Fourth, we have been accumulating this knowlege ever since we found the Anarchist's Cookbook on the local BBS
Isn't there a rumor that the book was really
written by the gov't and filled with unstable
recipes so that the anarchist wannabes would
blow themselves up?
If Linux were as popular as Windows, it would also attract buggy drivers, and be unstable.
Is that meant to spoof the old "more Windows
viruses because it's more popular" myth?
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one
are they more likely to spend time writing and
testing properly: the one that will be
used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be
used on 5% of desktops? Even the large companies
that can write decent drivers often write
their Linux drivers in a rush, usually after some
big customer asks for it and they're facing the
loss of a big sale.
Of course, one could argue that a company that
doesn't have the resources to make a decent
driver won't even bother with the Linux market.
But such no-name companies mostly just use
common chipsets anyway, most of which have
good drivers.
... people could devise a scheme like that selling their "stolen" goods and then getting them back for free; even if they confessed to "stealing."
How would that be different from any of the other
scams people try, like torching their own
buildings and collecting the insurance? I'm sure
it would be covered by existing laws, such as
"filing false police reports."
Regulation means bureaucrats, who wield great power, and who will be attractive places for people like Microsoft, who possess vast fortunes, to spend it.
People often promote some kind of government
regulation in the mistaken hope that the people in
charge of enforcing it will share their ideals,
only to find out too late that they have little
control over who will enforce it.
Case in point: feminists in Canada helped push
for laws which gave customs agents the
power to seize "obscene" materials at the border. They were all
for this because they hated pr0n. It's sexist,
it makes objects out of women (insert C++ jokes),
it causes rape, yada yada yada.
Guess what? When the law went into effect, it
was the middle-aged, mostly male customs officials
who had to do the inspections and decide what
was obscene. ("So what do you do for a
living?" "I read pr0n all day!")
Turn out that they were stopping a lot of
gay/lesbian magazines from crossing the border,
which was making it hard for the gay/lesbian
bookstores to make money. While the big mags
(Playboy, et al.) got through OK. The feminist
crowd cried foul; they felt that only
heterosexual pr0n was bad.
(I imagine the Customs Office was like, "I
inspected this lesbian magazine, but I'm not sure
if it meets the government standards." "Well,
we'd better have everyone else read it too, so
we can reach a group consensus...")
if we can find a way to take away their motivations, we'll have less hassles to do with on our networks.
After R'ing TFA, I'd guess that the most
efficient way to take away their motivation would
be for the major ISPs to chip into a fund to
get hookers for them.
I learned TECO around the time the Solidarity
movement was big in the news. It seemed that
every Polish name I saw in the newspapers looked
like one of my TECO macros!
About 10 years ago, I read an article about some
theology student who was working on a Klingon
translation of the Bible! He was doing it like
a real biblical scholar (working from what are
assumed to be original sources, rather than
translations). He conceded it was mostly just for
fun, but held out hope that some ST fan who would
never read a regular Bible might read it.
The article discussed the challenges of
translating biblical concepts into a language
with something like 2,000 words. There apparently
was a way one could petition the "official"
keepers of the Klingon language to "discover" a
new word, but that was only to be used as a last
resort. Instead, he made due with what he had.
For instance, Klingon had no word for god but
he used something that translated roughly as
"Highest Lord."
If people would read the document that read 'README' or read the error message instead of panicking when one occured, 95% of all computer problems would be fixed instantly.
Read the ____ error message -- what a concept!
I was adminning a lab full of Suns, and one guy
emailed me and said that he got a "filesystem
full" message, but he didn't have a key to the
room with the file server so he couldn't
reboot it!
"Why on earth would you reboot a machine for a
'filesystem full' error?"
"Because you always reboot machines to
fix problems!"
Now it wasn't like it was/tmp that was full, in
which case a reboot would at least fix
the problem, if sloppily.
Turns out he was raised on Windows, so in his
thinking, System Problem -> Reboot, automatically.
(We saved him in time, and got him into Linux,
Solaris and FreeBSD, so he turned out all right.
He may even be reading this now.)
With the elections being as close as they have been, shutting down machines in a few heavily [democratic|republican] districts could easily change the results of the election.
Quebec (Canada) tried this in their 1995
referendum on trying to secede from Canada.
Ballots were marked by hand and counted by hand.
Each ballot had large circles labeled YES and NO.
Only certain symbols were allowed (IIRC, they were
an X, a check mark, a straight horizontal line, or
filling in the circle completely). Anything else
was to be considered "spoiled" (historically, an
average of about 1% of ballots are spoiled, often
by voters protesting what they see as a poor
choice of candidates).
Some election officer took it upon himself to
issue written instructions to his counters
requiring them to be extremely picky in validating
the symbols. For instance, if the check mark were
drawn like a V (both strokes the same length), it
was to be counted as spoiled. All the districts
where he sent the instructions were ones which
could be predicted to tilt toward the NO side.
In some districts, as many as 12% of the ballots
were disqualified.
According to a guy I knew who was an observer
(parties get to have observers present at the
counting), some counting rooms almost erupted into
fistfights when observers loudly objected to the
disqualifying of so many ballots.
The referendum lost, but only by a margin which
was less than the estimated number of NO votes
lost in this manner. (Not that that means
anything, except to show how close things were.)
The secessionist Quebec government
"investigated," decided nothing was wrong, and
spent most of their energies trying to sue a
student group in Ontario for "illegally
subsidizing" the NO campaign by bussing students
to a pro-Canada rally in Montreal.
WinCo is about the only large grocery store in the Portland (Oregon) area
that hadn't gone in for the "membership" card BS.
Their prices are consistently lower than most other
stores I've seen (often dramatically), if you
exclude the loss leaders. Also, they have some
interesting concepts. You can buy things like
spices by spooning them into baggies and paying
by weight, rather than buying prepackaged (and
overpriced) bottles.
They don't take credit cards, which can be a pain
for some. (But then you know they
aren't tracking you.)
In colloquial usage to punt means either to do something essentially random and see what happens, or to "kick" the problem to someone else, leading to the common American phrase, "When in doubt, punt."
In some engineering communities (such as MIT),
"punt" can also mean just to quit, without
necessarily punting "to" someone. For instance,
"The last problem on the homework was taking too
long, so I just punted."
From an enduser perspective, it might be just be worth your while to get used to the English version as well, because the interface concepts (the File menu and so on) can be applied across many different applications, not just your localized OpenOffice.
Maybe a Rwandan user would be better off learning
English. Until he does, he'll get used to whatever
works in Rwandan, which is OO right now. When his
English proficiency is up, is he going to say,
"Oh boy, now I know English, so I can switch to
MSoffice"? Or is he going to say, "Why should I
switch when I know OO and it works fine?"
Yeah, harassing the salesman who has absolutely nothing to do with your machine's setup and is just following his manager's orders is definitely a lot of fun.
So we're supposed to feel sorry for the guy just
because he's a small cog in the Microsoft machine?
Hopefully, when the manager asks how that sale he
saw him working on turned out, the salesman will
say, "I almost had it, but then he started
talking about this 'Linux' thing and he didn't
like my answers and wandered off."
Now what will the manager do with this info?
Any decent sales manager will be keeping tuned
to customer demands.
(I once was at a trade show, and asked a guy
in a booth if his product worked under Linux.
He said no, but it was coming in 3 months. I
mentioned this to a friend, who told me he met
the same guy the day before, who had told
him Linux support was coming in 6 months! Now,
it could've been just vaporware, but at least
the guy was picking up on the fact that some
potential customers were interested in Linux
support.)
Wouldn't it be great to have a PDA built into a cell phone? Let's patent the idea and wait till somebody creates the device, then sue the shit out of them for copying our IP.
Sticking two existing things together and calling
it something new has a long history. The guy who
first stuck an erasor on the end of a pencil
(named Hymen Lipman -- I'm not making this up!)
got a U.S. patent on it! It was later
overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court
because a pencil manufacturer decided to fight it.
One of the leaders in computer architecture,
Yale Patt, has
already written a
book
based on this concept. He gives enough of an
overview of logic design to understand things
at an RTL (register) level, and distills CPU design
to its essentials. He doesn't get to C until
half way through the book.
His observation is that CS students have a MUCH
easier time comprehending things like recursion
when they understand what's really going on
inside.
(My efforts to get this book introduced at my
old university were unsuccessful, as the
department chairman was afraid that teaching
assembly language would drive students away.
He wanted to teach them Java instead.)
IBM, Intel charge ever-so-slightly higher prices to cover the expense of ridiculous law suits like this thing.
It sounds more like an insurance fund. It's
basically telling SCO that they'll have to pick
on a bunch of people at once (at least to exhaust
the $10M on the other side).
If it works, SCO won't even try. In which case
the money doesn't get used. I wonder if whatever
is left over when SCO finally goes TU is given
back to the contributors.
The RISC concept, implemented in CPUs like the MIPS R3000, originally meant very simple hardware without pipeline interlocks, instruction schedulers, or more than an absolute bare-bones set of instructions.
Not true at all! RISC refers to the instruction
set, not the internal architecture. Even the
earliest RISC processors to carry that name
included pipeline interlocks -- it was the
simplicity of RISC that made such techniques
feasible, especially at the chip densities of the
80's.
There's a lot of confusion about what RISC means.
Look up a computer architecture textbook.
RISC is somewhat fuzzy, and most chips bend the
edges of the definitions in places. The general
operating principle is "reduced," and herein lies
the ambiguity, since this is relative to the
technology of the day. (A "RISC" Alpha made in the
90's has more opcodes than a "CISC" 8086 made in
1978.) But RISC processors typically have the
following properties:
Limited addressing modes (typically
register-register, loads and stores only, maybe
with some variants like autoincrement)
Relatively simple instruction formats (often
all instructions are the same size)
Emphasis on general instructions rather than
specialized instructions with limited applicability
(such as string ops)
CISC used to mean that many or most instructions were implemented in microcode on the processor.
Again, no. CISC means supporting many different
kinds of operations directly in hardware. This
was especially appealing in the days when
back-end compiler code generation wasn't very
good, so CISC means often a simple 1-for-1
translation from high-level constructs to
machine opcodes. The ISA complexity usually
meant microcode was the best approach, but this
was not part of the definition.
Why does it need to have multiple computers networked?
Redundancy in case of failure.
You see, they'll be running Windows.
Re:Definitely
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A pretty easy way to generate passwords that
pass most picky password approval checkers is to
take a phrase that you can easily remember, and
then take the first letter of each word. Include
punctiation to get the requisite non-alphanumeric
characters. Make at least one numeric substitution
if you're required to have a number. For instance:
Does that make it acceptable for a business to be missing a major fraction of it's licenses?
In the BSA cases I've read, the threshold was as
low as 5%, not a "significant fraction."
At some point, it doesn't matter whether it was malicious or not, because of the epic scale of incompitence.
"Epic scale of incompitence [sic]"???
Over licenses costing a few hundred dollars?
First of all, most small-scale computer users may
not even be aware there's an issue. They
paid for their computer, right? Thanks to
Microsoft's monopoly, most people don't even think
of the software as being something intrinsically
separable from the platform. They think of Office
as being an option for their PC, like getting
automatic transmission. How many car owners are
expected to have separate documentation giving
them the right to use their automatic
transmission?
Second, it is standard practice in most businesses
that there is a price threshold below
which bookkeeping requirements are far less,
because of the expense involved. In my former
workplace, anything over $5K was "equipment" and
had to have stickers on it and all kinds of
tracking; anything less was "supplies." Meals
under $10 did not require receipts for
reimbursement, because having someone look at
them was more costly than the chance that someone
might claim his $5 lunch cost $9.99. For most
places, the typical cost of software falls in that
"supplies" region, and Microsoft's insistence
otherwise falls totally outside of normal
business expectations.
It's funny that you sneer at anyone whose
inventory methods don't meet Microsoft's
standards, calling them poor businessmen and
"incompitent," but you say nothing about
a giant company trying to get out of a legal
settlement by whining that they can't track do
the paperwork to verify every claim.
Notice, they don't need proof.
Since when was "innocent until proven guilty"
banished from our legal traditions? (Other than
asset
forfeiture?) Note that you are required to
carry registration for your car, but if you
can't produce it when you're pulled over, you
can only be charged with failing to show
registration. You can't be charged with
stealing the car unless they can actually prove
that.
why are they inviting Microsoft in, and agreeing to the diabolical licencing schemes. Either way you want to slice the onion, it's bad business
I would agree that buying Microsoft is bad
business, and I warn people about BSA audits
as one of the risks of MS software. But many
people say it is nearly impossible to do
business without buying MS (Word docs or ISVs
only writing for Windows or whatever), and their
argument was legally validated when Microsoft
was declared a monopoly by the same court system
they are so willing to use agianst others.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't there a rumor that the book was really written by the gov't and filled with unstable recipes so that the anarchist wannabes would blow themselves up?
Is that meant to spoof the old "more Windows viruses because it's more popular" myth?
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one are they more likely to spend time writing and testing properly: the one that will be used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be used on 5% of desktops? Even the large companies that can write decent drivers often write their Linux drivers in a rush, usually after some big customer asks for it and they're facing the loss of a big sale.
Of course, one could argue that a company that doesn't have the resources to make a decent driver won't even bother with the Linux market. But such no-name companies mostly just use common chipsets anyway, most of which have good drivers.
The old phones ran at 1900mhz. So the new phones are, what, like less than half as good as the old ones?
How would that be different from any of the other scams people try, like torching their own buildings and collecting the insurance? I'm sure it would be covered by existing laws, such as "filing false police reports."
People often promote some kind of government regulation in the mistaken hope that the people in charge of enforcing it will share their ideals, only to find out too late that they have little control over who will enforce it.
Case in point: feminists in Canada helped push for laws which gave customs agents the power to seize "obscene" materials at the border. They were all for this because they hated pr0n. It's sexist, it makes objects out of women (insert C++ jokes), it causes rape, yada yada yada.
Guess what? When the law went into effect, it was the middle-aged, mostly male customs officials who had to do the inspections and decide what was obscene. ("So what do you do for a living?" "I read pr0n all day!") Turn out that they were stopping a lot of gay/lesbian magazines from crossing the border, which was making it hard for the gay/lesbian bookstores to make money. While the big mags (Playboy, et al.) got through OK. The feminist crowd cried foul; they felt that only heterosexual pr0n was bad.
(I imagine the Customs Office was like, "I inspected this lesbian magazine, but I'm not sure if it meets the government standards." "Well, we'd better have everyone else read it too, so we can reach a group consensus...")
After R'ing TFA, I'd guess that the most efficient way to take away their motivation would be for the major ISPs to chip into a fund to get hookers for them.
I learned TECO around the time the Solidarity movement was big in the news. It seemed that every Polish name I saw in the newspapers looked like one of my TECO macros!
The article discussed the challenges of translating biblical concepts into a language with something like 2,000 words. There apparently was a way one could petition the "official" keepers of the Klingon language to "discover" a new word, but that was only to be used as a last resort. Instead, he made due with what he had. For instance, Klingon had no word for god but he used something that translated roughly as "Highest Lord."
Read the ____ error message -- what a concept!
I was adminning a lab full of Suns, and one guy emailed me and said that he got a "filesystem full" message, but he didn't have a key to the room with the file server so he couldn't reboot it!
"Why on earth would you reboot a machine for a 'filesystem full' error?"
"Because you always reboot machines to fix problems!"
Now it wasn't like it was /tmp that was full, in
which case a reboot would at least fix
the problem, if sloppily.
Turns out he was raised on Windows, so in his
thinking, System Problem -> Reboot, automatically.
(We saved him in time, and got him into Linux,
Solaris and FreeBSD, so he turned out all right.
He may even be reading this now.)
Quebec (Canada) tried this in their 1995 referendum on trying to secede from Canada. Ballots were marked by hand and counted by hand. Each ballot had large circles labeled YES and NO. Only certain symbols were allowed (IIRC, they were an X, a check mark, a straight horizontal line, or filling in the circle completely). Anything else was to be considered "spoiled" (historically, an average of about 1% of ballots are spoiled, often by voters protesting what they see as a poor choice of candidates).
Some election officer took it upon himself to issue written instructions to his counters requiring them to be extremely picky in validating the symbols. For instance, if the check mark were drawn like a V (both strokes the same length), it was to be counted as spoiled. All the districts where he sent the instructions were ones which could be predicted to tilt toward the NO side. In some districts, as many as 12% of the ballots were disqualified.
According to a guy I knew who was an observer (parties get to have observers present at the counting), some counting rooms almost erupted into fistfights when observers loudly objected to the disqualifying of so many ballots.
The referendum lost, but only by a margin which was less than the estimated number of NO votes lost in this manner. (Not that that means anything, except to show how close things were.) The secessionist Quebec government "investigated," decided nothing was wrong, and spent most of their energies trying to sue a student group in Ontario for "illegally subsidizing" the NO campaign by bussing students to a pro-Canada rally in Montreal.
There's a new Mel Gibson movie everyone's talking about (does mythology count?).
WinCo is about the only large grocery store in the Portland (Oregon) area that hadn't gone in for the "membership" card BS. Their prices are consistently lower than most other stores I've seen (often dramatically), if you exclude the loss leaders. Also, they have some interesting concepts. You can buy things like spices by spooning them into baggies and paying by weight, rather than buying prepackaged (and overpriced) bottles.
They don't take credit cards, which can be a pain for some. (But then you know they aren't tracking you.)
In some engineering communities (such as MIT), "punt" can also mean just to quit, without necessarily punting "to" someone. For instance, "The last problem on the homework was taking too long, so I just punted."
But his wife could whoop Darl's ass!
Maybe a Rwandan user would be better off learning English. Until he does, he'll get used to whatever works in Rwandan, which is OO right now. When his English proficiency is up, is he going to say, "Oh boy, now I know English, so I can switch to MSoffice"? Or is he going to say, "Why should I switch when I know OO and it works fine?"
So we're supposed to feel sorry for the guy just because he's a small cog in the Microsoft machine?
Hopefully, when the manager asks how that sale he saw him working on turned out, the salesman will say, "I almost had it, but then he started talking about this 'Linux' thing and he didn't like my answers and wandered off."
Now what will the manager do with this info? Any decent sales manager will be keeping tuned to customer demands.
(I once was at a trade show, and asked a guy in a booth if his product worked under Linux. He said no, but it was coming in 3 months. I mentioned this to a friend, who told me he met the same guy the day before, who had told him Linux support was coming in 6 months! Now, it could've been just vaporware, but at least the guy was picking up on the fact that some potential customers were interested in Linux support.)
Sticking two existing things together and calling it something new has a long history. The guy who first stuck an erasor on the end of a pencil (named Hymen Lipman -- I'm not making this up!) got a U.S. patent on it! It was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because a pencil manufacturer decided to fight it.
One of the leaders in computer architecture, Yale Patt, has already written a book based on this concept. He gives enough of an overview of logic design to understand things at an RTL (register) level, and distills CPU design to its essentials. He doesn't get to C until half way through the book.
His observation is that CS students have a MUCH easier time comprehending things like recursion when they understand what's really going on inside.
(My efforts to get this book introduced at my old university were unsuccessful, as the department chairman was afraid that teaching assembly language would drive students away. He wanted to teach them Java instead.)
It sounds more like an insurance fund. It's basically telling SCO that they'll have to pick on a bunch of people at once (at least to exhaust the $10M on the other side).
If it works, SCO won't even try. In which case the money doesn't get used. I wonder if whatever is left over when SCO finally goes TU is given back to the contributors.
Not true at all! RISC refers to the instruction set, not the internal architecture. Even the earliest RISC processors to carry that name included pipeline interlocks -- it was the simplicity of RISC that made such techniques feasible, especially at the chip densities of the 80's.
There's a lot of confusion about what RISC means. Look up a computer architecture textbook. RISC is somewhat fuzzy, and most chips bend the edges of the definitions in places. The general operating principle is "reduced," and herein lies the ambiguity, since this is relative to the technology of the day. (A "RISC" Alpha made in the 90's has more opcodes than a "CISC" 8086 made in 1978.) But RISC processors typically have the following properties:
CISC used to mean that many or most instructions were implemented in microcode on the processor.
Again, no. CISC means supporting many different kinds of operations directly in hardware. This was especially appealing in the days when back-end compiler code generation wasn't very good, so CISC means often a simple 1-for-1 translation from high-level constructs to machine opcodes. The ISA complexity usually meant microcode was the best approach, but this was not part of the definition.
Probably someone who truly believes their software is so ubiquitous that there would be no such thing as "hostile software."
Green Destiny at Los Alamos has 240 TM5600s.
Why does it need to have multiple computers networked? Redundancy in case of failure. You see, they'll be running Windows.
A pretty easy way to generate passwords that pass most picky password approval checkers is to take a phrase that you can easily remember, and then take the first letter of each word. Include punctiation to get the requisite non-alphanumeric characters. Make at least one numeric substitution if you're required to have a number. For instance:
N4N.Stm.
("News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.")
In the BSA cases I've read, the threshold was as low as 5%, not a "significant fraction."
At some point, it doesn't matter whether it was malicious or not, because of the epic scale of incompitence.
"Epic scale of incompitence [sic]"??? Over licenses costing a few hundred dollars?
First of all, most small-scale computer users may not even be aware there's an issue. They paid for their computer, right? Thanks to Microsoft's monopoly, most people don't even think of the software as being something intrinsically separable from the platform. They think of Office as being an option for their PC, like getting automatic transmission. How many car owners are expected to have separate documentation giving them the right to use their automatic transmission?
Second, it is standard practice in most businesses that there is a price threshold below which bookkeeping requirements are far less, because of the expense involved. In my former workplace, anything over $5K was "equipment" and had to have stickers on it and all kinds of tracking; anything less was "supplies." Meals under $10 did not require receipts for reimbursement, because having someone look at them was more costly than the chance that someone might claim his $5 lunch cost $9.99. For most places, the typical cost of software falls in that "supplies" region, and Microsoft's insistence otherwise falls totally outside of normal business expectations.
It's funny that you sneer at anyone whose inventory methods don't meet Microsoft's standards, calling them poor businessmen and "incompitent," but you say nothing about a giant company trying to get out of a legal settlement by whining that they can't track do the paperwork to verify every claim.
Notice, they don't need proof.
Since when was "innocent until proven guilty" banished from our legal traditions? (Other than asset forfeiture?) Note that you are required to carry registration for your car, but if you can't produce it when you're pulled over, you can only be charged with failing to show registration. You can't be charged with stealing the car unless they can actually prove that.
why are they inviting Microsoft in, and agreeing to the diabolical licencing schemes. Either way you want to slice the onion, it's bad business
I would agree that buying Microsoft is bad business, and I warn people about BSA audits as one of the risks of MS software. But many people say it is nearly impossible to do business without buying MS (Word docs or ISVs only writing for Windows or whatever), and their argument was legally validated when Microsoft was declared a monopoly by the same court system they are so willing to use agianst others.