The Mark VII torpedo scandal is a well known one. Less known is that the Germans suffered almost the exact same issue for over a year with signifigant impact to their U-boat operations.
There is a good reason why navies were pushing magnetic detonation: contact detonation sucks. Modern (as in post 1905) warships and some merchant vessels are sectioned off into watertight bulkheads to improve survivability in the event of a hull breach. Most ships can suffer a breach of 30-50% of its watertight compartments before sinking!
A contact-detonated torpedo often only blows a hole in one or two compartments. Thus, you need to fire four or more torpedoes which are in very limited supply (about 18 per boat, with a 20minute reload time)
Magnetic detonators explode directly beneath the hull of a ship, breaking the keel of the target and causing massive flooding. When magnetic detonators were perfected, most any non-capital ship could be sunk with a single torpedo hit.
You are unique. Very, very few people had even heard of the internet in 1990.
You sound like a grumpy old man whose private club has been overrun by the dirty and commercial public at large.
Your "large and vibrant" community consisted solely of computer science, engineering and math faculty and students, combined with a few defense contractors.
After all, why should the public, whose millions or billions of tax dollars built the internet be able to enjoy the many advantages that it offers.
Go to your favorite pub and drown your sorrows about the wane of text files and archie. Maybe the barman will care.
Your problem is either that you do not know how to delegate or your job sucks.
Email only arrives in my inbox from 25 people in my organization. Everything else goes in the trash. I read about 40 of 300 messages a day and need to respond to 10 or less.
If its important, they will call, visit or send a letter. I refuse to waste my time on other peoples bullshit.
I'd be more interested in number portability between companies, especially cell phone vendors?
For example, I've had a cell phone with SprintPCS for several years. Most everybody I know or do business with calls me on my Sprint number.
So if I want to switch to Verizon or Nextel or Cingular or Voicestream I lose my number. Plus, the cell phone is not listed in the phone book so people I don't talk to often will have trouble getting a hold of me.
Being able to xfer your number across company boundaries, even if it cost more money would be a worthwhile thing.
I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.
At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.
With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.
It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.
The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies. Linux and FreeBSD are targetted towards different segments of users, why can't we just accept that? Take a look at a typical posting from a Linux user on the freebsd-newbies list. We're talking two different worlds here.
I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.
From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.
Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.
Is the definition of "spam" as specified in the AUP as shown in this document http://litigation.paetec.net/ptmol.pdf
According to the defense affidavit, "Spamming is the distribution of unsolicited commercial e-mail in bulk"
What constitutes "bulk" email from regular email? They do not define "bulk email" as being 10 messages or 10,000 messages, and this gives the spammer a technicality to argue before the court or a tool to delay the process.
If you buy the media kit, you get documentation, and about 7 cds with OS stuff, docs, gnu utilities, star office, forte for java and an eval of forte for C/C++
I work in a job where I get 35 days a year in total vacation, sick and personal time.
There are clear rules that vacations are subject to supervisory approval. Very rarely would a vacation over 2 weeks be approved in the summertime. Occasionally you see someone take a month off in Aprril or during school holidays.
Maybe I've been smoking too much crack, but I though CmdrTaco stated one short week ago that Linux should not be referred to as GNU/Linux?
Fuck the lameness filter, here's something really lame, courtesey of Slash:
# interpolative hash ref. Got these figures by testing out
# several paragraphs of text and saw how each compressed
# the key is the ratio it should compress, the array lower,upper
# for the ratio. These ratios are _very_ conservative
# a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off
if (!$bad) {
my $limits = {
1.3 => [10,19],
1.1 => [20,29],
.8 => [30,44],
.5 => [45,99],
.4 => [100,199],
.3 => [200,299],
.2 => [300,399],
.1 => [400,1000000],
};
# Ok, one list ditch effort to skew out the trolls!
if (length($$comm) >= 10) {
for (keys %$limits) {
# DEBUG
# print "ratio $_ lower $limits->{$_}->[0] upper $limits->{$_}->[1]<br>\n";
# if it's within lower to upper
if (length($$comm) >= $limits->{$_}->[0] &&
length($$comm) <= $limits->{$_}->[1]) {
# if is >= the ratio, then it's most likely a
# troll comment
if ((length(compress($$comm)) /
length($$comm)) <= $_) {
"Honestly, sometimes I think that 99% of open source software is the willingness to do the work. I don't want to sound blasphemous, but it's just software. Anyone can write software and release it. And , looking at some of the code (oss and proprietary) just about anyone has."
I agree with you, but I am critizing those who harp on with nearly religious fervor against the notion of intellectual property, patents & copyright and for the GPL and other "open" licenses. (the editors and bulk of the posters to this site in particular)
You are correct, of course, they cannot directly re-license the work of independent developers. Not directly, anyway.
They CAN stop contributing to the GPL-version (they ARE the primary contributors) and extend the functionality of the application with proprietary modules. Who is to say those proprietary modules will not provide "enhanced" functionality that GPL'd code currently provides?
The notion that the GPL can keep software free is a myth. The same tactics GNU uses to knockoff proprietary software can be used to proprietize GNU software. This job is even easier, since the source is available.
The difficult part of creating software is designing it, tweaking it and finding/removing performance bottlenecks. The actual coding is not nearly as difficult. This why people & organizations patent the application of certain algorithms to certain problems.
The people controlling the site are the people who hold the pursestrings.
People are free to change their mind of course, but it does not help your credibility when you turn away from a license or a philosophy that is espoused as the only righteous and moral path by the "community".
What is hypocritical is that employees of VA Linux, namely the editors of this site, constantly and consistantly challenge the validity of copyright & patents as it pertains to "bad" organizations.
Will those feelings change when VA feels the need to defend it's intellectual property? How about when Slash become a proprietary product? You better believe it.
Feel free to moderate down to -1 Troll. I don't agree with the hivemind, sorry.
A leading "Open-Source" company is taking the work of the "community", repackaging it into a closed-source product and selling it corporations and government as a proprietary product.
It is news because it highlights the death of the "Free Software" large-scale business model.
How hypocritical is it that the people who run this site, while espousing the virtues of open source take an open-sourced program and make it proprietary.
While they will have a "Source Forge - Open Edition", there will undoubtably be features in the "Enterprise" edition missing from the GPL'd release. Is this fair to those who have contributed to SourceForge on a voluntary and uncompensated basis? Will the open-source contributers receive royalties from the commercial product?
Where is JonKatz and CmdrTaco crying out against this now? I guess moral superiority stops at the hands of those who sign their checks.
Scientists don't work for free. It may sound great to say "Fuck patents, lets take care of people" at first, until you think about it.
Drug companies will stop sending important drugs to places that flaunt their disregard of the law like Brazil. A few AIDS patients may live a little longer, but alot of new antibiotics & other drugs will never make it to Brazil.
Running telephone wires across national boundaries, and thus avoiding paying outrageous fees to the dictators telephone monopoly is a great way to get shot.
There isn't too many philanthropic millionaires in SA anymore either. Those who could left, and those who remain spend all their money on machine-gun toting security people to keep bands of criminals from gang-raping their wives and daughters. (Was featured on 60 minutes a month ago)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad I didn't get accepted to MIT. They've been officially declared 'evil' by the Slashbot collective.
The Mark VII torpedo scandal is a well known one. Less known is that the Germans suffered almost the exact same issue for over a year with signifigant impact to their U-boat operations.
There is a good reason why navies were pushing magnetic detonation: contact detonation sucks. Modern (as in post 1905) warships and some merchant vessels are sectioned off into watertight bulkheads to improve survivability in the event of a hull breach. Most ships can suffer a breach of 30-50% of its watertight compartments before sinking!
A contact-detonated torpedo often only blows a hole in one or two compartments. Thus, you need to fire four or more torpedoes which are in very limited supply (about 18 per boat, with a 20minute reload time)
Magnetic detonators explode directly beneath the hull of a ship, breaking the keel of the target and causing massive flooding. When magnetic detonators were perfected, most any non-capital ship could be sunk with a single torpedo hit.
If you are going to insult people, at least get it right:
"Those who can do; those who can't teach"
You are unique. Very, very few people had even heard of the internet in 1990.
You sound like a grumpy old man whose private club has been overrun by the dirty and commercial public at large.
Your "large and vibrant" community consisted solely of computer science, engineering and math faculty and students, combined with a few defense contractors.
After all, why should the public, whose millions or billions of tax dollars built the internet be able to enjoy the many advantages that it offers.
Go to your favorite pub and drown your sorrows about the wane of text files and archie. Maybe the barman will care.
Your problem is either that you do not know how to delegate or your job sucks.
Email only arrives in my inbox from 25 people in my organization. Everything else goes in the trash. I read about 40 of 300 messages a day and need to respond to 10 or less.
If its important, they will call, visit or send a letter. I refuse to waste my time on other peoples bullshit.
It's called the market, moron.
The academic and military internet still exists. Except nobody uses it (just like nobody used it back in the good old days)
I'd be more interested in number portability between companies, especially cell phone vendors?
For example, I've had a cell phone with SprintPCS for several years. Most everybody I know or do business with calls me on my Sprint number.
So if I want to switch to Verizon or Nextel or Cingular or Voicestream I lose my number. Plus, the cell phone is not listed in the phone book so people I don't talk to often will have trouble getting a hold of me.
Being able to xfer your number across company boundaries, even if it cost more money would be a worthwhile thing.
I just read that mailing list thread and got quite a chuckle out of it.
It's always amusing to watch two egomaniacs duel it out. I'd have to say Theo won this argument though, DJB came out looking like a real ass.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is the reason why lawyers can charge so much. Small details make the difference in legal action.
I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.
At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.
With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.
It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.
The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies. Linux and FreeBSD are targetted towards different segments of users, why can't we just accept that? Take a look at a typical posting from a Linux user on the freebsd-newbies list. We're talking two different worlds here.
I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.
From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.
Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.
Is the definition of "spam" as specified in the AUP as shown in this document http://litigation.paetec.net/ptmol.pdf
According to the defense affidavit, "Spamming is the distribution of unsolicited commercial e-mail in bulk"
What constitutes "bulk" email from regular email? They do not define "bulk email" as being 10 messages or 10,000 messages, and this gives the spammer a technicality to argue before the court or a tool to delay the process.
I like Solaris, but it doesn't come with a great LVM or JFS.
VxFS and Veritas Volume manager are great, but they cost alot. UFS & Disksuite kinda suck.
If you buy the media kit, you get documentation, and about 7 cds with OS stuff, docs, gnu utilities, star office, forte for java and an eval of forte for C/C++
I work in a job where I get 35 days a year in total vacation, sick and personal time.
There are clear rules that vacations are subject to supervisory approval. Very rarely would a vacation over 2 weeks be approved in the summertime. Occasionally you see someone take a month off in Aprril or during school holidays.
Maybe I've been smoking too much crack, but I though CmdrTaco stated one short week ago that Linux should not be referred to as GNU/Linux?
.8 => [30,44],
.5 => [45,99],
.4 => [100,199],
.3 => [200,299],
.2 => [300,399],
.1 => [400,1000000],
Fuck the lameness filter, here's something really lame, courtesey of Slash:
# interpolative hash ref. Got these figures by testing out
# several paragraphs of text and saw how each compressed
# the key is the ratio it should compress, the array lower,upper
# for the ratio. These ratios are _very_ conservative
# a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off
if (!$bad) {
my $limits = {
1.3 => [10,19],
1.1 => [20,29],
};
# Ok, one list ditch effort to skew out the trolls!
if (length($$comm) >= 10) {
for (keys %$limits) {
# DEBUG
# print "ratio $_ lower $limits->{$_}->[0] upper $limits->{$_}->[1]<br>\n";
# if it's within lower to upper
if (length($$comm) >= $limits->{$_}->[0] &&
length($$comm) <= $limits->{$_}->[1]) {
# if is >= the ratio, then it's most likely a
# troll comment
if ((length(compress($$comm)) /
length($$comm)) <= $_) {
# blammo luser
$$error_message = slashDisplay('errors', {
type => 'compress filter',
ratio => $_,
}, 1);
editComment('', $$error_message), return unless $preview;
$bad = 1;
last;
}
}
}
}
}
Yuo would think after three yeras that Taco wuld learn to spel and how to put togeher a complete sentence it is really pathetic and das.
"Honestly, sometimes I think that 99% of open source software is the willingness to do the work. I don't want to sound blasphemous, but it's just software. Anyone can write software and release it. And , looking at some of the code (oss and proprietary) just about anyone has."
I agree with you, but I am critizing those who harp on with nearly religious fervor against the notion of intellectual property, patents & copyright and for the GPL and other "open" licenses. (the editors and bulk of the posters to this site in particular)
You are correct, of course, they cannot directly re-license the work of independent developers. Not directly, anyway.
They CAN stop contributing to the GPL-version (they ARE the primary contributors) and extend the functionality of the application with proprietary modules. Who is to say those proprietary modules will not provide "enhanced" functionality that GPL'd code currently provides?
The notion that the GPL can keep software free is a myth. The same tactics GNU uses to knockoff proprietary software can be used to proprietize GNU software. This job is even easier, since the source is available.
The difficult part of creating software is designing it, tweaking it and finding/removing performance bottlenecks. The actual coding is not nearly as difficult. This why people & organizations patent the application of certain algorithms to certain problems.
The people controlling the site are the people who hold the pursestrings.
People are free to change their mind of course, but it does not help your credibility when you turn away from a license or a philosophy that is espoused as the only righteous and moral path by the "community".
What is hypocritical is that employees of VA Linux, namely the editors of this site, constantly and consistantly challenge the validity of copyright & patents as it pertains to "bad" organizations.
Will those feelings change when VA feels the need to defend it's intellectual property? How about when Slash become a proprietary product? You better believe it.
Feel free to moderate down to -1 Troll. I don't agree with the hivemind, sorry.
A leading "Open-Source" company is taking the work of the "community", repackaging it into a closed-source product and selling it corporations and government as a proprietary product.
It is news because it highlights the death of the "Free Software" large-scale business model.
How hypocritical is it that the people who run this site, while espousing the virtues of open source take an open-sourced program and make it proprietary.
While they will have a "Source Forge - Open Edition", there will undoubtably be features in the "Enterprise" edition missing from the GPL'd release. Is this fair to those who have contributed to SourceForge on a voluntary and uncompensated basis? Will the open-source contributers receive royalties from the commercial product?
Where is JonKatz and CmdrTaco crying out against this now? I guess moral superiority stops at the hands of those who sign their checks.
Slashdot, where open-source fascists live...
I wouldn't be making any new AIDS drugs.
Scientists don't work for free. It may sound great to say "Fuck patents, lets take care of people" at first, until you think about it.
Drug companies will stop sending important drugs to places that flaunt their disregard of the law like Brazil. A few AIDS patients may live a little longer, but alot of new antibiotics & other drugs will never make it to Brazil.
Great Advice.
Running telephone wires across national boundaries, and thus avoiding paying outrageous fees to the dictators telephone monopoly is a great way to get shot.
There isn't too many philanthropic millionaires in SA anymore either. Those who could left, and those who remain spend all their money on machine-gun toting security people to keep bands of criminals from gang-raping their wives and daughters. (Was featured on 60 minutes a month ago)