So when I go to the wiki to lookup an obscure subject that I know nothing about, can I just trust the information there? Or maybe it's totally incorrect, but hasn't been caught yet? How would I know if I didn't otherwise know anything about the subject?
If I have to check all of the information that I get from the wiki elsewhere, I may as well go to the secondary source first.
If I can only trust it for items that I know a lot about but need a little prodding to remember the details, that curtails it's usefulness.
If the wiki is only authoritative for topics that are pretty common knowledge (and thus checked frequently and often by knowledgeable readers) so be it. But that diminishes the value of a reference work to only being able to verify commonly known information, and then is much less useful for research into obscure topics.
If and until the wiki maintainers are willing to distinguish the knowledge levels of an expert with a saboteur, it is useless as the basis of factual research for obscure topics. It is certainly difficult to identify the experts for all of the fields of human endeavor, but that is precisely why the Enc Brit receives the acclaim that it does--they have identified those experts.
I have seen a few times mentioned here that only experts would be inclined to submit to the wiki, and clueless newbs wouldn't bother--friend, you need to read at -1 a little bit more. Clueless saboteurs, with too much time on their hands, will crap on anything just for the sport of it, just to see if their crap is still brown. And that's just speaking for the pranksters--without considering the folks with ideological bias that want to put their imprimatur on the facts. As we've seen, their errors of reason are a lot harder to detect, and often require the review by many experts to determine if they're legitimate.
To extend the Slashdot analogy a little bit further--do you read at -1? I don't. For good reason--because not everyone's opinion has the same merit. But the wiki doesn't even have a moderation system, let alone a review by experts opinion--what happens when Trollaxor writes an article on human sexuality? And every time he's edited, he edits back, just because he can? And he will.
I haven't seen US territory get hit with another major attack in the last three years.
This is not meant as a troll--although this is the hardest topic to avoid starting one in--but if we were hit, would you change your vote?
I ask because I firmly believe that we will be hit if Uncle Al thinks it'll help his goals, and I don't think that we can prevent it if Uncle Al cares to execute it. But then the question becomes: a) does Uncle Al prefer to see Bush or Kerry in control? I believe that there are arguments for either, which I'll probably have to elaborate on in the thread below; and b) would an attack make Bush more or less re-electable? Americans would surely feel the same wave of patriotism that they did the first time, and rally behind the commander-in-chief; otoh, Bush has credited himself with making the world and the US in particular much safer since he's the guy in charge. If Uncle Al puts a lie to that, are Americans likely to hold him accountable?
It's hard to me to guess, since I'll be voting for Kerry regardless of what happens. So I'm interested to hear from a "leaning-to-Bush" kinda guy to know if your vote could be flipped by an attack. I'm guessing that it couldn't be--but it seems like you've predicated your decision on his ability to make us safer, and if it's demonstrated that he really hasn't, I wonder if your opinion will change.
(Just to make sure this gets modded as a troll--I can't believe Cheney's latest statements, to the effect of: vote for Kerry and we'll be attacked; we've made the world safer, as we haven't been attacked since 9/11 due to our response. Either they know a lot more about Uncle Al's capability than I do--entirely possible--or they're doing a lot of wishful thinking and whistling past the graveyard. Uncle Al has already shown a willingness to influence the democratic process, so to challenge them to do it again seems like a stupid stupid stupid thing to do. I think it would have been much smarter to say "re-elect Bush as he's the only guy with the gumption to complete the job that's been started but to say that the job is over when it clearly isn't is just boggling. Didn't they learn from the Bring It On and the Mission Accomplished tough talk?)
The other problem with this is that they could have it used against them, next. For instance, should Kerry win and appoint judges not meeting the approval of a slightly Democratic Senate, the Republicans wouldn't be able to filibuster those choices themselves. As they did during the Clinton Administration, if memory serves.
Unless they're truly cynical, and expire such a rule on Jan 19, just before inauguration. But I think that would be really very surprising.
I haven't followed this story carefully, but you appear to have an opinion--why would Oracle care about a competitor acquiring a financial services firm?
Dupe from about 6 hours ago. The thread discusses the forgery allegations, although Twirlip obviously wants to make it more of a discussion.
I thought I removed this topic section from my preferences just so I could avoid this kind of crap. If I wanted political spin, I'd go to Fox News. Instead, I go to/. for News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters; and there was precious little political discussion here last time around in 2000, when the election promised to resolve the Microsoft lawsuit, and so was arguably on topic. Now it's hardly at all.
Well, I'm sure OS X can do this now, and other posts above this suggest that Windows can do it too. So I think it'll take more than that to get either OS X or Windows in your place of work. Even if that is just "IT Education"; they may not be aware that it's possible.
So from my mind, this is a Good Thing, and I'd like to see it on my OS X/Linux machines as well.
This is available in OS X if you're a "managed user." Which means essentially getting login creds (and authority to do things on your computer) from OS X 10.2 Server (or later).
Does currently require a server to manage it--so you can't lockout a non-admin user on your machine, but that kind of control may now be available via/etc/authorization, and may become available without requiring a Server in 10.4.
This will never go to trial though. Some higher up at Microsoft will come to his or her senses and put a stop to this nonsense.
I agree it'll never go to trial. What'll happen, though, is that Clear Channel and friends will get scared and negotiate with Microsoft; for example, will do an exclusive distribution deal through Microsoft's version of the iTMs. Then, Microsoft wins; Clear Channel wins; the RIAA wins.
Oh yeah, Real and Apple lose.
Microsoft surely doesn't want to be in a position of being a radio station disk jockey. What they want to do is tie up that content, and to do that you can't just ask Clear Channel politely; you have to give them a deal that they can't refuse. This is the big stick that drives CC to the bargaining table on terms favorable to Microsoft.
Microsoft will maybe be someday called on this tactic by someone who is willing to go the distance; maybe not. Maybe that foe is IBM--or maybe Microsoft is smart enough not to take on the Real Big Fish--like the Chinese government, or Wal-Mart. Time will tell.
Try it, they have a free demo. Try and see if you can break it (let me know if you can:)).
That offer good for the OS X version of their product, too? If so, you're on.
I'll also stipulate to disabling external booting via Firmware lock, disabling single user mode, and not having the root user enabled. I'll pretend that I can't defeat that by not changing the RAM--which is plausible on a workstation with a padlock (but not on a portable.)
Re:I think a ruse is going on at Microsoft
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Ballmer on Linux
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What would likely also shock you is that his goal like most 'softies is really to deliver solutions to the world.
I could believe that, really. But why do they insist on, then, "cutting off the oxygen supply", copy-catting instead of innovating, and buying up rival companies merely to bury their technology? Why don't they just compete on quality, instead of gamesmanship?
They may want to deliver solutions--but they also want to be the only solution available. And to preclude the development of future solutions. If they stuck with the former, it'd be fine; but they do the other things to. And if you and your fellow 'softies only see the first thing and not the latter, you're deluding yourself into a false sense of righteousness and altruism.
"Oh but no!" I hear you say. "Bungie is going to take over Microsoft from the inside!" Yeah. I'll believe that when I see Halo: 2 for the Mac. They started on the Mac, remember. Really, who's left at Bungie from the Marathon days? Haven't they all been replaced by MS dweebs now?
I have a few google email invites also. Send requests to: jmnemonic@gmail.com.
Please put "invite request" in your subject line so if I get an ass-load of requests I can filter.
From the interview with Stephen Colbert: I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
If I had had 1/10 of the enthusiasm for my schoolwork as I did for drawing maps on graph paper and figuring the averages of different dice shapes and combinations I could have gone to Harvard.
Instead, I moved from D&D to MUSHing, and now I post on / in the middle of the day. So it goes.
ps: A 6 sided die has a 3.5 average, for those who had things to do on Friday nights:)
One of Spirit's wheels isn't behaving properly--causing them to actually drive Spirit backwards most of the time; both have shown some temporary software glitches (which have been resolved pretty quickly.)
Given a large enough selection of eBooks to buy/download, they could take the lead on a very large untapped market.
For instance, if they were sold through the iRead--the eBook equivalent of the iTunes Music Store? If they had the O'Reilly library in eBook form, it would be powerful hard to resist.
I've long hated that the aspect ratio of a PDF is different than the monitor aspect ratio--I shouldn't have to scroll to read the bottom of a page, and then scroll back up to read the top half of the same page. How about rotating the page such that it fills the screen? But then the monitor is not oriented to the keyboard. This could fix that.
Plus, the guy that does Desktop Manager has hinted about curious screen rotation stuff in undocumented APIs. Hm.
It's almost as if their strategy is "ignore the man behind the curtain! Look at all the shiny things we might do!"
But: will any of those things keep them from losing $1B every quarter? Unless you can answer that question in the affirmative, and it'll ship soon, and not cost more to develop than it brings in, it's just looks like an attempt to distract from their failing core business.
You thought wrong. Nowhere is it required that Linux be distributed for free; it's only that you must be able to distribute it yourself for whatever charge you chose, including free; also that you must distribute the source to anyone to whom you distribute the binary.
So if a friend subscribes to YDL net, he has the authority to redistribute it to whomever he cares to for whatever price he sets it at. Many distributors of Linux have simply chosen to distribute their product for free, as that's where the price is driven and the marginal extra that they may be able to make isn't worth the headache.
But in this case YDL has chosen not to make it free. Read the GPL FAQ for yourself to learn about this.
Are there any IT professionals out there who don't want to log stuff when things go wrong?
Sure. So email me the logs to your servers. Oh, and you can't look at them first. I'll be real interested to know the services you have have running, the users that log in, and when they log in, and what they access.
Oh? You don't want to do that? Then why do you keep logs on your servers?
The problem here isn't the logging per se, it's that the owner of the vehicle will not be able to read the data generated by their property, and may have to relinquish the data generated by their property to government authorities. Especially if I can't look at the data myself, I won't be able to verify that it's recording accurately.
Although, like you say, logging my vehicle would be interesting. I imagine I could increase my mpg by analyzing speed/gas consumption/braking habits etc.
Re:What police/intelligence agencies have learned.
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Blackhat/Defcon Report
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There's no such timing information. While they do expect some attack before the elections, that's unrelated to the current information. Which has been determined to have been largely generated pre-9/11 in any event. Read: this was an over-reaction to worthless intel; they were all excited about it because of it's specificity, but it's stale stale. The reconnaissance info that they acquired had no timing information included.
In fact, it made me think of the "intel" that Princess Leia gave to Darth right before Alderaan was destroyed: prima facie useful, it's actually useless.
but crashing a cropduster into a Waffle House isn't going to have the same kind of effect.
As if GA lives have less value than NYC lives? C'mon. And I live in DC, fwiw. btw: we were hit too. Why is that always forgotten by New Yorkers?
And if you think it'd have less impact, riddle me this: what would happen to the US Economy if a crop duster flew into the Mall of America a week before Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving Day; the busiest retail shopping day of the year).
There goes Christmas shopping, and quite a few chains would have a hard time getting through that season with any money left.
Over unencrypted AFP (Mac native filesharing protocol) from one Xserve G5 2.0 DP to another, via a $100 Gigabit switch, I got 33MB/s, or almost exactly 2GB/minute.
I did find that turning on the encryption option blew that number to hell: I didn't play with it long, but it appeared that it cut my speeds to about 10% of that.
The servers in question didn't have much else going on, etc. Not truly scientific, as that rate was good enough for me. And enough to show me that I should not use encryption when I do large size file transfers.
At some point governments need to figure out this methodology doesn't work and try something new.
They either will, or they'll be beaten by an enemy that does internal management better/more efficiently. How many terrorist attacks can we suffer that result in 200 Billion dollar wars, before our economy collapses for good? I'll bet Al Queda knows. In fact, I think it's their goal.
Think it can't happen? What happened to the Roman, British, Spanish, French "world-wide" powers? Answer: they ran out of money to protect their worldwide interests. If we continue to fuck away money on imperial adventures, we will run out of money to support Israel. And then the terrorists win.
Slashdot Mirror
So when I go to the wiki to lookup an obscure subject that I know nothing about, can I just trust the information there? Or maybe it's totally incorrect, but hasn't been caught yet? How would I know if I didn't otherwise know anything about the subject?
If and until the wiki maintainers are willing to distinguish the knowledge levels of an expert with a saboteur, it is useless as the basis of factual research for obscure topics. It is certainly difficult to identify the experts for all of the fields of human endeavor, but that is precisely why the Enc Brit receives the acclaim that it does--they have identified those experts.
I have seen a few times mentioned here that only experts would be inclined to submit to the wiki, and clueless newbs wouldn't bother--friend, you need to read at -1 a little bit more. Clueless saboteurs, with too much time on their hands, will crap on anything just for the sport of it, just to see if their crap is still brown. And that's just speaking for the pranksters--without considering the folks with ideological bias that want to put their imprimatur on the facts. As we've seen, their errors of reason are a lot harder to detect, and often require the review by many experts to determine if they're legitimate.
To extend the Slashdot analogy a little bit further--do you read at -1? I don't. For good reason--because not everyone's opinion has the same merit. But the wiki doesn't even have a moderation system, let alone a review by experts opinion--what happens when Trollaxor writes an article on human sexuality? And every time he's edited, he edits back, just because he can? And he will.
I haven't seen US territory get hit with another major attack in the last three years.
This is not meant as a troll--although this is the hardest topic to avoid starting one in--but if we were hit, would you change your vote?
I ask because I firmly believe that we will be hit if Uncle Al thinks it'll help his goals, and I don't think that we can prevent it if Uncle Al cares to execute it. But then the question becomes: a) does Uncle Al prefer to see Bush or Kerry in control? I believe that there are arguments for either, which I'll probably have to elaborate on in the thread below; and b) would an attack make Bush more or less re-electable? Americans would surely feel the same wave of patriotism that they did the first time, and rally behind the commander-in-chief; otoh, Bush has credited himself with making the world and the US in particular much safer since he's the guy in charge. If Uncle Al puts a lie to that, are Americans likely to hold him accountable?
It's hard to me to guess, since I'll be voting for Kerry regardless of what happens. So I'm interested to hear from a "leaning-to-Bush" kinda guy to know if your vote could be flipped by an attack. I'm guessing that it couldn't be--but it seems like you've predicated your decision on his ability to make us safer, and if it's demonstrated that he really hasn't, I wonder if your opinion will change.
(Just to make sure this gets modded as a troll--I can't believe Cheney's latest statements, to the effect of: vote for Kerry and we'll be attacked; we've made the world safer, as we haven't been attacked since 9/11 due to our response. Either they know a lot more about Uncle Al's capability than I do--entirely possible--or they're doing a lot of wishful thinking and whistling past the graveyard. Uncle Al has already shown a willingness to influence the democratic process, so to challenge them to do it again seems like a stupid stupid stupid thing to do. I think it would have been much smarter to say "re-elect Bush as he's the only guy with the gumption to complete the job that's been started but to say that the job is over when it clearly isn't is just boggling. Didn't they learn from the Bring It On and the Mission Accomplished tough talk?)
The other problem with this is that they could have it used against them, next. For instance, should Kerry win and appoint judges not meeting the approval of a slightly Democratic Senate, the Republicans wouldn't be able to filibuster those choices themselves. As they did during the Clinton Administration, if memory serves.
Unless they're truly cynical, and expire such a rule on Jan 19, just before inauguration. But I think that would be really very surprising.
Available from Gutenburg here.
I haven't followed this story carefully, but you appear to have an opinion--why would Oracle care about a competitor acquiring a financial services firm?
Dupe from about 6 hours ago. The thread discusses the forgery allegations, although Twirlip obviously wants to make it more of a discussion.
I thought I removed this topic section from my preferences just so I could avoid this kind of crap. If I wanted political spin, I'd go to Fox News. Instead, I go to
Well, I'm sure OS X can do this now, and other posts above this suggest that Windows can do it too. So I think it'll take more than that to get either OS X or Windows in your place of work. Even if that is just "IT Education"; they may not be aware that it's possible.
So from my mind, this is a Good Thing, and I'd like to see it on my OS X/Linux machines as well.
This is available in OS X if you're a "managed user." Which means essentially getting login creds (and authority to do things on your computer) from OS X 10.2 Server (or later).
Does currently require a server to manage it--so you can't lockout a non-admin user on your machine, but that kind of control may now be available via
Kinda sad that these engineers would lose to most 4th graders.
I would like to meet a 4th grader that can design a de-orbit of a spacecraft after three years in space that never fails.
You were modded to -1 for a reason. Use thrusters indeed.
This will never go to trial though. Some higher up at Microsoft will come to his or her senses and put a stop to this nonsense.
I agree it'll never go to trial. What'll happen, though, is that Clear Channel and friends will get scared and negotiate with Microsoft; for example, will do an exclusive distribution deal through Microsoft's version of the iTMs. Then, Microsoft wins; Clear Channel wins; the RIAA wins.
Oh yeah, Real and Apple lose.
Microsoft surely doesn't want to be in a position of being a radio station disk jockey. What they want to do is tie up that content, and to do that you can't just ask Clear Channel politely; you have to give them a deal that they can't refuse. This is the big stick that drives CC to the bargaining table on terms favorable to Microsoft.
Microsoft will maybe be someday called on this tactic by someone who is willing to go the distance; maybe not. Maybe that foe is IBM--or maybe Microsoft is smart enough not to take on the Real Big Fish--like the Chinese government, or Wal-Mart. Time will tell.
Try it, they have a free demo. Try and see if you can break it (let me know if you can
That offer good for the OS X version of their product, too? If so, you're on.
I'll also stipulate to disabling external booting via Firmware lock, disabling single user mode, and not having the root user enabled. I'll pretend that I can't defeat that by not changing the RAM--which is plausible on a workstation with a padlock (but not on a portable.)
What would likely also shock you is that his goal like most 'softies is really to deliver solutions to the world.
I could believe that, really. But why do they insist on, then, "cutting off the oxygen supply", copy-catting instead of innovating, and buying up rival companies merely to bury their technology? Why don't they just compete on quality, instead of gamesmanship?
They may want to deliver solutions--but they also want to be the only solution available. And to preclude the development of future solutions. If they stuck with the former, it'd be fine; but they do the other things to. And if you and your fellow 'softies only see the first thing and not the latter, you're deluding yourself into a false sense of righteousness and altruism.
You forgot Bungie.
"Oh but no!" I hear you say. "Bungie is going to take over Microsoft from the inside!" Yeah. I'll believe that when I see Halo: 2 for the Mac. They started on the Mac, remember. Really, who's left at Bungie from the Marathon days? Haven't they all been replaced by MS dweebs now?
Sorry folks, all gone.
I have a few google email invites also. Send requests to: jmnemonic@gmail.com. Please put "invite request" in your subject line so if I get an ass-load of requests I can filter.
From the interview with Stephen Colbert: I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
If I had had 1/10 of the enthusiasm for my schoolwork as I did for drawing maps on graph paper and figuring the averages of different dice shapes and combinations I could have gone to Harvard.
Instead, I moved from D&D to MUSHing, and now I post on / in the middle of the day. So it goes.
ps: A 6 sided die has a 3.5 average, for those who had things to do on Friday nights
One of Spirit's wheels isn't behaving properly--causing them to actually drive Spirit backwards most of the time; both have shown some temporary software glitches (which have been resolved pretty quickly.)
Given a large enough selection of eBooks to buy/download, they could take the lead on a very large untapped market.
For instance, if they were sold through the iRead--the eBook equivalent of the iTunes Music Store? If they had the O'Reilly library in eBook form, it would be powerful hard to resist.
I've long hated that the aspect ratio of a PDF is different than the monitor aspect ratio--I shouldn't have to scroll to read the bottom of a page, and then scroll back up to read the top half of the same page. How about rotating the page such that it fills the screen? But then the monitor is not oriented to the keyboard. This could fix that.
Plus, the guy that does Desktop Manager has hinted about curious screen rotation stuff in undocumented APIs. Hm.
I agree.
It's almost as if their strategy is "ignore the man behind the curtain! Look at all the shiny things we might do!"
But: will any of those things keep them from losing $1B every quarter? Unless you can answer that question in the affirmative, and it'll ship soon, and not cost more to develop than it brings in, it's just looks like an attempt to distract from their failing core business.
I thought Linux was supposed to be free.
You thought wrong. Nowhere is it required that Linux be distributed for free; it's only that you must be able to distribute it yourself for whatever charge you chose, including free; also that you must distribute the source to anyone to whom you distribute the binary.
So if a friend subscribes to YDL net, he has the authority to redistribute it to whomever he cares to for whatever price he sets it at. Many distributors of Linux have simply chosen to distribute their product for free, as that's where the price is driven and the marginal extra that they may be able to make isn't worth the headache.
But in this case YDL has chosen not to make it free. Read the GPL FAQ for yourself to learn about this.
Are there any IT professionals out there who don't want to log stuff when things go wrong?
Sure. So email me the logs to your servers. Oh, and you can't look at them first. I'll be real interested to know the services you have have running, the users that log in, and when they log in, and what they access.
Oh? You don't want to do that? Then why do you keep logs on your servers?
The problem here isn't the logging per se, it's that the owner of the vehicle will not be able to read the data generated by their property, and may have to relinquish the data generated by their property to government authorities. Especially if I can't look at the data myself, I won't be able to verify that it's recording accurately.
Although, like you say, logging my vehicle would be interesting. I imagine I could increase my mpg by analyzing speed/gas consumption/braking habits etc.
There's no such timing information. While they do expect some attack before the elections, that's unrelated to the current information. Which has been determined to have been largely generated pre-9/11 in any event. Read: this was an over-reaction to worthless intel; they were all excited about it because of it's specificity, but it's stale stale. The reconnaissance info that they acquired had no timing information included.
In fact, it made me think of the "intel" that Princess Leia gave to Darth right before Alderaan was destroyed: prima facie useful, it's actually useless.
but crashing a cropduster into a Waffle House isn't going to have the same kind of effect.
As if GA lives have less value than NYC lives? C'mon. And I live in DC, fwiw. btw: we were hit too. Why is that always forgotten by New Yorkers?
And if you think it'd have less impact, riddle me this: what would happen to the US Economy if a crop duster flew into the Mall of America a week before Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving Day; the busiest retail shopping day of the year).
There goes Christmas shopping, and quite a few chains would have a hard time getting through that season with any money left.
Over unencrypted AFP (Mac native filesharing protocol) from one Xserve G5 2.0 DP to another, via a $100 Gigabit switch, I got 33MB/s, or almost exactly 2GB/minute.
I did find that turning on the encryption option blew that number to hell: I didn't play with it long, but it appeared that it cut my speeds to about 10% of that.
The servers in question didn't have much else going on, etc. Not truly scientific, as that rate was good enough for me. And enough to show me that I should not use encryption when I do large size file transfers.
At some point governments need to figure out this methodology doesn't work and try something new.
They either will, or they'll be beaten by an enemy that does internal management better/more efficiently. How many terrorist attacks can we suffer that result in 200 Billion dollar wars, before our economy collapses for good? I'll bet Al Queda knows. In fact, I think it's their goal.
Think it can't happen? What happened to the Roman, British, Spanish, French "world-wide" powers? Answer: they ran out of money to protect their worldwide interests. If we continue to fuck away money on imperial adventures, we will run out of money to support Israel. And then the terrorists win.