... the fact remains if they get to look at your HD via a warrent and they discover 20 GB of encrypted data...
One of the nice features of crypto on Linux is that you preseed the partition with random data dd-ed from/dev/random. Then when you start creating a filesystem you change around the bits on the disk, but it still looks like random data.
I wonder if there's a way to see whether or not the disk has has a crypto filesystem on it, or if it was just being prepared for that purpose?
They probably don't even really fire the guy if you insist on giving a 9...
You could be right. Some companies actually try to do better for real and get higher scores the right way. Who's to say some aren't tricking the game by nagging the customer until they give a 10/10?
Come to think of it, both methods could be used concurrently. There's no reason you can't nag at the customer until they give a 10 and then fire some guy if you don't succeed.
I don't know his source either, but there are plenty of relatively small family businesses (50-100 people) in my area -an insignificant part of Belgium- that have offices outside Europe. The biggest branch office is usually the one in North America.
North America is still the center of the world's economy and companies need to be present there.
I assume that yes, most them are there to sell goods and services. So what? Jobs are jobs, would you rather not have them?:)
This does raise an interesting point: if you enlarge your data set this way with mostly useless data, it could actually become more difficult to trace known bad guys.
I have to visit the US once in a while on business but now I'm no longer sure if I still want to go there with these laws in place.
US businesses and jobs will suffer, believe me. I just hope they start doing the same with every US citizen entering one of the countries on the fingerprint list. That way at least US citizens get to be treated as criminals too.
I think it's time we closed down NATO and got a real European defense organization.
At least we don't lock away people and then deny them the right to counsel, visits or trial, and then claim that that's ok because they're sub-humans anyway.
When you lookup slashdot.org you are looking up 'slashdot' inside the 'org' domain. To do that you need to know who knows about 'org'
Every domain name server has a list of root IP addresses, this is where he can find the ip address of the server that knows about 'org' and other domains.
The servers in that small list get a lot of traffic. Some are owned by the US military, other are owned by universities, etc. It's undoable for most for-profit organisations to fund such a machine (typically mainframes are used) or even its internet connection.
We do need a central authority to regulate the IP address ranges and adherence to RFCs such as the one in question here (DNS) that form the back bone of the internet, at least until we have something better.
In this case the ICANN has done its job, thankfully. Perhaps it's not a completely lost cause after all.
The parent was correct, Java desktop is just a name.
Sun does this kind of thing a lot, it confuses their customers into thinking they actually have something going there. They don't. For instance, ask them about a SunRay client for the Java Desktop or about VNC capability in the SunRay server).
Sun is going the way of the dodo. The selling power of Sun used to be their good desktops which shared a hardware platform with the servers (so no need to compile separate software trees for servers and clients). Now all that remains is their desktop exit strategy. Thank god they released the V*80 server series or they'd be dead already.
There is only a semantical difference between a theory and a hypothesis.
Typically a hypothesis is when you think 'may be the universe is like this', and you try and find a way to prove or disprove that argument.
A theory is what you get when you observe reality and try and find a rule that governs that reality.
Both processes involve creativity, supposition, observation and either confirmation or refutation. As such, both theories and hypothesis can be proven wrong.
I don't think it's a good idea to start judging scientific ideas on any other basis than comparison to reality. Limiting yourself to semantics is silly.
Several of the experts interviewed at the time said that the weapons had already been found by the previous weapons inspections after Bush War 1 (or is that Bush I War?). They found some new installations in the second rounds of inspections but nothing really major.
Some of the WMD inspectors even quit over this stuff. Perhaps your media neglected to mention these facts, ours did (Belgium).
No one with an ounce of sense actually believed at the time that this information was true. I didn't, no one I spoke to at the time thought there was any merit here.
Starting a business is daunting, but the point is spending your money well. You just spend that amount of money that is absolutely needed (I should know, the startup I worked for managed to go bankrupt in 6 months). Keeping your cash flow in balance is critical for any new business.
The problem with many people is that they start a business like you explained it. There's no reason to get a secretary when you have 0 customers, instead get a cell phone. The first thing to do is get a customer. Use your dad's printer, darned, and get a fax receive service where you can go collect any faxes for you.
One very important item: make sure you can survive if your customer doesn't pay. Explain him that you are a beginning businessman and need monthly payments. Do _not_ wait to get paid until the job is finished! Do _not_ give the customer the finished product without asking for a signature confirming delivery. Make sure the delivery confirmation mentions the contract under which the product was delivered to the customer. If the above is impossible then get an insurance against customers who won't pay and bump your price to account for the offset in cost.
Don't bother getting a business location, do that once you have actual money coming into your bank account. Use your house or your brothers' barn instead and deduct the cost as a business location. In my country if your house is 100 m2 and your desk where you run your business (your computer room) is 30 m2, then you can deduct 3/10 of your rent as a business expense!
If you can keep your company going like this for 2 or 3 years you're set.
Read this: Francesco Carlotta, "Was Jesus Caesar?".
In fact, Caesar's life went _exactly_ like that of Jesus. In the same order, with the same names of places (which never even existed in Palestine), with the same nouns, adjectives, verbs put in the same order, etc. The lot of it, up to and including translation errors which were copied.
The list of similarities is so long that in traditional text analysis (which is just part of his theory), the proof he gives is sufficient to claim that the Caesar and New Testament texts are indeed one and the same. Read the above sentence again: this is the same textual analysis which is used by all other Bible scholars to study the Bible (--> if what Carlotta saying is wrong, then everything else we 'know' about the Bible is also wrong because it is based on the same principle of text analysis).
Some examples:
The gospel of Caesar was taken by Caesar's veterans to the Middle East where he became the living God who died for his people (like Jesus).
In Rome in the forum Romanum a statue of Caesar (who was 'crucified' in the non-literal sense by those who opposed him) was erected in the form of a crucifix.
Every single person mentioned in the New Testament can be given a one-to-one relationship with every person known in Caesar's life.
Etc. etc. ad nauseam. It's just silly how the entire world has missed all this for 2000 years.
Whenever one of my friends with a good IT knowledge needs a job I help them by sending on their resumes to headhunters. I usually send them good people, and this way I'm sure to have a good email address to send my resume to if I ever get fired from a job.
If so, most of it is much older than 2,000 years (The old testament, which describes creation and early man). Most modern English translations come directly from the original Hebrew and Greek (and others)
Those translations always make certain assumptions though, which may or may not be true. For the Old Testament we only have a good idea for those texts that were actually written in Hebrew. But some, like Genesis, are older still - from before that language existed.
And consider the New Testament, which was edited considerably. We use the translated versions of those redacted texts and we really have no clue who wrote them or what the texts initially looked like. According to some, the New Testament is actually about Julius Caesar - the Jesus/Jerusalem part being a displacement of the original Julius/Rome. If that is a distinct possibility then what on earth can we say with surety about the Old Testament?
I'm taking a CS course after hours and I regularly have to write small papers which correctly refer to sources. But how far do you go? Papers like this usually do nothing but quote from the same 2 standards documents over and over and your job is simply to combine them and make something new.
The language in such documents is typically very precise so finding a new way of describing them may be dangerous. And putting quotes around them or putting in 15 footnotes isn't workable either - it makes the text less readable.
You need a special brand of faith to believe that poppycock.
Good point... I guess the scientists who wrote this article should try and get religion tax-exempt status.
But on a more serious note: whether or not you believe something is unrelated to whether or not it is true.
So how exactly is "You need a special brand of faith to believe that poppycock." related to the topic? Remember we're talking about science here, not your beliefs system.
"Security"? How's that going to help? You just may be able to prevent a single person from being murdered by erecting walls around them (read: the president) but how are you going to protect an entire country?
Don't you see that something else is wrong here? For one, maybe the US shouldn't be training terrorists like Osama Bin laden, the world would already be safer then.
So stop nagging about security, get your head out of your ass, and start thinking about why this trrorism is taking place.. It's just a symptom of a bigger issue and digging trenches or shutting your eyes to reality (and calling it 'security') is not going to help.
What we need is open minds to face the world of tomorrow. Not a reactionary, "we are better than the rest so it's okay for us to kill other people" and then expect that everyone will like you for it.
I won't call you a moron because I don't want to offend real morons.
Just because it works doesn't mean it's a cool or interesting lifestyle.
I'd agree, but it's not the parent's point. His point is that if you're good at fooling people and society permits it (and even thinks it's a good thing) then maybe what's wrong is society in making us do these things.
It seems like greed is a way of life now for a majority of the population. It's not because you and I don't like that, that it's going to go away. First we need to stop denying that this is in fact a problem.
with Sun pumping out hundreds of thousands of GNOME desktops, how long will geeks have any influence?
Until recently we had to compile our own Gnome and KDE versions on Solaris continuously so we'd be up-to-date, so I'm not at all angry with Sun for this move.
Look at it this way:
Sun doesn't sell nearly as many (enterprise) desktops as they used to in the Sparc 5 days. They would really love to change that.
For those that they do sell: this move towards using open source software is a real mind shift, Sun is a really closed company and for them to make this move is unprecedented.
This is making the visibility of open-source in the enterprise rocket sky high. Sun is a reputable company of Fortune 500 status.
The amount home users and small businesses that use Linux will also grow, not just enteprise packaged versions of the same.
Add to that a single desktop for companies and others to start using a a springboard onto open-source.
I truly don't see anything wrong here. Who cares what desktop choice UserLinux, HP or Sun makes as long as it isn't closed?
But I fear that the commercial industry will force the situation. If KDE ceases to be a viable competitor to GNOME, because of the commercial factor, competition in desktops will be a thing of the past.
KDE and gnome don't exist for that long, and they weren't designed like you'd design a rocket: clear interfaces that are well-planned from the start, etc like LDAP where implementations don't matter.
In time someone will come along and set goals for a protocol/interface that is capable of abstracting the implementation of GUIs (IEEE for instance, or a university like MIT which designed Kerberos).
At that time we'll be in a new world, as unimaginable as Linux being a threat to Microsoft would be in 1992. It's just a matter of time and if open-source gains wider acceptance and the worlds' computer-whiz resources are spent on issues like GUI implementation, then human nature will take over and change will occur - it is the nature of life. VHS supplanted the superior Betamax but won't withstand the computer age...
I would never use a commercial TCP/IP stack, for example.
For some computers there still are no freely available TCP/IP stacks. People still make a very good business selling commercial TCP/IP stacks e.g. for mainframes.
Even on PCs none were available until Linux or BSD 386 (which is one of the reasons Linus wrote Linux). The DOS ones truly sucked:).
... then why not just pick one (GTK, fine), default to GNOME on the standard install, but keep access to the KDE packages there, even unsupported, so the user can run KDE if so inclined?
Even unsupported packages cost time and money to maintain for the distributor. It looks like UserLinux just made a conscious decision based on a cost analysis and input from the marketing guys. That decision is subject to change though.
For instance, envision the KDE guys writing a totally compatible GTK interface and supplanting gnome. It is possible, just takes effort. Also don't forget the embedded market where QT is making inroads (and the embedded market could end up making the PC business look like a flee market).
Point is this all isn't important, what is important is that there be choice. You don't have to use UserLinux - right? Try gentoo or debian.
No, but along with RedHat and Novell adopting GNOME, it might just mean that GNOME "wins" by virtue of commercial forces rather than technical ones.
I wouldn't count on that, really. Maybe it will just drive KDE to get rid of the more braindead parts of their C++ code by providing good templates etc for people to use. If they win technically then they'll win in Linux. Don't forget that geeks are the Linux motor.
Personally I think someone will come along with something better real soon. It's just a case of getting colleges and universities to start doing the same good things as they did to Unix in the 70s and 80s (let people write something useful in their software projects). And companies of course.
More importantly, all this doesn't really matter. Who cares which one wins? Don't we want competion rather than monopoly? In my vision of an open source future there is no single supplier of software... Someone please finish Hurd and make a new X implementation:).
Slashdot Mirror
... the fact remains if they get to look at your HD via a warrent and they discover 20 GB of encrypted data...
/dev/random. Then when you start creating a filesystem you change around the bits on the disk, but it still looks like random data.
One of the nice features of crypto on Linux is that you preseed the partition with random data dd-ed from
I wonder if there's a way to see whether or not the disk has has a crypto filesystem on it, or if it was just being prepared for that purpose?
They probably don't even really fire the guy if you insist on giving a 9...
You could be right. Some companies actually try to do better for real and get higher scores the right way. Who's to say some aren't tricking the game by nagging the customer until they give a 10/10?
Come to think of it, both methods could be used concurrently. There's no reason you can't nag at the customer until they give a 10 and then fire some guy if you don't succeed.
I don't know his source either, but there are plenty of relatively small family businesses (50-100 people) in my area -an insignificant part of Belgium- that have offices outside Europe. The biggest branch office is usually the one in North America.
:)
North America is still the center of the world's economy and companies need to be present there.
I assume that yes, most them are there to sell goods and services. So what? Jobs are jobs, would you rather not have them?
This does raise an interesting point: if you enlarge your data set this way with mostly useless data, it could actually become more difficult to trace known bad guys.
I have to visit the US once in a while on business but now I'm no longer sure if I still want to go there with these laws in place.
US businesses and jobs will suffer, believe me. I just hope they start doing the same with every US citizen entering one of the countries on the fingerprint list. That way at least US citizens get to be treated as criminals too.
I think it's time we closed down NATO and got a real European defense organization.
At least we don't lock away people and then deny them the right to counsel, visits or trial, and then claim that that's ok because they're sub-humans anyway.
Fourth Reich indeed.
When you lookup slashdot.org you are looking up 'slashdot' inside the 'org' domain. To do that you need to know who knows about 'org'
Every domain name server has a list of root IP addresses, this is where he can find the ip address of the server that knows about 'org' and other domains.
The servers in that small list get a lot of traffic. Some are owned by the US military, other are owned by universities, etc. It's undoable for most for-profit organisations to fund such a machine (typically mainframes are used) or even its internet connection.
We do need a central authority to regulate the IP address ranges and adherence to RFCs such as the one in question here (DNS) that form the back bone of the internet, at least until we have something better.
In this case the ICANN has done its job, thankfully. Perhaps it's not a completely lost cause after all.
Mod parent up!
I was thinking precisely the same thing. When you want to confront a company about its strategy and position you're not supposed to quote the CEO?
Now, I can agree that a lot of things Scott says don't make any sense at all but that's hardly Eric's fault.
The parent was correct, Java desktop is just a name.
Sun does this kind of thing a lot, it confuses their customers into thinking they actually have something going there. They don't. For instance, ask them about a SunRay client for the Java Desktop or about VNC capability in the SunRay server).
Sun is going the way of the dodo. The selling power of Sun used to be their good desktops which shared a hardware platform with the servers (so no need to compile separate software trees for servers and clients). Now all that remains is their desktop exit strategy. Thank god they released the V*80 server series or they'd be dead already.
There is only a semantical difference between a theory and a hypothesis.
Typically a hypothesis is when you think 'may be the universe is like this', and you try and find a way to prove or disprove that argument.
A theory is what you get when you observe reality and try and find a rule that governs that reality.
Both processes involve creativity, supposition, observation and either confirmation or refutation.
As such, both theories and hypothesis can be proven wrong.
I don't think it's a good idea to start judging scientific ideas on any other basis than comparison to reality. Limiting yourself to semantics is silly.
Sorry to be nitpickin.
Several of the experts interviewed at the time said that the weapons had already been found by the previous weapons inspections after Bush War 1 (or is that Bush I War?). They found some new installations in the second rounds of inspections but nothing really major.
Some of the WMD inspectors even quit over this stuff. Perhaps your media neglected to mention these facts, ours did (Belgium).
No one with an ounce of sense actually believed at the time that this information was true. I didn't, no one I spoke to at the time thought there was any merit here.
Starting a business is daunting, but the point is spending your money well. You just spend that amount of money that is absolutely needed (I should know, the startup I worked for managed to go bankrupt in 6 months). Keeping your cash flow in balance is critical for any new business.
The problem with many people is that they start a business like you explained it. There's no reason to get a secretary when you have 0 customers, instead get a cell phone. The first thing to do is get a customer. Use your dad's printer, darned, and get a fax receive service where you can go collect any faxes for you.
One very important item: make sure you can survive if your customer doesn't pay. Explain him that you are a beginning businessman and need monthly payments. Do _not_ wait to get paid until the job is finished! Do _not_ give the customer the finished product without asking for a signature confirming delivery. Make sure the delivery confirmation mentions the contract under which the product was delivered to the customer. If the above is impossible then get an insurance against customers who won't pay and bump your price to account for the offset in cost.
Don't bother getting a business location, do that once you have actual money coming into your bank account. Use your house or your brothers' barn instead and deduct the cost as a business location. In my country if your house is 100 m2 and your desk where you run your business (your computer room) is 30 m2, then you can deduct 3/10 of your rent as a business expense!
If you can keep your company going like this for 2 or 3 years you're set.
Read this: Francesco Carlotta, "Was Jesus Caesar?".
In fact, Caesar's life went _exactly_ like that of Jesus. In the same order, with the same names of places (which never even existed in Palestine), with the same nouns, adjectives, verbs put in the same order, etc. The lot of it, up to and including translation errors which were copied.
The list of similarities is so long that in traditional text analysis (which is just part of his theory), the proof he gives is sufficient to claim that the Caesar and New Testament texts are indeed one and the same. Read the above sentence again: this is the same textual analysis which is used by all other Bible scholars to study the Bible (--> if what Carlotta saying is wrong, then everything else we 'know' about the Bible is also wrong because it is based on the same principle of text analysis).
Some examples:
The gospel of Caesar was taken by Caesar's veterans to the Middle East where he became the living God who died for his people (like Jesus).
In Rome in the forum Romanum a statue of Caesar (who was 'crucified' in the non-literal sense by those who opposed him) was erected in the form of a crucifix.
Every single person mentioned in the New Testament can be given a one-to-one relationship with every person known in Caesar's life.
Etc. etc. ad nauseam. It's just silly how the entire world has missed all this for 2000 years.
My method is keeping in touch with headhunters.
Whenever one of my friends with a good IT knowledge needs a job I help them by sending on their resumes to headhunters. I usually send them good people, and this way I'm sure to have a good email address to send my resume to if I ever get fired from a job.
If so, most of it is much older than 2,000 years (The old testament, which describes creation and early man). Most modern English translations come directly from the original Hebrew and Greek (and others)
Those translations always make certain assumptions though, which may or may not be true. For the Old Testament we only have a good idea for those texts that were actually written in Hebrew. But some, like Genesis, are older still - from before that language existed.
And consider the New Testament, which was edited considerably. We use the translated versions of those redacted texts and we really have no clue who wrote them or what the texts initially looked like. According to some, the New Testament is actually about Julius Caesar - the Jesus/Jerusalem part being a displacement of the original Julius/Rome. If that is a distinct possibility then what on earth can we say with surety about the Old Testament?
I'm taking a CS course after hours and I regularly have to write small papers which correctly refer to sources. But how far do you go? Papers like this usually do nothing but quote from the same 2 standards documents over and over and your job is simply to combine them and make something new.
The language in such documents is typically very precise so finding a new way of describing them may be dangerous. And putting quotes around them or putting in 15 footnotes isn't workable either - it makes the text less readable.
So are there any guidelines about this?
The article doesn't say anything about a return vehicle to get people off the surface of Mars back to Earth.
I wonder who they'll find for this.
You need a special brand of faith to believe that poppycock.
Good point... I guess the scientists who wrote this article should try and get religion tax-exempt status.
But on a more serious note: whether or not you believe something is unrelated to whether or not it is true.
So how exactly is "You need a special brand of faith to believe that poppycock." related to the topic? Remember we're talking about science here, not your beliefs system.
"Security"? How's that going to help? You just may be able to prevent a single person from being murdered by erecting walls around them (read: the president) but how are you going to protect an entire country?
Don't you see that something else is wrong here? For one, maybe the US shouldn't be training terrorists like Osama Bin laden, the world would already be safer then.
So stop nagging about security, get your head out of your ass, and start thinking about why this trrorism is taking place.. It's just a symptom of a bigger issue and digging trenches or shutting your eyes to reality (and calling it 'security') is not going to help.
What we need is open minds to face the world of tomorrow. Not a reactionary, "we are better than the rest so it's okay for us to kill other people" and then expect that everyone will like you for it.
I won't call you a moron because I don't want to offend real morons.
I'd agree, but it's not the parent's point. His point is that if you're good at fooling people and society permits it (and even thinks it's a good thing) then maybe what's wrong is society in making us do these things.
It seems like greed is a way of life now for a majority of the population. It's not because you and I don't like that, that it's going to go away. First we need to stop denying that this is in fact a problem.
Actually both SCO and IBM asked for a jury trial. Of course that doesn't mean the SCO vs IBM case is comparable to a criminal justice case.
Until recently we had to compile our own Gnome and KDE versions on Solaris continuously so we'd be up-to-date, so I'm not at all angry with Sun for this move.
Look at it this way:
I truly don't see anything wrong here. Who cares what desktop choice UserLinux, HP or Sun makes as long as it isn't closed?
But I fear that the commercial industry will force the situation. If KDE ceases to be a viable competitor to GNOME, because of the commercial factor, competition in desktops will be a thing of the past.
KDE and gnome don't exist for that long, and they weren't designed like you'd design a rocket: clear interfaces that are well-planned from the start, etc like LDAP where implementations don't matter.
In time someone will come along and set goals for a protocol/interface that is capable of abstracting the implementation of GUIs (IEEE for instance, or a university like MIT which designed Kerberos).
At that time we'll be in a new world, as unimaginable as Linux being a threat to Microsoft would be in 1992. It's just a matter of time and if open-source gains wider acceptance and the worlds' computer-whiz resources are spent on issues like GUI implementation, then human nature will take over and change will occur - it is the nature of life. VHS supplanted the superior Betamax but won't withstand the computer age...
I would never use a commercial TCP/IP stack, for example.
:).
For some computers there still are no freely available TCP/IP stacks. People still make a very good business selling commercial TCP/IP stacks e.g. for mainframes.
Even on PCs none were available until Linux or BSD 386 (which is one of the reasons Linus wrote Linux). The DOS ones truly sucked
... then why not just pick one (GTK, fine), default to GNOME on the standard install, but keep access to the KDE packages there, even unsupported, so the user can run KDE if so inclined?
Even unsupported packages cost time and money to maintain for the distributor. It looks like UserLinux just made a conscious decision based on a cost analysis and input from the marketing guys. That decision is subject to change though.
For instance, envision the KDE guys writing a totally compatible GTK interface and supplanting gnome. It is possible, just takes effort. Also don't forget the embedded market where QT is making inroads (and the embedded market could end up making the PC business look like a flee market).
Point is this all isn't important, what is important is that there be choice. You don't have to use UserLinux - right? Try gentoo or debian.
No, but along with RedHat and Novell adopting GNOME, it might just mean that GNOME "wins" by virtue of commercial forces rather than technical ones.
:).
I wouldn't count on that, really. Maybe it will just drive KDE to get rid of the more braindead parts of their C++ code by providing good templates etc for people to use. If they win technically then they'll win in Linux. Don't forget that geeks are the Linux motor.
Personally I think someone will come along with something better real soon. It's just a case of getting colleges and universities to start doing the same good things as they did to Unix in the 70s and 80s (let people write something useful in their software projects). And companies of course.
More importantly, all this doesn't really matter. Who cares which one wins? Don't we want competion rather than monopoly? In my vision of an open source future there is no single supplier of software... Someone please finish Hurd and make a new X implementation