies); industry reps routinely call names at anyone resisting the idea of legalizing sweatshops, most of our population can't care less because they never grew up as "middle-class" but jumped straight out of indigence into consumerism. Even what should be the "enlightened elite" only cares for the quick buck and literally sank all our major industries: IC, Chem, Metal. All that's left is media but it's not very healthy as one Mogul is conditioning it's development to his private convenience... the only developing industry over here is call-centres: low wage, cheap pseudo-butlery... do you really think we know better?;-(
Yours is a common argument amongst us westerners... it also has some logic within but our own success as a society debunks it. You see, here in Italy higher education and research are kept in very low consideration; many young people prefer to drop out of school to work in the "Made in Italy" industry. Apparently they seem to have a good deal with the wages earned they can afford uber cell phones, ridiculously aftermarketed cars, D. Beckham sportswear and sat TV football and disco club... They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value. We don't cultivate a competitive advantage, the whole world is catching up and will sooner or later leave us in the cold. What point am I trying to make? Well, while we are more or less conciously forfeigting our chances to keep the pace these kids sweating their lives in ratholes aren't getting their fair chance. There's no chance a country will improve if it coerces it's human resources into poor margin jobs; we are the living proof. So while those illiterate kids are pretty happy not to starve (but then wouldn't they be much happier if they had a school to attend or a childhood to play) they also suffer because their condition will likely never change in their lifetime and won't have enough income to bootstrap their descendancy's emancipation. For all practical purpouses they are medieval serfs... that's not nice and is cruel on our part to benefit from it.
Well yeah, strictly speaking it's off topic but I think it's also insightful. I believe scientific pursuit has to address whatever it feels interesting and is, in perspective, useful for the advancement of technic and pure knowledge. On the other hand, obtuse media coverage that is to scientific information like a circus show compared to a naturalistic report betrays profound callousness. I don't think anyone would be as excited driving through a desert road yet overnight everyone has become an eso-geologist... I'd prefer mass media to cover without pietism how the global community is/should fight to grab Africa out of the middle ages (and leave the Mars Explorations to good scientific journals, Nature, SciAm or Nat Geo for the beautiful imagery)... Now mod me down to -1
Slashdot Mirror
... and Microsoft is patenting the idea of rolling it... sigh! What is this with comp sci? Whatever naive, obvious and trivial mental association made in this field is considered insightful discovery! I'm a cheap ass sysadmin and everyone I know (except the real compsci dudes) venerates me for my quality expertise! WTF? Side note... this news can't be true; and if it were, it would violate the very principle of the Antitrust Lawsuit. How can something (XML) designed to enfranchise the IT world from proprietary undocumented formats be limited in it's applicability so that it can't be used for the very specific application it was developed for?
Sigh...
I've tried eZ publish which is a PHP based CMS. Does anyone know both systems enough to point out the differences in performance, setup, maintenance? Thanks.
... then you must be sick. Now, come on! Isn't this like a Brave New World? Taking drugs to coerce your brain into a social standard; this is sick. Thinking about it I might have an attention deficit syndrome; actually I'm pretty shure I DO have it. Does it interfere with my karma? When I was a kid I could read Homer all day long, or loop some symphony the whole damn day. Nobody ever diagnosed me some mental condition because I couldn't suffer stiffingly boring tripe for 45 mins. I AM myself, I'm not nuts, I'm sometimes surprised and cherish the mental associations that emerge from my stream. It's my beautiful brain working hard to factor, correlate and structure the stuff I throw at it. I've fallen in love with signal theory but with little reward because the prof. couln't really care less and just expected the students to memorize and cheat at the exam. My mind isn't passive but preempts (how many times have we undersood the point the lecturer was pointing at long before he made it?); I really hate people that can't follow (or even get once explained) my exuberancy and label me a 'nutty nerd'. Am I incapable of accomplishments? No. I did really cool stuff, sweated really hard and hit the bull's eye, often by challenging the trodden path, contemplation and final solution. That are my little neourons let loose, hounding elegance, simplicity, poetry... I'm proud of my bloody attention deficit, it's my intellect crying for more, more, MORE! If people can't keep up with me, it's their problem... not mine...
Yeah. I have this dead rat old box I'd like to upgrade but there aren't any compatible components for it any more. I've been told AGP isn't electrically compatible with the AGP I have on my box and the RAM wouldn't work either (a 66 MHz SDR DIMM system). Can I find a slot1 cpu to max out my mobo today? Nah... upgradability is a false icon... it's just componentization useful for VARs; the end user (old term... correct is 'consumer') will go for the various USB/FW devices...
Have a nice day, Paul! Buahahaha, he's the most AMUSING Microsoft fanboy I've ever seen... even better that the PH(not my)B I've met. He's what you wish all MS campers were like...
mod parent up guys... I'm bookmarking this...
Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent. Some new research threatens boatloads of papers, ok... mop it under the rug. Average, uninitiated scientists can't make heads or tails of the nasty slew of hypotherical particles and their family relations (that HAS to be true because it fits the model!)... oh, they're just ignorant. Hmm, I've grocked EM and some quantum physics (the basics: Schroedinger, Fermi and the avg undergraduate stuff in a Solid State Phy course) and never got the Alice in Wonderland feeling. If anything, I cound whip up some experimental paper and read the numbers. All this cosmology doesn't fit my vision of experimental science. You might argue that modern cosmology can account for all the data (or just give it enough time and it will) but anyone can shoehorn a dataset in a model... just add some epicycles, a nudge here, a constant there... it'll all fit. Well, if you're a cosmologist I have no chance holding up my opinion, these guys really know serious math, much more than I do. I've also moved along, I've dedicated myself to other fields but when I had my jab at the subject I had this uneasy feeling of numerical philosophy. So, I just wished these guys proposed something that didn't postulate unreproducible conditions (like +1 us in time since BB) or misterious events (inflation?) Why is there only G in the cosmos? Where has EM gone? Why does it look like The First Seven Days writ in scientific notation? Is H concentration and Hubble shift such a damning evidence? BTW, I'm biased... I'm italian (roman actually) and I've seen too many priests 'reconciling faith & science' under the BB theory ;-)
Noone will ever read this but here it is for the books... .pl scripts), Firewalls, database backends, and web caches... here in Italy every PHB is an M$ zealot, but when engineers close the doors and get the job dune it's Linux... and I'm not talking about small "Cobalt rack" LAMP arrays... govermental...) actually I'm damn happy about my Linux expertise... it'll be a very good checkmark on my resume... thank you.
all my friends that have graduated (sigh, I'll be the last) have repeatedly told me (a notourious linux geek... and Apple customer BTW) that they see Linux just about anywhere. Servers, IDS (even SUN stuff... paid thrugh the nose... just tailored HW & custom
It's just yet-another-inconsistency in the n-th hack to the BB theory introduced to clean up previous gripes. Undoubtedly some smart uberphysicist armed with pencil & paper (no lab mind you...) will find some toruous equation and shut up those not smart enough; it's been going on for decades. But, after all... do I care? Well, as long as they don't waste too much money chasing their glory I don't mind; I'm just worried that their sacerdotal attitude and pretence to know "God's mind" might dilute the distinction between Science and Faith.
... and they were even denied the 'scope to perform the observations!? (yeah, like the "Kid, don't bother us with that Lun'ux on our NT Backoffice" crap I was given 3 years ago...)
Ah, like all other human things, politics, jealousy and orthodoxy are science's greatest pain in the ass. It's a real shame that you have to wait for the white beards to retire or die before scrapping their pet theories or get out of the basement and have a real lab...
Now, I wonder what kind of superforce, string, lace, lasso, wimp, buga-uaba will jump out of the hat to save the BB this time... hmm... stars just minutes after the blast?... He, he...
If IBM wants to get this trough it needs to do a couple of things:
1. Take X11 and throw it out of the window. Build a FB acceled interface and make Qt/GTK use it. There already are some viable projects like DirectFB so IBM can simply inject some cash into it and strongarm the HW makers into more collaborative driver efforts.
2. Offer X11 as an add on like Apple; it's too useful for interoperability and compat but keeping it as a modified & bloated primary interface would make it too complicated for developers. Building a least-resistance clear cut route for them... they're lazy!
3. Buy Qt... LGPL it or offer it at dirt cheap prices... all specialist SW I've seen on WIN/UNIX is linked against Qt, wouldn't that be a better solution to wine (still interop but no OS/2 "might as well jmust go Windows right?")
4. Wait...
5. Give the finger to M$... >-]
He shure looks like one!
Jokes apart, Gerstner put this guy on top and it's the one that managed the first sniffing ceremonies towards Linux. Do I see a pattern? Companies on the point of extinction like Apple and IBM (big companies... as far as mindshare and cultural relevance) literally resurrected the moment they embraced OSS and played by it's rules. Other companies like sun are fading away and nasty M$ (Yah, troll me... I'm spelling is M$... yes, I'm biased) is yapping in fear. Folks, it's our time. Old PHBs are retiring to Florida's golf resorts, the evangelized decision makers are making space for the new illuminati... I hate to say it, actually I'm not pleased by the "feast or fast" attitude of this industry, but the cosmological pendulum is swinging our way (I just hope I won't be put aside as these fools are today).
done...
Bella frate... ma le tesine scopiazzate dall'enciclopedia dove le metti? A me che non lo facevo mettevano votacci... chi copiava invece... le lodi! Ah, secondo me il liceo e stato il peggior periodo (culturalmente parlando) della mia vita; ci ho messo anni a scrollarmi di dosso le pessime abitudini acquisite...
He's right, italian schools suck!
but how is your program registering itself to tmdns? Does it edit the config file and send a HUP or does it talk with the directly? In the latter case... it's just a wrapper around a lib, in the former... well, you're right but still it looks like a cludge.
Excuse me sir... and how is this userfriendlier than installing gentoo from source or mucking with a CVS Makefile? ;-) (take it easy, I'm just joking)
What? Please tell me where am I rooting for the little red book. Nowhere am I condemning capitalism, actually I'm complaining that our lousy condition was caused by the lack of a strong middle class! Italian capitalism is limp, that's a fact and any economic commentator worth it's salt will agree with this statement. It doesn't depend on capitalism per se but it just happened because we never had a true, solid and modern market economy (neither for goods, nor stock) but rather a familistic, credit driven and state investment supported caste system. That our industrial powerhorses have been slaughtered in the past 20 years is another fact; Gardini for Chem, De Benedetti for Electronics and Computer are two easy picks (FIAT...). Cuccia's Mediobanca kept a stranglehold on business for 40 years while Milan's stock exchange is still the "Parco Buoi" that it was 20 years ago. Huge wallops of money were wasted in politically manoevered investments doping whole parts of our national industrial growth. :-) but who wouldn't... he's a bad joke come true.
That Italy rapidly grew into consumerism without restraint is another fact and today we don't have a culturally strong middle class but a large social segment with lots of money to spend and no clue.
Yes I do lean on the leftish side but I'm NOT a red, I just happen to hate Berlusconi
but being limited to the local. link the mitm has to plug into your property; it is a problem but it doesn't expose you to across-the-globe script kiddies (and on the local link arp poisoning already does the trick even with traditional DNS) Being limited to your private network I think mDNS can easily integrate DNSSEC (whoever needs this level of security can fully deploy it independently)
you need repeates sitting on top of multihomed segment junctions (just like samba).
As for the xcsreensaver comment... it already happens, on the Mac at least. There's a screensaver called fluid that shares configs across local. machines. Also Roxio Toast 6 allows to seamlessly share your CD/DVD-RW on local. and although I haven't checked I'm pretty shure it runs off rendezvous.
I don't think it'll scale anywhere close to the global DNS range and actually I don't think it should; service autodiscovery is cool but it's a security concern too, so it's better to put tight limits to it.
You need to put this on the rc.d script right? Well, although this strategy is much more suited to a linux distro where choice is a totem (not necessarily a bad thing) it does have it's drawbacks. Keeping processes and portnum in sync becomes troublesome and isn't really optimal when the mDNS is part of the core system. In this case it's much more obvious to use programmatic interfaces rather than scripting cobwebs. I'm all for lightweight design but adding a 57 K lib isn't what I call "bloat" ;-) Just my 0.02
Ehm... a dual decker VCR? A looping tape? Sorry man, these are trivial ideas that were never implemented before purely for a cost reason, that's it. Noone would ever buy an analog tivo in the '80 because of it's expense or poor visual quality but now that HD storage is dirt cheap it's economically viable to do so. Tivo hasn't done anything new, they just put an old idea to practice because the tech that made it viable arrived.
It's more than that. I haven't yet seen the potential of mDNS revealed anywhay but take this example:
postgres is compiled with mDNS support, when the daemon starts it registers onto the server's mDNSResponder. You launch your data analisys app that broadcasts the query:_pgsql._tcp.local. and your server responds with netaddr/port. The app establishes the connection, you move on. This stuff IS cool. Linux efforts today are limited to tmdns that requires the server admin to manually edit a config file... shure, init scripts can do this but the idea is that you link to a lib that registers the app to the responder autonomously... howl does that. It's soo cool that I break up in tears thinking back at the time I've wasted on this stuff. If only iptables had a programmatic interface to open ports rather than handcrafting config scripts your little daemon config file would be the central repository for all relevant service information... hmm, a datacenter admin's wet dream
Historical perspective... yeah, bah... I'm not that shure about our historical perspective. Between the collapse of the roman empire and Italy's unification under the Savoia throne in the late '800 Italy has been the playground of local lords, foreign rulers and bickering nobility. No, against all efforts of our postfascist educational system to convice us of the contrary, Italy has stagnated for centuries. Even the industrial revolution took off late because of our campanilistic fragmentation. We never had a strong middle class and fascism came just in time to trounce any chance to develop one. After the war we sort of dedicated ourselves to survival and had some decent growth but the diffused cultural attitude shifted from "Reds Vs. Blue" class conflict to "Screw and when you're caught or screwed, whine" individualism. Only until recently nationalistic pride was deemed fascist (but we do have racist/secessionist party leaders in the government) but anyone save the most rabid reactionary is deemed a commie (can anyone beleive that over here government officials claim "The Economist" is sold out to the commies); industry reps routinely call names at anyone resisting the idea of legalizing sweatshops, most of our population can't care less because they never grew up as "middle-class" but jumped straight out of indigence into consumerism. Even what should be the "enlightened elite" only cares for the quick buck and literally sank all our major industries: IC, Chem, Metal. All that's left is media but it's not very healthy as one Mogul is conditioning it's development to his private convenience... the only developing industry over here is call-centres: low wage, cheap pseudo-butlery... do you really think we know better? ;-(
Yours is a common argument amongst us westerners... it also has some logic within but our own success as a society debunks it. You see, here in Italy higher education and research are kept in very low consideration; many young people prefer to drop out of school to work in the "Made in Italy" industry. Apparently they seem to have a good deal with the wages earned they can afford uber cell phones, ridiculously aftermarketed cars, D. Beckham sportswear and sat TV football and disco club... They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value. We don't cultivate a competitive advantage, the whole world is catching up and will sooner or later leave us in the cold. What point am I trying to make? Well, while we are more or less conciously forfeigting our chances to keep the pace these kids sweating their lives in ratholes aren't getting their fair chance. There's no chance a country will improve if it coerces it's human resources into poor margin jobs; we are the living proof. So while those illiterate kids are pretty happy not to starve (but then wouldn't they be much happier if they had a school to attend or a childhood to play) they also suffer because their condition will likely never change in their lifetime and won't have enough income to bootstrap their descendancy's emancipation. For all practical purpouses they are medieval serfs... that's not nice and is cruel on our part to benefit from it.
Well yeah, strictly speaking it's off topic but I think it's also insightful. I believe scientific pursuit has to address whatever it feels interesting and is, in perspective, useful for the advancement of technic and pure knowledge. On the other hand, obtuse media coverage that is to scientific information like a circus show compared to a naturalistic report betrays profound callousness. I don't think anyone would be as excited driving through a desert road yet overnight everyone has become an eso-geologist... I'd prefer mass media to cover without pietism how the global community is/should fight to grab Africa out of the middle ages (and leave the Mars Explorations to good scientific journals, Nature, SciAm or Nat Geo for the beautiful imagery)... Now mod me down to -1